Suburbia

Alba de Cespedes: Forbidden Notebook

Simply Messing About in Books

First some literary news. For those of you who don’t read The Guardian let me be the first to tell you Karl Ove Knausgaard has a new series of books. The Wolves of Eternity follows The Morning Star, and he has just finished the third in the series. All these books run to 800 pages, but instead of being about his family these books concern themselves with black metal and transhumanism, whatever that may mean. Will you be seeking them out?

A N Wilson : Confessions : A Life of Failed Promises

‘Failed’ in what sense? Why does Andrew Wilson profess to regard his life as one of ‘failed promises’? Is it because he never got a tenured teaching position? Is it because he never got a PhD? Is it because his marriage to the academic Katherine Duncan-Jones failed? Is it because he never became an Anglican priest? Or a Catholic priest? Or ever firmly made up his mind about which religion he subscribed to?

Why Blog?

The Gerts have been blogging for eight years now and writing together for about fifteen years. We started our blog in 2014 when Crane Mansions, our first book, was coming out on Kindle. We have kept it going, mainly through the persistence of Poet Gert, who has had to tell me, Music Gert, to pull my finger out at times. But we both put in a bit of work, and every time I read I have the thought of the Blog hovering at my shoulder, ‘Shall I write about this?’ ‘Can I really say what I think about this ghastly book,’ ‘ Am I the only person in the world who has read this book?’ and so on.

Ann Patchett : These Precious Days

Ann Patchett is often described as a ‘beloved writer’ having ‘wit charm and grace’ and being one of ‘the most celebrated writers of our time.’ And it’s true she has won the Orange Prize for Bel Canto. But, but, but…. Doesn’t her work sometimes verge on the saccharine? Doesn’t she often tend to let know you what a wonderful person she is? Doesn’t she use the lives of her friends in her own work? It all makes me rather uneasy.

Mothers, Fathers, and Others : Siri Hustvedt

In her latest book of essays Siri Hustvedt ranges far. She speaks of her family and her early life. She examines the power of art and of reading. She looks back at favourite books like Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights, she thinks about what we might be drawn to read during a pandemic, she plays around with the words of a famous story-teller, Scheherazade, and she examines the life of a prolific artist and journal writer, Louise Bourgeois. She also, as so often with her, tries to tease apart the debate about the relative merits of male and female art/writing.

Dickon Edwards – Where are You Now?

 

Last night I was relaxing with one of my favourite podcasts, Backlisted (thank you for the recommendation Jacqui). The discussion was about Angus Wilson’s first novel Hemlock and After, which I read many years ago. But before they even got to the discussion of the novel I was alerted to the voice of a very confident young(ish) man introduced as Dickon Edwards who has been described by the Centre for Life Writing Research at Kings College London as the author of the longest running on-line diary.

Drusilla Modjeska – Second Half First

Over the holidays I have been browsing through many books, one of which I won’t review here. Helen Garner’s One Day I’ll Remember This is the second excerpt from her journals to be published and covers the years 1987 to 1995. Years in which she had a relationship with the writer Murray Bail, whom she eventually married and divorced.

I won’t be reviewing the Garner book, even though there was much about the writing that appealed to me (being a journal keeper myself). Like many women of my generation, I can’t forgive her book The First Stone, where she (rather dishonestly in my opinion) attacks the young women who made a complaint about inappropriate behaviour of the Master of their university college. And then there was The Spare Room and This House of Grief – The Story of a Murder Trail, both of which, for me, had serious issues. But her journals have some honest observations and show the high value she gives to friendship and family, and the humble beauties of everyday life.

In the latest edition of her journals, she often speaks of a friend E with whom she stays, and who gives her friendship and support during her rather doomed affair with Bail. Later I discovered this friend was Drusilla Modjeska, a writer a little younger than Garner, but moving in the same circles and of the same mind. I worked out this connection because Modjeska had written a book, Stravinsky’s Lunch, about two women painters, Grace Cossington-Smith and Stella Bowen. In her diaries Garner describes a lunch with Murray Bail and a male friend and she and a female friend, now revealed as Modjeska, where the males applauded the story of Stravinsky demanding silence from the women in his household at lunch, so his creativity could flow uninterrupted. The implication seemed to follow that the work of men should have primacy over the work of women. Why Garner was so in love with a misogynistic mansplaining male is hard to understand but Drusilla Modjeska wrote her book to explore this idea.

Her memoir, then, begins with a question. Why do the women of her circle, educated, reasonably well off, with friends and support, all seem to hanker after the perfect relationship with the opposite sex? Garner certainly does, and at the beginning of her memoir, as she is about to turn forty, Modjeska terminates a long-term relationship that is not giving her what she needs.

Men. Oh, they were difficult years, so many of us wounded – them as much as us. But while we had each other and our conversations, our table, the men, many of them it seemed, needed a woman, one particular woman or another, to listen to them, to sympathise. It’s much harder for us, they’d say, with you women wanting to be independent. p 70

In the first section of her memoir, Modjeska explores the writing of two women in particular, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, and the sculptor, Louise Bourgeois and the way they depict relations between men and women.  She speaks of her own errors of judgement in her relationships with uncommitted men, or men with mental illness. She has not had the freedom to say, as Helen Garner has, that the last twenty years of her life, free of romantic entanglements, have been the happiest of her life.

I liked the exploration of life and books that inspired her, even though I may disagree with some of her opinions. I liked especially the account of her relationship with her father, another man whose career took primacy and who needed the services of women in his life.

Modjeska lost me a little in her accounts of finding herself through psychoanalytic psychotherapy (three times a week is beyond most of us) and I felt she should have kept her New Guinea stories for a second book.

She has written a rather wonderful book, Poppy, about her mother. I would like to see a book, Patrick where she explores her understanding of her father.

She feels some guilt for siding with her father when he left her mother with three children. It was always his approval she wanted. Perhaps that tells us something about the relationships she pursues. Only later she comes to realise how much her mother suffered and what a strong woman she was.

I am late to Drusilla Modjeska’s memoir; it was published in 2015, but I feel others will be led to revisit it after reading Helen Garner’s journals.

I will definitely be reading Stravinsky’s Lunch (published in 1999)

Having said all this, I do wonder whether these are very much the issues of the 1980’s and 1990’s . Are the debates more about gender today?

Indelicacy – Amina Cain

 

 

She works as a cleaner in a museum. It is hard to work out the time and place. She speaks of carriages and long dresses, yet also of the beach and bathing costumes. She lives alone and walks freely through the streets. Sometimes she might eat a small meal alone in a cheap cafe. She has no family that she sees, and in the beginning, only one friend. She speaks later of visiting Brazil, but it is hard to get a sense of where she is living.