Fiction – Page 3 – My Own RE:public

Reading at intervals

For the last days, sleep has come at intervals, and when it arrives then never lasting very long. Too warm nights interrupted by god knows what, and accompanied by mentionable – and not – bodily needs, including the cerebral. Unable to return to sleep, this latter (the head bit) is satisfied only by reading until the eye lids become heavy and then drop. At times such as these, it is not usually to the book(s) I am presently in the midst of that I turn, rather I reach to short stories or essays that I can read through in one fell swoop.

So it was, during one disturbed night last week, that I picked up Hilary Mantel’s 2014 short story collection “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher”.

I remember at the time of publication, there was a right royal hoo-ha at the title – lent from the final story of the collection. (Printed somewhere pre-publication, and read by me back then.) This was, after all, not very long after Thatcher’s death and the bells (in our heads) still rung with the sounds of: Ding dong! The Witch is dead. That, a rather distasteful appropriation I thought, and those chanting said ditty (not as the Munchkins do in the Land of Oz; rather, substituting a word that rhymes with ‘witch’ I seem to recall) too young and too privileged to have been affected by Thatcherism and the social coldness it brought. The title Hilary Mantel gives to her story, which very much describes the substance of it – not a metaphor, not a dream – doesn’t particularly concern me; I am confident that the author’s disaffection of Thatcher would be well informed and well felt, and could hardly surprise. Margaret Thatcher, after all, may have been a lot of things, but boring was she not, and offers a perfect template for a fictional character. And, a writer of the Mantel magnitude can well afford the well earned luxury of artistic risk and transgression. In my opinion. And, one could surmise she knew she would be asking for trouble; perhaps she was looking for it!

The collection (eleven stories) is framed by its opener and the said Assassination, and while the latter gets the title and ISBN, most of the attention and the tut-tuts, it is the first, “Sorry to Disturb”, that paves the way (one is tempted to again return to Oz and trip along a yellow brick road) that leads to the grisly end, via a series of various degrees of grotesque interludes. I say framed, because both stories evolve from male strangers intruding into the constricted domestic space of a woman; their motivations may be other but both are accompanied by an aura of deceit and the suspicion of a ‘not good’ agenda. In the first story, that agenda is based on opportunism, cultural expectations and misunderstandings and is, in the end, warded off and ultimately harmless, in the last, both the intent and the outcome are clear – and deadly.

“Sorry to Disturb” is written in the first person and is a memoir piece (first published as “Someone to Disturb“ in the LRB in 2009 and referencing diary notations) set in Saudi Arabia where Mantel lived with her husband during the 1980s. An excellent read, in my opinion, that illustrates well, and gives perspective to, the daily dilemmas Westerners living for a time in countries with vastly different social and cultural norms are confronted with – the atmospherics (in an extended sense), the solitude, and just the sheer strangeness of the whole adventure.

After reading the Assassination story again, I was struck, not just by how extraordinarily similar the narrative voice was, but the odd sameness of the structure. Almost like the same story spun on its axis and transplanted from the suffocating heat of Jeddah to the leafy green of the English home counties. In both stories the narrator is not just complicit in the chain of events that follow, but makes herself almost into a co-conspirator, even as she – or is it another entity – stands outside the plot considering the action. Do I recognize the magnificent style of the Cromwell trilogy here?

In-between are, of course, ten other stories. Maybe some are better than others but, to my mind, all have a peculiar slant and psychological depth. They are short and succinct, and with the fine composition one would expect from Hilary Mantel. Mostly in the first person, but not all. Some are grotesque, some tragic. There is often humor where good taste says it shouldn’t be – which just shows how overrated good taste is. They are very idiosyncratic.

In the end, Mantel’s stories may well have worked magic – but not upon my eyelids; in fact, I devoured the entire volume. However unsettling the subject matter, my conscious self was not over stimulated. Rather, my intellect nourished, sleep became my reward.

A couple of stories from this collection and other works from Hilary Mantel are available in the London Review of Books archive (usually subscription is required).

[22nd June 2022] Well, who would have thunk it! Some things have a longer life on the internet than others – at The Guardian (where it was that I probably first read it) – is, still, the fictional demise of Mrs. Thatcher, titled: Hilary Mantel: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983.

Either/Or

Elif Batuman is another of those writers – and there are enough – known to me through various long forms of journalism but whose books I haven’t read. But, having just listened to her and been reminded, I am encouraged to remedy this omission in the near future. Batuman’s recently released novel, Either/Or, has been very well received, and I have always had a penchant for the bildungsroman (as do some whose bildung only ever got so tend to have), or as which it was so described somewhere. This new work is, in fact, a sequel to her 2017 – also highly praised – book, The Idiot, and so I may have to read that first – if only to find out what Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard have in common, and what they both have in common with Batuman and her protagonist (be they not somehow the same!). Anyway, below is a Kindle preview that entices, and there is more information on the publisher’s website.

And, here, Alex Clarke’s review at The Guardian a couple of months ago that further whets the appetite.

& another bloomin’ 16th June …

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.

Out of Essex

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.

Whose country is it anyway?

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.

Housekeeping at the Dalloways

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.

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.)

“The Great Novel of the Internet Was Published in 1925” by Megan Garber at The Atlantic. (Limited access.)
“The Work of Living Goes On: Rereading Mrs Dalloway During an Endless Pandemic” by Colin Dickey at Literary Hub.
“Mrs. Dalloway: Secularism and Its Enchantments” by Jared Marcel Pollen for Quillette

Writing to remember

Patrick Modiano: “Invisible Ink” (2021)

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.

As I write, there is another new work from Patrick Modiano, published by Gallimard, again of novella length, and one can imagine translations will be available in a timely fashion.

When the bough breaks

As mentioned here, Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce (The Perfect Nanny in the US and Lullaby in the UK), in German translation as Dann schlaf auch du, did become available in my local library, and sooner than expected, and has now been read by me in the last day or so.

With a narrative that traverses the terrains of crime, suspense and underpinned by what could be interpreted as a social criticism of some aspects of modern family politics, and written in Slimani’s cool and precise style (I actually had the opportunity to browse the French original as I read the German edition), the novel makes for a rapid and compelling read. But, it is anything other than a comforting one. Not the butler, the nanny dun it – that much we know. When from the opening pages one is confronted with such a monstrous conclusion, the reader can not help but become engrossed in the quest to know the whole damned course of getting there.

Welcome into the hyper-stressed sphere of the restless Parisian middle class of young professionals; trying to organize careers and families, to keep up with …whoever are the French version of the Joneses, and ever alert to the social order and codes of their cohort. Such a couple are Paul and Myriam Massé, and they are much more of course, and Slimani develops them well; giving them contour – and contradiction. They interest me these thirty-somethings – juggling their ambitions with mounting insecurities seemingly at odds with their privileges. But with the family perfection of little girl Mila and baby boy Adam complete, Paul, who had found some favor and convenience in the one-partner-at-home model (in this case, the woman – surprise, surprise!), reluctantly acquiesces to the stressed and dissatisfied Myriam’s desire to return to her interrupted legal profession – so, the perfect nanny it must be; and it seems that Louise is just that.

I can well conjure a Paul and Myriam (perhaps I have known enough like them, or at least been informed of), but Louise remains to the very end a mystery to me, a mass of contradictions – her awkwardness in manner and speech; still, secretive, stubborn; a petite stature belying her vigor and strength; her plain, dated attire (peter pan collars we are told!) offset by cheap make-up – worn upon a face often described by the author as “moon face” or “doll face”. It irritated me that I was unable to form in my mind’s eye a more complete image of her. But perhaps that was the writer’s intent or at least an accident of the writer’s imagination: Dear reader, Slimani may be saying, think of Louise as an apparition blurred under the pale light of a full moon or some malleable figure with features painted upon china or plastic; garishly exact and without blemish. Neither are real, both an illusion. A mother’s worst nightmare.

For some readers, without proximity or at least awareness of the particular young, urban, professional milieu in which one is being drawn, the sociological aspects that may be read into the novel are somewhat elusive, and perhaps even inadequate as an explanation for the development of the plot; which I interpreted more as being psychologically driven. But deep seated norms are there to be extricated, and ultimately play an important role in the tragic human consequences. Parental choices made in modern societies are clearly complex – professional, financial, emotional considerations aplenty. But before that comes the choice to be a parent, and especially Myriam wonders at that; wonders at her own inadequacy and ineptitude – so conditioned is she in the absoluteness of the maternal role. Myriam thought she could have it all, failed to recognize the obstacles in her way, that cared not for her education, her abilities, saw only her sex. And wrong choices can be made, and most do not end with such a monstrous crime. (It should be said, Leïla Slimani based her novel on a 2012 murder in Manhattan; keeping some of the personal and class characteristics that were reported but transporting the situational to Paris.)

Expectations of a mutually beneficial alliance are negligible and the potential for conflict are high; for those (predominately) women who work in child care in some form or other – women like Louise and all those other nounous in the Parisian playgrounds – are often employed under precarious circumstances and for low wages. They may be immigrants or foreigners, students perhaps, and in this, Louise, as a white middle-aged French woman, differs; here, Slimani may have been deliberately making a character choice that defies the delusions of a society entrenched in its belief that all dangers come from without. Paul and Myriam could barely hide their satisfaction at not having to navigate the hurdles (as some of their friends must) brought into their home by a foreign custom or language.