Boyhood by JM Coetzee (1997)

 This is my first Coetzee. I know very little about the arc of his career, aside from the prizes. The first impression is of starkness, a boniness and pared-downness. But not poetry so much, though the prose sings very quietly. The feeling is that anything which was pronounced enough to be labelled 'poetic' would be a little distasteful to him. There are two things which seem critical: the depiction of himself here, and the broad fact that autobiography is reconstructed reality, has narrative structure retro-applied. It's the story of himself when young, in the South Africa of the 40s turning to the 50s. There is some talk of race, some of unthinking conservatism, some of the dryness and leachedness one might expect. Those things decorate a tale of his parents' unhappy marriage, of farms versus proto-suburbia, of family skeletons and melancholy, frustration and wondering. And there is the closer-in perspective of the child's world, dominated by school, and growing apprehension of what the adult world that impinges upon childhood might mean. Here is where both critical concerns come into play. He seems to know a great deal about his parents' crushednesses and fallibilities, seems very involved in their world and its story. This has a glimmer of reconstruction to it, and the concomitant purpose of making retro-fitted sense of what went on - would they have been intelligible in this fashion at the time in the way he portrays? Not a problem if not, if the reasons why have needed an adult mind to establish them, but then why portray himself as having agency in it at the time, and its dominance in his young world, as he does? Perhaps the situation was unusual, and he was involved to that extent. The other concern, that of the depiction of himself, is notable. The image that plays in my mind is a bit fanciful: the young Coetzee here has the resonance of a clay idol, a bit of a tiki. It has the glaring quality that goes with these, and the staring-eyed fierceness - anything could happen with this untamed demiurge, it blazes and is convex with urgency. And lacks a kind of softness and vulnerability, like he's seeing himself extra-starkly and finds engaging with the part of himself which is silly, humorous, even dear, as beyond the pale. Is this the Coetzee story, the 'thing' I need to recognize which is most typifying about his work? The potential shibboleth of extreme honesty works strongly here, with his desires, disgusts and cruelty self-mercilessly examined. Well, who ever knows how much of an autobiography is truthfully flagellatory, as against management for effect?

Tales about Temperaments by John Oliver Hobbes (1902)

 This one includes three long stories and two short plays. They originate mainly from the earlier part of her career in the 1890s. They all have the slight delusion playing in them which a regular Hobbes reader begins to identify early on. This is that her work seems at first glance hopelessly light, a frippery of aesthetic-era dandified talk. Then the subsequent realisation starts to get a little play, as the reader records the fact that tucked into these feathery sentences there is more solid material - there are tinctures and jags in Hobbes which lend the prose a sense of greater directness and sounding. In this instance, however, with that said, the airiness has a tendency to win out a bit more than usual. The overall effect is a little too sheer, let's say. The Worm that God Prepared details an illicit love, and a case of mistaken identity which leads to a stabbing, in a very sudden final change of tone whose unexpectedness is jolting, though effective. 'Tis an Ill Flight Without Wings tells of a dilettante's imagined sole serious love twisting on a simple crux which then falls to pieces as she is revealed to be engaged when finally discovered. Prince Toto was written for the author's son, and involves a bored, never-satisfied fairy prince who needs to be cured by a beautiful neighbouring fairy princess by her becoming extremely ugly through the offices of a witch - all ends well, of course. The first play, A Repentance, is set in the period of contest in Spain between the Carlists and the Christinists, and records the return of a presumed dead count to his countess, in disguise as a friar. He has swapped sides, while she has remained loyal to his old ideas, and thought him a martyr. It ends with him sacrificing himself in capture. The second play, Journeys End in Lovers Meeting (not sure about missing possessives, if there indeed are any), is about two married lovers who struggle through their recent history in a battling conversation while her visitor-who-would-like-to-be-a-lover hides in the next room. It was written for Ellen Terry and performed by her in two runs. Not a prime Hobbes volume, but not dismissable either.

To Whom She Will by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1955)

 This is her first novel. I have no experience yet of what she achieved later in her career, nothing with which to compare this, intra, only my knowledge of what the literary world was like in the mid 50s, extra. Alongside that, this looks fairly brilliant. It is a familiar-looking tale of naïve New Delhi youngsters caught up romantically in the idea of their love. Their families, true to caste and Indian convention, attempt to control the situation, which is one where he is regarded as too low for her, and she is regarded as not right for him, given that she is independent of spirit and wanting to whisk him off to England to marry. But it quickly becomes evident that neither of them have got down to brass tacks yet: Amrita is absorbed in her small rebellion, which flavours her attitude, and Hari is captivated by the idea of love, to the point of tears and the shadow side of deep emotions, but is more profoundly, but unawarely, connected to the idea of pleasing people and being comfortable. Their delusions remain unchallenged through most of the length of this book, coming into play gradually as the narrative develops. Mothers, sisters, aunts, and occasionally their menfolk, provide an exclamatory chorus of splendid stripe, tics clashing and assumptions raging, many of them to do with class and jealousy. For me it is here where Jhabvala's skill comes into full focus. Her slow unfolding, flavoured with generous doses of satire, and compensating tension, is magnificently controlled. She also dedicates herself to setting out what would have been seen then to be the intimate colours of Indian life, small detail which lends tang. The fact that she has applied these Austenish satiric flavours to an Indian subject with so much precise elan is what gives this a sense of delight. It's assured, and its confidence satisfies. But of course there's an elephant in this room: Jhabvala was of that surname by marriage. She was born in Germany to Jewish parents and (needfully) emigrated to Britain in 1939. So I am imagining that she would be touted in some circles as inauthentic, and very possibly a cultural appropriator. She must have seen a lot through living there and being married to an Indian, which experience, so closely lived, must give some sort of imprimatur. But that experience was not very old when this book was published. I can only say that the wry humour in this, which is both forgiving (broad warmth) and coldly telling (no quarter to errant conceits) is gratifyingly suave and cool-headed. 

Commonplace Book

 '"These men are so soft-headed," she reflected. "When people with money thief and build big house with the money nobody can touch them; but when poor people thief a pound of beef people throw their hands in the air and shout for he to go to prison."'

from A Man Come Home by Roy Heath (Chapter 18)

A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar (2019)

 This is a meditative book, of a time when the author was between another book and this one, and took some time out after an incredibly confronting period trying to discover what had happened to his dissident father in the Libya of Qaddafi. It was apparently a fruitless search, and must have been a horrifying and dislocating time. I haven't read the book which covers it, and perhaps should. Because this one feels very thin, and in places mistaken, and I'm sure that it doesn't show the author at his best. 'Holiday' pieces can be very re-fecundating for an author, and as well enriching for the reader - here is our premise. He has had a long-term fascination for the city of Siena, and the special expression in artistic terms to which it lends its name. So it is with a feeling of the possibility of healing that he decides finally to go to Siena and experience it for real. And to sit in front of some of the key works of the Sienese school in the galleries of the city. He says that he has done this before, where these works are owned in other galleries around the world, whenever he can get the opportunity. And he says what turns out to be an odd thing: that he sits in front of them for inordinate amounts of time, coming back day after day and contemplating stilly for hours. The part of this book that feels as though it's at its best is where he wanders Siena, and allows it to sink into his consciousness, meets a few people, starts a course to learn Italian properly, rather than family-inherited Italian-colonial Libyan usage. The specialness of the city comes out, seems to come naturally. Walks in lots of directions, eventually finding the walls, and the strict demarcation with the surrounding countryside. A cemetery, which brings up thoughts that link back to his father, and a visit to fellow Muslims of a welcoming family. This material is coolly brought out, and finds its mark, the gong of recognition sounding, if fairly mutedly. But the other main strain of this book is the analysis of the art, and here we meet trouble. The issue is with accuracy - exactly how supportable do one's assertions about what an artwork means have to be? Is it a matter of 'this is what it means to me' and that's it? If, in so doing, you assert that something looks like something, gives an impression of something, do you need to be able to show what in the artwork achieves that? I'd guess there are a few modes of thought about this, including one which says that anyone contesting in the way I am is requiring exactitude where it can't be. And a slightly more relaxed opposition, Neil-voiced and hippie-ish, consisting of objections of 'bringing imaginative freedom down'. The first concerns come in early on, when he talks about various characters in Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good Government, and what their facial expressions mean. When most of these have, very much in the style of their times, extremely similar and not especially lively facial expressions, because their purpose sat at a long distance from that aim, this raises a qualm, which then reverberates as he looks at other works. But the apogee of invention comes with a discussion near the end of the book of another Lorenzetti (it's by no means reserved for this painter), Madonna del latte. He calls it outrageous and unsettling - those are not the first words which come to mind, to put it mildly. Her face is quite impassive - he calls it cunning and questioning. He calls her roped veil restricting and therefore tension-creating - it's just coiled to keep its end out of the way. A hand cradling the child's buttock is firmly splayed to support the weight of the child - he calls it doubtful. The artist's representation of the (this time) evenly splayed fingers of the other hand cradling the child are likened to the bars of an iron cage. The picturing of the boy's eyebrow is called sardonic, when it is simply curved. The child's ear being half hidden by the surrounding blanket becomes an invitation to think about certain things being hidden from the child by the mother. We are asked to think about the child "wondering what it is exactly that he is earning from us: admiration or envy" - a question which pretty well could not come up without the extraordinary coinage of the author's 'exposition'. This suppositiousness leads to the following astounding sentence: "Like any child caught in public with his mother, he is concerned about his image". Something needs outlining here - that it isn't just "this is what it means to me" and that's it. If claims are made about an artwork, they need at least to have a sense of viability, and particularly not to lead to further inaccurate thinking on the part of others, if they are made public. Think what you like privately, in response to the vagaries of your own inner world - Madonna del latte is actually about flying elephants, and the extraordinary pink-and-yellow-stripedness of the sea, if you want, just for you. But, in the meantime, in the real world, the real painting is there on a wall, not being that, to all extents and purposes. Recognizing this is not a restriction - it's a means to a freedom. And the more subtle and viable your responses, if you are sensitive and write about them, the more they may help to illuminate the work for others. It is this claim of sensitivity which ultimately disturbs me most: he sits in front of these paintings for hours. Is it that he needs to, because analysing these pieces is hard work for him? They don't come naturally? Or is it that he is unusually sensitive, to the extent that he looks "too much", and begins to enthusiastically invent things that aren't there? You would wish him wariness, and self-examining moderation, if so. And if the former, you would want him to give it up as a bad job - it's not his forte.

Sonia Married by Stephen McKenna (1919)

 The thing I want to note about reading McKenna this time is what it feels like. He's a relatively conservative author, writes what would be considered standard narratives, and that of course is conservative and standard for, in this instance, a full century ago. But there is unmistakable uplift in reading him; a feeling of basedness, steadiness and polish which sits well, and somehow nourishes. He has dealt, in all of his work thus far, with the exigencies of the lives of well-heeled people, but in a relatively non-romantic way: the beauties in their environment are incidental; his key concerns are political and in the wrangle of their contested and nagged relationships. There is a feeling of modern guilt in liking these books. But then another instinct kicks in, and tells the reader that the deep-seated feeling of pleasure in reading them is not nothing - he's doing something very well, that is registering, and to be celebrated. This one concerns, as is evident from the title, the next part of the life of Sonia Dainton after that depicted in the wildly successful, eponymous 1918 novel. Her ornery nature means that her marriage to David O'Rane soon descends from its initial heights to mistrust, misunderstanding and potential dissolution on both their parts. She thinks he's carrying on with a secretary, he thinks she's unfair to think so because he isn't, and of course he wouldn't. She jumps off from what she sees as his disloyalty to flirtation and the possibility of an affair of her own. Their relations sour almost completely. Friends try to step in, or, not daring, watch from the sidelines as what they had seems to go down the pan. This one is told from the point of view of a background character in the previous novel, Jim Stornaway. He and one of the leads of Sonia, George Oakleigh, as well as George's bluff father Bertrand, are often depicted waiting in sitting rooms, in libraries, at clubs, and so on, discussing what David and Sonia might do next in the escapade which is this contest of wills. It gets dangerous as Sonia inveigles a bloodish type, Vincent Grayle, into an affair, leaves David, disappears in her usual elusive fashion for a good few months, and is finally discovered as a driver for a general, having found that outlet available as part of the war effort. Almost all of the main male characters apart from David are members of parliament, so there is a good amount of talk, some of it quite revealing of how the period was in its more minute aspect, of the progress of the war, the political machinations which surrounded it, and the ups and downs of how it was seen from an insider perspective. Many of these quotidian elements, which say so much, are now way out of common historical understanding of the period, and thus hugely valuable. It turns out that Sonia is pregnant, and has split up with Grayle violently and finally. She tries to remain aloof from a world she no longer quite trusts, but ends up back in their old home on Millbank as her confinement comes close, deeply conflicted about this child which will remind her of an affair she now regrets, and not at all sure she wants to make up with David in the long run. It ends with the child, a boy, born, some hope of Sonia and David making it up, but, by now, the full knowledge that their natures will probably make whatever comes next the usual bumpy ride. McKenna is not responding to the modernism inherent in his times (yet, anyway) and is limited in the scope of his characters socially, and by their attitudes, which were presumably his. But, of his small slipstream, he's a fine exponent.

Commonplace Book

 '...The openness seemed strange and marvellous. In these few days since my arrival Siena had already succeeded in making my eyes unaccustomed to the horizon. I suddenly felt I understood, and could see from Siena's point of view, that infinity is a claustrophobic prospect, that it is perfectly appropriate, given the chaotic nature of life, to cordon off an area in which to interpret ourselves, where one can decide what is important, what is to be privileged and what to be left out, determine the axes of the main thoroughfares and the arrangement of streets between them...'

from a section called The Bench, in A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar