The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

This film by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg won the Oscar for best animated short film this year. It is difficult for me to tell you how much it moved me. For the majority of the film I found myself making that strange, juddering sound somewhere between laughing and crying and my heart ached, yes, really ached. The importance of the book, as friend, healer, and confidante is what stands at the back of all the work I do. That sounds lofty and self important, but it's not supposed to. What I mean is that it is my pure and wholehearted love of books that made me want to do a job that involved sharing that feeling. I am evangelical when it comes to reading. And so is this film. Of the (many) things that I love about this film one of the best is the way it addresses the value of reading in its place in time. The film shares the spotlight with an app, an ebook for children which is completely interactive. The rise of the ebook is a controversial one in book-lovers' circles, but here it is done so right. Here we see artists and writers embracing what is new to enhance the experience of reading, to explore what is fun and vibrant, to be playful as well as respectful. The film is a joy, watch it over and over.

One of my favourite parts of the film is the surgery scene. How perfect that it is by reading the book that we bring it to life. It made me think of one of my favourite essays on reading by Maurice Blanchot, and that perhaps his words are a good way to leave this subject.

“The book whose source is art has no guarantee in the world, and when it is read, it has never been read before; it only attains its presence as a work in the space opened by this unique reading, each time the first reading and each time the only reading.”

“What is a book that no one reads? Something that has not yet been written. Reading, then, is not writing the book again but causing the book to write itself or be written- this time without the writer as intermediary, without anyone writing it.”


“Reading transforms a book the same way the sea and the sand transforms the work of men: the result is a smoother stone, a fragment that has fallen from heaven, without any past, without any future, and that we do not wonder about as we look at it.” 
                                      ~ Maurice Blanchot, Reading

The Night Circus- Erin Morgenstern

A busy week means I am late posting about this book- something I wanted to do as soon as I put it down last weekend. I find that everything is a bit stop and start at the moment, so when I have time to read something 'just for fun'- and I enjoy it as much as I did this book- I tear through it in one sitting. Reading in this particularly feverish way was wonderful when digging into The Night Circus.
A beautiful, dark, sprawling fairytale, The Night Circus is the story of a magical black and white circus that appears, without warning, and only at night. While the people who visit the circus are stunned by the intricate, breathtaking acts and scenes they come across they do not realise that the most obvious explanation for what they see is the truth of it. The circus is magic. And not just magic, but the venue chosen for a game of skill a lifetime in the making.
The premise of the book is interesting, but I did feel that the plot had unravelled slightly by the end, as if it needed to be wrapped up quickly- which was especially jarring as for most of the book the story unfolds quite gently. The book's late nineteenth century setting also felt, at times, like something of an after thought. That being said this book's real strength is in its incredible visual quality. While I would never call it a children's book it awoke in me the same sense of excitement and intense imaginative experience that I associate with reading as a child. The descriptions of the circus are wonderful and really play into this feeling of childlike abandon. Les Cirques des Reves is just that, an escape to a space full of living dreams, and it is this feeling of a dream that the slow burning pace of the novel respects. This is not a fast paced work of fantasy, and while the novel is built around a duel, it is a duel between artists attempting to create the most perfect of dreamscapes.
Given that the book is so intensely visual I am not surprised that the film rights to it have already been sold- there is a wealth of beautiful material here. Some of it too beautiful, I think, to be translated to the screen. I attach the book trailer because- although I dislike them in general- here I think it provides a nice mood piece which may give you a better idea of what you're getting into than all my hazy thoughts. Simply, I think you should read it. A lovely book.

Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska, Polish poet and Nobel Laureate, died this month. I have been a big fan of her poetry since I came across her in Czeslaw Milosz's anthology, A Book of Luminous Things (yes, that is the best title imaginable for a poetry anthology, and yes, the book absolutely lives up to its name.) Szymborska was a writer who found me at an important time in my life, during a year spent studying at the University of Tennessee where I found a life shaped by reading and writing poetry in a community of brilliant, important, and hugely talented friends and writers. I found, and still find, her poetry inspiring. I love how her poems are deceptively simple- they are so lyrical, so intricate, such a pleasure to unravel. There is one poem of hers - the first I ever read- that I often find myself returning to. I consider it a beautiful meditation on language and experience.

View With a Grain of Sand

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
Whether general, particular,
Permanent, passing,
Incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

Milosz considers Szymborska's view too scientific, too detached, but my own response feels more complicated than this. Like Milosz I dislike the idea of being so disconnected from the world around me, but in this poem I feel that Szymborska celebrates the richness of the internal experience in a way that is honest. It means that every individual's experience of the world is wholly unique. It also feels peaceful , as if to say worries and limitations are what we impose on ourselves- the world goes right on without them. Also, it sounds just beautiful. If you can get away with it read it aloud and you'll see what I mean.

Perhaps my reading of the poem is also coloured by Szymborska's Nobel lecture which is charming, funny, and which celebrates how astonishing the world really is, how far away she feels from finding answers. It is this desire for answers that drove her poetry, and that drives me every day in my own small endeavours. It is her own particular definition of inspiration that I find so moving because it is real, and it is why I am unimaginably lucky.

"Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

There aren't many such people. Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings."

Georges Poulet

It is time to introduce Georges Poulet, a man who is very important to me. It was his essay 'The Phenomenology of Reading'  that lit a fire under me and helped me to decide what it was that I wanted to write about, what was important to me. This essay is a beautiful, passionate celebration of the pleasures of reading, of the book as an object full of possibility. I am working a lot on the boundaries that we cross when we read, about the relationship between our interior and exterior worlds, and for me there is no better starting place than with Georges. (He is Georges to me now, in that way that writers who change you become great friends.) There is nothing I can say that will better explain the joy of reading his work, than by giving space to some of them here. Of books he writes, "made of paper and ink, they lie where they are put, until the moment some one shows an interest in them. They wait. Are they aware that an act of man might suddenly transform their existence? They appear to be lit up with that hope. Read me, they seem to say. I find it hard to resist their appeal. No, books are not just objects among others."

Another of my favourite sections from the essay begins like this:
"take a book and you will find it offering, opening itself. It is this openness of the book which I find so moving. A book is not shut in by its contours, is not walled-up as in a fortress. It asks nothing better than to exist outside itself, or to let you exist in it. In short, the extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside."
I love everything about this, and how it speaks to my experience of reading, and of that very particular joy. Hopefully I have linked to the full article on Jstor up at the top so if you have access I'd recommend reading the whole thing.

The Cazalet Chronicles- Elizabeth Jane Howard

The Cazalet Chronicles are four books by Elizabeth Jane Howard that tell the story of the Cazalet family from 1937 to 1947. I read all four books back to back only putting one down to pick another up. Reading them this way was wonderful, moving, terrible. The family make up a sprawling cast of characters, from the Brig and the Duchy to their children, their children's spouses,their grandchildren and their spouses, cousins, friends, lovers. From characters in their 80s to newborn babies, all are accounted for, and for great swathes of the books all are present under one roof. When not at Home Place, the idyllic family home in Sussex, each character still occupies space in the narrative. The books move from person to person, voice to voice in a way that many avoid. The result is a kind of clamouring, a demand for attention and over the course of the four books you gain insight into the motivations, the desires, the inner life of each character. It is an exhilarating, sometimes exhausting way to read. What I found particularly fascinating about these novels was that almost all of the male characters are too old or too young to go into active service. There is no space made in the books for descriptions of war, but it permeates every page. This is the story of war at home, of everything that was terrible and frightening, and of how people carried on living anyway. How children and teenagers grew up barely remembering a world in which they weren't living through a war, how everything was not a constant state of action and panic, but - and in its own way awful to read about- how inert things could be, how mundane rations and air raid alarms become when you don't remember life without them. In large part the novels focus on the three young girls, Louise, Polly, and Clary, who become teenagers, young women, wives and mothers during this strange, standstill time. The transition to adulthood is brilliantly explored, and it was so interesting to read about in this context- everything the same but completely different. All four books are beautifully written, this is a real family saga that you can throw yourself into- each character so fully imagined that now I feel when I remember the books that I am remembering people I know, places I've been.I am only sad that there aren't more of them- I'm finding it hard to say goodbye to the Cazalets.    

The Children's Book

This review is actually one I wrote some time ago, however  I decided it would be nice to include it here as the book I am currently reading put me in mind of it. In fact, for various reasons, this book has been hovering around in my brain a lot recently- over a year after reading it- which is surely the mark of an exceptional read. I think that justifies its inclusion here as an intensely pleasurable read. 

I have a confession to make. I have been putting off reading this book for over a year. When I bought it I read about 20 pages, put it down and decided I would come back to it when I had ‘enough time’ and by that, you know, I meant the right sort of time- long, book reading hours with a really wide awake brain. Once I eventually did start the book I finished it in two days. Ever since, I have been mulling over writing a blog about the experience. The truth is that  A. S. Byatt intimidates me. Now, don’t get me wrong…before we go any further I should say that the book is fantastic, that the reason I read this 624 page epic in less than 48 hours is that it is an incredibly absorbing, well written, finely crafted piece of literature. It is also unbelievably clever. I think it is her cleverness that intimidates me. When I first read ‘Possession’ I naïvely believed in Byatt’s two Victorian writers because I found it unthinkable that a person’s imagined characters could be so fully developed as to include their own entire back catalogues of perfectly crafted 19th Century verse. Of course, I was wrong.

If anything ’The Children’s Book’ is even richer in detail. A dizzying cast surrounds the Wellwood family, each character so complete it would hardly surprise you to bump into them in the street. To call the Wellwood family the ‘centre’ of the book is perhaps misleading. ‘The Children’s Book’ certainly begins with its focus firmly on Olive Wellwood, a successful children’s author, and her bohemian family who live a seemingly idyllic life in the English countryside but fine threads are quickly spun out from these characters to engage other families in the narrative, giving a broad cross-section of late 19th century life. One such family is the Fludd’s, headed by the truly scary Benedict Fludd, an artistic genius with a temperament to match. The exploits of this manic figure only further underline the dark tone of the book. And don’t be fooled by the title or the pretty cover, this book is seriously dark. The dark side of children’s literature is explored brilliantly and I loved the extracts from Olive’s books (yet another example of how completely imagined Byatt’s worlds are) which seemed heavily influenced by the kings of sinister children’s literature – the Grimm brothers. There is, in fact, an interesting thread about the children’s literature of the period running throughout the book with Kenneth Grahame, Edith Nesbit, and J.M.Barrie popping up and exerting their influence on Olive’s work. As an avid fan of children’s literature I was really charmed by these inclusions which acted as one in a long, long list of enriching details.

I know I’m not giving you too much information about plot, but that’s because it’s difficult to put into any sort of neat synopsis. This book is really the sum of its characters. Think big, sprawling stories like Middlemarch or the more sombre Dickens novels and you’ll get the idea. Of course, one thing that makes the novel so interesting is the inclusion of the first world war which we see hanging over the innocent children we meet at the beginning of the novel like an ominous thunder-cloud just waiting to burst. This results in a final section of the novel that is particularly well-handled and an inevitably devastating conclusion.

Although this book is quite long it is also very dense, and it is precisely this density that I both admire and take issue with. The detail is at times overwhelming, and Byatt’s novel is so complete that it leaves little room for the reader to really take hold of the book for themselves. There is not much room here for your imagination to fill in the gaps because there are no gaps to fill. In her earlier book ‘Possession’, Byatt raises some interesting questions about the ’ownership’ of a text, and in ‘The Children’s Book’ I found it very difficult to ‘own’ any of the characters for myself. At times this meant the book left me a little cold.

That being said, this seems like an almost inevitable result when crafting something so complex and full of detail, and I really would recommend picking up a copy of this book. Don’t let it intimidate you like it did me, because when I finally did read it I was sorry that I had left it looking sad on my shelf for so long.  Byatt’s impressive knowledge of her chosen period shines through every word, so much so that it could have been written there and then, and I am finding it difficult not to turn this post into a long (and slightly pretentious) essay. In brief- read this book. It is very, very good. Be not afraid.

Having a bad day?

This will make it better...