A Coincidental Trio
Two Memoirs and a Novel
My January reading so far has been intense. By chance, the three books in question have each had the subject of health at their core: close encounters with death, with the contemplation of mortality, with the urgency of life and the hard choices it throws at us. The three authors, again by chance all female, approach these thin moments, these desperate moments, these forceful encounters, with varying tones, pace and resonance. They each fill the shapes they carve in their story-telling according to their particular life experiences, their unique natures, inevitably. But as a trio of books, the whole they create together becomes a truly wonderful sum of its parts; each element augmenting the other. I have no doubt that each one read singly, or in any other combination in a string of reading, would maintain its integral power and magnificence; because they are all indeed, magnificent.
I began with Tanya Shadrick’s memoir The Cure for Sleep, being familiar beforehand with extracts and readings by the author online. Because of this, I felt I knew the story arc before opening the pages, and that I had a handle on the author’s intentions behind her narrative but in fact I was frequently side-swiped; lulled by her all-embracing prose, propelled along the author’s trajectory, mesmerised by her audacity, and shocked too. Assumptions and rules of play are central to this book; Tanya questions both and more, forensically pulling apart and scrutinizing convention, holding it up to her size and finding it doesn’t fit, then moving ahead anyway, regardless, further into a shape of her own choosing, exploring the terrain on her terms. Through designing a life for herself after near-death, that will enrich and fulfil her creative needs and do full justice to her second chance, she charts new territory indeed.
As uncompromising as Tanya is in her determination to finally be true to herself, so she is in her unselfconscious honesty on the page. She lets us in, deep into her mind as a young child, curious and bewildered, so that we feel the consequences of her difficult and at times frightening childhood with her, and then we find we are caught, perhaps struggling with our own attempts to shed the skin urged upon us, as much as grappling alongside her, as she battles to discard her own. The discomfort is all the more visceral because we witness things, in all likelihood, totally absent from our own sphere of direct experience, and not as a distanced onlooker but as a fully immersed and committed participant, it feels.
Choices Tanya makes in her adult life are formed by references and interests at times alien to my own, but my investment in her story and the obdurate nature of her telling, enable me to see why she made them; uncomfortable and unlikely preferences compared to mine as they might be. She has a unique focus and I love her for it and admire her.
After near-death, life took Tanya by force; or I should say, it was she who did the grasping, the shaking, the determined holding and moulding; it was she who bravely took on life. Her writing invited me to walk her path with her and I feel the richer for it.
I turned next to Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am. Another memoir, and here the author makes a mockery of a cat’s mere nine-lives as she charts her multiple encounters, many near-misses and close brushes with death. She recounts 17 significant incidents in her life with the same easy mastery of language and tone we find in her award-winning fiction; we are drawn in by her beguiling story-telling, descriptions of place and captured moments; distillations of their very essence. No word is superfluous. Her language is truly mellifluous and I found myself writing down vocabulary that in any other context might have jumped out as extravagant, overly complicated. Here, it is poetry.
Each chapter could be read as a short story; together, a collection with a thematic of the human body. And then you remember, it is the author speaking, and not imagining but recalling, in lucid technicolour, in pulsing, gripping, sensory language. She holds witness to other-worldly states of consciousness and understanding; portraying ways of beholding the world that defy accepted norms, as though seen through the eyes of a creature not yet known to humankind and yet communicating with great articulacy through our human language. Additionally, she recounts mundane events the like of which we will have probably encountered ourselves. But for this individual, their normality sidles her closer to her mortality and become for us, narratives of a rare and heightened quality. How thin is that veil that could lift for any one of us, if we had taken a different path that time, had we had our attention directed elsewhere for a moment and so averted one choice over another, had we lifted our heads a split-second earlier, or later, as that speeding vehicle passed by. Any number of these daily slithers of being could mark an end. That is the jeopardy of life. But for Maggie, this is a more perpetual state it seems: this being so close to the edge.
The narration is not chronological and in a masterful way, the heart of the story is left until the penultimate chapter. The revelation here goes a long way to explain much of the author’s preceding stories but to have placed this at the beginning would have lessened the power of the story-telling. Bewilderment, confusion, pain, fear, isolation: we need to witness these things without the panacea of explanation or illumination in order to share as truthfully as we can, the author’s experience. It also means, conversely, that we are led gradually, gently, at last, into the deepest depths of unimaginable physical pain and a state of total and complete powerlessness and vulnerability. It becomes almost a relief to understand something of what was after all, at the core.
I came by the third book in this coincidental trio, thanks to a knowledgeable bookseller in Waterstones in Salisbury. Asking for recommendations for something a bit challenging, I was handed a copy of Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from Spanish (the author is Mexican) by Rosalind Harvey. It’s cover intrigued me; the fact it was in translation intrigued me; the author’s name intrigued me. In all, I felt pleasantly bamboozled. Because of this, when I sat down to read it, I realised I had no idea of the synopsis, the genre, or indeed anything about it.
The publisher is Fitzcarraldo Editions and in my years of bookselling I had only recently become aware in my periphery, of the royal blue covers with minimal text, lack of imagery, an absence of quotes, that marks them out. The publisher doesn’t patronise us with the usual bombardment of sales barbs; the content must speak for itself and the reader must do the work! I wasn’t sure what I was handling, or what I had got myself into. My desire for a challenge, I thought, would be restricted to radical plot lines, experimental dialogue, exigent stylization. I didn’t imagine my first hurdle would present itself before I’d opened the pages.
All that was new to me in the format, I now adore. The content of all three books is remarkable but it is Still Born that I repeatedly pick up to handle and caress, with wonder.
Deciding not to research anything about the novel, not even to read the short paragraph offered on the back cover, I entered the world in Still Born of the protagonist, Laura. She is the sole narrator, through whom we follow all the characters’ movements and thoughts. This is cleverly done, using reported speech, using story-telling techniques that I can’t even identify. It is done with some kind of sorcery or enchantment, keeping the tone steady, level, and yet conveying tumultuous emotional journeys through love, empathy, friendship, parental bonds, fear, jealousy, revolt, despair and back to love. The characters are not overly described and yet they appear as fully rounded, fully believable three-dimensional people, people who we may easily have in our own lives and know well. There is a strange aloofness to Laura, and yet … her quiet ways through her days, her concerns, her inner dialogues and decision making, suggest to the reader that perhaps she is us, we are her, this is our story we ourselves are telling. I love it.
The story is powerful, dealing with fundamental questions about procreation; asking where do we place our love when parenthood takes on a totally different guise to what we presume; when ill-health might take a child from us at any point. But these difficult issues are held with a steady, confident hand, enabling us to look at them face-on. The final lines took me by surprise; the end came unexpectedly, with a natural calmness and inevitability, and it left a gentle smile on my face, as I hugged the book to me.
