Eating Muffins in an Agitated Manner

Sebald: Austerlitz

Posted by Sari

Austerlitz is the last novel of W.G. Sebald, a German author and academic who lived most of his adult life in England and was killed in a traffic accident in 2001. Austerlitz knocked a book out of my list of 32, first time this happened since I drew the list up four years a go.

Austerlitz is a strange narrative. It is a story of how its nameless narrator meets in Antwerp one Joseph Austerlitz, and keeps meeting him on and off through years. During their meetings Austerlitz and the narrator discuss about architecture, history, culture and ultimately Austerlitz's quest to find his own past.

Sebald writes in long sentences without chapters or paragraphs. I was expecting that getting into the rhythm of the text would be a chore like it is for me with Proust or later James, but somehow Sebalds narration rolled almost hypnotically from page to page interrupted only by the blurry and enigmatic photographs. It was easy to slip into the narrative even in a bus or a restaurant, slow one's heart to beat to synch with the novel.

As a historian, the themes of memory and history are naturally something I easily gravitate to, but in this case those were almost incidental. Though Sebald's vision is in itself revelatory, it is the way he echoes the themes of repression and memory in the structure and language of the book that leaves me almost speechless. In word and picture he talks from the beginning to the end about holocaust without really mentioning it : ”...I came on a glorious early summer's day to the city of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name. Even on my arrival, as the train rolled slowly over the viaduct with its curious pointed turrets on both sides and into the dark station concourse, I had begun to feel unwell, and this sense of indisposition persisted for the whole of my visit to Belgium on that occasion. I still remember the uncertainty of my footsteps as I walked all round the inner city, down Jeruzalemstraat, Nachtegaalstraat, Pelikaanstraat, Paradijsstraat, Immerseelstraat and many other streets and alleyways...” His metaphors, images, digressions and words criss-cross and connect through history making the past, ours and Austerlitz's into integral part of the present.

Through fortresses, libraries and railway stations, tree-roots and burial grounds Sebald gently hammers his passionate but unsentimental meditation on 20^thcentury Europe to the consciousness of his readers, reminding us of our shared history, and the need to remember. Do yourself a favour and read Austerlitz. It might change the way you look at literature.

Number four: Lois McMaster Bujold's Komarr

Posted by Sari

For some reason this has been surprisingly difficult entry to compose, I know why I find Bujold extremely satisfying writer, but I have been struggling with how to say it. Lois MacMaster Bujold writes space opera and fantasy and lately also both in the romantic subgenre. Most of her formidable collection of Hugo statuettes are for books belonging to her Vorkosigan saga, a series of novels about magnetic but diminutive Miles Vorkosigan, the scion of a noble house on planet Barrayar. Barrayar is struggling to rejoin galactic humanity after centuries of isolation during which it had adopted a monarchical system of government vaguely reminicent of 18^th-century France of perhaps even more 19^th-century Russia.

On one level, Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels are exciting space operatic romps with royalty, conspiracies, secret missions, captivating characters and delightfull derring do with cousin Ivan, that idiot, but what pushes them that extra notch up on my scale is the way Bujold sneaks in quite serious sociological and psychological themes almost casually among the action, romance and comedy. For example, Civil Campaing is a romantic comedy, the story of Miles grandiose and hamfisted efforts to woo his lady love. But it is also a sly look at reproductive rights in a society where male heirs and primogeniture are paramount but which has recently adopted advanced technology like ex-utero gestation.

In my chosen novel, Komarr, similar dual layered structure is at work. On one hand it is a detective story. Miles in his new job as Imperial Auditor is dispatched to Komarr, planet Barrayar has violently annexed to its empire, to investigate an explosion which might be sabotage. On the planet he meets Ekaterin, long-suffering wife of the chief administrator Tien Vorsoisson, a man who seems to be somehow involved in the sabotage. The novel shifts between Miles and Ekaterin’s points of view, and thus in between the well crafted mystery plot culminating on a hostage situation on a space station, there is a believable and terse look at a woman struggling to find her way out of a relationship that has over the years turned into emotional abuse and soul-destroying duty. And somehow Bujold manages to write these both stories seamlessly together. Now that is craftsmanship of highest order.

And I am glad to see that Jo Walton, World Fantasy Award winning author of the best dragon novel ever, Tooth and Claw agrees with me on Bujold’s excellence.

Number three

Posted by Sari

Not such a long time between numbers two and three on my best books ever list. See how approaching deadlines on PhD -thesis increase the need to write something completely different...

I Guess I am kinda cheating here, so many of my favourite books are actually series, but it is my list and I don’t really care. Third in the alphabetical order comes Martin Boyd’s Langton Quartett, which is clearly less famous work than the previous nominees. Amazon does not even have pictures up.

Martin Boyd unites two separate spheres of interest for me. First is the novel of manners, second is Australian literature. Boyd was part of Australia’s artistic and social elite: his siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews and even parents were all famous painters, arcitects, potters and other visual artists. His family was also part of pre-wars Melbourne elite,  wealthy enough to divide their time between Europe and Australia. Boyd’s most famous work, the Langton Quartett draws heavily from his own family amalgamating real persons and events with pure fiction.

Through his alter-egoish narrator Guy Langton, Boyd spins the tale of his family’s life in the pre-first world war Europe and Australia. In the first book, “Cardboard Crown” Guy reconstructs the life of her grandmother Alice through her diary and memories of his relations. In the second and most famous novel in the sequence, “A Difficult Young Man” Guy ponders on the youth of his brother Dominic. Third novel, the exquisitely named “Outbreak of Love” details the marital problems of Guy’s Aunt Diana making the the plot in a way a parallel to the events of the first novel. The last book “When the Blackbird Sings” is the only one which does not have Guy’s distancing narration, but is a straight third person narrative of Dominic's experience of the First World War.

I don’t know why Boyd’s novels have charmed me so. Perhaps it is the the love for a time past, and the impending doom hanging over everything in the form of the first world war. (Boyd, a veteran of that war began to write only after it, the war – as Barret Reid has put it – “released in Martin Boyd the blazing anger of a romantic betrayed”) These are novels of a irrevocably past way of life, grasped at the last possible moment. There is also the effort to relate past and present with each other, the search for reasons, sometimes absurd for why people turn up the way they do. And then there is Boyd’s vision of art and life, his pleasure of art and his fear that life was going to destroy it.

I am also fascinated by the way Langton’s and their class divide their time between two continents settling on neither and always missing the one they happen not to be on. Even though Australia as “the other”, something alien never to be taimed is never a major theme in the novels, the restlesness of the clan does relate to the post-colonial preoccupation with the land and landscape many Australian novelists and poets share.

But mostly, I think my love for these novels has to do with the integrity and transparency (or maybe I am fooling myself and it is an illusion of transparency) of Guy’s narrative voice. The gentle irony and the disance Guy’s narration gives to the stories makes them extremely readable and beautiful novels, but the real wonder is Guy's desperate need to explain and understand which allows him to give voice to all of the characters from the secondary characters like the strangely obsessive Hetty and upwardly mobile aunt Baba to – ultimately - his different and misunderstood brother Dominic without becoming just a cipher.

Number Two

Posted by Sari

Actually, I had written this quite some time ago, but wanted to wait for a bit for reasons to do with uni entrance examinations. But here goes: my favourite book(s) number two:

Which is Pat Baker’s Regenration –trilogy, a series of books about shell-shocked British officers during the First World War. It is an inspired series which weaves together history, metaphor and fiction better than any other book I know, and does it in so many ways.

At the center of the trilogy is the real and fascinating figure of doctor W.H.R. Rivers, an MD, psychologist and anthropologist who during the war was assigned to treat officers with war neuroses. Among his real patients was lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and decorated solider who in 1917 became so disgusted at war that he chucked his medals in the Mersey and wrote a declaration to be read in the House of Commons denouncing the continuation of the war. He was shipped off to Scotland to be treated by Rivers in order to avoid a scandal. Regenration, the first novel in the series depicts the debates about the justification of the war between Rivers and Sassoon, the friendship between Sassoon and fellow inmate Wilfred Owen and Rivers’ efforts to break through to patients really suffering from what today would be termed PTSD.

The next book, “The Eye in the Door” continues to trace the friendship between Rivers and Sassoon and the consequences of that friendship to Rivers’ world-view, but it centers more on a fictive patient of Rivers, Billy Prior who is a “temporary gentleman”, a working-class solider who has risen through ranks to be an officer. Besides being the liminal character capable (and eager) to transgress all boundaries, Prior presents in this part of the trilogy a new dilemma for a warring nation. As Rivers has to make sense of the world were he is curing patients so that they can be sent off to the front to be killed, Prior has to come to terms with his guilt regarding the inhumane way the state (and he himself as a representative of that coercive war-time regime) treats conscientious objectors, and to lesser extent others who do not wholeheartedly buy into the great nationalistic project.

The last part, Booker winning “Ghost Road” is in a strange way the most lyrical of the three and alternates between depictions of Owen and Prior back in France, Rivers in London and Rivers’ memories of his anthropological trips to pacific island headhunters whose culture is in crisis because westerners have banned head-hunting and thus destroyed the cultural equilibrium of the islands.

There are number of reasons why this trilogy is maybe my favourite work of fiction in the world. Firstly, it is the only historical novel I have ever read that has prompted me to read more about the subject-matter and that has not destroyed one bit of the effectiveness of the novel. Rivers’ own writings, his biography, Sassoon’s actual autobiography, his fictionalised autobiography, and biographies, Owen’s biography, Showalter’s “Female Malady”, Fussell, other works on FWW PTSD… I can situate all that in the novel and not cringe. That is not to say that Baker’s novel tells the truth about the war - the revisionist WW1 historians have severly criticized the fusselian take on the war experience – but it can and does tell a truth.

The second, and even more important reason why I love the books is the masterly way in which Baker uses the web of connections between the real persons and events as very powerful metaphors. For example,  stammering was one of the most common symptoms of war neuroses in officers. Rivers stammered. So did rev. Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll), a friend to Rivers’ father. Rivers father, also a clergyman, was also a speech-therapist. These are historical facts, but the way Baker interconnects them through Rivers and makes the power-relations of utterances one of the central themes in the book is nothing short of uncanny. Another example: before the war Rivers worked with his friend Dr. Henry Head in an experiment where they traced the regeneration of nervous system. They severed Head’s radial nerve, then sutured it and during the period of five years Rivers tested Head’s hand by pricking it with needles to see how and how the nerves regenerated. They named the two stages of nerve generation the protopathic, where the stimuli are percieved as painful and poorly localised  and epicritic, where responses to stimuli are gardeable and localisation can be percieved. In the book this experiment and its results act as metaphors for the process of trying to deal with the war trauma from the unlocalised suffocating pain of  the trauma to the gradable, localised pain achieved by therapy. For Rivers the experiment functions also as an allegorical reminder of the pain he caused/causes while dealing with his patients.

My third reason for admiring Barker’s trilogy can actually be seen as one of the central themes of the novels, the justification of war and violence. It carries through all three volumes, beginning with the discussions between Rivers and Sassoon where they in a way convince each other that the other is right, and ending in Ghost Road where the debate is lifeted out of this particular conflict by interspersing the text with passages of Rivers anthropological studies in the South Seas. On one hand there is a sensless slaughter in Europe bitterly described by Owen in Abraham and Isaac, on the other there is the Pacific head-hunter culture which through Rivers eyes looks like a dying idyll, because traditional outlet for tribal violence has been shut down western missionary culture. Neither Rivers or through him Barker find easy answers to the perpetual dilemma of the violence of humanity, but the trilogy, unlike many other fictive and historical works does at least face that question head on.

And if you googled yourself here because Regeneration is the entrance exam book for English Philology this year in Helsinki University, congrats. It is a great book to take apart and put together again.

Whiskers on Kittens

Posted by Sari

Are not my favourite things, and neither are brown paper packages tied up with string. Unless they contain books. And Bill Clinton gave me an idea, yes he did. His fancy new presidential library is going to be opened in the fall of this year near Little Rock, Arkansas and part of the exhibition he has picked 21 of his favourite books of all time.  Now, I have read - okay in some cases just leafed through - whopping six of his choices (Marcus Aurelius, Eliot, Ellison, Marquez, Weber and Yeats), and few more are on my endless to-be-read list (Orwell and Wright mainly), but most of them go straight to the never heard -category.  Some of his choises are pretty representational for a man hof his generation and beliefs and are less central to someone outside that experience and some are in fields like theology, philosophy or political science which I have always found, well, boring, so I am not going to feel too bad about not liking same books. And I think it is kind of cute he has Hillary's autobiography up there with Eliot and Thomas a Kempis...

But that got me thinking. Which would be my 21 books? Okay, firstly I could not narrow it down to 21. So I have 32. Which is 11 more than Bill and I am sure there is some deep numerological wisdom to be found in there. Secondly, I love novels, and in order to have some other works besides novels on the list I divided my list to 16 novels, five plays, five poems and six non-fiction books. Thirdly, the previous classification is the only structure I allowed for the list. I did not aim for erudition, geographical balance, inclusion or exclusion of genre books or anything other these are just books that made me go "Wow!" for some reason or another.  And fourthly, I exluded all books however good that have to do with my work, this is pleasure reading only.

So you want to see the list? Sorry, not yet. What would be fun in that? I spent enough of my Jukka's and Mexi's time on this excercise to just blurt it out.  I am feeding it to you in drops, one book at the time, in alphabetical order. Which mean we are beginning with one of my passions, Jane Austen.

Me and Jane got of to a very bad start when I was about eleven years old. I had just read Jane Eyre and was full of Mr. Rochester's passionate speeches and windswept moors and wanted more. My gran with whom we were spending our summer did not have Villette or Wuthering Heights, so she gave me Pride and Prejudice. Big mistake. How could "My affections and wishes are unchanged" hope to compare with "Oh Jane! My hope - my love - my life"? What a lame stuffed shirt that Darcy was, and there there was no kiss, even. Bah.

Later in life I learned to appreciate Austen’s fortes as a writer: sharp eye for character and charicature, engaging though very civilized love stories, delicious wit and masterful command of language. She worked on limited subject matter, the relationships between a small closed set of English gentry, the world she knew best. She herself described her work famously as “a little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with so fine a brush as to produce little effect after much labour”.

Though I loved each and every one of Austen’s books, the one which I keep returning time after time is her last, Persuasion (Viisasteleva sydän). There are millions of reasons I love the book to bits. In addition to the qualities it shares with all Austen’s work Persuasion has something extra. Firstly there is the heroine of the novel, of all the engaging characters Austen created I love Anne best, her hidden wit, her cool head in the crises and her kindness. I also love the more introspective and melancholy mood of the novel.  I also think the it captures wonderfully Anne’s agony when she is trying to singnal captain Wentworth that she still loves him when it is not proper for her to make it obvious neither by act or word. It is a beautiful and true depiction of how the society and the dominating friends and family have forced the heroine in such a passive position, she really has very few means to communicate what she wants. Then there is of course there is” the letter”, the one Wentworth  gives to Anne. Swoon.

And last but not least is the fact that this is the most nautical of Austen’s novels. Which mainly meas that in the novel there are a number of naval officers living on shore on half pay, and were thus available as objects of romantic attachment to the heroines of the novel. We have the adorable Admiral and Mrs. Croft, and the Captains Benwick, Harville and of course Wentworth to entertain us with tales from the seven seas. There just seems to be a little more feel of a world outside the tightly knit gentry community than in other Austen novels which makes Persuasion more part of the world than many other Austen novels. There are some glitches in the structure, mainly due to the fact that Austen died before she could polish it off, but even so it is a gem. And now I want go and read again the bit where Anne comes to visit her Musgrave relatives at Uppercross, and then maybe the bit where Luisa jumps of the stairs in Lyme and injures herself. And then the beginning wher Sir Walter is depicted obsessing over his entry in the baronetcy and then the scene at the recital at Bath which stills leaves me breathless in its perfection.