writing, not drowning

'You may have the universe, if I may have Italy'

Who am I to disagree with Giuseppe Verdi? I am, in fact, in total agreement and have been for, oh, more than half a century. And every year, usually in spring, I long to be there. These days, however, I don't manage to visit as often as I would like so have to settle for spending some time with my nose in a book, or books, about Italy. This year, the Italy-yearning surfaced in late September and certain books in the waiting-to-be-read pile beckoned . . .

The first, a novel set mainly in Rome and which had garnered enthusiastic reviews, was somewhat disappointing, with characters whose dialogue I never found wholly convincing. I won't name it, not least because I do appreciate the effort that goes into writing a novel and then actually having it published, although you may be able to work out the title from the 'Read 2015' list on the right.  

So I moved swiftly on to Elena Ferrante, for whom I had been saving myself - and I was holding my breath. There had been so much publicity and speculation about the reclusive author and so much praise heaped upon her novels that I could hardly bear the thought of a second disappointment. My relief, as soon as I started to read My Brilliant Friend was palpable. I loved it and have ordered the second, third and fourth of the Neapolitan novels from my local library; Ferrante, I feel sure, will carry me through an English winter.

I did have one or two qualms about the occasional Americanism in Ann Goldstein's translation but, having read this interview with her on Lizzy's Literary Life blog, I now appreciate the challenges she faced in translating Ferrante.

My Brilliant Friend is a wonderful evocation of adolescence - and adolescent friendships - in post-war Naples. Some of its themes are particular to the time and the place; others are universal and I can understand, completely, how Ferrante's work has suddenly captured the imagination of so many readers beyond Italy. 

Although I try to avoid too much self-referential thinking when reading, the setting for some of the most significant moments in the narrative - the shoeshop owned by Lila's father - took me straight back to a particular time in my own post-war adolescence. It was 1961, I was 14, staying in Liguria in northern Italy, and made friends with a girl of my age called Marisa. Her family owned a shoeshop in a narrow street in the centre of the town and I had visited the shop with my mother to buy some sandals. Marisa served us and we embarked on a  fractured conversation, she in her limited English and I my limited Italian. But the spark of friendship was there and I was soon spending every spare moment that I could with Marisa, initially at the shop, and then with some of her friends and family, including Alfredo, who worked at a nearby hotel and, a cousin, Giacomo, who was a student at the University of Turin. We went to an open-air cinema and although I can't remember what film we saw - and my Italian certainly wasn't up to the task of following the dialogue - it was all very heady romantic stuff for a impressionable young teenager from the west London suburbs . . . and it left an indelible mark.

I had grown up listening to fragments of Italian; my father had been a prisoner of war in Italy during WWII. He and his sergeant had escaped after bribing a guard, then lived a hand-to-mouth existence in the mountains, moving from safe house to safe house, sheltered by partisans for four months - until they sought shelter in a house that turned out not to be safe. (They ended up in another prisoner-of-war camp, this time in Germany.) It's amazing how proficient one can become in a foreign language when it is a matter of life or death.  

So, I was already familiar with a cluster of familiar words and phrases, although 'we're exhausted'; 'is there somewhere we can sleep?'; 'we are very, very hungry'; 'can you spare something to eat?', and 'we have nothing' were not going to get me very far on the Italian Riviera in 1961 . . .*

I learned more with Marisa and, at 16, I had the opportunity to study Italian O-level and A-level at school. If it is possible to fall in love with a language, I did; I'd already enjoyed studying French and Spanish but Italian was something else. It became a passion. Something similar happened to my daughter a couple of decades later when she spent a summer as an au pair in Florence and took Italian language classes; she went on to read Italian at university.

I try not to let my Italian turn to rust and, despite Ann Goldstein's mention of the challenges of Ferrante's language and sentence construction, I'd like, some day, to attempt to read Elena Ferrante in the original. 

Reading about Lila and her family and the calzature made me wonder what had happened to Marisa; we stayed in touch for a while, via postcards but, by the time my Italian was up to letter-writing standard, we had lost contact. However. . . it seems that the family still has a shoeshop in the same town but it is larger, grander and in a more fashionable location. A very smart sign hangs above the entrance to the shop. 

+++++++++++

*Although I was aware of the bare bones of my father's escape from the prisoner of war camp, I knew few of the details, and I certainly did not appreciate how gruelling those four months hiding out in the mountains would have been. Not until, that is, I read Iris Origo's War in Val d'Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944 a few years ago. I realised that I had had no idea but, by then, it was too late to ask the questions . . .

 

On 12 Years a Slave . . . and the way we live now

On a wet, windswept Sunday evening in Exeter, two friends and I went to see 12 Years a Slave. It was just as we had expected it to be: extraordinary, powerful, and profoundly moving. For once, I had read many of the reviews beforehand and although there were some dissenting voices, most critics and commentators seemed to speak as one. This is what the Channel 4 newscaster, Jon Snow, had to say on his C4 blog.

I don't think that I would dispute one word. Do go to see 12 Years a Slave if you can.

My friends and I agreed that watching this particular film on a large screen was worthwhile, not least because it emphasised its dramatic impact. But for us there was a distinct downside to this - the cinema itself. One of a large national chain, it had all the atmosphere of an industrial warehouse and the dreary, chilly foyer, with just a handful of seats, could have put us off cinema-going for life. 

There was the usual limited selection of you-know-who's sugar-laden soft drinks and giant buckets of popcorn but surely, we thought, this could not possibly be the sort of film people would want to munch and slurp through. How wrong we were. Once we were in the auditorium, we found ourselves surrounded by people clasping mega-containers and, yes, they did munch and slurp, even through some of the film's most harrowing scenes. Two of them sat at the end of our row, having arrived with so much food and drink that they seemed to be having difficulty carrying it all.

As soon as the film ended, the same people all rushed to the exit -they didn't hang around to watch the credits; they felt no need to acknowledge all the people whose individual and collective efforts had enabled them to watch this magnificent work.

When we got up to leave, almost the last people in the cinema to do so, we had to tread over a substantial pile of uneaten popcorn and fried food that the couple at the end of our row had thoughtfully thrown on the floor. Even if it had occurred to them that, apart from the waste, someone else would have to clear up their vile mess, it seemed that this was of no concern. Oh the irony, after such a film.

It reminded me of a scene I witnessed almost 30 years ago in what was then one of Sainsbury's newest and  largest branches in central London. Its location meant that it attracted some of the company's wealthiest customers, many of whom had deserted the much pricier Harrods Food Halls about a mile away.  A mother and daughter were making a stately progress around the aisles, when the daughter picked up and promptly dropped a bottle of something or other. The bottle smashed into pieces on the floor, leaving a shard-strewn, viscous mess. The daughter bent down and started to pick up the pieces of glass.

'Oh leave it, darling,' droned the plummy mummy, 'they have people to do that sort of thing.' And they resumed their stately progress.

I'm sure that Jon Snow is right. Everyone should see 12 Years a Slave. But not everyone will see it in the same way . . .

'If you build it . . .'

Transforming dreams into reality takes time and energy, hence yet another protracted blog absence. My apologies - as always - but I'm now several steps nearer to bringing various strands of my writing and mentoring life together, working with groups and individual students. Not quite there yet but the goal is in sight. A pilot scheme is under way, the website is now in the hands of a trusted friend and brilliant designer, a venue for another element of the work identified.

And it is, at last, spring, after a long, wet, grey, miserable winter that seems to have gone on for ever. The dogs - my own and the guest canines - rush around madly, leaping in and out of the river. The grass has had its first cut of the year and there are buds on the magnolia, hawthorn and camellia bushes. This is why I love spring; it is so full of possibilities. Creativity is at its height.

But the long winter has not been wasted; it has been given over to thinking, planning and a good deal of dreaming - because one is never too old to dream, to imagine the possibilities that spring and summer might bring to fruition.

I'm sure that many of you - especially readers in the USA - will immediately recognise the source of the title of this blog. And it was one of my students (a great lover of baseball films), to whom I was outlining my ideas, at an embryonic stage, who reminded me of the quote. Here's James Earl Jones affirming for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams - and for me - the importance of holding fast to one's dream, even in financially straitened times, and seeing it through to reality.

A taste for hunkering

 

After a recent post here, Materfamilias and I were exchanging comments on the nature of hunkering, as in hunkering down. Which is what you do when the weather is unbelievably bad and you cannot go anywhere and you need to occupy hands and or/ mind to stop cabin fever setting in. You need the right sort of books, the right sort of films, the right sort of food and so on and so forth. 

It's a time when I want stories; you know the kind, proper stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, yarns, myths, sagas. I want great fat Victorian novels, with casts of . . . I was going to say thousands but that is plainly ridiculous. In fact, I settled for a book I have given to several friends recently - Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin. But I'm not going to review it here because Gaile happens to be the sister of one of my closest friends and it might just seem like a shameless plug. As it turns out, the friends who have read it loved it and M, over at Random Distractions plans to review it. I'll include a link here when she does.

As you might guess from the title, Baking Cakes in Kigali is set in Rwanda, post-genocide Rwanda, a country Gaile knows well. It carries a very positive life-affirming message, especially for and about women, from an author who cares about her characters. As you will, I am sure, when you get to know them. (Anyway, it's got four stars over at Amazon and 57 largely enthusiastic customer reviews. Just saying.)

In the meantime, I'm now having one of my very rare forays into crime writing but only because I'd previously devoured every single page of Andrew Taylor's novel, The American Boy, with relish. I've been given a copy of the same author's Requiem for an Angel, otherwise known as the Roth Trilogy. Not Victorian but almost a thousand pages of gripping narrative. See? Perfect hunkering book fare.

Books are being interspersed with films and I eventually got round to watching A Touch of Spice, a coming of age story (with cookery) set in Istanbul and Athens. Despite some slightly wobbly continuity and a significant gap in the plot, it's a touching, bitter-sweet, film and provides an ideal way to conjure up the sights, sounds and aromas of Southern Europe and the gateway to Asia when, in England, all outside is deep and crisp and even. And extremely cold.

(The sight of all those delicious on-screen meze was going to be a bit of a challenge as I raided the store cupboard trying to think of 101 things to do with a tin of chickpeas and a packet of quinoa. Tomatoes and chillies were a big help. Someone bought me a loaf yesterday. Never has buttered toast and Marmite tasted so good.)

But all this time indoors has, inevitably, given rise to more time spent with the laptop. Not intentional, it just happened that way. In fact, I hung around for much of Friday on Twitter, as did a good many writers (a hugely popular procrastination technique for the profession) but I am not complaining because all sorts of nuggets of useful information came my way. 

One of the things I find fascinating about Twitter is the speed at which a cause or campaign can gather momentum and get results. (Remember what happened in Iran?) And it's on Twitter that I came across www.asafeworldforwomen.org 

If you need reminding just how unsafe the world still is for far too many girls and women, then do please take a look at the website. If you're on Twitter, pick up one the campaign's main messages and pass it on. (Incidentally, many of the Safe World Campaign's concerns feature fictionally in Baking Cakes in Kigali.) But the campaign's messages are universal; I chose to tweet a message about domestic violence in the UK and one of the many volunteers doing a great job co-ordinating all the cyber-messages pointed me in the direction of Janey Godley's blogpost on the subject.  Janey's name will be familiar to many of you, especially in Scotland, where she's a well-known stand-up comic, author, journalist and playwright.

It's a brave and honest post but it doesn't make for easy reading and it's a subject that some might prefer not to think about. But it takes enormous courage for a woman to speak out and tell a story like this and many are still too fearful to do so, even if the violence has stopped. Psychological wounds run very deep indeed. Perhaps the very least we can do is listen. It's not much to ask.

But it's a subject I've written about before and will do so again. Because it's too important to ignore and, even if it hasn't happened to you, I'd hazard a guess that you know a girl or woman who has been on the receiving end of violence in the one place where we all have a right to feel safe and protected.

And this is probably not quite where you expected to end up when you embarked on what you thought was going to be a cosy post about fireside reading. Bloggers, eh? Give them an inch . . .

Of queens, princes and baby Cadillacs . . .

There's a lot of dross on YouTube®. (Just how many reruns of the Britain's Got Talent finals can a person endure?) But among the dross there is gold. The British Film Institute (BFI) Archive is a rich seam. One of the latest BFI  additions dates from 1913; The Smallest Car in the Largest City in the world is quite surreal and quite wonderful, complete with juddery captions.

The smallest car was a baby Cadillac commisioned by Queen Alexandra as a gift for Prince Olaf of Norway (yes, honestly) and the largest city was London. My mum- a Londoner through and through - was six when this film was made; funny, she never mentioned anything about a baby Cadillac . . .