Some women writers: a reading list for the misogynist/myopic, courtesy of Twitter

To be going on with…

I wrote yesterday about the coincidence in my reading of Ben Lerner’s über-useless-man novel Leaving the Atocha Station and Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers and its upshot that I’m going to spend a few months reading women writers, instead of my usual men-heavy regime, just to see if I can separate out my own prejudices and inclinations from the institutionalised sexism of publishing at large.

I asked for recommendations and suggestions, and Henry Krempels asked me to post what people came up with, so here they are, in alphabetical order.

Where specific titles were suggested, I’ve listed them.

Where the writer was un- or little-known to me, and I Googled them, I’ve added any links I found useful or interesting, for the benefit of the similarly ignorant.

49 names were suggested on the first day of asking, and more have been coming in. I’m listing all suggestions, which obviously risks making the list diffuse and unwieldy. Later posts will try to make some sense of it all.

April reading: White Review Short Story Prize, Ben Lerner… but mostly: why I read so few women writers, and how you can help me kick the habit

[NB: Click here for the follow-up post, my 'Reading list, for the misogynist and myopic, of women writers']

Okay, so here’s my pile of books from April. Some can be dispensed with quickly: the Knausgaard I wrote about here; the Tim Parks was mentioned in my March reading, about pockets of time and site-specific reading; the Jonathan Buckley (Nostalgia) was for a review, forthcoming from The Independent; the White Review, though I read it, stands in for the shortlist of the White Review Short Story Prize, which had my story ‘The Story I’m Thinking Of’ on it.

In fact, a fair amount of April was spent fretting about that, and I came up with an ingenious way of not fretting: I read all the other stories once, quickly, so as to pick up their good points, but I read mine a dozen times or more, obsessively, until all meaning and possible good qualities had leached from it entirely, and I was convinced I wouldn’t win. Correctly, as it turned out, though I’m happy to say I didn’t guess the winner, Claire-Louise Bennett’s ‘The Lady of the House‘, the best qualities of which absolutely don’t give themselves up to skim reading online. It’s very good, on rereading, and will I think be even better when it’s read, in print, in the next issue of the journal.

That leaves Jay Griffiths and Edith Pearlman. Giffiths’ Kith, which I have only read some of, I found – as with many of the reviews that I’ve seen – disappointing. Where her previous book, Wild, seemed to vibrate with passion, this seems merely indignant, and the writing too quickly evaporates into abstractions. In Wild, Griffiths’ passion about her subject grew directly out of her first-hand experience of it – the places she had been, the things she had seen, lived and done – and the glorious baggage (the incisive and scintillating philosophical and literary reference and analysis) seemed to settle in effortlessly amongst it. Here, the first-hand experience – her memories her childhood – are too distant, too bound up in myth.

The Pearlman – her new and selected stories, Binocular Vision, I will reserve judgement on. It’s sitting by my bed, and I’m reading a story every now and then. The three that I’ve read (‘Fidelity’, ‘If Love Were All’ and ‘The Story’) have convinced me that she is a very strange writer indeed, and perhaps not best served by a collected stories like this one.

Those three stories are all very different, almost sui generis, and each carries within itself a decisive element of idiosyncrasy that it’s hard not to think of as a being close to a gimmick. They all do something very different to what they seemed to set out to do. They seem to start out like John Updike, and end up like Lydia Davis. Which makes reading them a disconcerting experience, especially when they live all together in a book like this. It makes the book seem unwieldy and inappropriate. I’d rather have them individually bound, so I can take them on one-on-one. Then they’d come with the sense that each one needs individual consideration. More on Pearlman, I hope.

The book that I was intending to write more on, this month, was the Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station, which I read quickly (overquickly) in an over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived fug in the days after not winning the White Review prize, which also involved a pretty big night’s drinking.

But my thoughts about Lerner are very much bound up in a problem which is ably represented by the book standing upright at the side of my pile: Elaine Showalter’s history of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers. This was a birthday present from my darling sister, who, if I didn’t know her better, might have meant it as an ironic rebuke that I don’t read enough women writers.

March Reading: Knausgaard, Marias, Ozeki, Ness, Meek, Freud, Penguin Lines… but mostly Paul Morley and the pockets of time theory of reading

Clearly I’m running late on my March reading. The pile of books looks impressive though, doesn’t it? March must have been a good month, for reading. (Okay, the Knausgaard, A Man in Love, stretched over to early April – and here’s my instant response posting on it, that I wrote when I should have been writing this.)

Some of the books were read to external deadlines – the Patrick Ness, Ruth Ozeki and James Meek all had to be written about – and so tended to be fitted around life. They got read in bed, at the desk, in a random chair, always with half an eye on the page count and half an eye on the calendar. Never the best circumstances for reading, and of course that ends up being reflected in what you write about the books. A book review is a particularly clumsy form, a rushed attempt at a pre-emptive backwards glance, a quasi-historical contextualisation before that context has had time to adhere.

Others, though, got read in their own time, those pockets of space that occasionally, if you’re lucky spring up for a book, or around a book, or in response to a book, and coax it into being read, and read properly.

(This is part of the greater argument about the novel as bourgeois object, that it flourished in response to middle class people having time to read novels… which argument goes on to say that the novel is doomed not because of its internal flaws, but because of the culture in which it lives. It’s an argument I think I probably agree with.

It’s not just that television takes up so much of that precious bourgeois time (‘quality time’ – can there be a more bourgeois phrase?) in most people’s lives – think of the rise of the box set as middle class cultural artefact, and of the digital hard drive attached to the TV… people have long talked of having more books in their house than they will ever have time to read. Now, for the first time, people have more television selected and stored in their house than they will ever have time to watch.

Two lost scenes: the stationery shop, the rotating prison

Two scenes from books I’ve read and now can’t place, and which niggle me for that reason. I write them down in the hope that someone can identify them for me – or that, if no one does, I can claim them for myself.

1. A scene in a stationery shop. We are in Europe, early or mid 20th Century, or perhaps that part of Midwest or northeastern America which once was Europe. The narrator, or protagonist, is on a return visit to the small town he has otherwise left behind. He is a young man now, or perhaps still just about a boy, in the last years of his teens. But probably a young man. The shop is old-fashioned, with a counter and shelves behind it. I don’t know what he is after: ink, or printer ribbons, but the girl, or young woman, behind the counter has to go up a ladder to reach it down for him. A step ladder. Shelves packed tight with the materials of writing – the protagonist must be a writer – that must be the point of the story. But, in truth, it is the girl or woman he has come to see. She was either his girlfriend, when he lived in the town, or his friend, or the object of his desire. She is what he might have aspired to, had he stayed – had he not left town to ‘become a writer’. Her father owns the shop. I don’t know if he is physically present in the scene, or only in spirit. I don’t know if the young woman, recognises the young man. I get the sense that he has come back half-hoping she will recognise him, that he can ‘take her away from here’, but also half-fearing the sight of what might have been, had he stayed – that his own doppelganger will be stood alongside her behind the counter. Will lay his hand on her arm, stare him out. I think I might be going beyond the bounds of the scene into my own concerns. In any case, it is an old story – the boy writing himself out of the ghetto, the woman as symbol of domestication. Here’s what you could have won. When what you have won is the endless loss of ‘being an artist’. I’ve been reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

2. This isn’t so much a scene as the whole premise or conceit of the story. A man is sent to prison. The prison is circular, like a wheel. It is built of stone, with stone walls radiating from the centre like spokes from the hub of a wheel. Each cell a segment, capped at its far end by the exterior wall. The spokes, however, turn, rotating clockwise above the stone floor. They turn slowly, moving millimetre by millimetre as they are pushed by the inmates. Soon after entering, they have moved enough that daylight is lost. This is their punishment, that their jail term is fixed by their communal efforts to push the walls until the wheel has come full circle and they can leave the way they came in. They never see another inmate, but can hear them. It sounds like bad Kafka, or Borges, but I can’t find it in them, and I don’t want to Google it, for fear of what I might find.

Found in translation: In the struggle between you and the world…

One of the most famous of the Kafka fragments used by György Kurtág in his song cycle Kafka Fragments (which I wrote on  after seeing it staged recently at the Royal Opera House) is this:

In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.

Now, I recognised this from The Zürau Aphorisms, a collection of fragments written by Kafka at his sister’s house, where he stayed for eight months over the winter and spring of 1917/8,  recuperating from his first bout of tuberculosis. However, in my Harvill Secker edition, translated by Michael Hofmann, it reads thus:

In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world’s coat.

In the original:

Im Kampf zwischen Dir und der Welt, sekondiere der Welt.

It’s a classic example of the translator’s dilemma: to follow the literal sense of the original phrase, or to honour the soul of the phrase, the echoes and traces it holds. The primary meaning of ‘to second’ is certainly to back, or support, but in the context of a struggle – or equally, a battle, or fight, if we go back to Kampf – the image of a duel is hard to ignore.

To second someone in a duel is to do far more than simply be on their side: it is essentially, to be at their side, carrying their coat, yes, and offering psychological back-up, but above all supporting them with your physical presence. Hofmann might be overstepping his bounds in introducing a clear and vivid image that was not there in the original, but he is certainly honouring some part of the soul of what Kafka wrote.

Above all, he is bringing out the absurdity at the heart of the aphorism, that “side with the world” neglects. The image of the individual, when facing the world with a sword, or pistol, in his hand, some misty dawn, surreptitiously leaving his body and sidling round to hold the coat of his opponent, is wonderful, and brings to mind the kind of tricks Bugs Bunny works on Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam.

Why Knausgaard?

Why Knausgaard? When I have a dozen other things I should be doing, at least three blogs I have lined up to write? Well, sometimes you just have to sit down and blog it out.

In this instance, the post was brought on last night when @gillybethstern hijacked a Twitter conversation about The National to ask: Any of you read the latest Knausgaard?

My contribution was:

I finished Vol II over w/end. Easy to SAY it’s superb. Harder to say WHY, to which Gillian replied

Agree. But I am enthralled, even when he boils water or fries up his meatballs. Then me:

and unties his shoelaces and takes off his shoes and hangs up his jacket…

She’s right, and those laces and jacket were already underlined in my copy of the book, that I finished in a glorious sunny binge this weekend just gone, during a 24 hour stretch staying in a nice hotel in St Ives on my own – one of those pockets in time that allow you to really immerse yourself in a book, with no distractions.

Nobody wanted me for reviewing duties on this, the second volume of Knausgaard’s epic, six-volume succès de scandale, My Struggle, so this is my opportunity to just sit down and bash out an attempt at that question: Why Knausgaard? What is about his books that fires me up in a way that simply no other books do, at the moment?

@seventydys tried to answer it thusly: The quality of attention. How the facts are held in language. Nope-can’t do it.

This then is nothing so considered as a review – instead, here are a few of the comments I scrawled across the tops of the pages I read, and a few of the lines or passages I underlined, with hopefully brief attempts to explicate them.

Kafka Fragments and the eros of performance

So, last night to the Royal Opera House, to see a performance of Kafka Fragments, by György Kurtág, with Peter Manning on violin and Claire Bloom soprano, the piece staged by Netia Jones.

It is a strange piece (and how could it not be?), that takes 40 short passages from Kafka and makes of them what you might call a song cycle, though you would be hard pushed to find any kind of narrative or development, as you might in Die Shöne Müllerin or Winterreise, for example

One or two pieces are repeated, in altered settings. Perhaps that is the closest you get to some kind of inner structure.

The settings are at once virtuosic and disjointed, as if to show that these texts demand a supreme and indeed extreme effort in order to find in them, catch and then hold onto a single clear meaning.

The music – violin and voice – jumps about like a landed fish.

The shortest pieces last mere seconds – the very shortest consists of a single word, “Ruhelos” (restless) repeated twice. It made me think a little of Napalm Death, the thrash metal band known for the brevity and intensity of their songs, especially as on the second ‘Ruhelos’ Bloom collapses to the floor.