Friday, March 29, 2024

Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum

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UNDERTOW Publications 2022

My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/undertow-publications/

When I read this book, I hope to give my thoughts on it in the comment stream below….

2 thoughts on “Helpmeet — Naben Ruthnum”

  1. I

    “…the last book he would ever begin.”

    Powerful and mesmeric descriptions of mysterious terminal disease in Edward as Louise plans, with help of her brother, to transport him by train  to his rightful home, where squat other members of his family, near Buffalo. The disease itself has to be read about to be felt without the morphia of not reading it at all to dull its effects, but aesthetic, if not anaesthetic, in a Happenstantial way when Louise plays with gauze of his fluids as ‘found’ fine art and, I infer, with cotton bud residue, too. Ruthfully numb.

  2. 2

    “; now, speaking the name and starting the story brought the rest of it back.”

    A chapter of light and dark. The interaction of brother and sister in the light of their own backstory and her husband’s possibly suspicious disease, as they manhandle his lightening body like luggage by carriage to the sleeper. A nameless disease’s aura of Conan Doyle at his most gruesome and  literary works of darkness that even corrode the co-vivid rust of the future? Thoughts, too, of the closer future for her. And what is in store, apotheosised by further fine art aesthetics of residue from ill wounds, as filtered by reality’s own natural light. And what of Nanda whose name we learn — as helpmeet?

    All couched in a beautiful book, with its own aesthetics, as well as anaesthesia of watermarks…


  1. 3

    “Edward suited his missing nose and eyes. They would have been an intrusion if they regenerated.”

    …as would my emptying brain, should it fill it up again. Edward, gradually waking, with his true helpmeet, his wife, Louise, arrives at his old Buffalo house, seemingly, for me, unexpectedly empty itself, but with issues concerning neighbours and its orchards,  a transport assisted by another passing helpmeet called Tom, but the prose used to describe Edward’s terminal state, as Louise settles him in,  needs no helpmeet at all. It is aesthetically disturbing, haunting but eventually it is, in turn, a helpmeet to any readers who want to face such dark sights, especially in the light of Louise’s faithful palliative care for such a ruthfully numbed sufferer. But does someone else come, I suddenly wonder?

    • I forgot to post the 4th entry here yesterday, but luckily I retrieved it from my notebook…

      4

      We see into Edward’s ‘disordered’ mind, and my own disordered mind does not help his, yet I sense he sees Jean, the whore I wonder, who he thinks, commingled with Louise,  once gave him the still encroaching disease as retribution for his body having invaded hers, and this time she has entered his. But the disorder of his discards  is pre-mapped by meticulous chalk-lines on the floor as if  such Found Art was strictly planned out after all. 

  2. 5

    “And a right elbow, an elbow on the part of your chaise where it just started to slope upward. I could see the elbow on the green felt, but I couldn’t remember the rest of the arm.”

    A most moving chapter for all readers, but especially for lovers of the elbow-trigger in literature, an instinctive device often used in fiction over the centuries as I have discovered empirically. Echoing Edward’s dreams of Jean, and/ or Louise’s dreams of Jean who had entered Edward and possibly given him this wasting disease, and now his tongue had sloughed from his mouth like a slug overnight. But osmosis via Louise, his discrete wife and discrete nurse combined, I sense, will still work for him, if not speech. Louise says of herself, vis à vis Jean, that she “followed the elbow to her arm,… […] ….her hand vanished into you.”

  3. 6

    “Then Louise looked at the dragged path she’d made from the elm root.”

    This is a surely unforgettable tour de force describing Edward’s managing to flee, even in his state, into the mulch of orchards on the verge of the forest, and his wife nurse as hELpMeet attempting to rescue both of him, or one of him from the other, from the fLOWEr?

    Only reading this chapter will do justice to its power.

    1. 7

      “…to smell it, to smell the living Edward inside it.”

      Whether this be a theme and variations on Mary Shelley, or a nod towards reincarnation, or a shape-shifting between lovers that is new to literature,  we have here a short chapter that will penetrate the rest of my days. Even Watch with Mother back to when I was too young to understand, and maybe the house knew something about it, too.

    2. 8

      ”…erases the original name.”

      The power endures. Who is helpmeet to whom? Now three, but which the Bowenesque ‘shadowy third’?

      The arrival of Isabel allows her name to complete the gestalt with Edward and Louise’s names, enabling ‘elbow’ to be formed from their letters.

    3. 9

      “With the correct letters written… […] The flower left in Isabel…”

      The power of this book endures. Impossible to interpret or evaluate, let alone describe. A story that is bespoke to each reader depending on how much ‘they’ take into themself in this new pronoun world. A sort of bodily ventriloquism as an extrapolation of Shirley Jackson’s ‘written ventriloquism’ recently reviewed HERE. A comparison that is also generally and inadvertently rewarding to each work.

      END

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Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Shadow Lines by Nicholas Royle

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SALT PUBLISHING 2024

My previous reviews of Nicholas Royle: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/14748-2/ and of Salt Publishing: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/salt-publishing/

When I read this book, I may comment on it in the comment stream below…

11 thoughts on “Shadow Lines by Nicholas Royle”

  1. “…trains and trams were inconvenient, and I don’t like buses, so I started walking in…”

    I have read the first two numbered chapters in this book, a compelling and enjoyably idiosyncratic audit trail within an eclectic treasure trove of books  connected by reading and buying them sometimes in and around lockdown time, often older books, a few marked in some way by their previous readers.  The first chapter deals, inter alia, with the Rev. W. Awdry train books that I do not remember from my own boyhood but from my son’s. And the second centres on ‘walking and reading’ which I rarely do. But I felt a strong connection between the central subject matters of these first two chapters. One that not even the author of this book may have thought of. One chapter absolving the dangers of the other, face up front while tracks guiding below…

  2. 3

    THE NUMBERS

    Finding telephone numbers in old books and having the cheek to follow them up.

    So many of these discoveries for this writer, one wonders whether such exposing oneself to books and their places of being sold, are in cahoots with what I do with the printed words themselves in the same books by means of my ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ processes which bring out the connections and synchronicities and spiritual assonances like a plague, along with my own handwritten aide-memoire review marginalia for others to find one day. 

    So many bookshops visited in this quest, and it is a delight to read here about their idiosyncrasies, but I wonder if this writer is old enough to have visited The Croydon Bookshop near Carshalton, a secondhand book emporium I once regularly visited many years ago and where Nicholas Royle spent a chapter telling us about visiting  in his recent book ‘David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine’.

  3. I have now read chapters 4 & 5, and I have been consumed by them in one sitting, full of the autonomous connections of book-places and publishing-type people, some of the latter necessarily redacted. I have  realised what ‘shadow lines’ really are regarding unread books and the discrete things inside such books.  It is the most mazy rollercoaster ever that seems as if it is still being built even as you take its exciting reading-ride … and then I reached the tantalising tangents of bookishness surrounding the PENGUIN MODERN STORIES series (1969-72) that I was recently inspired by this writer to obtain when he  posted the striking numbered covers to match each date he posted them, only made possible by means of his duplicated sets of this series, upon what was previously called Twitter, a social media that has now been named after its own redaction! Well, to cut a long short story short, I myself have since been ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ this Penguin series, story by story — reviews with their own spin-offs and synchronicities. Many of this series’ authors and stories mentioned in ‘Shadow Lines’ are listed here with links to my reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/penguin-modern-stories/

  4. The next chapter is a delightfully crammed cornucopia of Books and Films, not Books of Films or Films of Books, but Books seen IN Films, whether identified merely by being referred to as ‘first editions’ or actually spying the title and author. I was particularly struck by ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in ‘The Shining’ and the thoughts surrounding the book in ‘Don’t Look Now.’ 

    Then Chapter 8 deals with three fascinating reminiscences, one being the writer’s times at school and the influence upon him and his bookishness by a particular teacher who was later murdered. Thus, I discovered a connection with myself who also had an influential teacher later murdered, i.e. Anne Cluysenaar who taught me Literary Stylistics (see the murder reference in her posthumous Wikipedia.) 

    Also a reminiscence of JOEL LANE, who died far too young in 2013, and he was a big influence on me although I was somewhat older than him. I found this book’s A-Z approach to Joel illuminating as well as reawakeningly confirmatory about things I already knew. Just a bit disappointed that it mentions several publications wherein his work ws published, but not a mention of NEMONYMOUS (see Wikipedia for further info, the nature of which magazine might excuse the omission) in which Joel was published twice, one of the stories never having been published elsewhere so far. My own Joel Lane page here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/1479-2/

  5. The final three involuntarily page-turning chapters start with “Mike Nelson’s Books”, Nelson being someone of whom I know nothing until now, other than my past review of his story ‘On Monkeys Without Tails’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/12/10/the-new-abject-tales-of-modern-unease/#comment-20530 — I suppose if the monkeys had been without tales, the plays of Shakespeare would never have been written? Nelson is seemingly an installation artist with lots of books. “For Nelson, everything is connected. He may appear to jump from one subject to another, but there’s always a through line.” A shadow line, too? In fact that quotation seems to sum up the contents of this book itself and, also, to embody the ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ process, as does the following quote, in hindsight, from Nelson’s Monkey story: “a silent anagram waiting to be unearthed.” Often, hidden anagrams from the text of fiction books and from authors’ and characters’ names, I have often found, are more revelatory than authorially intentional factors and more meaningful than chance synchronicities of a lesser nature.

    The concluding two chapters, beginning with a Nightjar Press delivery, are teeming with many more book discoveries and discoveries inside books, and with all-too-human book-homing attempts, deploying connections too numerous to be itemised here, and I enjoyed the journey and view immensely. One particular work, Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is majored upon in this context, a work which I have shamefully failed to have read, I think. Perhaps little chance, now. Perhaps, not, but the chapter on this work was awesome to pilot myself through, nevertheless.

     I did once, however, review at length Paul Auster’s massive work 4,3,2,1 here in 2017: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/4-3-2-1-paul-auster/ Which brings us back to the numbers, I guess. And as to anagrams, the best attempt I can make is SLIDESHOW and SNOWSLIDE.

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