Ravens and Starlings Too – 13/07/2024

As Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she has time to look about her and wonder what will happen next. She falls past cupboards and shelves, looks at maps and picks up a jar labelled ‘Orange Marmalade.’ The jar is empty, otherwise one imagines that she would have tested the truth of the label and tried its contents. She wonders what will happen if she falls right through the earth and comes out the other side. In The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner offered an answer to this question, though he is flummoxed, not unfairly, by trying to answer why a raven is like a writing desk.

It was this scene that I thought of initially, and only later the chess game itself in Through the Looking Glass, as we discussed A Chess Story by Stefan Zweig at the short fiction group on Tuesday. I was thinking about puzzles, about logic, about what questions one must ask to gather enough information to turn mystery into clarity. I was trying to imagine having time and capacity to assess one’s next move in a game of chess, unperturbed as pieces fell. What might it be like to be able to visualise the next five or six moves? To play a whole game off the board? To play against oneself?

I hasten to add that I can barely play chess on the board. My game is more akin to Alice in the early stages of her story: sampling potions just because their labels advise me to do so.

A Chess Story is a fascinating novella which has nothing and everything to do with chess. You will not glean much about how to play chess. You will learn why chess matters. Chess, we are told, is the ‘singularity among the pastimes men have invented, which steps magnificently out from under the tyranny of chance to award its laurels only to the intellect.’ It is science, art, ancient, new, mechanical, imaginative, ‘more lasting in its forms and history than any works or books…’ And it is the ‘laughable task of backing a wooden king into the angle of a wooden board.’

A Chess Story could be a titanic battle of ambition, logic and imagination as two great players fight the most intellectual of battles. But at its heart it is a story of men treating others as worse than pawns. It shows how a regime can destroy a person.

The shelves lining the rabbit hole down which I fell this week were all full of puzzles (and lacking in marmalade).  

In Rosarita by Anita Desai, a woman visiting Mexico to study Spanish sits on a bench in a sun-soaked park to read the newspaper. A stranger interrupts her. The stranger knew her mother. Her mother sat in this exact spot when she came here to study art. Bonita insists that the woman is mistaken; her mother never left India for Mexico let alone pursued painting. This woman is mad or a confidence trickster.

Yet some of the illogical things The Stranger says start to sound like answerable riddles. There was one picture in her childhood home which did not go with the other carefully chosen decoration. Could her mother have pushed against the traditional role expected of her? Could she have left India? Was there something hidden in her mother’s family history, cards left unturned?

The Stranger, The Trickster, the woman speaking nonsense and adopting new roles each time she changes her clothes leads Bonita to look anew at the Partition of India, at the Mexican Revolution and at the art that found links between them.

How the book evokes all this in fewer than one hundred pages is a remarkable enigma of its own. Reading Rosarita has led me to begin Broken Threads by Mishal Husain, a history of partition told through the stories of her grandparents who were all moved to Pakistan and witnessed the violence of 1947. From unfinished memoirs, cassette tape recordings, photographs, letters and a piece of a sari, Husein pulls together the threads of this personal and national story.

Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski also draws the reader into an intricate puzzle. Each chapter focuses on a different woman, tangentially or deeply connected with Lucy who has died at a house party. It is a heady experience: entering the well-drawn lives of each new character, seeking connections, getting twisted in the web as one longs for the truth. I was utterly gripped – no time to attempt looking ahead to Grabowski’s next move as the stories propel you backwards to what happened on that night.

For the pattern spotters, Giorgio Parisi’s In A Flight of Starlings examines the synchronised movement of starlings, a marvellous wonder which for him inspired investigations into the principles of physics and understanding complex systems. Alongside the research itself, the Nobel Prize-winner makes a passionate argument for good scientific writing which illuminates and promotes trust in discoveries and reflects on the falsity of drawing boundaries between science and culture.

His research is fascinating but please don’t ask me to explain anything about it. Chess and complex systems are not my forte. I do enjoy the interplay between a poem and its reader, a conundrum to which one can return again and again. Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo was inspired by the death of a young boy in 2001. The story haunted Odubanjo who mourned for him and cried out against his treatment through this extraordinary poetry, itself published posthumously.

Tonight in the Arcade we continue celebrating poetry with Jonathan Edwards and Adam Elms. Tickets are available online or in the shop; we look forward to welcoming you with a glass of something fizzing at 6pm.

Finally, two great questions are answered in our current favourite picture books:

We have lots of events coming up, including at the RWA this Thursday and myriad book groups you may wish to join. Chess Club is not yet in session.

May your weekend offer starlings, unimpeded by clouds,
Lizzie

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