Mailbox Monday & It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? (25/ 7)

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benjamin zephaniah, carlos ruiz zafon, cats cradle, charlotte perkins gilman, civil war, emila zola, herman hesse, ian fleming, irvine welsh, Its monday what are you reading?, jm barrie, kurt busiek, kurt vonnegut, margaret atwood, mark millar, marvels, matt moylan, meme, mohsin hamid, patricia melo, Paul Auster, Paul Gallico, paul jenkins, peter pan, raymond carver, roberto bolano, siddhartha, stephen galloway, streetfighter world warrior encyclopedia, the angel's game, the cellist of sarajevo, the dream, the guernsey literary and potato peel pie society, the skating rink, the spy who loved me, the year of the flood, the yellow wallpaper, trainspotting, violette leduc, wolverine origins

Welcome to Monday Meme’s! (‘Mailbox Monday’ by Marcia at The Printed Page and ‘It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?’ by Sheila at The Book Journey are fun weekly meme’s that allow book-bloggers to share their reading progress and the books they have yet to read.

July has been a hectic month, but also fruitful in terms of books. Since I haven’t had time to post that often (due to my novel-writing) I’m taking this opportunity to pick up from where I left off in March. Here’s a review of the titles that have either wowed me, or left me a little disappointed:

Books Read | March/ April
(click for reviews)
Lost World by Patricia Melo (1/5)
Man in the Dark by Paul Auster (5/5)
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano (4/5) – review pending
Kung Fu Trip by Benjamin Zephaniah (3/5)
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico (5/5)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (3/5) – review pending
The Informers by Brett Easton Ellis (3/5) – review pending
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1/5) – review pending
The Paper House: A Novel by Carlos Maria Dominguez (4/5) – review pending

Books Read | May/ June
(click for reviews)
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (4/5) – review pending
2BR02B by Kurt Vonnegut (5/5)
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette LeDuc (1/5)
Peter Pan by JM Barrie (5/5)
The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories by Charlotte Gilman (4/5)
Beginners by Raymond Carver (5/5)
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (4/5)
The Dream by Emile Zola (5/5) – review pending
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Stephen Galloway (5/5)

 Other reviews:
The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (4.5/5)

Books Read | July
Streetfighter: World Warrior Encyclopedia by Matt Moylan (4/5)
Marvels by Kurt Busiek (5/5)
Wolverine: Origins by Paul Jenkins (3/5)
Civil War by Mark Millar (3/5)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (5/5)

Currently Reading/ August Outlook

 

What a pick-n-mix! As someone who never just reads one book at a time, I’ve started off first with Bolano’s “The Skating Rink”, which is a strange mix of romance, political scamming, figure-skating and cold-blooded murder. This is my second Bolano book (gearing myself up for ‘2666’) and the story seems to be chugging along quite well, despite the weird elements he’s thrown together to make it. Meanwhile I’m also poking around in “Trainspotting”, which unbeknownst to me is written in a very thick Scottish accent! I’m slowly getting used to it (fitba = football, hame = home, jaykits = jackets). It would be useful to have a glossary, but on second thought might spoil all the fun. After all, the best thing about ‘The Clockwork Orange’ was the strange Russian street lingo.

The one I can’t let go of at the moment is “The Spy Who Loved Me”. It is quite cheesy (as most Fleming books are) and it does feel a lot like one of those guilty comfort reads. The Bond of the movies and the Bond of the novels are so very different! However if there is one book I class as top-grade reading material, it is the Atwood. I practically have to ration her out for fear of guzzling through her entire works. She is so AMAZING! “The Year of the Flood” is the second in the MaddAddam trilogy, the first being ‘Oryx and Crake’, and loosely follows on from it. I can’t wait to lose myself in the plot. Can’t imagine what Atwood has dreamed up for us dystopian fiction lovers. Oh bliss…

What are you planning to read this week?

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Unauthorised Absences & The Writer’s Bug

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Haruki Murakami, margaret atwood, Nabokov, writers block, writing

Conquering the blank page is often the hardest task of an aspiring writer…

That’s the way they used to write it in the school register: ‘Unauthorised Absence’. A capital ‘U’ in the margin. That was the shameful mark of a ‘skivver’, a player of ‘hookey’, the class rebel, the tell-tale sign of one who smoked surreptitiously at the back of the bike-sheds. Not that I ever skipped school. Perish the thought! I was a good girl, a model student, teacher’s pet. Really. Honest. Ok, well not quite…

But I’ve been a bit naughty lately, in that I haven’t posted for a while. As you’ll have noticed. To quote Jack Jordon from ’21 Grams’, “The guilt, the guilt will suck you down to the bone”, and that’s exactly how I felt when I realised my transgression. It was only at a friends house last week (when we all got to talking about our respective blogs) that brought on the bone-sucking guilt. So here I am apologising for my unproductive, unforeseen disappearance act. Sharing our blogging experiences made me think about this place and what it really meant to me. It feels like I’ve had it forever, but it’s only been four months since I started blogging here, yet I’ve grown rather fond of it. Before I became a wordpresser (if there is such a word) I had a place on windows live spaces with very little readership. While it was an ideal place to cut my teeth, it didn’t have nearly enough tools that WordPress.com has to offer its bloggers.

However, unlike here, I was blogging more often yet the lack of readers made it feel like I was talking to myself half the time. The final move to a better platform came when Microsoft did away with its mediocre stats page (without warning I might add). Major mistake. As the final straw, I did a toss-up between the book bloggers favourite (blogspot) and it’s more intellectual adversary (wordpress). Now that I’m comfortably settled here and have regular readers, things have become more serious. Suddenly there’s a pressure to produce, to write articles of quality that will generate discussions, questions and hopefully inspire other bloggers too. There is a feeling of responsibility, and that brings with it a learning curve that helps to hone my writing skills and develop an eye for what is a good subject for a blog and what isn’t.

But I digress…While blogging is a whole other kettle of fish among the myriad forms of internet writing, I have been engaged with a totally different, more traditional method which brings me to the reason for my absence: I have begun a novel.

Yes, the writing bug now has me well and truly in its thrall; in a way that I have been praying and praying it eventually would. In the past the muses have not been kind to me and I have learnt that youth is often a disadvantage when it comes to the art of the novel. Coherence, plausibility, experience and of course the all important catalogue of ‘read’ books all go contribute to some aspect of becoming a well-rounded novelist.

As a life-long reader there were times that I’d find myself going through books with a kind of envious longing. As I pass by bookshops I dared to imagine my book, with my name on it filling the shelves. But the daydream would dissolve when I thought of authors like Atwood and Murakami, about how theirs is an inspired genius, a talent that is born not learned. My muses would tell me this, but then they’d also tell me about how half of a writer’s art is his craft, and how at least THAT could be learned through hard work.  

Sometimes a beautiful passage would make me wonder ‘why can’t I write something like this?’ To make matters worse, my family have often said the same thing too, ‘you have imagination, you like books, why don’t you try writing one?’ Or, ‘you read so much, can’t you think up a story?’ But by far the worst is ‘it can’t be that difficult!’ Albeit, its said with all the goodwill in the world, but it’s still irritating. It takes all I’ve got not to turn around and snarl back ‘but it IS that difficult! Can’t you see?’ Writing out of all art forms is the most difficult to understand. In it’s unworked state, without the guidance of an intuitive mentor it is an unruly force that behaves in vastly different ways in different people. 

I think we can agree that some people are naturally gifted. They can just ‘write’ it all out in a coherent manner and be done with it. But for the rest of us, it takes a lot of hard work. Using myself as an example, I can say that for the longest time I carried the ‘idea’ of my novel with me wherever I went. Fully formed as it was, it was my lack of writing skills that stopped me from getting it down on paper the way I wanted it, or more importantly, the way it deserved to be written. After a few unsuccessful, messy attempts, I let it sit at the back of my mind and took the radical decision to allow myself the time to get to know my craft.

After a few years of reading intensively and studying the works of prominent authors, I began to understand that writing is much, much more than merely putting words on paper. It is a way of thinking, a method of Cartesian logic that needs to be re-learned, even though it is, by origin, innate. I set about listening to audiotapes of authors talking about their craft and making notes about how they felt, the difficulties they faced while they set about creating in this loneliest of crafts. The trials and tribulations of each differed, yet the main bugbear of ‘writer’s block’ and performance anxiety (especially after a particularly successful book) were among those that struck a chord with me.  

I began to see many mutual points of suffering between me and authors like Saul Bellow, Katherine Mansfield and Vladimir Nabokov. I was relieved (if relief is such a word) that getting stuck, beating yourself up over a few sentences and the general worry and stress of writing is something that carries on throughout an author’s life and can even be the fuel that drives them to reach their potential best. It was then I decided to make peace with my anxiety, and funnily enough, only then did my story finally come forward and yield itself to me.

It’s been three months now, and my research has gathered a momentum and a logic that is slowly helping me unravel the knots in my narrative. Unlike last time, I’m not in a hurry to get things down as quickly as possible. I take the time to reflect and think calmly on what I have to say and how I want to say it. Needless to say, every now and then the writing bug will take me away from the blog, but it’s all for a good cause.  So there. I’m not playing hookey. When you don’t see any posts for a week or so, it means I’m working hard in finding the meaning of ‘writing’. I’ll be recording my journey as I go along, and if my findings are blogworthy I’ll be sharing them here along with you and my other bookish things.

Book Review | ‘Surfacing’ – Margaret Atwood

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charles dickens, Edible Woman, margaret atwood, nature, Oryx and Crake, surfacing

‘Surfacing‘ is set in the Canadian wilderness of Northern Quebec and is the story of a young woman travelling back to her family home to inverstigate her fathers mysterious disappearance. As the nameless narrator and her three friends arrive on the desolate island, she begins to feel the power of nature that once suffocated her childhood. As the woman begins to look for her father with increasing concern, she realises that the island is exerting it’s own unique hold on her. Memories from her repressed past flood out from ancient objects abandoned to time, and she realises that she is slowly going crazy.

“To become like a little child again, a barbarian, a vandal; it was in us too, it was innate.”

Water themes run deep in this novel. But there are others like returning to the past, hunting for the lost thread of an abandoned childhood that also take centre-stage. Water takes the shape of whatever you put it in, and in exactly the same way our nameless protagonist slowly changes shape to her environment, heeding the call of the wild, vicious habitat around her. The events take place over two weeks, yet in that time Atwood successfully manages to convey the subtle shifts in her narrator. Towards the end, the narrators’ thoughts are reduced to a basic, instinctive survival pattern. Language is it cut down to its bare elements. At one point there is no need for punctuation, which reflects the need/ desire of the narrator to cut out all past pollution, to clean herself of all unwanted clutter. This reflection of waters that have run still for many years gets more and more disturbing. The crucial point is her broken relationship with her parents, and the alienation that comes full circle with her arrival on the island. Nature is at the forefront in this novel, and it is those unspoken rules that guide the narrator mercilessly towards an ambiguous end.

As I read this novel I felt helplessly exposed to the elements. Atwood’s prose is so deep and rich, but at the same time deprives the reader of sympathy. At one point her writing became so wild, I became concerned for the main character, who becomes unhinged as she finds it hard to grieve for her parents, especially her lost father.

This is one of Atwood’s earlier novels written in and around the time of ‘The Edible Woman‘ and it is here that I can begin to see the Atwood that I know and love so much. Here I can sense a glimmer of the genius (or rather ‘genesis’) or ‘Oryx and Crake‘, as she really takes the time to look at nature, evolution and even ‘devolution’ within species. Her crystal-clear vision and diamond-sharp prose cuts dangerously close to the wilderness where the plot takes places, and also the hidden wilderness within. As a woman, I could relate to the yearning of getting back to basics, of the desire to slough off the dead, useless memories that hold a person back. Towards the end, our narrator goes through a whole ritual where she slowly descends into a primitive lifeform, re-enacting the basic animal rites of nature. It is amazing to watch how the character sheds the manacles of social conditioning, and this is further heightened by Atwoods morphing prose. Vicious, bloody and predatory. This tale is more about the secret world of the forest and the lake, and is an experiment in the wordless tongue of nature.

I give it 4/5 stars.

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