Our Wives Under the Sea is a devastating tale of love, loss, and the sea.
Julia Armfield writes about Leah’s return from the bottom of the ocean, a research trip in a submarine which was meant to be three weeks and not five months. The book is told through her and her wife, Miri’s point of view as the gap between their perspectives widen, gape, with the weight of everything unknown and unknowable. Leah describes her time at the bottom of the ocean in fragments, while Miri picks up the fragments of Leah on her return to the surface. The chapters are short and pacey, leading into the next and the next and the next. They feel like snippets of memory, recalled with an urgency to fill the gaps. The perspectives, Leah’s in particular, narrate a mind unravelling. It turns out to be written in retrospect in a desperate attempt to make sense of things.
I like how the book chews on the themes of knowing and seeing: to me, it’s about when objectivity tries to encroach on the unknown, and about the secular human need for empiricism. To rationalise the unknown into knowns. There is the marine science, Catholicism, folklore: the elitism of scientism. Leah punctuates their early relationship with facts taken from her father’s book on oceans. Then, as Miri tries to connect with her once she comes back, Leah carries on spouting facts until she eventually grows quiet, at which point Miri takes over, interrupting the silence with scraps of knowledge. The book circles slowly around the truth of what happened to Leah: the knowns which are unknowable.
Eyes follow you through the book. The motif recurs with eerie timing. There is what we can see and what we can’t, but seeing is not knowing. There’s also a pattern of skin. Paper hearts, scars, translucency, touching, not touching. There is seeing and there is feeling, one looking outward and the other inward.
There is also the unknowability of people. Miri says
‘I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It’s nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about their partner and not wish they’d get to their point a little faster: OK, so, you’re saying he likes long walks, you’re saying she’s a Capricorn, skip to the end.’
She points out that there’s understanding why one might love someone, and there’s truly understanding why they do. There are passages in the book which are just lists of things that have happened. The mosaic of moments which make up a relationship that aren’t cohesive or reduceable to anything.
Then there is the eerie possibility of conspiracy above and below the sea. Armfield leaves you to question how incidental any of the events are. Whether Leah was pushed or pulled under the waves.
Ultimately, the ocean isn’t for humans. It represents the largest sections of the planet that are unknown. Our Wives Under the Sea gave me goosebumps. It reminded me that humans are so small to the ocean, and in this case, Leah is smaller still in the hierarchy of humans. Our determination to push boundaries and shed light on darkness seems trivial in comparison to the vastness of the water surrounding us. The desire to know and therefore own gets us further into environments not made for us, and when we’re there, there’s only aluminium between us and not us.
I read Chelsea Girls, Eileen Myles’ autobiography, without knowing anything about the author. I was told that the book would tell me all I needed to know. It starts in the middle and continues as a series of distinct stories which go back and forth from Myles’ childhood to their present where they are in their 30s. Chelsea Girls is overflowing with the events of 30 years well lived, but I’ll be honest, it’s not the particular instances that have stuck in my mind. Especially given the fragmented nature of the narrative, it almost feels like they’re secondary to larger things at play. So I’m going to write about just one aspect, which is Myles’ constant meditation on and renegotiation of self.
Throughout the book, Myles’ voice is distant, the narrative marked by absence. While the sensations they describe are vivid -visceral even- cognition is reserved for musings that are often detached from the moment, from characters and the reader. It’s not that we have limited access to Myles’ subjectivity, but that subjectivity is often only found between the lines in passages of dialogue, which are strings of free-floating speech which run into each other and are curiously sparse. They relate conversation without its contents, record their interest with boredom, simultaneously having a good and a bad time. There is an intensity to Myles’ prose, but it is as if it is all so intense that they become numb, or perhaps that in detaching themselves, they are able to let it all in. There are long sections of introspection, but these are often wry, self-knowing, dismissed with a shrug.
The book is told with two voices, one hovering above sensations of drunkenness and the night, and the other high on the present. It is hard to know whether the estrangement comes as a result of retrospect or is felt in the moment. Myles encounters life with bemused voyeurism, casually mentioning addiction and abuse in passing. A insight on this comes on page 174, when they write that
‘I have always been afraid I would vanish, would cease to be, if I ever stopped trying to decide who I was, how I looked. Since childhood I had always been standing in the excessive glare of my father’s eyes, even when he wasn’t drunk. When he died I began watching myself all the time, for fear of being pitched into the blackness.’
At the same time, this watching of themselves collapses the boundaries between them and others. Their self is permeable. It’s interesting, because they are at once so completely outside of others’ expectations and also completely made up of them, like they are trying on a series of selves for size. I liked how non-judgementally they relate the fashion trends they followed as a teenager, comparing them to a uniform, or the sex they had with various men out of curiosity and for want of anything else to do. There is no coming out moment, in terms of gender, sexuality, or anything else: it’s all incidental, a process which does not separate them from anyone else.
They write that
‘I can remember a time when my name was for other people, before I even knew it was mine. The anonymous quality of its vowels—’”Ei” being a word you heard a lot. Later I would know it was a pronoun, but before I could write, before anything had established that different contexts for sounds, words, meant different things, the “Ei” I heard a lot when people spoke seemed to mean “you”.’
The ‘Leen’ is what contains the information, addresses them. This reminds me of the poststructuralist playfulness of Arundhati Roy, the child’s construction of the self in tandem with language. From an early age, Myles learns that ‘I/Ei’ is all selves. There doesn’t seem to be enough space for Ei/leen as ‘me’. But this also seems to make it easier for them to slip between layers of uniform than if the identities were internalised as ‘me’.
This is how they weave selfhood into the fabric of the book. As the writing rambles and merges, commas and full stops replacing quotation and exclamation marks, paragraph breaks and ellipses, you get a sense of the continual construction of Eileen. The prose style is dream-like in general, chapters placed in a disorientating order, Myles losing the thread of their narrative to find it again, oscillating between hyper-lucidity and strangeness. As a reader, you’re very aware of Myles’ presence as a curator of the narrative, tagging along for the ride as they tangle their thread and decide which bits to skip over. Their stories are always getting waylaid, the feelings and patterns that of a poet or (and) drunkard. The prose feels incidental and half done: the situation doesn’t contain clues for what they will do next; they act seemingly without apprehension.
Myles’ writing is brilliantly astute. My favourite images include when they talk about the night being made of sounds and temperatures, and that they were ‘a dot in bed that night. Just that tiny.’ This only adds to the impression that they are a vessel for sensations, watching everything within them with a poet’s distance. The moment is emptied of its contents, and all we remember is the taste.
Having said this, I struggled to keep reading continuously. It gets pacier when stories start connecting, filling gaps in the timeline, but ultimately, it feels a bit like a book which is designed to eject you. I know that this isn’t true for all its readers— the friend who gave me the book couldn’t have felt more differently— but it felt to me that the purpose of the fractured, estranging narrative is almost to dare you to read on. It doesn’t tell one big story to propel you along. Nor does it give you time to catch up as it sweeps along, dodging periodically down various side streets as it does so. The fact that I’m not into short stories or a part of the queer community surely doesn’t help the matter, but as fascinating as I found the text, as much as I appreciated the imagery and the thoughts it chewed around, I was left at the end with a curious sense of emptiness, of having been told a story at the end of a night and not quite remembering it the next morning.
Fans are clamouring for a sequel to How to be a Bad Book Lover, and who am I to disappoint them? Here is another instalment of hot takes on the bookish world. Try not to gasp.
Don’t Read the Classics (if you don’t want to)
Be wary of the classics. There are a lot of famous books that should not be read today for pleasure. I get into conversations about fiction when folks learn that I studied English literature. If I meet one more person (man) who normally reads nonfiction but is currently reading Moby Dick and Dostoyevsky, I might spontaneously combust. There are books that people read when they don’t really like fiction. Or fun. Invariably, I ask them how it’s going and they scrunch up their face and tell me it’s slow-going. I feign surprise.
‘The canon’ is useful to know if you’re studying English literature; you can’t go far without engaging with it. But one of the first things we learned in English literature was that ‘the canon’ is not decided by those who read it. It is a list handed down and it’s up to you to work out why it’s there and whether you want it there in the future.
Now, I always was (and still am) into the old stuff. I found it interesting to understand why a particular text made such and such an impact on literature and contemporary society. But then, I got marks for slagging it off. This is the caveat to my point: I have the privilege of already having the clout. I don’t feel the need to prove myself, since I get to dismiss even the authors I haven’t read with a certain amount of authority and long words. Plus, I got brownie points for reading unpleasant things in the first place, limiting the amount of self-motivation required. But since I have got all this, I get to say: don’t read ‘the classics’ because someone tells you to. Lots of people reading something 100+ years ago is not a reliable indicator of whether it is good. Other people are boring and many millions of people have read utter crap. On the other hand, if you trust that the person has good taste and isn’t trying to signal anything with their reading choices, go for it. But approach with caution.
Good Reads is bad reads?
Right, next I’m coming for Good Reads. And this really is an unpopular opinion. Most of my bookish friends have at least dabbled. They track what they’re reading, look at what other people are reading, see what they have to read next, look at people’s reviews. And I love that for them. But I think that Good Reads is what’s fuelling performative book reading. I am so pro Did Not Finish-ing a book! Some books are not worth your precious time, and you’ll know by page 100 if you are feeling it or not. But now even our books are sucked into the world of stats and likes. A book becomes a project to be invested in, the reward for which being a post. Call me a dinosaur, but I’m not into it. Plus, I don’t care what the vast majority of other people think about books. I learned the hard way that even people I love (online and real) will make different choices from me. There are a select few people in my life who will give the hard sell on a book and I will listen. But why should I care about Sheila from Norridge? And, I know: ‘says the book blogger’. But this is completely and totally different. Promise. So I’ll carry on writing my long long list of completed books offline.
Collecting books
Here’s one that a solid majority of bookish fiends will not relate to. I don’t get book collections. Or for that matter, book shops.
I know, I know. This is especially heinous given that I’d like to get into publishing or bookselling, which most would generally agree is supported by the selling of books. This is not me railing against the book industry. Talk about falling on one’s sword. Not that it would make me much less employable (sobs in English literature graduate).
As a person who reads pretty quickly when she gets going, buying books could be potentially bankrupting. The solution? SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARIES! Libraries are massively under-utilised. To my shame, I only got a library card after finishing my undergrad. This was my first since the days of swimming lessons and bartering with the Balsall Heath librarians to get more than the allowed amount out on my card each week. To this day, there is something about chlorine and book smells together.
Choosing which books to read is a bit of a gamble. Sometimes, you get a dud. I don’t want to pay for my reading mistakes. In a library, I can start and not finish 6 books at a time if I so wish. As I have expressed in part 2 of this argument, we need to cultivate a culture of DNFing.
What’s more, I’ve only reread about three books in my life. I will buy a book purely for the purpose of lending out every now and again, especially if it’s not one normally found on library shelves. But I don’t need to keep every book I’ve read. It should still be in the world somewhere in the unlikely event I want to revisit it.
And sure, library books have due dates. But most of the time, you can renew it, and in Glasgow at least, the worst you’ll get for a late book is a gentle tsk.
Reading ruts and why reading is like a bike
I think that people massively underestimate the habit itself of reading.
I completely agree that if you’re not into reading, you’re probably not reading the right stuff. But I think that even when the right stuff comes along, there’s still a bit of effort involved in turning the wheels. This is why reading books is like riding a bike. No, not that once you learn, you never unlearn. I’m arguing the opposite: with reading, you gather motivation as you would speeding down a hill. You develop the impulse to pick up a book the more you’re into a plot or world or character. Then, when you’ve finished it -after a short period of mourning, in my case- you go itching for another. Then, you start on something less pacey, less immediately inviting. But you’ve gathered speed from going down the hill, and fingers crossed, that momentum should get you through the uphill of the beginning, instead of the resistance when starting from stationary.
Now, say you are starting from stationary. You’ve already ground to a halt. Maybe because you just can’t find the time or willingness to read something you know you want or should read, and so you’ve ended up reading nothing instead. That’s when you get out your Terry Pratchett, your Beth O’Leary or Mhairi McFarlane. Don’t go for short stories: you think they are your friend. They are not your friend; once you finish a story, you will be overwhelmed with a sadness that you have to start a whole new one again. (That may just be me.) If there are authors you know do it for you, find a world to get lost in, a fantasy saga which doesn’t take itself too seriously and which opens its arms and promises to never end until it does but shh not for a while.
And so you have it. Opinions on the bookosphere from someone who spends half their time feeling ordained by the literary world to have such opinions, and the other half feeling a huge amount of imposter syndrome, convinced that they don’t read enough books or the right ones or in the right way.
Let us all read our own way.
And argue fiercely against anyone who reads otherwise.
Film Club is a gem of a series. It follows Evie, who is bound to the house by anxiety, her friend Noa, and their long-standing, very serious weekly film club which comes under threat when Noa gets a job in another city. We are let into Evie’s small cocoon as it is on the brink of opening. Not that she knows it yet.
The scope is small, but the stakes are high. Jobs in Manchester, not being able to leave the house: these are the things that get in the way of life. Some things can’t be conquered by love or fixed by a speech. Most of the big things are swept under the rug because they are too painful to talk about. Instead, Evie and Noa escape into niceties or films. That is, until it all starts to spill over; things change in perspective and they go ‘you know, why not?’ And this is just enough to fill the void when people move on and you’re left behind, not ready to move forward. Film Club is a celebration of moving at your own pace and the triumphs that only you can see.
The episodes are marked by a series of repetitions which start to falter: a testament to the precarity of the lives we set up for ourselves. Change shivers vibrations down our webs of interconnectedness but they ultimately hold us when something is cut loose. Evie’s university friend must announce that he can’t stay long, to Evie’s disappointed acceptance. At first, he’s just a busy, flaky character, but reiterated over episodes, it becomes obvious that he just doesn’t have space in his life for Evie’s rigidly enforced table of events. Blink and you miss it, but he’s slowly withdrawing from her life -already withdrawn in fact- but holding on for fear of shattering Evie’s comforting routine. A small but very touching moment comes when Evie hears him and gives him permission to withdraw, accepting a change that has been approaching for a long time. In the same way, the pattern of weekly film clubs, Evie’s mum repeating the same responses to each of Evie’s friends, starts to spin out of its rotation. It just remains to be seen whether it is for the better or for the worse. Most of the filming is in the house, with not much scene setting or time passing; characters are on top of each other like their dialogue. So Film Club captures the safety and limitations of a space for someone who is agoraphobic. The house exudes familiarity, Evie carving out an independence and routine out of survival mode, but as the repetition unravels, the house starts feeling too small for Evie.
At the same time, despite neuroses and brittle happiness, Evie is completely normal. Something I loved was that of all the things Evie struggles with, it isn’t romantic and sexual relationships, a sense of humour, or having strong opinions. While her mental health leaves her more open to abuse, she still exerts a massive amount of control and influence over her sphere. Evie is a people-pleaser, constantly walking a tightrope above the possibility of a breakdown, but she is not helpless. Neither is she quiet and reserved, yet the series watches her find a voice. She is a delightfully complex character, collapsing any stereotypes which form a binary between those who struggle and those who don’t. It is not a coming of age narrative. She knows who she is, she just needs to make it work with the world.
Evie’s anxiety is quietly echoed by her mum, Suz, who feels bound to the house for quite different reasons. She is just as isolated, stubbornly resisting any hint of patronisation or pity for events from her past, presiding over her Queendom while twisted into knots by worry. Her distinct patter of vocabulary shared with Evie’s boyfriend, consisting of ‘biccies’, and going for ‘Potters’, blankets a deep fear of being overbearing, a constant tug to fix and sort, and a much quieter sadness. She, her daughters, and their neighbour form the lynchpin of the show (sorry Noa). The women are so sincere and emotional and messy and hurtful and dismissive. They draw power and resilience from how much they care. There is an unadulterated joy when they are all on a sofa dressed up as bridesmaids getting outrageously drunk on bubbly and playing the ‘the rug game’ where they excavate things that have been swept under the proverbial rug.
That said, we need a moment for Noa’s watchful, tentative affection for Evie. The two ping-pong a volley of film quotes across the gulf of everything unsaid, but share a language which doesn’t need words. Film Club is a show with a lot of awkwardness and a lot of heart.
The Shipping News is one of my favourite books. But years have passed since I read it, and I wanted to remember why I liked it. Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain, writes about a bumbling, self-conscious man called Quoyle who moves with his aunt and two daughters up to where his family came from, Newfoundland. Untethered by a lack of purpose and chased north by painful memories, he joins a newspaper -the Gammy Bird- and gets to know the people of the rugged landscape.
The prose style is the first thing to hit you. Like it’s been left in the corrosive sea air, it is stripped of gloss. Proulx’s writing is gruff, skipping over pronouns and verbs so it reads like a set of notes for one of Quoyle’s news articles or fishermen exchanging news as they gut fish. Bunched up and spanning weeks or years over a paragraph, the book stops for moments of startling presentness. Scenes start ahead of you, bursting into the action, leaving you to fill in the gaps. As if bracing against the elements, vulnerability comes unbidden and unwelcomed, stuffed away to be peaked at when alone. Quoyle’s interiority is snatched between jobs, sparse asides to himself before the next thing.
Many of these asides are headlines that Quoyle makes out of his life. Having learned to write news for a paper in New York, Quoyle sees headlines everywhere: ‘Man Dies of Broken Heart’; ‘Car Disintegrates on Remote Goatpath’; ‘Dog Farts Fell Family of Four’; ‘Stupid Man Does Wrong Thing Once More’. Beneath the irony is a genuine need to contain the overwhelming enormity of life. The headlines slowly reduce in volume as his life becomes far more interesting than the headlines he writes for the Gammy Bird. The mandatory quota of car crashes and sex scandal stories in the Newfoundland paper are fetched from far away places and bulked up with poetic license, or else fabricated completely, using photos from a folder kept for this purpose. Ultimately, the news is just a set of stories. Various deaths and a single beheading could almost form footnotes to the construction of a new boat and Quoyle’s daughter’s chaotic behaviour. Quoyle learns to write his own story, one that can’t be reduced to a few headlines.
As Quoyle comes into himself as a writer of his own story and of others, Proulx leaves an intriguing vagueness over the question of whether we are fated to act out the stories others have left for us. Legacy is an eerie force which welcomes Quoyle to his family homeland: a place where bays hold his name, a hill holds a Quoyle house lashed down by wires, and people see his ancestry in his chin. He finds his roots, but does he like them? He is haunted, on multiple levels, by a family he has never met, until he finds his own plot in the narrative of place and family. Proulx shows the curse and the blessing of old community.
Proulx perfects the real patter of the community’s dialogue. Folks warm to a subject before launching their monologues, which are then interrupted or swerve onto other subjects as confidence is lost. Most of these are stories from the past, well worn and brought out for the newcomer. Kids do not let the grown ups finish what they’re saying and characters talk around their subjects, filling silences with inane small talk.
But Proulx also has a gift for images. She writes that Billy, a newspaper colleague, ‘seemed stored in an envelope; the flap sometimes lifted, his flattened self sliding onto the table’. She has a tendency to write a paragraph composed of a list, as if Quoyle is scanning a room, a crowd, a newspaper, endlessly taking it in. Playfully, Proulx refuses to constrain her images, painting the world as far as she can reach. Into the tangible normalcy of the world she sprinkles moments of oddness, where reality refuses to conform to conventional images.
The communities dotted around the coast live in greater proximity to death. There is a fascination with drownings and crashes, Mrs Buggit expecting her husband’s death at sea since they got married, hoping only to have his body to bury, unlike generations of Buggits before. The characters respect the sea more than their lives, pulled by its unknowable tides to go out year upon year for fishing and commuting. The many jagged rocks that line the coast each have a name, and each have their victims, a list with which occupies Billy for most of a boat-ride. There is the sense that death makes them alive. Once there, Quoyle decides not to leave remote Newfoundland. He feels his life only just beginning. He leaves the states after his no-good wife dies in a car crash, and uncannily gets put on car crashes for the Gammy Bird. Later into the book, he receives a call about violent riots in L.A. and New York. The perception of their relative safety vanishes, the binary becoming those that live with danger as an old friend, and those who hold it as a stranger which meaninglessly attacks. Quoyle is baptised in his own near-drowning and learns the true power of the sea. His previous life dies, the one that was not really living. Living life to its fullest because of mortality isn’t a subtle message in The Shipping News, but it’s a good one.
Hear ye, hear ye, come one and all. For we have been blessed by a very good show. Riot Women is a blazing, unflinching wrecking-ball of a BBC series and I for one want more.
For those who haven’t heard the naff-sounding advertisements for the series, Riot Women, written by Sally Wainwright, follows a group of mostly menopausal women on their quest to form a rock band. Organised by Landlady Jess, it is fuelled by an unlikely friendship between tight-lipped Beth and liability Kitty, and backed up by Nisha and Holly, two police officers who begin the series by tackling Kitty to the ground. One of the opening scenes finds Kitty in a supermarket, downing stolen vodka, drunkenly stuffing tampons in her pocket, and struggling to get the packaging off a kitchen knife. Then, she punches Holly in the nose and has her smile elongated by the knife Holly wrenches out of her mouth. Start as you mean to go on.
Riot women is pacey. It has better things to be doing than dragging a reveal all the way through a series; surprising information is discovered and then revealed to those who need to know within the course of an episode. This might say as much about me than TV shows, but I find it excruciating watching the whole tension of a series hinge on a miscommunication or misunderstanding. Yes, there is something to be said for scripts reflecting the messiness and inefficiency of real communication, but I just end up telling the characters myself, since no one else is going to tell them.
The show skips the stuff we don’t need to see. There is no improvement rehearsal montage, which I have mixed feelings about, and unexpectedly, the talent show which forms the band’s raison d’etre happens in episode four, bucking the classic band narrative formula. Plus, if something feels like an inevitability, like Kitty and Beth falling into a tight friendship, it happens. Wainwright gives you what you want; she doesn’t patronise her watchers.
Riot Women shares its niche with We Are Lady Parts, a brilliant band series about a Muslim punk band on channel four. But where Riot Women trumps Lady Parts is in its stakes. Lady Parts by no means flinches from controversy, but it manages to be quite wholesome at the same time. The existence of the band represents the biggest risk, costing their reputations and friendships. Riot Women is tense and very, very angry. Through blood (menstrual and otherwise) and tears, it shows middle age in all its viscera. Physical violence echoes the violence of misogyny, ageism, and racism, as their stories are told through sexual abuse, self-harm, and punches.
The show goes beyond the punchline of “surprise! Menopausal women aren’t invisible! And they can sing!” The formation of a rock band is only the beginning, before it is threatened by court-dates and grievous bodily harm. Wainwright captures the way men excuse other men- even ‘the good ones’. This means that there is one too many villain in this: the male characters that you want to strangle massively outnumber the ones you don’t. But to its credit, this creates a sense of claustrophobia, pointing quite clearly to the fact that it’s not ‘one bad apple’ propping up the patriarchy. Wainwright narrates the cycles of abuse, where vulnerability begets vulnerability.
In More than a Woman, Caitlin Moran talks about the stage in womanhood where the kids grow up and the parents start needing care: ‘forget the AA, you’re just about to become the Fourth Emergency Service…Your life’s about to become a callcentre for people who are exploding.’ She argues that young woman problems are all to do with yourself, but ‘when you enter middle age, you’ll know you’re middle-aged, because all your problems are…other people’s problems.’
Two of the band members are caring for mums with dementia. The band writes a song reclaiming the insult hurled by ex-partners that ‘you’re just like your mother’, as if the scariest thing is to be an older woman who has cared for you. They bite back, snarling that the ‘joke’s on you cos you never really knew her’, and the ‘rebellious suburban badass bitch’ she is. As much as Riot Women sometimes nears melodrama with its big villains and musical numbers, it also depicts the silent shouldering of care, the weaponised incompetence which keeps women locked into responsibility. But it also depicts the care that they can’t help but have for each other, and the joy they find in shrugging off just a bit of the other stuff.
I have never been a fan of the Romantics. To read The Wild Irish Girl is to reach the end of a whole page of swooning, throbbing, blushing, and blanching, only to return to the moment of the scene and find that no time has passed at all, and nothing has happened except for the protagonist retreating into his head to make internal examinations and exclamations. I’d take a witty eighteenth-century picaresque any day over a man pondering a leaf or a beggar for the secrets they reveal about the nature of the soul and god.
Enter The Blue Flower: a zippy novel about Novalis, the German philosopher and poet. Set at the end of the eighteenth century, it follows his early adulthood as he falls in love with a twelve-year-old called Sophie, and embarks on his mining career. Fitzgerald captures a slice of history with a beady eye and bags full of humour. The Blue Flower paints Romanticism in the wild, beyond the pages of poetic ramblings and into the mundane, banal every day. Outside of his own narrative, Fritz (Novalis) becomes an endearing but absurd character, contemplating aloud the universal abstractions of cosmology and human nature while the people around him are trying to darn socks or ask him about finances. Chapter titles include ‘what is the meaning?’, ‘what is pain?’ and ‘washday’. While Romanticism was in theory a movement of the tangible every day, and the intangible beauty or truth to be found within it, it was a certain kind of beauty, a certain kind of truth. These seem incongruent with the real every day.
The Blue Flower makes the historical ordinary. We have a long tradition of thinking that anyone from times gone by must have been stupid and/or deeply sincere and boring. We forget that what we read is a tiny fraction of what some publishers decided to print, and what others kept in their libraries. What’s fallen through the cracks is an infinitude of folks just getting on with it, worrying, laughing, having sex, and telling stories. Fitzgerald roots The Blue Flower so well in a world that feels familiar and real, down to the smell of pig sties and peppermint on Tennstedt fair day. So, when the characters nag and laugh at each other, the past gains colour again. Women are robust and not fainting, children are most certainly seen and heard.
Many, or even most, of Fritz’s contemplations of the universe and divine love are humoured, meet baffled looks, or are simply lost in the hum-drum of life. Fritz talks aloud to himself about the Absolute as he walks along, his friends agreeing that he has ‘no real barrier between the unseen and the seen’. He tells Sophie that although god created the world it has no real existence until we apprehend it, to which her sister replies ‘what a thing to tell a young girl!’ When he gets an apprenticeship in mining, his friends remark that unfortunately, the extraction of salt and coal can’t be dissolved into a myth, no matter how hard he tries. Thirty pages later, he is describing mining as the release of Nature’s secrets, at which his listener asks if he is going to mention these ideas to the committee.
The book reads like an eighteenth-century sitcom, a cast of characters speaking over each other in short, action-filled chapters. Fitzgerald’s dry quips made me laugh out loud several times, such as her observation that any fine young woman deserves to be bought a pig’s nostril by their affianced on fair day. The dialogue is snappy and sharp as the families fight for airspace. Sophie’s older sister tells the kids a parable meant to demonstrate that pain can serve as a warning. The kids reply that they don’t want any more warnings, they get into trouble enough as it is at school. When it is suggested that warnings help one repent, little George shouts that repentance is for old women and arse-holes. ‘They ought to whip you at school.’ ‘They do whip me at school’. When you zoom out from the lonely Romantic poet, you find a web of interconnectedness.
Fitzgerald captures the ridiculousness of the man bent on possessing the elusive woman who isn’t doing much beyond living her life, tormenting the poet simply by being. ‘Nature always pleases’ is the explanation given for why men keep falling for a girl. There is the sense of something inexplicable and transcendent about Sophie’s essence, but it is left up to us, along with the rest of the characters, as to whether that’s an excuse or whether Fritz is onto something. For me, she is no more and no less than what she is, neither a vapid temptress nor a vessel for sublimity; just a girl who finds everything around her very funny, even in the face of suffering. I asked my friend who gave me the book what she liked about it and she said that the women steal the show. The Blue Flower takes Romanticism beyond the page of poetic musings, out of the hands of the musers, and into the hands of the muses. Despite his tender endearments, Fritz can never quite grasp their subjective experience: speaking at them while projecting onto them a host baffling assumptions.
The book isn’t perfect. The beginning is a disorientating stream of place and character names, details awkwardly inserted, seemingly for the purpose of being mentioned later. The structure can feel a bit incidental. But it’s tight and vibrant, and these things are forgiven by the end.
The invisible, receptive poet-self becomes visible in the form of a bumbling, tall man perpetually trying to see beyond what he sees. As the narrative turns onto him and everyone else, the Romantic quest for the universal truth of things is recast as a set of perceptions, naturalised as truth. The Blue Flower creates an interesting landscape of those who question and those who don’t. Sophie and Fritz represent the meeting of each, the failure to grasp one another and the beauty to be found in trying.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a whimsical-yet-gritty magical realism novel by Julia Alvarez. This might feel like an unlikely combination, but think 100 Years of Solitude. It certainly shares a heritage with Colombian Garcia Marquez, Alvarez herself American-Dominican, so continuing the Latin American tradition of magical realism. I liked how the Spanish added texture to the writing in a way that describing a place in another language can fall short, but there was a lot of Spanish. I lost out on a fifth of each page because I can’t speak Spanish.
All novels are about stories. But in this novel, stories have a life of their own. Alma, a successful Dominican-American novelist entering her twilight years, inherits a plot of land in a run-down Dominican neighbourhood and decides to build a cemetery for the stories she never wrote, so they could be laid to rest and stop haunting her. The premise is beautiful, but sometimes struggles upon contact with plot, requiring a certain suspension of belief. But I guess that’s the game with magical realism: the symbolism takes on a tangible shape and it’s not the point to ask if anyone else can see it. In this book, they can hear it. The stories speak to Filomena, an overlooked neighbour from the community hired to keep the place tidy. They force her to listen to their stories and bicker with each other when she does her rounds, ordered to listen to the plots one by one.
At one point, I was unsure how we, the readers, were going to find out about the untold and buried stories. So when they literally start speaking to Filomena, it felt at once freshly unconvoluted, and also a bit on the nose. Perhaps this is an issue inherent within magical realism, but the whimsy lacked a pinch of mystery for me. It was quite straight-forward. But in fairness, this fit well with everything else, the prose unfussy, and directional, never getting lost in its many folds of narrative.
Alma’s untold stories join the untold stories of others. What appears like an introverted father with no new stories to tell is a man buried in his own guilt, his wrongdoings committed when his Americanised daughters stopped listening to his stories of home. Filomena is without family or friends, having lived in the service of others for decades, unable to do anything with the stories of betrayal and loss she holds inside her. Alvarez tenderly paints a generation of silence, full to the brim with narratives that will never reach the light of day.
Eventually, Alma herself joins her untold stories. She starts hearing stories around her as everything else slips away in old age. It’s a beautiful way to describe the mind as it corrupts itself, Alma the character disappearing through the cracks in the book as her sense of self starts to dissipate. It reminds me of a half-thereness I often found in my job in care of the elderly.
All in all, a thoughtful and bittersweet read, but I wouldn’t write home about it.
Hello! It is I, an avowed book-lover. I did a four-year undergrad in English literature and then came back for more. I have read many books: many for fun, many not for fun, and I have met a lot of other people who have read a lot of books. I’ve come to appreciate how divisive certain stances can be to the book-loving world. But unlike most (or at least half) of the bookosphere, I have a blog. So here are my spicy, mildly controversial takes on books and book culture:
To book or to e-book
I have a secret. I am unmoved by the smell of books. It does nothing for me. And you know what it also doesn’t do? Have a search function. Sure, a kindle is harder to flick through when you don’t know what you’re looking for, but otherwise, kindle all the way! Or, [insert far better ethical version]; let’s not dwell too long on the dystopian changes amazon made to kindle libraries so that they can alter a text that you have already bought. PLUS- and I may lose some street cred here- some books are just too heavy to facilitate all reading positions! I think I might have particularly flimsy wrists, but I’m a committed side-reader, one hand holding up the book, one keeping it open. And let me tell you, the Hyperion omnibus tested me. I had to read half of it on one side, then the other half on my other side, depending which half was heavier. Kindles are practically hands-free, if you lean it against something or have corduroy on. I don’t need to hold them open, and I have an entire library in one tiny packet. (Which you should set to horizontal for longer uninterrupted sentences!)
To blurb or sneak-peek
I don’t read blurbs. I said it. Whether a bloke named Dave meets a mystery which sends him back to his earlier years, or five strangers meet in extraordinary circumstances has no bearing on whether I’m going to enjoy the book. Every now and again, I’ll choose a book for its premise. Which means that, okay, sometimes I’ll read the blurb. But before I even think about reading the blurb, I flick to a page in the middle and read it. My favourite authors can write about lampshades and I will love them. A clever plot, cool world-building, and psychological depth are also great, but a blurb doesn’t tell you that either. So what I have to go on before I start reading is the words that the author uses, how they string them together, and how they are stringing them together by the 157th page. I’ve never once got a spoiler from doing this- my brain doesn’t retain information that has no meaning.
To annotate or not to annotate
Some people like writing things in margins. I think these are also the people who get tattoos. I respect both, but do neither. People can do with their books what they will, although it does make me wonder whether they are shortening the life of the book if they aren’t going to keep it forever. Because most people don’t like reading other people’s annotations. I have friends who have found books annotated by people with very niche knowledge on the content of the book, their notes adding a whole new meta-layer to the text. But that’s the exception. My real beef is with people who annotate library books. It’s just antisocial. I think people do it more at university libraries than public ones, but the amount of times I’ve had someone stab a biro through the middle of words or see fit to underline entire pages, I tut in their direction. The worst is when they write comments. Not only did I not ask for their interpretation, but yeah, someone’s died- you don’t say! Now the word ‘DEAD’ is left for posterity, decades worth of students turning the page, tension mounting, and reading DEAD written above the passage. What’s wrong with post-its or pencil? I would hold my censure if they wrote something interesting or funny, but comments pointing out that red=anger can be written in a notes app.
To fold pages or to rip the book in half
On the same note, what are the ethics of owning a book? Are there any? After all, it is your property. I have a friend who refuses to break the spines of any book he reads. Borrowing books from him is a unique brand of stress. My dad, on the other hand, once famously ripped a book in half so that he could start reading it while my mum finished the last few chapters. I think this would make a large contingent of booksters wince. Books exist in this liminal space between object and idea. Most of us romanticise them, even we don’t admit it. At the same time, we don’t permanently alter many other objects that are meant to stick around for a while. Also, even if we do accept that books are a fairly biodegradable commodity, it’s easy to forget that books won’t always be there when we want them on shop and library shelves. Texts go out of print, are banned, or edited according the whims of the reading population, so we are the guardians of the books that we want to stick around.
As for me, I’m quite vanilla on the spectrum of archivists to anarchists, but anything’s a hot take to someone. I’ll break the spine, spill tea, take a library book out of its sharp broken sleeve (cheeky). But I won’t fold pages or annotate. Notes can be made elsewhere, and it’s far easier to run my eyes down a page of bullet points than remember to look back at a particular page for its corresponding note. I know, I’m a goody-two-shoes, but hey, that shouldn’t surprise you about a girl with no tattoos.
So there you have it. By no means exhaustive, these were some of my mad, mad opinions about books. Let me be shushed by the strictest librarian, for I am a bad book-lover. I can hear them sharpening their pencils as we speak.
I’m going to come out and say it: I picked Sea Bean off the shelf because it was sparkly. Like a sea bean itself, it stood out against the texture of the background and I was drawn in, magpie-like.
For that reason, I didn’t know what I was reading. Yes, I could have checked the blurb, but where’s the fun in that? To my disdain, it turned out to be a memoir. Memoirs aren’t generally my thing, especially by people I’ve never heard of. But I soon realised that the Scottish coast is the book’s big name. Sea Bean is about Shetland and its neighbouring islands, told through the gifts that the sea deposits on its shores, and through Huband’s body as she collects them.
Huband’s prose is evocative and sensory. It shouldn’t be as gripping as it is, but it sucks you in with enveloping descriptions of sounds and smells. It’s not a page-turner, but it is a matter of life and death. Beaches whales, empty nests, and bird carcasses cohabit with the swooping of seasonal birds, and the living treasures which swim into Sally’s open hands.
Sea Bean scans the landscape and reads its politics. Each storm and unseasonable warm spell smells of change, every empty nest remembers the populations which lived there fifty years before. Huband is deeply cynical about the greenwashing of companies which claim to support Shetland’s communities while taking autonomy from the island. Huband’s interaction with the beaches and their life is fraught with tension and complicity: the sun that eases her pain forecasts the decimation of bird populations; her amazement at small creatures also an intrusion; her desire to find treasures crosses over into greed. But she also describes the community of those connected to beaches in this way: the volunteers who tag storm petrels, collect data, and attend talks, not to mention the beachcombing enthusiasts who bashfully compare finds and write messages in bottles.
Her body constitutes a second landscape, the coast mapped onto herself as she navigates chronic illness and motherhood. Huband sees life-giving and illness in the nature around her, its brutality and fragility speaking to her as a woman who has given birth and has since been struggling with two forms of arthritis. She describes the isolating experience of having a miscarriage off mainland Scotland, which echoes through the book as she looks at the contents of a female fulmar’s stomach and mourns empty skater eggs. Just as her house is barely inside, rattled by the storms and filled with sea-glass, Huband blurs the line between body and environment. On the beaches of Shetland, which she shares with the otters, whales, and comb jellies, she is just one of many animals.
While occasionally a bit shoehorned in, for the most part, the diversions she makes to talk about local mythologies, witch hunts, past experiences of the coasts, and current maps are beautifully anchored to detailed character portraits, her journey to health and independence, and, of course, the beach. Sea Bean paints an expansive picture of the North-Eastern coasts from a multitude of tiny observations, creating a profound meditation on the preciousness of British coasts.
Dog-eared Press 