Young and Restless

Are we made by what we read? I believe so. While I do try not to read only fictions and  not just fictions of a certain genre, I particularly enjoy reading general fictions that are centred around certain themes such as  memory and the unreliable nature of human memory. One of my favourite writers is Julian Barnes whose prose is elegant,  prolific and easy to get into the rhythm of.

Julian Barnes is back in his element talking about love and the memory of youth in The Only Story. This is how the novel begins: 

‘ Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.

You may point out – correctly- that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t . Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love. ‘

The story is about Paul's first love and it has lifelong consequences. It begins in the first person’s voice.

‘Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.”

At nineteen, Paul falls in love with Susan Macleod, a married woman who is almost three decades his senior. He is home for three months at the end of his first year at university. His mother suggests that he may like to join the tennis club. He is competitive at sport without being unduly talented. There is a Lucky Dip Mixed Doubles tournament and he is paired with Mrs Susan Macleod, thus begin his acquaintance with her and they become more than tennis buddies.

Paul was at the age when the one thing that he was not going to do with his existence was end up in a suburbia with a  tennis wife and 2.4 children, and watch them in turn find their mates at the club. When he accepted his mother’s suggestion and offer to sub him for a membership at the tennis club, it was ‘in a spirit of nothing but satire’.

The Only Story moves from the first person’s voice to second person’s voice and then onto the third person’s voice and back to the first person's voice in the end.

‘ As an adolescent, he had longed for more complication. And life had let him discover it . At times, he felt he had had enough of life’s complications .’

‘He always remembered what she had said to him after they left Joan’s house that day. Like most young men, especially those first in love, he had viewed life – and love – in terms of winners and losers. He, obviously, was a winner; Joan , he assumed , had been a loser, or more likely, not even a competitor. Susan had put him right. Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn’t make it any the less real. And it was the only story .’

As you get older, you know that life is both happy and miserable. I often feel protective of my daughters, afraid of their expectations about love and disappointments and life’s complications. But then they have to do the growing up and figure things out on their own.

I believe that it is better to have loved and perhaps  suffer for loving someone  than never to have loved for fear of getting hurt.

The Only Story is a sad love story. It is not tragically sad, it is just sad, it is about the passing of youth and the human heart.While it is a fiction, the observations about how the human heart and mind work are apt. The writing is simply engaging as the story unfolds. Everyone has a story to tell, what is yours? 

A Perfect Sunday

Overcast weather is perfect weather for a Sunday.

I  read profusely. I read to gain better understanding of  thoughts in general  and the very nature of our being or the very being of  our nature.

I read about the trajectory of  life, the state of  our being and hope to expand my mind. I read to write better sentences. Mostly I read for pleasure. I read more than one book at a time and try to be an omnivorous reader.

Words persuade, dissuade, describe and transcend all that define us, our beliefs, our insecurities, our hypocrisies, our truths and the ordinary events that shape our lives. 

It was one of those Sundays when the weather was perfect for reading outdoor. Even if it is  overcast weather, I am too wary of pigmentation to sit in the sun. Sunbathing is a thing of the past since I discovered how pigmentations have found their way to my skin.

Our dog does not  enjoy solitude and I have found a happy compromise. 

After some rain storms, the dog wanted the sun as much as I did. She left me alone when I read under the porch. She just wanted me to be in the vicinity, how adorable. I told  her , “ Maybe you can read in your next life.”  She seemed  to understand  and  lied there next to me, looking contented. She did her downward facing dog stretch like what she does all the time. She is natural at it, it is her pose after all.

When our  dog moved away from my feet, I knew  the sun had  reappeared.

We want the breeze and the sun. We want to have it all.

In the early evening, our dog hopped onto the wooden table where my book was placed, it was as if she wanted to see what book I was reading. After dinner , I took her  for an evening walk. She behaved so it was good. I never know how to train a dog.

I was reading The Noise of Time  written by  Julian Barnes . The story is based on the life of Dimitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, a Russian composer and how the tumultuous evolution of Soviet Union has affected him in his music compositions. The novel begins with the composer on the landing of his apartment block in the middle of the night waiting by the lift thinking that he would be arrested and persecuted as his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk click has met with Stalin's disapproval and public denunciation. The year was 1936.

The life of Shostakovich is full of ironies and contradictions.
In The Noise of Time, 

' One of the few places where optimism and pessimism could happily coexist -- indeed , where the presence of both is necessary for survival -- was family life. So, for instance, he loved Nita (optimism) , but did not know if he was a good husband (pessimism). He was an anxious man, and aware that anxiety makes people  egotistical and bad company. Nita would go off to work; but the moment she arrived at her Institute, he would telephone to ask when she was coming home. He could see that this was annoying: but his anxiety would just get the better of him.

   He loved the children ( optimism ) , but was not sure if he was a good father (pessimism). Sometimes he felt his love for his children was abnormal. even morbid. Well, life is not a walk across a field, as the saying goes.'

 Julian Barnes guides us through Shostakovich's career and meditates on the meaning of art and its place in a society that commands reeducation for artists.

' Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary form his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.'

The following passage strikes a chord with me.

' In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. And then, as one comes to understand things and people better, to develop a sense of irony. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism, and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony.

          But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer.'

The question thus is: Could irony protect Shostakovich's music? All his life, he had avoided joining the party but in 1960, when Shostakovich no longer feared for his life, he was required to join the Communist Party to endorse the new direction taken by his country and he had to accept the chairmanship of the Russian Federation Union of Composers.

' So irony becomes a defence of the self and the soul ; it lets you breather on a day-to -day basis. You write in a letter that someone is a 'marvellous person' and the recipient knows to conclude the opposite. 

The composer  had lived long enough to be dismayed by himself.

'And how would he now appear to his younger self, standing by the roadside as a haunted face in an official car swept past? Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.'

' He attended Party meetings as instructed. He let his mind wander during the endless speeches, merely applauding whenever others applauded. On one occasion, a friend asked why he had clapped a speech in the course of which Khrennikov had violently criticised him. The friend thought he was being ironic or, possibly, self-abusing. But the truth was , he hadn't been listening.'

All  his life, the composer had relied on irony.
' So irony becomes a defence of the self and the soul ; it lets you breather on a day-to -day basis. You write in a letter that someone is a 'marvellous person' and the recipient knows to conclude the opposite. 

' If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then?Sarcasm was irony which has lost its soul. 

The Noise of Time  is descriptive about how the composer had to submit to Power and lived through the complexities of life under tyranny. Despite repressive regimes and official intimidation, Shostakovich managed to compose music and produce great symphonies against the noise of time. If you ask to whom does music belong to, not being able to answer is the correct answer as Julian Barnes writes, ' Because music, in the end, belonged to music. That was all you could say, or wish for.'

Julian Barnes is absolutely prolific and his prose thought-provoking. He is a brilliant writer.

Comfort Zone

Wheelock Place, Singapore

My houseguests will not be leaving soon and there is nothing I can do about it. The feeling I have reminds me of the feeling that I had as a child when I sat in my father's car feeling sorry that all the movie tickets were sold out. Looking back I know it was sheer feeling of powerless. I have to adapt to television noise, chatter and activities around the house. How I miss the empty space and quiet at home. I get disorientated. A month ago, my younger daughter was home and she asked me if I had the SD card reader. I knew I had it somewhere and I just could not recall where I had tucked it away and then weeks later,  I came across not just one but two of them. I can usually place where I have kept my things and as I had to shift my books and papers out of their comfort zone i.e. the study, I  could not recall where I had shifted these things to after clearing up the space to make it into a guest room.

The fabric at home has changed. I know I need to change my mindset to embrace the situation. People are distractions to me and there are good days and bad days, some days I cope better than others.  I feel unsettled, so distracted and distressed that my reading has much slowed down and I have not been able to write much. I have to curb that feeling of dismay when another unproductive day bites the dust. 

Julian Barnes is one of my favourite writers. He writes with such elegance and efficacy. Since I first read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, I have bought almost every book written by the ever brilliant author. I find his prose witty and his observations insightful. In Talking It Over, every character narrates the story through his or her perspectives. It is about Oliver Russell, the never do well flamboyant friend of Stuart Hughes, his very old friend since school days. It is a love triangle story about how Oliver steals Stuart's wife, Gillian Wyatt.  Oliver falls in love with Gillian on the day she marries his good friend, Stuart. From their monologues, you get to know that Stuart is a young banker who is careful with his finances and not a confident person. Oliver is pedantic and yet a wilder type, an unfulfilled soul who winds up teaching at Shakespeare School of English and even manages to get himself sacked from the institution. Stuart and Oliver have struck an unlikely friendship throughout the years. Gillian is an art restorer and a former social worker. 

Through the different accounts by Stuart, Gillian and Oliver and several minor characters, the story is told. 

Stuart       Everything starts here. That’s what I keep repeating to myself. Everything starts  here.

            I was only average at school. I was never encouraged to think that I should aim for university. I did a correspondence course in economics and commercial law, then got accepted by the Bank as a general trainee. I work in the foreign exchange department. I’d better not mention the Bank’s name, just in case they don’t like it. But you’ll have heard of them. They’ve made it fairly clear to me that I’ll never be a high-flier, but every company needs some people who aren’t high-fliers, and that’s all right by me. My parents were the type of parents who always seemed faintly disappointed by whatever it was you did, as if you were constantly letting them down in small ways.

Oliver     I have to be near her, do you understand? I have to win her, I have to earn her, but first I have to be near her.

Gillian    I love Stuart. Now I love Oliver. Everyone got hurt. Of course I feel guilty. What would you have done? 

Again this is from Stuart.

'One of the first things people tell you about money is that it’s an illusion. It’s notional. If you give someone a dollar bill it’s not ‘worth’ a dollar – it’s ‘worth’ a small piece of paper and a small amount of printer’s ink – but everyone agrees, everyone subscribes to the illusion that it’s worth a dollar, and therefore it is. All the money in the world only means what it does because people subscribe to the same illusion about it. Why gold, why platinum? Because everyone agrees to place this value upon them. And so on.

         You can probably see where I’m leading. The other world illusion, the other thing that exists simply because everyone agrees to place a certain value on it, is love. Now you may call me a jaundiced observer, but that’s my conclusion. And I’ve just been pretty close up to it. I’ve had my nose rubbed in love, thank you very much. I’ve put my nose as close against love as I put my nose to the screen when I’m talking it over with money. And it seems to me there are parallels to be drawn. '

Each character is giving his or her own version of the story from his or her point of view and when we place these accounts together, they give a fair picture of what happens. You know it is fiction yet it is credible and it is dark when these characters are taken over by what and how they think about love. 

Years ago I read Love,etc, a sequel to Talking it Over. Love, etc is set ten years later and was written some ten years after Talking it Over. In Love, etc, we know that Stuart has since remarried, got divorced again but he has a successful organic food business. 

Life is work in progress so are we. As we grow up, there are always difficult situations that are thrown at us and years later, we probably end up in a place where we look back and wonder," What was all that about ?". I feel that whatever circumstances we are confronted with and whatever decisions or indecisions we may have made at the time, they are all necessary so we can be in a better place from where we once were. In the meantime,  we have to focus on the present and look forward to brighter days ahead. 

About Reading

Doris Lessing was conferred the 2001 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. The  speech given by her  is amongst the collection of essays and writings in Time Bites  by  Doris Lessing. 

‘There is a new kind of educated person, who may be at school and university for twenty, twenty-five years, who knows everything about a speciality, computers, the law , economics, politics, but know about nothing else, no literature, art, history, and may be heard enquiring, “But what was the Renaissance then?” “ What was the French Revolution?"

Even 50 years ago this person would have been seen as a barbarian. To have acquired an education with nothing of the old humaist background-impossible. To call oneself educated without a background of reading – impossible.

Reading , books, the literary culture, was respected, desired, for centuries.’ – Time Bites Chapter 7

I love reading fictions and through reading fictions, I see humanity for what it is and  reading enables us to connect with other minds across time and space. A novelist can provide a vivid description of a situation and the psyches of various characters so that his or her readers can possibly relate to the story and empathize with the characters, some ordinary, some quirky.  Of course not all the readers connect with a story  in the same manner  or like the same kind of writings. Reading is a pleasure only if the writing is good. Great writings engage our emotions and sometimes, when we immerse ourselves in a story and reach the end of it, we wish that the story would not end.

Julian Barnes wrote in his essay entitled :“ George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant” published in Through the Window :

‘ Most writing comes from an inchoate process; ideas may indeed propose words, but sometimes words propose ideas (both transactions occur within the same sentence) . As E. M. Forster, a frequent target of Orwell’s put it (or rather, quoted).in Aspects of the Novel : ‘ Now do I tell what I think till I see what I say?”

One of my favourite past times is to visit a local bookstore. Whenever I have to go to Kuala Lumpur for work,  nothing thrills me more than the idea of stepping into Kinokuniya at Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). I have to resist the temptation to purchase too many books as  carrying them back in my overnight bag may be a challenge.

In his essay entitled “ Wharton’s The Reef”. Julian Barnes wrote :

“NOVELS CONSIST OF words, evenly and democratically spaced; though some may acquire higher social rank by italicisation or capitalism. In most novels,this democracy spreads wider: every word is as important as every other word. In better novels, certain words have higher specific gravity than other words. This is something the better novelist does not draw attention to, but lets the better reader discover.”

Every word and every sentence in a novel are crafted by the author to tell a story. Every reader has his or her own preferences for the kind of fictions he or she reads. Reading is  a  solitary act. Nothing pleases me more than being able to pick up a novel and plunge into  the act of reading with undivided attention.

' FICTION IS THE MOST  fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves. Fiction is also conservative and conventional, because the structure of its market is relatively democratic ( novelists make a living one copy at a time, bringing pleasure to large audiences) , and because a novel asks for ten or twenty hours of solitary attentiveness from each member of its audience. You can walk past a painting fifty times before you begin to appreciate it. You can drift in and out of a Bartok sonata until its structures dawn on you. But a difficult novel just sits there on your shelf unread-unless you happen to be a student, in which case you’re forced to turn the pages of Woolf and Beckett.'  -  How to be alone by Jonathan Franzen. 

The Splendour of Love

Various contemporary writers shared their views about what literature could tell them about love in the article “ A Sentimental Education” published by New York Times recently.* In the French class last Saturday, we had to give our opinions as to whether we agree or disagree with the statement: L’amitie est preferable a l’amour. This is a difficult choice. Both are essentially about loyalty and acceptance. Friends probably can accept you the way you are if they like you enough but the kind of love we expect from a partner or spouse or lover may change in its character over a period of time as passion or love based on sexual attraction can be delusive. We all know about infatuations, puppy love, crushes and sometimes we may even find ourselves in love with the concept of love when we are young.

I sometimes think about my mother whose life seemed sad to my cousins, children of my mother’s sister  who is suffering from dementia and children of my mother’s brothers and also everyone who had known her for her modesty. She was devastated and became depressed when she had to deal with the reality that my dad had been unfaithful and his mistress had borne him two other children, a son and a daughter. What happened to my parents’ marriage had created an impact on my sister and me, in one way or another.

“ I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is  the question on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged ; and there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.”  - Julian Barnes writes in ‘The Sense of an Ending’.

As children, who are we to judge? I feel sorry for both my parents and  I believe  that both my parents must have suffered greatly for what had happened . Through reading I have become more empathetic about human nature and through reading I understand humanities a little better though I do not need literature to tell me about the impermanence of love. My sister found the journal that belonged to my late dad which is now amongst my possessions. My late dad had written in his journal about how he had been  smitten by my late mother. He kept a journal in the beginning of their courtship and it was incredible that he had kept it for thirty over years . My dad’s journal had somewhat given me a kind of  resolution to my parents’ union.  Even though I had already learnt about how illusive love is since my teenage years and that love can change, I still believe in stories with happy endings. Perhaps I want to believe in whatever that gives mankind inspirations and hope .

I rarely read poetry but I would like to quote a few lines from 'Dover Beach' a poem by Matthew Arnold that was produced at the end of  ‘Saturday’ the novel written by Ian McEwan.

Ah,love , let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
.....................................                                   

Saturday is a story about Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon who is a happily married man who wakes up before dawn on February 15 2003 and from his window he witnesses a burning plane as it heads towards Heathrow. That particular Saturday begins with an unease that materialises in the form of events that happen subsequently on that same day. Perowne is a scientific  man and he does not read fictions as he wants the world explained factually and not reinvented as stories. His father in law is a famous poet who has first introduced his daughter into the literary world. For some years  his too literate daughter has been guiding his literary education and he submits to her reading lists  as his means of remaining in touch with her as she grows away from her family even though he thinks he has seen enough death, fear, courage and suffering to supply half a dozen literatures.  A very profound and thought-provoking story indeed.

*http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/books/review/a-sentimental-education.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140206&tntemail0=y&_r=1