Habit

The end of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur  is mysterious, and seems like a key to everything I've read before and not understood or not paid enough attention to.

Narrator, grandmother and maid are spending what seems like several summer months at the Grand Hotel in Balbec. Siestas appear to be imposed by the grandmother,  though he comments several times how much he loves spending time on his own, the sweetness of it, and how exhausting it is to spend time with other people whom he always wants to please. He seems to succeed in pleasing very well, in fact something else is going on, because people mostly are attracted to him, desiring his friendship, for instance the painter Elstir - this is unexpected and unexplained.

At the end of the narrator's rest period, Francoise - the devoted family maid - opens the curtains. This is more complicated than one may think, as they have been pinned shut.There was a mention earlier about Francoise and the pins, but at that time it was unexplained. One has to forge ahead trusting that all will become clear. (I of course thought that I'd forgotten something or not read thoroughly enough.)

All along, in this section, Proust writes about the sun - how it slipped past the barrier of curtains, a golden bar on the wall, how it created a pattern on the carpet which he delighted in bathing his naked feet in and then finally when the curtains are fully drawn (open), the world beyond appears as a mummy which has been unwrapped - desemmaillotee - and revealed in its golden-ness. End.

The real world is from the past, dead and golden.

Proust wrote A la Recherche after the death of both his parents. He shut himself up, and wrote. In this book he describes separating from his mother at the railway station, how he wept leaving her. Once arrived in Balbec, he does not mention her again, she is gone from the story and he has adapted to the new circumstances. One understands better why he went 'searching for the lost past', recreating what had been through his writing.

Have picked up a short booklet by Samuel Beckett, Proust (1931, Grove Press) who writes learnedly - to my mind obscurely at times - about Proust, Time, Memory and Habit. Proust writes about habit and Habit, two different experiences. The lower case habit is what enables us to live our lives without acknowledging the fact that we are about to die, or could die at any time - to live as if our lives extended for ever.

Some people I know often make complicated plans for the distant future. The plans may even involve other people. They appear to believe that they are in control.

At the moment of giving birth, I experienced how much the creature of biology I am, not in control of anything at all. You might say, but that was a special moment...Our genetic makeup decides a lot for us. Free will is an illusion - see Sam Harris' recent book of that name.

The home and the heart

Have finished reading James McNeish's Touchstones (Random House, 2012), all in one day.The narrative is framed by his relationship with his father - the last and best photo is of him. The other photos seem to have suffered in the printing, one of them at least is all shadows.

McNeish worries away at the notion of the 'outsider', a leitmotif in his life, as a writer, a New Zealander overseas, or a Pakeha among Maori - though there is Maori in him, too. One stretch of his life was spent removed from the rest of the country, 15 years writing from a sand-spit where he lived with his wife. Asked in a recent interview where home was, he said: "Wherever my wife is".

Writing in a remote place is also the subject of Colm Toibin's latest book of essays, New Ways to Kill your Mother, about how writers achieve the distance from home needed in order to develop their writing. In Brian Moore's case, he left his mother-country, Ireland. The end of his life was spent in an isolated spot on California's coast. Toibin writes: "Imaginatively he lost touch with Ireland and never fully grasped North America". The perils of exile, the damage.

This does not apply to McNeish, a New Zealander writing about his own people. But the same theme is in his book - the need to get away,  to meet new people in different countries, to  see oneself and one's culture in as broad a context as possible. 

Choosing a name

Anne Tyler wrote The Beginner's Goodbye, about  a man grieving the loss of his wife. That is the basic story. Then are the many particular aspects - the kind of person this man is, the manner of his wife's death, the nature of their relationship - told in a light quiet voice, entirely believable. I enjoyed the reading. And yet, it seems like froth.

I am not sure why. The story is well told, it develops as time goes on, it rings true and it held my interest all the way through. There were no jarring tones. It is a bit like a bed-time story for grown-ups. Nothing too upsetting, nothing too deep. And consummate skill.

I particularly like the names Tyler gives her characters. The neighbour is plain Jim. His wife who matters more is Mary-Clyde. The sister is Nandina. The hero is Aaron.  See what I mean? The title is clever too...Am contrasting this with Emily Perkins' The Forrests - a multitude of people with bland names, too many names...

Deja vu? Deja ecrit?

Anne Korkeakivi has written An Unexpected Guest, and it is hard to put down. Not excellent, but a good read.

I was bothered by something in it, an echo of something else, which resonated while I was reading about the asparagus...The heroine of the story lives in Paris, the wife of a British diplomat. She is preparing a formal dinner which could be a crucial event in her husband's career. Her ally is the cook, who is rather a scary person, given to moods and sensitivities. She might sabotage the whole thing. At least the heroine thinks so.

And then I remembered: this whole scenario is Proust. In A la Recherche, he writes sensually about the long purple-tinted asparagus stalks. There too a gifted cook is at work behind the scenes. She is nasty to those below her in the pecking order, as Mathilde is here.

I am left wondering - I don't have Proust to hand. I don't really mind, am just glad that I found out where the niggle came from.

Another review mentions a similarity to Mrs Dalloway:  that did not ring any bells, except for the fact that it all takes place in one day - no harm in that, a pleasing device.

An unkind moment

Read The Forrests by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, 2012). Beautifully written, artful, creative.

Children who believe they are neglected. The effect of poverty.

For me, not enough.
I couldn't really care for the characters. Nothing develops very much, except that people grow wiser as they age. Their names are undifferentiated, bland.

There is one aha moment. One.
Maybe I missed something, because some are suggesting it might be a Booker Prize winner.
Well.
The style is good enough, for sure.

Maybe I'm just unkind.

Forms of evil

I have read two contrasting books: one was by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Old Child and The Book of Words (two novellas in one book) and the other J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.

I started Coetzee's book last night and read until my eyes closed, woke up early, and plunged straight back into it, with a feeling of relief and pleasure, because I loved the central character so much.

He's the Magistrate (no name) and runs a small outpost, a little town, on the frontier of an Empire. A Secret Service man arrives in the first paragraph and from there it is downhill all the way. What can be done about  paranoia and abuse of power?

Not a depressing book, on the contrary. I loved it.

Jenny Erpenbeck writes very very well, but her book was troublesome.  Finishing the first novella - The Old Child - I felt the need for a shower, to wash off something evil ...The world described reminded me of Elfriede Jelinek's descriptions of Austria - which I could not read for long either. A world lacking kindness, lacking soul. The Child does her best to cope. It is unrelenting.

Both Jelinek and Erpenbeck are Austrian. The friend who lent me this book said that Erpenbeck's second novella, the Book of Words, was troublesome for her...I didn't dare read it.

The Pressure of Sunlight Falling

Fiona Pardington is a New Zealand photographer whose work I like. I know of her from two projects: one was a series of large colour photographs of museum store-rooms: stuffed birds, furniture, walls hung with wooden Maori objects - I remember long wooden poles - were they paddles? The efficiency and cleanliness with which they are stored is shown - harmony, a sense of permanence, soothing for the heart.

The later works I saw were part of an exhibition at the City Art Gallery. I attended an introductory evening. We sat on untrustworthy folding chairs, aluminium tubing and white plastic, rows and rows of us. In front, they were talking to us and showing us things. But on the white walls on either side, there hung four big portraits, two on our left and two on our right, FP's work. Their silent presence dominated the event.

The photographs were of live casts (plaster casts): one of a tattooed Maori man's head, and one the head of a Pacific Islands man - I think. (It's hard to remember exactly now that I've seen more in the book.) The photos show the front and the back of their head individually, in black and white. One of the heads was stained dark, photographed against a pale background. The other was pale, I think. The photos were as wide as a door, not as high. The eyes were shut, of course. I spent time looking at them.

They made me very curious. They were real people. I felt as if they might open their eyes and laugh out loud any minute. But the neck ends in a plinth: it wasn't a photo of a real person, the real person was at one remove from what had been photographed. I had to remind myself of this several times.

I saw a book about FP on display at the Central Library sometime later, and took it home. The title is Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling by Kriselle Baker (Otago University Press, 2011). It includes the photographs and a collection of good articles about them. Fiona P found out as an adult that she is part Maori. One of the heads is of a person who is related to her - she could tell by the moko. I imagine the sense of something coming right when she met him, a sense of completion.  He was stored at the Musee du Quay Branly in Paris. I don't know if he is still there now. They repatriate the real heads; I don't know if they tried to get these back too.


The book includes many photos of casts of heads from a variety of Pacific nations, and they have the dreamy real-life quality I tried to describe above. Except for the photos of Dumont d'Urville's - the French scientist  who had the casts made and took them back to France- and the casts of his family, which are a dirty white on a grey background and look somehow pinched and tight. I couldn't get over the difference. D'Urville must have been a person beyond the norm, an exceptional man,  to carry out the sort of research he did, to convince people to go along with what must have been rather an uncomfortable procedure. That is not how he comes across in the cast. His children look young and innocent, as you'd expect. 

I read several of the articles, which was satisfying. (In particular David Elliot, the curator.) But the one that mattered most was  Kriselle's essay describing FP at work, the care, the immense trouble taken with the lighting...

I checked the photos again and realised that FP had not taken the photos of Dumont D'Urville and his family: they are labelled as coming from the Musee.

I suppose all artifacts are photographed for the record, and the photos of the casts of D'Urville and his children are equivalent to a photo from one of those booths in railway stations where you can get your photo taken in a few minutes.

It turns out that FP chose the title, from a description of what happens to objects in space...I hope I have got all of this right, I have already returned the book to the library and could not check everything. It is a wonderful book.