Summer Reading in the Winter Garden

Two years ago, during the hot and stormy summer, I began to read that equally stormy and tempestuous novel The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

This work, like all Dostoyevsky’s work, is visionary and hysterical. It exists in a sweltering, sweating heat of paranoia and obsession.

I took to reading this novel in the Winter Gardens in Sheffield which, despite its name, is actually a kind of hothouse full of tropical flora. Here, amongst the ferns and trees, I read about Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin.

I had previously read the author’s Letters from the Underworld in an old paperback edition that I had bought at a local jumble sale for 10 pence. Come to think of it, I bought my copy of The Idiot from a boot fair.

Yesterday, in this high English summer which is really a kind of perpetual autumn, an endless October of rain, I returned to the Winter Gardens to read some of the letters Franz Liszt wrote during his first residence in Weimar (at which point, Dostoyevsky was in prison doing hard labour).

I sat there and read under towering ferns, the great beams of the roof looking like they had been transplanted into reality from China Miéville’s fictional city of New Crobuzon.

 

What a space in which to read.

Although I like to do my summer reading in the Winter Gardens, I like to do my winter reading in the snug warmth of a parlour, in front of a fire, dreaming of Wuthering Heights and Poirot’s broken central heating.

My book-addled brain.

A sample paragraph from 'A Case of Unreliable Memory':

To my weary, book-addled brain the name slippages did not stop there. As I put down my whiskey glass, put on my reading glasses and looked at the book again the names started to slide in front of my eyes. I felt myself to be like that hapless narrator, Mr Lockwood, as he watches the engraved names merge and separate in front of his eyes in Wuthering Heights (1847). As I watched, and read, and dreamed, Christie’s character Molly Preston-Grey got married and became Molly Ravenscroft only to then slide over into that most affirmative of women, James Joyce’s Molly Bloom. Yes, there is nothing to connect them; and yes this was madness, I knew, but I couldn’t stop it, me, sitting there that night, and there was the noise of the wind again, and the neighbour’s dog still howling won’t it ever shut up, like that dog down on the moors terrible and painted. I rubbed my eyes, trying to snap myself out of this overwhelming literary sickness, only I found that I couldn’t. For wasn’t Molly Bloom herself only Homer’s Penelope, that weaver of tapestries and texts? Yes, again yes. The fact that Mrs Oliver’s ‘christian’ name is Ariadne only seemed to support my adoption of this ‘mythical method’. But, I knew, it didn’t lead to anything, this unravelling of threads, this making up of connections, yarns and literary memories – it only lead me back into a literary critical labyrinth.