Waterland (Picador Classic)

Product Information

Waterland is a story about storytelling, a narrative about narration that analyses the meaning and the necessity of history.

A formidably intelligent book—animated by an impressive, angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need.”— The New York Review of Books Tai viena tų istorijų, kurioje man nėra labai svarbu iki kur nuves, kaip baigsis. Joje svarbu būti, išgyventi, jausti. Ir nors tikrai buvo smalsu, kaip ta baigta dėlionė atrodys, procesas džiugino daug labiau! Mėgavausi, kai buvau viliojama ir už rankos vedama, pastūmiama prireikus, ar tiesiogiai pabaksnojama faktais prieš akis.💛 There are no compasses for journeying in time. As far as our sense of direction in this unchartable dimension is concerned, we are like lost travellers in a desert. We believe we are going forward...but how do we know that we are not moving in a great circle?"

Preferences

There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.” Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.” As critics and reviewers have pointed out there are similarities with Great Expectations and Absalom, Absalom: post-modern retellings which question narrative itself. Of course the material of the stories refuses to be shaped by them. There’s a great deal of water (this is the Fens!) and lots of water related motifs and symbols. It also fairly deftly jumps between the quaint and the macabre. This is an amalgam of lots of ideas which actually works rather well. And don’t forget the eels! Atmosferiškas, gilus, persmelktas pelkių, vandens ir cikliškumo pasakojimas. Emociškai sunkus kaip švinas, bet teikiantis begalinį pasimėgavimą! Bir tarih öğretmenimiz var ve onun kişisel tarihi, ailevi tarihi, meslek olarak tarihçiliği –tarihte kesintiye gidiyoruz- ve dünyanın sonunun tarihi özel bir anda eşzamanlı olarak çökmek ya da kitaba yaraşır bir şekilde söylemek gerekirse batmak üzeredir ama hiç batmamış olsak da biliriz ki batma eylemi bir çırpıda gerçekleşmez, zamana yayılır, ağır ağır gerçekleşir, yardım çığlıkları, ağıtlar, küfürler ve söylenmeler batış anına eşlik eder. Son kertede çırpınmadan geriye determinizm kalır, olması gereken olur ya da kitaba uygun bir şekilde söylemek gerekirse akacak kan bacak arasında durmaz. Ama yine biliriz ki “bebeklerin sevgiden neşet etmesi” gibi tarihte hikayelerden neşet eder.

I'm not kidding. This book gets a little ridiculous. It's a semi-Postmodern text examining the difficulty of writing Realism in a Postmodern era, but it goes off on romantic (not Romantic) tangents about natural history and cultural history and all, in a very Julian Barnes ( A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters) way. Then it goes into creepy, Stephen King-esque scenes with the children exploring the two great draws in life: sex and death. (The only constants, heh.) I ended up wishing either Stephen King or Julian Barnes had written it, and focused on it - as it is, the tension is uneasy, and yet uneasy in a way that really contributes to the novel and its aims. Although I do love how the idea of storytelling is played with in this novel: the idea that we can't bear reality without the stories we create to endow it with meaning, because otherwise reality is too strong, too harsh, and will overpower us. But again, that's very Barnes. Tom is the narrator of the story. He starts in the present, the 1980s. He is being forced into retirement. Why? Decreased funding or something else? Instead of delivering dry lectures he decides to tell of his own ancestors, his years as a teenager growing up in the Fens, the coastal lands of East Anglia, and of his marriage. He weaves himself into history. Why? Because personal stories make history relevant. Kaip aš jums noriu papasakoti apie šią knygą, ir kartu kaip jaudinuosi, kad neužteks žodžių, kad nežinau nuo ko pradėti. O jausmų tiek daug ir gilių kilo, ir nesu tikra, ar visus juos įžodint galiu.

The left side of my brain admired the novel’s ambition and scope. The right side of my brain remained detached and I was unable to stay immersed.

There is an excitement, a sense of tension that builds in the novel. You want to know more and more and more. A sentence is started and then left hanging. You know exactly what was to be said but is then not said. This writing style is unusual; I have not run into it before. It’s good, very good. It draws your attention, keeps you alert and adds suspense. There is an underlying satirical tone that has you questioning what is implied. The prose is thought provoking. Vienu metu galvojau, kad kiek primena Gabriel Garcia Marquez kūrybą. Riba tarp istorijos ir mito čia labai plona. Ir kaip viską išpainiot, kaip sudėliot į logiškus stalčiukus, o galiausiai - ar to išvis reikia? 🙂 Pasakojimuose man patinka, kai ši riba slysčioja tai šen tai ten. Kai tikra gali būt ir netikra. Kai vaizduotei paliekama vietos. Kažkas magiško ir nuostabaus! O]nly animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. Man, man – let me offer you a definition – is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right.’ Swift spins a tale of empire-building, land reclamation, brewers and sluice-minders, bewhiskered Victorian patriarchs, insane and visionary relicts . . . A book of strange, insidious, unsettling power.”— Books and Bookmen I enjoyed the slow, circular process of reading Waterland. I especially savored the parallel structure and imagery embedded in the prose. The novel's protagonist and storyteller is a history teacher. Swift's method of using the teacher's lessons to tell the stories in the book gives the novel a sense of breaking down the fourth wall.It has a strong and veritable bearing on today, this history, the past, that incident; incidents. It shapes, shakes, cautions, humiliates, and intimidates – this history. The Norwich, Gildsey, Peterborough railway was introduced primarily as a passenger service but, by enabling cheap freight transportation, also contributed to the emergence of rail as the principal artery of agricultural trade in mid-nineteenth century East Anglia, overtaking inland waterways, with radical implications for the region’s economy and socio-political fabric. In his 2017 lecture to the British Academy, John Burnside discussed an important strand of British fiction over the last thirty years – exemplified by work by Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe and Michael Bracewell – in which the growth of ‘cultural totalitarianism’ has engendered a profound grief for the consequent loss of communal and ritual life, as well as for the land itself which has been ‘savagely degraded’ over the same period. In this extract, he talks about the 1983 novel Waterland by Graham Swift.