Saturday 11 August 2012

Sightlines-Kathleen Jamie


Sightlines
Kathleen Jamie
Sort Of Books
Memoir/Travel/Essays





When I first got my copy of Sightlines and ran down the contents list I felt I had to jump to the essay titled The Gannetry. It was good, solid nature writing but it didn’t propel me to read the rest of the collection. Months later I finally sat down to read the whole book. 

In the first essay, Pathologies, Jamie gets agitated during a talk on the growing distance between humanity and nature at an environmentalist conference. Her mother had just died, “eventually of pneumonia”; Jamie knew that we are a part of, not apart from, the nature that she writes about. This not being a wallowing biographical essay, she investigates the commonality between nature and humanity by visiting a pathology lab where she studies human tissue under a microscope in the same way she looks at birds or inspects the layers of earth on an archaeological dig. I read Pathologies while eating my breakfast. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re squeamish, although it says a lot for Jamie’s writing that I could still look my eggs in the eye while reading about a colon being sliced into toenail shaped bits. Lucky for me, like all the best writers, Jamie defies clichés and consciously steered clear of food metaphors. As she travels through her essays and around the world, Jamie stumbles on many examples of humans’ attempts at claiming Nature as the other: the whalebones strapped to the ceiling of the Hvalsalon, the burial remains of The Woman in the Field, the empty houses on the abandoned Scottish islands, the tiny ring on a storm petrel put there by the British Museum. But by reading her essays one after the other you can spot the thread that tethers us and every living thing - no matter how small - to the world.

But these essays are not just nature writing; they are not easily categorised.  Jamie writes about everything and anything: travel, memoir, archaeology, biology, anthropology, history. It feels as though her interest in archaeology has best prepared her for her writing though; she roots out her subject and never fails to find the subtle layers of meanings that others might miss. Her subject doesn’t seem to matter. It is her writing that sells the book and there are some brilliant turns of phrase: on a trip to St Kilda she notices, “Once, a whale arched from the water below, blew and rolled down again, a black sigh.” Sightlines vividly brings to life that cold Northern world of uninhabited Hebridean islands and elongated Scandinavian days and nights.

But it got me thinking, should a book of essays be read from cover to cover or jumped about in? The organisation of the essays must play a role in engaging the reader, so the weaker essays get dropped into the fat at the middle of the book. Reading The Gannetry – an essay halfway through Sightlines – hadn’t inspired me to read the other essays. On my second approach, reading Pathologies did. Unfortunately, there are themes that continually roll through her essays and reading Sightlines wholesale feels like sea-watching. At times I did get sick of it. So I was grateful for essays that broke up the collection. La Cueva is an outstanding essay, a dry-break from the sea-life, a trip down into a cave that brings alive the history of consciousness. Maybe it’s my fault for reading cover to cover and not picking essays to read apart from each other? Maybe that’s the nature of essays.

Saturday 14 July 2012

My Best Friend and Other Enemies-Catherine Wilkins


My Best Friend and Other Enemies
Catherine Wilkins
Nosy Crow
9-12 years





Jessica, an 11 year old girl who loves drawing cartoons, is best friends with Natalie. They share everything with each other: secrets, dino biscuits and sleepovers. But when a new, horrible girl called Amelia comes to their school, Natalie and Jessica start to break apart. Jessica’s alright with it at first but when they form a secret club without her, she cracks. Jessica tries to create her own gang to be rivals with Natalie and Amelia’s gang, CAC. Can the ACE gang be better than CAC? As things start to get out of hand, in other words NASTY, poor Jessica has to try and cope with their rude comments and evil tricks. Will Jessica be able to cope without her best friend by her side? Will they stay enemies forever?

I really enjoyed reading this book; I couldn’t put it down! I loved reading it and can’t wait until she writes another book (even though this one’s not out for a couple more months!). I’ve racked my brains to find something it could improve on but I can’t think of anything. I loved the chatty style of writing that Catherine Wilkins has; it almost feels like the girl in the book is talking to you. I liked the characters, especially Jessica. My favourite bit was when they gave her the out of date invite to go bowling. It is realistic because problems like this happen all the time with friends. There will be some point when they’re mean to you or when you hate each other a little. I loved this book; it has to be one of my favourites!!!  Well done, it takes a lot to get me interested!!!!!

Amelia Callanan

Friday 13 July 2012

Blue Nights-Joan Didion


Blue Nights
Joan Didion
Fourth Estate
Memoir




Blue Nights suffered at the hands of critics when it was first published. I found myself appalled at Germaine Greer and John Carey dismissing this distinguished writer’s grief on Newsnight. But they did their job and scared me off reading the book. What if they were right and Blue Nights was all vacuous navel-gazing instead of the microscopic examination of one’s own pain at losing first their husband and then their daughter in the most unlucky of manners? So I left it a while but I’m glad I went back to it.

Didion’s account of her husband’s sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking, became so popular that her life probably doesn’t need reiterating here. And Blue Nights is not a straightforward retelling of Quintana’s life either, or rather Didion’s life while Quintana was in it; it is broken because this is how memory plays out. Didion is clutching at her memories of her daughter: the wedding, the adoption, the illness, the sparks of darkness only lit in hindsight.

I began reading Blue Nights knowing that I wanted to review it here and conscious that I did not want to write an apology for a once great writer. Didion’s non-fiction is known for its assuredness, even in The Year of Magical Thinking whilst rendered numb by her bereavement she is still trying to be the good journalist, digging into the situation, mining for its core truth. In Blue Nights that assuredness has been broken down; nearly every sentence questions. One of the criticisms I’d heard against this book was that it was hollow, with Didion putting herself at the centre where her daughter should be. Isn’t it absurd for one person to criticise another for not grieving right? And Didion is not really writing a biography of Quintana Roo, she is writing a memoir of her own trauma, it just so happens that that trauma is Quintana’s death and it swallows everything else, leaving Didion’s life hollow, an empty, sinister playground for her memories to knock about in. The writer is unravelling and the echoing sentences are the fraying evidence. The echoes are baroque, always circling back to the same, now mythologised, starting point: the phone call telling Didion that there is a ‘beautiful baby girl’ needing adopting at St John’s Hospital, Santa Monica.

Didion has also been criticised for name dropping, for labelling the clothes they wore and the places they went. But there are two good reasons for this: Didion could simply be trying to help draw the picture, misstepping, for sure, by believing we know how to visualise Christian Louboutin shoes, but are those shoes any different to the pink ribbon a nurse ties into baby Quintana’s hair or the ‘cap like a Dodger cap’ that the nightmarish Broken Man wears in Quintana’s imagination? She could also be noting how these things, fashion labels and swanky hotels, mattered during Quintana’s life and now mean nothing, ghosts of their former glories. It definitely seems like lazy thinking to pick on Didion for this materialism when she points it out herself in the book. 
‘Despite recognizing that for a woman my age even to note such details of appearance will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity.’

For a journalist who put herself inside the situations she wrote about, the memories related in Blue Nights show a very different woman, a woman on the quiet side-lines of her own life, a life that was filled with other people. She is more comfortable writing about aging and medicine than about Quintana and it produces sentences that prove her standing as a literary giant.

‘My memory would slip but whose memory does not slip. My eyesight would be more problematic than it might have been before I began seeing the world through sudden clouds of what looked like black lace and was actually blood, the residue of a series of retinal tears and detachments, but there would still be no question that I could see, read, write, navigate intersections without fear.’
Even the subjects of aging and medicine give short respite before circling back to Quintana. When Didion tells of a time she fell over, when she ended up being hospitalised, we see how empty her life is. This is a time when all you really have is your family. We see that without her husband and daughter, she is truly alone. The scene also echoes Quintana’s childhood fear of being left alone. With her tiny size and her vulnerability in age, Didion has become the lonely child. Sometime after her loss she begins to learn again, how to read and talk. Like a child. She lives out Quintana’s existence. It is another way for her to try and cling onto her daughter. Didion again is beautifully precise; a family is not separate members but one whole; we live each other’s lives.

Despite her loss of focus Didion doesn’t stop trying to reclaim the exactitude of her pen. ‘Let me again talk to you directly,’ she refrains again and again. Even the ‘you’ in that sentence is not stable, fluctuating between the reader and Quintana. For Didion, this whole book turns out to be her grasping onto what remains of her daughter. Didion ‘sees’ Quintana every day and is worried she will vanish entirely. Towards the end of Blue Nights Didion is watching the theatrical performance of The Year of Magical Thinking in the shadow of Quintana’s memorial service, adding another layer of unreality and echo but, hopefully, reaching some kind of conclusion for her.

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Virginia Woolf-Alexandra Harris

Virginia Woolf 
Alexandra Harris
Thames &Hudson 
Biography 

As a bookseller and writer there are some unforgiving holes in my reading history: I’ve started but never finished any Nabokov; I don’t think I’ve even picked up an Evelyn Waugh with the intention of buying it, let alone reading it. So I decided to rectify this by choosing one ‘important’ writer whose work I would read chronologically from beginning to end. I had read Mrs Dalloway when I was much younger, when the words swept over my head, and A Room of One’s Own made me first appreciate the essay form but despite only having a skimp handle on her work I have always known that Virginia Woolf might be the most important writer to me. I wanted to test the water with Alexandra Harris’s biography and it bolstered my confidence in choosing Woolf.

 I have to take some time to write about the physicality of this book. If you take a slight glance at the cover, you can be forgiven for thinking the photo is black and white but there is a blush of dusky pink that brings to my mind quilted silk throws. This pink also bleeds onto the flyleaf. Thames and Hudson have resurrected the bookmark ribbon, here in complimentary and tasteful silver. The paper is thicker and creamier than you will find in most books. Its weight mirrors Harris’s words and the subject matter. Whole pages are sporadically given over to single photographs with short captions. I much preferred this to the lazy clumping together in the middle that is the normal layout. The amount of photos of original jacket covers for Woolf’s books is an indicator that for Harris the main point of Woolf’s life is the writing.

 At 170 pages it is slight but Harris manages to pack her words tightly without need for padding. For someone whose writing can be seen as being too trapped in the mind, Harris draws out the emotion and feeling in and behind Woolf’s writing. Harris does air the personal, private indiscretions but she gives them a quick shake before folding them away. Harris prefers to concentrate on the writing; she holds up all of Woolf’s life and pegs it to each major work. It is at these points that Harris really shows her skill by immediately pressing on the main line of each novel.

 So what of the person? Harris swiftly paints a picture of contradictions, of a personality who craved and shunned the limelight, of a wife who needed to be married but was almost forgetful of that marriage, of a wit and a worrier, of a woman plagued by nervous breakdowns who relished life in the rests between bouts, but mostly Harris shows that Woolf is the most important writer of the 20th Century.

Wednesday 1 February 2012

The Brilliant World of Tom Gates-L. Pinchon

The Brilliant World of Tom Gates
L. Pichon 
Scholastic
Fiction 9-12 

 Tom Gates is a 9 year old boy in year 5 who is very naughty. He loves doodling when teachers aren’t looking and also reading comics in the back of the class. When his teacher asks him to add detail to his drawings, he draws a picture of his female teacher with very detailed facial hair! It’s a very good, humorous book. The funniest part of the book is the illustrations. They would make people who don’t usually like reading like the book! The book’s filled with bubble writing which, I think, is very creative. A tragedy of swapping chairs occurs which puts Tom Gates right in the teacher’s view. Will he still be able to do his beloved drawings without getting caught? Or will he have to behave and sit next to an idiot for the rest of the school year? Posted by Amelia Callanan :-)!!! (Daughter of Bookgannet)