The Seamstress and the Wind

In this week's twilight I read The Seamstress and the Wind, which I have had for some years, but didn't register the first time, the wrong time, evidently. This time it was like a nursery slope out of the last César Aira, a desire not to quit yet, with so much en mouvement, so much to play for, I noticed more, I'm sure, the colours, the flying wedding dress, the mummified armadillo/nouveau truck.

This evening I read the first few chapters again as the stove got going after a good day in the garden, stay long enough to see the story encouraged into life in a Paris café. I see him off down the road, Hail César, and the seamstress, the wind, the truck, the taxi, the wedding dress, the Monster.

The visceral Signor Aira

Mozart String Quintets

April outside in the early evening

Journey of a face: César Aira

Reading César Aira to discover I have been in dire need of something like this: a hundred pages of rare and rich uncertainty: what next and why, all known frames dissolved and resurrected all the time.  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter begins sedately, in the early nineteenth century, testing our patience for history, forcing us this way and that. 

"Rugendas' second and final voyage to America lasted seventeen years, from 1831 to 1847. His industrious journeying took him to Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brazil again and Argentina, and resulted in hundreds, indeed thousands of paintings."

Travel and painting were entwined like fibres in a rope. One by one, the dangers and difficulties of a route that was tortuous and terrifying at the best of times were transformed and left behind....  Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once.

By page seventeen he has me. I read most of the book over a cloudy afternoon and a sleepless night; finished it just now. The ending is orchestral. The artist Rugendas, after horrendous and delirious experiences, all the nerve-endings of his face open after a gory accident, finds himself in Indian wars; he wears a mantilla even as he sketches, reminds me of Paddy Shine up at the Lodgefest a few years ago, behind a mantilla or similar, black, as he drummed into his next move, which was just then, and then some. 

Also, Pierre in the film of War and Peace, watching from a small rise above the pitch, bespectacled, writing notes on the Battle of Austerlitz.

What we bring to our reading of anything is multitudinous, subtle.

 César Aira is excellent at reminding us of that. 

Reading your mind

It would be good to think that reading a book, reading book after book, honed more general reading skills, like reading your mind, your own and yours, dear reader, companion, fellow-sleeper, fellow insomniac, knowing, as far as is reasonable, who exactly is kicking whom around.

Flannery O'Connor

Dug over two or three beds in the veg plot; ground very dry and hard; hitting thick sods may be of a piece with reading the stories of Flannery O'Connor, several hundred pages of making your way towards death or other disaster. The end of each story is such a plunge I have to wait, if not plunge myself, into our pond.

Flannery kept peacocks; she lived with her mother on the family farm called Andalusia, in Georgia; ill with lupus, an awkward woman in her photos, her stories are the inside lupus voice, wrestled through with Catholic devotion and sacrifice, the tearing of flesh; someone will have fallen off the edge by the end.

The diary of Fanny Burney

I started reading Fanny Burney's diary — a 1940 Everyman edition I haven't looked at in decades. Perhaps after my week in France, a major diary moment, the idea of a late eighteenth century diary was appealing, and after a number of late-night short bursts of reading without great involvement, one day this week I spent much of a day feeling not so well and lay on the sofa in the new room with a hot water bottle and read more than a hundred pages. Weakness gave me patience with old-fashioned language, and a new-found susceptibility. 

Fanny Burney had no formal education at all, but grew up in a cultured household and educated herself by reading from the family library. Thus are free spirits made. For a number of years she was Keeper of the Robes at the court of George the Third, and became close to Queen Charlotte. Illumination here from  The Madness of King George. Fanny Burney slips in beside Helen Mirren's portrayal of Queen Charlotte. The crossover is in itself touching. Ill-health forces her to quit. She is sad to leave.

By now I am thoroughly engaged with this diarist, and can visualise her in the diary silences as well as in its reported days. She addresses frequently her two sisters, especially Susy, as if she's writing for them. Her diary permeates her family. The two sisters, who were considered more favoured than Fanny, did receive two years of education in France, but there's no resentment, and only affection for her father, as well as an extra father known as Daddy Crisp.

The finale came last night, awake as usual, and near the end of the diary: Fanny Burney, F. Burney married a Frenchman and became Madame d'Arblay. They spend some years in France, amid festering franco-britannic relations. No free movement here. A passport was more literal then: issued for one journey. Six weeks to negotiate crossing the Channel was nothing. 1815, and Bonaparte was ready for the fall. Madame d'Arblay left Paris at the dead of night and arrived in Belgium in time for Waterloo.

That day, and June 18th, I passed in hearing the cannon! Good heaven! what indescribable horror to be so near the field of slaughter! such I call it, for the preparation to the ear by the tremendous sound was soon followed by its fullest effect, in the view of the wounded, the bleeding martyrs to the formidable contention that was soon to terminate the history of the war. And hardly more afflicting was this disabled return from the battle, than the sight of the continually pouring forth ready-armed and vigorous victims that marched past my windows to meet similar destruction.