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Books And Pictures And So On.
Hilary Mantel can't bear Dickens- "such awful stuff- coarse, sentimental, conceited". And I can understand that. Dickens is such a full on blast of Victorian values you either duck out of the way or take a deep breath and let yourself to be carried along. He's our biggest writer- barring Shakespeare, of course. But Shakespeare is wonderfully impersonal- or rather he's hundreds of different people- whereas Dickens is an enormous single personality. He comes on like a weather front. He bullies, brags, imposes; you will all now rejoice with me. And now you will weep.
Mantel's anti-recommendation made me want to pick up something of his, but he hasn't put out anything new for quite a while and I have a need right now to read things I've never read before. Give me the new, always the new.... So I went through the shelves and found a copy of Ishiguro's An Artist of The Floating World which I bought a few years back, never got round to reading and didn't know I still had.
I just finished Ali Smith's How to Be Both- a book that couldn't be less Dickensian. Light- airy- all glances and suggestion- with doors left open, stories unfinished and issues unresolved. I love her imagining of the painter del Cossa. If I were more mobile than I am I'd hop across to Ferrara to stand in front of his three months in the Palace of Shifanoia. They're my new favourite art works and Peter Breughel can stand a little to the side for the time being. Actually Peter and Francesco have a lot in common- and that must say something about the way I look at life too. Both love the manyness of things- all those people, animals, objects that crowd their pictures- Francesco belonging to the spring of the renaissance, when all was promise and hope, and Peter to its end when rather too much of that promise and hope and been stomped over by people in muddy boots.
Talking about muddy boots I just read the New Yorker Story Cat Person which has been so much discussed on social media. Muddy boots is pretty much what it is about- how two people who have a nice, light, superficial connection- who can joke with one another and share harmless, whimsical fantasies- get drawn into a deeper connection which is entirely unsuitable- because of the muddy boots side to human nature. It's fairly cheerless. I gather female readers tend to take the woman's side and male ones the man's- which rather highlights the point the writer is making.
Mantel's anti-recommendation made me want to pick up something of his, but he hasn't put out anything new for quite a while and I have a need right now to read things I've never read before. Give me the new, always the new.... So I went through the shelves and found a copy of Ishiguro's An Artist of The Floating World which I bought a few years back, never got round to reading and didn't know I still had.
I just finished Ali Smith's How to Be Both- a book that couldn't be less Dickensian. Light- airy- all glances and suggestion- with doors left open, stories unfinished and issues unresolved. I love her imagining of the painter del Cossa. If I were more mobile than I am I'd hop across to Ferrara to stand in front of his three months in the Palace of Shifanoia. They're my new favourite art works and Peter Breughel can stand a little to the side for the time being. Actually Peter and Francesco have a lot in common- and that must say something about the way I look at life too. Both love the manyness of things- all those people, animals, objects that crowd their pictures- Francesco belonging to the spring of the renaissance, when all was promise and hope, and Peter to its end when rather too much of that promise and hope and been stomped over by people in muddy boots.
Talking about muddy boots I just read the New Yorker Story Cat Person which has been so much discussed on social media. Muddy boots is pretty much what it is about- how two people who have a nice, light, superficial connection- who can joke with one another and share harmless, whimsical fantasies- get drawn into a deeper connection which is entirely unsuitable- because of the muddy boots side to human nature. It's fairly cheerless. I gather female readers tend to take the woman's side and male ones the man's- which rather highlights the point the writer is making.
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Just sometimes he smacks you (and the Reverend Thomas Malthus) right upside the head and this is why I think Mantel has it wrong.
“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is.
“Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
As real now as it was then!
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Dickens is tremendous. I've always loved him. I got hooked on Pickwick Papers when I was about ten or eleven- and never looked back.