Vita interrupta

Well, the online translator tells me this is how you interrupt a life in Latin but please tell me, anyone, if it's not so. I'm across the Tasman at present (like Ratty, yes! strange that) so my work is being done in even shorter fits and starts than usual.

 I wanted to let you know that The Glass Harmonica: a sensualist's tale has been reduced in price by four dollars to 7 USD.

The cover of The Glass Harmonica will always be dear to my heart. Not only because it covers a novel dear to my heart and Rosa Mira's first (which speaks, too, of the trust and courage of its writer, Dorothee). But also because it was hand painted by Christine Buess of Dunedin, the design suggested to her by a description in the novel of the waistcoat Chjara borrows from her employer, the prurient opium addict, Victor Ravenaugh.

He opened his eyes and saw her: dressed in his own clothes. Dressed in his pantaloons. Stuffing his boots. She turned away from him when she tucked a rolled cloth between her legs, a cloth he couldn’t see hid a single hard gold coin. He would have spoken to her sharply but he had no energy for rebuking her at that moment; her arms were raised, her neck tilted back, and her long hair swept to the middle of her back. She was braiding it.

Victor Ravenaugh had not seen a woman braid her hair for a hundred years. She pulled on his wig from the days of Louis XVI, then she wrapped herself in his ivory silk shirt with the matching ivory waistcoat. The waistcoat had been stitched all over by those Asian devils with silk-thread blooms and pink butterflies and his favorite ornament, the bright red tomato or pomme d’amour, that exotic discovery of the Americas. She did not look at him as she left, and he imagined he saw his better self. Going. At last, gone.

Dorothee has recently been preparing a mixed-media ebook drawing on some of her fascinating findings while writing the novel, about America's first sexual revolution. Such Were My Temptations: Bawdy Americans 1760-1830 will be available soon. I'll keep you posted. 

A new batch of excerpts from Slightly Peculiar Love Stories can be read here.

Meanwhile, here in Victoria, beach walks are punctuated by little gems such as this no-longer-puffing puffer fish which, as you'll know, is the world's second most poisonous vertebrate after the golden poison frog. Almost all puffer fish contain tetrodotoxin, a substance that makes them foul tasting and often lethal to fish. To humans, tetrodotoxin is deadly, up to 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide. There is enough toxin in one puffer fish to kill 30 adult humans, and there is no known antidote.

I didn't touch it.

 

Helping make new readers

It's only just warm enough for this, but Ratty feels compelled to lie down as he drinks in the vibrant colours of the beach boxes here on the edge of a large Australian bay. He's pondering ebooks, naturally. He smiles thinking of the favourable review The Glass Harmonica received just the other day, online at Historical Novels.

He recalls, too, how the ratadilloes' eyes light up for their bedtime story session with him or Lily. He wonders when they'll begin to read all by themselves . . .

Learning to read: it's a privilege we more or less take for granted where I come from. It's not so everywhere. In Iowa in 2007, I met author and surgeon Kavery Nambisan who has been instrumental in setting up neighbourhood reading schemes in her native India:

The Nalanda Trust offers basic non-formal education to underprivileged children. Our objective is to reach out to those kids who have no access to a good basic education system. We also hope to motivate the parents to send their kids to school by making them understand that learning will help individuals and families earn a satisfactory living and help improve their quality of life in all spheres. We attempt to make them realise that it will broaden the mind, create awareness and stretch the imagination of their young so that they are better able to draw upon in-built strengths and develop various valuable skills.

We also run libraries for the young in mind without easy or affordable access to books but with the eagerness to know more about the world. 

Rosa Mira Books would like to contribute to work of the Nalanda Trust, which runs on a shoestring and is funded largely by the trustees and 'a few close friends'. Lately it has become a registered charitable trust, so can more easily receive donations from overseas. As yet, RMB hasn't broken even, let alone made the net profit of which it intends to share 10% with Nalanda. However, this month I'm going to send some money anyway, and thought I'd give my blog readers a chance to add to this sum — a couple of dollars, or a handful: any amount will make a difference. If you'd like to, leave a comment or contact me directly and we'll work out how, depending on where you live.

Walking the dog

Ratty's crossed the Tasman, leaving Lily and the ratadilloes camping out while he takes charge of a very large dog whose owners are away. He quite likes the 'don't-mess-with-me' feeling it gives him to step out with Maximus. He carries a tennis ball in a string bag, to throw on the beach. Max ploughs up the sand, chasing the ball, which gives Ratty's tail a few minutes' break.

This week Elena Bossi interviewed Tim Jones about his Slightly Peculiar Love Story 'Said Sheree'. You can read that interview on Elena's blog, Teoría y Crítica Literaria. Yes, it's in Spanish but what do you think a dashboard translator is for?

This week I've made contact with my trans-Tasman counterpart, Really Blue Books, 'Australia's first independent digital-only trade publisher'. Well, we've exchanged emails, one each, but with excitement that we've found someone else to talk with about the journey thus far. Check out the website; I like their attitude.

Slightly Peculiar Love Stories author Coral Atkinson wrote a story for Anzac Day about returning her father's war medal collection to Ireland. It appeared here on Beattie's Book Blog.

I like Dan Blank's blog. He's a generous encourager of authors and independent publishers. Here's his latest exhortation to remember what matters on this creative ride.

Picks of the week

Poet and fiction writer Tim Jones has interviewed Argentinean Elena Bossi about her Slightly Peculiar Love Story 'The Ache'. I like the way he managed to keep her inflection intact when Elena asked him to 'tidy' her English. Read the three questions here.

Elena Bossi

In case you didn't receive the rat's newsletter this week, it's here.

Someone's produced a book you can eat when you've finished with it; another you can plant and grow back into a cousin of the birch tree it came from: Ten Unusual Book Designs.

And finally, if any of you haven't met Emma Neale yet, or her blog, you are in for a treat.

Mock Wedding

This week, two of our Slightly Peculiar Love Stories authors got together (virtually). Coral Atkinson asked Susannah Poole three questions about her story in the collection, 'Mock Wedding'.

Coral: My reading of 'Mock Wedding' suggests that there are two conflicting strands in Eva's life. She wants to belong to the student crowd, yet she longs for a subtlety and romance that the group lacks. Was this your intention?

Susannah: It was my intention to have Eva in this conflict. On one hand she admires her flatmates and their friends. Watching them from the outside she thinks they're fun and effortlessly confident while she's shy and locked away studying seriously. After the wedding she is moving towards the realisation that the sweetness she longs for is okay. I think many people feel as though they are the odd one out when actually everyone is covering up things that they believe in or long for in the desire to belong.

Coral: The wedding dress and veil seem to have been a potent symbol in many famous works of fiction such as Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. Did you see your use of it as being in this tradition when you wrote 'Mock Wedding'?

Suasnnah: Without intending to — you are probably right! Jane Eyre is one of my favourite novels and Miss Haversham is one of the best, poignantly spooky, characters created. The wedding dress and veil are such loaded symbols, aren't they? They create the images of purity, happiness, vulnerability, beauty, and indicate a departure from one life to join another. 

Coral:  The fire and the firewood play an important symbolic role in the story; to me they appear to carry the idea of various types of love. Can you comment on this?

From the moment a baby is born there is the desire to keep them warm. We hold them to our chests and we tuck them snugly within blankets. This cosiness is associated with love, care and comfort, from those who give it and those who receive it. Maybe this is only in cold countries like New Zealand. I imagine in tropical places this same sentiment might be extended by keeping someone cool.

There is a great deal of work that goes into the chopping, splitting and stacking of firewood and so the gift of it is significant. There is the parental love given by Stig's parents who desire to look after him because, despite the lectures he gives them on their small-mindedness, he is still their baby. He may not realise or acknowledge it but in their eyes he will always be young enough to need their care.

When the fire is laid in Eva's room there are two kinds of love it may indicate.  It may be platonic love and prepared by a friend who has sensed Eva is ill at ease and wants her to be comforted by its warmth. Or it could be, as Eva interprets it, a gesture offering the romantic love she craves; the 'in love' love that many young people begin to experience for the first time at this age.

Because I am someone who dislikes being cold, I believe that creating warmth in a large cold house would be one of the kindest and most loving things that someone could do for another. 

On the night Eva agreed to be a revolutionary, the fireplace in the living room was filled with crackling flames devouring macrocarpa. The sap-scented smoke wafted into her bedroom where she sat at her desk in her sleeping bag, fully clothed and wearing a woolly hat. In front of her were highlighters and the draft of her essay ‘Indigenous Responses to Colonialism in 19th Century Art’. The happy chatter of guests arriving for the flat’s weekly video night was filling the house. Eva shuffled in tiny geisha steps to her door and listened. David was telling the tale of the firewood.  Read more.

Thanks, Coral and Susannah!

Talking with Michael

"New Zealand has never ceased to haunt me. Much as I have needed radically different places to enlarge my horizons, to challenge me as a person and as a writer, I have needed to sustain a relationship with the place that first nurtured me."

Please go and read the rich conversation with Tim Jones: Books in the Trees. Tim read Road Markings: An Anthrologist in the Antipodes, then interviewed Michael Jackson by email. It's a thought-provoking piece.You can read it here.

"I have always striven to realise the truth of Terence’s famous dictum: nothing human is alien to me."

Hoisted