Recommend a book for my mum's birthday

[Various Artist]

That sounds really fascinating Sam. I'm particularly intrigued by one point, though:

William himself is in it, often around the edges, but never actually named.

I don't get the logic of this. Presumably if the novel is set around the life of Hamnet Shakespeare, William ought to be a key character as he's indubitably his father. I can see how you might marginalise him in the telling, to take a different perspective, but not to the extent that his identity is effectively in doubt.
If the subject had been some contemporary of WS in, say, Stratford or the London theatre scene I can see how you might include the Bard as a peripheral figure whom you needn't even actually identify – there's plenty of precedent for having historical figures cameo 'uncredited' in fiction in such a way, to help lend colour and a sense of place and time to stories focused on an invented character. But I can't for the life of me work out how – or indeed why – you make William Shakespeare so out of focus in a story about his own nearest and dearest that it might not even be him...?

[Sam]

Well, one of the few facts we know with certainty about William Shakespeare's life is that he moved to London and left his family in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the novel follows Hamnet and Agnes/Anne rather than him. So in that respect, he made himself (in real life) peripheral to this particular (imagined) story.

All the same, on reflection I was a bit inaccurate to say he's in it 'around the edges'. He's been in it a fair bit so far, because the novel's told across two timelines, one while he's young and still in Stratford (told largely through Agnes's point of view) and one which (it's not a spoiler to say) is the last week of Hamnet's life, i.e. at a time when Hamnet's dad has been living in London and visiting home when he can for about a decade. So what I meant was that from what I'd read about the book before I picked it up, he's been in it more than I expected, but what I read before picking it up, combined with the fact that yesterday I read the chapter in which he leaves Stratford to go to London, makes me suspect he won't feature so much in what's left.

I have to say that when I realised that William was going to be the only (significant) character in the book who isn't actually named, I did wonder whether it'd feel a bit awkward – as if it was dancing around the elephant in the room – but it doesn't. Oh, and there's no doubt that it's him.

[delicatemoth]

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread. I've ordered Skylark and War's Unwomanly Face (well, I didn't have to order the latter as the excellent Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town keeps it in stock) for her.

[pebblethefish]

Many thanks also for those of you who have made me aware that Shakespeare actually did have a son called Hamnet. I thought it was just something that Upstart Crow had made up.

[WOM]

I started reading Skylark again because of this thread.

[laverte]

i'm too late to be of use for delicatemoth but add me to those who got a lot out of Ismail Kadare, and i agree with San B on Broken April. The first one of his i read was The dossier on H, and since his is such a discomforting world, it has stayed with me more. Those poor Irish lads trailing around Albania with their sinister song-trapping machine. It's poetry for 5G sceptics.

i've only read one book by Alexievich and i thought it was The unwomanly face of war, but it wasn't a novel so perhaps i misremembered. It's a collection of testimonies about the war, and although it's fascinating in small doses (and easily readable thus), when i tried to read it in chunks, the kind of massiveness of it and the lack of a driving narrative thread meant that i didn't get far.

[ursus arctos]

That sound like Last Witnesses, which is especially hard because many of the accounts are from children and adolescents, and even harder for me because that was the population my mother worked with after the war.

[laverte]

Yes, that must be it. There isn't much light and shade in it. Most of the witness accounts are extreme and banal at the same time, in the way that lives and deaths in a war zone must be. Because the tellers were children at the time there's a flatness to the narrative, where scant details are pieced together to form a kind of landscape of fear and confusion, more told than shown. It really highlights how insufficient words are to do justice to extreme experiences and emotions, and although the netting together of these stories is a brilliant and necessary project, it almost feels like a work of reference at times, rather than a book to read all the way through. i can't imagine how difficult it must have been to communicate with those people right after the war, especially as they had political as well as emotional reasons to be circumspect about what they said.

Anyway, for future reference, the book about mothers and mothering that has had most impact on me and which a brave child might think about offering (or want to read for themself if interested in the dynamics) is Landscape for a good woman by Carolyn Steedman. There's a nice review here. It's a hybrid work, quite of its time (1980s), mixing critical psychoanalysis with working-class memoir, in a story that, despite beginning beside a death bed, is neither sentimental nor reproachful. It's the portrait of a blunt, smart woman, made hard by struggle and circumstance, and the space that you have to learn to dig out for yourself when that person is your mother.

[ursus arctos]

i can't imagine how difficult it must have been to communicate with those people right after the war, especially as they had political as well as emotional reasons to be circumspect about what they said.

You and my mother would have gotten on like a house on fire.

This very question was one that often consumed her while she was there and one that she frequently returned to over the decades after she left. There is an argument that all first person narratives of war are fictional, as no one can be a reliable narrator of such horror.

[laverte]

i sense that's quite a compliment. i'm curious to know what work your mother was doing. It sounds like a situation made for whatever the equivalent of survivor guilt is for people who operate in an environment where they're the only ones who haven't been through a particular trauma.

i think the strength, and perhaps the limit too, of the Alexievich book we're talking about might be that, by registering so many narratives of the war, where the details vary (and may even be 'fictional'), a profound non-fictional truth behind them emerges and re-emerges through their accumulation. In fact, for me, there wasn't quite enough fiction in the book, which might sound odd when talking about a work of history/journalism. Maybe if i knew more about the background to the war in eastern Europe i would feel differently, but i found it hard to situate the speakers, who don't tend to appear more than once, from just a name, an age and a profession. Perhaps that's the beauty of it; they could be anyone. But i had this hunger to know them, not to allow them to be just anyone. Their stories seemed too important for that.

[ursus arctos]

You are very wise

And your comments are typically insightful. I think that what she was trying to do in that book was to get as many people as possible onto the record, rather than using them and their stories to construct a narrative.

I have done some oral histories, and can understand how one can be overwhelmed by a sense of urgency when confronted by a cohort that is in the process of disappearing and/or losing their ability to tell their stories. There can also be a very strong sense of not trusting one's "editorial" judgement, especially early in one's career. The Afghanistan and Chernobyl books are similar in structure, but the subjects tend to be younger, and the author older and more experienced.

My mother was a psychiatric social worker and one of the very few mental health professionals at a Displaced Persons camp in Bavaria whose population rarely included anyone over 23. It was a UN camp, and she got the position because of her language skills and professional training, but none of the staff there had experienced anything like what the people they were trying to help had seen. My mom had never been outside the Northeast US and had only left the New York area to go to graduate school. And being 24 when she arrived, she wasn't that much older than many of her clients.