#allenderreadinglist2022

[robinallender]

When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides. 

So begins Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It’s hard to talk about without mentioning spoilers, but there’s something of Borges and of Gormenghast in the novel. Clarke’s world-building is quite extraordinary; the universe of Piranesi is a beautifully imagined space with a profound sense of mystery. My only criticism would be that the more the mystery is explained the less powerful it becomes. But I suppose we can’t expect to wander around an entire novel in a permanent state of confusion (although I probably would read a novel like that, if someone wants to write it). I’m nitpicking – Piranesi is a brilliant, unique novel.

[robinallender]

I’m really enjoying Eclipse by John Banville at the moment. I couldn’t find a high-res image of the cover so here is a picture of Camberwell cemetery.

Banville writes so beautifully; every sentence is an elegiac little poem: ‘Listening shadows hung in the high room.’ Occasionally it gets a bit much (but maybe deliberately so?). I feel like characters in Banville novels can never just go for a pint, they always have to attend the cromulent bar, imbibing libation after libation of effervescent pilsner, the shadows of the past etching themselves into the darkened corners of the inner pub. Both are pretty cool to be fair.

[robinallender]

It was an absolute delight to reread Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett for the ‘Pub Library’ section of a recent Moon Under Water episode. There’s a great quotation from the literary critic M. W. Croll: ‘not a thought, but a mind thinking’. The poet Elizabeth Bishop latched on to this phrase because it represents a certain kind of poetic style that captures the nature of thought; the way the mind moves from one thing to another. Pond is written in this style, full of tangents and sudden breaks (‘none of this has anything to do with now whatsoever’), a true representation of the way a mind flits about and fizzes away. The novel is also very funny, verbose and knowing – reading it is like receiving a particularly insightful email from a friend. Actually, make that a letter, not an email. The narrator of Pond refers to the fact that she is writing it in longhand and you can kind of feel that as you read it. Time slows down as the language is drawn out and luxuriated in.

I cannot settle, and so I drink. I drink to you; I drink to me. I drink to plough and fortify a one-track mind and suddenly, briefly, the blood surrenders, shuffles through the old channels, and there is no such thing as a false move.

[robinallender]

I recently finished two superb collections of short stories. Dance Move is Wendy Erskine’s second collection (Sweet Home is also excellent!). Erskine’s characters are so well drawn and she’s brilliantly observant about class, social status and unspoken hierarchies. Her stories are full of people living compromised lives; labouring under delusions or entertaining pretensions.

Send Nudes by Saba Sams is also bleakly brilliant. Ten dark and often very moving stories of innocence and experience.

[robinallender]

Here’s a picture of the delicious madeleines at St. JOHN in Smithfield to celebrate the fact that I have finished reading The Way by Swann’s, the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (translated by Lydia Davis). (TLDR: eat a tea-soaked madeleine, remember stuff for 4000 pages.) I think it was one of the most amazing reading experiences of my life and I’m looking forward to slowly making my way through the whole thing. Just extraordinary writing about memory and music – and about how we experience life in two distinct ways: as we live through it and as we remember it. Or, as my friend Sam Wisternoff once wrote in a song, ‘a minute with you is an hour in my head the next day’. 

Anyway, how’s this for a description of nostalgia: 

what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory’s pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed. […] The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions that formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

P. S. Thanks to my friend Tom Wilson for encouraging (demanding) that I finally read it!

[robinallender]

I really enjoyed Emily Berry’s collection of poems Unexhausted Time, particularly ‘Ghosts (Homage to Burial)’, which is made up entirely of quotations from a Burial interview with Mark Fisher. I couldn’t find a decent image of the cover online so here is a photo of some moonbeams peeking through the curtains onto the bedroom ceiling. Anyway, this is a prose poem from Unexhausted Time called ‘Street’:

Walking along the street one afternoon I found myself abreast of another pedestrian who, for whatever reasons, perhaps the same as my own, could not bring themselves to generate a surge in pace sufficient to overtake me. So we continued in that way for some time, almost companionably, and when at last something did compel them to break away I felt a pact had been torn and I knew once and for all that my worst fears were true: I was all alone in the world and no one could save me.

[robinallender]

It was an absolute pleasure to talk to Ezra Furman for this week’s Moon Under Water podcast. Check out their brilliant new single Point Me Toward the Real – and I really cannot recommend their superb 33 1/3 book about Lou Reed’s Transformer highly enough. Some of the best music writing I’ve ever read; it’s a book that grapples with the multiplicities of a great artist/terrible person and celebrates the album’s profound ambiguity.

A song is a bad place to hide. Songs are always built to reveal their authors’ inner lives – it’s inherent to the form. You can dress your song up in jokey costumes, bury it in noise, or fill it with lies, but if you dare to sing it, you will reveal things about yourself. Having spent years trying it a million different ways, I’ve learned this beyond a doubt. Singing is confession.

[robinallender]

This is a beautiful meditation on music and writing. Occasionally it did remind me of the Twitter account ‘If plumbers spoke like writers’, in which some of the more self-regarding observations made by authors about their ‘craft’ have had the word ‘writing’ replaced with ‘plumbing’, e.g.: ‘My plumbing is an exaltation. A celebration of the fundamentals of humanity.’ Greenlaw does stray into this territory at times: ‘When I’m not plumbing, I sense its pull. I can’t hear what other people are saying or make space for other worlds. There’s an impatience to get back to it and a resentment of all that stands in its way. I feel the weight of it, its gnawing nature, constantly.’ But this is to an immense disservice to a book that is truly profound:

I didn’t yet understand that the home you leave behind, the one you grew up in, travels ahead and is always there in some form to greet you.

And I don’t think this description of reading can be bettered:

It’s an experience of finding yourself simultaneously elsewhere and travelling your own nature. It is also the enactment of a desire to be quiet. The book in your hands gives you permission to remain silent and alone. How much reading time is spent dreaming?