booklit

Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works Of T.S. Spivet (2009) caused a bit of storm last year when the American rights were snapped up for almost a million dollars. Its interesting presentation and quirky delivery were no doubt a contributing factor, and it will see release in many more countries. One of those is of course the United Kingdom, where it has recently been published by Harvill-Secker, an imprint best suited to putting it on store shelves, producing as they do a fine line in hardbacks. (See here.)

What makes this particular novel special is that the novel is illustrated throughout with a variety of sketches and diagrams - some colour, some black and white - all drawn by the author, although credited to the eponymous T.S. Spivet. Presentation-wise, it’s a work of art, although it’s unconventional breadth may see it struggle to slot in easily to some book cases.

The novel focuses on Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, a “12 year-old genius mapmaker”, as the blurb tells us, who lives with his family on a ranch in Montana. In what seems to be a family tradition of sorts, a woman of science has married a man of the land, and TS falls down squarely on his mother’s side as far as his intellectual development goes.  The maps he makes show all manner of observations, from how his sister, Gracie, shucks corn to the distribution of McDonalds in North Dakota.

…since Neolithic times we had been marking down representations on cave walls, in the dirt, on parchments, trees, lunch plates, napkins, even on our own skin so that we could remember where we have been, where we want to be going, where we should be going. There was a deep impulse ingrained in us to take these directions, coordinates, declarations out of the mush of our heads and actualize them in the real world. Since making my first maps of shaking hands with God, I had learned that the representation was not the real thing, but in a way this dissonance was what made it so good: the distance between the map and the territory allowed us breathing room to figure out where we stood.

Life on the farm is quite slow, so it’s with much relief that the narrative receives immediate propulsion from a phonecall informing TS that he has won a prestigious Baird Fellowship from the Smithsonian. His age unbeknownst to the institution, TS takes the decision to run away to Washington to deliver a speech and it’s this journey, of one young boy heading out into the world, that forms the backbone of The Selected Works Of TS Spivet.

In the mix of a journey and of a gifted child I was reminded of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time, a children’s book about an autistic boy who takes a journey of his own to London. Not so much for the principal similarities, but by what’s learnt about the mothers of each child. TS, on making his way to Washington, steals one of his mother’s notebooks and learns more about her, and his family, than he previously knew, his trip becoming a journey of discovery in more ways than one.

When it comes to children as narrators I admit to having a bit of a bugbear about them being precocious, moreso in the hands of new writers. I think this stems from my viewing it as daft way to impart the character with a unique trait. After all, some of the better child narrators I’ve read - Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye or Paddy Clarke - have little to recommend them, yet their delivery, innocence, and frailty makes them memorable. Where those characters had believable voices, it’s hard to accept that any twelve year old, genius or not, would come up with phrasings like this:

I was no advertising expert, but in observing my own behavior in the vicinity of McDonalds, I had mapped out a working theory about how the place penetrates my permeable barrier of aesthetic longing, in a trio of multi-sensory persuasion:

Or this:

Did the true, umbilical love that binds people together for the rest of their lives require a certain intellectual dislocution in order to push past our insistent rationalization and enter the rough, uneven space inside our hearts?

Where TS Spivet’s delivery does work, however, is in the sidebars that accompany the text. While infuriated by the volume of footnotes in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, the lines leading off from the end of paragraphs to small paragraphs or diagrams at the side of the page is effective. Typically they fill in some more detail without upsetting the narrative, but the best ones are the occasional visual gags that do highlight the world of an inquisitive mind.

At one point in the novel TS highlights five types of boredom experienced by his sister. In reading this book I may have a case for a sixth because, for all its visual flair, the novel never truly captured my imagination. Not once could I say I was there, part of Spivet’s adventure, and not once could I say I believed in him as a character, no matter his eccentricities.

The last quarter of the book does pick up the pace and the heightened vocabulary noticably takes a backseat, but it all leads to a rather jarring sentimental affair at odds with the rest of the story. Even with all the maps in this book, it would seem there’s still the capacity to get lost. I’d like to say it may be a case of Larsen going back to the drawing board, but, then, there’s nothing wrong with his drawings.

According to the inside flap Yoko Agawa has written more than twenty books and won every major Japanese literary award. Where else is there for her to go? Either it’s scooping every minor Japanese literary award - probably not worth her while - or it’s off to international waters, to a brand new audience, and perhaps add to her trophy case with an IMPAC, or something.

The Diving Pool, her first book translated to English, is not a novel but a collection of three novellas from early in her career, of about fifty pages, loosely connected by their content. All three are told by young women with a skewed outlook on reality relating stories about family members. In each, Ogawa deploys an precise style that maintains an eerie distance between the narrator and event, her words clinical and charged with meaning, always leading with a slow build that concludes with a twist - although backstroke is probably more apt.

Aya, the narrator of the title novella, lives with her parents in the Light House, which, she says, “is an orphanage where I am the only child who is not an orphan, a fact that has disfigured my family.” She has a crush on her foster-brother, who spends a great deal of time at the school pool honing his dive seemingly unaware that she is hiding in the bleachers (”I alone can see him, and he comes straight to me.”) admiring him from afar:

Does Jun let his body float free at the bottom of the pool, like a fetus in its mother’s womb. How I’d love to watch him to my heart’s content as he drifts there, utterly free.

It’s a frustrating thing, unrequited love, never mind being treated equal to the orphans by her parents, and Aya finds herself using one of the other orphans, a toddler named Rie, as an outlet:

When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see. I wanted to savor every one of Rie’s tears, to run my tongue over the damp, festering, vulnerable places in her heart and open the wounds even wider.

The tone throughout is a haunting and detached, maintaining a clinical calm not unlike the pool before Jun makes his dive. Ogawa’s words, spare as they are, are carefully picked and shot through with meaning, so much so that it’s not hard to interpret Aya’s home as being a metaphor for people, also like a pool, where we can only question at what happens under the surface:

The church and the Light House are old, Western-style wooden buildings, their age apparent in every floorboard, hinge and tile. The structures have become quite complex through frequent additions, and from the outside it is impossible to grasp their layout. Inside, they are more confusing still, with long winding halls and small flights of stairs.

The Diving Pool, where each page drips with mentions of water, is a powerful story, the most powerful of the three contained in the collection, and the splash of its ending proves an excellent introduction to Ogawa as the dangers of living in the Light House become apparent, of standing solitary and staring off at one point with a single beam, oblivious to everything else around.

The other two novellas maintain the icy tone, with the epistolary Pregnancy Diary, in which a woman keeps a record of her sister’s pregnancy, annoyed that her sister seems to disregard the child growing within her (”The baby haunted the shadows that fell between us.”) and the more straightforward, yet downright creepy, Dormitory, in which a woman haunted by a sound from her past secures a room for her cousin at her old dorm, now in a state of decline, and finds herself caring for the manager, a man who has lost both arms and a leg.

It’s a pity that the novellas are presented in this order, as the prose of Dormitory is paciest and would have served as a better lead in to Ogawa’s cool, calculated style, and would certainly have made the impact of The Diving Pool much stronger, where the satisfactory snapping shut of the book would have left waves rather than ripples. But there’s much to appreciate here, and that Ogawa has a back catalogue ripe for translation, is reason enough to dive in, even if these three novellas are the shallow end.

There is nothing original in the idea of what a person would do if they learned the scope of their finite lives. Invariably they make lists of things they haven’t seen, things they haven’t done, people to say their farewells to, and, if time permits, share a hand in planning the funeral. In this conceit, Andrey Kurkov’s A Matter Of Death And Life (1996, translated 2005) is nothing new (the situation arose on this blog in Quim Monzó’s The Enormity Of The Tragedy) but, rather than a terminal illness forcing tidy conclusions to his mortality, Tolya, the novel’s narrator, has decided to take matters into his own hands.

In post-Soviet Kiev, law and order has taken a back seat allowing the shadow of corruption to conceal the dodgy deals masquerading as business. This is a Kiev where “any kind of relationship is for sale”, life cheapened by the lack of opportunity, rendered useless. With nothing to live for, Tolya decides that the only way out is to hire a contract killer:

For years, in imagination and fantasy, I had been seeking some way out of my dead-end situation in life. And here, on a plate, it was - out of the dead end and of life itself. Too fond of life ever to take my own, I was made for the role of victim.

Such a drastic decision is arrived at because his marriage is falling apart and, as far as employment goes, Tolya finds himself drifting aimlessly from job to job. To be offed in such curious circumstances would place gravity upon him, make him someone people talked about, preserve his legend:

The idea of an effective end to my senseless life was alluring. One engaging feature of mysterious killings is how often they get referred to in the press and in books, along with names and details, affording a fair chance of survival in the popular memory.

Luckily his friend Dima has connections in the murky underworld, willing to do business for a paltry sum, and the plan is set in motion. Under the pretence of killing the lover of his wife, Tolya slips his own photograph and routine into the hitman’s dossier. But, after a brief dalliance with a prostitute - another unoriginality: the hooker with a heart of gold - Tolya finds himself preferring to embrace life after all. So, with a hitman looking to take him out, Tolya decides that the only logical step is to take out another contract.

It’s a light farce for the most part, only acquiring a bit of weight when Tolya steps into the aftermath of his actions, forming a bond with the wife of the first hitman who, without her husband, is equally lost. But the gravitas is not enough to balance the scales and, despite all of Tolya’s philosophising, and the seriousness of life in this impoverished Kiev, A Matter Of Death And Life is little more than a romp.

As a romp, however, it’s enjoyable and a whizz to read, breezing along with a fair mix of action and internalising, funny and captivating all the way, even at its most melancholy. And Kurkov does just the right thing by keeping the novel slight, at just over 110 pages. Any more and it would have become aimless, necessitating its own contract killing.

On the back of André Brink’s The Blue Door there’s a quote from Nadine Gordimer referring to it as a novel but, at 122 pages, it has even less of a claim to novelhood than Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Not that concerns about size should shadow content, but it’s also a book capable of fitting into a small pocket and, at £10.99, one can’t help feel it it’s way overpriced for what it is. But that cover, with its simple blue door, just begs to be opened, if only to find out what lies beyond. Because a peek through the keyhole would never do.

The Blue Door bills itself as that age old staple of storytelling: the ‘what if..?’ And here, the what if concerns the life of our narrator, David le Roux, a teacher turned artist. One day he’s married to Lydia sans children and then the next he’s married to a black woman called Sarah and has two loving children. It is, as he puts it, “the kind of moment that once turned the life of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa upside down.”

The reference to Kafka is a knowing one, as his influence is certainly here. David’s attempts to chase up his life with Lydia find him lost and confused in a disorientating world where buildings change - and disappear! - and men age visibly in a matter of minutes. In fact, the novel begins with a dream where David, Lydia, and three imagined daughters are moving house but, when he goes to fetch water for them, he is left behind. And from here on what’s dream (or delusion) and what’s real is very much a mystery. But one can’t help feel that David isn’t all too bothered about solving it and is, instead, resigned to his predicament:

In the morning, I think, I shall return to her. And take my time. To inspect everything that makes her. Her eyes and mouth and ears. Her shoulders, her arms and hands, each finger separately. Her nipples. Down to her toes. Everything. Everything. I must know who she is. I must find out what it means to say; “Sarah”.

While the situation springs from Kafka, the treatment is reminiscent of Kundera. David fusses over realistic questions about his new life - how do you enter the bed of your wife of nine years when you’ve only just met her? - while making some sort of sense of his new world. Brink explores the questions one might have when put in such a predicament, questioning the understanding of those in relationships and finding the point in which a person ends and who they think they are begins.

The Blue Door, at about an hour’s read, is packed with detail that swings between the realistic and in pursuit of metaphor. Colours, objects, people - all these are ripe for symbolism, although I didn’t quite get them all. But for all its texture, I didn’t experience the depth I had hoped for and felt that Brink had left too many loose ends for it to be ultimately satisfying. Perhaps its questions are designed to linger long after reading The Blue Door but I’m more inclined to lock it up and throw away the key.

The joy of browsing book shops tends to lead to serendipitous finds and recently I happened across I Could Read The Sky by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke. Now, I tend to be wary of fiction authored by more than one person but, on picking it up, was relieved to find that it was a collaboration between an author and a photographer. It had also, as the cover proudly boasted, won the Encore Award back in 1998. After a quick flick through and a skim of the blurb I knew I wanted it. So I had it.

I Could Read The Sky is told by an Irish emigrant, tucked away in Kentish Town, living his twilight years. Like many before him, including his father, he left Ireland to come to England to make his fortune. But when he gets there the jobs never last and he finds himself chasing work across the land - in fields, in building sites - until he finally arrives in London. All he has is his accordion and his dreams of love to keep the loneliness at bay.

While the narrator tells us his story, the text is accompanied by a series of photographs by Steve Pyke. These range in subject from solemn landscapes to still lifes to portraits of lived-in faces. Their black and white nature encourages reflection, awards them gravitas. Although they are unrelated to the story, they follow the same path, telling of local life in rural Ireland before moving on to depict the lives of emigrants, capturing the loneliness that accompanies it. As the narrator says at the beginning, “I have sounds and pictures but they flit and crash before I can get them.” These pictures provide what he can’t find words to say.

(photos: © Steve Pyke)

O’Grady gives his narrator’s voice a light poetic touch, his skill for ventriloquism picking up Irish slang and grammatical nuances. It was for this that I was surprised to learn that O’Grady was American, although his time in Ireland will surely have trained his ear. And the other diaspora running through this novel are also painted with the subtlest of strokes:

The last time I saw Dan he was coming up from the quay with two lobster pots and the wind nearly blowing him back into the sea.

For the many Irish living in post-war England the work is manual and often dries up, forcing them to continually move around, their stories shared from Glasgow to London. Our narrator’s first job on landing in Liverpool is working in a potato field:

It’s November and coming out from under the covers in the morning is like entering the cold sea, but the work is so fierce that we have our shirts off by mid-morning. The field is all mud. There’s mud on my trousers, mud on the sack and mud up my arms. There’s mud gone down into my boots. If I hold a potato in my hand I can make no sense of it. I try to think of a piece of it buttered and salted at the end of a fork. But I can’t.

As life moves on he finds himself in London, just another nameless man responsible for building up the city:

There are bricks from all the years that make up the walls. When I pass them I try to think of the men who put them there. Who told them where to place the bricks? What way did they shave? What was the drink they liked the best? I fall in among them and among the ages of the city.

While I Could Read The Sky follows the story of one exile, doing for the Irish what Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners did for West Indians, it is the story of many emigrants the world over. A snapshot of the lonely, of what it means to be away from all that you love. It aches with experience: of growing up, of grief, of love, of death.

The collaboration between O’Grady and Pyke - echoing that of James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - ensures a work of art that accurately captures the exile’s experience through prose and photography. It’s a slim volume but that’s only because each picture is ample replacement for a thousand words. And while our narrator could read the sky, I’m certain to read this again.