"Stay with me" by Hanne Orstavik

 

“No one at home ever said they loved me. If I'd asked, I know they would have said yes, Mamma and Pappa, of course they loved me. Only I didn't ask, part of the reason being that I didn't want Pappa getting angry. And of course it was such an unquestionable thing. Like god loving mankind. It's something you know. Why couldn't I feel it?” 

So starts this book in which the author, a writer, recounts her relationship with a much younger man, M, from whom she fears violence, and remembers the threat of violence in the family in which she grew up, from which her mother fled. 

There are two interwoven narratives. There is the one above, which sounds like a memoir, and there is the novel that the writer is trying to write. This novel sounds highly autobiographical. Both protagonists are recovering from a bereavement. Both are dating a much younger man. But the frame narrative is the one that has the constant fear of domestic violence, which seems to be the fundamental theme of the book.

What distinguished this book was the quality of the prose. She tended to write long paragraphs, sometimes containing rambling sentences full of comma-separated phrases, such as this one: “It's like we've gone behind a curtain and discovered a hidden place, the pond at the centre of everything, a place where there's no through-wind anymore, where everything that isn't carried along on the whirling current instead loses momentum and is deposited at the side and then just lies there, hesitantly almost, until enough detritus has collected and something else takes over and sort of shoves it into motion, gets it going again, a little bit more, come on, only then, eventually, when it's no longer possible to get any further, when there's nothing else left to come and carry it along, it all just collects at the side again, in the stagnant water.” (p 60) She has an inconsistent relationship with question-marks, as here: “How long does the beginning last. When does the beginning melt into something else, and become a person's days. And when do those days change, and become something else still.” (p 14) The idiosyncrasies were unimportant, what I loved was the way she could write about some transcendent ideas is very simple terms yet at the same time produce prose that seemed full of illumination. Look at that quote about the pond again. Isn't it brilliant? 

Selected quotes:

All extracts and page references are from the 2024 translation by Martin Aitken published by &And Other Stories, Sheffield, ISBN 9781916751088

• “It wasn't leaving the milk out, it was being that sort of person. The sort who's negligent, thoughtless, who never pays heed.” (p 8)
• “All I know is that I was afraid, afraid was a skin beneath my skin that couldn't be shed.” (p 8)
• “Love was something others were doing. I saw it in films and could imitate it. But it wouldn't let me in. I had no idea how to do it.” (p 10)
• “She looks down into the water, as if the water was a membrane and there was another world underneath.” (p 12)
• “The way everything is so big and there's no movement anywhere. As if she's a little girl in an over-dimensioned house surrounded by streets and trees and enormous skyscrapers, the big river rushing its course, and all around, to all sides, the endless prairie. The path leading across the lawns, and there’s such a long way to the cars and to the outside walls of the house. Space between all things.” (p 27)
• “Every moment, no matter if it hurts, no matter if it's terrible, is so intense then, it bursts open, and everything else is shoved out to the edges.” (p 34)
• “There's something we're permitted to see and there's something else for absolutely not permitted to see, and it's the line between those two things that makes the image shimmer.” (p 90)
• “Are we put together from multiple parts, where some of those parts are rudimentary and primitive and small, while others are bigger, older, more grown-up, competent and responsible? Do all those parts rattle around us, and who if anyone knows how they fit together? Is there someone who takes care of it all, who keeps us together, holds us tight and looks after us? Or is it all just parentless chaos in there, a legion of different-aged children, some retreated into the darkness of corners, others running around, boisterous and physical, sometimes at odds, while still others attempt to maintain order, meeting out punishments and keeping the rest in check?” (p 154)

A beautifully written novel, full of epiphanies, about a very troubling issue.

August 2024; 216 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Birds" by Tarjei Vesaas

 This book is the interior monologue of Matti, a 37 year old man living with his forty year old sister, Hege, in a small town in Norway. He is regarded by the others in his community as a 'Simple Simon' because he says strange things and he finds it difficult to concentrate (his inner life is by no means simple, being full of imaginative and spiritual thoughts) for long enough to hold down even the simplest of jobs. They tolerate him, even sometimes paying him for work that he cannot do and giving him free sweets, but he knows what they say about him and he is ashamed. Like anyone else he wants to be respected and admired. What he doesn't appreciate is how his sister has sacrificed her life to look after him, and he doesn't understand why sometimes she can be tetchy with him. 

In some ways the story is a picaresque, a series of loosely connected events, although Matti is scarcely a picaro; he's loveable but not a rogue. He is a bit like Don Quixote, having an unusually imaginative inner life, although this is not a comic novel. His adventures include a woodcock that flies over his house, sheltering in a privy during a thunderstorm, a disastrous day of working at turnip weeding, sinking in his rowing boat and having to be rescued by two girls, plying his trade as a ferryman, and the dreadful consequences of his encounter with a lumberjack.

There are moments when we fear for the consequences; my heart was in my mouth more than once. Matti is an innocent in the sense that he does not understand the rules and restrictions of society, but he still has the normal needs of a young man and danger is always lurking underneath the surface, though this is rarely the danger that Matti fears (eg being struck by lightning). His fundamental problem is that needs Hege to look after him for the whole of his life but she has needs too and he only vaguely understands that nothing lasts forever. 

The whole thing is written with a naive simplicity, in short sentences and short paragraphs, treating Matti's highly imaginative inner monologue with the same level of objectivity as actual events. This gives an indelible impression of someone who is simple in one sense and highly complex in another. The dialogue is full of ambiguous statements, achieving a high degree of verisimilitude, while at the same time brilliantly conveying to the reader, if not always to Matti, how others think of him, particularly the long-suffering Hege, torn between caring for Matti and finding personal fulfilment for herself. Matti, in particular, is prone to making gnomic statements which perfectly embody the gulf between his inner life and his ability to explain it using everyday words. Perhaps he ought to stick to the language of the birds.

It is a beautifully written book.

Perspectives:

• It's a book showing how all creative people are supported so generously by those who go out and do the work.
• It's about how women support men.
• Mattis is neurodiverse and this explores that.
• Mattis has superstitions and lives in an almost magical world; don't we all?
• It's about the loss of innocence.
• The village with its lake are the Garden of Eden ("If this isn't a paradise you're living in, then I don't know what is."; 2.21); Mattis is Adam and Hege is Eve and Jorgen is the serpent.
• "We are presented the world strictly from Mattis’s perspective, and typically from his often inaccurate perceptions. He struggles to understand what others are thinking, and by extension their identities. ... It’s a terribly lonely world in which he lives, if one filled with a beauty that only he sees, from the lake he lingers on, to the birds flying over his house, which only he bothers to look at and appreciate, despite his very best efforts to tell others about them." Daniel Kushner 2016 in The National Book Review
• "a masterful, haunting novel ... Mattis ... becomes frustrated very easily, he struggles to express himself, he has strange obsessions (about birds) and finds it very difficult to understand why other people do not share his interests. On a personal level, he is lonely, and both scared of approaching people and over-confident when he does." Scottmanleyhadley 2015 in Triumph of the Now

Selected quotes:

• "He was certainly lost in contemplation and let the twilight grow deeper and deeper, in so far as you could call it twilight and not just something unspeakably gentle." (1.5)
• "He sat surrounded by baffling problems, waiting with an important question." (1.11)
• "Some shining cars rushing past restored his courage. It was so easy meeting cars you didn't know. No one sitting inside them knew he was Simple Simon." (1.13)
• "Over the years Mattis had collected a large number of stories about lightning and what it did - but it had never struck a privy. Strange, but true." (2.24)
• "He wriggled his fingers furiously round his ears. Flash and thunderclap were coming together now. One, two, three. It wasn't the interval between lightning and thunder he was counting, it was the time he had left to live." (2.24)
• "It's a question of life and death. If it isn't Hege, it's me. Which would you rather? said a voice inside him." (2.25)
• "He was being given sweets like a child - although he knew great things like shattered trees and lightning and omens of death. ... He had been made to feel small. The worst of it was that the storekeeper had only been trying to be kind." (2.25)
• "His thoughts flapped helplessly around while he remained sitting still. The world was full of forces you couldn't fight against which suddenly loomed up and aimed a crushing blow at you." (3.37)
• "Isn't it odd that you only become clever when it's too late? he thought." (3.44)
• "He glided away from the shore. He was rowing and the things he was leaving behind remained in view the whole time." (3.46)
• "Across the desolate water his cry sounded like the call of a strange bird. How big or small the bird was, you couldn't really tell." (3.47; last lines)

January 2024; 186 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Death in the Family" by Karl Ove Knausgaard

This is the first volume of a six volume autobiography? memoir? fictionalised Life? entitled Min Kamp, My Struggle.

I read it just after my own dad had died and before his funeral. So, given its subject matter, it was a strange experience.

It is amazing. After a page long paragraph in which he describes the scientific process of dying, Karl Ove (never Karl!) tells us about incidents in his life as a boy, and the relationship he had with his father, in incredible detail. This is a documentary look at life and every wrinkle is recorded (including the shape of his penis). I have not yet read A Las Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust but I believe it is equally detailed; certainly Karl Ove's obsession for chronicling the tiniest of things makes James Joyce's Ulysses seem like a crayoned drawing next to an etching. And Knausgaard's book is, or at least purports to be, utterly and starkly factual.

This of course makes the book difficult to read. It is exhaustive and exhausting. This isn't helped by some very long paragraphs. And of course it also means that Karl Ove has to select one or two incidents in his growing up on which he will report:

• Aged eight he thinks he sees a face in the water on the television news report about a drowning; he rushes to tell his father (whom he fears) about it and that night he has to secretly creep into the lounge where his parents are watching the news to see if they will see the face.
• As a young teenager he lives in a flat on town on his own, shopping, cooking and caring for himself, with occasional visits from and to parents and grandparents. This section of the book dealt with his early attempts at making out with girls, an abortive career as Norway's worst rock group, and a hilarious attempt to celebrate New Year at a 'meaningful' party with beer. This last episode acts as an interesting counterpoint to the end of the book; it also reveals that Karl Ove was rather selective in his friends and very concerned with his street cred status (not an unusual feature of adolescence); this also tells us that Knausgaard is prepared to reveal his own personality warts and all (or is this just a smoke screen?). There is a wonderful moment when he is with Hanne, a girl who is friends with him and nothing more (though he wishes she was; unrequited love!), and watches her as a bad boy, comes into the room: "Even though I was there she opened herself to him. Laughed with him, met his gaze, even parted her knees at the desk where she was sitting, when he went right up to her. It was as if he had cast a spell over her." (p 186)
• Then he is an adult, his father is dead and he goes to the house with his brother to take care of the funeral. His father was living with his grandmother, they were getting drunk every night and the house is full of bottles and filth, there is urine and faeces all over the place and some of the clothing is rotting. This is a nightmare image and Karl Ove and Yngve his brother set to work to clean. And although Karl Ove hated his father ("dad had got what was coming to him, it was good that he was dead, anything in me that said otherwise was lying." (p 265)) he is the one who repeatedly spontaneously bursts into tears.

There are other selected moments which are told more briefly.The contrast between the long blanks in between the episodes selected and the immense detail of the description of those episodes is huge and left many unanswered questions. This is, presumably, deliberate. It is as if Knausgaard is saying that a relationship (between himself and his father in this case) can be encapsulated and explained in a few well-chosen examples. Or perhaps he is saying that we are creatures with a very very selective attention span and we can only remember a very limited part of life and that it is this inadequacy that gives rise to the immense mysteries of our lives.

Selected quotes:

• "Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides." (p 32)
• "Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue waters of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies." (p 183)
• "Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?" (p 261)
• "he would have to plough his own furrow, live his own life, die his own death" (p 268)
• "Had I ever initiated a conversation with a stranger?
• No, never.
• And there was no evidence to suggest I ever would." (p 278)
• "Feelings are like water, they always adapt to their surroundings." (p 288)
• "he could be more malicious to me than anyone else" (p 358)
• "This is what girls I have tried my luck with have seen in my eyes. Too much desire, too little hope." (p 365)
• "so young and no cleverer than three sparrows" (p 376)
• "He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world." (p 389) 
• "Becoming smaller and smaller as far as the eye could see. But what happened behind what the eye could see? Did the images carry on getting smaller and smaller?" (p 401)
• "She was like a vampire that had finally got a taste of blood ... life was returning to her, filling her limb by limb." (p 435)

This is an astonishing book. It is so truthful and so meticulous that I am not sure that I know what to make of it.

My reading group considered the book on 14th March 2017. Three of us enjoyed it (though only one was looking forward to reading further volumes on the series; the other two found it hard going but appreciated the craft); one absolutely hated it. If we reached any sort of insight about this book it was that Knausgaard tends (and we were divided as to whether this was a deliberate technique or revealed Knausgaard's lack of emotional intellignece) to write about what happened rather than speculating on why it happened. For example, there was no attempt to explain why Knausgaard could simultaneously be glad that his father had died and yet burst into spontaneous bouts of weeping. Nor did we understand why his father aroused such feelings of animosity in Knausgaard; what precisely did the man do that was wrong? Nor did we understand his affection for a mother who appears more or less completely absent from his life. This then led to the thought that perhaps the book is more revealing in the things it does not say than in the things it did.

It was also interesting that we liked different parts of the book. I had most enjoyed the funny quirkinesses of Knausgaard's adolescence, the very part that the reader who most liked the book liked least.

One thing we could conclude from our long, at times intense, discussion: we had all been deeply impressed by the characters in the book whether we liked them or not.

March 2017, 490 pages

Selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best books since Time began (1923).

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog include:

• Memoir of the Bobotes: by Joyce Cary: a brilliantly written memoir of the author's time as a medical officer during the Balkan Wars (pre World War I): the writer became a novelist and his craft shows; full of humour and keen observation
• My Family and Other Animals (and the sequels) by Gerald Durrell: Beautiful descriptions and hilarious accounts of an eccentric family living on the Greek Island of Corfu between WWI and WWII
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: a well-written, frequently humourous account of Pacific paradise
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: the account of three years spent on the remote and at the time unspoilt Greek island of Symi: well-written, charming and amusing
• Surprised by Joy by C S Lewis: an account of the famous author's life, mostly from the perspective of his Christianity: beautifully written
• A Death in the Family by Karl-Ove Knausgard: the first volume of a series in which the author, in the guise of writing novels, portrays real people with real names: the writing is brilliant
• Beautiful People by Simon Doonan: The story of a young gay man: well-written with moments of marvellous humour
• Teacher Man by Frank McCourt: the third volume in the series that started with Angela's Ashes
• The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice by Polly Coles: a reasonably well-written account of a year spent living in Venice
• A Detail on the Burma Front by Winifred Beaumont: a nurse's story from one of the theatres of World War II: more compassion and humour: reasonably well-written
• Whatever Happened to Margo: Margaret Durrell's account of running a boarding house in Bournemouth: sometimes muddled but often funny
• Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two by Maggie Smith-Bendell: an interesting and reasonably well-written account of a Romani Gypsy childhood
• Not for the faint-hearted by John Stevens: the autobiography of a senior police officer; probably best for those most interested in this sort of story
• Forty Years Catching Smugglers by Malcolm Nelson: the memoirs of a senior customs officer; probably best for those most interested in this sort of story