More dipping. And more non-fiction. I'm such a fickle reader. This time it's
Nature v. Nurture by Matt Ridley. Not my usual type of read, but pretty engaging nonetheless. He examines the notion of cultural determinism and lucidly explains, in his opinion, that humans produce culture - they are not produced by it. The production of culture is a social activity and is predicated on our ability to communicate symbolically to a greater degree than other species. We lean by imitation, we learn because we can understand another's intention; we empathise. I've just got to the bit where he outlines the various means by which we build culture throughout humanity: with imitation - as above - language and manual dexterity.
Nice
review of
The Shadow of the Wind in the
Guardian Review yesterday. Michael Kerrigan comments on the wordiness that has been plaguing me a bit whilst reading this, otherwise, great novel. But he finishes by noting why this is a book for people who love books:
Overall, however, he [Ruiz Zafon] does not come across as a writer wrapped up in literary theory: his conviction of the importance of literature in real life comes shining through. If the career of Julian Caraz illustrates the destructive effects of the artistic personality, his story exemplifies, too, the liberating power of the imagination. Walk down any street in Zafon's Barcelona and you'll glimpse the shades of the past and the secrets of the present, inscribed alike in the city's material fabric and the lives of its citizens. Exuberant, larger than life in their tragedies as in their joys and desires, they are irrepressible: no dictatorship can keep them down. Wee column from Andrew O'Hagan too,
'No page left unturned', about why he writes, and how he became a writer. He's not a bad writer either, in my opinion.
Personality was elegantly written, and extremely moving. A moral tale without an overbearing moral tone. When young, O'Hagan was apparently told that, if he wanted to write, he had to "read every book in the libary" so, bless 'im, he did. Now it seems that he feels that his becoming a writer was sort of inevitable, and not neccessarily to do with reading, but more an ability to experience tiny aspects of life, and extrapolate from those tiny experiences. A long final paragraph encapsulates this:
When I was writing my most recent novel, Personality, I got a sudden whiff one day of the pine disinfectant they used to clean the corridors of my old school, and with it came a memory of the way the town had looked in the evening from the playing fields, a vista of blue-flashing living rooms where the city overspill had hoped to live a better life. I didn't know then how the fulfillment of dreams can sometimes obliterate the dreamer, but I knew the houses were bright with life up ahead - and I knew I was a writer. All the books I will ever put my name to began somehow in the walk over that empty field, with the simple recognition that writing was something I could do. And there, in the seconds before breaking into a run, I felt the presence of unwritten lives and half-awakened form, and I knew that my heart was truly in it, ready to push the rest of me into a freedom I'd only ever heard about in borrowed books, objects that were always promising and never overdue.
