Tagged: Eimear McBride
In search of the Good Sex writing
I wrote this for the TLS blog as a response to the Bad Sex Awards. (Includes a brief definition of Gibbs’s Law of Reversible Similes.)
It’s easy to sneer at the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award – sneering at the sneerers, as it were – but it’s no lie that writing well about sex is difficult, and perhaps more difficult in prose than in poetry. I think there are three main reasons for this. Read on…
October reading / A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Booker and prizes in general
I’m supposed to be writing about the books that I read in October, but the award last night of the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing has diverted my train of thought. It’s not entirely unconnected: after all, the book I was reading at the beginning of October was Jim Crace’s Harvest, the only book to be on both the Goldsmiths and Man Booker shortlists.
This is, to put it mildly, a crossroads year for literary prizes in the UK. The 2013 Man Booker was the last prize to keep to its original remit of British/Irish/Commonwealth writers, before widening to any book written in English and published in the UK – which has been generally seen as a shift towards the US, and thus the end of an era. The Goldsmiths Prize is attempting to stake out a territory for experimental fiction, doing what some say the Booker should be doing by rewarding courage and risk-taking. And then we have the Folio Prize, set up in the wake of the ‘Rimington Booker’ of 2011, when it was seen as dumbing down, but which now, despite a rigorous and forward-thinking academy structure, seems rather lost in the wake of the Booker changes. After all, nobody could accuse The Luminaries of being a dumb book.
All this you know.
We also know that the Goldsmiths shortlist was a brilliant setting out of its stall, diverse and eye-catching in all sorts of ways: established vs unknown publishers, old vs new names, humour vs tragedy, dense vs aphoristic texts. I haven’t read enough of the shortlist to say whether I agree with the judges, but I’ve read Eimear’s book, and I can say it’s an utterly worthy winner: the best word I can think of to describe it is gobsmacking.
Certainly, anyone who picks it up and looks at the first page can see that something exciting and exalted is being done here with language (I’ve given extracts of it to Creative Writing students, just to say: Look, you can do this; this can be done), but persevere with the book – as you have to do: this is a demanding read – and it becomes clear that the characters in it are as strong as the language, and the scene-building as strong as the characters, and the story, in the end, as affecting as all of it. Continue reading
June and July Reading: Wyld, McBride, Ferrante, Owens, Butts, Arete
Two months’ reading conflated, due to the small matter of PhD thesis duly submitted, with this post rushed due to impending holiday – which, though, should allow plenty of time for more reading – and all coming out in the wrong order, a concatenation of events, stitched together with tiredness, a tinnitus of the calendar.
Working backwards, from July to June we have: After Claude, by Iris Owens, The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante, All The Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimear McBride and Armed With Madness, by Mary Butts. To which I’m adding a long poem, ‘You, Very Young in New York’, by Hannah Sullivan, from Areté’s Retrospective. Two new novels, one of them a new debut novel, the others recommendations from my Myopic/Misogynist reading list, one recent Italian translation and two classics of varying modernity – bitchy 70s New York, and and England between the wars.
And all touching, in one form or another, on madness, on a mind battling to contain and control the rising tide of reality – although strangely enough it’s the one with Madness in the title that least matches with what we think of as madness today – which I’d characterise as psychological disturbance. (I might be influenced in some of this by the fact that I’m married to a psychologist, who is very much against any kind of mystification or romanticisation of the topic.)
Perhaps that’s not surprising at all. Mary Butts’ book, Armed With Madness is a piece of modernism, coming somehow between Virginia Woolf and the Beats, if that’s a valid continuum, and seems to be of a time, or a moment, or a genre, that sees madness as something divine, and tragic, rather than, as today, something medical, and solvable. Continue reading
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
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. Continue reading
Tiny Camels / Jonathan Gibbs 