Poor neglected blog. Still, I did complete my PhD this year as planned, so something had to give. Here's this year's reading summary.
How many books read in 2014?
Only 30 books this year, which may be the lowest ever; there have been reading droughts if not actual incidences of the dreaded reader's block.
Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?
23 fiction and 7 non-fiction; one of the non-fiction books was David Miles's vast but very enjoyable The Tribes of Britain, which ought to count as about 3 books.
Male/Female authors?
13 books by male authors, and 17 by female authors.
Favourite book read?
Ali Smith's How to be Both and Evie Wyld's All the Birds Singing were both wonderful. Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby is an absorbing blend of memoir and travel writing and extremely moving. Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin was full of the unexpected. Honourable mention to Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop, a terribly sad book about the hideous politics of small town life, and to Hilary Mantel's astonishing Beyond Black.
Least favourite?
No real stinkers this year. A couple of slightly dull novels, but I didn't hate them enough to name them here.
Oldest book read?
Pilgrimage 1, by Dorothy Richardson - Pointed Roofs was first published in 1911.
Newest?
Ali Smith's How to be Both and Michael Cunningham's haunting The Snow Queen, both published this year.
Longest book title?
The Man Who Went Into the West, a life of the irascible poet and priest R.S. Thomas by Byron Rodgers.
Shortest title?
Sylvia Townsend Warner's witty account of Somerset.
How many re-reads?
Just one - Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?
Most books read by one author this year?
A December binge on Phil Rickman's marvellous Merrily Watkins books means I've read five books by him this year.
Any in translation?
Death and the Penguin, and Tove Jansson's story collection Travelling Light.
And how many of this year’s books were from the library?
Six library books, four of those borrowed as e-books.
Resolutions next year are to read more, and definitely to blog more.
Wednesday 31 December 2014
Sunday 23 March 2014
Pilgrimage 1 by Dorothy Richardson
I have submitted my thesis, so what could be a better way to celebrate than to start on Dorothy Richardson's modernist epic, a roman fleuve of 13 novels delineating the outer and inner lives of one Miriam Henderson? Pilgrimage has a reputation for being difficult, heavily reliant on interior monologue or, as May Sinclair famously called it in her review of the early novels in the sequence, stream of consciousness. Richardson's work influenced other novels I admire and enjoy, especially Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Sinclair's own Mary Olivier: A Life, and to be perfectly honest I was starting to feel slightly guilty for not having attempted it - so here we go.
The Virago edition of Pilgrimage 1 contains three novels: Pointed Roofs, Backwater, and Honeycomb. Pointed Roofs has a lot in common with other early twentieth-century fictions of women's lives, showing us in the early chapters a rather awkward Miriam and her rather hilarious sisters, their in-jokes and little rituals. Miriam is preparing to leave home to go to work in a school in Germany; her father has lost the family money in unwise speculation, and the girls are having to find work. Miriam takes to Germany, especially the beautiful old town of Hannover, although she remains uncertain about teaching. In fact she is hardly a teacher at all; she is a mixture between a paid English-speaking companion and a friend to the older girls. Miriam has, rather shockingly for the time (the first three books are set during the 1890s) tendencies to atheism, and some of the tension of the first novel comes from her relationship with the school's intensely pious headteacher, Fräulein Pfaff. Miriam was educated at a school run in line with the philosophies and ideas of Ruskin and Darwin, and really this makes her fairly ill-fitted to be a teacher in more conventional establishments. In Backwater she is back in London and teaching at a girls' school in North London, where she attempts to cure a sense of isolation by long walks in the park and a diet of sensation fiction from a penny library. Despite forming close relationships with the spinster sisters who run the school, Miriam leaves to go to work as a governess. In Honeycomb, she is living with the Corries in their country house, caring for two small children and trying to fill the uncomfortable position of one who is not quite a servant and not quite a member of the family, until her mother's ill health means that she has to leave.
In the background to all this are more typical events in the life of a late Victorian young woman. Miriam, when at home, goes to dances and parties, and meets possible young men; one of her sisters marries, and the family is rescued slightly from poverty by her new husband. Events happen off-stage, and are mentioned obliquely; a man that Miriam has been fond of dies, but we only find out about this when Miriam is reassuring a potential employer that she does not intend to marry. The circumstances and events of her mother's depressive illness are similarly obscure. Because everything is shown from Miriam's point of view, we can only know what she chooses to think about, or finds important, and often her thoughts are happenstance and disconnected, as thoughts tend to be. Dorothy Richardson used the materials of her own life to try to document and capture the unfolding development of a consciousness, a huge project that demanded this massive, finely detailed text.
In narrative terms the earlier volumes use a more traditional approach, with clearly signalled changes into the stream of consciousness mode. By Honeycomb, much of the narrative is being expressed through Miriam's thoughts and impressions. Does this make it difficult? I wouldn't say it is as difficult as parts of Joyce, but the allusive and obscure style meant that I needed to read attentively if I wanted to know what was happening, and it was easy to miss key sentences in the middle of a long internal monologue. But the attention paid off, and the book is highly enjoyable. I found Miriam and her negotiations with the world fascinating and very real, and the way that significant events emerge from her internal monologue can be very moving. The Pilgrimage series is in print, all four volumes being published by Virago.
The Virago edition of Pilgrimage 1 contains three novels: Pointed Roofs, Backwater, and Honeycomb. Pointed Roofs has a lot in common with other early twentieth-century fictions of women's lives, showing us in the early chapters a rather awkward Miriam and her rather hilarious sisters, their in-jokes and little rituals. Miriam is preparing to leave home to go to work in a school in Germany; her father has lost the family money in unwise speculation, and the girls are having to find work. Miriam takes to Germany, especially the beautiful old town of Hannover, although she remains uncertain about teaching. In fact she is hardly a teacher at all; she is a mixture between a paid English-speaking companion and a friend to the older girls. Miriam has, rather shockingly for the time (the first three books are set during the 1890s) tendencies to atheism, and some of the tension of the first novel comes from her relationship with the school's intensely pious headteacher, Fräulein Pfaff. Miriam was educated at a school run in line with the philosophies and ideas of Ruskin and Darwin, and really this makes her fairly ill-fitted to be a teacher in more conventional establishments. In Backwater she is back in London and teaching at a girls' school in North London, where she attempts to cure a sense of isolation by long walks in the park and a diet of sensation fiction from a penny library. Despite forming close relationships with the spinster sisters who run the school, Miriam leaves to go to work as a governess. In Honeycomb, she is living with the Corries in their country house, caring for two small children and trying to fill the uncomfortable position of one who is not quite a servant and not quite a member of the family, until her mother's ill health means that she has to leave.
In the background to all this are more typical events in the life of a late Victorian young woman. Miriam, when at home, goes to dances and parties, and meets possible young men; one of her sisters marries, and the family is rescued slightly from poverty by her new husband. Events happen off-stage, and are mentioned obliquely; a man that Miriam has been fond of dies, but we only find out about this when Miriam is reassuring a potential employer that she does not intend to marry. The circumstances and events of her mother's depressive illness are similarly obscure. Because everything is shown from Miriam's point of view, we can only know what she chooses to think about, or finds important, and often her thoughts are happenstance and disconnected, as thoughts tend to be. Dorothy Richardson used the materials of her own life to try to document and capture the unfolding development of a consciousness, a huge project that demanded this massive, finely detailed text.
In narrative terms the earlier volumes use a more traditional approach, with clearly signalled changes into the stream of consciousness mode. By Honeycomb, much of the narrative is being expressed through Miriam's thoughts and impressions. Does this make it difficult? I wouldn't say it is as difficult as parts of Joyce, but the allusive and obscure style meant that I needed to read attentively if I wanted to know what was happening, and it was easy to miss key sentences in the middle of a long internal monologue. But the attention paid off, and the book is highly enjoyable. I found Miriam and her negotiations with the world fascinating and very real, and the way that significant events emerge from her internal monologue can be very moving. The Pilgrimage series is in print, all four volumes being published by Virago.
Sunday 26 January 2014
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
This short novel tells the story of Siss, a young Norwegian girl who finds herself strangely drawn to the new girl in her class, orphan Unn who has only recently come to live in their isolated little town. The two girls spend an evening together that becomes freighted with meaning for both of them when Unn indicates she has a secret that cannot be spoken. The next day, excited about her new friend, Siss rushes to school, but Unn is nowhere to be seen; as excited and moved as Unn, she has taken the day off and gone to visit the titular ice palace - a waterfall frozen into fantastic caves and shapes. When Unn does not return, the local people searching for her put pressure on Siss to tell them everything that she knows - but what, really, does she really know about Unn? and will Unn ever come home?
There are lots of mysteries at the heart of this book, and Vesaas's style is often oblique and self-contained, not really giving anything away, but it also ranges to the poetic (one short chapter is actually in poem form) and to expansive interior monologue. We hear a lot of Siss's thoughts, and are invited to suffer with her as she, her parents, friends and neighbours, all try to resolve the feelings that arise from Unn's disappearance. The descriptions of the snowy Norwegian winter and the astonishing ice palace are lyrical and evocative. There is not much dialogue, and what there is is either direct and to the point, or deliberately vague and evasive. Vesaas weaves together a coming-of-age narrative with stories of friendship and of loss, producing a novel which is satisfyingly interesting even while it retains its own mysterious ambiguity.
I'm slightly ashamed that I first knew this story through the 1987 film of the same name, which I saw years ago without having any idea that it was based on a novel. Thanks to an episode of BBC Radio 4's A Good Read, however, where it was the choice of the writer Gabriel Gbadamosi, I realised that there was a novel and my kind partner bought it for me for Christmas. It's an excellent winter read, brief but very resonant, and will repay re-reading. The film doesn't seem to be available to buy, which is a shame - I remember it as extremely beautiful.
There are lots of mysteries at the heart of this book, and Vesaas's style is often oblique and self-contained, not really giving anything away, but it also ranges to the poetic (one short chapter is actually in poem form) and to expansive interior monologue. We hear a lot of Siss's thoughts, and are invited to suffer with her as she, her parents, friends and neighbours, all try to resolve the feelings that arise from Unn's disappearance. The descriptions of the snowy Norwegian winter and the astonishing ice palace are lyrical and evocative. There is not much dialogue, and what there is is either direct and to the point, or deliberately vague and evasive. Vesaas weaves together a coming-of-age narrative with stories of friendship and of loss, producing a novel which is satisfyingly interesting even while it retains its own mysterious ambiguity.
I'm slightly ashamed that I first knew this story through the 1987 film of the same name, which I saw years ago without having any idea that it was based on a novel. Thanks to an episode of BBC Radio 4's A Good Read, however, where it was the choice of the writer Gabriel Gbadamosi, I realised that there was a novel and my kind partner bought it for me for Christmas. It's an excellent winter read, brief but very resonant, and will repay re-reading. The film doesn't seem to be available to buy, which is a shame - I remember it as extremely beautiful.
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