Ah, the golden hour. Is there anything better? I must admit that I enjoyed today's even more than most because I was able to enjoy it sat in the dappled sunshine of London Fields at five thirty, the breeze in my plaits, rather than from the gaps in between people's heads on the overground back from work. My shifts are a little different this week so I've found myself with a rare mid-week day off which I duly decided to put to use peddling from E8 to NW1, Hackney to Camden, for a chickpea burger in a granary bun stuffed with shredded lettuce & beetroot washed down with a delicious Ethiopian iced coffee, nom. I made it back to the homestead just in time for the sun to start sinking behind the skyscrapers & for me to finally kick off my Doc Martens, prop up my bicycle against a tree & read a chapter or two of my current book.
This current book just so happens to be Jean Rhys' slim novel, 'Voyage In the Dark', a quaint Penguin Classics edition that I picked up in a secondhand bookshop in Stratford-Upon-Avon a couple of summers ago. It was while reading Olivia Laing's wonderful piece in The Guardian about women writers & alcoholism that I remembered owning such a volume among the (huge) stack of my to-read pile by my bed & decided to dig it out. I studied Jean Rhys' 'Good Morning, Midnight' during my second year of university & have always considered her to be a fascinating character, a woman whose tragedy is acutely expressed by Diana Athill & quoted by Laing:
'No one who has read Jean Rhys's first four novels can suppose that she was very good at life' but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was.'
'Voyage In the Dark' is one of those four novels that tells the story of the young Anna Morgan, a native of the West Indies for which she longs, & her fall from innocence during a flirtation with an older man she meets while on tour with a theatre company in England. While only two thirds through, the sense of the outsider & the character's experience of reality at one remove is particularly striking, elegantly expressed in the permeable border between the worlds of her wild childhood home & her rented rooms in London, her family & her current associates, her past & her present. First published in 1934, Rhys' perception of the significance of being a woman is also central to the novel, from the pressure of society's expectations to the ease with which men are able to hold them in their sway. It is the simplicity of the poetry of Rhys' prose that I really adore & I shall be sad to finish this little heartbreaker of a book.
I must admit that my tendency towards tales of hardship & misery has not waned of late & the book that I finished reading to make way for Ms. Rhys is certainly evidence of this, namely Oswald Wynd's 'The Ginger Tree'. It is now with horror that I realise that despite having been through so much education & an undergraduate degree in English Literature, I have not read so much as a page of a book originating from anywhere further East than perhaps the Czech Republic, sparing pieces of Dostoyevsky aside, & certainly nothing originating from Japan or China, something I hope to put right very soon. It started with this. 'The Ginger Tree' tells the story of Mary McKenzie, a young Scottish girl who takes a ship to China to marry a wealthy military attaché only to have an affair with a Japanese solider for which she is outcast - with her husband intending to return her to Scotland & the wrath of her mother, Mary instead flees to Japan to live out over forty years in an unfamiliar place that never truly embraces her differences. Widely recommended & a bestseller at the time of its publication in the 1970s, I had high hopes for this novel which were only partly realised. While sensitively written, especially considering the author was writing a female character & a mother at that, the story's telling through diary entries felt both claustrophobic & distancing - the reader never gets a complete sense of the protagonist from a singular perspective & thus your empathy for her is complicated &, arguably, made more difficult. Some passages that described the Empresses' palace in Peking & the landscape of the Fuji mountains in Japan were very beautifully wrought but I will need to read with greater variety if I am to get a more authentically drawn representation of these places, I think.
Reading about other cultures & particularly texts in translation has become another habit of mine that seems to have established itself of late. This is only reinforced with another couple of recent acquisitions from the ever-brilliant Pushkin Press, 'Red Love: The Story of an East German Family' by Maxim Leo (translated from the German) & 'The Spectre of Alexander Wolf' by Gaito Gazdanov (translated from the Russian) The first speaks of my love of biography & fondness for Berlin that I've had ever since learning German at school; the second has been endlessly recommended to me by many & whose blurb is too gripping not to have me at 'hello', or privet.
Both of these will, alas, have to wait until I have, at long, long last, started the first in the 'My Struggle' cycle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, for which I am quite giddy with excitement.
What's your favourite place to find yourself during the golden hour?
What're you reading at the moment?
Speak soon - O.
No comments:
Post a Comment