What I’m reading

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"Chernobyl prayer", "Isolarion", James Attlee, Kindle samples, Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich “Chernobyl prayer: a chronicle of the future”

(I don’t know why the discrepancy of titles. My kindle version bills itself as “Chernobyl prayer” and it’s the title I prefer.)

Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for a body of work focusing on soviet identity, the first non-fiction writer to win since Churchill in 1953. For her 1997 book on Chernobyl she interviewed 500 eyewitnesses, as many as twenty interviews with any one person. She allows individuals to speak without commentary, providing “a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details.” She distils what people (physicists, party men, doctors, children, wives, clean-up men, firefighters) say and shapes it into testimonies of rage, wisdom, philosophy, poetry and trauma. She sees what she does as a “novel of voices”, allowing her to be simultaneously reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher as she probes “the mystery of the human soul.” 

So many of the voices say how beautiful their landscape was, and what a rich harvest that year, 1986, gave. So many of the voices mourn loss – of children, husbands, homes, communities, a way of life. So many voices record their own casualness and the casualness of the authorities in the face of lethal radiation. So many voices record ongoing fear and the end of so many childhoods. So many voices remember the terrors of war and evacuation, and the sameness yet difference of these evacuations. So many voices apportion blame, or own complicity in awful things. So many voices express the heroics expected of Soviet Citizens. So many voices express the agony of savage deaths.

Her other books document in a similar way Russian women in WW2; soldiers returning from Afghanistan; and Russians responding to the collapse of the USSR. Putin is not impressed, and she spent years exiled from Belarus. Her inspiration was another Belarusan, Ales Adamovich, who developed a genre he called many things: a collective novel; a novel-oratorio; a novel-evidence; an epic chorus; or, simply, people talking about themselves. All these names give a flavour of what Svetlana Alexievich achieves.

This has been a long read and a hard one. 

A short movie, “The door“, encapsulates the experience of Chernobyl people: a father goes back to his contaminated house to get the door so he can lay out his young daughter on it, as is the custom of his people.

After books about Chernobyl and Ravensbrück as my bedtime reading, I turn to something far less gruelling, “Isolarion: a different Oxford journey” by James Attlee (2007). This book is the exploration of a street, framed as a pilgrimage on one’s own doorstep, a cross between William Sebald and Alexandra Horowitz. You meet the shopkeepers; enter many of the shops from sex shop to renovated restaurant; attend a reggae concert; encounter the lepers and the poor houses of the past; attend meetings where the council is attempting to rebrand Cowley Road; learn the history of St Edmund’s well; eavesdrop on a conversation with a young refugee from Albania awaiting deportation; sit down with a rabbi; join the drinkers in the churchyard; take part in a carnival; meet a badger in a bit of managed forest at dusk; talk with a woman reminiscing about the Cowley Road of her long-ago childhood; attend an African church service; watch robots at work in a car factory; and hear about rent stikes and union action in the 1930s. 

Each chapter is essay-like and they are strung together by the road, Attlee’s personality, and Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of melancholy”, which acts as a kind of intermittent commentator. The reader slip-slides around in time, but remains anchored by place. A place which changes while Attlee is making his stop-start pilgrimage, a pilgrimage that makes him feel more connected to the place where he lives.

What now, after this? I fill a hiatus reading samples I’ve plucked out of Amazon-air, rather than embarking on another whole book straight away.

I become fanciful.  I imagine the samples lined up like supplicants with gifts outside my throne-room. I, the monarch, survey the queue superciliously, wondering what the day’s audience will offer my book-greed.

They come in, one at a time

Mark McKenna hands me two shipwrecks and a walk up the 1797 coast from 90 mile beach to Sydney, and encounters with helpful Aboriginal people en route. I’m interested: this is my territory. There are three other lost histories in his book. I’ll deign to read “From the edge: Australia’s lost histories.”

Peter Wohlleben tells me that trees network and look after each other’s well being. He’s a forester, a man of science and observation, not prone to mad imaginings, so I’m looking forward to reading “The hidden life of trees: what they feel, how they communicate.”

The lineup must have learnt that I have a penchant for trees. The next bearer of gifts is Richard Fortey, brandishing “The wood for the trees: a long view of nature from a small wood.” He offers the history over a year of a small patch of English woodland, along with its history, archaeology and geology, so he tells me.

And more trees. Don Watson presents “A single tree: voices from the bush”. He owns up straight away that he’s a compiler, not an author and I briefly take against him. I’m sceptical too of sources in alphabetical order, but maybe that disorder will create its own interest.

Maybe word’s got out that I might’ve had enough of trees. Tim Low submits “Where song began” and enchants me with stories of birds in Australia, unflattering descriptions of their song from early settlers, and their uniqueness as nectar-eaters.

Bruce Pascoe has no humility. He strides in brandishing “Dark emu” and evidence that Aboriginal people were farmers, fish harvesters, bread makers and house-dwellers long before jumped up colonials arrived. He insists that I read his book. Fortunately for him, I want to.

At the end of the queue, there’s that pushy Mark McKenna again, this time with a biography of Australia’s grand old man of history, Manning Clark. He hooks me with his account of trawling the archives (arranged and annotated by Clark himself) and turns me off with the contradictory and irritating personas Clark presents. I’m ambivalent about whether I want to read “An eye for eternity: The life of Manning Clark” and tell McKenna to come back later.

Postscript: There will be no more Cliff Hardy, private investigator, stories, he who was my mainstay in the last days of Warsaw. His creator, Peter Corris, is legally blind and can no longer write, even, or maybe particularly, enlarging the font. He finds it impossible to dictate his fiction. Vale Cliff Hardy.

“The zookeeper’s wife”

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"The zookeeper's wife", Jews, Warsaw in WW2

This is my transition book, the book I begin appropriately in Warsaw, which is where the events take place, and finish through the haze and weird sleeping patterns of jetlag, as I try to remember that I’m back at Potato Point. It tells in fascinating detail a story I heard glimmerings of a few years ago as I researched my second home. The book was recommended in an email from J’s cousin, an engineer who lives in Brisbane. Such are the winding connections of the modern world.

“The zookeeper’s wife” by Diane Ackerman is the story of the Warsaw Zoo during WW2, where Antonia Żabińska and her husband Jan gave refuge to 300 Jews who escaped from the Ghetto, hiding them in the villa and in the animal cages. It’s based on Antonina’s journal and many other intriguing sources. It captures life under the Nazis in a detail I haven’t encountered before, what another historian I’m reading calls “whispers from the past” that break through the generic retelling of events.

There are so many threads to the story: life under bombardment and constant threat of discovery and execution; the child who has to be silent about what’s going on at home as he attends a secret school; the comings and goings of the Guests as they move into the zoo and then out again to other “safe” places; the agony of waiting for Jan to come home from his work with the underground; the loss of zoo animals to bombing, hunting, and appropriation by German zookeepers; fascinating details about the animals and their domestication to life in the house; and an account of attempts to back-breed to recover extinct animals and to set up hunting lodges in the primeval forest at Białowieża.

It’s Antonina who maintains life in the villa. Her courage in confrontations with Germans is astonishing; her fear for her son is palpable; and her knowledge of animals encyclopaedic and empathetic.

The day I left Warsaw the film of the book premiered there. I was eager to see it until I realised it was shot, not in Praga where the zoo is, but in Prague and the Czech Republic. The trailer looks a bit too animal-cute and romantic for my sense of the book. An article on culture.pl confirms this feeling.
The New York Times review is worth reading.

The living mountain

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"The living mountain", Nan Shepherd, the Cairngorms

The trail that led me to Nan Shepherd's The living mountain began about a year ago when my friend Annette gave me a copy of Robert Macfarlane's The old ways: a journey on foot. Annette has an uncanny knack for wonderful gifts, ones that keep giving. The old ways led me to two books by Roger Deakin, Wildwood: a journey through trees and Waterlog: a swimmer's journey through Britain (and incidentally to Daphne Dumaurier's Jamaica Inn and Geoffrey Household's Rogue male). The mode established, I picked up Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust. Nan Shepherd's name kept cropping up and everything I read about her intrigued me. Finally I came to rest in her Cairngorms, and found a kindred spirit, a woman who walked into the mountain, rather than just on it, knowing her mountain as I aspire to know my beach and headlands and bush.

Shepherd writes beautifully, lovingly, philosophically and thoughtfully about aspects of her experiences of the Cairngorms. The chapter titles give some idea of the intensity and specificity of her relationship with the mountain: The recesses; Water; Frost and snow; Air and light; Life (with a chapter each for plants; birds, animals and insects; and man); Sleep; The senses; and Being. The name of the last chapter encapsulates her connection perfectly.

What do I like about this jewel of a book? Her quiet passion and respect for the landscape; her infinite and minuscule perceptiveness; her intimate knowledge; the mix of daring and caution in her dealings with the mountain; her wisdom and sensibility; and her lack of judgement of summit-conquerors and the foolish.

But none of this would win out over poor writing. Her style is exquisite, precise, minutely observant, quietly poetic and unpretentious. Here is a taste.

The snow is rather dirty, perished in places like a torn dress

It astonished me that my memory was so much in the eye and so little in the feet.

I let my eyes travel over the surface, slowly, from shore to shore … The changing focus of the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one sense of outer reality… Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become!

Life here is hard and astringent, but it seldom kills grace in the soul.

The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers, the delicate tickle of a crawling caterpillar, the scatchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of the hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind.

 

For a review by Macfarlane and photos see here

 

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Slow reading

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"Wanderlust", Rebecca Solnit

Once upon a time, long ago, I decided to become a slow reader, instead of the gulper I'd always been, at least for some books. The hard ones, like Damasio and Ulysses and Proust and Stephen Jay Gould's account of the mysteries of the Burgess shale. I had the leisure. After all, I'd just retired and my time was mine to do as I wanted. No more leaping out of bed and heading off, sometimes 200 kilometres to a strange school where I was The Consultant. Slowly the slow read faded, and other enthusiasms took its place.

 

 

However, since my novel reading frenzy has slipped away as I criss-cross the world, I've returned to the habit with some pleasure and almost by accident. I picked up Wanderlust: a history of walking by Rebecca Solnit just before I flew to Warsaw, and the irony of reading a book about walking on a long-haul flight amused me. It was perfectly suited to the desultory kind of reading you do at airports and in flight: plenty of anecdotes, lovely turns of phrase and ideas that provoked thought. I could dip into it, read a few paragraphs, and stare into space thinking about what I read. It didn't offer a continuous argument that needed to be followed minutely.

My copy is dotted with small yellow diamonds in the margins, a way of noting without making notes. To write this, I am leafing though these yellow indicators to prompt a recalcitrant memory.

So what were the precise pleasures of this read? Social history. Literature. Diversity of walkers. An articulation of the pleasures of walking. A thesaurus of walking words.

Solnit reflected and inspired what I was doing or could do in my city, Warsaw: “reviews of my own and the city's history” perfectly fitted my rambles between tram stops and the overlaying of new experiences on my old experiences of Warsaw, of walking the Nerrigundah road and of surveying the Eurobodalla beaches. The eye as you walk settles on “small things, small epiphanies”: and you “celebrate the incidental and the inconsequential”. As Warsaw becomes increasingly familiar, my eye is free to do just that: to notice graffiti, and advertisements, and droppings from dog and tree on the footpath, and roadside flowers, and reflections in puddles and men at work. No longer do I have to focus on the practicalities. When she said “cities are forever spawning lists”, I was liberated into my native habitat of list-making as I walked or rode the trams.

One thing that appealed to me at first, and later drove me nuts, was a ribbon of quotations running along the bottom of the page, sometimes over a number of pages so you were flicking forward to finish the quote, and backwards to continue the book.

I enjoyed the chapters about literature: Elizabeth Bennett doubly breaking social protocol by walking, alone, to the neighbour's to visit her sister; William and Dorothy Wordsworth walking solid miles without a second thought; the flaneurs (I've always had a liking for that word) in the streets of Paris; the long string of philosophers and writers who were also walkers (Mill, Bentham, Kant, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Hobbes – who carried an inkwell in a walking stick ready to jot down ideas – Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Thoreau, Whitman, Lesley Stephen, de Quincey, Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson).

There were a few inspirational women striding the pages: notably Peace Pilgrim who walked the world for twenty-eight years, having vowed “to remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace”; and the Argentinian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who walked around the obelisk in the centre of the plaza every Friday in silent protest against the disappearings.

The most horrifying chapter was the one called “Walking after midnight: women, sex and public space.” Nighttime walking has often been regarded with suspicion: if you walk at night you're up to no good, and if you were a nineteenth century woman you were made to pay by submitting to a medical examination to prove you were “a good girl”.

 

WARNING

J insists that I add a warning so you don't rush off on my say-so and invest in a read that doesn't pay the dividends I promise. He wasn't charmed by Solnit (Germaine Greer in “White beech” is his current gold standard for charm) but there were chapters so full of interesting facts and theories that he kept reading.

 

As a lovely addendum to thinking about walking, please read Elissaveta's post, 'There are places only our feet can conquer.'

 

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White beech: the rainforest years

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botany, Numinbah Valley, rainforest

A chance encounter with Professor Germaine Greer via a paging announcement at Sydney Airport has led me to totally unexpected reading pleasure. As I was searching for the exact titles of books of hers I’d read, I came across “White beech”, which I’d never even heard of. It’s a fat hardback, 340 pages, about her rainforest property in the Gold Coast hinterland: its history, its ecology, and her attempts to rehabilitate it.

I was drawn into it by a number of familiarities. Her part of south-east Queensland is close to where my son and his family live; a few years ago I spent every weekend dropping over the edge into steep gulleys in search of rainforest patches; I have an ongoing interest in Aboriginal culture and language; and my post-retirement project led me into intermittent research into my south-coast local history. These are all threads in her account of her rainforest years. I’m fascinated by the discoveries made by a practised and dedicated researcher in a new field, and by the survival of her biting certainties into a new sphere. I’m also amused that the cowering student (me) and the towering and intimidating tutor (her) have arrived in a common place after fifty years.

Greer begins hunting for land in desert country near Alice Springs, and on the coast near Eden, motivated by a desire “to clean something up, sort something out, make it right”: she was finally charmed into buying 60 hectares of rainforest buried under lantana by an encounter with a superb bower bird “a sort of crow in fancy dress … clad in a tabard of yellow and a cap of the same with a frosting of red on the crown … He began dancing. Up and down bobbed his gaudy head, in and out went his hips, and all the time he kept a golden eye fixed on my face.” She decided to buy that night.

She spent eleven years rehabilitating her sixty hectares into a patch of Gondwanan rainforest, rich in animals, birds, mosses, grasses and of course trees. She documents her encounters with plants and creatures, many of which are familiar to me: possums, gliders, diamond pythons, red-bellied black snakes, antechinus, echidnas, dingoes, black beans, lawyer vine, stingers, treefrogs, flying foxes, powerful owls, quandongs and quolls, just for a start.

I learnt many things that shocked me. I discover that Poznan Zoo in Poland is breeding feather tail gliders, and supplying them to zoos all over Europe. That possums were classed as vermin from the early days of European settlement in Australia, and a million possum skins were sold to the Queensland fur market in 1921. That 2, 4, 5 – T, one of the two compounds in Agent Orange, was used in forestry and agriculture in south east Queensland in the late 1960s.

Greer mounts a full-scale campaign against Ferdinand Mueller (she refuses him his von), nineteenth century government botanist in Victoria, who not only got a lot wrong, but brown-nosed dignitaries by giving their cumbersome names to species, and planted blackberries wherever he went. Her botanist sister Jane does not agree with Greer’s assessment of von Mueller, nor does the entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but some contemporaries certainly did. George Bentham, an English botanist, wrote “it grieves me to think that you should have devoted so much of your valuable time to a work which, botanically speaking, is not only absolutely useless but worse than useless.” The chapter devoted to botanists and the virulent ongoing taxonomy wars was one of my favourites.

I also relished and envied her descriptions of plant and animal life. Basket grass has a “complicated inflorescence (that) appears as pale fur hovering over the neat patterning of the woven stolons and their short leaves.” Topknot pigeons “wear a toupee of swept-back ginger plumes and fly in battalions.” Iridescent blue flies have “sizzling gold eyes.” Antechinuses “can flatten themselves until they are no thicker than a credit card with a minute paw at each corner … and limbo dance under a door.”

The day I finished reading “White beech” I ordered a copy to own and spread around: that’s a rare accolade from this stingy book-buyer.

If you want to know more about the ongoing Cave Creek project, you can visit http://gondwanarainforest.org/

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