Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 15.-28.12 (Sunniva)

Half of this was written as notes at home the night before I left for England, and right now I am writing it into text directly on Internet Explorer on Karla's parents' laptop.

I was definitely not entirely awake and aware when I started reading the book, since I can't remember much of the first cities. As mentioned before, I find it difficult to read short stories and poems, because they require a completely different reading pattern to my usual and preferred one. I prefer sitting down with a book and reading for a long time, and I just can't do that with shorter texts without forgetting some of them and mixing them up with one another.

That said, I really enjoyed this book once I got into it. I spent almost two weeks reading it, and only really read it at breakfast and before bedtime, so the reading pattern fit more with reading about one or two cities, which was perfect.

Here are some of my thoughts from looking through the book again once I'd finished it:

Cities and Signs were the most interesting ones to me: the importance of signs, Cities and Signs 4 with the palace being the prison and so on. 5 that there is a back to every pretty façade. The idea is repeated in several other cities, especially Cities and Eyes 5.

Trading Cities 3 where they swap their living, houses and surroundings every now and then to keep
happy seemed like a perfect but fantastical solution to the problem that pretty much every person in the world has at one time or another.

Cities and the dead frighten me. They're intriguing, but also disturbing.

Cities and the sky 2: Different cities but the same - I have no idea what this note means as I do not have the book with me.

Cities and memory, changing but having the same name. This goes into the whole theme of the book - which is not cities, to me, not even Venice, which I see it is to some, but society. The book, and specific cities, can be applied to so much, so many places and settings, that it's difficult to write about it.

Continuous cities 1: Leonia, where they buy new things every day "So you begin to wonder if
Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not,
instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity." p. 114
Leonia, to me, is Norway. Or the society we've become, which wants new things all the time, and half the reason is that we feel grand and rich and happy throwing away old things.

2: That all cities are becoming the same.

Sometimes there's an underground and skyscrapers, and so we are pointed to the meta fiction of it
all – same with Marco Polo and Kublai Khan debating their own existence.

I loved this idea in Trading cities 1: The trading of memories after one keyword.
"at each word that one man says – such as "wolf", "sister", "hidden treasure", "battle", "scabies", "lovers" – the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles." p.36-37

Continuous Cities 5:

Penthesilea the city of suburbs reminds me of Managua - I'm too literal-minded but still it does. The neverendign suburbs, the non-existing city centre...

Berenice (Hidden Cities 5) is politics in my mind, even the new ones that take over are never that good even if they started with "just" thoughts.

You can tell that I'm a) busy celebrating New Years with friends I haven't seen in 18 months and b) not used to writing about short stories. I just put down all my thoughts about the different cities at home when I was supposed to be packing, late at night, the day before I flew over to England. And now the rest of the group is having pizza and I am honestly going to run off and join them and we can talk more about the book in comments and real life.

Short summary: I liked it. I need another book to read on the side in case I want to sit down with it for a long while, but I could easily do that. I do want to read his other books. And I am happy that this project is soon over, because it has been a little exhausting.
This edition: Published by Vintage, The Random House Group Limited, 1997

"Sommerboken" - Tove Jansson (29 Nov - 8 Dec)

This book fit very neatly into my life these days for a few different reasons. To begin with, university-related responsibilities finally got serious - about time, you'd expect that after three years I would be tired already, but honestly I feel that in London I usually have more free time than I had in high school back in Venezuela. Until now, that is. So even though it is pretty short, and actually much easier to read than I expected, I read it very intermittently. Because of this, the lack of a straight-up plot that I've missed in some of the previous books of this list, actually played in my favour: I would usually be content having read a chapter or two at a time.

Also, I've recently had to put quite a bit of time into planning "The Future" and whatever will become of it after this year in London. Some plans have already failed, others have come up, new ideas have arisen - all in all, it's a very tolling process. Fortunately classes finish this week, and with that comes a brief break. But these past few weeks, through "Sommerboken", I've had brief incursions into a little Baltic idyll that have been nearly as refreshing.

Well there, that's where I've been for the past few weeks. Now on with the book...

I can't remember if I read this in the foreword or elsewhere, but even though Sophia and her grandmother were born decades apart, they seem to take turns in being the driving force of their relationship. Sometimes it was Sophia's naivety that made her be so determined, and it was heaps of fun to be led by the hand by an - 8-year old? Who also happens to be a bit more obscure than your average 8-year old, I think. Not that I know many 8-year old at the moment, but this girl... This girl is up to something:

"You know what, sometimes I think it's deadly boring when everything is alright."

(I actually spent a lot of time reading this book with a dictionary beside me), which immediately reminded me of that old Garbage song, "I'm only happy when it rains".

And sure enough, Sophia ends up having some kind of fascination with storms which I found  quite charming, but I can't exactly say why. I suppose that growing up, or at least spending a big part of your childhood in these windy northern archipelagos gives you fixations that a sprawling city cannot.

I also quite liked the romantic idealist in Sophia:

"There's something weird about love," said Sophia. "The more you love another, the less the other likes you."
"That's quite true," noted her grandmother. "And what do you do then?"
"You keep loving," said Sophia menacingly. "You keep loving all the more badly."

to the point that I got personally threatened when her grandmother was a bit too cynical when talking about religion, and not that I'm a religion person myself, but Sophia just kind of wants to believe in something, whatever it is, and her grandmother keeps being the nagging voice of reason and old-age behind her. The grandmother's really smart about it though: Sophia will only push her grandmother as far as her limited language allows. Once the grandmother finds the gap in Sophia's logic (like saying, "yes but I prayed before you did, so clearly it was God's answering to me"), Sophia becomes just as willing to believe her as she had been to persuade her just a minute before.

Rhetoric and beliefs aside, I appreciated the heaps of  down-to-earth popular wisdom:

"Dreams require a good amount of petrol."

(There was another bit which I tried to translate but gave up after a while. Something about wanting kittens in June and a drunken cat by the first of September, and about needing something to desire in between, which also reminds me of "Singing softly to me", by The Kings of Convenience.)

As I write this I realize that this is probably the main message I'm taking from this book (this time around): these in-between periods of time - like "the summer", or at least the Western conception of "the summer" and "holidays" that we live with - are really important in more than a few ways. We need to fill them up with something meaningful, even if it has little to do with the rest of our years. I don't really know what Sophia's father was working on the whole summer on his table, and I don't know where Sophia goes to school or if the mother has ever been a part of this family, but all of these temporary adventures are essential. Even if you stop believing them afterwards, this hands-on escapism is wonderful and necessary.

Sommerboken by Tove Jansson, tried to start both 30. November and 3. December, read in its entirety 7. December (apart from the introduction by Tove Nilsen because it seemed spoilery and I forgot about it until now) (Sunniva)

As "randomly" as we selected these books, we still selected authors we knew, or at least one of us knew, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that all of the books (7 so far, out of 9) have been enjoyable, even if they have all also had their problems.

This book I really like as well. It has no moral problems as far as I can tell (trespassing doesn't really count), and the parts that I don't outright enjoy, I still enjoy for their quirkiness and something which I've chosen to think of as a Northern Scandinavian something. Yes, I am clearly a master of words.

After looking through many book shops and second hand shops for this book, I finally found it in a commercial book shop in Oslo last weekend, when I was there for the Global Dignity evaluation meeting, and also to meet friends – some of the girls I went to Nicaragua with, and my friend Maja whom I both studied and lived with in Falmouth. I had a brilliant but tiring time, since I've been moving house, finishing the layout of our Nicaragua photography book, working almost full time in day care centres, and then this Oslo-trip came in the middle of my post-move-and-no-sleep-week-developed-cold.

I finally realised I would be better off reading the book on my trip to Harstad this weekend, when I was spending six hours return on a boat on Saturday... And I read it in about two hours, even reading slowly.

The way she writes... This might be imagination, but I do think it represents a Scandinavian way of thinking, a Northern way of thinking, which she is aware of, with her comments on the people coming from town, and the different ways of the island dwellers.

Sophia's grandmother must be the one I identify with the most. Partly in the ideas of child rearing – which again I see reflected in the day care centres where I work – and again I (maybe vainly) think of as Nordic – but also in being very independent and in need of time away from the people she has around her, in being stubborn and doing stuff because she has decided that it should be done or she wants to do it, and starting to prepare for leaving the island way before time, preparing for all eventualities... I could go on for a while, it seems.

I wonder what the dad's work is. Writing? Or sculpting? I believe I read that Jansson's parents were artists.

As I finished this review, I quickly read the introduction, to see if I'd missed something. The only thing was that Tove Nilsen wants to see it as a novel, talking only of one summer. I disagree, or if it is, then the chapters are in a jumbled order, because we move from midsummer to late summer (with darkness) and back to the flowers blooming in May. An impression of different years also gave itself to me, for unknown reasons. Maybe Sophia gets older? I can't be sure. The only thing I can say with certainty is that I will have to read this many times, and that I hope to discover new things again and again.

Now, my last comment will be that I wrote all this on my laptop without the letter 'e'. Please give me some kind of prize?