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‘Strange things happen when men tell stories about magical sea-women.’ -Charlotte Runcie, Salt on Your Tongue (review)
‘Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world.’ -Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent
Book Review | To the River by Olivia Laing
‘A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit.’
On a midsummer morning, Olivia Laing set off on a journey that took her along the River Ouse from source to sea. The Ouse, the river where Virginia Woolf drowned herself, is a place Laing is attached to and like Woolf, Laing is fascinated by the alluring yet deadly element of water. Laing knows very well that place is not one-dimensional; various moments in time are superimposed in a landscape, so that place is haunted by stories from the past, and ghostly figures tread and re-tread the place beneath the surface of the present. This is why ‘To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface’ is a mixture of travel book, nature writing, memoir, biography, and history. Laing minutely records the paths she takes and the landscape (she has a particularly keen eye for the flora) while reflecting on herself and recalling her memories; but she also narrates a myriad stories that are connected to the River Ouse and its surrounding landscape, ranging from Mansell’s discovery of the iguanodon to Kenneth Grahame’s biography. Her digressive curiosity reminded me very much of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Perhaps some may be frustrated by so many tangents, but I personally love this very allusive kind of writing. So while Laing physically traverses space, her mind (and To the River’s narrative) moves through time, too. Woolf is a significant and recurrent ghostly presence in To the River and I thoroughly enjoyed Laing’s reflection on her life and work. All this is delivered in an elegant and often quotable writing. This was a pleasure to read not just because I love Sebaldian, hybrid texts, but also because of Laing’s gentle, compelling, and sensitive (especially towards the environment) personality that comes through.
This is one of those haunted and haunting books.
Buy this book from Book Depository by clicking here (affiliate).
‘The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.’ - Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
‘Books are the mirrors of the soul.’ -Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
‘Memory is a funny business. Sometimes, moving through water, I feel I’m washed of all thoughts, all desires: content to luxuriate like a starfish, rocking on my own pulse, sensate to no more than the wavering light as it sinks through space to reach my eyes. I might as well have never been born; I’m not sure I know even my name. And then, on other days, the opposite occurs. There have been times when, sunk in a river or a chalky sea, I have felt the past rise up upon me like a wave. The water has loosened something; has dissolved what once was dry; weighted as if with lead, it filters now through my own veins. The present is obliterated, but what the eye sees, what the ear hears, it is not possible to share.’ -Olivia Laing, To the River
Autumn Book Recommendations 🍂 | Jasmine Alexa
Who’s excited for autumn? I am! Autumn reminds me of books with a melancholic mood, books that capture the transience of life and the fast approaching death of winter. Here are some books that would make perfect 🍂 autumn 🍂 reads! Instead of writing a description of each book, I decided to give you a taste of what the prose is like by quoting from the book. I hope you I inspire you to pick up a few of these books!
1. Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk ‘We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Offering no clarity; veiling reality instead, hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a tea kettle has been spouting steam on winter’s day.’
2. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
‘There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.’
3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
‘No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.’
4. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
‘In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.’
5. The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
‘I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.’
6. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
‘I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart.’
What are some of your favourite autumnal reads? Let me know!
(In affiliation with Book Depository.)
‘Maybe, in the end, all that mattered of these two days without respite was the transplanting of the story from one head to the other, like a healthy organ that my mother had given up to me out of affection.’ — Elena Ferrante, Troubling Love
Book Review | Memories of Low Tide by Chantal Thomas
‘Day after day she abandoned herself to the lake water and I to the amniotic fluid, I inhabited her rhythm. We floated, together.’
In French, the words for mother and sea — mère and mer — are homonyms. The figure of the mother and the sea are likewise inextricable in Memories of Low Tide by Chantal Thomas, a memoir which depicts the strong bond that her late mother Jackie had with the sea and that recounts Chantal’s own idyllic childhood spent on the shore of Arcachon Bay, near Bordeaux. True to its name, a series of chronologically ordered memories are unfolded, starting from before Chantal is born. Because this memoir is not about Chantal herself as much as it is a photo album, as it were, of her mother. From a young age, Jackie is drawn to water and the sense of freedom that it gives her. She’s destined to be sportswoman, but she finds herself married with a baby, Chantal, to take care of. Still, she convinces her husband to relocate to Arcachon Bay, where she spends hours, days, seasons swimming with grace and precision, as if she were one with the sea, a perennial 'summertime child'. Chantal inherits her mother’s passion. And this is not just evident through her recollections of her childhood games at the seaside. Her love for the sea is present in the simple yet graceful nature of the memoir’s prose and the lyricism as well as sensory detail with which she evokes the sea. Her early impressions of the sea eventually give way to reflections on her mother. In fact, ‘Memories’ touches upon many themes relating to womanhood, mothering, and female sexuality as Chantal matures and gradually understands her mother’s thessalophilia as well as her mental health. The metamorphic nature of the sea speaks to her femininity and her inability to abide by the pinning down of masculinist society. As Chantal stresses, the sea is not just a backdrop to human life, but also a way of living. Ultimately, Memories of Low Tide is a beautiful expression of love conveyed in waves of memory, where the sea is both a physical presence and a metaphor for the amniotic fluid that connects mother to daughter.
This book was gifted to me by Pushkin Press in exchange for an honest review.
Buy this book: Book Depository
#WomeninTranslation Recommendations | Jasmine Alexa
Did you know that August is #WomeninTranslation Month? Well, if you didn’t, now you do! Here are some brilliant women writers in translation that you should check out sooner rather than later.
1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (Italian)
This is the first novel of the Neapolitan Novels, a quartet that I’ll never stop recommending to everyone. It depicts the story of a friendship between two Neapolitan girls that eventually grow into such complex, fascinating women.
2. A Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux (French)
Annie Ernaux writes autofiction (a blend of autobiography and fiction) at its finest. This tiny novella depicts a passionate love affair between a heterosexual couple from the woman's perspective in a very raw and striking prose.
3. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (French)
Françoise Sagan writes the dreamiest novellas set in the sun-drenched shores of the French Riviera. I highly recommend her to those who have also read and enjoyed Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk.
4. Memories of Low Tide by Chantal Thomas (French)
This is a poetic memoir that weaves together memories of childhood, a mother-daughter relationship, and their bond with the sea. It will strike a chord with anyone who is interested in mothering and female sexuality.
‘I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.’ -Francoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
‘I was born under the spell of the music and gentle sway of the mingled waters of my mother and the lake ...’ -Chantal Thomas, Memories of Low Tide
“Time moves along, without constraints—no matter how hard one may attempt to pause, to alter, to rewrite it. Quite simply, there is nothing to stop it, nothing at all.” -Christine Mangan, Tangerine
From the greatest sea voyage of all time to mischief in Algiers, this is what I read this month.
‘Life can have an ironic geometry.’ -Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter
“I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.” -Deborah Levy, Hot Milk
“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.” -Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment