Continuing...

...as I was saying--what was I saying? Siri Hufstedt...but I am finished with her.
    When we were in Holland we saw exhibition of late Rembrandt pictures, and in the bookshop was a book by Simon Schama called "Rembrandt's Eyes." I ordered it from our Kensington Public Library. When I got it--on the same day I got Stanley Karnow's history of the Vietnam war--I realized that I would simply not be able to read it from cover to cover, as it was over 800 pages. But I read some interesting chapters about the later life of Rembrandt, and the book is worth getting even if you only go through it slowly, looking at the pictures, and just read the chapters on how Rembrandt moved away from his earlier style to the pictures he painted later in life--those we admire most. And Schama, the historian, is very good on the social side, and the wealth, of Holland in the time of Rembrandt.
    Stanley Karnow's history of the Vietnam War depressed me. The waste of so many lives in such an absurd quagmire--and almost solely because at no stage was any politician--especially Johnson--willing to admit that the whole enterprise was a ghastly mistake and to order what would have been a retreat, because--after all--Americans never retreat, do they? (They should have copied us Brits, who turned a disastrous retreat into the 'victory' of Dunkirk)
    As I mentioned earlier, I often turn to a sequence of books following on from something I read in the newspapers. The murder/mystery writer Ruth Rendell (Baroness Rendell) died recently, and I read an obituary by someone I had never heard of called Jeannette Winterson--who mentioned that she had lived with Ruth Rendell and her husband, Don, when she was writing, I think, her first book. So, with a bit of Googling, I find Jeannette Winterson has written a number of novels; has a partner called Susie Orbach, (author of "Fat is a Feminist Issue"); and that she had an affair with Julian Barnes's wife, Pat Kavanagh, who apparently left Barnes to live with Winterson for a while--but went back later. Kavanagh died some years ago and Barnes has written about his grief in more than one book.
    So, when I find myself in the Kensington Library, I look for Winterson and find two novels--"The Passion," and "Written on the Body." Incidentally, I also take out an old Ruth Rendell mystery/murder story that I read very quickly: it was an earlier one, and not much good, except perhaps in the clever portraits of her characters. I recorded one of her later mystery books for the Library of Congress, and that was excellent. I exchanged a few e-mails with her on some pronunciation questions--her e-mail address was given in the directory to the members of The House of Lords, and she was quite chatty in her responses.
    "The Passion" was supposedly written in some way to reflect Winterson's affair with Pat Kavanagh--but I could see little connection. It is a very odd story. The young Frenchman Henri is sent to fight in the Napoleonic wars, where he becomes a personal servant to Napoleon. He meets a Venetian woman with webbed feet, Villanelle, during the Russian campaign.  Villanelle has lived a life of cross-dressing in Venice, and she has had an affair with a married woman, with whom she is deeply in love. She is somehow recruited into a group of 'comfort women' for French generals in the Grande Armee. Henri meets her in Russia and falls in love with her, and they desert the army in Russia, making their way back to Venice on foot. Villanelle marries an ex-cook from the army: Henri kills him and winds up in prison, where Villanelle visits him, eventually bearing his child though refusing to marry him. There are two narrators--Henri and Villanelle. The narrators voices are strange; there is an overwhelming strangeness about the story; and I am not sure I would recommend the book. I fall back on the cliche "interesting," which is a way of avoiding making a serious, considered judgement on a book or a work of art. Sometimes it is a word we use to avoid appearing philistine and saying that a book or an art installation is simply rubbish.
    "Written on the Body" seems to me a much more accomplished novel. Although the first person narrator's gender is never mentioned, and there is scarcely a clue as to what it is, one has to assume that it is a female and that the book is about lesbian love.
The narrator has had her heart broken by an earlier affair with a married dentist, and she settles for a placid and uninteresting relationship with Jacqueline, with whom she is not in love. She then falls desperately in love with Louise--another married woman. She leave Jacqueline for Louise and life is idyllic until Louise's husband, Elgin, a cancer specialist, tells the narrator that Louise has cancer, and that if she returns to him, there is the chance of a cure--but if she stays with the narrator, Louise will die. The narrator decides she must leave Louise, and she buries herself in the country, where she lives a squalid life in a ramshackle cottage and works as a waitress in a down-market restaurant. Her boss--a woman--tries to start an affair with her, but also condemns her for leaving Louise, and urges her to go and find her. The narrator goes back to London and to Switzerland and searches in vain for Louise. She returns in misery to her squalid cottage in Yorkshire, and --lo and behold--Louise is there. End of book. 
    I would recommend this book--it is a celebration of love and--in one section--a paean of affection--not lust--for the body of the loved one. And it is exceedingly well-written. I think I will sample another Winterson novel when I run out of what I am reading at the moment. 
    Just as an aside, a day or two ago we saw a documentary about Susan Sontag. I was reminded of the Winterson books, because Sontag seemed to have Winterson's propensity for falling in love. First, as a seventeen year old girl with a professor of philosophy much older than her, and then with a long succession of different women, and one got the impression that the "falling in love relationship" was much more important to her than the physical aspect. (When I ask Joan about this point, she judiciously refrains from speculation)
    As for my current reading, I am well into Ann Enright's "The Green Road," and today the Washington Public Library informed me I could download to my I-Pad "A Spool of Blue Thread," by Anne Tyler. I have read a few of her books in the past, but nothing recently. They are usually about families, as indeed is the one Ann Enright novel --"The Gathering"--that I have read. James Wood in the New Yorker praises "The Green Road" and notes:
"More than most contemporary writers, the Irish novelist Anne Enright finds it hard to escape the tidal pull of the family. In a series of funny, bleak, radically unsentimental novels, she has examined the engrossments of such life and has pored over the social genetics of family inheritance—the unhappiness we bequeath, the pleasure we inherit, the tyranny of biological contingency. Like “The Gathering” (2007), in which the narrator tells the story of her brother’s suicide, in Brighton, and the consequent wake, her latest novel, “The Green Road” (Norton), is about a clan’s dispersal and reunion."
    I am about halfway through, and I have read the first ten pages of the Ann Tyler.
    More when I have finished the two books.

Resuming...

    It seems to have been a long time since I wrote anything here--I see it was April 28th when I last did anything--which means we have been close to a month here in the mews house we are renting in behind St. Mary Abbott's church, in Kensington--with Kensington High Street to the south and Kensington Church Street to the east. This is Drayson Mews, and there is a house here advertised for the unbelievable price of two million, six hundred thousand pounds. We have rented here before, a few summers ago: each year the landlady goes to another house she owns in Yorkshire. Our tenancy will run to July 17, when we will start a gypsy existence with a rented car, visiting the Cotswolds, Pembrokeshire, and Cornwall, with a couple of stops at my sister's home in Plymouth before ending at Heathrow on August 11th and flying to Washington.
    But I have been reading--extensively, and doing what I often do, which is to start following a trail--that is, reading some review, or noticing something in the newspapers, which sets me off googling and--then--one book leads to another.
   At the start of the last few weeks I remained fascinated by Siri Hufstedt. In addition to being a tremendously talented novelist, she is also a philosopher (expert on Kierkgarde), and art critic. I decided to read a book of her essays on art called The Mysteries of the Rectangle. She writes in detail about pictures by a number of artists such as Goya, Vermeer, and Gerhard Richter. She stresses the rewards to be gained by sustained, careful attention, noting that she spent two hours looking at one painting. She notes that books and films progress over time--but "a painting is all there at once," and you need to spend time with it and revisit it. She writes that it is only with patience and repeated viewings that "elusive meanings present themselves." She has a web-site, which is worth visiting and she has a blog in the New York Times.      Something has gone wrong with the font here, and I think the only thing I can do to remedy it is to post this entry and start over.