the product of this fascination

Twelve months ago I published a list of ten favourite quotes, all of them from books I'd read that year. This week I decided I'd publish a list for 2010. I've left out Proust again, deliberately, along with everything I've already excerpted onto this blog (and I think I've already used my favourite pieces of Ruskin, so no him, and no Ernestine Hill -- and no Anita Brookner either, because I've decided that her intelligence (which nobody can deny) doesn't come across well in quotes. In her books she's thoughtful but in quotes she sounds arch or non sequiturial. You can't tell the quality of an author through their quotes. Henry James quotes badly. Like trying to quote a cloud. His moments need masses behind them).

The moment was gone by; there had been no ecstasy, no gladness even; hardly half an hour had passed, and few words had been spoken, yet with that quickness in weaving new futures which belongs to women whose notions have kept them in habitual fear of consequences, Mrs Transome thought she saw with all the clearness of demonstration that her son's return had not been a good for her, in the sense of making her any happier.




My griefe, quoth I, is called Ignorance,
Which makes me differ little from a brute:
For animals are led by natures lore,
Their seeming science is but customes fruit;
When they are hurt they haue a sense of paine;
But want the sense to cure themselues againe.

And euer since this griefe did me oppresse,
Instinct of nature is my chiefest guide;
I feele disease, yet know not what I ayle,
I finde a sore, but can no salue prouide;
I hungry am, yet cannot seeke for foode;
Because I know not what is bad or good.




Hence the predicament of the poor after self-preservation has been assured is that their lives are without consequence, and that they remain excluded from the light of the public realm where excellence can shine; they stand in darkness wherever they go.




It would be easy to enumerate many important and splendid gifts in which Butler as a novelist was deficient; but his deficiency serves to lay bare one gift in which he excelled, which is his point of view. To have by nature a point of view, to stick to it, to follow it where it leads, is the rarest of possessions and lends value even to trifles.




For human intercourse … is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. In this direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence … [Fictional characters] are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible.




Throughout the seventeenth century we find a deepening fascination with the complexity of the ego, complexities not to be disciplined or even negated in the interest of immediacies of religious encounter, but on the contrary to be mapped and cultivated for their own sake. The prose novel, whose beginnings are so characteristically those of the fantasy journey, or of the epistolary dialogue, is the product of this fascination. And many of its early triumphs … directly embody the techniques and rhetorical conventions developed in previous periods of religious ethical introspection.




The mistress of the Establishment holds no place in our memory; but, rampant on one eternal door-mat, in an eternal entry long and narrow, is a puffy pug-dog, with a personal animosity towards us, who triumphs over Time. The bark of that baleful Pug, a certain radiating way he had of snapping at our undefended legs, the ghastly grinning of his moist black muzzle and white teeth, and the insolence of his crisp tail curled like a pastoral crook, all live and flourish. From an otherwise unaccountable association of him with a fiddle, we conclude that he was of French extraction, and his name FIDELE.




From the Renaissance onward marvels were no longer those from distant lands … curiosities or the relics of saints, but the wonders of the human body and its recesses that had been secret until then.




Magic is the rudimentary form of that causal thinking that ultimately liquidates magic.




For Prospero remains the evergreen
Cell by the margins of the sea and land,
Who many cities, plains, and people saw
Yet by his open door
In sunlight fell asleep
One summer with the Apple in his hand.

George Eliot: Felix Holt, the Radical, Rachel Speight: The Dreame, Hannah Arendt: On Revolution, Virginia Woolf: In a Library, E.M. Forster: Aspects of the Novel, George Steiner: On Difficulty and Other Essays, Charles Dickens: Our School, Umberto Eco: The Infinity of Lists, Theodor Adorno translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor: Aesthetic Theory, Lawrence Durrell: Cities, Plains, and People.

return to me

In December last year the bloggers at The Auteurs Notebook posted lists of "fantasy double features": films that, they thought, deserved to appear together, like Miyazaki's Ponyo and Osamu Tezuka's Legend of the Forest, Part I. I thought: I wonder what it would look like if you used books.

And I dawdled over the idea for weeks until the Guardian book blog beat me to it.

A few suggestions:




Martin Boyd's Langton Quartet and Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time.

I haven't finished the Quartet, but unless the last part is dramatically different to the first, I think this would work. Both authors owe a debt to Proust; and the tone of voice in both cases seems to me similar, being decent, reflective, friendly, settled, British (even though Boyd is not), male, and fairly socially privileged. (Whispering Gums suggests similarities between Boyd and Austen.)




Colette's My Mother's House and Sido, and Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.

The two writers remember their parents, taking particular notice of their mothers. Lucille Clifton's poem oh antic God could be inserted before the main feature to take the place of a short.

… return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother's calling …

Clifton died recently. The Poetry Foundation website has a selection of her work.

For a more dramatic contrast: My Mother's House and The Man Who Loved Children.




Two poems: Cesário Verde's The Feelings of a Westerner and Bysshe Vanolis' City of Dreadful Night.

This double bill was inspired by the Wuthering Expectations blog's investigation of Vanolis, a Scot whose real name was James Thomson. Both poems are narrated by men who feel extravagant and distressing emotions as they walk through large cities; and both were written in the second half of the 1800s.





Daniachew Worku's The Thirteenth Sun and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

Worku takes the language of Faulkner's ideas and uses it to describe Ethiopia during the reign of Haile Selassie. You could also pair Worku's book with Williams Sassine's Wirriyamu, comparing the polemic fiction of African anti-colonialism to the pessimistic self-assessment of an African country that has not been colonised. (Calm pessimism is a luxury.)





George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.

You could mix these around with Bleak House, War and Peace, or any of those other books that try to swallow a whole country from the higher parts of society to the lower. A Suitable Boy perhaps?




Hannah Arendt's On Revolution and Melville's Billy Budd.

Arendt draws on Budd as she discusses the intersection between Rousseau's ideas about the native virtue of Natural Man, and the men who saw the French Revolution transform into the Reign of Terror.




Elizabeth Jolley's Lovesong and Alex Miller's Lovesong.

Purely for the titles. I haven't read Miller's book.




The Selected Poems of Gwen Harwood and Jolley's Lovesong.

Music is important to both books, and the two writers share an impressionistic or pointillist method of putting a piece of work together.




Pierre Louÿs' Aphrodite and Jacob's Room, by Woolf.

One writer's worship of the ancient world versus the other writer's sane and smiling glance at ancient-world worship. I would read them in that order too. Aphrodite contains the quintessential decadent line: "It is almost three hours since I arose; I am dying of fatigue," uttered by a character who has spent most of that three hours sitting in a chair or lying down in a bath.




En-hedu-ana's Inana and Ebih and Antar (or Antara, or Antarah, or 'Antarah Ibn Shaddād al-'Absī)'s The Poem of Antar.

Two warlike narrators and a chanting style, at least in translation. (I am thinking of this version of Inana and this Antar.)




Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Grossman's book would not have existed in its present shape without Tolstoy's. He is even faithful to the idea that we should spend intimate time with the leaders of both sides in his story's war. One of the book's daring surprises -- which I am about to ruin for you if you have not read it -- is the sudden plunge into Hitler.




Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast and Christina Stead's The People with the Dogs.

The two authors look at utopias. Theroux approaches the idea from one angle, Stead approaches it from others. His approach is quite clear and driven, hers surrounds the idea like an amoeba and bores into it.




Christina Stead's Letty Fox - Her Luck, and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders.

Letty is like Moll, sexually pragmatic.




Two short stories: Alice Munro's Runaway and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find.




Ovid's Metamorphoses and Satomi Ikazawa's Guru Guru Pon-Chan.




The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Fernanado Pessoa's Book of Disquiet.




Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines and today's newspaper.

here a foie-gras roll, there a chocolate éclair

Everyone at the moment is making end-of-year lists, so this morning I sat down and made an end-of-year list. Here are fifteen extracts from books I've read this year. They're not ranked, but they're some of my favourites. I've left out Proust because there's too much of him that's quotable, and I haven't repeated anything I've already posted on this blog (this wasn't done on purpose, my mind skipped past those quotes with the hazy idea that they'd "Already been dealt with" - I see this in retrospect), so there's no sign of ER Eddison's monstrous sentence, and nothing from Christina Stead, although if I'd thought of it I might have included the pity speech from The Puzzleheaded Girl, or the storm-sentence from The People With the Dogs.

The last one gives away the ending of Gustav Flaubert's juvenile novel November. Consider yourself warned there.

So:

*


I have seen the end of all this, clearly, in my imagination: the earth transfigured and the gods walking upon it in their bodies' light … It is the earth as we have made it, clearing, grafting, transplanting, carrying from one place to another, following no plan that we could enunciate, but allowing our bellies to lead us, and some other, deeper hunger, till the landscape we have made reveals to us the creature we long for and must become.


*


History was like that - a negative of which one was the print, the positive.


*


Expect a little, confer future and times past with the present, see the event and comfort thyself with it. It is as well to be discerned in commonwealths, cities, families, as in private men's estates. Italy was once lord of the world, Rome the queen of cities, vaunted herself of two myriads of inhabitants; now that all-commanding country is possessed by petty princes, Rome a small village in respect. Greece of old the seat of civility, mother of sciences and humanity, now forlorn, the nurse of barbarians, a den of thieves. Germany then, saith Tacitus, was incult and horrid, now full of magnificent cities: Athens, Corinth, Carthage, how flourishing cities! now buried in their own ruins: corrorum ferarum, aprorum et bestiarum lustra, like so many wildernesses, a receptacle of wild beasts. Venice, a poor fisher-town, Paris, London, small cottages in Ceasar's time, now most notable emporiums.


*


… at this period in his life he had been writing a a particularly prolific amount about the Slavonic Question, emphasizing the God-given role of the Russian people whose vocation it was to free the rest of Europe, the basis of this chosen destiny being, in his opinion, the special, unique nature of the Russian national mentality and character which, amongst other things, was demonstrated in the use of unprintable words pronounced in various ways and with various shades of meaning, which were employed by the common people not, of course, to insult others or abuse them, but to express the subtle, profound and even saintly feelings buried in the soul of every genuine Russian.


*


It was the old dilemma: how was one to be known?


*


It is the ultimate in being homeless when you understand you have no way of cooking a potato.


*


They must cook very gently indeed, the liquid not even simmering but merely shuddering.


*


"Any cup?" asked Reggie, questing like a prawn over the groaning board, seizing here a foie-gras roll, there a chocolate éclair.


*


The Master said, "What the gentleman seeks in himself, the small man seeks in others."


*


BOSWELL: "But I wonder, sir, you have not more pleasure in writing than in not writing." JOHNSON: "Sir you may wonder."

He talked of making verses, and observed, "The great difficulty is, to know when you have made good ones."


*


Because a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it to be beyond mortal power. On the contrary, if anything is possible and proper for man to do, assume that it must fall within your own capacity.


*


Those who strive to account for a man's deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop. Young Marius now acts like a son of Mars, now as a son of Venus.


*


Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about her or his life. Now I think, "That is what they thought at that time." An interim report - that is what an autobiography is. Would Cellini, would Casanova, would even Rousseau, later have agreed with what they said about themselves in those books that we assume is the fixed truth about what they thought?


*


Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable.


*


At length, last December, he died, but slowly, little by little, solely by the force of thought, without any organic malady, as one who dies of sorrow - which may seem incredible to those who have greatly suffered, but must be tolerated in a novel, for the sake of our love of the marvellous.

David Malouf: An Imaginary Life, Lawrence Durrell: The Avignon Quintet, Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy, Leonid Tsypkin: Summer in Baden-Baden, translated by Roger Keys, Anita Brookner: Strangers, Elizabeth Jolley: Lovesong, Elizabeth David: French Provincial Cooking, Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz, Confucius: The Analects, translated by Raymond Dawson, James Boswell: Life of Johnson, Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, translated by Maxwell Stanforth, Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays, translated by M. Screech, Doris Lessing, Time Bites, from the essay Writing Autobiography, George Eliot: Middlemarch, Gustav Flaubert: November, translated by Francis Steegmuller.