I have to confess that the La Trobe Journal is usually a bit too academic in its orientation for me, but this one (May 2009) is a gem, and I won’t be recycling it down at my local library!

The Journal is one of the benefits of being a State Library of Victoria Foundation member and it’s published twice a year in Spring and Autumn.  This edition, edited by John Arnold, complements the Independent Type exhibition at the State Library and it focuses on Victorian writers (that’s Victoria the State, not the period).  There is a lovely short essay entitled ‘Sweet Yarra, Run Softly’ by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and a really interesting article by Gavin de Lacey about neglected Victorian writers of the 1930s – Jean Campbell, ‘Georgia Rivers’ and ‘Capel Boake’ . These were especially interesting so soon after reading about Miles Franklin’s struggle for recognition as a mature writer in Jill Roe’s Stella Miles Franklin, A Biography.  I also enjoyed John Barnes’ memoir of Vance and Nettie Palmer, previously to me just authors of books I hadn’t yet read, but now fleshed-out to become real people and important literary patrons of their time. 

My favourite, however, was Terence O’Neill’s study of Joan Lindsay, author of Picnic at Hanging Rock.  What an interesting person she was, and how sad to read that she was an artist of some note who gave up her art because she was better at it than her husband.  Still, art’s loss was literature’s gain, as anyone who has read the novel or seen the film will attest. 

I collect Miles Franklin winners but have yet to acquire a copy of Trap  by Peter Mathers (1966).  As you can see if you click the link, there is no Wikipedia article about this novel, which has been out of print for more than 30 years.  If Peter Pierce should chance upon this blog post of mine, I hope he will take up the challenge of writing something about it, because he obviously thinks highly of the novel.

Another gem is the article about Georgina McCrae, with a reminder that Brenda Niall wrote Georgiana: a biography of Georgiana McCrae, painter, diarist, pioneer – which I really should try to chase up because I enjoyed her biography of the Boyds so much.

There I was, moaning away on my soapbox about how Tourism Australia needs to wake up and do something about literary tourism in this country, and lo! today in the mail there was a postcard from the State Library Foundation about a forthcoming weekend (October 10-11) to celebrate Henry Handel Richardson’s years in Maldon.  Henry Handel Richardson, as lovers of OzLit will know is the author of The Getting of Wisdom and the brilliant trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, and the good folks in Maldon have organised a splendid program of activities for her fans…

There is a walking tour, an exhibition of material from Richardson’s childhood, a screening of The Getting of Wisdom, a Cobb and Co carriage ride with an actor recreating Laura’s departure for boarding school in The Getting of Wisdom, and a ghost tour of the cemetery.  There are  lectures by historians, open gardens, and acting performances at the dinner on Saturday night.

 Add to that the delights of historic Maldon, including a brass band performance in the Rotunda, and what more could you ask?

  

Click here to download the HHR Maldon Weekend program and the HHR Maldon Weekend invitation

or for more info contact hhrmaldon@hotmail.com or Margaret at 03 5472 3942.

You’ll need to be quick to get accommodation in Maldon, but there are heaps of nice places to stay in Central Victoria, not to mention great restaurants en route if you’re driving up from Melbourne.  (We’re having dinner at the Royal George Hotel in Kyneton on the way up on Friday).

PS There is a Henry Handel Richardson Society and I can tell from the Guest counter that I’m one of many visitors to the site today!

Well, I’ve made a start…

Ulysses is written in three parts, The Telemachiad, The Odyssey and the Nostos, and today I’ve read (twice) The Telemachiad, Episodes 1,2 &3.

Source: the Annotated Ulysses

Episodes 1 & 2 are easy enough.  Although it’s not a straightforward narrative, we are introduced to Stephen Dedelus and Buck Mulligan, students who live together in the Martello Tower.  There is a witty parody of the Catholic mass, with Buck wearing white and gold vestments (his dressing gown), lifting his shaving bowl aloft like a chalice, and reciting the Introit.

Stephen is morose.  His mother has just died, and Buck has offended him by referring to her as the ‘beastly dead’.  As a medical student, he is blase about death, and provokes Stephen by reminding him that he denied her last wish by refusing to pray with her on her death bed.   He’s also not much impressed at Stephen’s insistence on borrowing black clothing for his mourning, considering his behaviour towards his mother. 

All Buck’s jokes are in bad taste (not least The Ballad of Joking Jesus) and he sponges off Stephen who, although he has a position as a schoolmaster teaching history and algebra, seems to have no money.  Buck is equally crass with Haines, an English student,and he pokes fun at the Irishwoman who brings the milk for their tea.  (In one of countless ironies, Haines the Englishman speaks Gaelic to the Irishwoman but she doesn’t understand.)

Haines and Stephen follow Buck and his friends down to the water (Dublin Bay) where Buck once again touches Stephen for money and demands the key to the tower.  Stephen goes off in a huff, calling Buck a ‘usurper’. 

Episode 2 begins without preamble, with Stephen taking a history class in the classics.  The boys are not interested and depart with relief to play hockey.  One, Sargent, an unattractive and not very bright boy, remains behind to get some extra help from Stephen, who – still thinking of his mother – tries to imagine how Sargent’s mother must have loved him.  He then collects his pay from the antiSemitic Mr Deasy, a sort of father figure, who lectures Stephen about managing his money wisely.  There are allusions to Hamlet and Iago, which seem fairly straightforward, and (since I am supplementing reading my own ancient Penguin by reading this online through BookGlutton.com so that I can record my own annotations) I have been able to Google most things that puzzle me such as the Latin quotations from the Mass.

Episode 3, however, is written as a poetic stream of consciousness, and it’s not easy to follow what’s going on.  Stephen walks along the beach, a fine mind idling through philosophy, memory and soul-searching.  He ponders his illegitimate birth (p43) , a visit to his unsympathetic aunt Sara and his uncle who’s a lawyer (p44), his adolescent fantasies and ambitions (p46-7), watches a couple and their dog, writes some poetry on the letter that Mr Deasy gave him to post (p54) and there is a reference to Ariel’s poem in The Tempest.

ARIEL’S SONG.

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell—
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong bell.

Does this mean that his father drowned??  It was his father who summoned Stephen home with a telegram to say that his mother is dying. (p47)

And what of the meaning of Telemachus?  My recollection of Ulysses is distinctly hazy and I turn out to be indebted to notes I scrawled in the margins of the Penguin.  Telemachus was the son of Odysseus/Ulysses, who in this novel is the famous (yet to appear) Bloom of Bloomsday.  Fatherless Stephen is Telemachus to Bloom the father figure, and in this episode Stephen/Telemachus ‘interviews’ Menelaus who has heard news of Ulysses/Bloom from Proteus, shape-shifting god of the sea. Complicated?? Confusing?? Yes.

Crib guides include NovelGuide, Ulysses Seen , the Ulysses Project and Ulysses Annotated - but really there is no substitute for reading it, teasing out the allusions and quotations using Google (as I have at BookGlutton) and when all else fails simply reading on in the hope that it will all eventually make sense!

Update 6 July 2009

I have found a marvellous site to guide my understanding of the structure of this novel.  Notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses  written by Gerry Carlin & Mair Evans show how every episode/chapter is structured around a complex schema comprising 

• about an hour of Bloomsday
• a scene somewhere in Dublin
• an organ of the body
• one of the Arts
• a colour
• a symbol
• a narrative technique, and
• correspondences supporting some theme, and 
• parallels with Homer’s Ulysses.

It is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)… It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to render the myth sub specie temporis nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique.
(James Joyce, Letters, 21st September 1920)

Cross-posting from the Carlin and Evans Notes [1], Episode 1 can be seen to be structured like this: 

TIME: 8.oo am.
SCENE: A Martello tower (erected by the British to repel French invasion during the Napoleonic wars) at Sandycove on the shore of Dublin Bay, 7 miles southeast of Dublin.
ORGAN: None
ART: Theology
COLOURS: White, gold
SYMBOL: Heir
TECHNIQUE: Narrative (young)
CORRESPONDENCES: Telemachus, Hamlet-Stephen; Antinous-Mulligan; Mentor-the milk woman. (Hamlet, Ireland and Stephen, Mentor, Pallas [Athena], the suitors and Penelope. Sense: Dispossessed son in struggle).
Homeric Parallels: In the council of the gods which opens Homer’s Odyssey, Zeus decides that it is time for Odysseus to return home. In Ithaca, Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope, is disgusted with the behaviour of the suitors toward his mother in his father’s absence (the suitors are led by the arrogant Antinous, and they mock the threatening omens sent by Zeus), and he seeks counsel from the gods. Pallas Athena, goddess of the arts of war and peace, domestic economy, wit and intuition, is revealed as Odysseus’ patron. She advises Telemachus to travel in search of his father.

Episode 2 uses the Catechism as a literary style, and Episode 3 is an interior (male) monologue.  For more detail from the Carlin and Evans site, click on the links.

For an online version with links explaining allusions and parallels, see Difficult Books, the Ulysses Project.  (They’ve done Episodes 1 & 2 so far.)

Oh, and for a really beaut (non-pompous) guide to reading and interpreting Ulysses, see Wandering Rocks.

[1] I have searched without success for a way to contact the authors of this site, http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/joynote.html to seek their permission to quote this small block of text.  If anyone has their contact details please let me know.

I have just finished reading One Foot Wrong for our ANZLL discussion which starts next week, and I don’t know what to write about this book. 

It’s about a child whose parents are religious nutters, and it’s written from her POV, repeating the things they say to her in a macabre sort of echo.  The parents abuse her physically and mentally, and some really shocking things happen. 

I find myself wondering why someone would want to tell a story like this.  I’m not suggesting that it shouldn’t be done; there’s a place for this kind of writing even if I don’t enjoy reading it. I just don’t understand why an author would feel compelled to put herself through the experience of vicariously living such horrors.  In an interview, Laguna explains the difficulty she had when writing it – having to write in short bursts because of needing to get away from it – but it doesn’t explain her motivation for wanting to write it in the first place or continuing with it when it was causing distress.

I get the impression that some reviewers don’t know what to make of it either.  For a (non spoiler)  summary, see Allen and Unwin; for reviews (some of which include spoilers) see the The Age, Guardian, MC Reviews, Bookishness, GoodReads and HorrorScope.

I’m not in the habit of writing fan letters, but I am very tempted to write to Jill Roe to thank her for writing this magnificent biography. Stella Miles Franklin, A Biography is not just an authoritative exploration of the life of one of my literary heroes, it’s also an intriguing read in its own right.  It’s excellent because it is so well structured, because the author’s prose is a pleasure to read and because the scholarship shines through without being heavy-handed.

Roe has not only read Franklin’s oeuvre and her voluminous correspondence, she has also read the books that Franklin enjoyed and considered memorable; she has read the most obscure of reviews about Franklin’s work, and she has the knack of using an apt comment from her sources to amplify her own analysis of events.  It is this perceptive analysis which sets this biography apart from the Olley biography which relies on commentary instead.

Almost everyone is familiar with My Brilliant Career – from the film if not from the novel - but I was intrigued to see that whereas today this book tends to be analysed in terms of gender and psychology, in Franklin’s day it was viewed through the perspectives of autobiography and class. Sybylla was rebellious and ‘unladylike’ it is true, but it was the gulf between the impoverished selectors and the squatters that lay at the heart of her rejection of Henry Beecham.  Even though she mellowed a little in her old age, Franklin was always radical in her opinions and politics, and nationalism and feminism were equally important in shaping both her professional and personal life.

Franklin’s friendship with Henry Lawson is a reminder of what The Bulletin used to be.  (It folded in 2008) In its early days it was a radical journal, definitely not the politically conservative magazine it was in my adulthood.  It was a strange mixture of nationalism and xenophobia; it was racist and anti-feminist; it was pro trade unionism and Australian independence, and it published the poetry and stories of working people such as Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy, Vance and Nettie Palmer, and yes, Miles Franklin.  It was Lawson who helped her to achieve publication for My Brilliant Career, but he did her a disservice in promoting its author as a ‘girl’; in the end Franklin had to publish under a male nom-de-plume in order to be taken seriously as a writer.

For a long time all her subsequent efforts seemed to fail.  She dashed off another novel to Blackwoods in London with an hubristic letter about wanting to avoid the fuss when it was published, only to have it rejected out of hand.  Many of her efforts were unpublishable, no matter how hard she tried, yet she was lionised as the ‘bush girl’ author, met numerous famous people and was taken up by feminists like Rosie Scott.  (At the same time, in her early twenties, she was being nagged by Granny Lampe about being left on the shelf).  It was embarrassing to have nothing published and she began writing columns for the papers but as was common at the time these were under pseudonyms and did not ease the pressure she must have felt.   Roe suggests that journalism was really what she was better suited to, but lacking the kind of mentor she needed she kept trying to write books which no one wanted to publish.  Her patrons all thought of her as a little girl, and she was too far ahead of her time with her social commentary, especially since she was a woman.  (Roe says that female journalists have never been taken as seriously as men in this country, and I think she’s right.  There are only two that I can think of: Pamela Bone - who transformed the so-called Women’s Pages into something worth reading - and Michelle Grattan, who was the first female editor of a metropolitan daily, The Canberra Times (and published my one-and-only venture into journalism!) but is now back with The Age.)

It must have taken courage for Miles Franklin to set off alone for America.  She arrived just as the San Francisco earthquake struck which must have been a shocking experience.  (Oddly, she seems not to have written about it).  In the US she began a career in the service of progressive causes:   in Chicago with the National Women’s Trade Union League, and then in London to work in housing reform.  She also worked as some kind of nurse in Serbia during WW1, and felt an affinity with the simple people she met, because they too were ‘unlettered’ like her.  These jobs were demanding, but she had a rich social life, numerous attentive boyfriends and a network of wonderful feminist friends with whom she kept contact throughout her lifetime – and she wrote, constantly, despite countless setbacks and rejection slips.  Like many writers today in paid employment, she found that her work reduced time for writing, but she was prolific – and indefatigable. 

Franklin’s great talent would not have been compromised in the way that it was, had she been able in adulthood to go to university, and she always felt this lack of education keenly.  (She would have loved the Whitlam reforms!) She needed a sympathetic editor to guide her choice of subject matter, but as Roe says she also needed to attend to her writing style which fared badly as modernism came of age.  She was mystified by Patrick White and Rex Ingamells, and she didn’t like the ‘ersatz’ Americanism of Harp in the South, and Come in Spinner .  Even when she found success writing under the pseudonym Brent of Bin-Bin she was a bit old-fashioned in style and although popular in their time these books do not, apparently, read well today.  Reading between Jill Roe’s lines it seems that of the countless novels and plays, nearly all unpublished and unpublishable, most had daft plots, stereotypical characters recycled either from life or her own romantic fantasies, and all seem deluged by her political and feminist radicalism.  Franklin wrote all the time – dashing things off to publishers and dramatists (she was keen to be a playwright) and recycling earlier efforts time and time again – but without a structured education and anyone to help her, she seems not to have learned to edit and improve her own work.  It is tragic that the ardent supporter of Australian literature as it blossomed had her talents wasted like this.

There are all sorts of interesting snippets in this biography.  Like Franklin herself, I was unimpressed to learn that in 1912 Sir George Reid, Australia’s High Commissioner in London and a former Prime Minister, had refused to meet Chicago suffragettes who wanted to know about the female vote in Australia.  (Australia was way ahead of the rest of the world; women had had the vote since since Federation, and in some states, before that).  His justification was that there was bad feeling about suffragettes in the UK, but Miles was outraged.  She wrote to Andrew Fisher, the Labor PM, wanting to know why Reid wasn’t proud of Australian progressivenes, and why wouldn’t he support equal suffrage as enshrined in our Constitution.  (About the only progressive thing in it, IMO).  She was even more unhappy that the progressiveness that had shaped the Federation years had been lost by the time she visited in 1923.

Opinionated, obsessive and dedicated to politics I don’t relate to even when I agree with her perspective (e.g. feminism in the 1930s) Franklin  nevertheless became very interesting to me through the pages of Roe’s biography.  I was amused by her wit; I liked her generosity and I admired her tenacity.  I would have liked visiting her in her old age.  Depite my reservations about Franklin’s style and themes, I found Roe’s summaries of the books tempting and I began wanting to jettison the TBR and re-read My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes Bung instead.  I find it sad that so much of Franklin’s oeuvre lies unread in the Franklin Papers at the State Library of NSW, but some at least are available at Project Gutenberg Australia.  I’d like to browse All That Swagger (1936), maybe the biography Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and His Book (1944) Pioneers on Parade, the parody that she co-wrote with Dymphnia Cusack;  her survey of Australian literature Laughter, Not for a Cage (published in 1956 two years after her death), and Childhood at Brindabella.  Already I’ve been down to the Op Shop and found books by Franklin’s contempories including Katharine Susannah Pritchard’s Coonaroo and Mr Hogarth’s Will by Catherine Helen Spence – maybe if I continue to keep an eye out for Franklin’s, I’ll find some of them as well.

Franklin’s return to Australia in the 1930s and her passionate defence of Australian literature is what her prize is all about, a point sometimes missed in the annual debate.  She did not like the sexualisation of literature and would have disapproved of Breath (the winner of the 2009 Miles Franklin Award) - she said she had to keep reminding herself that young people were interested in reading about sex!  (As a ‘first-wave feminist’, (p465) she felt that modern feminism was wrong to champion sexual freedom for women because ’sexual indulgence’ did not solve the problem of unwanted children, over-population and the impact of fecundity on women’s choices).  She probably wouldn’t have liked Voss as a winner either because she didn’t like Patrick White’s first novel, Happy Valley, but I think she’d have loved My Brother Jack by George Johnson.  I think she would have been very pleased to see that her award is Australia’s most high profile literary award - the one that serious writers want to win – because she knew the value of prizes,  not only for the financial support they offered but also for the psychological boost to the solitary writer and the affirmation that the work is valued by others.   She was a wonderful woman and I am so glad to have ‘met’ her through this biography.

There are other reviews of this fine biography but I can’t find Hilary McPhee’s incisive  ‘Spotting the Real Thing’ in the Australian Literary Review online . Brilliant Career by an Egalitarian Activist by Nicole Moore is (despite its inane and inaccurate headline) worth reading. 

I haven’t read the joint winners of the 2008 National Biography Award (These Few Lines: A Convict Story – The Lost Lives of Myra and William Sykes by Graham Seal and Napoleon, 1769-1799: The Path to Power by Philip Dwyer) but they must be remarkably good to have taken precedence over Stella Miles Franklin, A Biography by Jill Roe!

Chatting with my good friend Sue over at Whispering Gums, and berating myself for not having read enough American literature, I started listing what I had read in a comment reply – and realised it was more appropriately a post…

Some years ago I had an email correspondence with an African-American professor of literature because he’d asked me to recommend some Australian literature.  I was a bit bemused by this, and so asked him what his reading interests were, so that I might recommend something he’d be likely to enjoy.  It transpired that – by his own admission – he hadn’t read much literature other than his own, and by that he meant African-American, not American in general.  This astonished me, because I was but a primary school teacher with a mere undergraduate degree in English, and I had read many of the classic and notable Russians, Irish, Indian, English, American and Australian novels, not to mention poetry and some plays.  (Yes, the French are missing from that list, but I have since read Proust, quite a bit of Balzac and have Les Miserables on my TBR; also I had read Camus.)   I consider this professor impoverished by his lack of attention to world literature, and I can’t imagine how he got his job!

Anyway, to please him (for reasons I’ve forgotten) I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, an omission from the American writers we read at university: Henry James (can’t remember which one because I’ve read most of his novels since); Faulkner (Light in August); Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter); Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and Joyce Cary (The Horse’s Mouth.)  I discovered Steinbeck all by myself and have read almost every novel he wrote (I think); I recently discovered Hemingway and have a growing pile of treasures on my TBR (and a first edition of For Whom The Bell Tolls!)

In the classics, I’ve read Moby Dick, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening; a couple by Pearl S Buck; some short stories by F Scott Fitzgerland and others by W Somerset Maugham; Breakfast at Tiffany’s and some other short stories by Truman Capote; Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.   In my feminist phase I read Betty Friedan, Erica Jong and Marilyn French but not Gloria Steinam.

I’ve enjoyed ‘popular stuff’ – mostly okay but forgettable except for Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggars; Jane Hamilton, Amy Tan, Alison Lurie, Barbara Kingsolver and even the occasional Jodi Piccoult.  (Some of these are good on long haul flights). I’ve fallen for the over-hyped Charles Frazier and Anita Shreve and found them tedious while Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs was excruciating, drivel exceeded only by the tiresome The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. On the other hand I thought The Hours by Michael Cunningham was terrific; and I also liked Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

The guilt starts with the ‘canon’ of more recent writing, the authors whose names are suggested for the Nobel and Man Booker Literature prizes.  Until this week I hadn’t read anything by Toni Morrison.  I’ve read one by Updike (Terrorist), but have two on my TBR, and started but didn’t finish The Body Artist by Don DeLillo – I have his Falling Man on the TBR but can’t make myself begin it. I enjoyed three or four short stories by Saul Bellow, and liked Jane Smiley till I got tired of her.  I’ve read and don’t like Siri Hustvedt, Marilynne Robinson, and especially not Cormac McCarthy.  I have E.L. Doctorow on my TBR, and hope to get to him one day because Lurline aka The Temptress recommended him.

To refresh my memory I checked out the Excel file where I keep a record of what’s in my Reading Journals – there are 165 entries for American authors since I started keeping journals in 1997. 

Maybe that’s enough?

Many years ago  I read The Impossible Country, by Brian Hall  - a journalist’s attempt to make sense of what had happened in the former Yugoslavia.  He had been there in the months before war broke out, and he could not understand how it was that people who had lived peacefully together had suddenly become consumed by hatred and riven apart by atrocity.  Although he included some of the history of the place to illuminate ancient discords, the book was more like an elegy for civilised behaviour than the usual hasty book thrown together to make good sales to a mystified public.  It was excellent. 

And now, so many years later, I read The Cellist of Sarajevo, and it makes a powerful assertion: in the midst of horror and hatred, it is possible to make moral choices and retain one’s humanity.  Through the eyes of three characters, Dragan, Kenan and Arrow, we see them confront moral dilemmas large and small, and the choices they make define them as noble. 

Kenan ventures out into a city beset by snipers, to get water for his family.  He has an unpleasant neighbour who expects him to get water for her too.  It would be easier, and safer, and he would have to make the risky trip to the brewery less often if he did not help her. 

Dragan is an old man, on his way to the bakery where he works.  Each day he must traverse an intersection where snipers pick off easy victims.  A cameraman comes to film the scene for the foreign media and there is a body on the street.  Dragan does not want the world to think that they are a people who leave the dead abandoned on the street but it’s highly risky to retrieve it.

Arrow is a young woman who has become a sniper.  For her it is important not to become consumed by hate.  When she is assigned to protect the cellist of Sarajevo, who played Albinoni’s Adagio at the site of a massacre where 22 people were shelled on their way to the bakery, she is expected to kill the sniper for the ‘men on the hills’ who has in turn been assigned to kill the cellist.  She sees him stay his rifle and listen to the music.  Should she kill him?

The daily lives of these three characters reveal the privations and misery of life under the siege.  All three are fatalistic about their chances of survival, but are determined that the Sarajevo that survives will be a place worth fighting for.

It’s a beautiful book.

Beloved is a wonderful book even though it is deeply disturbing to read.   It was published in 1987, it won the Pulitzer Prize and Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.  Why it has taken me more than 20 years to get round to reading it, and how I came to miss the movie, I can’t explain….

It’s the story of Sethe, in post Civil War Ohio, coming to terms with a freedom which has not really set her free.  The narrative leaks unwelcome intrusions from her past into the present and it presents multiple voices, but Sethe is the central character.  A former slave, she has lost so much and she is such a damaged person that I found it hard to reconcile this depiction of a former slave with Lawrence Hill’s Someone Knows My Name.  I had reservations about the resilience of the character Aminata at the time of reading Hill’s book, and Beloved reinforces my view that the impact of slavery on the pysche is, in Someone Knows My Name, somewhat sanitised.   

Sethe’s house, No 124, is haunted by her dead toddler, and everyone avoids the place.  Her grandmother, Baby Suggs, has not long died and Sethe lives there alone with her surviving daughter, Denver, until Paul D turns up.  He is a former slave also from the ironically named plantation Sweet Home, and his arrival triggers the presence of Beloved, who seems to be an adult reincarnation of the dead child.

Memories too painful to remember surge back to life.  We learn about the thrashing Sethe received from Schoolmaster so that her back resembles a chokeberry tree, and how two boys stole her milk, suckling as if she were an animal.  She flees, going into premature labour from which she is rescued by Amy Denver, poor ‘white trash’.  Amy saves her life, she cleans and tends her feet as Christ would have done, and crucially, despite her own poverty, she does not turn Sethe in to claim reward money for the recapture of a runaway. 

Schoolteacher finds her anyway and it is then that Sethe tries to kill her children to prevent them from being taken back to slavery, but she succeeds only with one, ‘trying to put my babies where they would be safe’.  It is a gruesome death, triggered by panic, but the local community cannot forgive her for it, and Paul D cannot come to terms with it either although he yearns to bring Sethe back to normality and into the healing life of the Black Community.

He, like Sethe, has learned not to love.  When husbands, wives and children are taken away and sold, it doesn’t pay to love anyone at all.  He witnessed the outrage perpertrated on Sethe but could not speak because he had an iron bit in his mouth.  Later he is forced to wear a metal collar and is shamed to be wearing it in Sethe’s presence.  The horrors described in this book are sometimes quite overwhelming but there are words also which shock and shock again, as when Schoolmaster refers to Sethe’s baby as a foal.   There is a painfully poignant moment when Paul D recognises that as a slave he has less value than a rooster, because roosters have freedom, and even when they’re killed they’re still roosters, but Negro slaves have no identity, no intrinsic worth and no value other than economic. 

There is no coming to terms with slavery for any of these people, not even for Denver who was born in freedom.  When she walks down the street and hears footsteps behind her she is in a lather of fear until it is clear that they are Black, not White, and will not torment her.  There is no release ever from the sense of having being ‘owned’ even though there is a kind of surreal joy when Paul D first experiences being paid for his labour and spends money he has earned.

Nevertheless, there is a kind of bittersweet triumph when the women of the community ’sing away’ Beloved when she threatens to engulf Sethe entirely, and Paul D reclaims her so that they can have a future of sorts.

Beloved is rich in symbolism, themes and moral dilemmas (and there are probably countless websites analysing it) – but for me the raw experience of reading it has changed the way I think about slavery forever.  I knew it was evil in all its manifestations, even in pseudo-benign forms like Sweet Home or Hill’s Carolina indigo plantations, but I had not thought through the psychological scarring that permeates the generations that follow.  It is like the Holocaust – an inimaginable horror made real and an unforgiveable crime – but more than that, it haunts the mind and perhaps may never be cleansed from memory.

I am not sure that the powerful emotions this book evoked would translate well into film.  Part of the power of this book is the fractured narrative and the incoherence of the characters’ thoughts.  Tidying that up into an accessible film might well have muted its message.

Having joined Team Ulysses at DoveGreyReader (and the group read was my idea so I’m quite excited!) I am now embarking on my fourth reading of Ulysses by James Joyce. 

To take my own advice, I’m heading this post with the link to Ulysses at Wikipedia because if offers a bit of guidance with the way Joyce plays around with different literary styles and uses allusions etc, and I am going to want to refer to it often.  It is the difference in literary styles that I remember most from reading this book at Melbourne University in 1981 – and I do so wish I could remember the name of my tutor because she was excellent - I would have liked to pay homage to her skills in leading us onto a higher plane in reading pleasure than ever we could have had without her. 

A brief digression….

Wikipedia tells me that James Joyce first discovered Ulysses the hero when he was a child, reading Charles Lamb – and this has reminded me of the disaster which befell my beautifully illustrated copy of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare….

No amount of rearranging the shelves in the library could make space for some of my larger books, and I resorted to placing some of them in a stack on top of the shelves.  These shelves are almost floor-to-ceiling, but there is space to store the books for The Spouse’s business records, should the ATO ever wish to audit us.  (They’ll be wasting their time if they do!)  Alas, I had forgotten that when the shelves were installed, within the corner where the two sides meet is vacant space, leaving a splendid column of empty air to collect cobwebs – and a perilous edge beyond which anything which fell might never be retrieved.  As the business records bred, the space they took up edged ever closer to the precipice, but it was not Business Activity Statements Nos 31-34 which toppled to their doom but my Tales from Shakespeare, an illustrated  World of Charles Dickens and some treasured children’s picture books.  I have tried everything possible to get them out of their tomb, but the architecture of the shelves defies all efforts.  The books are there till the shelves are demolished, where they are likely to be turfed out with the rubbish by some heartless tradesman.  I am still very cross with myself about this….

My copy of Ulysses is far from lovely.  It is a battered old Penguin, and I am astonished to find that it is full of pencil annotations in my own hand!  When was I ever such a vandal?  I hope I didn’t do this to any of the other books that I read at university because I dislike reading books so mutilated – the (usually inane) comments in the margins detract from the flow of reading the author’s words.  

Why for example did I underline Buck Mulligan’s claim to Stephen’s pay packet on p17?  ‘How much? Four quid? Lend us one.‘  Instead of simply reading on, I’m now pressured into considering the signifiance of these seven words.  I’ve missed something that I ought to recognise, and 28 years after marking the book I can’t remember the import.  It’s very tiresome, and it’s my fault entirely. 

I wonder how many who have signed up to Team Ulysses will finish.  Will I?  I have already read it three times, and there are so many other wonderful books as yet unread, and yet more that I have read and loved and want to read again.  We shall see…

 I didn’t enjoy this.  Not that I expected to ‘enjoy’  any story about the 1992-5 Bosnian War - but I found the style of this novel too exuberant. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is written from the POV of a young boy, naïve and foolish and utterly unable to comprehend much of the disaster about to befall his little town. On the one hand this resilience is impressive and on the other his incomprehension is almost endearing, but we, the readers, know what it means when Amelia has to go in the bedroom with a Serbian soldier, and we know about the finality of death.

As the story progresses and his family flees to Germany, he is haunted by his memories of lost friends and it becomes increasingly grim.  The pell-mell frantic prose left me confused about events and I lost track of what was going on.  Wars, of course, are like that, but I wasn’t familiar enough with this one to make sense of it all. In the end, I found myself skipping chunks of it, just to get to the end.