Sommarboken

I began reading Sommarboken (The Summer Book) by Tove Jansson in the original Swedish on my Kobo but found it quite hard going, and missed some of the enchantment that I could feel was present in the language. So I got an English copy, the translation by Thomas Teal, and reading the two versions together was a wonderful experience. It's become an annual ritual for many Swedes (and Swedish-speaking Finns) to read the book at the beginning of every summer, and I can see myself doing that too. 

The story of Sophia and her grandmother (farmor) is simple but wise. Point-of-view is beautifully handled, as we see things through a child’s eyes and then an adult’s; sometimes Sophia is the child and sometimes the Grandmother is. Summers pass by on their little island in the Finnish archipelago. The themes are the passing and return of the seasons, aging, endings and beginnings, memory, what is left at the end, the fragility of nature, the fragility of people... all the important things.

Ali Smith – whose recommendation in The Guardian set me off – has a blurb on the back cover of Teal’s translation that captures it perfectly:

[Jansson’s] writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.

The character of Sophia is based on Jansson's niece of the same name, and I found a video of the real Sophia talking about the 50th anniversary edition. I love the accent of Swedish-speaking Finns. My old Stockholmare friend Fredrik used to admit that Swedish-Finns spoke the nicest Swedish and listening to this I think I'll have to get an audiobook version of Sommarboken.

De Profundis

When I was in Paris in April I took a guided tour of Père-Lachaise cemetery, so of course I visited the imposing resting place of Oscar Wilde.

Our tour guide quoted Oscar, "je n'ai rien d'autre à déclarer que mon génie", which baffled some people on the tour who only came for Jim Morrison.

I hadn't thought about Wilde for many a year, though I'm very familiar with most of his work: Salomé, An Ideal Husband, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and especially The Importance of Being Earnest which I studied for my Leaving Cert and can still quote at length. The one work I'd never engaged with was De Profundis, the long letter he wrote in prison.

A few days later I visited the Pantheon, just out of general interest as I'd never been. There was an exhibition there about the life of Robert Badinter, the French politician who removed the death penalty from the French penal code and decriminalised homosexuality. I learned that Badinter was a fan of Wilde, and that he wrote a play based on De Profundis, decrying the injustice of Wilde's imprisonment. 

Back home, I caught up with my favourite literary podcast Backlisted, re-running one of their old episodes. Stephen Fry joined Andy Miller and John Mitchinson to discuss...De Profundis. It was a brilliant discussion. Fry can sometimes get on my wick with his incessant hamming up, but here he was erudite and even humble as he discussed Wilde, his literary hero.

It was clear what I had to do next. Andy recommended the audio book of De Profundis, read by Simon Russell Beale, and I thoroughly enjoyed it and wondered at its insightfulness. Like this:

People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going.  They can’t know.  In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge.  But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.  The final mystery is oneself.  When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.  Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?  

Sadly, Wilde's insights didn't lead him to any kind of salvation, but his pathetic destitution in Paris doesn't take anything away from the truths he told through his art.

When I was in Dublin a few weeks later I paid my respects at his statue in Merrion Square, a few footsteps from the house where he was born.

Writers of Montparnasse

Martine and I spent a lovely afternoon in Montparnasse cemetery a few weeks ago, visiting the graves of writers.

Short stories
Tall grave

Guy de Maupassant was a renowned short story writer . I first came across him thanks to George Saunders, who did a close reading and breakdown of the story Boule de Suif in his story club, and concluded that learning from Maupassant is a must for any short story writer. His grave is imposing and covered with flowering shrubs.

One of these names has faded...

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre are buried together, in a grave that is covered anew every day in tributes...to Simone. Sartre's name has faded on the headstone. When they were both alive it was he who was more celebrated, but she and her work have aged better.

Self-effacing Sam

The grave of Samuel Beckett and Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil is modest and low to the ground, and the inscriptions are already fading after less than forty years. This all seems rather appropriate for Beckett's personality. I picked up a new copy of Waiting for Godot at Shakespeare & Company and was reminded how vibrant and full of life his writing still is.

Never forget...

Alfred Dreyfus wasn't a writer, but he inspired Émile Zola to write his famous letter J'accuse. I made a brief visit to Montmartre cemetery and saw Zola's grave but didn't take a photo. However, I did place a pebble on Dreyfus' grave in Montparnasse and was happy to see that many others had done the same. 

2025 Readings

In 2025 I read twenty-two books of fiction, six of creative non-fiction, and three new-to-me poetry collections. I read many other things too, in literary magazines and on SubStack for example, but I committed a significant amount of time to each of these thirty-one books.

Fiction

Asimov, Isaac: I, Robot

Barbeau-Lavalette, Anaïs: La femme qui fuit (en français)

Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451

Carson, Jan: Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

Cusk, Rachel: Coventry (my 2nd reading)

Cusk, Rachel: Parade

DeLillo, Don: The Silence

Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Erskine, Wendy: The Benefactors

Flanagan, Richard: Question 7

Gallant, Mavis: Montreal Stories

Harding, Paul: Tinkers

Holloway, Patrick: The Language of Remembering

Lalami, Laila: The Dream Hotel

McCormack, Mike: Getting it in the Head

Ní Chuinn, Liadan: Every One Still Here

O’Neill, Heather: Valentine in Montreal

O’Neill, Joseph: Godwin

Ryan, Donal: heart, be at peace

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Frankenstein

Thien, Madeleine: The Book of Records

Tolstoy, Leo: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Non-fiction

Arendt, Hannah: Eichmann in Jerusalem

Bouchard, Serge: Caribou Hunter / Récits de Mathieu Mestokosho, chasseur innu (In English et en français)

Cron, Lisa: Wired for Story

Gallant, Mavis: Montreal Standard Time

O’Connor, Sinéad: Rememberings

Stonebridge, Lyndsey: We are Free to Change the World

Poetry Collections

Collins, Billy: Aimless Love

MacNeice, Louis: Autumn Journal

Muldoon, Paul: Selected Poems

There are a few connecting threads: Hannah Arendt's life and work for example (the books by Thien, Stonebridge, and Arendt herself), my interest in evolving views of AI and consciousness (Asimov, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), and my exploration of the possibilities of the short story (Carson, Gallant, and Ní Chuinn).

In previous years it's been difficult to pick a single favourite read of the year, but I have no such problems this year. Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is far and away the best thing I've read in a long time. It's an extraordinary book, a combination of fiction, biography, and non-fiction, that delves deep into Flanagan's family history while sweeping across the arc of the 20th century. I loved his Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Flanagan has explained how his father's experience as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese was one of its inspirations for that. In Question 7 his father's experience is once again a starting point, as his father was released when Japan surrendered, an event that could conceivably have its origins in the love affair between Rebecca West and H. G. Wells...

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan project there is no lever at 8.15am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.

I'd rate Question 7 as highly as the best work by W. G. Sebald, which is the highest praise I can offer. This review in The Guardian came to the same conclusion.

• 2024 Readings
• 2023 Readings
• 2022 Readings

Virginia Woolf en Français

The Quebecoise director Lorraine Pintal is on a mission: raise the profile of Virginia Woolf in the francophone community. Last December I saw a piece she directed that was loosely based on Orlando, though I didn't really click with it. A few weeks ago I saw another play that she directed, Indomptable Virginia Woolf, presented in the festival Les Correspondances d'Eastman. I had some troubles with this one too, but for different reasons.

The play, written by Robert Lalonde (who also played the character of Leonard Woolf), is based on Virginia Woolf's diaries, with extracts from several of her works (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando). It works pretty well. This performance felt a little under-rehearsed and underdeveloped, something that Pintal freely admitted was the case as it was put together in a rush in order to be included in the festival, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem was all mine: my French.

Firstly, Robert Lalonde doesn't enunciate very clearly. I had to concentrate hard to get 50% of what he said, and when I mentioned to my francophone wife that he was hard to follow she confirmed that he was a mumbler. But what flipped me over the edge was the scene where Virginia indulges in some fancy wordplay. I'm sure the original English text was witty but translated and adapted into French it went completely over my head. I had an extremely frustrating five or six minutes that seemed like an hour, everyone around me laughing heartily while I was baffled. That coloured my enjoyment of the rest of the piece.

My principal takeaway is that I need to watch more movies in French or perhaps listen to some audiobooks. My day-to-day comprehension is good, but I still do struggle a bit at the theatre. 

To finish on a positive note, the performance by Bénedicte Décary was excellent. She played three characters: Vanessa Bell, Vita Sackville-West, and the Woolf's domestic servant, and she was delightfully convincing in each role. And she enunciated perfectly too, fair play to her.

What is Laurence Lumsden reading?

In July I had a story published in The New Quarterly (yay me!) and the marketing team asked me to write a few posts for their "Online Exclusives" blog. So, here's one I wrote about some of my recent readings: What is Laurence Lumsden reading?

Finish the book!

I've read several articles and social media posts recently along the lines that if a book doesn't grab you after twenty or thirty pages then give it up. Your time is too precious to waste.

Which all seems fair enough. There's no point spending time struggling through a bad book.

But what if it's not a bad book? What if it's a book that others have recognised as fine book, maybe even a masterpiece? Why did you consider reading it in the first place?

In one of those articles, by Marianna Mazza in La Presse, she complained about a two-page description of the winter sun she came across in a book, how it really annoyed her, so she closed the book and abandoned it. So with that mindset the long-windedness of Marcel Proust would not be for her, evidently. But on the other hand, perhaps that's why persevering with a Proustian novel might be perfect for her. By opening her mind to a different sensibility she might gain a new appreciation for the viewpoints of others. She might even become a more patient person. 

I suspect that Marianna Mazza is an advocate of inclusion and diversity in the world, for whom empathy for how others feels is an important value, and here's a way she could embrace that in a very personal way.

Alain de Botton wrote a clever book on this topic: How Proust Can Change Your Life.

One of his points is that Proust was quite deliberate in his style, as he wanted readers to slow down and really pay attention to the scene, and ultimately to the world around them. Botton, a philosopher, describes how habitual behaviour causes us to overlook the beauty around us, that we go through much of our lives on automatic pilot, and that there is much to be gained by focusing on the rich detail all around us.

The writer L.M. Sacassas is often very wise on these matters. Here he is on the difference between being a tourist through life, or a pilgrim:

The way of the tourist is to consume; the way of the pilgrim is to be consumed. To the tourist the journey is a means. The pilgrim understands that it is both a means and an end in itself. The tourist and the pilgrim experience time differently. For the former, time is the foe that gives consumption its urgency. For the latter, time is a gift in which the possibility of the journey is actualized. Or better, for the pilgrim time is already surrendered to the journey that, sooner or later, will come to its end. The tourist bends the place to the shape of the self. The pilgrim is bent to shape of the journey.

2024 Reading List

2024 was a good reading year. I suspect 2025 will be even better, as I'll be diving into fiction to avoid reading any news about you-know-who.

The highlights of my 2024 reading year would have to include these four books:

• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, his first novel, which I read on the basis of a review in The Guardian. The idea is brilliant, a story of a war in ancient Greece made real and relevant by the present tense narration of two characters with funny Dublin accents. It's truly glorious from beginning to end. 
  
  
• The 19th century Russian short stories collected and analysed by George Saunders under the title A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. The stories are really good, but my appreciation of them was doubled by Saunders' explanations. This is such an enjoyable read, but also so insightful for an aspiring writer. 

 

• A memoir that was assigned in a writing craft class, Splinters by Leslie Jamison. It's fair to say that I wasn't looking forward to reading yet another divorce memoir, but Jamison's writing is sharp, insightful, and often extremely witty in an understated and subtle way, a pleasure to read.
  
  
• Orbital. It's wonderful, but sure everybody knows that already. 
  
  

I was a bit disappointed by Mike McCormack's This Plague of Souls. I was so looking forward to it as Solar Bones is one of my all-time favourite novels, but it didn't quite land for me. It felt unfinished. McCormack has said that these books are part of a triptych, with Solar Bones as the centre-piece, so maybe this will all come together in the end when the third novel is published.

I was quite underwhelmed by Sally Rooney's Normal People, just as I was underwhelmed in the past by Beautiful World, Where Are You. I'm ready to accept it's my fault, not Rooney's, but I've given it a good go now so Intermezzo is not in my plans.

Here's the complete list of what I read in 2024:

Fiction

Amis, Martin: The Zone of Interest

Arikha, Alba: Two Hours

Barry, Kevin: That Old Country Music

Boyne, John: Water

Cusk, Rachel: Transit (2nd reading)

Dutton, John B: 2084

Ephron, Nora: Heartburn

Ferrell Carolyn: Dear Miss Metropolitan

Fosse, Jon: A Shining

Harvey, Samantha: Orbital

Keegan, Claire: Foster (2nd reading)

Lennon, Ferdia: Glorious Exploits

McCann, Colum: Thirteen Ways of Looking

McCormack, Mike: Solar Bones (3rd reading)

McCormack, Mike: This Plague of Souls

McLiam Wilson, Robert: Eureka Street

Mitchell, David: Slade House

Murray, Paul: The Bee Sting

Richler, Mordecai: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Rooney, Sally: Normal People

Saunders, George (editor): A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - stories by Chekov, Tolstoy et al

Thúy, Kim: Ru (en Français)

Non-fiction

Balinska, Maria: The Bagel

Cohen, Richard: How to Write like Tolstoy

Dyer, Geoff: The Last Days of Roger Federer

Ho Davies, Peter: The Art of Revision - The Last Word

Jamison, Leslie: Splinters

Olen Butler, Robert: From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

Poetry

Mandelstam, Osip: Stolen Air

Pinsky, Robert: Proverbs of Limbo

Roeser, Dana: All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts

Eternal Orlando

This production at La Maison Symphonique was an 'adaptation' of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando into a performance that combined spoken word with pieces of classical music played by the Orchestre Métropolitain. I put 'adaptation' in inverted commas because beyond the basic outline of the story of the time-travelling and gender-shifting Orlando there wasn't that much left of Woolf's novel. Firstly, the text was changed into a series of dialogues and speeches in French that were more inspired by the novel that translated from it. Secondly, the story was altered to incorporate other pieces by Woolf, such as her famous essay on the historical treatment of women artists A Room of One's Own. But most annoyingly for me, the adaptation incorporated elements of Woolf's own life. 

It's increasingly common to approach art through the artist's biography and while that can be illuminating it also feels reductive, especially for women artists. So Woolf is always the lesbian who killed herself (and Syliva Plath is always the wronged wife, who killed herself). These are very one-dimensional ways of approaching their art. The final scene of this production showed the Orlando / Woolf character filling her pockets with stones, preparing to walk into the river Ouse. I'd rather engage with her art without always thinking about this, then think of her as the brilliant and original author who created Orlando, To the Lighthouse, and especially, Mrs. Dalloway. 

But the music was beautiful. 

The highlight of the evening for me was the concluding piece, the Canadian premiere of a cello concerto by Nathalie Joachim (who was in the audience) with Seth Parker Woods the soloist. The concerto was spectacular in the first movements, and then incredibly moving in the final movement. I'll be looking out for a recording. The playing by Woods was brilliant and charismatic, inspiring the orchestra and audience. His clothes made quite the statement, apparently inspired by the Black Dandyism movement. He looked like a rock star compared to the sombre orchestra musicians. I hope to hear and see him again.

Seth Parker Woods
(screengrab from YouTube)

Am I a writer?

In the Canada Writes Facebook group there was a debate recently about the definition of a writer, and there were opposing views. 'Anyone who writes,' said one group. 'Au contraire,' said the second group. 'That's an "aspiring writer". A writer is someone whose writing has appeared in a publication that has an editor, selection criteria, and other quality controls.' (i.e. self-publishing doesn't count).

Why do I care?  

Well, I'm not a software development leader anymore (so I no longer have much use for my LinkedIn account).

But I've had five stories published by reputable literary magazines, with a sixth one on the way. And I've been paid real money for some of this writing (though if I divided the fee by the time I spent on the piece the hourly rate would be hilariously small!)

So today, this nineteenth of November in the year twenty twenty-four, I'm putting a stake in the ground: I am a writer.

You can find my writing at my new website, LaurenceWrites.com. I'll continue to use this blog for occasional musings and diary entries.

2023 Reading list

This should have been my first post of 2023, but here, belatedly, is a list of the books I read in 2023:

Fiction

Companion Piece by Ali Smith

Daydreams of Angels by Heather O’Neill

Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet

Foster by Claire Keegan

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Look at me by Jennifer Egan

Nirliit by Juliana Léveillé-Trudel (en Français)

Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Tenth of December by George Saunders

The Hour after Happy Hour by Mary O’Donoghue

The Singularities by John Banville

The Writer’s Torch ed. by Boumans, et al

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Tiohtiá:ke by Michel Jean (en Français)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Poetry

Ariel – The Restored Edition by Syliva Plath

If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin

Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

Non-fiction

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy

Negative Space by Cristín Leach

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

It's hard to pick a favourite from this list, but I particularly loved the novels by Paul Harding and Claire Keegan and their completely opposite approaches: the former for the brilliance of his prose in capturing the immediate experience of his characters, and the latter for the deceptive simplicity of her narration and the way it creeps up on you. The non-fiction work by Cristín Leach is wonderfully insightful on the intersection between writing lives and personal lives and I added many quotes from it to my notebook.

See also:

September 2021 - December 2022 reading list

January 2020 - August 2021 reading list

Reading list

I haven't updated the list of books I've read since a post in August 2021. Here's my reading list for the period September 2021 to December 2022.

Fiction

Barnes, Julian: Levels of Life

Barrett, Colin: Homesickness

Borges, Jorge Luis: Labyrinths

Cusk, Rachel: Second Place

Erskine, Wendy: Dance Move

Galgut, Damon: The Promise

Ishiguro, Kazuo: Klara and the Sun

Jean, Michel: Kukum

Keegan, Clare: Small Things Like These

Magee, Audrey: The Colony

Mansfield, Katherine: Selected Stories

Mitchell, David: The thousand autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Murnane, Gerald: The Plains

Rooney, Sally: Beautiful World, Where Are You

Saramago, José: Blindness

Shafak, Elif: Three daughters of Eve

Tóibín, Colm: The Testament of Mary

Woolf, Virgina / Emre, Merve: The annotated Mrs Dalloway

My top three would be the books by Magee, Mitchell, and Saramago, with honorable mentions for Ishiguro and Tóibín. I didn't get on at all with the book by Murnane, simply finding it dull. The book by Sally Rooney was good, she writes well, but I really don't understand what all the hype is about. The narrator's voice in Rachel Cusk's 'Second Place' got on my nerves a bit, but thinking about it afterwards I sense that was deliberate on Cusk's part and I've resolved to read the book again.

I also read a lot of non-fiction and particularly enjoyed the personal history 'We Don't Know Ourselves' by Fintan O'Toole. His Ireland is also my Ireland, and unfortunately it includes the perverted and sexually abusive Christian Brother we both encountered in Colaiste Chaoimhin, me six years after him.

Poetry Collections

Caldwell, Anne: Alice and the North

Ducker, Christy: Skipper

Mahon, Derek: New Selected Poems

Ní Ghríofa, Doireann: Lies

Ní Ghríofa, Doireann: To Star the Dark

These are all great but the collection by Caldwell was particularly illuminating, showing me possibilities that I hadn't imagined before in a themed sequence of prose poems.

Books, memory and the Holocaust

Last Friday I visited the Montreal Holocaust Museum along with my partner-in-life M, and our neighbour J. I've wanted to go for years, since the boys went with their school, and we eventually committed to a date over back-garden drinks with J and her husband. They're a jewish couple, something which is incidental to our usual conversations, but it came up this time after they recounted receiving anti-semitic insults from Trump supporters at their holiday apartment in Florida. They've decided to sell it.

Of course the museum is a terribly moving experience, but it's also a brilliantly educational one. What are the first warning signs of an impending genocide? The museum tells of several, and the one that struck me most were the huge book burnings in Germany in the early 30's. We saw a video of smiling people running to toss piles of books into the towering flames, watching on by celebrating crowds. Books in Hebrew. Books written by jews like Proust and Einstein. Books written by 'degenerates' like Hemmingway. Hatred with smiles, a communal experience in front of a roaring fire, a loosening of repressions, an opening of terrible possibilities. 

It seems to me that writers have a special responsibility to memory. What else is writing other than the ultimate act of remembering? And books have a special symbolism, representing memory and culture, a voice kept alive long after death. 

It's easy to be critical of the modern state of Israel. There's a many good things about it, but its treatment of the Palestinians is so obviously wrong. Criticism of that is just. And needed.

Sally Rooney is a fine writer. She clearly loves books and, well-educated in modern Ireland, she undoubtedly knows the history of the 20th century. She has refused to have her latest book published in Hebrew because the publisher operates in Israel, her way of expressing solidarity with the Palestinians. Frankly, the symbolism of that decision is horrific. And liable to be jumped upon by some of the most unsavoury elements in Irish society, anti-semites who lurk in the so-called republican movement. 

So although I don't always agree with Anne Harris, I'm in complete agreement with her article in today's Irish Times. The rabid reaction of some of the people commentating on it shows why.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Over the weekend I finished 'Beautiful world, where are you' by Sally Rooney. A few years ago I read a fine short story she wrote in the Irish Times, but with all the hype about her since Normal People was televised I thought it was about time I read one of her novels. Well reader, I found it to be a strangely complex and unsatisfying experience. But that might be exactly what she was aiming for. 

For me, the first three quarters of the book are a bit cold and lifeless. The interactions of the four principal characters are stilted, all manners and pose. Their conversations never seem to get to a point, very little that they're saying seems authentic or of any real consequence. Their sexual relations are detailed explicitly but are self-conscious and, dare I say, passionless. In their emails to each other the characters of Eileen and Alice adopt  intellectual personae to pontificate about politics and culture, each seeking to impress the other in an earnest and writerly way, and neither trying to read deeply what the other is saying. The narrator's perspective moves in and out, sometimes intensely close to the thoughts and feelings of the characters, sometime floating far about them and puzzling about what they are thinking, just like the reader is. That seems intentionally cinematographic, like Rooney was already thinking about how this could be filmed. But her mastery of the building blocks of the novel is evident, there is real skill on display here. to the point where I feel she must be deliberately making a point of highlighting the narrative technique rather than the characters.  

And then at about the three-quarters point the four characters come together to share a house for a few days and the story finally grips and we see the emotions come to the fore. Each of them is flawed, and none of them is particularly likeable. But this part is compelling, and as I read it I thought that Rooney had been using the first three quarters as a set up just to emphasize the impact of these moments when the characters reveal themselves. And if that was her plan, well, it worked very well. But just as I was ready to say that this was a great novel, the last two chapters bring us back again into an email exchange, and we're back to that shiny surface that occludes the interior.

At the end I feel this is not a great novel but a very clever one, and that Rooney is in some way challenging her readers, testing what she can get away with. I admire what she has done, but can't say I really loved it. Frankly I got a bit bored with it and rushed to finish it because I didn't care about any of these characters at all. But the author's skill is undeniable and I'm really curious about what she'll produce next.   

Kukum by Michel Jean (en français)

Kukum is the story of a white francophone woman in late 19th-century Québec, who marries an Innu and takes on the life of the First Nations people. She embraces the life of a hunter, moving with the seasons from summer lakeside idylls to harsh winter camps. But over her life of ninety-seven years the natives' lands are taken for logging, their children are taken for forced re-education, and they end up living bleak sedentary lives on a reservation plagued by alcoholism and deprivation (the reservation now known as Mashteuiatsh.)

    You might think you've heard this story before, the tragedy of the First Nations that's sparks much hand-wringing but little action. But what you haven't heard before is the story told in first-person, in the rich and compelling voice of this woman whose passion leaps off the page to inhabit you completely. The voice belongs to Almanda, the eponymous Kukum (grandmother in Innu-aimun). The author has lightly fictionalised the story of his own great-grandmother to create this unforgettable character. The story is not at all bleak. The strongest feelings are her love for her husband and children, and her passionate engagement in their life amongst the lakes, rivers and forests. Her narrative places the Innu at the centre of the history of this part of Québec, along the North Shore of the St. Lawrence (called Nitassinan in Innu-aimun), and weaves in strands such as Francophone politics, Anglophone logging companies, and Irish immigrants. 

    The book is organized into 48 short chapters, bite-sized chunks which worked well for me as I read more slowly in French, helped by the online dictionary of my Kindle. I've been enthusing about the book in dinner conversations with my family, so I've bought a paper copy today to leave in the kitchen where I hope one of them will pick it up.  It's a book that deserves to be read, a compelling novel in its own right but also one that can help to build greater empathy and understanding of the difficulties faced by the First Nations peoples today, and our shared history that brought us to this point.

Reading, not blogging

This is my first post in over a year. But if the pandemic hasn't been a good time for my blogging, it's been great for reading: in these eighteen months I've read twenty-three works of fiction and two collections of poetry. 

What struck me when I listed them was that the majority of the authors were women, sixteen of the twenty-five in fact. That wasn't a plan, it just somehow turned out that way. 

Picking the next book to read is a bit of a convoluted process for me. I research carefully, reading book reviews, recommendations by authors I like,  as well as word-of-mouth from others readers I know. I don't want to waste my reading time. And there were several authors whose book I liked so much I decided to read more of their work so they show up several times in my list: Ali Smith, Francis Spufford, and Madeleine Thien.

Of the books I read for the first time, it would be hard to say which one I loved the most. But if I were forced to choose it would be hard not to say Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, so she's on my 'must read more by her' list. 

So here's the list of fiction and poetry I've read since March 12th 2020. There's not one here I didn't enjoy greatly:

Fiction

Snow, by John Banville
Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry
Quarantine, by Jim Crace
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
Outline, by Rachel Cusk (my second reading of it)
Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo
Travellers, by Helon Habila
Sudden Traveller, by Sarah Hall
A Ghost in the Throat, by Doireann ní Ghríofa
The End of the Road is a Cul de Sac, by Louise Kennedy
Dinosaurs on Other Planets, by Danielle McLaughlin
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
Autumn, by Ali Smith
Winter, by Ali Smith
Spring, by Ali Smith
Summer, by Ali Smith
Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeleine Thien (my third reading of it)
Dogs at the Perimeter, by Madeleine Thien
Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (my third or fourth reading of it)

Poetry

A Poet’s Dublin, by Eavan Boland
Call Me Ishmael Tonight, by Agha Shahid Ali

Aftermath and beforemath

• Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
  
• Motoring as Metaphor by Rachel Cusk
  
• The Pianist of Willesden Lane by Mona Golabek, as performed at the Segal Centre, September 2019

The metaphorical "time's arrow" flies backwards in the novel by Amis. We begin at the end, and end at the beginning. It's clever and expertly executed: food comes out of mouths to be arranged neatly on plates, babies return to their wombs, and the principal character youths (unages?) back through his life. We start with his death, and fast reverse through his old age, then the silver-haired honorable phase of his medical career, back to his mid-life crisis, than to young adulthood where we arrive in a dreadful place. For it soon becomes clear that we will pass through the Holocaust, when the venerable doctor, now a young Nazi medic in Auschwitz, will reconstitite families from piles of twisted corpses.

Why does Amis go to the trouble of telling the story in reverse? Well one reason might be to showcase his brilliance, I suppose, but the reverse exposition had a profound effect on me: I turned each page with an intensifying and terrible dread. The crimes were committed in the medic's youth in the few years of the war. His long life afterwards was an aftermath, a war criminal whose assumed identities never erase who he is. By telling his story in reverse we spend almost all of the novel swimming back through the chill aftermath, our despair growing as we know where we will inevitably end: at the very beginning of the horror. It's not a page turner but it's quite unforgettable.

In Rachel Cusk's essay "Motoring as Metaphor" she recounts an incident involving an elderly driver where, though time's arrow flies in its usual direction, the end changes everything that came before. Cusk writes:

A few years ago a woman of 94 killed a girl of 10 at a pedestrian crossing. There have doubtless been a number of such incidents, but this one has stayed in my mind. One reason, I suppose, has to do with narrative, with the fact that the meaning of this woman's life was entirely altered by a single event at its end: this is not how stories generally work. Since she had already lived an unusually long life I wondered whether the woman wished she had died before killing the girl

Knowing how her story ends causes us to see her 94 years as the lead-up to a tragedy. Effectively that's how Amis is telling his story too, a horror story whose end/beginning changes everything.

Amis tells us the story of a perpertrator, whereas it's the long aftermath of the victims that is the story told by Mona Golabek. A classical pianist, as was her mother who escaped Vienna for London on a kindertransport in 1938, destined to never see her parents again. She grew up in London; they were murdered in Auschwitz. The thread that binds her story is music as she plays the pieces her grandmother taught her mother, Grieg's piano concerto foremost amongst them, echoing down the years of the aftermath. Each piece is as beautiful as when it was first played but each is also changed forever for having passed through those times in the minds of the victims: the dead and their descendants. As we listen to the story and the music, told and played beautifully by Golabek, we are still very much in the aftermath of the horrors, 71 years later.

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.

Tender...

Jim Harrison's "Bridge" is one of the poems I learned off by heart a few years ago. His description of the sea reminds of the times I spent camping in Co. Wexford as a little boy with my family, stormy dark nights when the wind tore at the tent, the rain machine-gunned the canvas, and the sea thundered a baseline to the cacophony. 

Sometimes the sea roars and howls like 

the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.

What beauty in this the darkest music 

over which you can hear the lightest music of human 

behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.

from Bridge by Jim Harrison 

Under a wide and starry night sky I too have felt a connection with the galaxies that sprawl to a horizon a billion light-years away. But the word "tender" intervenes like a note from a different key, intimate and melancholy in the midst of a grand symphony. I don't really understand precisely why the connection might be tender, but I do love the music created by that surprising little phrase.

Reading in bed late one night last week, I heard the same note when that word "tender" showed up in a very different piece.

Comme si cette grande colère m'avait purgé du mal, vidé d'espoir, devant cette nuit chargée de signes et d'étoiles, je m'ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.

from L'étranger by Albert Camus 

Merseault, the eponymous "l'étranger" (best translated as "outsider") of Camus' masterpiece, is expressing the opposite emotion, the stars opening his eyes to the "tender" indifference of the world, rather than its connection with him. But the effect is similar, a note of intimacy and melancholy is struck in this tumultuous last movement of the novel.

I wonder if this resonance only sounds for me or if Harrison deliberately planted it there?  

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

I'm delighted to see this novel get the recognition it merits: Solar Bones by Mike McCormack has just won the International Dublin literary award. I read it last year on the back of a strong review in the Irish Times, and it's one of the very few books which I've turned around and read again as soon as I finished it (Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald being the only other in recent times).

The recent reviews and indeed the blurb on the back of the paperback all give the reader a piece of information about the novel's main character and narrator which in my opinion you would be better off not knowing. I read it on my Kindle and didn't have this information, so I found the first half of the book a bit disorienting and eerie - it was wonderful!

I’ve lived in for nearly twenty-five years and raised a family, this house outside the village of Louisburgh in the county of Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, the village in which I can trace my seed and breed back to a time when it was nothing more than a ramshackle river crossing of a few smoky homesteads clustered around a forge and a log bridge, a sod-and-stone hamlet not yet gathered to a proper plan nor licensed to hold a fair, my line traceable to the gloomy prehistory in which a tenacious clan of farmers and fishermen kept their grip on a small patch of land
   through hail and gale
   hell and high water
men with bellies and short tempers, half of whom went to their graves with pains in their chests before they were sixty, good singers many of them

The other thing you'll hear in any review is that the book is written as one long sentence, which is factually true but misleading. There is a lot of punctuation, just no full stops, and there are obvious pauses and changes of perspective. The quality of the writing is of an uncommonly high standard in its tone and lyricism. It's not a difficult read, quite the contrary it's extremely engaging but demanding of your full attention.

The opening of the novel is pure poetry. In fact as I re-read it now it causes another poem to echo in my mind.

the bell
  the bell as
  hearing the bell as
    hearing the bell as standing here
    the bell being heard standing here
    hearing it ring out through the grey light of this
    morning, noon or night
    god knows
    this grey day standing here and
    listening to this bell in the middle of the day,
 the middle of the day bell, the Angelus bell in the middle of the day

The sounds and repetitions in those opening lines reminds me of the last poem written by Samuel Beckett "What is the word" 

folly –
folly for to –
for to –
what is the word –
folly from this –
all this –
folly from all this –
given –
folly given all this –
seeing –
folly seeing all this –
this –
what is the word –
this this –
this this here –

Hmm, has anyone else noticed this echo?