Lines in Books

Christine has that layer under her skin that cuts off her outside from her inside and allows no communication between the person she once believed she could be and the person she has in fact become. The does not acknowledge the other's existence. The women from war are like that, a new kind of being that no one knew one before, not exactly male but no longer female. How easy it is to become unlikable and to act atrociously when one feels as though, perhaps not without reason, that the cards are stacked against one and that, regardless of what one does to improve one's lot, one is destined to fail... Add to that trauma which causes woman to disengage from herself, to become harsher than she would likely have been without the trauma of being a woman in a man's world, of belonging to a post-colonial country recovering from war.

And there are always those who would watch Alexandria burn. There always have been. There always will be. We are all stardust & stories, we're told. And sometimes there is no fixing things other than to move forward in the brokenness. But there can be revival. And so there is in a magical underground library. 

But when it comes to my houses - well, I always feel a pride, and I like to know people will live in those houses and weave their own histories. History isn't always what's written in books or taught in schools. The history of ordinary men and women is embedded in walls and floors and timbers of buildings. A builder commits four murders: the wife who poisons her husband, her sister when she spurns him, her nephew who he believes has seen him kill his mother, and his father who knows his secrets. The dead speak on: through music they play in death, through their letters they wrote in life, ultimately leading to the sordid tale which unfolded a century ago being uncovered. 

"If death comes, I can face it quite bravely if I know even one piece will survive,' he had written.    (Phineas Fox Mystery #2) A German musician who has fallen in love with a Jewish woman wants his music to survive. Her cousin, taken to a concentration camp, to be forced to write victory music for Hitler (chosen specifically because all Jews are expendable to the Nazis), finds the score just before she is captured. And, after seeing the musician being tortured for his supposed betrayal of the Nazi cause, decides that's what she wants for him too. She removes her cousin's name from the music: it is no longer Silke's music, and it becomes music marked with her own signature, a ghost note which her husband, who is later separately brought to a Nazi holding house along with their teenaged daughter, finds... the music does in fact survive, in two differently named copies, though those who find it decades later know nothing of its true composer, raising questions of wh...

Words are capable of flying. They dart through windows, over fences, between bar stools and across courtyards. They travel rapidly from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. And as they go, they pick up speed and weight and substance and gravity. Until they land with a scud, take seed and grow as fast as the unruliest of beanstalks. The dead are almost as alive as the living, and they help a young man learn who killed his mother, an unwed teenager in a small Irish town which called her a whore, and wanted to believe that she'd simply got on a bus and left their community one day in 1950.

Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope - and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way of seeing such landscapes, it might be thought of as "occulting': the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness.  What will survive of us is more likely to be our sewer systems than surface structures, the author points out as he journeys underworld, through caves and catacombs, experiencing nature's beauty and exploring human effect on the Earth which is not always beautiful. (Non-fiction)

Agnes saw that what people had taken for strength and leadership in her mother might just have been desperation, a manic instinct to survive. She didn't know if there was a difference. Shouldn't there be?  A reminder that, for all the fantasies urban folk have of living with 'nature', actually living in the wild is not easy at all, although, with the way we've been plundering the Earth, there may come a time soon enough when our cities will become unliveable and only a few of us will be lucky enough to be able to retreat into what's left of the wild where we will be required to prioritise not just needs but also people, as a young mother discovers in this dystopian novel set in the future. She shifts to the wilderness along with her husband and child, and a few others; the child is too ill to survive the City, and she will do whatever she can to keep her alive.

Only for the duration, of course, for the foreseeable future, as the posters said.  So much changed during the 1918 pandemic. Rules were bent, protocols changed. A young woman spent her life in the 'care' of nuns who valued her so little that they sent her to volunteer in a hospital during the 1918 flu; at other times, she probably wouldn't have been allowed in. She wasn't familiar with happiness but she did find it just before she died, days after she came to the hospital, having likely caught the flu there... despite all that was done to her in life, she fairly sparkled on the page. Hers the most compelling story in this short, brutal novel set in a makeshift maternity ward, and full of gems.    

Memory is deceptive when it comes to recalling the events and places of our childhood; it tells us a story of our past, idealised and distorted by the passage of time. Loss is the most powerful of these emotional lenses, endowing the places we can never return to with a magic that mag- nifies the good and softens the ugly. The author sets out to discover her grandmother Inge's past and, along the way, learns of long-held secrets. Inge, born in East Prussia, was forced to flee the end of WWII. Along with her daughter and parents, she made her way to Denmark which showed little compassion too German refugees once the war ended only to find herself in Germany where life was significantly harder. Stories like hers were largely ignored because who, really, has ever been inclined to care about the travails of German civilians then? (Non- fiction)

I was not in time with history but blood dries faster than memory. A strange feverdream of a novel where it's never clear what's real and what's not. Lives are structured like sonatas, themes are repeated. The man who supposedly sees everything sees almost nothing. He is, in fact, so detached that his girlfriend only feels able to reach him through the lens of her camera. All that one can be sure of in this intermingling of fact and fantasy is that the world with its rules are inescapable even if one deploys all one's selfishness to sidestep them. 

Mother always said it wasn't just about keeping going, but about standing up for what you believed in as well. A young woman becomes a typist for a very brusque agony aunt at a women's periodical, and winds up impersonating her answering queries which the 'editress' refuses to touch seemingly because she finds them vulgar. Far more interesting than the tale of the letters though is the relationship which the young woman shares with her best friend: a tale of how even the strongest friendships can flounder at times although true friends tend to find their way back to each other. 

Everyone who loves is afraid of not being loved. Perhaps there's such a thing as too much Ferrante. The Lying Life of Adults seems to follow a young girl as she is initiated into the ways of adults and ultimately becomes one herself. There is little by way of what feels like universal or even common psychological truth in the telling: the young woman's story does seem to come across as being rather emphatically her own although one might also argue that there isn't any story which is truly unique, and that it is but one telling of the human condition. 

To survive, she is cultivating distance.   In the blink of an eye, almost all the menfolk in a remote coastal settlement are lost to a storm. The women must fend for themselves and some of them turn to ostentatious religion. When a commissioner intent on rooting out witchcraft arrives in their midst, some of them turn on each other literally starting a fire that they cannot control; two of their number are burnt at the stake. The commissioner dies soon after: his wife, who has come to despise him, hits him on the head when he accuses her friend of witchcraft and attacks her. "The rolling pin smacks at the centre of his skull. It sounds like a bird's egg, cracking..."

Survival is another country too, and we have to make it there first.  In world where no-one is treated kindly, it is women alone who are stripped of choice: they are allotted either blue or white tickets upon reaching adulthood which determine the whether or not they are legally permitted to have children; they are monitored by doctors and they are  conned into believing they are given the tickets they deserve and that it's not a lottery.  However, it isn't a world in which only men oppress women: it is a brutal, patriarchal society in which men oppress each other too, and in which some women are involved in effecting the oppression of their fellows as the narrator,  a woman who tries to flee learns: she becomes a criminal by choosing to have a child despite having been allotted a freedom ticket instead of a motherhood ticket only to be betrayed by another woman.

One thing Natalie had never wondered about until now: After the explosion of tributes, then what? Who picked up the wilted flowers, the rain-soaked poems, the blurred photos, the jarred candles? After a woman's mother dies along with the man who was about to propose marriage to her, she is forced to pick up the pieces. She gives up her job that provides more stability than joy, and heads back to her childhood home where her mother ran a bookshop and her grandfather, now beginning to suffer from dementia, continues live. There's a pile of work to be done there, getting the bookshop's finances in order and keeping the building from falling apart both of which she manages to do with help. Not for nothing, in the course of the repairs, the building reveals its secrets: keepsakes hidden in its crevices by former occupants including a rare set of books which ultimately acts as a saviour. 

"I'm the armarius, in charge of the scriptorium and the library." "Is it a big library?" "We have eight books, but when I get home we'll have sixteen. And the scriptorium consists of me and an assistant, Brother Tatwine. He colors the capital letters. I do the plain writing—I'm more interested in words than colors." A prequel to The Pillars of the Earth, the author talks about how Kingsbridge priory came to be from uninspiring beginnings thanks to the vision, generosity, and hard work of a few people despite odds that often seemed all but insurmountable. Also, an interesting study of how justice is all too often superseded by expediency and power. Even so, justice sometimes triumphs in the long run. 

There are patterns to life... Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply  living . I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness.  A young woman with more regrets than she can easily keep track of, the bulk of which seem to be not fulfilling others' dreams for her, snaps under the weight of her burdens and tries to kill herself. She winds up not quite dead and being given the opportunity to see what her life would have looked like had she made other choices only to discover that she does make a difference, and that the life she tried to escape is the one she wants. 

I know now that burning out is when a longer struggle gives way to a relentless, unstoppable assault, like a rock's face being worn down by erosion. You emerge with your contours hewn differently and something else inside transfigured. Some of these changes are welcome, but others can leave you grieving for the self you have lost. A woman and her husband move away from London to an island in Scotland. There, their marriage falls apart, and he leaves her to live alone and be reshaped by the loss of love, by local traditions, and by the land itself into a more resilient person than perhaps she herself knew she could become. 

Memory is not to be trusted. It's as mendacious as the shimmer on the surface of a placid lake. Providing an illusion of calm, while beyond the sunless depths the sand and silt are littered with rocks and the debris of life. And there within the roots of a drowned tree, a pike lurks with hate in its unseeing eyes. A man remembers being abused by his mother, and reconnects with his older brother whom he had forgotten. His brother too had been abused, and had run away from home as a child only to find himself in the hands of traffickers. 

Coming at us like this—in waves, massed and unbreachable—knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment—becomes bad knowledge—so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness. [....] In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence. [....] If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance. A television series made in America and aired in Japan to sell US meat there winds up becoming the unlikely vehicle through which lives are changed, and authenticity is found in the fabulist.