Kill Yourself and Count to 10

The South African Defence Force: “Inventing threats to the country and scared of its shadow since the 1950s.” People who speak about the actions of this literal force tend to be threatened (no jokes - I knew someone who received death threats for even considering writing about a NP government-planned assassination) or ugly-eyeballed or murdered, which gives us insight into the paranoia that transcends the ping-pong stupidity of US relations with North Korea. But somehow I think I am less of a threat than the urgency of their psychiatric evaluations, and in any case, I will whisper.

See, the Nationalist government was afraid of more than colour TV, rock music and the second half of the century. It was afraid of *hushed tones* the liberals. History tells us that the greatest threat to a regime is that exact same threat carried out by someone else. In this case, one half of a race divided by language and violence dating back to the 19th century, gained power by voicing its second-citizen-man-ship and retained power by intimidation. Yes, they were afraid of the oppressed because they had felt oppressed so they oppressed. I can appreciate that someone heavily invested in their culture might believe that nurturing culture means some degree of separation. But in hindsight, it is about as practical as democracy or communism. You get that now, right?

But this is heavy-duty psychology here.

Up until the 80s, the SADF enforced conscription. Yes, folks. I always think, what we need is more soldiers. Eighteen-year-old men were decked in khakis, oppressed and repressed, and then given rifles. Why? Because we were fighting a war, fool! Against their ghosts and, oh yes, anyone whose hair didn't pass the pencil test. Another book called An Unpopular War (actually a very popular book) raises the issue of the silence around conscription and our fathers’ roles in the force, but primarily what those young men went through that was so heinous they pretend it never happened.

No one talks about it. I have never had a discussion with anyone about this, unless you count my father telling me that he was exempt because he had a heart condition. Some of the forces were sent into Namibia and Angola, destroying people and villages with, um, inventive (I edited my thesaurus so that 'inventive' means 'horrifying') tactics (not as efficiently as Boko Haram though - 16 villages destroyed in one weekend. 16, two days). Some were sent into townships and villages to stir up trouble that they could blame on the 'insurrectionists' (again, I edited my thesaurus so that it means 'an adult who daydreamed about walking down any street in any area without being asked for his papers as if there were a border post on every corner').

No one talks about conscription. No one.

Well almost no one, otherwise there wouldn't be a post. Kill Yourself and Count to 10 by Gordon Torr is about a specific hernia in a long medical report about the SADF. Scene: Greefwald, a small barracks near the border with Botswana and along the Limpopo River. Premise: handfuls of transgressive liberals, gay men and the mentally ill are shipped here and moulded into wholesome members of society. Near-fatal physical tasks like lifting rubble and boulders from one place to another all day, and leisurely jogs in the bright sun or through thick bush, with some mind games before lunch, being a reasonable way to mould a wayward child, right?

Characters: one haunting egomaniac and possible rapist of a psychiatrist; many enraged, impotent and not well-spoken commanders, sergeants and lieutenants; a riff-raff of erratically lovable misfits ranging from those so liberal they can only be pushed to say that they don’t know any black people so they can’t comment on their moral characters, metrosexuals and repressed homosexuals, and drug addicts, psychotics and potential psychotics. In 2015, this counts as a substantial demographic of the South African population, so they stuffed this one up.

The story is told from the present, by a Greefwald survivor, to a third person who is our narrator. The survivor, Lloyd, wants to drum up support for a lawsuit against Levin, the psychiatrist, who is being expedited from Canada. Levin masterminded the camp based on outdated research and with funding from a government spooked by long-legged spiders. The camp is a bit like the retreat in which Sandra Bullock lifts a horse's hock to prove she is better, except the aim is to break you not free you so I shudder to think about the poor horse. A former Greefwald doctor pops up to add perspective on Lloyd’s character.

I hope I have this right. The story is dense and mostly innuendo, so I gave up trying to understand the chronology or characters about midway. (I convinced myself I was living in the moment. In a book about the past.) It is divided into chapters headed by names of people and places. Sometimes the chapters are one page long and cuddle some heavy plot-point that is never alluded to again (or that I could follow - always blame the author, you - have I taught you nothing?). I couldn't match places to people’s names to characters to contexts, so I mostly drifted along, picking up flotsam and fashioning it into a cabin.

What makes my cabin pretty pathetic is that it is made of an incredible story told by an expert writer. His images and constructs are slick, and his sentences and paragraphs well-crafted. (Don’t get a big head, now.) I imagine someone wandering in, saying the book is too long and whittling away at it, so well that they have translated it into a dialect of very concise, very urgent English that turns this book into flotsam on a sea that I pick up and fashion into a cabin (I almost wrote ‘sandwich’) because I can't tell that the pieces are part of a puzzle that is actually a map to land.

All this flotsam bobs around the conclusion. Often, I feel like the writer has spent so long on the rest of the book that the conclusion is, well, far gone. (Maybe I am projecting.) Too far gone. They are so sick of the tripe they have expelled that they wrap everything up with the first piece of rope they are given. Now, this writer ties knots so good they cannot be unpicked and the rest of the book is bound separately by string not rope and the parcels are accidentally sent to different continents. 

Two major ideas play out in the last thirty pages. I want to reset my reading to find the links to the ideas that are right up my street (don't worry, I don't need a pass), but that’s like scouring the Arctic Ocean without a wetsuit. The first idea is psychological and gives insight into the divide between what was planned and what did happen, and so, so much more. The second idea is so extraordinary that it mows the prime neuroses of the SADF and its decision-makers with lime into the flora of the Lowveld. I wish I could just tell you what these ideas are, but spoilers are on the ‘don’t’ side of the bibliophile code of conduct - teasing you with them, however, is in the ‘you may’ column. Perhaps we could play Jacky Hangman? (That in itself is a double clue.)

Word 1: l_ _ _. 

Word 2: _ s _ _ _ _ n _ _ _.

There is a third idea I can talk about. The narrator mentions that the camp was on the site of Mapungubwe, a thousand-year-old Shona kingdom along the Limpopo. The apartheid government was by the 70s so invested in its delusion that it needed to invest in maintaining its delusion. Here was evidence that the land had already been ‘claimed’ - yikes, let me get you a crane to lift those reparations - and that African people had a history of civilisation that the NP government had said didn't exist as they broke champagne bottles and heads against the borders of the so-called homelands - we'll have to make multiple trips with that crane.

Traitors to their archaeological profession (under the 'don't' of their code is 'knowingly fudge history'. I am pretty sure about this) uncovered thousands of artifacts, then locked them in a room at Wits University and literally threw away the key (someone found it, fyi – the room, not the key). I am taking bets that they also played target practice with or made ashtrays out of some pieces. With decades of practice in self-protection (my thesaurus reads 'delusion'), the NPers did a good job of burying history. Today, I know as much about Mapungubwe as I do about those decades of conscription – although unfortunately, I know more than I want to about the types of atrocities the SADF's victims suffered and how the government justified them via the TRC, which is a whole other can of worms.

One last clue about the clues in this can. I know intelligent people who believe the Kingdom of Mapungubwe is a myth drummed up by well-meaning liberals, based on tenuous evidence collected by easily manipulated academics. Counter-counter-history *knowing look*. Which would perhaps be more effective if the liberals publicised their discoveries instead of building casinos and BnBs on the bones. But then again, Jewish elders made and buried fake dinosaur bones… in… everywhere, and  invented carbon dating and convinced everyone it had something to do with time - and Greefwald was a constructive attempt to rehabilitate deviants. Where 'constructive' means that the deviants lug rocks (artifacts?) around like Sisyphus and his eagle.

*sarcasm hand*

I should know better

I should know better. Haven't I been down this road? And haven't I dragged you with me, just to hear you scream? (Solidarity is what I mean. Scream in solidarity.) Suffer for your art. Lesson learnt. Do what you love. Learnt and burnt. (It rhymes. Stop thinking so much.) Language is a fickle thing, swayed by plays on words. Live what you love and vice versa. Maybe I enjoy testing platitudes, maybe I am just otherwise and maybe there is a teeny tiny origami-ed singularity of... hope... living in a swamp of nihilism. Unlikely, right? Maybe it's just a stagnant pond.

I have struck out on my own, hypothetically earning money by writing. Yes, for a living. Yes, hypothetically for a living. Yes, I know. I should know better.

For those you who are new to said screaming, a publisher in Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller explains, unasked, that a reader should never be a publisher. He leaves his claim hanging, for you to fill in the gaps. For me, it was a) realising that most of the manuscripts you thumb through are just that: a dirty thumbprint as well as an exercise in egoism - you are not discovering Yeats or Morrison; you are packaging products that are shelved and bought and shelved, and to be followed by the sequel, and b) the previous point (I got ahead of myself) about packaging.

See, words and books are the altar at which I scrutinise and decode and generally worship with the nit-pickiness of the editor I am. I am an editor and writer. In the most fundamental existential and religious sense (although I am told this is not possible, I live to be otherwise). A career is something you do to fund your existential crises - and that discord is exactly how you come to be good at your job (and, to be crass, to make piles of money you can use to line your published novels with).

Hang on. Something is out of sync in this tirade. What is it? Is it my bleeding wounds? My rampaging cynicism? My unfed facetiousness?

Bear with me, now. Perhaps this is an old song, taught to me by a long-dead bird (it may be under my bed cuddled by a self-satisfied cat named Selina the Psychopath). Perhaps I am older, bolder and uglier, better poised to defend my altar without necessarily dying in the process. This cannot be. If it is, my days and nights will run together (ok, that began yonks ago); I will hum while I do chores; I may actually finish my novel and at some point I will be... content? Sorry, I dropped my laptop as the shivers paralysed my motor skills. 

A writer is nothing without discontent. Every story has a complication or infinite; every award-worthy literary novel has complication, anti-climax and a resolution that is both unknowable and for you to find out. All writers are cynical, vaguely hostile, isolated and definitely not in any way wealthy. Or even just head-above-water not-broke. Or so volumes of novels and biographies, and degrees of terrabytes of movies tell us.

Virginia Woolf or Marianne Keyes? That is my choice? Oh deity of my absolutely fictional altar, I am just going to hide out under it for a while with you, if that's ok? I don't take up much space. Especially when I have dehydrated myself with hours of bawling.

I still protest the word plays that skip like Little Bo Peeps through this post. Partly because that is just tempting Murphy (remember last week when I left my house keys in my car, which was being serviced, or when I forgot my wallet at home and was already in a queue and had to beg the parking office to let me out, or when I left my lights on at work and had to call for a jump start at 23:00 on a Sunday evening? I have seen him in pyjamas, folks. Pyjamas) and partly because life is more complicated than seven words (which in itself nullifies that clause).

Ok, ok, since you are that insistent I will crawl out from underneath this altar and write everything and only enjoy it a medium amount of much. I will also desist from the crazy meandering of this post.  I will stop crying if you stop screaming. I will not overanalyse how much I do enjoy writing (insurance is more interesting that you think, you). I will do all of this, but I will take my imaginary deity with me. We have a novel to finish. And it needs to be complicated and unresolved.

Done counted, Nano

Say that in a stereotyped and offensive ghetto accent, and you be knowing that this is a dig at the world. Like Leonardo trying to throw himself in front of the Titanic. The Sundance Kid stopping a train. Every sod plodding from pavement to pavement. The world be schooled. By a novel - my novel  - my Nano novel - c'mon, you know it isn't that simple. Simple is a deception. In this case, a deceptive introduction to my blogpost. Read on. There's a novel in there, although it is more a sod plodding than Romeo or a cowboy.

As per my last, cobwebbed post, Nanowrimo is a month-long, world-wide premise in which to write a 50 000 word novel. That is definitely a deceptive explanation (rule of thumb: assume everything simple is deceptive. Also everything anyone has ever seen or done and maybe the universe). You (would-be author of Water for Elephants, which, yes, was a Nano novel) sign up online, where you are part of a community of coffee-addicted variations of the writer archetype. You stake out and mine your claim via a dashboard, which shows stats like your word count per day. (Yes, thanks, I get it, computer gnome. I am inadequate.)

You can ONLY start on the 1st (no head starts, fools) and finish by the 30th (late validations have to be done personally). You have to write from scratch - no existing novels and such, because we all have a lame one nursing itself somewhere. Every day you update your word count (no, not an imagined one 'cause then you are just a fool wasting time you could spend writing). Your dashboard updates the stats, so you know for example that it will take you 20 more days to finish (and you're on the 21st), and you have 10 920 words to go and an average daily word count of 3.

The overriding and oversimplified objective is to adapt to the discipline of being a writer. A real one. Not just a wannabe one with a lame novel. Contrary to legend, the trick to being a writer is like any other profession: you work hard. Especially since society in general has no respect for copyright and actively views it as an occasion to 'stick it to The Man'.

Let me duck out of Nano to explain something: Copyright, like general labour law, is a system to reward artists for their intellectual property. Without it, we rely on government subsidy and censorship is um bad. Do I need to explain?

Writers (and musicians and artists) sell their copyright, along with their book, to publishers, because (no matter who tells you otherwise) a self-published author does not usually have the resources to edit, typeset, print (if they need to), distribute, market and monitor sales of their book. In return, the author receives a cut of the sales value (net, mind, not gross). The books that do sell, pay my rent. Or not. So thanks for believing the fools who tell you piracy is a moral necessity.

You can see the link, right? I have to work harder to make less or I stop writing and find something less rewarding but more lucrative - no, that means something else is more rewarding. My argument falters like that of intellectual property pirates.

And... we're back!

To finish your novel on time, you must write 1 600 words a day. I am a trained and experienced writer, and I can usually push out 500 words a half hour or 1 200 a hour. Should I wait while you do the maths? That is about 1,5 hours a day. Hours stolen from the hours you are not at work. Stop cooking? Stop cleaning? Stop sleeping? Drink flagons of potent coffee (basically grounds)? Lookee, you really are a writer! (Here's the secret: the stereotype has always been true because writing requires discipline. More so now that everyone and their pets think they are writers. Lookee, I just pounded on these keys and then Kindle bought it and 3 people read it!)

Focus, focus.

For the first three years, I retired early: before 10 000 words (twice), before 30 000 words and before I started. Even then, I was fairly disciplined about writing for at least half an hour a day. Sylvia Plath wrote 1 500 words a day. (Ya' know before she bought into the patriarchal system and her life went avocado-shaped.) That fact has always inspired me. As you will know if you read her letters and journals, she was prodigious - far more prodigious than one novel would suggest.

This time, what with being part-time unemployed, I had an hour and a half to spare, and I was searching for a purpose. I needed a win. Also a cool pseudonym for some things I need to say. (In the end, I used my real one. Some things gotta be said and someone gotta back them up (and not back down. Fools). Adopt ghetto accent again.)

30 000 and then 42 000 were the trickiest. Around 30 000, I realised that my joke of about 20 000 words was true: my novel had literally lost its plot, it was descending into a teen romance (don't worry, I squashed this pandering to the patriarchy by redirecting her energy) and (now this is unlike me) all description had been replaced with dialogue and facial expressions. Dialogue? What newly creviced crevice of my soul is this? Luckily, I still didn't have a plot. I defy Aristotle, too.

At 42 000, I was close but so far. I started to just spew rubbish, pretending to realign the plot and develop characters and even link it to a previous lame novel licking itself right under my chair. I jumped from section to section because I couldn't remember what had happened and I didn't have time to read back. This one squashed itself, thank goodness. I had no clue how to do it myself.

Sitting in a coffee shop, on my sixth cup of the day and with the sugar of a chocolate danish animating my fingers, I pounded out 5 000 words with only a brief paralysis before the last hour and (I confess) during most of it.

As I looked to the corner of the screen, I yelped and did a dance in my chair that was mostly just moving my hands up and down, ghetto style. (I looked cool, fools. Haters.) I copied the creature and pasted it on my dashboard. I pressed 'Validate' with shaking hands (my hands shake normally. I think they are alive and trying to escape my body, digit by digit). The browser burbled and (really quickly especially for SA's bandwidth) congratulated me. I had written 50 250 words (of dialogue). I scrolled down... to claim my... badge. And... discounts on merchandise. Err...

None of the people exhaustedly trying to suppress the energy of their tiny people turned to acknowledge me, not even my impressive in-the-chair ghetto dancing.

It ended the way it began (and had never ended before). Quietly. To the aroma of coffee and chocolate croissants. I have 50 000 words, although not a novel, contrary to Nano's hopes. Please, you have read (at least this) my blogposts. You should know that I employ most of the words in the dictionary, instead of just the word dictionary. I barely even have a middle - just dialogue and facial expressions (read the sample on my profile and you will understand). Halfway through (calculate that however you like) I realised that I had a solution to the inertia of my first novel. I had the plot and it had been sitting on my nose like a freckle all along (it's difficult to pick out).

Oh, are you waiting for something? Oh, right, you want to know what the plot is. Dear fools, then you wouldn't buy the novel (or pirate it and therefore rob me of all acknowledgement of this incredible achievement) and I will continue to be partly unemployed and eventually my service provider will rob me of data because it doesn't believe in not getting money for its service and I won't have any. Thieves!

To convince you to ghetto dance with me, I dare you to Nano it up next year. Feel the muscle burn in your brain and fingers, the paralysis, the aches from sitting in a chair on your legs for too long (bad habit). Feel the Nano. And then, let's talk international property law and why I should be your very employed agent.

Nanowrimo: the countdown

What month is it? Yes, November. Yes, a countdown to religious holidays involving fake trees and gold tinsel. I bet you didn't guess correctly! Oh wait, if you didn't guess from the title of this post, please shut down your browser and never come here again. Yes, it's Nanowrimo!

For the (majority of) people who don't know this is an acronym, it is. It stands for: National Novel Writing Month. Because we are all one nation on the internet? No, because we aren't, unless you are a first-world hipster looking at everything through rose-tinted Google Glass. You can keep reading, but only if you take that headset off, because you look less like a sci-fi hero than a real-life dork and not the cool kind.

I am guessing it started as an American campaign and went global. Lack of foresight, but the alliteration works. The campaign encourages people to write by creating communities. Every November, aspiring authors log in to their accounts (most have forgotten their passwords and need to reset - not me, of course. Of course. No, not me) and fill in the details of their project: title, summary, extract and cover.

There are a couple of rules:

1. It has to be a new novel, not one you have already started.
2. You cannot copy and paste ten times to reach the word count (this seems obvious but if not, time to, yes, shut down your browser).
3. You 'win' when you reach 50 000 words. You win, I win, we all win. Like a marathon where we all get medals for finishing, at which point I'm wondering why I am putting myself through this.

We got here sooner than I expected. I signed up in 2010. I lost in 2010, 2011 and 2012. I didn't even try in 2013. I lost because a week into the marathon, I asked myself why I was putting myself through this.

Why? you ask. Why do you writers pretend writing is so difficult? We all write every day: emails, application forms, notes. Yes, you do (and may I point out, from an editor's point of view, that if you didn't have spell and grammar check, your 'writing' would be illegible. And even then people can't tell the difference between 'its' and 'it's'). I am all for you writing 50 000 words of emails. Please don't send it to me, but go ahead.

The Most Difficult Thing about writing is resisting the urge to purge the file or set the pages alight. This urge should take hold of you at about word 14. If as a first-time writer you make it to 4 000 words, I will actually read your (pending) 50 000 word email.

I have been writing, properly, for ten years. I still have to wrestle that urge and chain it under my desk. Like David Copperfield, he will free himself, but it gives me a headstart. I first tracked his movements by writing stream-of-consciousness style for 30 minutes a day. No lifting pen from paper except to turn the page (and unless you print and between words, but you get it). It takes about 20 minutes to start writing fluidly.

Where do you find 30 minutes a day? I don't know, it's your schedule. If you are serious about this, you will quit gym and write instead. And potentially die early of heath problems. Which would make you a bona fide writer. I used to write first-thing in the morning (Jessica Simpson swears by this), but I am not a morning person. Unless you count waking up at 11. So now I write in the evening.

Sylvia Plath (of whom I am such a fan that I hate Ted Hughes with a passion) wrote 1 500 words a day. She started the habit late in high school and published a number of poems and short stories in college. 1 500. That was the length of some of my essays in undergrad.

So ten years of wrestling the monster of writer's block later, I can write about 500 words per half hour, sometimes more if I don't edit. That's an hour to an hour and a half. Sorry, how long did you say it took you to write 4 000 words? Because it just took me two days.

In other words, writing is a discipline. Write the same amount of words at the same time in the same place. Be prepared to do this for years and years. Train yourself to wrestle that monster. In addition, you will need to do research and be prepared to burrow into the bits of yourself you wouldn't stare down in a lit room. Or maybe you get it right first time. It happens. I hate you.

We have bumped into Nanowrimo again. It is November, after all. One of the functions of Nano (apart from creating a community) is to train you to do all of those things above (I don't need to recap do I?). I have gone through periods of writing religiously (I mean that word seriously - if I had a single belief, it would be in words) and of letting the words build up until I am a little volcano. So Nano is definitely worthwhile.

But a week has always been my limit. If you do the maths, you need to write about 1 600 words a day to finish on time. Remember: an hour and a half. I used to work a lot. For various reasons that even therapy won't fully explain. Identity, self-worth, self-destruction. That is a bleak path, dear reader. Now I know better, although knowing isn't always understanding. So finding that hour and a half when you work at least 10 hours a day and don't eat lunch is difficult.

So my strategy had two parts:

1. Start strong: write as much as you can in the first week.
2. Continue strong on the weekends, when you have time.

I mentioned I never made it past number 1? Except for 2012, when I wrote 28 000 words, which is about 17 days. It sounds like the home stretch, but it isn't, it really isn't.

You can see this coming, can't you? Or you've already checked my profile. Eight days in and I average close to 2 000 words per day. A fist bump and a happy dance. That is more than 15 000 words. In one week. One week, my friends, just over an hour a day. One hour.

What did writing replace? Not gym. I don't do gym. I just make promises I haven't kept yet. Well, I went out on my own, business-wise, and am planning a little sum'ing sum'ing. Stay tuned for me crowdsourcing your wallet. Technically, writing counts as part of my work day. Since my work day is 10 hours, I am just retrieving a couple of them.

While I work, that monster has a seat next to me, but he is on the edge of it, watching the words spill on to the electronic page. Sometimes he helps me find a synonym. He also reminds me to eat lunch.

I think this is the year I am going to win Nanowrimo. I have no illusions that this novel is publishable. The story is going nowhere and comprised mostly of dialogue. I can't think of names for most of the characters and unravelling the pronouns would be a full-time job. But it is giving me more insight into my first (and real) novel. (Which is, oddly, the premise of that novel.) The novel will have six dedications and Sylvia Plath is the first and Nano the last.

The Luminaries

I finished Madaddam. I don't want to talk about it for a while. Which probably means, at the most, four days. Since then, predictably, I have been in a book rut, with reading block and written wordititis (official diagnosis - look it up, after I have created the Wikipedia entry). Granted, this may or may not have something to do with the books themselves. Spoiler alert (post-alert, but you should know better when reading this blog).

Particularly The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. It isn't a trilogy but it feels like one.

It is beautifully written. So beautiful that it may have been written during the late-ish 19th century. Which is the point, because it is set in the 19th century in a gold mining town in New Zealand, which is arbitrary, unless you're a Post-modernist adopting a vintage voice for effect. The effect being full blown reading block.

As I write this, I am conscious that Mr Murakami sits on my dresser, carving a space for itself in the wood using gravity and its density. That's less a block than terror.

In varsity, my least favourite courses were on Romantic and Victorian literature. (Predictably though, I enjoyed Gothic literature - Wuthering Heights and Turn of the Screw. Ghosts as the projections of psychological neuroses and social dysfunctions, notably patriarchy? Strangely, I am iffy about Jane Eyre for the same reasons, but passionate about Wide Sargasso Sea which was a Post-modernist feminist 'prequel' to Jane Eyre. Basically the wife is victimised which is a prerequisite for moral indignation. Go feminism.)

Back my Point, which is a winding, perhaps circular path, and perhaps just me plowing through bush until I hit my toe on something. I am barefoot. Yes, ok, carry on. The prose of The Luminaries is as winding as my posts. I am 17% through my Kindle version. So far:

A man wanders into a hotel bar in a town with one main road and a jail. The men already in the room have gone to great lengths to keep everyone out of the room and they're not very good at disguising this. (When you fake-read a paper, move your eyes. Amateurs.)

Said man is interrogated and brought into their confidence.

So they embark on a story in a story (we're on 12% at this point and I think, thank goodness, the narrator is finally going to introduce the conflict).

But NO! We learn about everyone's business in this town and very little about the important stuff. Or what I presume to be important, because it could turn out the missing dress case is the important stuff. I don't care. Mislead me. Just mislead me with something.

See, what I disliked about Pope, Coleridge and Wordsworth (I never even touched Swift because I could feel it was boring from a distance. Wish I had had the same premonition about Heart of Darkness) was that they padded. Seriously, that's a cloud. Your poetry, like a cloud, drifts over and above the poem without actually having a relationship with the poem, except to the extent that it blocks out the sun sometimes. The sun also being tangential to your existence fyi.

My argument is tenuous, I see that. But equally tenuous is the link between my attention and the author's waffling.

You obviously noticed I said books earlier (take the credit for being observant, you). I never finished V. I never finished it because it was too soon after The Goldfinch; if I didn't read it for one day I forgot what had happened and had to reread the fifty pages before it, and because, I confess, when I reread the synopses, I realised I had no idea what was going on. That disappointment was like thinking you understood a sentence in Ulysses and realising you had transposed two words in your head and it makes no sense now, but with less street cred.

On the up side, I realised I don't just read for themes and characters - insofar as they relate to themes - as I have always believed. I do care about plot. I want an introduction, conflict, exposition, climax and resolution. I want to be tossed around by the tide in addition to being conscious of the chill of the waves, the foam in my nostrils and that I can't feel my toes or fingers.

The Luminaries was nominated for the Mann Booker Prize and V is a classic. So, the books themselves are not bad. I assume. Book people aren't easily bribed, because there's no benefit for the briber. I can see the value of Pope, Coleridge and Wordsworth (not Swift or Conrad - the cartoon version of Gulliver's Travels is creepy (why do people not see this?) and Conrad cannot write (why does no one see this?)), but I just don't value them.

I have always said it's dangerous to review a book before you have read it. Or made it past 20%. But then I wouldn't have anything to blog about. Look forward to my retraction. Or the repetition of certain metaphors, because as a writer, I believe extended metaphors are important. Not more important than plot but more important than spelling (Word can fix that).

Here is my conundrum (not my Point): my novel is almost entirely observations and walking to and from places. Various characters never reappear and others merely haunt the novel. I don't pad, because there is nothing to pad, except my own interests. Is that daring or uninspired? Exposition or just conclusion? Meh, as long as no one finds this blogpost, they will never know and hopefully some misguided professor will assign my novel and pretend she understands it for street cred. I won't believe her unless she compares me with Swift (not Conrad, never Conrad)).

PS. The cover pics won't load so you will have to do without.

Harvest

How did I find this book? Did I download it or did I copy it from somewhere (I'll explain this criminal activity later)? Was it in my Amazon-generated list of recommendations? This is how it feels to read Harvest by Jim Crace. It feels a bit like reading Oryx and Crake (or have you forgotten this quickly?!). It lingers, like overpowering aftershave that wafts into a thin note of something cool and shadowy. Obviously shadowy does not mean happy tralala handstand here, because you know how I feel about happy. Suspicious.

I also don't know why I didn't blog about it when I finished it. I read it a few months ago, in that bleak period when I was too tired even to read. Yet I read Harvest. I couldn't not read Harvest.

Am I the only one whose relationships with books sometimes don't have words? Or is it just the nature of tapping away at a keyword (the 'j' button of which is stuck, I think with something sugary) without human contact? I mean, if it's just me, I don't have to use words, do I? And if I do, well, that's a new problem that requires me leaving my apartment.

Apart from Oryx and Crake, it also characterised my reading of People's Act of Love and Mara and Dann. Which if you read back (although I don't think I used labels back them so you'll just have to stumble blindly through 400 and something posts. Good luck), gutted me. Not only because I missed the characters and narrative style, but because my friends had just kicked me out of their snowy or verdant or dusty lives and I must have hit my head because when I woke up I was here. But here doesn't fit like there did.

Make sense? No, I didn't think so. I'm not sure I understood that. But then I did hit my head so I have an excuse.

Most of Harvest is almost unbearably creepy. It reminded me of The Village, except after a little while, you don't have time to worry about the Others - one eye is watching your neighbours in case they set fire to your house and the other is watching the gentlemen of the farm because people are going missing (well, not missing, you know where some of them are: inside the house), your brain is thinking about this idyllic but harsh life on the farm and in the village (where your neighbours are so welcoming) and your heart is bleeding for the trespassers who are now undergoing a punishment that seems like a hanging except you live and people throw squishy tomatoes at you.

Sorry, is that a bit much in one gulp? Well, that's the point, although I'm sure you realised that. Right?

Okay, now, spoilers exiled. Within the first few pages, you meet the narrator, a villager on a late 19th century farm, as he tries to convince us the villagers live autonomously. Feudal system aside, he was not born in the village, but married into it. (No one seems worried about interbreeding and the rather stupid children they seem to be producing.) So his neighbours are wary of him. Who knows what he could do?! Set fire to his own house?

Rather than being wary of him right now, they become wary of a camp of trespassers. Apparently setting a fire in that part of never never land means you are settling there, like a smoke signal (har!). The villagers and gentleman of the farm traipse towards the smoking fire to dissuade its lighters. No one appears to be home so they destroy everything like children unmaking a fort into a mess their mother has to tidy up. But no, there is a beautiful woman. Now the men stand around and gulp.

Then, like the trespassing rats they are, two men step in to help her. Her family, we can assume. One threatens the gentleman on his horse, the woman spits at him and the men are captured but the woman runs away. Some of the men go after her and you know enough to rock on your heels thinking she best run and hide like a deer. One that survives.

There is another gentleman on the farm, not propertied but an artist slash surveyor. Although he may just be an artist wishing he were surveyor because he needs the money. He goes after her too, but instead of feeling relief, you hope he runs and hides like a blerry rabbit.

Some feeling you can't name because it's hiding in the shadows is now tumbling around and making you dizzy. You don't like this situation, which is solved by everyone leaving the forest. Trespassers (minus one) in tow. No wait! There is a gallows-type structure set in some ruins of something, someone pulls out two nooses (neese?), they point the men's heads through until their chins are resting on the ropes and they are forced to stand on tiptoes. Then the villagers walk away. They intend to come back later and throw things at the men but then there is a violent storm and they snuggle up next to fires.

The narrator, not being a real villager, does come out to help them - and there I have to stop recounting that plot line because I almost spoiled it. I can tell you the woman is narry to be found, which is either a good or a bad thing. Obviously. But you don't know which to hope for. The artist is also missing. And all the men are missing the woman and all the women are furrowing their brows.

Plot line B involves the gentleman of the farm's deceased wife having relatives who suddenly decide to become farmers. The farm is technically theirs, but they are complete jerks who act like bouncers at a club where the club is anything that touches the same earth as them. They have now arrived to assess the property, because they would like to evict the villagers and turn the land to grazing. Basically replacing the villagers with cows. Bad joke. It's a metaphor for industrialisation and the disregard for the wellbeing of other humans - well, not a metaphor, it's an example.

The narrator has some suspicions about these men, but it doesn't really matter because the villagers can see the writing on the wall and they are hightailing it anywhere else but there. Well, obviously not anywhere else, but somewhere within a couple of hundred kilometres where they can make a living without being beaten by these specific men.

To recap, my dear readers, we are in the village from The Village, but the red people are hiding in the hearts of the villagers and the nooses and the entire bodies of the men who repossess the farm. Some more red things are hiding in the spaces left by the woman and the artist, who allegedly has led the exodus from the farm, but without taking his stuff.

On the bright side, you learn a lot about subsistence farming. Because the narrator is relatively new to the area (having parents who aren't cousins), he relates the learning curve of trying to fit in among these people who don't trust him (because his parents weren't cousins).

Jokes aside, this part of the story balances (and maybe draws) out the unsettled feelings that do handstands in the corner of your vision. The way the narrator describes the world around him helps you to understand why he lives among these people. There is also his sense of loyalty - he grew up with the gentleman and has never left his side. He is honest about his guilt and failure to stand up for the trespassers, his concern, and his sense of self-preservation - and his lust and jealousy.

Harvest is more than a horror story. It is more than an example: it is a metaphor for the changing times, from the pastoral to the industrial, the sense that no one explains what is going one, but someone keeps switching the signposts around. And just removes some of them. As a result, you too are wary, looking into every shadow of the story, hoping to see the young woman or a matchstick you can use to halt the wrecking ball on the horizon.

Some of the mysteries have answers and others don't - not in the way detective series have led us to understand 'answer'. I suppose even the alleged answers are mysterious. I'll bet that you feel a little unsettled and a little curious based on only a few paragraphs that are mostly facetious jokes, right? What did it for me are the tortures inflicted on those men for silly infringements. You're a vagrant, just like these people are about to become, and these people attack your shelter and wife. What are you, especially as a man in that time, going to do? Threaten their stick-thin and therefore breakable fibula is what.

These jokes are a way of dealing with what I don't understand, which is almost everything in this novel. The extent to which I am trying to deal with it is a verification of how little can be understood (which is tautological, but this seems fitting). Harvest is a beautifully told novel in which the narrator and his voice fit as perfectly as a novelist can write them. You know as much as he does - what he knows is what he has learnt and what he feels he needs to explain, and what he doesn't he still feels he needs to uncover. (And here we are at the beginning again.)

MaddAddam: Part 1 of 2

My introduction to the works of Margaret Atwood was Oryx and Crake. I used to work at a bookshop which hosts a huge sale every quarter. It is a good place to pick up hardcover first editions. (Sorry, peeps, but if you can't find anything good on sale, it's because the staff nabbed them while they unpacked boxes.) Deckle edges (when the page edges are rough and uneven) are a red flag. This habit is mostly for novelty value than for any misplaced hope that this one book of thousands will become valuable. Anyway, I have this book and I have read it.

Let's retreat even further in time and test your patience. Because it is entertaining to imagine anyone is reading this and that you are on tenterhooks to see where I am going with this.

I read Dorothy Lessing's The Golden Notebook in high school (y'know, as normal learners spend their free time) and adored it. It opened up a new world of politicised literature for me, as a natural and nurtured feminist, although I didn't know where to find more of the same or how to exercise it.

Later I would read AS Byatt and fall in love for the same reason - together with her representation of the post-Modern psyche: by definition ultimately and completely apathetic. The last few pages of Possession sealed the deal.

Around this time, a friend was surprised that I hadn't yet read any Margaret Atwood. 'As a feminist of your own devising, I would think you would have devoured her work.' (Or something as cultured.) I am otherwise like that, as you know (as above), so I didn't read any just because he said I should (a reflection on our friendship, too). Until, while rooting around in my collection of books, I found the book and couldn't resist those deckle edges (they get me every time).

I was ambivalent. I was also confused. I was ambivalent because I was confused. The ideas of Oryx and Crake rooted around in the recesses of my brain and unravelled things I did not want to see in the dark of an alley or in the light of day. (An older me is more comfortable in alleys than sunlight.) So I ravelled those things up again while Oryx, Crake and Snowman-the-Jimmy weren't looking, and packed those three characters along with them.

Burying them didn't help. They kept popping up in my mind, while I was thinking about genetically modified anything (not often), overgrown grass (more often than you'd think), apocalypse (very often), the destructiveness of the human species (very, very often) and things that have little to do with the book, like apples. Each time, I would wander down one of the many paths in that greenhouse and whisk myself out when I realised what half of me was doing while the other half wasn't looking.

Excuse the pun but it grew on me (actually, don't excuse me - that's a pretty good one). One day I realised that other half have shoved my dislike over onto the 'like' side and closer to 'craving'. Muttering under my breath, I read others, like The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale. To be honest, I can't remember what any of them are about. They weren't Oryx and Crake. They were too packed with ideas and my brain kept overheating (it does that. Even a bibliophile has limits).

Lucky me, Oryx and Crake was about to become... wait for it... a trilogy. Even an author needs to make money. Thank you, JRR Tolkien. Again, I was ambivalent. I don't like being coerced into spending my money (although, let's be honest, that's how capitalism works). But I craved more.

I caved and read The Year of the Flood, fairly recently, although it had been out for several years. Hammer - nail - head. Down to the squirming ambivalence. Except, as I mentioned, the older me is far more comfortable with squirming and finds it more comforting than the safety of ignorance. Oryx, Crake and Snowman-the-Jimmy didn't play as crucial a role, appearing mostly as backstory. While Oryx and Crake was set after the pandemic that wipes out a very destructive human race, The Year of the Flood is set around it.

Now came MaddAddam! I waited and waited for the Kindle version but eventually couldn't handle the suspense and went with the hardcopy. Which poses a problem because I have two of the three in hardcopy and other as .mobi. Hmmm I also object to the waste of paying for something twice. Hmmm

Conundrum aside, I am halfway through. This book knits together the two stories, in a different narrative style: one character takes centre stage. His story is told as a story to his lover who turns it into a (almost Biblical) story for a species of not-but-almost-human beings, who are depicted as childlike in their ignorance but are probably better suited to the world, honestly.

All of these stories tell the story of how pre-pandemic society became further divided than ours (pre-pre-pandemic) into haves and have-nots, both brainwashed (sometimes violently) into maintaining the status quo. Except, as we all know, sometimes wolves make their way into the herd and these wolves were called the MaddAddamites, and named themselves after animals we have made extinct. Whatever, because the pandemic happened and now they're telling stories in the aftermath.

No spoilers there, I promise.

I haven't finished the book so cart - horse, y'know, but based on The Year of the Flood, there is none of the same crypticness and magic of Oryx and Crake. That book punched me in my stomach, because Snowman-the-Jimmy's story was impossible to fully untangle. It also ended with another punch that physically made me blink and try to block the memory out. Although there have been moments of unveiling, where clues have fitted together, there hasn't been the same kind of (almost Biblical) revelation.

That said, I can't get enough of Zeb's story in MaddAddam, where he (so far) plays an incidental role in the pandemic, although we already know he is critical after it. (It's always the people prepared to hit under the belt that survive in a pandemic. Remember this, peeps, when you play guns and crossbows in your minds.) This is exactly the reason I am slowplaying my reading. (No, not to learn how to use a crossbow, because I am comfortable with the under-the-belt people doing it for me.) Because, based on my experience of Oryx and Crake, I will have to manage the craving after I have put it down.

Forget the apocalypse, this is a far more important (and imminent) problem.

All of the books are narratives within narratives: told first by the character (almost self-consciously because they are pretty much telling their stories to themselves, old loud, which is not considered crazy in an apocalypse), and then revised for an audience, even if we aren't always privy to the telling. Although AS Byatt hits - nail - head with Possession about post-Modern society, universally people enjoy stories. In a story, you are the maker of your own destiny.

Stories lead you into the garage of your mind, to topple the piles of things you prefer to ignore. That may be as damaging in the lead-up to a pandemic than how it is executed. With stories, and in the toppling, we imagine the means of our destruction into being.