On Monday I popped along to the Wheeler Centre to see Barcelona-born, LA-based author Carlos Ruiz Zafón in conversation with local writer and broadcaster Sian Prior. As usual, I went bearing pen and paper, and took copious notes. (A video of the event will be forthcoming from the Wheeler Centre, but a sort-of-verbatim transcript never hurts.)

Prior began the conversation with an observation regarding Ruiz Zafón’s obvious passion for books as artefacts, as well as the power of stories, and how these appear as recurring motifs in his work.

Stories have always been an important part of Ruiz Zafón’s life: even as a child he was fascinated by the concept of storytelling, and by all types of stories, between which he never differentiated as a young reader. Everything was, to him, a “big bag of stories”. He was intrigued not just by stories, but by their structure and architecture, and was always toying with them and analysing them to determine how they worked. It was only later that he began to differentiate between different forms of storytelling–for example between books, graphic novels, and films–as well as the different genres within these forms.

As seems to be surprisingly often the case for bookish individuals, Ruiz Zafón was the only keen reader in a family that was generally not especially interested in the arts and entertainment. As such, he was always seeking out books wherever he could find them, an approach to which he partly contributes his omnivorous reading diet. He would read through his father’s book collection, which comprised large sets of beautifully bound, poorly printed classics and heavy books–the types of books bought for display rather than for reading, and which Ruiz Zafón joked were probably bought by the metre. In addition to these, he would also read the Marvel comic books that his grandmother would buy for him.

A book is a gothic cathedral of words.

Prior commented that this kind of genre agnosticism is evident in Ruiz Zafón’s own work, which mixes genres and stylistic elements in a way that is redolent of a labyrinth.

Ruiz Zafón agreed, saying that he relishes working with complex, challenging systems and developing labyrinthine, layered works. His approach to plotting is one that takes time to coalesce into something concrete, involving as it does a good deal of time spent on thinking and musing over various themes, elements and characters and the way that they will overlap. It’s also one that requires re-plotting and re-working: no matter how much time is spent on developing these things, everything needs to be continually redrawn as the book progresses.

It’s a system that has evolved over time, however. When he first started out, he tended to work without much of a plan, and would let himself reach the end of a work before going back to fix problems or analyse the devices he had incorporated. Now, however, he thinks of plotting a book as something akin to building a gothic cathedral–a complex structure made from words. It’s essential to keep restructuring and reworking until the final result is as close as possible to the original idea.

A good deal of planning was required when developing the four-book Shadow of the Wind cycle, which he originally conceived of as a single, epic volume. Having got about thirty or pages into the manuscript of the first volume, he realised that the result would be something so monstrous that it would probably be physically impossible to shelve it (and, he joked, there was the risk that people might perish under the weight of the thing). He didn’t, however, want to write the cycle as a sequential series or 19th Century-style saga, but rather as four books, each representing a different entry into the “labyrinth” of an overarching narrative, and thus creating a variety of different possible reading experiences.

The aim was to deconstruct storytelling, to play around with it, and to make storytelling itself the heart of the story: he wanted to explore readers’ often complex relationships with books, how genres and so on work, and to combine it all using whatever tricks were available to him as an author. All of this was pinned against the skeleton of the classic saga trope of a young boy growing up and trying to find his place in the world.

Ruiz Zafón believes firmly that character should always usurp plot, and that good plots arise from good characters, not the other way around. Each of the characters in The Shadow of the Wind saga has a variety of roles to play. Fermín, for example, is an homage to the picaresque tradition. He’s the fool, the madman, the jester, but at the same time, has the freedom to speak the truth when no one else can. He’s the moral centre of the books even though he’s not necessarily going to be taken seriously by the reader due to his strange and outlandish theories. But these are theories and are always well-meant: he always attempts to be a decent person in a profoundly decent world, something at which all of the other characters eventually fail.

To destroy books is to destroy the mind.

Prior suggested that in the books there’s a sense of books and reading being in a way dangerous, and Ruiz Zafón concurred, saying that books and knowledge can be a curse for some. You can fall in love with literature, he said, but literature never falls in love with you. He added that books are a repository of beauty, knowledge, memory and identity, and that they help us understand who were are. It’s this power that makes them so very dangerous in the eyes of some–to the extent that some groups seek to destroy books, hoping that in doing so they can destroy all that books represent.

When you destroy language, you destroy identity. And to destroy books is to destroy the mind.

Prior commented on the connection between language, culture and place, and asked to what extent the cycle is an homage to Barcelona, a place with which tourists so famously fall in love. Ruiz Zafón responded that Barcelona is his mother, something so key to his identity and experience that he cannot see it in the way that a tourist does. Rather, he seeks to get to the true heart of the city, to explore the truths of its characters. He has a conflicted relationship with the city, seeing it as he does through the eyes of a native, but like all writers he needs to engage with it in order to come to terms with his roots and origins. He is, though, very aware that it’s impossible to portray a city exactly as it is: there are many Barcelonas. 

When asked about both the difficult history of Barcelona and the research that goes into his books, Ruiz Zafón responded by saying that he believes that most residents of the city today don’t necessarily think, at least deliberately and consciously, of events such as the civil war or WWII, and that they’re disconnected from the past in a way, having not been alive during those times. He says that this is something that’s true for all of Europe: “The end of the world happened there sixty years ago, but now it’s all Benetton shops.”

However, even so, it’s impossible to escape the history of a place. As someone who’s a natural autodidact, he’s always seeking to learn more about his home city, and about the world generally. Rather than researching something specifically, for specific purposes, he tends to simply read widely and supplement this reading with his own deep knowledge of specific things. He would not write about something about which he’d need to begin from scratch–for example, he would be shy writing about Melbourne as not only does he not know the city, he feels as though he could never know it.

Interestingly, the majority of The Shadow of the Wind cycle was not written in Barcelona, but rather in Los Angeles, where Ruiz Zafón prefers to write, believing that he is more productive and creative there. The Angel’s Game, however, was written in Barcelona, and he believes that it shows: place inevitably taints the writing. He feels, too, that the books are not at all Spanish in feel–even the Barcelona of the books is very much a construct–but rather have a very LA-style sensibility, something that was an issue when he attempted to sell the books into Spain, which saw them as entirely “un-Spanish” and outside the Spanish literary tradition. It wasn’t until the books become hugely successful that they were gradually accepted into the Spanish literary scene. 

Young readers are sincere and passionate, but they’re also merciless.

Prior drew the conversation around to matters of audience, noting that although Ruiz Zafón’s first few books were for young readers he seems to write now for an audience that’s more adult-oriented, or that at least has crossover appeal. Ruiz Zafón rather sheepishly explained that he found himself writing for young readers after his first book won a prestigious YA award that came with a large monetary prize. He was all too aware of how difficult it was to make a living as an author, and so felt in a way that he had to pursue this path, even though in his heart he had never wanted to write within a specific genre or for a carefully delineated audience. Perhaps out of conservatism or cowardliness he continued writing young adult books until he realised that he was betraying not only himself, but his readers by doing so.

He noted, though, that when he first began writing for young readers, the market was nothing like how it is now: there was no internet, and no young adult category. There were certainly no paranormal romance shelves, he said, lamenting about such books, “man, it’s the end of the world. We have like six months.” However, though YA isn’t his genre as such, he believes that young readers can be among the best readers an author can have. They’re sincere and passionate, but they’re also merciless. Unlike adult readers, they can’t be swayed by reviews or awards, and will put down a book immediately if it doesn’t grab them.

The conversation steered around to the place of the bookshop in today’s world, something that is of interest to Ruiz Zafón given the subject matter of his books. When Prior suggested that we might be seeing the “end” of the bookshop, Ruiz Zafón disagreed, arguing that although many of today’s bookshops will disappear, others will appear. The problem is, he says, we have a habit of thinking of ourselves as the end of history, when really we’re merely passing through. Everything changes, and will change even in our lifetimes. Publishing, for example, has changed dramatically over the past century, and what we think of as “publishing” or “bookselling” is really only a brief moment of transition in a changing model.

Beauty and knowledge – the redeemers.

Whether books, stories, or minds survive, however, is something that is up to us. Ruiz Zafón believes that there are two redeeming values in the world: beauty and knowledge.

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“If [the myth of Sisyphus] is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?” writes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he grapples with whether–and if so, how–it’s possible to exist in a life that is without meaning.

However, it’s in the following that it becomes apparent that Camus’ modernity differs somewhat from our own:

“The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”

Camus’ use of “rare” to describe our awareness of the absurdity of our experience rings a warning bell for me; it seems to flag a significant shift in our social identity and ideology since the publication of this essay. Contexts change, and so too, it seems, does the applicability of the Camusian argument.

(Perhaps this is an odd little counterpoint to Haruki Murakami’s claim that “while there are no undying works, on principle there can be no undying translations“. It’s not just the linguistic side of things that shifts over time, but also the sociolinguistic element. Maybe “translations” here could be expanded to mean “interpretations”.)

Though I take many of Camus’ points about the absurd experience of life, I would suggest that the way in which the Camusian “revolt” against this very thing has played out in the present day world differs from the case he has argued for it.

I speak, of course, of the rise of the hipster.

I’ll get to that in the moment.

Camus argues that absurdity arises, and is acknowledged, when spiritual dimensions are stripped away and we are left to face life purely on its own terms. With the egress of organised religion from the western world (the exception, perhaps, being the weirdly puritanical USA), the emphasis on the individual over the collective, and the shift towards a society that emphasises intellectual labour, it’s surely the case that although existence is no less absurd, our awareness of such absurdity is on the rise.

We’re a society primed to recognise the absurdity of our existence. Hence, no doubt, the ubiquity of terms such as “quarter-life crisis”, “mid-life crisis”, “identity crisis” and so on.

But acknowledgement is only the beginning. Far more profound is the way in which people respond to this recognition of the absurd nature of life. Camus highlights several representative exemplars of possible such reactions, all of which really entail the same thing, an idea summed up in the following: “What counts is not the best living but the most living.” We have the Don Juan character who loses himself in passionate affairs, the actor who lives myriad lives in quick succession, and the warrior who sacrifices thought for action.

It’s not hard to see contemporary equivalents in the commercial Don Juanism that is the drive for the consumption of goods, or the extraordinary amounts of media that we take in, or the tendency towards over-scheduling and dabbling.

There’s an ephemerality in all of these examples, an existential lightness that at first glance seems to conflict with the fate of our titular Sisyphus, a man who suffers beneath the indignity of endless, backbreaking labour, a man cursed to strive forever towards a goal that cannot be obtained. Sisyphus’s task, after all, is one imposed from without, unlike those engaged in by the characters Camus describes. Sisyphus is further distanced from these individuals by the fact that he is immortal, and his fate is an eternal one. This would seem to set the Sisyphean case at odds with Camus’ argument of the absurdity of life, which can’t exist without the prospect of death.

But immortality is, by its very nature, all about death. By removing it from the equation it looms even larger than before: it’s there by virtue of its not being there. It’s a chilling notion, because by removing such an important boundary from life, it’s hard to imagine what’s left. When everything becomes infinite, everything becomes nothing. Given that he is cursed to repeat his boulder-carrying task for all eternity, it would seem that Sisyphus’s possible responses are few. All that is possible is an emotional response. Happiness, Camus puts forth, is one.

Fear, brought about by this ontological (dear nonexistent God, did I just write “ontological”?) crisis, is the other. It’s an emotion that I think can manifest in a variety of ways, including the Camusian examples I’ve reprised above–although these, I suppose, might well be motivated by happiness as well.

My thought is that in today’s world, or at least amongst my moustachioed, chai latte-sipping contemporaries, this fear doesn’t manifest itself in the sort of engagement we see in the aforementioned examples, but rather the opposite. It shows up in disaffection, disengagement, and that oh-so-hipster sense of irony. Camus touches on this when he writes: “for the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.”

But while Camus argues for “revolt” in the form of railing against the absurd life by throwing oneself into the moment, we rail against our absurd existence through withdrawal and irony. While it’s suggested in the essay that there is something profound to be found within the Sisyphean existence, something that can arise out of the redefining and re-envisaging of failure, an ironic existence further narrows the sphere of our experience. Rather than “the most living”, we seem to seek out the opposite.

Curiously, an ironic stance is both defeatist and nihilistic, but is also retrospectively oriented as well: though Camus’ absurd person lives in the moment, an ironic existence seeks to disconnect from the present, and necessarily uses the past for a point of comparison.

But I can’t help but wonder whether that’s the point of it. Where Sisyphus embraces the absurd life, the ironic response seems to try to deny that the acknowledgement of the absurdity of existence ever occurred in the first place. Is our revolt one of fearful non-revolt and the revocation of acknowledgement? This would seem to jive with Camus’ assertion that “living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully.”

But is it too late? Is irony enough to provide us with the existential time-travel that we need to wipe clean the absurdist slate once we’ve chalked all over it? It would seem not, according to Camus, who writes:

“A man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. He must pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.”

And yet, we are told: “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

Like it or not, we are all the modern day Sisyphus. But we are an army of Sisyphuses who are more likely to ironically Instagram our boulders than carry them up a hill.

See also our post on The Outsider

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Of late it seems that I am being haunted by intertextuality. Each book that I pick up seems to slot into the vast Connect Four board of hermeneutics that is my reading life, and with everything I read, I find my to-read list growing ever broader and ever deeper.

I seem to be at a stage in my reading where so many unknown unknowns are swiftly becoming known unknowns. It’s a tantalising, maddening point to reach, and my reading has slowed dramatically as I find myself digging not just more deeply into individual works, but in my attempts to see how they connect to each other.

While reading Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, which I read just after Chaim Potok’s In the Beginning, I happened across an article on breath and breathing by Sebastian Normandin that somehow tied the concepts in the two books together for me.

All three texts evoke in me a mental image of a pendulum, an image that I think is quite aptly applied to where I find myself in my own reading and writing and desire for understanding.

In Sisyphus’s endlessly repeating task, as in breathing, as in the quest for knowledge, there is a precipice, a turning point, that must be negotiated. There is the point where Sisyphus’s boulder reaches its gravitational apogee, at which it will begin to descend again; there is also the point where Sisyphus pauses, reflects, then commits to beginning his task anew. The same sequence occurs with each breath that we take.

But each instance can never be the exact same beginning as the last one. You might argue that all beginnings are turning points, and all turning points are beginnings. Each change, each realisation, each opportunity for growth involves seeing the boulder tumble back down, ready to be pushed up again to that cruelly insurmountable precipice.

In the Beginning is filled with these moments. A lyrical, formidable bildungsroman, it’s many things, but for me it’s most saliently a celebration of the courage involved in not just recognising a new branch in the ever unspooling fractal of one’s intellectual life, but in deciding to take this branch.

It’s a celebration of curiosity, of the sometimes destructive human thirst for knowledge and understanding, of the breath-stealing moment that is standing at that edge and wondering just where the pendulum will take you.

“All beginnings are hard,” writes narrator David. “Especially a beginning that you make by yourself. That’s the hardest beginning of all.”

Indeed, David’s battle is one that bears many similarities to that of Sisyphus–and Camus would surely quirk an eyebrow at the absurdity (in the Camus sense) of a young Jewish boy devoting a life to biblical study. It’s an absurdity that Potok acknowledges in the narrative through the unanticipated precipices that he throws David’s way:

“I have accidents all the time. I killed a canary and a dog by accident. And I fall and hurt myself. And I almost started a fire once in our kitchen. And I almost fell out of my window…Every night I dream about having accidents…sometimes I think there’s something wrong with me.”

But like Sisyphus, David persists despite the many and myriad obstacles in his way. When he muses: ”when you didn’t expect something to happen and it happened, that was also an accident…” it’s hard not to think about this in terms of unknowns and turning points. Accidents are, obviously, an outcome of sorts, and therefore represent a turning point; a possibility for a new beginning or that moment whereupon a Sisyphean hero takes that breath and makes a decision to continue.

By persisting in his search for knowledge in the face of these accidents, David is constantly reasserting his humanity. It’s those who don’t struggle, who don’t seek those turning points who slip away into nothingness, into intellectual and spiritual stagnation:

“What’s a sacred heart?” David asks at one point, to which he receives the response: ”I don’t know. I don’t interest myself in such matters.”

Apathy requires disengagement, a stepping away from involvement. It’s the safe route, but what’s the point of it? Sisyphus might, after all, simply step to one side and let his boulder slip away and come to rest. But then what? If he did so, who would he be? What would be his purpose? What would he have achieved but that single event?

“Anyone who knows very clearly what he’s doing with his life will have people who dislike him,” David is told. Perhaps what is meant here is not dislike so much as lack of understanding, of appreciation.

I think that the reason that intellectual journeys are so challenging to appreciate and comprehend is their lack of resolution, of a clear outcome. Learning is a process, and it’s a strange, cyclical, self-referential one, much like Sisyphus’s lifelong task. It is its own reward.

During a tango workshop a few weeks ago, my teacher mentioned that everything comes back to basics, that it’s all about the walk. Every time she takes a step, she’s achieving something: she’s bringing a new perspective, or experience, or simple reaffirmation to this most basic element of dancing.

It’s an ongoing effort to refine, to improve, to seek a change.

Camus and Potok have something fundamental in common. Camus tells us to imagine Sisyphus happy, and perhaps he has a point. The Sisyphean existence isn’t devoid of meaning. In fact, it’s about finding meaning.

As David’s teacher puts it:

“A shallow mind is a sin against God. A man who does not struggle is a fool.”

It’s a surprising achievement to realise just how much you don’t know, and it’s kind of exhilarating to stand there with a boulder, take a deep breath, and seek one of many, many new beginnings.

As a reader, I’m a very, very happy Sisyphus.

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Over the course of my last few reviews I’ve been considering the role of the author as narrator and as character, and the degree to which authorial insertion is, to the mind of the reader, assumed to be inalienable. In large part this has been inspired by the narrator character–who is, perhaps, the author himself–in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and his/her thoughts regarding the use of characters as an author’s possible selves.

The idea has continued to haunt me, and in my reading recently I’ve been pondering the inextricability of the author and their work. I do think that there’s a winking fallaciousness to Kundera’s statement, and it’s to do with the slippery slope and extrapolation that’s inherent in the idea of possibility. There are, obviously, degrees of remoteness involved in all of this. An author might create a character who is in every way the author’s image (or at least as near as possible–the character can never be the author, but only ever a facsimile of the author). This would be an example of a close possible self. Of course, an author might create someone who is their polar opposite, but for all this dichotomy, this character would still remain a possible self, merely a distant one. After all, it’s impossible to write without using oneself as a reference.

However, I do think that there is a tendency for readers, unless told otherwise, to see an author’s characters as close possible selves. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, which I’m presently reading, says, “though I have seen the same actor a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any better personally. Yet if I add up the heroes he has personified and if I say that I know him a little better at the hundredth character counted off, this will be felt to contain an element of truth.” I think that this is particularly true of narrator characters. (For an example of this, you need only see my lack of certainty above regarding the identity of the narrator character in the Kundera.)

Where, of course, this conflation of author and character becomes a problem is when the character exhibits morally questionable traits.

I read with interest some months ago an interview with Junot Diaz regarding his writing of a misogynistic character in such a way that he as an author would not be seen as tacitly condoning the character’s sexism, but that would not signpost his own beliefs in such a way that it would break into the narrative:

“If it’s too brutal and too obvious then it becomes allegorical, becomes a parable, becomes kind of a moral tale. You want to make it subtle enough so that there are arguments like this….For the kind of sophisticated art I’m interested in the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don’t think makes for good literature.”

This line of moral ambiguity is one along which Nabokov carefully treads in his masterpiece Lolita, and throughout the book we see a careful distancing of author, narrator, and even character in order to achieve a separation of author and work. That the novel is bookended by an explanatory, absolving foreword from a fictional character posing as the author, and an afterword by Nabokov himself speaks volumes; there is also further distance created in my edition (The Everyman’s Library edition) by the inclusion of a lengthy introductory essay. We see an additional obscuring of identity and therefore of self by the fact that Humbert is itself a pseudonym, as is the surname “Haze”, given to Lolita and her family. These structural elements are probably the most overt attempts at separating the author and work, but Lolita is rife with them.

Take, for example, the book’s self-consciously literary approach, with its three-act structure and its narrative artifice. The various deaths and disappearances of Humbert’s lovers feel deliberate and unnatural, carefully shoehorned into the plot to create a sense of the created rather than the naturally arising. Characters and situations appear as obstacles or illustrative points less than they do organic explorations of real life, the effect resulting in a sort of moral cushioning, particularly when we consider the book as being framed within the context of the introductory foreword from a “John Ray Jr, PhD”, with its placatory remarks about the text being a “lesson” or a “warning”.

Beyond the higher level structural elements, however, we have those occurring at the character and prose level, and it’s here that Nabokov plies his authorial genius, driving a stunningly wrought sentence-level wedge between the writer and the written. The book hums with a note of critique, with what feels like a misalignment between Humbert’s predatory waywardness and the author’s own moral code. Even at his most sincere, Humbert’s account reads with a dissonance, with a careening madness that positions him as pitiable and unhinged, an egocentric individual whose myopic obsession transforms him into a figure to be mocked, one who is incapable of being taken seriously. He is a pathetic figure, a man who is obsolete, lost in a fusty history and a tumult of justification and self-deception, scarcely capable of existing in the present day. With his old-fashioned mannerisms and language, he is disconnected from reality, and approaches the world in a strangely cerebral, removed manner. This is characterisation by careful design: we are warned, cleverly, by a subtle authorial hand, against connecting with him.

And of course, finally, there’s the elegant de-eroticisation of Humbert’s relationship with Lolita, and of Lolita herself. There’s something grotesque and impersonal about Humbert’s obsession with Lolita: rather than being the actual object of his desire, she is simply a sort of sexual golem upon whom he applies a general sense of deviancy. His descriptions of her are ugly and garish: “her toenails showed remnants of cherry-red polish and there was a bit of adhesive tape across her big toe”, he writes early on, and these descriptions grow no more beautiful over time–”monkeyish” seems to be his most commonly tapped adjective. There’s a sense of appalling ugliness and baseness applied not just to Lolita, but to Humbert’s courtship of her, and it’s hard not to assume a degree of approbation emanating from Nabokov’s pen throughout. This, to me, at least, is perhaps most evident in the searingly illusive, deeply figurative prose, a descriptive sleight of hand that misdirects the reader’s eye away from the flinching carnality of the narrative and instead to the breathtaking richness of language.

All too aware of the danger of author-narrator conflation, Nabokov seems to be seeking solace in the diffuse wadding of the poetic, allowing himself to drift in the layered ambiguity surrounding the possible self, creating narrative buffers that prevent him from plunging headlong into the fraught waters of the character-as-self, and allowing him to tell the story that needs to be told. All characters may be linked back to their creator, but, Lolita reminds us, it is dangerous to assume that all characters are a close possible self.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

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When reading PG Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens recently I was struck by the narrator’s curiosity regarding “to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private affairs.” These words resonated with me as they were the third time in as many books that I’d come across a similar sentiment; the other books being Nabokov’s Lolita and Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, both of which are transcendent works that involve literary types and themes in a way that’s mesmerisingly recursive.

In her introductory essay to I Capture the Castle (included in the Folio Society edition), Valerie Grove describes the torment experienced by Smith in the writing of the novel: 

“She kept a 100,000-word notebook on her progress, which reveals that it almost drove her to a breakdown. She was so anxious that her first novel should be a success after the long years of frustration that she spent two years on rewriting, when every line of dialogue reverberated in her head, interrupting her sleep, causing her to wake each day with a visceral dread, her mind nagged with doubt, her brain throbbing. She felt she was disintegrating, mentally and physically…endlessly, she noted her anxieties over whether the characters worked: ‘never, never have I suffered so over any piece of work. Sometimes I would spend two hours without getting one short paragraph of revision right. And always I was dogged by the fear that my creative powers were fading for good, that I should never be able to write anything else in the future.’”

The novel, incidentally, reads in an astonishingly effortless manner, its breezy, mirthful prose belying none of the creative anguish experienced by Smith. Where this conflict does break through to the surface is in the contrast of the characters of narrator Cassandra and her father, the reclusive and acclaimed author James Mortmain. Cassandra’s efforts to “capture the castle” are almost hypergraphic: her narration occurs in what is close enough to real time, brimming with quick and easy observation and unselfconscious diarisation. She has mastered, she tells us, the art of “speed writing”.

In contrast, her father is crippled by what is described as writer’s block, but which seems attributable instead to the overwhelming pressure he faces in writing a sophomore volume capable of living up to, or surpassing, his debut Jacob Wrestling. “It’s time that this legend that I’m a writer ceased,” he snaps at his daughter at one point. And when asked by a visitor when a follow-up might be expected–this some years after the book’s publication–he responds, deflated, shoulders sagging, with a breathed, “never”.

His interrogator quickly seeks to atone for his misstep with the following:

“Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they’re complete, not leading anywhere… The originators among writers–perhaps, in a sense, the only true creators–dip deep and bring up one perfect work; complete, not a link in a chain. Later, they dip again–for something as unique. God may have created other worlds, but he obviously didn’t go on adding to this one.”

This is certainly the case for Cassandra’s father, whose slowly transpiring follow-up effort involves a bizarre mish-mash of exploratory elements–everything from nonsensical crossword puzzles to fishbone-inspired word art. It’s the creative equivalent of the identity binary found in siblings: the only way to avoid comparison with a brother or sister is to position oneself in an utterly oppositional manner. And the author whose oeuvre is utterly divergent is safer, in a way, than the author who works down a kind of bibliographic train-line. It’s easier to separate the author and work, after all, if the work is all manner of things.

It’s hard not to draw the kind of parallel suggested by Wodehouse here: the inevitable link between the author and the authored. After all, as Milan Kundera suggests, aren’t all characters simply an author exploring his or her possible selves? (“But some characters in books are very real,” writes Cassandra.) But this brings with it an obvious issue, as alluded to above: the conflation of the author and the author’s work, and the resulting critique not only of the work, but of the individual.  This seems to be at the heart of James Mortmain’s writer’s block, and it’s an idea that Smith looks at with deep-seated irony and cynicism. There’s a point where Mortmain is said to have “changed his mind about it–he now thinks he did mean all the things the critic says he did,” and it’s hard not to read this as a cynical capitulation, particularly when we hear of the subject of his second book.

Although plot-wise it comprises only a small element of the book, the battle of the author and author’s creation (and indeed the re-creation of that creation by the reading public) is immensely palpable throughout I Capture the Castle, and despite Mortmain’s sardonic note about the interpretive liberties of critics, it’s hard not to concede Wodehouse’s point about the inevitable interrelation of art and life. “To what extent is the work of authors influenced by their private affairs?” he asks; to which we can respond to as great an extent as the reader wishes it to be so…

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Love Among the Chickens is my first foray into the work of Wodehouse; and as a fairly early work, it’s one of Wodehouse’s first forays into Wodehouse as well. A deliciously written farcical novel, it brings together the seemingly dissimilar worlds of writing and chicken farming—which prove to have a lot more in common than one might first imagine, and make for a rather delightful spot of Venn diagramming.

Our narrator is middling novelist Jeremy Garnet, a fellow who’s largely along for the ride as his zany, onomastically dense friend Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge–a would-be entrepreneur of the type who would, today, be mashing together a bunch of vaguely tech-related words and heading off to Silicon Valley to prise hundreds of millions of start-up dollars out of the hands of a bunch of strangers–decides that a chicken farm is a perfectly infallible business.

After all, those debates about chickens and eggs and their circularly reduplicative tendencies must have some basis.

(If you’re after a brief insight into the character of Ukridge, this little snippet might help: “He…made use of [the appellation “Old Horse”] while interviewing the parents of new pupils, and the latter had gone away, as a result, with a feeling that this must be either the easy manner of Genius or due to alcohol, and hoping for the best…” I have an investment banker cousin to whom this description could just as easily apply, but that’s by the by…)

Needless to say, everything goes terribly, remarkably, wrong, with Ukridge opting for some rather inspired but inadvisable business practices regarding the incubation of chickens and lines of credit, and all manner of silliness ensues. This is interwoven with Garnet’s own narrative of personal discovery, and the two plot lines mirror each other in an intriguing (and highly amusing) way.

Garnet, though writing of Ukridge’s merry megalomania, is himself as terribly (and unjustifiably!) guilty of extreme hubris. Upon meeting the young Phyllis, who happens to be reading the latest of his novels, he muses: “That a girl should look as pretty as that and at the same time have the rare intelligence to read Me…well, it seemed an almost superhuman combination of the excellencies.”

The expectation that the world should want whatever it is that Garnet has to offer is not so far from Ukridge’s own expectations, and Wodehouse has a wink-nudge moment with this momentarily, where he allows Phyllis to critique Garnet’s work:

“Molly McEachern gave it to me when I left the Abbey,” says Phyllis of Garnet’s book. “She keeps a shelf of books for her guests when they are going away. Books that she considers rubbish, and doesn’t want, you know…”

(To which Garnet, like any self-respecting author, professes to “hate Miss McEarchern without further evidence.”)

Interestingly, the fledgling relationship between Phyllis and Garnet seems to have copped some flack over the years: Garnet attends to his interest in Phyllis through various bizarre methods, many of which are flat-out stalkerish–hiding in hedges; faux-drowning the poor girl’s father, you know, minor things like that. But I think there’s some deliberate tongue-in-cheek recursion going on here. After all, when we meet Phyllis, she muses:

“I wonder who Jeremy Garnet is…I’ve never heard of him before. I imagine him rather an old young man, probably with an eyeglass and conceited. And I should think he didn’t know many girls. At least if he thinks Pamela an ordinary sort of girl. She’s a cr-r-eature…”

Given this, it only makes sense that not only is Phyllis a “creature” herself, but that Garnet is absurdly rambunctious in his wooing of her.

This sort of art-meets-life-meets-art chicken-and-egg thing is rife throughout the book, much of which is actually a meditation on writing itself, and it’s hard not to have a chuckle at the juxtaposition of what is often seen as a scholarly, high-brow pursuit with the uproarious shenanigans of the unapologetically insouciant Ukridge and his harem of chickens (with the standout feathered lass being “the disagreeable, sardonic-looking bird which Ukridge, on the strength of an alleged similarity of profile to his wife’s nearest relative, had christened Aunt Elizabeth. A Bolshevist hen, always at the bottom of any disturbance in the fowl-run, a bird which ate its head off daily at our expense and bit the hands which fed it by resolutely declining to lay a single egg…”).

Not to mention the deep irony evident in statements such as the following, from Garnet:

“It would be interesting to know to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private affairs. If life is flowing smoothly, are the novels they write in that period of content coloured with optimism? And if things are running cross-wise, do they work of the resultant gloom on their faithful public?…If Maxim Gorky were invited to lunch by Trotsky, to meet Lenin, would he sit down and dash off a trifle in the vein of Stephen Leacock? Probably the eminent have the power of detaching their writing self from their living, work-a-day self; but, for my own part, the frame of mind in which I now found myself had a disastrous effect on what my novel was to be. I had designed it as a light comedy effort…but now great slabs of gloom began to work themselves into the scheme of it…”

Apparently light comedy is indeed in the eye of the beholder…

And then there’s this one, which is witty enough in its own right, but which is given added resonance when we think of Ukridge’s endlessly trotted out (pardon the pun) “Old Horse” and his myriad upper-class colloquialisms:

“I may mention here that I do not propose to inflict dialect upon the reader. If he has borne with my narrative thus far, I look on him as a friend and feel that he deserves consideration. I may not have brought out the fact with sufficient emphasis in the foregoing pages, but nevertheless I protest that I have a conscience…”

But apropos of nothing, perhaps what delighted me most of all about the book was this little metaphysical reference, which was fiercely apt given my recent reading of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which looks at the same idea, only drawing the opposite conclusion:

“Look at the thing from the standpoint of the philosopher, old horse,” urged Ukridge, splashing after him. “The fact that the rescue was arranged oughtn’t to matter. I mean to say, you didn’t know it at the time, so, relatively, it was not, and you were genuinely saved from a watery grave and all that sort of thing.”

Oh, Ukridge. If we’re to get philosophical, you’ve really opted for lightness over weight, haven’t you?

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (excellent)

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Einmal ist keinmal.

What happens but once might as well not have happened at all…

The story that I am asked to tell most often is how I met my husband, a story that is notable for the coincidence that it involves. We met, of course, in two different venues in a single night. Without exception, people seem to see this story as something involving fate.

But what if we’d met only once?

If I’m to be honest, this is a question that has haunted me for years now, and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, already widely regarded as a modern classic, has resulted in my exploring the idea a good deal further.

Like the circumstances behind how I met my own husband, the meeting between key characters Tomas and Tereza is one steeped in chance and coincidence. Although each of these chance events on their own is meaningless and trivial enough—the repetition of certain numbers, situational happenstance—when confronted with them as a series, it’s almost impossible not to apply some sort of narrative to them, seeing them as interrelated and inter-operative.

And with narrative, of course, comes meaning…and responsibility. Tereza sees the combination of chance events behind her meeting with Tomas as having some sort of essential resonance, enough that she not only predicates an entire relationship on these coincidences, but endures Tomas’s philandering in large part because she feels a sort of existential indebtedness to their relationship because of the circumstances of their meeting.

For Tereza this narrative is mostly unquestionable, but Tomas rails against it, embarking on a prodigious array of fleeting sexual encounters as though to prove that chance meetings are everywhere—and may result in all manner of possible outcomes.

But even Tomas concedes in some ways to the push and shove of fate, most demonstrably when he writes a letter to a newspaper regarding the need to accept personal responsibility for the outcomes of one’s actions, even if one doesn’t know the outcome of those actions. There is a second incident where Thomas bows—ostensibly—to fate: when he follows Tereza back to Prague, something that he claims is beyond his control (Es muss sein!, he cries. It must be so!)

And yet, despite this act in accordance with what he seems to believe is the hand of fate, Tomas conceives of his love life not in terms of Es muss sein, but rather Es konnte auch anders sein (It could just as well be otherwise).

But so too, I think, does Tereza. After all, she sees her relationship with Tomas as having arisen from a series of coincidences (and surely this is partly the motivation behind her decision to see the two of them move to the countryside, thus narrowing the range of possible “other” experiences?). The difference seems to be Tereza searches for positive affirmation of this, while Tomas searches for negative affirmation: that is, that Tereza sees their relationship validated by the things that have happened, and Thomas by the things that might have but have not happened.

Of a related note is the idea of “possible selves”, which Kundera examines at length—at one point breaking the fourth wall in order to posit that all of a novelist’s characters are necessarily hypothetical experiential alternatives.

Given this line of thought I can’t help but wonder whether Tomas’s womanising is his own way of exploring his own possible selves in a manner that is free from responsibility or culpability. After all, he argues the importance of taking responsibility of one’s own actions, and yet this becomes a moot point if we are to return to the idea of einmal ist keinmal. (Our narrator disagrees, however, arguing that things that happen just once can have resonance by the very virtue of their uniqueness.)

I think what strikes me most in all of this is the arbitrariness in the way that we apply the ideas of chance, fate and narrative. The applicability of any and all of these is up to individual interpretation—and possibly an imposed collective interpretation—and surely any narrative that is applied is influenced not only by the events of the time as they occur, but also those that follow.

For example, meeting my future husband twice in one night tends to invite narrative applications of “fate”, but would the same be true if we’d broken up shortly after, or if he’d turned out to be a crazed serial killer? Similarly, what would the interpretations be if we’d only met once?

And finally, what if we apply Tomas’s notion of es konnte auch anders sein?

Personally, I think that although it’s possible to consider this on a hypothetical level, it’s impossible to apply as much weight or import to something that might have happened as it is to something that actually has happened.

But then, maybe I’m just applying a narrative of my own…

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(image from FlickR Commons)

Today’s guest post on the writing process is by SD Thorpe, whose book Getting Up is published through Momentum Books.

The writing process. It goes like this. You get up early. You make a cup of tea. You sit down in front of the computer. Turn it on. Do NOT check Facebook, Twitter, email, Tumblr, Instagram or Ebay.

Remember your dreams…write one down to get you started. Think about making it a story. Set the scene, the mood, the place, the time. Put a character into it. Then edit what you have written so far very carefully thinking about every word you have written. A word can take you into another place, a phrase can take you straight to sub-plot. How about that character? What do they look like?  What do they sound like? Where do they come from, who are their family- are they in love? Out of love? Happy, sad, male, female, old, young?

Now you need something to happen. What is your character doing? Mine your own life for stories–what do you say to people when they say- what’s new? What stories do you tell people over dinner? At parties? Think of a great anecdote from your own life and then apply imagination. Add fantastic elements if you like..there are rules of believability but they can be stretched. I wrote an entire novel about a 16 year old male graffiti artist. I am not 16, male or a graffiti artist, but I found I could get into his head pretty easily.

Then magic happens. Suddenly the world you have created takes on a life of its own. I started with a dream I had which featured the image of a kid sitting on the steps of Flinders St Station in Melbourne and the name Roket. He had a pack full of markers and spray cans and was about to go out on graff raid with a crew of kids he hardly knew. But he’s 16, so he’s probably bored, horny and pissed off. And hungry. So before he meets the boys in the graff crew, he needs to eat. So he goes into MacDonald’s of course. There is a girl behind the counter with amazing ultra-marine eyes. She’s looking at him, and he wants to act tough and order a Big Mac, but he hasn’t got enough money. She’s still staring at him. No money and a hard on. Crap. He asks for a Happy Meal. So embarrassing.

When he gets outside, he looks in the bag. She has given him a free Big Mac and an apple turnover. It must be love. That begins a week in his life in which lots of things happen. But you will have to read the book to find out exactly what. Suffice to say there’s everything there–death, love and art.

The ending may well not be clear to you. Don’t worry about that–keep writing, it will come clear eventually. Problems will be met and you will spend your writing time unfurling them, making them the meat of your story. Keep at it, read it before you go to sleep and let your unconscious get to work.

Repeat this process until you are done. Good luck! Now you can check out Facebook.

About the author:

SD Thorpe has fished for barramundi in northern Australia, edited a feminist punk magazine, lived with wild rockers, fallen in love with the wrong men, hitch-hiked to Darwin from Melbourne and worked in radio at the ABC for 20 years.

She married a sculptor with a 16-foot wire dragon on his car, and has a daughter and four step-daughters. She once wrote the words “legalise graffiti, make me a star” on a wall. They’re not there anymore.

Find out more about SD Thorpe and the other Momentumites at:

Website  |   Facebook   |  Twitter

Getting Up by SD Thorpe:

His mother is hopeless and his dad is gone. Roket loves graffiti, his mum and McDonalds, and when the girl with the ultramarine eyes gives him a free Big Mac, it must be love.

He joins a graff crew and drops out of school. But rivalries in his new world threaten to be fatal. By the end of the week Roket has been pushed to his limits.

One night it all goes horribly wrong and Roket suddenly finds his reputation and his freedom on the line. Can he prove his innocence, as well as winning the graff battle…and the girl?

Getting Up is illustrated with original photographs taken on location.

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In Susan Hill’s A Change for the Better Deirdre Fount finds herself traversing a path that is not the one she intended to venture down. Though she might have stumbled upon it of her own accord, her marathon trek along it is due to a mix of personal inertia and the pressures and expectations of others around her.

This is how I’ve been feeling about this website for some time.

I began Read in a Single Sitting in response to series of reading assignments I’d set myself: a holiday spent working through Herman Hesse, Shusaku Endo, Kenzaburo Oe and other works. I’d been reading voraciously, furiously, making up for the literary starvation endured during my university years, when most of my reading comprised textbooks and linguistics articles.

These reading habits had led to a sort of cerebral imbalance, a deficiency of creativity, and in response I gorged on all manner of worthy tomes, attempting to redress this balance.

I am prone to overdoing things.

After spooning down the final mouthful of the ten-course meal that is the The Glass Bead Game, and washing it down with a slug of post-modern something or other, I found myself doing the literary equivalent of collapsing supine on the floor and unbuttoning my jeans button.

And like many have done in the same situation, I decided to make a change to my reading diet. No longer would I binge on bookish fois gras and black truffles; instead I would opt for a more moderate approach. And sure enough, I did: though I took to grazing on this and that, I was cautious about my portion sizes, eschewing reading anything that was likely to give me a hernia were I to pack it up and carry it around with me.

All was well for a while.

But then things started to change (including that extended food-themed metaphor, which has been extended so far it’s about to break through a neighbour’s fence…)

The site began to grow, and with that growth came review copies and approaches from PR agencies, authors and so on. It was a delightful novelty at first, and I was happy to intersperse my reading with this or that new release–at this point largely only titles that I’d requested.

But this is not a slippery slope I recommend attempting to navigate. The review copies started to pile in, arriving with the vim and profligacy of lemons on a tree, and soon I had more than I knew what to do with. Like an introduced pest species, they began multiplying until they reached plague proportions, burying beneath their gloss-finished pelts the hundreds of books I’d lovingly purchased of my own volition.

I began reading as though I were bailing out a boat: as much as possible, as quickly as possible, motivated by both guilt and obligation. Of course, the faster I read, the faster they piled up, a tetris nightmare from which there was no escape. Meanwhile, all the books I’d been actually wanting to read–the literary fiction I so adore, the classics I’ve longed to get to, the fusty Penguin modern classics that fill whole shelves–continued to languish. They were a mirage-like oasis in the distance, getting farther away the more determinedly I approached.

Was I doomed to die of thirst in this literary desert? (Oh, the irony of living a Borges-like existence while scarcely having dipped into the Borges on my shelves…)

Then I read Joe Queenan’s One for the Books, an unswervingly curmudgeonly rant that resonated with me on a number of levels (not least that I am myself an unswerving curmudgeon), but in particular in his calculations about how many books he had left to read before his death. I did the maths for myself, and assuming a long life with plenty of reading time, I have some 10,500 books remaining.

That may seem like a lot of books, but in fact it’s not.

Since starting this site three years ago I’ve reviewed just under five hundred books, and a good deal of them have been mediocre; many of them have been truly, eyeball-excoriatingly terrible. If I’d been left to my own reading devices I probably would have read a good many fewer terrible books and many, many more wonderful books. Books that are not only objectively better–books that have, say, stood up against the erosive forces of time–but that are suited to me as a reader.

And to me as a writer.

Writing is how I make my living, and by consuming all of these mediocre books at the (polite) behest of others I am doing myself a disservice. I’m tired of having others directing my reading choices. I’m tired of trying to drag meaning out of superficial pap and of being blinded by endless sandstorms of woeful writing. I am tired of tiptoeing along the very thin line between critique and public relations.

And so it’s time that I make a change before I become a Deirdre Fount myself.

The direction of this site will be changing from books that are ostensibly long enough to be read in a single sitting to books that are worthy enough that I truly want to read them in a single sitting. I’ll be writing fewer reviews and more personal responses and reflections–and the books I’ll be reading will be those that invite that sort of response.

After three years of living largely on junk food, I’m ready to return to what is, for me, fine dining.

But this time around I’m going to do it a little more slowly, a little more restrainedly…and perhaps wearing the literary equivalent of elastic-waisted jeans.

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RIASS stuff:

Book Review: A Change for the Better by Susan Hill Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Guest Post: Balancing writing and family by Kate Belle

Review: My Happy Life by Lydia Millet Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Review: Journey from Venice by Ruth Cracknell Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Interview: Sandra Antonelli on advocating for older protagonists in romance fiction

Other bookish stuff:

A tale of two editors ”What’s changing most of all for editors is our workflow. There’s a proportion of editing that’s still happening on paper with pencils but much of it is moving onscreen,” says Samantha Sainsbury.

Newly named Mercury craters honour Madeleine L’Engle, Lovecraft & more

On the importance of the backlist to publishers’ bottom lines and how copyright reform might affect this. 

Brave New Infographic: Huxley vs Orwell

How to rewrite your book from scratch in 75 days ”Wake in a panic every day at 6:00 AM, wondering why you haven’t yet finished your daily word count. Get sick again, twice. Eat an entire bag of Cadbury mini-eggs in four days (unrelated.) Buy a new laptop when your graphics card dies with no warning. Find yourself doing things like wandering aimlessly in a sleet storm in search of chocolate-covered potato chips.”

One of the best advertising campaigns I’ve seen lately

An interview about the Amazon Goodreads buyout (people are asking my thoughts on this, but as an aspiring author I’m a bit too scared to say anything. Which says it all, really.)

Writing a character’s dark side ”A deeply conflicted character can only exist in someone who is aware of and in touch with his deepest self and knows the purity that existed there, then behaves in a way that is contradictory to that knowledge. That is self-betrayal. And you know it’s going to come back to bite. A shadow begins to grow.”

Has British literature become less emotional? I’m going to write a post on this, but I have a feeling that a lot of this to do with a) the shift in popular “emotion” words, and the emphasis of showing over telling, and the move towards dialogue-heavy, exposition-light books.

Excellent post on the Australian cultural cringe and on literary traditions ”In its current form, the cringe does not mean that Australians openly disparage their own culture, but rather that more value and prestige attaches to those Australian cultural products which have been validated by well-respected overseas institutions with high reserves of symbolic capital.”

Minecraft children’s books, anyone?

“Don’t be boring. It may not lead to immediate publication, but at least your integrity will be intact.” 

1960s library posters

On author rights ”These days, we’re expected to do more with less. Now, it’s with nothing. Higher royalties are great, but you don’t see the money until it’s too late to do book release promo. So let’s see more no-advance publishers broadening and consulting with authors on their own promotional efforts, in return for no up-front payment.”

Hey Harper’s, how about publishing some female writers? ”I feel as if there will be a hole where my Harper’s subscription used to be. But I also know that plenty of women writers are out there getting published elsewhere. So, elsewhere is where I’ll look. I can no longer, in good conscience, support a magazine that feels such contempt for women.”

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