The Memory Keeper's Daughter

The author Kim Edwards was, according to the website, 'born on May 4, 1958, in Killeen, Texas. When she was only two months old, her parents moved the family back to upstate New York, where Edwards grew up. Although she was interested in writing since she was a little girl, it was in her college years that the wheels were set in motion for her writing career. After transferring from Auburn Community College (now Cayuga Community College) to Colgate University in 1979, she signed up for a fiction workshop. Here, Edwards wrote her first story, ‘‘Cords,’’ which eventually became ‘‘The Way It Felt to Be Falling.’’...' She teaches creative writing, and has published a volume of short stories, but The Memory Keeper's Daughter is her first novel.

The story was given to her - a 'found' plot - by the pastor of her local church and she felt it was so extraordinary that she had to write about it. Kim Edwards talks about it in an interview you can read here.

I was attracted by the title when I saw it in a bookshop in New Zealand and put it on my wish list last year. This month, I was given it as a birthday present by my daughter and it kept me company in bed with the dreaded SF Virus. I'm an omnivore where books are concerned and like to alternate meaty books with a bit of light froth and cover the whole spectrum from non-fiction through lit fiction, crime and romance with the odd bit of sc-fi and horror. Where does this book fit? If you like Jodi Picoult, you'll like this. If you enjoyed Message in a Bottle, or The Notebook, you'll like this. The author's development of the central plot theme - a betrayal that rots a marriage at the root from the very beginning - is well executed. She describes an act done to protect someone, which in the end damages both the protector and the protected.

There's no mystery - we're told at the beginning that when twins are born, one of them has downs syndrome and the father - a doctor - decides that the baby should be taken away to be brought up by someone else. He tells his wife that the baby has died. The trouble is, the author didn't make me believe it, even though this is a 'true' story. I didn't know enough about the doctor's 'back story' at the beginning, to find his act credible. He just didn't seem capable of such ruthless cruelty. But from then on the motivations are perfectly worked out. The book is very well written and the journey the parents make towards their lost daughter is beautifully told. The 'Memory Keeper'? It's a camera and photography is central to the plot. And, yes, it does have a happy ending.

How to Paint a Dead Man

The links between Literature and Landscape have always fascinated me. Living in such a beautiful part of the world, known internationally for it's authors - Wordsworth, Arthur Ransome, John Ruskin, Hugh Walpole, Norman Nicholson, to name only a few - I'm always interested to see how my compatriots transmute their backdrop into words on a printed page. Melvyn Bragg mines his Cumbrian heritage regularly and almost obsessively, Margaret Forster subtly and more in memoir than fiction. The two youngest writers - poet Jacob Polley and novelist Sarah Hall are both happy to admit that their writing has grown naturally out of the landscape they were brought up in.

I'm currently reading Sarah Hall's latest novel. It's difficult for one writer to criticise another - we know, better than anyone else, just how difficult it is to DO. But I have to be honest about how her work makes me feel. She is - I think - one of the uk's most gifted young novelists and I'm always curious to read her next book. She has very original ideas, brilliant titles and she's an expert at plot construction. But so far her work has failed to move me in some fundamental way. When I read Haweswater I often wondered whether she was trying too hard to be 'literary'? There is a great deal of detail in her books - so much that I often wish she wrote more sparingly - but I've also been aware of a detachment, a distance, a lack of passion, or perhaps just the failure to communicate that passion to me (or my failure to detect it?).

How to Paint a Dead Man is much, much better than its predecessors. The temptation to overwrite is still there - I wanted more space for the reader - but there is real passion in her portrayal of the bereaved Susan and more profound insights into the complexities that arise from being human; how bad we are at the relationships we need - how we elevate reason over instinct, and value the activities of the brain over those of the flesh.

Sarah Hall uses her plotting skills to interweave four stories with only the most tenuous of links. A dying painter in Italy, a blind flower girl, Susan's father Peter - who paints the wild northern landscape he lives in - and Susan, a brilliant young photographer who has just lost her twin brother and her own sense of identity. I was attracted by the fact that the book's settings reflect aspects of my own life - the time divided between Cumbria and Italy - and, since I live with a visual artist, the daily argument between creativity and bodily realities. This book goes deeper and takes more risks than her previous books and I suspect that it will be a turning point in her career. It has kept me reading, despite having a head full of the swine flu virus. That has to be a good recommendation and I wish her luck in the Man Booker lottery. More please!

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.

Second-hand Treasure Trove

Charity bookshop trawls can throw up some unexpected treasures. Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino was published back in the 70s, and it was so surreal I didn't know quite what to make of it at first. It's a brilliant satire on writing that most writers will enjoy. I loved the way the characters get so fed up with the author, and the dreadful book he's working on, that they try to plot their own way out of the story. I really liked the idea that characters from books live in a separate dimension where they are constantly looking for employment in other books by other authors. There are quite a lot of stories within stories, some of which are so bizarre and strange I was tempted to skip (but I would have missed some real treasures!). Halpin, the main character's, diary is a good antidote to the tedious chapters of the novel and the author's journal is such a send up I couldn't keep from smiling. His letters to publishers and critics are hilarious. There are some really good examples of 'how not to write' which I can use with creative writing students. The whole thing is wierd and bizarre, but incredibly well written. The 'author' is so pretentious and awful I can't help but feel I've met him.

Also in my second-hand book swoop was The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler. How good she is. The writing is brilliant - the way she weaves the story, the dialogue, the characters. And yet it's quiet, not showy.


My New Zealand publishers sent me a book by another of their authors, Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova It's a wonderful memoir about growing up in communist Bulgaria, moving to the West as a teenager and then going back after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It captures perfectly the tragedy of communism, and the cultural schizophrenia that so many suffered from afterwards. She writes beautiful prose and is also a very good poet. I just missed her at the Edinburgh Festival and wish now that I'd been able to make it.

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

This is the first time I've read anything by Kiran Desai and I'm impressed. Apparently this was her first book, written while she took a year off from a post-graduate American creative writing programme. It's beautifully written - rich in word-pictures that capture the odours, the colours, the tastes of India as well as its totally over-the-top, sensual overload effect. She's quoted as saying: 'I think my first book was filled with all that I loved most about India and knew I was in the inevitable process of losing. It was also very much a book that came from the happiness of realizing how much I loved to write.' That really does come off the page. I loved the characters, particularly the enigmatic, self-absorbed Kulfi, whose culinary witchcraft is the creative force of the novel.

'She was producing meals so intricate, they were cooked sometimes with a hundred ingredients, balanced precariously within a complicated and delicate mesh of spices - marvellous triumphs of the complex and delicate art of seasoning ...... The meats were beaten to silk, so spiced and fragrant they clouded the senses; the sauces were full of strange hints and dark undercurrents, leaving you on firm ground one moment, dragging you under the next. There were dishes with an aftertaste that exploded upon you and left you gasping a whole half-hour after you'd eaten them. Some that were delicate, with a haunting flavour that teased like the memory of something you'd once known but could no longer put your finger on. Pickled limes stuffed with cardamom and cumin, crepuscular creatures simmered upon the wood of a scented tree, small river fish baked in green coconuts, rice steamed with nasturtium flowers in the pale hollow of a bamboo stem ...... Desire filled Sampath as he waited for his meals.'

The novel is also funny - the revelations of Kulfi's son Sampath in the Guava tree, the antics of a plague of alcoholic monkeys, the formation of the Monkey Protection Society, and the romantic dilemmas of the Hungry Hop ice cream man. The ultimate chaos of the resolution, where the army and the police mount a dawn raid to banish the monkeys, is classic farce. The minimalist ending of the book is beautifully done, leaving the reader plenty of space for their own imagination. I can quote it, without giving anything away.

'Despite themselves, they drew their attention from the mountain top. Above Kulfi's enormous cooking pot hung a broken branch. In the pot were spices and seasonings, herbs and fruit, a delicious gravy.
And something else.
Gingerly, they approached the bubbling cauldron.'

Talk of the Town by Jacob Polley

I went to one of Jacob's book launch events to hear him read this and talk about it before I opened the book. I love his poetry - recently featured in ads for the BBC's poetry season programmes - so I was really interested to see how he'd tackle the novel. I don't know whether I'm disappointed or not. I found the novel uneven - very slow to start, but picking up pace towards the last third of the book. The 'voice' of the first-person narrator wasn't always consistent either in the way he spoke, or in what it revealed of his character. The dialect sometimes slipped between local idiom and southern english (as Jacob's own voice does), and sometimes the reader could hear the voice of the mature poet coming through that of the 14 year old boy. There were descriptions and images that didn't seem in keeping with the mind-set of the young narrator. But these are quibbles. The achievement of writing a whole first-person novel in dialect (Cumbrian at that) is amazing.

Talk of the Town is a Quest novel - Chris's quest to find his missing friend Arthur, but also to find answers to his own questions about himself and his place in the order of things. There's real violence and danger at the heart of this book and Jacob Polley makes us care enough about the hero to want him to emerge intact. It's initially hard to read, but worth persevering. It has a tight plot and the ending is much better than the beginning. He captures perfectly the tribal world of teenage boys, where you have to walk down the road in just the right way (not too nonchalantly, or too aggressively, and definitely not timidly!) in order to escape being beaten; as well as the magnetic attractions of violence and petty crime that masquerade as rites of passage.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

I've just finished Kate Summerscale's book and it was a very good read. I hadn't realised that Mr Whicher and his famous murder case were at the root of the detective genre, or that Jack Whicher was the template for Sherlock Holmes - even the Curious Incident of the Dog that didn't bark in the night came from this real-life mystery. I liked the way she unfolded the story, keeping the suspense, and letting the spotlight fall on different characters at different times. The historical detail was well handled too and not allowed to overwhelm the story. And what a story! I'd be fascinated to know how she found it in the archives. Kate Summerscale also exposes the myth of 'Victorian values', revealing the suffering, abuses of parental power and sexual repression that existed within outwardly respectable Victorian families. If you like crime fiction, this is a must-read, even though it's fact.