Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

Sometimes I remember an article not so much for the content of it but for a particular sentence that captures my attention. That has nothing to do with the quality of the piece but with the quality of the writer; someone who is so skilful that certain phrases cause me to do a double-take and go back to them. That’s exactly what happened recently when I came upon a feature by one of The New Yorker’s staff writers, Adam Gopnik. I love Gopnik’s writing and on this occasion I was really looking forward to what he had to say about a new Hemingway biography. Yet, I was more drawn to a couple of sentences almost at the beginning of his review than what came after.

On talking about Hemingway’s fall from grace after a long period of almost-sycophantic celebration, Gopnik states that “few would now give the old man the heavyweight championship of literature for which he fought so hard, not least because thinking of literature as an elimination bout is no longer our style.We think of it more as a quilting bee, with everyone having a chance to add a patch, and the finest patches often arising from the least privileged quilters.In recent decades, Hemingway has represented the authority of writing only for people who never read.”

I swear that I had never contemplated literature as an elimination bout. Elimination from what, exactly? It is my assumption that Adam is perhaps referring to an era when writing, especially in the States, was all about working on the Great Novel (or the Great American Novel, if we are going to be really specific). The next sentence and his mention of a quilting bee sounds slightly snobbish and sniffy. To me it looks as if Mr Gopnik disapproves of the way editors and publishers have cast their nets wider in recent decades to include an ever-growing, varied readership.

Literature is not just about the person who writes the book, but equally important, the person who reads it. The world we enter may be the writer’s, but the one opening the door is the reader. The reader then decides to stay in this world or not. Sometimes the reader stays when this world resembles their own somewhat. Sometimes, they stay for the opposite reason. The landscape in front of their eyes looks nothing like what they experience in their daily lives. Whether realism or escapism is the outcome, literature has achieved one of its main aims: to create a relationship between writer and reader.

Reading is a skill not to be learned passively. It doesn’t matter if you choose a couch or a chair to sit on whilst devouring a book; you are still allowing a piece of someone’s brain (to put it crudely) into yours. You, reader, deserve utmost respect.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

What happens when literature becomes a single-identity creative platform, catering chiefly to a particular demographic? Is this the elimination bout Adam Gopnik was referring to? A group of writers from said demographic sparring with each other to see who comes out on top? In my view, this goes against the democratic nature of reading. Let’s consider this: writing, by its very nature, is anarchic, or at least it should be. It should only obey the laws imposed by its master/mistress. Reading, on the other hand, is democratic (and individual[istic]). We share our passion for a specific book or author with like-minded readers. Harry Potter, pre-marketing frenzy, is a good example. For some reason, the idea of JK Rowling being given a free ride as a quilter (After what? Dozens of rejections from publishers!) makes no sense to me. If I were to twist Adam’s theory around, I would say that the quilting bee he so easily dismisses also includes patches by renowned writers like Papa Hemingway. But the more diverse patches we add, the better literature we will have.

© 2017

Next Post: “London, my London”, to be published on Saturday 15^th July at 6pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

As a reader, I find non-fiction as compelling as fiction. However, non-fiction becomes a minefield when polarising conflicts are thrown in. Biographies and autobiographies are usually straightforward affairs in which history has as much a big part to play as character. Memoirs or real-life-based accounts, however, are a different kettle of fish. I was reminded of their complex nature recently after reading a diary entry by the Libyan-American writer, Hisham Matar, in the London Review of Books.

Hisham was in Arkansas last year touring his latest book, a memoir entitled The Return (I am acquainted with his work through his novel In the Country of Men). At a public reading at a library, a Syrian woman asks him how it is possible for him to still be able to write with everything that has been happening in the Arab world for the last half decade.

Hisham’s response made me think of the relationship between politics and literature. A relationship that is less natural than many people might think and more nuanced than many others would prefer.

In between these two positions: one claiming that all literature ought to be political somehow or other, and another saying that literature and politics should never mix, the writer’s voice is lost. If an author’s oeuvre depends chiefly on adhering to one of these two extreme positions, the result will not be a work of art but a party manifesto.

By coincidence around the same time I read Hisham’s article, I had just finished The Gate, by the French writer Francois Bizot. The Gate is a powerful, detail-rich insight into the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Bizot is an ethnologist who is captured by young guerrillas and taken deep into the jungle. His interrogator happens to be the school-teacher-cum revolutionary Comrade Douch (sadly famous Comrade Douch) who would go on to kill thousands in the horrifying Tuol Sleng prison. Bizot was kept three months in the jungle. He was the only foreigner to come out alive from his group. All the others were murdered. The book stayed inside him for thirty years. This is the price of nuance.

Non-fiction by its very nature tends to be more tyrannical than fiction. Writers need their readers to believe that the way they are telling the story is the way it actually happened. In order to achieve this, sometimes they adopt the view that is more prevalent around them as opposed to the more truthful to them and their narrative. In doing so, they are exercising someone else’s imagination whilst sacrificing theirs. This is why it is so important to understand what the Syrian woman was saying to Hisham. I get it. In the face of horror, how can we pick up a pen instead of a gun?

Horror of the type being visited upon the people of Syria nowadays surely leads to trauma. One of the consequences of trauma is numbness. A mental numbness that cancels out some of our functions. We can still breathe, eat and defecate. But it is hard to create in those circumstances. This is what happened to many Holocaust survivors. The tragedy they had just experienced was too unreal to make sense of it immediately. This is also why it is essential to read books like Primo Levi’s If This is a Man/The Truce. Far from adhering to a particular discourse, Primo comes up with his own one. One that is unique whilst not letting the Nazis off the hook, humourous whilst not “pretty-ing up” what happened in the gas chambers.

In the end Hisham tells the woman that, when faced with horror like the Syrian one, writers should still attempt to write. In doing so, writers should free themselves from any obligation, no matter how lofty the ideal. It is to literature that authors are contracted first and foremost. Writing about a conflict, or a difficult political issue, is fine. But above all, it must be literature.

© 2017

Next Post: “Thoughts in Progress”, to be published on Saturday 3^rd June at 6pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

I recently cycled along the River Lee Navigation. For those of you who are not acquainted with one of London and Hertfordshire’s (a county just outside the British capital to the north) most picturesque routes I would strongly recommend that you keep it in mind if you ever visit the UK. The unbroken path is perfect for walking and biking. I have made this trip before but on this occasion I went much further up.

Travelling from someone near east London up to Cheshunt the journey took me through some of the most scenic open spaces ever. As it is the custom with me when I am cycling on a traffic-free route, I went into reverie mode, whilst at the same time paying close attention to the path and the people walking or cycling on it.

I do not know if poetry has the same effect on you, fellow bloggers and readers, but in my case I have always seen it as evocative. A poem like Ode to a Nightingale makes me think more of the feelings that led Keats to compose the piece and the sentiments it continues to trigger to this day. The bird in question becomes secondary or even non-existent.

This is exactly what happened that day on the towpath of the River Lee Navigation. Perhaps it was the peace around me, the calm water, the stationery boats, the slow pace, both amongst walkers and cyclists and the overpowering sense of history that triggered off a deep spiritual connection to my immediate environment. As I neared the Lee Valley White Water Centre I saw a wall (or the remains of it) on my right handside with a crack running down the middle. I stopped on one side of the path for a couple of minutes and watched the concrete entity closer.

In the context of everything I had seen so far the wall was ugly. It broke the harmony of the urban and rural mix I had cycled past up to now on my way to Hertfordshire. Yet, all the same I felt that there was a reason for that wall to be part of this bucolic landscape. All of a sudden, lines from Fleur Adcock’s poem Against Coupling came to my mind. I could not remember the whole piece (I very rarely remember entire poems by heart) but I did recall the following verses: “There is much to be said for abandoning this no longer novel exercise/for not’ participating in total experience’.

The strange thing was that whereas Fleur was writing about the need for occasional alienation in a couple (temporary “uncoupling”, if you like), I was looking at the wall in a whole different light. To me it was an object that refused to conform to the beauty standards that the canal had unwittingly imposed. It was an unremarkable wall by any definition. One that could be found anywhere else in the world: South Africa, Thailand, Cuba. However, to me it only made sense in that moment, surrounded by cormorants, herons and oak trees.

I carried on, still thinking of the odd relationship between that wall’s ordinariness and inelegance and the canal’s exuberance. And how poetry married (at least in my head) the two of them somehow.

© 2017

Photo taken by the blog author

Next Post: “Thoughts in Progress”, to be published on Saturday 25^th February at 6pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

Judging by the title, Arundhati Roy’s second novel must be a joyfest. Named The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, this will be the author’s sophomore effort after a 20-year wait. Compared to famous procrastinators such as Harper Lee and Leon Tolstoy, two decades might not seem much, but what hides behind the wait?

I, for one, am really looking forward to reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. If it is anything like The God of Small Things, Arundhati’s only novel so far, I expect free-jazz-like sentences jumping off the page. A language as rich as the twins Rahel and Estha’s imagination. And a million-story plot. I want to be surprised and shaken, but also entertained.

Therein, then, lies the dilemma of the “tardy” author.

I have often wondered what led the likes of Joyce and Kundera to wait several years before continuing to do what was apparently natural to them: writing a novel. The former let seventeen years slip by between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The latter took thirteen to complete The Festival of Insignificance after the publication of Ignorance. Was it fear of not rising up to the challenge posed by the devoted reader? Or perhaps dea(r)th of creativity?

I have a theory. Authors whose oeuvre transcends the confines of literature and become bywords for cultural phenomena (think Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and its social and political connotations) have much more to lose if their next book does not stand up to scrutiny as their previous one. That is quite a lot of pressure already. On top of that, there is the commercial one. They have to make money. After all, this is their craft. So, making money whilst remaining authentic. Fancy giving it a try, reader?

A second reason for any dilly-dallying about bringing another book out could be linked to fear of disappointing followers. For me, Kundera’s philosophical musings are central to his narratives. Without them, I would not have enjoyed The Joke or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Hence my feelings of frustration when I read his three “French” novellas(they were written in French rather than Czech, the language he had used until then). They lacked his usual insightful, eagle-eye examinations, even if any trace of philosophy in them felt as if it had been thrown in at the last minute. Understandably, Milan went away and came back with what many thought was a return to the golden years of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his 2015 effort The Festival of Insignificance.

Self-consciousness could be another factor. Harper Lee famously miscalculated the impact of To Kill a Mockingbird on both the public and the critics. The fact that the novel was so well received and that there was such open encouragement for her to keep on writing might have been one of the reasons why she became a recluse.

Some of you are probably thinking “Yes, but writing and publishing are two different things. The former can take two days or two years or two decades. The latter is decided by a group of people, including the writer’s agent, a publisher and editor and it is done within a reasonable time frame.”

You are right. Not only that, but also, not writing a second or third or fourth novel for fifteen, twenty or thirty years does not mean that the writer does not write at all. Arundhati Roy has been very, very busy writing non-fiction for the last two decades. Some of it I have read and it is just as good as the make-believe world she created in The God of Small Things.

What, then, makes a writer procrastinate? I have no idea. What I do know is that sometimes, just like now, it is worth the wait. I have not read The Ministry of Utmost Happiness yet, but I am sure that by the end of the book I will have surely partaken in Roy’s literary joyfest.

© 2016

Next Post: “Thoughts in Progress”, to be published on Saturday 15^th October at 6pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

One of the reasons why I became a pacifist years ago was the sudden realisation that most wars (I would probably say “all”, but I do not want to be absolute) are senseless. The brutality involved contrasts sharply with the glory they supposedly bring. Of course, there are conflicts that are necessary, either because of nations being invaded and having to defend themselves or border skirmishes that turn into full-on confrontations. One of them was the First World War, which became the backdrop for Ernest Hemingway’s wartime novel A Farewell to Arms.

I first read this book back in uni. I say “read” but what I actually mean is that the book content somehow went through me, including my brain and left no traces. Nothing to do with the writing, which I think it’s pretty good in my humble opinion. At the time I am describing there were still coffins arriving from Angola, the result of a decade-long “international adventure” that cost Cuba twenty thousand troops. I do not think that I was then in the frame of mind to understand Papa Hemingway’s universal message: war is chaotic and produces neither saints nor sinners.

Re-reading the book now I realise that in the intervening 20-odd years I have become more staunchly anti-war. Coming across again the lives of Frederic Henry, the American “tenente” and main character, and his Italian confreres, I cannot ignore the sense of detachment one must adopt in the theatre of war. What this approach does to one’s humanity is, paradoxically, to take it away. The only way the Italians can kill the Austrians is by seeing them not only as the enemy and invader but as non-humans first and foremost. Same with the Italian battle police when they arrest their own officers during the army’s retreat: they kill them.

A Farewell to Arms can be said to be not just a novel about the crumbling of columns of soldiers but also about the crumbling of an ideology: wars are necessary and are winnable. The human wreckage left behind betrays this idea and turns it on its head. The fragile minds, the inability to display any kind of rational thinking and the moral collapse amongst troops are testament to war’s barbaric nature.

Hemingway’s language when describing his characters’ actions is casual, almost ordinary. There is a sort of quotidianness that lulls the reader, almost making us comfortable and misleading us to think that perhaps war is not that bad. Yes, there is a little bit of suffering and killing but it is all for a good cause. Until reality kicks in to great effect. Frederic Henry kills an engineer who tries to desert him and his men as they leave their jeep behind, stuck in the mud. The murder is in cold blood, but even calling it murder feels wrong and Papa wants us to know that, for this is war, what did you expect? It is not called murder but execution. His description of the death of Aymo, one of the Italian drivers, takes him fewer than ten lines.

And yet, there are beautiful moments in the novel that remind the reader that maybe, just maybe, there is hope somewhere at the end of the tunnel. Henry falls in love with a British nurse. Although love is the wrong word here. Both Frederic and Catherine, the nurse, are fleeing personal demons: she, a dead fiancé, he the spectre of a war he feels ambivalent about. Together, they build a relationship based on pain and escapism rather than love. I must admit that I found the dialogue between them repetitive and monotonous; however, it is one of the ingenious ways in which Hemingway shows us the futility of war. At any given moment one of these two characters can be wiped off the face of the earth forever and then what? Nothing, because that is war really, the battle for nothingness.

The novel might have reinforced my pacifism but I doubt it made Hemingway feel the same as he was writing it. Machismo is everywhere: there is plenty of braggadocio, especially of the womanising variety, Italian men are shown as virile and hot-blooded and the American lieutenant as calculating and decisive. A Farewell to Arms might be more nuanced than other Hemingway novels but in its no-holds-barred depiction of war it somehow celebrates old-fashioned masculinity.

Whereas Books 1; 2 and 3 create the background for Hemingway’s plot-setting and character-exploration, the last two parts bring powerful reflections on war and its controversial role in peace-brokering. Who knows? Perhaps Papa Hemingway was also a pacifist after all.

© 2016

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 28^th May at 6pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

I only did realise after the seventh or eighth day in succession. It was the craving that did it. Window of our office semi-open (just the tiniest of gaps, enough to avoid the heater's steam from misting up the glass) and the sweet aroma of croissant wafting up to the operations department where I worked at the time. The smell awakened a primal instinct inside me and I could not wait until lunchtime to dash downstairs and part with my usual two or three quid for my regular prandial treat. That’s when I knew I was developing a problem. A croissant-and-hot-chocolate addiction by literary proxy.

I was reading Joanne Harris’ Chocolat at the time.

Forgettable plot and clichéd characters but sublime food. This is how I remember this novel. It all came back a few days ago when I read an article about memorable meals in books.

Cuisine can play an important role in literature as the feature states. I still remember Leopold Bloom’s liver slices fried with crustcrumbs in Ulysses. And what to say about that Cuban masterpiece, Paradiso by Lezama Lima? Banana soup (probably plantain), beetroot salad and roast turkey amongst other succulent ingredients.

Feeling peckish?

I imagine that authors are presented with a choice when including food in their narrative: be descriptive or suggestive. If I remember correctly the latter applies to Chocolat, which is probably the reason why every morning and afternoon for less than a fortnight (I read the book very quickly. As I mentioned before, if the plot had been like the food…) I would add an almond croissant and hot chocolate to my breakfast and the butter version and same hot beverage to my lunch after the main course. Descriptive meals tend to leave this madeleine-chaser somewhat cold.

I like my food. I am not afraid to say that. And when it comes to literature, I like “happening” upon food. A good example is in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, when Ugwu arrives at Odenigbo’s house to apply for a position as a houseboy and sees a “a roasted, shimmering chicken” in the kitchen. He touches the chicken and to me that moment even has erotic connotations, bearing in mind that when it comes to epicurean matters, carnal desires can and do often make a cameo.

Talking of eroticism, I have occasionally heard comparisons between sex and food scenes and even a sort of continuum drawn between the two. I do not dispute that. Some writers do use food as a preamble to sexual intercourse between characters. However, sex scenes very often feel “flat” (in my humble opinion), due to a lack of honesty. Either the author is doing too much or too little. Let us not forget that sex is, whether we like it or not, linked to our innermost, primitive selves. Inevitably conclusions about who we are or what we want in bed will be reached, no matter how detached we claim to be from our dramatis personae. With food, on the other hand, it is different. No revelation is necessary. We can disassociate completely from the meal we knock up. I’ve read very precise descriptions of Asian food, including the sourcing of ingredients, the cooking of them and the methods used, from non-Asian writers, as if they had been born in the subcontinent and lived there all their lives. Part of it could be the fact that we live in such an intricately connected, globalised world that geographical barriers count for nothing anymore. Plus, in cosmopolitan cities such as London, Paris or New York, there is always the opportunity of delving into other cultures and getting to know them properly without really being part of them. This, of course, will include food, too. Which is probably why I went through my croissant-binge stage. Chocolat takes place in France and at the time of reading it my office was sandwiched between two French pattiseries. Well, at least the Indian restaurant was a few doors further down, otherwise, well, who knows what would have happened?

© 2015

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 7^th November at 6pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

So, how are you getting on with reading only in German these days, I hear you ask? After all, it was only a few months ago that I decided to buy four books in the original German by the same author (three novels and two novellas) and immerse myself once again in the beauty of the Teutonic language. I have not been disappointed at all. The writer, Marlen Haushofer, has turned out to be better than I expected. I must admit that I still struggle a bit with certain words and phrases but on the whole the experience has been very enjoyable.

One of the reasons for the switch from my perennial English- and sporadic Spanish-language reading to German is the way syntax is built in the latter. I mean that almost literally. Sentences in German, at least in the literature I have read so far, seem to have been put through a very effective cement mixer in order to have a good, long-lasting product to lay across the bricks that make up the edifice. What you end up with is page after page of pure poetry in prose.

The two novellas are included in the same volume. Wir töten Stella (We kill Stella) is narrated from the point of view of a housewife. She uses a weekend when her husband is away to put down on paper all the events of the past few months. This involves the eponymous Stella, a teenager who comes to stay with her family and who is shamelessly seduced by the narrator’s husband. Stella gets pregnant and is forced to have an abortion. After attempting and failing to kill herself, Stella accidentally steps in front of a passing lorry and gets run over.

The shortness of the work belies the intensity of it. Wir töten Stella stays long with the reader, her (almost silent) voice echoing down the corridors of one’s mind.

I found similarities between this novella and the novel I am reading now, Die Wand (The Wall), which incidentally was turned into a motion picture. Both tales are written in the first person singular and both feature female narrators. Also, although not stated explicitly in Wir töten Stella, both women write about their experiences in order to stay sane. In the case of the protagonist of Die Wand, she is invited to go on a hunting trip by a couple with whom she is good friends. Once at their hut, the couple decide to take a walk around the forest before setting off on their expedition the next morning. However they fail to come back at dusk. The woman decides to look for them the next day. After walking for a long time without much success she finds the couple’s dog sitting in the middle of a path looking afraid. The woman ventures forth but the dog refuses to follow her. She carries on down the path herself and all of a sudden bumps into an invisible wall. From then on an internal monologue takes place. A monologue that leads us into a world (the woman’s internal world) full of questions but with very few answers, other than those about survival.

Heute, am fünfsten November, beginne ich mit meinem Bericht...

I mentioned that one of the reasons why I had gone back to German was to remind myself of the beautiful syntax this language possesses. The other reason was the actual author I am reading. Marlen Haushofr was a post-war writer who had to fight, first her own lack of confidence and, secondly the hostile world in which she lived. As someone not familiar with many Austrian, German or Swiss (those from the German-speaking part) post-war works of literature I was curious to see what they were like. One of the comments I often heard when I began to learn German all those years ago was that in the wake of Hitler’s defeat and the demise of Nazism many German-speaking writers decided to carry out an act of self-censorship in relation to the war. They stopped mentioning it. Marlen’s works might validate that theory. Certainly Wir töten Stella, Das fünste Jahr (the two novellas) and so far Die Wand stray from any mention of World War II. This begs the question: should writers who happened to be born in countries where atrocities were committed by brutal regimes have to confront these demons of the past? Should a Russian (Stalin), a Cambodian (Pol Pot) or an Italian (Mussolini) writer always or at least most of the time have to reference their country’s past as a way of acknowledging former misdeeds?

I do not think so. If I move swiftly from literature to cinema I remember watching Argentinian films many years ago and pondering whether they all had to mention the terrible dictatorship that South American nation suffered in the late 70s and early 80s. Do not get me wrong. Many movies of that era, especially the ones that came out in the immediate aftermath, were top-notch. But I also recall some whose plot had nothing to do with the dictatorship and yet it felt as if by not mentioning the “disappeared” and the “junta”, these film-makers were betraying some kind of secret agreement.

Back in the world of literature, I am of the opinion that any pressure on a writer to approach or acknowledge a certain subject, chiefly in relation to their country’s past, and even more specifically one on which their homeland might not come out a in good light, risks placing shackles on both reader and writer. It hinders development, not only at an individual level, but also nationwide. What I have enjoyed about Marlen Haushofer’s writing so far is that she was more concerned with equipping her main character in Die Wand with a credible internal voice than with Hitler’s ascension to power. The main beneficiary? Culture. And of course, yours truly, for I have reconciled my long-term affair with the German language.

© 2015

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 6^th June at 6pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

If, like me, you buy or you are subscribed to The New Humanist, you, too, probably read a recent essay by Philip Pullman that appeared on the pages of the magazine. Under the title “Writing is despotism, but reading is democracy”, the best-selling author mixed cuckoos, philosophy, censorship and writers’ responsibility towards their readers. I might not be familiar with Pullman the fiction writer (my son is), but I have always been really keen on Pullman the essayist.

The title of Pullman’s piece is, of course, confrontational. Because that is what the better intellectual minds do; they provoke, and in the process they make us think. Pullman’s statement might come across as absolutist and dogmatic, but scrape the surface and you will find plenty to agree with. Equally, some of his ideas will leave you shaking your head.

I think Pullman is right when he avers that arts have other values (...) that can’t be measured in financial terms. In this case his use of Wilde’s theory of books not being either moral or immoral, only good or bad, is apposite. Similarly, the kernel of his argument, the writer’s despotism vs reader’s democracy is hard to disagree with prima facie. On writing a book (fiction, poetry, non-fiction, I am not being discriminatory here), the writer creates a private space between the reader and themselves. It is this intimate relationship that I seek when I take a book off my shelf and rest it on my lap, when I decide to delve in its pages, when I close myself off to the outside world. But whilst I buy the despotic nature of the author, I do not totally agree with the reader’s democratic character.

Who is the real victim, the writer or the reader? Or both?

We, readers, can be as brutal as any writer. We demand, that is our essence. This is even more so, when we follow a certain author. Like junkies, albeit of the literary type, we strap up our arm whilst cooking up the next volume of letters slowly on a leather-bound spoon. We fill up the syringe with each word, sentence and trope, until we finally sink it into our flesh. Yes, you might say that I have gone a bit too far with my metaphor or you could say that I have been watching too much Breaking Bad lately. About the latter, yes, I have, but I am merely catching up. Still the metaphor applies. Because if we are not happy with the product, if we feel let down, even cheated, we will not return to the same dealer. i.e. writer. So, no democracy, as in demos (common) and kratos (rule). “Reading is tyranny” could well have been the second part of Phillip’s essay title.

Of course, not all readers are the same, and in this respect you could well agree with Pullman’s use of the word “democracy”. Just as there are intolerant readers for whom a change of genre signifies a breakdown in their imaginary relationship with their favourite author, there are also readers who behave otherwise. The latter are the ones who understand development and evolution. Sometimes at the expense of structure, mind you. But the gains are far better than the losses.

What about the financial side of writing? Pullman touches on it briefly and, in my opinion, he is quite dismissive of it. I would not dare adopt the same approach. When I worked in the cultural and creative industries (CCIs was the handy acronym we used in those days), we always had to emphasise the revenue the arts generated in the wider economy. Without making that point it was nigh impossible to convince the movers and shakers of local authorities, funding bodies and community organisations that the print and design industry, for instance, had a value to the office of the Exchequer. Writing, sadly, falls into the category of jobs in which most people struggle to make ends meet. So, when someone says, to quote Pullman – who is already using a quote in his article – that “the arts are important because they bring in so many billion pounds to the economy”, s/he is not being money-minded, but trying to place the creative industries in the same context as the banking or manufacturing ones. Let us not forget that Britain is chiefly nowadays a “service” nation. What this means in reality is that the service sector is one of the industries leading the economic recovery.

Where I do fully agree with Philip is on what motivates a writer to pick up a pen or switch a computer/laptop on. It is that interaction with the medium in which the writer frees up her/his imagination that gives us the Dickens and the Munro. Forget about the relationship between author and reader, it is the engagement with language that constitutes the ultimate display of despotism, democracy and anarchy, all rolled into one. Despotism because our friend, l‘écrivain, exercises absolute authority. Democracy because very often this authority is undermined by a conglomerate made up of agents, editor, publishers and last, but not least, the public. And anarchy because writing, as an art form, is sometimes chaotic and unstructured and therefore it should ideally respond first and foremost to the writer and then to everyone else.

Read Philip Pullman’s essay and let me know what you think. Is writing despotic and reading democratic or is there space for overlapping?

© 2015

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 21^st March at 6pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

I’m in the final third of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, the second book in a trilogy that also includes Oryx and Crake and MaddAddam. Readers and fellow bloggers know how keen I am on the Canadian author’s writing.

However, my post tonight is not about Atwood’s writing per se but about a peculiar phenomenon I have noticed quite often but which until now I had not dared to mention.

As I said before Margaret is Canadian and yet you would be hard pressed to find traces of her nationality in her oeuvre. I checked the handful of books I own, which does not necessarily mean they are the only ones I have read by her. The Blind Assassin, The Edible Woman and her magnum opus, The Handmaid’s Tale. Of all these, the second one might be the only that comes close to providing a Canadian setting with Canadian characters. But the story it tells is so universal that it transcends its geographical borders (if any).

Atwood: universal writing

This subject of “author semi-separated from her/his own immediate reality” played on my mind as I recalled recently an essay by the Nigerian novelist BenOkri (I have never read any of Ben Okri’s books; however I have read his essays and articles before). In it, the African writer looked at the ways authors from “ethnic” backgrounds are portrayed (some would even say “marketed”). I found Ben’s column interesting as I, an avid reader, have very often wondered the same.

For Mr Okri some people “read Flaubert for beauty, Joyce for innovation, Virginia Woolf for poetry and Jane Austen for psychology”. I shall leave you to assess the veracity of that sentence. However, writers from backgrounds considered to be “ethnic” (for example, Asian and African to mention two) are read for subjects that define and focus on their immediate reality. To wit, a black author’s book will be read for her/his portrayal of “slavery, colonialism, poverty, civil wars, imprisonment and female circumcision”.

I went back to my bookshelf to test Okri’s theory and he was right. At least in regards to my small collection. There they were: the Rushdies, Chimamandas, Morrisons (as in Toni), Levys, Walkers (as in Alice) and Hosseinis. Their works either portrayed stories set in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Jamaica, US and India or had characters that were originally from these countries.

This is where Ben’s essay comes into the picture. I agree with him when he avers that “The black and African writer is expected to write about certain things, and if they don’t they are seen as irrelevant”. I disagree when he states that this repetition can render their fiction monotonous. To me repetition doesn’t equate monotony (I love JS Bach and a lot of the music he composed was based on repetition). But I do worry about capability. Is the writer using the same setting and the same nationalities because she or he can’t do better?

My answer to my own rhetorical question is no. The (sur)names I mentioned above speak for themselves when it comes to top quality writing. However, I would not be lying if I told you that every time I open a novel or a collection of short stories by Salman Rushdie I expect to find at least two Asian characters in it, if not more. I would be telling porkies if I said that when I read Andrea Levy I do not have the sound of Jamaican patois ringing in my ears.

This predictability is my dilemma. As I mentioned before being predictable has very little effect on quality. But as Mr Okri asks: “Who wants to constantly read a literature of suffering, of heaviness?” Surely not the Nigerian or Afghani since that is their reality. I agree with Ben, it is the western reader whose surroundings do not resemble north-eastern Nigeria or Taliban-threatened Afghanistan. The “ethnic” writer tries to reflect the reality of her or his country through the kaleidoscope of fiction. Yet, one of the outcomes of their endeavour is that they provide a form of “escapism” to the western reader. Thus a cycle, chain, system, conveyor belt, you name it, is formed. You “ethnic” writer feed, I, western reader, consume.

What happens if the author decides not to confront their immediate reality?

In vain I searched my shelves for an example to answer that question. I hear that Chimamanda Ngozi’s latest novel, Americanah, changes settings, in that one part of the book takes place in the States. But it still contains Nigerian characters, a very Nigerian plot and the other part is set in Lagos. I’m not knocking Chimamanda, who I think is one the better writers I have read in the last ten years. Nevertheless, read the blurb for Americanah and you will see what I mean: race, identity, military dictatorship and flight are all mentioned. Go back now to Ben Okri’s earlier point. What complicates matters more is that writers like Chimamanda are quite rightly acknowledged for their creativity. Ngozi’s books have been longlisted for the Booker Prize, won the Orange Prize for Fiction and been selected by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association and the BBC Short Story Awards.

These accolades pose a question: if a writer is having the success they deserve, writing what they know about, why would they change tact? Why would they go looking for subjects on which they might not have as much knowledge?

As a reader, my response would be: because as Ben Okri rightly says, literature’s basic prerequisite is mental freedom. Both for reader and writer. Especially when it comes to demanding readers. Orangesfrom Spain is a superb collection of short stories by the Irish writer David Park. After I finished reading it, I wanted more. But when I searched for more of his books, I realised that all he ever wrote about was Northern Ireland. No matter how beautiful and nuanced his use of language is, I felt somewhat put off.

Mental freedom for the writer carries a danger sign, though. If she or he finds success writing about a particular subject, the public will most likely want them to stick to that subject. Variations on the same topic, like a Kundera, for instance, work wonders. If they so much as deviate one iota from the formula their readers have created for them, the writer will pay the heaviest price: at the till.

I have not even gone into the issue of credibility. That means writer’s credibility when they write about a subject they are not known for or which does not tick one of their identity boxes, i.e., Irish writer writing about something other than Ireland, US writer writing about something other than racism, Latin writer writing about something other than immigration. All of a sudden, we, readers, transform ourselves into judges and experts. That is another can of worms which I might be tempted to open on another occasion. In the meantime, I shall leave you tonight with these reflections to digest. I can’t wait to read your comments.

© 2015

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 1^st February at 10am (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

You might think that 28 million quid is a lot of dough these days but apparently it ain’t. Well, even two million quid is not a lot, according to Mylene Klass. You can’t even get a decent garage in London for that kind of money to live in, as she reminded the hapless leader of the opposition, Ed Milliband recently. But £28m is not a lot of money either, especially if you are a female artist like Georgia O’ Keeffe. Her Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 sold for that figure last week in New York. However, when compared to her male counterparts, O’ Keeffe’s auctioned piece is dwarfed by the prices fetched by works of art by the likes of Picasso and Pollock. In a sort of journalistic hara-kiri piece, The Guardian’s chief arts critic, Jonathan Jones, blamed men like him who have long championed male artists over female ones.

Jonathan’s article made me think that there were parallels here between female artists and female writers. Even as the landscape of publishing has drastically altered in the last ten to fifteen years with the advent of the internet and all technological developments related to it, the field of literature, prizes and recognition remains very male, and I would dare say, very white, middle-class and middle-aged.  “Field of literature” refers in this case mainly to the perception of it, rather than the output. When it comes to output women might actually outnumber men, although I have not got any figures to back that statement up. It just feels that way. The internet and self-publishing, especially, have served well the female of the species. Yet, here is the crux of the matter. Prolific female writers are still judged on the genre in which they write rather on the transcendence of their work, unlike their male compatriots. Occasionally women are given the keys to the club, but on the whole the Picassos and Pollocks of the written word still guard the entrance. An example that comes to mind is the excellent short-story  writer Alice Munro. Profiled everywhere, from The New Yorker, to The London Review of Books, Alice should be seen as a game-changing writer in her own right. Yet the language most critics use when focusing on her work seems to imply that Alice Munro is a niche or even a cult author. Contrast that with Updike, DeLillo and Franzen. The phrase “The Great American Novel” is never far behind.

Does any of this matter? No, it doesn’t, and it probably wouldn’t if writers were judged solely on merit. But that’s not the reality. The knock-on effect of this perception of some male authors as epoch-making and female writers as niche-creators (chick-lit anyone?) is that literature becomes a marketing playground on which readers are easily duped with shiny toys. Not all readers, granted, many of us can still think for ourselves, but gender division and its implications is a dream scenario for a publicity company. If you want proof of this, how about this: you may think you know who I am but you are wrong. In reality I am a 60-year-old woman who has a disposable income of more than £1,000 a month. My favourite food is Vichysoisse soup (I had to look that name up, by the way) and I enjoy going to the theatre. Oh, and I have a cat. Obviously, you probably know that I don’t have any pets and that I am forty-three years old. Oh, and before I forget, I am a bloke. How did we arrive at that description? Through my love of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels and the few short stories by her I have read in other publications. It turns out that fans of Mantel’s fiction fit the category I mentioned first. According to a YouGov Profiles service we, readers, can be labelled according to the writers we follow. The reality is more complex, as we know, but isn’t this “boxing-in” attitude a consequence of the same phenomenon I explained before? Do you think that fans of Ian McEwan have to worry about being stereotyped? Not a bit, because the author they have been identified with is one of those game-changers, who has been trying to write “The Great British Novel” with his mates Amis and Rushdie since the 80s. Meanwhile Sarah Waters gets on with what she does best: writing brilliant, best-selling novels, but apparently, no epoch-making ones.

Hilary Mantel: reading her makes me change my sex and age

Maybe I am just letting off steam. After all, it’s not every day that I open the paper and realise that someone has changed my sex overnight without my permission, adding a few more years in the process. The irony is that the article about the YouGov Profiles service came straight after one about a campaign gaining ground currently in the UK in which readers want to “let books be books”. This means that books should not come with a tag attached to them that says they are either for boys or girls. I quite agree with the campaign. I’m willing to start another campaign called “Let Readers Be Readers”. My gut feeling is that it would probably change the perception we have, not just of readers, but also of writers and their transcendence. Maybe we could start with a donation of 28 million quid. After all, apparently that’s not a lot of money.

© 2014

Photo taken from The Guardian website

Next Post: “Urban Dictionary”, to be published on Thursday 27^th November at 11:59pm (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

It is hard to be original in literature. Good, up-and-coming authors have to put up with being compared to literary giants from the past, both distant and recent. Writing styles have become defined along such demanding lines that only by putting them all in a big cauldron, mixing them and stirring them up can one attempt to come up with a new breed. Sometimes I think that writers are defter at chemistry than at their craft. Wizards of letters could be a new job description to appear in the ad pages of the London Review of Books.

This is the reason why I can’t think highly enough of Dirty Havana Trilogy, a novel written by the Cuban author Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. I read it last summer and it left me with a nasty, and yet at the same time pleasant taste in my mouth. Whilst conforming to some of the stereotypes people have of Cubans (even those who have never paid a visit to the island), the book escapes classification. The nasty/pleasant taste in my mouth had nothing to do with the sex scenes, mind you, unbridled and “in your face” as they were. It was not the heavy dose of realism that permeated each and every single sentence of the book. It was something else and I would like to use this column and the next three-hundred or four-hundred words to explore it.

Because it is so hard to be an original author nowadays, many of those who choose writing as their profession resort to clichés, either in form or content. Pedro manages to manoeuvre himself out of these literary booby-traps.

Dirty Havana Trilogy is a novel in three parts about a man’s (called Pedro Juan as well) observations and experiences of the Havana of the 90s. Having lived through those years myself (’90 – ’97, when I relocated to London) I looked forward to reading what this fellow habanero had to write about one of the more significant periods in the history of our nation. I was left with mixed feelings but with a sense that for Pedro it was mission accomplished.

Havana is presented as a city of sex, drugs and... more sex and drugs. No surprise about that. I recognised some of the characters because I used to hang out with many of them. The sex scenes (plentiful, sorry about the spoiler) were also familiar to me. The language was shocking. It was not just the foul language in the mouths of the characters but in the narrator’s mind.

A cliché is not just a stereotyped expression but also the loss of original thinking. In Dirty Havana Trilogy Gutiérrez avoids this by enhancing the sense of smell. It seems as if he were saying “This is the reek of my city. It won’t feature in the brochures you pick up on the high street of your western country, but it’s the stench I wake up to and have to put up with every day”. No wonder the book was banned in Cuba after publication. It's not the economy, stupid; it’s the stink!  The novel very adroitly describes the hopelessness that swept through Cuba in the terrible 90s in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the start of the “special period” (not very special for those at the top). Occupying a lead role in the volume is the rafters’ crisis in ’94, probably the closest the Cuban system came to collapsing.

Some books find themselves in the unenviable position of being one or two words away from the edge of the abyss of platitudes. Use the wrong phrase and down you go; you lose your reader. This is particularly characteristic of what I call books with “risky” subject matter.The trick, As I see it, is in feeling the writing as it comes along, as it leaves your head and it’s passed onto the blank paper. Let the reader make up his or her mind.

Dirty? Yes. Smelly? Yes. But cliché-free

Pedro skips around the pitfalls that come with writing a “socio-political” novel. His book is at times cynical like when he praises a mulatto woman who has the typical swagger many of my fellow countrywomen display. Twenty years from now, his description goes, she will still be desired and that is one of the reasons why he would stay on the island until the end of his days. His internal speech is impassioned and full of candour for his subject but it is given a reality-check at the end. This woman, like many others, is looking for a “yuma” (“foreigner” in Cuban slang) who will take her out of the country. The novel has moments of real humanity and I remember those vividly. Not everyone is out to get you. Not everyone is out to rob you. Not everyone is out to con you. Yes, the 90s were terrible, to the point where for the sake of a dollar someone could put a knife on your throat. However, underneath this social decay there were still some decent human beings, fewer but present.

In the same way that Ginsberg’s best minds of his generation were “destroyed by madness”, Pedro’s characters are crushed by the dyad of, on the one hand the self-inflicted Cuban embargo and on the other hand, the five-decades-old US one. That he carves such a fine, cliché-free piece of work out of this situation is a testament to good, original literature and we should enjoy it while we can.

© 2014

Next Post: “Sunday Morning: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 28^th September at 10am (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

Not gone, never gone

If you were to freeze halfway through the poem Still I Rise and try to define its significance there and then you would be lost in a sea of superlatives. And each one of these superlatives would be as good as if not better than the one you used before: Does my haughtiness offend you?/Don’t you take it awful hard/’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines/Diggin’ in my own backyard. Let those lines slip off your tongue. Let those lines be the slogan on your T-shirt the next morning. Clad in the type of language that shouts out: I’m proud and I’m saying it out loud! Maya Angelou’s anthemic verses have a reach beyond gender, race, sexual orientation, age, creed and (dis)ability.

Maya Angelou died last 28^th May. I say “died”. What I really meant was that her body stopped moving, human functions such as breathing, laughing, crying, talking and smelling stopped happening. Maya, however, has not died. How can she? When even non-native English-speaking blokes like me have adopted Phenomenal Woman as one of their favourite incantations? A magical way to scare away the evil spirits of pessimism, machismo and bigotry.

If I were to freeze the moment when I discovered Maya I would have to take you back seventeen years. You and I would have to get on a DeLoran-like time machine and go back to the summer of 1997. Then you would see a twenty-five, almost twenty-six year-old man making his way to a flat in the leafy neighbourhood of Playa. That’s where one of his friends lives. Follow him now leaving his friend’s house with a letter in his hand. Watch him ripping the letter open (it’s from his then-girlfriend, now wife) whilst keeping an eye on the uneven pavement. Look at how he cuts across back streets, jumping over puddles of dirty water streaming its way downhill. And now, see his face. Freeze this frame for it will become a long-lasting memory in his life. His girlfriend is pregnant with their first child, she is in London and he is in Havana. She has included a poem by a poet of whom he has never heard before. Yet, from the word go he feels as if this poet has just dispossessed him of his armour, removed his mask, bared his soul. The opening lines go like this: You may write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies,/You may trod me in the very dirt/But still, like dust, I'll rise. Who is she? How dare she?  How does she know...? Questions, questions, questions. But all is in vain. In the presence of greatness we all become momentarily pious. This one altar, we don’t mind worshipping to. This is the altar steeped in antiquity and like a universal language that has been passed down from generation to generation, a language that respects no linguistic barriers (all foreigners welcome!), this altar summons those who give rationality the heave-ho and adopt feeling as their travelling companion in the ocean of Poetry.

If I were to freeze that moment you would see red ice-cold eyes, rock-solid tears caught mid-journey down my visage. That moment would be a snapshot of a discovery. The discovery of a new (at least to me) voice, one who sings out verses that sound as if they have been made of the same material as the leather of a drum or the bow of a fiddle.  Still I Rise ends in what I can only describe as a rapturous, symphonic crescendo. Each preceding stanza is a steady increase in the rhythm, a gradual build-up towards the end: oil wells pumping, hopes springing high, diamonds at the meeting of my thighs.

Maya Angelou did not die last 28^th May. She is still asking people to rise. And I, for one, Maya, will never stop doing that.

© 2014

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 9^th June (GMT)

Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts

I have been running a film club in the school where I work for the last four months and a bit. It is one of those activities that gives me great satisfaction. I had already had a similar experience before but the difference this time is that the club members are really keen to write about the movies they have watched. The weekly session is divided between screen time on a Tuesday and online review time on a Wednesday. As I said to them after I showed the first film: watching a flick is not just about entertainment, it’s also about seeing the credits roll up at the end. It’s about the experience, as a whole.

So, what’s a film club got to do with literature, I hear you ask me? A lot, as it happens. One characteristic of this after-school club is that some of the members are what is commonly known as EAL children (English as an Additional Language). Through the medium of cinemascope I am providing them with opportunities to improve their reading and writing. It is too soon to talk about results but so far the majority of non-native English speakers have risen to the challenge. I have also noticed a phenomenon that reminded me of my own childhood: speed-reading.

The way I usually start my online review sessions is with guidelines to help members write better posts. My rule is simple: no one-word reviews, or one-liners. To that effect I get them to choose from headings I have already prepared for them. I also get them to read the headings aloud, helping those students (EAL or not) who lack the confidence to do so. What works in my favour in this enterprise is the size of this special “writing” club; roughly ten or eleven regulars out of the twenty members in total I have on screening days. The following will not surprise anyone who’s been around children of primary school age. Some whiz through the sentences I’ve copied on the board like miniature Michael Schumachers of the written word. Others read as if each word has been fitted with its own brain and it is pondering whether to come out or not. Some people, including teachers, see the former as a measure of success. But does speed equal efficiency? Is a fast reader a better reader than a slow one?

I learnt how to read and write before I was meant to. As I have mentioned before on this blog, I had the misfortune to be diagnosed with gastritis and stomach ulcer when I was five. That meant missing out huge chunks of curriculum time when I was in reception. My mother made up for this by teaching me how to read and write when I was bed-ridden in hospital. By the time I began my Year 1 I was well ahead of the class in literacy (not so much in numeracy and the maths curse has followed me since then). I became, not just a fluent reader, but also a fast one. The type who left visitors to my house with their mouths gaping open. Over time I developed this trait internally as well. When reading in silence as a child I sped through passages. I sometimes used to read entire books in two or three days.

Agree or disagree?

But whilst this gave me confidence in reading and developed my love for literature, I don’t think it skilled me up much for in-depth reading. This is the type of activity you do in further and higher education. By the time I started university in ’89 I was ill-equipped to cope with the amount of literature my course included. The other disadvantage I found was that up to then I had the freedom to choose my reading material, whereas now, in uni, I was expected to delve into books that sometimes didn’t interest me much, classic status notwithstanding.

That was when I slowed down. I remember it was Margaret Atwood’s fiction that caused me to forgo the strict timeline I imposed on myself and to seek out and enjoy instead the beauty of a well-crafted sentence. Whereas before the plot was my main source of literary fulfilment, now I also began to pay closer attention to the nuances of sentences, ideas and words. Doing a degree that dealt with linguistics helped me out, too. I started to look at languages (English and Spanish alike) in a different light.

All this came to my mind recently. Not just because of the progress my film club members have made, but also because I have been on a good run in terms of the books I have read. First it was The Smile of theLamb by the Israeli writer David Grossman. Using a Palestinian village in the West Bank as setting, this many-layered novel explored two sides of the occupying forces in Uri and Katzman; the former an idealistic type of soldier, sympathetic towards the villagers, the latter a more gung-ho squaddie. The style was rich, beautiful and delicate with plenty of cliff-hangers to keep the reader hooked. Then came Grace Notes, a novel in which musician Catherine McKenna, the main character, had to come to terms with her past: on the one hand, a claustrophobic Catholic upbringing and on the other hand, a destructive relationship with a drunken and abusive man. Despite the subject matter, this was a very poetic book about the healing power of music in the face of adversity.

The hat-trick has just been completed by NoViolet Bulawayo and her Booker Prize-nominated novel We Need New Names (I haven’t finished reading it yet at the time of writing this post, though. But I’ve got only about twenty-odd pages to go).  At times innocent and at times brutal, the book demands to be read at a slow pace, the better to savour sentences like this one, thought up by the main character, Darling: In America we saw more food than we had seen in all our lives and we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God.

Three books that acted as reminders about why being a fast reader doesn’t mean being a better reader, in my opinion. Now, if I could just get this message across to the members of my film club.

© 2014

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 23^rd February at 10am (GMT)