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House Happy by Muriel Resnik

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House Happy (1958) by Muriel Resnik is one of the books I’ve bought for my Project 24 – I’d seen it every time I’ve been to Astley Book Farm, and I finally couldn’t resist and had to splurge a little to bring it home with me. The cover has a lot to do with it – as does the intriguing subtitle ‘A Tale of Mortgages and Mirth’. And it ended up being a lot of fun.

The cover is very accurate about the starting point of the novel – which begins with the bedframe you can see in the bottom left. Lucy Butler is a divorced mother of two who is drawn to elegance and beauty even when it is impractical. And one of the things that catches her eye is a beautiful French bedframe – which is only five dollars. By the time she’s got it delivered it costs several times that, and the chain of events it kicks off is extremely expensive. Because she decides she needs a new home to fit the bedframe – and sets her heart on one that she certainly can’t afford.

Lucy Butler reminds me a lot of Cornelia Otis Skinner’s essays – the same sort of amusement at being expected to take part in everyday life, and the same ability to get through it absurdly but in tact. While Skinner is very self-deprecating, Lucy seems to coast along on naivety and charm. She is certainly attractive to most men – particularly when she walks, which is a detail Resnik labours and which feels very of its time. (Allegedly her husband left her because she walked too seductively, which… ok.)

I kept thinking of other novels as I read House Happy, the trouble being that they’re not really household names and thus the comparisons might not be helpful. The tone is like Thorne Smith, albeit several notches less farcical; the sequence of events is rather like Eric Rabkin’s Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, though without the underlying sense of tragedy. It all feels a bit like a screwball comedy, tethered to the domestic.

My favourite scenes were when Lucy looked on as a helpless bystander, dizzied by proceedings, particularly when trying to exchange contracts as the housing solicitors (curious spellings Resnik’s own!):

They brought in a chair for me and had a terrible time finding room for it, and then the secretary started reading the most boring contract all about the party of the first part and the party of the second part and one of them was me but I don’t know which. And it was full of whereases and therefors and wherefors and so forth and Arthur kept interrupting with his silly ideas about changing a whereas to a wherefor or the other way round. Really he’s so petty and it was just terrible.

Similar confusion and frustration happens when she is trying to arrange garbage collection – a saga that I very much enjoyed. Many details of finding, buying, and moving into a new house haven’t really changed in the decades since Resnik this, though I doubt many of us find tens of thousands of dollars becoming suddenly available when we take a closer look at our property portfolios.

I haven’t mentioned any of the other characters, and it’s true that Lucy is the undisputed star, but I also enjoyed her cynical sister and her two teenage sons – one of whom is very excited about the move, and the other keeps trying to put obstacles in the way. And yes, there is a romance element, of course. It’s not the most convincing element, but I was happy to go along for the ride.

Overall, House Happy is a good mix of domestic detail and silliness, and I really enjoyed my time in House Happy. It’s too intentionally absurd in tone to have the sort of mimesis that appears in lots of novels about mid-century housewives and mothers – but it’s something different, and joyful.

A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson

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Somehow five months have passed since I read A Town Called Solace (2021) by Mary Lawson and I haven’t written about it yet – but that’s not because I disliked it. On the contrary, Lawson is up there with the small number of living authors I love – and my love of her came on in bounds when I read The Other Side of the Bridge and declared it my best read of 2021.

In A Town Called Solace, Lawson is back in Ontario, Canada, in the fictional small town of Solace in 1972. It’s the sort of place where everyone knows each other, there’s only one place to eat, and that one place has a minuscule menu. In this community we first meet Clara, looking out of the window at the house next door – Mrs Orchard’s house. She sees a new, unknown man arrive there.

There were four boxes. Big ones. They must have lots of things in them because they were heavy, you could tell by the way the man walked when he carried them in, stooped over, knees bent. He brought them right into Mrs Orchard’s house, next door to Clara’s, that first evening and just left them there. That meant the boxes didn’t have necessary things in them, things he needed straight away like pyjamas, or he’d have unpacked them.

Clara is an eight-year-old, and so her perspective on things that happen around her is not an adult perspective. She knows that her older sister Rose is missing, after a row with her parents, and has vowed to stay looking out of the window until she comes back. She knows that Mrs Orchard – Elizabeth – is also away, because she has been asked to feed the cat. But she doesn’t know who this man is, what his connection is with Mrs Orchard, or why she is taking so long to return.

Lawson takes us into another two perspectives, in different chapters. One is this new man, Liam, who has just separated from his wife and left city life for this provincial backwater. I loved seeing him discover a small-town community (and interested to discover that Lawson left Ontario herself for England in the 1960s – so this is all drawn from memory). This community is not particularly warm to his arrival, and certainly doesn’t find some pure, simple folk to Remind Him About The Meaning Of Life. Rather, Lawson shows the contrast between urban and rural life, with the advantages and disadvantages of both. I particularly enjoyed reading the stilted, amiable relationships he finds with locals – in the sole eating place, and especially with Jim, a local handyman who starts to employ Liam. What a lovely, insightful portrayal of Jim this is:

He straightened up and raked through a jar of screws. “All you do for your kids, three square meals a day, nice warm house, teach them a good trade, what do they do? Take off and learn to be a vet. I told him, you like animals so much, get yourself a dog, for Pete’s sake! Get a horse! Get an elephant! Cheaper than a vet degree. I’m staring poverty in the face.”

He was a big, tough-looking, weather-beaten guy but he was so proud of his son he couldn’t even look at you for fear it would show, Liam could hear it in his voice.

The third perspective we get is Elizabeth Orchard’s – though this is the only that isn’t from the 1970s. We see her thirty years earlier, and gradually learn about her connection with Liam. I shan’t say anymore about that, but it’s done beautifully. Lawson is better known for slower, more meditative narratives. A Town Called Solace is still more interested in character than plot, and she transports the reader into a different world for a while with an expert authorial gentleness – but this is definitely plottier than the other books I’ve read by her. There are twists and turns in the connection between Elizabeth and Liam, and in the modern day story too. It even gets a bit dark, which I felt perhaps distorted the tone a little at times towards the end. That’s my only quibble with this book.

Overall, I thought this was another triumph by Lawson. It has certainly stayed with me over the months since I read it, while most novels fade from my memory very quickly. Lawson is so good at drawing complex, interesting, believable people – and even better at putting them in communities and seeing how the dynamics shape and evolve. All three of the main characters here are fully realised people who draw the reader’s empathy and even love. It’s hard not to love characters this vividly created.

Two novels about female friendship

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At my book group last month, we talked about novels about friendship – how surprisingly few of them there are. It’s something Rachel and I often mention on ‘Tea or Books?’. While there are many, many children’s books where friends are front and centre, it’s an area that novels for adults have curiously overlooked. And yet, for many people, they are just as important as romantic relationships – and likely to last longer.

But I have read two books in recent weeks that are about the intensity, highs and lows of friendship between two women.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?: Amazon.co.uk: Moore, Lorrie: 9780571268559: BooksWho Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994)  has a dreadful title but a very good novella about the friendship between Berie (the narrator) and Sils – starting as children, and both deepening and splintering as they head towards the cusp of adulthood.

The girls work together at Storyland – a sort of theme park, where local teenagers dress up as storybook characters, and younger local and visiting children go on the kind of lacklustre fairground attraction that is only a draw in a small town. The crux of the shift in Berie and Sils’ friendship is the different rate at which they mature. Sils is clearly readier for adult life, or at least believes she is. She is more attractive to men, more confident in her sexuality, more willing to explore a new stage in life. We see all this from Berie’s perspective – which is, in fact, the adult, married Berie looking back on her adolescence. The layers of knowledge and regret cover over the naivety and confusion that teenage Berie felt, and the whirlwind experience that knowing Sils was.

“How yew girls doin’?” was inevitably how it began, and then usually the guy fussed with the front lock of Sils’s hair, pulling it out of her eyes, or he sat next to her, hip to hip, or he asked what she was drinking or did she want to dance to this song, it was a good song for dancing, it was a good night for dancing, didn’t she think so?

Usually it was a humid night, the boards of the place dank as a river dock. Sometimes I protected her with gruffness or a smirk or a cryptic look to make the guy think we were making fun of him. That he was too old. “It’s only teenage wasteland,” wailed the jukebox during the band’s breaks. I would nudge her.

But sometimes I got up and went to the bathroom, let her deal with him, and sometimes later he would give us a ride home at eleven-thirty, hoping for her, dreaming, waiting for us at the corner while we went to one or the other of our houses, said good night to our mothers, went to our room, stuffed pillows under the covers, making curved and lumpy bodies, then climbed out the window.

I’d only previously read some of Moore’s short stories, which I didn’t love, so I wasn’t prepared for the brilliance of this book. Everything is slightly off-kilter, and I thought the tone of Berie’s narration was done so well. There’s a matter-of-factness to it that is belied by the emotional intensity – which, again, is softened by the years that have passed before she narrates the story. It melds expertly, and Moore plays with memory in a way that gives Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? extra depth and nuance.

And all this in under 150 pages! (The cover quote from Dave Eggers says she is one of the funniest writers alive – there is a dry humour at times to this, and the humour of looking back at another self, but I don’t think I’d have called it a comic novel.) I heartily recommend this one, and would be interested to know which other of her novels or novellas to try.

Swing Time (Smith novel).jpgSwing Time by Zadie Smith

If Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is an example of a book that manages to achieve greatness in a short span, then Swing Time (2016) is one which should have had a much more ruthless editor. Or, indeed, should simply have been two novels. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it – I thought it was very good, but could have been much better.

The unnamed narrator is friends with Tracey from childhood. Both are mixed-race girls in London, and unite over their shared passion for dancing – not just as a hobby, but as something which could really be a career. But both are held back by their mothers, for different reasons. Tracey’s is unambitious and can be snide; the narrator’s is so abstract and intellectual that she has little maternal care. Smith is clever at giving two mothers who are very different without simply making them opposites of each other – and without making one a good mother and the other a bad mother. Rather, we see how their richly detailed characters leave a legacy on their daughters.

Tracey and the narrator have a tempestuous childhood friendship – characterised by friendship, love, envy, competition, and everything in between. Both have to learn that their lives cannot follow the same path, for any number of reasons.

Swing Time moves about in time and place a lot, and Smith handles this incredibly well – it is never confusing about where and when we are, even though there are no headings to tell us. And a lot of the novel shows the narrator as an adult, working as an assistant and confidante to Aimee, a worldwide superstar pop icon. Think Madonna. She has been famous for many years, since the narrator was a child, and the narrator is now caught in the strange unreality of the long-term celebrity – a network of people working for Aimee masquerading as a friendship group. It includes long periods in an unspecified African country, where Aimee is trying to Do Good.

The weakness of Swing Time, for me, was that there is a brilliant novel about an intense and important female friendship, and a really good book about working with a celebrity – but, together, they dilute each other. There is little to connect them, except for the narrator’s confused nostalgia when she is no longer close to Tracey. I think it’s fine for a novel to cover a wide time span and be about two stages of life, but when they form two tonally distinct novels with seemingly different purposes, it doesn’t work to fuse them. They do reunite as adults, with a long, silent period of resentment and uncertainty between them.

This is my first Smith novel, and I was a bit surprised by the style – which is assured, but not very distinctive. I don’t think anybody could show me a sentence that I would be able to identify as showing Smith’s style. It is very good, but in the blandly accomplished way that many other novels are written very well.

Of the two books, I think Moore’s is a greater success – though both tackle a neglected topic well, and more interestingly than most of the romantic relationships I read about.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Fifty Forgotten Books | And Other StoriesJoin me in wishing Our Vicar’s Wife a very happy birthday today – it’s a big one, though I won’t say which because I’m a GENTLEMAN. Since I last wrote here I’ve had a weekend trip to Brussels – very handily, my friend’s boyfriend is a tour guide, so we were shown around excellently. Yes, I gorged on chocs and waffles, and took a trip of mourning to the EU Parliament.

Hope you’re having a good weekend – here’s a book, a blog post, and a link to take you into it.

1.) The book – “Fifty Forgotten Books [by R.B. Russell] is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bibliophile and for book-lovers of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty backrooms of long vanished used bookstores, a love letter to bookshops and bookselling, and a browser’s dream wish list of often overlooked and unloved novels, short story collections, poetry collections and works of nonfiction.” That’s the description from And Other Stories’ website. I preordered it as soon as I saw it included Miss Hargreaves…

2.) The link – is to my brother’s movie podcast, The C to Z of Movies – because I’m a guest in the most recent episode. Among other things, we discuss the portrayal of twins in movies. I’ve linked to the SoundCloud, but you can find it anywhere you download podcasts.

3.) The blog post – I enjoyed Rosemary’s round up of recent reading, even if I didn’t agree with all the results…

Violeta Among the Stars by Dulce Maria Caroso – #EUPL

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I’m glad I’ve finished Violeta Among the Stars (2005) by Dulce Maria Cardoso in time to include it in Women in Translation month – it’s also one of the European Union Prize for Literature winners in the batch that I’m reviewing. It won the best part of 20 years ago, but it was only last year that it was translated from Portuguese by Ángel Gurría-Quintana.

The most noticeable thing about this 400-page novel is that it is all one sentence. It’s not the first novel I’ve read like that, but it is perhaps the one where it works most fluidly. In between paragraphs of text are occasional indented lines, slipping in the middle of phrases – these indents are dialogue, though plenty of dialogue also appears in the massed paragraphs of phrases separated by commas, rather than full stops.

There is some logic to this style. Violeta has been driving along a road on an appointment to sell hair-removal wax – she sees all unwanted hair follicles as her personal nemeses. Alone, on a wet road, she has a horrific car accident – and Violeta Among the Stars almost all takes place in the moments afterwards as her life flashes before her eyes. As such, there are occasional reminders of where she literally is – noticing the broken glass everywhere, say – but it is mostly a rhapsodic swirl of memory.

We start by learning about her habit of going to lorry parks to get sex – not as a prostitute, but simply to find an unquestioning partner who won’t want any commitment. As the novel progresses, we meet her daughter Dora. She is the person most capable of causing Violeta pain, but also her proudest achievement and her deepest disappointment. The background of her family tree slowly fills in the gaps. Her strained relationship with her mother; her uncertain closeness with her father that is threatened by a secret; her curious relationship with Dora’s father Ângelo.

I don’t want to be trapped in the past, neither by revenge like Ângelo, nor by love like Dora, the past will use anything to keep us trapped, memory is the worst form of torture, memory won’t let me rest even when I can no longer feel my body, hanging by the seatbelt, that night I got drunk in Ângelo’s two miserable basement rooms, or perhaps it was another night when I went to visit him, I frequently got drunk when I visited him, perhaps to be able to laugh sincerely at his lame jokes, when I was drunk I saw my father in that house with his lover and their bastard, fulfilled like I never saw him in this house, maybe this house also hurt him, the walls also closed in to suffocate him, the ceilings came down to crush him, this house also hurt my father, I used to get drunk and instead of laughing at the jokes I would start shouting at Ângelo,

I was a bit unsure about going into Violeta Among the Stars. The single-sentence conceit could have been frustrating or unnecessary – but I think Caroso uses it so cleverly. The story comes look a flood of water, ebbing and flowing in simple thoughts (expertly translated) so that there is something about the simplicity and directness of Violeta’s presentation of her self that works really well alongside the lack of full stops. Conventional and unconventional storytelling combine very effectively.

And Violeta is a fascinating character, so deeply delineated and detailed. Because there are so few significant characters in this long-ish novel, we get to know them all thoroughly. Violeta certainly isn’t all good; she is probably more bad than good. But we know so much about her by the end that she is sympathetic. I worried at first that her obesity would be her most salient characteristic, and Caroso certainly writes a great deal about it, but it ends up being more significant in the way that people respond to it, rather than anything inherent.

After Kokoschka’s Doll, this is another really interesting and original winner of the EUPL. I look forward to discovering another couple from this batch.

Do head over to the European Union Prize for Literature website to find out more about this year’s prize, and all previous winners.

M is for Milne

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

I can’t believe I haven’t done anything in my ‘A is for’ series since JANUARY? I knew I was putting it off for a bit because it meant moving some books around (my Milne shelf is on the back of a mantlepiece, with plenty of other books in front of them). But I finally did it, and here we are. When I started this little blogging project, I always knew who would be in the alphabet for M – and any long-term readers of StuckinaBook wouldn’t be in any doubt either.

How many books do I have by A.A. Milne?

When I did Stephen Leacock for L, I thought I was hitting a peak with 27 books. Well, I have 50 books by A.A. Milne. That’s more or less everything he ever published, and I’d reached about 46 of those a long, long time ago. Over the intervening years I’ve managed to get hold of some very obscure pamphlets (e.g. War Aims Unlimited) and plays (e.g. Other People’s Lives), and the books that remain missing are either prohibitively expensive or might never have been published. There are a couple of plays mentioned on his Wikipedia page that I’ve never seen, so would have to rely on stray acting editions turning up. I don’t care at all about having first editions or pristine editions – I just want to get my hands on everything Milne ever wrote!

How many of these have I read?

Hold onto your hats, because I’ve read it ALL. Most of my Milne collecting came around 2002-2005, when I only had a few hundred books and (gasp) often read the ones I bought. Because Milne was, and is, my favourite writer, newly acquired books by him always went straight to the top of the pile. I’ve done quite a lot of re-reading too, though there are still some books I’ve only read once, nearly two decades ago.

How did I start reading A.A. Milne?

He was really my gateway into a world of interwar literature. It all started when I watched a documentary about Winnie the Pooh in about 2002, and I decided I wanted to read more about it. That led me to Christopher Milne’s first autobiography, The Enchanted Places, which in turn led me to Ann Thwaite’s biography of Milne. And after that I scoured secondhand bookshops, began using ebay and other embryonic online places for buying books. It was surprisingly easy and cheap to get most of Milne’s books (and difficult and expensive to get the remaining handful).

General impressions…

Well, I love him, of course! On this shelf are plays, novels, sketches, essays, poetry, pamphlets, autobiography, and of course children’s books. He turned his hand to almost everything. And he was brilliant at it all, with an insouciant, witty, capable tone that pervades everything. It is a joy to fall in love with an author whose style is so identifiable and yet can be turned to such a wide variety of works. Every now and then something by him is rediscovered – his detective novel, The Red House Mystery, seems to be rediscovered every few years, and it was great to see Mr Pim Passes By and Four Days’ Wonder come back into print a little while ago, though I’m not sure if they’re still available. For my money, my favourite AAM books are his autobiography It’s Too Late Now, the touchingly comic novel Mr Pim Passes By (and the play it was adapted from), his pacifist work Peace With Honour, and any of the early sketch collections about the ‘rabbits’. He is a joy. Incidentally, one of the best blogging experiences I’ve had was watching Claire at the Captive Reader fall in love with AAM too.

You can read more about what reading Milne has meant to me in a post I wrote eight years ago.

Appointment With Venus by Jerrard Tickell

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When I saw that Manderley Press had reprinted Appointment With Venus (1951) by Jerrard Tickell in the beautiful new edition pictured, I decided I had to get my own copy off the shelf. Mine isn’t quite so beautiful (what could be?) but it’s got its own charm – one of those books from the Reprint Society where they covered the dustjacket with quasi-astrological pictures that aren’t very relevant to the plot. You might think it’s to do with the title, but my copy of Guard Your Daughters is the same.

It’s worth noting from the outset that the Venus of the title isn’t the planet, or even the goddess – it’s a cow. Let me explain. The action takes place on Armorel, a fictional addition to the Channel Islands (at one point the others are listed, so it’s not a stand-in). The population is about 300, in a close-knit community with a strong hierarchy. There is a Provost standing in for the Suzerain, the leader of the island who is away at war. Other inhabitants of the island include Lionel Fallaize, an artist who is a conscientious objector, various herdsmen, and others who are excluded from war work for being too young or too old.

(I will get to the cow eventually, promise.)

The island has been occupied by Nazi soldiers – as indeed happened in the Channel Islands. One of the interesting things about Tickell’s novel is how sympathetic it is to the soldiers – not at all to Nazism or to the idea of German victory, but these soldiers are men doing their job and doing what they believe to be right. Things like the Holocaust never come up; this is a question of nationalism alone. (Which is no good thing in my book, but it’s still notable that Tickell could create sympathetic and non-aggressive characters like Captain Weiss as early as 1951.) Even the unnamed German soldiers are not demonised.

The occupation of Armorel was carried out with unusual discretion. The German soldiers arrived without fuss and marched in silence up the hill to the commandeered hotel which was to be their barracks. One detachment went to the lighthouse, another to the telephone exchange. A sentry was posted at the gate of the hotel drive. He was a young man of about twenty, unarmed and smiling. The children gazed at him wide-eyed from behind the hedges, as he leisurely paced up and down in the sunshine. Soon the boldest of them ventured on to the road to stand and stare. The sentry stopped and felt in his pocket, found an apple. He said, still smiling: “You wish an apple?”

The islanders are still resistant to occupation, of course, ‘knowing, with a sense of bewildered resentment, that their beloved island was clasped in a loop of alien steel’. They are polite but clear – they are waiting for Britain to win the war, and will never collaborate with their invaders.

Back on mainland UK, interest turns to a curious quarter – to Venus, the eponymous cow. She is pregnant by Mars, a prize bull who is now deceased, having stepped on a landmine. Both Venus and Mars come from pedigree lineage, and their progeny is widely believed to be the perfect imaginable cow. Captain Weiss was a farmer before he was a soldier and recognises the calf’s worth – and wants to take him back to Germany. And so a plot is launched to sequester Venus and her unborn calf away from Armorel…

I can’t think of a more quintessentially British plot. The pluckiness, the underdog, the eccentricity. It feels like something that might have been an Ealing comedy – and it was indeed made into a film in the same year it was published. I haven’t watched it, but it’s all on YouTube (embedded below).

I absolutely loved Appointment With Venus. Tickell’s clever trick is never making the plot to rescue a cow seem silly. A few characters raise eyebrows, but broadly we are onboard with the priorities of the people doing the rescuing. All the characters are well-drawn and nuanced, and I particularly liked Lionel Fallaize. I’m not sure I needed the romance subplot, but such things are inevitable.

The book is a joyful experience, with enough realism about the experiences of living under Nazi occupation to prevent it feeling saccharine or sentimental. I wholeheartedly recommend that you make acquaintance with Venus and all those who love her.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Yikes, it’s hot. Here in the UK, we are not built to deal with these muggy temperatures (and almost no homes have air-conditioning), so I am spending my time feeling enervated in front of a fan. And reading, of course. And looking suspiciously out of the window, wondering if I should go somewhere or if that would kill me.

ANYWAY, hope you’re having a good weekend, wherever you are! The usual book, blog post, and link…

1.) The link – want to move to the Bennet family house from the 1995 Pride and Prejudice? I should warn you that it has a pretty sort of wilderness. Anyway, it can be yours for offers in excess of £6,000,000. Makes you wonder why Lizzie said “Beggars can’t be choosers”, doesn’t it?

2.) The book – I’m watching the growing list at Manderley Press with a lot of interest. Indeed, I’m currently reading one of their first books – Appointment With Venus by Jerrard Tickell – in an edition I’ve had on my shelf for a few years. The one that has really caught my eye is The Fly on the Wheel by Katherine Cecil Thurston. Click that link to learn more about this 1908 Irish novel – but that stunning cover (by Fatti Burke) and the promise of a spirited heroine are enough to have me looking forward to its October publication.

3.) The blog post – I love a themed list, particularly if it’s about types of houses in books. And so Susan’s list of ‘Five Books I’ve Read Set in Apartment Buildings’ at A Life in Books was a delight – as were all the recommendations in the comments. Go and explore, and maybe add your own?

 

 

 

Kokoschka’s Doll by Afonso Cruz – #EUPL

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Kokoschka's Doll by Afonso Cruz | Hachette UKYou might remember that, last year, I read and reviewed a few of the books that had won the European Union Prize for Literature, also known as the EUPL. Among them was Selja Ahava’s Things That Fall From the Sky, one of my favourite reads of 2021. Well, I’ve been kindly asked to do the same again – and got to choose from a list of all the previous winners. Or at least those that have been translated into English. While the prize isn’t a translation prize, and the books are judged in their original language, I can only read English – so I am grateful Rahul Bery for translating Afonso Cruz’s Kokoschka’s Doll (2010) from Portuguese. What a strange and engaging book. Here are its curious and inviting opening lines:

At the age of forty-two, or, to be precise, two days after his birthday that year, Bonifaz Vogel began to hear a voice. Initially, he thought it was the mice. Then he thought about calling someone to deal with the woodworm, but something stopped him. Perhaps it was the way the voice had given him orders, with the authority of those voices that live deep inside us.

The novel is set (at least at first) in Dresden during the Second World War. Rather than a voice living inside Bonifaz Vogel, the voice belongs  to a young Jewish boy called Isaac Dresner – who is living under the floor of Vogel’s bird shop. Yes, ‘Vogel’ means ‘bird’ in Germans. It’s that sort of novel, constantly playful, sometimes in an obvious way and sometimes in a way that cannot possibly be unravelled. Anyway, Isaac is in hiding after a Nazi soldier murdered his friend. Vogel doesn’t particularly question this. Once he realises that the voice is quite wise, he turns to it in every discussion. The voice helps him when people are haggling in the shop. It helps him feel connection.

This alone would be a quirky and interesting novel but, oh boy, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Along the way a young female painter called Tsilia joins them but, again, Cruz is only getting started. Somehow they get onto the trail of Mathias Popa – an author who apparently found a lost manuscript by Thomas Mann and passed it off as his own. And it failed horribly. He is working on a new book, though… called Kokoschka’s Doll.

You might be wondering when that title was going to come into play. The middle section of the novel (printed on slightly greyed pages in my edition by MacLehose Press, and possibly in every edition) is the novel Kokoschka’s Doll. It includes the story of a man hired to write a book alluding to all sorts of other books, none of which exist – until the same man is hired to write all of those books too. Keeping up?

And – so, so briefly – we eventually get to the story of Kokoschka’s doll. For a handful of pages, while we’re most of the way through the book. This is the bit that is based on a true story, so you might know it already. Oskar Kokoschka (curiously referred to as Oscar Kokoschka in this translation of Cruz’s novel – deliberate or mistake? Hard to tell in this sort of book) was a painter who commissioned a life-sized doll of Alma Mahler, after the end of a two-year relationship with her. He later destroyed the doll during a party.

After the end of ‘Popa’s’ book, we are introduced to a whole range of characters we haven’t met before, almost as though we should know who they are. And they do eventually link back to the cast we already know, but it is quite disconcerting.

I came to the conclusion that Cruz loves to unsettle the reader. There is so much allusion and confusion in Kokoschka’s Doll, so you can never predict what is happening next, or even be entirely certain about what has happened before. Cleverly, this is contrasted with simplicity in the writing and in the characters. They are simple people – believable, but easily comprehendible. The writing is spare and enjoyable, and often pages only have a short paragraph or two on them. It makes you feel like you are reading something akin to children’s literature – but the loops you are taken in are experimental.

I think the combination worked really well, and I can see why the EUPL judges wanted to reward Cruz. Apparently he is prodigious and prestigious in his native Portugal and Kokoschka’s Doll is certainly the work of an assured author. I don’t fully know or understand what I read, but I really enjoyed reading it.

Do head over to the European Union Prize for Literature website to find out more about this year’s prize, and all previous winners.

Anne of Avonlea… isn’t very good?

StuckinaBook All , , , 87 Comments

Anne of Avonlea--cover page.jpgHere’s a blog post that might get me in hot water – but I recently listened to the audiobook of Anne of Avonlea and, let me tell you, I felt let DOWN.

Anne of Avonlea (1909) is the second book in the Anne of Green Gables series. Until now, I had only read the original – and loved it. Anne is so spirited and fun, and there is a great deal of heart and humour in Anne of Green Gables. Fast forward to the next book, Anne is in her late teens, still living in Avonlea. All of the books are available for free in the Audible Plus catalogue, so I thought it was worth diving in.

Oh.

So much that made Anne of Green Gables wonderful is missing here. Anne is a schoolteacher, a founding member of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, a sort of grown-up foster sister to a pair of twins who arrive on the scene (more on them later), and generally a noble and good member of society.

The rest of this post is going to be in bullet point form, because that is the best to describe my disappointment. Though I’ll try to throw in some good things along the way.

  • Anne is so Noble and Good in this book. She has become the quintessential heroine of a Victorian children’s novel (albeit this is later than that), thinking good thoughts and doing good deeds.
  • ALL her spirit seems to have gone. I cannot emphasise how dull she is now.
  • Gilbert Blythe gets maybe four lines of dialogue?
  • Even in his most interesting scenes, writing pretend letters to someone, he barely appears.
  • WHY SO LITTLE GILBERT?
  • (I know he comes back in later books, but I cannot fathom why L.M. Montgomery took away one of the two most interesting relationships from Anne of Green Gables. The other was with Matthew, so I can at least see why that isn’t present.)
  • Marilla takes in the twins, Dora and Davy. And lord knows I wish she hadn’t. Davy is forever doing naughty things then saying “Good gosh, Miss Anne, I had no notion this was a naughty thing to do! How will I ever repent of it when it was so fun?” and Dora just cries. How did an author who made a girl character like Anne also make these Boys Will Be Boys And Girls Will Cry characters? I loathed them.
  • Mrs Lavendar Lewis was great, I will acknowledge. An old lady who is something of a recluse but brings joy and wit to every scene she’s in.
  • Did I mention that there is basically no Gilbert?

I had planned to go on with the rest of the series, but I’m much more reluctant now. Anne has gone from one of the best characters in fiction to one of the most tedious – and, without her spark, the novel really dragged for me.

Others have promised me that the series looks up in later volumes. Does Anne get her spark back? Should I continue?