Making Sense(ibility) of it all

An alien, walking into the average Anglophone bookshop, would be forgiven for thinking that Jane Austen must have been the single greatest writer in the history of literature.  Despite only producing a handful of works, various editions of her novels tend to be scattered across the shelves, dominating the classics section wherever you go.  The fact that our Alien friend probably wouldn't have made it that far, having been distracted by the gigantic vampire section at the front of the shop is a matter for another time - although, even here, you're never far away from Saint Jane...

While I quite like Austen's work, I'm not the biggest of fans myself, and the one novel I've had trouble with in the past is Sense and Sensibility, a book I read a couple of times in my youth.  A spate of reviews recently brought it to mind, and (as I was in the middle of my Women Writers Month) I thought I would give it another try.  Did I end up loving it, or was I able to find out what it is about the book that puts me off ?  Patience, patience...

Sense and Sensibility, as many of you will know, is primarily focused on the lovelives of the two eldest Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne.  After the death of their father, they are forced into a move to pastures fresh by the stinginess of their half-brother (and the meanness of his wife...).  The move takes the sober, rational Elinor away from the man her sister believes her to be engaged to, Edward Ferrars; however, for the impetuous, passionate Marianne, the change of scenery brings with it two very different suitors.  Will the two sisters find love and happiness at the end of the novel?

Yep, stupid question.  A better question, of course, is who the lucky men will be, and how it will all pan out; a relatively happy ending is never in doubt.  Of course, there are many twists and turns before we find the answer, and we have ample opportunity to observe the two girls and marvel at their opposing attitudes to life.  Elinor's clear-headed, over-cautious approach clashes at all points with Marianne's uncompromising quest for the perfect romance...

...and this is exactly what Austen is aiming to do, as the sisters are more than just characters.  They are actually embodiments of two philosophical approaches, with Elinor representing the Enlightenment and Rationalism, while Marianne is the epitome of Romanticism.  The reader is able to compare and choose between two modes of life, the scientific and the natural, the cool and the passionate, the reserved and the uninhibited.  At first, it appears that the choice is an easy one, as much as we would all enjoy running barefoot up and down hills all summer; however, the longer the novel goes on, the more it becomes apparent that both extremes have their disadvantages.

Is it a good book?  Of course, but that is pretty much a given, and not the question I'm trying to answer for myself here.  Do I like it?  Yes, but...  There is a lot to like about Sense and Sensibility, not least the metaphorical rope Austen gives her characters, allowing them to commit social suicide at their leisure, but I have a few reservations which affected my enjoyment of the book.

The first is that unlike Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Sense and Sensibility delivers you into the hand (and mind) of a central character it is very difficult to feel for.  I get the impression that Austen began the book thinking that Elinor was the natural heroine, the sister most people would sympathise with, but the longer the novel goes on, the less clear this impression becomes.  It is also very hard at times to distinguish between what Elinor thinks and what the impersonal narrator is saying.  Occasionally, some very nasty things are said, and people are most cruelly depicted, but it is difficult to tell whose opinion this is...

Another problem is the resolution of the story and the matrimonial choices made.  The last part of the novel seemed rather rushed and contrived, and while Austen certainly justifies her decisions, I can't say I agree with them (I would have chosen different partners for both Elinor and Marianne!).  Certainly, Marianne's recovery and eventual surrender are very weak to the modern eye.

Finally, Sense and Sensibility, unlike other Austen novels I've read, seemed horribly claustrophobic.  I felt trapped inside Elinor's point-of-view (not one I particularly enjoyed) while everything of importance was happening elsewhere.  Each time the sisters announced that they were to up sticks and visit another part of England, I rejoiced, grateful for the change of pace that would ensue.

I know that this restricted female life was the reality for the time, and certainly not restricted to this book; however, it's something that I noticed much more here than in the other Austen novels I've read in recent years.  I am (as someone recently mentioned...) more in my comfort zone in the later Victorian era, and one reason for that is the extended palette the writers use.  After wandering through the vast Dickensian and Trollopian expanses of London, being stuck sewing in a cramped cottage seems a little tame by comparison...

Don't let me put you off reading Sense and Sensibility: it's an excellent novel, and this post has been more about helping myself to understand my feelings towards it than about coming to any objective conclusion as to the worth of the book.  Nevertheless, I fully expect outraged Janeites to disagree - comments and abuse in the usual place, please ;)

Sadly though, that's all I've got time for today.  I've just had a call from the local bookshop - apparently, there's a little green man, clutching a copy of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and he does not look happy.  Duty calls...

How I Lost Your Mother

I am a fairly placid sort of blogger, one unwilling to lay into novels in the way some reviewers do, but there are some books which, for some reason or other, just annoy me.  Let's leave it there for a while...

Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mother (translated by Chi-Young Kim) is a Korean million-selling novel, due to be published in twenty-three countries and short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize.  It's a story in five parts, told from the points of view of the titular mother's family members after her disappearance on a visit to Seoul to see her family.  She becomes separated from her husband at the city's main train station and, despite the family's best efforts, cannot be found.

However, the novel is less about the search for the mother than a reevaluation of her life, seen through the eyes of the people who have taken her for granted for so long.  As they begin to share stories, they realise that the picture they had of her is deeply flawed, and each of them realises just how much she meant to them - if only too late.  It's also an allegory for the situation of the nation as a whole, one which may have sacrificed its past in order to ensure a prosperous future.

Before you start thinking that this is a wonderfully heart-warming story though, one you might want to look for on your local library database, let me give you a piece of advice - don't bother.  Please Look After Mother is a piece of trashy kitsch, a giant guilt-trip of a book which has probably sold its million copies simply by virtue of making middle-class Koreans uncomfortable about not having called Mum much recently.  I am amazed that it made it onto the Man Asian short-list (ahead of Murakami's 1Q84!), and I am crossing my fingers that the panel aren't short-sighted enough to actually give it the prize.

So what's wrong with it?  To be honest, there isn't much right with it, but I'll list a few of my concerns.  The way the book is structured, using first-, second- and third-person viewpoints, is gimmicky and pointless - the idea adds nothing to the story being told.  The actual story itself is repetitive: once you get past the first section, it's the same old story of whining, sibling squabbles and hand-wringing.  The characters are wooden and unlikeable, especially the men (which could be a cultural thing or merely bad writing), and shout at each other at the drop of a hat.  I think you've got the idea by now that I'm not a huge fan.

What was probably a very average novel in the original though has undoubtedly been made worse by a sub-par translation.  Please Look After Mother reads like a clichéd translated novel, clumsy, with unnatural sentence structure and over-formal language (meant to reflect the original Korean, no doubt, but out of place in a translation).  There were also several errors with pronouns, forcing me to go back and find out who exactly was supposed to be talking to whom, and an obsession with repeated relative clauses, which just looked strange in English.

It's sad because the idea behind the novel is a good one.  The premise of an old woman's disappearance serving as a reflection on the price paid for the rapid societal progress South Korea has made over the past few decades is a very interesting one.  We get to see how Seoul has developed in the space of a generation, and the way in which the population has shifted from a rural to a mainly urban one in a matter of decades.  However, Shin's treatment of these issues is superficial and fleeting, as is her attempt to portray the effect of the mother's disappearance on her family.  Sadly, I really didn't care about any of them.

As I am nothing but fair though, I'll finish by pointing you in the direction of a few more reviews.  The team behind the Shadow Man Asian Prize have nearly all reviewed this book, so why not have a look at what they had to say?  I'm sure it'll be more entertaining than the book itself...

It Takes A Community To Raise A Child

It has been about a year now since a Kindle first arrived on my doorstep, and a glance at the contents of my little electronic friend will quickly tell you what I have become accustomed to using it for.  The majority of the digital books I have stored away for a rainy day are German-language classics, books I'm not quite sure of but would like to give a go, and it is for this availability of free classic texts that I am extremely grateful.  While blindly perusing Teutonic novellas doesn't always work out for the best (e.g. Die Glücksritter, Die Judenbuche), more often than not (e.g. Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Lena Christ) I've come up with some new favourite writers.

Today's book then is another of these G-Lit classics, a famous novel by a Victorian-era Austrian writer (who fits in nicely with my Women Writers Month!), Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.  Das Gemeindekind (The Community Child or The Child of the Parish) is an excellent book, a psychological (psychoanalytical?) tale of a case study of nature versus nurture.  I'm aware of the cliché of dragging Freud's name into any review of an Austrian book, but it is sadly unavoidable in this case...

Martin Holub, a lazy, drunken brickmaker, arrives in a small village with his family, and within the space of six months is driven out again - at which point he robs and murders the local clergyman.  He is promptly sentenced to death, and his wife Barbara, who refuses to dispute Martin's attempt to lay the blame on her, is sentenced to ten years in prison.  Unfortunately, this causes another issue for the small township - what to do with the couple's two children...

Persuading the local baroness to take charge of the sweet and likeable daughter Milada is a fairly simple matter.  However, the teenage son, Pavel, a surly, stubborn youth, becomes the community's responsibility, one which it could do without.  Sent to live with a family who are themselves not without their own criminal tendencies, it seems as if Pavel is destined for an unhappy life and an early (and unnatural death).  But the local teacher, a man who knows what it's like to be ostracised decides that there is more to Pavel than the community is willing to admit...

Das Gemeindekind is a wonderful book, a Bildungsroman which avoids the trap of idealising the young man whose life it is describing.  Pavel may be the hero of our story, but he is far from perfect.  He is an angry young man, enraged with the way society in general (and certain people in the village in particular) have already decided that he is worthless and (as one character remarks) on his way to join either his mother or his father.

Whenever events fail to go his way, his short fuse burns through, further justifying the unjustified opinions of all who live around him.  On seeing the seductive and mischievous Vinska, a girl he has a secret crush on, in the arms of another man:

"Über den Anblick vergaß Pavel seinen Hunger - seine Ungeduld wich einem rasenden, ihm unbegreiflichen Schmerz; wie in den Fängen eines Raubtieres wand er sich und brachte ein entsetzliches Röcheln hervor." p.35

"At this sight, Pavel forgot his hunger - his impatience was replaced by a throbbing, incomprehensible pain; he twisted and turned as if in the clutches of a predator and brought forth a terrible groan."***

His aggressive behaviour, coupled with his tendency to play up his bad reputation, makes it likely that he will follow his parents' lead...

However, Pavel is fortunate enough to find one person willing to believe in him, the local teacher Habrecht ('Beright' would be a an appropriate Dickensian translation of this name!).  In one of his first appearances in the book, he is forced to give Pavel a thrashing in front of the class, but:

"Seine Ansicht war, daß solche vor einem jugendlichen Publikum vorgenommene Exekution demjenigen, an dem sie vollzogen wird, selten nützt, und denen, die ihr zusehen, immer schadet." p.19

"His view was that such punishments carried out before a young audience are seldom useful for those they punish, and always harmful for those who look on."***

Habrecht is initially the only one willing to take up Pavel's case (and that includes Pavel himself), but the more our young hero matures, the more he is accepted by the community, and the better his character becomes as a consequence.

As stated above, Ebner-Eschenbach uses Das Gemeindekind as a vehicle to explore the idea of nature versus nurture, forcing us to examine our prejudices.  Not only does Pavel have to contend with the lax upbringing of his biological father; his new guardians are fairly loose with the law themselves.  The more trouble Pavel gets into, however, the more likely people are to attribute it to his genes than the lack of care shown by the community.

There is also more than a hint of racial prejudice at play: the events take place back in the days of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, and it appears that the Czech-sounding name of Pavel Holub - and his family's gipsy-like wanderings - may have instantly drawn suspicion from some of the more Germanic leading citizens of the town.  If we throw in the Oedipal context of Pavel's struggles to provide a home for his mother once she is released from prison, you can see that there is a lot going on beneath the surface of this book...

On the face of it, Das Gemeindekind doesn't have a lot in common with other Bildungsromane, such as Great Expectations.  However, it does share one excellent trait with Dicken's novel.  Like Pip, Pavel does not come to the end of his story on the final page of the novel; the end of the book is merely the start of another chapter in his life (one I would be very interested in reading, if it existed...).  Unlike Great Expectations though, there's one really bad thing about this book - those of you who are unable to understand German are unlikely to ever be able to read it :(

*****

The translations of the German in this text, marked ***, are my own, less-than-perfect attempts :)

A Little Silliness Goes a Long Way

Last week I posted on the last of George Eliot's works of fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, but until that post became a little longer than expected, I had actually intended to review another side of Eliot's writing along side it - one which I've finally got around to talking about today :)  As you may have heard, Eliot, as well as being a novelist, was a writer of essays and assorted non-fiction, and while I was stumbling around her Wikipedia page, I came across a link to a text copy of a certain literary text she wrote...

The title - Silly Novels by Lady Novelists - will immediately tell you what it's all about, and the essay does exactly what it says on the tin.  In twenty pages or so, Eliot discusses various types of dreadful novels, and... but let me hand you over to the lady herself:

"Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them - the frothy, the prosy, the pious or the pedantic."

Where Impressions of Theophrastus Such was a little lacking in humour, this piece has it in spades, dripping in sarcasm while ripping bad writers to shreds.  This particular lady novelist really has it in for those of her gender who give everyone else a bad reputation.  While female writers in the Victorian era were often forced into the profession (as the only one suitable for a middle-class lady in need of an income), Eliot suspects that many of the worst offenders do not have this excuse.  She writes:

"It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains."

Ouch.

One particular criticism is the formulaic nature of certain novels, with their unrealistic characters and simplistic plots, where:

"The vicious baronet is sure to be killed in a duel, and the tedious husband dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favour to him, to marry the man she loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the lover informing him of the comfortable arrangement."

Eliot scathingly dissects numerous bad examples of the genres she criticises, wittily expounding upon the female protagonists more competent in ancient languages than the average college professor (and more prone to using that ability in public), and four-year-old children who can express their feelings with the pathos of a romantic poet.  She is, as you've probably gathered by now, not very generous about it.

And why should she be?  As she points out, the efforts of these dilettantes do women in general (and female writers in particular) a disservice.  It's hard enough being a female writer in a man's world, without being compared to the mindless creators of the works savaged here.  Eliot claims that this has happened because the awful amateur is received kindly - at first:

"By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman's talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if she ever reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point."

Perhaps Eliot was a little sensitive here to criticism of her own work...

I'm not usually one for including several direct quotations from books, but once again I was tempted to copy huge swathes of this essay and let Eliot speak for herself.  She is quite simply a wonderful writer, and when freed from the constraints of a monstrous three-volume novel, she can also be very, very funny.  Silly Novels by Lady Novelists is freely available and fairly short, so I would recommend that you give it a go.  It is well worth the effort :)

Blinded by Science

With my focus on female writers this month, and the plethora of Australian challenges I'm taking part in (see the icons on the right of my blog for details), when I heard of Carrie Tiffany's latest book, I thought it sounded like one for me.  I was cheeky enough to ask for a review copy of Mateship with Birds and her previous novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, and the lovely people at PanMcMillan (Picador) Australia were kind enough to send me a copy of both.  Sometimes life's like that :)

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living is set in the Mallee region in country Victoria, a part of the Australian wheat belt, in the 1930s, where our main character, Jean Finnegan, is travelling around on the Better Farming Train, a government-funded initiative to bring progress and development to the people outside the major capitals.  Jean, a superb seamstress (two in one month!) falls in love with Robert Pettergree, an expert on soils, and the two of them very quickly decide to get married and establish their own farm in the Mallee, one based on scientific principles.

With Robert's farming expertise and Jean's wealth of household knowledge, the couple are sure they can make a go of things out in the country.  Sadly though, events conspire against them: the harsh Australian climate takes its toll on all the farmers eking out a living, and the Great Depression rolls in from the city to the country.  Sometimes scientific living just isn't enough...

There's a lot to like about this book.  It stands out from the usual urban tales of Australiana, ignoring the state capital of Melbourne and instead concentrating on life out in the country, where when people talk about the city, they mean the small regional centre of Swan Hill, not the bustling metropolis which the best tennis players in the world are currently visiting ;)  It's also a reminder that the Great Depression was a worldwide affair, not a Steinbeckian phenomenon limited to the heartlands of America, and we can see the effects of the drought and economic disaster right here on our doorstep.

One by one, farmers fall victim to the drought, unable to cope in times of reduced rainfall and economic hardship.  As Robert, on the orders of the state government, tries to move the farmers on to a more scientific method of growing wheat, the signs of the Depression are already in the air.  The very train bringing the super phosphate, the chemical which is to increase the wheat yield, also harbours economic refugees from the city - the first signs of what is to come.

It's also an interesting book in a feminist light as we get to see Jean's motives for marrying and the world she has born into, not one which encourages young women to hang around waiting for a man or to try to make a go of it on their own.  In an early flash back, we see Jean at school, in a scene where we are told in no uncertain terms what her role in society is to be:

"I didn't like it when the teacher split us into boys and girls and we had special talks.  Our talks were about being modest and having babies.  The teacher showed us a map of Australia and drew a big rectangle inside the middle of it with a ruler.

'See this - all empty.  And whose job is it to fill up the empty continent with lovely healthy babies?  It's your job, girls.  What an honour.  What a privilege...'" p.16 (Picador, 2005)

When we move forward twenty years, we see that little has changed.  On moving to her new home of Wycheproof, Jean visits the small library at the local Mechanics' Institute.  Unfortunately though, she is unable to get her library card on that day - the application form has to be filled out in the name of her husband...

It is against this background that Jean's decision to get married, even if it is to someone she loves (and sexually desires) is made.  With no real family life to return to, she finds it easy to throw in her lot with the taciturn Robert, deciding to stick it out in the country, whatever may happen.  However, for Robert, life is not so simple.  His belief in the progressive nature of science and the inevitability of correct preparation bringing superior results, means that he is unable to cope with the cruel surprises nature - and economics - spring on him.  Perversely, the more Jean rises to the challenge, the more he loses his faith in what he is doing, and his nature prevents him from truly confiding in the woman he has chosen to share this life of hardship.

It's not a perfect book by any means.  It's a little short, and the part about the train, a mobile practical classroom roaming around country Victoria, is over in a flash, half making you wonder whether it was worth including it at all.  There are several sex scenes which, while probably serving some purpose, seemed a little exaggerated and superfluous at times, and one supporting character, the Japanese scientist Mr. Ohno, bordered on a caricature, one which I really didn't think worked very well at all.  The writing is also fairly sparing and simple - while effective, there are no elegant, lexical pyrotechnics to be found here (although many readers may consider this a good thing!).

Overall though, these are minor, personal quibbles, and the positives of Tiffany's novel far outweigh the negatives.  It's an easy read, but a compelling one, and anyone interested in Australian history will particularly enjoy Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living.  Having enjoyed the first novel then, I'll be very happy to check out Mateship with Birds, again set in country Victoria, but this time in the 1950s.  I see my Women Writers Month might last a little longer than I'd originally planned for...

It's All Under Control...

Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris was written in 1996, but it took until 2010 for an English translation (courtesy of Stephen Snyder) to appear.  While this is just another indictment of the lack of adventure in Anglophone publishing (I recall that Caroline told me she read it - in German - about ten years ago...), it's still a surprise.  This is an excellent novel, one which should have been translated a lot earlier.

Anyone expecting another gentle, heart-warming tale in the vein of The Housekeeper and The Professor is, however, in for a bit of a shock.  Hotel Iris is an erotically-charged, breath-taking and, at times, extremely disturbing book, definitely not one for the nervous among you.  If this doesn't put you off though, then you'll certainly be rewarded for your bravery ;)

The novel begins in the hotel of the title, a run-down, ramshackle place, set a little back from the main beach of a Japanese seaside town.  Mari, the teenage daughter of the hotel owner, leads a boring existence behind the front desk, checking in the guests and helping out with the cleaning and cooking when required.  One night, there is a disturbance in one of the rooms when a prostitute runs out, screaming at the man inside.  As she flees, the man booms out a command - words which turn Mari's world upside down.

It's not giving away much to say that Mari eventually becomes involved with the man, who turns out to be a translator, one claiming to be working on an obscure Russian novel.  This is no ordinary summer fling though; not only is the translator about forty years older than Mari, he also has some rather specific sexual preferences - and a very murky past...

Hotel Iris is a fairly short novel, only 164-pages long in my version, yet it is incredibly deeply written.  All of the handful of major characters have been skilfully brought to life, each of them adding their nuances to the overall picture: Mari's over-controlling mother with her obsession with her daughter's hair; the kleptomaniac maid, who may suspect Mari's secret; Mari's father, long dead, but a potential source of some of her issues.  Even the hotel itself seems to be a part of the plot, with the 'R' of 'Iris' in the hotel's name-sign hanging ominously askew.

Mari herself is a wonderfully-complicated person, switching from a sweet, obedient mother's girl to a secretive, self-destructive wreck at the drop of a hat.  Her deep need to be controlled and debased, stemming perhaps from events in her childhood, soon gets out of control.   She's the perfect find for the sinister translator, an empty vessel to be filled as he wishes...

...and yet, we have to wonder at times who is using whom.  The story is told from Mari's point of view, and there is no attempt to make excuses for herself or to shift the blame for matters fully onto the shoulders of the older man.  While no secret is made of the translator's deep-seated rage and his need to control every element of his life, things never appear forced in his treatment of Mari - at least, not more than she wants.

Ogawa's novel can be extremely unsettling, but that's definitely not a bad thing.  This is a book where even inanimate objects can appear dark and slightly unnerving.  The fountain in the hotel courtyard, poisoned by waste from Mari's grandfather's illness, decays just as Mari's innocence does, and the story the translator is working on, a romance with a heroine called Marie, has parallels with Mari's own life.  Pay attention while reading this book as there is definitely more to what happens in the small seaside town than meets the eye.

As I suggested above, this is not one of those pure, aesthetically-pleasing, Japanese novels westerners love to read, so it may not be to everyone's liking.  However, if you're ready to try something a little darker, why not check in at the Hotel Iris?  Its length means it'll only be an overnight stay; which is just as well - I wouldn't want to be in Ogawa's world for too long...

*****
And that brings down the curtain on the current Japanese Literature Challenge, the fifth in the series.  Thanks again to Belezza for organising the event - as always, it has motivated me to get out there and discover lots of wonderful new writers (and spend time with some old friends).  Hopefully, it won't be too long until JLC6 comes around :)  Until then, ja mata - ki o tsukete ne ;)

Impressive Impressions

When it came to choosing a Victorian writer to contribute to my Women Writers Month, it was hard to go past George Eliot, even though I've already read (and, in many cases, reread) all of her more famous fiction.  I was originally planning to read The Mill on the Floss, when I remembered that I had a couple of her less well-known works on my Kindle - which brings me to today's offering...

Impressions of Theophrastus Such is one of Eliot's minor works of fiction, and probably one for the completist rather than the casual reader, but it's still an interesting little book.  It consists of a series of philosophical musings on a range of topics, by a friendly narrator called (I assume) Theophrastus Such.  Such is (in his own words) an averagely-intelligent middle-aged man who wants to tease out a few issues with regards to human behaviour.  Of course, this is just a front, allowing the formidable mind of George Eliot to dissect the foibles of the Victorian middle classes :)

In eighteen short chapters, Such discusses issues such as people who cannot bear other people's success, the perils of attempting to create new research whilst stepping on other men's toes, the horrors of plagiarism, and the possible consequences of technological advancement.  For the most part, the essays are written in a light-hearted manner, reminiscent of Jerome K. Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, or Anthony Trollope's occasional quasi-philosophical asides to his readers, but as you can probably tell from the topics above, Eliot's serious side is never far from the surface, negating the humour a little.

Which is not to say that it's not humorous.  I spent half my time highlighting wonderful passages, some thought-provoking, others witty, the occasional line being laugh-out-loud funny.  One unfortunate man is treated as follows:

" Some listeners incautious in their epithets would have called Hinze an "ass".  For my part I would never insult that intelligent and unpretending animal who no doubt brays with perfect simplicity and substantial meaning to those acquainted with his idiom." p.47

When discussing another gentleman, the person whose jealousy won't allow him to appreciate anything done by anyone else, Such ponders:

"Why, then did he speak of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his tone of assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you to suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him, and shown an indisposition to repay?" p.38

And there's one particularly wonderful quote, one which may hit close to home for the bloggers among us...

"And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we have anything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which has not been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth considering what effect the printing may have on ourselves." p.102

Perhaps I'd better move on...

While Impressions of Theophrastus Such is a wonderfully-entertaining read though, it's not perfect.  You see, Eliot is such an intellectual giant that she occasional shoots too high, and the reader is likely to get lost if they are unacquainted with at least the rudiments of the classics and a firm grounding in modern foreign languages.  While I appreciated the humour of the articles published in the "Selten-erscheinende Monat-Schrift" ("Rarely-Appearing Monthly", p.30), I doubt that many others would.  Also, beginning one essay with half a page of untranslated French is unlikely to endear Mr. Such to many monolingual readers :(

Do stick with it though, because there are a couple of gems near the end.  In one, Such (in a discussion with a friend) predicts the rise of the machines and the disappearance of the human race in a disturbingly Terminator-esque portrayal.  In another, the most serious of the collection, Such (Eliot...) argues passionately for an end to prejudice against Jews, reliving the history of the race and showing how ludicrous society's treatment of them really is.  She truly was a woman ahead of her time...

So where can you get this work?  There don't seem to be any editions from the usual suspects, but The Book Depository has scanned and formatted it, offering a copy in its Dodo Press range for about AU$12.  However, this edition is also available as a free PDF, so you can just pop over to the site and download it onto the electronic device of your choosing in a matter of moments - how good is that?!

Before you rush off though, I'll leave you with one last nugget of wisdom from the writings of the irrepressible Such.  A while back I put forward Eliot as my champion to take on the rather unlikeable V.S. Naipaul after his nasty comments about female writers, and one sentence, taken from an essay about people who can't help giving their opinions, just sums up nicely why Eliot would be up to the task:

 "Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact..." p.37

There's nothing really to be added to that :)

Stories from the Land, Stories from the Sea...

It's taken a full nineteen days of the new year, but I've finally got around to reviewing my first book for the multitude of Australian challenges I'm participating in this year - and it's a very good one to get me underway too :)  Alexis Wright's Carpentaria was the winner of the 2007 Miles Franklin Award (Australia's most well-known book prize), amongst a stack of other literary contests, thus promising to be an excellent read.  It certainly lives up to this promise...

*****

Carpentaria takes us to the Far-North-Queensland town of Desperance, an isolated little place on the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, a reasonable plane journey from any major city.  A small white population lives in the town, existing mainly as vassals of the major mining company which has recently set up operations.  Meanwhile, skirting the town on opposite sides, two Aboriginal tribes live in what some see as squalor, but which others regard as a traditional way of life.

The two groups are led by larger-than-life elders.  The Eastsiders' chief is the ancient trickster Joseph Midnight, but it is the head of the Westsiders who is the key to Carpentaria.  Normal Phantom is a fisherman, an ancient mariner with an unparallelled knowledge of the seas, and the stars which enable him to navigate them.  After his wife leaves him, he temporarily decides to stay at home, spending his time making miraculous specimens of stuffed fish for envious Whites.  It is not until one of his sons, the prodigal Will, returns to town bearing a less-than-welcome gift, that Norm decides that it is time to return to the ocean wave...

After the first two hundred pages or so of this book, I was starting to wonder if it was really a novel at all.  The pace unfolds slowly, unhurriedly, each chapter languidly introducing and following a new character - the laconic Norm and his haughty wife, Angel Day; the miracle from the sea, Elias Smith; the nomadic Mozzie Fishman and the mysterious Will Phantom.  The first half of the book seems to be more like a series of loosely-related novellas, set in the same town with a cast of extras in the background.  Slowly though, Wright allows us to learn more information about our new friends, and Will's return to the aptly named Desperance (an apparent mix of hope and desperation...) kick-starts the narrative into another, more powerful gear.

On the surface, Carpentaria appears to be about the clash of the old and the new, the traditional and settling communities, but this is not really the case.  Although the white community is there in body, in another sense, they're not really that important.  Despite their position in the centre of the town, they are in fact marginal, irrelevant - until, that is, the time comes for scapegoats to be found, and the paths of the communities cross.  In fact, for much of the book, more is made of the rivalry between the Westsiders and Eastsiders, both of whom believe they are the rightful owners of the land.

A more prominent issue is faith, and the way it supports those who truly believe.  Of course, in a book like Carpentaria, this idea of faith is far from being restricted to the Christian religions; it has just as much to do with indigenous beliefs in the dreamtime and the debt owed to the memories of one's ancestors.  The characters who prosper in the book are those who have kept their connection with their past, who refuse to forget where they came from.

This is one of the problems for the white inhabitants of 'Uptown' - rootless and (practically, if not theoretically) godless, they have nothing to cling to, nothing that pulls them together except a dependence on the mining money and a shared fear of both the Aboriginal population and the sea.  This is a telling contrast to what drives people like Norm and Mozzie, whose constant retelling of inherited stories grounds them and connects them with with their past.

While Norm and Mozzie share a link with their history and traditions, they are separated in a much more fundamental way though, a gulf which is probably the biggest dividing force in Carpentaria.  Norm is a man of the sea, and Mozzie is deeply rooted to the land; both are unable to function properly outside their natural environment.  Norm is, metaphorically, if not literally, a fish out of water when stuck at home restoring his fish in his shed.  His soul belongs out on the sea, sailing alone under the stars, with only the fish for company.  Mozzie spends his life in a never-ending tour of the continent, visiting sacred places, paying respects to his ancestors and bending everyone's ear with his stories.

Desperance itself, caught in an uneasy position of being delicately poised between the unforgiving arid land and the menacing, ever-shifting shoreline, is unable to establish itself, unable to decide what it is.  The white folk refuse to set out to sea, afraid of what might happen to them, preferring, despite their proximity to the wealth of the oceans, to look to the land for riches - a decision which will prove to be a misguided one by the end of the novel.

So what is Carpentaria?  It will probably be a lot of things to a lot of people.  It's a story of tension between black and white and between different tribes.  It's an exploration of the importance of faith and history, an emphasis on the necessity of belonging.  It's a description of how life can be, far from the centres of 'civilisation'.  It's a novel with a wonderfully-imaginative style of writing, an Australian variety of magical realism, asking the reader to suspend disbelief while making them wonder if perhaps, just perhaps, it could all be true...

While reading Carpentaria, I had a small scrap of paper at the back of my book, ready for any pearls of wisdom which might occur to me.  By the time I had finished reading, it was full of messy, scrawled fragments, too many to use in what has already become a lengthy, incoherent ramble.  Even without being subjected to my musings on the role of angels, ghosts and demons, the suggestion of parallels with the American deep south and a lengthy polemic on racism, it will be pretty clear to the reader of this post that Carpentaria is a book I enjoyed greatly.

But how to leave the book behind...  Well, I think a look at the name of one of our new friends will help us out here.  In one way, the name of the book's main character sums the novel up pretty well as phantoms abound in the seas around Desperance.  In another though, it's not terribly apt; you see, as I hope has become apparent by now, there's definitely nothing normal about Carpentaria...

A Short Life in Detail

The famous (East) German writer Christa Wolf passed away in December last year, and sadly that was the event which pushed me into trying one of her books for the first time.  I was supposed to have read Kein Ort, Nirgends (Nowhere on Earth) at university at one point, but as I recall I didn't even get around to buying it (which says less about Wolf than about my efforts at university...).  This time, however, I managed to both buy and read one of her works - and, more importantly, enjoyed it as well.

Nachdenken über Christa T. (usually translated as The Quest for Christa T.) is an intriguing, at times confusing, story of the short life of a young woman living in the former German Democratic Republic.  Our narrator meets Christa T. at school during the Second World War, and bumps into her again when studying at university a number of years later.  The narrator uses the book to relate selected details from Christa's life, from the moment of that first meeting until her untimely death from leukaemia at the age of thirty-six.

So far, so normal, you may think; however, this book is anything but.  It consists of a series of anecdotes from the narrator, who has been given a box of documents by Christa's widower and is determined to lay bare her friend's life in an attempt to explain to the reader what kind of woman she was and how she lived her life.  But why should we care?

This is a question which is (deliberately) never satisfactorily answered, and it's not the only ambiguous part of the story.  As the narrator relates events from Christa's life, the point of view slips back and forth between the first- and third-person, at times making it difficult to tell who is meant by 'ich' ('I').  In any case, the reader suspects that this issue of identification is complicated further by the temptation to throw a third speaker into the mix - Wolf herself.  Towards the end of the novel, the narrator sympathises with Christa's tendency to slip into the third-person, citing "...die Schwierigkeit ich zu sagen." ("...the difficulty of saying I.", p.201)***.  So just who is speaking here?

Knowing that the book is set in East Germany, it's difficult to avoid reading certain things into Nachdenken über Christa T., even though Wolf was one of the writers who stayed and defended her mother country.  Christa is shown to be a free spirit who refuses to be tied down by the expectations of society, waltzing in and out of lectures, not caring if her marks drag down the average of her study group, running off with any man who takes her fancy.  At one point, the narrator says:

"Kein Verfahren findet statt, kein Urteil wird gesprochen..." p.68

"No trial is taking place, no judgement is being made..."***

However, it is difficult to take this at face value; there is a pervading sense that the free-spirited Christa is somehow letting the system down by doing exactly (and only) what she wants to do.  Mind you, the state censors let it slip through, so I won't labour the point ;)

This book, with its emphasis on examining a person's life in detail, enabling a portrait to be painstakingly built up, reminds me in many ways of another classic German novel, Heinrich Böll's Gruppenbild mit Dame (Group Portrait with Lady).  Böll also used third-party sources to slowly develop his main character, avoiding having her appear in person until late in the piece to heighten the effect of the puzzle.

However, a major difference is that where Böll's Verf., the man engaged in building up a picture of Leni Pfeiffer, roamed far and wide interviewing people to get his information, Wolf's narrator refuses to ask others for help, preferring to rely on her own memory and the scraps of paper she has been given.  At times, she even imagines conversations and scenes which may have taken place, filling in certain gaps for herself.  When events start to become blurred later in the piece, this gives us even more reason to be suspicious of the facts - and of her motives...

Of course, we are given clues of this 'blurriness' early in the novel, when the narrator discusses the difficulties of ever getting a clear view of events, using clever word play related to poetry.

"Dichten, dicht machen, die sprache hilft.  Was denn dicht machen und wogegen?" p.24

"To write poetry, to seal off, language helps us.  Seal off what and from what?"***

Here Wolf is playing on the sounds of 'dichten' (to write poetry) and 'dicht machen' (to seal off) to explain that the role of poetry and literary writing is to obscure, just as much as it is to reveal.

This idea of 'defamiliarisation' would be a familiar(!) one to anyone who has studied literary theory, and while it may sound perverse, there is actually a kind of twisted logic in it.  By defamiliarising an object and rendering it difficult to make out, the writer forces us to concentrate our attention much harder on it.  In this way, we find something new in mundane objects which we don't really see properly any more.

And this is what Wolf does in Nachdenken über Christa T. - she takes an ordinary life and, through her smoke and mirrors, produces the story of a life less ordinary, a life spent trying to avoid being pigeon-holed, trying to find out what she actually wants from her time on earth.  The narrator has used this opportunity in an attempt to show us, just one time, how Christa T. really was, not how people saw her.  Why?

"Wann, wenn nicht jetzt?" p.219

"When, if not now?"***

 *****

Page numbers are from the German Suhrkamp Taschenbuch edition (2007).
All quotes marked *** are my attempts at translation :)

Coming Apart at the Seams

I came home from work a couple of months ago to find a book waiting for me, a fairly common occurrence around my neck of the woods.  However, this particular incident was a little out of the ordinary as it was a book I'd never heard of and had not asked for (even my wife looked a little confused).  Could it be...  Yes, on this day, I had received one of those mythical items, an unrequested advance review copy, a sign that I too had ascended to the next circle of bloggerdom, become one of the chosen...

The book in question was María Dueñas' The Seamstress (also known as The Time In Between), a best-selling Spanish novel of a woman caught up in political intrigue during the Spanish Civil War and World War II.  I was a little hesitant to read it at first, despite its being a translated work, as I suspected that it might be chick-lit in disguise (the cover certainly didn't convince me that it would be one I'd enjoy...).  However, in the idea of trying new things, and with a month of reading books by female writers in full swing, I decided to give it a go :)

The Seamstress, translated by Daniel Hahn (although you have to look pretty hard to find his name...), is written around Sira Quiroga, a young dressmaker living in Madrid, who abandons her ordinary life (and her very ordinary fiancé) to run off with a smooth-talking salesman.  Having been abandoned by her lover in Tangiers, she moves on to Tetouan (in the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco), where she is forced to work hard to pay off debts incurred by her horrible ex.

There she makes the acquaintance of Rosalinda Fox, an English woman who wants help making a fabulous dress at very short notice.  She needs it to wear to a function, on the arm of her lover - a high-ranking Nationalist official.  This chance meeting is the start of Sira's life of political intrigue...

Let me make something clear right from the start - this is not one of my usual literary tomes.  Unfortunately, my first impressions were largely justified, and I spent most of the novel picking faults in Dueñas' style, thinking about how this could have been a better book.  The major issue is that the writer is too eager to tell the story to let the story actually be told.  A good story unfolds at its own pace, unhurried by the writer's intentions, but Dueñas seems to be pushing The Seamstress along as if she has somewhere to be, and that's quite a feat in a book that runs to more than 600 pages (of admittedly large type).  In better hands, this could have been a trilogy of literary tales rather than one plumped-up page turner.

Another worrying problem is the characterisation.  The Seamstress is full of two-dimensional, stereotyped supporting players: the educated, possibly gay neighbour; the suave, roguish, seductive lover who abandons Sira; the buxom, matronly housekeeper (and smuggler!) who takes Sira under her wing in Tetouan.  Every time the reader is introduced to someone new, Sira gives us just enough details to let us know what kind of person it is before the plot continues on its merry way.  Sadly, it's not enough to make us care about any of them a great deal.

I would also argue that the choice of a first-person narrator is a fairly limiting one, forcing the author to resort to a long sequence of monologues, interrupted by the occasional conversation.  In one instance, Dueñas obviously realises that this is insufficient, and the chapter moves away from Sira and describes life in Madrid for Rosalinda and her beau.  In the final paragraphs of the chapter, we find out how this is done; it's all information Sira has gathered from letters - how convenient...

There are several more issues I had with The Seamstress, but to simply list them here would be overkill, and slightly unfair.  You see, for all the problems I had with the book, I did actually read it through to the end, and I ended up enjoying it.  As mentioned above, it is a page-turner, in the good sense as well as the bad, and the further the story progressed, the more I wanted to know about Franco-era Spain and Morocco.  It's an interesting setting for a World War II thriller, playing out in a country which isn't actually taking part in the conflict (even if it is very clear whose side Spain is actually on).

So is it worth reading?  I would argue that this depends very much on the reader.  If you crave literary fiction, books which are written in elegant and mesmerising language, painstakingly constructed with vast repositories of hidden meaning, then The Seamstress is definitely not for you.  However, if you enjoy historical fiction and ripping yarns, especially those told in the first-person by a young female narrator, you may well get a lot out of this novel (I've had a quick look around the blogosphere, and it appears that I am pretty much alone in my opinion of the book!).

Still, one thing's for sure - I don't think I'll be getting any unrequested ARCs again in a hurry...

A Reflection of Society

Bloggers are lovely people.  A while back, I left a comment on a post on Banana Yoshimoto's The Lake by Lisa from ANZ Lit Lovers, in which I had a little whinge about not receiving a review copy of the book after someone from the publisher's had actually contacted me first.  Not only did I get the sympathy I was after (I'm so transparent), but she actually offered to send me her review copy to add to my little library of J-Lit tomes!

Obviously, if the book turned out to be rubbish, I was going to feel very silly indeed.  Luckily though, that's not the case.  The Lake is a very fine little novel, probably one of the best of the five Yoshimoto works I've read, and a very enjoyable way to spend New Year's Day to boot (I ran through the whole thing in a matter of hours!).  Thanks Lisa :)

The Lake (translated by Michael Emmerich) introduces us to Chihiro, a woman approaching thirty, who earns a living painting murals on walls and buildings while she thinks about what she wants to do with her life.  As we enter her world, she has just begun a relationship with a neighbour, Nakajima, a rather intelligent young man with a disturbed, and disturbing, past - one that we (and Chihiro) will learn more about as the story progresses.  Chihiro senses that Nakajima's fear of intimacy and social situations must be related to some kind of childhood trauma, but she is unwilling to push him into a confession, for fear of hurting him.  Then, one day, Nakajima asks Chihiro to accompany him on a journey into the past - a trip to visit some friends living beside a lake...

This journey to the lake is the key to understanding the novel, but Yoshimoto sensibly initially leaves things as vague and murky for the reader as the fog-bound body of water the couple first encounter.  We are gradually fed small pieces of information about Nakajima's past, with the truth not coming out until about forty pages from the end.  Even then, there are things left unsaid, memories left untouched - and the book is the better for it.

Nakajima is ostensibly the character we should be interested in, but Chihiro herself is also an intriguing creation.  While she has not been subjected to the treatment Nakajima was forced to endure, she too, in her own way, has suffered from the way a certain group of people thinks you should live.  Living in an unorthodox family unit, simply because her father's family, appalled by her mother's lifestyle, refused to allow him to marry, Chihiro and her parents were left as a perfect nuclear family without the official social sanction.

For anyone who has lived in Japan, or read anything about its customs, the idea of a homogeneous society will be nothing new, and it is this issue which Yoshimoto constantly returns to in her fiction, the way outsiders have to find a place for themselves in a society which would rather they didn't exist.  In many ways, the group that takes control of Nakajima is a microcosm of Japan itself, a community unwilling to accept difference and determined to make people conform to its own norms.  It is no coincidence that Chihiro and Nakajima are alike in their different approaches to life, or that their goal is to flee to Paris - often the only way for young Japanese to escape the constraints of family and social ties...

As for the lake itself, it's a wonderful piece of imagery and symbolism, almost certainly containing the crux of the whole work - now, if only I knew what that actually was :(  Perhaps a clue can be found in the way Mino, one of the friends living by the lake, insists that although the lake may seem still, it is in fact constantly changing with the seasons and with the activity on it - just like society itself...  Chihiro's attempt then to recreate the lake in her mural could represent an attempt to reshape society to suit her own wishes and to make a place for the two young lovers to live without fear of outside interference.  Then again, I may just have been hitting the literary theory books too hard recently...

Whether any of this makes sense or not, what I've taken from reading The Lake is a sense that this is a very good book, one which lingers in the memory (unlike certain others of Yoshimoto's works) and contains a lot more in its 188 pages than you might think.  I'm not sure that it's the kind of book which wins prizes, but it's certainly worthy of its place on the Man Asian Literary Prize long-list.  Like the body of water which gives the book its name, there's definitely more to The Lake than meets the eye.