Andrew Blackman

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

- Alan Kay

Andrew Blackman Inspiration

On the Holloway Road got a nice review from a fellow writer and blogger, Helen J Beal. I found it particularly encouraging because she hates travelogues and Kerouac, so could have been expected to hate my book! Anyway, the site is worth checking out for more than just the review. It’s a good mix of reviews, poetry and tangential musings.

Andrew Blackman On the Holloway Road helen j beal, On the Holloway Road, review

Sorry, this has nothing to do with reading, or writing, or anything else this blog is supposed to be about. I just read an amazing piece about bees in the latest issue of the New Internationalist, and before I throw the magazine I wanted to record some amazing facts.

• To make a pound of honey, a bee flies about 55,000 miles, equivalent to going around the world twice. It visits 10,000 flowers on more than 500 foraging trips.
• A single bee-hive can produce as much as 1kg of honey every day.
• 500g of honey represents the sweetness of about 10 million blossoms.
• Turkey is the world’s 2nd-biggest honey producer – beekeeping provides an income for 180,000 families.
• Bees communicate with each other by dancing. A series of circular runs with frequent changes in direction signals to other bees that there’s a new food source nearby – the rate of change increases with the quality of the nectar. For food further away, they use a complicated figure-8 which shows the distance of the food and its direction in relation to the sun. The Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 for discovering this.

Andrew Blackman Reading

“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”

Barbara Kingsolver

(thanks to Amberdine)

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration

Dostoevsky is one of my favourite writers. I discovered him in my teenage years, read as many of his books as I could get my hands on, and to be honest haven’t read anything else by him in a long time. I still count him as one of my favourite writers, though, more on memory than anything else. His writing is so urgent and immediate, and began to open up a world for me beyond 1990s South London.

The Gentle Spirit is very short – longer than a short story, but barely long enough to be called a novella. Because of this, it doesn’t have the grand scale of Dostoevsky’s longer works. But it does succeed in its aim – to get inside the head of a pawnbroker as he watches his dead wife laid out on the table in front of him, the wife that he has recently driven to suicide.

The language reflects the disordered state of the character’s mind as he tries to understand what has happened. He asks questions, changes his mind, berates himself for going too fast or too slow or missing the point, and is always alternating between self-justification and self-flagellation. It’s a convincing portrait.

The wife’s character is not so clear, but in a way that’s the point. The pawnbroker did not understand her – still doesn’t, really. Because we see the world entirely through his eyes, our view is very limited and distorted. His wife is the “gentle spirit” of the book’s title, much younger than he is and perhaps a little naive in her expectations of him, but beyond that we discover little about her.

Even the pawnbroker’s own motives are not very clear – he decided from the start of the marriage to be “stern” with her and to withhold love and affection, but the only reason given for this is that it’s what he was used to from his job – a pawnbroker has to be stern with his customers, and not allow himself to be emotionally involved in their plight. Perhaps Dostoevsky is saying that after cutting himself off from people in this way for so many years, he was unable to achieve intimacy with another human being. By the time he does realise his mistake and declare his love for her, it is too late and too extreme – after months of not speaking to her at all, he suddenly throws himself at her feet and tells her everything. Whereas at the beginning she would have welcomed this display of love, after everything she’s been through it just frightens her and drives her away from him.

This was a quick and enjoyable read, and was probably the right length – because of the limitations of the pawnbroker’s perspective, it might be tough to read a whole novel based inside his head. In this short book, though, the style worked very well, and although I didn’t really understand either character very well, they felt real to me. Now I feel inspired to go back and re-read some of those novels I loved all those years ago.

Andrew Blackman Fyodor Dostoevsky 19th century, dostoevsky, gentle spirit, russian literature

“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”

- William Faulkner

(seen in The New Writer magazine)

Andrew Blackman Inspiration

Some interesting analysis of US and UK reading habits, courtesy of the summer edition of The Author magazine:

• American readers prefer romance; British ones prefer literary fiction
• Men make 35% of book purchases in the US; 42% in the UK
• In both countries, two-thirds of books are bought by people over the age of 42
• In fiction, mystery and romance account for 58% of purchases in the US, compared with 31% in the UK
• In non-fiction, religious books do well in the US; celebrity biographies in the UK.

Original source was a presentation at the London Book Fair by survey companies BML, who surveyed UK readers, and Pub Track/Bowker, who did the same in the US. At first I was quite struck by the fact that two-thirds of books are bought by people over the age of 42, and was going to start writing about how young people don’t read etc etc. But then I realised that probably two-thirds of adults are over 42 anyway, so actually it’s the sort of proportion you’d expect!

I guess the real question is why men don’t read very much. Certainly when doing publicity for my book, I’ve noticed that most of the people who turn up to readings and speaking events are women, and on sites like Goodreads or in book blogs, I’d say there are more women than men. That’s just my own experience, though – what do you think? Are there more women than men involved in reading and talking about books? If so, any idea why? (No need for proof or data of any kind – wild speculation is more than welcome here!).

Andrew Blackman Literary news, Reading book buying statistics, Reading, reading habits, UK, US

There are three separate stories in this book: one is the killing of Russian Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by the Chicago Chief of Police in 1908; another is the struggle of the narrator, Bosnian immigrant Brik, to adapt to life in contemporary Chicago; a third is the 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia, as told mostly by Brik’s friend Rora.

At first the different stories are told in separate chapters, but as the novel progresses they gradually merge, so that the narrative shifts abruptly between the different times and spaces. Even within each individual stories, there are frequent flashbacks to earlier events, such as the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which Lazarus and his family lived through, or Brik’s early life in America.

It sounds confusing, but it wasn’t at all difficult to follow. Hemon is a skilled storyteller, and although the movements in time and space are abrupt, they feel natural. I think he’s captured very successfully the nature of memory. There is often a certain logic to the memories, but it’s not an obviously “rational” logic – it’s more subconscious, to do with shapes, smells, colours, etc. I was once walking past a carpet shop, and the smell of the chemical they’d used to clean the carpets gave me an incredibly powerful image of my childhood bedroom where I crawled around playing with cars. It was abrupt but made a certain sense.

I think that’s the kind of thing that Hemon is trying to achieve here, and he handles it very well. As the narrator, Brik, does more research into Lazarus’s story, he starts thinking about Lazarus more often, and the story in some way merges with his own. That matches my experience of working on a book – when it’s going well and you’re immersed in it, you think about it at the most unexpected times. So the abrupt shifts from a Moldovan car ride to Brik’s marriage to the Kishinev progrom felt natural to me.

There are quite a few parallels, too, between the different times and places. Names are repeated – Schuettler is both the Assistant Chief of the 1908 Chicago police and the contemporary source of Brik’s writing grant; Miller is a reporter in 1908 Chicago and also 1990s Sarajevo. In all three stories there is an ultimate lack of meaning or even truth – we never know for sure why Lazarus went to visit the Chief of Police or what was in the letter he was carrying; Rora is established from the beginning as a teller of far-fetched tale’s, so it’s impossible to know which of his stories of Sarajevo are true; Brik’s marriage is falling apart for reasons that are elusive.

Hemon repeats several times something like the phrase “She was like everybody else because there was nobody like her”, and I think the parallels between the stories are a way of showing that, although the individual is always different and the specific circumstances change,  much about the human experience remains the same. The Lazarus story is clearly meant to tell us something about contemporary America – the hysteria about “Jewish anarchists” in 1908, the hysteria about “Muslim extremists/terrorists” a century later.  Lazarus is also, of course, s Biblical symbol of resurrection, and I think Hemon is saying something here about how individuals’ stories are resurrected by groups within society and given a new, completely different life. The newspapers and politicians of the day made Lazarus into a demon; the anarchists made him into a martyr. Neither version was true. Yet throughout time we continue to do the same things (think of the “life after death” of Michael Jackson, for example, or Princess Diana, or JFK). I wonder if Hemon is also saying something about the “collective unconscious” – Jung’s idea that beyond our individual experiences, we also tap into a “reservoir of experiences” of humanity.

Hemon is one of those writers who leaves a lot unsaid, and also casts doubt on the veracity of much of what has been said. Perhaps that’s why, after 300 pages of engaging prose, the ending felt a little flat. In all three strands of the book, many things happened, but not much really changed. I suspect that’s the point, but still it felt a little disappointing. In Hemon’s book of short stories, “A Question of Bruno”, the open endings worked really well. In a novel, you invest so much more time and energy into the characters, and it’s disappointing when the book effectively just stops. It’s probably more true to life than a novel where everything is neatly wrapped up and all the loose ends tied, but I still felt that I wanted something more from the ending. That’s about my only complaint. Will definitely be reading his next book.

Andrew Blackman Aleksandar Hemon america, book review, bosnian, chicago, fiction, hemon, kishinev pogrom, lazarus

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.”

- Orson Scott Card

(seen in The New Writer magazine)

Andrew Blackman Inspiration

I had never heard of Leopardi before picking up this book – to be honest, I was seduced by the beautiful desert picture on the cover, and also the blurb’s promise of amazing philosophical and psychological insights. What I got was basically the notebook of an intelligent, thoughtful person. There were some interesting ideas, but nothing was fully formed or developed enough to be particularly interesting to me. The book did a good job of skewering social pretensions and shallowness, but that was nothing particularly new. The book was unfinished in Leopardi’s lifetime, and perhaps the finished version would have been brilliant. This sequence of half-formed thoughts and bons mots, however, was just a quick and not particularly satisfying read.

Andrew Blackman Giacomo Leopardi book review, humanity, leopardi, philosophy