Summer Reading 2016 - Literary Journeys
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Vacation time – especially, I think, vacation time in a warm place away from home – is very different from normal time. Without schedules and obligations the mind tends to float through the day in a state of gentle flux, thinking about anything or nothing at all (while one does anything or nothing at all). Throw in some tension and you have a particularly conducive setting for a modernist novel about the fluidity of consciousness and human connection—or connexion, in this case.Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, captures this feeling of languid contemplation perfectly when Lily Briscoe and William Bankes, guests at the summer home of the Ramsay family on the Isle of Skye, walk down to a break in the hedges to look out on the water:
They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave their bodies even some sort of physical relief.
To the Lighthouse is a book driven more by thought than dialogue. The plot is skeletal: small events furnish opportunities for its characters to consider their lives, their aspirations, and their relationship to each other, and that internal motion is the true action of the novel.A dozen characters populate it, but in the absence of mutual understanding they bounce off each other like so many marbles, flinching from the pain of their awkward encounters. “Children never forget,” thinks Mrs Ramsay, and “for this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed.” Alone and unencumbered,
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she found herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
There is even a trip with in a trip, a boat ride (to the lighthouse, naturally) for Mr Ramsay and two of his children, which doesn't occur until ten years past the main action of the novel. By then many of the others have died or faded from their lives, taking with them any further opportunity to make a real connection, to reach the mutual understanding Woolf's characters have been striving for.But there is hope for the characters in To the Lighthouse (and, Woolf implies, for us). Lily Briscoe, a frustrated painter, finds a small measure of satisfaction at last in the completion of her painting. A simple compliment turns James Ramsay's resentment toward his father into affection, and his sister Cam discovers a new admiration for her father's solidity of purpose.There's much more besides, but then people's thoughts are so hard to explain, and I don't want to ruin it for you. Take it with you on your next vacation. Steve Donoghue, Managing Editor
I was unaware that there were other people like me, people who might think of their urge to travel as an acceptable characteristic of a bona fide lifestyle. Romantics, to be sure; fools, possibly, escapists, probably. Dreamers who pursued irregular but nonetheless intrepid dreams of dubious value to the social order, their minds flaring with extravagant narratives.
I wondered idly if the yellow lights were fireflies – then suddenly realized that those lights are homes, you idiot, homes, where real people live out their real lives, hundreds of tiny, one-room, tin-roofed cinder-block and daub-and-wattle cabins lit by candles and smoky kerosene lamps, where men and women and children are living in a reality utterly unlike my own, a world just as subjective as mine, but infinitely more difficult and punishing, their lives and dreams putting the ease and luxury of mine to shame. In the end their inner lives and dreams were for me unknowable.
He ends up making those lives – and their distant land – a bit more knowable; all three of these books do that, as all the best travel-writing does. They're the next best thing to going afield yourself, even if you're only going as far as the backyard swimming pool with a good book in hand. Rohan Maitzen, Senior Editor
WELL!!!All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive, and degenerate times when a bookshop -- a BOOKSHOP -- starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper. I said to John Henry when he stepped out of it:“Would you believe a thing like that, Your Eminence?” and he said he wouldn’t. You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle and I don’t even know what war it was.The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I’m just beginning to recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it’s a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman’s leather easy chair -- not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.
Hanff is a reader, not a collector, though, and it’s her unabashed bibliophile’s enthusiasm for everything from Leigh Hunt to Tristram Shandy that makes 84, Charing Cross Road such a refreshing treat.
I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St Paul’s where John Donne preached and sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower . . . A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I’d go looking for the England of English literature, and he said:“Then it’s there.”
The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street lacks some of the spontaneity of 84, Charing Cross Road: Hanff can’t have doubted that it would end up published as the sequel, and that expectation, added to the inevitable self-consciousness of a writer’s diary, means that it feels a bit more staged, a bit more artificial. Still, her thrill at finding “the England of English literature” is palpable and endearing:
He took me to a pub called The George, and as he opened the door for me he said in that light, neutral voice:“Shakespeare used to come here.”I mean I went through a door Shakespeare once went through, and into a pub he knew. We sat at a table against the back wall and I leaned my head back, against a wall Shakespeare’s head once touched, and it was indescribable.
She’s initially irritated at the rowdy crowd in what is, for her, a sacred space. “I could imagine Shakespeare walking in now,” she tells her escort crabbily, “if it weren’t for the people.”
And the minute I said it I knew I was wrong. He said it before I could:“Oh no. The people are just the same.”And of course they were. Look again, and there was a blond, bearded Justice Shallow talking to the bartender. Further along the bar, Bottom the Weaver was telling his ponderous troubles to a sharp-faced Bardolph. And at a table right next to us, in a flowered dress and pot-bellied white hat, Mistress Quickly was laughing fit to kill.
She’s equally moved by every place where the words that have lived with her so long were breathed into being:
It was lovely to walk along the river with John Donne’s cathedral looming ahead. . . . I walked up the step of St. Paul’s -- finally, finally, after how many years? -- and in through the doorway, and stood there looking up at the domed ceiling and down the broad aisles to the altar, and tried to imagine how Donne felt the night King James sent for him.
On her way out she reaches out and touches Donne’s shroud, a small moment of tactile connection that epitomizes the magic of feeling that literature is continuous with life and that we, as readers, have our place in the grandeur of it all.
Near the ferry of Bara [in the Punjab] we found the fishermen actively engaged in sharing amongst themselves an immense alligator (seesar) which they had just caught. The monster had been cut up into joints and bits, some of which they were about to eat, assuring us that the steaks were delicious. I asked if these animals did not eat men, but the fishermen boldly got rid of this objection by assuring me that alligators and crocodiles lived entirely on fish! Having partaken of frog, horse, shark, and camel, I resolved to add a new item to my list of gastronomic experiences, and to try my hand at crocodile-steaks; but I found them to be poor, close-grained, dry, and deficient in flavor, and I was very soon satisfied. Probably the art of cooking crocodiles may be yet in its infancy.
As Burnes traveled in the role of explorer, military scout, diplomat and foreign adviser, his account is a motley blend of natural science, biographical sketches, dubious anthropology, palace gossip, and of course political analysis, much of which is tinged with a decidedly old-fashioned kind of moralizing. Describing the reformations of Paolo Avitabile, an Italian mercenary who joined Ranjit Singh’s Sikh army and was appointed administrator of the Punjabi city Waziribad, Burnes admires the “fine bazaars and widening streets; nay that most conclusive proof of civilization, the erection of a gallows, proved how much he had done towards bringing this wild neighborhood under subjection.”But the promise of wildness and the luster of danger are what give Burnes’ narrative its flamboyant excitement. The author’s amazing story continues well beyond this book’s final page, and readers who care to follow it can turn to first-rate histories such as Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game or William Dalrymple’s Return of a King to learn about the duration of his time in Kabul up to its abrupt end in 1841 when he was hacked to death by a crowd of vengeful Afghanis.____
