Not a ghost town

I read Ghost Town - Tales of Manhattan Then and Now by Patrick McGrath in New York City and finished it off in Washington. It is the first fiction in the Bloomsbury series The Writer and the City which includes Peter Carey on Sydney and John Banville on Prague. McGrath gives us three short pieces set in different times in the life of NYC.

The first tale is about a woman who spied for George Washington in 1776 when lower Manhattan was destroyed by the British, the second is set in the 19th century and involves a small scandal that descends on a wealthy merchant of Dutch stock and his family at a time of Irish immigration, and the third story is set in the wake of 9/11 and involves a psychiatrist and his patient and a woman who's lost someone in the tragedy.

I heard McGrath read from the book when he was in Wellington for the Writers' Festival and he charmed the audience with his avuncular story-telling. I bought it to read in NYC and enjoyed the stories of an early Manhattan all the more for having walked with my daughter in Battery Park and around the Tribeca area. The story called Ground Zero was a stronger piece for me because I'd been to Ground Zero. It's a strangely unspooky place - a building site now with workers and machinery moving in and out, and down one side, people making their way to the train station and home.

I reached Broadway and headed south toward the site. Across from City Hall the phone company was digging up the street. A sanitation truck went by, its yellow lights blinking, spraying water to keep down the dust. More barriers, the familiar NYPD trestles, painted blue, stencilled, familiar.... Not far from the Brooklyn Bridge I came level with the ruins. all that had once been familiar was strange to me now, and it was not easy to know what I was looking at. Down a side street -was it Fulton, or John? - I saw a high building torn open, its innards sheared off and spilling out, twisted beyond recognition and starkly illuminated by that unearthly blue light...' Ground Zero, Patrick McGrath

There is some great writing but there is something lacking in the three stories. They first two feel to me like compressed novels with an 'and then and then' quality about them. The third story feels richer more complex but still lacks something essential. Issy and I have just spent the day in Universal Studios driving through Jurassic Park and avoiding special effects in Backdraft so the brain isn't up to analysing what that essential thing is right now. Later perhaps.

Anyway, New York is itself a rich and complex place. Overwhelming at times. Exhilarating. And exhausting. But I barely touched the surface, and I'd love to go back for more. I didn't get to Brooklyn where Paul Auster lives and writes and where novels like The Brooklyn Follies are set. I didn't get to really explore Greenwich Village or SoHo although I glimpsed where Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen got their first breaks. I didn't go to the Metropolitan Art Museum or eat in Little Italy or Chinatown. Or stand outside the Chelsea Hotel.

What Issy and I did was wonderful: Central Park, a Broadway Show, Times Square at night, the MoMA. We ate in diners where breakfast was $1.95 (including coffee). We stood on the top of the Rockefeller Centre and saw the top of the Empire State Building. We went downtown to Ground Zero and the Statue of Liberty. We went window-shopping on 5th Avenue and bought some ear muffs from a street vendor. Most of all we watched New Yorkers walk and talk in the dark and gleaming canyons they call home.

Magic.

The Wonder of Alice

I am still in Canada - until tomorrow. And I am still reading the inimitable Canadian author Alice Munro who recently hung up her skates because she'd apparently said all she had to say. Here's a slice from her short story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage which I bought the other day in an Ottawa bookstore:

'I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida - not of that in particular - but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories, The cries of the crowd came to me like heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.

This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.' Family Furnishings

In the story Family Furnishings, Munro has a character who comes to the point where she knows she wants to write. The description above is what she feels writing is, and being a writer is. It could be my thoughts on the matter.

This is the first time I've read Munro's work in Canada. Suddenly, stories which mention Ottawa or Quebec or the thawing of the snow or a field of corn resonate differently, feel different. Even the voices I'm reading sound different here.

One day they were out in the fields of stubble playing with my father's dog whose name was Mack. That day the sun shone, but did not melt the ice in the furrows. They stomped on the ice and enjoyed the crackle underfoot. Family Furnishings

There was no fence. The cornfield just petered out into the yard. She walked straight ahead into it, onto the narrow path her arms like streamers of oilcloth. She had to remove her hat so they would not knock it off. Each stalk had its cob, like a baby in a shroud. There was a strong, almost sickening smell of vegetable growth, of green starch and hot sap. Floating Bridge

What hasn't changed is the way Munro is able to write the fine filigrees of feeling, and the equally fine shifts in those feelings. The way she makes a feeling an event, an event a place, a place a person, a person a feeling, and on it goes.

It seemed to her this was the first time ever that she had participated in a kiss that was an event in itself. The whole story, all by itself. A tender prologue, an efficient pressure, a wholehearted probing and receiving , a lingering thanks, and a drawing away satisfied. Floating Bridge

Munro's good on kisses. She had a great kiss in her collection Runaway that helped me write a kiss in The Blue. She also knows just when to open something out, to let it breathe and gain weight, and be suddenly bigger than, weightier than the sum of its parts.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given. Floating Bridge

And all this because Munro must listen to those distant sounds of 'inhuman assent and lamentation', really listen, and then suddenly - like a insect-eating bird - grab them from the air. Swallow that humming. Make it into words.

One guesses that for the character of the writer in Family Furnishings she listened to a sound already swallowed.

And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself...

To finish with, here are some photographs from the Rideau Canal today in Ottawa. Minus 34 degrees C with the wind chill and yet there were so many people skating on the ice, all ages and backgrounds (it's free), wrapped up tight, together.

There isn't much noise except the scratch of the skates, the odd snatch of conversation in English and French. But there is that wave of sound Munro talks about - the sound humanity makes at its best one cold Saturday out on a canal.

Holding its own in Canada

I mentioned in my last post that I saw Rachael King's novel The Sound of Butterflies on the shelves at the huge Chapters Bookshop in Ottawa, Ontario. And that I felt proud. Well here it is, holding its own. A lovely sheen to this cover.

Land of the Giants

It's the middle of the night in Ottawa and we're too far from Washington to hear the inauguration celebrations. Canadians I know seem to have watched the historic ceremony at work and school and home. They're all asleep now (the ones I know.)

There's not much to see outside but I can still make out the dips in the snow on the balcony railing where a squirrel shimmied along it two days ago. That's the thing about snow, all sorts of things are frozen for weeks: dog pee, squirrel prints, rubbish. You leave water and cameras in the car, they freeze too.
The snow blankets and muffles as you'd expect. It wraps up sound and tucks it down for winter.

We are in a giant fairy tale. Really. Giant. Eggs come in one and a half dozens. I saw a blue jay today, it's so much bigger than I thought a blue jay would be. There was what looked like a child's fort in the trees and my nephew said it was an abandoned crows nest.

Squirrels are darker and more menacing when hopping through snow. When you run into a baby bear, look for the mother, you might need to start running again.

Snowflakes on your eyelids are enchanting. In your eye they hurt.

Cafe au lait and brioche for breakfast in a patisserie. If we'd only come for that it would have been enough.

Today's winter sports and their aftermath: my niece was on a ski-trip but a suspected broken leg from a fall saw her stretchered off the mountain (luckily it's just a double sprain), my brother-in-law was on an annual ski trip up Mont Tremblant and lost his car keys, my nephew skated on the school rink without mishap ( we have pools, they have rinks.)

We go ice skating on the canal on Thursday. I can't ice skate.

I am reading Alice Munro's stories after buying a lovely new Penguin (Canada) copy of Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage at Chapters Bookstore in Ottawa.

I found Rachael King's The Sound of Butterflies there too and felt very proud.

After Munro, I need to finish Auster's The Brooklyn Follies. Then I think I'll start Obama's Audacity of Hope. The book is in my suitcase. It begins: 'On most days, I enter the Capitol through the basement...'

Hallelujah.

O Canada

Bienvenue a Quebec City. On the way there by car from Ottawa, the traffic signs said: 'froid intense' and the road was 'glissant'. It was in the minus 30s and a blizzard hit us on the way home, but our first day shone brilliantly in this 400-year-old fortified city on the narrowest part of the St Laurence River.

Ah yes, books. A whole bookstore full of French books including Quebecois Literature. I was looking for a novel by a former sister-in-law and another by a nephew. Neither were there. Meanwhile, I've started on Carol Shields' novel Unless. Good to read a Canadian.

Back to Ottawa.We've been very domestic and 'family' here since arriving with the only outing a spot of shopping at the local mall. We hit the city centre tomorrow. Maybe try some ice skating on the canal or a snowball fight?
A demain.

Inspiration

Lovely word in-spi-ra-tion. The breathing in... the oxygenation of the brain... the suggestion of the divine. The Marie Antoinette piccy above is an inspiration award for my blog from Aspiring Writer (ah, another one: a-spir-ing) whose blog I like to visit. And I am touched especially as I have been a bit quiet on here recently.

The idea is I pass the award onto seven others now, link to them, let them know and generally spread the love. The trouble is, five of the seven bloggers Aspiring Writer (Joanne Ganley) has picked are on my list of seven anyway! I see those five have said the same thing. It's a funny world the internet - it seems so big, but inside it are these tight little communities like villages.

Anyway, here are seven of my inspiring blogs - I can't say much about them because I should be packing ....

1. To Joanne who is Aspiring Writer and is enthusiastic and smart and keen as mustard to write and has lovely pictures of her garden 2. To Vanda Symon - a driven woman! She writes a book a year, raises two children, seems to have created her own mountain range of laundry and hosts a book show, and still keeps smiling all the time. 3. Gondal Girl who is quirky, mad on Emily Bronte, has finished her first novel, looks a bit like Nicole Kidman and seems - from her blog - to share so many of my preoccupations including birds. I feel I know her but we've never met. 4. Rachael King who is stylish and clever and honest to a fault, and driven to complete novel no. 2 while also sharing her love of collecting and a form of dance with a name that escapes me and some lovely music. 5. Andrea at acatofimpossiblecolour who captivates with her honesty about her life as a Zimbabwe immigrant in NZ. She writes madly and buys clothes crazily and collects gorgeous tea cups and shows all this off with such style and warmth. 6. Denis Welch at Opposable Thumb who refuses to be pigeonholed and will write intelligently, fluently, and beautifully about anything from the sound a car door makes when it shuts to his view on the Israeli-Palestinian issue to books he's enjoyed. 7. David Cohen's This is not a Blog Post - incisive and provocative media and political commentary by the Master.

Finally 8. (aren't I allowed a number 8?) Bookman Beattie's mad book site which he updates many times a day - full of stuff about books and writers. It gets a thousand hits a day from all over the world. Couldn't do without it.

Actually I have a number 9, too, Fifi, and a 10, Shroedinger's Tabby .... better stop...

I think my brain is a little lacking in oxygen at this late hour and a plane to catch tomorrow for one of those long, brain-numbing flights. I have packed my clothes and gifts for the family, and helped by daughter (and travel companion) pack her things. She has been far more efficient than me. I asked if she'd brought some jewellery (for when we hit the high spots in New York) and she said, 'I'll be wearing it.'

She has also chosen to bring the heaviest book in her collection of books to read, it's the third book in the Inkheart trilogy by Cornelia Funke and called Inkdeath - at least 500 pages long by the look of it and in hard back. This writer is one of Issy's faves, but couldn't a lighter book be found for the trip? I dragged A Suitable Boy around Samoa for six weeks and know how important it is to 'travel light.' But my daughter just smiled sweetly and pushed Inkdeath into her back pack.

She's a lot better by the way. Just hope those muscles of hers are up to lugging that back pack around Canada and the US. Then again, I suppose I've got my laptop and a small selection of books of my own. More on that later.

I'll try and blog while I'm away.

Hums from the Hammock #2

isn't it lovely tiddly pom to be reading tiddly pom a lovely book tiddly pom and not any old book tiddly pom but one you can hold tiddly pom and float like a bear tiddly pom looking for honey tiddly pom...here's another one...

Breakwater by Kate Duignan [VUP 2001]. Ella, a young woman who unexpectedly finds herself pregnant, accepts a place to live with her friend Tess and her mother Louise. Louise lives on Wellington's south coast, owns the Breakwater Cafe and has struggled to bring up her now grown-up children on her own. This first novel written by Duignan in her mid 20s as part of the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University is surprising for its maturity and polish. The author treads firmly in the world of daily human interaction pausing to make you watch what people are really doing, and listen, truly listen, to what people are trying to say. There is a delicacy of thought here, and an unsentimental, intelligent view of the world that lets characters quietly unfold and surprise you. The wild Wellington setting beside the sea is simply terrific. This is Louise:

'While each one of them sleeps and sloughs off the frustrations of the morning she is left alone, wound up, unable to read or think. She is reminded of the silverbeet growing up in the garden, in urgent need of treatment for white butterflies, and of the McCahon exhibition she hasn't seen yet, and of this slim novel, about Clarissa Dalloway and her plans to hold a party. All persistently unfinished. She wonders how it has come to this so quickly: being swept up entirely in the eye of young storms, with nothing of her own, no space to breathe. How has it happened that she is here once again? Taken over, and separate from her sense of self, which she sees as a shadow, quickly becoming thin and transparent, and walking now in a different direction.'

Hums from a Hammock #1

isn't it lovely
tiddly pom
to be reading
tiddly pom
a lovely book
tiddly pom
and not any old book
tiddly pom
but one you can hold
tiddly pom
and float like a bear
tiddly pom
looking for honey
tiddly pom
here's one...

Travelling with Augusta: Preston - Gorizia - Venice - Masterton, by Ingrid Horrocks [VUP 2003]. A reflective, intelligent travel memoir of the best sort. NZ poet and academic Ingrid Horrocks uses her Great-great-great Aunt Augusta's travel journal from 1835 as a basis for her own journey through Italy and Croatia. This journey includes an intelligent, thoughtful and, at times, provocative meditation on the role and meaning of the woman traveller. Wonderful insights into this part of the world, too. Stunning holiday reading. Makes me want to travel again on my own or, at the very least, to travel with Ingrid. A good independent bookshop like Unity in Wellington should have this book which came out five years ago and so should any good library near you. It has just been translated into Italian.

Merry Christmas

I love pohutukawa. The city is foaming with them. Such a lovely start to Christmas.

We go over the hill tomorrow for Christmas Day at our olive grove. I think we will have twenty-two family and friends there this year eating, drinking, singing, swimming, lying around and playing petanque. There aren't any pohutukawa up that way so I might take a few with me.

I once drove up to a friend's wedding in Turangi - the chilly bin packed with red blossoms. They looked great on the tables in the marae, although one of the kuia took me aside to explain that there were no pohutukawa thereabouts except for one on an island in Lake Taupo, and there was a good reason (backed up by myth) why that was so. She said she found the sight of the pohutukawa in Turangi lovely but perplexing.

They might look a bit odd among the olive trees, too, but they will be festive. And they'll blend in with the other imported blossoms like this little one below.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all visitors to O Audacious Book especially the bloggers I visit in turn through the year. I really appreciate people coming here, commenting, coming back ... I will try to post over the holiday period, although I'll be terribly busy reading all the books I never got to in 2008 but wanted to. I can get through one a day over the hill in summer.

Hammock here I come.

This Year

Weird video but I saw the Mountain Goats sing This Year live on Thursday night as the last song in their Wellington set at San Francisco Bath House, and it was one of those perfect moments in a string of perfect moments at the gig.

Singer John Darnielle [called by The New Yorker 'America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist']announced it was the last outing of the year for his US indie band, and punched out This Year like it was his last song forever.

It's been an intense year for me - using the Henry James quote regarding what people want in literature - it's been a year of 'bliss' (centring around my book) and 'bale' (centring around my family), and a bit of bliss in the bale, and bale in the bliss, if you know what I mean. So This Year is aways turned up loud in my car with the line 'I'm going to make it through this year if it kills me' a great one to sing-along to. Talk about cathartic.

But Darnielle is like that - he rinses words out and wrings them so hard they're not only fresh and shiny again, they're a different shape.

Celebratory. Berating. Questioning. Sweet and gentle, too. At the Wellington gig, Darnielle stepped away from the mike sometimes and sang some of the sweetest lines into the crowd without amplification. Lines like the one about being 'desperate' in someone's arms.

Darnielle is funny and enigmatic on stage and the total professional, as you'd expect. He was also wearing a lovely jacket until he got too hot. After a solo turn, he was joined by his excellent bassist and drummer.

Darnielle has his own blog here which shows an unhealthy fascination with metal music and horror movies and Jamie Lee Curtis. And another blogger has a look at some of the MG songs and great lines here.

And we didn't get to hear Woke up New performed but it's one of those sweet ones with sudden knife-sharp insight, and is a better video than most of the MG ones on youtube. Lovely, really.

The Blue in Japan

His Excellency Ian Kennedy, NZ Ambassador to Japan, with his signed copy of The Blue. A nice irony here as The Blue is about NZ whaling and NZ was pivotal in the International Whaling Commission establishing itself as an anti-whaling organisation against the wishes of the Japanese.

I know this because my father-in-law, Ian Stewart, was New Zealand's Whaling Commissioner and Chair of the IWC in the 1980s. I visited him at the annual conference in the UK in 1985 and remember the Japanese fury at the NZ position.

It was then I started to become interested in whales and whale conservation and the history of whaling. I reported what was happening at the IWC conference that year for Radio NZ, and went on to report on the work of the Commission when I returned to NZ and worked for TVNZ's Eyewitness current affairs programme.

I remember the IWC met in Auckland in 1988 and I went up to cover it. I also remember looking for whaling footage for the story and being fascinated by the astonishing shots of whales cavorting in the ocean and looking after their young.

I had fallen upon the name Perano while I was at university in the early 80s and tucked it away (without realising) for future use. This was the family of Italian descent that began modern Tory Channel whaling which is the stuff of The Blue. Put that together with what I discovered about whales via my father-in-law, not least the passion people feel about them, and you have the curling tendrils of thought that led to my novel.

Thanks to Anna, Martin and Humphrey who sent me the photo of Ian Kennedy taken earlier this year after giving him a copy of The Blue. Anna's a second cousin to my father-in-law and her son Humphrey is living in Japan for a while.

short stories rock

Do you ever think of the time, Olivia, when we were stuck in the stairwell? Of the way I dived through the fire-stop door and down the stairs and you followed me all tap-tap and clatter in those pointy boots of yours, and one floor down, my floor, the exit door was locked? I huffed a little, tried it twice, did a U-turn, led the way back up the stairs, back to the floor where the lecture was, but that door, the one we’d just come through, had locked behind us.

Okay this is very very cool. This is the beginning of my first ever published short story The Stairwell and the whole thing is published here on the new Turbine on-line journal (which is also very very cool and edited by the wonderful crew at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University.) You can see I am at a loss for words on this one. Do go and check out the whole of Turbine 2008 with its -okay - cool array of poets, fiction and memoir writers.

And another very cool thing and first for me is this blog award from a cat of impossible colour who is a bit of a rocker herself in blog terms (thanks Andrea). So it feels like an early Christmas for me. And a cool one at that. Might even need to get myself some snow boots.

the art of breathing or the best books 08

My penny's worth is in The Listener feature on the 100 Best Books 08 along with a bunch of other writers. I love perusing the list - while thinking how odd it is that The Blue is regarded as a 2007 book, which it is of course, and it doesn't get a peek in - but what is fascinating is reading what the other writers have to say.

It's a great insight into the way Montana Medal winner Charlotte Grimshaw thinks to see she's read Tim Winton's Breath three times for enjoyment and 'out of what you might call technical interest.' Also interesting to see Menton fellow Damien Wilkins putting Marilynne Robinson's Home as his favourite novel. I remember discussing the book she wrote as its precursor - Gilead - with Damien when he was my tutor in creative writing at Victoria University. I am trying to remember if I got onto Robinson's writing in the first place because Damien recommended her first novel Housekeeping which is a modern classic. Come to think of it, I think he did. I loved Gilead very much but when I saw Home I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to that careful, quiet, constructed world again. Maybe I should (Elizabeth Knox loved it too I see).

And both Damien Wilkins and KM Award winner Julian Novitz seem to have loved Ellie Catton's spiky debut The Rehearsal which is another book I've been holding off reading because I know it's terribly clever with wonderful words. I usually want more than that from a novel you see. Then again, I think maybe I should stop thinking about it and just buy the book. When I heard Catton read from the manuscript a couple of years ago I was transfixed.

Lastly, good to see Vanda Symon's The Ringmaster, Sue Orr's Etiquette for a Dinner Party and My Father's Shadow: A Portrait of Justice Peter Mahon by Sam Mahon on the list. From my bookshop dips into each, and Mahon's reading at the Christchurch writers' festival, this is well-deserved and I intend to read all three forthwith.

Actually, my favourite 'best of' list didn't make it into The Listener.

Here's mine:

MY BEST BOOKS 2008 (The NZ Listener)

My top books for the first time ever are all non-fiction. First up: Rita Angus, An Artist’s Life by Jill Trevelyan (Te Papa Press). It is the whole package: exquisitely produced with a tantalising subject, stunning art plates, and prose that levers open the woman, her art and her time. Then there’s The Love School, Personal Essays by Elizabeth Knox (VUP) which I confess I have skimmed and am now reading, and find a thrilling insight into the mind of one of this country’s most imaginative and audacious writers.

Third on the list is Corvus, A Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson (Granta) - a memoir about this writer’s unusual family in Aberdeen which has at different times included a rook, a crow and a magpie. This book offers up intelligent personal observations and facts that challenged my understanding of birds and the rest of the natural world.

UK uber-reader discovers Frame

Devonshire-based book blogger extraordinaire Dovegreyreader has discovered Janet Frame. Her post was a nice surprise when I popped there today to see what she's been reading. I saw the NZ flag first and then the title Calling NZ - I've been Framed Again, and it begins like this:

Calling New Zealand...are you there New Zealand?Do you receive me?I'm just semaphoring across the oceans to let you know that I think you are a very fortunate country indeed to be able to lay claim to an author like Janet Frame. I hope there are trusts and monuments and preserved houses, a Janet Frame national holiday and the rest because what a legacy. Look, I'm even flying your flag for the day in recognition. I've read through the rules and I think it's allowed.

More here from this thoughtful and generous reviewer.

Needless to say Frame's literary executor and niece Pamela Gordon has already been in contact with dovegreyreader. For yes, there's a trust and a house and an award (won this year by Emma Neale) but there is no Janet Frame National Holiday. Not yet anyway.

Pictured above is a first edition of Owls Do Cry which I am proud to say is the copy I own (along with a very tatty paperback). Owls Do Cry is one of my favourite novels of all time, first read when I was 16, and to me a revelation in terms of the gorgeous possibilities of prose, and NZ prose at that.

Squealing at satire

Here's the link to the Radio NZ book review of Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Frankly, I blithered on rather than expounded in a succinct and thoughtful fashion, but you can tell I loved it to bits. I even squealed at one point.

Readers and writers surely love this book for its insights into story and the role of books and the flimsiness of genre (Clarke's novel is a faux-memoir and 'how to' guide which skewers these genres and makes use of them.). And if that doesn't grab readers, surely they're interested in Clarke's anti-hero's take on what he refers to as the Human Condition?

But when I raved to a very nice keen-reading customer along these lines in the bookshop today he listened politely and went off with the Booker winner instead. Maybe he doesn't like satirical novels.

I love them you see. Gulliver's Travels is one of my favourite books of all times. It's that way of looking at the Human Condition with a sharp and comic eye that makes the reader step back amused/provoked/thoughtful, and at the same time provides sudden brief and glowing epiphanies like - well - a match firing. In fact, Clarke's novel has fuller character development than most satires with bumbler arsonist Sam Pulsifer still an insistent voice in my head.

There's a little more on the book in the previous post. I wish, Gondal Girl (who asked), I could write a fuller written review but I simply haven't got the time.

Photo: the Emily Dickinson museum

An Arsonist's Guide

I'm reviewing this wonderful satirical darkly comic heart-warming book on Radio NZ National tomorrow (Thursday Dec 4) at 10.30 am. The frenetic, searching voice of bumbler arsonist Sam Pulsifer is unforgettable - a sort of Richard Ford on speed crossed with The World According to Garp.

An Arsonist’s Guide is, among other things, about how we want books to do so many things—like make our life better, or make us better people—that they’re often unwilling, or unable, or ill-suited, to do. [Brock Clarke]

And there's more - lots more - on his website.

Persecuted by ideas - the inner life of Elizabeth Knox

I have skimmed and am now reading page by page Elizabeth Knox's wonderful collection of essays The Love School: Personal Essays. I am a terrible skimmer of non-fiction, especially exciting non-fiction. But I really must settle and read it properly because everything I've caught sight of so far has been the stuff that David Larsen describes as making 'the world tilt'. It is truly a fascinating insight into the mind of one of this country's most imaginative and successful writers and Larsen's review does it justice.

Rather than try and replicate that, here are some of the bits and pieces I've collected on Elizabeth Knox over the past few months, planning at some stage to post something on her on O Audacious Book. As happens, I still have the notes scrawled in red ink in one of my moleskine notebooks, and a tatty old review or two and nothing more substantial. So rather than dally any longer, here they are ...
*
Most of the notes were scrawled down when I heard Elizabeth Knox speak at the NZ Post National Schools Writing Festival at Victoria University in August. She was her usual frank self - talking deeply and absorbingly about why she writes and what she writes. One student asked her where she got all her ideas from and she said: 'I'm persecuted by ideas, I know what I'm going to write for the next ten years.'
On what to write about: 'I wait for something that is so exciting it's driving me crazy. I have a lot of ideas but I don't always know which end to start it from.'
To other writers: 'Take what really blows up your skirt and take an angle on it - something you haven't thought about before.' And 'every idea is a whole lot of ideas bundled up together.'
On the physicality of finishing the Dreamhunter books: 'The matrix of the whole story was falling out of my head and my brain was unravelling. It was physical. A very strange feeling.'
On her new novel The Angel's Cut - the 'sequel to The Vintner's Luck' due out soon: 'Xas is so pleased with himself and so powerful and so ruined at the end (of TVL). And you start with the ruined Xas in The Angel's Cut.'
Knox says she was preoccupied with flight in The Angel's Cut. 'Xas lost his wings in Vintner's Luck. He's very small and thinks he's an insignificant (? or maybe she said 'significant'?) angel. He's been wandering the earth since he lost his love Sobran.... He's been back in the air including on a zeppelin in WWI in an airshow in France...'
On the the negative reaction to Black Oxen: 'I was walking down the street and I thought 'I don't want anyone to look at me.''
*
I have kept a Listener review of The Vintner's Luck when it came out ten years ago (it has been stunningly re-issued to celebrate its tenth anniversary). The review is by writer Peter Wells and reminds me of the excitement so many people felt on reading Vintner's Luck all those years ago and continue to feel, and the excitement many of us have felt ever since when we see Knox's name on another new novel.

The truth is, you never know what to expect when you open that fresh shiny cover, but you do know it'll be a ride to remember. Appositely, at the school writing festival this year, Knox read a scene from The Angel's Cut which described Xas on a rollercoaster in the US. It was sensational. Literally. I barely wrote a word I was so taken up with experiencing the physical sensation of that ride. I did record a single quote that has no context but clearly stunned me at the time: 'left that person's hungry skin.'

Here's Peter Wells (The Listener 1998):

Reading The Vintner's Luck, I was reminded of why we read. We read to evade the weight of time ('Despair is gravity' - Elizabeth Knox.) We read also to experience the pleasure, almost unseen, of a beautiful construction, an airy theorem that exists only in words on the page and inside our heads. We read also to forget who or where we are. As Elizabeth Knox says, 'Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or neighbours.'

how to be above reproach

Talented essayist Anna Sanderson has just won one of the Arts Foundation’s ‘New Generation’ Awards donated by the Freemasons and worth a gob-smacking $25,000.

Here she is speaking as one of the writers shortlisted for the Modern Letters Prize this year. Next to her is Bill Manhire and, beside him, the ear of the winner, David Beach.

I am thrilled for Anna who was in my MA class at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2005. A quietly-spoken classmate with a background in photography and art writing, everything she said was astute and worth listening to. I think all nine of the rest of us made note of Anna's comments on our work and vowed to be better next time.

The essays she was working on, which became her MA thesis and eventually her book, Brainpark, astonished all of us with their insight, singularity and power. The other thing we had to grasp in a hurry was that Anna wasn't out to impress anyone, she just wrote as she wrote, and that meant she provoked and unsettled people and left them feeling plain uncomfortable sometimes.

The other astonishing thing was Anna found herself unexpectedly pregnant near the start of the year and still managed to have her baby, get back to class, complete her thesis and win one of the IIML prizes.

Anna's publisher Victoria University Press says 'Brainpark is a wholly convincing experiment in the essay form. A core theme of disassociation of feeling and aesthetic effect is explored in a number of contexts – family, faith, art history, sanctuary.'

Anna does all this with intellectual playfulness, literary surefootedness and self-effacing honesty. Writer Ian Wedde picked Anna's book as one of his finds of the year and said it is 'an engrossing read, a critically astute piece of writing and a mature accomplishment. Brainpark sets a new standard for the personal essay in New Zealand.' Anna went on to win the prestigious Landfall Essay Competition in 2006.

Looking through my MA reading journal (titled 'The Incredible Shrinking Novel') I realise how often Anna gave me small gifts about the art of writing that I stored away and have fallen back on many times since. The one I remember most clearly was an epiphany about the use of precise description to reveal a sudden startling insight into character. What someone once referred to as describing the coffin not the grief. Here's what I wrote back then:

I've just read Anna's description of her father cutting her nails. She has an ambivalent relationship with him but Anna doesn’t say that, she talks about how he cut the nails – pure and simple.

She’s 19, he holds the nails tightly but still there’s a 'doddery imprecision', he has high quality Swedish nail scissors. He seems controlling, perfectionist, cold, detached. She never uses those words. It is a triumph this paragraph.

I have learnt a lot from Anna’s strange, prickly, clever essays especially her character studies. I enjoyed too an apposite quote she included from Ingmar Bergman regarding how art lost its way when it became separate from worship.

Early on in class, Anna made clear her approach to writing and she never veered from it. Even if at times we felt uncomfortable in its glare. Here's the reading journal again - this time we'd just finished a poetry exercise.

Approaching the poem, I was determined to be more honest in my writing – this came fresh off the back of Anna’s startling honesty last week in her False Starts assignment. The statement that resonated for all of us was: I want to be above reproach. This referred to how her work was viewed by the class.

It struck me then how engaging honesty is in writing, just as it is in people we meet. It has a nice way of making the reader complicit with the author: ‘look here’s a secret.’ I realise I was far more open when I was first writing years ago, but have learnt over the years to make more use of, what Bill Manhire calls, a ‘foliage of words.’ Maybe there’s more to protect as one gets older.

Later on in the year, Anna returned to this theme.

Regarding poetry being ‘complicated’, Anna pointed out sometimes we are sated with indirectness and implication and need something more concrete, and to explore bigger issues head on. [Later note: there is some irony in this as in a matter of days Anna will have her baby.]

On the day of the Brainpark book launch, Anna arrived with her partner and her baby and said she had been shaking all day with the thought of what she had written going out into the world. She stood up to speak without an apparent tremor, and was grinning from ear to ear signing books afterwards.

I have deep respect for Anna and her courage and skill as a writer and I am immensely grateful for what she taught me the year of my MA which is when I whittled a flabby manuscript of The Blue down to size, and made it into a novel.

There were a lot of wonderful people saying 'drink me' that year, but Anna's voice was one of the most compelling. The $25,000 prize couldn't have fallen on more fertile or deserving ground. At last, this supremely talented writer can afford to give herself a small break from her babies (there are two now) and get back to prodding those dark corners again to give us all a little more light.

Dad would stand on my right-hand side with his quality Swedish nail scissors, and hold each finger quite tightly as he cut it. He had a slightly doddery imprecision. He would purse his lips in concentration, and then run his thumb over the newly cut edge as if to feel for burrs or rough spots after each nail had been cut. The nails would drop down two storeys to the concrete below.

Anna Sanderson, Brainpark [VUP 2006]

to make us less afraid

"Kundera argues that the novel's purpose is not to uplift us, or to provide moral guidance, but to make us less afraid." Susan Salter Reynolds • Los Angeles Times

Laughter and Forgetting

Opposable Thumb - a blog by writer, reviewer, philosopher Denis Welch - quotes Milan Kundera. It stopped me in my tracks because the quote he uses expresses so aptly the thoughts that have been tapping inside my head. It describes the precariosity I want to capture one way or another in my new novel.

It takes so little, so infinitely little for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith,history. Human life—and herein lies its secret—takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch. [Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.]

I was one of many readers captured by Czech author Kundera in 1984 with the publication of his novel The Incredible Lightness of Being. We were living in London at the time and I remember sitting in one of those humid basement laundries waiting for the clothes to dry, and reading a persuasive review of TILB in The Guardian. I went the next day to Charing Cross Road to buy it. Such a title and such a book.

It's about a group of intellectuals living in the wake of the Prague Spring and develops the idea that existence is light because the ordinary life is lived only once in a straight line, and without repetition there is no weight to existence, and therefore no happiness. Or I think that's it. Kundera's not a straightforward read. And like John Banville who reviewed it 20 years later in The Guardian, there is much I've forgotten [more than usual!]:

As I began re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera's novel of love and politics in communist-run Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the early 1980s, I realised that, true to its title, the book had floated out of my mind like a hot-air balloon come adrift from its tethers. I managed to retrieve a few fragments - the naked woman in the bowler hat whom we all remember, the death of a pet dog, a lavatory seat compared to a white water lily rising out of the bathroom floor, and the fact that Nietzsche's name appears in the first line on the first page - but of the characters I retained nothing at all, not even their names. [John Banville]

And you know, try as I might, I don't remember the naked woman in the bowler hat! I remember the womanising Tomas and the painful relationship he has with Tereza. The death of the dog. The deep, depressing drumroll of fate. How sad it all was and how provocative its thinking. Those who know the work of Nietzsche say Kundera appears to both accept and reject the philosopher's position on what the lack of repetition in life means.



It's the author's deep-tissue thinking that elevates The Incredible Lightness of Being into a modern classic. He's considered a modernist and post-modernist, a man of his times and a man who isn't tied to time at all, a moralist and a writer of ideas who gives insights into the 'felt life' [Banville], a writer of significance who writes brilliantly of our insignificance. You don't have to believe what he says to be dazzled by him.



Or at least his writing. The reclusive Kundera - who lives in France in his late 70s - was just last month accused of having betrayed a Czech who spied for the west 58 years ago. Kundera has denied the charge, declaring it 'the assassination of the author.' The Economist titled its article on the subject: 'The Unbearable Weight of History.'


I don't have a copy of The Incredible Lightness of Being anymore. I lent it to a Greek communist, my aunt's former lover, and it was never returned. I have The Book of Laughter and Forgetting somewhere and will never forget the opening image as a searing insight into power and the communist regime. Or perhaps simply power and the closeness of the border posts.

In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.

Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald's head.

The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.

Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald's head.

It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.