Category: Kingsnorth Paul

Books of the 2010s: Fifty Memories, nos. 20-11

Welcome to the fourth part of my countdown of reading memories from the 2010s. You can read the previous instalments here: 50-41, 40-31, 30-21.

Something I’ve found interesting about this instalment in particular is that a couple of the books here (The Wake and Lightning Rods) just missed out on a place in my yearly list of favourites when I first read them. But they have stayed with me over the years, and their placing on my list reflects that.

This is one of my reasons for making this list: to see how my feelings about different books have (or haven’t) changed.

On to this week’s memories…

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Some reviews elsewhere

I haven’t been posting links to my external reviews lately, so here’s a round-up of the most recent four: all books that are worth your time.

winterlingsThe Winterlings by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade (tr. Samuel Rutter). Twenty-five years after being evacuated to England, two sisters return to the Galician parish of their childhood. The place is otherworldly to them, but they also have a glamour of their own – and so mystery encroaches on the reader from all sides. Reviewed for European Literature Network.

 

beast

Beast by Paul Kingsnorth. Second part of the thematic trilogy that began with The Wake. This volume is set in the present day, and focuses on an Englishman in search of his place in the landscape. A strange creature haunts the corner of his eye, and his language grows more primal as he heads further into hallucination. Reviewed for Shiny New Books.

 

brussoloThe Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo (tr. Edward Gauvin). A tantalising slice of weirdness set in a reality where art is retrieved from the depths of dreams. One man believes that the dream realm has its own objective existence – and he’ll risk his very self to prove it. Reviewed for Strange Horizons.

 

tobacconist

The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler (tr. Charlotte Collins). A new novel in English from the author of A Whole Life. The tale of a young man who becomes a tobacconist’s apprentice in 1930s Vienna and strikes up a friendship with Sigmund Freud. Love begins to stir, just as the shadow of the Nazis grows. Reviewed for European Literature Network.

Towards language

I used to approach my reading in terms of content. I’d be looking for particular genres, or at the very least I would choose books based on whether the subject matter appealed to me. But something has changed (or maybe something has been brought out) in the years since I’ve been blogging. I now approach books much more in terms of language.

What do I mean by this? Well, I don’t mean that I’m drawn to ‘fine writing’. Indeed, I think that literary style, in and of itself, is a red herring. What counts for me is not the style of writing per se, but what the writing opens up. In the work I value most, the language embodies what it seeks to portray; the way a piece of fiction is written becomes part of what it means.

WakePB

 

 

A good example is Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, which is set in the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest of England and written in a ‘shadow tongue’, a modified version of Old English. The effect of this shadow tongue is to estrange the reader just enough from what might otherwise seem an overly familiar historical period. The crucial thing is that the same story couldn’t be told in a more contemporary style (or even a more conventional ‘historical’ one), because the style of The Wake adds its own layer – a particular relationship between reader, text and world – to the work, one that can’t be replicated otherwise.

 

 

So perhaps it’s not surprising that I tend to gravitate towards fiction that departs from stylistic norms (though not fiction that does so just for its own sake – the interplay of style, form and subject is important). But there are less obvious examples, too, such as The First Bad Man by Miranda July. This novel is written a slightly heightened way that often gets labelled ‘quirky’; when I read it, I recognised the general tone from a whole raft of contemporary American fiction. But then it became apparent that all the artifice in July’s book is there to represent a shield between the characters and the harshness of the ‘real world’. Again, the language of the novel adds a further dimension to the whole.

MJuly

 

Recently I came across Gabirel Josipovici’s idea that art can be like a toy (see, for example, his essay ‘I Dream of Toys’, collected in The Singer on the Shore. He describes how children turn the most ordinary objects into toys by applying imagination: a cardboard box becomes a house; a stick becomes a hobby-horse – but, at the same time, they’re still a box and a stick. Josipovici goes on to suggest that some works of art function like this: their component parts are plain to see; we can take them and make our own experience.

This idea really strikes a chord with me, because I can’t help but thing that the kings of books I’ve been talking about here – the kind I most want to read – act in a similar way. To go with the same examples: the distortions of language are clear enough in Kingsnorth’s and July’s novels; when I open my imagination to them, the books gain a deeper richness.

Book details (Foyles affiliate and publisher links)

The Wake (2014) by Paul Kingsnorth, Unbound paperback

The First Bad Man (2015) by Miranda July, Canongate paperback

The Singer on the Shore: Essays 1991-2004 (2006) by Gabriel Josipovici, Carcanet paperback

Reflections: reading through a doorway, reading through a hole

FilerI have an on-off relationship with my ereader. I’m not particularly averse to electronic reading; it’s just that I rarely think to pick the ereader up when all the shelves of print books are so much more visible. I still prefer paper books at heart; indeed, very few of the ebooks I own are titles that I could also have bought as a print copy.

One of those few is Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall, which I’ve been re-reading for my book group. I’d forgotten how much I liked it – the way it creeps up on you, gradually revealing that its form and narrator are not as they first appeared to be. I had put that forgetting down to not having read Shock until after it became a Big Name Book and somehow subconsciously (erroneously) assuming that meant it couldn’t be good, even though I remembered otherwise. But I also wonder if the experience of reading the book electronically didn’t have something to do with it.

“A book…is a doorway,” wrote Eleanor Catton recently. Her metaphor was more general, and made in a different context; but let’s run with the specifics of it for a while. When I open a print book, it is like stepping through a doorway, into the world of the book. Whatever distractions there may be from outside, it is ultimately just me and the book, and I have the whole text – its whole world – before me.

Catton goes on: “A screen is all surface. How many adults can sit at a computer terminal and read diligently and immersively, for hours?” It’s worth pointing out that, these days, such electronic reading is less likely to be done on a terminal than on something like a tablet or phone. But I think she does have a point here, because I find that, when I try to read on a multifunction device, I don’t have the same level of focus. After all, in those circumstances, reading is just one function among many.

I would distinguish, though, between multifunction devices and dedicated ereaders. With an ereader, it is still just me and the book, but the experience is different. If reading a print book is like opening a door, using an ereader to me is like peering through a hole. With a printed text, I can feel that I have the whole book in my hands. With the ereader, I have a single page (or page fragment) in front of me at any one time; I can’t flick so easily back and forth through the book; and an electronic page or percentage count give me a less intuitive sense of where I am in the book than holding a physical volume.

The effect of this is that, with ebooks, I find myself focusing much more on the isolated moment, less so on the context. It may be no coincidence that the only book read electronically that I’ve reviewed on this blog at any length is Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, a novel that demands – and rewards – attention to and engagement with its language, which is something that reading in the moment can encourage. On the other hand, The Shock of the Fall, which takes you through different texts and styles, rewards an appreciation of its cumulative effect. I appreciated Filer’s novel well enough on the electronic page, but perhaps I would have experienced it better on the printed one.

 

The shape of language and the spectre of history: Paul Kingsnorth and Mathias Enard

Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake (2014)
Mathias Enard, Zone (2008)
Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (2010)

It often strikes me that, in England at least, we tend to treat history as safe and unproblematic – a source of colourful stories, perhaps; but not necessarily something that needs to be thought about much in order for us to engage with it. 1066, for example, is probably the most famous date in English history; our perception of it is likely to be dominated by a few names and images that we think we know – William the Conqueror; the Bayeux Tapestry; King Harold with an arrow in his eye. But how many of us really think about this as a lived moment in time?

KingsnorthThat’s a central issue in Paul Kingsnorth’s Booker-longlisted debut novel The Wake, which is narrated by one Buccmaster of Holland, a Lincolnshire freeman who first knows that ‘there is sum thing cuman’ when strange portents are seen in the sky. News of an invasion from France gradually arrives; twice, Buccmaster’s sons go away to fight – and the second time, they do not return. When Buccmaster’s house is later burned down with his wife inside, he forms a small band of fighters dedicated to resisting Norman rule.

As a plot summary, that may not sound particularly remarkable; but The Wake is transfigured through its use of language. Kingsnorth has written his novel in what he calls a ‘shadow tongue’, a version of Old English which has been tweaked to make it comprehensible to modern readers. ‘Comprehensible’ is relative, of course; here, for example, is how the novel begins:

the night was clere though i slept I seen it. though I slept I seen the calm hierde naht only the still. when I gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not cepe me still

So let’s be clear that, like The Luminaries and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing before it, The Wake is a novel that demands total engagement from the reader, because it is uncompromising in the vision of the world that it presents. But (again, as with those two earlier books) give The Wake space and time and it will reveal its aesthetic logic (there is a partial glossary at the back, but I managed well enough without it). Kingsnorth’s language makes his past England an alien place, brings us a character whose thought processes are likely different from our own, and makes us confront that difference. It’s a fine  example of what I wrote about for Fiction Uncovered the other day, of language shaping the world of the novel.

It is also worth noting that, like The Luminaries, Kingsnorth’s novel has an acute sense of its own artifice. As the author notes in his afterword, his shadow tongue never existed; so, in a fundamental sense, the world it depicts never existed, either. What is the value of using a specifically artificial form of English? I would say that it helps to keep the past an open question: read in Old English or modern English, we might know too easily where we were (be it somewhere familiar or unfamiliar). With the shadow tongue, the door is opened just enough for us to see glimpses of understanding amidst the strangeness; we don’t know where we are, and this keeps the world of The Wake alive.

So too does Kingsnorth’s use of perception. Buccmaster frequently has visions of (and conversations with) Welland the Smith, and it remains ambiguous as to what these actually are. Kingsnorth takes his novel in directions that we may not expect of historical fiction, all the while making clear that there’s no real reason to have those expectations in the first place. Even though we may know how the story of the Norman invasion of England ends, we don’t know how the story of The Wake ends – and that’s because Kingsnorth creates the sense of a historical moment that’s alive on its own terms, where the future can still be contested.

***

Enard

Where we might say that The Wake depicts a past haunted by the spectre of the future, Mathias Enard’s Zone shows a present suffused with the ghosts of history. The novel revolves around Francis Mirković, once a mercenary, now an agent of the French secret service. For fifteen years, he has worked in the lands around the Mediterranean – a region he calls ‘the Zone’ – being involved in violence there as well as gathering information on it. Now, he is bringing that life to an end, as he takes a briefcase filled with intelligence from Milan to Rome, with the intention of selling it to the Vatican. We join him on his train journey, as he reflects on his own past and that of the Zone.

Each chapter of Mirković’s thoughts is presented as a pages-long sentence fragment (a superb feat of translation from Charlotte Mandell). The best way I found to read this was simply to jump in and let it carry me forward; there is a constant, driving momentum and rhythm to the book, like the motion of Mirković’s train. But, though the train may travel inexorably on, the novel’s overall sense is of an unending cycle, as conflicts recur throughout history, and the countries of the Zone remain scarred by the violence they have witnessed.

There’s also a thread running through Zone which concerns how lives may become reduced to memory, a text. Mirković carries the lives of war criminals and others in his briefcase; he himself has lived under several aliases, which he now intends to put away. Then there are the three chapters which are taken from the (fictitious) novel that Mirković occasionally reads while on the train. These tell of a Palestinian resistance fighter named Intissar, and are conventional in form and punctuation. Intissar’s story is serious and powerful; so it’s jarring indeed to return from her chapters to Mirković, and find him enjoying her tale as a thrilling adventure. (Ah, but isn’t that the sort of thing we do all the time as readers?) And, of course, Mirković himself is only a figure in the text of Enard’s novel… If The Wake gives a sense of deep vitality to a moment in history, Zone shows how easily history can be reduced to paper.

***

Finally, a note on the publication of these books. The Wake was crowdfunded through Unbound; having been published in the US by Open Letter Books, Zone is now the launch title of the UK small press Fitzcarraldo Editions – and I can scarcely think of a bolder statement for a new publisher to make. Publishing may be in a precarious position right now, but in many respects this is also a golden age for adventurous readers. And, while interesting books are certainly still being released by the major houses, smaller publishers play a vital role in bringing such books to our attention. I’m glad that there are novels like The Wake and Zone in the world, and that there are people who believe in them so strongly. They are right to do so.

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