That Was Then

The other day I was invited to a concert at Berwald Concert Hall. I don’t know why I had ignored it in favour of Stockholm Concert Hall in the past three years; I guess it just so happened. Yet being there brought back an avalanche of memories.

Once upon a time, five lives ago, I used to work as an interpreter at Swedish Army Tattoo. It was a huge biennial event, with urban parades, performances at big arenas and concerts that were usually held in Berwald Hall. Many international bands attended, and the foremost guests of honour were the US and the Soviet/Russian bands. From the USA, it was most often US Army Band “Pershing’s Own”, and from Russia one of the two top bands, Army or Navy. All were musicians of highest class. As an interpreter for the Russian band, I had all kinds of tasks, from small talk at table (when they take away your plate before you had a chance to eat) to guiding the Russian bus driver through Stockholm to rendering instructions for marching performances. One year, and I am not sure exactly which year, possibly 1990 when the fall of Soviet communism was imminent, I was sitting on the stage in Berwald Hall, with US Army Band “Pershing’s Own” on my right and the Exemplary Band of Soviet Navy on the left: for the first time in history they were to perform together. For me, it was a sublime moment, and I could not help saying so as we finished the rehearsal. Friends, I said, I grew up in the Soviet Union, and I could never imagine I would live to see a Russian and an American band performing together, in a deeply significant symbolic act of friendship and solidarity. I broke into tears, and the musicians gave me an applaud. The concert was a tremendous success. At that time, we were sure that things were going in the right direction, and that the only way the two armies should ever meet was in a concert hall.

The story had an amusing ending. Colonel Shelburn, the boss of Pershing’s Own, asked for my business card, and a few weeks later there was a letter in my pigeonhole at work, in a fancy envelope emblazoned with “US Department of Defence Pentagon”. I wonder what my colleagues thought.

Photo credit: usarmyband.com

A lonely woman’s New Year Eve

 Forty two years ago I went to the Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow to read Swedish newspapers. In those dark and evil days, foreign newspapers, unless published by approved Communist parties, were only accessible in special reading rooms that required a permit. Permits were issued if for whatever reason you needed this dangerous reading matter for work. I had a permit, renewable every year, because I had to read Swedish film reviews for work. In the largest Swedish morning daily, film reviews appeared on the page facing columns, so when I opened the paper on that January day I saw a column titled “A lonely man’s New Year Eve”. I had just had a brief and stormy affair with a married Swedish journalist, and I was really sad to read his column describing his lonely celebration. Why on Earth was he alone on New Year Eve? Where was his family? Didn’t he have friends? I was used to wild New Year parties or at least quiet New Year parties in the company of close friends, and I felt so profoundly sorry for the lonely man that I had no mental energy to read any film reviews that day. 

Eventually the brief and stormy affair developed into a long and stormy marriage, and during those years I would occasionally go back to Moscow for New Year and leave my husband to spend it on his own, but more often we had wild parties and quiet family evenings, and every year we would listen to New Year Eve bells from Sweden’s thirteen cathedrals on the radio, followed by La Jouissance.

The last two years, I spent the New Year Eve on my own. I considered feeling sorry for myself. I considered ignoring it altogether and going to bed as usual (a bit difficult with loud firework displays outside). Then I decided that dignity demanded I celebrate no matter what. This year in particular I had learned that several of my close friends were also spending New Year Eve on their own. There was nothing extraordinary about it. (I guess during years with wild parties and quiet family evenings I never gave a thought to people mentioned by the radio host: “If you are lonely this night…”).

I prepared an elegant four-course dinner for myself. I bought a piccolo bottle of sparkling (I don’t drink alcohol otherwise, but I can make an exception for New Year Eve). I set the table nicely. I lit candles. I dressed up. I gave the cats some extra delicious food I had saved for the occasion. During my meal, I listened to Baroque Tafelmusik on Spotify. Between the meal and midnight, I watched a movie and did a jigsaw puzzle. I sent good vibes and WhatsApp messages to my lonely friends. At midnight, I opened the bottle and listened to cathedral bells, ignoring the loud fireworks outside. I cried floods, remembering all those previous New Years and realising how much I valued them, although sometimes I got irritated: “Can’t we listen to something else for a change?” It turns out, I cannot. And the radio host’s words resonated deeply: “If you are lonely this night...”

Me and my brain

 

I haven’t been an active blogger this year, and writing does not come naturally any more. This is quite remarkable given that I earned my living throughout my whole career, over fifty years, by writing. Yet now, anything longer that a photo caption on facebook feels strenuous, or rather totally unappealing. I was recently asked to contribute a piece to a Festschrift for a retiring colleague, which is a pleasurable task as it can be light in tone and devoid of heavy referencing. Yet as I considered possible topics and browsed through my files for something to recycle, I realised that there was no way I could do it. It is as if my brain has simply shut down its areas of academic thinking.

Reflecting upon this weird phenomenon, with my patchy knowledge of neuroscience, I realise that it is not just “as if”. My brain has indeed shut down the storage of scholarly approaches. When I decided, some time before my actual retirement, that I didn’t want to continue any academic pursuits, my brain made a mental note of it – sorry, unintended pun, but probably suitable. The brain is a very economic machine. When it knows that some portions of accumulated knowledge will not be used ever again, it seals off those storage rooms. Anyone who has tried knows how hard it is to come back to academic studies after a long break. The brain needs to re-learn to receive, process and store information. I not only find it next to impossible to write, but also extremely hard to read anything work-related. Former-work related. I have no problems reading instructions for assembling a miniature four-poster bed or for arranging a Basic Slanting-Style Moribana in Reverse.

Being a good housekeeper, the brain knows that there is new and radically different information coming in these days. Information more connected to the right hemisphere, to hand-eye coordination for crafts, to concrete orientation in space when I lead walks. This information needs new neuronal paths to be created, which in turn needs energy. The brain is energy-hungry; it uses 20% of all energy we receive from nutrition, more than any organ in our body. There is no point maintaining paths between sealed storage rooms. It’s a waste of energy. The brain hates waste. It is now busy making new connections, supporting new paths, making room for visual and haptic skills I didn’t need before.

When friends and colleagues tell me that I will one day want to write another scholarly book, I know for sure it won’t happen because I would then need to persuade the brain to reopen the sealed rooms and rebuild the dismantled pathways. It would take years. I don’t have these years, and it’s not worth while. Once again, to allow the brain to shut down significant bits of the left hemisphere was a deliberate and well thought-through decision that I don’t regret. Moreover, if I had known fifty years ago, when I was choosing my career, what I know now I probably wouldn’t have chosen to become an academic. I would have trained to become a garden architect or a cabinet-maker or a desert explorer. I have no time to pursue any of these careers other than on a small, even a miniature scale. But that’s enough for me, and my brain supports my new endeavours.

There is one area that the brain has kept open, and it belongs to both left and right hemisphere. I am still able to learn a new language.

Looking back

It is two years since I left Cambridge. At the time, it wasn't meant to be a definitive farewell. I planned to return to Cambridge in December for Guest Night at college and for my swearing-in as an Emeritus Fellow, and when that didn't happen for a number of reasons, I planned to go to Cambridge in March (2020) for the Charter Dinner, and we know why that didn't happen. Here I am, two years later, and no prospect of going to Cambridge in a foreseeable future. 

Do I miss Cambridge? Yes and no. I miss the community, my friends and colleagues, my students, seminars, college lunches and dinners... and I have to remind myself that none of this has happened in the past year and a half. So what I miss is in the past, not what I am missing now by not being in Cambridge. I know it sounds awful, but, to put it cynically, I haven't missed much. What I valued most in Cambridge has been severely reduced. To put it even more cynically, I am glad I left Cambridge when I did. 

In the first year, I still had some ties with Cambridge, supervising a few PhDs for a miserable remuneration. Online supervisions that were extraordinary in the beginning soon became routine for everyone so I didn't even feel I was particularly isolated. I stayed in touch with some colleagues, but eventually what is going on in my precious baby, my Research Centre, is no longer my concern. I don't know the new cohorts of graduate students, and they don't know me. They are likely to know of me and are probably assigned some of my work, but I am not a person anymore, just a name. And my former students have moved on, have jobs and families, and I see them occasionally on Facebook. Every now and then, Facebook sends me a "memory" of a doctoral defence or a graduation ceremony.

I have been allowed to keep my university email address, and I am still getting messages from various committees that have forgotten to take me off records, and I am getting lovely messages from my college supporting its members in these difficult times. I have participated in a couple of zoominars, but that, too, feels less and less relevant. 

The main reason Cambridge has become a ghost is my firm decision to withdraw from academic life altogether. If I had been still active as a researcher I would have participated in more events, made myself available for supervisions and assessments and at the very least kept track of what is going on in my field in general and in my former research environment in particular. As it is, I have moved on so far away that sometimes I am not even sure that Cambridge has really happened to me, because the person I have become in these two years wouldn't find academic life attractive. I do remember of course that the person I used to be valued her academic career and enjoyed academic life with all its horrors and rewards. But that person is no more. 

Therefore I don't miss Cambridge. 

A Russian emigree was once asked whether they were planning to visit Moscow. The answer was: "I have already been to Moscow". I have already been to Cambridge.  

Homerton college on a rare occasion of snow

Re-reading Lord of the Flies

 

This will be the last book in my 2020 re-reading challenge, and I believe it was the greatest positive surprise. I first read it when I was 20-ish and had never re-read it. A fellow student lent me her paperback that someone else had probably lent her. Remember that in Russia of my youth all foreign books that crossed the Iron Curtain were random. We didn’t know anything about the book or its author. By that time I had heard of, if not read The Lord of the Rings and was struck by the similarity of titles.

For inexplicable reasons this novel has been on school syllabi in many countries for years and years. Inexplicable because although the existential message is transparent, it is, I would claim, of little relevance for young readers, now as much as then. The adventurous plot is slow, and a significant portion of the book is exquisite nature descriptions that, as research shows, young readers skip. I am sure I did, even if at that time I regarded myself a sophisticated reader. If the novel had been subjected to the same kind of adaptation as Robinson Crusoe there wouldn’t be much left. (What most people remember or know by hearsay in Robinson is his encounter with Friday which is a minor episode toward the very end of the book).

I remembered most of the plot, although misremembered some details. For instance in my memory (spoiler!) Piggy was brutally murdered, while it was in fact Simon. I had forgotten the paratrooper. Knowing the plot, what I enjoyed most was the language, these beautiful, poetic, vivid descriptions of the island, the sea, the sky. For their sake, I will probably re-read the book again. And if you decide to re-read it (or read it for the first time – it’s one of those so called classics that people have heard of but never actually read unless they were forced to in school), take your time. You know what happens, but make sure you notice how it happens, how the tiny change in tone is rendered, and of course the elaborate setting that brings you right in the middle of this terrifying paradise.

Re-reading The Pickwick Papers

 

I chose The Pickwick Papers because I had re-read most other Dickens’s novels in the past fifty years, some quite recently, and Dickens was an important author back then, one that everybody read, even my snobbish mother. Bleak House was my favourite when I was twelve. The Pickwick Papers was supposed to be funny, and as I re-read it now, which was painful, I kept asking myself what we possibly could consider funny. Was it simply exotic and incomprehensibly British? I am thinking about Three Men in a Boat, that is very British and hilarious, then as now (I re-read it just a few years ago with great pleasure). Pickwick has a vague plot, mostly sketches of upper-class life full of ways and habits totally alien to me – I wonder how today’s British readers view it. There are no characters to like or dislike, and their concerns don’t engage me. A few phrases were witty, but mostly the language was flat. Perhaps when the book was first published, in instalments as was the practice, readers were kept in suspense about some minor quirks of the plot. Definitely there was more for them to recognise, and yes, I understand that it is all satire. But it was lost on me. I won’t bore you, dear reader, with more details.  

Re-reading The Power and the Glory

Yet another book that I was sure I had read, but as it turned out didn’t remember a word of. I think I remember the cover of the paperback I borrowed from a friend of my mother, but I could not find it on the web. Could it be that I started reading it, age 16, and gave up? There isn’t much of interest in the novel for a sixteen-year-old without any religious background. Extremely dense text, no action, scarce dialogue, no romance, alien setting, totally incomprehensible historical circumstances. Of Greene’s novels, two were translated and published in Russia in the 1960s, Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American, apparently because they depicted “the decay of capitalism”, which was the standard wording in Russian literary criticism of the time. The Power and the Glory could not be translated because of its theme. Religion was banned in Russia, and priests had been persecuted and shot, just as in Greene’s novel, but the author’s sympathy is not on Red Shirts’ side, and even a skilful foreword writer wouldn’t be able to explain it to the Soviet reader. 

I didn’t know anything about Mexico’s history then, as it wasn’t part of our history curriculum, and I must admit that I had to look it up now as well. Parallels to Soviet history are striking. But there is, as far as I know, no Russian novel portraying a persecuted Russian priest, at least not in the same poignant way. Greene’s protagonist is not a helpless and innocent victim; he is not particularly likable, and yet I kept falling into the unforgivable reader fallacy of yelling at him: Don’t do this, can’t you see it’s a trap? Which I think is the intention.

The Power and the Glory is perhaps the strongest impression of my 2020 re-reading challenge. Several books proved better on re-reading, but this is superior by far. I will read it again in a couple of years or maybe even sooner.

Re-reading Homo Faber

Max Frisch’s novel was not on my re-reading list, and I cannot remember why and how I decided to re-read it, but I know that it was an important book when I was young so it should have been on the list.

Once again, I know it was important, but I had rather vague memories of it. The strongest memory was of the final call at the airport, which, in my memory, was the final scene in the novel, while it actually happens right in the beginning. I remembered it contained incest, which was disturbing and fascinating. I remembered a particular reflection on human reproductive act that I could have sworn came from the girl, while it actually is Faber’s. That’s it. A general theme and two details, both wrong.

I did not remember at all the Conradesque adventure in the jungle. I did not remember Faber’s betrayal of his girlfriend, and I didn’t remember that he meets her again under dramatic circumstances. I winced at a casual remark by the narrator early in the novel, “if… then Sabeth would be alive”. I did not remember that she dies, still less how she dies, which right now strikes me as implausible, something from a TV thriller rather than a highbrow novel. When I was young I probably thought it was romantic. I didn’t reflect on why male authors always need to sacrifice female characters to redeem their male protagonists.

I don’t think I had read Lolita before I read Homo Faber, but now I see similarities, although Sabeth is twenty and not a minor. The similarity is in the narrator who is trying hard to exculpate himself, repeating again and again that he didn’t know, that he couldn’t resist, that it was Sabeth who seduced him, that it wasn’t his fault at all that he abandoned Sabeth’s mother, that they had agreed that she would get an abortion… and so on, over and over again.  And he is confident that he is objective - the novel's subtitle is "Report". I am sure I didn’t understand this fifty years ago, any more than I understood that Humbert Humbert was trying to acquit himself. But today I find such unreliable, self-delusive narrators one of the most interesting features of contemporary fiction. (I keep saying “contemporary” about books published seventy years ago because they were contemporary back then. By now, they are vintage if not classics).

Another thing that I enjoyed about Homo Faber is that it didn’t feel as translation. I am sure I could have read it in German, but I didn’t, and not once did I stop to consider that I was reading a translated book, which otherwise is for me a good reason to put a book aside. Fifty years ago I read it in Russian, and apparently that was a good translation too.

I strongly recommend this book if you haven’t read it – or if you have, but like me have forgotten.

Re-reading Margaret Drabble

Similar to Muriel Spark, I had a Margaret Drabble period when I read everything I could get hold of, which wasn’t easy behind the Iron Curtain – it wasn’t just the matter of popping into the nearest book shop. I had The Summer Bird-Cage on my 2020 re-reading list, but it wasn’t available on Kindle, so I chose The Millstone instead although I am not sure I read it back then. I know I read The Garrick Year and Needle’s Eye. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because The Summer Bird-Cage and The Millstone are thematically similar, and since both are Drabble’s early novels I would guess they are similar in other ways too. And I only have a vague memory of the former.

I can see what was attractive to me in Drabble’s novels then. They are set in a time almost contemporary with mine, in a place I was curious about. They have female characters of a background similar to mine: educated, intellectual, high aspiring women. At the time I read them, I was a single mother, but I never experienced the shaming Rosamund in The Millstone went through. She and I shared some human – female – experience, but otherwise lived on different planets. And I think mine was nicer.

I finished the book because it was part of the challenge, but otherwise I would have stopped early. I guess it wouldn’t be labeled chic lit because it is Great Literature, but then I am not well read in chic lit. I found Rosamund repulsive, which perhaps was intentional, but if so why would the novel be praised as feminist? When she finds herself pregnant after her first and only casual sexual experience – isn’t it one of the most banal plots in literature? - she first tries to get rid of the baby, and failing spectacularly with the totally inefficient method of hard liquor and a hot bath (another literary cliché) decides that she will keep the baby and love it beyond measure. I think the narrator is trying to convey her emotions, but it is mostly external events of a most trivial kind. Which in itself can be interesting as documentation of its time, but I was mainly irritated. The ending is pathetic, but I believe it is exactly a tear-jerker that I would have liked fifty years ago.

I will definitely not re-read any of Drabble’s early novels that I enjoyed then, but I may try one of her latest to see whether she has become more to my current taste.

Re-reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

 

Curiouser and curiouser! I will never again claim that I have read a book if I read it more than three months ago. I know for sure that I had a Muriel Spark period in my early twenties, meaning that I read as many of her books as I could get hold of. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, I recognise the titles The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Abbess of Crewe, but couldn’t say what they are about, and I have a vague memory that The Mandelbaum Gate takes place in Jerusalem and the main character has doubts about her Jewish identity. I chose The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for my re-reading challenge because I thought I remembered it well, and I didn’t. I didn’t remember it at all so, as with some other books on my list, I now wonder whether I had read it back then. Maybe yet another book I thought I had read because it is one of Spark’s best known. Sometimes I made a point of not reading an author’s most famous book that everybody else read.

Anyway, I read this novel as if for the first time or perhaps indeed for the first time, and I enjoyed it very much, certainly much more than I would have when I was young. If I did read it, it's unlikely I was familiar with the concept of flashforward, which is its most prominent narrative trait, alongside omission. I first got a bit concerned when the narrative was told predominantly through one schoolgirl’s point of view: I have read far too many girl school novels. But of course it is not a girl school novel; if anything, it is a parody on a girl school novel, and fifty years ago I wouldn’t have recognised it as such. The irony and sarcasm would have been lost on the young me.

So if you like stories elegantly told, with all characters equally horrible, but each in their own way, give this novel a chance. It has aged well.

Re-reading The Sound and the Fury

My re-reading project is getting more and more revealing. I chose The Sound and the Fury of all Faulkner novels we read fifty years ago because it is perhaps his most famous, and I have referred to it repeatedly in my research as an example of mission impossible: giving verbal expression to something that a character cannot express by words. Benjy as this impossible narrator features in every work on narratology, and I wonder whether I have done the unforgivable: cited someone else rather than going to the source. For I hadn’t re-read the source when I was referring to it, and now I wonder whether I have read it at all. Maybe it is one of those books you believe you have read, but actually haven’t. I cannot be sure, because this re-reading exercise has clearly demonstrated that I had no memory whatsoever of books I had definitely read. So maybe I did read The Sound and the Fury fifty years ago and not only pretended I understood it, but pretended I liked it and went on pretending, to the degree that I gave it five stars on Goodreads when I was building my shelf about twelve years ago (it was called Shelfari then). Maybe I did read it, but I am totally confident after re-reading it now, that I could not have understood much of it. Not just because of Benjy, since all other narrators are just as incoherent, and although this time I was reading slowly and carefully, I cannot claim that I was able to reconstruct the course of events. I didn’t enjoy the language enough to ignore the plot, and I wasn’t too engaged with the characters. If I hadn’t been reading for my challenge I think I would have given up, just as I have repeatedly given up on Ulysses.

Memories of Orkney, part 2

Read the beginning of this story.

I will not account for the trip day by day because it will be repetitive, but I will point out some highlights. To begin with, I was, as mentioned earlier, a bit anxious about sharing a room with a stranger, but I decided to be positive and proactive, so the moment my roommate Shelley and I stepped into the room, I offered to make tea, and while we had tea, we chatted and told each other about what we did when we didn't go on walking tours. Shelley's luggage got lost at her connecting airport, which is always a good conversation starter. It turned out she was a retired lawyer with specialism in children's rights so we even had some common point of interest. She was from Arizona and had lived in Canada. At dinner that night we all introduced ourselves more properly: a couple from Oxford (non-academic), a father and a pregnant daughter from Denver, a lady from Texas, another from the UK. All nice, all eager and experienced travellers. This was what I had hoped for: people my age or older (except the pregnant daughter) who go on walking holidays and can afford relatively expensive trips are the kind of people I can deal with. There are certain unwritten rules for such travel, for instance, rotating seats in the van. When someone's luggage is lost everyone supports and shares whatever can be shared. And it was an interesting and diverse bunch of people so there were no problems finding subjects to talk about. Shelley had brought her flute! She and I got along well: we conversed a bit, then opened our iPads and let each other be; we had no arguments about who would shower first, and we didn't mind seeing each other walk about the room in pyjamas. If I ever travel again, I would prefer a single room, but I now know that I can share with a stranger if necessary. I think it helped that four of us were elderly single ladies, and three other people were also at the same stage in life. Everybody hinted at high blood pressure, and nobody was concerned about other people farting. 

The days were intensive. We had early breakfasts and sat in the van by 8, to drive or to take a ferry to one of the islands. We had packed lunch: the horrible triangular sandwiches, but I hadn't expected anything else. At least there was a variety of them, and you could choose the evening before. Dinners were exquisite, but very late for me; some were in our hotel, some in local pubs. Maybe other people stayed up for a while, but I collapsed directly after dinner.

Most walks were coastal and highly enjoyable. The trip was ”grade 2”, or easy, and I had no problems keeping pace. The weather changed dramatically, but we were all well equipped, and when it started raining – and once even hailing – we simply put on our waterproof trousers and walked on. 

Some days, or portions of days, were warm enough to wear three layers of clothes rather than six. So you had to carry stuff for all occasions. On walks like this, you always come to a point, some time in the afternoon, especially if you are wet and walking uphill for ages, when you start asking yourself why you are doing this, voluntarily and at high cost. When you no longer are able to appreciate anything around you and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. There isn't much else you can do, because you cannot lie down on wet ground and have a tantrum, and you are also pressed for time because you need to catch the last ferry. Then suddenly it goes over, and life is great again. For me at that time, worrying about where to put my foot meant I had no time worrying about other things, which was exactly what I needed. And it was good to know, as we compared notes during evening meals, that everybody was dead tired – in a good way. 

As I said, I had not done my homework properly, but even if I had, Orkney is full of surprises. I have travelled a lot, and Orkney is not like any other place. It was much larger than I had anticipated. All islands are different, and none is like Mainland – that has a fresh-water lake and marshes! The scenery is stunning everywhere, with stone arches and other remarkable stone formations, like the Old Man of Hoy. Wildlife is abundant. All those thousands of birds on the cliffs – precisely like an Attenborough film. We did see puffins. We also saw all kinds of cultural stuff: Neolithic, Iron Age, Vikings, standing stones, WWII. I didn't know Orkney was so important strategically.

 

Even in a really tiny area – Orkney has a population of 22,000 – there is a competition between the capital, Kirkwall, and the next largest city, Stromness, that boasts of being more cultural. My Orcadian friend is born in Stromness so when we met in Kirkwall she immediately drove me

to Stromness because it was more interesting. It had a book store that carried local children's authors. I bought a few. And suddenly Farewell to Stromness made sense.

Already by reading Orkney Tapestry I realised how close it was to Norse culture, most tangible in place names. Kirk is obviously the same word as church, but closer to Nordic kirke/kyrka. Ay in many island names: Rousay, Birsay - is Nordic ö or øy. Brogh is borg, castle. And so on. I was perhaps the only one in our group who appreciated it. On another matter, my travel companions thought it weird that it was still full daylight at ten in the evening, while for me it is of course perfectly natural. 

 

All walks were remarkable, although Hoy was probably the highlight for me. Generally, I felt I got good value for my money, and I also got precisely what I needed most at that point: total break and peace of mind. Our guide was nice and knowledgeable, and he very cleverly planned our walks and visits to cultural sites to avoid crowds (there were huge cruise ships coming in every day). And I got role models in single female travellers!

Whenever I travel I typically get enthusiastic about the place and determined to come back. There is a lot more to explore in Orkney, and I even had an idea for a walking seminar, but I knew even then that I would probably never go back. Today, as the world has changed, I definitely know it will never happen. Therefore I am incredibly lucky to have done this trip, getting everything I had hoped out of it tenfold.

Travel home turned out to be a nightmare, but I won't tell you about it. 

 

Memories of Orkney

Facebook has been reminding me of my trip to Orkney last year, and I have realised that I never wrote up this story although I shared pictures on the go. Staying at home with slim chances of travel in the observable future, it may be a good idea to re-live the experience. I will use my travel diary, but inevitably add reflections from today's vantage point.

It all started five years ago when I made acquaintance with an Orcadian at a conference. Of course I knew vaguely about the existence of remote islands off the northern shores of Scotland, but they hadn't really been on my list of places to visit. Talking to this colleague got me fascinated, particularly as she mentioned Island Studies. Imagine, there was a discipline called Island Studies! I have always been intrigued by islands of all kinds and sizes, although I don't perceive Great Britain as an island. Many years ago when I studied Scandinavian languages I considered specialising in Faeroe Islands and becoming a unique expert in all things Faeroese: language, history, culture, even politics. It didn't happen, but some twenty years ago I was invited to Faeroe Islands to lecture – sadly it clashed with another commitment. In Sweden, I have been to many islands, large and small. I went to Iceland twice. I visited Madagascar some years ago. I wandered on Inis Mor off Ireland's west coast when I was at a conference in Galway. There is something special about islands – I have written an academic paper on the topic.

Listening to my new colleague triggered my imagination, and of course like you do at conferences she invited me to come and give a talk. Then we forgot about it. Or almost. Every now and then I looked up Orkney and considered a self-guided trip, but it always felt intimidating, and there was always something in the way. Two years ago there was a conference in Orkney that I wanted to attend, but it clashed with another conference I was running. Last spring I realised that I would be moving away from the UK soon, and it was now or never. Self-guided still felt daunting, and I checked travel agents for small-group walking tours with reasonable comfort. All trips were unsurprisingly fully booked except one space in the end of May and a couple in September. September seemed too far away, and I am glad I didn't opt for that since by September I had already moved back to Sweden. End of May is still term time, and I was not supposed to be away from Cambridge during term time, but I decided that if I told my students discreetly that I wouldn't be able to meet them for supervisions for a week we could keep it between ourselves. I booked the trip, paying in full since it was less than a month in advance. I wanted a single room, but it wasn't available, and I had to accept it, booking last-minute. That last space seemed like destiny.

As I have mentioned some times before, I am not good at preparing for travel when it comes to reading guidebooks, but this time I wanted to make the most of it so I started, as you do, by trying amazon and getting 600 hits. It felt hopeless so I asked my Orcadian friend for recommendations. The best was The Orkney Tapestry, by George Mackey Brown, a book worth reading regardless. It provided more or less everything essential I needed to know about my destination, while also being deeply personal and engaging.

I read the travel agent's brochure and studied various maps. Orkney consists of seventy islands, and we were supposed to visit several. It was exciting. It was right in the middle of a very difficult period in my life, and I was looking forward to a break far, far away from everything and offline. I was tremendously anxious about travelling on my own, among strangers. I had done it dozens of times in the past, but recently I had preferred company, just to be on the safe side. I do have a condition, and I am not young anymore. I was, however, confident that I was in good physical shape after extensive power walking.

The trip started in Inverness, and I first considered taking the night train, but I didn't want to run a risk of not sleeping properly and be tired in the morning. So I booked a B&B in Inverness, arriving in the evening and having a good rest. In the morning I walked to the station, worrying that I wouldn't find my guide. I always worry about silly things like that. I was hugely worried about the crossing because guidebooks said it could be rough, and I have bad experience of rough seas.

I found the guide and my travel companions, just eight of us. I was going to share a room with one of them, and while we drove up to John O'Groats, I looked at them, hoping that my roommate would be nice. People going on demanding walking holidays are usually nice.

To be continued. 

Re-reading Catch 22

I had no memory of this novel at all, although I know I read it all those years and years ago. Of course I know what “catch 22” means, and I had some vague memories of pilots having to fly more and more missions, but I am not sure whether I remembered it from the book or from the film. I know for sure that I remembered the most gory detail from the film and was waiting for it to turn up in the book. It did, at the very end. I don't know whether the knowledge spoiled my reading experience.

I am confident that I didn't understand anything of the novel when I read it fifty years ago, and as with most books on my re-reading list, I wonder how much I bluffed then. The plot is non-existent, and at that time plot was more important than anything else. The book is exceptionally repetitive, and an inexperienced reader – as I was then – would certainly get bored, unaware that repetition is the most prominent and of course deliberate narrative device. It is used in conjunction with another powerful device: omission, or paralipsis, to use a fancy word. The same episode is told over and over again, each time slightly differently and each time omitting the most significant detail that would explain everything that is going on. How clever! It also employs an intricate temporality as events follow upon each other randomly, as deviations, by association, connected solely by a reminiscence, or even without any tangible connection at all. Each chapter seemingly focuses on a secondary or sometimes completely peripheral character, and only in hindsight do we understand why the story had to be told at all. If I were still an active academic I would write an article on this novel and include it in my courses. Not as a war novel, but as an example of exquisite storytelling.

However, the greatest surprise to me was that the novel is so wonderfully hilarious. Of course I remembered, more from criticism than from actual reading, that it was a satire on war. Yet a satire is not necessarily funny, and the novel is. I don't often laugh outloud when I read, but I did. Pity nobody was listening except my cats. I would almost claim that Catch 22 is the twentieth-century reply to Alice in Wonderland with its twisted logic and magnificent wordplay. Maybe this is the only possible way to write about the horrors of war.

Re-Reading A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust was my random choice for 2020 re-reading challenge out of many novels by Evelyn Waugh, although I probably read more of them than my friends, and definitely more than my parents and their friends, because I could read them in English. Inexplicably, Waugh's novels in paperback were sold among a handful – no pun intended – English-language books in a major bookstore in Moscow. The price was 5 or 6 rubles – my salary was 100 rubles (for comparison: a kilo beef was 2 rubles; a pair of tights was 10 rubles). I bought as many books as were available, maybe spending a month's salary. That's what you did. The reason those paperbacks made their way into Russia was that a couple of Waugh's novels had been translated into Russian, including A Handful of Dust. In a handbook of British literature, written by an esteemed Russian scholar, Waugh was presented as ultra-reactionary, so it is surprising he was translated at all, but there was never any logic behind what was or wasn't acceptable.

I remembered merely one detail from the book, which I also believed happened in a totally different book. A young boy is learning to ride a pony and gets kicked off. His coach tells him it happened because he ”opened his bloody legs and cut an arser”. The boy dutifully reports this to his parents. This was the first time a rude word was published in a Russian book, and my father was delighted. He read it outloud for my mother and me, and later to several guests. Maybe this is why I remembered this particular episode, because I didn't remember anything else, and it didn't come back as I was reading. So I can almost say I had never read this book before.

It is one of those books where all characters are repulsive, but unlike many books with repulsive characters I was curious about them and wanted to get to know them better. Against all my convictions as a reader, I wished I could warn them: Don't be a fool, stop doing this! I wished I could change their destinies.

My scholarly self prompts that Waugh's sarcastic writing goes back to Jane Austen, although he would probably deny it. Anyway, the book is brilliantly written, and I may re-read it again soon. Warmly recommended.

 

Re-reading The Little Lady of the Big House

I have included this, frankly, mediocre and unremarkable novel in my re-reading challenge because for some reason it was exceptionally significant for me and my friends, and also my parents' generation knew it well. Jack London was a popular author in Russia, maybe the most popular American author after Mark Twain. We had his collected works in 10 volumes in my childhood home. I wonder why he was acceptable for the Soviet regime, probably because of his socialist views and support of working class movement. Martin Eden, a Künstlerroman featuring a protagonist with a working class background, was introduced officially as his best work. I don't think I ever read it (anything officially introduced as good was perceived as bad). We read The Call of the Wild and White Fang, but they were never my favourites, because there were other, more powerful animal stories I liked. We were greatly fascinated by The Star Rover, an early sci-fi novel, and my father's favourite was John Barleycorn, an autobiography focused on alcoholism.

But why The Little Lady? In my case, I was so obsessed by the novel that I would cast people in my surroundings as the characters, and this was probably the closest I ever came to having a crush on a literary character. The reason, as with so many other books from the same stage of our lives, was love. The love triangle in the novel was the attraction, and the tragic outcome only amplified it. Remember, we were not familiar with romance, not with with any kind of trash, but particularly not romance since it had nothing to contribute to the formation of the new socialist citizen. Therefore any book - or movie – with any kind of romantic plot worked as a substitute for mass-market romance.

As with most books on my re-reading list, I had rather vague memories of my once great favourite that I certainly read over and over again, first time probably when I was thirteen. I remembered some key scenes, I remembered there was a lot of horseback riding. Some details came back as I was reading, others didn't ring a bell. What I had completely forgotten, most likely because I didn't pay attention to it before, was the extensive focus on Dick's agricultural projects. Actually, the title character does not appear in the first quarter of the novel. However, Dick's fixation on his business provides an essential background to the central conflict, whether intentionally or not. Every time Paula comes in visit her husband in his office, he is in a hurry, looking sideways at his spreadsheets while she is trying to catch his attention. They have separate quarters and meet at lunch and dinner, seldom on their own as the house is always full of guests. Their marriage is explicitly presented as happy, while it is quite clear that it is a disaster, which makes Paula's fascination with handsome, exciting Graham much more plausible. Her dilemma is not between two men she loves – even though she says so – but between love and duty. Dick himself admits that she never loved him the way she loves Graham. A detail I had completely forgotten was that Dick eventually decides to commit suicide, staging it as an accident, so that Paula is spared the choice. Hearing a gunshot, he says: “She beat me to it”.

It was illuminating, once again, to consider what might have been attractive about this book fifty years ago when I clearly see that at least half of it would be of no interest to a seventeen-year-old, at least not the seventeen-year-old me. The more I re-read, the more I wonder whether I used to skim-read, slowing down at more “interesting” passages (read, “about love”) because some I remember by heart.

I started by stating that The Little Lady was a mediocre novel, and I stand by this judgement. The plot is trivial and not really convincing, the characters are flat (the external descriptions are so stereotypical you could puke), there is a lot of political and philosophical discussions among secondary characters, that feel pointless. The writing is not particularly good. Still, I am glad I re-read the book so that I am now rid of the distorted image I had from my youth. I would not recommend anyone to read it. If you want romance, there are so many other books that do not pretend to be anything other than romance. 

 

Re-reading 2001: A Space Odyssey

I wouldn't call myself a voracious science-fiction reader, but I was obsessed with space since I was a young child, wanted to be an astronomer and until certain age firmly believed that I would one day travel to Mars and Saturn and beyond. Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke were my house gods, and not only mine – they were highly regarded among my friends and my parents' friends. I never saw the movie until I came to Sweden, so my memory of 50 years ago is of the book alone.

Even today there are certain images and verbal passages describing deep space that give me the creeps. Maybe it's true about everyone – it's just too overwhelming. I remember reading the chapter in which Bowman is falling through the shaft, me feeling nauseated and intoxicated at the same time. Otherwise, as with most books on my re-reading list, I did not remember much. I did not remember the first, lengthy part in pre-historic time that is so marvellously transposed into screen. I must say, it didn't quite work for me now, narratively, but not to the degree I was disturbed by it. It was the same with later chapters told from the point of view of the superior aliens that had planted the monoliths on Earth, Moon and Japetus. The omniscience of the narrator was a bit problematic for me as a professional reader. I am sure I didn't notice it back then.

I believe that we are all highly affected by the movie and cannot “unwatch” it, therefore my memory of Hal the computer was that he – it – was an evil rebel, malicious AI in conflict with humanity. It has been a while since I saw the movie but as I remember this is the way Hal is portrayed in the film. In the book, he – yes, I will refer to Hal as he – is presented as a more ethical being than the humans. He has a moral dilemma because he has been programmed to lie to the crew about the true nature of the mission. But he also needs to complete the mission, and the imperfect and mendacious humans are in the way. I fully empathised with Hal and felt unhappy that he had to be destroyed. He was only doing his duty.

The detailed description of Bowman's isolation resonates in a weird way today. And I wasn't at all disturbed by outdated details, as I know I might have been with a less engaging story. I started reading with apprehension: what if the book felt hopelessly obsolete? It didn't.

And I wonder whether Clarke had read The Magician's Nephew and referred to it, consciously or subconsciously, in the depiction of interstellar Grand Central Station.

Now I want to re-watch the movie.

Re-reading The Group

I included The Group in my 2020 re-reading challenge because it fit the criterion of a book that was important fifty years ago and that I hadn't re-read since. It was important to me and my female friends as a source of information we could not obtain elsewhere; it was also enticing in a way few other books were. Remember: we were behind the Iron Curtain where anything even remotely hinting at a possibility that human beings practised sexual reproduction was outrageous. Unlike the other books I have re-read, The Group was obviously not translated into Russian, so someone smuggled paperback copies from the West at great risk, because it was certainly on some top-secret list of banned pornography. It was pornography in our eyes because it was the closest we had ever seen or read of explicit sex. It also depicted glamorous life we were denied.

I remembered two details from the book. First, that one of the girls went to get a pessary. We had heard vaguely that there was such a thing; rumours had it that the Bolshoi ballet dancers were given them. There is a detailed description in the book of the procedure, which triggered our imagination. The second episode was another girl being shocked to see her friend's naked baby. I don't know why it made an impression on me. Even at that time I had seen naked male babies.

As young readers in the Soviet Union we were multiply displaced from the story and its protagonists. The USA was another world, a galaxy far far away. We didn't know what Vassar was, and although it is clear from the book that it is a women's college the connotation was lost on us. We didn't understand that the girls and their families were privileged because we thought everybody in the USA was rich. We probably didn't notice that the novel, published in 1963, takes place in the '30s. I definitely had no memories of the extensive political discourse. Today, I winced at some male characters being Communists, clearly with the author's sympathy.

The preface to the Kindle edition I have now read, written by someone who is presumably famous and of whom I had never heard, states that the novel, despite repeated claims, is not a forerunner to chick lit because it has literary merit. If so, I failed to notice it. Now, I am not an expert in chick lit. At the same time as The Group, we also read Valley of the Dolls, which puzzled me, since I just didn't get it. Some years ago I tried to read a couple of chick lit novels my daughter had recommended, and again, I didn't get it. The lifestyle, views and aspirations of the girls of The Group are totally alien to me and not interesting enough to want to know more. While whatever was attractive fifty years ago isn't any longer. I finished the book because it was part of the challenge, but it was painful.

A friend has told me that their grandchild loved the book. I wonder what it offers to the young generation today.

This is the paperback edition I read fifty years ago