Autumn Round-Up.

October —
Hamnet | Maggie O' Farrell

It's been talked about for years in my friendship circle, it seems. I was always going to get around to it at some point & then a friend left her copy at work so I loaned her one from the library; once returned, she later lent me hers to read. Circuitous but we got there.
I'd heard that it was hugely moving, potentially a tearjerker of an ending. 
- Is the best book to read, when recently bereaved one, given a key theme is bereavement? Mm. Is there a place, a moment in time where the language & lived experience connect & bring comfort? Perhaps. 

- O'Farrell's understated style.
Yes. All the way.
The repetitive nature of pronouns used lending rhythm to speech.

- That Shakespeare, our most famous playwright, goes unnamed; referred to only through nouns: the father, the son, the Latin master, the brother, the husband. 

- His first sighting of, then subsequent meeting with Agnes & the hawk.
- Their partnership; her gifts and their recognition of each other; cleaved unto. 
  Love, sacrifice and compromise; Shakespeare & Agnes' reconciliation [311-321].

- Force of will.

She knows she is meant to have only two children but she will not accept this. She tells herself this ..  She will not let it happen; not tonight, not tomorrow, not any day. She will find that door & slam it shut. [239]

- The journey of the plague from foreign shores to Stratford; a masterpiece  [166-180]. 

- The journey of Agnes & Bartholomew to London, to the playhouse.

Hamnet, the boy.
It takes a while to arrive at the volta, the crux but it's not want of waiting impatiently for the story to begin. There's already plenty underway by then in learning and knowing how the different family members interact, what their characteristics are. 

Death & its accompaniment in that ... they were there, they were just there; only moments, minutes, days prior. A phone call away. (A line from a recent Guardian article -- 

I thought I had more time. We always think we have more time.

- This, exactly. )

Everywhere he looks: Hamnet. Aged two, gripping the edges of the window ledge ... As a baby, tucked with Judith ... Pushing open the front door ... Catching a ball in its hoop ... Lifting his face from his schoolwork to his father to ask about a tense in Greek ... The sound of his voice, calling ... [280]

He will never come again. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet's death, his boyhood, his infancy, his birth, right back until the moment she and her husband cleaved together ... She would like to unspool it all, render it all back down to raw fleece, to find her way back, to that moment, and she would stand up, she would turn her face to the stars, to the heaven, to the moon, and appeal to them...

There will be no going back. No undoing of what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed.. and time runs only one way. [287] 

Autumn, when it comes, is terrible too. The sharpness on the air, early in the morning. The mist gathering in the yard. The hens fussing and murmuring in their pen.. The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving forward without him. [291]

- Grief, claustrophobia & the theatre:

It is intolerable. All of it. He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings & tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns. Here he is, back in this town, in this house, and all of it makes him fearful that he might never get away; this grief, this loss, might keep him here, might destroy all he has made for himself in London. His company will descend into chaos & disorder without him; they will lose all of their money & disband; they  might find another to take his place  [...]   He might lose his hold on all that he has built there. It is so tenuous, so fragile, the life of the playhouses. He often thinks that, more than anything, it is like the embroidery on his father's gloves: only the beautiful shows, only the smallest part, while underneath is a cross-hatching of labour and skill and frustration and sweat. [281-2]

... he must hold himself separate in order to survive. [305] 

__________________________

November —
Two Across | Jeff Bartsch
Open River | Caleb Azumah Nelson

Two Across, courtesy of Annie Spence's suggestion list. 
- A coming-of-age tale involving crossword puzzles. Words were going to play a key part in this one. Sign me up! 
I liked it. I was rooting for the two leads, Stanley & Vera through all their wrong turns & misadventures; moments where they'd connect & yet somehow awkwardly still misalign.

Now that he had found her, the urgency and crippling emptiness of his time alone in Boston had eased away [...]  he was carried along by inertia, doped up with the sedative effect of happiness. So he let the months slip by, the grand gesture not coming in the winter, not coming in the spring, comfortably living a non-life with her, a life without substance, written in ink that fades away. [212] 

Spring was cooked away by the increasingly oppressive afternoons of the impending summer, and then summer itself ripened and rotted and was gently laid to rest. From his place on the bench... he observed these changes while the better part of his mind tried to tell itself that he was living an extraordinary life. [178] 

 Would it have been the same novel if Vera had been up front from the start? Probably not. By stretching the story across a good few decades, both characters could grow the heck up, attempt relationships elsewhere & work out where their priorities lay. The cast of supporting characters also integrated well with their goals as parents and/or career women; their changing habits & alliances with each other.
The storyline retained my interest from the faked wedding, throughout additional scandals; pushed onwards by Vera's propensity to bolt whenever things became overwhelming. 

Vera was done with Stanley. Done. That’s what she told herself and that’s what she believed. She made light of it. [...] She made peace with her own mind and finally found a way to tuck him into one of the pockets where all of the accidental characters we encounter throughout our lives eventually take their places, waiting for the archivist of memory, to come poking around again, coming across one here and another one there, and saying, "Ah, there’s Arnold Grant, the funny red-faced boy from first grade" [...] Stanley’s pocket was a very prominent one, but Vera convinced herself that one day it would become as inconsequential and as seldom touched upon as poor Arnold Grant's. [198]

It was funny too. Firstly, for seeing how far these booksmart people had to go to learn a life lesson as well as their shrewd method of communicating across the country, of signalling intent. But secondly, a witty read just in itself. (Pity the humble, practical butter knife!)

He was as useful and reliable as a butter knife, and just as dull. [271]

There was no avoiding the fact that she missed his body. She was flesh and blood after all. But she wouldn’t say his name, or even let it whisper through her mind. If she felt the "S" coming, she would bend it in to quickly bend it into something else. Sss-standard. Sss-starlight.  [...]  Sss-spaghetti. [228]

 My favourite line, 

She was convinced she could spend the rest of her life without a man. Instead, perhaps she would buy one of those nice Japanese teapots.  [226]

Bartsch, Jeff. Two Across. Grand Central Publishing: NY, 2016.

_________

Open River.

Let's start with the good. 
- A friendly recommendation from an actor shared backstage. A book that would've otherwise escaped me, most probably or I may not have loaned at all. 
- Poetic in style. 
- Highly lauded... That's a neither nor here there though. ("Sally Rooney meets Michaela Coel", NYT -- oh, can we not? Can we not just say what it's like rather than having to fall into lazy mash-up territory?) 
- Is it a book for me though? ('what it means to move through the world whilst Black' - Bolu Babalola.) Maybe. Maybe I'd identify with aspects of it; find commonality or find myself challenged. 

There were elements recognisable, certainly in the love story's dynamics:

'It's easier to do this, to open a box & close it quick, seal it with sharp quips. It's easier to let your bodies do the same...'  [45]

'Honestly,' you said. 'I don't know.'
Except you did know. To give desire a voice is to give it a body through which to breathe & live. [...] It was easier to remain silent & hold the desire to yourself. [65]

- the injustices of Stop & Search; the fatigue [59],

The sirens grow closer. All those present grow more fearful in the presence of the siren because when they, the police, are close, you lose your names & you have all done wrong. [117]

And there were elements which also left me feeling othered. I didn't know many of the Black names that were filtered into the writing but I did like how readily they were included, as part & parcel of the whole.

There were times when the poetry grasped the moment.

Love as a form of meditation; reaching towards a more honest expression of self.  [110]

And there were times when the language felt ... much more languorous. I took a break from it for a few weeks & I wasn't exactly rushing to return. 
Being a tale of two lovers in their early twenties, I found that it navel gazes somewhat. It's about the young man and his experience & understanding of how he fits in his community & within the wider world. Yet as much as he's writing & talking about her, the love interest - it's all about him, and all about him & being Just Friends again & again until ...  I started to find that rather cloying. 

To strike out here entirely & draw a line back across my reading past, I think - if I wanted to read poetic prose again - I think I'd return to Jon McGregor. I'm glad to have read it but ... unless his next one were to shake things up, I don't think I'd be rushing to encounter another.

Nelson, Caleb Azumah. Open River. Penguin: UK, 2022. 

Remarkable | if nobody speak of...

As Associated With Cambridge (i) 

 I mean to write about a recently loaned novel, Fried Green Tomatoes' - but before I do that, I feel I should backtrack slightly as there's another one which preceded it. 

One which I fully intended to review a fair while back. if nobody speaks of remarkable things: 

This book is: April 2008, lit by the early morning light creeping into Carl's room. Awaking with more than a hint of Cope's poem that, at 3am: somewhere else / you're sleeping / and besides you there's a woman / who is crying quietly / so you won't awake, I picked up from where I'd left off from my Standing Room Only journey on the tube and out of London, the previous day. 

 I'd found it on a charity shop shelf in North Berwick that Easter. For me, that's a surprisingly short amount of time between purchase & the act of beginning to read. I have books stockpiled from the last three years, calling out for a bit of love & attention. I can't remember now if it was just the blurb itself, which happened to sell the book to me. (I mean, how is one meant to walk away from

this novel owes as much to poetry as it does to prose.. an invocation of the life of the city (Times); overflows with prose as poetry (BI) ?

I know I couldn't and didn't.) 

Or maybe I'd read a review on it sometime that year? That's just as likely for the title to have curled up, dormant in my head for a while, to reawaken later on. 

Returning to it now (& its many edge-folded pages), it was this one which still stands out clearly in my mind from that morning, trying to make out the shape of the words from the limited light:

The man sitting on his wall, outside number eleven, he is drawing a picture of the street [..] That is what he wants to get onto the page, all the architectural details. For now there are just a few lines, faintly etched and erased and re-etched [..]  He wants to do a good job of this today. He's been told that his drawing is weak and that he must improve it,.. so he is trying very hard [..]  These houses are very different from the houses in his street, of course. The colour, the shape, the way they are all joined into one another.. it is all different to his village at home. But he likes them, there is a pride to see in these houses, in their age and in their grandeur. He knows that they were built over a hundred years ago ... He wonders about the people who lived in these houses first,.. what they would say if they could see their houses now, shunted into the poor part of town, broken up into apartments and bedsits.. But still he thinks, even if they are not what they were they are still good houses, in a good street.. He measures the distances between the ridges and the eaves, calculating the angles, and as he looks... he notices that the hop-skipping girl is standing right behind him and is looking at his skeletal drawing. It is the street he says, and he waves a hand at the row of houses opposite, I am drawing your marvellous street, and she giggles because his accent makes marvellous rhyme with jealous..

The book still holds a kind of beauty and power for me; it's so easy to just slip back between its pages. It opens with a song of the city, of that pulse and vibe of urban life. It pivots around its own finale. 

The climax of the novel is presented to us from the start so the movement of the text both leads up to and away from this moment. We have the accident constantly in our mind's eye and yet we still wait upon the intricacies which lead up to it, without fully knowing when or how the tragedy will break loose again. 

McGregor uses two plotlines to tell the story of what came after, as well as what came before. 

It's a novel of only a few voices but many-peopled and with many stories. Each person with their own bit of history and experience living inside them.

The novel moves smoothly between the third person narrative of the lives of those on the street and the first person, dominant storyline of the girl just become pregnant. Of the grief and daring which led her to that point and the way she adapts to her new state alongside an unlikely budding romance, her mother's dismay, as well as her 'social condition' in how the public now view and treat her. 

The difference between the narrative forms do not however, create any kind of hierarchy as to how much empathy is felt by the reader across the large cast of characters. Indeed, I was as interested and touched by the old couple from Number 20, dealing with terminal illness and the widowed father with his scarred hands & his young daughter & yellow ribbon of Number Sixteen as I was in following the girl herself and her evolving story. 

 McGregor writes in a way which reflects upon the mundane in the rituals of life and routine and the breaks we create within them. He describes beautifully in places the clutter of life, of possessions and memory-keeping, as underlined by the young characters packing up their belongings & moving out, moving on. 

He presents in the novel both noise - the dull traffic, the bland chatter, the small talk, movements within sex - and silences - from absence, loneliness, shyness, within married life, within the accident itself. 

 The clever part in his characterisation comes from the intertwining of lives and experience. Of neighbourhood life with people crossing in the street, interacting from their doorsteps, leaning out of windows, sitting on the garden wall. Living side-by-side but knowing only faces and habits. Of the girl, in her meeting with Michael and learning of his brother she unwittingly bewitched. 

Also, of relationships, blood and water: man and wife, father and daughter, mother and daughter; the casual exploratory nature of teenage relationships; the state of platonic, sexual, married relations. 

Amongst the turned page corners:
- Michael's brother, 'the young man with the dry eyes' of number eighteen and his recollections of 'that Wednesday night ... thinking he was getting ahead of the situation' and his desire for the relationship to be realised;

- the girl with the boy in Aberdeen in the aftermath of the funeral and the sudden attraction:

I'd never before felt such a deep need to move that way ... It made me feel primitive, rooted, connected to the dirt of the earth and the light of the stars, a spun thread pulled across the span of generations. I was swollen and pregnant with desire, and the need swept through me in waves...

- the old man of the couple, of his going away to war and returning home:

When he came back to her he would be unable to talk, knew it as soon as he put his hand on the cold tailgate of the truck heading home.. He could see her face all through that long journey, waiting to hear his stories, wanting to comfort his sadnesses. He could see the expectation she would have in her eyes, not knowing what he would say but knowing that he would surely say something. But this was different, and perhaps she'd understand.

- the man with the scarred hands, recalling his wife:

The look in her face when she lifted the veil, the delight, the pride, the beautiful in her soul, could be yesterday. Her face, was beautiful. Her hands, was beautiful. Her skin, was smooth and clear and unbroken, when she touched him lightly it felt like water trickling across his body... She was tall, and strong, and she kept her hair coiled tightly around the back of her head and she had intricate paintings on the secret parts of her body. She was a wonderful woman, but this was not enough to help her. He loved her deeply but this was not enough to help her... He could not reach, he was not enough.

- the prose-poem of the rain shower, falling and feeding itself into the plot like a portent:

...And there's the smell in the air, swelling and rolling, a smell like metal scraped clean of rust, a hard cleanness, the air tight with it, sprung, an electrical tingle winding from the ground to the sky, a smell that unfurls in the back of the mouth, dense, clammy, a smell without a name but easy to recognise and everyone in the street knows it.. everyone is smelling the air, looking upwards, saying or thinking it smells like rain... One, two, three drops at a time, a slow streak down a bedroom window... And after these first kissed hints there is the full embrace, the wetness of the sky pouring suddenly down upon this street, these housesm this city, falling with a strange quietness.. gently gathering momentum until suddenly there is a noise like gravel slung at windows and the rain is falling hard, heavy, bouncing off the tarmac with such force.. it's hard to tell if the rain is coming up or down...

- that tense moment, preceding a kiss, between Michael & the girl:

I say is that better, I say it quietly and I move closer to him as I say it. .. He says yes, thankyou and I move closer still, as if to hear the words. I look at him, I lift my face and he lowers his. He looks at me, he moves a breath closer, I feel his hands hovering around the sides of my face. Our mouths are as close as the closed wings of a butterfly. We each move closer, and the distance between us thins further, a veil of silk, a breath. Everything has stopped.

~ as well as the broken moment after a kiss is aborted:

... I don't say anything, I look at him, he looks at me, he looks away, he looks at me, he says I have to go I'm sorry, he picks up his coat and then he is gone. On the floor, a puddle of water and a crumpled t-shirt, wet footprints, a towel.

The man with scarred hands:

He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words.. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.

I don't think I want to do a starred breakdown for this. I simply loved what I read.

McGregor, Jon. If Nobody Speak Of Unremarkable Things. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc: London, 2003. (Paperback ed.)