Poetry Galore!

 

The books I won from Oxford University Press in a twitter (go follow them!) competition a few weeks ago finally arrived earlier this week. I received five volumes of poetry galore which is rather ironic since poetry is the one type of literature that I have immense trouble with. However, flicking through the collection, I am warming up to it and have read quite a few already.

The prize:

• Poems and Prose – Christina Rossetti
• Selected Poetry – John Keats
• Aurora Leigh – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Selected Poetry – William Blake
• Selected Poetry – Samuel Coleridge

I’m very excited about the collection and I’ve always been partial to Christina Rossetti’s work. Here is one of my favourite Rossetti poems:

Song

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree:

 

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

 

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain:

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget.

It’s quite morose but it’s beautiful.

Review: “Harbour” by John Ajvide Lindqvist [2008]; translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy [2010]

If anybody were to write a horror story about the ocean (yes, you read it right), John Ajvide Lindqvist is the man to do it. The third of Lindqvist’s novels to be translated into English, the other two being the now well known Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead, Harbour follows Lindqvist’s rather unique take on the horror genre.

On the isolated island of Domarö, Anders takes his family to visit the lighthouse. His wife, Cecilia, are childhood sweethearts having spent their summer holidays at Domarö since their youth. Their six year-old daughter, Maja, is a fireball of energy and set in her own ways.

The narrative is split largely between Anders and his step grandfather, Simon, a retired magician. Simon and Anders’ grandmother, Anna-Greta, have been together for the past fifty years although they still live separately with Simon living in the garden’s summer house. Simon and Anna-Greta reside on the island all year round and are considered ‘natives’ although Simon moved to Domarö in his early thirties.

On the way to the lighthouse, Simon is watching the little family from his house. The trio are impossible to miss due to their bright coats against the stark white bareness of the icy landscape. As Simon is observing them, a neighbour suggests that Simon ring Anders and tell them to turn away.

‘I think you should ring him and tell him … he ought to come home now.’

‘Why?

…

‘The ice can be unsafe out there.’

Simon snorted. ‘But it’s half a metre thick right across the bay!’

Elof sighed even more deeply and studied the pattern on the carpet. Then he did something unexpected. He raised his head, looked Simon straight in the eyes and said, ‘Do as I say. Ring the boy. And tell  him to gather up his family. And go home.’ – p. 19

The warning does not come in vain. Later that afternoon, while the family rests at the top of the lighthouse in the viewing room, Maja runs off to explore the place. She is never seen again. Although an extensive search is carried out, Maja has left no prints and the snow around the lighthouse is pristine save for the set leading to the lighthouse. Devastated, Anders and Cecilia leave Domarö

Two years later, Anders returns after Cecilia leaves him unable to cope any longer with his alcoholism and inability to seek help for his despair at losing Maja. Returning to the Shack where his family last resided, Anders strongly feels Maja’s presence and it both unsettles and comforts him. Anders also finds the camera he used on that fateful day and decides to develop the roll of film. In the last photos of Maja, Anders discovers that Maja is persistently staring at the same spot in the distance and he recalls the conversation he had with Maja while they were both in the lighthouse’s viewing room:

Maja was standing with her nose and hands pressed against the glass wall. When she heard Anders coming, she pointed out across the ice, towards the north-east.

‘Daddy, what’s that?’

Anders screwed his eyes up against the brightness and looked out over the ice. He couldn’t see anything apart from the white covering, and far away on the horizon just a hint of Ledinge archipelago.

‘What do you mean?’

Maja pointed. ‘There. On the ice.’ – p. 22

As Anders investigates further, he discovers that Maja isn’t the first to disappear completely without a trace. The town’s natives also have an unexplained fear of the sea although one of the main industry is herring. There is a strange hold over the island and an unlikely source of fear and power is revealed, harking back to the history of the island.

Harbour is another great read by Lindqvist although at 500 pages, it could have done with a good edit. The use of various narrative strings also tended to detract from the main story although it did help fill in the background and help streamline the jumping time line. The story is creepy but Lindqvist, like his previous novels, marries the unnatural, supernatural and reality seamlessly.

Review: “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro [2005]

*There are spoilers in the review.

What begins as a seemingly naive story about the character’s childhood and teenage years at a boarding school slowly reveals its quite horrifying, but not unbelievable, truth about the characters. Set in the late 1990s*, Never Let Me Go is narrated by Kathy H., a thirty-one year old carer, who reminisces about her school years at Hailsham. In the beginning, Kathy tells us that she recently came back into contact with Ruth, her childhood best friend, when Kathy became Ruth’s carer after her first donation. Take these terms as you understand them and try not to think about them too much. Their true meaning will be eventually revealed.

Kathy remembers her time at Hailsham with Ruth and Tommy. The three were good friends and have seemingly grown up together. There is the typical playground politics between the students. Kathy and Ruth’s friendship is fraught with those moments of who has the upper hand with Ruth, and her rather brash and strong personality, always coming out on top. At Hailsham, the students learned the usual subjects while there is particular emphasis on art. Art was the most important subject and students’ reputation was defined by their artistic skills. Each month, a woman known as Madame would come into the school and pick out the best art to take away with her to hang in her rumoured gallery. The students were never told where their art were taken to.

In their last years at Hailsham, the students were given classes on what was to be expected out in the real world once they leave Hailsham and here the truth about the students slowly become clearer. During a class, one of the more liberal teachers, Miss Lucy, explained to them that they are not like everybody else:

‘You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way … Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.’ – p. 80

The truth is out but it seems that all the students somehow knew it already. Kathy, Ruth and Tommy leave Hailsham and go to the Cottages where they reside until they decide they are ready to start their training as carers.

The relationship between the trio becomes somewhat like a love triangle. Ruth and Tommy are dating but Tommy and Kathy are more compatible. The friendship between Ruth and Kathy, while it seems extremely tight knit, tension always seems to be simmering underneath and it is really a quite toxic friendship. Ruth is quite unlikeable. The trio disintegrate after one quite explosive afternoon and Kathy doesn’t see Ruth and Tommy again until she becomes Ruth’s carer.

As realistically Ishiguro wrote the tempestuous adolescent relationships, I was much more fascinated and struck by the whole ethical concept of organ donation and what Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are. They are, in fact, clones of other people. These characters, people, were designed to be walking and living organ farms and that was their sole purpose in ‘life’. Once they were called up to start donating, they don’t stop until they ‘complete’. In other words, they donate their organs until there is nothing left or their body can no longer sustain the operations.  Those that survive to their fourth donation are treated like rock stars. The likes of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy frightened the rest of the population. Many believed they had no souls and were simply empty beings which is why art played such an important role because it demonstrated that was something ‘human’ within. While Kathy showed that they had feelings, temptations, and dreams just like every other natural person, I felt, and I’m assuming Ishiguro intended it as such, that something was lacking in Kathy’s narrative. It was all somewhat flat.

Never Let Me Go is a very unique read and raises so many relevant questions. The characters are all brilliant although I really did despise Ruth and wanted to smack her in the head. One pressing question is why the powers that be, whoever it was that looked after all these clones, weren’t afraid that they would hurt themselves either by getting into a car accident or by suicide if they were really resentful. None of the donors expressed resentment at being forced to donate, that their lives is absolutely meaningless and that it was never their own. Of course, the easy answer would be that they were designed that way. The human factor in clones and sustainable organ donation – this leaves you lots to think about.

* Alternate 1990s, of course.

Review: “The Romantic: Italian Nights and Days” by Kate Holden [2010]

I adore Kate Holden and have great admiration for her and her writing. Her fortnightly columns in Saturday Age and her musings on her website are filled with wit and a wry sense of humour. I also loved her first autobiography In My Skin.

So it really pains me to say that her second autobiography left me quite disappointed. The Romantic follows up after the seemingly ‘happily ever after’ in the first book where Kate kicked her heroin addiction, left her job as a prostitute and finally got herself sorted enough to get on a plane and leave for Italy and to make a clean break. (Note: you don’t need to have read the first book in order to understand the second). In Italy, Kate, now twenty-nine, roams listlessly between Rome and Naples and have a long string of affairs. The book is basically a description of her string of affairs and sexual escapades in Italy. She wanders through the sights, learns some Italian, writes in her diary and reads the romantic poets in her spare time.

The book is divided and titled on the man Kate is happening to have an affair or sex with. There is Jack, a married man twice her age; Guido, a cheeky hotel worker; Massimo, Guido’s cheekier and charismatic brother; Rufus, a writer; Gabriele, a charming, hardworking and sweet Italian man; Donetella, a woman who gets entangled with Kate and Gabriele; and finally, Kate alone. There is a lot of sex. Kate likes sex, that point is clear, but there seems to be very little character development and the pacing stumbles with its aimlessness, perhaps intentional to capture Kate’s own feeling of aimlessness. There is also the struggle within Kate as she tries to distinguish herself between the Prostitute Kate and Clean Kate. Men seem to fall instantly in love with Kate and she does not discourage them. In being with so many different men and giving herself so easily and freely, it seemed like she was trying to find acceptance somehow and a place for her somewhere, anywhere, in society although almost all the men Kate was with were all unavailable one way or another.

In a moment he’s gone. She watches them drive away. This is the city where they met; they have said goodbye here before.

‘You are in my heart,’ he had said.

‘You are my heart,’ she replied.

But her heart is gone. She was always trying to give it away. – p. 233

Despite being let down by the book, the writing is beautiful even when the content is crude. The whole idea of identity is at play here (as it tends to be when a book is an autobiography!) and Kate really loses and distances herself as she refers to herself in third person in the book as if to point out that the Kate then is not the Kate now.