One From the Archive: ‘Shire’ by Ali Smith ****

First published in 2013

Shire is the newest offering from surely one of our most original contemporary authors, Ali Smith. In these four short stories -‘The beholder’, ‘The poet’, ‘The commission’ and ‘The wound’ – she ‘pays tribute to the sources, the people and the places which produce and nurture life and art’. Throughout, she also draws parallels and similarities between her native Scotland, and Cambridge, the city in which she now lives. The divide between the north and south has been both drawn and erased in this collection, and Smith also places much focus upon ‘poetry and the creative process’ and the ideas of ‘death and renewal’. The entire volume has been beautifully produced, and is accompanied by a lovely series of Sarah Wood’s photographs and illustrations.

Smith has used many different sources as her inspiration for these tales, ranging from a modern myth with an ‘hallucinatory quality’ and a memoriam of two Scottish poets, to an autobiographical meeting with the influential Helena Mennie Shire, a Cambridge University professor. It is perhaps easiest to write about these stories in entirely separate sections, as whilst they do share a common style, the thoughts and subject matter which they deal with can vary greatly from one to the next.

Let us begin, therefore, with ‘The beholder’. In this story, Smith has managed to inject original details into the mundane. The unnamed protagonist is visiting her doctor with regard to a breathing difficulty. When asked how her life is, she informs him: ‘… well, my dad died and my siblings went mad and we’ve all stopped speaking to each other and my ex-partner is sueing me for half the value of everything I own and I got redundant and about a month ago my next door neighbour bought a drum kit, but other than that, just, you know, the usual’. Just a little further on in the story, the narrator returns to the doctor’s surgery with a most unusual complaint – ‘little stubby branch things’ have begun to grow out of her chest. Later, she describes the way in which ‘the whole rich tangled mass of me swung and shifted and shivered every serrated edge of its hundreds of perfect green new leaves’. This is, on the face of it, an incredibly simple story, but Smith’s inventiveness and her execution of it shines. She has stuffed it to the brim with magical realism whilst also commenting on the human condition and the way in which humans can unite with the world around them.

The second story, ‘The poet’, which follows Olive Fraser, begins in the following way: ‘So she’d taken the book and she’d thrown it across the room and when it hit the wall then fell to the floor with its pages open it nearly broke, which was one of the worst things you could do, maybe a worse thing even than saying a blasphemous curse’. The narrative of this story includes some Scottish dialect – for example, ‘it wasn’t grammatical or real Latin like’, ‘the water had darkened his good trews’, ‘He was too feart even to try’ and ‘time meant a lot more than the face of a wee gold watch, aye’ – which reinforces some of the scenes. In this particular tale, the stream of consciousness style is so beautifully written that the reader cannot help but be dragged into the story. Smith’s admiration of Fraser shines through on every page, and she has created rather a delightful memoriam in consequence.

‘The commission’ is an interesting biographical essay of sorts, detailing what it was like to be a postgraduate student at Cambridge University. Smith states that she applied to Newnham College only so that she could ‘get a book grant’ whilst she was there. In ‘The wound’, nature is prominent from the first richly written page: ‘Look at the dew, so twinklingly like diamonds on every twirl of foliage; look at the flowers falling over themselves to bloom’. This story is a literary criticism of sorts, an interesting and well done reimagining of a poem by Alexander Montgomerie.

Shire is a clever, astute and rather accomplished volume, which blends together seamlessly despite its disparities with regard to genres and subject matter. It is sure to delight every existing fan of Smith’s work, and would serve as a wonderful introduction for any newcomers to her writing.

‘We Don’t Know What We’re Doing’ by Thomas Morris ****

We Don’t Know What We’re Doing is the debut short story collection by Thomas Morris.  First published in 2015, it was chosen by one of my favourite authors, Ali Smith, as one of her books of the year.  She writes that this collection is ‘Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and not just a book of the year for me but one of the most satisfying collections I’ve read for years.’  Colm Toibin deems it ‘really impressive and memorable’, and it has also been highly praised by a number of publications; the Observer, for instance, calls it ‘brilliantly judged… a quiet masterstroke.’  For me, the collection ticked so many boxes, and as I particularly enjoy discovering new-to-me short story authors, I snapped up a copy as soon as I saw one in a branch of Fopp.

Set in the ‘sleepy castle town’ of Caerphilly in southern Wales, this collection of ten stories ‘offers vivid and moving glimpses into the lives of some of its inhabitants – the lost, lonely and bemused.’  Each protagonist is troubled in some way.  One of the protagonists in the opening story, ‘Bolt’ calls Caerphilly a ‘paradox’, in that ‘it only looks nice when you’re away from it.’  I have read rather a lot of fiction set in Wales, but this collection felt a little different, in that it is based around a town, rather than taking place in a purely rural setting.  I found it most interesting to read something more urban in character, the town used as it is as a focal point which connects its disparate inhabitants.  Caerphilly is referenced many times throughout the stories; it is a presence always there, and always discernible.

Each of the stories in We Don’t Know What We’re Doing offer up tiny, realistic slices of life.  There are characters here going through complicated breakups, suffering at work, trying to come to terms with grief, or in less than perfect relationships.  Morris focuses upon the minutiae of life, and those things which have the power to change someone, sometimes irrevocably.  His prose and plotlines are sometimes startling relatable.  In ‘Castle View’, for instance, Morris describes the sleeplessness of his main character: ‘It’s been four months now since he started at the school, and he hasn’t been sleeping well.  He dreams of losing teeth and being chased, and in the mornings he’s disappointed by the obviousness of these dreams.  In the night, his wife talks in her sleep.  There are times when he wakes to hear her speaking a kind of Russian-sounding language.  For a while he tried to stay awake when it happened.  He thought she might disclose something important.  Another man’s name, perhaps.  But no, just more gibberish.  Where do they come from, he thinks, all these chains of nonsense?’

Much sadness and despair penetrates both the town and its inhabitants; even the characters of comparative privilege here are suffering in some way. Throughout, Morris is revealing of his intriguing cast of characters, and often of the way in which their surroundings impact upon them.  Many of them have a lot going on in their lives, and act contrary to societal expectations.  Some of Morris’ protagonists are likeable, others not so much, but each can be believed and understood.

Throughout, I really admired Morris’ writing, particular with regard to the way in which he uses similes.  In ‘Bolt’, a group of young girls teeter past on ‘heels the size of Coke cans’, and in ‘Fugue’, ‘side-on, your father’s eyes seem like two swollen capital Ds – glassy and unreal.’  He knows instinctively the number of details to reveal about a character or scene, and I was intrigued throughout by these tightly plotted tales. There are dark edges to every single one of the stories; these range from a secret and suppressed memories, to the dislocation one might feel when coming back to their childhood home after time away.

I admired the use of different narrative perspectives used throughout the collection, and found the variety here engaging.  One of the stories, ‘Fugue’, is told using the second person perspective, and begins as follows: ‘On the way back from Cardiff, your father asks questions about Edinburgh and Tim.  You answer vaguely, and look out the window as the landmarks of approaching home draw near.  You haven’t been back in a year, and you’d forgotten that these places… even exist.’

We Don’t Know What We’re Doing is a transporting and assured debut collection.  Morris already has a strong authorial voice, and it seems as though he effortlessly brings each one of his characters, many of which are unnamed, to life.  We Don’t Know What We’re Doing is the first work by a promising voice in fiction; it is an impressive collection, which reads like the work of a seasoned author.  The collection is a cohesive one, in which several characters cleverly slip in and out of other stories.  I for one am very much looking forward to Morris’ future publications.

Purchase from The Book Depository

Three Novels: ‘Winter’, ‘War Crimes for the Home’, and ‘Turtles All the Way Down’

Winter by Ali Smith *****
Anybody who knows me will not be surprised in the slightest to hear that Ali Smith’s Winter, the second novel in her seasonal quartet, was one of my most highly anticipated reads of 2017. I received a signed copy for Christmas, and read it just three days afterwards. The novel is, again unsurprisingly, startlingly brilliant; I was swept in immediately, and was once again blown away by the quality and clarity of Smith’s writing. Winter is searing, and so clever; it is once incredibly topical, informed, and important. I cannot speak highly enough of the novel in my review; I shall merely end by saying that it is an absolutely brilliant literary offering from Smith, as per.

 

War Crimes for the Home by Liz Jensen ****
I have very much enjoyed most of Liz Jensen’s novels to date, and the storyline of War Crimes for the Home would have piqued my interest even if I had not already been acquainted with her work. This is, I believe, my first foray into her historical fiction, and I found it very enjoyable. This takes place on the Home Front in Britain during the Second World War, and the battles fought on British soil, along with the effects which they brought, have been well captured. I liked the use of retrospect, and the memory loss which present-day Gloria suffers with has been handled well. Not at all a nostalgic portrayal of times gone by, War Crimes for the Home is sure to appeal to every fan of historical fiction that likes to be surprised a little in their reading.

 

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green ****
As with many readers, John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down was a highly anticipated read for me. I really enjoy his writing, particularly with regard to the dialogue which he sculpts; it is not always entirely authentic, in that I cannot imagine many teenagers speaking as articulately as he clearly can, but it is stuffed with original ideas, and beautiful turns of phrase. Green’s portrayal of anxiety is not a stereotypical one, such as I have read before; rather, it has depth. The plot is not a predictable, and it certainly throws up some surprises along the way. Whilst not my favourite of his novels, I still found it markedly difficult to put Turtles All the Way Down well… all the way down.

 

Purchase from The Book Depository

Lit Titbits (1)

I read so many lovely pieces on the Internet, all related to literature, and thought that I would start grouping them together into a little series which I am calling ‘Lit Titbits’.  Each will be made up of five or six different links, and will, I hope, be the perfect things for you to read over a well-deserved tea break, or when you have a few minutes to relax during your day.  They make perfect, brief stops from thesis research too (trust me, I speak from experience).  Without further ado, I hope you enjoy this new series.

1. ‘Ali Smith: How I Write’ in The Daily Beast is a wonderfully insightful interview about the woman behind some of my favourite books.  Read it here.
2. The Guardian posted this fascinating study, based on stats from http://www.audiobooks.com, of when exactly we give up on audiobooks here.
3. The Bookseller talks of how the world, and our reading, has changed upon the tenth anniversary of the Kindle.  Read it here.
4. Back in November 2017, Jane of Beyond Eden Rock wrote this absolutely wonderful review of Emile Zola’s The Fortunes of the Rougons, which has made me want to get to the rest of the series as soon as I possibly can.
5. ‘The Persephone Post’, by one of my favourite publishers, is updated regularly, and is wonderful for a browse.  Find it here.

Highly Anticipated Releases

As I do around this time every year, I thought that I would make a list of ten highly anticipated book releases which are coming out (and will hopefully be on my shelves) within the next few months.

1. Winter by Ali Smith (02/11/2017; Hamish Hamilton)
‘The dazzling second novel in Ali Smith’s essential Seasonal Quartet — from the Baileys Prize-winning, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and How to be both.  Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer’s leaves? Dead litter.  The world shrinks; the sap sinks.  But winter makes things visible. And if there’s ice, there’ll be fire.  In Ali Smith’s Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith’s shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter.  It’s the season that teaches us survival.   Here comes Winter.’

 

2. Awayland: Short Stories by Ramona Ausubel (06/03/2018; Riverhead Books)
‘An inventive story collection that spans the globe as it explores love, childhood, and parenthood with an electric mix of humor and emotion.  Acclaimed for the grace, wit, and magic of her novels, Ramona Ausubel introduces us to a geography both fantastic and familiar in eleven new stories, some of them previously published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Elegantly structured, these stories span the globe and beyond, from small-town America and sunny Caribbean islands to the Arctic Ocean and the very gates of Heaven itself. And though some of the stories are steeped in mythology, they remain grounded in universal experiences: loss of identity, leaving home, parenthood, joy, and longing.  Crisscrossing the pages of Awayland are travelers and expats, shadows and ghosts. A girl watches as her homesick mother slowly dissolves into literal mist. The mayor of a small Midwestern town offers a strange prize, for stranger reasons, to the parents of any baby born on Lenin’s birthday. A chef bound for Mars begins an even more treacherous journey much closer to home. And a lonely heart searches for love online—never mind that he’s a Cyclops.  With her signature tenderness, Ramona Ausubel applies a mapmaker’s eye to landscapes both real and imagined, all the while providing a keen guide to the wild, uncharted terrain of the human heart.’

 

3. Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (23/01/2018; Penguin Books)
‘From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi—a scavenger and an oddball fixture at the local cafe—collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of horrendous-looking criminals who, though shot, cannot be killed.  Hadi soon realizes he’s created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive—first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. As the violence builds and Hadi’s acquaintances—a journalist, a government worker, a lonely older woman—become involved, the Whatsitsname and the havoc it wreaks assume a magnitude far greater than anyone could have imagined. An extraordinary achievement, at once horrific and blackly humorous, Frankenstein in Baghdad captures the surreal reality of contemporary Baghdad.‘

 

4. Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson (10/10/2017; Penguin Classics)
‘For the first time in one volume, a collection of Shirley Jackson’s scariest stories.  There’s something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial  killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods…‘

 

5. I Was Anastasia: A Novel by Ariel Lawhon (20/03/2018; Doubleday)
‘Ariel Lawhon, a rising star in historical suspense, unravels the extraordinary twists and turns in Anna Anderson’s 50-year battle to be recognized as Anastasia Romanov. Is she the Russian Grand Duchess, a beloved daughter and revered icon, or is she an imposter, the thief of another woman’s legacy?  Russia, July 17, 1918: Under direct orders from Vladimir Lenin, Bolshevik secret police force Anastasia Romanov, along with the entire imperial family, into a damp basement in Siberia where they face a merciless firing squad. None survive. At least that is what the executioners have always claimed.   Germany, February 17, 1920: A young woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to Anastasia Romanov is pulled shivering and senseless from a canal. Refusing to explain her presence in the freezing water, she is taken to the hospital where an examination reveals that her body is riddled with countless, horrific scars. When she finally does speak, this frightened, mysterious woman claims to be the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia.  Her detractors, convinced that the young woman is only after the immense Romanov fortune, insist on calling her by a different name: Anna Anderson.
As rumors begin to circulate through European society that the youngest Romanov daughter has survived the massacre, old enemies and new threats are awakened. With a brilliantly crafted dual narrative structure, Lawhon wades into the most psychologically complex and emotionally compelling territory: the nature of identity itself.
The question of who Anna Anderson is and what actually happened to Anastasia Romanov creates a saga that spans fifty years and touches three continents. This thrilling story is every bit as moving and momentous as it is harrowing and twisted.‘

 

6. Aetherial Worlds: Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya (20/03/2018; Knopf)
‘Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. A woman’s deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife; a Russian professor in a small American town constructs elaborate fantasies during her cigarette break; a man falls in love with a marble statue as his marriage falls apart; a child glimpses heaven through a stained-glass window. With the emotional insight of Chekhov, the surreal satire of Gogol, and a unique blend of humor and poetry all her own, Tolstaya transmutes the quotidian into aetherial alternatives. These tales, about politics, identity, love, and loss, cut to the core of the Russian psyche, even as they lay bare human universals. Tolstaya’s characters—seekers all—are daydreaming children, lonely adults, dislocated foreigners in unfamiliar lands. Whether contemplating the strategic complexities of delivering telegrams in Leningrad or the meditative melancholy of holiday aspic, vibrant inner lives and the grim elements of existence are registered in equally sharp detail in a starkly bleak but sympathetic vision of life on earth.  A unique collection from one of the first women in years to rank among Russia’s most important writers.‘

 

7. Macbeth by Jo Nesbo (10/04/2018; Hogarth Press)
‘Set in the 1970s in a run-down, rainy industrial town with low employment and high crime, Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth centers around a police force struggling to shed the incessant drug problem. Duncan, chief of police, is idealistic and visionary, a dream to the townspeople but a nightmare for the criminals. The drug trade is ruled by Hekate, whose illegal cultivation of substances, known as “the brew,” is overseen by her crew, “the sisters.” A master of manipulation, Hekate has connections with the highest in power, and she plans to use them to get her way.  Hekate contacts Inspector Macbeth, popular head of the Emergency Response Group, to tell him that one day he’ll be the chief of police if he cooperates with her. When Macbeth’s love interest, a casino owner named Lady, hears of Hekate’s prophesy, she calculates who lies between Macbeth and the top job: Duncan and the assistant chief, Malcolm. Under Lady’s pressure, Macbeth does what he believes needs to be done, making sure the blame is pointed at his best friend and colleague, Duff. What follows is an unputdownable story of love and guilt, political ambition, and greed for more, exploring the darkest corners of human nature, the aspirations of the criminal mind, and whether or not free will even matters. In his retelling of Macbeth, Jo Nesbø brings the gritty, powerful procedural gusto that made him an international New York Times bestseller to William Shakespeare’s most timeless tragedy.‘

 

8. The Vanishing Princess: Stories by Jenny Diski (05/12/2017; Ecco)
‘Jenny Diski’s prose is as sharp and steely as her imagination is wild and wondrous. When she died of cancer in April 2016, after chronicling her illness in strikingly honest essays in the London Review of Books, readers, admirers, and critics around the world mourned the loss. In a cool and unflinching tone that came to define her singular voice, she explored the subjects of sex, power, domesticity, femininity, hysteria, and loneliness with humor and honesty.  The stories in The Vanishing Princess showcase a rarely seen side of this beloved writer, channeling both the piercing social examination of her nonfiction and the vivid, dreamlike landscapes of her novels. In a Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale turned on its head, a miller’s daughter rises to power and wealth to rule over her kingdom and outwit the title villain. “Bathtime” tells the story of a woman’s life through her attempts to build the perfect bathtub, chasing an elusive moment of peace. In “Short Curcuit,” the author mines her own bouts in and out of mental institutions outside London to question whether those we think are mad are really the sanest among us.’

 

9. The Twelve-Mile Straight: A Novel by Eleanor Henderson (12/09/2017; Ecco)
‘Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: in a house full of secrets, two babies-one light-skinned, the other dark-are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper’s daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm’s inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.  Despite the prying eyes and curious whispers of the townspeople, Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. But soon it becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together are more intricate than any could have ever imagined. As startling revelations mount, a web of lies begins to collapse around the family, destabilizing their precarious world and forcing all to reckon with the painful truth.  Acclaimed author Eleanor Henderson has returned with a novel that combines the intimacy of a family drama with the staggering presence of a great Southern saga. Tackling themes of racialized violence, social division, and financial crisis, The Twelve-Mile Straight is a startlingly timely, emotionally resonant, and magnificent tour de force.’

 

10. Census by Jesse Ball (06/03/2018; Ecco)
‘When a widower receives notice from a doctor that he doesn’t have long left to live, he is struck by the question of who will care for his adult son—a son whom he fiercely loves, a boy with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind, and with a desire to see the country on one last trip, the man signs up as a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and leaves town with his son.  Traveling into the country, through towns named only by ascending letters of the alphabet, the man and his son encounter a wide range of human experience. While some townspeople welcome them into their homes, others who bear the physical brand of past censuses on their ribs are wary of their presence. When they press toward the edges of civilization, the landscape grows wilder, and the towns grow farther apart and more blighted by industrial decay. As they approach “Z,” the man must confront a series of questions: What is the purpose of the census? Is he complicit in its mission? And just how will he learn to say good-bye to his son?  Mysterious and evocative, Census is a novel about free will, grief, the power of memory, and the ferocity of parental love, from one of our most captivating young writers.’

 

Have you been lucky enough to read any of these already?  Which are your most anticipated forthcoming titles?

‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington ****

‘One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a sinister retirement home, where the elderly must inhabit buildings shaped like igloos and birthday cakes, endure twisted religious preaching and eat in a canteen overlooked by the mysterious portrait of a leering Abbess. But when another resident secretly hands Marian a book recounding the life of the Abbess, a joyous and brilliantly surreal adventure begins to unfold. Written in the early 1960s, The Hearing Trumpet remains one of the most original and inspirational of all fantastic novels.’

Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet is as wonderfully odd and obscure as it sounds. The novel is amusing, sometimes startlingly so; it made me laugh aloud in a few places, which very few books manage to do. (I do have a sense of humour. Promise.) Whilst I wasn’t at all fond of the religious aspects, I found our protagonist Marian quite a character. She and her best friend Carmella are two great eccentrics, really. One never quite knows what they’re going to do next.

I would categorise The Hearing Trumpet as falling somewhere between magical realism and utterly fantastical; there are recognisable elements, but it often reads like what I imagine a strong drugs trip might do to one. There were, rather strangely, echoes of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree for me here; read it, and you’ll understand why. There are also a few harks back to fairytales – ever so strange ones, but fairytales all the same.

The Hearing Trumpet is perhaps the epitome of Surrealist literature, and I have never read anything quite like it; the closest I have come to date is probably the work of Scottish author Naomi Mitchison, who is undeservedly neglected. The ending was even stranger than I was expecting, and verged upon the disturbing. My favourite quote from the whole is: ‘People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats’.

As a final thought, it was a wonderful surprise to discover that the introduction to the volume which I borrowed from the library was written by one of my absolute favourite authors, Ali Smith; her work is, as ever, fantastic, both fascinating and funny, and she set the tone of the whole perfectly.

Purchase from The Book Depository

One From the Archive: ‘The Reader’ by Ali Smith ****

‘The Reader’ by Ali Smith

The Reader is a marvellous idea for a book, and it is great to be able to see what has inspired Smith to pursue her own literary career. There is a whole scope of different literature and non-fiction here, some of which is new to me, and some of which is dear to my heart. I loved the fact that Smith and I have so many favourites in common (Jansson, Plath, Mansfield, Anne Frank – all swoonworthy authors), and I feel that I have some real gems in store for me with Smith’s recommendations as my starting point.

Smith states in her introduction that she has decided not to write a personal comment alongside each inclusion. I felt whilst reading that this was a real shame, as for me, it undermines the entire goal of creating a personal reading anthology. Still, the pieces which she had chosen, for reasons unknown, were marvellous.

My favourites (both old and new):
‘Northanger Abbey’ by Jane Austen; ‘Lady Sings the Blues’ by Billie Holiday; ‘Witch’ by George Mackay Brown; ‘We Shall Not Escape Hell’ by Marina Tsvetaeva; ‘Meadowsweet’ by Kathleen Jamie; ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston; ‘Wise Children’ by Angela Carter; ‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson; ‘Everything is Nice’ by Jane Bowles; ‘Orlando’ by Virginia Woolf; ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ by John Keats; ‘On the Ward with TV, iPod and Telephone’ by Kasia Boddy; ‘To Anybody At All’ by Margaret Tait; ‘Wants’ by Grace Paley; ‘On Angels’ by Czeslaw Milosz; ‘Ars Poetica?’ by Czeslaw Milosz; ‘The Cinema and The Classics’ by H.D.; ‘Mae West’ by Colette; ‘Colette’ by Lee Miller; ‘Bloodshed and Three Novellas’ by Cynthia Ozick; ‘A Writer’s Diary’ by Virginia Woolf; ‘The Journal of Katherine Mansfield’; ‘Unseen Translation’ by Kate Atkinson; ‘Adlestrop’ by Edward Thomas; ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ by W.B. Yeats; ‘Passengers with Heavy Loads’ by Joseph Roth; ‘The Falling City’ by Lavinia Greenlaw; ‘Kansas to New York’ by Louise Brooks; ‘Remedy’ by A.M. Homes; ‘The Darkling Thrush’ by Thomas Hardy; ‘Hymn to Iris’ by Alice Oswald; ‘Art in Nature’ by Tove Jansson; ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ by Sylvia Plath; ‘The 24-Hour Dog’ by Jeanette Winterson; ‘The Living Mountain’ by Nan Shepherd; ‘Independence’ by Helen Oyeyemi; ‘The House I Live In’ by Maggie O’Farrell (absolutely stunning); the extract from Anne Frank’s diary; ‘From Berlin’ by Armando; ‘Cymbeline’ by William Shakespeare; and ‘Ninth Elegy’ by Rainer Maria Rilke.

The Book Trail: From ‘Artful’ to Footnotes

For today’s Book Trail post, we begin with one of Ali Smith’s lecture series-cum-incredibly readable book, and weave our way through tomes weird and wonderful.

1. Artful by Ali Smith
‘In February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted—literally—by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.  A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate.  Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form, from ancient cave painting to 1960s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights—on the relation of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.‘

 

2. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger
‘In an extraordinary distillation of his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality.‘

 

3. The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer
‘The Ongoing Moment is Dyer’s unique and idiosyncratic history of photography. Seeking to identify their signature styles Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same scenes and objects (benches, hats, hands, roads). In doing so Dyer constructs a narrative in which those photographers – many of whom never met in their lives – constantly come into contact with each other. Great photographs change the way we see the world; The Ongoing Moment changes the way we look at both. It is the most ambitious example to date of a form of writing that Dyer has made his own: the non-fiction work of art.‘

 

4. Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon
‘Yours Ever explores the offhand masterpieces dispatched through the ages by messenger, postal service, and BlackBerry. Thomas Mallon weaves a remarkable assortment of epistolary riches into his own insightful and eloquent commentary on the circumstances and characters of the world’s most intriguing letter writers. Here are Madame de Sévigné’s devastatingly sharp reports from the court of Louis XIV, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tormented advice to his young daughter, the besotted midlife billets-doux of a suddenly rejuvenated Woodrow Wilson, the casually brilliant spiritual musings of Flannery O’Connor, the lustful boastings of Lord Byron, the cries from prison of Sacco and Vanzetti. Along with the confessions and complaints and revelations sent from battlefields, frontier cabins, and luxury liners, a reader will find Mallon considering travel bulletins, suicide notes, fan letters, and hate mail–forms as varied as the human experiences behind them.  Yours Ever is an exuberant reintroduction to a vast and entertaining literature–a book that will help to revive, in the digital age, this glorious lost art.‘

 

5. Classics For Pleasure by Michael Dirda
‘In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world’s most entertaining books. Writing with affection as well as authority, Dirda covers masterpieces of fantasy and science fiction, horror and adventure, as well as epics, history, essay, and children’s literature. Organized thematically, these are works that have shaped our imaginations. Love’s Mysteries moves from Sappho and Arthurian romance to Soren Kierkegaard and Georgette Heyer. In other categories Dirda discusses not only Dracula and Sherlock Holmes but also the Tao Te Ching and Icelandic sagas, Frederick Douglass and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Whether writing about Petronius or Perelman, Dirda makes literature come alive. Classics for Pleasure is a perfect companion for any reading group or lover of books.‘

 

6. 500 Great Books by Women, edited by Erika Bauermeister
‘Here is an articulate guide to more than 500 books written by women, a unique resource that allows readers the joy of discovering new authors as well as revisiting familiar favorites. Organized by such themes as Art, Choices, Families, Growing Old, Growing Up, Places and Homes, Power, and Work, this reference book presents classic and contemporary works, from Lady Nijo’s thirteenth-century diaries to books by authors including Toni Morrison, Alice Hoffman, Nadine Gordimer, and Isabel Allende. With annotated entries that capture the flavor of each book and seven cross-referenced indexes, 500 Great Books by Women is a one-of-a-kind guide for all readers and book lovers that celebrates and recommends some of the very best writing by women.‘

 

7. The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly
‘In an age when deleted scenes from Adam Sandler movies are saved, it’s sobering to realize that some of the world’s greatest prose and poetry has gone missing. This witty, wry, and unique new book rectifies that wrong. Part detective story, part history lesson, part exposé, The Book of Lost Books is the first guide to literature’s what-ifs and never-weres.  In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are the true stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only in imagination.‘

 

8. Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore by Lawrence Goldstone
‘More than a sequel, Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore is a companion piece for Used and Rare. A delight for the general reader and book collector alike, it details the Goldstones’ further explorations into the curious world of book collecting. In Slightly Chipped, they get hooked on the correspondence and couplings of Bloomsbury; they track down Bram Stoker’s earliest notes for Dracula; and they are introduced to hyper-moderns. Slightly Chipped is filled with all of the anecdotes and esoterica about the world of book collecting that charmed readers of Used and Rare.‘

 

Purchase from The Book Depository

The Book Trail: From the Library to Hollywood

I am beginning this Book Trail with a book by my favourite living author, Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories.  I did try to begin with her 2016 release Autumn, but Goodreads had no recommended fiction to recommend at the time of creating this post.

As always, seven fascinating tomes will follow, all found on consequent ‘Readers Also Enjoyed’ pages on Goodreads.  Please let me know if you’ve read any of these, and if you’ve created any of your own Book Trails, I’d love to see them.

1. Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith
‘A richly inventive new collection of stories from Ali Smith.  Why are books so very powerful?  What do the books we’ve read over our lives – our own personal libraries – make of us?  What does the unravelling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us?  The stories in Ali Smith’s new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make.  Public libraries are places of joy, freedom, community and discovery – and right now they are under threat from funding cuts and widespread closures across the UK and further afield. With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith joins the campaign to save our public libraries and celebrate their true place in our culture and history.‘

 

2. The New York Stories by Elizabeth Hardwick
‘Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.‘

 

3. My Fantoms by Theophile Gautier
‘Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet—not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town—Théophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature.  In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great bu too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier’s career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of “The Adolescent” through “The Poet,” a piercing recollection of the mad genius Gérard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier’s youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. ”What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?” Gautier wonders. “He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial…”  Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: “No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.”‘

 

4. Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau
‘Seated in a Paris café, a man glimpses another man, a shadowy figure hurrying for the train: Who is he? he wonders, How does he live? And instantly the shadow comes to life, precipitating a series of comic run-ins among a range of disreputable and heartwarming characters living on the sleazy outskirts of the city of lights. Witch Grass (previously titled The Bark Tree) is a philosophical farce, an epic comedy, a mesmerizing book about the daily grind that is an enchantment itself.‘

 

5. Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars
‘At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars’s Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it’s a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when “the whole world was doing a Moravagine.”‘

 

6. Mouchette by Georges Bernanos
‘One of the great mavericks of French literature, Georges Bernanos combined raw realism with a spiritual focus of visionary intensity. Mouchette stands with his celebrated Diary of a Country Priest as the perfection of his singular art.  “Nothing but a little savage” is how the village school-teacher describes fourteen-year-old Mouchette, and that view is echoed by every right-thinking local citizen. Mouchette herself doesn’t bother to contradict it; ragged, foulmouthed, dirt-poor, a born liar and loser, she knows herself to be, in the words of the story, “alone, completely alone, against everyone.” Hers is a tale of “tragic solitude” in which despair and salvation appear to be inextricably intertwined.   Bernanos uncompromising genius was a powerful inspiration to Flannery O’Connor, and Mouchette was the source of a celebrated movie by Robert Bresson.‘

 

7. Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke
‘Short Letter, Long Farewell is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke’s novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of America—from Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything’s spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all, Short Letter, Long Farewell is a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new life—or the corpse of an old one—lying just around the corner.‘

 

8. A Way of Life, Like Any Other by Darcy O’Brien
‘The hero of Darcy O’Brien’s A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a child of Hollywood, and once his life was a glittery dream. His father starred in Westerns. His mother was a goddess of the silver screen. The family enjoyed the high life on their estate, Casa Fiesta. But his parents’ careers have crashed since then, and their marriage has broken up too.  Lovesick and sex-crazed, the mother sets out on an intercontinental quest for the right—or wrong—man, while her mild-mannered but manipulative former husband clings to his memories in California. And their teenage son? How he struggles both to keep faith with his family and to get by himself, and what in the end he must do to break free, makes for a classic coming-of-age story—a novel that combines keen insight and devastating wit to hilarious and heartbreaking effect.‘

 

Purchase from The Book Depository

‘Autumn’ by Ali Smith *****

Warning: gushing will ensue.  Please proceed with caution.

Well, it was no great surprise that Ali Smith’s Autumn is incredible.  I had originally asked my boyfriend to buy me a copy as my Christmas gift, and whilst he was happy to do so, I simply could not pass up the opportunity of reading a galley.  I am far too impatient when a new Ali Smith is released; she is my favourite living author, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, and meeting her whilst studying at King’s College London is the only time in my life that I have felt starstruck.

Autumn is the first of four books in a seasonal sequence, and in my mind, it is the best choice to begin such a series with.  I adore all of the seasons, but autumn is a real joy; there is so much beauty around.  The novel has also been billed as a serious post-Brexit novel.  Brexit – that horrible word that my laptop is intent upon changing to the more kindly ‘Brett’ – is a decision which I still cannot believe has occurred; I find myself saddened by my fellow man, that such a wonderful and secure alliance could be severed so easily.  I have a feeling that these are Smith’s feelings too; the inference here, particularly when one takes the character of Elisabeth’s mother into account, are that Britain has made a mistake of great enormity, which will affect everyone in horrid ways.  Of the novel, in fact, she stated the following in a recent interview: ‘It’s a pivotal moment…  a question of what happens culturally when something is built on a lie’.

As anyone who has read her work before will know, Smith is incredibly sharp, and she has created, once again, a fantastic range of characters to people her latest novel.  The conversational patterns which strike up between them feel both unusual and realistic.  As always, Smith says a wealth of incredibly important things – about society, and humankind, and decision making, and friendship, and love.  She writes of the young and the old, the past and the future.

Smith’s prose, as always, is both stunning, and often profound: ‘It is a privilege, to watch someone sleep, Elisabeth tells herself.  It is a privilege to be able to witness someone both here and not here.  To be included in someone’s absence, it is an honour, and it asks quiet.  It asks respect’.  I could happily quote extensively here to further prove my point, so I shall.  ‘Time travel is real, Daniel said.  We do it all the time.  Moment to moment, minute to minute’.  The prose about Daniel’s younger sister was particularly compelling:

‘She dances round the room shouting the word he can hardly say himself in her presence.
She is mad.
But she is uncannily right about that story.
She is brilliant.
She is a whole new level of the world true.
She is dangerous and shining.’

Unlike the Brexit result, Autumn is perfect.  The material is incredibly well handled, and it is certainly one of her very best books to date; perhaps the very best, in fact.  I keep thinking that she can never get any better with each new release, and lo and behold, she does.  The novel’s wordplay is exhilarating.  Autumn is a triumph; compulsive and compelling, timely and timeless.  It is a wonderful, wondrous book.  When I reached the all to brief end, I was tempted to go right back to the beginning and read it all over again.

Purchase from The Book Depository