{"id":5018,"date":"2020-07-03T17:37:26","date_gmt":"2020-07-03T16:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodvale.com\/?p=5018"},"modified":"2020-07-03T17:37:26","modified_gmt":"2020-07-03T16:37:26","slug":"the-lit-fix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/the-lit-fix\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lit Fix July 20"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a new book column, the Marshwood Vale-based author, Sophy Roberts,<\/strong>\u00a0gives us her slim pickings for July.<\/p>\n

I picked up a new reading habit during lockdown. Profoundly distracted, I was unable to click away from the \u2018always on\u2019 news cycle. I couldn\u2019t seem to finish anything I started. Discipline, I thought; I would use the opportunity to fill some of those glaring holes in my literary knowledge. I\u2019d take on something big and significant to pull me out of the here and now. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. Or Moby Dick, suggested an American friend shocked I should have reached my late 40s without having read a word of Melville. Wanting adventure (and some Napoleonic grandeur), I settled upon The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. But when his 1844 epic arrived in the mail, my heart sank at the size of it. It wasn\u2019t the proverbial brick of a book, but a breeze block. I flipped to the last line, on page 1243.
\n\u201c\u2018My dearest,\u2019 said Valentine, \u2018has the count not just told us that all human wisdom are contained in these two words \u2014 \u201cwait\u201d and \u201chope\u201d?\u2019<\/p>\n

Not b**dy likely, I thought. I can\u2019t wait. I have low hope right now. So I put Dumas to one side in favour of a quicker fix. I would stick to books no thicker than a mobile phone. Novellas, short stories, essays. Each one would allow me to escape for an hour or two each day\u2014something I could start and finish in the bath, or before I fell asleep at night\u2014giving me a daily sense of achievement (and much-needed escape) in these otherwise bewildering times. Here\u2019s my shortlist of three.<\/p>\n

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd<\/strong><\/em>
\nRobert Macfarlane describes this between-the-wars ode to Scotland\u2019s Cairngorm Mountains as a \u201cslender masterpiece\u201d. What\u2019s remarkable is that it sat in Shepherd\u2019s drawer unpublished for 40 years. I love its poetic economy, the ways Shepherd weaves deep story out of a landscape so familiar to her, and her admission that in spite of a lifetime of walking the Cairngorms\u2019 hummocked snows and gaunt corries, it\u2019s still so rich with discovery. \u201cKnowing another is endless,\u201d she writes: \u201cThe thing to be known grows with the knowing.\u201d Above all, I like this book because it reminds me that sometimes what lies right under our feet is all we need to have for an adventure worth telling.<\/p>\n

Turbulence by David Szalay<\/strong><\/em>
\nThis is a piece of genius from a master of the novella form. He steps inside the skin of twelve passengers on the move around the globe, flying \u201cahead of the night\u201d over the Atlantic, and elsewhere, to India, Dakar and beyond. With each journey, we meet a secondary character who shifts into the leading role in the next instalment. It\u2019s a clever structure which allows the parts to hang together as Szalay delves into bigger issues, from the loss of a child, to dementia. A book rich in empathy, it has a kind of tragic undercurrent to it as he explores the inner, lonely life of \u2018passengers\u2019 on the Wheel of Fate. \u201cIt was hard to understand quite what an insignificant speck this aeroplane was, in terms of the size of the ocean it was flying over, in terms of quantity of emptiness which surrounded it on all sides.\u201d<\/p>\n

Journeys by Stefan Zweig<\/strong><\/em>
\nPerpetually curious, the Austrian author Stefan Zweig found it hard to be in any one place for too long. Writing between the wars\u2014a period of rising nationalism and economic depression\u2014he also realised that the freedom to travel might not last forever. \u201cIs it the premonition that a time is approaching when countries will erect barriers between them, so you yearn to breathe quickly, while you still can, a little of the world\u2019s air?\u201d he wrote in 1935. This collection of anecdotes about his European escapades is a call for purpose. \u201cTravel must be an extravagance, a sacrifice to the rules of chance, from daily life to the extraordinary, it must represent the most intimate and original form of our taste. That\u2019s why we must defend it against this new fashion for the bureaucratic, automated, displacement en masse, the industry of travel.\u201d Post Covid, I suspect package holidays will never be the same again. Post Zweig, I will certainly treasure serendipity like never before.<\/p>\n

Buy any of the books above at Archway Bookshop in Axminster in July and receive a 10% discount when you mention Marshwood Vale Magazine. archwaybookshop.co.uk.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a new book column, the Marshwood Vale-based author, Sophy Roberts,\u00a0gives us her slim pickings for July. I picked up a new reading habit during lockdown. Profoundly distracted, I was unable to click away from the \u2018always on\u2019 news cycle. I couldn\u2019t seem to finish anything I started. Discipline, I thought; I would use the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-5018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts","tag-sophy-roberts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}