Both Eyes Book Blog

With apologies to Sir Mix-a-Lot:

[Intro]

Oh, my, god.  Becky, look at her book.

It is so big.  She looks like,

One of those writers’ girlfriends.

But, you know, who understands those writers?

They only talk to her, because,

She looks like a dang librarian, ‘kay?

I mean, that book, is just so big.

I can’t believe it’s just so thick, it’s like,

A tome, I mean – whoa.  Look!

She’s got a stack!

I like big books and I cannot lie

You other bloggers can’t deny

I’ve got my books stacked up in an itty bitty space

And one in front of my face

I read Proust, I don’t think it’s so tough

You might notice I can’t get enough

At the fat books I’m staring

I’m hooked on the book comparing

O Author, I want your signature –

Autographed picture

My dilemma is thorny

A big book has…

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Kangaroo Notebook

So, I’ve only just started this book by Kobo Abe but I’m having a similar feeling of physical nausea and a need to shower/scour out my brain with a scrubbing brush as I had when I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Beckett’s Happy Days…I’ll update this if/when I finish. It’s pretty amazing how some ideas can be quite so invasive – worth a read I’d say. Although, not at night, it is like a protracted nightmare, the same flawed and inevitable logic and the suppressed horror that goes with it.

Anil’s Ghost

Michael Ondaatje is one of my favourite writers and I couldn’t wait to read this one. I think his In the Skin of a Lion is wonderful and a perfect novel – revising it for my exams was just fun.

In the Skin of a Lion deals with some serious and challenging subjects, but Anil’s Ghost is several steps beyond. As an exploration of the effects of prolonged civil war this book just about manages not to take sides in a conflict that has been dogged by accusations of partisanship in reporting and commentary.

Although the conflict in Sri Lanka has now, supposedly, ended, the issues this book raises about the personal experiences of war, where to trust anyone or anything is likely to be a death sentence of some kind, and even supposedly ‘objective’ external observers are at risk, are relevant in any conflict, especially those of the modern world that so often involve state reaction to internal groups rather than inter-state war.

This is a book that will stay with me a long time. The reader becomes immured to the everyday violence of the life described much as the characters seem to have become, if not indifferent, at least accustomed to what they see around them. This may be because Anil is a forensic anthropologist – for her the bodies and relics she deals with are something of history and the past and she is a detached, yet fascinated, explorer piecing together what she can of their experience of life. What she finds in Sri Lanka, though, is a source that tells her more about the experience of death and it is death that haunts this book. Death hovers and adds threat to every scene. Even the flashbacks, something Ondaatje often uses as a device, are coloured by this sense of mindless menace.

The reader is left feeling bruised and saddened and almost desperate. This is not an uplifting book, but it is a powerful one. Conflict and violence here is dreamlike and arbitrary – like death itself it is random and callous. Anil’s journey is never really her own, and its consequences are not what she aims for. She is, like many of Ondaatje’s characters, an outsider yet not an outsider, stuck in the ambiguous void of the diaspora. Her efforts, like all ‘outside’ attempts to intervene in Sri Lanka, set little success against great cost to the individuals involved.

Hello world!

I shall start my new blog with a positive note.

I FINALLY read Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman this weekend – it was brilliant, so witty and right, so depressingly right.  I was actually laughing out loud at points, which I find doesn’t happen with many books.  So, so welcome to find an intelligent, sensible and hilarious feminist voice out there and reaching so many many women.  I shall lend (sorry Moran!) my copy to as many friends as I can to spread the word.

There were a few slightly sticky bits – such as her claim that motherhood made her a woman being swiftly followed by a chapter about how we didn’t need to procreate to be women, and that maybe we were better off (and it was almost our duty) not sprogging, as then we could spend more time trying to find what it is women are, and what we want to be.

Still, in spite of this I thought overall it was well written, fun (SO important that it should be, feminism’s lost years need to end now) and while I’ve met and even been supervised by the Goddess Greer now I want to meet and heroine worship Moran.

(would she like that? Is it like ‘actor’ v ‘actress’, should we all just be ‘hero’ as we’re all just ‘human’?)

I was merely a feminist before, now I will strive to be a STRIDENT feminist and will have even less time for bullshit than I did before (and that wasn’t much).