Breaking the Silence

There has been a rather long silence here at this delicious solitude lately. Partly this has been because my work has changed this year, and with extra responsibilities there, there has seemed to be little time to write here.

Also, I've had a sort of writer's block when it comes to my blog. Somehow when I'm on the internet I seem to be more easily distracted by other bright and shiny sites and have neglected my own. Embarrassingly enough, Facebook has been sucking up my time, as has my recent obsession with cooking blogs. I'm not quite sure where that came from but perhaps in times of stress and tiredness it is quite nice to read the sort of blogs that don't make me feel just a little guilty about not writing posts for my own blog.

Finally my reading has been a little lacklustre lately. The last two books that I read for my book club were fairly uninspiring and before that I spent a lot of time reading The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber, which I enjoyed to an extent but which didn't really deliver in the long run (for me at least, I know lots of other people loved it).

Thankfully though I now have two weeks holidays and have read some great books that actually make me feel like blogging again.

Many of you will no doubt be familiar with the crime fiction of James Lee Burke. I had heard all sorts of good things about his Dave Robicheaux mysteries but hadn't gotten around to actually reading one until this week and I really loved it. In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead is steeped in atmosphere. Burke is particularly good at evoking the smells of the landscape, which might sound strange, but is absolutely appropriate when describing a place as humid and lush as the Louisiana Bayou where the novel is set. Although this novel falls somewhere in the middle of what is now a long series of novels, it worked really well as a stand-alone book. A back story was hinted at but I didn't feel that I needed to read all the others in the series to understand what was going on here.

In many ways the novel covers typical crime fiction territory. Robicheaux is a troubled detective with a chequered past and a gruff demeanour. The plot concerns the serial murders of young prostitutes, possibly connected with mob activity. So far, fairly standard. However it is Burke's descriptive writing that really brings the setting into vivid life. I really felt like I was right there in New Iberia, Louisiana. I could feel the dripping humidity and the smell the rotting vegetation. There is also an intriguing sub-plot involving the appearance of the confederate soldier ghosts that give the novel its title, which in lesser hands might have been a bit silly but actually works here. I'm curious to see what the film version of this novel will be like- it's due for release this year some time.

The other book I've read, and loved, recently is David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day. I recently raved about When You Are Engulfed in Flames in this blog, and I loved Me Talk Pretty One Day for all the same reasons. Sedaris is clever, funny and touching in these personal essays. The thread that runs through the book is one about language and speech, as the title suggests. One of the most touching essays is the one in which a speech therapist is assigned to David at school in order to 'correct' his speech, a process that amounts to little less than formalised humiliation. This links nicely with one of the funniest essays which describes Sedaris' language lessons in France in which the class is routinely humiliated by their sadistic French teacher. The attempts of the class to describe, in broken French, the meaning of Easter is laugh out loud funny ("It is a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus" etc).

On that note, I wish you all an enjoyable Easter break and am heading off now to curl up with a cup of tea, some chocolate and another James Lee Burke mystery.

Recent Reading

For someone who rarely reads much other than fiction, I seem to have found myself reading outside of my usual comfort zone lately. For starters, I read Where Underpants Come From by Joe Bennett for my book club. Bennett has written an account of his search for the source of the unbelievably cheap underpants he buys at his local department store in New Zealand. The book becomes a kind of investigation of the crazily successful Chinese manufacturing industry, and of the Chinese economy and culture more broadly. Where Underpants Come From is an engaging read and is sometimes quite funny but I found Bennett's innocent-abroad persona a bit grating after a while. He seems to feel that because he is an amateur that he doesn't really need to go beyond superficial insights or do much research. While it's interesting to read about his experiences in remote parts of China, I couldn't help but think that there must be more thoughtful books on Chinese culture available.

I've also finished Michael Chabon's books of essays called Maps and Legends. Those of you who follow this blog will know that I love Chabon's fiction and I was happy to find that I also enjoy his thoughts on other people's writing and the process of being a writer. Chabon has twin fixations, genre fiction and his Jewish heritage, and he brings together these elements in the fantastic final essay entitled Golems I Have Known, or Why My Elder Son's Middle Name is Napoleon. In the essay he uses the idea of the golem as a metaphor for creating fiction and he plays with the idea of truth and its relationship to fiction. Other essays cover such topics as Arthur Conan Doyle, the short story, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and various moments in the author's own creative life. I found myself agreeing with Chabon's championing of genre fiction and, as always, enjoying his writing style and humour. In one particular passage Chabon writes about the influence of science fiction on his own writing in a particularly lovely way:

I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces and long descriptive passages, and "round" characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill- or rather I didn't want to lose- that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, that was sometimes called "the sense of wonder." If my subject matter couldn't do it- if I wasn't writing about people who sailed through neutron stars or harnessed suns together- then it was going to fall to my sentences themselves to open up the heads of my readers and decant into them enough crackling plasma to light up the eye sockets for a week.

Happily, I think he has achieved that rather ambitious aim.

I'm now half-way through Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History which is a collection of autobiographical essays, so far mostly about Franzen's rather fraught and anxious childhood and adolescence. There are some similarities to the Chabon book; both authors share a middle class, suburban upbringing and are roughly the same age, and both tend to write in a slightly self-mocking but ultimately confident style. However, where Chabon focuses on writing and books, both his own and those of others who have influenced him, Franzen's book is much more a straight down the line autobiography. So far I'm really enjoying The Discomfort Zone. Franzen has a way of capturing the painful awkwardness of adolescence that I could really relate to. He also captures the relationship between a child and their parents so accurately that it made me wince. These are the same things I remember liking about The Corrections and so I imagine fans of that book would enjoy this smaller, more intimate and personal piece of writing.

When I finish Franzen, I'm determined to get back into some fiction so top of the list is M.J. Hyland's Carry Me Down which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year (or the year before?). I have to admit though, I have enjoyed my little side trip into non-fiction and I might well find myself back here before long.

Passionate Minds

After recently claiming that I don't read much non-fiction I now find myself in the strange situation of reading not one, but two collections of essays at once. I'm part of the way through The Grave of Alice B. Toklas by Otto Friedrich and after I posted on his essay about Alice B. Toklas I picked up another book that has been sitting on the shelf for a while: Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World by Claudia Roth Pierpont. I originally planned to just read her essay on Gertrude Stein but I've found myself swept up in the essays and have gone on to read several more.

Pierpont declares in her introduction that she has chosen to write about 'literary women of influence (very different from women of literary influence)', hence some surprising inclusions such as Mae West who I had never thought of as a writer (it turns out she wrote several plays, film scripts and of course her autobiography). The first section, most of which I've read now, is loosely group around the issue of sex, and includes essays on Stein, Mae West, Anais Nin and Olive Schreiner. There are two other sections dealing with politics (Marina Tsvetaeva, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy) and race (Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty). These are interesting, diverse selections.

I had expected that the essays would be reverential in tone as sometimes is the case in these kinds of collections of writing on influential women. In fact Pierpont is quite critical of some of her subjects and does not fall into the trap of romanticising them. She acknowledges that much of Gertrude Stein's writing was incomprehensible and of Anais Nin's writing she says:

For the reader able to escape the solitary confinement of these endless pages through the mere act of closing a book- such a simple deliverance- relief is dulled only by a shuddering pity for the woman who lived all her days trapped inside.

Each essay is a kind of mini-biography and I've enjoyed learning about the lives of these women who I mostly didn't know much about. Pierpont convincingly argues that each of her subjects changed the world in some way. While Anais Nin might not be the world's best writer, her writing, and her life, showed women that it might be possible to view their own sexuality in a different way, that women should acknowledge their desires in the way that men have been able to in the past. Mae West similarly showed audiences that women could enjoy their sexuality without the burden of romantic love through her creation of the bawdy character, Diamond Lil. In Stein's case she thought that a woman could achieve as much as a man by purging herself of what is expected of women and writing 'like a man'.

The essays I've read so far concern the lives of very different women but they intersect in interesting ways. All of them struggled against societies expectations and all of them had periods of hardship and mixed fortune even after they had achieved fame. Sometimes it feels as though Pierpont has tried to squeeze too much in here- it's hard to condense these rich lives into essay form- but it still makes for interesting reading.

The Grave of Alice B. Toklas

I should be reading Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks at the moment, especially as I set it for myself as a kind of personal reading challenge for Remembrance Day. Instead I keep picking up a collection of essays by Otto Friedrich called The Grave of Alice B. Toklas & Other Reports from the Past.

This collection was published in 1991 and it's comprised of writing from throughout Friedrich's career as a writer and journalist. It's a surprisingly engaging book, especially for someone like me who tends not to read much non-fiction. Maybe I've enjoyed it so much so far because the first few essays deal with the process of writing and creating art.

The title essay describes Friedrich's youth and the years he lived in Europe fancying himself as the next great novelist. With the incredible confidence of the young, he goes about meeting many of the great living writers in a Europe that is just emerging from the devastation of World War II. His journey finally leads him to the living room of Alice B. Toklas who nurtures and encourages his writing. Friedrich's output is incredibly prolific (at 20 he has already written two novels and is planning a quadrilogy) and ambitious (his quadrilogy will 'capture' the second World War and its impact). Friedrich writes 'Somewhere Gertrude Stein had written that writers don't need literary criticism, they need praise' and this is what Toklas gives him. Their friendship lasts until Toklas' death despite Friedrich's failure to publish his early novels, or to achieve the literary greatness he had hoped for. In some ways the friendship becomes burdensome to him towards the end, a reminder of what he has failed to become, and this gives the essay a certain poignancy. Still, it is an interesting portrait of Toklas who spent so many years in the shadow of her more famous partner Gertrude Stein.

Another interesting essay is about Wagner. Friedrich uses Wagner as a way of discussing the guilt felt by many people of German ancestry, including Friedrich himself, after the holocaust and how far art can be implicated in politics. Can Wagner ever be free of association with Hitler and the Nazi party? Or can it be enjoyed as art separately from its political associations? And just how does the audience survive a four hour sitting of Parsifal with no intermission?

Now that I think about it, some of these issues are pretty appropriate for Remembrance Day so perhaps I needn't have worried about neglecting Birdsong after all.