Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Franz Kafka / The Metamorphosis


Franz kafka
THE METAMORPHOSIS
Leizip, 1916, first edition
Franz Kafka
BIOGRAPHY
The Metamorphosis

I

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly stay in place and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.
What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet within its four familiar walls. Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur hat on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!
Gregor's eyes turned next to the window, and the overcast sky—one could hear raindrops beating on the window gutter—made him quite melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done, for he was accustomed to sleep on his right side and in his present condition he could not turn himself over. However violently he forced himself toward his right side he always rolled onto his back again. He tried it at least a hundred times, shutting his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs, and only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never felt before.
Oh God, he thought, what an exhausting job I've picked out for myself! On the road day in, day out. It's much more irritating work than doing the actual business in the home office, and on top of that there's the trouble of constant traveling, of worrying about train connections, the bad food and irregular meals, casual acquaintances that are always new and never become intimate friends. The devil take it all! He felt a slight itching up on his belly, slowly pushed himself on his back nearer to the top of the bed so that he could lift his head more easily, identified the itching place which was surrounded by many small white spots the nature of which he could not understand and was about to touch it with a leg, but drew the leg back immediately, for the contact made a cold shiver run through him.
He slid down again into his former position. This getting up early, he thought, can make an idiot out of anyone. A man needs his sleep. Other salesmen live like harem women. For instance, when I come back to the hotel in the morning to write up my orders these others are only sitting down to breakfast. Let me just try that with my boss; I’d be fired on the spot. Anyhow, that might be quite a good thing for me, who can tell? If I didn't have to hold back because of my parents I'd have given notice long ago, I'd have gone to the boss and told him exactly what I think of him. That would knock him right off his desk! It's a peculiar habit of his, too, sitting on top of the desk like that and talking down to employees, especially when they have to come quite near because the boss is hard of hearing. Well, there's still hope; once I've saved enough money to pay back my parents' debts to him—that should take another five or six years—I'll do it without fail. I’ll cut my ties completely then. For the moment, though, I'd better get up, since my train leaves at five.
He looked at the alarm clock ticking on the chest of drawers. Heavenly Father! he thought. It was half-past six and the hands were quietly moving on, it was even past the half-hour, it was getting on toward a quarter to seven. Had the alarm clock not gone off? From the bed one could see that it had been properly set for four o'clock; of course it must have gone off. Yes, but was it possible to sleep quietly through that ear-splitting noise? Well, he had not slept quietly, yet apparently all the more soundly for that. But what was he to do now? The next train went at seven o'clock; to catch that he would need to hurry like mad and his samples weren't even packed, and he himself wasn't feeling particularly fresh and energetic. And even if he did catch the train he couldn't avoid a tirade from the boss, since the messenger boy must have been waiting for the five o'clock train and must have long since reported his failure to turn up. This messenger was a creature of the boss's, spineless and stupid. Well, supposing he were to say he was sick? But that would be very awkward and would look suspicious, since during his five years’ employment he had not been ill once. The boss himself would be sure to come with the health insurance doctor, would reproach his parents for their son's laziness, and would cut all excuses short by handing the matter over to the insurance doctor, who of course regarded all mankind as perfectly healthy malingerers. And would he be so far wrong in this case? Gregor really felt quite well, apart from a drowsiness that was quite inexcusable after such a long sleep, and he was even unusually hungry.
As all this was running through his mind at top speed without his being able to decide to leave his bed—the alarm clock had just struck a quarter to seven—there was a cautious tap at the door near the head of his bed. "Gregor," said a voice—it was his mother's—"it's a quarter to seven. Didn't you have a train to catch?" That gentle voice! Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice answering hers, unmistakably his own voice, it was true, but with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone, which left the words in their clear shape only for the first moment and then rose up reverberating around them to destroy their sense, so that one could not be sure one had heard them rightly. Gregor wanted to answer at length and explain everything, but in the circumstances he confined himself to saying: "Yes, yes, thank you, Mother, I'm getting up now." The wooden door between them must have kept the change in his voice from being noticeable outside, for his mother contented herself with this statement and shuffled away. Yet this brief exchange of words had made the other members of the family aware that Gregor was, strangely, still at home, and at one of the side doors his father was already knocking, gently, yet with his fist. "Gregor, Gregor," he called, "What's the matter with you?" And after a little while he called again in a deeper voice: "Gregor! Gregor!" At the other side door his sister was saying in a low, plaintive tone: "Gregor? Aren't you well? Do you need anything?" He answered them both at once: "I'm just about ready," and did his best to make his voice sound as normal as possible by enunciating the words very clearly and leaving long pauses between them. So his father went back to his breakfast, but his sister whispered: "Gregor, open the door, I beg you." However, he was not thinking of opening the door, and felt thankful for the prudent habit he had acquired on the road of locking all doors during the night, even at home.
His immediate intention was to get up quietly without being disturbed, to put on his clothes and above all eat his breakfast, and only then to consider what else had to be done, since he was well aware his meditations would come to no sensible conclusion if he remained in bed. He remembered that often enough in bed he had felt small aches and pains, probably caused by lying in awkward positions, which had proved purely imaginary once he got up, and he looked forward eagerly to seeing this morning's delusions gradually evaporate. That the change in his voice was nothing but the precursor of a bad cold, a typical ailment of traveling salesmen, he had not the slightest doubt.
To get rid of the quilt was quite easy; he had only to inflate himself a little and it fell off by itself. But the next move was difficult, especially because he was so unusually broad. He would have needed arms and hands to hoist himself up; instead he had only the numerous little legs which never stopped waving in all directions and which he could not control in the least. When he tried to bend one of them the first thing it did was to stretch itself out straight; and if he finally succeeded in making it do what he wanted, all the other legs meanwhile waved the more wildly in the most painful anal unpleasant way. "But what's the use of lying idle in bed?" said Gregor to himself.
He thought that he might get out of bed with the lower part of his body first, but this lower part, which he had not yet seen and of which he could form no clear picture, proved too difficult to move; it shifted so slowly; and when finally, almost wild with annoyance, he gathered his forces together and thrust out recklessly, he had miscalculated the direction and bumped heavily against the lower end of the bed, and the stinging pain he felt informed him that precisely this lower part of his body was at the moment probably the most sensitive.
So he tried to get the top part of himself out first, and cautiously moved his head toward the edge of the bed. That proved easy enough, and despite its breadth and mass the bulk of his body at last slowly followed the movement of his head. Still, when he finally got his head free over the edge of the bed he felt too scared to go on advancing, for, after all, if he let himself fall in this way it would take a miracle to keep his head from being injured. And under no circumstances could he afford to lose consciousness now, precisely now; he would rather stay in bed.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Rachel Weisz interview / A spy in the house of love


Culture clash: while her husband Daniel Craig plays Bond, Rachel Weisz is soon to star in the new Bourne film.
 Photograph: Paola Kudacki

Rachel Weisz interview: A spy in the house of love


Since she started dating Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz has shunned the limelight. Even now, she remains at a distance. In the first interview since their marriage, she tells Carole Cadwalladr about her new MI5 thriller, kissing Bill Nighy – and what it's like having spooks in the family
Carole Cadwalladr
Sunday 28 August 2011 00.05 BST


O
h, it was very different the last time the Observer interviewed Rachel Weisz. Last time around, back in 2005, Weisz had yet to be propelled into the Hollywood A-list. The Constant Gardener, the film for which she would win an Oscar, was just on the cusp of being released. And doing an interview with a journalist from the Observer involved a leisurely lunch at a fashionable Manhattan restaurant and then, as Sean O'Hagan, the interviewer, notes, "she will ring later to rave about a Tobias Wolff short story whose name escapes her while we speak".

Hmm. Yes, well. Let's just say, this time around there is no lunch. No casually glamorous New York eatery. And we don't get to catch up later to gab about our favourite books. We don't even meet, for Pete's sake. She's supposed to be in Detroit shooting her latest film, Oz: The Great and the Powerful, the prequel to The Wizard of Oz, but I'm not allowed to visit her there. It's off limits. And no, not New York either. Her US publicist is insistent that Weisz won't do a face-to-face interview under any circumstances, and so although this is the only interview she's doing to publicise her role in a new BBC drama, Page Eight, written and directed by David Hare, I'm told it has to be by phone.
I can't help thinking that this is a shame. She's mesmerisingly beautiful on screen, and having read through the cuts I'm left in no doubt of the dazzling effect of that beauty in real life, too. Male interviewers tend to quiver. Female ones wrestle with their inner lesbian. In one interview, even a passing dog seems a little over-awed.
"When Ms Weisz strolls in," wrote O'Hagan back in 2005, "she looks like she has just wandered off the catwalk. She walks across the room looking immaculately cool in a little black number and heels. Heads turn, waiters dance in attendance, chilled drinks materialise as if by magic."
I, on the other hand, get a crackling line and a revelation. She's not in Detroit at all, it turns out. She's less than a mile up the road! And she still won't meet me.
"Oh God," she says when I finally get her. "I'm so sorry."
We didn't know you were going to be in Britain, I say.
"I didn't know I was going to be here either. It just happened. I've just come to see family and then I'm leaving. I'm so sorry."
It's hard to know what's going on. "I always do my interviews face to face," Weisz tells me. "Just look at my cuts." She does, it's true. Or at least she did. But then her circumstances have changed rather dramatically in recent months.
Last November, she and her partner, film director Darren Aronofsky, with whom she has a five-year-old son, Henry Chance, announced that they were separating. A month later it was revealed she was dating Daniel Craig – they had worked together on a film, Dream House, last spring – and he'd subsequently split from his long-term fiancée, Satsuki Mitchell.
And then, two months ago, it transpired Weisz and Craig got married in a low-key ceremony in New York with just her son, his teenage daughter and two family friends present.

Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig
 Past lives: with Daniel Craig in New York in 2004, long before they became a couple. Photograph: Bowers/Getty Images

There have been rumours on the internet that she's pregnant – could that be why she doesn't want to meet in person? Or could it be the influence of the notoriously tight-lipped Craig, who refuses to ever talk about his personal life; and the only pictures of them together are of him looking faintly murderous toward the photographer.
Or is it, simply, like she says, some sort of bizarre misunderstanding? ("I was told you didn't want to come to New York," she says.)
Who knows? Though I do wonder if suddenly becoming one half of an extremely famous couple has changed things. Is she feeling a bit hunted?
"No I really don't, actually. Maybe I'm just not interesting enough. But no, I haven't felt hunted at all."
"But you've made a decision as a couple not to talk to the press?"
"I think that both of us… yes," she says simply and waits for the next question.
In fact, it's another condition of the interview that I won't ask her about Craig. Anyway, it'd be pretty hard for her to, given the circumstances: he told a magazine this month that talking about her would be "like shooting [her] in the back".
Henry, on the other hand, her son, sitting in the back seat of his car with his nanny, is desperate to insert himself into the interview. At one point when Weisz is talking about the lack of female directors in Hollywood, a small voice pipes up: "What's female?"
"Female is a girl, darling," says Weisz. And then, "Yes, that's right. It means there's enough boys." (I do wonder how this might be re-played back to Daddy, a boydirector.)
Still, it's a vivid illustration of what's involved in being a working mother. "It is hard. But then for every single working mother in the world it's complicated and difficult. I feel like I'm one of the many working mothers. And I only have one child. I know working mums who have three or four. It's definitely a challenge but it's a wonderful challenge to be able to do both."
Weisz was brought UP in Hampstead Garden Suburb by her mother, a psychotherapist from Vienna, and her father, a Hungarian inventor, and I wonder if the fact that her mother was a psychotherapist has made her think about the way she's bringing up her own child.
"I don't think so, no. For me, being a mum has been a really, really instinctive thing."
As is acting. She's not sure, she says, where the drive to perform sprang from. "I wasn't at all the star of the school play. I wasn't getting up on tables and singing. It was more of a secret, really. I don't know. For me it's all about disappearing. When people think of performing they usually think of show-offs, but I think of it more that you disappear into somebody else."
In fact her teenage years were fairly troubled, though she's reluctant to talk about it. Her parents divorced. She went through three expensive private girls' schools (North London Collegiate and Benenden, before settling at St Paul's). It's usually said that she was expelled from the first two, but the last time the Guardianprinted that, her mother wrote in to say it wasn't true. She had, she says, "a problem with authority", and when I point out that in women that's usually to do with an issue with their father, she says, "Goodness! Hmm. I don't know. I don't think there's anything wrong with a bit of healthy disrespect."
Her mother had wanted to be an actress herself in her youth: she was the one who queued for tickets for King Lear at the National on behalf of her daughter in 1986, and seeing it "was one of the reasons I was inspired to act", says Weisz. Seeing, that is, one actor, in particular: Bill Nighy.
"It was just one of the best performances I've seen. It was just like Mick Jagger came on stage or something. It was pretty extraordinary."
And two and a half decades on, she's finally getting the chance to act with him. "I was a fan. A proper fan. I'd go and see him in things and then go backstage and knock on the door and he's always said to me that I liked him before anyone else. And we've always said, 'Let's find something to do together.'
"And we would text each other now and again to say, 'Have you found anything?' And we hadn't. Until David [Hare] offered us Page Eight. So it's been a really long time coming. A couple of decades."
The result is a spy thriller of the sort that simply doesn't get made any more. Or at least, not as this one is, for TV. Nighy is Johnny Worricker, an old-school MI5 agent – decent, uncorrupted, increasingly cast adrift – who's being forced to deal with the realities of the post-Iraq world. It's a big subject – the post-Blairite realpolitik of how a government deals with its own intelligence agencies. And it has a truly stellar cast. As well as Nighy and Weisz, Michael Gambon plays the head of the section, and Ralph Fiennes is the prime minister.

Rachel Weisz and Bill Nighy in Page Eight
 Leading lights: with Page Eight co-star Bill Nighy, whom she idolised as a young, up-and-coming actress. Photograph: BBC/Heyday Films/Runaway Fridge/Carnival/NBC Universal

It's Hare's first directorial outing for 14 years, and when it premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival earlier this year, the Guardian commended the "effortlessly world-weary chemistry between Nighy and Gambon". And Weisz is as magnetic on screen as she always is. It's hard to take your eyes off her, as she inhabits the kind of character that in recent years she's made her own: a woman of passion and commitment. The Guardian, however, noted, that "the 20-year age gap between Nighy and Weisz is the kind of thing that could draw ridicule."
Weisz bristles when I mention this. "I'm not sure how old Bill is. Do you know? I'm 41. You need to Google it. We're not making out. There's one very delicate kiss in the last frame of the film, which is incredibly tender. They connect with their hearts and they have a great amount of empathy. Anyway, I think people of all sorts of different ages can get it on. It doesn't bother me."
Is it my imagination? Or simply a crackly phone line? But, Weisz seems to alternate between full-force charm and a certain belligerent defensiveness. She keeps telling me how great my questions are. And then refusing to answer them.
I try to talk to her about ageing, but turning 40, she says, was "so not a major milestone". And the pressure to look good? "I think as an actor, you have to look after yourself," she says. "It's like being an athlete. You have to look after yourself and work out."
But you haven't felt like you might have to have things lifted or tucked at some point?
"Oh God. Ask me in a few years. I feel a bit too young for that. Maybe I'm deluded. I don't have a philosophical problem with people who do things like that. It's really up to them. But personally, I'll just have to see how I go."
Pretty well, so far; and there's no shortage of roles. After the Oz film, she starts filming on the new Bourne vehicle.
"Are there any family tensions?" I ask. "With Daniel doing James Bond, does it feel disloyal to be doing the other great spy franchise?"
"No. There's no tension. I guess there's a B, an O and an N but they're very different. Bourne is American and I'll be playing American. It's Americana. And Bond is very, very English. I think it's culturally, tonally, very different."
Logistically, though, it's obviously not the easiest thing being two actors in a new relationship, with a young child. Henry will go with her and the nanny to Detroit to film Oz, she says, but he starts school in September. "And I think it will affect things." she says. "It'll be up to him a bit. He might not want to come… I mean so far he comes with a nanny and hangs out on set."

Rachel Weisz in A Streetcar Named Desire
 Lady in red: playing Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, which won her the coveted Olivier award last year. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

In past interviews, Weisz has said that acting is all about choices: making the right choices, not making the wrong choices. "Well, yes," she says. "Like life. You just never know at the time how things are going to turn out." And she's still, she says, "fiercely" ambitious. But having a school-age child will inevitably affect her choices now. "There are certain things that are now out of the question. Absolutely."
It must be tempting, I say, if you're married to another actor, to do a film together simply so that you can be in the same place for a bit.
"We've already done one. Maybe one day. It's not something we've been thinking about right now. We've been offered some plays."
Is that something you want to do? More theatre?
"Yeah. I'd really love to do a play next year."
Given she won an Olivier award last year for Best Actress for her role in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar, she'll surely get her pick of the parts.
But then things do seem to have a habit of coming her way, although she's astute enough to acknowledge this. At 15, she won a part in a major Hollywood movie, King David, playing opposite Richard Gere, but her father put his foot down and wouldn't let her take it. It wasn't a truly terrible blow, she says, because "I wasn't burning to act. It was something which came later on. It just came my way."
And it would come her way again, after studying at Cambridge. And when I ask her about the struggles of her 20s – she's said in the past that she had problems getting out of bed some days, and underwent a long stint of therapy – she says: "I think moaning about what a hard time I've had in my 20s would be pretty bad taste. I've had a very privileged life, wouldn't you say? Looking at it from the outside? It looks pretty good, doesn't it?"
It does. Although, when I listen to the tape later, I can't quite catch the tone of this. She has, admittedly, recently shacked up with James Bond, but anyone who's just come out of a nine-year relationship and divorced the father of their child hasn't had it all roses, have they?
Is she being ironic? Or just super-literal? I'm really not sure. But I suspect that looking at Rachel Weisz from the outside is now probably the closest anybody is going to get.



Pam Norfolk / The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde

Book review
Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life
of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle
London, Wednesday 24 August 2011
By  Pam Norfolk
Published on Friday 15 July 2011 01:00



‘Dear Constance ... I am coming to see you at nine o’clock. Please be in – it is important. Ever yours Oscar.’
The hastily written note, reeking of panic, which arrived in the space and calm of Oscar Wilde’s modishly minimalist home in Chelsea in February 1895 must have been greeted with some concern by his wife.
And rightly so because Oscar’s forthcoming confession was just the start of a nightmare journey for London society’s most sought-after and talked-about couple...
Franny Moyle’s poignant and revealing biography delivers a welcome new perspective on Oscar Wilde’s beautiful, bewitching and long-suffering wife.
Drawing on numerous unpublished letters, she brings to life the story of a woman at the heart of fin-de-siècle London who was the victim of one of the greatest betrayals of all time.
A celebrity in her own right, Constance was a popular children’s author, fashion icon, a member of the popular Victorian Aesthetic Movement and a leading campaigner for women’s rights.
In that spring of 1895, just as Oscar’s play An Ideal Husband was ironically taking the city by storm, her life changed irrevocably when he was convicted of homosexual crimes and she was forced to flee with her two sons to the Continent.
Her life eclipsed by scandal, her glittering literary and political career abruptly ended, she changed her name to Holland and lived in exile until her premature death aged 39 after a botched spinal operation just three years later.
Born into an Anglo-Irish family, Constance Lloyd was the daughter of a barrister and raised in Bayswater in London.
Constance and Cyril Wilde
Resented by her mother because of her natural beauty, Constance found solace in the bohemian world where she met and fell in love with the avant-garde Oscar Wilde.
The first years of their marriage were deliriously happy for them both, Constance telling Oscar ‘As long as I live you shall be my lover’ and Oscar declaring that he was ‘incomplete’ without her.
Over the next two years she gave birth to two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, but very soon marriage for Oscar had become ‘a curious mixture of ardour and indifference.’
He loved Constance’s company and companionship but he also loved the attention of young men and when the couple generously took in a friend’s son and practising homosexual, 17-year-old Robbie Ross, Oscar embarked on his first physical relationship with another man.
Constance had always been aware of her husband’s friendship with younger men and, indeed, wrote proudly to a friend in 1892 about ‘how good O’s influence is on young men.’
By this time Constance had accepted the diminished physical passion in her marriage and was reassured that at least the emotional and social bond between them remained despite Oscar now living intermittently at a fashionable hotel in Piccadilly.
Constance, a woman Moyles sees as in a classic state of denial, seemed to be almost permanently on the move with her two sons in these later years of her marriage.
But it was a state of affairs she could no longer ignore when the despicable Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas entered her husband’s life.
Oscar became smitten by the selfish, demanding and manipulative Bosie… a fatal attraction that would lead to the writer’s arrest, trial for gross indecency and imprisonment, and Constance’s enforced exile.
Moyles opens up a new window onto Constance’s life and character, allowing us to see her strengths as well as her failures.
In today’s world, her predicament would be greeted with sympathy and understanding ... unfortunately for Constance, she married the wrong man in the wrong era.

(John Murray, hardback, £20)



Friday, August 26, 2011

A life in writing / John Burnside

John Burnsdide



John Burnside: a life in writing


'Having been, as it were, mad, and lived with horror I believed in, I know that rationality doesn't carry you all the way'

Sarah Crown
Friday 26 August 2011 22.54 BST


"What I'm interested in just now," says John Burnside, "is the Schrödinger's cat novel: two mutually exclusive possibilities sitting together without cancelling each other out." He achieves just such a balancing act in his latest novel, A Summer of Drowning, in which the narrator, Liv, wrestles with the question of whether a series of unexplained deaths in her island community can be laid at the door of a malign spirit – the huldra – said to haunt the Arctic forests where she lives. "I wanted readers to be able to believe that the huldra exists, at the same time as rationally thinking 'this cannot be'," Burnside explains. "Because, you know, that's how we live our lives."
It's certainly how Burnside has lived his. Here is a man whose first poetry volume, published in 1988 when he was in his 30s, turned out to be the pebble that called forth the avalanche: in the quarter-century since, he has written compulsively, pouring out an astonishing (and astonishingly well-received) 13 collections and eight novels. But here, too, is a man whose early life, set out in a pair of bleached and harrowing memoirs, was so catastrophic that it tipped him into a spiral of LSD binges, psychiatric wards and, finally insanity. In a scene at the beginning of his second volume of memoir, Waking Up in Toytown, he comes to on a bed, surrounded by bottles holding "a mixture of blood, honey, alcohol, olive oil and urine" with "a single feather, balanced precariously on each rim". The intention, as far as he can recall, was "to cast a spell that would stop the world from disintegrating . . . if one feather falls, then the spell fails". Rationally, it is impossible to square this vision of disintegration with the thoughtful, cheerful man currently sipping a beer across the table – but perhaps that explains why Burnside gives short shrift to rationality and its adherents. "I always feel saddened by intelligent people who say, this can't be true because it doesn't work in terms of rationality," he says. "What does? Inspiration? Art? Romantic love? Having been, as it were, mad, and lived with horror which at that moment I completely believed in, I know that rationality doesn't carry you all the way. Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful."

In A Summer of Drowning, it is both. The book has its roots in a family trip to the Arctic circle over a decade ago, when Burnside and his wife, Sarah, decamped to north Norway for the summer with their infant son. "Lucas's first birthday was on the island of Kvaløya, where the book's set," Burnside remembers (the couple now have two sons). "You sat outside your hut and gazed for miles: nothing but wind and sea and Arctic terns. It was gorgeous; it was like heaven to me. That's when I started this book. It took me 10 years to write it."
The magic of that summer infuses the book: a wide, white canvas lit by splashes of prismatic colour, it is at once the most ravishing novel I've read all year, and the most intellectually provoking. Liv, the young narrator, lives in beautiful seclusion on Kvaløya with her mother, a gifted but reclusive painter. A loner herself, Liv has little to do with her classmates, preferring to train her gaze on her environment, and visit her elderly neighbour, Kyrre, who beguiles her with local stories of trolls and lost children. When two teenaged boys drown in calm water under the midnight sun, "that still, silvery-white gloaming that makes everything spectral", Kyrre maintains that a huldra, a malevolent forest-spirit which takes the form of a beautiful young girl, drove them to it. At first Liv disregards him, but as the novel winds towards its convulsive ending, she becomes convinced of the literal truth of his tale. And we, who see everything through her eyes, grow simultaneously more aware of her profound unreliability as a narrator and less certain of what, precisely, it is that we're seeing.
For seasoned Burnside readers, the real wonder of the novel isn't the slippery subject matter, but that this is the first time he has fully succeeded in fusing the opposing strengths of his prose and his poetry in one book. In the past, the two have inhabited very different arenas – the first obsessively occupied with darkness and violence, the second with the gloriously mystical. But in A Summer of Drowning, bloodshed is balanced by beauty: the sensuousness of Liv's gaze, which lingers on food and flowers and the sea's "endlessly shifting maze of grey and silver and salt-blue", offsets the patches of pitch-blackness in a story that, like the legend of the huldra itself, has "chaos at its heart". Just as his fiction is beginning to incorporate some of the mysticism of his poetry, so Burnside's poetry appears to be absorbing the firmness of his fiction. Over the years he has established himself as a laureate of the transcendental, but his new collection, Black Cat Bone, shows a perceptible change of tack. "I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak," he says. "This new book is about things that nobody can deny. I'm always referred to as being interested in the numinous, the immanent, those kinds of words. I decided not to do it any more. This book still deals with the evanescent, but it's about sex, love, death – solid, real-life things." The two books, taken together, read like the works of a man in the process of making peace with himself.

There has been much to reconcile. Burnside was born in Dunfermline in 1955, to a mother fast realising she'd made a terrible mistake and a father who would cast a polluting shadow over his son's life well beyond his own death from a heart attack between the bar and the cigarette machine of the Silver Band Club many years later. Hard-drinking, hard-gambling, simmeringly violent, he was determined to bludgeon any trace of softness or sweetness out of his son. "What he wanted," Burnside says, in 2006's superb A Lie About My Father, "was to warn me against hope, against any expectation of someone from my background being treated as a human being in the big hard world. He wanted to kill off my finer – and so, weaker – self. Art. Music. Books. Imagination. Signs of weakness, all. A man was defined, in my father's circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself."
This lesson in working-class Catholic masculinity was achieved through a series of viciously petty acts of cruelty, such as the burning of a favourite teddy bear, that continue to haunt Burnside's dreams decades later. Although his subsequent discovery that his father had been abandoned as an infant allowed him to forgive the man, he was unable to forget. "I cannot talk about him without talking about myself," he writes, "just as I can never look at myself in the mirror without seeing his face." Eventually, inevitably, Burnside followed his father into the same vortex of repression and release through alcohol – but in his case the vortex went deeper, ending in drug abuse and mental breakdown.
'I didn't set out to write about my early life," Burnside says. "One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: I'm going to write a book about my father. We were expecting Lucas at the time, and I suddenly thought, what stories do I have for my son? I didn't even have a family album with pictures of me as a kid: I'd refused all of that. My father told all these versions of his life – he'd been adopted by his uncle, he was the son of an industrialist and a factory girl, or of a lay preacher who'd strayed – so I went to see my aunt to find out what was true, what was false. She told me the full story, the whole foundling thing. After that the book had to happen."
He followed it four years later with Waking Up in Toytown, which details his struggle to shake off the shadow. He wanted "a normal life. Sober. Drug-free. Dreamless. In gainful employment. A householder. A taxpayer. A name on the electoral roll", and on the surface, at least, he achieved it. For 10 years, he slipped himself into a textbook middle-class existence: house in Surrey, job in computing, numbing visits to cinema and garden centre. But beneath the surface, this book is, if anything, more desperate even than the first. Despite his best efforts, alcohol sneaked back in, turning his nights into uneasy odysseys, leading him to a series of encounters with equally damaged souls: the mother who dopes her kids with valium-laced orange juice; the fellow-drinker who tries to persuade Burnside to bump off his wife. The suburbia he finds for himself turns out to be a fatally debased version of the television fantasy, not the safe haven he'd imagined.

"I realised I'd been faking 'normal' for 10 years, pretty much," Burnside says. "And I knew it had to stop. I ended up walking into my boss's office and saying, 'That's it, I'm done'. And he looked at me – I was a 40-ish guy, he knew I wrote poetry – and said 'I suppose you're off to write a novel?'. In the end he told me to do some consultancy work to ease the transition."
By now, the poetry that had welled through the cracks of his suburban life was flowing, and he was several collections in, despite a shaky start. "My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them. I'd sent some poems to Carcanet, and Michael Schmidt [the editor] was very encouraging and suggested a book. I assumed this was the first stage of a long process of honing, but instead they just put my poems together, with a picture of me in a tank top on the back. They sent me a copy, and I said 'oh, this is the proof, is it?'. I thought, god, I'm not doing that again."
He decided to give up poetry there and then, but felt obliged to do a couple of readings on the back of publication. At one, he met the poet Sarah Maguire, who persuaded him to send some poems to Robin Robertson, poetry editor at Jonathan Cape, before jacking it in. "I began working with Robin and everything changed."
Burnside got married at about the time he published his first novel, The Dumb House, and moved back to Scotland where he took up a writer's residency at Dundee University. Though he was well known and admired within the poetry world (he'd been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize, and had taken the Whitbread poetry award for his 2000 collection, The Asylum Dance), his longer writing took time to gel. The Dumb House, in which a Mengele-esque narrator attempts to discover "the locus of the soul" by carrying out surgical experiments on his twin children, was reasonably well received, but the follow-ups were, Burnside says, "disastrous".
"The second one, The Mercy Boys, was an emotional response to going back to Scotland, and probably an early way of trying to deal with some of the issues around my father – the gambling, the booze, the tension in that men's world. I shouldn't have written it. Then came The Locust Room," a curiously affectless tale about the 1970s Cambridge rapist, "which was very self-indulgent: a book-length apology for having been a dick when I was growing up, for having treated my sisters and my mother the way my father did." The next book, Living Nowhere, was "better", but he still hadn't hit his fictional stride. After the memoirs were written, much of the personal stuff he'd been trying to smuggle into the fiction was cleared out.
Nowadays, he says, for the first time he is "happy with what I'm doing. I feel as if I know where I'm going now – I can see four or five books ahead." Despite the forward planning, however, when it comes to the act of writing, he's sticking with irrationality. "I imagine the mind as a big house. You've got the parlour where you sit and have tea, your bedroom, your kitchen, your bathroom. But actually there are endless rooms around you that you don't use, and there's one room way at the back – the furnace room, maybe – where your thoughts begin. Sometimes they walk all the way up to the parlour to find you before you even realised they were coming. That's how it feels for me. I think good ideas work like that."