Two from Virago.

I have just finished two rather different novels, both published by Virago. The first is Nami Mun's debut, Miles From Nowhere. A pdf of the first chapter is available here. I decided it would be good for my digestion of novels to write a blurb for them. So here is by backcoverbrowsing effort for Miles from Nowhere:

"When Joon's father finally leaves her mother, rendering her catatonic, Joon, a 13 year old Korean immigrant, leaves too, and sets out to survive on the streets of New York. we travel with her through prostitution, addiction and viloence, to a moment of equilibrium, where the possibility of redemption glimmers.

A glimpse of the underbelly of the society of the dispossessed, this stark debut novel is shot through with an optimism that the flame of humanity can light even the darkest corners."

An obvious point of comparison is Jon McGregor's Even the Dogs, which unaccountably I don't seem to have mentioned yet (one more for the catch-up list!) Both novels are bleak, but toughed with insight into how humans see in each other something which spurs them to battle on.

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The second of today's novels was Home by Marilynne Robinson. This is a beautiful novel about family, forgiveness and salvation. I fell, having read the novel once, relatively briskly, as though I have dipped my little finger into its large, cool pond, up to the first knuckle. It is deep with scriptural allusion; it is the companion-piece to Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead, which i haven't read; and without either of those considerations it would be a novel dense with the nuance of familial relationships.

So this is one of that rare breed: a novel which is enjoyable, beautiful and touching, which will almost certainly reward a second visit. I will try to get hold of a copy of Gilead and then return [to] Home once again.

Another one from the Orange Prize shortlist...

Yesterday I read Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson. I guess it follows in the footsteps of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, in that it gives a voice (in the form of a narrator's inner-voice) to a character who cannot vocalise their thoughts and observations. The great strength of the novel is that allowing the reader access to Grace's inner voice is the only artifice or conceit employed by Henderson. This makes accepting the reality of Grace's voice relatively easy (and made easier still by the very distinctive authorial voice she conjures). Had we also to cope with, for example the 'unreliable narrator' it could easily have got too much.

The structure is almost entirely chronological, and structured like a memoir. There is plenty of narrative tension, without resort to any trickery beyond good, clever writing. In fact, the lack of sensationalism in the plotting allows the winning and unusual aspect of the novel - that unique, normally unheard authorial voice - to create and inhabit its own space, and ultimately leave a lasting impression.

This is an incredibly clever novel in that it does not leave you 'wow'-ing at bold narrative strokes, but instead creates a character and a voice which seem to add something to the experience of having encountered people like Grace, both problemmatising and enhancing their personhood. This is a wonderful example of the way in which a novel can alter, just slightly, the way in which you parse the world.

There is a town in North Ontario...

In my attempt to play catch up, I am going back to a novel I read a few weeks ago: Mary Lawson's The Other Side of the Bridge, which was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and it is not hard to see why. I wrote when I finished it that: "This is a good, satisfying novel [but]...it is not a great novel."

The link to the Random House site, above, includes a summary and some review quotes, so I won't re-cover that ground here. The novel seemed to me to be about the complexities of loving relationships: between parents and children; siblings; men and women; individuals and communities. It is also about how these kinds of love combine to form, or threaten contentment. Lawson is a very compact writer, in the sense that she conveys an awful lot in a few phrases, and this allows her to crank the tension towards the denoument in an enjoyable and believable way. She is also an extremely good storyteller - the structure and pace here are gripping. I would certainly recommend this novel, and look forward to reading more by her.

So why did I begin with the assertion that this is good but not great? It does everything right, but I just couldn't find the extraordinary, the small thing which sets this above other good novels. I guess that missing ingredient is necessarily intangible, or there could be no such thing as a great novel...

Drawers of other summers

I have now finished Great House by Nicole Krauss. The novels is in two parts, each dealing with four narrative strands one at a time. They are connected by a huge desk, which has many drawers of various sizes, and by a young Chilean poet, who possessed the desk for an amount of time. The poet had been kidnapped during the Pinochet revolution in Chile and killed. The hole left in the lives of several of the novel's protagonists by this character reminded me a bit of Archimboldi, but this is a novel, which although peopled by characters many of whom are writers, is about people, rather than literature. Or perhaps it would be more clear to say it is about the effect the creative process has on those characters, but has very little to say about the writing that they produce. I was reminded more of Small Island by Andrea Levy, both because of the way several interconnected narrative strands run concurrently, and because one strand of each novel shares a similarity. This book is not treated favourably by the comparison. The structured coincidences which tie the story together seen too forced: they lack either the natural realism of Small Island or the easy serendipity of Krauss' acclaimed first novel The History of Love. This is by no stretch a bad novel; of the four narratives one in particular is sharply realised and affecting. The problem is simply that it wears the nuts and bolts of its architecture like Paris' Pompidou Centre, which made the writers presence that bit too intrusive.

Relaunch

I lost my thread and got lost in a sea of literature. Time to start again. I am currently reading Great House by Nicole Krauss, so perhaps i will start there when i have finished, by I also want to come back to 1984, along with Ayn Rand's Anthem and Huxley's Brave New World, so I've got a bit of catching up to do.

Meanwhile, i was really struck by the last paragraphs of Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet On The Western Front' (Random House - Vintage (2005 (1994 [1929])):

"I am very calm. let the months come, and the years, they'll take nothing more from me, they can take nothing more from me. I am so alone and so devoid of any hope that I can confront them without fear. Life, which carried me through these years, is still there in my hands and in my eyes. Whether or not I have mastered it, I do not know. but as long as life is there it will make it's own way, whether my conscious self likes it or not."

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He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army despatches restricted themselves to the single sentence: that there was nothing new to report on the western front.
He had sunk forwards and was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over, you could see that he could not have suffered long - his face wore an expression that was so composed that it looked as if he were almost happy that it had turned out that way."


This passage is all the more chilling for the fact that the whole novel has been narrated by the protaganist, and it is not difficult to distrust the conclusions drawn by the second narrator in the final paragraph. It is impossible to forget the earlier account of the impossibility of finding men who had fallen face down, since their comrades could not locate the source of the sounds they made, meaning they might lie moaning for days, heard but not found by their friends. In addition, after hope had seeped away throughout the novel, it returns to some extent in the penultimate paragraph.

The last page of this novel elevated it, in my mind, from a very good novel to an extraordinary one.

1984

The reason for the delay is that I got carried away. As well as 1984, I read Huxley's Brave New World, and Orwell's Animal Farm, and having got carried along on a wave of old classics, also read Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Meanwhile I watched a fine movie, All About My Mother, which may not seem to provide any connexion to those novels, but which will be discussed alongside them, below, after I have dealt seperately with each. So, to 1984.

The further through the novel I progressed, the more I was reminded of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which may, of course, be no accident. What is interesting about the novel is not only how realistic Orwell's distopia seems, but also his examination of the mechanism by which it gains acceptance in the minds of party members, through "doublethink." That it takes determined presence of mind to reconcile oneself to an unappealing totalitarian state, from which there is no hope of escape, is an insight which suggests an angle on the question of the cupability of the 'ordinary man' living under such a state.

The fate of the 'proles' is interesting in this regard. Not obliged to tow the ideological line, they do not have to submit themselves to 'doublethink,' and, provided they are not distinguished by intelligence, have relatively little to fear from the Though Police, or the civil police. Not granted the awful Imperial Gin, they drink beer in the pub. It seems a far less bad life than that of the party member. Perhaps we are to pity the ignorant mob, but political conditions seem to affect their lifes in a far less insidious way than that of party members.

Ignorance is perhaps the salient factor. After all, Winston's troubles are rooted in the fact that he is concerned with an abstract idea of the truth, a concept tied closely to his perception of his own personhood and sanity. As he worries about the effect of the obliteration of evidence on the ontological status of the past, I was put in mind of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and the passage in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, where the link of the physical place and artefact to the identity of the protaganist suggests the material role of material objects in the creation and reinforcement of personal identity. Given Orwell's concern with the documentary record, the infamous 'dodgy dossier' also sprang to mind.

1984 is both a cleverly constructed, gripping novel, and a fascinating insight into the worries of the time at which it was written. While I wouldn't want to overplay the hackneyed 'continuing relavence for today,' it is also true to say that in the 'information age' the novel raises pertinent questions about the relations between power, information, identity and memory. It has taken me a surprisingly long time to get round to reading this novel, and I find it difficult to explain why, but to anyone who has thought about it but never quite bothered, I would suggest it is worth the modest time investment.

The what and why

Having recently finished Roberto Bolano's 2666, which made me think about how transient even my personal memory of the novels I have read is, I decided that writing about what I read would provide an enjoyable record, and hopefully help me to find more interesting books to read. I may come back to things I have recently read, but will begin with the novel I am currently reading, namely Orwell's 1984, which oddly I have never read.

Anyway, I'm halfway through, so I shall finish it and report back soon.