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! 😊

Theodor Fontane’s Irretrievable / No Way Back

Theodor Fontane’s Irretrievable, also translated as No Way Back (German: Unwiederbringlich), is a carefully constructed social drama in the same vein as his Effi Briest, which I’ve written about here. Fontane, who is little known outside of his native Germany, belongs to the same group of masterful European realists as Flaubert and Turgenev. And like Turgenev, his novels are usually pleasantly short. Irretrievable focuses on the collapse and apparent reconciliation between a married couple. Count Holk and his dully religious wife Christine have, after many years of marriage, drifted apart. When Holk meets an exciting and flirtatious young lady, Ebba von Rosenberg, during his work at court, far away from home, he begins to doubt his marriage.

Is it too late to change, and is it right to?

Houses and Juxtapositions

I’ve noticed that all of Fontane’s novel begin with descriptions of houses. Though it’s a practice any modern editor would undoubtedly murder him for, nonetheless it serves its purpose. One thing I really like about Fontane is his use of natural objects as symbols. By natural, I mean the sort of things that in our own, non-fictional, minds can be seen with hindsight as symbols of this or that. A house reflects its owners, and in the Holks’ case, the castle already hints at various disunities in their world. For though Irretrievable takes place in Schleswig and Denmark during the time when they were both still under one ruler, the house has “a Mediterranean feel”. It is out of place by the beach on the Baltic coast.

The Baltic coastline of Irretrievable is peaceful and ultimately boring for Holk. Instead, he heads into the city of Copenhagen, where excitement can be found – but also the seeds of tragedy. John Samuel CC BY-SA

It is also not where Countess Christine wants to live. The castle was built by Holk recently, as an alternative to the traditional seat of his family, which lies inland. She and he have lived in both buildings, and she prefers the original. For her, it is associated with the happier days of her marriage. So, immediately, we have one spouse who has moved forward, and another who is looking back. This kind of division runs through Irretrievable and will be one source of its ultimate tragedy.

Indeed, the danger of irretrievable lies in the sharpness of its divisions. There are two houses. There is the sea and the land. Holk and Christine live in the countryside, but Holk works at the Court in Copenhagen, which Christine considers a hive of immorality. The countryfolk are pious and intelligent, while the inhabitants of the city are playful and mysterious. For Holk, once he decides to move away from Christine, there can be no gradualism, and no clear compromise. It is either one extreme, or the other. And although he thinks otherwise, he is not suited for either option.

Holk and the Crisis of Masculinity

Holk is an insecure man. Early on the narrator informs us that he finds Christine too perfect, while she herself wishes he were more so. “He would be the ideal husband, if only he had some ideals”, she says. Without ideals he thinks only of the present, while she thinks both of the past – in her mourning both of a deceased child and of the old house – and of the future – in considering where the two living children will go to school to finish their education. And so Holk falls into flirtation, an action marked by its disregard of past affections and future consequences. He flirts both with the daughter of his landlady, Brigitte Hansen, and with Ebba von Rosenberg, the companion of the Danish princess whom he serves.

For Holk, life with Christine at their castle by the sea is dreadfully dull, and flirtation is exciting. He imagines that he is moving beyond the strict social constraints of that pious coastal life, but he doesn’t realise that flirting just brings him into another set of social codes, of whose very existence he is blissfully unaware. He thinks that Ebba is interested in him, and indeed their affection is consummated over the course of a single hour, but when he’s next seen by the Princess she shuns him for breaking the rules of Copenhagen society. While Holk thinks that he must propose to Ebba, he doesn’t realise that she considers her brief romance with him to be a simple game, and she rejects him harshly.

Interior 1899 Vilhelm Hammershoi 1864-1916 Presented in memory of Leonard Borwick by his friends through the Art Fund 1926 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N04106  Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported). Photo @ Tate

Holk is guilty of a traditionally masculine overconfidence. He lacks the emotional intelligence to notice the social constraints he has flouted until it is too late. In the same way, when he first meets Ebba, he tries to impress her with his knowledge of genealogy, trying to guess her origins. But in spite of his impressive memory, she reveals that she is the granddaughter of a court Jew, which shames him and reveals his racial prejudices also. Holk, having rejected one world, finds himself failing to enter the new one too. He doesn’t notice the rules until it’s too late. At the end of the book he returns painfully to Christine to beg forgiveness; meanwhile, Ebba has made a fantastic marriage to an extremely rich Englishman. She, at least, understood how to play the game.

Speech, Style, and Structure

Fontane is a master of dialogue. It sounds realistic and advances the plot, which I suppose is all we can ask for, given the novel’s ambitions. But in Irretrievable dialogue isn’t the only way that the plot is advanced, however, and there are a number of cool little tactics I think are worth dwelling on. One of these is connected to the novel’s setting. Much of the novel’s action takes place in Denmark proper, where Holk works at court. News comes predominantly from letters, whether from his wife, his brother-in-law, or someone else. That means that news is delayed, but it also means that news is open to interpretation. Holk constantly misreads letters, assuming a different tone than is actually there. This is in part because he wants to justify his infidelity to himself. The reader, because the narration follows Holk closely, is consequently led along with his delusions.

Fontane thus gives us a narrative that seems at first flat, by which I mean there are few key moments of change – rather we just witness the gradual moral decline of Holk. But because he isn’t aware of this, Fontane makes the reader responsible for finding significance in his actions and inactions. For example, there is the way that he first promises Christine he will be home for Christmas… and then by new year he is still in Denmark. The narrative rarely draws attention to this, but so the reader must pay attention to connect the dots.

Paying attention also reveals a certain degree of irony in the narration, of the sort that Holk himself seems incapable of picking up on. “Christine was unable to write because she was ill. It couldn’t be said that this information made much impression on him.”, is one example. Uncertainty is carefully maintained all through the story, providing an implicit contrast to Holk’s self-assurance in his interpretation of events. One such example lies at the end of the book, warning of the final tragedy of it all – “Holk’s dream was fulfilled, or seemed about to be fulfilled”. This use of “seemed” repeats at key moments throughout. In Irretrievable Fontane artfully uses a seemingly straightforward narrative only to reveal its – and Holk’s – ultimate illusory control over events. It’s quite clever, really.

The Title – the Shades of Meaning of Irretrievable / No Way Back

Irretrievable takes place in 1859-1861, towards the end of Danish control of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Politics and history are not of prime importance, but they already add a shade of meaning to the title of Irretrievable. Readers familiar with German history know what none of the characters can yet know – that the uneasy presence in Denmark of two duchies containing a sizeable ethnic German population will not last more than a few years after the novel ends. Holk, as an ethnic German serving an aging Princess in the Danish court, has an uncertain future even before his infidelity is considered. What Irretrievable becomes, then, is also a record of a dying place, culture, and identity.

Irretrievable refers, more obviously however, to the state of Christine and Holk’s marriage. Their relationship goes from tranquil distance at the beginning to – ultimately – Christine’s suicide under the waves. Yet this suicide comes only pages after a renewal of their marriage vows, after Holk’s return following their separation. There are few signs that there really was no way back. So the title, although it speaks to the inevitability of the plot, doesn’t speak to the reality of the situation. Rather, it reflects a single character’s view on things – Christine’s. It is she who cannot move on from first the loss of her child, and then Holk’s infidelity. The simplicity of the title conceals the ultimate fragility of the viewpoint it expresses.

Theodor Fontane himself lost a child, so had plenty of reasons to feel Christine’s position. Nonetheless, he knew that staying in the past could only lead to further tragedy.

The idea of irretrievability also has some relevance to Holk’s age. In the novel he is not old, but at about forty, he is also not young either. His dalliance with Ebba reflects ultimately how out of touch he is as to his true identity as an aging family man. He can try to flirt and flout convention, but in the end, he does not belong to that world anymore, and his failure is inevitable.

Conclusion

There’s no way back to the youth we’ve lost, just as there’s no way to remove the fact of death’s loss from out hearts. But we can move on and try again to find life and love beyond them. Holk returns to Christine after his infidelity and they even renew their marriage vows. She, however, is unable to move on. Being locked in the past only leads to an ever-greater dislocation from the present, and one that proves ultimately fatal for her. Fontane wrote Irretrievable in the aftermath of the death of one of his own children, and it’s easy to see how its theme could be dear to him. For although on one level this is simply a book about an adulterous adventure gone wrong, at a deeper level it is about whether we choose to live in the past or try to find life in the present.

I enjoyed it a lot.

For more Fontane, here’s my review of Effi Briest.

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!