Books do Furnish a Room's Book Blog 2017

[Books do furnish a room]

Vertical Motion by Can Xue

This is my first foray into the work of Can Xue (real name Deng XiaoHua). She grew up in the Cultural Revolution and did not have a high school education and so is largely self-taught. Her adopted name is a play on words because it means the dirty snow which cannot melt and also the pure snow on top of the mountain.

The stories have familiar settings in China but they are by no means simple. They are often surreal and disturbing, everyday settings and relationships are subverted. Words like magic realism and experimentalism have been thrown around. The themes are old ones, but addressed in new ways with the unusual, a disappearing staircase, flowers that grow underground and a very large and sinister owl. Xue says that her work is soul literature:

“I do not tell plane stories; I tell stereoscopic stories. …. when we are reading, we should regard a work as a medium that can start the a priori ability—an ability for prior direct-viewing in our soul. We use the work to stimulate that ability, and let the structure of time and space in our heart appear. Then we use the direct-viewing to watch the beautiful scenery in the work that belongs to oneself at last.”

There are themes, the subterranean is one, as is moving away from the city, exploration of secret spaces and there are often animals playing a significant role. The characters often are struggling with life and with the situations they find themselves in;

“The person was on the stairs, which is to say he was in midair. Judging by his voice, he must be hanging in midair. I couldn’t bear to shout again, because I was afraid he would fall. Maybe the one facing danger wasn’t he, but I. Was he saying that I was in danger? I didn’t dare shout again. This was Uncle Lou’s home. Eventually he would have to return. Perhaps he had simply gone downstairs to buy groceries. It was a nice day. The sun was out, so it was a little hot in the room. So what? I shouldn’t start making a fuss because of this. When I recalled that someone outside was hanging in midair, I started sweating even more profusely. My clothes stuck to my body; this was hard to endure.”

The familiar slides into unfamiliarity. There is enough information to set the imagination going, but interpretation is very much up to the reader. This is from Red Leaves:

“After finishing the cigarette, Gu thanked the worker and stood up, intending to continue up the stairs, when he suddenly heard the worker beside him make a cat sound. It was very harsh. But when he glanced at him, he looked as if nothing had happened. No one else was here. If he hadn't made the sound, who had? Gu changed his mind; he wanted to see if this person would do anything else.

He waited awhile longer, but the worker didn't do anything, he just put his cigarette butt in his pocket, rose, and went back to the water cart. He pushed the cart into the ward. Gu subconsciously put his hand into his own pocket, took out the cigarette butt, and looked at it, but he saw nothing unusual. In a trance, he twisted and crushed the butt. He saw an insect with a shell moving around in the tobacco shreds. The lower half of its body had been charred, but it still didn't seem to want to die. Nauseated, Gu threw the butt on the floor and, without looking back, climbed to the eighth floor.”

The usual precis and description of the stories would be superfluous; these stories need to be read.

 7 and a half out of 10

Starting Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

[Books do furnish a room]

Goblin Market and other poems by Christina Rossetti

Goblin Market is a narrative poem written by Christina Rossetti in 1859, eventually being published in 1862, along with the rest of the poems in this collection. Goblin Market has been much argued over and there are numerous interpretations; the themes of temptation, salvation and sacrifice and the seemingly sexual imagery have ensured the debate will continue. The plot is simple; two sisters (Laura and Lizzie) live together (their age is never specified). They hear the call of the goblin merchants and are tempted by their wares:

Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—

Laura yields to temptation and pays with a lock of hair and “a tear more rare than a pearl”. She then enjoys the fruit in a scene vaguely reminiscent of the food scene in the film of Tom Jones. She returns home satiated and soon desires more. However although her sister can still hear the call of the goblins, she cannot. Laura begins to pine and decline and is becoming weaker, dying. Lizzie, in desperation goes to the goblins to buy fruit for her sister. She means to pay with money and that angers the goblins with attempt to force the fruit into her. They cannot and Lizzie leaves covered in the juice and she gives some drops to Laura, who after an initial paroxysm recovers. There is a moral about the power of sisterly love!

The poem has waxed and waned in popularity, but the interpretations are worth listing: Marxist, Freudian, a warning about the free market economy, a tale about anorexia, an early feminist text, a Christian parable about sacrifice and salvation, a warning about the prevalence of food adulteration in the Victorian era (I kid you not), an exploration of incestuous yearning, “a parable of female resistance and solidarity” and inevitably an article in Playboy portrayed it as “unambiguously pornographic”. Some of the interpretations are more convincing than others!

The rest of the poems are very Victorian; a great deal about death, the beloved rotting away under a carpet of grass, plenty of lost loves and changing seasons, a good deal of religious nonsense and quite a lot about nature and the seasons.

One of the rescuers of Rossetti from obscurity was Virginia Woolf, who wrote about her on the one hundredth anniversary of her birth:

“Yours was a complex song. When you struck your harp many strings sounded together … A firm hand pruned your lines; a sharp ear tasted their music. Nothing soft, otiose, irrelevant cumbered your pages. In a word, you were an artist.”

She was also rediscovered by feminists in the 1970s.

I enjoyed Goblin Market and I recognise that it is open to a lot of variable interpretation. There is very definitely an intensity of delight in the material world;

“I'll bring you plums tomorrow
Fresh on their mother twigs,
Cherries worth getting;
You cannot think what figs
My teeth have met in,
What melons, icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold”

7 out of 10

Starting Mr Scarborough's Family by Anthony Trollope

[Hayley]

I'm not usually the biggest fan of poetry but I always liked Goblin Market. It's so beautifully written and I think it's interesting how many different interpretations there are of its meaning. Personally I read it originally as a story about love. The temptations of the goblins are purely physical and material, they give temporary satisfaction and excitement but they don't last and, ultimately, all they do is hurt Laura. Lizzie's love on the other hand is all about strength, loyalty and sacrifice. She gives Laura the same thing in a different way (literally the juice from the fruit), asking for nothing in return and this is a more honest and pure love that saves Laura. 

 

I've never read anything else by Christina Rosetti though. I get the impression you didn't like the other poems in the collection as much?

[Books do furnish a room]

You would be amazed at some of the interpretations! I did think that the others were not as compelling

[Madeleine]

She wrote the words to "In the Bleak mid-winter" (my favourite carol).