Lovesong

Success at last.
I like "Lovesong" by Alex Miller.

I cannot claim to love it or think that I would rush around recommending it to friends. It is a melancholic rather than a tragic tome but the cultural references kept me going and whetted my curiosity to read it last night, skipping along in a form of speed reading that made it bearable. I was not in a humour to indulge the sadness that seeps through much of the narrative and it would not be a good choice as a gift for anybody who was not in excellent spirits. It has been described as "depressing" by some on Goodreads.

I'm not sure how much the prose would stand up to a close reading of text, as I would be bound to start getting irritated with the insistence on the beauty and sadness of the main protagonist, Sabiha, and with the continual references to love, when, in fact, this is a book about grief.
(The name Sabiha means "beautiful").
The style is sparse, full of the short sentences that send me back, gasping, to the nineteenth century novelists and to Proust, to a literary world where one can actually feel that language is alive and can still allow one to breathe. Why so many modern writers keep their readers on a choke chain is one of life's great mysteries.

There is a Tunisian saying "relations are scorpions" and "Lovesong" seems to prove this proverb to be sometimes true. Mr Miller is very sure handed in his understanding of Mediterranean culture and the violent melancholia that underlies it.
The story is told through two prisms... it is recounted over time by Sabiha's husband, John Patterner, to an aging novelist, Ken, who is considering retirement from his trade. Finding, as many retired men do, that doing nothing is more demanding than work, Ken gets drawn into a form of psychological collaboration with John, who is suffering from a guilty conscience and who, not unlike the ancient mariner, seems compelled to tell his wife's story as a sort of expiation. His peculiar reluctance to reveal all (the story is told over time, not in one sitting) is linked to the fact that John gradually comes to believe that he will write Sabiha's story himself. There is much mulling over the role of the writer in this book and the soul searching is often a bit intense. I have not decided whether or not I find this disingenuous.

Some readers have found the passivity of John Pattiner to be unconvincing. However, the book is insightful on the stark reality that there are many kinds of men and that tolerance, based on love and respect, can bring couples closer in times of trouble rather than lead to acrimony and divorce.
The fact that strong women do not stop to think before they use men for their own ends is also well portrayed.

The central issue, the trouble that John and Sabiha have during sixteen or seventeen years running a restaurant in Vaugirard in Paris, is that Sabiha does not feel she will have fulfilled her destiny as a woman if she does not have a child. Years ago I learned from a doctor that the percentage of couples who fail to conceive is as high as ten per cent and that the sense of loss this can cause is a major cause for concern within the medical profession. So, before the days of IVF, Sabiha cuckolds her husband with consequences that ensure their leaving Paris forever to live in Melbourne, a place that John has always considered to be his home.

The dislocation of family life when people migrate is very well explored. People stay for years away from "home" and I think that living in Australia since the age of sixteen (he was born in Britain) has given Alex Miller a fine insight into the psyche of people who are uprooted from their homelands and who feel they are wasting their lives on foreign soil.

I have been asked strange questions in Australia... "Do you feel isolated?" in Perth.
Perth is the most isolated city in the World, apparently, and many Australians would never think of going there. "Do you find the history of Australia boring, since we have only two hundred years of history and Europe is so rich in stories?" That one really puzzled me, given that the Aborginal peoples have the longest continuous art tradition in the world... or at least one of them (not wishing to start a row with somebody who knows of a longer tradition somewhere else).
But the terms of the story in "Lovesong" are set out honestly in the first few pages when the narrator fusses a lot about whether he was wise to return "home" to Melbourne.
Should he have stayed in Venice?

I had sympathy with his problem. He ends up successful in his endeavour to interpret John and Sabiha's story and ensures their friendship which is the only way to have a sense of belonging for him. Work and friends are essential in the male world as it is presented in "Lovesong". Some readers have found difficulty with Ken's bogun son-in-law-to-be. However, Ken is stoical, in my eyes, in allowing his daughter her chance of happiness after a failed marriage when the boorish and somewhat stereotypically very "Australian" new lover comes to live in his house. Some of my friends who have not visited Australia are very critical of the men, but the fastidious Ken is more typical of the sort of Australian I have met than the wretched chap who would be more at home in "Muriel's Wedding" and does not seem to be a plausible mate for Clare, the cynical daughter in her late thirties.

This book reminds me that there are so many people on the planet who can put up with situations that I would find intolerable. I also have "discovered" Tunisia and the fact that El Djem has the largest Roman amphitheatre in the world. I was neither startled or surprised by the violent episode that is revealed towards the end of the book and which spoiled the story for some.
Honour killings are not uncommon in Paris or London and the police can never get to the bottom of why they happen. Anybody who has difficulty with this twist in the plot might find "Mateo Falcone" by Prosper Mérimée helpful as a cultural parallel. There is a very moving scene where a young man, Bruno, brings a gift of a box of tomatoes to the grieving Sabiha, revealing that his Italian family understand Tunisian culture and wish to console her.
This is also a book about inter cultural tensions and the fact that in some places death is still the only punishment for those who step out of line?

I will leave the very pleasurable references to food and cooking which is the great joy of this book for me, for another post. I remember Paris before the markets moved to Rungis and the bustle and sense of urgency the customers had to find the finest and freshest produce.

Also, the racial tensions between white and black people which are always so shocking in Paris are worth further exploration. Alex Miller may be dealing with a very Australian theme, the place of black people in relation to the law. It's not spelled out in "Lovesong" but it is a topic that obsesses Australian intellectuals.
I need to read more of Mr Miller's books to appreciate why he is so very highly regarded and honoured as it seems that "Lovesong" has not been greeted as his best book.
And just for fear I have emphasised the sadness too much, the book has a happy and encouraging ending, which might be worth reading first. I always read the beginning, the end and then an arbitrary piece from anywhere in the middle before setting out to spend time on reading.
Since the last pages rarely reveal the actual end of any story this does not spoil the effect and I thoroughly enjoyed phrases like "It's the kind of day Chinese students get up and offer me their seat on the tram." In fact the Chinese students in Melbourne are the most polite in the world, so it's nice to know that others have noticed.
One reader has referred to a "masochistic sexual fantasy".
Don't hold your breath if that is your favourite genre.

Also there was one harsh criticism about the question of Alex Miller's age. He is now seventy five, which seems to me to be the ideal age for a good contemporary novelist. He has a lively understanding of love at first sight and while the more visceral aspects of Sabiha's desire for pregnancy made me uncomfortable he cannot be in any way faulted on having lack of imagination.