Saturday 10 November 2018

Recent Readings

If you only like novels with a strong plot then move along, there's nothing like that to be seen here.  But I really enjoyed all of these books in the past months, and a week in Cuba meant I'd a lot of extra reading time.

A trilogy by Rachel Cusk: Outline, Transit, Kudos

The three novels are an exploration of the theme given in each title, in the context of relationships forming, changing and ending. Our viewpoint is that of a mother of 2 children, a writer living in England who has gone through a bitter divorce. We hear very little about her directly; instead she relates her conversations with her students, other authors, ex-lovers, strangers on a plane, all told in her own voice and vocabulary, which to my ear echoes Virginia Woolf (of whom more below). Her character emerges at the boundaries of these interactions.

Now that might sound a bit stiff and dull, but what makes the novels work so well is the quality of that authors voice and the depth of the conversations - Cusk brings our attention to the minute details of our interactions with others and dives deep for nuggets of insight. Or as one of the character says:

Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.
I was hooked from the very first page and read the three books one after another, though they won't be everyone's cup of earl grey. 

Albert Camus: L'Étranger

Kamel Daoud: Meursault, contre-enquête
There's nothing I can say about L'Étranger, one of the most renowned books of the 20th century, that hasn't already been said. I enjoyed it and improved my French too. The novel by Daoud is a riposte to it, centred on "l'arabe" who is murdered by the eponymous "l'étranger" Meursault . In Camus' work we learn nothing about this victim, not even his name; he is irrelevant to Meursault and to Camus, and his murder is meaningless. In Daoud's novel we learn that he was named Moussa, and that the lives of his mother and brother were changed forever by his murder. The killing is then put in to context of pre-independence Algeria and how the "pieds noirs" were viewed at that time. Then we enter a mirror image of the Camus story where one of the pied noir, a Frenchman, is murdered by Moussa's brother in an act of revenge that is also meaningless. It's an innovative and enjoyable read, though my level of French is insufficient for me to have an opinion on how well-written it is.

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

I've read and re-read this book many times, sometimes just dipping in for a few pages at a time. It's so rich and wise and the prose is so beautiful I'll never be finished with it.

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