The plan: to note something for each of the next 365 days. May be something, may be garbage….may not last past June.
Today by “the pond” in Reykjavik in the sun a young girl feeding bread to ducks, gulls and geese. She was earring a Barcelona football shirt with the name Camilla on the back. On her feet were purple glitter trainers.
Later we bought things from dead.
Reading 2023
The novel most enjoyed: new (to me) writers:
Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse; Minor Detail by Adania Shibli; The Night of the Hunter by Grubb Davis
The novels most enjoyed (as well as the above):
The Lady in The Lake by Raymond Chandler; The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
Single most astonishing novel of the year:
(a tie) – Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse; Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
The most striking non-fiction works:
Angela Y Davis: Women, Race & Class – documents the various oppressions before correctly, in my view, saying it all comes down to class and through that, power: revelatory. I do not know why I haven’t read her before.
Virginie Despentes: King Kong Theory
Rebecca Solnit: Recollections of my Non-Existence
Friedrich Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England – and what has changed?
Nick Hayes: The Book of Trespass – this has lit a flame…spells out what we all know, if we just care to think about it.
…plus a couple of the essays in Aurochs and Auks by John Burnside, which move between discussions of extinction and his own near-death experience with Covid.
The most uplifting work:
Virginie Despentes: King Kong Theory – furious punk-energised feminist fury – gang-raped as a teenager, escort in her early twenties, refused to have the limits to her life prescribed for her, went on to write books and films: utterly righteous and inspirational
Everything I have read by Kathleen Jamie
Most uncategorisable & yet bloody brilliant book:
Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis
Novel that disappointed:
Paradais by Fernanda Melchor
The year’s most striking fictional character:
Alicia (Stella Maris)
…and the most-dastardly villain(s):
The ruling, land-owning, worker-supressing, profit-robbing class (again)
The best authors encountered for the first time this year:
Jon Fosse, Louise Kennedy, Claire Keegan, Adania Shibli, Kathleen Jamie
The most beautifully written novel:
Aliss at the Fire
Poetry most enjoyed:
Terence Hayes: for his poems and his performance of them
The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie – it was all people promised me it would be.
How it Will Happen by Lisa Blackwell – just for how much it took me by surprise
Pepper Seed by Malika Booker
The Dogs by Michael Stewart – for the poetry alongside the art, the concept, the “everything” of it.
Anthology of the Year:
More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry
Reading: Fiction
Bernstein, Sarah: Study for Obedience
Chandler, Raymond: The Lady in The Lake
De Beauvoir, Simone: The Inseperables
Ditlevsen, Tove: The Trouble with Happiness
Duggal, Sharon: Should We Fall Behind
Fagin, Jenni: Hex
Fitzgerald, Penelope: The Bookshop
Fosse, Jon: Aliss at the Fire (x2); A Shining
Gaitskill, Mary: Bad Behaviour
Gonzalez, Tomas: Difficult Light
Grubb, Davis: The Night of the Hunter
Hedayat, Sadeq: Blind Owl
Holliday, SJI: Violet
Jonasson, Ragnar: Outside
Kang, Han: Greek Lessons
Kawakami, Mieko: All the Lovers in the Night
Keegan, Claire: Antarctica
Kennedy, Louise: Trespasses
Kundera, Milan: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Laxness, Haldor: Fish Can Sing
McCarthy, Cormac: The Passenger; Stella Maris; Outer Dark; The Counsellor (screenplay)
Melchor, Fernanda: Paradais
Mishima, Yukio: Beautiful Star
Rankin, Ian: Rather be the Devil
Smith, Ben: Doggerland
Soyinka, Wole: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth
Stuart, Douglas: Young Mungo
Non-Fiction
Polly Barton: Porn
Tom Blass: The Naked Shore of the North Sea
John Burnside: Aurochs & Auks
Angela Y Davis: Women, Race & Class
Virginie Despentes: King Kong Theory
Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Warren Ellis: Nina Simone’s Gum
Friedrich Engels: The Condiition of the Working Class in England
Annie Ernaux: Exteriors; The Years
Kathleen Jamie: Findings; Sightlines
Linton Kwesi Johnson: Time Come
Nick Hayes: The Book of Trespass
Mark Hodkinson: No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy
Mark Lanegan: Devil in a Coma
Audre Lorde: Your Silence Will Not Protect You
Helen Mort: A Line Above the Sky
Jaqueline Rose: The Plague
Bobby Sands: Writings from Prison
Rebecca Solnit: Recollections of my Non-Existence
Poetry
Anthology: More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry
Anthology: In the Hour of War: Poetry From Ukraine
Raymond Antrobus: Perseverance
Lisa Blackwell: How it Will Happen
Malika Booker: Pepper Seed
George Mackay Brown: The Storm
Zakia Carpenter-Hall: Into the Same Sound Twice
Jo Clement: Outlandish
Charlotte Eichler: Swimming Between Islands
Ella Frears: Shine, Darling
Terrence Hayes: so to speak; American Sonnets…
Ian Humphries: Tormentil
Kathleen Jamie: The Overhaul
Anthony Joseph: Sonnets for Albert
Ilya Kaminsky: Dancing in Odessa
Rachel Long: My Darling From The Lions
Hannah Lowe: The KIds
Carola Luther: On the Way to Jerusalem Farm
Audrey Molloy: The Blue Cocktail
Don Patterson: The Arctic
Alice Oswald: Nobody (x3)
Arthur Rimbaud: Seasons in Hell
Michael Stewart: The Dogs
Hannah Sullivan: was it for this
Marina Tsvetaeva: Brides of Ice
Polly Barton: Porn
“Porn, and masturbation in general, are subjects about which people are taught to carry a lot of shame, and fear of others’ judgement.”
“Talking about porn, is not talking about the thing that’s the problem, which is patriarchy and misogyny…”
Starting from her own position of “tortured ambivalence… ” toward porn, Barton embarked on nineteen conversations with a random(ish) set of (anonymised) adults ranging in age from early twenties to early eighties, about their use of, and thoughts about, porn. They were all people that Barton had some form of “in” with – friends, friends of friends – that sort of thing…all people she could email with “the idea” initially to see if they would be interested in taking part. The resulting group crosses genders, sexualities, parenthood or not, I don’t think anyone had any strongly held religious views, and nationalities – Barton has friends from her times living abroad. It might just be my own prejudices playing in, but I did get the feeling that I was hearing a lot of “the educated class” talking here – as in there was no one that stood out as working class, in what I was reading, and no one who positively identified themselves that way – whether that has any relevance, I don’t know. (And in reading back the introduction I see Barton herself identifies both ethnicity and class as intersections that would readily benefit from more in-depth investigation)
She describes what she thinks may be her general underlying reasons for writing this book, as “… a fascination for the clandestine, an inability to leave alone the things that one is not supposed to probe.” She reviewed her own “knee-jerk” reaction to the word itself, creating a concern that publishing anything with that word in the title may damage future prospects…and then also how doing so might lead people to think she was a connoisseur of porn, which she says she isn’t, before acknowledging the whole self-referential mess and embarrassment she was embroiled in. She worried it would make her a “bad feminist“. She also identifies a very specific trigger for her wish to explore the topic: a male, not a stranger to her, but not a romantic attachment sent her a text out of the blue that said “I am watching porn”. It was her inability to quantify this message, his reasons for sending it – and to her – and her reactions to his doing so that spurred her on. It most definitely was not the same as texting her to say “I am watching football”. Why wasn’t it?
What is learned:
…everybody is convinced that pretty much everyone else is watching porn: especially women talking about men, although it becomes clear – within this group at least – that women are just as likely to watch it, and just as likely to feel embarrassed about doing so. But none of this was judgemental – it was very matter of fact
…porn consumption (and the “pornification” of society) has exploded since the invention of the internet – yes, there was VHS for a while, but really its the internet. That’s not to say porn has only existed for the last 30 years, we know that is nonsense, but the ease of access to it has exploded. It is a multi-billion dollar industry (and the industry bit is where the ethical difficulties tend to come in). Many of the conversations touched on the ethics, without ever reaching conclusions…probably because that’s how ethics work, and where individuals stand on them are hugely different in life rather than just porn
…which also helps, to go some way towards explaining an apparently more relaxed attitude in younger generations to its existence, and also an apparent willingness to discuss and accept use of porn, with partners, within a relationship – not many saw it as “cheating” – some saw it as a way of opening up the relationship, the ability to talk and explore what turned each other on
…it is not just porn that is a difficult conversation between friends and / or partners – masturbation, sexual preferences and proclivities, but also certain illnesses are seen as more “difficult” conversations to have – and we know that there is great work being done in some arenas, male mental health for eg – to try and get the understanding out there that there is widespread “permission” for such conversations
…that what people see as “OK”, is fluid – it may change with time, relationship status, whether they become parents, health (their’s or their partner’s)
…there’s always another “kink” that you had not thought of…
…no one seems to have much truck with the Andrea Dworkin position of all porn being violence, although in the closing chapter Barton does go – surprisingly to me, for the first time – to Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power“, which talks about the difference between pornography and what is truly erotic, describing porn as the polar opposite of eroticism because it “represents the suppression of true feeling.” Again, Lorde was writing in the 70s & 80s and I think that makes some difference.
I keep thinking back to the conversation with the woman (seven), who said she “didn’t think anything about porn” – she is mid-thirties, in a long term relationship with a male – where she referenced disengagement, a “sort of blankness“, which she ascribed to reading and studying Dworkin, and how she found herself horrified by the end-position of Dworkin’s “radical feminist” approach was that she was on the same side as the political far-right, which the woman just felt couldn’t be correct – she also made a link with the type of argument some feminists are making that takes them straight into TERF territory, which again she knows is not where she wants her feminism to lead her – “not wanting to fall into that trap… radical feminism once again touching on a fascist position“. In short, this woman had far more to say on porn that was of interest to me, because she started from the political, the social-power dynamic and worked her way back into the subject from there.
“…we all know that power dynamics within sexuality and desire and pleasure are a complex and valuable thing… and (sometimes) not a bad thing in itself. Then you have to try and separate misogyny from the power dynamic thing. Which is really bizarre… It is really difficult to square the positive and negative aspects of power dynamics in your head, which is important for people to explore…”
She later discusses (and Barton agrees) being in a same-sex relationship, as she had been, she found the power dynamic was absent, which she surprised herself by missing, noting that she was, “reliant on non-equality in a way” because “sex is not neutral.“
It is worth finishing with a couple of the broader societal / contextual thoughts that these conversations have led Barton to crystallise and express:
“What I have come to realise about porn over the course of these conversations is that what scares me the most about it… is the way that the shame and the silence and the guilt and the awkwardness surrounding it … work to produce a sense of passivity, a lack of agency and responsibility… of course, in this porn is not a standalone phenomenon, but is part of a capitalist socio-economic context … dubbed ‘the pornification of the world.’… where the productive apparatus endeavours not only to sell us products but to create needs, and ultimately induce addictive behaviour.”
“When we have fully accepted the implications of living in an invisible supermarket, we may well end up accepting the inevitability of the trajectory that we’re on as a society…” but in order to do that we owe it to ourselves to do it consciously, “maintaining a sense of agency and responsibility… I still believe that this consciousness is preferable to burying our heads in the sand.”
“What would sex look like without porn, we don’t have a control group,” quoting Maggie Nelson.
There is nothing salacious here, it is all a pretty serious set of conversations with people being given a safe space to discuss what they do and think about porn: and really the point of the book, is that it – these conversations – exist and are recorded. That in itself is enough, for now.
So it went, with a whimper not a bang as our latest manager sent out 7 defenders in the starting XI, for the game we had to win.
The last 5 years at Leeds have been an absolute vindication of Marcelo Bielsa’s coaching and playing ethos: a bunch of mid-Championship also rans (consecutive 14th place finishes), converted through huge amounts of hard work, belief, team effort and a coach who prepared himself and his team, beyond what many would see as reasonable – to almost achieve promotion in his first year, achieve it gloriously in the second season and then beyond everyone’s wildest expectations finished 9th in the Premiership, with a scorching run of 23 points in the last 10 games.
Since his sacking and replacement with a clown, a presence that barely registered, then an out and out mercenary, respectively, the team’s fitness and self-belief has plummeted, along with the crowd’s satisfaction – Leeds don’t mind a team that goes down fighting, but the fight has to be there, without that, it feels like a facsimile of a Leeds team, a fake.
And now, without all of those Bielsa trademarks, the players have reverted to their former level – the formidable fitness is gone, they run out of steam after 60 minutes; their belief in themselves and the team is fragile, players who could previously ping around first touch passes weaving exquisite patterns around defenders who found themselves chasing shadows, and moving the game up the pitch towards the opponent’s goal at lightning pace, can no longer be relied to make simple square passes over 20 yards.
The do or die for the team is gone. It has been gone for months.
But it was much more important than the swashbuckling glory of the football on the pitch: it was the ethic. He brought a pride to the club, top to bottom, and hence to the city, who saw that this effort was reaping rewards and courting admiration from around the footballing world. Murals started appearing, there was a spreading of his philosophy beyond the lines of a football pitch – he wanted to do things well and to do them in the right way, with respect for others, with an appreciation of importance of footballers, the club and most importantly the fans – he knitted them together, it became a joint venture, a shared joy, a community.
He believed that football should be beautiful, you win games by scoring more than your opponent (as opposed to stopping them at all costs), the players earned the right under his system to express themselves – ask Pablo Hernandez, Stuart Dallas, Mateus Klich, Raphinha and the rest. Ask Harrison, Ayling and Bamford, spoken of in terms of a national call up at the end of that first season.
Ask Kalvin Philips. A solid but uninspiring midfielder – local lad so he had leeway – until Bielsa got him fitter and built a team around his being deep sitting holding midfield player, almost a sweeper in front of the back four, and foil to Hernandez’s attacking trickery. He made Philips into an international player who was England’s player of the Euro tournament they failed to win on penalties in the final… who moved to warm the bench and pick up medals at Man City.
Now, the club is back in the Championship, just where Marcelo picked them up from.
“If there is something that makes this profession attractive to me, it’s the power to be in contact with the passion of the public. The supporters, the only thing for them is that they love their club. The only thing they receive in exchange is emotion. This is going to be a lovely moment for all of my life. And it was beautiful.” (Bielsa on winning the Championship)
Ella Frears: Shine, Darling
I like Frears’ poetry, it is bold, fun, sexy, slightly out of kilter to the world – there’s a lot of it set in Cornwall, where I have just been on holiday, so perhaps I am biased: Fucking in Cornwall is hilarious, and recommended – kiss me in the pasty shop with all the ovens on. There are concerns about self-image, relationships, relationships with parents and with nature, the moon.
Two whip-smart and funny poems about periods Magical Thinking (I) & (II) – yes, there is a Joan Didion epigram – the second has her mother telling adult Ella, about her mortification at coming on at the aunt’s house (they are in a taxi together, just leaving a party), so much so that she smuggled out the (favourite) cushion she had been sitting on. From MT (I):
The hand is quicker than the eye, said Lily / showing us how to slip a tampon out / and a man in with one swift movement.
The Film, is an absolute show-stopper of a poem, which is hard to discuss without giving away its power – suffice to say, that when she and a female friend decide for “art” to walk around campus asking men to hit Frears in the face, on film… the result is stunning, abrupt and shocking.
ETA
Bastard / grey road. / Empty sky. / Radio – dull, / dull songs. / Even you, / who I love / fiercely, are / fucking me / off. On our / way to a party. / Family party. / Obligatory… / The urge / to punch / a nice old / man…
There is also the complete reprint / re-use of her earlier 14 page pamphlet Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity in the middle of the new book, and this has narked me more than perhaps it should. The fact that these 14 pages crackle, are exceptional, is perhaps more to the point:
I had been tasting the cold air, / feeling my heart beat / into the dark car park, / the thrill of my presence / under the sky alone
So, just buy the full collection is the message.
Rachel Long: My Darling From the Lions
Long is a new poet to me, and this is her first collection – shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection. There’s some sex / relationship stuff, some religion, family, adolescence, race and there’s hair… and in Communion there is hair as religion.
There is a good deal of humour, not brash laugh out loud stuff, or “look at me aren’t I clever” stuff, but understated humour, slipped in almost deadpan. When her mum, doing her hair, tells the teenage girl she will be as beautiful as Winnie Mandela, the girl thinks, “I don’t know who this is, / but it doesn’t sound like someone Ben Clark will fancy.” (Jail Letter)
I feel middle-class when I’m in love. / I think it’s all the poached eggs on bird-seed bread. (Portent)
The repetition of the 5 line poems called “Open“, in the first section – of three – are all similar, but just different enough to make the point…
Writing as the voice of Barbie the narrator for two poems about the battles between Barbie’s Ken, and the doll who would be her new man, Steve…is a funny, precise punch of poetry.
Some poems tell stories – Helena, a drug-horror-date rape; Red Hoover, about a couple of hilariously failed dates with “the ridiculously good-looking Nigerian“; Mum’s Snake, on how you can’t let anyone touch your hair or they might curse you, in her mum’s case, with migraines.
When the mum of my then-best friend said / her daughter wasn’t allowed to play with me / because I was another N-word – meaning / Mum went round in her dressing gown to slap her silly / with her tongue, the returned to scatter the kitchen / and shred Dad’s Guardian for not sticking up for us … (Apples)
As is clear there are some substantial subjects covered head on, some alluded to, but Long’s use of words always feels deft, light-touched and precise, without being pedantic. A collection I can see myself re-reading … even if I don’t understand the title.
Tove Ditlevsen: The Trouble with Happiness (trans Michael Favala Goldman)
Ditlevsen is apparently better known in her native Denmark as a poet, having never read any of her poetry, the power of these short stories make me wonder just how ferociously good her poetry must be. Born in 1917, in a working class neighbourhood of Copenhagen, she was a successful and noted writer in many forms, producing 29 books in total. Her private life was full of upheaval – 4 marriages and divorces – she struggled with addiction and was admitted to psychiatric care several times. By the time she took her own life, aged 58, she was one of Denmark’s most celebrated writers.
This book contains 21 stories, coming in at an economical 180 pages. They are brisk, brittle, claustrophobic, razor-sharp, based around suburban family life and expectations and some have cleverly disguised ‘reveals’ towards the end of the story – when you realise that a child is not the child of its ‘parents’ as it has been led to believe, or that the husband being discussed has actually left the family home – there are quite a lot of unfaithful fathers, leaving the mother with kids as he sets out with a younger woman; and as many overbearing mothers who cannot / will not their children become adults and leave home. One other recurrent theme is ‘lost childhood’.
“The most important thing is probably always precisely the thing you can’t have. That’s where all the happiness is.“
There are obsessions – a wife’s for a silk umbrella; a boy’s for a lost hunting knife; a wife desperate for a reason to sack the beautiful young housemaid, who may or may not be sleeping with her teenage son. With story titles like, “My Wife Doesn’t Dance”, “His Mother”, “Depression”, “Anxiety”, “Perpetuation”… and so on, you get the picture.
The Best Joke begins: “One morning he was sitting on the edge of the bed and he was getting divorced. His wife was standing somewhere in the room talking. Something about her mother and someone else. Home to her mother; found someone else. And at seven in the morning, when you haven’t filled out your body yet and you’re cold and you have to go to work. He picked his nose and didn’t understand how anyone could get so ugly in five years.“
Her most celebrated work, The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth and Dependency, sits waiting on my bedside table. and I am more than eager to get to it.
Mieko Kawakami: All The Lovers In The Night (trans: by Sam Bett and David Boyd)
This is the third Kawakami novel translated into English, and the third I have read: they are spectacularly good. The writing is beautiful, and slightly oblique. Her main subject has been, so far, young women, often quiet, anxious young women, unsure of how to get through life – things seem to them confusing, challenging, often too brash, or insensitive. They quietly go about their daily life trying to be as little noticed was possible.
Fuyuko is a proof reader. At the start of the book she is with a firm, but she doesn’t speak to anyone there, and they have long ago given up asking her out for social drinks. She is a good worker – it seems to take up an unhealthy amount of her spare time, as she literally seems to do nothing else. Hijiri, was her boss and becomes her boss / benefactor as she persuades Fuyuko to go freelance, when she sees that she can earn the same money – if not more – and need never meet anyone, she can do the work at home, or in the corner of a cafe or library.
In her mid-30s, Fuyuko has had sex once. A painful, horribly confused teenage fumble that became a rape. Since then she has had no sexual interest in anyone. Fuyuko sees a reflection of herself and is brought to a state of shock…she cannot quantify what it is she thinks she has become, but it is not what she expected.
Her one concession to ‘stepping out’ of her flat for pleasure rather than necessity is on her birthday which is Christmas Eve, every year, she goes for a solo walk through the night streets of the town she lives in. Until one year a chance encounter with a man twenty years her senior changes things. They begin to meet for coffee and conversation once a week every week.
It is a subtle, gentle and beautiful study of a woman trying to understand herself, what she has become, and whether she likes herself.
I took the pencil to the first blank page and wrote the words “All the lovers in the night.” The phrase had appeared out of nowhere. through the faint light in the room, I looked over the words, which came together in the strangest way…seeing my handwriting under the light, I realised that this was the first time I’d written something without having a specific purpose, not a comment in someone else’s manuscript or galley, but my own words on a blank sheet of paper. I had no clue what to do with these words, no idea what they were for, or what they meant, but I stared at them and felt them reach my heart and linger there.
Annie Ernaux: The Years and Exteriors (trans by Alison L Sayer and Tanya Leslie respectively)
Fernanda Melchor: Paradais (trans Sophie Hughes)
Ernaux, Nobel Laureate writes with frankness about where she is from and about her adult life – unflinchingly, would probably be the word. She is in many ways an inheritor of the mantle of de Beauvoir, with less of the forthright politicking, which is not to say that what she says in unpolitical, it is just not framed as such. It is life-telling, with an acute awareness and apparently unswerving honesty.
Exteriors: is a short book 80 pages. It is a collection of thoughts and observations as she is passing through the world in the late 80s and early 90s. There’s no theme, no great structure, just whatever takes her fancy to record and then to publish: sometimes it is a simple observation about the way someone looks or carries themselves:
“In a Metro carriage, a boy and a girl argue and stroke other, alternately, as if they were alone in the world. But they know that’s not true: every now and then they stare insolently at the other passengers. My heart sinks. I tell myself that this is what writing is for me.”
The switches between insight and banality are fascinating and also, hugely relieving – to me at least – because much of this sounds like what goes on in my head – and therefore what I guess goes on in many other heads – but it is written down and made available to the world.
The Years: published first in France in 2008, the book relates moments in Ernaux’s life between 1940-2006, but in a tricksy, not entirely trustworthy way – which isn’t to say it feels like she is deliberately exaggerating or ornamenting, but more that because she relies on memory – over that time span – and on emotive triggers, and digressive re-telling, it is all very hard to pin down. It is interesting that the book is presented in the white cover of Fitzcaraldos ‘factual’ output, but has nevertheless also been described as fiction. This “slippery narrative” is, Ernaux writes, “composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes”, it places the book squarely in the realm of Proust, and its is not cowed.
Ernaux comes from a working class background in Normandy, and has become a lecturer and literary figure based on the edge of Paris, where she raised two sons and divorced their father.
The narrator slips between “we” and “she”, and the story related covers a personal life and an idiosyncratic selection of world and French social / political events. The feeling I got as the booked moved forward through time was that the stories got shorter, more economical – less ruminatory and prone to digression – almost like time spinning down a plughole…which could of course be completely illusory. Anyway, this is highly recommended and I intend to read it again soon.
“We strongly sensed that with the pill, life would never be the same again. We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.“
Paradais: I rarely put “bad” reviews up here because I don’t see the point, I should just move on, but I found this a deeply objectionable book and one which took far longer to get through than its 120 pages warranted, so I’ll be brief. Paradais is a gated-community in Mexico: Polo is a poor kid who works there as a kind of caretaker / gardner, “Fatboy” is roughly the same age, but is a spoilt child of one of the resident families. Polo hangs out with Fatboy because he gets him free drink and drugs. The price is that he has to listen to Fatboy’s sociopathic, violently pornographic musings about what he would do to the mother of some other kids in his school, Señora Marian, who is also a resident of the community. The story wanders around various little episodes between this mismatched pair and Fatboy’s increasingly graphic and bizarre fantasies – often involving late night sitting outdoors drinking purloined booze. Polo’s mum is a hardworking cleaner at the compound, which is how he got the job, who despairs of ever having enough to keep her kids fed. So, as Fatboy actually begins to make plans to take action – breaking into the family house of the Señora so that he can facilitate his assault, Polo sees that he can use the break in to steal goods which he can sell and help out his own family.
Jon Fosse: Aliss at the Fire (trans Damien Searls)
“…there is something like a yellow sunbeam of despair“
Dear God but this is 65 pages of intense. The kind of book, the kind of writing that demonstrates how fire makes darkness.
It runs over generations, names, time, memory – pulling and pushing at them so that confusion is easily caused and I suspect intentionally. There are few sentence breaks, aside from the speech, and even then it is hard to decipher who said what.
And it all begins when Signe lies down on a bench at home to ponder again what can have happened that dark November night 23 years ago, when her husband Asle went out on the fjord in a small boat during a storm and never came home.
And an empty boat knocked all day against the rocks on the shore.
“…and Brita’s scream fills everything there is, the fjord, the mountain, and Asle doesn’t answer…“
Devastating.
365 times 50 