White Lotus

It's been a cosy-ish weekend at home, with some gardening, some cooking, and more decluttering.

On Friday, in between bouts of torrential rain (and hailstorms) I managed to get rid of the remainder of Matthias's old books, plus some unwanted gardening equipment. People really will take everything off the street if we put it out on the footpath! There's still stuff to go, but everything feels a lot more manageable now, and we don't have boxes all over the living room floor.

Yesterday was fitness classes, vegetable and fruit from the market (the strawberries at the moment are amazing, and I've just discovered that the discarded strawberry tops can be added to tap water to infuse it in much the same way that I usually do with slices of lime or lemon — it tastes fantastic), momos from the Tibetan stall for lunch, then pottering around at home. Today I spent a lot of time in the garden this morning, mainly repotting seedlings: tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, and some chives. So far the only stuff that's actually ready to eat are the mixed salad greens, which are a variety of shapes and colours, and taste bitter and earthy. We've got unripe strawberries, cherries, apples and pears, but nothing edible at the moment.

Reading this week has involved a great array of books.

I picked up The Draw of the Sea (Wyl Menmuir) on chestnut_pod's recommendation, and I'm glad I did. It's a collection of nature writing, mainly about the Cornish coast (although there are diversions to Svalbard, and other waters), meandering from environmental and social commentary to meditations on surfing and freediving. As suspected, my favourite parts were about the psychological effects of ocean swimming. It paired nicely both with Dee Holloway's fantastic zine Lost Coast (an in depth exploration of the various watery threads connecting Susan Cooper's Greenwitch and the films The Fog and Enys Men), and this new-to-me music (electronic Breton mermaids).

Next was The Bloody Branch (Brigid Lowe), which did for me for the Mabinogi what Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls did as an Iliad retelling: a complex, nuanced reworking of the source material in a way that does it the courtesy of taking its characters' alienating worldviews and frames of reference seriously, while giving the female characters interiority, voice, and agency within the truly awful situations in which they find themselves. Lowe does an incredible job conveying the sheer weirdness of the original medieval Welsh material, which exists in its own strange universe of blurred lines and shifting boundaries — between human and animal, between the otherworld and the waking world above, between earth and sea, and so on. Her Blodeuwedd felt really believably made of flowers, and the horror at that unbounded floral existence being forced into the shape of a human woman is absolutely visceral; likewise her Arianrhod felt half woman, half ocean. It's a brutal, violent book, in which brutal, violent things are done to its female characters, and sometimes the only possible response is endurance, survival, and the ability to tell their own stories, in their own words. I absolutely loved it.

Finally, I devoured the final novel in Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan quartet of books, The Story of the Lost Child, which covers the later adult life of its pair of childhood friends. While the events of the earlier three novels took place in relatively tight timeframes, this one covers more than thirty years — motherhood, relationships (and their ends), careers, the demands of complicated extended families, and the complex mess of the characters' origins in an impoverished, violent neighbourhood of Naples, and the way they're never fully able to escape this. Both the characters — the narrator in particular — make some truly terrible decisions; the consequences of these decisions are so excruciatingly obvious that I was almost reading through my fingers in horror for the hundred pages or so until the characters caught up with me and realised the same thing. While the intense interiority of the other novels remains, the authorial gaze also sweeps outwards, to take in Italian politics and societal changes during the period, and the ever present struggles against corruption and organised crime, and the ways these brush up against the lives of the characters and their families. I'm so glad that I picked up this quartet of books at last: the hype is so incredibly justified.

I'm almost scared to pick up a new book, because the week's previous reading has been so good!