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.

Book extract: For the Safety of All – A Story of Scotland's Lighthouses

Butt of Lewis Lighthouse, Na h-Eileanan Siar 

The view from the Butt – the gleam from the lighthouse once cast its glow on the crofthouses and croftland, moorland and machair, sand and shore from its stance on Rubha Robhanais, illuminating the waves of lazy beds as well as those found on the surface of the sea.

We are extremely pleased to be publishing this extract from For the Safety of All: A Story of Scotland’s Lighthouses. In this new book, Donald S Murray explores Scotland’s lighthouses through history, storytelling and the voices of the lighthouse keepers.

By Donald S Murray

Frequently, during my childhood and teenage years in Ness, on the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis, there were reminders of the depth of darkness that existed for centuries around the coastline of this country. 

At night or early evening, a storm might rattle windows, a gust of wind puff above chimney tops. The lights across the house would falter and flicker before disappearing. After that, there would be a scramble for matches and candles, a torch if there was one to be found. A Tilley lamp would be lit, taking a moment or two to ignite and burn before its warm glow added intricacies of light and shade to a room which seconds earlier had been illuminated only by the flame of a peat fire. It was as if we had stepped back in history, into the period before electricity had come to our homes, the ages swirling into reverse for a moment or two. 

And that change was most apparent when we peered out of the window at the rest of the village and the broad stretch of the moor. Apart from the spin and eddy of the Butt of Lewis lighthouse, the stillness of the red light above the Decca Station and the rare sweep of a set of car headlights, all was in darkness. We could imagine the householders performing the same rituals we did – scuttling through the kitchen cabinet or chest of drawers for matches, looking in the understairs cupboard among sheets and blankets for the lamp – before they restored muted light to their homes. This was what might have been seen in these houses if a passer-by had peeked in. The faint glimmer of firelight. The subdued flame of a Tilley lamp. Or perhaps even more dim and pale than any of these lanterns – a wick dipped in the oil of a seabird, seal or whale. An unsteady flicker casting more shade than light into the room. 

The scale of this darkness was one of the factors that made travel around the British Isles difficult for centuries. Difficult enough on land, this was especially the case when boats were the main mode of transport. Until the expansion of road and rail, after all, the seas and waterways were Scotland’s main highways. The seasons intensified travel problems, especially during late autumn and winter. In many ways, the sailors and travellers of these early times lived the opposite kind of lives to the modern city dweller. The latter’s constant use of electric light, whether found in the streets they walk and drive through or within their homes, prevents them seeing the moon and stars above their heads. For those who made journeys either on shore or at sea in the past, there were sometimes contrary issues. The need to observe and navigate by the stars made them focus overhead, leading – occasionally – to failure to see the rocks and skerries that loomed out of the ocean, the unpredictable nature of both depths and shoreline. 

And then there was the unreliable character of light before the arrival of the lighthouse to these shores, a process that began in earnest around the commencement of the nineteenth century. Sometimes, when a storm buffeted their boat, the glow of fire on the coastline meant safety and security for sailors, a harbour where a vessel could be tied up and fastened until that night’s tempest passed. However, there were occasions when their need for shelter and protection made mariners too easily deceived. Allegedly wreckers on the coastline of these islands took advantage of their desperation, ushering them to a shore where the consignment of goods aboard would be plundered, their lives lost. Fires would be lit, and signals flashed, but their boats were ushered only in the direction of danger. Over the course of the nineteenth century and later, the Stevenson family and the Northern Lighthouse Board put an end to these practices. Their lighthouses were charted and mapped. If anything flickered elsewhere, as it sometimes had in the past, it would most likely be a trick or a ruse, a deadly trap. 

There were other hazards in the northern edge of the world in summer. During this season, those of us who live in places like the north of Scotland have the sun as an almost constant companion. Its presence, in some shape or form, rarely leaves the sky, creating a continual twilight, blurring at most to a shade of ochre in the sky. The persistent lack of rhythm of light and dark has its effect on people, making some edgy and ill-at-ease. Insomnia abounds: attention wanders. Storm-clouds and dangers on the horizon can fail to be seen. Mist, particularly on Scotland’s east coast, prone to haar, can obscure and conceal the risks ahead. 

It was this – their awareness of the constant threat of terrors posed by both human actions and seaborne life – that made men begin to build lighthouses, a way of making the existence of both ship and crew more secure and safe. 

***

Donald S Murray grew up under the gleam of Butt of Lewis lighthouse, and lighthouses have remained a continual presence in his life. He is the author of non-fiction, fiction and poetry, with a particular focus on Scotland’s islands.  His books include the acclaimed As the Women Lay Dreaming, In a Veil of Mist, The Dark Stuff: Stories from the Peatlands and The Guga Hunters.

For the Safety of All is out now, published by Historic Environment Scotland.

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.

Packed with Hope: Campaign for children displaced by war in Ukraine

Two of our finest independent publishers, Little Toller Books and Bluemoose Books have just launched a campaign called PACKED WITH HOPE that we encourage our readers to support if at all possible. Already over a million people have fled the war in Ukraine and the estimates are that many more will be forced from their homes in the weeks to come. PACKED WITH HOPE is a campaign for children who have been displaced, separated from their friends and family, school and community.

On the campaign’s JustGiving page, Gracie Cooper and Kevin Duffy (Little Toller and Bluemoose respectively) write:

“With such terrible disruption to the familiar places, people and routine of their lives, we are hoping to offer just a little comfort and escape, especially as they try to settle for bedtime. Starting with storybooks, every one of the 10,000 backpacks will be filled with a selection of items that are both comforting and essential, such as head torches, notepads, colouring pencils, toothbrushes, puzzles, playing cards, activity books, bags of marbles, hot water bottles, socks, hats and scarfs, reusable drinking bottles, and many other much-needed things.”

You can support them financially via the JustGiving page, and the money will be used to purchase any items that are not donated as well as the costs of transporting and distributing the 10,000 backpacks.

At the same time, PACKED WITH HOPE are looking to mobilise a volunteer network in Dorset, as well as sourcing books and all the other items listed above. If there are any publishers reading this, or others who think they might be able to help, then please use the contact information that can be found on the campaign press release.

DONATE TO PACKED WITH HOPE HERE

Book Extract: Twisted Mountains by Tim Woods

We are extremely proud to present this extract from the story ‘Offcomers’ from the new collection Twisted Mountains by our very own Tim Woods. Twisted Mountains is a collection of short stories set among the hills of Scotland, England and Wales, with each story telling the tale of someone who has their own reason for being in the mountains, from a vengeful student to a wannabe biker and Wainwright expert with a secret. ‘Offcomers’ concerns an obsessive hotel owner, what money can buy and who owns the views of high places…

It is the most striking view in the country, of that there is no question. Today, exactly one year on from our grand reopening, it is at its most remarkable – a mountain alive with autumn colour. Its flanks are cloaked with russet bracken, which stops sharply at the dark band of woodland. Beyond, the tetrahedral fells melt into one another, each a little hazier than its predecessor. The lake that separates the mountain from me reflects all of this, doubling the splendour.

The first time I saw it, in February two years ago, I knew I had to have it. Although on that day, I would have happily taken any view on offer – anything to distract me from the interminable board meeting in which I was trapped.

The purpose was to agree exactly how many redundancies the company would need to make that year, and our declining prospects were evident in the choice of venue: a run-down hotel set two hundred metres back from the lake. The kind of place that tries to add a touch of glamour by providing cheap sparkling wine with lunch, no doubt trusting its regular clientele won’t realise it is nowhere even close to champagne. The whole charade was utterly tiresome and I resented being part of it, especially as I had already informed my fellow executives of my decision to retire. None of the redundancies would be my responsibility, so there was no need for me to be involved. Yet there I was, trapped in an increasingly aggravated discussion about unions, corporate responsibility and two-yearly forecasts. 

***

I passed the time staring out of the window and across the water. The small thicket of trees on the near shoreline prevented a clear view, yet I was still able to observe how the mood of the mountain opposite changed with each passing hour. Its still-snowy summit accentuated the cold grey-green of its flanks, while the strip of white cloud ravelling down its face accentuated its nuance and depth. Birds glided effortlessly on the hyaline water between us, leaving dissipating arrowheads behind them. As argument and counterargument raged around me, I knew that I had to have this view. To own it. To decide who got to share it and who didn’t. I blocked out all else and began to formulate my retirement plan.

At sunrise next morning, I walked down to the lake. I needed to see it again, at its earliest hour, just to be certain. Passing flower beds showing the first shoots of daffodils – such an uninspiring choice – I headed for the bench a little further up the shore. Unobscured by the trees in front of the hotel, the view from here was even finer and the mountain somehow even more spectacular. The sun crept up behind me, illuminating the eastern face inch by inch and painting it with a fresh palette, one of brown and purple and orange, scorched through with thick black shadows cast by its ridges and folds, a shifting show of shadow puppets. The singularity of this view was confirmed by the photographers jockeying for position on the grass around me, some even waiting in line for their turn in the prime spot. Even the joggers paused to take their own mental snapshots.

It is possible to have everything in life and still want more. Once back in London, I could not stop obsessing about the view imprinted so vividly on my mind. During those long final weeks before retirement, I set out the details of my new project: a fully refurbished hotel, five stars and fine dining in place of the shabby old relic where I’d been forced to stay. Something exceptional for those who not only deserve it, but can also afford it. It was just what the region needed: a taste of the top-end, an overdue injection of style and refinement. An alternative to the washed-out places that still, even now, proliferate around here, somehow surviving on two-for-one weekend deals and ten-pound lunches. By contrast, my hotel would be perfect. And the perfect hotel demands the perfect view.

***

Too many people dismiss us wealthy as being materialistic. It is a lazy insult, painting us as fools who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is also incorrect: we can appreciate the beauty of the natural world as readily as anyone else. The lower classes have long thought they had an exclusive moral right to enjoy the countryside, ever since they set off on their trespass over Kinder Scout. Yet the key word there is trespass: they were not supposed to be there. Would we have defended it so fiercely if we had not also valued it? No, the wealthy have the right to enjoy England’s beauty too. Anyone with money has worked to earn it, or toiled still harder to keep it. We deserve the chance to enjoy what it can buy, and exclusivity is part of enjoyment.

***

The complaints began even before our first month was through. The dining hall had no privacy, said the guests, as the huge windows meant that people passing by could watch them eat. Others said it was too cold in there. Which was nonsense, of course, and I even installed an antique thermometer to assuage their doubts. But a landscape of frost-capped fells can, it seems, make people feel cold, even in the confines of a fully insulated and expensively heated building. And people are so very eager to share imagined discomforts in lieu of any actual ones. Even those who didn’t complain failed to appreciate what they were experiencing, with eyes more commonly fixed on their phones, their food, or occasionally their companions. Anywhere other than my mountain. 

They also failed to appreciate the master suite. Complaints ranged from the noise of the diners below to the smells from the kitchen, and again the imagined cold. Yet as autumn changed to winter, by far the commonest cause for complaint on those insufferable online review websites was the dining hall windows, my Italian-made, nine-foot-high windows. There’s too much sunlight; the rain is too loud; why are there no blinds to stop people looking in… The unique opportunity to admire the finest view in the land was never remarked upon. Not once.

The final straw came during that first winter. Bookings were below half-occupancy and I had already been forced to lower prices after less than four months of operating. As I passed through the reception on my way to meet, and possibly sack, my manager, I heard someone complaining at reception. He was rich, arrogant and trying to impress a woman who was clearly only with him for weekends away in expensive country hotels. But the nature of his grievance hit me like a fist: he didn’t like the view. For three hundred and fifty pounds, he expected more than just a lake and a mountain. The girl on reception tried to placate him, but I cut her off before she had even completed her sentence. Give them a full refund as long as they leave immediately. I won’t let anyone talk about my mountain like that, especially not in my own hotel. 

It was clear to me by then that somehow, somewhere along the way, I had got it wrong. My vision was wasted on other people, whether rich or poor. I summoned my team of architects once more and explained what needed to be done.

***

The trees I felled and promised to replace have finally taken root, although rather than doing so in a nearby field, they now form a neat row between the old hotel buildings and the sparkling new construction near the water. The latter is now my residence, and quite possibly the most expensive private home in the country. The master suite is my bedroom, and the dining hall – my brilliant, beautiful dining hall – is the office from which I now manage the hotel myself, ensuring it matches the tastes of the lower classes. Once grown, those trees will become a barrier, affording me a little privacy from the riff-raff who now comprise my clientele. More importantly, they will block off all views across the water for anyone except me. Never again will my guests be confronted by a mountain too grand for them to behold, or be disturbed by a majesty they cannot appreciate. That burden is now mine, and one I bear alone. 

***

You can order your copy of Twisted Mountains via Little Peak Press. 

The Library: The Heeding, by Rob Cowen and Nick Hayes

Read by Marcel Krueger:

One and a half years into the current global pandemic, and we now see the first publications of what you could call “Coronavirus Lit”. After a run on Camus' The Plague and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year when it all started, now contemporary writers have begun to engage with the pandemic itself, with quarantine, isolation and living through it - with a varying degree of success. One the one hand there are inspiring projects like the online and offline The Decameron Project of the New York Times Magazine, which brings together such diverse writers like Rivka Galchen, Colm Tóibín, Margaret Atwood and Yiyun Li, on the other German novelist Thea Dorn's whiny Trost. Briefe an Max (Confort. Letter to Max) which barely misses becoming an anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination manifest while pretending to be highbrow literature. 

The Heeding, a collaboration between writer Rob Cowen and illustrator and graphic artist Nick Hayes can definitely be considered Corona Lit, and is thankfully of the inspiring variety. The book contains 35 wonderfully illustrated poems and spans the pandemic from spring 2020 to spring 2021, but this is not a lockdown diary (even though it picks up contemporary themes like the Black Lives Matter movement), but a book about the world as a whole and our place in it. As Cowen says in the introduction, when referring to the trauma World War II his grandfather lived through:

"This book is born out of a different time and trauma, but perhaps it might likewise be thought of as a collection of things, of findings and workings out - if not conclusions - around our relationships with nature, ourselves and each other at another moment of profound change."

The theme of the poems varies immensely, from moors and allotments to living in quarantine with children, family grief, isolation and loneliness to anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and drinking songs, nicely bookended by two poems about duels between hawks and their prey. Nick Hayes' illustrations complement the poems perfectly: the first image the reader encounters before said first poem is a hawk in flight that practically explodes from the page, and really gave me pause. 

The only weak point of this wonderful book is the – for me – sometimes too widely meandering subject matter of the poems. While this wide-angled approach is something that definitely works in Rob Cowen's prose work Common Ground, where walking a part of the edgelands makes the protagonist explore all sorts of interconnections and layers of history, the poems in The Heeding sometimes feel disjointed. But then, is disjointed not what we all felt at some point in the last twelve months? 

What I like about this beautiful book is that it treats the Covid-19 pandemic not as a once-in-a-lifetime event that we all have to make it through to get back to like everyone was before. It references extreme heatwaves and human failure to show humility in the face of nature, and that makes it more an example of the first contemporary plague literature than a look back at a unique event. As I write this the plague is still ongoing, and there are countries on the planet that have not even seen one single vaccine dose making its way there. And as things stand, this will not have been the last global pandemic in our lifetime - it's just a question if we can learn to better tackle these in the future. There will be more floods and droughts and heatwaves and fires and bumbling politicians failing, but maybe we can find hope and inspiration to face and change these in books like The Heeding. Or if not hope, then at least compassion for our fellow man and nature. It is sure needed. As Rob Cowen says in his poem ‘The End of This (Drinking Poem)’:

Pass me a glass. Give me courage
to start over. And be better.  

***

The Heeding 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.