27 Sunday Apr 2014
Posted in quotes
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If biography is ‘a definite region: bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium, according to one English historian, then literary biography is particularly constrained by the need to balance the life and the oeuvre.
– Louis Adler, review of Roth Unbound, The Age, 19 April 2014.
25 Saturday Jan 2014
Posted in biographical method, Katharine Susannah Prichard, quotes
I think biography should attempt to give a sense of how the subject has lived their everyday life. Not in exhaustive detail, but well chosen sketches. Most of the attention of the biography, of course, needs to be taken up by the more dramatic moments, but a sense of the everyday gives some context for the dramatic.
As in a novel, a key way to convey such a picture is in long sentences summing up a long period of time by observing the patterns. In his biography of his mother, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Ric Throssell does it well at this point:
…and somehow contrived to write among the distractions of the city and the realities of the present: the war, the pot-boiling chores still necessary to earn her living; the political commitments she had accepted; friends who called unendingly to talk of art and literature, of world affairs and industry, and the personal problems of love, marriage, children and the state of their health — friends among the men of power in industry and radical politics; those whose names were to fade into obscurity; young writers who later achieved recognition; the known and once-famous, who drifted with the years and disappeared; the unimportant, insignificant, unaccomplished men and women who earned Katharine’s affection by simply being what they were.
Ric Throssell, (2012-05-23). Wild Weeds and Windflowers: The life and letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard (p. 120). Allen and Unwin. Kindle Edition.
07 Saturday Dec 2013
It is a rare gift to make the intrinsically dull interesting, to tell you things you thought you didn’t want to know in a compelling manner – imagine a biography of Charles Lamb, say, that dealt exclusively with his nine-to-five at the East India Office and you have the literary equivalent – and Knight has that gift in spades.
– David Crane, reviewing Roger Knight, Britain Against Napoleon in The Australian, sec: Review, 7/12/13, p.18.
The best book reviews give important insights into what makes writing work, and this is one of those moments. The book’s subject matter is the ‘government contracts and procurement’ and the ‘mechanics of trade and finance’ powering Britain’s war against Napoleon. I almost want to read it, just to see how these things are made interesting.
Can you think of other examples of what the reviewer is talking about, the dull made interesting?
16 Sunday Oct 2011
Posted in quotes
‘Goodness!’ said Louisa – which alternated with ‘Horror!’ in her small repertoire of interjections, and was more or less interchangeable with it.
– Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Picador, 2011) p. 129.
Do you ever start noticing people’s interjections? If you really start to listen to them, you might start getting annoyed at people. As a child I used to feel angry at the untruthfulness of them. They can rarely be taken literally, and as a child I felt words should be used precisely; I guess I still do. Hollinghurst captures this quirk of social interactions so well in this quote.
I get annoyed at myself when I find myself using interjections I don’t particularly like. My small repertoire is more chameleon like; I hear myself adapting to the people I’m with. It’s passed down the paternal line, this sympathetic adaption; once I was hiking with my dad and a surfer offered us a lift; Dad said, ‘That’d be cool mate.’
26 Friday Aug 2011
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Hence, to sum up: The most rational modes of keeping physical decay or deterioration at bay, and thus retarding the approach of old age, are avoiding all foods rich in the earth salts, using much fruit, especially juicy, uncooked apples, and by taking daily two or three tumblerfuls of distilled water with about ten or fifteen drops of diluted phosphoric acid in each glassful.
– William Kinner, North American Review 1893
15 Sunday May 2011
The joke on me is the joke on everyone: youth makes life mythic; then leaves. If you’re lucky, first love comes along and makes it mythic again. Then leaves. For a few God, the fit having inexplicably taken Him, steps in and makes life mythic again. Then most likely leaves. For the rest only death – the mother’s funeral, the aftershaved doctor and the test results – retains the heft to make life mythic again, and that’s an awfully high price to pay.
– The Bloodstone Papers, p. 105
He’s a writer obsessed with death and God, so I’m glad my friend introduced me to him.
15 Wednesday Sep 2010
I don’t re-read many novels, but I felt compelled to re-read Gilead after reading its companion novel, Home. I gave it 8/10 in January last year, but this time, I have recorded it as a 10/10. (Marilynne may wish to put this on the back cover of future reprints, but given she has every second reviewer around the world saying it is a masterpiece, she may not need my commendation.) And indeed, I don’t feel able to add to the wonderful reviewing and criticism already written about Gilead. It is a beautiful novel about living, dying, race and America. And faith. Here are some quotes I took from it.
“When this old sanctuary is full of silence and prayer, every book Karl Barth will ever write would not be a feather in the scales against it from the point of view of profundity, and I would not believe in Barth’s own authenticity if I did not also believe he would know and recognize the truth of that, and honor it, too.” (p.197)
You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. (p.236)
But the fact is that his mind came from one set of books as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But that can’t be true. While I was at seminary I read every book he had ever mentioned and every book I thought he might have read, if I could put my hand on it and it wasn’t in German… Who knows where any mind comes from. It’s all mystery. (p.142)
– I found this particularly interesting. He’s reflecting on how his brother became an atheist while he carried on his father and grandfather’s business of being a preacher. Where does faith come from? Where does a worldview come from? To what extent is it a product of the books you read?
I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time…. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. (p.104)
15 Monday Feb 2010
Posted in autobiographical, quotes
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Kiki recalled being invincible and truth-loving and twenty years old; remembered feeling exactly this: that if her family could only speak the truth, together they would emerge, weeping but clear-eyed into the light.
-Zadie Smith, On Beauty, p.60
In this sentence from Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel, Kiki, the mother of the family, is responding to the latest truth-telling assualt of her son, Jerome. I think it is a brilliant and wise insight into families and generations.
Does it ring true for you? At twenty, did you have the answers to your family’s problems? Did it all seem so clear? If only they could be more honest, fearless, authentic like you, then all their problems would disappear?
I think it was true of me. I think when I was twenty I believed more strongly in people’s ability to change and the absolute value of unflinching honesty. If only we could all tell exactly how we feel, instead of holding back.
Nine years later, I recognise the value of social niceties, of politeness, of treading carefully. My twenty-year old self looks through the decade in disgust. I don’t really care. He wasn’t all wrong, just too absolute.
01 Thursday Oct 2009
Posted in books, libraries, quotes, reading, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)
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Alberto Manguel’s The Library At Night examines books, reading and the library through a series of themes. It’s the sort of book where so much of it feels quotable that one is tempted to give up: the book resists being reduced, highlighted. Still, here’s some quotes I have pulled from it:
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiplies seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts. (56)
During the day, I write, browse, rearrange books, put away my new acquisitions, reshuffle sections for the sake of space. Newcomers are made welcome after a period of inspection. If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page. Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned. (17)
And yet, however careful our reading, remembered texts often undergo curious changes; they fragment, shrivel up or grow unpredictably long. In my mental library, The Tempest is reduced to a few immortal lines, while a brief novel such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo occupies my entire Mexican imaginary landscape. A couple of sentences by George Orwell in the essay “Shooting an Elephant” expand in my memory to several pages of description and reflection that I think I can actually see in my mind, printed on the page; of the lengthy medieval romance The Devoured Heart, all I can remember is the title. (197)
23 Thursday Jul 2009
Posted in quotes, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), writing
Good writing, surely, occurs when we somehow make ourselves as open as possible to intense, half-conscious impulses, even though the expression of them will make us uncomfortable because they matter so much. Revision is learning to read our work as if someone else had written it, paying attention to our confusions, lapses of interest, our disbelief or failure to care.
– Mattison, A. (2004). “Coincidence in Stories : An Essay Against Craft.” Writer’s Chronicle 36(6): 10.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 