In Which The Author Attempts to Pen a Cross – Carmichael – Category Post (Because That’s What She Usually Does Anyway)

Honestly, I thought I was so clever creating my categories. Obviously I now see that they break all the dictates for WordPress success vis-à-vis clarity and concision of purpose in post and blog. Without a John Malkovich portal (ah, now you get the blog title) how on earth do I drag you, Dear Reader, along with me and my clan? I don’t want to dump you or have you jumping out on the hard shoulder on a New Jersey turnpike. Oh no, no, no. That’s not, and never was, my intention.

In direct contradiction to Freshly-Pressable rules I tend to circle a topic like a dog sniffing out the perfect spot to pee. Mind map forgotten and synapses firing fit to burst, my cortex cannot seem to focus on one subject long enough to scribe even a thousand words without detours, speed bumps, distractions and a Thomas the Tank Engine sized set of buffers back at Big Station.

I can never get to the point, it appears. Mrs Carmichael is a personification of ‘the road less travelled by’. Ah me. Alas. Alack.

This afternoon I was about to write a Reading Repository book review (Carmichael style) but have become sidetracked before placing nail to keyboard. And now I see it’s almost 5.00 pm so thoughts are turning to my larder and, newly cleaned, fridge and I am already distracted.

I have six categories to cover. I must begin.

1) mrscarmichael’s reading repository

I have just finished Michael Frayn’s latest novel, Skios. Set on an imaginary Greek island the story takes place over a few days of bouganvilla clad summer and features an airport, a villa and a conference hotel as the backdrop.

Mistaken identity is the premise of this 200 odd paged book. A suitcase mixup at arrivals sets the story off and Dr Norman Wilfred, the guest speaker, and Oliver Fox, lothario at large, have their week’s plans derailed, one more willingly than the other.

Skios is fast paced in a farce-like way and reminds me more of Frayn’s Noises Off than other novels of his that I have read.  Spies, his Whitbread winner and in my top ten of all time, so utterly different to this offering.

That is not to say I didn’t enjoy the book. I did but Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times promised me the following: ‘This book risks being unreadable…….tears of laughter make the print swim in front of your eyes.’

Peter, are you given to hyperbole in other areas of your life or only when paid to write a promo? I did laugh but tears did not drip onto page. Nor was I rendered incapable of action. My sides did not split.

I know what that’s like you see.

2) meet the Carmichaels

When I first moved to London mumble years ago, I lived in a North London high street above a magazine shop and a curry house. It was all terribly exciting and in those days a second floor (UK), third floor (US) walk up was no problem for young knees and buoyant souls. The constant smell of chicken Korma, prawn balti and sag aloo another story all together.

The fact that our Lilliputian sized flat had no washing machine did not bother us either. We took turns of a Saturday/Sunday morning to visit the laundrette two doors up (now a Snappy Snaps) on the corner and return home with wonderful baguettes and croissants from the local deli five doors down (still there).

On my clothe cleaning weeks I enjoyed a hour’s read in the laundrette. The patrons, seated on central benches between the banks of washing machines and industrial dryers, chatted (rarely), read newspapers, watched their tumbling  garments or like me, read a book.

I think it was a David Lodge and without ordering his whole back catalogue (which I admit I’m tempted to do) I don’t remember the title. I’d got it from Hampstead Library and saved it for this moment. Opening the cover I began to read.

I started to smile and relax. I began to laugh. I was getting noisy and getting stares. I kept reading. And laughing. I wasn’t off page one. I think I hiccuped. I know I snorted. Everyone was looking at me now, papers lowered, washing forgotten. I apologised, tears rolling down my cheeks and began reading anew. I was still on page one. Guffawer is the only word that does what I was doing justice. I had to stop reading.

I had to stop reading a book because I was in public and I was making a scene. I have never forgotten the moment. If I wrote that as a book promo no one would believe it. Perhaps Peter Kemp’s tears really did make the words swim. I don’t think so though.

3) mrscarmichael is away from her desk

Now the sleuths amongst you may be asking how Mrs C knows the laundrette is no more as she lives on the edge of the Chilterns?

And the answer is simple. As I mentioned in, Art Meets Architecture (A Cultural Diversion) I am, because of sudden, sad and somewhat unexpected arrival of free time, broadening my horizons and travelling those other roads in the hope that I might use Robert Frost’s wonderful poem to justify my new peripatetic ambitions, ‘and that has made all the difference’. I am on the hunt for different things to do.

Currently I’m pretending that I live in places I used to and spending inordinate amounts of time there, taking photos and remembering incidents of uncontrolled giggling in laundrettes. Call me barmy, I don’t mind.

4) through mrscarmichael’s contact lens

ahh, my old front door (mrscarmichael)

5) mrscarmichael’s creative twin

At the time I lived on Rosslyn Hill I banged into quite a number of famous residents of the ‘burb; Michael Foot (the then Labour Party Leader), John Cleese (actor/comedian), Dame Judi Dench (actor extraordinaire) and last but by no means least Slim Jim Phantom, the Stray Cats drummer who lived, albeit briefly, upstairs.

I met him when I went up to complain about the drumming. It was 3.00 am and I had a job to go to. Not recognising him I possibly came across as rather angry. I don’t think Britt was on the scene just yet because I surely would have recognised her.

my flat and a Stray Cat’s (mrscarmichael)

And that’s enough famous/clever/talented people envy for one publication.

6) mrscarmichael’s catchall

Obviously this is where I shall allocate this post. There is no carmichael category more deserving. Thank you and goodnight.

Have Books Will Travel

As you all know I am away from my desk at the moment. I am, in fact, hot-desking in Wellington at present and although taking many photos am finding little time to put finger to keyboard. Which is a good thing. It would be sad to travel 12,000 miles and sit at a pc all day typing. I’m seeing old friends, new friends, catching up with long lost relatives and eating/drinking way too much.

I am also getting some time to read. You know, those wee small hours (the Spanish have a lovely term for that time of night, la madrugada), those single digit times that you wish to be asleep but the over excitement of traveling and jet lag have put paid to sleep. So you turn the light on and read.

Books have always cost a lot in New Zealand. I try and bring plenty, read them and pass them on. This trip is no exception. I finished book the first on the 28 hour flight.

Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures (Emma Straub) was gifted to me by Mrs Litlove, Tales from the Reading Room and was a perfect antidote to economy travel. It was also exactly the right length. I finished it as we taxied to the terminal at Auckland airport. I also watched three movies. 28 hours is a long time to be on an aeroplane.

Laura Lamont has a new home in Glen Dowie, Auckland now. I hope she is enjoying the magnificent views over the Tamaki Estuary.

where a Hollywood film star can really relax (mrscarmichael)

I then read The Seamstress by Maria Duenas. There should be a squiggle over the ‘n’ but I can’t be bothered to find it on the keyboard. I’d been saving it for the trip because the first paragraph promises so much.

A typewriter shattered my destiny. The culprit was a Hispano Olivetti, and for weeks, a store window kept it from me. Looking back now, from the vantage point of the years gone by, it’s hard to believe a simple mechanical object could have the power to divert the course of an entire life in just four short days, to pulverise the intricate plans on which it was built. And yet that is how it was, and there was nothing I could have done to stop it.

Good huh?

Sira, the protagonist, moves from Madrid to Morocco, back to Madrid and stops briefly in Lisbon during the Spanish Civil War and subsequently World War II. Her journey both real and metaphorical is gripping and page turning and written (and translated) beautifully.

The Seamstress has a new home on the corner of Vivian and Marion Streets in downtown Wellington. From the seventh floor she has 360 degree views of the whole city. Lucky woman.

Here is but one of her views:

that’s the Queen Mary leaving Wellington Harbour (mrscarmichael)

I tried to read Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End for the second time. Someone tell me it’s worth enduring more than the first thirty pages otherwise I might just leave it in the Antipodes unread be Yours Truly.

Now, the other night we went out for a Vietnamese and I was introduced to a wonderful second hand bookshop on ‘the left bank’ (capital city version) off Cuba Street. Called Pegasus Books, it’s a Wellington institution and deserves iconic status to my mind.

still open at 10 pm (mrscarmichael)

I bought a book, my friend C……., three.

The place put me in mind of Shakespeare and Company in Paris where Jeanette Winterson wrote about in Why Be Happy When You Can be Normal?  There she stayed in one of the back rooms and was made to feel so welcome she found her fighting spirit and credits the father and daughter duo with a slice of her salvation.

There are no sleeping quarters at Pegasus, not that I could see but there should be. It’s so cool and welcoming.

exterior, day (mrscarmichael)

Different huh?

It has multiple rooms and is way better that most English libraries which I find to be sad things these days.

Not a Kindle lover in sight either!

I am now reading Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts) which has a bit of cult status here. He’s an Aussie who escaped prison and, on a forged New Zealand passport, immersed himself in Bombay life. I am only on page 72 so it’s way too early to pass judgement yet. The book’s 1000 pages in girth. I have barely scratched the underbelly.

In my final week of travel I seem to have acquired more bookage than I left with and that in combination with the pineapple lumps, chocolate fish and Hundreds and Thousand biscuits my daughters demand I bring back to Blighty my suitcase is in danger of overweight status.

Books and biscuits – yummy huh?

Reading Repository #3 – The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

America’s dream? (mrscarmichael)

Now it would be fair to say that I like a campus novel. it would be equally fair to say that I am regularly disappointed with the reality of the novel I so eagerly anticipate. Tom Wolfe’s, I Am Charlotte Simmons (never really got off the starting blocks) and Donna Tartt’s, The Secret History ( promised so much but finished half way through) two cases in point.

I did enjoy the mentalist, Brett Eastern Ellis’, Rules of Attraction (am I just a sucker for punishment?). At the other end of the campus spectrum Jane Smiley’s satirical, Moo which, like The Art of Fielding, is set in America’s Mid-West in an imaginary university is a jolly good and thought provoking read. While her central character, Earl Butz, a pure white hog, is the American heartland’s answer to Moby Dick, Harbach invokes Melville’s giant white whale throughout this, his debut novel. Surnames (Skrimshander), Baseball teams (Harpooners), tattoos, tee-shirts, long lost essays and research works (The Sperm-Squeezers) all have at their heart the ‘greatest’ of American novels.

If chasing the American dream is the premise for this novel then Harbach succeeds in his ambition. The central characters are striving to better themselves (be it in sport, academia or relationships) and through talent, luck, tenacity, escape and death the majority do.

The narrative arc is traditional and the story ends as it begins, on the field of play. Baseball, quintessentially American, the chosen device and the protagonist has travelled from nobody through superhero to pretty regular guy with a rosy future.

Unlike Eugenides’ recently reviewed novel Reading Repository #1 – The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides the characters in The Art of Fielding are likeable and deserve empathy. I do think our protagonist Henry Skrimshander could have been developed way more and the only woman, Pella needs Harbach to get in touch with his true feminine side to become fully rounded but as the plot whips along I do wish them all well and want to know their fates.

My book group meets again on February 11th and it is my turn to host. As I outlined in Rules of Engagement it has fallen to me to read and choose the book. The event will not be at my house and I will not be providing a three course repast (again Rules of Engagement). Thankfully, because our pre-Christmas hostess did such an amazing Armenian job of hers we have crowned her Queen and abandoned the competition. For that is what it would have, no doubt, become.

However, ’twas I who championed the must pre-read the proposed to avoid, in the future, such nightmares as The Quincunx and Traveller of the Century so your truly has already come in for critical comment. I hadn’t read The Art of Fielding.

In my defence, I have wanted to for over a year, I have bought it for Mr Carmichael’s Christmas stocking because I have wanted to read it for over a year and my friend P……. says it’s good.

It is. Phew. So I’m happy and confident all will finish it, some will love it, some will like it and some will not. That, for me, is a perfect book for a reading group.

There’s the campus genre, there’s sport (but not too much), there’s love and sex of all kinds and overall there’s the condition of being human.

Mr Carmichael is already on Chapter Ten so Mr Harbach is doing something right.

I am currently reading Gaudí by Gijs van Hensbergen in preparation for my Barcelona weekend, Take Three Girls: Barcelona (DP Challenge), so I can bore my friends, in sober moments, with interesting facts.

Reading Repository #2 – My Animals and Other Family by Clare Balding

meet the family (mrscarmichael)

Interspersed within my month of January’s and a particle of February’s chosen book list will be some Christmas haulage. This is not a bad thing because it gives me an opportunity to read that which I would naturally bypass. And being out of my comfort zone be it travel, company or indeed reading matter is an ambition of mine for the year 2013.

Clare Balding’s, My Animals and Other Family, falls neatly into this resolutional category. In fact, I remember clearly telling Mr Carmichael not to get it. But, as discussed in Dear Santa, the Christmas Eve buying bonanza went into husbandly overdrive and resulted in quite a few books for yours truly.

In the UK there will be few who do not know Clare Balding. She has been on our television screens for many years now, first as a jockey and then a racing correspondent. Her TV presence has grown latterly and Balding’s 2012 could be likened, in the world of business, to a friendly takeover. Omnipotent. That’s the word.

She was the face of the BBC’s Olympic and Channel 5’s Paralympic coverage and never off our screens for a while this summer. For the very most part she did a jolly good job and even when I became engaged in a tweet-fest over her, I guess he’ll have to settle for bronze, comment, the apology made it all ok again.

A good year then to publish an autobiography. I’m sure it must be one of this country’s best sellers. It’s been marketed hard (Mr C was sold), we all love a horse or a doggy story and Clare comes across as a jolly nice kinda gal.

Now, Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals is in my all time top ten reads and I think, just as I cannot bare to read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley because it is my favourite movie of all time and I don’t want the novel to be anything but brilliant, I was slightly put off the offering by the ‘clever’ inversion of my conservationist hero’s title. Make up your own, Clare, I thought when first spotting the publication.

Here I must mention that the author does not only credit the original title inventor but asked his wife for permission to flip.

The premise of the book is that the author’s life is relayed by reference to a specific animal (horse or dog) in each chapter and because they, the horses and dogs, have been such a pivotal presence in Balding family life (her father Ian, the champion horse trainer) it is a valid platform on which to tell her story. Clare herself calls it the ‘key’ that enabled her to write this, her first book.

I learnt a lot about Clare and the family she grew up in. A family where she and her brother ‘came very low down the pecking order’ but seem to have got as much out of parenting at a distance as they, perhaps, missed out on. The tales made me smile and I too fell for Frank, one of Clare’s life’s loves.

Anatole France is quoted at the outset. ‘ Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened’ and I think he is right. My soul was vigorously awakened by Bertie, my devil with a smile, Golden Retriever –  Making ‘Naughty Dog’ a Life’s Work.

And I did enjoy the book. It’s a summer read, a light and quick soufflé but there is nothing wrong with that is there? Were I cast away on a desert island I might err on the side of heftier tomes.

I am now reading The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach which I gave to Mr Carmichael for Christmas because I was pretty sure he wouldn’t give it to me.

Reading Repository #1 – The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

iceberg (mrscarmichael)

I enjoyed both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex and thus was looking forward to Eugenides’ 2011 creative output. It’s all about ivy league unis, the 1980’s, English literature, young things, young love, parents, mental illness and the angst of life in general. What’s not to like?

About two thirds of the novel, as it turns out.

It all starts so well and builds nicely into a romantic love triangle with Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell as the points.

But from part two, ‘Pilgrims’ I begin to loose a little interest and am obliged to speed read. The clue, for me is in part the second’s title as the author takes us on a somewhat tortuous and ultimately unnecessary tour of duty through Europe and the Indian sub-continent.

Jeffery, if you’re going to subject us to lengthy and multiple excursions please get your geographical facts straight.

To anyone reading this briefest of reviews and planning to travel through inland Spain including such places as Barcelona, Seville and the two Pueblos Blancos of Jerez and Ronda do not go the way our protagonists choose. It would be foolish and wrong. I found myself speaking to Mr Eugenides. Out loud.

Again, I want, nay need, to point out that the main casino in Monte Carlo is not on the waterfront. Small point perhaps but there’s something wrong about every place I’ve been so I guess there must be mistakes in the tumble weed of other destinations as well.

Anyway, these snagging issues spoil the book for me. It could all have happened on America’s Eastern Seaboard and the story would have been shorter, the characters more likeable (possibly) and I would be a happier reader.

As a wee child I loved the Madeleine picture books and many said my oldest daughter looked like the movie Madeleine. That’s one thing. In ‘a great American novel’ I do not need quotations from Madeleine rammed down my jugular to the point where I am convinced that our heroine’s name is chosen so Madeleine quotations can be rammed down my jugular, Miss Clavel can chase me down a boarding school corridor (even if it is in Paris) and my bedroom decoration can come to life as realistically as Charlotte Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper.

I want to read about young things, uni life and the angst of youth as promised.

The opening is good. The ending is good. I would like to have written both. But not the rest.