One hundred of them; if counted from the 1922 publication of James Joyce’s modernist novel, Ulysses. Or, if one will, add another eighteen to count from the 16th June of 1904; the Dublin day fictionalized by Joyce, and presumably lived by him in a first carnal – or romantic, or both – encounter with Nora Barnacle.
Some resources for Bloomsday 2022, sponsored by The James Joyce Centre in Dublin, can be found here.
Enough that I castigate myself – again! – for not having read this bloomin’ legendary book. And, swear – again! – that I will. I will, I will! Or thus do I will myself.
My copy of The Essex Serpent, pub. UK Serpent’s Tail (new paperback resplendent with Claire Danes & Tom Hiddleston!)
Sometimes a darn good yarn is in order, and it is as such that I would describe Sarah Perry’s 2016 novel The Essex Serpent that I have just finished reading. I recall that it was well received at the time of publication and quickly became a public’s darling (in the first instance, very much through ‘word of mouth’) and having read of a newly released streaming series (about which I heard the author speak on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme a short time ago), I was easily enough tempted by a bookshop display.
Not a complex book, but an intelligent and thoughtful one – well structured, with original, well formed characters and very nicely written indeed. If so inclined – and Perry encourages the inclination – it can also inspire to some historical and philosophical reflection on the last decades of the 19th century in Victorian England – a tumultuous time in which the social consequences of the industrial age were still settling, rigid class structures showing signs of fracture and Darwinism already being hijacked to explain “the evils” in society. Specifically, Perry uses this latter; imagined as a new “religion” based on science and rational thought, in conflict with the mysticism and belief system of the Christian tradition, and fought in proxy and along different lines by several of the characters.
Here, a review from 2016, a 2020 piece by Sarah Perry on how she came to write the novel, and, here, her thoughts about the Apple TV adaptation which premiered at the end of May (all in The Guardian). Like the author, I didn’t exactly envisage a Claire Danes sort as Cora, but Perry embraces the choice (so so will I!), and is very satisfied indeed with the production. Below, the trailer. I don’t have Apple TV but I will certainly try to see the series some time in the future.
Nations and nationality. Land and people. Well worth contemplating at any time, but more so in these anxious days as an unjust war continues on the European continent, as a sovereign country is invaded and by a more powerful aggressor declared to as such not exist; these tangled roots of conflict inextricably entwined in the historical paths of the new nation states that were formed in accordance with the treaties made at the end of World War I, only to be viciously torn asunder, to then re-form (and again …) in the post World War II years as the old colonial powers retreated further out of lands strewn wide and two distinctly different conceptions of freedom and governance faced off and redefined the geo-political order. During those years, conflicts burgeoned in all corners of the world, one such being that region in the north-west of the African continent called the Maghreb.
Excerpt for the opening of “In the Country of Others” by Leïla Slimani, pub. Penguin, 2021.
In the Country of Others is the first novel in a planned series from Leïla Slimani; set in Morocco and exploring the fraught relationship between the peoples of that country and the French colonial power, and framed between the years immediately following the Second World War and the splintered nationalistic allegiances and revolutionary fervor of the mid-1950s that were to lead to independence. I should say, though this novel is removed with the war that rages in the Ukraine as I write – geographically, culturally, historically, that conflict informs and casts a shadow over all my reading at the moment, Slimani’s book is a powerful literary rendering of just one of the many failures of reconciliation left over from the last century and in that sense is informative of the situation in the conglomerate of states that (re-) formed after the break up of the Soviet.
As in her previous works of fiction, Slimani develops her narrative from very real circumstances, but this time very close to home indeed, and in every way. Home, here, is not the Parisian suburbs and their contemporary, middle-class milieus but, rather, the post-war colonial Morocco and a family blended out of French and Moroccan, like that of Slimani’s, and, as they, enmeshed in a profound and sometimes violent struggle for personal and cultural identity.
Calling upon an array of analogy and metaphor, like that of the hybrid orange and lemon trees that bring forth the most bitter of fruit, and through some wonderfully realized descriptive passages and imagery – visual and sensual – of a landscape and its inhabitants, at once harsh and seductive, juxtaposed against a reality defined by extreme hardship and poverty and the indignities of subjection that bring forth not the best in man, Slimani tells her story of the Belhaj family; seeking to take root upon harsh ground that is sparse in the emotional nourishment needed to grow and flourish.
Slimani’s characters, and with them their very personal searches for freedom and meaning, converge in Meknès and on the Belhaj farm in the rugged hilly terrain beyond. Mathilde sought an escape from the rural Alsatian monotony and found one in the small, dark and beautiful man out of the Maghreb, and Amine saw in the young French woman – sturdy, blonde, vivacious – a just reward for services rendered to a land not his own. In the hills sufficiently remote from the stringent cultural norms of the medina, Amine will shed himself of the traumas of war and realize his father’s interrupted dream of a prosperous fruit farm and, at the same time, raise his family insulated from the gossip and politicking of the old town and the old ways. But, old ways are hard to shed and, for this uncommonly attractive pair, the passion that promised so much, is hard to sustain.
For Mouilala, Amine’s mother, her only freedom is to be found shrouded in rigid custom and widowhood, and the confines of house and terrace. Who are we to say freedom must know no boundaries. And for the lovely young sister Selma, it is in the pursuit of Western pleasures; not knowing that pleasure comes at a cost. For the angry, oft absent brother, Omar, held captive to an ideology and the tricolore, freedom will come only in its demise.
There is the baby, Selim (to be heard from later I expect), and then there is Aïcha. Oh, and what a girl she is! (I allow myself to imagine her as Slimani’s maman!) For the greater part of the novel she is about seven years old. We go to school with her on her first day; to a Catholic institution in the city, at the insistence of Mathilde. A disaster to be sure, but a heralding in of many colorful narrative strands to come. There is nobody like Aïcha; neither physically nor intellectually. She gives back as much as she gets from the pampered colonial daughters, and in Jesus she finds a friend. (And has the good sense to keep this to herself.) And in the nuns, allies; for it is – perhaps, surprisingly – clear to them that she is an exceptional little girl.
Slimani allows all her characters’ viewpoints to come to the fore, but though it’s the voice of Mathilde that initially reverberates most, that sets the tone, that drives the narrative forward from the time of their arrival in Morocco in 1947, in the end it’s Aïcha’s way of seeing that lingers most. Once she lets us inside her precocious head, crowned with untamed locks, we see the people and the land, both near and dear, as a child would for sure – with love and anger, with envy and with confusion – but there is something more, an uncanny wisdom rooted in something more, something that makes her seem as old as the earth beneath her feet.
Somewhere in her slight, but written with almost existential urgency, 1987 memoir, Une femme, Annie Ernaux recalls how her mother, in her quest to improve the family’s standing, her striving for upward mobility in the firmly entrenched social structure of post-war France, at some stage began referring to her husband in the oh so formal language imagined (by her) to be that of the bourgeoisie. Now, having read this book in German (Eine Frau, Suhrkamp, 2019), the class difference to be discerned in the “upgrading” of (presumably in the original French) mon mari to mon époux (in German: mein (Ehe)Mann to mein Gatte), and especially in respect to the social norms of the time, is clear in the formalities of both languages, but I am not so sure how that would transpose in modern English nor how that was handled in the English translation. When did you last hear anyone casually – or seriously – referring to their “spouse”? In this respect the English formal is often confined to tax forms! And, complicated further by the social and linguistic improvements (or at least changes) of the last decade or so, I do wonder where the translation would have gone with this.
French original, pub. Gallimard (1987)
But, I divert, for it is not so much this (not uninteresting) nuance of language that concerns me, but rather how powerfully that seemingly simple but inherently complex play with words describes the life and the ambitions of Annie Ernaux’s mother, and that were so inextricable from husband and child. I read this book very much as a memorial to this life – giving it the respect and meaning in memory and reflection that it was often denied in the course of its living. And, because Ernaux’s mother is never named, it may be, more generally, read as about a woman of a certain stand and certain generation in a certain place – or any place really.
Unlike La placewhich I have previously written on, in which Ernaux disentangles her relationship with her father, and which is rendered with the rational distance from events and emotions that only distance in time affords, Une femme is written with immediacy and in the midst of grief and the lonely struggle against feelings of guilt and shame that that brings. But, it is also written by “a writer”, and as such Ernaux can do nothing other than write her way to some point of reconciliation; remaining attentive to her craft – assembling fragments, observations, narratives to a captivating whole. This book touched me deeply. I could write about all the “class” stuff that could be extricated from the text, but I won’t here – not now – rather I will just pay tribute to the courage of this wonderful French writer who, in confronting her own imperfect place in the world, dignifies that held by others. And gratitude, for sharing that experience that many of us have had, or will have, when faced with the realization that someone near and dear will never again exist upon this earth; one who connects us to our past, of finding ourselves for a short time or long set adrift; flaying, disoriented.
With the end of year two of the pandemic, I note with pleasure – whereby, in these complicated days, that a relative state of being – where it was that one of our literary flights of fancy led. And, that was back to the London of a century ago, and all that could happen on just one day traversing the topography between Westminster and Bond Street – on the ground, in the heart and in the head.
Penguin ed. 2021
A particular literary journey inspired, at least to some extent it seems, by the publication of two new editions of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – one from Penguin Random House (with a forward by Jenny Offill and introduction and notes by Elaine Showalter) and an annotated edition from Merve Emre published by Liveright (w.w. norton). Or was it the other way round, and these publications came with an awareness of renewed interest and the potential of a new readership amongst younger generations?
Whichever, as a matter of ‘housekeeping’, and before they go astray amongst my chaotic collection of bookmarks and the like, following are links to just three of the articles that I have collected during the year. (Some other good pieces, unfortunately, require subscriptions.)
Mrs. Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light, pub. Penguin 2007
Alison Light’s 2007 book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants – referred to by me here – is indeed a wonderful read, and for many reasons. Significantly, it goes some way in satisfying my curiosity about the complicated relationship of the said Mrs. Woolf with her servants, and, more generally, in offering through this particular example an engrossing and informative account of the domestic power structures of the middle and upper class households (in Britain), and as a microcosm of the hierarchical distribution of power in greater society, from the end of the Victorian era through to the post-war twentieth century. The gap in my own knowledge was quickly apparent – and gaping! – and Light’s book has gone some considerable way towards remedying my ignorance.
Even from the prologue, I was heartened to read that Alison Light’s motivation for writing the book came from her reading of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and her discomfort, on one hand, and fascination on the other, with Woolf’s language concerning her domestic help over the years, and like me especially with respect to Nellie Boxall. (And I must add: it was just as heartening to hear a British scholar of such standing – and to the Left! – admit to her previous ignorance of the historical importance of domestic service in Britain, and especially for women.)
Broadly chronological, the book traces the history of domestic servitude parallel to that of Virginia Woolf’s life. But ‘parallel’ is a misplaced word here (when thinking about time it may always be!); more precisely, these lives and histories are intertwined in ways obvious and not so; imbued with a public presence that abides by social norms, and a behind closed doors intimacy that is mutually dependent (and, as Light says, unequal); in both spheres easily sentimentalized – then and now.
Woolf is not necessarily the star of this narrative, but rather the accompaniment for the lives of others: of Sophie Farrell, the treasure of the Stephan household in late-Victorian Hyde Park Gate, of Nellie and Lottie Hope, inseparable, in service and out, almost a life long, and of the Batholomews and Annie Thompsett and the Haskins and Louie Everest all who made Monks House the “home” Woolf had needed for her emotional well-being and creative and professional development as a writer. Would she have been generous in accepting this supporting role? I think so, I hope so.
And, as employers, the Woolfs are hardly set decorations – it is important what Light has to say about their role as representative of an intellectual class in the first half of the twentieth century: the disparity that existed between the political and societal agenda that was being propagated and the actuality of a way of life that contributed to the cementing of rigid class structures. I think it is fair to say that it was the highly political Leonard who spoke and wrote loudest on the rights of the working class, but maintained an imperious attitude to those employed in his own home.
With not even 150 pages, Patrick Modiano’s latest novel to be translated, Encre sympathique (Gallimard, 2019), is a very quick read indeed. As with so many of the French works that I have turned to in recent times, including other works by Modiano, it too was read in the German translation: Unsichtbare Tinte (trans. by Elisabeth Edl).
And a fine and evocative read it is. Modiano’s reflection upon time and memory is as always exquisite. And as always, people, things, situations disappear and fade over time, but are always lurking there in the crevices of unconscious thought, ready to be awakened and hauled into the present – to be then something other than that which they once were. Or as one thought, for who’s to say just how precise any memory is to the actuality of an event? And who (or what) defines the actual, anyway?
In a search to fill all the empty spaces in a life, the novel’s narrator struggles against the unreliability of his own memories and motivations, and he struggles against the forgetting – which is not quite the same thing as the not remembering. And that has been the life work of his creator; Patrick Mondiano’s gift to his country and the world: all his stories of occupied and post-war Paris and France; often heavy but written with a lightness of being, sometimes dark but uncompromising in demanding of a reader the same degree of reflection and moral fortitude with which he writes.
There is a plot – a mystery, detective story of sorts (explained well in this review at The Spectator) – and it is the scaffolding that supports, holds together, all the fragmentary memories as they traverse time and take us with them; speaking to us from a present back some thirty odd years with some stops in-between, and with the promise of an “end” in the here and now. There is, this time at least, some light at the end of the tunnel.
Mysterious, I said; and that’s what so entrances me when I am reading Modiano: a moodiness, a haziness; as if something not quite tangible is always looming close, never to be wholly captured. (I transgress! I imagine myself now in a smoke-filled Parisian jazz club in the fifties or sixties! Though, in his Nobel Prize lecture, when Modiano speaks of his envy of music being better able to encapsulate the essence of a moment as a continuity of thought and experience, he makes reference to Chopin’s nocturnes – also, to be played in the late hours under the muted light of a different sort of venue I could imagine.) Some may find his style old-fashioned, and I have heard it said that he has only one story that he retells over, and over again, albeit beautifully so. But I disagree, well, not on the last said – I do very well appreciate the unique stylistic elements of Modiano’s writing and his identifiable voice – but only a very superficial consideration could be so dismissive. Yes, perhaps the time frame and the way he approaches that, and Paris, of course, are constants, but I actually feel the ageing of this writer, and not in a negative way, rather I admire how the years affect his retrospection – on other generations and the societies in which they interacted with – and that look is not static. What he has, is an absolute integrity, a commitment to using the power of his pen, his words, to ward off the insidious human tendency of forgetting that which shouldn’t.
Be it in the ports and industrial centers of Britain or those of continental Europe, or whether just another small town, like that of Angoulême in south-west France, of which Emma Rothschild tells of in this aeon article, the tentacles of the slave trade and the societies that subsisted from its labors and the wealth accrued through its brutality and the denial of human dignity, stretch across oceans and continents and are indelibly entwined throughout much of modern history; from out of the so-called Age of Discovery, through the years of “revolution” and “enlightenment” and beyond.
Slavery; certainly, long (or belatedly) recognized by most as a monumental moral failing, but too often regarded as an unfortunate consequence of the human quest for improvement and expansion – a weak defense of colonialism and tainted by theories of race and white superiority. Only in the most recent of times, have the complicated threads of slavery come to the forefront of research and public discourse, and as being more than just a factor, but a defining factor, in the course of the Modern era, and one still having a profound (and detrimental) effect on societies around the world. A history revolving around the once accepted narratives of great men and great events has been, if not superseded, greatly complemented by this shifting focus. If telling the story of slavery is long overdue, it is also an important consequence that in doing so other influencing strands in the historical narrative have gained traction – of families, of women and children, about work and play; in other words, the stories of ordinary people who lived and died, who made good choices and bad, and were never just the set decorations to the epochs adorned with the jewels of State – monarchs, politics and church.
Emma Rothschild’s essay compliments her latest book, An Infinite History, in which she explores the extended family of her subject over many generations, bringing to the fore, amongst other things, a complicity in slavery – to be read as a microcosm of that of a greater society, and the responsibilities that follow out of that. As she explains it:
[…] An Infinite History is a micro-history, in the sense that it starts with an individual, and it is also a medium-scale and even a macro-history, in the sense that it moves outwards from the individual, by the relationship of contiguity, to her immediate family, to her acquaintances and neighbours, in the social space of Angoulême, and to her posterity over time. It has turned out, along the way, to be a history of what individuals knew about far-off slavery, and of what it meant in their lives.
Emma Rothschild’s book, An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries is published by Princeton Press, and there is more information on their website, including a Q. and A. with the author, and another short essay on the “hidden economic lives of women”; also a concern Rothschild develops in her book. I should say, the book has its own website with a number of interesting resources; for example, a family tree and maps.
Below embedded is a short taster about the book – a project, really, on a particular way of telling history – on SOUNDCLOUD.
“An Infinite History” by Emma Rothschild, Princeton University Press, 2021.
