Not Drowning, Reading - Softcover

Andrew Relph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 192169680X ISBN 13: 9781921696800

Publisher: Fremantle Press, 2012

Synopsis

This is a memoir about the art, and gift, of reading. Author's statement: As a young child I couldn't read or write. That was something I knew about myself, If you'd ahve asked me, at the time, smoe question skilfully designed to elicit the child's sense of identity, it would have been there, resting just below the surface ... In adolescence I read as if my life depended upon it, and I think it did. Now increasingly I read for enjoyment rather than survival/

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Relph is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist who lives and works in Perth, Western Australia. 'Not Drowning, Reading' is his first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Not Drowning, Reading

By Andrew Relph

Fremantle Press

Copyright © 2012 Andrew Relph
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-921696-80-0

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright, 
not drowning, reading, 
about the author, 
prelude, 
the stolen child, 
sally and miriam, 
shopping with clara, 
Reading and Writing, 
intermezzo, 
ignoring icarus, 
did you read doctor zhivago, 
hamlet, 
my mother's book, 
being herzog, 
brothers and fathers, 
the space in the story, 
coda, 
sources, 
acknowledgements, 

CHAPTER 1

the stolen child

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

–W.B. Yeats, 'The Stolen Child'

I

Ireland. Here lay the consolation of the land itself. I had always somehow known that in this place the very soil would be sympathetic.

The Dingle Peninsula is approached from across the water. It is first sighted by the visitor approaching from the south-east across the broad bay of the same name. Through mist or driving rain, the late afternoon sunlight can make the finger of land stretching out towards America appear as in a dream. So it was, that late September day. I saw it through the windscreen wipers, through the rain, and through sunlight that reflected sharply off the ocean. Through the thousand shimmering tears, I saw the low green hills, dreamlike, suspended between grey sky and grey ocean.

The town was small and banked up on the bay as if it had been washed there by a particularly high tide. By the time we had explored the harbour, the rain had stopped and darkness had begun to settle quietly over the strand. The buildings of the town were losing their colour and the lights were coming on. The house where we would stay was barely fifteen minutes drive away. First we would have dinner in town.

The restaurant was yellow with light and noisy with people as we entered. I was dimly aware of the protest contained in the signs and menus that were written in Irish. I asked the waiter about it and she said that in this settlement the official language was Irish. English, it seemed, was tolerated.

In the black night, we navigated the four miles to the house. It was illuminated only by the dim light over the front door. To me it was unexpectedly modern in its construction. The tourist office in Dublin had said it was on castle lands and I had impulsively asked them to book a room. Shown upstairs with our heavy suitcases, we were soon in bed; weary travellers with a day full of sensations. When the lights were out, I lay on my back retracing our journey. It was a night when the air itself seemed black.

Four hours later I awoke from a dream and everything had changed. The curtains were illuminated from without. The careless gap between the drapes sent a skein of colourless light across the end of the bed. I pulled myself up on my elbows, orienting myself. Ireland, yes; Dingle, yes; the bed and breakfast. And the light? Unmistakably the full moon at its zenith. My chest and scalp felt swollen and tingling with sensation. I had become sharply awake, as if primitively I knew instant action was required. I sat peering from the headboard, arrested by the moonlight on the mountain peaks of my feet and, next to me, the sleeping form of my companion. My body was oddly still, in comparison to my mind, which urgently clung first to the emotion and then to the images from which I'd woken.

I had been at the base of a medieval scaffolding set up to execute peopl

Edition details

• Publisher: Fremantle Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 192169680X
• ISBN 13: 9781921696800
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176