My short story Safety was recently published in Carillon Magazine. A woman tries to keep herself safe from life by never leaving her flat in her gated community. But eventually, of course, she has to leave…
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From Friends of the Earth, http://www.foei.org/en/get-involved/livemore. Seen originally as a cartoon in New Internationalist, August 2008
I’m never sure how these lists get created. In any case, the Guardian has named it’s books not to miss in 2009. Odd phrasing – not books to read, but books not to miss. Like the best advertising, it suggests an urgency, a tremendous opportunity that could be missed if you’re not fast enough.
In any case, the one I’m most interested in not missing is Set 2666 by Roberto Bolano. I have not read anything by him yet, but keep coming across the name and have seen good reviews for this book in particular. I might also read In the Kitchen by Monica Ali – I wasn’t a great fan of Brick Lane, but the subject matter of this one sounds interesting. With Hilary Mantel it’s the reverse – I like her as a writer, but have no particular interest in a novel set in Henry VIII’s court. I might check it out anyway.
None of the others really get me that excited about 2009. Iain Sinclair’s book about Hackney, possibly, but the others not really. Anyway, I’m sure there’ll be plenty more good books coming out that the Guardian doesn’t know about yet.
Most of this novel is memory: a woman thinking about her daughter’s suicide and remembering an earlier summer in post-War Nagasaki. Almost nothing ha
ppens in the present day. The whole story takes place in the past.
And the story in the past is full of holes. At first this annoyed me but, the more I thought about it, the more I realised how true this is to the story as the woman would have thought about it. Not only are our memories full of holes, but there are also plenty of things we simply don’t want to think about, either because they are too painful (the suicide) or simply because they are obvious to us as we know them already. This is why a lot of things a reader would want to know, for example how the woman ended up leaving her first husband and going from Japan to England, are left virtually untouched. We might want to know, but it’s not where this woman’s mind is going. She’s interested in a seemingly unimportant episode, a fairly brief friendship a long time ago with a woman called Sachiko and her small daughter Mariko. Gradually we realise that the woman is thinking about them as a way of drawing parallels with her own life and understanding her relationship with her daughter. Sachiko just wants to escape from Nagasaki, where the Bomb dropped, where so many died and the survivors are living in tough conditions, and she’ll do anything to get out, even though she knows she is being a bad mother to Mariko.
The guilt comes across gradually, indirectly, but this is all we can expect from an emotionally repressed character, one who states at the outset: “I have no great wish to dwell on Keiko [her daughter] now, it brings me little comfort.”
The writing style is beautiful, restrained, and Ishiguro is particularly good at making things clear without making them obvious, for example a character is saying they are happy, they couldn’t be happier, and yet although there are no overt sings of it, we know they are lying. There are also ideas here that will be developed at greater length in his later novels, for example the old man who is rejected by the younger generation, which became the theme of “An Artist of the Floating World”.
I’ve read all but one of Ishiguro’s novels now and enjoyed all of them. His writing is a little bit similar in all of them, though – even though they are first-person narrators in wildly different settings, they all sound like the same person somehow. But the stories are compelling enough, and the writing beautiful enough, for this not to matter really.
The original New York Times review in 1937 put it this way:
Mr. Hemingway has been for some years an outstanding figure in American literature; he has influenced greatly men a little younger than himself, and they have paid him the tribute of imitation. Whatever he does is of interest because he has, unquestionably, a very real talent. What has he done with it in “To Have and Have Not”?
It’s a good question, and one that hasn’t really been answered in the 70 years since then. Some have said Hemingway hated the book himself and only wrote it to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation. But how could he be contractually obliged to write an awful book? Even if somebody did set the subject matter, surely he could have produced something better than this?
The main problem with the book is that it is schizophrenic. It’s a cross between an adolescent high-seas adventure story and a social analysis of the effects of the Great Depression. Even if both could be crammed into one book, it’s probably safe to say that fans of one genre are unlikely to be fans of the other.
The writing style, too, is schizophrenic, lurching from first person to third person, from one character’s point of view to another’s. Harry Morgan’s character, too, changes. He starts out as a hard-drinking, hard-fighting Hemingway hero, but later on, as the whole idea of the book seems to change midstream, he becomes more of a Steinbeck-style poor old victim of the system. His wife and children then appear in the book, looking as if they have been grafted on to make him appear more sympathetic. Then rich people start to appear, being vile and self-obsessed but never fully drawn as characters. Their only role appears to be to act as “haves” to contrast against the “have nots”.
Another major problem I had with the book was its racism. You could argue that Hemingway was showing his characters to be racist, but still the constant, overwhelming use of words like “nigger” and “chink” really shocked me and immediately put me off the book. And worse than the words themselves were the way the characters of other races were described as objects more than people, with no characters beyond crude racial stereotypes like lazy blacks and untrustworthy Chinese. They are hardly ever even given names, but just referred to by their race: “the [insert racial slur] said….”
Well, I suppose every good writer has a clunker. I still like Hemingway’s writing, particularly in For Whom the Bell Tolls. So this book did teach me one thing: don’t judge an author by one book alone. If this had been my first Hemingway book, I’d probably never have read another, and as a result I’d have missed out on some fantastic writing.
Mario del Monaco, Nessun Dorma
The human being may be no more real than is a cinematograph film. When the projected light is switched off all that remains is a blank screen. That which has been projected by light was a series of ’stills’. Such also is what is being projected by ‘life’. The more you consider the analogy the more perfect it seems to be: it could help us to understand. – Wei Wu Wei
In Japan, a prisoner on death row wakes up every morning not knowing if he will be executed that day. The prisoner doesn’t know his execution date until the morning it is to be carried out. His family only finds out after the execution has already taken place.
Hakamada Iwao has been on death row for 40 years. 28 of those years have been spent in solitary confinement. He now suffers from mental illness. The basis for his conviction in 1968 was a confession extracted after 20 days of intensive interrogation. He claims he was beaten and forced to sign. One of the judges who convicted him later said he believed him to be innocent. To me, even if he was guilty, this kind of treatment would not be warranted.
I have just sent him a card as part of Amnesty International’s greetings card campaign. Clearly this is a very small gesture, and will not do too much to help him. But it only takes a few minutes and certainly can’t hurt. Here’s what Amnesty says:
The annual Greetings Card Campaign brings people across the world in touch with each other in a simple way – sending a card with a friendly greeting or message of solidarity to someone who is in danger or unjustly imprisoned. These are prisoners of conscience, people under sentence of death, human rights defenders under threat because of their work, and others at risk.
The campaign, which runs from 1 November to 31 January, offers hope and encouragement to the people who receive our cards. It can also help bring about change – the impression their international mail makes on police, prison staff or political authorities can help keep them safe.
Read a very interesting piece by Franco Moretti in New Left Review, July/August 2008. It seems like a synopsis of a much longer, multi-volume work on the theory of the novel, which I plan to read when I have time.
Moretti talks about the theory of the novel by asking three surprising questions: Why are novels in prose? Why are they so often stories of adventures? Why was there a European, but not a Chinese, rise of the novel in the course of the 18th century?
His point about prose is that, while many story-telling traditions employ verse, the prose style of the novel has less symmetry and permanence, more sense of being forward-looking, consequenced-based. It also allows for more narrative complexity, with long sentences and subordinate clauses explaining the full motivations of characters, etc. Moretti also makes the interesting, if seemingly unconnected, point that most novels ever produced are dime-store novels, trashy romances and adventures, but most of the study of novels focuses on the tiny minority of “literary” works. As Moretti says, it is odd that an academic study should focus on an extreme rather than the norm.
That novels are often about adventures is a reflection of the widening of scope and exploration of new worlds that took place along with the rise of the novel. But while it’s geographical widening, it’s socially narrow. It’s the world of the petty nobility of penniless knights, brought forward into the bourgeois age.
Chinese 18th century novels, Moretti says, are different in character from European ones. The protagonists are often groups, not individuals – a household, a set of outlaws – and there is less narrative drama. They are less ‘forward looking’; the action moves more ‘to the side’, i.e. the effects of one action ripple across a huge narrative system, with the characters often trying to contain the change rather than intensify it. He gives an example where a character overhears a big secret, one that could undo the main character in the book and set off a whole chain of events. In a European novel she would have told someone, or threatened to tell someone, or blackmailed the main character. But in the Chinese novel, she decides to keep it to herself.
At the end of the eighteenth century, there was a divergence between Europe and China – China produced very few novels, but those it did produce were seen as art. Europe had a huge explosion in quantity but little increase in quality. This was tied in, Moretti claims, with mass consumption – people had to be constantly re-reading the latest thing, but never re-read anything. They wanted width, not depth.
I need to read the whole book, I suppose, to understand the full meaning of these disparate observations for the theory of the novel. This article just raised some interesting perspectives, and encouraged me to think more about it.
