Katherine Mansfield's letters

I was recently given all of my grandparents books. They both died when I was ten, so it is fascinating to reconnect with them through words: reading, books and their marginalia. My grandma appears to have had a passion for poetry. This summer I read her two hard-backed editions of Katherine Mansfield's letters. Collated by her husband, John Middleton Murray, the letters span from 1913-1922. The writing is alive, spontaneous, extraordinary. Desperately ill, Mansfield describes convalescence on the Cote d'Azur, Paris during WW1 and a writing life separated from her beloved author husband. In his introductory note, J. Middleton Murray writes, "Mansfield's one concern was to leave behind her some small legacy of truth..not a little of her 'truth' is contained in these letters"; the texts are lit by her veracity, a naive startling brilliance. Here's an excerpt from a letter written to her husband in the Summer of 1913,

"I'm a lion all day, darling, but with that last point of daylight I begin to turn into a lamb and by midnight mon Dieu! by midnight the whole world has turned into a butcher!"

Summer books

Am planning to take these texts when I travel: a P.D James detective novel, Mary Midgely (The Myths we Live By), Francois Cheng (The Way of Beauty), a Pierre Hadot book for some dry, but thoughtful Greek philosophy, a collection of American short stories recommended on an excellent summer reading list here, a Le Monde magazine edition about Levis-Strauss, a recent novel about death by French writer Maylis de Kerangal and a very old green hard-backed collection of Katherine Mansfield's letters, bought by my grandma in 1929. I am opting for Kindle and books and my bag is rather heavy!

Books By My Bed : in total disorder

We only moved house three weeks ago. Yet, I appear to have already recreated the messy pile of books by my bed. This pile appears to have a life of it's own, to be attached to me; like Linus's security blanket in Charlie Brown, wherever I go, my pile travels with me. At the moment there are ( in total disorder) : Jasper FForde, Lost in a Good Book, three matching brown Muji notebooks, one small black notebook, David Vann Goat Mountain, P.D James Trilogy of Death, Elias Cannetti Masse et Puissance, Francoise Dolto Tout est Langage, Wilkie Collin The Woman in White and various research notes and articles for I play that I am writing. There's also a loom bracelet, a bottle of water, a pen and a dead fly...

Sorting books

I write. I read. I have far too many books and I am moving in four days. In the garage of the new house are fifty boxes containing my dad's books, my grandparents books and possible their parents books. There are books everywhere; books I keep for the title (ex a scientific theory of bowls), old books, new books, a blue book (my sister gave me), classic books and modern fiction. There are kids books, non-fiction books, cookery books and those which I keep by my bed, just because I want them close while I sleep. Some books house so many memories I'd like to chuck them on a bonfire and watch them burn. Other books are unfamiliar, I don't know how they got on to my shelf. I've made so many boxes of books, I can't count. They bring me laughter, bewilderment, a nest to escape to, miracles for dreaming,   a place to hide.  

Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City and sandwiches

I've been wanting to write about several things: Armistead Maupin, the act of re-reading, Jane Austen and the daily practise of writing by hand ( as opposed to using keyboard and screen). Tales of the City has been my pre-sleep book of late; it's light, entertaining, caustic, witty. Just what you need when Murakami seems far too heavy but you don't want to dumb down to airport trash, moments to reach for Ian Rankin, Fred Vargas and Armistead Maupin. If Tales of the City were food it would not be a banquet, or four-course French gastronomie but a well-made high-class snack. I imagine this book as a sourdough sandwich, filled with roast tomatoes, organic goats cheese and  local mesclun, served with hand-made beetroot crisps. 

P.S To clarify, I consider sandwich-making an art.

admiring silence

Just whizzed through Admiring Silence by Abdulrazak Gurnah; a study of identity, belonging and home. The story of a man's escape and subsequent return, many years later, to his native Zanzibar. These are themes which are close to my heart. Good writing about home can be found in the books of Nancy Huston and Milan Kundera, particularly the book Ignorance. Ignorance, another story of a bitter home-coming, echoes the themes in Admiring Silence, how we create our identities culturally, the honey trap of nostalgia, the impossibility of belonging once you have left. Admiring Silence is particularly brilliant in it's satirical insights into our many-layered post-colonial cultures. 'The ruins are one of the many things which make England a nation, along with a certain over-confident, hedonist cynicism which passes for sophistication and street-wisdom. Because the England of those ruins does not exist anymore'.

A Writer's Diary

I've just finished ploughing through the blustery pages of Woolf's A Writer's Diary. It feels like she lived such a cyclical existence, falling from one book to another; first draft, second draft, layout, publication, she waited for the fallout and then started again. I never realised how prolific she was, how much fiction and how much literary criticism she wrote. I love the entries where she describes forming a book in her mind, as without word-processing the action of moving from thought to page is radically transformed; the novel much imagined before words hit paper. There is so many things to say about this book: it informs us technically about the different stages of her writing process, illustrates how she reads - the classics, falling like rain- how she lives, moving from country to town and the book also contains jewelled morcels of descriptive prose that could be framed and hung upon the wall.