The Secret History

Some books weave themselves so completely into your soul that finishing them feels like the end of a relationship - a messy end that will change you. The Secret History is one of those books. I couldn't bear to read anything else after I finished it; I pined for it. To this day, I look back at it with nostalgia, as if I had lived not the lives in its pages but the actual words printed on them.

Robert Bolano's covers

You can't see the spine of 2666 here, but you can't possibly miss the book on a bookshelf. It's the same pink (I know there is a word for this particular shade but I can't think of it right now) as the title. And it is thick (think Joyce's Ulysses). When you open the cover, the eye belongs to a skeletal face that might be screaming or laughing. It's horrific. Which makes it strangely compelling. One review says that the novel contains the entirety of human experience between its pages. Which is even more horrific.

A fear of genies

To pick up from my last post (except that it's more laying the foundation than picking up), a while ago I kept running into djinns or genies. Genies are frightening creatures. They seem to me to be a manifestation of our wills - but more precisely our inability to impose our will on the world. The line drawn between us and the world, the frontline of a battle. Even as a child I suspected that these creatures were a symbol of frustration and thus they became for me a harbinger of news I did not want to hear.

I encountered my first of these genies in a tiny book of fairytales by AS Byatt called The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (see the author's commentary on the book and fairytales here). I bought this book a couple of years ago, when I was working at the magazine and had taken a day's sick leave. Although I had sinusitis and felt like death warmed up, a day off was a luxury, it literally felt luxurious. (I didn't realise it then but I was very unhappy and would only get unhappier.) Anyway, I decided to rent a DVD and I stopped in at one of my usual secondhand bookshops while I was in the shopping centre. It was winter but one of those true Joburg winter mornings when the frost lingers at the edges of things, sharpening the sunshine so that everything looks new. The morning felt like magic. Browsing the beginning of the fiction section, tucked into a narrow passage, I saw a tiny hardback volume crouched among bent and bunched spines. Its rich green and black cover was wrapped in plastic. I opened it and smelt its pages and then I bought it. It was, I suppose, my clouded glass bottle. When I came to Cape Town, I brought it with me, and when I finally read it a few weeks ago, it was to reassure myself. Byatt's prose has a way of both grounding me and binding me to another, beautiful world, a world of words and symbolism and magic and meaning. Her prose makes me both happy and sad.

My encounter with the djinns this time around was still awkward. Although I had had my suspicions when I was a child, as an adult I was so conscious of the frustrations that knot together to form a creature that grants wishes and as he does so injects your deepest desires with spite. Whether being aware of this makes the djinns more or less frightening I'm not sure. But my fear of these creatures is luxurious and poetic, and has far fewer thorns than the reality I inhabit.

Even a world of stories can't accommodate utopia

Books and plots bleed into each other. One book picks up the plot of another you recently read, extends it or twists it or blows it up. When recalling the storyline of one book you enjoyed and are recommending to a friend, you add in details from another book you read, similar or not. Your latest read unwittingly adapts a theme from your favourite childhood story. Like some kind of collective narrative, always growing.

I just finished Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, in which a woman who is branded as schizophrenic by 1960s America has psychic access to a future that contains both a fascist dystopia and socialist utopia, at war with each other. Before that, I read The Night Watch, which details an institutionalised war between the Light and the Dark, carried out by soldiers of varying magical gifts. At one point, one of the leaders of the Light describes the aim of his institution: to provide humanity with a social system that will create a utopic society in which, fundamentally, people respect each other. The question hidden within this plan is whether the ends justify the means.

Both societies are at war, both societies have a vision of a better society built on respect and a sense of human dignity. What I found interesting is that even the utopic society detailed in Piercy's novel has a vision of a better society, even this society has to live side by side with its moral opposite. To me, this suggests that our dreams of utopia may always remain just a dream. Built into the 'narrative genetic code' of a utopia is a fundamental contradiction: that humanity is made up of people of differing moral 'levels', or integrities, I suppose you could call it. It could never fully be realised, except perhaps in fiction, and even that must find some way to deal with the contradiction, whether by casting it outside itself or containing it within itself. This is something more than the idea (hijacked by hippies) of ying and yan, that reality is made up of moral opposites. It is humanity in which the contradiction exists only; reality might even be barren of the moral substance from which to build this kind of contradiction. So, I guess, even if we do create a fictional utopia which embraces everything, there would be someone within it who desires to do wrong, who would have to be forced to live a better life and so invalidate the utopia. Humanity's tragic flaw has many facets - hubris included - but perhaps it can be summed up in this, that we can never be at peace with ourselves, as individuals or societies.

My point, when I started this post, is that Woman on the Edge of Time took the ideas that were still haunting the corridors of my imagination, a bit like the smoke from a cigarette which spirals into the air for a bit before dispersing, and extended them. Both novels ask similar ideas, but more than this, they seem to inhabit the same narrative world. They feed off each other. Now I am reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman and hopefully soon The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin, so let's see where this takes us...

David Mitchell's covers

Kafka on the Shore

The cover sums it up. Surreal and intriguing. Simple, but deceptively so.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is bizarre. It's populated by talking cats, unexplained (-able?) incidents, unsolvable riddles, Greek myth, Japanese fairytales, a little bit of Freud. It is highly addictive - I read it in about a day and a half, cancelling my plans to do so.

As a reader, I grappled with how to make meaning in a shifting landscape. Each of the pieces fits with another piece, but that doesn't mean that they all fit together. Somehow, this book exists in multiple dimensions, which is both profoundly liberating and deeply unsatisfying. For days, you find yourself returning to different facets of the riddle(s) and prodding, only curiously though because you know there are no answers here.

As a writer, I took notes on how to write the impossible: a book that obliterates the reader's Suspension of Disbelief - only to build it back up again, stronger than before. Also, how to write a book that is flawed in so many ways but is a masterpiece (maybe not Murakami's greatest masterpiece, but a masterpiece by lesser standards) precisely because it is so distinctive.

For example, the dialogue is stilted and serves more to muse on philosophy than to develop the plot or characters. A number of the characters are undeveloped and unconvincing. Events and mysteries are left to flap in the wind. According to his own account, the writer doesn't even know what it all means (although I suspect that his professed ignorance is also in part a strategy to heighten the intrigue).

Perhaps the trick is that all of these elements force the reader to work harder, to really engage with the novel and its ideas. It reminds me of fairytales (the real ones, not the adulterated pretty versions that kids read today), which contain morals buried deep and in criss-crossing strata - when I uncovered them they were like ropes that tied themselves around my body and with which I would always struggle for a few days before giving up and letting them become part of me.

And perhaps its magic is also part of the riddle - you can prod at it for days, for weeks, for months, but you know that there are no answers here.

Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (extract here) was lent to me by a friend and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I loved it.

It's like a slice of black forest cake, sweet but with a hint of darkness. Like Carnival (the TV series), but less apocalyptic. It is a love story, a romantic story. A review in the New York Times describes the novel as a 'fairy tale', which hits the nail on the head. A grand romantic fairy tale that is somehow about the everyday. It's enchanting.

And now I see that they are making a movie with Robert Pattinson. I swear that's not why I thought of this book!

Some background

A few years ago, a friend recommended that I read The Paper House. She hinted that there was some secret - a Moral - in the book's pages, something would shed some light on my peculiar existence. It is a lovely and little book, with a cover that shines as if lined in pearl. The paper is thick and glossy, and the illustrations are made of delicate feathers dusted with colour.

The Moral was (to paraphrase): my obsession with books would one day suffocate me.

When I saw my friend next, I told her I had finished the book and that I understood. She smiled at me, my co-conspirator.

Ever since then, I have kept this moral tucked away in my heart, a secret key to my soul. I am a bibliophile, I think sometimes, and smile. The idea that my obsession might one day kill me is less scary than reassuring, you see. Live by the sword; die by the sword. Except this metaphysical death is more of a phoenix-like rebirth.

Then, a few months ago, the same friend gave me another book: How Proust Can Change Your Life. The moral of this one: Put down this book! I felt attacked, offended; there was a conspiracy afoot. But, defiant, I carried on as usual. But then the next book I read said the same thing! And the next! Perhaps they were all right. Perhaps I am slowly being suffocated. Perhaps I already have been and what is left is an idea-embalmed corpse. So, I decided to change my life. Escape from my imagination. Live in the real world. Every step like glass under my feet and no voice to scream.

That is when I hit the wall. The wall that stretches up to the sky and as far along the horizon as you can see. That is how I found myself on the ground, with a brickwork pattern imprinted on my skin.

On why I am sitting here, on the ground

I feel that I have been cheated.

And I am angry about it. A good question might be: who am I angry with? I don't know. I am just angry.

I grew up reading. Ever since a thief made off with our TV in the middle of the night (through a hole in the window that my parents insisted a bird had made) and so my father was obliged to get us each library cards to keep us entertained. I read just about everything I could get my hands on - until I was 16, when I ran out of things to read. But that's Another Story.

The point is that I grew up believing in magic. The magic of stories. I believed - honest to goodness BELIEVED - that my life would be lived like the plot of a novel. I believed that I would encounter challenges but that I would overcome, effortlessly, simply because I was destined to be the heroine of my own life. I believed that events in my life would have climaxes and morals and resolutions. The morals would be the magic - like a hero in a quest, I would accumulate them until I had solved The Mystery (of Existence). So, I jumped headfirst into new challenges because I believed there was a mystical safety net to catch me when I fell.

(Wrapped up in this is also Another Story. Another Story for Another Time.)

Then, almost a year ago, I began moonlighting as a project manager at a leading education publisher. I moved across the country, leaving behind everything really, even myself to an extent. (I set off with such naivete (albeit made of a bronze that hadn't been polished in some time), with such hope and so many expectations. I had been tested over the last year and a bit. So I was tired, but here I was facing my Moral, possibly even my Resolution. I was going to be rewarded. I was going to be my own heroine.) I started off with a slow jog, and worked up to a solid run. I stumbled, I fell, but I kept picking myself up, dusting myself off, and setting off again, first at a jog and then at a run. Although I didn't notice it at first, eventually I was so scraped and bruised and bleeding that it wore a hole in my soul and in my heart so big...

Just then, as I was contemplating my mortality and not looking where I was going, I hit a brick wall that reaches up to the sky and stretches along the horizon as far as you can see. It stretches on so high and so far that it fills up your vision and your whole body and you are transformed into brick, rooted to the spot, on your ass. And so I was lost. If you can see it, the wall has already won your soul. What I only realise now, as I type, is that the wall was there all along; this was just the first time I had seen it.

So there is no magic. My life is not a story; I am not destined to succeed. There is no Grand Mystery and there is no moral. I have been abandoned. Abandoned. Lost. I am rooted to the ground, sitting before a wall; I am part of the wall; its pattern adorns my skin. I will not get up again. I give up! I yell. Not too loudly. I give up.

The only way that I get a happy ending is to retreat back into my world. The world made up of stories others have invented and those that I weave around my own life. It feels less like giving up than going home.

So, folks, I am angry. I am angry because I have been cheated. I am not angry with anyone, but I am still angry. I am sure you can understand.