But, although there is a wealth of description of what a geisha does, there is very little exploration of how she feels. Golden seems loth to leave a single thing out.Although the story takes place over 30 years, starting in the late 1920s, Golden makes no attempt to integrate the heroine’s development with that of the wider world. This is no Farewell My Concubine (even if the beatings are as savage). He fills the book with fascinating details, such as the geisha’s use of face cream made from nightingale droppings and their need to sleep on wooden stands rather than pillows in order to protect their elaborately coiffed hair. Gion exists apart from the rest of society (when the geishas attend a function at Kyoto university, they are greeted with amusement by the students). Sayuri admits she knows nothing about politics; it is only when forced by the war to leave the city that she acknowledges anything beyond her own concerns.This would not be a problem were those concerns examined in any depth. Unfortunately, this background atmosphere comes to overwhelm the book.
Rose Tremain recently advised that the key to writing a historical novel was do the research and then to forget it. They tell the story of her life in a small fishing village up to her mother’s death and her sale, aged eight, to an okiya (geisha house) in the Gion district of Kyoto. Here, she encounters her fellow apprentice, Pumpkin, and the beautiful but vicious geisha Hatsumomo, on whose income the establishment depends.Golden offers an exhaustive account of the geisha’s training, from the formal lessons in singing, dancing and the tea ceremony, to the all-important relationships with men. Not since Allan Gurganus’s Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All has an American debutant adopted such an exotic persona. Gurganus’s heroine was, at least, his compatriot, whereas Sayuri, the geisha at the heart of these fictionalised memoirs, comes from not only an alien culture but a hidden world.Sayuri’s memoirs, ostensibly dictated to a Dutch translator, reveal Golden to have great gifts of imaginative empathy. There is also less of the sly humour that laces the Scottish pieces, as a lack of conviction occasionally sours what is otherwise a taste-pleasing sample of the novelist’s short treats.. Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden
Chatto & Windus, pounds 9.99Few writers can have so effectively scotched the notion of a first novel as thinly disguised autobiography as Arthur Golden.
An advent tale closes with a man holding a baby in a brightly-lit window; elsewhere an advertising man’s exploitative instincts are subject to an ironic reversal.An acidness sneaks in, as McWilliam probes a housewife’s bored strivings and shows a keen ear for class spite. The great vividness of hot greasy seafood eaten in a cold, liquor-braced air brings to mind E Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, as does McWilliam’s awareness of the ways fish punish and replenish these people’s lives – such as the Aberdeen teenagers’ savouring of cod-roe fry and pineapple fritters along a romantic night-walk.Stories in the English section begin to lose their distinction, however, falling into conceits shaped to particular commissions and anthologies. For sharpness of style I’d say Scotland has England beat hands down. Readers of McWilliam’s novel Debatable Land will not be surprised by the luminous clarity of her descriptions of air, island, rock, water and “the settling grey cloud with its violent edge of light”.
McWilliam’s intelligence alights on rare moments when her characters perceive a fragment of past through a bright prism of present. She is alert to delicacies such as the way houses can be loved like lovers, or family – and to the deep, enduring print of place.The book is divided, as Edinburgh-born McWilliam may be herself, into North and South. “She had been raised on bread and dripping, so meatily, richly, delicious, its memory gave you a wet mouth.” The stories feature spoiling couples and lone, ageing ladies, flights of drunkenness or lust at a funeral or in an old people’s home. In the most affecting, McWilliam investigates the diverging perceptions of twos: a young couple’s disparate lies and concealments; or a pair of old friends, one settled in the country with a new baby, the other a mobile phonecall away from dubious dates with men called Fordyce.
Wait Till I Tell You by Candia McWilliam
Bloomsbury, pounds 14.99
The title of Candia McWilliam’s story collection suggests a breathless urgency – the kind of stories that talk right off the page, as Grace Paley’s do But McWilliam’s are quieter, more interior. These pieces are sharp glances and eccentric explorations that make us wait – pleasurably – for their slow, subtle graces to dawn on us.On the whole the people McWilliam writes about are neither generous nor rich, though her own fluid language is generally both. While his book represents an incremental advance in our understanding of , Lottman’s “pioneering” work remains, well, pioneering.. During the filming of a television programme the producer called out “Hey, Albert!” to a technician with the same first name. Thinking he was being addressed over-familiarly, snapped that he should be referred to as “Monsieur !”The English version of this biography has been reduced by more than 300 pages from the original French. Todd is also good on the way that, in the wake of his break with Sartre and as a result of his besieged position on the Algerian war, became a prematurely desolate figure. His winning the Nobel coincided with his reputation reaching a low ebb in France.Todd rightly emphasises that, in Sartre’s harsh phrase, there was a “sombre, self-importance” about.