Finished only this morning, another title by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Book of Words, a 150-page novella detailing a woman’s recollections of childhood, which take on a progressively more menacing and unnerving cast as they go on. Compared to Go Went Gone, it’s perhaps more stylistically refined — beautifully well-written — though meanwhile a little less to my taste than the later novel. The translation, again by Susan Bernofsky, seems excellent.
On Saturday I read The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer. This is a very slim volume, with the body of the text not amounting to fifty pages, so it didn’t take long to traverse it. At the bookshop in Chepstow that morning I’d first picked up a different Fitzcarraldo title, and had then wondered if there were any of their several volumes of Ernaux’s memoirs & essays on the shelves: as it happened, there was only this one. The book is in the form of a letter by Ernaux to the sister she never met. Ginette Duchesne had died aged 6, in 1938, of diphtheria. Annie was born two years later. As she recalls it, her parents never directly talked to her about her sister, and she describes overhearing her mother talk about ‘the other girl’ only once. Nor did Ernaux ever question her parents about Ginette, whose unspoken absence nevertheless continued to haunt them all:
...you and I were fated to be only children. Their desire to have just one child, which they made very clear (we couldn’t do for two what we are doing for one), meant it was either you or me, but not both... It took almost thirty years [...] for it to hit me: I was born because you died, and I replaced you.
It’s a powerful little book. At times reading it felt uncomfortably like intruding on a series of private moments. On the strength it I’m now keen to read Ernaux’s The Years, though I don’t know if I’ll want to venture much further into her bibliography than that.
No new music arrived this week. Instead I can mention a couple of recent acquisitions overlooked in previous posts: Grasshopper (1982) by J.J. Cale, and Quiet (1996) by John Scofield. After Naturally, Troubadour and Travel-Log, Grasshopper is my fourth J.J. Cale album on vinyl. I don’t think it’s unfair to say it’s neither one of the best nor the worst of his records: even so, mid-tier J.J. is well worth my time & attention. ‘City Girls’ was the lead single from it, and perhaps its most memorable tune.
Reading on-line about John Scofield’s album A Go Go, which I bought last month, I saw it had followed a very different release, Quiet, on which the guitarist had played only acoustically, accompanied by drums, bass, and a seven piece horn section, augmented on a couple of numbers by Wayne Shorter on the tenor sax. I obtained a reasonably inexpensive second-hand CD copy via ebay. It’s a subtle and low-key collection of good tunes in elaborate arrangements, all beautifully played. It may not be among Scofield’s best-regarded albums, but it hits a sweet spot for me. Opener ‘After the Fact’ establishes the mood very nicely.
After finishing a bottle of Ardbeg last month, I opened something very different on Wednesday evening in the shape of ‘The Targe 30 year-old Highland Single Grain scotch whisky’. When I bought it at Lidl the year before last it was originally earmarked as a gift for someone else. Plans changed, and I kept it instead in reserve for myself. Its time to shine has now finally arrived. My one prior experience of a single grain whisky (sampled decades ago), hadn’t thrilled me, but, on the grounds that it’s all too seldom I can afford to try anything that has languished in a cask for thirty years, I’d been curious to try this one anyway. It’s a light & clean sort of dram, with initial impressions of mellow sweetness in which I discerned notes of coconut crumb and vanilla. Unsurprisingly there is woodiness too, with a typical whisky sourness eventually also asserting itself. It’s very smooth and affable with no murky depths: an interesting change of scenery I think I’ll enjoy.