Peaceable Land 4 - Magic in Life
On the details...
If I tell you that skipping an extremely starry invite so I could discuss the great men of history beneath gilded ceiling, behind security rope, and before Maclise’s 46-foot Waterloo in Westminster Palace was the second smuggest satisfaction of Monday, then you will sense that the week began, at least, on more or less a tolerable note. Tuesday saw my bag poached from a gross boozer on the Farringdon Road. No one say karma.
So it was Wednesday and Thursday haunting an Upper Street graveyard my laptop had pinged in, and Friday before I could start this. So something of a rustle-up this week, friends.
But that’s not bad. In a way it confines eye to prize – the prize being, of course, the novel.
There are two that I’ve bulk bought this year. One is Never Mind, the first of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose books. When I manage to corner the journalists I admire and ask their constellation it is named with shocking reliability. So I give it to friends who ask what’s considered gold standard now.
The other is Ia Genberg’s The Details. I’ve given three copies on birthdays and have three more piled by my bed. The friend staying this weekend is locked on the balcony so I can write this: a copy of Genberg is her only sustenance, but that will nourish.
It was on the International Booker shortlist, which I read all of and wrote about in a happy and dreamlike week in May. Below are my review from the time and an interview I got with Genberg on the red carpet. (And a scintilla of scandal!)
Ia Genberg’s The Details is made up of four portraits, each of a person the narrator has known. The girlfriend chosen to be a subject is not selected because she’s the narrator’s first, or last, or longest-term partner, but because her memory is the most powerfully felt. All that matters is “magnitude… the concentrated mass of meaning”…
“Going deeper requires a loss of control, requires the abandonment of that constant surveillance of time and space in exchange for a headlong fall inside oneself, or into somebody else, or down one of life’s many cracks and fissures.”
The narrator is thrillingly impressionable. It really is amazing just how much of other people she lets in, and what volume of life and personality flows through her. We cannot be our own: that the self is no more than the traces of the people we rub up and lean against; and no relationship ever ends, because people change us forever. Some “blow through your life” and with others you keep “a bracing pact in the face of every new circumstance in our respective lives.” Reading you are possessed irresistibly to sprint to a restaurant, seize an outdoor table, and spend a whole evening and night in conversation with someone… remembering to order a new galette only every three hours!
“This is how I remember Alejandro even today, absolutely still on the pillow, with his face right close to mine and his black eyes like a colon I could zoom in on and press through. I’ve had more than my share of magic in life, most often in the encounter with others. There is something there, and only there. I can’t be more specific than that, can only say that if we’re searching we should look in each other, that a pair of eyes are another’s sideways colon into something, or out of something.”
I read The Details on a lovely evening of sun after rain, on the heath then in the bath. I’ll give it to my mum on her coming 60th birthday. It seems like it would be good near a scary day like that, as a reminder of how much of loved others you hold in you and how much of you is held in loved others.
GM: Hi Ms Genberg, thanks for that book.
IG: Hello George.
GM: Any life advice? The book made me think I want to live like this, I want to feel like this. How do you do it?
IG: Don't think about yourself too much.
GM: Yeah, but how do you stop doing that?
IG: Focus outwards, on the life around you.
GM: Some volunteering?
IG: Yeah, maybe a home for cats or something.
GM: Why the opposition to individualism? Is that Swedish?
IG: I don't think it's particularly Swedish. I wanted to write about a person who was focussed outwards. Not so occupied by herself and her own feelings.
GM: How old would you like to live to be and why?
IG: I can't say that. Now is a very good time. The best time is now.
GM: How did you compose the passage with the colon in the eyes?
IG: It's very visual. If you look at someone it's like a colon.
GM: But how do you compose a big poetic flourish like that?
IG: I can't say that, it just came.
GM: Just talent?
IG: Yeah.
GM: Who are your influences?
IG: Some Swedish writers that you've not heard about. Paul Auster.
GM: Can we be our own person alone? Niki says you have to be leaning on someone else.
IG: You don't live here by yourself. You're not alone in the world. So we have to be a little influenced by each other, lean on each other. Don't you think? Rub against each other. You don't create yourself just thinking this is what I'm going to be.
GM: Don't create yourself?
IG: Yeah, no, you don't really create yourself, don't you? Do you think? I mean, if you were in another environment, like a very poor person in India, are you the same person really? Or with other parents or other classmates? I mean suddenly just coming into a group of people and just starting to behave differently and getting influenced.
GM: But the people on the top of monuments are people defied that and created themselves in spite what's around them. Napoleon is maybe the foremost, maybe even the original with the French Revolution. Do you think that's bad for us? Should we be doing something else instead?
IG: I have no answer to that. It's a too big question for me.
GM: Were there any other potential characters for the portraits?
IG: No. I got so exhausted by writing this book because I did a lot of rewriting all the time. After four chapters I was quite exhausted. I was thinking about writing another one but I felt 150 pages, it was not a brochure, it was like a book.
GM: It's a day.
IG: Yeah it's a day. I think it's very good for the readers to have a quick short book. And also it's very compact. To be that compact you can't be too big.
GM: What's next?
IG: I don't know. This. Dinner.
GM: That’s so like your book. All right well thanks a lot. I did read it in a day and it was one of the best days ever so thanks a lot. I hope you win. I think you should.
She didn’t win. The prize went to Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. Because of what I’d written about that book, they escorted me off the premises of my scheduled winner interview! Didn’t even let me finish my coffee. It was very dramatic. Though I must say, and you’ve sensed it anyway, that I did quite enjoy feeling myself a man of dangerous ideas.
Thanks so much everyone who is signing up, it is just thrilling to see!
Thank you!
GM