Feb ’24 Round-Up/Plans for March ’24

My reading hasn’t been up to speed recently, but I got through seven books in February, including (finally) A. S. Byatt’s Possession, as well as the Xiaolu Guo book I reviewed last week. Tellywise I’ve been enjoying the new Mr and Mrs Smith series on Amazon Prime, with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine. It’s very entertaining, with some great cameos. I don’t much remember the 2005 Brangelina film on which it’s loosely based, but I think this is better, the two leads have great chemistry, and it can be very funny. And I’ve loved One Day of course, it’s a real nostalgia-fest and has reminded me how much I loved the book.

It was my birthday early in the month, and I enjoyed going to see Standing at the Sky’s Edge at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London with my Sheffield friend Emily. It’s set in one flat in Sheffield’s Park Hill over three decades, with events told in a series of songs by Richard Hawley. It was very sad though, and I’m slightly embarrassed to confess that my trip to Strictly Live at the London O2 was more fun, albeit 100 times more cheesy.

I saw a couple of exhibitions, aside from the Myanmar show that I’ve already written about. At the British Museum I saw a newly opened show Legion: Life in the Roman Army, which was a story of violence, social mobility – and endless bureaucracy. The exhibition was built around the story of one individual, informed by surviving correspondence from a young solder to his family: after 25 years’ service he was able to retire with a pension worth 10 years’ pay. When he started out in the navy, though, he resented the lack of attention paid to him by his colleagues, and said he might as well be “a toilet sponge on a stick”, which made me smile, and which suddenly made ancient Rome feel much closer. Highlights were the crocodile armour – literally made of tanned crocodile skin – and the amazingly well-preserved Draco dragon standard, pictured above. The label alongside said that the bronze standard head would have had a tube made of colourful materials attached to it, which would trail behind the rider making a whistling sound to emulate a terrifying beast.

I also went on a day trip to Brighton to see my daughter, and we saw the Lee Miller: Dressed exhibition at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. I was fascinated by her outfits, plus her special suitcase for shoes, which held 12 different pairs. The highlight of the day though was seeing a murmuration of starlings off the pier – it was mesmerising, and I missed my train because of it!

As for films, I’ve seen a couple: Wonka, which was a bit disappointing, though Hugh Grant stole the show, and All of Us Strangers, starring Andrew Scott, which was evocative and moving, but also confused the hell out of me.

My husband is going to be in Kyoto for a week this month (so jealous, I’ve always wanted to go to Japan), so it’s possible I will have more time over the next few days (or less since I’ve no one to share the school drop-offs and cooking with). Plans for March include reading ahead for 1937 week, and attempting to find suitable reading material for me to participate in Cathy’s annual Reading Ireland month and Paula’s Reading Wales 2024 (though I can’t find any Welsh books at home at the moment!).

My tbr pile currently looks like this.

Book Review: A Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo (China)

This was a very enjoyable coming of age tale from my local library. It’s not a dictionary! Instead it tells the story of 23-year-old Zhuang (or Z), who is sent by her parents to London to study English at a language school for an extended period.

In a monthly journal-style format, she describes her linguistic trials and her difficulties in accustoming herself to the strange new culture (complete with strange food), and the much more individualistic people. As the months progress her writing, initially tentative and inarticulate, becomes increasing fluent and expressive, reflecting her diligent studies at her language school – as well as the influence of an older man who she meets at the cinema within a few weeks of her arrival.

This is something of an odd couple romance: he is 20 yrs older than Z and bisexual, having had most of his sexual relationships with other men, and the power dynamic is certainly problematic from a 2024 perspective (and probably always!). Z has limited English and has had no sexual experience with anyone at all. She makes unexpected assumptions about the relationship, including that her new boyfriend is inviting her to stay indefinitely (when she asks to see his place, and he replies ‘be my guest’), and that, as her partner, he will pay for everything.

It’s a rom-com of sorts, full of quirky insights into the differences between British and Chinese culture. For example, Z is incredulous at her boyfriend’s vegetarianism. I found certain linguistic differences fascinating to read about: the conditional tense that we use in the UK is new to Z, and she rages against circuitous British uses of language like “I’m going to go…”

As the first flush of romance begins to pall, paradoxically the couple’s communication difficulties intensify as the cultural obstacles to their intimate relationship become more evident, even while Z’s language skills are improving rapidly.

The story develops beyond the domestic sphere and is something of a psychogeography of navigating London as a young foreign woman and, after her boyfriend encourages her to use her summer holidays to explore more widely, as a woman negotiating wider European travel alone. The book is a deceptively quick and easy read, even while it tackles important issues of identity, alienation and assimilation.

Xiaolu Guo grew up in China before moving to the UK as a young adult, and she says the language side of the novel at least is semi-autobiographical. She has continued to live outside China, and has described the need she felt to sacrifice her attachment to her homeland in order to pursue artistic freedom. She has published widely, and this novel, which came out in 2007, is the first that she wrote in English, and was nominated for high-profile prizes, including being shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Exhibition Review: Burma to Myanmar at the British Museum

In its closing week in early Feb I took a day off work and went to see a fascinating exhibition at the British Museum in London, displaying items from throughout Myanmar’s history. Some of these items had been presented to visiting dignitaries over the years. Inevitably, still others had been stolen by colonizing British forces, and the exhibition made efforts at least to acknowledge these wrongs.

I didn’t know much about the country beforehand and there was lots to take in. Myanmar was originally made up of various loosely connected states and kingdoms, and from the early 19th century was violently brought under British colonial rule in three stages.

The country has significant stretches of coastline and had access to a vast array of natural resources, including ivory, rubies and silk. Items on display included this huge seashell, containing silk pages in which in 1907 the people of Myanmar requested increased funding from the colonial powers for essentials like clean water, transport and education.

During the first Anglo-Burmese war in the first half of the 19th century looting was widespread, and this large, golden seated Buddha was one of the items ‘acquired’ by naval officer Capt Frederick Marryat (who also wrote The Children of the New Forest and whose wife gave birth to a wincing seven daughters and four sons).

Later, in 1885 the British dismantled the monarchy, sending the local King, Thibaw, into exile in India. This manuscript depicts the King being escorted away by identikit smug red-haired British soldiers.

As the British became established in Myanmar, furniture began to be made in European styles, using Burmese materials and craftsmanship. This beautifully carved chair allegedly belonged to King Thibaw before his unceremonious removal from power.

The British attempted to classify the people and animals of Burma in albums like this, which ignored religious and cultural differences, and stereotyped customs and people into one homogenous stereotype.

The British were finally kicked out, and the scope of Myanmar’s current territory was formalized on independence in 1948. After a coup in 1962, however, a repressive military dictatorship took power, which pursued a socialist path and focused on self-sufficiency. Although military control was relaxed somewhat during the 2010s, there was a new coup in 2021, and modern Myanmar remains something of an enigma to most outsiders. This exhibition, though, gave a fascinating, if very partial, insight into part of its history.

Book Review: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli (Italy)

Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

My dad was a physicist but I had zero interest in it at school, dropping it entirely by the age of 14. After he died, for some reason I felt should make an attempt to understand some basic concepts (though it’s not like I can talk about it with him so I’m not sure about the motivation there – it’s certainly not logic). I reserved a library copy of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (which since its publication in 2014 has sold over 1m. copies in 52 languages), went to pick it up, and felt pure delight that it was nice and thin: I could do this!

What I didn’t expect in a book devoted to the topic of quantum physics was beautiful prose and elements of philosophy. Everyone I’ve spoken to about this book since has been keen to read it: my daughter, my son (who never reads for pleasure), my mum… I bought a copy for my daughter to read and now have a small wait list of people who are eager to borrow it.

The book opens in the early 20th century with Einstein’s theory of relativity, and continues with discussions on subjects as disparate as black holes and the nature of time. Much of the science in the book isn’t esoteric and abstract, but instead forms the basis of knowledge that has allowed the development of now-essential everyday technologies such as GPS satnavs. Meanwhile, the text is not merely a dry recitation of facts about space and physics, but is totally mind-bending, and I took screenshots of several passages, Whatsapping them to family and friends with expressive but inarticulate captions like “whoooooaah”.

“...the great explosion or ‘Big Bang’ may actually have been a ‘Big Bounce’. Our world may actually have been born from a preceding universe which contracted under its own weight until it was squeezed into a tiny space before ‘bouncing’ out and beginning to re-expand, thus becoming the expanding universe which we observe around us.”

There are some consolations here too:

“When his great Italian friend Michele Besso died, Einstein wrote a moving letter to Michele’s sister: ‘Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.”

This book took me entirely out of my comfort zone, but in provoking a sense of wonder at the vast scale of the universe and the length of its existence, in contrast with the transience and minute scale of our own human lives, it highlighted for me the unimportance of petty grudges and the banality of many other everyday concerns, and provided a healthy sense of perspective. I recommend this surprisingly accessible book wholeheartedly.

Cuisine Review: Burmese Restaurant Lahpet Shoreditch (Myanmar)

I’ve been meaning to review a wonderful restaurant we visited in the first half of December last year, when we caught up with some old friends from Australia at a Burmese restaurant in London E1 that they had found. Events intervened, but finally here it is. I’d never been there, and none of us had tried Burmese food, although – as might be expected from its location – it has similarities with other South-East Asian cuisines, with Indian, Chinese and Thai influences.

We ordered a multi-dish meal, with everything served more or less at the same time. Small plates included more-ish veggie fritters (pictured below) made of kidney beans and ginger, split peas and shan tofu, with a delicious dipping sauce. Alternative options included yellow pea parathas, ginger salad, and rakhine prawn and squid salad.

Sides included familiar items like coconut rice and parathas, as well as the unfamiliar balachaung, a sort of relish made of fried and pound dried shrimp, garlic, ginger, chilli and paprika. A veggie version comprised pea protein, dried fermented soya bean, garlic, ginger, paprika and peanuts. Really delicious.

Burmese food uses a lot of pulses and beans, and I tried the lentil-heavy vegetarian Yangon Vegetable Curry (Thee Sone Pe Hin). Other ingredients included aubergine, cauliflower, potatoes and radishes, with just the right balance of flavour and spice. Mohinga noodles (here served in a catfish and lemongrass chowder) are considered one of the country’s national dishes, and they headed up the list of noodle dishes, while there were plenty of other fish and meat dishes on offer.

I don’t spend much time in East London, but can very much recommend Lahpet to anyone who happens to be in that part of town.

Jan. 2024 Round-up and plans for Feb.

January was overshadowed by plans for dad’s funeral, as I spent some time in Lincs early in the month to help mum with funeral arrangements and to register the death, and back again for the funeral itself. It was a beautiful service and wake, and the music we chose was perfect. Even the minister said he had tears in his eyes when we played Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending during that peaceful rural service as we said farewell to my lovely dad, who so loved his birds and butterflies and plants.

Other than that January was quiet, I took my eldest daughter back to university and met a good friend for drinks, had a midlife-crisis fringe cut in, took my other daughter to a show of the work of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama at the Photgraphers’ Gallery in Soho, and generally got back to work. I read a few short books: Carlo Rovelli’s truly extraordinary and unexpectedly beautiful Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (dad was a physicist and I wish I hadn’t waited so long to read it), Donal Ryan’s much-hyped financial crisis novel The Spinning Heart, and Annie Ernaux’s heart-felt and intelligent memoir of her mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s, I Remain in Darkness.

My daughter and I went to see Priscilla before she returned to uni, and we stifled giggles in the very silent and serious cinema at Jacob ‘Saltburn’ Elordi’s Elvis voice. On TV I watched and loved two series of Australian legal comedy Fisk on Netflix and got embroiled in The Traitors on BBC (and Claudia Winkleman’s fabulous outfits – I had a pair of leather fingerless gloves in my Amazon basket for a fortnight, which my daughter pleaded with me not to buy).

For February I need to tackle at least part of the 20-book pile comprising my library reserves and a few other books that has taken over my bedside table. I’ve gone back to Possession, cast aside last month, as one of our book club members has just had major surgery, and if she can motivate herself to get through the book club books on time then surely I can (the other is Andrey Kirkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv). My friend Emma sent me A Grief Observed, which I’ve read before years ago, but am gladly reading again. The Sartre book looks hard, but is part of the LRB’s Close Readings series for this year (£4.99 a month gets you a sub to the accompanying podcast). I’m looking forward to Jacqueline Crook’s Fire Rush, an impulse purchase, and I’m listening to Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld on car journeys with my younger daughter and reading bird/grief memoir H is for Hawk by Helen McDonald on my Kindle.

Turning 50 in the next few days and having just lost my dad, it feels like time to take stock and make some time for myself. I’ve been spending my life working frantically at my day job, balancing the needs of three kids and a husband and trying to keep our house from toppling into disrepair and being taken over by dust and clutter. But I’m pretty sure I won’t look back in 30 years and wish I’d spent more time at my desk or hoovering the stair carpet.

I’ve got some fun plans lined up for the month: trips to see Strictly Live (I don’t even watch Strictly) and the Richard Hawley music Standing at the Sky’s Edge with my friends Jo and Sheffield Emily (to distinguish her from my sister-in-law Emily). Meals and birthday drinks with my husband tonight, with two of my kids tomorrow, with my elder daughter in Brighton on Wednesday and with my pals Bridget and Polly on Thursday. Tickets to an exhibition at the British Museum, and plans to see other things, plus a visit to mum. There are loads of films I want to see too, if I can scrabble together cash for the tickets and some spare evenings to watch them in!

Return to Vienna: A Journal by Hilde Spiel review (Austria)

Translated by Christine Shuttleworth (the author’s daughter)

I read Return to Vienna: A Journal earlier this month, as a sort of companion piece to Stefan Zweig’s Austrian memoir The World of Yesterday, which ends while the Second Word War is still raging. I read Zweig’s book late last year, as part of an ongoing deep dive into Austrian culture that I embarked on at a relaxed pace in late November.

Published in 1968, Return to Vienna follows journalist and writer Hilde Spiel’s experiences on returning to her home city of Vienna after spending the time since 1936 in the UK, where she had been raising her family. Coming from an assimilated, middle-class Jewish family, Spiel nevertheless did not view herself as Jewish, having been raised as a Catholic.

The book covers a period between January and February 1946, with a concise additional section that is dated 1967. Although presented as a journal, an Afterword by Jacqueline Vansant makes it clear that this was a literary device, with the work being significantly redrafted and reworked over a long period of time. However, as Vansant notes, the diary form works well in evoking the immediacy and shock of Spiel’s encounter with a changed Vienna, while the intervening years before the book’s publication enabled Spiel to reflect on and process the impact – on Vienna and on herself – of the devastating war years.

Spiel describes returning in 1946 to the Prater amusement park (also pictured above), which had opened in the 1700s and remains a significant tourist attraction to this day. She writes of the plans she had nursed to one day take her own children to the park, with its ‘grotto railway’, which passed through fantastical scenes, and its Ferris wheel. Of the amusement park immediately after the war she writes sadly that it: “has been replaced by a desert of charred timber and warped iron girders, above which the giant wheel, bent and twisted and lacking its wagons, towers in poignant solitude”.

She is conflicted, pulled between her native Austrian and adopted British identities. At a meeting she attends in Vienna in February 1946 she notes the differences in the conversational styles of the British and the Viennese: “here one notices no perfection of form or elegance, no flippant Anglo-Saxon wit, but also nothing of the weighty profundity of the Germans. … these tea-drinkers devote themselves, like Russians, to endless and boundless discussions, matter-of-fact conversations which are sometimes deeply melancholy and the next moment almost irrationally cheerful.” Spiel eventually returned permanently to Austria in 1963, after years in London and then Berlin.

On reuniting with old acquaintances in Vienna, Spiel notes a disconnect between people’s pleasantness to her and their allegiances or at least passive acceptance of events during the war and the impact of that time on the Jewish population. She spends an evening with Viennese friends together with a famous actress and her husband, who is the guest of honour and a celebrated musician. During the evening the musician – who had been saved from deportation during the war because of the influence of his famous wife, instead spending it in a munitions factory – plays Strauss’s Enoch Arden on the piano. Spiel notes chillingly that “if Germany had won the war, I realize that only the guest of honour, Enoch Arden and I would have been absent from this carefree circle.”

This was a disturbing and enlightening read, which I wished I had read alongside a few Wikipedia articles and some maps of post-war Vienna. One to return to perhaps.

Overall progress in bucket list aim to Read and Watch the World (by reading/reviewing for each country at least 5 books (a mix of fiction and non-fiction), 5 films/TV, an artist or artists, food and music)

AUSTRIA

Books:

Film/TV:

Artists:

Gustav Klimt/Egon Schiele

Food

Lebkuchen

Music

Parov Stelar

Art Review: Serbian artist Marina Abramović at the Royal Academy, London

A huge 50-year retrospective of Marina Abramović’s work showed at the Royal Academy in London during the final four months of 2023. Astonishingly, Abramović states in the RA magazine that this was the first time, in over 250 years, that a woman had held a solo show in the Royal Academy.

Abramović was born in 1946 in the Serbian capital Belgrade to parents who were partisan heroes of World War II and was raised under socialist dictator Tito.

I had never understood the potency of her influence as a conceptual and performance artist, and the exhibition really helped to communicate her significance to the contemporary art movement, and the extent to which she challenged convention. Naked live performers were dotted throughout the exhibition, recreating some of her iconic performances.

Now world-renowned, fame came to her relatively late in her career with her work Balkan Baroque, which involved singing folk songs and scrubbing cow bones in a Venice basement, in an act of mourning for the Balkan conflicts of the early 1990s. She won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale in 1997 for that work.

In Rhythm O (1974), for six hours Abramović stood motionless in front of an audience next to a table covered in 72 objects associated with pain and pleasure (see photo). The audience were invited to make use of the objects as they wished. Although initially hesitant, some (men) gradually became increasingly violent, stripping her to the waist or even cutting her skin. When she eventually moved to signify the end of the performance, the audience literally fled. The trauma is said to turned a section of Abramović’s hair white.

Rhythm 0
Rhythm

She remained interested in serving as a conduit for her audience’s emotions, but sought to avoid brute physicality and instead more interested in the stillness of a spiritual encounter, as demonstrated by her work The Artist is Present (2010), where for eight hours day, for three months, she invited audience members to sit opposite her and gaze into her face. The intensity of this experience was demonstrated in a large photo montage on display at the exhibition. This stillness from Abramović is anything but passivity.

The Artist is Present

Some of her collaborations with her long-term performance (and romantic) partner, German artist Ulay, made me laugh, despite myself:

In another performance piece, Abramović first took medication prescribed to treat catatonia and schizophrenia (she suffered from neither). “Shortly after taking the [first] medication, my muscles start to contract violently, until I totally lose control. Consciously I am very aware of what is going on but I can’t control my body. (Duration 50 min).” Then there was a 10-minute break, during which the audience listened to “Slavic folk songs on the radio”. During the second part of the performance, when she took the schizophrenia medication, “I first feel cold then completely lose consciousness, forgetting who and where I am”. The performance continued until the effects of the medication had worn off.

In later life Abramović is still working and has recently been touring an opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. She notes: “My generation just come to see if I’m still alive, whether I have done something shitty, or whatever. But the young give me so much love. I’m not sure why I touch them. I think it’s because I don’t compromise – I tell the truth, I’m not bullshitting”.

December 2023 Summary and 2024 Reading Plans

Dad died just before Christmas, so all my plans were scrapped. We spent a dreadful week sitting with dad before he died, during which I’d tried to read Possession, but I can’t look at it now, plus it really is the most turgid book.

As well as the work reviewed on the blog in December, I finished Joseph Roth’s The Radetsky March and read a newly published retelling of 1984, Julia by Sandra Newman – I was delighted by a totally unexpected scene that was clearly set in our local South London, Victorian-era ‘anthropological’ museum, the Horniman, famous for its over-stuffed walrus.

I have reading plans for January but am not going to put a huge amount of pressure on myself to finish them, and will pick and choose at random I think from my current teetering pile:

One additional book I’m planning to spend some time with is a bird book of my dad’s that I remember copying drawings from as a child (pictured at the top of this post). It’s the AA Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, published in 1969 – which doesn’t sound particularly inspiring – but it has beautiful painted illustrations, which, for me, are really evocative. Maybe I’ll start a bird-spotting project – dad was a keen ornithologist to the end, even after he became overwhelmed by dementia and was unable to walk, he still asked for his binoculars.

Lebkuchen: An Austrian-influenced Treat

My son and I rounded off the year by baking some Lebkuchen, honey-sweetened gingery festive treats popular in Austria, as well as Germany. We used a recipe from BBC Good Food, and I’m linking to it rather than reproducing it, as I don’t want to provoke the ire of the BBC recipe rights team :). Home-baked Lebkuchen are much nicer than the ready-made imports that I’ve bought from a local deli in the past.

Although we have baked gingerbread in previous years, it is easy to overcook and goes hard quite quickly, so doesn’t seem to keep very well. In contrast, these Lebkuchen are really easy to make, and appear to be impossible to screw up. We didn’t use the recipe’s suggestion of mixing 100g icing sugar with a beaten egg white to decorate, and instead just made our usual white icing, with icing sugar and water (adding a bit of green food colouring to some of it).

I’m not a super-keen and proficient cook, but these were delicious biscuity treats, with just the right level of gingery spice, and feel healthier and tastier than bought biscuits to accompany a cup of tea. Highly recommended!