There are pages of Le Guin when to read is to be lifted like a leaf by the wind and borne along.
Brantor Ogge is a depiction of a bullying male such as I haven’t come across before in her writing. You can feel the menace. This lively account of a young Englishman’s experiences in Japan is so much more than an entertainment. As Boon learns to decipher the codes of Japanese culture and behavioural patterns, he presents to us an eloquent and revelatory interpretation of the Japanese mind with an astuteness that matches his own personal captivation.
Never bookish, always vital, he sheds light on a mindset and society I have never before come close to comprehending. Gavin Young first met the Ma’dan, the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, in the 1950s. Following his return in 1973, he wrote this account to celebrate a people whose culture and way of life was not going to last forever, and his friendship with them.
It’s a simple, personal tale, prefaced by some history. For me, it was an insight into the lives of a people who I’d never heard of, whose home and existence existed off the land grid: in the vast maze of waterways between the Tigris and the Euphrates that are the marshlands. The only way in or out was to leave car or bus behind and take a thin, silent, paddled launch, so that to enter was to cross a threshold. There, the Ma’dan had lived for centuries in a constellation of tiny one-family islands, in houses made of reeds, where they fished, kept buffalo, and moved between each other in canoes short and long. The cover photograph by Nik Wheeler suggests an otherworldliness of the living marshlands that was clearly mesmerizing. Since the book was published, the Ma’dan’s story has been one of decline. For being proud, disobedient and independent people, who would typically harbour political fugitives, Sadam Hussein had their marshes drained and the wetlands have never recovered. Back then, in the 1990s, there were a quarter of a million of these descendants of the Sumerians. Now there are just a few thousand, the rest dispersed to their fate in the cities. Young’s affectionate memoir relates happier times. His encounters describe what can seem like a rare species that evolves and flourishes, only to suffer setbacks, languish and fade away. Individuals and civilizations, butterflies and stars, all have their day, a chance to shine, and are gone. My favourite book last year.
Udall writes serious humour with the kind of natural flair that is a joy to read. A lost Arizona kid does what he can to survive institutions and the good intentions and wayward behaviour of adults, who are lost in their own way, odd and incompetent. Edgar relates his story with a refreshing absence of grievance, learning how to make his own way in a discouraging and prosaic mid-west. His mere existence, it seems, is enough to generate the most engaging misadventures. He is a clear-sighted survivor equipped with a rare strength of focus, and yet still a young boy, touchingly clouded by hope. To it all, Udall brings to bear strong American poetry with understated elegance. These days, side by side in Kyiv’s Holodomor Museum are exhibits from 1932-33 and 2022-23.
For each time period, the rescued manuscript of a book is on display. In the early 1930s, Stalin’s imposition of collectivization in Ukraine decreed that all agricultural grain had to be handed over to the state. It caused the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainian people by starvation. In June 1933, 28,000 people died of hunger every day. While the USSR exported grain to pay for industrialization, hungry farmers were punished for collecting the crop leftovers from fields with ten years imprisonment and confiscation of property or execution. In July 2023, a mass Russian missile strike destroyed 60,000 tons of Ukrainian grain. Now, as then, a Russian tyrant wants to suppress the people of the Ukraine, their culture, and their right to exist as an independent nation. In the 1960s, Lavr Nechyporenko made an eyewitness account of the holodomor in a novel called “1933”. He handed over the MS to dissident Ivan Kovalenko who was arrested, losing the book. Kovalenko was finally—remarkably—reunited with it in 1994. That is the first book. On 1st July 2023, 37-year-old Ukrainian novelist and war crimes researcher, Victoria Amelina, was killed by a Russian missile attack. Shortly before her death, Amelina had found the manuscript of a war diary, “Vivat”, kept by Volodymyr Vakulenko, buried in the backyard of his house in Kharkiv, where the Russians had invaded. Vakulenko was killed on 20th March 2023. That is the second book. I spied this one on the avenue outside Kyiv’s University Metro. I might find fantasy writing seductive myself but it’s urban, as they say, and I steer a wide berth around most sorcery-and-princesses guff, which only makes me want to fall on my sword. On this occasion, the only book I had with me was The Kite Runner which I was getting sick of, so I cheerfully coughed up 50 hryvnia for Enchantment: and am I glad I did!
Appropriately enough, the main setting for the story turned out to be the ancient Carpathian forest of western Ukraine. To have a princess who is so plain-spoken with her rescuer as to appear downright rude was a delightful surprise. The tension between these two, in a love story divided by centuries of difference, keeps the narrative going until… well, I won’t give it away. The bad witch is very, VERY bad and the magic is consistent, except for a rather crucial moment when a message is delivered in a far-fetched twist that disappoints after all the hard work put in to maintain credibility. Not a big deal. As the plot develops, Card is generally a dab hand at anticipating objections and heading them off. Where a lesser writer might have you exclaiming “Yes, but…!”, Card will have a character bring up the selfsame objection in your mind and nip it in the bud. This happens all the time. And you never feel that you’re being steered towards the anticlimax of an obvious reveal. Card is also highly talented in presenting the complexity of a person’s reasoning without it being a drag. It brings clarity to motivation and drives the story along so that you’re not left wondering. I found loads to enjoy in his novel, loads to learn from. Picked up these two for the ride home. Mr Sanderson’s name keeps cropping up so I thought I’d give him a try—and maybe interesting short story writing by Ms Ivory?
In a country under constant and long-term attack by Russia, for the population to conduct life as normal is itself an act of resistance and defiance.
As Kyiv prepares for another winter of bombardment, power outages and freezing cold, it decides to… hold a book fair. Pavilions and stalls of titles by Ukrainian writers, with a generous provision for children. What is must be like to be a parent in wartime. Reading is a declaration of belief in a future. Every book bought here means something. Each fairgoer is a story of perseverance. In the days before internet, roaming South America with a backpackful of curiosity and doubt, I met two other soulful explorers high in the Peruvian Andes. Over the following weeks, we shared trials, delights and other lessons of travelling and became firm friends. Thirty-seven years later, Ian sent me this travelogue and the past stirred in me once more.
The journey is through Chile. I recalled a particular image here and there, “the varnished curve of Brian’s closed, upper birth” on the Tamuco to Santiago train, although I was sick by then and my memory preserves few clear moments of that country. Ian’s intention was, I know, more to evoke the lands that we knew together, Peru and Bolivia. The impressions that remain, the heaving first gear of the bus engines, the acrid stench of rotting produce in the streets, the silent faces in a village at dawn, the unknowable land stretching away. He also reminds me how fellow travellers can have quite different experiences of the same events. And how much does the self we know match the person our friends see? The powerful background to Keenan and McCarthy’s trek is the infamous and long incarceration that they endured together in Beirut under Islamic Jihadists. One of the fabulous stories they told, to keep the flame of hope alive, was that they would farm yaks in Patagonia. In 1995, five years after their release, they met again to make their trip of discovery, not to find a farm in earnest, but to travel as liberated men, to meet the vast and varying wildness head on and fulfil a karmic promise. I don’t know why the Sunday Times described the book as “funny” (as if an account of travels has to be amusing or it’s not worth the bother). It’s more interesting than that. From the desert of Arica to the other desolation at Puerto Williams in Tierra del Fuego, the book is written in tandem, one man’s diary entry followed by the other’s. The more laidback Keenan has Neruda and the revolutionary O’Higgins as his spiritual guides. McCarthy is the detailed organizer. In the end, for all that their personalities and interpretations differ, it is interesting how much they coincide. Both think that their way is for the best and, with their differences and similarities, an arduous odyssey pushes onward. They are mature enough, their friendship more than deep enough to see it through, even if “the profound need for mutual support we had in Beirut is not now so vital.” What they don’t do is dwell on their years of terrible imprisonment in a tiny cell. They hardly ever refer to it. But the reader knows. Their journals are characterized by a poetic worldliness that they both have. Keenan is imaginative and lyrical, McCarthy equally insightful and also, when the mood takes him, elegantly poetic also. In 1972, the term “near-death experience” was unheard of. When a six-year-old Belgian girl nearly drowned in a lake and attempted to explain where she had gone and what she had seen, the adults dismissed it as childish nonsense.
That might have an end to the story, but then Maryse came close to death again: and again, many times over. She had been born with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome which caused her heart to stop without warning. This occurred twice a week on average over a period of 25 years and each time, she would enter a magical, timeless world of living colours, where she soared and pulsated with their loving vibrations. And each time, her heart would kick back in at a terrifying speed and she would be back and breathing again. It made her into an apprehensive, misunderstood child and a vulnerable adult until, at the age of 31, a surgeon finally diagnosed her condition and cured her heart. She was now physically well, but her secret world, the one that meant so much to her, was lost. A long, dark depression followed until she at last emerged through the medium of painting, had life-changing experiences with a dolphin and native people in Australia, and then discovered the practice of Vedic Art, which she now teaches in order to bring out the creative life force in others. She is also an accomplished artist in her own right. Maryse has never made a fuss of her near-death experiences—a quick calculation tells you there were about 2,500 of them—partly out of modesty, mostly because she is focussed on the present and her work, but what she learned in these epiphanies and in dream visions underlies all her teaching and makes for a very interesting and readable autobiography. The drama of Maryse Alen’s story is that much more effective for the simple, direct style in which it is written. The Colours of Freedom is published as an ebook and illustrated with 21 reproductions of Maryse’s paintings, which she made at crucial life moments to accompany and help her make sense of them. Flemish/Dutch readers can also buy the physical book. |
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