JUDY KRAVIS

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Monday, 17 February 2025

The Moon and the Bonfires — Cesare Pavese

You have to read books twice in February. The mist is down. The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese you'd have to read twice at any time of year. I read the first chapter twice, to begin with. Twenty years on a man returns to the Piedmont hills and farms where he grew up, legitimate now he's rich, redeemed, staying in the Hotel Angelo, walking the old lands with his old friend Nuto. This is a climate more than a story. He might be staying in the hotel, he might buy a farm, for now he buys a penknife for a crippled boy. That could be me, he thought. Even with the leg. Not so much reading, more temperature-taking, making an even way of words through a troubled past.

Only on the second reading do I sense the geography of it, the different farms, the people who lived there, which vineyard had which grape, who lay with whom, and died of it. There is no future here, despite repeated attempts. 

I have been watching the BBC adaptation of Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, one of the first BBC series I ever watched (the other was The Golden Bowl). I was entranced by this time spent in a life I couldn't have known, but did. Long vistas of lowlands, a  presbyterian stoicism, fed on porridge in a wooden bowl with a wooden spoon, a wooden plough tilling the low land, a marriage an evening party and then there's the outdoor work to do next morning.

Once you've read that Cesare Pavese was not the creature that he wrote, he was not an illegitimate bastard but he felt like one, his nickname was not Eel, but he felt like an eel, he slithered around with none of the eel's savoir faire. He contemplated  his old friend Nuto, who had not left, had not made his fortune but carried on.

He might have wound up as many do in this valley, growing like a plant, getting old like a woman or a goat, without knowing anything of life the other side of the Bormida, without ever stepping out of the routine oaf home and grape-picking and village fairs. But though he never travelled, something did happen for Nuto, a destiny of sorts — I mean this idea he has that you have to understand things, that the world is all wrong and it's in everyone's interest to change things.


Monday, 10 February 2025

BOYHOOD: inside the Coetzee chill

When I was sixteen there were two new English teachers at school: Mr Harrison was genial and engaging from day one, a cricketer on an open wicket; Mr Gough was gangly, awkward, reticent, an odd boy who didn't like sport. Mr Gough is the one I remember because it took a while. I don't remember what we were reading with him, I remember the tenor of what he said, the reserve and yet desire to say it as simply as possible.

Boyhood, the first volume of J.M. Coetzee's trilogy, reminded me of Mr Gough, and of myself. How generous/free are we able to be in telling our early lives? 

It takes a while. 

I have taken Coetzee sparingly for about twenty-five years and only now thought to read about his growing up in South Africa: small town astringent, fearful, correct, understanding little, foreseeing every tiny disaster, every humiliation. 

So that is what is at stake. That is why he never makes a sound in class. That is why he is always neat, why his homework is always done, why he always knows the answer. He dare not slip. If he slips, he risks being beaten; and whether he is beaten or whether he struggles against being beaten, it is all the same, he will die.

Young Coetzee is aware that if he could break the spell of terror, slip up, take one beating, he would come out the other side a normal boy. Like Pinocchio, who dreamed of being a real boy. 

Boyhood ends with a consideration of death.

He does not like to think of death. He would prefer it if, when people got old and sick, they simply stopped existing and disappeared. He does not like ugly old bodies; the thought of old people taking off their clothes makes him shudder.  ....

His own death is a different matter. He is always somehow present after his death, floating above the spectacle, enjoying the grief of those who cased it and who, now that it is too late, wish he were still alive.

 It took this long to get into Coetzee because I recognise and don't entirely like what I see in his mirror.

Saturday, 1 February 2025

MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS

She stood among the circles and colours of Richard Gorman paintings, her flared patched jeans down to the floor, a brick-orange beanie, light hazel eyes, among light flicks at her phone her sweatshirt read Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Yes, I thought, I didn't have it written across my chest above my flared trousers when I was twenty, but it was my home ground.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness turns out to be a song by Smashing Pumpkins. Infinite sadness, according to wiki-google-etc, is a form of anxiety that can be remedied with the right drugs. They are missing the art of sadness, the occupation of melancholy. Private, inarticulate, infinite sadness remains intact. That's the beauty of it.