Natalia Ginzberg - A Family Lexicon

It feels like this book was written for the author and not for the reader.  A huge cast of family and friends are introduced without any context or continuity.  I found it nearly impossible to keep track of them all and the author does nothing to aid the reader.  I suppose the intended effect is one of familiarity and intimacy but my overwhelming feeling was one of confusion.

The prose is good, straightforward and uncomplicated.  Occasionally it captures the feeling of family life so perfectly it’s impossible to say the author isn’t an extremely gifted writer.  However, there is absolutely no structure to speak of.  There are no chapters and the double spaced line breaks that provide the only pauses may as well have been placed at random.  The narrative, if there is one, is jerky and staccato.  Characters and themes are introduced and then dropped again after a few sentences without rhyme or reason.  A typical section might run something like, “My father had a lab assistant who liked fish on a Friday.  My father called it nitwittery.  Mario was never a nitwit.  He once moved to Pisa to sleep with his friend’s ex.  Mother never liked communism but used to have a dress maker on so-and-so street.”  It’s more or less a stream of consciousness.  The text does have a feeling of intimacy and authenticity, as well it should given the author says she is writing from memory, but ultimately I found it sloppy and self-indulgent.  I wanted someone to think about the characters and present them to me in an intelligible way, not just dump out the waste paper basket of their memory onto a page.

The family seems to have lived an interesting life, collectively, in Italy during the run up to WW2 and its aftermath.  Nonetheless, I would struggle to tell you even how many brothers or sisters the author has after nearly 300 pages (4?).  It’s a chaos of loosely connected associations and is barely comprehensible as a novel, which is how the author claims they want the book to be read.  

The book also had the annoying habit of repeating family jokes, catch phrases and poems ad nauseam.  I felt like I would have preferred it if the author could have reminded the reader who’s who a bit more often and left the hackneyed jokes unrepeated.  There was also a huge amount of name dropping, presumably to show how important and wonderful they all are.

Another aspect of the book that really pissed me off was the disrespect the author has for the privacy of her family.  She writes uncomplimentary things about all of her family and never writes anything about herself.  Given she was already a successful author by the time she wrote it, I felt like she is using the lives of people she allegedly loves to draw attention to herself, further her career or earn money - which is pretty shitty in my view.  If one of my siblings had written a book like this about my family, I’d give them a good slap!  Why not change the names and say it’s a novel?  This seems to me to be what many other authors do, with good reason! 

A final gripe is why Daunt books chose an American translator, with all the consequences this entails for vocabulary and syntax, when it’s a British shop and Ginzberg’s father is stated to be an Anglophile.  I felt it would have been much more appropriate to the book’s nature to have a British translator.  What kind of Anglophile would ever use a word like ‘jackass’ for heaven’s sake?! 

I didn’t get much out this book at all and didn’t enjoy reading it.  I suppose I could have gone through the book and constructed a family tree or list of characters but I felt, ‘why should I bother if the author can’t even be fucked to organise their own thoughts?’ It was more or less a waste of time.  I think it would take someone with a colossal ego and extremely high opinion of themselves to write a book like this, which made me like it even less!

Neil M. Gunn - The Silver Darlings

The author creates a rich and detailed world, with lots of important 19th century historical themes.  It touches on the economic and social anatomy of an export-led fishing boom, the aftermath of the Highland clearances, the relationship between lords and crofters, the plague, evangelicalism and religious fervor.  This was well done and never felt heavy handed with the author choosing poignant vignettes to illustrate the wider point.  

This book is a bildungsroman set in coastal, north-east Scotland during the 19th century, after the Highland clearances.  The region undergoes a fishing boom centered on herring, which are called ‘the silver darlings.’   

The protagonist is a young boy called Finn, although the story begins with his father and mother.  His father is one of the first men in their village to buy a boat and begin fishing but, very soon after, he and his crew are captured by a naval press gang while at sea and forced into naval service.  Finn’s mother, Catrine, has a dream that her husband is dead.  

She is pregnant with Finn at the time and decides to move away from ‘Dale’ to ‘Dunster’ to stay with an old woman called Kirsty and her husband.  The family grows up here, plague comes to the village, Kirsty dies and Finn’s mother, who cared for her, becomes ill but survives.  Kirsty leaves her croft and some money to Catrine and Finn and they continue to live there. 

Finn eventually becomes a fisherman in the crew of a local hero called Roddie.  Catrine and Roddie fall in love and get married and Finn comes of age, becoming the captain of his own boat and falling in love with a woman called Una.

I really enjoyed the narrative pacing and structure of the book.  To be sure, there are a fair number of exciting events that take place over the 20-30 odd years the book covers but it never felt outlandish or melodramatic.  The feeling of the plot is quotidian and realistic.  Just as exciting as the tales from the high seas are the internal, emotional storms that the characters navigate and often these are better and more clearly sketched than the physical adventures of the fishermen.   The best of these were Finn’s struggles to come to terms with his mother’s relationship with Roddie, his captain, and his attempts to understand his own emotions about Una - a popular fish gutter who has many suitors in the village.  The book’s dialogue is also generally strong, which is an achievement.

I did not like the book’s tendency towards romanticism and sentimentality.  This was most obvious in the prose, which could be florid and verbose.  In stark contrast to the dialogue, which is pithy.  There’s no economy to the writing whatsoever and huge numbers of words are used to achieve underwhelming results.  Often, so many words are thrown together haphazardly it’s quite hard to work out what the author means.  I suppose it’s supposed to be poetic but I sometimes found it unclear and prattling.  

Take this example describing waves. It begins, ‘no poem could describe them all’ but unfortunately that doesn’t stop the author from trying: ‘Take this one coming in at them now - now! - its water on the crest turned into little waters, running herding together, before - up - up! Over its shoulder and down into the long flecked hollow like a living skin.  Or that one steaming off there! - a great lump of ocean, a long-backed ridge overtopping all, a piled-up mountain.’ (p298) I found myself wondering if any of it added much or described waves meaningfully.  

Another passage, where the prose is equally purple, includes no less than 8 gerunds - ‘during the long, dark hours, an awakened ear had heard the booming, the ravening roaring winds, as if held to security by a miracle in the centre of a crashing hell.  And more than once the mind had rushed wakefulness in a vast upheaving and plunging recession, a tearing loose, with a blinded moment of dread that could feel no more as it waited the smashing obliterating impact.’ (p325) 

Sometimes sentences can run to 100-odd words and 16 commas (p368/69), which is too long for me especially when coupled with flashy prose.  Sometimes it’s just too romantic: ‘her shoulders and head uprose like an obstruction, a smooth rock, in the river of time running round and past her.  It was shape in the void, it was constancy in the flux, it was beauty’s still flower in eternity.’ (p370)   The author never seems afraid to use three descriptions where one would suffice!  

This tendency towards overly-elaborate and ‘poetic’ prose, perhaps understandably, is at its worst discussing romance.  ‘He let the dark girl - brown in her darkness, a mouse brightness - fade from his mind, pass away into the outer ring of eternal beauty and eternal sorrow, the dark outer ring of the song, where it is lonely to wander’ (p400). I thought it was high falutin and ineffective.  It is coupled with a weird sort of prudishness when it comes to sexual matters.  Where other matters can be described in candid terms, if the author isn’t gripped by the desire to be poetic, sex is always dealt with in breathless witterings.  It’s all, ‘crash through the barrier of strange reluctance’ and ‘find peace for herself and her body inside the circle of his strength’ (p230).  Given Roddie’s violent outburst in a bar in Stornaway, I’m not sure getting fucked by him would be such a peaceful experience!  Catrine, an otherwise highly pragmatic and strong woman, seems to turn into a giddy schoolgirl, rather than a middle-aged mother of an adult child, when she eventually gets it on with Roddie. ‘“Roddie, no!” she said, feeling the dark force of his body coming at her, pleading wildly out of the weakness that was melting her flesh.’ (p478)  The appearance of sex is always the prompt for ugly and circuitous prose!

There is also a very annoying amount of repetition, which really starts to grate after 600 odd pages.  Everytime a fisherman swears to God at sea he must touch cold iron. This made an appearance every 20 pages or so whenever anyone is in a boat - which is a fair amount!  One of Roddie’s crew called Henry is never mentioned without the word ‘satiric’ being used.  Finn’s biggest adventure, an ill fated trip to Stornoway in foul weather with Roddie, is related at great length and is then more or less repeated when Finn recounts the story back on dry land.  

It now feels like I’ve written a lot more about how I disliked the prose than I’ve written about how much I enjoyed the setting, feel and plot of the story, which were all really good.  Even though the prose really pissed me off at points and the book has an unmistakable leaning towards sentimentalism, ultimately, there’s a lot more to enjoy than there is to feel upset about.  It’s a good book and I would definitely recommend it.