Teju Cole event at The Portobello Bookshop

I very much enjoyed the event with Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole at The Portobello Bookshop last night, chaired by Roxani Krystalli -- I accessed the event online. Cole is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of Creative Writing at Harvard.

He was charming and funny - and illuminating on the writing process. He talked of writing as a way of not forgetting, a sense of 'if you don't write it down it will vanish'.

I was kind of relieved when he said that TREMOR, his new novel, is the least morose book he has written. He referred to having been a 'serious melancholic' in his younger years - he is now almost fifty - and made play of the fact he is no longer such a 'misery guts'. I had read his first (highly acclaimed) novel OPEN CITY in 2012 and confess to not having loved it, the writing is immaculate but I got weary of the heaviness of tone (I reviewed the book here on Goodreads over a decade ago). 

I am only two chapters into TREMOR and loving it. 

Near the end of the event, he alluded to the current assault on Gaza and mentioned a Palestinian friend who is just now harvesting olives. I was very glad he mentioned Gaza. I think it must be hard to perform just now as artist/writer and not mention what is going on in that part of the world.

Thanks, too, to Porty Books for making the event accessible online. Hybrid events are maybe the one good thing to have come out of the pandemic.

Ten years since The State of Me - publishing & illness (&Lionel Shriver)

This August it will  be ten years since the The State of Me was published. I'm still very proud of the novel and it remains my weapon in the fight for truth about my illness. A decade has been enough time for me to get over the roller coaster of the publishing process - and I have happily mostly forgotten the shock of it all. It was like a never-ending game of snakes and ladders. As a result of the liquidation of my indie publisher, the novel did not receive the marketing it should have done - but I remain very grateful my precious work was not lost in the drama and that HarperCollins rescued the book. This review by writer Elizabeth Baines remains one of my favourite reviews.

The path to being published was though unbelievably stressful and possibly contributed to my later developing idiopathic bilateral uveitis, a rare and serious autoimmune eye condition, where your iris attacks itself. It was a truly awful time, pouring steroids into my eyes, with the side effects of increased eye pressure, which also had to be treated (I'm sure ME was implicated and I still get six-monthly checks at eye hospital). I still remember at the time a friend telling me not to read  José Saramago's Blindness, which I, of course, did read.

If I were well, I'd no doubt be on to my third, or even fourth novel, by now, but I live necessarily in the margins of the writing world. It is often said you are only as good as your last book, but I'm happy to say that my novel is still being read quietly in the background, giving people pleasure and educating about ME.

I was delighted recently that Nick Duerden, a journalist and writer who has made a good recovery from his own very disabling postviral illness, messaged me and said he found the book 'very powerful and gripping'. He also said: 'You write fear, confusion and anger very well indeed. It moved me'. Nick is author of the recent memoir Get Well Soon (Green Tree, 2018). In the same week, Scottish film director and screen writer May Miles Thomas sent me a lovely card saying how much she had enjoyed the novel. I'd sent May a copy as a thank you for having the opportunity to watch her brilliant and hypnotic film Voyageuse free online on Vimeo.  Voyageuse made me think a lot about the layers of storytelling and how we (re)construct a life. I highly recommend this film.

I have been asked by Lighthouse Books to speak about writing and disability at a one hour event with other ill/disabled writers (I identify as chronically ill rather than disabled, the social model of disability does not in my view serve people with ME particularly well). I have said yes though I never know how I will be on the day, but am flattered as it's a decade since The State of Me was published. I've been shortlisted for a couple of short fiction awards since then, and had short non/fiction published here and there - details in sidebar - but because I live with ME, every minute of every day, I am the polar opposite of prolific (my novella-in-progress in 2015 is still in progress).

I do, though, know about the writing process - The State of Me took probably eight or nine years to write/publish in all - and I do, of course, know intimately about chronic illness. Writing is harder when you are ill. Everything is harder when you are ill. But writing (even as slowly as I do) sustains me. I would love to publish another book in my lifetime, I may be sixty by the time that happens, and I am not joking when I say that. Approaching my mid-fifties, I find I am thinking more about life and death and what we do in  a lifetime. I'm also more acutely aware of just how much my illness has thieved from me. (Interesting to read this interview with Elizabeth Strout who didn't publish her first novel until she was forty-two (I was forty-four). She went on to win a Pulitzer.)

*

Lionel Shriver has been off on one of her wee rants again - this time she is bemoaning the fact that Penguin Random House has a diversity drive. She petulantly writes:

“Thus from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes. We can safely infer from that email that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling. Good luck with that business model. Publishers may eschew standards, but readers will still have some."

How can she be so goddam myopic and insecure? Diversity can only ever be a force for good (as long as we are talking about actual meaningful representation and not just tokenism). Do we really want to be reading the same novels about the same characters by the same people over and over again? There is an excellent response to Lionel's nonsense here.

I can honestly though say I have never felt discriminated against in terms of ethnicity (in fact, mixed race writers are all the rage) or disability, though one agent unprofessionally left her job without telling me, I imagine she did not realise just how slowly I wrote. It was a huge shock to me, but somehow I picked myself up and kept writing, slowly, slowly. Self-belief and the importance of bearing witness to the catastrophe of my illness was what drove me. But like many debut writers, I just felt constantly thwarted by the gate-keeping mechanisms of publishing in general. To be constantly told how good your writing was but because of marketing/pigeonholing there was no 'fit' for your book was soul-crushing. I think though pigeonholing is less rigid now, fiction and memoir are more readily blurred. The idea of what constitutes a novel is much more fluid.

When my novel was eventually published ten years ago, it had nothing to do with representation of illness/disability -  the notion of diversity was not being trumpeted back then. My novel was published in spite of my illness rather than because of. It was published on its own merit, as novels should be. Also, I'm mixed race but The State of Me has nothing to do with race - I'm sure Lionel would be very confused: a mixed race author with a white main character whose illness/disability informs the whole novel. Also, my character does not use a mobility scooter, but I had my first try of one a few weeks ago at the Botanics in Edinburgh and it was bloody liberating.

*

Illness brings a walling off, there are simply aspects of being a writer that are impossible for me. I cannot embark upon the circuit of readings and  festivals that is required of writers these days. The performance part is, for many, a significant part of the writing life. I was lucky that (pre-liquidation) my indie publisher had no concerns about my being unable to do the running around and promoting. It does break my heart a little that I am walled off like this, but that is the case with many aspects of my life. Many years ago in late nineties, I was shortlisted for the Robert Louis Stevenson Award on the basis of a short story. The award is a month in France in Grez-sur-Loing where RLS spent much time. It looks blissful and restful and surely promotes one's creativity. I seduced myself into applying  as my undergraduate year in France in 1983 was cut short because of the onset of ME and I felt that RLS, himself ill his whole adult life, would have wanted me to go. But had I won I would have been unable to go as I learned later that you have to cycle through the forest to get your groceries.

Still, a decade ago I had my book launch in Waterstone's on George Street (it still had the comma then, though now closed down) - it was probably the happiest moment of my life.

Penelope Lively on ageing reminds me of getting used to being ill at twenty

I've just started Penelope Lively's memoir Ammonites and Leaping Fish, I had not heard of this book and am glad that artist and writer Nancy nudged me in its direction. For a long time, I've been reading about South Asia in 1940s and 1950s in an attempt to put together some kind of fictionalised version of my father, and Nancy told me Penelope talks about Suez in 1950s, which is perfect as my dad travelled by ship from Pakistan to UK at least once in that decade (I even found the passenger list). I'm not yet at the Suez part, but Penelope's chapter on old age makes me smile. Talking about adapting to old age - she is 80 - she says:

You get used to it. And that surprises me. You get used to diminishment, to a body that is stalled, an impediment? Well, yes, you do. An alter ego is amazed, aghast perhaps - myself in the roaring forties, when robust health was an assumption, a given, something you barely noticed because it was always there. Acceptance has set in, somehow, has crept up on you, which is just as well, because the alternative - perpetual rage and resentment - would not help matters. You are now this other person, your earlier selves are out there, familiar, well remembered, but you have to come to terms with a different incarnation.

Getting used to a different incarnation is, of course, very different when you are young and the catastrophe of illness has punched into your life. I always say it takes about a decade to get used to having ME. That's probably how long it took me. In The State of Me when Helen is still horribly ill, aged 21, in bed, she lists 10 things about her old life:

6. Looking at photos of other self in other life. Tracing finger over old self, a smiling girl in a hockey team. My hockey stick lay like a corpse in the back of my cupboard, club foot poking through my clothes, reminding me of my frailty. I had tried to throw it out twice, but Nab had brought it back in.

And in real life I didn't really ever have difficulty accepting, it just was, though at the beginning, when acutely ill, I was more terrified than anything of how ill you could feel and not be dying. I think I have always dealt with my illness with dignity, but there may well be some rage at the fucking circus of psychiatrists who have made life so hard for us by denying our illness is physical. The PACE trial is crumbling though. And we have Americans - journalist and academic David Tuller and professor of psychology James Coyne - to thank for that.

(And I had to look up ammonite. )

Writing, Rituximab & a Japanese film about death

Three pieces on writing I have recently enjoyed:

An interview with Janice Galloway, who has a new collection of short stories out. Speaking about the blurring of memoir and fiction, she says: 'It’s all stories, as far as I’m concerned and your job is to tell the story interestingly and not be dull.'

I agree with her wholeheartedly.

Here, writer Fiona Melrose on how a Caravaggio painting she loves makes her think about story and construct: 'Someone central in your story has to want something that drives some sort of journey, even if the thing they want the most is to stop everything from changing.'

I think that's an interesting point. Writers learn early on their main character has to want something - I remember reading years ago that your character has to really want something, even if it's just a glass of water - but wanting things not to change is often a driving force in real life, so of course applies to fictional characters.

And a very interesting essay on ethnicity and writing - should ethnicity limit what a writer can write? - from  Susan Barker, who describes herself as 'British — mixed-race English and Chinese, but linguistically and culturally British'. I too am British, a Scottish mother and Pakistani father, and I certainly feel culturally and linguistically Scottish. 

I've been thinking recently that Helen Fleet my main character in 'The State of Me' is white, it never occurred to me that she wouldn't be. My novel is about illness, not race. Writing Caucasian characters is natural to me, whereas writing Asian characters is harder as I did not have much Asian influence in my childhood. I am less confident with Asian characters, but that does not mean I should not write them. After all,  fiction-writing is pretending to be someone else. And I am in the slow process. 

I tried to say more about this in the comment thread of an excellent blog post about diversity and fiction  back in June by Nikesh Shukla.

Going back to Susan Barker's essay, she says: 'In a best case scenario, what should determine the legitimacy of fiction is the writing itself, and though this is not always the case, fiction writers should not be deterred from writing from other cultural perspectives.'

Indeed, it's the writing, always the writing.

*
 

Also, good news on Rituximab last month, phase 2 of the Norwegian drug trial was published. I feel cautiously optimistic. Just so gratifying to see actual science in progress, after decades of buffoonery.

And I highly recommend this Japanese film from 2009, 'Departures', a gorgeous film about death.

'Dans la rue': a few thoughts on Patrick Modiano

Like many, I had not heard of Patrick Modiano when he was announced yesterday as the 2014 winner of the Nobel Literature prize.  He sounds like a lovely man, overwhelmed by the news. I listened to a short interview here in French and this illuminating discussion in English. He was walking in the Jardin du Luxembourg when he got the call he'd won.  I love that he was 'dans la rue' when he heard the news. 'Dans la rue' is one of the first, most simple phrases you learn in  French and  Patrick Mondiano is 'dans la rue' when he hears his words have just won him the Nobel prize for literature. I also love - from a writer's perspective -  that his work fuses autobiography and fiction and his books are only 100 pages, shorter than the length of the typical publishing house model - probably that is why he has not (yet) been widely translated into English.

I can still read French novels - slowly, slowly - if they are not too taxing. I downloaded a Kindle sample of Modiano's Pour que tu ne perdes pas dans le quartier yesterday but it will most likely be on the virtual shelf for a good wee while with all the other samples. (I started reading  Véronique Olmi's Bord de mer in paperback a couple of years ago but it was too bleak to finish.  I may go back though.)

*

I was living in France 32 years ago, exactly, I'd just started my year abroad, the third year of my joint Honours French and English degree. I was ill from the start, I'd gone off to France, not knowing I had picked up the Coxsackie B4 virus (there had been an outbreak of this enterovirus at home in the west of Scotland). The rest, as they say, is history. I just  hope the next 32 years bring some real hope to people with  ME. I believe that if I had not spent the first decade fighting my illness, pushing myself, I would be more recovered than I am today. I didn't do GET, it was not yet invented, and I would have refused to do it, but I did do real damage by 'forcing' myself better even when I was clearly still very ill. So, please, can I say again if you have classic ME, rest, rest, rest, do not go near GET, the bizarre therapy peddled by those bizarre medics. They don't know what they are talking about. Listen to the doctors who *do* know, the informed ones, the educated ones.

Discovering Anita Desai and Malcolm Lowry

I hadn't read anything by Anita Desai before, but just loved her gorgeous, short novel Clear Light of Day, a collection of disappointments and sadnesses, sprinkled with joy as two sisters Bim and Tara look back on their childhood in India in 1940s and their lives post-Partition. Here's a short clip of Desai  talking about Indian writers writing in English. And a longer interview here. Also, I recently discovered the writer Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), this Oscar-nominated documentary from 1976, 'Volcano, An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry' is on YouTube. It's a compelling and disturbing portrayal of the debauchery and devastation of alcoholism and the cycle of perseverance and rejection and success in the writing life. I couldn't watch this film in one go, it's a disquieting experience, I watched it over a few nights,  the soundtrack is jangling and alienating. One of Lowry's friends interviewed, years after his death, wipes away a tear saying: 'The idea of such a talented man going so wrong... He could cope as long as he was drunk...' This resonates,  thinking of my own father.

Ann Beattie in Granta mag

I love this article by American writer Ann Beattie in Granta mag:

All those echoes, all those memories nipping at my heels. I guess that like a lot of writers, I write for myself, hoping I’ll believe the fiction, that the stand-in will make what happened (or what I thought happened) less painful, or at least more remote.

Lou Reed, Doris Lessing and Lionel Shriver

I felt sad about Lou Reed, 71 is not old (especially as I am approaching 50). You feel sad not only for the (at times, grumpy) man, but for the person you were when you listened to his music. Transformer was an album I listened to countless times with my first boyfriend in early 80s. We were together for five years. I can still see us taking the album out of the sleeve to put it on the record player. He lived in a 'rough' area and his dad was a communist. He'd shout upstairs, It's time Nasim was going over the road, and  the boyfriend would  dutifully walk me home. All of them are dead now, the druggy boyfriend, the father and Lou Reed. In that order.

I've just started Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor, it's been yellowing on my bookshelves, I've no idea when I got it. I'm only 35 pages in but love its strangeness and clarity, and Hugo the yellow cat/dog. Am smiling that her character smokes one cigarette every day, one of the characters I'm writing just now does too - her luxury in one dreadful day after another. These coincidences always happen, and are always going to happen, but just so you know I'm not nicking from Doris. (I met a woman once who smoked one cigarette every New Year's Eve.)

I'm having an eye saga again, no uveitis, thankfully, and touching all the wood in the world, every single tree, but the pressures have risen again, no idea why as there is no inflammation, and I stopped using steroid drops two years ago, but the pressure-lowering drops do not agree with me, they cause eyelid swelling - most eye drops do in my case, and ME can make you especially sensitive to drugs - which is just not on. And my poor eyes are dry as stones. When you have an opthalmology appointment now, they phone you a week before and you press this key and that  key to confirm. I'm always scared I make a mistake, but I love our NHS and would happily press keys every day to confirm.

And speaking of eyes, am very tempted to say to Lionel Shriver, Dry your eyes, Lionel. Also tired of her and Jonathan Franzen badmouthing social media, they don't understand that many writers use it intelligently and creatively. Yes, Lionel, dry your eyes.

'Everyone must leave something behind when he dies...'

I came across this wonderful Ray Bradbury quote today:

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

The last word

Interesting to read about writers who write the last chapter (even sentence, in case of John Irving) first. I love Graham Greene's words:

So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious; in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.”

And an update on Rituximab research from ME Association.

Reading from a Chesterfield with Lister looking on...

Last week, I read at the Dissecting Edinburgh 'Writing Medicine' event in Surgeons' Hall, alongside Alison Summers and Tracey Rosenberg (their websites are listed in the previous link). Alison is writing a novel about Pick's disease, and Tracey, a novelist, has also published poetry about cancer. The venue was changed from the pathology museum to the library and what a gorgeous library those surgeons have!  I had a wonderful Chesterfield armchair and  Lister looked down from his painting behind me  - I felt protected. I should say I was not on my best form, I was wrecked  even before the reading - I was in bed until four o'clock -  but that lends to the authenticity, I guess. Alison and Tracey are both great performers, I loved their energy. This is only the second time I have read from The State of Me in public - though I did read a short extract on the BBC Alba documentary 'Toxic Tiredness' in 2011, but that felt different, the audience was not yet present, I read to a camera man at my kitchen table (you can be more sassy in your kitchen). I was saying to friends, after Surgeons' Hall, that at my Waterstone's launch in  2008 - it still had an apostrophe then! -  it felt very much like I was reading fiction aloud,  my precious novel out at last, after all the hype and craziness before publication. This time though, I felt almost tearful when I was practising the extracts beforehand - it felt like I was reading about my life - Helen Feet's plasma exchange in the eighties, and  I felt sad.  But what a treat to have read in Surgeons' Hall. And lovely to see some of my friends there and new faces too, though it is a big tangle of colour when everyone is focused on you. My head gets that inflated/pumped up feeling and I have to take myself away and untangle the threads.

* Delighted to hear from Alison that she loved The State of Me, which she has just finished reading.

Why do we read fiction?

Can reading literature make doctors better doctors was one of the questions posed at a 'Dissecting Edinburgh' event last month. It made me think of James Wood's How Fiction Works where he describes how in 2006 a Mexican municipal president decided that his police force should be prescribed reading certain novels - One Hundred Years of Solitude was on the list -  to make them 'better citizens'. And psychologist Keith Oatley speaks of fiction as a 'kind of simulation that runs on minds', and argues that novels can help us understand the world better. I'm not sure if  doctors *can* 'learn' empathy from fiction (I tend to think you've got empathy or you haven't) but  it's certainly  interesting to think of why we read rather than the more often discussed why we write. Both questions are answered by Portugese writer Fernando Pessoa: 'Literature is proof that life is not enough'. (I came across this gorgeous quote a couple of months ago in Pascal Garnier author's note in The Panda Theory. It is often in my head now.)

I happened the day before yesterday to be reading the quaint and bizarre short story 'Rab and His Friends' (1859) by Scottish doctor John Brown  featured at the Dissecting Edinburgh event - Rab is the name of a dog belonging to a man whose wife has incurable cancer - when I learned that Iain Banks is terminally ill. I had a lump in my throat. I remember reading The Wasp Factory in a friend's flat in Aberdeen in eighties. And how crazy we all were for The Crow Road in the nineties. I recall it was dramatised too. Such sad, sad news.

Who controls the story?

I've been not particularly well this last week and reading Joseph Anton in bed, it's a long book - 600 pages, which on a Kindle can seem endless, you don't get the same sense of progress you get with a paper book - but compelling even though Salman can be a bit up himself. Whatever you think of the man, he can write, and this book is like a banquet of Michelin food and junk food (the bitchiness, the gossip), on which you gorge and have indigestion afterwards and need to take a break. It is also repetitive, necessarily so, and lots and lots of detail. 

I feel linked with Salman's books as I read Midnight's Children when I was very ill in mid-eighties. I had to stop and start, stop and start, but persevered. Reading this novel was my window on real life when my own life was suffocating and claustrophobic, bedridden as I was with ME. Then five, six years later when all the hullaballoo started I was in London trying to find part-time work, heading (unknowingly) for a catastrophic relapse and the news on TV was of books being burned and I recall watching with my flatmates and feeling baffled, and so very ill (for neuroimmune reasons). Fast forward another six years, and I saw him speak in Edinburgh, I think the Traverse Theatre, and we had to go through airport security (as usual, I had to sit while others kept my place) and  afterwards we left with signed copies of The Moor's Last Sigh (which I still have not read, but I will). Salman says in his memoir that when he was writing TMLS he was annoyed he could not travel to India to do the research and was worried about 'authenticity', but many writers have to imagine the places they are writing about (and he already had much experience of India). I would love, for example, to have the option to go back to Pakistan, I have family there, but I can't risk the vaccinations, or not having the vaccinations, and so I have to rely on memory (of a 6-week trip as a child) and my heart. (Salman's exiled Somalian writer friend Nuruddin Farah advised him to write from what he'd kept in his heart.)

My favourite line so far  is: 'At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses, he said, behind all the accusations and abuse, was a question of profound importance: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told?...'

I am struck (not for the first time) by this concept of 'who owns the story', who is in control of the narrative, and while I am trying not to write about ME as I am so fucking bored with it, this is what happened with my illness, the narrative was stolen and distorted by a clique of medics/health editors, and the story has been spun and spun like a spider's web. Thankfully, science is the opposite of these 'purveyors of untruth' and is making headway in spite of it all. This from Open Medicine Institute is encouraging.

And, this is good, an essay on why writers should use Twitter. I used to hate Twitter, thought it was bollocks - and there is a lot of bollocks on there, like the internet in general - but it is also a lovely thing, for many reasons, not least  because it takes hardly any energy. I recently came across this short interview with Dr John Chia via Twitter, he researches treatments for ME triggered by enterovirus (as mine was). And unlike the purveyors of untruth he is very interested in the  original virus that has actually caused ME.

And if anyone is interested, here is Zoe Heller's review of  Joseph Anton, shortlisted for hatchet job of the year. I think she is a little hard on him. And a more sympathetic review here from writer Laila Lalami.

Gems (2)

I've been dipping into 'How Fiction Works' by James Wood.  I got it in May 2011 and skim it now and then. Written in very short sections, there are some gems, though sometimes it's a little hardgoing,  a lot of detail about texts I haven't read. And quite a bit on Flaubert and  style indirect libre,  which I vaguely recall from French lectures.

Speaking about the writer Henry Green's attitude to dialogue, Wood says: 'Green argued that dialogue is the best way to communicate with one's readers, and that nothing killed 'life' so much as explanation'. He thought that dialogue should 'carry multiple meanings' and be interpreted however the reader wished, and that the writer should impose no fixed meaning since we can never really know what others are thinking. Wood  continues: 'The reader tends to plump for one reading, while being aware that multiple readings are also possible; we sew ourselves into the text, becoming highly invested in our version of events'.

We sew ourselves into the text is just gorgeous.

I had not heard of Henry Green and will seek him out.

And on metaphor Wood has this to say: 'Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story.'

Manto & translation, & Pakistani fathers

This is Saadat Hasan Manto's Mottled Dawn, Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, published by Penguin India. The cover is exquisite, it came the other day. The painting is 'Melting Wit' (2005, acrylic on canvas) by N. S. Harsha. I'm not sure if the clowns are bleeding or melting. Harsha says: 'I fill my work with gaps and loose ends; I want to lead and mislead the viewer. Ambiguity makes a picture very exciting'.

I've already read 'Toba Tek Singh' online - the first story in this anthology -  and have also read the introduction by Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose own short story 'A Spoiled Man' from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is one of the saddest stories I've ever read. I look forward to the rest of Manto's  deceptively simple yet brutal and sometimes funny stories about Partition. It struck me that Manto was only seven years older than my Indian-born Pakistani father, who migrated to Karachi briefly in the late forties before coming to the west to work as a doctor. Manto migrated to Lahore from Bombay, but he was never happy there. Both of them died as not old men through alcohol excess.

These stories have been translated by Khalid Hasan and I was interested to read that Aatish Taseer - the estranged son of  the assassinated Pakistani politician (himself the nephew of poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz ) - does not approve of Hasan's translations, suggesting he lacks 'the simplicity, speed and vitality' of the original prose. He has translated Manto himself in an anthology of Selected Stories (Random House). I downloaded these last month and have read a couple. This reviewer is critical of Taseer's criticism of Hasan as a translator. As I only know a few words in Urdu - banana, water and thank you - I have to trust that whoever has translated has done a fine job.

And, on translation, here is a list of the best books of 2012.

'The shimmer of fiction'

Wonderful interview with Edna O'Brien here, who at eighty-plus is still captivating. She says she found her memoir much harder to write than her novels and that 'memoir must have the shimmer of fiction', which is just gorgeous. (I've remembered that my friend's mum - Bernard MacLaverty's wife - said The State of Me reminded her of The Country Girls when she first read it a few years ago.)

And this is just so beautiful and inspiring, children in Paraguay playing cellos and violins that have been recycled from landfill. One of my nephews is getting a violin for Christmas, so this resonated even more. The clip is a teaser for the movie 'Landfill Harmonic'.

And, last but not least, the ME Association is raising money to educate GPs about the illness, you can donate until the 18 December. Please do so if you can. There is still much misinformation flying around - with the shimmer of fiction, you could say - thanks to the opposite of science that abounds in the UK. How can it be that thirty years on from my own diagnosis, there is more obfuscation and lack of clarity than ever?!

Looking for Martin Amis...

Years ago, I marked down these words of Martin Amis: '... the writer is the opposite of the suicide, constantly applauding life and, furthermore, creating it, assigning breath and pulse to a non-existent progeny.'

I cannot recall where the quote comes from, perhaps his memoir Experience?

 I would really like to know the source, if anyone has an idea please let me know. Thank you!

Saadat Manto's 'Toba Tek Singh'

I have recently discovered the writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, he wrote short stories in Urdu, the bad boy of Partition literature. This story 'Toba Tek Singh' is one of his most popular, a satire on the separation of India and Pakistan, and focuses on the exchange across the border of inmates from mental institutions (based on fact).

'All that these inmates knew was that there was a man by the name of Quaid-e-Azam who had set up a separate state for Muslims, called Pakistan. But they had no idea where Pakistan was. That was why they were all at a loss whether they were now in India or in Pakistan. If they were in India, then where was Pakistan? If they were in Pakistan, how come that only a short while ago they were in India? How could they be in India a short while ago and now suddenly in Pakistan?'

The full story is here in English, it is very short, and funny and desperately sad at the same time. I just wish I could understand Urdu and read the original.

'Telling stories is really telling lies'

I used to collect wee scraps of writers' quotes that I liked and paste them into a book. I found this snippet I cut out years ago from BS Johnson:

"Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this means falsification. Telling stories is really telling lies."

And I love this:

"The novel is a form in the same sense that the sonnet is a form; within that form, one may write truth or fiction. I choose to write truth in the form of a novel."

Tanks In Our Bedrooms

You feel a helpless fury and incomprehension, you don't even want to see or hear any more news when this is the image you went to sleep with.  It's not rocket science - excuse the terrible pun - to work out that the hugely disproportionate - and brutally predictable - response of Israel is going to lead nowhere except hell. 

I came across this Granta essay from 2009 by Libyan writer Hisham Mater. He has also tweeted that: 'Most US newspaper/magazine articles I've read dwell on Israeli suffering whilst keeping any mention of Gaza brief & incomplete'.

Also read this sobering piece from the Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish who lost three of his daughters in 2009.

And this from Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent on Britain's culpable role in the first place.

When you can't comprehend you turn to the words of others:

Here is Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish via Sarah Irving's interesting blog.

At weekend was dipping into Mourid Barghouti's I was Born There, I was Born Here which I got for Christmas last year. He says:  Many western journalists who mantain a studied and malign blindness to the Occupation have asked me whether the Palestinian people are really ready to coexist with the Jews and I reply that we coexisted with them for hundreds of years in Palestine ...What is asked of us today, however, and has been ever since their military occupation of our land, is to coexist with their tanks in our bedrooms! Show me one person in the world, I say to them, who can live with a tank in his bedroom.'

And my publisher Scott is kindly sending me up his copy of Israeli writer Amos Oz' How to Cure a Fanatic which someone gave him and he has just finished.

* Izzeldin Abuelaish speaks about Gaza 9.30 mins into this Radio 4 programme (19/11/2012). And Mehdi Hasan,  speaks about the importance of context when reporting on Israel/Palestine conflict.

** Journalist Sherine Tadros speaks about difficulty of impartiality in an unbalanced conflict.