“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language /And next year’s words await another voice.” (TS Eliot)

November 7, 2013March 31, 2014 / madamebibilophile / 12 Comments

Today marks a year since my first blog post. During the year I’ve got so much more out of blogging than I ever thought possible, and that is due in no small part to my fellow bloggers, you gorgeous bunch. So I thought it would be apt to commemorate my first year by looking at a piece of writing by another WordPress blogger.

(Image from http://www.juicyoccasions.co.uk/2012_02_01_archive.html)

Becky Mayhew blogs at Becky Says Things. Her blog is funny, insightful and truly original. Do check it out, I promise you will be better for it as Becky points and laughs at the absurdities of life, and has something interesting to say about it all too. In 2011, Becky had a collection of short stories published by the lovely Treehouse Press, Lost Souls. It is collection of three stories, “Shelves”, “Ramona” and “Roses”.

“Shelves” is told to us by a librarian, whose sexual encounters are intertwined with her job and the reading matter of her partners. So she sleeps with the “insipid, vole-like” Geoffrey when he takes on board her suggestion to abandon John Grisham for Jane Austen, and later, after Wuthering Heights:

“I think the dynamic impression of hot-blooded Heathcliff had gone to his head a little, as he had the audacity to suggest we go back to mine. I conceded, and took him round the corner along the twelve houses to my flat, almost entirely for my own personal interest in what a week of Heathcliff does to a man; as it turned out, less than I hoped.”

As the passage above shows, there’s a wry, dry humour running through the tale, and the librarian’s voice is strong and distinctive. There are some beautiful images and Becky has an original turn of phrase:

“His eyes slid like oil over titles, one black eyebrow raised; occasionally he paused to finger a book spine or to bend to a lower shelf, and then he moved on, disappearing and reappearing in and out of bookcases like a thief.”

Fellow bibliophiles, didn’t we always know that libraries are hotbeds of sexual tension?

The narrator of “Ramona” is a middle-aged teacher, struggling to assert herself in all aspects of her life. I know enough teachers to know the description of how “it is depressing trying to teach a class of idiots who are far more interested in their social and sexual status than in how Margaret Atwood develops her characters” rings true. The narrator’s interest in one of her pupils, Ramona Manson, is slightly baffling to her, as Ramona “is not charming, she is not beautiful, she is not even particularly threatening”, and yet, she goes through life with an ease the narrator cannot achieve, and with a sense of authority that continually evades the older woman. The plot of “Ramona” is a simple one, and yet through this largely unremarkable time the fracture lines in the teacher’s life become fully exposed. The story is an artfully constructed portrait of an ordinary life teetering on the edge.

I loved the first line of the final story, “Roses”: “There he is, inside a flaming scarlet halo.” It’s a perfect example of what is to come – a beautifully written, unnerving, and insidiously violent tale. Unlike the other two stories, “Roses” is told in the third person, from the point of view of Elizabeth, a florist and fantasist, for whom the flowers are people:

“The bamboo chuckles raspingly under its breath. The lilies poke out their tongues; the sunflowers nod on their aching necks, shoulders shaking with weary laughter…”

Elizabeth spends her day obsessed with a man who uses the coffee shop opposite her florists:

“Sometimes she can feel him, in the long stretches when she is alone with her flowers; she can feel a presence, a warmth about her, as though he is sitting right there beside her, breathing her perfumed air. Their worlds beautifully interlaced like the coiling infinity of an open rose.”

That last sentence is such perfectly balanced writing: an image of originality and meaning without any pretension or heavy-handedness. I don’t want to say too much more about “Roses” as it would give the plot away, but the final page of this book, containing the last four short paragraphs of this story, was breathtakingly well-written. The images are startling and evocative, and I absolutely loved this story. Becky has blogged in the past about her tendency to procrastinate. I can only hope she is more successful than me at beating this behaviour, because I want to read more of her work very soon…

On their website, Treehouse Press say “we want our books to be unique and beautiful objects, a thing you’d want to hold in your hand, and also for the writing and the artwork to engage you”. Hopefully I’ve convinced you of the engaging quality of Becky’s writing. In the book the stories are alongside the haunting images of Paul G. Vine’s photographs, certainly making it a lovely object. You can buy Lost Souls direct from the publisher at http://www.treehousepress.co.uk/products/lost-souls , so if you’d like to get Becky’s book can I enter a plea that you buy it there and not from a certain tax-avoiding multi-national company?

(Image from http://www.treehousepress.co.uk/products/lost-souls )

Thanks to everyone who’s looked at the blog/followed/commented/re-blogged etc and made the last year such a joy!

“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” (Betty Reese)

July 20, 2013July 20, 2013 / madamebibilophile / 2 Comments

My mother was telling me this week that she has had a lot of ideas for short stories come to her, and was asking me for collections of short stories to read to update herself with the form. It was a coincidence as I’d just finished reading Miranda July’s No-one Belongs Here More than You (Canongate, 2007) which is a highly readable collection of odd, unsettling stories that were both challenging and compassionate. So there’s my first recommendation. I’ve talked about short story collections in other posts: James Joyce’s Dubliners, Jeremy Dyson’s Never Trust a Rabbit, but I thought I’d write a post specifically around this type of fiction, as according to Truman Capote, the short story is “the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing”. Good luck Maman!

Firstly, Sea Monster Tattoo and Other Stories by Ruth Thomas (1997, Polygon). This was Ruth Thomas’ debut, and it is a confident and varied collection of stories, some of which are only a few pages. “In Love” is one such story, an entire love affair described over 2 and half sides. Thomas is such an accomplished writer than the brevity doesn’t result in a lack of depth. Rather, she is able to create a sense of things distilled to their essence, but lightly, looking at the meaning of everyday occurrences. Sometimes her imagery is startling:

“In February her flatmate said, “I can’t stand the strain,” and moved out. Everything had ice on it, even eyelashes.”

This almost seems like a non-sequitur, then the meaning hits you, all the more forcefully for allowing the reader to connect the dots. Some of the stories read like that as a whole; Thomas takes snapshots of lives and then leaves you to find the meaning in the picture. The title story tells the tale of a group of girls travelling in southern Europe. Rather than a time of youthful exuberance, it’s an experience of dreary surroundings and small niggles. As the narrator feels distanced from her companions, we are brought alongside her thoughts:

“I’m thinking of the last time I was on a ferry, in Scotland. It was cold then too, at a strange time in the morning; I had got off some coach, woken up from some strange dream, and I think there were also sheep in a lorry. But I was much younger, travelling with my family. When we got on board there was a fruit machine and decks of cards sticky with beer. The crossing took over four hours. My mother tried to get me to sleep on an orange plastic sofa in the lounge but I just sat and stared out of the window at the sea , which was dark and wide and smooth as chocolate.”

The stories in Sea Monster Tattoo are full of such small observances, both of surroundings and of people. Through these details, Thomas shows great empathy and understanding, and just how much a short narrative can express.

Secondly, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken (1993, Turtle Bay Books). Again, this was a writer’s debut, but I confess I read it after I’d read her first novel, The Giant’s House, because I’d loved it so much. I wasn’t disappointed. The things I’d loved about the novel: inventiveness, compassion, quirkiness, are all present in McCracken’s short fiction. In “It’s Bad Luck to Die”, a woman tells of her love for her tattoo artist husband. She’s six feet tall:

“Years later he told me how he was bowled over by all those square inches of skin, how I was so big and still not fat. “I fell for you right away,” he said.

[…] but he didn’t give me my first tattoo till a year later, the day after we were married: a little butterfly pooled in the small of my back. Five years later, he began referring to it as his “early work,” even though he’d been tattooing for twenty-five years before he met me. That didn’’t rankle me as much as you might think – I liked being his early body of work, work-in-progress, future. That little butterfly sat by itself for a while, but in five years time Tiny flooded it with other designs: carnations, an apple, a bomber plane, his initials.”

The tattoos are a living part of her, she almost expects to prick herself on a rose etched on her body. In the course of 22 pages McCracken portrays this couple and their method of communication that no-one around them understands with such delicate sensitivity that I was really moved by the story; I found the final line brought tears to my eyes. Proof that in the right writer’s hands, you don’t need a whole novel.

In the title story, McCracken’s offbeat humour is at the fore, with a tale of Aunt Helen Beck, who claims to be peoples’ aunt even though they don’t know her, and in this way travels around the country taking advantage of their hospitality. She is a forceful presence:

They went around back and walked into a bright kitchen, full of the sorts of long skinny plants Aunt Helen Beck had always distrusted: they looked like they wanted to ruffle your hair or sample your cooking. The boy followed them into the house…

“So,” she said. “what’s your name?”

“Mercury,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Ford shrugged. “His mother likes planets.”

“I like vegetables,” said Aunt Helen Beck, “but I wouldn’t name my child Rutabaga.”

Aunt Helen Beck isn’t quite as morally upright and conservative as she likes to convey, and she and Mercury bond in what is a truly touching, unlikely friendship. I think this is McCracken’s great strength: her characters are always unusual but not self-consciously quirky, and her writing reminds us of all the ways human beings can reach out to each other across seeming differences.

Both these collections contain lots of little gems, great stories by accomplished writers with distinctive voices.

Here are the books with a pea, and any princess who’s had a sleepless night can attest to how powerful this small thing can be:

“I’m frightened of eggs” (Alfred Hitchcock)

April 1, 2013July 18, 2013 / madamebibilophile / Leave a comment

This weekend has been the long Easter weekend in the UK. I appreciate not everyone’s Christian (myself included) or that even if you are you might not necessarily celebrate Easter now but in May instead, or not at all. So I don’t want to bang on about the festival itself at any great length, but I did use it as a starting point for this week’s choices. I chose a book with references to bunnies in the title, and one about life & death, seeing as how its Easter and springtime, season of renewal. Two ways to celebrate Easter with no associated risk of adult-onset diabetes (unless of course you tuck into chocolate eggs & simnel cake while reading them, behaviour which I couldn’t possibly endorse…)

Firstly, Never Trust a Rabbit by Jeremy Dyson (Duck editions, 2000). Dyson is one of the comedy quartet The League of Gentlemen. I’m not sure how much success they had outside of the UK, so do forgive me if I’m about to tell you what you already know. The League made three TV series set in the fictional village of Royston Vasey, where three of the four writers played various bizarre residents of the village (Dyson doesn’t enjoy appearing on screen). They also made a feature film (The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse), in which they played themselves, and Michael Sheen played the role of Dyson. The reason I mention the TV series is that is if you’re familiar with it, you’ll already have an idea of what to expect: the village production of The Sound of Music as directed by Dario Argento. The book contains twelve short stories which present familiar situations but unnerve the reader as it gradually emerges that the reality we are dealing with is not exactly what we think we know. My favourite was probably City Deep, set on the London Underground. It’s an environment I have to deal with regularly but that I try to avoid wherever possible, as I hate the idea of being trapped in a crowd in a tunnel underground. Dyson perfectly captured the stifling, detached reality that the Tube offers and took it a step further, with a ghoulish, terrifying denouement that to a reluctant tube-user like myself seemed at once outrageous and entirely believable (the dark, hidden truth that I suspected was always there). But the stories aren’t resolutely parochial. The longest story, The Engine of Desire, takes in several locations worldwide, as the sinister Jack Sleighmaker travels the globe to track down whatever item his extremely wealthy clients desire, by any means necessary. Sleighmaker is an utterly reprehensible human being and his client is the equally despicable Prince Bandar, but Dyson’s writing is so well-paced and compelling that you find yourself reading on despite not rooting for any of the characters. I read this story in bed and found it so creepy I had to watch clips of kittens falling off things on YouTube before I could go to sleep. The twelve stories in the collection are all equally strong, there are no weak links; they are also varied enough from one another to keep you entertained while still working together as a collection. (As a P.S to this, another member of The League is Mark Gatiss, whose novels about the gentleman spy Lucifer Box I discuss in the post “Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes” on 14 November 2012).

Secondly, The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri. This novel tells the story of Vishnu, an odd-job man in a residential block, who sleeps on the landing, and now lies dying the same place. An author’s note at the start of the novel tells you this is based on a true story: while the characters that surround Vishnu are fictional, Vishnu’s name, occupation, and the manner of his death are all true. I’m still not sure how I feel about this: whether it seems cruel and uncaring, or whether as a Westerner I’m too used to seeing death made taboo, institutionalised and tucked away out of sight so we don’t have to deal with it or our own mortality, and to let a man die where he chooses, the place where he has always lived in full sight, is an acceptance of the process we all face. The novel doesn’t offer easy answers, it instead presents things as they are and encourages us to recognise a common humanity, in its many guises. Take the opening line: “Not wanting to arouse Vishnu in case he hadn’t died yet, Mrs Asrani tiptoed down to the third step above the landing on which he lived, teakettle in hand.” On the one hand this shows consideration, on the other, Mrs Asrani doesn’t want to wake Vishnu up because she doesn’t want to deal with him. Things are not clearly defined in the novel, the characters are all flawed (Vishnu is an alcoholic who is bribed into doing his work by the residents) but they are fully drawn and entirely believable. We learn about the residents of the block and their various intrigues, and about Vishnu himself as the ordinary events of the day mingle with his reminiscences about his life. It seems apt to include his memory of Holi, as last week was Holi week:

“The light shines through the landing window. It plays on Vishnu’s face. It passes through his closed eyelids and whispers to him in red. The red is everywhere, blanketing the ground, coloring the breeze. It must be the red of Holi. He is nine, hiding behind a tree, fistfuls of red powder in each hand.”

The Death of Vishnu is beautifully written but in a simple style that allows the characters to breathe and readers to find their own way amongst them.

Here are the books with some non-chocolate eggs, so if you share Hitchcock’s phobia look away now:

“Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.” (Albert Einstein)

February 2, 2013January 9, 2016 / madamebibilophile / 2 Comments

Two days ago I went to a talk at the London Review Bookshop entitled The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things with Paula Byrne and John Mullan. These two authors have both recently published works on Austen, and realised that they shared common ground in their consideration of the treatment of “small things” in her work, hence the joint talk. I hadn’t read either of their books, but if they are as lively, learned and accessible in print as they are in person, and you are interested in Jane Austen, I would hazard a guess that seeking out their work would be time well spent.

So this got me thinking about the treatment of small things in literature and I came home to peruse my bookshelves and decide on which books to discuss in this post. I was struck by how many were suitable, how many look at the small things in our lives. I suppose novels lend themselves to this – it is an intimate form, taking us inside people’s heads, but via our own internal voice. The gap between ourselves and the story becomes almost imperceptible. Novels can detail the minutiae of life, and I often think that is where the intimacy is. You know a person well when you know the small things. A writer who knew the value of small things is oddly, a writer whose most famous work was epic. James Joyce, author of Ulysses, used to document what he called epiphanies, to use in his work. What exactly constitutes an epiphany and how to define it is a matter of debate, but I don’t think it matters that we can’t exactly say what they are. In Stephen Hero (an unpublished precursor to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) Joyce defines epiphanies as “the most delicate and evanescent of moments”. Not all of his recorded epiphanies survive, but an oft-quoted one is as follows:

“The Young Lady-(drawling discreetly) … 0, yes … I was … at the … cha … pel …

The Young Gentleman- (inaudibly) … I … (again inaudibly) … I …

The Young Lady-(softly) … 0 … but you’re … ve … ry … wick … ed .”

The meaning that Joyce found in this delicate, evanescent moment cannot be known for sure, but the epiphanies show us that this great writer took small matters seriously and sought out their truth.

If you’ve given Ulysses a bash & given up, you are far from alone. I only know one person who’s finished it. But don’t let that put you off Joyce entirely. Dubliners is a collection of 15 stories set in the Irish capital and is far more accessible than Ulysses. Deceptively so, as the more you look into the stories the more complex and multi-layered they reveal themselves to be, a bit like the small things in life that we actually attach great meaning to. But the stories can be read easily and a lot gained from doing so, without even exploring their complexities. They are written in groups of ages, starting off with tales of childhood, then young adulthood, progressing to the final story, The Dead. Eveline is the fourth story, (from the young adult group) and begins:

“She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.”

In these opening three sentences Joyce evokes so much about Eveline’s situation through the small things: exactly why she is tired, why the curtains are dusty, and why she is looking out into the city become more apparent throughout the story, and these small things have a cumulative meaning of great significance. But Joyce never explicitly states the epiphanies of his stories, leaving it instead for the reader to extract meaning. The stories are determinedly small (like Austen’s “two inches of ivory”) but at the same time, by allowing readers to decide for themselves, Joyce ensures they are also limitless.

I saw Annie Proulx interviewed once and she said the short story was her favourite form as every word counts. Joyce described the style of Dubliners as one of “scrupulous meanness”, and he famously spent days constructing sentences: “the right words in the right order” (how did Ulysses ever get finished?), making every word count. I think this is what makes him both the perfect observer and constructor of small things.

In keeping with the theme of this post, I’m only discussing one book this time. There didn’t seem to be another one as perfect for this theme as Dubliners, so I decided it was clear I should keep the post a small thing in itself. (There were lots of contenders though; I’ll have to work out how to squeeze them into another theme). And rather than a photo, this time I’ll leave you with a question raised in this video of one of the greatest moments in one of the greatest sitcoms: are small things really small, or just far away……?