Hackescher Markt, Berlin

It’s just started to rain and we’re looking for somewhere to eat. The place we chose earlier is full and the fall-back place has a large TV above the only available table so we head back to Hackescher Markt to see what we can find. Hackescher Markt has a station on the S-Bahn and the train line runs above a series of arches, most of them transformed along this stretch – from Alexanderplatz to Museuminsel – into  restaurants. We had breakfast in one this morning and a pre-dinner beer outside another less than an hour ago, sitting beneath a rust-coloured umbrella beside a patio heater as light rain fell around us, having our usual holiday conversation  about the oddness of time. The entrance to the station is three arches down and we pass beneath to get to the square where all the restaurants are and to escape, for a moment, from the rain. There’s a girl there, busking with a band. She’s singing Satisfaction, her voice hard and compact, powerful and aware of its power as she sings, repeatedly, and I try, fists bunched, head thrusting forward. It’s the first time I’ve actually heard the song in more than thirty years. I put a coin in the almost empty guitar case and we walk across the square to a restaurant that specialises, as far as we can tell, in southern German cuisine. We’re greeted by a tall young woman in traditional Heidi-style dress, and placed at one end of a long scrubbed table. At the other end a man and woman in their sixties are finishing litre glasses of beer. They nod and smile and raise their glasses to us. When I look for the toilet, the Heidi woman points me downstairs where middle-aged and older couples are dancing to a band of musicians in Alpine costume. Upstairs again, I order a dish that’s described on the haphazardly translated menu as a ‘meal for men’ – pork knuckle, sauerkraut and potato dumplings, with a litre of ‘festival’ beer.

Ninety minutes later, we head back across the square, and the girl and her band are still there. There’s a small audience by this time, and more money in the guitar case. They’ve moved on from 60s British R’n’B to classic reggae. Everything is gonna be all right, she’s singing and we stop to listen along with fifteen, maybe twenty other people. There’s a woman with half her hair shaved off, and a man in a striped pullover, dancing in a loose-limbed semi-catatonic way, a beer bottle in his hand. Another man, very tall and very thin, is moving in a way I haven’t seen for years, an intricate, hippie-like weaving of angular limbs. The band has three or four musicians, but my eyes are on the girl. She’s small, white, a long blonde fringe, pretty but tough with it. Singing or not, she doesn’t stop moving, she has a little dance that reminds me of the way children suddenly break into a skipping run as though walking just doesn’t do it for them, there’s more to moving around than just walking. She has what looks like a large Moleskine, the size below A4, and a list of the songs she knows must be written in it because she’ll crouch down between one piece and another to thumb through it, then tell one of the other musicians, a guitarist, the chords he needs to play. I watch them running through the sequence, her eyes on his left hand. Other people wander past as they perform. A man we noticed yesterday, dressed in a colourful clown’s outfit like a child’s all-in-one pyjama suit, complete with red nose and a rain hat, walks past, talks briefly to one of the band, moves on, comes back a little later. The music continues, some songs familiar and others not, but the girls’ voice takes them all on and makes them her own. So much busking is a sort of karaoke, it’s startling to hear something that isn’t, something that reminds you that Joni Mitchell might also have stood beneath a railway arch in a foreign capital and sung as though her life depended on it. I say to Giuseppe, I hope her parents are proud of her, but we both know how unlikely that is. I’m useless, she sings, but not for long. She’s wearing a pair of low-slung skinny jeans she has to keep hitching up and a red sleeve that it takes me a while to realise is the covering of a cast. When we clap, as we do at the end of each song, she wants to thump the air with pleasure but the cast gets in the way, transforming the gesture into something less triumphant and more touching, elbows out, ungainly. Other things happen while they’re performing. A young guy with a dog and half a dozen plastic bags cadges a cigarette from Giuseppe and stands beside us, drug-swaying, cigarette unlit, until the girl he was with comes back and leads them both off. A woman in a wheelchair, encased in rainproof plastic, also with a dog, is approached by another woman. Money is exchanged and the woman in the wheelchair reaches under the plastic and pulls out what turns out to be a snack for the dog, which the standing woman takes and offers. I’ve no idea what’s happening but I watch the scene anyway. I love places where dogs are loved. Minutes later, a stocky man in his forties passes under the arch. He pauses and begins to dance in a comically hip-grinding fashion with the shaven-headed woman, knees bent, faux– humping, his arms embracing the space around her, almost, but not quite touching. Then, as surprisingly as he began, he stops, straightens up, moves on, his life picked up where he left it, momentarily, only moments ago, a dozen feet from where he’s standing now.

Ten minutes later, a couple of drunks in suits and white shirts come over and ask the girl to sing Look Back in Anger. They ask her more than once, in a bullying, truculent way. They’re English and I’ve heard her speak enough to know that English is also her mother tongue. She might be American, I think. When she refuses, one of the drunks kicks at the guitar case on the floor and starts to push around a musician, a black guy with locks and two guitars. He’s turned up late to the party and it’s hard not to think he saw the money on the floor in front of the band and decided to play along and take his share. Other men pull the drunk away but the mood’s been damaged, a hairline crack that doesn’t spoil everything but still can’t not be heard. The original audience is drifting away now, and so I walk across and tell one of the guitarists how much I’ve enjoyed their work.  I ask if they’ll be back tomorrow and they say they will as the girl turns round. Tonight has been a good night, she says. She can’t stop smiling. She asks me my name, and tells me hers. Alice. She comes from South Africa. Cape Town. She has something special, I tell her, a special gift, and she smiles even more and shakes her head, but she knows I’m right and I know she knows. She didn’t realise she’d broken her arm until a few days later, she says, she normally plays the guitar, and I can see how her dance, which is all footwork, is the result of that. See you tomorrow, I say, and put some more money in the guitar case at her feet.

Short Fiction 2012

The new issue of this splendid, and beautifully illustrated, literary journal is now out and, if you look closely (or click on the image), you’ll see that it contains not only new work by a host of exciting writers but also a story by me. The story is called SATURATION and it’s a dark, unsettling piece about destructive love. If you’d like to know more (i.e. buy a copy), click here. You won’t regret it.

Common sense: Impressions of South Africa

The visit begins with snow in Johannesburg. It’s the first time, they tell us, in thirty years, and people are gathering outside the African craft market near Rosebank shopping mall to watch it fall. We’ve come from temperatures in Italy in the mid-30s and the snow has a manna-like quality; we want to gather it in our hands and let it melt. But it doesn’t stick. Within minutes the dusting of white on the yellowwood trees and the rows of metal guinea fowls outside the market has disappeared as we walk towards the mall. A mall is a mall is a mall, insists Wayne, our host, but that’s only partly true. Woolworths went bust in the UK some years ago, for example, but here it still is, or something like it, shifted up-market, filled with clothes that remind me of Gap, with a food hall tucked away in the back that could happily compete with M&S. (I find out later that Woolworths SA is quite distinct from its UK namesake.) In M&S branches in some parts of England, the Midlands, say, it’s easy to forget the large black population outside the walls of the store; you need to go to Asda or Primark to be reminded. But here in Johannesburg, in this unexpectedly elegant mall, the customers are black and white in roughly equal numbers; I’m surprised by this and distrust my surprise, and this mixture of discordant emotions, with its underpinning niggle of guilt, will accompany me for much of my stay in South Africa. I buy myself an ochre-coloured padded canvas bomber jacket in the Woolworths sale, to shield me from the unanticipated cold.  Later, after a seafood lunch at Ocean Basket, we drink perfect Illy espressos in a bar with hi-tech troughs of shimmering fire along one wall. Outside, the snow continues to fall.

The next day, driving downtown through half-deserted suburban streets, we hear that hundreds of people have stayed at home because it’s too cold to go to work and I wonder how that would play in, say, Finland. But South Africa isn’t Finland. Besides, not everyone is scared of the weather. The area we drive to, the CBD or Central Business District, is filled with people selling number-plates and fruit in the lengthening shadows of often abandoned skyscrapers. There’s a shop selling Italian fashion wear designed by St. Thomas Moore. Everywhere we look, flyers attached to lampposts offer penis enlargement and pain-free abortions. We’re looking for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, but we can’t find it; it isn’t where it ought to be, beside a park the guidebooks advise us to avoid. Wayne, who’s driving, tells us to keep our windows closed, just in case, and we do what he says. I sit and take photographs, encased in this curious, over-heated bubble, excited, a little scared. No one seems to notice us, or, if they notice, care.

Passport control. In Italy, some bored man with his shirt-sleeves rolled up will take a sideward glance at your passport and, assuming you’re European, wave you through. In the UK, default mode is disbelief. My cheery hello is ignored as a sour-faced official holds the document face-down on the reader and stares at the screen. At O.R. Tambo (già Jan Smuts) International Airport, Johannesburg, a young woman takes my passport and asks me how I am, using my name to do so. I’m well, I say and, as she continues to look at me, despite my better judgement, I add, And how are you? I’m good, she replies, and smiles. Like everyone else in authority here, as far as I can see, she’s black. Welcome to South Africa. When I leave by the same airport two weeks later and the guy at security offers me his hand before checking my belt, I’m used to it, this ceaseless welcome, this affability. But to be used to something is not to take it for granted. I’m sorry to be going, I say, and he nods. Have a good trip, he says. He doesn’t want me to leave, it seems, and neither do I.

One of the issues that most strikes me about South Africa is the friendliness we’re met by on every occasion, in shops and restaurants, service stations and hotels, museums and bars, all the places in which we connect with people in a fleeting, superficial way, each meeting bound up as it is with commerce and provision. Although issue isn’t the word; the real issue might be what the right word actually is to describe this constant assault of charm and non-invasive interest, this greeting that seems formulaic and yet, somehow, isn’t, that demonstrates a warmth I initially feel I have no right to, and feel myself resisting, and to which I then succumb. To say it’s genuine, a genuine pleasure in serving our passing needs, sounds sentimental, and maybe – in this specific, socio-economic post-apartheid context, where 90 percent of those offering such warmth are black – even worse; it sounds paternalistic, racist, an anachronism. Just listen to yourself. Labour’s cheap round here, after all. Someone else will be more than ready to do the job with a smile if they don’t. They don’t really mean it. But the alternative is that what we’re witnessing is the service industry at its most blatant and self-interested, because there is also the issue – that word again – of semi-obligatory tipping here, ten percent to be added to every bill, which arrives with ballpoint pen provided. And that rings just as false somehow, like nothing so much as simple cynicism, the flip-side of sentimentality, the doing-dirt on life, as Lawrence put it. You have to trust your feelings in the end. You take the hand, and the smile, and you ask this person in front of you how she is, or he is, and you listen to the answer as they have listened to you. It might be brief, and seem to lead nowhere, but surely that’s less important than the fact that such an exchange has taken place, and touched you.

We travel to Stellenbosch, and then Stanford. Stellenbosch is a white town in every sense, not only historically. The buildings – small-town, stately, colonial style affairs – are gleaming limewash in the sunlight, the sky fresh blue after rain; they’re arranged around an extended village green, their roofs made of thatch or grey-green corrugated iron. The arsenal, with its bell-tower and bellied roof, has the homely air of a rural church. There’s a botanical garden with bonsais and a pizzeria called Col Cacchio, which makes us laugh, and the university, behind the main street and surrounded by the type of bar universities throughout the world attract. But what makes the place so luminous this winter morning is the contrast between the light we see and the darkness behind it, without which it would not be visible. It’s a comfortably-off, artistic sort of place, like Heidelberg or Cheltenham. Among the works of art that decorate the streets is the statue of a naked man, possibly black, an Anthony Gormley-style life-sized figure fashioned out of what seems to be compressed earth, mud and straw. As a material, it’s both elemental and derogatory. It’s the first man, modelled from the stuff of the world, but it’s also waiting for the arrival of spirit, some vital urge that will move it, and make it fully human. Down a side street there are lines of what look like washing strung from one side to the other, which turn out to be an installation entitled Coloured Prayers, the work of the artist Jacques Coetzer, using clothes from Cloetesville, a settlement outside Cape Town. In both cases, the work doesn’t quite live up to the challenge it sets itself. Stanford, our next stop, is a windswept St Ives-like colony, a smallish grid of one-story buildings beneath an immense inverted bowl of striated cloud and sky. It has an ugly church and strings of arts and crafts shops, and three black boys walking with purpose along an otherwise empty street. I buy a basket woven in Madagascar from the wife of an artist in a shop that blends into a gallery-cum-house, then talk to an upholsterer who lived in London for decades and has made an extraordinary sofa with the silhouette of Table Mountain, for the pleasure of it. He misses London.

We’re driven out to Soweto by Booysie, a man who was born there and who still lives in the city with his wife, a teacher, and daughter. He’s a lovely man, my age to within a few months, happy to talk about politics, life in general, happy to answer the most foolish, ingenuous questions. I talk about how, for people of my generation in the UK, South Africa was our Vietnam, our big source of guilt and space for redemption, and he nods, perhaps aware, as I am, that this telling now is also a sort of apology that still, somehow, needs to be made. What he says to me in reply is that he – and everyone else in Soweto, and every other township, in every farm and mine – had no idea that anyone outside the borders of the country even cared. This should have been obvious – the first act of any totalitarian state is to close off or distort information. That’s why we have Ministries of Truth, to make sure none of it gets through. But it’s odd, and painful, to think of just how effective that closure was; those fragile bonds of hope and solidarity we imagined we were forging between the freedom of our own hemisphere and the slavery of theirs intercepted, filed away in some office. Booysie tells me that, nonetheless, what we did – our optimistic, pathetically ineffectual protest – made a difference, was not ineffectual, and he’s probably right. It’s good to think so. He’s a friend of Desmond Tutu, and there’s a quality of forgiveness in him which can’t have been hurt by that. Talking to him about what’s happened, and how he sees the future, is a lesson on how reconciliation might have worked. Eighteen years ago he might not have looked me in the eyes. But I can’t believe that. He’s my contemporary. On the drive back, two middle-aged men in the same rocking boat, we talk about the pros and cons of working freelance.

Our last visit in Soweto is to Kliptown. We’ve seen the richer part of the city, where people are building new houses on old plots, villas and haciendas and shrunken castles alongside the kind of open-plan houses one might expect to see in the suburbs of a city like Phoenix. Booysie apologises for the poor state of the rugby pitch at the local school. We tell him British schools are selling off their playing fields, that Italian schoolchildren have to provide their own toilet paper, but I’m not sure that he believes us. We visit the home of a smiling mother and daughter and their families, two pebble-dashed rooms at the heart of a cluster of immaculate bedrooms, clinging to the core of the house like feeding pups. We admire a cast-iron stove, the kind we’re looking for in Italy, we say, and they laugh at the idea of it. We pose together for photographs in the yard behind the house. When I ask Booysie if an offer of money of some kind would be appropriate, he squeezes my arm. It would be much appreciated, he says. Later, we eat in the sun outside a restaurant offering a buffet lunch. Tripe, lamb stew, a spicy bean salad, English trifle, all of it good. The restaurant is halfway between the homes of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, the only road in the world to have housed two Nobel laureates, Booysie reminds us, and I think – irreverently – of the two vast painted cooling towers on the Soweto skyline and the bungee-jumping platform suspended between them. As we’re leaving, an Italian woman asks us if we can recommend a bed and breakfast place in the area, and Booysie makes a couple of phone calls, and finds her a room. A hundred metres up the road, where Hector Pieterson was murdered at the age of 13, is the Hector Pieterson Museum. Outside the museum, I see the photograph of the dying boy being carried by a man who never knew him, Hector’s sister beside them both, and remember it as vividly as I remember other photos like it, of suffering children, and wonder how I’d ever managed to forget it. When Booysie tells me the man who picked Hector up went into hiding and has never been seen again, I’m lost for words. And then we go to Kliptown.

Booysie drives down a dirt road with a railway line running along one side of it and a row of large vans parked along the other. They belong to a production company; someone is making a film here. He turns right into a courtyard surrounded by brightly-coloured one-story buildings. We leave the car and are greeted by a young man called Thabo, wearing calf-length cargo pants and a sky-blue tee-shirt with the words New York and a pre-9/11 view of the Manhattan skyline. Thabo’s our guide. He takes us away from the lilac and green and shocking pink of the courtyard into the cluster of houses beyond it. They’re brutally inadequate, sheets of corrugated iron nailed roughly together, unpainted. He tells us we can take photos if we want, but none of us does. There are chickens, some men are bundling faggots of wood with wire. There is a furrow of dank water along the middle of the track. We stop by a tap and Thabo tells us all about the tap and what it does, how it isn’t just the only source of water for all the houses around it. How it offers a forum for discussion, and news, and gossip. How people who meet here help one another, and fight, and fall in love. How without the tap there would be no sharing, and without sharing there would be no community. All the time he’s saying this he’s smiling. He says that he likes us because he sees no pity in our eyes, but that’s just another sign of the generosity of his spirit. In any case, I’m wearing sunglasses that hide my tears. On the way back to the courtyard he talks about SKY, the Soweto Kliptown Youth Programme, and Bob, the man who founded it, in 1986, under apartheid. He tells us they’re filming Mandela’s autobiography down the road, and that some of the SKY kids are working on the production. It’s all good news. Thabo will be 21 in five days’ time.

The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg is an appropriately harsh-looking, brutal building, between the city centre and Soweto. The tickets we buy to enter the museum all look the same until we turn them over and discover we’ve been classified, assigned the status of Whites or Non-Whites. One White (me). Two Non-Whites (them). It’s as arbitrary as that. Well, of course it is; it always has been. We enter the museum through separate turnstiles and find ourselves in parallel corridors, separated by a deep metallic grid containing blown-up facsimiles of the identity cards people carried under apartheid. We look at the cards that define these people, some of whom will be dead by now, some of whom may have died long before these cards were no longer needed, defined until their final day in this vile capricious way, like steer for marketing. But when I say we, I mean something else. Because I’m here and they’re over there, my husband and our friend, and what they’re seeing is the same as what I’m seeing and yet not the same. It’s extraordinary how simple it is to create unease. I’m walking along my corridor, and I can see them walking along theirs. We can talk, but we can’t touch, not quite. And we don’t know how long this will go on, whether our paths will be allowed to meet later or not. I’m worried we’ll experience the museum differently, to such an extent that what we talk about later will make no common sense. We’ll have seen the same place but won’t know that, or be sure of that, or what we have seen will have no shared qualities at all, and we won’t know that either; all we’ll have is half of what should be ours. We’ll have lived half-lives, all of us, in one way or another. When we turn the corner after maybe twenty yards and our paths are reunited, we’re still anxious, still not entirely convinced we won’t be divided again. It takes this little to tell us something we thought we knew, but didn’t, not really. Just as what we know now can never be what those people whose identity cards formed part of the wall between us knew intimately, every waking hour and day of their lives.

Andrés Neuman, Traveller of the Century

I first came across the name of Andrés Neuman a few months ago, when I got round to reading the number of Granta dedicated to young Spanish-language novelists.  Ostensibly about grief, his story – “After Helena” – is a brightly written, rather snippy tale of academic rivalries, attentive to detail but not afraid of larger, more sweeping statements. I liked it, although other stories in the collection made a greater impression on me, and the story, attractive though it is, certainly did nothing to prepare me for this novel.

Impeccably published by Pushkin Press, Traveller of the Century comes with an introduction by Roberto Bolaño, who died some years before the novel was published. Necessarily, he talks not about this novel, which he will not have seen, but about Neuman, for whom he has the highest praise – “The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers” – and about an earlier novel, Bariloche, still, unfortunately, untranslated. Referring to this book, he comments:

Nothing in his work feels fake – all is real, all is illusion, the dream in which the Buenos Aires garbage man moves like a sleepwalker, the dream of great literature rendered by the author in precise words and scenes.

Much of this could apply just as well to Traveller of the Century. I should say immediately that I thought it was a wonderful book, surprising, complex and utterly engaging. It’s a large book, in length and vision, but unlike the last book of this size that bowled me over – Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen – it seemed to me both wildly ambitious and perfectly achieved.

The novel recounts the adventures of a young translator, Hans, who arrives in the city of Wandernberg on his way to Dessau, with a trunk. “What have you got in there, a dead body, complained the coachman. […] Not one dead body, Hans said with a smile, several.” Almost immediately he makes friends with a mendicant organ grinder; later, he finds himself becoming involved with the literary salon run by a merchant’s daughter, Sophie Gottlieb, with whom he slowly falls in love. One thing leads to another, and his attempts to leave the town are constantly postponed or thwarted. “I don’t know what it is about this city, […] it’s as if it won’t let me leave.” Soon after that, though, as the city takes hold and the will to leave it falters, he comments: “Borders shift around like flocks of sheep, countries shrink, break apart, grow bigger; empires are born and die. The only thing we can be sure of is our lives, and we can live them anywhere.” This cavalier dismissal of history and historical process, in a novel that both is and isn’t of the period in which it’s set, which plays with the conventions of the period as it does with the conventions of the realist novel, begs other, larger questions about what it means to live a life.

From the moment of his arrival in the inn, anxieties about the nature of reality set in, his own and that of the town. The innkeeper’s son, Thomas, is the first to cast doubt, appropriately enough (and I’ll be talking about names later) when he ask Hans who he is. “I’m Hans, said Hans, to which Thomas replied: Then I don’t know who you are.” The town itself has a curious, shape-shifting quality, as though on the move. What we mean by movement, and stasis, is one of the main concerns of the novel. At one point, sitting outside the cave where his friend the organ grinder lives, the two of them see some windmills. They’ve been talking about the virtues of music, and travel. For Hans, “people who travel are musicians or poets because they are looking for sounds.” The organ grinder disagrees. “I understand […] but I don’t see the need to travel in order to find sounds, can’t you also be very still, attentive […] and wait for sounds to arrive?” Hans replies: “My dear organ grinder, we’re back to the same idea – should we leave or stay, be still or keep moving? Well, the organ grinder grinned, at least you agree we haven’t budged from that point.”  The passage continues:

Wait, wait, I don’t think so, said the organ grinder, I don’t think so (you don’t think what? asked Hans), sorry, I don’t think it’s true (what’s not true? Hans persisted), about being stuck at one point. I said the idea is always the same and that’s true. But we also like to reflect on it, turn it over in our minds, like those windmills. So maybe we aren’t so stuck after all. I was looking at the windmills, and suddenly I thought, are they moving or not? And I didn’t know.

It’s no accident – nothing in this novel is accidental – that they were talking about music. If you listen you will always hear music, says the organ grinder. The music the organ grinder makes is pre-established, immutable, but that isn’t how he sees it.

When the barrel organ is playing and the lid is down, I like to pretend it isn’t the keys making the sounds, but the people the songs describe. I pretend they are the ones singing, laughing, weeping, dancing up and down between the strings. And that way I play better. Because I tell you Hans, when I close the lid there’s life in there. Almost a heart.

The final phrase gives its name to the second, and longest, section of the book, much of which is devoted to conversations about politics, poetry and philosophy with, among others, the redoubtable Professor Mietter, Hans’ intellectual sparring partner and, as things turn out, a man with a secret. This might sound dry, but it’s absolutely the contrary of dry. Neuman’s ability to inject life into the most academic of discussions is an absolute delight, and much of that delight comes from an almost Austenite attention to niceties and social underplay; or, in the case of Hans and Sophie, foreplay. The section, inevitably, concludes with Hans and Sophie recognising and consummating their mutual attraction.

The love story between Hans and Sophie is physical, and depicted with enormous skill and tenderness, but it’s also intellectual, and the field in which intellects meet and meld is translation. Translation is at the heart of the book: it occupies the minds of the salon-goers, it’s at the core of Hans’ relationship with his Spanish friend, Álvaro, it lurks beneath the idea of stasis and motion as texts remain themselves and become other, as travellers re-contextualise themselves and interrogate the notion of home, and what it might mean (people who travel are fleeing nostalgia). There is also the question of fidelity to be considered, not only to the original, but to one’s promises, as Sophie betrays the man she’s supposed to be marrying. Sophie is an extraordinarily vivid creation, a woman who, despite her modernity in terms of sexual and intellectual freedom, is nonetheless perfectly pitched in the post-Napoleonic context of the novel. And this might be the place to say that the translation of this novel also struck me as pitch-perfect. When we say that a translated novel is beautifully written, we sometimes forget that what we’re praising is not the original text, but the translation. In this case, Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia have done their author proud. The final section, in particular, is a tour de force.

One last thing. As I implied above, great play is made of names. Wandernburg needs no gloss. Hans, I imagine, has the same sort of feel in German as John might in English – a sort of Everyman – but there’s also the Lucky Hans of the Brothers Grimm, who starts with everything or the potential for everything, an apprentice out in the world, and ends with nothing, and is nonetheless content. The innkeeper’s name is Zeit (time), while Sophie (wisdom) discards her surname (Gottlieb – Love of God) for her mother’s maiden name, Bodenlieb. In Scandinavian the meaning of the name Boden is: He who delivers the news, and this would be wonderfully suggestive, although it’s more likely that Neuman is expecting us to pick up on the German meaning: ground. Even Álvaro has a hidden resonance, originally meaning “all guard”. The novel’s ludic nature is more than evident here, and it’s integral to the flavour of the book, allowing it to evade any shade of pastiche it might otherwise possess. But what remains in my mind is less the sense of play, both intellectual and formal, than a tenderness, a humaneness that strikes, as the last-but-one section has it, a sombre chord, it has high notes and low notes, you can hear them quite clearly, some rise, others fall, kof, they rise and fall, can’t you hear them? Can’t you hear them? Can’t you…

Willesden Herald, New Short Stories 6

I’m delighted to be able to say that a story of mine, Curtains, was chosen as one of the two runners-up in this year’s Willesden Herald Short Story Competition, organised by Steve Moran and judged by Roddy Doyle. Extracts from some of the stories were read out by actors from Liars’ League – Susan Moisan did a fantastic job with mine but I think all the writers present were just as pleased as I was – and the standard was not only exceptionally high (if that doesn’t sound too immodest) but also, to Steve Moran’s credit, extremely varied. Short stories can often fall into orthodoxies, particularly when competitions are involved (I chatted about this with Y.J. Zhu, another shortlisted author), so it’s a joy to find a reader who listens out with such attention for the voice of the story as it actually is, rather than as it should be. And it’s a sign of the respect writers feel for this competition that so many of the shortlisted authors should have travelled so far to be there on the night. That, and the giant pretzels…

You can buy the book from Book Depository, by the way. Just thought I’d mention it.

Michel Tournier, The Erl-King (on normblog)

Just over a month ago, Norman Geras did me the honour of asking me to contribute a second time to his Writer’s Choice series on normblog. The first time I wrote about Christopher Isherwood‘s second novel, The Memorial, due to be reissued by Vintage next month (and about time too). This time round I decided to write about Michel Tournier‘s second novel, The Erl-King, more commonly – but, I think, less felicitously – referred to these days as The Ogre. It’s a dark and challenging book, and it’s haunted me for years, for better or for worse. You can find out why I rate it so highly and why I’m intrigued and disturbed by the hold it continues to have on me by reading what I wrote here.

Vanessa Gebbie, The Coward’s Tale

I’m delighted to be hosting Vanessa Gebbie on my blog today. Her visit is part of a whirlwind tour of the blogosphere to coincide with the paperback publication of her extraordinary first novel, The Coward’s Tale (details of the complete tour here). As you may have noticed (see tagline at top right), this blog is mostly about books – I save my ranting and indiscretions for other places – but I wanted to say a few words about myself as an introduction to what Vanessa has to say below.

My partner Giuseppe and I became civil partners in the UK last month. We met almost 26 years ago and have lived together ever since, in Italy and England, so it wasn’t a particularly hasty decision. Our reasons for getting hitched after such a long engagement (although we never saw our relationship in those terms – it never struck either of us as incomplete or preliminary to something better) were practical: taxation, inheritance, hospital visiting; the kind of things that begin to matter when one passes 55. But the event was also – surprisingly for us both although less so for our friends – deeply touching and this set me thinking about the strange arc that had brought me from a childhood in which homosexuality was illegal – I was 14, and fully aware of my sexuality, when homosexual acts were finally, in part, decriminalised – to a late adulthood in which I could stand beside another man in the ceremonies room of a provincial town hall and repeat after a government official what were – to all legal intents and purposes – marriage vows. In Italy, of course, where we spend most of our time, these vows mean nothing, and even in the UK there’s an ongoing resistance that’s sustained by people who should know better, if only by their own estimation. Which makes what Vanessa has to say below even more pertinent. So I’ll waste no more time and hand you over to her straight away. It’s all yours, Vanessa!

Charles

 I am delighted to be perching on your illustrious blog today – thank you for the invitation.  And I bring with me a virtual Methuselah of bubbly and a vast bunch of roses – many heartfelt congratulations on your recent civil partnership with Giuseppe. I wish you a long and happy life together.

What think you then, of all the column inches filled with arguments for and against same-sex marriages? Don’t answer that – I can guess. I hope the negatives have not taken the edge off your celebrations. I guess you are probably just getting on with life, content that Popes and Archbishops are not speaking for you – as, increasingly they are not speaking for the majority of us – but they will go on pronouncing, sadly.

 I am female and have been married for over thirty five years to a bloke – but I have a considered view, so thanks for the opportunity to express it. It links nicely to a section of ‘The Coward’s Tale’, and I will give you a link to an early version of that section online, at the end.

I’ve just been reading some pronouncements from Pope Benedict against same-sex marriage.  I think these are direct quotes – if not they are paraphrases:

 “Marriage between a man and a woman must be preserved because it protects parents, children and the whole of society.”

“All our efforts in this area are ultimately concerned with the good of children, who have a fundamental right to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships.”

He may mean well, and is ‘just doing his job’, but coming hot on the heels of recent scandals which will not go away, his words ring hollow.

 “Marriage between a man and a woman must be preserved because it protects parents, children and the whole of society.” How so? Marriage had not protected either adults, children or society  at large from the damage perpetrated for decades by his employees however indirect he might like to say the employer/employee relationship is – and there is an argument that says they might not have damaged at all had they been allowed to express their sexual needs in a loving relationship.

“Children (…) have a fundamental right to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality.”

“ A healthy understanding of sexuality” would include a healthy understanding of all sexuality, wouldn’t it, not just one sub-section?  I remember hearing the writer Colm Toibin talking about times past in rural Ireland when young teenage blokes who weren’t attracted to girls would be told by their village priests that this was an indication that they were being called to the church.  No mention of the fact that this might be a perfectly normal thing, and what about boys? Perhaps because the priests didn’t know, or did know, and suppressed their own instinctive knowledge?

 He talks as if attraction to a person of the same sex is an illness. Goodness – I remember absolutely adoring an older girl when I was at school to the extent that I went weak at the knees when she walked by. In the Pope’s book, I should have been hospitalised. Or shot. 

 Jokes apart – the world is in enough of a mess, surely the churches can find better things to do than seek to prevent two human beings finding happiness and expressing their commitment to each other publicly? So much strife seems to be caused by exclusive religious posturing, doesn’t it? If you ain’t in my gang you ain’t going to heaven… Doesn’t that sound a little odd, these days? Can’t people be good human beings, and not seek to hurt each other, physically, emotionally, economically, and still ‘get to heaven’ if such exists? Don’t we need to recognise that an urge for companionship and fulfilment, sexual or otherwise, is a fundamental need? And if we are denied our basic needs, we are damaged. Rather as these poor priests who abuse do so partly because their job requires them to deny one of the most fundamental needs of all.

 In ‘The Coward’s Tale’, there is an old guy called Judah Jones. He is a window cleaner, an old man who still works hard, not able to retire despite his age, who pushes his bike and his ladders up and down the hilly streets of the town to make sure the people can see out of their houses. He lives alone, always has, and is desperately lonely. But Judah loves someone dearly, and has done for years. He loves a collier called Peter to the extent that when he sees him, he cannot speak, he has to hide, not walk past. He has wanted him for as long as he can remember. And has never done anything about it. Because the time and the place will not allow it.

 I felt desperately sad for this man, as I was writing him. He would have made a terrific partner, a terrific husband, a terrific wife. If times were different, he would have lived a more fulfilling life.  

 I make this point somewhere in his story: “If you have love to give it has to go somewhere, for it cannot go nowhere…” and so Judah Jones loves an image, on a window, in chapel. He cares for that image as if it was a person. He adores that image beyond reason. 

‘The Coward’s Tale’ is full of the tales of men whose lives are spoiled, held up, by issues caused by an incident that happened generations ago. And it is the same for Judah. His fixation with the window goes back… but perhaps I will let your readers follow the link to read his story as it was back in 2008, when it won a prize in the USA – before it was edited to become part of ‘The Coward’s Tale’. 

 http://www.percontra.net/10gebbie.htm

 But back to religion with a small ‘r’, if we may. If we must. I have been asked why Judah’s story finishes as it does. My great writing buddy Andrew is gay, and he found it hard to accept this ending. My only answer is that all my main male characters are based on images we have come to associate with the twelve men we know as The Twelve Apostles. Judah is based on Judas. And whatever else happens in the story of Judas, the ultimate sadness for him as a human being is that he kills the thing he really loves.

 Looking back on this story, I can see that it does reflect what I believe, although it was not written with those beliefs as ink. If society does not allow each one of us to love as we need to, then we are causing not only personal pain but inflicting unnecessary and often lasting damage on ourselves as a community. 

 Thanks for letting me perch, Charles. 

And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Vanessa, not to mention the roses and champagne!

Richard Gwyn, The Vagabond’s Breakfast

I was drawn to this book for a number of reasons. The first is that Richard Gwyn and I crossed paths briefly many years ago, in the council estates of East London, and – if I’m not confusing him with someone else, which is quite possible – he still owes me a tenner. But I’ll let that pass. The second reason for reading it, and one that does us both more credit, is that the book’s been very highly recommended by Scott Pack, who describes it as “utterly terrifying, funny, thought provoking and seemingly without an ounce of self-pity. A masterpiece”. As someone who’s also basked in Scott’s praise in the past, I can hardly doubt his judgement when he high fives someone else’s work. The third reason is that it gives me a chance to mention one of my favourite Joni Mitchell songs, The Last Time I Saw Richard, not because I want to talk about the last time I saw this particular Richard – my memory of the occasion is understandably vague given the excesses of that period – but because the text of that song oddly illuminates Richard Gwyn’s extraordinary book. It’s a song that explicitly condemns romanticism while implicitly rendering it homage. If it’s true that ‘all romantics meet the same fate someday, cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café’, it’s equally true – as the song admits – that the accuser’s eyes are also still ‘full of moon’, and that no one, finally, is immune from ‘pretty lies’. I suspect that Gwyn might play down the latter truth, and understandably so, but look at this:

We picked up the caritas blankets she had stashed behind the bar, went out into the square, grabbed an armload of cardboard from a skip, walked down a few streets and climbed a crumbling wall and through an archway without a streetlight nearby; this place is good, said Charo, this place is safe. We wrapped ourselves under the blankets and onto the card, she smelled like a warm animal, we burrowed deep into each other’s warmth, deep into the soft haven of each other’s sorrow, we lay under the canopy of night and listened to the wind tearing down the narrow streets of the city, listened to the howling of the wind in our warm and destitute embrace, until the drugs and sleep took us hostage, until sleep weighed down on us like mercury.

It’s no surprise to the reader, after passages like this, that a friend tells Gwyn he is a ‘prisoner of duality […] addicted to the notion of the epic quest’. It’s as though his life has been lived to fulfil a need for sublimity, inverted, in acts and in language, to become a ‘singer prince […] consigned to the kingdom of the gutter.’ A singer prince who is also ‘a person in the very process of disintegration.’ What marks him out from others who have trod this same hobo-ish track, though, can be seen in these last few words. If ‘singer prince’ belongs to the lexis of romanticism at its most sublime,  ‘process of disintegration’ forms part of an entirely different register.

Because The Vagabond’s Breakfast belongs in a strangely hybrid way to two distinct genres: the literature of, for want of a better term, tramping and the literature of illness. On the one hand we have Kerouac, Genet, George Orwell; on the other Dermot Welch, Nerval, Dostoyevsky. What’s interesting about both groups of writers is the extent to which, with the exception of Orwell, they’re romantics; there’s a sense in all of them that hardship, pain, degradation bestow their own rewards and that to receive them is to be marked out in more than a merely negative way. It’s not just nostalgie de la boue – for many of these writers, it’s the boue itself. Gwyn, in this book, straddles the genres by sandwiching two memoirs – the story of his dissolute past on the other hand and, on the other, as consequence and antithesis, that of his current battle with illness. The illness is the result of the dissolution, but it’s also its mirror image – it’s a defining business, one that takes over the life of its host to the exclusion of almost everything else. This makes for some bare, and harrowing, writing. For example:

One night, I climb to the loft of the house, where my study is located, in search of a cigarette lighter. When I step into the room, swaying under the dual onslaught of sleep deprivation and brain fog, I am on a mission. I have a cheap lighter in my hand, but it will not suffice, since according to the demented logic of some fleeting obsession, the lighter I am searching for has to be white, and the one in my hand is blue, an aberration. I spot the power lead that connects my laptop to the mains, and it terminates in a rectangular white fixture, which I remove, thinking it might also function as a lighter, and I attempt to light it with the blue one, convinced that the only way to ignite a lighter is with another lighter. I can smell burning plastic, but because of the defect in my cognitive wiring am not immediately able to connect the smell with my own activity, until I realise that the melting fixture is burning my fingers. I am, at that moment, aware of myself as an alien presence, an utter anomaly, a man standing alone in his study having attempted, unsuccessfully, to set fire to a computer, or – which is the same thing – to his memory. The next day I find the blackened remains of the fixture hanging from my desk.

The absence of metaphor in this passage, the writerly curiosity and search for exactitude are in sharp contrast to the romanticising sublimity of ‘warm and destitute embrace’ in the extract above, and Gwyn is fully aware of this. Indeed, The Vagabond’s Breakfast is nothing if not self-aware, which is the opposite of self-pitying. Towards the end of this extraordinary book, in what stands as both an admission and a statement of intent, he writes:

It is something that I never seem able to escape, this constant interweaving and interplay between the two domains of experience that constitute my life, this life which is not enough for everything.

Dreamhouse, by Alison Habens

What an odd book this is. And in the best possible sense. I came across it some time ago in a list made by Scott Pack of books that hadn’t attracted the attention they deserved – a subject dear to my bruised, neglected heart. I ordered it (a used copy – the novel is now out of print) and then forgot all about it until I was looking through a pile of unread books behind a sofa – yes, I’m that disorganised – and found it, dusty, slightly forlorn, with the tagline you can see in the picture to the left of this: “One of the best first novels to appear this year”, which, given its current status (on Amazon UK, 11 used from £0.01) occasioned a rush of sympathy and anxiety, and the tiniest, tiniest pinch of schadenfreude, disguised as authorly fellow-feeling. I popped it in my bag and started reading it that morning, on the train to work. And I’m very glad I did.

The book was published in 1996 but the mood of the opening pages took me further back, to the early work of Mike Leigh: wonderful television films like Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party, with their fascinated, unnerving and nerve-raw take on aspiration, usually represented by Alison Steadman (coincidence, surely?) The heroine of Dreamhouse is herself a Steadman-like figure called Celia whose lifetime ambition, to celebrate her forthcoming marriage by holding an engagement party, is about to be realised. Celia shares a house with three other people, two of whom, inconveniently, have decided to host their own parties the same evening. Unlike Celia, they live in a world where bottom drawers are less important than mind-altering substances and feminist cinema. What can possibly go wrong?

The premise is farcical, but also appalling, for Celia at least, and the novel develops both the horror and the farce as though there were no significant difference between the two. Which is rarely true in real life, but is certainly true in certain forms of art and recreational drug use. Habens skilfully yokes both to the chariot of her novel, which runs amok within the walls of the shared (dream)house as it transforms itself into an inverted wonderland. Alice’s descent, for example, is paralleled by Celia’s ascent as she climbs the stairs to the first floor. There, she finds herself in a themed fancy-dress party and it will surprise no one to learn that the theme is Alice in Wonderland. That Celia is dressed in an improbably old-fashioned pale blue dress and has long blonde hair only adds to the confusion. In one sense, the novel is driven by this sort of muddle and displacement, like the finest Feydeau. Who people might actually be becomes contingent on a host of externalities: dress, place, expectation. Even gender is called into play, as the novel fills with competing Alices of both sexes and Celia’s one true self, as much a mystery to her as it is to anyone else, is called upon to define itself.

Celia is an anagram of Alice (I hope this isn’t giving too much away – I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I didn’t cotton on to this myself but had to wait until I was told…) and Dreamhouse, in its disarmingly inventive way, is itself an anagram of Lewis Carroll‘s Alice books, their elements, or some of them, being taken up and rearranged with the casual disregard for identity, and logic, of the original works, and with all their wit and delight in wordplay multiplied tenfold. Because, for sheer linguistic exuberance, Habens gleefully outdoes her inspiration by weaving wordplay – puns, assonance, spoonerisms, half-rhymes – into the very stuff of the writing. Everything, from Carroll to Joyce via music hall innuendo, gets tumbled into the mix. Here’s an example:

‘Within a matter of minutes my trousers were terrified and trying to come off. I hurried to help her remove her dress too, frightened little bit of flimsy that it was, for she was bellowing “Get off! Get off!” at the bottom of her voice. But I couldn’t get the frock off fast enough for her; it was frozen with fear, and some of the bottons got pulled off in the panic. Well, by this time she was everywhere. She came at me with open legs. Her body was all over my hands. She rammed herself at my rod, so soft I thought she would swallow me up.

Linguistic high jinks but beneath the dazzle is the description of what might have been a rape; and once again, this disjunction – this arbitrariness, if you like, within the language itself – between what’s said and what’s meant is at the very heart of what’s going on. In the dreamhouse nothing is stable, least of all the subjects concerned, as their clothes, their limbs, their members begin to do their feeling for them. The final court scene, towards which everything converges both within the novel and in its status as parody and anagram of the Alice books, is an absolute joy, told with an hallucinatory energy that would have left the Victorian don reeling. But it’s also the point at which the world outside this ersatz drug-induced wonderland comes back into play. It’s a world on the brink of chaotic involution; the fact that Glenda Jackson appears at one point – to refute the notion of sexual crime as a crime against property rather than the person – only adds to the general feeling that something larger is about to break through, something more real than apparent, or less topsyturvy. Connections begin to be made. There’s a death, a real death…

At times, the energy of Dreamhouse is simply too much to absorb. Nothing, in the end,  is more exhausting than something that is itself inexhaustible. And for all its Aliceness, and its playful quizzical vigour, Habens’ novel is driven by something more than the final impossibility of defining what we mean by identity, and the fun this might produce. Like Tim Burton’s recent film based on the Alice books, it aims to do more and ends up doing slightly less. In both cases, it’s a question of narrative imperative being stronger than the kind of epistemological questioning Carroll engaged in. For all the visionary élan of Burton’s film, his need to simplify the story into good and evil plays against, and ultimately defuses, the gleeful relativism of the original books. In Habens’ case, the very real plight of Celia, of who she is and of what she might become, runs counter to the very procedures that give the novel its form, its charm, and its startling originality. In this sense, the novel is too rich a concoction for its own good; a concoction in which the parts of the book can begin to seem greater than the whole. But to say this is simply to recognise – and acknowledge – the book’s ambition, which is immense.

Whoops!

I accidentally published an unfinished review of Alison Habens’ novel Dreamhouse a couple of minutes ago. If you saw it, wipe it from your mind! The finished article is on its way…