Bookshops I

In addition to my Book-centric Memories and my technicolour bookshelves posts, I also plan to periodically post about bookshops that I visit or have in the past visited that have made a profound (or at the very least, extremely pleasurable) impression. Now, to be fair, I am a bibliophile and a fold-down table with a handful of secondhand books at the end of the street is bound to excite me but you know the bookshops I mean... the ones where you could happily lose myself for hours.

Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London (not at number 84 but at 113-119) is one such bookshop and I actually did manage to become lost when I first visited (you will find the memory of what I bought on that visit in the penultimate paragraph of this post). Foyles is spread over four floors and has nooks and crannies aplenty; walking through it you have the sense that you wandering from room to room in a rather large library.

Foyles is a family-owned bookshop that has retained its private independence since 1903 (the store has survived in its location from 1906) and has only recently branched across central London; Charing Cross Road remains its flagship store and is the one with extensive character. To mark its centenary this Foyles was extensively refurbished, although it is still renowned for its legendary chit system; the neon red signs gracing the building are gaudy but fitting with its Soho locale.

My bookgroup meets here, which is only apt, but then we move on to somewhere that serves dinner. Many a book has been bought there; when I have house-guests I take them to Foyles; I even worked there temporarily last Christmas (a bookselling experience was a dream come true and it did not deter me from frequenting the shop afterwards). If you are ever in London then please take the time to visit and peruse all of the lovely books and unique shelf and table displays. I judge the quality of their displays on how many books I notice and want to buy whilst I am there. Foyles is supportive of the small, independent publisher and there are often displays of beautiful books that you may not have come across before; it is definitely a book lover's paradise.

Do you have a favourite bookshop to while away the time in? What do you love about it that makes you go back time after time?

Guest Post

I have written a guest post for Verity's Virago Venture on the beautiful covers of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, which Verity read and reviewed this week. Please read it (I had great fun writing it and there are lovely covers photographed) and support Verity in her personal reading challenge, which is something I highly admire as the Virago Modern Classics list is a LONG one with close to 550 books on it. I wish Verity success and look forward to future collaborations, especially Persephone Reading Week.

The Orange Shelf

Following the introduction of my white shelf I thought I would, in a creative spurt, temporarily add an orange shelf to my bookcases. I have always wanted an orange shelf and one day this will become a permanent addition but solely for your viewing pleasure -whilst I was in a bored and restless mood- I tried it out for a thematic sense of what it would look like. I like what I see. I created it quickly and with more time and effort involved for permanence I would alternate a few titles; I forgot that my copy of The Women's Room by Marilyn French (this edition) was orange and it would make a welcome edition in the future.

As you should be able to see, despite the glare, a number of the orange books are old orange Penguins, which isn't surprising. Some of these live on the short story volumes shelf, a couple on the shelf that houses Colette's books, another where Virginia Woolf likes to reside.

A few of these orange books can be found normally on the drama shelf and two belong with the other Angela Carter books on a shelf devoted to her alone. Bruno Bettleheim's The Uses of Enchantment should be on the fairy tale shelf and both The Madwoman in the Attic and Cunt: a Declaration of Independence (yes, I really do have a book with that title) come from the shelf reserved for feminist writings.

Last, but not least, The Other Hand and The Bone People both reside on my immediate reading pile, not on a shelf as yet.

This, readers, is my orange shelf -or something resembling it- once I have one.

Teaser Tuesdays

Quote a couple of spoiler-free sentences from the book you’re reading to tempt others.

"The war was four years old. It had started in the same month my son was born, and they'd grown up together."

The Other Hand by Chris Cleve

The Optimist's Daughter

Synopsis (from back cover): The people of Mount Salus, Mississippi always felt good about Judge McKelva. He was a quiet, solid reassuring figure, just as a judge should be. Then, ten years after his first wife's death, he marries the frivolous young Wanda Fay. No-one can understand his action, not least his beloved daughter, Laurel, who finds it hard to accept the new bride. It is only some years later, when circumstance brings her back to her childhood home, that Laurel stirs old memories and comes to understand the peculiarities of her upbringing, and the true relationship between her parents and herself.

The Optimist's Daughter is a reflective, poignant novel of independence and love, for which Eudora Welty, one of America's gretest contemporary Southern writers, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Have you ever read a book where your preconceived notions are something different? From its cover (a photograph of the author as a young girl) and from the above description I felt somewhat misled by the plot description for The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty. Both suggest that Laurel is a child when her mother, Becky, dies and then ten years later her father marries Fay and she is perhaps then entering adolescence and finds a new stepmother difficult to accept. Then "some years later" Laurel returns to her childhood home as an adult. However, this is not the case; instead it is only the year before the novel's setting -when Judge McKelva is seventy, his daughter forty, and Fay younger than that- when the Judge and his new wife marry and a year later when Laurel travels to New Orleans to assist her father post-operation for a detached retina and a few weeks later travels to her childhood home in Mount Sulas, Mississippi, for his funeral following his decline and counting down to death.

How peculiar that such a mistake -sheer laziness, in my opinion- would be made in the simple description of the novel; it is not an egregious error, by any means, nor did it affect my enjoyment of the novel but its inaccuracy is frustrating. I wanted to point his out before reviewing the novel as it bothered me.

Anyway, Laurel is a middle-aged women who is a designer in Chicago; her and Fay do not know each other, let alone like one another. Fay is obnoxious and comes across as an immature, spoiled child and Laurel isn't characterised as anything really... she comes across as a little cold but I think it is to convey the numbness of grief; she is, after all, still grieving for her mother as well as now her father. The strength of Welty's description also lies in the fringe characters, Fay's family -who are not as despicable as she is- and the residents of Mount Sulas, who rally around Laurel. Apparently this is the most autobiographical of Welty's novels and her observations of the townspeople are wittily realised but Fay is truly her tour de force.

I read this both because it was a Pulitzer winner, the first read since I announced my challenge, and because it is a Virago Modern Classic and the plot appealed to me; with so many challenges on the go just now I am trying to read books that tick a few boxes as opposed to just a book that I would love to read (this is only whilst I'm working my way the Booker longlist). I wasn't disappointed as it is a great book and a short read. I think perhaps that it is one that would bear re-reading once I am older -perhaps Laurel's age- and appreciative of the pain of grief and power of memory.

As it is, without much identification with the plot I appreciated the novel greatly for its brevity and economy of writing, the beauty of that writing, and its poignancy in tone. There are some wonderfully written passages and I would recommend this novel especially to those who simply love good writing.

The train gathered speed as swiftly as it had brought itself to a halt. It went out of sight while the wagon, loaded with thelong box now, and attended by a stranger in a business suit, was wheeled slowly back along the platform and steered to where a hearse, backed in among the cars, stood with its door wide.

In the lateness of the night, their two voices reading to each other where she could hear them, never letting a silence divide or interrupt them, combined into one unceasing voice and wrapped her around as she listened, as still as if she were asleep. She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.

But there was nothing of her mother here for Fay to find, or for herself to retrieve. The only traces there were of anybody were the drops of nail varnish. Laurel studiously went on work on them; she lifted them from the surface of the desk and rubbed it afterwards with wax until nothing was left to show of them, either.

The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles

As a prelude to my reading list for the Japanese Literature challenge I read the novella "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles" by Kij Johnson, which can be read here (it is 64 pages). My appetite is now whetted for reading The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson as well as I am a Cat by Soseki Natsume; cats also frequently figure in the fiction of Haruki Murakami. Does anyone know of the cultural significance of cats in Japan? Is it just that they are a symbol of good luck or a more deep-rooted devotion?

I am a passionate cat-lover and adore reading about cats in fiction and one of my favourite novellas is "The Cat" by Colette. "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles" is set in Imperial China and is about Small Cat who lives in a garden in the capital city with other female felines (Tom-cats visit) and share their lives together:

The cats shared another thing: their fudoki. The fudoki was the collection of stories about all the cats who had lived in a place. It described what made it a home, and what made the cats a family. Mothers taught their kittens the fudoki. If the mother died too soon, the other cats, the aunts and cousins, would teach the kittens. A cat with no fudoki was a cat with no family, no home, and no roots.

Small Cat's fudoki -her sense of self- is the essence of the story; when an earthquake and subsequent fire destroy her home and no other cats are left but her, Small Cat makes a pilgrimage to the North in search of other cats belonging to her fudoki. Her journey of a thousand miles is from the capital (still Tokyo?) to the North, beyond Mt Fuji (which is only 60 miles from Tokyo) to provinces that do not know cats and see them as demons where she encounters a Monk, a Bear Hunter, a Bear, Snow, cats belonging to a different fudoki, and a ferry journey for the first time. At her journey's end Small Cat has made her own fudoki - The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles - and realises that stories are not just told and learned but are made by ourselves. Anyone who loves cats, mythology, and the nature of stories will enjoy this lovely novella.

Everyone had a fudoki, Small Cat knew now. Everyone had their own stories, and the stories of their families and ancestors. There were adventures and love stories, or tricks and jokes and funny things that had happened or disasters. Everyone wanted to tell the stories, and to know where they fit in their own fudokis. She was not that different.

Claire from kiss a cloud described the entrancing, "solemnity and the subtlety" of Japanese literature and I think that is a beautiful way of describing the characteristic nature of its canon. The lyrical nature of Japanese literature in translation is beautiful and surreal, like a walk through cherry blossom.

I suspect that this short story is a shorter revision of Johnson's second novel, Fudoki, which Nymeth reviews here. For anyone wanting to read another Japanese short story about cats then this one by Haruki Murakami is good although it is practically identical to the middle section of his novel, Sputnik Sweetheart.

Some favourite passages:

It seemed to snow every few days, sometimes clumps heavy enough to splat when they landed,
sometimes tiny flakes so light they tickled her whiskers. Small Cat didn’t like snow: it looked like feathers, but it just turned into water when it landed on her.

There was not much for them to do but talk and sing, so they talked and sang a lot. They shared fairy tales and ghost stories. They told funny stories about themselves or the people they knew.
People had their own fudoki, Small Cat realized, though there seemed to be no order to the stories, and she didn’t see yet how they made a place home. They sang love-songs and funny songs about foolish adventurers, and Small Cat realized that songs were stories as well.

The Island at the End of the World

I came across The Island at the End of the World by Sam Taylor thanks to Jackie at Farm Lane Books and her predictions for this year's Man Booker Prize longlist. Regrettably it did not make the list -an omission that now baffles me- but I still borrowed it from the library as its premise fascinated me and I had high hopes for an enriching reading experience.

Synopsis (courtesy of Waterstone's): Eight-year-old Finn lives with his father, Pa, and sisters Alice and Daisy on the wreck of an ark on a remote and isolated island. The last remaining survivors of the flood, they rely on this tight-knit family unit for emotional and practical support. For Finn, the island and his relationship with Pa encompass his entire world. But Alice - a teenager growing increasingly frustrated and suspicious of the stories Pa tells of their past - begins despairingly to seek contact with the outside world. And when a boy, a stranger, is washed up on the shore, it appears they may not be alone after all. "The Island at the End of the World" is a deeply unnerving and beautifully written exploration of family, reality and fiction, and the baffling nature of the adult world through the eyes of children.

My hopes were not dashed. I loved this book and its sheer ambition. It is a biblical allegory of the Book of Genesis and covers the Ark; Paradise; and the Tree of Knowledge in a present post-apocalyptic setting. The narration in the first part of the novel alternates between Finn & and Pa and in the second between precociously adolescent Alice and Pa. Finn's narration is in his own langauge, an invented eight year old child's phonetic vernacular, and it is difficult to read and decipher at times but I highly admired it. If there is any feature of the novel that may detract readers then it is this, Finn's narration, which may appear gimmicky or even pretentious to some, but is worth persevering with. The stark contrast between the innocence of Finn's observations and the dark, brutal narration or Pa is well-realised as it is later with Alice's more perceptive but rebellious insights. A central theme of the novel is the lengths parents go to protect their children and the paradise/home they create to nurture and keep them safe; when the serpent enters and attempts to destroy that paradise, there is nothing that Pa won't do to stop him.

Alice begins to suspect Pa's dark side and the reader sees it early on but what surprised me, and what I consider Sam Taylor's greatest achievement with this work, is that by the end I sympathised with Pa and pitied his mad delusions and what they had reduced him to. There was an incongruity between the past and present, of Pa (Ben) in "Babylon" (Los Angeles) eight years prior when he envisioned Apocalypse and found God during the first earthquake that preceded "the flood". Ben worked in marketing, and was a very successful, well-off, typically middle-class husband and father until the earthquake and his subsequent devotion. Although very subtly suggested, I suspect through the timeline that these pre-flood days occurred immediately after 9/11 as allusions are made to War and a President who will bring on annihilation; there is also a passion allusion to Hurricane Katrina, and it may be what inspired the flood.

The ending is very much open to interpretation but is not frustrating, either way the "end" is still the same. It reminded me of an M. Night Shyamalan movie but besides that this novel defies categorisations or a clear-cut genre, in the way that Life of Pi by Yann Martel and Everything is Illuminated by Jonafan Safran Foer stand alone. I can't remember who it was who said that all literature is imitation but Sam Taylor manages to create something new and fresh. He draws on the Bible, Shakespeare (especially The Tempest), and the great desert island novels such as Lord of the Flies, which shares a dystopia, and Robin Crusoe; I was even reminded of Enid Blyon's island books, The Secret Island and Five on an Island in the descriptions of food and how they fed and fended for themselves. Another novel that came to mind is the post-apocalyptic novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, where they discover that there are other survivors. In The Island at the End of the World they only have three books from which to read:

"[O]n the walls now pears to be some thing I thought dint zist. Books. Hunerds of em by the looks of it maybe even thouzuns. But how. Ikerda sworn Pa told us hed only saved three books from the flood. The three mos portant books of all he said Tales the Bible an Shakespeare. All the other books in the world came from these he said."

The above quote also gives a helpful example of the writing style in Finn's parts as well as the suggestion that not all is as it seems. As Alice tells Finn:

"You only no wat Pa told you."

This is the crux of the novel; children believe what there parents tell them but where parents will go to any lengths to protect their children, children will go to any lengths to discover what their parents aren't telling them. The Tree of Knowledge is a dangerous place.

I enjoyed this novel immensely. I love when writers take risks with literature and I look forward to reading more of Sam Taylor's work; his debut novel, The Republic of Trees made my radar last year and promptly fell off it again but that will be remedied in the future along with his second novel.

I leave you with his re-working of the classic nursery rhyme:

Its raining its poring

The neighbors ignoring
They laft at our boar
Til we started to float
An they were all dead in the morning