The Book of Strange New Things - Michael Faber - a time to read and a time to..., Bridge of Spies

I finished reading The Book of Strange New Things this morning, sitting in bed for an hour and a half because I didn't need to get up, and it is one of those books that draws you in deeper and tighter as you read - in some respects. One of the other of those respects is the letters that the protagonist, Peter - a missionary on a far off planet- and his wife, Beatrice, left back on a social disintegrating earth of buffeted by the effects of global warming, exchange are written as those characters may have written  - so there's no literary beauty, there are even typos, and they are the inadequate scribblings of two people trying to communicate across a vast distance. It makes them something that I read quickly, speed read, skim, like you do an article that doesn't interest you much, but you do need to get the gist of the story, you do need to take it all in. It's curiously unsatisfying, but necessary for the book as a who;e - the rest of the writing is clear and satisfying by contrast, striking in its building up of the incidental and the important, compelling in both description and narrative. It has no answers though. I thought that it might have, that it might produce some new and illuminating perspective from which I could learn new and strange things.

It's been a day like that. Now I'm watching Bridge of Spies, and taking breaks from it to have snacks, with writing this, even play games of Hearthstone, in the way that you can't if you are watching with somebody else. Bridge of Spies is satisfying, it's moral dilemmas are clear and distinct, and the lawyer defending the Russian spy is straight up and honorable, unwilling to break his client confidentiality to satisfy the CIA, he is decided that if he is to represent this client, he will not compromise the values, rules and the Constitution. It's well photographed, the steely blues and rain of the spy movie, the warm ochres of home scenes sit well on the eye.

More reading obviously: the never-ending list. In Gratitude - Jenny Diski, The Book of Strange New Things - Michael Faber

The list is never-ending - I've given up writing down titles from the New Yorker and the Guardian book reviews, but there are books that leap out at me and I think, yes I must read this. In Gratitude is what manged the leap from review to reading, for a number of reasons. I like Jenny Diski's writing, particularly her autobiographical stuff. It's an inelegant word, "stuff", but I use it intentionally, because there is another more prurient, more "stuff" centered reason for reading In Gratitude - it's because she finally writes about her relationship with Doris Lessing, one of my most revered writers, both for her novels and writing and for her approach to politics and Sufism - it's because of Doris Lessing that I started reading Idris Shah and that gave me a way of thinking that, I think, has made me so much more critical of any ideologies or received ideas, and maybe, just maybe, has made me a more useful person that I might have been without exposure to Sufi ideas. Let's straight away dispose of any notion that I got any secret spiritual or any other enlightenment - I didn't. What I have understood from Idris Shah and Doris Lessing's writings on Sufism is that service, just plain ordinary service is what counts - forget enlightenment, forget spiritual insight - until you are of practical ordinary use in the world there is no possibility of gaining that - and in addition, even if you are of service, do practical good, there are no guarantees, no promises - you might be in the wrong car, the wrong place, at the wrong time and nothing is going to come of it.  I've always felt that this has been a useful way to look at the world if only to prevent yourself being swept up in cults, ideologies, political and campaigning groups, ways of thinking that are more about group bindings and emotional satisfaction than anything else. Other than that, on balance, I think it's caused me more pain and upset than if I had gone down these other routes in that I don't think I have been able to apply the lessons therein and I don't think I have been able to be of service except in very small limited ways - which is not self-beration, it's just a simple statement of fact, and it does not detract from the very small services that I have performed at various times.

What I read in In Gratitude about Doris Lessing was disturbing, upsetting and unsettling. You can read much of it here. The background was that Doris Lessing took Jenny Diski in as a very disturbed 15yr old girl, and allowed her to live in her house for four years, and even after that gave her an allowance to live on.  That it was a continuing act of unimaginable generosity is never in doubt, that Doris Lessing did not understand in any way how to look after a damaged 15yr old girl is, certainly from reading Jenny Diski's account, never in doubt either. 

The Book of Strange New Things needs a quick mention, - by the author of the rather disturbing Under the Skin (do I make a point of reading disturbing books all the time I wonder - is that why I have so many nightmares?) . It too is disturbing, but in a more friendly, good way - perhaps gently provoking is a better description - but I'm only a quarter of the way through, and I have no idea at all where it is headed, although it reads well and coherently so far - which is an exciting thing in a book. Maybe I'll buy his new book now. Sigh. 

Post script re In Gratitude

Of course one of the most disturbing (I know I'm using the word disturbing too much in this entry, but it seems stupid to look up synonyms just for the sake of it)  things about In Gratitude was its rather dismissive take on Idris Shah and the Sufis. That's been bothering me - but I found this letter from  Seán Gallagher in the LRB that explains it . "Shah didn’t work with other Sufis at Langton Green, his home in Kent. It would have been pointless. " he says - Shah gathered people around him to help in his endeavors, but they were not Sufis - nor did Doris Lessing claim to be a Sufi. What Shah did was gather people around him :

"What he sought was potential. Given his task of spreading Sufism at all reachable levels of society, he did indeed draw about him groups of men and women of social influence, not all of them as students, to help advance his ‘brief’. That this worked is clear from the international spread of his university lectureships and in the reach of his more than thirty published works, sold in a dozen translations and in their millions."

Letter to the London Review of Books, 7 January 2016.

This makes sense to me - particularly since I've met a few of the people who did indeed meet with Shah, and that to me did not seem "Sufis", but certainly very able in their fields, sometimes a little strange - but then who am I to judge?

What to read, what to read

The mountain of books I want to read gets bigger, the time, inevitably gets shorter. There is no possibility of reading them all - I am going to have to get super selective, so much better at forecasting whether this is the one to read , not that one. Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is one that I saw reviewed in the New Yorker Magazine and thought I have to read this book, and my instinct was right. It's a - well I was going to use the word coruscating, because I like the sound of it, and it has, in my mind a connection with pouring hydrochloric acid into a filthy toilet bowl and cleaning it out, taking away the dark faecal stains and limescale - which is a horrible image and, in fact, has little connection to the real meaning of the  word, which is "flashing, sparkling, glittering, twinkling [twinkling!!] brilliant, dazzling, scintillating, exhilarating, stimulating, invigorating"  Serendipitously this all describes my reaction to the book and the book itself, because the book does glitter with thinking and feeling along with this undercurrent of cleansing and eating away at the pain with acid. It's a complex thing, it's a complex book.

But there are still more books I want to read. Here's the list as it stands at this actual moment, just after reading and skipping through the Guardian review pages where I awlays find books I want to read, mentally note them, and often forget until I see them again. 

1. Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot, Mark Vanhoenacker -= the review soeaks of the books beauty in terms that make me see this as a must read - but when? how.  Because there is also:
2. Criminal: The Truth about Why Bad People Do Bad Things, Tom Gash - "disproving the 11 most commonly believed myths about crime", from left and right wing points of view - it's not just about morality, it's not just about poverty. I've got form here - I used to work in juvenile justice, and we always used to say about our alternative to custody program that we had kids (16-18 year olds) who did bad things, not bad kids per se. So this is a "must read" - I am going to have to put "must read" in inverted commas now, because it's just a euphemism for "want", and the fact that wanting to read something is almost as beautiful as actually reading it sometimes better when the rad doesn't live up to expectations. (More about wanting and reading later). 

3. Then there's China Mieville - I don't really like his books, have tried to read Perdido Station twice and put it down, - even thrown away the copy that had its cover ripped off in some bookish accident, but every time I see someone praising his writing I think I must go back and try again, read another of his densely plotted and written novels of future dystopias because otherwise I will miss out on a brilliant writer. (More about wanting and reading, and missing out later). So I want read The City and the City - or do I?

4. Kazuo Ishiguro - there';s an article on him reading Proust while ill and imagining the novel that became The Artist of the Floating World, and I think I only have that book in an electronic copy and I would like to read most of  Kazuo Ishiguro's novels again.

And I haven't finished reading the Guardian review this week. More to come.

Is there anyone? Incompleteness - Rebecca Goldstein 2, Gödel, Einstein

So is there anyone out there (preferably in Brighton, but hey we've got the internet)  who deeply understands Gödel's Incompleteness theorems, and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity enough to explain them to me in depth (I have a superficial understanding only) AND then to collaborate on a play or short story something like Michael Frayn's Copenhagen that imagines the conversations between Godel and Einstein as they walk between buildings at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in New Jersey in the early 1940s and on to Einstein's death in 1955. The play will concentrate on the platonic versus the logical positivist philosophical approaches, with references, of course, to the Bohr/ Heisenberg's rejection of physics being descriptive of actual reality( as explored in Copenhagen). Provisionally titled "No Dice". Any takers?

Of course the play will also be about friendship and insanity and their limits.

"When the random permutation of genetic blending produce an offspring whose intelligence far outstrips their parents that child faces a special type of predicament: he both recognises his utter dependence, being after all only a child; and he also clearly perceives the severe limits of his own parent's understanding. .... ... the reaction of the young child is more likely top be blind terror(how can they be trusted to take care of me)"

p56 Incompleteness - Rebecca Goldstein 

Or as Gödel was apparently diagnosed with at five years old, a mild anxiety neurosis ("leichte Angst Nuerose"). That does feel familiar, that sense of helplessness against the world, which is large and threatening (as well as full of opportunities and wonders) and which you know your parents do not understand and therefore they are quite unable to protect you unless you are held deep inside the family. And to be held deep inside the family is constricting and stifling in itself, because again the arbitrary rules of the god like parents are harsh and unknowing of their effect.    

The Book of Dave - Will Self, War & Peace - Tolstoy

It's always difficult when you're reading a book that is more or less, begrudgingly, keeping your attention, but you know with that sinking feeling in your heart that you don't want to read any more, that it just isn't doing it for you, and it's a purgatory to continue. It's not the same as when you read something that you take an instant dislike to in a few  pages and then put it down - I'm talking here about having put some considerable investment in the reading, maybe a quarter of the way through maybe even a half way through, and although its "OK", although the writing is "good" you know that you don't want to continue any more. Especially now - sixty years old, so many more books to read, maybe not even enough time to reread all the re-reads that you want to encounter again. So it is with Will Self's Book of Dave. I've tried to read it twice now. Twice! I'm giving up this second attempt before I even got as far as I did in the last one.  It's  because I just haven't got the interest in the story . He is a great writer, his language bounces off the page in satisfying nuggets, but I just don't care for the narrative, I really don't care that much what happens, there isn't a hook pulling me through. I guess I'm still stuck in the ordinary novel, stuck in dreamy reading where you are transported into something. 

So I'm re-reading War & Peace, the quintessential big novel, for the third time - why? Well the TV series obviously. And because there was probably so much that I missed last time, and I can't remember any of the detail - I mean I first read it in the Pyrenees in 1978 in a long indian summer turning to autumn, underneath an almond tree, on the alternate days when I wasn't picking grapes on the mountainside. And the second time? I can't remember, probably twenty years ago - maybe the late nineties? So I finished the first volume (I've got an old Folio edition, different from the Constance Garnett translation that I still have in the original paperback from the 1970s, although the only thing I'm noticing is that the German characters are depicted as talking in "foreign accents", a kind of "vat do ve have veer" touch that I don't really appreciate)). It's still breathtakingly good. It is weird reading it after watching the new TV series as all the pictures in my head are from the TV, but then I kind of drill down into the detail of the sentences and get something different - a more fine grained intelligence perhaps, or a difference in emphasis.

Essentially I am ending up with a bastardized complex mish-mash of the interpretation of the TV series, my interpretation, the translation. Tolstoy seems to survive this mangling but it make me think about how much our surroundings and our feelings permeate and filter what we take from what we read. Is that what makes a great novel - something that can withstand all the interpretive pressure we bring to it and stil stand out on its own? And maybe that's why I can't finish The Book of Dave, I'm too caught up in wanting to have it my way, to get some kind of self-regarding sustenance and wisdom out of the book without being pushed too far. 

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.