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My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is
In My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is, the extraordinary follow-up to his prize-winning novel Forbidden Line, Paul Stanbridge tells us about remarkable things.
He tells us about the plains of Doggerland, lost under the North Sea.
He tells us about ancient horses, carved into chalk hillsides.
He tells us about the mysteries and wonders of trees, the beauty of equations.
My Mind to Me A Kingdom Is is a book bursting with knowledge. It is a novel about the joy of discovery, the beauty of the world, the rich, warm pulse of life.
It is also a book about death.
In 2015, Paul’s brother took his own life, leaving behind pitifully few possessions and an irreducible complex of questions. In his search for answers, Paul discovers that facts can be the opposite of truth, and that to see something fully, we must sometimes look away. In the end, sifting through a chaos of fragmentary remains - both personal and historical - Paul begins to piece together a sense of the value of living, and to understand what cannot be known.
Blending fiction and memoir, knowing and unknowing, love and loss, My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is is a heartbreaking and generous exploration of grief. A beautiful and painful tribute to Paul's brother, it stands alone.
He tells us about the plains of Doggerland, lost under the North Sea.
He tells us about ancient horses, carved into chalk hillsides.
He tells us about the mysteries and wonders of trees, the beauty of equations.
My Mind to Me A Kingdom Is is a book bursting with knowledge. It is a novel about the joy of discovery, the beauty of the world, the rich, warm pulse of life.
It is also a book about death.
In 2015, Paul’s brother took his own life, leaving behind pitifully few possessions and an irreducible complex of questions. In his search for answers, Paul discovers that facts can be the opposite of truth, and that to see something fully, we must sometimes look away. In the end, sifting through a chaos of fragmentary remains - both personal and historical - Paul begins to piece together a sense of the value of living, and to understand what cannot be known.
Blending fiction and memoir, knowing and unknowing, love and loss, My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is is a heartbreaking and generous exploration of grief. A beautiful and painful tribute to Paul's brother, it stands alone.
232 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
October 10, 2022
Grief is so hard to write because it's personal. Even the best novelists can only convey a sense of personal tragedy indirectly to a reader, the reader feeling just a portion of that loss. Paul Stanbridge lost his brother to suicide in 2015. In the ensuing years, he has worked through that grief like we all do after a loss. This book is about his journey, not so much about the grief itself but about the working through that grief, reframing his loss as he goes. Much of the book takes on a Sebaldian flavor, Stanbridge retracing Sebald's footsteps through East Anglia and mimicking his other peccadillos. I don't read this so much as a book about Sebald but rather about the process of working through grief. Stanbridge's preoccupations with Sebald aren't universal but they needn't be. The tasks involved could very well have been gardening or woodworking or fishing. It is the mode of thought that is key, a pattern of distraction that loops back to memory that launches off again when prompted by movement. Ultimately, I am of two minds about this book. On one hand, it is incredibly moving and erudite, an outstanding contribution to the world. On the other hand, it is a bit long for what it is, a personal journey that readers can only share so far.
November 12, 2022
What had begun as a doodled voice would become a hectoring treatise, one I would sometimes interrogate as if real and external to myself.
Does this mean then that your mind is out there doing its mad work still? Your switches all ticking back and forth this way and that, but out there in the soil, on the sea, and up there in the sky in pure elemental force?
Yes, that is exactly what I mean. Infinite is my new kingdom.
Then how is it that you are come to speak to me now in this voice?, I found myself led to enquire, but the answer was unsatisfactory:
Ah, this voice is not me at all, but your guilt.
The book is published by the twice-Goldsmith, twice-Desmond Elliott prize winning Norfolk based publisher Galley Beggar – publishers of (among others) “A Girl is A Half Formed Thing”, “We That Are Young”, “Ducks, Newburyport” and most recently the Booker longlisted “After Sappho”.
The author’s debut novel “Forbidden Line” was itself Desmond Elliott longlisted and won a special first novel category in the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize – and was actually the book that first introduced me to Galley Beggar and lead to be becoming one of their limited number of Buddy subscribers.
That book was an audacious, sometimes learned, sometimes madcap but always unique retelling of Don Quixote (with an equally eccentric protagonist, and a narrative which like the original becomes self-consciously more meta-fictional over time) culminating in a modern day reinactment of the Peasant’s Revolt and shot through with copious references to the Hyperfine transition of Hydrogen.
This book by contrast is more moving than madcap, and more deeply personal than unique (in fact if anything it seems almost a tribute to another author’s writing).
The book is written around the suicide of the author’s brother in 2015 and describe the author’s attempts to come to terms with what happens, while circling around his own obsessions which both distract from and illuminate his quest for understanding. The book is written in three sections:
Cave (which is starts around the author’s interest in the naming of the North/German Sea) and from there moves into a general interest in oceans and maps – a quest which allows the author to spend his dreams in a cave in the underwater Doggerland. This section particularly interested me for its primary setting in my birth and second home county of Norfolk.
Why, if I had my answer, then, did this task preoccupy me for many months further? This general truth - that the renaming of the North Sea was a gradual process tentatively initiated in reaction to the politics of the early eighteenth century - was not enough. It was not enough because it did not satisfy. I pursued this new interest as if I were a plant and it were the sun: relentlessly, somatically, and under the force of a desire which swept every other consideration into irrelevance. And so how could something so impoverished as an answer cause me to cease this undertaking? It could not.
Horses – which was naturally of interest to me given a recent pony acquisition – and which starts with the author staying in someone else’s house where he finds a store of equine books which leads him to a wider interest (which includes White horses and the spread of languages)
I tended always to return by some route or other to the figure of Clever Hans the horse. Still I was unable to discover the precise significance this story held for me, but I felt a strong and certain truthfulness in it which refused to dissipate with time. This interest in Hans the horse eventually branched out and led me by a lurching, fragmented, grotesque taxonomy through the shape of my own broken thoughts. The horse - horses in general - though they had never interested me in the slightest before, began to assume a monumental importance. They promised to solve some obscure riddle of existence which I had never before considered. I undertook researches into horses in war, horses in chess, horses as workers, horses as signs and emblems, horses as vehicles. I tried to think myself into the places and minds of those people who first domesticated the horse on the steppe eight thousand years ago and more, and then rode out across Europe to make what would become everything around me.
And Trees where the author is drawn to the tree on which his brother died.
The book is from the off, with its East Anglian setting, Anglo-German considerations and discursive writing style, mixing physical roaming with writing that roams across historical figures (with a dose of fiction) and with even some black and white photos – very consciously Sebaldesque and in fact the Trees section opens with the author seeking out a memorial to Sebald.
Overall the book while covering much of historical/factual/biographical interest is really circling around questions of memory and forgetting, of facts and legend, of seeing and obliqueness, of the personal and the universal, of truth and fiction, of belief and obsession, of life and death, of ignorance and knowledge, of beginnings and ends, of roots and branches (and in each case realising that the more one looks the more one realises that the two parts of each pair are much more merged than distinct).
Overall a very different book to the author’s debut but one I am very glad that I read.
August 30, 2022
I'm a bit on the fence with this one: the writing on a technical level is gorgeous with a lovely smoothness and fluency. However, I'm increasingly questioning how 'innovative' books are which are innovative in the same, and often Sebaldean, manner. This is a case in point as the narrator travels and muses in a melancholy manner; there are inset photos, the narrative itself is a peripatetic discourse on all manner of things including seas and drowned kingdoms, chalk horses, trees and maps. Somehow this research-based travelling didn't engage me in the way that Sebald's own journeys do, maybe because they are landscape based, hard to put my finger on why I was {whisper} a bit bored.
What saves this book, however, is the fact that so much of the content serves as a kind of displacement activity as well as a route through grief: for this is also a meditation on the presumed suicide of the narrator's brother, a man who suffered from mental health issues. These sections are intensely moving, partly because they are restrained and controlled, with no loose and dramatic sensationalism or sentimentality. It's the linkage between the more arid parts and the emotional heart (trees: the brother seems to have hung himself from a tree; the idea of submerged lands: excavating troubling emotions that sit beneath the surface) that pulls this up from yet another itinerant piece of postmodernism for me and which raised this from 3- to 4-stars.
All the same, this form and structure of literary production has become a sort of genre in itself (and note how often we're seeing 'Sebaldean' as an adjective) so that it is no longer as innovative or experimental or adventurous as it once was: the slippery porosity between author and narrator, the journey that purports to be physical as well as intellectual and emotional, the undercurrent of guilt and melancholy - this book ticks all the pre-formed boxes, however emotionally powerful it is in parts.
Despite some larger qualms and qualifications, I loved the concept of this book and the way it channels deep and difficult emotions through a seemingly more objective, less solipsistic, medium: so 4-stars for the artistic underpinning and the sensitive, perceptive writing - but I'd like to see some more creative breaks with this whole Sebaldean mode of writing.
What saves this book, however, is the fact that so much of the content serves as a kind of displacement activity as well as a route through grief: for this is also a meditation on the presumed suicide of the narrator's brother, a man who suffered from mental health issues. These sections are intensely moving, partly because they are restrained and controlled, with no loose and dramatic sensationalism or sentimentality. It's the linkage between the more arid parts and the emotional heart (trees: the brother seems to have hung himself from a tree; the idea of submerged lands: excavating troubling emotions that sit beneath the surface) that pulls this up from yet another itinerant piece of postmodernism for me and which raised this from 3- to 4-stars.
All the same, this form and structure of literary production has become a sort of genre in itself (and note how often we're seeing 'Sebaldean' as an adjective) so that it is no longer as innovative or experimental or adventurous as it once was: the slippery porosity between author and narrator, the journey that purports to be physical as well as intellectual and emotional, the undercurrent of guilt and melancholy - this book ticks all the pre-formed boxes, however emotionally powerful it is in parts.
Despite some larger qualms and qualifications, I loved the concept of this book and the way it channels deep and difficult emotions through a seemingly more objective, less solipsistic, medium: so 4-stars for the artistic underpinning and the sensitive, perceptive writing - but I'd like to see some more creative breaks with this whole Sebaldean mode of writing.
October 29, 2022
From a simple starting point, an innocent budding of the intellect, there may ensue a dogged, all-consuming undertaking which depletes the body, overstrains the senses, and destroys the mind.
Paul Stanbridge’s Forbidden Line won a specially-created award, the Best First Novel prize for a ‘Surfeit of Multitudinous Energy’, in the first year of the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
The novel was a uniquely riotous modern-day take on Don Quixote, the “Don” here Donald J. Waisall, who had spent 21 years living inside the Jumbo Water Tower in Colchester, writing an "Encyclopaedia of Being, Synthesised in Accordance with the Eternal Verities Delineated by the Spectral Line of the Hyperfine Transition of Hydrogen".
My review
His second novel “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is” rather different in style and tone but no less impressive.
It blends fiction and very personal memoir, the novel inspired by the death of Paul’s brother Mark in 2015. He was discovered by a farmer hanging from a tree in Lords Wood at Stoke by Clare, with suicide suspected, although the coroner recorded an open verdict.
The novel takes its title from the poem “My minde to me a kingdom is”, first published in 1588, and traditional attributed to Edward Dyer, although a forward to the novel explains both the rationale for the attribution and a potential alternative, based on a paper published in the Review of English Studies in 1975.
This somewhat obsessive determination to discover the truth is characteristic of the narrator. The first section, Caves, starts with the author/narrator becoming interested in maps, then the naming of the North Sea (and when the name in English changed from the German Sea), and then the underwater caves and trenches that lie beneath the water, to which he journeys in his mind.
IT WAS AT A PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT PERIOD OF MY LIFE, one which I continue to find myself unable to look at directly, that I first began to develop an interest in the toponymy of the North Sea. A previous piece of work had involved my going through as many of the early maps featuring the British Isles as I could find, from the second century Ptolemaic, through the mappae mundi of the Middle Ages, to those of Caxton and his contemporaries in the Renaissance, and further, into the Enlightenment, the time of the great instruments, when the land mass, I noted, like a developing child in the womb begins to assume a shape with which we are familiar, one recognisably our own. What I was then pursuing, I cannot remember. But certainly, at that time, I was interested in what, to our thinking, is there: the land. It was only later, when that great shock befell me, that I first began to conceive of a greater attraction to the waters between.
Day by day, I downloaded more and more maps of the North Sea, and very soon was struck by an impression that we humans cannot refrain from naming things, that everything that is — and even isn’t — must eventually accrue a denotative tag, even the shifting waters and unguessable floor of the ocean, as those mysterious names of the regions of the North Sea attest: Doggerbank, Farn Deeps, Utsira High, Revet, Broad Fourteens, Devil’s Hole, and so on. Nothing, I understood, was beyond the limitless power of words to name it: not the unseeable ground; not the shapeless water which, continually mingling and separating, is only ever itself in a single moment; not even the infinite extension of blank space above us — so like an ocean — and, within it, those great concentrations of gravity at the centre of which light is held still and time is said to stop, or not yet to have begun.
This is taken to new levels when, in the archives of Norfolk Castle Museum he finds the notebooks of a predecessor who had shared a similar obsession, one that drove him to insanity:
From the evidence, it seemed that the author of these notebooks had conceived of some kind of livingness within one of the two maps, and descended quickly thereafter into insanity. Disappointed and somewhat chastened I made agreement with myself that these researches of my own might for the sake of my health be suspended or at least curtailed, until I discovered a note inserted into the archive referring to the records for a Jan Baumgarten held in the Norwich Borough Asylum archive. Of course, and against all the determination of my resolution just then made, I immediately phoned the Norfolk County Library Service in order to request access to this archive. It was here that I discovered that the author had been committed to the Asylum, though for blindness rather than mental incapacity, and that a record had been made, presumably by dictation to an employee at the hospital for the two-fold purpose of individual diagnosis and general medical research, of the narrative which the notebooks held in code but which I was incapable of translating into meaningful words.
This research is intermingled with the story of his brother and Mark’s mental health issues, as well as his obsession with indecipherable mathematics. There are also sections written to, in a sense in dialogue with his brother, since at times his words are, he feels, channelling Mark.
If Forbidden Line was a conscious updating of Don Quixote, the reader of My Mind to Me a Kingdom can’t help but immediately call to mind the novels of WG Sebald, with their mixture of memoir and novel (although Stanbridge’s brother is real, whereas, as reported in The Atlantic Sebald is known to have appropriated and fictionalised stories), digressive and erudite research (although the narrator/author here takes this to obsessive levels) and grainy black and white photos (although again Sebald’s are often repurposed and not what they purport to be, whereas these are authentic).
The link to Sebald, particularly The Rings of Saturn (in Hulse’s translation) is particularly strong given the East Anglian coastal locale of the first part. A section visiting the famous Happisburgh lighthouse feels as if it could have been an offcut from that novel (complete even with the odd absence of other people):
After alighting, I walked up the shallow incline of the approach to the fighthouse.The freshly ploughed earth on either side of me gave off a distinctive hot fern fragrance which at first gave me pleasure, though soon became cloying. So it was that I was happy to reach my destination. Visitors' hours were presented upon a plastic-wrapped sheet stapled to the door of the lighthouse, the current hour falling within, and yet the door was locked, and the building had that air of one which has been closed up for a long time. It was unclear what I should do. I walked around the building and then, as if by the force of some magnetism or gravitational pull, found myself drawn across the field on the other side and soon standing at the clifftop a good three inches taller than my customary height, owing to an agglutination of the heavy clay soil to my bootsoles. Looking out to the grey sea below me, I was caused again to think of the poet Kostas Karyotakis. How, after moving in 1928 to Preveza, a town on the Ambradan Gulf in the north-west of Greece — a town which disgusted the young poet —he was compelled by this disgust to attempt to drown himself in the waters off the enormous eighteen mile long Monolithi Beach.
The second part of the novel, Horses, sees the narrator house-sitting for some friends near to Devizes in Wiltshire. He becomes obsessed with horses, following on from an obsession from a former inhabitant of the house who left behind an extensive library, including the chalk white horses of England (also a key motif in the Booker longlisted Treacle Walker.)
And in the third part, Tree, the obsession shifts to the arboreal, this time triggered by an unsuccessful visit to the UEA in Norwich to find the memorial bench apparently situated there to WG Sebald (the first explicit mention of the author).
The author has only a photo, appropriately reproduced here in grainy black and white, found from Sebald’s German Wikipedia entry, testifying to the existence of the memorial, but can find no trace of it, and speculates it may have been absorbed in to the Copper Beech tree, planted in Sebald’s memory around whose trunk it was apparently situated.
This leads on to musings on the phenomenon of vanishing twins, where one embryo absorbs another, with the link to Stanbridge’s own feeling about his brother – this a passage I marked from early in the book, but which resonated with the closing pages:
You sit beside me, even across me, half inside, wherever I am, and you hold my hand, and you make me speak, and here I am now, telling these tales. Everything is desire. Sometimes you will speak back, with hushed voice, conciliatory. Sometimes you will tear back into the past with the same words you used then, persuaded you were intentionally destroyed. You were never my twin but it feels as if that is how it must have been. Either way, it is all just desire. Stories grow out of me like branches from the trunk of a tree, and if they are later grown round and leave such obdurate knots within that one day the timber of me will be useful for nothing but firewood, then that's life — or death.
A dense read – the 230 pages took me longer than a typical 500 page novel, and I feel I would need to re-read to fully appreciate the text – and the Sebaldian aspects at times errs towards the derivative, but ultimately this is an impressive, and moving, book.
4.5 stars.
Paul Stanbridge’s Forbidden Line won a specially-created award, the Best First Novel prize for a ‘Surfeit of Multitudinous Energy’, in the first year of the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
The novel was a uniquely riotous modern-day take on Don Quixote, the “Don” here Donald J. Waisall, who had spent 21 years living inside the Jumbo Water Tower in Colchester, writing an "Encyclopaedia of Being, Synthesised in Accordance with the Eternal Verities Delineated by the Spectral Line of the Hyperfine Transition of Hydrogen".
My review
His second novel “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is” rather different in style and tone but no less impressive.
It blends fiction and very personal memoir, the novel inspired by the death of Paul’s brother Mark in 2015. He was discovered by a farmer hanging from a tree in Lords Wood at Stoke by Clare, with suicide suspected, although the coroner recorded an open verdict.
The novel takes its title from the poem “My minde to me a kingdom is”, first published in 1588, and traditional attributed to Edward Dyer, although a forward to the novel explains both the rationale for the attribution and a potential alternative, based on a paper published in the Review of English Studies in 1975.
This somewhat obsessive determination to discover the truth is characteristic of the narrator. The first section, Caves, starts with the author/narrator becoming interested in maps, then the naming of the North Sea (and when the name in English changed from the German Sea), and then the underwater caves and trenches that lie beneath the water, to which he journeys in his mind.
IT WAS AT A PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT PERIOD OF MY LIFE, one which I continue to find myself unable to look at directly, that I first began to develop an interest in the toponymy of the North Sea. A previous piece of work had involved my going through as many of the early maps featuring the British Isles as I could find, from the second century Ptolemaic, through the mappae mundi of the Middle Ages, to those of Caxton and his contemporaries in the Renaissance, and further, into the Enlightenment, the time of the great instruments, when the land mass, I noted, like a developing child in the womb begins to assume a shape with which we are familiar, one recognisably our own. What I was then pursuing, I cannot remember. But certainly, at that time, I was interested in what, to our thinking, is there: the land. It was only later, when that great shock befell me, that I first began to conceive of a greater attraction to the waters between.
Day by day, I downloaded more and more maps of the North Sea, and very soon was struck by an impression that we humans cannot refrain from naming things, that everything that is — and even isn’t — must eventually accrue a denotative tag, even the shifting waters and unguessable floor of the ocean, as those mysterious names of the regions of the North Sea attest: Doggerbank, Farn Deeps, Utsira High, Revet, Broad Fourteens, Devil’s Hole, and so on. Nothing, I understood, was beyond the limitless power of words to name it: not the unseeable ground; not the shapeless water which, continually mingling and separating, is only ever itself in a single moment; not even the infinite extension of blank space above us — so like an ocean — and, within it, those great concentrations of gravity at the centre of which light is held still and time is said to stop, or not yet to have begun.
This is taken to new levels when, in the archives of Norfolk Castle Museum he finds the notebooks of a predecessor who had shared a similar obsession, one that drove him to insanity:
From the evidence, it seemed that the author of these notebooks had conceived of some kind of livingness within one of the two maps, and descended quickly thereafter into insanity. Disappointed and somewhat chastened I made agreement with myself that these researches of my own might for the sake of my health be suspended or at least curtailed, until I discovered a note inserted into the archive referring to the records for a Jan Baumgarten held in the Norwich Borough Asylum archive. Of course, and against all the determination of my resolution just then made, I immediately phoned the Norfolk County Library Service in order to request access to this archive. It was here that I discovered that the author had been committed to the Asylum, though for blindness rather than mental incapacity, and that a record had been made, presumably by dictation to an employee at the hospital for the two-fold purpose of individual diagnosis and general medical research, of the narrative which the notebooks held in code but which I was incapable of translating into meaningful words.
This research is intermingled with the story of his brother and Mark’s mental health issues, as well as his obsession with indecipherable mathematics. There are also sections written to, in a sense in dialogue with his brother, since at times his words are, he feels, channelling Mark.
If Forbidden Line was a conscious updating of Don Quixote, the reader of My Mind to Me a Kingdom can’t help but immediately call to mind the novels of WG Sebald, with their mixture of memoir and novel (although Stanbridge’s brother is real, whereas, as reported in The Atlantic Sebald is known to have appropriated and fictionalised stories), digressive and erudite research (although the narrator/author here takes this to obsessive levels) and grainy black and white photos (although again Sebald’s are often repurposed and not what they purport to be, whereas these are authentic).
The link to Sebald, particularly The Rings of Saturn (in Hulse’s translation) is particularly strong given the East Anglian coastal locale of the first part. A section visiting the famous Happisburgh lighthouse feels as if it could have been an offcut from that novel (complete even with the odd absence of other people):
After alighting, I walked up the shallow incline of the approach to the fighthouse.The freshly ploughed earth on either side of me gave off a distinctive hot fern fragrance which at first gave me pleasure, though soon became cloying. So it was that I was happy to reach my destination. Visitors' hours were presented upon a plastic-wrapped sheet stapled to the door of the lighthouse, the current hour falling within, and yet the door was locked, and the building had that air of one which has been closed up for a long time. It was unclear what I should do. I walked around the building and then, as if by the force of some magnetism or gravitational pull, found myself drawn across the field on the other side and soon standing at the clifftop a good three inches taller than my customary height, owing to an agglutination of the heavy clay soil to my bootsoles. Looking out to the grey sea below me, I was caused again to think of the poet Kostas Karyotakis. How, after moving in 1928 to Preveza, a town on the Ambradan Gulf in the north-west of Greece — a town which disgusted the young poet —he was compelled by this disgust to attempt to drown himself in the waters off the enormous eighteen mile long Monolithi Beach.
The second part of the novel, Horses, sees the narrator house-sitting for some friends near to Devizes in Wiltshire. He becomes obsessed with horses, following on from an obsession from a former inhabitant of the house who left behind an extensive library, including the chalk white horses of England (also a key motif in the Booker longlisted Treacle Walker.)
And in the third part, Tree, the obsession shifts to the arboreal, this time triggered by an unsuccessful visit to the UEA in Norwich to find the memorial bench apparently situated there to WG Sebald (the first explicit mention of the author).
The author has only a photo, appropriately reproduced here in grainy black and white, found from Sebald’s German Wikipedia entry, testifying to the existence of the memorial, but can find no trace of it, and speculates it may have been absorbed in to the Copper Beech tree, planted in Sebald’s memory around whose trunk it was apparently situated.
Auf dem Gelände der University of East Anglia in Norwich umgibt eine kreisförmige Sitzbank eine Blutbuche, gepflanzt im Jahr 2003 von der Familie W. G. Sebalds zur Erinnerung an den Schriftsteller. Zusammen mit weiteren Bäumen, die von ehemaligen Studenten des Schriftstellers gespendet wurden, wird der Platz Sebald Copse („Sebald-Wäldchen“) genannt. Die Bank, deren Form an die Ringe des Saturn erinnert, trägt ein Zitat aus Unerzählt (auf Deutsch): „Unerzählt bleibt die Geschichte der abgewandten Gesichter“.
This leads on to musings on the phenomenon of vanishing twins, where one embryo absorbs another, with the link to Stanbridge’s own feeling about his brother – this a passage I marked from early in the book, but which resonated with the closing pages:
You sit beside me, even across me, half inside, wherever I am, and you hold my hand, and you make me speak, and here I am now, telling these tales. Everything is desire. Sometimes you will speak back, with hushed voice, conciliatory. Sometimes you will tear back into the past with the same words you used then, persuaded you were intentionally destroyed. You were never my twin but it feels as if that is how it must have been. Either way, it is all just desire. Stories grow out of me like branches from the trunk of a tree, and if they are later grown round and leave such obdurate knots within that one day the timber of me will be useful for nothing but firewood, then that's life — or death.
A dense read – the 230 pages took me longer than a typical 500 page novel, and I feel I would need to re-read to fully appreciate the text – and the Sebaldian aspects at times errs towards the derivative, but ultimately this is an impressive, and moving, book.
4.5 stars.
September 20, 2022
I read this while on holiday in the Outer Hebrides with no internet connection. That's why I didn't post a review. The reason I didn't write one is more puzzling, but it is probably related to the fact that I wanted to look a few things up before I tried to capture my thoughts. Maybe I'll do that one day because this is an excellent and engrossing book to read.
November 6, 2022
I have always held that the ghost of W.G. Sebald lingers with a lot of adventurous literature, and most of the time he is credited in the process, which is something I like. The Sebaldian style consists of interesting facts and trivia which link into each other, giving the impression that the author is going on a long ramble and then at a crucial moment a traumatic life event is dropped into the narrative and all along all those facts are connected tot he traumatic event.
My Mind To Me A Kingdom is, starts with a description of the author looking up the North Sea and discovering that it went under a different name, which prompts him to investigate further and it leads into a fascination with rivers and caves. The book continues with discourses on horses, mathematics and trees.
The central theme of the book and the one all the discussions revolve around is Paul Stanbridge’s brother’s suicide. One can feel the loss and confusion Paul Stanbridge went through when the narrative shifts to this topic. Despite all the sections about lakes, horses, trees – living things, death does permeate the book. One feels that although we are in a world that evolves, shifts and is full of mystery, death is finite and lingers.
My Mind To Me A Kingdom is, is a personal book, one that has some decoration but one can plainly see this is Paul Stanbridge’s way of grieving, In fact throughout the book every time Stanbridge presents a different topic, it is because he remembers is brother, be it living in a run down cottage or staying with friends, the impact of his brother’s actions stick.
If this book is a form of catharsis, it is definitely an educational one but it is also proof how fragile the world we live in is – from people renaming a lake, interpretative drawing of horses to the end of life itself. There’s a fine balance and Paul Stanbridge brings that out excellently.
My Mind To Me A Kingdom is, starts with a description of the author looking up the North Sea and discovering that it went under a different name, which prompts him to investigate further and it leads into a fascination with rivers and caves. The book continues with discourses on horses, mathematics and trees.
The central theme of the book and the one all the discussions revolve around is Paul Stanbridge’s brother’s suicide. One can feel the loss and confusion Paul Stanbridge went through when the narrative shifts to this topic. Despite all the sections about lakes, horses, trees – living things, death does permeate the book. One feels that although we are in a world that evolves, shifts and is full of mystery, death is finite and lingers.
My Mind To Me A Kingdom is, is a personal book, one that has some decoration but one can plainly see this is Paul Stanbridge’s way of grieving, In fact throughout the book every time Stanbridge presents a different topic, it is because he remembers is brother, be it living in a run down cottage or staying with friends, the impact of his brother’s actions stick.
If this book is a form of catharsis, it is definitely an educational one but it is also proof how fragile the world we live in is – from people renaming a lake, interpretative drawing of horses to the end of life itself. There’s a fine balance and Paul Stanbridge brings that out excellently.
November 23, 2024
Might you speak, as did that other tree, in the best of dreams? Do you hold your bright beams still out in that timeless wood? Did there spring from your bark such blood from the wound of his knife? When I think of solitary you, you are many.
Did Yggdrasil quiver, with you, at the weight of him? Did the nine worlds shake? Did the four stags make bellow at the deathful shiver of it? Did Odin's horsetree make inquiry across the glade, to share stories of the long days and nights beneath his weight? How might himself to himself, and where is the sense in it?
Did Pan come at that time, to caulk his mortality with your saps? Did he tread hooves upon the bunched roots at your foot and make his characteristic chuckle? Did he lay a bouquet of mathematical flowers?
Did they knap flints beneath your spread? Did they feed fire with the storm-lost parts of you? At which bright spark did the gods brgin to spring out of your boughs and shape?
Did the springsprung squirrels make tracks about your maypole, over the deep-scarred bark? Did the urging buds know what was gathered in, and how they would burst open, and what now the difference? Do the birds still now sing within you?
Are you everything which they say you are? Which is every possibility, being as you are SIGN? Are you worldtree, everywhere, everyone? What is at your roots? You who connect what is beneath to what is above, what will we do when you are felled?
Is it possible, that where such bad has happened, has happened good?
If it is true, that you are dead at your centre, where then will the words be made? Does what was, become what will be, because of the Tree? When will you speak? [223–4]
dnf
January 24, 2023January 2023, 50pp: This is beautifully written - the narrator is trying to distract himself from the dead of his brother with the sea, which I found very relatable. When I was depressed, I also swam quite often and I remember finding a lot of comfort on diving to the bottom of the pool and being completely surrounded by water. When he talks about the seabed and being deep in a trench in the North Sea while he can't sleep, and how he investigates several map makers, it is so clear that he is drowning in grief in a very spare way. As some other reviews say, the author loops from related topics to related topics with enticing prose but it's not clicking with me at this time. I am keeping it on my shelf for the appropriate moment, though.
March 5, 2023
There’s no right or wrong way to do grief - sometimes makes us lose our minds, and sometimes it makes us carry out in-depth research into horse orientation and ocean bed mapping. Whenever the author gets too close to thinking about his brother’s suicide, he veers into (over)analysis - sometimes perhaps continuing his brother’s tangential thinking. In the course of the book he spirals closer, or at least making explicit what he will never touch. I was moved and frustrated equally.
July 8, 2022
This is stunning, one of the best things I have read in the last couple of years.
January 13, 2025
“I circle, and I ask questions, and I find that they are the same thing.” Paul Stanbridge’s My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is, another autobiographical novel published by Galley Beggar Press in the last six months, uses history, literature and the art of invention to circumnavigate the suicide of a brother, elliptically confronting-avoiding an unbearable moment, an unbearable fact. “It was at a particularly difficult period of my life, one which I continue to find myself unable to look at directly, that I first began to develop an interest in the toponymy of the North Sea.” As Stanbridge contemplates caves, horses, trees — the three parts of this novel — a picture of his brother, loving and fraught with the various complications of life, family, and mental illness, emerges, alongside haunting images of his suffering, his death, and Stanbridge’s grief in the years following. “Deep at the heart of things, time slows to a stop. This is why I am here and like this, held in this fleshy body”. In its complex motions, its swathes of light and dark, this novel is a work of elegy, remembrance (“Everywhere, echoes.”), celebrating the spirit, “a current to existence that — the body adopting its rhythms and resonances — smudges the edges of the self”, reckoning with the expansive territories of the human mind, where the potential of exalting heights is ever bound to the threat of shadowy depths. Despite, or maybe because of, the core narrative conflict (“If I am honest with myself - but of course I cannot be honest with myself. I cannot see because two worlds collide.”), it is as engrossing as it is moving.
October 14, 2022
Wow, what a book, what a trip through a mind saturated with grief!
Paul Stanbridge's brilliant 'auto-fiction' My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is, published by the wonderful Galley Beggar, leads us tentatively with an almost begrudging at first hand, on a journey crammed with the bizarre, full of wonder, as the narrator embarks on an achingly frustrating search for distraction from the inevitable - from coming to terms with the recent death of his brother.
In each near-impossible quest, Paul drags us under the surface of surfeits of information, data, facts stories and untruths about his obsessions. We are pulled deep under the North Sea to the washed-out realms of Doggerland exploring the fathoms of a scarred landscape; dragged high up chalky hillsides where men have attempted to imprint their own marks on the land and through forests where the extensive evidence of death and decay entwine beautifully with the persistent sinew of life.
In all these distractions, in dark underwater caves where dream and reality coincide, on lonely liminal places steeped in ancient and recent history, amongst the arboreal long-time witnesses to our incomprehensibly short lives and potent deaths, the narrator finds that the further he allows himself to drift from his grief the closer he finds himself to the darkness he is afraid to face.
Paul Stanbridge's brilliant 'auto-fiction' My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is, published by the wonderful Galley Beggar, leads us tentatively with an almost begrudging at first hand, on a journey crammed with the bizarre, full of wonder, as the narrator embarks on an achingly frustrating search for distraction from the inevitable - from coming to terms with the recent death of his brother.
In each near-impossible quest, Paul drags us under the surface of surfeits of information, data, facts stories and untruths about his obsessions. We are pulled deep under the North Sea to the washed-out realms of Doggerland exploring the fathoms of a scarred landscape; dragged high up chalky hillsides where men have attempted to imprint their own marks on the land and through forests where the extensive evidence of death and decay entwine beautifully with the persistent sinew of life.
In all these distractions, in dark underwater caves where dream and reality coincide, on lonely liminal places steeped in ancient and recent history, amongst the arboreal long-time witnesses to our incomprehensibly short lives and potent deaths, the narrator finds that the further he allows himself to drift from his grief the closer he finds himself to the darkness he is afraid to face.
February 25, 2023
I'm giving it 4 stars because I think I need to read it again. I must admit that at the very beginning, with all the information about maps and the North Sea, I thought it would be an strenuous reading. I was wrong. As the associations unfold and I started to see how each page was carrying so much meaning, I became really involved with the reflection, with the grief and the heaviness of the two lives/brothers.
However, I found it easier to get lost myself when reading. Then out of nothing there was a marvelous fragment and my mind would come back to the book. I'm sure if I read it again I'll see many more fragments that I missed, so I'll save my 5 stars for this second moment.
However, I found it easier to get lost myself when reading. Then out of nothing there was a marvelous fragment and my mind would come back to the book. I'm sure if I read it again I'll see many more fragments that I missed, so I'll save my 5 stars for this second moment.
March 15, 2023
I just finished it, and I was speechless, I wouldn't know who to recommend this book to but I think it came to me at an excellent time to help me meditate on my anxiety about death.
Maybe I'll give it one more star. I'll have to meditate on how I feel about it with the passing of time.
Maybe I'll give it one more star. I'll have to meditate on how I feel about it with the passing of time.
June 9, 2023
Een moeilijk boek waarin heldere passages afgewisseld werden met onnavolgbare. Genoot er soms van, was dan weer totaal afgeleid. 3.5 ster
March 16, 2024
Fascinating
I loved this book, particularly through the chapters of maps and the North Sea. A sad and beautiful journey through dealing with grief.
I loved this book, particularly through the chapters of maps and the North Sea. A sad and beautiful journey through dealing with grief.
May 18, 2025
I struggled a lot at the beginning of this book. The author presents this book as a mourning process but the result is more of a diary. He takes the reader through stories and research while denying his process. Sometimes the sentences are beautifully written but other times its just unnecessarily complicated. This book was just ups and downs for me, where sometimes I was captivated by the writing and other times it was just painful to go through.
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