#56 & 57: Oxford & Costa Brava.

[extemporally]

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers.

"When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the 'Gaudy', the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies, and poison-pen letters, including one that says, "Ask your boyrfiend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup." Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection, and those of her paramour, Lord Peter Wimsey."

This is a reread, and I don't normally count rereads but I am this one! I read this novel a couple of months before going to university, and I am so glad to have reread this now because a) I know the places she namechecks in here, personally, and that is an amazing feeling to have and b) I understand the emotions and social reactions Harriet Vane has 100% more now. Two years ago I found Harriet Vane distinctly unlikeable; now I find her..... wounded. and interesting. The two are not necessarily related to each other.

Here is one of the passages I found incredibly mean-spirited when I first read it, but makes all the sense in the world to me now:

Mary Stokes (now Mary Attwood) seemed cut off from them, by sickness, by marriage, by - it was no use to blink the truth - by a kind of mental stagnation that had nothing to do with either illness or marriage. "I suppose," thought Harriet, "she had one of those small, summery brains, that flower early and run to seed. Here she is - my intimate friend - talking to me with a painful kind of admiring politeness about my books. And I am talking with a painful kind of admiring politeness about her children. We ought not to have met again. It's awful."

Oh god, precocity.

But also now I am of an age to find her and Peter Wimsey's romance apx. the most best thing ever:

He had made no commetn and asked no questions - that made it worse. More generously still, he had not only refrained from offers of help and advice which she might have resented; he had deliberately acknowledged that she had the right to run her own risks. "Do be careful of yourself"; "I hate to think of your being exposed to unpleasantness"; "If only I could be there to protect you"; any such phrase would express the normal male reaction. Not one man in ten thousand would say to the woman he loved, or to any woman: "Disagreeableness and danger will not turn your back, and God forbid they should."

&

He looked up; and she was instantly scarlet, as though she had been dipped in boiling water. Through the confusion of her darkened eyes and drumming ears some enormous bulk seemed to stoop over her. Then the mist cleared. His eyes were riveted upon the manuscript again, but he breathed as though he had been running.

So, thought Harriet, it has happened. But it happened long ago. The only new thing that has happened is that now I have got to admit it to myself. I have known it for some time. But does he know it? He has very little excuse, after this, for not knowing it. Apparently he refuses to see it, and that may be new. If so, it ought to be easier to do what I meant to do.

She stared out resolutely across the dimpling water. But she was conscious of his every movement, of every page he turned, of every breath he drew. She seemed to be separately conscious of every bone in his body. At length he spoke, and she wondered how she could ever have mistaken another man's voice for his.

Another thing that is fascinating: the way Sayers does gender dynamics in this book. I was saying somewhere else on the Internet a couple of days ago that negotiatiating heterosexual relationships as a feminist can be extremely fraught and subversive, because there are all these assigned dynamics and narratives about how relationships ought to work that, as a feminist, you may feel conflicted about or outright reject. Sayers does this well: of course, Harriet Vane is reluctant to marry Peter because she has been hurt very badly, once before, but another thing she resents about Peter is his air of 'supreme authority'; his habit of 'laying down the law with exquisite insolence to all the world'; that they have been battling for five years and he has shown only his strength. And here it is both his weakness that makes him appealing, as well as his respect.

Interesting that Dorothy Sayers picked Oxford as the setting in which their relationship should finally flourish - in the sense that the depiction of the atmosphere here is one that is learned, academic, humanistic. Differences seem to matter less here. Of course, the entire A-plot - the mystery plot - is about gender and the question of women's education, in a women's college, and how the reputability of that is brought under question by anonymous notes, and based on Sayers' depiction of the relationships between male and female undergraduates it's extremely clear that she has no rose-tinted view of Oxford as a gender panacea at all. But nevertheless: better than London, surely, and it is this depiction of Oxford as a place of humanism (which Aung San Suu Kyi concurs with), that is so at odds with my experience of the place, that makes me want to examine Sayers' privilege, certainly, but also my own.

The Skating Rink, by Roberto Bolano.

This didn't overwhelm me like The Savage Detectives did or slay me like the end of Nazi Literature in the Americas did, but I still really enjoyed this. Roberto Bolano is brilliant!

"Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, Spain, The Skating Rink is told in short, suspenseful chapters by three male narrators, and revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Marti. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, one of the three men, a besotted pompous civil servant, secretly builds her a skating rink in a ruined mansion on the outskirts of town, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene. A mysterious pair of women, an ex-opera singer and a taciturn girl armed with a knife, turn up as well."

That's what it's about, I guess. What it's about is sex and political corruption and immigrants and skating doesn't really come into it, and how it's done is in the most clever way possible: a detective mystery in reverse, because you know the murder happens before it does, in the book, but you don't know who dies and you don't know who does it. And actually, scratch that, it isn't so much a detective mystery in reverse as it is deconstructed, because the murder doesn't in the end really have anything to do with the skating rink at all.

This is the beginning:

The first time I saw him, it was in the Calle Buareli, in Mexico City, that is, back in the vague shifty territory of our adolescence, the province of hardened poets, on a night of heavy fog, which slowed the traffic and prompted conversations about that odd phenomenon, so rare in Mexico City at night, at least as far as I can remember. Before he was introduced to me, at the door of the Cafe La Habana, I heard his deep velvety voice, the one thing that hasn't changed over the years. He said: This is just the night for Jack. He was referring to Jack the Ripper, but his voice seemed to be conjuring lawless territories, where anything was possible. We were adolescents, all of us, but seasoned already, and poets, so we laughed. The stranger's name was Gaspar Heredia, Gasparin to his casual friends and enemies. I can still remember the fog seeping in under the revolving doors and the wisecracks flying back and forth. Faces and lamps barely emerged from the gloom, and, wrapped in that cloak, everyone seemed enthusiastic and ignorant, fragmentary and innocent, as in fact we were. Now we're thousands of miles from the Cafe La Habana, and the fog is thicker than it was back then, better still for Jack the Ripper. From the Calle Bucareli, in Mexico City, to murder, you must be thinking... But it's not like that at all, which is why I'm telling you this story...

I love: that Gasparin sounds very mysterious but then turns up later as one of the narrators, distinctly unmysterious, and that the last sentence of this first paragraph sounds like an unfolding overture.

I love the way they speak in here, too:

You can't compare living things, you see, said Carmen. Take plants, for example, they're happy with a thimbleful of water, or take the trees called oaks or the ones they call stone pines: they might be engulfed by the flames of a forest fire, or brought back to life by a trickle of dirty pee...

Incidentally: even though there are three male narrators and three other female characters, this was still brilliantly-written. I'm not sure I found any of the female characters 'convincing' or 'lifelike', but this is because I don't find that most Bolano characters offer any sense of realism whatsoever. WHICH IS NOT A CRITICISM, um. I just mean that they all just live such different lives.

I do find it really interesting that most of his novels, and this one especially, tend to portray Latin American people converging on Spain. I know nothing about the Spanish-speaking peoples. Is this a common thing?? What I really want now is a novel about people from the Commonwealth and their lives in Britain, and I want it to be exciting.

In conclusion: yay Roberto Bolano, yay this translation. \o/