Book 136, Jersey: "Menagerie Manor" by Gerald Durrell

During my primary and secondary school holidays, my English teachers had a habit of prescribing Durrell - and why not? Kids love animals, and a bit of light, classic British humour is always a delight. Never got round to reading him, though, so it was only when I conceived this project that I realised he was the founder of a zoo in Jersey; the very first zoo to have an interest in sustaining endangered species through captive breeding pairs, in fact.

The image above isn't of the copy I read, I'm afraid - I ended up with the UEA's mammoth compendium of Durrell's writings: My Family and Other Animals, The Bafut Beagles, The Drunken Forest, Encounters with Animals, A Zoo in My Luggage and The Whispering Land, as well as this baby. Didn't feel compelled to consult the other books - they're all about his growing up amidst wildlife in Corfu, or collecting creatures in Cameroon or Argentina.

But I might read 'em someday, The animal yarns here are loads of fun - little adventure tales about escaped tapirs, nail-biting stories of charismatic gorillas on the brink of death, blunder-after-blunder anecdotes of attempting to work with live reptiles and primates on TV (for some reason, he had to crate up his animals and send them to Bristol for the recording).

And yeah, it does make you want to visit. Singapore's zoo is often ranked as the best in the world, and the scenes in the Manor of des Augres aren't a hundred percent charming - there are cages and chicken-wire mentioned a-plenty. But this was back in 1959, when Singapore was still getting its own self-rule - Durrell couldn't even figure out the sex of his lizards, and everyone in Europe was still killing their New Zealand tuataras by putting them in tropical greenhouses. Makes you want to see how they've moved on - this book was written just five years after the zoo's opening; think how many more stories have bred since then.

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I'll leave you with one of the more alarming descriptions of animal behaviour Durrell managed to catalogue, regarding that most loved of Singapore Zoo animals, the orang-utan:

Representative quote: It is unfortunate that, like many apes, Oscar and Bali have developed some rather revolting characteristics, one of which is the drinking of each other's urine. It sounds frightful, but they are such enchanting animals and do it in such a way that you can only feel amused to see Oscar sitting up on his iron ladder urinating copiously, while Bali sits below with open mouth to receive the nectar, and then savours it with all the air of a connoisseur. She puts her head on one side, rolling the liquid around her mouth as if trying to make up her mind from which vineyard it came and in what year it was bottled. They also, unfortunately, enjoy eating their own excreta.

Next book: William Shakespeare's Henry IV (Parts I & II), from the United Kingdom.

Book 135, Guernsey: "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows

I've decided, with some regret, not to do Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England as separate entities. We do not have a majority of citizens in these regions calling for independence (not even in Scotland!). Also, if I did all four countries within the UK, I'd logically also have to do all seven emirates in the UAE. All fifty states in the US might be pleasant, but Emirati writing still has a long way to go.

But we're on Guernsey now! One of the two Channel Islands - and you'll see on the map below how close they are to France, and thus how understandable it is that they're regarded as a separate from the UK. Also understandable is how they were occupied by the Nazis during WWII, the Brits tactically abandoning them for the sake of their own behinds.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society is a description of that occupation, narrated through the letters and telegrams of the single, thirty-something year-old writer Juliet Ashton in 1946. She's a London girl, the recipient of recent fame and success after the publication of her humorous wartime newspaper columns - because people did need humour during the war - and now on track for her next book. 

One day she receives a letter from a certain Dawsey Adams, a Guernsey fisherman who's very much enjoyed a second-hand copy of Charles Lamb's Selected Essays of Elia which once belonged to her. He mentions the existence of the eponymous literary club during the war - at first an excuse to explain to the Germans why they were out so late during curfew, but later a coping mechanism (the pie being another such coping mechanism). The two commence a correspondence, and gradually Juliet comes to realise her destiny is to go to Guernsey and chronicle the experience of the war there.

It's honestly rather lovely to read an epistolary novel of this sort, recalling a time before e-mail and Whatsapp (though I really have no idea how one-sentence letters exchanged on the same day work - these people do not have footmen, after all). Principal author Mary Ann Shaffer has a wonderful range of voices, vivacious and folksy and prissy, bringing to life the cast of her novel. 

And what a cast it is. On the island, there's the poultice-brewing wise woman Isola Pribby, the haughty Adelaide Addison, the worried half-Jewish butler John Booker - and off the island, there's the frighteningly charismatic American publisher Markham V. Reynolds, and of course the terribly fun Juliet herself. Plus the unseen figure of Elizabeth - this young independent woman who invented the ruse of the literary club and was eventually arrested by the Nazis towards the end of the war, and who ends up being the subject of Juliet's book.

Mind you, this isn't high literature, by certain standards. The cover above shows how marketable it is as  pure and simple chick-lit - period too! An adaptation of Pride and Prejudice's love story: Dawsey is Darcy and Markham is Wickham. But it is so full of story, and texture, and joy, which is why it was a bestseller, and what I'm having so much trouble with in my own writing.

One final note: Shaffer was the original author of the book - wrote it as her first complete novel when she was an old woman, years after being stranded in a bookshop during a foggy Guernsey excursion and learning all about the occupation. However, once the novel had been optioned, changes were suggested - and she was seriously sick - so her niece, Annie Barrows, stepped in and filled her shoes, recreating the familiar style of storytelling she'd heard so much during family visits. I rather like that. Two women, one beginning a story, the other ending it. But there'll no more Shaffer novels, I'm afraid: she's dead and gone as of 2008, just before the book was published in its current form.

I actually finished this book last week - have been trying to keep up with my own reading in the meantime. It's a quick read, as is my next book, so I'll probably have my next update up pretty damn quick.

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Representative quote: As the mail boat lurched into the harbour, I saw St Peter Port rising up from the sea, with a church at the top like a cake decoration, and I realised that my heart was galloping. However much I tried to persuade myself it was the thrill of the scenery, I knew better. All those people I've come to know and even love a little, waiting to see - me. And I, without any paper to hide behind. Sidney, in these past two or three years, I have become better at writing than living - and think what you do to my writing. On the page, I'm perfectly charming, but that's just a trick I've learnt. It has nothing to do with me.

Next book: Gerald Durrell's Menagerie Manor, from Jersey.

I've got a gig in London!

Since I know I have a number of UK readers, I'm just gonna announce the following. 

Next Wednesday, I'll be taking the train down from Norwich, performing 15 minutes of slam with some UK artists in Forget What You Heard (About Spoken Word).  The Facebook page is here.

My fellow Singaporean poet, Stephanie Dogfoot, programmed me in - she recently represented the UK in the World Cup for Poetry Slam in Paris! It's also her farewell gig, 'cos she's returning home soon - hopefully developing our own scene.

Date: Wednesday, 9 October

Time: 19:30-23:00

Venue: Ryan's Bar, Stoke Newington Church St N16, London

That's the best photo I took of Steph when we met up in London the second day I was here. The blurb for the event's below!

Autumn is upon us, cold weather is approaching, the year 2013 is drawing to a close so what does this mean?

NOTHING! Except that the October edition of Forget What You Heard is round the corner and its the LAST ONE where we'll have co-host Stephanie Dogfoot before she moves back to Singapore....
So come down and join STEPHANIE DOGFOOT and MATT CUMMINS and celebrate/commiserate/bid farewell, and October's three spell-binding features you will definitely remember for a long time coming..fireball Anna Kahn, one of the most exciting & funny & accomplished young poets from Singapore today Ng Yi-Sheng and the tender yet ferociously compelling Alex Etchart.

and of course, YOURSELVES on the open mic! As always, entry by donation.
p.s. Since our open mic is so consistently packed out nowadays, we'll only be letting half of the open-mic slots go BEFORE the night, so that there's still room for people to rock up on the day and take part. So that means there are SIX spots up for grabs to you eager social networkers. Go, go, go!

ANNA KAHN Anna Kahn writes letters for a living and poems because apparently thinking about words for eight hours a day is not enough thinking about words. She once beat Scroobius Pip in a Golden Gun contest judged by a lady with questionable taste (true story). She writes everything from PG-rated poems about sexual deviancy to firmly 18-rated poems about her own grandmother, but she promises that if you'd ever met her grandmother this would make perfect sense. She's never been published, partly because she's one of those dreadful spoken-word impostors the Independent says is killing poetry by never actually submitting anything to anyone.

NG YI-SHENG Ng Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean poet-playwright-journalist-fictionist and LGBT activist. He's the youngest ever winner of the Singapore Literature Prize, which he received for his debut poetry collection "last boy". Recently, he co-edited two literary collections: "GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose" and "Eastern Heathens: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore". For the past few years, he has taught in his country's only university-level creative writing program and co-organised the monthly multi-disciplinary arts event SPORE Art Salon. Right now, he's based in Norwich, doing his Masters in Creative Writing (Prose) at the University of East Anglia. He was possibly the first slam poet Stephanie ever saw and got inspired by in one of the first queer literary readings in Singapore in 2005.

ALEX ETCHART Alex Etchart is a community musician, folk singer, poet, activist, clown, drama teacher, workshop facilitator and all-round decent human being. He has been involved with and inspired by Occupy London, Friern Barnet library and Balcombe anti-fracking Community Camp. Taking a page from folk singers from Woody Guthrie to David Rovics, his poetry is urgent and unapolagetically critical of the world as we know it, and unflinching in its call to unfuck-it-up, with a solid dose of heart and humour.

Book 134, Isle of Man: "The Manxman" by Hall Caine

UEA’s library isn’t quite as voluminous as some I’ve seen, but it does contain some nice surprises. I was originally planning to read some book of folklore for the Isle of Man (which is actually classified as a separate entity from the UK). While searching the catalogue, I also happened to come across a biography of an eminent Victorian named Hall Caine – a bestselling author and playwright, a companion of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, and a proud Manxman.

Once a recognizable face on both sides of the Atlantic, Caine is largely forgotten today. This online biography suggests that his greatest work was The Scapegoat, but the library offered me a copy of The Manxman instead: 29th edition, printed in the 1920s. Sadly, I dropped it - the librarians will have some gumming together of spines to do after this – and resorted to reading an online edition for the remainder of the week.

But heavens, this is good stuff. It’s fundamentally the tale of a love triangle: simple Pete, his smart half-cousin Philip, and the fair Kate. But the story follows them from birth to childhood to adolescence to tumultuous adulthood, their drama playing out against the charming backdrop of Sulby, a coastal village alive with superstition and fishermen’s rebellions and Christian extremism and ridiculous codes of honour – Philip and Pete, for instance, are both the grandsons of the old Deemster, a high-born judge in his castle, but the father of the first was disowned when he married a common-born girl and the second was the fruit of an affair with his mother paid off in cash for her shame. There’s this stupid, stupid taboo against marrying below or above your station – it’s something a gentleman simply cannot do if he wants to continue receiving the respect of the tiny island community.

But I suppose it’s character that really drives the tale. Philip's a social climber, guilt-tripped by the memory of his late father whose ambitions were ruined by his love for his lower-class, equipped with the intelligence and the personality for a rising career in law and politics, ultimately becoming a Deemster, or a judge for the island. He falls in love with Kate, who used to be Pete's sweetheart, before Pete set off for the diamond mines of Kimberley for five years, so he could earn a fortune worthy of her hand. The guilt of this tortures him utterly - and it tortures Kate too. Meanwhile, Pete's just the most big-hearted, loving man possible, unaware that his every forgiveness of Kate and his kindness to Philip just tortures them further.

Basically, this is a story of adultery in which everyone involved is actually a good person - sure, they do terrible things sometimes, but they feel horribly guilty about it (mind you, they're the sort of folks who feel guilty even when they do good). And it works. We're thrust into the minds of all three protagonists, and we struggle with them, feeling for them. (Me particularly: I'm in a weird halfway state in my relationship to a very good person, and I'm not sure where how it's all going to end up.)

But there's also a huge level of absurdity to the characters' quandaries - their values, their conceptions of sin that outweigh any considerations of social achievement, are very un-Asian (or perhaps un-21st century, or simply unworldly). It's a little mad, how a successful young man with a rising career, a credit to his race, et cetera, should be in agony over the thought of marrying a "fallen woman" - or indeed, that any woman should consider herself fallen at all.

Messy thoughts today. Also on my mind is the fleetingness of Caine's fame - he peddled his exotic status as the "Bard of Manxland" in a manner that presages the workings of "world literature" as a contemporary genre, but because he was only a geographical minority, not a racial of gender one, he's fallen quite out of the Canon. Plus, his irrelevance to my current course: it'd be unwise for me to emulate his maudlin histrionics, no matter how effective they may still be.

Plenty more reading for me to do for school. If, however, you'd like to spend just a couple of hours with the story, you could check out the film version, directed by no less than Alfred Hitchcock!

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Representative quote:
That night Philip dreamt a dream. He was sitting on a dais with a wooden canopy above him, the English coat of arms behind, and a great book in front; his hands shook as he turned the leaves; he felt his leg hang heavily; people bowed low to him, and dropped their voices in his presence; he was the Deemster, and he was old. A young woman stood in the dock, dripping water from her hair, and she had covered her face with her hands. In the witness-box a young man was standing, and his head was down. The man had delivered the woman to dishonour; she had attempted her life in her shame and her despair. And looking on the man, the Deemster thought he spoke in a stern voice, saying, "Witness, I am compelled to punish her, but oh to heaven that I could punish you in her place! What have you to say for yourself?" "I have nothing to say for myself," the young man answered, and he lifted his head and the old Deemster saw his face. Then Philip awoke with a smothered scream, for the young man's face had been his own.

Next book: Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, from Guernsey.

Book 133, Ireland: "Ulysses" by James Joyce

Yes!!!! I’ve finally finished this classic of world literature, one day before my classes start! Read it half through a paperback copy (which got wet in my bag, which made its cover to tear off when I later dropped it), and half via Kindle (which cost US$0.99 and a great deal of headscratching over whether certain Unicode symbols were scanning errors or modernist experiments).

I’ve been called to read this so many times – once as a child, when I happened across an encyclopaedia of the English language in a bookstore which exhibited the weird drafting process of Mr Joyce; once in university, when I learned that this had been part of the original CoreCurriculum syllabus but had been replaced for political reasons with Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse; once when Kenny at BooksActually was announcing a Bloomsday event.

And now I’ve finally finished it. Whoop huzzah!

As for understanding it, that’s a entirely different matter.

The first chapter is surprisingly digestible: it’s the young intellectual Stephen Daedalus having a chat with his friend in the morning, them throwing around literary references like nobody’s business – but I get that; that’s how I talk to my sister sometimes. Sure, it’s weird, but that’s more or less the point – you don’t come to Joyce expecting stories written in plain English. (This was perhaps why I couldn’t see the point of Dubliners.)

Once we enter the world of the middle-aged quasi-Jewish retiree Leopold Bloom, however, I get pretty lost – how is this character related to Stephen? Who are all these other characters, anyway? My friend Rachel Westbrook actually recommended that I read the SparkNotes on the book simultaneously, and I did refer to them a little on my smartphone. (I’d heard that each section corresponded to a different period of English literature, and I was picking up on a few references to the Odyssey, but the Hamlet parallels had eluded me.) This casual 3G business became more difficult once I travelled overseas, of course.

Now that I’ve finished, though, a few things stick in my mind:

1) This book is very dirty.

No wonder it got accused of obscenity! Molly Bloom’s sexual fantasies/recollections are quite shockingly explicit, and Leopold’s recollections/fantasies are as scatologically perverse as Joyce's own fart-obsessed correspondence. Although the charge does turn out to be over Bloom's masturbation scene over 20 year-old Gerty's legs in the park, which I totally did not get.

2) The book is surprisingly global.

I'd known, of course, that this was an encapsulation of the whole of the western tradition, but I'd forgotten how much of the east and the south had leaked into the west by the Edwardian era, partly because of the hugeness of the British Empire, which Ireland was the very first building block of (unless you count Scotland and Wales, I suppose). Sailors showing off Chinese tattoos, faces that look like Indian gods, Japanese attending imaginary socialist conferences, veterans of the Boer Wars, the word "nigger" thrown around to talk about straw hats or lips or hair or cannibalism, a reference to Zarathustra and Buddha.

And even the Italian waiters hanging around, and Bloom's Hungarian heritage. Dublin might've seemed like a cold nowhere town, but there was stuff happening there, the world streaming in. Search for keywords on the html version, if you don't believe me.

3) The book is of its time.

Of course every book is, but we think of epics as timeless, so it's strange to be reminded of how this is all taking place on the specific date of 16 June 1904, in the wake of Parnell's failed struggle for Irish independence, when Yeats was the only literary Irish giant; ten years before Joyce would start working on this and twenty before it was published in America, a time span in which Joyce aged from Stephen Daedalus's twentysomethingness to Bloom's fat forties.

And all the references to Jews, and the casual antisemitism - sobering to think that this was written before the Holocaust, indeed during the Great War which would lay the foundations for the Third Reich.

And now Ireland's had its prosperity, risen and fell as a Celtic Tiger, had the resources to celebrate its great literary heritage. (I suppose I ought to honour the memory of Seamus Heaney here, even though I always thought of him as Northern Irish.)  It's a different land, and yet this relic of a novel from an age of pessimism is such a prize in the nation's treasure trove, because it's so rich, because it's so daring, because it's so strange.

Oh it's tempting now to conjecture how one could write a Singaporean Ulysses, drawing the craziness of Asia and the West together on a trek down Armenian Street. But how true would it be? Would it be an attempt not to create something great, but to create something for the sake of greatness?


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Representative quote:

THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: I here present your undoubted emperor-president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!
ALL: God save Leopold the First!
BLOOM: (In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the bishop of Down and Connor, with dignity) Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.
WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (In purple stock and shovel hat) Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?
BLOOM: (Placing his right hand on his testicles, swears) So may the Creator deal with me. All this I promise to do.
MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (Pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom's head) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. Habemus carneficem. Leopold, Patrick, Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed!
(Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put on at the same time their twentyeight crowns. Joybells ring in Christ church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs. The peers do homage, one by one, approaching and genuflecting.)
THE PEERS: I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly worship.
(Bloom holds up his right hand on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor diamond. His palfrey neighs. Immediate silence. Wireless intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception of message.)
BLOOM: My subjects! We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we have this day repudiated our former spouse and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess Selene, the splendour of night.
(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black Maria. The princess Selene, in moonblue robes, a silver crescent on her head, descends from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. An outburst of cheering.)
JOHN HOWARD PARNELL: (Raises the royal standard) Illustrious Bloom! Successor to my famous brother!
BLOOM: (Embraces John Howard Parnell) We thank you from our heart, John, for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the promised land of our common ancestors.

Next book: Hall Caine's The Manxman, from the Isle of Man.

I'm in the UK!

And I'm now reading Ulysses on the Kindle!

Admittedly, it's odd to be now surveying world literature from a centre of hegemonic production. I actually take pride in being on the margins, commenting on the rest of the world. Zero authority, zero responsibility, zero blame.

Some friends have compared my project to A Year of Reading the World, which the UK writer Ann Morgan did over 2012, in conjunction with the London Olympics. I always liked to point out the differences: she focussed only on fiction from the UN's independent nations, written/translated into English - even had some writers writing stuff specially for her. I thought my multipolar, multigenre, sorta multilingual project was *better* in some way.

But no matter now. I have left the periphery and am now the centre!

The Deal with My Year Abroad

Well, I'm just under halfway through Ulysses. Which means there's no way I'll finish it before leaving Singapore this coming Thursday, 12 September.

As I've mentioned before, I'm spending a year at the University of East Anglia to pursue an M.A. in Creative Writing (Prose). My course starts in Norwich on the 23rd; in between I'll be doing a bunch of settling in, some finishing up of articles, some preparatory writing, some reading.

But after that? Well, that's the big question. I'm going to UEA with the specific ambition of training myself to become a more rigorous, disciplined writer, which means fewer distractions. Which means that I'm not sure how much time I should allow myself to nance about with random artefacts of world literature. Which means that this blog might become even less regularly updated than it already is.

It's odd, the thought of abandoning this project, even temporarily. It's become one of the few constants in my life over the past few years. And it might not happen.

Just giving everyone a heads up, just in case.