Cód:
491_9780992650940
Yealm is a memoir set in the first half of the twentieth century. It deals with the migration of Jews from the East, Anarchist circles, imprisonment, London bohemia, schooling, war, evacuation, the world of work and all the intricacies of everyday life that bolster and ruin us. Through all this course the destructive energies of world events. We observe the ways in which people are flung around by forces that are greater than themselves. Yealm is both intimate and grand-scale. All the contradictions that texture lives, personal and political, are assembled here, like the bundle of straw that lends the title, in order to make sense of the nonsense of official history.Yealm... is a wonderfully full and detailed account of a childhood and adolescence, like an old-fashioned novel, in which a cast of hundreds is brought to life and lost again. Some of the characters are well-known, at least to a 1930s literary nerd like me: Sheilas unlucky father Charlie Lahr, James Hanley (who had an affair with her mother), Rhys Davies, Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and plenty of others. But they come and go, according to the ways they impinge on Sheilas life and consciousness. And the reason it works is because of her consciousness, which is both created with hindsight and recreated with complete presentness. The two books which it calls to my mind are in many ways quite different, being written with a profoundly literary sense of form and shaped into artifice in order to get at their truth: Prousts In Search of Lost Time, and Edward Upwards The Spiral Ascent. But Yealm has a comparable fluency, evocativeness, detail and reflectiveness. And its very well-written and a real pleasure to read. The world it portrays is one familiar to me at one remove, as its close to the world my mother (born eight years before Sheila) grew up in, but which I never knew. The personal becomes generalisable. Peoples lives and their often brief intersections with other lives create
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