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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.
www.nemonymous.com
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.
LIVING story and themes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_(novel)
The plot is outlined above, and I will merely draw out other threads and themes that appeal to me, as I did in CONCLUDING here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/11/12/concluding-by-henry-green/, but I fear I shall find the heavy dialect dialogue in LIVING off-putting. Yet, at outset, I sense this non-dialect paragraph below without sparse definite articles — the point I have read up to so far — is important but I am unsure why!
“Standing in foundry shop son of Mr Dupret thought in mind and it seemed to him that these iron castings were beautiful and he reached out fingers to them, he touched them; he thought and only in machinery it seemed to him was savagery left now for in the country, in summer, trees were like sheep while here men created what you could touch, wild shapes, soft like silk, which would last and would be working in great factories, they made them with their hands. He felt more certain and he said to himself it was wild incidental beauty in these things where engineers had thought only of the use put to them. He thought, he declaimed to himself this was the life to lead, making useful things which were beautiful, and the gladness to make them, which you could touch; but when he was most sure he remembered, he remembered it had been said before and he said to himself, ‘Ruskin built a road which went nowhere with the help of undergraduates and in so doing said the last word on that.’ And then what had been so plain, stiff and bursting inside him like soda fountains, this died as a small wind goes out, and he felt embarrassed standing as he did in fine clothes.”
Including a cinema, this is a patchwork of scenes with spoken raw words amidst other smoky purple prose of various folk living in this foreign country of literature which you enter as if into the humdrum work-a-day rhythm. Of social history itself seemingly mutated to modern eyes, but truer even than ourselves.
Read up to:
“…I don’t know what’s the matter with me but I feel like someone had given me a cut over the brow with a five-eighth spanner. Worry, I’ve ‘ad enough of that washing about in my head to drown a dolphin. If another bit comes along it’ll displace the brains. Yes there won’t be room, something’ll have to go. Anyone else’d be dead now in my place. Ah, so it goes on, every day, and then one day it breaks, the blood comes running out of your nose as you might be a fish has got a knock on the snout. Till you drop dead.”
After a bird trapped between two panes of a single window and the ease with a which a woman could release it after the failed efforts of more than one man…
Read up to:: “In ‘ell they will stoke the coal on your tongue babble baby”
“Da, da DID DEE”
Inter alia, talk of divergent toilet breaks taken by factory workers.
Read up to: “He put hands up over his face and laid weight of his head on them, resting elbows on his knees.”
Read up to:
“Water dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water. Sun in there shook on the walls and ceiling. As rings went out round trembling over the water shadows of light from sun in these trembled on walls. On the ceiling.”
Cross-referenced here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/02/solage-nimbus-ashley/#comment-27809
I think the dialogue and some lack of definite articles and seemingly complex plot that I am intended to grasp has beaten my poor ageing brain! My fault, not the novel’s. I refer you to the plot outline linked above, and I sense this is an important sympathetic and experimental novel about the working-class by someone upper class. I shall leave you with one further passage…
“Friday evening and Miss Gates was sitting by Mr. Craigan’s bed. She was sewing. Then getting up on elbow he fetched out purse from under his pillows. He took 6d. from it and said for her to go to the movies. She said what alone, and to leave him! He said she’d better go, she was in too much he said. So that night she went.”
And I will soon continue with these Green novels here: