Weekdays are miles away from Sundays (literally and figuratively) and sitting in Salons and reading books and commenting on books!  Aren’t they just.  After over 500 miles in two days and visiting the lovely Wales, I am contemplating what to write to keep you happy.  Yes, I’m still reading although I must admit I fell asleep after reading about 3 more pages of Malouf last night in this wonderfully quaint hotel called ‘The Speech House - go and visit, I just did not have enough time to really savour it all, it’s somewhere in the Forest of Deans in Wales.   I arrived after a long hot spell in the car on motorways only to discover that the access road my sat nav took me to, was closed because of a land slide…   Well, sat navs being what they are, they give up telling you to turn round and after persisting for some time on the main road it recalculated another way for me to get there, eventually.  So, I did not have to spend the night at the side of the roads with the sheep and lambs that seemed to settle as night was falling.   No, I had a nice meal with a colleague in The Speech House, where we worked a bit more on our presentation the next morning and where I fell asleep soundly, admittedly after half a bottle of wine, with the clear air of the forest knocking me out completely. 

I found out that I had to resubmit this story for my course in a slightly different format, so I panicked a bit as I had been quite pleased with myself and being virtuous as I had already submitted  it on Sunday.  So I have now reformatted according to the standards set by the OU.  All this has caused havoc with most of my fellow students I gather from the forum, as instructions are to be found, only this time round, in both course book and guide book.  And the deadline is Friday.

And so, tomorrow (Thursday) I’m off to Sussex to do some more presentations on a completely different project, for which I am also writing the report.  So you see, I do an awful lot of writing, only the creative bit is squeezed out of the picture, every so often.

 

I am not sure how to add the Sunday Salon logo to my side bar - wordpress idiosynchrasies still play havoc - and although I realise that there are instructions on the host website for copying and pasting, my attempts have failed.  Also, having signed up to the Sunday Salon, I actually have no idea whether I am supposed to link my postings somehow or other to the host and if so, how to do that.

Never mind, I happily join this group of bloggers as I usually provide comments on my reading on Sundays anyway and this is a nice way of keeping in touch on progress with everyone else.

Today is one of those unusually hot days in England, with temperatures soaring to mid 20s and we now have had half a week of this weather.  So, I wrote most of this while enjoying the sunshine in my garden and I’m afraid that there is not much serious reading going on today, apart from scouring the newspapers.    I have, however, dug up all the weed from a side patch of the garden and have planted shrubs and flowers.  Hopefully they grow and the patch does not deteriorate once more into a weed covered mass because there are only so many things I can keep up with during the week.

I have been doing some reading though this week and parallel to James Wood I have been reading through Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’.  The latter needs to be read alongside the little style guide by Strunk and White Elements of Style.  Stephen King swears by the advice offered in this little handbook and I must say that even if it all seems a matter of fact, it is actually indispensible, as King suggests.  It’s the use of adverbs (or rather, the non-use of adverbs), the usage of the ‘which’ and ‘that’ the many silly little errors an aspiring writer can make and that can ruin an otherwise well written piece and may be the difference betwen a successful and well-written story and a badly written one.  Don’t I know it: the same style guidance of course applies to the writing of reports, as I do in the day job.  How easy it is however to forget all this common sense and resort to difficult constructins and imporant sounding words and phrases only because you want it to sound so much more important and interesting and ‘professional’.  A big mistake of course and re-reading the style book helps you stay on the straight and narrow.

This week I’ve also started another book from the Neustadt list, I am hooked by these authors.  I intended to read Octavio Paz but so far I have not been able to lay my hands on a copy so I picked up David Malouf’s colection of short stories ‘Every Move You Make’.  A wonderful find, again, as not only are these stories fantastically well written, the book can also go towards my short story challenge for this year.  I’ll review these stories once I’ve read them all.  So far, I’ve read the first two and I think they are really impressive.  I wish I could write with this seeming ease and such perfect use of language.

And then I have submitted my short story for the writing course - not a bad week after all. 

 

‘The Neustadt International Prize for Literature is a biennial award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today.

The Prize consists of $50,000, a replica of an eagle feather cast in silver, and a certificate. A generous endowment from the Neustadt Family of Ardmore, Oklahoma, and Dallas, Texas, ensures the award in perpetuity.

The prize was established in 1969 as the Books Abroad International Prize for Literature, then renamed the Books Abroad / Neustadt Prize before assuming its present name in 1976, The Neustadt International Prize for Literature. It is the first international literary award of this scope to originate in the United States and is one of the very few international prizes for which poets, novelists, and playwrights are equally eligible.’ (The Neustadt International Literature Prize website)

 

 

One of the winners of this prize is Max Frisch, who was given the award in 1986.

Max Frisch was born in Switzerland in 1911 and he died in 1991.  He was an architect but also a novelist who won a number of German literature prizes as well as the Neustadt international Prize. 

 

Homo Faber was first published in 1957 (in German) and this translation into English is by Michael Bullock in 1959.  As mentioned previously I found the book a page-turner.  The story takes off from La Guardia Airport in New York, literally, and takes us into skin and life of Walter Faber, a Swiss engineer who is really only taken by the tangible and verifiable world.   His life and work is about the technological world and he is therefore nicknamed Homo Faber (man as the maker).  A chance encounter on that plane followed by the plane having to make an emergency landing, cause Walter’s life to change irrevocably.  His past comes back at him as he is unwittingly making choices and decisions that will make him more and more examine the choices he made earlier on in his life. 

 

The writing is terse and beautifully evokes the changing moods, the sceneries, and the relationships, unpicking the interactions until the moral decisions he has made and makes become somehow inextricably linked with the cancer that is destroying his body.

 

The terseness of the writing exhibits itself in the very short sentences, and the paragraphs that at times are no longer than one such short sentence, for example

            Later I slept.

            The gusts of wind fell off

These two sentences/paragraphs are followed by a slightly longer paragraph in which Walter tries to work out why he is so irritated by this chance encounter with a German, on the plane.  And this is followed by

            He was already eating his breakfast.

            I pretended to be still asleep.

            As I could see out of my right eye, we were somewhere……etc. [a longer paragraph describing what he sees and where they are].

 

This style of writing is sustained throughout the book, like thought processes, urging the character on and with him he reader. 

 

The horror of the crime Walter Faber unwittingly commits, and then the moral question whether it can therefore really be called a crime is one that stays with you after you finish the book.  This is writing about moral dilemmas, alienation, identity and how one makes choices.  Yes, Faber is human, and this is a story about what it is to be human and make choices that sometimes lead to desperate anguish.

 

This, I think, was a good start to the Neustadt Reading Challenge, hosted by Wendi.

           

           

The bank holiday weekend has proved productive in that I now have a fairly satisfactory draft ready for my next short story submission to the OU course.  It is such hard work to do this well, this story writing I mean, the more I learn about techniques and style and the difference between telling and showing, the more clumsy I view my own writing to be.  Nevertheless, there’s the challenge. 

This week, some time, I will write a review of my first book in the Neustadt Challenge, Max Frisch Homo Faber, which I found a real page turner and I am pleased I took him as first on my list to read.  I am glad have got a list of non-English authors to read through - they provide a different perspective that keeps you on board with the rest of the world.

And now I must start the next assignment, which is going to be a rewrite of the first chapter of that novel that I started last year.  In fact, I have realised I need to rewrite every single chapter, all in the light of my newfound knowledge (wisdom?) of what good writing consists of…  A job and a half, in other words. 

Ahead of Sunday (I have signed up to the Sunday Salon)  and as part of a wonderful long bank holiday weekend with lots of reading and writing, herewith some more reflections on James Wood How fiction works.

 

I have now finished reading this little gem of a book.   It’s helpful at a time when I quietly despair about my own writing efforts and wonder whether what I’m writing is only so much more dross.  Reading this book has been a form of escapism, while trying to come to grips with the fact that I simply have not got the energy to write after the day job has swallowed up all my creativity in the production of research reports and non-fiction papers on education, policy and strategy and such like things.

 

So, how does fiction work?

The book has a wonderful chapter on Language and then later on some sections on the use of metaphor and the free indirect style.  Wood gives examples of writers producing beautiful sentences in an inherently simple prose style.  For example, Woolf’s The day waves yellow with all its crops  (Waves) evokes the cornfields, the wind, the colours etc and James Wood goes on to say that we should be aware that authors use the ‘same banknotes as everyone else does’ (p.139).

 

Wood considers the attack by Patrick Giles (on a literary blog) and William Gass on fiction as ‘realism’; they end up asserting that realism is a genre that is wedded to a certain conventionality.  Wood says ‘you cannot move from the charge that there is a certain fiction with a conventionality to the sceptical conclusion that fictive content can therefore never convey anything real, that narrative represents literally nothing’.  This, he says, is an incoherent argument and as a former philosophy graduate I am greatly taken by this reductio ad absurdum.

 

In Wood’s view all fiction is convention in one way or another; and if you reject a certain kind of realism for being conventional you will also have to reject for the same reason surrealism, science fiction, and all those others.

 

Through a number of supremely clearly argued sections he arrives at the notion that realism as truthfulness in novels is about lifelikeness, life on the page, not just about verisimilitude or lifesameness.  Realism allows all the other forms such as magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, because it is no less than life brought to a different life by the author, the ‘highest artistry’. 

 

This is a great book, very clear and a must for anyone interested in reading and writing.  I’m going to spend Sunday doing some more of both: reading and writing.

 

I have added an extra page to this site under the above heading, and have now posted my list of books to read.  I know, I’m half a day late but I’m sure Alisia will look kindly on me.  I’ve got the list and I’ve actually ordered some of the books and look forward to reading them. 

In Greek mythology Telethusa and Ligdus were a couple living in Crete and when Telethusa becomes pregnant Ligdus threatens to kill the child if it turns out not to be a boy, because they cannot afford a girl.   The mother is of course devastated and prays to the gods who tell her everything will be fine, whatever happens.   Of course, the baby is a girl, but the mother brings her up as a boy and no one knows  (you do wonder,  don’t you??).  She is called Iphis.  Ovid writes about this myth in the Metamorphoses, stories about transformations. Iphis falls in love with her childhood friend, Ianthe, who is a girl of course and this ultimately gets resolved by Iphis metamorphosing into a boy, after more prayer to the gods. 

 

This is the basis for Ali Smith’s wonderful novel Girl meets Boy but then in a modern setting.  It is about girls, women, love and how girls try and somehow cope with a number of bewildering choices that need to be made. I started reading the book as I travelled to London on the train, kept reading on the tube, went to my meetings, came back on the train and finished it. (I had no laptop with me, so could not be distracted.)   It was one of my best journeys ever, even if I did not get back till 10 at night.  The style of writing is refreshingly different and it is what James Wood, in How Fiction Works refers to as the free indirect style.  This is ‘what happens in most modern stories since Flaubert [who, Wood says, invented this] when a novelist wants us to inhabit a character’s confusion, but will not ‘correct’ that confusion, refuses to make clear what that confusion would look like’ (p.12).  It allows us to identify with the characters and Ali Smith does that wonderfully well.  The story is of two sisters, Scottish, and we are taken along with them, falling in love, working in an (ethically) wrong company and their responses, and confusions.  We know, even think their thoughts, they’re put in brackets;  for example (I cannot bring myself to say the word)  (My little sister is going to have a terribly sad life).  This is hilarious at times but conveys so well the way our thoughts jump from one thing to another, and these thoughts are interspersed with first person narrative that keeps you on the move, time passing, you’re in there all the time.  And then the author comes back in, telling us what someone is thinking.  But the gap is always very small.   It’s a lovely book, go and get it.  I am definitely going to try some of the others that are published in the Myth series, by Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, and others.

 

At the same time, as you may have guessed I am totally engrossed by James Wood How Fiction Works’, which provides wonderful insights into what makes a novel great, how the language works, e.g. ’so the novelist is always working with at least three languages.  There is the author’s own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character’s presumed language, style, perceptual equipment and so on; and there is what we would call the language of the world – the language which fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging’.    How right this is and what wonderful insights into character development, style and many more.  Definitely a book for the bookshelf of any aspiring writer, or anyone interested in literature and how great stories work.  I shall pick this one up from the shelf over and over again. 

Roald Dahl’s The Way up to Heaven

 

Just when you think the weather is taking a turn for the better and that spring is at long last with us, you’re back in the rain.  I find my mood shifting as much as the weather does and in the little time I have left after the day job, I uneasily switch from short story, to book, to magazine and back again.

 

The Way up to Heaven by Roald Dahl is this month’s short story discussed by members of A curious singularity.  Until I picked this up I had not read anything by Roald Dahl, no hard to believe probably but really not.  And now, having read this story, I am not convinced that I will read more by him.  It’s a peculiarly Agatha Christie type approach, a what happened story, a seemingly tragic death with an uneasy edge because the couple involved are so ultimately not likeable.  My first reaction was they deserve each other and I could not really care whether or not she actually tampered with the lift so he died a slow and gruesome death, while she was away visiting their daughter and grandchildren in Europe.

 

Then of course you think this must be a couple living in the fifties when men were nasty to their wives and would go unpunished because their wives in fact colluded anyway, apparently totally dependent on their approval or agreement.  From that point of view Dahl’s portrayal of the couple and how they interact with each other is very nicely done, even if I suspect from a very male chauvinistic point of view.  Her idiotic obsession with needing to be on time and his callous responses, making her wait on purpose, the way they interact non-verbally but maliciously, is great writing.

 

Perhaps then quite a good story after all?  I managed to read it quite quickly, sitting on my sofa with a first pre-breakfast cup of coffee on a Saturday morning, and it gave me something to think about while getting on with the rest of the day, as I wondered why I did not particularly like this story.  Well, I think it is because I don’t feel much affinity with the setting, the theme or the characters, and definitely no sympathy.  Oh well, that’s it then.  Time to pick up another book, another story.

 

This week’s Observer has got a number of very interesting reviews.  There’s a long inteview with David Lodge, whose Art of Fiction and The Practice of Writing are always within reach on my table and bookshelf.  Of course, he’s also written those wonderful novels that depict English academia so nicely, the campus pieces and academic conferences in Changing Places and The British Museum is Falling Down.  All ultimately suitable for rereading, if ever I have the time!  The Observer interview is partly about his new book Deaf Sentence, which is now on my ‘to read list’.

There is also an almost as long review by Tim Adams under the title Tales of a fabulist traveller of Salman Rushdie’s new book The Enchantress of Florence .  I’m always slightly more reserved about Rushdie’s books, as after a while I have to force myself to stay on course, the stories are all his and I don’t always find it easy to make them mine.  It is as if he knows what he is talking about and it’s simply tough on the reader if they cannot follow him because they haven’t read all the background literature that he obviously absorbs before telling his stories.  Nevertheless Tim Adams is in awe of this Rushdie and this new book in particular ‘Stories are the essennce of Rushdie’s wild and whirling novel’ and ‘The overriding argument of The Enchantress of Florence is partly that western civilisation, to borrow from Ghandi, would be a good idea.  Superstition and despotism are not the preserve of the mystical East here, nor are enlightenment and humanism inventions of the classical West.  Each civilisatin has its fair share of beauty and folly, cruelty and benevolence.’  Put this way, the book becomes intriguing and so I will put it on my ‘to read list’ after all.

Then, happy to see my admiration last week of Granta is confirmed by Ruaridh Nicoll, who reviews a number of contributions in the 101th edition of this magazine-cum-book. 

 

 

In this month of poetry, I signed up to reviewing one poem, or a book of poems, in April.  Kate is hosting this.

Well, I’ll never manage a book of poems in any one month, but I do read poetry when I come across it, and enjoy it.   Recently I rediscovered Granta ‘the Magazine for New Writing’ and its 100^th edition has a number of gems, ranging from poetry, to fiction and life writing, as well as some beautiful black and white photographs.  It’s a real treasure throve.

 

 

I keep coming back to two poems in this edition though, reread them, and after every reading love them more.  Yes, I know, we should be thinking of spring and flowers and sun, but this poem about snow is just wonderful: 

 

 How snow falls by Craig Raine:

 

Like the unshaven prickle

of a sharpened razor,

 

this new coldness in the air,

the pang

 

of something intangible.

Filling our eyes,

 

The sinusitis of perfume

without pefume.

 

And then love’s vertigo,

love’s exactitude,

 

this snow, this transfiguration

we never quite get over.

 

 

 

Don’t you think it’s beautiful, this transposition from snow, the surprise and freshness of it, to love and how it changes us?  So few words and so recognisable.

 

The other poem?  Well, some other time – it’s quite a bit longer and it’s by Alice Oswald: Eel Tail.  This  reminds me of my childhood, looking into those muddy pools of water.