Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus

I thought I was going to love this book, but found that not enough was going on to keep my attention, and the beautiful writing by itself couldn't compel me to keep on reading.  I skipped quite a lot to get to the end.

I think that a lot of books are ruined by hype and The Night Circus might be one of them.  How you feel about a book is the difference between your expectations and what you find.  I certainly expected a lot more and so was disappointed.  If it hadn’t been hyped, I probably would have enjoyed it more.

I read all the rave reviews, downloaded a sample, liked the sample and bought the book on Kindle.  It's beautifully written, intricately plotted - the word 'exquisite' comes to mind - and it's got some original ideas.  But ...... I quickly became bored.  Not a great deal happens.  The magical duel didn't really involve me as it should and I didn't care about the characters enough to want to know how they turned out. It was all rather precious and somehow distant.  Angela Carter this is not.

If this book hadn't been hyped so much, I probably would have been kinder.  I would have said - fantastic new author, interesting idea, really good writing - watch this space!  But now I wonder whether Erin Morgenstern will be damaged by having too much heaped on her in too short a time. If she's the good writer I think she is, she will survive this and write other fantastic novels.  My worry is that the publishers will just want her to produce more of the same.

If you love fantasy and magical realism, and you don't expect too much, you will enjoy this book very much.

Maybe This Time: Alois Hotschnig

Peirene Press specialise in slim books, translated from a variety of European authors they think we should know more about.  I've read a couple now and I'm hooked. It's so refreshing to get away from the cloned literature churned out by the American and UK mainstream publishers.


The stories in Maybe This Time are weird.  Perhaps if you managed to cross Raymond Carver with Kafka you might get close.  These are dark stories of obsession and illusion.  Alois Hotschnig does disturbed states of mind really well and these stories will take you out of your comfort zone, but in a good way.  I read them twice before I really managed to penetrate all the layers that are there.  The prose is spare - not a word extra - and it's very subtle.  There are nuances of meaning I only got on the second reading. 

The title story  'Maybe This time'  is dominated by the absent member of the family. The narrator tells us about his/her parents 'One of them always used to stay at home. For as long as I can remember they've never left the house together, and for some time now they haven't even left separately, fearing that Walter might come and they wouldn't be here.'  It examines family ties and the price that has to be paid for evading them. 

Unreliable narrators are a given.  You can't trust anyone.  In 'The Beginning of Something' the protagonist is unable to wake from what he thinks is a dream, walking through familiar yet unfamiliar rooms where nothing, even notes written the night before, can be relied on to tell the truth.  The reader inhabits his delusional consciousness with the same precarious grasp of reality and feels the ground shifting beneath them as they read - treading literary quicksand.

Hotschnig is good at the surreal.  In another story (Then a Door opens and Swings Shut) there are rooms full of macabre dolls 'old and new, clothed and naked ... young, middle-aged and old', and among them the protagonist finds one that is just like himself.  

Another story 'You don't know them, they're strangers', is the most surreal of all. The narrator arrives at the door of a flat believing that he is arriving for the first time, but it seems that this is his home, his neighbours know him well and he is shown photographs of himself from earlier times.  He goes out for a drink with a man he claims not to know.  'From the first sentence, it was clear that this man also took him for the person his neighbours believed him to be.  After a while the stranger was as familiar to him as if they had been childhood friends'.

In the morning he sets off for the office at an unknown location;  and again everyone greets him as familiar, though he believes it is his first day.  'He sat at a desk he sensed was his desk, but he was far from certain'.  But in the evening the neighbours greet him as if he's just arrived, a new name is on his flat door and there are different things inside it, although the identity card looks just like him.  A woman calls for him and tells him they are splitting up.  This goes on for some time.  'Every morning he left his flat and was recognised, even if not as the person he thought he was at the time.'

In the end he learns to adapt, to accept that everyone perceives him as someone different and that he simply has to be that person. 'Without disguising himself, he went around disguised, if not from others then simply from himself.'

Maybe This Time is another excellent read from Peirene Press which you can buy in paperback, but it’s on Kindle for only 99p - at last a publisher who knows the value of e-books! I’ve got my eyes on The Brothers, a dark tale from Finland, next!

Sophie Nicholls: The Dress

Today I'm reviewing over at the Indie E-Book Review website and The Dress is my July E-book of the Month, a romantic novel (in the best sense) from a Salt-published poet who proves that Ewan Morrison in the Guardian is wrong, wrong, wrong.  There is some good stuff out there. (And there's quite a heated spat going on if you look in the comments after the article and at the Guardian's Facebook page - JA Konrath, Authors Electric and others taking EM on with no holds barred!).

But back to The Dress and my review:-

'Reading about an independently published novel by a first-time novelist who makes it to the top of the Amazon best-sellers’ list sounds like a fairy tale.  But this isn’t the much discussed Amanda Hocking, this is UK author Sophie Nicholls, whose novel, The Dress, has been an E-book sensation.  It isn’t sci-fi, or fantasy, or crime, or erotica, or any of the other ‘fashionable’ genres at the moment - just straight-forward fiction likely to appeal to a predominantly female audience right across the age spectrum.  

Of course, as it implies in the title, ‘It all began with a dress....’   Read more ......


I will be interviewing Sophie Nicholls to find our how she did it on the Authors Electric blogspot on August 5th. The answers to my questions were a surprise and very interesting.

Brain Turner: Here Bullet and Phantom Noise

Brian Turner served as a US soldier in the middle east and in the Bosnian war in Yugoslavia.   Everything in these poems he has seen, heard or felt.   Here Bullet comes from his active service, Phantom Noise from the trauma of trying to reintegrate into civilian life afterwards.
 
The poet puts in front of us Wilfred Owen’s ‘pity of war’ as well as Yeats’ ‘terrible beauty’ with the minimum of words and economical imagery.  There is no hyperbole, no gratuitous violence, pathos or horror just for effect.  Brian Turner lets us enter an unimaginable world where human beings are stretched beyond their limits of endurance, where extremes are ‘normal’.   The horror is never condoned. They are trained to kill, but Turner gives a warning in a poem called  Sadiq -

‘It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in a desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequence
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists my friend,
it should break your heart to kill’

For me one of the highlights of this collection was the prose poem ‘Last Night’s Dream’ dedicated to Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of fertility, love and war.  The poem records the catastrophic result of any kind of love or union between two opposed cultures, however much it may be longed for by individuals.  Though it also seems to be saying that it is only through love that true understanding can be achieved.

‘In the dream she kisses Arabic into my skin and I understand every word of it, I transcribe it backwards into cuneiform and stone, I rename the arteries and veins for every river and wadi from Dohuk north to Basra south, I feel for this geography of pleasure, my tongue is a marker that writes even in the rain, even in salt and sweat, and I write with it now, over every curve and turn of her body.

In his dream they fuse together and their explosive love-making destroys everything around them.  ‘As we kiss on, long into the denouement of skin and fire, where medevac helicopters fly in the dark caverns of our lungs in search of the wounded, and we breathe them one to another, a deep rotorwash of pain and bandages.’

There are graphic images from war of slowness, hours and hours of waiting and watching, keyed up for action.  
‘And the hours pass the way helicopters
hover above the palm groves
or the way Fiorillo reads letters from his wife
with a red lens flashlight, down in the troop hold.’

In Night in Blue the soldier is leaving Iraq and finds language inadequate to express what he has experienced.

‘At seven thousand feet and looking back, running lights
blacked out under the wings and America waiting,
a year of my life disappears at midnight.......

I have no words to speak of war. ....

I have only the shadows under the leaves
to take with me, the quiet of the desert,
the low fog of Balad, orange groves
with ice forming on the rinds of fruit.
I have a woman crying in my ear
late at night when the stars go dim,
moonlight and sand as a resonance
of the dust of bones, and nothing more.

Turner's poetry stands with the poetry of other middle eastern poets - Iraqi or Palestinian - it goes beyond politics, articulating what war does to people - physically and mentally.  It asks the question why?  Points out the idiocy of it all, the pointless destruction.

There are beautiful, sensual descriptions of the middle eastern landscape:-

‘Cowbirds rest in the groves of date palms,
whole flocks of them, white as flowers
blossoming into wings when the wind rises up.’
[Jameel]

I haven't read war poetry in the English language as powerful as Turner's since I read Wilfred Owen.
As one reviewer put it: the poems ‘leave the reader to draw conclusions or moral lessons. Here, Bullet is a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.’

More importantly for me, all the poems reference arabic poets and the long tradition of poetry in the middle east, with quotations and epigraphs, Brian Turner fitting his own work alongside theirs in a way that makes conflict between the east and west appear obscene.

Phantom Noise allows us to experience what it feels like to come back to the ordinary lives of ordinary people, in a place of relative safety.  The world of shopping malls and relationships, where every nail becomes a pin from a weapon, every car hides a bomb, the street a booby trap.  The woman in bed with you faces away from you to avoid the war video running in your eyes as you look at her.

Returning soldiers who have seen and done the unspeakable, carry the war inside them like an invisible wound.  The film of it plays and replays in their heads.  Post traumatic stress syndrome isn’t an illness, it’s an alteration of the personality, changing the way the world is seen and experienced.  Brian Turner writes from within it, with supreme intelligence.  If the reader was a fibre optic probe inside the soldier’s brain, we couldn’t have a view more graphic than this.

Personally, I think Here Bullet is the better of the two collections, but it was Phantom Noise that was short-listed for the TS Eliot prize.   Both collections are published by Bloodaxe and are also available on E-platforms. 

Peirene Press - Pia Juul: The Murder of Halland

I like something a bit different to read, and the big mainstream publishers seem so often to just churn out the same-old, same-old, stuff.   So I often trawl the internet for some of the smaller presses, the so-called 'boutique' publishers, like Salt and Granta.  I've just discovered Peirene Press, who publish short novels and novellas of contemporary European fiction in translation.

I've just read 'The Murder of Halland' by Danish author and poet Pia Juul.  It's technically crime fiction, in that the central character Halland is shot in the opening pages, but it's the emotional life of his wife Bess that is the focus of the book rather than a search to find out who committed the crime. In fact at the end of the book I was not much wiser than I was at the beginning, but it was a very interesting journey.

'Pia Juul .... dismantles the rules of an entire genre', the cover blurb promises.  And she does.   This is literary fiction of a very high calibre.  The story is narrated in the first person by Bess herself, and she is a very unstable, unreliable, narrator - dealing with all the baggage of broken relationships - an abandoned daughter she grieves for, an ex-husband who has never forgiven her for leaving.  She doesn't understand her own emotions, locks uncomfortable things away in drawers and boxes.  Things she now has to confront.
Why did Halland have a strange set of keys in his pocket?  Why had all his papers been removed from the house?  Where was he going when he was killed?  Pia Juul gives us exploration rather than answers.

There's a very interesting video of Pia Juul talking about the novel and her work generally - if you can just ignore the irritating interviewer!
I'm currently devouring a book of Austrian short stories from Peirene ('Maybe This Time' by Alois Hotschnig).  The press is a fantastic find - you can take out a subscription and they send you a book every four months, but I'm still tracking through the back list and fancy a book called 'The Brothers' by Finnish author Asko Sahlberg next.
                     

Sue Gee: Last Fling

Salt are rapidly establishing a reputation for publishing fine writing - particularly poetry and short stories.   Sue Gee has written a number of excellent, best-selling novels for Hodder Headline  (Reading in Bed serialised by the BBC, The Mysteries of Glass long-listed for the Orange prize)  but it's Salt who have published her collection of short stories.   I really like Sue Gee's writing and so I delved happily into the twelve stories that make up Last Fling.  They are very, very good - each one reads like the beginning of a novel and I would have gone on and on reading if there had been more.  

If there's a theme to this collection, it's loneliness - the solitary person, only children, single parents, women who have never married, men whose wives have left them, business men alone in a foreign city. As one of the characters remarks: 'being single is an art. It is, like a marriage, something to work at'. These solitary people feel different, even from other solitary people. One of them observes: 'Jenny didn't seem single', she had 'the air of a woman who knew how to live with someone, should she ever choose to.'

Sue Gee was until recently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and is currently teaching for the new Faber Academy - a fast-track scheme for creative writing students.  She really knows how to establish a setting and fill in character within the first paragraphs, and then give each story the depth of a novel. She has a light touch - she never tells too much - and this is a collection of excellent, traditional, short stories - some of the best I've read in a long time.  The title story 'Last Fling', about a gifted musician suffering from cancer, is still with me, turning itself over and over in my head. 

The Kindle edition of this was, at £6.17 at the top of my price range, but small publishers can't discount in the way that the big ones can and - as I feel Salt are worth supporting - I paid up with the certain knowledge that whatever I bought from them would be worth it.  The collection is available in paperback at a similar price.   I'm also delighted to find out that she has a new novel out this year provisionally titled 'The Tiger of Tulsipore'.  More great reading!

Robert Bringhurst: The Tree of Meaning

A Story as Sharp as a Knife was the first book of Robert Bringhurst’s that I read and I found it so interesting I began to look around for others.   The Tree of Meaning is a collection of essays, which were given as lectures on the subjects of language, mind and ecology.  Margaret Atwood wrote that ‘it’s one of those works that rearranges the inside of your head - a profound mediation on the nature of oral poetry and myth, and on the habits of thought and feeling that inform them.’   It’s also about how we use language to make sense of the world, and how we can learn the language of the universe and develop a sustainable relationship with it. 

Robert Bringhurst is known for his work on the mythology and literature of the Haida nation.   When challenged about why he spends so much time learning and researching ‘extinct’ languages, he responds that they are of great practical value to us.  ‘They are the legacy, after all, of peoples who knew how to live in this land for thousands of years without wrecking it.’

Like fossils in rock, these languages tell us a lot about ourselves as well as the people who used them and are a cautionary tale for the present. ‘A language is a life-form, like a species of plant or animal.  Once extinct, it is gone forever.  And as each one dies, the intellectual gene pool of the human species shrinks.’  We lose knowledge that can’t be replaced; we lose diversity and progress further and further towards monoculture.  ‘The structure of meaning,’ Bringhurst asserts, ‘is polyphonic’ - the more voices we lose, the nearer we get to monotony.   A culture is an ecosystem - ‘the community we create for one another’ that enables us to function as a human organism.

He refers to the colonial policies that have led to the mass extinction of languages and cultures.  Bringhurst thinks that the greatest danger to the planet is ‘those who think the world belongs to them’ rather than those who think they belong to the world.  Cultures are still being wiped out and Bringhurst cites the recent Bosnian war ‘where a tradition of oral, epic poetry survived from Homer’s time ....... now, at this moment, the villages in which those poets lived are rubble and mass graves.’

He homes in on our increasing numbers and the flawed logic of consumerism - ‘endlessly increasing material wealth for an endlessly increasing number of humans is a suicidal dream’.  I have to agree with him, particularly when he identifies the moment it all went wrong - the moment when commerce changed from a public service meeting the needs of the community, to a predator, creating needs and strengthening demands ‘turning them into addictions which cause material goods to turn into drugs’.   He doesn’t claim to have answers, but he asks questions and thinks around them in an intelligent way.
 
But he’s best on language and poetry.  All language, he reminds us, is metaphor - standing in for the thing itself.  What makes a poem?  In poetry ‘it is not the text that counts.  However remarkable this text may be, its poetic quality depends on its author having known how to keep alive in it the light of what is beyond language.’  And he’s very good on metaphor.   ‘In every tuneful metaphor, an interval is sounded.  It is heard in the mind’s eye, or the mind’s ear ..... Two disjunct constituents of reality are evoked, on top of one another, like two bells rung at once.  The interval is the simultaneous consonance and difference between them.’

Simone Weil wrote that the purpose of works of art ‘is to testify, after the fashion of blossoming apple trees and stars.’  Poetry, Bringhurst adds, ‘is the thinking of things’.  Though this resonates with me at an emotional level, I’m not entirely sure what he means by it in plain words. It made me think of Rilke’s lines from the Duino Elegies:

Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, -
possibly: Pillar, Tower?... but for saying, remember,
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be.
               
A tree has its own truth, a plant or a rock, or a star - anything we say about them can only be at second hand - though as a writer I try to get as close as I can to Rilke’s intense ‘saying’.   Stories and poems grow like trees from the roots of our language - as human beings we crave them.  These are what Robert Bringhurst calls the ‘trees of meaning’, trees that embody the whole history of our culture and take their place in the forest of cultures that have grown during the lifetime of human existence on the planet.  Every tree that is cut down impoverishes our literature and our lives.

According to Bringhurst, the original text is the world itself, a text that we, in our urban, consumer-driven citadels, are increasingly unable to interpret, even as our scientific knowledge of it grows.  The general message of the book is that if we don’t see ourselves as part of the ecology - the forest - of the whole planet, if we continue to exterminate other cultures and species instead of cultivating diversity, we won’t survive, and our stories and mythologies will die with us.

It’s absolutely true, but I can’t help believing that somewhere, somehow, a small group of humans will survive the catastrophe and become feral and their language too will escape into the wild, throw down new roots and grow new branches.   I can’t imagine what it will look like, but on one of the twigs there just might be the story of a man and a woman, a utopia, and a fruit that gave forbidden knowledge and brought expulsion, destruction and ruin.