Winter Additions.

“Books are safe.”

||  January

Contrary to Whovian—Fahrenheit lore, when turning a page is one of the few activities least likely to exacerbate a shouty shoulder, books do turn somewhat benign. 

Kicking off the New Year with this mixed parcel of reads (‘highbrow’, ‘low-brow’ & ‘eyebrow’, wrote my friend), starting with the most racy & light-hearted of the three; an easy flick-through. 

California Dreamers | Norman Bogner

Being as old than myself, some of Bogner’s attitudes here are certainly contemporaneous (rape games? Mm. Gross.) 

But on the whole, I found I could easily root the most for protagonist Claire, “the jilted small-town beauty who followed [Bobby] West”. 

Her determination to pick herself up, dust herself off & stand her ground in matters of business, romance & love. 

I’m still not entirely convinced of the logical leap from seeing someone sporting camouflage trousers to setting up an entire equivalent Army-&-Navy Store but hey ho, plot must. 

I did appreciate the turn of phrase here,

These were the faces she encountered each day on Rodeo Drive, tough and finicky in stores, but at night their real faces crawled out of the sunlight…” [203-204]

 Bogner, Norman. California Dreamers.
Sphere Books: London, 1982. 

Next up:

|| February | March | April 

Night Side Of The River | Jeanette Winterson

Appropriately enough: 

    What did Albert Camus say? It’s not one thing or the other which leads to madness; it’s the space in between them. 

    I’m living in a space between lives — my past and my future. I’m living in a space between worlds. How could I not feel like a crazy woman. [102]

— Mm. Not so much crazed as caught. 

This was a slow burn read for me. 

Short story collections aren’t my usual go-to. I’m not sure I’ve actually read a collection since my undergrad years with its Granta broad strokes C.20th (somewhat underwhelming) American anthology (1998 ed.?) 

— All I remember from then is a woman, a girdle & some … turkey fat perhaps? Delightful. 

Give me Uncle Tom’s Cabin over that any day. 

Although perhaps I should actually be following up on Bill Nighy’s ill advised secondary Percival Everett recommendation of James (second to The Trees); anyway —

I’d not picked up any Winterson for a while, crammed as the Ws of my bookcase may be. 

The book was loaned by a former colleague; they’d never quite clicked with her before & yet - this time - the ghost stories paid off. Triumph! 

Favourite chapters include

•  Ghost In The Machine: 

an awkward love triangle between the living, the dead & the avatar. 

•  The Spare Room: 

its nod to Spitalfields, of rooms occupied & not, of bad endings, seeking closure & forging resolution. 

This. Oh. 

Absolutely this:

Winterson, Jeanette. Night Side Of The River. 

Vintage: Great Britain, 2023.

My Year In Books: 2025

 The Night After Christmas - Kes Gray
*Night Side Of The River - Jeanette Winterson
The Blue-Footed Booby - Rob Biddulph
Hotel World - Ali Smith
The Penguin Lessons - Tom Michell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pageboy - Elliot Page 
The Dead - James Joyce

Well-thumbed; JW.

Brilliant. 

Lyrical. Witty. Authentic. Eye-opening. 

Shining a light on what she writes, why she writes & how she writes. 

Intertextual; a love of literature. 

Life in Accrington I'd known about & likewise of her time in Oxford due to ground covered in Oranges. But the breakdown? Writing her way out of it; figuring through. That particular chapter, The Night Sea Voyage, came up like a sharp left turn for the reader. 

Moving. Engaging. The recriminatory conversational creature. Courageous. 

The adoption papers trail; making the novel more than ever into a compelling page-turner. 

There were so many lines too, thoughts & themes which I wanted to savour. As the above photo shows, the closer I moved towards the ending, the more I felt struck by & wanted to revisit. 

______________________

.. In the morning there were stray bits of texts all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps.
  It is probably why I write as I do - collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? These fragments have I shored against my ruin . . . 

[41]

12. THE NIGHT SEA VOYAGE

... Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write a story with a beginning, a middle & an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me. That is why I write as I do and how I write as I do. It isn't a method; it's me.   [...]
 Whenever I write a book, one sentence forms in my mind, like a sandbar above the waterline. They are like the texts written up on the walls when we all lived at 200 Water Street; exhortations, maxims, lighthouse signals flashed out as a memory and warning.
  The Passion: 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me.'
  Written on the Body: 'Why is the measure of love loss?'
  The PowerBook: 'To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.'   [156]

...  Then a string of lines start replaying in my head - lines from my own books - 'I keep writing this so that one day she will read it.' 'Looking for you, looking for me, I guess I've been looking for us both all my life . . . '
  I have written love narratives and loss narratives - stories of longing and belonging. It all seems so obvious now - the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother. It is my mother. It is my mother.   [160]

. . .

On text memorised,

I had lines inside me - a string of guiding lights. I had language.

[9]

4. THE TROUBLE WITH A BOOK . . .

At home one of the six books was unexpected: a copy of Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Mallory. It was a beautiful edition with pictures, and it had belonged to a bohemian, educated uncle   [...]
I have gone on working with the Grail stories all my life. They are stories of loss, of loyalty, of failure, of recognition, of second chances.  [...]
Later, when things were difficult for me with my work, and I felt that I had lost it turned away from something I couldn’t even identify, it was the Perceval story that gave me hope. There might be a second chance . . .

[37-8]

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy.
A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.
It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place. 

[40]

I looked out and it didn’t look like a mirror or a world. It was the place I was, not the place where I would be. The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed. What they held was already inside me, and together we would get away.  [...]
‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own.’ 

[43]

5. AT HOME

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. 

  There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know this from the chilly nights on the doorstep.

12. THE NIGHT SEA VOYAGE

  On bad days I just held onto the thinning rope.
  The rope was poetry. All that poetry I learned when I had to keep my library inside of me now offered a rescue rope.   
[...]  
  But what is really your own never does leave you. I could not find words, not directly, for my own state but every so often I could write, and I did so in lit-up explosions, that for a time showed me that there was still a world - proper and splendid.   

[163]

It was a rope slung across space. It was a chance as near to killing me as to saving me and I believe it was an even bet which way it went. It was the loss of everything through the fierce and unseen return of the lost loss. The door into the dark room had swung open.   [...]

  The door had swung open. I had gone in. The room had no floor. I had fallen and fallen and fallen.

  But I was alive.

  And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the broken pieces of my mind. 

[169]

14. THIS APPOINTMENT TAKES PLACE IN THE PAST

.. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn't believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated .. 

[185]

15. THE WOUND

  All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to my identity - the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognisable by my scar. 

[223]

Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. 

Vintage: London, 2012

"You play; you win." | The Passion

There she meets her husband, who literally steals her heart. After leaving & meeting Henri, they set off to reclaim her heart from her husband’s house. 

I need to revisit The Passion. I read it quickly in my first year to keep up with term & the reading list. I borrowed rather than bought a copy to cut down on costs. It was quickly supplanted by 'Oranges for which I cared a great deal more. Even so, I remember reading of the above adventure. The concept has always moved me. Winterson's metaphor made literal; the lost heart recovered.

Passion, to Winterson, is a love of life, a love both of the defeats and of the victories. Passion is playing at life without pacing oneself. Passion is betting everything on the rounds of life. When Villanelle gives her heart to her wealthy lover, she has exhibited passion. She loses, but because she already is a gambler at life, she is not destroyed; she instead becomes a wiser gambler at life than she was before her loss.

One troubling aspect of Villanelle is the manner in which she describes love. She always seems to speak of someone stealing her heart rather than her giving it to someone. Yet she understands the gamble of playing with her heart. In the middle of the war, she is grateful for the absence left by her heart. Salvadore wishes to exchange hearts with Villanelle yet it has been stolen by another. It seems that she gave it or gambled it, not that it was stolen. She speaks of her desire for someone to steal Henri’s heart, but does not realize that she is the one to whom he has given it already. Why does Villanelle refer to her heart as stolen when it was actually lost in a wager? She speaks that way because she fancies herself as a smart gambler and one who does not lose.

- students.depaul.edu/~jabsher/undergrad/novel/Youplay.doc

" 'Symmetries"

It was, of course, a good choice. 

I'm reading every evening before falling asleep until I recognise I'm no longer taking in the words from the page & draw to a close. 

I'm reading every morning after my alarm goes off; just another page or two before I get up & face the world. 

I don't do that often: it's usually a snatched moment or away from the demands of the day in some enclosed vacuum of time, on a bus or a train journey when it's possible to do very little else. 

But Winterson invites the luxury of the moment, the prioritising of that particular time spent on that activity as opposed to any other. She draws in her reader, establishes an intimate confidence and in doing so, maintains their interest in plot development. 

 It took me a good chapter or so to find my stride & settle into the story. I recognised some of the conscious rhetoric also deployed in The Passion & wasn't sure if I would take to it. 

    The Passion is deemed so unique and elevated amongst her works that I didn't want to risk a repeat encounter; I wanted something new. It's Winterson's lyricism & metaphor which I love. The post-modernism and meta-narrative is fun & can be cleverly deployed but in terms of defining character, it now belongs in my head to Villanelle who assumes it like a second skin. 

  In the chapter of The Fool, I was struggling to establish which voice out of the two women, Stella & Alice, was speaking. But once into The Tower & the finding of the affair and from then onwards into the three chapters of childhood, the novel just flowed. Beautiful words and fully eloquent passages. 

   I've been passing them across the ocean, borrowing from their nuances & metaphor to lend weight to other words. To try & articulate emotional experiences, which would otherwise be struggling into sense or remain mute, entirely wordless.

 ___

Walk with me ... Walk the seen and the unseen. What can be rendered visible and what cannot.

The wind up at dusk and the leaves in squalls and the birds flying into the wind-backed leaves so that in the lost light I could not say where the leaves stopped and the birds began. I try to distinguish but at crucial moments the space between carefully separated objects collapses and I too am whirled up against my will into the dervish of matter. The difficulty is that every firm step I win out of chaos is a firm step towards . . . more chaos. I throw a rope bridge, haul myself across the gap, and huddled on a little outcrop, safe for now, observe the view. What is the view? Another gap, another stretch of water. (102)

___

.. The riverrun is maverick, there is a high chance of cross-current, a snag of time that returns us without warning to a place we thought we had sailed through long since. 

Anyone to whom this happens clings faithfully to the clock; the hour will pass, we will certainly move on. Then we find the clock is neither raft nor lifebelt. The horological illusion of progress sinks. The past comes with us, like a drag-net of fishes. We tow it down river, people and things, emotion, time's inhabitants, not left on shore way back, but still swimming close by. .. The unconscious, it seems, will not let go of its hoard. The past comes with us and occassionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. Present. Future. When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be sure who we are. If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water. (104-5)

____

Walk with me. Walk the broken past, named and not. Walk the splintered planks, chaos on both sides, walk the discovered and what cannot be discovered. Walk the uneasy peace we share. Walk with me, through the night, the night air, the breathing particles of other lives. Breathe in, breathe out, steady now, not too fast on gassed lungs. I did not mean my words to poison you. Walk with me, walk it off, the excess fat of misery and fear. Too much to carry around the heart. Walk free. (117-8)

____

I want to feel but with feeling comes pain. I could advise myself to keep out complications and I won't pretend that I have no choice in any of this. I have noticed that the choices seem to be made in advance of what is chosen. The time gap in between the determining will and the determined event is a handy excuse to deny causality. In space-time there is always a lag between prediction and response.., sometimes of seconds, sometimes of years, but we programme events far more than we like to think. (120)

____

'Do you fall in love often?'

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

'I'm not in love with you.'

What would it be to love? Would it be the field under rain, the vivid green the grass takes? .. Would it be natural at all? Would it be lucky find or magic trick? Buried treasure of sleight of hand? Would I be the conjuror or the conjured? Would it be a spell or the song I sing? If I am a wound would love be my salve? If I am speechless would love be a mouth? I do not want to declare love on you as of midnight yesterday. I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun at your head. I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a volunteer member of the FBI. Where did you go, who did you see, what did you do today dear? I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. (126-7)

Winterson, Jeanette. Gut Symmetries. Granta Books: London, 1997

Reading from 'Symmetries...

... But for now, the missing link will have to wait. I needed a Winterson fix badly last night. Gut Symmetries (1997) filled the want perfectly. I only got a chapter in; already I was reaching for paper & pen as she so aptly & succinctly hit the nail right bang on the head again. Myth. Oh my goodness, yes.

Silver's Story | Lighthousekeeping

I had a train journey to Royston & back last weekend. Lighthousekeeping accompanied me, as did Their Eyes Were Watching God and both of which I managed to finish.

Lighthousekeeping was as good as it first promised to be.
It made me laugh:

After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistock Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I had only ever stolen one of each.
_________________

'Was there no human being you could have talked to instead?'
'I wasn't talking to the bird. The bird was talking to me.'

There was a long pause. There are some things that shouldn't be said in company. See above.

and it prompted me to delight in her use of language and power of expression:

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

Plus more on that favourite of themes, with echoes reaching back to Oranges:

... it matched a moment in me that was waiting for someone to call my name. Names are still magic: even Sharon, Karen, Darren and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In the fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.

There were other elements of classic Winterson in Lighthousekeeping, which I enjoyed:

the quirky heroine overcoming the odds pitched against her and journeying through life; affirmative first-person narrative; her episodic style, interspersed by myth & tales: Babel Dark's history
as recounted by Pew,Tristan & Isolde making an appearance;
Silver's refrain; story-telling; love-making; a nod to the multiplicity of female identity:

There's always a woman somewhere, child; a princess; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or as one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good.
Is that the complete list?
Then there's the woman you love.

Babel Dark's character was somewhat beguiling in its duality. The journals serving as a brilliant example of this, strengthened later by Stevenson's inclusion in the novel along with his text of Jekyll & Hyde.

He kept two journals; the first, a mild and scholarly account of a clergyman's life in Scotland. The second, a wild and torn folder of scattered pages, disordered, unnumbered, punctured where his nib had bitten the paper.

Babel as the minister with its social standing in Salts, a role that grants authority but also serves to hem him in, curtailing his freedom. Acting as a man of faith whilst being confronted by Darwinism. Challenged by his duty to God to the extent that he betrays himself & his real love: I stood firm, I stood firm, I stood firm.
The complexity of his feelings towards Molly. You could just about forgive his infidelity, his bi-annual escape to Bristol as Mr. Lux, were it not for the dark human aspect of his character: his jealousy breaking out in violence, the harsh treatment of his wife where his frustration manifests itself through abuse.

I enjoyed the introduction to Silver and the surreal state of her childhood but I was increasingly charmed by her upon her relocation to Bristol & the lengths to which she went in overcoming library bureaucracy so as to complete Death in Venice.

I liked "The Hut " episode within the novel but this also created a questionable flaw for me, within the novel. There was something in the handling of Silver's romance with the girl from the convent which seemed to disrupt the flow of her story. 

Almost like the novel tripped itself up in its eagerness to pull in a love interest to aid Silver's journey to self-fulfillment & understanding. Something too conventional in how the inclusion of a romance was equated towards the completion of Silver's journey. 

I'm still trying to work through whether Winterson really intended it as thus: the love interest serving as an end in itself, rather than the means to her eventual end. 

I had been rooting for Silver to find that sense of understanding & her path through life and to find it from within herself, not simply due to finding love with someone else.

Winterson uses the metaphor of the open door:

I fell asleep, and dreamed of a door opening.
Doors opening into rooms that opened into doors that opened into rooms. We burst through, panelled, baize, flushed, glazed, steel, reinforced, safe doors, secret doors, double doors, trap doors. The forbidden door that can only be opened with a small silver key.
You are the door in the rock that finally swings free when moonlight shines upon it.. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.

- which could just be a metaphor for an awakening through finding a connection through love, sex and conversation - but then again,

Open me. Wide. Narrow. Pass through me, and whatever lies on the other side, could not be reached except by this. This you. This me. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

Does the girl from the convent resolve one aspect of Silver's search or is she, like Pew, DogJim & Babel Dark, an equal contributor towards Silver's journey's end?
 Because the novel does reach completion with her homecoming - regaining the haven of her lighthouse:

I took out my little silver key and opened the door into our kitchen [..] Finally, not knowing what I did, I had come back ... I got up, opened the drawer.. took out the key and wound the spring. Tick, tick, tick. Better - much better. Time had begun again.
... I had often seen this light. Inland, land-locked, sailing my years, uncertain of my position, the light had been what Pew had promised - marker, guide, comfort and warning.
Then I saw him. Pew in the blue boat.

~ Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. Harper Perennial: London, 2004.

____________

Plot: ****
Fun: ****
Novelty: ****
Overall: ****

unearthed | Lighthousekeeping

I discovered a new Winterson last week, picked up a few lines written from a blog quoting out of Lighthousekeeping and soon after, headed to Shelter, three down from work. There's always at least a copy of Oranges waiting amongst the 'W's for a new reader. As it happened, I was in luck.

I've had Sexing The Cherry waiting in the wings for a while. I can't remember when or where I found it, sometime in the last three years. But Lighthousekeeping, the quotes I read compelled me to start now. Standing in the shop, I leafed through it, finding its weight amongst the words; that kind of 'affirming gravity' with which she writes. The style which won me over entirely when I first finished Oranges nine years ago: 'As it is, I can't settle...' I flipped to the back page. Exactly what you shouldn't do, but still.

And there it was:

I'll call you, and we'll light a fire, and drink some wine, and recognise each other in the place that is ours. Don't wait. Don't tell the story later.
Life is so short. This stretch of sea and sand, this walk on the shore, before the tide covers everything we have done.
I love you.
The three most difficult words in the world.
But what else can I say?

~ Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. Harper Perennial: London, 2004.

There will be others I'm sure, which nestle their way into my mind, which speak directly to me. Once I return and start again from the beginning. But for now, that will do.