The books I read, Summer 2012
Throughout the
summer I worked hard on my portfolio for the MA course in creative writing at
Lancaster University, but this didn’t stop me from reading extensively as well.
I read mainly one author: Andrew Motion.
I was intrigued by his last poetry collection, The Cinder Path, after a reading at the
Storey Auditorium organized by Paul Farley and including Jean Sprackland and
Daljit Nagra. It was so exciting to have such great poets reading their work in
Lancaster that I hardly believed it was real till I saw them on the stage.
Afterwards I
browsed on the Internet and found out that Andrew Motion wrote not only poetry
(he was appointed Poet Laureate for ten years in 1999) but also prose, fiction
and non-fiction. I ordered some of his books and started my reading adventure.
His autobiography, In
the Blood, a memoir of my childhood, was my first great experience. His enchanting writing style -- the choice of
words, the evocative images and detailed descriptions -- creates a whole magic
world where the reader wends in ecstasy. I found his prose surreal in parts,
always gripping, massively appealing. The events he describes in the
autobiography may seem ordinary, everyday things but take the shape of unique
adventures in his narration. And this is the secret of life, and of writing,
isn’t it?
The death of
his mother when he was only seventeen is narrated at the beginning of the book
as if it has influenced all his life, before and after the event. An
existential sense of loss, a stoic nostalgia is present in all his work. The
intuition of something rare and priceless he will never attain again; it may be
childhood, innocence, love, health or dreams. It is like the pearl in the
parable about the Kingdom of Heaven: a merchant found an invaluable pearl and
sold everything he had to buy it. But here the pearl is irretrievably lost.
This profound
awareness made me think of one of the greatest Italian poets: Giacomo Leopardi.
I have re-read his work recently and can’t help linking his mature poems with
Andrew Motion’s work. The relationship is more about feelings and emotions than
specific connections. Their deep understanding of our world, of its inner
meanings and the capacity to communicate it, typical of great artists.
Besides The Cinder Path,
I also read Love in a Life and The Price of Everything, two poetry
collections. I found again a pervading, understated sense of the struggle to
attain something lost forever: his mother’s love, an antidote to solitude, the
peace of the heart, wholeness, truth. A never ending, sometimes excruciating
quest, whose goal is a secret treasure hidden somewhere. Speaking of which he
wrote Silver, return to Treasure Island,
a follow up to Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
The book is
written in his usual rich, fascinating style. The story is gripping, eventful
and contemplative at the same time. Jim, Jim Hawkin’s son, and Natalie, Long
John Silver’s daughter, sail for an adventure to find the rest of the treasure
their fathers left behind: the silver part. A perfect combination of pace, setting and enchanting atmosphere makes
the book extremely entertaining and the story engrossing in both plot and
philosophy.
I also read The
Invention of Dr Cake and Ways of
Life, on places, painters and poets, absolutely delightful readings. What I
especially liked were the parts where a landscape, or a picture, or the life
and work of a poet become alive in his descriptions. They speak to the reader
in a clear, passionate voice. I would be surprised if Andrew Motion wasn’t on
the list of the likely candidates for the Nobel Prize for literature.
In the last few days of my summer holidays I enjoyed the
Paralympics, above all the awesome opening ceremony. I was also able to see the
Abbot Hall exhibition in Kendal, Francis
Bacon to Paula Rego, celebrating 50 years of great British painters. There
were some exceptional pieces by Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow, Robert Priseman,
Michael Andrews, and Francis Bacon and Paula Rego of course. They also
displayed A Rake’s Progress by David
Hockney, a clever transposition to
1960s USA of Hogarth’s Rise and Fall of Tom Rakewell.
I found the
Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry interesting too. I especially admired
Stanley Webb Davies’ spare, unfussy pieces of furniture and the Ruskin laces.
Back to my usual life, it was all cleaning, washing and
ironing for a while. Then school started...and we began planning our next
holiday.
The books I read,
I had a relaxing
holiday, with no worries about cooking, cleaning or ironing (I just helped my
mother with the washing up), so plenty of time to read.
At first I immersed
myself in A kind of Intimacy by Jenn
Ashworth (I know she wrote two more books after it: Cold Light and The Friday
Gospel, but I like to start from the beginning), which completely gripped
me for several days. The setting and characters were developed and portrayed so
well that I felt I was back in the north of England.
After it, I finished
two collections of poetry I had started before Christmas: The Customs House by Andrew Motion and Bevel by William Letford. They are slim books, but poetry needs to
be savoured and re-read again and again, to absorb its rhythm and the images it
develops. Andrew Motion’s poetry is so well crafted and at the same time so
profound and true that it touches your inner self. William Letford’s poems are
very different but definitely interesting. I saw him performing at the Litfest
in Lancaster last October and whenever I read his lines I can’t help but hear
his Scottish accent, which makes his poems even more appealing.
The War Tour by Zoe Lambert was my next step, a collection of short stories on
wars or memories of wars told by witnesses. Each story is perfectly set and
creates the sense of fear and loss typical of the harsh reality of war.
Then I tackled a book I
had just bought in Rome, selected poems by J.L.Borges from 1923 to 1976. I had
never read his poetry before so it was surprising to discover how his complex
imagination worked. His poems are passionate and erudite at the same time; his
images are both tangible and cerebral.
My last task was to
finish a beloved collection I had started before Christmas: Tea at the Midland and other stories by
David Constantine: stories of relationships, love, loneliness, homeless people,
told with a touch of surrealism that makes the author’s world unique.
On my father’s desk I
found Un Papa difficile da amare (a
Pope difficult to love) by Leonardo Boff. My family has always been very
critical towards the Vatican and my parents are non believers. I had read
Boff’s book some years ago (it was published when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was
elected Pope in 2005). Reading it again I found it still relevant and I agreed
with its ideas even more. The main point the author states is that the Catholic
Church is not going to change its conservative line and revise its structure.
In fact it almost ignores the new and urgent needs of mankind, like poverty,
sexual diversity and the new role of women. Leonardo Boff, like St. Francis,
hopes for a humble, unwordly Church that should give up its temporal power,
huge wealth and rich palaces. Who will believe that this would ever happen?
Another book my father
gave me is the Italian translation of Original
Blessing by Matthew Fox. I had no time to read it all but did look at the
introduction by Vito Mancuso. He treats the text as a proposal to rediscover an
authentic, original Christianity based on joy and peaceful living, without too
much stress on sin and faults. This has already been propounded in past
centuries by saints and eminent religious people, like St. Francis, Nicola
Cusano, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Pope John XXIII, Thomas Merton,
Meister Eckhard and Matilda of Magdeburg. Like Leornardo Boff, Matthew Fox was
also excluded from his religious order by Cardinal Ratzinger.
In the introduction
there is also a long list of inquisitors, people who repressed religious
creativity and crushed free thinking (Bernard Gui, Nicolau Eymerich, Thomàs de
Torquemada, Heinrick Kramer, Michele Ghislieri), and a much longer list of
people slaughtered in Italy because they didn’t agree with the Catholic Church.
Above all there was the Waldenses’ extermination in Calabria in 1561 by order
of Michele Ghislieri, who became Pope Pius V and a saint in 1712. There
followed a long list of heretics and virtual heretics burned at the stake,
among them priests, friars, preachers and protestants.
Of course like all temporal
powers the Catholic Church is not dependent on the whim of evangelical mercy,
but on the more convenient oxymoron ‘true freedom is in giving up your own
freedom and surrendering to the Church’. Obedience is more important than love.
Will a new Pope change
anything?
Summer journal 2013, books
I had a busy reading
holiday enjoying every book I read, savouring every line in the sun, when we
had such gorgeous days in July, or inside when it was cloudy, lazily stretching
out on the sofa. I read poems, short short stories (also called flash fiction)
and a few novels.
Pure Contradiction, selected poems by Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated and introduced by Ian Crockatt, Arc publication 2012, was the first
Rilke poems I have ever read. The introduction is insightful, clear and shows a
deep knowledge of Rilke’s poetry, which made me trust the translator.
Definitely life and poetry was one thing for Rilke: he lived for poetry and
poetry sprung out of his life, the prototype of the Romantic artist. I can’t
understand German, except for a few words here and there, so I was particularly
interested in the way Ian Crockatt worked on the original. In the introduction
he acknowledges that a translated poem sounds very different in its new
language (the words seem strange, much more than in a prose piece) but at the
same time we need the translation. The translator can’t help interpreting a
poem but also needs to find a balance between what the author says and his view
of it. I found the translations in the book were very clever and kept the
poetic rhythm and tone of the pieces. What impressed me in Rilke’s poetry was
his capacity to expand from an intimate personal experience to the physical and
mental space around. He amplifies and embraces the whole world, reaches cosmic meanings and aspires to a
total osmosis with abstract mysteries and inexplicable truths. For this reason
he uses mainly abstract words and there isn’t any attempt at rational analysis.
All is played in a wonderful world of emotions, sensations, intuitions, so
beautifully and deeply felt that it aches. Tremendously lyrical and sensual.
Besides, I loved the picture on the cover of the book, the stylized shape of a
dawn in a green field by Wenna Crockatt.
At Ledbury Festival I
attended Jamie McKendrick’s reading and bought two of his collections: Crocodiles & Obelisks (Faber and
Faber 2007) and Out there (Faber and
Faber 2012). I enjoyed both enormously. Crocodiles
& Obelisks reveals how mysterious connections and contradictions rule
different events in our unpredictable world, e.g. a father who tells his son not to ‘wear a wig or join
the Masons’ while he is a Mason and wears a wig, dead people described as
‘villains we pretend to love’, a telescope ‘whose desire is so intense it sees
in the total dark’ and a flat in Salerno whose floor covers secret hideouts and
layers of settlements. Irony and humour veil a deep understanding of human
beings which makes the reading entertaining and engrossing. Out there is another ironic, clever
collection of poems. The quotation from Dante’s Paradiso ‘Questo aiuolo che ci
fa tanto feroci’(This little patch of earth that makes us all so fierce),
reveals the core of our concerns. Though ‘this little patch of earth’ is all we
can think about and fight for, it is our paradise. The attention the author has
for details (trees, gates, rain, wind, colours) and the original way he links
them to us, to his existence, to our lives, make the book worth reading. We are
part of a natural world where we feel strangers and at home at the same time. A
superb attempt to catch its meaning by filtering it through everyday
experience.
Sleeping Keys by Jean Sprackland (Cape Poetry, 2013) made me love her poetry even
more. Apparently simple, down to earth poems with deep, unexpected, surprising
images. Ordinary themes and occasions inspired the poems: cleaning a chimney,
buying an aquarium, house plants, old keys, a staircase, but they are treated
in such an extraordinarily symbolic way that every line, each word are loaded
with meaning. One of my favourite ones, Up,
is about a staircase seen as a place where lovers meet on their way upstairs
(‘linking the two worlds: public and private’), a place where you can also
dream, remember and climb up in an unreal world.
I also read two
collection of short pieces: Nel condominio
di carne by Valerio Magrelli (Einaudi, 2003) and Lost Property by Calum Kerr (Cinder house, 2003). Valerio Magrelli
is one of my favourite poets, this witty, disenchanted book exploring the inner
parts of the human body, observing its organs and fluids, the symbolic trash of
human existence, is engrossing and funny. Maybe our mysteries are just
excrements; our soul is made of refuse. His writing reminds me of another great
Italian writer: Italo Calvino, the slipping sense of humour in describing decomposition
and death, the richness of language and images. In the book there are frequent
references to mythical characters from ancient times as well as to everyday
life: advertising and satirical sketches. Simply hilarious.
Lost Property is life seen in fragments with irony, joie de vivre and scary
fantasies spicing it up. I read it slowly, ‘sipped’ it to savour it better. The
stories are often masterfully understated, superbly weird; brief intervals to
meditate on what we do and who we are. There are unanswerable questions (why
does love end?). Life seems without logic, indescribable except in scraps where
rituals replace beliefs, fantasies liven up boring everyday reality and loss is
sometimes the final reward.
More books discussed
next week.
During my summer
holidays I read three novels (almost three novels as, in all honesty, I
couldn’t finish one of them) and a novella. Poetry and short stories are my
favourite genre at the moment (see the previous blog entry) but I still indulge
in a substantial prose piece from time to time.
I must confess that I
am terribly fond of J.K. Rowling, I love her writing style, her sharpness. Her
plots grip me completely. The Casual
Vacancy (Sphere, 2012) had me in its grip from the first page: pacy, full
of events, well described with fantastic dialogue. I read some indifferent
reviews and was bewildered. The reviewers seemed disappointed after Harry
Potter (which is hard to match). However, I found a lot of her same genius in The Casual Vacancy. It is clever, logical, full of a deep
understanding of people, with variety of characters and scenes and never
boring. What she says is interesting. It is not a world of magic but a world of
fiction, a claustrophobic world, symbolic of our own world, with allegories,
hinted messages, morality. The ending seemed a problem for some critics. It is
not a happy ending, not at all. Everything collapses, Voldemort is not defeated
this time, only partially punished. And the innocents die (which is a relief
considering the abuse and suffering they had to undergo with no real help or
alternative). Changes loom on the horizon but they will be too late. It’s a
deprived world at all levels: gossiping and retaliation are the main interest
and aim. Is this our world? Certainly not a teenager world, but an adult world
with extreme challenges, frustrations and instability. I think the book
reflects a vision, a sort of political allegory, an interpretation of our
society. We can agree or disagree, or partially agree. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The Cuckoo’s Calling (Robert Galbraith, a pen name for J.K. Rowling,
Sphere, 2013) is a gripping crime fiction story. A different genre, not my
favourite to be honest (though I watch who-done-it films all the time), but I
loved this one. I couldn’t stop reading it. I was totally immersed in the
setting and atmosphere of the story. I am sure it is the beginning of a series
which will be successful again. I just wondered if the world of millionaires is
really as she describes it (isn’t she a millionaire too?). It seems pretty
boring and pointless. But I can’t judge, I’ve never met one. Looking forward to
reading more about Cormoran Strike.
The novella I read was The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick (Vintage
international, 1990). The book is composed of two parts, a sort story, The Shawl, and a novella, Rosa. The style impressed me: evocative,
surreal, poetic, it creates images in the reader’s mind giving a fragmented
report of what has happened. The reader has to fill in the gaps. The voice of
the story is very strong and reports precise descriptions. The tone and
atmosphere are created by a skilful use of punctuation and repetition,
alternating abstract and down to earth words. The stories are about a Nazi
concentration camp and the consequence of it in the life of Rosa, a survivor.
The shawl protected and ‘fed’ Magda, a child, in the camp till her death. Rosa
remembers it after thirty years while she is having some time off in Florida.
She is considered ‘a mad woman and a scavenger’ and her obsessions lead the
reader into her conception of life: the only meaningful, possible reality is
the period she spent in the concentration camp (‘Before is a dream. After is a
joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie’). It is not only a story
about the Holocaust, it reaches the core of what life can really be: not a
dream, neither a joke, but ruthless sufferance and exploitation.
Finally I started to
read May we be forgiven by A.M.
Holmes (Granta, 2012, winner of the Women’s Prize for fiction 2013).
Unfortunately I couldn’t finish it. I must say the action was quick (maybe too
quick?), the dialogues smart, snappy and clever (too clever?). Lots of things
happen (too many?). Sometimes it sounds stereotyped, banal, aimless, probably
intentionally. But after two hundred pages I felt worn out. I definitely got
all I could out of it and had had enough. I couldn’t endure such a crazy
rhythm, not even in reading. Imagine this in real life! (I wonder if anybody can). Maybe I’m
just old fashioned.
On the whole I had a
great reading season.
Rome, Christmas 2013
At Christmas I received
some books as a present and I had also brought more books from England to avoid
being idle. When I left Lancaster I was reading NW by Zadie Smith (Penguin books, 2013). I was intrigued by the
story after reading her article in the Guardian
Review about the inspiration behind NW. She says that the main topics she
wanted to explore were the ‘thingyness’ of people and the ‘qualities of
language’. Her dialogues are really gripping and take up a good part of the
novel. She doesn’t use inverted commas but I didn’t miss them while I was
reading. Actually the dialogues shape the characters more than any description.
They make them come alive, living and acting in front of the reader. Her other
inspiration was Measure for Measure,
where the characters find neither happiness nor annihilation, though some of
the characters seem to be searching for happiness, heroism or death. In a similar way the four protagonists of
Zadie Smith’s book (Leah, Felix, Natalia and Nathan) look for happiness or,
more generally, an aim that makes their lives worth living. But they shift
often from family to jobs, to love affairs, sex, drugs or parenthood, without
finding proper direction or real fulfilment. It sounds rather depressing but it
is realistic. What I also noticed is the fact that the characters, beside being
overwhelmed by boredom and aimlessness, are also unmotivated. They have no
dreams, no hopes but live in the moment, in fragments (the last section of the
book is made of short chapters, almost flash fiction pieces put together),
feeding their needs and instincts, in a simplistic manner: very symbolic.
A good book I received
as a Christmas present from a friend was Viaggio
in Sardegna (a journey in Sardinia) by Michela Murgia (Einaudi, 2011), a
fantastic Italian writer from fabulous Sardinia. In this book the author
revisits her land in its traditions, cuisine, legends, history and
architecture. The language is rich, the descriptions are vivid, conveying her
love and deep understanding of the culture she comes from: complex and
appealing at the same time, tremendously genuine. In origin Sardinian
traditions are simple, reflecting the sparse, harsh environment that made its
inhabitants close to nature. She shows how much they love and respect nature
and are loyal to their land and community, a culture based on sharing resources
and the necessity to stick to democratic rules from ancient times, just for
survival. Similar to other insular cultures (e.g. Celtic), their structures of
stones in geometric patterns have the distinct feel of Greek temples and
Corinthian columns. In this kind of society, women were not considered inferior
but had their fair share in the life of the community. I’ve always loved
Sardinia (though I have no Sardinian origin, as far as I know) and used to
spend a month's holiday on a campsite on the east coast when we lived in Italy.
I like not only its clear sea and white sandy beaches, but also its bare
landscapes, the nuraghe, the stone
monuments, the colourful women's costumes and its ancient festivities, like the
Sartiglia and the mamuthones procession. Michela Murgia’s
book is a must to read before visiting, together with the insightful Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence.
Another famous book by
the same author (which I promptly bought and read while I was in Rome) is Accabadora (Einaudi, 2009). It won
prizes and was translated into several languages. The accabadora is a traditional figure you can still find in Sardinia,
a woman (sometimes a man) who practices euthanasia on terminally ill people.
Michela Murgia creates perfectly the atmosphere of a Sardinian village, the
characters demure about sex, discreet in communication and faithful to their
land. The narration is fast-paced, readable and gripping. The story is believable
and full of symbolic, ancient rituals. The writer's images and metaphors make
the reader feel the emotions, fears and thoughts of the characters perfectly.
It was so engrossing that I read it in less than a day. Another must-read book.
I couldn’t miss some
poetry reading. Before Christmas I ordered on Amazon two important prize
winning collections to savour during my holidays, and afterwards.
Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey (Carcanet, 2013) intrigued me with its sense of
‘apparent displacement...of an object’, which is the meaning of the title of
the collection. It stresses the different points of view from which you can
observe, and measure the distance of an object. The word ‘parallax’ is also
used in astronomy to measure the distance of the stars. The engrossing and
beautiful poems of the collection gave me a sense of shifting. Everything
moves: people, thoughts, perspectives. Nothing seems stable and firm. And this
is an advantage, a talent in a way, a positive characteristic in our way of
seeing, feeling and describing the world. Striking images and unexpected
endings make the reading always new and interesting.
Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts (Cape poetry, 2013) is an amazing
collection. It won the Forward prize and the Costa prize and was shortlisted
for the T.S. Eliot prize. All the poems of the collection have fifteen lines
(they were rightly called ‘super-sonnets’), the structure, topics and tones
recall psalters, contemporary prayers about our reality, with a strong
awareness about who we are and where we live. It starts and ends with two poems
describing our world in fragments (World
into Fragments and Fragments into
World), disasters hovering on us, a scattered world that disassembles and
reassembles under our eyes, fragile and fascinating in its different,
innumerable pieces. Nevertheless we are still here, witnessing, observing,
tip-toeing amongst the ruins, exploring. An optimistic, positive book.
In Rome I had the
opportunity to meet Valerio Magrelli in the café of a famous bookshop, Feltrinelli.
He gave me some of his books, which I really enjoyed reading. One in particular
struck me: Sopralluoghi (on-the-spot
investigations), Fazi editore, 2005. It is a self-made anthology by Valerio
Magrelli, taking twelve poems from four of his own collections. Besides, the
poems are commented on by the author in a DVD. The places he inspects are
always linked to the poems he reads, to sites of the mind, like a car crusher,
the monumental cemetery of Rome (Verano), the Casanatense library, a toy shop, a
cinema, a cellar, Villa Borghese, the graffiti along the banks of the river
Tiber. The relationship between places, words, inspirations, and sounds are
precisely analyzed, the explanations and digressions engrossing. One of my
favourite poems tells the story of a man (E.H., like Ecce Homo) who died sitting in front of the TV and who was found
after nine months (this really happened in France). The poem, composed of two
sonnets, transfers the effect of decomposition from the corpse to the TV
screen, the place to which we often delegate our emotions, love, illusions and
dreams, and finally death.
The last book I read
during my Christmas holidays (and finished in January) was Fifteen modern tales of attraction by Alison McLeod (Hamish
Hamilton, 2007), an unusual, interesting collection of short stories. I loved
some of them, sensual and savvy. Atypical couples and unexpected attractions
are explored: a girl and a dying man, a woman and a little child, a whale and a
girl. Impossible affairs develop in a subconscious state of mind, never meant
to be real, though interesting to investigate. The style is rich, involving,
never banal. The short story about the E-love between Heloise and Abelard is
wonderful, the interpretation of their relationship bold and witty. Heloise is
so strong-minded, passionate and successful in her own way, but above all
indomitable. Definitely superior to poor Abelard.
I must say I enjoyed
myself.
Jawbreakers
Then your mind
wanders on to the many possible endings, following the hints, and filling in
the gaps left open by the brevity of the genre itself, with your imagination. A
fulfilling experience, comparable to reading
a poem or a prose poem. Hard to
write, though, because it can easily be
too banal or too cryptic.
This is not the case of Jawbreakers,
the fascinating collection of flash-fiction edited by Calum Kerr and Valerie
O’Riordan, published for the National Flash-Fiction Day, 16th May
2012 (www.flashfictionday.co.uk). These are short-shorts that accept the
challenge of writing a whole story in five hundred words or fewer, with
stunning results. The collection also
includes a micro-fiction by Ali Smith, stories by Ian Rankin, Jenn Ashworth,
Vanessa Gebbie, Tania Hershman, and many more, and the winners and runners-up
of the micro fiction competition run in early 2012.
Being a flash-fiction fan, and a writer of flash-fiction
myself, I always expect the best. I
found it in Jawbreakers. There was a peculiarly surreal touch in
most of the stories that intrigued me and made me look for a deeper meaning, a
different interpretation, my interpretation.
Sixty-two
stories, all unique, portrayed a world in a few words that tell the reader
about relationships, inequity, friends, family, invisible children, trolls,
cheese, mysterious doors, silent harps and porcelain girls. The endings are often surprising, with an
ironic twist that opens the eyes wider to greater insights.
A short,
sublime experience worth living through.
Some
books I read, 2014
I read a good selection of books throughout the
winter and spring. Reading is one of my greatest pleasures. It’s also linked to
my job (teaching literature) and to my constant effort to learn more about
writing in an attempt to improve my style and technique.
I deeply enjoyed Alice Munroe’s Selected Stories (Chatto and Windus, 1996) and her last book, Dear life (Vintage books, 2013). She is
a great writer, undoubtedly, and the 2013 Nobel prize confirmed it. Her way of
handling the short story genre is surprisingly simple yet constantly re-inventing itself, so that you
never have enough of her work. This is a field in which I am trying to improve,
as I am writing and editing my own short stories.
Munroe’s stories are usually set in a bare landscape
where nothing special seems to happen, but a lot does, quietly and
meaningfully. They are excitingly different and profoundly human. Some time ago
I read a review in London Review of Books (shortly before she won the Nobel
prize for literature) where her stories were depicted as boring, uneventful and
repetitive. The reviewer said he had read all her collections of short stories
(fourteen plus the compilations) in one go. I suppose he just had poor
digestion and couldn’t stomach the smell of her books.
But I loved her stories and her style. She catches
the innermost feelings of her characters and communicates their emotions in a
powerful, extraordinary way. There is always something unusual in her
descriptions and there is no logical reason for unexpected behaviour or
actions. Events just happen. At times her narrators and characters seem
opinionated (as people often are). They rely on first impressions and are
reluctant to change their opinions. After all, our apparently rational
reasoning is only a way to hide our messy, unpredictable self. Her style is
original and inspiring. Unusually, she doesn’t use direct speech very often,
preferring indirect speech, summaries, flashbacks and descriptions.
Her stories are very entertaining, readable and above
all deeply human. They seem to develop in a relaxed, spontaneous way,
organically. Nothing serious or tragic ever happens. It’s ordinary life but so
important and fascinating. No fights or killings, no vendettas or passionate
breath-taking love, but dreams, hopes and misunderstandings. Sometimes the
stories appear banal but never false or preposterous. A moving, disenchanted
way to look at life, which is always dear, beloved and lived in full.
I also read The
red house (Vintage books, 2013) by Mark Haddon, and re-read his best seller
The curious incident of the dog in the
night time. The latter is a brilliant book, original in every way, well
written, well documented and gripping from first to last page. The red house is interesting, sometimes
absorbing. At first I found it difficult to grasp all the characters as they
are introduced and developed throughout the book using the first person, the
narrator shifting the point of view from one to another and giving each
character one or two pages, sometimes less. This creates the illusion of seeing
the same facts from different sides, by moving from one character to the other.
We know all their feelings, backgrounds, obsessions, dreams during a quite
ordinary week's holiday in Wales. I struggled to follow who was who at times,
but after a time the story flowed smoothly. There are a few tense moments
(Daisy realizes she is gay, Dominic cheats on poor Angela and their sons find
out, Richard sprains his ankle while he is jogging in the forest alone and
suffers from hypothermia, Melissa punches the boy who is trying to fuck her).
On the whole I enjoyed the book though I think the author's technique is a
little confusing for the reader. But I also found some of the descriptive
writing intensely poetic and involving.
For poetry, I read an anthology: Heavenly Bodies (Beautiful Dragons
Collaborations, 2014) edited by Rebecca Bilkau, also containing one of my own
poems. Eighty-eight poets from the north west each wrote a poem on a different
constellation (mine was Triangulum Australe, the southern triangle). An
incredible creativity is displayed in this collection. The constellations are
approached in a wide variety of ways: mythological or scientific, historical,
down-to-earth or rational. The Abbé Lacaille appears from time to time, as he
named more than fifteen constellations, but is never used repetitively. What
impressed me was the mystery of our skies and how our imagination overflows
when we look at them. In spite of the fact that stars and planets are distant
entities, completely out of our control and possibly already extinct as we view
them, they still provoke such inspiration.
Falling
into place by Jane Routh (Smith Doorstop, 2014) is a book of
short prose pieces, similar to prose poems (as the style is precise and yet
poetical in images and sounds) in the shape of a shepherd's calendar or journal
describing how the changing of the seasons affects the land, animals, trees and
consequently people. The descriptions are accurate, clever, deeply felt and
experienced by the author, who has something new to discover and observe every
day. An inattentive wanderer may miss a lot walking in a forest, but Jane Routh
records every little variation without fail. Beautiful black and white photos
by the same author illustrate every piece, adding a mysterious, artistic touch.
I loved the last publication by Sarah Hymas (www.sarahhymas.net): In Good Weather the Sign Outside Reads
Danger Quicksand. It is a collection of four prose poems elegantly printed
in an artistic booklet resembling an art book, wherein a storm in Morecambe Bay
interweaves with a friend’s operation and their relationship: the fury of the
sea against the poet’s garden and house, the adrenalin which negates the
sedative taken before the operation, how it then had to be postponed. The
adrenaline of the waves casts their flotsam on the shore, invading the kitchen,
in pointless, relentless violence. When the storm is over, all that remains is
to gather up its waste.
The
Folded Moment, a poetry pamphlet by Mike Barlow
(Wayleave, 2014), is a deep reasoning between man and the land, an internal
never-ending dialogue with nature, observing it, trying to dominate it and then
surrendering to it. How do we look like to animals? How can we keep something
special and unique we finally found? There are no definite answers, of course,
only tentative research, personal investigations that end with an open door to
more analysis and experimentation.
The last book I read is Friday Gospels by Jenn Ashworth (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013).
It’s a tremendously well written book. Each chapter represents the point of
view of one of the Leeke family, who are Lancastrian Mormons. The author
herself was part of a Mormon family and now lives in Preston. Her insight into
the Mormon mentality and beliefs is deep and clearly documented, sometimes
showing, apparently innocently, a humorous side. Contradictions in the
characters’ attitudes are inevitable, often funny, a little crazy, then
grotesque and ending in an unexpectedly tragic way, but with a hint of dark
humour. The voices of the different members of the family are so strong and
clear, their stories believable and the development so interesting, that the
reader can’t help being totally mesmerized by the book (just as with Jenn
Ashworth’s previous novels). It was an immense, entertaining experience.
Books I read in summer 2014
I started my summer
reading with two unforgettable books: How
to be a husband by Tim Dowling and The
Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling's pen name).
I never miss Tim
Dowling’s column in the Guardian Weekend. The accounts of his
dysfunctional family crack me up and sometimes I really want to meet his wife
and ask her if it’s all true. Dowling eventually wrote a book telling the whole
story from the beginning: how they met, when they married, having children,
working, DIY, sex and how to carry on together after twenty years of marriage. How to be a husband is extremely funny,
realistic, ironical and unconventional. I laughed out loud from the first to
the last page. The author is American. He met his future wife (the 'English girl
[who] scared the shit out of me') in New York and magically fell in love with
her, enduring years in and out of the UK complicated by expiring visas until he
proposed. She said yes and added, ‘We can always get divorced’. He describes
himself as naturally indolent, working from home (he’s a freelancer),
experienced in DIY and, compared to the top alpha male, in a position around
lambda.
Honestly, I found a few
parallels with my own family such as in the children's upbringing and in the
way he plays down rough moments. Fundamentally he enjoys family life, having
fun with his apparently severe wife and unruly children. His marriage, he says,
is built on mistakes and apologies. But I had the impression that it is also
built on sharing feelings and experiences and on common beliefs. I strongly
advised my husband to read it.
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith is an incredibly well written, gripping and
clever novel. Typically great quotations
begin each chapter, this time from 17th century English tragedies.
The setting of the awful murder is the literary world, where harsh competition,
jealousy and betrayal evidently rule. The characters are alive, interesting and
perfectly credible. Cormorant Strike and his assistant Robin are more and more
shaped by their personal stories and reactions to the tumbling and twisting of
events. The final capture of the killer is totally unexpected as is usual in
the best who-done-its. It is a satire of the literary world where the question,
never stated outright, inevitably lingers: why does everybody today want to
write? The answer is obvious: most of us are literate and love to express our
own opinions. But that may be too simplistic.
In the acknowledgements
the author thanks the people in the business who believed she still had ‘some
marble left’. And she has.
I couldn’t miss reading
a poetry book: Indwelling by Gillian Allnutt, a collection of spare, short poems.
Strangely they have little or no punctuation and the lines are double spaced,
as if one line has little to do with the one before or after. Or maybe they
need their own space. They give the impression of being different stanzas of
one line each, which is unusual and interesting, though at first the reader may
feel the poems are incomplete and want more. The words are tremendously
incisive, the result of long reading and deep meditations. Very few words are
used to explain the complex feelings and outcomes of praying. A mix of Psalms,
lyrics, nursery rhymes and other poems make the reader reconstruct a mosaic of
references and memories that opens up a new world. They evoke rather than
explain. Then the spaces between the lines take on a deeper meaning: they give
the reader the opportunity to fill the gaps with their own thoughts, words and
sounds.
As I was at the Matisse
Cut-Outs exhibition at the Tate Modern, I bought Jazz by the artist himself, a biography (Henri Matisse, a second life by Alastair Sooke) and a book of short
stories by A.S. Byatt inspired by the artist’s work (I found it well written
but rather forced in its plots and
inspirations). I spoke about Jazz in
a previous article. The text itself is a mere frame to the amazing
illustrations.
The biography by
Alastair Sooke is extremely interesting and faithful to Matisse’s last eleven
years of life. In a clear, insightful way he explains how the artist slowly
recovered and found new meaning and inspiration in the projects he created with
cut-out techniques. The brilliant colours and vitality of the shapes are
perfectly described and re-created by the author.
Finally I read, in
part, Crash by J.G. Ballard, after
having seen Zadie Smith's positive review when the novel was reprinted. First
of all I was mesmerized by the style: elaborate, captivating, sometimes
ironical; then by the content, which is pornographic, perverse and at times
disturbing. Sex in a car, with the car, at high speed (no wonder it often ends
in a crash), coitus attained when risk, pleasure and pain reach an apex. Blood,
sperm, urine and vagina mucus are spattered everywhere. I found some of it amusing
rather than titillating. In the preface, possibly the most genuinely
interesting section, he says that the world we live in is fiction and the
writer’s task is to create reality, to explain it by making sense of what we
experience. What he does is enlarge reality, visually and conceptually, to
bring it into focus as if under a magnifying glass.
This is the way I read
the book (not till the end, I’m afraid). The story tends to be repetitive, as
sex often is. The protagonist sees shapes of penis and vagina in steering
wheels, clutches, the geometry of air planes or slashes on car seats. The
characters play dangerous games on the brink of death, thereby completely
savouring both life and pleasure. The final aim of the story is to show how
everybody ruthlessly uses everybody else, which may be a profound truth but is
hard to swallow.
Finally, I’m happy to
end with a piece of good news: one of my short pieces, Encounter, was published on Cake,
issue 6: Lemon Drizzles. More
information on www.cake-magazine.co.uk
Italian books My
job in the south has changed my reading habits. Besides English books, I am now
devouring Italian books because I teach Italian literature. I don’t need to
spend money as most of the Italian books I am reading, or re-reading, have been
on the family bookshelves for a long time, being part of our high school and
university studies. It is so rejuvenating to read them again, remembering the
first time I read them: the sensations I had and details I noticed in the past
come back to my mind. It’s like re-discovering a hidden treasure. Although I
understand and interpret them in a different way today, which is an intriguing
fact in itself.
I went back to Gianni
Rodari’s poems, which I used to read to my children when they were between
three and six. They usually learned the poems by heart without any effort;
after a while, I started the first line and they recited the whole piece. They
are simple poems, but also clever, original and captivating. Among Rodari’s
work, the most brilliant is the Book of
Errors, where untranslatable puns and misunderstandings make fun of grammar
rules and conventions.
Another author I am
re-reading is Italo Calvino, the stories about Marcovaldo and the trilogy Our Ancestors. Marcovaldo is a collection of short stories arranged according to
the changing of the seasons. The protagonist, Marcovaldo, has funny and rather
alienating experiences: one example is when his family have no fuel for the stove
in chilly winter time. Being unable to find any wood in the city, they cut
pieces off roadsigns found along roads and motorways and bring them home to
burn in the stove. Marcovaldo always looks for a way to live in empathy with
natural cycles, but in a city he usually ends in a paradoxical environment that
traps him. Nevertheless he manages to survive and carries on bravely to the
next adventure, always hoping that this time it will be different.
Our Ancestors is composed of three books: The
Cloven Viscount, The Baron of the
Trees and The Nonexhistent Knight.
They testify Calvino’s passion for Chivalric Romance and his dedication to the
study of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso. The three books are wonderfully written. The stories have profound
meanings that develop slowly and captivate the reader. A constant research into
balance and fairness dominates them, both at personal and social level. Extreme
attitudes fail (the Viscount is divided in two parts by a cannon ball: one part
is total evil, the other absolute good. Both keep on living separately and
cause great trouble wherever they go till the two parts are united again); too
much stress on spirituality and strict moral rules can have opposite effect (e.g.
ruthless selfishness or perverted desires); tyranny can lead only to rebellion.
Moderation is the magic word, together with acceptance of who we are: good and
evil, with both envy and love, spiritual and carnal sides. The important thing
is to keep a certain sense of justice, be generous and, if possible, genuine.
A book I enjoyed
greatly is Io non ho paura (I'm
not scared) by Niccolò Ammanniti. (The book was published in 2001 and the
film directed by Gabriele Salvatores was released in 2003). It’s an excellent
story, written at a perfect pace, where nothing is redundant or unclear. It’s
about a kidnapping set in a poor village in the south of Italy in the late 70s.
It’s a scorching summer and everybody knows what is happening. Only a ten year
old boy, Michele Amitrano, finds the courage to help the kidnapped child, the
same age as him, kept starving in a hole in the ground. Michele has simple,
heroic qualities: he is brave and humble at the same time, determined in his
attempts to rescue the poor child.
Other books I read are:
Vittorio Alfieri’s Life (he had a
constant attraction for England, loved travelling and dedicated his life to
art, women and horses), Machiavelli’s Mandrake
(still funny and absorbing after five hundred years), Pirandello’s La Giara and other short pieces. Also, I read a large number
of poems by the most important Italian poets like Dante, Petrarca, Poliziano,
Ariosto, Tasso, Foscolo, Leopardi, Carducci, Pascoli, Ungaretti, Montale,
Quasimodo, Pasolini and Alda Merini. I thoroughly enjoyed all of them; they took me back to my schooldays
when I had to learn their most famous poems by heart and used to recite them
again and again. They evoke such profound emotions of who I was, what I’d felt
at the time compared to who I am now and what I now feel. Poetry can have this
magical element: it touches very deep and hidden components of our mind and
personality.
Last but not least, I
revised my notes on the origin and history of Italian language and prepared a
PowerPoint presentation and hand-outs on the first texts written in Italian (early Italian, dating back to 10th-13th
centuries). It was one of my favourite subjects at university. It’s engrossing
to discover how a language evolves, changes and matures, shaping the mentality
and culture of the people who speak and create it.
The history of the
Italian language is rather different from the history of other European
languages. The reason for this is the continual comparison with Latin, which
was of paramount importance in Italy because of the Romans. The second reason
is that the Italian language developed from one of the dialects spoken in
Italy: the dialect of Florence, which was the native language of three
extremely important Italian writers: Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and
Giovanni Boccaccio. They were so popular, their work was so brilliant and their
fame so long lasting, that all later writers and scholars admired them and
wanted to imitate their work. All the intellectuals in Italy chose to write in
the language of Florence, even if their mother tongue was a completely different
dialect. In time (around the Renaissance: 15th-16th
century) it became the Italian language, though Italy became a nation only in
1861. Everybody kept on speaking their local dialect and Italian was the
language learned at school (together with Latin, of course), till the
widespread outreach of newspapers, then radio and television, helped greatly to
standardize the language. Today almost every Italian speaks Italian, keeping
their local accent, and only a few speak specific dialects, unintelligible out
of their area.
Some books I read at Christmas (2014)
My holiday reading is
always voracious, I have to catch up on all the times I hadn’t got time to give
books what they deserve: my total attention. Here are my great entertainers.
The New World by Andrew Motion, the second of his adventure books (Silver was the first one), an imaginary
sequel of Treasure Island. Beautiful
writing and extremely entertaining. Naive Jim and clever Natty have
opportunities in America and some hard times with a native American tribe.
Natty and Jim live like brother and sister: a sexless relationship as if they
were too young (or too old) to have it all. He seems willing at times but she
is apparently too moody. A peculiar story for today, when sex is
overflowing in all kinds of ways. Adventure
is the chief protagonist and for the sake of it they stay close, face all the
hardships and keep together even though there seems to be no real communication
between them at times. A ‘good companionship’ that brings them home, sound and
safe and ready to start again. The descriptions of the wild evoke a realistic
world at the edge of dreams where everyday life expands into the possible,
reaching the borders of fantasy. The style is poetic, of course, in the sense
that prose is often surpassed by poetry, which I loved in its richness of
repetitions, climaxes and alliterations. The ending is wide open, looking
forward to the next step.
Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood was such a pleasure to read. Only nine stories,
but so sharp and inventive that I was totally involved and couldn’t wait for
spare time to keep on reading. Some
stories are funny, some dark, others evoke a fantasy world called Alphinland.
They are all humorous, a daring approach that makes the reader feel the spooky
side of everyday life and the funny side of our dreams and fantasies. I was
never bored, so different are the perspectives and the voices, all perfectly
characterized. Certainly Margaret Atwood never lets you down.
Fauverie by Pascale Petit contains more poems about her father, the wild beast
rising in us like a recurring nightmare. He comes back with all his ferocity
and tenderness, from the abuse of her childhood to decaying old age. An ever
changing, unpredictable king. He has different names, lives in different
countries but is always present in her memory. Black jaguar, leopard, vulture,
lion, a naturally carnivorous animal, ruthlessly aggressive by instinct, his
penis a red-hot prong, a humming bird beak. On the other side the abused little
girl is a songbird, a rabbit cut in half, a goat devoured alive. ‘In his grave
he’s pawing the soil with impatient coughs’: impressive, unforgettable images
awakening unconscious feelings and deep unspeakable truths.
Hold your own by Kate Tempest was a treat I kept on my desk for a long time before
I could savour it. I read a lot about her (she is a famous spoken word artist
and won the Ted Hughes Prize) but never had the chance to see her performing,
which must be a great experience. I couldn’t find much on youtube but reading
her poems gave me the idea of all the energy, passion and strength she must put
in her performances. Life vibrates in her work, life lived in full, lightly and
seriously, hating it and loving it. Living in spite of disappointments and
failures, living the moment, living in sorrow and bliss. Tiresias is the thread
that links all,
Happy are the Happy (original title: Heureux les Heureux) by Yasmina Reza, a book I received as a
present in the Italian translation, apparently an incredibly successful book as
my friend had to rush from one bookshop to another to grab the last copy
available. Honestly I wasn’t impressed, though I liked the format: short pieces
(sort of flash fiction) written in the first person from the point of view of
different characters, who are finally connected, more or less loosely, to each
other. The story is of an extended French-Jewish family (relatives, friends and
lovers), mainly Parisian, essentially concerned with sex and love. The themes
are often repetitive though the characters' voices are strong. There's lot of
humour and funny episodes, usually referring to sex and ageing and sometimes
stereotypical. Here and there are
poetical descriptions and fresh images. It ends with a funeral where all
the loose threads finally meet: a déjà-vu. All in all a readable book, but
nothing special.
The end of another stay
on my journey.
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