The Sunday Salon: cooking at Le Cordon Bleu and re-visiting some old friends

Having succumbed to gluttony Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, I was appropriately enough reading The sharper your knife, the less you cry: love, laughter and tears at the world’s most famous cooking school by Kathleen Flinn, a thirty-six year old American with a passion for cooking. When Flinn lost her corporate job in London, she made the impulsive decision to enrol at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and try to earn her diploma. Her book charts the ups and downs of living in Paris and learning French cuisine. It’s full of wonderful recipes I look forward to trying, and was a perfect holiday read. If you enjoyed Julie and Julia, I’d recommend it.

Reading wise, I’m planning to ease into the New Year by re-reading the six novels of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire series, starting with The Warden. It’s always comforting to immerse myself in Trollope’s extensive and ordered world. As Clifton Fadiman put it in his wonderful essay Pillow Books (re the search for appropriate bedtime reading):

“As for novels, give me no profound Russians, no overlucid Frenchmen, no opaque Germans. Give me solid Englishmen of the nineteenth century or early twentieth…Above all give me Trollope, from whom I have received so much pleasure that I would willingly call him another St. Anthony; Trollope, who breaks instantly through the time barrier and teleports the horizontal reader instantly to a divinely settled, comfortable, income-taxless vanished world. His half a hundred novels are good for five years of bedside reading. Of those who minister to the tired, night-welcoming mind, Trollope is king. He never fails to interest, but not too much; to soothe, but not too much. Trollope is the perfect novelist for the bedside.”

I’d only add, for the holidays!

Book Bloggers’ Christmas Swap – Thanks Tanabata!

After a tough day at work yesterday, I was delighted to come home and find my Book Bloggers’ Chrissie swap pressie in my letterbox. When I opened the envelope, I saw this:

Of course, I couldn’t resist opening it, and was rapt to discover:

1. A 2009 Library calendar, open to my favourite picture, the Francisco de Burgoa Library in Oaxaca, Mexico.
2. Love and Friendship by Jane Austen- a beautifully published Hesperus press edition of Austen’s juvenalia. I haven’t read this and look forward to doing so soon.
3. An unusual card/bookmark.

All courtesy of Tanabata, who blogs at In Spring it is the dawn. Thanks Tanabata for a lovely and thoughtful gift, I hope you and your family have a Merry Christmas.

My first Sunday Salon

I was relieved to see Jane Eyre win over Wuthering Heights in Simon’s most recent weekly poll. Having just re-read Jane Eyre, my choice was clear.

Rochester is far from my ideal man (I often want to shake him and yell GET A JOB instead of marrying for money, how DARE you lie to Jane etc!). A fondness for Byronic leading men then doesn’t explain why I love the book so much.

What does is the character of Jane, who from the days of Mrs Reed through to those of St John Rivers, thinks her own thoughts if not expresses them and is her own woman. First as a bookish twelve-year old (and many times since) I was thrilled to read Jane declare to Rochester:

” ‘I tell you I must go!’ I retorted, roused to something like passion. ‘Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? -a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; – it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal, – as we are!’ “

And when tempted to become Rochester’s mistress, to think:

” “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad- as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth- so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane- quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by; there I plant my foot.’ “

Wuthering Heights is a strange and beautiful book but Jane Eyre is for this devoted reader at least, the one with more to say.

Whilst I’m on the subject of women sticking up for themselves, I’ve just finished Shannon Hale’s wonderful re-telling of a Grimm bothers fairy tale, The Goose Girl. Young adult fiction especially young adult fantasy is not my usual cup-of-tea, so I’m surprised to say I enjoyed this. It tells the story of Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isile, Crown Princess of Kildenree who finds herself betrayed and usurped in the foreign kingdom of Bayern and resorts to working as a goose-girl whilst trying to avoid her murderous pursuers and see justice done. It was sad, thrilling, funny and romantic and I look forward to reading the rest of Hale’s work.

In the meantime, I’ve started Things without a name by Joanne Fedler, which tells the story of 34 year old Faith Roberts, a legal counsellor in a woman’s crisis centre. Published this year, it has an awful women’s domestic fiction cover which as a literary snob I wouldn’t have picked up. However I read an interesting interview with Fedler where she described her own experiences as a legal counsellor at a woman’s centre in South Africa prior to migrating to Australia. As I hope to work in the public legal sector once I graduate, I decided to try this and see what I’m in for.  So far, it’s a good if not uplifting read which I’m now off to continue.

The history boys by Alan Bennett, 2004

For anyone who doesn’t know, Alan Bennett’s wildly successful play follows eight sixth form boys in a grammar school in the North of England in the 1980’s as they are prepared for the Oxbridge entrance exams. It examines the questions of what is history?, how should it be taught? and more broadly, what is education and what is its point?

Idealistic English teacher Hector is unconvinced of the wisdom of the attempt, believing the boys only want to go:

“because other boys want to go there. It’s the hot ticket, standing room only. So I’ll thank you (hitting him) if nobody mentions Oxford (hit) or Cambridge (hit) in my lessons. There is a world elsewhere.”

Hector’s approach to education is a long term one along the lines of Miss Brodie’s leading out. That is, of a large and varied amount of information for its own sake, passionate and committed and certainly not curriculum orientated!

Their often astringent history teacher Mrs Linott has seen to it that the boys:

“know their stuff. Plainly stated and properly organised facts” or as Hector puts it:

“You give them an education. I give them the werewithal to resist it.”

She is another unconvinced that it is best for each boy to try for Oxbridge. However, the school’s headmaster has his eye on league tables and open scholarships, and hires the pragamtic Irwin to give the boys a little polish and see to it that they ace their exams. Irwin derides them as:

“Dull.

Dull. Abysmally dull.

A triumph… the dullest of the lot…

I didn’t say it was wrong. I said it was dull.

Its sheer competence was staggering.

Interest nil.

Oddity nil.

Singularity nowhere.”

and explains that what with bored examiners:

“The wrong end of the stick is the right one. A question has a front door and a back door. Go in the back, or better still, the side.

Flee the crowd. Follow Orwell. Be perverse…

History nowadays is not a matter of conviction. It’s a performance. It’s entartainment. And if it isn’t, make it so.”

He sets about helping the boys to find an ‘angle’, believing from his own Oxbridge experience that “truth is no more at issue in an examination than thirst at a wine-tasting or fashion at a strip-tease.”

This ideological conflict is the heart of the play. But it is not all so cerebral – these being young men there is plenty of sexual discussion, especially by the good-looking and cocksure Daikin. Rather disturbingly, both teachers make their attraction to a pupil or pupils clear, a weakness that is important to the play’s unexpected and moving conclusion.

In The history boys, Bennett convincingly creates eight individual boys full of promise at a turning point in their lives. With a liberal amount of cultural allusions high and low and humour, Bennett shows us what is “the only education worth having”. At one point, Hector explains that:

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things- which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

For this devoted reader, The history boys is full of such moments. I thoroughly enjoyed it (and will be seeking out the film version as a substitute for seeing it performed). Bravo Mr Bennett!

Book Bloggers’ Christmas Swap 2008

I’ve just found out about the second annual Book Bloggers Christmas Swap, and as it sounds like fun I’ll be participating.

The second annual what?
Last year, Nymeth organized a Secret Santa swap between book bloggers, and this year Dewey is helping out.

How does it work?
You sign up by sending an e-mail to xmasswap08 at gmail. You have until the 18th of November to do so. You will then be randomly assigned as another blogger’s Secret Santa.

What you have to do next is send that person a little something – it can be a book, a journal or bookmark, a box of holiday cookies, a mixed CD, whatever you can think of. It doesn’t have to be anything pricey, of course. Second hand books are perfectly acceptable, as are homemade gifts.

A different person will be assigned as your Secret Santa, and you’ll only find out who they are when you get their package in the mail.

Something to keep in mind: Because there are book bloggers from all over the world, this is going to be an international swap. I understand that not everyone can afford to send a package overseas, though, so if that’s the case with you, please don’t feel that you can’t sign up. Just include a note saying so in your e-mail, and we’ll make sure you get a blogger who’s near you.

What else should your e-mail include?
Other than your name, mailing address and willingness to send internationally, you should include your blog url and a short paragraph about what kind of gifts you like, so that your Secret Santa has an idea of what to get you. You could also include links to online wishlists, your librarything catalogue, etc. Anything that you think will make your Santa’s life easier!

Important dates: The most important date is the 18th of November. It’s very important that you sign up before then, because after that we’ll be assigning the Secret Santas, and once that has been done it would be complicated to include new participants.

As for when to mail your package, if you’re sending internationally it’s probably best to post it before the end of November. Last year, I suggested that people post theirs before the end of the first week of December, but that turned out to be a little late. If you’re sending within your own country there’s more flexibility, but remember that the mail tends to be slow around this time of year.

In any case, you should all know who your blogger is around the 20th of November, which leaves you at the very least ten days to get and mail your gift.

One more thing: if you could help spread the word by posting about this on your blogs, it would be very much appreciated!

Still breathing!

Just a quick note to say I’m taking a blogging break, as I’ve just moved house and my Internet is not yet connected. With all the packing, moving, unpacking etc my reading has dwindled, something I hope to rectify this weekend with Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce, The comfort of Saturdays by Alexander McCall Smith and volume II of the collected Paris Review interviews. I’m also going to a charity book fair, so it will be a blissfully bookish time after my recent deprivation.

The ode less travelled by Stephen Fry, 2005

Stephen Fry begins this beginner’s guide to reading and writing poetry by confessing:

“I HAVE A DARK AND DREADFUL SECRET. I write poetry.

This is an embarrassing confession for an adult to make. In their idle hours Winston Churchill and Noel Coward painted. For fun and relaxation Albert Einstein played the violin. Hemingway hunted, Agatha Christie gardened, James Joyce sang arias and Nabokov chased butterflies. But poetry?”

He goes on to state:

“I believe poetry is a primal impulse within us all. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it. I believe our poetic impulse is blocked by the false belief that poetry might on the one hand be academic and technical and on the other formless and random. It seems to many that while there is a clear road to learning music, gardening or watercolours, poetry lies in inaccessible marshland: no pathways, no signposts, just the skeletons of long-dead poets poking through the bog and the unedifying sight of living ones floundering about in apparent confusion and mutual enmity. Behind it all, the dread memory of classrooms swollen into resentful silence while the English teacher invites us to ‘respond’ to a poem.”

Before explaining:

“I have written this book because over the past thirty-five years I have derived enormous private pleasure from writing poetry and like anyone with a passion I am keen to share it.

…

This is not the only work on prosody (the art of versification) ever published in English, but it is the one that I should have liked to have been available to me many years ago. It is technical yes, inasmuch as it investigates technique, but I hope that does not make it dry, obscure or difficult- after all, ‘technique’ is just the Greek for ‘art’. I have tried to make everything approachable without being loopily matey or absurdly simplistic.”

After slowly making my way though The ode less travelled, I’m happy to say Fry has succeeded in writing an entertaining, informative and inspiring poetry primer. It is divided into four chapters- Metre, Rhyme, Form and finally Diction and Poetics today. Each chapter explains things clearly and concisely and is illuminated by examples of poems good and bad and challenging exercises.

Fortunately for a poetical novice like myself, Fry realizes when the information provided may be getting overwhelming, and leavens things with humour and some decided opinions. For example, in the section on sprung rhythm and its creator Gerald Manley Hopkins:

“It is possible that you come across this mysterious Jesuit priest’s verse at school and that someone had the dreadful task of trying to explain to you how sprung rhythm worked. Relax: it is like Palmerston and the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Only three people in the world understand it, one is dead, the other has gone mad and the third is me, and I have forgotten.”

For future reference, The ode less travelled has a useful metrical table and glossary, a detailed contents and index page and suggestions for further reading. The book’s dedication includes the epigraph:

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains.

The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

- William Arthur Ward.

For this reader, in The ode less travelled Stephen Fry is a good, superior and great teacher. Having read his book I want to read poetry. I will be starting my foray into reading poetry for pleasure with Milton’s Paradise Lost, and thank Eva for bringing The ode less travelled to my attention via her review.

The Franchise affair by Josephine Tey, 1949

I’d never heard of Josephine Tey until various British book bloggers praised her. As a lover of a good cozy crime book though, once I had heard about her I decided to make up for lost time by reading The Franchise affair. I’m glad I did!

The novel opens with a succinct introduction to the quiet county town of Milford and unlikely hero Robert Blair, an unmarried solicitor who has started to experience an “odd sensation” in his chest recently:

“Until the last year or so, he had found no fault with certainty or placidity. He had never wanted any other life but this: this quiet friendly life in the place where he had grown up. He still did not want any other. But once or twice lately an odd, alien thought had crossed his mind; irrelevant and unbidden. As near as it could be put into words it was: ‘This is all you are ever going to have.’ And with the thought would come that moment’s constriction in his chest. Almost like a panic reaction; like the heart-squeezing that remembering a dentist appointment would cause in his ten-year-old breast.”

Fortunately for Robert, he receives a telephone call from Marion Sharpe (until now only known to him by sight) asking for his help as she is in trouble with Scotland Yard. His initial objections overridden, Robert arrives at The Franchise, the isolated house where Marion and her mother live and where Detective-Inspector Allen relates an extraordinary story. Fifteen year old Elizabeth Kane, missing for a fortnight, “walked into her home near Aylesbury late one night wearing only a dress and shoes, and in a state of complete exhaustion.” She claims to have been kidnapped by two women whose description fits the Sharpes, who locked her up, fed her little, beat her often and forced her to work as a domestic drudge until she managed to escape. And Elizabeth has startlingly detailed descriptions of the Sharpes and their home to back her up. But the Sharpes completely deny this story.

The questions for the Yard and Robert Blair are is the story true? and if not, how does Elizabeth know so much about the Sharpes and The Franchise and where was she for the two weeks she was missing?

Considering the dearth of bodies found in the library (or anywhere else for that matter), watching Robert solve the mystery is surprisingly interesting. Tey has a knack for apt descriptions- Marion “looked as if the stake would be her natural prop if stakes were not out of fashion.” , Larborough “was bicycles, small arms, tin-tacks, Cowan’s Cranberry Sauce, and a million human souls living cheek by jowl in dirty red brick; and periodically it broke bounds in an atavistic longing for grass and earth. But there was nothing in the Milford country to attract a race who demanded with grass and earth both views and teahouses; when Larborough went on holiday it went as one man west to the hills and the sea, and the great stretch of country north and east of it stayed lonely and quiet and unlittered as it had been in the days of the Sun in Splendour. It was ‘dull’; and by that damnation was saved.” In The Franchise affair, she uses this talent to great effect, including not only a mystery but also humorous views of human foibles- for example the war between the Milford garage and stables:

“Across the narrow lane, face to face in perpetual enmity, stood the local livery stable and the town’s newest garage. The garage frightened the horses (so said the livery stable), and the livery stable blocked up the lane continually with delivery loads of straw and fodder and what not (so said the garage). Moreover the garage was run by Bill Brough, ex-R.E.M.E, and Stanley Peters, ex-Royal Corps of Signals; and old Matt Ellis, ex-King’s Dragoon Guards, looked on them as representatives of a generation which had destroyed the cavalry and an offence to civilization…

Today the Signals wanted to know the difference between libel and slander, and what exactly constituted defamation of character. Was it defamation of character to say that a man was ‘a tinkerer with tin cans who wouldn’t know a nut from an acorn’?”

- wry social commentary and a hint of romance. I’m looking forward to reading the remainder of Tey’s novels- suggestions are welcome- and was interested to see this one included in Tana French’s top 10 mysteries list in The Guardian this week. Which reminds me, I must rescue French’s first novel from my TBR pile and read it soon.

A blogging break

Courtesy of Telstra, I am currently not connected to tne net at home so will be taking a blogging break.  I’m told the external line fault responsible should be fixed within five working days i.e. by Friday so hope to be back posting then.

Breath by Tim Winton, 2008

I finished this last week and still don’t know what to say beyond Breath is a skillfully written and surprisingly interesting novel which I’d recommend you read. In the interests of elucidation however…

The novel opens with ambo Bruce Pike (aka Pikelet) attending a teenage boy found hanging in his bedroom. From the first page, Pikelet’s voice is authentic and immediate (something that doesn’t change over the course of 200 odd pages all in the first person). He realizes:

“that this job’s become a pack and carry. Usually they see the uniform and light up with it, but neither of them gives me as much as a glance.

The bedroom in question isn’t hard to find. A little mat of vomit in the hall. Splinters of wood. I step over the broken-down door and see the mother at the bed where the boy is laid out, and as I quietly introduce myself I take it all in. The room smells of pot and urine and disinfectant and it’s clear that she’s cut him down and dressed him and tidied everything up.

I slip in beside her and do the business but the kid’s been gone a while. He looks about seventeen. There are ligature marks on his neck and older bruises around them. Even while I’m going through the motions she strokes the boy’s dark, curly hair. A nice-looking kid. She’s washed him. He smells of Pears soap and freshly laundered clothes. I ask for her name and for her son’s, and she tells me that she’s June and the boy’s name is Aaron.

I’m sorry, June, I murmur, but he’s passed away.

I know that.
…
Is there anyone else you’d like me to call?

Jodie and two cops appear at the door.

Call? says June. You can call my son back. As you can see, he’s not listening to his mother.”

This death sets off Pikelet’s recollection of his own adolescence, the defining (and damaging) years in which he recklessly took risks for kicks. Pikelet is the only child of ten pound Poms who’ve migrated to the mill town of Sawyer. He makes friends with Ivan Loon on the basis of a shared love of thrill seeking. Or as Pikelet puts it “We scared people, pushing each other harder and further until often as not we scared ourselves.”

Initially, this takes the harmless enough form of diving into the river and holding their breath underwater. One Saturday though, the boys hitch a lift to the beach with some surfers and it’s love at first sight. Winton writes lyrically of surfing in all its “useless beauty” and although I’m not a surfer I was swept along by Pikelet’s passion. With writing as good as this-

“On a still morning in late September, in a lull between cold fronts, Loonie and I pedalled with our boards to the Point where the waves were small and clean and the cold water was as clear as the sky. We sat inside at the mellow edge of the rip and paddled into waist-high rollers that carried us hooting and howling in to the beach. We had the place to ourselves. The sandbanks rippled underfoot, schools of herring swerved and morphed as one in the channel, and across in the bay the breaths of breaching dolphins hung in the air.

I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of the upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light. I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonie’s smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated. And though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.”

- how can you not be?

Surfing leads the boys to becoming friends with a local couple, Sando and Eva. Sando, a retired champion surfer, takes the boys under his wing and this doesn’t seem too bad to begin with. Their obsessive focus on surfing doesn’t do their schoolwork any favours, but they’re young after all. Unfortunately though, the boys are increasingly in Sando’s thrall, taking ever bigger risks to impress him and feel extraordinary. This weakens their friendship and leads Pikelet to reflect:

“This winter I’d seen and done stuff I could never have imagined previously. Things had borne down so quickly on me that it was brain-shaking. For the past few months I’d been an outrider, a trailblazer, and the excitement and strangeness of it had changed me. There was such an intoxicating power to be had from doing things that no one else dared try. But once we started talking about the Nautilus I got the creeping sense that I’d begun something I didn’t know how to finish.”

And at this point, he doesn’t know the half of it! As a reader, the story’s tension builds and builds like one of the giant waves Pikelet surfs and you wait breathlessly for the inevitable crash. Pikelet, who’s really just a kid for all his bravado (albeit one addicted to danger) is drawn into doing things he really doesn’t want to.

When it all ends, Pikelet initially seems okay. He realizes:

“there was no room left in my life for stupid risks. Death was everywhere- waiting, welling, undiminished. It would always be coming for me and for mine and I told myself I could no longer afford the thrill of courting it.”

and seems to get on with things. But as he describes in a few pages how he got to where he is now, it is evident that Pikelet was and is deeply affected by those few years so vividly recalled. The rest of his life seems like a mere postscript:

“I didn’t exactly pull myself together- I got past such notions- but bits of me did come around again, as flies or memories or subatomic particles will for reasons of their own. Bit by bit I congregated, I suppose you could say, and then somehow I cohered. I went on and had another life. Or went ahead and made the best of the old one.”

I cried for the boy Pikelet was and the man he became. Breath is elegiac in tone, but it is not a grand tragedy. Rather, it is the small story of one man’s life and his attempt to rebel “against the monotony of drawing breath.” It is a literary page-turner, full of quietly touching moments leavened by laconic humour and of course, descriptions of the joys of surfing.

As you may have gathered, I was impressed by my first Winton read and am looking forward to reading more by him. Recommendations are welcome- otherwise I’ll just read what strikes my fancy.

There was an interesting interview with Tim Winton in The Age last week, which you can read here.