Recent Reading - Late January

Note - I read pretty indiscriminately, in the sense that I don’t have a taste and I don’t like a particular genre. The more insistently The Algorithm tries to recommend me things, the more mulishly I feel that my generic dilettantism is a good thing. I’m going to try and do a little round up every week on a Friday.

I haven’t written these down necessarily in the order that I read them. I’m having one of those great reading periods where everything I read feels connected to everything else, so I’m writing about them in the way that makes the most sense for exploring those connections. 

Grimms’ Fairy Tales - The Brothers Grimm

I probably read this all wrong. I should have read the Tales in some beautifully illustrated book, or maybe had someone read them to me. By a fire. In a cabin. In a film.

But I read them on Kindle in tiny typeface on a plane. There you go. 

Still, I enjoyed some of the tales - particularly the ones that were well-known enough for me to have heard them at one point, but obscure enough that I’d forgotten about them.

Near my flat in Berlin is the Volkspark Friedrichshain, and in the park is a beautiful fountain carved with the characters of Grimms’ fairy tales. I recognised some of them from Disney movies, but I thought I ought to understand them better so I decided to read the Brothers Grimm. 

I’m reading a book about the Abrahamic religions (hopefully to be included in a future roundup) and one of the most illuminating sections deals with the two governing forms of meaning-making that exist in our words - mythos and logos:

Both were essential… Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. 

(Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Text Only) . HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition).

Logos, by contrast, is concerned with linearity, cause and effect ,and deifies progress. It’s useful for invention, but counterproductive when society doesn’t have the resources to sustain too many dreams.

Fairytales are pure mythos. Originality isn’t the point - if there’s going to be a stepmother then of course she has to be evil. If a young girl meets a king then of course she’s going to marry him. No innovation, please. Men can turn into frogs or bears or swans, but girls are girls and they’d damn well better get married. Speaking of which, the girls really are girls, not women. They’re depicted as children, delighted by play, right up until they meet a prince and he decides he’d into them, and they transition seamlessly into wives before they’ve had any chance to become sexual themselves. I don’t know what this signifies and I’m on a plane, so I can’t research it, but it’s interesting.

Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert

I like Elizabeth Gilbert. There, I’ve said it. I liked Big Magic, and I really liked Committed, and I downloaded Eat, Pray, Love as an audiobook to listen to when I’m cleaning. I think if Elizabeth Gilbert had been a man then this book would not be derided as casually as it is, but she’s not and that’s okay, because women love it and feel allowed to love it, and that’s basically more important than critical acclaim. 

I liked Eat and Love more than Pray. This might be because I primarily listened to the bulk of that middle section, which takes place in an Ashram in India, while I was putting together IKEA furniture; it made me feel resentful. 

The parts in Italy really were good - I think Gilbert often gets depicted as a dappy American woman pronouncing cluelessly on fetishised cultures, and I don’t think that’s fair. She learned Italian, which is more than a lot of travel writers would do. I suppose the criticism is that she learned Italian while having Feelings about her divorce, which is of course very womanish and silly of her. Shut up, woman. No one needs to hear your cogent reflections on a widely-shared life experience. 

I looked up a bit about the two Balinese healers that Gilbert befriended - Wayan and Ketut Lyer. Lots of American women getting pissed off that Lyer charged them $25 for a palm reading. Apparently he told everyone more or less exactly the thing. Apparently he also had dementia. Go figure. You’ve spent the money flying to fucking Bali and you begrudge an old man making good money out of the lifestyle-blogger fetishisation of his culture? Jesus. White people, we suck.

Speaking of which…

The Confessions of Frannie Langton* - Sara Collins

It was good to read The Confessions of Frannie Langton in the same week as The Underground Railroad - both modern interpretations of slave narratives. The personalising difference is that Frannie Langton is set in Jamaica and London, not America. Think Alias Grace meets Wide Sargasso Sea. The Underground Railroad forced me to look at slavery, and Frannie Langton made me look at slavery as part of my country’s history, and therefore my history. In Britain we love the idea that slavery was something that happened somewhere else - that the only time we ever had anything to do with slavery was when we were kind enough to abolish it. 

Sara Collins takes that British complacency by the scruff of its neck and holds it firmly, demanding that we look fully at the wound. Not just the mechanics of slavery - the exploitation of black bodies for white profit - but the post-hoc ideology that was developed to justify it, with all the attendant violence that ideology inflicts. 

One of the most powerful recurring themes of Frannie Langton is the idea of freedom - more specifically, the kinds of freedom that can exist within the condition of bondage. The freedom to defer or not defer, the freedom to be complicit or not, the freedom to remember or forget, and of course the freedom to tell a story. 

Sara Collins’ prose has a beautiful weightiness to it, just as all the best Gothic novels have - the rustling weightiness of a velvet dress. She writes the kind of characters that settle into your memory and take up residence there. It’s an unbelievably accomplished debút, and I will clear a space on my shelf for all her future books, which I know will be wonderful. 

*proof copy - The Confessions of Frannie Langton will be published on 04.04.19 by Viking. You can preorder it here

The Underground Railroad - Coleson Whitehead

A really difficult read. Coleson Whitehead depicts the antebellum South as a hellscape, which was the reality for most of its inhabitants, since in many of the ‘slave states’ enslaved Africans outnumbered whites. If there’s any true history of the American South then I suspect it resembles this. Coleson Whitehead’s style is spare, but the violence inflicted on black bodies in the novel is almost baroque in its excess.

Why? Power of course, and who gets to write the story. We all know that cognitively, but Whitehead makes you feel it in your viscera. That’s what fiction’s for. 

My Sister, The Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite

Odd book - fresh and interesting. Sold as a thriller, complete with an endorsement by Gillian Flynn, but it isn’t, not really, because there isn’t exactly suspense. What there is is a character study of two sisters, of the deep complicity and jealousy and hatred and loyalty of sibling relationships.

Misogynies - Joan Smith

The basic premise draws on Roland Barthes’ Mythologies - case studies from our culture, depicting how misogyny is knitted into our institutions. The centrepiece is a study of the Yorkshire Ripper and the handling of the case. Her central thesis is really this: 

Peter Sutcliffe’s hatred of women was extreme but it wasn’t unique, which was one of the reasons why the police had such trouble catching him. They thought he would stand out and I thought exactly the opposite: that he could hide quite easily in a culture which often displayed casual contempt for women.

(Smith, Joan. Misogynies (p. 10). Saqi. Kindle Edition.)

Beautifully distilled summation of why violence against women is both treated as anathema to our culture, and yet constantly reiterated within it. 

The Lonely City - Olivia Laing

I must admit I’m a bit frustrated by Olivia Laing’s work. Maybe it’s because she writes about avant-garde artists as if she understands them or their work, and that makes me feel like a dunce and a square. But I think she feels like that art criticism component of her work is the crux, whereas I feel that it’s a crutch - a sort of apology for writing subjectively in the first person about ideas she cares about. That’s a particular trap for writing about loneliness, I think, because loneliness is so crushingly solipsistic by definition. 

The Trip to Echo Spring - Olivia Laing

This is my favourite of Olivia Laing’s books (I’ve read them all apart from To The River). Maybe that’s because it was about writers rather than artists, which made it feel easier to grasp. But I think I just loved the examination of alcoholism and its relationship with the Romantic tortured artist ideal, from the sceptical perspective of someone who’s felt its impact. But it’s not preachy - Laing’s too smart for that. 

The Sleep of Reason - David James Smith

As soon as I started reading this I realised that I was going to have to read it very quickly, because the subject matter is very nearly unbearable, and I didn’t want to have the book in my life for very long. No dice, of course, because it’s probably going to stick with me forever.

The Sleep of Reason by David James Smith is about the abduction and murder of James Bulger by Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. There’s scarcely anything by way of interpretation or opinion in the book - just the tissue of interlocking facts that form a person, a family, a community. Both the events of the day of James’ kidnap, and the history of the families involved, are depicted in clinical detail, with a black hole at the centre - why did those two ten-year-old boys do what they did? Why did they murder a toddler?

Smith presents himself as one of those people who offers his opinion very rarely, which automatically makes you listen very carefully when he does. He suggests that evil - the kind of evil that the two boys were painted as, evil for evil’s sake - does not exist, except as the product of a bigoted imagination. Everything else - whether it’s Venables and Thompson or Peter Sutcliffe, can make some sense in the context of our culture, of its crushing banalities and festering little hatreds. It doesn’t seem like a good enough reason, but it makes more sense, from a logos perspective, at least, than mythical monsters and wicked stepmothers.