Tag: literature

"Silence upon silence, stones piled upon stones"

12th January 2014 / / 2 Comments

Ray Robinson, Jawbone Lake (2014)

Jawbone LakeRay Robinson was last seen on this blog in 2010 when I read Forgetting Zoë, his excellent novel about a young girl held captive in Arizona, in danger of losing her very self. For his new book, Robinson travels closer to home, with a tale which is more concerned with remembering, as its characters face life without loved ones whom they remember painfully well – although, in one case, they didn’t know him quite well enough.

We begin on New Year’s Eve, with a Land Rover driving straight into Jawbone Lake, near the Peak District town of Ravenstor. The driver of the vehicle was CJ Arms, a local businessman who’d built up a successful company in Spain. CJ’s son Joe returns home from London to a family who cannot explain the crash, clinging to the hope that, as long as CJ’s body is not found, he may still be alive. Joe’s grandfather Bill asks him to travel to Spain and find out the truth of CJ’s life there; what Joe discovers will challenge everything he thought he knew about his father.

The events of New Year’s Eve were witnessed by Rebecca Miller, otherwise known as Rabbit, a woman haunted by the sudden death of her baby son a year previously. She is developing an uncertain attraction for a colleague at work, but perhaps her main hope is for somewhere to hide from the world. And a third figure, Grogan – who pursued CJ down to the lake – is watching both Joe and Rabbit, waiting for the right moment to tidy things up.

For quite a way into Jawbone Lake, I was thinking that the character of Grogan didn’t seem to fit: he’s the type of sinister hard man who is a mainstay of Brit gangster thrillers, but seems out of place in what is generally quite a reflective portrait of families dealing with grief and loss. Then it struck me that this may be the point: the thriller elements of the novel are an intrusion on what appeared to be the reality of life. Perhaps this is most clear when Joe visits Spain, and learns about his father’s other life; it doesn’t square with the CJ he knew, but is nonetheless real, and Joe has to face up to that.

So, the loss of CJ leaves a hole in the Arms family’s life that gets harder to fill the more they learn about him. The situation is subtly different in Rabbit’s case: there’s a hole in her life caused by the death of her son (and that of her mother, who passed away some years before); but it’s only by reaching into and learning more about herself that Rabbit is able to find a way forward. The general theme of hidden truth is mirrored elegantly in Robinson’s use of landscape: Jawbone Lake is not a natural feature, but a reservoir with an old village at the bottom (I must tip my hat here to the superb cover design, which heightens the artificiality of a supposedly ‘natural’ scene, and is really quite eerie); every new environment in which CJ lived seems to have brought out a different side to him.

In Jawbone Lake, you have a novel that starts off as the mystery of why this man would drive into a lake; grows into an examination of how people may try to handle grief and uncovering secrets; and that knows how to thrill, even as it treats its thriller aspect as something strange and inscrutable. So that’s another intriguing book from an author whose work should not remain a secret.

Elsewhere
Ray Robinson’s website
Interview and review at Raven Crime Reads
Robinson writes about the places that inspired Jawbone Lake

Reading round-up: early January

2nd January 2014 / / 1 Comment

Happy New Year! To kick off my blogging in 2014, I have a new Reading Log page for the year; and here’s a round-up of some of the books I’ve read lately…

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Taste of Apple SeedsKatharina Hagena, The Taste of Apple Seeds (2008)
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch (2013)

When her grandmother dies, Iris inherits the old house. She returns to the village of her childhood to sort through everything; but finds that stepping back into her old world is not as easy as trying on her aunt’s dresses – and that there are family secrets to be uncovered. There’s a nice sense of place about Hagena’s novel, and some poignant reflections on loss (Iris’s grandmother had dementia before she died; her forgetting stands in contrast to Iris’s remembering and learning). Characters and memories circle around Iris in an intriguing dance, which ends with the prospect of further hope and sadness to come.

Matthew Hart, Gold (2013)

Journalist Hart brings together history, economics, and reportage in this account of gold’s changing role in the world economy. It’s a fascinating story to someone like me who doesn’t know about the subject; the way Hart tells it, it’s almost as though the idea of gold has become more important than the substance itself. I’m impressed with the range of Hart’s book, and with how deftly he ties all the threads together.

Ash Cameron, Confessions of an Undercover Cop (2013)

Another book in the Friday Project’s series of professional memoirs, this is a collection of tales from the author’s twenty-year police career, in both London and northern England, and in various sections of the force. Typically for this series, Cameron’s stories are a mixture of the humorous and dark, but always make for fascinating reading.

Equilateral

Ken Kalfus, Equilateral (2013)

In the last decade of the 19th century, British astronomer Sanford Thayer leads a grand engineering project: the construction of a giant equilateral triangle that will be seen from Mars -a signal to the great civilisation believed to reside there.  As Kalfus chronicles the scheme’s trials and tribulations, the ironies are plain to see – not just that of the great faith in the Martians’ existence and superiority (a faith which looks rather more misplaced to us), but also that Thayer remains enamoured of the Martians while having no regard for his Arab workers. The cool tone of the writing makes Equilateral a novel to savour.

Robert W. Greene, The Sting Man (1981)

This book is about Mel Weinberg, a hustler who was recruited by the FBI in the 1970s to work on Abscam, a sting operation that investigated public corruption (and which inspired the film American Hustle). I found the earlier parts of the book, covering Weinberg’s pre-Abscam career, to be the most interesting; Greene portrays Weinberg as an intriguingly ambivalent character: charismatic to an extent, repellent in other ways. Either way, though, Weinberg’s audacity is quite something to read about.

Nicholas Griffin, Ping-Pong Diplomacy (2014)

This is an account of: the development of table tennis as a sport, and the political dimension that was seemingly present from the start as the rules were codified. Griffin (a journalist and novelist) focuses particularly on ping-pong’s role in the thawing of relations between China and the USA during the 1970s, when table tennis players could move between the two countries in ways that diplomats could not. I knew barely anything about this part of history, and found Griffin’s book illuminating.

Alternate worlds, Stephen King, and Vector

27th December 2013 / / 1 Comment

Issue 274 of the BSFA’s critical journal Vector arrived in the post just before Christmas. It was a very special moment for me, because this issue contains my first published piece of criticism about books: a look at how two contrasting collections of linked stories (one, Nina Allan’s The Silver Wind, speculative fiction; the other, David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide, not) treat what might be termed ‘alternate worlds’. I was pleased with how the piece turned out, and hope to be able to republish it online at some point.

For now, however, I will leave you with the review that I also have in this issue of Vector, of Stephen King’s time-travel novel, 11.22.63:

Stephen King, 11.22.63 (2011)

112263There’s a portal leading to 1958 in the storeroom of Al Templeton’s diner. No matter how much time someone spends there, only two minutes will have elapsed in the present when they return. Their actions in the past may altered the present – but all will be reset if the portal is used again. Al has tried to change the course of history by preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy; but cancer caught up with him before he could wait out the necessary five years. Back in 2011, he enlists teacher Jake Epping to go back and do what he couldn’t.

JFK’s murder may be the impetus of its plot, but the main focus of 11.22.63 for much of its length is Jake’s experience of the past: his realisation that he quite likes it back there, and his personal relationships, especially in Jodie, the small Texas town where he eventually settles and falls in love with a librarian named Sadie Dunhill. This strand has its moments, but in many ways it’s the least interesting aspect of King’s novel: as a character, Jake is rather anonymous – which is part of what helps him slot into 1958, but it also means there’s less emotional interest when he’s not being driven by his mission.

Nor is there much friction between past and present in the novel. Jake sees signs of the period’s prejudice and bigotry, but never has cause to truly confront or engage with them. For King’s protagonist, the 1950s and ‘60s can, unproblematically, be a time when root beer tasted better and folks were friendlier. The odd acknowledgement of social attitudes that don’t sit well with Jake’s liberal sensibilities does not carry much force in the face of this living past’s seductive nostalgia.

There are intriguing hints throughout 11.22.63’s midsection that time itself its resisting Jake’s attempts to change history; this maintains tension over whether he will actually succeed. But it’s not until novel’s end that the time travel aspect comes right to the fore – and here the book unbalances, as the tone built up over 700 pages shifts more than once over the next 30. A historical domestic drama with overtones of a thriller becomes a compressed science fiction story, and the transition is too abrupt to work.

The characterisation of Jake also causes the ending to come unstuck. Up to that point, the protagonist has seemed mostly detached; now, he acts with a strength of feeling that we haven’t really seen before – that King hasn’t really earned on the page. What’s more, the closing shifts feel like an author trying to have his cake and eat it, backtracking on a commitment to an emotional position. It’s a frustrating end to an uneven novel.

Reading round-up: mid-December

15th December 2013 / / 0 Comments

The books in this round-up post are all debut novels from independent publishers.

Albert Alla, Black Chalk (2013)

Black ChalkThe sole survivor of a classroom shooting, Nate Dillingham becomes something of a media celebrity, and can’t escape being asked about what happened wherever he goes – to the point that his memory starts to blur. Several years later, Nate is back in Oxford and embarks on a relationship that takes him back to the fateful day. The novel takes a reflective tone, chronicling Nate’s changing thoughts over the years, and exploring the effects on him of both the shooting and having to replay it over the years – until the truth is finally revealed. Published by Garnet Publishing.

Michelle Flatley, My Beautiful England (2013)

This novel tells the stories of three women who meet at an English-lanuage class in Burnley: Sumalee from Thailand, who married a middle-aged Englishman after losing her husband in the 2004 tsunami; Samina fom Pakistan, who lives with her husband and nine more relatives; and Lenka from Poland, whose abusive husband has left her. Flatley shows how the reality of life in England does not match up to what the women had imagined it would be; and examines the tensions at work as her characters try to adjust to living in a new culture. The result is a tale that’s harrowing and uplifting by turns. Published by Cutting Edge Press.

Saga Takeshi, Crashman (2013)

Crashman

This is a short, fragmented novel whose narrator appears variously to be caught up in plane crashes; going through life unnoticed by others; working listlessly in some office job; and imagining/remembering a beautiful woman. Is the narrator dead? Caught in a nightmare? Something else? As the book progresses, the author weaves in transcripts of actual cockpit recordings from crashing planes; though these seem a little out of place at first, the technique pays off brilliantly at novel’s end, when we finally gain a devastating insight into what happened to our man. Published by Gigolo Publishing.

Kirk Kjeldsen, Tomorrow City (2013)

When a job he’s on goes wrong, crook Brendan Lavin steals his cousin’s passport and flees New York. Twelve years on, he has a new family in Shanghai and his life of crime is behind him – or so he thinks; his old crew have other ideas, and need him for something. Tomorrow City is a short thriller whose pace never lets up; it’s also an effective portrait of a (not always sympathetic) character trying to make the best he can from life in tough circumstances. Published by Signal 8 Press.

Reading round-up: books for Christmas presents

9th December 2013 / / 0 Comments

This isn’t meant to be a guide to Christmas gift ideas as such (for that, let me direct you to Kim’s excellent series of posts over on Reading Matters). It’s more that I’ve read a few books lately which, it struck me, would make good Christmas presents; so I thought I’d put them together into a blog post, and add in some other titles that I reviewed earlier in the year.

Non-Fiction

Letters of Note, ed. Shaun Usher

This huge, lavishly illustrated collection of letters (based on the website of the same name) is an ideal gift for anyone interested in the personal side of history, or who likes letters and books as objects. Read more about it in my original review.

Wordsmiths & Warriors by David and Hilary Crystal

This is an illustrated travelogue of significant places in the history of the English language in Britain. I haven’t seen the finished book, as I read a proof version when I reviewed it; but I’ve no doubt that it will look beautiful.

Fred's WarFred’s War by Andrew Davidson

Andrew Davidson’s grandfather Fred was a medical officer of the 1st battalion Cameronians during World War One. Although photography was banned on the front line, Fred and several other officers had cameras with them, and took photographs of their lives at war. Davidson uses these images to tell the story of the 1st Cameronians during the year that Fred was a serving officer. It’s a vivid and intimate account; there’s a real sense of the war gradually coalescing around the men as they march through France. Though Davidson refers to the photographs, he doesn’t caption them, which adds to the sense of this being an unfolding story for the men involved. Fred’s War gives a personal portrait of the conflict which is not quite like anything I’ve come across before.

Girl from Station X

The Girl from Station X by Elisa Segrave

Here’s another book based around personal wartime accounts, this time the diaries of Elisa Segrave’s mother Anne, who was stationed at Bletchley Park during World War Two. Again, it’s a fascinating glimpse into history, seeing Anne move from her privileged girlhood world into her wartime career; but this is Elisa’s story as much as Anne’s. Segrave describes how Anne’s diaries revealed to her a side of her mother that she had never known, and enabled her perhaps to understand Anne as she had not previously been able to. This double story is what particularly intrigues about The Girl from Station X.

Fiction

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Yes, I know: any excuse to enthuse about The Luminaries. But it is just the sort of big hardback novel that would make a great Christmas gift, especially for readers who may have been undecided about trying it out for themselves (it may take them well into the new year to read it, too).

If not The Luminaries, then Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch or Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity may also fit the bill (I have heard great things about both, but haven’t read them, so I can’t give a personal recommendation).

Crystal MirrorThe Crystal Mirror by Tim Malnick and Katie Green

From three long books to a much shorter one. This is a crowd-funded collection of “timeless tales for children and grown-ups alike”, written by Tim Malnick and illustrated by Katie Green. The five stories are all about characters changing their outlook on life to find a way forward, from the painter imprisoned in a bare tower room, to a bat fascinated by daylight. Malnick’s prose has the rhythms of a classic fairytale, and Green’s illustrations are gorgeous. I may not be quite the intended audience for The Crystal Mirror, but I found the book absolutely charming.

Non-Fiction about Fiction

Novel Cure

The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin

Subtitled “An A-Z of Literary Remedies”, this book has suggestions for reading to help alleviate a variety of ailments. Some are quite tongue-in-cheek (David Vann’s Caribou Island as a cure for enthusiasm with DIY; Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson to treat fear of doing your tax return); others more serious (Wuthering Heights to cure a desire to seek vengeance; Mrs Dalloway to tackle that Monday morning feeling). But the entries are always written with wit (I especially love the entries which spoof the style of the book being recommended; my favourite is the one for House of Leaves) and enthusiasm. After reading The Novel Cure, or even just dipping into it, you’ll almost certainly have some new books that you want to try. Now, what’s the cure for an exponentially increasing to-read pile..?

Sunday Story Society: ‘A Mild Attack of Locusts’ by Doris Lessing

1st December 2013 / / 2 Comments

sundaystorysmall

Sunday Story Society is a monthly feature in which I review a (usually recent) short story.  The stories will be available for free online, so if you like, you can read along and talk about the story in the comments.

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‘A Mild Attack of Locusts’ was Doris Lessing’s first piece of work to be published in the New Yorker, in February 1955. It’s also the first work of hers that I’ve read, so I came to it knowing little more than that it was one of Lessing’s many stories set in Africa. We see events through the eyes of Margaret, a city woman married to Richard, and now three years on the maize farm of Richard’s father Stephen. For all her time there, the ways of the farm remain a mystery to Margaret:

She still did not understand why they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the government. But she was getting to learn the language. Farmers’ language. And she noticed that for all Richard’s and Stephen’s complaints, they did not go bankrupt. Nor did they get very rich; they jogged along, doing comfortably.

Whatever Margaret may have experienced on the farm so far is nothing, though, compared to what is coming now: a swarm of locusts which destroys the entire crop.

Two things strike me in particular about this story. One is Lessing’s descriptive language, the way she evokes the vastness and implacability of the swarm:

When she looked out, all the trees were queer and still, clotted with insects, their boughs weighted to the ground. The earth seemed to be moving, with locusts crawling everywhere; she could not see the lands at all, so thick was the swarm. Toward the mountains, it was like looking into driving rain; even as she watched, the sun was blotted out with a fresh onrush of the insects. It was a half night, a perverted blackness.

I love especially that image of trees ‘clotted with locusts’, making the swarm seem less a collection of living creatures than some sort of viscous substance that happens to move under its own volition. The imagery here emphasises how vast and overwhelming this attack is: the locusts make the land disappear, act like a weather system, turn day into night.

The second aspect that strikes me is what the attack reveals about the characters’ relationships with nature. Even though the locusts have eaten everything, the men of the farm still work to drive them away, because they know the difference it could make: it could stop their locusts from laying their eggs here. Attuned to the rhythms of the farm, the men call this attack mild – not because minimal damage has been done, but because they are resigned to paying a price, and know how much greater the cost might have been. In contrast, Margaret is still only beginning to comprehend the situation: ‘if this devastated and mangled countryside was not ruin,’ she wonders, ‘what then was ruin?’ Lessing shows life on the farm to be a constant battle against nature, fought in the knowledge that any reprieve is only temporary.

Reading round-up: late November

29th November 2013 / / 2 Comments

Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative (2010)

dnIn early-1980s Johannesburg, young Neville Lister is angry at the injustices he sees around him, but that anger lacks focus. His family arranges for him to spend a day with the photographer Saul Auierbach, famed for his ability to capture the stories behind the everyday. Auerbach and Lister are challenged to approach three random houses and find a story in each; they get to two, and the resulting portraits become celebrated. Years later, Lister returns from London to the post-apartheid South Africa, sets up as a photographer, and, disoriented by his changed city, goes to find out who is behind the door of that third house.

As its title suggests, Double Negative is a novel of mirroring and inversions. In his youth, Lister is driven by an untamed social conscience; but he finds himself lost when apartheid actually ends. Where Auerbach seems to find truth with ease in his work, for Lister it is a struggle. By novel’s end, in 2009, Lister has become a fêted photographer in his own right, but appears to have become the kind of closed-off person that one senses the young Neville Lister would despise. In Double Negative, Ivan Vladislavić has created an intriguing character study, and an examination of social change refracted through the experience of one individual. Good on And Other Stories for picking it up and bringing it to a wider audience.

Trezza Azzopardi, The Tip of My Tongue (2013)
Tishani Doshi, Fountainville (2013)

These are the final pair of titles in Seren Books’ New Stories from the Mabinogion series (see here and here for my blog posts about some of the previous volumes). Reading these books has always been fascinating; I’ve constantly been impressed by the ingenuity with which the writers reshape their source material (as I don’t know the Mabinogion much at all, I’ve been grateful for the summaries of the original tales which appear in each book). The new titles are no exception.

tt

Trezza Azzopardi’s The Tip of My Tongue is based on the story of ‘Geraint, son of Erbin’. In the original tale, Geraint is a Cornish prince who marries the beautiful Enid; he forbids her to speak to him as they travel, even though she warns him of danger (I’m glossing over a lot of events here, but these Mabinogion stories are not easy to sum up in a sentence or two). Azzopardi’s novel begins in 1970s Cardiff, where Enid is a young girl and Geraint her spoiled cousin. Much to her annoyance, Enid is sent to live with Geraint and his family, the Erbins, in Devon. The Tip of My Tongue is more of a thematic interpretation of the Mabinogion story than a literal retelling; Azzopardi is perhaps most interested in exploring (as she comments in her afterword) ‘the idea of the female voice as powerful, as a tool – as a weapon.’ Young Enid’s voice is powerful because it is more or less the only thing over which she has control; in a sense, it’s the only thing we have as readers, because the novel is filtered through Enid’s perception. Her narrative voice is full of verve and delightful to read; but it also makes us aware of all the subtleties on which Enid doesn’t pick up – in other words, the power that she doesn’t have. That combination makes The Tip of my Tongue an absorbing book.

fvIn Fountainville, Tishani Doshi also reimagines a Mabinogion story from a female character’s viewpoint, this time the tale of ‘The Lady of the Fountain’, which sees one of Arthur’s knights, Owain, travel to a distant castle, kill its black knight, and fall in love with the knight’s wife, the Lady of the Well. Fountainville is set in non-specific frontier country that is something like India sprinkled with touches of the Wild West. Its Lady is Begum, keeper of the town’s fountain, who is married to a gang lord named Kedar and runs a ‘greenhouse’ for women rather than plants. Doshi’s narrator is Begum’s assistant Luna, who takes a liking to Owain Knight, a foreigner who arrives in Fountainville one day. The characters’ lives are shaken when Kedar is killed; then Owain disappears, and Luna discovers his secret. As with Azzopardi’s book, I’m struck by how Doshi has subtly altered the focus of the story in repurposing its elements. Fountainville strikes me as a story of change: Luna’s personal change, and the changing face of the town. It and The Tip of My Tongue are a fitting end to the New Stories from the Mabinogion.

German Literature Month: Alina Bronsky

20th November 2013 / / 8 Comments

Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (2010)
Translated from the German by Tim Mohr, 2011

abI would call this book delightful, but that doesn’t seem quite the right word for a novel with such a splendidly awful protagonist, and which actually carries quite a bitter sting. I was taken with The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine from the first two paragraphs, so perhaps I’ll quote those:

As my daughter Sulfia was explaining that she was pregnant but that she didn’t know by whom, I paid extra attention to my posture. I sat with my back perfectly straight and folded my hands elegantly in my lap.

Sulfia was sitting on a kitchen stool. Her shoulders were scrunched up and her eyes were red; instead of simply letting her tears flow she insisted on rubbing them into her face with the backs of her hands. This despite the fact that when she was still a child I had taught her how to cry without making herself look ugly, and how to smilr without promising too much.

This voice belongs to one Rosa Achmetowna; already we get a sense of the kind of person she is: concerned about how she appears (which must be proper), and possessed of a very low opinion of her daughter.

What we see shortly after is that Rosa will go to extraordinary lengths to achieve her goals, and that she’ll change her attitude in a heartbeat if it suits her. Her first reaction to Sulfia’s pregnancy is to try to stop it; her folk remedies don’t work, but a knitting needle does the trick – except it turns out that Sulfia had twins, and one of them comes to term. Rosa is horrified at the thought of Sulfia having a child – until little Aminat is born, and proves (unlike Sulfia) to share her grandmother’s Tartar features. Aminat promptly becomes the apple of Rosa’s eye, so much so that Rosa thinks the girl would be better off with her than Sulfia.

Much of the humour in Alina Bronksy’s book comes from seeing just how far Rosa is prepared to go. For example, when Rosa is casting about trying to find Sulfia a good husband, she learns of a German man in a coma who’s been brought into the hospital where Sulfia works (Dieter Rossmann; “What a nice name!” says Rosa), she sees her chance, even entertaining the thought that Sulfia could tell him when he wakes up that the two of them are in a relationship, in case he’s lost his memory. Rosa is even more delighted to discover that Dieter is a journalist researching Tartar cuisine – until she finds out that he cooks himself, at which point she wants nothing more to do with him. That changes again when the prospect arises of the family being invited to move to Germany, where Rosa thinks they’ll have a much better life.

Rosa has a very clear image of herself and her worth: she always thinks that she’s the best looking, the best dressed – better than those around her. How much of what she does is for the good of her family, and how much for her own self-worth, is open to question; the two are so bound up with each other that perhaps there is no difference in Rosa’s mind. The real sting of the novel comes from seeing how Rosa’s view of herself doesn’t always correspond with reality. When her family makes it to Germany, Rosa gets a job as a cleaner; she’s very pleased at this, and suddenly we experience the jolt of recognition that Rosa’s high opinion of herself may not be as high as we thought.

This feeling of dissonance returns – though developing more slowly, and with a more melancholic undertone – as Rosa grows older, and starts to lose her grip on the world around her. If she was out to improve her family’s lot in life – well, that’s happened in some ways, but not in others. If she was out to improve her own, I suppose that has also happened, if not quite in a way Rosa would have anticipated. In other words, the outcome is a typically bittersweet jumble of life – but the book that chronicles it is a joy. Bronsky has one other novel in English, Broken Glass Park; you can be sure that it’s on my to-read list.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of this book: Janet Potter for The Millions; Boston Bibliophile; Lizzy’s Literary Life; Leafing Through Life.

German Literature Month: Bernhard Schlink

14th November 2013 / / 3 Comments

Bernhard Schlink, Summer Lies (2010)
Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway, 2012

9781780220918I should say first of all that the only thing I knew about Bernhard Schlink prior to reading this story collection was that he wrote The Reader – and I haven’t read that novel, nor seen the film. So I came to Summer Lies pretty much cold.

I’d sum this book up as a collection of stories about loss. The protagonists tend to be middle-aged (usually men), generally successful, but often with the nagging sense that things are starting to slip (or have slipped) away. I like the title, Summer Lies, as a reflection of this: it could mean lies that last a golden season; or (and I don’t know if this pun works in the original German) that summer itself is lying – that the good things are not just transient, but in a sense were never really there at all.

I’m going to pick out two contrasting stories to illustrate Schlink’s approach. The writer protagonist of ‘The Night in Baden-Baden’ is either lying to himself or simply doesn’t care. As the story starts, he has taken Therese to Baden-Baden, to see the opening night of his first play. All well and good, except that Therese isn’t his girlfriend. His actual girlfriend, Anne, doesn’t like him seeing other women; he can’t understand why, and wonders why she doesn’t see that he’s bothered with all the travelling Anne does for her job as an academic. They’ve both chosen their paths in life, he reasons, so these are the consequences.

Our man is adept at justifying his actions to himself, and that includes withholding the truth from Anne (‘He wasn’t presenting anyone with a false picture.He was presenting sketches rather than pictures, and sketches aren’t false, because that’s all they are—sketches,’ p. 55). He’s not so good at comprehending why the two of them drift apart when Anne eventually finds out about Baden-Baden. Whatever he has lost by that happening… well, he’ll probably find something else to replace it. As a study of a quite obnoxious character, ‘The Night in Baden-Baden’ works well.

‘After the Season’ is the story of a holiday romance, a typical young lovers’ whirlwind – except these two are just either side of forty. Richard, a German flautist living in New York, meets Susan, a Los Angeles-based American who works for a theatre foundation. The pair bond over a shared love of music, and end up planning their future together, even though they know it can’t last.

Theirs is a romance born from the freedom of being away from their normal lives – so, when the time comes for them to return, the relationship can’t be sustained. Richard in particular doesn’t realise until that moment how much he is invested in his partnership with Susan; like the protagonist of ‘The Night in Baden-Baden’, he has either been fooling himself or willingly ignoring the truth – but, as he’s more open emotionally, Richard’s reaction is rather different. He is facing the sudden loss of summer, and is not prepared for the autumn.

Elsewhere
Read a story from the collection: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen’
Some other blogs on Summer Lies: Winstonsdad; Lizzy’s Literary Life; Julie Fisher for Bookmunch.

German Literature Month: Alissa Walser

6th November 2013 / / 5 Comments

Alissa Walser, Mesmerized (2010)
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, 2012

This November, I am taking part in German Literature Month which is co-hosted by the blogs Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy’s Literary Life. As part of my efforts to read more works in translation, this seemed a good thing to get involved in; so I scoured my shelves for books originally written in German, and have three more lined up for the rest of the month. This first one, though, is a book I bought especially for German Lit Month, because it intrigued me when I saw it in the bookshop.

Mesmerized is a fictionalised account of Franz Mesmer’s attempts to restore the eyesight of Maria Theresia Paradis, the court secretary’s daughter, a musical prodigy in Mozart’s Vienna. Mesmer’s methods are controversial, but they do seem to have some effect on Maria’s blindness  – possibly, though, at the cost of her musical ability.

mesmerizedI’d describe Mesmerized as a novel of fragments. Alissa Walser’s prose (as translated by Jamie Bulloch) is full of sentence-fragments, which clump together like iron filings attracted to one of Mesmer’s magnets. Here, for instance, is Maria experiencing music:

Those notes. Which flew away before they had properly settled. Blended into each other. As if each note were too large for a single pitch. As if several chords were flowing out of the note and in all directions. A fading polyphony. Almost sad. Sadly excited. [p. 58]

This style mirrors the coming together of disparate elements to form an individual’s perception, the different senses which make up Maria’s experience of living. It also creates a constant feeling of unease and instability, that all these fragments could just scatter if whatever keeps them in place disappears. This is what Maria feels when she starts to struggle with her music; and there’s also a sense that treating her is the only thing holding together Mesmer’s life in Vienna. So one might say the two of them are pulling in different directions – and Walser leaves us wondering to the very end who will win out.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Mesmerized: Iris on Books; Erykah Brackenbury at For Books’ Sake; 50 Year Project.
A sample from the book.

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