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One Year of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for just over a year, and it’s time for a little retrospective. I started the blog for a few different reasons. I was about to leave Cambridge and spend a year in Russia, and I would be losing the company of my dear friends Sophie and James, both of whom received the brunt of my reading reviews over dinner each day. I wanted to tell somebody – anyone really – about what I was looking at and what I thought of it. A blog has the advantage of eventually creating a little community around it, with regular commentators and a discursive atmosphere. This has not happened with Mostly About Stories yet, but perhaps it will one day.

Another reason was that I wanted to make sure I was writing. My creativity is fickle, but both from a literary and an academic perspective it makes sense for me to be regularly squeezing thoughts and words out of myself. The weekly/fortnightly deadline I set myself was successful in forcing me to write. It also forces me to think, just a little. Another, closely related, advantage is that of the reading I have done, much of it has been from my reading list for the next academic year, so writing about these books serves as a preliminary solidification in my memory of impressions and the early formulation of critical viewpoints.

It is funny how, as I began to see viewers come in, and then eventually began to see one or two of them stay, I started to be concerned about views. Initially I was writing for myself, on the whole. But once I had a little counter, like a budding little “influencer” I came to consider how to boost my popularity. Luckily, that desire is not too dominant. The fact is, if I wanted views I would need to focus on writing “analyses” and “summaries” of my reading list. In the end, the idea of making a small community of like-minded readers is more attractive, and although having some views are important in that – otherwise how will anyone find the blog at all? – a different style and some small degree of quality is more important.

But anyway.

What Went Right; What Went Wrong

So, as far as I understand it, the blog has not done badly in terms of views. After all, who reads these days? As the year went on, I got more and more of them – except for the final months. when university ended and people presumably had better things to do. Now that we are into January, things are picking up again, and I hope that the trend will continue once we get into February proper.

Not a disaster by any stretch. As the year progressed I had slightly more viewers than when I started!

I had a comment too! My review of Satantango had a comment by the translator. This was very exciting, because I’d liked the book a lot. Nonetheless, that’s one comment over the course of an entire year. I’d prefer to have more. Engagement is great, because it makes you – as the author – feel that people are at least reaching the end of your pieces. I have, as I imagine others do also, an instinctive distrust of Google’s Analytics, which although they are very detailed, paint a somewhat depressing view of how long people actually look at things. Or perhaps it’s just that my content isn’t good. Who knows?

The same situation holds true with my subscribers. Or should I say subscriber? The subscription box, much as is with the case with comments, isn’t easy to locate, and I imagine confirming an email subscription takes a lot of effort – I know I’d hardly do it myself. But still, it would be good to have at least one more subscriber, and ideally someone I didn’t actually know in real life.

A Bit of Data

Mostly About Stories is a book blog. I dropped maths as early as I could, and although I like it, nonetheless it is one of my weaker areas. Still. Here are some statistics for you.

In 2019 I had 4635 views from 3336 unique visitors, 2 comments, and 1 subscriber. By the end of the year, in October and November, I was averaging 35 views a day. On my best day I had 96 views – that day was also my birthday, funnily enough – but as most of the views were on my article about Walter Benjamin this seems a simple coincidence. At the time of writing there are 37 posts on the blog, which is pretty good going. I only once took a break between posts of longer than two weeks (my stated schedule in the about page).

For a book blog this may be good, but probably isn’t. My only real source of data is this page.

Concerning the Writing

Of course, it’s all well and good to look at metrics and think of plans, but really the heart of any blog is its content. Mostly About Stories is dominated, in its views, by my piece on Walter Benjamin’s the Storyteller (see above). Next to that is my translation of Kafka’s Before the Law, and my essay on Gogol’s The Nose. But everything that I’ve written, almost without exception, has had a viewer or two. That makes writing them worthwhile, as it’s often the less well-known things that I’m most excited to share with people.

My favourite pieces on the blog, or at least the ones I feel most proud of, are likely Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, and Valentin Rasputin’s Money for Maria. I also quite like my translations of Theodor Storm’s poetry.

I do admit that this blog probably lacks a coherent identity. It’s basically just me reading literature, mostly from my reading lists, and writing about it. I quite like the idea, going forward, of being a bit more disciplined with my post lengths. I read somewhere that viewer attention drops off rapidly once a post goes over 1700 words, and I want to make that my target. Something should be not too long, but also sufficiently in-depth as to be interesting. That would be good.

Steps Forward and Goals for 2020

I recently changed the theme of Mostly About Stories. I think it looks better now. It makes the text easier to read and has a bit more of a modern feel to it.

I’d like to have a few more comments, maybe another subscriber, before this year is over. All that would be good. Perhaps I should be like those annoying YouTubers who end every video begging us to like and subscribe? It’s a difficult balance to get and I tend to hope any readers who want to comment will comment without prompting, but perhaps I should try to be a little more pushy?

Anyway, I hope you found this look at one year of Mostly About Stories to be slightly entertaining. Remember to like, subscribe, and leave a comment about how I can improve the blog going forward! 😊

Progress and my Discontent – Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends

The trouble with going to a university like Cambridge is that I could review the Irish author Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends entirely through anecdotes and references to my own friends and acquaintances. Because if there is one thing this book does well above all else it is (re)create a certain type of person, one dominating English faculties the world over. It is funny that this even extends to the cover of my edition of the book. The two girls there look remarkably like an ex-friend of mine, and if you’re anyway connected to that world, you’ll recognize the hair and dress sense too.

A cover of Conversations with Friends shows a drawing of two women — The cover of my edition of *Conversations with Friends* shows two girls who look weirdly like a girl I was once friends with… It is a girl who populates humanities faculties the world over.

But anecdotes, probably, will not do. Rooney and her work are being praised the world over, a tv-series is in the works, and she’s not even thirty. The question, then, is whether this book is actually any good. At the end of the day, anybody can tape our banal dinnertime conversations, can write down a list of topics that come up again and again. To make a good book it isn’t enough just to capture reality; that reality needs to be transformed such as to give it greater significance. Given the context, it is a balancing act for Rooney. First, she has to show us that our conversations aren’t as significant as we thought, but then that our lives are significant precisely where we don’t expect it. That’s how the material can become truly transformative.

The Plot of Conversations with Friends

Frances is a twenty-one-year-old student in Dublin who wants to write. She’s rather cold and doesn’t have a huge number of friends. Her best friend is Bobbi, who is cool. Bobbi and Frances together perform in poetry readings. At one of these poetry readings they meet Melissa, a well-known journalist, who decides to write about them. At this point the two young women are taken into Melissa’s world, one from a higher class than what Frances is used to. At a party Frances gets to know Nick, Melissa’s husband, and they start sleeping together. But sleeping with someone, especially someone who is married, isn’t always a painless operation. This new relationship ends up straining Frances’ relationship with those around her and revealing an awful lot about herself that she perhaps didn’t want to know.

Thematically, Conversations with Friends does a lot of things. One of the main conflicts is between youthful idealism and aged experience. Melissa and Nick are a lot older than Frances and Bobbi, and their views consequently differ a lot. It’s one thing to talk about destroying capitalism; quite another to, when faced with the richness of its blessings, reject it once again. In the same way, an adulterous relationship is hardly the ideal sort of relationship for plenty of reasons, and Frances needs to move away from an intellectual view of the world to have any chance of enjoying it. Purity localised within yourself might work, but demanding the world be equally perfect is a recipe for disaster.

Form and Structure

Conversations with Friends reminds me, to a large extent, of Brett Easton Ellis’s debut novel, Less than Zero. Both of them take a youthful cast of characters and reveal the fault lines within their world. Both of them also share a similar pared-down style that lacks direct relation of the characters’ emotions. Conversations with Friends uses first-person narration, but Frances hides her personal views from the reader just as much as she does from herself, so that the narration feels strangely empty. There is also no use of speech marks. It is easy enough to tell who is talking and when, but it gives the effect of isolating Frances. It feels like we are only inside her mind, and that connections with other people are fleeting. I like it; it suits the idea of the novel. We may talk and talk yet never reach each other’s hearts.

Culture and Politics

A bit like Less than Zero, Conversations with Friends is full of those little cultural markers which, like spices, give their representation of reality its relevance and accuracy. Films, books, television series, and even games are all named in logical places. Rooney wants to show the kind of shared cultural milieu that her characters inhabit, and she succeeds. But the naming doesn’t just extend to cultural artefacts – the politics of Conversations with Friends is also decidedly locked into its time. News of Syria, police brutality, and so on all tie the work into the late 2010s. The characters are all politically radical, as we humanities students often are. Communism, anarchism, Gilles Deleuze, modern feminism – a common frame of political reference is established early on.

Mark Fisher, whose work I’ve written on here, certainly seems relevant in the context of the characters’ depressions and despairs under late capitalism. While I read, I also thought a lot about David Foster Wallace’s essay on Dostoevsky, where he talks about the kind of literature we need to write to be able to move on from the pervasive ironic unseriousness of the present day. Rooney doesn’t really move beyond this irony, but instead of attacking the systematic problems and inequalities in the modern state her targets seem to be the very people who think they are most against the state. I mean, it’s in the title – conversations dominate. And conversations achieve very little in this book. The characters, concerned as they are with everything that is wrong with the world, don’t seem interested in doing anything about it.

What really matters

In the end Conversations with Friends is about conversations with friends, and the friends and time the characters spend with them become far more important than their political views. It is not that politics divides us – the characters in the book are all on the same page – but rather that politics doesn’t bring the characters together. But speaking, revealing the truth of one’s heart – this does have the capacity to create a lasting and valuable relationship between people. Ultimately, the contents of the relationships prove less important than the relationships themselves. Frances goes from a position of apparently great academic knowledge but limited self-knowledge to almost the exact opposite, and she’s all the happier for it.

What I liked about Conversations with Friends

I ended up liking quite a few things about Conversations with Friends. For one, the book not only accurately portrays its chosen milieu, it also successfully satirises it. The book is, I mean, quite funny. “I said hello, though what I meant was: I hope you haven’t found out about me sleeping with your husband”. Frances’s deadpan style makes humour easy. The humour is biting and modern, and indeed another thing I liked about the book was that it really felt it was written in this century. Rooney successfully incorporates instant messaging, emails, and games in a way that is natural, instead of pretending they don’t exist.

I also liked the way that the people were also modern. Their concerns were relevant, their attitudes – this kind of particular middle-class guilt – are attitudes that really haven’t existed for very long. Rooney gives voice not to a people who have been traditionally voiceless, but to part of a new generation that hasn’t yet been given voice. In this sense, the book is pretty unique for the moment. Even the older characters were well done. I felt Frances’s fear when she went home to her alcoholic father’s house, and recognised my own father in the language of Frances’s.

The way that Rooney emphasises the importance of human connections and relationships is also something I liked. It’s not an original message, but it’s one we all need to hear. The incorporation of a little spiritual subplot wasn’t half-bad either, though Frances’ modern sensibility prevents this from going very far. As is, I suppose, reasonable enough. The book, for all its dryness – Conversations with Friends definitely came from under Raymond Carver’s Overcoat, so to speak – also has a few moments of surprising beauty, like this one: “Buses ran past like boxes of light, carrying faces in the windows”. It’s sometimes easy to forget that the world in front of us is capable of that.

What I didn’t like

“you have to do more than say you’re anti things” – Bobbi. Rooney is a self-professed Marxist, and Conversations with Friends does well in showing the complicated structures that reinforce unequal hierarchies, oppress certain groups, and all of that stuff. Frances claims she doesn’t want to work, but through connections ends up making quite a bit of money on a writing project. Everything works out in the end, but only because she is already, comparatively, well-placed within the late stage capital environment of modern Ireland as a middle-class white woman.

A photo of Sally Rooney — Sally Rooney was born in 1991, so unlike the people I’m usually reading she’s neither dead nor old. But she’s pretty cool! Photo by Alberto Cristofari—Contrasto/Redux via TIME

But though I appreciated the politics of Conversations with Friends, I felt the ultimate message was somewhat off. Rooney has written that she doesn’t know how to incorporate her politics into her work, and I completely understand the difficulty. But to reject politics in favour of the present moment and relationships (as the book’s conclusion seems to suggest) feels a lot like rejecting political action altogether. Talk accomplishes nothing, and since nobody seems serious about acting the overall feeling is that we may as well ignore the glaring problems we’re facing and hope they’ll just go away. I don’t really like the pessimism of this undertone; it sits uneasily with me.

Conclusion

I think I must have liked Conversations with Friends, though, in the end. After all, it’s a debut novel. It’s funny, at times even beautiful, and it hits close to home. The challenge of conveying radical politics within a novel while still making the novel compelling is a great one, and Rooney’s in no way to blame for not entirely succeeding. In fact, I’m glad that she at the very least reveals the degree of hypocrisy that underlines a lot of our virtue signalling these days. The value of our friendships and relationships transcends the political interests of the present moment, and hopefully always will. But we shouldn’t give up on change altogether. There is a compromise out there. The challenge of the great novels to come is finding it.

I’m looking forward to reading Normal People soon.

Update: I read it!

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day – A Review

My friend James almost always brings up The Remains of the Day when we talk about literature. He’s a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro and rather thought the book would be my cup of tea. Well, at long last I’ve read the book and I have to admit that he was right. The Remains of the Day is a fascinating and sad story about the passage of time, and what we can salvage from the end of our lives, when it might seem that so much has passed us by. At my advanced age of twenty-two, it seems perfectly suited for me.

A photo of Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017 — Kazuo Ishiguro is among the most celebrated authors writing in the UK now, and *The Remains of the Day* is probably his most famous work. He won the Nobel Prize in 2017. Photo by Frankie Fouganthin (CC BY-SA 4.0)

It tells the story of the life of a butler, Mr Stevens, who works in a great English country house, Darlington Hall, and the challenges he faces when he comes to look back on his past in his twilight years. For me the book is particularly poignant because of my own experience of the topics dealt within it, as my grandmother lives in a castle that is still served by staff (though they don’t live on site). Although it was published in 1989 and the action takes place in 1956, the questions and concerns of The Remains of the Day all remain vital and interesting now, and stretch far beyond the secret world of British upper classes it takes as its setting.

The Story

Mr Stevens, the aging butler of Darlington Hall, is presented with his greatest challenge yet when his new American employer suggests he goes for a car ride to get himself out of the house. The American is returning for a few weeks to his homeland and thinks that Stevens could use the fresh air. Stevens himself is not altogether for the idea, but he manages to convince himself. He has begun to notice certain mistakes in the running of the household, which he attributes to a lack of staff employed since Lord Darlington, the original owner, left. The trip can therefore be justified as a business one, for Stevens has recently received a letter from a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and he decides to end his trip with a visit to her home, hoping she will rejoin the household.

Though Stevens travels around the countryside, most of The Remains of the Day comes as memories Stevens reconsiders with age. The central tension in Remains of the Day becomes the one between what Stevens is willing to admit to himself, and what out of fear, or cowardice, or pride, he does not accept. The decline and death of his own father, the rise of fascism, and Stevens’ relations with Miss Kenton and Lord Darlington are all replayed to the reader, but only by looking at what is not said can we appreciate their significance.

The Style and Form of The Remains of the Day

The first-person narration of The Remains of the Day is deceptively simple. It certainly is deceptive. Stevens has been plucked perfectly from his upper-class milieu, and like the English upper-class, he rarely says what he means. It is only thanks to the vividness of his memories, in particular through remembered dialogue, that we come to see what is really going on in the past and in the present. To take one example, when Stevens finds that his father has died, he decides to continue working at an important international conference instead of taking a break. In the narration there is no hint that Stevens is suffering. The recollection is explained by Stevens as the apotheosis of his career as a butler, his ultimate mastery of dignity. But then we reach the dialogue of his waiting, and his desired impression comes under attack.

“Stevens, are you all right?”

“Yes, sir. Perfectly.”

“You look as though you’re crying.” I laughed and taking out a handkerchief, quickly wiped my face.

“I’m very sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day.”

Without narration to interrupt and reinterpret this exchange, we are presented with a direct glimpse of Stevens’ pain. But when the chapter ends he tries once more to control our interpretation of the recollection. “For all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph.” Language is a tool for the expression of our selves, for communication. But it can just as easily be used for creating a false picture of the world. Stevens, as if to save himself from the truth of that day, from the rejection of his father on his death bed, uses language to justify his cold-heartedness, to turn defeat into a kind of triumph. “You see, I know my father would have wishes me to carry on just now.” He says. But we aren’t so easily fooled.

Love and Deceit

The language of The Remains of the Day, instead of revealing, conceals the true nature of what has passed. Through verbiage and excessive reasoning Stevens tries to fool himself and the reader. Miss Kenton and her attempts to flirt with Stevens are concealed in the narration by Stevens’ refusal to ascribe any kind of romantic meaning to them. They appear only as words, and we need to divine their hidden depths for ourselves. Likewise, Stevens structures his trip to Miss Kenton – he initially “forgets” that she’s married and now Mrs Benn – as a business trip. But to the reader it’s clear enough that there is a romantic interest involved too.

We would be forgiven for thinking that Stevens does not realise what he is doing, that he is deceiving himself. The truth is much more sad. As the book draws to a close we find Stevens, at the end of the day, sitting by the beach. As he talks with a stranger it becomes clear that he knows that his life has been filled with mistakes, and that he’s trying desperately to find something good in all of them. The ending at least gives us a glimmer of hope, that though Stevens is old, still he might yet change, and find joy in what remains to him, and what has passed him by.

A photo of an English country house, located in front of a pond — An English country house, of the sort that Mr Stevens spends his life in. But is there something missing in that world and that life? photo by Ronald Searle (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Great Butler and the Stiff Upper Lip

We English tend not to talk about our feelings, not even among friends. Stevens, one can tell, has never confided a thing to anybody. But though he has survived, The Remains of the Day raises the question of how far our English taciturnity is cause for celebration. Stevens is preoccupied with the question of “what is a great butler”, a question he explores with almost academic rigour. A large part of it is the stiff upper lip, what Stevens terms dignity. It is the decision never to let one’s feelings either show or affect one’s work. Stevens, in his own description of himself, asks the reader to consider whether he himself might be such a butler. For anybody who has been reading, his loyalty to Lord Darlington and his dignity in the face of his father’s death, are all compelling evidence of his “greatness”.

But Stevens never asks us at what cost this greatness has been attained. The Remains of the Day doesn’t just undermine Stevens’ narrative, it also challenges the very values he holds dear. What we see, even if he doesn’t, is that being a great butler attacks Stevens’ own humanity. The coldness, the dedication to one’s craft that Stevens practices, dehumanises him. He is unable to “banter”, to engage in the world and form non-professional relationships with other people. He suffers especially harshly at the hands of his new American employer, Mr Farraday, for whom bantering is second nature.

But Stevens also doesn’t appreciate beauty either. Although he claims to live in one of the most magical places in England, he rarely shows it. Whether the portraits on the wall or silver on the table, the beauty in objects simply becomes part of Stevens’ job – he must keep things clean and shiny. It is only extremely infrequently, and often in the company of Miss Kenton, that Stevens’ narration is forced, for a moment, to acknowledge the beauty of the sun setting or the grounds of the manor house. Stevens is a great butler, but for all that he’s lost his friends, he’s failed to find love, and he cannot even appreciate the beauty that lies in front of him. Truth be told, the cost of his excellence seems far too high.

The Glory of the Past

The common note in The Remains of the Day, even before Stevens’ personal failures are explored, is melancholy and decline. It is the gentle melancholy of Chekhov, seeing the world fall apart but not wishing to intervene. In Ishiguro’s novel this decline is primarily a decline of the worldview and corresponding world of the British upper class. We see this immediately at the novel’s beginning. Stevens has remained in the employ of the owners of Darlington Hall, but the Darlingtons are nowhere to be seen. Instead, an outsider – and American – has arrived, and most of the original staff have left. Americans in The Remains of the Day represent the future. Lord Darlington, dismayed by the cruel treatment of Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, hopes to change the treaty’s contents.

To this end, Darlington eventually organises a conference with major figures from all across Europe. The goal is to pressure their respective governments to ease the reparations demanded of Germany. It is a noble goal, motivated by honour and respect for the First World War’s defeated countries. However, it is a goal from a bygone age. An American in attendance stands and gives a speech where he attacks all of the Europeans for their foolish idealism, for their useless values and amateurism. What they need to succeed is cunning and professionalism. He is booed out of the conference. But Hitler succeeds precisely because he knew how to manipulate this idealism, how to appeal to the values of the British classes when encouraging appeasement. In the end, of course, the American is proved right.

The glorious past that Stevens loves is revealed, over the course of The Remains of the Day, to be ultimately an illusion. Darlington, with his conference a failure, dabbles in fascism and dies a disgrace. Antisemitism leads to the unfair dismissal of two maids, and Stevens – ever the professional – refuses even to comfort them as he removes them from their positions. Stevens is also a terrible elitist and snob without ever, really, justifying these views. As easy as it is to begin The Remains of the Day with a sense of nostalgia, it’s equally hard not to end the book with a feeling of disappointment in the world that lies behind us. Of course, there was a lot to value in some of the old British values – but there was far more that really isn’t worth our time.

Conclusion

It was interesting as I read The Remains of the Day to see how my attitude to Stevens himself changed. At first I thought of him as something of a buffoon. But then as time went on that bemusement morphed into sadness, disappointment, and finally a kind of anger. I was angry that Stevens was so obsessed about being a great butler that he came to neglect everything else in the world. I was angry that he spends the entire book lying to himself. It’s only at the very end that there’s a brief hint that all that might change. But I was glad of it, just as I was glad for Stevens. In truth, I pitied him.

the original cover of The Remains of the Day, showing a pocket watch on a black background — The book’s original cover.

The Remains of the Day is a lovely book. Its story of decline hidden under the façade of class glory rings true with my own experience of the declining position of old elites. It is wonderfully written – it is not beautiful, but it is the perfect blend of form and content. Stevens feels incredibly real, and his self-delusion seems strikingly real too. There are many of us who go through life trying to tell ourselves that our own course is the right one. But sooner or later the time comes when we must face the truth of our error. Even if we are already in the remains of our own days upon this earth, there is still great value in taking the step towards self-knowledge. In that sense, for all its melancholy, the message of The Remains of the Day remains an uplifting one. Check it out.

For more delicate treatment of the past, consider Salvatore Satta’s tale of the coming of modernity in Sardinia, The Day of Judgement, reviewed here; and also Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, presenting in an interview format the collapse of the Soviet Union from those who experienced it, reviewed here.