BOOKLOOSE #18: Summer in the City
It’s summer in Vienna, which means the rose gardens are in bloom at Volkstheatre, there are trays of apricots at the Brunnengasse markets and it doesn’t get dark until 10pm. The buildings look particularly like iced cakes in this light.
For the last few years, summertime has made me think of this beautifully written profile of Deborah Levy. To me, it captures why and how she has become a cultural hero: for women, for artists, for the menopausal, for men who are sensitive, for Tilda Swinton, for readers and for books. She lets so much of herself out for us to dig into and relish. She loves the artistic life as much as she loves making art. I’ll show you what I mean:
“The studio was as near to the platonic ideal of a Paris garret as you could imagine: reached by a winding stair through a courtyard, and with low ceilings and wooden beams. Kilim rugs were scattered on the floor, and her bed was covered in a fluffy sheepskin throw. There was a stash of red wine in the fireplace. Everything about the studio radiated her delight in objects and food and pleasure, reminding me of how, when we’d met for lunch at a London pavement cafe the previous July, despite the overwhelming heat she’d ordered a vermouth on ice followed by a pizza, topped off by a strong coffee and a roll-up. If you met the author and saw the studio before you read the work, you might expect something more excessive and elaborate than the stripped-down, translucent prose she produces.”
Oh to be a drizzle of vermouth on ice being slowly sipped by Debroah Levy.
(P. S. I went back to Melbourne last month, so the accidental theme today is “home”. Some bonus recommendations I discovered while searching for a way to unblock my ear canals from a jetlagged-induced cold are: predicting the murderer in every episode of Foyle’s War seasons 1-4, reading “The Rachel Incident” by Caroline O’Donoghue in one sitting, crying during Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris at 35,000ft.)
Paris or Die by Jayne Tuttle, 2019
In the spirit of Paris and of dying for art, this book starts with a death, ends with a near-death and is filled with the classic starving-but-charming-expat-artist-in-Paris stuffing. A fantasy sandwich, if you will.
Jayne is a girl from country Australia who wants two things: to be an actress, and to go to Paris. After the sudden and unexpected death of a close family member and an unexplained scholarship to study a traditional acting method that sounds like something between clowning and mime in the French capital, she hotfoots it to The Continent and stays there for fifteen years. She drinks a lot of cheap wine, does many interpretive performances, and seduces some hot locals. More stuff happens too but it’s way more fun if you read it for yourself.
I would say this book is severely underrated as a literary work. Condemnation to the invisible overlords/minions/bureaucrats that didn’t give it the exposure it deserved at the time of publication! Though perhaps status as a potential cult classic is a more romantic fate.
Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, 2019
Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar pretty unfazed by the foremost pursuit of academia: writing impenetrable texts. Sand Talk is incredibly readable despite being about enormous topics like deep time, creation, revolution, and other things he can’t actually talk about in detail. He enjoys upending the Western-colonial understanding of pretty much everything — reading, violence, conclusions — with first a drawn symbol, a Dreaming story, and then his own thoughts that don’t necessarily lead to neat arguments. Each chapter is not the articulation of an idea broken down into smaller parts with evidence to back up each claim (i.e. the scientific formula for pop non-fiction); instead, the whole book acts like a mycelium network that moves through concepts like whiteness, language, Prussia, constellations and ghosts in an interconnected web. It mimics the way we would learn about these topics — collecting, adding, fusing — if we shifted back to an Aboriginal knowledge framework.
Every once in a while I like to indulge myself in a particular rant: my belief that Google Maps is eroding our connection to place. People don’t get lost anymore, and we no longer have the narrative of a location banked in our memory in order to navigate it once we return. Tyson Yunkaporta expounds a much more detailed and thoughtful version of my own smug argument, but the logic is the same. Getting lost, finding our own ways, listening, watching, remembering, storing. It’s a metaphor for physical wayfinding, yes, but it’s also about internal navigation – about our abilities to deeply know things rather than just wash in the experience for a few minutes and then dry ourselves off again.
It’s refreshing to read a nonfiction book that doesn’t preach or condescend, one that doesn’t narrate from a perspective of detached authority. Immediately, Yunkaporta trades objectivity for a casual, individual voice (his voice!) and admits to not telling the reader everything he knows about Indigenous knowledge (respect). By leaving some yarns untethered he moves in a language of gaps and tangents which, in turn, enact the wandering style of thinking he also explains in words. It’s hard to do that, perform your thinking as you describe it, but these wide and circular motions is, as he explains, how ideas move in oral cultures rather than their isolated states in print-based ones. And despite this newsletter itself being a print-based text extolling the virtues of other print-based texts, I fully endorse this message.
A few hours after finishing this book I managed to weave its ideas into conversation at least three different times that evening, proof that its claims of applicability to everyday life are true. The ideas in question are obvious in their ancientness but so obscured by the vortex of colonialism that discovering them now feels like burrowing under your bed for a lost slipper and finding a photo album you didn’t even know you lost a decade ago.
Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright, 2015
Fiona Wright has been a trainee journalist in Sri Lanka, a uni student in Berlin, a poet and a critic, but the dominant face of her many identities in this book, her first ever essay collection, is as an anorexic. What starts as a long-undiagnosed muscular tic in her stomach that causes random and incessant vomiting soon turns into a full-blown eating disorder that settles over most of Wright’s twenties. These delicate, complex pages are her (very good) attempt at making sense of it, and making sense of bodies at all in this economy.
From the jungles of Colombo to her host family’s house in Germany and group therapy in Sydney she looks into corners of her past for answers to the logic of hunger. While she’s there, she sees the effects of a society that’s starving too. Can hunger be an indulgence depending on your socio-economic status or passport? Why is the aesthetics of the miniature so bewitching? Is art-making itself an act of fasting? What does a starving mind and body do to personhood?
It’s a bloody graceful book: intellectually rigorous without being pompous, honest without indulging in trauma porn, sad but not sentimental. I suspect she is the closest thing we have to Leslie Jamison (another writer keen on mapping illness in the human body onto the symptoms of social breakdown).
I find Wright’s writing so clear and penetrating I don’t know how she does it. And believe me, I’ve tried to work it out. In the last month I have sat at my own desk reading the first essay in this collection over and over again to understand the voice and the mechanics of the sentence structure. Conclusion: I have no idea! And that’s how you know it’s good. Let me know if you crack it.
Thanks Sasha for another set of insightful book reviews and more books to add to my buy and read list!
Jane