DOUBLE FAULT

I've just finished Double Fault by Lionel Shriver. As usual for Lionel, it was a great read, even for someone like me who isn't particularly interested in tennis. But an added bonus for a sad old Arts faculty MA graduate like me was to find no less than 3 pages at the end of set literary essay questions on the book - a great starting point for a dissertation or book group discussion. Next time I attend my book group, I might suggest reading this just so we can wade through he questions. Wonderful! All works of fiction should contain this!

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN BY LIONEL SHRIVER

Just before I had Anna, everyone in my family started raving about We need to talk about Kevin (please DON'T read the spoilers if you intend to read it). First Amanda read it for some book group, then dad and finally mum got dragged into the circle. As the family's resident worm, I heard over and over how I just had to read it, apparently I had no choice in the matter! I was given a copy. 'Shortlisted for the Orange prize for literature', it said. I read the blurb - it sounded readable enough. I started it in December - 9 months pregnant, exhausted. I tried to read a few pages every night before bed. The style didn't lend itself to that - the sentences were long, the topic stressful, the tension tangible. I really couldn't see what the fuss was about. After Anna was born, I managed 2 or 3 pages a week and frankly the style was annoying me. But my whole family couldn't be wrong, could they? So I took it with me to Denmark this week and read it in one go. By half way through I couldn't put it down and as I wandered round Copenhagen and Amsterdam airports today majorly sleep-deprived, I still couldn't stop. I was banging into people reading the way most people walk around texting! I just finished it (holding it in one hand while changing Anna's nappy with the other - I just didn't want to put it down for that 3 minutes!)
Phew - I am exhausted, wrung out. Shit... wow. Eva is quite a character. I wonder if you need to be a parent to read it or if it knocks over even non-parents. Kids... the part of ourselves we know nothing of.

NOT NORTHERN ROCK

Since most people will be blogging Northern Rock in all its outrageousness today, I'll leave that to the papers and comment, instead, on the passing of Alain Robbe-Grillet. I studied contemporary French literature as part of my Masters degree back in the last millennium - yeah it is that long ago. I studied that amongst other more traditional French literary gems - you know the usual Descartes, Pascal, Zola, Baudelaire, Chateaubriand, Madame de Lafayette etcetc. I was the only one who admitted to preferring the contemporary stuff. The dark Céline was unputdownable, the Gide too and Camus made me smile with his dropping of the much-loathed past historic tense. I was probably a little too young at 20 to quite grasp the ins and outs of Sartre's ideas, but relished everything by his better half a few years later and even spent a long 6 months studying the clandestine literature written under the French resistance. But Robbe-Grillet was definitely hard going - I wasn't really sure what he was trying to do in 'Dans le labyrinthe' at first - it wasn't like a real novel - it never seemed to start or end, character and narrator seemed to blur into one, or maybe be the wrong way around. I found I was never overly interested in the long descriptions or the fate of the soldier. It was the one novel on the contemporary list, that I felt perhaps, just a little too stupid to understand! It seemed almost like a meaningless experiment in the norms of the formation of the modern novel. Maybe I should go back and read it now I'm older and wiser, to see if it has caught up with me yet. The tutor we had at the time, Dorothy, enthused so much about it, I felt pained to admit it was the one novel that had failed to captivate me!

RAINBOW BOOKS

rainbow books
Originally uploaded by PhylB

Together, we have so many books, we decided for fun to try to shelf them by colour rather than topic or author. This was just a wee ten minute trial to see if it'd work- we'll now move them about to match the spectrum in order and shades. Obviously with so many black or white ones we can't achieve the effect everywhere but as we're likely to end up with a minimum of 6 or 7 different bookshelves around the house, we thought doing just the two large ones in the living room like that would be pretty!

DORIS'S PRIZE

Nice to see Doris has finally been recognized as a brilliant writer. Not before time, I've been a big fan ever since I discovered the Children of Violence series back at age 20! I did have to laugh when I heard her candid interview on radio 2 though - she pointed out that at 88, the Nobel people had probably decided they'd better hurry up and award her something as Nobel prizes can't be given posthumously and they probably figured she was on the verge of 'popping off!' I guess she has all her marbles about her and still likes to provoke!

A FUN EVENING

Glasgow city centre at 11-55pm. People waiting to get into a night club? No not likely, waiting to get into Waterstones and WH Smith for the last Harry Potter book! And who would be crazy enough to do such a thing? I can't think of a single soul...

COLIN BATEMAN

Oh! When looking up the link for my previous posting, it seems Colin has written lots of new books since HarperCollins lost him to Headline Book Publishing Ltd - I must order everything from Murphy's Law onwards used from Amazon - I usually enjoy him - he's a bit wacky. I miss picking them up for 50p at work.

CURIOUS QUESTIONS

It's nice to have a library in your house. Mine's a nice sunny room you can sit in a choose something from the shelf and while away your time (usually 35 seconds in my case between screams of Muuuuuuum!) Anyway it is full of 20 years of books - big, small, fiction, fact, silly, intellectual - you name it. Books are like extra little children to me - I may lend them out for a day or two but they have to come back or I start to twitch nervously!

Recently my parents had a guest staying with them for a few weeks so they all came up and we had a coffee in the library one afternoon. This is nice, she said, have you read any of them or are they just for show? Why on earth would anyone waste a fortune on books, and use up loads of space storing them, not to read them? I think I was too dumbfounded to reply at first, but later tried a tactful, I'm about half way through but I intend to get there.

A QUESTION OF PERSPECTIVE

One of my favourite quotes if from Doris Lessing's autobiography, Part 1 Under my Skin.

When scientists try to get us to understand the real importance of the human race, they say something like, 'If the story of the earth is twenty-four hours long, then humanity's part in it occupies the last minute of that day.' Similarly, in the story of a life, if it is being told true to time as actually experienced, then I'd say seventy percent of the book would take you to age ten. At eighty percent you would have reached fifteen. At ninety-five per cent, you get to about thirty. The rest is a rush - towards eternity.

As an eighty year old woman she is qualified to describe time from the different age perspectives she can remember. I remember those too, though am not sure they will still be so vivid when I am 80! (If I break the family rule and actually manage to live that long!) I think this strikes you most as a parent. When you are a child, childhood takes forever, naturally, but when you see that same childhood from the parental perspective it is over in the blink of an eye. The first 3 or 4 years take the longest but as soon as they start school, year after year flashes by. Yesterday Marcel was a cute little 5 year old in primary 1, now he's testing adolescence in primary 5. Where did those years go? And baby Pudge who has only just arrived is already walking around the room hanging on to the furniture. We watch them grow so we can let them go, but letting them go is the hardest thing in the world.

Even more poignantly, I've just been watching the interview on Austrian TV with that poor child Natascha Kampusch . I guess the perspective thing probably holds true for her too. For the 44 year old captor 8 years will have passed much more quickly than for the 10 year old captive. That makes what is already unimaginable, even worse, if that is possible. I hope she finds a way to live after this.

I must blog another book that I have read and reread An evil cradling, when I get a minute. That is another one to make you think.

THE BOOK GROUP

I'm in this cool book group - Me, Amanda (my brother's wife), and her friends Roisin, Andrea, Jan and Mandy. We started the book group about 20 months ago. The plan was simple - once every 6-8 weeks or so we were to meet, discuss something we've all read and have loads of nice food and wine. Sounds like a good plan but I think there's something gone a bit wrong with the focus of our group. First Roisin had a baby so we needed to have a break for a month or two, then I had a baby so we needed to have a wee break, then Amanda had a baby so, yes you guessed it...and now not only is Roisin pregnant again but both Andrea and Jan are getting married this month so I guess our little group may end up a very big group indeed. Maybe it's time we threw in the towel and just called it what it is - the Literary crèche and babysitting circle!

So the tally stands like this so far:

Babies: Caitlin, Léon, Gordon
Books: A big boy did it and ran away, Life of Pi, Pride and Prejudice, The time traveler's wife, The red tent, Demo, Dropping in on Idi.

I wanted to get us to read I don't know how she does it when it's my turn but at this rate we may need to book larger premises to accomodate all these new members.