It became frightening to step back onto firm ground

getting-the-pictureGetting the Picture
by Sarah Salway

When new publisher Dean Street Press offered up any of their books for review, I picked this one partly because the synopsis sounded good but mostly because they had a quote from Neil Gaiman on the cover. Not the greatest reason but I think it worked out.

The book opens with Maureen accompanying her model friend Pat to a photographer’s studio. Maureen is married with a young child and the photographer, Martin, specialises in nude portraits – tasteful ones, but nudes all the same – so Maureen is nervous to be there but undeniably attracted to Martin. Cut to 40 years later and Martin is moving into a retirement home. He writes a letter to Maureen to tell her that he picked the same home that her husband George is in, because he wants to finally understand why she went back to her husband after their affair ended.

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Politics are what brought us together, in this room

asylum and exileAsylum and Exile: the Hidden Voices of London
by Bidisha

I picked this book up at its launch in London last week after hearing a few samples from it read aloud. It’s a short, jauntily written memoir that is deceptive in the power of what it has to say.

Bidisha is a British author, journalist and broadcaster who in 2011 started to run creative writing workshops for asylum seekers and other migrants in London, organised by English PEN. She quickly realised that most people who turned up for the class were not interested in becoming writers – they were there to improve their English or to spend some time with people in a similar situation or even to receive the free tea, cake and £8 travel subsidy provided by the charity. But she also found that didn’t matter because she discovered amazing people and had her preconceptions of refugees challenged.

“On the board, I draw a sun with a smiling face and rays and all its clichés flowing out from it: warmth, light, shininess, redness, yellowness and gold, nourishment, hope and life and growth, tanning and health, sunset and sunrise. These are all banned.

A woman with a canny face, gleaming jet skin and matte black eyes chuckles as she prepares to read hers out. Grandly, emphatically: ‘I miss the African sun because it made me sweat out all my African fat.’

Clapping, laughter and loud agreement from everyone.”

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Sunday Salon: So much stuff

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The Sunday Salon

It’s been a busy week, full of bookish stuff, plus friends and family, and that work thing, so I am too tired for our weekly pub quiz and instead am sat at home watching junk TV instead of reading any of the many piles of unread books lying around. I should probably feel bad about this but I don’t.

Watermark BooksOn Tuesday I went to London and I tried really hard not to go to any bookshops while I was there after last week’s book buying. I avoided all the bookshops I know and love and instead went to the British Library to visit the Lines in the Ice exhibition (one of their smaller exhibitions but still really interesting – lots of old maps, which I love). Thankfully the place was so swarming with people visiting the Magna Carta that I didn’t even consider visiting their giftshop, which is basically a bookshop. But then when I was searching for the toilets in Kings Cross Station I stumbled across a tiny but lovely branch of the US book chain Watermark Books next door to the Harry Potter Shop. Of course, I couldn’t walk into a new bookshop find without buying anything, but I picked a couple of smaller books in the hopes of actually squeezing in reading them!

bookshop buys

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A gleam of light in the impenetrable mystery

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The Little PrinceThe Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
translated from French by Katherine Woods

This is my first read for Classics Club and it may have been an odd place to start, or maybe a very good place. I’m not sure. It certainly wasn’t the book I expected and yet, thinking about it, I really should have known exactly how it would be.

First of all, it’s a children’s book, which I knew, but so many adults rave about it that I suppose I thought it wouldn’t read quite so very much like one. Also, it was written in the 1940s and has the moralising tone to suit, though it’s an unusual set of morals that it’s selling.

The story is wonderful, by which I mean both that it’s lovely and that it’s full of wonder. A young pilot crashes his plane in the Sahara Desert and there meets and befriends an alien who has travelled to many worlds. The alien, the little prince of the title, tells the pilot about his home world and his travels and the life lessons he has learned.

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Asylum and Exile: the Hidden Voices of London

FreeWord-logo

Bidisha
Free Word Centre, London, 3 February

I’ve been on the English PEN mailing list for years, but as their events are mostly in London I’ve never actually made it to one before. This one was also in London but I had some holiday to use up so I took a half-day off work to make my leisurely way to Clerkenwell and listen to a fascinating discussion around issues of refugees, asylum and the written word.

Bidisha, a writer who has run writing workshops in London for asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants, has written some great background to the event here so I will summarise fairly quickly and nudge you over there for more detail! The event took its name from a book Bidisha is publishing (official release date is 11 February, though last night was effectively its launch) about the writing workshops she ran, the people she met through them and the stories they had to tell. (I started reading it on the train home and I’m already most of the way through – it’s a great book that I will post more about soon.) She is an elegant, poised woman who spoke with passion but also plenty of humour about issues surrounding asylum. The event is part of a series organised by English PEN to counter the pervasive negative media picture of asylum seekers in the UK and Bidisha was joined on stage by people who have worked for or with a whole host of related charities, mostly with a literary aspect to their work.

Maurice Wren, CEO of the Refugee Council, kicked things off by explaining that the problem they face when countering media stereotypes is that they are “tackling simple lies with complex truths”. It’s a tough task, but one thing everyone on stage believes can work is telling individual stories. It’s certainly true that the things that stand out for me from last night are those individual stories – they are unavoidably more powerful than numbers, however big or small.

Bethan Lant works as an advocate for asylum seekers for Praxis Community Projects, dealing with the legal side of things but also the practicalities of finding them a place to sleep, an interpretor for those who don’t speak English and so on. She told a very telling story about two young men who recently showed up in her office at the end of the day with no English, no place to stay, no clue what papers had to be filled in or what status they needed to apply for. Bethan went into work mode, solving all their problems, including escorting them to the Tube to reach their temporary accommodation. Afterward, she realised she hadn’t even asked their names until a form required it, and all she knew about them was their country of origin and that they had come to the UK via Calais. What stories they could have told her, what journeys they must have led, but she had fallen into the trap of seeing those young men as problems not people.

Bethan added that the problem isn’t exactly that refugees’ stories aren’t heard. They have to tell their stories over and over again in the official process, but they aren’t heard as human beings. This point was picked up by Bamidele Hassan, a refugee from Nigeria who now runs poetry workshops for the Migrant and Refugee Committees Forum. The worst part of the UK process for asylum seekers is that the Home Office assumes your story is false. It is not uncommon for refugees to spend years in various detention centres being told over and over that they are lying, which is not only dehumanising but can make people doubt their own sanity.

Nadifa Mohamed and Malika Booker are both writers who came to the UK as children. Nadifa has been here now for 30 years, but says that anti-immigration rhetoric still has the power to make her feel like an outsider, that this isn’t her home. Malika added to this that she is alarmed by the rise of the far right wing across Europe; looked at in historical context this is something that should worry us all. An audience member added that it isn’t just Europe experiencing this. In her native South Africa, violence against refugees and migrants from other African countries is on the rise, but newspaper reports focus on the outrage of the South Africans at the “invaders”, never on the migrants.

Bidisha picked up the baton here with her own hope that art can be a counter narrative. The people she spoke to for her book weren’t writers but when people are talking about things that really matter to them, they are eloquent. These are the stories that need to be heard, not the nameless faceless numbers games that newspapers play. She urged the audience to go away and write articles, spread these stories. Malika said that it’s not just for political benefit that these stories should be told. She has learned from the writing classes she runs that it’s of huge benefit to people to find a way to tell their story and feel heard. Bethan added that the best way of doing that is to get a group of people with similar backgrounds together, to let them discover for themselves what is universal and what is unique about their experience.

Which is of course where Bidisha and her book come in, because they make this point so very well. The experience of exile, seeking asylum, building a new life from nothing, is sadly all too common, but the people sharing that experience are hugely diverse, from the lives they led before to their personalities to the way they approach life – it sounds like a crass, obvious thing to say, but it’s all too easily forgotten. It would be easy to say what I learned last night about Bamidele is that he spent 11 months in detention before being granted refugee status, the suffering and indignity that he went through. But I also learned that he is a soft-spoken man brimming with justified anger. I heard the conviction in his voice when he told others’ stories and implored us to see that the system cannot be right. I saw how shyly he read out the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley, with what quiet power he explained why it speaks to him, and in particular the final lines:

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”

Thank you to the Free Word Centre and English PEN for organising this excellent event. I only wish I could do it justice, but suffice to say that I came away both suffused with the need to share these stories and full of hope because these people are already doing such wonderful things that I really believe in.

For more information, please do check out the excellent work that these charities do:
Free Word
English PEN
Refugee Council
The Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum
Praxis Community Projects
Migrant Voice

January reading round-up

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Ex-Machina-2-9

I had so many good intentions this weekend: write a review of the book I finished a week ago (The Little Prince, my review is started, which is something); post my January reading round-up on the last day of January, not the first of February; finish another book (I’ve read about five pages all weekend); and most urgently of all to not buy any more books, which should have been easy as we had no plans to go shopping, but then we did and I bought not just one or two but nine books. Oops.

The thing is, the very helpful knowledgeable folks at Excelsior comic shop recommended Ex Machina by Brian K Vaughan to me towards the end of last year (a series that finished in 2009, so it has the added bonus that I can collect the whole set without having to wait for it to be written), so I bought the first volume and really really liked it. When Tim and I changed our plans today and headed to Excelsior, I figured I’d buy the next volume, maybe two. But when I looked at the shelves, I saw that they have started reissuing Ex Machina in a new design, which I don’t like as much aesthetically but I did like that they’re each twice the size for only 1.5 times the price. So I was on the verge of buying the first couple of volumes of the new design, but then the manager said that he’d quite like to get rid of the old designs, which they had a full set of minus the one I bought last year, so he’d discount them for me. Of course, I didn’t have to buy the whole lot, but on the other hand it would suck if I bought half the series in the old design and then had to switch. So – nine new books.

To be honest, January was a bit unexciting after my birthday, but we have all sorts of fun plans for February, so watch this space!

 

Books

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch (short review)

The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen (review)

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld (review)

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Saga volume 4 by Brian K Vaughan

 

Short stories / essays

“Pnin” by Vladimir Nabokov (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“Housecleaning in Babylon” by John Gregory Dunne (Saturday Evening Post, Points West column)

“Brother Theobold’s earthquake” by Joan Didion (Saturday Evening Post, Points West column)

“On becoming a cop hater” by Joan Didion (Saturday Evening Post, Points West column)

“Dreampolitik” by Joan Didion (Saturday Evening Post, Points West column)

 

Happy February folks, and most of all, happy reading!

An underwater stillness, no wind or rain

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All the Birds, SingingAll the Birds, Singing
by Evie Wyld

If someone had told me that I would rave enthusiastically over a book about sheep farming, frankly I would have laughed at such a ridiculous statement. Now perhaps it’s because the sheep farming is arguably incidental, and not really what this novel’s about, but there is quite a lot of it and yet I really loved this book.

How to describe this book? Jake (who, confusingly, is female) is living on an unnamed British island farming sheep. She avoids people as much as she can and seems to have run away from something in her past back in Australia. Interspersed between us learning more (although far from everything) about her past, we follow her present, where something or someone is killing her sheep but she is reluctant to ask for help dealing with it.

“Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding. Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that.”

Clearly there is something dark in her past, which aligns well with the literal wet and dark atmosphere of the present, but the way it is gradually revealed is clever and the facts themselves were surprising, not what I expected, even with on reflection plenty of hints given. But the gaps that are left leave you still guessing, still piecing the full story together at the end, which I almost feel should have been frustrating, but actually worked for me.

Jake herself is an interesting character, brittle and stand-offish, but to an extent it’s left open whether that’s innate to who she is or the result of her past. She’s also a very strong person – though her age isn’t given in the present section, I got the impression she was still in her twenties, yet she’s running a small sheep farm single-handed.

But for all the hard work and difficult subject matter, there’s also humour. Black humour, to be sure, but it’s enough to lift the mood at just the right moments and make the story wholly human. For all Jake’s distance from other people, there are still some touching emotional scenes as well. Plus (and this went down particularly well at book club) there are two dogs that are very much major characters themselves, not just pets in the background, which is pretty awesome.

There’s also a gothic element to the book, with a few scenes that could be interpreted as in some way supernatural, but then again could just be Jake’s altered state of mind. Certainly the wild, wet and windy island, and Jake’s remote farmhouse surrounded by muddy fields, are a perfect gothic setting, and somehow the stark realism of some scenes, such as her rescuing a sheep that’s stuck in mud, only add to that atmosphere.

“An underwater stillness, no wind or rain, not even a small owl, just a thick blanket of silence. I shut my eyes, and felt the mattress creak as Dog loped up on it, and weaved himself between my feet. The room settled and I counted heartbeats. There was a quiet crackle then silence again.”

I really did love this book and will definitely be adding Wyld’s first book, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, to my shelves soon.

Published 2013 by Jonathan Cape.

Source: Waterstones.

See also: Simon Savidge’s podcast You Wrote the Book includes a great interview with Evie Wyld about this book

Sunday Salon: Should we judge older books by today’s standards?

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The Sunday Salon

This year I joined the Classics Club, with the aim of reading a list of 50 classics in five years. Some of my list are modern classics (okay, a lot) but about half were written before 1930 and, well, those times they were quite different. I’ve only read one book off my list so far (review to follow soon), but I’ve read enough older books in the past to know that the same problem raises its ugly head time and again: the different moral and social standards of earlier times can be upsetting and affect my opinion of the book. Is it wrong of me to let that happen?

The thing is, while in, say, 1860, language (and indeed actions) that were sexist, racist, homophobic and all sorts of other discriminatory were common throughout society, does that really mean that all people then didn’t know those derogatory terms were wrong?

Now, you could argue that, right or wrong, if discriminatory language was common, then a novelist writing a realistic story has a right, or even a duty, to reflect that language in their work. But equally you could argue that a novelist has a duty to make it clear that such language is not morally defensible.

Moralising, however, is another of those things that older books tend to do that can put me right off. Which I know sounds a bit hypocritical after all the above. But it is tedious, right, when you can see a message being driven home from a mile off?

What about you? Do you judge older books by today’s standards? Are there any other things that put you off a book?

Jokes, banalities and metaphors assaulted her sensibilities

rabbit-back-literature-societyThe Rabbit Back Literature Society
by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
translated from Finnish by Lola M Rogers

This book was one of the staff recommendations at Mr B’s Reading Emporium and I was attracted to the title and the sinister tone of the blurb. I waited until it was suitably wintry outside (it is set in Finland, after all) and then settled in for something magical.

Ella Milana has recently moved back to her home town of Rabbit Back to teach literature and help her mother cope with Ella’s father’s decline into dementia. Rabbit Back is renowned throughout Finland, indeed the world, for being the home of acclaimed children’s author Laura White, who is not only a beloved bestseller herself, but also declared that she could take ten children from her home town and turn them into successful writers as well. To this end she formed the Rabbit Back Literature Society, to which she invited nine children who have grown up to become great writers. As Ella is both an adult and not a regular writer (she dabbles), she is rather taken aback to be chosen as the society’s tenth member.

“The essays blared through her consciousness…Jokes, banalities and metaphors assaulted her sensibilities, and the floodgates of language standards creaked as dubious sentence structures and hyphenation errors dribbled through their cracks. Every imperfect essay left a dent in Ella’s mind.”

This passport to greatness appears to have been curtailed as soon as it began when at a dinner party thrown at Laura White’s house, a key person disappears in a cloud of snow. But Ella is still a member of this writers’ society and she is determined to dig up all its secrets, big and small, real and imagined. Why are words changing in library books? Why is society member sci-fi writer Arne C Ahlqvist (real name Aura Jokinen) creeping around Ella’s house at night? And was there a previous tenth member of the society who has been written out of its history?

I love that when the first few strange things happen, including Ella’s invite to the society, she is too busy with her normal life to pay it all much heed. She has a job, difficult parents, her own preoccupations. This really highlighted for me how often in books characters jump to something new in their life with no regard for what they would otherwise have been doing.

“He just wanted to look at the garden, to watch it grow – that’s how he explained it to his wife, Marjatta, who had begun to think of herself as a widow and sometimes suffered from a terrible feeling of guilt because of it. Old age doesn’t always wait till you’re old, was her way of answering him. Every day seemed to break off another little piece of Paavo Emil Milana’s personality, and piece by piece he was less and less the Paavo Emil Milana she had married.”

The story hints at and creeps into several genres. The overall structure is that of the detective novel, but it’s not clear whether any crime has been committed. Similarly, there are strange hints of the supernatural in various forms – ghosts, faerie creatures, magic – but nothing is definite, nothing is explained. Could it all just be over-fired imaginations?

The imagination is certainly central to everything else in this novel. White has trained her writers to tap into their and each other’s deepest, most buried thoughts to fuel their writing. The whole town seems to believe in magical creatures, in dark shapes in the shadows become manifest. Even the dogs are behaving strangely. But there is also the beautiful possibility of imagination, the joy that books (and other writing – one of the society members writes for TV and another for film) bring.

“ ‘It was a lovely collapse,’ Saaristo said. ‘Like something out of an old melodrama. All that was missing were the smelling salts. It’s no wonder you fainted in this crowd. Free coffee and cake will get the masses out better than resurrection day.’ She looked around, smiled broadly, and said, ‘But if you want to find characters for a book, this is a good place to do it, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I found bits of a serial killer’s mother, half of a hero’s lover, and three whole peripheral characters today. A nice haul.’ ”

As Ella learns the rituals of the secretive society and unearths its and the town’s secrets, there is always the potential for something awful to come to light, but what is hidden is more often sad in an everyday way, or at least everyday for the world – loneliness, infertility, the death of parents, the love affair that ended.

And yet somehow it isn’t a sad book, this tinge of sorrow underlines but doesn’t overwhelm the magical otherness, the sense of fun and adventure, the intrigue of mystery. There’s a black humour, a nod to the idea of the idyllic-seeming town harbouring dark secrets, but it’s so much stranger than that.

Lumikko ja yhdeksän muuta first published 2006 by Atena Kustannus.

This translation published 2013 by Pushkin Press.

Source: Mr B’s Reading Emporium.

Sunday Salon: Noted quotes

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The Sunday SalonWhen I was a teenager I used to write down favourite quotes and stick them on my bedroom wall and mirror. I had dozens of them by the time I left for university. I remember there were a lot of Oscar Wilde aphorisms, because they seem immensely clever and worldly when you first discover them, but there were also some lines of poetry, beautiful combinations of words that spoke to me.

These days when I read, I don’t take note of the same kind of things I did back then. When I pick out quotes for my reviews, I’m choosing lines that demonstrate the style of the book. They might well be clever and/or beautiful, but not in the same way as those words on my old wall. Teenage me was searching for words to live by: inspiration, hope, advice, wisdom. Older me looks for a more abstract beauty in words, a sense of originality, ultimately something I truly admire.

Those teenage quotes are still with me, as in I remember most of them, though I expect the actual scraps of paper are long gone and if not, I’m pretty sure the ink will have faded to almost nothing. But though the quotes I pick out these days are arguably better, chosen for purer reasons, I never remember them. Even as I’m closing the final pages of a book in which I have underlined dozens of passages that I loved, I won’t remember any of them.

This might be partly a comment on my failing memory, or on how much more information I have crammed into my brain in the years since I was a teenager, but I find it a little sad I don’t retain nuggets of literature in that way anymore. Perhaps I need to read more poetry, as the rhythms lend themselves to being memorised. I love the idea of being able to quote whole poems (something else I did as a teenager – why yes I was tad pretentious) but worry what other information I’d be squeezing out.

Do you remember good quotes from books you read? Do you keep note of quotes you like?