Waterland (Picador Classic)

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Do we all live in the fens of history, I dare to ask? And is there more to it than trying to keep our heads above the water of its recurring floods? As critics and reviewers have pointed out there are similarities with Great Expectations and Absalom, Absalom: post-modern retellings which question narrative itself. Of course the material of the stories refuses to be shaped by them. There’s a great deal of water (this is the Fens!) and lots of water related motifs and symbols. It also fairly deftly jumps between the quaint and the macabre. This is an amalgam of lots of ideas which actually works rather well. And don’t forget the eels! I enjoyed the slow, circular process of reading Waterland. I especially savored the parallel structure and imagery embedded in the prose. The novel's protagonist and storyteller is a history teacher. Swift's method of using the teacher's lessons to tell the stories in the book gives the novel a sense of breaking down the fourth wall. The telling shifts this way and that in time. The telling is fragmentary and nonlinear. This is a technique that usually does not appeal to me, but it works here!

The plot of the novel revolves around loosely interwoven themes and narrative, including the attraction of the narrator's brother to his girlfriend/wife, a resulting murder, a girl having an abortion that leaves her sterile, and her later struggle with depression. As an adult woman, she kidnaps a baby. Waterland is a story about storytelling, a narrative about narration that analyses the meaning and the necessity of history. There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.”Waterland is a 1983 novel by Graham Swift, set in the Fenland of eastern England. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.” This personal narrative is set in the context of a wider history, of the narrator's family, the Fens in general, and the eel.

There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress, it doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant busi-ness. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.’ Pradėjus skaityti galvojau "kaip žmogus gali taip gerai rašyti?". Ir iki šiol tas jausmas liko. Ši istorija - tai dėlionė akylam ir neskubančiam skaitytojui. Ji supinta iš subtilių užuominų, kurios viena po kitos atskleidžiamos ir po truputį dedamos į savas vietas parodo pilną vaizdą. Aš joje tiesiog mėgavausi. Pasakojimo stiliumi, pasirinktomis temomis, magijos ir pasakos priemaišomis, istorija ir beprotybe, pelkėmis, vandenimis ir jų žmonėmis. 💛 O]nly animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. Man, man – let me offer you a definition – is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right.’ Read the full text of John Burnside’s lecture ‘“Soliloquies of suffering and consolation”: Fiction as elegy and refusal’, published in the Journal of British Academy in December 2017. Murder, incest, guilt, insanity, ale and eels. Hard to imagine not loving a book with themes like that eh? Or is it?The Norwich, Gildsey, Peterborough railway was introduced primarily as a passenger service but, by enabling cheap freight transportation, also contributed to the emergence of rail as the principal artery of agricultural trade in mid-nineteenth century East Anglia, overtaking inland waterways, with radical implications for the region’s economy and socio-political fabric. Tai viena tų istorijų, kurioje man nėra labai svarbu iki kur nuves, kaip baigsis. Joje svarbu būti, išgyventi, jausti. Ir nors tikrai buvo smalsu, kaip ta baigta dėlionė atrodys, procesas džiugino daug labiau! Mėgavausi, kai buvau viliojama ir už rankos vedama, pastūmiama prireikus, ar tiesiogiai pabaksnojama faktais prieš akis.💛 Vienu metu galvojau, kad kiek primena Gabriel Garcia Marquez kūrybą. Riba tarp istorijos ir mito čia labai plona. Ir kaip viską išpainiot, kaip sudėliot į logiškus stalčiukus, o galiausiai - ar to išvis reikia? 🙂 Pasakojimuose man patinka, kai ši riba slysčioja tai šen tai ten. Kai tikra gali būt ir netikra. Kai vaizduotei paliekama vietos. Kažkas magiško ir nuostabaus!