Category: Archive

Berlin is a wonderful city, and I am not only saying this because I have an unhealthy Brezel addiction, facilitated by my best friend who lives there. I have been to Berlin five times now, and it was the first place that I ever travelled to outside of Bulgaria, so it holds a certain esteemed place in my heart. It feels familiar, and yet there’s always something to make it just a little bit different from the previous time (and of course, looking for new Brezel fillings to try also helps).

My most recent foray was in June, in part to catch an Angus & Julia Stone concert, in part to finally see Berlin in the summer (and naturally, it rained all throughout!) With a concert in Neukölnn and a bookshop in Kreuzberg, I spent a considerable amount of time on the U7.  Now, I confess that Another Country was not a random discovery – I deliberately picked it from among the results of an Internet search, which informed me that in 2010, Lonely Planet had placed it in the top 10 bookshops in the world.

The inside, though, surpassed my expectations of quirky/alternative/hipster. I have seen the inside of quite a few unusual second-hand bookshops, but this one was on a completely different level. You could buy beer from a fridge to sip on whilst looking around. Packages of toast bread randomly decorated the place. A sort of back room sported crates and a slightly eerie figurine (as pictured). Downstairs was the domain of more books (of course!), but it also served as a space where events and meetings are occasionally held. It is an English-language bookshop, and you can borrow some of the books for a price, and then get it partly refunded when/if you return it. The owner is Sophia, a British expat who changed gender around 2008/9; throughout my visit, she sat behind the counter, intently listened to a young American talking about his struggles in Berlin. I felt as if I had stepped into a film – anything could happen.

And it did happen. I discovered Primo Levi’s short stories. Again, I wish I could have read them in Italian, but alas. The foreword notes that Levi is primarily known for his Holocaust writings, whereas the ones in A Tranquil Star venture into other topics. These stories are exquisite, and they will bring particular pleasure to those who, like me, cherish ambiguity, multiple meanings, and are curious about readers’ response to fiction. In the foreword, Levi is quoted: “In my opinion, a story has as many meanings as there are keys in which it can be read, and so all interpretations are true, in fact the more interpretations a story can give, the more ambiguous it is.” A man after my own heart…

Levi was a chemist and this influence is more or less visible in stories like “The Magic Paint” and “The Molecule’s Defiance,” but, of course, they reach beyond the specificity of chemical make-up. There is something slightly dystopian about them, and “Knall”, with its strange killing contraption, reminded me of both Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.

“In the Park,” a story about a self-contained ‘village’ where fictional characters live, best explains the reason why Levi’s style appeals to me. He combines an exciting plot with expressive words. The story is so particular and alive with details that it sucks you right in, not just in that specific little world, but in anything Levi might have ever written. It is the sophistication of inventiveness that charms, with its seemingly effortless meticulousness –  in a way less verbose than the craftsman on my pedestal, Nabokov, but equally captivating.

My two personal favourites are “The Fugitive,” in which a poem escapes from a piece of paper despite the poet’s best efforts to literally pin it down, and “The Girl in The Book”. This latter story charmed my thoughts away from the plot, and directed them beyond, to my own love for fiction, for its ambiguity and the life it can acquire on its own, irrespective of originary inspiration. A woman’s confrontation with the fictionalised portrait of her youth struck me as both tragic and poignantly beautiful. To hear yourself as the construction of someone else’s mind and to juxtapose this with the subjective experience of your own life, inseverable and inalienable, could quite possibly create a rift, filled with sadness, a feeling of failed correspondence. But such regrets may remain couched in other words, less to the point, and so will be felt even more acutely. The sentences we concoct, not just in fiction, but also during our daily errands, are the bits and pieces which help erect someone else’s (sense of) self. Some would say life is always more real than fiction; some that fiction makes life appear more beautiful than it is. “You choose,” is what Levi’s story offers, before it shows that spillages between our decisive, programmatic worlds could always break through, break us, all of a sudden.

A day and a half after I arrived in Wales, I was already enchanted by Caerleon, with its green grass and secret – at least to me – garden, its history of harbouring Alfred, Lord Tennyson who began writing his Idylls of the King there. Almost a decade earlier, I’d spent a summer sighing and shivering over Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, on which Tennyson based his cycle of poems. I should have known then…

“Any man can lose his hat in a fairy-wind.” Any woman, too… In Cardiff, I finally gave up and let go of it in a bookshop called Troutmark. And if there is one thing better than a solitary browse, it is a browse with a friend equally in love with books, one who also roams around the aisles searching for surprises.

Shelves and shelves later, I left with some old favourites (I could not resist) and this new-found inspiration – Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale.

I picked it up from the shelf because of the light green of the cover, surrounded by sharp grass stalks, and the blurb which mentions enchantment and wood clearings. The first sentence sucked me in straight away. “In the deepest heart of England there is a place where everything is at fault.” There is something in such magical first sentences which promises that whatever happens later was always meant to flow exactly like this, like a spell that repeats itself, in a resolved circle.

Graham Joyce’s fiction is speculative and has been hard to fit into a specific genre. Some Kind of Fairy Tale tells of Tara, who, twenty years earlier, vanished in the woods of Leicestershire, in the bluebell season, after quarrelling with her boyfriend Richie. Thin and strange-eyed, she returns, claiming that she lived with the fairies for six months only, that she is still a teenager. Some chapters recount her time in that other kingdom, where Hiero (pronounced Yarrow) took her and never stopped yearning for her. Then others centre around her brother, Peter, his wife Genevieve, and their children, or around Richie. With Tara’s return, the distant and unusual mingles with daily family life … Jack, the son of Peter and Genevieve, searches for a way to make it up to the old lady who has lost her cat, and in the meantime, Tara charms mice away from Richie’s house. And yet, the most haunting of all is the havoc she wreaks in the hearts of her brother and ex-boyfriend. It’s the slow aching realisation that loss reversed is no less a loss. When I was little, lost in the magic of stories, I longed to be taken, to escape to someplace like Avalon. Then one day, I chanced upon Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Now I think of literary fairies as neither good nor bad, regardless of their portrayal. The space they inhabit is just different. I still long for it, but I know the only way of reaching it is with human strokes.

Joyce’s language is a thing of beauty, words that spring scenes at you. The bluebells beckon and their perfume lingers, conjured. With it, some ancient, handed-down magic dissolves in the air. Could be the hooves of Hiero’s steed, could be the threads invisibly spun by a masterful storyteller.

Within the daily, there are things that pop up, defying order established by repetition. Some of those things are ours for the taking. But there is also a kind of strangeness that needs a special understanding, which all of us, or I hope just most of us, are doomed never to find. It’s a lack of a common code. It’s the impossibility of searching for one together.

To live with the fairies is to let in a longing and never stop feeding it, until there’s no erasure, until it becomes like time passing, a necessity. Go with them once, and six months become twenty years, if you ever return to that previous world.

This is just a story. It wags no cautionary fingers. But still… It would be wise to time your adventures. Be careful how long you spend in worlds spun by strangers. They sound so fine, like a daydream sprung to life. It must come alive only through me, as I choose to go, as I read the second sentence… But then again, this wind…

Graham Joyce died on 9 September 2014. May his world(s) last in the memories of his family and in the books we carry with us.

Gary Jules has this one song, “No Poetry”, where verse fails to bring together pen and paper. Unfortunately, this was a case of a whole lot of poetry coming between me and the keyboard. In the time it has taken me to finally write this, I have ventured out to both Wales and Germany in search of old friends, stomach muscles cramped with laughter, and books (which I have even finished now). The reason it has taken me so long to get round to writing this particular review is that I made the choice to pick up, from the dimly lit bowels of Quinto & Francis Edwards Books, a time-warping compendium of poetry.

Soho, the location of the bookshop, is a nightmare of a place for the indecisive book lover. Too many doors to strange paper-locked lands everywhere, all equally alluring. Quinto & Francis Edwards was as random a possibility as any of the others. Nothing in particular led me to it, except maybe a whole heap of historical unanalysable choices. The bookshop is a wonderful place for the collector of antiquarian books (the Francis Edwards branch on the ground floor), but none of those fit my hand with that enchanting poof of dust. I had to make my way downstairs, to the old and more modestly priced stock of Quinto, to find what I didn’t know I was looking for.

The thing with poetry is that to me, it is always as sweet as Turkish delight, and needs to be measured out. As you can see from my copy of The Cherry Tree, it is very lovingly battered. Not that it was lustrous and shining in the first place, but all the lugging around certainly hasn’t helped. Geoffrey Grigson, the wonderful poet and critic who has collected the poems, also didn’t contribute to me whizzing through the book, as he urges in the foreword: “Being read – yes, by yourself, and aloud. After all, poems are made aloud. They are read over and over by the poets who are making them, and using that apparatus by which words are announced and pronounced.”

In my life of weird habits and obsessions, I have read so many things out loud – including all five A Song of Ice and Fire novels, and I did not need to be told twice that these poems were to be discovered in solitude, by my own vocal chords. And yet, I would also take The Cherry Tree with me everywhere, sometimes mouthing words in the incidental moments of quiet during the day, more often getting frustrated with the social conventions forcing me to keep a good poem behind teeth bars, suffocating on beauty in the morning suit-riddled carriages of the London Tube.

The book is divided in sections of moods and subjects, and many of those begin with a reproduction of a beautiful woodcut.

As an example, this one is from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a romance by Francesco de Colonna, printed in 1488/89 by the Aldine Press in Venice. Seeing these transported me to Mo and Meggie Folchart’s Inkheart world, where an Old Europe feel, the craft of bookbinding, and poems preceding the chapters combined to shape my dreams for life.

Another thing that made it hard for me to read this book in a linear manner was the coincidences that accompanied its lines. This left me stunned for a good few minutes: “For many an honest Indian ass/Goes for a unicorn.” Indeed it does, as I recently discovered myself, but I did not expect to be told again so soon, and definitely not in a poem.

A few hundred pages later, Edmund Spencer’s Prothalamion appeared, at I time that I’d been reading T.S. Eliot’s interviews, and rereading The Wasteland. “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” became a constant accompaniment in my head whenever I saw the river in real life, wondering what songs the Thames has succumbed to now, for mine seemed only to be a mash-up of the lines of others.

Geoffrey Grigson continues: “Reading them by yourself […] until, at any rate, we can share them with someone we love.” I have chosen three poems to share, hoping that the vocal chords of strangers and friends will cut them loose in new air, in fresh momentary solitudes. They all have something to do with that fear which makes me hunger for poetry in the first place, for lines that burst open the raw core of that desperate beauty which lies dormant in the busy daily rituals.

On the Beach at Night by Walt Whitman, “something there is more immortal even than the stars”.

We’ll Go to Sea No More by unknown author, “An’ in your tales and sangs we’ll tell/How weel the boat ye row”.

Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost, “One luminary clock against the sky,/ Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.”

It is shameful, really, this delay of mine, slipping into old habits of enthusiastic beginnings and lazy follow-ups. And yet, what can you do against an insistent feeling of not wanting to let go of these poems, because they are like paperweights, holding you down against the blowing away, reminders that touching the poetic pulse of life makes it that much sweeter and yet that much harder to do anything at all.

And because I can, and because it is becoming something of a tradition, here goes Billy Collins on the moment of sighs that incapacitates me so.

Someplace else, people are rushing past each other with that awful dog-eat-dog cadence of Waterloo Station. In Hyde Park, tourists snap photographs of Peter Pan’s statue, and only a couple of children run around and irreverently stand on the plaque. London is basking in the May sunshine, gently slurping at it, and you can feel the pleasure of its drunkenness.

Gloucester Road is bustling with people headed to the museums, children in tow. Only a little bit further down the road, Slightly Foxed lies in plain sight, undisturbed, better than a museum, books overflowing onto the sidewalk.

As I walk in, I think of a world where it’d be just as dangerous to leave books unsupervised as it would be to do so with diamonds. It’s intimate and hot inside, the sun refusing to be kept out.  A “More books downstairs” sign points to a dark and cavernous basement. I love those signs – they remind me of books clamouring for attention, eager to not be overlooked, to be given a chance.

I failed this appeal, though. I went for an upstairs book, since that’s where most of the second-hand ones are. My choice this time was The Honey Siege, by Gil Buhet. I wish I could have found it in French, but the blurb was irresistible. And luckily so – later, an Internet search revealed that detailed information about the book or the author, in either language, was lacking. A fortunate find, and a reminder that there are literary worlds out there to pick out for ourselves.

I remember that a few years ago, paraphrasing Gandalf, I declared that I had been meddling in the affairs of adults. Now, in retrospect, at the time, that meddling really was only that – a peripheral incursion, a slight stirring with the finger of the pot of things that come with being a “grown-up”. Spending days and days of accomplishing utterly reasonable things, as I am undoubtedly supposed to know, makes the world go round, and saps the strength of those intolerable beasts called idleness and nonsense.

The Honey Siege is the story of six boys in the imaginary French town of Casteilcorbon. There’s Pierrot Daranluz, the popular leader who brightens everyone’s day (the original French title of the book is Le Chevalier Pierrot) and whose parents own the town’s inn; Gustave (Tatave) Grosbelhomme, who lives with his widowed herbalist mother; Riquet Martelot, the inventive son of the blacksmith; Francisco Guartorella, who often accompanies his Spanish father on poaching forays; Victorin Muche, the older (and apparently not too bright) son of the mayor; and Georget Grillon, the teacher’s son. The drama unfolds precisely around M. Grillon’s beloved bees. One day, he discovers the hives ransacked, the honey stolen, and the bees in starved distress. But when he decides to punish the stubbornly unconfessing boys by giving them an extra weekend class, oh, how they rebel. The historic fortress of Casteilcorbon is chosen as the perfect place to teach adults a lesson of honour and solidarity and just what offended children can accomplish. Portcullis drawn in and some fouaces stolen, the knights even take a prisoner and welcome a noteworthy guest.

Reading The Honey Siege is like being stuck in that specific moment when you suddenly discover that the childhood spirit has been packing its bags for quite some time in the spare room you hardly ever visit. There’s that shadowy age period when escapades and irresponsibility are still well within the realm of the possible, but when it comes right down to it, acting like a child – well, it’s just inappropriate. It could be the fatigue, the weary familiarity of this world, a simple overabundance of the past tense. After all, as the book says, “The despair of a child is complete and absolute, for he has no experience by which to measure it.”

The boys’ parents are some of the most interestingly imperfect I have come across in this type of fiction. M. Mouche is a loud and offensive authority figure. The blacksmith often hits Riquet. M. Grillon can’t talk to his son about the death of his mother. Cisco has drunkards for parents, and it is his sister who takes care of the baby. Mme. Grosbelhomme’s love is stifling and over-protective. Pierrot darts between the inn’s customers, a pet mouse in his pocket – still, his parents seem to be the only ones who have, if not necessarily admirable traits, at least no disconcerting ones. And as if that weren’t enough – Tatave’s mother and the teacher are secretly conspiring to marry. What is to be done when faced with such grown-ups? Nothing. “Not for the present. Later on, when they were parents themselves, things would be different; but until that golden age arrived you had to admit the imperfections of existence.” This is the child’s conviction of the power of young imagination, of its rightful dominion that would reign supreme if only it weren’t checked by adult forces. Often this conviction gets lost with the passage of time. Later, the newly acquired freedom might find its expression in indulgence in material things, and the feeling of being freed from powerlessness becomes the duty to take up the well-earned place in the ranks of the status quo.

The Honey Siege offers a consolation of sorts, though. If children, the masters of unravelling the mysteries of so many things, are helpless before that indomitable rock called adulthood, then the following conclusion can be drawn – adults themselves are way too unreasonable to be deemed reasonable. You can test this – stick your (well-washed!) fingers in the honey jar, lick them over well, and no doubt – you’ll get a stern look from a grown-up. That ridiculous consternation in itself is silliness. So, maybe there’s still hope that what makes us children, curious, naughty, nonsensical children, is also what makes us people, a whole lifetime over.

P.S. A registered recurrence: my love for Billy Collins’s poems, once mentioned, will be indulged in again.

(Note, 15 April 2018: At the start of 2016, Slightly Foxed had to close its Gloucester Road premises. Currently, the bookshop resides at 53 Hoxton Square in Shoreditch.)

The London Review of Books has its own bookshop, and this revelation hit me en route to the British Museum. I had stepped out of Holborn tube station, right into an area which I inevitably associate with the Inns of Court and a somewhat Dickensian atmosphere. Still, I know enough about the Bloomsbury set (let’s not linger on this, though, lest another reading list gap rears its head) to get the tingling feeling of a literary time-traveller once the dome of St Paul’s is out of sight.

The LRB bookshop is of an ordered nature, all pristine books in neat lines of uncracked spines. The entrance area feels somewhat transitory, with wide windows framing the outside world which still feels too close for comfort. Downstairs, it’s a different, hushed, story, where time spent in the company of books is a slow affair.

My choice was largely inspired by the flashbacks which its title and cover brought about. When I was little, I was so fascinated by my father’s veterinary textbooks that I gobbled up whole chunks of what I couldn’t understand – as exemplified by a durable and proclaimed conviction that horses can suffer from amnesia (as opposed to anemia). Then, I started acquiring information about all sorts of animals – the mouflon and Przewalski’s horse being two particular favourites. So when I saw a book titled The Natural History of Unicorns, sporting a drawing of a very un-unicorn looking animal, I had to know.

As it turns out, in order to be a scholar of unicorns – and there is, believe it or not, such a thing as unicorn scholarship – you would have to be of that special kind of people who are willing to pursue chimeras. Thankfully, Chris Lavers, a Lecturer at the University of Nottingham, is one such person. History here is jumbled and hard to follow in a linear manner. It is like swimming in a vast expanse of stories and emerging with a sea shell which carries only a distant echo of the truth.

Ctesias, a Greek physician who lived in the court of the Persian king in fifth century BC, was fascinated by the unknown lands to the East – India. In Indica, a work which survives only in fragments or accounts, he describes a peculiar animal with one horn. It combines so many distinct traits that it could only be a composite of a number of animals. Thus, animals as different from each other as the rhinoceros, the chiru (Tibetan antelope), the kiang, the wild ass, and the yak, could have merged to form Ctesias’ beast.

Much later, when a unicorn pops up in the Bible, it is rather strange that its defining characteristic – namely, unicornity – is not elaborated upon. And here, there is a wonderful story. When the Bible text was translated from Hebrew into Greek, no scholar recognised the animal reem mentioned in the original, but it seemed to vaguely correspond to Ctesias’ descriptions. Thus, it was translated with a Greek word meaning monoceros, i.e. one-horn. The dominant Christian position thereafter was that the reem is the rhinoceros.  However, the original reem, that of the Hebrew text, turned out to be (as later revealed in Henry Rawlinson’s study of a Persian inscription), the now extinct aurochs – a two-horned animal.

Throughout time, the unicorn became more prominent in the Christian tradition. Physiologus, a (presumably) second-century text/predecessor of bestiaries, consists of descriptions of animals and fantastical creatures, and, of course, features the unicorn. The nature of stories in the text is allegorical, and the tale of the unicorn refers to the a virgin who can trap the animal, and carries distinctly Christian connotations. This story, however, seems to be a modified version of ancient Eastern tales of the male meeting the female, and settling down after the due process of (sexual) taming is completed.  The religious later seeped out into the secular and chivalrous which, in an ironic return, was once more preoccupied with the charms of women. It’s a beautiful way to think about stories as they twist their way through the centuries, to then flow into others, and, ultimately, saturate human lives, not only in art, but in practice as well. Thus, in the Middle Ages, alicorn – the unicorn’s horn – became a desired and consequently very expensive possession, due to its supposed alexipharmic properties (i.e. as an antidote to poison). In reality, what was peddled as alicorn had very little to do with what we would now picture when we think of a unicorn. Just compare a photo of a narwhal to the white horse-like creatures of medieval tapestries.

In the eighteenth century, travellers encountered the idea of a one-horned animal in their explorations of India and Tibet. Lavers says: “Nikolai Przhevalsky eventually twigged that Himalayan unicorns existed wherever he happened not to be, a phenomenon nicely illustrated by the rajah’s phrase barra dûre!, a great way off!” Similarly, later exploits into Africa did not result in the discovery of unicorns – but the pursuit led to Harry Johnston finding the okapi in the Ituri rainforest. Unicorns don’t and can’t exist, was the adamant position. Until science, in the face of W. Franklin Dove, intervened to create a unicorned calf, by surgically manipulating its horn buds.

I have to admit complete and utter failure in all my attempts to arrange the facts, conclusions, and hypotheses of this book neatly and chronologically in my head. Coming to the natural history of unicorns as a lay lover of zoology, I relished the descriptions of the real animals, accompanied by pictures and stories. But what stuck with me above all is humanity’s power to transcend the constraints of its surrounding world through a combination of chance, foolishness, and imagination. A child sits down to watch a cartoon about a unicorn, surrounded by a biscuit tin, an ironing board, and the ghost of an aurochs. It’s the stuff of myth, really.

The great thing about big and famous cities is that they let you create personal cult artefacts out of your lived experience, as well as crane your neck like a tourist to see those made famous by others. This bookshop caught me on the way to the iconic Portobello Road, a place baggaged with plenty of cultural cool. Headed for the infamous blue door of Notting Hill (which is actually not there anymore, having been sold at an auction) or the blue plaque marking George Orwell’s old lodgings, you can easily miss the Book & Comic Exchange. Especially if you are used to books exuding a lot of lustre.

This second-hand bookshop is in no way glamorous – it is cramped, old, and does not beckon with baubles and the literary champagne of scribbled reviews of this and that recommended read. If you go in searching for a specific new title, most likely it won’t be there, or if it is, you won’t be able to locate it. What you can do, though, is while away ages deposing books from their shelves whilst literally rubbing shoulders with fellow literature aficionados.

Perhaps most tellingly, this place made me completely fail in terms of self-restraint. I walked out not with one, but three books. Still, given the wonderfully random collection of alluring titles, and the ridiculously affordable prices, it’s debatable whether it was lack of self-control or just good bibliophile investment.

The focus here is, of course, on the truly spontaneous choice. Longitude, by Dava Sobel, recounts the history of time-keeping, and its evolution towards ever sharper accuracy. This was propelled by the increasingly desperate need of seafarers to have a reliable way of telling their whereabouts. It is also inevitably linked to the story of the Englishman John Harrison and his life-long work, including overcoming all sorts of obstacles that stood in the way of creating the perfect marine chronometer.

My immediate attraction to this story about telling time aboard a ship comes from a lasting love of the sea/ocean, and the stories which this vast expanse of water has inspired. From the Bulgarian poet Hristo Fotev’s rhymes about the Black Sea, to Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco and We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen, I sink in them all with Legolas’ lament, “Alas! for the gulls. No peace shall I have again under beech or under elm”. The ocean sea is so vast and immutable but relentlessly travelled that it is easy to forget it was ever different, that it too used to be wild and uncharted before it was domesticated. Even the greatest explorers got lost at sea.

Parallels and meridians slice the world in chunks; or they are rather like a net thrown over the globe, with humanity left to blunder around, trapped between the rough edges of its ropes. Finding longitude was not always a simple thing, and, annoyingly, it was inextricably linked to time(-keeping). It required setting time at the meridian of reference at local noon and comparing it to the (recorded) time in the home port, in order to calculate the distance from the latter, in degrees (one hour of difference between the two being equal to fifteen degrees of longitude).

John Harrison’s creation of a precise mechanical timekeeper came after years of only partially successful attempts to attain accuracy. Astronomy with its focus on the clockwork universe offered a way out of the difficulties – the sun, the stars, and the moon all seemed to hold promises, but the associated methods either depended on clear weather, rare celestial events, or knowledge that required advanced technology. Galileo saw a potential solution in observing the moons of Jupiter – this, however, required equipment that was not practicable on a ship. Interestingly, his idea later served to advance mapmaking, and prompted the comment of Louis XIV that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.

Then there were the ridiculous and cruel methods, such as the wounded dog theory. A substance called powder of sympathy was sprinkled on a weapon which had been used to injure a dog. The dog would then be sent off on the ship. Each sprinkle, which would be performed in the home port at certain pre-determined times, would supposedly cause the wounded dog to yelp in pain (while somehow healing its wounds, too), and, that way, the animal would announce the (home port) time through its suffering.

The big problem, of course, was that a ship which has lost its way often sails towards destruction. In 1707, a British naval fleet was obliterated by the rocks off the Isles of Scilly when the ships couldn’t calculate their bearings. More than 1,400 sailors died. In the wake of that disaster, Parliament passed the Longitude Act 1714, which established a Board of Longitude, meant to encourage and examine new methods. John Harrison, the hero of Longitude, is mysteriously lacking in formal education or apprenticeship to any famous clockmaker. He worked as a carpenter, and his mastery of that trade is evident in his wooden clocks. During the course of his life, he made numerous mechanical timekeepers which were presented to the Board. He could have claimed the prize at an early stage, but the reason for his many attempts and years and years of labour, was that he himself pointed out of the flaws of his works, in a desire to reach perfection. In the competition with those certain that a solution would come from the clockwork universe and not from lowly, earthly mechanics, Harrison and his timekeepers suffered great injustice. Until, of course, they were vindicated in the most fitting way – by the passage of time itself.

Dava Sobel has travelled to the Clockmakers Museum in Guildhall and to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, both of which house creations by Harrison. Her immersion in the story is enviable, and is most touching when she recalls the moment she finally sees the timepieces about which she has read so much.

Longitude immerses you in a tale of astronomy, clockmaking, voyages by sea, the stubborn determination of not one but many men, their mistakes, failures and triumphs. And all of this sprinkled with the absurdity of what could easily be fiction, but, miraculously, is not.

Walking around on a lazy dusk-infused Saturday, I bumped into Heywood Hill, also known as the Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street. A look through the window promised wonders inside, and I knew I’d chanced upon something I’d been missing for quite some time. The blue plaque informed me that Nancy Mitford had worked there (a sigh for another gap in my reading history), and the bike perched against the fence added to the surreal feeling of having seen this place a million times before, in bits and pieces, and now it had assembled itself to become my own personal rabbit-hole.

 

Inside, Heywood Hill really is packed full of books, old and new. I pined (still am pining, actually) for a beautiful black-and-white edition of 101 Dalmatians. The bookshop is a place to slow down in the company of volumes stacked high on the floor, resting on tables, and spying from high shelves. I had the perfect long and undisturbed browse, accompanied only by the sound of creaking floorboards.

I tend to gravitate towards second-hand books. The thought that a book belonged to someone else is an exciting one. The one I picked up even has an ex libris, and a few typos are corrected in pencil. (A Billy Collins poem comes to mind.)

 

This book is a reminder of how entertaining biographical writing can be, and also of the charm of the now extinct ornate language of the previous century. In a meta-commentary on his own task, Pearson writes (in relation to Scott’s late-life work on a biography of Napoleon), “He had not the true biographer’s intense but impartial interest in the personality of his subject, and he could not make up his mind about Napoleon […] Such terms [virtue, greatness] however are wholly inconclusive when applied to the Napoleons of life, who are created by universal hallucination and reflect the absurdity, the idealism, the evil, the stupidity, the passions of humanity. The ordinary phrases by which we define a man as great, good, wicked, noble, vicious, moral, criminal, and so on, are meaningless when ascribed to creatures of peculiar circumstance and popular emotion, who are not personalities but phenomena.” A passage slightly unexpected in light of quite a few partial (and pretty entertaining) remarks earlier on from Pearson, yet it also underlines that this is an intimate story of a human being – a tale which, when it inevitably ends with death, leaves you shaken, having lost a friend all too soon.

Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771, and spent a good part of his childhood in the countryside, recovering from a powerless right leg (as well as from questionable treatments). He loved listening to stories and had a formidable imagination. One of the many great passages in the biography tells of an incident from his school days. Scott coveted the status of a boy who always answered questions in class first, and upon observing that the boy would fumble with a button on his waistcoat every time a question was asked, Scott decided to relieve his classmate from that aide-mémoire. The mischievous deed done and the next question asked, the boy was utterly confounded at the absence of the button and never recovered, which quite affected Scott’s conscience, especially when later the grown boy came to occupy an inferior legal position in Edinburgh, and even took to drinking. Pearson concludes: “The connection between button and bottle is too vague to found a moral on the tale”. Reader, you (and Sir Walter Scott) have been told.

Scott studied law and was admitted to the Bar in 1792, but law books were often put aside for Scottish ballads and German poetry. He fell deeply in love with Williamina Belsches, who decided to marry William Forbes despite her attachment to Scott, and the shock of this turn of events had a lasting effect on him. He later married Charlotte Charpentier, who overlooked Scott’s limp for his sense of humour, and whom he loved with the spent but lifelong affection of someone who had lived through one turbulent affair and did not hope or wish for another.

He started with poetry, and his first bestseller was a narrative poem. An interesting anecdote evokes an assembly where both Scott and Coleridge were present, the latter being constantly lauded by his admirers who would even go so far as to ask Scott to read one of his own works, for the specific purpose of highlighting its inferiority to Coleridge’s poems. One time, Scott repeated a couple of lines from what he had supposedly read in a provincial paper – those were received with coldness and some offensive comments. That is, until Coleridge declared “For God’s sake, let Mr Scott alone – I wrote the poem.” Scott was acquainted with a number of significant people of his time – Joana Baillie, Maria Edgworth, George IV (who was a fan), Goethe (with whom he corresponded and who apparently put everything else aside when a new Waverley novel appeared). Scott’s love of Scottish tales and ballads surrounded him with interesting and peculiar people with a strong connection to the land.  He thought Byron the superior poet with his “deep-seated knowledge of the human heart”; he also admired Jane Austen for her ability to portray daily life (so different from his own romanticism) in a way that is poignant in its acute truthfulness.

Scott was an extremely prolific novelist (and he only started in his early 40s), and wrote without pre-planning the plot.  He published the Waverley novels anonymously: “It was his humour to be the Great Unknown”. Yet despite the commercial success of a number of his works, and the fact that when he ran into financial troubles later, Scott wrote with the express desire to pay off his and his publishers’ debts, writing seemed to have a further, different power for him. In 1818, when suffering from the extreme pain of a persistent illness, Scott dictated The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose. Later he did not remember any of the characters or events in them.

In 1831, he went on a tour across Europe, and when he heard that Goethe, whom he had intended to visit at Weimar, had died, insisted on a swift return to Abbotsford, his own Scottish home which he had spent so much time planning, building and extending. He died there in 1832.

Walter Scott, his life and personality, spilled out of the pages into my own days and saturated them with the warmth of his interest in and love of people. He helped friends and dependents, and was a charitable man. Pearson writes, “Too selfish to take an interest in human beings, many people display an interest in the community, deluding themselves with the belief that institutions are of greater moment than individuals, the sabbath than the man. Scott was not of their number.” Which is why he was and remains so popular – there is that powerful romantic sentiment in his characters and plots which reveals, without moralising, the ambivalent power of human emotion. Even though Pearson kindly informed me that The Bride of Lammermoor is not exactly one of Scott’s best works, the context-deprived I of some years ago sat horrified but deeply touched as the last pages of the story fluttered away. Still, I do believe that even though Scott himself did not think highly of the Bride, he would not judge me for liking it.

Now here’s something I hadn’t really thought about. This second blank page is even more intimidating, what with all its intolerance of any continued introductory blues and its expectations of neat verbosity. So, I’m jumping straight in…

My first spontaneous book trip was to Word on the Water, a boat/bookshop on the canal by Paddington station. I walk past it every day in the morning and evening – and what a treat it is to be coming back from work at dusk, in the springtime, to the sight of books being brought back in from where they have been luring strangers all day under the sounds of music over the water.

And it was only when I went in for the first time that I became acquainted with its two lovely assistants (only one of them pictured here).

But enough about the London bookbarge. There is a lot on the Internet about it and the fascinating people behind the idea. I’m moving on to the main thing – the book I picked up.

My first completely uninformed and unbiased book expedition in years didn’t start all too smoothly. As was to be expected, I caught sight of a few titles that I had always wanted to read but managed to resist the temptation.

One lengthy browse later, I came out with this.

I was initially drawn by the title, and somehow thought it fitting to pick a book referring to the Danube whilst in a boat on a London canal. Which is just a standard example of my self-indulgent fascination with personal associations, however remote. The Danube is only a couple of hours away from my Bulgarian home, and continues eastwards to flow into my beloved Black Sea. The journeys of border-spanning rivers have always intrigued me.

Set in and around Vienna, The Danube Testament has S. for narrator, a man who has lived through some terrible events, and struggles at the edge of sanity. In light of this, it is impossible to completely trust anything he shares. S.’s tone is light-hearted, even when things like infanticide are introduced. The many characters in his life are wonderfully diverse – his sister Eva, a martyr of circumstance; aunt Mia, an impressive, canasta-loving old lady; cousin Hannah, S.’s childhood crush/love, who now lives in the USA and is a doctor with a penchant for the unconventional; a conflicted priest; the psychiatrist Dr. Rosen. Most interestingly, untrustworthy as they are, S.’s stories about all these lives offer a chance to touch upon what is barely discernible, concealed as it is beneath the self-deception resulting from S.’s condition – the loneliness of the self, and perhaps most achingly, what struck me as the loneliness and misery which S. believes imposed upon everyone else, all hope for true connection lost. The narrative itself is a consequence of S.’s obsession with creative writing as a way of coping with problems. This really made me qualify and question my own ideas about the power of imagination.

I loved the intermingling of the idea of Old Europe, in some of S.’s little anecdotes, with the realities of the modern everyday – flights, deadlines, rock music. One of the most memorable stories was that of the city fathers of Marseille, who provided cups of poison to those wishing to end their lives if the latter could provide a good reason for doing so. So far, I have found absolutely nothing to back the historical veracity of this. Given that it is part of S.’s narrative, this is unsurprising, though. At the very end, the last chapter/appendix, which is a fiction story written by S., wiped away all the carefully crafted evasiveness and even humour of the preceding parts. The Danube just happens to be the rain-swollen backdrop to this testament imbibed with the anguish and the imposed escapism of illness. This could be the plight of any individual, and is therefore the plight of humanity as such.

Lastly, the story of the book itself is quite interesting. Its first edition apparently vanished, and copies are extremely rare. Mine is a second-hand first edition of the reissue by another publisher. Still, there are very few results for The Danube Testament online, which is a shame. And I have absolutely no idea who the author is. All that the blurb says is that “Ingrid Mann was born in Vienna”. If you do know more, please drop me a line – whether now or at whatever point in the future you happen to come across this.

I liked this book, if this is the appropriate verb to use for a story that often disturbs, raises questions without answers, and really stays with you, underneath all the hubbub of the day.

Two subsequent notes (13 April 2018): 

Months after writing this post, I received an email letting me know that Ingrid Mann had passed away on 17 August 2015, in New Jersey, US. This is a link to her obituary in the Bangor Daily News, which also outlines her story.

Unfortunately, in 2014/2015, Word on the Water lost its Paddington mooring. It can now be found at Granary Square (Regent’s Canal), near King’s Cross. Here’s a New York Times article about the story of the London Bookbarge.