A literary theme this week, of sorts - for the artist's stage name is Charlotte Sometimes (from the children's book of that name by Penelope Farmer) and her song is 'How I Could Just Kill A Man.' It's not my favourite of her songs, but it's the one which comes with a fun video.
Sunday, 8 July 2012
Saturday, 7 July 2012
Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany
Well, it's wet and miserable here - but it has been beautiful, as exemplified in this picture from the road trip I took on Thursday to Toot Baldon (because of its brilliant name). Not a bad view for our picnic, eh?
1.) The blog post - go and read Hayley's lovely, thought-provoking post about why so many of us love books as well as reading...
2.) The link - is this Youtube clip: a man being 'interviewed' by himself, from a video he made 20 years ago. It's very clever.
3.) The book - came from Bloomsbury the other day. I should have read this back during the Jubilee weekend, but it's still Jubilee Year, isn't it? I'm very excited about Coronation by Paul Gallico... I'll let you know more soon!
Have a great weekend!
1.) The blog post - go and read Hayley's lovely, thought-provoking post about why so many of us love books as well as reading...
2.) The link - is this Youtube clip: a man being 'interviewed' by himself, from a video he made 20 years ago. It's very clever.
3.) The book - came from Bloomsbury the other day. I should have read this back during the Jubilee weekend, but it's still Jubilee Year, isn't it? I'm very excited about Coronation by Paul Gallico... I'll let you know more soon!
Have a great weekend!
Friday, 6 July 2012
Briefly... a pet peeve!
I discovered recently that I have a pet peeve when it comes to novels. I've been reading two really good books - Wise Children by Angela Carter and A Favourite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford - and they both are really, really good. But both were a little marred for me... I've discovered that I really don't like it when a novel starts with one scene in 'present day', and then skips back and starts again in the past, progressing forwards again to the present.
I haven't quite worked out why. I think I'm used to 'flashbacks' being a bit of something to skim through, and when the flashback takes up the entire novel, obviously things are different - and perhaps I find that disconcerting. Somehow everything takes on that sepia tone of prolonged anticlimax...
Does anyone else feel like this? I imagine not... but perhaps you have other pet peeves which feel irrational, yet affect your enjoyment a bit?
Sorry for such a brief post - I've spent the evening painting (final picture will be shown, if it is ever finished!) and now I'm going to sleep the sleep ofjust person in a turpentine-filled room.
I haven't quite worked out why. I think I'm used to 'flashbacks' being a bit of something to skim through, and when the flashback takes up the entire novel, obviously things are different - and perhaps I find that disconcerting. Somehow everything takes on that sepia tone of prolonged anticlimax...
Does anyone else feel like this? I imagine not... but perhaps you have other pet peeves which feel irrational, yet affect your enjoyment a bit?
Sorry for such a brief post - I've spent the evening painting (final picture will be shown, if it is ever finished!) and now I'm going to sleep the sleep of
Thursday, 5 July 2012
The Love-Child by Edith Olivier
I have blogged before about The Love-Child, one of my favourite books and in my ongoing list of 50 You Must Read, but I've never been very happy with my post on it. Nor do I think the following wholly encapsulates how wonderful the novel is by any means, but... I thought it worth sharing. I wrote it for Hesperus Press's Uncover A Classic competition - but, sadly for me, a different book was chosen. More on that soon, but I decided not to put my '500 word introduction' to waste - and so, just in case you've yet to read this beautiful novel, here is the piece I wrote for the Hesperus competition...
Edith Olivier’s The Love Child (1927) was her first novel, and easily her best. Although rediscovered as a ‘modern classic’ in 1981, it has not been reprinted since – perhaps because it resist categorisation – yet it deserves a far wider, rapturous audience.
The Love Child tells the story of Agatha Bodenham, a middle-aged childless spinster mourning the death of her mother as the novel opens. She fondly recalls her childhood imaginary friend, Clarissa, and even copes with her loneliness by talking to Clarissa again. This attachment grows until one afternoon, to Agatha’s surprise, Clarissa herself appears in the garden: ‘She was smaller even than Agatha had imagined her, and she looked young for her age, which must have been ten or eleven. […] Physically, she looked shadowy and pathetic, but a spirit peeped out of her eyes, with something of roguishness, perhaps, but yet it was unmistakably there.’
Initially Clarissa is visible only to Agatha, but gradually others can see her also – and Agatha copes with both the joy of new-found companionship, and the embarrassment of explaining the sudden appearance of a child. Eventually she decides she must pretend that Clarissa is her own daughter; her love child. ‘She had saved her. But at what a cost! Her position, her name, her character – she had given them all, but Clarissa was hers’.
Olivier constructs a mother/daughter relationship which is more poignant, and more vulnerable than most. Clarissa may disappear as suddenly as she appeared – especially when, as the years progress, a local man named David begins to fall in love with her. Agatha’s possessiveness and uncertainty are drawn beautifully, demonstrating the pain suffered by one unused to love when her creation may be taken from her. She is not cast as a villain, but simply a lonely woman battling for the solution to that loneliness. Olivier herself had neither husband nor children when, in her fifties, she was inspired to start writing novels. According to her autobiography, the idea for The Love Child came to her suddenly in the middle of the night, and was written ‘during those feverish wakeful hours when the body is weary but the mind seems let loose to work abnormally quickly.’ The novel certainly reads with the enchanting spontaneity this writing process suggests and, although often addressing sad topics, is far from a melancholy book. This is primarily due to Clarissa herself. She is a captivating character – naïve, almost elfin, yet fascinated by science and delighted by motorcars – she animates not only Agatha’s monotonous life, but enlivens the whole novel.
In a short book, which could easily be read in two or three hours, Olivier encompasses moving and involving themes in a warm, lively manner; it seems absurd that this beautiful novel should ever have fallen out of print. A new generation of readers deserve to discover The Love Child.
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| photo source |
Edith Olivier’s The Love Child (1927) was her first novel, and easily her best. Although rediscovered as a ‘modern classic’ in 1981, it has not been reprinted since – perhaps because it resist categorisation – yet it deserves a far wider, rapturous audience.
The Love Child tells the story of Agatha Bodenham, a middle-aged childless spinster mourning the death of her mother as the novel opens. She fondly recalls her childhood imaginary friend, Clarissa, and even copes with her loneliness by talking to Clarissa again. This attachment grows until one afternoon, to Agatha’s surprise, Clarissa herself appears in the garden: ‘She was smaller even than Agatha had imagined her, and she looked young for her age, which must have been ten or eleven. […] Physically, she looked shadowy and pathetic, but a spirit peeped out of her eyes, with something of roguishness, perhaps, but yet it was unmistakably there.’
Initially Clarissa is visible only to Agatha, but gradually others can see her also – and Agatha copes with both the joy of new-found companionship, and the embarrassment of explaining the sudden appearance of a child. Eventually she decides she must pretend that Clarissa is her own daughter; her love child. ‘She had saved her. But at what a cost! Her position, her name, her character – she had given them all, but Clarissa was hers’.
Olivier constructs a mother/daughter relationship which is more poignant, and more vulnerable than most. Clarissa may disappear as suddenly as she appeared – especially when, as the years progress, a local man named David begins to fall in love with her. Agatha’s possessiveness and uncertainty are drawn beautifully, demonstrating the pain suffered by one unused to love when her creation may be taken from her. She is not cast as a villain, but simply a lonely woman battling for the solution to that loneliness. Olivier herself had neither husband nor children when, in her fifties, she was inspired to start writing novels. According to her autobiography, the idea for The Love Child came to her suddenly in the middle of the night, and was written ‘during those feverish wakeful hours when the body is weary but the mind seems let loose to work abnormally quickly.’ The novel certainly reads with the enchanting spontaneity this writing process suggests and, although often addressing sad topics, is far from a melancholy book. This is primarily due to Clarissa herself. She is a captivating character – naïve, almost elfin, yet fascinated by science and delighted by motorcars – she animates not only Agatha’s monotonous life, but enlivens the whole novel.
In a short book, which could easily be read in two or three hours, Olivier encompasses moving and involving themes in a warm, lively manner; it seems absurd that this beautiful novel should ever have fallen out of print. A new generation of readers deserve to discover The Love Child.
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
The Island of the Colourblind - Oliver Sacks
I already knew that I loved Sacks' book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and I have one or two of his books in various places - including The Island of the Colourblind (1997) (sorry, I can't bring myself to give the American title, blame my English student sensibilities). I can't remember what it was that catapulted the book from shelf to hand - perhaps one too many novels with teacups and maids? - but it did indeed find its way there, and I whipped through it in a day or two.
The title and blurb both offer slightly false information - suggesting that there is an entire community of colourblind people on the 'tiny Pacific atoll' Pingelap. It turns out that the incident of achromatopsia (symptoms are complete colourblindness - i.e. everything in greyscale - and a high sensitivity to light) is in fact one in 12 of the population. It's still wildly more than the rest of the world - where achromatopsia is found in one in 30,000. Even though it is not the isolated, uniform community which Sacks initially hoped to find, he does highlight the emotional benefits of this high incidence:
There was an immediate understanding and sharing between them, a commonality of language and perception, which extended to Knut as well. [...] When a Pingelapese baby starts to squint and turn away from the light, there is at least a cultural knowledge of his perceptual world, his special needs and strengths, even a mythology to explain it. In this sense, then, Pingelap is an island of the colourblind. No one born here with the maskun finds himself wholly isolated or misunderstood, which is the almost universal lot of people with congenital achromatopsia elsewhere in the world.Amongst that number is the mentioned Knut - a Scandinavian scientist who both has and investigates the condition. When Sacks offers Knut the chance to accompany him, Knut leaps at the chance - and his experience with the condition proves invaluable as a point of connection between the outsider Westerners and the inevitably intimate island society. (Sacks is occasionally rather scathing about other Westerners who have visited, especially missionaries, but I suppose I couldn't expect him to share my views on them - and, unlike his view of other visitors, he never considers his own work and provisions as a colonial activity.) Knut also provides a sophisticated, intelligent and thorough angle of living with achromatopsia amongst millions who don't.
Not thinking, I enthused about the wonderful blues of the sea - then stopped, embarrassed. Knut, though he has no direct experience of colour, is very erudite on the subject. He is intrigued by the range of words and images other people use about colour and was arrested by my use of the word "azure." ("Is it similar to cerulean?") He wondered whether "indigo" was, for me, a separate, seventh colour of the spectrum, neither blue nor violet, but itself, in between. "Many people," he added, "do not see indigo as a separate spectral colour, and others see light blue as distinct from blue." With no direct knowledge of colour, Knut has accumulated an immense mental catalogue, an archive, of vicarious colour knowledge about the world.It reminded me somehow of Helen Keller's accounts of living as a blind, dumb, death woman in a world which is largely none of these things - and the sensitivity with which she perceives how others might perceive her world.
There is no cure for achromatopsia, but it is a condition which becomes much more manageable with the simple expedient of dark glasses and strong magnifying glasses. The next island Sacks visits, Guam, has a more debilitating illness shared by much of the population: Lytico-Bodig disease. (I'm just realising how unlike my normal posts this is!) It's a neurological disease which manifests itself in symptoms like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Despite decades of research, nobody has worked out what caused this - but nobody born in the past few decades has shown any symptoms. Sacks gets a bit too involved in the history of research into the disease for my understanding, but more personal accounts of people living with the condition cannot but be moving.
Sacks is certainly a learned neurologist, but his books are not textbooks in their style. He has the gift of interweaving the scientist and the storyteller. His narrative is moving and personal, rather than the impersonal facts and figures one might anticipate from a scientific study. Perhaps it is most poignant when Sacks realises the limitations of his work:
To calm her, the family started to sing an old folk song, and the old lady, so demented, so fragmented, most of the time, joined in, singing fluently along with the others. She seemed to get all the words, all the feeling, of the song, and to be composed, restored to herself, as long as she sang. John and I slipped out quietly while they were singing, suddenly feeling, at this point, that neurology was irrelevant.I wouldn't ever browse the science sections of bookshops, and I don't remember how I first stumbled across The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, but I'm very glad I did. The Island of the Colourblind (a play on Wells' The Island of the Blind, which I should mention before this post ends) isn't as captivating as that book, but it is a rather different kettle of fish. Instead of many psychological disorders and fascinating patients, Sacks explores two communities - more slowly, more deeply, and even more sympathetically. There was a danger in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat that it could feel a bit like giving a penny to see a freakshow (although I'm sure that's not what Sacks intended.) The Island of the Colourblind invites the reader onto two islands, to become, however briefly, a concerned member of two very different communities - not watching from the outside, but sympathising from the inside. The fascinating statistical aberrations are still there, as are some as-yet unexplained mysteries, but this is primarily a very human study - and a narrative which treads the path between science and storytelling, almost always with impressive success.
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Half a Century of Books
I had a lovely break in Somerset, and was surprised by how well my little sale went - I'll head off to the post office tomorrow, laden with parcels. I'll see how many books I cull later in the year, and might well bring it back again.
But onto today's post... We are now in the second half of the year, and I am continuing my quarterly look at how A Century of Books is going. Here was the first quarter's, where I was on exactly 25 that qualified. My sidebar at the moment announces that I've done 44 of my 100, but there are a further six which I've yet to review, so... once more, I am precisely on target! 50 books read for A Century of Books; 50 to go. (I have actually read nearer 70 books this year, but the others have been pre- or post- 20th century, or overlapped on my list.)
Links to all the reviewed books are here. And here's how I'm doing, by decade...
1900s: 3
1910s: 1
1920s: 8
1930s: 6
1940s: 8
1950s: 5
1960s: 3
1970s: 5
1980s: 6
1990s: 5
Still a noticeable slump at the beginning of the century, but surprisingly high numbers at the end of it...
If you're reading along with A Century of Books, or any similar project - how is yours going?
But onto today's post... We are now in the second half of the year, and I am continuing my quarterly look at how A Century of Books is going. Here was the first quarter's, where I was on exactly 25 that qualified. My sidebar at the moment announces that I've done 44 of my 100, but there are a further six which I've yet to review, so... once more, I am precisely on target! 50 books read for A Century of Books; 50 to go. (I have actually read nearer 70 books this year, but the others have been pre- or post- 20th century, or overlapped on my list.)
Links to all the reviewed books are here. And here's how I'm doing, by decade...
1900s: 3
1910s: 1
1920s: 8
1930s: 6
1940s: 8
1950s: 5
1960s: 3
1970s: 5
1980s: 6
1990s: 5
Still a noticeable slump at the beginning of the century, but surprisingly high numbers at the end of it...
If you're reading along with A Century of Books, or any similar project - how is yours going?
Thursday, 28 June 2012
A Little Sale...
Books for Sale!
I'm going away for a long weekend (conference down near home, so making the most of it) and thought I'd try something... I've been having a sort-out, and have quite a few books I don't need any more. I'm also somewhat in need of monies at the moment, what with an unfunded DPhil and all, so I thought I'd copy an idea Rachel had a while ago, and put up my old books for sale. I think some of them might appeal. Hope you don't mind this swerve away from normal blog posts - but I think it could be win-win for us both.
Because of postage costs, this is just for people in the UK - but if you see something you really like, then email me and we can try to work something out!
To make things simple, they're £4 each, 3 for £10, including postage. Pick the one(s) you want, and email me at simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk (and maybe stake your claim in the comments) - payment would have to be by cheque, or bank transfer, or Paypal.
With every order, if you like, I'll include one of my sketches. Just say 'yes please, sketch!' with your email. (Feel free to pick one from the archives - links in the left column - or I'll pick one.)
I don't know if this is going to be wildly successful or a complete dud, but I thought it would be worth a shot! There are pictures of them all below, and a list at the bottom (I'll delete them from the list as they go... pictures might not be updated). I wish I could just post them all off for free, but it would leave me very skint!
Normal service will resume next Tuesday :)
The Upright Piano Player - David Abbott
A Long, Long Way - Sebastian Barry
Discipline - Mary Brunton
Cloud 9 - Caryl Churchill
Youth and other stories - Joseph Conrad
Under Western Eyes - Josephn Conrad
Old Men Forget - Duff Cooper
The New House - Lettice Cooper
The Ridleys - Richmal Crompton
Weatherley Parade - Richmal Crompton
Mariana - Monica Dickens
The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald
The Battle of the Villa Fiorita - Rumer Godden
Island Magic - Elizabeth Goudge
The Ivory Tower - Henry James
The Gingerbread Woman - Jennifer Johnson
Kim - Rudyard Kipling
The Village - Marghanita Laski
Little Boy Lost - Marghanita Laski
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town - Stephen Leacock
Babbit - Sinclair Lewis
The World My Wilderness - Rose Macaulay
Greenery Street - Denis Mackail
If I May - A.A. Milne
Once on a Time - A.A. Milne
The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet - Benjamin Hoff
The Empty Room - Charles Morgan
White Boots - Noel Streatfeild
Love Letters - Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons
A Haunted House - Virginia Woolf
A Book of One's Own: People and their Diaries - Thomas Mallon
I'm going away for a long weekend (conference down near home, so making the most of it) and thought I'd try something... I've been having a sort-out, and have quite a few books I don't need any more. I'm also somewhat in need of monies at the moment, what with an unfunded DPhil and all, so I thought I'd copy an idea Rachel had a while ago, and put up my old books for sale. I think some of them might appeal. Hope you don't mind this swerve away from normal blog posts - but I think it could be win-win for us both.
Because of postage costs, this is just for people in the UK - but if you see something you really like, then email me and we can try to work something out!
To make things simple, they're £4 each, 3 for £10, including postage. Pick the one(s) you want, and email me at simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk (and maybe stake your claim in the comments) - payment would have to be by cheque, or bank transfer, or Paypal.
With every order, if you like, I'll include one of my sketches. Just say 'yes please, sketch!' with your email. (Feel free to pick one from the archives - links in the left column - or I'll pick one.)
I don't know if this is going to be wildly successful or a complete dud, but I thought it would be worth a shot! There are pictures of them all below, and a list at the bottom (I'll delete them from the list as they go... pictures might not be updated). I wish I could just post them all off for free, but it would leave me very skint!
Normal service will resume next Tuesday :)
The Upright Piano Player - David Abbott
Discipline - Mary Brunton
Cloud 9 - Caryl Churchill
Under Western Eyes - Josephn Conrad
The Empty Room - Charles Morgan
A Book of One's Own: People and their Diaries - Thomas Mallon
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