Paradise by A.L.Kennedy

Wow!
This is one of those rare, precious times when I have read a book and been blown away by how simply perfect it is. Each word, each phrase, ah, just the right one. This is an author that I knew only by reputation, and now I will always read everything that she writes. What a writer!

So, the story. Well it's about an alcoholic woman in her late 30's. It follows her bumpy up and down path as she drinks too much, so much, that it makes her ill, and her family send her to dry out and recover. She has a relationship with a man who also has a drink problem, they find beauty in the glass, the bottle, each other, they also become engulfed in the dark vile side of alcoholism.
It's more than that of course, it's about life and disappointment and not fitting into the position the family have decided you should fill, it's about the mundanity of the day to day grind, it's about hope and need and the longing to escape from dull jobs. Never has a drink sounded more glorious than when described here, but there's plenty of grim descriptions of truth.
It's surprisingly humorous too, and the descriptions of everything from the weather and landscape to the shine of a bottle are spot on. She does dialogue incredibly well too, capturing the drunks slur and jerky speech. Somehow we maintain sympathy for Hannah, the main character, even when she turfs a disabled woman out of a wheelchair!
It's a wonderful book, and I thoroughly recommend it. It is such a pleasure to discover a supremely skilled writer, I feel rather thrilled.
Here is an extract which showcases in my opinion the finest hungover lift description ever, and gives a wonderful flavour of the rest of the novel.


Which carries me past a last view of Wispy's vaguely stricken offspring and off on a wavery march for the doorway, then out, a passageway (passageways lead to staircases and lifts, they are my friends), through a fire door and into a foyer complicated with several queues - not helpful - but, yes, here is a lift.
When I stop, the momentum of my thoughts sends them rushing forward, pressing and wetting the backs of my eyes. I raise my key to aid steadier inspection - it is attached by a chain to leaf number 536: fifth floor, then.
And, thankfully, no one else is with me when the doors whump shut and seal me in the queasily rising box. The surrounding walls are mirrored from waist height up which suggests an illusion of space and must be a comfort to claustrophobics, but which also - due to the laws of physics - does have one truly horrible consequence: I can see myself. Not only one's self, naturally: from a few especially disastrous angles my right selves and my left selves reflect each other unrelentingly. On both sides, I can watch my head diminish along an undulating corridor of shrinking repetitions until I finally coalesce into one last, pinkish drop of light. This aches.
It isn't fair. All I wanted to do was find 536 and take care of my head, but instead I'm trapped inside this 3-D memento mori - staring at eternity while it howls graphically away, before and after (as if I were an extra in some truly sadistic, educational short), and all that I'm fond of as me is cupped up in this single, staring instant - which isn't enough. Look at me - this is the only point where I'm recognisable, where I make sense - beyond it, I'm nothing but distortion and then I completely disappear. What is this - a Jesuit lift? I am not at an appropriate moment to be metaphysical. For Christ's sake, I was only trying to cut out the stairs. I didn't ask to be forcibly reminded that I don't want to die, not ever, no thank you very much. I am not well and terrified and I don't have the room to be either properly.
So I am not in quite perfect condition when the lift shunts open and gives a gloating little ding. Meanwhile,my sweat gets a chance to chill in the passageway where small metal plaques with arrows are waiting for me, all set to suggest hypothetical directions.
543-589, this way: 502-527, that way; 518 over there.
I'm taking little runs to blind ends, finding corridors that loop round on themselves, cupboards, fire escapes, while the floor starts to pitch down quietly beneath my feet, as if I were aboard some ghastly submarine.
The world cannot be as this is, I refuse to accept it.
543-589 this way. But they were that way before.
I deny the existence of this hotel in its current form. I deny the existence of this hotel in its current form.
528, 529, 530 . . . which is encouraging, fairly, I should be okay, it can't be far -
500.
Bastards.
I deny the existence -
I'm not going to be sick.
I deny the existence of this hotel -
533, 534 -
in its current form.
I deny -
535 . . . 536.
536.
Well, well.
Slowly. Approach it slowly, it may move. Don't let the key chain rattle, make no sudden cries, but, as soon as I'm ready . . . hold the bloody handle, grab it, key in the lock, key in the lock, right in, in, okay. And.Turn.Turn everything.
The room agrees to be opened and it is, indeed, my room - here is my holdall on its floor, lolling open, and this is my own, my personal alarm clock, ticking primly by the raddled bed: the soft, the horizontal, the wanted bed.There is nothing better than being bewildered and unhappy and very tired and then discovering you have a bed.

Argh pc fucksy grr ness etcetera.

My pc is fucksy. It is full of wrongness. I haven't posted much anywhere, haven't been able to comment on my favourite blogs and so on, because at any time, without warning, crash, it chucks me off, it deletes my email/post/whatever.
Just thought I should say so...
Of course this happens when I am supposed to be really concentrating on my attempted entry to the NYP Bookseller comp. Le sigh. I can't write direct to pc in case it snaffles it, instead I am scrawling longhand on various ripped out bits of paper, and trying to convince myself that somehow they will come together and become a cohesive and wonderful whole.
(I know, I could use any one of my gazillion notebooks, but when i sit with a book open it seems to scare my words away. I have to wait for them to rush into my head and trap them like a scurrying spider, quickly, plop, on any old paper to hand.)

Oh dear, I fear I'm writing utter shite.

Bookseller/ Counsellor

From time to time a customer will approach the desk to make an enquiry and, in the course of doing so, reveal something personal and sad about themselves. I will respond, sometimes with fake bookseller politeness, sometimes with genuine interest and sometimes with a wash of empathy.
(Other times I veer backwards in horror at the nuttiness that can unravel.)
This weekend a middle aged man came in with an enquiry about audio books. I answered him, offered a suggestion or 2 and smiled as he left. He returned shortly after with another similar question. This time he revealed that he suffers from problems with his memory, brought on by shock.
He said that he was mugged several years ago. I won't go into details because I would hate for him to happen upon himself on-line one day. Suffice to say that apparently the incident shocked him so much that he no longer has the ability to hold new memories. He therefore is unable to continue his work as a teacher. He seemed nice, sad, vague. He says he feels very vulnerable and won't go out after dark.
We chatted for a while, he was apologetic about taking up my time. I told him it was fine, and it was. It seems to me that if his story is true (and why would it not be) that's what he is left with. This is him, he is a man who was mugged and now has a problem. It's the information that he has waiting to spill out of him, he has lost who he was, indeed is no longer able to be that person and function in the ways that he did before. He has become this man as a result of a random act of violence. He wants to tell everyone, because it is huge and important and all consuming. He looks the same as he ever did, retains his long term memory, and is passed unnoticed always. He bears no visible scars of trauma, it's all in his head, and he says that the doctors deem it a form of neuroses now. He hates that.

Any N's?

"Where have you put your "N's?"
"N's?"
"Yes, N's" Customer gestures with one arm sweeping across the alphabetized fiction bay of L's and M's and, yes, N's and O's and P's.
"There are no N's," he says crossly.
I go over and sweep my own arm across in a matching movement. I stop in front of...da dahhh, N.
"Here we are, N's, just here."
"Ah, right, thanks."
"No problem."

The usual bookshop baloney.

The name of an author of several popular guides to organic gardening is...
Bob Flowerdew.
Tee hee etcetera.

I had to work on the third floor yesterday, not somewhere I feel particularly comfortable as it exposes my awful gaps in knowledge about both geography and art.
A man came in and asked if I had anything on so and so's dad. Having never even heard of so and so it was even less likely that I'd have a clue about his father. People do always assume that you will know exactly what they are talking about, but it simply isn't possible. I rarely work on the third floor, and it has usually changed by the time I next go there. Anyway, being the good bookseller that I am I was able to establish this man's identity, but it took a wee while, and I felt stupid that I hadn't heard of him.
Fleeting pride was mine when someone else came and said they didn't know what they were after, but it was an artist that had something to do with Mount Fuji, and I was able to ask if it might be Hokusai. It was, and the customer was impressed. Yay me, something seeped in during the years I worked at the museum.

I usually work on 1st, with the lovely fiction, where I am calm and useful and glad. Or the ground, where the best sellers and biography's are. Or 2nd, with all the children's books and health and sci-fi and crime and poetry. These things I can "do".
The art section and I aren't wholly compatible. The bay labelled "graphic art" is divided into many sub sections and when a book is sealed and has no words on its cover, and when the computer says simply that it belongs in graphic art, how the fuck am I supposed to know if it belongs with graffiti or packaging or any one of the many other headings?

Of course the coffee shop is on 3rd now, and I felt myself become irritated by the people plucking books from the shelves and strolling into the Costa where they sat, munching on their cookies and slurping their skinny lattes. I was morphing into one of those tutting uptight bitches. Suppressing the yell:
DON'T FUCKING READ THE BOOKS WITHOUT PAYING. WE ARE NOT A LIBRARY.

And breathe.

I amused myself by shelving books in the travel section and trying to guess the country. I am fairly rubbish at it, and shelving took a while. I guessed that one place was in Italy, then Spain, before discovering it is actually a Greek island. Ho hum. I haven't learnt anything though because I can't recall the name of it to write here.

So, that was my weekend really, fun huh?

Blogging etiquette.

(This may sound snarky, but truly it's not meant to be, I am genuinely interested to know what you think.)

If you link to someone on your blog do you expect them to reciprocate? Or is it just a matter that you link to the blogs that interest you and may interest others? If someone says they have linked to you are you supposed to link back? Why would you not link back, would it be because you disliked the blog and so therefore it is a bloggy insult? Is it OK to just link without telling?
Do you prune your links and weed out the ones that no longer seem to be updated or that you don't care for? Do you get pissed at people for breaking blog etiquette?

I sound a wee bit odd I think, but someone has got cross with me...

This is my head.

Blah blah, here I am, feeling like a big fat fake.
I'm not a writer. Writer's write. I'm not writing.
Well, why don't I finish that story about the old woman?
Because I am stuck, even though I know the ending not even I am interested enough to bother.
What about the "mirror" themed story for yet another Mslexia attempt? I have an idea that I could try and make concrete.
I don't feel well.
I honestly don't.
It's not an excuse.
My body is wrong, it's fucked up. I feel rubbish.
But writing makes me feel alive and worthwhile. I need to do it.
But I'm not.
I have to try to finish a synopsis for my ha-ha-ha-ha-yeah-right-as-if novel.
I want to make a submission to the Not Yet Published book tokens thingy.
I wonder if I won't. Something else to hate myself for.
My head is full of hot fuzz, and self disgust.
Just in case you were wondering.