Roadside Picnic - Arkady & Boris Strugatsky,Stalker - Tarkovsky, Stalky & Co - Rudyard Kipling

Roadside Picnic - Arkady & Boris Strugatsky,Stalker - Tarkovsky, Stalky & Co - Rudyard Kipling - who would have thought they were all linked so closely - one of the most astounding and wonderful discoveries of my reading life. All beautifully knitted together in an afterword written by Boris Strugatsky in my new addition of  Roadside Picnic on Saturday, that replaced the old Gollancz version I lost years ago. Cut short, Arkady Strugatsky made a rough translation into Russion of Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co ( a tale of public schoolboys at school and so much more : read it) for his brother Boris, translating Stalky as "Stullky". Then as they began the writing the story of these "prospectors", or "trappers", who raided this strange, dangerous,  incomprehensible zone left behind by incomprehensible aliens, long since gone, they invented this new word "stullker" in Russian  to describe them, a word whose resonance Tarkovsky picked up on - and so, in english, the film is entitled "Stalker".  Read the books, see the film.

This was something of an epiphany for me, the yoking of Kipling with the  Strugatsky brothers (and thence Tarkovsky's Stalker), two books and one film that I have reread, rewatched. It's a proof ( for me), well evidence anyway, that Kipling had this wonderful subversive edge - he wasn't all Empire and colonialism, he was a deep and meaningful writer. I only recently read Kim, and that book is a strange and beautiful  beast, with a deep love and understanding of India, Afghanistan and its many peoples, and its centre the eponymous Kim, this half Indian, half English boy whose strength and wonder grow throughout the book.

The Shore - Sara Taylor, The Scent of Dried Roses - Tim Lott, The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro

Every so often you come across a new writer who is just such a damn good storyteller, always a good thing. I bought his after reading the Guardian review (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/18/the-shore-sara-taylor-review-kate-clanchy) - a great review, fair and well-written, enough to make me hit the search and buy button on my Kindle and start reading straightaway - such a strange feeling of decadence still,  seeing a book like that and then reading it within seconds - no more waiting, no more searching book shops - no more ordering of books that "should be in next week". The corollary is that there is so much  less browsing though actual bookshops, although I still do that. That's how I bought The Sleeping Giant - a book I wanted but I was seduced as well by the sheer size and weight and glory of its presentation - it felt good to heft it over to the counter even though I was paying quids and quids more than I would via Amazon. 

The Shore though, is housed in quiet electronic bytes and bits, the colourful cover  only really viewable on my Nexus, and I can't weigh it in my hand like I can a paper book - it's joined the other invisible unless I search books, books that do not sit on my bookshelves to be pulled out just when I catch sight of them, to be flicked through. That is a loss - there's a bit in Monique Roffey's With the Kisses of His Mouth where she describes a party that we were at, but it would be difficult to find - I'll have to search for the book, search through the pages - [perhaps use a search term like "Night of the Senses" then  trawl though all the false hits, and then at the end not a well-thumbed page, but a few arrangements of pixels on a screen. Which is not to mistake the form for the content - I still like reading books on a Kindle or anywhere, but there is that loss of some of the experience, the ability to wearily toss the book aside and see it waiting reproachfully for you to pick it up again. The other book that springs to mind is Tim Lott's  The Scent of Dried Roses: One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy which is a very well written account of his upbringing in the sixties and seventies in Ealing, his tales of past family that led to their Ealing home, his descent into depression and his slow climb out of it, and then the brick in the window, so to speak, of his mother' suicide just as he was recovering. I started reading his column in the Family section of the Guardian a little earlier and found I was enjoying his familiar, likable, warts-and-all confessional style, so bought the book. His writing lifts up several levels in the book - I enjoyed it for the sheer pleasure of his storytelling and prose, as well as the heady dose of nostalgia that it instilled. (Nostalgia for what I ask myself - I wouldn't want to go back in time any more than I am sure that he would, but it's that elegiac sense of a past that has been lost, which had a quieter less knowing feel to it). Now I'd love to be able to flick though the pages and flick through bits without all that harsh, clinical computery stuff. Well there's only one answer - I'll have to buy the paperback as well.

Fifty five years a reader... part 3

In the best traditions of writers like Karl Ove this will not be a linear account. Sitting anywhere - at breakfast, in a cafe, in a waiting room, or standing anywhere come to that, I always get a little edgy if I can't find anything to read. This means I end up reading the backs of cereal boxes,  packets of sugar, menus when I didn't want to eat,  bus shelter adverts, the sides of vans, left behind newspapers and magazines that I wouldn't normally give house room or any attention to. Today it meant that I read the University of Sussex Alumni magazine while eating scrambled eggs with chilies, chive and smoked salmon - that should have been enough to keep my attention focused on eating, but I still have that addictive habit of wanting to cast my eye over some kind of text.  Today I had to hand The University of Sussex Alumni. The University of Sussex Alumni magazine is a publication that I deeply and unfairly resent for its smug self declaiming mish-mash of smiling students or smiling people who once were students, all saying how really fucking successful they have been which has made them deeply grateful to Sussex, grateful enough in many instances to hand over the dosh in considerable amounts. Leaving aside - no not leaving aside the issue of how you might feel "grateful" to an institution that is nothing like it was in the seventies, is now a vast corporate enterprise, the likes of which we would have scorned from our lefty perspectives that long time ago, and which we would not feel "grateful" to, because it's just too big and anonymous a beast to be "grateful" to, and smacks of gratitude for the poorhouse soup. Nostalgic, wistful, angry, amazed, incredulous, now those are the feelings and emotions that people (well me anyway) might actually have. There was one tiny little bit of nostalgic memorabilia that did strike me, as I skipped my way bad-temperedly through its cheap but substantial matt pages( why are all these alumni magazines printed on a cross between cardboard and paper? Do they think that way we will keep and treasure them for ever?). It was a memory (spoilt by a punning headline so bad that I can't even repeat it here), of being able to hear cows from the East Slope residences, in 1975/6 my first year at Sussex. It instigated a gush of nostalgia that made me feel breathless and inescapably frightened of death, like the nightmares I have where I can't breath, because I spent such an intense and beautiful summer on that gorgeous campus, with its rooks cawing, its honey bricks , its idyllic pastoral setting, sweet scented air, my first proper relationship with a fresh faced and beautiful girl, blonde hair and blue eyes. It was that endless hot summer of'76, and like all endless seeming summers the grass went brown and it was all over for ever.  I got glandular fever, plunged into clinical depression, lost all sense of where I should be going and what I should be doing.  Well nothing new there - and of course it's not the whole story, but that little reminiscence made me literally feel ill with nostalgia -ahh what a poisonous emotion it can be.

PS. The damnedest thing is that without Sussex I wouldn't be the fairly successful person that I am, I'm sure, but gratitude, gratitude is something I reserve for people, not institutions.  Anyway, Bretton Hall was the best place I ever went to, although, although when I think about that long hot spring and summer at Sussex, I am, fuck it, I am grateful it happened. 

Karl Ove - Dancing in the dark, Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman, Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

Dancing in the Dark covers the late adolescent years, so it's a well mined area  of confessional literature by the likes of the wonderful Caitlin Moran (yes I think she is very good, for some of the same reasons I think Karl Ove is, and anyone who can't get along with Caitlin isn't going to get along with Karl Ove). Once again Karl Ove communicates the utter intensity of the ordinary, as well as the white hot intensity of the sexual obsession, for almost every adolescent boy, complicated by his instant premature ejaculation whenever he gets anywhere near his goal. There is one amazing fact about Karl Ove, and it can't be unconnected with his sexual problem: he says he never masturbated, ever. This is really really fucking weird - given his openness about everything else I guess it's true.  It's easier to read about Caitlin Moran, gaily fumbling along from orgasm to orgasm, than poor old Karl Ove - he never made it easy for himself.

Then when I'd finished, hurried though Dancing in the Dark, to get to read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, but then I felt this strange reluctance - supposing it wasn't up to the standard of all his previous novels, suppose the mood isn;t quite right? It was a strange feeling, but the book itself, its deep grey green cover (is it grey green? I can't remember), its black tinged pages, its weight, the thick feel of bound pages gave me this comforting sense that it would be alright. Why I don't know. It is a terrific book - need to say that right from the start - I am a fan of Kazuo Ishiguro anyway, but this is really good. It got mealy mouthed reviews from the likes of The New Yorker Magazine, among others,people who just don't get it, people who cannot, it seems, let their imagination soar as Ishiguro does. 

His prose is still, well, how do you describe it? - clear and ordinary but cumulatively devastating in its impact and emotional payload. Here he does allow himself some lovely forays into a slightly stilted "heightened" language, especially in the characters' speech.  In the end it's an almost unbearably poignant love story, set in the context of War and Peace, and what they do to us,  with all the power and depth combined with ambiguity that he is such a master stylist of. And he's yet another nail in the coffin of those who want to pigeonhole fantasy, science fiction, or any other genre, and say you can't produce literature using the tropes of any of those.

Fifty five years a reader... part 2

So where then after Biggles and Blyton? The first real adult literature I read was Wuthering Heights, one rainy Saturday afternoon when I was sixteen. So there is a long long gap in which I had to satisfy my voracious reading appetite. I did reread a lot - I had to - I would read all the books in the school even though I had been allowed to go and help chose the books from the library bus that came round. Of course I joined the library - that first trip there, getting my junior library ticket,  going into the small room that served for children's books. That access was magical, truly magical, but I lacked guidance in what to read as my mum's tastes weren't really mine. At the time I found Pooh Bear a bit simplistic and frankly weird, Wind in the Willows I only came to appreciate later. Of course I was read to as a child, but I cannot remember a single story or book that I was read. The only memory of reading with my mother I can access is being in front of the fire with the Jack and Jill comic, colouring in the dots. But comics! Of course comics - loyal to Valiant mostly, while my brother had Buster, but with occasional frays into The Eagle, Boy's World the Beano, a faintly scurrilous funny called Wham and at the other end of the spectrum Look and Learn. Always torn by Look and Learn - it had enough text to actually give me more than a few minutes reading - even then I read very fast, but it only had one comic strip and it was often a bit dull.  Valiant was my favourite - the stories and story-lines were exactly tuned to my sensibilities - Captain Hurricane - the obligatory 2nd World War hero, Legg's Eleven - a terrific football serial, The Wild Twins, and a text only story about a man with X-ray eyes. They came every Monday, early, and I would read the entire comic cover to cover before breakfast.

But books.. I picked out The Hobbit from the library early on, probably when I was about seven years old, because of its fairy tale cover and description - I had no idea who Tolkien was, no idea it was a famous book. It was strange disturbing reading, the dwarves and Bilbo himself seemed amoral, they weren't "good" characters at all, not even particularly nice characters. Mirkwood scared me to death, and I took the book back the first time without having got any further, but like a persistent itch I need to know what happened, so I got it out again - but failed once more to make it through Mirkwood - it took a third attempt, probably a year or so later, maybe more, to actually finish it.

Fifty five years a reader... part 1

It's been along time since the Janet & John books ( I seem to still remember the very particular style and colours of those books, the way the text was so clearly laid out on the page with lots of white space around it as if presaging the white space look of the uncluttered   web page, but i can't remember any of the words. The next book was green, I think, and had the story of chicken-licken which at the time I was vaguely disturbed by, just as I was by the later knowledge, when I was nine or ten, that the sun would eventually blaze up and engulf the earth, this fact conflicting with my dimly felt sense of immortality.

I remember going up to read to the teacher - a Mrs Cohen, a smily, dark haired bird of a woman, slight and short, who nevertheless once banged mine and Simon Collis's heads together in the cloakroom of Halsford Park School because we had made dire and plain nasty threats that we would smash a little girl's dollies - I don't know why we did that, but I do remember the clash of heads. (You'd think this was a predicate of a bad future, these bullying little boys of six picking on a smaller girl in the class (actually she might not have been smaller - I can't even remember who she was|), but I did OK, and Simon Collis, according to my mother's best  friend and Google was the British Ambassador to Iraq from 2012 to 2014 among other achievements). And I have to say that we were usually pretty well-behaved and peaceable children, but for some reason this event did happen).

 When you read to Mrs Cohen you were allowed to read until you made a mistake and I was always keyed up and anxious, so wishing to read on and on and.. but I would always trip over a word or a pronunciation and that would be it, back to my table in the class. The next memory, though, is the same class./ I'm reading on my own Enid Blyton's Magic Faraway Tree, completely swept up in it. It is Mrs Cohen's personal copy because I have read every single reading book in the class. Somehow,. somewhere a reading bomb exploded in my head and I never stopped.

Never stopped reading, yes, but what did I read? I didn't come from a well  educated home - my Dad left school at 14 and was apprenticed as a draughtsman, my Mum had been at what was essentially a lower middle class finishing school until she was sixteen before she joined the Civil Service as a typist. From my Mum's background I had the children's classics - most of the Swallows and Amazons series, Richmal Crompton's William books, but I didn't care for them that much. There was one book though that I read and reread even though I didn't like the strong musty smell from its faux leather binding - Arthur Ransom's Old Peter's Russian Tales.  (The smell is one that I love now, faded though it is, I bury my nose in the pages to inhale the feeling of reading these strange light and dark tales).

 I like to think, I do think, it was the narrative excitement of Blyton and Biggles that kept me reading and reading but the powerful heart of fairy tales that eventually brought me to literature - and kept me sane.

Postscript - 15th January 2019
I was searching for somewhere in this blog where I thought I remembered  lamenting how little time there was - but there isn't a search facility in this damn cheap  blog software - all I found was the first part of Fifty five years a reader from three years ago, so even less time now - maybe not even the time to reread all the books I want to read again, let alone the new.
Oh and Simon Collis is now the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia , and the only Ambassador to complete the Hajj - good on him!

Koyaannisqatsi

I first saw and heard  Koyaannisqatsi on a bad quality VHS tape on a video player borrowed from the social work centre where I worked. It was stunning then, and through the years I watched it again on a DVD - took Thomas and Jacob to see it at the cinema one afternoon when they were six and nine (that was amazing), then a couple of years ago(?) Tom and I saw Philip Glass and the Ensemble perform it live in the Brighton Dome. Now I listen to it more than see it as all the images are in my head anyway. One sticks though. Always when I watch it  I try to make myself  pay attention to each person that appears (it's a bit manic in the crowd scenes, so I often try to see people I haven't seen before). But I have my favourites - and the best is this - the hot lazy beach, a woman sleeping in the sun on a towel with her child sleeping beside her, then the camara pans out and up the beach to bring the San Ofre Nuclear Generating Station - just up the coast from San Diego - into focus. Who is / was she who is /was the child?  - there's a whole pointless quest where I'd like to know what happened to every single one of the people in the film. But this image stays with me  on its own. I don't need or want to know anymore, it's perfect.

Scenes from an unclerical life 2

extract from "Scenes from an unclerical life" - "The Unreliable Narrator"
"What they loved was a crisp shining New Years day with the fire fresh lit in the grate, the Christmas lights still shining, friends popping round for mince pies and mulled wine, the New Years Concert from Vienna playing as it happened - a complete first - remembered, switched the radio on, actually listened to it. Glowing and rosy cheeked from their morning walk they all gather round the fire - everyone's up, friends have decided to stay on for tea and drinks. The day before, he had made a vast turkey and ham pie with an equally vast salad with two dressings, one hot and strong it's little fiery tips of chilies peeping out from the glistening oil like the pointy ends of elves  boots, another flush with the green of basil plucked fresh from the plant on the window sill.

But all this is not so.

New Year finds our hapless couple in the throes of sickness and self mortification, unable to rise from their rumpled bed without vertigo, nausea and blunt shafts of pain that take the place of any sunshine that might have shone into their room if the curtains were open and if there were any sun anyway. A peep though the gaps shows a light but dull grey, unbroken seamless cloud. She tries to remember what they did last night - did they actually finish? - an exploratory hand confirms that she is wet and swampy, and the involuntary sniff of her fingers confirms, also, the cod liver fish oil smell of last nights sex. "

The writing conveys the listless regretful sense of too much partying for too little gain. A realistic bit ultimately depressing picture that I enjoy all the more because I am bright, awake and unhungover - I may have missed the New Years Concert but it's all eminently repeatable on Spotify. Janice has been up for hours, deciding to clean the kitchen and bake cheese straws to eat round the fire - so thankful that we ordered that extra load of logs so that we didn't run out for the New Year. Jacob and Marisa are cooking a fragrant Thai curry with lemon grass and lime leaves for supper later. The house vibrates with positive energy and thankfulness for an other years dawn.  There is something fragrant and life-giving in making the decision to stay in, watch a joyful Jools Holland and go to bed about 1.30am.