Andrew Blackman

Titles are important. This book was an excellent survey of emerging philosophies and practices, but it did not convince me that a “global shift” is really taking place, or that, as the subtitle promises, a “new worldview is transforming humanity”. I still enjoyed reading the book, and found some very interesting ideas in it. I just found that the title, while attention-grabbing, oversold the contents and set up unrealistic expectations.

The book is published by an imprint of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which defines itself as follows:

The word “noetic” comes from the ancient Greek nous, for which there is no exact equivalent in English. It refers to “inner knowing,” a kind of intuitive consciousness—direct and immediate access to knowledge beyond what is available to our normal senses and the power of reason.

The book claims that a shift is taking place in various disciplines towards this kind of intuitive consciousness and a new approach to life. Some of the key points in this shift are:

• Development of a respectful and cooperative relationship with nature
• Increased sense of connection and communion for all peoples
• Greater compassion for all beings
• Decline of consumerism
• Valuing of intuitive knowledge
• A natural ethics based in compassion
• Emergence of a global consciousness

The book then describes some conceptual shifts that are necessary to support these changing attitudes:

• Nature is conscious and exhibits attributes of consciousness at all levels from atoms to galaxies
• Reality is larger than the observable physical universe, and contains multiple nonphysical dimensions
• Knowledge based on intuition is just as valid and necessary as empirical knowledge based on the senses
• All of us are joined as one; nothing is independent of any other thing
• Feminine values of interdependency, cooperation and respect for the earth are a central part of the worldview
• The basis for ethics is not found in socially constructed rules relative to each culture but in the natural order of the universe

These conceptual shifts in turn lead to value shifts:

• Increased reverence and respect for the earth and all forms of life on it
• Increased compassion rather than prejudice toward people whose race/nationality/religion/ethnic group/economic status differs from our own
• Greater priority given to personal and spiritual growth than to materialistic values of acquisition and consumption
• Embracing nonlinear, intuitive ways of knowing the world
• Honouring unconditional love and forgiveness as the highest values in all of our relations with others

Finally, these value shifts lead to new actions:

• Simplify your life
• Learn communication skills that promote compassion and understanding
• Transition your diet from processed to whole organic foods
• Take time out from stress to relax every day
• Exercise regularly to discharge tension
• Visualise and deeply affirm a goal
• Reframe your attitude toward negative experiences
• Help the earth and disadvantaged people

At the end of the book, there’s some advice on how to take each of these actions on a practical level. For example, you could simplify your life by downsizing your living space, letting go of clutter, doing what you want for a living, reducing your commute, reducing exposure to TV and computer screens, living closer to nature, not always answering the phone, delegating chores and learning to say no. Improve your diet by shifting to organic, whole foods and more vegetables. Have protein as 25-30% of the total calories, fat as 25-30% and carbohydrate as 40-50%. Chew each bite 10 to 20 times before swallowing, to get maximum nutrition. Relax by spending an hour a day doing nothing, not even reading or watching TV – just experiencing silence.

I think that if the shift really were occurring globally, it would be a fantastic thing. I agreed with a lot of what I read in the book, and the changes it describes are very positive. But when I read the news, I just don’t see these values becoming dominant. I see the reverse – consumerism becoming more rampant, nature being ravaged, compassion being stamped out by ignorant tabloid headlines, people living disconnected from each other, from nature and from their own selves.

Am I cynical? Or unaware of this great shift taking place? All I know is that the book described a lot of things I agreed with and I wish they were more widely practised. The only real evidence presented for a real global shift is a few survey results and statistics on things like people practising yoga or meditation. But these numbers are surely dwarved by the millions of people hurtling headlong into consumerism and material accumulation. I thought the motivations given for making the shift were very telling:

• Life crisis
• Burnout with material values
• Peak experiences (heightened awareness at important times, e.g. the birth of a child)
• Peer influence
• Education (books, magazines, internet)

The only people suffering burnout with material values are those in privileged positions in rich countries, i.e. a very small minority of the world’s population. These are the same people who have the most access to books, magazines and the internet, and for whom peer influence encourages them to do things like eating organic food. The majority of the world’s population is desperate for more wealth. For every rich Westerner quitting his corporate job and doing yoga and meditation, there must be a thousand people in developing countries leaving their traditional way of life behind, moving to cities and trying to make enough money to be able to afford a bit of consumerism. The shift described in the book seems to result from a sickness with material excess, something that I, as a privileged person in a rich country, can fully identify with. But this is not the reality for most people in the world. They are not at the far end of capitalism, wondering what next after all this accumulation of wealth. They are at the beginning, having been shut out for centuries by the inequities of imperialism and its descendants. Try telling someone living on a dollar a day to give greater priority to personal and spiritual growth than to acquisition and consumption.

All of these criticisms could have been avoided if the title hadn’t made such a broad claim. The book is describing real changes that are taking place among certain groups of people in certain countries. There are some great local environmental initiatives, transition towns, local currencies, cooperatives, etc etc etc. But to call it a global shift is taking it too far, and invites criticisms that detract from the important ideas the book presents.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, environmentalism, global shift, higher consciousness, noetic sciences

In the final part of this series of posts, I’m reviewing stories by Mavis Gallant, V.S. Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hal Porter and Chinua Achebe.

Mavis Gallant (Canada) – Orphans’ Progress

According to the introduction, Gallant’s work mostly deals with broken families, and this is no exception: two girls are taken into care because their mother is irresponsible. They go to live with relatives, and then at a school run by nuns, until finally they have forgotten where they came from. At the time it seemed normal – it was the only life they knew, and they didn’t feel neglected. But at the end, passing her old home, “Mildred glanced up, and then back at her book. She had no reason to believe she had seen the place, or would ever again.” This story felt as if it could, and perhaps should, have been a novel. There was a lot happening, and I think it was too much for a short story. It relied on caring about the characters, and this would have been easier over a longer form like the novel.

V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad) – Man-man

Everyone used to think Man-man was crazy, but now the narrator is not so sure. Man-man did eccentric things, and was clever too – he got his dog to leave droppings on people’s clothes and then came by later and was given the clothes, and took them away and sold them. When the dog got run over, he became a prophet, claiming to have seen God, and built up a following. Finally he said he would be crucified, and tied himself to a cross and asked people to stone him. They hesitated, and he encouraged them more, and then finally they did start stoning him, and he started cursing and demanding to be let down again. A humorous story, but also with lots to say about the conflict between human aspirations and reality.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya) – A Meeting in the Dark

I’m referring to Ngugi by the name he now uses, although in this book the story is credited to James Ngugi. It’s about a preacher’s son who is about to go off to university, and is facing a conflict between the new and old, African and European. He’s got his girlfriend pregnant and doesn’t know what to do – she’s been circumcised, which is frowned upon by the British authorities and the Church, so he can’t marry her without offending his preacher father and destroying his own chances for career advancement. I liked the setup, but the ending felt too extreme and sudden – it was clear the character was trapped, but killing his girlfriend felt too dramatic and unrealistic. It was a very short story so it probably just needed to be established more. I liked the issues the story dealt with, though – just the ending was a letdown.

Hal Porter (Australia) – Francis Silver

This one is about the destruction of the romantic ideals of youth. The character’s mother always used to tell him stories about her courtship with Francis Silver before she married his father. It was a familiar part of his childhood, always referred to jokingly by both his mother and father. When his mother dies, he takes her store of postcards from Francis and returns them to him. But Francis can’t remember her – the romance is destroyed, and his mother’s fond memories made to seem ridiculous. He’d even planned to give Francis a lock of his mother’s hair that she’d wanted to give him but never did. But he doesn’t give it to him, and instead burns it. Meanwhile he “had made up an outline of lies to satisfy and comfort my father, for whom I felt the truth, as I saw it, to be of the wrong shape.” I love that line, and the subtle sadness of the story and what it says about the importance we place on memories that are often completely wrong.

Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) – The Sacrificial Egg

This is a very short short story, with quite a powerful ending. Like Ngugi’s story, it deals with the conflict of new and old. Julius is a clerk, and has had a Christian education which he thinks “placed him above such superstitious stuff” as the traditional beliefs of his people. But one night he is out late and hears the night spirit and starts running, and steps on an egg at a crossroads. He realises it is a sacrificial egg, put out by someone trying to get rid of misfortune, and that by stepping on it he has taken the misfortune onto himself. He still struggles to convince himself that he doesn’t believe in all that “superstitious stuff”, but it remains a fact that after he stepped on the egg, a smallpox epidemic hit the town and killed the woman he was going to marry, the woman he was visiting that night.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, Chinua Achebe, commonwealth literature, fiction, Hal Porter, Mavis Gallant, ngugi wa thiong'o, short stories, V.S. Naipaul

Continuing the series, here are my notes on the short stories by Randolph Stow, Janet Frame, Andrew Salkey and Ezekiel Mphahlele.

Randolph Stow (Australia) – Magic

This is based on the ’sulumwoya’ myth of the Trobriand Islands, where incest between a brother and a sister is the supreme sexual taboo. The introduction says he took the myth and added psychological realism and more description of the setting. But I couldn’t see much evidence of either – it felt like a traditional myth. The lust was heavily foreshadowed from the first scene where the girl drinks coconut water and the brother watches as two trickles “flowed down her body, over the brown breasts, to the waistband of her skirt.” I didn’t find the story particularly surprising or new.

Janet Frame (New Zealand) – Two Sheep and Boy’s Will

Two Sheep is a fable, based on two sheep travelling to the slaughter house. The first sheep knows its fate and the other doesn’t. The first one keeps saying how beautiful everything is, and the second one complains all the time about the heat, the dust, etc. The first one is in denial when he gets to the slaughter house, seeing it as a “pleasant little house” ready for a “seaside holiday”. But then he can deny it no longer, and slumps exhausted in a corner, where he is left for dead by the farmer and escapes.  Then he falls in with another flock, and starts complaining about the heat and dust, and the sheep next to him says how beautiful everything is.

Boy’s Will is a very different story, about a boy, Peter, with a high IQ, who is suffering under the weight of his mother’s and aunt’s expectations. He got interested in storms and began recording them:

“He’ll be a meteorologist”, his mother said, almost destroying his new passion with the weight of her tomorrow.

The pressure makes him rageful, but he finally finds pleasure in the simple act of making a kite and flying it, then patiently repairing it when the wind tears it. I liked both stories in different ways, and was impressed by the wide range of styles used by the same author.

Andrew Salkey (Panama/Jamaica) – Anancy

Salkey uses the traditional Ashanti story of the spider Anancy, but gives it a new form, exploring the fate of the African in the New World (according to the introduction!). Anancy goes on a voyage of self-discovery to the spirit world (symbolising Africa). He fights the ghosts and defeats them, but is finally defeated by his own spirit. Again according to the introduction, it shows the duality of West Indian identity, the West Indian’s inability to defeat the African presence, and they are finally reconciled. To be honest I didn’t get all of that from my first reading, but I can sort of see it now.

Ezekiel Mphahlele (South Africa) – The Living and the Dead

A racist white man, Stoffel Visser, is forced for the first time to see his servant, Jackson, as a human being, when Jackson goes missing. Stoffel speaks to Jackson’s wife, and sees a letter from Jackson’s father with pictures of his family. Finally Jackson turns up, and it turns out he was beaten up and imprisoned for responding to a white man who called him a monkey. Stoffel is forced to confront himself and his views, but quickly becomes angry, and takes refuge in action and duty as an avoidance strategy – “He did not want to think and feel. He wanted to do something.” He concentrates on dispatching a report. “He was a white man, and he must be responsible. To be white and to be responsible were the same thing.” I liked the way the story was constructed, with the initial mystery over Jackson’s disappearance, then the suggestion that Stoffel will have a great epiphany, then the more realistic outcome of restoring normality and avoiding hard questions.

Tomorrow, the final installment of this short story collection: Mavis Gallant, V.S. Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hal Porter and Chinua Achebe.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews Andrew Salkey, book review, commonwealth literature, Ezekiel Mphahlele, fiction, Janet Frame, Randolph Stow, short stories

This is a continuation from yesterday’s post, which was becoming too long! Today, I’m reviewing stories by Mordecai Richler, Lee Kok Liang, Wilson Harris, Frank Sargeson and Amos Tutuola.

Mordecai Richler (Canada) – The Summer my Grandmother was Supposed to Die

The story is a narrated by a child, and starts with his grandmother being diagnosed with gangrene and a doctor saying “She won’t last a month.” Gradually she lasts longer and longer, and there are some good observations about how the family is prepared to help for weeks or months, but as it turns into years it’s very different. It was closely observed and witty sometimes, but overall it felt like quite a familiar satire of a Jewish family, and the ending was very flat.

Lee Kok Liang (Malaysia) – When the Saints Go Marching

This was really slow-moving at first, with pages of description of a man driving home, feeling a slight throb at his temples, unlocking the gates, driving up the path, turning off the engine, looking at the back of his hand, etc., etc. I found it quite dull, but it gets better as it goes into why the character feels guilty and tortured on the anniversary of independence, and tells how he kissed his sister-in-law on the day independence was proclaimed, driving her to suicide and his wife to mental illness. He is tortured by his own actions as he looks after his wife and never gets the sons he built the large house for. The disastrous consequences of that one moment felt extreme to me, but perhaps in that time and place it really would have happened like that.

Wilson Harris (Guyana) – Kanaima

The story is infused with death throughout. A group of Indians are travelling from their home village which had been destroyed, but everywhere they go they see death before them in the form of Kanaima, the spirit of death and evil. In the village of Tumatumari they can’t escape it either – they’re warned, but are too tired and have to stop. Kanaima comes that night, bringing death but in an unexpected way. Yet after all that ominous build-up, the story ends on a strangely ambiguous note, as the person who apparently plunged into a waterfall is clinging to a vine. “Kanaima alone knew whether she would reach the cliff top.” It’s a great evocation of a nightmarish world of death and the struggle for survival, and I liked that after the apparent inevitability of death there was unexpected hope.

Frank Sargeson (New Zealand) – A Man and His Wife

The language here is plain and unadorned – Sargeson was reacting against “the formal language of the English novelists”. It’s a bit reminiscent of dirty realism, although it was written earlier. The story is of a man during the slump when times were hard. His roommate has split from his wife and is really close to his dog, but then the dog gets run over and he gets a bird, and again he spends all his time with it and lavishes affection on it. He leaves the cage open so the bird can get exercise, and one day he leaves the window open too, saying the bird loves him too much to fly away. It flies away. He goes back to his wife.

I’ve still got the wife, he said. Yes, I said. The wife never let me down, he said. No, I said. It was all I could think of to say.

There’s a real lack of human relationships in the story, and the relationships with the dog and the bird are clearly substitutes. Even the narrator and his roommate don’t communicate really. Very spare and bleak, with some dark humour.

Amos Tutuola (Nigeria) – The Complete Gentleman

Tutuola bases his stories in Yoruba myths and legends, and this story had that feeling, although there were some modern details like petrol drums and bombers. The narrator is following a quest, to find the daughter of the head of the town. He discovers that she went off with someone who looked like a complete gentleman, with the finest clothes and so on. But as the gentleman left the town, he returned the clothes he’d rented from people along the way, and then returning body parts, until eventually all that was left was a skull. It’s a real morality tale, with the morals spelled out in sub-headings for those who missed them, e.g. “Do Not Follow Unknown Man’s Beauty”. I liked the bizarreness of the story, though, and it was well told.

More to follow tomorrow: Randolph Stow, Janet Frame, Andrew Salkey and Ezekiel Mphahlele.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews amos tutuola, book review, commonwealth literature, fiction, frank sargeson, lee kok liang, mordecai richler, wilson harris

There are some excellent stories in here, from big names like V.S. Naipaul, Patrick White,  George Lamming, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (although this book is so old he is credited as James Ngugi, his birth name which he rejected as a sign of colonial influence). Also some good ones from writers I didn’t know, like R.K. Narayan from India and Amos Tutuola from Nigeria.

The editors, Anna Rutherford and Donald Hannah, have also provided for each of the 18 stories a couple of pages of introduction giving background about the author and a context for the story, often linking it to others in the collection and to the rest of the author’s work, which I really liked. I made notes on each of the stories – a lot of detail, I know, but pick and choose the ones you’re interested in. I just wanted to remember the stories, because I don’t own a copy of the book. I’ve split them over several posts, so this is part 1 – R.K. Narayan, Patrick White, George Lamming and Peter Cowan.

R.K. Narayan (India) – A Horse and Two Goats

This story draws a lot of humour from the conflict of incompatible cultures, as an American tourist tries to buy a statue of a horse from an old man in a small Indian village. There is complete misunderstanding throughout, as they have no common language. The old man thinks the tourist is a police officer because of his khaki clothes, and the tourist assumes the old man owns the statue when in fact he’s just watching his goats. The tourist’s conversation is all about money, ownership and practicalities, while the old man’s replies are about tradition and spirituality. There’s also a contrast of wealth – the old man’s lifelong dream is to sell his goats to raise 20 rupees with which to start a small shop selling nuts and sweets; the tourist easily pulls out 120 rupees from his wallet to buy the statue. The horse means different things to each of them – for the old man it will become an avatar to redeem the good people at the end of the world; to the tourist it’s a commodity to be bought. And to the young people in the village, they are “hardly aware of its existence.” Really enjoyed this one.

Patrick White (Australia) – Down at the Dump

According to the introduction, White wanted to explore the narrowness of Australian suburbia, but not to be completely critical – he wanted also to show the “extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which alone could make bearable the lives of such people”. The snooty Hogbens look down on their neighbours the Whalleys, who scour dumps for goods to use or sell. The central action is the funeral of Mrs Hogben’s sister Daise, who was shameful in the eyes of society but was actually practising Christ’s message of love, especially for the downtrodden – she took in a man she met at the showground who was down on his luck, and was ridiculed for spending time with a “scabby deadbeat” and “a Roman Catholic for extra value”. The Hogbens’ daughter Meg meets Lum Whalley at the dump, which is next to the cemetery, and they kiss. She wants to explore and discover life as her aunt Daise did, not be content with the narrow, judgmental world of her parents, which is mercilessly evoked through little details like having to clean her shoes every five minutes even though they immediately get dusty again, or to put plastic over the pixies in the garden to protect them from the rain – it’s all about surface appearances, whereas Daise and Meg are looking for something deeper and more true, even if socially unacceptable.

George Lamming (Barbados) – A Wedding in Spring

Again the comedy here is from a clash of cultures, although there’s also a serious undertone and a sadness to it, as the characters are Barbadians in England, displaced from their familiar culture and trying to mimic English customs. The lack of a cultural anchor or authority is clear – Beresford and his sister Flo argue over the marriage of Beresford to an Englishwoman, and constantly try to guess what their mother would do or want them to do. They seem adrift and far from the certainties of home. There’s some slapstick comedy, for example Beresford’s friend Knickerbocker ripping his trousers, but there’s also the sadness of living in an alien culture, trying to do the right thing but not knowing how or having the money. The friendships with the people from “back home” are strong, despite the arguments, but English people, even the bride, are virtually absent – although the wedding is central to the story, the bride is only mentioned once in passing.

Peter Cowan (Australia) – The Tractor

This is similar to White’s story in its criticism of Australian suburbia, but Cowan has no interest in finding mystery or poetry – suburbia in this story is a definitively negative thing, seeming to have a life of its own, swallowing up the land for no reason other than to give developers a tax break. It’s a relentless invasion – a hermit puts up a fight, and a developer’s wife helps him, but it feels hopeless. The wife, Ann, tries to argue against her husband, but he just says “You can’t stop progress.” She calls it “The unanswerable answer” and says “So we must all conform”. I liked the feeling evoked in this story, and how the land and suburbia seemed like characters of their own, beyond the human characters who were all pretty powerless in the end.

That’s it for now – more to follow tomorrow, with notes on Mordecai Richler, Lee Kok Liang, Wilson Harris, Frank Sargeson and Amos Tutuola.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, commonwealth literature, fiction, george lamming, patrick white, peter cowan, r.k. narayan, short stories

I liked the premise of this book. It’s set in 1983 against the backdrop of the Grenadian revolution, and is basically a love story, with a lot of complications due to the family backgrounds of Ramona and Fabian and also the turbulent political events. I like this combination of personal and political, and the plot moved nicely along, allowing the discussion of political events and racial prejudice.

What I thought didn’t work so well was that a lot of the major plot points relied on large coincidences. Ramona and Fabian get together based on a chance encounter on a street corner, and then it just so happens that Fabian’s mother had jilted Ramona’s father years ago, and so we get to hear their story too. Later in the book, when Ramona has been kidnapped, Fabian’s estranged great-grandfather (who is looking for a way to win back Fabian’s approval) just happens to be in the same hospital ward as her kidnapper and to overhear him mumbling to himself about Ramona’s precise location.

Of course coincidences do happen in real life. And perhaps in a small island like Grenada things like this are more likely than in the large countries I’ve always lived in. But still, coincidences in fiction often ring false for me. Perhaps it’s because I write fiction myself, and I know how hard it can be to arrange the plot so that particular characters have a plausible reason to meet and interact as you want them to. It can take weeks or months of thinking and rewriting to get it to happen. Having them characters just happen to turn up in the same room feels like a bit of a cheat.

Perhaps it was also that the book was quite short, just 115 pages, and so the events happened very fast. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with coincidences in themselves – they just needed more time to be set them up and established in the reader’s mind. Overall this was certainly a good read, and gave an interesting insight into a fascinating moment in history. It felt as if with an additional hundred pages to flesh out the characters and make the fast-moving plot more believable, it could have been a really excellent book, but as it stands it was, for me, enjoyable but not spectacular.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, grenada, grenadian revolution, october all over

What struck me about these stories is the similarity between traditional folk tales in different parts of the world. I grew up, of course, with British or European stories, whereas these stories are either of Carib or African origin. Yet many of them sounded familiar, not in the specifics but in the general themes — explaining the world and how things came to be the way they are, through stories with animals as characters illustrating different aspects of human behaviour.

What was also interesting about these stories was that the moral was not always clear. The spider Anansi figures heavily in the African-origin stories, and he often tricks the other animals or acts selfishly, taking advantage of their generosity or trust. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. The outcome wasn’t as predictable as I’d expected it to be.

The first few stories are from the Carib people, the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean who gave the region its name but suffered heavily under European colonisation and are now very few in number. They explain the origins of the people, saying they used to live on the moon but saw in the bright procession of worlds around them there was one that looked dull and needed cleaning. So they went down to Earth on cloud chariots to clean it, but got stuck here when the cloud chariots broke loose and floated away. They cried out to Kabo Tano ( the ‘Ancient One’) for help, and he gave them a huge Coomacka Tree with all kinds of fruit and vegetable. Then he ordered them to cut it down, and each one took cuttings from it. “And so, to this day, every Carib has food close to his dwelling.” Then there are stories to explain the animals, for example how the sun-spirit Arawidi created the dog as a companion for humans, molding it out of fish. The part he held in his hand became the nose, and that’s why every dog has a cold nose.

Then the majority of the stories are those the enslaved Africans brought with them to the West Indies from their homelands. Many of them are originally Ashanti tales – in the West African language Twi, the word for spider is “ananse”. The characters in these stories are animals, but with human characteristics, for example living in houses, wearing clothes, talking, paying each other money. Anansi the spider, the central character, is often greedy and selfish, scheming to outwit the other animals, but is portrayed sympathetically – as the weakest animal, he can’t compete physically with the tigers etc, so has to use his wits.

One interesting parallel with the Carib stories was the trajectory of all the animals living together as friends at first, before pulling apart and becoming enemies as a result of some trick. For example in the Carib stories, the reason man needed the dog as a companion was that all the other animals had deserted him after times were hard and he started hunting them to stave off his hunger. In the African stories, Anansi and Tiger used to be friends, but Anansi stole Tiger’s lunch one day and so Tiger retreated deep into the bush and Anansi hid in a tree, safe in his web.

I would be interested to know how this book was put together – what the original sources were, and how much the modern-day author Philip Sherlock adapted them. It was always a question in my mind, particularly when I saw striking parallels with other cultures. For example the character of the Wise Owl appears in both the African and Carib stories, and is of course also familiar from European stories. It’s quite amazing that people in three different corners of the world should see an owl in the same way – reminds me of the parallels I’m seeing in “The Golden Bough”, a massive compilation of myths and traditional beliefs from around the world that I’m reading gradually over several months. For me, this was the most interesting part of these stories. I enjoyed them for themselves and their characters too, but mostly for the unexpected feeling of deep familiarity.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, short stories, west indian folk tales

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

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