Space Saving

 One and a quarter inches of shelf space, £6.81 and the accompanying carbon footprint were saved by reading books from the library rather than ordering them this week. Multiply that by 52, or in fact by 73 because the two books took 5 days to read, and that makes over 7 feet six inches of shelf space and almost £500 a year if we calculate the savings the way a government might. It wouldn't be quite that much because I might not read two books in five days for a year, some titles will have to be bought, etc. but it does rather advertise the benefits of the library which I, for one, have for so long overlooked.

It will keep the Portsmouth libraries busy moving my orders to Copnor library but they seem to want to do it. Not every book I want will be in their catalogue, like not apparently Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry but it's quite possible something like a yard of shelf space and maybe £200's worth of orders might be saved.

This wek's two books picked from their shelves were Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata and Ancient Light by John Banville. They were both worth reading but it's not necessary for copies of them to be kept upstairs for future reference.

Kawabata first came to my notice when Colin Webb's legendary one-man operation in Cornwall was called the Kawabata Press and published Sepia magazine and some of the first poems I had in print. Like Yukio Mishima, Kawabata committed suicide. In 1962. Perhaps in the same way that Japanese, or even English, readers might think that Dickens, Trollope and a litany of other C19th English novelists seem similar, Kawabata's novel had at least superficial things in common with novelists like Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Mishims himself and others one might mention. It is full of raw emotional confession, the characters much more vulnerable and open to their own analysis than we usually expect in Eng Lit. Even the detail of Keiko's impossibly beautiful ears is carried forward into Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase and 1Q84, in which they can 'stop traffic'. 

Japanese literature spends more time contemplating such extremes, or that which seem like extremes to the more downbeat, ironic English and 'beauty' is more highly prized. I came to it originally in a feature in The Observer on cult fiction in the 1990's in which books like The Naked Lunch, On the Road et al were given symbols for horror, drugs, sex and such categories and Banana's Kitchen ticked every box. But it was the short stories in Lizard that I was more taken with and I became a Yoshimoto, and particularly a Murakami, reader ever since. 

One can hardly call John Banville a 'discovery', with him being a major contemporary novelist and Booker Prize winner. He's not on the shelves upstairs but I remember The Sea, and Ancient Light is no less compelling for the quality of the writing. It might be suspected of being a fraction over-written if one thinks that the best prose is like glass and you don't notice it but Banville's is noticeable when it's just that fraction too good. It can be sensual, as it needs to be in this story, but its perceptions go beyond the merely necessary into a kind of 'poetry', for want of a better word,

He had a remarkably small and disproportionate head, which gave one the illusion that one was always farther off from him than was in fact the case.

 

If there's another Banville ready and waiting on the library shelves on Monday, it's likely to get chosen ahead of the daunting 850 pages of David Copperfield or any other Dickens I find myself dutifully taking home but one can take home an armful and discard them if need be. It's just that what is on the shelves and not moved in from other libraries might not last me long. However, it's hard to believe that such a service is still provided for the sake of its own greatness, having been neglected by funding programmes and me for so long. I'm going to give it all the support I can. 

It transpires that Ancient Light is the final part of a trilogy that began with Eclipse and Shroud. One wouldn't have known, it was entire of itself, but there's two obvious choices to read in the wrong order.