(My reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/)
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN
The story of the eponymous narrator being groomed by an older man called Archer at a ski resort, much to the eventual discovered disgust of tbr narrator’s older brother who was acting as guardian during this skiing holiday… Tellingly tactile with socks and old sweat and syrupy coffee, down to the peeled tangerine ‘pigs’, if not figs! Prehensilely Proustian. With slippery word meanings.
NARCISSUS BAY
Bay or boy?
A boy visiting his mother in China, and we witness a tranche of his life, such as a cruelty witnessed by him — four men and a woman, two of the men sadists, the other three victims — and cruelty he colluded in, with other children. Girls and their fat nurse who did jelly along, and, later, a boy he was friends with who cruelly taunted (something our boy witnessed) a third younger boy. Taunted him with jellyfish. And with a swordfish that comes up to attack your bottom when sitting in lavatories.
And our boy’s memories of the shrine in the hills nearby where Gods looked down… I wondered who kept whom at bay.
THE TROUT STREAM
“…I felt haunted. My mother’s sudden giddiness in the train had fixed my mind on pain and illness, so that I had been made specially conscious of Mr. Mellon’s useless legs; then I had crept into the drawing-room and seen that terrible starving man gnawed by rats.”
…the latter being an ivory carving. This is the classic I hoped to find in this book, a blend of Le Grand Meaulnes, Marcel Proust, Walter de la Mare and Robert Aickman.
The rite of passage in three distinct stages, with years between, of the narrator as a boy to a grown up. In interface with his mother, and when she died, his father, and the morphing households of Mr Mellon, the latter’s half-Japanese and/or half-Javanese servant Mrs Slade, and her daughter Phyllis roughly the same age as the narrator and grows up into what he sees as a ‘breasted’ woman, and she is made Mr M’s inheritrix. And not forgetting Bob, Mr M’s masseur, chauffeur and valet, with eyelids too small for his eyes. A sense of inferred sexuality between all these characters involved, even his mother with a stranger on a train. And the tiered landscapes of rock and land in the second stage of this story towards the eponymous stream, wherein tragedy is also inferred at the end of the third stage. Oh yes, also not forgetting the many Indian servants in the first stage of this story, and the pervasive white elephant that Mr M mentioned. I sensed hardness softening in walls and people. I wish I could forget some aspects of this stunning reading experience, though. Best not to mention such aspects here, as a means towards that wish.
“It was the counterfeit of a counterfeit.”
Leaves From A Young Person’s Notebook
“And suddenly I couldn’t understand what anything was for. The room seemed a riddle, the moaning of the sea, myself,…”
The powerfully disturbing notebook of what one would call, perhaps, a neurodiverse man now recovering from himself, as it were, in a nursing home on the East coast, not far, doubtless, from where I live at another resort on the same coast. We follow his thoughts as if with a direct current into our own thoughts, watching, alongside him, a rather cheeky girl in the road from the balcony, and surveying the iron lampposts as if they are isolated souls, and then he is threatening his own tantrums in the sun room, later escaping without leave, away from his leaves, for a while, into the road and then a pub, helping finish off graffiti of a woman in the pub loo so that she is more holy in her beauty, not brazen, an artistically pictorial stage-door to what role-play later? … back with Sister Howe at the home, burying himself in her ‘football bosom’, once he returns. An unmitigated glimpse into a soul that might once have been our own soul. Now no vacancy for any of us, even though we know more about him and others.
Self-abasement and ‘un-understanding’. The sound of the sea’s waves as the sound of the words in unending sentences…
THE BARN
“…then turned violently, making a superb chocolate fan on the emerald grass.”
One brother teaching whom I assumed was his his kid brother Denton to make proper skids when riding a bike. The art of skids. But then Denton, our narrator, is sent on an errand his brother refused, to Mrs. Singleton and Denton — who always feared, he tells us, old man dirt — finds her in corsets and suspenders around her ‘blancmange buttocks’, and later he does his make-believe or monkey exercises in an old barn that he considers to be his private place. Later his father allows a tramp to use the barn to sleep in because of the rain. And Denton visits him in the night, watching him sleep, despite the tramp’s own smells of dirt. Not an old man, though, a young 24 year old [“He looked beautiful. Then, as he suddenly awoke, his face broke into a cobweb of connecting lines..”], a tramp,who later calls Denton a ‘silly old bugger’ when Denton ask to go along with him and his wandering lifestyle. A story tranche, a fan of cobweb connections. Life is one long skid?
THE DIAMOND BADGE
“The heavy impasto was a little distasteful to me, and I found myself repeating the old phrase: ‘Excrement on canvas.’”
Or words on paper about this still life that the female narrator tells us about having been found in the house of Andrew, a famous writer whose book she had admired, and she wrote to him via the publisher, and was invited to tea, and was there looked after by Andrew’s manservant Tom and by Andrew himself (shrunken as well as deformed: reminiscent of the dwarf in another painting, one by Velásquez) — and they tend to her when she wakes with a nightmare in the night (her having been asked to stay after the supper as well as the tea!)
This story has the spirit of a Walter de la Mare story in its prose sensibility about nightingales, medieval coffins, a cocoon, a web of a thousand strands, Rubens ladies turned into telephone poles, Dresden china and much else, if not the sensibility of the characters themselves. Eventually, she deliberately leaves her eponymous diamond brooch in the bed before scuttling away before the two men wake up, so that Tom would contact her afterwards when returning it. Instead the brooch becomes the crucial prop in a short story, even though it is now re-badged.
This is a miracle of a story, one that held me throughout, and I would surely have regretted not reading it, should I ever become The Man Too iLL To Be Me! Not forgetting the ‘peculiar darns’ she put in Tom’s socks.
“…it is often impossible to understand the reason for one’s actions. How much more impossible to interpret the reasons of others.”
A FRAGMENT OF A LIFE STORY
“There is no doubt about it, I was overcome with the horror of living. It was too disgusting for any words.”
A tranche of the narrator’s neurodiverse problems, as magnified by the words he happens to write. His annoyance with a friend who takes him to a religious film, and a domino rally of severe frustrations with his doctor, as he intrudes into his house, the narrator’s visions, his over-dosing on his prescribed pills, self pity, self-destructiveness, but it may be, I thought, all show for this narration? Trying to shock us while he sat at home in relative calm? This photo I took as shown below may persuade many readers that this is no fictitious sham; nobody could pretend such a vision as anything other than what one sees, too, when being inspired by this story’s spire.
“You bucking feast, you ruggering bat!” I screamed.
THE COFFIN ON THE HILL
“I had the idea that a monk’s life was nothing but a waste of idleness, and I decided that they would all go mad in the end.”
Someone, presumably English, looking back to when he was eight years old and his parents — along with their Boy, Cook and Coolie — took him for a houseboat cruise on the river Yangtze from Shanghai, and as seen though his eyes, we share evocations of the sights he sees, and his fears of being dragged down by the current in the shape of creatures with monstrous tentacles, and other naive matters such as his doll (neither masculine nor feminine) whom he cherishes and the name of whom he knows but has never written down before, viz. Lymph Est. Which seems ironically pertinent to this particular reader today — when he recently knows he will soon or eventually perish by an invasion specifically of his Lymph. Not Est but Diest, I guess. And indeed this child faces death disarmingly amidst the picnics and other sight seeings. The monks and the granite incense burner with broken lip his parents are given by monks, a graveyard on a hill where in one grave he can see the rotted dead within. A coffin into which all of us, even his mother, will end up. And so defiantly, almost accidentally, almost deliberately, he drops the doll into the running, sucking river. An experiment to disprove the future’s dire rite of passage he dreads? Or just his own version of my own petulant attention-seeking? Some wondrous passages in this work.
ANNA DILLON
“She hoped he would ask no questions and tell her nothing.”
And here the author tells us nothing, expecting most readers to infer merely a plain story of the eponymous young woman, fatally iill, she says, of TB, yet she has a gold and diamond cigarette case that she foolhardily takes out with her, because she might lose it, into the countryside where she makes sketches. She only enjoys smoking when taking the white tubes from such a container. Foolhardily smoking, indeed. Silver fish jumping. Nostalgic bi-planes in the sky, during wartime. And she finds an airman sleeping whom she starts to sketch. Eventually she takes him home for tea, and they begin what what turns out to be potentially future romance, should he return from the dangers of night flights in the war. She loves the feel of his uniform’s material.
Simply that.
But I at least ask questions. Why is that cigarette case not ever mentioned again, as they dance to gramophone records on the wireless? Or is he merely a ghost of an airman? For many reasons, the latter is unlikely. But I think I definitely know the answer to the first, even though there is no evidence for it, other than his earlier saying to her: “…it’s just life — no use to kick and strain — got to take it as it comes.”
THE HATEFUL WORD
“; she felt the Adam’s apple rise and fall, like a squirrel leaping to escape, but tied by the leg.”
This is the touching story of a middle-aged lady picking up in England a German prisoner who looked to be in his twenties, someone who was let out by the camp during the day. Lonely, and at a loose end. Him or her? Both of them? Her husband ever brings his business clients home in his head when returning from London each day. She gets the prisoner to help with the garden on a regular basis. Until she felt his adam’s apple and later heard him say the hateful word that he called her, a spoiler to reveal the word here. I was intrigued by there being such phenomena as German prisoners let out for the day. A dated story that somehow never dates. Just the changing roles that equally never change.