Book extract: Fragments of a Woman, by Emma Venables

Berlin, UNter den linden, 1937 – Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1998-011-01 / Hagemann, Otto / CC-BY-SA 3.0

It is always an exciting day when someone that we know and admire has their book published, especially when it concerns itself with our home city of Berlin. Emma Venables is an extremely talented writer (whose work we are proud to have published here on Elsewhere) and her debut novel Fragments of a Woman is both startling and impressive. Following the lives of five women in National Socialist Germany, I was extremely privileged to be given the opportunity to read an advance copy ahead of its publication this month. 

Exploring themes of identity, nationalism, womanhood and motherhood, trauma and the crimes of National Socialism, this book is unflinching, moving and beautifully written, and for this reader at least posed a number of uncomfortable questions about how we as readers approach certain types of characters and the expectations and preconceptions we bring to someone else’s words on the page. Fragments of a Woman tells stories of Nazi Germany, at a time when there are no longer many around who can share their experiences, and stories such as these, when written with diligence and intelligence, will be increasingly important.

This book holds the reader by the head and makes us look, which we do with both empathy and, at times, horror. It is a fine achievement, and we thank Emma for the chance to share this extract with you… – Paul Scraton

Fragments of a Woman – Chapter 4

By Emma Venables:

Gisela loves the smell of a Berlin bar, loves the smell of stale beer, of smoke, the hint of vodka, sweat, and polish. She loves the sound of good music – the whine of a violin, the tinkle of a piano. She loves the way heads turn when she walks in, even though the men around her, in this particular bar, are not inter- ested in her curves, her flesh, her pulse. A few smile, raise their glasses as she makes her way through the crowd. She raises herself to her tiptoes, looking over familiar and unfamiliar heads to find Volker. She recognises his back, would recognise it anywhere, for he always wears a waistcoat, and tonight his chosen one is her favourite shade of purple. 

She steps left, then right, around the patrons blocking her way. Someone steps on her toe, and she winces, utters a curse under her breath. She wafts a cloud of smoke from her face, scowls at the man responsible until finally she stands behind Volker. She reaches out and rubs his back. He turns, wobbling on his barstool. 

‘Steady on,’ she says. 

He leans back, resting against her shoulder, and gives her an awkward kiss meant for her cheek, but landing on her nose. 

‘Happy Birthday, Gisi!’ he says. ‘It’s 1934, and you’ve been on this earth exactly nineteen years today. And how honoured you must be to share your celebrations with the Chancellor of Germany.’ 

‘Have you been drinking for me or for him?’ she asks, pushing him forward. 

Volker turns, pauses, and squints as if trying to do a difficult equation. 

‘You, naturally, because you know my feelings for you know who.’ 

Gisela raises an index finger to silence him. He shrugs, waves a hand around as if to indicate everyone agrees. Gisela grabs his face between her hands and plants a kiss on his lips. 

‘You’re adorable when your face is all squished up,’ she says, and kisses him once again. 

Volker shakes himself free. ‘And you’re wearing an exquisite dress. Spin for me.’ 

Gisela obliges. ‘Kaufmann’s’ finest. His wife is quite the seam- stress,’ she says, smoothing the skirt of her navy-blue tea dress. 

‘I approve. I love the neckline,’ he says, with a wink.

‘Stop staring at my chest.’ She places a hand to her collarbone. 

‘You know your chest would have to be much flatter for me to feel any fire in my loins.’

They laugh. Volker turns to the bar, and waves for the barman’s attention.

Gisela taps the shoulder of man on the stool next to Volker.  ‘I think that’s my seat.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Don’t worry about it, but you need to move now.’

The man sighs but vacates the stool. Gisela sits down. 

‘You’re shameless,’ Volker says.

‘I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, it’s my birthday.’ 

Gisela takes a swig of her drink, leans her head back, and smiles at the damp ceiling above. She still feels slightly nauseous from eating the giant slice of cake decorated with a swastika a woman in the street handed her earlier. It’s my birthday, too, she had told the woman, but refused the second slice of cake she was offered. Although, she did take the flower from the boy in the Hitlerjugend uniform. A pink carnation, which she dropped into her handbag and forgot about until she got her purse out in Kaufmann’s to pay for her dress. She had felt around the lining for the loose petals and stem and asked Herr Kaufmann if he had a bin. 

‘God, I’m glad this place hasn’t been shut down yet,’ she says, moving her gaze to the row of bottles behind the bar. 

‘You, me, and every one of these beautiful people,’ Volker says. 

‘But it’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?’ 

‘Don’t get mournful on your birthday, Gisi. You go down, I go down, isn’t that the way it’s always been? Ever since I was six and my mother dragged me away from you because you weren’t our kind of person, and your mother certainly wasn’t.’ 

‘Well, a respectable little German boy shouldn’t play with girls from the gutter.’ 

‘To hell with that. Cheers.’ 

Volker raises his glass and clinks it so hard against Gisela’s that a tiny crack appears in the rim; he runs his finger back and forth over the uneven surface. 

‘I almost got caught on my knees in the Tiergarten the other day,’ Gisela says. 

He wipes amber droplets from his chin. ‘You need to be more careful, Gisi.’ 

‘We were behind a tree, hidden by several trees, actually, but they’re relentless. In the end, I had to leap up, wipe my face, push the pervert I was with into action, and feign a proposal.’ 

‘A proposal?’ 

‘Yes. He was down on one knee by the time they appeared between trees, and I was professing that he’d have to ask my father for I wasn’t that kind of girl. They nodded and left sharply, which is a relief because when he stood up his limp cock was still hanging from his trousers.’ 

Volker’s head rests upon the bar now, and his shoulders shake. He still grips his half-filled glass of beer in his left hand. 

‘Are you laughing or crying? Because at the time I wasn’t sure what to do either.’

‘Both, I think,’ he says, his voice muffled.

Gisela rests her head on Volker’s shoulder. Even here the band strike up a chorus of ‘Zum Geburtstag viel Glück’ in honour of Adolf Hitler. Gisela and Volker remain silent, but Gisela smiles at the sardonic tone she can detect in the voices around her. Applause fills the room. Glasses clink. A barmaid places a cake on the bar. Gisela sighs. 

‘I’ve eaten more swastikas today than I care for. Shall we go?’ she asks. 

‘So early?’ Volker says, sitting upright.

‘I’ve got something to do at ten,’ she says.

‘You’ve got someone to do at ten, you mean,’ Volker says. ‘I suppose I could go and see Hans.’

‘Not home to mama?’

‘God, no. I’ll slip in in the early hours and she’ll never know. She sleeps like an elephant. I’ve really no idea how an elephant sleeps but I presume it’s heavily.’ 

‘I imagine she’s exhausted from all the celebrating today,’ Gisela says, sliding off her stool. 

‘Yes, she was feeling rather exuberant when I left. I had to tell her I was going to celebrate Hitler’s birthday with friends.’ 

‘I’m surprised she hasn’t dressed you in a little brown shirt.’ 

They step out onto Motzstrasse, and Gisela links her arm through Volker’s. She looks up and breathes in the cool air. She likes looking at the windows above, at the light escaping through cracks between curtains, knowing people go about their lives behind walls: that men kiss men, and women kiss women, and the government cannot stop them all. A car’s brakes squeal in another street. Someone opens a window above and the white noise of an un-tuned wireless seeps out. Volker lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and offers it to Gisela. He holds the cigarette while she inhales. As she exhales, she notices two men walking towards them.

‘We just saw you coming out of that bar over there,’ one of them says.

‘And?’ Gisela says, eyeing up their uniforms. ‘My boyfriend and I were enjoying a quiet drink, celebrating the Chancellor’s birthday. Then they broke into song and brought out a cake. Lovely cake. Swastikas and black icing. Looked just like that band on your arm. We all sang for the Chancellor. Then we ate cake.’ 

The men look at Volker. Gisela feels a tremor in his arm. She clenches her muscles, attempting to reassure him. One of them loops his fingers around his braces. 

‘And now my boyfriend’s walking me home to my mother, so we have to go. Good night.’ 

Gisela gently tugs on Volker’s arm, and they begin to walk. Volker stumbles slightly, but she holds him upright. The men do not seem to notice. She listens for the sound of their footsteps receding, determined not to speak until they have moved on. She turns her head a fraction to the right, pretending to admire the doorway of an apartment building, and from the corner of her eye watches them walk in the opposite direction. 

‘Are you OK?’ she asks. 

Volker nods, keeping his eyes on the street ahead. ‘I can’t believe you sleep with men like that.’ 

‘They pay me well, and sometimes they’re quite gentle. It’s as if they’ve spent all their hatred out here and they just want to give affection in bed.’ 

Volker shakes his head. Gisela takes his hand and grips it in hers. 

‘We must be careful, you and I,’ he says. 

He breathes sharply and throws his burnt-out cigarette towards the gutter. 

‘We must be bold and beautiful, as always,’ she says. 

He pulls her towards him, muffling her face against his chest. She puts her arms around him and breathes him in – aftershave he cannot really afford, cigarette smoke, the tinge of sweat – until the buttons of his waistcoat become uncomfortable against her face. 

***

Fragments of a Woman is published by Aderyn Press in paperback £8.99 and is available to purchase from your local bookshop or from the publisher directly. Support independent publishing!

Emma Venables' short and flash fiction has been widely published in magazines and journals. Her short story, ‘Woman at Gunpoint, 1945’ was a runner-up in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2020. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London and Liverpool Hope University.

Capturing the forest – the photography of Eymelt Sehmer

By Paul Scraton:

It was a cold winter day when Eymelt invited us to her studio in Berlin-Weißensee. She had been looking for models, people she could photograph using a technique that dates back to the earliest days of photography. It would take a while, she said, to capture each image. We would – in this era of mobile phones and Instagram, when more photographs are taken in a single year than in the previous century – have to be patient.

The collodion wet plate process requires that a black tin plate be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. We spent a few happy hours in her studio room, laughing and joking and mainly talking to Eymelt’s legs, because she was usually under a thick blanket of some short, either behind the camera or in her self-made dark room where she prepared the collodion emulsion, coating the plates and then developing them by hand.

‘Did you ever try this outside?’ someone asked, and in those six words, an idea was born.

In early 2017, Eymelt had made a short film based on my book Ghosts on Shore about the Baltic coast, and we had been keen to work together on a project again. The idea of finding a way to take the collodion wet plate technique out of the studio and into the landscape was the starting point for what would become our new book. 

In the Pines is a combination of words and images. It is my novella, a whole-life story told through fragments about a narrator’s relationship to the forest, sharing the pages with Eymelt’s photographs from between the trees. Some of the stories contained within the book gave Eymelt inspiration when she took her mobile darkroom into the forest. Some of the images she returned to inspired new stories in turn. Eymelt’s art both illustrates the text and inspires it, and I know I would have created something different, something lesser, without our collaboration.

To celebrate the launch of the book this autumn I wanted to celebrate Eymelt’s talent and her art. What follows is my short interview with Eymelt, about the photography in our book and what she’s planning next. 

What is it about this technique that is so appealing to you as a photographer?

First, I love analogue photography in general. And then, what I find most intriguing about the collodion wet plate process, are the imperfections of the images. The photos are blurred; the images look liquid, creating blind spots. These are voids to be filled by the viewer’s imagination. And each photograph is truly unique.

When you first showed me the technique in the studio, it seemed almost impossible you could take it outside. What specific challenges did you face when taking your camera out into the forest?

The most challenging thing involves the developing, in that I have to do it immediately. The coated photoplate needs to still be wet for the developing process, which means I have about ten to fifteen minutes from coating the plate until developing it. I have to therefore coat each plate by hand before each photograph. I cannot prepare a batch in advance.

Once the photograph is taken, the plates can only be handled in darkness. So I need a mobile darkroom, and I built one out of a former steamer trunk. Transporting this monster out into the woods, to basically build a lab out there among the trees, was quite a challenge and was time-consuming as well. 

Added to all this, and related to how much time everything takes, is that I am somewhat exposed. To the weather, and especially the temperature, which can have a major impact. During the winter, for example, the chemicals on the plates froze, creating some beautiful crystalline structures on the photographs. It was as if the environment had engrained itself on the image. But that is also what I love about the technique – you have to embrace the uncontrollable and see what happens.

In my introduction, I’ve written about how the photographs both related to the text and sometimes also inspired it. How was it for you, working on a collaborative project like this?

Generally, the inspiration for my works comes from fairy tales and myths, so the starting point is almost always a story. In the Pines was my first ever collaboration of words and photography, and as your language is very evocative, I could picture some of the images in my head right away. What also helped were the walks and talks we had, especially through the landscape. It helped me get a feeling for it.

Text is interesting because it can go into detail, and you take the reader with you. With an image it is slightly different. I am choosing the frame of course, the perspective and the light situation. But there is more there for the viewer to decide for themselves. Not least when it comes to how close or carefully they decide to look.

My favourite aspect of the collaboration was that it basically forced me to take the technique outside and into the woods. Without this project, I’m not sure I would have given it a try. And spending all that time out there with my camera and my mobile darkroom meant I had lots of beautiful encounters with mushroom foragers, kindergarten kids, horses and hikers.

So will you be taking more landscape or outside photographs using this technique in the future?

I’m certainly going to take some more. I would also like to experiment more, try some things with filters etc. 

In the Pines is all about the narrator’s lifelong connection to the forest. What does the forest mean to you?
For me the forest has always been, since early childhood, a kind of retreat – a place of sanctuary. I could lose myself in fairy tales, and in difficult emotional times it was a place where I took refuge. To this day, the forest is still a place of solace for me.

It was also an adventurous playground for myself and my brothers. A place where you could pick berries and hunt mushrooms, where you could climb trees and build secret hiding places far from the parents’ eyes. It was our own microcosmic realm and it captivated our imagination.

Finally, what’s next for Eymelt Sehmer? You have a gallery in Berlin – are there any projects or news from the gallery you’d like to share with us?

Oh, I have lots of ideas! In early 2020 I took the Trans-Siberian Express through Russia to Mongolia where, thanks to the pandemic, I got stuck. Initially I’d intended travelling there to take photographs of the Dukha people, a nomadic reindeer tribe, and then, having got stuck in Ulaanbaatar with my guide and his family, I met his wife Mugi’s motorcycle club – the first and only female motorcycle club in the country: the Mongolian Lady Riders. Modern nomads.

I made a short film about the motorcyclists and have photographs from the entire trip, but it takes thought and care as to how they might be used. My experience with the Dukha, for example. It was a nice experience, but parts still felt awkward, and we as artists or tourists always need to be careful as to how we present, and indeed to an extent, ‘exploit’ such encounters and topics for our own artistic ends. 

I’m also working on a portfolio of analogue photographs of female characters in mythology, and in the gallery we are slowly getting back to exhibitions, readings and film screenings. Thanks to the pandemic, and the ever-changing situation, it is hard to plan things in advance. But in 2022 we hope to host some photography workshops and collaborations with different people from our neighbourhood in Berlin.

Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, Berlin
In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer, published by Influx Press

The Library: Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

By Marcel Krueger:

According to German writer Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) and his "Irish Journal" first published in 1957, "the people of Ireland are the only people in Europe who have never invaded other countries [...]". Since the publication of his book, this view has been the mainstream view of Ireland from Germany for decades, fuelled by countless media campaigns of Fáilte Ireland , the Irish Tourism Board: a twee, harmless island of green fields, dramatic cliffs and pubs with open fires, peopled by jolly fiddlers, naive artists and buxom ginger maidens. The dark and martial history of Ireland as a whole is often swept under the glossy rug made of postcards or Instagram reels from the "Wild Atlantic Way", or only ever mentioned if it can be commodified and packaged into something visitors can consume, like swashbuckling stories of Grace O'Neill or the conflict in Northern Ireland only made accessible through guided tours of murals and "Peace Walls". The fact that Ireland did invade other countries, its soldiers employed as mercenaries by European powers for centuries, or that its people have been slaughtering each other for a hundred years with bullets and bombs, is all glossed over. 

I hope that many people from Germany will read “Thin Places” by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, which in its complexity addresses the violence all over Ireland, and offers a way of understanding and a potential way out of the spiral of violence that engulfed the north of the island for so long. Coincidentally, the German feuilleton often uses the term Seelenstriptease, literally a “soul striptease”, for a work of art, a book, an interview, a movie that reveals deeply personal and intimate details about the creator of that work, or the subject. I don't really like the word, but it is the first I thought about when finishing Kerri's wonderful work, that this book is very much a soul, and a country, stripped bare.

The book is about many things: Brexit, place, trauma, alcoholism, grief, hope and fear, and uses the structure of memoir to follow the life of the writer: from her growing up as the child of a Catholic mother and a Protestant father in Derry/Londonderry, firebombed out of her home during the “Troubles”, the civil war in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998, and then moving away to Scotland and England before finally returning to her hometown in her 30s. Whereas the many excellent essay collection that have come out of Ireland in recent years, like Sinéad Gleeson's "Constellations" or Ian Maleney's “Minor Monuments” use personal stories as starting points to establish the theme of single essays, "Thin Places" is a book-length essay in itself, one that drifts of into certain themes but always circles back to the main structure of handling trauma - and failing in doing so.

This is not a book that is easy to read. Not because of the complexity of writing or the darkness it explores, but because it does not offer easy escapism, or just food for thought that makes you utter "Interesting!" and then put it aside. Many things that Kerri writes about in here are so profound and moving that I literally had to pause after a few paragraphs, put the book down and explore what her words had caused inside of me. Sometimes I got confused by the many places and (life) times the author jumps back and forth between, but then the key themes and the overall structure remain clear and always allow the reader to climb back in.   

This island on which I was born is a wild, ancient and stirring place - a place so ethereal as to take a given moment in time and bathe it in the light of something divine, a place that was eternal and holy long before those words ever had need for voicing. [...] Ireland - this ethereal and mythical island, set down in the heart of the ravenous, tumultuous Atlantic Ocean - is black, too, coal-black, as black as to be the making of the crows. Black is the colour of many of our true loves' hairs on this island but it is also the colour of sorrow and fear - of mystery and the unknown, of so much death, and of the unimaginable depths of our grief.

The book ends on a note of hope, with the image of the winter solstice and the conviction that there is always light ahead when it is darkest, but I don't think that that is necessary. Looking at the pictures coming from Northern Ireland in April 2021, it is clear that the important thing here is balance, balance in the peace process and the self. There are only ever small victories possible for all of us, and we have to fight every day so that the needle does not  tilt back to the dark side again. “Thin Places” is a deeply personal work of art and at the same time a timely portrait of the (still) hurting island of Ireland that everyone should read. Especially in Germany.  

***

Thin Places is published by Cannongate.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

The Library: Unofficial Britain by Gareth E. Rees

Read by Marcel Krueger:

During the first weeks of Coronavirus lockdown in the Republic of Ireland, where I live, everyone was confined to a two-kilometre radius around our houses to help prevent the spread of the virus. I was lucky to have an obvious sliver of Irish history within my 2 km-circle, a sliver that shows that even a small town like Dundalk has its place in history and displays that proudly when you know where to look: on my street is Seatown Castle, actually the bell tower of a 13th century Franciscan monastery. It was once plundered by invading Scots, Scots brought over by Edward the Bruce in 1315 in his claim for the Irish crown. He crowned himself High King of Ireland in Dundalk the same year, just a few streets away, where today Micheal McCourt’s pub can be found.

But just around the corner from that pile of medieval stones, on Mill Street, is another reminder of history, one that is not as flashy as the Seatown Castle but maybe as equally important for the town. Sitting in the sidewalk is a rusty-brown water meter cover, one that must have been set here at some point in the 1980, when (long before water meters were a political issue in Ireland) someone in Louth County Council bought these from Wabash, Indiana, a small town of 10,000 inhabitants which produced the hexagonal water meter covers that to this day are strewn around this equally small town on the east coast of Ireland and proudly bear the inscription “Ford Meter Box Co., Wabash, Indiana U.S.A.”.

In his latest book, Gareth E. Rees equally focuses on these unobtrusive landmarks of the quotidian (albeit more bigger ones), landmarks that form the backdrop to our lives every day that might get unnoticed by many but are, after a fashion, holding the fabric of the world together. While in his previous books, Marshland (Influx Press, 2013), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), Rees mainly focused either on a specific place - the  Hackney Marshes or Hastings - or on an ultra-local theme like that of car parks, Unofficial Britain is a more wide-reaching book that covers most of the island of Great Britain in search for what the author calls “anaologue relics of a bygone era before digital technology, mobile phones and the internet“, the structures of modernity that have existed for the last seventy years everywhere around us: electricity pylons, power stations, multistorey car parks, suburban housing estates. 

The book is divided into nine chapters plus introduction and epilogue, each dedicated to the “non-places” of today and their mythology, located in Scotland, England and Wales. By mixing architectural details with urban legends, ghost stories and bits and pieces from his own biography when writing about ring roads and roundabouts, flyovers and underpasses, Rees – who is also the founder of the Unofficial Britain website that was around long before the book and equally dedicated to the mysteries of the quotidian - shows us that these locations and buildings are as important as the holloways, medieval churches and cursed oaks of a British countryside. And even more important than the idea of a countryside that in many cases only exists in the imagination of over-romantic nature writers and the xenophobic fever dreams of UKIP and Britain First, like when he writes about the Redcliffe Flyover that existed in Bristol from 1967 to 1998:

Like the Eiffel Tower, built as a temporary structure never intended to be an enduring Parisian landmark, the Redcliffe Flyover became totemic. It came to represent fun, thrills and amusement; rare moments of child-like wonder in the midst of a tough, troubled city. A similar process of appropriation can happen to other unlikely landmarks such as chimneys, communication masts and factories. As we grow up among them they become ingrained within our memories and shared history. What can seem at first ugly and soulless can gradually come to accumulate emotional resonance through the sheer power of persistence.

At the same time Rees is stocktaking: with Unofficial Britain, he has created the standard reference for landscape punk and urban place writing in Britain 2020. Besides his own concrete experiences he uses examples of the works and lives of other important urban explorer artists like Salena Godden, Gary Budden, Nick Papadimitriou, Olivia Laing or Clare Archibald, a veritable who's who of deep topographers. With its honest narration and its accessible language this is the perfect introduction for anyone wondering what the whole psychogeography hogwash is all about; a wonderful ramble through the Brexit Britain of today - warts and all.

But isn't this how we experience a place? For a place is more than bricks and mortar. More than a map. More than a bunch of articles about social deprivation and sneery lists of Britain's worst towns. A place is made of stories and you read and rumours you hear. It is made of prejudices and anxieties, shaped by our past experiences. It is an atmosphere - a synchronicity of light, sound, smell, texture and temperature. 

The only thing I wish Rees would have done was to include Northern Ireland - as wide-reaching as his account of unofficial Britain is, I would be curious to see what the Troubles meant and mean for the urban fabric of the quotidian in this part of Britain across the water; and if what he might have found here made would have been vastly different to those in Scotland, Wales and England. 

For the time being, we keep on living in the pandemic dead future of the 60s and 70s in a time where the future only seems to promise more ruins, more cracked concrete and more neglected estates as government funds run out or are shovelled into offshore accounts while the sea levels are rising. This book is a sober account of the dreams and nightmares of our environment, of the bridges and buildings that really form the fabric of our lives and not the rose-tinted utopias of the past that all the right-wing nincompoops try to sell us; and it will all be just more water meter covers, more concrete poured into flood defences and refugee camps from here on. 

***

Unofficial Britain is published by Elliott&Thompson. 

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

The Grey Headlands, from Country Music by Will Burns

By Will Burns:

Green lizards sunned themselves
on the tennis court of the abandoned chalet
with its almost-French name.
Gatekeepers hid themselves in the dying grasses.
Like the ground, the butterflies were dust –
on this island the soil is suffering its own crisis.
The steep fields had once more offered up
their customary, well-protected crop.
Before the end we would beg for rain,
having long forgotten
the words for the relevant gods.

***

Country Music is the debut collection from the poet and friend of Elsewhere Will Burns, published in April by Offord Road Books. We are big fans of Will for how his work captures a sense of place and of memory, and for showing us a way of looking at the world, of noticing things, that informs our own explorations of place and spaces.

The collection is wonderful and a fine addition to any library of place writing. If you want to know more about Will and his work, read our Five Questions… interview or our review of the album Chalk Hill Blue, a collaboration with the musician Hannah Peel.

Unreal estate No.02: Quoyle's Point

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the second of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Quoyle’s Point from Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Annie Proulx herself.

“The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought.”
- Annie Proulx, The Shipping News, 1993

“There was something about that hard, bare rock, the whistling wind, I found very appealing,” American author Annie Proulx said about her first time in Newfoundland, when she went there on a fishing trip, for a The New York Times interview 26 years ago. “I liked the loneliness and desolateness, the heavily wooded feeling of it. I felt clasped to that stony bosom in a way. I was physically shaken.” 

The idea for The Shipping News, her second book, was born. Annie Proulx fell in love with the landscape on this large island in Atlantic Ocean off eastern Canada, and later even bought her own house in Newfoundland, a cottage where she spent part of the year, dividing time between her other house at that time in Wyoming.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News, published in 1993, is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of a family moving to Newfoundland and starting to live among local fishermen in an abandoned seaside house at Quoyle’s Point, a house that is itself a vivid character, dusty and gaunt, moaning in the wind.

“I feel that stories come out of geography, climate, weather,” Annie Proulx said in an interview for SaltWire, “out of wind and mud, the placement of houses and villages, local landscape markers and anomalies.” 

The House

Quoyle’s Point is an imagined place in Newfoundland. For forty-four years a house has stood there empty, until the protagonist Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and “thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love”, travels to Newfoundland with his two little daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, and aunt Agnis Hamm, who was born in the house years ago. Quoyle’s faithless wife, and the girls’ mother, dies in a car accident after selling her two daughters to a sexual molester. Quoyle gets his girls back and they are ready to leave the broken life in New York and start anew. Aunt isn’t sure if the house is still standing, but inwardly believes that something had held, “that time had not cheated her of this return”. For Aunt the house is filled with good and bad memories.

The house was built a long time ago on Gaze Island (also a fictional place), where all Quoyles once lived. They were pirates that lured ships onto the rocks. When Gaze Island became flooded with Christians, the Quoyles dragged the house over a frozen bay to the shore and put it “like a hat on a rock”. In the beginning of the book it is hard to imagine that Quoyle’s ancestors were pirates. He is afraid of water and is described as a failure at life. On the ferry to Newfoundland, to his new life, Quoyle sits seasick, his face “the color of a bad pearl”. 

On the western side of the fictional Omaloor Bay, the Quoyle’s Point thrusts into the Atlantic Ocean like a bent thumb. Aunt left the house behind when she was fifteen. She wonders now which has changed the most, place or self? “She leaned on the rail, looking into the dark Atlantic that snuffled at the slope of the past.” When a ferry approaches the coast, Aunt suddenly has a glimpse of the building into the stirring mist. “I saw the house. The old windows. Double chimneys. As it always was. Over there! I’m telling you I saw it!” 

When they arrive at the Quoyle’s Point, it is all foggy until the wind goes under the fog and drives it up. The gaunt building appears. The house is the green of a grass stain. Bunny hates the colour, it makes her nauseous. The distinctive feature of the house is a window flanked by two smaller ones, “as an adult might stand with protective arms around children’s shoulders.” Half the panes are gone. Paint flakes from wood. There are holes in the roof. “Miracle it’s standing. That roofline is straight as a ruler,” Aunt says. Quoyle wants to check inside, if floors haven’t fallen into the cellar, but Aunt laughs. “Not likely,” she says joyfully. “There is no cellar.” 

The house is lashed with cable to iron rings set in the rock. The cables bristle with broken wires. Long before Aunt was born, there were no cables. The house rocked in storms like a big rocking chair, back and forth. “Made the women sick, afraid,” Aunt tells Quoyle, “so they lashed it down and it doesn’t move an inch but the wind singing through those cables makes a noise you don’t forget. Oh, do I remember it in the winter storms. Like a moaning.”

“Even when fresh the rooms must have been mean and hopeless,” Quoyle thinks, when exploring the inside of the abandoned, dusty house. Through the windows he sees the cool plain of the sea. “The bay rolled and rolled.” Square rooms, lofty ceilings. The floorboards slant under the feet, wood as bare as skin. “And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe.” 

In a couple of weeks with the help of a local carpenter Dennis Buggit the house is fixed as far as to be safe to move in. “Dad, I thought it was going to be a new house,” says Bunny, when they arrive with bags. “That Dennis was making it new. But it’s the same one. It’s ugly, Dad. I hate green houses.”

No matter what they did to the house, it kept its gaunt look, never altered from that first looming vision behind the fog. “How had it looked, new and raw on Gaze Island, or sliding over the cracking ice?” Quoyle wonders. The idea fixed in him that the journey over the frozen bay had twisted the house out of true, wrenched the timbers into a rare geometry. At one point in the book he visits the Gaze Island and finds a place of flat rocks laid out, where his house once stood. 

They had started to live at Quoyle’s Point in May; the end of September is the first time Quoyle is alone in the green house. He stomps around the still underfurnished rooms as “dusty air seemed to wrinkle as he moved through it”. At night the wind moans through the house cables, a sound that invokes a sense of hopeless abandonment. But he pulls the sleeping bag corner over his upper ear and sleeps again; “Getting used to nightmares.”

When winter nears, Aunt becomes worried. Snow could keep them trapped inside the house, quite far from everything. She encourages them to move across the bay to the city for the winter. “Consider this place a summer camp,” she says. “We can move out to the green house again in spring, as soon as the road is open. It’ll be the sweeter for waiting. I mean, if you still like it here. Or maybe you’re thinking of going back to New York?”

They can’t buy a new house for the winter season, because Quoyle has put a lot of money into the old house. He doesn’t have much left. They have to rent a place to stay. Quoyle returns to the green house, to pick up the rest of the things. The gravel road to Quoyle’s Point, had never seemed so miserable to him. Inside the house the abandoned silence. The stale smells. As it was the first time. As though they had never lived in it.

“The house was heavy around him, the pressure of the past filling the rooms like odourless gas. The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought. Dragged by human labor across miles of ice, the outcasts straining against the ropes and shouting curses at the godly mob. Winched onto the rock. Groaning. A bound prisoner straining to get free. The humming of the taut cables. The vibration passed into the house, made it seem alive. That was it, in the house he felt he was inside a tethered animal, dumb but feeling. Swallowed by the shouting past.”

Winter in Newfoundland is savage cold. Early spring brings a huge storm. Wind noises at night causes nightmares to Bunny. She sees the green house being blown away by the wind. “Each of the taut cables shouted a different bull-roarer note, the mad bass driving into rock, the house beams and timbers vibrating. The walls chattered, shot nails onto the heaving floors. The house strained towards the sea.” Then cables snap one after another in her nightmare, caused by the real storm outside. Glass burst in her dream. House lifts in wind at the freed corners. “The last cables snapped, and in a great, looping roll the house toppled.” 

Was it just a dream? What Bunny saw turns out to be prophetic.

“You know I believe your ’ouse is gone. Take a look.” Archie says on the next morning with cigarette in his mouth and hands to Quoyle his old-fashioned binoculars. “No, you won’t find ’er for she’s not there. I looked out for ’er this morning, but she’s not where she was. Thought you might want to go along down and see if she was just tipped over or sailed away. Was some shocking ’ard wind we ’ad. How many years was them cables ’olding ’er down?” Quoyle didn’t know. Since before the Aunt time, what sixty-four years and many more. Since the old Quoyles dragged the house across the ice. 

“The great rock stood naked. Bolts fast in the stone, a loop of cable curled like a hawser. And nothing else. For the house of the Quoyle was gone, lifted by the wind, tumbled down the rock and into the sea in a wake of glass and snow crystals.” 

Good thing, Aunt had insured the green house, first thing she did when they arrived in Newfoundland. Quoyle didn’t know that. Aunt didn’t worry too much about the loss and planned which place to buy for the insurance money, for Quoyle and Wavey, his new love that he will marry, and girls. 

“In a way it’s a blessing the old place is gone.”

***

About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

Five Questions for... Jessica J. Lee

Two years ago we reviewed Turning, her memoir about swimming in the lakes around Berlin. This autumn Jessica J. Lee is back with the autobiographical Two Trees Make a Forest: On Memory, Migration and Taiwan. She is an environmental historian, writing tutor, nature writer and editor of The Willowherb Review, an online platform for nature writing by writers of colour. Jessica writes with the precision of a botanist but without the pretence that nature writing has no singularity, discarding the old cliché haunting the genre: that we all experience the environment in the same way, that diversity doesn’t matter and doesn’t exist. 

 What does home mean to you?

Multiplicity. It’s taken me a really long time to realise that home didn’t have to be singular, that I didn’t need to pick one place to call home. Both my parents are immigrants, and I’ve been an immigrant myself: instead of seeing that as a kind of “dislocation”, I’ve made a conscious choice to see that as productive, as a way of saying I belong to many places. I was born in London, Ontario, which people seem to find confusing because I lived in London, England for so long. Halifax (in Nova Scotia). Toronto. Berlin. Taipei. 

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I wrote my PhD dissertation about Hampstead Heath, which I lived next to through my early twenties. There was a beautiful lime tree that I used to hang out under, reading, resting, dreaming, crying: it bore witness to a lot of my most transformative moments in young adulthood. The tree came down in a storm in 2012, but the spot where it stood still draws me in. I have its leaf tattooed on my arm. 

 So I’d say there, but also: the bay at my family’s cottage in Canada, the cafe window in Berlin where I usually sit and write, the Taiwanese breakfast shop in Taipei where I get cold soy milk and hot shaobing youtiao. 

What is beyond your front door?

My street has one of the most beautiful views in Berlin, I think: it’s abnormally long and tree-lined and lovely. To the left, you’ll find more children and ice cream shops and wine bars and pet stores than necessary, and to the right you’ll find a busy road with a tram that races back and forth over the old Berlin Wall border all day. There’s a spicy hand-pulled noodle shop not far away, which is probably the best thing within walking distance. 

 What place would you most like to visit?

This is an impossible choice! There are so many countries I’ve yet to visit—Japan, Norway, New Zealand—but if I can be really specific, I’ll say Jiaming Lake in the Central Mountains of Taiwan. It’s a teardrop of a lake at the top of the mountains, famous for being a shallow, glassy mirror of the sky. People used to say it was formed by a meteor strike, but it was actually formed by glacial movement. But it’s a nightmare to hike to because of permits, the logistics of getting to the trailhead, the three-day trek, etc. I’ve twice had journeys to the Jiaming cancelled, so it’s become something of an obsession for me to one day actually make it there. 

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

I have the bad habit of reading many books at once. Currently, Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall and Yoko Tawada’s The Last Children of Tokyo during the day, and Ben Aaronovitch’s The October Man as bedtime reading. I watch too much television—it’s one of the only ways I can switch off at home—so I’m currently finishing with Jane the Virgin. And for music, I’ve returned to Japanese Breakfast’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet on repeat. 

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The Library: Hard Border – Walking Through a Century of Irish Partition, by Darach MacDonald

Read by Marcel Krueger:

The Automobile Associaton of Ireland's 1962 handbook contains six pages of guidance for people planning to cross the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. There are 18 approved roads with customs posts, and the AA warns that vehicles were liable for customs duty and purchase tax upon entering Northern Ireland, requiring motorists to 'lodge large sums of money at the frontier' or avoid doing so by providing a so-called 'triptyque' passbook for stamping at frontier crossings. The border section closes with a warning: motorists crossing on unapproved roads are 'liable to very severe penalties, including confiscation of [their] car.' Customs post also only had limited opening hours and late-night crossings incurred an additional fee of 2 shillings, usually paid in advance.

The slow train wreck of Brexit and the connected question of the future of the only land border between the European Union and the UK has in recent years increased the interest in the history of Irish partition and the 499 km-long frontier between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Countless TV and print reports have investigated it, the border now has its own darkly funny Twitter account, and there has been a loose series of books about the border as well, first and foremost Garett Carr's 'The Rule of Land' (2017), which follows the author's trek from Carlingford Lough along the border to Lough Foyle. Darach MacDonald's 'Hard Border' is the latest addition to the loose canon of Irish border books, but this one zooms in a bit deeper than most. Despite the flashy cover which seems to indicate a more political look at the potential of a 'hard' border, instead this is a deeply personal look at the history of the border, and 'hard' here could also mean 'deadly'.

MacDonald is a veteran journalist hailing from Clones in County Monaghan, and has written extensively about his home country and the border, most recently in ' Blood & Thunder: Inside an Ulster Protestant Band' (2010). For this later border-book, he walked the 75-kilometer route of the now-defunct Ulster Canal, which was completed in 1842 to link Lough Neagh to the Erne system but proved unsuccessful, was outstripped by the railways and the subsequent partition of Ireland and finally closed in 1932. Even though there are plans to develop a greenway along its banks, to date most of it is neglected and overgrown, which forces MacDonald through dense undergrowth and on many detours – which is almost synonymous for the tangled history of the Irish border which he encounters. Following the canal from Castle Saunderson to the Moy, the author explores both the drumlin landscape and the history of the last 100 years in the border heartlands, where five counties meet: Cavan and Monaghan in the Republic and Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh in Northern Ireland. Here, the border shifts and snakes around villages and roads, forming loops that almost become enclaves and exclaves (and will cause many a Brexit headache): for example, there are eight roads in and out Clones in Monaghan – five of which run into Fermanagh.

Walking this convoluted border give MacDonald the chance to dive deep into the political reasons behind partition and also to chart the violence that spilled across the border from both sides: from the Irish Civil War over the so-called border campaign of the IRA in the 1950s to the horrors of the Northern Ireland conflict between 1969 and 1998. And it is the latter which results in the strongest parts of the book, when MacDonald talks about the horrendous tit-for-tat killings that he witnessed, often perpetrated by neighbours and members of the same community:

The terror persisted and lapped to and fro across the border, as with the abduction and murder of Ross Hearst of Middletown in 1980. The 52-year old father of five was taken at gunpoint outside a friend's house in Tullylush, back near where the Monaghan Mushrooms plant stands today. His corpse with four bullet wounds was dumped at Wards Cross, a short distance away on the border. [...] Seamus Soroghan of Monaghan town was later convicted of the murder. Yet no sentence could allay the trauma of the Hearst family, which at the time of the father's death was still mourning the 1977 killing of his daughter Margaret Ann Hearst, a 24-year-old-single mother of a 3-year-old child, and part-time soldier in the UDR [Ulster Defence Regiment].

As an outsider from Germany, the Irish border and its effect on the communities it historically divided and still divides often reminds me of the Berlin Wall, which had similar seemingly random nooks and crannies that meant division and death for their inhabitants. There is the 'Entenschnabel', the Duck's Bill in Glienicke/Nordbahn, where a GDR neighbourhood along one street was enclosed by West Berlin on three sides, or the Eiskeller, where three West Berlin farmer families could only get to the city along a small road four metres wide and 800 meters long. And while the Irish Border was not as tightly sealed as the Berlin one, it was at least as deadly and meant similar arrangements for those affected by it. At the height of the Troubles, the five roads out of Clones into the North were closed, and just a single main route across the border remained open in the area, and any traffic wishing to pass had to go through a full military checkpoint, often resulting in long delays - and at the height of the IRA’s campaign in the 1970s and 80s most smaller lanes leading from that main road across the border were spiked, blocked with concrete blocks or blown up by the British Army.

There's a lot of fighting and killing in this book, but this is no over-proportionate for the slice of Irish landscape and history it analyses – the terror, after all, was real. This is not a lighthearted romp, but also not a hopeless one. There's plenty of positive stories, like the history of the Leslie family of Glaslough and their (in)famous parties, or the stories of local entrepreneurship (like the aforementioned mushroom plant) that were made possible by the opening of the border after the Good Friday Agreement 1999. MacDonald is apprehensive about the potential impacts of Brexit, and rightly so, as his fine mix of memoir and history in 'Hard Border' properly put the border and its effect on the local communities into perspective. The only thing lacking is a detailed map, which would make it easy for those encountering the pitfalls of the Irish border for the first time to trace its weird loops – and a timeline would also have helped.

But otherwise, this is a fine journey through the history of the Irish border heartlands, filled with affrays, danger, hope, a soviet in the Monaghan Lunatic Asylum and Oscar Wilde's sisters, burning to death on Halloween. I can thoroughly recommend it to both newcomers to the Irish border as well as veteran border writers and walkers. And especially to Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Hard Border is published by New Island and is available through their website or from any independent bookshop.