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.

My name is Jesmyn Ward…

The English book club I frequent in the middle of Germany somewhere, will be reading Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones after Easter. Following is a little video from The New York Times in 2013 after the publication of another work Men We Reaped, a memoir and, if you will, a real life counter-point to her fiction.

Much more on the wonderful Jesmyn Ward to come.

Where fiction begins

Still on Julian Barnes, another of his novels that I really like is Noise of Time (2017), a literary imagining of sorts of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.  Musically I will almost certainly never know Shostakovich, but Barnes’s fine character study revealed to me a man tormented by the inability to reconcile the virtuosity and grandeur of an interior personae with the smallness of the exterior life as lived, or vice versa.  And one asks and must answer each for oneself: which was the real “Shostakovich” here anyway? And how great and how small can a man be? And will only time tell?

At the time of publication, along with some lauded reviews, there were a number of more critical pieces focusing on the controversial place of Dmitri Shostakovich in the history of 20th century music; some, whilst accepting  Julian Barnes’s use of a real historical figure as a useful device in fictional narrative, seem to suggest that he has deliberately sought to secure Shostakovich’s legacy, not only as an artist but in a moral sense.  One example is this by the musicologist, Richard Taruskin. Taruskin sees the problematic starting in fact with the very use of the composer’s real name, and an inherent confusion in differentiating between fact and fiction.  This may be a valid enough criticism, though it rather underestimates the sophistication of the modern discerning reader, but he extends his negative appraisal by interpreting the novel as an attempt by Barnes to place the (historical) composer in the role of victim rather than identifying him as the opportunist he surely was.  In my opinion, this is a very superficial interpretation. My reading is of the portrayal of a man, and an artist, living under totalitarianism, who, yes, made a deliberate choice to kowtow to the regime, but also had to live with the consequence of doing so; including a tainted reputation in the wider world and feeble attempts to redeem himself at least for posterity, and all of this shaded by an ever pervasive sense of guilt.  Nor do I see that Barnes in any way diminishes the greater sacrifices made by others – real people and braver people; sometimes even greater artists.

Barnes’s third person narrative, told in the form of interior monologues, is of course highly subjective and therefore biased, even egocentric, but always to be discerned is a tormented, not very courageous man forever afraid of impending denunciation; mitigated only by his retreat to silence and irony and passive cooperation. I accepted the “story” – “his” story and “his” truth; the real Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich remains as elusive to me as is his music (there is something to be said for reading from a point of ignorance), and that in my opinion doesn’t detract from the literary merit of Barnes’s novel.  But perhaps that is because I came to the book without looking for a confirmation of the historical person and without knowledge of the “Shostakovich Wars” played out by experts and related others only in the colours of the keys of a piano.

Memories never quite lost

I have just completed reading, and in one sitting – well its pages only number 100 odd! – Patrick Modiano’s Schlafende Erinnerungen. As a matter of convenience I read it in German; in the French original it is titled Souvenirs dormants and in English Sleep of Memory (whereby one could wonder why not “Sleeping Memories” – but that is a thing with memories, we never quite know what to do with them, nor what they do to us!)

This was Modiano’s first work after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, and I seem to recall at the time the usual disenchantment in the English speaking universe when one of their own misses out (again!). Certainly I didn’t know him at all, but it was apparent that in Germany he had an appreciative readership amongst Francophiles and literati sorts, and his books seem to be constantly in print. I did then read his first novel La Place de l’Étoile, written in 1968 when he was just 22 years old, and was at once perplexed and captivated by the unusual voice (not to mention the subject matter of German occupation and collaboration and where all that can lead – but that is another thing again, and something that I will return to) and on reading this new work I recognized immediately this almost dream-like quality in Modiano’s writing that is really quite singular to him.  (It must surely be that this is a characteristic of the original French (and Modiano works in general) so I must say Elisabeth Edl seems to capture this beautifully in her German translation.)

Out of the present, the 70 year old narrator Jean remembers his youth in the Paris of the early sixties and in the telling weaves a fine tapestry of fragmented memory of people and place. (Wonderfully illustrated at one point by the metaphor of the Metro plan that lights up on selecting a destination). As if in a trance, Jean takes us with him as he revisits ghosts from this past; those women (enigmatic all in one way or another and beautifully portrayed) who left his life as they entered it, shrouded by mystery, but live still along the boulevards, in the cafes and apartments of his memory, where secrets as dark as the light of a Paris night are shared.

Sleep of Memory is to me a profoundly haunting literary jewel, and if someone were to say (and I have heard it said) that Patrick Modiano somehow seems to write the same story over and over again, then I would reply that is because perhaps that is the only story. 

Which has led me back to this impossible book from Julian Barnes! And I should say this so favoured (by me) and very British of writers of a certain age has much in common with the quintessential Parisian Modiano (also of a certain age), most particularly in their consideration of the elusive nature and inherent imperfections of memory. I know only that Barnes is a Francophile and worships at the altar of Flaubert.

And on (literary) jewels, another Modiano book has come to my attention: La Petite Bijou (2001) translated into English only in 2016 as Little Jewel!

The only story (that matters?)

Inevitably perhaps, I can’t help but compare Julian Barnes’ most recent novel The Only Story with his 2011 Booker Prize winning novel The Sense of Ending: the most obvious comparison being the perspective from which the narrative stems, that of an older man, say, of approximately Julian Barnes’ age – you may do the arithmetic – recalling his youth and more youthful years and the defining events now filtered through time and the iteration of memory. 

And whilst speaking of memory, I do remember enjoying immensely The Sense of an Ending; the layers in time, the complexity of character and narrative, and now I wonder whether it is perhaps the development of these attributes that I miss in this new work – but then just as I think this I am not totally convinced I haven’t missed something more.

Try as I may I could not warm to the unlikely protagonists; either individually or as a pair. The radical age difference – Paul is a 19 year old university student, Susan a 48 year old housewife – is, well, radical!  Forgive me I have led a sheltered life … an affair, an arrangement, an accident perhaps, but more? Well, I thought, I dare say Mr. Barnes’ life has been much more interesting than mine! The peripheral characters also were abhorrent to various degrees, and in terms of Susan’s husband bordering on the grotesque. And the lineal development of the affair from tennis club to social exclusion to long drawn out disintegration was, well, just too…lineal, and Paul’s recollections of these ten precious years of his younger self that took such a bizarre turn so obviously selective. I did wonder a lot about the things he could no longer seem to recall with any certitude, and why not.

In the end, I didn’t believe this story being spun, and believe me that made me cranky because I love Barnes. And that is why I can’t leave it at that and why on further considering all those aspects of the story that seemed to me to so lack credibility, I begin to wonder whether Barnes is not having me (us, the collective reader) on?  Is hiding behind an ostensibly serious, albeit against all conventions, love story and simplistic philosophical musings along the lines of “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”, perhaps a jest, an intricate satire of sorts of suburbia and its social mores?

Satire as another vehicle to explore the consequences of decisions made and the imperfections of memory? I have time aplenty to dwell on this some more.

Goblin Market

Reading recently by chance Christina Rossetti’s narrative poem “Goblin Market”, I could not help but think about Virginia Woolf; the reasons for which I explain in some detail here.

Christina Rossetti is deserving of more attention, and will be returned to (soon, I hope!). Amongst other things, given Rossetti’s intense religiosity, I would be interested in exploring the leap of faith necessary for Woolf to embrace her.

Also, whilst looking for a copy of the poem, I came across this very nicely put together page at The Victorian Web, with the full text and a lot of interesting contextual information about the poem and of course about Rossetti herself. More generally, The Victorian Web is one of the better and more accessible resources out there in the big, wide whatever …!