Galle Literary Festival day 4

The Narrow Road to the Deep North / First Person - Richard Flanagan

• A book succeeds where people find many different things in it
• John Friedrich - the con artist whose autobiography RF ghostwrote at the beginning of his writing career - had a coherent worldview: the world is evil so you might as well act accordingly and accumulate treasures along the way
• This view has now become ascendant (Trumpian) - there is now a fundamental attack on the idea of truth, and if there is no truth then all that matters is opinion, and if so then the opinions of the most powerful will prevail
• Mark Zuckerberg has said we no longer have separate identities at work, home etc; this is the great totalitarian dream, to destroy the private sphere - today our private lives are increasingly assailed
• Novels have become a new unnamed resistance; reading is subversively in opposition to the assault on truth and private lives

Made me want to read either or both of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and First Person (also taking into account vague memories of enjoying Gould's Book of Fish a lot and a more recent mention of Narrow Road).

Whither Asia? - Pankaj Mishra and Nisid Hajari

PM: We are amidst not just an economic shift but a massive psychological shift; it's the west that made the modern world (through colonisation or deprivation of sovereignty) and created a system which is now coming to the end of a phase of relatively uninterrupted success; Asia now confident while the west is not
PM: First half of 20th C traumatic for China: internal struggle between Mao Tse Tung and Chiang Kai Shek and brutal Japanese occupation; so national sovereignty is #1 priority; belief that must develop or be destroyed; all led by historical experience of humiliation and loss
PM: China can appear an island of stability amidst ocean of chaos (not troubled by politics, technocratic, one-party)
NH: But if no dissent, risk of groupthink, e.g. worst recent mistakes such as territorial overclaim in South China Sea where China totally taken aback to have the ruling go against them
NH: Also means that the government's one source of legitimacy is its ability to deliver national outcomes
PM: Across the world we are seeing the fragmentation of individual nations' shared national dreams (e.g. the American dream); contrast China where there is an ideological consensus across rulers and ruled about China's promised/imminent greatness; should not underestimate the power of this coherency
PM: Xi Jinping trying to renew this by going after corruption - renewing legitimacy of the party state as the protector of the people's interests
NH: The environment also undermines legitimacy (e.g. air pollution) and China has responded strongly to this, including at cost to economic growth
NH: China hasn't yet been tested as a fully fledged world power (e.g. their roles in Korea and Afghanistan - via Pakistan influence - are critical but we haven't really seen how they'll act yet)
PM: China has no ideology to promote - it looks at the world instrumentally, as something that can help China become and stay powerful - it's not imperial in its approach
NH: Wonder whether that's a smart long-term strategy - by not intervening in the internal matters of the Asian countries it supports by investing in, and propping up repressive approaches, it may be becoming unpopular with the predominantly young populations of those countries
PM: The China/India comparison is lazy; they are chalk and cheese apart from population size; India's projections of catching up to China are a fantasy and not rooted in any domestic achievement; indicators of social stability and achievement in India are fragile and risk spiralling down; can't be an international power until it gets its own house in order
NH: The key decision China made early on was to invest heavily in primary health care and education, and that drove its economic growth; India is spending a fraction of what it needs to on that so will never grow its workforce to the level needed for such economic strength
PM: Moreover India missed the advantages of a semi free market economy where the state can intervene to make industries internationally competitive
PM: Also China (brutally) broke down existing class/power structures (e.g. land reforms, executing landlords) while India still has an oppressive caste society, not egalitarian, stifles innovation and ideas (which is one reason the US got ahead)
NH: Singapore has found a place between the elephants
PM: No one talks about Indonesia despite size/importance (NH: they are inward looking, don't asset themselves)
PM: Indonesia, India, and many western countries are all experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, which has been met by the rise of harder edged nationalist leaders playing on ethnic, religious, culturally chauvinist views and attacking the former 'elites'
PM: China decisively pursued modernisation but not westernisation; India has always been heavily influenced by British gradualist, Fabian notions, as well as the British bureaucratic and institutional apparatus (e.g. education system emphasises rote learning; universities turn out graduates with qualifications that are useless) and has sought to emulate westernised ways of doing things

Galle Literary Festival day 3

Some more content-heavy sessions today so more detailed notes.

The Ambassadors and Ministers Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary to China: Nirupama Rao and David Dabydeen

NR: Indian Ambassador to Sri Lanka (2004-06), China (2006-09) and the US (2011-13), and head of the Indian Foreign Service 2009-11
DD: Guyanan Ambassador to China (2010-15), also novelist/poet

NR: The thing with China and India is that India remembers 1962 (war embedded in national psyche)
DD: The common person on the street in China sees India as caste-ridden and its cities as dirty
DD: China took the Caribbean states very seriously (politically not economically) because such a high proportion of UN votes
NR: India and China share very long border; Chinese people have supercilious attitude towards India; (quoting) "the relationship was created in heaven but constructed on earth"; China is an unfinished country with many aspects needed to become great
DD: When DD was ambassador, China was transitioning from regional to world superpower and at the time did not have the obligations of a world superpower
DD: There is a view held by some (not DD) that China is plotting to take over the world, by putting its people everywhere and by taking over economic infrastructure (e.g. owning ports)
DD: There have always been 'three Ts' that are difficult to engage China on: Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square; after Liu Xiaobo's death in custody, an 'N' was added (Nobel)
DD: Human rights picture should be more nuanced: millions of people lifted out of poverty
NR: India has also lifted millions out of poverty
NR: What sets India apart is democracy; open government; what you see is what you get; the Dalai Lama and a Tibetan refugee community have been living in India for nearly 60 years; post-Davos heard Modi referred to as leader of the free world!!
NR: No doubt China has the dollars to make inroads
NR: Chinese presence in SL has been much debated in India: what does it mean for India's security and welfare, what does it mean for India-SL relationship? India-SL is based on history, religion, ethnicity, migration; China-SL will always be defined by development aid, credit, concessional loans, projects
DD: Language is also an issue (Mandarin can be impenetrable from outside)
DD: China has great fear of disintegration a la USSR - 53 ethnic groups, large Muslim population
DD: Official Chinese policy is now that market forces are "decisive" (previously they were "critical") - they don't want to impose culture, it is not like western imperialism, it is all about money
NR: "Take that with a huge double salt"
NR: Look at the belt that China is constructing; not just Chinese $, also a way of doing it - lack of transparency, lots of Chinese workers, Chinese economic interests being entrenched
DD: But the long term benefit is to the country where the infrastructure (e.g. road) is built
DD: China also adopts differing levels of transparency in different countries
DD: btw Guyana has just discovered huge oil reserves; now China will come to us; compare Exxon vs CNOC in levels of corruption; look to emulate Norwegian model of resource development
NR: The issue for India is how do we bring China into a rule based set of relationships
DD: It is very understandable that China is testing the limits, flexing its muscles, with its own history of colonialism, Japanese occupation, internal division - we should wait and see and be less fearful
NR: "Diplomacy is life without maps" and we can't afford just to sit back; moreover public opinion is increasingly a factor in the formation of policy and citizens may have different views

Q: Where does China see itself in 50, 100 years?
NR: Chinese dream: strength and power; it's all about power; China has become increasingly more granular in how it perceives power
DD: In many ways an echo of US dream; wants to be at the high table; want to recover from a past of shame and colonial intervention

Q: Doesn't the real power rest with multinationals; isn't SL just a vassal state anyway?
NR: In India, you have 1.2bn people much more invested in belief in power of government, not corporations

Q: Is India failing to grasp the opportunity offered by tourism?
NR: Yes, we've been too inward looking over the last few ... centuries; haven't listened enough to what the rest of the world is saying about us

Q: What is the Indian view on current US administration (Trump)?
NR: Purely from an Indian view, it's been quite good: he's right to focus on the Korean peninsula (America must remain involved; China hasn't been able to do anything about it); hasn't done too badly with China since elected (Cf inflammatory campaign statements); US-India r/ship been in a good place since Clinton, Trump hasn't done anything to indicate moving away from fundamentals

Climate Change: A View from the Future - Lord David Puttnam

• Look at this through the lens of personal responsibility and trust - need both, and ability to interrogate information if we are to make any progress on climate change
• Climate change will produce unimaginable levels of migration
• Raising awareness of impacts of change change is equivalent of the civil rights movement for this generation
• Sacrifice will be a necessary component of people's lives; we must find a way to bring young people to believe that service is core to living
• Droughts, floods, landslides, cyclones
• Change takes longer than you expect and when it happens it happens faster than you ever believed possible
• The notion of individual freedom, and its associate creative freedom, comparatively recent therefore vulnerable and first line of defence must be our own standards and integrity, as part of a sustainable social agenda --> collective responsibility
• We've ceased to actively negotiate with each other, own own roles in the world, and this boils down to trust; trust gap --> concerns become fears --> fears further erode belief in system --> the echo chamber accelerates this until official sources become less trusted than rumours
• TV is no longer a public square; look at media, consider its effects and whose interests are being promoted
• Predict there will be a serious climate change induced incident in Asia by 2028 at which point it will become apparent that only China will have the resources and the will to address it

To a question about the role of education and teachers:

• Never understood why education is a political football; needs to advance in an apolitical environment
• Why is it that science have moved forward so much more quickly than teaching and learning? Science builds on shoulders of giants. If someone has an illness and someone else offers a solution, the patient will try it. Whether it works, science advances. Whereas in education we consistently default to the known because we're (rightly) terrified of damaging a cohort.
• Now the challenge is so great - changing jobs in future etc - that we are all becoming aware that all we can do is teach children to be flexible, collaborative etc
• A teacher today is doing something no teacher in history has ever been asked to do: guide students into a world that we don't fully understand (in the past, the world was pretty well known) (I think what he really meant by this, which is right, is that in the past the known world and what it might ask of children of any given situation (class etc) was pretty well known, whereas now what awaits any given child is much more unknown (both known unknowns, and unknown unknowns)
• Were it possible: allow NGOs into schools

Translating Print into Film - Maylis de Kerangal, Shrabani Basu, Sebastian Faulks, Alexander McCall Smith and Lord David Puttnam (good moderation by Ashok Ferrey)

How possessive are you about your books?
AMS: It takes into account fear, avarice, ambition, vanity
MdK: Even translation, even each reading changes - each reader makes his own film of the book

Does the prospect of film adaptation influence how you write?
SB (author of Victoria and Abdul): The screenplay is the key

What if the focus of the film is different?
MdK: It might be a different story then, not the point of the book, but no one forces you to sell the rights to make your book into a film

What do you look for in a script?
DP (producer): Try to work with a screenwriter from concept stage - if you get it as a script it's already someone else's vision; also, when working from short story (rather than novel) the interpretive gap is minimised

Would you ever start with a novel if trying to make a great film?
SF: Never - a novel is about slow psychological processes, a film tells a story in pictures (and dialogue)
SB: The most important thing is that Abdul's story has now been told, and to so many more people via film, when it had previously been erased

Does film have a knock-on effect on books?
AMS: It does have implications for readers' and authors' ownership of how characters 'are' and of ideas
MdK: Cinema is an art of incarnation; when writing, MdK is full of movies, they are in her head, sometimes feels like she is translating cinema into literature

Murder She Said - Justice Shiranee Tilakawardane

Accounts of the forensic processes and chains of evidence that led to convictions in three cases where the judge herself has sat: the gunning down of another judge, Justice Ambepitiya, the trials of several police officers after two young men died in their custody; and the 'Royal Park condo' case where a young woman was killed in her penthouse.

She did a good job whipping through the cases and how the evidence of fingerprints, vomit, cell phone records, ballistics, police records and more led to the convictions, was engaging in how she told the stories, and ended by dedicating the session to the 'government servants' (of which she counts herself as one, for 37 years) who are serving the public good, but the reason I was moved to join the standing ovation she received at the end was much more because of - taking the material at face value, as one must - her whole career of dedication to human rights and justice in a system where that must not have always been easy, as apparent even just from the three examples she gave.

Megan Abbott - You Will Know Me

Sharp and streamlined. Stays laser-focused on Devon, the cost to everyone (including her) of pursuing gymnastics to elite level, and ultimately also on her mother Katie (the narrator) and her part in all of it. Sometimes it's a bit too streamlined - everything that happens, everything that's said, has either plot or symbolic significance (especially what Drew says). But a very good genre piece whose prose and craft are never distracting.

Galle Literary Festival day 2

Lost Without Translation - Bruce Wannell, Michael Kumpfmuller, Laurence Boissier and Nalin Ranasinghe

Bruce Wannell (translator)

• A panel on the felicities and infelicities, perils and dangers of translation.
• Translation: an attempt to build bridges, an attempt to make people understand each other.
• Beware of false cousins; don't look for perfect overlap between words.

Laurence Boissier (self-translates)

• Had a story translated from French into German and Italian. German translator never asked any questions, Italian translator wanted to know what was happening between the lines of what she'd written and used language of collective unconscious.
• LB wanted to use translation to make her work better. Has been translating her own work into English (using google translate and synonym.com) then back into French and the texts become better, with other dimensions.

Nalin Ranasinghe (philosophical translation)

• Take Homer's Odyssey. To understand the Greek philosophers you must understand their mythology. "You can't take philosophy out of its native element" (including story).
• Helped to understand, post September 11, what was war like - in USA, and also the civil war in Sri Lanka.
• "Whether we like it or not, we live in a world filled with strange gods" (Ares --> Rumsfeld?) and lurking irrational forces
• Students at the University of Jaffna (north; Tamil) - "they knew the Odyssey, they had lived through the Odyssey".

Michael Kumpfmuller (been translated)

• "We need translators because we are sinners" (we once had a common language then we prayed to the wrong gods - Babel)
• Often you cannot read a single word or character of the language into which you are translated
• MK wrote book about Kafka; discovered that Kafka deeply meaningful in many far flung countries e.g. China and Vietnam

Question (asked by me!): what are the human qualities, as opposed to the technical and contextual knowledge, that make a good translator?

Compendium of answers from the four panelists: creativity, what makes people laugh, 'pub knowledge', humility, passion and love of the culture you're dealing with, sense of commonality of humanity, courage ("you must not fear intimacy")

Austenistan: Jane Austen 200 Years On

First a two person reading by English actors Adrian Lukis (Wickham in the 1995 - or 'Colin Firth' - Pride and Prejudice, though that means nothing to me) and Caroline Languishe about the life and books of Jane Austen, including dramatisations of a few passages from those novels.

Then a panel discussion involving Laaleen Sukhera and Gayathri Warnasuriya - both members of the Jane Austen society of Pakistan and contributors to the recent anthology Austenistan, comprising short stories inspired by Austen and set in contemporary Pakistan. Sukhera also convener of said society and editor of the anthology.

• Many parallels between Regency England and South Asian society today, including due to postcolonial legacy - misogyny, hypocrisy, femininity and domesticity.
• Growing up, could relate more to Austen characters than US teen book characters: restrictions placed on interactions with opposite sex, excitement about going to a ball, the marriage market (Pakistan still has a social season: are you invited to the right places, are you the right pedigree, ladies' maids attending the balls with them).
• Society not a book club per se - they met (meet) to discuss some associated topics, and a couple of times a year do cosplay with dancing and tea parties (some of the clothes and fabrics from Regency England are still worn in contemporary Pakistan).

Also - picking up my festival game I was interviewed afterwards for a British Council arts podcast. We'll see whether I make the cut!

From the Galle Art Trail

A few artists and pieces that have caught my attention across the various of the 20 or so venues with art displayed as part of the festival, most - maybe all - on a pop-up basis, in a range of exceedingly picturesque run down old colonial buildings. I've felt very starved of art and have missed it as this trip has gone on, so this has been a tonic.

"Paintography" by Dillai and Dhanush 

One takes photos and the other then paints over them. Some were a bit schmaltzy for me but others were very nice. Dillai Joseph and Dhanush De Costa.

Sofie Knijff: "Tales"

Wonderful fairytale-tinged photographs. Liked these a lot. And even more after reading that part of her practice with this series was enabling her child subjects to find their own preferred roles.

Marie-Caroline Senlis: "Bloom"

Interestingly a second artist working in photography with subsequent treatment, in her case (I think) coloured tints applied to black and white. Some nice effects in the way she captures a range of Sri Lankan flowers. (website)

J C Rathnayake: "Reality Check"

Small repeating buddhas or sometimes just human figures in series.

Kavan Balasuriya

I liked that he had a numbered series called 'The Persistence of Memory' but my favourite was one called 'Labyrinths'. (website)

Galle Literary Festival day 1

In the interests of these not becoming a chore but instead serving their purpose as an aide memoire, entries in short form (and idiosyncratic according to what caught my attention), my editorialising in italics:

Welcome to The Age of Anger - Pankaj Mishra

• Democracy promises equality, capitalism promotes inequality. The conflict between them has ushered in the age of anger that we are now living through. An unavoidable consequence of the 'radical project of modernity' which has followed Enlightenment (broadly defined) and industrialisation since the late 18th C. Brexit, Trump, Modi.
• People 'seceding' to the transnational elite, leaving others behind. People like Trump thrive on the ambiguity of 'elite' (cultural, financial).
• Industrialisation --> men as breadwinners --> crisis of masculinity (including construction of white masculinity in opposition to everything else)
• Absurd to look for roots of terrorism in any particular religion (militant Buddhists, popular association of terrorism with Islam yet it was LTTE who first used suicide bomber tactics).
• Need a new social order, a renewed sense of collective welfare (i.e. going beyond conventional liberalism I think), a reassertion of values such as compassion. Equality, fraternity and solidarity. (not liberty!)

Impressive; I liked him. Maybe even worth reading the book. Somewhat hand-wavey about 'equality' but core idea convincing. 

The Story of the Fish Ladder - Katharine Norbury

• Fish ladder = pretty much a literal ladder constructed to enable salmon and other upstream fish to swim upstream where an obstacle now exists ('a man-made solution to a man-made problem') - dangerous for salmon because if they fall through rungs they die, but alternative is to not make the journey at all (metaphor is about journeys back to origins etc)
• In Celtic mythology salmon equivalent to the apple in Christian mythology
• KN adoption, Catholic hospital, earliest memories of Sister Mary-Therese, cancer, mother rejection, memoir/'outdoor genre'

Behavioural Economics and State Capitalism in Transition Economies - Kiryl Rudy

• KR = former economic advisor to Belarus president
• Belarus reform program seeking econ dev not econ growth (cut inflation etc)
• Reforms didn't work - mistake was assuming that people would act rationally within economic system but actually people had other targets than just economic ones
• Come to view that 'economic DNA' is passed down socially. Information is the key. Whatever info people receive creates its own logic and then traps us in our old circles.
• Need to change people's behaviour by changing information they receive and therefore changing culture and values. Use tools like education, rule of law, social nudges and foreign investment. (!! quite an array of tools of different types and rather different from the usual BE/BI toolkit ...  but that may be the relevance of the 'state capitalism' and 'transition economies' as well as a neo-liberal ideology and austerity-by-another-name reform program)
• Belarus culture, three key things: (1) common sense and sceptical attitude; (2) paternalism; (3) orientation to Soviet past (when things were smoother and less complex).
• 'Both economists and writers, we are dreamers' ... the economist's dream about human nature is one of freedom through rationality.

My eyes lit up when I saw behavioural economics on the program! But his 'insight' about information is not so remarkable given 'perfect information' is the fundamental of mainstream textbook economics and as became evident in the Q&A KR does hew to a neo-liberal economic worldview (e.g. article of faith that direct foreign investment is in everyone's utility-maximising best interests)

E. Lockhart - Genuine Fraud

Starts very strong, dropping us straight in with an intriguing main character (Jules, though she gives her name as Imogen) with a mysterious and cinematic back story, lots of questions that you want answers to, and some breakneck action into the bargain. And largely sustains it for the first half of the book, as things get darker and it becomes clearer that Jules is thoroughly unreliable - Lockhart is a really effective, confident story-teller, excellent at keeping things moving quickly forward while layering in details of character and doubt.

But, as cleverly as it's set up (and the backwards-moving structure is crafty and sustained), the excitement and intrigue slowed considerably for me from the point when I picked up the first very clearly signposted Talented Mr Ripley reference, the scene on the boat (there were probably others earlier, but it's been a while since I read the book or saw the film), and guessed the rest of where it was going - in reverse - which turned out to indeed be where it went.

(also by Lockhart; both stronger than this one: We Were Liars, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks)

Kelly Link - Stranger Things Happen

I started reading this quite a while back, but came back to it a few days ago after noticing it on my kindle. I picked a story at random - 'Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party' - and it turned out to be just the kind of story I needed to read right then, in the way it built and paid off on an unnerving sense of creepiness and threat, and so I've since gone back and read the entire collection.

Apart from the unifying element of strangeness - manifesting in both what occurs and the (linguistic/tonal) register in which they happen, and are described as happening - the stories in Stranger Things Happen are an uneven bunch.

The good ones are very good: slippery, unstable and menacing, and satisfyingly emotionally grounded (in a 'glimpse of truth' kind of way) without being at all obvious in how they get there; "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" and "Louise's Ghost" are two that stand out in that latter way in particular. So too do "The Specialist's Hat" and "Vanishing Act", both of which also, without being exactly better, are sharpened somehow to a finer point, "The Specialist's Hat" in its creeping sense of dread and hauntedness (not to mention how it invokes, eludes and partakes in generic horror story-telling expectation, with its two twin girls, mysterious babysitter, and dark things lurking within and outside the house), and "Vanishing Act", which is maybe just a touch more direct (without sacrificing nuance) in how it goes at the plaintive sense of grief and confusion associated with one's parents being absent in whatever sense.

On the other hand, some of the others, I tended to bounce off a bit. I didn't find them interesting or feel there was anything much going on with them. There wasn't any particular pattern to those, except maybe they tended to adhere more closely to a particular fairytale ("Travels with the Snow Queen") or mythological ("Flying Lessons") outline ... but what Link's about is difficult and I don't hold that against her given how good most of these are.

Also - it is glorious how funny she is in patches. Some of the stuff with the ghost that haunts Louise is gold, and the riffing she does about the various state contestants in the beauty pageant in the 'Miss Kansas on Judgment Day' section of 'Shoe and Marriage' is hilarious - the kind of writing that feels so unforced that one imagines it must have come out, more or less, in one smooth continuous flow of joyous inspiration, but actually was almost certainly laboured over and carefully crafted (I say that with admiration) to create that impression.

Naomi Alderman - The Power

This is an exciting novel. Ok, fine: electric. Its urgency arises from both its subject matter (and premise) - power and how it shifts in society, specifically between genders, after women acquire their new power - and how it's written, in shortish page-turning sections from alternating perspectives (initially, and predominantly, Allie, Roxy, Tunde and Margot), with plenty of action.

The politics are interesting. I was a bit unsure how to take the way that when women gain physical dominance, things flip so simply with women then replicating the patterns of oppression and entitlement that exist in our (actual, male-dominated) real-world society ... but ultimately I think it's polemically and politically effective, in highlighting even more clearly the effects of power. It also dodges the question about whether a matriarchal society would be more caring, collaborative, communicative and so on, or at any rate whether innate difference is or should be a driver of how we think about these things. And it stages the old 'radical' vs 'liberal' feminist approaches, in the end giving us a playing out of the radical (via cataclysm), which leads to a thousands-of-years-in-the-future society which, so for as we can tell from the framing, has at least some things in common with present-day society but just with a straight gender-power reversal.

Anyway, it's a lot of fun, it's neat, it's pacy, and it's thoughtful in how it engages with gender and power. A good read.

George Saunders - Tenth of December

Fair to say that I was primed to like this, having enjoyed so much of what Saunders has written - about writing and about living - not to mention having already read two of its 10 stories, "Puppy" and "Home", never mind the general critical adoration for it.

So it's an indication of how really great Tenth of December is that it did live up to my expectations, wringing drama and feeling, gusts of humour, and fresh ways of seeing the familiar world, in a mode that's endlessly attuned to individuals as well as the larger social and economic forces at whose mercy they at least partly are (that interplay between the humanistic and the political), from its close, compassionate attention to the perspectives, experiences and world views of all of its characters. One thing that Saunders has said in a couple of pieces which left an impression on me is that, by pursuing detail and asking himself 'why' about his characters, he invariably ends up with greater kindness towards them, and that is certainly in operation across this collection.

My favourites were the first, "Victory Lap", and the last (the title story), both generating enormous narrative drive from the life-and-death scenarios they pose and the back and forth inhabiting of their different characters' consciousnesses, and also "The Semplica Girl Diaries", which is remarkable in how both caustic and kind it is; all three made me feel like I would overflow with feeling. Something something humanity, it's close to magic. But there isn't a dud here ("Home" gets better every time I read it; "Escape from Spiderhead" and "My Chivalric Fiasco" both gain from what could easily be distancing stylistic choices; more generally, the sharp veers from naturalism are always on point) and there's an originality to it all which adds to the stories' effect and sting.

Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials series

I figured at some point I'd probably want some traditional 'holiday' (or possibly airport) reading and what could be better than this, especially with the new one (The Book of Dust) having recently come out? I have to say, this time through it did scan very much as children's - well, young adult - literature, especially in the characterisation (although Lyra remains a wonderful creation). But it was still very good and a breeze to read, albeit dragging just a bit in the closing stretch.

Also - Keats on negative capability! And Cittàgazze now strikes me as a forebear (can a place be a forebear?) of the in-between city of fountains, the Neitherlands, in the Magicians series - both of them echoing with de Chirico's dreamscapes.

(first read: 1, 2/3; second read: 1, 2/3)

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun

In some ways this is a very simple novel - and, indeed, to a fault in the more simplistic characterisation and depiction of the various markers of identity that are important (racial, cultural, tribal, class), in some of the 'telling' that goes on about the broader context of the Biafran secession, and in the straightforwardness of some of the symbolism.

But at the same time it would feel churlish to dwell on that when the book tells such a powerful story about a place and period - it's told in two sections each for 'the early 1960s' and 'the late 1960s' in Nigeria/Biafra - that I knew little about but very easily found myself in once Adichie got going (the colonial dimension that's front-and-centre from the beginning helps with that familiarisation), through the experience of a set of characters who, at the very least, never feel like cut-outs or merely symbolic or representative stand-ins. Kainene is my favourite character, and her relationship with her twin sister Olanna is one of the best things about the book; Ugwu's coming of age is a strong backbone too.

The Dark Tower

So much potential (McConaughey, Elba, seemingly a decent sized budget, and - mainly - the whole darn mythology of the Dark Tower books themselves, much of which I would think is super-visual) but squandered in a film that never feels at all convincingly epic, undermined at every turn by flat direction, odd pacing, an unfortunate mix of over-explaining and under-texturing, and, several times, a horribly tin ear for dialogue.

(plane viewing #6)

Ingrid Goes West

Plenty to cringe at in Aubrey Plaza's mentally disordered social media-fueled pursuit of friendship with Elizabeth Olsen's insta-celeb about town, but its critique of internet - and celebrity, consumerist, image-obsessed - culture doesn't strike home with anywhere near the sharpness that's clearly intended (down to the somewhat dark ending). One of those potentially interesting but actually kind of 6 1/2 out of 10 type films.

(plane viewing #5)

"The Blue of Distance": Rebecca Solnit - A Field Guide to Getting Lost

This is the one physical book I've brought on this trip (the response of the bookseller at Embiggen - after exclaiming, without context, 'Of course!' on seeing it in my hand at the counter - when I said it was for travel reading: 'You're in good company'), and I've deliberately read it slowly, knowing that I'll only get to read it for the first time once. Indeed I've now read it twice - once more or less in Zanzibar, a second time pretty much here in Mauritius. For not since To The Lighthouse has a book prompted so many instances for me of that special kind of recognition that comes when an insight about life and what it is to be human arrives in words that light the thought with both newness and deep familiarity. This is a special book.

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else? 

Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

'What follows are a few of my own maps', the first chapter ends, but actually each of the sections that follow it deserve maps of their own, wending around and between ideas, subjects and images. It's not easy, even after an attentive reading - or even two - to say simply what each section is 'about', even knowing that loss, losing and lostness are the book's through-lines, and that every second chapter is titled The Blue of Distance. And that elusiveness is not a weakness, but a virtue.

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. 

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world. One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast, and the brown coffee and yellow eggs and green traffic lights filled me with no such desire, and besides I was looking forward to going hiking on the mountain’s west slope. 

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

I think it's the images and stories that will stay with me, and the insights they bring - a memory of a little girl's blue dress from Bolivia (Lake Titicaca, one of those high altitude lakes, like blue eyes staring back at the blue sky), the imaginings and elisions associated with a long-disappeared great-grandmother, what came from loving a man who was a lot like the desert, and also butterflies, souls (psyche), tortoises, crabs, maps, Vertigo, jouissance, dreams, houses that we carry with us until we don't.