Dreams of Speaking

34. Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (2006, 214 pages, Read May 29 – Jun 6)

I read her book [Sorry] years ago and it was an odd experience where I didn't love the book, but was really struck by the lyrical writing. It left me with a feeling that somehow lingered. I waited years to read this book because I just never was in the right place to take in the kind of writing I was expecting.

Dreams of Speaking was published one year before [Sorry], and the writing is quite different and not as good, but the book is actually quite interesting. Jones is looking hard at modern life and the isolation caused by technology. Alice, the Australian main character, is in Paris trying to write a book on this when she meets Mr. Sakamota, a Japanese show more survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bomb. Mr. Sakamota is writing a book on Alexander Grahm Bell. He sees the humanity in technology is struck by how Bell's insights into physical nature of human communication through speech led him toward his invention. Through the book Alice will encounter a series of challenging experiences on subways, in her family, her relationships, and in the atomic bomb museum in Nagasaki. It's not clear where it leaves her─she remains in some indecisive space between her own pessimism and Mr. Sakamota's optimism about technology.

The writing I didn't like. Everything is described in multiple phrases with slightly different meaning and feel as she tries to capture different perspectives all in one sentence. One review called the book a "synonym avalanche". The affect is a mixed sense of repetition, indecisiveness and, oddly hyperbole. That may have been an intended affect (it's a feature lacking whenever Mr. Sakamota talks or writes), but it's unpleasant...and clearly not what I was anticipating.

While I wasn't crazy about the writing, I found the book overall thought provoking and worth the experience.

'The difficulty with celebrating modernity,' he declared, 'is that we live with so many persistently unmodern things. Dreams, love, babies, illness. Memory. Death. And all the natural things. Leaves, birds, ocean, animals. Think of your Australian kangaroo,' he added. 'The kangaroo is truly unmodern.'

Here he paused and smiled, as if telling himself a joke.

'And sky. Think of sky. There is nothing modern about the sky.'

2014
https://www.librarything.com/topic/172769#4738392 show less

This is the first novel I've read by Gail Jones, but it certainly won't be the last. She writes beautifully.

Briefly, Alice Black has just returned to her home in Australia after spending time on a grant in Paris where she was writing and researching a book on the poetics of modern technology. While on a train, she meets Mr. Sakamoto, a survivor of Nagasaki, who is writing a biography of Alexander Graham Bell. The novel is the story of their friendship, their shared interest in technology, and about Alice's inner explorations of her life and her family.

Jones manages to capture the immediacy of experience in telling specificity:

"Alice was flying to Europe, following darkness around the planet in her north-westerly projection. She would show more have a doubled night -- the nothing space of jet flight was freighted with black magic, so that passengers bore stoically their extended nocturne, relinquishing the ordinariness of time, relinquishing good meals and intelligent conversation, for this wearisome, dull, zombie imprisoning.... The lights switched off and passengers seemed instantly to sleep. They had become sluggish, bored. Now they met the extra night with eyes closed, their heads thrown back, their mouths slackly agape like codfish....It was as if the plane was governed by alien air or some creaturely intention. A posthumous blue washed over bodies, faces....She retreated quietly, wondering about the automation of planes, how they stayed up, anyway, what antigravitational devices kept them there, defying all instinct, hurtling like a thrown thing through distorted ever-darkness." show less

I was impressed by this writer’s use of language and her observations on life. The following is an example. It is a commentary on Alice’s parents. ‘Her breasts sagged with the downward pull of her maternal history. She was old at thirty. She was sorrowful and embittered. Fred seemed unchanged by their marriage and she was unable to tell him how very altered she was. Every marriage has these silences, these demolitions. The white noise of interior monologues that can never be spoken.’
I thought her control of language masterful and the observations made about the impact of technology on our lives thought provoking.

I started this book with an open mind, drawn to the Japanese connection more than anything. The cover sings the authors praises from papers like The Independent. I was quite disappointed though. I found the central character, Alice, selfish and superior and did not really warm to her at all. Her relationship with Mr Sakamoto was interesting, and I would have liked the author to have expanded on this. The second part of the book was much better - the character was forced to interact and react to her surroundings and the events that unfold, but the book ended all too quickly without a satisfying resolution. Maybe it was too highbrow for me, or maybe I just didn't like it!

Very briefly, Dreams of Speaking is Jones's fourth book, after Sixty Lights. A young woman, who is a bit emotionally unsettled, is in Paris working on her project, "the poetics of modernity", when on a train trip she meets an older Japanese man: an atomic bomb survivor and poet. This is the story of their friendship. Again, another bloody brilliant work by Jones whose intelligence and lyricism shines throughout.

Friendship between a young Australian girl and an older Japanese man, both of whom share a love of technology is the predominant theme. Very readable.