Tagged: Herta Muller
May Reading: Heti, Levy, Luiselli, Müller, Butts
Tattoo of Sheila Heti from a set by Joanna Walsh (@badaude) available from www.badaude.typepad.com
When I set out to read only women writers for the months of May, June and July, it was with the idea that the exercise might help me focus my mind on the prejudices that might be lurking in my lizard reading brain, that preconscious part of my literary apparatus that nudges me towards male books, and male books of a certain tenor.
Basically, if you asked me to name the books and writers that make up my personal (contemporary) canon, you would hear names like Javier Marías, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Geoff Dyer, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, WG Sebald, Alan Warner, Roberto Bolaño, Ben Marcus, Michel Houellebecq, Alan Hollinghurst, and so on, before you heard a female name. These are the writers who have produced the books that I value the highest, that have the greatest worth, that tell me the most, and tell me best, about what it is to be a thinking human in the world today.
Or are they just telling me about myself? Continue reading
Today’s sermon: I walked and walked
Reading Herta Müller’s The Appointment, the following phrase lodged itself in my consciousness:
I started walking and walking.
How weird, that ‘and’, that repetition. It lodged itself, halted my reading and turned it to thinking. ‘And’, as a connective, can signify simultaneity: “We walked and talked”; or it can signify sequentiality: “I chopped the onion and put it in the pan”. But here it seems to signify a kind of intensification. She walked, and then after she had walked, she continued walking. There is no suggestion that, from the outside, any observer might have been able to spot when the first ‘walking’ stopped and the second began. It’s all interior.
I thought and thought.
I walked and walked.
I cried and cried.
Certainly, there is length there, the idea that the action went on further than might have been expected. But there is something more, the second incidence of the verb always carries a sense that the experience is altered, deepened, taken to a different degree.
Reading the phrase, and thinking of how I must have used it, or a version of it, somewhere in my writing, I thought how strange these constructions are, that they fly from our mind, our tongue, our pen, our fingers, without us ever crediting the weird, deep grammar that upholds them, that belongs not to us, but to the language itself.
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 