Out of Place No.04: 'The Summer Book' by Tove Jansson

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘Floating on the water like a drifting leaf.’ – Islands and imaginary worlds in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

The sea is always subject to unusual events; things drift in or run aground or shift in the night when the wind changes, and keeping track of all this takes experience, imagination, and unflagging watchfulness.

In a cabin on an island somewhere in the Gulf of Finland, a little girl awakes under a full moon to find herself alone in bed. Perhaps it is the moonlight that illuminates and sweeps across the island to wake her, like the sea covered by ice at its shores. She remembers that she is sleeping in a bed by herself on the island because her mother is dead. She climbs out of bed and looks out of the window. It is April, and the floor is very cold under her feet. The fire is lit and flames flicker on the ceiling. The black ice on the sea mingles with reflections of the room, and its furniture and objects. It appears as if the suitcases and trunks that are lying open on the floor are filled with moss and snow, and ‘coal-black shadow’. There is a dreamlike intensity to the images and reflections that she sees, a mingling of perspectives of inside and outside, so that we are not sure if she is awake or dreaming. She watches their luggage float out in a river of moonlight, ‘All the suitcases were open and full of darkness and moss, and none of them ever came back.’ As she drifts back to sleep, Sophia lets the whole island float out on the ice and on to the horizon, as if she is letting go.

The Summer Book is full of such moments of space and solitude. Ali Smith writes that ‘the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.’ The presence of water is a constant and the book is full of images of floating and drifting, sinking and diving. For the inhabitants of an island, the sea is always there, ‘a long blue landscape of vanishing waves,’ an immersion in water. The book contains beautiful and striking descriptions of the sea and the archipelago, such as the arrival of a storm, when the island begins to look small and insignificant and the sea becomes immense, ‘white and yellow and grey and horizonless’. 

Tove Jansson, known mainly as creator of the Moomins, was a writer, illustrator, and painter, who wrote several novels and short stories for adults including The Summer Book, published in 1972. Running through the book is the relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter, and their shifting perspectives, which Jansson navigates with a light touch. They are companions who explore and have adventures together, arguing and playing together during a summer on the island. Recurring throughout are their thoughts and conversations which touch on questions about life and death in a way that is open-minded and truthful, irreverent, and unconventional. 

There is a sense of displacement and loss that comes from those images of the suitcases gliding away, the black ice and the moonlight, reflections of the darkness outside and the fire inside. This moment of grief is never dealt with explicitly, but perhaps a sense of loss hovers at the edges of the narrative. Jansson wrote The Summer Book after her mother’s death and in some ways the book feels like a remembrance of absent friends, and of an intense spirit of creativity and imagination which seems emblematic of her art and personal relationships. Contained within its pages is a deeply held belief in difference and free thinking, and a tolerance for others. It is a book about age and wisdom – ‘you have to come to it by yourself’ - that manages to be both weighty and understated, philosophical and poetic, moving and very funny. 

It is a book that resists characterisation and one that creates space for the reader through its structure: a series of vignettes, of connecting episodes and stories that are interlinked and overlapping. Ali Smith describes how the ‘profound quiet of the setting’ allows space for all the things left unsaid to be heard. ‘Jansson's brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string, each chapter its own beautifully constructed, random-seeming, complete story.’

It is a book that rewards re-reading, one of those books in which you notice different things each time you read. Reminding me of a time when I sat down to write, with the book beside me, in the early mornings of a long dark winter. I would set an alarm for 5am and sit with a blanket around me, often lighting a candle, and write for an hour or two when daily life would start to intrude again; the rituals of getting ready for school and work. The flame of the candle was the space I was carving out for myself, and sometimes a glimmer of an idea would surface. Writing back through the lens of memories real and imagined, I started to realize that it was places I was seeking to capture in words, a particular kind of longing.

The Summer Book is rich in place with a deep respect for the natural landscape. The setting is a tiny rocky island in the Pellinge archipelago in the Gulf of Finland. Tove and her brother Lars built a house on the island of Bredskär in 1947, and Tove and her long-term partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent many years together on a nearby island Klovharun further out on the rim of the archipelago, where it is possible to visit their summer cottage. The book is set during a summer, or perhaps a series of summers spent on the island: ‘It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace.’ For me, Tove’s writing, and her descriptions of the island, render a landscape I recognize from summers spent in Sweden as a child, the forests, lakes and archipelagos, the moss and granite rocks. The vividness of that landscape for me feels like the experience of summer, a place I associate with space and light.  

The book describes how these tiny rocky islands are remarkably resilient and self-contained. A small island ‘takes care of itself. It drinks melting snow and spring rain and, finally, dew, and if there is a drought the island waits for the next summer and grows its flowers then instead. The flowers are used to it and wait quietly in their roots.’ The human inhabitants of the island are self-sufficient too and the book is full of reflections on island living and island dwellers. In her foreword to The Summer Book, Esther Freud describes her visit to the island and how amazed she is to find how tiny it really is. She marvels at the use Jansson made of her surroundings ‘investing so much detail in every patch of ground’. Here, she thinks, was a writer who understood ‘the proper magnitudes of our small worlds’.

Although its setting is a tiny island, it is a book that is full of travel and imaginary worlds. When a picture postcard of Venice arrives one day, Grandmother begins to recall her travels in Venice and Sophia is curious about this city built on the water. Tove herself loved to travel and had spent time in Italy. The postcard is ‘the prettiest picture anyone in the family had ever seen. There was a long row of pink and gilded palaces rising from a dark waterway that mirrored the lanterns on several slim gondolas. The full moon was shining on a dark blue sky, and a beautiful, lonely woman stood on a little bridge with one had covering her eyes.’ The image of Venice sinking into the sea fuels their imaginations and they build their own pretend version of Venice, carefully constructing palazzos and bridges and gondolas: ‘There is something very elegant about throwing the plates out the window after dinner, and about living in a house that is slowly sinking to its doom.’

For Grandmother, moments of stillness and of careful observation are meaningful. She observes with care a blade of grass, a fragment of seabird down, becoming entranced by tiny details - the way they are constructed, how they move in a draft of air. This attentiveness to details can be revelatory, and Grandmother knows that she must give these moments her full attention: ‘It was important for her not to stand up too quickly, so she had time to watch the blade of grass just as the down left its hold and was borne away in a light morning breeze. It was carried out of her field of vision, and when she got on her feet the landscape had grown smaller.’ A tiny piece of driftwood, a scrap of bark that she finds on the shores of the island, could become a whole world. ‘If you looked at it for a long time it grew and became a very ancient mountain. The upper side had craters and excavations that looked like whirlpools.’ 

Running through the book is a deep awareness and respect for the living creatures they share the landscape with, for every plant, insect, bird, and animal that dwells on the island. The magic forest is a ‘dense, sheltering wall of trees’ that ‘had shaped itself with slow and laborious care, and the balance between survival and extinction was so delicate that even the smallest change was unthinkable.’ They leave the trees untouched, for to clear a space between them or attempt to separate them ‘might lead to the ruin of the magic forest’. Grandmother sits in the magic forest and carves animals from driftwood that she finds: ‘They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs and legs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest.’ As for the forest, left to themselves, ‘the trees slipped deeper and deeper into each other’s arms as time went by.’

This sense of preservation and letting things be is part of their existence on the island, to leave parts untouched, to not leave too many traces. They are part of a bigger system, a sustainable island environment in which you sense that all things are equal and have their place. The human inhabitants of the island stick to narrow paths by which they wander the different parts of the island, the rocks and to the sand beach, bypassing the carpet of moss and being careful not to step on the frail moss: ‘Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on the moss, it dies.’ Their habitation of the island is based on a deep understanding and reverence for the other forms of life with which they co-habit. 

‘The Tent’ is an incredibly beautiful and moving section of the book, in which the story seems to echo through the dual perspectives of grandmother and granddaughter. Sophia wants to hear Grandmother’s stories about the past and about her days as a Scout leader, and what it was like to camp outside in a tent. But when Grandmother tries to put her memories into words, they feel fragile and distant; it is as if everything is gliding away from her. Sophia sets out to spend the night in a tent, and as she sets out on her adventure, the creek where the tent is placed starts to feel like a ravine, distant and forsaken. She zips up the little yellow tent which feels small and friendly, ‘a cocoon of light and silence’. In the long summer evenings, it is still light outside, and she falls asleep. Later, waking up in the night, she finds that darkness has entered the tent and now surrounds her. She can hear strange movements and sounds, ‘the kind no one can trace or account for’. In this darkness she finds she really listens for the first time in her life and notices the feel of the ground under her feet which is ‘cold, grainy, terribly complicated’. In this awareness and surrounded by darkness she has the sense that the island has grown tiny, that it is ‘floating on the water like a drifting leaf’. Returning to find Grandmother awake, Sophia begins to tell, in her own words, what it feels like to sleep in a tent.

As the summer nights begin to fade away, the human inhabitants begin to remove their marks and traces from the island, ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’.  Grandmother feels the island becoming cleaner and returning to its original condition. It begins to feel lonelier and more distant and secret. There is a sense of taking leave, as Grandmother sits by the water at nightfall, watching the passing boats. The Summer Book is full of such quiet moments, where the lightness of Tove’s writing reveals depths. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Book extract: Fragments of a Woman, by Emma Venables

Berlin, UNter den linden, 1937 – Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1998-011-01 / Hagemann, Otto / CC-BY-SA 3.0

It is always an exciting day when someone that we know and admire has their book published, especially when it concerns itself with our home city of Berlin. Emma Venables is an extremely talented writer (whose work we are proud to have published here on Elsewhere) and her debut novel Fragments of a Woman is both startling and impressive. Following the lives of five women in National Socialist Germany, I was extremely privileged to be given the opportunity to read an advance copy ahead of its publication this month. 

Exploring themes of identity, nationalism, womanhood and motherhood, trauma and the crimes of National Socialism, this book is unflinching, moving and beautifully written, and for this reader at least posed a number of uncomfortable questions about how we as readers approach certain types of characters and the expectations and preconceptions we bring to someone else’s words on the page. Fragments of a Woman tells stories of Nazi Germany, at a time when there are no longer many around who can share their experiences, and stories such as these, when written with diligence and intelligence, will be increasingly important.

This book holds the reader by the head and makes us look, which we do with both empathy and, at times, horror. It is a fine achievement, and we thank Emma for the chance to share this extract with you… – Paul Scraton

Fragments of a Woman – Chapter 4

By Emma Venables:

Gisela loves the smell of a Berlin bar, loves the smell of stale beer, of smoke, the hint of vodka, sweat, and polish. She loves the sound of good music – the whine of a violin, the tinkle of a piano. She loves the way heads turn when she walks in, even though the men around her, in this particular bar, are not inter- ested in her curves, her flesh, her pulse. A few smile, raise their glasses as she makes her way through the crowd. She raises herself to her tiptoes, looking over familiar and unfamiliar heads to find Volker. She recognises his back, would recognise it anywhere, for he always wears a waistcoat, and tonight his chosen one is her favourite shade of purple. 

She steps left, then right, around the patrons blocking her way. Someone steps on her toe, and she winces, utters a curse under her breath. She wafts a cloud of smoke from her face, scowls at the man responsible until finally she stands behind Volker. She reaches out and rubs his back. He turns, wobbling on his barstool. 

‘Steady on,’ she says. 

He leans back, resting against her shoulder, and gives her an awkward kiss meant for her cheek, but landing on her nose. 

‘Happy Birthday, Gisi!’ he says. ‘It’s 1934, and you’ve been on this earth exactly nineteen years today. And how honoured you must be to share your celebrations with the Chancellor of Germany.’ 

‘Have you been drinking for me or for him?’ she asks, pushing him forward. 

Volker turns, pauses, and squints as if trying to do a difficult equation. 

‘You, naturally, because you know my feelings for you know who.’ 

Gisela raises an index finger to silence him. He shrugs, waves a hand around as if to indicate everyone agrees. Gisela grabs his face between her hands and plants a kiss on his lips. 

‘You’re adorable when your face is all squished up,’ she says, and kisses him once again. 

Volker shakes himself free. ‘And you’re wearing an exquisite dress. Spin for me.’ 

Gisela obliges. ‘Kaufmann’s’ finest. His wife is quite the seam- stress,’ she says, smoothing the skirt of her navy-blue tea dress. 

‘I approve. I love the neckline,’ he says, with a wink.

‘Stop staring at my chest.’ She places a hand to her collarbone. 

‘You know your chest would have to be much flatter for me to feel any fire in my loins.’

They laugh. Volker turns to the bar, and waves for the barman’s attention.

Gisela taps the shoulder of man on the stool next to Volker.  ‘I think that’s my seat.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Don’t worry about it, but you need to move now.’

The man sighs but vacates the stool. Gisela sits down. 

‘You’re shameless,’ Volker says.

‘I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, it’s my birthday.’ 

Gisela takes a swig of her drink, leans her head back, and smiles at the damp ceiling above. She still feels slightly nauseous from eating the giant slice of cake decorated with a swastika a woman in the street handed her earlier. It’s my birthday, too, she had told the woman, but refused the second slice of cake she was offered. Although, she did take the flower from the boy in the Hitlerjugend uniform. A pink carnation, which she dropped into her handbag and forgot about until she got her purse out in Kaufmann’s to pay for her dress. She had felt around the lining for the loose petals and stem and asked Herr Kaufmann if he had a bin. 

‘God, I’m glad this place hasn’t been shut down yet,’ she says, moving her gaze to the row of bottles behind the bar. 

‘You, me, and every one of these beautiful people,’ Volker says. 

‘But it’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?’ 

‘Don’t get mournful on your birthday, Gisi. You go down, I go down, isn’t that the way it’s always been? Ever since I was six and my mother dragged me away from you because you weren’t our kind of person, and your mother certainly wasn’t.’ 

‘Well, a respectable little German boy shouldn’t play with girls from the gutter.’ 

‘To hell with that. Cheers.’ 

Volker raises his glass and clinks it so hard against Gisela’s that a tiny crack appears in the rim; he runs his finger back and forth over the uneven surface. 

‘I almost got caught on my knees in the Tiergarten the other day,’ Gisela says. 

He wipes amber droplets from his chin. ‘You need to be more careful, Gisi.’ 

‘We were behind a tree, hidden by several trees, actually, but they’re relentless. In the end, I had to leap up, wipe my face, push the pervert I was with into action, and feign a proposal.’ 

‘A proposal?’ 

‘Yes. He was down on one knee by the time they appeared between trees, and I was professing that he’d have to ask my father for I wasn’t that kind of girl. They nodded and left sharply, which is a relief because when he stood up his limp cock was still hanging from his trousers.’ 

Volker’s head rests upon the bar now, and his shoulders shake. He still grips his half-filled glass of beer in his left hand. 

‘Are you laughing or crying? Because at the time I wasn’t sure what to do either.’

‘Both, I think,’ he says, his voice muffled.

Gisela rests her head on Volker’s shoulder. Even here the band strike up a chorus of ‘Zum Geburtstag viel Glück’ in honour of Adolf Hitler. Gisela and Volker remain silent, but Gisela smiles at the sardonic tone she can detect in the voices around her. Applause fills the room. Glasses clink. A barmaid places a cake on the bar. Gisela sighs. 

‘I’ve eaten more swastikas today than I care for. Shall we go?’ she asks. 

‘So early?’ Volker says, sitting upright.

‘I’ve got something to do at ten,’ she says.

‘You’ve got someone to do at ten, you mean,’ Volker says. ‘I suppose I could go and see Hans.’

‘Not home to mama?’

‘God, no. I’ll slip in in the early hours and she’ll never know. She sleeps like an elephant. I’ve really no idea how an elephant sleeps but I presume it’s heavily.’ 

‘I imagine she’s exhausted from all the celebrating today,’ Gisela says, sliding off her stool. 

‘Yes, she was feeling rather exuberant when I left. I had to tell her I was going to celebrate Hitler’s birthday with friends.’ 

‘I’m surprised she hasn’t dressed you in a little brown shirt.’ 

They step out onto Motzstrasse, and Gisela links her arm through Volker’s. She looks up and breathes in the cool air. She likes looking at the windows above, at the light escaping through cracks between curtains, knowing people go about their lives behind walls: that men kiss men, and women kiss women, and the government cannot stop them all. A car’s brakes squeal in another street. Someone opens a window above and the white noise of an un-tuned wireless seeps out. Volker lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and offers it to Gisela. He holds the cigarette while she inhales. As she exhales, she notices two men walking towards them.

‘We just saw you coming out of that bar over there,’ one of them says.

‘And?’ Gisela says, eyeing up their uniforms. ‘My boyfriend and I were enjoying a quiet drink, celebrating the Chancellor’s birthday. Then they broke into song and brought out a cake. Lovely cake. Swastikas and black icing. Looked just like that band on your arm. We all sang for the Chancellor. Then we ate cake.’ 

The men look at Volker. Gisela feels a tremor in his arm. She clenches her muscles, attempting to reassure him. One of them loops his fingers around his braces. 

‘And now my boyfriend’s walking me home to my mother, so we have to go. Good night.’ 

Gisela gently tugs on Volker’s arm, and they begin to walk. Volker stumbles slightly, but she holds him upright. The men do not seem to notice. She listens for the sound of their footsteps receding, determined not to speak until they have moved on. She turns her head a fraction to the right, pretending to admire the doorway of an apartment building, and from the corner of her eye watches them walk in the opposite direction. 

‘Are you OK?’ she asks. 

Volker nods, keeping his eyes on the street ahead. ‘I can’t believe you sleep with men like that.’ 

‘They pay me well, and sometimes they’re quite gentle. It’s as if they’ve spent all their hatred out here and they just want to give affection in bed.’ 

Volker shakes his head. Gisela takes his hand and grips it in hers. 

‘We must be careful, you and I,’ he says. 

He breathes sharply and throws his burnt-out cigarette towards the gutter. 

‘We must be bold and beautiful, as always,’ she says. 

He pulls her towards him, muffling her face against his chest. She puts her arms around him and breathes him in – aftershave he cannot really afford, cigarette smoke, the tinge of sweat – until the buttons of his waistcoat become uncomfortable against her face. 

***

Fragments of a Woman is published by Aderyn Press in paperback £8.99 and is available to purchase from your local bookshop or from the publisher directly. Support independent publishing!

Emma Venables' short and flash fiction has been widely published in magazines and journals. Her short story, ‘Woman at Gunpoint, 1945’ was a runner-up in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2020. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London and Liverpool Hope University.

Out of Place No.03: 'Missing Person' by Patrick Modiano

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘To make a few faded words visible again.’ Memory and oblivion in Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person

The last rays of the sun linger on the façade and the glass-fronted doors of the garage, over there, on the other side of Rue de Rome, by the railway track.

From the window of an apartment, a man looks out across the city at night contemplating the rooftops, the façades of the buildings with windows lit up, a maze of staircases and elevators. In the distance, the city stretches out to streets, gardens, squares, and métro stations. To the bridges crossing the river, and lines of cars. The city is imagined as a dreamlike labyrinth, a network of chance meetings and encounters, of paths that cross, and lives that leave few traces. 

Published in 1978 and steeped in the shadows of Paris during the occupation, Missing Person evokes a city of mystery and ambiguity. Patrick Modiano creates a haunting and melancholy atmosphere of dreamlike uncertainty, from the first line of the book: ‘I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop.’ 

Guy Roland is a detective on a quest into his own past, hoping to uncover the identity he lost during the occupation of Paris. In the years following 1945 he found himself ‘struck by amnesia and was groping about in a fog’. Following a thread of fragments of evidence, of names, addresses, and photographs, the book maps a trail of clues and a series of encounters. He begins to submerge himself in the past, hoping to be recognized, for his own memory to surface. Amidst a tangle of revelations, of possible directions and stories, of unreliable evidence, are the memories even real or are they imagined: ‘Is it really my life I’m tracking down? Or someone else’s into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?’

Modiano’s work is preoccupied by the ways in which the past lives on and shapes the city of the present. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, which cited ‘the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation’. Since the publication of his first novel in 1968, Modiano has felt compelled to keep returning to this period of history, to begin to unravel its secrets, and to piece together in fragments what it felt like to live in those years, the gaps in memory and silences about wartime France and the occupation.

Modiano borrows the framework of a detective thriller, but this is a detective story in which no resolution is possible, because the evidence is fragmentary and dependent on chance and memory. Perhaps there are no answers, only dead ends. The search for a lost past creates a sense of dislocation and doubt that it’s enigmatic narrator can be anything other than a missing person with no verifiable name or history: I am nothing. 

Missing Person describes a series of phantomlike encounters with people whose lives briefly intersected. There are meetings with people who fail to recognize him, and muffled conversations. His identity is obscured, obliterated by the distance of time, by the fading of memory. ‘There, under the embankment trees, I had the unpleasant sensation that I was dreaming. I had already lived my life and was just a ghost hovering in the tepid air of a Saturday evening. Why try to renew ties which had been broken and look for paths that had been blocked off long ago?’

It feels as if uncertainty is what defines Modiano’s writing, and his themes of loss and abandonment arise from the precarious circumstances of his upbringing which he has written about in his memoir Pedigree. Missing Person echoes some of these fragments, and there is a crossover of places and names. Modiano has written about his memories of walking the city from a young age, in areas of Paris such as Pigalle and Montmartre, and the influence of these first impressions on his subsequent writing: ‘It was there, on rue Fontaine, place Blanche, rue Frochot, that I first brushed against the mysteries of Paris and, without realizing it, began dreaming of a life for myself.’

Modiano’s cities are memoryscapes. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he spoke about the links between walking and exploring the city and imagination: ‘through the topography of a city, your whole life comes back in the form of successive layers, as if you could decipher the superimposed writings of a palimpsest.’ Modiano’s places tend to be spaces of transit, hotel rooms, cafes, rented apartments. He is drawn to explore the run down and haunting atmosphere of certain quarters of the city. They are ephemeral and intriguing locations that fill his books with an atmosphere of mystery and melancholy. In Missing Person, the narrative circles around the Rue de Rome in Batignolles and the train tracks, the site of a lost memory.

What is striking on reading Missing Person is the detailed geography of the city, and the number of references to street names and specific places. The city becomes a site of clues or signs to be followed like a trail. They provide something tangible. Signs that might point the way through the darkness of memory. ‘I use them to try to obtain reference points. Buildings bring back memories and the more precise the setting the better it suits my imagination.’

I couldn’t resist the urge to map this book, the specific locations contrast with the uncertainty and lack of solidity which are the overall effect of the book. For Modiano’s narrators, the city is a place of anonymity in which it is possible to merge with your surroundings. Mark Polizzotti describes how this effect of disorientation is created precisely by a ‘sense of tension arising from this almost hyperreal precision and the knowledge that, despite this, the places themselves keep eluding our grasp.’ 

In Missing Person, the reader is led along a trail of papers, lists and fragments - postcards, letters, files and memos, newspaper articles, and old photos. Tracing backwards into the distant past, these artefacts begin to feel like evidence – the only proof the past was not a dream, a denial that lives could disappear and leave no traces. In the office of the detective agency, there are dark wooden shelves lined with street-and-trade directories: ‘these directories and year-books constituted the most valuable and moving library you could imagine, as their pages listed people, things, vanished worlds, to which they alone bore witness.’ 

In his Nobel speech, Modiano describes writing his first books, and looking at old Parisian telephone directories, their names, addresses, phone numbers and imagining the lives of those inside: ‘I had the feeling as I turned the pages that I was looking at an X-ray of the city – a submerged city like Atlantis – and breathing in the scent of time.’

Modiano’s work is interested in the way memories can arrive unexpectedly, and their connection to place. In the book, the narrator begins to walk the streets, attempting to retrace his steps and to piece together flashes of memory, like the traces of a dream on waking up: ‘I was like a water-diviner watching for the slightest movement of his pendulum. At the top of each street I would stop, hoping that the trees, the buildings, would make me suddenly remember.’

In his writing, Modiano explores the idea that places hold traces of the lives of those who have passed through, and that certain areas of the city retain a mystery and strangeness. The novelist becomes a seismograph, ‘standing by to pick up barely perceptible movements.’ The city is a site of memory, a layered surface that merges with the present and retains traces of the past; a haunting that can be detected in vibrations or waves within the spaces of the city itself: ‘I believe that the entrance-halls of buildings still retain the echo of footsteps of those who used to cross them and who have since vanished.’ Certain streets create a particular affect, as though they are weighted with the past. There is a feeling of peril in certain locations, as if some areas of the map are charged with meaning or tension and shape the present city. 

Missing Person is saturated with the oppressive atmosphere of the occupation. The darkness of the blackout and the silence of the curfews creates ‘a city which seemed to be absent from itself’. It is a place of transitory encounters, false papers, and random police checks, where on the surface life continued but in which ‘adults and children could disappear without a trace from one moment to the next.’ 

There is a sense of menace and fear to the city that pervades the novel, a feeling of suffocation, of the net closing around you. The city feels haunted and uncanny, as if it carries the weight of the past alongside it. ‘He remembered that tiny snowflakes – almost raindrops – were swirling outside the window. And this snow, the night outside, the bareness of the room, made him feel he was suffocating. Was it still possible to get away, even with money?’

The atmosphere feels shrouded in mystery and shadow, as though the encounters take place in a dream, half glimpsed and uncertain. It is as if the past city emerges through the fog, and Modiano uses imagery to create an atmosphere of fragility and a lack of solidity: ‘Everything about us was deserted, frozen. Even the Eiffel Tower, which I could make out on the other side of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower generally so reassuring, looked like a hulk of oxidized scrap-iron.’

In this city, Modiano places shadowy figures of uncertain identity, ‘the strange people who discussed their affairs in low voices’. His characters drift through an untethered existence, plagued by doubts or a sense of guilt and unease about the events of the past. They are stateless and exiled emigres of indeterminate nationality: ‘They spring out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.’

The act of vanishing is one of the central metaphors of the book, and Modiano’s work is full of characters who go missing. The occupation is portrayed as a time of disappearances, and the threat of obliteration feels present. Retracing his footsteps to Megève, the whiteness of the snow-covered landscape is like the amnesia that grips him. He finds himself surrounded by snow which seems to suggest invisibility: ‘All around me there was nothing but whiteness.’

In his Nobel speech, Modiano spoke of memory as engaged in ‘a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies.’ 

Modiano’s work has been guided by this prevailing interest in the silences and omissions of memory, an attempt ‘to shine a light into the darkness’ and to trace what is left of the disappeared, of those who left few traces. ‘Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.’

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Out of Place No.02: 'The Vagabond' by Colette

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘Nothing keeps me here or elsewhere.’ Freedom and writing in Colette’s The Vagabond

It is true that departures sadden and exhilarate me, and whatever I pass through – new countries, skies pure or cloudy, seas under rain the colour of a grey pearl – something of myself catches on it and clings so passionately that I feel as though I were leaving behind me a thousand little phantoms in my image, rocked on the waves, cradled in the leaves, scattered among the clouds.

In the dressing room of the Empyrée-Clichy, a café-concert in Paris, Renée Néré is preparing for her act. She contemplates the mirror, from behind the mask of her stage make-up: ‘my painted mentor and I gravely take stock of each other like well-matched adversaries.’ It is a cold night, and the dressing rooms are unheated. She can feel the floor vibrate from the chorus and the dancers, listening to the creaking iron staircase and waiting to go on stage as the minutes crawl slowly by. This is ‘the dangerous, lucid hour,’ the time when thoughts and doubts creep in. A restless crowd has gathered in the dark and dusty, smoky auditorium. From the moment the first bars of music strike up, a mysterious discipline takes over and Renée has the sensation that all is well, that she no longer belongs to herself. On the stage she feels ‘protected from the whole world by a barrier of light.’ 

Published in 1910, La Vagabonde, which translates as ‘the wanderer’ was something of a turning point for Colette. This story of life in the music halls of Paris in the early twentieth century was drawn from her personal experience, travelling around France performing as a dancer and mime. As Renée reflects upon solitude and independence, the conflict between a sense of liberation and security, the book mirrors Colette’s own struggles to find artistic freedom. 

The encounter with the mirror image, a self-portrait in disguise, is something that recurs in Colette’s writing and suggests a way of framing her work. As she writes in her 1928 novel, Break of Day: ‘Are you imagining, as you read me, that I'm portraying myself? Have patience: this is merely my model.’

Written in a personal style, The Vagabond is a novel that breaks new ground suggesting that Colette was already beginning to explore the possibilities of a shifting style of writing, moving between fiction and memoir. In her work she mixes genres and different modes of writing in a way that feels distinctive and radical. Colette’s form of writing was based around her own life, but carefully crafted and shaped; constantly reinvented. From the start, we are in the company of a voice that feels fresh and immediate. The Vagabond is written in a first person, present tense that makes it feel ageless and undated. The tone is full of energy and sparkle. She is playful and inventive, witty and disparaging, yet also compassionate and sincere. 

Written in three parts, the novel mirrors aspects of Colette’s life and the events following the end of her first marriage to Willy. Married at the age of twenty, Colette’s life was transformed from the quiet solitude of her upbringing roaming the countryside, to a Parisian woman of society. Willy wrote popular novels, or more accurately employed a production line of young writers to produce the work which was unpublished under his own name. It was during these years that Colette began to write, later she would describe this as her ‘apprenticeship’, and became a ghost writer, publishing the Claudine series of novels under Willy’s name. The Claudine novels were incredibly successful, and the couple became well known within Parisian society. Not only did Willy keep the rights to the books, but he also sold them for an enormous sum of money in 1909. After their marriage and divorce, Colette began to publish under her own name.

Renée too is a writer whose books have had ‘an unexpected and extravagant success.’ The name Renée connotes rebirth, it means to come back to life or re-emerge, to be reborn. In the mirror she sees the image of ‘a woman of letters who has turned out badly’ in the eyes of the world. The book is about finding an identity in writing. As Renée tells us: ‘And that is where my story ends – or begins.’

The Vagabond describes these years of marriage as painful and humiliating - the discovery of her husband as serially unfaithful – and as a time of self-effacement: ‘I was made to understand so well that, without him, I didn’t exist.’ These past experiences haunt Renée when she meets a new admirer and begins to confront the central dilemma of the novel. Torn between finding love and companionship and letting go of her solitary life, and the sense of empowerment and self-sufficiency she has worked so hard to find: ‘On my good days I joyfully say over and over again to myself that I earn my living.’ 

For Renée, the music hall provides a way of securing financial independence, a way for her to survive outside the constraints of marriage, which for Colette represents a form of entrapment for women: ‘He offers me marriage as if he were offering me a sunny enclosure, bounded by solid walls.’ The conflicting needs of independence, work, and love are themes of Colette’s writing, and Renée feels ‘an active passion, a real need to work, a mysterious and undefined need which I could satisfy equally well by dancing, writing, running, acting, or pulling a hand-cart.’ 

The Paris of The Vagabond is Montmartre and its surrounding areas. She writes about the street girls of the quarter: ‘slowly dying of misery and pride, beautiful in their stark poverty … they belong to a breed which never gives in, never admits to cold or hunger or love.’ With Colette as a guide, the Parisian dance halls and café-concerts come alive. The Empyrée-Clichy is a fictional theatre perhaps based on the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Rochechouart. She draws portraits of the music hall artistes. The star of the show is a singer from the streets, raw and untamed: ‘She sings like a sempstress or a street singer, and it never occurs to her that there is any other way of singing […] The public adores her just as she is.’

Behind the perception of the music hall as a place of dubious morality, Renée finds a comradeship among her fellow performers, while acknowledging the precarity of their lives: ‘my silent sympathy goes out to them without any preferences.’ They live an uncertain, wandering life, unrecognized, disparaged, little understood. In her eyes, there is a dignity to the insecurity, the sadness and pride of their lives away from the stage: ‘Who will condescend to wonder what you do […] when darkness has swallowed you up and you are hurrying, towards midnight, along the Boulevard Rochechouart, so thin you are almost transparent.’

Within this life, there is a truth about living. Renée has chosen a life of chance. She is aware that freedom comes also with loss: ‘I attract and keep the friendship of those melancholy, solitary persons who are pledged to loneliness or the wandering life, as I am.’ She tries not to look in the mirror too closely for there she sees the solitary life she has chosen and ‘the realisation that there is no one waiting for me on the road I follow, a road leading neither to glory nor riches nor love.’

On reading The Vagabond, I am struck by Colette’s great love of language and attentiveness in observing the world around her. She is a writer of the senses, concerned with feelings. Her writing is elegantly constructed, absorbing, written with exquisite timing and an extraordinary clarity of expression. The book describes the act of writing, ‘the patient struggling with a phrase until it becomes supple and finally settles down, curled up like a tamed animal, the motionless lying in wait for a word by which in the end one ensnares it.’ Colette’s descriptions are vivid, dreamily poetic, and intense. She writes in a way that seems to map feelings onto the world around her, blurring the boundaries between internal and external experience through memory and reflection.

Colette is a writer of place and landscape, and she has written often of her memories of the countryside where she grew up, Puisaye, an area of northern Burgundy. In The Vagabond, she talks about finding a refuge in the past through writing about memories and places: ‘Every time I touch the fringes of it, my own country casts a spell on me, filling me with sad, transitory rapture; but I would not dare to stop there. Perhaps it is only beautiful because I have lost it.’

Renée’s long self-examination and the central dilemma of the book concerns this sense of being torn between freedom and solitude: ‘I escape from myself, but I am not still free of you, I know it. A vagabond, and free, I shall sometimes long for the shade of your walls.’ These moments of reflection and melancholy contain a realisation that she holds the key to her own destiny, and that sometimes this means ‘the right to be sad’ and to exist in her interior mind, to become ‘neither darker nor lighter than the shadows.’ 

‘Call it obscurity, if you will: the obscurity of a room seen from without. I would rather call it dark, not obscure. Dark but made beautiful by an unwearying sadness: silvery and twilit like the white owl, the silky mouse, the wings of the clothes-moth.’

The Vagabond echoes its title in summoning a writing that is all about movement, and the conjuring power of words. Renée describes herself as an exile, a wanderer, a solitary. She feels a draw towards departures and a yearning for travel: ‘to move from one place to another, to forget who I am and the name of the town which sheltered me the day before, scarcely to think, to receive and retain no impressions but that of the beautiful landscape which unfolds and changes as the train runs past.’

Part three of the novel is the tour itself, written partly in letter form, full of glimpses, details, and images of the places they visit along the way. Colette writes beautifully about the passing landscape, the feel of travel, and of letting go, of seeing the changing scenery unfold. There is real life and feeling to this writing: ‘Half asleep, like the sea, and yielding to the swaying of the train, I thought I was skimming the waves, so close at hand, with a swallow’s cutting flight.’

There is a sense that this freedom is also about writing, and that the book mirrors Colette’s own path towards finding an identity through writing: ‘What are you giving me? Another myself? There is no other myself.’ For Colette, writing The Vagabond could be seen as a turning point, of belief in herself as a writer, and her quest to express what matters most to her in the world. Within the perfect moments of travel, and glimpses from the window of the changing landscape, comes a realisation: ‘as if the one dominating anxiety in my life were to seek for words […] In that same hour an insidious spirit whispered to me: And if indeed that were the only urgent thing? […] If everything, save that, were merely ashes?’

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Printed Matters: Kyklàda

Photo © kyklàda.press.

By Sara Bellini

At the core of Kyklàda's publishing project is an “archeology of moods and emotions”, a research that starts with topography and architecture and moves through history, art, public health, social norms, and cultural heritage. The small Athens-based press was born in 2020 and its catalogue has six active titles at the time of writing, with two more coming this autumn. Their multidisciplinary, collective approach focuses on the production of mini collections of texts and visual essays inspired by the Cycladic islands - hence the name - and in their specificity, their themes have universal appeal. 

The homepage of their website reads: “the Cycladic Landscape is both rural and urban: the Aegean Archipelago, south-east of Athens, extends into the city hills.” This interconnectedness between countryside and city, island and continent, natural and human-made, individual and collective, drives each publication and echoes across the six volumes: from the healing value of touch in Architectures of Healing, to the violence of uprooting in (Forced) Movement, the origin of the practice of the quarantine in Public Health in Crisis, the sexual freedom in Mykonos in Free Love Paid Love.

Kyklàda’s essays exist in the space between a question and an answer, and center on relationality and social dynamics rather than isolating phenomena and people. The relationship between humans (as individuals or groups) and the place(s) they inhabit is complex and diverse: What is the difference or similarity between refugee and migrant, pilgrimage and tourism, imposed confinement and forced movement? This is what Kyklàda asks, questions and explores, leaving the answers as open and multi-faceted as the sea.

Photo © kyklàda.press.

Here is our interview with team members David Bergé, Phevos Kallitsis and Juan Duque:

You define your book series as a catalogue of “liquid forms of modernity”. Can you tell us a bit more about what you mean with this phrase?

David: We don't see modernity as a celebration of a singular thing. In conceiving our books, we suggest parallel modernities. We see the world today as a complex and layered place where concepts and ideas are less solid and autonomous. An environment in which things are harder to grasp into one entity, where initially fixed objects may become liquid, can leak or spill into something else. I imagine this project, part of my artistic practice, as something as fluid as a human body, a living organism able to adapt to different climates, conditions, environments and contexts. A body can move around, travel, isolate, focus, loosen up, take different shapes, get sick, recover, relate to other bodies, eat and rest. 

How did you make the decision to distill your work into books rather than journals or a completely different format?

David: There are several motivations: I believe in the momentum of publishing on paper. The decision to make small books was made during the first lockdown, where we had the feeling we wanted something more tangible yet light enough to distribute and travel with.  Besides making the kyklàda.press series in the form of books, we produce formats for reading, writing and mediating tactile perception in gardens and large indoor spaces. 'The Conscious Effort Fort' is an environment conceived for reading and writing in the proximity of others, which then feeds back our research for future books. 

How is your creative process structured: What inspires you and how do you manage collaborative projects?

David: Our approach is not author or disciplinary-centered. Through dialogue and shared research, the team makes books often contaminated and strengthened by already ongoing research of involved team members. Four to five people work on each book. We research together, which gradually leads to taking positions and forms in writing, finally leading up to the book in question. As a team, we can read and research in about nine languages, are familiar with discourses in different fields and have access to a lot of practical skills that come at hand when self-publishing: from ideas to proofreading, from designing to printing to figuring out a webshop, understand how to parasite (or share?) already existing networks of logistics and distribution. 

Let’s talk about islands. You want to challenge the cliché that sees islands as separate worlds we can project our expectations on. What is your relationship with the Cyclades?

Phevos: The archipelago is a mesmerising experience, a place where you can easily navigate between islands, get lost and end up spending way more time than you initially wanted to. I always return.

Juan: Through navigation, our Westernized sense of perspective has established a common horizon, simplifying islands as visual spots at the surface of the sea. At kyklàda.press we believe that islands are not exotic entities alone in the sea waters. Islands remain interconnected with the mainland and each other, from the top of the mountains to the hidden topographies of the sea bed: a myriad of creatures and non-organic matter which lives in constant symbiosis with water; tectonic plates, fossil fuel pipes, and data cables.

David: To me the Cycladic landscape is both rural and urban and continues into the city hills of Athens. This is where the idea was born: a writing experiment disseminating knowledge on the Aegean archipelago, a project starting from this tight geography.

Interconnectedness, care and emotions are recurrent themes in your writing. What is the value of connection and in which space can these connections exist?

Phevos: Connection is an intrinsic element to existence, and we live in a time that the connection is multi-scalar and multidirectional. Physical or virtual space can be the medium that facilitates connection, but space can be what we connect to, and then it becomes a place. In the same way, we connect with people, the flora, and the fauna or objects. We live at a time when care, emotions, and interconnectednesses are foci and concerns, even when using a different lexicon to describe them.

***

Kyklàda’s books can be purchased online as well as in selected bookshops and museum shops in Europe and the UK, as listed on their website.
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Out of Place No.01: ‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

It is better to have nothing': Transience in Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.

Housekeeping, the first novel by Marilynne Robinson, published in 1980, is a book that is strongly resonant of place. It is a book with themes of transience and ideas about the meaning of home, even if that home is found elsewhere. Rooted in nature, it is also deeply human. It is a striking and singular book, full of beautiful imagery, written with a philosophical lyricism. When I first read it, I felt that it existed on its own plane, somehow. 

In the book, Sylvie, described as a transient and drifter, returns to her childhood town to look after her orphaned nieces. It is partly a coming-of-age story, about separation, memory, and loss. It begins with a train derailment, and the haunting image of a train disappearing into the lake. The train lies lost and submerged, hidden in its depths, becoming a legend in the town of Fingerbone, a story which also foreshadows the lives of its characters.

Housekeeping was highly acclaimed on publication, to the surprise of its author. In an interview with Thomas Schaub, Robinson remarks that when writing the book, she felt its style went against the tide of contemporary literature, and of what might be considered publishable: ‘part of what I was doing was trying to write a book that I would want to read, just to see what one would look like.’

It is a book that has language at its centre, and that uses language and metaphor to take us elsewhere. In the Schaub interview, Robinson talks about her interest in the idea that lived experience is something that transcends spoken, everyday language, and that people are more than what they say. In the book, Robinson uses metaphor to explore ideas through the thoughts of her narrator, Ruthie. She says that what interested her in writing was ‘in trying to be beyond my own grasp or outside my own expectations.’ 

The idea behind this series is partly to consider what it is about literature that seems particularly displacing, and what novels can tell us about being in the world. As Robinson puts it: ‘Art in a sense is recurring at the frontier of understanding because it integrates the problems of experience and the ordering of experience.’

In the book, dreams appear as real as memories, and the line between them is blurred: ‘I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.’ 

The fictional town of Fingerbone is based on Sandpoint in northern Idaho, which is situated on a vast lake, Lake Pend Oreille, between three mountain ranges and surrounded by National Forests. A long railroad bridge crosses the lake, as in the book, ‘from any distance its length and the vastness of the lake made it seem fragile and attenuated.’ The Northern Pacific Railroad built a depot at Sandpoint in 1882 opening a trade route for timber and freight trains, and the railroads played an important role in the arrival of settlers into this remote part of North Idaho. Amtrak’s long distance Empire Builder train route, which travels between Chicago and Portland or Seattle, stops at Sandpoint. 

Landscape plays a central role in the story, and is based on the place Robinson grew up, a part of the country where her family had lived for a long time. She describes the early parts of the book as ‘either memories from my childhood in some oblique form or stories from my family.’ Robinson’s all-female cast of characters are significant. When writing the book, she was aware of an imaginative lack and misrepresentations in stories and accounts of the American west, including the absence of women from these portrayals.  

Throughout, the book enacts a tension between transience and settlement, and between movement and stasis. Sylvie likes to watch the passing trains, and all the stories she tells are about boxcars and train or bus stations. She retains her transient habits, preferring food that can be eaten on the move, and the only place she will shop is the five and dime store.  She keeps her clothes in a cardboard box under the bed, and sleeps on top of the covers, fully clothed and with her shoes on. The book plays with the figure of the hobo, and with depictions of female drifters and migrant workers. For Sylvie, the trains represent a home that is always on the move, and through which pass the lives of many people, the invisible transient souls who claim a space within its wagons.

Sylvie’s drifting seems to arise partly as a response to Fingerbone’s isolation and instability. It is dominated by the lake that surrounds and threatens to overwhelm the physical spaces of the town. In Fingerbone, even the wind is watery. Each year the lake freezes over, and then thaws dramatically. Its houses seem like insecure and fragile dwellings, and there is recurring imagery of fallen houses, lost to the weight of snow and ice, and of houses adrift or unmoored: ‘a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel.’ 

Water imagery and metaphors of flooding and drifting recur throughout its pages. This connects to the idea of transience: ‘our lives floated as weightless, intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water.’ The word ‘transient’ comes from the Latin transiens which means ‘to cross’, and this crossing of boundaries, the seeping and infiltration of water, is everywhere in the book. The lake is a constant presence reaching deep into their imaginations, infringing the boundaries between land and water.  

Robinson writes: ‘Below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains.’ We are used to hearing about the movement of people as streams, flows, and floods. In the book, the lake becomes a container for the lost: ‘all those who were never found and never missed, who were uncommemorated’.  

Fingerbone is described as insignificant and negligible, melting into the darkness, as if glimpsed from the window of a moving train. The town’s residents feel unsettled by the presence of the transients who arrive with the railroad, or from the mountains, who are found by the shores of the lake, and in the forests. They are described as ghosts, wandering through Fingerbone, ‘like people in old photographs’, ‘the nameless’ and ‘the dispossessed’. Their presence threatens the stability of the town, its claim to be a tenable and rooted place, and implies a recognition, of something too close for comfort. Robinson writes that, ‘a diaspora threatened always,’ and the book creates a space for the displaced and unknown who haunt its edges. 

Throughout the book, there is a tension between domestic life and drifting. Sylvie struggles with the feeling of being contained within a house, and her housekeeping begins to overlap the boundaries between inside and outside: ‘Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude.’ She opens the windows and turns out the lights, and every evening they have dinner in darkness, with the sounds of the night outside. Leaves begin to gather in the corners of the room. Crickets and squirrels begin to reside in the house, sparrows and swallows begin to nest in the attic. 

The book traces the narrator Ruthie’s thought process as she tries to come to terms with what makes her feel different from others. She describes feeling invisible, like a ghost: ‘It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.’ She experiences the absence of her mother, her sense of loss, as a constant waiting and expectation, so that ‘the ordinary demanded unblinking attention.’ The book’s characters feel an intense quiet awareness and stillness: When we did not move or speak, there was no proof we were there at all.’

Ruthie begins to find a greater awareness of fragility, of instability and impermanence. To stay still in the book, is to be caught up in the ordered time of the domestic. It can be a way to hold the past at a distance and keep out the ghosts of those who are absent or lost. For Ruthie and Sylvie, these fragments of memory threaten to overwhelm the present, and a life of drifting become a way of comprehending the ghosts of the past, of keeping them alive through movement. 

Becoming transient is to reach an awareness of the unsheltered, the nameless, the lonely; those who drift outside the lighted windows of the houses. Ruthie begins to feel that she is ‘breaking the tethers of need, one by one’, moving further from the comforts of the settled world, in which the sense of security, of permanence is an illusion: ‘It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.’

In Housekeeping, the idea recurs that families should not be broken: ‘That’s how it is with family, Sylvie said. You feel them the most when they’re gone.’ As I write this, I have been thinking about the separation of families in a more recent context, about migration and detention; about children caught up in war and conflict. Long journeys across impossible spaces; the events that cause people to become separated, to become lost. 

I’ve been thinking about the Sylvie who exists in me, my own restlessness and tendency to drift. And about the problems with a romanticized impression of life on the road or rails. But the invocation of this book, that families cannot be broken, brings back the idea of displacement. The book makes its transients central, rather than leaving them on the edges of things. 

Housekeeping portrays a longing for movement that is also a deep awareness, that registers the presence of those who have vanished; the unrecorded lives of those who left few traces behind. Perhaps a troubled line runs between these kinds of longing, and the small gratitude of having safety and security, somewhere to hide away, when needed, and to sleep in peace. 

Housekeeping depicts a different way of living in the world and evokes a belonging that can exist outside ideas of home as being rooted in one place. The book questions the notion of a stable past, a version of home that is not available to everyone. It is about the insecurity at the heart of living, of finding meaning and a place to be, within movement.

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Capturing the forest – the photography of Eymelt Sehmer

By Paul Scraton:

It was a cold winter day when Eymelt invited us to her studio in Berlin-Weißensee. She had been looking for models, people she could photograph using a technique that dates back to the earliest days of photography. It would take a while, she said, to capture each image. We would – in this era of mobile phones and Instagram, when more photographs are taken in a single year than in the previous century – have to be patient.

The collodion wet plate process requires that a black tin plate be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. We spent a few happy hours in her studio room, laughing and joking and mainly talking to Eymelt’s legs, because she was usually under a thick blanket of some short, either behind the camera or in her self-made dark room where she prepared the collodion emulsion, coating the plates and then developing them by hand.

‘Did you ever try this outside?’ someone asked, and in those six words, an idea was born.

In early 2017, Eymelt had made a short film based on my book Ghosts on Shore about the Baltic coast, and we had been keen to work together on a project again. The idea of finding a way to take the collodion wet plate technique out of the studio and into the landscape was the starting point for what would become our new book. 

In the Pines is a combination of words and images. It is my novella, a whole-life story told through fragments about a narrator’s relationship to the forest, sharing the pages with Eymelt’s photographs from between the trees. Some of the stories contained within the book gave Eymelt inspiration when she took her mobile darkroom into the forest. Some of the images she returned to inspired new stories in turn. Eymelt’s art both illustrates the text and inspires it, and I know I would have created something different, something lesser, without our collaboration.

To celebrate the launch of the book this autumn I wanted to celebrate Eymelt’s talent and her art. What follows is my short interview with Eymelt, about the photography in our book and what she’s planning next. 

What is it about this technique that is so appealing to you as a photographer?

First, I love analogue photography in general. And then, what I find most intriguing about the collodion wet plate process, are the imperfections of the images. The photos are blurred; the images look liquid, creating blind spots. These are voids to be filled by the viewer’s imagination. And each photograph is truly unique.

When you first showed me the technique in the studio, it seemed almost impossible you could take it outside. What specific challenges did you face when taking your camera out into the forest?

The most challenging thing involves the developing, in that I have to do it immediately. The coated photoplate needs to still be wet for the developing process, which means I have about ten to fifteen minutes from coating the plate until developing it. I have to therefore coat each plate by hand before each photograph. I cannot prepare a batch in advance.

Once the photograph is taken, the plates can only be handled in darkness. So I need a mobile darkroom, and I built one out of a former steamer trunk. Transporting this monster out into the woods, to basically build a lab out there among the trees, was quite a challenge and was time-consuming as well. 

Added to all this, and related to how much time everything takes, is that I am somewhat exposed. To the weather, and especially the temperature, which can have a major impact. During the winter, for example, the chemicals on the plates froze, creating some beautiful crystalline structures on the photographs. It was as if the environment had engrained itself on the image. But that is also what I love about the technique – you have to embrace the uncontrollable and see what happens.

In my introduction, I’ve written about how the photographs both related to the text and sometimes also inspired it. How was it for you, working on a collaborative project like this?

Generally, the inspiration for my works comes from fairy tales and myths, so the starting point is almost always a story. In the Pines was my first ever collaboration of words and photography, and as your language is very evocative, I could picture some of the images in my head right away. What also helped were the walks and talks we had, especially through the landscape. It helped me get a feeling for it.

Text is interesting because it can go into detail, and you take the reader with you. With an image it is slightly different. I am choosing the frame of course, the perspective and the light situation. But there is more there for the viewer to decide for themselves. Not least when it comes to how close or carefully they decide to look.

My favourite aspect of the collaboration was that it basically forced me to take the technique outside and into the woods. Without this project, I’m not sure I would have given it a try. And spending all that time out there with my camera and my mobile darkroom meant I had lots of beautiful encounters with mushroom foragers, kindergarten kids, horses and hikers.

So will you be taking more landscape or outside photographs using this technique in the future?

I’m certainly going to take some more. I would also like to experiment more, try some things with filters etc. 

In the Pines is all about the narrator’s lifelong connection to the forest. What does the forest mean to you?
For me the forest has always been, since early childhood, a kind of retreat – a place of sanctuary. I could lose myself in fairy tales, and in difficult emotional times it was a place where I took refuge. To this day, the forest is still a place of solace for me.

It was also an adventurous playground for myself and my brothers. A place where you could pick berries and hunt mushrooms, where you could climb trees and build secret hiding places far from the parents’ eyes. It was our own microcosmic realm and it captivated our imagination.

Finally, what’s next for Eymelt Sehmer? You have a gallery in Berlin – are there any projects or news from the gallery you’d like to share with us?

Oh, I have lots of ideas! In early 2020 I took the Trans-Siberian Express through Russia to Mongolia where, thanks to the pandemic, I got stuck. Initially I’d intended travelling there to take photographs of the Dukha people, a nomadic reindeer tribe, and then, having got stuck in Ulaanbaatar with my guide and his family, I met his wife Mugi’s motorcycle club – the first and only female motorcycle club in the country: the Mongolian Lady Riders. Modern nomads.

I made a short film about the motorcyclists and have photographs from the entire trip, but it takes thought and care as to how they might be used. My experience with the Dukha, for example. It was a nice experience, but parts still felt awkward, and we as artists or tourists always need to be careful as to how we present, and indeed to an extent, ‘exploit’ such encounters and topics for our own artistic ends. 

I’m also working on a portfolio of analogue photographs of female characters in mythology, and in the gallery we are slowly getting back to exhibitions, readings and film screenings. Thanks to the pandemic, and the ever-changing situation, it is hard to plan things in advance. But in 2022 we hope to host some photography workshops and collaborations with different people from our neighbourhood in Berlin.

Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, Berlin
In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer, published by Influx Press

The Library: Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

By Marcel Krueger:

According to German writer Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) and his "Irish Journal" first published in 1957, "the people of Ireland are the only people in Europe who have never invaded other countries [...]". Since the publication of his book, this view has been the mainstream view of Ireland from Germany for decades, fuelled by countless media campaigns of Fáilte Ireland , the Irish Tourism Board: a twee, harmless island of green fields, dramatic cliffs and pubs with open fires, peopled by jolly fiddlers, naive artists and buxom ginger maidens. The dark and martial history of Ireland as a whole is often swept under the glossy rug made of postcards or Instagram reels from the "Wild Atlantic Way", or only ever mentioned if it can be commodified and packaged into something visitors can consume, like swashbuckling stories of Grace O'Neill or the conflict in Northern Ireland only made accessible through guided tours of murals and "Peace Walls". The fact that Ireland did invade other countries, its soldiers employed as mercenaries by European powers for centuries, or that its people have been slaughtering each other for a hundred years with bullets and bombs, is all glossed over. 

I hope that many people from Germany will read “Thin Places” by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, which in its complexity addresses the violence all over Ireland, and offers a way of understanding and a potential way out of the spiral of violence that engulfed the north of the island for so long. Coincidentally, the German feuilleton often uses the term Seelenstriptease, literally a “soul striptease”, for a work of art, a book, an interview, a movie that reveals deeply personal and intimate details about the creator of that work, or the subject. I don't really like the word, but it is the first I thought about when finishing Kerri's wonderful work, that this book is very much a soul, and a country, stripped bare.

The book is about many things: Brexit, place, trauma, alcoholism, grief, hope and fear, and uses the structure of memoir to follow the life of the writer: from her growing up as the child of a Catholic mother and a Protestant father in Derry/Londonderry, firebombed out of her home during the “Troubles”, the civil war in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998, and then moving away to Scotland and England before finally returning to her hometown in her 30s. Whereas the many excellent essay collection that have come out of Ireland in recent years, like Sinéad Gleeson's "Constellations" or Ian Maleney's “Minor Monuments” use personal stories as starting points to establish the theme of single essays, "Thin Places" is a book-length essay in itself, one that drifts of into certain themes but always circles back to the main structure of handling trauma - and failing in doing so.

This is not a book that is easy to read. Not because of the complexity of writing or the darkness it explores, but because it does not offer easy escapism, or just food for thought that makes you utter "Interesting!" and then put it aside. Many things that Kerri writes about in here are so profound and moving that I literally had to pause after a few paragraphs, put the book down and explore what her words had caused inside of me. Sometimes I got confused by the many places and (life) times the author jumps back and forth between, but then the key themes and the overall structure remain clear and always allow the reader to climb back in.   

This island on which I was born is a wild, ancient and stirring place - a place so ethereal as to take a given moment in time and bathe it in the light of something divine, a place that was eternal and holy long before those words ever had need for voicing. [...] Ireland - this ethereal and mythical island, set down in the heart of the ravenous, tumultuous Atlantic Ocean - is black, too, coal-black, as black as to be the making of the crows. Black is the colour of many of our true loves' hairs on this island but it is also the colour of sorrow and fear - of mystery and the unknown, of so much death, and of the unimaginable depths of our grief.

The book ends on a note of hope, with the image of the winter solstice and the conviction that there is always light ahead when it is darkest, but I don't think that that is necessary. Looking at the pictures coming from Northern Ireland in April 2021, it is clear that the important thing here is balance, balance in the peace process and the self. There are only ever small victories possible for all of us, and we have to fight every day so that the needle does not  tilt back to the dark side again. “Thin Places” is a deeply personal work of art and at the same time a timely portrait of the (still) hurting island of Ireland that everyone should read. Especially in Germany.  

***

Thin Places is published by Cannongate.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Trans-Mongolian

By Kenn Taylor:

Lying on my back on a bunk bed, on a very long, very bare train. Going a very long way through a very bare landscape a long way from anywhere.

At this point, I’d been travelling on it for so many days, that whenever the train stopped and I briefly stepped onto the terra firma of a platform to buy food, I had sea legs. Well, train legs. So used to the constant shaking and rhythm of the railway journey that, removed from it, everything seemed unbalanced and off kilter.

Being on a train for so long, there is nothing but time. To be filled in many ways. Looking out for the arresting moments between endless tress and endless desert. Games. Chat. Drinking. Lots of drinking. Someone brought a laptop with downloaded films and music, which in back then seemed over the top and now seems like common sense.

With me always being a late adopter, I’d brought books. Although like everyone else I’d been very affected, if not traumatised, by the animated film, I’d never actually read Watership Down. She had recommended it in her usual passionate way, so I thought, why not get a copy for my travels. In what was no doubt another daft attempt at maintaining a connection.

So, with an incongruity recognised by myself and others, I found myself reading a novel about anthropomorphic rabbits filled with descriptions of the lush, green and wet English countryside, whilst sat on a train going through the depths of dry, summer, eastern Siberia. With this being August, Siberia of course was nothing like the snow covered images of popular culture. A week earlier we had sunbathed near the Kremlin. As you do. It was odd but all the more vivid to be down the, er, rabbit hole, of this book about the loss of an arcadian England, whilst being on the other side of the world in a moving metal box going through a striking but unforgiving landscape.

Of course, wherever you go though, you are still you. I dived into the depths of this book and this journey, trying to concentrate on reading whilst also sucking in the vast stream of everyone and everything going past. On this bunk in the quiet afternoon though, in the world of rabbits as the eternal human struggle, I still found myself thinking of her and the chest pressing gulp of the pain swept back in.

Back then though, the wider world seemed brighter. This journey just another example of it opening up ever further, ever faster. Here we were crossing continents, a multiplicity of backgrounds filled with camaraderie, in a world of expanding global interconnection, dialogue and understanding.

Yet the warnings of how thin a veneer this all was were already on display here. A guide telling us of the racism he experienced all the time. Russians more than happy with Putin telling us ‘we need a strong leader’. The call to Free Pussy Riot provoking indifference, ‘they shouldn’t have behaved like that in a church.’ No one likes us, we don’t care. What now stares us in the face as the growing threat to democracy in the 21st century was all there lurking in the background. We had thought then perhaps that this was just the leftovers of an old world that was dying. Really though, the post 2008 trauma was still just sinking in. The thwarted ambitions and dreams of millions, many struggling now even for a basic standard of living. Their sense of injustice ruthlessly diverted to other targets by those in power, so they could maintain the status quo, despite its diminishing returns for the majority.

The world has turned darker in the last decade. So many of the places we visited then, even if it still possible, we might not choose to now. Borders going back up. Minorities oppressed. Rights shredded. History coming roaring back to bite. Wherever you go, you are still you and you take your experience and culture with you. Sometimes though, what you see when you go elsewhere follows you back home much later.

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. www.kenn-taylor.com

The Library: Unofficial Britain by Gareth E. Rees

Read by Marcel Krueger:

During the first weeks of Coronavirus lockdown in the Republic of Ireland, where I live, everyone was confined to a two-kilometre radius around our houses to help prevent the spread of the virus. I was lucky to have an obvious sliver of Irish history within my 2 km-circle, a sliver that shows that even a small town like Dundalk has its place in history and displays that proudly when you know where to look: on my street is Seatown Castle, actually the bell tower of a 13th century Franciscan monastery. It was once plundered by invading Scots, Scots brought over by Edward the Bruce in 1315 in his claim for the Irish crown. He crowned himself High King of Ireland in Dundalk the same year, just a few streets away, where today Micheal McCourt’s pub can be found.

But just around the corner from that pile of medieval stones, on Mill Street, is another reminder of history, one that is not as flashy as the Seatown Castle but maybe as equally important for the town. Sitting in the sidewalk is a rusty-brown water meter cover, one that must have been set here at some point in the 1980, when (long before water meters were a political issue in Ireland) someone in Louth County Council bought these from Wabash, Indiana, a small town of 10,000 inhabitants which produced the hexagonal water meter covers that to this day are strewn around this equally small town on the east coast of Ireland and proudly bear the inscription “Ford Meter Box Co., Wabash, Indiana U.S.A.”.

In his latest book, Gareth E. Rees equally focuses on these unobtrusive landmarks of the quotidian (albeit more bigger ones), landmarks that form the backdrop to our lives every day that might get unnoticed by many but are, after a fashion, holding the fabric of the world together. While in his previous books, Marshland (Influx Press, 2013), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), Rees mainly focused either on a specific place - the  Hackney Marshes or Hastings - or on an ultra-local theme like that of car parks, Unofficial Britain is a more wide-reaching book that covers most of the island of Great Britain in search for what the author calls “anaologue relics of a bygone era before digital technology, mobile phones and the internet“, the structures of modernity that have existed for the last seventy years everywhere around us: electricity pylons, power stations, multistorey car parks, suburban housing estates. 

The book is divided into nine chapters plus introduction and epilogue, each dedicated to the “non-places” of today and their mythology, located in Scotland, England and Wales. By mixing architectural details with urban legends, ghost stories and bits and pieces from his own biography when writing about ring roads and roundabouts, flyovers and underpasses, Rees – who is also the founder of the Unofficial Britain website that was around long before the book and equally dedicated to the mysteries of the quotidian - shows us that these locations and buildings are as important as the holloways, medieval churches and cursed oaks of a British countryside. And even more important than the idea of a countryside that in many cases only exists in the imagination of over-romantic nature writers and the xenophobic fever dreams of UKIP and Britain First, like when he writes about the Redcliffe Flyover that existed in Bristol from 1967 to 1998:

Like the Eiffel Tower, built as a temporary structure never intended to be an enduring Parisian landmark, the Redcliffe Flyover became totemic. It came to represent fun, thrills and amusement; rare moments of child-like wonder in the midst of a tough, troubled city. A similar process of appropriation can happen to other unlikely landmarks such as chimneys, communication masts and factories. As we grow up among them they become ingrained within our memories and shared history. What can seem at first ugly and soulless can gradually come to accumulate emotional resonance through the sheer power of persistence.

At the same time Rees is stocktaking: with Unofficial Britain, he has created the standard reference for landscape punk and urban place writing in Britain 2020. Besides his own concrete experiences he uses examples of the works and lives of other important urban explorer artists like Salena Godden, Gary Budden, Nick Papadimitriou, Olivia Laing or Clare Archibald, a veritable who's who of deep topographers. With its honest narration and its accessible language this is the perfect introduction for anyone wondering what the whole psychogeography hogwash is all about; a wonderful ramble through the Brexit Britain of today - warts and all.

But isn't this how we experience a place? For a place is more than bricks and mortar. More than a map. More than a bunch of articles about social deprivation and sneery lists of Britain's worst towns. A place is made of stories and you read and rumours you hear. It is made of prejudices and anxieties, shaped by our past experiences. It is an atmosphere - a synchronicity of light, sound, smell, texture and temperature. 

The only thing I wish Rees would have done was to include Northern Ireland - as wide-reaching as his account of unofficial Britain is, I would be curious to see what the Troubles meant and mean for the urban fabric of the quotidian in this part of Britain across the water; and if what he might have found here made would have been vastly different to those in Scotland, Wales and England. 

For the time being, we keep on living in the pandemic dead future of the 60s and 70s in a time where the future only seems to promise more ruins, more cracked concrete and more neglected estates as government funds run out or are shovelled into offshore accounts while the sea levels are rising. This book is a sober account of the dreams and nightmares of our environment, of the bridges and buildings that really form the fabric of our lives and not the rose-tinted utopias of the past that all the right-wing nincompoops try to sell us; and it will all be just more water meter covers, more concrete poured into flood defences and refugee camps from here on. 

***

Unofficial Britain is published by Elliott&Thompson. 

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.