normblog

The oldest Holocaust survivor in the world

Next month Alice Herz-Sommer will celebrate her 107th birthday. This short film tells, among other things, of how her life has been 'nourished by the unquenchable power of music'. (Thanks: MK.)

Taking sides against fascism

Behind the Times paywall there are some good paragraphs by Philip Collins on Christopher Hitchens. The whole piece (£) is well worth reading and mainly concerns Hitch's refusal of the consolations of religion in the face of terminal illness. But Collins also addresses the charge against him of political apostasy:

[I]t is... Hitchens' late conversion to scepticism in politics that has inspired the scorn of former comrades on the Left. Hitchens, they say, has turned from the idealistic Left to the neo-conservative Right. The most obvious manifestation of this apostasy is his character[i]stically voluble support for the War on Terror and action in Iraq.

Hitchens needs no defence from anyone else but, as it happens, his support for the war in Iraq is entirely consistent with his previous support for the Falklands war and for American intervention in Bosnia. On each occasion he has taken sides against fascism in its various guises. As he said in 2002: "I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials." The better critique of Hitchens is not that he has betrayed the cause. It is that, much like... Tony Blair, his account of global religious conflict reduces a complex problem to a Manichean one. But it is hard to repulse the insinuating thought: what if he's right?

It is also hard - for this blogger, anyway - to repulse the thought that right and wrong on these issues may not be blocks of solid marble, in possession of one set of partisans or another, but parcelled out amongst them - though not necessarily in even proportions, and not necessarily amongst all of them. Collins would, it seems, be receptive to that thought as well, for, as he also writes:

Hitchens has, indeed, moved. He has given up a belief in a political utopia and replaced it with the insight that the combination of capitalism with liberal democracy needs to be cherished and defended. If only Hitchens had a full term to pursue this belief. As he says in Love, Poverty and War: "It is civilisation and pluralism and secularism that need pitiless and unapologetic fighters."

The shame is that it took until the end of his memoirs, which will be in turn too close to the end of his life, before Hitchens stumbled on what he calls his "Hitch-22": that we must commit to our beliefs while remaining sceptical about those who are fired by certainty. The old comrades simply cannot fathom that acquiring scepticism in politics, and in the process throwing off defunct beliefs, is the same process as acquiring wisdom.

I don't myself think all of Hitch's old beliefs are defunct, and I doubt that he for his part thinks so. But the general spirit of these words from Collins is spot on.

The normblog profile 371: Agnes Marron

Agnes Marron is a person of strange appearance and even stranger views. She is a stranger to tact, discretion and the cinematic oeuvre of Peter Greenaway. She keeps wicket for East Dibsden 2nd XI and cultivates roses. This is her first appearance on normblog.

Why do you blog? > I don't.

What has been your best blogging experience? > You're not listening; I don't blog.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > Watch it, Geras. I won't be made a fool of in front of your readers.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Stay out of jail.

What are you reading at the moment? > The Oxford Guide to English Flora and Fauna, Cooking for the Incompetent and Boxing to Win.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Don Stroud, Yakima Canutt and Elisha Cook Jr.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > When I was very young I was an Arsenal supporter.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > 'The truth is lying next to you.'

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > 'It's all relative.' There are many people I wouldn't dream of having for a relative.

Which what are you whatting next? > This what and that what.

[After 370 weeks on the trot the normblog profile has gone missing today. However, internet access problems at the new normblog home are, I hope, close to being resolved.]

Lost and found

Lost - that's what I’ve been to blogging these last few days, and I'm here with a word of explanation. Much of the reason is just standard moving-house stuff. You take the order of your life, throw it up in the air, mix it up a little bit, put it all in boxes, then transport it in a truck and disgorge it at the other end - a mountain of boxes in every room. Where to begin? You can work from 6 am till midnight and you've only just begun to make a dent. Everything needs to go to its place and some of these places are obvious; but others of them aren't. Different house, differently designated rooms, so some things that used to belong 'there' don't any longer, or in this house there is no 'there'. Where is to replace the there of old? There are so many things to be assigned, carried, adjusted, taken back to the first room. Hey, where did I put the hammer? What happened to my mobes? And so on.

But quite apart from all that, Adèle and I arrived to one or two difficulties of a fairly major kind, which I won't go into except to say that they have required some resolve and a spirit of fortitude to get through. And then there is the fact that, despite my best efforts in advance of moving, I have a quality of internet access that would madden a laid-back slug, with no interest in blogging: occasional, on-and-off even when it happens, slow to the point of complete stasis on nine out of ten moves. It's enough to make a committed blogger weep.

And yet... committed as I have, for seven years, been in that department, I have not wept. Too much else to do, and I've been enjoying it. No, I'll rephrase that: I've been loving it. Not the inability to blog, but the activity of putting our home back together, in a new and different way, schlepping this way and that, upstairs and down, carrying, unpacking, shelving, arranging, rearranging. A happy coincidence, therefore, that unable to blog effectively, I had something else I really wanted to do, and do non-stop. I found another me, such as used once to exist before normblog. Today's Writer's Choice follows on Friday's normblog profile without a single post in between. Never happened before in the entire history of the world. How long my internet-access difficulties will continue I cannot say, but when they are resolved I should be able to resume something like normal service. We're nearly up and running here, but not quite. Once we are, I know my blogging enthusiasm will return together with the technical basis for putting it into effect - alevai!

Writer's choice 282: Kay Woodward

Kay Woodward has worked in children's publishing since text was pasted on to acetate and the screen on an Apple Mac monitor was the size of a Penguin classic. First, she edited illustrated non-fiction, then fiction. And then she did what she'd wanted to do all along - she became an author. Her most recent titles are Stars on Ice and Jane Airhead, which is the story of a girl who just LOVES Jane Eyre – the subject of this post.

Kay Woodward on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

I love Jane Eyre. Not for any grand literary reasons - of which there are many - but because it's simply the best book ever. I first read it when I was eleven, which was... um... ages ago. And since then, I've read my three copies (one 1983 Penguin, one lime-green Penguin and one classy Waterstone's hardback) countless times and watched every film and TV adaptation. Occasionally, whenever I come across a really fabulous book, like William Boyd's Any Human Heart or Graham Swift's Waterland or Julian Barnes's Love, Etc, I'm briefly tempted to say that it's my favourite book, but I know deep down that it isn't. That's still Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre is the story of a poor, unloved orphan who's been reluctantly raised by relatives that are officially despicable. As soon as possible, Jane is offloaded to Lowood Institution - a charity school that's a hotbed of 19th-century disease, cruelty and death - where she survives thanks to her supreme gutsiness.

After completing her education, Jane Eyre's lack of funds means that she's forced to stay on at Lowood as a teacher. But she has an escape plan and secures a position as a governess to a Mr Edward Fairfax Rochester's young ward. With relief, she sets off to the gorgeously gothic Thornfield Hall to begin her new life.

And then Jane meets Mr Rochester.

I could wax lyrical for weeks about this, without coming close to describing the drama, humour and pure wow of the complex relationship between Jane and Rochester. But Charlotte Brontë does it so much better. Suffice to say that Mr Rochester is charmed by Jane, who manages not to faint with delight in a billowing heap of 19th-century skirts. She is no pushover. In the end, Rochester does win her over. And soon afterwards, his mysterious past catches up with him, everything goes horribly wrong and he loses her again. Jane leaves - her principles allow her no other option. It's all very complicated and totally gripping and I'm not going to go into it further for fear of spoiling the rest of the book for anyone who hasn't read it yet.

Jane Eyre does not star the archetypal heroine. At the beginning of the novel, she's small, plain and very feisty. And by the end, she might be a little taller, but she's still plain (there's no let-your-hair-down-Jane-and-take-your-glasses-off-and-wow-how-beautiful-you-are moment) and she's still feisty. She doesn't suffer fools and she stands up for herself. Jane Eyre is, quite simply, great.

Mr Rochester is larger than life. Loud and unfeasibly grumpy, he's verging on ugly (although I am sure Charlotte Brontë must have been mistaken on this point) and his closet is rammed with skeletons. But he has a wicked sense of humour and a habit of emerging from the mist on a rearing horse. In short, he's fantastic. Step aside, Darcy.

[Am I allowed to digress very slightly by mentioning the BBC's 1983 version of Jane Eyre, starring Zelah Clarke as Jane and Timothy Dalton as Rochester that I taped on cassette - that's audio, not even Betamax - every Sunday evening? Hmm. Thought not. But it made me love the book even more.]

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë has written a book that is rich with description. The northern setting is beautiful, yet dark and real. Thornfield Hall is magnificently gloomy. I adore the opening scene where Jane is squirrelled away on a windowseat - I still have serious windowseat envy - reading secretly, while the rain batters on the windowpane.

The author whisks her reader through pretty much every emotion in the spectrum. I remember sobbing over Lowood, gasping over Rochester's first dramatic appearance and wailing 'nooooo' over the wedding that never was. (I also remember being seriously puzzled over why everyone kept slurring Sinjin instead of St John in TV adaptations. Why is that?)

Jane Eyre is a book to curl up with on a rainy Saturday afternoon. It's unconventional (and remarkably so for the time it was written), it's filled with surprises, it's bristling with villains and the star is a girl who should probably have been content to sit back and do as she was told. Thank goodness Charlotte Brontë's character didn't do that.

Reader, it's smashing.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

The normblog profile 370: Miriam Shaviv

Miriam Shaviv was born in the UK, and grew up in Israel, the UK, Australia and Canada. After completing an English degree at McGill University, she worked for The Jerusalem Post as parliamentary reporter, feature writer and literary editor. In 2004, she moved back to England on getting married, and joined The Jewish Chronicle, where she edited the comment section and was - until last week - Foreign Editor. She is currently Features Editor of the Times Higher Education magazine. Miriam blogs at Bloghead and tweets at @miriamsh.

Why do you blog? > I used to be able to explain it. It began as a bit of fun when I moved back to England in 2004 and was looking for a job, but I quickly realized that blogging forced me to sharpen my views and I enjoyed the challenge. Nowadays the question 'why' hardly makes sense. I'm way past that. It's an addiction.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Being linked to by Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) in the early days of my blog. I received so many thousands of hits, in a matter of minutes, I thought there was something wrong with my traffic counter.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > Threat of a lawsuit by a well-known journalist who, bizarrely, believed I had damaged her reputation when I proved one of her interviewees had been lying.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Only do it for as long as you enjoy it. Don't feel pressured to post in order to keep your readers happy if you have nothing to say - you will burn out.

What are your favourite blogs? > Yaakov Lozowick's Ruminations, Jeffrey Goldberg, A Mother in Israel.

What are you reading at the moment? > Atonement by Ian McEwan, That's Not What The Good Book Says by Avigdor Shinan, and Yair Zakovitch (Hebrew) on biblical myths.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Despite (or perhaps because of) a degree in English literature, I rarely read fiction any more. In recent years, Beaufort, Ron Leshem's fictional account of an IDF bunker in Lebanon, left a deep impression on me.

What is your favourite poem? > Strangely for a good Jewish girl, 'The Windhover: To Christ our Lord' by Gerard Manley Hopkins (subject of my BA honours thesis).

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I grew up as a lone lefty in a right-wing environment, believing it is in Israel's power to deliver peace; but I gradually came to the conclusion that I was wrong: there is no partner for peace on the Palestinian side right now.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > In my own Orthodox Jewish community, the idea that combining a life of tradition and Jewish law with modernity is the Jewish ideal - not a compromise.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > That religious faith is a delusion (à la Dawkins).

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Pious and Rebellious, a history of Jewish women in Medieval Europe by Avraham Grossman, significantly changed the way I think about the evolution of religion, women's role in religion and the way we record, and distort, history. Turns out Jewish women in the Middle Ages were quite liberated in some ways.

Who are your political heroes? > Despite his manifest failures in domestic policy, I very much admire Tony Blair for having the courage of his convictions in foreign policy, even at the price of his leadership. Similarly, I admire Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper for conducting what I see as a moral foreign policy, despite the political costs.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > I would stop protecting the NHS from cuts and subject it far more to market forces. I am constantly appalled by a level of care, and wastage, that would be unacceptable in the other three countries in which I have lived. It needs to be forced to become more efficient.

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be Prime Minister, who would you choose? > I'd import Stephen Harper.

What would you do with the UN? > It's beyond repair. The word of the 'international community' doesn't mean much if it's dictatorships and human rights abusers doing the talking.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > Western laziness about defending its own liberty, values and friends.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > At the risk of sounding cynical, who says we're so civilized now?

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > Yes. Back when I was a voter for Israel's Labour party, I dated a guy who lived in a settlement. Although we both held strong views, politics were hardly even discussed.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > People who can't spell.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Reality TV (with the exception of Wife Swap, a brilliant insight into real people's lives).

What, if anything, do you worry about? > That the UK is not the best place in which to raise my children and that I am living my life in the wrong country.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > I'd do another degree. Not sure I'll ever get the chance now.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > And other than where I have? I've always had a thing for Boston.

What is your most treasured possession? > My 30 diaries, kept, on and off, from ages 6 to 25. I learn something about myself every time I revisit them.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > My second name, Tamar. I have always hated my first name, which is very old-fashioned, but never had the guts to make the switch.

What talent would you most like to have? > I love cooking and entertaining, but I wish I had a natural flair instead of just following other people's recipes.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > I always wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and head a school, in order to help shape children's educational experience (but never had the patience to put in the years in the classroom first).

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I would buy a house in Israel and spend much more of my time there, allowing my kids to become fully immersed in a completely different culture and language, and spending much more time with family.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > The late journalist Chaim Bermant, whom I never met, although he is related to me by marriage; Jesus; and Tony Blair.

[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Liveblogging the move

Adèle and I are now sitting in an all but empty house and most of our stuff is on the back of a truck. We have a bed, a kitchen table to sit at and a couple of armchairs in the lounge. I'm wondering how it would be if, instead, the material substratum of our lives was still in the house and the two of us were in the back of the truck. Thus does a new venture like this shake all one's settled assumptions and pitch one down the path of adventurous thinking. Yet, strange to relate, despite the emptiness of the house and its echoing echoeyness, I still feel very much at home here. This is not a mere shell; it remains the place of 27 years of life events. Who needs a fridge or a television set when there are the memories? Who needs a ladder, a wastepaper basket, a full-length mirror, green tea, when we've got each other? Who needs a networked computer since the dongle - cringe - came along?

For the second time in my life I am amazed at the strength, the skills and the energies that enable three guys to pack and empty the contents of a large house in just a few hours.

IDF Q&A;

John Rentoul's well-known series on questions to which the answer is no could well be supplemented by another: questions to which the answer is short. Here is such a question (lodged in the second paragraph):

Take the Israeli army. At a single glitzy charity gala in New York earlier this year, an impressive $20m (£12.5m) was donated in one evening by the rich guests. This event was organised by Friends of the Israel Defence Forces, the main US organisation raising funds for Israeli soldiers on active duty, which raised nearly $50m in 2008. Similar fundraising operations exist in a number of European countries, as a recent investigation by the Inter Press Service revealed.

With Israel possessing the most powerful military in the Middle East and one of the richest and best-equipped in the world, many will be scratching their heads as to why the IDF needs "charity". Not only are soldiers the responsibility of the army they serve – and by extension the government – surely the IDF can afford to take care of its own. After all, it swallows up at least 6% of Israel's GDP and receives some $3bn a year in US military aid.

Why the IDF receives charity is because it is Israel's defence against its enemies, and some people think, rightly, that this defence is needed.

Let the Mistry be

A 'sorry spectacle of book burning and book banning'.

In defence of Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey isn't the greatest thing I've ever seen on TV, but I've been enjoying it in a relaxed rather than jumping-up-and-down sort of way. Along with 9.2 million other people, it seems - or maybe that should be 9.2 million minus one. Some have found the series predictable, familiar (£), clichéd; and I'm in no position to quarrel with these judgements. It's all of that. But while ground-breaking drama, drama that is not predictable or any of those other things, is often to be admired and applauded, it would of course be fallacious to infer from this that only the unpredictable and unfamiliar can be pleasing or worth our time. We all have some taste for the predictable, otherwise we wouldn't listen again to music that we love. We'd want a sudden passage of Nirvana (or even the sound of massed lawn mowers) inside a late Beethoven quartet. We'd want 'Good Vibrations' to take an unexpected turn.

Anyway, as always in these matters, to each his or her own. However, I do think exception is to be taken to this additional complaint against Downton Abbey, levelled in today's Times (£) by Sathnam Sanghera. It is that...

... part of the attraction of Downton Abbey, at least on a subliminal level, is that it is almost entirely darkie-free.

Even allowing that among 9.2 million viewers there must be some of whom Sanghera's speculation - for that is all it is - is true, I would say that this is an ungrounded slander against, at least, some millions of them. He just knows (does he?) that most or much of this vast audience would like the programme less should a character be featured in it who was black. Must we, then, also think that most of those 9.2 million viewers are also enjoying Downton Abbey because so far it contains no Jews? Sanghera here comes up with an empty piece of attitudinizing.

Bait and switch

There's an instructive and enjoyable post here by Pascal Boyer, in which he exposes the mechanism of a widespread but useless form of intellectual argument. I know it as: there's the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.

A familiar form of this is: 'There's no such thing as human nature.' 'Really? But what about the various biological constants, and the human needs and abilities that are based on them?' 'Well, there's obviously a human nature in that sense; but I meant that human beings aren't all greedy, selfish and devotees of reality TV'. Net result: denying at first there was any human nature, your interlocutor ends by arguing that some particular qualities (usually ones she disapproves of) are not a part of human nature.

Pascal Boyer presents some other examples of the method and names it differently:

[C]onsider relativism, which tells us that people literally live in incommensurable worlds. Or the common anthropological idea that kinship has nothing to do with reproduction and genetics. Or the literary critics who say that writing is primary and orality is a derived form of communication. Or the notion that gender is completely unrelated to sex.

The mechanism that made these strange notions popular is actually not so mysterious. It is a simple variant on the age-old technique of bait and switch, that is, giving the sucker something attractive to expect (the bait) and then substituting a dud once the customer is hooked (that's the switch).

Most of the academic ideologies I mentioned, and I imagine many others, are attractive because they seem to violate some of our common assumptions... Manhood has nothing to do with being a fellow! One is not born a woman, one becomes a woman!

But on closer inspection, it generally turns out that the initial, amazing, challenging statements in fact disguised crashingly banal assumptions. Suppose you point out to your academic ideologue that, for instance, if maleness and manhood really are completely unrelated... then it is puzzling that an extraordinarily vast number of [socially constructed] "men" happen to be [chromosomal] "males", and that such a coincidence is spooky. You will probably be told that you did not quite understand the original statement. What it meant was that the meaning of maleness could not be derived from possession of the Y chromosome...

It's the banality of the preposterous.

Five the magic number

Richard Hobson reports in the Times (£):

Australia's hopes of expanding future Ashes series to six-Test encounters are set to be dealt a terminal blow in the revamp of international cricket from 2012 that has left the ECB re-examining its schedule.

The ICC [International Cricket Council] is considering an upper limit of five matches in any series, with the existing minimum of two games remaining in place to count towards the rankings.

Whether or not they're doing it for the right reasons - and that isn't a safe assumption - the ICC would be making the right decision. At least between sides that are reasonably evenly-matched a five-test series is the best kind. I ain't even going to argue for it; it just has a good balance and duration, I feel.

Voting power and face-to-face justification

A post by Martin O'Neill at Comment is Free laments the extremes of income inequality and offers a proposal as to how they might be mitigated. I share Martin's starting assumptions about the moral issue involved, but want nonetheless to express a reservation about the limitations in his proposal. The problem, as he states it:

The facts about income inequality in the UK are nothing less than mind-boggling. The average income of a FTSE 100 chief executive, according to the most recent Guardian survey of executive pay, is over £3m per year, including bonuses and pension contributions. This is more than 100 times median household income.

Martin says that inequality of this order 'undermines relations of social solidarity'. It could also be argued that, even if you hesitate before rough equality as an ideal, such huge inequalities are unjust, whatever they do for social solidarity. In any case, Martin's proposal is to 'change the composition of remuneration committees, adding some broader and more critical voices to the mix'; he refers to the possibility of worker representation on them. 'Moral philosophers', he says, 'have long recognised the special significance of face-to-face justification'. I don't dissent from this either; things that are hard to justify are harder still to justify if one has to do it before an audience of those on the wrong end of them. Still, the proposal is, for my money, too much Habermas and too little Hobbes or Marx. It is too much discourse ethics and too little power. When it comes to defending their dearest interests many people will swallow the difficulty, if they have to, of looking bad in front of others, and use what voting clout they have to get the result they want. Crucial, therefore, in the proposal concerning remuneration committees would be not the mere presence of some 'more critical voices' but the exact composition of the committees and the distribution of voting power that was a consequence of it.

(The subhead given to the piece, by the way, which I take it was given to it by someone other than Martin himself, is, as a summary of his meaning, ridiculous: 'If business leaders had to explain why they are worth their extravagant salaries, we might see an end to corrosive inequality.' A 'softening of', maybe. An 'end to', ha ha.)

Writer's choice 281: Adèle Geras

Adèle Geras, aka WotN, has written more than 90 books for children of all ages and for adults. Her most recent novel is Dido. In this, her third, contribution to the Writer's Choice series, she writes about Elizabeth Strout's Amy and Isabelle.

Adèle Geras on Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout should be much better known in this country. Her name should be spoken in the same breath as those of Anne Tyler, Marilynne Robinson and Alice Munro. Like them, she writes about real people in recognizable settings with great literary skill, married to both readability and a refreshing absence of pretentiousness or obscurity for its own sake. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for her third novel, Olive Kitteridge, but the Pulitzer seems not to cut very much ice in the UK and, besides, the cover was one of the most inappropriate I've ever seen. I have no idea how many copies it sold here, but I'm prepared to bet that it didn't do as well as it might have done. I recommend it to many, but almost everyone I speak to has never heard of it before, nor of its author.

Olive Kitteridge is the tale of a middle-aged retired Maths teacher. Olive taught for years at the local school in the small New England town where she lives. This brought her into contact with many of its citizens, either as pupils or as parents or friends and neighbours. She is married to Henry who works as a pharmacist in the drugstore. She has a beloved son. She is awkward, physically gawky and not particularly attractive. Her history unfolds in a series of short stories which, taken together, make up a novel full of small, everyday tragedies and epiphanies. Nothing explodes, no one travels to other universes or fights terrifying monsters, no historically or politically significant fictional canvasses are mapped for us, but nevertheless we are taken out of ourselves and into the lives of others where we see and understand what makes up the daily fabric of their existence; how they get through the days and nights.

Her second novel, Abide With Me, is about a clergyman who is left widowed quite suddenly. His young daughter is so traumatized by her mother's death that she stops speaking altogether. A woman called Connie housekeeps for him and helps to look after his child. The teacher at the primary school is drawn into the story. So are others in the congregation and gradually we learn what happened in the years leading up to the present day. Through every turn of the plot we have a sense of a community and its secrets being gradually exposed to our gaze. The book is written with economy and precision and is a brilliant account of bereavement, loss and gradual emergence from the darkness of mourning.

Strout's début novel, Amy and Isabelle, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2000 and was briefly talked about and reviewed but somehow it didn't attract the hype and attention that catapults a book into bestsellerdom. I certainly wasn't driven to read it 10 years ago by a clamour of praise rising up from the assorted media.

Now that I have read it, I understand a little why this might have been the case. On the face of it, a novel about a mother and a daughter in a small New England mill town over the course of a hot summer and early autumn in the 1960s might not be exactly the stuff to set the literary landscape on fire. Haven't we been here before? Aren't relationships between mothers and daughters the stuff of a thousand schlocky, soapy, magaziney fictions? Well, yes, but also no. This is an outstanding novel that's almost impossible to describe. Everything you say about it is true but somehow not enough. It's a wonderful description of the tenderness, rage, resentment and love-and-hate-coexisting-at-the-same-time in the breast of a teenage girl. It analyzes, dissects and describes the feelings of a mother who's loving and fearful and also resentful, worried, insecure and out of place in the society in which she finds herself.

Isabelle is a single parent. We learn her history right at the end of the book in a scene which is one of the best depictions of female friendship that I've ever read, but we guess at some of it right from the beginning of the story. This doesn’t matter. Clichés you've come across in other novels of this kind might be recalled but this story is written and presented through characters whom you feel you've known intimately and in language that's lucid, resonant, simple and poetic. It's also crude where it needs to be and quite often funny too. The comedy comes mostly from the characters and in particular from Fat Bev, who is a kind of exuberant, over-the-top mother-figure to the women who work in the offices of the local mill, but in particular to her friend Dottie, and to Isabelle and Amy.

I'm not going to outline the details of the plot. This book has three things which make it special... Firstly (and this is a quality of Strout's work which appears in all her novels), I can’t think of another writer who so skilfully gives you a sense, as you're reading, of the whole community which surrounds the main characters. You end up knowing as much about the people in Shirley Falls as though you've lived there for years. You know which churches they go to, who their friends are, the relationship between one set of women and another. You know how they dress and where they have their teeth done. You know where they live and how their houses look. The geography of the town is clear to you. You have a place to wander about in, created for you by the writer and you go from scene to scene with a vivid sense of who's there and what it feels like to be in amongst the characters. This is true whether you're in the high school with Amy and her teachers or in the mill office with Isabelle and the women, where the boss, Avery Clark, sits all day in his 'fishbowl' looking out at the desks beyond his glass partition.

Secondly, Strout describes the weather and the passage of the seasons brilliantly. This might not seem like a big deal, but when it's done well, it adds a dimension of pleasure that's often missing. The summer she's telling us about is one of the hottest on record and we feel with the characters every single degree of the heat as it seems to flatten the town and all who live there. We rejoice when the weather changes at last, and the fact that this comes as the novel reaches its dénouement and mirrors the state of mind of the protagonists is something that's often been done before in literature, but it works most effectively when it’s done well and Strout does it to perfection.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Strout is a writer who's not afraid of emotions. This might seem an obvious thing to say. Of course, a novelist writing about different kinds of love is going to be dealing with strong emotions, but Amy and Isabelle have a complicated relationship which encompasses many different threads of feeling and the way these are braided together and how the strands then begin to unravel and are at last woven back together again is so subtly and carefully done that the result is never cloying or over-sentimental, but always expressed with care and the special elegance and poise that marks the writing. Sunt lacrimae rerum, though, and Strout is not afraid to say so and show us what they are.

I'm going to finish with a quotation from the novel. It comes towards the end of a harrowing time for both our main protagonists and expresses one of the main themes of this astonishingly accomplished and hugely enjoyable book.

It seemed to her (What was that sound? Only Fat Bev snoring) that kindness was one of God's greatest gifts: the fact that people, so many people, held within themselves the ability to be kind, really, was the work of God. How kind those women downstairs had been to her tonight! How kind the policeman had been earlier, the doctor on the telephone, the silent pharmacist (remembering only a large, white-coated bulk of a man). Yes, how kind people could be.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

On Keef at CiF

Mick nails it: 'the notion that it's reactionary to advocate the removal of a genocidal tyrant also goes unexamined' - the context being this.

Times a-changin'

What normblog initiated on a Tuesday over five years ago, in June 2005, and has repeated every Tuesday since, the Times gets round to in October 2010. Today it announces (£) that every week its writers will discuss a favourite book:

Each Monday a Times writer will recommend a title that they love or particularly admire.

My own invitation to contributors to the Writer's Choice series says: 'I'm writing to ask if you'd be willing to do a short guest piece for my blog... on a book that you like or admire.' Glad to see the mainstream media catching up with the lowly blogosphere - except that my net is wider than theirs. I've featured Times writers but among others.

A moving experience

Back in the now prehistoric past, in - ooh - March or April, when Adèle and I began to wonder about the possibility of moving south, I made a list of 'considerations': you know, pros, cons, and things of (as yet) uncertain leaning or value, to be thought about in coming to a decision. I won't bore you with the list as a whole, but one important item for me went under the heading of 'disruption'. The thought behind this was, roughly: OK, if we decide to move, fine; but it must happen with a minimum of disruption. I meant disruption to normal life: work, blogging, reading, social intercourse and suchlike.

Ha. Was I ever deluded! To move house without incurring disruption is a hope of the same order as intending to mark a huge pile of exam scripts while maintaining an interest in what you read. It's like listening to the music of Mary Chapin Carpenter without longing for Emmylou or Merle Haggard or George Jones. You start by setting aside an hour here and there, nicely integrated into the rest of your day; soon you find that an hour is way too little if you're to be ready in time, so you do a bit more, and then a bit more than that. Then, if you have a positive attitude to life, you begin to find that the aforementioned disruption has an enjoyable side to it. You're planning a different future - might as well do it well. What the hell, next thing is that if this isn't the best-organized move in the history of the world, we'll have failed. What was at first disruption to normal life has become your normal life, and you're trying to fit in the odd other activity when you can manage it.

The big week is upon us. What will happen on this blog in the coming days I do not dare to contemplate. But I will endeavour to sustain some sort of presence here. I beg the indulgence of my regular readers.

Crooked words and straight ones

You'll remember from a couple of months back the young Afghan woman whose face was mutilated by her Taliban husband, and whose photograph was featured on the cover of Time magazine. It was an issue over which one or two members of the Western commentariat didn't exactly distinguish themselves. A report in Thursday's Independent has a picture of Aisha after reconstructive surgery. Discussing - apropos of the item - some of the progress lately made by women in Afghanistan and the distance there still is to be covered, one person expressing her simple moral solidarity with these women is Laura Bush.

Relevant reading

From a feature on Howard Jacobson in today's Sunday Times (£):

"I don't think people are being taught how to read. I saw Michael Gove being attacked for saying that children should read Dryden. Well, children should. I read Dryden. I can still quote you Dryden. [He does so, at length.] The minute you give children books that are 'relevant' to them, you are depriving them of a real education. Reading is about discovering other lives than your own."

'Relevant' is, in any case, a context-relative term. It may be relevant for young readers to read about others just like themselves. But it also may not. What if some of them find this dull? For someone who's interested in reading about people in locations that are, to her or him, exotically different, or about people from the past, or from invented worlds, then these all become relevant to them. At a certain stage during my teenage years, I became fascinated by stories of escape from German and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Just like my life in Bulawayo! Taking a narrow view of relevance, wherever that happens, is not a good pedagogic philosophy.

The Momma 'n' Daddy Collection 121

The way some people look down their noses at country music, it dismays me. Country music has real depth. As an illustration of this, today I bring you another facet of the Momma 'n' Daddy experience. As I believe I've said before, just about everybody has a pair of parental woojes; it stands to reason, therefore, that all variants of the relationship between mothers and fathers, on the one hand, and their children, on the other, are reflected somewhere in the canon. This episode may be regarded as the King Lear Momma 'n' Daddy. I know the song - 'Over The Hill To The Poor House' - from Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and you cannot fail to get the Shakespearean reference:

Oh, how can it be they have driven
Their father so helpless and old
(Oh God, may their crimes be forgiven)
To perish out here in the cold

Oh, heaven I'm sad and I'm weary
See the tears how they course down my cheek
This world is so lonely and weary
My heart for relief vainly seeks

Chorus:
I'm old and I'm helpless and feeble
And the days of my youth have gone by
And it's over the hill to the poor house
I must wander alone there to die

Long years since Mary was taken
My faithful affectionate wife
Since then I've been alone and forsaken
The light has died out of my life

Oh, me on the doorstep up yonder
I've set with my babes on my knee
No father was happier or fonder
Than I of my little ones three

Repeat chorus

The boys were so rosy and cheerful
And Lily was bright and so sweet
God knows how their father has loved them
But they've driven him out on the street

I gave them the place where I lived on
A deed to the farm and more
I gave them the house they were born in
And now I am turned from its door

Repeat chorus

And you thought it was all honeyed stuff. There's a version here by Lester Flatt and Mac Wiseman.

[The Momma 'n' Daddy Archive, containing all the details of the series, is here.]