Tagged: Lara Pawson
Instead of June reading 2021: the fragmentary vs the one-paragraph text – Riviere, Hazzard, Offill, Lockwood, Ellmann, Markson, Énard etc etc
This isn’t really going to function as a ‘What I read this month’ post, in part because I haven’t read many books right through. (Lots of scattered reading as preparation for next academic year. Lots of fragmentary DeLillo for an academic chapter I filed today, yay!)
Instead I’m going to focus on a couple of the books I read this month, and others like them: Weather by Jenny Offill, and Dead Souls, by Sam Riviere. I wrote about the fragmentary nature of Offill’s writing last month, when I reread her Dept. of Speculation after reading Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (the month before), all three books written or at least presented in isolated paragraphs, with often no great through-flow of narrative or logic to carry you from paragraph to paragraph.
Riviere’s novel, by contrast, is written in a single 300-page paragraph, albeit in carefully constructed and easy-to-parse sentences. And, as it happens, I’ve just picked up another new novel written in a single paragraph – this one in fact in a single sentence: Lorem Ipsum by Oli Hazzard. I haven’t finished it, but it helped focus some thoughts that I’ll try to get down now. These will be rough, and provisional.
Questions (not yet all answered):
- What does it mean to present a text as isolated paragraphs, or as one unbroken paragraph?
- Is it coincidence that these various books turned up at the same time?
- Does it tell us something about ambitions or intentions of writers just now?
- Are fragmentary and single-par forms in fact opposite, and pulling in different directions?
- If they are, does that signify a move away from the centre ground? If not, what joins them?
Let’s pull together the examples that spring to mind, or from my shelves:
Recent fragmentary narratives:
- No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)
- Weather (2020) and Dept. of Speculation (2014) by Jenny Offill
- Assembly by Natasha Brown (2021) – in part, it jumps around, I haven’t read much of it yet.
And further back;
- This is the Place to Be by Lara Pawson (2016) A brilliant memoir written in block paragraphs, but allowing for a certain ‘through-flow’ of idea and argument.
- This is Memorial Device by David Keenan (2017) – normal-length (mostly longish) paragraphs, but separated by line breaks, rather than indented.
- Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (2015) – a series of long-ish numbered paragraphs, separated by line breaks.
- Unmastered by Katherine Angel (2012) – fragmentary aphoristic non-fiction, not strictly speaking narrative.
- Various late novels by David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress onwards
- Tristano by Nanni Balestrini (1966 and 2014) – a novel of fragmentary identically-sized paragraphs, randomly ordered, two to a page. The paragraphs are separated by line breaks, but my guess is that the randomness drives the presentation on the page.
Recent all-in-one-paragraph narratives:
- Lorem Ipsum by Oli Hazzard (2021)
- Dead Souls by Sam Riviere (2021)
- Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (2019)
And further back:
- Zone (2008) and Compass (2015) by Mathias Énard
- Various novels by László Krasznahorkai, of which I’ve only read Satantango (1985) – a series of single-paragraph chapters.
- Various novels by Thomas Bernhard, of which I’ve only read Correction (1975) and Concrete (1982)
- The first chapter of Beckett’s Molloy (1950) is a single paragraph, as is the last nine tenths of The Unnameable(1952)
- The final section of Ulysses, by James Joyce (1922)
So, my thoughts:
Continue readingNovember Reading: James, Simenon, Booth, Keenan
In a way I spent November getting over reading Christina Stead. For Love Alone is a big, old-fashioned novel that’s not afraid to move slowly, and be dense, all the better to throw up bright shards of insight. I can’t quite remember why I picked up PD James. It was one of those moments when a new book (a charity shop find) skips to the top of the to-be-read pile, ahead of other, possibly worthier, certainly more patient and long-suffering novels. So far as I tell, this is the first book of hers I’ve read. I’m not a massive reader of classic detective thrillers: Chandler, Ellroy, Hammett, Mankell, Rankin and Christie are probably the only authors I’ve read multiple books by – and Simenon of course, but we’ll get to him in a moment.
Teaching creative writing means thinking a lot about plot, and there is no genre more concerned with that aspect of the novel than the murder mystery. In November I also rewatched the Gary Oldman Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy and that led me, as with the last two watches, to pick back up the le Carré novel. It does open brilliantly, but once the plot proper gets going it seems to settle into a linear plod towards the truth, as Smiley heads across town, from encounter to encounter, picking up clue after clue, rather like a character in a dull 1980s text-based computer game. I put the book back down.
James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman avoids this through having the distinctly odd device of the protagonist, the young private detective Cordelia Gray, actually moving into the cottage where the murder took place, to live, while she investigates.
Books of the Year 2016
Transit, by Rachel Cusk (Jonathan Cape)
I loved Outline, and I love this, its sequel and the second in a projected trilogy. Transit shares with the earlier book its dispassionate writer-narrator, Faye, and a super-cool novelistic intelligence, and the simple but effective premise that Faye narrates her dull, everyday encounters – with her ex, her hairdresser, her Albanian builder and others – without explicitly ever giving her side of the conversation.
We get what they say in direct speech, but what she says only in paraphrase. She is utterly reserved, absent in except in her reflections, appraisals, judgements. There is no plot arc, no sense that any of these people suspect that this person is spending the entirety of their time together processing and narrating it, rather than committing to the encounter on equal, human terms.
The risk with these books is that they avoid the tricks writers usually use to make their stories stick in your memory, and this does mean that they start to lose traction the moment the reading ends. Six months on, all I could really remember from Transit was two great set-pieces: a damp literary festival, and the Cotswolds dinner party that ends the book.
This isn’t one of the great dramatic, explosive literary dinner parties (think of James Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Out Descent), but what it is, is true to life, rather than true to books. Doubly so, in fact. It is realistic both in how these kinds of things pan out, and in how we see them as they’re doing their out-panning, from behind a pane of glass called consciousness.
I remembered, too, that the book ended brilliantly, that it makes most novel endings seem bluntly contrived.
This is the Place to Be, by Lara Pawson (CB Editions)
I reviewed this in brief for The Guardian (not available online, alas) and it’s hung around in my head, as I knew it would from the moment I opened it on the tube. Brilliant and uncompromising is what I said in the review, but there is more to it than just the brutally candid reflections of a one-time BBC correspondent on her time reporting in war-torn Angola, and on what awaited her when she tried to re-enter ordinary life.
The book’s brilliance is in its discovery of a form to match the subject matter. This is the Place to Be is written in fragments, in unindented block paragraphs separated by white space. Sometimes the link between paragraphs is obvious, sometimes not, sometimes tangential, sometimes delayed. Writing in fragments is a risky business, but this is textbook stuff. (Literally so, if I ever get around to writing the book I want to.) Continue reading
Tiny Camels / Jonathan Gibbs 