A World Gone Mad – The diaries of Astrid Lindgren 1939 – 1945

Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death

August is Women in translation month, and so when not reading books for All Virago/All August or book group reads I like to try and fit two or three #WITmonth books in as well. August is all about juggling books it seems.

My first read for this year’s women in translation month was A World Gone Mad – the diaries of Astrid Lindgren 1939-1945, which I remember buying in the London review bookshop on my last London shopping expedition in November. Astrid Lindgren, of course the author of the children’s classic Pippi Longstocking books, stories which at the time these diaries were begun has not even been thought of. The title attracted me – how often in the last year or so have people declared ‘dear heavens, the world has gone mad’ – I have certainly said it and the week I picked up this book, there were further world events over which to shake our heads. I was made to think, more than once, how stupid an apparently intelligent species must be – if they fail to learn from their own history.

“Oh! War broke out today. Nobody could believe it.
Yesterday afternoon, Elsa Gullander and I were in Vasa Park with the children running and playing around us and we sat there giving Hitler a nice, cosy telling-off and agreed that there definitely was not going to be a war – and now today!”

Diaries are rather difficult to review, but this a very readable book and its author is very relatable to. Astrid Lindgren stares forlornly from the cover, pulling the reader in and one can’t help but wonder her thoughts. Karin Nyman, Astrid Lindgren’s daughter in her foreword explains how her mother had been determined to document the war from which Sweden remained neutral, but which raged around them on all sides. She remembers seeing her mother scribbling in her notebooks cutting out things from the newspapers, for the five-year-old Karin it was perfectly normal. The diaries were discovered in a wicker laundry basket in the Dalagatan home where Astrid Lindgren had lived from the 1940s until her death in 2002. Her daughter acknowledges how extraordinary it was, for a thirty-two-year-old wife and mother with some secretarial training but no previous experience of political thinking to have produced what she did. For almost six years, recording her thoughts, painstakingly cutting out newspaper articles to stick alongside her entries (these articles are not reproduced in the book).

“Today’s huge sensation – Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, flew to the British Isles in a Messerschmitt plane and parachuted safely to the ground, where a Scottish farm-worker looked after him and took him to hospital in Glasgow. Now we’ve seen everything.”

Throughout the war, Astrid Lindgren documented the war as she saw it, felt about it and feared it, as well as what she read about it in the newspapers. Sweden had elected to remain neutral from the war – and given their precarious geographical position that probably saved a great many Swedes. However, their neutral position was one Astrid sometimes felt uncomfortable about – as she read about devastating occupations, war crimes and food shortages. As she continues to document the war, the shifting political alliances and how they impacted upon the war, she often considers the nature of evil, and the individual’s responsibility at such times to stand against it.

All around Sweden, other nations were suffering terribly, Norway and Denmark occupied by the Germans, Finland by the Russians, resulting in them losing a sizable amount of their territory in uneasy peace negotiations. Sweden was in a vulnerable position, and there were times when Astrid was practically holding her breath, anxious lest her country find themselves invaded, drawn into hostilities against their will.

“It was Karin’s seventh birthday yesterday. I wrote in my diary on this day last year ‘God grant that the world will look different by Karin’s next birthday!’ And it certainly does look different, but there’s no sign of any changes for the better. Possibly Sweden and the other Nordic countries are in slightly less danger, the main focus now seems to be on the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. Yesterday the Germans launched an air invasion on Crete, or was it the day before? What’s left of Greek resistance is concentrated there, with British assistance.”

Alongside her entries which document the war so well, we get frequent glimpses of ordinary family life. The children’s birthdays, the gifts they received the food that was cooked and eaten in celebration. We also get some moving descriptions of her marriage – hints of some difficulties in the last year of the war, which she doesn’t dwell on or go into any detail about, in what for her was obviously meant as a chronicle of war. As a mother to a teenage boy as well as a young daughter – Astrid felt especially for the mothers of soldiers killed and maimed, realising, as she considered her own dear son, that the pain of just imagining him in their place was more than she could bear.

As the war years advanced Astrid began working as a censor in the postal control division, the letters that passed through her hands, providing Astrid with another more personal perspective on the war that was destroying Europe. An aspiring writer, Astrid won a competition in 1944 with a story about Britt-Marie, the Pippi Longstocking stories were originally invented to entertain her daughter while she was ill.

These diaries were a great way for to celebrate Women in Translation month. I found I really liked Astrid, and on finishing the book looked up her Wikipedia page – she really was a fascinating woman who was obviously very well loved by the people of Sweden.

Read Full Post »

The Year of Reading Dangerously – Andy Miller (2014)

I expect the twitterers among you already follow Andy Miller (AKA @i_am_mill_i_am ) writer and co-host of the Backlisted podcasts, if not you should. I haven’t really got into listening to the podcasts regularly yet as I never seem to have time – reading, blogging, a P365 photography group on Facebook, working full time, sleeping argh! I need more hours.

The Year of Reading Dangerously is a book I have been aware of for a long time, but it was only recently I got around to buying a copy. I’m famously bad at reading non-fiction, but I do like a book about books, so I was confident that there would be a lot for me to enjoy in this book – there was.

“It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.”

Andy Miller had the kind of life many people I suspect would recognise as being similar to their own. A job he liked, a commute to London, a wonderful family – a busy routine and a love of books he had stopped finding the time to read. Realising that books had become what was missing in his life, Andy set about putting that right – and so began a year of reading which would slowly transform his life. He committed himself to fifty pages a day – it was a commitment which quickly became a luxury, a joy – though with some books it really was more of a commitment.

This book is about that year of reading, about the fifty books he came to choose and added to The List of Betterment (serious books, classics, literature), his reading of them, reaction to them, and the life he was living as a husband, father and editor while he was reading. The List of Betterment was not a list compiled especially because it contained all the books Miller thought everyone should read, they were simply the books he wanted to read. I love a book list, what reader doesn’t? So, I had to turn to the list first (sorry) and count up how many I had read – eighteen! Oops – I wondered what I would put on my own list of betterment (ugh-o I really wish I hadn’t thought of that!)

It began with The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, bought on a day out to Broadstairs with his young son Alex, (Alex got a copy of Mr Small).

“Some part of that book, of Bulgakov himself, now lived on in me. The secret of The Master and Margarita, which seems to speak to countless people who know nothing about the bureaucratic machinations of the early Stalinist dictatorship or the agony of the novel’s gestation: words are our transport, our flight and our homecoming in one.
You don’t get that from Dan Brown.”

Other books include: Middlemarch, Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Sea, The Sea and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. *Disclaimer* when I looked at that list there were books on it I knew I never wanted to read, and would only ever read should I have the misfortune to be locked in a (well-lit) dungeon with only those books for company. Still, that didn’t prevent me from being interested in Andy’s journey through his betterment books – a couple even got added to my wishlist. His enthusiasm for Anna Karenina, made me want to re-read it, though I too absolutely loved it many moons ago, equally his irritation with Pride and Prejudice only made me love it more – I’ve read it four times.

As well as being a book about books The Year of Reading Dangerously is a work of memoir too. I loved the glimpses into Andy’s world, the relationship with his son is especially touching. I began to think we must be similar ages, so many of his references are mine too – so much resonated, especially his memory of school days. However, literary snob that I am, the thing that got me most excited was Andy’s ruminating about the children’s story book The Tiger Who Came to Tea. So, while I may have only read eighteen books from The List of Betterment – I have read The Tiger Who Came to Tea numerous times, and never tire of it.

“Is it wrong to prefer books to people? Not at Christmas. A book is like a guest you have invited into your home, except you don’t have to play Pictionary with it or supply it with biscuits and stollen.”

This is a book which will appeal greatly to those who love a book about books, whether you think you want to read those books or not, but it is also honest, funny and wise – the chapter about Herman Melville vs Dan Browne is quite hilarious – and while I shall never read either one, I was wonderfully entertained.

Read Full Post »

Until we are Free – Shirin Ebadi (2016)

Last year, while I was at the Hay Festival I attended an event with Shirin Ebadi – who I admit – I knew nothing about. I thought a talk by an Iranian human rights lawyer would be interesting – it was fascinating, and inspiring. I couldn’t help but buy her most recent book – and queued up to have it signed.

Such is the state of my tbr – and my fickleness as a reader I can buy or receive as a gift a book I long to read and have it sit there for two years – another time I buy a book and read it a week later. I don’t know why Until we are Free has sat unread for almost a year – but I recently suggested it to my very small book group and we will meet next week to discuss it.

Shirin Ebadi published two previous volumes – Iran Awakening a memoir of her life and work, and The Golden Cage, which tells stories of living under the Iranian regime. Until we are Free is another memoir – this time it tells the story of what happened to Shirin Ebadi and her family after she won the Nobel Peace prize in 2003. It is a story of extraordinary determination, and heart-breaking personal sacrifice.

“The story of Iran is the story of my life. Sometimes I wonder why I am so attached to my country, why the outline of Tehran’s Alborz mountains is as intimate and precious to me as the curve of my daughter’s face, and why I feel a duty to my nation that overwhelms everything else. I remember when so many of my friends and relatives were leaving the country in the 1980s, disheartened by the bombs raining down from the war with Iraq and by the morality police checkpoints set up by the still new Islamic government. While I did not judge anyone for wanting to leave, I could not fathom the impulse. Did one leave the city where one’s children had been born? Did one walk away from the trees in the garden one planted each year, even before they bore pomegranates and walnuts and scented apples?”

Shirin Ebadi has spent her life working for improvements in democracy and human rights, especially women’s, children’s, and refugee rights. She became a judge in 1969 but following the revolution in 1979 – clerics ruled that Islam prohibited women being judges and Ebadi was forced to step down. Until 1993 she was unable to practice law – and during those years she write extensively, publishing books and articles which frequently put her into conflict with the Iranian authorities. Throughout these years, she had the full support of her husband Javad – who she had met in the comparatively balmy days of pre-revolution Iran in the 1970s.

Shirin Ebadi had never feared speaking out, publishing articles in Iranian journals and periodicals she became a well-known figure. When she began to practise as a lawyer in the 1990s – Ebadi worked mainly pro-bono and took on many controversial cases – including fighting for abused children and people of the Baha’i faith who are treated badly by the Iranian regime.

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize increased Ebadi’s standing worldwide and brought some unwelcome attention to the regime. By the time, she received the prize – Shirin’s two daughters had left Iran to finish their education and start out on their own careers in the US and Canada. The money that Shirin received with the Nobel prize allowed her to continue the pro-bono work she was doing, it also allowed her to travel abroad, where she continued to pull no punches. This didn’t endear her any further the authorities at home, who she knew quite well were always watching, always listening. She and her husband lived in an apartment with a metal door – she received threatening phone calls, found messages pinned to her door. After the prize, the intimidation she received was stepped up, one man; an intelligence officer was completely obsessed with bringing her down. Her law centre was closed down, her phones were tapped. The intelligence officer had Shirin followed, her colleagues harassed and questioned. It led him to set up a dreadful entrapment.

In 2009 Shirin Ebadi’s Nobel medal was confiscated by the regime – while she was abroad. It was seized along with other belongings from her safety deposit box. She was advised not to try and return to Iran – and found herself thus in exile.

“…My great sorrow arose from being so far from Iran, and no medicine could alleviate this pain.
Some days, when the sun was setting, I imagined I heard the sound of the call to prayer, the azaan, as we say in Persian. I thought perhaps there was a local mosque, and I would search for it. But I soon realised there was none nearby; it had been my mind producing the sounds of the familiar. Sometimes I would overhear people speaking in a shop and would think that I’d picked up a scrap of Persian; but when I listened again, I was usually wrong. So I did the only thing I knew how to: I worked harder.”

The resolve Shirin Ebadi shows in the face of the most terrifying intimidation is in itself inspiring, she knows fear, but she never allowed it to stop her. In a bid to shut her up – members of her family were targeted, arrested and questioned at length – her husband of over thirty years was led into a terrible entrapment – and still Shirin stood firm, she never forgot the people she had fought for over the years. She wouldn’t let them win. Shirin Ebadi remains in exile, living in London.

Until we are Free is a hugely compelling memoir, eye opening and unforgettable.

Read Full Post »

The Return: Fathers, sons and the land in between – Hisham Matar (2016)

Hisham Matar is a gifted novelist, his novels In the Country of Men and Anatomy of Disappearance captivated me, his writing is beautiful and the stories he tells in those novels unforgettable, and I already knew they were inspired on some level at least, by true events. This book, The Return: fathers, sons and the land in between is the story at the centre of Hisham Matar’s life, the story of his father, of exile a disappearance, and finally a return.

“There is a moment when you realise that you and your parent are not the same person, and it usually occurs when you are both consumed by a similar passion.”

Hisham Matar’s memoir is the story of a family, and a meditation on the history and politics of a land beset by conflict and dictatorship. It is also the story of a man’s love for his father. In 2012 with the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, Hisham Matar embarks on a journey back to Libya – after an absence of more than thirty years. It is a journey that is both physical and emotional, a return to a land that robbed him of his father – where many family members who he hasn’t seen since childhood are waiting to meet him.

“There it was, the land. Rust and yellow. The colour of newly healed skin. Perhaps I will finally be released. The land got darker. Green sprouting, thinly covering hills. And, suddenly, my childhood sea. How often exiles romanticize the landscape of the homeland. I have cautioned myself against that. Nothing used to irritate me more than a Libyan waxing lyrical about ‘our sea’, ‘our land’, ‘the breeze of the homeland’. Privately, though, I continued to believe that the light back home was unmatched. I continued to think of every sea, no matter how beautiful, as an imposter. Now, catching these first glimpses of the country, I thought that if anything, it was more luminous than I remembered. The fact that it had existed all this time, that it remained as it was all these years, that I was able to recognize it, felt like an exchange, a call and its echo, a mutual expression of recognition.”

Hisham Matar, born in New York to Libyan parents is the youngest son of Jaballa Matar, one of the chief opponents to the Gaddafi (spelled Qaddafi in the book) regime. In 1973 the family returned to Libya – where Hisham is surrounded by a large and loving extended family. Jaballa continued to speak out against the regime though, so in 1979 the family had to flee Libya, finally settling in Egypt. The regime keep tabs on the family over the years, and Matar relates a terrifying story of his older brother’s narrow escape, pursued by agents on his way home from school in Switzerland. Hisham elects to go to boarding school in England, a country that is to become his home for many years to come.

In 1990, while nineteen-year-old Hisham and his brother are in London, Egyptian agents take Jaballa Matar off the streets of Cairo and hand him over to the Libyans. Jaballa Matar is never seen again. Over the first few years a few letters are smuggled out of the notorious Abu Salim Prison, eventually making their way to Jaballa’s family in Cairo – after that there is silence. Other family members still living in Libya are also imprisoned by the regime – and Hisham his mother and brother begin a long, sad, tireless journey toward the truth.

The Return is also about Hisham Matar’s life as an artist, his relationship with literature and art, his writing and how he uses his words to help his family discover the truth of what happened to Jaballa Matar and other family members in Libya.

There is so much raw emotion in this memoir – sections that tell of deeds of such horrific brutality and loss that is quite mind numbing. To have to sit back and imagine your beloved father reduced to incarceration in a tiny cell, no contact with the outside world, no kindness or basic humanity, even enduring tortures, knowing perhaps he has even already died, and you didn’t know the moment when, because you were not there to watch the life go out of him. Hisham Matar writes of these things with poignant honesty.

“I heard the stories and registered them perhaps the way we all, from within our detailed lives, perceive facts–that is, we do not perceive them at all until they have been repeated countless times and, even then, understand them only partially. So much information is lost that every small loss provokes inexplicable grief. Power must know this. Power must know how fatigued human nature is, and how unready we are to listen, and how willing we are to settle for lies. Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know.”

Recently longlisted for this year’s Orwell prize, which is awarded for political writing, The Return is every bit as readable as a fast-paced novel – as Hisham Matar tells of even finding himself negotiating with Gaddafi’s brother in law for information. The Return is an intimate portrayal of the Matars exile, the raised hopes, rumour and despair that accompanies the disappeared. It is also the story of a return from exile exploring the two sides of one coin, the joy of reuniting with family, reconnecting with a land and its people and the grief that exists when someone is missing.

Read Full Post »

Everywoman – Jess Phillips (2017)

 

(Yes, yes I know, rather stepping out of my comfort zone with this one – it does me good to do so from time to time.)

Just over a week ago, I went to an event at Birmingham Waterstone’s in which my local MP Jess Phillips was appearing to talk about her book Everywoman. It was a brilliant evening, I was massively impressed with everything Jess said – and how later she took the time to have a short conversation with everyone in the queue (it was a long queue) waiting for signings. Note the inscription in my edition below  – I was very chuffed with it. During the conversation, which preceded that signing, Jess had talked politics of course, she also spoke about her work with Women’s Aid (she was a business development manager) and her passion to change things for women suffering abuse, and inequality. She spoke passionately too about how anyone can and should get involved with politics if they feel strongly about changing things. It is, I know, an overused phrase, but- she was very inspiring. She was also, delightfully funny – she has a true Brummie sense of humour, it became a hugely entertaining evening.  

Everywoman is part memoir, part feminist manifesto. I generally don’t talk politics on here – I am kind of loathe to do so now, but I feel I need to state my position. I didn’t vote for Jess Philips – I had lost confidence in the Labour Party – and loathed her predecessor (a Lib Dem MP) and so having decamped to the Greens, I knew nothing about Jess Phillips until after she was elected. She’s a kick ass feminist, who wears her heart on her sleeve, she spends her life fighting for women who have no voice – or feel like they have no voice – she’s heroically fierce, and very funny – she’s a normal woman, who has a demanding full time job, and two kids I really liked her. However, normal women, with full time demanding jobs and two kids don’t generally have to run a sickening gauntlet of daily, vile rape threats and online abuse – Jess Philips does. Why? Because she’s a woman, she says just what she thinks, she isn’t a Corbyn supporter and she has been marked out as an angry feminist (*sigh*) – that is basically all it takes to be so abused. Jess has been criticised for the silliest things; showing too much cleavage on channel 4, and writing the word Mom, rather than mum – yeah well, we say mom in Birmingham so get over it – I’m with Jess on that one, though I tend to write mum (I don’t know why) I know when I speak it comes out mom.

There is a wonderful honesty in this book, she really does tell the truth, about pretty much everything that matters. Jess Philips admits to her own mistakes, those gaffs – which when you’re in the public eye stay with you for ever (haven’t we all opened our mouths at work before fully engaging our brain?). Her detractors are pretty unforgiving, leaping on any little error with whooping glee – it’s all depressingly nasty. It is a wonder to me that anyone sticks their head above the parapet – thank goodness however for the rest of us, that they do. In this book, Jess tells us just what it is like to win an election, and then find herself having to report for duty (in Parliament!) just seventy-two hours later. Four months later she was told by Rt Hon. Harriet Harman MP that she would never be popular – blimey!

“Being told that you’ll never be popular might seem harsh. Especially when it was said to me by the woman who, aside from my mother, had probably had the greatest effect on my life. This is the woman who fought for women like me to get where I am. She was elected around the same time I was born. Every moment she has spent in our democratic palace has been to make sure that girls like me from outside the Establishment can have a couple of kids, make some monumental mistakes and still stumble upon success and, in my case, one of the most powerful jobs in the land.”

Today, even in 2017 there are those (frequently, lets be honest they are men)  who seek to silence those who speak out against violence and inequality – they attach labels to them – angry feminist being one. It’s a dangerous world out there, and the abuse that Jess Phillips is subject to would have me hiding under my bed with a baseball bat. Jess, is braver than me. Going on to tell us about her own self-doubts, not always as confident as she may appear she must often force herself out the door to attend whatever meeting she has lined up. Motherhood and politics are not an easy mix – (and she doesn’t claim that male MPs’ family lives are not affected) but she doesn’t see her kids everyday – and she knows she couldn’t do her job without the support of her husband and her mother-in-law. There are plenty of people who don’t think Jess Phillips should be an MP – I rather love her response.

“I have made no secret of the fact that I was selected on an all-woman shortlist (AWS). People often use this to assert that I was not the best person for the job, merely the best woman. Because, you know, women aren’t people apparently. I wonder if Jessica Ennis-Hill was ever told this? ‘Er, sorry, Jess, your Olympic gold medal isn’t a real one because you only competed against other women; instead we’ve given you this medal we call girlie gold.’”

She pays homage to her mother, who died a few years ago – a woman who was a fearless campaigner herself, she helped make Jess the woman she is today. A woman who continues to fight for the women who have had all the fight (literally) knocked out of them, who gives an empowering voice to those whose voices can’t be heard. She is a proponent of the Universal Basic Income, and is the chair of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party, and has (two years on the trot) read out the names of all the women murdered by men in the previous year. One of the names she read out this year was that of Labour MP Jo Cox (one of the people to whom this book is dedicated) a colleague of Jess’s she was also a friend. What happened to Jo Cox was so dreadful it gave us all pause for thought in June of last year– and yet a few days later the madness continued, and we all know what happened then.

I could probably say a lot more about this book, (but I have gone on long enough) empowering, honest, illuminating and funny – it is as the title suggests, a book for every woman, and I would suggest every man.

So, Jess Phillips in the very unlikely event that you are reading this – I may not have voted for you myself – but I am very proud to have you as my MP – thank you. If anyone can persuade me to re-join the Labour party – it might just be you.

 

Read Full Post »

Names for the Sea; strangers in Iceland – Sarah Moss (2012)

Soon, I will be boarding a plane to Iceland with three friends, and Names for the Sea; strangers in Iceland, was the book I decided to read in preparation. It’s the kind of book I don’t often read, but it does me good to step outside my comfort zone. A friend of mine who has visited Iceland three times and has also read this book warned me that there were some negative points which didn’t match her experience, so I was ready to be not put off Iceland by those parts. Names for the Sea relates the experience of author and university  teacher Sarah Moss; who takes a job at the university of Reykjavik and moves herself, her husband and two young sons to the Icelandic capital for an entire year. Naturally someone spending a year in Reykjavik, with young children, a job, financial concerns etc. will face entirely different experiences to those of us just visiting.

This is not Sarah’s first visit to Iceland, in 1995 when they were nineteen, she and her friend Kathy spent six wonderful summer weeks in Iceland. Sarah feels like she has always been drawn northward.

“The Arctic is just over the horizon, the six months’ darkness always at the back of the mind, the summer-long day impossible to believe in winter and impossible to doubt when it comes. Here, just below the Earth’s summit, there are towns and villages, a tangle of human lives, in the shadow of Arctic eschatology. I keep going back to the North Atlantic, working my way north and west as the Celts and Vikings did, as if I’m heading for the Vikings’ westernmost point at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.”

It was 2009 when Sarah Moss took a job at Reykjavik university and she and her family left their home in Canterbury for a year in Iceland. Between accepting the job and moving to Iceland, beginning the search for an apartment and all the rest that goes along with moving a family from one country to another, the financial crisis hits Iceland, and the value of her salary is practically halved. The (some would say bad) timing of Sarah’s year in Iceland is quite key – because the financial crisis affects the kinds of goods readily available in the Icelandic supermarkets – and has Sarah soon yearning after the plentiful fruits of Kent.

Moving to another country will always be something of a culture shock – I don’t think it is ever something I could do. Sarah is very aware of her ‘foreignness’ finding her few words of Icelandic stick in her throat – it’s that acute embarrassment thing, isn’t it? – but mortified to be continually expecting people to speak English to her. Customs, everyday practices which Icelanders takes for granted must be explained. Living in a new (not yet finished) apartment complex out in the suburbs Sarah learns that just like in California – everybody drives – almost no one of driving age gets the bus, but for the first few months Sarah’s family resist getting a car because they have so little money. It can be quite an operation preparing herself and the children to walk to school from their apartment once the winter begins, and it is at this point a car becomes a necessity. The financial crisis hit Iceland hard, and Sarah and her family – living with very sparse, basic furnishings (sitting on garden chairs in their living room as they were cheaper) – feel very poor. Sarah begins to look for that poverty in Icelanders – and is unable to find it easily – though she knows it must exist. She also discovers that there is practically no such thing as second hand in Iceland – people having a cultural reticence to using other people’s things.

The weather is another key feature – probably unsurprisingly – and again Moss can appear a bit negative, again, I find that totally understandable. Working with children as I do, I know how staff feel when the children haven’t been able to go out to play two days on the trot – it drives us all demented – imagine having two young lively boys effectively cooped up in an apartment for months. She does however find moments within those long winter months that charm and delight her.

“The aurora are unsettling partly because they show the depth of the space, the falsity of our illusion that the sky is two-dimensional, and partly because it’s hard to convince your instincts that something bigger than you and grabbing at the sky isn’t out to get you.”

Overall Sarah’s experiences are fascinating, I was particularly interested in the details of schooling and nursery provision which she had to access for her sons – children start school at six and continue until they are twenty! There is good, full time nursery provision in Reykjavik which it seems everybody takes advantage of. Sarah’s youngest son, picks up Icelandic with impressive speed, young children often do in these situations, while her elder son settles happily at an international school. Sarah is drawn to the Icelandic landscape, the volcanic craters, the scattered farmhouses and isolated communities, she drives at speed along unsurfaced roads as she explores her unique environment.

During her year in Iceland, Sarah makes a lot of friends and connections among the people she lives and works among. She works hard to learn more about the country and its people. She learns about the elves and the hidden people, who play an important part in the oral histories of the country. Sarah meets Þórunn at her remote house, a house for which Sarah feels immediate envy, Þórunn claims that she is never alone in her isolated summer home, she is surrounded by hidden people.

“Þórunn gestures, and I gaze at the space she’s pointing to. I can see my own reflection, out there under the tree, and I can see the table on the veranda Þórunn a, and the wind stirring the rowan trees, and the ash cloud rising into the blue sky. ‘She’s from the hidden people, and she lives in the lava field with her family. I used to go and visit her, but about three years ago she started to come and see me, just for a visit. And there are tree elves that I can see out there, small tree elves, and the flower elves, which are even smaller’ – Þórunn holds her hand about a foot above the coffee table – ‘but usually elves are very delicate creatures, with a very fine bone structure.”

At the end of the year, Sarah and her family return to England, to Cornwall this time, but a year or so later return to Iceland for a holiday. On this return trip, she notes how the availability of some goods she had so missed while she lived in Reykjavik had improved quite a lot.

I’m glad I read this book, I feel as if I have learnt a lot about a country I have wanted to visit for years. I am only visiting Iceland for a few days, but a whole year – that is an entirely different kettle of fish. The one thing I don’t think I would do very well with however – is that six-month winter, though the long bright days at the other end of the year sound wonderful. As I get older I appreciate the light more and more. I am still, naturally really looking forward to my holiday. Iceland sounds like it is a fascinating country.

Read Full Post »

Instead of a Letter – Diana Athill (1963)

 

I have read a couple of Diana Athill’s later memoirs, Yesterday Morning (2002) and Somewhere Towards the End (2008). They were wonderful and I have been meaning to read more of her work for ages. Her short stories published by Persephone books are particularly on my radar. I came across this lovely old edition of Instead of a Letter in a second hand bookshop – I love these old dust-jackets.

Instead of a Letter, Diana Athill’s first work of autobiography was written when Diana Athill was only in her 40s, published a year after her first volume of short stories. Since then, she has written several more volumes of memoir, including one quite recently. Considering that Athill didn’t write these in any kind of chronological order I can’t see it matters which order one reads them in, as each book does seem to have a different focus. Born in 1917 – she will be celebrating her 99th birthday just before Christmas.

Diana Athill was born into a wealthy, aristocratic family, and brought up in the Norfolk countryside. Having worked for the BBC before the war, she later worked in publishing and as an editor, working with many very famous literary greats.

In writing this memoir when she did, Diana Athill, was trying to discover something about herself, and crucially about what her life had been for. It was a question which had been prompted by the memory of her maternal grandmother.

“By the end, pain and exhaustion had loosened her grip on life so that when she ‘recovered’ yet again from a heart attack she would whisper, ‘why doesn’t God let me die?’ but for a long time she was afraid of what was happening to her. She was afraid of death, and she was sorrowful – which was worse – because she had much time in which to ask herself what her life had been for, and often she could not answer.”

She is, as ever, uncompromisingly honest. This is a woman, who the reader instantly feels right at home with, someone will a brilliant understanding of herself, and the ability to examine herself with unflinching honesty.
Although this memoir begins when Diana is a child, it is not a childhood memoir (Yesterday Morning is her childhood memoir – and is brilliant). Instead of a Letter takes us from those years when Diana was living in the country with her family, to her happy times at Oxford in the 1930s through to those darker days after the Second World War, as she recovered from a terrible heartbreak. It is this relationship which is at the heart of the novel, and which was brought suddenly and unexpectedly back to her on a chance visit to an Oxfordshire village.

“ ‘Good evening… Oh, my God, it’s Paul’s girl!’
‘Maggie, you recognised me!’
Maggie held my arm for a moment after kissing me, looking as though she might cry, while I stood there feeling a curious internal vertigo. It was almost twenty years since I had last gone through the narrow door into the taproom of the Plough at Appleton, a small village about ten miles from Oxford; almost twenty years since Maggie and I had seen each other.’

When she was in her teens, a young man named Paul was brought into her home to help tutor Diana’s brother for his public-school entrance exam. Paul was only four years older than Diana, though the age gap never seemed very big at all. Diana fell in love with the mere idea of him. When the real Paul turned up Diana found in him all she could have dreamed – and more.

“I wrote to a friend of mine: ‘The tutor’s come and he’s a perfectly marvellous person. He’s got brown eyes and fair hair and I suppose he ought to be taller really but he has got broad shoulders and a good figure, and he’s country and London at the same time. He would be at home anywhere. He’s very funny and reads a lot, but he isn’t a bit highbrow. We took a boat up the stream yesterday, through all that tangly bit beyond the wood, like going up the Amazon, and he made up a tremendous story about who we were and what we were doing. He knows more about birds than anyone I know, but he dances well, too.’ ”

Paul, first more like a brother, eventually became the centre of her world, and she invested almost everything in him. The war separates them, and Diana must content herself with infrequent letters and a long-distance relationship before she becomes an RAF wife. Paul’s dissertation of her is devastating, more so perhaps as she never gets the chance to forgive him.

This memoir perfectly evokes the times in which Diana Athill lived as a young woman, the people she writes about emerge from the pages fully formed. Athill beautifully recreates her greatest love story from which she seemed to emerge a wiser, sadder woman, but one who knew herself, in a way, perhaps not all of us do. She writes in a very un-embarrassed way about her various brief sexual relationships and the abortion she felt she had to have. After the war, saw her begin working with André Deutsch with whom she was to have a long and successful association. Later Diana was to find true happiness when she discovered writing for herself.

This is a wonderful book, in which we see the devastation of a loss, and the redemptive power of finding one’s true self in creative work.

 

 

 

Read Full Post »