paul griffiths
let me tell you
Reality Street Editions, Hastings, 2008 ISBN: 9781874400431
extracts in Golden Handcuffs Review No.8
reading notes by Anthony Miller
‘I found let me tell you a beautiful and enthralling work, as well as a great success in Oulipian terms.’ (Harry Mathews)
‘...the result is tender, touching and extremely beautiful....We grow accustomed to this sad young woman’s voice. The limits of her speech begin to feel as natural as breathing. They never muffle—in fact, they intensify—her bewilderment at Hamlet’s pain, a lost soul "of such cold woe that one could weep". They brighten the glimpses of a happy childhood, quicken the anguish of estrangement from Laertes ("how could that sweet little brother of my memory have turned in to this?") and sharpen anger at her mother’s neglect as she sports lasciviously with her lovers....As the plot of Hamlet circles round her like a wolf from the surrounding snows, she seeks to give it the slip and "make another way" (shades of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). Ophelia feels, and shows, that "there’s more to me now than the poor, sweet daughter". And she does so in achingly lovely words—all her own words—that stem from Shakespeare but bring Beckett’s later prose to mind....let me tell you narrows its range to deepen its impact (again, Beckett is the exemplar). Not many authors will want to wear such shackles. Only a few can ever make them sing. But when work of this poignant beauty comes along, less really does mean more.’ (Boyd Tonkin, Independent, 16 January 2009)
‘Like a Beckett character marooned on an RSC stage set, Griffiths’s Ophelia suspects her words even as she utters them....The very literal limitations of O’s language underscore her own sense of its inadequacy to her interiority; thus the slightly irregular syntax that is all her limited vocabulary allows makes her lamentation all the more affecting....Much of the wonderful ambiguity integral to Shakespeare resides in the indeterminacy of his language, and Griffiths can retain that quality by pressing upon the pluripotency of each word in its turn. Here, his work as music critic and translator shines through; from his limited repertoire of words he has composed a prose work whose components recur and resound like familiar notes....On the scale of the entire novel, Griffiths has forged a leitmotif from certain words suggestive of his heroine’s problematic conception of herself: memory, mind, be, nothing, will, words, other, speak, thoughts, and know, acquire great weight as this increasingly willful Ophelia begins to consider a means of defining herself outside a language “that again now is no home to me.”’ (Alyssa Pelish, Rain Taxi)
‘At first sight, Paul Griffiths’s exceptional novel might be recognized as an attempt to draw the profile of the woman Shakespeare obscured, and that would not be wrong, but it is not why the book is exceptional. Ophelia has been reimagined before...yet never with such restraint, or, more precisely, constraint....[The] formal restriction still enables Ophelia to tell a story rich in detail and expression, taking us back to her happy childhood with a distant, speech-making father, to the birth of her beloved brother and to the glowing presence of a nameless maid who comes from over "the cold green mountain"; a radiance soon gone. The repetitions of words and familiar phrases powerfully evoke what remains uncertain in Ophelia’s life outside the play, what these words alone will never quite say....The effects of necessary variation and repetition kindle both the freedom of another life and the fire that burns it away.’ (Stephen Mitchelmore, Times Literary Supplement, 19/26 December 2008)
‘In Let Me Tell You, Griffiths trusts that his form will effect its own kind of "saying." That it results in a character with emotional depth and a narrative that plausibly develops a life story about which Hamlet is otherwise silent only validates the wisdom of the author's commitment to that form. Ultimately, Let Me Tell You seems to me one of those experimental fictions that straddles the line between narrative fiction and poetry.’ (Daniel Green, The Reading Experience, 27 May 2009)
‘....Paul Griffiths's book is a more profound achievement....Griffiths pulls off some fine tricks, and shows how much of [Ophelia’s] speech can be chopped up and made to sound like Beckett, or the Beatles (she quotes Love Me Do verbatim), or Oscar Wilde. There are the rhythms of recognisable nursery rhymes throughout....[T]his is a vital book, as much for musicians as for literary theorists. From Griffiths, who is perhaps best known as an invaluable guide to contemporary music, this is a composition in its own right, to listen to along with Berio’s Sinfonia with its spliced quotations from Mahler and Beckett, or John Cage’s Dadaist treatment of Finnegans Wake. For feminist critics, ironies abound: here is Ophelia’s story, at last, but with words that a man wrote for her being hacked about by another man. But then, somebody had to do it (the book does make you feel this way)....’ (Tom Payne,Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2008)
‘My reading fancies have been most tickled of late by a small but hugely resonant book just out from Reality Street, Paul Griffiths’s let me tell you....It is a vital part of the success of the work that it is not quite able to, presumably not seeking to, rise above its limits; it doesn’t want you to forget what shapes it. But it does exceed, lyrically, hauntingly, its limited life as a game or exercise. The breakages and small bathetic failures of its textures and materials, the gaps and fissures within which the language reverberates, start to speak for themselves, about the homelessness, the terrible wandering madness, of the disembodied voice within such an insistent text. We start to hear something almost like a computer voice — like HAL, say, in 2001: A Space Odyssey: this artificial Ophelia likewise has just enough intelligence to be paranoid; so much of her expressivity rests on polysemy, and yet if these few words are all she has, how is she to trust them when they’re so unstable? It is a sad, beautiful, limpid book. Were he living, Edward Lear would read it and weep; Veronica Forrest-Thompson, likewise, might bat an eyelid, were she.’ (Chris Goode, Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire)
‘The beautiful, moving, and unsettling narrative Griffiths crafts for Ophelia from her drastically limited lexis inevitably resonates, as one reads, against the actual speeches written for her by Shakespeare....let me tell you takes us into the heart of the Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia family. Mrs Polonius appears here too, in unflattering terms: she is portrayed as a nymphomaniac who has herself serviced daily by a pair of lusty attendant lords, until she finally abandons her family altogether, much to her daughter’s relief. Ophelia’’s love for her brother and father is delicately limned, and we learn too of her brother’s first erotic experiences, in a series of bawdy sonnets that make repeated use of the word cock (‘‘Young men will do’t, if they come to’t, / By Cock, they are to blame.’’) Underlying her memoir, however, is the terrible knowledge of her impending betrayal, lunacy and death, which have been predicted to her by a prophetic maid. She ends the novel on the brink of an attempt to escape Elsinore once and for all. Although we know this attempt will prove futile, that a watery death still awaits her, this ingenious novel does succeed—as her clothes do in the brook—in bearing her up mermaid-like awhile, before the fate allotted her by Shakespeare reasserts its imperious grip.’ (Mark Ford)
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