Currently reading...

...and here's a wonderful connection between things I'm interested in: her son, Waris Hussein, was director for the first four episodes of Doctor Who, as well as a later serial 'Marco Polo'. He seems to be an interesting person in his own right, but of course, it's being the very first director of Doctor Who for which he'll always be most remembered. I love his own memories of it:

"[I was] a graduate from Cambridge with honours, and you're directing this piece about cavemen in skins...I thought, 'Where have I landed up in my life?'"

*

On the face of it, it seems such a delightfully odd juxtaposition. Stories of pre-partition feudal North India, and the first story of what now seems to be an almost quintessentially English science fiction show for the BBC. The Sceenonline profile argues for a consistent interest in 'female psychology' throughout Waris Hussain's work. Certainly what I've read of his mother's work suggests a concern with the roles available to women within a feudal patriarchal society.

In her introduction to my edition, Anita Desai tries to make a connection with the Mughal school of miniature painting and the influence of Urdu. This feels rather a stretch to me - a touch of exoticism for a Western audience that is being reintroduced to an Indian author - but even allowing for that, there's surely equally a modernist influence. A concern with the confrontation between an older feudal India and modernity. These are also works of memory, describing a world which by that point no longer existed - written after Attia Hosain decided to remain in England following Partition in 1947. So the bridge between tradition and modernity, which I'm rather artificially setting up here with my somewhat comical juxtaposition, was present in her life.

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Other family connections: her niece is the Pakistani author and journalist Muneeza Shamsie, and her great niece the novelist Kamila Shamsie. Quite a family!

I'm reminded of something I once read in an interview with Martin Amis, when he was promoting his autobiography. Part of the the inspiration for writing Experience was that he wanted to record his relationship with his father. This fact, two successful writers in the family, one the parent to the other, was a 'special case'. Even at the time, I thought this was off. Just of the top of my head I could think of Dumas pere et fils. Now I can see how his claim is part of the romanticising of the writing life. As though plenty of people don't follow their parents into similar or related careers.

And what about siblings? The Brontes? A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble? Vidia and Shiva Naipaul? Or is it only parents and children that count. The literal act of generation paralleling the metaphorical one of literary production.

It's also about opportunity. How many writers had parents who nursed ambitions, but never made it into print? Or who might have done once or twice? Or worked in journalism? How many mothers or grandmothers had gifts for storytelling, but never even dreamed of making it into print? So yes, I think it's a rather gendered claim which sees only certain kinds of writing, of literary art, as worthy of importance.

As so often with Amis, it's hard to escape the conclusion that if he'd been a bit less impressed with himself, he'd have been a better writer.

Oranges for the Son of Alexander Levy

"The Lenin Library in Moscow doesn't close until ten in the evening. For me this is a sign of civilisation. I was working on the ground floor, between two bookcases full of old books with green and red bindings, next to a window which looked out on to a park..." 

Oranges for the Son of Alexander Levy, Nella Bielski (trans. John Berger & Lisa Appignanesi)

[I would have liked to find a more appropriate picture to illustrate the quote, but it was the best I could do from a few minutes googling. Besides, I rather like it for some reason.

[The novel takes the form of a monologue of a middle aged woman, while she sits in a Moscow hospital next to her mother, who is dying of cancer. Written in the late 70s - like her author she's part of a generation that was evacuated to the Urals during the Second World war, and has since survived the death of Stalin, Khrushchev, and has now reached the point where the Soviet system was starting it's slow decline into obsolescence. Her account of her life circles around the figures of her absent husband, a Frenchman who has recently left her, her young daughter, her parents, the life she and her friends have managed to live in spite of all the political repression they faced under Communism. It's concerned principally with all that's left over, with all that can't be accounted for by any ideology.]

on Darwin

"The extermination of the Aborigines produced the no man's land which according the the doctrine of terra nullius gave the white settlers rights to the land. 

"Most whites were convinced that those who had been murdered in this way were members of an inferior race, doomed to destruction. They could cite the foremost biological authority of the day: Charles Darwin. In chapters 5 and 6 of The Decent of Man (1871), he presents the extermination of indigenous peoples as a natural part of the process of evolution. Animal species have always exterminated one another; races of savages have always exterminated one another; and now that there are civilised peoples, the savage races will be wiped out altogether: 'When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.' 

"Darwin had himself seen it happen - in Argentina, in Tasmania, in mainland Australia - and reacted strongly against what he saw. But in the context of his theory of evolution, the extermination of indigenous peoples no longer appeared a crime, but seemed to be the inevitable outcome of natural processes and the precondition for continued progress. Post-Darwin, it became the done thing to shrug one's shoulders at extermination. Those reacting with disgust were merely displaying their ignorance." 

Sven Lindqvist, Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land

[It's only a few days since I was seeing posts on Facebook and elsewhere about 'Darwin Day'. According to the official website, 'Darwin Day' is a "global celebration of science and reason".]

on Claude Levi-Strauss

"What is it that makes us human beings? That was the great question that Darwin posed and Freud, Durkheim, and the rest of the class of 1913 tried to answer with reference to the Australian Aborigines. 

"Claude Levi-Strauss took up the challenge issued by his eminent predecessors. His answer was that reciprocity (reciprocite) was the key to humanity and civilisation. 

"...This was not an entirely new idea. But no one argued the case of reciprocity with more tenacity and rhetorical imagination than Levi-Strauss. Nor did anyone else have his pretensions. 

"Levi-Strauss does not study relationships between people and groups of people, but models resembling economists' ideal models of market functions. Like many economists, Levi-Strauss and his adherents believe the study of models offers knowledge of deeper, truer reality of experience, which is all to often contaminated by specific circumstances. 'To reach reality one has first to reject experience.'" 

Sven Linqvist, Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land

Quote

"Something seems to demand that truly great art skirt the edge of tastelessness, and that it be complex only incidentally, as a side-effect of trying to be absolutely simple. What is the difference between tastelessness—that quality shared between trash and high art—and banality—signature of the middlebrow? It may have something to do with extremism, with an insistence on putting gods and devils onstage alongside mere man…" 

John Pistelli

Simonetta Perkins

"Alas, one cannot reply to an author exempt by making notes in the margin, notes he will never see!"

L.P. Hartley, Simonetta Perkins

[A young lady here who is clearly in need of a blog! Published in 1925, an early work by the novelist who these days is surely mainly known for his novel which is the source of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter's successful film adaptation, as well as one of the most celebrated opening lines of twentieth century literature. I'd read nothing else by him until today, and am definitely going to read more. The above line appears as early as the second page of this brief work, and is not really relevant to the main focus of the plot. But it did put me in mind of how the internet has changed the relationship between authors and readers. Unless of course you think that it hasn't. Certainly, by this point it appears to be a proverbial sentiment, whether one takes it to be a positive development or otherwise. Anyway, Happy New Year, assuming there's anyone reading this blog. I'm very lax in updating it I know. And I'm honestly never entirely sure whether I have any kind of readership. As ever, I am equally unsure if it matters overmuch. If these quotes and ramblings provide even a little pleasure or satisfaction to whoever stumbles across them, then I would think they have served their purpose, such as it is.]

Alberto Manguel, With Borges

His library (which like that of every other reader was also his autobiography) reflected his belief in chance and the rules of anarchy. ‘I am a pleasure-seeking reader: I’ve never allowed my sense of duty to have a hand in such a personal matter as that of buying books.’

Alberto Manguel, With Borges

If he had a favourite literary genre (he disbelieved in literary genres) it was the epic. In the Anglo-Saxon sagas, in Homer, in the gangster sagas and westerns of Hollywood, in Melville and in the mythology of the Buenos Aires underworld, he recognised the same themes of courage and battle. For Borges, the epic themes is an essential human hunger, like that for love or happiness, or misfortune.

…He loved detective novels. He found in their formulae the ideal narrative structures which allow the fiction writer to set up his own borders and to concentrate on the efficiency of words and images made of words. He enjoyed significant details. He once observed, as we were reading the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Red-Haired League’, that detective fiction was closer to the Aristotelian  notion of a literary work than any other genre. 

Alberto Manguel, ibid.