Laura Mansfield

 

1. wind

I like to read in series. I often get stuck more or less unwittingly on a particular theme or type of writing before noticing that I have gathered up a pile of books that all seem to be touching on a similar subject. When I was in my mid 20s I remember having a really clear mindset and intention to read novels in which wind plays a central part in the narrative -  saturating a  scene or setting with a particular mood and framing the action with its actual and metaphorical force. In Salmun Rushdie’s Midnight Children a wind makes people feel slightly mad, feverish and unsettled. The disruptive tornado in The Wizard of Oz transports Dorothy to a whole new world in which her everyday is upended. I got stuck on drifting thoughts of wind after reading an article about the Austrian Föhn, a dry, warm, downslope wind on the lee side of a mountain range that is said to cause headaches, migraines and even psychosis. It is common to get a sick note from the doctor when the Föhn blows its pain-inducing air pressure. I remember that I thought my temporary fixation on wind was going to lead me to my own groundbreaking creative work, assuming it was the start of a larger project, a period of reading and collecting before some  creative gesture that in the end failed to arrive. 

Someone once told me they thought there was a wind in A Passage to India by E.M Forster. I read the whole book waiting to come across that wind. But it never came. No rush of air that suddenly broke with intensity through the story, no elemental force disrupting the everyday of the characters to transport them elsewhere. There was, however, an echo - a vibration of sound waves. Perhaps the reader had confused my desire for wind with that for some reverberating echo. My memory of the book is one of a prolonged, forever disappointed waiting. Waiting for something to appear that never quite did. Perhaps not in a dissimilar way the winds that I did find and enthusiastically collected never led to the creative masterpiece I had envisaged they would, ending up merely as an eclectic reading list of windy novels .

 

2. water

 

When working as a researcher for an artist, I was tasked with compiling a list of books related to water. I quickly realised that I found myself gathering writings about swimming. The collection became once again a defunct resource, not quite on brief. The stack of books now rests on our bookshelf, a visible marker for a project that never materialised. Pulled by an interest in bodies of water, I encountered writing about swimming or wanting to swim whilst being stuck in cities or landlocked countries, dreaming of being submerged in a rare and distant element. A short story 'The Swim Team' by the American writer, artist and filmmaker Miranda July was one of my favourites. In her signature prose of dry humour, July recounts the story of a young woman finding herself in need of a job in a mid western town. Surprisingly she finds a cohort of elderly residents who want to learn how to swim. Sprawled on the living room floor, balancing on the sofa, they awkwardly propel themselves across the room for a set amount of time each week, believing and convincing themselves of their ability to undertake the sport, submerged in an imaginary water geographically positioned at a great distance from their bodies in actuality. 

 

July’s story sits in my collection of swimming books alongside illustrator and author Leanne Shapton’s memoir Swimming Studies, which details her years spent swimming competitively. From pre teen to her 20s, Shapton partook in regular swim meets, culminating in the trials for the 1998 Canadian Olympic team. She builds a tangible picture of 5am mornings in her canadian home, peeling on 3 swimsuits under her duvet cover, layered to create drag in the water for training. Sat curled on the front seat of the car she would eat hot bran muffin mix from a mug with mitten-clad hands, as her mother drove through the snow-covered roads to the training pool, a rectangular block that glowed and steamed in the darkness of the winter morning. Shapton’s writing is crisp and succinct, her precision of prose managing to evoke a quality of cinematic imagery; expanses of lanes, repeated costumed figures waiting on bleachers or behind starting blocks. From evocative descriptions Shapton dives into the complexity of training, the psychological strain of rigid routine and the uncertainty that makes her teeter on the edge of reason when she steps away from the world of meets and training regimes, as well as the lurking figure of the coach, always on the poolside, sliders on feet, watching, always, and always in control. For Shapton, swimming, being submerged in the water, is both a release from the unknown and unpredictable world of dry land and an entrapment whose clear boundaries and expectations can start to become self-limiting. 

 

In Nina Mingya Powles Small Bodies of Water, swimming is a connection to the different places she has called home; first learning to swim in Borneo, where her mother was born, before spending her teenage years in Wellington, New Zealand, studying in Beijing and finally living in London. In each country she swims, suspended in water, either the crisp blue of Wellington Harbour or the murky green of Hampstead Heath, her suspension becomes a metaphor for her life ‘in between’ cultures, languages and continents, both a means of connecting to her home, its own body of water, and a reminder of her stark removal from it. 

 

In each piece of writing swimming and its absence, the act or wish of submerging oneself in water, swells with questions of identity, belonging and desire - desire for a future self or for a reconnection to somewhere physically out of reach.

 

3. Women 

Last summer I slowly came to realise that I had been reading a collection of books that all shared stories of women coming of age and growing into adulthood in various European cities. A collection of memoirs by Tove Ditlevson, Annie Ernaux and Natalia Ginzburg. Each of them, in their own ways, teetering at some point on the threat or allure of their rational everyday collapsing, walking a thin line between day to day life and the urge or act of “letting it all go to ruin”. 

Three women and three cities gathering into a small pile by the bed, three different lives that I can momentarily rest within and witness, picking a path through individual struggles that can be extrapolated out into shared themes of what being a woman encompassess. 

So here it is, my humble history of reading in series, a habit forming small thematic clusters of books piled by the bed or shoved onto a shelf. Three themed stacks that have come about through the interest of an abandoned project, a work-related research task or simply crept upon me unwittingly.

If I were to create a library it would be one in which books are categorised thematically, enabling genres and time spans of literature to sit beside each other, with surnames mixed and the linking threads more or less tangible at first to the visiting reader.