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April
6 2009
Austerlitz by WG Sebald
This
book, one of my favourites ever, was my suggestion for the group.
Narrated by a character who seems very close to the author - a favourite
technique of Sebald's, apparently (I have yet to read his other
books) - it features the first-person story of Jacques Austerlitz
as told to the narrator during a series of initially chance but
later arranged meetings from the sixties to the nineties in various
European cities and London.
A
lonesome and somewhat eccentric figure, Austerlitz is a university
teacher of architecture, and begins by sharing with the narrator
his fascination with railway architecture - it is in a railway station
that they first meet - and, perhaps more importantly, with fortresses
and the paradoxes within their design which always lead to their
failure as buildings of defence (and ultimate use as prisons). All
of this apparently inconsequential and potentially dry material
seems yet strangely resonant (although Clare in our group did not
find it so). Then on a subsequent meeting (at which point even Clare
became engaged) Austerlitz begins to talk more personally and relates
his affectless post-war childhood in Wales as the adopted child
of a Methodist minister and his wife. Here again there are resonances
which seem to float without meaning: Austerlitz's obsession with
the drowned village beneath a local reservoir and its tower, a local
man's tales of seeing ghosts, and Austerlitz's own childhood sense
of a dimension of life which remains invisible. It is only when
he is at boarding school and his step-parents are no longer available
for questioning (one dead and the other committed to a psychiatric
hospital) that he discovers his real name, Austerlitz, and thus
any inkling of his European origins, after which he fortresses himself
in academic studies and the obsessions with which, during their
discussions, the narrator - and this reader - become infected.
During years when Austerlitz and the narrator do not see each other,
Austerlitz suffers a serious breakdown which leads him finally to
set out to uncover his own origins which inevitably involve the
history of Nazi Germany and the Jews.
I told the group that I loved the book, and that I was stunned by
the original way it was written. Lacking chapters, it consists of
only three sections entirely devoid of paragraphs and which are
hardly noticeable as sections as they are divided only by asterisks.
Furthermore, long sentences sweep you from one subject to another
in a kind of stream of consciousness - one sentence, significantly
describing life in the Theresienstadt ghetto, is 11 pages long.
The book thus reads like a kind of dream with a dream's weird yet
urgent and incontrovertible logic and unanswerable emotional resonance,
carrying on the level of form the message that everything in the
novel is after all connected: Austerlitz's seemingly dry obsessions
turn out to be rooted, stunningly and vividly, in the past which
was first hidden from him and which later he failed for a long time
even to enquire into.
I said I thought the book was about memory and the repression of
memory, and that I thought that Sebald had found a new form to convey
them. There were murmurs of agreement and appreciation and Clare
and new member Jo said they had loved the book too. I said that
there was only one wrong note for me: I know very well that one
retrieved memory can open up other lost memories in turn, but it
didn't seem to me psychologically convincing that the moment Austerlitz
arrives back in his birthplace he so suddenly remembers his post-British
early childhood (up to the age of four-and-a-half) in such complete
and wholesale detail. I asked Clare, who is a psychotherapist, what
she thought about that, and she agreed.
Then Jenny, who had been very quiet up to that point, spoke up and
said that she hadn't liked the book. Others were stunned and demanded
to know why not. She said, Well, it's such a common story! Presumably
she meant the story of the kindertransport of which Austerlitz was
of course a part, and I countered that the book wasn't just about
that but, as I had said, about memory and repression and the way
we deal with loss and pain. Others came in and backed me up, pointing
out Austerlitz's signs of repression: his obsessiveness, his depression,
his inability to make relationships. Jenny said, But those are the
results of his sterile upbringing in Wales. Why didn't Sebald just
write about that, why create a whole elaborate device to tack on
the story of the Nazis and the Jews? Jo said, No, surely his problems
were caused by the replacement of his earlier happy childhood
with that sterile upbringing. Jenny said, But he had no memory of
that earlier time. I said, But that's the point: it was repressed;
his step-parents suppressed the truth, leading him to repress his
own memories. Jenny said, But why did it have to be to do with Nazi
Gemany and the Jews? And anyway, he didn't repress it, he went looking
for his past. I said, But it should have been pretty obvious which
way things pointed once he found out his name at the age of 16 or
so, yet it took him until middle age and a breakdown to face up
to that. As for her objection to its being a kindertransport adoption
rather than an ordinary one, I feel we didn't answer Jenny adequately
at the time: it would not be simply the memory of an earlier happier
childhood which Austerlitzwould be repressing, but the climate of
fear surrounding his upheaval, which a child of four-and-a-half
would pick up. Surely one of the main points of this book is how
we try to wipe history, and the way this is played out on the personal
level in this novel is extremely moving.
Everyone else in the group thought the book was amazingly moving,
and staggered that this could have been the case when the prose
style was so spare, even flat, and the story distanced by the double-narrator
device. In fact, I think there is something moving about this double-narrator
effect: there's a kind of double-exposure which underlines the novel's
theme of cloaked meanings and alternative possibe lives. At times
it's hard to remember which narrator is speaking: the ostensibly
objective narrator becomes identifed with Austerlitz, and along
with him the reader. In this way the concept of narratorial 'objectivity'
is challenged and at the same time Austerlitz's psychological state
is given a stunning 'objective' authenticity.
John said that he thought it was perhaps the most honest book he
had ever read, by which he meant emotionally honest, but Jenny retorted
that it wasn't honest at all, it was all device. And then it was
Doug's turn to stun us all by saying he wouldn't be reading another
Sebald novel. Why? we wanted know. He said that he had thought it
was beautifully written, but he could hardly say like the rest of
us that he loved it, he couldn't even say he liked it, because he
had found it so painful.
At which Jenny said again that she didn't like it at all.
April
23 2009
The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm
Hans
suggested this book, which we all very much liked, after a German
friend had recommended it to him: we hadn't heard of it, but in
fact it's a bestseller and something of a modern classic in Germany.
It's short, a novella, and is told by a narrator who, like that
of Austerlitz which we
read last, seems very close to the author.
Returning
to his native Hamburg, the narrator sets out to prove that the popular
dish of curried sausage sold on German street-stands did not originate
in Berlin in the fifties as is generally accepted, but was invented
by his aunt's Hamburg neighbour, Mrs Brucker, who sold it on the
local square immediately after the war. However, tracking her down
to an old people's home and getting her talking, he learns far more
than the answer to this question - which was yes, she did invent
it - and the matter of how she came to invent it is withheld as
her poignant wartime story unfolds.
With a husband and two grown children away in the war, Lena Brucker
meets at the cinema a young soldier who, failing to leave her flat
next morning, becomes a deserter secreted by her there. When the
war ends very soon after his arrival, she can't bring herself to
tell him and inevitably lose him, and thus he becomes her unwitting
prisoner. It is only later, after this story has played itself out,
and Lena sets about making a postwar living for herself, that the
recipe for curried sausage comes to her more or less by accident.
Thus the search for the truth about curried sausage is a kind of
device, or even a McGuffin, for the unravelling of a more emotionally
complex tale, but, 'combining the farthest with the nearest' as
the narrator says it does, it is also a kind of metaphor for that
tale too: the coming together of two disparate people who would
not under normal circumstances do so, a woman reaching middle age
and a young man with a wife and new baby to whom he feels committed.
John suggested that it also operated as a way to make palatable
and approach a subject which is of great sensitivity in Germany,
since the denouement of Lena's wartime story, which I won't give
away here, hinges on the revelation to her of what had been happening
in the death camps. He said he also thought that the double-narrator
device which this book shared with Austerlitz was connected
with this: a way for the generation of Germans tackling this subject
in novels to 'distance' it and make it possible to handle. He thought
it was interesting too, and perhaps inevitable as a strategy, that
both these novels and The Reader
feature a younger narrator forging a relationship with an older
person who had been involved to greater or lesser degrees in these
events.
Everyone had good things to say about this book. People liked its
depiction of the ways that the extremities of war disrupt convention,
and in particular the portrayal of the tenderness yet toughness
of the unconventional relationship. They loved the little touches,
such as the two officers of the occupying English force turning
out to have Hamburg accents (and to be Jews), and the portrayal
of the postwar black market bartering. They were especially taken
by the book's illustration of the fact the people you least expected
turned out to be the wartime informers. Clare said that she was
amazed when she realized what a short time the two had been together
in the flat, as it had seemed to go on for ages, and everyone agreed
that this was an achievement of the novel: recreating the suspension
of time and reality for the two characters.
I said that I thought the book extremely well written, as far as
you could tell from a translation, or maybe you could tell because
the translation read so well. Clare then asked me what I meant by
well written. I said I meant emotional acuity or truthfulness conveyed
via apt language, and John summed it up better by saying that in
well-written prose there isn't a false note, which everyone agreed
was true about the prose of this book. I also said that one of the
things which struck me forcibly about the double narrator device
which seems to be a feature of these recent German books is that
it serves to subsume the ego of the author: all the emotional and
verbal acuity is handed by the author to a narrator, which I said
struck me as an act of great authorial generosity, and John wondered
if it were a function of the act of reparation which these novels
may be seen as.
We did find some false notes on other levels, however. While the
narrator reports Lena's story indirectly, thus giving himself room
for interpolation, it is nevertheless the story as told to him
by Lena, and on one or two occasions the novel swerves unconvincingly
from its own convention when we are presented with the interiority
of other characters. Some people said they had found themselves
wondering if it really were believable that the soldier, Bremer,
didn't guess that the war was over as he watched the road from the
window all day long. I said I had a slight doubt about the novel's
treatment of the business of the informers and people's knowledge
of the death camps: the novel seems to imply that people like Lena
were completely unaware of what was happening with the Jews (Lena
thinks back to a Jewish neighbour leaving with her case and how
nothing much struck her about it at the time), yet Lena lived more
or less in the Jewish quarter, and also, the novel seems to indicate,
people knew that there were informers informing on the Jews.
Doug said that the worst false note was right at the end, indeed
the very last word, when the narrator comes upon a scrap of paper
on which is one of the crosswords which Bremer whiled away his time
doing. One of the words filled in by Bremer is 'even though nobody
will believe me - novella'. Everyone cried out in horrified agreement,
and Doug said he'd thrown the book down at that final point.
Even so, we liked the book enough to forgive it any of its faults,
including this.
May
2009
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
This
book was chosen more or less by default: Jo, whose turn it had been
to suggest our next reading, failed to turn up, and, off the top
of his head, Doug tentatively suggested this because he'd just bought
it. Having read Panjak Mishra's Guardian
article on 9/11 literature I said I thought it was a book we
should perhaps read, and since we'd very much admired DeLillo's
prophetic White Noise, we
agreed on it.
We were very disappointed, and I found that the book bore out the
criticisms in Mishra's article. One of Mishra's main complaints
is that, as a study of the psychic effects on a bourgeois couple
after the husband Keith survives the twin towers, the book is a
retreat into the domestic, and thus away from the wider issues.
I'm not sure that such a focus, in theory, would necessarily carry
inbuilt failure in exploring the important issues, but we certainly
found that it failed here: we found the couple almost entirely unsympathetic
(with the exception that John thought the wife Lianne a fairly sympathetic
character), and the conversations between Lianne and her mother
Nina and Nina's lover almost shocking in their seemingly inappropriate
urbane novel-of-manners style - convoluted, arcane and indeed very
difficult to follow - and making it hard at times feel the urgency
or import of the twin-tower context even when they are discussing
the politics. We could see that there might be a political authorial
point here, that DeLillo is showing the inability of Americans to
absorb the reality of the situation, and indeed Keith's journey
through the novel seems to be one away from reality (into a life
of gambling), but the effect on us as readers was fatally ennervating.
(As Jo said to me in the cafe the week before the meeting, she didn't
care a hoot about the characters, and she wouldn't have gone on
reading if she hadn't been doing it for the group.) As a result
we found similarly ennervating the fragmented non-linear structure
and the glancing, cumulative prose which I felt should in theory
have been powerful as a depiction of the breakdown of bourgeois
American certainty.
For
a long time in our discussion we failed even to mention the fact
that each of the three sections of the book is concluded with a
piece which takes the viewpoint of Hammad, one of the 9/11 hijackers,
and the three together chart his progress from his initial conversion
to Islamism to the moment of impact. The fact that we omitted them
so long from our discussion is an interesting comment, I think,
on the ultimately bourgeois focus of the book, and once they were
mentioned, people didn't really know what to make of them. Mishra's
comment, in line with some other critics, is that the depiction
here is founded in unsubtle stereotype. Our group wasn't quite sure
what to think, but did find the depiction unconvincing (and someone
questioned the factual/historical accuracy of Hammad's geographical
origins). It's perhaps again an interesting comment on the failure
and pallor of the rest of the book that, even so, some said they
found these sections the most engaging and vivid.
If I understand him correctly, Mishra charges DeLillo with subscribing,
via this sterotyping and the 'Western'-centric focus of the rest
of the book, to a profile of Muslims as regarding 'Westerners' as
'other', while indeed colluding in a view of Muslims as 'other'.
I believe that DeLillo is striving hard to avoid this: there are
various tropes in the book which seek to break down such concepts
of otherness. Most obvious is the fact that Nina's German lover
has himself been a terrorist/freedom fighter (and argues the case
for Islamist dissatisfaction with the West). Then there is the moment
at the end of the book when the concept of 'organic shrapel' (in
which pellets of the skin of suicide bombers become embedded in
the flesh of survivors) is taken to a striking level when the body
and consciousness of Hammad morph in the moment of impact into those
of Keith in the tower. Such self-conscious tropes, however, are
at odds with the psychic centre of the novel, which is indeed 'Western',
forcing the 'eastern' into otherness, and in consequence, it seemed
to me, the sections concerning Hammad's story felt more like colonization
than the empathy which DeLillo may have intended. As Mishra notes,
most Muslims already live with a complex sense of their own Westernization,
rather than the polarization of which DeLillo feels compelled to
mastermind such a striking conversion in this final scene.
Meanwhile, on the less conscious level, it seems, an undercurrent
of polarization runs through the novel: Clare and I in particular
felt shocked by an episode in which Lianne hits the woman in the
downstairs flat purely for her insensitivity in playing eastern
music in the aftermath of 9/11. While there was some sense that
her behaviour was a kind of madness that had overcome Lianne (and
Keith suffers a similar 'madness' when he hits a man in a department
store for a perceived personal slight), there seemed too little
authorial indication that the true madness is that her sense of
injury and insult could only emerge from a sense of the music as
'other', and it was this that felt shocking.
And the street performance artwork mimicking the famous image of
the man falling from one of the towers seemed - apart from highly
unlikely: people thought that in reality the artist would have been
lynched by New Yorkers - yet another dislocation into artifice of
this urgent real-life issue.
Trevor was very late for this meeting, having double-booked, and
we had finished the discussion when he arrived. Since he so often
likes books others don't, we expected him to put up a defence for
it, but when we asked what he thought he lifted his hand and stuck
his thumb down, not exactly perpendicular but almost. And Hans had
the last word when he said that he had looked on the internet for
a real-life film of 9/11, and the very short one he had found he
left him a hundred times more profoundly affected than had this
novel.
June
2009
The Autograph Hound by John Lahr
This
meeting was a mauling, and a pretty unfair one at that, since most
of us hadn't even really read the book. Published in the early seventies,
it is narrated by its 1960s anti-hero Benny Walsh, collector of
autographs and busboy at the New York Wild-West-themed Homestead
Restaurant, a place frequented by top celebrities and so a source
of the choicest autograph pickings. Trevor had suggested it, as
he read it when he was in the process of dropping out of university
in the seventies, and thought it was absolutely fantastic.
Well,
we thought that as a book about an obsession with celebrity it sounded
good and, spurred on by Trevor's enthusiasm, we went away looking
forward to it. The first obstacle we encountered was that it was
out of print, and we all set about ordering it from ABE Books. Mine
and John's came back fairly quickly, the original British hardback
complete with glossy pink-purple dust cover, but unfortunately I
had only just started reading it when I left it in a taxi and we
had to order the book all over again. Granted I was coming back
from A & E in that taxi, having fallen and sprained my ankle,
which may have made me less than competent, but I can't help thinking
that the fact that I simply couldn't get into the book may have
had something to do with it too. And I know I was also not in the
best state for getting into a book, but not many other people in
the group could get into it, either, it turned out.
Most of us gave up and failed to read much more than half of it
- John giving up very soon after the beginning - and I'm afraid
we had a very hazy impression of what we had read. Clare did get
to the end but in such a fast, skipping manner that she had missed
the dramatic denouement which Trevor revealed to us. We wondered
why we had found it so hard to engage with. The critics' comments
on the paperback edition I finally got hold of praise the book for
its contemporary aphorisms, and we wondered if this was the problem:
that Benny's voice, and thus the novel, were so steeped in late-sixties
language and mentality that the book was simply dated (much of the
lingo, which seems to be authorially relished, now seeming old fashioned
or cliched; eg: 'See you later?' 'Not if I see you first.') Anne
also said, to general agreement, that the long lists of names of
celebrities which mean nothing to us now is de-focussing and distancing.
Trevor
groaned in disbelief. But, he said, the book was brilliant! So fantastically
written! I said, How could it be well-written if it doesn't draw
you in, or give you any sense of what it's all about? What about
the character of Gloria, for instance (a young actress Benny meets
early on and who eventually tries to get him to sell his autograph
collection to save himself from the pickle he ends up in)? It was
ages before I got a handle on her, I said, and at the start I pictured
a middle-aged woman. I argued that the reason for this was unfocused
prose which failed to realize Gloria: I had been left with the impression
that Gloria is simply not described early enough. Trevor could hardly
believe I was saying this, and argued that one of the great things
about the book was its vivid descriptions. After the meeting I set
myself the task of starting the novel again and reading it carefully
through to the end, and I found that Trevor was right: Gloria is
described by narrator Benny the moment we meet her, indeed in list-checking
detail, thus: The lady stands out like Mary Martin across a
crowded room... She's wearing a long dress down to her ankles, a
veil hangs from her hat. So why did I, and others, fail to
see her clearly?
The
language, along with the atypical clothes, put me off the scent:
that word 'lady', and the fact that Benny goes on to refer to her
(and characterize her) as 'the well-dressed lady'. But it's not
the language in itself. It's not that I simply saw Gloria in the
wrong light, but that I had a very strong sense of not really grasping
her. There are plenty of novels the language of which is now dated
but which we can read without trouble, feeling that we are getting
a true sense of the world being depicted. It seems to me the problem
is deeper and relates to the way we are meant to take Benny. How
significant is Benny's use of the word 'lady'? Are we meant to take
it as language of the era and not particularly notable, or are we
meant to see it as indicative of Benny's singular psychology - his
prudishness and sexual repression (he is 35 years old but worries
like a child about his own penis - which he calls 'it', he has failed
to detach psychologically from his mother, is clearly frightened
of any sexual relations with Gloria and refers coyly to horses lifting
their tails and doing their 'number twos')? Or is this dichotomy
- prudishness and arrested development alongside streetwise lingo
and sex dens - meant to be typical of the age (which I think it
may have been) and significanty so? There was huge (initial) disagreement
in our group about how we are meant to take Benny. Having read the
book properly now it's clear to me that Lahr intends Benny as an
anti-hero: he reveals himself as viciously racist and worse, if
also pathetically lost in a fantasy world. Yet those of us who hadn't
read much of the book had come away without any sense that were
we meant to see Benny in this light. Hans gave a list of objections
to the book which I don't recall specifically but which amounted
to the fact that he considered it juvenile, the very thing which
characterizes Benny with his stunted personality, his obsession
with celebrity, and his totemic belief in the power of autographs
of the famous. In other words, Hans had not seen any distinction
between the narrator and the author, and neither had I: I had even
come away with the impression that we were meant to see Benny as
cool. Those who had read properly to the end - Trevor, Jenny and
Doug - were quick to put us right, but all three - even Jenny, who
was irritated by the style of the novel - said that they felt sorry
for Benny, for his emptiness and his pathetic and doomed attempt
to fill it with celebrity.
It
seems to me that the problem is that by taking too much relish in
its anti-hero's mentality and language, the author fails to satirize
them enough - which is interestingly the complaint
made by James Wood about Zadie Smith's similarly titled novel (The
Autograph Man) on the same subject and theme.
I said
that I thought that the book's take on celebrity was dated too:
that nowadays people don't hero-worship celebrities so much as identify
with them and desire fame for themselves, a phenomenon fed by reality
TV. Some people strongly disagreed, citing the huge sales of Heat
etc (which, frankly, I didn't see as destroying my argument), and
that they definitely feel a bit in awe if they ever meet celebrities.
I also said that I didn't really understand this interest in celebrity,
which I don't, but I am very interested in the interest in celebrity,
and by the time I went home I was in danger of writing my own and
yet another novel on the subject...
PS:
In a somewhat ironic twist, after I lost our first copy John and
I each ordered a copy (so we ended up doubling up) and John's copy
turned out to be the original US hardback bearing, of all things,
the author's autograph.
August
2009
Changes of Address by Lee Langley
Ann suggested this 1987 novel which she'd enjoyed years ago, narrated
by the adult Maggie who is looking back on a late-thirties and early-forties
childhood in which she was dragged around India by a scandalous
mother exiled and self-exiled from the British colonial community
into which Maggie had been born.
Having read it again for the group, Ann said that she was interested
in the different things one can take from a novel at different times
in our lives. If I'm remembering correctly, she said that the first
time she read it, when she was very young, she liked it for the
vivid way that the community was depicted, and the echoes it provided
of her own expatriate childhood. This time she appreciated that
and the portrayal of the mother as she declines into poverty and
squalor, but what really struck her was the fact that the novel
was about memory, and how far we can trust our memory, as narrator
Maggie wonders whether certain memories are her own or have been
imposed by her mother. Ann was particularly struck by the narratorial
technique of alternating between the first-person past-tense retrospective
narration in which these doubts are raised and a historic-present
mode of narration grounded in the sensual experience of Maggie the
child yet paradoxically cast in the alienating third person illustrating,
Ann thought, the mother's alienation from what she calls 'The Child'.
Ann also very much appreciated the exploration of the notion of
home for expatriates - the idea that there is never just one 'home'
and yet nowhere is really 'home' - as did Clare who also spent her
childhood abroad, and I who spent my childhood moving around Britain.
I too very much appreciated the theme of the dubiousness of memory
- not least because it's the theme of an (as yet unpublished novel)
I've written. I was also struck by the double-narration technique,
but wasn't quite sure that it worked, or that its purpose was clear.
I couldn't help thinking that the third-person narration indicated
a certain alienation of the narrator from herself, or at least from
her childhood self, either conscious or unconscious on the part
of the author, and I wasn't sure what to make of this. Sometimes
the narrative slips from one mode to another in mid-section or even
-paragraph, and I felt that this indicated a certain lack of authorial
clarity of purpose. Indeed, I found that sometimes at such moments
and others there was an uncertainty of rhythm and tone. This links
perhaps to my main doubt about the book, which was that it read
as a memoir rather than as a novel, lacking the kind of shaping
that a novel requires. The whole narrative is incredibly linear
in the most fundamental way: events occur and characters appear
in sequence, each in turn presented vividly, sometimes portentously
so that you take them as symbolic or prefiguring future developments,
yet then they drop away to be forgotten and overtaken by new, similarly
vivid yet transient characters and events, and (while everyone agreed
that the book was a very easy read) the narrative has a particularly
static feel.
John strongly thought the same, and others agreed. The one dissenter
was Trevor, who said that that static quality was what characterized
the life the girl was being forced to lead (a life on the move but
repetitive, motored only by the selfish mother's repetitive series
of sexual liaisons: there's a consequent sense of arrest, exacerbated
by the mother's public and sometimes even private underestimation
of Maggie's age in order to minimize her own - a factor which makes
the adult Maggie uncertain of her own age at various moments when
she looks back). In any case, Trevor said, children don't shape
their experience: it is to them a linear series of events, none
more significant than others.
I'm not sure I agree with that last, but didn't say so because even
granting it I didn't agree that that meant that the novel needed
to lack shape. John thought that too: he said that a great novelist
would find some way of replicating that childhood experience, yet
also manage to select and point up for significance. For instance,
he said, there was the moment that the child Maggie walks into a
mirror. That seemed so symbolic at the time of reading it, yet it
is never really used symbolically and indeed the novel appears to
replicate the child Maggie's lack of awareness of its symbolic potential.
Trevor stuck to his guns that that was acceptable as a replication
of her experience, but I said actually it wasn't, precisely because
the author provides herself with a narratorial shaping device, ie
the retrospective consciousness of Maggie as an adult narrator.
In the light of such apparent authorial uncertainties, the narrator's
uncertainties about what she remembers come to be seen as potentially
rather those of the author, and the more we discussed the book the
more sure we felt that the material was intensely autobiographical
and incompletely processed. There is one thing that Maggie is certain
about, and that is that her mother treated her inexcusably badly
(and as a teenager at the end of the remembered story she cuts herself
off from her mother, never to meet her again). This is indeed the
one-dimensional way that the novel presents the mother, and I said
I found it somewhat odd that, having been a mother herself (something
which she makes much of, having vowed to be a different kind of
mother), the middle-aged Maggie hasn't come to any understanding
of her own mother's position at the time. Only at the very end,
prompted by the memory of a remark by the man her mother finally
settles down with, does it occur to the narrator Maggie to wonder
if maybe her mother wasn't quite the baddie she's always thought
her, but a more complex character. I said that the way this felt
to me was that this was a thought which had occurred newly to the
author, that it was the process of writing the story that had brought
her to this conclusion, and that what she really needed to have
done then was to go back and redraft the novel taking the notion
into account: this may have resolved many of the uncertainties and
provided a far more complex character in the mother and a consequently
richer story.
Ann said, Well maybe she couldn't, and everyone felt that that must
be the truth: that that very cutting off from the mother (if, as
it seems, the novel is autobiographical) would make emotional resolution
very difficult. John noted that there was a certain avoidance of
exploration of emotion in the novel, and while this could be regarded
as representing the mores of the time, we felt it ran deeper: for
instance, in the scene where for the first time Maggie fights back
when her mother tries to beat her, there's a retreat in perspective
and tone: To anyone watching, it might look funny: this slow,
silent combat, a tableau-vivant - 'The Gladiators' - as the child
hangs like a mongoose on the throat of a threshing snake, slowly
dragging the woman's head backwards (that coyly jovial tableau-vivant
- 'The Gladiators') which indicates an authorial holding back.
Trevor insisted (repeatedly) that no one could ever come to terms
with having had such a mother and I think he was saying that this
justified the novel. Also, in spite of his previous comments, he
insisted now that it was simply not possible ever to replicate the
psychology of a child in writing, because one always comes to it
with an adult consciousness (which I don't agree with either), so
I'm not quite sure I've got the gist of what he was saying overall.
It was also noted that the India around the characters and the tense
political situation of the time were only vaguely indicated in the
novel, and while again this could be said to be a function of the
self-obsession and isolation of the British characters, there is
an unutilized opportunity to deal with them via the adult narrator.
There is in fact some perfunctory retrospective comment by the narrator,
a kind of wondering realization that momentous things were happening
around them of which as a child she had been unaware, but this disjunction
is not woven into the fabric of the remembered story in any satisfactory
novelistic way.
There was some general talk about the difficulty of writing about
experiences close to you, and an acknowledgement of the fact that
if you change details like setting etc you can distance your own
experience and make it easier to process in writing. That, I said,
is what's so cathartic about writing, and we all then agreed that
there was something painful about this novel and it didn't feel
like catharsis at all.
Then Doug said it was 'a bit girly' - only partly ironically, which
made us all hoot with laughter, and then some people went home but
some of us stayed and Clare got some more drink, pink fizz, out
of the fridge and I am afraid to say I got quite drunk.
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