HOW is almost October already? I feel like somebody should have warned me. The bright side of the year slipping away is that it’ll soon be time for another year club – and this time it’s the 1930 Club, from 14-21 October. Fun!
For the uninitiated – every six months, Karen and I host a ‘club’ across the blogosphere where we ask everyone to read books from a particular year. Together, we can put together an interesting overview of the year. Just put your thougths on your blog, GoodReads, LibraryThing, etc – or in the comments on my blog or Karen’s if you don’t have anywhere to host it.
I can’t remember how we chose 1930, but it is definitely right in the middle of my reading happy place. I have dozens of books from that year, and at least half of those are unread – but I’ve put together a shortlist of titles I’m thinking about reading.
Who knows if I’ll stick to these, but it’s nice to have options. In case you can’t see, the black one is Turn Back The Leaves by E.M. Delafield.
If you’re joining in – put the dates in your diary. Head over to ‘1930 in literature’ on Wikipedia. And read Diary of a Provincial Lady if you haven’t yet! Let me know if you’ve already picked out what to read – looking forward to it!
I just started Diary of a Provincial Lady, and am enjoying it. It is a lot like D.E. Stevenson in humor although perhaps not as warm.
Glad my timing is working out!
So looking forward to this Club year, Simon! I think there’s going to be a *lot* of variety and your selections look very interesting! :D
I think it’s going to be Le Bal by Irene Nemirovsky, which was first published in France in 1930. A rather short novella but just the ticket because I’m short of time at the mo!
Thanks for hosting this! I need to get together a pile o’ books, but Cakes and Ale would be a very good choice–I want to explore Maugham more.
I’m hoping it’s going to be Cakes and Ale for me too. I’ve reserved The Maltese Falcon at the library though I gather it’s not really my kind of book, so I’m hoping my other reserve for Cakes and Ale comes in on time.
Lovely to see another Club event looming on the horizon, even if it does feel too soon to be October already! All being well, I’m hoping to join in the fun! :)
I envy you the dozen books you have that fit this year since I just have the one. It’s a monster and I am short on time so will have to resort to the library…..
“Very Good, Jeeves” by PG Woodhouse for me. Ready to go!
Oh, darn, I’d already planned to read lots of Swiss writers for October, so I’m now trying to find a book published in 1930 by a Swiss writer. Would it be stretching things too far if I were to read Ramuz ‘Beauty on Earth’, published in 1927 but first English translation published in 1930? Ooooh, I’ve just seen that Camil Petrescu’s best novel Last Night of Love, First Night of War was published in 1930, which I have got on my shelf, so I might give that a go… Or – oooh, Patapoufs and Filifers, a children’s book which is so prescient about war!
Can’t wait, in other words…
Hooray! I’m planning on reading Diary of a Provincial Lady and Not So Quiet. I’m looking forward to all the posts!
Oh exciting! I have a few Viragoes and Persephones on my TBR so hope one of them is from the right year!
Cakes and Ale it turned out to be!
https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/10/04/cakes-and-ale-by-w-somerset-maugham/
I can’t believe this has come around so quickly. Fortunately I did sort out a pile of books when you first mentioned it Simon, and I’ve just discovered that another recent purchase fits the bill too.
I took a photo but I can’t work out how to insert it into this comment (advice welcome!) – so here is my list of possibles, and I’ll put the picture on twitter:
Gwynedd Rae – All Mary (did anyone else read the Mary Plain books as a child?)
Evelyn Waugh – Vile Bodies
Vita Sackville West – The Edwardians
Miles Burton – The Secret of High Eldersham
Dorothy L Sayers – Strong Poison
1066 and All That
F Scott Fitzgerald – The Rich Boy and Other Stories
Christine Chaundler – The Madcap of the School
Nan Shepherd – The Weatherhouse
I’m a very slow reader so if I manage one of these I’ll be doing well, but it was fun digging them out – every time I found something from 1930 on my shelves it felt like the prize in a treasure hunt.
I haven’t heard of a handful of these, and naturally they’re the ones I’m most intrigued by! Particularly the Shepherd, for some reason.
I have started A Shutter of Snow with the intention of reviewing it next week. I also have The Mysterious Mr Quin as my second choice.
Fun!
Simon, I don’t really have anywhere else to post my review, so here it is: apologies if it’s too long:
The Weatherhouse by Nan Shepherd
Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse was written in 1930, twelve years after the war in which it is set had ended. It is about small, fictitious, farming community in North East Scotland, and more particularly about a small group of women living their circumvented lives – but it is about much more than this. In describing a few, seemingly insignificant, events, Shepherd is able to examine the nature and perception of truth, the meaning of war, and what was for her the essential oneness of the physical, spiritual and natural worlds.
Nan Shepherd was born in 1893, in a house less than a mile from the one in which I am writing this review, at Peterculter on Deeside. The family then moved to Cults, a little closer to Aberdeen, and there she remained for the rest of her long and active life. She worked for many years at Aberdeen College Of Education, and is remembered as a generous and forward-thinking teacher, but her first love was always the Cairngorms, the mountain range in which she spent so much of her time, and about which she wrote her late-discovered classic The Living Mountain. She also wrote three novels, which together with The Living Mountain, form the Grampian Quartet. The Weatherhouse is the second of the three.
Aunt Craigmyle (known as Lang Leeb, for this is rural Aberdeenshire, in which nicknames are commonplace) is over 90 and lives at the Weatherhouse with her three daughters, Annie (or Paradise), Theresa and Ellen. Only Ellen has been married, and her marriage ended in dismal failure; she has returned home with her placid adult daughter Kate, who works at a local hospital. Most able-bodied men are away at the war.
Into their lives comes Lindsay, daughter of Lang Leeb’s solicitor cousin Andrew Lorimer. Lindsay has been sent to stay at the Weatherhouse to get over a love affair of which her parents – her mother in particular – disapprove. It is however not long before the object of her affections, Garry Forbes, returns wounded from the war to stay with his aunt, Barbara (Bawbie) Patterson, a near neighbour of the Craigmyles at Knapperley.
One other character of importance features in the story; Louie Morgan, the daughter of a previous minister of the Kirk. Louie has told everyone that she was engaged to David Grey, a close friend of Garry’s who has died of TB. Louie is a fanciful, over dramatic woman; Garry cannot believe that his friend could ever have been involved with her, and decides that he has to show Louie up as a liar. On this central issue the plot turns, and this may at first seem a very flimsy story on which to turn it – but the ripples that eddy out from Louie’s assertions and Garry’s attempts to disprove them soon become treacherous, and Garry, Louie, Lindsay and Ellen in particular are forced to question the motives for their actions;
‘Things are true and right in one relationship, and quite false in another’ (Louie)
‘Was the truth, after all, more important than the pain you inflict on others for its sake?’ (Garry)
The beauty of The Weatherhouse lies not only in the main story, but also in its vivid pictures of country life in early 20th century Scotland and of the idiosyncratic members of the small community. From Bawbie, a fierce, strong, independent woman who drinks whisky with the tramp Johnny Rogie (a war veteran, now seeking his fortune on the road), treats the blackout with total disdain, and dances alone in her farmhouse kitchen, to local odd job man Francie Ferguson, who has waited 20 years to marry his bride in order not to offend his brother (‘Feel Weelum’), Theresa, who has a habit of appropriating other people’s things, and scheming cobbler Jonathan Bannochie, who is busy making money out of the war, every character is brought to life; small details let us see each one as their neighbours see them.
Shepherd was a feminist before her time, and The Weatherhouse shows us the effects of the constraints on women who want more than the domestic round. Both Ellen and Louie suffer for their dreams, and Ellen especially, denied a full life and with the hopes born of imagination eventually destroyed, ends up a tragic, Miss Havisham-like figure.
Written mostly in the Doric, the novel is not easy to follow at first (and I lived for some years in a remote part of Aberdeenshire where this is still in everyday use) – Shepherd provides a glossary, but many of the words are not in it, so we are left wondering if she thought we should work them out for ourselves; this is easier to achieve if you read the more opaque sentences aloud. Once you get into the rhythm of the language, however, it takes on a beauty of its own; without it the story would not be as rooted in the rough, unforgiving landscape of the area. Shepherd’s descriptions are startling in their originality;
‘(Lindsay) crashed like a cataract down the stair’
Landscape and weather were of supreme importance to her; the characters sometimes seem to become part of the natural world (something that Shepherd herself felt when in the Cairngorms, and about which she wrote in The Living Mountain. To Garry, observing his aunt spinning in her solitary dance, Bawbie becomes a star, and Lindsay;
‘Running thus before the wind (she) had entered into a place that is beyond understanding; she was at one with the motion of the universe.’
At the end of this superlative novel some of the characters achieve a version of happiness, some do not. The Weatherhouse has, at times, a dreamlike quality, but it is also real. In the wider world the war is destroying lives; in the microcosm that is Fetter-Rothnie frustration and gossip destroy hope and reputation. But despite all of this, Garry eventually learns to appreciate the value of what he has;
‘It wasn’t the war that was big, it was being alive…..where there were other people, divinely different from oneself; whole kingdoms of Heaven clamouring to be…loved in spite of themselves.’
The Weatherhouse by Nan Shepherd is published by Canongate Books.
Lovely review – you should start a blog! The Doric thing does make me nervous, but it does sound like a great read.
It’s a brilliant book, I’m just about to start trying to set down my thoughts about it, and am so glad someone else has written something about it too.
I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts. I feel that mine are still developing – it’s certainly a book that stays with you, isn’t it?
Don’t be put off Simon! It is quite a challenge at first but you do get into it, and sometimes you just have to let it wash over you – it’s often more the feel of the thing than the actual meaning. And there are sections in ‘normal’ English as well.
WhenI first moved to Aberdeenshire many years ago I had no idea what people meant when they said ‘Fit like?’ but now my automatic response is ‘Mucktie aye’ – and I was born in south London. (It means ‘How’s things’ – ‘Fine thanks’ – or something like that!). Ian Rankin has a great bit in one of his Rebus books when he calls Aberdeen the Furry Boots town. This is not a comment on the weather but means ‘Furrabouts ye from?’ (Where are you from?’). If you live in the country for long things like ‘fly pieces’ become normal currency. Nan Shepherd, after all, came from Cults (now a very smart Aberdeen suburb) not some remote farming village, so she must have learned the Doric somewhere herself.
It’s definitely worth giving her books a try.