All in one superhuman breath

I’d really like to get away from this theme, but the examples keep finding me. On reflection it’s mostly the plaudits on the covers of books which contain sloppy writing, that annoys me to the point of complaint. It’s also, of course, a way of warning myself to keep being attentive and particular in my own writing.

This example is from Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, in her own translation. The narrator’s ageing frail mother, apparently not far from ‘dramatic decline’, delivers a speech of some 18 sentences, covering almost a full page (p138-139). We are told that the mother delivers this speech ‘all in one breath’. I tried reading it aloud and managed six and a half sentences. Perhaps the publisher’s editor has greater lung capacity.

This example doesn’t particularly offend, it’s just funny (and, yes, laughably sloppy). The author has little excuse, having also been the translator. And is it unfair to ask if the editor actually read the work? I begin to wonder, is being able to read a pre-requisite for becoming an editor?

Previously:

Can editors be trusted?

And another thing

Contrasting and complimentary perspectives on social issues

An oddity

Everything is written about

In decades gone by, I used to give presentations on the societal implications of the emerging information technologies. One of the points I made occasionally was that the most impactful technology that humans ever invented was the alphabet. The effect of making this observation was typically silent scepticism, at least among the tech-besotted, but at least some people pondered the point. The alphabet is a technology, because it can be used to make other things, and on its own it's pretty much useless: and the ramifications of those other things has been in all respects transformative across civilisations. And I’ve just come across an observation that augments the point — everything is written about:

“There are few events which don’t leave a written trace at least. At one time or another, almost everything passes through a sheet of paper, the page of a notebook, or of a diary, or some other chance support… on which, at varying speeds and by a different technique depending on the place, time and mood, one or another of the miscellaneous elements that comprise the everydayness of life comes to be inscribed” (Georges Perec, Species of spaces, trans John Sturrock, 1974 (1997), p12).

Leonora Brito: unfulfilled talent

In my many years working in community development, mostly in England and Wales, I remember widespread appreciation for the fact that the city of Cardiff had achieved, over years, very considerable racial integration (the Tiger Bay phenomenon) without a history of confrontation or violence. I designed and ran a British Council residential event round about 2004 which included an off-site visit to explore this very phenomenon.

But I don’t believe I ever came across the name of Leonora Brito until recently, when I got hold of a collection of her short stories, Dat’s love (1995). Brito expresses the experience of growing up mixed-race in urban south Wales, through lively invention, keen observation, an ear for the rhythm of vernacular conversation, and sensitivity to the difference between casual and less casual racism.

I was attracted partly because I’m interested in writers who did not decide (or, worse, might have been persuaded) at an early age that they were ‘Going To Be A Writer’ — Brito left school at sixteen, eventually took an art course, followed by a degree in Law and History, before Dat’s love was published when she was 41. And secondly I was attracted to this book because I’m interested in authors known by a single work. Sadly, although apparently she was working on a second collection — reassuringly not seduced by any pressure to write a novel — she died in 2007 and there’s no sign, as far as I’m aware, of any other pieces.

Don’t be put off by Penguin Books' wild exaggeration and their puffers’ illiterate habit of splitting infinitives, this is lively writing which feels like the emergence of a talent sadly undeveloped. Not all the stories are successful, in my view, but there is both raw talent and subtle insight into the black feminist experience here.

An instance of unfulfilled talent like this is a reminder to all of us — something like ‘get on with it, you don’t know how much time you have’.