Sometimes Writing

... and then I'll stop, I promise!

This lengthy essay gives a blow-by-blow account of the staggeringly overwhelming non-stop series of shenanigans (autocratic regime and its external autocratic patrons) that voters had to deal with during the lengthy lead up to Sunday's vote. (This included: nonstop antisemitic propaganda campaign claiming the democratic opposition were stooges of Zelenskyy, recycled from a previous nonstop antisemitic propaganda campaign claiming the same thing about Soros, ham-fisted false flag attacks from Russian intelligence on an oil pipeline in Serbia which they tried to spin as a Ukrainian sabotage, intelligence operations targeting teenage opposition IT specialists, attempts to charge independent investigative journalists with espionage, etc.)

Plus:

systematic vote-buying: bribing people with bags of potatoes, cash, even drugs; local strongmen threatening to fire them from their jobs if they don’t vote Fidesz, or call child services on them; thugs accompany citizens into the voting booth — a full logistics chain of stealing the election.

As the author of the essay said, Hungary under Orbán was 'not a democracy with flaws, but an autocracy with elections.'

It took a lot to overcome that wall of horrors, and this thread by a Hungarian academic summarises it well.

What they were up against was unbelievable, and I am so immensely impressed. No wonder everyone took to the streets and partied as if they'd just won the World Cup.

The Hungarian election result is giving me life. I spent much time with the Guardian's livefeed of the election and its aftermath, just basking in happiness. My favourite moments were the thousands dancing along the shores and bridges of the Danube (including the health minister-to-be, whose dancing went viral), and the gleeful gloating of the Polish prime minister and foreign minister

People on the subway high fived each other as they passed on the escalators (third video in the carousel) and were pouring out glasses of champagne to strangers, and it was so crowded with people trying to get across the river to the victory celebrations that they couldn't fit into the subway carriages.

If it must be necessary, my favourite (sadly universal) experience of democracy is witnessing voters take to the streets to dance in relief and joy at having voted out corrupt, autocratic governments. Inject this straight into my veins, forever.

Apparently the partying in Budapest went on until 5am, and then everyone just floated deliriously into work on Monday morning, awash in the sense of their own political agency.

Edited to add, because I couldn't resist, Marie Le Conte liveblogging the celebrations in the streets of Budapest. Oh, my heart.

I've just rushed in to gather the remainder of the laundry, as it suddenly began bucketing down rain. Amusingly, the neighbours on either side sprinted out to their own gardens at exactly the same moment to do exactly the same thing, and we all gave each other rueful smiles. It's that time of year.

I was recovering from a fairly mild cold this weekend (the worst of it was on Wednesday and Thursday, so by Saturday I was just at the stage of sniffling a bit, and having constant nosebleeds), so things have been relatively quiet, even by my standards: no pool, no gym, very limited activities. I did go to Waterbeach with Matthias yesterday, to sit for a few hours in the taproom of the brewery that only opens up one Saturday a month (where we listened to the couple next to us plan their wedding, with much arguing over seating plans and whether or not to have a traditional fruit cake, but general agreement as to the — seemingly bottomless — quantities of alcohol they were going to serve their guests), and eat handmade pizza from the food truck next door.

Otherwise, the only eventful stuff this weekend has been gardening: readying a few containers with compost in order to transfer the mixed lettuce, dill, and spring onion seedlings out of the growhouse some time later in the week, and planting the next batch of growhouse seedlings (rocket, radishes, corn, zucchini, butternut pumpkin, garlic kale, red spring onions, giant cabbages, and peppermint chard). I'm feeling quite smug that we managed to get all this done this morning, before the rain began.

I think I've only finished two books this week — probably not helped by the fact that I spent Thursday in bed dozing — but both were relatively satisfying.

The first was The Rider of the White Horse, continuing my Rosemary Sutcliff reading with a big shift from her Romano-British trilogy to the time of the English Civil War, and from her resolutely male protagonists and worlds to a female protagonist: the wife of an aristocrat from the north of England fighting for the Parliamentary cause who follows him across the various battlefields as their fortunes wax and wane. As with other Sutcliff books, it has a very strong sense of place, as well as a strongly crafted depiction of life with an early modern army on the move: the muddy plains of battle, the besieged cities, with their populations' fate resting on the choices and consequences happening outside their walls, but here also with an additional focus of what this world might have been like for its women. The other feature that I've come to recognise as a Sutcliff staple — the sense of the catastrophic ending of a particular kind of world, and the disorienting horror felt by people as old familiar certainties are cast aside, unmooring them from former expectations and reference points — is also present and correct. The central relationship — between the protagonist and her husband — is an interesting authorial choice, in that it is an aristocratic arranged marriage which opens with one spouse (the wife) loving the other while knowing that this love is not returned, and over the course of the book, and all the pair experience together and separately, their feelings shift and change until their love for each other is mutual, and more mature, being based, at this point, on a deeper understanding of each other as people. In general, I found the whole book very solid, although it didn't resonate quite as strongly with current global politics as some of her previous fiction that I've read.

I followed this with Mythica, in which classicist Emily Hauser uses the women of and adjacent to Homeric epics as a jumping off point to explore the lives of women in the historical record, and in the material culture of west Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, with digressions into reception studies, and many millennia of literary criticism, historiography, and the shifting western literary canon (as well as some contemporary female character-centric Iliad and Iliad-adjacent retellings).

It's a good thing that although Hauser's name seemed vaguely familiar to me, I had forgotten that this was because she had written a Briseis-centric Iliad retelling that I absolutely detested, because if I'd remembered that detail, I would never have picked up Mythica. (In a very comical moment, she mentions her own retelling as one among many supposedly feminist recent takes on Homer's epic that restore interiority and agency to its women: you and I remember your novel very differently, Emily Hauser.) I'm not enough of a classicist or an archaelogist to know how solid her pulling together of the various threads was, but I felt that as a picture of a specific region in a specific moment in time, shedding light on its non-elite residents (women, enslaved people, ordinary artisans and traders) it did a pretty good job, although Hauser had a frustrating tendency towards certainty where I felt she could stand to be more equivocal when it came to the evidence available. When it came more to the literary and intellectual history of the many millennia of human engagement with Homeric epic, I found the book to be more superficial (is it really news to anyone that for most of recorded 'western' history, the male intellectual and political elite were either silent or misogynistic about the women of the Iliad and the Odyssey?), but possibly this is a reflection both of the type of fiction I tend to read for pleasure (I have a 'briseis fanblog' tag for a reason) and my academic background. Ultimately, I felt that the 'women of the Iliad and the Odyssey' framing of the book was a convenient structure and marketing gimmick for what in reality was an interesting and accessibly told survey of the history and material culture of the lives of ordinary people of the eastern Mediterranean (she does a particularly good job at emphasising the extent that the sea operated as a road, and how outwardly oriented everyone's lives were) that might otherwise have struggled to find a publishing foothold.

In the half-hour or so that it's taken for me to write this post, the rain has, of course, stopped, and my laundry — now laid out on every available surface of the house — is looking at me in a somewhat accusatory manner!

I'm just coming to the end of a fantastic four-day weekend, and I'm not ready for it to be over. I never travel over the Easter weekend — it always comes at exactly the point in the year when I need a lot of rest and recovery — and so, other than day trips, I stick fairly close to home. My rule is that I go the furthest away on the Friday, and then stay progressively closer and closer as the four days continue, and I find that this works well.

This time around, Matthias and I went out on the train to Bury St Edmund's on Friday. We pottered around in town for a bit, had lunch at this place (excellent), then wandered across the road to a pub that was having a mini beer festival, and sat around outside for a bit, although it was windy and cold and I had to ask them to turn on their outdoor gas heaters to keep me warm! Bury is fairly close, but I feel as if I've rarely gone there, in spite of living in this part of the world for many, many years now.

On Saturday, we had a day out in Ely — cheese platter for lunch this place, sushi for dinner at the fancy sushi restaurant, and more wandering around in between. It was again a bit too cold to be outdoors much, but the river was as pretty as ever, and dotted with various groups of people having cups of tea or rounds of drinks in the houseboats.

Yesterday we didn't leave the house at all. I did a bit of gardening, read, did yoga, and spent most of the day slow-cooking an Indonesian curry for dinner. The garden is slowly springing back to life. I have to spend much of my time chasing the wood pigeons away from the cherry trees, as if they're left to their own devices, they'll eat all the flowers and shoots and we won't have any fruit. The seedlings in the growhouse are coming along nicely, and I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of being able to make my own pickles from cucumbers I've grown myself this year.

Today began with a fairly slow start: the last of the hot cross buns, laundry, cleaning, more communing with the garden, and then a little walk through the park that rings our part of the town. After lunch, we went and sat out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar for a bit, then picked up the first gelato of the year from the place that is only seasonally open (I think the owners go back somewhere warmer and more Mediterranean over the winter) on the way home. Once I've finished off this post, I'll gather in the laundry, do a last sweep of the garden, and start winding down.

You can see from this weekend photoset that I started out with some extremely ambitious reading plans, and I'm pretty pleased that I made it through five of these books. Five out of seven isn't too shabby! Those books were a wonderful mix of new-to-me and annual reread favourites, fiction and nonfiction, short stories and novels.

I started off with Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane's latest. This is nature writing about rivers (including some of the world's last remaining chalk streams around the corner from my workplace in Cambridge), but also a look at the global movement to grant legal personhood to the natural world — in particular rivers — and the people and organisations fighting to make that happen. As with any nonfiction writing about the state of the environment, it's pretty bleak in places, although the relentless energy (and enthusiasm they have for frogs, fungi, beetles, snakes, bodies of water, etc) of the various people Macfarlane encounters is infectious.

Next up was Death and the Penguin, Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov's most famous work. Having familiarised myself with Kurkov through both his historical mysteries and his war memoirs, it seemed only fair to pick this one up when I could, and I'm glad I did. It's a blackly comic, surreal look at the chaos and disorientation of Ukraine in the early years of independence from the Soviet Union, with a hapless struggling author protagonist who winds up working for a newspaper as an obituary writer, only to realise that his obituaries (which, as is the case for all newspapers, are written in advance of their subjects' deaths) are serving as a hit list for organised crime. One of Kurkov's strengths as a writer is his talent for observing and cataloguing the minutiae of everyday life in very specific times and places, and this is on full display here in his evocation of 1990s Kyiv and the people who inhabit it.

Another author who excels at observing the specific is Elena Ferrante, whose third book in the series of novels about two girls growing up in inpoverished circumstances in post-WWII Naples, and their subsequent adult lives was next on my reading list for the long weekend. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay picks up the story in the early adult years: Lenu, the narrator, has graduated university, published her first novel, and is about to marry her university boyfriend, who comes from an educated upper middle class background, and much of the novel deals with the sense of anxiety and imposter syndrome she feels having achieved social mobility — out of place among the educated elite, but ill at ease whenever she returns to her childhood home. Meanwhile, her childhood friend Lina is dealing with the consequences of a series of spectacularly bad decisions made in the previous book. Marriage and motherhood is difficult for both women in different ways, and the book is particularly good at conveying the pain of being sort of disappeared into those roles, with no outlets for their restless, hungry, wide-ranging intelligence. As with previous books in the series, this third outing is also a vivid snapshot of a very specific time and place, although it moves beyond one single neighbourhood in Naples to take in the sweep of political and cultural change in late 1960s Italy as a whole — as the characters' worlds open up, so their view (and that of the reader) becomes wider. There's just one book left in the series, which (so far) really does live up to the extremely well deserved hype.

Easter is always the time for my annual reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, my very favourite of her Dark Is Rising series. Seaside holidays, 200-year-old Cornish smuggling history bubbling up to haunt an entire village of the smugglers' descendants, weird children's folk horror, women having emotions near the sea, and the sea having emotions right back at women: what's not to love?

Finally, I've been reading my way through Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story (and poetry) collection. I think I've read pretty much every item previously, as there is no new work, and most of it was published in online SFF magazines, or on El-Mohtar's own website, but it's lovely to see it all brought together in one place. As with all short fiction collections, I enjoy some stories more than others, but in this case everything works as a coherent whole. You can see her coming back time and time again to the same ground: language and multilingualism, the natural world (especially birds and bodies of water), books and writing and folk tales, cities and cafes and migration, and relationships between women in all their myriad forms. It's as if she picks up an idea, polishes it into an exquisite, self-contained gem, and then returns to pick it up some years later to polish again into a slightly different gem when she realises she has more to say, or a different understanding. There are few authors whose work I feel finds its most perfect expression in shorter form, but Amal El-Mohtar is one of them. This collection represents about twenty years' worth of fiction (it was interesting to see her talk in the afterward about the vanished world of SFF publishing/aspiring author Livejournal, and how this incredible community shaped her as a writer and nurtured so many of these stories into existence; I witnessed this from the periphery and it feels that this particular alchemy is an impossibility in a much louder, more crowded and fast-moving internet), and it's my fervent hope that we can look forward to a similar collection in twenty years' time — with the same favourite themes and imagery explored with even greater richness.