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literature, What I have read

4096 what I’ve read : Edward St-Aubyn

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Photo: abandoned boat in Pohara, like the poor little Patrick of the story

St-Aubyn, Edward, Patrick Melrose, Novels, 2012, Picador, 680p.

I bought this very lengthy book in English, a few years ago, after watching the TV series, Patrick Melrose, whose main character was masterfully played by Dominic Cumberbatch,  impersonating  an addict .

I didn’t know much at the time about Edward St-Aubyn, but the series had got me interested  and  when I found this book at the Nelson  Book Fair, I felt like giving it a go. What a good idea it was  because the book, covered a lot more than the series, in fact,  four of the five novels in the Patrick Melrose saga: Never mind,  Bad News, Some hope and Mother’s Milk, so much more than the series, which focused on Bad News.

The complete book (minus the last book, At last) brings together four semi-autobiographical novels by the author, who grew up in the modern British aristocracy, and  deals with, in addition to a merciless description of this privileged society,  the permanent evil caused by incest, child abuse,  drug abuse and addiction.

In Never mind, he action takes place in a mountain village in the South-east of France, in the family’s summer residence, when Patrick  is 5 years old. His terribly cruel father and gentle alcoholic mother welcome several guests to a dinner party. We are also presented, as a bonus,  the state of mind of the British aristocracy (quite fascinating) and the courage of Patrick Melrose/Edward St-Aubyn, who faces his father to stop the abuse. In  Bad News, Patrick is a 25-year-old heroin addict. Over a period of 24 hours, we see Patrick coming to New York to collect his father’s ashes and in the process provides  the reader with  a very fine depiction of the mindset of an addict.  After All is set in England a few years later, before and during a social party. Patrick struggles to stay clean and confides his shameful secret to his best friend, reflects on his relationship with his father and observes the haughty, superficiality and cruelty of the British high society. Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess  Margaret,  makes an appearance in an unflattering role.

Mother’s milk, unlike the first 3, takes place over several years. Patrick’s 2 sons were born. For the most part, Patrick is  self-absorbed, drunk and on painkillers. His mother has given  most of Patrick’s inheritance to her spiritual guide.

Each of the novels can be read independently, fortunately, since  I read it over several months (or years?) because, when I receive a book from the library, I drop everything else  to finish it quickly. Each novel is relatively short, apart from the last one,  and I found it easy to get back into the story,  also thanks to the images  from TV series. This book opened the doors to a world about which I know nothing, in fact, and the detachment and humor of the author, combined with a very beautiful style, made the experience very interesting. I will not forget his reflections on his relationship with his father, particularly his indulgence and his detachment.  The French translation contains the fifth book and who knows, maybe I will find it this year at the used book fair.

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#4068 what I have read: Deborah Levy

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photo : encountering beauty on Pohara beach. Population : 560
Deborah Levy. Real Estate,  published in English in 2021, the third volume of the trilogy of her  » living autobiography », as she calls it. I talked about the first volume elsewhere, and the second  is not in the library at the moment. She takes stock of her life, close to her sixtieth birthday , as her daughters prepare to leave their London apartment. The English title emphasizes one part of the book, where she mentions her dream house. She wonders what is a home, or why, while she is a recognized author, translated into several languages, she still cannot afford to own a house, what she would like to find in it if she had one, where she would like it to be, etcetera. That was what intrigued me about this book, because it is a theme rarely discussed. However, the book  is as much and perhaps even more a kind of daydreaming rather than a biography. A critic has said elsewhere that no one, better than Levy, knows how to talk about the everyday, essentially feminine, and that as such she describes what it means to be a woman and this is  mainly what it is :  a collection of her thoughts about her encounters, objects that are part of her life (shoes, among others), observations about strangers or neighbours, her friends, certain details of her daily life, her childhood memories,   her mother and, ultimately, the female condition. The quality of the writing makes it worth reading,  but  because the English title promised me something else,  I kind of lost interest because of the expectations I had. The French title fits much better with what is in the book, far from the idea of biography I had.
I then tried reading one of his novels, August Blue, but I took a dislike to the theme after a few pages and have given up for the moment. I will perhaps try The man who saw everything later, which was shortlisted (I think) for the Booker. And I hope that the library will soon bring in the second book of the trilogy, which will perhaps interest me more.

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#4061 What I have read : Eleanor Catton

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I finally got tempted by Eleanor Catton ‘s most recent book , “ Birnam Wood”, published in 2023, around ten years after The Luminaries which earned her the “Booker” for a book of more than eight hundred pages, which I didn’t like very much. Still, I  read it all, forcing myself to read about ten pages before falling asleep and even today, it’s a bad memory. So I hesitated before starting to read her latest publication, but the fact that this time there were only four hundred and some pages helped me take the plunge and I also was attracted to the topic . This time Catton wrote a  psychological or political thriller that draws attention to the impasses of nowadays politics.

The first protagonist is Birnam Wood, an activist collective based in Christchurch, New Zealand. Its founder, Mira Bunting , dreams of radical, widespread and lasting social change; To achieve this, the members of Birnam Wood engage in a sort of gardening guerrilla, reclaiming unused public and private land for cultivation. The other protagonist of  the novel, Robert Lemoine, is an Americain billionaire. He has officially come to New Zealand to build himself a bunker in anticipation of a catastrophic event. In reality he digs the New Zealand earth to extract billions of dollars of rare earths in a national park.

The two meet and soon, Mira believes she can use Robert Lemoine’s money and land to carry out her mission, while Robert Lemoine wants to use Birnam Wood to camouflage his operations. We also meet Tony Gallo, a young idealistic journalist, as well as a recently knighted New Zealand businessman, Sir Owen Darvish, and his wife.

The first half of the novel puts all the elements of the story in place and it’s actually my favourite part. Catton displays a light sense of humour that I hadn’t felt in the previous book. It seems to me that she is  settling scores, to a certain extent with New Zealand, where she was criticized extensively after the publication of The Luminaries , among other things, because she was not shy about her criticism of New Zealand. The Prime Minister at the time did not particularly like it and the quarrel escalated to the point where her father (a lecturer at the University of Canterbury where I worked at the time) felt the need to publicly demand that  we stop harassing his daughter (as far as I’m concerned, it’s more the dad’s intervention that I found irritating).  She enjoys  making fun of the increasingly ridiculous honours that are awarded indiscriminately to just about anyone. They disappeared for a while, but the aforementioned Prime Minister restored them so he could become a Sir himself! Since then, we have rewarded just about anyone for just about anything and it has become a joke, I completely agree with Catton. Other criticisms of New Zealand, however, sometimes seem unfair to me when it asserts that certain behaviours are typical of New Zealanders  when in fact it is typical human pettiness or jealousy. For instance, if we except the United States (but maybe it is an outdated  and unfair cliche), where becoming rich is seen as a clear sign of success, billionaires are not  particularly popular in most countries, I would say. She also mentions a negative attitude towards people who live abroad for some time, a lack of curiosity, anger from the family sometime also, but I have experienced the same (I paid a visit to somebody I had not seen in twenty years and she asked me one question, the rest of the two hours was devoted to herself. Not that I particularly enjoy being the centre of attention, in fact it is quite the opposite, but I was impressed by the lack of curiosity and the indifference). It does not seem to me to be a New Zealand thing.

I found the second part less interesting, it seemed to fall back into the habits that had annoyed me in the previous book with useless descriptions. That being said, it’s a thought I have almost every time I have read a book recently, where I find long unnecessary passages that I would have eliminated (do we do this to give the reader more bang for their buck? ?). I particularly appreciated that she gently made fun of activists and billionaires with a certain lightness. It also raises essential questions about the type of world we are building (or enduring). I found the ending disappointing, but that ‘s also been the case for quite a while with most of the books I read (or TV shows I watch).

The book will no doubt be translated into French soon , but for those who read a little English, it reads quite well. I read it in a week when I was in Pohara .

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#4011 Alicia Stallings

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Every four years, for the past three hundred years, Oxford has elected a new professor of poetry (by vote). This is the most prestigious academic position in this field, and it is a fifty-five-year-old American, Alicia Stallings, who has just won this election, the first person who does not come from the British Isles and the second woman (in three hundred years). She has lived in Greece for about twenty years. She is said in The Telegraph to be, of course, American and also a poet, but probably not an American poet. She herself feels alienated from what is happening on the American scene, in part because poetry lives there mainly in academia and in creative writing programs, while she herself earns her living by writing literary criticism and other texts as a freelance writer.

Another important detail, her poems rhyme, and this is considered by most American poetic magazines as too traditional and ancient, not worth of publishing, the same ones who probably, in the same breath, would swoon in front of Rimbaud or Verlaine.

I didn’t know this poet, and I don’t know if I’m going to like her poetry, but she definitely has the main trait I look for in it: simplicity. As for rhymes, they do not scare me, and I like to have fun with one form or another depending on the inspiration of the moment. A nice mockery of the poetry snobs, bravo Oxford! As for me, I’m off now to familiarise myself with her work.

the article in The Telegraph:  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/a-e-stallings-oxford-poetry-professor-rhyme/

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#4011 Alicia Stallings

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A tous les quatre ans, depuis trois cents ans, Oxford élit un nouveau professeur de poésie (par des votes). Il s’agit du poste universitaire le plus prestigieux dans ce domaine, et c’est une Américaine de cinquante-cinq ans, Alicia Stallings, qui vientè de remporter cette élection, la première personne qui ne vient pas des îles britanniques et la seconde femme (en trois cents ans). Elle vit en Grèce depuis une vingtaine d’années. On dit d’elle, dans The Telegraph, qu’elle est bien sûr, Américaine et qu’elle est également poète, mais probablement pas une poète américaine. Elle-même se sent étrangère à ce qui se passe sur la scène américaine, en partie parce  que la poésie y vit surtout dans le monde universitaire et dans les programmes de « creative writing », alors qu’elle-même  gagne sa vie en écrivant des critiques littéraires et autres textes  typiques du travailleur autonome. Ce qui la distingue de bon nombre d’autres poètes est la simplicité de son écriture, compréhensible par tous et dont le sens augmente, en quelque sorte, au fur et à mesure des lectures. Autre détail important, elle écrit des poèmes en rimes, considérés par la plupart des magazines poétiques américains comme trop traditionnels et anciens, qui refusent de publier cette poésie mais qui, du même souffle, se pâment devant Rimbaud et Verlaine.

Je ne connaissais pas cette poète,  et je ne sais pas si je vais aimer sa poésie, mais elle possède à n’en pas douter  le trait principal que je recherche dans la poésie : la simplicité. Quant aux rimes, moi, ils ne me font pas  peur et j’aime m’amuser avec une forme ou une autre selon l’inspiration du moment. Un beau pied de nez aux snobs de la poésie, bravo Oxford ! Quant à moi, je vais de ce pas me familiariser avec son oeuvre.

L’article du Telegraph:  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/a-e-stallings-oxford-poetry-professor-rhyme/