International Women’s Day (in Books)

Alice Munro

It’s International Women’s Day, and some ripples can be felt in the literary world as, for instance, the longlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction (the only literary prize judged by women that considers novels written exclusively by women) has been unveiled today. This year’s list presents the usual wide array of nationalities and genres, with a preponderance of historical fiction (although that seems to be something of a trend in prize nominations these days).

I think this day is a great opportunity to give female writers some love, so I wanted to share my thoughts on three women writers I adore. The first is Alice Munro, a Canadian short story writer whom I constantly mention on Twitter and who’s been a very important inspiration for me. Munro is a very wise and very humble writer, who continues to produce excellent stories with a remarkable consistency. If you don’t know much about her, I would recommend that you buy her Best Stories volume, but also that you check out this article her friend and fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood wrote about her in The Guardian.

Diana Athill

I’ve also written before about my second subject, the British editor and writer Diana Athill, whose memoirs remain among the most funny and moving books I have ever read. In her volumes of memoir Athill offers a true master class in writing, and also an honest portrayal of her life as a woman. I haven’t read her latest book, Instead of a Book (the title is a nod to her first book of memoirs, Instead of a Letter), which is a selection of letters she sent to the American poet Edward Fields over the span of 30 years, but I mean to pick it up very soon.

As for my third pick, I consider her one of the great underread writers of the 20th century: Elizabeth Bowen. Bowen wrote a large number of exquisite novels from the 1920s to the 1960s, and many of them are masterpieces of authorial voice and human psychology. I’d never heard of her before university but she now ranks among my favorite writers. In fact, I like to think that if I were to complete a PhD thesis (which I won’t), I would write it on Bowen because I believe her prose can undergo rigorous examination and study and still remain beautiful.

Elizabeth Bowen

These three women have written about many things and many kinds of people, but where they excel is in their portrayal of women in all stages of life. They write about bright-eyed, perspicacious girls who peer into the world of adults and feel it’s sharp sting—like Athill, humiliated in front of the stable-boy whom she is in love with as a girl in Yesterday Morning. They write about disillusioned young women who take their fates into their own hands, like the female protagonists in Bowen’s To the North. They write about middle-aged women who recognize their faults and rebel against those who would constrain them—Munro’s women are nieces (“Connections”), daughters (“The Moons of Jupiter”), wives (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”), lovers (“Corrie”), and  mothers (“Deep Holes”) in this situation, for better or for worse. The write about quirky, charming, resolved old women, which they have themselves become (or, in Bowen’s case, became before she died in 1973). Here are three truly first-rate writers. 

So, which are female writer are you going to pick up and celebrate today? 

Comfort Lit

When you're not feeling too well, slipping into a hot bath with a good book can do miracles. The hard part is choosing what book to read.

It’s good to remember that sometimes, when things aren’t going so well or your feeling a bit under the weather, books are there to offer comfort. Not any book, mind you. Novels are usually good, although it’s important to make sure the that subject matter isn’t closely related to what’s bothering you, and you wouldn’t want to pull something too hefty or difficult off the shelf. Ulysses is a great read in some contexts, but when you need to bundle up with a blanket, a cuppa, and a good book, I don’t think it offers the right kind of escapism. Mind you, I usually go for particularly light — or at least highly readable, which isn’t quite the same thing — books when I need comfort lit because I usually seek these books out as a break from school work, in which my principal task is reading fiction (yes, these are the woes of an English major). 

The excellent Sarah Crown, from The Guardian, recently posted an article on her blog on sick lit, or the kind of literature she goes to when she’s ill (apparently, she has years of experience). The number one rule, according to her, is never to read something for the first time. I agree. Your mind, confounded by disease or simply troubled with other things, won’t have the capacity to cope with anything new to read, or at least it won’t be able to appreciate it. A visit from an old friend can do a lot of good when you’re not feeling well, but having to make the effort of conversing with someone new most certainly won’t. Revisits are therefore ideal, and Sarah Crown adds that revisiting anything is not necessarily the best idea either (once again, Ulysses comes to mind). As she puts it: “A crucial balance of familiarity, likeability and narrative propulsion must be struck.”

For readability and escapism, one of the most satisfying types of books I fall back on is of course YA or fantasy novels (I know G. would agree — how many times have I seen her reach for The Lord of the Rings after a stressful day of studying during exam periods). The Harry Potter books have changed my mind off dreary thoughts many times and invariably color sick days in bed with more fun and excitement than the TV ever could, and I’ve always told myself that my next bad cold would be the perfect opportunity to plunge once again into Philip Pullman’s engrossing His Dark Materials. 

Non-fiction of the most confessional and charming kind also features prominently on my list of Comfort Lit. As already mentioned on this blog, Diana Athill’s memoir Yesterday Morning and a hot bath once saved me from a dreadful November flu. In the same vein, I revisit Anne Fadiman’s brilliant, funny, moving “confessional essays” — collected in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader and At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist — whenever I need to quiet down and cheer up. Speaking of Anne Fadiman, a bibliophile if there ever was one (her husband once offered her 19 pounds of used books for her birthday, to her delight) my preferred Comfort Lit is books about books — those rare, wonderful volumes that treat of literature and reading. I am always enchanted by their eccentricity, their passion, and their inevitably charming prose. The best writer on the subject is certainly Alberto Manguel, whose History of Reading and The Library at Night — readable, magical — are bibles for bibliophiles. 

So that’s what I pull out when I need some Comfort Lit. What about you?

PROFILE: Diana Athill

The vivacious and charming Diana Athill.

This post is also featured as a guest-blogger article in this week’s #FridayReads blog.

I was very ill the first time I read one of Diana Athill’s books. I left school early on a Friday with a bad cold, my head pounding and my nose dripping uncontrollably. As soon as I got home I drew myself a hot bath and slipped into the steaming water with the elegant but unassuming hardcover edition of Yesterday Morning. Diana Athill, as it turned out, was just what I needed that day. Yesterday Morning is as unassuming and elegant as its cover, but it’s also touching, human, funny, and written with beautiful simplicity — as are all of her books. Reading Athill on a bad day is like having an adorable grandmother there to take care of you.

I’ve now ambled my way through the four books at the core of Athill’s memoirs: Stet, about her career as a literary editor to such big names as Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul; Yesterday Morning, in which she revisits her happy childhood in the country manor her grandparents owned and the complicated relationship between her mother and father; Somewhere Towards the End, her Costa Prize and NBCC award-winning account of growing old with wisdom, wit, and lots of optimism; and Instead of a Letter, which is mostly about her doomed love affair with a man to which she was engaged, who stopped writing for years during his military service, eventually communicated with her by telegram to break up the engagement so he could get married to someone else, and finally died in the war.

Instead of a Letter is the first volume of memoirs Athill wrote, when she was 43, and the latest one I’ve read, in order to unwind at the beginning of the spring holidays. I was surprised to find as much of her bright intelligence and wonderful understanding of the human nature as in all of her other books. There’s a fair bit of overlap in subject matter between all of these, so I wouldn’t recommend reading all of her books in one go, but it’s charming to plunge into one of them every so often. The repetition is part of the charm, part of way Athill tells her story, just like you’d expect a slightly extravagant British lady to recount bits of her life to you.

Yet writing is not Athill’s principal vocation. It’s something that happened to her along the way and something she’s always done on the side. Because of that, I think, she writes with an honesty that is rare and appealing, especially in an era of celebrity memoirs and loud voices that have nothing to say. Athill doesn’t shy away from writing about deeply personal things like sex and humiliation, and lays out her emotions with touching truthfulness and a deep understanding of herself — but she never falls into self-pity. Her prose is simple and straightforward, but all the more enthralling because she doesn’t seek to embellish or excuse. Athill’s goal is to write about life “just as it was”, and it makes her life — and prose — all the more fascinating.

Essential reading, Life Class collects several of Athill's memoirs in a single book.

The Travelling Library

The ultimate travelling library: "Archive II", designed by David Garcia, which allows you to walk away with half a ton of books!

The most important part of preparing any trip — be it a weekend at the cottage or a longer stay abroad — is most certainly packing your bags. However, I’ve found that one specific aspect of packing often takes up a lot more of my thoughts and time than it should: deciding what books I’m going to bring along with me. I always take along at least two books, no matter how long the trip, to make sure I have a backup if I finish or get tired of the first one. If travelling involves flying, I find that complicates the decision-making; I always want to bring something really long I’ve been meaning to get to for a while because I tell myself that a flight will give me several solid hours with no interruptions and nothing better to do, although of course I should bring something lighter and really engaging because airplanes are so uncomfortable. I always end up bringing loads of books with me on planes and read only very little — I tend to switch to the little screen rather quickly.

Of course, reading is enjoyable at home, but there’s a very vivid satisfaction in sitting in a park or a café abroad and doing something so usual, so normal. It’s a good way to escape the eery feeling of displacement that travelling gives me, and slip into that very moment, enter the texture of life in the place where I am a stranger. I have very fond memories of visiting a lot of truly fascinating places in Ireland when I went backpacking there for a month in 2008, but I also remember — with equal fondness — reading DeNiro’s Game on a bench in the gardens of Saint-Patrick’s Cathedral, or José Saramago’s The Cave in a hostel common room on a rainy day.

Reading Dostoyevsky with a nice, cold beer in Sofia, Bulgaria.

I’ve found it’s really important not to bring something too engrossing to read on a trip, however, or else all I want to do is read and skip all the sightseeing and experiences the place has to offer. On another backpacking trip two years ago, in Turkey and the Balkans, I brought One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Brothers Karamazov, Voyage jusqu’au bout de la nuit, and other stuff I’d wanted to read for a long time. These proved perfect: good to escape elsewhere in long, hot bus rides, but not exactly thrillers. My girlfriend and I learned this truth the hard way when she brought The Shadow of the Wind on the same trip; she mostly wanted to stay by the hotel pool for the (very short) time it took her to read it. I ended up bringing way too many books on that particular trip myself, some of which I didn’t even get around to reading (Le Rouge et le noir, if you really want to know, which still stares at me accusingly from my shelf, as yet unread). All those books did serve a purpose when my backpack was searched in the night train on the border between Bulgaria and Serbia. “Books! Books! BOOKS!” cried the customs officer as she shuffled through my backpack, pulling out volume after volume. She sighed rather desperately and gave up her search. If ever you need to pass anything illegal through Eastern-European borders, now you know how.

My "to read" pile.

I know what you’re thinking: an e-reader would solve that problem, and I could carry an entire library with me in the volume of a single, paperback novella. But the thing is, the love I have for ink and paper books still outweighs the advantages of those clever little machines. I like how I can annotate my books, I like turning the bottom corner of pages I want to read to G., and I like being able to measure how much I have left to read by the space between my thumb and index. I also have a tendency to buy books abroad, where they become mementos of the places I visit. Downloading them abroad just wouldn’t be the same. For example, I cherish my Everyman edition of Ulysses all the more because I bought it in Dublin, from the James Joyce Center. Similarly, I needed to get something — anything — from Shakespeare & Company, in Paris, the first time I went there a few months ago (I finally settled on a book about bookstores, The Yellow-Lighted Bookstore, by Lewis Buzbee, which I felt was appropriate). I didn’t see many decent books in English in the Balkans, although I did find a nice edition of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in English, with an introduction in Bulgarian, in a street market in Sofia. My foreign book buying activities have gotten a little problematic in the last year, since I’ve been studying abroad in England and, although I brought a decent number of books along with me, I’ve also been buying lots of books here, because I like to surround myself with books — it gives me comfort and makes wherever I live feel like home. The problem is, come June, I need to bring all these books with me back to Montreal.

The nature of residence rooms means bookshelves also holds crockery and wine glasses. It adds to the charm, I suppose.

The core of my library-away-from-home is made up of the books I brought with me (The Measure of Paris, by Stephen Scobie, Possession by A. S. Byatt, and others), then there are books I needed to buy for school (Henry James and Shakespeare figure prominently here), and finally all the books I bought here: The Granta Book of Irish Short Stories, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Al Alvarez’s Risky Business, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita bought at Mr B’s Book Emporium, in Bath), Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter (bought in the London Review bookstore), and (too) many others. Some of these I’ve read, some I haven’t. In my defense, I’ve promised to stop buying books while I’m here — if only because of the logistical problem of bringing them back home with me — at least until I’ve read all of those I have.

Meanwhile, I have another problem; it’s Easter vacation and I’m leaving for a short trip to Italy this week… which books, I wonder, will get the chance to visit Florence with me?

Of Titles

Michel de Montaigne. His titles were bit repetitive, but at least they were straightforward.

Like a book, a blog needs a title — and preferably a good one.

A good title, of course, is a complicated thing. It has to reveal something about the content without saying too much, it has to be easily remembered without being obvious, and it has to sound smart without being obscure or pedantic. Titles for smaller works — a single blog post, an essay, a short story — are probably easier to find because they are headers for a more narrow field of inquiry. Influential essay writers like Montaigne or Francis Bacon solved the title by problem several centuries ago by taking the subject of their text and slapping the word “Of” before it: “Of Sleeping”, “Of Moderation”, “Of Fear”, “Of Travel”, “Of Drunkenness”, and so on.

Titles for longer pieces of writing or collections are trickier, because they have to encompass a sometimes very broad array of subject matters. Short story collections, like CDs, often reuse the title of one of the stories (or songs) comprised within it as the title of the whole. Alice Munro, for instance, has done this for virtually all of her short story collection; and since she has a knack for good titles, the result is usually excellent,

When a title's that good, you don't even need an image on the cover.

like Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage or The Moons of Jupiter. Or else, like Annie Proulx, they use a title that fits in some way with the general trend of all the stories, and add an ugly, literal subtitle underneath just to make sure you know exactly what the book is about: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3.

Some books have really good titles. They make you want to read them, they make you feel connected to the book before you’ve even picked it up. Some of my favorites are Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant, Risky Business by Al Alvarez, Somewhere Towards the End (Like Alice Munro, Diana Athill always has beautiful titles for her books: Instead of a Letter, Stet, Yesterday Morning, Don’t Look at Me Like That)… Other books have not so good titles: Ian McEwan’s latest book Solar, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, 2666 (You can’t say this one without sounding like a you have a speech impediment), … I’m not entirely sure why I don’t like them, I just find they sound bland, or obvious. It has nothing to do with the books themselves; and to be fair, there are some much worse book titles out there. All genres considered, I think the worst is probably The Duchess, her Maid, The Groom, & Their Lover, an erotic novel by Victoria Janssen — although Carlton Mellick III’s The Haunted Vagina is definitely up there. Tangentially, I’d like to add that I tend not to like books that are entitled after their main characters. I really find it’s the least creative way to name your novel. For instance, Dickens’ working title for Little Dorrit was Nobody’s Fault — imagine how much better that would’ve been! Using a protagonist’s name as the title of a book also frustrates me because, unless your character becomes embedded in pop culture (like David Copperfield or Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn), then it’s sometimes very difficult to tell which name on the book cover is the author’s and which is the title — take the Pulitzer-winning Oliver Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout.

Probably the worst book title in history.

Hemingway, as the compulsive perfectionist that he was, unsurprisingly spent a long time deciding on the titles for his books. When he had finished writing something, he would sit down and come up with a list of possible titles, and the select the best one. His technique seemed to work well, since he came up with some of the most memorable titles of the 20th century, like The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I inspired myself somewhat from Hemingway’s method in finding the title for this blog. I had a brainstorming session with my girlfriend in which we came up with some very bad ideas (Logophagist, Alphabetist, The Reading Lamp) and some rather good ones (Bibliology; or The Science of Book-Loving, I’d Rather Be Reading, BookLust). The title we finally chose, Book’s End, emerged as a world play on a “book end”, the staple of every bibliophile’s wall shelves (lest his books fall off and get damaged… and maybe also hurt someone).

I wanted this blog to be first and foremost a place, a kind of haven where readers and book lovers could go to, get informed, and participate in a conversation about literature and books in general. Book’s End is that place, like a dead end (except very much alive) for bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs and “bibliologists”, and casual readers too. Book’s End is also a specific reminder that books do, indeed, end. Luckily, you can always pick up a new one (or an old one) afterward and keep on reading. In a broader sense, the title is also a warning, in the age of Internet, Amazon, GoogleBooks, and E-Readers, that the “Book” as we know and define it — a concept and an object which so many of us still cherish very strongly — is changing very quickly indeed.

And so, let the book-blogging begin!