This is exactly why I love A.S. Byatt books! I've finished Sugar & Other Stories and enjoyed every page. And how many writers can one say that about? It's only recently that I've begun reading all of her short story collections and I can't figure out why I've waited so long (that pesky -- and disappearing -- bias against short stories, perhaps?).

I particularly enjoyed the stories "Loss of Face" -- about an encounter at a literature conference -- and "Precipice-Encurled" -- in which the travel plans of Robert Browning are an excuse to examine the elusivity of art and love in the characters Juliana Fishwick and Joshua Riddell -- but that's not to say the others don't still inhabit my imagination and challenge my sense of what is possible in a work of fiction.

I love how Byatt blends the unseen with the mundane, the poetry with the prose. How does she pull it off every time? It doesn't matter whether ghosts or other equally uncanny figures wander in and out of the narrative, the threads of story all hold together and pull the reader along.

Some of my favourite bits . . .

George Eliot, as quoted in the short story "Loss of Face":

"A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of a tender kinship for the face of the earth."

Also from the same story:

"Celia thought of art as a work of rescue. These fragments, said T.S. Eliot, I have shored against my ruin, speaking of various eclectically framed morsels of Dante, Wagner, Middleton, the Upanishads, Hamlet, and so on . . ."

And from "Precipice-Encurled":

"His paint was light. He had painted, not the thing seen, but the act of seeing. So now, Joshua thought, as the first thin films of mist began to approach his eyrie, I want to note down these shifting, these vanishing veils."

Also from "Precipice-Encurled" but from Robert Browning's musings:

"Even the greatest tragedies in his life had rarely stirred him directly to composition. They left him mute. He should hate any mechanical attempt to do what would only acquire worth from being a spontaneous outflow. Poems arose like birds setting off from stray twigs of facts to flight of more or less distance, unpredictably and often after many years."

One learns so much from a bit of Byatt prose.

In other bookish news: I highly recommend checking this out (via So Many Books). Fascinating stuff.

I can't imagine how I missed these books. While filling out a book list meme a few weeks ago*, I noticed a number of novels I had not read (and a number I'd never heard of) and immediately decided to try finding and reading the ones that sounded interesting (after all, book lists are like gauntlets thrown at the feet of a reading addict).

The first two I tried were Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (my edition is a comfy paperback published in 2008 by Key Porter Books) and Richard Adams' Watership Down (my copy is borrowed from the library but it is now on my 'must own myself' list). I had heard of, and long wanted to read, Ishiguro's, but I shamefacedly admit to knowing nothing at all about the existence of Watership Down until it was referenced on Flight of the Conchords last season (and the reference had absolutely nothing to do with the novel, really, so I was still in the dark).

A poety friend recommended we both read The Remains of the Day by the end of this month and I agreed, not knowing that I wouldn't be able to put it down, that it would call a halt to all my writing and reviewing projects until I had read it through. What a beautifully sad novel! The careful, often poetic, restraint of the narrative voice; the need to read between the lines, as it were, to feel the tragedy of it all; the irony and the pathos that never quite tip the scales of this reader's patience. I loved it.

The narrative, centring around the first person narrator Stevens (lingering butler from an extinct era) as it does, is so brilliantly paced and delivered. The distillation of the narrator's emotions through his journal-like jottings (who is he writing for/to?) was so effective, and affecting. It's the kind of novel that just sticks in the imagination, inhabiting.

The second novel picked from the list, Watership Down , was just as engrossing both in terms of subject and atmosphere (disappearing lifestyles in a sparkling, but changing, England). I have to say, though, that the first few chapters were hard going for this reader. I couldn't stop asking myself where it was going, and why I was reading a novel about bunnies. However, after the first twenty pages or so I became completely wrapped up in the world of Hazel, Fiver, and Bigwig et al.

When their warren is threatened by Man and the visionary warning of Fiver is ignored by the Chief Rabbit, Hazel and Fiver, along with a handful of other male rabbits (bucks), decide to set out in search of a safer life, a more democratic/free style of warren government, and (eventually, inevitably) some does. It sounds so very simple, but the story unfolds in such a way that it grabs you and pulls you in until you are reading on the edge of your seat, gobbling up the pages to find out what happens to these noble bunnies. Politics, the environment, religion, philosophy. It's all in there (even though -- or perhaps because -- it is a 'children's classic'). What a great read!

An excerpt from Watership Down:

We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable, flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile . . . We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers.

* The one that was sent my way was a slight variation of this.

Listening To: Blackbird by The Beatles and Bye Bye Blackbird by Miles Davis.

Currently Reading and Enjoying: A.S. Byatt's Sugar & Other Stories. After rushing through the brilliant The Little Black Book of Stories (couldn't put it down), I'm intentionally savouring this book. One mustn't use up all of ones Byatt at once (although, that having been said, one can always just start re-reading . . . again).

Recently Watched and Enjoyed: The Quiet American. I've not read the novel on which the film is based -- so I can't make a compare and contrast comment -- but I loved the film. Complex (there are no heroes here) and very human. Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser do a superb job. Caine really stands out. The vulnerability was palpable. The pre-Vietnam War atmosphere, as well as the all too familiar nastiness of Imperialism, are illustrated so effectively just by focusing on two characters. Loved it!

Just Read and Liked: David Helwig's The Sway of Otherwise (published by Oberon). What I like about this collection is the way sound complements meaning, as well as the accessibility of his style (these are poems anyone can read and enjoy). For a good listen, try here.

When I think about what a poem should or shouldn't be doing (whether writing my own or reading another poet's work) I have a tendency to prefer (at least an attempt at) originality while avoiding gimmick; the clever use, and obvious love, of language and how it feels on the tongue and in the mind; imagery that you can take with you, mull over, sink your teeth into; an awareness that lines of poetry still do make sounds (regardless of the advent of the open form) and that a poet should make use of this. And the imagery, the language, the sounds should all lead somewhere, should transcend the level of play, should do more than just lie on the page. A good poem is so well that it becomes.

Sue Sinclair's Breaker contains that kind of poetry. I was hooked from the opening poem with the words "Sometimes the light, a horse" -- it just grabbed me. The plethora of crackling images (like lightning) all drawing us on to these observations about what it feels/means to be here, now. Metaphysical at times, often sombre, I found this collection so compelling.

Never overly intellectualized, the poems are consistently vibrant and terribly relevant. There's an awareness of the cost of things, of "[t]he obstacles / to happiness," ** of the sadness or danger in beauty, of isolation. Sinclair writes about abandonment, the past, nature, the heart, survival.

And I like what she does with light. It becomes a malevolent force in so many of these poems, as does beauty. The dark unseen places (underground, undergrowth) become imbued with -- not benevolence -- the inevitable.

Natural details abound, handed over in fresh images (like a garden being compared to a ship or the sound of a fish hitting the water rendered as "guffaw"), and the arrangement of the lines -- the way the lines sing -- brings you back again and again to see how she does it. They're absolutely gorgeous poems. And haunting, certainly.

From "Drought": "And overhead, the birds: / chips of bone in the sky, remnants, / fact of the world's brokenness." That image just sticks in the mind. And there are so many examples to choose from.

Really wonderful collection! I'll give you a poem-length example of why I love this book:

Metropolis by Sue Sinclair

The city is a piano, its pedals sunk
deep underground. Commuters in the subway
listen to the instrument groan,
feel their own bodies shudder and give.

There is more memory here than we can manage.
We become paper shredders for obsolete decades --
strips of the past float down from tall buildings,
festoon the shoulders of the unemployed.
History might disappear entirely if we work hard enough.

We all want the day to be our own.
Shoulders rub on shoulders. If everything else were silent,
it would sound like rain:
we are divisible by thousands and remain thousands.


** (from her poem "In Spring, When the Earth")

Currently trapped under a pile of books and reviews (what fun!). I've been slowly digging my way out one word at a time . . . this makes for sporadic posting but it does mean lovely afternoons curled up with cats and various kinds of prose and poetry.

I've just finished Richard Adams' Watership Down and have planned a long post on the surprisingly fascinating world of the talking rabbit.

And I'm still ruminating over Sue Sinclair's Breaker. Having finished it, my first reaction is simply, 'wow!' So a longish post is in the planning for this book, too. It's just that good. (And it was just short-listed for the Atlantic Poetry Prize!! Also note the inclusion of Wilson's Sky Atlas!!).

But Spring has hit (I think/I hope)and the poems are running (kind of like sap -- messy and they take their time) so I'll also be spending as much time writing as possible.

There's a great line from Big Trouble In Little China. Early on in the film, before the weirdness really gets going, Jack Burton (played by Kurt Russell who was a perfect casting choice) and his friend Wang Chi are heading to the airport to pick up Wang's girlfriend after gambling all night (the last game involving Wang betting Jack that he could slice a glass bottle in half). Wang is talking about how nervous he is and suddenly he says, "That's why the bottle didn't slice. My mind and my spirit are goin' north and south." And that pretty much describes this week for me. But for the first time in months the sun feels warm and the promise of spring looks like it might deliver. Besides, there are books . . .

Books arrived today:

• House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Long been on my list of must reads. Now I can.

• Sugar & Other Stories by A.S. Byatt. Byatt!! Need I say more?

• Leaving Earth by Helen Humphreys. I think I've read all the other novels except this one, so had to give it a try. I'll need to start on her poetry next.

• Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer. I was finally able to purchase this after coveting it for a year or so. It's such a fascinating idea . . . I hope it reads well.

• Alexandra: The Last Tsarina by Carolly Erickson. Part of my current obsession with things Russian (just add it to my growing pile of obsessions: Byatt, Austen, Shakespeare, Flight of the Conchords, etc :). Also, I'm just such a fan of Erickson's bios.
  

I foresee much time spent with books in the near future. What more could one want?

Alas for the underwhelming. Finished Blodgett's The Invisible Poem the other night and was, sadly, not particularly engaged. The collection is in both English and French -- which I like because it seems like reading both in a complementary fashion makes for almost a third (even for someone whose French language skills are not very good) -- but I just couldn't connect with the spare style combined with the repetition of images that didn't seem to transcend being images. Although there were some great lines, I closed the book feeling somewhat dissatisfied. However . . .

Hurrah for the amazing! After finishing the aforementioned, I immediately started Sue Sinclair's Breaker and I'm loving it. Published by Brick Books (who publish armloads of good stuff), it looks like it will only build on the Sinclair brilliance that has gone before (Mortal Arguments, The Drunken Lovely Bird). I'll definitely be posting more about this new collection.

The view on waking (not altogether inspiring when Spring is longed for):


However -- and despite time being generally out of joint (due to DST)-- the day turned out to be rather fun. Why? It was filled with books, discussions about reading (a great over-breakfast chat about Margaret Visser's wonderful The Gift of Thanks), and new book perusals (the anticipation of the yet-to-read!!).

New book acquisitions:

• Home by Marilynne Robinson. I've been wanting to read this since Trudy reviewed it over at Compulsive Overreader. So excited when it came in the mail.
• The Tsarina's Daughter by Carolly Erickson. Again, another interesting review from Trudy sent me to the bookstore. I've read and loved a number of Erickson's historical nonfiction (her books on Elizabeth I, Marie Antoinette, Victoria, and Catherine the Great) so have high hopes for the fiction.
• The Invisible Poem by E.D. Blodgett, published by Buschek Books.
  
• The Sway of Otherwise by David Helwig, published by Oberon. It was hard to put down while perusing, so that's a good sign.
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I have wanted to read this for some time and now, thanks to a good poety friend, I've an excuse to pick up a copy. We've challenged each other to read it by the end of March.
  

And . . . the knowledge of more books coming in the mail (this being my yearly 'so-tired-of-winter-must-buy-books-online' event . . . which must last me for most of the coming year).

Listening To: Leonard Cohen.

Recently Watched and Enjoyed: The Office: Season 3. Excruciating and yet quite brilliant all at the same time.

Currently Reading and Loving: Margaret Visser's The Gift of Thanks: The Roots, Persistence, and Paradoxical Meanings of a Social Ritual. Random (and yet not) quote from same: "In the early twentieth century the German sociologist Georg Simmel claimed that gratitude is what in fact holds all of society together. He called it 'the moral memory of mankind.'" This promises to be a great read. I'm already looking forward to reading more Visser once this book is completed.

It's an eclectic day!

It just feels like a good day for a Byatt quote. From the short story "A Stone Woman" (found in Little Black Book of Stories):

She came to a park -- a tamed, urban park, with rose beds and rubbish bins, doggy-lavatories and a concrete fountain. She could hear the water on the cement with a new intricate music. The smell of a rain-squall blew away the wafting warmth of dog-shit. She put up her face and pulled off her hood. Her cheeks were beginning to sprout silicone flakes and dendrite fibres, but she only looked, she thought, like a lumpy old woman. There were droplets of alabaster and peridot clustering in her grey hair like the eggs of some mythic stony louse, but they could not yet be seen, except from close. She shook her hair free and turned her face up to the branches and the clouds as the rain began. Big drops splashed on her sharp nose; she licked them from stiffening lips between crystalline teeth, with a still-flexible tongue-tip, and tasted skywater, mineral and delicious. She stood there and let the thick streams of water run over her body and down inside her flimsy garments, streaking her carnelian nipples and adamantine wrists. The lightning came in sheets of metal sheen. The thunder crashed in the sky and the surface of the woman crackled and creaked in sympathy.

Full engagement of the senses. Poetic detail. Gorgeous writing.

I used to gobble up Georgette Heyer novels in my youth. The Regency romance stories that borrow a great deal from Jane Austen (though the characters and plots are less fully realized, less complex) were often seen littered about our house in the summer, spines creased from being pushed -- oh so carelessly -- face down on the couch. The whole time I had no idea she wrote detective fiction as well or much more enjoyment would have been had in those distant years.

While browsing around my local bookstore, I came across a pink cover with Georgette Heyer's name on it in the Mystery section (I was looking for Ellis Peters whose work is seemingly unavailable at the moment . . . here at least). I had to try it out. Sure enough, a drawing room mystery along the lines of better writers, but diverting enough for a cold Winter's afternoon. Heyer is, after all, a good, solid writer who knows how to work a plot to advantage.

Behold, Here's Poison involves a brother and uncle (one Gregory Matthews) found murdered (by nicotine poisoning) in his bedroom one May morning. The Scotland Yard detective (a virtual rock of understated calm) comes in to round up the suspects and try to make sense of the crime. A whodunnit with a sense of humour, too. Is it the Wagnerian sister Gertrude -- compulsive straight talker -- who did the poisoning? The cheapskate sister Harriet who hated him? The selfish, incompetently manipulative sister-in-law Zoe? Or her desperate children, interior decorator Guy and well-meaning Stella? Or is it the venomous Randall Matthews, nephew and heir, who did the foul deed?

Randall Matthews, incidentally, is a brilliant character drawn with sure and subtle strokes. He fairly leaps off the page at you. It's worth the read just to get to know him. Lots of fun!

Having recently finished it, I'm not sure what to think. It's written in an engaging, if repetitive style, with a good deal of research. But I don't feel completely satisfied with it. And I'm not sure why. I think, perhaps, it's the too strident tone from time to time, the repetition of argument, and the often patronizing approach to the character of Thomas Jefferson (I'm not, strictly speaking, an American -- many of my ancestors would have viewed Jefferson as, most decidedly, the enemy -- but I can't help feel that a large part of the narrative completely disregards the fact that he was one of the great geniuses of the past three hundred years and that some of the people working with and around him, enslaved or not, were intelligent enough to recognize that and value the experience . . . but I digress).**

I'm talking about The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed. The story of Jefferson's African American family is an interesting one that delves into the realities of American slave society in the 18th and early 19th centuries. James and Robert Hemings, brothers to the president's mistress, are talked about (James' story is fascinating and ultimately tragic) and what life must have been like for the children of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is touched on. But that's the thing. I felt as if the world in which they lived, as well as the main figures in this complex tale, remained shadowy.

I realize there isn't a lot one can do aside from make educated assumptions based on sketchy records and little personal info. That does not make the story less valuable or the information less worthy of being tracked down, but it should mean a thinner book in the end. Furthermore, this was an ambitious subject that set out to map the trajectory of a family that had become entangled in the life of Thomas Jefferson. While the family was the focus (and rightly so after all these years of silence), I can't help but feel I still didn't get to know them. Perhaps this is the ultimate tragedy of marginalized lives.

** I also object to the offhand dismissal she makes regarding the status of women. Early on in the book Gordon-Reed makes a point of saying that though people like to connect the virtual slave status of women at various times throughout history (and, indeed, with regards to the status of women in the southern United States of the late 18th/early 19th centuries) there is really no comparison between a white woman at that time and the existence of an enslaved individual on a southern plantation. Because it is offhand, and I have heard much sustained argument to the contrary, I found this claim puzzling and unsatisfying. Since women, at various times throughout history, had the legal status of chattel (possessions) with no autonomy as such, and Jefferson's own daughters were not free to come and go as they pleased but relied on the good will of the men in their lives, what would be the distinction again? I'll have to think about that some more. Again, Gordon-Reed's book was engaging and, by and large, enjoyable. I'd recommend it as an interesting read . . . but it has a good number of faults that, unfortunately, keep it from becoming a personal favourite.

Reading and still enjoying The Hemingses of Monticello. I just have so many questions. It seems to me impossible that Jefferson's close friendship with his mistress's brothers (Robert and James), and even Sally herself, would not have had an impact on his views about freedom and the possibilities for the future of American life. What might they have said to him about his ideals? What kinds of discussions (if any) might they have had? It's tantalizing to think of this other political world existing in the shadows of the one that appeared in letters and papers of the time.

Speaking of papers, the Federalists certainly made a great deal of fuss about his relationship with an African American woman (who was also a slave). This must have changed his view of himself (how could it not?) and it definitely changed how others saw him as president and leader of the young, seemingly morally upright nation (Gordon-Reed talks about how image-conscious Jefferson was both in Paris and on his return to the States). What an odd way to begin a country, don't you think?** Slave-owners propounding freedom while taking advantage of the lack thereof?

** Not that the births of most nations aren't, generally, odd.

I don't even know where to start. I've turned the last page of A.S. Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories and all I want to do is go back to the beginning and read them all over again. How does she do it? It feels so effortless, the way the characters emerge, the way the story folds back and reveals something surprising, disturbing, undeniably beautiful, and/or profound. Amazing!



This collection of short stories contains five narratives that are equally fascinating, puzzling, and ultimately disturbing. "The Thing in the Forest" is about two children sent from London during the Blitz and what they encounter in the country. "Body Art" centres on a homeless artist who haunts a hospital. "A Stone Woman" follows Ines in the aftermath of her mother's death. "Raw Material" focusses on a creative writing class and the instructor who sees potential in one of his students. And "The Pink Ribbon" shows us a couple in the unravelling later years of life. But all of that tells you nothing about the sheer brilliance of line, of detail, or Byatt's unerring way with words.

I liked how each story says something about our relationship to artifice and reality, art and life. I liked the Icelandic and stone/rock details in "A Stone Woman" and the absolute weirdness of "Body Art." While my favourite was (hands down) "A Stone Woman," "Raw Material" might be the most haunting.

If I was not already a Byatt fan, this collection would certainly win me over. Loved, loved, loved it.

P.S. And I can't wait for this!!!