Even though I am now two months into my thirties, I thought I would continue with my Thirty for Thirty series as you were so receptive to it.  Thank you to those who reassured me how liberating I would find turning thirty as I can now say that -so far- my thirties rock!  I really don’t know why I was so worried. So, more books that have made an impact on my first thirty years…

Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis: to all those Amis haters out there, you must read this; it probably won’t change your opinion of the man but it will his writing.  I studied this novel and was blown away by how powerful and clever it was and been haunted by it since.  It tells, in reverse chronological order, the story of a Nazi doctor so is obviously far less funny than some of Amis’ other novels.  The reverse chronology can be disorientating but it is very effective; the reader is not passive but instead complicit in the acts as they have to be reversed to see the narrator’s culpability/untangle his false memories.  For example, one of the stand-out images that I have retained is of the narrator helping a Jew out of a pit.  What you probably don’t know about me is that I have a morbid fascination with the Holocaust and with devastating reads in general; sometimes, in a perverted way, I crave an emotionally-draining read to remember what’s important and what should never, ever happen again.

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. Hm, what was I just saying about my interest in Holocaust literature? Read this; it is an astonishing debut novel. Safran Foer’s prose is sublime and he has an intelligent yet quirky humour that is a joy to read. I’m amused all over again when I think of Alex’s thesaurus-learned English and how that is so often lost in translation.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham is another example of my love for depressing subject matter.  This is such a fantastic novel but I am especially fond of it because of the love it gave me for Virginia Woolf.  I studied Mrs Dalloway, my first Virginia Woolf novel, in my first year at uni and didn’t enjoy or appreciate it until I then followed it up by reading The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize the previous year; Cunningham’s take on Mrs Dalloway and how it affected three generations of women had a considerable effect on me and my understanding and liking of Woolf.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn best exhibits my love for the bizarre in literature and life.  This is a real cult novel and deserving of being sought out if you too love the wacky.  The novel is the story of a travelling carnival and family of “freaks”; the children are all genetically modified in utero by their parents through extensive drug use and exposure to radioactive materials and is narrated by one of the children, Olympia, a hunch-backed albino dwarf.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides yet again shows my love for dark subject matter (although often told in blackly comic ways).  Personally I was underwhelmed by Eugenides’ Middlesex but I know I am in the minority; I read it many years after first reading The Virgin Suicides and it failed to meet my high expectations.  The Virgin Suicides is a book I have picked up to reread on a rainy afternoon as it so readable and atmospheric, offering something new each time.  My first reading of it was as an angsty eighteen year old just as the Sofia Coppola adaptation was released; I have a fabulously retro-like edition with floral cover and a dust-jacket with a rosy still from the film.  The Virgin Suicides was, for me, my generation’s equivalent to The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

Wise Children by Angela Carter. I could not have a thirty year retrospective of formative books without including one by Angela Carter; Wise Children is a less obvious choice than some of her other work but I adore this book for its playfulness, raucous humour and because it was her last novel.  Wise Children is a bawdy romp about several sets of twins, Shakespeare and of authorship and legitimacy. Such a fun, fun book that has a lightness (in tone) to it that is particularly poignant knowing that Carter wrote it after she had been diagnosed with cancer.  It embodies so much that I love about literature: magical realism, literary allusion, the carnivalesque, Shakespeare and also has a London setting so what is not to love?

]]> http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2011/06/04/thirty-for-thirty-pt-2/feed/ 18 http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/06/12/books-and-chocolate/ http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/06/12/books-and-chocolate/#comments Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:25:30 +0000 Paperback Reader http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/?p=1845

When I’m reading I do like doing it with a cuppa and some chocolate; I have also been known to have a glass of wine in one hand and a book in the other.  When I was given the opportunity to review chocolate with red wine, it was an offer I could not decline.  I feel that books and chocolate are very similar in their packaging/cover; both work towards attracting you and compelling you to pick up the chocolate /book in the first place and make you want to buy it. Also a good chocolate bar, just like a good book, should excite and have an interesting beginning, middle and end with different levels of intensity, texture and enjoyment.  Moreover, I think that on bottles of wine, where it tells you what meals it is best to drink with, chocolate packaging should cover which books are best to read or films to watch whilst eating… marketing departments, take note.  Wine labels should extend to sharing that information too: full or medium-bodied, with hints of, best read with…

As for my review itself: I was kindly sent a bar of Zotter Chocolate Schönberger Red Wine by Lee of Chocolate Reviews.  This Fairtrade alcoholic chocolate from an Austrian company is given the following description “A premium red wine from Burgenland. The Blaufränkisch (Burgundy) grapes form a complex taste spectrum, which give the exquisite dark chocolate a soft aftertaste” and retails at £3.00 a bar.  More expensive than a regular bar of chocolate it tastes rich; it is potent truffle-filled bar that is not moulded into segments but is one slab. A fine bitter chocolate with red wine and chocolate inside, it is a chocolate bar with a filling as opposed to a bar of chocolate infused with red wine. The bitterness prevented me from being able to eat this bar in the one sitting -and therefore is not one to eat on the run for energy- but I enjoyed it in small nibbles and thought it worked well with a glass of wine to bring out its notes.  I was impressed by how authentically like wine the chocolate tasted although that’s not surprising as it is made with red wine as opposed to artificial flavoring; the alcohol content of the bar is 2% and yet manages to be heady and taste strong.  The aroma is of cocoa as opposed to wine and the packaging something of a let-down (the gold foil reminded me of the inside of cigarette packets, which instantly cheapened it for me).  This chocolate was a rare treat and more decadent and rich than I am used to but if you enjoy truffles (and, of course, red wine) then this is recommended, or is perfect for a special occasion.

Whilst I prefer my chocolate less rich I do love richness in my reading; I like my wine full-bodied and the same can be said of my literature.  This post and photograph also serve to contribute to Simon of Stuck in a Book’s meme.  Simon called for a photograph that summed up my reading taste that didn’t include a book in it (am I ineligible as this one does, even though it is only for decoration?) and I ruminated long and hard before I realised that the photograph above was perfect.  My reading taste is eclectic and difficult to fully surmise but liking my taste in books to my taste in red wine is accurate; both are great loves of my life (as are cats) and share many elements.  My favourite writers -Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, Colette, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Waters- all write rich prose that I become drunk on and then require a little break from; their language, imagery, and stories are lush as am I… Like the most heady of red wines, these writers are at the top of the grape varieties and they mature with age, with hidden notes and subtle flavours detected upon further tastes.  Reading a book by one of these writers is like drinking a fine wine, something I appreciate, savour, and look forward to, and yet try to do in moderation.

I also enjoy Earl Grey tea reading -Persephone Books- or Champagne reads that are bubbly and effervescent, that go straight to my head, like The Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice, but I will always return to my favourite tipple of all: red wine.

In the aftermath of consecutive Angela Carter month and Persephone Reading Week, I have a lot of blogging to catch up with.  I have a few weeks’ worth of reviews to be scheduled and haven’t yet reviewed those books read during the read-a-thon that I participated in early April.  This post is actually micro-reveiws of three of my read-a-thon reads, to allow me to catch up that little bit sooner; the top book in the photograph, the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange, I shall review separately as I want to devote a post to that one and my re-read of Black Venus during the read-a-thon has already been covered. Those were the two books that I started the read-a-thon with and the short stories (Carter) were a struggle to focus on and rather time-consuming before moving onto the play, which was far better-suited to read-a-thon conditions.

Following the play, I moved onto a novella (yes, I attempted to squeeze as many literary forms into the read-a-thon as possible and missed the novel itself), The Finishing School by Muriel Spark. I’ve been on something of a Spark kick this year and have a further four of her novel(la)s lined up on my immediate to-be-read -albeit mental- pile.  The Finishing School was less satisfying than my previous -and more recent- reads, Memento Mori (which is already a strong contender for my favourite read of the year) and The Girls of Slender Means; it was  last work published two years (2004) before death and may offer more in re-reading but immediately was lacking in comparison to Memento Mori and The Driver’s Seat, which are, in my opinion, Spark’s masterpieces.

The Finishing School is about a creative writing finishing school run by Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina Parker, on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.  Rowland is struggling with his latest novel whilst teaching aspiring writers; he discovers that one of their students, Chris, who is only seventeen, is also writing a novel and that it and he display extraordinary promise.  Rowland becomes professionally jealous  of the younger man’s talent and obsessed with Chris, putting himself, his marriage and the school at risk.

[O]f all the pupils Chris caused Rowland the most disquiet.  He was writing a novel, yes. Rowland, too was writing a novel, and he wasn’t going to say how good he thought Chris was.  A faint twinge of that jealousy which was to mastermind Rowland’s coming months, growing in intensity small hour by hour, seized Rowland as he looked.

This is a curious novella but very effective in its description of jealousy and how insane with envy people can become, driving them to do crazy things and destroy those around them, including themselves.  Spark does get under the skin of the situation and encapsulates in a short amount of pages the madness of Rowland.

It was mainly, at this moment, a question of trying to keep Rowland’s state of mind from running away with itself.  Chris, only Chris?  Was Rowland an unconscious homosexual?  It would be strange if this were so, considering the very perceptive views of life that he held in all other respects.  To be sexually jealous over a man or a woman was something Nina understood, but jealousy over a book, a work of art, a piece of writing…  That was indeed a fact she was trying to swallow.  Rowland was simply going mad with jealousy about the writing of novels.

Early on in the novella I was reminded of Polly of Novel Insight’s feature, Things I Learn From Books; in The Finishing School I learned the etiquette of eating asparagus in England (like Spark herself, I am Scottish but living in England; I also love asparagus but never eaten it in the way described).

Listen: when you eat asparagus in England, as everyone knows, you take it in your fingers, but the secret of exquisite manners with regard to asparagus is to eat it held in your left hand.  Got it?

As my eyes grew more tired and my brain turned to mush, I moved to graphic novels, which are an effective use of time and do seem to involve less concentration simply because there are less words to grapple with on the page when all you want to do is sleep.  I started off by reading Bone: Out of Boneville by Jeff Smith, the first volume in the successful Bone comic series.  Bone has been on the periphery of my consciousness for a while now and I borrowed it last-minute from the library as I knew it would definitely be read during the read-a-thon; I enjoyed it and now have the second volume, The Great Cow Race lined up to read.  I don’t have anything more really to offer other than it is an original premise, it’s very much an on-going story (hence the second one being picked up), and to learn more please read the Wikipedia article linked to or this insightful and enthusiastic review (of the series) by Nymeth of Things Mean a Lot.

Speaking of Nymeth, she and Aarti of Book Lust posted an outstanding co-review earlier this year of Blankets by Craig Thompson.  Blankets seems to have blown up across the blogosphere in the last six months or so and I had requested it from the library (it’s a very expensive graphic novel, mainly because of its length at close to 600-pages) around the same time as reading that review; it then languished on my library pile until the read-a-thon came around.  In the closing two hours of the read-a-thon (after I had slept for around four hours), I read Blankets in one sitting and found it just as touching and profound as the reviews I had read of it  had made it sound.  Blankets is a graphic memoir of Chris Thompson’s childhood and adolescence, focusing on his first experience of love in the background of a strict Christian upbringing.  I find it curious that most of the graphic novels that I have read (Persepolis and Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi;  The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman; Fun Home by Alison Bechdel) have all been memoirs; I don’t read memoirs in any other form and it is interesting that the medium of graphic novels allows their stories to be told and for me to enjoy them.  In my opinion the combination of visual story-telling and subtle narrative heightens the tenderness of this story, a story that otherwise may not have had the same impact; comparatively, a graphic novel such as Maus is less intense because of its form but both suggest that the graphic novel medium is the most accessible -as well as the most touching- form for memoirs.

The same week as the read-a-thon I attended this quilts exhibition at the V&A museum, which deepened my appreciation for Blankets.  A patchwork quilt is a real labour of love and Craig is touchingly presented with one by his girlfriend Raina, with whom he has a bittersweet relationship.  The blankets of the title also refers to blankets of snow and connotes images of comfort, of being tenderly blanketed, or of blank canvases -in art, writing and life.  Blankets is tender, moving, and highly recommended.

]]> http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/05/12/review-a-thon-bone-blankets-and-the-finishing-school/feed/ 17 http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/05/07/%e2%80%9cshe-will-never-have-the-chance-to-shock-us-at-70-%e2%80%9d/ http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/05/07/%e2%80%9cshe-will-never-have-the-chance-to-shock-us-at-70-%e2%80%9d/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 19:07:07 +0000 Paperback Reader http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/?p=2248

Today would have been Angela Carter’s seventieth birthday, had she lived and not died at the age of fifty-one from cancer.  The words of Lorna Sage in her obituary of Carter, “She will never have the chance to shock us at 70”, is unbearably poignant today.  The world lost an amazing literary talent and although she was not our intellectual property and her death is sad in its own right, selfishly we cannot help but imagine what prolific work she would have produced had she lived, not least of all the sequel to Jane Eyre, the later life of Jane’s stepdaughter, Adèle Varens, on which she was working on when she died.  Her swan-song, Wise Children, is full of abundant life and energy, and, published the year of her death, it remains a fitting, lively, and never-dying tribute to her.

Had I had the foresight I would have timed my Angela Carter month in April to finish today; this of course would have inconveniently and overwhelmingly clashed with Persephone Reading Week and I am not altogether confident that the sensibilities of Persephone Books and Angela Carter mesh (regardless of how much affection I have for both).  Carter  famously said of Virago Books (the press who famously did not like Persephone favourite, Dorothy Whipple):

I am moved towards it by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite prose though it might contain.  BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.

Lorna Sage, Good As Her Word: Selected Journalism (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), p. 75.

Instead I overlap the two events, draw your attention to the date, and urge you to read Angela Carter if you have not yet done so and that is all that I can offer in memorial.

Since Angela Carter month drew to a close there have been a few reviews, which I would like to share with you, along with this  article by journalist Kate Webb -the only press tribute- acknowledging today (thank you kindly to Kirsty of Other Stories who brought it to my attention), and from which I borrowed the Lorna Sage quote for the title of this post.

Dioni of Bookie Mee said of Carter -in relation to The Bloody Chamber- that “[w]hat sets her apart for me is how her writing oozes sexuality. It’s almost like girl soft-porn for the literary minded” (she means that as a compliment, which is how I took it!)

Jenny of Jenny’s Books aptly wrote about the swan-song, Wise Children and said of the author, “I think that Angela Carter is like what I imagine marzipan to be like, or maybe this particular sort of chocolate mint cake my father has: delicious and rich but you maybe wouldn’t want a massive lot of it at once”.  Jenny was concerned it was an unfair metaphor but I think it is the perfect analogy.

My name-sake Claire of Kiss a Cloud read her first Carter (after much haranguing by myself) and made it The Magic Toyshop; her thoughts on Carter were that her “brashness advances into the revolting. Carter definitely didn’t hold back”.  Again, an apt and fair evaluation; I personally love Carter’s no-holds-bar approach to description and tackling of themes.

Pri of another cookie crumbles continued her exploration of Carter’s work, this time with her debut novel, Shadow Dance (Honeybuzzard in the States); she thought it “an incredibly strong debut” that takes a “special kind of talent for the writer to write a book, where none of the characters are really likeable, and yet, the story is completely captivating”.

The loss of a writer “at the height of her powers as a novelist” (Sage) was tragic and today I mourn and celebrate her.

]]> http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/05/07/%e2%80%9cshe-will-never-have-the-chance-to-shock-us-at-70-%e2%80%9d/feed/ 6 http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/04/30/carter-collation-post-v/ http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/04/30/carter-collation-post-v/#comments Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:10:39 +0000 Paperback Reader http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/?p=2094

Where has April gone? My Angela Carter month has now drawn to a close and I am both saddened that it has come to an end and delighted at the reception it has received.  I would like to extend thanks to those who have participated in the month by reading and reviewing Angela Carter’s books, as well as those who will do so in the coming months.  This event has reaffirmed my love for my favourite author and you can look forward to another month in the future as well as occasional Angela Carter posts interspersed with my usual fare; first up will be my review of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which will appear once Persephone Reading Week has come to an end.

This month was a celebration of aspects of Angela Carter and her work that I especially enjoy but I haven’t even scratched the surface.  From the response, it appears that most of you share my enthusiasm for the writer and would look forward to my sharing of my passion on another occasion.  I look forward to seeing how you all embrace and re-discover Angela Carter within your own reading experiences and I am thrilled that I could play a part in that.

In the meantime here is a collation of Angela Carter-related posts from this past week to enjoy:

Annabel of Gaskella re-discovered Carter (more successful this time) through The Bloody Chamber and thought her fairy tales were “the complete antithesis of the Disneyfied versions that dominate these days”.

Verity of Verity’s Virago Venture read her final Angela Carter Virago Modern Classic, Fireworks, and found the stories “wide-ranging – set in Japan, in the Orient, in the Jungle, but all full of intense imagery”.

Tea Lady of The Glittering Burn read Nights at the Circus for her first Carter, a feminist “book challenged [her] lazy preconceptions every step of the way.

Hayley of Desperate Reader also read Shadow Dance this month and thought Carter’s debut, “Tense and chilling, it’s a very convincing sort of gothic horror written and set in the 1960’s”.

Thank you again to everyone who joined me for Angela Carter month -whether out of curiosity or familiarity- and I do hope that you enjoyed it.  If you haven’t had a chance to then please read my interview with Roxanna Bikadoroff, illustrator of Angela Carter’s books, as it was one of my highlights of this month.

I hope to see many of you next week for Persephone Reading Week 2010.

PBR: I am a huge admirer of your work, coming to it through Angela Carter’s books and I find it refreshing; it has gone a long way in contributing to my love of book covers, the attention I now pay to them, and my coveting and collecting of them.  I am most interested in how you found your inspiration for the covers and your thoughts on Carter and her writing.

RB: Thanks for your kind words. Haven’t done any such work in some time…guess I’ve been so associated with one writer, etc. Been working on paintings and other projects of late,though always open to more of the old style.

One thing I always insist on is reading the books I’m illustrating covers for (surprizingly not expected of illustrators) and doing the writing justice.  Marketing depts are usually more concerned with visibility on the shelf, etc.

PBR: I’m glad that you mentioned insisting on reading the books before illustrating the covers as I was going to ask you that.  Your illustrations for Carter’s books are so representative of the work itself and you can tell that you are familiar with the characters and story with the wealth of detail that has gone into the artwork.  You have certainly done the writing justice as the illustrations are as rich and as vibrant as the prose.

Coming to blogging last year I have become even more interested in how books are marketed and especially in the cover art.  Illustrators and translators seem to be the neglected parties when it comes to books being appreciated by the reader and I am more conscious of the work that goes into the design of a book especially.  Your Carter artwork is definitely the bar against which I measure the cover of a book and its success at tempting me to buy it; I remember the first time I came across the cover you did for the Virago re-issue of The Magic Toyshop in 2006, I had to immediately purchase a copy of the book even though I already owned it.

Which moves me on to asking when you first began to illustrate Carter’s novels, how it come about, and then with Virago in the UK?

RB: It was for Penguin US back in the early nineties, I was just starting to gain some ground as a freelance illustrator, getting work for US publications, like the New Yorker. The art director at Penguin at the time was the brilliantly talented Michael Ian Kaye, who had a way of letting illustrators do their thing and simply providing the necessary design details to make it look fab. I used to send samples to art directors with fancy, hand-written envelopes (remember those days?) and I think this gave him the bright idea to let me do the hand-lettered titles. After that I was constantly asked to hand-letter things, as was everyone else.

As for Virago, I guess they just wanted to maintain the look. It’s funny, because for the longest time the UK publisher of AC (can’t recall if it was then Virago or Penguin UK) didn’t want the same look as the US covers. Maybe they were trying to attract a new/younger generation of readers.

PBR: in the Nineties Virago (who published AC) streamlined their covers so that they were a distinctive imprint, with bottle-green spines; I collect those old covers but I am delighted that they moved in the same direction as Penguin US, especially as it adds a dimension of universality to Carter’s books, which are also so immediately identifiable.  I think that your eye-catching designs will definitely attract a wider -and perhaps- younger readership.

I am huge fan of your stylized typography and how the title and author are incorporated into the illustration; again, the font is recognisable on the front cover as your work (I would even know it on chocolate too!)

In reference to your and Carter’s work being mutually recognisable, you mention that you have been associated with this one writer, do you find that restrictive in any way, a blessing, or both?

RB: Both. I am honored to be associated with Angela Carter and Flannery O’Connor, two very strong, enduring, women writers that almost seemed to have sprung up from their graves and offered me a gift  But my later association with trendy ‘chick lit’ books may have been the beginning of the end…

PBR: “seemed to have sprung up from their graves and offered me a gift” is a beautiful way of expressing it.  For anyone who isn’t familiar with your Flannery O’Connor work (which is silk-screened, I believe) then I’ve linked to another interview with you here that displays the covers in the body of the post.  I have only read a little Flannery O’Connor in the past but fully intend to read more in the future and perhaps I’ll obtain those stunning editions to do so; they contrast so much with the Carter ones and yet are also equally appealing.

It’s funny that you should mention the later association with ‘chick lit’ as there is a book that I came across through the post I’ve just linked to, which I was attracted to mainly for the cover and duly requested it from my library, but when it arrived it had an entirely different cover (I wrote about that experience here).  Sometimes we most definitely do judge a book by its cover, for good or for bad.

Back to Carter, do you have a favourite book of hers and what do you enjoy about her work?

RB: That’s a hard one – but the one that seems to stick with me in most detail is The Magic Toyshop. I loved Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, too, because those were my intro to her work and they just blew me away! Like nothing I’d read before and right up my alley. What I like about her work is that she takes themes that might better be suited to a children’s book, but puts back all the creepiness and uncertainty and sensory perception – so it’s like, an adult remembering childhood but being able to go back with all the tools to decipher the experience intellectually. Yet she doesn’t detach from the emotional either.

Fairy Tales, for example, were not originally for children, they were more like ‘tribal therapy’, but were later relegated – along with women’s status – to the nursery. Angela Carter,  has single-handedly put it all back together again. Does that make sense ?!

PBR: It makes complete sense!  It is wonderful to detect the same enthusiasm for Carter’s work that I have in your answer and I understand your points perfectly, both agreeing and contemplating them further.  Carter definitely deconstructed innocence in her fairy tales (rewriting, translating and/or editing them), injecting them with a more sinister, sensual overtone that was latent in the originals; The Magic Toyshop definitely does the same in novel-form and I can see why it would stand out to you for those reasons.

“Like nothing I’d read before” is the way I responded to Carter for the first time, every time really, and the way I describe her to others.

Speaking of there being no one quite like Carter … is there any particular writer whose work you would love to illustrate?

RB: Well, I’m huge on fairy tales. Started illustrating a Russian one, but had no takers, so it’s on hold while I tend to my other love-labours!

PBR: I’m also a huge fan of fairy tales (I love Pan’s Labyrinth and completely agree with you that Carter would have received a real kick out of that film) so you have me intrigued … I wish you success in finding a book for that particular illustration and for your future endeavours.  I will definitely be continuing to pick up book covers with your work.

On behalf of myself and those reading I would like to thank you very much for your time and direct interested parties to your Snazzy Art Boutique and Gallerie Mystique.  Our discussion has developed by appreciation for my Angela Carter collection even more (which I didn’t think was possible!) and my interest in book cover illustration.  This was a wonderful way to celebrate Angela Carter and I am grateful to you for participating in my month as it draws to a close.

]]> http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/04/28/angela-carter-cover-art/feed/ 10 http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/04/24/carter-collation-post-iv/ http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/04/24/carter-collation-post-iv/#comments Sat, 24 Apr 2010 08:00:47 +0000 Paperback Reader http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/?p=2059

Another round-up post to keep you abreast of other bloggers’ participation in Angela Carter month.

Kim of Reading Matters went off-the-beaten-track a little with the delightful The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault for her first Carter experience; she is now re-assessing those seemingly innocent fairy tales she read as a child.  Kim also enjoyed Carter’s rather wicked feminist eye, which is as observant as it is mocking.

Jackie of Farm Lane Books took her first foray in Angela Carter’s universe by reading Nights at the Circus; she found Fevvers to be “one of the most vivid characters” she had ever read and loved her extraordinariness but was not a fan of Carter’s heavy use of magical realism.  Jackie also didn’t think she shared Carter’s sense of humour, which I have to say is quite twisted and dark (just the way I like it).

Vivienne of Serendipity hasn’t read any of Angela Carter’s work for years and re-embraced her by reading The Passion of New Eve.  Vivienne has written an admirably balanced and fair review of a novel that she is still speechless about and yet has been able to fully articulate her ambivalence towards it. This paragraph from the review had me chuckling:

Whilst reading it, I kept holding my breath as the situation changed and went from one extreme to another. The story is full of twists and turns which at times lost me and had me scanning back through the pages to find the clues I had missed. This story has to be the most bizarre book I have ever read. The changes that occur to Evelyn are quite mind boggling and rather sadistic. I am surprised that Evelyn did not top himself by the end of the book, because I do believe any sane person would have reached for poison long before the end of the book.

This week I also drew the winner of the Black Venus draw and congratulations goes to Sakura!  Please contact me to arrange delivery of your prize.

Please join me next week for the last posts for what has been an exciting and inspiring Angela Carter month.

This weekend I will be at home in Glasgow for the wedding of a dear friend and I thought it appropriate to schedule a wedding-themed Angela Carter post.  Being Carter, of course, it’s not happily-ever-after; she had a penchant for depicting daughters wearing their mothers’ wedding dresses, as a Gothic symbol for loss-of-innocence.  I opted to feature the Roxanna Bikadoroff illustration for the US edition (Penguin) of The Magic Toyshop because it shows Melanie in the wedding-dress  that is so central to the plot.  The Magic Toyshop is a coming-of-age novel that focuses on the pubescent Melanie and celebrates her burgeoning sexuality and the loss of  her innocence.  The first chapter of the novel is about her the trying on of the dress, her mother wore on her wedding dress; the subsequent spoiling of the dress when she is locked out in the garden and has to climb a tree, spilling blood in the process; the eventual blame upon herself for her parents’ deaths, putting it down to the wearing of the dress.

She examined the wedding dress more closely.  It seemed a strange way to dress up just in order to lose your virginity.  She wondered if her parents had sexual intercourse before they were married.  She felt she was really growing up if she had started to speculate about this … Symbolic and virtuous white.  White satin shows every mark, white tulle crumples at the touch of a finger, white roses shower petals at a breath.  Virtue is fragile.  It was a marvellous wedding-dress. Did she, Melanie wondered for a moment, wear it on the wedding night?

The title of this post refers to Miss Havisham from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Jilted on her wedding day, humiliated and heartbroken, Miss Havisham never removes her wedding dress  -which she was already dressed in- and leaves the wedding cake uneaten on the table.  Miss Havisham is a haunting female character and I think that Carter is acknowledging her standing in literary tradition as a scorned female and significant character.  Melanie, of course, is a young girl, blossoming into herself, whereas Miss Havisham is a woman whose life has been lived in resentment at a broken heart; the decaying image of a woman living in the similarly ruined mansion, with all the clocks stopped at the hour of her betrayal, contrasts to the heightened life-blood of Melanie.  The vampiric eponymous lady of  “The Lady of the House of Love” in The Bloody Chamber is even more reminiscent of Miss Havisham:

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

All day, she lies in her coffin in her négligé of blood-stained lace. When the sun drops behind the mountain, she yawns and stirs and puts on the only dress she has, her mother’s wedding dress, to sit and read her cards until she grows hungry.

First of all, he saw only a shape, a shape imbued with a faint luminosity since it caught and reflected in its yellowed surfaces what little light there was in the ill-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all things, a hoop-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a dress fifty or sixty years out of fashion but once, obviously, intended for a wedding. And then he saw the girl who wore the dress, a girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in the dank air, a fabulous lending, a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in a machine.

Read the beautiful prose in the above passages; Carter has re-envisaged Miss Havisham as well as loosely using the premise of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale.

The character too of Tristessa in The Passion of New Eve is a type of Miss Havisham, négligéed and forced into marriage; however, to reveal how Carter subverts the notion of Tristessa as a reclusive Miss Havisham is to spoil the novel.

I don’t pretend to offer any profound insights in this post but I did want to highlight Carter’s progressive use of similar images, themes and her use of intertextuality in her work.  Previously I have mentioned Carter’s wealth  of literary allusion but she also relies on the images and reputation of classic texts to shape her own, which makes her intricately crafted prose all the richer.

Ten days remaining of my Angela Carter month and still so much I would love to share with you.  Thank you for the lovely encouraging comments you have left so far and the enthusiasm and support you have provided me with.  I was particularly touched by the comment left by Vasilly at the weekend: “You know what I love most about Angela Carter month? That your passion for this author is so strong that you’re sharing everything you enjoy about Carter with us. It’s an inspiration and your passion for Carter, makes me want to read her even more.”  This reinforcement of my goal this month helped a lot; it encapsulates what I am aiming for with my spotlight on Angela Carter and I am so relieved that it is being translated in the posts I have made.

The one thing that I would have loved more of a chance to do this month, is rereading Carter’s work; I’ve managed some but I will definitely be carving out some time in the coming months to curl up and enjoy her books.  The book I am most excited about rereading is Wise Children, Carter’s last novel and Shakespearean romp, more so after reading this review by Rachel of Book Snob.  One of the things that I am loving about reading your reviews is the exuberance reflected in the writing; the enthused descriptions and heightened language is doing justice to Carter’s extraordinary and transcendent writing skills.  Rachel describes Wise Children as, “a very witty and subversive novel, using plenty of Shakespearean conceits to great effect and to produce fantastic, larger than life characters. There are the infinite succession of twins, some identical and some not, whose identity is fluid, as well as that of their children. Most characters are illegitimate, some knowingly, most unknowingly, and this makes for interesting observations as to the source of our identity and history, and whether a parent is more than just biology”. Wise Children is a delight and one that is so infectiously uplifting, even to read about.

Despite describing herself as “Carter-indifferent”, Verity kindly read more of Angela Carter’s writing this month and “can certainly attest to the quality of her prose even if I have not always hugely enjoyed her books”.  Her experience with Several Perceptions was more favourable than her last Carter novel and she found it more accessible and interesting to observe the early writing style and preoccupations.

Something that was raised today, in two separate conversations with two different bloggers, was the fear of upsetting me by posting a review in which they less-than-love Angela Carter.  Don’t worry: I’m a big girl and I fully accept that she is a writer whose work is most definitely not for everyone; she is a magical realist at times whose writing is elevated and her plots mostly secondary with themes that are sometimes unsettling.  She is my favourite author and I am very attached to her work but my aim with this month was to urge you to at least read one of her books, not for you to necessarily love it (if they go hand-in-hand then more’s the better but it isn’t mandatory), but just to try her and discover whether or not she is for you; for those of you with previous experience of Carter -good or bad- then it was simply encouragement to read/attempt her again. Please don’t worry about offending me; reading is subjective and what works for me may not work for you; I’m just grateful to you for you participating.

The prize-copies of Angela Carter books are on their way, later than I intended and now (those going overseas) subject to postal delays caused by the volcanic ash in UK airspace.  I am very sorry that these won’t be with many of you until  after the close of Angela Carter month. One consolation is that there will be an extenuation of the Angela Carter celebrations; there is also some time left to enter my draw for a copy of Black Venus.

Just before Christmas last year I participated in Aarti of Booklust’s wonderful Rosie’s Riveters feature, before it came to an end.  I hope that Aarti doesn’t mind me recycling that post; I was inspired by a survey posted by My Friend Amy today: What Books Do You Wish Everyone Would Read?  It will, I hope, be clear that in hosting a month dedicated to Angela Carter, that I am very much a devoted advocate for reading her; I would encourage everyone to read at least one of books.  If you read this post or any that I have written this month, it should be apparent why, but simply put: I am a firm believer that your reading life will be richer for the experience.  Now, I recommend different Carter books to different people -as I have to many of you reading this- based on your personal taste and my feel for what you would perhaps enjoy more; however, if there is one book that I wish everyone would read then it would be my favourite, Nights at the Circus.  My first Carter novel, this was where the love-affair began with the writer and her work; it inspired my postgraduate education and a subsequent Master’s thesis on a specific aspect of Angela Carter’s work; it affects where I am today as sharing my delight in and enthusiasm for Angela Carter is a huge motivator behind why I write this blog; it is the book that I am spotlighting today by re-posting my Rosie’s Riveter selection.

Rosie’s Riveters is a weekly posting written by Booklust readers about riveting females in literature. Many readers have strong reactions to the women in the books they read- either very positive or very negative. These are the characters we find riveting, for good reasons or bad ones, and they form the population of Rosie’s Riveters. Through this weekly post, we can discuss females we love to hate, or love to love. And maybe, just maybe- we can determine why we react so strongly to them.

Fevvers, christened Sophie.

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

LOVE her!

Feisty, sensational, outrageous, revolutionary, personable, unforgettable, unbelievable.

No, Fevvers is a celebrity in her own right; she is a celebrated winged aerialiste at the turn of the nineteenth century and leading attraction at a circus.

Hatched from an egg, Fevvers sprouted wings when she was menstruating.  She is Cockney, larger-than-life literally at over six feet in her stocking-feet and peroxide blonde; she is a virgin raised in a brothel and is the strongest female protagonist in literary fiction.

She is one of the greatest feminist literary constructs of all time and also a construct of her own imagination.  A “Cockney Venus” in Victorian London, Fevvers is a wonderful heroine.

Absolutely! Angela Carter is an amazing writer and Nights at the Circus is my favourite of her books; her writing is superb and Fevvers is a riveting realisation.

At the dawn of a new century Fevvers looks to the day where “All the women will have wings, the same as I”.