When I was an upstart feminist playwright and director in Canada (“angry, but not shrill”, according to male critics), I was often asked to speak on panels where we fielded one and the same question: Do wimmin write differently than men? Direct differently? I joined the Vehement Yes. Me and my gals opposed that Aristotelian story structure which insisted on conflict-build-it-build-it-build-it-until—ahhhhh-catharsis, and, instead, argued for a narrative structure more aligned to ecstasy as we understood it, coming in waves rather than rolling over and going to sleep.
Maybe none of the five writers in this batch ever thought about structure in that way. But it’s obvious that these are (ah, how refreshing) female authors, though not always for the same reasons.
#65 in 2023
I squeezed into the packed-like-sardines bookstore when my friend-acquaintance Kate Cayley read poems from her book Lent some months ago. I confess that I skipped the long line-up of people wanting an autograph. Though I could race through a slim volume of poems like this one in a flash, I resolved to savour the book instead, and so it waited for me all summer.
I have a Grand Theory that, until recently, most literature was written by angry children. Mothers only began writing in the twentieth century, and some of them, like Sylvia Plath, weren’t exactly motherly.
The Mother-Writer provides a whole new vista of literature. (There have been scores of father-writers, but most of them never wiped a single bum and you can tell.) Kate Cayley has definitely wiped bums, noses, and guck off the floor, while she ponders why she doesn’t quite believe in God, and what it was like to be Ted Hughes’s next wife. Whether writing about sixty harvests left to the world or a small brown toy rabbit, Kate balances the quotidian with the profound, which is the fancy way to describe her work.
To have children is to be brokenhearted so often it is not worth mentioning.
There’s a set of poems about Assia Wevill (the woman after Plath) which is begging to be staged, with titles like She Imagines Sylvia Trying to Write; poems about the Dutch Masters and other artists; but I lingered longest over the Mother Poems, the Mother Trying to Explain Time to Children, the Mother Poet who mulls over disastrous environmental predictions she hears on the radio, and then paints this scene:
…My daughter sews masks at the sewing machine while my sons / fight each other while three men who have bought /the house next door struggle with drywall and smoke / companionably in the front yard. My wife and I /are easy with each other, then uneasy, then easy again. / We are low on milk..
Kate’s short stories are very fine, too, with a long aftertaste, like that New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc I like so much (Stoneleigh). Don’t forego Lent.
#66 in 2023
Rasa Bugavičiute-Pēce, Puika, kurš redzēja tumsā.
I’ll talk about this book for my Latvian readers. Titled The Boy Who Saw in the Dark, it’s the story of a boy who grows up with blind parents. Everyone else, please keep scrolling.
Šis puika redz tumsā jo viņš uzaug ar akliem vecākiem. Ass un mīļš, tāds ir šis stāsts, savā vienkāršībā atgādinot bestseleru Kalendārs. Dzīve Latvijas pilsētiņās nav nekāda Leiputrija, un jo vairāk ja taviem vecākiem ir īpašas vajadzības, bet vienalga kā, cilvēkiem netrūkst mīlestības.
Mērķauditorija šai grāmatai nav pavisam skaidra - kaut sākumā puikam ir astoņi gadi, bet beigās — kad viņš izrauj siksnu no mammas rokām, kad viņš krata tēvu no dzēruma, — puikam ir piecpadsmit. Laikam te Kanādā šo grāmatu dēvētu kā ‘YA’.
Te ir bērna kauns, kad mamma izliekas, ka viņa var redzēt; Ivariņš, kas nomira no pārpārpārmērīgas alkohola lietošanas; izdomātais draugs Matiass; aklā zarna, zagšana, pirmā mīlestība. Grāmatas beigas ir negaidīti skarbas, laikam, jo tagad ir tīnis.
Gribas paslavēt grāmatas skaisto dizainu, ko radīja Zane Veldre.
#67 in 2023
The only children in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies are absent, whisked off to Lisbon by an errant wife, while her husband begins a tender yet dispassionate affair with the protagonist, a translator at The Hague. She is amazed when he presses the key to his apartment on her and leaves for Lisbon to sort things out with the wife. She’s not even sure she wants to stay in The Hague where she has to translate for war criminals, where her lips tickle the fur on the ear of a commander responsible for torture, rape, and mass graves.
For a book called Intimacies the writing is un-intimate. As much as it is written in the first person, the only strong emotion you get close to is the sensation of being inhabited by someone else as you translate their testimony, especially when the testimony is gruesome.
I said: There was the sound of shooting coming louder and louder and then the men started banging on the door. I could hear them from the shed outside, I could hear everything. They broke the door down and then they ordered my father and my brothers to lie on the ground.
Kitamura uses the word ‘intimacy’ many times in this novel; nevertheless, I felt like the pages I was turning were made of glass.
Not so with the next book.
#68 in 2023
Edna O'Brien, A Scandalous Woman, and Other Stories
Where Kitamura is cold, O’Brien is hot — and wet. A girl called the Favourite goes away to school and she is gifted oodles of hankies, — silk hankies, georgette hankies, lawn hankies, hankie sachets. She’ll need those hankies; she is in an O’ Brien story which means there will be tears.
There are times when the thing we are seeing changes before our very eyes, and if it is a landscape we praise nature, and if it is a spectre we shudder or cross ourselves but if it is a loved one that defects, we excuse ourselves and say we have to be somewhere, and are already late for our next appointment.
Men bring disaster. Honeymoons can lead to haemorrhoids or being conked on the head with a beach ball by your husband or the realization that you have made a big mistake which you will now regret for the rest of your life.
Often, the lover is married. The short story called ‘ Over’ is just about the most desperate monologue by a woman abandoned; it is a prose poem crying out to be performed. It is so good that once again I thought, damn those Irish authors, how do they best us? This is how the story starts:
Oh my dear I would like to be something else, anything else, an albatross. In short I wish I never knew you. Or could forget. Or be a bone — you could suck it.
Bookish friend, in case you feel shaken by these stories, the unwanted pregnancies, the various madwomen, keep a jar of gummi worms nearby. Or a hankie, a silk one, a lawn one.
#69 in 2023
On the cover the wonderful novelist Kate Atkinson and Mr. Percival Everett himself announce that Jessica Anthony’ s Enter the Aaardvark is a great read. For once, the blurbs on the dustjacket did what they were supposed to do: make me keep reading, because the first two pages were daunting. The story jumps into the very beginning of life, moving wordily to the fish who want to go upland, and Lo, here begins the Great Creep, and will you look at them there ectothermic tetrapod vertebrates go! It’s a relief when we jump cut to Modern Man in 1875, who finds, in Southern Africa, a strange and hideous creature, the aardvark.
…despite its appalling morphology, beauty is possible
Enter hilarity. The story in Anthony’s comic novel moves back and forth between a taxidermist in the 19th century and a congressional US candidate in the present. Sir Richard Ostlet from London sends the aardvark to Mr. Titus Downing in Leamington Spa; Greg Tampico brings it from Namibia to Washington where he gifts it o congressional candidate Alexander Paine Wilson who resembles Matt Gaetz. All of these men insist that they are Not Gay, and therein lies the tragedy, a tragedy set in motion by the aardvark, who is, I must point out, a female.
Human beings will all kill each other and die off, and millions of other creatures will each in their own way and time die off, but the aardvark will probably never die off, and knowing this makes you furious.
I gamboled, I frolicked. The fun just kept escalating and then suddenly it was over. Endings are hard, and this one doesn’t quite land, but who cares, given how I chortled when Greg Tampico never texted back.
*
I’m sitting here wondering how my bookish friends would answer that question: do women write differently from men, Yes or No?
If you say No, okay, why? And if you say Yes, then how do they do it?
Feel free to comment. In the meantime, stay bookish!
What I’m still reading: John Ghazvinian, America and Iran: a history, 1720 to the present, 2020
With all due respect, I could not stick to Jennifer Steil, Exile Music; Plum Johnson, They Left us Everything: a memoir
Coming up:
Featured Author: Percival Everett with Jamaica Kincaid, A history of the African-American people (proposed) by Strom Thurmond, 2004
Second Latest Saved: Sanghera Sathnam, The boy with the topknot, a memoir of love, secrets and lies in Wolverhampton, 2009 (I heard him speak on the podcast Empire and also my favourite Maggie O’Farrell recommends it)
Reader Recommended: Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, 2019 (because my bookish friend Maureen said I have to give it a second chance)
The Random List: Nicole Krauss, Great House, 2010 (know nothing)
Emily St. John Mandel, Last Night in Montreal, 2009 (an early work by the brilliant author of Station Eleven, also Canadian)
Yes I think women write differently and to wildly generalize let's say that women are more comfortable writing from a 'deep first person" - from a high subjective and emotionally alert perspective. Edna O'Brien being an excellent case in point. V. Woolf of course another example of swirling through other character's consciousness rather than obeying a plot outline. Perhaps male writers honour 'what is' more closely and women are drawn to "what might be/could be" ? I myself have a hard time with the importance of "plot" in a book and am often satisfied with one strong appealing voice in a book, taking me wherever. But I also like John leCarre so go figure