Deaf sentence

I love David Lodge. No, seriously, I think I love him, not just his books. I want to knit him a jumper or make him a desk tidy out of recycled mouse-mats or something. He just writes so clearly and so brilliantly, whether in a novel or in his literary criticism. And he was so blisteringly honest about his own vulnerabilities and professional vanity in The Year of Henry James (when his novel about HJ was beaten to the bookshops by another much praised novel about the famous author) that I nearly wrote him a fan letter to say that his was the better novel, at least as far as I was concerned.

So, anything by DL usually wins with me. I've just finished reading Deaf Sentence, a novel about a retiried linguistics professor, Desmond Bates, struggling with deafness, which reads very much like DL's own diary, as he was also an academic and is now also pretty deaf. It is written mostly in the form of a journal and, as well as lots of amusing incidents which arise because of Desmond's deafness, there is a lot of general musing on the condition of deafness (compared with, for example, blindness), on famous writers, musicians and artists who were deaf, accompanied by plenty of 'deaf/death' puns. Like many people, I'd assumed that once a hearing aid was acquired, a deaf person's problems were over, but I now realise it is much more complicated than that and as a result the limitations of aids are many and various.

DL does not shy away from using the pantomime staple of the deaf character who comically mishears everything or from taking it to hilarious lengths when Desmond attends a noisy reception party:

'The pastime of the dance went to pot,' Sylvia Cooper seemed to say, 'so we spent most of the time in our shit, the cows' in-laws finding they stuttered.'

'What?' I said.

'I said, the last time we went to France it was so hot we spent most of the time in our gite, cowering indoors behind the shutters.'

In the novel, Desmond finds himself becoming entangled with a mysterious female postgraduate writing a PhD on the language of suicide notes and this plot drives the narrative along, with DL's acute observations on ageing, marriage, sex, death (and deafness) always ringing true. His acerbic account of a visit to a thinly-disguised Center Parcs is deadly accurate.

The novel ends on a sober note with a visit during a Polish lecture tour to the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau and then, on Desmond's return to the UK, the final illness and death of his elderly father. At the beginning of the novel, Desmond states that deafness is comic, blindness tragic, but in the end he changes this to 'death is tragic' because it is 'final, inevitable and inscrutable'. He concludes: 'Better to dwell on life and try to value the passing time.'

What else indeed can we do?

Travels with a Donkey to Longitude

I've just been thinking back to the holidays and some summer reading done in anticipation of a trip to France. We were heading for a gite near the Cevennes, so Brigit said you MUST read Travels with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson, and of course I said 'it's on my TBR list'.

So off the TBR list it had to come, and (to cheapskate reader's satisfaction) I realised that I had two copies, one inherited from the Scottish grandfather-in-law and one bought second-hand (from the excellent Helston Bookworm, I think), both of them with blue covers and gold lettering.

RLS made a walking tour of the Cevennes in the 1870s accompanied by a very reluctant donkey called Modestine to carry his pack and his home-made 'sleeping sack'. His account of trying to get the ambling and recalcitrant Modestine to move at all, let alone at any speed, nor to veer off the path to eat wayside grass and heather are very funny. Pitying locals provide him with various implements to 'encourage' her along, culminating in the most successful, a goad (basically a stick with a pin in the end of it) with which a by now heart-hardened RLS forces Modestine to shift: 'Thenceforward Modestine was my slave,' he finally declares triumphantly.

Stevenson's walk was extremely short compared with modern travel writers' long-haul treks across continents - less than two weeks. But he is a born writer who makes the mountain scenery and the humour of his experiences walking through it zing off the page:

'Why anyone should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints ... To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?'

Before reading this book, I was completely ignorant of the importance of the Cevennes hills as a refuge for the Protestant minority in eighteenth-century France, and so was surprised at how prominent a role religion plays in Stevenson's account. (His interest in the conflict may even have acted as a motivation for visiting the area in the first place.) RLS imaginatively recounts the persecutions and bloody skirmishes between the Protestant 'Camisards' and the Catholics. Wherever he goes, people ask about his religion and he asks them theirs, and there are frequent heated discussions. Unsurprisingly, when we walked in the Cevennes hills this summer, unaccompanied by either a willing or an unwilling donkey, no one at all asked about our religion. And disappointingly, I didn't see a single donkey, just one roadside sign offering donkey-rides (presumably without the benefit of goads).

As so often happens, reading one book leads me on to another because I come across a reference to my Favouritely Named Character from History, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who was sent to the Mediterranean to bring aid to the besieged Camisards of the Cevennes. (Anything to spite the dastardly French.) Two years later, Shovel was the admiral whose ship was wrecked on the rocks of the foggy Isles of Scilly when he and his fellow navigators incorrectly calculated their longitude as being west of the Isle d'Ouessant off Brittany. According to Longitude by Dava Sobel, Shovel had discounted the opinion of one of his ordinary crew members who had correctly reckoned the ships' position as being near the Scillies and instead had him hanged for insubordination. Just two men from the four ships that went down survived. Sir Cloudesley himself was washed up alive on a beach but then was murdered for the emerald ring on his finger by a local woman. This famous disaster for the British fleet spurred on attempts to find a way to measure longitude accurately, which leads on to the story of John Harrison told in Longitude. But, typically, I still haven't read the whole book (the rest remains TBR).

Abandoning Austerlitz

I have just had to abandon Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald two thirds of the way through. I feel rather pained about this, as it undermines my self-image as a serious reader of literary fiction (especially when I read the list of worthy reviewers who have rated it so highly). But I was so bored, not only was I skimming it, I was falling asleep over it (even more quickly than I already fall asleep while reading in bed anyway). I could cope with the lack of paragraphs and the stream of consciousness style, but the constant description, like an endless loop from a beautiful but uneventful film, combined with the relative lack of strong characters failed to grab me. The flattish prose (which may have lost something in the translation) did not wake me out of my torpor either and its dream-like qualities just ended with me actually dreaming.

I did get more out of Rings of Saturn, if that redeems me in any way. Part travelogue, part reminiscence, part biography/history, this book defies neat categorisation but was fascinating. It is based round a walking tour of East Anglia and includes descriptions of several places I know well combined with riveting stories of people and buildings. Austerlitz too is filled with plenty of important and sombre details about the deportation of the Jews and the Nazi concentration camps but these facts seemed undermined by the vague and dreamy narration of the shadowy not-quite-real Austerlitz himself.

(Anyway, at least Rings of Saturn's spine shows that I read it to the very end, unlike the tell-tale spine of Austerlitz.)

PS Thanks to Susan for recommending Rings of Saturn.