New Arrivals

I've been a bit naughty these last few weeks: I kinda promised that I would read the unread books I have before buying any others and would go to the library if there was anything I was desperate to get my hands on before then....

...obviously, fail - duh - so an In My Mailbox-type post seemed totes appropes.

First, I went to a day of Charleston's 'Small Wonder' short story festival, which was fabulous, and attended a talk called 'Dark Corners' with Sarah Hall and Elif Shafak. From that I came away with this,The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak. She was actually there talking about her most recent book, Honour, but I'd heard her talk about this one on The Book Show previously and quite fancied approaching her work a little more chronologically.

'Discover the forty rules of love...
Ella Rubenstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella's life - an emptiness once filled by love.

So when Ella reads a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and Shams of Tabiz, and his forty rules of life and love, her world is turned upside down. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work.

It is a quest infused with Sufi mysticism and verse, taking Ella and us into an exotic world where faith and love are heartbreakingly explored...'

Then, after attending Messages from Angela Carter which featured a fabulous reading of her classic 'The Tiger's Bride' which you can listen to by clicking on the link, we went to What Are You Looking At? with Will Gompertz, which was hilarious. So hilarious, in fact, I bought the accompanying book.

According to the blurb, by reading What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye you will learn:

'Conceptual art isn't actually rubbish

Picasso is a genius (but Cezanne might be better)

Pollock is no drip

Cubism has no cubes

A urinal changed the course of art

And why your five-year-old really couldn't do it.'

Excited about this.


Then, this week, charity shop! Who can resist at £1.99...?

 

A modern classic. I think the copy I read before must have been a library book as I don't have it, but I re-watched the film the other night - Scarlett Johansson still blows my mind - and then bumped into this copy, so it seemed like fate.





 
Everything I've heard about Megan Abbott has been unanimously wonderful, so I'm itching to get into this, and then maybe search out Dare Me, her most recent one, which featured on The Million's Most Anticipated Listearlier this year.





 


I bought Vikram Seth's  An Equal Music because I will be absolutely bereft when A Suitable Boy ends. *sob* I hope this is just as rich, moving and epic.





 

The purchasing of  Daughter of the River: An Autobiography by Hong Ying proves yet again that Asia has a huge pull on my imagination, and that comparing something to 'Wild Swans' is the best way to get me to buy anything at all :) 





'Sea of Ink' by Richard Weihe

A lovely surprise popped through my letter box a few days ago: 'Sea of Ink' by Richard Weihe from the lovely people at Peirene (pronouced 'Pie-ree-nee') Press.

'Sea of Ink' is the first English translation of 'Meer der Tusche' which was published in Switzerland in 2005 and won the Prix des Auditeurs de la Radio Suisse Romande in the same year, and is about Bada Shanren, a 17th century Chinese painter who starts life as a member of the aristocracy, but goes on to take many guises (and different names!) whilst forging his own path through the creative and contemporary world. He becomes, to name a few, a monk, a madman, a father and a husband, so this book gives you a pretty thorough account of life at the time, although most of it is fiction as you can imagine that 17th century Chinese non-governmental sources are few and far between... Structurally, it is 51 short chapters arranged as a 118 page novella, the idea being across the Peirene range that you can read these little gems in an evening, or the same amount of time you might use to watch a film.

Rather than film time, it took me a bath and a train journey to delve through to the end, and a very calming and enjoyable read it was too.  I don't know if it's because Bada Shanren is a fairly serene figure or because the Chinese landscape is so poetically evoked, but I found this book to be a profound quiet spot in two quite busy days. The language is lovely, the tale is simply told and I loved that Weihe imagined the process of Bada Shanren painting his most famous pictures (I've included some below) and included the pictures also, so you can read the process of Bada Shanren painting his most famous pictures whilst tracing the lines with your eyes on the opposite page. The novella-length feature that is common to the whole Peirene series is inspired - what a nice feeling to zip quietly through a lovely book in two hours, a small interlude in the midst of my mammoth, if wildly satisfying 'A Suitable Boy' Readathon which is going to take me at least a month more yet :)

My only slight criticism might be to do with the translation - some of the sentences feel too short to let the mood really flow - but in large part it's excellent; the poetic eloquence of the story was conveyed very well by the translator, which after all is the most important thing.

As a side thing, it was a real novelty for me to pick up a book and not to have my attention grabbed immediately by the fellow author boosters and recommendations that normally wave from the cover and chatter through the first few pages, as if buying/borrowing a book wasn't even to imply interest and that we might still need convincing. I found it very refreshing to see a book and feel that the publishers had enough confidence in it to leave this off and say, yes, this book is good enough and brave enough to stand on its own. The cover is gorgeous too - taking the sum of its parts, it's a really lovely thing.

This book is actually one of the thematically linked trio of books that Peirene are publishing in 2012 - the others are 'The Murder of Halland' by Pia Juul and 'The Brothers' by Asko Sahlberg, comprising the 'Small Epics' series; 2011's series was 'Male Dilemma' and 2010's 'Female Voice'. All are European novels in translation, and most (if not all) were launched with a variety of literary salons and elegant evenings with the author attached, so Peirene seems to provide a very sophisticated and total experience. I'm excited. I actually own one of the books from the 'Female Voice' series although I have yet to read it, but I think I'll be bumping it up the series so I get to it soon. 

I thoroughly recommend this lovely, poetic book and actually attended a Peirene event last night where I met the author and saw someone respond to the text via the medium of clarinet (!), so check back tomorrow for my write-up of that! 

Title: Sea of Ink
Author: Richard Weihe
Publisher: Peirene Press
Date: September 2012
Format: Paperback, 118 pages, and it was a happily received ARC.

  





Bookish Art: Galerija Umjetnina, Croatia

As I mentioned in a post the other day, I went to Croatia recently on holiday, travelling from Dubrovnik to Sipan to Brac to Split for twelve days of food, sun and culture. It was bliss. Whilst in Split, I went to the Galerija Umjetnina which sits just outside the Old Town walls, and some of the stuff was so lovely, I thought I'd share.*

Girl Reading I;

'The Divan' by Vlaho Bukovac, 1905 

 

Tolstoy, looking his usual cheery self; 

'Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy' by Ivan Meštrović, 1904

This is a man with a monkey;

Man with a Monkey, Frano Šimunović, 1935

 Girl Reading II;

Nude in the Interior, Sava Šumunović, ca 1926

 I just liked this;

Women in my Garden, Boris Bućan, 2009

There was also some great graffiti in the same area:

 *These are photos taken of artwork there, so obviously I claim no copyright etc. apart from to the photos themselves.







A Hundred Seas Rising

So today I did something a bit different...

I received an email yesterday asking me if I wanted to take part in a slightly different kind of Dickens tribute for the bicentenary, based around an artist's exploration of the idea, featured in Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities', that literature might be 'implicated in the imagination or trajectories of revolutions'. Of course I said yes (how interesting does that sound?!), and went along this afternoon.







Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want

Ok, here’s a fun  and divisive activity: go up to a group of friends (or strangers) and tell them you’re excited to go see the Tracey Emin retrospective exhibition that’s currently on at the Hayward Gallery in London. I reckon, out of a group of ten, five or six will go ‘no, she’s a fraud/awful person/exhibitionist opportunist’, one or two might go ‘who?’ and carry on drinking and the final two, three or four might express something between vague, sheepish interest and an interest equal to yours (or, more accurately, mine.)

(If you're not sure who she is, maybe click the highlighted words and watch the videos below. I'm not actually sure how well know she is outside the UK.)

I went to see said exhibit earlier this month and I thought it was excellent. There, I said it. EXCELLENT. Moving and raw and immensely affecting. I think her work is vulnerable and touching and immensely powerful in its honesty. Also, I think her work on fertility, childhood and abortion (namely, her childhood, fertility and abortions) has gone some way to lifting the veil of secrecy and shame that tends to hang over such things, and I don’t understand how people target her for her controversy when she’s just expressing what has been a difficult and controversial life. Art is self-expression, after all, so what else would she express? Most of it is actually about a longing for love: familial, nostalgic, sexual, platonic. 

What I did find slightly creepy was the number of mothers with children and babies in prams watching the video installation How It Feels; if you’ve seen that you’ll probably be able to imagine how unsettling that might be. But then, I guess that’s the whole point of it. By expressing her own experience of it, she unites others who’ve experienced it but can’t, or don’t want to, say. Tellingly, there were people of all sorts there, and lots of them too.

Anyway, that’s probably enough from me, except to say GO AND SEE IT if you can, if only to put meat on the bones of the arguments against.

This is the gallery’s overview of the exhibit:

Her thoughts on the retrospective:

And a clip of a Sky Arts interview, ‘In Confidence’, in which Laurie Taylor exhibited, to me, a complete ignorance on the processes and meaning of art (that part isn’t really in this short excerpt though):

 http://video.sky.com/skyarts/related/remap/video-tracey-emin-in-confidence/

The Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want exhibit is at the Hayward Gallery until the 29th August 2011.

For more information on Tracey Emin, see her page on Artsy.