15 READS - Summer 23
Assemblage
Balancing
Intersections
The land
Distillation
Daylight
Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Democracy of Species
How can we once again live in reciprocity with the land Robin Wall Kimmerer asks? How can we safeguard our natural world?
Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Democracy of Species, Penguin Classics, 2021
How can we once again live in reciprocity with the land Robin Wall Kimmerer asks? How can we safeguard our natural world? In three brief essays she shows that it is by reconnecting with the stories and memories land holds, through language and the way in which language opens up or alters possibilities for relating to the natural world that we can begin to re-connect. In doing so she tells us that we can once again realise our responsibilities to the land and the sensate world upon which we depend.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Democracy of Species, Penguin Classics, 2021
How can we once again live in reciprocity with the land Robin Wall Kimmerer asks? How can we safeguard our natural world? In three brief essays she shows that it is by reconnecting with the stories and memories land holds, through language and the way in which language opens up or alters possibilities for relating to the natural world that we can begin to re-connect. In doing so she tells us that we can once again realise our responsibilities to the land and the sensate world upon which we depend.
Alain Mabankou
As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems
Brief poems evoke Mabankou’s childhood in Congo-Brazzaville from which he is now exiled. They speak of the ancestral lands which hold not only his childhood memories but in the tenacity of the trees which grow from its red soil, his hope for the future of this nation.
Alain Mabankou, As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems, Seagull Books, 2021
Brief poems evoke Mabankou’s childhood in Congo-Brazzaville from which he is now exiled. They speak of the ancestral lands which hold not only his childhood memories but in the tenacity of the trees which grow from its red soil, his hope for the future of this nation. With little punctuation and a lack of titles, the rhythmic patterning of the language carries the narrative which is sometimes playful, sometimes biting, filled with yearning and vivid images, expressive of his deep connection with the remembered land.
Alain Mabankou, As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems, Seagull Books, 2021
Brief poems evoke Mabankou’s childhood in Congo-Brazzaville from which he is now exiled. They speak of the ancestral lands which hold not only his childhood memories but in the tenacity of the trees which grow from its red soil, his hope for the future of this nation. With little punctuation and a lack of titles, the rhythmic patterning of the language carries the narrative which is sometimes playful, sometimes biting, filled with yearning and vivid images, expressive of his deep connection with the remembered land.
Margiad Evans
Autobiography
Following the seasons between 1939-43, Evans writes with an acute attentiveness to the Welsh countryside in which she lives and works.
Margiad Evans, Autobiography, (1943), Honno Books, 2022
Following the seasons between 1939-43, Evans writes with an acute attentiveness to the Welsh countryside in which she lives and works. She has written that the ‘joys of Autobiography were snatched moments from the type of life lived by any poor woman without help… many of the things witnessed in it were seen while fetching water, mending a sheet or a shirt…’ Absorbing and expressing what she sees and experiences into her own deeply interconnected and often painterly way of seeing the natural world, she expresses her perceptions and feelings with dedicated precision. Throughout, she writes about the process of writing and her concern and aspiration to find words which ‘will not bend the thought’. Reaching beyond observation and description, she writes about her connection to the earth, through both mind and body, in what she has called ‘earth writing’.
Alison Uttley
The Country Child
A gentle semi-autobiographical story about a girl growing up on a Derbyshire hill farm before the First World War, the narrative is rooted in the land and cycles of the farming year.
Alison Uttley, The Country Child, (1931), Puffin Books, 2016
A gentle semi-autobiographical story about a girl growing up on a Derbyshire hill farm before the First World War, the narrative is rooted in the land and cycles of the farming year. Day-to-day life is recounted, from the long walk to school to the routines on the farm, from the arrival of the swallows to a child’s delight in the annual appearance of the Irish shearers. Uttley portrays an imaginative child whose life is fraught with brief sorrows and enlivened with delight in the smallest of things, showing a way of life and a way of working with the land that has long since disappeared.
Elizabeth Bowen
The Heat of the Day
The claustrophobic intimacies of the blackout in wartime London edgy with tension and a certain carelessness for any future that the bombing engenders are tempered by daylight’s apparent clarity.
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day, (1948), Vintage, 1998
The claustrophobic intimacies of the blackout in wartime London edgy with tension and a certain carelessness for any future that the bombing engenders are tempered by daylight’s apparent clarity. Each night-time scene is written as if momentarily illuminated by a searchlight or the fires from air raids, almost as if untethered from the day which brings either confusion, small insights or the mundanity of wartime routine. It is in this febrile atmosphere that Stella finds herself trying to decipher truths about the men in her life; particulalry her lover and the man who is trailing him.
Katherine Mansfield
The Garden Party and Other Stories
Focusing on the inner lives of her characters, it is through their emotions and observations as much as their actions that these stories unfold.
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2007
Focusing on the inner lives of her characters, it is through their emotions and observations as much as their actions that these stories unfold. Each short story turns on a small moment; a realisation, a disappointment, a betrayal, a personal sacrifice, moving in an instant from happiness or conviviality to sadness or disappointment. These impressionistic streams of consciousness examine class, motherhood, society’s expectations, illusion and reality.
Brian Dillon
Affinities
Brief essays focus on images which have remained with the author over the years, or which developed in significance during the time of the pandemic. Groups of essays are intersected by ten texts examining different interpretations and nuances of the word affinity.
Brian Dillon, Affinities, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023
Brief essays focus on images which have remained with the author over the years, or which developed in significance during the time of the pandemic. Groups of essays are intersected by ten texts examining different interpretations and nuances of the word affinity. Ranging from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas to John Stezaker’s collages, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs to a film by Tacita Dean via Dora Maar and Hannah Hoch, Dillon brings his expansive visual knowledge to draw connections, intersections, affinities and in so doing shows through text and image, the world differently or slightly re-arranged.
Margarita Liberaki
Three Summers
Three sisters living in an unorthodox household in a rural suburb of Athens come of age during three summers. Their bildungsromane are described by the youngest sister who records the events in their lives heightened by the intensities and confusions of adolescent obsessions, first loves and negotiating the adult world.
Margarita Liberaki, Three Summers (1946), translated by Karen Van Dyke, Penguin Books, 2016
Three sisters living in an unorthodox household in a rural suburb of Athens come of age during three summers. Their bildungsromane are described by the youngest sister who records the events in their lives heightened by the intensities and confusions of adolescent obsessions, first loves and negotiating the adult world. The complex characters of each sister and the light and shade of their relationships with each other is subtly drawn, set against Greece’s evocative landscape and intense summer heat. Their lives are contextualised by the realities of Greece’s civil war which remains a subtle presence at the periphery of the narrative, perhaps mirroring teenage self-absorption.
Ann Quin
Passages
Her: intense, obsessive, disconnected, alluring, in search of her missing brother. Him: haunted, excessive, Dionysian, drifting, addicted, troubled by his Jewish identity. Together they travel through a land of heat, figs, halva, black coffee, cypresses, asphodel.
Ann Quin, Passages, (1969), And Other Stories, 2021
Her: intense, obsessive, disconnected, alluring, in search of her missing brother. Him: haunted, excessive, Dionysian, drifting, addicted, troubled by his Jewish identity. Together they travel through a land of heat, figs, halva, black coffee, cypresses, asphodel. This is a country where the walls are scarred by bullets, there is martial law and the secret police are ever present. The experiences and thoughts of this woman and her companion, their dreams or hallucinations, imaginaries and fears intermingle, often interwoven or juxtaposed on the page with Greek myths, Talmudic teachings and actions depicted on Greek vases.
Clarice Lispecter
Too Much Life
A compendium of weekly crônicos were mostly written for the Jornal do Brasil between 1967 and 1977. Each distilled observation or occurrence reflects Lispecter’s cultural, political and social interests often expressing her very personal perspective on life.
Clarice Lispecter, Too Much Life, Translated by Margaret Jull & Robin Patterson, Penguin Books, 2022
A compendium of weekly crônicos were mostly written for the Jornal do Brasil between 1967 and 1977. Each distilled observation or occurrence reflects Lispecter’s cultural, political and social interests often expressing her very personal perspective on life. At times playful or gently ironic, her insights pierce to the very heart of the things that matter. Beginning with the smallest observation or incident such as a speck of dust in her eye, Lispecter arrives at universal truths as she draws us into a dialogue which we feel is just between herself and each of us, her readers.
Alba de Céspedés Forbidden Notebook
Valeria Cossati, a married working woman with a husband and two children impulsively purchases a notebook in which she secretly writes her diary. This becomes her confessional, her confidante, her act of rebellion.
Alba de Céspedés, Forbidden Notebook (1952), translated by Ann Goldstein, Pushkin Press, 2023
Valeria Cossati, a married working woman with a husband and two children impulsively purchases a notebook in which she secretly writes her diary. This becomes her confessional, her confidante, her act of rebellion. The entries which comprise the novel, reveal the position of middle-class women in post-war Italy and the small freedoms that Valeria manages to gain for herself. It is only in this clandestine act of writing that she can express her thoughts and concerns and in doing so gradually begin to realise her own desires.
Rohinton Mistry
A Fine Balance
Inspired by Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, the novel explores the fine balance necessary for India’s poor to survive during Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency, 1975 – 1977. The lives of four characters unexpectedly collide amidst the turmoil of political unrest, state violence and a changing, industrialising India.
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance, (1995), Faber & Faber, 2006
Inspired by Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, the novel explores the fine balance necessary for India’s poor to survive during Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency, 1975 – 1977. The lives of four characters unexpectedly collide amidst the turmoil of political unrest, state violence and a changing, industrialising India. Their stories and ultimately each of their destinies expose a system stacked against them, revealing the plight of widows, being Muslim in a partitioned country, or condemned to the lower castes. This is however also a novel of friendship and compassion, about the instinct and drive to survive, absorbing readers in the sights, sounds, smells and melée of the slums in an unnamed city by the sea.
Louise Erdrich
Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Travelling Through the Land of My Ancestors
‘My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books islands. Islands, books.’ So begins Louise Erdrich’s short memoir of a journey she takes with her eighteen-month-old daughter Kiizhikok through her ancestral Ojibwe territory spanning south Ontario and north Minnesota.
Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Travelling Through the Land of My Ancestors, Daunt Books, 2023
‘My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books islands. Islands, books.’ So begins Louise Erdrich’s short memoir of a journey she takes with her eighteen-month-old daughter Kiizhikok through her ancestral Ojibwe territory spanning south Ontario and north Minnesota. That territory comprises over 14,000 islands: ‘So these islands, which I am longing to read, are books in themselves.’ Across five chapters, Erdrich draws upon storytelling, tribal history, ancestral memory and mythology, interspersing her writing with delicate hand-drawn illustrations. She traverses the lakes with her daughter in a small boat, visiting ancient painted rocks and a hermit’s library – meditating on plants and creatures sacred to the Ojibwe and on Ojibwemowin language.
Wangari Maathai
The World We Once Lived In
In three brief essays, Wangarai Maathai calls for a ‘change in consciousness that includes rediscovering the love of nature that animated the minds and souls of our ancestors’ which she shows was and still is necessary for our survival.
Wangari Maathai, The World We Once Lived In, Penguin Books, 2021
In three brief essays, Wangarai Maathai calls for a ‘change in consciousness that includes rediscovering the love of nature that animated the minds and souls of our ancestors’ which she shows was and still is necessary for our survival. She draws upon world cultures and religions to portray the significance of trees and our relationship to the natural world, describing the economic threats, their ecological role and the reforesting programmes she led in Kenya for which she received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Bruce Chatwin
On the Black Hill
Born at the turn of the twentieth century, twin brothers Lewis and Benjamin Jones farm the land on which they were raised.
Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill, Vintage Classics, 1998
Born at the turn of the twentieth century, twin brothers Lewis and Benjamin Jones farm the land on which they were raised. Set in the Black Mountains, the borderlands between Wales and England, the novel encompasses both the small and cataclysmic events of the twentieth century and the affects and changes these bring to the isolated community surrounding the farm. Chatwin paints an evocative picture of life on the land, the characters who people the landscape and the brothers themselves who are the observers of these changes rather than willing participants.