A Commitment to #TBR20

I mentioned #TBR20 in my 2015 Reading Ambitions blog, and since then the movement (started by blogger Eva Stalker) has been gaining steam and national attention, including multiple references on the Guardian website. Eva has compiled an excellent list of all the people taking part which includes pictures of people’s TBR piles which is worth a view here 

For myself, I had planned to pick my TBRs as I went along, I certainly have a large enough selection to choose from (I could probably choose a TBR100 without much effort). I started my initiative in December, and so far I’ve already read 10 of my TBR20. This has led to a number of soul-searching thoughts including ‘am I cheating?’, ‘am I making this too easy on myself?’, ‘am I really committed?’ and being honest I have to say that there may have been a slight degree of making the challenge easy (the selection  of a Moomins book condemns me, I think). So in typical me fashion I think that maybe I need to make this more of a challenge. I am pretty desperate to buy a book right now. There’s one particular book I really, really want to own (not just read, own (aka ‘covet’) ) which is this one. I have some book tokens burning a hole in my pocket, I have Waterstone's points and am one stamp off a £10 voucher. I have the means to buy a book, I have the desire (when don’t I?), but I also have this commitment to try to slow my buying speed and I think it would do me the power of good to break my habit of impulse book buying. It would certainly do some good for my bulging shelves and my empty bank balance. So in the true spirit of New Year in which we self punish for the excesses of Christmas, I am going to make my challenge a little bit harder. Here is my challenge:

I’m going to select the final 10 of my #TBR20 list.

Yes, I admit, it doesn’t sound too groundbreaking, but there’s a sting in the tail. You see, I find it very difficult to stick to a reading list and I’m one of those readers who slips from book to book through a curiosity algorithm that would defy the most advanced mathematician. Since I’ve committed to reading Virginia Woolf, I have largely managed to stick to the plan but I have had breaks to read other books (How to be Both, Lila, the Ancillary series) so haven’t stuck to the plan entirely rigidly. So my deal with myself is this: I will select the last 10 of my TBR list and whilst I am permitted to read other books, books from my collection or books from the library, I am forbidden from buying  another book until I have finished those 10. That means I can have read 20 or even 30 books that I already own or have loaned, but until all those chosen titles have been read the book token stays in my pocket. My reward for successful completion of this project is the purchase of that lovely Tove Jansson biography (and maybe Hermione Lee’s book about Virginia Woolf). I think that cuts a fair deal.

So onto the selection. Again, not making to want it too easy on myself (I have whizzed through my first 10 at breakneck speed thanks, in part, to a Christmas break during which we had no phone or broadband connection courtesy of some clumsy-fingered BT engineer), I have tried to select a challenging array of books to comprise my last ten. Here is my selection.

To explain: the pile on the left represents the books I’ve already read (missing Lila, which I had to return to the library). In my ‘to read’ pile, each of the books falls into one or more of the following categories:

1. It’s a Virginia Woolf book – my commitment to finish reading all of Virginia Woolf’s fiction continues and these final two may comprise, bizarrely, the most ‘easy’ of my choices.

2. It’s a book that a friend bought for me and I haven’t yet got around to reading it – because guilt. This would include the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks which looks like exactly my kind of book, but it’s quite long and daunting and sciency so I keep putting it off. Which leads to category 3.

3. It’s a book I’ve been avoiding for one reason or another. This explains most of the pile. All of those books are books that I have desired to read and have then put off reading because: 1) they’re long, 2) they’re complex, 3) I was in the ‘wrong frame of mind’, 4) they were written by a man. So it’s about time I got around to them. They’ve been hanging around in my collection so long, their characters may have aged or died.

4. It’s a book I bought for a bizarre reason – like Caramelo, which I bought because the cover is so strangely awful (yet compelling) I had to have it in my collection (true fact).

5. My daughter chose it – excited by my prowling around the library, my daughter asked if she could pick a book to add to the pile, then she picked 2. This explains why my TBR10 is actually 11.

I think this is a challenge I can do (I am trying to expunge from my memory the failure iro Proust). Perhaps with a little help from my co-TBRers, it’ll keep me honest and on the path to success. Wish me luck!

In case you can't read the titles the books are:
Read pile: The Waves (Virginia Woolf), Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal (Jeanette Winterson), Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie), Ancillary Sword (Ann Leckie), Good Morning, Midnight (Jean Rhys), The Years (Virginia Woolf), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit), Moominland Midwinter (Tove Jansson), Full Tilt (Dervla Murphy)
To Read pile: The Ramayana (unknown, but probably a bloke), Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn), Caramelo (Sandra Cisneros), Americanah (the excellent Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), School for Love (Oivia Manning), Behindlings (Nicola Barker), The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot), The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell), Between the Acts (Virginia Woolf), Flush (Virginia Woolf). 

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is a writer who openly plumbs her own history in her work, famously so in her debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit which chronicles her childhood as an adoptive daughter, living in the house of a woman obsessed with the apocalypse and highly homophobic, which is unfortunate for Winterson who is a lesbian. I haven’t read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, though it is a book which has been sitting on my shelf for some time, and having read Why Be Happy… I think it’s about time I got around to it.

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal is a memoir, a non-fictionalised account of the same events but also spanning a greater period of Winterson’s life. The memoir focuses on three significant events: her adoptive childhood and her relationship with Mrs Winterson, her emotional breakdown following the death of her mother and the end of a long-term relationship, and the search for her birth mother. Interspersed amongst these events are many fascinating observations about education, about reading, about feminism, about her love of women and women she has loved, about love, sharings of wisdom and history to name but a few. It is a difficult book to explain because of this, so perhaps I can explain by saying that whenever I read a book I mark pages of interest with a little torn strip of paper, so I can return to it and write about it or reflect on it. My copy of Why Be Happy is bursting at the seams with these little strips of paper. There is much wisdom in this book, much honestly and reflection.

Jeanette Winterson is a writer who is honest and open, she writes with passion and risk, she is funny, bright and insightful. It is, whether you know her story or not, an insightful and informative read. And it’s fun to read too. There were many points in the reading that I laughed openly, other times when I felt close to tears. Winterson is a writer who pulls emotion close to the surface, but she’s not sentimental or crass. She writes an incredible amount about love; I have seen this in her fiction, most especially in The Powerbook which is, perhaps, one of the most passionate books I have ever read. It is therefore surprising that Winterson spends much of the book convincing the reader that she doesn’t know how to love, that she learned to do it wrong. As she explains here:

“No. And all my life I have repeated patterns of rejection. My success with books felt like gatecrashing. 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, but I did know that I wasn’t wanted.

And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned in any sane and stead way – the triangles of marriages and complex affiliations. I have failed to love well where I might have done, and I have stayed in relationships too long because I did not want to be a quitter who did not know how to love.

But I did not know how to love. If I could have faced that simple fact about myself, and the likelihood that someone with my story (my stories, both real and invented) would have big problems with love, then, then, what?

Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.

Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.

We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.

In my work I found a way to talk about love – and that was real. I had not found a way to love. That was changing.”

Jeanette Winterson is an intelligent and vibrant woman, she is a fighter and she fights through her fiction, she reaches and explores searching out what she wants and needs to survive, but more than to survive: to live. Coming from a working class background in the North of England (not hugely different to my own, though my mother was mine and more stable) she scrabbled and fought her way out of an appalling family situation into a degree course at Oxford (no mean feat) into a published, award winning novelist by the age of 25. She touches on all of this throughout Why Be Happy, and she does this not by being modest or with hubris but with that luminous clarity she describes about her connection with language. Whilst love may have failed her, language hasn’t and her relationship with reading, how she explored and learned from it, its intrinsic value, is inspiring. Another aspect of the book I particularly loved was the way it dipped and dove around in time. This is a feature of Winterson’s books (it has certainly appeared in all the others I’ve read) and it is one that could be frustrating but which I find very personable. Particularly in the memoir form, you get the sense that you’re following the train of Winterson’s mind where she leads you, that one thought leads to another and then to another. It places Winterson very present in the book, it is like she is talking to you. A conversation I think I would find terrifying and fascinating in equal measure.

I came away from Why Be Happy with a huge respect for Winterson as a writer. It is an honest, heartfelt and intelligent book. There are so many fonts of wisdom it is impossible to write about them all here. I was a fan before, and I’m more of a fan now. She is a writer not afraid of taking a risk, she is herself and unashamed of it. She has suffered, she has lost, she has used her life and her loss and her pain and her endless search for love as a mine for her fiction and it is remarkable for it. This non-fictional account is no different. What a great book, and a great woman.

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal receives a respectful 10 out of 10 Biis. 

Reading Ambitions: 2015

I don’t plan on looking back at my reading year for 2014. It’s something that I used to do, it’s fun to do, but after my list making habit began to border on the edge of insanity I stopped keeping a book list entirely, and besides most of the books I’ve read have been reviewed on the blog already so I would prefer to encourage readers to dig around in the blog instead. Sanity thus protected, I thought it would be good, instead, to set out some reading goals for 2015.

Goals is the wrong word, of course. Goals and reading are not concepts that really fit together in my mind, though perhaps if I was a schoolteacher I might have a different perception on that. Perhaps, then, it is better to say some loose guidelines around the kind of reading I’d quite like to do in 2015. Or beyond. I’m not big on this whole living year by year concept either. Yet here I am writing about the next block of 364 days like a trooper. Did I say my sanity had been protected?

One of the great reading decisions I made in 2014, not that I’m reflecting on it of course, was to try to read books written by female writers. I didn’t set out to make this an iron-clad rule but in the end, barring half of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (which I quit because, unbelievably, I was finding it a bit boring/repetitive. This shocked me a great deal), I did end up reading only books written by women. This was surprising, as I thought I’d cave at some point and read, perhaps, the new David Mitchell, or perhaps something by Ballard or Nicholson Baker. Yet that didn’t happen. That wasn’t because I exercised an iron will to keep picking books written by women, neither was it because of dogged stubbornness or determination to hit a target. I didn’t have to keep convincing myself. It was easy. That’s because there are a huge number of amazing writers out there who also happen to have two X chromosomes and I was lucky to have encountered a bunch of brilliant bloggers who have been sharing their thoughts on great writers they’ve read who also happen to have two X chromosomes. The pool was rich with writing brilliance. Consequently I have read some amazing new (to me) contemporary writers (Evie Wyld, Hannah Kent, Elena Ferrante, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kathleen Jamie, Helen McDonald, Annie Dillard); reminded myself of some more familiar, great contemporary writers (Ali Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Yoko Ogawa, Helen DeWitt); explored in more depth some classic (or should be classic) female greats (Virginia Woolf, Tove Jansson). Not that I’m reflecting on 2014 at all.

I don’t plan to exclusively read female writers, but I think after having experimented and explored for the last year I’ve discovered an appetite to experiment and explore some more. In the course of reading around different female writers I have, inevitably, encountered others that I’d like to read that I simply haven’t had time to. The following are writers I’d like to read (either for the first time, or in more depth) in the not-too-distant future:

Joan Didion – I have Katie Roiphe to thank for that one.

Edna O’Brien – because I bought the Country Girls trilogy from the secondhand bookshop and I’m itching to read them.

George Eliot – because she is greater than just Middlemarch and my collection of Eliot books is growing.

Rebecca Solnit – 2 books in my collection, none read yet. Yet I’ve encountered her writing elsewhere and she’s always impressed me as an intelligent, insightful woman.

Elena Ferrante – because the 3 books of the Neopolitan series are watching me…watching me I say!

Carol Shields – because she’s been recommended to me by too many people, there must be something in it.

Jane Gardam – for the same reason (also her Old Filth trilogy has just been reissued, quite beautifully)

I also want to go back to reading Japanese writers more regularly. I’ve committed to joining in with January in Japan, as promoted here in Tony Reading List  which will see me reading my first book by a male writer in a year, though Kawabata is surely an artist worth making the break for. I have a particular love for Japanese writers, there is something about Japanese fiction which really resonates with me. There is a well established catalogue of male Japanese writers that I’m already familiar with, so I’d like to explore the female writers in more depth. Writers who have made my ‘to read’ list so far include: Minae Mizumura (A True Novel, recommended from more than one source); Fumiko Enchi, because The Waiting Years was amazing; Yoko Ogawa, because everything I’ve read that she’s written has been amazing in quite different ways; and some writers that are completely new to me including Masako Togawa, Yoko Tawada, Morio Kito and Mitsuyo Kakuto. My aim is to try to read one per month, but I’ll see how that works out.  

I’d like to read more translated fiction in general. I’m not sure how I’ll fit that in, but I’ll find a way. Of course Ferrante will be in translation, as will the Japanese fiction (though I’m working on my Japanese reading skills…one day) so perhaps it will be easier than I think. There’s also one other commitment which I haven’t yet mentioned, which is my #TBR20 commitment over on Twitter. The idea behind this (if you’re not already familiar) is that it’s a commitment to read 20 books you already own, before buying (or borrowing) any more. I will have to break this to read the Kawabata (which I’ll loan from the library) but otherwise I’d like to stick to this commitment which may help me get through January with cash still in the bank. I haven’t made a list, I don’t want to be too prescriptive about which 20 books I read, and I have read 8 already (though I may have slightly cheated by including a children’s book in there) but there’s an opportunity to dig out some of my books in translation I haven’t yet got around to and kill two birds with one stone. And when I’ve finished, I will feel extremely virtuous. Then again, there is this amazing biography of Tove Jansson’s work which is tempting me and I do have some book tokens just burning to be used…

One thing I don’t want to do in 2015 is read more. My reading is lightweight compared to some (I’ve seen listings in excess of 150 books per year, whereas I generally average between 60 – 80, not that I’m counting (I’m really not)), but it is enough. I think if I try to read more I’m only going to absorb less. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about reading Woolf (which I haven’t quite finished) is how much richer the experience is when I’m forced to delve deeply, to take my time. I am enjoying re-reading favourite novels, or taking my time over difficult, but rewarding, books. I don’t know if this is an age thing, or just a realisation that I cannot read everything so I should make sure that what I do read is fulfilling to me. It is not quantity, but quality that matters. I’ve been lucky to have encountered a lot of fulfilling books recently, and I’ve no desire to give that up.

Aside from these (ambitious) goals, I’d like to continue reading non-fiction books. I’ve enjoyed the many I’ve read in the last 12 months, and I have a shelf-full of others that I really need to work my way around to.

Wishing you all another great year of reading pleasure. 

Reading Virginia Woolf: The Waves

The Waves is Woolf at her most unreachable, Woolf transmitting her highest art. Consequently it is also Woolf at her hardest to read, and as a person who generally likes to guzzle books down taking the time to give credit to Woolf’s great work was difficult. Yet worthwhile, I think. Very worthwhile.

The Waves follows the lives of six people: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda, starting at their childhood in the nursery school they went to together and following them to their deaths. There is a seventh person, the silent Percival, who I will get to later. Their stories are told in blocks of perspective: Bernard speaks, Susan speaks, Louis speaks and so on, and this is the only perspective we receive barring the interludes between chapters in which the waves, the scenery, the time of day are described, forming a frame through which we view the passage of time. Yet the waves do not change.

To understand the challenge of The Waves, I think it’s best to allow the book to speak for itself. From the beginning:

“’Stones are cold to my feet,’ said Neville. ‘I feel each one, round or pointed, separately.’

‘The back of my hand burns,’ said Jinny, ‘but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.’

‘Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide,’ said Bernard.

‘Birds are singling up and down and in and out all round us,’ said Susan.

‘The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute on the beach stamps,’ said Louis.

‘Look at the house, said Jinny, ‘with all its windows white with blinds.’

‘Cold water begins to run from the scullery tap,’ said Rhoda, ‘over the mackerel in the bowl.’

The initial part of The Waves is brief and choppy in that way, though later in the book each character is given greater space to speak and at this point I began to find it much easier to read. At this point, also, each character started to resolve into a distinct personality and it is testament to Woolf’s skill at characterisation that with so brief a remit she can draw something distinct from each character. I started to see how each resolved into a kind of conflict: Bernard and his ‘phrases’ whose personality was changeable and existed only through and in the presence of others; Louis who could never forget his origins, who felt he didn’t ‘fit in’, who wanted to expunge his history with another, more noble origin; Neville who was sharp, who was true and somehow unforgiving, who loved one only (Percival); Susan who is of the earth, a person rooted in land and property; Jinny who is of the body, who is immediate and quick and of the moment; Rhoda who is uncertain who she is, who desires to be invisible, to be not herself, who finds being a challenge and a constant conflict of fear. There is a sense here and throughout the book that Woolf is exploring herself, exploring the nature of identity, what separates and unites us, how we are made and unmade by the perspective of others who surround us. Of all Woolf’s works I have read so far, this is the one in which Woolf the woman is most heavily present. You get the sense, almost, that you are exploring her mind, exploring her questing and imagining, her questions about the nature of who and what she is.

In some respects Woolf presents this quite openly. Here, it seems Woolf addresses criticism of her work in which plot is often notably absent:

“But then Rhoda, or it may be Louis, some fasting and anguished spirit, passes through and out again. They want a plot, do they? They want a reason? It is not enough for them, this ordinary scene. It is not enough to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written; to see the sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making character; to perceive, suddenly, some group in outline against the sky. Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room. One comes in, one goes out. There are sobs on the staircase. I have heard threads broken and knots tied and the quiet stitching of white cambric going on and on on the knees of a woman.”

Here, through Rhoda, she appears to explore the difficulties of being trapped in society life:

“’Oh, life, how I have dreaded you,’ said Rhoda, ‘oh human beings how I have hated you! How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube! Now as I climb this mountain, from the top of which I shall see Africa, my mind is printed with brown-paper parcels and your faces. I have been stained by you and corrupted. You smell so unpleasant too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets. All were dressed in indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a blue feather pinned to a hat. None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowing, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair and sat yourself down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the wastepaper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.”

Then there is the enigmatic Percival. Percival never speaks for himself in The Waves, though he appears to be the pivotal point around which the others circle. Percival is loved by all, envied by some. Neville is evidently in love with Percival. Percival loves Susan, yet she refuses him. Percival is a hero who dies an un-heroic death at the age of twenty-five, falling from his horse in India. His death is a shockwave to the others, having invested Percival with all their expectations. And yet Percival never has real presence or weight in the book, we never really see nor hear him. We only know of his influence and the impact of his passing. It is an interesting approach, perhaps taking the premise of Jacob’s Room even further by denying Percival any voice at all.

It is an interesting book, The Waves. There is so much to say about it that I simply don’t have the space to get into here. Its style is unusual, it is the most inaccessible of Woolf’s books (so far) and yet it is the most thought-provoking and the most beautiful. It is so stunningly written, it is pure poetry from start to finish. It is a book to read slowly and to savour, a book to return to, to read in short bursts and then over again. It is framed by the concept of waves, it has a wave-like structure and a wave-like rhythm to its words. The protagonists speak in waves and then disappear. It was interesting, also, to see the appearance and re-appearance of the motif of the moth, as Woolf started the book as ‘The Moths’ and then changed it later, yet didn’t remove the concept entirely. Moths, waves: the idea runs through the book of something beating, something flowing forwards and backwards, sending ripples out into the world. It certainly creates ripples, ones which I need time and repetition to confront and understand.

It would be wrong to say I loved this book. I didn’t love it; I found it hard to read, exhausting at times. Yet it is beautifully written, thought-provoking and inspiring. I appreciate the artistry that has gone into its making and I know it is a book I will return to when I am better able to read slowly and absorb all of its wisdom. It is a wise book, it is explorative, it presents a lot of questions around being and identity which I don’t think it answers but prompts the reader to similarly question. It is pure poetry, and like poetry it takes time to absorb, it is something to be read, re-read and unpicked slowly. It is not a book to be swallowed down in great gulps, it takes patience though I think it rewards in equal measure. It is a book to be scribbled on and scribbled over in great quantity, and I cannot do it justice here. One must simply read it, and then again in ten years time read it again. A book for all time, and a great work of art. Whether or not you enjoy the book, I think you have to respect it. And I do.

The Waves receives a thought-provoked 9 out of 10 Biis.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson isn’t a prolific writer, but she is a great one. Her latest offering, Lila, continues her exploration of the fictional town of Gilead, focusing this time on the wife of the Reverend John Ames. Lila appeared as a side character in both Home and, in a more prominent position, in Gilead so it was lovely to return to her here and discover her perspective. In fact I think this is the most beautiful, most stirring and poignant book of the three.

Lila’s story is filled with loneliness and absence. From the beginning, Lila has been rejected, cast out, as we learn in the opening sequence:

“The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping. She couldn’t holler anymore and they didn’t hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I’ll do it! and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the stoop and shut the door and the cats went under the house. They wouldn’t let her near them anymore because she picked them up by their tails sometimes. Her arms were all over scratches, and the scratches stung. She had crawled under the house to find the cats, but even when she did catch one in her hands it struggled harder the harder she held onto it and it bit her so she let it go. Why you keep pounding on that screen door? Nobody gonna want you around if you act like that. And then the door closed again, and after a while night came.”

The child Lila is taken up by a woman named Doll, who wraps her in a shawl and rescues her. It’s apparent that Doll’s actions save Lila’s life, but from that point they live on the road as Doll avoids Lila’s family who, unbeknownst to Lila, keep following after them, less bothered about the child than the insult to their honour of Doll taking her.

The story is told in a series of recollections. At the point we meet Lila the woman she is married to the Reverend John Ames, a man much older than she is, and expecting a child. Doll, who was like a mother to Lila, is long gone. Lila who had lived her life on the road, who had worked for a period in a whorehouse, struggles with trust and is constantly on her guard for the time when the Reverend will cast her out, as others have, preparing herself to make the next move out of this town where people know too much about her and report on her every move. But the Reverend loves her (if you’ve read Gilead you will know this) and slowly Lila moves towards an acceptance of her new life.

As always there is a religious element to the story. John Ames is a religious man (not surprisingly, given he’s a Reverend) and has lived in a religious family his whole life. Lila comes to him a vagrant, an untrusting (and perhaps untrustworthy, though I think it is quite apparent how trustworthy she is) woman, a whore, a woman who doesn’t enter churches for fear she’ll be ripped off. An un-baptised woman, who the Reverend baptises and then spends considerable effort trying to wash the baptism off. Through Lila we see the church, the Bible, its rituals and beliefs through a more naturalistic point of view. Lila is horrified at the idea that Doll and the others from her wandering family won’t be waiting for her in heaven because in their ignorance they were not baptised. Yet at the same time she reads the Bible and find her life in it, albeit in the most unlikely seeming places.

There’s a lot to take in, yet it is easy because Lila is so beautifully, so honestly written. The voice throughout the book is extremely authentic, you really feel like you are listening to Lila relay her story. She is an astonishing character. She is honest, kind and unfettered by convention. She believes in love, yet has experienced it so little. She craves it to the point that she imagines stealing the child of a fellow prostitute once it’s born, as she was once stolen. Her plans are subverted and yet, in the end, she has a child of her own. The presence of this child forces her to confront her lack of trust, her inability to take root. Much of her story centres around the idea of the lost child, as she describes here when reflecting on a time when a woman (albeit kindly) mistakenly believed she’d had an illegal abortion and offered to help her:

“She’d been thinking about herself hiding that filthy dress under her coat the best she could, all sweaty even out in the cold, knowing anybody who saw her would think what that woman did. Guilty of the saddest crime there is. Nobody surprised to know she had that scrap of paper in her pocket. Old shame falling to her when it had been worn to rags by so many women before her. She could almost forget that the shame wasn’t really hers at all, any more than any child was hers, not even a child cast out and weltering in its blood, God bless it. Well, that was a way of speaking she had picked up from the old man. It let you imagine you could comfort someone you couldn’t comfort at all, a child that never even had an existence to begin with. God bless it. She hoped it would have broken her heart if she had done what that woman thought she had, but she was hard in those days. Maybe not so hard that she wouldn’t have left it on a church step. How did that woman know it wasn’t back at her room, bundled in a towel and crying for her, waiting for her voice and her smell, her breast? The sound of her heart. God bless it. And she so desperate to give it comfort, aching to. Frightened for it, just the sight of so much yearning reddening a little body, darkening its fact almost blue. Maybe that was weltering.”

It is a beautiful story, humane and thoughtful. It is similar, in many ways, to my favourite of Robinson’s works, Housekeeping, which explores the issue of vagrancy in more depth, though more coldly. Yet Lila is such a warm book, it is honest and true, it asks us to think about the nature of religion and how it applies to the innocent, those not touched by church teaching or doctrine. It asks us to think about the nature of compassion, about the idea of sin (original and not). It asks us to think about judgement and what that means. Lila doesn’t judge. She is compassionate. She is distrustful yet honest. She tries not to tell lies, even when telling the truth feels like a lie. She is uneducated, but that doesn’t make her unknowing. She is the outcast who comes back into the fold through the love of a sinner and a man of the church. It is an unlikely story, stunningly told. A beautiful, soulful book.

Lila receives an open-hearted 9 out of 10 Biis. 

In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe

In Praise of Messy Lives was a book I hadn’t heard of and probably wouldn’t have bought had I not received a copy from Canongate as part of their ‘handpicked’ initiative in which if you bought one book from Canongate they would handpick another for you. In my case I picked a copy of A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, which I’ve wanted to read for some time, and alongside it I received a wonderfully thoughtful postcard from Louise at Canongate and a copy of this book.

There will be, no doubt, many American readers of this blog that have heard of Katie Roiphe, but she was a complete unknown to me so I just started reading. Then I read some more, and some more. In Praise of Messy Lives is a collection of essays, loosely centred around the theme of ‘messy lives’, selling the benefit of living less than perfectly. It’s an interesting theme, and Katie Roiphe has a strong voice, an interesting perspective and a perceptive outlook. I can imagine it is a voice that people would quite strongly disagree with, and I suspect, also, that there are elements of me that Roiphe was arguing quite vociferously against. Yet this, for me, made it a refreshing and insightful read.

The book is split into 3 sections which organise the essays around 3 core themes: Life & Times, Book and The Way We Live Now. Each section offers a range of perspectives from the behaviour of others following a divorce, views on single parenting, the life of Jane Austen, the great American writers: Updike, Roth and Bellow; Facebook (or Fakebook, which is a great name for it I think), angry commentators and sadomasochism. Roiphe’s themes, I should point out, are not for the faint hearted. She is challenging, intelligent and unforgiving. Like here where she talks about helicopter parenting in the essay ‘The Child is King’:

“In discussing the disheartening toll babies take on relationships, Badinter writers, ‘A mother cannot allow herself to be consumed by her baby to the point of destroying her desires as a woman.’ It occurs to me that in some sense, many of the mothers she is talking about are using their children as an escape from the imperatives of romantic life. This elevation and fetishisation of the child over the parent’s private life is perhaps not always the cause of unhappiness, but rather it may be some sort of escape from the pressure to be happy, some flight from the demands of romantic connection. If the child is overwhelmingly central to family life, in all of the much discussed, anti-romantic ways, then you are delivered from the demands of true intimacy, at least for a while; it’s a reprieve from the expectation of romantic happiness, which can, of course, be exhausting.”

I think she’s got a point. There are lots of challenging views on Roiphe’s book, and I use the word challenging too often here, which makes her sound like a harridan, yet I think I would very much enjoy the sharpness of her insight and wit, the way in which she picks words apart, the ways in which social riskiness has become even more difficult and the ‘enlightened’ way to live casts an oppressive shadow over otherwise perfectly responsible people. I found much in Roiphe’s essays humorous and perceptive, and I enjoyed the way she forced me to reconsider some of the way in which I live ‘safely’ and consequently deny myself a more rich and varied existence. I think, somehow, this was a book I really needed to read.

What Roiphe exposes across the body of her essays is how much of people’s behaviour is driven by image presentation and cliché, that true insight and honesty are rare. People play up to a role, and fear stepping outside of it. Yet they reveal themselves through use of language, through their ‘concerns’ and interactions. I loved the way Roiphe explains her experience after she and her husband split up, from her essay ‘The Great Escape’:

“One does have to wonder about the prurient hunger for unhappy detail. Is there an imperative for certain married people to believe that anyone existing outside of the institution of marriage must be suffering? Does the imperative, perhaps, have something to do with their own discontents? (The happily married couples I know are noticeably less invested in the idea that I am suffering some form of collapse. Warwick Deeping, a novelist of the twenties, observed, ‘Those who have made a success of marriage can be gentler to the failures.’) I have noticed the couples most interested in the grand tour of my tragedy are often in couples therapy. They are often in that phase where they hire a babysitter once a week so that they can sit across from each other at a restaurant and distract themselves from the vast distance, the dullness, that has risen up between them with the bustle of menus and waiters. For whatever reason, it is extremely important for these couples to believe that once you are outside of marriage, you have fallen into the abyss. Furthermore, they are extremely interested in watching you, limbs flailing, as you are falling. But what if you, say, refuse to fall?

I begin to notice that when I am a little bit happy, there is nearly always someone there to tell me that I should be serious. That I should be focusing on my situation. That I should be worrying about my child. There is nearly always someone to deftly reel any subject I have ranged onto back to the question of whether my daughter is okay. I am, of course, always ready to worry about whether she is okay. But I wonder if it is truly in her best interest to embrace the philosophy of perpetual worry people seem to be encouraging. Wouldn’t it be better to take her to the zoo?”

I loved this book, I loved its piercing voice, it’s unwillingness to be humble or uncertain, the way in which it shone a light on things that people don’t want to talk about, ripping a hole through life’s daily clichés. I didn’t agree with everything in there, but I don’t think Roiphe cares too much about that. What she does care about is writing clearly, perceptively and honestly. Her sentences are not baggy, they’re not weak. She is brilliant, daring and unflinching. I think she is a person who not only accepts criticism but takes it gracefully, and yet I think I’d be fearful of criticising in case she turned that unflinching gaze on me. Somehow I think I’d be the better for it, and the conversation would be amazing.  

In Praise of Messy Lives receives a respectful 9 out of 10 Biis. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

  

Many thanks to Canongate books, Louise especially, for the excellent choice.