Stefania Memole Female, 26. Treviso, Italy

• *** This comment contains spoilers! ***

  I absolutely love Virginia Woolf: I’ve already read "To The Lighthouse", "Orlando" and most of "A Room of One’s Own" (I used it a lot when I was writing my graduation thesis on Janet Frame, as both authors felt the necessity to have a quiet place and enough “piece of mind” to write without too many ... (continue)

  I absolutely love Virginia Woolf: I’ve already read "To The Lighthouse", "Orlando" and most of "A Room of One’s Own" (I used it a lot when I was writing my graduation thesis on Janet Frame, as both authors felt the necessity to have a quiet place and enough “piece of mind” to write without too many worries). I love her “stream of consciousness” and how she portrays the inner life of different people, especially women, in their everyday actions. When I was in London I went in front of her house in Bloomsbury and took a picture, then sat in the nice park in the square just in front of it and ate my sandwich, wondering how many “deep thoughts” that place had heard from Virginia and her friends of the Bloomsbury group.
  In Cunningham’s "The Hours" (and in the movie of the same name) there is a fictionalised version of Virginia Woolf in the period when she was writing "Mrs Dalloway" (and also in the period of her suicide, such a sad thing when it happens to an artist, don’t you think?). I think that the use of famous people, either dead or alive, as characters in novels (it’s becoming more and more common) reveals that the interior world of that particular person is something we still have an interest in. In this book, we don’t read about Virginia Woolf’s interior world, of course, but we learn about Mrs Dalloway’s thoughts and musings, which is quite satisfying anyway.
  Given that it is quite impossible to say something on Mrs Dalloway that hasn’t already been said a hundred times, I just want to point out something that struck me. A recurring sentence in the book, which is actually a verse from Shakespeare’s "Cymbeline", says: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages”. Both Septimus Warren Smith and Mrs Dalloway utter this sentence over and over again. Moreover, it is used in Janet Frame’s Autobiography: when the author is in the mental hospital, she keeps on scribbling this sentence (I can recall the scene in the movie very well, because she writes the sentence on the walls of her room / cell). The three of them (Septimus Warren Smith, Janet Frame and Virginia Woolf) suffered from some sort of mental illness and my interpretation, at the time when I was reading Janet Frame’s book, was completely wrong. I thought that this verse was quite hopeful, a sort of encouragement to ignore the storms in your inner world and try to live your life happily, but I found out that it is quite the opposite. The line is actually from a funeral song that celebrates death as a comfort after a difficult life. Septimus’s life has become unbearable: he has lived the horrors of the war and lost many friends, thus ordinary life in post-war London is worthless to him. Clarissa reflects on the death of her friend and feels responsible for it. Was it the same feeling experienced by Virginia Woolf moments before she drowned herself, during the Second World War, when London was being bombed? Through Shakespeare’s words, nonetheless, Clarissa can finally accept death, something that had been troubling her for the whole day. There is therefore an optimistic side to this novel that is otherwise rather sad.
  I acknowledge that with this novel Virginia Woolf found her voice: she describes everyday actions like buying flowers or eating dinner, showing that no action is too ordinary for the attention of a writer. Given that Virginia Woolf was writing the novel in the period when Sigmund Freud was publishing his theories on the subconscious and there was much interest in psychology, I can understand how fascinating the mind of a human being must have been for her. The author shows that our inner lives are always very rich, but they are separated from each other’s. Despite the fact that Clarissa throws parties in order to draw people together, they remain distant and struggle to communicate with each other. It is perfectly clear that people like Clarissa or Septimus are emotional and sensitive, they like to think a lot and to reflect about life, whereas other people like Richard or Lady Bruton are more materialistic. If you pay attention, for example, flowers are a recurring theme and certainly they are a symbol of emotions and a rich inner life. In the book people treat flowers differently: Clarissa is comfortable with flowers and in the first section she is buying flowers for the party, whereas Richard handles the conventional bouquet of roses awkwardly and gives them to Lady Bruton, who lays them stiffly by the plate.
  There is so much more to this novel and I’m sure it needed more attention and at least a reread (sometimes it was difficult for me to deal with the shifts of point of view, but I guess that’s the inconvenience of the stream of consciousness).

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  ― Posted on Aug 28, 2009 | Add your feedback

• Sea of Poppies is supposed to be the first book in a projected trilogy on the Ibis (which will be awfully long, seen that this book only is 530 pages long!). In my opinion, it should have won the Booker Prize last year instead of The White Tiger (link to my review in Italian), because it was so much ... (continue)

  Sea of Poppies is supposed to be the first book in a projected trilogy on the Ibis (which will be awfully long, seen that this book only is 530 pages long!). In my opinion, it should have won the Booker Prize last year instead of The White Tiger (link to my review in Italian), because it was so much better than any other book in the shortlist. It is one of those 500-pages-long books that you can read in just a few days, never growing tired of the characters.
  Much space is given to the second mate, Zachary Reid, an American whose mixed origins will leave him a target for blackmail. Then there is Paulette Lambert, an orphan French girl who grew up in India and speaks perfect Bengali and Hindi; she wants to escape to Mauritius and is in love with Zachary. Neel Rattan is a bankrupt raja who is being deported and has lost all his privileges, while Deeti, the widow of an opium grower, is travelling with a low-caste Oxen driver considered by everybody to be her husband. On board there are also the “lascars”, the Asian sailors who crew the ship, among them Serang Ali and Ah Fatt, half Parsee and half Chinese. It is an unlikely group of passengers for a ship: they all come from very different backgrounds and are divided by race, gender and cultural heritage. In particular, there is a hierarchy among people on the ship, even though many people (Zachary, Paulette and Neel in particular) are hiding their true identities. There are strong bounds that connect the characters and others are made on board of the Ibis. The voyage that many passengers were seeking as a refuge becomes in fact a nightmare.
  Sea of Poppies is an adventure novel and an epic saga at the same time. It would be perfect for the silver screen, as many features would perfectly fit in a movie (the love between Zachary and Paulette, for example, or the cruelty of British officers on board towards the “coolies”). There is even a website (http://www.seaofpoppies.com/) where all the words in the Pidgin English of the lascars are explained, imagining that Neel Rattan devoted the last years of his life to a dictionary of nautical jargon used by the lascars (who came from many different parts of Asia and Africa and therefore created a pidgin language).

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• Last summer I read "Every Light in the House Burnin'", Levy’s first novel, but I was a bit disappointed. Despite the interesting setting, London in the 1960s from the point of view of a young girl of Jamaican origins, there was something missing. The remarks on the racial relations between the Jacob ... (continue)

  Last summer I read "Every Light in the House Burnin'", Levy’s first novel, but I was a bit disappointed. Despite the interesting setting, London in the 1960s from the point of view of a young girl of Jamaican origins, there was something missing. The remarks on the racial relations between the Jacobs and a predominantly white society were not explored enough and sometimes I found the story a bit dull. However, I decided to read Small Island, Levy’s most recent novel to date, because it is supposed to be her best (it won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread Prize and the Orange of Oranges) and I must say that this time I was not disappointed.
  The novel is told in four voices: Gilbert’s and his wife Hortense’s, who travel from Jamaica to England just after the Second World War, and then from the point of view of an English couple, Queenie and Bernard. Andrea Levy said: "None of my books is just about race, they're about people and history". As a matter of fact, there is a lot of history in the book: for example the involvement of Jamaican people in the Second World War and in the Royal Air Force and their relations with American soldiers, their racism and their reactios to black British soldiers (America still had the so-called Jim Crow laws). There is also much about people in the novel: Levy writes about the displacement of English soldiers in remote areas of Asia and the experiences and impressions of the first Jamaican immigrants just after the war, together with the climate of austerity and poorness that England was experiencing at the time.
  There is some irony and funny moments in Small Island, a thing that reminds me of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), one of my favourite novels. There is a profile of Andrea Levy in the book section of The Guardian (here) and one of the questions that arises is why Andrea Levy didn’t have the same success as Zadie Smith with her novels about black people in London, at least until Small Island came. I think that the answer is the humour: Andrea Levy can use some humour (Hortense’s nickname, “Miss mucky foot”, or Gilbert’s failed “bee business” are some fine examples), a thing that is always appreciated.
  One thing that shocked me in the novel are the differences between the Jamaican couple and the Londoners. There is no doubt that Jamaica was settled at the time: Hortense truly believes that she is British and wants to be considered as such. She is and educated young lady and her skin is light, something that she thought English people would immediately notice. She is shocked by the fact that English people can be poor, ugly and dark-skinned as well. She expected to live in a fine house with a back garden, instead she finds a city almost completely destroyed by bombs, a country impoverished by the war, where she must adapt to live in a cold, badly-furnished room with just a small sink and a toilet at the bottom of the stairs.

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  ― Posted on Aug 28, 2009 | Add your feedback

• Having read and loved A World of Strangers, one of Gordimer’s first novels, last year I decided to cue for a couple of hours and go to a theatre to listen to her presenting her new collection of short stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She is a very lively and witty old lady who genuinly lo ... (continue)

  Having read and loved A World of Strangers, one of Gordimer’s first novels, last year I decided to cue for a couple of hours and go to a theatre to listen to her presenting her new collection of short stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She is a very lively and witty old lady who genuinly loves Italy (she said that it resembles Africa because we live much in the streets, which I think is a compliment). In spite of that, I didn’t enjoy Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black as much as A World of Strangers, which is quite an old book, having been first published in 1958. Perhaps it’s because post-apartheid South Africa is difficult to tell in stories (and in fact only one story was, partly, about “the black issue”), but I was a bit disappointed with it. Anyway, I thought that it would be great to read one of her old novels, in order to know more about South Africa during the apartheid, which is something that Nadine Gordimer can describe very well.
  In July’s People, Nadine Gordimer tells us of an uncommon family in 1980s’ South Africa: rich and liberal, the Smales are not racist, even though they enjoy the luxuries they have. For them it was normal to have black servants living in the house and to allow them to go back to their villages once every few years. They never treated July badly and insisted that he didn’t use the word “master” with them. When they are forced to leave their well-furnished seven-room house to leave inside a hut made with mud, they have difficulties to adjust to the new life. When July says that, back there, with their wine glasses and the clothes in the cupboards, they looked different, he underlines that the main difference between them is not he colour of the skin but the money, and therefore the lifestyle they are used to. In the village they are forced to live like everybody else, their privileges being erased by the loss of their house and their money. When July takes the key of the yellow bakkie, the Smales’ car, the last privilege is gone: he takes the power from them and becomes their “master”. It is unclear if July did it on purpose or not, since he is quite an ambigous character. Another symbol of Bam’s power is his gun, which gets stolen and changes the relations of power and the ways of communication between the Smales and the black people of the village. This underlines how much the question of who has the power in South Africa was related to the possession of tools, such as weapons, technology or a better education.
  If the Smales in their big house could convince themselves that they were not racist, in the village it is somehow different and their prejudice feelings come out every now and then (for example when Bam asks Maureen if she couldn’t have asked a black woman to kill the kittens, as if a black person is more suited for the job). Frustrated by the fact that they are helpless and restricted to a village where they don’t know anybody, they become nervous and begin to wonder if this is how black people have always felt about South Africa, their own country. Even though Maureen is supposed to have a better relationship with July than her husband Bam, she is the one who is more stressed by the change of habits: she cannot adjust to the life in the village, whereas Bam tries to become part of the community. As a consequence, Maureen’s relationship with July is broken: there are awkward silences and misunderstandings between them. The ending is ambiguous: a helicopter is heard and Maureen runs towards it, even though she doesn’t now if it brings saviours or murderers. The good thing about July’s People is that the relationship between black people and their white upper-class masters is not stereotyped. The characters don’t have clear-cut opinions on the racial issues of South Africa: you have to understand their opinions on apartheid and on the condition of black people through small clues in the novel. In A World of Strangers, on the contrary, the characters are quite strongly pro or agaisnt apartheid, maybe too much. In spite of this flaw I liked that book best, maybe because the relationships between the characters were easier to understand. With July’s People you are never completely sure that you have understood everything: for example, is it only my imagination or were there some sexual undertones in July and Maureen’s conversations?

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  ― Posted on Jul 1, 2009 | Add your feedback

• This novel is set in scarcely populated Western Australia in the 1930s-40s. Perdita’s father is an anthropologist who has lost the interest in his profession and Perdita’s mother, Stella, is an Englishwoman who never ever thought that she would be having such a dull life in a remote hut in Australia ... (continue)

  This novel is set in scarcely populated Western Australia in the 1930s-40s. Perdita’s father is an anthropologist who has lost the interest in his profession and Perdita’s mother, Stella, is an Englishwoman who never ever thought that she would be having such a dull life in a remote hut in Australia. None of them really wanted to have a daughter, so Perdita grows up without love. Stella needs hospitalisation every now and then because she “loses touch with reality” and her dad becomes obsessed with war and pins images and newspaper articles on the war on the walls of the hut where he lives with his daughter.
  Perdita is fond of the Aboriginal woman who nurses her and becomes close friend with Mary. This is one of the few Australian novels where the problem of the Stolen Generations is tackled (the Stolen Generations being a practice which involved Aboriginal children being taken from their families and brought up among white people to make them forget about their culture and in a way lead the Aboriginal race towards extinction). The core of the novel is the murder of Perdita’s father, but this traumatic event in Perdita’s past is a bit obscure. Who is the murderer? What really happened in the hut that night?
  Perdita has a speech impediment and can speak without stuttering only when she recites Shakespeare. As a linguist, I found this quite interesting but a bit strange. Jones does not explain why Perdita suddenly begins to stutter (this is before the murder so it’s not a consequence of the trauma, but then the way her speech impediment is solved seems to be linked to the murder). Her only friend apart from Mary is Billy, a deaf-mute. It’s interesting that despite the problems of communication – she stutters, so he can’t read from her lips – they remain friends and can perfectly understand each other.
  Unfortunately, there’s something missing in this novel: it should be about the friendship between a white girl and an Aboriginal orphan girl in the 1940s in the Australian outback, but I think the relationship between the two girls is not given enough space. The Aboriginal issue is very important for the author: the “sorry” of the title is in fact intended for all the Aboriginal people who have been mistreated by white men in Australia. Unfortunately, there are too many pages at the beginning of the novel concerning Perdita’s parents, Stella and Nicholas: how they met, why they got married, migrated to Australia and why their relationship couldn’t flourish. The rest of the book is about Perdita’s upbringing among Shakespeare’s sonnets and disturbing pictures of World War II’s soldiers. As a consequence, there are few pages left to describe the relationship between Perdita and Mary or between Perdita and the rest of the Aboriginal community.

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  ― Posted on Jul 1, 2009 | Add your feedback

Stefania Memole has margin notes. Take a look.