Anne Enright: The Wig My Father Wore

      I’m really not sure what to make of this one…

Enright uses language beautifully, playfully, in a way that to me is particularly Irish, in the sense that it reminds me of James Joyce, and even more of Flann O’Brien; there’s a linguistic levity that conceals a seriousness unless you slow down and look closely, beneath the surface.

There are other aspects that make it Irish, to me: an awareness of and – not quite rejection, but distancing from – a sense of provincialism, primitiveness, smallworldliness of the place, that is also connected with religion. The effect of cloying Catholic pietism pervaded Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it was the combination of all these factors that led him to permanent exile from his homeland a century ago. Enright also, for me, resembles Joyce in the way she conveys a particular attitude to sex and sexuality, which is also shaped by religion. It was interesting to come across a portrayal of this by a woman writer.

And then there’s the surrealism, both of the plot – Grace, the narrator, has an angel living with her, and she wants to get him into bed, and she works on an Irish TV dating show that struggles with how explicit or not to be in matters sexual – and of the general presentation of people and events; further shades of O’Brien here…

It’s incredibly funny in places, absolutely deranged in others, and yet, sixty pages in (my usual trigger for why am I bothering?) I found myself thinking, what is the point of all this? I was sort of enjoying the plot and the offbeatness of Enright’s style, but what was I getting from the book other than light entertainment, which isn’t my usual motive for persisting.

And I can’t really answer that question. I finished the book and thought okay, Irish person writing about their perceptions of the weirdness of the Irish, and their take on love and sex…well-written, but derivative and basically all done before; enjoyable enough, but nothing new to see here. Have I missed something?

Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

What an extraordinary novel – a woman living in a hamlet in the mountains on the border between Poland and the Czech republic involved in a murder mystery as local people are killed, apparently by wild animals. She is very strange, obsessed with translating William Blake into Polish, endlessly watching the weather channel on TV, her world governed by astrological readings and interpretations.

Olga Tokarczuk takes us convincingly inside the head of this narrator and her bizarre perspective on the world, and we come to like her and empathise with her, even as she becomes ever stranger. Her personality very strongly and sympathetically and shapes the entire first person narrative. At various points I was reminded of the surrealism of Boris Vian’s novels, though our narrator’s world is populated by relatively ordinary folk and objects, and also some of the weirdness of the Ben Marcus novels I have read, except that again things aren’t quite so externally strange in this book.

Everything begins with the mysterious death of one of the other inhabitants of the village, yet rapidly, as events unfold through her perspective, we find ourselves wondering, ‘is this woman mad?’ as she proposes the theory that the man has been killed in revenge by the local wild deer whom he has been hunting…

In some ways it’s a challenging read, presenting the reader with uncomfortable moral truths about our relations with the animal world; what strikes more than anything is how these moral challenges are presented. From inside the narrator’s head, we read a rambling story: she is pleasant, even endearing through her crankiness and obsessions. As there’s an element of mystery and detection I won’t say too much about the plot. When she comes onto the mediaeval court cases that humans brought against various animals for crimes against people, her idea that the animal world might be capable of getting its own back no longer seems quite so weird.

It is an astonishingly good and utterly surreal tale, and several times I found myself admiring the translator’s work: Antonia Lloyd Jones has done a wonderful job making this such a flowing and accessible read. The novel’s title is (roughly) taken from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There is a superb twist at the end, which I had begun to suspect… if you want something really different to start your year with, this is a good one.

French Literature – an eye-opener

I really enjoyed studying French literature at university, and the year in France that was part of the course enabled me to begin to understand the country, its culture and literature, as well as firming up my knowledge of and fluency with the language. Because I was studying two literatures (three, if I count American separately) I began to see links between the histories, cultures and literatures of nations, and this has stood me in good stead all through my reading life, as I’ve branched out further.

French Renaissance literature, apart from the joys of Rabelais (in the original, I might add), was unremittingly tedious, and after the free-flow of Elizabethan and Jacobean blank verse, the rhymed alexandrine of French drama palled very quickly. Moliere I really liked, and I began to be clearer about how coded messages and criticism might be concealed in an author’s work when open criticism was more than frowned on, but actually punishable, and I rate my introduction to Voltaire as a major life-changing moment: French literature seemed more challenging, more revolutionary, at a time when this teenage student was susceptible to, if not yearning for, such influences.

Their nineteenth century novels spoke more to me that the English ones: Stendhal, Flaubert and above all Zola were real discoveries; the freshness of the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud was welcome. And the twentieth century had even more to offer: the political novels of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism, surrealism, so much more. I think my major discoveries during my year abroad were firstly, their school philosophy textbooks (why couldn’t we do this in England? I asked myself. Answer came there none.) and secondly the surreal writings of Boris Vian, which I still love today. Surrealism and the absurd…turning the world upside down. I’d met one of Ionesco‘s plays at A level, and found myself reading most of the rest. Here were writers I could see playing with, and doing experimental things with their language; I admired them in the same ways as I admired English writers who did such things.

Some of the magic of French literature is obviously the being able to read it in the original. This was an absolute eye-opener; it sounds like a statement of the obvious, but there was something special about realising I could speak the language, be taken for a local in the country, I could read its newspapers and books as if it were my own language. And in a sense it was, because I had mastered it, and if you, dear reader, have reached this stage in your knowledge of another tongue than your native one, you will understand the epiphany, perhaps. Then you realise at the same time, just how different France is, with its own history, regions, Paris-centrism, wars, conquests and revolutions, and also how the language gives you access to a wider world of literature from the entire Francophone world…

Reading and enjoying French literature

I really enjoyed studying French literature at university, and the year in France that was part of my course enabled me to begin to understand the country, its culture and literature, as well as firming up my knowledge of and fluency in the language. Because I was studying two literatures (three, if I count American separately) I began to see links between the histories, cultures and literatures of nations and their influences on each other, and this has stood me in good stead all through my reading life, as I’ve branched out further.

French Renaissance literature, apart from the joys of Rabelais (in the original, I might add), was unremittingly tedious, and after the free-flow of Elizabethan and Jacobean blank verse, the rhymed alexandrine of French drama palled very quickly. Moliere I really liked, and I began to be clearer about how coded messages and criticism might be concealed in an author’s work when open criticism was more than frowned on, but actually punishable, and I rate my introduction to Voltaire as a major life-changing moment: French literature seemed more challenging, more revolutionary, at a time when this teenage student was susceptible to, if not yearning for, such influences.

Their nineteenth century novels spoke more to me that the English ones: Stendhal, Flaubert and above all Zola were real discoveries; the freshness of the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud was welcome. And the twentieth century had even more to offer: the political novels of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism, surrealism, so much more. I think my major discoveries during my year abroad were firstly, their school philosophy textbooks (why couldn’t we do this in England? I asked myself. Answer came there none.) and secondly the surreal writings of Boris Vian, which I still love today. Surrealism and the absurd…turning the world upside down. I’d met one of Ionesco‘s plays at A level, and found myself reading most of the rest. Here were writers I could see playing with, and doing experimental things with their language; I admired them in the same ways as I admired English writers who did such things.

Some of the magic of French literature is obviously the being able to read it in the original. This was an absolute eye-opener; it sounds like a statement of the obvious, but there was something special about realising I could speak the language, be taken for a local in the country, I could read its newspapers and books as if it were my own language. And in a sense it was, because I had mastered it, and if you, dear reader, have reached this stage in your knowledge of another tongue than your native one, you will understand the epiphany, perhaps. Then you realise at the same time, just how different France is, with its own history, regions, Paris-centredness, wars, conquests and revolutions, and also how the language gives you access to a wider world of literature from the entire Francophone world…

Bruno Schultz: The Street of Crocodiles

I finally picked this up and read it for the first time (having bought it new in 1980!) because I learned from Gombrowicz‘ diary that the two knew each other, and Gombrowicz rated Schultz quite highly.

It’s a collection of linked short stories centred on Schultz’ hometown of Drohobycz, formerly in eastern Poland. The atmosphere is dreamlike, almost hallucinatory in places; there are echoes of Kafka‘s short story Metamorphosis as Schultz writes about his father, though the transformation is slower and more drawn out than that of Gregor Samsa.

Although they are divorced from reality, there is a hypnotic feel to the stories; the characters are also unreal: the closest comparison I could come up with as I thought about them was with Marquez and magic realism, that style which was to emerge much later on. The language is often beautiful, lyrical as we shift from semi-reality to fantasy. Echoes of some of Boris Vian, too. I often wonder which writers have read, heard of or comes across each other when I pick up on similar traits like this in different writers.

The two most accomplished stories are The Street of Crocodiles and Cinnamon Shops (this collection is sometimes given the name of that story as its title), both powerful and haunting visions of aspects of the town. When I read something like this, I find myself reading quite differently compared with how I interact with a more conventional novel or short story: here, I drift too, in a dreamlike state, through the almost poetic visions and imaginings of the writer, rather than absorbing words and thinking about them as I seek to take plot and character on board. Quite a magical experience.