What I'm reading now...

I've just started reading Suspended Sentences by Mark McWatt, a collection of short stories which a group of sixth-formers in Guyana were 'sentenced' to write as a punishment for trashing a club at the end of their exams.

Not all of the stories were written in the 1960s when the punishment was issued - but after the death of one of the group years later, McWatt reminded them of the punishment, called in the stories and created this collection.
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Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre

I picked up Jean Ryhs's Wide Sargasso Sea again reaently (I'm going through a rereading phase at the moment) and I got think about how although each time I've read it, I've thought about Jane Eyre, I've never read them in succession.
So I'm going to do it now. It's going to be an odd experience, and a bit like a weird kind of time travel - Rhys wrote her book long after Bronte, but chronologically, it pre-empts Jane Eyre as it writes back in time to it. Also, like most people, I read Wide Sargasso Sea as an adult, long after I first read Jane Eyre - which my grandmother bought it for me and I loved when I was younger. Rhys's novel was also one of the first texts to bring home the concept of the postcolonial to me - perhaps because it made me completely rethink a text that I thought I knew so well. Why had I never thought about 'the madwoman in the attic' before? It's unsettling to have your literary map upset like that, and I suppose I'm wondering if rereading the two texts in succession will do it again.

Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid

I went back and re-read an old favourite recently - Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid and as I was reading it, I remembered a seminar at university where we discussed it.
My class (which was all female - as most of my seminar groups tended to be) were asked what we thought of the book - and after suffering that agonising 'I'm not going to be the first one to speak in case what I say isn't the same as what everyone else thinks' silence that typified the first two and half years of my degree, I rolled my eyes and spoke up. I said that I loved the book, because I thought it was really accurate portrayal of how teenage girls interact with their mothers.
Cue a sharp intake of breath, no doubt from the girls who think that their mum is their best friend, share clothes and go shopping with them and have never exchanged a cross word - what I said was an aberration to them, because, to put it bluntly, Annie John really seems to hate her mother.
It's fair to say that while I love my mum and have a huge amount of respect for her now, our relationship throughout my teenage years was a bit like a pitched battle - I was awkward, angry and for the most part, really unhappy, from the age of 11 to about 18 - I can't even imagine how awful living with me must have been.
I read Annie John after I had left home and moved away from my family (as Annie herself does at the end of the book) and I could look back on my own teenage years as I read about Annie's. I recognised how Jamaica Kincaid describes the way the relationship between mothers and daughters changes when you suddenly stop being a child and start having an identity of your own - one that could well disappoint your parents. In Annie I see the same conflict between wanting to please my Mum and realising that I couldn't change who I was and feeling angry that she couldn't accept my personality.
It's hard to write about teenagers without it sounding ridiculous (just look at all the comments
this article about The Catcher in the Rye sparked - and all the people saying that they couldn't stand the book because of all the self-pity and angst) and I think I love Annie John so much because it avoids that trap, and because I can read it, remember my teenage years and take them a bit seriously, rather than squirm in embarrassment.

Derek Walcott vs VS Naipaul

I'd forgotten about this - but I saw Omeros by Derek Walcott sitting (unfinished) on my shelf, and I remembered reading this poetic assault on Naipaul by Walcott

From 'The Mongoose'

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection
Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction
Read his last novels, you'll see just
what I mean
A lethargy, approaching the obscene
The model is more ho-hum than Dickens
The essays have more bite
They scatter chickens like critics, but
each stabbing phrase is poison
Since he has made that snaring style
a prison
The plots are forced, the prose
sedate and silly
The anti-hero is a prick named Willie
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence
And whines with his creator's
self-abhorrence

These two have a long-lasting, well-documented feud (I'm on Walcott's side) that I'm not going to recount, but I love the idea of two seventy-something Nobel prize winners engaging in a literary smackdown...this poem is a fantastic example of using your intelligence to fight your fight. Walcott definitely gets his point across...I seem to remember being left speechless by the fact that it ended with the line 'He doesn't like black men but he loves black cunt.' I wish I could find the full version of this poem to post - the rest is just as brilliant, but I'm not going to transcribe it - you can listen to it here http://www.radioopensource.org/calabash-08-first-the-fireworks/