Sunday Supplement: On reviews as short stories

Almost a year ago I decided to try a new approach to book reviewing. I was tired with the same old way I talked about books, and bored of writing reviews. I still wanted to have the end product to look back on and revisit as an aide memoir, but I didn't want to write them. And so, the book review as a short story was born, a way to share the experience of reading rather than the technical qualities of the book; to celebrate the effect of a book, without sounding glib or too heartfelt.

I wrote two. One, on In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut I felt was a general success, the second, The Finkler Question, less so. And then I hit a wall and didn't write another for 10 months. Or rather, I intermittently played around with one, trying to find a way to chisel out a finished piece from a quarry.

I had great hopes for another review, of Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. It was a perfect fit, a review about the experience of reading a book about the experience of writing a book. It was to be a sort of manifesto for the style of review I wanted to develop. There was a metaphor I came up with, as I walked home one day, that summed it all up. I promised I'd remember it but then lost my train of thought and spent months failing to to recapture it.

And with those failures I lost the impetus. I fell back into

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I completed the review of Rain that had taken months to write. And I was delighted and amazed by the response. So now I'm right back in the mix, keen and committed to develop the idea further. But that also means I'm right back in the quagmire of where to go next. The Geoff Dyer is half written, but without that metaphor I've lost it feels unfinished.

And there's a structural problem I can't resolve that is holding me back. Writing a review in the form of short story is all very well when I have a strong response to a book, or when the experience of reading it is significant and story worthy. But there are only certain books that are like that. What I need to work out is how to use the story format, which is all about experience, to write about books where the experience is less than amazing. I just can't find a way to do it.

If anyone out there has any ideas or advice, I'd really appreciate it. In the meantime, I think I'll work on the Geoff Dyer one some more.

As they say...if at first you don't succeed...

Book Review: Rain by Don Paterson

This book response is written in the form of a short story. For a discussion of why I am trailing this approach to writing about books see the Reviewed a Short Stories page, here.

It started in The Gambia. Or came to a head, there, anyway. One or the other.

Walking along a dusty road overlooking the ocean and discussing poetry. From shanty town to boutique hotel like the evocations of privilege they were.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

A disappointed scoff from her companion. “I’m sick of hearing people say that,” the poet replied tersely. “People are scared of poetry and I don’t understand why.”

She could give no adequate response. So she closed her mouth and changed the subject. She didn’t read poetry. She read novels. How could she explain why one form of marks on a page made sense and another didn’t? How could she explain that she was scared of poetry; that it seemed to require a higher plane of comprehension than she possessed? They changed the subject and walked on. Tension wilting under the sun that scorched white their combating views.

**

Back in the UK she started a new job. Working in literature; still not ‘getting’ poetry. She attended readings, programmed poets, sometimes even introduced them, too. But never read any. Poetry was West Berlin in the 1950s, walled off from the rest of literature surrounding it. It made sense, somehow, to assign these labels, despite her otherwise conciliatory nature. It was one of those hypocrisies of character she didn’t think to question.

**

This is a story of the crumbling of that wall. But there was no storming or smashing; no momentous moment to witness. No gatekeeper received an order to lift the barrier and allow the inevitable to pass peacefully. This wall crumbled without resistance, gradually, over the course of months.

The catalyst for change was money. A grant for the development of a programme to improve the teaching of poetry in schools. Teachers were recruited. They amassed and sat around a table. A poet – a cross between a soldier and missionary and yet nothing like either - entered. He said that poetry was like running. Both were things we did in childhood, and lost interest in as we grew older. That school had a stultifying way of making both seem difficult; more like work than play. Focusing on what they said, rather than the feelings they engendered.

“Poetry,” the poet declared and she paraphrased, is a personal thing. “A work either speaks to you or it doesn’t. If it does, and you enjoy it, then it is good. If it does not, then move on to something else.” She nods some more and goes home. Permission. Something inside has shifted. Her head as yet unaware what it means. She has always been inordinately influenced by what people say.

Later, she hears a quote from Samuel Johnson and assimilates it. “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it”.

Yes, she thinks. That is what the poet meant.

**

Somewhere amidst these words she understands something she had not before. It was the word ‘poetry’ she struggled with, not the form. The word ‘poetry’ that had skulked around inside her, distorting her impressions of what it was. A red blanket cast over a genre, designating it other; making trust difficult.

How preposterous, she now thinks. How judgemental. She is embarrassed and confused at her readiness to categorise.

Almost at once, it is as though that wall rolls over onto its side, vast slabs of concrete chromatically shifting from grey to yellow brick.

**

Months later she leaves work and walks the cold streets with a collection of poetry in hand. It is winter. The sun sunk hours ago. The bar she settles in has a Victorian feel. Lamps ensconced on walls, red candles dripping lava down old wine bottles. Upstairs, there’s a sense that a séance may begin at any minute. The lights are dim, almost too dark to read. She unfurls in a corner.

And she reads. The words stand up to greet her, images like shadows moving around, whispering to her.

We talk, make love, we sleep in the same bed –

But no matter what we do, you can’t be me.

We only dream this place up in one head.

‘The Day’

Gulping, she marks passage after passage. She reads as she would read prose: confidently, taking each word as it comes, unfussed by line breaks or meter. Experiencing them. Nothing more or less. They make her laugh, sometimes. Cry, sometimes. Other times she merely smiles at the Robin Hood accuracy of an observation.

If we never left this room

The wind would be a ghost to us.

‘Motive’

When other people arrive for the book club, she resents their intrusion. They discuss, academically at times. She listens. They slice open the words; revealing shades inside that expand her understanding. She listens and enjoys the explanations, technical comprehension that causes her head to bob in agreement. But nothing touches her experience of the words. When the confronted her in the corner and made her feel things. She loved the book for how it enabled her to feel, the images it conjures for her. The rest is pleasant white noise.

**

That was a second beginning, of sorts. From there she reads other collections, enjoying some more than others. That evening and that collection stands out amidst them, a union of setting and text and emotion that shapes every positive reading experience she has had. Like the time she read The Great Gatsby on a train back from London. Or The Ground Beneath Her Feet in an apartment in Barcelona. Or Even the Dogs on a bus in Kentish Town. Or, now, Rain in a low ceilinged bar in Norwich. Times, like this, when she unfurled within and divisions came to seem painfully arbitrary.

**

The poet said something else too.

“Poetry works in tandem with its environment and that environment includes the reader. Just as the sensation of running is strongly linked to the world around the runner, so the experience of a poem is linked to the world around the reader. It is so important to remember that.”

Yes. Experience, she thinks. That is what reading is all about.

Rain was published by Faber and Faber in 2009. 80pp, ISBN: 9780571249572

Book Review: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Read: October-November 2010 (not completed)


Reviewed for Borewrimo, a month in which I aim to experiment with the form and purpose of book reviewing by writing 50,000 words of book reviews as short stories.

She begins in a fit of exuberance.

The Booker winner has just been announced and it comes as a complete surprise to her. She shouldn’t be surprised – she’s never once accurately predicted the winner – but she is. It was the only one she thought couldn’t possibly win.
Inevitably, she is delighted: it feels like a personal gift from the judges. Yesterday she would never have considered reading it; now she cannot wait to start.

She jogs home through crisply deserted streets. Stars visible in the clear autumn sky, cars keeping watch over the deserted urban landscape. Her head buzzes from too much elderflower cider and socialising. She cannot wait to be alone with that book in her hands. It is the lover she longs to undress.

As she takes it gently from the bag her nails trace its pages. She is ready for a life-changing experience.

***

Sometimes it is difficult to stay awake.

It becomes apparent after only a few short pages that this is not to be the literary panacea she imagined. It’s clunky in her hands and on her mind. They do not move gracefully together as lovers should, but fumble against each other without connection or intimacy.

Days later, she wonders why she started this. She should be more discerning, more circumspect. She should take other people’s advice and test the water first: read a page or two first, see whether the plot synopsis draws her in. Had she done so it would never have come to this. There were warning signs blazoned across the inside jacket: an overly long blurb that seemed to be attempting the exaggerated absurd without managing to make even the corner of her mouth twitch into a smile.

Had she only read page 100 she would have found this passage, so convoluted it sums up everything she comes to dislike about the book, and never read any further.

“Finkler, as it happened, was well aware of his old friend’s sons and felt warmly disposed to them, not impossibly because he was Treslove’s rival in fatherhood and unclehood as well as in everything else, and wanted to be seen to be making up to the boys for what their real father hadn’t given them. Making up the them and giving them a higher standard to judge by. Alf was the one he knew better, on account of an incident at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne – the gist of it being that Finkler had calculated on the Grand being a reliably romantic and discreet place to take a woman for a Friday night and Saturday morning – seagulls outside the windows and the other guests being too old to be able to place him or to do anything about it if they had – but he hadn’t calculated on finding Alf playing the piano during dinner.”

But that is not her way. She is all or nothing. A book is a projection of who she might be rather than who she is. She is interested in the story of why she has picked up a book perhaps more than the book itself. And so she finds herself in situations like this: stretched out in bed in the company of three aging men who neither excite, make her laugh, or even elicit sympathy.

The Finker Question is middle-aged male literature at its worst, a tawdry affair comprising little more than ambivalent sex and an absurd attempt by the protagonist Julian Teslove to manufacture a Jewish identity for himself. It is a biting satire about Jewishness – The Finkler Question of the title being Treslove’s private way of saying The Jewish Question – and society’s obsession with stereotyping certain groups with certain traits, but it’s too absurd to be meaningful and too flippant to find amusing.

Enjoying a leisurely walk home late one night, Julian Treslove is attacked, shoved against a shop window and mugged. Shocked by this unprovoked violence, his shame is further exacerbated by the discovery that his assailant is female. But as the days pass by he becomes troubled by another element of the attack. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he is sure she called him a Jew. A Jew! Could this have been a mistakenly anti-Semitic attack? He finds himself associating this violence with the violence he feels Jews must have suffered throughout history, and comes to identify with them.

Two things trouble her about this premise. Firstly, she cannot help but feel that the shock engendered by the mugger being a woman is symptomatic of the insipid maleness of the entire book. This makes her uneasy and ostracises her, not as a woman but as a human being who doesn’t understand the need to categorise men and women so starkly.

The second thing that troubles her is more practical: she knows nothing about Jewishness. Other than references to global political issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict she feels herself swimming against the tide. On every page, she imagines there to be some kind of Jewish joke being made, or else some subtle Jewish commentary, but it goes over her head. For all she can see, it is essentially about Treslove’s desire to find belonging in an otherwise disassociated life. In an intellectual sort of way, he’s sympathetic, as are his recently widowed friends. But it goes no further than this. She cannot care for them, cannot even whip-up disinterest.

She doesn’t hate it. She certainly doesn’t love it. But ambivalence is the worst response one can have to a book. She can barely be bothered to pick it up. Night after night she lies cradling it in her hands. Night after night she falls asleep mid-sentence. On not one of the twenty-four nights that she tosses and turns does she manage more than fifteen pages before drifting into peaceful sleep. Most nights it is more like five.

She tells herself:
“I’m overworked. By the time I get to bed I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. It’s not the book. It’s me.”

She also tells herself:
“If reading were easy then it wouldn’t be so rewarding.”

She always finishes books. In her entire life she can only think of only three she has stopped before the end. And one of those was only because another book came along that she wanted to read more. Only this year she ploughed through 200 mind-numbingly dull pages of Gone with the Wind to find she could no-longer put it down. The memory of this keeps her returning to Treslove night after night in the hope that love will blossom from disinterest.

She reminds herself that it is only by finishing the book that she is able to say whether she liked it or not. It is only by reading the final word that she can make sense of what has preceded it. And yet. Doesn’t that suggest that reading should be utilitarian? Doesn’t that create the impression that reading is about the end rather than the means, thus denying the tenet she holds most dearly: reading for the enjoyment of reading.

She should stop and read something else. But she cannot let go. To stop feels like denying herself the chance to understand, to square the circle and make sense of it all.

So she ploughs on.

***

Her life has not been without trauma. She spent her teenage years watching on as others fell in and out of love, getting close to people she longed to know. Once, aged fourteen she joined a group of bullies in the homophobic abuse a lapsed friend. The memory of that day will never be forgotten. Another time she opened up to her parents and now cannot get over how vulnerable she feels around them, how much their caring eyes haunt her. And then of course, earlier this year, she found out she probably couldn’t have children.
Perhaps none of these equates to the trauma of being mugged by a woman, or suspecting it to be an anti-Semitic attack. She could not say. But her reaction to everything that takes place in The Finkler Question can be summed up in the shrug of her too heavy shoulders.

And then, one day, she finds she no longer cares. Like a tired elastic band her patience has been stretched too thin and breaks without whiplash. She doesn’t pick it up again

That it saps her love of reading until there is nothing left for a while feels like the biggest trauma of all. For weeks she does not start another book, finds herself doing anything but making time for reading.
It is not the books fault and neither is it hers. Sometimes relationships don’t work out the way we wish them to.

Next time, she says, I’ll be more careful about what I choose to read.

But what one month of disappointment destroyed, it takes barely 10 minutes in a bookshop to rebuild. And before she knows it, she’s careering off into another relationship without a care in the world.

The Finkler Question is published by Bloomsbury (307pp, ISBN: 9781408808870, £18.99)