REVIEW: Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson

This is not a book you can read once and absorb its whole intention. I think I have barely scratched the surface of its intention, which I think it is questioning the increasing concept of modernist reductionism. And what Robinson calls the ‘parascientists’ and their exclusion of anything that predates their current theories. Theories which she feels rarely hold up under intelligent scrutiny, and that don’t ask questions whose answers would contradict those theories. She is not anti-science, but believes that many of these more accessible ideas are given more weight by inferring a scientific analysis which is far less rigorous than that used for physical science.


It is difficult to rate a book one barely understands the content of, but the fact that it will provide much food for thought, and its own rigour, despite only having a superficial understanding seems quite obvious.

'Must Try Harder'

I decided when I began this blog that I wasn’t going to ‘waffle’ when I didn’t have anything to say. I can’t really believe I have had nothing to say since April, which only leaves the excuse of laziness – can that be an excuse? My ‘school report’ will now read ‘must try harder’.

Well I have read 35 books since my last entry, among those that impressed me most were John Henry Newman’s ‘The Idea of the University’, a book I came to via Helene Hanff’s ’84 Charing Cross Road’ – she loved the first edition that Marks and Co were able to procure for her. I can understand her delight. The edition I read was not a first, but was still from 1879 (a London Library loan) and as well as the content, the heft, page quality and smell of ‘old book’ were part of the pleasure of its reading. If I could recommend one book to our new coalition leaders and education ministers to read it would be this one. The import of knowledge for its own sake seems to be a resource and desire long lost and undervalued, and Newman makes a fine case for its consideration. This book is as relevant now as it was at its time of writing. I had to buy my own copy in the end, I can’t bear not to own books I love. My paperback isn’t as seductive to hold though as the 1879 edition!

Ahead of going to see the exhibition ‘The Wyeth Family’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery I bumped into a biography of Andrew Wyeth on the Library shelves – the artist in that family whose work I have long admired. Richard Meryman’s ‘Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life’ was insightful and fascinating.

“Oil is hot and fiery, almost like a summer night, where tempera is a cool breeze, dry, crackling like winter branches blowing in the wind. I’m a dry person, really. I’m not a juicy painter. There’s no fight in oil. It doesn’t have the austere in it. The difference is like the difference between Beethoven and Bach.”

Andrew Wyeth in Meryman, R, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, HarperCollins, 1997, p 118

If the exhibition was a little disappointing in that it was made up of works from a single collection, and in my view, didn’t span the breadth of Andrew Wyeth’s work, I did purchase a couple of beautiful books of his paintings.

At first sight, Allison Pearson’s ‘I think I love you’ appeared likely to be a more ‘fluffy’ novel than the kind of novel I might normally pick up, but as a one-time David Cassidy fan (aged 11-13 – why is it necessary to qualify!) I couldn’t resist. She has certainly captured that high-octane obsession young girls were capable of, certainly in the 1960s/1970s, who are trying out their new emotions on safe, feminised, unattainable famous young men. And there was much to amuse in this (autobiographical?) novel of two young welsh girls to women and their passion. But more seriously Allison Pearson captured some of the ages of youth to young adulthood experienced by teen girls. And also the less positive side of the life of fame for a young man, still evolving, who is riding a wave of success, but whose identity was both being consumed, defined and distorted by the media, and whose own natural ‘growing’ arc was being warped by the experience he was undergoing. In the end I felt hugely sorry for Cassidy (perhaps lock up your son’s mother!). The book concludes with an interview Pearson did with David Cassidy in the 1990s, where you can sense a duality of acceptance – whilst wishing to acknowledge the privilege of bearing such an important role in the lives of young girls and women at a very formative age, there is a core of resentment towards the strains and abuses sustained by himself.

Since reading Shirley Hazzard’s memoir on Graham Greene and her most admired novel ‘The Transit of Venus’ I have acquired the rest of her novels and enjoyed the tone and constrained style of both ‘The Evening of the Holiday’ and ‘The Bay at Noon’. I am looking forward to the remaining three volumes on the pile over the Summer holiday.

Also among the Summer reading pile will be: Carol Sklenicka’s biography of Raymond Carver, and a re-reading of some of his short stories, comparing them with the volume ‘Beginnings’ which are the stories before they were edited by Gordon Lish. Two volumes awaiting the pressing of ‘send’ in my Amazon basket: Fergal Keane’s ‘Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 - The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire’ and Jonathan Raban’s ‘Driving Home – an American Scrapbook’, both writers whose work I greatly admire. Stella Duffy’s novel ‘Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore’, the first of her novels I will have read, and possibly a trip to India with Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ ... but then again...

London Library - episode 2

I’ve now been a member of the wonderful London Library for 3 weeks. Luckily three weeks when I have had time to enjoy regular weekly visits. Wandering around its eclectic stacks, borrowing books I have had on my ‘to read’ list for years. Sitting for hours in the reading room and enjoying the peace and quiet; mildly amused by the regular snoozers in the afternoons (sorry gentlemen, well, so far they have all been male!).



I’ve long wanted to read Leonard Woolf’s ‘After the Deluge’ which appears in 3 volumes, and I have now read the first of these and was much interested in how contemporary it seemed. Much of it could have been written post 9/11 (it was actually written in the 1920s). This book fits right into what I had imagined being able to do. To borrow a 79 year old book which hadn’t been off the shelves for 29 years – but no one felt it was necessary to cast it into the oblivion of the pulp machine. Volumes 2 and 3 are in my London Library reading pile.

I am going to post reviews of some of my Library loans here:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/CJM_at_LondonLibrary

I love the heft of the older books, and the smell of library they leave on your hand after long holding. I even think it will reduce my greed for purchasing new books myself. With a million to peruse here, they must have almost every book I may wish to read, and will buy others members request if they don’t already have them. I’ve only purchased 2 books since becoming a member – my general monthly average is 7-10 purchases!

I’ve also been enjoying some very broad and interesting reading among the publications, current and past. They have bound copies of every publication subscribed to, so you can read The American Scholar and The Edinburgh Review, and even take the bound editions home with you to read at leisure.

As well as Mr Woolf, I have John Henry Newman’s ‘The Idea of Universities’, Stefan Zweig’s ‘Romain Rolland’ and Scott’s ‘Waverley’ in the pile. As well as volume 2 of Dorothy Richardson’s ‘The Pilgrimage’ (a woman after Proust’s heart I suspect). All in old editions that may well have been borrowed and read by literary heroes or heroines. That somewhat romantic idea enhances my pleasure in the reading of them.

What having access to writing across the centuries makes me aware of is the variety of styles and tones, slower and more convoluted writing, learning to slow down and read and think in another century is a skill I am enjoying acquiring. Shifting from plot driven to idea driven work is interesting, challenging and beneficial. Learning to expand the definition of what the pleasure in reading can be.

The most frustrating thing for me is perhaps that in the era that many of the books I am reading were written, it was only expected that men of a certain educational background will be reading them, and therefore there are no translations of the primarily latin and French quotes they include. So I feel that they are hiding things from view behind the curtains sometimes. But these books are of their era, and I am a time traveller and I will have to accept certain limitations, or get out the dictionaries (the reading room has all of those!).

Review: I LOCK MY DOOR UPON MYSELF by Joyce Carol Oates [re-read]

The language is slow and lazy and languid. Although less than a hundred pages long, this is a powerful novel, if a quiet one.

It tells the story of Edith Margaret Freilicht (nee Honeystone) – or Calla as she was named by her mother, the name she speaks to herself and gifts rarely to others. Calla Honeystone is a strange child whose mother dies at her birth. She is a wild redheaded child who turns into a strange and introverted woman who is married off to an older man called George Freilicht.

His physicality repels her, but over time and familiarity he touches the pity inside her, and she cedes him access to her body. Bearing him 3 children who are tended by his family as she shows little interest or concern for them. After the painful birth of the third child she reclaims her body, and he is almost as relieved as she to return to a celibate state.

Calla lives in her head, which we, unlike everyone else, are given controlled and limited access too.

When she meets the water diviner Tyrell Thompson who comes to the farm to see if he can earn himself a ‘gift’ in exchange for finding the place to drill for a well, Calla realises he is the broad, tall black man she has been watching by the river. She follows him around the land as, uninvited, he seeks for water on the Freilicht property, opening up to him in ways her in-laws, watching from the windows of the house have never seen her respond to anyone before.

She has seen very few negroes in her lifetime. Occasionally on a visit to the city she has seen some of the younger folk, now liberated from slavery. “...but their blackness, their essence-that had been owned. And now in this city amid the heterogeneous white population of the city they were so relatively few in number-like small dark carp in an immense school of fiercely golden carp, depending upon God knows what precarious law or whim of nature to survive. Like me they are outcasts in this country. No, not like me: they are true outcasts”. [p40]

In Thompson she has found a kind of kindred spirit in his outcastness that whilst she acknowledges is more authentic than her own, she is drawn to him, and soon they become lovers.

Calla has always been whispered about, but now the whispering becomes louder as the rumours and gossip of the relationship between a white married woman and a black itinerant tie the tongues of the townsfolk together.

To tell much more of Calla’s story would be to deprive a new reader of too many of the twists and turns of the journey.

The novel presents us with a woman who is forced into a life that she hasn’t chosen, and yet she does not fight it overtly. She fights by withdrawal into herself, as the book’s title infers. She becomes powerful inside herself, ultimately going her own way, taking the reader’s sympathy with her. However, it is also the case that you can see that even in the quiet path she has taken, she is leaving destruction and damage behind in the lack of engagement, love or concern for the children she has given her husband, as she herself says in one place, she thought he wanted them.

This is also a novel about the African American experience. Although not blatant in its exploration, in a handful of paragraphs Oates subtly weaves a powerful chunk of that experience into this story.

Joyce Carol Oates is probably one of the least formulaic writers working over the past 50+ years. Each novel varying in style, genre, intention. There are themes, she often writes about the disenfranchised, she is concerned especially with the lives of those with the least. She is often poking around in the darker corners of people’s worlds, where death and violence lurks. This is one of her more linearly written novels, whose size is deceptive.

She rarely writes comfortable novels and often writes novels it is hard to feel warmth for the characters, sometimes even hard to empathise with them, but what Oates almost always does is permit you to understand what even the most difficult of characters does and why. If she does not do this, she does not do it with intent.

THE LONDON LIBRARY : I died and went to heaven

If there is one improvement I might suggest to make the London Library ‘absolute heaven’ instead of just ‘heaven’ it might be that as well as coffee, they sold chocolate! But perhaps its better they don’t!  

I had the delicious opportunity of visiting this wonderful literary institution last week as a precursor to becoming a member and (as if there was ever any doubt) my desire to join was only heightened. When time was up, my eyes were casting about to see if there was any dark desk I might hide beneath in order to get locked in overnight! 

This is the library I dream about. A library that has books that may not have left their place on the shelves for 30, 50, 100 years, but is still there, winking at the passers-by and ever optimistic that its time will come to be liberated from its regal home and taken out again into the big wide world for a visit. 97% of the books in this 1 million plus book collection are available to be taken out on loan by its members. This isn’t the library for you if you are only interested in the latest editions to the publishing cannon (although a small number of new books are purchased each year to keep the collection growing), nor if you are seeking specialist research in a narrow field, this was a collection of books gathered to feed the intellectual hunger of the literary masses during the 19th & 20th Centuries. Started by Thomas Carlyle because he apparently found he waited too long for his requests at the British Library, it has been the treasure-trove and retreat of many of the great writers and readers since that time. Unlike the British Library you walk the stacks yourself, peruse, browse and then retreat to a reading desk, an armchair or a computer desk and submerge yourself in your new find.

As well as an extraordinary collection of books, the library subscribe to a fascinatingly broad collection of periodicals. I can see myself losing a day just grazing some of these, from Anatolian Archaeology to the Dublin Review, The Norfolk Ancestor, to World Interiors, the Wildean and back again! And nothing gets thrown away, weeded or remaindered. Periodicals are eventually bound and shelved, books suffering from the wear and tear of being lovingly read and enjoyed receive restoration and tlc.

The annual membership fee for a regular person on the street might feel like an ouch at £395, but it is payable in instalments (monthly or quarterly – if I’d known that earlier I’d have probably joined years ago!), and there is a supported membership for those who would find the full membership too much of a burden. When I think about it, it’s probably my book budget for 4 months, on a good year, so.... Will it reduce my book budget in the long run? Unlikely. Unfortunately if I love a book I have to have it in my own collection, perched and ready to dive into my outstretch hand at the drop of a bookmark! However, it will lead me to new horizons, and even lost horizons perhaps, as this looks like my very own Shangri-la! In April I hope to become a member, and I imagine it will be for life (though not all at once!).


 http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/index.htm

Photograph (c) London Library 2005, taken by Shira Klasmer

Review: Trespass (Rose Tremain)

Tremain is one of those writers whose books are often very different, and this is definitely the case between this novel and her prize-winning last novel. That’s not to say that this isn’t a prize-winning book.

Set mostly in France, the story revolves around two sets of adult siblings. English Veronica and Anthony, and French Audrun and her brother Aromon. The thing that links both sets of siblings is that they are all damaged by their upbringing and by careless parents. They all harbour self blame and some of them are constantly attempting to compensate for acts they feel responsible for.

It is quite hard not to give too much away with a novel of this kind. However as the novel progresses you discover that each character has suffered and been responsible for a trespass. The trespasses may be literal or figurative, metaphorical but, all the same real. Anthony, dissatisfied with his now less than celebratory life decides to visit his sister in France, and when he gets there begins to feel his only chance of creating a future is to leave his old life behind and move to France. His search for a possible home leads him to Audrun and Aromon. The book opens with one kind of scream, and in a sense concludes with another.

At one point I was very put in mind of Dirk Bogarde’s French novels (though as it is years since I read these it was a ‘sense’ more than anything concrete), but no sooner had I thought this, than he gets himself a mention, in his role in the film Death in Venice.

This is a deftly structured novel which keeps you page turning. You become deeply involved with these deeply disturbing stories.

Review: Pollard (Laura Beatty)

This is a beautifully crafted, evocative and alive debut novel. We see Anne fleetingly as a misplaced adult at the opening of the book, the village outsider. But this is the story of a child who doesn’t even fit into her relatively mis-fit family, who seeks solace in the wood near where she lives. Leaving home aged 14 with nothing but a wheelbarrow of miscellaneous tools and objects liberated from her father’s shed, Anne takes up residence under a Pollard Ash tree in the depths of the wood. She learns how to survive within the wood, she learns how to prosper and to grow.

Foraging one day Anne meets Steve who lives with his aging mother and runs the local dump, and with whom she strikes up a friendship of support. Steve teaches her some of the survival techniques he has learned in the armed forces. In return for food and companionship, Anne works at reinvigorating some of the detritus that ends up at the dump, and with her care and attention Steve can sell it on to earn a living. It gives her a purpose and a connection, however tenuous, to the world outside the wood.

Gradually, in the wood, she is no longer an outsider to herself. She fits, she has a place in this fertile and living place. And Beatty makes us hear and breath and smell the wood. Only when the world outside encroaches within her world does Anne become insecure again.

Anne and the wood are sculpted with great warmth. As are some of the friendships she makes. I did feel however that the ending needed something else. We needed to be more fully led back to the life of Anne in adulthood, as this was not fully drawn at the outset, and I did feel I’d been left hanging a little at the close of the novel.