Toby Brothers

Odyssean dreams

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As we begin to prepare for our next visit to the Greek island of Agistri for another week reading Homer’s Odyssey (28 April – 5 May 2023) here are a few reflections on our past experiences.

Jane, Caroline and I have now run two Odyssey retreats at Rosy’s Little Village on the island of Agistri in the Saronic Gulf near Athens. Each of these journeys has been personally and collectively deeply fulfilling. It is such a beautiful indulgence to spend a week fully immersed in an epic that – however much I may think I know of the narrative – surprises me on every reading with what it reveals about human nature, the deep past, our present relationships, the encounter with the stranger . . .

That quality of immersion, away from loud and full regular life, allows the mind to expand in unexpected ways. And then there is the space itself: Rosy and family have a created a unique environment, full of natural beauty and views over the crystalline waters, which feeds the imaginative realm. This is not to forget the wonderful feeding of the body, the food at Rosy’s is deliciously fresh and thoughtfully created. 

We have devised a schedule that combines the rigour of study with time to reflect and enjoy the place itself. Caroline’s guidance through contemporary poetic interpretations of the Odyssey is often cited as a favourite part of our week together, as is Jane’s generous sharing of her talent and passion for enacting the text: the words come alive as each participant has the opportunity to prepare a passage with her expert coaching and support. Without giving too much away, Jane and Caroline have activities and sessions planned that open us all up to each other and to the themes and language of the text. 

Every journey through the Odyssey in Agistri feels almost dreamlike as we experience the beauty of the place and the depths we are able to discover in our work together. And then there is the swimming, the sunshine, the company . . .

Many of last year’s participants are returning to Agistri with us to enjoy reading Aeschylus’s Oresteia (which is fully booked) and here are some of their comments on the Odyssey experience:

“It was a wonderful trip . . . the landscape, especially around the islands, is so seductive that you can see how these wonderful texts were written.”
 
“I loved the discussions around the text and getting to know a fascinating group of people.”
 
“It was an amazing and enriching experience.”

The Odyssey group on Agistri in 2022

There are still some places available on this year’s Odyssey trip if you would like to join us for this special offering!

What is Wide Open Reading?

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Photo by Katie Doherty on Unsplash

As 2023 begins we are launching ‘Wide Open Reading’, a series of occasional studies that will be slightly different to those we have traditionally offered, embracing a broader and more diverse variety of writers and texts. Initially focusing on fiction and poetry, every study will comprise 2-4 weekly meetings in London led by facilitators who are continually exploring and developing their in-depth knowledge of these relatively new works.

Our goal is to feature writers ranging from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, traditional or experimental in style, voicing the experiences of people from an unlimited range of places, communities and perspectives. This may include South Asia, the Caribbean, Africa (north, south and central), the Middle East, people of colour, displaced peoples, indigenous peoples, post-colonial experience, exiles, migrants, LGBTQ+ and more . . .

We aim to be genuinely wide open and invite you to join us with a correspondingly wide open mind. Our first title is Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with meetings starting in February.

The Mutilated World

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The Wawel Cathedral, Krakow, Poland, © Toby Brothers, 2022

Andy and I have travelled to Krakow to meet our daughter, Madeline, who has been working outside of Lviv. She has been doing humanitarian aid work for a small local NGO that is providing food, power and medical supplies to the eastern part of Ukraine that has been destroyed — and then re-destroyed — by Russian missile strikes. I gather her fiercely in my arms, but no encompassing hug, no comforting words can erase the reality of war that she is living. And that reality, despite my over-active imagination, I cannot truly comprehend as I have only read about it. What she speaks about in her time with the Ukrainian guys she works with is their laughter, their teasing, their attempts to understand her feminism against their more traditional gender roles — how they meet the logistical challenges of moving truckloads of donated items across war-torn spaces.

We are reconnecting with her as we wander around the beautiful city of Krakow. I learn more specifically about the cycles of the portioning of Poland and the vast and violent re-drawings of empire that this land bears witness to. We enter the Wawel Cathedral and, amidst the relics of saints and royals, we find the Crypt of National Poets. And there on the wall is a poem, shared with me many years ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by my Athenian colleague Lisa Haney, and returned to when the horrors of history and the moment well up in me: Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski.

Try to praise the mutilated world

In reading that poem again — in marble, on the wall of this crypt, next to my weary daughter — I feel how the layers of unliveable history shape us. Zagajewski connects the daily acts of praise of living with the web of struggle and loss that we inherit.

You must praise the mutilated world

This is a call, a demand that in spite of the mutilation we should find beauty and coherence. The horror must be included in the blessing. I don’t know how. And I want to turn away. And I know we are all called to learn, to seek understanding where there is grief, to see the scars of the past on the earth.

Praise the mutilated world

I remember first reading this poem in the aftermath of 9/11 and thinking — briefly, self-indulgently — that I had an understanding of living in war. Such an American indulgence! My understanding has become more layered as I contingently watch what happens in Ukraine. As a citizen of London, I am learning all the time how the aftermath of war has shaped and shifted time and place, how it reframes our lives today. The poem reflects how deeply and desperately the mind holds the everyday miracle of living in equilibrium with injustice and violence. The poem connects me to past reckonings with history’s wrath — and gives me the breath of the light of living.

Solstice is a celebration of the necessity of the darkening days with the shift towards more light in our daily cycle. This poem meets that primal movement with the historical movement between times of peace and times of struggle. Zagajewski catches the experience of using our imagination as a way into other stories (the eternal role of the creative arts), other histories. Isn’t this in part why we wander through old buildings, tapestried halls? And it is not really the moments of triumph we seek, but a map of how to negotiate the exiles, the griefs — the blasts into the work of living. 

In The New Republic, the poet Robert Pinsky wrote in 1993 that Mr. Zagajewski’s poems, in a collection titled Canvas, were “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day — and in the ways we see and feel.”

More on Zagajewski can be found in this New York Times obituary from March 2021.

To once and future Proustians – on the 100th anniversary of the death of Marcel Proust . . .

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Photo of Marcel Proust in 1900 by Otto Wegener

A recent surge in Proust references, responding to the 100th anniversary of the writer’s death on 18th November 2022 has given me a moment to reflect on all the Proust studies I have led – and all the wonderful minds (more than 70!) that have joined along the way. Some have stayed for the whole two-and-a-half-years/seven volumes, some for just parts of that, some returning to revisit, some expanding into other literary realms. All of you have moved the discussion forward, giving me so much richness in my own grappling with our Marcel. Along the way I have peeled back layers in my own mind about the mind and memory, prejudice, the aquarium of social relationships, social power, the space between sleep and waking, the unknowable, multiple self, the unfathomable beloved . . . and I have become more attentive to the wonder of the world (and hawthorns).

I am currently running two Proust cycles. The Proust 5s are in the agonising pages of The Captive, we are at the Verdurins’ and Morel has just finished playing Vinteuil’s unknown Septet . . . Proust 6 have just started The Guermantes Way and we are alive to the sound of the fire, the stimulus of a soldier’s life in Doncieres. I am hoping to host a Salon special with Lucy Raitz whose new translation of Swann in Love as a standalone novella has just been published. She is a friend of Salonista and facilitator Keith Fosbrook and we are lucky to have that connection! 

My dear friend Sheila, who curates the wonderful Swimming by the Book posted this loveliness to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passing of Marcel Proust, while current Proustians (thanks Kaye, Sue, Caroline, et al) alerted me to the following (thanks Kaye, Sue, Caroline…) 

Please see below a piece on Proust being best left to ‘snobs’ – you will giggle, i think.

The Guardian had this lovely piece which includes: 

Although Marcel – after four years I can call him that – and I are separated by a century and by nationality, class, sexuality and sensibility, and despite regularly finding him exasperatingly obsessive and neurotic, I did come to regard him as a friend, though not one I could open my heart to fully. He watched me too sharply for that. I was in awe of his unending desire and unmatched capacity to recreate each moment, each fluctuation of existence – I just wouldn’t trust him once I’d left the room.

The reading pleasure was not to do with the narrative, which despite being at times, mind-meltingly slow, did eventually form an intricate pattern, nor the fascinating and often hilariously repellant characters, it was the sudden moments of what I can only call “satori”, the Japanese word for a sudden jolt out of the mundane surface into a the bright clarity of awareness of being.

. . . As it is read aloud, every moment hangs in the air, an extraordinary architecture of light, always in flux but always precise . . .

Patti Miller, The Guardian

And for those with access to The Times online, there is this view on the centenary.

I hope that wherever you are, life is full of orangeade and hawthornes, madeleines and humming memories. I leave you with this last reflection from Nabokov on reading and re-reading. 

See you in the pages…

Good Readers and Good Writers

Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

Vladimir Nabokov, 1948

N.B. The complete essay is gorgeous, and it’s hard to just choose one passage or line!

Remembering Javier Marias

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Writer, translator and journalist

Photo: Javier Marias, Wikimedia Commons

20 September 1951 – 11 September 2022

I had the wonderful opportunity to study two of the works of Javier Marías in Valencia in the years before the pandemic. Veteran Salonista Robin Tottenham hosted our gatherings on her lovely terrace overlooking Valencia’s glorious Mercado Centrale; Salonistas Keith Fosbrook and Ellie Ferguson had been emphatic in their urging me to dive into the works of Marías—and I am so glad that I did.

At first, I struggled to get a grip on his aesthetic vision. With his works, I often felt that I was a voyeur observing the lives of contemporary people struggling in spaces of passion and betrayal—his characters felt like people I had come to know, the entanglements dramatic but recognisably arising from all-too-common blindspots in human behaviour. But the work of studying Marías with a committed group paid off: I came to understand that what Marías offers is an acute understanding of how human consciousness is revealed in all the forces that press upon our fragile integrity: desire, history, injustice, guilt, betrayal…and how we employ narrative to give a shape to what has happened—even when we cannot shape what has happened into coherence. 

I think this quote from a Guardian article on Marías in 2013 gives a sense of his profound probing: 

“As a columnist I write as citizen and maybe have too many opinions” – he has published a whole book of just his football articles – “but writing as a novelist is different. I don’t like the journalistic kind of novel which is now rather fashionable. If a book or film takes a good subject from the everyday press – say domestic murders in Spain, which are a historic disgrace – everyone will applaud, but it is easy applause. Who will say it is bad? People say the novel is a way of imparting knowledge. Well, maybe. But for me it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes’. It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable. You find this in Proust, who is one of the cruellest authors in the history of literature. He says terrible things, but in such a way that you know that you have experienced those thoughts too.”

Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian, 22 February 2013

We have lost a wonderful writer and philosopher in the death of Javier Marías. I hope to re-visit the works I have read and expand my knowledge of his writings in the coming year. I am grateful to Robin, Ellie and Keith who inspired the Marías studies—and I look forward to more. 

“Marías also wrote movingly about old age, and cast an unflinching eye on male-female relationships. The novels often begin with a shocking scene – an unexplained suicide, the sudden death in bed of a lover, a complex love triangle – plunging reader and narrator into the plot-to-be.

The main characters are often translators or interpreters – or, latterly, spies – people who have renounced their own voices, but who are also, in a sense, interpreters of people, which is, of course, precisely what any good novelist aspires to be. In Your Face Tomorrow, the narrator, Deza, is recruited to become exactly that, “an interpreter of people”, whose job it is to write detailed reports on the people he has seen only in videos or via a two-way mirror.”

Margaret Julla Costa, The Guardian, Obituary 15 September 2022

‘A war of narratives’ . . . honouring Sir Salman Rushdie today

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The jacket of the first edition of Midnight’s Children

I have taught Midnight’s Children for three decades, in three countries and to readers of many ages and nationalities. The humour and poignancy of the work – as well as its epic vision – buoy the reader through complex history and multiple cultures. The strongest aspect of the book is how Rushdie uses the body and mind of his protagonist Saleem as a canvas on which to illustrate the birth of India as an independent nation, with all its bloody communal tensions and its incredible possibilities. Although it is given to a cruel teacher to point to how Saleem’s physiognomy symbolically represents the continent of India, this is just the more crude slippage between symbol and actuality that Rushdie employs. Saleem’s ongoing struggle for identity and agency – and his cry that the blows he suffers are “not fair” – these more crucially reflect the struggle of India for independence against the forces of other national and tribal power struggles. 

This is what narrative can do: in a deft way, a carefully crafted narration makes comprehensible and digestible the huge political and historical forces that impact us all. 

The brutal attack on Salman Rushdie, as he was preparing to speak about the importance of providing sanctuary to exiled writers – and appreciating the United States for this – is a reminder of just how threatening free speech is seen to be by regimes of intolerance. 

As usual, the author himself says it better: 

‘We are engaged in a war of narratives, incompatible versions of reality, and need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance and are already creating a legend of freedom. Meanwhile America is sliding back toward the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over black bodies, but women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from centuries ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand. Violence grows as democracy dies. False narratives of Indian history are at play that privilege the majority and oppress minorities, and are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed.

‘This is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said that the powerful may own the present but writers own the future, for it is through our work—or the best of it the work that endures—that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. How can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, what can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all satirists are heroes.

‘But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that song is stronger than death.

‘We can sing the truth and name the liars.

‘We can stand in solidarity with our fellows on the frontlines and magnify their voices by adding our own. Above all we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have attracted many.

‘So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories in which people want to live. The battle is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are also contested territories. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.’

Salman Rushdie’s words delivered at PEN America’s 2022 Emergency Writers Congress

Closer to Fine

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Photo by Mark Lewis on Unsplash

August is the moment when I breathe in and gaze across the previous months of studies and work. This August feels particularly welcome: the Salon has grown with the incredible energy of the new facilitators (new as in going from myself and Mark a few years ago to a current staff of 13) and Nicky Mayhew keeping the Salon ship moving with communications, strategic advice and administrative support. We are also indebted to Sophie and crew at TPR media who have helped raise the Salon profile with interviews and news on Start the Week, BBC London and more.

At the heart of our work is always the experience of the studies themselves: the magical and enriching journey through the words into the blossoming spaces of imagination and contemplation. I am sharply aware that all around me the world is challenged with wars and violence, with climate change and suffering. I am also aware that the monsters of intolerance and prejudice are swelling, greedy in their appetite for discord. Sometimes I realise the Salon discussions offer an escape—an immersion in the artistic rendering of the human mind that emphasizes the lyric and generous visions of writers able to illuminate all aspects of our living.

But it is more than an escape. Within Salon discussions we learn to form and speak our insights to provocative ideas. We learn to hear each other and even—perhaps especially—to disagree respectfully, opening our minds to differing views and the reflections of others. Stepping out of our individual perspective and entering into the mind of an author, a character, another being—this is the practice of empathy. I experience this both in deep reading and discussion of the literature, and also in focused engagement with the participants in a Salon discussion. 

Mohsin Hamid recently explored the dangerous progression he has witnessed towards binary thinking and how reading and writing literature pushes against it, read his article here.

“I wrote this novel to explore what it has been to be myself, and also to explore what it is to be other selves. I intend it as a means for readers to do the same. We risk being trapped in a dangerous and decadent tyranny of binaries. Perhaps fiction can help us investigate the space between the ones and zeroes, the space that presently seems empty, impossible, but then, when entered, when occupied, continues to expand and expand, bending and stretching and eventually, possibly, revealing its unexpected capacity for encompassing us all.”

Mohsin Hamid

August is also the time (well, of course, it should be July or earlier but, hey, we are all doing the best we can) when we plan and announce the bulk of the studies for the coming year. This has been a big year for Joyce and Ulysses (one hundred years since publication) and I am still basking in the afterglow of the three study groups—one for returning readers, with whom I was privileged to explore again, more deeply, this incredible work that celebrates curiosity, fantasy, and desire while skewering one-eyed prejudicial perspectives. The Bloomsday festivities—in London and in Dublin—were particularly sweet this year. The building Ulyssian energy has prompted a new ‘Slow Read’ of the great book, commencing in October, rolling forward in ten-week waves so participants can join along the way. This format echoes the Finnegans Wake approach that is now on its second cycle after four years of study, and it is so satisfying to dwell in such a complex text with the time and space for careful consideration. 

There are so many wonderful and unique studies coming in the next few months. I am still harnessing the right words to express the particular magic of the travel studies—this past year in St Ives, Umbria and Greece—these adventures create on-going groups connected through their combined love of literature and adventure. We are working on the travel offerings for the coming year, and this year’s September/October St. Ives studies are in place with one remaining space for Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as I write.

Thinking across the variety of genres, historical and social contexts that we offer in the Salon, an old verse from the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls plays on the edges of my mind. My hungry brain seeks an answer, THE answer (how to fight inequities in power and resources, what is the best way to live, what confers meaning on our existence?), but the study of great writing bends my mind towards possibilities and means of expanding my understanding. Art can offer a gasp of insight to the big questions—not to stop the asking but to find a moment of solidity on the climb. 

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(The less I seek my source)
Closer I am to fine, yeah

Indigo Girls, Closer to Fine

More about James Joyce . . .

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Continuing my long association with the City Lit, starting on 13 June I am leading a four-week ‘sampler’ course introducing the first four chapters of Ulysses.

For those who can’t get enough of Joyce – or for those who would like to know what all the fuss is about – this course will immerse you in the realm of Modernism and Joyce’s experimentation with language. Ulysses is the huge book that sits atop most ‘best novels of all time’ lists, but few people have actually managed to read this work. The writing is challenging – but when discussed with a group of readers, with carefully chosen resources, you will be amazed at how much this work will develop your perspective on language, love, nationhood, identity, history and lemon soap. And funny – it is a deeply humorous and at times absurd book. We will consider just the first four chapters of the work: this will introduce readers to the vast wealth of material that the book offers. Most readers, once they have engaged with the book the first time, return repeatedly, finding more with each read.

More Joyce reminders:

  • On Sunday 12 June Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE’s Drama on One.
  • On the same day in London the Balloonatics (joined by, ahem, me) will enact the second annual Tufnell Park Bloomsday Walk.
  • Meanwhile, a group of Ulyssians and Wakians from the Salon will head to Dublin to experience the carnival in the streets that celebrates this bounding work.

Bloomsday 2022

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The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit…

Photo (Brownstown Head, Co Waterford) by Will Francis on Unsplash

Those who have not YET read Ulysses may wonder what all the fuss is around Bloomsday, 16 June. There are those books you read that shift your world view – adding more intense colours to the interior and exterior landscape, have you rolling a favourite line or two sweetly in your mind – and then there are those few works that blast the mind right open: frustrating, challenging and ultimately symphonically exploding your understanding of what language can do, of what we might be able to understand about ourselves, each other, through the medium of language. Ulysses is the latter. 

Having stumbled, trotted and slip-slided through this beautiful work many times now with such wonderful minds, Ulysses is in my bones – constantly reminding me that any given day, for any regular person, can be epic when we attend to the mind’s stream…Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all….

On this, the 100th year anniversary of Joyce’s publication, the Salon is proud to highlight some of the many ways readers and would-be readers celebrate this work that warmly embraces the rhythm of life. 

  • On Sunday 12 June Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE’s Drama on One (more to follow on this).
  • On the same day in London the Balloonatics (joined by, ahem, me) will enact the second annual Tufnell Park Bloomsday Walk.
  • Meanwhile, a group of Ulyssians and Wakians from the Salon will head to Dublin to experience the carnival in the streets that celebrates this bounding work.

News from the Salon community

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Our very own Kaye Seamer (who spans Joyce and Proust gracefully) has also sung for twelve years with the Royal Choral Society, which is staging a concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 1 June to mark its 150th Anniversary. The concert will be particularly special because the RCS gave the premier British performance of the work at the Royal Albert Hall in 1875, conducted by Verdi himself.

Tickets are available through the Southbank Centre and a 20% discount can be obtained by using the code RCSVERDI.

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