This feels like a #FridayFun post, but, for a change, it’s not about escapism and ideal libraries. It’s about a hard-earned library, after 50 years of collecting (I include some books I had as a child) and moving around between countries, with accommodation ranging from tiny rooms to four-bedroom houses – at last count, probably at least 28-29 moves that involved books (so not counting any short-term stays of just a couple of months). After a massive purge before I left the UK (donating to charity and friends, leaving some of my sons’ books with their father), and without counting the books that are still at my parents’ house (and will remain there forevermore), I estimate that I have around 3500 books here, so I was very worried whether they’d all fit into just two walls full of shelves. It turns out they do… and I even have a couple of small shelves left over for any future… ahem, plans!
I had already earmarked this room as the study/library/guestroom. But when my boxes arrived, I started having doubts as to whether I would ever see the light at the end of the tunnel (or have a clear balcony again).
Living like this for a couple of months while I investigated the most suitable (and affordable) shelving options was a bit hellish.
I finally cracked and hurriedly bought some Ikea bookshelves for at least one of the walls, so that I could unpack some of the boxes, under Kasper’s wise supervision.
I managed to get one set of bookcases completed just in time before my first guest arrived at the end of November, although they had to put up with the mess elsewhere in the room.
The wall opposite was a bit trickier and required custom-made shelving, including drawers and cupboards with doors to hide a multitude of folders and other sins. This finally arrived last Thursday and took five hours of an experienced craftsman’s time to assemble.
Once all the shelves and books had been unpacked, a clear balcony now seems like an impossible dream…
It then took three days of shelving, climbing on ladders, readjusting…
I can finally see my printer again (and hopefully use it, too!), but those shelves filled up pretty fast. Some double shelving could not be avoided, but that’s why these are the deeper bookshelves.
The depth also allows for my elephant collection (and a cat) to be displayed. As always, my books are arranged by geography or themes. In the example above: my Berlin books and two of my favourite writers side by side: Virginia Woolf and Shirley Jackson.
Meanwhile, the Ikea shelves are no longer double-shelved and I have a comfy chaiselongue for reading… and please notice the small amounts of space just begging to be filled.
This might look a bit narrow, but there’s actually almost two metres between the sofa and the bookshelves opposite, so even when it opens up as a guestbed, guests should still be able to move through. Kasper is stretching as if to prove it.
So this is the ‘after’ version of the first picture in this post. Aside from the mess on the balcony, I now finally have the room that I dreamt of. It might not be quite as impossibly perfect as the ones I show on Friday Fun, but I’m still pleased with it. And exhausted!
In conclusion, I never want to move again… Maybe I’ll just build a new library at my parents’ house instead!
Last week I went back to the UK, to see one son settled in at university, to pick up another (furry) son, to sort out some final admin, see friends again and of course also go to the One OK Rock concert in London. Sadly, I didn’t get any tickets for the sumo wrestling at the Royal Albert Hall, but it was a productive and fun trip nevertheless. Lots of pictures to follow in this post, and then normal book reviewing blogging will resume at last.
My son was not convinced by my assertion that Cambridge is one of the driest places in the UK, since it has been drizzling ever since he got there – and it did the whole time I was there with him. Nevertheless, autumn on the Backs is lovely!
I had to admit that my son’s college is more conventionally pretty (classically beautiful), but it was such a delight to be back in my beloved Wolfson.
I was less impressed with my return to Maidenhead, where the England and Union Jack flags are still flying all over the place for no (proper) reason at all
What can I say? One of my favourite bands and the first time I saw them live: a dream come true
The way I like the Union Jack – with fan signatures and messages and wrapped all around Taka
Took the opportunity to see the Lee Miller exhibition at Tate Britain (it was completely sold out that day, but luckily I’m still a member). Was expecting to see some of her most famous photos as a war correspondent, but this one of a soprano singing in the ruins of the Vienna Opera House did surprise me
As did this one entitled: You will not lunch in Charlotte Street today (1940). I had just dined the previous evening with a friend in Charlotte Street – a new Portuguese restaurant Luso, highly recommend it by the way, though pricey
And I had no idea Lee Miller had been several times to Romania. This photo shows the ‘Walking the Bear’ tradition (nowadays used as an expression for ‘get lost’)
I also had a look at the Edward Burra exhibition, since it was the final day for it.
Then, yesterday, both Kasper and I had the longest day: non-stop in car, airport, airplane, train, underground for over 9 hours (flight back to Berlin via Frankfurt). It all went very smoothly, thanks to Kasper’s impeccable behaviour, but, understandably, we were both exhausted after all that.
I heard that the TV series Reply 1988 (which aired in 2015-16 and is the final part of a non-linked trilogy of Replies, also including Reply 1997 and Reply 1994) is one of the most beloved TV dramas in South Korea, but less well-known and loved abroad. One of the reasons for that (and the one that put me off watching it initially) is that it’s 20 episodes of 90-110 minutes each, which is a huge time commitment. The other reason might be that it doesn’t contain any of the twists and turns and cliffhangers of typical K dramas: no revenge plots, no whodunit mysteries, no lost twins adopted from orphanages and misplaced in chaebol families, no time travel or amnesia, not even ill-fated romances. Instead, it is an immersive experience of living alongisde five families on the same street in the Ssangmundong neighbourhood in Seoul in 1988, just as the city is hosting the Olympic Games. It shows the friendship among the five kids (four boys and a girl) who’ve known each other almost since birth, as well as the bickering, teasing, food, financial and moral support that the neighbours provide for each other. Although the first episode might make you feel there is too much screeching and physical violence going on, and some of the characters (both parents and children) can feel farcical and over the top, it is worth persevering, because as the series develops you develop much more sympathy for every one of the characters, as you realise they all have their problems and shortcomings but also admirable traits. Nothing much happens – and yet everything happens, life itself with all its major and minor joys and aches. You become addicted this gentle, warm-hearted look at daily lives, their hopes and disappointments, their quarrels and misunderstandings, the need to grasp and make the most of each fleeting moment, to tell our loved ones just how much they mean to us while we still can.
1988 was a key year in South Korean history, and hosting the Olympics brought about a turning point to the politics and economics of the country, and this is beautifully (but not heavy-handedly) conveyed in the series. What particularly resonated with me was that I was almost the exact age of the young protagonists in 1988 and had been hoping to go to the Seoul Olympics to compete in athletics (I gave up a year or so earlier, when I realised that Romania had too many good athletes and I stood little chance of getting selected). That’s why so many of the details about the clothes and shoes, make-up, walkmans, mix tapes, videos, even high school games they played all resonated with me. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling, and reminded me that I also have many wonderful and happy memories associated with those years, not just the sudden flooding of trauma and regrets that arose recently after discovering some hitherto unsuspected bad behaviour from my mother, which led to me rereading my high-school diaries.
While I didn’t have such continuous friendships (having lived abroad for a good part of my childhood), there were some really close and dear friends in high school and we did spend all our free time at each other’s houses, watching videos of Duran Duran and Madonna, or smuggled films, or mooching about outside our blocks of flats until our parents called us in for dinner. Our mothers also exchanged dishes (despite the shortage of ingredients), our fathers exchanged bottles of home-made brandy, and we would occasionally borrow each other’s clothes and make-up. We also tried to imitate dance moves – more specifically, we tried to do breakdancing (so the recent ‘breaking’ at the Olympics added to my nostalgia). And we also discovered many years later that some of the boys in our friendship group quite fancied some of us girls, but were too shy to tell us so.
The five friends of Reply 1988. So much denim!
However, watching it now, I’m at the age of the parents in the series, who constantly struggle with financial pressures, worry about their children’s future, complain about their marriages and lack of communication or sex lives, or realise that the years have gone by and they are very far removed from the expectations they had in their youth,. Nevertheless, they have each other – or at least they do until they all move out of that neighbourhood. I liked the fact that the parents were complete characters in themselves, with their own hopes and dreams, occasionally putting pressure on their children, but never as extremely interfering or unreasonable as in some other K dramas.
The series feels so true to life, because we see time passing, the children growing up, life separating them; ultimately, the neighbourhood is abandoned and then demolished to make way for blocks of flats.
Time will always flow. Everything will pass by. Everything will age. That might be why youth is beautiful. It shines, blindingly bright, for just an instant. But you can never go back to it… This is the end of our Ssamundong story. Longing for that time and longing for that street is not because I miss a younger version of myself. It’s because it was the place of my father’s youth, of my mother’s youth, of my friends’ youth. It’s the place that holds the youth of everyone I love. I regret being unable to say my final farewell to that place, where we can never all gather again. To the things that are already gone, to a time that has already passed, I want to say a belated farewell. Goodbye, my youth. Goodbye, Ssamundong. A time so warm and pure, that it was painful.
The series is a love letter to a certain time and place, but also the people who make such a time and place unforgettable. I enjoyed it very much and heartily recommend it to those who like a slower-paced, low-key, charming TV series running on vibes and character development rather than exciting plotlines. It got me ruminating, however, about the power and the dangers of nostalgia. The term ‘nostalgia = nostos + algia, literally the ache for returning home’ was coined by Swiss medic Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe the homesickness that was particularly frequent in Swiss mercenary soldiers who pined for their mountain landscapes when out fighting wars in other countries. A century later it was also used to describe the condition that beset many of the crew sailing with Captain Cook, and it was seen as something to be feared or to be ashamed of, a disease that caused depression, lethargy, fever, and in some cases even death.
Psychologists have become more nuanced when discussing nostalgia nowadays. Some of them see the personal benefits of a moderate dwelling in nostalgia (which is hopefully what I’ve been doing for the past month or two, as I reconnect with my past with a view to possibly writing a memoir): it can help combat loneliness and sadness when we reminisce about a period in our lives when we were happy and felt connected. By triggering happy emotions and memories, it acts as a sort of abstract ‘pacifier’ that can soothe us when times are rough or even just a bit dull. The danger is when we become so wedded to the past that we find it difficult to accept and live in the present – whether as individuals or as a society (or social group) that is forever harking back to some glorious past, often a selectively remembered or even entirely imagined glorious past.
This is where it gets interesting for me as an anthropologist, for I see many worrying about and denouncing the so-called ‘Ostalgie’ in the former German Democratic Republic. It was (and sometimes still is) perceived by most West Germans as a lack of willingness to integrate or an attempt to reverse German reunification, but in fact it is a coping mechanism for East Germans who suddenly found their whole way of life, which contained happy memories as well as brutal and difficult ones, swept away and devalued. It is a way to validate and value their own experiences, and I see that with many of my friends of similar age from Romania too. The challenges of living under Communism meant we all experienced the same hardships, having hot water only for a couple of hours a day, or power cuts every day, having to queue for hours for eggs or milk or flour, having to tread a very fine line with censorship (which was, let’s admit it, at times a very thrilling line for us young people – to see what you could get away with!). The fact that none of us could rise too much above the others in terms of wealth or power (at least, not in our non-party-elite circles), this all created a sense of solidarity and community which got lost very quickly once competitive capitalism had us in its thrall. Reply 1988 suggests that this was what happened to South Korea as well, which is perhaps why it felt so relatable.
I was unfortunately roped in for two such stadium shows, one for 1st May and one for 23rd August (which was then our national holiday). The rehearsals were exhausting and the way we were treated was ghastly, but there were happy moments too of complicity, laughter and living together like in a summer camp.
What does puzzle me is when opinion polls in Romania show that quite a significant proportion of people believe that Communism was a good thing for Romania (48.1%) and that living standards were better under Communism (46.4% of all responses). While I admit that some of the changes were sudden and brutal, while other hoped-for improvements are taking too long to materialise, this is really selective amnesia or uncritical nostalgia and I hope that young people who never experienced that period themselves do not fall prey to it. As mentioned above, this is the dangerous kind of ‘Ostalgie’, which is not really about the East, but more about nationalist, so-called ‘anti-woke’ propaganda.
As I watched the Olympic Games in Paris, I have to admit that I was slightly sad that Romania won so few medals (more than in the previous few Olympic Games, but a definite decline since 2004), when in our heyday in 1984 and 1988 we won so many. But then I remember the pros and cons of the training camps and the harsh training regimes, and any regrets I might have are firmly stopped right there in their tracks. Sometimes the past is not as comforting as we believe it to have been, or at least not for others, even if it was sort of okay for ourselves. I prefer to temper my nostalgia with realism, but I can also fall in love with TV shows that make us come to terms with our past.
CW: Largely personal musing, so look away now if autobiographical confessions are not your thing.
It is not unusual to be struck by a feeling of sadness when you finish a book or a film, whether you loved it or not. If you didn’t like it much, the sadness may be more of a rage-filled kind, that you wasted so many minutes or hours of your life engaging with it. If you loved it, you may wonder how to find a book that can follow on from it, without disappointing you.
Alberto Manguel, whose wonderful book Packing My Library I’m currently reading (just as I start packing my own library), has another explanation for this melancholy feeling. Based on the apocryphal quote from Aristotle (or perhaps Galen) that ‘after intercourse all animals are sad’, Manguel then broadens it out: ‘Perhaps all intercourse – with pictures, with books, with people, with the virtual inhabitants of cyberspace – breeds sadness because it reminds us that, in the end, we are alone.
Yet, in a way, this sadness might also arise because it reminds us that we are not alone, that our experiences are not unique but have been shared by others. This is often my case, because I identify with certain aspects of a work of art too closely, because I am such a ‘gut reader/audience member/viewer/writer’, with emotions leading the way and cerebral wit limping after in a desperate game of catch-up. It might even open windows into parts of our lives and experiences that we had carefully locked away or reduced to a flippant image or sentence which makes the past bearable.
This is why I sometimes resist reading certain books where I know the subject matter could potentially be troubling, such as Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, although at other times I find the messy unravelling of a fictional character oddly soothing and preventative of my own unspooling, such as Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. This is why I perfectly understand the need for trigger warnings, although the very vagueness of those warnings make them essentially meaningless in my case. ‘Trigger warning: bad mothers’ means very little – in some contexts, I can cope with it fine and it even amuses or intrigues me, while in other situations it can make me regress to a sullen, rebellious, unhappy child.
Poster for the K drama Something in the Rain, featuring the obligatory umbrella
All of this is leading up to a case of no trigger warnings, as I settled down to watch yet another K drama. I wanted something a little lighter, more romantic after a few action-packed, tense thrillery type ones. So I dived into Something in the Rain without knowing too much about it, other than that it was a romance between a 35 year old woman who falls for the younger brother (about 29-30 years old) of her best friend, and described as a beautiful and haunting love story by Vishy. Sounds kinda fun, right? But alas, it turned out to be quite traumatic, and not just because I found some of the characters’ behaviours irritating, but because it brought up some traumatic memories from my own youth.
I should say that the ‘inappropriate age gap’ (not that significant in my eyes, but considered rather daring in some places) ends up being only a minor point in the series – this is no Aimez-vous Brahms, which had me bawling as a teenager (and would probably have me bawling even more now!). There is also a depressing thread about sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace, which is not satisfactorily resolved (or perhaps too realistically resolved). But most of all, it is about a narcissistic mother who cares too much about what others think and therefore tries to push her daughter into fulfilling her own expectations, as well as ineffectual or disengaged fathers who cannot provide you with any role models – and a woman who is a bit too dependent on other people’s opinions of her, too much a people-pleaser and a pushover, has been perhaps a little too brainwashed by traditional expectations even as she tries to push against them, and therefore makes amazingly bad, often childish decisions.
Asian parents are often overbearing and justify it as ‘it’s all for your own good and own future’, but they don’t have the monopoly on aggressive interference – Romanian parents can be just as bad! Perhaps there is some cognitive dissonance there in societies with more ‘traditional’ values that have experienced very rapid modernisation and Westernisation. However, I did feel frustrated that this 35 year old living in 2014 could still be so brainwashed by her parents – then again, I do wonder how I’d have fared if I’d had to live close to my mother for the remainder of my life.
Photo of 18 year old me, taken by my skier boyfriend (see below)
My mother has also interfered in almost every relationship I ever had (or at least the ones she knew about), occasionally calling in for reinforcements from my clueless but every-now-and-then patriarchal father. Although painful at all stages in life, at least we’ve had the whole continent of Europe dividing us for the past 20+ years and a phone call that can be ended at any point when things get too much. However, things were much more difficult back when I was 18-19, in my final year of high school and first year of university, and I was still living at home and financially almost completely dependent on my parents (the money I was making as a tourist guide was barely enough to cover my summer holiday expenses). I recently heard from my high school sweetheart that she threatened him with the vice police (although, ironically, I was the older one by a few months, so it could be claimed that I led him astray!) – all the more galling to him, since I’d just ended things with him a couple of weeks prior to their meeting.
I had a long list of grievances against her which I thought I’d distanced myself from by now (her reading my diaries, intercepting letters from boyfriends, following me on the streets when I was accompanied home late at night etc.). I’d forgotten (or rather, glossed over) most of the details. Memory can be selective like that for our own protection – once a certain scene or person can be reduced to just a couple of traits or lines of dialogue, it becomes safer to handle.
During that conversation with my high school boyfriend, I contradicted him when he remembered certain of my statements from that time. With my wiser, more mature and freedom-loving head on, I couldn’t believe that I’d been such a slave to convention during my teens. So I went back to my diaries – and discovered that he really does have a photographic memory, while in my head I edited my teen angst and beliefs to something more palatable, more in line with my later way of thinking. Post-processing, I believe they call this in the film world! 😉
But what I also discovered in those diaries is that I had a very similar story of giving in to my parents’ whims and thus finally exasperating and losing one of the men I loved most in my life. My only excuse is that I was very young at the time. He was a skier of Hungarian origin, member of the Romanian Olympic team, and therefore almost constantly away at training camp. Although there was no age gap to worry about, my parents hated everything else about him. He was too good-looking (therefore obviously a womaniser), he was an ethnic Hungarian (therefore potentially jealous and possessive), he was too preoccupied with sport (therefore uneducated), he was always staying in hotels in training camps (therefore I might run off to meet him in places they could not control and invigilate). Above all, he was dangerous – he might distract me from my studying for the entrance exams at university, and he might get me pregnant (which was admittedly a hazardous undertaking in Ceausescu’s Romania where contraception and abortions were banned). My mother was constantly opening all the letters that arrived for me with a postmark from any of the mountain resorts (some of them were not from him) and interfered to the point where he was in danger of losing his place on the national team.
During the first few weeks at university, me pretending to kneel in front of one of my fellow students in the Japanese department.
We struggled against all odds for nearly a year and a half, but in the end he could no longer bear the fact that I was either unable or unwilling to fight for him and sent me a very hurtful break-up letter, lashing out like a cornered animal. The truth is that, mad as I was about the boy, I could not envisage a long-term relationship with him and had prepared my own break-up letter for him, which I never got to send: ‘Surely it’s better to cut things off now with a sharp axe than to hack at it endlessly with a blunt kitchen knife!’
To this day it’s not entirely clear to me whether this was because I was a snob (our department at university had the reputation of being extremely high-falutin’), or because I realised that what bound us was primarily physical attraction. The curated memory tended towards the latter explanation, but my diaries show much more inner turmoil, as well as sweet moments of complicity and compatibility that my subsequent pain had managed to completely erase from my memory. They also show me as a vacillating, annoying, clueless young woman who was far too much of a people-pleaser, a little too brainwashed by traditional expectations and who rebelled in silly, ineffectual, childish ways.
findingtimetowrite 