Families and readers

I have been reading The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, a lovely saga of a thing, perfect for wintry nights because its set somewhere warm (Egypt) and has at its heart a reader prone to worrying with whom I instantly identified. This is the beginning of the book. "Amal reads deep into the night. She reads and lets Anna's words flow into her, probing gently at dreams and hope and sorrows she had sorted out, labelled and put away". I loved Amal as a character. She has so much integrity, but because the world is so imperfect this leads to a passivity and inertia because it is so difficult to act with integrity when all of one's choices seemed not quite right. Amal absorbs herself in the documents of Anna Winterbourne and her grandmother Layla, documents in English, French and a "neat Arabic raq'a script". I loved this too - the intersections of culture as manifest in language.

It's so clever because at the same time as it is an exotic love story between Anna and Sharif and then Isabel and Omar, it also problematises this notion of exoticism (and really of love). There's a moment in the novel where Amal discovers an article by Sharif about the appeal of the East which he sees as a economic solution to the West's problems and also the Orient, a wonderful otherwordly place full of exoticism. Amal jokes that they could republish it now. I found myself wanting to read about this book (discovering this very glamourous photograph of Ahdaf giving a speech) and some people found the romance too much and others found it a wonderful post-colonialistic launching pad for pontificating! (Actually this article was very interesting about the letters of women travellers as a subversive discourse).

The structure was great - I liked the layers, the disparities between the past and present, the gaps in knowledge between the generations. I found myself fascinated by the missing generation, the adult Nur (Anna's daughter and Isabella's grandmother) and Ahmad (Layla's son and Amal's grandfather), their life stories hinted at in just a few sentences.

Tangles of a Story

Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero was a small gift of a thing. Its subject - the fragility of families - is mirrored in the fragile narrative that spreads like a cobweb with tenuous and haphazard links between the characters. I keep finding stories of fathers in my reading travels and this was an interesting one - a silent, dutiful father with moments of explosive temper. A particular moment of temper - violent and truly awful - propels Anna, Claire and Coop into different worlds. Anna, whose identity is riven by this act of violence becomes an academic, being particularly drawn to the story of a writer called Lucien Segura - whose family is as fragmented as her own. Claire becomes a paralegal, making a career out of building a false intimacy with strangers and Coop a high stakes gambler also an artifice of sorts.

Divisadero blends the poetic and the narrative. Ondaatje's sentences are effortlessly beautiful. Like this one from Anna's point of view: "I am a person who discovers archival subtexts in history and art where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story." Ondaatje's doesn't over explain his poetry or force closure on his narrative - this spiralling is exactly his method here. It's finding moments of truth, epiphany and hope in the randomness of life.

Forgetting our thirties...

This book dug under my ribs. I'd put an exclamation mark here - except I'm not sure it was a pleasant feeling! (There! That thought can have one!) Alice has had a head injury and wakes up thinking she is girlishly 29, happily married and expecting her first baby. In reality she is 39, getting divorced, has three children and has turned into a Stepford wife. Its territory I have been travelling in my minds murk. How does one keep one's girlishness alive against the demands of life? I guess at twenty nine Pascale was a baby and Kris and I were newly married. Thirty-nine was that challenging year after the broken engagement. Maybe this why this book has left me a little melancholy. Still I think some people do get nicer as they (we?) get older. The odd disappointment or two makes us more compassionate, having children more generous.

I loved Liane Moriarity's The Last Anniversary. It was so whimsical and quirky (but honest enough not to be completely fluffy) and I was hoping for more of the same with this one. But although it had some quirk (I loved the blogging granny broadcasting the family secrets online and that when Alice loses her memory she starts raiding her daughter's dress up box),the ending was a little fluffy and unbelievable. Of course, perhaps that is the point. Although I think no-one has their happy endings all at the same time, its a squiggly graph like the ABC logo and even feel good books feel better when they are true to this, other wise it feels like a lie and makes you feel worse!

Angels and Daughters

I followed my daughter through the labyrinth of these lovely books - City of Bones, City of Ashes and City of Glass - snuggled up on the couch reading different installments. It's perfect fare for us as there’s a mother and daughter – Jocelyn and Clary - at the centre of this story. I remember when my daughter was about four starting to read Ursula Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan to her and it was terrifying because the mother dies so early in the narrative and the little girl is so completely and utterly alone. Before she could speak she was also riveted by Are You My Mother, the story of the little bird who has fallen out of his nest and needs to find his mother. So it’s an elemental part of a story being separated from a mother and the anxiety this causes, especially in fantasy stories. Fantasy stories do this so well. In this trilogy The Mortal Instruments, Clary must save her mother, who is kidnapped by a Ravener demon and bewitched. It is the adololescent shift in this relationship, where the little girl must rescue her mother. My daughter was very sage about it all, refusing to give away the plot details I was desperate for, thus rescuing me from my own self-destructive thwarting of my plot satisfaction.

Reading these books was so utterly pleasurable. The narrative seemed to combine every fairy tale motif imaginable with out being too much: angels, enchanted swords, magical runes, vampires, lost evil Frankenstein-like fathers, separated siblings, impossible love. I imagine this must have been what reading Harry Potter must have been like for the people who could get over the clunky sentences. It reminded me a little of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – without the cheesiness - and of Phillip Pulmann’s His Dark Materials without the ponderous qualities. When Cassandra Clare was borrowing plots – such as from Star Wars and Paradise Lost she referenced it in a worldly postmodern way. At our place we are both desperate for her new book!

Teenager Discovers Kissing – Stop Press!

As the saying goes, teenagers cannot see beyond the end of their noses and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging by Louise Rennison adds to the body of evidence – narrator Georgia Nicholson is a very self-absorbed girl. Unless of course beyond the end of one’s nose are a pair of boyish lips on which to experiment. Georgia approaches kissing like netball training, at one stage going to a boy Peter’s house who teaches kissing skills to girls “but doesn’t take any money or anything” and she discovers that kissing is best when you fancy the kissee, in fact you go “jelloid”. Georgia’s poor mother with a not-quite toilet trained three year old, self-absorbed Georgia and a hairy husband in New Zealand could probably have told her that, but the older characters the parents and teachers are figures of fun in this book.

The novel is for the funny girls. It shows its readers you can be funny and desirable (even dressed up as an olive). Georgia is often a funny narrator. “His Mick Jagger impression did not stop at the lips. He was a lunatic on the dance floor, strutting around with his hands on his hips. I nearly died. Then Sven joined in, dragging Rosie with him. His style of dancing was more Cossack, a lot of going down into a squat position and kicking his legs out”. And of course kissing is lovely; it’s lovely to discover its loveliness and lovely to be reminded of its loveliness. Here is how it went for Georgia: “I went completely jelloid – it was like being part girl, part jellyfish. It was mega brilliant. Twenty out of ten type kissing. I got all the stuff you’re supposed to have fireworks whooshing in your head, bands playing, sea crashing in and out”. Maybe I’ve been a little hard on Georgia… but she’s is unrelenting on parents and teachers!

Under the Spell of the Astrarium….

After my sojourn in the nineteenth century, a return to the modern world – and the Middle East in the brash seventies no less – was very pleasurable indeed. Tobsha Learner’s Sphinx had a page-turning quality that was not unlike an airport novel – in a good way. I think this page turning quality is highly admirable, I would like to know how to do it!


She is returning, here, to Witch of Cologne territory in the sense of the grand love that transcends time and place; and also the dialogue between the rational and the esoteric. Like Ruth and Detlef, the lovers Isabella and Oliver occupy different ends of the rational and mystical spectrum. Oliver the narrator is skeptical whereas Isabella recklessly and boldly pursues magic in the form of an agristrum, an ancient Egyptian device with the capacity to predict death and thus change the future. There is something of the quest novel in Sphinx and I guess this is where that racing thrust of the narrative comes from. It reminded me a little of The Amber Spyglass in that way, it’s a race for good to defeat evil, although the morality of this novel is refreshingly murky. Despite the intensity of their relationship, it seems Isabella and Oliver have not been entirely honest with each other. Oliver’s initial imperative to fulfill his dead wife’s quest for the astrarium becomes compromised by his own desires. All the characters have their compromises and their secrets.

There is something a little over the top about this novel that touches on melodrama. The historical settings of Tobsha’s previous novels The Witch of Cologne and Soul seemed to work a little better with this intensity. But I admired her attempt to explore these ideas in a more contemporary setting. I remember news reports that I didn’t quite understand about Sadat and the peace process when I was growing up. The ancient Egyptian side of things was rather fun, although a little teacherly in tone, but I didn’t mind that. It’s rather good fun to learn a thing or two about history through a rollicking narrative.

Another Lovely Literary Gilbert

I have closed the black cover of Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall with its very serious, thin-lipped painted lady - two tomes from the nineteenth century dispensed with in a month!

This one is a version of the "who to choose" novel - the handsome exciting man or the sensible good man, but whereas Jane Austen's heroines always seem to have the good sense to see through the hollow charms of these caddish types, poor Helen -Anne's heroine - marries one. I have to say I liked her the more for it. Who hasn't been charmed by a handsome man at some time or other? I also admired Anne for moving beyond the conventions of the conventional romance to write honestly of her observations of relationships at this time. In her introduction she says "I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it. But as the priceless treasure too frequently hides at the bottom of a well, it needs some courage to dive for it". (She has a soft spot for a slightly purple metaphor) Indeed she even hints at venereal disease in Arthur's decline when she says "It is deplorable to see how completely his past life has degenerated his once noble constitution". Or perhaps I am reading too much in to it!

But of course Tenant is foremost Helen and Gilbert's love story and they are both so lovely, temperate and undemanding of each other that when at last the husband dies, they almost miss the opportunity to live a long, lovely temperate and undemanding life together.

The novel has a strange structure. It begins with Gilbert writing an intimate letter to a male friend and about a fifth of the way through the book Helen gives Gilbert her diary so that he may know her sad story. I was fascinated by this as a plot device. At one level I found it very unbelievable - but at another I admired its grandness as a gesture of intimacy.

Through the Looking Glass of Sexual Awakening

I have been too scatty to read lately, so this morning I gave myself the pleasure of finishing this book curled up on the couch with a coffee before life intervened. Actually I read with a sense of urgency as I was somewhat worried about Lily the main character, as it was looking risky for her. (Actually I had checked to see her name on the final page, I am a narrative cheat!)

The book drew me in my its seductive descriptions of Lily's attraction to Ed an artist painting in the street. I liked the descriptions of their erotic world very much - it was understated and honest. There was a surreal quality to the book, at one point in the narrative I wondered whether the strange events were occurring only in Lily's consciousness.

The enchantment of Lily occurs on a number of levels: she enchants others - her ex Hank and the disturbed Martin - and Ed and the creative life - in Lily's case acting - enchants her. In particular her performance of Hermia in a Midsummer Nights Dream, creates a sense of new confidence and possibilities for her, as an artist and as a woman with sexual agency. I liked the interpretation offered of Hermia in this book as a "tough broad". I've always thought of her as a whiny princess, used to having it her own way!

I also loved Lily's relationship with an old older woman Mabel. There's a moment towards the ending of the novel where they escape to bed, surrounded by books.

The book is an interpretation of the Alice in Wonderland quest, where the quest is sexual identity, a confident and in-control womanliness. (Maybe that's what Freud would make of all those holes anyway). I liked it!