16, NG12, F10, E16

Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

Die Synopsis des Buches war schon so vielversprechend, dass ich nicht widerstehen konnte und mir das Buch auf den Paperwhite lud, als ich fürs erste genug von Krimis und Kurzgeschichten hatte. Und dann enttäuschte es nicht, sondern erwies sich als so spannend und nahezu unwiderstehlich - als ob es mich förmlich einsaugte - dass ich es kaum aus der Hand legen mochte und in zwei Tagen durchhatte. Schon die Idee ist einfach so ansprechend, drei völlig unterschiedliche Kinder eines Samenspenders, die zueinander und damit auch zu sich selbst finden und es auch schaffen, ihren biologischen Vater noch kennenzulernen bevor es zu spät ist. Jede einzelne der Geschichten wäre für sich schon ein Buch wert.

He had not chewed anything for days. He had not held a tea cup or picked up a paper for days. Death was playing a childisch game, tip-toeing around mischievously: 'Here I am! Oh, no, only joking, I'm over here... no, over here!' Every time she asked a nurse, 'How long? How long do you think?' she would be met with the same response. It could be anytime. Death did not just hit you with a stick and then walk away and leave you to die. Death fiddled about with you first. Death forced you head first into the toilet bowl of your demise and then yanked you back by the collar. Death was not as simple as Maggie had imagined.
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There she lay, her fists curled inwards towards her ears, a living, breathing amalgamation of a hundred thousand different people, all of whom had at some point in their lives had a night of passion with somebody else and made another one, outwards and onwards in ever-increasing circles, an unstoppable force of humanity extrapolating itself across millennia. Until here, in a small cottage in a Bury St. Edmunds backwater, it was all distilled down into one perfect, creamy pearly - Matilda.
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The more ill he becomes, the less he finds himself alone. Possibly because he sleeps for much longer but also because people do not like to leave the dying in case there is no one there to see them go. Like waiting for a bus, the more time you invest in awaiting the outcome the harder it is to walk away.
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(Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us, 2011

4, NG3, M2, E4

Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat

Während der Lektüre fragte ich mich immer wieder, wie lange Julian Barnes die Idee für dieses Buch schon mit sich herumgetragen hat und wieviel Recherche, Zeit und Liebesmüh er investiert hat. Vieles muss ihm schon bei seinen Studien von Flaubert vertraut gewesen sein. Und immer wieder hatte ich das Gefühl einen langen Vortrag über die Belle Epoque, oder vielleicht einen ausgedehnten Essay zu lesen, in dem er immer wieder von Namen zu Namen springt, bedeutende Ereignisse in einen Zusammenhang bringt und mitunter rasante Bögen schlägt, so dass letztendlich ein sehr informativer und oft unterhaltsamer Überblick entsteht, mit Dr. Pozzi, der indirekten Titelfigur und Schlüsselperson als Dreh- und Angelpunkt. Mir war vor dem Buch garnicht klar, wie wenig ich selbst über die Personen, die mir schon ein Begriff waren - wie z.B. Oskar Wilde - eigentlich wußte. Allein dafür lohnte sich das Buch schon. Vielleicht wäre die gebundene Ausgabe mit all den Bildern in Farbe besser gewesen, aber das lässt sich ja immer noch nachholen.

Flaubert was always sternly against the sentimental, meliorist view of literature: the notion that an uplifting storoy with a happy ending (though weepie-happy would do just as well) might inspire readers to behave better and improve their lot. But 'knowing humanity' and describing it accurately is an essentially corrective action. Things are not like that, you are saying, things are like this. People operate like this; society runs like this; religion (and sentimental literature) affect human sensibilities like this; what you have read in other novels is wrong. And this corrective function - oh, and by the way, love and sex and death aren't like that either - has an effect, the effect of truth, of restored vision. Though what people - readers - choose to do with this truth is not up to Flaubert. Some close the book in their hands, and simultaneously close their minds; others leave it open, and are filled with a form of grave reverie.
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Any practising novelist will be familiar with the jocular-yet-serious response when someone newly met discovers what you do. 'I'd better watch what I say, then, hadn't I?'; or, sometimes, 'I've got a great story for you.' You (well, I) will tend to answer, 'It doesn't work like that', because it doesn't. There is nothing more useless than someone else's already highly worked-up anecdote - 'varnished for eternity', as Lucien Daudet said of Montesquiou; nor does a novelist 'study' a real-life person with any deliberate intent to copy and paste them into a novel. The whole process is usually much more passive, sponge-like and haphazard than that. The reader's motive - wanting to understand the process of literary creation - is of course legitimate, but also ultimately futile, since even the most self-conscious novelist often cannot properly explain what it is he or she does, and how it comes about.

(Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat, 2019)

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Pauline J. Alama, The Eye of Night

Ich stieß auf dieses Juwel von einem Fantasyepos, als ich ganz gezielt nach Büchern von Autorinnen suchte, deren Kurzgeschichten mir in Sword & Sorceress gefallen hatten. Insofern ist Alama keine 'neue' Autorin für mich, auch wenn ich sie wohl in der Liste als neu einstufen werde. Dieses Buch, unerwartet lang und ausschweifend, begeisterte mich immer mehr, je weiter ich damit kam. Vor allem die handfeste und ausgefeilte Mythologie mit den vier Göttern des Rades und die vielen philophischen Passagen, die dieser faszinierenden Quest erst das nötige Gewicht verliehen, überzeugten mich. Jetzt wünschte ich, es gäbe noch mehr längere Werke von Alama, und wer weiß, vielleicht kommt ja noch etwas. Bis dahin muss ich mich mit dem wiederlesen der Kurzgeschichten begnügen.

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".. Night is falling; nothing worse," she declared, her voice level but tense with feeling. "Night has a bad name on the earth; we fear the dark as children, and scarcely put away that fear when we come of age. But what would become of the world without night?" Hwyn demanded of me.
"No rest for the weary laborer," I said, "and no cool nights to relieve the summer's heat."
"Very true," she said, "yet there is more: no private time for wife and husband, no sheltering darkness for lovers. And graver: every flowering plant and seed-bearing tree on the earth times its seasons of flower and fruit by the changing cycle of night and day. Without night there can be no flowers, no fruits, no grains. Picture the earth barren, hungry, and hot under an endless, weary day."
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The ghosts, it seemed, only haunted those who belonged to them.
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The only eyes that would meet mine were the painted ones on icons of the Upside-Down God. In this festival time, his image was everywhere: falling, falling, never to quite hit bottom. He seemed a strangely hapless figure. Drawn alone, he was usually hanging by the foot from a tree branch like a tortured prisoner, but smiling as though unaware of his plight. In the Divine Wheel with the other three Great Ones, he sometimes still appeared with a rope on one ankle as though bound to the Wheel and its turning - though it was said that he himself, as the Turning God, started the Wheel's motion and with it time, birth and death. In other images he simply fell unrestrained, unprotected, helpless, plunging toward a doom always inevitable but never realized.
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"It's all right," I said. "I was falling toward you. I've been falling toward you all my life, like the Upside-Down God to the Hidden Goddess." Suddenly the rightness of it struck me, a blow that nearly unbalanced me. "Sky-Raven's Bones!" I swore like Hwyn. "At the risk of sounding blasphemous - what are we, you and I?"
"We are human creatures," said Mirror of St. Fiern, "and in us, the gods are born anew."

(Pualine J. Alama, The Eye of Night, 2002)
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**Nächstes Jahr werde ich E-Bücher entweder garnicht oder nur noch mit einem "E" kennzeichnen. Oder nur noch die gedruckten Bücher vermerken. Das macht vermutlich mehr Sinn.

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Iain Banks, A Song of Stone

Ich brauchte ein bißchen länger für das Buch, weil mir über die Feiertage einfach die Zeit fehlte und darüber hinaus der größtenteils der zweiten Person gehaltene Erzählstil mehr Aufmerksamkeit erforderte. Und ich konnte einfach das Gefühl es schon einmal gelesen zu haben nicht abschütteln, obwohl es keine Passage gab, die mir definitiv vertraut war. Aber obwohl oft sehr bedrückend ist es ein faszinierendes Buch, wie alles von Banks.

I am cells; no more, I think. This present assemblage - bones, flesh and blood - is more complicated than most such gatherings to be found on the world's rude surface, and my quorum of sense-holding plasm may be greater than other animals can muster, but the principle's the same, and all our extra wisdom does is let us know the truth of our own insignificance more fully. My body, my whole dazed being, seems like little more than a pile of autumn leaves, blown and bunched by a swirling wind and trapped, coralled by a chance of ancillary geography into a localised drift. Of what greater consequence am I than that temporary heap of leaves, that collection of cells, collectively dead or dying? How much more do any of us signify?
Yet still we do ascribe a greater pain and joy and weight of import to ourselves than to any mere clump of matter, and feel it too. We seduce ourselves with our own images, perhaps. The leaf dryly tumbling along the road is not really like a refugee.

(Iain Banks, A Song of Stone, 1997)

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Lisa Jewell, The House we grew up in

Obwohl nicht so bedrückend wie 'And then she was gone' oder zu spannend wie 'I found You' gingen mir einige Stellen bei diesem Band doch sehr nah. Ganz abgesehen davon, dass es wieder eine sehr bewegende Familiengeschichte ist, bietet sie auch ganz ungewöhnliche Einblicke in das Seelenleben eines Hoarders oder Messies, Aspekte, die ich noch garnicht so betrachtet hatte und irgendwie auch nachvollziehen konnte.

You know, why wait for a certain day if you want to buy flowers now? Unimaginative really, isn't it, buying overpriced roses on the same day as everybody else. You know, you see a woman walking home with a bouquet of flowers, you think, Wow, someone really loves her! You see the same woman with the ame bouquet on Valentine's and you just get the feeling that someone was going through the motions.
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You know how you have a memory of something, and it's flat, you know, like a piece of paper. It's just a fact that you can recall. A moment. And then other times that memory extrapolates itself into something three-dimensional with smells and textures and colour? And you think to yourself; where was that hiding all this time? Do you ever get that, Jim? Well, as you know, that's why I keep so many things, because of that innate energy that things carry, that shadow of a memory that each thing casts.
...and then I realised that a spirit is just another word for a memory, isn't it? The stronger the memory the stronger the spirit. Because as much as I'd love to believe that the spirit lives on as a thing separate to humanity, I know that's not true. It's in our minds, in our hearts, that a person's spirit lives on.

(Lisa Jewell, The House we grew up in, 2013)

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Tanith Lee, The Gods are Thirsty

Unglaublich aber wahr, nach fast zwei Monaten ist der Wälzer endlich geschafft. Dass es nicht noch länger dauerte, war den letzten 60 Seiten, bzw. dem 12. und 13. Teil zu verdanken, von denen ich mich nicht losreißen konnte, so bitter und herzzerreißend sie sich auch lasen. Ach, wenn es diesen Wälzer doch nur als E-Book gäbe, dann hätte ich ihn viel öfter und schneller durchlesen können, als immer wieder an freien Tagen und freien halben Stunden am Stück. Aber dafür ist das Cover wunderschön und die Schriftgröße gut geeignet. Ich glaube nicht, dass ich mich von dem Stück je wieder werde trennen können, diesem Ausnahmewerk, dass so anders ist als die vielen anderen Büchern von Tanith Lee und doch so unzweifelhaft ihres. Ich hab es schon so oft bei so vielen Autoren beobachtet, dass es irgendwann ein Buch von ihnen gibt, dass aus der Reihe tanzt, ganz anders ist als was sie sonst schreiben, und doch oder gerade deshalb wie mit ihrem Herzblut geschrieben. Ich wollte ein Buch über die französische Revolution lesen, dass keine trockene Biografie war, keine Aufzählung von Fakten und Namen, und dieser Roman erfüllte meine Ansprüche weitgehend, wenn er auch in der zweiten Hälfte oft etwas verwirrend und gedrängt schien. Und der dreizehnte Teil, das letzte Zehntel, ist einfach meisterhaft geschrieben.
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There is a new goddess in Paris. She is, in her way, impressive, tall and slender, her silhouette against the sky. When the coverings are on her, she is a high-shouldered woman, curiously missing a head. When the cloak comes off, her naked frame holds air, and in her belly is a round navel of emptiness. You must climb upward to reach her, and then you must lie down, as it's always well to do with any deity, on your face. She puts her wooden hands about your throat. And then: the cold steel kiss.
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But one doesn't laugh at funerals. It gets one a bad name.
Very different, though, on the road to the scaffold.
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The flash of light comes, as it always does. And then the flash of red.
Adieu, Madame la Reine Blanche. Whatever your wickedness or error, you've paid for it. The blade dropped to your neck, a single shining tear. Can you doubt history will weep for you? And young girls press dried flowers between the pages which will tell them how you lived, and how you died.
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It comes to me - too late, naturally, and there is a rationale, too, in that lateness - that any man who tries to change the world, unless he is God or all the gods together, can manage much - but much of that much will be a nightmare and worse, chaos. Those who attempt the feat, the idealists and dreamers, are too drunk on their ideals and dreams to see the errors in their modus operandi. They end to the neck in blood as we did, all of us. The deity we created devoured its own fathers. (The name Camille derives from the Etruscan. It means Attendant at the Sacrifice. Fortune must have had a hand in that.)
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(Tanith Lee, The Gods must be Thirsty, 1996)

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Lisa Jewell, 31, Dreamstreet

Ja, ich gebe es zu, im Moment bin ich ein bisschen süchtig nach dieser Autorin, und lese ihre Bücher einfach zu schnell. Als dritten Band suchte ich mir ganz bewußt einen aus, dessen Synopsis nicht so viel Dramatik und Nervenkitzel (oder -Tötung in meinem Fall) versprach, sondern eine etwas besinnlichere Charakterstudie in Aussicht stellte. Und bereute die Wahl nicht, auch wenn ich für dieses Buch auch kaum mehr als zwei Tage brauchte. Wie die ganzen gescheiterten Existenzen in dem seltsamen Haus auf einmal gezwungen werden, sich ihren eigenen Weg aus der bequemen Sackgasse, die einst ihre Zuflucht war, zu finden, ist unglaublich faszinierend. Noch so ein 'ruhiger' Band wäre schön, aber große Hoffnungen mache ich mir nicht ...

People didn't need to match to be together. Lean and Amibtabh matched in every way except skin colour, and that one simple factor had been their undoing. Just because Leah was sporty, organized, tidy, fresh, easy-going and gregarious, there was no reason why she shouldn't want to spend time with someone lazy, messy, scruffy, neurotic and antisocial. She'd made it very clear that she found Toby's company enjoyable. It was she, after all, who had instigated their weekend meeting and it was she who had suggested swimming. The onus, therefore, was on Toby to accept her offer. The next move was his.
By sitting in his room thinking of reasons not to pursue his friendship with Leah, he was creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. By assuming that he was unlovable he was ensuring that he would remain unloved. By assuming that he was unwanted he was ensuring that he would remain alone.

(Lisa Jewell, 31, Dreamstreet, 2007)