How I Live Now

How I Live Now by Meg Roshoff is a treasure that I had not expected to find. There was always a copy or two at the bookshop's biannual sale - I noticed because I love those Penguin Classic covers. I had seen it but never really noticed it. When someone brought it to bookclub, I was intrigued when she described it as an apocalyptic novel that has resonances with WWII Britain.

The main character is your typical (literary) neurotic American teenage girl - typical only in the sense that she reminds me of other characters in other novels bravely fighting wicked stepmothers and half-sisters and fathers who just don't notice them. She is sent to Britain in the face of a pending war to live with her aunt and cousins on a farm. Just when she thinks she has found herself in the Garden of Eden, war breaks out and the cousins are separated. She has to find a way to come to terms with the ways in which war has changed her life while trying to escape back to the rest of her family.

The book is ostensibly set in the present or the future - the main character has a cellphone, although it can't get a signal. But this is really the only clue. Otherwise, this setting has the feel of a Blyton-esque country idyll. In addition, the war does not involve nuclear weapons at all, only 'ordinary' bombs, which makes one wonder whether these kids are stuck in a time warp, and are in fact victims of WWII. These kinds of questions define the spirit of Roshoff's novel. It is passionate and unsettling; it pulls you in like mud, except you're more than happy to sit there, all soggy and cold.

I'm still puzzling over the ending, though. At the beginning of the novel, the main character hints that she and her cousins somehow bring the chaos on themselves. This becomes clearer at the end, but is more an expression of guilt than of reality. But then, that last chapter...

Portrait of an artist

I used to think that the idea of a tortured artist, writhing in a stinking mess of their own emotions, was a Romantic ideal. It served to idealise the profession, when a true artist is dedicated and disciplined and armed with intelligence. In the same breath I often wondered what makes art Art. What is it that makes so much contemporary art seem lifeless, intellectual? It stirs the emotions, sure, but often just because it is controversial.

Being a writer is hard. Writing a novel is hard. Every time I start a sentence I have to fight a monster who tells me this isn't good enough, I cannot do this. Every time I read something I have written, I have to agree with the monster. Yet something in me believes I can do this, so I persevere.

I wade through human emotions, picking the ones that are just right for what I want to say. Sometimes they're pretty little darlings, but usually they are distorted aborted things. Each emotion goes together with a set of gestures and facial expressions, personality traits and a personal history. It's difficult not to take these things on as your own, and sometimes they creep into the cracks and layer your everyday.

And usually, they are part of your everyday anyway. You recognise emotions because you have felt them; you assign gestures and expressions because you have used them.

At some point, someone isn't going to approve. Their criticism is going to be hidden in their words and gestures and facial expressions, and you know where they hide so you will see them. Every compliment contains a criticism, a something you are not.

But doesn't this hyper-self-awareness, this emotional sensitivity, make one's art better? Isn't THIS what art is? Something that shows you the best and the worst of people, and casts a spell around it so that you can't look away? Not something that horrifies you so much that you have to? Art is pain and suffering. It is also dedication and discipline. Art is venturing out into the depths of human experience and coming back with a spiny prize in your cupped palms.

Thirteen minutes...

One of my short fiction pieces was published in itch earlier this month and people keep telling me they wish it hadn't ended so abruptly. That abruptness was intentional; people are supposed to feel like they have been thrown up against a brick wall, like I did. I had felt completely disorientated after this experience, but I realise now that there wasn't enough groundwork.

I love the idea of the city and I love writing about the city. But that love can be difficult to reconcile with my writing. I see a bizarre character, like a man carrying two streetlight poles slung over his shoulder or a man preaching next to a traffic light, and I want to write them into a story. Usually, they become a symbol of an emotion or concept.

But how do I do this without in some way stripping them of their humanity? This sounds like a purely intellectual, and therefore redundant, question, but it's not. Who am I to patronise someone by using them as a symbol? How would you like it if someone wrote about you and then claimed that you embodied sadness or the rift between the classes?

In this particular story, I assume first that these people are in some way a danger to me because they come from a different social 'class'. Then I assume that they hold some knowledge about life that makes them spiritually superior to me. As if poverty is the portal to enlightenment.

That is my conflict at the end of the story. This is the brick wall I was thrown against. But, just like the previous piece that was published, I didn't tell people enough of the truth behind it.

In Miss Lecter, I hoped that people would see a break near the end, before the teacher imparts her moral. I was too chicken and too inexperienced to tell people that anything can be turned into a religion using pretty words. So instead I took the middle ground.

Being a writer means being brave. I haven't been brave enough.

"If Kelsey Newman's theory about the end of time is true..." I will have enough time to read every book on my list

Browsing through the local bookshop at lunch, I saw Scarlett Thomas's latest, Our Tragic Universe. When I first read The End of Mr Y, I loved it, although now I think perhaps there is just too much pop-science with very little substance. This amendment to my opinion might have something to do the second novel of hers I read, called Popco. That one just didn't hold together very well - I would like to say that it lacks direction, but it does have a direction, just not a very interesting one.

I'm intrigued by the blurb of Our Tragic Universe, but more specifically by this line: "If Kelsey Newman's theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever." So, more pop-science then. And oh I do love pop-science (no sarcasm intended although it is here somehow). But the first paragraph let me down. It reads like something a talented high school student might write with some coaching, rather than something written by an experienced author. Read it for yourself and see.

To add to this, as much as I love the original cover idea, it seems a little staid - especially since the world and her mother have since used the same idea. They seem to have made some effort to update it through the colours, and it definitely jumped off the shelf at me, but something about it still bores me. Perhaps I will feel differently when I finish reading it?

No small consolation

Surprise, surprise: my latest read is prompting an existential crisis as vast as the Grand Canyon to open up below my feet. Good thing I can fly... well, glide.

I'm reading The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, after Remains of the Day completely charmed me with its subtlety a few months ago. The blurb said that it was a novel about a pianist who finds himself in a city "he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give."

The alarm bells began to ding, but more like a doorbell than anything else.

The cover is inviting. It features a romantic, Old-World city street in blue tones, set on what looks like faded brown wrapping paper because you can see the faint lines weave down the page. So I opened it up.

The first paragraph of a book is always my favourite. It tells you what to expect; it is the story at its best. Maybe I should stick to reading first paragraphs?

In this first paragraph, a taxi-driver is looking for the hotel clerk, who seems to be missing. He looks (inanely) behind potplants and chairs before leaving the traveller alone with his bags.

The alarm bells began to ring like the doorbell to the portal of hell.

I should have just put the book down. If only I had listened! 'Put that book down!' they had all said. But no, I was going to defy the world.

I'm about halfway now. The rest of the paragraphs have been much of the same. Bizarre characters, bizarre events, one man's subconscious traversing the city and interrogating him. Everything takes on a Freudian meaning and the main character is trapped in a whirlpool of it.

Perhaps this should encourage me, that I had the same idea as someone as brilliant as Ishiguro. But no, not really. All it does is throw my weaknesses in my face. My characters are too abstract, my plot too arbitrary. I focus too much on details that do not propel my plot forward.

Do I really have the writerly strength to improve on these faults? Do I have the strength to make my city convincing in all its details? I'm not even sure I have the strength to finish reading this novel...

No such thing as too many library cards

I'm going to join the library near work on Monday. That means I will have three library cards, but since one of them is for Joburg and it has probably expired, I guess that doesn't count. So I can get 7 books for 2 weeks and another 3 for 3 weeks which means that I will have more books than I could possibly read and that I will have piles of them. Books are my religion, no blasphemy intended. So piles of books are like icons, they give me a sense of solidity in the world.

Gaiman vs Murakami

In hindsight, reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods after Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore was a mistake. Kafka on the Shore affected me profoundly. Not only did it show me how to write the impossible without ever suggesting that it is possible, it showed me how to live (it's a lesson I can't explain in words much better than the first clause of this sentence). It gave me hope.

Gaiman's world, by comparison, seems too neat. The loose ends are too carefully arranged, not flying around in the tail of a tornado - some without actually being tied to anything - as Murakami's are. His characters, too, seem too plausible - logically illogical even. The conclusion is carefully vague but never frustrating. People are not logical, life is not logical. There are no pretty ribbons tying everything together. Life is bizarre, entirely random, hideous. We do it every day because we think we have to.

I enjoyed Stardust far more, I think because it was less careful and more romantic (with a capital R). It made me forget about the real world for a while, but then again I hadn't met Murakami yet...