Doris Lessing, 1919-2013

A dull yellow (impersonating gold) trade paperback, in library-grade plastic and accompanying Dewy-decimal-system label on the spine. This was when I first met Ms Doris Lessing. (Disclaimer: it was not The Grass is Singing, because a BA degree is an overdose in colonial and post-colonial fiction. Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez is tainted by my grand nemesis The Heart of Darkness - Mr Achebe, while I'm with you about the layers upon layers - no, actually, just one deep layer - of racism, it is also one deeper layer of boring.)

The Golden Notebook. My first handshake with Ms Lessing. Not literally. Read above, please. Read the title. Focus!

I was about 20, in my gap year between one degree and the next, naively contemplating the theme of my adult life (naively because, as you know, dear reader, that theme snaps at your heels, accuses you, does back flips and takes your spot on the couch endlessly - right? Or is this just me?).

In brief (this book is anything but brief), the novel is comprised of five, different coloured (not literally, fool) notebooks and a binding story set in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. The protagonist is a middle-aged woman named Anna Wulf, living in London. (For those who know Ms Lessing's own story or have the power to Google, the plot(s) resonate.)

The book was written in 1962. We could ascribe the politics of the novel to the time - and this probably didn't hurt sales - but these themes could be traced back to the novel of the singing grass and Ms Lessing's liberal but tempered temperament. The themes (of both novels) include feminism and socialism (loaded terms, but that's why there's Wikipedia (again, encyclopaedia is spelt with an 'a', open source dorks).

Even as a teenager, perhaps even a tot, I have gravitated toward these liberal movements - I shudder as I type 'liberal' - literature tells me liberals are too impassioned to be rational, misguided and unfocused, appealing to human nature rather than the greed, envy, lust and basic selfishness that natural selection rewards. Trust me, I went to a politicised university and have seen two riots. Wait, now I'm a voyeuristic, liberalesque pseudo-intellectual. Still, call me a liberal and I will... moderate your comment. You.

The novel stalks the measure of the terms - from the perspective of the times, obviously; I later learnt more about the revolutions before and after (and no I'm not talking about #Occupy-a-park) - setting my principles in some sort of shape, like water in an ice block (just way more haphazard). Feminism was the one that immediately appealed to me. Given that a comment about women drivers is still enough to incite me to violence - or wait, my favourite "She's a smart cookie." Do I look like a gingerbread woman?

Today, when I think about the novel, some shadow of the experience of reading projects on the back of my head. Of sitting on a forest-green couch in a room painted yellow. Of the view from a kitchen window of a London street. The aura of importance that being involved in grand ideas provokes. Of a mother and her children, with the realisation that a child is a separate being to her. Of gritted teeth as a man, of common mind, tells a woman what feminism means.

None of these are necessarily written in the book - but they are what I see when when I think of it. They are a set of first dates with the world around ideas I thought were mine. A world which the mass media do not quite grasp.

Ms Lessing passed away about two months ago. The literary world is reeling. AS Byatt and Margaret Atwood have written tributes to her. Did you know she won the Nobel Prize for Literature five years ago? Did you know she had the same effect on me as touching a bell as it swings? Why is the whole world not reeling?

I had ordered two of her novels online and they were delivered the day before she passed: Mara and Dann and The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. Predictably (for me) they are dystopian novels, predictably (for her) written to explore political and social issues. Reading them feels like a ritual honouring her and her effect on me. What else will she teach me? What other ideas will she help me shape?

Doris Lessing was one of the greats, unassuming but influential. This post is my tribute to her and acknowledgement of her influence on me. And an assuaging of my guilt. I confess I have undervalued the author over the last few years. Read my archives and she doesn't appear, except as a passing reference. As often happens, it has taken her death and the reeling of my world to make me appreciate Doris Lessing and The Golden Notebook.

Footnote: Stay posted (har!) for reviews of Mara and Dann and its sequel. I will try to keep the soppy to a minimum.

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales

A review on Amazon compares the author's style with Murakami (of course, because all Japanese authors sound the same - future reviewers, if you compare me with Lauren Beukes, I will stop writing forever, I promise you) with the "shadow of Borges" (you may compare me with Borges - please do) and the "macabre of EA Poe" (indifferent). My brain started to salivate. It's why we indirectly pay the production costs, in the millions, of horror movies: the desire to reassure ourselves we are immortal. Or something. Freud explains it better.

I say 'we' but I don't. I don't watch horror movies and I certainly don't pay the production costs. I usually don't read horror or crime or true crime or thriller novels either. (I wish I could say I don't judge people who do these things, I don't like to lie. So I'll keep quiet.) Intentional and 'intimate' violence revolts me, real or fake. By intimate, I mean in a person's physical space; not guns etc. I am desensitised to that - Hollywood cheers as I stand in line to watch an action movie.

Just hearing or reading a description of violence makes me dizzy and pale. Sometimes I can feel pain in the same place - I'm imagining a rugby injury I saw once, where the player's fibula broke, the bottom half slicing the skin. My left leg pounds and the blood rushes from my cheeks. (Doing a final edit and again - except this time my throat tastes like bile.) Yep. I am going to need a first aider home to treat any accident-prone children (all children are accident-prone; I'll just train them to do it themselves). I'll cower in the corner, hands over ears, thanks.

Sometimes, they slip such violence into literature. Usually authors choose to represent more serious trauma with silence (see previous post on Toni Morrison - but only when you're done here). I think this a good idea. And not because it has a purpose. Nope. In this context, I won't argue whether shock or absence conveys trauma better. Just keep it to yourself. Bury it. Shoot it into the solar system in a space rocket (everyone's doing it these days - including a company whose rocket failed to launch three times before it did. When do I get to say I told you so?).

Murakami does it in both Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, in prolonged scenes of excruciating violence. (How does the human mind imagine this stuff?! My own mind revolts when I try. I don't try often, don't worry, but sometimes people make me want to be able to. Instead I read.) The violence isn't gratuitous though, so I can sit through it for the literature.

Then there's Michel Houellebecq. Atomised is a mosaic of violence and porn that would be considered good literature by a psychopath with mother issues. There is no distinguishable plot, except for the happenings that lead to violence and porn. He is meant to be A Grand Author, by said psychopaths, so I persevered. Actually, no, I can't even justify it. I protest the dogearing of pages, bending of spines or *cringe* writing and highlighting in books; another type of violence. But I would happily pulp my copy myself, except I don't like to touch it.

Recalculating route. Spoiler alert!

People die. In every story. There are eleven. By story three, you expect it, beginning each new paragraph tentatively. The author doesn't describe the actual murder, and hides other relevant details, but reveals enough to make me dizzy and pale. Or maybe this is how I see the stories after reading The Story that inspired this post. No, I really don't think so, but maybe.

Tools of torture. There is a whole story devoted to these tools, which are in a dedicated museum. (A museum?!) The guide says they collect implements that have been used. Yep. How do you verify that? Andthemindisoffandawayflyingoutfrontfollowedby... Implied violence does not reassure me of my own immortality, Mr Freud and Ms Ogawa. (I don't need to be reassured, right?) They convince me that I am a cuckoo in a cuckoo's nest; that I am a normal person in a herd of psychopaths. I ask again - how do you imagine these things? Ms Ogawa has a ball with these implements, so perhaps we should ask her.

Don't get me wrong - the violence is not gratuitous and the stories are good (even though they are character sketches more than stories). I wouldn't quite compare her with Murakami and definitely not Borges (but still indifferent to Poe). Further than that, I can't comment. This cuckoo spends too much time cowering at the beginning of each paragraph, sentence, word...

So why (oh why) am I reading this book? Why did my brain salivate? While some people get their kicks from violent movies, I get mine from dark and tragic literature, a taste I don't satisfy often, for the same reason we only drink coffee before 17.00. That's what I thought I was downloading: dark and tragic. A lesson in reading the blurb - and downloading a sample. On the upside, if there was someone I wanted to hurt in my mind's eye, they are very very dead. Very.

Read the book for us and let this cuckoo know what it's like. It's time for you to do some work around here, you!

Clash of the... sequential displays of information

Haruki Murakami: if you have read one of his books, you will understand the cat

Lists. The internet enjoys lists. The editor in me throws up a red light: 'the internet' is an inanimate repository; it cannot enjoy anything, much less walk, talk or create memes. It's shorthand, you pedant - the author is dead, the reader has gone AWOL and the medium itself is becoming AI, apparently. Bulb in red light broken, there are lists of troll names, swimming pool shapes and someone's favourite malls in Bangalore. Lists are content developers' way of filling space and users' way of sharing of themselves without having to worry about grammar or spelling.

My point (not the Point): please read to the bottom before you judge. You, discreetly coughing into hand ... before you judge which of the above this post is. I prefer you AWOL.

My favourite books
1. People's Act of Love, James Meek
2. Seizure of Power, Czeslaw Milosz
3. Possession, AS Byatt
4. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
5. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

My favourite authors
1. AS Byatt
2. Hilary Mantel
3. Truman Capote
4. Haruki Murakami
5. Virginia Woolf
[Reserve]Peter Hoeg

AS Byatt, with The Children's Book

Both lists are in order of 'favourite'. If I were better at HTML, I would put the list in two columns so you could compare easily (the reader is lazy and AWOL). Then I would also have to do fancy footwork to make sure the columns hold, like pottery - and who has time for that? The only point that correlates is 4, Murakami. The only other author on both lists is AS Byatt. If you had asked me the same question three years ago, only Byatt, Rushdie and Woolf would recur.

Interestingly (to me at least), I read People's Act of Love many years ago, but for all those years, I was terrified of it. I vowed never to lend it out or recommend it. Upon which, I promptly lent it out. Luckily the person never finished it. So it's a late addition, based on a friend's willingness to dive into the abyss with me and reread it. See the many, surprisingly popular posts, bottom right. Not now!

The obvious point is that tastes change. Also (does this really need to be said?) experiences along the way help change said tastes. I think I would have hated Murakami five years ago (with the same passion I hate Michel Hollebeque and Aryan Kaganoff. No, actually, not possible, but a lot).

Czeslaw Milosz

My favourite authors are richly symbolic. Even The Seizure of Power, which is a political and historical novel, about the presence of Russian soldiers in Poland after the First World War. (Regular readers may remember the main character is me - he verbalises the things I cannot, precisely as I would if I could!) Byatt, Murakami and Rushdie... Enough said. This symbolism extends wonderful, core-gripping themes throughout the novels, but makes the novel accessible (to those who don't understand the illuminatingly empty terms such as trope, palimpsest and simulacrum).

They meet (and define) my criteria for good literature - my good, not literary good - who has time for that? Every one of these books is 'contained' - the only loose ends are the ones that trail from the symbols. They are not 'and-they-all-live-happily-ever-after' novels (although the Murakami could be classed as a happy ending; I found it distressing, which is good evidence it was happy). There are no weddings, only funerals - in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, there are only funerals.

Truman Capote, being suitably dramatic

Reading down the lists to flesh out the Point (no, no, keep reading, I know exactly where we're going. Exactly. Exactly.) I want to add notes on why I favourite these books, when I read them, the context in which I read them, how they settled afterwards and why you should favourite them too. But who has time for that? (Except on Goodreads. There's a link up to your left. Finish reading first!)

I just realised, I have ignored non-fiction. I don't often read non-fiction, but there were a few goodies in the pile of boredom - I can't think of a replacement description. I won't list them, because I don't have enough titles and because (don't swear at me! It's unlady/gentleman-like) it's not rankable (stop! I warned you). I live a life of fiction - I mean, imagination - I mean, in my own head - these all sound like committable offences. Ok, fine, I'll list them. (See what I did there? I snuck in a third list and you're complicit.)

• The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr
• The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederik Engels
• The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
• How Proust can Change your Life, Alain de Botton

This paragraph and the next contains sharing but has no link with the previous or next, so you can skip it. Each of these books traces my often frantic attempts to deal with a condition that hadn't been diagnosed yet. Only one dates after my diagnosis (not by me, myself, because this dreamer could think of something way more interesting) and I haven't listed the book, but another by the same author. Why? Because although it made me feel I am not alone, in the real world I am.

Virginia Woolf

The remaining titles were straws to clutch, taught me strategies I could use, even if not entirely healthy ones. They worked at the time. Unfortunately none of these strategies included becoming an olfactory genius and luckily I didn't find myself a soapbox (although read Trotsky too and you will be tempted to teach the Occupy-ers a thing or two about revolution). Done. You can bin the tissues.

Like those all those needy writers before me, the ones I snubbed in the introduction, who really cannot spell or construct a sentence or even use a comma correctly, while I can, I wanted to understand more about Now Self, thinking I knew my Old Self. (I also wanted you to know, because I could have just written this in my journal.) Now I realise I can't know either, because both selves are rolling around, picking up moss (har!) and insects and dirt, and getting chipped and incised as they do. (I'm assuming this is a forest, because of, you know, the moss and dirt, and because I live I life of fiction and forests are the home of myth.)

The assumptions I am making are ones I knew before. I have become more political - no, more revolutionary. Or, more appropriately, I have been able to verbalise my refusal to accept things the way they are. (Just because there are homeless people at intersections, doesn't mean they must or should be there, or that we know their stories. How can a democratic nation, that vows to accept all lifestyles, within reason, not accept or even find out the potential of a people that blanket the nation?! Rant to be continued, when you least expect it.)

Hilary Mantel

After all this, I am going to confess, they are the books I wish I had written. Except the non-fiction. If I ever do that, it's an attempt to win the Nobel. Keep your friends close... and... you know the rest. (A 'no' and 'yes' volleyball game is being staged in my mind. Ok, I concede, the answer is the net, not the teams. Which, yes, is a foul.) Enough about this!

Do you forgive me for my lists? They were useful, no? I found them useful. In consolidating the things I knew about myself. At least, this was an interesting post to write. Again, I found it interesting. I do wonder though, about the nature of posting these lists on the internet. Have I shared too much? To a faceless audience (by which I don't mean robots). This is a blog and not a formal forum. And I own this piece of land (no, Blogger lets me use it gratis. But I haven't been evicted for excessive... sharing yet).

Peter Hoeg

There are some fairly ridiculous things being posted about the growth of the internet in the long-term (seriously, has anyone even looked at a typical growth chart since they were in Grade 10, or even then?). Apparently, we're going to wear clothes made of laser sensors, and have catalogues of every damn thing, down to swimming pools and our own daily movements (exciting, huh?). I'm not worried though, about future AI ... AIers .... reading my 'sensitive' information. Unless they develop the skills of reading metaphor and sarcasm.

Best start reading these books before the robots use them to refuel themselves (oil ran out yonks ago and I'm suspicious of more things running on air and electricity). If you're reading this and I'm already deceased (and you're wearing clothes made of lasers (haha sorry for you)), hide copies of these books quickly. You'll thank me.

A Beautiful Mind

Sometimes, meaning is hidden in what isn't there. You've heard this vague explanation before. I've heard it. Usually from a pretentious sot. Sorry, sirs and ma'ams and doctors and such. But most of what you spew (at least a plantation's worth) means as much as a politician's apology speech. Although, that in itself proves the original premise. ... So what is hidden in a premise about what isn't there? Would there be something there if we weren't here to read it? Folks, I'm bored by the laziness of that last question. You?

Ah-hah! Your boredom has propelled you unawares into my waiting... Point (I don't have real arms here, on my white and your grey screens, and the whole thing would be weird. Is weird).

Ah-hah! What is missing in the title A Beautiful Mind? That isn't rhetorical. It's time to work, you (pl.).

The movie is based on the book, this book we are stripping. So I'm going to assume the title fits the book better than the movie. > Yes, Dr? a pretentious sot is flashing hypertext at the blogger I'm going to interrupt your long and circular speech to agree with you: that you can't use words like 'better' to compare things like this. The title fits the movie in a different way. downloading app to delete hypertext 

'Different', it fits the book differently. (Where 'different' means better. I'm reviewing here, not writing a thesis! Or an apology speech.)

Ah-hah! Have you worked out my interpretation of the title as better applied to the book than the movie? The book is a biography of man who experiences severe psychotic episodes. Oh and by the way he is a brilliant mathematician, a bit like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, without the janitor-ing and without his good looks. Also without his endearing personality (on and off screen).

Aside on that note, Matt Damon casts the same light on Jason Bourne, where in the book he's a wild card. A card covered in blood and mud, and that growls like a creature in the dark.

John Nash is calculating and nasty, according to the book. Not a horrible person, mind. The author, Sylvia Nasar, treats the man with respect and seems almost surprised by what she finds. But (and this is my reading not hers) it is almost as though he is lopsided - his intelligence is a parasite (not a negative but biological term) sucking away at his sense of empathy.

Is this only my reading though? The stereotype of the 'mentally ill' (or 'creative'...) is of some lowborn character in a Greek myth, given the gifts of intelligence and creativity in return for... how to say this... emotions. (There is always a catch.) How romantic, right? Or Romantic? This myth is much easier to translate into a movie and scale the box office. Here's a vague comment: People tick different boxes on the same checklist and we can draw correlations but sometimes the correlations are just superficial and blinkered.

Ah-hah! That is just to wake you up. Diatribe over. That one at least.

Because you have been scribbling away at the answer, let's get to the Point. The title points to one part of the body: the mind; not 'soul' or physique or personality. Because we know what to expect, a tale of genius and 'madness', we don't notice that hiding place. There's another: 'beautiful'. Not usually a term we apply to the sparks within that wrinkled sponge knocking around in our skulls. Ideas, yes; emotions, yes; physique, definitely. Especially since you don't get much prettier than 'beautiful'.

But Nasar, an intelligent and experienced author (the book is 900-and-something pages long, in this size font, with footnotes), must have known what growling creatures live in the title. But she rarely invokes the Romantic myth, and when she dabbles with it, it's to see how it fits. The only section I suspect contains unfairly subjective judgements is the marriage between Nash and his first wife. She suggests their marriage rewarded them both with gifts of social acceptance: she is 'high-born' and he rising among the intellectual elite.

Then there are the opinions of the subjects themselves. Apparently the family withdrew their support for the book during the manuscript phase. Who wants to be described as calculating and nasty (my words) and a social climber? Even if the next breath you are brilliant. That's one of the hazards of biographies. Advice: rather don't authorise your biography, ever.

I called off one diatribe, but here is another. See it as intermission. As a writer, I struggle with the ethics of portraying other people. Even if I stitch on other limbs, I have appropriated something from that person. If a journalist takes a photo of you, she has to get your ok.  I don't, but does that give me the rights? You could argue in certain circumstances that a character constitutes libel. In this case (to refer to previous diatribe), lazy readers will jump straight into the stereotype while looking for the movie-like action.

I watched the movie before the book, which explains my surprise at the tone of the book. Measured, researched, considered and consciously objective. The life of John Nash is not Romantic; it is tragic, in the Aristotelian sense. It is not a story: if it is, it is deeply unsatisfying. And it uses the stereotypes of mental illness as shorthand. There are creatures here so stop looking! I enjoyed the movie, I cried, I can remember shots and scenes from it. But as bibliophiles before me have cried, it's not the book!