After the first couple of chapters I began to think this would be one of those books that I'd abandon. Firmin -- you can read extensively about him online but briefly the runt of a litter of 13 rats who develops a taste for eating books and discovers that this leads to enlightenment through some weird process of absorption through digestion -- takes, I think it is fair to say, a while to get going.
Many of the online reviews revel in the slow pace of the start. The detailed description of life as a young rat living in a bookstore, the trials and tribulations of being the 13th rat born to a mother who, as nature dictates, only has 12 teats. His discovery of books and his long-distance, always doomed, relationship (or attempt at one) with the bookseller. I just found it hard going. By the time I'd read a third of the novel I was convinced I was going to give up, but I've abandoned so many book club books. I decided to press on and see what happened. So for me the story didn't really take off until the second half when Firmin meets, and eventually starts to lodge with, the writer Jerry. And unlike many of my book club contemporaries I found Firmin's sojourns to the cinema, and his surreal encounter with Ginger Rogers, added to the story. It ended up being, if not exactly a fulfilling read, then at least quirky, original, and reasonably entertaining.
While researching other readers' views on Firmin prior to writing this (more to see whether the idea another book club reader had -- that Firmin is, in fact, the alter ego of Jerry the writer -- was really as inventive and original as it sounded during the meeting), I came across an interview with the author, Sam Savage, from 2008. Savage wrote Firmin when he was 67, and this extract from the interview I found unexpectedly moving:
'He pauses, then says: "Of course, everyone asks me now why I waited so long to write. And I give different answers. I had always wanted to be a writer: I'd written a lot of poetry, which I didn't like then and don't like now. I used to publish it every now and then, but I found it very unsatisfactory.
"Anyway, when we moved up here, we had to clear everything out, all our books and papers and everything. And I found fragments of novels, whole chapters that I've written over the past 35 or 40 years, and I'd read them, and I'd think: this is not bad. I thought I'd abandoned these because they were terrible. But not only did I not remember writing them, I couldn't recognise the person who did write them.
"So I suppose that in one sense the person who wrote Firmin didn't come into existence till later, and I couldn't have written it at any other time. But also, Firmin's essential experience is of failure - failure to write, failure to complete - and I'd had that experience. You can't have that at 30, because you think it's going to happen: you have to reach a certain age before you realise that it isn't.
"I thought I'd give classes on writer's block," he continues, "because I know the solution: it is to give up. Not pretend to give up, but really give up. I'd stopped writing for several years, I had a sailboat and I was going to sail around the world, and I thought that that was what I'd do before I died. I'm not going to be a writer, I thought, I'm not going to write.
"Now there's something in Buddhism - called, I think, the great death - where people go to the master, and they struggle, and they memorise the texts and the sutras and so forth, and they meditate and they meditate, and they don't achieve it, and then they give up. Right? Ain't gonna come. And then you have all those Zen parables, where the old man goes off, and he's sweeping, and he knocks the pebble into the bamboo, and - there it is. Enlightenment.
"And you can't give up like that when you're young," he sums up.
"You can only give up like that when you realise your life is approaching its end. I did, and it just came. Like a miracle."'
(You can read the full review and interview here.)
For someone (clue: it's me) who's been struggling to find the impetus, the energy, the motivation to write another novel after having spent 7 years writing the first and not having any success with publishers in the three years since, Savage's words felt something like a blessing. The cynical side of me laughed a hollow laugh and thought "Christ! I can't even give up properly!" but the small boy who always wanted to be a writer? Well, his ears perked up (well, OK, I was reading rather than listening, but I don't like the image of eyes perking up. Even if they can) and he thought Yeah. This guy didn't make it until he was 67. I'm only 54. There's time.
No comments:
Post a Comment