Question Time

This is Sarah! As you can see, one of her favourite past-times is rolling around in mud and dirt like an animal. She is an outrageously excellent, talented and often inappropriate friend of mine, and has filled in my questionnaire about her thoughts on literature. Oh, and she's probably going to win the Booker prize one day too.

Who are you?

The photo above is the best way I could think of to answer this question!

What have you read recently that has really resonated with you?

“The Doctor” by Andre Dubus, from his first short story collection, ‘Separate Fights’. As I’ve already described it to Elsie in pain-staking detail TWICE (once sober, once hideously drunk), I’m not going to go over it again. So, aside from that, Ali Smith. Back in March my friend Grace showed me one of Smith’s short stories, and I was hooked; in a couple of months I read everything by her, except for one collection that I still haven’t been able to track down. Stylistically, Ali Smith writes the way I want to be able to write, and her themes really struck a chord, too. For example, her depictions of the way our sense of our own identity is socially conditioned – it’s not an innate thing – and how this conditioning can be undone really hit home.

Who are your favourite authors?

I haven’t read enough by most authors to be able to call them my favourites, and of those I have read enough by there’s only ever a couple of works in the author’s bibliography that I really, properly love – apart from J.D. Salinger. I’ve read pretty much everything by him (even the unanthologized stuff, on the sly – god bless you, UEA library!) and got good things out of all of it.

What are you reading at the moment and what's it like so far?

‘Carry Me Down’, by M.J. Hyland, because she’ll be tutoring me next year and I want to see what her writing’s like, and because it was on sale at JR & RK Ellis, one of Norwich’s loveliest second-hand bookshops. I’m not very far in, but it’s pretty good so far – feels a bit early Ian McEwan light, but it’s got this great, queasy atmosphere, and the twelve year old narrator’s voice is well captured.

What is it about reading that you enjoy?

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”

I came across this quote from Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’ through Elsie, and it says almost everything that needs to be said about why I enjoy reading. The only thing to add is that, because of the way it’s produced, I think literature is much less likely to communicate dominant (and therefore traditional, conservative, and sometimes downright dangerous) ideologies than lots of the film and TV I watch.

What was your favourite childhood book and why?

It’s a bit of a boring answer, but ‘Harry Potter’. I read the first book twenty-six times before not bothering to count anymore. One of the reasons I liked it so much is because it is the story-world is so incredibly (and, in the later books, excessively) detailed. It has this incredible verisimilitude; you can really immerse yourself in it. When I was in Year Seven I used to genuinely, painfully long to go to Hogwarts (as I was only ten and hated secondary school, I think this was allowed). Sadly it never happened.

After studying English Literature, what do you feel you have learnt, and do you feel that it is still an important area of study?

Apart from the influence of the protestant work ethic on the formulation of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and other obscure essay answers, I think that one of the main things that studying English Literature has taught me is a much better ability to empathize with other people and to appreciate different points of view. I feel much more open to the equivocalness of everything after being at university for three years.
This links to why I think English Literature is important. I think the English language (and probably most languages) is a deeply ineffective medium of communication; in conversations you’re never able to say exactly what you think or feel. The written word is still imperfect, but I think that it’s the best channel we have to communicate thoughts and emotions to other people. Literature can create a genuine connection through author-character-reader, and it’s because of this that it’s so valuable. The human connection means that literature is, I think, at least as effective as works of pure philosophy, or history, or psychology (and so on) in helping people understand those subjects, and so understand themselves.

Is there a book that you feel you should have read, but haven't?

This feeling often depends on how horrified my excessively well-read older brother is when I tell him I haven’t read ‘The Faerie Queen’, ’Paradise Lost’, etc. He comes close to anaphylactic shock when I admit that, no, I still haven’t got round to reading any Dickens. This is the author I feel worst about not having read – although I will probably continue to not read Dickens for the foreseeable future.

What is the one book that you always recommend to others?
If the person I’m recommending to is, I don’t know, twenty-five or under, then I go for ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. It has the potential to be an incredible reading experience, one that can really change you, but Salinger creates his teenage narrator so effectively that if his readers are too far gone into adulthood they may not be able to empathise with Holden, and dismiss the character’s concerns as juvenile. So read it while you still can! Aside from that it’s horses for courses, innit?

Frozen Sea

"One should only read books which bite and sting one. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what's the point in reading? A book must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka.

I've had this quote on my mind for a little while, which got me thinking about the books I have read that have 'smashed the frozen sea' inside me. I remember feeling utterly staggered after finishing George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', and the experience of reading that book has stayed with me for a long time. Phrases like 'Big Brother', 'Orwellian state' and so forth are bandied about so often in the press that the terror that comes across in the novel seems to have been diluted, but when reading it again I'm constantly holding my breath and wondering if Orwell actually did have some kind of grim crystal ball to see the society we find ourselves in now.

Another one that I felt broke my frozen sea is 'North and South' by Elizabeth Gaskell. I'm not much of a romantic but this novel somehow managed to 'melt' me. Not just with her depiction of a blossoming, difficult and angst-ridden relationship between Thornton and Margaret Hale, which I loved, but with her portrayal of the hardships facing the mill-workers. The excrutiating unfairness of the divide between the wealthy and the poor came across so sharply that the novel felt like a portrait of the few that didn't necessarily benefit from the industrial boom in the 19th century; a group we don't always consider. It's a good old romance, too.

'Jane Eyre' is another classic that gets me every time. I realise that it's a bit of a typical 'literary girl' book, but I honestly feel that it's gets better with every reading. As I get older, different parts speak to me more strongly, and I can trace Jane's confusion and growth within the novel alongside my own experiences.

I've recently given a few of my friends a little questionnaire, with one of the questions asking what book has resonated with them, and I'm really excited to read their answers. I'm going to post their completed entries every so often on here. Hurray!