Good evening!
I hope everyone is coping in the heat -- I, for one, am not. I hate this weather, it is evil. Not much to report non-reading wise this week, I’ve just been working a lot. I finally finished a complete draft of the PhD chapter I was working on and have started editing the next one, so I hope you’re ready to hear me moaning about that now.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
Last week I left you having read half of Dinah Brook’s Lord Jim at Home (1973), a book I was very much enjoying, and, happily, continued to enjoy. It is primarily about Giles, a man born into enormous wealth and status, but who can’t keep up with social or familial expectations. He is the grandson of a judge and the son of a lawyer, but the only thing he is really good at is cricket and getting drunk. As a child, he is viciously brought up by a sullen and strict nurse and it is implied that this changes something inherent in his nature. He is not a gifted student, and it actually comes as a bit of a relief to him when war breaks out, because it means he can join the army and leave England behind for a while.
Brook’s novel is not as simplistic as you might be thinking. It is a meditation on privilege, but it is also a Gothic novel that utilises a lot of body horror, and it illustrates the national PTSD that Britain had after WWII. A lot of Gothic texts use aristocratic/upper-class characters to enact violence upon, as a kind of commentary on how wealth and inherited status is usually built on nefarious grounds, and as a ‘the sins of the father will be visited upon the son’ type of narrative. As with a lot of other stories and novels, the terror comes from inside the family, and it serves to show us that privilege does not mean contentment. What Lord Jim does really well is show us that the conditions that the upper-classes have set as their mark of distinction can also be its downfall.This manifests in a variety of ways.
I mentioned above that it also depicts Britain after WWII really well, and I think this is what I appreciated most in the novel. This isn’t a book that has any kind of hero-worship in it, or any hints towards glorifying war and the people who died in it. It shows how uncertain and traumatised the national psyche was, but also how ready everyone was to move on with little reflection.
The next novel I read was The Queens of Sarmiento Park by Camila Sosa Villada, translated by Kit Maude (2019 Spanish/ 2022 English). This is set in Argentina and centres on the trans women who populate Córdoba, especially those who gather in Sarmiento Park to solicit sex work by night. The protagonist, also called Camila, is the youngest of this group, having moved to the city from a rural town to attend University. Low on money but free to explore her true gender identity, she starts turning tricks and falls upon Auntie Encarna’s boarding house, which is both a meeting point and living quarters for local trans women. Auntie Encarna is 178 years old and begins the novel by finding a baby in the park, who she takes in as her own son.
The harsh reality that these women live under sits alongside more fantastical elements, such as Auntie Encarna’s age, a girl who turns into a bird and a werewolf. I felt like the magical realism was a little bit weaker than the realism, but I appreciated it on a textual level. It felt like Villada was telling her reader that there are things in these women’s experiences that can’t be easily vocalised, and instead need to manifest in motifs beyond usual comprehension. There is an author’s note at the beginning which summarises this feeling, in which she explains her use of the word travesti to talk about her characters, as travesti is a slur for trans women in Argentina. She talks about western theories on gender and the trans experience, saying that these theories were developed in order to ‘make our existence more hygienic because they couldn’t stand letting something go unexplained.’ She takes back travesti in order to differentiate these Argentinian women from other trans women across the world, who might themselves be coming up with these theories. I think the novel largely hinges off of this line of thinking, and I appreciated it very much.
I’m now more than halfway through Giorgio Bassani’s Within the Walls, translated by Jamie McKendrick (1956). I hadn’t actually heard of Bassani until yesterday, when I was mooching around the library looking for something exciting. I was intrigued by Within the Walls because it is the first book in what became The Novel of Ferrara. Each of the books is made up of stories all set in the small Italian city of Ferrara, which when put together interconnect with one another. I thought this was a really great premise and hoped very much that the execution was as good as the aim, and it is. What has struck me most about it so far is how it is very much haunted by the Holocaust. I googled Bassani and wasn’t surprised to find that he was a Jewish Italian (and was also slightly relieved because someone who mentions Jewish people that much at that time in history but who isn’t Jewish is probably not in favour of them).
As I haven’t finished, my thoughts on this are still slightly juvenile, but I do think there is a lot of room for a Derrdian reading of Within the Walls (and perhaps all of the books of The Novel of Ferrara), in that is displays quite neatly his theory of Hauntology. Almost everything in the text feels impacted by the war and fascism, even if the setting of the individual story is remote from this period, in the late nineteenth-century as an example. The expulsion and murder of Bassani’s community from Italy hangs over most of the character’s actions, however minute.
Books on my radar
When I was in the library yesterday I also took out Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982) because I’ve never read any Acker, and also because (as we know) I do like a Dickens retelling. I also took out Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s A Spell of Good Things (2023) after requesting it a little while ago -- I loved her debut novel Stay With Me (2017) and am excited to read this one.