Author: StuckinaBook

The Spring House by Cynthia Asquith

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We all know that the quality of a book is no guarantee that it will stay in print. The ones that survive almost always have merit, but the ones that disappear could be equally brilliant. And I was reminded of that yet again with The Spring House (1936) by Lady Cynthia Asquith. I’m going to warn you up front: this book is incredibly difficult to get hold of, but if you do have the chance then leap at it.

One of my favourite Instagram accounts is Virginia at Old Book Dreamer. She mostly reads mid-century women writers and has the most astonishing book collection – astonishing for the beautiful editions, but also because she manages to get hold of books that seem to have almost disappeared. It was she who recommended Asquith’s novels to me – not this particular one, but The Spring House was the first I managed to get hold of. And, indeed, I think Asquith only wrote two novels. I’m so grateful that Virginia directed me to her.

Though published on the cusp of World War Two, The Spring House is set during World War One. The heroine, Miranda, is living at her palatial family home that has been turned into a convalesence hospital for soldiers. In her mid-20s, she has a soldier husband who was in Canada at the outbreak of war and has had to remain there, and a young son called Pat. Among the cast of characters are her kind, slightly anxious mother, a witty friend called Gloria, a naively virtuous nurse called Vera, and her officious Aunt Madge. And then there are the men…

Miranda is considered a good person by everyone who knows her, the reader included. And it’s perhaps curious that nobody seems at all censorious about her various relationships with men. While she hasn’t committed adultery, there are several flirtatious friendships – with Richard, with Horace, with a pacifist poet and a demanding portrait artist – that are accepted fact in her social circle and seem to matter more to her than her absent husband. We learn so very little about him for most of the novel. Nobody seems to lament his absence or even particularly to notice it. It’s a curious slant on the traditional anxious-wife-on-the-home-front image that we are accustomed to.

Here she is with Richard who, as the novel opens, is perhaps the man getting closest to her heart (and, like the others, doesn’t give her husband a second thought):

Richard complained that she did not really care for him, but only for his admiration.

“To you I am only one of many. You ration me. I want long draughts of your company: not just tantalising sips. I wish you hadn’t got such a hospitable heart, that is, if you have any at all.”

Miranda winched.

[…]

“You only want admiration,” he went on. “You can’t stand any heart-searching. All you want is a superficial, stationary relationship.”

As always when pressed, Miranda felt herself losing all sense of her own identity. Everything seemed slipping from her. She felt like an actress in a badly-rehearsed play – as though she had forgotten her part. But something must be said.

“Oh, please, Richard,” she quavered, “must you be so interrogative? We used to be so happy.”

She spoke with a paralysing sense of unreality. The scene seemed something she had read about, and her mind, as we often the case, split into mutually critical parts. If only she could be spontaneous, instead of always her own censor! How much easier it would be to speak out on this sort of occasion if one had read less, she thought, not for the first time. If only I hadn’t read so many novels! They tie one’s tongue by making everything seem a cliché.

That ended up being quite a long excerpt, but I think it gives you a good sense of who Miranda is as a character – and who Asquith is an author. Because Richard isn’t wrong (without being entirely right). And Miranda just wants to be let alone to live as makes herself and others most content – including, later, getting involved in nursing. But what makes the scene and character so unusual for me is how conscious Miranda is of her perception and her reactions – not just in comparison to the other women she knows, but in comparison to the long line of fictional characters she’s encountered in books. And nothing can warm a reader to a character more than them being a reader.

But she is not alarmingly self-aware. She treads the line constantly between self-awareness and self-delusion, as the narrative often highlights. When her usually irritating Aunt does something requiring some sympathy, the narrative notes, ‘Never able to distinguish between pity and affection, she at once began to feel fond of her.’

Quite a lot of the novel has happened when the main plot comes along. He is a soldier, a friend of Miranda’s brother, home on leave. And with a speed that would be irritating if the novelist weren’t keenly aware of it, they fall in love. The main stage of the novel is then occupied by the rush and shock of feelings Miranda hasn’t experienced before, and the attempt to fit him into her life. The husband is remembered, but really only as a sad obstacle.

This is the perhaps the main thrust of The Spring House, but I am writing about it briefly because I didn’t find it as interesting as other relationships in her life – particularly her two brothers, Robin and Stephen. The way Asquith writes about mourning a sibling is subtle and beautiful. It is surely no coincidence that Asquith’s own brother died during World War One. There is a ring of authenticity to so much of The Spring House, and it’s worth remembering that Cynthia Asquith was in her late 20s during the war. Despite being written a couple of decades later, there are many elements that conjure up the war vividly and often with an unusual perspective. For example…

It was some weeks since Miranda had been in London. She was struck by its air of resigned adaptation, the prevalance of khaki, the number of slightly wounded to be seen in the streets, and the look of subdued sorror on so many faces. The sight and sound of marching soldiers still moved her like a fine line of poetry, but the Join-our-jolly-Picnic recruiting posters angered her, and she sickened at the grim sight of the sacks hung up for bayonet practice in Chelsea Barracks. As she approached Waterloo Station, she passed the ongoing draft of guardsmen, about three hundred moving as one, and many women running along by the side of them.

Asquith is clearly a very excellent writer. Her talents seem to have mostly been turned to memoirs and ghost stories, but she turns her hand to novels with a beautiful elegance. Here’s an example of her writing that also helps explain the title:

Slipping a coat over her nightgown, she stole downstairs and out of the back door. It was very mild, but the beauty of the still night made her shiver. The lawns were silver with dew, as silver as the giant soaring stems of the beeches. She hurried to the little wooden hut with a thatched roof that was perched half way up the hill from which one looked down on the House. It had been built for her as a surprised birthday present when she was six. The ‘Spring House’ she had called it as a child, because she preferred spring to summer, and the name had clung. A favourite refuge of her childhood, it always drew her back. Wherever she might be, she felt it was here that she would wish to bring any great perplexity, joy or sorrow. Within its shelter she seemed able to shrink back from the glare of life into the golden haze of her girlhood; or, if she chose to invite them, memories of early childhood came flying back to her heart.

Harder to convey is her excellence at creating place and character. Miranda is such a vivid, rounded character that it feels almost scandalous that so few contemporary readers have had the chance to meet her. You know how some characters are so alive that they should be recognised and celebrated in readerly circles? Elizabeth Bennet, Cassandra Mortmain, Anne Shirley, Mrs Danvers, John Ames and so on. It’s absurd to me that someone as alive as Miranda should only be met by a handful of living readers.

Does the book have flaws? Yes, there is a tendency to self-analysis and philosophising that could wear a bit then. I could see somebody losing patience with the way people openly and unrealistically discuss themselves and others. Love at first sight is also a red flag for some readers, and I did find the romantic relationship one of the least interesting (though still quite interesting). But The Spring House has that special something which overcomes any drawbacks. It’s one of the most immersive, beautiful novels I’ve read in many years and has reminded me what I love so much about interwar writing. Since it’s not set at the time it’s written, I don’t think it could fit into the British Library Women Writers series – but it would be a brilliant find for Persephone or a similar publishing house. We can but hope.

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

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Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris | Goodreads

I remember falling in love with David Sedaris. I was staying in a Youth Hostel in the Lake District, having gone there to give a talk on ‘the fantastic fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’ to a room of people who couldn’t hear much of what I was saying. My bedroom was under the stairs, so I could hear people walk up and down throughout the night. But it was nice to get away, and of course it meant plenty of uninterrupted reading time.

One of the books I’d brought with me was Sedaris’s book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which I’d picked out of my book group’s lucky dip Secret Santa. I didn’t know anything about the book or the author. Indeed, I thought it was a novel, and for some reason had decided the narrator was a young girl. It got confusing when the cast of characters changed in the second chapter, and when the narrator was addressed as ‘David’.

I pieced it together, of course, and now know that Sedaris is one of the most beloved humorists of his generation – sharing tales from his eccentric family’s eccentric life, sparing no details and no blushes. His parents, siblings, and long-term boyfriend come in for the most exposure, but anybody who crosses his path is likely to be dealt with in excruiating, gloriously witty prose.

And Barrel Fever (1994) was Sedaris’s first book. It is the only one of his books which divides into ‘Stories’ and ‘Essays’. The former are clearly fictional – for instance, the male narrator of ‘Parade’ has an energetic sexual relationship with Mike Tyson, having dumped Charlton Heston- but there is an interesting note in the beginning saying ‘This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.’ Is this the handiwork of a lawyer? Or do all his books have this disclaimer? Sedaris’s style relies on exaggeration and selection, but I would have assumed that his essays are based in at least some truth.

In my copy, there are only four essays – compared to 12 stories. I started by listening to the audiobook, which confusingly has fewer stories, retitles an essay, adds in one from Me Talk Pretty One Day, and cuts the most famous – ‘SantaLand Diaries’. It also had the cover art for Naked, so maybe I should have been forewarned. Anyway, once I’d compiled the audiobook and the print book, I read everything in Barrel Fever and more – and it is already clear in his first book that Sedaris is much better at the comic personal essay than he is at the short story.

‘Diary of a Smoker’ is a funny, short essay about how Sedaris’s family’s history of smoking, and how annoying it is when well-meaning non-smokers try to get you to quit:

The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you’ll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don’t understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.

‘The SantaLand Diaries’ made Sedaris famous, and is about his exploits and annoyances as an elf for Macy’s department store during the Christmas rush. It is every bit as scathing, self-loathing, and ridiculous as you’d expect from Sedaris writing that scenario – hovering just on the right side of good taste, as there an awful lot of innocent young children who are vulnerable to his sharp tongue.

But my favourite is ‘Giantess’, because it is so sublimely Sedaris. It’s very short, following Sedaris as he works as a painter ande decorator, while simultaneously in talks with the editor of Giantess magazine about submitting erotic fiction about abnormally tall or supernaturally growing women.

The editor of Giantess called to say he’d received my letter and thinks I might have potential. He introduced himsefl as Hank, saying, “I liked your story, Dave, but for Giantess you’ll need to drop the silly business and get straight to the turn-on, if you know what I mean. Do you understand what I’m talking about here, Dave?” Hank told me his readers are interested in women ranging anywhere from ten to seventy-five feet tall, and take their greatest delight in the physical description of a giantess outgrowing her clothing. “Do you know what I’m talking about, Dave? I need to hear those clothes splitting apart. Do you think you can do that for me?”

It’s not exactly the sort of thing I usually read about, but I loved the specificity which Sedaris gives to the absurd. It’s the unasked-for use of ‘Dave’. It’s the exactitude of the height range, and the mundanity of submitting stories to a publication that doesn’t get any less mundane because of the variety of publication. Sedaris looks at the ridiculous face-on and finds a world-weariness in it.

I also enjoyed reading the stories, I should add. My favourite was the satirical ‘Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter’, perhaps because it is the nearest to Sedaris’s voice – albeit through a depth of distortion. For the most part, though, the stories seem an exercise in creating the most unpleasant people possible. Some are cruel, some are so thoughtless that they ruin other people’s lives, and some are evil to the point of absurdity. Individually, they were diverting – but it grows old quite quickly to simply have dreadful characters doing dreadful things. It’s a trick that obscures the more subtle ways that Sedaris can create character and twist scenarios into something special.

There’s no wonder that Sedaris pursued the personal essay for all his subsequent collections. Who knows how much is fiction and how much is genuine autobiography, but the blend is clearly where Sedaris excels. Barrel Fever is most interesting as an author trying his hand at different styles, and he made the right conclusion for his future books.

Life hacks and hand cream! Peas in a Podcast #17

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Oh my gosh Peas in a Podcast is BACK! Due to HUGE DEMAND!

For those not in the know, it’s the very occasional podcast I do with my brother Colin, arguably about nothing. You might be able to find it in your podcast app, and I’m trying to add it to Spotify as we speak… edit: it’s there!

Fingers crossed we’ll do them more frequently than once every two years now??

The Clocks by Agatha Christie

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The Clocks - Wikipedia

I’ve reached the point where I can’t really remember which Agatha Christie novels I’ve read and which I haven’t. Which I suppose is a good thing, because it means I can go back and re-read them and will have probably forgotten who the murderer is. Or, more likely, think I’m being very clever when it comes back to me.

But I definitely hadn’t read The Clocks before. Published in 1963, that means it falls towards the end of her writing career – but before the books got really bad. It’s also technically a Hercule Poirot but, for reasons we will come onto, it doesn’t really feel like one.

(Btw, I shan’t give away huge spoilers – like the culprit – but there will be some milder spoilers in this review, so you are warned.)

The location of the murder is 19, Wilbraham Crescent. Christie describes the street in a way that I enjoyed:

Wilbraham Crescent was a fantasy executed by a Victorian builder in the 1880’s [sic]. It was a half-moon of double houses and gardens set back to back. This conceit was a source of considerable difficulty to persons unacquainted with the locality. Those who arrived on the outer side were unable to find the lower numbers and those who hit the inner side first were baffled as to the whereabouts of the higher numbers. The houses were neat, prim, artistically balconied and eminently respectable. Modernisation had as yet barely touched them – on the outside, that is to say. Kitchens and bathrooms were the first to feel the wind of change.

I think that’s a lovely observational, about kitchens and bathrooms, and it’s expressed well and elegantly. Christie is often unfairly dismissed an excellent plotter and poor writer, but I disagree. A lot of The Clocks is quietly amusing and she has a good eye for social detail.

Anyway, a young typist called Sheila Webb is called to a new client’s house. Mrs Pebmarsh has requested her by name to 19, Wilbraham Crescent, and off she goes, letting herself in (as instructed). She finds a living room with numerous clocks on the mantlepiece and other places – far more clocks than anybody would normally need. And, more curiously, they are all at 4:13pm – an hour ahead of the current time.

But that’s the strangest thing Sheila finds in the room. The other, behind the sofa, is the body of a dead man.

She runs out screaming, and encounters our narrator for half the novel – Colin Lamb. Christie goes back and forth between third-person narrator and Colin’s perspective, and he is really our detective for the novel. He’s also rather smitten by Sheila.

We gather some facts: Mrs Pebmarsh says she did not request a typist. She does not know who the man in her house is, and she is blind – so he may have been there for a while without her noticing. Colin begins questioning all the various neighbours, who do rather get confusing, as we pretty quickly go to lots of different houses and encounter a large number of people who may or may not have any bearing on the novel. It’s an opportunity for Christie to enjoy herself though – there’s a ‘cat lady’ totally devoted to her cats; there are some rowdy but intelligent young boys; there is a glimpse of a certain type of political discourse in 1963:

“Each of these four clocks represented a time about an hour later than the cuckoo clock and the grandfather clock.”

“Must have been foreign,” said Mrs Curtin. “Me and my old man went on a coach trip to Switzerland and Italy once and it was a whole hour further on there. Must be something to do with the Common Market. I don’t hold with the Common Market and nor does Mr Curtin. England’s good enough for me.”

Plus ça change, if I may.

So, where does Hercule Poirot come into this? Just barely. We know that we are in a Poirot novel because of there are stray mentions of Ariadne Oliver (and Christie has her usual good time poking fun at Oliver for choosing a Finnish detective when she doesn’t know anything about Finland). The man himself enters by way of interview with Colin Lamb, an old friend – or, rather, a younger friend whom Poirot tries to educate, but in a sort of frustrating way where he never says what he means. A few times, Colin Lamb traipses off to Poirot’s residence to lay his new findings at Poirot’s feet and get some sort of enigmatic reply in return. At no point does Poirot himself talk to anybody else involved, or visit the scene of the crime. It’s all rather strange. Why is he there at all?

For much of The Clocks, I thought I was onto a real winner, and wondered why it wasn’t talked about more about Christie’s oeuvre. It was a page-turner with entertaining writing and a fun (if occasionally slightly overwhelming) cast of characters. The sidelining of Poirot was odd, but I went with it. Even the occasional hints of spy rings didn’t put me off – and I find Christie very tedious in spy mode, which she couldn’t resist returning to.

Well – without spoilers – The Clocks did end up being a disappointment to me. I’ll just say that the solution wasn’t at all satisfying, and it felt very anti-climactic compared to her usual cleverness. I feel like the inventive set-up deserved a better pay-off. I’m glad I read it and I enjoyed myself, and from another author I’d be very impressed, but this definitely isn’t one of Christie’s masterpieces.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

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When I was in Canada last year (how I miss it and how I want to return!), I met up with Debra and she very kindly gave me a copy of The Stone Diaries (1993) by Canadian literary royalty Carol Shields. I was familiar with Shields but had never read her, and didn’t really know what to expect. As luck would have it, 1993 was proving a tricky year to fill for A Century of Books – and it was very useful to have The Stone Diaries on hand. And what an unusual, and unusually good, book it is.

Towards the end of the novel, its heroine Daisy reflects:

All she’s trying to do is keep things straight in her head. To keep the weight of her memories evenly distributed. To hold the chapters of her life in order. She feels a new tenderness growing for certain moments; they’re like beads on a string, and the string is wearing out. At the same time she knows that what lies ahead of her must be concluded by the efforts of her imagination and not by the straight-faced recital of a thottled and unlit history. Words are more and more required. And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression? The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge? She needs a quiet place in which to think about this immensity. And she needs someone — anyone — to listen.

It’s a good question: what is the story of a life? In some ways, Shields’ approach to the question is conventional. The Stone Diaries follows the life of a fairly ordinary Canadian woman from birth through to her death as an octogenarian. The sections are called things like ‘childhood’, ‘marriage’, ‘motherhood’ and so on. Daisy falls in love (not necessarily with the man she marries); she has friends, acquaintances, colleagues. Her one brush with the something that threatens to be extraordinary is becoming a popular gardening columnist, but she doesn’t truly become a celebrity. She has children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It is an ordinary life, well-lived.

But The Stone Diaries is not an ordinary novel. Here’s how it starts:

My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband’s supper. A cookery book lay open on the table: “Take some slices of stale bread,” the recipe said, “and one pint of currants; half a pint of raspberries; four ounces of sugar; some sweet cream if available.” Of course she’s divided the recipe in half, there being just the two of them, and what with the scarcity of currents, and Cuyler (my father) being a dainty eater. A pick-and-nibble fellow she calls him, able to take his food or leave it.

You can quickly tell that this is no ordinary narrator. This section is in the first-person – but telling us about an event she can’t have witnessed, down to the detail of the recipe. Throughout the novel, the narrative chops and changes between the third-person and the first-person – sometimes taking us into Daisy’s eyes and sometimes looking at her from a distance. It swirls between the two without pause, giving us a sense of the panoramic.

Add to this that the storytelling sometimes comes with preternatural knowledge, and sometimes more as you’d expect from the more off-the-shelf Bildungsroman. And then there’s a chapter entirely in letters, and another on different characters’ perspectives on what happened to Daisy. In the hands of most authors, this mix could be an awkward technique – but Shields wields it expertly. The tone and the narrative approach really elevate The Stone Diaries above the ordinary. It is handled with such assurance, which is perhaps no surprise as Shields was almost two decades into a revered career. More to the point, it never reads pretentiously – The Stone Diaries manages that exceptional feat: being both narrative experiment and page-turner. I think the only element that didn’t work for me was the inclusion of photographs of the characters, which felt a little bit self-indulgent.

I haven’t told you much about the other characters or the plot, but to be honest they are secondary to the prose and the confidence of the storytelling. You may end up not remembering all the grandchildren, or even quite disentangling the complexities of Daisy’s father, adoptive parents, relatives, lovers and so forth. But you’ll remember how different the novel felt, and how powerfully you are enveloped into one woman’s life.

Treasures of Time by Penelope Lively

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One of the things I love about my book group is how varied our book choices are – not just the latest hit novels, but ranging back over a century and more. Somebody suggested we read some Penelope Lively (she was a local, after all) and we landed on her second novel, Treasures of Time (1979).

The concept feels both modern and somehow very old-fashioned: a TV crew is making a documentary about a late archeologist, Hugh Paxton, and we witness what this exploration looks like in the lives of his widow, daughter, sister-in-law and so on. What makes it feel old-fashioned is how unintrusive the documentary crew is – they aren’t trying to sensationalise anything, and any secrets that are dug up will be a byproduct of a fairly earnest attempt to Hugh Paxton’s life. (The resultant documentary, which we see towards the end of the novel, seems laughably slow.)

But the late Hugh Paxton is not the most interesting person in this book, nor is his relationship with anybody paramount. To me, the most fascinating dynamic in this novel is between Hugh’s widow, Laura, and their daughter Kate. (Could Lively have chosen any more stereotypical middle-class white women’s names than Laura and Kate! Endless mid-century novels have one or the other.)

Laura is not a monster. To most of her acquaintance, she is probably considered charming and capable. But to Kate, she is often brutal – brutal with the polite kindness of a mother who ‘wants what’s best’ for her daughter and continually belittles her. She makes constantly clear that Kate is a disappointment: not beautiful enough, not successful enough, not elegant enough, not married enough. There is a very telling moment early on where Kate tries to decide what to wear to see her mother – knowing that she will be criticised if it is too casual (as being disrespectful and unflattering) and equally criticsed if she dresses up (silly and over the top). But she can’t help try, forever reframing her understanding of herself through her mother’s gaze.

Kate is no pushover herself. She is clearly damaged by her domineering, probably well-meaning mother – and it comes out as determination and bad decision making.

There are a scattering of sympathetic characters in Treasures of Time, with my favourite perhaps being the enthusiastic, wrong-footed documentary maker. But Lively isn’t very interested in whether people are sympathetic or not. Rather, she is searing in how she presents any human relationships – perhaps more at home when describing familial relationships than romantic ones.

Lively is also very good on class. I thought this was brilliant (and heaven knows I still encounter enough middle-class people desperate to be considered busy beyond belief in their very ordinary lives):

He had discovered with surprise, on his arrival in the southern white-collar counties, the furious busyness of the professional classes. You could not hold up your head in society, it seemed, if you were unable to claim intolerable pressures, both inside an occupation and, even more, outside it. At a sherry party in his supervisors house, he had listened with interest to a group of (he gathered) unemployed women vying with one another in their accounts of lives have never a spare moment to, dizzy in the service of Parent Teacher Associations, Conservation Societies, adult literacy campaigns and ornithology. Going home again, he found himself taking a new view of his parents’ untroubled appreciation of the eight hour day in the five day week. If he had asked his father if he was busy, he would have stared in incomprehension: if you were at work, you were at work, and if you were at home you were at home, and that was all there was to it.

This is all sounding like a very positive review, and I do admire a lot about Penelope Lively’s writing. But I’ll end by admitting that I do struggle to love her novels. I’ve read a handful, and indeed some with very overlapping themes (a biographer in According to Mark; reflections on a long life in Moon Tiger) and it can feel like I’ve looking through a clouded pane of class. It is expertly done, but I don’t quite feel connected to it. I admire, but I haven’t yet felt touched by her writing.

Some spinsters for Spinster September

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It’s September, which means it’s officially Spinster September! It’s the brainchild of Nora (@pear.jelly on Instagram) and it’s a celebration of all the wonderful spinsters of literature. You know I love a novel about spinsters, whether it’s a joyful one where she’s reclaiming her independence or a morose one where she’s all melancholy. It’s all my jam.

My suggestions could be endless, so instead I’m going to go very route one – sharing the books I own that have the word ‘spinster’ in the title! Here we go…

Spinster by Sylvia Ashton-Warner

There’s more than one Sylvia BLANK-Warner on the block for Spinster September! This is a New Zealand novel about a teacher that I was given back in about 2011 but haven’t read yet – it’s the one I’m hoping to read during this month.

Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins

Oh my gosh I LOVE this novel so much. You might not usually think of Patricia Brent as a spinster, since she is in her mid-20s – but she is feeling the judgement of the old ladies in her boarding house. So she pretends she is engaged and off to meet her fiance. When she is followed, she sits next to a man and welcomes him as her affianced, hoping (successfully) that he plays the part. And, of course, they fall in love. It’s so silly, but a total delight.

Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh

I bought this murder mystery novel quite recently, on the strength of the title (and having enjoyed one or two other Ngaio Marsh books). Not read yet.

The Indignant Spinsters by Winifred Boggs

Winfired Boggs wrote Sally on the Rocks, a brilliant and surprisingly modern-feeling 1910s novel now reprinted in the British Library Women Writers series. So I had high hopes for this brilliantly titled novel about three sisters who assume fake identities to try and get eligibly married. Sadly, it doesn’t live up to the excellence of the title, or the sophistication of Sally on the Rocks. It felt, instead, like quite disposable romantic fiction.

The Magnificent Spinster by May Sarton

People love this novel, don’t they? I’ve read it, and even done a Tea or Books? episode on it, but I don’t remember a single thing about it. Time to revisit?

What will you be reading during Spinster September?

It’s another A Century of Books round-up!

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My century of books is much healthier than it looks, and that’s cos I have been reading a whole heap of books I’ve not been writing about. And these eleven books aren’t gonna get a whole blog post out of me… so let’s see how we can fill some ACOB gaps.

The Art of I. Compton-Burnett (1972) ed. Charles Burkhart

Charles Burkhart was such an Ivy Compton-Burnett stan (samesies) and this is one of many books he wrote or edited about her – it includes various critical essays, appreciations, reviews, obituaries etc. Most valuably, it has two interviews that ICB gave – where she is at her most irrepressible. Such a glorious mix of disingenuous obtuseness and elaborate self-revelation. I love the collection for those – everything else is fun but inessential.

More Women Than Men (1933) by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Speaking of, I never mentioned that I re-read my favourite ICB novel earlier in the year. And it’s still marvellous and ingenious.

A Thousand Mornings (2012) by Mary Oliver

So many people have said they love Mary Oliver, so I thought I’d try a collection of her poetry. I’ve definitely enjoyed some of the works I’ve seen people post, particularly around the time she died, but this collection did leave me a bit cold. Maybe it’s deceptively simple and I need to reread a few times.

Much Dithering (1938) by Dorothy Lambert

I had really high hopes for this novel about quiet, young widow Jocelyn and the three men who might end up being her next husband (at least one of whom faces competition in Jocelyn’s vivacious, selfish mother). The plot is really fun and there are enjoyable details about village life, but I’m afraid I found the novel a bit bland overall. There was something in the writing that seemed to deaden the momentum for me. A pity.

Sunday (1962) by Kay Dick

This was even more of a disappointment. Kay Dick is now best known for They, reprinted to much fanfare (though I haven’t read it). Sunday is about a woman called Sunday from her daughter’s perspective, and the various men who were in love with her at different times – as well as their complex relationship. The final sections were quite good, told in the present – but most of the book is told in a ‘My mother always used to -‘ sort of way that makes it all feel very distant. There is no urgency to the novel and I found it extremely tedious. I’m assuming They is rather better.

How To Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) by Joanna Russ

Hopefully it’s obvious that this title is satirical! Russ traces the history of literary reception, and the way that women writers have been suppressed from writing, or from finding fame if they do write, or from a glowing reception if they were famous. It’s fascinating and saddening, and I hope some things have changed in the past 40 years – but I daresay not as much as you’d hope. (I found it interesting that most of the book’s argument is written out on the front cover.)

A Song for Summer (1997) by Eva Ibbotson

We had a lot of fun talking about The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson when Claire was a guest on the Tea or Books? podcast – and it definitely felt like retreading similar ground in this WW2-set novel. The heroine is very good and very spirited; the hero is diffident but noble and musical. It was entertaining enough as a novel, but clearly not her strongest. (I also listened to the audiobook, and the narrator’s choice of voice for the hero was distractingly weird and husky.)

Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) by Truman Capote

Apparently very autobiographical, this is about a fey young boy trying to find his absent father – and meeting a fascinating and eccentric group of people in his search. I really enjoyed the writing with this one, though maybe it’s not one I should have listened to. One day I’ll probably reread as a physical book, and that would do the story justice.

At The Pines (1971) by Mollie Panter-Downes

Love Mollie P-D; felt quite ambivalent about this book. It’s about the home of Algernon Charles Swinburne (poet) and his life. It’s amazing how much he’s fallen out of favour – does anybody care about Swinburne now? I hoped this book was about Panter-Downes’ experiences and reflections, and it isn’t really. She writes well, but on a subject I had no interest in. I’d much rather she wrote about herself.

Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy

This is another where I’d misunderstood what the novel was actually about. The blurb says it’s a feminist classic about a woman who sees the future – so I thought maybe she’s see a few hours into the future, and perhaps use this skill to get beyond the bounds of misogynistic control. But she actually sees visions of 2137 and the people there, all the while sectioned in a run-down hospital. The novel opens extremely brutally, and it’s a pretty bleak book throughout. I guess it’s a sort of fantasy (it’s called science fiction, but I don’t see quite how) that doesn’t interest me very much.

The Bridesmaid (1989) by Ruth Rendell

My first Ruth Rendell and I was very impressed by her writing. It wasn’t really a murder mystery, which I had been expecting, and there wasn’t actually a bridesmaid (it’s, for some reason, the name of a statue). I don’t even want to give away what happens – except that it’s a story of how love can get out of control. Wikipedia tells me it’s a fan-favourite, and I can see why.

Rereadings by Anne Fadiman

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I imagine quite a lot of you have read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, and hopefully you loved it as much as I did. It was one of the earliest examples of those little books-about-reading that have proliferated in the past couple of decades – and I love the genre wholeheartedly. There was something special about Ex Libris, and it felt like finding a kindred spirit in an era before blogging and before social media took off.

She followed up Ex Libris with Rereadings (2005), which my brother bought for my birthday in 2010. As so often, it sat on my shelves for a long time – and I took it on my recent Scottish holiday, and found it was the perfect time for it. I absolutely loved reading it.

While Anne Fadiman’s name is on the cover as the editor of this collection, she only writes the foreword. What follows are 17 essays on rereading, which first appeared in The American Scholar (which Fadiman edited). I’d only read two of the books mentioned – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Journals, Letters and Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Others mention authors I know for other books (D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Colette, Joseph Conrad, Knut Hamsun, J.D. Salinger) while others focus on books by authors I’d never even heard of – H.C. Witwer, Enid Starkie, Helen Dore Bolyston and more. It really didn’t matter which book or author was being discussed, because I was swept away by every single essayist’s contribution.

Each essay talks about a book from the past, of course, but they are really more about the experience of rereading than they are about the individual books. They are about looking back over decades of time to a younger self, and comparing what you were to what you are. That might mean you’ve totally changed your mind about the book. It might simply mean that the world of possibilities, which you were living when you first read the book, has shrunk to a world of actualities, for better or worse. It was curiously moving to read each essay. A poem by Walt Whitman or a guide to wildflowers might be the hook on which the essay is hung, but they are really memoirs in miniature.

Here’s Vivian Gornick, on The Vagabond by Colette:

I want the reading of Colette to be the same as it once was, but it is not. Yet I am wrenched by the beauty of that which no longer feels large, and can never feel large again.

And here is Sven Bikerts, talking about rereading Pan by Knut Hamsun:

For such is the power of a book, a memory, that it can in a flash outwit any structure or system we have raised against it. I had, yes, steeled myself against Glahn, against the sorrow of his story, against his complete destruction by the passion that had erupted in his unguarded heart. I had not, however, braced myself against the encounter with myself, the sixteen-year-old who went at the world, at the dream of love, with the same unscreened intensity. I read Pan, but the person I met on those woodland paths was my feverish younger self. I felt sorrow from the first sentence on, sorrow so sweet and piercing that it was hard to turn the pages. Worse, though – for sorrow recollected can bring a certain pleasure – was my self-reproach. As I read I indicted myself. I had, in stages, without ever planning it, traded off that raw nerved-up avidness. I’d had to, of course; it was inevitable. We do not survive the dream of love, not at that pitch. We build in our safeguards and protective reflexes. We give in to the repetitions, let them gradually tame the erratic element. We grow wise and find balance – or perish. Still, to encounter the stalking ghost of the self here, now, at midlife…

That ended up being a longer excerpt than I intended, because once I started writing I couldn’t stop. I found his reflections profoundly beautiful. Maybe most of us could be some book in place of Pan and feel much the same way.

I could read volumes and volumes more of this, though sadly no more collections were ever published. I had only heard of one of the contributors, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a stunning, moving collection of essays that any lifelong reader will warm to – as soon as you open it, you know for sure that you are among friends.

Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson

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Moominsummer Madness

I started seeing Moomins popping up in reviews all over the place, and discovered that that it is #Moominweek! Literary Potpourri and Calmgrove have set this up, and even though I was late to the party, I rushed off to read Moominsummer Madness (1954) translated by Thomas Warburton – handily also ticking the Women in Translation Month box.

Tove Jansson is one of my favourite writers – you can click her name in the tags/categories section and find all of the other reviews I’ve done – but I’ve only read one Moomin book before. She is so brilliant in her adult novels and short stories at piercing relationships between people who aren’t quite able to communicate, whether that be the beautifully unsentimental meeting of grandmother and granddaughter in The Summer Book or the who-is-fooling-whom darkness of The True Deceiver. How does that translate to a world not about humans, but instead about moomins and their ilk?

In Moominsummer Madness, a nearby volcano causes tremendous flooding in Moominvalley.

In the fair night they could see something enormous rise high over the tree-tops of the forest, like a great wall that grew and grew with a white and foaming crest.

“I suppose we’d better go into the drawing-room now,” said Moominmamma.

They had no more than got their tails inside the door when the flood wave came crashing through the Moomin Valley and drenched everything in darkness. The house rocked slightly but didn’t lose its foothold. It was soundly built and a very good house. But after a while the drawing-room furniture began to float around. The family then moved upstairs and sat down to wait for the storm to blow over.

The whole house is soon under water. Somehow they rescue food from the kitchen (why is bread edible after it’s been floating around in floodwater? Maybe we shouldn’t ask such questions) and they don’t seem very perturbed by the turn of events. Calmness is key. And, calmly, they adopt another house that floats by.

At first they are worried that they are evicting someone else, or that the residents have perished in the flood. What the reader works out pretty quickly is that this is a floating theatre. The world of stage, props and backdrops is foreign to Moominmamma, Moominpappa et al, and it’s fun to see them discovering what’s going on – helped, sort of, but a grumpy rat (Emma) that lives in the theatre and speaks often of her late husband (who passed when the iron curtain fell on him).

Along the way, some of the gang get arrested for complex reasons, and there are various sidelines about combatting an overly authoritative park keeper and adopting a group of ‘woodies’. There’s a lot going on in quite a short book, and that’s partly because it is a constant chain of events – the characters seem to take most things in their stride, so there isn’t all that much describing their reactions. But there is some lovely humour along the way. I enjoyed Jansson’s riff on the theatre:

‘I want a lion in the play, at all costs,’ Moominpappa replied sourly.

‘But you must write it again, in blank verse! Blank verse! Rhymes won’t do!’ said Emma.

‘What do you mean, blank verse,’ asked Moominpappa.

‘It should go like this: Ti-dum, ti-umty-um – ti-dumty-um-tum,’ explained Emma. ‘And you mustn’t express yourself so naturally.’

Moominpappa brightened. ‘Do you mean: “I tremble not before the Desert King, be he a savage beast or not so savage”?’ he asked.

‘That’s more like it,’ said Emma. ‘Now go and write it all in blank verse. And remember that in all the good old tragedies most of the people are each other’s relatives.’

‘But how can they be angry at each other if they’re of the same family?’ Moominmamma asked cautiously. ‘And is there no princess in the play? Can’t you put in a happy end? It’s so sad when people die.’

‘This is a tragedy, dearest,’ said Moominpappa. ‘And because of that somebody has to die in the end. Preferably all except one of them, and perhaps that one too. Emma’s said so.’

Not being super family with the family and add-ons, I couldn’t remember much about people’s characters. They are sketchily reintroduced, so I know that Moominmamma is reassuring and calm, Moominpappa is kind and imaginative, Little My is angry and looking for affection etc. But I have to admit that I can’t quite get past them all being non-human, made-up creatures. I realise that it is an imaginative failing in me, but though I enjoyed reading Moominsummer Madness, I’d have enjoyed it more if they were all humans and the story was surreal rather than fantastic.

I’ll probably keep reading Moomin books now and then, because I want as much Jansson as I can get. And, yes, this was fun. But I’m so glad that there are plenty of non-Moomin books out there to show how brilliant Jansson was at her best. (Sorry not to write a wholly enthusiastic post for #Moominweek, but I’m glad to participate nonetheless!)