The Moth – 50 Extraordinary True Stories – edited by Catherine Burns

Tags

Book Review, Catherine Burns, Neil Gaiman, Performance, The Moth, True Stories

The patterns of story making; the connection of a listening audience

I can quote no better description of The Moth than Neil Gaiman’s introduction to these performed narrations

The Moth connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin colour, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realise that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery

The Moth, an American phenomenon – but, o blessed be, due to arrive in the UK this year, is a collection of true story tellings by hundreds of people, which later became broadcast on radio, and has here been collected into a book of 50 of them. Some of the contributors are already in the public eye, as writers, performers, luminaries of one kind or another. But some of them are ‘just ordinary people with extraordinary, ordinary lives. I must admit it was these I found more fascinating.

Inevitably, in appearing ‘in public’ we all, to a greater or lesser extent assume a polished persona. And those most used to this will have a slicker and more professional persona to more easily assume. Sure, each storyteller gets helped, directed, coached to an extent in delivering their story with spellbind and style, but those who do this with less frequency are more likely to let us see the raw of them.

This is a most interesting book of events and lives and viewpoints to read, but I found myself aching for what I could not have – the live presence of these storytellers, their voices, speech patterns, gestures, – to experience the narration in the presence of other listeners.

Photographs by Michael Falco for The New York Times, 2009 Moth Event
at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe

Reading is primarily a solitary, interior experience – but this sort of storytelling needs the audience and the storyteller to be wrapped together.

I assume this book will introduce those unfamiliar with ‘The Moth – This Is A True Story’ to the concept itself, and create an audience for the live experience.

Make no mistake, these are fascinating and enjoyable, moving and amusing. Live, they must be mesmeric, sensational, cohesive and exhilarating to hear.

As the Moth Editor and Artistic Director, Catherine Burns, reminds us

As a society, we have forgotten how to listen deeply. Each Moth evening is a chance to practice listening, to find connection with your neighbours. And while that intimacy might feel terrifying at first, it’s vital. It’s what will save us

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK

The Moth Amazon UK
The Moth Amazon USA

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Ellen Feldman – The Unwitting

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Book Review, Ellen Feldman, McCarthy, Novels about America, The Cold War, The Kennedys, The Unwitting

Politics, like love, can be a dirty game

Ellen Feldman’s tautly written, reflective book set in post-war America is a splendid, page-turning book, exploring the territory of the Cold War, rife with darkness and suspicion from both sides of the ideological divide, as seen through the prism of one marriage.

Nell and Charlie Benjamin, at the start of this novel, set on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, are a couple who have it all. She is a journalist, he is the publisher of a respected liberal left leaning magazine. Both of them have secrets. Some of these are in the field of their personal relationship, some of them are where individual and state connect, particularly at a time when there were real battles for hearts and minds going on between ideologies which were carving up the world.

Both America and Russia at that time were claiming some sort of higher moral ground; both had far less moral ways of seeking to exert control.

Feldman expertly weaves her way through a period in American history from 1948 to 1971, exploring attitudes to race, sexual politics, and lifting the lid on the difference the myth and the reality between public face and behind closed doors.

Singer Moses LaMarr singing spirituals to children in Gorky Park, Leningrad, Russia in December 1955 – American Theatre Troupe Production of Porgy and Bess, tour to Moscow and Leningrad,

Just when the central character, Nell, has a handle on ‘what is right’…she gets presented with nuance and ambiguity again and again.

This is a pacy, fascinating read, heroes have feet of clay, the corrupt have surprising integrity. The reader, like the central character, is forced to interpret and reinterpret a life and events, backwards. What happens now, what we know now, may force us to reinterpret what we thought we knew then.

This is a book full of absolutely believable twists and turns. Nell and Charlie are fictional, but the stage on which Feldman sets them, and the manipulations that went on to control that stage, were not

I was past the point in life when I believed people were of a piece. I had learned to live with ambiguity. If you can’t you have no business falling in love

The title of the book refers to unwitting, because unknowing, collusion in what goes on; however, the unwitting might have asked the questions which were staring them in the face. Sometimes innocence looks like an unwillingness to face the unpalatable

This is in some ways, a difficult book to review, because to explain much of the ‘about’ is to spoil the reader’s own journey.

I recommend this very highly, and will read more of Feldman’s work

The book reminded me, in some ways, of Sebastian Faulks’ similar time-set On Green Dolphin Street, but also, a more recent, factual read, the excellent A Spy Among Friends, Ben MacIntyre’s account of post-war politics amidst the cold war, and how Britain, America and Russia accommodated themselves, losing and gaining power and ideological empire

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK

The Unwitting Amazon UK
The Unwitting Amazon USA

Tim O’Brien – In The Lake Of The Woods

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American politics and society, Book Review, In The Lake Of The Woods, Tim O'Brien, Vietnam War

Darkness unfathomable, Darkness inherent

I was steered to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried by a reviewer who had commented on another post-Vietnam, anti-war novel which I’d read, and been profoundly impressed by. It was a good recommendation, introducing me to a reflective, powerful, brilliantly crafted writer who was new to me.

In The Lake of the Woods, first published in 1994, and therefore written some twenty years after active USA involvement in that war, has as its meta-theme, war, and the thin layers of reasoned, tender humanity which we build over – not our animal nature, but something which arises from our consciousness and the complexity of rationality itself.

O’ Brien was a vet, and that experience – and, he suggests, the experience of that entire generation is now buried deep, and therefore, not always clearly seen, in the psyche of modern American. What is deep-denied cannot be engaged with, worked with, used and transformed.

John Wade, a rising Democrat politician suddenly, crushingly defeated in primaries, following the revelation of forged military history which hid his involvement in Charlie-1 platoon (the My Lai massacre), escapes the media circus by holing up in Lake Of The Woods, an isolated part of Minnesota, with his beloved wife, Kathy. Then Kathy disappears.

Pose Lake, Minnesota, Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Wiki Commons

This can indeed be read on one level as a mystery or thriller. But it is also a portrait of not just a nation with festering wounds, but of this tendency to darkness within collective and individual psyche.

The interesting structure of the book weaves ‘the facts’ of the story of John and Kathy, (fictional characters) with police and procedural enquiries. Some of these are fictional – but interwoven with these, as the character of Wade and his background in Charlie-1 emerges, are real reports from enquiries into My Lai, and what happened. And lest anyone thinks the atrocities were particular only to that time and place, other writings, other reports are cited, into the whole history of young America and How The West Was Won – and early British settlers, too, when this side of the pond thought America was ours.

‘There is a line that a man dare not cross, deeds he dare not commit, regardless of orders and the hopelessness of the situation, for such deeds would destroy something in him that he values more than life itself ‘

J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors : Reflections On Men In Battle, quoted in this book.

O’ Brien is a subtle, complex writer, delving deeply into nuances of collective and individual psychology – he postulates many versions for what ‘might have happened’ to Kathy, in chapters of Hypothesis, and refuses, and explains why he refuses, to give the reader the easy fictional, tied-up, wrapped up end.

Partly a clearly argued, unfolding look at what is unresolved, at skeletons in cupboards, partly a beautifully chilling thriller, it is also a darker exploration into something which does not sit well with a society which tries to rationally categorise, weigh and measure everything, – the possibility of more ancient forces – does sin itself exist, does evil?. The Ancient Greeks may well have found stories like these easier to understand than a society which believes darkness can always be banished by fluorescent strip lights. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

Wiki Commons

What resonates for me in O’ Brien’s writing, is his ability, as writer, to sneak up into the face of the reader, and address him/her directly, to remind us this is story, but where story comes from, to make the reader take a long, cool, gravely thoughtful look at themselves in the mirror. What lies beneath the surface you recognise? Whose is the face beneath the practiced mask? And dare you even look? This is a fine writer indeed, who can entertain whilst extending, instructing, and maybe even fulfilling the role of shaman, rending the veil between the seen and the unimagined.

This could not have happened. Therefore it did not

Already he felt better

I did have one cavil : I felt many of the quoted sources were repeating information, re-iterating points already made, so some of these sources could have been cut, making the book tighter, and with even more deadly punch.

In The Lake of The Woods Amazon UK
In The Lake of The Woods Amazon USA

Linda Grant – I Murdered My Library

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Book Collections, Book Review, Books about Books, ereaders, I Murdered My Library, Linda Grant, Reading about Reading

A witty, thoughtful exploration into books, Kindles and downsizing a collection

This essay by Linda Grant is unfortunately ONLY available to those with ereaders, meaning the blissfully Kindle resistant will be deprived of its wisdom, pathos and humour.

Perhaps it is Grant’s vicious little revenge on those who have not moved home into a smaller place, and thus been forced, as she has, to perform an act of cruel culling on her lifetime collection of books.

I found MUCH to nod sagely at, and much to underline, on my KINDLE. However, nothing beats the pleasure of annotating and underlining on a REAL book, as Grant herself alludes. Yes, I know, some readers faint in horror at the idea of marking books in this way, but I have always regarded reading as a dialogue between writer and reader, a relationship between reader and what they read. Hence, riffling through my ancient, dusty, texts, some, like Grant’s dating back to childhood, it is the imprint of my physical presence at the time(s) I engaged with the tomes, that matters. Not just the writer’s words, which are the same, Kindle or book, and I may indeed have underlined and crossly or ecstatically commented on, in that furiously annoying neutrality of peck peck typing in the e reader format – but, the colour of the pen or pencil hastily picked up, the particular energy of my underlining or commenting, the handwriting itself – which has changed, and continues to change, over time, the smears of what was clearly a chocolate, or some tomato coloured sauce, across a page, the curious bus ticket hastily used as book mark – but to a place I swear I have never, ever been to – all this sings of relationship

To those who are muttering ‘vandal, brute’ at evidence of such cavalier ill-treatment of my own books, I would riposte and say that such greedy, energetic handling shows evidence of extreme love. I CHEERED at Grant’s assertion about her library of books, inhabiting and overflowing in the house she is downsizing from

The glory of the library for me is how many of the books are in poor physical condition. They are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and shopworn.I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken

Grant details the agony of parting with her history – sure, SOME but not all of the older books will be available on Kindle, for re-read, and she will buy these when re-reads call, but, as she says, the physical books mark the passage of her years, a history of who she was, and hold intense memory in a way that does not happen with ereaders. To stand in front of one’s own bookshelves, if you are a life-long and voracious reader, is to see, as Grant confesses :

What I saw, swelling with self-important pride, was evidence of how I had constructed my own intellectual history through reading

Grant contrasts the swings between the airy freedom produced by the library held on a Kindle, with the feelings of devastation caused by the casting aside of some dusty tomes, and the keeping of others, in order that she will be able to fit into and live inside, her new, much smaller space

Melk Benedictine Abbey Library, Austria, Wiki Commons

Now at least half of the thousands of books I have bought are gone. It is one of the worst things I have ever done.

The Kindle though, offers a freedom to enlarge the fonts of books which she can no longer read with tiny text – books that therefore remind the reader of ageing, of death, of loss. What once could be read, now can only be perused with magnifying glasses

But she also talks, with some spite and acerbic observation of the great tendency of style and design over substance – selling her house, the estate agent winces at the overflowing bookshelves, which are evidence of mess, and clutter.

Estate agents do not think that books furnish a room – books make rooms look messy….They completely destroy the impact of the accent wall. Books are too personal as objects to be displayed

I too, cannot help it, but to visit a book free home makes me uneasy. It is the very messiness of books, like the messiness of real, physical life, unsanitised, which books represent, which lures me. A bookshelf offers an intimacy into who someone is, and out on display, this is an intimacy a visitor is allowed to look at

For Grant, her real, physical library gives access to something deep:

I return in memory and imagination, but I return by taking a book down from the shelf, and reading a few pages. That is a library. A full larder for the soul.

I’m astonished, and not a little embarrassed that what Grant produced in a mere 28 pages in this essay should have led to me writing so many words (believe me, I could have written many more!)

In defence – I will say that this little essay of hers packs a world and a time into those 28 pages. Not surprising really, as readers of Grant’s novels know, she is a writer who chooses her words well, and writes ‘about stuff’ even when she is being ‘entertaining’. She uncovered more in her 28 pages than many denser tomes about books, reading, writing and the history of all this might have done.

I Murdered My Library Amazon UK
I Murdered My Library Amazon USA

Nathan Penlington – The Boy In The Book It’s publication day!

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Book Review, Nathan Penlington, Performance, Publication Day, The Boy In The Book, Theatrical Event

It’s release day for this charming, quirky, feel-good true account of a search inspired by jottings found in a second hand book.

This is for all of you who love second hand books in part for the lure and mystery of the lives of their previous owner(s)

It’s an enchanting, very funny, wryly observed book and I found it an utter delight

Here is my original review written last month after receiving it as an ARC from NetGalley in digital form

 

The Boy In The Book Amazon UK
The Boy In The Book Amazon USA

Jonathan Coe – What A Carve-Up

Tags

1980s, Book Review, Humour and Wit, Jonathan Coe, Thatcher's Britain, What A Carve-Up

Remarkably easy to read – but reflection shows how stunning and well-crafted it is

I came to Coe late, when I originally read and reviewed this book, originally published in 1994, back in 2010 and enjoyed it so much that I read his  The House of Sleep and The Rotters’ Club in quick succession.  Someone has just reminded me of this book, and i remembered my delight in it, hence I trawled through my back catalogue of vintage vinyl reviews!

He’s a fabulous writer. He has an enviable ‘light touch’ an excellent comedic sense, which he uses like a sugar pill to disguise the deep, serious nature of his writing. Fundamentally, I think he is writing about politics, and examining the nefarious nature of capitalism. He doesn’t bang you on the head with simplistic, didactic polemic. He seduces you with wit, compassion, narrative, much more wit, and then delivers rapier sharp conclusions – in the very best ‘show, don’t tell’ manner

What A Carve Up does for the 80’s, Thatcher’s greedy ‘there is no such thing as society’ decade, what The Rotter’s Club did for the 70’s

The telling, layered title of the book refers to the film What A Carve Up [1961] [DVD], starring Sid James, Shirley Eaton, Kenneth Connor, which exerts a profound effect on at least 2 of the central characters – scenes from this film are replayed in different ways throughout the book.

Excuse for photo of well-loved Carry-On star Sid James

And I’m afraid i also can’t resist this elderly but still-got-legs joke from that 1961 film with the wonderfully seedy Sid James delivering it

Back to Coe: At a deeper level, the title of the book also serves to encapsulate the dismantling of the public sector which took place in the 80s. It refers to the carve-up of our assets, and the effects of privatisation.

The structure of the book is stunning. A writer (because of a complex subplot which doesn’t get revealed until the end) is hired to produce a biography of a wealthy family, all of whom, in different ways, are bedded deeply into the various power complexes of the state – the food industry, the financial sector, Parliament, the media, defence. And are rampant self-servers, to a man and woman, symbolising what happens when self-interest is followed at the expense of ‘there’s-no-such-thing-as’-society. The book flips back and forth between the seminal setting the scene events of a particular day in 1961, to the writer’s personal storyline, and chapters from the developing careers and personalities of, the various biographical subjects. There is also the construction of a second book, which will be a fictionalised version of the beginning-to-be-too-hot-to-handle biography.

We meet a cast of believable, individuals outside the central ones (writer and ‘The Family’) – none of whom are wasted. Coe skilfully, effortlessly (to the reader’s eye) connects the spider’s web. The interconnected life proves, again and again, the lie of ‘there is no such thing as society’.

And flowing through all this, seductively, engagingly, is the humour….and behind this the ability to make the pain of humanity plain, a fine sense of individual psychology. Coe has that right combination of heart and head coupled with flair, imagination, artistry and, innate, the ability to be that magical teller of tales, the weaver of a story, a spell-binder.

I recently read, thanks to the Amazon Vine ARC programme, his most recent book Expo 58, which unfortunately I was less than ‘whelmed’ (!) by. An agreeable, rather enjoyable, undemanding read, but the humour was not anywhere near as sharp, and the vision not as razor-edged in balancing the knife edge of warm-hearted empathy, incisive social commentary and mordant wit. So it did not, and does not, get reviewed according to my ‘go get this!’ bloggy criteria.

This though, strongly recommended – a light-hearted easy read with a lot to tickle, tease and niggle the old brain-cells as well

What A Carve-Up Amazon UK
What A Carve-Up Amazon USA

Sadly, it is not available on Kindle download in the States, and only reasonably priced ‘in real’ used, from market place sellers. You might be the lucky one, as reasonably priced useds are finite!

Marisha Pessl – Special Topics In Calamity Physics

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Book Review, Marisha Pessl, Special Topics In Calamity Physics

Tartt’s younger, more extrovert, funnier sister?

Firstly, I confess I often find comparisons between very successful, admired, popular pieces of work, erroneous pieces of publicity and marketing drive. I’m currently reading a new author being hailed and compared with Donna Tartt’s magnificent (in my opinion) The Goldfinch. And it ain’t, not by a long flight.

Anyway, having been steered to Pessl’s second novel Night Film, by another reviewer, I was sufficiently impressed to miss her, and have very quickly read her first novel. And – a good test, at the end of ‘Calamity Physics’ I am feeling cross and bereft that there are no other Pessls to read. Whilst not quite as long time a writing as Ms Tartt, there was a gap between Pessl one and Pessl two of some 6 years, so I am guessing patience will be my watchword for at least 5.

Comparisons between the two are most clear between Calamity Physics and Secret History. Both writers are FIERCELY and I mean FIERCELY intelligent and erudite, widely read literati; good users of language, unfurlers of a measured narrative drive, but determined to make their readers observe the countryside they are travelling through, and not just driven speedily by ‘what happens next’ plot impatience. Both create complex, layered characters, both set their books within academia, and moreover the academia of the glitteringly brilliant. In both books, there is a charismatic, magus type teacher figure who exerts undue and ultimately destructive power over a group of young, impressionable acolytes. This is obviously a well-worn groove, which can be brilliantly done – Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie an early example of the genre, and can be, well, dire. I have read some of these, and screamed and hurled those as derivative, sensationalist and unbelievable.  Pessl, like Tartt, inhabits the vibrantly successful end of the spectrum, though both lack Spark’s ability to pare down to the bone, and produce a piece of writing which runs clear, arrow like and lethal to its conclusion.

Female Leptotes cassius, Flicr, commons. Magnus Manske

Tartt’s book has an older group, at a New England college, studying Ancient Greek. These are the makers and shakers of society in the future, entering their twenties, already partially formed. Pessl takes a group a handful of years younger, 15-17, from privileged backgrounds – the group are called the Bluebloods, under the influence of a darker, less stable Jean Brodie type figure, Hannah Schneider, who may or may not be who she claims to be, and who unravels through the 500 odd pages of the book. Just as there was an outsider figure, both OF and not-of the elite group in Secret History (Papen) we have one here, 15 year old Blue van Meer. Blue, like Richard Papen, is the narrator. She is sophisticated, fearsomely intelligent, well-read in a number of fields. Yes she is precocious; but this all makes perfect sense – she is the daughter of an equally precocious, opinionated, well travelled academic professor, and her mother (who died when Blue was very young, in tragic circumstances, which are not fully unfurled till late on in the book) was a passionate and erudite lepidopterist, specialising in a particular blue butterfly (after which Blue was named). Like Tartt, Pessl starts with the crime – in this case, the death of the charismatic teacher, discovered by Blue (no spoiler, it’s on the dust-jacket ‘hook’ for the book) So, right from the start, we are given the shock we will work towards. This book is written by Blue, a year after the discovery of Hannah’s body, and Blue is now an introverted, melancholic, young student now at Harvard. In an attempt to free herself from, and understand the past, she begins to write the story.

I know that this book has garnered widely differing reviews, with some readers at screaming pitch, finding Pessl arrogant, pretentious and a show-off, and others (I’m one) absolutely savouring the literary illusions (each chapter has the title of a piece of literature which references in some way that chapter) She also does full referencing of texts .Blue is of course now a student within higher education and referencing is de rigueur. Some of the texts are real, some are there because Pessl is playing with us, and you sense the mischief. There are also what Blue calls ‘visual aids’ scattered throughout the text – her drawings of photographs, or just her drawings, illustrating the people she is writing. And, yes the illustrations are from Pessl’s doubly gifted pen.

Blue (centre right) and other students. artist Marisha Pessl

I think it comes down to, do you resonate with the author’s voice – do you want to listen to what she says, does she grab your attention, or do you find her like chalk on a blackboard. I found Pessl – or rather Pessl subsumed into Blue, marvellous funny, witty, her humour sharp, dry and sometimes cruelly deadly.

I guess this IS Pessl’s wit, as the central character of Night Film is equally acerbic and ouchly, wickedly, funny. Where Night Film references films, Calamity Physics is literary,

For a brief flavour, Blue on her father, who unfortunately was a magnet for females, whom Blue named the June Bugs – they had an intense life in Gareth Van Meer’s bed, just like those brilliant short summer insects, before being suddenly abandoned for a newer bug:

Dad picked up women the way certain wool pants can’t help but pick up lint. For years I had a nickname for them, though I feel a little guilty using it now :June Bugs (see “Figeater Beetle”, Ordinary Insects, Vol.24)

There was Mona Letrovski, the actress from Chicago with wide-set eyes and dark hair on her arms who liked to shout , “Gareth, you’re a fool, ” with her back to him. Dad’s cue to run to her, turn her around to see the Look of Bitter Longing on her face. Only Dad never turned her round to see the Bitter Longing. Instead, he stared at her back as if it were an abstract painting. Then he went into the kitchen for a glass of bourbon.

Blue (and the Bluebloods) are, yes, at times operatic, self-indulgent, melodramatic, cruel and without a shred of empathy. But they are very young, still, and often this age is cruelly judgmental, especially to its peers. Experience and suffering (life) develop empathy and nuance.

Blue Ridge Mountains, Wiki Commons

After having taken us through the huge events, the teenage tantrums, the cruelly funny dismissive barbs of young teens, which it is (or was) impossible for this reader to avoid laughing at, whilst wincing at the cruel put-downs, Pessl skilfully steers us to the not-so-sudden bleakness of an ending. The one we do not want, but the one which changes Blue, the one which makes her able to “feel a little guilty using it now”. Blue enters bleakness, the wit and the humour suddenly ripped aside, and we suddenly are slap-bang into a depth. The ending, which I am still thinking about, still going ‘oh no, oh no’ is perfect, and Pessl has made the reader inhabit this likeable, frightening, irritating, far too worldly, intelligent adolescent, and really engage with the journey.

When I read the book again (as I surely will) I will ensure I have also read the chapter heading literary works I DON’T know, in order to gain a bit of extra nuanced flavour from the chapter it announces. It is absolutely possible to enjoy this book hugely if you are completely unfamiliar with any of the texts, but knowing them, adds a bit of spice.

Special Topics In Calamity Physics Amazon UK
Special Topics In Calamity Physics Amazon USA

Oliver Sacks – The Mind’s Eye

Tags

Book Review, Neurological Disorders, Neurology, Oliver Sacks, The Mind's Eye

Looking out on the world

Oliver Sacks looks at sight and disorders of vision in this book. I was pleased to find that his customary relating of his patients’ stories,and the differing and intriguing ways in which they are sometimes able to compensate for neurological damage or malfunction, seemed somehow more engaged and less dry than his book on the perception of music ‘Musicophilia’

However it wasn’t until I was a way through the book that I realised why this might have been the case – it was whilst he was writing that previous book that he was diagnosed with a tumour in his eye, and was writing and correcting this book whilst not knowing if he was going to lose sight in that eye – or indeed, survive.

For me, the most fascinating ‘stories’ were Sacks’ own, as of course the understanding that any disorder is much more than an interesting piece of medical history, but is LIVED by the person who experiences it, comes clearest when the sufferer describes it from the inside.

Deviant Art, Wiki Commons. My Mind’s Eye, Wyldelyfe22

The chapter on ‘faceblindness’ , prosopagnosia, which Sacks also suffers from, is particularly fascinating. It is a more common condition than is realised. Most of us, if someone repeatedly failed to recognise us, might either think that person totally self-obsessed, or fear that there might be something terribly lacking in ourselves, that we are so unmemorable. Either way, it might make us regard the person who doesn’t recognise us a little less warmly. Conscious of their difficulty in remembering and recognising faces, and perhaps being slightly shunned or criticised for this, its possible that many cases of extreme ‘shyness’ may in fact not be a personality disorder at all – but a neurological disorder.

The Mind’s Eye Amazon UK
The Mind’s Eye Amazon USA

Geraldine McCaughrean – The White Darkness

Tags

Antarctic, Book Review, Geraldine McCaughrean, Polar expedition, The White Darkness, Titus Oates, Young Adult Fiction

Very disturbing, very dark teen-read.

Geraldine McCaughrean, whose Not The End of The World, a subversive way of looking at Noah’s Flood, I had absolutely adored, here turns her pull-few-punches gaze on a story of the Antarctic, marrying revisitings of Scott’s expedition with the story of a young girl, and a fascination/obsession with Titus Oates, from that expedition, and her own, much darker trip to the Antarctic.

I am devoted to books with Polar, frozen settings, and I do very much like fine writing for teens which does not patronise, dumb down, or underestimate the intelligence of that audience. As McCaughrean is definitely a writer without an ounce of ‘talking down to’ in her writing, and is moreover a writer who makes any reader – teen or far beyond the YA world, work and pay attention whilst at the same time being driven on by ‘what happens next and to whom’ urgency, I really expected to love this book

And I did and I didn’t. The central character, Sym, is intelligent, wounded, rather a loner, and out of step within the world of her peers, who appear to be an unlikeable, superficial, tiresome bunch,

For some crime committed by my ancestors in the dark and forgotten days, I came into the world already tarred and feathered. With shyness. It hurts terribly-every bit as much as hot tar choking every pore-and I wish I could get rid of it. But it hurts a lot less than having someone try and peel the shyness off. That’s like being flayed alive.

Sym is extremely likeable, an attractive combination of maturity and integrity but despite some sort of emotional wisdom, she is extremely innocent of ‘street smarts’, and therefore extremely vulnerable to those without the integrity she has. And that is pretty well every character in the book.

Sym has a rich inner fantasy life. Her father died when she was quite young, and she has constructed a strong inner male hero, protector, guide, who teeters between father figure, someone SHE protects, and possible future lover. This fantasy figure is Titus Oates, always in her head and heart, with whom she has imagined conversations, whom she goes to for advice – he almost functions as an aspect of her best self. She is extremely complex, and absolutely out of step with a more simplistic, unsubtle world, especially a world filled with people on the make.

Captain Lawrence (Titus) Oates Wiki Commons

I failed to completely love this book in part because the situations Sym was manipulated into were very distressing indeed to an adult reader. I suspect the intended audience may have slightly tougher skins, certainly those that are possessed of street smarts and affect a world-weary demeanour. I found myself slightly shocked that this is a book for children. But it can’t be denied that the world contains plenty of people who DO prey on, and exploit children, in many different ways.

McCaughrean tells her story sensitively and some of my sense of disturbance, paradoxically comes because she is so light touch. She trusts the reader’s sensibility. . It is a book, apart from Sym herself and her imaginary presence of Titus Oates, pretty much without another major redeeming or redeemable character, whether adult or child/teen.

Sym herself is the only light, brightness. The frozen, indifferent, beautiful, treacherous landscape is a major character in this.

I stood on the edge of Camp Aurora where icefalls tumbled away from me like frozen river rapids and formed a buckled chute downwards on to the Ice Shelf that exists in place of the sea. And I looked westwards across it – a thousand kilometres of flat, frozen nothingness…..The Ice doesn’t differentiate between land and water; it just smothers the whole continent, from the middle outwards, then keeps on spreading outwards over the sea, roofing over huge sea inlets for a thousand kilometres.

Brrrrrrr

The only concession to the age of her audience, I felt, was the ending. Not quite one which works for this reader, I felt the author had pulled a little back from reality, allowed a couple of coincidences too far, to provide something a little more palatable, a little less bleak

The White Darkness Amazon UK
The White Darkness Amazon USA

Laurie Lee – Cider With Rosie

Tags

Autobiography, Book Review, Cider With Rosie, Gloucestershire, Laurie Lee

I remember, I remember, the house where I was born………..

Having recently read a couple of house-brick sized tomes which played games with narrative form and structure, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction, creating book within a book, or using multimedia to enhance the book experience, it is with a real feeling of relief, despite my enjoyment of the house-bricks, that I return to a re-read of a much simpler, tightly crafted, slower-paced, exquisitely crafted piece of writing – Laurie Lee’s well-loved Cider With Rosie, recently re-issued. As no doubt it will be, one hopes, many more times, as writing of this much heart, sensitivity and timelessness, though dealing with a world largely gone, outlasts the fashions of temporary trends.

Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, a brief few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. The family moved to nearby, rural Slad, and it is this boyhood in Slad which is the subject of this first book of an autobiographical trilogy.

He tells of a time long gone, deeply wedded into the landscape and the seasons:

The year revolved around the village, the festivals round the year, the church round the festivals, the Squire around the church, and the village round the Squire. The Squire was our centre, a crumbling moot tree; and few indeed of our local celebrations could take place without his shade

And in that last sentence there is one of those pause-for-thought poetical images which arrestingly scatter through the pages of the book. The Squirearchy already beginning to crumble and decay, a sense of something which has been slow growing, deeply rooted, but that landscape will soon be gone.

Lee tells the story of his own boyhood, his family history – a poor, ordinary family, one of millions, not the story of the movers and shakers of world history, but the story of unique and rich humanity none-the-less. He recounts with great love his sense of place, his life within a small corner of rural Gloucestershire. Not just the landscape, and his own family, but the lives of neighbours are tenderly and precisely recounted.

Steanbridge Mill Pond, Slad. Copyright Ian Hunter, licensed for re-use

Two elderly ladies, enemies for ever, but when one dies, the other follows suddenly within a very small space of time. Enmity was the energy which sustained their lives, and with the death of the first, the point to living had gone for the second.. The sad tale of another elderly couple, united by love and long marriage. When the husband begins to become ill, and they can no longer fend for themselves, they are taken into the Workhouse – where, unfortunately, there are male wards and female wards. Forced apart for the first time for more than 50 years, within a week both have died. Love, not hatred, was their sustaining energy.

Something which began to enthrall and nag at me in the book, was the fact that Lee had had a long early period of profound, recurring, feverish ill health, falling prey to just about every illness going. During many spikes of high fever, visions, nightmares, the uncurling of reality occurred, again and again. Periods of return from near death and fever spikes would leave his senses for a time preternaturally sensitive. It made me ponder the role of childhood illness in developing artistic sensibilities. Not just the fact that illness renders a child more solitary, bed-bound, during their periods of illness, more likely to be reading and imagining than gregarious and doing, but wondering specifically about changes in brain physiology from repeated, prolonged, fever, where the barriers between ‘real’ and imagined, break down, and the imagined becomes real. Illness as a producer of alterations

in consciousness. Lee’s descriptions of the natural world, the closeness and shimmer of his vision, at times reads like writings on experiences with hallucinogens.

I remember, too, the light on the slopes, long shadows in tufts and hollows, with cattle, brilliant as painted china, treading their echoing shapes. Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn’t raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things

I could almost have underlined the whole book as an example of beautiful, attention focusing, arresting, truthful images and observations about place, people and time

A stunning, elegiac, celebratory book. Its all about living within the moment, and really savouring the moment you are in.

And is full of earthy comedy as well as tragedy, dark doings and high fine transcendence

We sit down and eat, and the cousins kick us under the table, from excitement rather than spite. Then we play with their ferrets, spit down their well, have a fight, and break down a wall. Later we are called for and given a beating, then we climb up the tree by the earth closet. Edie climbs highest, till we bite her legs, then she hangs upside down and screams. It has been a full, far-flung and satisfactory day; dusk falls, and we say goodbye

I received this as a digital ARC via the publishers. Charming line drawings by John Ward complete this reissue, in the centenary year of Lee’s birth

Cider With Rosie Amazon UK
Cider With Rosie Amazon USA