Solaris

Image from here

Ok, so no reviews for absolutely ages, I haven’t read anything in a while that has really inspired me to write about it.

Until…. Solaris! What a mind trip… I have to prepare myself mentally when I am about to embark on the next few pages when I pick it up again (it’s another slow burner). The atmosphere is so heavy in this book it feels like the author (Stanislaw Lem) has cast a creepy spell making it feel as if you are in outer space with the protagonist, Kelvin.

The book begins with Kelvin landing on a space station on the planet Solaris. He is there to join a pre-existing team of scientists and researchers. Straight away, there is something that isn’t quite right. The men he meets there are sinister and don’t answer his questions. So far, so creepy. However, the most genius thing of the book is the planet’s only inhabitant.

The ocean. No two scientists can agree whether this massive entity is intelligent or primeval. They know it isn’t a cellular structure, but what they don’t understand is how it can possibly think for itself and create activity and phenomena.

This sets up Lem very well for what begins to be seen as a sadly beautiful picture of grief and suppressed dark desire. This isn’t really a science fiction novel in the contemporary canon, but of the older kind where a setting in space seemed also about an exploration of philosophical ideas.
All the inhabitants of the space station are haunted by their own private ghosts- manifested into flesh and blood hallucinations.
Kelvin feels responsible for the suicide of his wife 10 years previously. She comes back to him at the station, and he can’t reconcile himself with her death, repeatedly swerving between extremes of familiar recognition and sickening guilt. At first he tries to get away from her – just a copy of the real girl he loved – but after a while he begins to be reconciled to her presence in strange ways, but she becomes slowly aware of her transience and is in agony as a result...
In a way, it is wonderful that Andrey Tarkovsky made the film adaptation of Solaris, you only have to look at this wonderful book of his polaroids to understand that he knew something about loss and longing.
Give it a try, even if you usually give science fiction a miss. There are some undervalued gems in this genre.

Moon Tiger

Claudia Hampton, infirm in old age, lying in bed, sets out to write a history of the world, and her own history in the process.

This book is about memory. The mystery of it, the way it develops and transforms over time. The way it can be deceptive, painful, vivid and generous all at once.

The narrative shifts between time and place effortlessly and fluidly. The narrative also shifts into the point of view of the other characters, telling one memory from the recollection of several people, illustrating perfectly how experience and subsequent memory of an event is only ever personal and always different according to whom you ask.

Penelope Lively writes wonderfully and the way that the book shifts is never uncomfortable.
It is very easy to follow, because of, not despite its fragmented nature. There are parts that are like a flash of an image, like some memories can be, there are parts that are remembered for an unexplained reason, parts that are richly detailed (particularly those parts where Claudia is in WW2-time Egypt), parts that are hazy and sparse. It is because of this fragmented nature that the book is not difficult. Instead, it is familiar, because this is the exact same way that most people remember.

Side note: if you are interested in films about memory, watch 'Amarcord' by Federico Fellini, filmed in a similar way to how this book is written, but about the director's childhood in a small town in Italy.

There was also a small but very interesting vein running through the book, that of collective memory. Claudia Hampton is a historian, so she mostly deals with this. Those facts and accounts that have become something everyone thinks of when they think of something they have not experienced for themselves. This is particularly relevant when she writes about the war in Egypt: from a human perspective, very biased.
That is something that collective memory can never be, violent and hot. Strangely enough when we talk of a memory of a people, wars and invasions in particular, the collective 'memory' is dulled and ground to the gray dust of numbers and impersonality.

I think this book is incredibly successful with its experimental style, I have never, until now, read a book that attempts so many stylistic devices and carries them off. It took me about three weeks to read, as sometimes I had to put it down because I had to think about what I'd just read (and I don't normally do this! Also I don't mean to sound horribly pretentious- just a bit maybe!).

This is a part that I particularly liked:

'...truth is tied to
words, to print, to the testimony of the page. Moments shower
away; the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial
than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring
than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at
their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine - all these are
nailed down for ever, on the page and in a million heads. What
happened to me on Charmouth beach in 1920, on the other
hand, is thisledown. And when you and I talk about history
we don't mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic
chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this
into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon
years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances,
following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.'

Moon Tiger is also, by coincidence, being covered by the Guardian book club, if you wanted to read a bit more about it (better yet though, read the book!).

Year Of Wonders

Written by a journalist, Geraldine Brooks, 'Year of Wonders' has a reportage flavour to it.
This book chronicles two years in the life of Anna Frith, a woman living in a remote Derbyshire village, from the time the bubonic plague arrives (1665) to claim its first victims, to when it departs, having ravaged the town, reducing the population by two-thirds.

The narrator is a poor woman taken under the wing of the village rector and educated to read and write by his wife. She is flawed but clear of vision, not turning her head from the terrors in store for her.
The basic story is a true one, of one village's noble attempt to halt the spread of illness by shutting itself off from the world for one year, but Brooks deftly captures a larger story of isolation, loss, loneliness, and fear. The heroine's grasp of the fragility of hope and her desperate hold on reasons to carry on make for often anguishing reading, but written with such clarity and precision that this is never a struggle.
At times, the descriptions of the plague are so raw and grisly that I kept finding myself on buses with my mouth gaping in horror.

Brooks has an amazing way with words and there are certain passages that beg to be re-read often, one example follows:

'It is a strange prospect, our main street these days. I used
to rue its dustiness in summer and muddiness in winter,
the rain all rizen in the wheel ruts making glassy hazards
for the unwary stepper. But now there is neither ice nor
mud nor dust, for the road is grassed over, with just a
cow-track down the centre where the slight use of a few
passing feet has worn the weeds down. For hundreds of
years, the people of this village pushed Nature back from
its precincts. It has taken less than a year to begin to
reclaim its place. In the very middle of the street, a walnut
shell lies broken, and from it, already, sprouts a sapling
that wants to grow up to block our way entire. I have
watched it from its first seed leaves, wondering when
someone would pull it out. No one has yet done so, and
now it stands already a yard high. Footprints testify that
we are all walking around it. I wonder if it is indifference,
or whether, like me, others are so brimful of endings that
they cannot bear to wretch even a scrawny sapling from its
tenuous grip on life.'

Somehow, this book encapsulates perfectly the feeling of life being so fleeting, to know that you might be next and to thank your lucky stars that the Black Death is now treatable (there are plenty of things that are not treatable, but luckily this one gruesome disease is almost out of the picture).
I don't want to be one of those people, that when there is a bit of a 'crunching of the credit' (as one friend's grandmother so delicately put it), to suddenly start reading and recommending lots of books that make you 'appreciate your life' and think 'there's always others that are worse off', but I will recommend this one, as it makes you want to be someone who is strong and can pick out glistening specks of beauty from the dirt in which it lies.

An account of first love

Image from the Victoria and Albert Museum Archives

I will not talk too much of the plot of 'I Capture the Castle' by Dodie Smith, here, I wanted to talk about the things I will always remember about this book, the only thing I want to stress is, please read it yourself. Do not dismiss it as a girl's, children's or 'young adult' book.

The first thing that makes an impression from 'I Capture the Castle', is the tear-inducingly vivid imagery of the Castle the Mortmain family inhabit and the countryside around it. The author was an Englishwoman marooned in the glaring sun and shiny automobiles of Hollywood, longing to see her home. Her descriptions of forests and grass make you feel as if you were pressing your nose into a field of wildflowers.
Further into the book, the sharply exact way Smith recounts the agonies of first love are at times so evocative that you have to stop and gape. The desperation, sleepless nights and endless daydreams Smith has her heroine, Cassandra experience are so beautifully truthful and universal, the book could have been written for anyone and about everyone.

Two quotes that elaborate on the theme of first love and the sheer maddening torture/euphoria of it all:

'It hurt me so much that I moaned out loud. I wanted
to fling myself down in the mud and beat my way into
the ground... '

On suffering:
'I said aloud: "I don't want to miss anything." And then
misery came rushing back like a river that has been
dammed up. I tried to open my heart to it, to welcome
it as a part of my life's experience, and at first that
made it easier to bear. Then it got worse than ever
before - it was physical as well as mental, my heart and
ribs and shoulders and chest, even my arms ached. I
longed so desperately for someone to comfort me...'

I don't want to sound too gushing, but I haven't even said anything about the other characters, all very wonderfully formed, or about Smith's portrayal of London in the 1930's.
So, if you can't go and sit in a bluebell wood with someone you fancy the pants off, this is the next best alternative, or maybe even better!