Draw Breath

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 read the rest of this post »

I have just finished the incredible In the Wake by Per Petterson. Petterson won this year's IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Out Stealing Horses. In the Wake is at least semi-autobiographical in that it describes the Scandanavian Star disaster of 1990, the disaster in which a number of Petterson's own family died. The book is a meditation on loss but is not without moments of comedy. We meet the main character lapsing into an all to common breakdown on the streets of his home town. Such is his despair at not possessing enough money to buy a fizzy drink in his local shop that the shop assistant simply gives it to him without question.

Grief on the loss of his much loved family members has rendered life unbearably heavy; even the weight of his own body seems too much. Six years on from the tragedy, his life is still a waking nightmare; dreams and vsions intersperse the book. The book reminds me of some of Thomas Hardy's most poignant poems on grief; the mist of Hardy here being replaced by vast snowscapes. There is no one moment of recovery, simply a series of false starts which somehow propel the narrator back to some kind of normality. The incongruousness of some of these false starts is not lost on him, whether in a moment of sheer panic while in flagrante or while being told to keep driving during a snow storm.

In the Wake may not have got any major awards but in the tradition of all great books, it lingers and changes in the mind long after a first reading.

In entirely other news, Chris Bertram has a great discussion over on Crooked Timber about, as one commenter puts it, glum Nordic detectives. That's my Summer reading sorted. I'd also throw Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman into the ring. What it loses in not being a detective novel it gains in mid-Summer desolation.

And also, like bludgeon, the word glum is just not used enough. I mean, living in Belfast you'd think opportunities to employ these sorts of words would be ten to the penny.

Coetzee's Slow Man is definitely deserving of all accolades. I would guess that anyone who has ever lost a limb would judge the treatment of it as accurate.

Intimacy and its illusory quality is at the heart of the novel; physical closeness does not denote a meeting of minds, rancour doesn't necessarily mean a lack of deep love.

Plotwise, it is only dawning on me now that there may be a touch of the Sixth Sense about Slow Man. Does Elizabeth Costello really exist in the context of the novel? (Coetzee has another book devoted solely to her). Is there ever a point where she speaks directly to any of the other characters? A re-read is in order!