Lines in Books

We grow to understand that our wounds give life its richness, even when they hurt and bleed and show no sign of healing. We carry them with us, even when we do not think that we can bear them at all. A novel about the writing of the St Matthew Passion in the voice of one of Bach's students... 

"She had thought, for a while, that she’d lost the magic of it: the ability to immerse herself in another time, another place. It had felt like forgetting to breathe. But she needn’t have worried. Now, worlds, characters, even sentences linger – burning like beacons in her brain. Reminding her that she’s not alone." Three women from the same family living in different centuries all have their lives upended by vicious men intent on controlling them, and all of them manage to find ways to subvert their tormentors (in at least two cases, with the help of good men, it has to be said) & remain true to themselves.

To what extent do we live in the moment? To what extent does the moment live in us? Supported by forays into quantum physics, a young woman explores time's elasticity as she's experienced it in her journey through life and within music.

Three sisters with vastly different personalities (although each one has a great deal of courage) find their own paths in life disrupted by the violence of independence and partition only to discover that those paths lead them back to each other factious though the three may be.

A group of filmmakers heading to Arcadia, which is both fact and metaphor, make their way through the Swiss mountains which work their magic on each one of them. Part philosophical discussion, part glamorous stopover, and part everyday narration, this is a book worth savouring. The novel makes me think that perhaps each one of us has the opportunity to define the wilderness idyll of Arcadia for ourselves, and to find it within ourselves. And that, I think, with all the bleakness in the world, is a blessing.

Two women of different generations, both traumatised by their own stories, forge an unlikely friendship working side by side on a farm and ultimately leading each other towards fuller lives. The title 'Tasting Sunlight' didn't make much sense till I read the book. Even in translation, the descriptions of nature are gorgeous. And leave one feeling as though one has been engulfed by the natural world. No rural idyll this where all is pretty but splendid nonetheless. Somehow, Tasting Sunlight is staying with me. The two women: the younger one anorexic and committing self harm. The older having stabbed her abusive husband in the chest for which she was sentenced to 8 years in gaol; she also lost touch with her son. There were often moments in the book when I wondered if the younger woman was an apparition the older one had created in her mind for companionship, for healing. But, no, I don't think she was. The novel ends on a cliffhanger (with the older woman moving towards ...

Supposedly a feminist re-telling of an old saga, it reads more like a complete re-imagining instead. And what a bloody depressing read it is! An abused wife voyages to afar to escape her husband who drags her back. She finds love inbetween but those who helped most all die. The woman's character does not seem to align with what mediæval sources have to say of her at all. But for all that, the novel is well worth reading simply because it is an accurate portrayal of what we know of spousal abuse and the support those subjected to it (do not) get.A woman with whom she hides tells her husband of her escape plans. Her brother gives her his support to escape, and then appears to promptly give her abusive husband a ship to follow her... And, so, The Voyage of Freydis was doomed almost before it began.

The moon, beautiful in its bruises. In which a mandolin helps a man emerge from a coma... A tangled tale, with some unlikely coincidences, in which a girl whose family is forced to live almost off the grid after they lose much in the Great Depression comes into her own, at one with the mountain she lives on.

…the reality she had bought into might just slaughter her …I wanted to be in exile from exile Deborah Levy speaks of her childhood as an adult, her recollections ending with preparing to write Swimming Home , a novel which is perhaps easier to make sense of with these memoirs. Many of Levy's childhood experiences appear to experiences that led her to knowledge she would have preferred to remain ignorant of. Hence, the title of her memoirs, I think: Things I Don't Want to Know . Although, of course, as she finds, she cannot unknow what she does know. The past is always in the present. It is never far behind, and it always catches up with one.

An imagining of life in a covent in Renaissance Italy. Through the tale of a young woman who has been shut up in a covent against her will, the novel deals with autonomy, pragmatism, and free will. There are repeated references to the Council of Trent and the counter-reformation, along with discussions sotto voce about sidestepping it. After all, rules and laws are nothing but words on paper by themselves, certainly important in the making but ineffective without implementation. Which, as the nuns in the convent realise all too quickly, involves interpreting the text of the written word and navigating the realpolitik of the implied word... The young woman, incidentally, unlike so many women through history who were virtually imprisoned in convents, did manage to make her way out with the guile of an older, sympathetic nun and the acquiescence of the abess who was both ruthless and compassionate.

"If she knew that to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile, she did not know how to use this knowledge in her own life." Somehow familiar. "Women who walk into water do it with stones in their pockets." Through my reading of this short-strange novel, that line which I assume I once read somewhere played itself in my mind over and over again. Except it wasn't a woman grappling with unhappiness who died in the novel but a man who ostensibly wasn't. Each character is well fleshed out, so well fleshed out that they seemed slightly sinister to me reflecting, I thought, how pointless life can be. A book that deserves a slow re-read.