Margaret Mahy

I am very sad to see the passing of Margaret Mahy.

She was one of those authors who stands alone, who doesn't need comparison to anyone else and who is so unique and charming and imaginative that she is memorable to every one who reads her work.

Margaret Mahy was one of the first authors who taught me that children's literature can set the bar enormously high for all the literature you read from then on and into your adulthood. She taught the world that children are to be respected and are worthy of the prolific life work of a genius.

Margaret Mahy was one of the first authors I ever read who presented my own country and my own people to me.

Margaret Mahy was not afraid to be colourful and unique and eccentric. I could still learn a lot from the way she lived life.

Her YA novel The Tricksters is one of the few novels that is placed firmly on my list of Books That I Think Are Written Perfectly.

She really was a giant to me, as a New Zealander, an aspiring author and a woman.

quotable

What I learned from authors, part I


I've been thinking about what I've learned from other authors when it comes to lessons for my own writing.

To start off, and inspired by my friend and former flatmate, Jessica, who has written and illustrated her own children's book, I bring you a blog post with some actual quotable quotes about writing, by writers, which have been thought-provoking for me.

A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost. - Henry James

This is one of the few quotes about writing in which I first saw myself. It was an encouraging moment, to realise why I write and to understand that it's not necessarily normal to notice as much as I notice.

Often, I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself, leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Well, I certainly felt this way after my finishing my thesis, although I suspect that I would invest even more of myself in a novel.

Human language is like the cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. - Gustave Flaubert
There's something ironic about this quote, in that it's written so beautifully even as it mourns for the absence of a completely satisfying language. I like that. One has to remember that although perfection is so far from one's grasp, it is still possible to write magically.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. - Red Smith
Reading this was one of the first times I realised that my vision of becoming an author was not a very romantic vision.

I... do not think the worse of him for having a brain so very different from mine. ... And he deserves better treatment than to be obliged to read any more of my works. - Jane Austen
At first when reading this I thought of V. S. Naipaul and his comments about women writers, and I thought about how comparatively gracious Jane Austen was in this sense. Then I also learned an important lesson - not everybody needs to like your writing.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. - Oscar Wilde
OK, so I haven't quite got this far yet, but I certainly empathise and can see this in my future!

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book. - Ernest Hemingway
Verification from one of the "great writers" that the literature that is not usually seen as "high" can be the most difficult to write.

And now for a quote I disagree with:
Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct, and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish. - Monica Dickens
Now, I don't like this quote so much, because I think that writers are perpetually bound to reality, even the writers that produce fantasy or science fiction or the like. Writing is hard work and then on top of that the "real world" is constantly standing over you, hammering you with its reality cudgel until you bleed, trying to make your writing work.

What have you learned from the advice that other authors have given?

some thoughts on V. S. Naipaul, female writers and Jane Austen

So, the latest mudslinging match in the literary world: V. S. Naipaul's comments about himself, about women who write, about his former editor Diana Athill, and about Jane Austen.

(Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. He has written books like A House for Mr Biswas. I have not read any of his books so I will not be commenting on his literary talent. I understand he is a skillful writer with an off-putting personal life.)

The Guardian's summary is pretty good, but for your information, here are some of the things he said:

- No woman writer is his equal, in literary value or skill.

- People like his former editor, a successful writer in her own right, and Jane Austen are good examples of a "feminine" style which he labelled "feminine tosh". He can always pick up a piece of writing and assess within a few minutes whether it was written by a man or a woman.

- Jane Austen in particular wrote books out of "sentimental ambitions" and had a "sentimental sense of the world".

- This is because women inevitably are not "complete master[s] of a house", and so they have a "narrow view of the world".

I think my first response to these comments was confusion - I felt like laughing uproariously but I also felt rather horrified.

Here are some of my bullet-pointed thoughts in response.

1. Jane Austen? Sentimental?!
Have we been reading the same novels?
If you're going to pick an example of a sentimental female writer, surely Austen is one of the most bizarre choices to pull out of one's hat.

2. My theory is that he secretly identifies with Jane Austen's most ridiculous characters. The vain Sir Walter Elliot, the pompous Mr Collins. It's clear to me from this brief encounter with V. S. Naipaul that Jane Austen would have had a field day with him. She would have skewered him. And so he feels threatened.

3. Naipaul's blatant sexism is disturbing, to say the least. I suppose it's not surprising from an unsavoury misogynist who beat his wife, but, as Diana Abu-Jaber writes, his comment about women failing to be "master" of their own homes is chilling.
It is also horridly ironic, coming from someone who criticises women who fail to write about the evils of Western colonialism, but who does not notice his own ruthless male colonialism of the home.

4. Naipaul is so absorbed in himself that he clearly values no literature except his own genre and only a few within his genre. As Roxana Robinson said:

I suspect that, actually, Naipaul doesn’t think any male writers are his equal, either, nor any Jewish writers, nor Chinese or Arabic ones. I think Naipaul thinks no-one is his equal, and, in terms of hubris, he may be right.

It is, in fact, tempting to ignore him entirely. Except that I feel so furious.

Here is some more comment:
Diana Athill on Naipaul's attack on her
The Guardian's test: can you tell if the author is male or female?
"Sense and Sentimentality"
Jennifer Egan's response
The response of the Tribune (India)

I leave you with a quote from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The author is dead, but she still manages to speak for herself:

She agreed to it all for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.

playing with dolls of a fictional sort

I did something very silly yesterday.

I was bored. The essential prerequisite.

I went on facebook and nothing, absolutely nothing, was happening. Sometimes, in situations like this particular one, I feel like yelling, with virtual hands raised to the sky, "O facebook! ENTERTAIN ME!"

Here is what happened next. I created a new facebook account for Jane Austen.

Obviously, I am not the first person to have wasted time in precisely this way. But I still feel slightly embarrassed about the enjoyment I got out of listing her hometown, her final resting place, the languages she speaks, the school she went to (which, fantastically enough, still exists)...

Jane Austen (aka, Me) now "likes" Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and her own novels. She "likes" playing the piano. Burney, Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, William Makepeace Thackeray and so on have not yet accepted her friendship requests. I left out Charlotte Brontë on purpose, given her less than admiring comments about Miss Austen.

I don't know enough about her to know who/what else I should add. But doing some research on this should be fun!

Am still in two minds about posting this for all to see on the blog. It seems just a little too embarrassing...

I am excited that...

... Natasha Solomons has finished her second novel, The Novel in the Viola. Or so I hear, from her blog. Feast your eyes on the cover and then try to tell me that you don't want to read it.

I reviewed her last book, Mr Rosenblum's List, on Halfway Down the Stairs. Of the books I have reviewed, it has been a favourite, if not the favourite, and so I have been looking forward to her next novel for some time. So three cheers for The Novel in the Viola! Let's hope it's as wonderful as its cover suggests.

meaningful

In 2007, I wrote a blog post about five books that were meaningful to me. Some have changed. Some remain the same. I want to have a re-run because I like making lists and analysing myself. That's honesty for you.

Before:
1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Persuasion, by Jane Austen
3. The short stories of Katherine Mansfield
4. The short stories of Roald Dahl
5. The Ordinary Princess, by M. M. Kaye

The funny thing is, things have changed.

Some things remain the same. Jane Austen retains her position at the head. I just can't decide which particular book I'm going to honour, and I'm not sure if I need to. I love her. I can't explain why. The closest I can come is an explanation which I have used before. Here it is again. When I read Jane Austen's novels, I feel like I can sense her, the narrator, sitting just behind the text and enjoying what she is writing. It's as if she is living on in her writing. I never get the same feeling with other authors. Her perspective is so unique. I love that at first glance her novels seem like just another rom-com, but in fact they are so much more. She shows so much more restraint than any other author I have read. She had no pretensions. She was just interested in people, and she wrote about them. I am absolutely sure that she herself was as charming and interesting as her heroines.

A small anecdote: When I was exploring the National Portrait Gallery in London, I bumped into the tiny miniature of her, almost by accident, I almost burst into tears. The fact that the only existing picture of her was this tiny little miniature, surrounded by all this grandeur, these kings and leaders and their pride, seemed to sum up everything I love about her. Does anyone understand what I'm going on about here or is this completely oblique?

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, is connected in some ways with the reasons I love Jane Austen. CB herself did not think much of Austen's work, but in a century of male authors writing about either frail little women who need a hero or villainous temptresses, I love the strong women they wrote about. Jane Eyre is one of the most wonderful characters of literature, for me.

Animal Farm, by George Orwell, is another book that is meaningful for me now. I thought about this when I wrote a blog post a while ago on retracing my steps - and I've realised that reading Animal Farm in fifth form English at school was a huge turning point for me, even if I didn't realise it at the time. It was where I was first intrigued by the bizarre, depressing history of Communism in Russia. It turns out I was lucky to get my first glimpse through Orwell's perceptive eyes, as so much has been said about the Soviet Union which is horrifically tainted - and the fact that is an allegory of sorts, and not even a perfect one, possibly helped.

Winter of Fire, by Sherryl Jordan, makes the list now. This is a YA novel by a Kiwi author which we were told to read in school when I was 12, because the author was coming to visit. It turned out to be a fantastic book, and I met my first real live author. I managed to impress her, somehow, with my hand-raising-and-question-asking technique, and when my teacher told her later that I wanted to be an author when I grew up, she wrote me a little card encouraging me to follow this dream. I've always been grateful to her for this, and it had a huge impact on me. So her book has a special place in my heart.

I will always love C. S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles.

And, finally, The Ordinary Princess, by M. M. Kaye, still makes the cut. I have tried to introduce my nieces to this book, because at this stage they are still buying into the Disney perfect-happy-ever-after, you-must-be-beautiful-and-enjoy-cleaning princess stories. So far, I have only received agitated questions: "But when are they going to get married?!" I persevere regardless.

It's not that the other books are no longer meaningful to me. They don't live in my consciousness in quite the same way, though.