The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read

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I’d enjoyed elements of several of her books ( Swimming Home, Hot Milk and especially The Man Who Saw Everything). I thought her stories quirky, her dialogue taught and interesting but I found her characters sometimes hard to like and a couple of her stories I found a little soulless. So I thought it would be interesting to delve into the life of this author a little, to discover what experiences might have helped shape this person. But this is no ordinary autobiography: to start with it’s really very short - the first part of a trilogy of memoirs - and secondly its structure is really that of an extended essay, in fact a response to Orwell’s Why I Write. When a female writer walks a female character in to the centre of her literary enquiry . . . she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place. She will have to be canny how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best if she was uncanny when she sets about doing this. It's exhausting to learn ow to become a subject, it's hard enough learning how to become a writer." If Orwell would have been alive, how would he have reacted to Deborah's take on writing? He might have quarreled with her, or he might have admired her. What Orwell might have done is not so relevant but what we will do is rather crucial as she is pointing something really poignant yet absolutely germane. The only possible flaw for me was the decidedly one-sided look at only the dreary side of things; no one’s life is working well here. But then contentment doesn’t make good drama, does it? While not exactly haunted (as the blurb promises) I was left mostly melancholy, but the wonderful writing is so worth it. Go to the library and ask the librarian for books that would be appropriate for your child’s age. Can your child read that material? Can they understand it and discuss it with you?

And that’s where the familiarity ends, because the book in question is a very special book. It is, of course, The Book That Did Not Want To Be Read, and it’s going to try everything it can to stop the grown-up reading it. What follows, had both my boys in giggles and out-and-out laughter. The recommended reading age is 4-7, but both my 6 year old and my 10 year old really love this book. Neopatriarchy is the form of patriarchal projection into the millennial's nuclear families. These women accept the ludicrous gender role. The way they try to play with their power game is preposterous. The mother-in-law and sister-in-law manipulate and sabotage the new poor woman (son's or brother's bride). They accept the absurdity of patriarchy and give men unwanted pre-eminence and try to banjax other ladies lives inside their own nuclear families. We have to say that Deborah Levy hit the bullseye here in divulging us this aspect. For some high school students, just reading a chapter in a textbook becomes like climbing a mountain, even though they are good readers. How can parents recognize the difference between an emotionally turned-off reader and a child with a learning problem? In one of the book’s cleverest philosophical asides, Elwin is asked to help devise a warning to mark the nation’s repository for 800,000 drums of radioactive waste. How, the government wants to know, can we speak about our most toxic dregs to the next 400 generations? Elwin isn’t very hopeful about being able to communicate anything meaningful over that distance, and the assignment seems even more futile given the trouble he has communicating over just a single generation with his own father. While I am alert (awake) enough, I think I'll put in my tuppence worth on the "to out of up for" sentence. My feeling is that it is a little too complex for formal writing, where the intonation is absent, but natural enough for casual speaking. My observations/opinions:

Christmas Gifts

It came to me when I read Anne Frank's diary as a very young teenager and became obsessed with the nightmare of her life and death. I DID NOT want to know, and yet I read everything my local library in the middle of nowhere in Sweden in the late 80s had to offer. And I have not stopped thinking about not wanting to know, while now even teaching it myself, to the next generation of readers and thinkers and feelers. In his essay "Why I write" (which I confess I have not read), George Orwell identifies four motives for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. Here, in the first of a planned trilogy of autobiographical essays/memoirs, Deborah Levy takes those four motivations and responds to them via episodes from her own life. This book will make us whizz through three countries Spain, South Africa, and England, to know more about the author's life and her opinion about writing and her life as a woman. The author's outlook on multiple subjects might enlighten you, perturb you, perplex you, depress you, and enliven you. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." He divided reasons into"sheer egoism", "aesthetic enthusiasm", "historical impulse" and "political purpose".

Her massive ego helped her crush delusions about feminists under each of her shoes- which were smaller than her spectacles. When she wasn't too drunk, she found the intellectual energy to move on and crush another one. Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December." Well, too many kids can’t read, but there’s another growing problem to contend with in this country. We’re seeing more and more kids that can read well but don’t. I think that in the process of learning how to read, kids get turned off. Except my boys DON’T say “I want to sleep now. Goodnight.” like the child in the book. No, they want us to read the book all over again. Or sometimes, my older boy reads it to his little brother. Or they read it together, giggling to each other. Overconsumption: “he understood that with more came less. That there was an equilibrium to life, and that with everything you gained you lost something as well, in the same measure, so that whatever further bliss was available to him would have to be paid with equal degrees of pain. He had just one life, not two, meaning more was an illusion, a traitorous chimera.” One of the many strengths of this novel is its characters — the best (if least likeable) of which is Dave. Dave is skeezy middle-aged New Jerseyan who has gotten rich from a business he started that acquires debt at auction and then employs any means necessary to collect them. We first meet Dave on Thanksgiving Day as he's just taken what he considers to be a beautiful poop — so beautiful in fact, he snaps of photo with his camera phone, and later shows it to his teenage stepdaughter. Dave has very little scruples — he'll do whatever it takes to collect a debt, and he uses the proceeds to buy meaningless stuff, like fake boobs for his second wife Sara.

Books Multibuys

Finally we return to Majorca for "Aesthetic Experience" where a Chinese shopkeeper advises her that sometimes we have to know when to stop and where she meditates on Apollinaire’s line "The window opens like an orange". She wonders "What do we do with the things we do not want to know?" And her answer is, she writes about them. It all depends on how it’s done. Try to make it relaxing and low-key for a short part of the day. Share something of your own. Read aloud some funny or interesting parts of a book that you’re reading. Draw your child in with a riddle book for kids, a passage from Sports Illustrated, or a newspaper story. I really, really loved this book. I mean, REALLY loved it. This is the one novel I've read this year that when I finished, my first reaction was to run out to the street corner to start preaching it. It's that good.