Bleak, bitter and brilliant. The author’s synopsis is as follows: “It is about the Regent’s Canal in London; a bench; a man; a woman; a gang of youths; secrets; commuting; work; bicycle bells; canal dredgers; technology; swans; Canada geese; coots; memory; civil aircraft; the London bombers and 9/11. But crucially it is about the man, the woman and the swan.” The three meet when the unnamed narrator gives up his job to spend his days sitting canalside and consumed with boredom. Part way through he discusses the 7/7 bombs with a female companion who frequents the same bench. One remarks on the ordinariness of the people who carried it out, caught moments before on CCTV. Rourke’s novel acts in the same way. It feels homemade, assembled from the mundane and unassuming and detonating into something truly frightening, violent and wildly illogical. It is terrifying for showing boredom as a force. The narrator explains: “A lot of people have attributed boredom to a lack of things to do – this has always confused me. For me the act of boredom, by its very nature, is doing something. As I have mentioned before, boredom moves me, it forces me to react.” Rourke’s use of repetition – in scene, in dialogue, in imagery (the lovely “greasy” rain he uses so much) – works as an illustration of this banality-with-dynamics. Both meaningless and meaningful, as one reviewer put it, and I’m still slightly in awe as to how he pulls it off. He is also one of the best articulators of silence that you’re likely to read. In the narrator’s conversations with the woman, “…” becomes just as valid a response as the verbal, and says as much by saying nothing.
Her new collection of essays – How Did You Get This Number – is as good as the Cake one. She writes particularly brilliantly about Paris (including the useful rule your language teacher never told you that “Any word over ten letters in English is the same word in French. Fact.”) and pets. Of parrots: “Is it such a good idea to purchase an animal whose face is the basis for can openers?” I’m revising plans for a Beckett-quoting African Grey in the shop on that very basis.
Six essays are represented in paper doll form on her website here:
And there’s more about the rise of female confessional memoirists here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/01/emily-gould-meghan-daum-confessional
Yesterday a moorhen surprised us both by winging into the shop (I think it’s fair to say he was the more startled of the two because he crapped everywhere, whereas I kept reasonable control of my bowels). We both flapped considerably for about five minutes. Then he eyeballed the Russian Lit section, further redecorated the walls/windows/floor with poop that looked like a pesto-based pasta sauce, before departing WITHOUT BANGING HIS HEAD (let that be a lesson to us all). Anyway, I have cleaned up to the best of my ability and inclination but suspect some incontinence remains, somewhere. If you pick up a soiled book I have wet wipes and can offer money off.
Often as a bookseller you are inexplicably given gifts, I am discovering. Over the past 12 months customer largess has included – in no particular order – a multitude of cake-based treats, periodic bottles of wine, bulk buys of cider, a tiara, a plastic receptacle for curry powder, salopettes, a lego man, a foil-wrapped sandwich of indeterminate meat and a paper plate decorated with glitter (one of my favourite presents until the sparkly stuff started transferring to my physiognomy… and lunch).
Two days ago I received, in quick succession, two goodies that seemed to trump this collective boon entirely. The first was a billion dollar bill and was possibly sent to me by mistake. I was momentarily (and monetarily) overwhelmed before reading in small letters underneath the White House that it was not legal tender and probably belonged to a board game of very convoluted rules. I gave it to the eight-year-old brother of the paper plate-bequeathing girl and slowly came to terms with penury again.
Just a few hours later I was handed what can only be described as a phallus of tea. Now I am no stranger to tea-inspired gifts, both professionally and personally. In the shop I have thrice been given mugs to hold it and, more often, bags containing it. At Christmas, my sister sent me tea that had been paw-picked by Chinese monkeys. I should be unfazed by kettle offerings. And I was, initially. This particular goodie came from a customer returning from an extended holiday in the Caribbean and, despite looking vaguely narcotic (it is wrapped in a sausage of clingfilm), I looked forward to drinking my cocoa-flavoured hot beverage and thanked him accordingly. It was only later in the afternoon, as I was working out embarrassingly simple addition on the calculator for a sale, that I noticed the corner of my desk on which it lay was attracting rather startled looks. There were whisperings. One man came in for a closer look and reported back to his wife with the merest baffled shake of his head. Then they both left. This continued for some time until I was suitably bothered to stand up and scrutinise it from their position, whereupon the full suggestiveness of the object struck me. With its crudely printed serving instructions sellotaped to one side, concluding with a bold “Enjoy” directive and multiple exclamation marks, the tea had taken on the appearance of a home-baked sex toy. A Class A one at that. I have put it on the shelf next to The Tea Lover’s Companion (ISBN 1905400306), which sounds aptly euphemistic.
Who knew I could ever come to worship a New Yorker with the horrendous appellation of Sloane? But I think I was a little in love from the title of this collection alone. And then she wrote something particularly vitriolic about a friend’s wedding with an overwhelming sentiment of being ‘put upon’ and I was forever going to be her champion . I have my reasons. Her essays, which are funny and cranky and wonderful, also relate how she once baked a cookie of her boss’s head and a lingering paranoia that her secret plastic pony collection will be discovered posthumously – and with some distress – by close family members.
Ps. The name thing is dealt with in the book. Hilariously. Also, three essays from it have been turned into three-dimensional plexiglass dioramas on her website here:
Prove you’re well-RED and charitable by buying something from Penguin’s newly-launched classics range in association with Bono/Bobby Shriver’s Product (RED) initiative. We’ve got all the titles in the shop, which have striking crimson covers and cost the same as any other title on the Penguin Classics list. The difference is that 50% of the profits from each sale will go to the Global Fund to help eliminate AIDS in Africa.
All very well and good.
Alternatively if, like us, the consumerist bent of Product (RED) makes you feel slightly ill (coupled with the awful singing Dubliner link…), you could just give the money direct to charity. Or you could buy any other book in the shop and still feel very philanthropic because a small percentage of that sale will go to ME and keep me in hot water bottles and gin over the gloomy winter.
Book Barge regular and English teacher extraordinaire Lisa Farrell sent in this review of Luis Alberto Urrea’s new-in-paperback novel Into the Beautiful North – a must-read for all who like their stories flamboyant and character driven. The author himself, who is rather brilliant, is appearing at Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath next week for his one and only UK reading. Info here: http://www.mrbsemporium.com/Events.htm If you can’t make it, go and visit Mr B’s another time anyway. It’s a quite, quite heavenly shop.
The women of Tres Camarones have had enough. All of their men have left to travel to ‘el norte’ in search of work, leaving a motley bunch behind (the ineffectual ‘rich man’ of the town, Garcia-Garcia; the crazy Pepino and gay bar owner, Tacho). And the bandidos have moved into town…
Inspired by a screening of The Magnificent Seven at the local cinema (part of a Yul Brynner season demanded by the town’s matriarch, Tia Irma, in homage to the best actor to come out of Mexico) nineteen-year-old Nayeli (a martial arts trained footballer and waitress) sets off with her two friends and Tacho to bring back seven soldiers who will help rid the town of the bandidos. She packs two cards for her journey: one from Matt the missionary, who came to Tres Camarones hoping to convert the peasants and went away breaking the heart of every girl in the town, and a postcard from Kankakee, Illinois from her father.
What ensues is a wonderfully imagined road trip from Tres Camarones to Tijuana and over the border to Los Yunaites. Along the way the group meets a colourful array of memorable characters, from the crazy, stick-toting Atomiko to suave Don Chava Chavarin, one-time Mexican bowling champion and paramour of Tia Irma. By turns moving and hilarious, this novel is that special blend of humour, pathos and social realism that is rare to find. A real gem of a book!
Sky News at Christmas and now the dizzying intellectual heights (ahem) of Channel 4/More4′s TV Book Club. The boat’s reading group featured on the show last night discussing Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and looked gloriously clever and not at all Pimm’s-soaked in block colour and false eyelashes. Watch it here:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-tv-book-club/4od
The Book Barge only features in the last five minutes of the show but the entirety is worth a look, if only for Jo Brand’s insightful Peter Andre quizzing (“So which do you prefer, words or pictures?”) and the conclusion that books are better than eReaders, which flattered our booksellerly sensibilities immensely.
Anyone inspired to join our reading group can do so by emailing info@thebookbarge.co.uk. The next meeting is on Thursday 15th July in the Apple Tree Coffee Shop, Barton Marina at 19:30. We’re reading Brooklyn by Colm Toibin.
Eagleman’s series of short thought experiments imagine a world beyond the one we know in some of the most imaginative and unsettling writing you’re likely to read this year. Our hauntingly favourite vignette was the nightmarish suggestion in Subjunctive that the afterlife is full of all the people you could have been – those who made better choices and now brush past you in bars to toast their recent successes or jog down the street outside with fitter bodies, and those who made worse decisions and squandered their potential in indolence and fear. And thus, Eagleman writes, “Your punishment is cleverly and automatically regulated: the more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with.”
So the scarecrow appeal was met with resounding apathy and confusion reigned. Wednesday evening was half-heartedly spent trying to fashion figures out of old sheets, ladies’ hosiery and a stapler, which I suspect is not de rigeur in scarecrow manufacturing circles. We were left with a fraying and emaciated-looking voodoo doll family, since binned. Subsequently, our grand designs were shelved for something altogether simpler and solitary – a lone pirate figure with arms that defy medical science. He is rather grandly called THE BOOKANEER – like ‘buccaneer’, but specialising in the pillage and plunder of floating bookshops. This particular specimen (who smells of tummy button dirt and cauliflower) has already looted Mills&Boon classic The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst, which he is reading upside down because he is steaming drunk on Bargain Booze’s finest Jamaican rum. Bookaneers generally are swarthy and foul-mouthed and should be avoided unless you’re looking for trouble with a capital T. They extort, pilfer, filch, sack, maraud, embezzle, kidnap, ravage and are generally bad eggs. Contrary to popular belief they don’t sing sea shanties, preferring Lady Gaga choooons and the dulcet tones of Justin Bieber. They LOVE Justin Bieber. What else… Bookaneers can shoot peas from their peg legs, thumb wrestle with their hook hands and get their waistcoats made on Saville Row. They get really irritated when people touch their hair. They don’t all have scurvy. Most just suffer from man flu and PRETEND it’s scurvy. Above all, bookaneers want the TomToms on their frigates to stop sending them down narrow waterways because they get their hulls wedged and can’t reverse.
Anyway, the Barton Scarecrow Festival is today and tomorrow and likely to be won by a terrific Rolf Harris at Gallery Three. There’s also a Teddy Extravaganza in the village – take your stuffed toys down and they can bungee jump and all manner of exciting things.
