Sunset Song (Canons)

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I am listening to the audiobook narrated by Eileen McCallum. You have to pay attention. Understanding the Scottish dialect is difficult, but worth it. I don't understand all the words. Most you understand from the context. The dialect captures the colloquial speech of the area. The dialect is said to be artificial, but I didn’t realize this. McCallum's intonation reflects the humor, sadness and anger found in the lines. She sings the Scottish tunes. Five stars for the excellent narration. In my view the narration enhances one's appreciation of the text. Islamic state and Taliban were not the first to realise that profound change comes only by killing the roots, the image, the word, the idea of the fully creative human. The results are well recorded.

Why now are we getting an article that reflects badly on Scotland’s now distant past? Can we look forward to further pieces highlighting the treatment of witches, sectarianism or whatever shameful demonstration of the failures of the current people of Scotland. El personaje de Chris es el verdadero eje central de la novela, su pequeño debate interno al comienzo abre las puertas a una protagonista luchadora y valiente que no se deja amedrentar. Pasaremos por varias etapas de su vida, en las que florecerá el auto descubrimiento, el hallazgo interno de la pasión y del amor, así como la superación y el poder emergente que nace desde lo más profundo de su ser. Su evolución, al igual que la formación de la protagonista son desarrolladas magistralmente. But, for all that, it was Chris Guthrie that gave Sunset Song the place in my heart that it still occupies today. I am genuinely not sure if it is true or a stretch to say, as many do, that the Chris of Sunset Song – and the two subsequent novels that make up the Scots Quair trilogy – personifies Scotland. Sunset Song: watch the exclusive trailer for the first world war tragedy starring Agyness Deyn – video Guardian Throughout Sunset Song, there is repeated reference to “two Chrisses” as a way of describing the conflict that she carries within her. It is best articulated in this beautiful passage which I still think of regularly:

Este libro se convirtió rápidamente en uno de mis favoritos. Pocos libros se sienten tan grandes en alcance mientras tratan cosas tan pequeñas. As for Lesley Mitchell, the people he wrote about did not recognise themselves in his descriptions of them. They were generally ‘affronted’ and not just his father. Is that denialism? Or did Mitchell consciously exaggerate the harshness for dramatic effect? Or was it not also partly the effect of his own nervous disposition? He went through several breakdowns and people who are mentally unwell have distorted views of reality. It may be real to them – we have to respect and empathise with their subjective feelings as have an internal validity – but others may see the same events and characters differently. People are complex. I remember my grandfather as sad, because I have a vivid sense of his carrying around a great deal of unspoken pain the last time I saw him. I did not know it then (I was ten years old) but he was dying of stomach cancer. My sense of his silent suffering was not my invention, but it had different causes than mental pain, which I did not understand because that knowledge was not told to me. My sister though remembered a different man, in happier times, when he would dandle us on his knee and sing us songs to amuse us. Memory can be very subjective. There are many layers to memory just as there are many layers to character. People are psychologically complex, and a person who is mentally ill sees certain layers and not others. Sunset Song is profound. It is heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting and life affirming. It tells a story of a Scotland that, in some senses, is no more, yet, in others, still lives in the hearts of each and every one of us. The cruel aspects of Gibbon’s story flow in part from his diffusionist philosophy which blames agriculture for society’s woes. He also detested religion and thought Calvinism responsible for the Scots’ unnatural attitude towards sexuality and the human body. But Leslie Mitchell, Gibbon’s real name, had his own personal reasons to feel alienated from his family and culture and to consider it brutal.

The central character is a young woman, Chris Guthrie, growing up in a farming family in the fictional parish of Kinraddie in the Mearns at the start of the 20th century. Life is hard, and her family is dysfunctional. But suddenly, at the point where Chris finds herself alone and independent, the book turns into something quite wonderful. The story of Chris and Ewan falling in love and marrying is full of emotional truth. This isn't a great romance – this is two young people setting out to make a life for themselves and their inevitable children, farming the land in continuity with the generations before them and assuming they will hand it on in turn to the next, and making the adjustments that any couple must when the realities of living with another person don't quite match up to the dream. I know there are many historical-fictionistas out there who dislike dialects and there is a further modernist warning: The novel itself is set in the years before and during WW1, amongst a community of small tenant farmers in the north-east of Scotland. Their age-old way of life is facing its end as the modern world reaches them. Both the characters and the landscape are wonderfully conjured into life, but whilst the novel has a definite “end of epoch” feel this is no romanticised portrait of past rural life. Incest, suicide and marital rape all feature, and there’s a strong theme of how people are either brutalised or worn down by the harshness of their lives. Particularly impressive was the way LGG perfectly captured the gossiping and scandalmongering that goes on in this type of community. There’s plenty of tragedy in the book, but some great humour too. It just was common that fathers were feared rather than loved. Fathers were not expected to play a role in child care. But they were also generally respected. Respect was the basis of filial regard rather than love. A good father was one you could look up to and respect. Love did not come into it. It was rare to find examples of loving fathers who actually played with their children and were fun to be around and openly affectionate. It was mostly found amongst fathers who were comfortably off, and had leisure, like Charles Darwin who was broken hearted at the death of his young daughter, or E. C. Milne’s father who had the time to write Winnie the Pooh books to entertain his young son. But even then, Christopher Robin still remembered his father as emotionally remote.I have been an avid reader of fiction for as long as I can remember, probably longer. My childhood memories are full of the stories of Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, CS Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Laura Ingalls Wilder and many others. For me, nothing – not TV or playing games with friends – could beat the joy and exhilaration of being transported by a story to a place of the imagination. I still love and marvel at the power of story to lift us from our own reality. In Chapter 1 Jean Guthrie – the mother of the protagonist, Chris Guthrie – discovered she was pregnant with twins, despite already having four children. Because their family was now so large, her husband John took the decision to take over the lease at a farm called Blawearie and move the whole family to Kinraddie. Jean was deeply unhappy about having more children, but with no access to contraception and her husband’s refusal to respect her decisions about her body, she was left with no choice. Once in Kinraddie, Chris was sent to study at a nearby college where she felt herself torn between two identities: one which loved learning and the intellect, the other which loved agriculture and the land. Throughout Sunset Song, there is repeated reference to ‘two Chrisses’ as a way of describing the conflict that she carries within her. It is best articulated in this beautiful passage which I still think of regularly: Lewis Grassic Gibbon retrata con minuciosidad y con inmenso cariño la vida de esta pequeña comunidad de campesinos escoceses. Pero lo hace sin concesiones. La vida es dura, cruel e injusta. Estos hombres y mujeres, moldeados por el tiempo y el trabajo, aman y sufren. Saben acariciar pero también golpean con mano de hierro, incluso a los que más quieren. Y a pesar de todo uno los compadece y entiende; no son mejores ni peores, simplemente son humanos. Personas de carne y hueso que casi parecen salir de las páginas de 'Canción del ocaso' para confiarte al oído su propia historia, sus anhelos y pesares... The author lived a short life between 1901 and 1935. For a man of his time he was unusual in that he often placed women as the central characters of his stories, many of which were told from a female perspective. So pronounced was this tendency that during his lifetime some people thought his books were written by a female author using a penname. Lewis Grassic Gibbon was in fact a penname, though of a man called James Leslie Mitchell. “Sunset Song” fits this pattern, with its central character being a young woman, Christine (Chris) Guthrie.