The memory of water, the power of words

These small white pills are homoeopathic remedies for back-ache. Anyone who follows this blog will know that I'm not a fan of alternative medicines, but this doesn't mean that the various metaphors of homoeopathy aren't as potent as the remedies themselves are ineffective and, in the wrong hands and contexts, criminal. Still, I'm not here to talk about homoeopathy in Africa, or talking to plants, or over-priced oatcakes or any other of Prince Charles's contributions to modern thought. I'm here to direct you towards my review of an intriguing new novel, whose central character is a practising homoeopath, and whose procedures, among other things, explore the metaphorical riches of the ideas behind it. Memory, energy, guilt, repression, love. Powerful stuff, and grippingly told. The novel is called Out of Sight, its author is Isabelle Grey and my review is here.

Secret embroidery

It's been asserted recently - we needn't dwell on by whom - that women's writing can be distinguished from men's after reading a single paragraph. This certainly isn't the case for me, and, as the author of a novel whose first-person narrator is a woman, I hope other readers are equally gender-blind. But there is a case, I think, for suggesting that certain kinds of art are, if not the prerogative, at least the favoured preserve of women, and that seems to me to have to do with the choice of materials. Fabrics, quilts, clothes, media that aren't just humble but pliable, soft to the touch. Oldenburg did his soft sculptures, I know, but they strike me as detumescent rather than enveloping, irremediably male in their anguish about a lost rigidity. Women artists, on the other hand, use softness in a myriad of ways, often as disturbing as the stuff they use is domestic and reassuring. Bourgeois, Messager (pictured), in the UK Lucas and Emin: these woman and others have used the scraps of fabric that surround us, from nurseries and kitchens and wardrobes and turned them into the stuff of dream, and of nightmare. There's a character in Siri Hustvedt's new novel, The Summer without Men, who does something similar. You can read my review of it here.

Hangmen and Cities of Happiness

These are David Mitchell and Enid Blyton. If you'd like to know what links them, click here.

Identity bracelets...

...and the Antipodes. Confused? You needn't be. Just click here.

We do it for the villa in the Bahamas...

...obviously...

Cheat death...

Or not... 

Manners maketh man...

... so where do allotments fit in? Find out here.

I love you past speech

This is Eros, the god of love. If you'd like to know where he hangs out, click here.

Low Moon

This is an image of a low moon. If you'd like to know what it has to do with poetry and ghosts, click here.

Sixty Two

Somebody likes The Scent of Cinnamon very much indeed. Want to know who? Click here.

Dark times, dark tales

Fancy something a bit creepy for the weekend? Need some advice? Click here.

Ouch!

If you want to know what this instrument of torture has to do with Any Human Face, click here.

Transformations

Girls made out of flowers, brothers becoming beasts and breeding, David Beckham an object of blind irrational worship. What is the world coming to? Find out here.

And if you want to see some seriously demented whimsy, google for images of Blodeuwedd...

Never Let Me Go

I've just posted a review of Ishiguro's novel (not the film, which I haven't seen, and probably won't see) over at my other blog - the serious one I save for talk about books... You can find it here. And if you haven't read the book, or seen the film, try not to think too hard about the implications of the picture on this post. I wouldn't want to spoil it for you.

Futile preoccupations...?

A few weeks ago Rob at the Fiction Desk reviewed Any Human Face and, with great generosity, gave away ten free copies of the novel. One of the copies went to the man behind the book blog His Futile Preoccupations... You can see the impression the novel made here. Here's a bit to be going on with:

I had a bit of luck recently when I won a book give-away held by The Fiction Desk. The book, Any Human Face by Charles Lambert arrived and I almost immediately picked it up. I planned to read the back cover and perhaps a page or two as I had another book I intended to get to first. I ended up devouring this book in two separate readings over the course of a twenty-four hour period. The blurb on the front of the novel promises: A dark, fast-paced story of love, sex, abduction and murder, and the book certainly lives up to all those qualities.

Snail-keeping and Sunday salons

Clare Dudman, author of A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees (which I'm currently reading and wholeheartedly recommend - but more of that later), has interviewed me for her Sunday Salon on her literary blog, Keeper of the Snails. We talk about Any Human Face, life-changing moments and pride (with a small 'p'). You can read the interview here.

The Slaughteryard

Assuming you know nothing of the work of the nineteenth century Argentine writer Esteban Echeverria, you can approach this book, one of the Friday Project’s Library of Lost Books, in two ways. The first is to cut to the chase and read the beating and rather bloody heart of it, the long short story, entitled The Slaughteryard, a vivid, in many ways chilling, account of a cattle butchering and its disturbing aftermath in one of the four slaughter yards of Buenos Aires during the first decades of the nineteenth century. It’s a powerful, and memorable, tale, packed with information and colour, observation and, above all, political indictment. Translated with enormous vigour by erstwhile Borges collaborator and translator, Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, and Susan Ashe, it provides an insight into a world that’s both recognisably modern and tantalisingly ‘other’, which is just what you’d expect from a classic ‘lost book’.

If you stop at the story, you’ll already have had value for money. If you decide to read the rest of the book as well, you’ll come away not only wiser, but also irresistibly entertained. It’s packed with gems: historical details about slaughtering methods, the use of the lasso, and, more worryingly, the mazorca (you’ll have to read the glossary to find out why this should be worrying, but Edward II might provide a hint), the practice known as the slippery dance, the other, less musical meaning of the violin y violon; and, underlying all this, the tragic oppression of one faction by another, in a Swiftian parody of political schism and reversal that, as these things tend to do, resulted in the deaths and torture of thousands. On top of this, you’ll have contemporary accounts of butchery in Buenos Aires by the famous, such as Darwin, and other less well-known travellers, such as a certain Major Alexander Gillespie, according to whom “negroes [...] have generally a predilection for food very salt, and even tainted”.

The book as a whole, in other words, not only introduces and contextualises one of South America's greatest stories, but delights on its own terms. I recommend it.

Two people, one bleeding

And here's another review of Any Human Face, from The Fiction Desk this time. It's typically perceptive and I particularly enjoyed this sentence:

The character interactions are driven by Lambert’s interest in the way people react to power and vulnerability in themselves and in each other; it’s tempting to say that the archetypal Charles Lambert scene is one in which two people are in a room, and one of them is bleeding.

Fascinating, though I'm not sure how true this is. Any ideas?

Little Monsters returns!

This is getting better and better. Bookeywookey (subtitle: LITERATURE GOOD AND BAD, THEATER,AND NEUROSCIENCE....NO REALLY), who wrote the excellent review of Any Human Face mentioned in the previous post, has turned his critical eye on Little Monsters. To flattering effect. Here's a preview:

Lambert writes of the pain of existential longing with a knowing heart and a sure, forceful pen. He knows, as one character says to another in Little Monsters, that 'people are not simple,' and that's why I loved this beautiful novel. I feel I've discovered a deep well in Lambert. Sometimes his work evokes Hermann Hesse for me, although he is less of an innocent.

If I needed any encouragement to work on my next novel (though I don't), this would certainly provide it. Thank you, Ted.

Any Human Face review

And I found this review of Any Human Face waiting for me when I turned on my laptop this afternoon... Here's a taste of it.

This is an unusual book in that it has everything - love, suspense, moral conflict, social criticism, psychological acuity, and crack writing - but none of it is expected.

As Giuseppe would say, not bad.