Good evening!
Back after a short break — I was drunk at a hen weekend last week so there was no way I could formulate coherent thoughts about reading, never mind write them down. I was going to send a newsletter out on Sunday when I got back but I fell asleep on the couch all afternoon because I am elderly.
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
I actually forgot to mention that I had read Nox by Anne Carson (2010) in my last update, somehow. I love Carson and I knew I would love this. I read most of it in an evening after starting it a few times and knowing that I wasn’t in the right space for it. It was written after the death of her brother that she had an unusual relationship with. After an incident that got him in trouble in his young adulthood (I think? It’s v much shrouded in mystery), her brother went travelling/on the run and ended up in Copenhagen. Carson and her family didn’t often hear from him so his death, reported to them by his wife, is an odd, difficult thing. Carson works through her grief and their relationship in Nox, a fractured poem that appears on a long concertina fold-out. It is interspersed with a word-by-word translation of Catallus’ poem 101:
Having been carried through many nations and over many seas,
I arrive, brother, for these wretched funeral rites
so that I might present you with the last tribute of death
and speak in vain to silent ash,
since Fortune has taken you, yourself, away from me.
Alas, poor brother, unfairly taken away from me,
now in the meantime, nevertheless, these things which in the ancient custom of ancestors
are handed over as a sad tribute to the rites,
receive, dripping much with brotherly weeping.
And forever, brother, hail and farewell.
It was an unusual, but moving reading experience, both for the details of it that are specific to Carson and her brother, but also for its reflections on grief more broadly. I probably read it at the right time.
I’ve also read Brontë’s Villette (1853) since my last post, a re-read for teaching. I first read this novel as an undergraduate (for the same module I’m now teaching on), much of it in a day while I was in bed with a caffeine withdrawal headache. One thing I will say: this book is so odd, much odder than I remember. It is both chaotic and conservative, with one of the most neurotic and straight-laced protagonists you could ever come across. Lucy Snowe loooooooves projecting her insecurities on everyone around her, making her an extremely unstable and unreliable narrator.
To be honest, I think ‘unreliable narrator’ is a bit overused, both as a descriptor by readers and a writing device. In an era where people on the internet love to pretend they are very kooky and strange by saying they love ‘horrible women’ (see: ‘feral girls’, ‘gross girl lit’, ‘insane women novels’ etc etc) (it’s always women also), having an unreliable narrator is largely an easy signpost by writers to signal to these kinds of readers that that is what they are going to get. (Btw I do actually think a lot of these books are good, I just think the culture and conversations around them are very boring). All narrators are unreliable, because they are written by a person who is bringing their social and political contexts to their work. All readers are unreliable, because they too are bringing their social and political contexts to the texts that they choose to read. Reading is an interaction, and it can therefore never be stable, or apolitical, or neutral.
Lucy Snowe is not the kind of unreliable narrator who intentionally lies to her reader (and she doesn’t have a writer who is doing a big wink-wink-nudge-nudge display of her instability). Instead, she is just extremely normal, in that she tells herself a story of how events went, and what kind of person she is, and what other people think of her. There are countless moments in the novel where it is evident that the person she thinks she is is not the person she actually is. For one thing, she is extremely jealous and allows this to cloud her judgement on other people, while at the same time she is telling her reader that she is very sensible and held up as a stable, neutral force among her acquaintances. When this behaviour is on the page, this is jarring and we too pass judgement. But we all do this! We all build up a version of ourselves in our heads that is always a bit wrong, because we don’t actually know how we come across to every single person — like a writer and a reader meeting in a text, everyone brings their own experiences and interprets things differently. That kind of unreliability is inherent to personhood, so while she is unstable and unreliable, Lucy is also very authentic.
Moving on, I am also around 100 pages into an advanced copy of Imogen West-Knight’s Deep Down (2023), which I am enjoying very much. I’ll write about it next week when I have a fuller picture of the novel, but something I am enjoying is how the woman protagonist pointedly does not read and isn’t very cultured. There are a lot of novels about at the moment where the main character is a bookish woman who likes to write, which often works well and is interesting, but it does smack a bit of Jane Austen calling her most perfect character Jane.
Books on my radar
Yesterday I, once again, went to West Kirby books for an event. This time it was Rebecca May Johnson and Sam Johnson-Schlee in conversation, which turned into a fascinating discussion on housing, kitchens, recipes and identity, with readings from their books Small Fires (Rebecca, 2022) and Living Rooms (Sam, 2022). While I was there I picked up Celia Dale’s A Helping Hand (1966), which looks like my vibe.
This week I woke up with an overwhelming urge to read The Wine in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908). I don’t know why but I do know I will not rest until I have a copy.
I was sent a copy of Brian Dillon’s forthcoming book Affinities, published by Fitzacarraldo in February next year. I’m really looking forward to this.
I was also sent a copy of Jen Calleja’s verse-novel Vehicle, published by Prototype also in February next year. I really need to read Calleja’s short stories because I’ve heard they’re wonderful.