10 women in translation that everyone should read

You may (or may not) be aware that August is Women in Translation month in the book reading universe (#WITmonth over on Twitter), a movement being ably championed by Biblibio and I’d encourage you to give her blog a visit as she’s been exploring some great writers and great books over the course of the month. When talking about women in translation in this context, this means women writing in languages other than English being translated into English. There are, of course, many amazing female writers of colour writing excellent books in English (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulaweyo, Xiaolu Guo, Arundhati Roy to name but a few, more obvious examples), but given that books translated into English comprise such a small portion of the market, and books by women translated into English a depressingly small proportion of that, the purpose of Women in Translation month is to spread the word about this under-represented section of the writing world. Maybe you’ll discover a new, amazing writer in the process. Who knows?

I have made a much more conscious effort to try to read female writers from different cultures this year and I have to say I have discovered some amazing writers. The following represents my list of female writers in translation that everyone should read. I am aware that this list, in and of itself, is not hugely representative and I am no doubt missing some awesome writers and whole cultures (for example, I have not yet had chance to explore Middle Eastern, African, South American or non-Japanese Asian writers in any depth. The world is large.) that I haven’t yet encountered. If you think anyone is missing, please share your thoughts in the comments.

Without further ado, here are my suggestions.   

Tove Jansson (Finland)

What would my list of favourites be if it didn’t mention Tove Jansson? Written by somebody else, I think. Jansson has something for everyone, from her excellent Moomintroll books which are great for kids and adults both, to her profound and life-affirming shorts in The Summer Book and The Winter Book. Fair Play is an excellent exploration of interrelationships and The True Deceiver a cold and fascinatingly odd book. Jansson’s books are full of wisdom and insight, truth and honesty. In the words of Moomintroll:

“Just think, never to be glad or disappointed. Never to like anyone and get cross at him and forgive him. Never to sleep or feel cold, never to make a mistake and have a stomach-ache and be cured from it, never to have a birthday party, drink beer, and have a bad conscience…

How terrible.”

Elena Ferrante (Italy)

I’m jumping on the bandwagon and giving a shoutout for Elena Ferrante here, one of the most exciting writers I’ve discovered this year. Her novel The Days of Abandonment is a wild and unsettling exploration of the breakdown of a woman following the end of her marriage, in which the main character is flawed, confused, angry, vulgar and a pretty terrible mother who makes some rotten choices and does not escape unscathed.  I am reliably informed that her Neapolitan series (beginning with My Brilliant Friend) is an excellent read and I’m so confident it is, that it’s on my ‘to buy’ and not ‘to borrow’ list.   

Simone de Beauvoir (France)

Most famous for her feminist tract The Second Sex and her relationship with Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir was an intelligent and driven woman who also wrote some amazing books. The Woman Destroyed, a triptych of mid-length stories, blew me away the first time I read it and should be compulsory reading for kids in their late teens as an excellent exploration of female empowerment (or the lack of it). I certainly shall be encouraging my kids to read it. It’s a great companion piece to Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (mentioned above). De Beauvoir also wrote honestly and with difficulty about her relationship with her mother and the expectations placed upon her.

Fumiko Enchi (Japan)

If you’ve read this blog at all you will probably be aware that I have a particular love for Japanese fiction. It’s worth mentioning that the first credited novel, The Tale of Genji, is both Japanese and written by a woman (Murasaki Shikibu) and if you read only one novel of Japanese origin, this mighty tome is one worth selecting. But I’m not talking about Genji here (even though I am) but the equally mighty Fumiko Enchi. Her most famous work, The Waiting Years, is a tense and unsettling exploration of a Japanese marriage in which the woman has been replaced by a younger (too young) concubine. Sadly Enchi is quite difficult to get hold of in UK, but if you’re lucky and you have a great library any of her works is worth exploring.

Yoko Ogawa (Japan)

A more modern (and living) Japanese writer, Yoko Ogawa has a range of interesting work out there. My first introduction to Ogawa was the dark and disturbing The Diving Pool, followed by The Housekeeper and the Professor which, I would have to say is not Ogawa’s usual style, is just about one of the most uplifting books I’ve ever read. What unites them is an intelligent style and an interesting perspective, with a definite psychological bent.

Marlen Haushofer (Austria)

Haushofer writes books that are a continuous stream of consciousness, which are honest and deep and complex whilst appearing deceptively simple. Perhaps best known for her post-apocalyptic work The Wall (also a movie), which explores the life of a woman trapped in the Austrian mountains with only a dog, a cat and a cow for company. Something has happened to the world, but she never does find out what it is. Instead she is left alone with her thoughts and fears and a journal to write her thoughts in. It is an interesting work of isolation, of the influence of society, of fear and hope. Haushofer writes powerfully of the world whilst focusing on the seemingly domestic. She is clever, insightful and deceptive and worthy of multiple re-reads.

Marguerite Duras (France)

Duras wrote strange books, as anyone who has read The Sailor from Gibraltar will know. Yet her books are intelligent and insightful, unusual and honest. Duras has a very clean way of writing, direct and precise, razor-like and unflinching in its gaze. Duras wrote about female sexuality, about passion; she wrote novels, stories, plays and prose. Perhaps most famous for writing the script to the movie Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Isabel Allende (Chile)

Allende is a writer I’ve only touched upon, and one that is difficult to categorise. Known for her magical realism works like House of the Spirits, she has also written books of historical fiction (Eva Luna), a book about Zorro, and books for young readers (Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, which is very entertaining). Allende writes about people, stories of passion (as she refers to in her excellent TED talk, which is one of my favourites) and intrigue. In her catalogue, there should be something for everyone.

Sigrid Undset (Norway)

A Nobel Prize winner, no less. Undset is known for her epic story Kristen Lavransdatter, which follows the life of a woman in 14^th Century Norway. Kristen makes choices for herself, based on her desires, and has to live them out. A sinful life, as some would see it. The novel itself was considered controversial due to its frank treatment of sex and female sexuality and desire. It is an epic, engaging and involved story with life-filled characters who behave frustratingly, but truly to themselves.

Adania Shibli (Palestine)

I have read only one work by Shibli, the brief but poetic Touch, but it was a highly effective work. Her writing is beautiful yet powerful, she obscures her subject but reveals more by doing so. Her writing is pure, confusing and requires more than one reading. Shibli is a poet who writes in prose, and I can think of no better way of speaking for her than allowing her to speak for herself:

“The written words followed her eyes onto everything. Some books always stood between her eyes and all other eyes in the house, always hiding its world, which, if it appeared from time to time, appeared as a world whose words were read rather than heard, and so she did not say anything.”

Teaching a Stone to Talk (Expeditions and Encounters) by Annie Dillard

I’ve come to Annie Dillard late, I think. Being as she’s a Pullitzer Prize winner and all. Having come to her late, however, perhaps I appreciate her more? One thing’s for certain, after reading this short work I instantly went out and bought another three of Dillard’s works. As good an endorsement as any reader can give, I think. 

Teaching a Stone to Talk is a series of essays centred around the concept of encounters. It begins with Dillard’s encounter with a solar eclipse, something I can relate to having attended the solar eclipse that occurred over Cornwall and Devon in 1999. At the time I was pregnant with my first child, the son that will go on to eclipse me many times (and not just in height, though we are there already) and we combined the trip with a visit to my mother-in-law who lives in Brixham and picked out a good spot for us to view though didn’t, in the end, bother to view herself. Attending an eclipse is an encounter I can relate to, but what I didn’t expect was how fresh and vivid, how interesting a perspective Dillard, a great writer, could lend to the experience. Considering over fourteen years have elapsed since I experienced the eclipse, her prose and perspective brought it very much back to life for me.

It is the quality, the clarity and surety of Dillard’s writing which shines through in this book, the uniqueness of her perspective and keen observational skills, not just of events but of the vagaries of human nature and behaviour. In the second essay, An Expedition to the Pole, Dillard juxtaposes her visits to Catholic Mass against the experience of a polar expedition, and somehow this interspersal works in a way that I simply couldn’t have imagined (and I am not often accused of lack of imagination, though in this instance it may be an accurate accusation).

Though the course of the essays Dillard explores the Arctic, the Galapagos islands, the jungle, a field, Tinker Creek (which may be a familiar place to Dillard readers, a place she explores often and in great depth), the nature of mirages, mangrove swaps, a visit to a cabin in the woods with her daughter, an encounter with Santa Claus. Running through all these tales is a kind of meditative peace, an exploration of the world conducted largely without judgement but with a questing, open-mindedness of the kind I wished I had. These tales are not just encounters with the physical but with the spiritual, with the abstract, with ideas. Like here, from the essay In the Jungle:

“The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place. We might as well get a feel for the fringes and hollows in which life is lived, for the Amazon basin which covers half a continent, and for the life that – there, like anywhere else – is always and necessarily lived in detail: on tributaries, in the riverside villages, sucking this particular white-fleshed guava in this particular pattern of shade.”

Each short essay was a distinct pleasure to read, a soothing moment in the travails of the day and I felt calmer and more peaceable for having read them. It also gave me more of an appreciation for what is around me, the glorious diversity of life and the way it is lived. Not many books do that for me, which is perhaps why I found myself wanting to read much more of it. Anything that makes us see the world around us as something beautiful, wondrous, that posits differences as something interesting to be explored as opposed to a threat or something to fear of be destroyed, well there should be more of it. I hope Dillard writes more and more and more.

Teaching a Stone to Talk receives a rarified 10 out of 10 Biis.

  

Do or do not, there is no try

Star Wars has its silly moments, in fact as an adult watching Star Wars it’s hard not to become absorbed by its plot holes and pseudo-science, but that little quote by Yoda I have taken as a little bit of useful wisdom that I try to incorporate into my daily life. There is much to be said for the idea of just getting on with it, forgetting about fears and the risk of failure. Even practicing is doing.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, as it’s something that applies to my approach to writing. In many tasks in my life, I just get on with it. Work I get on with. Cooking I get on with. Reading certainly so, I do it without hesitation. All of the things I manage to do successfully have been things I’ve just got on with. This has been proven quite recently, when we had a limited amount of time to prepare for Comic Con. We decided to cosplay this year, and as is often the case this involved a certain amount of hand-crafting. In the case of my daughter’s outfit, I had to make a complicated cloak/mask combo as well as a simple white tabard (she went as San, from Princess Mononoke). For my son I had to make a hood and, in the end, a happi coat as I could not find anything suitable to adapt for his top (he went as Ashitaka, from Princess Mononoke…there’s a theme here). With limited time and budget I surfed the web, found some instructions, dug out the sewing machine, shredded paper, blew up balloons and papier mache’d and sewed for two weeks solid and in the end they had passable outfits which were recognisable enough that they were photographed copiously at Comic Con and had a fabulous time. My husband blew us all away with his hand-crafted No Face outfit (from Spirited Away) which he couldn’t then wear because it was blazing hot and dehydration would have ensued. Still, it proved that facing a task with a lack of fear and an open mind (and a touch of desperation) go a long way towards resultant success.

When I read the Dorothea Brande book on ‘being a writer’ there was one piece of advice which stuck in my mind. Brande refers to the importance of learning to write to a schedule. There is a process she lays out which leads to this, but in the final part of the chapter (p. 79) she says this:

“Succeed, or stop writing

Right here I should like to sound the solemnest word of warning that you will find in this book: If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing. Your resistance is actually greater than your desire to write, and you may as well find some other outlet for your energy early as late.”

I have been thinking about those words a lot recently, because when it comes to writing I do not considerable more than I do. I have been able to get into the habit of morning writing, that comes easily but it comes in the form of journaling rather than exploring creative writing. What I haven’t been able to do, and what I think I may never be able to do, is get into a regular schedule of writing. In fact whilst I think a lot about writing, I do very little beyond this blog. The truth is, I have failed Brande’s test. Now, whilst I understand that there are many routes to writing, that Brande’s advice must be taken only as that, I have to admit that there is much truth to it and if I do not write I cannot become a writer. In a way the what of what I write isn’t important, but being committed to writing and actually doing it is quite critical to success (by success I don’t mean multi-million copy selling or even published, just a ‘writer’: being someone who writes). I have always, in the past, been able to hide behind that villainly ‘procrastination’, as most writers would admit to falling under its terrible thrall. In fact, I remember being heartened by these words in Renata Adler’s strange book Speedboat (which I will, honestly, one day read in its entirety):

“That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”

Somehow I think I am more the kind of writer that Adler is referring to (ranting, drinking and sleeping. Not phoning, however) than the kind that industriously turns out books. Unfortunately, I think you really need to be the latter to call yourself a writer at all.

I am trying to be honest with myself, and the honest truth is that I am over-committed to everything and at some point I have to choose to do something. I have a new job, and to do it successfully I will have to devote myself to doing it. I know I can do this, I have done it before. I want to be successful in my job (and I will, I am committed to it). I have a family which is less needy but still needy, in the sense that I have to devote at least some time to them (and I want to, being the more important point). I want to learn Japanese and how to crochet, and both of these things seem possible not least of which because I have attempted both before. At a recent camping trip my daughter had a go at archery, and now she’d like to try it more seriously but she is too young to go alone. I understand her desire. At sixteen I too had a go at archery and I loved it and I was a bowman for two years until a car accident unexpectedly knocked me back and then life took over, and I have, for a long time, wanted to take it back up but haven’t had the opportunity. Archery takes time, and having a family with small children simply doesn’t allow for that. But now it does. I think I can easily commit to archery. I have done so before, and somehow I understand it all a lot better now. It is something we can do as a family (guess where I met my husband?).

Stacking everything up I realise I cannot do all of this. I can learn Japanese and crochet, these are things I can fit around my busy life by doing just a little every day. What I can’t commit to is writing. I want to do it, I’m scared of doing it, it makes me frustrated and angry and absorbs hours of my time sometimes just in thinking. I’m not ready for it. I’m nearly 40, and am beginning to wonder when, if ever, I will be ready for it. Maybe never. That’s a chilling thought.

So I’m giving it up, for the time being. I feel quite strangely about it, though perhaps I shouldn't. A friend recently, quite astutely, commented that I'm something of a 'serial starter' which suggests, also astutely, that I don't finish things, which is true but also not true as I do finish a lot of things. I finish meals, for example, and drinks. I finish washing and then I start it again because washing is one of those tasks that never ends. I finish movies and books, quite regularly. I finish small projects like making Comic Con outfits and cross-stitched bookmarks. I finish a considerable amount at work, in fact I am a project completer. Perhaps that is why, in my personal life, I'm not so hugely keen on finishing. Perhaps because, in the final analysis, actual finishing is death and I'm not hugely keen on getting there fast. I do feel strange not finishing this. Being a writer has been a lifelong dream, but perhaps what I am finally learning is that dreams are not real. To make it real, I have to do it and that seems to be the one thing I simply cannot do. I don’t have the talent or the skill, or the commitment to develop either. Of course I will still write my blog, I don’t think that counts as the kind of ‘writing’ I mean (though I know it is writing). I am an excellent reader, and perhaps I have to learn to be contented with that. For the time being, anyway. I can still be one of those lady-writers who writes her first book at 50. I’m not giving my dream away quite that easily.  

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

There are times when I approach reading burnout, when my mind is so full of words that adding to the pile is like adding the proverbial straw to the proverbial camel’s back and I feel like my brain will crack under the pressure. Sometimes I look at my book collection and think ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ and ‘what for?’ and wonder at the insanity that drives me to read every day. Sometimes I want (or need) a break. Yet I never stop reading. At those times I turn to something familiar, something soothing or easy to read. It is times like this that I turn to The Last Samurai. 

The Last Samurai is not easy to read (except it is), it is dense and complex, it is funny (very funny) and implausible, it is clever and mind-blowing and educational and fascinating. It is a book for people who think boredom a fate worse than death. It is not boring.

There’s no neat little summary that will give you a flavour of The Last Samurai, so instead I’ll give you a quick overview of the story. It starts with Sibylla, or perhaps Sibylla’s parents, and their frustrated ambitions. Sibylla herself has moved to London (having blagged her way into Oxford) having grown up in various towns in America that were ‘excited to get their first motel’. Sibylla discovers she cannot be an academic after frustrated attempts to translate a German text Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik at which point she discovers:

 

“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up to join them so other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.”

Sibylla discovers that this is not a life for her, but she doesn’t want to return to the States so instead she takes a job working as a typist in a publishing house. This decision leads her to a party which leads her to ‘Liberace’ (not the) which leads her to becoming the unsuspecting mother of Ludoviticus (or David or Stephen), child genius and prodigy over whom she troubles so greatly and about whom this story revolves.

Ludo is an unusual child, with an aptitude for languages and logic. Sibylla teaches him to read English at 3, Greek at 4 and when we enter their story he can already speak Arabic and is desperate to learn Japanese. This desperation stems, in part, from the family relationship with the movie (Kurosawa’s masterpiece) Seven Samurai. Sibylla, reading a magazine one day, makes this terrible discovery from which spirals the rest of the story:

“Today I read these terrible words in the paper:

In the absence of a benevolent male, the single mother faces an uphill battle in raising her son. It is essential that she provides the boy with male role models – neighbours or uncles, or friends of the family, to share their interests and hobbies.

This is all very well but Ludo is an uncleless boy, and I don’t happen to know any well meaning stamp collectors (and if I did I would do my best to avoid them). It’s worrying. I once read that Argentine soldiers tied up dissidents and took them up in planes over the sea and threw them out. I thought: well, if L needs a role model let him watch Seven Samurai & he will have 8.”

Enter Ludo, who at the age of 5 begins to speak for himself. Ludo is desperate to know who his father is, and discovers the truth remarkably quickly. Disappointed and unable to confront his father with the truth, he embarks on a quest to choose his own father from role models he has discovered through his reading or through Sibylla’s many anecdotes. Using a plot device from Seven Samurai, in which Kambei (leader of the seven) finds other samurai to join their band by attempting to trick them. In the movie, the samurai are lured to a building by Rikichi (a farmer seeking samurai to rid his village of the threat of bandits). Behind the door novice samurai Katsushiro is waiting with a raised stick which he is to bring down on the head of the unsuspecting samurai as he walks through the door. A true samurai, Kambei reasons, will see through the trick “A true samurai will parry the blow”). If they see through the trick, they are the kind of samurai they are looking for. In this way Ludo brings down his own stick on each of the ‘chosen’ (I am your son) and only if they see through the trick will they be suitable to become his chosen father.

In the course of his adventures Ludo encounters a traveller, an artist, a campaigner/kidnap victim, a Nobel prize winner, a musician. What unfolds from each encounter is that this journey is as much about Ludo’s relationship with his mother, and his fear that she will commit suicide, that she only chose to live because of him. That in the course of his explorations, he is trying to find out who she is and how he can save her. In the Seven Samurai world, Sibylla is Rikichi, the farmer with burning eyes without which there would be no story.

The Last Samurai is a marvellous book, full of detail and humour and definitely not boring. It covers a huge range of themes including language (Greek and Japanese), aerodynamics, logic, algebra, music, education, the difficulties of being a single mother, death, the Tube, suicide, ambition and, more critically, the movies of Akira Kurosawa. It is a clever and complex book which benefits from multiple readings (sometimes one after the other) interspersed with viewings of Seven Samurai which is an excellent movie (not comparable, in any way, to The Magnificent Seven which Sibylla calls out very humorously “Look, tall men in tight jeans” which, when stacked up against Seven Samurai, makes no sense at all. It is a homage in the way my finger daubing would be an homage to Picasso) and well worth the watch whether or not inspired by this excellent book.

In the words of Red Devlin, “oh go on”. Just read it.

The Last Samurai receives an implausible 20 out of 10 Biis.

  

Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones

Being a happy subscriber of the wonderful And Other Stories publishing house, I have, of course, sat on my first book for a considerable length of time before getting around to reading it. I should point out that this is not unusual for me. My bookshelves are peppered with books I just couldn’t wait to read and which, several years later, haven’t managed to push themselves into my hands or in front of my eyes. Yes, I am a fickle reader if a consistent one...?

Anywho, I’m glad to say I finally got around to reading this book by Albanian writer Elvria Dones, a book which explores an unusual Albanian tradition in which a woman can choose to live as a man, as a ‘sworn virgin’, taking their place as the head of the family. In this story Hana, or Mark, is in the process of emigrating to America, where her cousin Lila lives. Hana/Mark is also embarking on another kind of emigration, or perhaps it is truer to say a return, from living as a man to living as the woman that she is. Through the course of the story we follow Hana/Mark as she makes this transformation, gaining insights through flashbacks into how she came to become a sworn virgin in the first place.

I enjoy stories about duality, so this story was bound to be of interest to me, and Dones has a light and easy way of writing so that the story sweeps you along. That being said, I felt that the exploration of Hana’s journey back to becoming a women was a little lightweight. This story offered a great opportunity to reflect deeply on issues of gender, and whilst Dones does touch upon this, it is after all the cornerstone of the story, there’s a superficiality to it which seems to boil down the ‘manliness’ of Mark into a few core activities: Mark drinks raki and smokes and has a pared down way of thinking, whereas Hana does housework and obsesses about her looks and losing her virginity. In this way Dones presents gender as a cloak which can be pulled on and off, something which is reduced to parodied actions rather than an essence. And in some ways I think this is true, this is an interesting way to consider gender as something which has only a superficial impact upon a person’s identity, and perhaps this was the point Dones was making, but if so I’d have liked that to be a little more explored and perhaps a little more transparent. Perhaps I am just a lazy reader.

The strength in Dones’s writing is in the characterisation. Whereas gender plays a surprisingly insignificant role considering the subject matter, the characters of Hana and Lila, as well as Lila’s daughter Jonida really shine. I loved how Dones presents all the characters as forceful and single-minded: Lila and Hana spend as much time fighting as they do caring for each other, and the interplay between the two is touching and realistic. Equally, Dones draws a vivid picture of Albania from the mountainous poverty-stricken villages of the North to the more cosmopolitan yet quirky city of Tirana. Dones brings the country into high definition with her descriptions of life in the villages and mountains, the interplay between northerners and southerner (why are northerners always the peasants?!), the ongoing impact of communism, strange and quirky characters who leap from the page.  In contrast the American scenes seem flat and grey, the country plays less part in Hana’s identity yet offers her the freedom to be who she really is. Hana cannot return to her home country, at least not as a woman.

There was huge scope in this book to explore a whole range of different themes about identity, gender, immigration and the American dream and perhaps that is why I found the book slightly disappointing. On the rear cover Dones is described as a writer who is “unabashed by taboos of any kind” and yet this book didn’t feel like it was taboo breaking. Rather it stood on an interesting concept, a strange old Albanian tradition, and rather than explore it, use it as a vehicle to uncover truths about identity and gender, rather the focus was on Hana’s quest to lose her virginity, as though that was the one thing which would make her a woman. Somehow it seemed a little thin to me, a little superficial and consequently I found it a little annoying.

That being said the story was entertaining and not entirely without weight, and it sent my mind spiralling in lots of different directions. I enjoy stories which make you think, which this one definitely did. I just would have liked it to make me think a little more and maybe present the idea of fulfilment as a woman as being achieved without the assistance of a penis.

Sworn Virgin receives an identity questioning 7 out of 10 Biis.  

Reflections on reading: making connections

One of the things I notice about reading, or perhaps it is just the books I read and particularly enjoy, is how one book opens connections to another book or another something or other that sends my mind wandering in a direction I wasn’t expecting. And so I have to explore it, or want to explore it, until I read the next book which sets my mind wandering in another, completely different direction and I’m so full of things I want to know and explore that I simply don’t know where to start and I’m left wondering how, with all the information and experiences and ideas there are in the world, anyone has time to ever get to know anything and where does it stop and instead I’ll go and watch an episode of Stargate SG1 or a panel show or a Studio Ghibli movie and try to forget about it all.

Perhaps that is why people watch TV programmes like Coronation Street and Neighbours.  In the infinity of ideas and knowledge and stories one is as good as another.

I have noticed this particularly because it has happened a lot to me lately. I have spent a lot of time following threads and accumulating a list of desires and interests. Right now I am re-reading The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, which is an amazing book, and which I remember from my first read made me want to watch The Seven Samurai (which I did, followed by the car crash that is The Magnificent Seven (comparably) ), learn Greek (which I didn’t), learn Japanese (which I have attempted many times and largely failed) and which cemented in my head forever more the phrases ‘a good samurai will parry the blow’ and ‘if we were using real swords, I'd have killed you’ which are from The Seven Samurai which is, in fact, an excellent film and which spiralled me into a relationship with Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune (who is peerless in  The Hidden Fortress, which inspired Star Wars if you can believe it) and Takashi Shimura (known for Godzilla and the masterpiece Ikiru which everyone should watch).  Right now I am feeling that I absolutely must watch Sanshiro Sugata, which is available in a box set of Kurosawa movies meaning I will have even more Kurosawa movies, as though such a thing were possible. Sigh.

Then thinking back, I begin to acknowledge all the other crazy things I have absolutely had to do after reading a book. Like how after reading Olivia Laing’s To The River I absolutely had to start walking again (which I have done and which I have enjoyed greatly and consequently have thought, quite seriously, about walking The Pennine Way solo and writing a book about it only to find that Simon Armitage has pretty much done that already. Hadrian’s Wall, perhaps?) as well as dig, heavily, into the life and works of Virginia Woolf. And reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries has made me highly curious about the life of Vita Sackville-West and consequently I’m now reading the letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West and I have logged, on my wishlist, Vita Sackville-West’s book Challenge which is a love story about her relationship with Violet. Then I find there are letters from Vita to Virginia Woolf and I absolutely must read those. You get the picture. And I recall having read A Tale for the Time Being and absolutely certainly having to read the Shōbōgenzō (which I have started and not got very far with) and Proust (I endured book 1. No more).

I begin to realise how much influence books have over my life. In fact when I think about it, it is not just my own life that my reading influences but also the life of my family. My husband has been (and will be) subjected to many Kurosawa movies, some of which he wanted to watch and others not so much. And my whole family has been indoctrinated into a love of Japan, primarily because of my reading habits (and viewing...which may have spun from the reading thing). I go for walks with my daughter, which I can directly attribute to my current interest in nature/travel writing (though, to be fair, it did remind me how much I have always enjoyed being in amongst nature) and which will probably worsen when I get around to reading Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust which is sitting on my shelf right now in prime reading position.

All this made me wonder if it would be possible to trace all your reading habits (or mine, perhaps) back to one book. That one critical book which tipped off the next book, which pointed to the next book, which indicated the next three and so on and so forth until before you know it you’re so buried in books you want to read that really the only thing to do is close the library door and go switch on Neighbours.

I am not so sure this isn’t a sign of madness. I look at my library shelves and wonder, if amongst the titles, the varied and seemingly unconnected mass of them, there is a pulsing link, that a cleverer person than me could look at those books and read my neural map there, figure out who I am and every notable experience in my history. Do my books read me? It is disconcerting to think that someone could deduce a key aspect of my character merely from the positioning of A Vindication on the Rights of Women next to Thus Spake Zarathustra, my tattered copy of The Penguin Book of Modern Verse compared to the sharp-edged Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, my neat collection of grey-backed Persephones.  

I wonder how unique this kind of reading journey is. Is that how everyone experiences it? That one book leads to the curiosity for another. If I hadn’t read Angela Carter as an impressionable teenager, would I be a feminist? If I hadn’t read Cloud Atlas, would I have ever discovered The Bridge of San Luis Rey? Writers lead to writers and stories to stories and suddenly the world unfolds as one, great, narrative including the story of us and the story of stones, the story of dinosaurs, the story of art, the story of war and conflict, the story of country, the story of love and peace, the story of the flowers in the field, the story of bones, the story of air, the story of what is fixed and what is broken, the story of time, my story and yours.

I want to read them all; I know that is not possible. So I guess I will continue to plough ahead, following the map the books give me, wherever that leads. 

The Loft by Marlen Haushofer

The Loft is the second book I’ve read by Marlen Haushofer, a largely unknown but brilliant Austrian writer. Haushofer has three books translated to English: The Wall (which I highly recommend), Nowhere Ending Sky (which I’m getting around to) and The Loft. The Wall is a sturdier work, perhaps a more traditional narrative, whereas The Loft leaves a lot more unsaid. Consequently it is more ephemeral, in some respects frustrating, but a highly powered work.

Little happens in The Loft. The story revolves around a week in the life of an unnamed woman and her regular suburban life, her little arguments with her husband Hubert and her curiously distant relationship with her children Ferdinand and Ilse, as well as other peripheral characters. “From our bedroom window we can see a tree that we never seem able to agree about.” the narrator begins, and on this simple detail a stifling, unsettling story unfolds.  It becomes apparent very quickly that there is something not quite right in this little world. Haushofer creates a sense of emotional detachment, that our narrator is simply going through the motions in her daily routine and so are the people around her. That what they are doing are no more than actions, a playing of roles, and that by doing this all participants avoid addressing something true or meaningful between them. The narrator speaks without attachment to any of the members of her family or her acquaintances except, perhaps, when speaking about her dead father-in-law, the original Ferdinand, who seems to be the only person she genuinely cares for. This strange lack of affection seems mirrored in the only activity she undertakes with any seriousness: “My aim is to draw a bird that is not the only bird in the world. By this I mean that anyone looking at it must grasp this fact straight away. To date I have never achieved this and I doubt I ever shall.” It seems that she sees herself as the only bird in the world, and no matter how she tries she shall never feel like she is a part of something. 

The reason for this strange detachment is hidden, though the narrator hints at a lonely childhood and an unsettling event in her own history shortly after Ferdinand was born. At some point she became inexplicably deaf, and because of this deafness her husband Hubert sent her away, to live by herself in the woods with only an unpleasant gamekeeper for company. This terrible event in her history is brought back into focus by the strange delivery of extracts of her diary from that period which appear in her letterbox daily, unsettling her routine. Each day she takes herself to her loft, a place which is her own, and reads these extracts, burning them after reading them in the hope of their destruction. Through her confrontation of her diary entries, coupled with her musings on her day to day life, a palpable sense of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ are created, in which ‘before’ was childlike and suffused with love and ‘after’ was nothing more than dead routine, an empty shell-like existence without meaning or feeling.

Haushofer presents a stifling picture of this woman’s daily existence. Living without sympathy and hiding from a terrible event in her own history which neither she nor those around her can seem to confront. It is hard not to see this story as a metaphor for the annexation of Austria, the Anschluss, during the war, the sense of isolation and ongoing guilt. The sudden, unexpected deafness. the unpleasant gamekeeper and a strange man in the woods who shouts terrible things at her because she can’t hear them. Meanwhile her husband Hubert, her son Ferdinand about whom she seems to care intensely, are left in the clutches of her mother-in-law, a soulless woman who never approved of their marriage (representing Europe, perhaps?). Once you start to see this connection, it crops up everywhere in the little, seemingly unimportant, details of her musings. Like here, when she reflects upon her dark dreams:

“Ten years ago, for example, I dreamed I was in a wide open landscape like a park in which big glass tanks were arranged, full of water. In them say mermaids and mermen playing on harps and flutes. I couldn’t hear through the glass what they were playing but I knew it was the true music, not destined for the human ear. Their scaly tails shone like mother of pearl, and their long flowing hair floated on the surface of the water. They were beautiful. I stood and watched them in breathless rapture, but then suddenly I knew I wasn’t meant to be there with those creatures. It grew dark and a voice said: ‘They have abandoned us; it is the end of the world.’”

Whether or not The Loft is a metaphor for the war, it is an interesting meditation on the strangeness of human existence and the danger of hiding from a truth that seems to define us. At times the narrator can be frustrating, as her avoidance of the truth in her life seems measured and deliberate and it is hard to understand how she can want to live that way. Yet there is a sense that somehow this is the only way that she can live. As she explains: “But what are you to do when you aren’t dead but only dead-apparent? The obvious answer is just to reoccupy the place you left vacant, but this doesn’t really work either.”

Fortunately there remains a sense of redemption, a long slow and painful recovery that is taken in small, almost meaningless steps. And whilst the story is told in a seemingly pedestrian manner, and whilst there is as much time spent hiding from and avoiding the truth as uncovering it, this is a remarkably powerful work that could too easily, on superficial reading, be dismissed as a slow, domestic drama. But it is far more than this, and I find myself impressed (again) by Haushofer’s skill in weaving such an intense and difficult subject-matter into the story of a woman doing her domestic chores and drawing little pictures of birds trying not to seem lonely in a loft.

The Loft receives a drawn-out 9 out of 10 Biis.