Sunday Supplement - On the power of great art

This morning I sat down to write my first Sunday Supplement for a few weeks. But as I was typing I heard the terrible news of the apparent suicide of Gary Speed and talking cerebrally about literature lost its importance. I put the computer down and shed a tear as the Swansea and Villa players marked their minute’s silence.

It is strange that the loss of a man I never met, who never played for my team or directly impacted on my life, could leave me so utterly shocked. But his has. Gary Speed was one of those consummate professionals that have formed the bedrock of football over the last 20 years. Whether depression is a cause here or not is still to be identified, but the fear is that the silent killer has ensnared another person without anyone knowing. Loss of life is always tragic, when it is at your own hands it is even more so.

I have a tendency to over-identify with music. This evening has been one of those occasions. I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning by Bright Eyes is an album I often turn to and it captures much of what I’m feeling today. That post-socialising dissolution where you fearfully remember every dumb thing you might have said and long for company to keep the fears at bay. The exhaustion that comes with a little too much alcohol, the Sunday morning pillow-day need for comfort and warmth. And most of all the shock of a life ended too soon.

Bright Eyes is a rare and brilliant poet-songwriter. At heart he’s a beat poet, the spirit of Kerouac for a new millennium with a heart that feels too much and wants from the world something it cannot give. Yet disappointment never blunts his optimism for too long. There’s some Bob Dylan in him, too, and many others. Listening to this sublime album reminds me of wonder of music.

I’m not like Bright Eyes. I’m a quiet and insular person and generally plough a pretty steady field. That’s what I love about art. Great art puts you in the body of another person and lets you see the world through their eyes and your eyes at the same time. Great art lets you be someone you are not and feel what it is like to be them.

Come tomorrow I’ll wake up excited to start the week. But Gary Speed will not. I’m not sure what the point of this blog is. Perhaps it is 42. 

Like life, sometimes things are just what they are.

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...

Sunday Supplement: On Reading and Writing

I don't think I could ever be a novelist. Not a good one, not the sort I'd want to be, at least. For all my fandom makes me dream of vaulting the divide and becoming a creator, as well as consumer, of stories, I grow increasingly aware that I lack what I consider the most important in a novelist. Literature may have moved away somewhat from the notion that a novel is first and foremost about stories and characters, but if I had to chose (and thankfully I don't!), I'd take a solid character driven story from a Bronte (any of them, really!), or Daphne du Maurier, or Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami or Jeffrey Eugenides etc over clever post-modern narrative or lyrical prose or fabulous dreamscape description any day.They are my heroes of literature, the writers who take me out of my skin and place me in another, who let me see the world through another pair of eyes, or show me worlds I'm never likely to see. Yes, that's right, when I read I value escapism over all else. And that shouldn't be a dirty word.

Why couldn't I write that sort of fiction? I consider myself a capable wordsmith, and sometimes I even come up with ideas that I think could make good plots. (Sometimes, I even start to write them down - shhhh.)
But where I come up short is in basic human empathy. The simple truth is that I seem to lack empathy and self awareness and social awareness. That doesn't mean I don't have huge amounts of caring and sympathy for myself and others, simply that I don't know myself very well, and even more so I don't know other people. I find it impossible to put myself in another person's shoes. In writing, this results in weak, two dimensional characters that I fail to engage with. Ironically - is this ironic? I've never quite got to grips with the concept of irony and still misuse it regularly - I think I could possibly write the sort of idea heavy fiction, or even biography disguised loosely as fiction. Not very well, mind you! But I don't want to. I don't want to write something I wouldn't particularly want to read.

So, that is a long rambling overly confessional way of saying that I love reading fiction because it gives me something I don't have in my everyday life. I've been reading The Great Night by Chris Adrian this week and above all else I'm hugely impressed with his compassion, his understanding without judgement of human nature, his basic goodness. For a re-writing of A Midsummer Nights Dream - and therefore a book full of fairies - it is amazingly down to earth, a veritable feast of the mundane. Its not so much magical realism, as realist magic, using the mundane to explain our need for a sense of magic, rather than magic as a way of comprehending the everyday. It is a tour de force that every bit lives up to the praise that has been heaped upon it, one of those books I turned page after page after page compulsively, to find out what would happen to our portfolio of characters, and through them to learn more about myself and the world around me. For that is the great thing about escapism - like immigration - : we take with us some of our experiences and knowledge and discover new things that become part of us, expanding our horizons in ways we could not otherwise have dreamed. To be a bit hyperbolic (something I'm often guilty of!), I think fiction both entertains and makes me a better human being. Why would I chose to add mediocre work to the mounds already written, when I can wallow for years in the great work that others have slaved over? It is a lot better for me, that is for sure.

Sunday Supplement 1: New books and immanent trips

I've never quite got the hang of this blogging business. Too retiring, perhaps, to share much of myself here. But I'd like to try. Having watched Julie and Julia a couple of week's ago, I'm inspired by - and a little enraptured with - the idea of emotional honesty in blogs, of using them as a journal of experience. Schmaltzy movies always get to me; they tend to feature characters that I want to be more like.

There's so much more to reading than simply reviewing, and that is what I wish to capture here. The joy of discovery, random thoughts that drift through one's mind while reading, how where and when one reads a book impacts on the response to it.

It was my Birthday a couple of weeks ago and I got a few books I'd been hoping for. From Megan, I got The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, which I discovered through reading Jonathan Safran Foer's die-cut Tree of Codes, and because it was then recommended in The Book Hive, the premier independent bookshop in Norwich, by acclaimed poet George Szirtes. I haven't yet read it, but I will get there soon. Also unwrapped was a signed copy of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, that I borrowed from the library and read earlier this year but wanted a copy of my own to keep . It is a beautifully produced book, one I could flick through for hours just looking at the illustrations. Like the art of Shaun Tan, it would be suited to enlarging and framing and hanging from the wall. Well, if it weren't so dark and foreboding, anyway.

From my parents I also received the latest Andrey Kurkov novel to be translated into English, The Milkman in the Night, and a work of sociology that my mum mentioned reading when she was a student and which had an impact on her thinking. Written in the 1970s, it is called The Gift Relationship and looks at the value altruism plays in a healthy society, considering specifically blood donation. With David Cameron's supposedly radical Big Society in the news at the moment, I was interested in looking back at what altruism can offer and how it can be harnessed for the good of society, rather than coerced for small government ideological reasons. I don't read many academic studies, so I don't know whether I'll get around to reading this or not, but much of book buying, for me at least, is aspirational, reflecting the person I want to be rather than the person I am.

As if that wasn't enough books to keep me busy, on returning to work I found a mound of books that I had requested from publishers. Forthcoming and recently published books by the likes of Joe Dunthorne, Dalgit Nagra, Hari Kunzru, Anna Funder, Esi Edugyan, Erin Morgenstern, and more. It was like having my birthday all over again, and when I came to the last pile I couldn't believe my luck. There, on the bottom of the pile, were proofs of Murakami's forthcoming 1Q84. I hadn't expected there to be proofs, much less that I would be sent one!

Expecting to get something I've put on my birthday list, lets me anticipate it, get used to the idea of wanting it, and plan when to read it. I love it. But presents are best of all when they anticipate what you most want, and give you a complete surprise. Nothing could have beaten the excitement I felt on finding the Murakami proofs. 

I'm off to Edinburgh this week, to check out some authors at the International Book Festival, and play an ingenious place specific poetry game at the Fringe Festival. Run by Cambridge poet Ross Sutherland and social games entrepreneurs Hide and Seek, Hinterland is, according to their website, "about the space that appears when we speak languages that aren’t our mother tongue. And maybe also a bit about how rubbish so many of us tend to be at speaking languages other than English." I don't fully understand it, as yet, but it sounds intriguing, and the collage poem Ross created as a result of their last collaboration recreated the atmosphere or walking alone through an urban night, and is well worth a listen.

I'll let you know what it's like, and which authors caught my eye, next week. In the meantime I have twelve hours or train journey's ahead of me in which to read some of the books I haven't had a chance to yet this year. I'm definitely taking Naomi Wood's The Godless Boys, and probably The Echo Chamber by Luke Williams. But what else I haven't yet decided. Could go for highly rated The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, or possibly The Street of Crocodiles. I'm saving 1Q84 for a luxuriant treat when I get back home.

Happy reading!