Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2018‎ (190)

’It’s not “weird”, Alex. There was a move to close the Children’s Library and Granny was all mixed up with it somehow. Now it’s threatened with clo

’It’s not “weird”, Alex. There was a move to close the Children’s Library and Granny was all mixed up with it somehow. Now it’s threatened with closure again so she’s agreed to speak at an event which they hope might help to keep the library open.’ ‘I don’t see why we need libraries,’ Alex said. ‘You can get anything you want off the internet.’ His sister, who was of an age to enjoy going against a popular tide, sighed audibly and their mother said, ‘Yes, but how do you know what to look for? That’s why libraries are so important. Without the library, Granny might not have become a writer herself.’ ......

...... My own life was transformed by one young woman who worked in this library, Miss Sylvia Blackwell, who, single-handed, helped me to enter worlds and find the words to describe them that I should never otherwise have found.

By rights, Miss Crake should have been the Trustee. If this was a children’s book she would be, she thought crossly.

Hugh had lied to her. She knew this as surely as she had ever known anything. He had not bothered to read, or not all through, I Capture the Castle, with its bittersweet ending, where a girl’s love in the end comes to nothing.

Elizabeth could see them in her mind’s eye, the slight fair-haired woman with the grey-green eyes with the tall man in horn-rimmed specs, almost as if it was a memory she had forgotten or laid aside. In one of her books they would have found each other, finally, sometime, somewhere.

This is madness, she said to herself. I’m involved with a married man. What a cliché ......

.... It’s a cliché to say your wife doesn’t understand you but I hope you’ll forgive my saying that Jeanette doesn’t fully understand me.

Is this too unbearably pompous?’

He’s an unusual child with an unusually well-developed political sense

Only fools disregard children’s literature. Clarity of vision is shed with childhood but one can sometimes recover a glimpse of it in the best children’s literature.

Aloud she said, ‘Myself, I think children know more or at least better about love than adults. It’s part of the magic for them. Look at Tom’s Midnight Garden.’

As you can tell, I am a passionate, a passionate, supporter of libraries, especially for children who might otherwise have no access to the resources of children’s literature. Children are the citizens of the future and what they are fed and nourished on will form the destiny of our world and the destiny of our beleaguered planet. We have a duty, a moral duty, to ensure that not only the stomachs of our children are fed but also their imaginations. We do not’ –here she paused and swept a glance around her audience –‘we emphatically do not want to find that we have reached such a state of dearth in our society that we must provide food banks for the imagination as well as, as we so regrettably have to do today, for the physical body. Up and down the country there are local libraries, granaries of rich supplies, potential feasts of nourishment, often gifted, as this library was, by benefactors for the good of children, their children and the future of our children’s children and our children’s future children’s children, which it is sheer wickedness to waste and destroy.’

‘But we also need guardians of this wealth, to ensure that it reaches those who may not know they are hungry. our civilisation –a civilisation that is now under threat.’

“To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was

“To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement of that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept”

“saw that at once, as a business man and Abwehr operative, Schindler had contact with every stage of the process of destruction of Jewish Europeans. That is he saw the confiscation of residential and commercial properties … the ghettoisation of the Jews and was part of their exploitation as cheap labour in factories. He saw the unutterably violent liquidation camps, and was a whistle blower as to the existence of .. destruction camps, where death was delivered by industrial gas on a production line scale”

He had a virtual fetish about writing in the voice, and the skin, of a woman. He defended it lightly, saying, "If I write as a woman, I can do all the autobiographical stuff without getting picked up on it"; but the regularity with which he performed this trans-gender ventriloquism suggests a deeply serious engagement with female emotional responses. The charting of a doomed modern love affair, in The Doctor's Wife, filled with off-puttingly clinical sexual encounters, marked perhaps the low- point of these explorations.

“Perhaps chance and destiny are interdependent, in that the latter cannot be fulfilled without the casual intervention of the former. A craggy rock

“Perhaps chance and destiny are interdependent, in that the latter cannot be fulfilled without the casual intervention of the former. A craggy rock placed at a distance from the water will never be worn smooth”

“Myrtle is an interesting subject – in regard to the question as to whether fate or chance holds the upper hand. The ifs are numerous. If Beartrice had not shown an affection for her, would she not have vanished into the orphanage. What if Pompey Jones’s unfortunate arrangement of the tiger’s head had not ended Annie’s hope of motherhood? If old Mrs Hardy had woken that morning in a cheerful mood, would Myrtle have been required to follow George down to the town. Then there is the matter of his returning to Blackberty Lane by a different route than was usual. If the woman’s screams had echoed unheard in another street, what then”

“There’s something of black magic in the photographer’s art, in that he stops time ….. I don’t know that I think much of the camera. It appears to hold reality hostage and yet fails to snap thoughts in the head … The lens is powerless to catch the interior turmoil boiling within the skull”

“I reckon memory is selective ….. I tried to get Potter to discuss what it meant when events were recollected differently. He said he wasn’t in the mood and had enough lapses of his own without fretting over other people’s”

“… crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That,

“… crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once”

“Not a thing of beauty I’m afraid … Nineteeth Century of course”

“Marian was beginning to find the late evenings at Gaze rather hard to live through”

“This is an insane story ….. I don’t mean I don’t believe you. But it’s all mad …. Why does she put up with it, who doesn’t she just pack up and go away”

“Plato tells us that of all the things which belong to the spiritual world beauty is the one which is most easily seen here below.”
“Max’s oblivion of everything to do with Freud was one of the things which made Effingham love him”

“I know one mustn’t think of her as a legendary creature, a beautiful unicorn –
“The unicorn is also the image of Christ. But we have to do too with an ordinary guilty person ….. Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves”

“It was like a comedy by Shakespeare. All the ends of the story were being bound in a good way”

“You both feel you are sitting out the end of some tedious film, don’t you, where you already know what is going to happen …. But perhaps you don’t know what is going to happen, perhaps there are surprises, turns of the story …

“Perhaps Hannah is my experiment! I’ve always had a great theoretical knowledge of morals, but practically speaking I’ve never done a hand’s turn”

“Gerald had no theory about Hannah. Gerald not been paralysed by an allegory”

“Hannah had been to him the chaste mother-godess, the Virgin mother. The sin which Hannah was, through her own sinless suffering redeeming him for had been the sin of his own mother’s betrayal of him with her own father …… Because of his unconscious resentment of his own Mother’s sin of sex, he had been, he explained, unable to establish any satisfactory relations with women other than those of Courtly Love”

“The play is over, the Vampire Play let us call it”
“The spell is broken and the magic is all blown away”
“We were all the attendants up on that ceremony and we are now all dismissed. So we return to our real life and our real tasks”
“It has been a fantasy of the spiritual life, a story, a tragedy ….. He would hurry back to his familiar, ordinary world”

“His death rounded the thing off, gave it a tragic completeness which made it all the easier to cut free of it”
“He was now in a frenzy to be off, to have escaped”

“While you are playing ring-a-roses, others are working the machine”

“Her encounter with Denis, for all its surpisingness and oddness, had so much of the feeling of coming into real life ….. this would be the real business which one human being has with another”

Out on the terrace, the golden retriever came rushing up to Effingham, planting its paws upon his waistcoat and then rolling upon its back in a fluffy whirl of smiling mouth and waving paws”

“There was a roaring sound behind the rain which was perhaps the sea”

At Istros, we

At Istros, we believe that high-quality literature can transcend national interests and speak to us with the common voice of human experience. Discovering contemporary voices and rediscovering forgotten ones, Istros Books works hard to bring you the best that European literature can offer. After a great deal of thinking about the areas of Europe we wanted to cover and the image we wanted to create, we came up with the name Istros Books. Istros is the old Greek and Thracian name for the lower Danube River, which winds its way down from its source in Germany and flows into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and goes on to cross many of the countries of South-East Europe: Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. Its watershed also extends to other neighbouring countries, with one of the main Danubian tributaries, the Sava, serving Slovenia and Bosnia/Herzegovina, while also feeding the waterways and lakes of Macedonia and Montenegro and Albania. These are the countries of focus for Istros Books, evoking the image of the Danube river flowing carelessly across the borders of Europe and encapsulating the ideal of the free-flow of knowledge and the cultural exchange that books promote

She gave clear indications that the translation of her works into other languages should not stray from her intention, form or style. Dialogue is in italics, always. Inverted commas are reserved for irony, ridicule. Word order is carefully chosen, for stress, and should not be transposed. There should be few commas and even fewer semi-colons. ‘I evade semi-colons when I want my protagonists to speak in a breath – so, comma, comma, comma.’ She often talked about dialogue this way, as a breath. Sentences should not be broken up; she was not in the business of making things easier for the reader: ‘The rhythm and repetition are meant to irritate.’ She abhorred qualifiers which might ‘sweeten’ the text. Her language was not to be sweet, nor soft, nor ornamental, because her subjects were not sweet, and she rarely used ellipses, let alone exclamation marks. Everything should be said, not evaded, and the simpler, the more concise, the better: ‘I weigh words, I respect them, I work with them. Where there are repetitions, they are there for a purpose (rhythm and context).

Oh, there is one little book (we laugh). Yes, there is one little book that I love and nobody likes it. Well, let’s say that not many people like it. I don’t know why. Of course, it hasn’t been translated. There were good critiques of it, but it is, probably, a disturbing book. It’s called Doppelganger and it’s about two old people who meet on New Year’s Eve. Both are incontinent, they have diapers and, when the New Year’s Eve ends, they have manual sex through these diapers. But, in the background, you have the stories – one was a naval army officer from the Yugoslavian army and the woman was a Jew with some Austrian descendants and she came to live to Croatia – well, the country isn’t specified. While they’re meeting each other, you have, in the background, this police dossier story. It ends with their suicide. It’s grotesque, in a way. They told me it’s reminiscent of Beckett’s characters. These people, the police, the sex, it was all, probably, repulsive for readers. But it’s my favorite, I would really like to push it outside Croatia. Maybe just because not many people like it, as when you have a disabled child, I don’t know.

“Maybe the time will come when I want nothing more than to return to Buenos Aires, or maybe it will never happen. I try to imagine the feeling my p

“Maybe the time will come when I want nothing more than to return to Buenos Aires, or maybe it will never happen. I try to imagine the feeling my parents must’ve had, the forced decision to stay so far from home. But I don’t have anything keeping me from going back, from picking my life right where I left off. Though the life I had before is impossible now. I stop on the bridge”

“In my first book, No Bones, the critics seemed to think I was writing about a dysfunctional family to show up the dysfunctional society, but it was actually the other way round. The Troubles was the backdrop and the family stuff felt more important and urgent. I think it’s because I’ve resolved something about family issues that I can now do the “bigger” issue – which actually, for me, is the lesser issue.”

“not, for me, about any Northern Irish paramilitary organisation, or about the Troubles, or any government administration of any area . . . for me, it’s about the domestic madness and collusion of the family and associates of the insane leader of a murder gang. That could be any murder gang. What does their consciousness do with what it really knows all along but has to pretend to itself that it doesn’t know?”

Replay the major scene; get on top of it. Take your life into your

Replay the major scene; get on top of it. Take your life into your own hands. Your past belongs to you. Explode the ambient discourse: spit in their soup, which was already pretty murky. Weave your monologue my dear, that’s what I told myself”

“you can always carve wood, mold clay, or polish marble better than anyone, but what good is it if you don’t tell your own story … [which] is not the one they’ve told you, the one they wanted to make you believe”

“The artist Louise Bourgeois, for example, was suddenly all the rage in her last years and finally allowed to come out of the closet and be seen, when her male counterparts had been on the public stage all along, entertaining people with their grandiose and self-destructive behaviour. Yet if one looked at the work of Louise Bourgeois, one saw that it concerned the private history of the female body, its suppression and exploitation and transmogrifications, its terrible malleability as a form and its capacity to create other forms ….

“The ungifted tend not to like themselves very much, and they often don’t like their work either. And so they work feverishly in an unconscious attempt to flee success when they glimpse it, unwittingly protecting their work. Their power to touch viewers, to say something, stays more alive by being constantly put off until later. And it’s precisely in this later that their force resides, Later may well never arrive, but it retains a potential that right now quickly exhausts”

“all fathers are vain braggarts and vacillators, particularly mine and all presidents of absolutely anything .. are ineffectual and pretentious, strutting about … all Don Quixotes … All .. who flaunt their authority, who hide behind their authority, who constantly convince themselves of the sold basis of their authority are ridiculous balloons that we pop like the plump paunches that constitute their entire catechism”

“As an adolescent, you developed a passion for geometry. To be mentally present at the unfurling of a curve, at the turning of a sphere, at the intersection of a plane and a figure filled you with calm. Above all you wanted an abstract character, all affect stripped away, all passions hidden, just geometry. As well as security, with everything predictable, a code that nothing could disrupt, happiness. It’s a domain beyond authority – paternal, professorial, social …”

“It’s a cultivated, refined, intelligent happiness, at that – with references to the history of art and sciences [my note – I would substitute “geometry”] thrown in”

The five silver anklets around the slim leg, the dress with its orangery tint, the golden shoulder and the beauty spot and the base of the neck will show up in a corner of the Sistine chapel a few years later. In painting as in architecture, the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti will own much to Istanbul. His gaze is transformed by the city and otherness: scenes, colours, forms will permeate his work for the rest of his life. The cupola of St Peter is inspired by Santa Sophia and Bayezid’s mosque: the library of the Medicis is inspired by the Sultan’s which he visits with Manuel: the statues in the chapel of the Medicis and even the Moises for Julius II bear the imprint of attitudes and characters he met her, in Constantinople.