novel on yellow paper.

This book is so intensely most brilliant. I'll just say it now in the beginning. I had to force myself to finish it, for it was not the easy breezy summer holiday read I thought, but rather it was quite tricky, slipping away from me and going all over the place with many genius ramblings stopped short by references to something that belongs to a different time. It may have read easier had I been in the mode of fitly reading cleverclever books for my English degree two years ago. But still I pushed through and it was worth it.

Stevie Smith is the author that makes you want to write. I stumbled across her poetry in the library a while back, intrigued by the fantastic drawings that accompanied her poetry. This is the first novel I've read of hers.

She is the one who writes about her life in a jolly fictional way with the Big Things constantly underfoot. She writes sweetly, determinedly, casually and oh-so-cleverly with wit. Above all, even though she wrote this novel in the mid-1930s in London, she will always be (even today) Cool. Stevie Smith was, and is, Totally Cool.

Novel on Yellow Paper or Work it Out For Yourself consists of the thoughts of a young secretary. Bizarre twists and turn, you have to keep up with the main character's convoluted thought process. Her name is Pompey (a name so glorious that I will have to name every plant, small animal, child, or other nameable object that crosses my way 'Pompey'.) The thing I enjoyed the most, was every time I felt exasperated at her confusing prose and impatient at the self-indulgent scattered style, Pompey would suddenly address me, the Reader and acknowledge my impatience with humour. Smith knows how slippery she writes and revels in it.

I wasn't 'Dear Reader'ed' like sappy old Fanny Price or even like conflicted, pathetic Jane Eyre. No, Pompey acknowledges the reader with unforgiving curiosity, which in turn makes you curious about the author.

Of course I think one of the reasons she turned out so interesting is because she was raised by a feminist.  But she is also interesting because in between many bouts of incoherence, a single sentence or paragraph suddenly jumps out at you as clear as day and that sentence makes you so happy because you think "OF COURSE DAMMIT" and and you are filled with triumph and the sentence stops and then you keep reading, sucked back into her word games and unfinished anecdotes.

Also, why have none of us heard of her? We get so few female authors of that time. At the height of Modernism, the world is bursting with men but we have to hunt down specifically those women making art in the 30s and 40s. In Highschool, we don't get given the sassy, live, hopping ones like Steve Smith here, we only get given the sad, suicidal, dead ones because that's how they convinced the Men that they were serious enough to make art, too. (Incidentally Plath was a big fan of Smith's poetry).

Eh. So it goes. I'm not sure if you'd enjoy it, read it to impress someone or prove something and then it will have been read and you won't regret it.


(Also, my friend Sebastian said I should add pictures - so here are some. They were all so lovely I couldn't decide which one so I chose them all...)