30 IN BRIEF

TLS MARCH 24 2017

to have less to do with the dozens of horsesgalloping through it than with Stroud herself,trapped in a past she can neither live with norwrite her way out of.

SHEENA JOUGHIN

EssaysMichel de MontaigneDRAWN FROM LIFE

Translated by M. A. Screech, with anintroduction by Tim Parks

184pp. Notting Hill Editions. £14.99(US $18.95).

978 1 910749 23 4

Reader, I myself am the subject of mybook,” Michel de Montaigne writes inthe exordium to his Essays, “it is not reason-able that you should employ your leisure on atopic so frivolous and so vain.” Himself andhis writings thus dismissed, Montaigne turnsto the reader and dismisses them too: “There-fore, Reader, farewell”.Quite apart from the intriguing question ofwho should be taking their leave at this com-mand (are we, the reader, to go? Or is it Mon-taigne himself who is for the off?), thisintroduction encapsulates the self-deprecat-ing, modest tone which has drawn readers toMontaigne’s work for more than four centu-ries. He is a writer who rewards reading in allits forms– sequential, chronological, thematicand eclectic. There is percipience in both his

extensive treatiseon scepticism(“AnApologyfor Raymond Sebond”) and his four-para-graphmusings on idleness. In this newedition,TimParks brings together a selectionof essayswhich exhibit Montaigne’s erudite, occasion-ally quirky brilliance.It is almost twenty-five years since theeloquent translations of M. A. Screech firstappeared in their entirety inPenguin.Sensibly,Parks makes use of them here. The selectioncovers a wide range of topics, and in the spiritof Montaigne’s eclecticism, reading rewardsa diversity of interests. For example, Mon-taigne’s observations “On the Cannibals”represents a vital contemporary resource forstudying Shakespeare’s The Tempest, while“On Restraining Your Will” elucidates ourunderstanding of the author’s place as a bridgebetween classicism andmodernity in the Stoicphilosophical tradition.The collection is introduced by the editorwith an astute summary of Montaigne’s writ-ings, life and interests. Describing the essay-ist as “both bewitching and bewildering”,Parks draws attention to Montaigne’s digres-sionary style, dialogic character and seem-ingly doctrinaire attitude to everything frommagistrates and kings (his most famous workwas famously banned by the Vatican from1674 to 1858) to the notion of a constant, con-tinual self. Postmodern theorists willundoubtedly be attracted to such heterodoxattitudes in the context of early modern reli-gious and political dogmatism. However, thegeneral reader too will be entertained byMontaigne’s observations, for they are bothwitty and wise, and contain an almost inex-haustible trove of delights.

PATRICK J . MURRAY

Cultural StudiesWill Tosh

MALE FRIENDSHIP ANDTESTIMONIES OF LOVE INSHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND

211pp. Palgrave. $95.978 1 137 49496 2

If a man “have not a friend”, Francis Baconsays, “he may quit the stage”. In 1586–7 hisbrother Anthony – spy, secretary, archivist –must have been feeling especially friendless,and wondering which of his many stages toquit: he had been convicted of sexual relationswith a manservant. To complicate matters, hisconviction came from thebench inMontauban,south-west France, while he was on a spyingmission for Elizabeth I’s intelligence establish-ment. Some of Anthony’s French contactsintervened – but as far as we can tell, no one inEngland ever knew.In this, his first book,Will Tosh suggests onereason why: had Bacon told his friends inEngland, he would have risked wrecking notonly his reputation but also his carefully cali-brated ecosystem of friendship and favour.Through a reading of Bacon’s archive at Lam-beth Palace, Tosh identifies the myriad aspectsof a Renaissance friendship: Ciceronian (andalmost Petrarchan) ideals, “affectional transac-tions”, “chivalric brotherhood”. Amid all this,Tosh finds a refreshing space for sincerity.Expressions of friendship were not “‘merely’conventional”orwritten inanexclusively“rhe-toricalmode”.He presents some of the “friend-ship spaces” available to men in the EnglishRenaissance – from the Inns of Court to the

Kurdish FictionBakhtiyar Ali

I STARED AT THE NIGHT OF THECITY

Translated by Kareem Abdulrahman422pp. Periscope. Paperback, £9.99.

978 1 85964 125 5

IStared at the Night of the City is set in IraqiKurdistan, a region devastated by repression,insurgency and war. Bakhtiyar Ali’s narrativeskips back and forth in time, from the late 1970sto the aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasionand then back to the 1990s.Wemeet a dizzyingcast of characters, including a boy with a talentfor sniffing out buried corpses; a posse of out-of-work assassins who carouse at the IdleMur-ders’ Club; a precocious poet who entrancesdown-and-outs in a dive bar with his verse; anda gifted carpet weaver who eschews a life ofcomfort to dedicate herself to the welfare ofvulnerablewomen.The latterduoemergeas theheroes of the novel, their creativity a beacon ofhope in a wretched status quo.“Hope”, Ali writes, in Kareem Abdulrah-man’s translation, “is the only thing that canshatter solidmatter,bendandbreakearthly lawsand bring down the barriers of theworld.”Ali’spaean to the emancipatory power of the imagi-nation pits the idealism of artists against thehard-headed cynicism of industrialists, “whohad machines, cement, concrete, reinforcediron bars and asphalt”. I Stared at the Night ofthe City is notable as the first Kurdish novel tobe translated into English, but the literary tradi-tion towhich it belongs has no country: the alle-gorical didacticism and aphoristic lyricism –often lapsing into fortune-cookie sentimental-ism – are mainstays of the magic realist genre,seenhere, as sooftenbefore, againstadecidedlyreal-world sociopolitical backdrop.Iraqi Kurdistan has enjoyed de facto auto-

MemoirsClover Stroud

THE WILD OTHERA memoir

288pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £20.978 1 4736 3021 5

In November 1991, sixteen-year-old CloverStroud was called from afternoon class inschool and driven to a hospital. Her motherwas in a coma there after a horseriding acci-dent that left her permanently brain-damaged.“Alive and dead at the same time”, she spentthe next twenty years in nursinghomes, unableto connect with the world in any meaningfulway, but sentient enough to draw a horse, justonce, and scrawl “I wrecked myself”.“I’d wrestled and tussled with grief all myadult life,”Stroudwrites, “resisting it, loathingit, yet craving it, but never ever being able torealise it sincemymotherwas alive and I couldnot grieve a person who was not dead.” Shesuffered “acute heart pain . . . sadness andtrauma and yearning and pain tied togetherwith guilt”, all of which makes for difficultreading, as she subjects herself to damagethrough years of life lived without any realfeeling except the visceral thrill she gets fromriding horses. From Ireland toTexas toRussia,she follows a handful of hard-drinking casuallovers, all of whom love to ride. We meet thefake Irishman,Dan,who fathers twoofher fivechildren but spends his days in bed, hungover.We meet Dallas cowboys with names such asRandy, who live on beer and steak and teachher to break wild ponies. We meet a crazy cir-cus performer, Zour,who takes her towar-tornOssetia, where she finds the “darkness thatmakesme feel complete”. She takes drugs, shedrinks, she has endless sex; “What I was doingwas imitating theway I thought a girl whowashappy would have behaved”. “I didn’t care if Iwas hurt. I wanted to be hurt.”There is some relief fromgruelling details ofdissociative self-destruction in Stroud’s regu-lar descriptions of the landscape near the vil-lage of Baulking, where she is now settled.There is awhite horse cut into thehill atUffing-ton, where she and her various children roam,but these repetitive interludes do nothing totether the narrative since it has no coherenttimeline. Summer follows autumn; childrenare two years old, then babies again; she hasmoved from Oxford to Baulking and then is“still living in Oxford” ten pages later. Like adot-to-dot puzzle with no numbers to follow,the book remains formless; more a representa-tion of something fatally unresolved than anexploration of it. “I understand when I lookback on it all now that trauma made me reallygrip life and feel itwith everypart ofmybody”,she tells us. Yet all the while, “I felt like I waswatching a film I had no part in”. The “wildother”of this inchoatememoir seems in the end

The dome of Saint George, Cairo, Egypt; from Cairo Inside Out by Trevor Naylor,with photographs by Doriana Dimitrova (148pp. The American University in Cairo

Press. £19.95. 978 977 416 756 0)

nomy since 1991; Ali poignantly evokes thesorrow of former activists as the freedom theyfought forgivesway togangsterismandsqualidcorruption. We see shyster businessmen incahootswith government officials, their hench-men roughing up anyone who gets in their wayas they carry out forced evictions and buy upbusinesses at knock-down rates. Alongside thisis the destabilizing impact of urbanization, andthe not-unrelated rise of Islamism. Here areturning exile ruminates on the meaning ofnational identity (“To him . . . Kurdishnessmeant a fear ofwalls, an eternal flight frombar-riers”), there an ex-revolutionary laments awasted life: “I am angry that I killed people forfifteen years, thinking I was serving a cause . . .and then realised there was no cause”. Theresult is apowerful, bleakpanoramaofasocietyscarred by history.

HOUMAN BAREKAT

IN BRIEF 31

TLS MARCH 24 2017

French FictionCatherine Colomb

THE SPIRITS OF THE EARTHTranslated by John Taylor

232pp. Seagull. £17 (US $24.50).978 0 85742 372 6

Catherine Colomb’sThe Spirits of the Earthexamines the dysfunctional narratives ofan interwar family. Originally published inFrench in 1953 as the second entry in an unoffi-cial trilogy, this new Seagull edition providesthe first English translation of the Swissauthor’s extraordinary work. The story is set inthe rustic climes of Colomb’s native Canton ofVaud, where the descendants of a moneyedfamily share their decayingspoils in the formoftwo ageing estates – the Château Fraidaigue,which sits on Lake Geneva, and the mountainhome,Maison d’enHaut. The former is ownedby one son, Eugène, and his family, while theless opulent mountain retreat has been takenover by another son, Adolphe. In exchange forthis inheritance after their parents’ suddendeaths, the twosons are chargedwithprovidingfor theirother siblings, amental invalidZoéandthe firstborn, César, a moony itinerant whoalternates between the two houses every sixmonths. César’s peripatetic rhythm suppliessomethingof anoperatic conceit to the book, ashe trundlesbackandforthbetween the families,instigating both domestic turmoil and collec-tive memories during his stays.Colomb employs an archetypal family con-flict, one tortured by bothmoney and legacy, toinvent a fantastical domestic order in whichmemory and reverie blend. Bound financiallyand symbolically to their bequests, the charac-tersarehauntedbyrecollectionsofMaisond’enHaut and Fraidaigue, where the family matri-arch fell from one of its towers to her death.From the opening page, in which César con-spires to throw his young nephew Abrahamfrom Fraidaigue’s roof, these episodes of death

play out in repeating Möbius strips, often fromdifferent perspectives.Other scenes, trading between mundanedaily rituals and the whimsical digressions ofthe shifting narrators, evoke a lyrical, streamof consciousness like Proust’s À la Recherchedu temps perdu and Virginia Woolf’s TheWaves, as well as the spectral form of AlainResnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad (1961).As the translator John Taylor observes in hisintroduction, the novel’s frequent use of ellipti-caldevices impartsadistinct supernaturalismtothe text, as though its characters exist as some-thing between ghost and angel. It is this multi-dimensional indeterminacy that makesColomb’s work a compelling example ofFrancophone literature that is both thoroughly“French” and distinctly Swiss.

ERIK MORSE

Literary CriticismSusan Signe Morrison

A MEDIEVAL WOMAN’SCOMPANION

176pp. Oxbow. Paperback, £16.95.978 1 78 570079 8

Apregnant teenager. The teacher whoseduced her.” These sentences might

sound like clickbait, or the headline rippedfrom amodern newspaper. But as Susan SigneMorrison delights in revealing, they actuallydescribe twelfth-century events – specifically,the relationship between the young studentHéloïse and her private tutor, Abelard, whoseromance endured both separation and castra-tion. Throughout her lively companion tomedievalwomen,Morrisonworkshard todrawout the transhistorical aspects of the stories shetells, in order to challenge twenty-first-centuryassumptions about the “dark ages”. Shedescribes the famous Paston women, who leftbehind a treasure trove of family correspond-ence, as “The Real Housewives of Norfolk”.Christina of Markyate, a prioress who hid in atiny, uncomfortable cell for twoyears to escapean arranged marriage, she calls a “teen runa-way”. While such hooks do not, of course, tellthe whole story, they do serve to invite readersto think about thesewomen as living, breathinghumans rather than distant historical figures.With chapter headings such as “Christine dePizan: Vocal feminist” and “Eleanor of Aqui-tane: Queen and cougar”, Morrison capturesthe readers’ attention. Having reeled us in, shethen uses the lives of these women as a vehiclefor discussing more complex ideas, such asgender dynamics, religious belief and politicalengagement.The Companion is directed at high schoolandcollege students and it is therefore anexcel-lent resource for teachers, too. Thewebsite andblogwhich supplement it even offer a “curricu-lum guideline” with practical instructions onhow to incorporate some of the women into ahistoricalor literarysyllabus. In recentyears thecanonofEnglishLiteraturehasbeen thesubjectof scrutiny and a topic for debate. Morrisonsounds a rallying cry for more women to beintegrated into programmes that teach medi-eval literature or history andher book, so rich inmaterial, serves to challenge any argument thatthere simply aren’t enough records ofmedievalwomen’s writings to merit their inclusion.Other readers should not be put off, how-ever. The Companion offers a surprising peep-hole into the everyday life of both medieval

womenandmenforanyonewho is interested inthe period. It also serves to revise many of ourmodern preconceptions about the MiddleAges, particularly with regard to gender. Any-one who believes that medieval women weresubdued, powerless and oppressed into silenceby the patriarchy should be directed to Morri-son’s chapter on Christine de Pizan. In TheBook of the City of Ladies, published in 1410,Pizan deliberately and artfully smashes everymale,medieval argument against the female ofthe species with a pen as keen as any sword.

HETTA HOWES

TravelAndrew and Suzanne Edwards

ANDALUCIAA literary guide for travellers288pp. I. B. Tauris. £16.99.978 1 78453 390 8

The title Andalucia: A literary guide fortravellersmay suggest a reverence for thetourist/traveller distinction that has dominatedmuch travelwriting from the twentieth centuryonwards. Andrew and Suzanne Edwards’slatest book is clearly aimedat the erudite,well-heeled sightseer as opposed to the frivolousthrill-seeker; and it is, indeed, a thoughtful,throughly researched and remarkably well-balanced scholarly guide to the literary historyof one of Spain’s most celebrated regions.As they state in their introduction, theauthors are fully aware of Andalusia’s stereo-types and “hackneyed images” of bulls, tapas,lust and sherry, while also acknowledging thatthese can’t have emerged from thin air. How-ever, in their outright dismissal of bullfightingas “abhorrent”, theirmere passing reference tothe duende phenomenon and the minimal dis-cussion of flamenco songs and its associatedliterature, they have perhaps been a touch tooassiduous in avoiding the obvious.In terms of writers, they have achieved asuitable balance of local voices and foreigntravellers, discussing writers from the Span-ish literary canon (Federico García Lorca,Félix Lope de Vega, Antonio Machado, LuisdeGóngora) aswell as classic English-speak-ingwriters suchasGeorgeBorrowandGeraldBrenan. Space has also been found for morerecent interventions from lesser-knownSpanish writers such as Javier Egea and Ale-jandro Luque. More recent British travellersare also featured (among them JasonWebsterand Chris Stewart).At times the book reads strictly like a travelguide, describing sitesof literaryandhistoricalinterest, but there are also more expositorypieces. The text is rich in detail, and thewritersmaintain interest through a surprising collec-tion of anecdotes – from Brenan’s tour ofbrothels in Almería as an “onlooker”, to thepoet Luis Cernuda’s poignant exile and war-time radio broadcasts.Although a brief mention is made of it in theintroduction, the spelling “Andalucia” remainspuzzling – being neither the full Spanishaccented spelling nor the usual anglicized one.Except for this and some questionable phrases(Byron described at “his full Byronic best”; aninanereference toSeville’s“constant landscapewith its gentle undulations”), this is a thoroughand entertaining piece of scholarship for any-one interested in Andalusia’s literary history –whether traveller, tourist or mere “onlooker”.

MAX LONG

ReligionAbby Day

THE RELIGIOUS LIVES OF OLDERLAYWOMEN

The last active Anglican generation272pp. Oxford University Press. £50.

978 0 19 873958 6

Avigorous strand in social anthropologygives attention to “muted” groups. Abby

Day,Canadianbybirthandagnosticbypersua-sion, presents an outstanding ethnography ofthe dwindling generation of laywomen, nowmostly in their eighties and nineties, whoseunobtrusive devotion to the Anglican/Episco-pal tradition has kept parish churches servicedand surviving. Most of her participatory field-work was carried out in Britain, with someinterludes in North America and Sri Lanka.TheChurch of England is too late, Day argues,in trying to attract the young: it has failed toretain the middle generation (to which shebelongs). Cathedrals, Pentecostal churchesand faith schools help to keep up the numbersof Christian observance in England, but main-streamAnglican parishes are bound to decline.With sharp words for those who conde-scend to these women, Day takes them seri-ously as having provided leadership in amale-dominated Church as well as their unpaidlabour, often including a modest form ofsocial service to the “precariat”. Her acquiredempathywith their conservativevalues ledher

to feel loyalty towards them, which shadedinto guilt when her fieldwork came to an end;yet she is also proficientwith themore chillingtools of social science.TheReligiousLives ofOlderLaywomenwillring bells with anyone brought up with flowerrotas, bring-and-buy sales and hymns such as“Eternal Father, Strong To Save”. We read ofone woman who always buys prizes for thechildren’s games at her church’s Christmasparty and summer fête: she has terminal cancerand“now,ofcourse, she isextrabusywrappingfor next year as well in case she’s not here”.QueenElizabeth II herself belongs towhatDaycalls “Generation A”, and has earned a specialplace in its hearts. But there is much of interesthere for awider understanding of religion.Dayrelates the “meditative, rhythmic, dreamyquality of cleaning”,which she learnt to appre-ciate when helping out in church, to the lateMary Douglas’s anthropological writings onpurity and her defence of Catholic traditional-ism in Natural Symbols. The congregation inan Anglican church queues to take Commu-nion with a prescribed sombre demeanour,which is balanced afterwards by the convivial,but also ritualized, serving of biscuits and teaor coffee. Day avoids sentimentality, but con-veys a sense of loss. Her findings add to theheadaches that trouble the Church ofEngland’s current leaders.

JONATHAN BENTHALL

prison house. He carefully polices the distinc-tions between male friendship and male love,noting for example that the extravagant cos-tumes worn by men at the Inns of Court werenot – as it now appears – flamboyant camperybut, rather, an attempt to rise up the scale in asociety governed by sumptuary laws. It wasmore a social than a sexual or gendered drag.In discussing theBacon letters and the “cote-rie style” that grew up around friendshipgroups, Tosh is alert and cool-headed. Despiteits title, there is very little Shakespeare in thisbook – and Tosh’s closing discussion of theSonnets is slightly out of step with his carefularchival and epistemological work on the let-ters. He claims that some of the early sonnets“were almost certainly written for” HenryWriothesley. I agree, but the only evidenceTosh supplies is a footnote to Katherine Dun-can-Jones’seditionof theSonnets, inwhichshesettles on William Herbert as the more likely“begetter”of thesepoems.Then, incharacteriz-ing the poems’ homoeroticism as a strategicappeal to the “followers and clients” around theEarl of Essex, hemisses the “coterie style” sug-gestedbyFrancisMereswhenhewrote in 1598of Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets”. Fouryears earlier, Meres’s friend Richard Barnfieldhad alluded to Christopher Marlowe’s poemsusing exactly the same phrase; Barnfield andMarlowewere, of course,writers ofprofoundlyhomoerotic verse. Meres might have beendrawing Shakespeare into their circle, as muchas Shakespearemight have been trying to drawhimself into the Earl of Essex’s. However, anyquibbles about two or three pages only serve toreinforce this book’s general excellence – theyare the exception which prove the rule. It is atonce spry and judicious, humane and knowl-edgeable; it has, in another of Francis Bacon’sremarks about friendship, “peace in the affec-tions and support of the judgment”.

ROBERT STAGG