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.
