Blog Archives

Mapping the psyche of a culture

30/9/2015

With three high-profile husbands and two serious relationships with female colleagues, the life of the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, seems to have been as original as her research endeavours. While criticised as both a woman in a man’s world and a populariser of social science, as well as her findings on the sexual freedoms of Samoan society being subject to challenge, she remains – according to my totally unscientific survey of one – the best-known anthropologist of all time. In Euphoria, Lily King brings her vividly to life in this fictionalised account of a woman with a very similar history to Mead’s during a period of fieldwork along New Guinea’s Sepik river in 1933.

Nell and her husband Fen – malarial, injured and dejected after five months with the dreadful Mumbanyo tribe, she in particular despairing at their neglect and mistreatment of babies – are about to return to Australia when Bankson, another anthropologist based on Mead’s third husband, Gregory Bateson, familiar to me through the double-blind theory, persuades them to reconsider.

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Meeting the other: The Looking-Glass Sisters and White Hunger from Peirine Press

28/9/2015

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Two middle-aged sisters live together on the edge of the moors in a remote part of northern Norway. They experience little of life beyond their house although the elder, Ragna, occasionally ventures into the village for provisions. The younger sister and (I think) unnamed chronicler of their lonely existence has been disabled since childhood, dragging her withered legs around on crutches, which function as both mobility aid and weapon. Their mutual resentment at their dependence on each other forges a bond of hatred more powerful than love that binds them to the house they have occupied their entire lives (p 81-82):

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Marketing declarations

24/9/2015

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Mired in marketing my novel, less of a shrinking violet perhaps, but still paddling in the shallows, I was pleased when the latest post from the Carrot Ranch appeared in my inbox this morning declaring that Charli Mills also has marketing in mind. “Marketing takes time,” she says. “You’re too damn right,” says I. But when the alternative is readers failing to find my novel, I accept I have little choice. Because when they find it, and let me know they’ve not only read it but loved it, I still get a buzz.

Today’s highlights have been a tweet from a reader who found my novel via a tweet of this photo by Rebecca Root and a yes from one of the quirkiest independent bookshops around these parts in response to my email nudging them to stock my book. Small gains, but they matter. As Charli says, “Being a marketer is like being a watchmaker. The gears do work, but you have to get it all aligned one piece at a time.” At the moment, I don’t even know what the pieces are, but I’m doing what I can to at least give them a chance of lining up.

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Birth control: Frog by Mo Yan (translated by Howard Goldblatt)

23/9/2015

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Throughout history, and across cultures, we encounter myriad competing narratives about women’s fertility and the attempts to control it: on the one hand, myths and fairy tales telling of miracle births (for example, in The Snow Child) and the agonies of unwanted pregnancies on the other. In China’s controversial one-child policy, parental ambitions are set against government responsibility for the welfare of the population, making this a subject ripe for fiction, and perhaps with particular fascination for readers in the more individualistic West. Following years of famine, there’s a certain logic to the attempt to curtail population growth, yet it brings misery, confusion and untimely death through enforced late abortions to the peasantry. Gugu, an obstetrician previously lauded for her skills in bringing healthy babies into the world, is now vilified as the instrument of governmental edict (p142-4):

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Reflections on literary love

21/9/2015

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When I posted my reflections from my Sunday walk last week, I failed to do justice to the writerly fruitfulness of that particular walk. Not only did I mull over getting lost, consistent with that week’s flash fiction prompt, I also began to formulate some ideas for a short story. Call me psychic – although the theme was more likely to have come from my recent post on Readers Writers Journal about the seduction of romance – but this story with a rare (for me) examination of love was the exact fit for Charli’s latest prompt, apart from being at least three times longer than the 99-word limit. But, tight for time, I’ve decided to use the opening as my contribution to this week’s compilation:

You saved me a seat in the lecture hall, knowing my bus was always late. You cheered louder than anyone when I got the prize for the highest marks in our year. You persuaded the corner shop to stock gluten-free croissants, so you could serve me breakfast in bed. You held me tight when the memories overwhelmed me, despite knowing no amount of holding could undo the past. You wore top hat and tails at our wedding, though more at home in jumpers and jeans. You did it all with perfect grace. You did it gladly, unthinkingly, for me.

The story I want to write in full is a bit darker, but the essence of being loved remains.

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Othering India? Land Where I Flee by Prajwal Parajuly

18/9/2015

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In Gangtok in the remote state of Sikkim, Chitralekha, Nepali-speaking Indian clothing factory owner with the ear of the local politicians, awaits her eighty-fourth birthday. Reluctantly, her thirty-something grandchildren travel from across the world to join her: Agastaya from New York; Manasa from London; and Bhagwati from Boulder, Colorado. Each arrives without their significant other: Agastaya because he can’t tell his family he’s gay; Manasa – married by arrangement into a high-caste Nepali family whose Oxford degree is useless now she stays at home nursing her father-in-law – because she is grateful for a break; Bhagwati because her low-caste Bhutanese husband and two Americanised sons would be unwelcome in the family home. So far, so clichéd, but a dysfunctional family, especially one in an exotic culture, can be entertaining in its way, even if, like in a stale sitcom, the characters are obliged to continually repeat their defining grievances, just in case the audience hasn’t got it.

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Lost: the pleasures and terrors

15/9/2015

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Out walking at the weekend, the latest post from Charli Mills was preying on my mind. She’s writing about feeling lost, and challenging us to write a 99-word story on the subject. I can do that, I think. Despite being trained in navigation, I often get lost out on the hills. But there’s another kind of lost that’s more than geographical; as a psychologist and writer, I’m interested in lost as a state of mind.

I set out on Sunday in territory less familiar than my usual stomping ground, only intermittently checking my progress against the map. Avoiding a crowd of noisy cattle, I plunged through shoulder-high bracken, soaking my trousers with the residue of the previous day’s rain. I headed for a path I thought I recognised only to realise, ten minutes later, the rest of the topography didn’t fit. But I pressed on, seesawing between anxiety and excitement. I love discovering new corners of the landscape, finding enormous satisfaction in the moment when the strange intersects with the known. But there’s an edge of concern that I’ll delve too far into unknown territory, that I won’t make it back to base in time.

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My Father and Other Liars Blog Tour: Geoff LePard on writing about fictional embryo research

14/9/2015

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As one of those who nagged Geoff LePard to give his second novel a proper launch, I’m delighted to be a calling-off point on his blog tour. By a strange quirk of fate, I find myself opening proceedings on the very day I’m over on Terry Tyler’s Zodiac Files explaining how I lack the leadership qualities said to typify a Leo. Whatever the ironies of that, I’m honoured to be able to return the favour of when Geoff welcomed me to his blog last month with an introduction that made me laugh. I can’t match Geoff’s talent for comedy, but I can give another side to the story of our original meeting at an Arvon course six years ago.

Although the course was on second drafts, he and I were in the minority in having actually completed our first. Lugging my box-file of assorted papers down to the classroom/diningroom on the first morning, I found Geoff thumbing through a spiral-bound A5 book, I gormlessly asked if that was his novel, trying to keep the envy out of my voice. One of them, he quipped. I’m not sure how I coped with the discovery that he had four first drafts completed at that point, but I did get to read each of them in those early stages, so it’s wonderful to witness their gradual emergence into the world as bone fide books.

Given my own interest in fictional research, I was curious to learn more about Geoff’s experience of writing a thriller about the controversial issue of embryo research. I hope you enjoy his account as much as I do.

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Making sense of suicide: can fiction help?

9/9/2015

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As I mentioned on my recent post on Random Musings, I sometimes coordinate my blog posts with one of the international commemorative days dotted through the calendar. But, with a blog about reading and writing, seasoned with psychology, I do wonder about the legitimacy of made-up stories in amongst the true accounts of heroic attempts to tackle the issue of the day. Yet I’m convinced fiction has its place. By providing a safe space in which we can explore attitudes and motivations from which we might shy away in real life, fiction can help make sense of potentially overwhelming aspects of the human condition. So, for my first post for World Suicide Prevention Day, I’m exploring the portrayal of suicide in fiction. But if you’re looking for the facts and figures on suicide, or more direct strategies of prevention, click on the image for more information. While you’ll find a long list of fictional suicides on Wikipedia, I’m limiting myself to novels I’ve reviewed.

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The loss of the self: An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

7/9/2015

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On holiday in Port au Prince, Mireille Duval Jameson is taken at gunpoint from outside her parents’ luxury villa in front of her husband, Michael, and baby son. Held captive, with little food or water, in a suffocating room she calls her cell, by a gang of thugs headed by The Commander, she waits for her father to pay the ransom that will set her free. But Sebastien is not the kind of man to give in to terrorists. Having grown up in Haiti’s blistering poverty himself, although bringing up his family in the USA, he’s not prepared to hand over his hard-earned dollars to men unwilling to work for a living. Besides, rewarding kidnappers increases the risk that they’ll repeat their behaviour, upping the stakes each time. So, while Miri’s husband frantically phones his lawyer back home to see how far he can go towards raising the million-dollar ransom, her father remains calm, calling in a professional negotiator to bargain down his daughter’s price. But, like Kotler in The Betrayers, his principled stance has dreadful consequences for his child, as The Commander and his men inflict their rage on Miri’s body through repeated brutal acts of rape.

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The promised land: The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

5/9/2015

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Acclaimed Israeli politician, Baruch Kotler has betrayed his wife and children in (a seemingly chaste) affair with a young woman. Never one to compromise, when he is threatened with exposure if he continues his stand against the government’s decision to forcibly withdraw Jewish settlers from the occupied territories, he flees the country and ensuing scandal along with his lover, Leora. Russian by birth, Kotler’s nostalgia for an idyllic childhood holiday, takes them to the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. Against all odds, they pitch up at the home of Chiam Tankilevich, Kotler’s former friend who betrayed him to the KGB and thirteen years in the gulag forty years before.

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Capitalism can damage your health: The Zoo by Jamie Mollart

3/9/2015

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High-powered advertising executive, James Marlowe, is delighted when he wins the brief to create a new campaign for an international bank. But his involvement in the corporate world comes at a heavy cost, as he becomes increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol in a vain attempt to keep the unethical nature of this endeavour out of mind. This distances him from his beloved wife and son and, eventually, from himself, as a psychotic breakdown lands him in a psychiatric hospital, terrified by a collection of plastic and metal animals and figurines which he calls The Zoo. It’s there that the reader first meets him, and there that we sit alongside him as he gradually pieces together the sequence of events that have brought him to the lowest point of his life.

The perspective on corruption is chilling, to quote one of the minor characters, Lou, the moral voice of the novel (p234-5):

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An enclosure act: The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader

1/9/2015

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Sarah is seventeen in 1255 when she chooses to be enclosed in a cell, seven paces by nine, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing her mother and her younger sister in childbirth, and the unwelcome attentions of the lord of the manor, she renounces the world and all its dangers and disappointments to a living death dedicated to God. With guidance from The Rule, a book copied without flourishes by her reluctant confessor, Father Ranaulf, she’s also responsible for the moral welfare of her two servant women and, indirectly through her prayers, the well-being of the village, proud to have an anchoress in their midst, even if they cannot see her.

It takes great skill to compose an engaging narrative about a woman who never leaves her room, but Sarah is an intriguing character. We wonder about her motivation for being there, the impact of her incarceration on her body and mind and, when we discover along with her that one of the previous inhabitants of her cell left in disgrace, whether she will stay. And, much as Sarah would prefer to renounce the world, she cannot be completely isolated, as she hears the church services through a slit in the adjoining wall and the rhythms of village life on the other side, and as women from the village come to solicit her prayers.

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Mapping the psyche of a culture

Meeting the other: The Looking-Glass Sisters and White Hunger from Peirine Press

Marketing declarations

Birth control: Frog by Mo Yan (translated by Howard Goldblatt)

Reflections on literary love

Othering India? Land Where I Flee by Prajwal Parajuly

Lost: the pleasures and terrors

My Father and Other Liars Blog Tour: Geoff LePard on writing about fictional embryo research

Making sense of suicide: can fiction help?

The loss of the self: An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

The promised land: The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

Capitalism can damage your health: The Zoo by Jamie Mollart

An enclosure act: The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader

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