Book Notes No. 24 : Onitsha, JMG Le Clézio

Eighteen degrees at 8am and looking gloomy. Twenty-eight degrees at 11am, sunny and hot. Not having been off the Rock since last Tuesday. This morning's kindergarten run was a bit of a shock to the old ankle...


Anyway, here's the book review :

Onitsha tells the story of Fintan, a youth who travels by boat to Africa in 1948 with his Italian mother to join the English father he has never met. Their destination is Onitsha, a busy city on the banks of the Niger. Initially enchanted with this new and exotic world, Fintan gradually comes to recognise the intolerance and brutality of the colonial system.

I chose this of all of Nobel prize-winner Le Clèzio's 30+ novels because of past connections with Nigeria. And I wasn't disappointed. Le Clèzio's Nigeria is the Nigeria I experienced. The stunning contrast between its poverty and its wealth. Its dangerous mystery and its heady generosity. The abrasive relationship between blacks and whites, and the deep abyss between them. Added to this is the desperation of a woman who fits nowhere in this strange new world, and the growing outrage of a boy on the verge of adulthood, learning the harsh realities of colonial life and at the same time coming to understand what it is to be a man.

This novel is brutal, intense, sensual and disturbing. I will never forget it.

Neither will you.

Book notes No. 23 : Reeds in the Wind, Grazia Deledda

Ten degrees at 8am. Blue skies with a touch of haze and a touchy little breeze.

So, on this the last day of March, I've finally put words on the screen about the first of this year's Nobel Prize-winning novelists, which I had hoped to deliver on the last day of January (that's motherhood for you). See here.

Grazia Deledda's novel, Reeds in the Wind, has, quite simply, taken my breath away and effectively given me writer's block (I aspire, but would surely fail). I remember now why the Nobel is the Nobel and why no other literary award except perhaps the Pulitzer and the Booker could ever come close.

Deledda was born in 1871, in Nuoro, Sardinia. She had little formal education, but read and read and read, insatiably you might say. She left her small hometown in 1899, stopping first in Cagliari before settling in Rome. She wrote an astonishing 33 novels and many collections of short stories, and at the age of 55 became the second woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The story? It's the story of the Pintor sisters, their nephew, Giacinto, and their ageing serf, Efix. Most of all it's about Efix, who continues to serve the family even though they have descended from their nobility and affluence to a kind of noble poverty. For Efix has committed a secret crime and has spent most of his life trying to make up for it, and now the time has come for the ultimate penance.

Reeds in the Wind is an astonishing novel. Deledda has here produced a deft and sustained picture of life in Sardinia, evoking its landscapes, its people and its traditions. Her characters, even those sketched in among the crowds, are all people on the brink of a new, modern world. They seem to be struggling with the old ways, the old forms, the old beliefs - the baronial system, for example, and a Christianity mingled benignly with belief in nighttime goblins and witches - as those ways, forms and beliefs seem to be sliding out of their reach, to be replaced by...what?

This is a poignant moment in history, and, for the characters of the novel, one full of emotion. And Deledda doesn't shie away from eliciting those emotions from the reader. In particular, she makes use of what James Joyce would have called the 'Epiphany' to halt the progress of the narrative and encapsulate a moment of pure understanding, emotion or transformation-transfiguration. (And there was me thinking the Epiphany was unique to Joyce.) Two characters in the book fall in love, and I have never before read two such moving renditions of this exact moment as I found in this book.

Reeds in the Wind is a complex novel, but not as demanding as one might expect. And its rewards are many. As Todd Gitlin wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

"The world is suddenly fuller, the reader's own capacity for astonishment miraculously replenished....A writer of the emotional power of Grazia Deledda is overdue for literary resurrection...."

I'd heartily second that emotion, and would recommend Reeds in the Wind to anyone looking for the reading experience of the year, 2009, a full 80 years after this book was first published.

The first of the month

Zero at ten. Snowing - raining - snowing - raining. Gloomy.

Despite not having so much as flipped the cover of January's Nobel Book (see yesterday's post), I'm going to plough on regardless and line up the book I am planning to discuss on February 28 (and hopefully read in between now and then).

The Living and the Dead, Patrick White
The Amazon description has this to say : set in 1930s London, this is a portrayal of the complex ebb and flow of relationships within a family. The ageing Mrs Standish is drawn into secret liaisons; her daughter Eden experiments with left-wing politics; and Elyot, the only son stands aloof.

White, an Australian writer, won the Nobel Prize in 1973, praised "...for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature".

A new continent. I like new continents.

The last of the month

The last day of the month. The last of Italy's three giorni della merla, traditionally the three coldest days of the year. But not this year, according to my extremely scientific observations. Today, it was minus one at 8am, overcast and still.

The last day of the month. The day everyone expected to read illuminating and erudite comments on a novel by a Nobel Prize winner (didn't they?).

So I failed!

So sue me!

I haven't even so much as picked up Grazia Deledda's Reeds in the Wind. It's languishing in the entrance hall, covers curling in the cold air, taking on the smell of damp soil and looking unwanted.

Fact is, I'm spellbound by G.W. Dahlquist's preposterous Victorian Gothic adventure, The Glass Books of the Dream-Eaters which, at a couple of pages a night (I get tired...very tired...) is going to take just a few more nights to finish.

Patience is a virtue.

Cold cats and cats with colds

A mega six degrees at 9am. Cloudy, with that tantalising pre-spring smell on the air.

All the cats in Carmine have colds. If you were one of those taking a Sunday stroll around Carmine yesterday, you may not have seen our feline friends, but you may have heard the sneezing and the snoring, the wheezing and the coughing. From inside bushes, behind rickety dry-stone walls, from high up on the rooftops and from behind oversized plant pots.

I worry.

The cat infirmary has two new rooms. The pantry remains infirmary ward no. 1, equipped with a luxurious electrically heated blanket, supplied with all the zucchini chutney a cat could ever want and sleeping at present two. But now also the sitting room and the bedroom have been equipped with litter, food and water, and with snuffly tenants.

The mice, are, of course, dancing on the tabletops by moonlight and helping themselves to all the chocolate and nesting materials they can find (rugs, books, elaborately-decorated Christmas stockings...). Even if a cat decides it might have enough energy to go mousing, they can hear its wheezing around the corner and down the lane, and will have leapt commando-style, back into the woodpile before the poor cat has time to blow her nose.

I'd better get on with the ironing.

PS : About that New Year's Resolution...can I have an extension, please?
PPS : Congratulations to AJ for a fantastic school report. We're very proud of you!

Illustrious arrival

Four degrees at 9am. Overcast with a little breeze. This morning, the young cockerel did a curious side shuffle in the opposite direction when he saw me, and his longsuffering friend, a smaller-than-breed, lopsided hen (there's always one in every brood) jumped up on the feed bucket and let me stroke her.

Today, Grazia Deledda arrived. Not physically, of course. I can be fairly certain that she wouldn't make it up the hill. I mean a copy of her most well-loved novel, Reeds in the Wind. Now I really have no excuse but to start on my New Year's resolution, and from a quick browse through I think I'm going to enjoy it...

New Year's Nobel Resolution

It's actually Thursday January 8th.

The temperature is today hovering just above zero and the two-days'-worth of snow is gently dripping off Carmine's gutterless roofs. Overcast.

A friend-of-a-friend, writer Marita van der Vyver, and author of Reading Space, wrote recently about the new Nobel Laureate for Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio. Her post got me thinking. For many years I've concentrated on reading the Booker Prize winners, and last year's 25-book Carmine reading list didn't include a single Nobel laureate. And while I'm relieved to say that I have in the past read several of those on The List, I can count them on the fingers of only one hand : Hesse, Coetzee, Pinter, Beckett, Steinbeck, Hemmingway, Pamuk, Lessing, Fo, Golding, Marquez, Boll, Neruda, Solzhenitsyn...how many hands is that? Oh forget about the hands, it's just not good enough!

So.

It being New Year's Resolution time, I've added one to my list. This is to read one Nobel Laureate per month for the whole of 2009.

I'll be posting the name of the Laureate and the title of the book I've chosen on the first of every month, with a reminder in the sidebar. I'll post my own paltry thoughts on the last day of the month (the vagaries of the Amazon European courier service notwithstanding). If you'd like to read and opine along with me, feel free.

In recognition of the literature of the country in which I now seem to be semi-permanently resident, this month's Laureate is Grazia Deledda, who won the prize in 1926. Born in Sardinia in 1871, Deledda published novels, short stories and a single play. You'll find out more about her here. The novel I've chosen is Reeds in the Wind, translated into English by Martha King.

Watch this space on 30th January for more...