Poustinia (Catherine de Hueck Doherty, 1975)

I am fascinated by human solitude. I learned of the Russian orthodox concept of the poustinia years ago, but only very cursorily. It is a tradition of retreating in solitude to a designated cabin in the woods, to sit in silence and contemplate God. Essentially, a form of meditation. This notion stuck to my mind, without me really pursuing it further – until a few months ago when I chanched upon this volume at a local second hand bookstore. I figured I should honor the coincidence, and bought the book.

 It is written by a russian-born Canadian social worker baroness named Catherine de Hueck Doherty. She felt the need to spread the Russian orthodox teachings in the anglosphere, so she founded a religious community in Ontario and wrote this book. Reading religious literature of this kind is a novel experience to me, and I found it fascinating to enter into the mindset of a believer. There wasn’t all that much information about poustinia, but apparently it means desert, and is meant to recall the desert fathers of the 3nd century, like John of Chrysostom or Arsenius the Great. I actually had a kind of poustinik lifestyle for a while, when i lived in the Norwegian countryside (in the sense that I led a semi-hermetic lifestyle). That is what for me is the lure of the poustinik, the withdrawal into the mental world, to contemplative, meditative states. Some religious traditions involve meditative or trance-like prayer, like the yogic and dervish practices in the hindu and sufi traditions. The jewish tradition has a practice called davening, physically engaging prayer by mental recital and bodily rocking back and forth.

My grandmother’s sister was a nun, and my great grandfather was a rabbi, so religious perspectives are present in my family history, even though I was raised extremely atheist. Or, I’d actually prefer the term, non-religious, because to me atheism often entails a modicum of militancy.

I can’t say i learned a lot from this book, but it was a new experience that wakened my dormant interest in French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and Russian religious thinkers like Rozanov, Berdyaev and Shestov. Croyant thinking is so foreign to me that it intrigues me. It was almost written as a self-help book, with a quite loose style. Some details from the time it was written was amusing to read, like “I felt, as the young people say nowadays, ‘wiped out'”, or references to movies like Nicholas and Alexandra, and books like Black Like Me.

Outline (Rachel Cusk, 2014)

The outline of a life – is that what is meant by the title of this celebrated “autofiction” bestseller from 2014? I read it thusly, because this book dips in and out of the life stories of a series of characters, and provides middle age sophistry as commentary. I found it quite charming.

I am always tragically late to all books with buzz, probably because the buzz ticks me off, and it is impossible to know if there is any redeeming quality to the book once the dust settles. I have found that the dust will have settled about six years after publication, so I tried this book out on a whim. Well, that’s only part of the truth – it was also a curiosity about what passes for contemporary fiction these days that brought this book to my attention. It is part of a trilogy of books, all supposedly written in the same style, published 2014-2018. And it is a very peculiar style indeed.

The story concerns a writer, about to spend a week as a guest lecturer in creative writing in Athens. She meets people during this week, whose lives are explored in detail. Not much is said about the main character, she more or less goes around as a vessel for the other stories, which makes for quite an unusual effect. I took this as a possible comment on how certain men annoyingly overshare and take over conversations – but later in the novel the same procedure goes for the women. A little trick that Cusk uses (that I’ve noticed elsewhere in newer fiction, I wonder where it comes from? possibly magazine journalism) is to mix first person narration with spoken lines of the characters, which produces a mesmerising effect. Something like this, from the beginning of chapter seven:

I said it looked very impressive, and we got out of the car and sat at a table, beside one of the palm trees. It was important, he said, to remember to enjoy yourself along the way: in a sense, this had become his philosophy of life these days.

It is a middle aged person thinking about life, surrounded by other middle aged persons thinking about life, too. I’ve never read a book that explicitly deals with thoughts on the life course. Most closely maybe Annie Ernaux, Nina Bouraoui or possibly Benjamins bok by Bo Carpelan (a book someone recommended to me). Maybe the Sports Writer by Richard Ford? But all these books are about one character dwelling on aging, Cusk’s unique contribution is to provide a chorus of voices – and this without even giving the protagonist much space at all.

The story is quite secondary, the main event is the composition. In short, she meets a man on the plane who takes her out on a boat, she has lunch with an Irish fellow guest teacher, she meets with a Greek literary agent and a local writer. And she describes her teaching sessions, where the students talk about their assignments. I don’t know how much of this is based on lived experience, and I wonder how knowing that would change my perception of the book. I also thought about whether there is any larger theme to this purported trilogy, or if it just keeps going in the same style. I might return to volume two at some point. We’ll see…

Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871-72)

Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871)
Middlemarch was recently voted best British novel of all time. I’ve always figured that it was too heavy, with its 900 pages of English 1830s provincial life. Having no real prior experience of reading Victorian novels, I decided I must take up the challenge of this book.

Middlemarch is divided in eight books, and was published in installments, as was fashionable at the time. Many of the chapters begin with an epigraph or quotation, from the likes of Chaucer, Robert Burton and Dante. Reading a book written in the 1870s set in the 1830s is like being on a bridge back in time. I don’t usually veer outside of the 20th or 21st century in my reading, but for a historically minded reader like me, it was quite exhilarating (in its own little way).
I won’t bother going in to the plot that much, but the book is about young Dorothea Brooke, who marries an older scholar, in the hopes that it will provide her with intellectual stimulation. This turns out not to be the case, and the marriage is a failure. A lot of the events of the book revolve around the theme of disappointment. I could even guess that the title of the book is meant to recall middling living, and the acceptance of failure. It might also suggest the middle of England and the middle of life. It is quite a good title for the book. The idea of the book came to Eliot (whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, but as young readers might not realize she published under a male pseudonym due to prejudices in 19th century society) after having lived a number of years in the middle English town of Nuneaton in Coventry. In fact, the book is a quite astute sociological portrait of town life with the interactions of the bankers, the doctors, the lawyers and the farmers. The idea of a book as a portrait of a town was merged with another novel idea of Eliot’s, which is the story of Dorothea.

Reading the book gave me a deeper understanding of 19th century Britain. A linguistic note: a common expression in the book was “by Jove”, which I felt compelled to investigate the etymology of. Apparently Jove is connected to the PIE word for sky and God, that we recognize in words like Dieu and Jupiter. Jupiter is Jove-pater, i.e. sky-father. Fascinating stuff.

Jews without Money (Michael Gold, 1930)

The life of a poor jewish boy living in the tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1900’s. This book is credited with being one of the earliest examples of working class literature, but I have my doubts about that. I bought this book, along with “Call it Sleep” (Henry Roth, 1934), on a trip to New York two years ago, because I was interested in that time period, and of Jewish life in the Lower East Side at the time. I also read Jacob Riis’ “How the other Half Lives”, from 1890, a journalistic take on life in the tenements for poor people, and the mix of all kinds of immigrants. This book captures some of the same things, but in memoirs form, from the perspective of a young jewish boy. It is filled with horrific stories of violence, injustice, sadness and lurid goings-on, all told in a quite matter-of-factly childish point of view. I learned half-way through reading the book that it isn’t author Michael Gold’s actual memoirs, but rather a novel inspired by his childhood, a fact which instantly changed the reading experience, and lowered the satisfaction of my “reality hunger” (to introduce a concept by writer David Shields). It got me to thinking about my attitude towards memoirs and fiction, and how I as a reader usually value a real life testimony more than a novel, which seems cheaper, or not as real. This is an old discussion in literary circles, no doubt, but it was unusually sharply actualized for me this time, when I for half of the book thought it was the author’s verbatim recollections.
Reading about Jewish customs and family histories in Romanian and Hungarian Jewry, I was also struck by heritage-related feeling – as I am wont to do with this kind of material; “what if my grandparents went to America instead”, “what would life have been if they had been able to stay in their home town” and similar questions. I like a lot of the stories collected in this book, and I recognize a lot of the observations from my own life. I liked being in company of the Jews of the lower east side, and realize that I miss a Jewish component in my own life.
One point of conjecture with this book is that it sometimes feels a bit preachy about how the working class is exploited. At least I thought it was a bit too transparent once I learned that Michael Gold was a lifelong working class activist. I have had this discussion in relation to Berthold Brecht too, but as I am often on the fence about these things, I’m not sure.