suicide – findingtimetowrite

#InternationalBooker: Anne Serre – A Leopard-Skin Hat

Anne Serre: A Leopard-Skin Hat, transl. Mark Hutchinson, New Directions, 2023

Together with Hunchback, this is one of the shortest of the books on the International Booker longlist and this is probably just as well. Not that it is difficult or unpleasant to read, but I found the subject matter somewhat challenging, given my own experience of trying to love and care for someone struggling with their mental health.

The Narrator has been a lifelong friend of Fanny, who was always strong-willed, lively and unpredictable, but started suffering from a variety of undisclosed psychological disorders when she turned twenty or so. We are told from the start that she died at the age of forty-three and that the Narrator is trying to make sense of her life, her demons and their own relationship. The author has spoken of the fact that the book was written in the aftermath of the death of her own younger sister, which is why there is so much love coexisting with hopelessness in these poignant descriptions of a difficult, at times infuriating person who doesn’t seem to want to be helped, or doesn’t know how to accept help.

I’m not sure if the author intends to confound our assumptions by making this a male/female friendship. The close examination of Fanny in all her mood swings, expressions, words and gestures, her physical aspect, can feel quite voyeuristic, almost like a stalker. But the relationship always remains purely platonic, although we might speculate that perhaps one or the other would have wanted to take things further (and whether that would have helped or escalated Fanny’s mental turmoil). At some point we realise the Narrator had his own world, distinct from Fanny, from which he derived some sense of comfort, which turns this into a story of friendship and its limitations.

Told in short, disparate and occasionally contradictory fragments, we get brief illuminations of Fanny’s character and are just as puzzled about her thoughts and motivations as our narrator. Along the way, we also get some interesting thoughts about who gets to tell the story as well, recognising his own shortcomings:

For the Narrator, however, until he has examined the question from every conceivable angle, read all the books, and scrutinized all those faces, he won’t reach a verdict. It’s not that he’s spineless, he’s simply made in such a way that his life began with a question, and along the way all the things he has seen, read, heard, and experienced, have given him part of the answer, but over the years, of course, these answers have grown more and more meager, warped, swollen, and frayed, and he’s so enamored of this perpetual back and forth between edification and composition that he keeps on toiling away.

Above all, this book is an elegy to the unknowability of the other: that no matter how much we may love and be close to another person, there are aspects that will remain forever hidden to us, that we either cannot understand or else are not even aware of. Serre expresses it much better than me, of course:

You never know who your loved ones are or what they are capable of. Perhaps they have lives we never even suspect? Perhaps we all have lives the person closest to us knows nothing of? And perhaps this is what really attracts us to each other: the presence of this secret life which, from time to time, is revealed to us through a gleaming, narrow slit. The vision is fleeting and comes as a complete surprise; all our convictions are shaken because, however observant we might be, we hadn’t noticed a thing.

So what about the title? It turns out that one day Fanny stole a leopard-skin hat (from a shop or a person, we don’t quite know), which she had ‘taken a shining to’, but which she hardly ever wore. It comes to represent perhaps the woman that she would have liked to have been, the jovial, carefree persona she tried on from time to time, but which was never really quite her, or at least not all of her.

I haven’t read anything else by Anne Serre, but on the strength of this slight but moving work, I’d like to read more. Will this make the shortlist? It feels like a small, well-polished gem, that might, however, feel insufficiently weighty in terms of subject matter to warrant a prize. It’s a personal story rather than a ‘state of the world’ story, but a personal story with universal appeal for those of us unlucky enough to experience bipolar disorder either as a protagonist or a bystander.

Holidays: Between Cultures, Between Generations and a Massive Book Haul

This will just be a random rambling because I haven’t had time to organise my thoughts or fully process the multitude of often contradictory feelings I had about my short holiday in Romania last week.

The reason why I went there at this time of year was to attend the wedding in Bucharest of my second cousin (who is over 20 years younger than me), but of course I spent most of the time with my parents in the countryside. As always, I felt torn between cultures, mistress of (or slave to) none. I also noticed a profound difference between generations, and I can only hope that the younger generation does not get cynical and give up.

Romanian weddings are truly joyous occasions, with no embarrassing speeches or drunken antics, only dancing and eating and children running around (they had a children’s entertainer for them and they were outside most of the time). My cousin wanted hers to be relatively small and modern, so she only invited about 120 people (small by Romanian standards) to the reception, mostly young friends of the couple, including friends from abroad. The menu and the music were a little bit too modern for the few more distant middle-aged relatives who had been invited. I too regretted the lack of ‘sarmale’ (stuffed cabbage leaves, a wedding feast staple), but appreciated the very wide range of music for dancing, from the 1970s to 2020, from folklore to rock to pop to jazz, in a mix of languages and styles. The bride and groom had a stunning opening dance, which my cousin had personally choreographed, and, although they couldn’t bring their dog with them to the venue, she was present via the groom’s custom-made cufflinks with her portrait on them. Other innovations included an instant photo booth to provide souvenirs for all the guests, and a little buffet of savoury and sweet dishes while the guests were arriving and pictures were being taken. (Usually you have to wait for ages until the first course is served.)
Instead of presents, the tradition is to give money to the bridal couple in an envelope at the wedding (like in Japan). I’ve been reliably informed that Romanians are among the most generous in the world with the sums they give at weddings.
I was woefully underdressed for the occasion. I had bought a nice enough knitted skirt and top combo from Cos for the wedding, but it turned out to be too hot for it, so I only wore the skirt and improvised a light top, but the other guests were extremely impressive in all their finery.
I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened with an open bar tab at a wedding in England. Some of the friends did have one or two rounds of tequila shots, but it was honestly very tame. Instead, there was lot of smoking or vaping outside – so each country has its own vice, I guess. What struck me, however, is how chatty, friendly, lively, eager to dance almost all of the guests were. For an introvert it must be a nightmare, but for me, it felt great to be able to join in conversations with just about anyone, see some of the youngsters play basketball in their finest outfits, do the silliest dance moves without any shame – and huge kudos to the guests from abroad who did their best to join in the Romanian folk dances.

The weather was far too hot for late October: a bonus for the wedding, but worrying in terms of climate change. At my parents’ house, close to the mountains, temperatures did drop down to 2-3 overnight, but were still 25-26 during the day, while in Bucharest it was easily around 29-30 and didn’t feel too cold even after midnight.

As always, I talked extensively to people of all ages and noticed quite a generation gap. Young people and those up to about my age are all working very hard, very long hours, and often spend many hours stuck in traffic or commuting. Many of them also have elderly parents or relatives in the countryside whom they have to visit regularly) What spare time they have, they spend on sports, meeting up with friends or travelling (mostly abroad). They are often exhausted and those who are in their 50s are all planning to retire as soon as they can, before the pension reforms kick in. There will be a huge talent and experience gap coming up in many professions.

The older generation are more traditionalist, and have far too much time to fall for and talk about conspiracy theories. Although my father as a former diplomat has a more nuanced view of the whole situation in the Middle East, many people I spoke to were racist, although, oddly enough, equal-opportunities racist about ‘the Arabs overrunning all of Europe and committing terrorist acts’ or ‘those Jews controlling too much of the world’s media and committing atrocities’.

Closer to home, my niece’s mental health problems and suicide are still regarded with utter horror as a mortal sin, and not an ounce of compassion was forthcoming from the older family members. I remember my maternal grandmother and at least one aunt on my father’s side having much more progressive views back in the days, but the Orthodox church has got a firm grip on the older generation. They have deleted all her online posts and blogs in which she discussed her struggles with depression quite frankly, and destroyed her notebooks, and have nothing but nasty stories to tell about her and speculations about her messy lifestyle which ‘made her go off the rails’.

I tried very hard to hold my tongue and not to succumb to lengthy arguments on either political or religious or psychological subjects.

However, one source of joy was the large pile of books I acquired, although I didn’t find all the ones I was searching for in the bookshops (I should have ordered them online beforehand and had them delivered at my parents’ house). I didn’t bring quite all of them back, because I also wanted to bring some of the books already on my parents’ bookshelves. such as Middlemarch (it’s not the prettiest edition, a Pan Classics, but it’s been read with much fondness – I found a Japanese bookmark in it, so I must have been reading it as a student), Kurt Tucholsky’s Schloss Gripsholm – the quintessential summer book (translation by Michael Hoffman published by NYRB) and an illustrated bilingual limited edition of What These Ithakas Mean: Readings in Cavafy, published by the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive in 2002. But I did bring back books by seven women authors (two of them from Moldova, the others from Romania), and four male authors, including a book of plays, so I hope to have some translation samples available soon and start knocking on publishers’ doors with them.

Two Recent Memoirs: Seán Hewitt and Catherine Taylor

Two memoirs that begin in (and return to) graveyards, although they don’t have much else in common. I enjoyed them both for very different reasons. Although we grew up in very different places (and countries), Catherine and I are near contemporaries, so the richness of period detail appealed to me. I can relate far less to the much younger Sean’s memoir of growing up gay, but I was captivated by his prose. Both of the books have an elegiac tone to them at times and discuss difficult topics; above all, they don’t feel as self-indulgent as some other memoirs I have read in recent years. They both capture a time and place, as well as social attitudes, and contain vivid descriptions and concern for others.

Seán Hewitt: All Down Darkness Wide, Jonathan Cape, 2022.

I first encountered Seán’s poetry when I was in the Shadow Panel for the Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2020 and he was my personal favourite to win. (My second favourite, Jay Bernard’s Surge, won in the end.) As one might expect from a poet, this memoir is full of breathtakingly beautiful (but not overwritten) passages, but I certainly wasn’t expecting its rather Gothic, sinister tone (not just in the graveyard scene). Yet it fits the subject matter very well.

The author reminisces about his relationship to two young men, one his friend from university, the other a Swedish man he met while travelling in South America after graduation. He discovers, to his dismay, that the friend he felt such a connection with at university but with whom he had lost touch died by suicide, and that he only has one random photo by which to remember him. Later on, he falls in love with Elias and they move in together, first in Liverpool and then in Sweden. But Elias falls into a deep depression and becomes suicidal, and this is such a raw, emotional account of what it means to live with someone whom you wish to ‘save’ and remind of the beauties of life, but no matter how much you love them, no matter what you do, you cannot really help them.

There is no morality to depression, no way to apportion blame for what either of us did, but every day I felt that weight crushing down on me, tightening my lungs, making my breaths quick and shallow. I felt that everything was to be given away; that nothing was my own. If I was to save him, I needed to be a non-person, to subsume myself; and if I broke… I felt that threat rising through the room. I would be abandoning him. I would be confirming all his darker suppositions. Any wrong turn might lead to disaster. Not for the first time, I had to displace myself from myself. Not for the first time, I found myself caught inside a secret.

And this is where the author does something really interesting, by moving away from the specific to the far more common story (among gay teens in particular) of pretending to be something that you are not, of lying in order to please others or make life easier for yourself. Furthermore, he links this to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who became a Catholic priest and struggled in his life and his poetry with his sexuality and desires. Hewitt feels a special connection to Hopkins (the title comes from one his poems), but he also sees him as part of the queer community, a sort of historical inheritance that he can feel in his bones or running through his blood.

The ghosts of the past haunt this work in both subtle and sometimes quite harsh ways: I could easily see this adapted into a film directed by Christian Petzold (or maybe that is because soon after reading this, I went to see Petzold’s latest film ‘Afire (Roter Himmel’). There is something timeless and Dickensian about passages such as these:

Past midnight, one mid-January, standing in the church gardens, I felt the wind blow up from the River Mersey, weighted with Atlantic salt. It blustered up to the city, battering the red bricks of the warehouses on the dock, rattling the barred doors of the pump house and the locks of the customs house. I heard it rush south-east between the empty units along St James’s Street, clapping the tattered flags of the old sailors’ church, and spinning frantically in the bell-turret of St Vincent’s…. scurried down the tree-tunnelled sandstone path into the cathedral cemetery, resting, finally in a swirl of leaves and a ripple of the spring water by that catacombs, unseen by anyone except a carved angel weeping over a nineteenth-century grave, and the lone figure of a man- me- kneeling and drinking from the water flowing in runnels down the old cemetery wall.

Catherine Taylor: The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023.

Catherine Taylor’s memoir is also rich in visual detail, but the style is far more contemporary – or rather, it is above all the sound of the 1970s and 80s that she brings to life. This is the book of a journalist (critic and essayist), interested in the social and political history of the decades when she grew up, highly observant of place and customs and character quirks. She somewhat self-deprecatingly describes her book as being about ‘a typical family and an ordinary story, although neither the family nor the story seems commonplace when it is your family and your story’, but it is also a fascinating portrait of Sheffield.

Much has been made in the media about this being a ‘coming of age tale in the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper’, but this feels reductionist. It is about much more than that: it is about the constant fear that women grow up with (then and now), a story of political activism and striving to be taken seriously but then having your hopes crushed (Miners’ strikes, Greenham Common), about making and losing friends, about a family falling apart, and then the profound grief of losing a friend at a young age. Taylor feels a sense of community and inheritance with the place she grows up in, but is also made to constantly feel like an outsider: for being too bookish, for being ‘frit’, for being the only child with divorced parents, for being diagnosed (and initially misdiagnosed) with Graves’ disease.

The book is filled with anecdotes both hilarious and poignant, as this solemn child, whose head was constantly stuck in a book, tries to make sense of the world around her, including those dramatic teenage monologues.

At sixteen, I saw myself slipping easily into the Cassandra role. No one ever listened to me, either.

In tribute to Cassandra and the women of Greenham, I composed a song (working title: ‘Cassandra and the Women of Greenham’) in the style of Kate Bush and played it mercilessly on the piano.

In the next room, my mother sighed and turned the TV up louder.

The graveyard scenes at the start and end of the book are tremendously atmospheric (though not quite as Gothic as Hewitt’s, there is nevertheless a sense of menace), but what a difference between them, what a journey we have been through. Because, above all, this is a wonderful story of resilience, and how each so-called ‘ordinary’ life is in fact extraordinary. It made me want to examine my own personal story and see what social forces shaped me. A memorable and very enjoyable ride.

#FrenchFebruary and #ReadIndies: Cloé Mehdi

Cloé Mehdi: Nothing Is Lost (Rien ne se perd), transl. Howard Curtis, Europa Editions, 2023.

Born near Lyon and currently living in Marseille, Mehdi was only 24 years old when she wrote this, her second novel, which won several notable prizes in France. It is set in the Parisian banlieue, with which the author seems equally familiar, at least judging by her essay written about Fleury-Mérogis, a southern suburb of Paris which is home to the largest prison in France (and Europe), a jail that is a hotbed of Islamist radicalisation.

This is an unapologetically political, even militant novel: it addresses very dark themes (police brutality, social injustice, poverty, mental illnesses and how they are treated, murder, suicide, parental neglect). The humour, if we can describe it as such, is of a cynical variety as voiced by the precocious and world-weary narrator Mattia. At just eleven years old, Mattia has already experienced more than his share of trouble: his father’s mental health problems and subsequent suicide, his sister running away and his mother ‘gave him away’, unable to cope with him after his own attempt to commit suicide aged seven. He is the ward of the eminently unsuitable Zé, himself only 24, who comes from a wealthy white family, but has gone ‘down’ in the world, overcome by guilt since he was accused of killing a classmate at high school, works as a nightwatchman at a supermarket, recites French poets non-stop and forgets to pick Mattia up from school, and tries desperately to keep his girlfriend Gabrielle from committing suicide.

Mattia is bored in school, wary of grown-ups and the authorities, but things get worse when graffiti start appearing, demanding justice for Said, a young teen killed in a police identity check gone wrong. The case happened fifteen years ago and the policeman who beat up Said was acquitted, but it appears that Mattia’s family was somehow involved in what happened then, before he was even born.

This is not really a mystery or suspense story, but more of a relentless portrayal of contemporary French society at the margins, in the vein of the films La Haine or Bande de filles. It also reminded me of Jérôme Leroy’s Little Rebel in its mix of anger and black humour, or the documentaries and novels of Karim Miské set in the 19th arrondisement of Paris. The voice of the eleven-year-old does not always ring true – although he has had to grow faster than others, the language and concepts he uses are too mature and articulate for his age. Some of his outbursts are age-appropriate and ring true, while others are less successful.

When I was small, I thought grown-ups never cried. I realized later that they hide in order to do so. Now I’ve stopped trusting them. I’ve learned to look beyond what they agree to show me, because grown-ups keep the most important things to themselves.

I have a conjugation test tomorrow. How fortunate that someone invented the imperfect subjunctive to distract us from how lousy things really are!

The misfortunes heaped upon our main protagonist can feel almost manipulative at times, to provoke our pity. However, the novel succeeds best in its quieter moments, when there is less commentary attached to the observations of everyday life. For example, there is a scene where the crowds are rioting in response to the acquittal of the police officer against a backdrop of a poster at the bus stop advertising the perfume ‘La vie est belle (Life is beautiful)’.

Some might say that the author tries to work too much into the novel: race and deprivation and redevelopment (the blocks of flats are being torn down and the area is being gentrified), as well as mental health issues. The truth is that all of these problems often coexist and aggravate each other. No wonder Mattia feels that mental breakdown is inevitable, particularly if you have a family history of it. The author is scathing about the treatment of patients experiencing suicidal tendencies or other mental health conditions.

Gradually, the treatments worked. A nameless fog in your head. After that, the idea of escaping or dying was a long way from your daily concerns. As long as you could drink a cup of coffee without spilling it on your pajamas… And so it went on, until they decided you could leave. Free at last, but on borrowed time. Until the next breakdown and the next spell in hopsital. Thanks to them, you were again ready to live in society. You were normal. Were you happy? Nobody cared about that. The important thing was to make you capable of living outside, no matter in what state. No matter if the world around you hadn’t changed. They said it was up to you to adapt. They haven’t yet invented antipsychotics that can modify reality.

This was a brutal if somewhat messy read (the revenge narrative gets a bit bogged down, for example). I was glad to have read it – it feels like a necessary slice of urban life that we need to be aware of – and I read it quite quickly, but it left me feeling there is not much hope for any of the characters involved.

Europa Editions is an independent publisher of quality fiction in translation (I am particularly in love with their Europa World Noir series), so I can link my review once again to the #ReadIndies initiative.