Tag: writing

Reflection: Fishing for memories denied

It is rare that I indulge in sharing a significant quotation simply because it speaks to the space in which I find myself but I keep returning to these words from Intimate Stranger by Breyten Breytenbach (Archipelago Books, 2009).

“Writing is fishing for memory in time. Viscous. Time black. Sometimes you see it flitting just below the surface – memory – miming time. Memory takes on the blackness of time. Memory will be time surfacing. Use word as bait. Beat the water. Beat the weird beat of baited words. Bloated. Wounds. The bleeding words like wounded boats on a black sea. Let the fleet wash up. The coast is the beginning of the sea’s wisdom. It comes with the territory.

Words have their own territory, they return home as in a song. The fish only discovers the water once it is removed from it. This land is a memotory.

But not peaceful. Memory as trigger for territory and tongue. The mind is full of bloody pieces staked out by tongue. Is there room enough? Memory killing memory.”

initmateThis book, a selection of meditations on reading and writing, was waiting for me when I returned home from the hospital just 10 days ago. I have been keeping it close and dipping in and out of it. Breytenbach is a South African poet, writer and painter but his life, his work, his vision is borderless. In this collection he offers practical advice, shares poems and reflections on the power of the word, drawing on his own experiences as well as the wisdom of a legacy of gifted writers.

Memory is the foundation of writing. One draws on experience when putting pen to paper – poetry, fiction, memoir alike. And it is memory that is weighing me down, threatening to drag me beneath the surface; a memory that haunts and obsesses me because although it involves me, I will never access it.

I have lost a space in time. Like a bruise it bleeds beyond the boundary of the injury, reaching backward and forward from the instant a clot in my lung threatened to stop my heart. Days are absolutely gone, the day or two before the incident, the day or so in ICU and the first days after waking. But I can’t let the blackness go. I cannot let it wash out to sea. I want to hold the moments, hours, days in my hands but I cannot. They do not belong to me. They are about me. They will never be mine.

I have read my discharge summary until I know it inside out. I have pestered my anxious son with questions. What was it like to find me in distress? How did you get to the hospital? How did you feel? Stupid questions. I am struck with shocked disquiet to realize that my family did not know if I would survive.

If I had not survived the blackness would be complete. Viscous. Time black. Inanimate from my perspective. My own memories lost. The sole distorted possession of those who knew me, no longer mine.

Sands are shifting. I have some fishing to attend to before the next high tide.

Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape, South Africa Copyright JM Schreiber 2015
Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape, South Africa
Copyright JM Schreiber 2015

Looking back over my shoulder at three weeks in South Africa

It is coming up on two weeks now since I left South Africa. I was missing the country before I left; I am missing it now. When I passed though customs at the airport the official who stamped my Canadian passport sighed and shook his head. “Everyone is going to Canada these days,” he said. What could I say? Only that morning I had only read a newspaper article about young South African families eager to find a new home abroad – the US, Australia, Canada.

I suppose if I was raising young children in a city where so many single family dwellings have the appearance of bunkers with high walls, spiked gates and coiled razor wire, I too would be looking to distant shores. Over the course of my limited stay in Cape Town I regularly walked between my B&B in Sea Point and the downtown core. The occasional house perched on the slopes of Signal Hill without such enclosures was a source of fascination. What manner of brave or reckless soul lives here?

A sign on a narrow cobblestone street In the Bo Kaap district of Cape Town - Copyright JM Schreiber
A sign on a narrow cobblestone street In the Bo Kaap district of Cape Town
– Copyright JM Schreiber

I can’t say that I felt uncomfortable as I wondered the streets or rode the buses. I did quickly learn to make prudent choices, especially after a couple of unnerving encounters set me off my guard. My bad. I don’t make the same mistake twice. Aside from a night out with a friend in Green Point, my stay in the city was quiet, skirting most of the major tourist sites, sticking to bookstores, museums, galleries. Despite the cool weather tourists flocked to the Waterfront and Table Mountain but no one chanced more than a passing glance while I sat mesmerized by the full 30 minutes of William Kentridge’s installation The Refusal of Time at the South African National Gallery. I seemed to find hollow pockets in the city, safe but open empty spaces. And it felt right. I had come to South Africa, after all, to find myself.

What I found surprised me and is only beginning to take form in my thinking now that I am back home. My interest in South Africa is a curious blend of sociological, historical and literary factors but it has always been mutable and undefined. It just is. It stretches back to the early 1980s when I first encountered South African ex-pats while I was at university, continued forward, from the outside, as the world watched the steady and difficult move to independence. Being able to visit the country and, for the most part, simply talk to people and observe has marked the beginning of a process of reconciliation for myself – on a deeply personal level on the one hand, on a socio-political level on the other.

Eastern Cape morning - Copyright JM Schreiber
Eastern Cape morning
– Copyright JM Schreiber

With respect to the former I will simply say that my decision to actually visit South Africa this year was sudden and born of the intense loneliness that sweeps over me regularly. One day when that wave crashed upon me I stopped and realized that the one person in the world that I really needed and wanted to talk to, the sole person who could understand the strange mixture of illness and queerness that I have been struggling to sort out lately, lives across the globe – in South Africa, Eastern Cape province. And, with some money I had needed to access that was not worth reinvesting at today’s interest rates I had enough to get there. So I went.

Arriving at my friend’s home in a small village perched on the edge of the Indian Ocean, I was stunned by the beauty of the unfolding landscape, green flecked with the orange of aloe in bloom, the wide open blue skies, and the crystal brilliance of the waves crashing upon rocky shores. I was at peace. I felt grounded. I felt I had come home to somewhere I had never been. My friend and I settled into a comfortable routine as if we had known each other forever. Although at ease in silence, we never ran short of things to talk about. When it came time for me to prepare to head back to Cape Town, her dog worried after me as I packed my bags in the same way that my own cats had fretted over my suitcases back in Calgary. In a little over a week I had been accepted as family.

Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape - Copyright JM Schreiber
Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape
– Copyright JM Schreiber

Oddly I never felt lonely in South Africa, even though I spent much of my time alone. Strange that that feeling oppresses me in the city that I have lived in or near for most of my life, or this country where I have lived for over five decades. At one time I was immensely proud to be a Canadian but I feel increasingly discouraged and estranged from this land. Oh, of course, it has its beauty and, compared to so much of the world, its benefits are innumerable. But there are concerns, inequities, a steady erosion of freedoms, unresolved historical debts to our First Nations and now a rapidly declining economy against a growing racism and xenophobia to think about.

While I was in South Africa, whenever anyone would ask me where I was from, eyes would light up and I would be met with statements like: “Ah Canada, that’s like the perfect country, isn’t it?” Perhaps I am less than patriotic (which is in itself a rather Canadian thing to be), but I felt it was worth engaging people in honest discussions. After all in early June the final report of our very own Truth and Reconciliation Commission was released. For over 100 years First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were routinely removed from their homes and placed in Residential Schools. The cumulative impact of the abuses, trauma and cultural disintegration has been significant and devastating for Aboriginal communities. If I wanted to engage in conversations about colonial legacies it is not to compare or absolve anyone. But no country is perfect. The question for a citizen is, what am I willing to speak to? I can only speak to my experience in Canada and listen to South Africans. Which is a good start.

Sunset over the Atlantic, Cape Town - Copyright JM Schreiber
Sunset over the Atlantic, Cape Town
– Copyright JM Schreiber

But not even two weeks home and I feel shiftlessness starting to seep in again. On the positive, I returned to the promise that some healthy changes may be emerging in the life of my troubled son, opportunities that might not have arisen had I not put a continent and hemisphere between us. And on my last full day in Cape Town I sat in the Company’s Gardens and finally began to write in earnest in the notebook I had been scribbling in throughout my visit. That has continued. Yet I am aching for that indefinable other that drew me to South Africa in the first place… the landscape, the people, my friend, the oceans.

Yes, the oceans. Landlocked here in a vast country that spans 5½ time zones, it really is little wonder I feel so alone.

Of misery and cauliflower: The Author and Me by Éric Chevillard

The tale that unfolds between the covers of The Author and Me by French writer Éric Chevillard is, to be honest, quite unlike anything I have ever read. In fact the tale, or rather tales and other sundry comments exist on two levels: in what might be considered the primary text and in an extensive series of footnotes, which at one point digress into a 40 page story called The Ant. And linking it all is the character’s (and possibly the author’s) explicit loathing for cauliflower gratin. And can the protagonist wax lyrical about his utter contempt for the cruciferous casserole? He can, and does. He also sings the praises of his most desired dish, trout amandine. It would be ridiculous – well perhaps it is ridiculous – if it was not so very funny.

AuthorOh wait, I can sense you backing away now and looking for a quick exit. Would it help if I add that you will also find murder and two shocking twists within these pages?

The book opens with a Foreword in which the author briefly discusses the way his past characters have been conflated with either real individuals or with himself. Questions of the nature of writing and an author’s responsibility for the beliefs and actions of his or her creations continue in the extensive, ongoing footnotes. Meanwhile, on ground level, shall we say, the main character, a middle aged man, collars a young woman sitting on the terrace of a café. With little preamble he launches into what may, or may not, be leading to the confession of a crime predicated on the indignity of being promised trout and being serve a dish of congealed cauliflower and cheese. He contrasts his views about the two dishes with passion:

“On the one hand, the vast openness of space, the loving moon, still more heavens beyond the heavens; on the other, a dull, leaden horizon, the collapsed roof, the flooded basement.

On the one hand, life in all its possibility, benign and, for a few moments – some ten mouthfuls – magnificent; on the other, the wretched gloom of day following endlessly upon day, a longing for death, death as rescue and release.”

As the character’s tale of woe continues, the footnotes run commentary on the author’s tendencies and predilections, muse on the relationship between the author and his character, the author and his reader, and the general nature of writers and their relationship to the world. As you might imagine, the lines between the actual author, M. Chevillard, who continually references his own prevous work, the (presumably) fictional author and the created character blur as the novel becomes increasingly bizarre.

Which all brings us back to this most reviled of vegetable dishes. How serious is the character’s diatribe? How much, against the footnote creator’s protestations, is ironic? Allegorical? To what is it a commentary on the state of literature? On the very state of civilization?

And when is cauliflower gratin simply cauliflower gratin?

For a taste of contemporary experimental absurdist French literature, tuck in your napkin, pray for trout but prepare for cauliflower. Created with finely seasoned humour by Éric Chevillard, carefully prepared and translated for your consumption by Jordan Stump and served up by Dalkey Archive Press, this is a novel that has to be experienced to be appreciated. It has definitely whet my appetite for tasting Chevillard’s earlier work.

This novel was shortlisted for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award.

A love song for the loveless: Reflections on unrequited love – Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut

Copyright JM Schreiber, 2012
Copyright JM Schreiber, 2012

Valentines Day. It has been many years since I have had a true object of romantic affection. This annual occasion tends to come and go without my notice. Even my children are too old to warrant the heart shaped candies and chocolates I used to purchase. And yet I have to stop and wonder why I do not feel the absence.

I am not sure it is coincidental, but romance does not seem to figure highly in the work I tend to read. Lost love, dysfunctional relationships, misplaced attempts to find affection, yes; but it tends to be the underlying elements of discord that create dramatic tension and literary interest for me. Tolstoy’s unhappy families and all that. So in thinking about today’s exaltation of romantic love I decided to turn to a book I read last year but did not review, a novel that holds, at its heart, the account of a deeply felt but unrequited love: Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer.

In this fictionalized biography of EM Forster, Galgut re-imagines the eleven years of frustrated creative blockage that spanned the time between Forster’s initial conception of his “Indian novel” and the final product, A Passage to India. Along the way we meet Syed Ross Masood, the Indian man with whom Forster will fall passionately in love – a love that will shape, define and haunt his romantic sensibilities – but which will remain one that the heterosexual Masood is unable to return in anything but platonic terms. During the World War I years in Alexandria, Forster finally loses his own virginity at the age of 37 but his meagre intimate relations will remain a sorry, even pathetic, attempt to achieve the emotional and physical comfort he longs to find in another man’s arms. Sexually repressed and closeted until his death, he is, nonetheless, able to channel his affections and experiences in India into one of the finest English novels of the early 20th century. It would be the last work of fiction Forster would produce though he would live and continue to write and engage actively in the literary world for another 45 years.

arctic summerIn my first encounter with Arctic Summer last fall my reactions were mixed. I was a great fan of Galgut’s more typical pared down, ambiguous and haunting novels and I was immediately struck by the more claustrophobic atmosphere he had created to evoke the sensibility of the world in which Forster lived and wrote. At times I felt it weighing on me as a reader. Having the good fortune to hear Damon speak in person and meet him when he passed through my home town with our writer’s festival while I was in the midst of my reading, I was aware that he had found the process of writing a historical novel rewarding but not one he would be anxious to repeat. That awareness may have been a factor but I suspect there was also something more at play. After all, as readers, we enter into any work with our own issues, histories and expectations.

At the timel I was still struggling to break down the barriers that I had constructed over the preceding decade or so to keep those around me from getting close. By that point I was painfully aware that I had re-closeted myself in the world to avoid emotional risk and vulnerability. At one point, despairing of ever experiencing desire in the way he longs, Galgut’s Forster reflects:

“His own sterility was apparent to him and would soon, he felt sure, be visible to others. Curiously, he didn’t feel depressed at the prospect. He was almost intrigued by the idea of giving in to his oddness, turning into one of those remote, ineffectual creatures so warped by their solitude that they became distasteful to normal people.”

I was struck by that passage, I remember where I was when I read it and the page number in my paperback American edition is burned into my memory. Although I had been, oddly enough, a single male parent for years, through my determined unwillingness to express romantic interest or engagement with anyone, female or male, I had stubbornly sought to neuter myself in the world. Unpeeling those layers of defense and reclaiming an identity, especially one that falls outside the default mainstream, is not easy. Forster’s dilemma was hitting too close to home.

As I have since learned to re-embrace my identity and sexuality, I did briefly imagine that I was ready to open myself again to the possibility of falling in love. The result was in influx of a emptiness and longing. I began to feel the absence and did not like the void. So I have decided to turn my focus to building an emotional support network based on common interest and experience. It is, I realize, a much better place to start. If, somewhere along the way, the potential for romance arises I would not necessarily reject it, but it cannot be the grounds for meaning and value in my life.

Now, four months after I first finished Arctic Summer, I have occasioned to revisit A Passage to India, and have found myself dipping back in and out of Galgut’s novel simply to savour the restrained beauty and sensitive recreation of the writer’s inner personal and creative journey against the lush landscape of India. The work has simmered in my consciousness and increased in the power that it holds for me as a reader. I cannot help but wonder what might have happened if Forster’s love for Masood had been reciprocated. I am not sure he would have ever been able to even crack open the closet doors and I suspect that he might have ended up even more deeply torn between his homosexuality and his attachment to his mother. For better or worse he was able to channel his energy into writing, friendship and a long life.

Well lived? For his sake I hope so.

Home is wherever you find yourself: The Alphabet of Birds by S.J. Naudé

birdsFor all my best intentions to read the stack of books I had planned to tackle with the new year, I keep getting side lined by new releases. And I am, it would seem, still caught in a South African vortex. This time I have been swept into the hypnotic landscape of words and images that is The Alphabet of Birds by S. J. Naudé. Originally published in Afrikaans, this debut collection of short stories has just been released in the UK and America in the author’s own English translation. A fascinating communication between Naudé and fellow countryman Ivan Vladislavic posted on the Granta website drew my attention to his work and I was not disappointed by a single story in this amazing collection.

Trained as a lawyer, Naudé spent many years working in New York and London before returning to South Africa to pursue a career in writing. As a result, most of the stories in The Alphabet of Birds explore the complicated existences of ex-pat South Africans who find themselves losing their footing abroad but are uncertain how to negotiate the emotional dynamics of family and the socio-economic realities of a new South Africa. Home is increasingly elusive, fleeting attempts to find meaning fall into emptiness. In one of my favourite stories, “A Master from Germany,” the desire to escape a soulless corporate existence leads to a fantastical hedonistic adventure that turns into an achingly sad domestic vigil at a parent’s bedside. There is a profound sense of alienation that runs through all of these tales: a husband unable to rescue his wife from herself, scattered siblings across the globe, men seeking solace with male lovers who are either too elusive or too intrusive.

These are not stories for those who prefer a traditional narrative arc. Naudé writes with a cinematic eye. The violent storms that stretch across the open South African skies in “The Van” are breathtaking, the slow and painful disintegration of a parent dying of cancer portrayed “A Master from Germany” and “War, Blossoms” are heartrending. Images and motifs recur. Illness and death. Sex and drugs. Love and loss. Music and birds. With a language that is poetic and precise, he focuses his attention on sounds and silences, brutality and fragility; opening wounds and blurring boundaries between identities. His characters tend to become increasingly opaque, mysterious even to themselves: “simultaneously armour-plated and flayed.”

I have been slow in coming to appreciate what can be done within the medium of the short story. In the Granta discussion Naudé explores his fascination with the processes at play in the work of W. G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard, among others. As those two writers are a key focus for me as a critical reader this year, I was keen to see how such influences would play out in his work. In terms of possibilities for storytelling I find myself very excited by this collection. I simply did not want it to end.

The themes of borderlessness and alienation that drive these tales are very human and have far reaching relevance beyond the South African experience. Now that it is available to an English speaking audience, thanks to the subscription funded publisher And Other Stories (I just had to subscribe too), The Alphabet of Birds will hopefully reach a wider audience. I suspect it will likely be one of my favourite reads of the year too, and it’s only January.

Copyright JM Schreiber, 2010
Copyright JM Schreiber, 2010

This Is Paradise, or where does fiction meet real life?

I cannot remember ever really wanting to be anything other than a writer. How then did I get to mid-life believing that my aspirations would never extend beyond the inevitable writing and editing of newsletters and promotional material with every job or volunteer position I have ever held? Why have I been hit with a curious mix of pride and anxiety every time someone has commented on my facility with words?

In truth, there was a point in my late teens or early 20s in which I made the conscious decision to wait until I had lived a little before writing. I assumed a little experience would provide material and perspective. I had not bargained for the complicated experiences that awaited me or how long it would take for me to wade through and unravel it all. And when I did find my way through I found myself unwilling to bare my soul on the page. But every writer has a story they were born to tell, or as James Baldwin said about Go Tell It On the Mountain, the story they have to tell if they tell no other. Frequently it is a coming of age story, a coming out story, a tale of childhood loss or trauma. But that not need be the case. Nor is it necessarily the first story a writer sits down to tell. It can be recounted in fiction or presented as memoir, but the telling is essential, cathartic and close to the bone; even if no one beyond a few friends or relatives ever see the manuscript or hold a copy of a self-published book.

As I look back, I finally understand why I decided to put my writerly aspirations on hold so many years ago. I also understand the barriers I have placed between my impulse to protect myself and my identity and any story I thought I might tell. In this context those reasons are not important. I have also come to recognize the story that I really need to tell is one which I have only recently come to understand myself. So with the unexpected time that my present inability to return to work has afforded me, the gift of introspection and a desperate need to get this story out onto the page and hopefully gain some distance; I want to see what I can do.

But the challenge with stories that find their source close to life lived, is that this same life not only belongs to me. It cannot be divorced from real people. Or real experience. I am not certain how to balance the need to breathe truth into an experience and the desire to protect those I love.

paradiseMy latest read has inspired these questions. After my enthusiastic encounter with Will Eaves’ The Absent Therapist, I turned to his 2012 novel This Is Paradise, which I have had on hand for nearly two years. The right book, at the right moment it seems. A relatively spare novel that is at once intimate and ambitious in scope, this book opens with Emily Allden’s difficult pregnancy with her fourth child, and closes decades later following her death. Benjamin, the youngest, unborn at the beginning is an enthusiastic traveller on his first chance to join his older siblings and parents on their regular holiday trip to France in the first half of the novel. In the second half Benjamin, now grown becomes the lens through whom we see the family – his well meaning but emotionally distant father; his intelligent but volatile older brother Clive (who is clearly dealing with perhaps aspergers or a mental health disorder) and his two sisters, the capable Liz and the delicate Lotte – as they cope with their mother’s increasing dementia, the decision to place her in a care facility, and the lingering final days of her life.

Eaves’ deft ear for the nuances of conversation, sensitivity for the complex social dynamics that bind and divide family, and keen eye for visual detail allow him to create a coherent interplay between the members of this large family and a handful of supporting characters across the decades. He does this by employing a style that is at times fragmentary, sometimes reflectively slipping back into passing remembrances, but always evocative of the way that we tend to think about and experience our lives over time. The result is rich with wonderful moments that add depth and resonance.

Yet as I was reading This Is Paradise, I was especially struck by the pivotal account of Emily’s illness, the details of her physical and mental disintegration, and the mixed emotions that rise and fall between the various members of the Allden clan throughout this process. It rang true in a way that made me wonder if it was grounded in lived experience. It was then no surprise to find that Will Eaves had in fact published an essay in The Guardian about his mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s. When he recounts an event repeated in the novel I naturally wanted to know where reality and fiction intersect in his story. And how does an author decide what to paint clearly and what to disguise?

To be honest I am not generally drawn to family dramas, especially ones with such a sprawling cast and ambitious reach across the years. Mind you in another writer’s hands this would likely be a book at least 600 pages long. In half that length, we trace a loving portrait of a complex and deeply human family from childhood spats through adult stresses and concerns to the bonding moment of shared loss.

And since it is from my own immediate family that the story I want to tell arises, I suppose I will be paying closer attention than ever to the way such dynamics are played out in literature.

An eclectic collection of my favourite reads of 2014

I am not a conventional book blogger and, as such, I only touched on a limited selection of the 45 or so books that I read this year. Sometimes I can’t help devoting a post to a book that has grabbed me or fits into the particular flow of my life which, since June, has been waylaid by mental health concerns. I do hope that in the new year I will have more of a bookish focus but I am still likely to concentrate on musing about books that resonate with life for me at that moment. I am a firm believer that we have a kind of karmic relationship with books, that when we encounter a book that encounter is coloured by where we are at that moment in time. It might be the perfect moment. But that perfect moment might be passed or not yet come.

At this time I am particularly concerned with innovative approaches to story telling, especially stories that seek to give life to real or difficult experiences. To that end I have veered into some contemporary experimental novels, not always with entirely satisfying results. However, three novels are clear standouts, one new, one translated for the first time this year and one from a few years back. I have touched on all three to a greater or lesser extent in past posts.

My Top Three:
seventerrorsfrontcover_50acc7efa1d7c_250x800r Seven Terrors, is the first novel by Bosnian writer Selvedin Avdic (Istros Books). Briefly, this is the story of a man who takes to his bed for nine months after his wife leaves him, emerging only when the daughter of a former colleague approaches him to help her find out what happened to her father who disappeared during the war. What ensues is on one level a detective story into which come elements of Bosnian folklore, politics, criminal interests and an increasing sense of madness. The Balkan war is only approached obliquely, primarily in the accompanying end notes. The overriding theme is one of the damage, collective and individual, that the horror has left in its wake. The book concludes with musings about, terror, philosophy and Bosnian mythology, followed by seven blank pages for the reader to use to record his or her own fears. I read this book back in February and it has continued to haunt me all year.

20797992The Absent Therapist by Will Eaves (CB Editions), a recently encountered treasure, is an inventive juxtaposition of the mundane everyday snippets of conversation, remembrances and idle thoughts, against the extraordinary musings and reflections about the nature of human existence. There is no singular voice, no story arc, no solid ground. But in this collection of fragments there lies the essence of a rich and deeply human experience, at once stripped down and laid bare as they are collected and made whole.

 

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In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (McClelland & Stewart), has been out for four years but I came to it this year, most specifically because I wanted to see how a personal experience could be pared down to its essentials and explored through the lens of time and memory. The result is some of the most evocative and precise writing about what it means to be grounded in ones self and in relation to others (or not); the allure of the road and the ambiguity of home; and, most vividly, the way that all truth lived is a fiction – one that is necessarily subjective. Galgut is quickly becoming one of my favourite authors and the opportunity to meet him and engage in an encouraging conversation about writing was the highlight of our local writer’s festival for me this fall.

Other books that had a particular impact on me this year included:

23626238I Refuse by Per Petterson. Recently translated, this latest book by another of my favourite writers is darker, richer and more complex than his masterful Out Stealing Horses. This book explores the memories of youth, the mystery and pain of mental illness, and the re-evaluations that mark mid-life. Like life, there are no neat, easy resolutions. I discussed this book in a recent post.

 

Pakistan

 

Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh. This was a recommendation from a regular poster on the brilliant Tips, Links and Suggestions (TLS) blog of the Guardian Books website, a must stop for any avid reader who likes to talk about books, reading and that endless TBR list. I had never heard about this classic tale of the brutal fallout following partition in India in 1947 as communities were dismantled and muslims relocated north to Pakistan, hindus south to Gujarat. Countless men women and children failed to make it across the border alive. I am ashamed that it took the death of the author just shy of his 100th birthday to bring this brilliant book to my attention and all I can say is, if you have not done so, read it. It is important, deeply moving and the last few pages are the most agonizingly intense you will ever read. Enough said.

BarracudaBarracuda by Christos Tsiolkas. Honestly this is a book totally outside my comfort zone, I just am not inclined to huge sprawling dramas that take on all of the big issues of class, race, family, love, sex, death, success, failure etc, etc and clock in over 500 pages. Give me spare novels with lots of space for unresolved tension and moral ambiguity, thank you. So I was blindsided by how much I loved this book. It was, in part, a book I needed to read at the time, as I was coping with shame, desire for redemption and loss of identity following my breakdown earlier this year and uncertainty around my ability to return to a career I loved. It is also a skillfully crafted, fast moving and intensely powerful novel on every count. And it contains the best descriptions of brain injury in adults that I have ever seen in literature – the main character has a brain injured cousin and goes on to find in himself (though he fails to fully appreciate it) a gift for working with the disabled. Tsiolkas was another author I was fortunate to see interviewed live and speak to at length. I found him to be absolutely passionate about reading and writing and extremely kind and generous with his time and enthusiasm.

There were many other novels I enjoyed and more than a few that were mediocre at best.

GevisserIn non-fiction, I only read a handful of titles, but my favourite was Lost and Found in Johannesburg by Mark Gevisser. The author came to my attention as the result of his recent article in Granta previewing his current involvement in a global survey of sexuality and gender diversity and, although these interests are also reflected in this memoir, the book is a fascinating family history tracing his Jewish ancestors back to Lithuania, recounting his upbringing in a segregated South Africa and his discovery through a childhood obsession with maps that there were places in his own city seemingly inaccessible. Communities, he would discover, that black people emerged from and returned to each day, often very close but in another reality altogether. He takes the reader on a journey back in time to the activists who challenged the colour barrier early on (a nice dovetail with my reading of Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter this year), on a tour of the black communities as they exist today, and through the vivid horror of being held at gunpoint for three hours as he and two female friends were the victims of a home invasion in early 2012. It paints a stark and yet loving portrait of a difficult city.

SpaceFinally, my guilty pleasure is science fiction, generally veering to the weird. I regularly read J G Ballard and I did read Jeff VanderMeer’s acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy this year and although I loved the first two books, the third seemed to try to resolve things in a most awkward and unsatisfying way for me. So my pick of the year was also my first read of 2014, the last installment of M John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Empty Space. It was just as haunting and grotesque as one could want, assuming one wants such an experience. But for me Harrison is in a league of his own and I am even enough of a geek fan to have purchased single story chapbook signed by the man himself this year. So there.

I may finish a few more books before the year is out but this is the longest post I have written to date, so I will stop here.

Happy reading in 2015.

Manic Implosion: Venturing into the third section of Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room without warning

About a month ago I had an opportunity to talk briefly with Damon Galgut following his appearance at Wordfest here in Calgary. He published his first novel at 18 and I shared that I had wanted to write when I was younger but wanted to live first, completely unprepared for the messy and complicated path my life would take. So we spoke about the challenge of winnowing out a story that runs close to bone from the detritus of life lived. He pointed to my newly signed copy of In a Strange Room, his 2010 Booker short-listed novel, and admitted that in this, of all his works, he felt that he had most closely captured the essence of his self. And he achieved it, I later learned, by telling three tales which recount actual events from his life and feature a character named Damon from perspectives that often shift from first to third person to a detached observer, sometimes within the same sentence or paragraph.

So far so good.

7199962The first two sections involve travel and more or less unresolved interactions and attractions between the remembered Damon character and people he meets while he frets and wanders through parts of Europe and Africa with a restless inablity to settle himself. The prose is tight and evocative with the open ended reflections and ambiguity that feature in my favourite of his writings. But I was sucker punched by Part Three: The Guardian. Not only is it harrowing in its intensity, but the devastating action centres around a woman in the throws of a full-blown suicidal manic pychosis. I could not help but relate as a caregiver but more critically as someone who has experienced the full impact of manic psychosis from the inside. My blessing, if there is one, is that I have never been especially suicidal or inclined to self-harm, nor do I drink or use drugs. All of those factors are added to the mix in this account.

And it takes place in India.

It is not a secret that his close friend Anna is not in a good way, when Damon agrees to allow her to accompany him on the first part of a trip to India. He has been before and intends to stay and write for several months, but it is thought that the change of scenery might be a positive and healing experience for Anna. Her life is beginning to unravel around her and the creative, vivacious woman he has known for many years is tipping dangerously close to the edge. With a stock of mood stabilizers, tranquilizers and sleeping pills she promises not to drink or indulge in recreational drugs on this excursion – a vow sullenly defied as soon as they take flight. Her mood escalates, and behaviour becomes increasingly frenzied and unpredictable from there, culminating in an intentional overdose while her already weary guardian is close at hand but not paying close attention.

Throughout this process and the weeks that follow, Damon’s concern is stretched beyond affection to annoyance to guilt and back again. While Anna fights for her life in ICU, a British nurse and another couple from the village where they are staying are co-opted into a tag team to provide support and relief for Damon at the hospital where cockroaches and rats scurry about and, although care is free, all supplies from bandages to drugs to all other medical items much be purchased by friends or relatives who trek back and forth to the pharmacy with lists. As Anna begins to recover and relocate to more crowded and unattended wards, she not only becomes increasingly volatile and unpredictable, but her erstwhile crew of attendants have to attend to all her care including propping her over the bedpan and cleaning up the splashing mess afterwards.

Care for her actual mental health concerns is not part of the treatment plan.

To make matters worse, attempted suicide is a criminal offense in India and the police are awaiting Anna’s release so they can detain her. An escape must be planned and executed. Finally she is safely returned to South Africa, but she and her support network are shattered and strained at both ends. Sadly her successful suicide is only delayed, not avoided. And her traumatic spiral leaves those who love her and even those who get caught up in her whirlwind of self destruction, with wounds that will take their own time to heal long after she finally achieves the rest, or self martyrdom, that her illness drives her to desire.

No one wins.

My own manic psychosis was maintained to my home where the refrigerator filled with inedible meals and my children destroyed the yard while I struggled to make it through the days. As my grasp on reality slipped and the long standing issues I had been fighting off for years bubbled and distorted in my mind, a month of growing horror ended in a morning of escalating fear and violence before the ambulance finally arrived. Diagnosis and treatment of my bipolar disorder helped explain much, but in the end the very real issues of identity that had haunted me for most my life still existed. The difficult years that followed would see the end of a long marriage and, the beginning of a new authentic existence for me.

Anna was committed to death in her madness. In mine I found life.

I finished reading this book late this afternoon at a cafe where I frequently go to clear my mind and write. I could not put it down until I reached the final pages. As I stumbled out of the cafe into the biting cold and snow of this premature winter evening, I felt devastated and emotionally wrung out. As painful as it was to read, for those of us who live with manic depression or care for someone who does (and I do both), the third part of In a Strange Room is essential reading.

But consider yourself warned.

Want to write? Start with reading.

It has taken me over a week to come down after volunteering with and attending events at our recent word festival. I entered into the week slightly down and was spiraling up within a few days. If it was a test of my ability to return to regular work, this is clear evidence that my mixed state is still far from stable. But I would not have missed it for the world.

It was an absolute thrill to mingle with people who are passionate about books and listen to Canadian and international authors talk about their craft. Whenever an author was asked about his or her influences, a love of the magic of books and literature shone through in their responses. If asked about advice for want-to-be writers, the common answer was read, read, read… read widely and drink deep from the wealth that books have to offer.

The stash of books I bought at the event, not including the titles I purchased or read in advance. Volunteering in the bookstore can be expensive!
The stash of books I bought at the event, not including the titles I purchased or read in advance. Volunteering in the bookstore can be expensive!

And so there was this man I crossed paths with at various venues throughout the festival. He told me he was a writer. Patting the breast pocket of his jacket he indicated that he felt he was getting ready to pull together his work. He had a gold pass so I saw him a number of times but always alone, ordering a coffee or buying a glass of wine at the bar. He would acknowledge me and we would exchange a few words on whatever interview or panel we was waiting for. But I never witnessed him engaged in animated discussion with fellow attendees.

The solitary man at a venue where excited discussions about books were regularly erupting between strangers is an anomaly.

On Saturday afternoon I encountered him in the lobby. He was carrying a copy of Sweetland by Michael Crummey. I got the impression he was done with the festival regardless of the major authors still to come. He said, “I have decided, this is the one that impresses me. Let’s see if he writes as well as he talks.” I responded that I had recently obtained a copy of his previous work Galore, the novel Crummey described as the one he feels he was born to write and that I wanted to read that first. He looked at me with surprise and said, “You mean you have heard of him?”

Suddenly it dawned on me that this man, the self-described writer, does not read at all. I suppose he thought he he would be able to absorb all the final inspiration and direction from this one book. If he did not know one of the best known Canadian contemporary authors and poets, even if he had never actually read one of his books, I could not help but wonder how he imagined himself ready to pull his accumulated scratchings into a final product.

With a full evening and day still ahead, he had selected his role model. I never saw him at the theatre again.

Even if it left me swinging up on my attempt to stablize this recovery from my recent manic episode, I was deeply inspired by the talks I attended, delighted by the company of fellow book lovers and especially grateful to a few authors who took a little extra time to encourage me as writer. I was regularly reminded that it is never too late to start.

And I am never lacking for books. In fact they seem to multiply in my life on their own as any truly avid reader knows.

Good words and a smile (oh and a good book too)

Wordfest, our annual literary festival is underway. After several months struggling with the fall out from a serious mental health episode this week is my first serious self test, my chance to explore my level of stamina and commitment. It is also an opportunity to spend time with people who love books and listen to great writers talk about their work.

I started with two volunteer shifts and some selected presentations I wanted to see and, as you might suspect, the volunteer commitment portion quickly expanded.

Am I exhausted yet? A little. I will likely sleep for a day when it’s all over but I have so desperately needed to get out in the world. Admittedly I am buffered with medication but the creeping anxiety stays in the car when I get into the venues.

Now if I can find a way for the medical system to prescribe a literary solution I might just be able to live with this bipolar beast. I just have to be able to afford to eat too!

Today has lifted my spirits more than I can remember in months. I had one single volunteer shift as a bookseller at one of the smaller venues, but I was nervous simply because I was expecting a panel discussion featuring one of my favourite authors. When I arrived to discover that the other writer had been forced to cancel at the last minute, the presentation had been redesigned as an hour long one-to-one interview with South African novelist Damon Galgut.

The host was scrambling but I could not have been happier.

American edition of Arctic Summer in case anyone is wondering -a nicer cover than the Canadian/UK I think.
American edition of Arctic Summer in case anyone is wondering -a nicer cover than the Canadian/UK I think.

I have always been apprehensive about meeting my heroes, for fear of disillusion. Nonetheless I had come prepared to have my books signed and hopeful for even a few words with a writer whose works I admire so much. Although we did have books to sell I noticed that I was not the only person who had arrived with their own copies of his latest work, Arctic Summer, already in tow. This novel is an imagined biographical account of the complex personal and emotional factors that led E M Forester through the extended  writer’s block that ultimately produced his greatest work, A Passage to India. As an historical novel it is a departure for Galgut (and one he admitted he would be in no rush to repeat) but rich with a deep affection for India and the driving forces of unrequited desire.

I confess I abandoned my post presentation bookselling duties early to make sure I didn’t miss out on the opportunity to have my copies of In a Strange Room and Arctic Summer signed. To be honest I have yet to see an unpleasant author at any of the events I’ve helped with, but it meant more than I can measure for Damon to take the time to, ask me about myself and encourage me that it is never too late to start writing. I am grateful for his kind words.

This experience, simple and important for me, has lifted my spirits in a way that feels healthier than the meds alone. It feels good to be human again. I have commitments with Wordfest right through until Sunday evening, but for now I am enjoying this warm feeling.