Sing, sing of …

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” pub. Scribner, 2017.

In Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing we are returned to the fictional Bois (Sauvage) of Salvage the Bones then north on an odyssey to (a very real) Parchman and back again. And what an odyssey it is in every meaning of that word, for I am struck by the language of Homer in the very title – “Sing, O goddess, the anger …”( The Iliad, Samuel Butler, Ed.) and suggesting the ancient’s interest in ritual and the afterlife. This is an even more powerful work; uncompromising, brutal even. To be wondered at again is Ward’s gift of crafting such a narrative with the tools of lyric and filtered through the veil of myth.

For the most part, the narrative voice alternates between JoJo and his troubled, addicted mother Leonie, and it is through their eyes, eyes that see other, that father and grandfather, Pop, and the dying Mam are described, that their world is described. When we meet them it is JoJo’s thirteenth birthday, and the eve of their trip together with Leonie’s friend Misty, white, just as troubled, and the three year old baby of the family, called Michaela by Leonie and Kayla by JoJo (which says something about the order of affections and disaffections of mother and son) to bring home Michael, the lover of one and the absent father the other. Along the way we will be confronted with the irreconcilable truths that haunt them both.

And indeed they are haunted – Leonie by the silent ghost of the elder brother, Given, beloved by all, taken in youth, beautiful, not yet tainted by the harsh reality defined by race and place that killed him, and JoJo by the boy Richie, a tortured spirit, bound to him through his grandfather and the history shared at Parchman, long ago when neither was much more than a child and one survived and the other not. Richie does have a voice and a lot to say, and joins the narrating chorus for the journey home.

The relationships here are so intense, the interplay of race and familial dynamics all pervading and the situations described with a realism such that one’s senses are in a permanent state of alert – the stench conjured each time the little Kayla vomits is as visceral as the softness of her cheeks seeking human touch. And when these realistic elements are intertwined with the mythical of afterlife and voodoo ritual, a potent literary tableau is created.

A wanting, needing, to get home permeates the whole novel, and home comes in a guise other than situational – rather as an overriding desire to find a place of rest, either in this world or the next. Some are to find it, some not, and for some we just don’t know. And after all, isn’t that how it is?

Just like in the ancient Greek song culture, the song never really ends, for memory never ends, but is passed on through the generations. And so it is fitting that this wonderful novel should close with Kayla singing joyfully forth in unison with all the ghosts of the past, and with the promise of an enduring love that fate denied her mother, that her mother denied herself.

On Reading Robinson

Though coming late to Marilynne Robinson, I was immediately captivated by her narrative form, the power of the characters and the moral integrity that rises above moralising.

Having written several posts during 2018-19 in respect to Robinson’s Gilead trilogy, I have taken the time to experiment a little and put together an edited collection; compiled in LaTeX and available in PDF from my Downloads page.

The Hours MS

A favourite “day in the life of” if ever there was one, is brought to mind again with The New York Times reporting on the publication of a new reproduction of the full draft of what was tentatively titled “The Hours” and was to become Mrs. Dalloway. Absolutely beyond my modest budget, but an imagined treasure just the same!

Cover design Vanessa Bell, Hogarth Press, 1925.

Beyond the title, revealed (to me anyway!) is the metamorphose of Virginia Woolf’s initial idea of a grand post-war London narrative into a deceptively more modest work. The minutiose account of one woman on one day endures as one of the finest character studies in modern literature.

By the way, I’m collecting all things that come my way relating somehow to Mrs. Dalloway here, where links are also to be found to “The Hours” manuscripts held at the British Library.

Salvage the Bones (part 2) …and what I can say…

…Well, the first thing I can say relates to the coincidental reading of Salvage the Bones not long after committing myself to giving William Faulkner a “go” – again, after many years.  I will try to expand my thoughts about him another time – a daunting prospect! – but here I will just say the book I first turned to was “As I Lay Dying”.  In terms of narrative, if one were to think of that novel as a sort of grotesque road trip, then from what I know of Sing, Unburied, Sing, it is with this more recent novel that comparisons are suggested; sharing not only the road, but also a bizarre choir of alternating narrative voices.  But maybe because my reading of “As I Lay Dying” is fresh, and thinking about the respective cast of characters, I discern in Salvage the Bones also the ghost of William Faulkner hovering over the Batiste family and the “Pit” down there on the Gulf coast that is their home.

Consider for instance, two young pregnant girls, two youngest brothers of a certain age (do I imagine similarities in their mimic, their speech, emotional distress), a pair of youths both with “crushes” on animals – pit-bull and horse, mothers dying and dead but with spirits indomitable, fathers at once dominating and apathetic, familial loyalties written in a code only to be understood by the initiated.  I couldn’t help but relate the Batiste family’s confused and instinctive responses to the rising waters initiated by hurricane Katrina to Faulkner’s Bundrens and their chaotic attempts to cross a flooding river. Both a matter of keeping one’s head above the water – actually and metaphorically. 

And then there is this certain mood to Ward’s writing that I find difficult to define, but it is something perhaps related to the “South”, a mythical quality of place and beyond place, that she shares with Faulkner. 


Hurricane Katrina formed on August 23, 2005, and in less than a week grew from a tropical depression into a category 4 hurricane. When Katrina made landfall on August 29 near New Orleans on the U.S. Gulf Coast, it brought widespread devastation and flooding with it.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Christine McCabe and Kenny Chmielewski

Then there is “Katrina”. As fundamental as she has now become to the narrative of the Gulf states, her legend too lives way beyond the American shores.  For many, her brief, devastating life – those few days in August, 2005 – not much more than the days told in Salvage the Bones, exposed – surprisingly for some, not so for others – the deep fractures traversing the most powerful nation on earth; laid bare the inherent racism, the disparities of wealth and all that follows in terms of health, welfare, education, jobs, and the tenuous fabric of a society woven out of a history as cruel, crueler, than the mythical beauty of the geography.

Told in the voice of the fifteen year old Esch, Salvage the Bones is compact in place, a fictional backwater near the Mississippi Gulf coast with the daunting name of Bois Sauvage, and resolutely chronological, with the past only anecdotally revisited in Esch’s thoughts to then be made present (the past is never dead, it is not even past – more Faulkner!) and spanning just a twelve day period from the certainty of her pregnancy and culminating in the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the day after.

The reader is drawn into Esch’s world of poverty and disrepair, of loyalties tested every day, and wonders at the fortitude displayed by her family in their constant battle to survive on not much at all, and witnesses friendships that break – with Manny; he responsible but not willing to take responsibility, and those that endure – like Big Henry; with a heart even bigger than his stature. And just as powerful is Esch’s remarkable inner life that she shares (with us); one that has evolved through real hardship and a rich, uncompromising imagination. And Esch is the mother (to be) that is still there when the others have gone quiet – Medea, Katrina, China. There are passages and scenes that repulse and disturb, but that ultimately blend with the heroic to create a most fabulous tableau.

Oak tree landscape in DeLisle, Miss., Jesmyn Ward’s home town from which Bois Sauvage is inspired. Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America

Jesmyn Ward weaves her story with the virtuosity that comes only with knowledge – and a good portion of love. Yes, she was there, she was really there – a place called DeLisle – and her family survived as the fictional Batiste family does too, but it is not only that singular experience of “Katrina”, she knows intimately this cruel, beautiful neck of the woods, she knows her characters.  This place and these people – they are hers, and she gives them dignity.  Community.

I loved this book. I loved the things it made me think about. And I haven’t finished – thinking – nor have I mentioned Medea who plays too a role amongst the extraordinary cast of “mothers”, so more is yet to come.

Salvage the Bones (part 1)

Sometimes a good read comes one’s way through a “having to …” (for one reason or another). And so it was when Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones was recently set for discussion at a local book club I attend here in Germany. Irrespective of the National Book Award in 2011, I missed this novel these some years now gone (gone where?!), and in fact Ward has only really come to my attention in much more recent times with news of her third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing which has been extensively reviewed (and in 2017 won for Ward again the National Book Award!), and I should say has also has not yet been read by me.  As is the way, her previous works were often brought up in medial appraisals of this latter work, so generally speaking I knew the what and when of Salvage the Bones. (And I should say William Faulkner seemed also to be often mentioned by reviewers – more on this later.)

In preparation for the reading, I went to the internet to see what I could find (this PBS video for instance or a piece written for an August, 2018 Time special on the American South) – the who and what and when of Jesmyn Ward – and as a result, I must say before I had even started reading I was quite captured by her presence; her person. Every fiction needs a narrative and every person has one, but with the latter as with the former some are just a little more compelling than others. It seems to me, Ward has lived and lives one such – for better or worse she may well add. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing overly demonstrative or theatrical about her, nothing, rather one senses a decency, a generosity of spirit, and an integrity that is rare in days of endless posturing. I very much wanted to discover whether she could also write a “life”, so to speak; translate the personal world she inhabits and its concerns into a fictional narrative. And, it is not just the reviewers, Jesmyn Ward herself mentions Faulkner – a lot!

And so I read Salvage the Bones, and was certainly not disappointed.  Some could quibble, but I will not.  It is not perfect.  It is not Faulkner.  (And, by the way, nor is he – perfect, that is.) She is not he, so how could it be. Her debt to him though is obvious. What would he say?  That he, a white man of the South, of the early, middle 20th century, he of the segregated, racist South should give a voice to an African-American woman in the early decades of the 21st century – one firmly rooted in a contemporary Mississippi that may be desegregated formally but bearing still the scars of its past. Or is it more a voice shared – in and somehow beyond time and person and even race? And what can I say, as one not of the South, foreign to this very particular part of America, its norms and its codes? … (to be continued)

With a half year all but gone…

The Guardian: Best books of 2019…to date

The Guardian, 5th June, 2019

More for future reference than anything else – given that I usually have a year (or two, or three …) lag, The Guardian has published a list of their best (& reviewed) for the year to date.

A few of the publications I have been aware of, for example from The Guardian’s must-reads from year’s beginning here , like for instance the new books from Ali Smith, Tana French and Toni Morrison, but there are some that are new to me. That part of me attracted to myth, either in narrative form or as scholarly excursus respectful of the “lay” intelligence, takes particular heed of Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships which gives the women of Homer’s Iliad their very own voice (I know women writers dabbling where they don’t belong is being done a lot of late, but we do have two or three thousand years to catch up on!). And for a different sort of myth, if you will: A History of the Bible: the Book and its Faiths by Oxford professor and Anglican priest John Barton sounds to me like an intellectually stimulating and original work, without an agenda beyond putting fundamental interpretation of all persuasion in its place and the joyful exposition of all the splendours of a literary reading-that’s what I understand from their review anyway.

The Mirror and the Light

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel, pub. Harper & Collins, March 5 2020.

As one of those many waiting – at first patiently, and for a little while now not so – I note here the really excellent news of the forthcoming publication, in March 2020, of Hilary Mantel’s concluding book to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

Could it be, I should return for another read of the preceding books – Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies? I think so – there is time enough and Mantel’s Cromwell is so powerful, so agonisingly real I have to make reacquaintance with him and his journey so far before accompanying him to the demise he knows he deserves.