In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Ailsa Ross’s novel Hovel is a lyrical, inventive, and profound debut.
The Globe and Mail wrote of the book:
“Olga Tokarczuk, Ali Smith and Rachel Cusk are listed as comparables for this moody, poetic first novel (speckled through with equally moody photographs) about a homesick Scottish woman living in the Rocky Mountains whose growing fixation on ancestral rituals and memory unsettles her marriage and alienates her from the surrounding community.”
In her own words, here is Ailsa Ross’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Hovel:
Chris Hughes’ Slow Motion Blackbird
The narrator of HOVEL is trying to defamiliarize the familiar world; she’s trying to see the world anew by probing it from as many strange angles as possible.
In this song, the familiar song of a blackbird gets slowed down, and slowed down again, and again, until it’s unfamiliar, until it’s fresh and new. In no small part, this song was the inspiration for the projects the narrator gives herself in my novel – such as letting mosquitoes bite her until they no longer bother her, such as fermenting things that have no business being fermented.
Björk’s Virus
When I hear this song, I feel I am hearing a young whale crooning from the depths of a cold ocean, though of course I am actually just hearing Björk singing about when she had a candida issue in her throat.
During the writing of HOVEL, I was listening to Björk’s entire Biophilia album over and over again, and then as the months became years and I was nearing the final draft stage, I listened to only this one song on repeat. At that point I was often working on my manuscript from 7am to 11pm, which means I was listening to this same song for sixteen hours a day. It stands to reason that I cannot really listen to this song anymore.
Peter Maxwell Davies’ Farewell to Stromness
My favourite story about Peter Maxwell Davies involves a swan. Specifically, a March 2005 story in The Guardian titled ‘Composer ruffles feathers over swan bake’ begins,
“One of Britain’s leading composers is being investigated by police after officers found a dead swan at his home which he was planning to eat, it was confirmed today…
… Sir Peter, 70, who was conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for a decade, denied any wrongdoing when interviewed on the BBC’s Around Orkney programme this morning. He said the bird was already dead when he found it and decided to take it home to hang it before eating it.”
I was hesitant to mention this swan anecdote here (I also mention it in HOVEL) because it obscures the beauty of his compositions, his ability to hear the sounds of the natural world and render them in music. Yet, I do like this swan anecdote so much.
John Cage’s Dream
The narrator of HOVEL tries lucid dreaming – like the composer John Cage – in the hopes of transforming the noise of the trains that run by her apartment into visuals that would not rouse her from sleep at night. Cage was successful at this; with practice, for him a Manhattan burglar alarm lasting several hours came to resemble a Constantin Brâncuși sculpture. My narrator is not so successful.
Luigi Russolo’s Awakening of a City
At one point in HOVEL, the narrator starts to imagine what it must have been like at one of the first concerts performed by Luigi Russolo, in Milan in 1914, when the sound of musicians cranking at his handmade Intonarumori instruments was so terrible that the audience became extremely violent. To go with his Futurist music, Russolo wrote a manifesto, which includes the lines:
“For years, Beethoven and Wagner have deliciously shaken our hearts. Now we are fed up with them. This is why we get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds, than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies.”
My narrator wants to believe Russolo, but in truth she prefers Wagner.
Pluscarden Abbey’s Hymn: Lucis Creator
A few years ago I went to Mass at Pluscarden Abbey in northeast Scotland. What I remember is the morning sun streaming through huge windows as the monks performed a series of Gregorian chants. I listen to this recording of the monks at Pluscarden to remember the feeling I had being there. Being in the abbey, among all that light, was the feeling I wanted to bring into my novel, and actually Pluscarden features in HOVEL’s pages.
AILSA ROSS writes about people, place, and art for Outside, Orion, the Guardian, BBC History and others. She grew up in the north of Scotland and lives in the Canadian Badlands. HOVEL is her first novel.