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bethan_clark's reviews
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A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel
5.0
The Reith Lectures alone are incredible, the rest adds v interesting insight into her and her writing
Excerpts I highlighted to transcribe:
Book reviews section:
Everything human being is worth more than the worst act of his or her life. The death penalty is not wrong because it is inconsistently administered. If it were fairly administered, it would still be wrong.
Tenderness towards the bush is something that only the secure can feel. Only those who are free to leave them can be sentimental about the wild places of the earth.
As a travel writer, he knows journeys are to be endured, not enjoyed. They look glamourous only in retrospect. Most people's journeys in the course of history have not been voluntary. Transportation, slavery and forced migration have taken more people away from their birthplace than has the desire for novelty.
... those travlelers who get into trouble only to feel smug about it afterwards.
He knows that the unfamiliar need not be sought, for it comes to find you. For the nervous man, familiarity can be destroyed by a walk into the next room. The real undiscovered country is other people: human beings in all their singularity.
From the Reith Lectures:
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not the truth, though they are part of it. Information is not knowledge. And history is not the past. It is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It is the record left of what's on the record. It's the plan of the positions taken when we stop the dance to note them down. It is what's left in the sieve after the centuries have run through it: a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more the past than the birth certificate is the birth, or a script is a performance , or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of fallible or biased witnesses combined with incomplete accounts of actions not understood by the people who performed them. It is no more than the best we can do and often it falls short of that. Historians are sometimes scrupulous and self aware and sometimes careless or biased. Yet in either case, and hardly knowing which is which, we cede them moral authority. They may not consciously fictionalise and we believe they are trying to tell the truth. But historical novelists face, as they should, questions about whether their work is legitimate.
No other type of writer has to explain their trade so often. The reader asks: is this story true? That sounds like a simple question, but we have to unwrap it. Often the reader is asking: can I check this out in the history book? Does this agree with other accounts? Would my history teacher recognise it? It may be that a novelist's driving idea is to take apart the received version, but readers are touchingly loyal to the first version they learned. And if you challenge it, it is like taking away their childhood. For a person who seeks safety and authority, history is the wrong place to look. Any worthwhile history is a constant state of self questioning, just as any worthwhile fiction is.
If a reader asks the writer, is there evidence to back your story? The answer should be yes, but you hope that the reader is wise to the many types of evidence there are, any how they can be used.
Your real job as a novelist is not to be an inferior sort of historian but to recreate the texture of lived experience. To activate the senses and deepen the readers engagement through feeling. Research is not a separate phase from writing. There is no point the writer can say: I know enough. It is not like building a wall....The activity is immersive. The novelist is after a type of knowledge that goes beyond the academic. She is entering into a dramatic process with her characters and until she plunges into a particular scene she hardly knows what she needs to know... You have to expand your area of curiosity - away from political history and into every area of culture. Learn about art, trade, how things are made, then lift your eye a from the page, and learn to look. At first you are a stranger in your chosen era. But a time comes when you can walk around in a room and touch the objects. When you know not only what your characters wore but feel their clothes on your back. That rasp of homespun wool, the whisper of linen, the weight of brocade, the way your riding coat settles when you mount your horse, that clink and sway of items at your belt - scissors or keys or rosary beads. You listen - what sound do your feet make on this floor of beaten earth? Or on these terracotta tiles? How do your feet feel when you pull your boots out of the mud? How old are your boots? What colour is the mud? When you can answer these questions, you are ready to begin.
In every scene , the writer's opportunity comes at a point of a change. A person doesn't notice a street he walks down every day. But when they knock down a house on the corner and a new vista is revealed, that's when he notices, that's when you can describe. Landscapes, streetscapes, objects are dead in themselves. They only come alive through the sense of your character. Through his perceptions, his opinions, his point of view. There are no special tricks to make exposition work - only differences in the skill of the author.
From her reflective writing section:
I simply became aware that all my life is been living in a room with a door while I'd been trying to climb out a narrow window.
Our identity, then, is intimately linked to the natural world. As soon as we define man as apart from that natural world, the question of our identity begins to arise.
For generations, our historians had proceeded as if British and English were the same... Historically, the English have not bothered to define themselves, they just are. It is other people who, in their view, have the problem of definition. English nationalism is not recognised to exist.
By writing a novel, one performs a revolutionary act. a novel is an act of hope. It allows us to imagine that things may be other than they are.
... at the point where one could take a boat either to Amsterdam or Vienna. I felt a childlike moment of wonder: Europe connects... It is a small thing to look at a map but a greater thing to feel for yourself how a map relates to life.
Our sense of our self is altered and for once not by some great discontinuity, not by a fracture, but by a process of linking up, of connection. There is not heroic sea voyage, nor airport formalities, nor a moment of take off, a traumatic separation from ones solid earth. Only the business of changing platforms at a London station.
An attempt familiar to us in Europe: an attempt to reach back to a mythical time and place. It was a sham, but it was seductive
The thing that is extremely attractive to the exile: a spurious sense of belonging.
A viking bracelet found in a Dublin archeological dig... To my own satisfaction, I had come home in Ireland and Europe. Though it is powerful to me, I know it is a confabulation.
We are all, as I have tried to show, members of imagined communities. In the century ahead, shall we transcend nationalism, or accomodate it? There is a sense in which a postmodern world must be a post-nationalist world, but the idea of a nation will be with us for a long time yet. Historically, nationalist ideals have provided us with ideas of resistance and emancipation, and in the present sorry state of Europe I don't think we can reasonably ask a thwarted and injured people to do without their national ideals, nor to ask them to bask in the light of a sunny cosmopolitan world... For them, the day has not yet dawned.
I think it is the role of writers and artists to make sure that the idea of a nation is not regressive, not oppressive, not injurious to the ideas of others. Can this be? It is artists and writers who deal in symbol and myth... Myth is what can be collectively remembered, collectively imagined. I do not think you can separate what is remembered from what is imagined... Myth is a mirror we hold to long vanished faces. "See," we say, "they were just like us". Myth is a kind of sacred history: it seems to incarnate a truth that goes beyond fact. It appeals to our origins among the gods, before we were merely human.
All this tinkering is a substitute for fresh thought.
The paper version shows up the problems, but not necessarily the solutions.
She had learnt more from Austen than from her mother.
Comedy does not come from a writer who comes to who desk saying, "Now I will be funny". It comes from one who crawls to her desk leaking shame and despair, and begins to describe faithfully how things are. In that fidelity to the details of misery, one feels relish. The grimmer it is the better it is. Slowly, reluctantly, comedy seeps through.
Readers who do not care about the rich characters do not care about the poor ones either.
No doubt the best conversations are those that never quite occurred. I sensed that we both lived in hope and had frequently lived a myth.
.... a novelist has to do: unfreeze antique feeling, unlock the emotion stored and packed tight in paper, brick and stone.
You need not believe in life after death to believe in ghosts. The dead exist only because the living let them. They are what we make them. Nothing illustrates this better than the afterlife of Diana.
You have a glimpse, an inspiration, you write a paragraph and you think it's there - but when you read it back, it's not there. Every picture painted, every opera composed, every book that is written is the ghost of the possibilities that were in the artist's head. Art brings back the dead but it also makes perpetual mourners of us all. Nothing lasts. That's what Apollo, the father of Orpeus, sings to him in Monteverdi's opera...
Excerpts I highlighted to transcribe:
Book reviews section:
Everything human being is worth more than the worst act of his or her life. The death penalty is not wrong because it is inconsistently administered. If it were fairly administered, it would still be wrong.
Tenderness towards the bush is something that only the secure can feel. Only those who are free to leave them can be sentimental about the wild places of the earth.
As a travel writer, he knows journeys are to be endured, not enjoyed. They look glamourous only in retrospect. Most people's journeys in the course of history have not been voluntary. Transportation, slavery and forced migration have taken more people away from their birthplace than has the desire for novelty.
... those travlelers who get into trouble only to feel smug about it afterwards.
He knows that the unfamiliar need not be sought, for it comes to find you. For the nervous man, familiarity can be destroyed by a walk into the next room. The real undiscovered country is other people: human beings in all their singularity.
From the Reith Lectures:
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not the truth, though they are part of it. Information is not knowledge. And history is not the past. It is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It is the record left of what's on the record. It's the plan of the positions taken when we stop the dance to note them down. It is what's left in the sieve after the centuries have run through it: a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more the past than the birth certificate is the birth, or a script is a performance , or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of fallible or biased witnesses combined with incomplete accounts of actions not understood by the people who performed them. It is no more than the best we can do and often it falls short of that. Historians are sometimes scrupulous and self aware and sometimes careless or biased. Yet in either case, and hardly knowing which is which, we cede them moral authority. They may not consciously fictionalise and we believe they are trying to tell the truth. But historical novelists face, as they should, questions about whether their work is legitimate.
No other type of writer has to explain their trade so often. The reader asks: is this story true? That sounds like a simple question, but we have to unwrap it. Often the reader is asking: can I check this out in the history book? Does this agree with other accounts? Would my history teacher recognise it? It may be that a novelist's driving idea is to take apart the received version, but readers are touchingly loyal to the first version they learned. And if you challenge it, it is like taking away their childhood. For a person who seeks safety and authority, history is the wrong place to look. Any worthwhile history is a constant state of self questioning, just as any worthwhile fiction is.
If a reader asks the writer, is there evidence to back your story? The answer should be yes, but you hope that the reader is wise to the many types of evidence there are, any how they can be used.
Your real job as a novelist is not to be an inferior sort of historian but to recreate the texture of lived experience. To activate the senses and deepen the readers engagement through feeling. Research is not a separate phase from writing. There is no point the writer can say: I know enough. It is not like building a wall....The activity is immersive. The novelist is after a type of knowledge that goes beyond the academic. She is entering into a dramatic process with her characters and until she plunges into a particular scene she hardly knows what she needs to know... You have to expand your area of curiosity - away from political history and into every area of culture. Learn about art, trade, how things are made, then lift your eye a from the page, and learn to look. At first you are a stranger in your chosen era. But a time comes when you can walk around in a room and touch the objects. When you know not only what your characters wore but feel their clothes on your back. That rasp of homespun wool, the whisper of linen, the weight of brocade, the way your riding coat settles when you mount your horse, that clink and sway of items at your belt - scissors or keys or rosary beads. You listen - what sound do your feet make on this floor of beaten earth? Or on these terracotta tiles? How do your feet feel when you pull your boots out of the mud? How old are your boots? What colour is the mud? When you can answer these questions, you are ready to begin.
In every scene , the writer's opportunity comes at a point of a change. A person doesn't notice a street he walks down every day. But when they knock down a house on the corner and a new vista is revealed, that's when he notices, that's when you can describe. Landscapes, streetscapes, objects are dead in themselves. They only come alive through the sense of your character. Through his perceptions, his opinions, his point of view. There are no special tricks to make exposition work - only differences in the skill of the author.
From her reflective writing section:
I simply became aware that all my life is been living in a room with a door while I'd been trying to climb out a narrow window.
Our identity, then, is intimately linked to the natural world. As soon as we define man as apart from that natural world, the question of our identity begins to arise.
For generations, our historians had proceeded as if British and English were the same... Historically, the English have not bothered to define themselves, they just are. It is other people who, in their view, have the problem of definition. English nationalism is not recognised to exist.
By writing a novel, one performs a revolutionary act. a novel is an act of hope. It allows us to imagine that things may be other than they are.
... at the point where one could take a boat either to Amsterdam or Vienna. I felt a childlike moment of wonder: Europe connects... It is a small thing to look at a map but a greater thing to feel for yourself how a map relates to life.
Our sense of our self is altered and for once not by some great discontinuity, not by a fracture, but by a process of linking up, of connection. There is not heroic sea voyage, nor airport formalities, nor a moment of take off, a traumatic separation from ones solid earth. Only the business of changing platforms at a London station.
An attempt familiar to us in Europe: an attempt to reach back to a mythical time and place. It was a sham, but it was seductive
The thing that is extremely attractive to the exile: a spurious sense of belonging.
A viking bracelet found in a Dublin archeological dig... To my own satisfaction, I had come home in Ireland and Europe. Though it is powerful to me, I know it is a confabulation.
We are all, as I have tried to show, members of imagined communities. In the century ahead, shall we transcend nationalism, or accomodate it? There is a sense in which a postmodern world must be a post-nationalist world, but the idea of a nation will be with us for a long time yet. Historically, nationalist ideals have provided us with ideas of resistance and emancipation, and in the present sorry state of Europe I don't think we can reasonably ask a thwarted and injured people to do without their national ideals, nor to ask them to bask in the light of a sunny cosmopolitan world... For them, the day has not yet dawned.
I think it is the role of writers and artists to make sure that the idea of a nation is not regressive, not oppressive, not injurious to the ideas of others. Can this be? It is artists and writers who deal in symbol and myth... Myth is what can be collectively remembered, collectively imagined. I do not think you can separate what is remembered from what is imagined... Myth is a mirror we hold to long vanished faces. "See," we say, "they were just like us". Myth is a kind of sacred history: it seems to incarnate a truth that goes beyond fact. It appeals to our origins among the gods, before we were merely human.
All this tinkering is a substitute for fresh thought.
The paper version shows up the problems, but not necessarily the solutions.
She had learnt more from Austen than from her mother.
Comedy does not come from a writer who comes to who desk saying, "Now I will be funny". It comes from one who crawls to her desk leaking shame and despair, and begins to describe faithfully how things are. In that fidelity to the details of misery, one feels relish. The grimmer it is the better it is. Slowly, reluctantly, comedy seeps through.
Readers who do not care about the rich characters do not care about the poor ones either.
No doubt the best conversations are those that never quite occurred. I sensed that we both lived in hope and had frequently lived a myth.
.... a novelist has to do: unfreeze antique feeling, unlock the emotion stored and packed tight in paper, brick and stone.
You need not believe in life after death to believe in ghosts. The dead exist only because the living let them. They are what we make them. Nothing illustrates this better than the afterlife of Diana.
You have a glimpse, an inspiration, you write a paragraph and you think it's there - but when you read it back, it's not there. Every picture painted, every opera composed, every book that is written is the ghost of the possibilities that were in the artist's head. Art brings back the dead but it also makes perpetual mourners of us all. Nothing lasts. That's what Apollo, the father of Orpeus, sings to him in Monteverdi's opera...