Reading for the book club

I have been enjoying my sojourn with Virginia Woolf. I liked "To the Lighthouse" although I got on better with the first part than the second. Then I tried "Jacob's Room" which I could see was not as successful as the other, greater novels, because it was earlier and she was feeling her way with her impressionistic technique, which meant that some of the time it was hard to understand what on earth was going on. Jacob was there as a blocky smudge, as his impressions of others and their impressions of him.

Then I went to the book club book: "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan, and its ideas of what matters enough to record, and what is the truth, are so entirely different that it knocks one's head sideways. But here there's a boldness and confidence about what matters that's dizzying and the writer has no truck with gentleness. It's as though the bright colours and reality of hard Australian trees and extreme climate has trained him to write in a hard, bright way.

Yet there are surprising similarities about what matters, Flanagan writes about death and VW was no stranger to death; before she was eighteen her mother, sister, brother and father had died; it seemed that they were always at deathbeds, and grief and bereftness comes into the three books I have read - that intrusive, unnecessary bloody death in "Mrs Dalloway" for example.. VW felt the importance of returning to reading the classics, like Flanagan's protagonist.  Flanagan is struggling with the truth just as much as Virginia Woolf, he is also asking what is true, for example, about heroism.

Sometimes in my life, what is given as truth and what I understand as truth are very different, and I think, I must record that, I must write this discrepancy down -  and I don't support the idea that there is no truth. I look sideways and I say nothing, but I know what is true. But I may be seen as a different character whose version of the truth is distorted.

It's a mast year again, and all the oak trees are productive together - acorns fall on my roof from time to time and I like to hear that clunk and roll.