 | The Writer's Map: An atlas of imaginary lands edited by Huw Lewis-Jones {Reviewed by STELLA} What could be better than opening a new book to find a map of a yet-to-be-discovered world? If you were a child like me, you would have spent as many hours looking at the map and imagining yourself in it as you would have done reading (and re-reading) the book itself. From Milly Molly Mandy’s village - her home, the house that little friend Susan lived in, where they picked berries, the village green where the fete would be - to the land of Narnia through the wardrobe, maps in books were a key that opened a portal to the worlds beyond home, school and the dreariness of the ‘real’ world. Finding a Moomin book in the deaccessioned shelf at the public library was a discovery in itself, but that it included an amazing and delightful world, with a detailed map, was unforgettable. Maps still have that fascination and I never tire of atlases. There’s something about imaging oneself elsewhere. The Writer’s Map is a beautifully illustrated atlas of literary maps, edited by historian Huw Lewis-Jones, with accompanying insightful essays from writers, designers and illustrators. They talk about the influence of maps on their own work, the importance of map-making in creating plot and place and the wondrous spaces, emotional and physical, that maps have taken and continue to take them. Philip Pullman, the creator of Northern Lights, opens with an essay entitled 'A Plausible Possible', where he describes creating a map for a book he wrote called The Tin Princess. To create a plausible scenario for his princess, Adelaide, he needed a possible world where the plot could play out. Other authors in the book write about the relationship between map-making and fiction: David Mitchell sketches and draws maps for his books, despite the fact that these do not appear in the finished novels. There are examples from his private notebooks showing islands, mountain trails and fortifications. “Maps of fictitious places are maps of mind. You lose yourself in them and find, if not factual truth, then other kinds.” Brian Selznick, the author/illustrator of several amazing books, remembers his fascination with the anatomy section of his Golden Encyclopedia, with its mapping of the human bodies, all the pathways of connected systems played out with layered acetate sheets. As a ten-year-old he had a major operation, one that he recovered slowly from. Drawing was his world and continued to be so. “We all end up drawing the maps to our own futures, though we usually don’t know it at the time.” The book is split into four sections, 'Make Believe', with introductory essays from Huw Lewis-Jones and Brian Sibley; 'Writing Maps', with author contributions; 'Creating Maps', with contributions from illustrators and designers; and Reading Maps. Many of the contributors draw on their childhood memories and their love of books and maps, and how these influenced their own work. References include Treasure Island, Middle-earth, Narnia and Moomin Valley. They also outline their own journeys as map-makers, storytellers and creators of imaginary worlds. The Writer’s Map is lavishly illustrated and a pleasure to read. It will have you wanting to delve into an imaginary world immediately, or to take up your pencil to draw your very own. |
 | Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li {Reviewed by THOMAS} “When a train stops in the open country between two stations, it is impossible not to put one’s head out of the window and see what’s up,” Katherine Mansfield is quoted as writing in her journals by Yiyun Li in this collection of essays titled after another line by Mansfield and addressing topics such as time, authenticity, intention, attachment, character, ambivalence and melodrama as they are mapped in literature, both for readers and for writers, and as demonstrable parts of mechanisms of the depression that led Li to attempt suicide twice. Since her suicide attempts, Li has not written fiction but has immersed herself in reading as an alternative mode of nonexistence - “To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.” - and in writing about reading and about writing and about the underlying motivations for both activities. “But for those who wish to erase themselves by writing: why write at all? Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.” Li proceeds, appropriately, considering her pre-literary career as a scientist, treating each statement she makes as a hypothesis to be tested and disputed and refined by the kind of close, intelligent reading of others’ writing that it is a privilege to accompany. “I have arrived at a point where defending and disputing my actions are the same argument. Everything I say is scrutinised by myself, not only the words and their logic but also my motives. As a body suffers from an autoimmune disease, my mind targets every feeling and thought it creates.” This sort of rigour is as hazardous to perform as it is to avoid, and we begin to be convinced that the stakes of all literature are existential. Why is literature written and read? What is its relationship to so-called ‘real life’? For Li, the expectations visited by oneself upon oneself when relating to actual people are an existential threat that can be avoided with resort to literature. “The part of me that could be so free and happy on its own is not fit to live among people. It strives in vain to articulate its right to be; it shies away from drama or feeling yet avoidance only leads to melodrama: it compromises one, it shames one, it terrorises one; it makes one’s life into a cautionary tale.” Melodrama refuses to act as a metaphor. For someone “whose real context is books”, literature is the testing ground for one’s existential gambits, the place in which, for both reader and writer, the ambivalent impulses of existence/nonexistence, emptiness/identity, constraint/freedom, story/incoherence can be exercised, observed, and, to an extent, contained (not that this diminishes the valencies or the threats they pose). “How much does one believe in the possibilities of one person’s knowing and understanding another? A real person, open-ended, can only be approached as a hypothesis. To say that we know a person is to write a person off. A person written off becomes a character.” If a character appears in a novel, what is the modicum of coherence/incoherence that makes them both believable and comprehensible (if believability and comprehensibility can be seen as opposing qualities)? “What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject? I wished then and I wish now that I had never formed an attachment to anyone in the world. I would be all kindness. I had often glided through life with deceiving tranquility, I had the confidence to put up a seeming as my being. That confidence, however, is the void replacing I. The moment I enters my narrative my confidence crumbles. Can one live without what one cannot have - the absence of I, and the closeness to people that makes absence impossible? Willfulness turns the inevitable into the desirable. Time spent with other people is the time to prepare for their disappearance. By abolishing you, the opposite ofI, I could erase the troublesome I from my narrative, too.” Literature provides a means of self-erasure for both writer and reader but has the antithetical consequence of self-extension - or it might be better to say that literature provides a means of self-extension but has the antithetical consequence of self-erasure. “To write is to revive feelings, but it is to leave these feelings behind that I write.” Li may escape from herself into Mansfield, Hardy or Kierkegaard, but, by reading, she brings herself more clearly into focus, a being that observes without being burdened by any qualities of its own, a being precisely located by its own attention but otherwise unobservable. |
 | Women Talking by Miriam Toews A group of women are meeting to make a decision that will change their lives. In Miriam Toews’s Women Talking this is no ordinary group, no ordinary situation. These women live in a remote Mennonite colony in South America, they and their children have been victims of rape and abuse, and they are deciding what their response will be. When we enter the story, the rapists (eight men of the colony) have been arrested and taken to the city at the instigation of Peters - The Elder - to ‘protect’ them from the women. For several years the women have awoken from drug-induced unconsciousness to find themselves beaten and bloodied. Peters has told them it is the work of the devil and they are being punished for their wrong-doings. Once someone is caught red-handed this story no longer stacks up and the perpetrator names others, revealing a culture of abuse, domination and depravity. Yet Toews does not give us a story of abuse and powerlessness, she heads off in the direction of survival and decision-making. The book is a two-evening record of meetings (while most of the men are in the city to pay bail and bring the arrested men back to the colony), recorded by the recently returned August, the school teacher, who has been allowed back into the colony by Peters (he had left as a child with his excommunicated parents (excommunicated for sharing illicit literature - a book of paintings)). August’s role is to record the eight women’s discussion: he is the only person who can write and read, and is empathetic to the women’s dilemma. They have come to the conclusion that they have three choices: stay and fight, leave, or do nothing. There are several women who have decided that doing nothing is their only option, and that they will not go against the rulings of their men. The others, eight women from two different families, battle out their options in a feisty exchange of words - some philosophical, others personal - and debate the merits of each option. To stay and do nothing requires them to forgive the men, absolving all from sin and allowing everyone to go to heaven. (This is what Elder Peters wants and the members (the men only) have decided is right). To stay and fight comes with more violence, and they question their will or ability to kill if needs be. Do they want to be murderers to protect themselves and, more importantly, their children? The arguments roll backwards and forwards as they consider their religious beliefs, the rules of the community, how they can leave if they leave, and where they would go (as hardly anyone has gone further than the next colony), their moral obligations and philosophical musings about their role and rights within this rigid community. The conversations go something like this: whether by leaving they are breaking any rules aside from disobedience to their menfolk, but if they (the men) are not there to disallow them to leave are they, in fact, guilty of disobedience? Add to that some banter about who already disobeys their husband, who lets their husband walk all over them, and you have lively discussions to flow in and out of personal jibes and silly jealousies. Toews, herself an ex-Mennonite, carefully and cleverly constructs this story, giving us the horror of the situation without the drama, and putting the power into the hands of the women. The men that remain in the colony are either young, senile, infirm, or ineffectual. August is the exception, seen by the women as trustworthy because of his love for Ona and his position as an outsider due to his recent return and his worldly experience and education. Toews creates a wonderful tableau of characters: the women are lively, argumentative, petty and loyal, naive yet wise. Despite the risk in meeting to make a choice, they are resolute in their self-determination for their own and their children’s survival. Toews takes this grim story, based upona true happening in a Bolivian Mennonite community in the early 2000s, and infuses it with humour, philosophy, and respect for women who counter patriarchal and authoritarian regimes. Witty, insightful and unforgiving. |
 | Blush by Natalia Zagorska-Thomas and Jack Robinson I do not blush, I cannot make myself blush nor put myself in a situation where I would blush, but a blusher cannot help but blush. A blush, according to Darwin, is "the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions," and the expression over which blushers have the least control. It is a signal that subverts all systems of signalling, one that exists below the reach of the intentional and intellectual strata of signalling systems and one that therefore cannot be hidden or misrepresented by them. In this a blush is in a sense unique. A blush can only be authentic, because involuntary, which not only makes a blusher especially awkward, exposed and vulnerable but also, precisely because of these qualities, gives blushing a special attractive power, an authenticity that is imitated by cosmetics but so unconvincingly as to border on irony. “A blush is a quick-motion bruise. A blush is a passing wound, subcutaneous, the blood seeking release but the skin holding tight,” writes Robinson in this thoughtful exploration of the phenomenon of blushing. Blood rushes towards the the locus of action, in the case of a blush towards the interface between the private and the public worlds, towards the tissue where the body ends, where otherness begins. There is “a chink, a gap, a little slippage between me and the other me, the one I’m performing - where the blush gets in.” A blush is a transgression of the customary border between the personal and the public, the border upon which both the world outside us and we ourselves heap so many expectations, personae and intentions, expectations; personae and intentions that are rendered null by a blush. A blush is regarded as embarrassing in the context of these expectations, personae and intentions, both from society and ourselves, but therein lies also the beauty and liberating power of the blush in a world in the grip of a crisis of authenticity, where “we live on the cusp between ignorance and oblivion.” The intimate/over-intimate presentation of a blush is “an index of confusion,” and has the same utility as other indices, where the blood rises to the surface of a book and shows us a way through all that prose. In Blush, Jack Robinson (one of the pseudonyms of Charles Boyle, publisher of the ever-wonderful CB Editions), provides a subtle and insightful phenomenology and social history of blushing alongside witty and equally subtle and insightful images by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas (some more of her work can be seen here), each and both displaying the virtue of lightness that lends their work a polyvalent concision that enables it to keep generating meaning for a considerable time after the reading/viewing has been ostensibly completed. |
 | Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara Shopsin {Reviewed by STELLA} Tamara Shopsin has written a personal and lively memoir about growing up in New York in the 1970s, specifically, about growing up in Greenwich Village in the shadow, or more precisely in the arms, of The Store. The Store was famous in spite of itself, and still is an iconic New York institution. What started solely as a grocer became a restaurant of repute in the 1970s, a place with its very own style and culture and a centre of the conversation, happenings and relationships of a neighbourhood. Tamara’s father Kenny Shopsin was a New York personality running The Store with his partner Eve. The five children grew up on the street and in the restaurant - on the sawdust floor, beside the freezer that gave electric shocks, in the arms of regulars, and under the feet of customers. Each had their shop chores and all chipped in as needed. Tamara Shopsin’s memoir is a homage to New York City, a New York that she sees as under threat from developers, increased housing prices and homogenised culture. It’s a homage to her eccentric father who had his own style, constantly changing the vast menu (especially if a dish became too popular) and making crazy customer rules - rules that made his place even more attractive to some and completely repellent to others: no phones, parties of no more than four people (don’t even try to sneak in with a three and a two and then pretend it is a coincidence), and no copying what someone else has just ordered. You could be a friend for life or blacklisted by putting a foot wrong with Kenny. The book is a homage to friends, family, and the importance of neighbourhood. Shopsin recalls the famous and the ordinary, drawing out the stories of those closest to her, particularly her father’s friend Willy, who in his unusual way sees them all through some sticky situations. There is a fascinating account of the development of the crossword puzzle and Margaret Petherbridge’s role in this at the New York Times. Kenny sometimes submitted puzzles and kept up a correspondence with Margaret over numerous years. There are numerous asides and insights making reading this memoir a delight. Arbitrary Stupid Goal is arranged as small pieces loosely connected, pieces that scoot from present day to a Tamara of age five and back, into times before her birth and retold stories. Over the course of the book she shapes a conversation that gives you an insight to her and her siblings’ childhood, the bohemian nature of The Village, the quirks of her father's cooking practices and temperament, the significance of the seemingly ordinary, and the importance of place. The Store was a meeting place that attracted celebrities, eccentrics and local, a place that accepted people for who they were but brokered no quarter for fakes or demanding clientele. In fact, Kenny feared success (and having to work too hard) and shrugged off reviewers and interviews, even going as far as to tell guidebook publishers that the restaurant had closed or that The Store was now a shoe shop. Tamara Shopsin’s writing style is quirky and idiosyncratic. She writes from the point of view a middle child, a keen observer with an agile mind, the point of view of a woman still very much connected to the place that made such an impact on her. Tamara Shopsin cooks weekends at The Store and is passionate about its legacy and the New York City she believes in. Touchingly personal and endlessly fascinating, this is a memoir which moves from hilarious to tragic and back again in a half a breath. |
 |
The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Disappearance is contagious. Everyone knows this.” The underlying, or overarching, crisis in Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest is one of authenticity. What is known, what is written, what is uttered, what is achieved immediately begins to be eroded through that onslaught of words, thoughts and experiences that constitutes what we think of as the passage of time. To hold on to one’s identity is, in such circumstances, a neurotic tendency, the invocation of a threat. “We are always prepared for the appearance of fear. We lie in wait for it. We invoke it and reject it with equal stubbornness.” The narrator in The Iliac Crest is a doctor in a hospital, situated on the border of land and sea as it is on the border of life and death, which expedites the deaths of incurables, completing, as thoroughly as possible, their disappearances as individuals. Disappearance is here both a medical and a political condition. After working at the hospital for 25 years, the doctor’s home is effectively colonised, almost simultaneously, by an ex-lover, who immediately falls ill and becomes effectively inaccessible to the doctor for the rest of the novel, and by a woman claiming to be the (actual) Mexican author Amparo Dávila, who is writing 'the story of her disappearance' in a notebook. From the evening of their intrusion upon his previous routine, from the intrusion upon his habitual life of both memory and imagination, the doctor’s world begins to become destabilised, ultimately threatening his identity and sanity. Language is the way in which borders and distinctions are maintained, but language is also the way in which borders may be destabilised and subverted. The book displays constant tension between language and bodies, between the conceptual and the physical, between construction and erosion. There is an emphasis on borders and distinctions, especially spurious borders and distinctions, and on the subversion of these borders and distinctions. On a conceptual field there is more distance within a category than between one category and another, but the distance within categories is invisible to those intent upon borders between them. But all borders are arbitrary and therefore spurious: male/female, reality/fiction, desire/fear, fascination/repulsion, eros/abjection - these pairings are not dichotomies but overlays, more similar than they are different. Maintaining these distinctions is a compulsive act that reveals the neurotic bases of language. Rivera Garza has a lot of fun undermining distinctions, dragging the contents of her novel over them in one direction or another, or, especially, leaving them suspended on the polyvalent point of maximum ambiguity, “this threshold where one state ended and the next is unable to begin.” The characters show themselves to be, and discover themselves to be, copies, false copies, copies separated from their originals by time or by the meanings attributed to them by others. Amparo Dávila, transgressing the border between fiction and actuality, is forced to defend her authenticity and authorship when made aware of another, older, ‘truer’ Amparo Dávila (who eventually reveals herself to be dead, to be Disappearance itself). The narrator is told by the women who are staying in his house that they know his secret: that he too is a woman. He strenuously denies this but is compelled to keep checking his genitals to reassure himself, increasingly unconvincingly he tries and fails to defend his masculinity, and eventually ceases to deny her femaleness. The narrator is pushed by the events of the novel into an ambiguous zone in which distinctions do not apply, a zone which is both hazardous and liberating. “We live on terrain that bore only a very remote resemblance to life. Our irreality and our lack of evidence not only constituted a prison but also a radical form of freedom.”
|
