Katariina Kottonen > Recent Status Updates

“[Frances] read the information sheet the library woman had given her, with its regulations and list of opening times. There was only one indication that life in Saudi had its tiny upsets. ‘PLEASE,’ begged the hand-out, ‘make EVERY effort to return your books if you have to leave the Kingdom hurriedly and unexpectedly.’”

“‘Haven’t they heard of seatbelts?’ Frances inquired.

‘Bit of a dodgy concept,’ Andrew said. ‘Allah has appointed a term to every life.’

‘Who tells you this stuff?’

‘Oh, guys at work.’”

‘But clearly they are not for walking on, she thought. Men drive cars; women stay at home. Pavements are a buffer zone, to prevent the cars from running into the buildings.’ (2/2)

‘Every few yards it was necessary to step down from the eighteen-inch curb and into the gutter; the municipality had planted saplings, etiolated and ill-doing plants inside concrete rectangles, and it did not seem to have occurred to anyone that the saplings would block the pavements, and the pavements are for walking on.’ (1/2)

‘I didn’t know that on that first day I was setting into a pattern, a routine, drifting around the flat alone, maybe reading for a bit, doing this and that, and daydreaming. I can see now that it will need a great effort not to let my whole life fall into this pattern.’

The comparison with The Turn of the Screw on the front cover makes more sense now.

The overall impression of the life our heroes are provided with in the Saudi Kingdom is that of hostile comfort.

‘Turadup and William are dead and forgotten now, but the son of Schaper is still around, and the company’s recent success is due in no small part to his ready and willing adaptation to Middle Eastern business practices: tardiness, doublespeak, and graft.’

There is a lonely shoe, with the other one having gone missing after the customs. There is also a huge cockroach, met in the bathroom and then, in the living-room. I am rather surprised our heroine did not arrange for a meeting between the shoe and the insect.

‘In Africa there was no need to keep a diary to convince yourself you had an interesting life. Things were always happening. The garden boy would get syphilis, for instance. Perhaps it is a relief not to have household help.’

‘With the thrusting arms, and the weaving bodies, it was soon impossible to distinguish the Deputy Minister from the mill of petitioners; and the whole resembled nothing so much as a basket of laundry animated by a poltergeist.’

‘With hindsight she would think, if I had known then what I know now, I would have moved, I would have looked, I would have noticed everything and written it down; and my response would not have been boredom, but fear.’

Do not layer the foreshadowing too thickly, will you? (2/2)

‘Later she would remember quite clearly these first few minutes alone on Ghazzah Street, these tired, half-automatic actions; how her first, her original response to Jeddah had been boredom, inertia, a disinclination to move from the bed or look out of the window to see what was going on outside.’ (1/2)

It seemed to me at first that the perspective is that of our main female character, Frances Shore; and so it was strange to then follow her husband's motions in close third. He, Andrew, is less present and less fleshed-out — but that might change. It may also prove a device. (3/3)

Most matters appear either understated or presented with exaggeration, depending on the character; both approaches introduce a credible, life-like sense of unreliability. (2/3)

Having read the first (and, so far, just the first) chapter, 'September 1984. In Flight', I would declare the book intelligent: both in the structure and in the delivery. The ending of the section satisfyingly takes you back to the beginning — while also re-introducing the unclear threat on the horizon. (1/3)

‘I must like it, she thought. I shall try to like it. When everyone is so negative about a place you begin to suspect it must have some virtues after all.’

“‘Are you sure that this is the right thing to do?’ she said. ‘Is this what you want?’

‘They’re doubling my salary,’ he said flatly.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’

She turned away and bent over the tea-chest again, cleanly stabbed by avarice, like a peach with a silver knife.”

“The woman held up her coffee cup. He swayed towards her with the pot. ‘Non-dairy creamer, Madam?’

‘I always wonder about this stuff,’ she said, accepting the foil packet. ‘It says what it isn’t, but not what it is.’

‘That’s life,’ the steward said.”

‘V. H. Drummond’, credited as the book’s illustrator, stands for Violet Hilda Drummond (1911–2000), a British children’s author and illustrator of the 1930-1970s. Pictures for later books in the Carbonel series were created by other artists (but Drummond’s hand can be seen in the illustrations for Lawrence Durrell and Helen Cresswell, among others).

I love this book. I love this book! It is written with such humbling erudition, with such passion for its subject, with such masterful possession of language that it is impossible not to enjoy it.

Allan Nevins (1890–1971), American historian and journalist, known for his extensive work on the history of the Civil War and biographies of American statesmen and magnates.

[NB! Here and earlier, the source of biographical information in my notes is either Wikipedia or Britannica; the former more often than the latter.]

Charles Beard: referring to Charles A. Beard (1874–1948), American historian, professor at Columbia University. Beard's works included a radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed to be more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles.

"The modern idea of testing a reader's 'comprehension', as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending?"

H-O: the abbreviation stands for Hornby's Oats, an oat milling company founded by Alexander Hornby in New York, in the 1880s. The advertising for H-O oatmeal, the main product, was ubiquitous into the 1930s.

Fulling-Mill: 'fulling mill', a mill in which cloth is fulled.

Frank Presbrey (1855–1936), 20th-century advertising pioneer, author of The History and Development of Advertising (1929).

'...the history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered, all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment.'

James Mill: ostensibly, referring to James Mill (1773–1836), Scottish historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher.

Stephen Vincent Benet (1898–1943), American poet, short story writer, and novelist.

Natty Bumppo: referring to Nathaniel 'Natty' Bumppo, the protagonist of the novels by James Fenimore Cooper.