Draw Breath

I have just come across the First Aid Kit. Great mesh of voices and great songs. Check out their version of Fleet Foxes’ Tiger Mountain Peasant song.

I finished a great book recently by Washington Post journalist, Helene Cooper, The House at Sugar Beach. Set in war-torn Liberia before and after the revolution, it describes how her childhood and young adulthood are transformed completely by the political uncertainty in the country. Although it is an autobiography, the book has many parallels with two recent books of fiction based on experiences of war, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half a Yellow Sun.

Liberia’s past may be chaotic and rooted in slavery but Cooper is at pains to emphasise the rich legacy she has inherited from her forefathers; these were true pioneers who returned from base lives as slaves in the US to create a land they could hope to be proud of. However, native people also lived in Liberia and were none too happy with the sudden influx of non-natives. The tensions of history are shown to resurface through the bloody revolution.

As in The Kite Runner, early life is uncomplicated, almost idyllic through the child’s eyes. There are deep family bonds and family members live nearby. All types of family relationships are supported including siblings born as a result of a parent having a second relationship and pseudo siblings where the family effectively adopts an unrelated child as their own. It is this last case which informs much of The House at Sugar Beach, Helene’s relationship with Eunice, an older girl adopted as a companion. Although Helene, Eunice and younger sister Marlene form a close trio in times of peace, it is unthinkable that Eunice should join them when they ultimately leave the country, ironically to establish a new life in the United States. The uncomfortable nature of this reality haunts Helene as she grows up in the US and grows to haunt the reader.

It is the narrator’s lightness of touch which ultimately makes this book such a great read. On a number of occasions, the reader is drawn into unspeakable acts of cruelty of war. The description is always humane , often humorous, in a manner that acually jolts the reader more rather than less.

Similarly deft is Cooper’s historical narration. By the end of the book the reader has been thoroughly educated in the history of Liberia.

The House on Sugar Beach catches the reader unawares on a number of levels. It deserves to get a wide readership.

A minor furore today over whether or not Coldplay has copied Joe Satriani’s If I Could Fly with their song Viva La Vida. I have to say that close aural scrutiny does reveal a similar chord progression and melody line in parts. However, If I Could Fly is not the most memorable tune ever. Pleasant and all as it is, Viva la Vida is not one of Coldplay’s strongest numbers either. In fact, I would be inclined to believe Coldplay when they say any similarity is coincidental. No danger of similarities between tunes during Coldplay’s concert in Dublin on 14 September with Girls Aloud and Jay-Z as support. An eclectic mix which could make or break the evening!

Michael Wood’s excellent BBC documentary The Story of India whets the appetite for further information on a rich and fascinating country. For someone coming to Indian history for the first time, I would recomend A Traveller’s History of India by Sinharaaja Tammita-Delgoda. Despite being aimed at a prospective visitor to India, it is more detailed history than travelogue. Also, although the British colonial period is covered, it represents just a chapter in the book which starts the historical journey at 1500 BC and ends with a discussion of the present unrest in both India and Pakistan.

Though outbreaks of strife and power struggles punctuate India’s past, the country went through long periods of stability and blossoming creativity. One character who paid a part in this was the enigmatic Mughal leader Akbar (1542–1605). Although he never learned to read or write, his son Jahangir (who unfortunately turned against him in later years) reports:

Although he was illiterate, so much became clear to him through constant intercourse with the learned and the wise in his conversations. He counted his wakefulness at night as so much added to his life.

Akbar’s greatest achievement was in creating an inclusive empire, one in which all religions were tolerated and encouraged. Many places of worship had both Muslim and Hindu elements. Akbar also loved the arts and the Hindi epic Ramcharitmanas was written dring his reign.

Unfortunately, after Akbar’s death, many of the interwining strands started to unravel. It is hard to imagine his cultural vision of society being achieved today.

The open road, the freedom afforded by a life of wandering, is much celebrated in every art form. Literature is full of tales of the lure of wandering, either in non-fiction form or in the creations of Swift, Shakespeare, Twain or Jack London In music, the Bruce Springsteen song Further On (Up the Road) perfectly evokes both the uncertainty and the excitement afforded to the traveller.

I have recently finished the book Into the Wild by John Krakaur, the film version of which is playing in cinemas at present (and is certainly worth seeing). Into the Wild tells the story of Chris McCandless who gave up every trapping of civilisation in order to retreat to the wilds of Alaska and live off the land.

In theory, Chris McCandless had everything going for him; a close relationship with his sister (if not his parents), financial security and a keen intellect which was propelling him fairly effortlessly towards whatever career path he desired. However, the more solid the pillars of his life became, the more he felt bound to break free and leave it all behind. The actual catalyst for McCandless’s departure may be explained by the revelation that for the early years of his life his father was continuing to have a relationship with a former wife. Morally repulsed, McCandless’s reaction was to wipe out his own entire previous existence.

Krakaur paints a vivid picture of what life was like for the first two years of McCandless’s adventure. Both the book, and to an extent the film, point to his capability for self-sufficiency and total retreat but also to his capacity for engagement with those strangers he met. This is a recurring irony in the Chris McCandless story.

When his death comes, he is actually not as far away from civilisation as he thinks. An up to date map would have pointed out a number of escape routes close by. All the more heart-breaking is the fact that it is just at this point that he has realised that it is within his desires to live among people again.

Comparisons with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road come to mind when reading Into the Wild. Unlike McCandless, McCarthy’s man is condemned by some cataclysmic event to take to the road with his son. Death stalks them at every turn. Palid greys, duns and blacks are the colours of their surroundings. However, what is important in The Road is not the physical state of the father and son nor their surroundings but rather their own inner strength and the strength of human bonds.

McCarthy’s strongest message is that to have any hope of peace. the inner landscape must be more fertile than physical surroundings, selflessness must be a stronger impulse than regard for oneself. Despite its terror-filled vistas, this is what ultimately renders The Road an epic and Into the Wild a cautionary tale.

Vincent Browne’s summer absence has been tempered somewhat by a new nightly music programme on RTE 1, Acoustic Highway. Tonight, they played tracks from Waltzing Alone from the Guggenheim Grotto and Natalie Merchant’s Motherland. Both to be checked out further!

An exhibition of early twentieth century photos has just opened in the City Museum in Galway. In 1913, a Parisian banker, Albert Kahn decided that a good course of action to promote world peace would be to make use of the new technologies in colour photography and send photographers all over the world to photograph different cultures. Two women, Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba arrived in Ireland and spent a number of weeks in Ireland. Unfortunately, Kahn’s motives were not well-timed and the world was taken over by the Great War. However, the quality and depth of colour of the photos online are breath-taking (see in particular the photo of the curragh and shawl).

Haruki Murakami’s book of short stories, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman is making for fascinating reading. Oddly enough, there is strong cinematic potential to the stories despite the fact that a lot is left unspoken.

In the introduction to the book, Murakami compares writing novels to planting a forest, but writing short stories to planting a garden. He says that though writing a short story is a relatively quick process, revisions can be endless. This is echoed by the writer Claire Keegan in the Irish Times Saturday Weekend supplement this week, where she says that she could re-draft a single short story 30 times. Does this mean that the short story writing process is harder than the novel? if so, should we rank the quality of a short story higher than a novel?