Water, Paper, Stone by Judy O'Shea

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Water, Paper, Stone

Judy O’Shea

In 1991 Judy left her job as a senior executive in the USA for a sabbatical year with her husband Mike, who had taken early retirement at 51 to fulfill a lifelong dream to become an artist.  They made a bucket list and one of the items on it was to spend time in Europe and learn another language.  After several false starts, they found themselves in the south of France in the Haut Languedoc on a touring holiday and fell in love with a village on the Tarn river.

Back in the states and ready to go back to work, Judy discovered that her sister Linda was critically ill following a cardiac arrest.  She had sustained significant brain damage.  ‘Linda’s courage and struggle to recover gave me the guts to get off the treadmill of my high-pressure career,’ Judy writes.   The book is written as a series of letters and emails to Linda as well as extracts from Judy’s personal journal.

Driven by a new sense that time was running out, Judy and her husband retired to France and bought a derelict water mill on the Tarn river - totally uninhabitable - and began to restore it and live their dream.

The memoir reminds me a little of ‘A Year in Provence’ - I could taste the cheese and the wine and share the drama of every catastrophe.  Living without mod-cons stretched Judy to the limit - ‘I learned I can pee in positions unknown to womanhood’.  They had a backhoe in the living room, no bathroom, rising and falling damp, rats, and incompetent builders, but they were reassured by their neighbour that ‘Avec l’argent tout est possible’ (with money anything is possible).  And so it proves.

I got involved with the fortunes of the Blanc family, where Judy goes to learn how to kill a sheep and make duck au confit.  I learned about the process of making Roquefort, the marital difficulties of the local restaurateur, and the plight of Christelle - a mail-order bride from Madagascar imported by one of their workmen -  who consults Judy about his lack of personal hygiene (how do you tell a large Frenchman that he needs a bath?)

Judy learns carpentry, stone masonry and the art of paper-making and discovers her own creativity as well as her husbands.  Before long she is being asked to take part in exhibitions in France and the United States and is setting up fascinating installations. It’s an amazing achievement.  How much personal creativity is wasted in corporate culture?

I enjoyed the glimpse into someone else’s life - the book is honest and well-written.  But it is also, for someone whose views are well to the left, an illustration of what has happened all over Spain, Italy and France, where wealthy colonisers have moved in from outside - Russians, Germans, Scandinavians, English, Americans - and driven prices up beyond the threshold for the local population.  It’s a dilemma - ruinous buildings are rescued and restored, but it often has a negative impact on the local community.  There are both pros and cons.  Judy’s book gave me much food for thought.

Amazon link to Water, Paper, Stone

Twelve Minutes of Love - Kapka Kassabova

Have you ever danced at a Milonga?  Do you know what a Gancho is?  Ever had a Tangasm?  If so, then it’s very likely you’re a Tango addict like Kapka Kassabova.  If the answer’s no, then prepare to be informed, moved, seduced and entertained. 

Kapka Kassabova is a wonderful poet and the author of a previous memoir, ‘Street without a Name’, about growing up in Communist Bulgaria.  That story ends as the Kassabova family leave Bulgaria for the UK and New Zealand.  When Twelve Minutes of Love opens, Kapka is a 27 year old New Zealander, with no sense of belonging anywhere, and a permanent sense of what the Portuguese call ‘Saudade’ - a state of longing, homesickness and displacement; the condition of the exile.

Straying into a club one evening to meet friends, Kapka hears Tango for the first time, watches a couple dance it, and becomes hooked.  Tango was created in South America by exiles, displaced people living outside the fringes of society.   It’s a hybrid, a sinuous, seductive mongrel - a music that was in perfect synchronicity with Kapka’s mood at the time.

Kapka with her collection of Tango shoes

Soon, she was discovering that there are tango relationships and other relationships and the two don’t always mix.  The perfect partner in one life may have two left feet in the other. Kapka began travelling the world in search of tango - Auckland, Argentina, Berlin, Edinburgh, Marseilles - and the book describes her relationships and the extraordinary cast of characters she meets in what Kapka believes to be a search for new tango experiences, but which is in fact a search for who she is and where she belongs.  And, yes, it does have a happy ending.

This is a beautifully crafted memoir that uses the structure of the music as a structure for the book.  It’s a brilliant read and Kapka Kassabova obviously dances as well as she writes.  I'm jealous!

The Return of Captain John Emmett: Elizabeth Speller

I bought The Return of Captain John Emmett and began to read it believing it to be  literary fiction.  I was quite surprised (and pleased) to find it morph into a thriller.  Laurence Bartram's life, like thousands of others, has been dislocated by the first world war, and his mind too has been affected by personal trauma.  As the narrator remarks 'Extreme violence changes everything.'   When he's approached by a young woman who asks him to try to find the truth behind her brother's suicide, Laurence agrees partly because his life is empty and partly because the boys had been childhood friends.  Very soon he realises that there is more to John Emmett's death than has ever been acknowledged.  A series of killings, beginning with the death of a young officer on the front line, comes to light and Laurence is drawn into a complicated, dangerous investigation where nothing is quite what it seems.  As Laurence says to his friend Charles,  'I didn't know it wasn't going to be simple.  It isn't like your storybook sleuths.  Everybody isn't either good or bad, with clues and a tidy solution to be unravelled.  Everything here goes round in circles.'

I enjoyed the novel;  the period atmosphere is beautifully evoked and it's well paced and plotted.  It kept me guessing too - just when I thought I had an inkling about who the perpetrator was, the ground shifted under me.   There was only one reservation.  The prose is curiously dispassionate - though this may be intentional - echoing the emotional detachment of the narrator.  It was all very careful and elegant - something you can admire yet not be moved by.  I would have liked to be more involved.

This is Elizabeth Speller's first novel.  She wrote a memoir, which I read a couple of years ago, called The Sunlight on the Garden, about her difficult childhood.  That, too, had a certain detachment that prevented me from being emotionally involved with the characters in it. So perhaps this coolness is a characteristic of the author's prose.   Odd, because Elizabeth is a brilliant poet who has won several prizes for her poetry, which you can read online on her website.

Although this is literary crime fiction, there are several elements of the classic crime novel  in The Return of Captain John Emmett - the lonely, slightly awkward, male detective who has an upper-class sidekick who goes fact finding - in this story it's the old school chum Charles with his private income and high-powered sports car.    The open ending leads me to believe that Laurence and Charles will be problem solving again quite soon.  And I will be happily reading on, though not quite as enthusiastically as I read Kate Atkinson or Ann Zouroudi.

The novel is already a best seller, but the author has had a great deal of help to get this far.   In the acknowledgements she admits to being 'extremely grateful' to her agent and the two assistants who apparently helped to get 'the first draft of this book to a state where it could be considered a novel.'  She also thanks Lenni Goodings at Virago for 'her confidence and continued investment' which were 'hugely encouraging'.    A copy-editor and another publisher's editor are also thanked for 'pushing the book forward', not to mention the assistance of Richard Holmes.   Publishing isn't a level playing field these days.  I wonder how many other brilliant first novels are out there, being lamented by talented writers who don't have that kind of support network.   This may sound rather ungracious, but it's a fact of modern publishing.  Who you know is important and having an enthusiastic agent is essential if you want to be hyped into best-sellerdom.

Thin Paths by Julia Blackburn

I love Julia Blackburn's work - her biography/memoir 'Daisy Bates in the Desert' is one of my favourite books.  Add to that the fact that I live much of the year in an Italian mountain village not far from Julia's home in Liguria and you can see why Thin Paths - Journeys in and around an Italian Village was a must for me to read.

My partner loves climbing mountains, so we've been exploring the 'thin paths' that spread like a spider's web over the slopes for several years now.  These paths are very old, some of them are paved and walled and date back to Etruscan or Roman times.   This one is a carefully constructed series of stone steps.

 Often they lead to abandoned hamlets of stone houses high on the mountain-side - now ruined and overgrown,  but which used to be inhabited every summer when livestock was brought up to the high summer pastures.

Some were permanently inhabited by people who lived, precariously, off the land.  Inside, oddments of furniture still rot in rooms exposed to the elements, cattle chains and implements dangle from rusty hooks.  You get glimpses of an old way of life, gone for ever.

There are also other, less pleasant, memorials here.  Crude metal crosses, shrines, stones roughly inscribed with names, that mark the places where men were killed during the brutal civil war in 1944/5 between the fascists (both German and Italian) and the partisans (mostly peasants trying to protect their homes, crops and their way of life).   Communities up here are scarred forever by it - still living beside families who took the other side, or who betrayed friends or relatives.  Terrible things happened which those over 70 still remember witnessing. 

Julia records her own exploration of her village in Liguria and the paths that wind their way up into the mountains.  She records her neighbour's stories; finds the caves they hid in, visits the ruined villages where they were born.  At one point she discovers an entire abandoned hamlet with clothes still in the closets and crockery in the cupboards, left to mice and bats and the predations of the weather.  She has encounters with wild boar, salamanders and snakes.   The book began as a series of pieces commissioned for BBC radio and is composed of journal entries and essays which some reviewers have criticised for being too fragmentary.  It's true that it leads to a certain amount of repetition, but I didn't find that a problem.

What does come out of the book is the terrible hardship of the lives these people lived.  Yet they loved the landscape so much they were often unable to settle in the coastal towns they moved to after the war to get work.

I definitely recommend this book as a window on Italian life.

William Fiennes: The Music Room

William Fiennes has somehow escaped me until now - maybe because autobiography isn’t one of my favourite genres, except when it’s a person I’m really interested in. But I saw the Snow Geese reviewed on another book blog (Dovegreyreader, who raved about it) and then found the Music Room in a remaindered book shop for £2.99.

I read it quickly - it’s refreshingly short - and with more pleasure than almost anything else I’ve read in a long time. The prose is beautiful and the way he takes readers into the world of the child is perfectly done. I can’t believe it’s only his second book.

William Fiennes was brought up in a moated castle (Broughton in Oxfordshire) though it’s never named in the book. Apparently he wanted every reader to imagine their own perfect castle as they read (interview here). But although his childhood was more privileged than most, he was lonely, being about 10 years younger than his nearest siblings. The castle became his playground, the film set for his imagination.

The family’s outwardly idyllic existence was overshadowed by tragedy. An older brother, Thomas, had been killed aged 3 in a freak accident before William was born. His eldest brother, Richard, suffered severe epilepsy that left him brain-damaged and sometimes violent. One of the most poignant moments in the book is the one where William comes round the corner of a secluded part of the garden -

“I saw Dad standing next to the house, his right arm stretched out, palm pressed flat against a buttress, his head dropped. He didn’t move.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

He said he was asking the house for some of its strength.”

The book also explores the murky history of epilepsy and the effect that it has had on families and communities over the centuries, being associated either with witchcraft or divine revelation. I couldn’t help thinking about the ‘lost prince’, George V’s son John, who was hidden away from the public gaze until he died at the age of 13. William Fiennes’ brother survives into adult-hood, but the effect on the family is profound.  One reviewer called the book 'jaw-droppingly beautiful'  and it is.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY - FACT AND FACTION

Just finished Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock. This is very different from her previous short story collections because it's rooted in her family history and the memories of her own childhood and more recent past. In the introduction Alice Munro underlines the way we shape the narratives of our lives into stories when we're reminiscing, editing and embellishing them, obedient to the templates of story-telling we absorb as children. She writes about the process of researching her family's origins and writing about her ancestors; 'I put all this material together over the years, and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself, here and there, into something like stories. Some of the characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their situations. Their words and my words, a curious re-creation of lives, in a given setting that was as truthful as our notion of the past can ever be.' She traces her family history from the bleak austerities of eighteenth century Scotland to twenty first century Canada in a series of thoughtful explorations of the conflicts between landscape and character, individual and circumstance. But in the end what she writes is not fact but fable - 'These are stories' she insists, adding, 'You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does.'





Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast: the Restored Version
I didn't realise that the version published in the 60s after Hemingway committed suicide had been significantly edited by his publisher and his fourth wife. Now Hemingway's grandson has found the original manuscript and published it as it stands. That doesn't mean it's how Hemingway would have published it, but at least it's how it was written.

There's a steamy, glowering photograph of Hemingway on the cover and it looks satisfyingly retro. It's a memoir of the author's early years in Paris in the nineteen twenties with his first wife. He talks about his relationship with James Joyce, Ezra Pound, (who kept a supply of opium for a friend), F. Scott Fitzgerald (usually drunk), Ford Madox Ford (who had halitosis), the terrifying Gertrude Stein, and the proprietor of the Shakespeare bookshop, Sylvia Beach. There's even a glimpse of Aleister Crowley striding past in the street, and Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda gets a minor role - mad and bad at Juan les Pins. In between these encounters we are treated to Hemingway's thoughts on underwear, sex, boxing, racing, french food and french toilets, and the way a writer converts experience into copy - input and output.

Even more interesting than the vignettes is the way Hemingway writes about the process of writing - or rather, becoming a writer. One of the sections that his wife originally deleted is a musing on the pitfalls of writing in the 1st person. This is fascinating because big chunks of the memoir were deliberately written by H in the second person 'you' and that was altered by his wife, who converted the whole manuscript back to the first person. He spent quite a lot of time writing in cafès, partly to get out of the small flat he shared with his wife and baby, and partly because he found the atmosphere conducive to writing. They were 'transitional places' and he found it easier in one place, to write about another. He watched people and listened to their conversations . He had particular working rules 'I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.' He would then go and do something completely different; 'I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything.'

There's always a perspective in memoir. This is an old man writing about a young man's life with the disadvantage of knowing how it all turned out in the end. The Hemingway who wrote this was a wounded animal, though he was scarcely into his sixties. His painful references to the failure of his memory (after Electric Shock Treatment) and loss of confidence in his own ability to continue writing, were excised in the original version by his wife and publisher - here they are given as they were written. The result is a more chaotic account of his years in Paris, more confessional than you'd expect from Hemingway, but also - perhaps - just a little closer to how that period of his life was actually lived.