"Checkout 19"

[fiefoe]

Claire-Louise Bennett's torrent of a novel is very easy to get lost in, and I didn't even try to keep my bearing after the first ten pages or so.

• The words on the right page do indeed make us peculiarly aware of our face. Is it our face? Is it? Well? The words on the right seem far too eager, overbearing, and yes somewhat ingratiating in fact, and very soon our rattled eyes leave the right page in order to seek refuge in the left. We look down at the right page and up at the left page. We do actually. And we nearly always read the left page much more slowly than the right. There seems to be more time on the left page. Yes. Yes. Yes there does. On the left page there is more space it seems, on either side of the words, and above and below every sentence. And the left page nearly always has better words on it it seems. That’s right – words like ‘shone’ and ‘creature’ and ‘champagne’ and ‘ragged’ and ‘clump’, for example. Words that really don’t require any explanation. Words that happen one by one rather than words that bandy together to try to convince you of something that is not happening.
• We have turned over a new leaf and as such we feel instantly youthful and supremely open-minded and that is why we quite naturally adopt the uplifted mien of an urbane albeit slightly indulged protégé every time we turn the page. A new leaf. Yes. By the time we get to the bottom of the right page we have aged approximately twenty years.
• Every term in fact the pupils became fixated on a particular stunt and took great delight in pulling it off in just the same way day after day for most of the term’s duration. It was quite perverse. Like performers in the avant-garde tradition they were alert to the ways sustained repetition produces subtle and absurd variations that are as transfixing as they are subversive.
• Could it be that the pupils knew very well that they wouldn’t ever amount to anything much themselves? Knew that the system was rigged against them, could feel it in their waxing bones – their bones which were also their mother’s and father’s bones, and their mother’s mother’s and father’s bones, and their father’s mother’s and father’s bones, and so on and so on, a long line on all sides of rankled, rigged against, and put-upon bones. And as such the present fresh-faced custodians of these burgeoning yet bridled bones concocted a controlled scenario that occasionally culminated in a flashy climatic blast but more often than not only fizzled pathetically, leached and dripped and abated.
• Still I was annoyed with myself. How many years have you been having periods, and still you manage to get blood everywhere?
• Jumbled up footwear of any sort piled high all the laces trailing and the rumpled tongues spilling makes me think of the Second World War and when I say that what I really mean is the death camps.
• On the first day the colour is very pretty – it’s a shade of red I’ve been looking for in a lipstick since forever. Neither too dark, nor too bright. Not too pink not too brown not too orange. More than once I’ve imagined taking the bloodstained tissue into a department store, up to the Chanel counter, the Dior counter, the Lancôme counter, and saying ‘Look, this is the red, this is it, this is the most perfect red in the world. Let me see a lipstick at long last in this most perfect shade of red.’ Needless to say I’ve never done it. Month after month I ruefully drop the most perfect shade of red down the toilet and flush it away.
• My family relished exchanging grisly tales, though usually I’d only ever catch a snippet – which, severed from the full body of the story, became disturbingly visceral and took on a lasting and malignant life all of its own... My tendency to take every word I heard absolutely literally paradoxically meant I very often got the wrong end of the stick about quite a lot of things on a daily basis
• I got the impression she was of the opinion that, as far as men were concerned, you could tell exactly what they got up to just by looking at them. And of course you could tell what they got up to just by looking at them since they went around getting up to whatever they pleased with no compunction whatsoever – women, on the other hand, were secretive and hid things and though it may have looked like they were doing one thing they were in fact quite often doing something else entirely.
• Drawing him kept him steady in the centre of her mind and brought him in closer, even closer, blotting everything else out. He wasn’t absent – she wasn’t remembering him – he was here – he was right here, moving through her mind, making it warm and luxuriant, and he could see of course all the many things she kept stored away in it, though only from an oblique angle
• A conflict simmered on and on in my father – on the one hand he was rightly proud of the progress he’d made in his chosen trade and of the top-drawer material comforts he was able to consistently provide his family with because of it, yet on the other hand he also felt like a bit of a mug for going along with it all – working and buying and working and buying – working harder and buying better – it was all a big game after all, wasn’t it, he could see that, and it wasn’t a game he was destined to come out on top of, he knew that, he knew that and the conflict roiled away in him, on and on.
• They started absolutely from scratch. And so naturally it became important to have things. It helps make unexpected circumstances seem planned and even desirable. Things hold life in place. Like pebbles on a blanket at the beach they stop it from drifting away or flying up in your face. Having nice things makes you feel like you’re doing a good job and shuts everybody else up. There’s nothing anybody can say to you so long as you have nice things all around you.
• with the way I imagined gentlemen in the mid-1800s to speak – byzantine, comical, and portending. In addition to speech there was also the matter of Tarquin Superbus’s attire and apartment to consider.
• I’ve always been very taken with aubergines, with the way they are so tightly sheathed in a shining bulletproof darkness. When I was a dismayed student in London I often fantasised about hanging a great many aubergines from the square ceiling of my sketchy boudoir. Imagine lying there beneath such a pendulous chandelier of lambent gloom – imagine the transporting reflections slipping across their sleek hermetic skins, the assuaging shadows they’d cast as degradation tipped them into slow stately revolutions, the whisperings, the whisperings, the sighs, the melancholy glow.
• If there is a waning fire lolling and catching sporadically in the hearth. If he fills his wine glass again and again to the brim. If he is especially feverish. If he is irate with paranoia. If he can’t remember where he left his slippers. If the conversations with the Doctor are erratic and cabbalistic and cunning. If his grasp on reality is a little shaky to say the least, Tarquin Superbus is in Venice, because, after all, what reality is there to be found in Venice?
• Tarquin hears him mention the Medicis, the Borgias, the Gonzagas, and something about the Inquisition – there is always something or other about the Inquisition – and it is such a salve to hear these familiar venerable words, they chime upon the air like spheres, each one entire and unsnagged.
• There are no more blockages, no more demarcations, no defences, nothing in the way – he or she, the perceiver, is released completely, and immediately transcends all definition. He or she is free then to participate at once in the greater imagination, what some go so far as to call the world soul. Importantly, the sentence cannot be shown to anyone else – it is an impossibility. It connects with and emancipates only the person who discovers it. Once connection has occurred, and the awakened state has been achieved, the sentence disappears from the page. It vanishes completely, Tarquin, in an instant, and materialises somewhere else, on another page, another page god knows where inside these thousands of books. So, you understand, it is quite impossible to show the sentence to anyone else.
• But for one sentence! No, I could not leave it there. Strange to think but when I first wrote the tale I hadn’t yet read a single word by Italo Calvino, Jean Rhys, Borges, or Thomas Bernhard, nor Clarice Lispector.
• The things I read in that book by Elaine Showalter were absolutely harrowing and upset me a great deal. It described in painful detail various so-called therapeutic practices that have been used on women in order to bring them back to their senses – and back into line. These depictions were vivid and sickening and they shot right in beneath my skin, into that place between the nerves that is not me or even mine, that unseperate place where my mother’s mother and my mother’s mother’s mother are softly present, like supple shadows overlapping in a sacred alcove.
• Many years later I will come across a phrase in a slim book with a black and white cover which I will take to my heart at once; ‘the glow of grime.’ The glow of grime. Just a few words yet how they soothed me.
• Tanizaki suggests that these aesthetic differences are indicative of attitudes to light and dark on a deeper level. He surmises that in the West we are fearful of shadows and seek to banish them, while the Japanese are more inclined to ‘guide shadows towards beauty’s end’, and in doing so are able to live cheek by jowl with phantoms, mysteries, the ancient, and the chimerical. I don’t believe for one moment that cultural ideas about how women should live and behave have ever been any better in Japan, not at all, but that doesn’t detract from the virtue of Tanizaki’s notion of ‘visible darkness’ – a perhaps inadvertent inversion of Milton’s ‘darkness visible’ which indeed flips the hellish connotations of that chilling oxymoron by inferring that the blackness within you is stilled, is transfixed perhaps, when it has in its gaze the blackness without.
• it seemed to me that the biographies he read were always very flattering, I was surprised he was taken in by them – that he read biography ‘in a state of bovine equanimity’ as Janet Malcolm memorably puts it in her gripping investigation of the subject, and then I realised he really did want to believe in greatness
• Anaïs Nin... writes about sexual relations as a way of uprooting herself, of remaining unfixed, of transgressing the familiar lines of her personality. In fact, if anything – though I did not say this – Nin should be read later on in life, when one has solidified and feels so very sure of themselves and would perhaps benefit from coming undone, from perhaps going out of their minds.
• yes indeed, Lucy Honeychurch has promise. Well we all have promise, don’t we? We all feel it thumping in us, especially around that age, seventeen, and it’s irksome.
• saying to him: ‘What did you throw in?’! Perhaps there has been operating in me a belief that men do not throw anything into water besides hooks and stones. That the impulse to release a thing into the drift is a female one. Perhaps I consider that impulse to be exclusively female because I understand it to be an immemorial tremor, somewhere between rebellion and collapse. Not quite knowing how to rebel, but nonetheless wanting to, very very much.
• The pair of us stiffened just like that in a haunted impasse. There was no getting out of it. Centuries and centuries of mutual obsession and vengeance fastened us to the spot. We were not quite ourselves. We were not quite ourselves. We were the drama.
• e. e. cummings whose phoney lower-case initials and self-deprecating tone I couldn’t stand – making yourself small really was the most sly and loathsome ploy for insinuating yourself into a woman’s knickers – and there was that suffocatingly drippy line of his about such small hands,
• I’ve read lots and lots more books by writers such as Fleur Jaeggy and Ingeborg Bachmann and Diana Athill and Doris Lessing and Marlen Haushofer and Shirley Jackson and Tove Ditlevsen and Ágota Kristóf and Muriel Spark and Eudora Welty and Inger Christensen and Anna Kavan and Jane Bowles and Silvina Ocampo and Angela Carter and Leonora Carrington and Tove Jansson and Mercè Rodoreda. There came a point I don’t know when exactly when I’d read enough books by men for the time being.
• Certain written words are alive, active, living – they are entirely in the present, the same present as you. In fact it feels as if they are being written as you read them, that your eyes upon the page are perhaps even making them appear, in any case, certain sentences do not feel in the least bit separate from you or from the moment in time when you are reading them. You feel they wouldn’t exist without your seeing them. Like they wouldn’t exist without you. And isn’t the opposite true too – that the pages you read bring you to life? Turning the pages, turning the pages. Yes, that is how I have gone on living... Sometimes all it takes is just one sentence. Just one sentence, and there you are, part of something that has been part of you since the beginning, whenever that might rightly be. The source, yes, you can feel it thrumming and surging, and it’s such a relief, to feel you are made of much more than just yourself, that you are only a rind really, a rind you should take care of yet mustn’t get too attached to, that you mustn’t be afraid to let melt away now and then.
• Among the millions of words of poetry and philosophy and theory and prose that were desecrated was a sentence by the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine, who in 1821 had written in his play Almansor the words: ‘Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen’ – ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.’
• The pupil is of course the rimmed abyss out of which we are pushed and around which we array our unfurling selves, so naturally when the face began it was the eyes that first appeared. I’d noticed on more than one occasion one or another classmate approach the task of depicting a face by sketching its outline first of all, within which the features – brows, eyes, nose, mouth – were subsequently arranged, just as if they were the sloppy toppings of an extravagant pizza. Sometimes I saw that there wasn’t enough room for all the features and so quite often the mouth for example would exceed the face’s perimeter and thus there would be no estimable chin to speak of.
• Ergo my mind was quickly set upon by the mercilessly figurative nature of all manner of profound formulations including Syllogistic Ravens, Fearful Symmetry, The Five Ways, Hume’s Fork, Ockham’s Razor, Lucretius’s Spear, Vegetable Love, The Golden Mean, A Cat in a Drawer, A Pampered Swelling Flea, A Tree Falling in a Forest, A Cave of Shadows, A Ship of Fools, The Myth of Metals, A Drop of Dew, The Death of God, The Opium of The People, Time’s Winged Chariot and The Tables Turned. These capital ideas and sublime conceits conspired to unfold in me an awe-inspiring and loaded landscape of mostly grassy dunes and clandestine groves and fragrant bowers and minarets all bronze and brass and gold, with many precise ornaments here and there such as a topsy-turvy hamlet of small bamboo cages cradling tortoises tugging at the crimpled edges of bright green lettuce hearts, a filing cabinet skew-whiff in the sand, golden grasshoppers abounding in pairs, a bowl of lemony lemons on the leaf, ball bearings on the move, a stone-cold anvil naturally going nowhere, a skein of thick coral-coloured rope, a river far off and unfinished, a long pair of scissors reflecting the clouds, streaming at speed, across a blue sky.
• Is there anything worse that can befall a young woman than to be robbed of impulse? Than to have her pounding promise laid to waste?
• a minor yet far-reaching aspect of my disposition wavered in the periodic presence of the Russian man nonetheless and has given me away, unveiled a secluded modicum of my deeper substance, for there is the proof, right beside me, that the Russian man has seen through my ruffled yet unbroken flesh. Straight into the quickening revolutions of my supremely aberrant imaginings.
• I think it is very likely that I will one day kill myself and if I do I want it to be all my own idea. I don’t want to lose myself in their shadows their darkness might swarm in and drench mine so that I won’t be able to tell them apart and what then? I knew only what I’d experienced and although I didn’t know why I felt the way I did I could know at least that it wasn’t due to anything I’d read... And I was afraid that if I read if I became immersed in the writings of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and so on I’d become horribly self-conscious and it whatever it was my own little bit of occasionally all-consuming darkness would drift away from me because perhaps my own shadows were only very flimsy and wayward and away they’d go once these unequivocal much more established shadows swooped in
• Charlotte Bartlett. She had a secret it seemed to me. That’s right – she was the only one out of all of them who had a past. Her life was not a well-made thing, one instance causing another and on and on – somewhere along the way something immense had broken off, floated away, never to be retrieved or rectified, yet everybody in the book and outside of the book makes the classic mistake of supposing that she’d never been any other way than the way she is now
• When they withdrew into their separate rooms at the pensione at the end of the day it was into Charlotte’s room not Lucy’s I went and I lay down in the dark and remembered things for her, alongside her. Her secret glimmered and shone obscurely and edgeless, like moonstone. She is never without it. The briefest love is also sometimes the longest love.
• In addition to her suicide, it is also pointed out time and again that Ann Quin was working-class – and an ‘avant-garde’ writer. To be one or the other in addition to being a woman would have been sufficiently indecorous, to be both was downright impudent,
• I didn’t have to go along with whatever derivative scenario he was trying to initiate nor the shabby roles that that drama designated, just who did he think he was, a shambling badass laureate of the dispossessed who would one day show them all, he who laughs last laughs longest, wasn’t that what he always said,
• The village was dreary – there was nothing beautiful or transporting about it. Even the mountains were unpleasant and begrudging. They did not soar upwards. They had no business with the sky. No, they were embroiled with the comings and goings below on that mile-long road. Huddled together like debt collectors blocking out the sun.
• What did it mean? Whatever did it mean? How could we regard a man’s death as a grim motif in our own lives, and then again, how could we not?
• The surrealists delighted in contradictions. Yes. It’s a form of rupture in reality and there isn’t anything the surrealists like more is there than a rupture in reality.