Kia ora koutou
It all depends on how they’re put together but my life has been enriched by words on pages and now in 2020, on screens. Here are a few of my more recent favourites…
‘The cab was decorated with a great many ornaments: the dashboard was practically a shrine. It was oddly warm and comforting, sharing the space with a little luminous god. Isobel sank back against the shabby seat cover, the ancient springs. Tears, unbidden, ran down her cheeks and she stroked them away with her fingertips. A tissue was passed from the front seat, the turbanned head looked straight ahead. Only once, just before the cab pulled into the kerb, did their eyes meet in the mirror.
‘No charge,’ he said when she was opening her purse.
‘But I insist,’ Isobel said.
‘No, Madame. No.’ (From Loving Sylvie by Elizabeth Smither, (pub 2019 Allen & Unwin).
***
”I’m just so tired,’ Brownie said against Vic’s chest. ‘So fucking tired of being afraid, and pretending, and being alone.’
‘Yeah, loneliness is a bugger all right,’ said Vic. ‘Makes you wonder what you did to be so unloveable.’
Brownie sat up. Smeared the tears from his face with dirty hands. ‘Its not what I did,’ he said, ‘its who I am. Who I really am, not this – sham persona I put on. But I’m too cowardly to find out how the real me will get on. People look at me sideways enough now. They don’t trust me or like me, and why should they? I was a stupid, arrogant, criminal idiot. Why give them one more reason to hate my guts?’
Vic had lost the thread – if he’d ever had it in the first place. ‘What would be worse than you being a drug dealer?’ Not terribly tactful but there didn’t seem a better way to put it.
Brownie uttered a short despairing laugh. ‘What do you think? Honestly, I’ve no idea why nobody’s spotted it before. Well, to be fair, the odd one has, but they have the same vested interest in keeping mum.’
‘Uh…’ Vic was truly struggling. The upside of this was that brownie was very nearly amused.
I’ll give you a hint, shall I?’ he said. ‘I’m extremely neat.’
‘OK?’
‘And I’ve never had a girlfriend.’
‘Oh…Oh shit.’
‘Regret touching me now?’
(from What You Wish For by Catherine Robertson, pub Black Swan).
She peels the spuds, cuts up the pumpkin and slides them under the leg of mutton. Friday night, roast dinners, it had been her idea – so we can have cold meat for the weekend Mrs Smithson. Or we can use it in a shepherd’s pie. She does the work, the cleaning up afterwards and Mrs Smithson gets the smiles, ooh look, Miss Phillips, mint sauce, how lovely, Mrs Smithson.
She scrapes the carrots, lifts the kettle off the range and tops up the water bubbling around the pudding. She has the table done in the dining room, all’s needed now is to boil the cabbage and carrots and make the gravy.
She knows how to set it all up so a house runs right but how would she manage in an office? Would she ever be able to learn to use a typewriter and manage the filing and categorising they talked about in the advertisement for the secretarial school? She doesn’t even know what filing and categorising means…(Paddy Richardson’s Through the Lonesome Dark, pub Upstart Press Ltd)
Apart from loving the whole books, I quoted these three moments of crisis, of change, or the possibility of change, because I’ve been thinking about why they caught my attention on the very first reading. There’s a lifetime of reading, a mix of memory and appreciation of the way words are arranged, that ordering of words sets me to wondering yet again, how it is that certain arrangements of words give me that indefinable catch of the heart, that appreciation of how much the arrangement of words matters to me, how it contributes to the meaning underneath them, how that combination makes me go back and read the same piece over and over.
Is it the felicitous way the words are arranged? Very likely.
Is it the character (s)? Bound to be.
Is it something about the simplicity of these moments? Something about the craft, the use of words and the space around the words? Yes…yes.
And what about the reader? This is not a solo act. The writer writes the story, the reader reads it and if she’s lucky, the writer doesn’t tell her every little detail, there is room for the reader to draw conclusions, to relive memories, to be introduced to new ones, to marvel at the ease of the words, the strength of them, the way the writer’s words gather that reader in.
These writers have the skill not to say everything – they allude, they hint, they have faith – they leave room for me.
You will have these moments too. They’ll be different from mine but you will know that lift of the heart when you read a piece, you’ll know because it speaks to you.
If I chucked all those words into a hat and said to these writers, pull out the ones you want, they’d do it, then they’d arrange and rearrange, keep it up until they got those words placed the way they wanted. I don’t know if its instinct, experience, a sense of balance (probably all three) that makes us know when words are in the right place, working together to make the impression, the reflection, the awkwardness, the surprise of these big moments in an imaginary character’s life but I do know it takes work and except for once or twice in a working writer’s lifetime, arranging words in the most satisfying pattern doesn’t happen easily.
These excerpts echo something I’ve experienced or they tell me something new or they show me something old in a new light. It has to be the way writers arranged the words. This has to be why I go back and back to favourite pages. The magical order of words to convey emotion without actually saying everything, that combination of what the writer has written and what I, as reader, bring to the page, all dependent on the writer not saying everything, it has to do with them leaving space for me.
Renée
