Endless Reads Review: Another Country by Anjali Joseph

 

 

When you read, what do you read for? Plot? Action? Erudition? What’s the meaning of reading? I suppose this question depends on your mood when reading. Sometimes you want to sink into a comfy sofa of a book – and sometimes you discover that what you thought would be a comfy sofa is something else. A hardback chair. Or, like this book, a collection of pearled papers, a gathering of bright brittle leaves.

 

Another Country centres around the centreless, rootless Leela Gosh, a Bombay (now Mumbai) born twenty-something middle class Cambridge graduate who, when the novel opens, is living in Paris as an English teacher and feeling hopelessly, but rather wonderfully, out of place. From the well written sentences and precise evocations you might presume that you are entering a guided space, and that the plot will roll out carefully in front of you. However, this is not that sort of book. And after the bluster of 1Q84, I was certainly glad it wasn’t.

 

Here is something tender, fragmentary.  In the Paris sections, I was reminded of Jean Rhys – as in her works, human interactions here are like inflictions, bruising.  Leela is aware of herself and her flaws, suspicious of the behaviour of others and of her own performance towards them:

 

Leela smiled. She pulled her thin jacket around her. They carried on walking, away from the others and into pools of light under streetlamps. And now, nagged a voice inside her, what will you do? She ignored it.

The pavement glittered with moisture.

Simon put a hand on her shoulder; she tried not to jump. He smiled. “What were we talking about, anyway, before we were so rudely thrown out of that bar?” He released her shoulder, but not before his hand had been there long enough to signal deliberateness. It was a charming gesture, and made her nervous.

 

There is the use of make up to construct an identity, a mask. There is the character’s apparent passivity, but it seems to me different to that of Rhys’ protagonists.  There is more hope here, far less fatalism. Even when in a dismal London, in a stagnant relationship, there is a sense that Leela hopes to startle herself out. Companions, though just as fleeting, are less cruel. In the level of detail used to describe them, it seems as if Joseph is grasping at them, trying to put down in record what she can of them, before they fade from Leela’s view. London was the hardest section for me to read, because of the long dreariness of malcontent coming after the dizzying snippets of Paris.

 

When Leela returns to Bombay, to construct a life there, the text morphs again, and we are presented with a different sort of culture clash – that of the returned immigrant. Gone are the tube stations and the grey skies, here come the familiar-unfamiliar: the turquoise sea and dirt and the banter of crows and mannered, elegant women and servants in the home.

 

Any thought of resolution in novels of migration is predicated on the notion that every person who continually crosses borders can solidify themselves, make themselves fit neatly within whatever rules – spoken and unspoken, learned, half-learned or never acquired – that particular country, and the strictures of class and race and gender impose. Leela is witness to this difficulty. Though she may seem listless, she is being daily buffeted by the winds of her own alienation. Another Country and Another Country, and you must keep tabs as well as live your life, make something out of the shifting sands. The protagonist as a leaf, the protagonist as a line that goes on forever, in a light hand.

 

When reading a book, it’s your attitude that shapes your experience of reading – your willingness to engage with what it presents. If the territory is not familiar, not structured around character development and plot arcs of whatever sort, you have to ask yourself, what am I willing to expose of myself here, do I need certain touchstones, or can I go alone. You must ask yourself, do I trust the author. Sometimes you will go by name recognition – Virginia Woolf, James Joyce. At other times, the book, however slender and unconsoling, might suit you perfectly. Another Country is just that book for me right now. I’m typing, ill in bed with a missing voice. I’ve come through a big read, and I needed a little careful bruising breeze, and this was just it.

Numb fingers type faster

 

Today was one of those high, blue, fine-threaded days that brought a frost, and which means that my flat, a tenement from the thirties, is cold inside. We have heating, but it’s on a pretty poor gas system and we recently discovered that it was squeezing D’s lungs. A space heater will have to do us, when we feel lux enough to use it. The low today is only minus 2 celsius, so it’s not great trial. It just feels a little Dickensian to be wrapped in – okay – snuggies and blankets, with cold noses and fingers that bend a little unwillingly.

 

But I’m not here to complain. I’m here to express my gratitude to all of the people who have been visiting this blog recently and who have started following me on twitter. To the people who retweeted my story from yesterday, and who contacted me directly about it. Thank you! I think every writer craves an audience, and feels that when he or she has made a connection with a reader that that is something really uplifting.  I cannot explain this comfort, except that all writing is a form of communication, an attempt to lay out in textures and black marks something important to them. A story that burns through the finger tips. That wants, as Sundog Lit say, to burn the retinas. To light someone else up in the ways that they can and are able be. A less-than-perfect cross between song and chatter, physical sculpture and neon and flame.

 

 

It’s a dark time of the year, as I have said. Cold, blue, low lit. Writing is more important than ever, it feels. Reading, huddling round a book or bringing one clumsily, bittily, into being. I will have more time, now that my work, sadly, is cutting back my hours in the winter slump. The pictures above are from one of the distractions of the season: the Christmas Market on Princess Street. Outside of the picture are little huts strung with lights and tinsel, selling overpriced decorations and German snacks and hot mulled wine with schnapps. I’m thinking of setting up my own stand – selling a poem. Selling a photograph of this city. I won’t, because I’m truly not business minded, but the idea of doing it makes me smile. The possibility of physically handing my art over to someone as we both shiver and clap our hands at the chill.

 

There are ways to speak and ways to see on these cold days. If it’s warm where you are, perhaps summer, I am envious, but not. How are you managing though, wherever you are?

 

And thank you, as ever, for reading here.

Book Christmas

 

 

I received all these books today (after a few days of missed connections) – all three volumes of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead, Restoration by Rose Tremain, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright and The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell.  And a little slip that reads ‘Vintage Books – with compliments’. Spectacular. Thanks so much to the lovely people @vintagebooks (who tweet delightfully). Endless Reads 2012 continues finely apace.

 

Mute

 

Because it is hard to speak today, because I need something solid to lean on, let someone else speak well:

I watched an armory combing its bronze bricks
and in the sky there were glistening rails of milk.
Where had the swan gone, the one with the lame back?

Now mounting the steps
I enter my new home full
of grey radiators and glass
ashtrays full of wool.

Against the winter I must get a samovar
embroidered with basil leaves and Ukranian mottos
to the distant sound of wings, painfully anti-wind,

a little bit of the blue
summer air will come back
as the steam chuckles in
the monster’s steamy attack

and I’ll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get
to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least.

 

- from ‘Poem‘ by Frank O’Hara

A Reading List

Recently, I compiled a list of reading for a very high level ESL student of mine. I thought I’d share it here – in part in case I lose it, in part because that student has now left, and I’d like to mark that in some way. It’ll be some time before I get to have literary discussions as part of my job.

 

I wanted to provide a list that would challenge. That would demonstrate various Englishes, from 19th century works to the modern day, from Scottish English, to African American dialect, to Nadsat. That I had read before and so could mark their varying levels of difficulty – in terms of vocabulary and structure and so on. That would be of interest to that particular student, I hope. The selections are unashamedly idiosyncratic. They are books that question and probe and twist, or simply tell a story. Some are serious, some fluffier, some influential, some brand new.

 

It is my wish that at least some of them will open up the world for this student a fraction, a crack. That the words will not only be new and add knowledge, but will charm and fire. What would you, personally, have suggested to someone new to literature in English?

 

Here’s what I passed on:

 

The Annotated Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (notes by Alfred Appel)

Textually rich, lyrical and fanciful in imagery. Challenging subject matter (in the disturbing sense – and in the sense that the narrator is openly unreliable)

Difficulty rating: Tricky – though the rhythm of the sentences should help you through them, and the notes will explain any obscure references.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Also lyrical – and short! The American Dream in the jazz age (1920s-30s) is one big party. Or is it? The end paragraph is one of the most famous in American literature.

Difficulty rating: Moderate, but short, did I mention it’s short? Taught in American High Schools.

Possession, A.S. Byatt

A very literary mystery – Roland is a loser academic living in a flat that smells of cat pee, but studying in the library one day, he discovers a previously unknown poem by a famous 19^th century figure. He pairs up with Maud Bailey to solve the mystery and evade a covetous American memorabilia collector. Meanwhile, in the 19^th century the poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte embark on passionate love affair which will have lasting effects on the present day. Far and away not as trashy as it sounds.

Difficulty rating:  This is an intellectually playful book, utilising poetry, letters and diary entries alongside 3^rd person narration. A nice mash of contemporary (80s) language and 19^th century conversational and written styles.  Longish. So moderate-to-difficult

One D.O.A., One on the Way, Mary Robison

Eve is married to Adam, a Southern gent with an identical twin. Eve may or may not be sleeping with the identical twin, who can really tell. Amongst the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, the story plays out. Witty and dark and bourbon-soaked.

Difficulty Rating: The minimalist prose style makes this one of the easier books on the list.

Beloved, Toni Morrison

A slave woman in the Southern United states is on the run with her children when she is cornered. Loath to see her children taken from her, she commits an act so brutal it will split the world from its reality. Brutal and lyrical, based partially on a true story. The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this.

Difficulty rating: Pretty high, using African-American dialect in dialogue, but the sentences are shorter for the most part, which should make it a little easier going.

The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

A charming love story between a  girl/young woman and a handsome librarian afflicted with a disease that forces him to jump naked through his own timeline.

Difficulty level: Easy (but contemporary)

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

A ferocious American preacher takes his family on a mission to the Congo. Told by the five women who surround him and must endure his fervour and madness and failures. A long but beautiful book.

Difficulty level: Depends which voice you are reading.

Glaciers, Alexis M Smith

Short, neat and moving – a story of memory, new love, and the landscapes of Pacific North Western United States.

Difficulty level – easier, very contemporary. Contains some of the most beautiful sentences I have ever read.

Green Girl, Kate Zambreno

A neurotic American girl with a fragile sense of self drifts and fails her way through her life in London. Every chapter begins with an interesting quote which will then be explored in some way. If you’d like to read ‘literature of the girl’ then read this. Some brutal scenes. Very contemporary.

Difficulty level: the quotes bump it up a little, but it’s crisp and clear.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg

The book that Fight Club might have been inspired by. A young religious man meets a person he believes to be Peter the Great and embarks on a series of crimes at his new friend’s suggestion. But why has nobody seen this friend of his?

Difficulty: old fashioned (18^th-19^th century writing style) but it’s a short book

House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

Demented novel/movie transcript/not all that scary horror story/breakdown.

Difficulty level: how good are you at reading upside down?

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

A difficult childhood surrounded by religious hypocrites  and coldness does nothing to damage Jane’s strength of character. Which is good at because Jane’s first job as a governess at a draughty mansion, the glowering Mr Rochester will be testing that to the extreme.  A love story about God and the moors and being a poor woman in a rich man’s house.

Difficulty level: 19^th century – so long convoluted sentences. But there is a movie to help clarify things.

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

The ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre. But in fact a darker beast altogether. The action takes place on Jamaica just after the emancipation of the slaves – the land where Rochester was sent to make his fortune. It’s all chaos and faded fortune and steamy heat and colonialism and desire. Antoinette Causeway is brought up in a similarly lonely way to Jane, but her outlook on life is decidedly more fatalistic.

Difficulty level: straightforward, punchy sentences make this quite an easy one. Also short. But read after you’ve at least seen the movie of Jane Eyre.

1984, George Orwell

Because you must, if you like novels of ideas.

Difficulty level: easier than…

 

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

A sample: “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. […] The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence.”

Difficulty level: (see above) But you’ll be ahead with the Russian bits. There is also a film version.

Zazen, Vanessa Veselka

America is about to be torn apart, but what to do until then? Make tofu scramble and do yoga and protest something.

A sample:  “War A is going well and no longer a threat, small and mature. Like a Bonsai. War B is in full flower. Its thin green shoots reaching across the ocean floor like fibre optic cable. The TVs are on all the time all the time now. The lights dim and everyone moves in amber. They flicker like votives. That’s what we will all be one day, insects in sap, strange jewels.”

Difficulty level : It’s contemporary and full of unusual sentences like the ones above. But gorgeous, and not as difficult as A Clockwork Orange!

Orlando, Virginia Woolf

An aristocratic man lives for 400 years, changing gender and having various adventures. The style of the language changes as the years pass – from an Elizabethan English style to the Modernism of the 20^th century. Actually a cheerful story.

Difficulty level: hard.

Autumn Endless Reads

 

I look outside and cannot understand why the leaves have not already turned.  I’ve set my mind on Autumn and now I’m impatient for the season to make a clear announcement of its arrival. It’s already cold and damp now, the hours are drawing in (sunset before 9pm, now, a sure sign of the year heading towards late middle age), the festival is winding down, and Winter coats are coming out. Come on, decay, we’re ready for you.

 

In the mood for this chill turn, I begin planning autumnal reads. Not that I stopped reading over the Summer, but I think it’s good every season to pause for a moment to see what’s on the cards. Up for September:

 

 

 

NW, of course. Maidenhead I received today from Canadian publisher Coach House. Lots of people on twitter recommended this book to me after I decried my embarrassing lack of Can Lit reading. Coach House very generously sent it my way. The package brought with it an interview with the author, Tamara Faith Berger, and an insight into the themes of the novel – sexual and political awakening, feminism, slavery, art and pornography. That’s a promotional condom that was included with the book. I’ve just finished The Listeners by Leni Zumas which was, while well written, full of imagery of injury and blood (of which I am very phobic) so Maidenhead, while likely to be graphic and very challenging, is less likely to make me nearly faint every few pages.

 

The other book is one I’ve had for a while and have yet to get to – Now Trends, a collection of stories by Karl Taro Greenfield. The cover design and portability is meant to imitate a travel guide, and the stories themselves range across the world. Armchair travel for a dreichit time of the year.

 

I hope to review the latter three books on PANK in due course, and NW some time later here.

 

What do you have lined up to see you through the warm weather’s disappearance? That’s if it’s ever Autumnal in your part of the world.

August like a sharp intake of breath in a field of bright yellows and something like wheat

 

 

It is already August, it’s never August in Edinburgh until suddenly the streets are full of revelers for the festival, for the comedy, the book, the music, the children’s festivals and the populations swells and butts up against one another in the street, or else wanders drunkenly about, or else begs or juggles and we get a tiny break in the clouds, once or twice a day, that shows a scorching blue.

 

I have been having great fun reading the submissions for the Thresholds Project. Stories of imminence, of tension, of waiting at the doorway of life or simply a window, looking out. I really would love to read more. If you’d like to send me a poem or a flash piece, please do!

 

This, along with my Share Your Spaces project, are tentative attempts at something bigger. I might not be able to create a literary journal just yet, but I can wobbly step in the direction, here on the blog. I can look at the spaces within which you write, and be inspired. If you want to inspire me, and the readers of my blog further, and you have work that fits the criteria of ‘thresholds’ (a wide, and welcoming criteria of simply, a point of boundary, or a breaking of boundary, or traversing), please email me your work, or questions if you have them to: wheresthebread[@]hotmail.com

 

It all really began this year with the Endless Reads project, which lead to me reading some amazing, challenging works, to expansive and though-provoking connections with their authors via various social media, and to my becoming a reviewer on the online arm of a really fabulous magazine, which was something I had for a long time dreamed of doing.

 

The year is still young, even if the sun is setting earlier and earlier. Now at nine, it’s growing darker. Now the gloaming is thinning, and the nettles in my neighbour’s garden are dusty. New flowers grow all the time. Big-eyed daisies, bright orange things I cannot name. The reek of honeysuckle. I am hopeful.

Endless Reads Review at PANK: I Have Blinded Myself Writing This by Jess Stoner

My new review is up on PANK, and the book itself was a cracker, not one I would have picked up but for that acute title and the sense that something good must be in it (it’s published by the same press which is involved in the making of Hobart Journal, which is always intriguing). Some of the text in the first quote in the review is revealed when it should be struckout, just so no one’s confused when they read the review.

Experimental Fiction. What comes to mind when you read or hear these words? For me they conjure up feelings of eager apprehension, similar to walking into a free exhibition at a small, untested art gallery.

 

Dissonant music begins to play. There is a dark room with a video installation griddled with distortions playing, but you noticed that odd man going in there by himself, and you perhaps want to wait till he’s done. There’s that kind unplaceable feeling of pressure. You must take your time, but it’s an uncomfortable place to linger. There’s all this space, or perhaps none at all, and nothing in the design lets in the air or the light.

Perhaps intense reactions of claustrophobia to books aren’t felt by everyone?

At any rate, I was nervous.

You are here

It’s been a long time. Finally, internet. Finally all of the stresses D and I have been working through seem to be drawing to a close (or will, in the near future). Nothing to do with writing, so I won’t go into them here, just to say that last night D woke me up to tell me I had been grinding my teeth loudly enough to wake him. I haven’t ground my teeth since I was an undergrad, I believe.

All day, those teeth have made their presence known, but the pain won’t last. It’s one of those tidy little aches that you know will fade. I had dreams of drowning, of trying to pull people up from a sunken cruise ship. My breath seemed to last forever deep down in the graded blue, kicking between the hulk and the debris. I still feel the pressure in my chest. Now I breathe out, for the first time in what feels like a month. It’s so simple, breath, and we make it so difficult, and surround it with language and critique. I’ll breathe out wonky. Take big gulps and hiss it out through those crumbly teeth.

Now, at any rate, I have the pictures of reindeer, so calm, or skittish but in an easy-to-soothe way.

This wee man is Domino, a yearling reindeer. A little feartie as our trek was one of his first, but amazingly responsive to soft murmurs, stopping on command and starting again. Reindeer were domesticated a long time ago, perhaps one of the first creatures we managed to tame. You can see from the picture below, with a fully grown deer next to a fully grown D, that they are smaller than us. We are stronger than them too. Not like horses at all. Not like dogs who are often lithe streaks of muscle (even the dainty lap dogs can drag you down the street). I lead Domino like a sheep, and even if at first they don’t agree with your choice of direction, they will concede to you. For the most part.

This is D with Puddock, looking out over the Black Loch at the top of the hill enclosure. Puddock (the Scots word for frog) is four or five, and was utterly calm. He didn’t care to walk behind D, and chose instead to walk beside him. A reindeer with a relative amount of spunk. He tried to eat everything in sight, and gave hearty burps whenever he could. Apparently this is something reindeer do a lot when relaxed. Otherwise they are nearly silent beasts. Bar the clicking in their heels as the older one walked – an evolutionary advantage on wickedly cold arctic winter days, when it would expend too much heat to call back to other members of the herd. They can follow the sound of clicking instead. A little disconcerting, yes.

And then there was Spike, another yearling, but born in Sweden, brought over to improve diversity of the herd’s genetics. He was on his first ever trek, and was led by one of the herders. He was prone to bucking when startled, and hit out at the guide with his hooves in protest at being tethered to the ground. It was time for a feed, but when the large pile of barley and brewer’s meal and lichen (favourite food of reindeer) he just looked at it. His nose wrinkled and he stood steadily, visibly sulking, for a good fifteen minutes until we turned our backs on him. Then he ate.

Reindeer have been in Scotland for only 60 years – since they were wiped out around seven or eight hundred years ago. They were reintroduced by a Sami man and his American wife. Mikel Utsi recognised in the Cairngorms a habitat that was similar to his native Sweden, so he petitioned to have a few brought over, and built on from there. The female reindeer roam free in the mountains with their young, while the males are kept mostly in a large hill enclosure, and are the only ones used for treks and at Christmas time, when they pull the sleigh for Santa all across the UK.

The centre is tucked off in the valley, and we drove up to the hill and walked for about fifteen minutes through the fertile slopes, until we hit the barren moorland. Despite the fact it was mid June, it was cold, around 8c, exposed, a little blustery. Mercifully dry. We were on the trek for around 4 hours, and at the end returned to the centre in order to see an orphaned infant being fed. Not fawn, apparently, not a pretty little roe deerling, but a fluffy, grunting calf. With the trek came a free adoption certificate, and we chose Domino: a mild, fretful animal, but a work in progress, a striver. Probably you can see why I went for him.

It’s been a while since the trek, and we’ve since received the bumper welcome pack with a certificate of adoption, a picture of a younger Domino with his mother Fly, and information about the celebrations for 60 years of reindeer in Scotland.

 

Looking back on it now, I see my birthday, when we went on the trek and drove around without plans or pressure, as a high point in the blur. I hope now for many more. What has kept me together, apart from D, friends and family, has been reading everything I could get my hands on. I’m a slow reader, but got through five books in two weeks, and there’s a review of one of them, The Bee-Loud Glade, by Steve Himmer, up on PANK, if you’re interested in something that focuses on nature, on the pace of living and the different forms of artifice.  I for one want to explore this idea of the self-in-the-landscape, the merging/effacement of the self into a being in a constant present. Or the impulse to resist this, to fire oneself up, to be ambitious in the different ways were are ambitious.

 

For the moment, that ragged, unshapely, urgent breathing in and out sits with the idea of the unartificial, the calm-which-is-beyond-me, and I am glad to be either and neither.

 

 

 

 

 

World Book Night – how it went down

Well, that went amazingly well!

 

I fully attribute this to the use of the sign you see above, sitting in an empty box where copies of I Capture The Castle used to be.

 

My pitch, a slightly reedy call of  ”Free Book for World Book Night! Just a book, no obligations, just a book!” Sometimes adding, “just run and grab a copy if you’re too shy!” While I used the sign for emphasis.

 

The worst I had was a scowl from a handful of people. That I expected. Most people smiled, even as they walked right by. But then there were the best people – the people who were going to walk on by, who shyly changed their minds, rushed back and grabbed one, smiling just a little.

 

And the one younger woman, who was not a native English speaker, who started talking to me about the power of stories and how she hopes my book will get published (a surprising number of people thought I was giving away my own book, which I found funny).

 

And the older couple with their grown up child, who also all seemed unconvinced, then when I explained it was a charity event comprised by volunteers and going on across the UK, who smiled at me. The woman saying, “thank you, for standing out here doing this.”

 

And the group of Spanish people, who seemed to decide to take it on hearing World Book Night was partly about celebrating the birthday of Cervantes (Shakespeare too).

 

And the woman who looked so, so wide-eyed and pleased when I gave her a copy, and said “you’ve made my day, you really have.”

 

And the last recipient of the book, who wanted to help me by taking the final copy in that box. Who wasn’t, he said, a reader, but this would spur him to give it a go. I said, this book is funny, and sweet, and dry, I think you’ll like it. I thanked him profusely. I thank him again, and all of the people who were open to a free book. Open to the idea of reading something a stranger gives them with a clumsy recommendation of how good it is.

 

Also thanks to Tess of The Loch Tess Monster who came all the way out to visit me, though by the time she got there, the books had all vanished. I think I managed it in under fifty minutes!

 

Faith in humanity restored. What also helps perhaps is the Scottish love of all things free – but as you can see, things were quite international, so it can’t be explained away so easily.

 

Bring on next year!