Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich (2014)

 This is my first Erdrich, though she's been present in my life through all its adult span. When I first became a bookseller in the mid 80s, she was one of the bright new things, and back then it was remarkable that she was Native American. This one is a rare non-fiction effort; a journey from Minneapolis, where she lives, to the key territory of her people, an enormous lake system in southern Ontario called the Lake of the Woods, which, on the map inside the book, is shown to be not a wide expanse of water in the sense of the Great Lakes, but instead a marsh-originated network of bays and islands with a broader expanse to the south. The journey there and elements of the stay are treated autobiographically, with discussion of her toddler daughter who accompanies her, her new partner (her daughter's father) and some soul-talk about nature and the wild world. She's very direct, simply interested in things for themselves, and only drawing out meanings when there is a cultural significance that she feels is important. The whole area of the lake used to be inhabited by Ojibwe people - it is largely not so now. The dispossession happened not so very long ago, so there are cabins and lodges gradually returning to nature on many of the islands - the atmosphere is one of quiet and greenery and slowness and removedness - another world. Islands are the core of the piece for most of its length, apart from a shortish mention of books very early on, and, at that time also, probably the one thing I don't care for in this piece - an attempt to conceptually rename the native artworks on rocks throughout the lake system as "books". Doesn't fly for me. That sort of gymnastics reminds me of recent academic papers I've read which attempt to claim all sorts of significances for the work being discussed on the weakest of physical premises. Anyway, grouch over, it's minor. Near to the end, books raise their presence in a visit to an island which had been the home of Ernest Oberholtzer, and which is preserved for very limited groups of people to visit, among them Ojibwe who are seeking retreat. "Ober" was a traveller, naturalist, friend of the Ojibwe and book-lover, and his island has cabins studded around it, each filled with his many thousands of books. Your classic dream-island to all extents and purposes. This, some splendid animal encounters, and some really interesting discussion of Ojibwemowin, the language of the people, are the tastiest parts of the piece. This book was first published in 2003 and then reissued in 2014 with an extra chapter of a return visit. I'm glad to have finally read her, and find her writing manner quietly comforting. It's also good to read something which has a different cultural background underlying it - the usual signposts slightly rearranged.

The Door by Magda Szabó (1987)

 I'm not sure I have the full measure of this, so will have to follow my nose, and see. It has become in recent years by far her most known and respected novel. Sadly a good amount of its uptick, and the concomitant raising of her other works, has come about after her death in 2007. It's a very concentrated story of the people of a street in Budapest, centred around a "writer lady" who seems like she would be similar to Szabó herself, and another local woman, Emerence Szeredás, who is an older powerhouse who manages a great many things in the neighbourhood, like sweeping the streets and snow clearance, as well as providing home help either to those in need or those who hire her formally. Emerence is the clear centre of the piece, with a character built up of toughness, not-to-be-fooledness, decided opinions, fearless speaking, love of animals, enormous capabilities, and intense secrecy regarding her own private life and home. The writer lady would like to hire her early on, but, to all extents and purposes, has to pass the "Emerence-examination" in order to be allowed to! Thankfully from a practical point of view for her, she benefits enormously from this arrangement, and her life runs somewhat smoothly. Any rumples in the fabric come from the two women slowly getting to know each other: the writer lady's ego, assumptions and pretensions and Emerence's harsh criticisms, differing tastes and wish to control. The slow knowing also reveals quite a bit of Emerence's story in bursts: she comes from the country, had a horrifying family experience in childhood which included the death of very young twin siblings, was engaged to be married but it never eventuated, never got along with her wider family, was governess-assistant to a wealthy Jewish family just before the war, ended up looking after their youngest daughter when everything went haywire during it, lost her faith. In the time of the story, she's become both a proud woman and a secretive one, making sure, in speech or by unopposable action, that people know what she thinks, and don't know anything she doesn't want them to. The writer lady tells us that she's furious with Emerence at points all throughout the early part of the book, but somehow Emerence always wins, is right, knows best, and makes sure she knows it. The writer lady is really the only other character we get to know at all fully, but there're quite a few gaps in that story. There are several other people of the street and area who play smaller parts with occasional quirks. All of them meet both Emerence and each other at various times on Emerence's porch - she's very clear that no-one comes inside. There are seats there, and drinks and food served, and jobs done - it's actually quite a welcoming place where some of the gears of the neighbourhood are engaged and decisions made. This house/apartment becomes the focus of the latter part of the novel. Emerence is getting older, and finally relents at a particular juncture, bringing the writer lady into the house when no-one else is about. She sees how ordinary everything is, apart from the sealed room behind a cabinet - and nine cats! Emerence has always a sense of domineering commonality with animals, and these she has rescued from the streets. She becomes ill, tries to continue her obsessive levels of work in the area, out in all weathers sweeping and clearing. Eventually she retires to her home, unable to continue and wanting to be left alone to get well again. By this time the writer lady is strongly associated with her by the community, and there is acknowledgement by her that there is a bond of love between them, despite the spits and sours of the relationship. But Emerence rebuffs not only all other comers, but also the writer lady, yelling through the door to leave her alone. The community grows increasingly worried. Emerence's speech seems slurred. There's a strange smell coming from under the door. Having promised on her single visit inside to look after Emerence's affairs and the cats if anything happens, the writer lady feels responsible. At an impossible point, where it's clear something needs to happen, but not able to get in, she has to "betray" Emerence by enlisting the local authority to break down the door. Inside is a horrible stinking mess of rotting food which had been brought over prior weeks to succour Emerence, the mess of eight cats and the body of the ninth, also rotting. Emerence has clearly had a stroke, has soiled herself continually, and is in a dreadful state, barely conscious. It's like a nightmare. She is taken off to hospital and not expected to survive. Her astonishing strength wells up under care and her mind clears. Given her pride and privacy, it is thought better for the writer lady to tell her lies, saying that the apartment is all tidied up, and back to its usual hyper-clean state, the cats all well and cared for there - everything waiting for her return. The reality is very different - the apartment has had to be decontaminated, all the furniture and belongings burnt in the yard, the cats darted out the door when it was broken in and have never been seen again. But, most importantly, all this has happened in the full view of the community. If these details were known by her, the sense of betrayal and shame could very well kill Emerence. Contrary to expectations, she continues to improve mentally, experiencing some forms of physical paralysis. Eventually, the doctor of the hospital explains that he can no longer justify keeping Emerence in their care. She needs to be found a home. Of course, Emerence is thinking that she'll return to her treasured original home with extra help. It is decided that, as she is now at her healthiest since the disaster, she must be told the truth. This happens, against the writer lady's best instincts; she is dismissed by a local controller as not understanding how strong and reasonable Emerence is. The effect is much as the writer lady has feared. Emerence's feeling of collapse of pride and betrayal drives a knife between them, and another of their angry scenes develops, but in an atmosphere of resignation for the writer lady, the expectation softening the blow a little. By this time she is exhausted. Having parted in anger, it seems they may never patch things up. Then Emerence has another stroke and dies. The writer lady has circled back to the first page - where she explained that she feels that she, in some senses, was responsible for Emerence's death. There follow a few short chapters speaking, almost hollowly, about the consequences and last efforts resulting from her end. The funeral is held; much against Emerence's wishes, it is a religious one. The writer lady is named in Emerence's will as the inheritor of the contents of her locked room - this is finally opened and revealed to be, as expected, part of the gorgeous furniture of Emerence's Jewish employers before the war, saved from destruction by her. Once the dust has settled, one of the close company of characters is chosen as Emerence's replacement in the community and her building. Another, who had "disgraced" herself in making an offer for this position while Emerence was still in hospital, is, in a last twist, taken on by the writer lady as her new help, despite initial loathing, because of her practical hard-working similarity to Emerence, but also her lack of secrets and "temperament". The anticipation/fear of death works strongly in this - in an emotional range from the personal, gritty here and now back to the political maelstrom and uncertainty engendered by the war. The concentration on key characters means that all life outside their orbit is necessarily a blur. Both the main characters are very flawed, and seen only in their relation to each other and a small set around them - parts of their lives where they might be more relaxed, softly smiling, in a state of greater inner peace, are largely absent. There are moments in the last few short chapters where things seem to take on almost a fabular flavour: a beloved dog "never barks again" after Emerence's death; the furniture in the locked room is absolutely beautiful, but "crumbled into nothing", "turning to powder before our eyes" due to woodworm; the funeral is attended by an enormous number of people, despite Emerence's circle being highly restricted. I'm not sure what Szabó intended by these slips into fantasy - is the accentuation in some way meant to signify the heightened state of emotion following a death? The creative mind of the writer lady dramatising the strung-out atmosphere? In its scene, its concentration, its intense preoccupation with very distinct, proud and flawed, characters in certain aspects of their lives, this is completely engrossing, and very unusual. It exerts a strange fascination.

Essays about Men, Women and Books by Augustine Birrell (1894)

 What a pleasure. That rare feeling when you sink into something knowing you'll be entertained, learn a bit, and are in safe hands. There are nineteen essays here, all of which were journal-published originally. They read almost like book reviews, but in a sense are review-extensions, where the advent of his reading a particular title brings up a discussion about something broader. His allowing of this opening out also allows philosophically inspired wit to creep in, and the nature and foibles of humanity and its pretensions, elisions and perhaps lazy misapprehensions to be discussed. His is an acerbic tongue. The subjects range between the long ago of Swift, Sterne and Johnson to the recency of Marie Bashkirtseff. His treatments cover not only literary critical interpretation, but also deep forays into previous editions, consequences of various edits, celebration and deprecation of the vices of both authors, compilers and editors, and, subsequently, all the outflow of what any given point might mean as applied to our societal norms and prejudices. He's great company.

Fifty Forgotten Books by R. B. Russell (2022)

 I'm beginning to develop a shorthand for a recent change in literature. At the moment, it's LITE21C. When I was young, "lite" literature was what was called 'the beach read'. These were typified by things like lurid covers, foiling of the cover-text and, most importantly, being in A-format (which is those smallest paperbacks, usually 18cm high and 11 across). Bookstands in airports were full of them, yes, which was part of what led to the beach read appellation, but they had a broader cultural signifier of light reading, and were widely available throughout the trade. Nowadays, the threads have changed, most works are not in that format, but we still have the need for light reading, of course. So light reads, deceptively but I don't think altogether intentionally so, are in the same format as the weightier ones. In fact, the level of intention is probably the important thing to investigate. It often appears to lead to confusion, at the least. This is a LITE21C read. I enjoy light reading on occasion, like many. But I do inevitably end up thinking, in these days of can't-tell-one-thing-from-another-ness, that I hope people are still registering the difference. These are mini-essays on the author's favourite 'lost' books, and contain genial stories of discovering them in secondhand bookshops, of characters met whilst doing so, also of a bit of personal history alongside: joining literary societies, starting his own publishing business with a partner, and again the characters encountered in doing so. He is part of a set who are very influenced by writers of the supernatural, like Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft, and who work on producing new editions of them. I really enjoy all the stuff about collecting interesting old books, as it's a passion of mine, and always get pleasure from hearing about the deeper background of authors who are known to me in only a limited way. The classic terms of appealing light reading really. The designation is recognisable not because of any strict determination of content, I think at least, but rather because of the feeling it gives of being a congenial wander through a subject. Perfectly pleasant, and completely unchallenging. Very different to "weighty" reading.

Descents of Memory by Morine Krissdóttir (2007)

 This is, as far as I am aware, the only substantial biography of John Cowper Powys. There have been pieces dedicated to all three writer brothers, there have been works of literary criticism with strong biographical content, but this is the first attempt to cover him solo from a biographical standpoint. Of course, the Powyses being what they were, there is no avoiding Theodore and Llewelyn, as they were critical in their brother's imaginative and practical life, makeup and exigencies. All the other children of the family are here in reasonable detail also, as are the parents, who were equally influential. Krissdóttir's angle is psychological, an extremely fruitful one when it comes to this subject. Not only was he fascinated by it, allowing it to leak into all his works to varying degrees, he was also subject to great swathes of manias, conceits and theorisings in his personal life, as far as those two things can be separated in such a Herculean being. The picture that is built up is an extraordinary one, of a character seething with ego and not necessarily recognising it, of the eldest of the clannish family running amok with the respect with which he was accorded by them, of early beginnings of somewhat curdled sexuality and decadence, of what became typical brazen selfishness covered over with childlike manipulation, of the eventual development of incredible levels of complexity and vision in novels which have the quality of being both folie de grandeurs and inspiringly magnificent. This piece also releases another vital story, although in a slightly muted fashion - that of Phyllis Playter, his second partner. Records of her in the form of letters or diaries are a lot less common, which explains the partial quality of the portrait. I would have liked to see a little more decision in the analysis of their connection, a plumping for reasons - it seems to me that this has happened in the case of Powys himself, but Krissdóttir has declined to do the same for Playter. There are surely conclusions to which a biographer could come regarding the deeper contexts of their relationship - what we get is a "maybe-ing" instead. The one thing which I think the book is fully missing also relates to Playter, though it may be something to do with length. It's already a very long book, quite appropriately, with somewhat spidery text on 44-line pages with slim margins - it really should have been two volumes, and falls in half very readily. But, having grown familiar to a significant extent with Playter, having had her hard life exposed from both a strictly biographical standpoint and a feminist one, and grown to care about these things, we should, I feel, have had an epilogue about her life between Powys' death in 1963 and hers in 1982. The lack feels like a missing last figure in the pattern. But what is here is an extraordinary and serious revelation, the result of a titanic amount of work, and to be celebrated with not exactly joy, but a feeling of enlightenment.

Five T'ang Poets (Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-yin) translated by David Young (1990)

 This followed on from a 1980 original which had only the first four poets. It's a fascinating thing. The first major question which arose for me surrounded the position of these writers in the Chinese society of the eighth and ninth centuries. Young provides piercing introductions to each, as well as an overall one. I didn't get the impression they were courtiers of the type we can possibly imagine. They seemed independent of at least some of that, though I'm sure there were influences, preferment, pensions and so on which arose from that centre of power. What I was after in thinking about that was a definition of the word "poet" in this circumstance. They seemed glimpsers, still-pensive-moment recorders, rather than prolix commentators. The job of poetry was a little different. Is it poetry at all? Or is it even more concentratedly so? (Don't like the idea of the "it's just different" dull-minded imagined reply.) The "what is poetry?" discussion, especially across cultures, is an interesting one. These things went through my head. The major revelations in the introduction were quite how much leeway there was in terms of translation on the one hand, because of the mechanics of the Chinese language, and contrastingly the fact that these works in their original could exude meaning not only horizontally but vertically - the characters as they were written influencing each other multi-directionally. This element is no doubt often, or even always, lost in translation, along with the highly specific cultural references which underlie parts of the expression. All of which has the corollary of congratulation to Young for a book so pleasurable to read. These poems are surprisingly corporeal, but I guess that surprise emanates from too little knowledge. They use very tight images of things, juxtapose them with one another, and extract highly distilled direct meaning - there's nothing particularly identifiable as diffuse here. Or hard to fathom in essence, though in line with the above we may well be missing tangents. There is a definite feeling of looking out at a landscape, the seasons, birds, in many cases, careful feeling of the way through to significance in few words. There is also a slight smile in some, mention of drunkenness and self-pity, loneliness and yearning, again sparely. And sensuality has its part, particularly in some works of the last poet, Li Shang-yin, where images feel as though they could be (highly civilised!) double-entendre. As one perhaps imagines, green is the signal colour throughout. Goodness knows how many times it is mentioned in this book: suits me very well.

H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq (1991)

 I've read quite a few essays which were published before the Second World War, and I haven't yet come across one which valorises overstatement as though it were passion. I don't quite get the genesis of this recent peculiarity, particularly among the French. It seems a superficial understanding, to be frank, of the terms of passion, like a little kid's idea of love. One can imagine the child, having seen some films, emoting like hell, waving their arms about, and saying something hilariously smoochy and over the top. This feels a little like that, but with an academic carapace. The further astonishment is that academia has seriously taken this attitude of "passion" on board, as though it's a new language, a development into subtlety and deeper understanding. I've read a little bit of Lovecraft, and have absorbed whatever that's given me of his way with things, have a sense of how he goes about telling his tale. So when I read things like "a supreme antidote against all forms of realism" as describing Lovecraft's modus, I feel I'm at sea (already, as this is on the first page). Lovecraft seems to use all manner of realistic tropes, for one. One might say it was this situating realism that made more of his fantastic exertions. So, a dubious claim contentually, and then put in this "all forms", "supreme"-ly excessive way, evocative of French academia's worst. But, if one can mentally filter out the noise from all this stuff, there's a load of interesting detail here. Biographical notes filling in a picture of this worried, harassed, bitter, socially limited man in particular. Again filtering like mad, one can build up one's own picture of who he was, how he functioned. Another observation: I can't put this down to Houellebecq alone, because it's more universal than that, but there is the "usual" commentary here about how, in Lovecraft's stories, we come face to face with (definitively and classically) absolute terror, complete horror, etc. It seems to me that, in the stories I've read at least, the impact is not that. It's much more of a hinting. I don't get creeps up my spine, I get a feeling of fascination tempered with the author's love of queasy detail. Biographically, Lovecraft seems "ick"-laden: he had a horror, post the New York years particularly, of other races and their seemingly animalistic qualities; even earlier, he withdrew in a nervous state from the world for a long period, and then delimited his life to gentlemanly and polite pursuits after the big reclusion had ended; he didn't want to much engage with sexuality or the elements of any sort of physical hedonism, certainly not publically anyway. The impact of his stories seems allied to this - a feeling of ick. And, thanks, despite himself, to Houellebecq, I now see this echo more clearly. Lovecraft and Houellebecq are the two primary authors here, but there are a couple of others to mention: Stephen King provides an introduction, and celebrates the author's "passion", whilst also decrying it - very gently; Dorna Khazeni is the translator, who has felt the need to add an appendix listing all the times she found it impossible to locate Houellebecq's sources for quotes. He mentions early on that this book, his first, was "almost a first novel" - giving himself a neat little out for invention? I dunno, it doesn't recommend itself as a cause for confidence. The details through this piece are great, despite one's need to constantly mentally edit as one reads, until Khazeni's appendix is reached. I think on the whole Houellebecq can be relied on for the spirit/essence of his "facts", but can't help feeling a sense of caution.