Andrew Blackman

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.

– Thomas Edison

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration

It was one of those moments when you realise you’re old – or at least no longer young. I am working on editing the draft of my next novel, and decided to go to a cafe – somewhere I hadn’t been before, a fresh location for a fresh perspective on the manuscript.

All was going well as I got an enormous fry-up and mug of tea for £4. But then as I settled down to work, the music in the place just started driving me crazy. They had the radio on, and it was all the latest pop music, and it just drove me crazy. It was impossible to form good sentences while listening to Rihanna singing “Come here rude boy, boy, is you big enough?” or 50 Cent saying “Have a baby by me, be a millionaire”.

So I took out my iPod, put on Andrea Bocelli and felt like an old man sitting in a cafe listening to Andrea Bocelli. The worst of it was that in the quiet moments, some of the jangly pop music came through, and so I had to turn up the iPod louder and louder, and in no time I got the dreaded “Low battery” message which, in the case of my iPod, means basically no battery at all – a couple of minutes later it switched itself off, and I was left with the radio.

Here’s the thing, though – I stayed, and in the end it wasn’t so bad. Most of the stuff didn’t really grab me, but it wasn’t unpleasant either. I managed to turn it into just background noise, and focus on my work, and in the end I got quite a lot done. Maybe I’m just old and set in my ways and impatient when it comes to hearing new stuff. Pop music was never high art, but I could always listen to it before.

Is it just me, though, or is some of the latest stuff a new level of nastiness? According to MetroLyrics, the parts I couldn’t hear were even nastier than the parts I could. For example, in 50 Cent: “I bet I’ll get you open, I’ll leave your headboard broken”. Or in Rihanna, “Tonight I’mma let you be a rider, Giddy up, baby, giddy up, giddy up babe.”

Let me clarify: it’s not that they’re singing about sex, I have no problem with that. It’s the violent imagery, the emotionless, loveless, animalistic nature of it, that just makes me sad. Broken headboards and horse-riders and breaking you off and getting you open and pull my hair and touch me there and give it to me baby like boom boom boom. God I feel old right now.

Andrew Blackman Local news aging, cafe, music, Writing

One of my fellow Legend Press authors, Mark Piggott, wrote an interesting article in the Independent about ’state of the nation’ novels. I thought it would be complaining that nobody’s writing about contemporary British issues these days – there’s been quite a bit of that recently, because historical novels have been getting a lot of the awards and attention lately. But he takes a more interesting line, noting that historical novels have been getting the attention, but pointing out the wealth of books tackling contemporary issues (of which mine is listed as one, although that’s not the only reason I liked the article!).

Piggott also explores the difficulty of writing a ’state of the nation’ novel, getting good quotes from some major British literary figures. Martin Amis thinks it’s down to a lack of national pride – the US now produces more state of the nation novels, because it’s the centre of the earth; British novelists are more like dissidents. Toby Litt says that writers are trying it, but in a “more focused” way – “they don’t do sweep, they do stab.” Piggott also makes the point that sometimes it’s new arrivals who most effectively hold a mirror up to British society, and so the place to look is more on the margins than on the Booker Prize shortlist.

Anyway, as someone who aspires to describe at least a part of the state of the nation in his writing, I thought it was a good exploration of the difficulties and possibilities of doing this, and also a guide to some of the more interesting names in British literature.

Andrew Blackman Literary news british fiction, contemporary fiction, independent, mark piggott, novels, state of the nation

This is not your standard biography. Translator Andrew Brown abandons the usual chronological approach in favour of an entertaining, thematic narrative that moves through Flaubert’s life by a kind of free association. The first chapter, for example, is on the spire of Rouen cathedral, and the second on the spiral of Flaubert’s life, “a matter of many returns, not always happy (or even unhappy). I found it worked really well, giving more of an insight into Flaubert’s character than a standard “life and times” approach would have done.

I learned that Flaubert was an iconoclast:

“I don’t want to be part of anything, to belong to any academy, any corporation, any association whatsoever. I hate the herd, the rule and the norm. A Bedouin, yes, as much as you like; a citizen, never.”

Yet he was also against strongly-held opinions, because he could always see both sides of the argument. He lived through revolutionary times in France (both 1848 and 1870), but was as distrustful of communards as royalists. He detested stupidity, but found it everywhere, even in himself. He was always correcting, pointing out mistakes, tearing down the grand ideas and ideologies in which the 19th century abounded. He loved opposites and contradictions. When he wrote to his lover from Egypt she berated him for describing the bedbugs in too much detail; he replied that they were a part of the beauty, just as the lemon trees he saw in Jaffa formed a “complete poetry” with the rotting corpses half-exposed in the cemetery there. He could be quite vulgar in some of his writing – he refused to edit out anything (I was reminded here of Milan Kundera talking about “kitsch” – Flaubert would have had zero tolerance for kitsch!).

Flaubert was very well-read, and got through enormous amounts of research for anything he wrote, and yet he was resolutely anti-intellectual. He seemed to grasp that no matter how much you know, there’s always an enormous amount you don’t know, or can’t ever know. Perhaps that’s why he chose fiction, where ideas and facts are inherently less firm than in non-fiction. His writing took a huge toll on his health, as he stayed up long into the night and described in his letters the physical effects of his labours. Yet he also realised that for all his research and hard work, an important ingredient of his fiction came from outside. Here’s a prayer he wrote in his notebook while visiting Carthage:

May all the energies of nature which I have breathed in penetrate me, and may they be breathed out into my work. Come to me, powers of creative emotion! To me, resurrection of the past, to me, to me! Through the Beautiful, something living and true must also be made. Have pity on my willpower, God of souls! Give me Strength and Hope!

Flaubert’s last book, Bouvard et Pecouchet, was his final indictment of all the stupid ideas that great men had uttered throughout history. He hoped that “once people have read it they won’t dare speak again, for fear of uttering quite naturally one of the phrases in it.” Or, as he wrote in a letter:

I sense floods of hatred for the stupidity of my period, and I’m drowning in them. Shit keeps rising to my mouth, as in strangulated hernias. But I want to keep that shit, fix it, harden it; I want to make it into a paste with which I’d smear the 19th century, in the same way that they decorate Indian pagodas with cow dung.

By the end of this quite short book, I felt I knew Gustave Flaubert very well (perhaps too well!), thanks to the thematic approach and the extensive use of Flaubert’s personal letters and notebooks. This is what I want from a biography, much more than the dates and formalities of his public life. I’d recommend this book, even if, like me, you have no particular prior interest in Flaubert.

One thing to note: Andrew Brown’s vocabulary is enormous. I thought mine was quite satisfactory, but by the end of this book I had jotted down a whole list of words I needed to look up in the dictionary, either because I was unsure of their meaning or, in many cases, because I’d simply never heard of them before:

• sempiternal: enduring constantly and continually
• crocket: an ornament used in Gothic architecture, usually in the form of buds or curled leaves
• curlicue: a fantastic curl or twist
• pediment: wide triangle on the front of a classical building above the portico
• sacristan: church officer
• Mariolatry: excessive reverence for the Virgin Mary
• unctuous: oily, or in a person, smug/self-satisfied
• canticle: hymn
• scabrous: harsh, rough
• truculent: ferocious, savage
• anamnesis: recollection
• mountebank: charletan
• delectation: delight, pleasure
• arabesque: mural/decoration with flowing lines often fancifully intertwined
• marquetry: inlaid work in word, ivory, etc., especially for furniture
• querulous: peevish, given to complaint
• pseudopod: an extension or projection
• logorrheal: excessive flow of words
• Priapus: Greco-Roman god of fertility, hence also used to mean an erect penis
• psychopompos: conductor of souls to the place of the dead
• phosphenes: subjective sensation of light, e.g. produced by pressing on eyeball
• ecmnesic: having a poor short-term memory, but retaining memory of the distant past
• quiddities: subtle arguments or quibbles
• quillities: quibbles
• psychogenic: having a psychological cause as opposed to a physical one
• somatisation: bodily symptoms resulting from a mental disorder
• ergotism: arguing/quibbling
• hebetude: bluntness or dullness
• aphasic: mute
• calvary: representation of the crucifixion
• valetudinarian: person in ill health
• bluestocking: sneering reference to women with literary tastes
• imprecatory: invoking evil or a curse on somebody
• alexandrines: lines of six feet or twelve syllables in poetry
• romans a clef: novels in which real people or events appear in disguise
• catamite: boy who is in a sexual relationship with a man
• bardash: another word for catamite
• ben trovato: appropriate even if not true
• terebinth: small tree of the cashew family
• patella: knee-cap
• chancre: sore or ulcer, especially due to syphilis
• glacis: gentle slope
• dehiscence: splitting open
• buskin: a laced boot reaching halfway to the knee
• lubricious: wanton, lecherous
• manustuprate: masturbate (archaic)
• panoptic: all-seeing, comprehensive
• lapidary: concerned with stones, especially monuments

Do I just have a bad vocabulary, or are some of these words really obscure? I should point out that not knowing them didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the book – in most cases I could guess from the context the rough meaning, or if not, it didn’t matter much. In fact I quite liked looking them all up! And for some reason Brown’s use of them didn’t come across as pretentious – it just seemed as if he loved language, and was using unusual words for the fun of it.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews andrew brown, book review, flaubert

When I talked about why I blogged, I used to use this book as my stock example. Here I am in September 2008, for example:

The original idea of this blog was to provide somewhere for me to record the books and articles I read. I forget things so easily: I know I’ve read “Catcher in the Rye”, for instance. I see it on my bookshelf sometimes, and the spine has creases. It’s definitely been read. But I can’t remember a single thing about it. Not one event, character, idea, sentence. Nothing. So my idea with this blog was to write things down.

Well, now I’ve re-read Catcher in the Rye, so I guess I’ll have to update my examples. It’s sad that it took me so long to come back to the book, and that it took the death of its author to prompt me. There really is a lot of good stuff in here.

What I found most amazing was that, although it was narrated by a self-pitying teenager with a lot of repeated verbal ticks, it never irritated me. It was just Holden Caulfield’s voice, and it felt authentic from the very first paragraph.

The other great achievement was to communicate a lot of ideas through the mind of a narrator who doesn’t have access to a lot of wisdom or perspective. He’s a teenager, and he’s grappling with feelings of alienation and revulsion, but doesn’t really understand why. Yet Salinger lets us understand more, partly by filling in back-story like the death of his little brother Allie, and partly by having adults speak to and about Holden, suggesting possible reasons for his position.

Holden is presented in some reviews as just an annoying, privileged kid who hates the world for no reason and should grow up and get over it. It’s easy to see why people would think that, but for me the story of Allie and his relationship with his little sister Phoebe give a much more interesting perspective on his character. Losing a brother is a horrible thing for any child to experience, and it seems to be the root of Holden’s hatred for the world. Allie died of leukemia at a young age and so is always preserved in Holden’s mind as a perfect, innocent child who went for walks with him in the park and wrote poetry on his baseball glove. Holden compares everyone else to this idealised picture of Allie, and it’s not surprising that he finds them all to be phony or dishonest. It’s also not surprising that he hates them, because they lived and Allie didn’t. He’s a child trying and failing to understand death and injustice. He holds the world up to impossible standards because in a way the people he meets have to prove why they deserve to live when Allie died. They, of course, fail to live up to his standards in various ways, and so he hates them.

Holden also fails, and he’s aware of it – he’s a coward himself, and phony sometimes, and he hates himself for it. He invites pain – the bloody nose from his school roommate, the roughing up from the elevator boy/pimp in the hotel, the cold in Central Park. He invites it perhaps because he feels he deserves it. Again, he’s comparing himself to Allie and finding himself wanting. Phoebe is the only person in the book he likes, because she’s still a child and so still innocent. He wants to protect her, to keep her frozen in childhood, a cute kid on a carousel. He hates the idea of her growing up and getting corrupted – when he goes to her school and sees someone has written “Fuck you” on the wall, he is furious and scrapes it off. Whenever he sees a child, it makes him happy – for him they are the symbol of purity in a dishonest world.

The title of the book ties all this together. When it’s first mentioned, on page 115, Holden is walking along Broadway feeling depressed as usual when he sees a young boy walking along the curb singing a song, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye”. The effect on him is instant: “It made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed any more.” Then near the end of the book Holden is talking to Phoebe and she asks him what he wants to do in his life, and he can only think of one thing, based on the same song the boy was singing:

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.

This is characteristic of the whole book – Holden doesn’t really understand, but expresses something in a confused way, and Salinger gives the reader enough information to understand and piece it all together. When you know about Allie, and see how Holden behaves around other children, this passage makes perfect sense. He wants to protect the children, and also to go back himself into a purer, happier time, before Allie’s death, before he started moving towards adulthood. He wants to catch them and preserve them as they are, happy and innocent, to save them from becoming adults or, worse, from becoming Holden Caulfield.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, catcher in the rye, J.D. Salinger

“Life is brief and art is long.”

- Gustave Flaubert

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration

The other day, I picked up a copy of The Times because of the news of J.D. Salinger’s death on the cover. I read about Catcher in the Rye and its skewering of “phonies”, and how Salinger retreated to his home in New Hampshire and ignored the world for about forty years. Then I read the rest of the paper, an unusual thing for me to do these days. I read an article about Britain’s measure of inequality hitting a new high, and why this was not a bad thing. I read about the latest inquiry into the Iraq War, and how the commission is mostly composed of Tony Blair’s old friends. I read about how Blair, surely the very definition of a phony, would appear before the commission and justify his decision. I read and I read, and the more I read, the more attractive the idea sounded. A house in New Hampshire, the life of a recluse, an escape from the lies and shallowness. Reading The Times these days, or any other Murdoch paper, often has that effect on me.

Anyway, I’m rereading Catcher in the Rye this weekend. I read it years ago but can’t remember much about it. My memory’s awful. I’ll post a review when I’m done. RIP Mr Salinger. In an age where self-publicising seems almost compulsory, it’s refreshing to hear of someone who just didn’t bother. There’s even a rumour that he was writing all that time, not for the world or for fame or for approval or for money, but purely for the love of it. What a strange concept.

Andrew Blackman Literary news death, J.D. Salinger, phony

Damien March, a bored BBC journalist on the night shift, suddenly inherits a house on an island off the coast of Cape Cod from his long-lost uncle Patrick. There is a condition, however – he must preserve the house exactly as it is. Given that his uncle was somewhat eccentric, and the house is littered with bric-a-brac (e.g. a collection of ice-cream scoops), this is not as easy as it sounds.

In trying to settle into the house, Damien comes across letters and old manuscripts that reveal more about his uncle than he perhaps wanted to know. One of the stories is about Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s little-known brother, carrying out a vigilante-style murder of a man who is abusing his deaf wife and children. When he meets a deaf woman on the island whose abusive husband died in mysterious circumstances, he begins to wonder if the story is more than just fiction.

I enjoyed the exploration of Patrick’s stories and what they revealed about his life, whether literally or in the subtext: “As I surrendered to the story, I had the odd feeling that I was entering my uncle’s dream life.” I also liked that the unexpected conclusion was hinted at through Patrick’s fiction, some of which is reproduced in the middle of the book. “Paperchase” is an appropriate title, because Damien does come to know his uncle, and in the process to understand more about his family and himself, almost entirely through the paper that Patrick has left behind. Patrick had cut himself off from the family and the rest of the world for many years, so the stories were all that was left.

This was a quick read, and a surprisingly rewarding one. I say “surprisingly” because in the early parts of the book I was not really impressed – I didn’t care about the characters, and the writing was not lively enough to sustain my interest. But it grew on me as the action shifted to the island and the story of Mycroft Holmes, and the ending was handled really well. So by the end, I had a really positive view of the book. It didn’t sear itself into my memory as great books do, but it was certainly a worthwhile and ultimately thought-provoking read.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews award winner, book review, marcel, paperchase, somerset maugham award, theroux

I’ve listed Milan Kundera as one of my favourite authors for a while now, but oddly I’d never read his most famous book until now. It was definitely no letdown – the same philosophical style I’ve come to expect, but sustained over a longer time and with characters that I felt closer to than in other books I’ve read by him.

The story is of Tomas and Tereza, and whether they will stay together despite Tomas’s constant infidelity. Branching out from this central story are other stories, following the lives, for example, of Tomas’s mistress Sabina and her new lover Franz. The central theme is explored through the lives of the various characters. Is it better to be light or heavy? Lives full of responsibility and attachment are heavy and burdensome, but “closer to the earth”, “more real and truthful.” Lives that are light contain no burdens and allow a person to soar,  “his movements as free as they are insignificant”.

Sabina abandons her family and everyone who means anything to her, and ends up in America selling her paintings, making money, doing well and feeling empty. She has no burdens, no attachments, no real meaning or purpose. She composes a will saying she wants to be cremated and her ashes scattered on the winds. “She wanted to die under the sign of lightness”. Tomas, on the other hand, chooses heaviness. He has opportunities to escape from his burdens – he gets out of Czechoslovakia and is living in Vienna, for example, but goes back to find Tereza. He loses his job as a doctor because of writing an article critical of the regime, and is offered several chances at redemption by renouncing his article. But he chooses not to, and so his life becomes harder and harder, heavier and heavier.

By the end of the book, the heavier life comes to seem preferable, to me anyway. It has more sorrow, but that’s because there is more to care about. Lightness, the absence of ties or emotional attachments, is easier on the surface, but ultimately meaningless, and therefore unbearable.

Apart from the main thematic development, there were some wonderful side discussions. I loved the way he talked about “kitsch”, for example. I only new “kitsch” as meaning “bad taste” or “cheesy”, but Kundera uses a very different definition, from the original German so he says: “kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” Or as he puts it more directly, “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word.” Kitsch is life without the shit, it’s the pretense that there’s nothing unseemly or unpleasant, it’s erasing anything that doesn’t fit. Communist kitsch is all the parades and the positive, uplifting art that denies the existence of any societal problems. Epitaphs are often kitsch under this definition, denying the existence of pain or suffering or even death itself, concealing it behind euphemisms. As Kundera says, “Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

I also enjoyed the “Short dictionary of misunderstood words”, a series of chapters in which Kundera shows how Franz and Sabina think they understand each other but don’t, because they are using the same words to mean different things. They have met relatively late in life, and are old enough to have accumulated their own meanings and associations and memories, of which the other person is not a part. Whereas Tomas and Sabina were young and could create their own meanings together, Franz and Sabina are too old to do this. Or as Kundera more poetically puts it:

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to them.

I thought this was a great insight, and the book was full of them. Kundera is a close observer of the human condition, and always finds fresh, innovative ways of expressing his ideas. I’m glad that I’ve finally read his most famous book, and glad that it lived up to my high expectations. I’ll keep exploring his lesser-known books now.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, kundera, unbearable lightness of being

I’m a bit late to the New Year goal-setting party, but here goes. For my writing, I want to finish my second novel and get it published, and start on a third. I also want to write more short stories and submit them to magazines and contests. For my reading, I want to read a book a week. I think I do this already, but have never really tracked it for a full year to find out if it’s true. So this year I want to make a note of every book I read, and also review it on this site, and I’m aiming for 52 books for the year. I’ve added a new page on the top menu, 2010 reading, where I will post updates.

That’s it. Nothing too difficult – I believe in setting realistic goals and actually meeting them (I only came to this belief after years of pie-in-the-sky New Year’s resolutions that came unstuck by the end of January). What about you? Any goals you’d like to share for 2010?

Andrew Blackman Uncategorized 2010, goals, Interesting snippets, Writing