Laundry, love and literature

What is it about Karl Ove Knausgaard that is so fascinating? It’s not that, stylistically, he’s such a wonderful writer, as far as one can tell from an English translation. There are some marvellous passages – the description of clearing out his father’s house in A Death in the Family, Linda’s giving birth in A Man in Love, and a lot of the writing about nature and the weather.  But there’s a lot (a lot!) of stuff like this:

            I got up, put a tea bag in a cup, poured the steaming water over it, went to the fridge to get a carton of milk, then sat down.

Or

            I switched on the light, sorted the clothes into four heaps, coloureds forty, coloureds sixty, whites forty, whites sixty, and shoved two of the piles into the two big machines, poured powder into the detachable drawer on the control panel and switched it on.

In fact this minute attention to mundanity is part of Knausgaard’s project. He observes himself, his everyday actions and his feelings as a primate keeper might observe the behavior of his chimps. And yet he is not detached. The primate keeper is the observer, but he is also inside the chimp’s mind and heart, the mind and heart of a writer, a lover, a parent, a house-husband, a son, a friend, a displaced Norwegian. This is what it’s like, really like, to be all those things at once. Above all there is the furious will of the self to survive, no matter what the demands of love may be.

The 'My horrible father' genre

Gert has long considered writing a book called "My Horrible Father".  It is a venerable genre stretching back at least to the Old Testament God.  Then there are many horrible fathers in fairy tales who lock their children up, abandon them or sell them. Shakespeare did a nice line in the horrible father, King Lear being one who combines many of the prototypical characteristics of vanity, solipsism, emotional vampirism,  and that worst of all failings in a father, what Gert's mother used to call "making a show" of his children in public. Dickens specialised in the weak and/or treacherous father with a noble daughter who loves him in spite of it. We have had fathers who abuse their children sexually, drunk fathers, shiftless fathers, childish fathers, religious fathers, hypercritical fathers, and Gert's favourite, charismatic lying fathers.
Gert's book would not, of course, be autobiographical, her own father being perfectly decent and well-meaning. Nor does she want to do what has been done before.  So, perhaps an enormously fat and gluttonous father, a  modern-day monster Oblomov?

Gert resurgens

Gert fell into a bit of a slump after  completing the first draft of her last book.  The problem was that our main character, Freddie Todd, bored us. We plodded on and completed the book, but the fine careless rapture just wasn't there. It is quite possible that others who find our other books rather outre may find Freddie more to their liking than the megalomaniacs, liars and dreamers who populate the other books. But we prefer our reality a bit larger than life.

And so we have decided to go digital and put out an ebook of our second novel Writing is Easy, a story set in a dysfunctional writing workshop and peopled by as fine a collection of egotists as you'll ever meet, in real life or outside it. It gave Gert the opportunity to try her hand at crime writing, erotic fiction, historical memoir and scifi as she impersonated the various students in the workshop, not to mention the lurid popular outpourings of our antihero Marcus Goddard and the impenetrable Steinisms of his sworn enemy Lilian Bracegirdle.

Maybe Writing is Easy will languish in the modern slushpile that is the world of ebooks.  Maybe a handful of people who never would have read it, will. If they have half as much fun as we did writing it, that'll do.

The imbrications of John Banville

Not only is there “an imbricated array of banana sandwiches” in John Banville’s Ancient Light, the book itself is imbrication upon imbrication: from  Nabokov,  Dostoevsky,Yeats, Shelley, Leopardi, Paul de Man, the characters and narrative of preceding books Shroud and Eclipse and The Infinities (via the reference to Kleist’s Amphitryon) to Banville’s long-standing preoccupation with the mirror-to-mirror unreliability of memory, even to Banville himself in the person of the biographer JB, the “somewhat shifty and self-effacing fellow” who writes “like Walter Pater in a delirium.”

All this in the strangely stagey Banville style in which characters and even Nature herself seem to be kept in the wings waiting to be called forth to strut and fret their hour upon the stage. It’s no accident that Banville is attracted to stories of gods, as in The Infinities, based on Amphitryon; there are few authors who play the deus ex machina more overtly.

Many readers will respond to the relationship between the young Alex and Mrs Gray, and to the unresolveable sorrow of Alex and Lydia’s loss of their daughter Cass. It’s harder to be interested in the Alex Vander narrative, and the outcome of the Mrs Gray story is verging on the banal. There is an uncharacteristic impatience, a loss of the control of tone, in the way Banville bundles her off by way of a condensed explanation from her daughter.

The end of the book suggests there’s more to come of the tale of Alex Cleave, his lost daughter, and Alex Vander. I wonder how long Banville can go on mining this particular seam.

Lorenzo, all is forgiven

Four chapters in, Sons & Lovers is triumphantly passing the iPod test. The tenderness, observation and psychological insight with which Lawrence creates the Morels' world are matchless.  There's real vitality here, the deep vitality that Lawrence worshipped in human relations, not the puffed-up, strained-for vitality that Women in Love bangs on about so tiresomely. So what went wrong? Is it another case of an author seduced by his own publicity (see our earlier post on Hilary Mantel on this subject), of an author writing more books than he has in him, of an author who knows he has death within him flailing about desperately to hold on to life?

The iPod test

In the course of her travels recently Gert has taken to listening to novels downloaded from the free site LibriVox (LibriVox.org) and has discovered that writer's tics and foibles leap out at her as they don't when she is reading, particularly if the book is one she's read more than once, as is the case with Women in Love.  She was reminded at every turn  of How not to write a novel (Mittelmark & Newman).  DHL needs a stern editor to remove all adverbs, restrict adjectives to one per noun, allow only "said" as a dialogue marker and come down heavily on all scenes involving horses or cattle. The scene in which Gudrun performs Dalcroze movements to a herd of surprised cattle made Gert laugh and laugh, as did Hermione's standing-up orgasm as she bashes Birkin on the head with a lapis lazuli paperweight.
Results of a scientific word-count:
1) loins - the runaway winner, followed by
2) queer ( as part of an adjective chain describing facial expressions or tones of voice)
3) swoon, -ed, -ing
4) inchoate

Loins, queer, swoon, inchoate - there you have the DHL project. A friend has also pointed out his fascination with women's stockings, sashes and hats, while the males are all loins.

Gert does, though, remember Sons & Lovers being rather better, and may subject it to the iPod test.

But how would her own work stand up to the test?

Hilary Mantel, you little ripper

It's hard to say she just gets better and better, because what could be better,  each of its kind, than Eight months on Ghazzah Street, Beyond Black, Fludd, Giving up the ghost? No, the fascinating thing about Hilary Mantel is that she shows no signs of falling for her own publicity. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, gifted writers derailed by their ego. John Banville,  entranced by his reputation for beautiful prose. Even the trucker Ian McEwan wobbles from time to time (Saturday). But good old Hilary's ego is swallowed up in her subject.  She looves it! as an Irish relative of ours would say. Bring on the third volume of the Wolf Hall trilogy.