Sabbing

There's a beautiful verb in Dutch, which I find hard to translate: soggen. Sog is short for Studie Ontwijkend Gedrag, literally Study Avoiding Behaviour. But sabbing is not just any type of ducking your responsibilities, it's not picking your belly button. To explain what I mean with, I'll explain what I've been up to lately.

Upcoming Thursday, I'll have to defend my philosophy thesis. This requires an extensive preparation, especially since I've written this dissertation before I went to England, a year ago, and haven't looked back at it since.

So, ideally, I would lock myself up in the library, reread all texts I used and my notes, memorise key passages of my dissertation and do some more research into both translation theory and the philosophy of Walter Benjamin.

But... I couldn't resist surfing the web for interesting job vacancies; read In de mist van het schimmenrijk” by W.F. Hermans; arrange interviews with several important people in The Netherlands; write the synopsis of my novel so that I can send it to an agent; read Ruth Rendell's The Monster in The Box and write a review for www.OpSpraak.net (conclusion: it's a thriller in the tradition if-you've-got-a-lion-in-a-cage, someone has to forget to close the cage. Unfortunately, some emotional lions remained caged, while plot-technical lions escaped from cages I hadn't seen before.); organise my graduation party and surf the discussions on LinkedIn. Someone posted the question “Do you play games with language in your wrintings, or do you stick to the 'rules'? And, either way, why do you do so?” and I even posted a reply.

Whenever I start to think up word games, this is a sign I'm distracted from the story I'm trying to tell.

Either because the story is boring - in which case I should stop - or because I'm approaching a very sensitive, difficult scene - in which case I should definitely not start playing games, but should focus on the storytelling!

Sometimes I change words while editing because they are funnier, because of etymological reasons or because they add an extra layer of meaning to the whole story. But that's what editing is for.

While writing, I'm not managing the words. The words choose me. I mean, I usually don't know which words I'm going to write down before they're there. Just like when I'm speaking.

And if I do know which words I'm going to use (e.g. when I'm playing with words), people often tell me that that passage doesn't sound right. The words are in charge, not me.”

In short, I've been promoting my novel, thinking about my career and organising my graduation party. It's all very interesting and important. But I've been doing anything but cramming for my defence appeal. Which is what I should have been doing.

I wonder why there is no good English word for soggen, so that I have to invent sabbing (which actually has to do with spontaneous abortion – how appropriate!). Is it typically a problem for Dutch students, that there are so many important things to take care of that don't involve studying?

Hip Hip Hurrah!

My birthdays tend to coincide with special events.

On my 21^st birthday I won €250 worth in book vouchers in the short story competition Write Now; on my 23^rd birthday I received a beautiful bouquet with the message that I was chosen for the Dutch National Think Tank, and today, on my 25^th birthday, I got a letter congratulating me with the fact that Toby Turd and The Pile of Poo was short listed for the competition of the Academy of Children's Writers (over 2,000 entries). I'm not a winner, but it's a start!

To celebrate my birthday, I went to The Book Club Boutique with Cara last night, where we discovered the wonderful creature called Salena Godden. She's a singer, a poet and a writer; she's got an amazing voice and an even better sense of humour; she's beautiful and very macho... she's the type of woman that makes me think: oh yes, I almost forgot, life is fun!

I hear y'all asking: what do I want as a birthday present? From you, dear blog-readers, I want book tips! Tell me what books I should definitely read this year!

To give you an impression of my taste, I've answered the Book Quiz for Bookies.

Feel free to scroll straight ahead to the comments-section, though. Much fun as I had recollecting the books I read this year, I can imagine it's quite boring to read.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dostojevski, Terry Pratchett and Ronald Giphart...

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I own two copies of Also Sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche), Echte Filosofie (Oudemans) and Embers (Sandor Marai), and several of copies of Voortplanting en Waarheidsverloochening (Sex and Lies, my dissertation on Schopenhauer).

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Should it?

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Jonathan Strange. But don't tell anyone!

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
Een onaangename geschiedenis (an unfortunate history) by Dostojevski. I read it about 18 times.

6) What was your favourite book when you were ten years old?
Anything by R.L. Stine I could lay my eyes on.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
In the last three weeks alone I hated Belle de Jour,The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and Een Tafel Vol Vlinders, by Tim Krabbé equally, and I couldn't appreciate Dot in The Universe by Lucy Ellman either. I don't even want to think back further.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
I just finished Piercing, by Ryu Murakami, and I loved it. I fondly think back of rereading George's Marvellous Medicine (Roald Dahl) a couple of months ago. But actually, I think Hunger by Knut Hamsun was the best book I read this year.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
I can't say

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Love of Seven Dolls by Paul Gallico

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
The Writers' and Artists' yearbook. Or actually, I would like to see that!

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I remember I dreamt about 'a famous writer' a couple of weeks ago. Even in the dream, the identity of the writer was not further specified than that he was famous, and I looked up to him. It was quite a pervy dream, a nightmare, but I don't remember what happened.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
Teena Thyme, by Jennifer Jane Pope

15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
The Fragments of Parmenides (I read them in Coxon's collection), and Heidegger's lingering around these fragments.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
I don't think King Lear is very obscure...

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Russians

18) Roth or Updike? 19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers? 20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? 21) Austen or Eliot? 22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Emphasised by question 18 to 21

23) What is your favourite novel?
Perhaps A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Or The Coma by Alex Garland. Or La Nausee by Sartre.

24) Play?
Bakchai by Euripides

25) Poem?
Haelfte des Lebens by Hölderlin

26) Essay?
Der Erzähler by Walter Benjamin

27) Short Story?
Taste by Roald Dahl

28) Work of nonfiction?
I couldn't move to London without Die Technik und die Kehre, by Heidegger.

29) Who is your favourite author?
Dostojevski.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
How about Martin Amis?

31) What is your desert island book?
Nietzsche's Nachlass. When can I go?

32) And... what are you reading right now?
Stephen King, The Green Mile (Cara's birthday present!).

A Table Full of Butterflies

“Hey, that’s Dutch! I can read that!”
Tuesday, my first day at Bloomsbury, and I already felt at home enough to shout and attract everyone’s attention. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing.
“What does it say?” asked the editor on who’s desk I had spotted the word ‘vlinders’.
“A table full of butterflies,” I said. Odd, isn’t it, that Tim Krabbé has to be the first since my arrival in London to make me proud of my origin. In a publishing house, of all places.
“Do we have anything Dutch we can ask her to read?”asked another editor.
“You can read this for us,” the first said, “if you like. But we do need the book back afterwards. It’s our only copy.”

So I took Een Tafel Vol Vlinders back home and forced myself to read it instead of Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, which I also happen to be reading. I took a bit of a detour, getting off at Liverpool Street to exchange my second copy of Mother’s Milk for a book of which I now don’t even remember author or title. I felt that was the least I could do, considering that, if it weren’t my first day at Bloomsbury, I would have been volunteering for Choose What You Read. I remember I preferred to read the CWYR book over Krabbé, though, because in the first paragraph the main character read in the newspaper that his dad had died. He hadn’t been informed personally because he had his mobile off all day, due to an important meeting, but he hoped his dad had suffered.

The next morning when I got to the office, I told the editor over coffee what I thought of A Table Full Of Butterflies. I can tell you the plot here, ‘cause if it’s up to me it won’t be translated any way.

Plot
Fred is middle-aged, blasé and has ‘sort of’ failed in his ambitions: to be an explorer and a novelist. He now earns his money as a travel-journalist. In the opening of the book he is climbing a beautiful volcano. But Fred is not impressed; Fred is annoyed with his fellow travellers and is inclined to give up several metres before he reaches the top. When his wife calls him on his mobile and tells him to call her as soon as he gets back to his hotel, he is convinced that his stepson, Bram, is dead. He starts imagining the funeral and reminiscing their life together.
His real father committed suicide when Bram was only three weeks old. Fred started dating his mother, Nicolien, soon after, and became Bram’s dad. When Nicolien got married to another man, John, Fred adopted Bram. He wanted his stepson to be special, to be the writer and adventurer that he failed to be. Bram tried to live up to these expectations and hitch hiked to New-Zealand when he was eighteen. He came back to Holland after that, but just to earn some money before leaving off again. When Bram drives Fred to the airport to go to his volcano-trip, he tells him he’s in love. Fred is unsympathetic and warns him not to grow too attached: men are meant to be great, women are meant to keep them small.
The second part is a first person narrative and takes off when, Bram, the new main character, meets his first true love: Emma. For the first time in his life he doesn’t feel lonely. But he experiences her as a “dil-emma”: his past (the ambitions Fred has superimposed on him) on the one hand, and his future (being happy with Emma) on the other. He takes Fred’s last words very seriously, and agrees that Emma is holding him down. With this insight, his love for her starts to fade, but his ambition to explore the world doesn’t revive. And that’s why he decides to take after his real dad and do himself in.

Opinion
Because the book takes off with an unsatisfied, complaining old man, I was inclined to put the book down after the first 10 pages. The atmosphere is depressing, and I can’t feel any sympathy for someone who is suddenly convinced that his son is dead when there is no real reason to assume so.
It gets better when the focus shifts to Bram. However, when he starts to see Emma as a burden, I got the impression Krabbé was just being plain sexist. That’s when I realised that all women in the book are unfaithful (while all the men are reliable), and when I stopped caring whether Bram would actually be dead, as Fred predicted in the beginning, or not.
I guess most readers finished it because they got it given for free, because there was a lot of media coverage (there always is a lot of media coverage for the National Book Week Present), because Tim Krabbé is famous in Holland, and because it was really short.
Stripped from one (or more) of these advantages, I think the book loses all appeal.

Book Launch: Albertopolis Disparu

There is something enticing about closing time. Even the most ordinary supermarket, post-office or call-centre turns into a magical place when the doors are shut and the alarm system is turned on. Everyone who has read Matt Thorne’s Eight Minutes Idle knows what I mean. Everyone who has ever worked in a bar knows too that the staff-after-parties are much cooler than the parties the costumers have during opening hours. It’s hard to imagine what the Science Museum is like after six, so you can picture how excited Bronagh, Anneka and I were Monday night, during the launch of a new Science Museum Booklet: Albertopolis Disparu by Tony White.

The presentation took place in front of the Listening Post, and as long as copies are available, they will be handed out for free on the same spot. This spot was chosen because this enchanting machine, which projects live messages from internet chat rooms onto a giant grid of small screens, was the inspiration for the short story.

As the writer in residence at the Science Museum, White says he came across the preface to a lost work by author James Colvin. The structure of a main story embedded within several narratives is similar to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and typical for the Steampunk tradition this work is placed within. I don't want to spoil it for you, so I'll tell you no more, except that it made me laugh.

Now, if you’re in the vicinity of London, I suggest you hurry to South Kensington and pick up this wicked little piece of art. Apparently, the green cabman’s shelter opposite the V&A has resumed the tradition of educating taxi drivers by handing out free copies of this Science Museum Booklet. But for ordinary human beings the booklet is available at the Waterstone’s in the Science Museum and next to the Listening Post in the museum. And if you’re not in London, I suggest you download the PDF.

So far for growing up

The latest post of Mr. Gorilla Bananas sent me right back to reminiscing my 20th birthday. It was the nineteenth of May, the year 2004, when the great Richard Dawkins came down to the Netherlands to give the first Tinbergen Memorial Lecture at the Pieterskerk in my home town Leiden. My joy was great, for as a student in Philosophy I could not imagine a better way to celebrate my growing up than by attending this reading.
The irony, that such a reading should be held in a church! The first thing he remarked, was a praise for priests, who had learned how to give sermons under the current acoustic circumstances. I'll spare you all the details of the rest of his lecture, for I assume you've already read all the important books in life, and if not, I urge you to get to work without further ado.
After the reading, Mr. Dawkins sold and signed copies of The Blind Watchmaker, but being the poor student I was (and still am) I could not afford to line up. Instead, I waited with my tattered copy of The Selfish Gene until he was about to leave the cathedral. When I finally dared to approach him, I stumbled over the inscriptions of the graves we were walking on. Still blushing and trembling, I asked the surprised scientist if he would be so kind as to put his autograph in my book.
“Of course,” he said. “What's your name?”
“Deborah,” I said. And then, out of the blue: “Could you tell me, what's your favourite passage?”
He leafed through the book and saw how much I had underlined and read some of my notes.
“That would be the bit about the lumbering robots,” he said, “because that's the most creative part.”
“Could you write in front which page that is?” I asked. I had never thought of asking these questions, but standing there at that moment, I felt like I had to ask him just a little bit more than his autograph. And unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything intelligent to say.
“Certainly.” He took his pen and started to write. He had no table, so he just held the book in his other hand, and wrote sort of in the air. I stood by and felt very awkward.
“Today's a very special day for me,” I said. “It's my birthday.”
“Congratulations,” he said, “I hope you enjoyed the lecture. Have a good evening.” He gave me back my book, shook my hand and left the church. And left me trembling, blushing, contemplating what a fool I had made out of myself in front of my idol. I felt like a bloody Backstreet Boys fan. So far for growing up!

The Raw Shark Texts

“He would have done anything to save her, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes, I think that’s right. Is that the way you feel about Scout?”
When someone asks a question out of the blue, there’s a chance the guards will be caught sleeping. When this happens, the brain sometimes responds before the mind has a chance to lock the doors and winch your standard mind your own business flag up the flagpole. Sometimes the brain surprises everyone, even itself, with its answers.
“Yeah. I mean, maybe if things had carried on and if this hadn’t –”

(Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, p. 276-277)

This is what The Raw Shark Texts is all about, the everyday experience that we don’t pick our words, but that what we say is there before we know it. It’s a hell of a lot worse for you lot, native speakers, but even my artificial speech is crowded with unintended fillers like “I’m not gonna lie about this,” and “innit”, “do you know what I mean”?
And the more people around me use these chunks of junk-language, the more I hear myself repeating them. It’s as if I’m not using these phrases, but they are using me. They are using me to procreate.
Since I read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, I’ve accepted that I’m just a lumbering robot, constituted by a colony of genes that are able to copy themselves thanks to ‘me’. And I’ve accepted that there’s a massive amount of freeloading genes in my genome, bits of DNA that don’t have any effect on my phenotype, but get copied along with all the other DNA anyway. That’s called junk-DNA.
From here, it’s not that hard to image that other types of replicators, which are not molecules, use this survival machine (me) to replicate themselves just like the junk-DNA, such as the phrases “at the end of the day”, “he was, like, well, yeah”, “y’know”. Dawkins calls these linguistic equivalents of the genes memes.

“They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places.”
(Hall, p. 55)

Now, the memes are small building blocks, like genes. And what Hall has done in his novel, is ask the question: What if, parallel to genes building huge survival machines, memes have evolved along a similar track?
Conceptual fish might be swimming in the sea of words we blurt out continuously – fish appearing in an earlier stage of evolution than mammals – without us even noticing, simply because we aren’t looking for it. After all,

“Sometimes it’s just hard to see what’s in front of you. But once you do see it, or once something connected to the it touches you, I don’t think there’s any going back.”
(Hall, p. 232)

The Raw Shark Texts takes place in our own world, and makes the aspect of the memes incredibly tangible, by sending Eric Sanderson, our main character, on a quest for his love, Clio Aames, in the realm of the ideas.
Hall uses vivid images to make his point. For example, when Eric and Scout reach Dr. Trey Fidorous, they have to go through a maze of books. The walls are covered with all types of books, no, in fact, the walls are made of books. When I read this, I swore this book will be turned into a film soon.
The conceptual shark which is after Eric, is literally (pun intended) devouring him. Words, the lesson is, are just as real, if not more real, than anything else.
When I wait at the traffic light, I don’t wait at a blue canvas, grey patch on the lower halve, with one black streak in the middle with a red circle on top. I wait at a traffic light, and that’s exactly why I wait there. Because I see the word ‘traffic light’. And that silver blur that comes whizzing by is a Mercedes, immediately. The age of the impressionists is over. My world doesn’t consist of impressions.
Before the ‘raw data’ is there, I see things by their names.

Apology to the bookshop on Windsor Street

If there's one thing I can't take in a bookshop, it's muzak. When I go shopping for books, it's not like I've got a shopping list from which I don't want to divert. On the contrary, I want titles to attract my attention, I want them to seduce me to take them of their shelves, I want to read the blurbs and first pages, I want to focus on them and I want them to convince me to spend my money on them. Walking through a book store with the radio on is more like visiting a graveyard: you read the names and titles, but the books can't come to life.

Today I payed a visit to Uxbridge's Waterstones' to order a copy of Kamila Shamsie's In the City by the Sea. I felt a bit bad because I'd rather order it at the little bookshop on Windsor Street (I don't even know what it's called, but I like the way it smells and I like the people that work there). Unfortunately, I've been putting it off for too long, and I figured Waterstones might get hold of the book earlier.

There was one book that caught my eye specifically: We need to talk about Kevin. It displayed a picture of a mischievous looking schoolboy and I could almost hear his teacher pronouncing the title. Despite the background music I picked up the book and read what it said on the back. When he's aged fifteen, Kevin runs into his school with a gun and kills several of his classmates and teachers. The book is a collection of letters in which his mum reflects on the way she brought him up.

Fair enough, the book had my attention. But the cheerful voices of the Abba Teens made it virtually impossible for me to understand the first page. With all the distraction it took me a lot of time to figure out what it said, but what's worse, I couldn't get the tone right. The atmosphere, the words didn't get through to me because I was feeling bloody Dancing Queen.

Their loss, I thought, and put the book back. They shouldn't have turned on that bleeding radio! This is not a supermarket and this is not the way to go about selling books. Their loss, not mine.

But that was not particularly true. Even though I wouldn't really have had the money to spend on another book, nor the time to read it, it still bothers me that Waterstones interfered with my flirt.

Now I realise why I prefer the small shop on Windsor Street. No chance of being disturbed by anything when shopping for books there.

Chicklitter

Dear Andrada,

If there's one domestic device I despise, it's the vacuum cleaner. The way it forces me to arch my back, the horrid howl and the greed with which it collects lost jewellery – I try to avoid it at any occasion. But today I had to, for the first time since I've moved to Britain. Even twice, because all my fingers seemed to have turned to thumbs overnight.
“A well-organised life is a great achievement,” my mother used to say. I do believe her, though I'm not the type of woman that likes to spend her time on housekeeping. I just can't get my head around the futility of cleaning. It always seems like such a waste of time, effort and talent to wipe bread crumbs from the kitchen sink, when you know they'll be back within a couple of hours: I could be reading and writing!
This morning I dropped my Elvis-glass in the kitchen. From amidst the splinters, his young face stared at me and I could swear he suddenly had this melancholic look about him. It was a twopence tumbler, really, but I loved it for its cheapability and when I moved to Britain I shipped it with the greatest care. Now this cheesy symbol of my student's life lay shattered in my new kitchen. I cried a little. But that was not enough to lull the ghost of an aborted symbol. As soon as I put the hated vacuum cleaner – filled with Elvis-splinters – back in the corner, my cupboard shook until a plate slipped out.
Until that moment I had not realised that the shattered glass was just as figurative as it had been before I dropped it. I had left my home country, my friends and family. Did I really believe I could hold on to the life-style this glass represented? Oh no! Of course I had left that too behind in Holland. The last traces of my former life just had to make way for something new: something British. But still something cheap, I'm afraid.



This is the sort of event that inspires me to write. While I was doing the necessary bit of cleaning, tatters of thought shaped themselves into a story. Narratives always present themselves when I'm not in the opportunity to jot them down (cleaning, jogging, falling asleep, socializing). Inspiration is quite similar to star-gazing, really: most stars you can only see from the corner of your eye. (We've got several sorts of receptor cells. The centre of the retina is dominated by cones, the ones that enable us to see colours. The rods only tell us whether there is light or not, and their threshold for passing this information to the brain happens to be a lot lower than the threshold for the cones. Therefore, the sky seems much starrier when we're not focussing on it.) The best stories I've written are recycled thoughts, processed elements of my daily life. As personal as autobiography, but without the boring bits. For a good piece of fiction, self-revelation is required. In fact, collecting splinters from a broken glass inspired me to write the tale of the bold bachelorette, the opening scene of my latest novel, Chicklitter.

Even though she was in great debt because of the leaded light she smashed, the bold bachelorette still sang along with Edith Piaf and meant every word of it.
“Non, je ne regrette rien, rien de rien!” Her voice was clear and great of volume, and made her bosom rise with every phrase. Art is alive, she thought, and it slowly dies if we don't feed it with admiration. It's a shame to save my voice for St. Matthew's Passion. What use is it to know I can sing, when nobody ever enjoys it? And how can we say a picture is beautiful, when it is locked away in a vault? Art should be a part of our daily life and each work should receive its deserved adoration, just like we deserve dinner every day.
And she did adore the leaded light, indeed, that night - before she threw a vodka bottle through it.

You may have noticed that I'm fond of poetic figures of speech. Rhythm is one of these; I read my writings aloud until it sounds perfect. Of course I'm not alone in that; I don't know if you do it too, but if you don't, I can only advise you to give it a try.
Anyhow, I hope my preference for alliteration and assonance is more characteristic for my work. When I manage to introduce some rhyme to a text, I feel like the chunk of communication turns into proper literature. And I like to believe not every author aims for this. (Which is why in Chicklitter I refer to my main character as the bold bachelorette rather than actually naming her.) Another poetic feature of my work is the unusually large amount of awkward imagery. I can hardly ever stop myself from thinking up mad metaphors, and though I strike out most of them to make my text readable, I'm afraid they're still quite prominent. For example, when the bold bachelorette has broken into a church to get drunk with her under age lover, she climbs the pulpit and starts speaking in a preachy tone:

“Don't you just love the Catholics? Yes, they are religious pigs, like the Muslims and the Jews and all the rest of them, but at least they've got good taste. Just look at this woodwork, it's carved so elegantly! Every functional bit is covered in decorations: every inch of it just breathes beauty! And awe... Behold that lovely lovely leaded light! The colours of the stained glass are so... amazing! Look at that cloak Maria's wearing: with the street lights behind it, it gleams like Negro skin in a bright green spotlight!”


The bold bachelorette is far from perfect: she's a burglar and a blasphemer, a racist and a pederast and like I announced in the first sentence, she's will break the beloved leading light. This too marks my work. I emphasize all flaws in my main character, without estranging the reader from her. When eventually the main character does show one good quality, it will be so much more important, thanks to the contrast. The heroine of Chicklitter eventually takes full accountability for the damage she did:

“Alas, I should have known better,” the bold bachelorette moaned to the police officer. “I should never have started dating someone five years younger than me. I should have picked someone my own age, who would have taken me to a club, like ordinary people. But instead I had to break into a church and get pissed in both the British and the American sense, which is not a good cocktail, if you know what I mean.”


And this brings me to the last aspect of my voice as an author, dear Andrada, an aspect that actually counts for you as much as it does for me. In the last line of the novel I emphasize the difference between the meaning of one word (pissed) in British and in American. This is the result of my external approach of the English language. Because English is not our primary language, we have to go looking for words all the time, we're in the constant habit of paying extra attention to our word choice, whereas natives can go lazy and pick the first word that comes to mind automatically. For example, If I call the shattered glass splinters instead of pieces, and if I say someone looks forlorn rather than miserable, that's because these words have their origin in Dutch, my mother tongue. I deliberately choose these words over others because they are closer to me. But I do not wish to erase the distance: I treasure it! Writing in a second language stimulates our awareness, sensitivity and creativity – which shows in our texts through the well-considered choice of words.

To recap: my stories are based on my own experiences – and they usually present themselves when it's least convenient. For turning my prose into literature I rely on poetic figures of speech, such as rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and assonance. My metaphors are often disturbing, as are my main characters. I've got a taste for anti-heroes, though nobody's completely imperfect (twisted as it may sound, to excel in taboos is still a form of excellence). And last but not least, I think the fact that English is not my mother tongue will always show in my writing.

Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts on your voice as a writer. Do you think, for example, that you've got a different voice in Romanian than in English?

Best wishes,

Deborah

Mantrapped

Dear Arian,

You may have noticed that this post carries the same title as the book by Fay Weldon that I've been reading last week. If you haven't, this entry might be a disappointment (or a relief?), for it will not deal with men trapping me. Instead, it's a tiny review.

At first, I couldn't find the book at Border's, because it wasn't in the fiction department, but on a shelf with autobiographies. One can read it as a self-help-book in creative writing too, which is what I did at first. But perhaps Fay's own view on what she's doing is even more appropriate: she's writing in a new genre: the reality novel. “Reality TV is real life lived out in a fictional context (the House): the reality novel threads the life through the fiction. Have my fiction, have me.” (p. 20)
In short, it's a pastiche of fiction, autobiography and some advice on how to write. That's a dreadful description, though. It doesn't sound coherent at all, while the book actually is one clear, consistent piece of writing. What is it, then, that binds all these different aspects so firmly together? I think the uniformity of this book springs from one central theme: identity.

Characters keep creeping into her story. She can't deny them access, it seems, even though she realizes that it tends to get confusing when she introduces too many of them at the same time. “Characters are meant to be introduced slowly, one by one, so readers can get used to them. You are meant to be kind to your readers, not defy them.”(p. 86) To help out her readers she recaps once in a while and prints their names in bold. However, when she tries to pin her characters down like this, they defy the authority of the GSWITS (the Great Script Writer In The Sky, p. 78). Some of them swap souls, while it's not even clear what a soul is. Others change their names or are married to someone without having a common language to communicate. And what exactly is the relationship between actual husbands and children, and the ones we meet in the autobiographical patches? The way I see it, the core of the book is Fay wondering: “who am I?”
Apparently, that's what readers demand these days. “Self-revelation is required. Too often readers cry out for bread and are given stones: writers fail them, fob them off with thrillers, good guys on the political left, the bad guys on the right. Or chick lit, first-person tales in the present tense leavened by wisecracks, feeble emotions if nifty enough plots.” (p. 18)

Without knowing it, Fay puts her finger on the spot when it comes to my attempt to write fiction in English. I've been warned a thousand times (at least!) that I will not be able to master the English language sufficiently in order to say exactly what I mean. “You will never understand proverbs and the British cultural aspects that natives have picked up during their childhood,” people keep telling me. But if they don't believe in me (they think I'm not smart enough!) I don't see any reason why I should believe them. Sure, it's a challenge, but I'm confident that I can manage – so I give them the cold shoulder.
But Fay draws my attention to something else, something deeper. As an author, I can communicate directly with innumerable readers. But why should they spend their valuable time on me and not on any random writer? What have I got to offer them, that nobody else can furnish them with? Nothing but my humble self. If I'm lucky, they'll want a piece of me. And perhaps Oudemans was right, when he broached that this unique intricacy, preceded and shaped by my mother tongue, can only be expressed properly in the language it springs from.

Dubiously yours,

Deborah