Category Archives: Book Group

The Book Group and Siri Hustvedt’s Blazing World

Posted on 16 April 2014 | 11 comments

Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (Sceptre 2014)

144477963X

Before the meeting: I’d missed a number of book group meetings – travelling, and then other evening commitments had got in the way. Alice Munro, The Red Badge of Courage, some Hemingway, The Dinner by Herman Koch – all were discussed without me. I thought I was going to miss out on the Siri Hustvedt dinner as well until Friday, when I realised the evening was wide open. I dashed into Gleebooks on Saturday morning and bought a copy, not actually intending to read the whole thing – I had a lot on my plate and the group’s emails that been less than enticing: ‘I am only up to page 32 and struggling with it!’ ‘I think page 32 is a mammoth effort.’ I planned to read to page 40 or so, enough to have some hope of following the talk when we met.

It was not to be.

The book is presented as a collection of documents – journal entries, art reviews, interviews, transcripts of statements, scholarly essays – by and about a New York artist Harriet Burden, edited by a scholar named I V Hess, whose ponderous introduction accounts for the first 12 pages and no doubt led to the book’s lack of appeal in some quarters. But Harry, as she is known to her friends, transcends the ponderousness. Having been the wife of a successful art dealer, she embarks after his death on a new artistic trajectory. Her work and she herself have been largely ignored or discounted by the art scene, and she comes up with a project to present new works as the creations of a series of three male artists. She’s tackling gender issues with passion born of a lifetime’s struggle, and at the same time exploring questions about the role of the creator’s reputation in how a work of art is seen, and deeper philosophical and psychological issues of identity, creativity, intersubjectivity, perception. I was hooked.

Other pressing demands on my time fell by the wayside and I read the book in three days. I rationalised that it was relevant to the online writing course I’m doing: this was a chance to see if in spite of its fragmentary appearance the book had something like the classic three-act structure. And behold, it does have the nine plot points we have been learning to identify, pretty much where they are suppose to fall. As a result, at any point in the novel you can feel it moving in a clear direction: the scholarly citations, the dissertations on hoaxes (mainly gender based ones such as James Tiptree Jr, but Ern Malley is mentioned in passing), the intellectual arguments, the meta moments such as the reference to ‘an obscure novelist and essayist, Siri Hustvedt’, the detailed descriptions of artworks, the ruminations on art history, the quotes from Whitman, Milton and Emily Dickinson, are all borne on a current leading inexorably towards what we know from near the start is a conclusion with more than one dead body. Novels, of course, don’t have to be tied to the classic three-act structure as tightly as we’re told films do, but I was gobsmacked to see how closely this novel, apparently so all over the place, sticks to the shape. It’s hard to talk about without spoilers, but here – perhaps of interest only to me – are the 9 points (there are 380 pages in the novel):

  1. set-up: We meet all the characters, or at least learn their names; Harry is widowed and in upheaval; she dreams up the Maskings project
  2. inciting incident (10%): page 39–40, she chooses her first ‘mask’
  3. change of plans: page 41–58, three new, widely divergent perspectives are introduced
  4. significant setback (25%): page 117, Harry’s first ‘mask’ having told her he was damaged by the project, she tells her friend Rachel: ‘There’s something in me, Rachel, something I don’t understand. … It’s something horrible inside me.’
  5. midpoint – sometimes called the point of no return (50%): page 213, ‘We have made the pact’
  6. darkest hour (75%): page 301, ‘He said, You look dead, Harry. She said, I feel dead.’
  7. glimmer of hope: page 314 ‘And then I said the right thing for once.’
  8. climax (90%+): Depending on how you read it, the climax is either page 322–324, a description of an artwork (he said, tactfully avoiding any spoliation), or page 351–361, which I don’t know how to characterise without giving too much away
  9. resolution: the very last page, the description of another artwork.

As I drove to the meeting I was prepared to be alone in having been completely absorbed, completely satisfied by the book.

The meeting: There were six of us, of whom two had read the whole book and one other was intending to finish it. A key thing that made the difference seemed to be that the three finishers had an interest in some kind in the art world: thanks to the Art Student, I’ve picked up a smattering over the last few years so I knew of many of the women artists named in the text, and found something almost uncannily familiar some of Harry’s observations about being an older woman in a scene that privileges youth and masculinity; another finisher has recently been an art student at TAFE; and the third has some wonderful art on his walls and is generally interested in it. Without some kind of prior interest, the device of multiple narrators and the general sense of contrivance seem to have stopped people from engaging.

There’s not much more to be said about the discussion of the book: conversation ranged instead over Pesach (last night was the second night), walking out of the theatre, a risqué witticism that Governor Marie Bashir once made to one of our number, the excellent seafood pie we ate, the inequity of raising the pension age, the difference between our current way of taking in most information through seeing and earlier times when it was mainly through hearing. The book, wonderful though it is, was a bit of a fizzer, but the dinner was a great success.

PS added later: I forgot to mention that one of us had started reading the book on his Kindle and found it very frustrating. When he shifted to a hard copy it became a much more manageable and pleasant experience. The difficulty seemed to have something to do with the way footnotes are treated in the ebook. They work better on the page.

11 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged ,

What Maisie and the Book Group Knew

Posted on 24 October 2013 | Leave a comment

What Maisie Knew, Henry James (1897, this Kindle edition based on Echo Library Large Print Edition 2006)

1_wmkBefore the meeting: When I read Henry James at university (Portrait of a Lady in first year and What Maisie Knew some time later), quite a bit of it went right over my head. I loved the prose, but the worlds of his novels were a long way from the North Queensland pragmatism and Catholic piety that I had been brought up with. Perhaps now, more than forty years of secular urban life under my belt, I’d have more luck. After all, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s movie adaptation just about tore my heart out a few weeks ago, and Kate Lilley’s poem ‘Maisily’ moved me simply by listing the adverbs from the book.

The Kindle edition gets right down to business – cover, title page, table of contents, and then, without so much as a chapter heading:

The litigation seemed interminable and had in fact been complicated; but by the decision on the appeal the judgement of the divorce-court was confirmed as to the assignment of the child. The father, who, though bespattered from head to foot, had made good his case, was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed to keep her: it was not so much that the mother’s character had been more absolutely damaged as that the brilliancy of a lady’s complexion (and this lady’s, in court, was immensely remarked) might be more regarded as showing the spots.

We’re thrown right into the middle of a story, everything in plain sight, embedded in metaphor and sarcasm. This can’t be read fast, and once you know that by this stage of his life James dictated his novels, it can’t be read without the mental image of a portly gentleman pacing the room enjoying the sound of the sentences as they roll out from his mouth.

And it continues as it has begun: rich, sonorous, intricate sentences that tell a story of child neglect from the point of view of the child, but with no attempt to tell it as a child would: instead, we are asked to explore the great complexity of this little girl’s perceptions of the adult world and her strategies for dealing with it, in language that is at times as baffling to the reader as that world is to her.

I enjoyed the book, but I can’t pretend that I always understood what was going on in that adult world. Specifically, in the last movement Maisie – now well past the age of six that she remains in the movie – has to make a decision about her living arrangements in a context where the adults clearly share an understanding of the issues and believe incorrectly that Maisie does too. James seems to expect his readers to have the insider’s view as well. But times have changed, and the reference point of the culture have shifted so much that I at least could only follow the broadest outlines of what F R Leavis calls the ‘moral squalor’ of the adult world. The governess Mrs Wix, who is possibly meant to be a kind of moral centre of gravity (and who is not there in the movie) wins out in the end, and I think we’re meant to see this as a triumph of good over evil, but I completely couldn’t see why Maisie’s rejection of Mrs Beale, who has always defended and loved her, should be seen as a good thing (though who can tell when the air is so thick with irony?).

By telling the story from Maisie’s point of view, the novel throws into question the whole concept of moral squalor, if that refers primarily to sexual behaviour: what Maisie doesn’t get is all the sexual stuff, so being a kept man or a loose woman or a gold-digger or someone who pays for sex, as various characters appear to be, matters not at all, whereas loyalty, patience, kindness, generosity and their absence are what count.

F R Leavis thought very highly of this novel, which is probably why it was set for us to study at Sydney University in the 1970s. I don’t know that it’s a book I’ll be in a hurry to reread, though many of James’s sentences merit many re-readings.

After the meeting: Words like ‘loathing’ kept cropping in emails leading up to last night’s dinner. However, it was hard to feel loathing for anything much, as we sat outside eating barbecued chicken and sausages on a balmy, mosquito-free Sydney spring evening, as darkness brought an end to a day that had been predicted to be full of bushfire horror but had instead been one where the volunteer rural fire service could be justifiably proud of having averted disaster by strategic backburning the day before.

There were six of us. A couple had been travelling, and shared travellers’ tales. One had been living in Darwin and told spectacular yarns of Territory life. Some of us had been to the theatre and had stories to tell from there as well – one involving a smart phone that played Beatles tunes as background to the drama until an actor politely asked the blithely unaware owner of said phone to turn it off. It was a warm, convivial evening.

We did talk about the book, happily and with minimal rancour. Only one of us – me – had read the whole thing. Only one of the others said he planned to finish it. I may have been the only one who found the sentences fascinating rather than perversely complex. As we were going home, we clapped eyes on the paperback that one chap was holding, and several of us had difficulty reconciling the slimness of the paperback with the size of the book we felt we had read on our various electronic devices.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , , ,

Edmund White Flâneur and the Book Group

Posted on 5 September 2013 | Leave a comment

Edmund White, The Flâneur: A stroll through the paradoxes of Paris (Bloomsbury 2001)

1582341354 Before the meeting: I was very happy when this book was suggested as our next title. I’d come across the idea of the flâneur, the aimless wanderer through an urban environment, as an artist archetype (I think it was at the launch of Michael Sharkey’s The Sweeping Plain in 2007), and had somehow got the idea that Baudelaire and Edmund White were the go-to writers for anyone wanting to understand the archetype.

I was misled, at least about Edmund White. That is, I thought he was going to turn out to be a flâneur like the protagonist of Teju Cole’s Open City (which I suggested as a supplementary title), and that’s not how this book works at all.

It’s a short book, part of Bloomsbury’s The Writer and the City series, in which, according to the back cover blurb here, ‘some of the finest writers of our time reveal the secrets of the city they know best’. Peter Carey’s self-indulgent and forgettable 30 Days in Sydney was part of the series, and New South’s generally excellent Cities series may have been inspired by it.

There are six chapters: a general introduction to the idea of the flâneur and the general complexity of Paris is followed by essays about French (and mostly Parisian) attitudes on race, Jews and homosexuality, with an inserted chapter on eccentric and little known museums, and a final chapter on the weirdness that is the French monarchist and royalist movements. In other words, the bulk of the book is taken up with considerations of French culture through the lens of US-style identity politics, in particular through the lens of US gay culture.  There’s very little wandering the streets, though as the text wanders through its chosen themes it sometimes creates an illusion of appropriate lack of discipline.

I enjoyed White’s mini-essays on Colette, Sidney Bechet and Josephine Baker. He gives a fascinating account of the Club des Hachichins (frequented by Baudelaire, Balzac and Théophile Gautier, if you can frequent something that only happened half a dozen times). His discussion of why AIDS had so much higher an incidence in Paris than in London raises interesting questions about identity politics (big in the US, sneered at in Paris – guess which attitude turns out to be superior!). The stories of a number of individual 19th century Jews are strikingly similar to the story of Charles Ephrussi in The Hare with Amber Eyes – in a good way.

There is all that, and much more that’s enjoyable and illuminating, but more often than not I was irritated. I grew tired of the name dropping (he once dined with Foucault, but that’s only the high point), the preening (his Parisian dinner-party comrades hadn’t noticed until he mentioned it that Paris is no longer a predominantly white city), the false modesty (he once gave a talk on Genet to a Palestinian audience, who surprised him by loving it even though he is white and Western), the persistent essentialising of ‘the French’ and ‘Parisians’, the titillatory titbits (wife-swapping clubs, cruising by the Seine) and the unremitting gay perspective (the most emphatic detail in his description of a mosque is that the Gay men who cruise its hammam on Sundays don’t touch each other out of respect for the religious environment).

After the meeting: It’s Rosh Hashanah, so attendance at the Book Group was down last night. (Memo to selves: Must keep a sharper eye out for High Holidays in future.) The five of us ate a hearty French meal, gossiped, engaged with the problem of an iPhone whose screen had gone blank, and discussed the book.

One man had really loved it. He’d read it when in the south of France, just before going to Paris, and so was much more attuned to its sense of place than I certainly was. He enjoyed the way the text moved between tiny details and broad perspectives. He found himself stopping to re-read paragraphs just for the pleasure of them. Interestingly enough, he loved the first sentence for its elegance and its cheeky wit, while I was irritated by its Americo-Eurocentrism and its snobbish smart-aleckery:

Paris is a big city, in the sense that London and New York are big cities and that Rome is a village, Los Angeles a collection of villages and Zürich a backwater.

One man had surrendered his copy when the library insisted he return it (probably because I was asking for it), but he hadn’t been unhappy about that as he’d had three attempts at the first chapter and been unengaged – because as far as he could tell, all White was doing was quoting a lot of other people about Paris, which is less true of later chapters. One had read it overnight (I’d dropped off that same library copy to him on Tuesday afternoon) and had a similar mix of enjoyment and irritation to mine, though I think with more pleasure and less irritation. Perhaps part of the problem is that we had all read the entry on ‘flâneur‘ in Wikipedia, and then approached the book expecting it to be an example of flâneurism, which it really isn’t.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged ,

The Book Group goes up Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

Posted on 1 August 2013 | 4 comments

Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke (John Murray 2011)

0719568986 Before the meeting: After Karl Ove Knausgaard’s mountains of mundane detail, we wanted our next book to be one that spins a great yarn. Someone proposed the sequel to Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, which we’d all enjoyed. There were no dissenting voices, so River of Smoke it was.

We’d forgotten that in his own way Ghosh is just as given to piling on the detail as Knausgaard. Especially in the first half of River of Smoke, hardly a paragraph is without its cluster of glittering facts or shiny words. A glossary would have to define a seemingly endless variety of boats, buildings, functionaries, items of clothing, financial processes, scientific equipment, dubious activities, plants, religious rituals and so on as they are named in Bengali and other Indian languages, Cantonese, Portuguese, Farsi, regional Englishes, Cantonese pidgin, Mauritian Kreol, and so on. And then there’s a wealth of historical anecdote: we see Napoleon at Longwood on St Helena; we hear of escaped slaves on Mauritius who committed mass suicide when they saw troops approaching their hiding place, unaware that the troops were coming to tell them that slavery had long since been abolished; we learn the origins of chai, and much much more. The effect isn’t intimidating: Amitav Ghosh is like a child let loose in a linguistic and historical lolly shop, and wants us to share his delight. The writer he most resembles in this love of the source material is Neal Stephenson.

As you would expect, River of Smoke starts out putting us back in touch with the main characters from Sea of Poppies. But pretty much as soon as they’ve been reintroduced most of them drop out of the picture, some never to be mentioned again, and those who remain gradually withdraw from centre stage to become relatively minor figures – the munshi (secretary cum newsgatherer) to a major character, the recipient of letters from another. The characters we engage with most strongly are new: Bahram Modi, a Parsi opium trader, and Robin Chinnery, artist, homosexual romantic and writer of long, flamboyant letters. Possibly the main character is fanqui-town, the brilliantly evoked, exhilaratingly diverse Babel on the edge of Canton where foreign traders were allowed to live and work in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The opium trade, whose viciousness was graphically evoked in the first book, is the most profitable activity of the fanquis, and the novel traces events leading up to the First Opium War in 1939: the Emperor is no longer turning a blind eye and a new, incorruptible man arrives in Canton to take definitive, dramatic action. According to Google the historical war didn’t turn out well for the Chinese and the trade continued for decades, but River of Smoke ends just before the war proper begins and that outcome isn’t at all obvious.

At the group meeting about Sea of Poppies, someone said he enjoyed the ripping yarn and learned a lot of history but wasn’t engaged in the way he wanted to be by a novel. For all its delights, River of Smoke was like that for me. The tension is real, the stakes are high, and I trust that I’m being told a true story – but sometimes it’s as if the novelist was swamped by his research and forgot that he cared about his characters. There are longish extracts from actual documents issued by the Chinese authorities and the fanqui opium traders, for example, which are fabulous to read, but leave our characters with little to do but react or comment from the sidelines.

Maybe the book suffers from the Middle Book Syndrome – in the first book the world and characters were new. In the third book we’ll find out how everything is resolved. In this one, we just have to get from Book One to Book Three. It’s a bridge rather than a stand-alone, and so not completely satisfying.

After the meeting: There were seven of us, of whom five had read the book.

Two people reported being on holiday and experiencing a powerful resistance to submitting to the world of the book – one ploughed on despite the resistance, the other followed his bliss after 20 pages or so.

The man who liked the book most described it – accurately – as very visual. At a level of simple pleasure it was the linguistic fireworks that appealed most to me. Someone else was most moved by the painful sense of history.

None of us were wildly enthusiastic about the epistolary chapters, tending to find the flamboyant Robin Chinnery a bit on the tiresome side.

Someone arrived with multiple tabs open on his iPad web browser: paintings of Canton’s foreign factories in the 18th and early 19th century, maps of historic Canton, etc. It turned out that a number of us had been to Wikipedia to look up the Opium Wars, and to see if various characters were real (many were). Amitav Ghosh’s web site has the Chrestomathy, mentioned in passing in the book, which is an odd linguistic document compiled in old age by Neel, the zemindar turned munshi who may well turn out to be the central character of the trilogy.

Attitudes to the as yet non-existent third volume ranged from eager anticipation to ‘meh’. I’m close to the eager anticipation end of that continuum.

[As I was about to upload this, I checked and found that Amitav Ghosh is on Twitter, which prompts two remarks. First, I hope Twitter isn’t distracting him from his writing, and if it is I apologise for adding to the distraction. Second, I was delighted to see that someone on Twitter actually drew the world’s, and Ghosh’s, attention to something that I kept to myself all through our meeting – ‘fanqui-town’ sounds very like ‘Funky Town’. Ghosh’s response was three exclamation marks.]

4 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged ,

The Book Group and Book One of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Struggle

Posted on 20 June 2013 | 2 comments

Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family (My Struggle: 1) (2009, translation by Don Bartlett 2012, Vintage 2013)

0099555166When we googled “My Struggle” at the Book Group last month, the top result was Hitler’s Mein Kampf. We were mildly amused by what we took to be a google oddity. But the Norwegian title of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume novel is Min Kamp – a similarity that could hardly be accidental. At the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the man himself told us that the sixth and final volume is a 400 page essay about Adolf Hitler. One has to wonder: if A Death in the Family is point A, how does he get from point A to point Way Off the Chart?

But since only two of the books are available in English so far, that’s a question for later.

Before the meeting: I finished reading A Death in the Family a couple of weeks ago, just after hearing Karl Ove speak at the SWF. I would have moved straight on to the second volume, A Man in Love, if I hadn’t had other more pressing demands on my imaginative faculties. The appeal, for me, is to do with shoe leather.

In the movie business shoe leather is the term for precious screen time wasted on actors walking from place to place. Knausgaard has elevated its written equivalent to a high art. It seems no one ever just gets in a car and drives somewhere: they always turn on the indicator, check the rear-vision mirror and pull out into the traffic, then follow a series of carefully named streets until they arrive at their destination. When a character cleans a book case, it goes like this:

I sprayed the glass door of the bookcase, crumpled up the newspaper and rubbed it over the runny liquid a few times until the glass was dry and shiny. Looked around for more to do while I had the spray in my hand, but saw nothing apart from the windows, which I had determined to save until later. Instead, I went on with the bookcase, tidied everything, starting with its contents.

That man be unremarkable, but so much of the book is taken up with similar attention to detail that how a reader responds to it will have a huge influence on their response to the book as a whole. Early on, there’s a passage about growing up that helps explain what’s happening, as I understand it:

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to keep a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilise it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years we strive to attain the correct distance from objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty.

I read the narrative’s wealth of undifferentiated detail as an attempt to reverse that process: to give priority to specific observations and experiences over any abstraction, to go for immediately apprehended ‘meaning’ over calm, generalisable ‘knowledge’, to avoid our habitual exclusion of some things from consideration. As well as the tiny acts, the brand names, the hyper-specifics, we are given the narrator’s play of mind, apparently unfiltered – memories and meditations that are jogged by the brand names on cleaning products, say, his adolescent worries about the shape of his penis when erect, or  the strange feeling he had as a boy about the gravel on the floor of the family garage. And, because nothing is being left out, he tells us things that are just not talked about: how he shakes his little girl when she irritates him, the extraordinarily squalid circumstances of his father’s death, his grandmother’s incontinence. These last things don’t feel deliberately shocking – more like the inevitable result of a  decision made at the beginning to put everything in.

Karl Ove has said that the overwhelming emotion he had while writing the novel was shame. He couldn’t believe anyone would read it, and now he is embarrassed to realise that roughly half a million people know all about his failures as a parent and his sexual inadequacies (those are yet to come, perhaps in the second book).

After the meeting:  This book provoked as much sustained conversation as any we’ve discussed in the group. One man who spent his childhood in Britain was most deeply struck by the way the weather was evoked: the grimness of the winter and the way spring came as a great relief. This struck a chord with others who had lived in northern Europe for any length of time. Another man, following his daughter’s lead, had been watching a lot of Simon Amstell‘s recent melancholy stand-up and found a striking resonance with this book. Another man was struck by the book’s failure to make him empathise with the narrator – at one stage he thought it might all be total fiction, that Knausgaard the author might be no more Karl Ove the character than Mark Haddon is Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – and in that case it’s a brilliant creation. I don’t know that anyone liked it as much as I did.

As always, the conversation ranged widely, from the sexist bile being showered on Julia Gillard to details of our lives, all to the tune of excellent pasta, grilled zucchini and fennel and tomato salad.

2 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , , , , ,

Mercè Rodoreda’s In Diamond Square with the Book Group

Posted on 2 May 2013 | 2 comments

Mercè Rodoreda, In Diamond Square (1962, Translation by Peter Bush, Virago 2013)

1ids

Before the meeting: I came to this book with inaccurate expectations. Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes it on the cover as ‘the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War’, which I misread, lazily, as ‘about the Spanish Civil War’. True, the action of the novel spans the years of the Civil War, which is a major element in the story, but it would be quite a stretch to say the novel is about the war. The novel tells the story of Natalia, a naive, uneducated young woman from Gracia, then a poor area of Barcelona rather than what the internet now calls ‘one of the city’s hippest areas’. She marries a volatile young man whose entrepreneurial ambition fills their apartment, bizarrely and malodorously, with pigeons. The Civil War disrupts their family life when her husband and their male friends joins the militia – we see none of the combat, and none of the reasons for the war are discussed or explained, but we stay within Natalia’s narrow horizons, following her through wretchedness, deprivation, despair and unexpected happiness (though, to save spoilers, not necessarily in that order).

It’s a gripping story, with some brilliant images, but the thing that struck me most strongly was the language. Natalia is the narrator, and her voice is what makes the novel what it is. She begins:

Julie came to the cake-shop just to tell me they would be raffling coffee pots before they got to the lucky posy; she’d seen them and they were lovely, an orange split in two, showing its pips, painted on a white background. I didn’t feel like going to the dance or even going out, after I’d spent the whole day selling cakes and my fingertips ached from tying all those gilded raffia knots and handles. And because I knew Julie could manage on as little as three hours’ sleep and didn’t mind whether she slept or not.

She begins as she plans to go on, with leaps in logic (from the coffee-pot design to the question of whether she will go out or not, omitting to mention that Julie had come to take her there), syntax that doesn’t quite cohere (‘And because’ – huh?), attention to details that lead nowhere (‘an orange split in two’ etc), lack of orientation (who is Julie?), unexplained cultural references (are we supposed to know what ‘the posy’ is?), and so on. Then it took me a moment to figure out that the third they was a different they from the first two, that Julie is talking about the coffee pots, not the people who were raffling them, and because that tiny awkwardness feels like the kind of thing that happens in translation, I lost confidence as a reader , and as I read on I couldn’t tell how much of the narrative voice was Natalia’s and how much was the sound of Peter Bush wrangling the transition from Catalan into English. I wasn’t necessarily critical of the translation: perhaps this is one of those books that defies translation – as I imagine Malcolm Knox’s The Life to be. (A literal translation of DK’s ‘Well yeah … but no’ would probably leave Catalan readers floundering, but how else do you translate it?)

I read on, enjoying the book, but my unease about the translation persisted, and about a hundred pages from the end I turned to the Internet for help. I don’t know what I expected, but I found an excellent article from the British journal The Translator, ‘Language and Characterization in Mercè Rodoreda’s La Plaça del Diamant‘ by Helena Miguélez Carballeira, which discusses the language of the book in the context of two previous translations. According to Ms Carballeira, Natalia’s discourse is what the boffins call escriptura parlada – spoken writing. Mercè Rodoreda sets out to ‘trace the discursive peculiarities’ of the uneducated Catalan working-class. Her speech is also full of features that mark it as peculiar to Barcelona, and is full of the euphemism, attention to detail and diminutives that mark stereotypically feminine speech. More than that, Carballeira argues (and I’m persuaded) that

Natàlia is a woman who feels uneasy with the very act of speaking. … The characteristics of [her] conversational, unmediated speech as a discursive device in the novel are rather predictable: there is an extensive use of idioms and colloquialisms, interjections and onomatopoeias. This yields a constant, highly idiomatic, non-straightforward use of language.

That is to say, Natalia is at least as big a headache for a translator as Knox’s DK.

A gauge of the difficulty of the task is the differences between translations. Carballeira discusses a number of fascinating examples. Here’s just one, quoted in a discussion of Natalia’s use of euphemism:

The original Catalan (1962):

I mentre em dedicava a la gran revolució amb els coloms va venir el que va venir, com una cosa que havia de ser molt curta.

From Eda O’Shiel’s The Pigeon Girl (1967):

And while I devoted my energies to the grand revolt against the pigeons, there took place what had to take place, and it seemed as if it would be over quickly.

From David H Rosenthal’s The Time of the Doves (1986):

And while I was working on the great revolution with the doves the war started and everyone thought it was going to be over quickly.

From Peter Bush’s In Diamond Square (2013):

And while I was waging my big revolution against the pigeons, what was brewing came, that they said would be a two-day wonder.

Having read this article when I was struggling, part way through the book, I had a much better time with the rest. Some of Peter Bush’s decisions had confused me. For example, he names Natalia’s husband Joe, possibly as what Carballeira calls a domesticating strategy, but when I read that his name is Quimet in the original I realised that the discord between his English name and his Catalan context had niggled away at the edge of my mind, creating a sense of unreality like the one in some CGI movies, where figures don’t quite seem to touch the ground. And another example: Joe/Quimet refuses to call Natalia by her name but calls her Pidgie, without explanation of where the name comes from – to my ear that sounded a bit like Piggsy, and so vaguely insulting, and it was a long way into the story that I realised it was short for Pigeon, and that Joe/Quimet was obsessed with those birds; in the original he calls her Columeta, which my computer translates from the Catalan as, you guessed it, Pigeon. Maybe to a British ear ‘Pidgie’ sounds more affectionate than ‘Pigeon’, but ‘Pigeon’ would have worked fine for me.

This experience makes me suspect that if I’m going to read books in translation a little bit of research will make the whole experience go better. As it happens I’ve been to Barcelona, so quite a few of the local references – Tibidabo, Parc Güell, etc – made immediate sense to me. If I hadn’t been there, I doubt if I would have bothered to get out a map, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea. (I do think I was right, though, not to read the author’s spoilerish 1982 ‘Prologue’ until after I’d read the book.)

The meeting: We were astonishingly unanimous in our responses to the book. We’d all enjoyed it; we’d all been at least mildly disconcerted by the language, though when someone read a short passage aloud, its ‘written speech’ qualities were obvious; we’d all engaged with Natalia and formed strong opinions about Joe/Quimet; and I think we’d all had our heartstrings / tear ducts activated. There was an attempt to get someone to read the last couple of pages, which are full of sweet, kind-of-sexual tenderness, but no one was up for the challenge. We enjoyed the book so much we contemplated staying with Catalonia for our next meeting, and reading The Sun Also Rises, Homage to Catalonia and perhaps something by Colm Toibín. (We decided against it, and will be heading off to Norway instead with Karl Ove Knausgaard.)

2 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , ,

The Book Group on Karen Armstrong on the Bible

Posted on 27 March 2013 | 4 comments

Karen Armstrong, On the Bible (Atlantic Books UK, Allen & Unwin 2007)

1ob Part of the function of a book group, or at least of mine, is to take you (me) out of your (my) comfort zone. So when On the Bible was proposed as the title for our March meeting, I resisted my urge to reach for a proverbial bargepole.

The urge didn’t come from a Dawkinsian disdain for religion. On the contrary, atheist though I am now, I was a member of the Marist Brothers in my teens and early 20s, and I treasure the memory of a series of lectures by nicotine-stained Brother Flavian, who was supposed to be teaching us Catechetics (whatever that is) but instead shared his passion for biblical studies an hour a week for a whole year. I wasn’t keen on revisiting the subject with what sounded like a dry introductory text.

But I’d seen Karen Armstrong’s TED Talk, Let’s Revive the Golden Rule, and the chap who proposed the book was very keen., so what the hell, archie, I thought, and happily supported the proposal..

It turns out that the stuff I remember from Brother Flavian’s lectures – the story of how the Bible was written and compiled, including the varied cultural and historical contexts – takes up just a fraction of the book. Karen Armstrong doesn’t linger on the poetry so much as sketch the politics, and though I miss the poetry, the politics is often fascinating, especially when there is an implied commentary on 21st century readings. For example, she describes P, the priestly strand of the Torah/Pentateuch, as proclaiming that ‘Israel was not a people because it dwelt in a particular country, but because it lived in the presence of God’; or, something that Brother Flavian could never have said but is glaringly obvious once articulated, ‘A thread of hatred runs through the New Testament.’ (Pharisee to Richard the Third: ‘You call that a hatchet job? This is a hatchet job.’)

The US title, The Bible: A Biography, is not only catchier, it also gives a better sense of what the book is: because once it has told the story of how the books of the Bible were written and assembled, it goes on with the process of canonisation (which happened over centuries, and was still being debated in Luther’s time), and then Armstrong’s real subject: how the way they were read changed over the centuries – by Jews, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Protestants. The Midrash and Talmud, the Platonists, the early Christian Fathers up to St Augustine, the mediaeval exegetes and the Kabbalists all brought different understandings of what the Bible was, and how it should be read, and what one was to make of its many inconsistencies. Then came the Protestant Reformation and capitalism, and Lurianic Kabbalah and tikkun olam, followed by the Enlightenment, which brought Spinoza ‘who studied the historical background and literary genres of the Bible with unprecedented objectivity’ and was the forerunner of the German Higher Criticism. We arrive at last at the mystical reading of the Hasidim, and the extreme literalism of the fundamentalism that came into being in late 19th century USA:

This was an entirely new departure. In the past, some interpreters had favoured the study of the literal sense of the Bible but they had never believed that every single word of scripture was factually true. Many had admitted that, if we confined our attention to the letter, the Bible was an impossible text. The belief in biblical inerrancy … would, however, become crucial to Christian fundamentalism and would involve considerable denial. [The leaders of this approach] were responding to the challenge of modernity but in their desperation were distorting the scriptural tradition they were trying to defend.

And then there’s post-Holocaust Judaic literalism which adopted the until-then secular ideology of Zionism, and came up with a doctrine that was in fact completely novel even while claiming to be based in antiquity:

Unless Jews occupied the whole land of Israel, exactly as this was defined in the Bible, there could be no Redemption.

The blurb tells us Karen Armstrong was a religious sister briefly some decades ago. You can’t tell from this book whether she is still a Catholic or even a believer, but there’s no hostility to religion. What does come through loud and strong is her antagonism to movements that hijack the Bible for political purposes, while disregarding the extraordinary richness of its history.

There are dry stretches, where the treatment of various Kabbalists, say, or different strands of mediaeval Christian hermeneutics amount to little more than annotated lists, potentially useful if one were to go on to further study, but skippable for the drive-by reader. Perhaps, in fact, those dry patches make up most of the book, so that in effect it’s more successful as a reference book than as a narrative. I found the bits that transcended that dryness fascinating, among other things for the way they illustrate that reading, reading anything at all, is a tremendously complex act that can transform the text being read.

I was reminded of Constantine’s Sword, James Carroll’s powerful history of anti-Jewish oppression in Christianity, especially Catholicism, which could almost read as an elaboration of one thread of this book..

The meeting:
In the days leading up to the meeting there was a flurry of emails saying their writers had up after a hundred pages or less, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the conversation last night had sputtered and died before moving on to the media’s nastiness about Julia Gillard. In fact, we stayed roughly on topic most of the evening – helped by a couple of the chaps having been to Seders the night before. Googling was banned for the evening, so there were interestingly speculative conversations about, among other things, the meaning of the orange on the Seder plate, and the colour and species of the animal that Jesus rode into Jerusalem.

Not many of us had read the whole thing. One had bought his copy of the US edition online from Able Books for 10 cents, no postage. The blurb on that edition referred to the book’s ‘cracking pace’, which we could all agree on, though it may have been precisely the ‘pace’ that made it hard going at times: the historical Jesus is dealt with in a single sentence, and I’m not sure if the historical books of the Hebrew Bible get even that. While a cracking pace is a good thing in a thriller, in an overview of a major element of western culture it tends to be either compacted or superficial. Still, I think there was a general respect for the book’s achievement in indicating the complexity of its subject without being impenetrable. Several of us remembered little, apparently casual observations that opened doors in our minds.

But there seemed to be a general thirst for some fiction as our next book

4 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , ,

The Book Group, Paul Ham and Hiroshima Nagasaki

Posted on 6 February 2013 | 3 comments

Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki (HaperCollins 2011)

1hnBefore the Group meeting: I heard Paul Ham speak about this book at Gleebooks early last year. He described it as narrative history, aiming to tell the story of what happened in the lead-up to dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the aftermath, paying attention to what the various players knew and understood as events unfolded, as opposed to their later accounts. He focused on the phrase ‘the least abhorrent alternative’ used by the US leadership after the fact. It encapsulates the official version of events that is not borne out by the records: in fact, he said, no other alternative was ever seriously considered. And, he said at that Gleebooks event, the record puts the lie to received wisdom that the atomic bombs saved as many as a million lives by bringing about an immediate Japanese surrender: the Japanese leadership in fact barely discussed the bombs at all, but were despertely alarmed by Russia’s entry into the Pacific War. Yet Ham dissociated himself from ‘revisionist’ histories that saw the US use of the bombs as knowingly unnecessary. I bought a copy of the book and was looking forward to reading it, so I was very glad that someone proposed it for the book group.

I finished it with days to spare before the meeting, but other demands on my time meant I didn’t get to write anything. I found it completely gripping – one night in bed, reading accounts of Hiroshima just after the bomb was dropped, I gasped involuntarily at least three times, interrupting the Art Student’s beauty sleep.

The meeting: There were nine of us, including one of the Founding Fathers who had been away for more than a year while finishing a degree, and the other Founding Father who has more or less moved to Darwin, but managed to be in town that night. The book generated a lot of discussion over soup, salad and sausages, with a backyard pond full of frogs as background music. I think it made a deep impression on each of us: it confronted us with our ignorance /amnesia about the Allies’ ‘terror bombing’ of Hamburg and Dresden, and of 60 Japanese cities including Tokyo; one guy who always wants us, as an all-male group, to talk about masculinity, found plenty of grist for that mill; there was rumination on the ‘anything can happen’ theme. Basically, we reminded each other of what was in the book rather than getting into controversy. One of us confessed to having bashed people’s ears about it over Christmas meals. Another said that a friend who hadn’t read the book dismissed it as being akin to the sloppy macho war histories produced by a Household Name (unnamed here because I haven’t read any of his work) – but none of us felt it matched that description. We did discuss briefly the absence of any exploration of the US’s insulting treatment of Japan in the decades leading up to Pearl Harbor, and wondered if we would have responded any differently from the Japanese people who were in thrall to the propaganda urging mass honorable suicide, or from the US people who cheered with no misgivings the mass killing wrought in their name. Someone said that he enjoyed books that were beautifully written; I felt that this is such a book, but he meant something different.

It was one of the best nights we’ve had in the group.

After the meeting: Geoffrey McSkimming, creator of the much-loved Cairo Jim–Jocelyn Osgood books for young people, once told me he has a rule that there need to be three good gags a page (Geoffrey, if you read this, please correct me if I misremember). Hiroshima Nagasaki keeps this rule, except it does it with interesting/devastating details or revelatory flashes rather than gags.

When I mentioned the three-gag rule at the meeting, someone mistook me to mean I loved the accumulation of facts and statistics, which he said (and I agreed) did sometimes become onerous. I was thinking rather of the kind of moment that strikes a spark of emotion or insight, or sets you googling to find out more about someone or something mentioned in passing. I decided to do a little test. I chose a page at random by tossing coins: 2 heads, 6 heads, 3 heads – page 263.

263

This is a key point in the narrative. The Allies have issued the Potsdam Declaration demanding that Japan surrender unconditionally or face ruin and destruction. The Japanese leadership consider it, but the hawkish, ‘samurai’ side carries the day, and the Prime Minister reluctantly issues a statement saying they ignore the declaration as beneath consideration – the Japanese concept is mokusatsu. This is interpreted in the West as a rejection of the ultimatum, and plans to drop the new bomb are greenlighted. All that is interesting in itself: the page is a good example of how the book’s narrative drive. But how about he three-gag rule? I think it holds up.

One: It may be idiosyncratic of me, but I find that parenthesis at the top of the page riveting. Arguably the most important meeting of the Japanese leadership and one of the two men arguing against suicidal defiance just happened to be absent. Can history really turn on such tiny hinges?

Two: Though the linguistic/cultural titbit about mokusatsu has been introduced on the previous page (along with the equally interesting haragei or ‘stomach art’), here the ‘gag’ is the tragic lost-in-translation effect of those US headlines hot on the heels of t he various literal versions of Suzuki’s words.

Three: The aphoristic punch of ‘The Japanese resolve to continue fighting was a depressing example of the triumph of hope over experience.’

It may not be up there with the page that tells us what the Hiroshima bombing crew did on their return to base, but it fits the rule.

It’s a solid book, with a hideous subject, based on original research and painstaking trawling through archives, and managing at the same time to be a lively, at times appalling read. It sits happily on my mental book shelf with Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’ Drawing the global Colour Line, which gives some perspective on the lead-up to Pearl Harbor; Robin Gerster’s Travels in Atomic Sunshine, about Australian occupying forces stationed near Hiroshima after the war; and The Boneman of Kokoda, an example of an extraordinary individual’s way of living honorably with his part in Japan’s war history..

3 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged ,

The Book Group climbs Venero Armanno’s Black Mountain, plus sonnet #4

Posted on 8 November 2012 | Leave a comment

Venero Armanno, Black Mountain (UQP 2012)

Before the Book Group meeting:
A hasty read of this book’s cover blurb led me to expect a kind of fictionalised misery memoir cum migration tale, a book where a second or third generation Australian explores his European heritage:

Beginning in the sulphur mines of Sicily over a century ago … Based on factual events … Italy … rural fringes of coastal Australia … a haunting exploration of what it means to be human.

There are elements of misery memoir: in the most powerful and memorable part of the book the main character, Cesare Montenero, is sold as a child into virtual slavery to work in Sicily’s sulphur mines in the early 20th century. But Cesare’s story is told in the literary equivalent of found footage, and the sulphur mines account for only 40 of the 200 or so pages of the found manuscript. A 30-page prologue has already set some creepy, horror-genre expectations, so that one’s antennae are out for hints of the darker, weirder underlying story. It’s hard to say much more without giving stuff away, but there are plenty of pleasing twists and turns. I’m glad I didn’t read any reviews beforehand, as one of the book’s pleasures is in the way appearances turn out to be deceptive, the ground shifts constantly under your feet, you can’t really be sure what kind of book you’re reading.

I enjoyed it, but can’t say I found it satisfactory. Too often I became aware of the plot mechanics, that someone was making it all up. A gauge of my lack of engagement is that I kept wanting to have a conversation with the copy editor: ‘If we’re going to opt for the US practicing,’ I wanted to ask her/him, ‘why not consistently use US spelling, like sulfur?’ Or, ‘Are sure you shouldn’t have queried whether resiled to should have been resigned to?’ There are more such moments, and the fact that I noticed them may say more about me than the book, but it does indicate I was less than fully engrossed.

After the meeting:
This was an unusual meeting. The group had been going for exactly 10 years last night, so there was much taking stock and reminiscing, and passing on of lore to those of us, like me, who weren’t there at the start. But our in-house facilitator made sure we each had a moment to give our personal take on this book, and uncharacteristically a consensus emerged: the book was OK, no one hated it, but all but one of us found it fairly ho-hum. The sulphur mine section got a general thumbs up – one chap had read the book a while ago and had trouble remembering anything else about it. And, as someone said, we enjoyed the brothels of Paris. But, while I think we all read to the end, the overarching plot failed to impress. Most of us didn’t feel the sulphur mines and the brothels to be integrated, so when those parts came to an end, the wheels of the plot had to start from a virtual standstill. The one person who had a different reading argued for a deep thematic coherence, but I won’t say more because it really is a book that can be spoiled by too much being given away.

And the obligatory sonnet:

Sonnet 4:
Ten years and more than 60 books
discussed by us (and mostly read) –
by builders, architects, home cooks
and sundry ageing chaps, well fed
each time in mind and body. Park,
Malouf, McEwan, Stead, Houellebecq,
Coetzee (twice), White, Ghosh (a naval
title), Falconer, Miéville:
We all loved Tolstoy. Tsiolkas split us.
Tonight: Armanno, reminiscence,
but mostly – here’s the Book Group’s essence –
not so much a tute on lit as
time for sharing – hip, hooray-able –
lives and minds around a table.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Group, Books, LoSoRhyMo

Tagged ,

The Book Group reads Chekhov short stories

Posted on 13 September 2012 | 5 comments

Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog and other stories, 1896–1904 (translated by Ronald Wilks, Penguin 2002)

I was enthralled by The Brothers Karamazov when I was 16 – the Grand Inquisitor raised the hairs on the back of my Catholic neck – but have so far managed to read very little of other 19th century Russian writers. The Book Group made me read Anna Karenina a while back, and now it’s Chekhov.

Before the meeting:
Knowing that Chekhov is one of the masters of the short story, I was vaguely expecting a display of virtuosity – cleverly constructed mechanisms with twists in the tail, perhaps, like O Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’ only profound. The stories in this late collection aren’t like that at all. (I don’t know about his earlier stories, and it would probably have been better to start with some of them.)

To generalise, the stories are studies in Russian provincial life at the turn of the twentieth century. It’s hard if not impossible to read them now without an awareness that the Communist revolution was on the horizon. Chekhov’s picture of the oppression of the peasants, the hand-wringing of liberal land-owners and the viciousness of others, the flailing about of the intellectuals, and the way the economic and social system stifles and corrupts everyone, clearly reflects a world ripe for revolution. Not that he calls for revolution, but he does lay out the inadequacy of anything else on offer. These are stories, not tracts. They contain a lot of argument, but they don’t push a line – or if they do, it’s in terms that have become impenetrable to this casual reader a century and a hemisphere away.

In ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, when a socially responsible woman chides the artist–narrator for having no interest in such matters as the creation of a clinic for peasants, he replies that on the contrary the question interests him a great deal, and in his opinion the peasants do not need a clinic:

‘To my mind, with things as they are, clinic, schools, libraries, dispensaries only serve to enslave people. The peasants are weighted down by a great chain and instead of breaking this chain you’re only adding new links … What matters is not Anna dying in childbirth, but that all these peasant Annas, Mavras and Pelageyas toil away from dawn to dusk and that this unremitting labour makes them ill. All their lives they go in fear and trembling for their sick and hungry children. … You come to their aid with hospitals and schools, but this doesn’t free them from their shackles.’

And he goes on. Up to the point where he starts talking about spirituality, he could be a hardline lefty of a couple of decades ago railing against reformism. In the story, the dilemma is not resolved. At the end the peasants are still suffering and the narrator, without explanation and perhaps symbolically, fails to find true love. (A while after I’d written that, I came across this quote from Chekhov’s correspondence:: ‘You … are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist.’)

Or take this rant in ‘Gooseberries’, in which a character is talking about his brother, who chose to live a contented life on a small farm. It could be 21st century polemic against the self-help industry:

It’s obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren’t for their silence, happiness would be quite impossible. It’s a kind of mass hypnosis. Someone ought to stand with a hammer at the door of every happy contented man, continually banging on it to remind him that there are unhappy people around and that however happy he may be at the time, sooner or later life will show him its claws and disaster will overtake him in the form of illness, poverty, bereavement and there will be no one to hear or see him. But there isn’t anyone holding a hammer, so our happy man goes his own sweet way and is only gently ruffled by life’s trivial cares, as an aspen is ruffled by the breeze. All’s well as far as he’s concerned.

There’s a lot of grim humour. The wedding celebration in ‘In the Ravine’ could have been the inspiration for Jack Hibberd’s Dimboola – but audiences laugh at the latter, while any laughs at the former are tinged with despair and disgust. And the stakes are raised by the peasants outside, one of whom shouts, ‘You’ve sucked us dry, you rotten bastards. You can all go to hell!’ That moment, of course, quickly passes as the peasants too join the celebratory mood. But the reader has been warned.

Chekhov isn’t one of those writers who ties everything up in a neat little bow. In ‘In the Ravine’ when a baby is murdered, his mother is blamed and the murderer goes free – but we are given no explanation for the mother’s failure to defend herself or other people’s silence about the cruel injustice. ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is a love story. Instead of ‘happily ever after’, it ends, ‘ And both of them clearly realised that the end was far, far away and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.’ Which is my sense of what all the stories are saying, about everything.

I’ve seen Eudora Welty quoted on the Internet as saying, ‘Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.’ That transforms my sense of what an angel can be.

The meeting: This meeting was postponed a number of times because I was hosting it and I was down with a heavy cold. As a result, most people’s recollection of the stories wasn’t very precise, but we’d had time to absorb them – in particular I had read some new Australian short stories (about which I’ll post separately), and my appreciation of the Chekhov had grown with the comparison. A big impediment to our discussion was that, as it turned out, we’d read different books: three of us had read The Lady with the Little Dog and other stories, 1896–1904. Others had read Lady with Lapdog and other stories, translated by David Magarshack, which contains a different set of stories (damn you, Penguin, for giving different books almost identical names!). The only stories in both books are ‘The House with an Attic’ aka ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, ‘Ionych’, and ‘Lady with Lapdog’ aka ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’.

We had a lively discussion. I think Chekhov was a bit of a surprise for everyone – not enough story for one chap (who thought the title of ‘A Boring Story’ said everything that needed to be said about it), a bit on the grim side for another, surprisingly modern in his discontinuities and sexual morality, surprisingly not, or not always, about the sufferings of the peasants.  At one stage, for the benefit of someone who hadn’t read it, I gave a synopsis of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’. It seemed a bit on the incoherent side, and then someone realised that I’d thrown in a key scene from another story altogether. Will I ever be trusted again?

Since the meeting, I found ‘A Dreary Story‘ on the internet in Constance Garnett’s translation (I think). There’s a wonderful passage near the beginning that could have been about me:

 I write poorly. That bit of my brain which presides over the faculty of authorship refuses to work. My memory has grown weak; there is a lack of sequence in my ideas, and when I put them on paper it always seems to me that I have lost the instinct for their organic connection; my construction is monotonous; my language is poor and timid. Often I write what I do not mean; I have forgotten the beginning when I am writing the end. Often I forget ordinary words, and I always have to waste a great deal of energy in avoiding superfluous phrases and unnecessary parentheses in my letters, both unmistakable proofs of a decline in mental activity. And it is noteworthy that the simpler the letter the more painful the effort to write it.

5 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books

Tagged , , , , , ,