Odds and Ends

Having got myself a new job at the other side of the country and found somewhere to live (first rule of flat-hunting: buy a map), I now have to pack for the move, and what books I take are - of course - top priority (I keep telling myself that because the job is book related I need to take as many books as possible, and then remember that I'll end up getting loads of books through the job and won't have any time to read them all...).

Today was book packing day and in the end I had to have a huge amount of will power. So my system was to pack only books which I had not read yet, of which there are too many to list here, but include a number of poetry books - mostly John Burnside, Robin Robertson, Kathleen Jamie, Alice Oswald, Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy - a wedge of Borges, a couple of Elizabeth Bowen novels and Lanark which I'm embarrassed to say was very, very dusty when I pulled it off the shelf.
There are a few exceptions to the rule: 2 AL Kennedy books (Paradise and On Bullfighting) , the dictionary (the little one not the multi volume one), Findings by Kathleen Jamie, a book of Brendan Kennelly's poems, and a few I've forgotten. Mrs Woolf is staying behind for the moment as I don't think there is enough room for her where I'm going (she takes up more shelves that AL Kennedy and Ali Smith put together).

Given that I've spent a fair bit of time on public transport with nothing else to do but read my most recent reads have been Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland and A Jealous Ghost by A.N. Wilson. My brief verdict is read Carry Me Down (just mind the stomach turning bit near the beginning) and leave A Jealous Ghost at the bookshop. These books were the first time I'd read work by either of the writers so I had no idea of what I was going to get. Carry Me Down is original and well written; not dressed up with fussy language and is subtle. It tells the story of John Egan who discovers he is a human lie detector, a discovery that has bizarre and violent consequences. In the end it seems to be a book about the human capacity for love and forgiveness. A Jealous Ghost is a 'reworking' of James' The Turn of the Screw and it is interesting to see how Wilson pulls that off, but the resulting book was too snobby about its roots (problematic for readers not familiar with James' story and annoying for those who are) and the author is clearly disdainful of his central character an American PhD student called Sally, whose thesis is about the James story on which the book is based. From the beginning of the book Sally confuses her situation with that of The Turn of the Screw and the consequences are to be expected. Aside from the academic, literary and social snobbery of the book my main problem is that - in my reading of it - Wilson's story doesn't say anything new about James' story, it doesn't read as something fresh and doesn't make me see The Turn of the Screw in a different light.

Departure and Arrival

My excuse for not posting for a week is that the first part of last week was spent travelling from one side of England to the other - in between the trains and freezing platforms I got a new job!! - and the second half was spent attempting to find somewhere to live.
I'm moving at the end of this week, so for the next week or so the blog will be a bit light on posts. In the meantime I'll be wondering which books to take with me, which books belong to the library, taking books back to the library, recovering books borrowed from me and not returned, and so on. My current dilema is whether or not I actually need to pack all six volumes of Virginia Woolf's letters or whether carry them on public transport is in fact too much. And I could carry considerably more poetry books - which are not nearly so heavy - if I don't pack them....

Not Another Literary Magazine

Given the weather we've been having, the last few days have largely been taken up sowing this year's veg and dealing with the complications of planting grid patterns of carrots, onions and marigolds (keeps the carrot fly away). This all left little time for reading anything too long and I began to realise that not being a member of an academic library anymore meant no access to full paper editions of all the magazines and journals I once read. Other than Granta I don't subscribe to anything and I'm beginning to feel a lack, so I trawled through the internet in search of some of the ones I used to read and at the same time came across some new ones, of which there are many.

This reminded me of the Oxford Don Sillery (Alan Bennett in the TV adaptation) in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time bemoaning the fact that one of his former students is setting up a new literary magazine - Fission - which seems doomed to fail from the start.

So my plan is to read a back copy which features a writer or writers I know I like and then if I like it consider subscribing. Here's what I'm going to try (or have already tried) over the next few weeks:

The new(ish) literary magazine Zembla seems to combine typical literary magazine content with truly mad things - like interviews with dead authors. Its designed in Australia and edited in the UK, and has a very annoying website. Its motto is 'Fun With Words'.

Canadian Literary Journal Brick is well worth a look. I ordered a back issue from them a while back and there was some confusion and I got sent the then current issue, but after numerous emails with a nice person called Emily I got the issue I wanted and they let me keep the one they sent me by accident.

Mslexia: If I could get hold of issues 2 and 18 then I might consider subscribing. Anyone out there have a copy of issue 2 and/or 18 they would consider parting with?

At £17 a year for three issues - each issue is now published in multi-volume format - the Edinburgh Review is I think pretty good value, and you should believe what Time Out said a few years back about it being better than Granta.

I'm giving issue 104 of The Threepenny Review a go purely because there is a new short story by AL Kennedy.

Then there are the e-zines: The Roundtable Review is launched on Wednesday 19th April; 3AM Magazine is interesting and diverse; and Inkwell Newswatch has everything you could possibly want from a literary e-zine.

Now off to work out the complications oftravelingg from the east of England to the west by train - how many changes? No less than five.

As The Crow Flies

Kafka on The Shore
by Haruki Murakami
Vintage, £7.99; pp 505
ISBN 0 099 45832 2

The boy named Crow seems to know the answers to everything, so following his advice Kafka Tamura takes flight on his fifteenth birthday. Everything Kafka has done in his life have lead him to this moment: the moment when he can leave home and run away from his father's oedipal prophecy. However fate, or chance, or destiny, lead him to fulfill the prophecy. When Kafka's father is found murdered, he takes refuge in a private library where he begins to dream. But Kafka is reminded that 'in dreams begin responsibility' and he comes to learn that he is responsible for more than just himself.

Meanwhile Nakata is searching for a missing cat. Left unable to read or write after an incident as a child Nakata's only talent is being able to talk to cats. What began as a simple task becomes complicated and confusing as someone takes advantage of his talent and leads him into a grotesque and violent nightmare. And the only way to put a stop to it will result in murder. Waking up under a bush Nakata discovers that his ability to speak to cats has evaporated and has been replaced with more surreal abilities.

As fish fall out of the sky Nakata and Kafka's lives collide and prophecies and destinies are fulfilled. Each are helped along their way - as any Greek hero would be - by an assortment of strange people; a gender confused librarian, symbols of American culture, truck drivers bunking off work, soldiers living in the woods since World War II, and ghosts of past happiness.

Kafka on the Shore is beautiful, comic, sad and at times baffling: read it and dream. But don't expect to find all the answers at once.

Arguging with the Celebrations

In The bookseller column of the review section of today's Guardian the 'industry row' over the Short Story Prize goes on.

"The new national Short Story Prize is a 'missed opportunity of gigantic proportions', according to a specialist short story publisher. Ra Page, editor of the Manchester-based Comma Press claims that the prize's inaugural shortlist has dealt a 'body blow to real investors in the short story', such as fellow small publishers Comma, Tindal Street, Route, Maia and Flambard. The stories in the running for the Radio 4/Prospect-backed award are mostly by authors published by major houses: Rana Dasgupta (Fourth Estate), Michel Faber (Canongate), James Lasdun (Jonathan Cape), Rose Tremain (Sceptre) and William Trevor (Penguin). Page complains that the shortlist 'reads like and invite checklist to make sure all the 'right' people - or same people - are coming to the party.' He adds: 'The message it sends us is : 'its OK, you don't have to look very hard to find short stories - the writers you're familiar with anyway will fulfill this need.'' But Radio 4 broadcaster Francine Stock, who chaired the prize says the shortlist was drawn up from 1,400 entries on merit alone: ' It was just a question of what succeeded on the page. If you set out with an agenda [to support smaller presses] then its not a valid competition, however valid the claim is'. And fellow judge Alex Linklater, deputy editor of Prospect, argues that most of the authors are still outside the 'mainstream' of British publishing. 'We wanted to find the finest out there - it is meant to be a celebration of the art of the short story."

Which brings us back to the never ending argument about literary prizes in general. Which is something Erica Wagner brings up in the books section of today's Times. Having argued the pros and cons of such prizes she concludes her column with: "It seems to me that the way for the book to fight back, if such a fight is needed, is for books to rejoice in their existence as objects. Books are beautiful in themselves ... "

So if prizes are supposed to be a celebration of books, of stories, of words, why then does such rejoicing invariably end in argument?

Avoidance

Its happened again. More books have just appeared inexplicably on my shelves. After considering the piles balanced on first set of shelves near the bedroom door (have run out of space to put the books in neat rows) I counted at least twenty new books - not including the ones from the library of which there are three - which I haven't opened yet. Moving onto the other two sets of shelving in the corner of the room I noticed there was a pile of poetry books which just appeared one day. I wonder if I'm buying so many books as some form of avoidance?

In fact today has been all about avoidance - avoiding filling in the thousands of forms I seem to have been sent by numerous people; avoiding being in the house too much due to family suddenly appearing out of thin air; avoiding writing article about writers in fiction; avoiding finishing Kafka on the Shore so I can avoid writing review of it ....

So to further avoid doing anything - in no particular order here's what I'll be reading in the coming weeks and I've got a couple of long trips to make so these should fill up the time spent on trains.

Pinkerton's Sister - Peter Rushforth (this was recommended on Book World)
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Carry Me Down - M.J. Hyland (no idea what its about but Ali Smith likes it so that is good enough for me)
Beyond Black - Hillary Mantel
The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
Findings - Kathleen Jamie (I was about halfway through this at the beginning of the year but got side tracked which is bad because this is a very wonderful book)
A Good neighbor - John Burnside
Swithering - Robin Robertson
Arthur and George - Julian Barnes (because I think this copy belongs to somebody other than myself)
Granta 98 - really the books aren't satisfied with appearing on my shelves so they have to appear in the post box as well! And its got a short essay about climbing Mount Sinai by AL Kennedy.

Container Culture

In vegetable gardening - or any gardening for that fact - the benefits of container growing are that it allows the gardener almost total control over what happens with the container and its contents. Obviously we don't want our lovingly sown cucumbers, tomatoes, rhubarb, sweetcorn, radishes, aubergines ... stop me before I run out of appropriate veg ... mixing in an uncontrolled environment with disease ridden soil and the possibility that if we just gave them a little space to do their own thing, they would turn out alright without too much intervention on our part.
There is a point to this ramble about container growing: have readers been unwittingly forced into a container culture controlled by the head gardeners of the book trade?

A recent wander through a London branch of a soulless chain pointed me in the direction of the answer whose only word was "yes". Having temporarily escaped the clutches of the medical profession I was in search of escapism. But it needed to be short escapism. So I flicked through the leaves of a few poetry books of the pathetically light poetry section of the store - sorry Mr Motion but the Scots do it better than you - and found nothing in the way of escapism at all. Deflated but not entirely defeated I forked through some short looking novels, which may have provided escapism, but escapism which wasn't short enough for my requirements.

What I needed was a short story collection.
Boy (who looked about nine, is it really that difficult to find staff who want to sell books?)behind the counter: No we don't sell those
Me: Why not?
9 year old: Nobody wants to buy them.

Which in turn reminded me of a publisher (who shall remain nameless because I've forgotten their first name) talking to a group of - possibly interested - undergraduate students about ... publishing (can you believe it?). Somewhere towards the end of this talk/ discussion/suicidal adventure the publisher in question told the writers among us not to bother writing short stories because nobody published short stories if they could possibly help it, because nobody brought collections of short stories and therefore nobody read them. It sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. No short stories: no readers.

And we should feel at times, if not permanently, concerned/angry/offended/upset/deprived about the lack of short stories being published. Because short stories have an important place in the world of literature. They can provide moments of escapism when a novel would be too much and a (shortish) poem not enough; in lunch hours/minutes, in doctors' waiting rooms, on buses, at train stations ...

Which is why the National Short Story Prize is important. The short list is being aired on Radio 4 this week at the absurd time of 11.30pm: a time which proves that the media has a reponsibility to the short story which it too has shirked. One can only hope that the publishers and booksellers are humble enough to realise their errors and publish more short story collections.

This is not to say that nobody cares about short stories: for the 2005 festival The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival comissioned eleven short stories from a diverse range of writers, to be performed for the first time at the festival, all under the heading of MultiStory. This was a poineering project, unique in its importance and bravery and one can only hope its a project which is continued in the future. In the meantime as readers we need to rebel against the container we've been forced into.

Can Books Propagate?

There I was happily wandering about looking at the pavement when all of a sudden a bag full of books appeared in my hand.

I've no idea how it happened to be there.

I swear.

Clearly my books are breeding, like there is some sort of greenhouse effect going on on my shelves - like the artichoke plants I put in the greenhouse at the weekend which suddenly shot up - although I'd like to think that was the effect Kafka on the Shore had on them.

If truth be told I went in search of a paperback copy of John Clare's complete poems - didn't find it and not sure if it exists - and Iain Sinclair's book about John Clare, Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out of Essex' - out of print apparently and waiting for paperback edition - but I came out with The Third Policeman, Turn of the Screw and two more Murakami books. Oh and a new notebook, and a collection of Virginia Woolf essays - the Penguin 70th birthday edition of Street Haunting. And I've yet to spend the book tokens my fellow slaves at the bank gave me as a leaving present. So after those are spent and I've purchased the various volumes which make up Brecht's letters and diaries from a secondhand bookshop near where I worked, I'm going to attempted not to buy any books for two months ...

... although I did see a complete set of e e cummings complete works the other day ... and a hardback copy of AL Kennedy's On Bullfighting because my paperback copy fell apart the other day ...

Censoring the dung-heap and crossing the milestone

I'm nearing the end of Kafka on the Shore and I'm trying to gather my thoughts about it. Its one of those books which is almost overflowing - so much in it that you can't or don't or won't take it all in the first time you read it.

Taking a moment between chapters in Kafka on the Shore, I flicked through the Folio Society edition of Anton Chekhov's letters (Chekhov: A Life in Letters, trans., and ed., Gordon McVay, London: The Folio Society, 1994) and came across this letter from early 1887 pp 36-37:

I don't know who is right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, the ancients as a whole, who were not afraid to rummage in the 'dung-heap' but who remained morally much more stable than we are, or modern writers who are prim on paper but cold and cynical in their spiritual and personal life? ... Journalists, lawyers and doctors, who are initiated into all the mysteries of human sin, are not renowned for their immorality; and realist writers are in most cases more moral that archimandrites...
Literature is accepted as an art form because it portrays life as it really is. Its aim is absolute and honest truth...
To a chemist nothing in the world is impure. A writer must be just as objective as a chemist - he must reject everyday subjectivity and realise that dung-heaps play a very honorable role in a landscape , while evil passions are just as much a feature of life as are good ones ...
No police force is competent to judge literature ... However hard you try, you won't come up with a better police force for literature than literary criticism and the author's own conscience ...

The final part seemed to be particularly prevalent at the moment with Orhan Pamuk being released and PEN lodging a complaint against Yahoo following imprisonment of the Chinese poet Shi Tao. Yahoo handed over private emails from Shi Tao's email account to the Chinese government and now he's serving a 10 year prison sentence. There are a few articles in yesterday's Guardian giving more details.

But I'm not sure that I agree with Chekhov that literary criticism is the best 'police force' for literature. Surely after 'the author's own conscience...' the best judge of literature is its readership? ...

And talking about readership, I notice Professor Lisa Jardine has been researching the effects of literature upon the nation's readership again. Last time it was the Women's Watershed Fiction, this time around its the same thing for men with the Men's Milestone Fiction. Naturally everyone is going to be getting all hot and bothered about the fact that there is only one woman writer amongst the men's top 20 most life changing/life saving/influential/inspirational etc books. However I think the titles of the two research projects are much more interesting - men get a milestone and women have a watershed: milestone sounds a bit tiring. What do you think?

Telling Tales

While I'm enjoying my ramble through the leaves of Kafka on the Shore and Ferdydurke (a bit like Kafka crossed with Ionesco maybe?) here's my verdict on one McEwan book which didn't end up in the charity pile when I was pruning.

Atonement
By Ian McEwan.
Vintage, £7.99; 372 pp.
ISBN 0 099 42979 9

It does well to remember that everybody lies. Nobody is to be trusted. Not even established literary figures. In Atonement by Ian McEwan lies are the illusion of fiction. As readers we accept the illusion because we trust the writer. We believe the story is true. We ignore the fact that stories are untrue. We trust in characters who do not exist. We allow ourselves to be lied to by the author.
Atonement is written in four parts. The first gives an account of a day which ends with two crimes: a rape and a lie. The lie belongs to thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis. Her lie is the naming of Robbie Turner – her sister Cecilia Tallis’ lover – as the rapist. The outcome is the locking up of Robbie and a family who can’t talk to each other because of a lie.
The second part is the story of Robbie’s survival at Dunkirk – but remember stories are untruths – and his return to Cecilia. The third is the beginning of Briony’s quest for atonement. A quest which lasts her sixty years. Briony intends to atone herself through writing. We learn that she has written a novella about her crime and that a publisher has rejected it. When Robbie asks for a letter of explanation Briony’s response is not a letter but a new draft.
The final part is set in 1999. Briony who begins the novel as a child writer - we first meet her writing her melodrama The Trials of Arabella – ends the book a well-known writer. We learn that she continues to lie about her crime. She calls it ‘our crime’ believing that the rapist and victim – her cousin ‘from the north’ Lola - to be guilty of lying as well. By the end of the book she has rewritten her story – her atonement – until the end result is the novel Atonement.
But there is no atonement: The title is a suggestion – even a question – not a statement of fact. If the reader takes the title as a fact then it too becomes a lie. McEwan writes that the novelist is God because there is nothing higher than their imagination. An imagination which lies. The writer is a God who deludes people but cannot be atoned: "No atonement for God, or novelists" But gods – and therefore writers – do not need to achieve atonement. Briony tells us that attempting atonement is enough: "It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all."
Atonement is a book about lies and writers and the lies writers are allowed to create. It is a book which tells us we should not believe in fiction as truth. We should not trust writers – especially not Briony – because they tell stories. Writers are illusionists and Atonement is an illusion which exposes itself. Everybody in Atonement lies – to themselves and each other - and McEwan is a writer who tells us that writers are liars. So we shouldn’t trust him. But we do.

You'll have noticed I've added a few webside links to the sidebar. The link to Theatremonkey is for a wonderful site about London theatre - Mr Theatremonkey provided the name for this blog - and is well worth a visit. Peter Falconer and The Mutiny are an exciting new band based in Greater London and you can hear clips of their music and get the details for their gigs amongst other things. Of all the literature festivals in this country The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival has to be the best and the Edinburgh Book Festival is pretty much on the same level - I just wish it wasn't in Edinburgh, but it is true to say that when you are in one of those tents in Charlotte Square Gardens you could be anywhere you wanted to be! And because I'm very biased on the subject of AL Kennedy's books there is a link to her site as well.

Why Pruning Doesn't Always Work

I used to serve a customer at the bank who owned an orchard containing something like a thousand apple trees. The last time I saw him he was bemoaning the fact that some of the trees were not doing too well - not enough apples, not enough height, not enough bark, not enough sun, not enough blossom etc - and that something drastic had to be done.

For the trees with not enough bark the drastic measure was to chop them down. Apparently rabbits and hares like to chew the bark on fruit trees and a number of this man's trees had been chewed all the way around the bottom and this I'm told spells doom. No bark: No tree. Because the bark protects the tree like a dustjacket protects a book (perhaps that explains why in the antquiarian book world dustjackets are so important to the value of the book?).

For the trees with not enough height, blossom or apples, the answer to the problem was some rather brutal pruning. No good taking a bit off here and there - you have to really go for it, and if the tree doesn't survive that then they also get the chop.

And therein lies the problem with pruning your 'library'. If its going to work you have to be brutal; and each time I go in for a bit of book pruning I invariably fail. My most recent pruning session was about two months ago. I embarked on this task partly because I had brought a first edition of AL Kennedy's first novel Looking for the Possible Dance and decided it needed to have a proper space on the bookshelves and partly because of the dust. But by the time I'd got all the books off the shelves in order to dust everything I discovered I owned considerably more books than I realised and therefore had to do a bit of pruning. Isn't it amazing the books we are delighted to discover we own, the books we are not, and the books we had forgotten about completely?

So I managed to remove something like 90 books which were then left in piles on the bedroom floor. However in the weeks gone by certain books have found their way back onto the shelves - DH Lawrence and Ian McEwan to name just two who thought they could escape the charity shop pile. But the problem lies with my inability to part with a book I may, possibily, want to read in the future. I'm simply not brutal enough; if I was I would have taken all the books to the charity shop the very same day and not left them in piles on the bedroom floor for two months while I slowly returned them to the shelves. So pruning doesn't always have the desired result and therefore doesn't always work.

The man who owned the orchard was having the same problem with his apple trees - he was a little bit too attached to them and couldn't hack away as much tree as he really should have for fear of killing off some of the weaker trees. His answer to the problem was to rent the orchard out to some else. Perhaps that is what I should do with my books?

But then the person I rent them out to may get rid of all my AL Kennedy books and that would have serious consequences.

Germination

Starting a book related blog and sorting out the vegetable garden were supposed to keep me as sane as possible while I was slaving away in the evil clutches of a High Street banking corporation. However as one thing does not follow the other and all the best laid plans go to pot I escaped the brain mulching daily grind of being a bank clerk before I had the time to start this blog. Nonetheless I now need something to keep me distracted whilst trying to find new employment (though nothing involving till stamps or the parents of Jacquline Wilson fans).

A recent glance at my bookshelves proved to me that I own a number of books which I have not yet read (I do also own double the number of unread books in books I have read more than once) and those books keep being added to on an almost weekly (if not daily) basis. Amongst the Leaves is an attempt to prevent the piles of forgotten titles gathering more dust: I'm going to read every title on my shelves and then write a review on it. To add a bit of eccentricity to it I'm going to conduct an experiment - of sorts - by reading at least one chapter of every book to my turnips and assorted other vegetables and see how they grow. So this blog will chart my journey through the paper and vegetable foliage of my life, with the occasional rambling about things unconcerened with either books or vegetables.

At the moment I'm reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz, which was kindly lent to me by the owner of the wonderful Harleston Bookshop in Norfolk, East Anglia, when I couldn't find anything to spend my book tokens (leaving present from the brach of High Street banking corporation, so capitalists can be nice, occasionally) on.

A note about the turnips: I am fully aware that I am not - in any way - cut out for farming as a career. However in years gone by my fantasy alternative life was to be a turnip farmer. Don't ask me why. There is no explaination for it.