I haven’t played Six Degrees of Separation for a while, but I’m feeling heavy and miserable with a headcold, so I’ll write this instead of racing out to weed the garden, or go for a walk, or clean the house, or something else I’d do if I had more energy.
The idea is that Kate from BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest chooses a starting book, and you then bounce off six other books that spring to mind. The starting book this month is Yael van der Wouden‘s The Safekeep. It is a truth universally acknowledged that I rarely have read the starting book, and this month is no exception. Wikipedia tells me that it is set in 1961 Netherlands, and tells the story of Isabel, a recluse living alone, who receives an unexpected guest when her brother Louis asks that his girlfriend Eva move into the home to stay with Isabel for the summer.
So, off to my six degrees.
Having not read The Safekeep, it seems as if Isabel has had this unexpected guest foisted upon her. Helen in Helen Garner’s The Spare Room hasn’t had her guest Nicola imposed on her, but she certainly feels ambivalent about this friend who comes down to Melbourne to stay with her while undergoing an unconventional treatment for cancer.
Then, there’s the foisted guest to consider. Claire Keegan’s The Foster, which I read as an essay in the New Yorker reduced me to tears. It’s about a young girl sent to live with a foster family, and it was filmed as ‘The Quiet Girl’ (my review of the film here). Keegan is masterful in the way that she can layer so much emotion and observation into a short story or novella.
So I jump from a quiet girl to The Silent Woman. Janet Malcolm’s reflection on writing the biography of Sylvia Plath in the face of the hostility of Plath’s husband the poet Ted Hughes, is a treatise on the impossibility and responsibility of biography, the role and power of gatekeepers and knowledge, the definition of character through memories, impressions, anecdote and documents.
And while we’re with silent females, how about Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. This historical fiction takes as its starting point the Siege of Troy, but it is told from the point of view of the women who are just a by-play in the battle between the Trojans and Aecheans. I must read the next book in the series which is on the TBR shelf.
You can’t get much more silent than a dead body, and in Elif Shafak’s Ten Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World the gradual shut-down of memory of Leila’s murdered body stuffed into a rubbish bin in Istanbul takes us through post-WW2 Turkey (where, as it happens the ancient city of Troy was said to be located). I loved the first 2/3 of this book, but didn’t like the last 1/3 at all.
But I have always loved the idea of Istanbul, and mourn that with increasing age and rapidly narrowing travel prospects, I’m not likely to ever visit it. I’ll have to settle with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City instead.
So, a Six Degrees rather dominated by female writers. Despite a reputation for garrulousness, perhaps women know far more than men about silence and safekeeping?
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 