Reading that breaks you, reading that makes you

I picked up Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours solely because of its cover. I’ve never claimed not to be shallow. (Did you know the French equivalent of ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is ‘L’habit ne fait pas le moine’ or ‘The clothing does not make the monk’?) I was fortunate that the copy the library happened to own was the copy that happened to be designed to appeal to me most. White background, black rose; the curves and serifs of the tautological title picked out in gold. Perhaps what attracted me most was not the cover but specifically its lack of a cover; its lack of a spine. Its spinelessness. It lies open, naked quires bound with green thread, as though abandoned partway through being finished.

The contents live up to its elegant, adventurous cover. One of my favourite stories talks about the power of reading to break you apart (see below). Oyeyemi is a writer who breaks and remakes your concept of language and how it should work: her prose is as unpredictable and poetic as her plots. In one story about the mysterious and sudden arrival of a young boy: “She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless.” “Makeless” here, of course, means “matchless”, but in this story it accurately represents this boy who has not been born or made, but simply appears.

The quotation below comes from the story ‘a brief history of the homely wench society’, which concerns two rival societies at Cambridge University. Boys’ club the Bettencourts created a list of the most ‘homely wenches’, and the wenches retaliated by forming their own society. When the Homely Wenches break into the Bettencourt headquarters, they find that less than ten per cent of their books are by women, and begin making swaps by torchlight. One of the replacements they make is for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, which leads to the following conversation:

‘It’s great, isn’t it? It sort of rocks you…reading it is sort of like reading from a cradle hung up in the trees, and the trees rock you with such sorrow, and as the volume turns up you realize that the trees are rocking you whilst deciding whether to let you live or die, and they’re sorry because they’ve decided to smash you to pieces…’
‘But then you’re put back together again, in a wholly different order…’
‘And it hurts so much you don’t know if the new order will work.’
‘It’ll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don’t you think?’

It makes me feel that reading as a process is a form of kintsugi: where broken pottery is repaired with gold. The repaired piece becomes more beautiful than the original. There we have it: a half-made book, a makeless boy, and reading that tears you apart and makes you again.

‘a brief history of the homely wench society’ is available to read online here.

Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (Picador, 2016)

Quotation of the month – Portobello books

This month’s quotation comes from Blanche Girouard’s Portobello Voices. It tells the story of Portobello Market in the unique voices of its traders. From antique dealers to costermongers, butchers to tin pan players, each person tells the story of their lives, collections, and relationship with Portobello.

I was inspired to read this because I am editing my own book of oral histories, Milton Keynes: The People’s Stories. Being guided by the words of others is a fascinating way to create a book, and it’s a huge privilege to be able to share their stories and their memories of Milton Keynes. Having spent hours cutting interviews to make them suitable for publication, I am impressed by how effortless this book seems. Each chapter tells an engaging story, and yet doesn’t feel edited at all. Girouard has perfectly preserved the voice of each trader, so that it feels each is speaking from the pages directly to you.

“You could get a modern reprint of that book but it’s rather nice to actually have an original. Because you can actually, viscerally, experience it the same way that somebody did nearly four hundred years ago. That, to me, is interesting. And there’s nothing like the smell of an old book. They smell differently from century to century because of the paper that was used, the leather that was used. I always think the older books have this lovely kind of organic aroma to them; they’ll smell vaguely of smoked meat. But by the time you get to the nineteenth century they stop making them with rag paper and make them with wood pulp and the leather was tanned at high speed in very acidic conditions. And in the nineteenth century they had gas lighting which put sulphuric acid into the atmosphere which reacted with the tanning agents in the bindings of books and the stuff that was used in the wood pulp paper, which is why that deteriorates so quickly. I’ve had occasions when I’ve opened the covers of a book and parts of the pages start falling out like confetti because the books have essentially rotted. Whereas I’ll show you one here…This book will be celebrating its five hundredth birthday next year and look at that paper – it’s as tough as nails!” Nicholas, Antique Dealer

From Blanche Girouard, Portobello Voices (The History Press, 2013), p.37.

Quotation of the month – love prose by Julian Barnes

Listening to John Finnemore presenting With Great Pleasure a few years ago, I became convinced of two things. Firstly, John Finnemore and I should be friends. After Souvenir Programme and Cabin Pressure, I was pretty sure of that already. But after listening, I was certain – I mean, really, how many people like PG Wodehouse AND Shakespeare? What are the chances?

Secondly, I realised I had to read something by Julian Barnes. John Finnemore chose a section from A History of the World in 10½ Chapters to be read aloud by Geoffrey Whitehead. Early in the chapter, Julian Barnes points out the clunkiness of love prose compared to love poetry: “[t]here is no genre that answers to the name of love prose. It sounds awkward, almost self-contradictory. Love Prose: A Plodder’s Handbook. Look for it in the carpentry section.” But this claim, as Finnemore points out, follows some of the most exquisite prose about love that has surely ever been written:

“Anyway… she’s asleep, turned away from me on her side. The usual stratagems and repositionings have failed to induce narcosis in me, so I decide to settle myself against the soft zigzag of her body. As I move and start to nestle my shin against a calf whose muscles are loosened by sleep, she senses what I’m doing, and without waking reaches up with her left hand and pulls the hair off her shoulders on the top of her head, leaving me her bare nape to nestle in. Each time she does this I feel a shudder of love at the exactness of this sleeping courtesy. My eyes prickle with tears, and I have to stop myself from waking her up to remind her of my love. At that moment, unconsciously, she’s touched some secret fulcrum of my feelings for her.”

In the weeks and months following the episode, I forgot the name of Julian Barnes and his book. But I never forgot the image he described. The memory of the extract was triggered each time I pulled back my own hair from my own shoulders. It became a Pavlovian response, action and memory inextricably intertwined. When I finally picked up A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, I was oblivious to its significance. Until I came to the chapter in question, (Parenthesis). On reading the opening words, “Let me tell you something about her. It’s that middle stretch of the night, when the curtains leak no light…She’s lying on her side, turned away from me.” I was immediately called back to that Pavlovian nape-nestling response. Sure enough, as I turned the page, there again was that extract. After 3 years not searching for it, I had finally found it.

Here’s the BBC page just in case they ever make the episode available again, but in the meantime here’s a version of dubious legality and quality via tumblr.

Quotations from Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (Vintage Books, 2009), pp.225-228.

Postscript: In a picture of domestic quietude quite unrepresentative of our everyday lives, I read this book while curled up next to my boyfriend on the sofa. As I began this very passage, filled with love, I nestled closer to him. He looked down at me and, with warning in his voice, said, “I’ve just farted.” I stayed where I was. If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is.

Quotation of the month – every man is an island

When selecting quotations for this blog, I tend to select quotations about books and reading. It gives me a vague sense of purpose; a theme with which to constrain myself. This quotation isn’t strictly about reading, but it is about communication, and how we can never be truly sure we understand one another. And it blows me away every time I read it.

It makes me think, of course, of John Donne’s Meditations. But also of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the efforts of the academy in Lagado to minimise errors in interpretation by using physical objects in place of words. It even reminds me of that old philosophical chestnut of how we interpret colour — do we each see the same shade of blue, or have we simply learned to call our disparate perceptions of one shade “blue”?

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (Penguin, 1973), p.13.

Quotation of the month – the alchemy of reading in Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon

At 704 pages, Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon is quite a commitment for the most dedicated reader. And you might find yourself having to reach for the dictionary every few pages. But just as a pot noodle isn’t as satisfying as the three-course meal you spent hours preparing, Harkaway more than rewards you for the effort you put in. It’s a deeply satisfying novel; complex, intellectual, and surprising. One of my favourite things about it was how ideas about narratives, interpretation, and reading were interweaved throughout the whole text. You can read my full review here, but these are two of my favourite quotations from Gnomon about reading:

“Poetry is a shotgun aimed at our shared experience, hoping to hit enough of the target that we all infer a great bulk of information conveyed as implication and metaphor in an approximately similar war. Making a unity between poet and reader.” loc 4220-4225

“[A] book is not finished until it is read. The writing is not complete until what is said has passed from the physical volume which gives it sensory reality into another mind where it kindles thoughts and impressions: a whole understanding of what it means to be, ignited on foreign soil in an act that is either erotic or imperialistic, but in either case miraculous. We become one another. Ink on paper is the frozen matter of a person, a snapshot of selfhood in fungal spores waiting to be quicked in our borrowed mentation, thought shaping itself in us, of us, to emerge from us.” (loc 4257-4262)

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon (William Heinemann, 2017)

Quotation of the month – Matt Haig on reading to stay alive

Reasons to Stay Alive came along at the perfect moment for me. Not only did it move me towards a new stage of recovery from my depression, it did so in a language that felt completely personal to me. For Haig, reading was a vital part of his recovery, and as such his book is liberally sprinkled with quotations from the literary greats. Emily Dickinson seems to be a particular favourite, and the fact that the words “hope is the thing with feathers” pop so frequently into my head when I’m in need of an emotional boost is entirely thanks to Haig. To read a book that was not only about hope in the midst of the darkness of depression, but also about the power of words and reading, made me feel that Haig had tailored this book just for me. And I know I’m not alone in feeling that.

Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive

“‘The object of art is to give life a shape,’ said Shakespeare. And my life – and my mess of a mind – needed shape. I had ‘lost the plot’. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to me to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to ‘someone is looking for something’. One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength. In my deepest state of depression, I had felt stuck. I felt trapped in quicksand (as a kid that had been my most common nightmare). Books were about movement. They were about quests and journeys. Beginnings and middles and ends, even if not in that order. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind. And because it was only a few months before that I had lost the point of words, and stories, and even language, I was determined never to feel like that again. I fed and I fed and I fed. I used to sit with the bedside lamp on, reading for about two hours after Andrea had gone to sleep, until my eyes were dry and sore, always seeking and never quite finding, but with that feeling of being tantalisingly close.” – Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive (Canongate Books, 2015), p.136.

 

Quotation of the month – John Wilkins on the vice of liberally quoting

I’m aware there is a certain irony in choosing as my quotation of the week a quotation that warns against quoting. But I think there is sufficient substance in Wilkins’ advice to justify sharing it here. I came across this in a notebook, clearly written before I started systematically writing exactly where I was quoting from. As such I have no idea where I found this quotation, but I’m sure it resonated with me as a scholar of English literature trying not to rely too heavily in my essays on the thoughts and ideas of others. I haven’t read all of Wilkins’ Ecclesiastes, but it sounds like an interesting read, calling for, as did many 17th-century works, simplicity and authenticity in speech and writing.

“To stuffe a Sermon with citations of Authors, and the witty sayings of others is to make a feast of vinegar and pepper, which may be very delightful being used moderately as sauces, but must needs be very improper and offensive to be fed upon such as diet.” – John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (1646)

Quotation of the month – Johnson on the mutability of language

I’ve always been fascinated by the tension between prescriptivism and descriptivisim, so it was a surprise to discover the Preface to Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary only recently. I had difficulty choosing which part to quote, because the whole thing is so perfectly phrased in that poised but passionate 18th-century way. The whole text is well worth a read, and available on Project Gutenberg and on the British Library website.

Title page to the second edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language

“…with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.
With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.
…The language most likely to continue long without alteration, would be that of a nation raised a little, and but a little, above barbarity, secluded from strangers, and totally employed in procuring the conveniencies of life; wither without books…men thus busied and unlearned, having only such words as common use requires, would perhaps long continue to express the same notions by the same signs, But no such constancy can be expected in a people polished by arts, and classed by subordination, where one part of the community is sustained and accommodated by the labour of the other. Those who have much leisure to think, will always be enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations of words. When the mind is unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience; when it is left at large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions; as any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice.” – from the Preface to Johnson’s Dictionary (1755)

Quotation of the month – Walter Moers takes us to Bookholm

I cannot recommend Walter Moers highly enough. His books combine fantasy, adventure, mystery, and stupendous writing. Reading his books you feel he has conjured a wild dream just for your enjoyment. Underlying it all is a huge sense of heart. Of love. Of passion for the wonder found in those small joys in life: from the taste of a perfectly ripe apricot to the alluring scent of old books.

To Bookholm:
“You can smell the place from a long way off. It reeks of old books. It’s as if you’ve opened the door of a gigantic second-hand bookshop—as if you’ve stirred up a cloud of unadulterated book dust and blown the detritus from millions of mouldering volumes straight into your face. There are folk who dislike that smell and turn on their heel as soon as it assails their nostrils. It isn’t an agreeable odour, granted. Hopelessly antiquated, it is eloquent of decay and dissolution, mildew and mortality. But it also has other associations: a hint of acidity reminiscent of lemon trees in flower; the stimulating scent of old leather; the acrid, intelligent tang of printer’s ink; and overlying all else, a reassuring aroma of wood.
I’m not talking about living wood or resinous forests and fresh pine needles; I mean felled, stripped, pulped, bleached, rolled and guillotined wood—in short, paper. Ah yes, my intellectually inquisitive friends, you too can smell it now, the odour of forgotten knowledge and age-old traditions of craftsmanship. Very well, let us quicken our pace!” – Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books (Vintage Books, 2007) p.10.

Quotation of the month – Italo Calvino on how books change our lives

Mr Palomar is a collection of philosophical meditations, as beautifully written as they are stylistically inventive. This is a quotation about books and about life, and how we construct our own narrative. But it particularly appeals to me because I’ve always been fascinated by how a book can mean something completely different to you depending on when you read it. When I first tried to read Gwyneth Lewis’s Sunbathing in the Rain I gave up after a couple of chapters. Her writing about her experiences with depression was simply too raw, too painfully real, for me to continue. When I returned to it later, I found it full of hope. That second time, it quite honestly changed my life.

“A person’s life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but rather corresponds to an inner architecture. A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, ‘How could I have lived without having read it!’ and also, ‘What a pity I did not read it in my youth!’ Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.” – Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar – The meditations of Palomar: Learning to be dead