Waterland (Picador Classic)

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In 1992, a film version of Waterland was released, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and starring Jeremy Irons. The adaptation retained some major plot points but moved the contemporary location to Pittsburgh, and eliminated many of the extensive historical asides. 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-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant busi-ness. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.’

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.’ What is drawn is no happy story, but it feels real. We read of the discovery and awakening of sexual desire. Of incest, mental retardation, jealousy and envy. Abortion and deaths. A father fights in the First World War and his son in the Second World War. By doing so, he makes himself a part of the history he is teaching, relating his tales to local history and genealogy. The headmaster, Lewis, tries to entice Tom into taking an early retirement. Tom resists this because his leaving would mean that the History Department would cease to exist and would be combined with the broader area of General Studies. Tom's wife is arrested for snatching a baby. The publicity that attends her arrest reflects badly on the school, and Tom is told that he now must retire. In response, he uses his impending forced retirement as an excuse to recount a story to his students. The pivot of Waterland focuses on both the past in 1943, and the present time thirty years after – all related through the eyes of Tom as an adolescent. 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. 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.

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Do we all live in the fens of history, I dare to ask? And is there more to it than trying to keep our heads above the water of its recurring floods? 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. 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

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. 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.”Graham Swift’s extraordinary masterpiece—a finalist for the Booker Prize—WATERLAND weaves together eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as Greek tragedy into one epic story. Is history simply a record of past mistakes? How do religious beliefs fit into the picture? Can knowledge of past events make us better people? With knowledge can we make better decisions? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Life without curiosity is a dead end. If you have curiosity, how can one stop asking why, why, why as life unrolls? If you are a person who incessantly asks why, the need for history is a given. 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! Atmosferiškas, gilus, persmelktas pelkių, vandens ir cikliškumo pasakojimas. Emociškai sunkus kaip švinas, bet teikiantis begalinį pasimėgavimą! The telling shifts this way and that in time. The telling is fragmentary and nonlinear. This is a technique that usually does not appeal to me, but it works here!