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StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend everyone! And it’s a VERY happy weekend for me, because – so long as I’m not pinged after I schedule this blog post – I’ll be spending my Saturday in Hay-on-Wye! While the number of bookshops there decreases every time I go, it’s still my favourite place – and I’m looking forward to sharing pictures of my spoils with you on my return.

The spoils I will leave you with, in the meantime, are the usual book, blog post, and link…

1.) The blog post – LouLouReads has reviewed one of my favourite frothy, silly novels – a total delight from cover to cover, and luckily she liked it too. Check out her thoughts on Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins.

2.) The link – interesting article on working-class author Ethel Carnie Holdsworth – I’ve only read Miss Nobody, but will be interested to see what comes of this potential revival of her work.

3.) The book – Jane Austen & Shelley in the Garden by Janet Todd sounds like a fascinating novel – Austen is so vivid in Fran’s life that she feels like she knows her. ‘An encounter with a long-standing friend, and a new one, a writer, lead to something new. The three women unite in their love of books and in a quest for the idealist poet Shelley at two pivotal moments: in Wales and Venice.’ Find out more at Todd’s website – I enjoyed her book on Fanny Wollstonecraft back in about 2008, and the premise here is intriguing.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

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My book group recently read Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, from 2016 and shortlisted for the Booker prize that year. Let’s experiment with a review in bullet points. This doesn’t reflect the style of the book – it reflects how much time I want to spend writing this review.

  • Look at that cover. It’s not my usual fare, is it?
  • Beautiful writing of a psychological portrait of Eileen – an old lady looking back on her young days in an unhappy home, alcoholic dad, sister who has escaped with a marriage. Eileen works at a boys’ prison, lusts after one of the guards who works there, doesn’t really engage with anybody.
  • It is a nuanced portrayal of a dislikeable woman – but why was it in the crime section of the library?
  • (Maybe the only time that library shelving has constituted a major spoiler for me?)
  • Eventually, perhaps three-quarters of the way through this novel, the enigmatic and beguiling Rebecca Saint John appears. She is very Hitchcockian and not at all fleshed out.
  • (Isn’t Rebecca Saint John such a femme fatale name?)
  • Things start to get really silly…
  • Oh, a series of twists, increasingly dark, clearly wanting to be the next Girl on the Train…
  • Perhaps the cleverest thing about the book is the reveal about what’s happening on the cover.

Ultimately, I found that Moshfegh was a really clever and interesting writer, but Eileen is a silly and melodramatic novel. Or, rather, becomes one – perhaps because Moshfegh lacked confidence that a quiet and poignant portrayal of an eccentric woman would bring her a publishing deal or success. Which does seem to be the case – have a look at this interview in the Guardian. The most baffling statement in it is “Trying to protect its [the novel’s] reputation as a postmodern work of art would not only be arrogant, but pointless.” It would also not be remotely true?

Have you read Eileen? I certainly found it pacey and compelling, even when it wasn’t clear why I was being compelled, but ultimately it felt like fast food you regret the next day.

Dreaming of Rose by Sarah LeFanu

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I love looking behind the scenes at books, and I’m particularly fascinated by the process of biography – because it’s a type of book that I can’t get my head around attempting. How to capture a full life of many, many days in one volume? How to approach it when there are already two existing biographies of that subject? These are among the things that Sarah LeFanu discusses in Dreaming of Rose, a diary of her research and writing a biography of Rose Macaulay, from 1998 until she finished writing it in 2002. It was self-published in 2013 and has now been reissued by Handheld Press.

I’ve read two biographies of Macaulay – but not this one. Still, a lot of the names will be familiar to anybody who has read any of the biographies, and you don’t have to have read any of Macaulay’s output to find this interesting. Indeed, LeFanu writes a great deal more about Macaulay’s personal life in Dreaming of Rose than she does about her published output – perhaps because trying to track down connections with possible-affair Gerald O’Donovan was more captivating a chase than analysing her novels.

Reviews of books like this tend to replicate all the information found therein, but I shan’t make this a potted biography of Macaulay. There are more than enough places to find that. Instead, I’ll talk about what I liked and didn’t like about LeFanu’s book – the former easily outweighing the latter.

It’s always terribly interesting to see how writers deal with the problems of structure – speaking as someone who finds this the hardest part of writing anything, and the most satisfying to fall into place.

Terrible frustration with my chapter on the Great War. It creaks and plods and I don’t really know what I’m saying about Rose and the war; I’ve been stuck on it all autumn. Reading the descriptive selection on the war in Told By An Idiot I found myself getting annoyed with Rose for not being sharp like Virginia Woolf was sharp, for muddling and muddying it, for sitting on the fence, for saying: the war meant this for this person, that for that person. I found myself for the first time feeling actively hostile towards her.

I suspect I’m blaming Rose for my inability to get on with writing this chapter. I desperately need a clear space with no teaching. I’m doing a day school on women poets the weekend after this, and haven’t even begun to think about it. And then there’s all next term’s reading still to do. Meanwhile a librarian at the Harry Ransom Research Centre will send me a copy of the Rose Macaulay card catalogue, and Muriel Thomas has unearthed six ‘chatty’ letters from Rose that she ‘can’t recollect proffering’ to Jane Emery [a previous biographer], which she’s going to photocopy and send.

For what it’s worth, LeFanu had a much better time with Harry Ransom than I did a decade or so later, where they wouldn’t send me even a photo of two pages from the only existing copy in the world of a journal I really needed for my DPhil. Still shocked at how unhelpful they were!

Of course, LeFanu wasn’t only preoccupied with her Macaulay biography during this period. She doesn’t write a great deal about her personal life, but there are intriguing aspects of other parts of her professional life – particularly when she is writing radio plays, one about Macaulay and one about Dorothy L Sayers. The back and forth with BBC editors sounds extremely painful. And I could have read a whole diary-worth about her brief experience at the helm of Radio 4’s A Good Read, and suspecting (correctly) that she is about to be fired.

This is one of many times when LeFanu has to consider her finances – and the precarious state of these is very illuminating about the process of writing. Grants become vitally important, as do other opportunities for work which are distracting but pay the bills.

As well as LeFanu’s travels all over the place to speak to people who’d known Macaulay, or might have some of her letters somewhere – and, of course, the correspondence with people reluctant to speak to LeFanu – I enjoyed the insights into the process of publishing. I wish she’d kept the diary going until after publication, because I’d have loved to read about her reaction to reviews, PR etc. But things like this, from towards the end of the diary, were great:

I think finishing a book is more like getting a divorce than like sending a child out into the world; and least of all like giving birth. Endless niggling details have to be discussed backwards and forwards, letters of supplication written to Random House, saying no I can’t afford such and such an amount for quoting just three lines of Virginia Woolf, and letters of protestation to the Wren at what they want to charge for reproducing some of the Macaulay family photos. Where are the feelings of pride, or relief? I’m filled with anxiety and frustration, tied by a hundred tiny ties to the book I want to cast off.

I’ll close with the short list of things I felt weren’t so successful in Dreaming of Rose. The addendum on some letters being released from their embargo was interesting but didn’t balance well with the rest of the book – it felt like a heavy weight on the end of the diary structure. Nobody wants to hear anybody’s dreams and, title notwithstanding, it wasn’t interesting to read about LeFanu’s dreams. Then there is a wearyingly familiar disdain for people of faith, which isn’t particularly helpful in a biographer of somebody who had faith.

Those are minor gripes about a book that was engrossing and very enjoyable, even without having read LeFanu’s biography. It hasn’t left me particularly feeling the need to read a third biography of Macaulay, and I think Constance Babington-Smith’s is probably the one that appeals most to me, because I always prefer one written by somebody who knew the subject (even if it less likely to be ruthlessly open, or that impossibility, ‘objective’). But even if you’ve never read a word of Macaulay’s writing and don’t have much interest in her life, I think Dreaming of Rose would appeal for that rare opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain at the life of a biographer.

Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić

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I’m continuing my read through winners of the European Union Prize for Literature (as ever, a video at the bottom explaining the prize), which has been a really interesting and varied experience even after only three books. Catch the Rabbit is one of the most recent winners – from 2020, by Bosnian author Lana Bastašić, who also translated it into English.

Sara is the narrator of the novel. She grew up in what was then Yugoslavia, and now lives in Dublin with her boyfriend Michael. In many ways, she has put that world behind her – fully immersed in an entirely different world, and without many connections to the country she left behind, but which is deep in her bones. The conflict, the tension that led to it, and its aftermath have all helped form who she is. And nobody has helped form her more than Lejla, the childhood best friend who hasn’t spoken to her in twelve years.

Until, out of the blue, Lejla calls and tells her to come to Bosnia. Because she thinks that her brother, Armin, is alive and living in Vienna. Armin hasn’t been heard of since he disappeared twenty years earlier, as the Bosnian War began. Despite some misgivings, Sara gets on a plane. Not least because she was once in love with Armin herself.

Armin’s possible reappearance might be the catalyst for the novel, but the real story of Catch the Rabbit is the friendship between Sara and Lejla. The novel jumps between present and future, and in both time periods it is a volatile and unpredictable friendship. Lejla – or Lela, as she rechristened herself after the war – is herself volatile and unpredictable. She shows no gratitude at Sara answering her unexpected cry, nor even much emotion at their reunion. Rather, she jumps straight back into the hold she has over Sara – perhaps not an intentionally malevolent one, but with the power of the more forceful personality. And Bastašić writes with extraordinary precision and insight into the detailed depths of an intense friendship.

Obsessive. One of her words. Back then, before college started, when I thought I was pregnant. ‘Don’t be obsessive, Sara.’ We’re sitting in some kafana toilet, waiting for the sign to appear on the stick. No, before that, before the stick, when we were studying for the chemistry test. I was angry because she couldn’t sit still and study. ‘Don’t be obsessive,’ she told me. Or perhaps even before, much before? Perhaps to her I had always been obsessive. And then I moved to Dublin, met Michael, and started speaking her language. ‘Don’t be obsessive,’ I’d tell him without blinking, at the same time feeling as if I had stolen something, something I didn’t think I needed. I had brought pieces of Lejla on me, tiny insects that had crawled into my bag, my pockets, under my pants, and yet they would hide their real nature before Michael. Our first date: an Icelandic movie we both pretended to have understood. ‘So what, you’re like an artist or something?’ I asked. I twisted my foot on the sidewalk and looked at him condescendingly. And he loved it, the Lejla in me, though her never met her. She got to have him, too.

There is a richness and beauty to Bastašić’s writing that doesn’t ever let the reader settle. Everything in the novel is set in the real world, but something in the way it was written always made me feel like it was on the precipice of magical realism. Perhaps it is the constant uncertainty – what is the importance of the rabbit they buried; what happened on the island that damaged their friendship so severely; where is Armin and why haven’t they heard from him for so long.

And, of course, the author was also the translator – and seems equally skilled at that. A good translation is one you don’t notice, and so I assume Bastašić’s was very good. The only awkward scene is where one character is speaking in Bosnian and the other in English – I assume in the original version, these were indeed in two languages. It doesn’t quite work when everything is in English!

Bastašić does seem to anticipate a little more knowledge about the history of the area than I have. This passage, for instance, I really liked – but, if I’m honest, I don’t know what happened in or before the Bosnian War except in the broadest of outlines. I was only 6 or 7 when it started, so perhaps readers a bit older than me – and certainly readers in Bosnia – will know and understand all the hinted-at bits that aren’t quite mentioned.

The dark spread around as if some mean kid had spilled it over us. Townspeople suddenly got new faces. Some had frowned just once and stayed that way forever. Others were gone for good, left without much noise. I would lie to foreigners later on. I was too little, I would say, I wasn’t even aware of what was going on. But that’s not true. We knew, you and I. We knew it had started, that they had started it. We knew it would last. Soon it was a constant, like an extra chemical element in the air. It was easy to say its name, roll it over the tongue like good morning or good night. It was everywhere: in the linden tree behind the school, in kids’ drawing in the school toilet, in the teachers who suddenly used the Cyrillic alphabet only. It was in you, in your new name, merged with Armin’s disappearance.

But factual history is only the backdrop for the unsettling revival of this friendship – disconcerting and joyful to Sara at the same time, thrown back into a world she has left behind with hardly any acknowledgement from Lejla that the reunion is anything out of the ordinary. This dissection of friendship is the novel I was hoping My Brilliant Friend would be. In my opinion, Catch the Rabbit is much the better book.

Thankfully it has been many years since I had a friendship this unpredictable and liable to damage – not since high school – but Bastašić expertly conveys what it feels like to be in the midst of it. All the more unsettling as any adult – and too complex to be dismissed as a bad friendship, because there is also so much richness and depth there. It’s such a nuanced portrait.

As the ending comes near, the reading experience starts to feel more and more unhinged – perhaps, as the cover quote suggests, like two Alices in Wonderland. It’s a tour de force and will stay with me.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Wow, it has been unbearably hot since the last weekend miscellany. UK houses weren’t built for heat – none of us have aircon – and even my thick-stoned flat only stayed cool for a couple of days. But the rains are coming tomorrow, and that’ll give us something else to complain about. The stereotypes are true: Brits can talk about weather for hours. The exciting thing on my horizon this weekend is my second Covid vaccine! I do have to drive an hour from my house, but it’s worth it – I’ll certainly be feeling safer getting out and about. Wherever you are, I really hope things are improving with vaccine roll-out and cases.

1.) The book – I don’t read a lot of medical books of any variety, but I do when they’re by my friends! Monty Lyman’s The Remarkable Life of the Skin was fascinating, and I’m pleased that he has another one out. The Painful Truth is all about the science of pain and it’s currently on its way to me from Blackwells…

2.) The link – I loved this Guardian article on a woman who decided, in her 60s, to open up her own secondhand bookshop – largely with her own lifetime of collected books. And it’s in Somerset, not far from where my parents lived. How have I not been yet??

3.) The blog post – Perhaps I’ll never get over the excitement of seeing people review British Library Women Writers books, especially when the novel was scarce beforehand and it was unlikely that anybody would ever read it. And I enjoyed Julia’s take on Mary Essex’s Tea Is So Intoxicating – hope you do too.

Notes to Self by Emilie Pine

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One of the flourishing genres that I like is the personal essay. I love it when they’re funny (Casey Wilson’s The Wreckage of My Presence is one of the best things I’ve read this year), but I also enjoy them when they’re more poignant. And lordy me, Notes to Self (2018) by Emilie Pine certainly isn’t a laugh a minute – but it is very, very good.

I think I saw a few people reading it on Instagram last year, and added it to my Christmas list – many thanks Mum and Dad for buying it for me. It’s a collection of six essays which are more or less all about trauma, of one sort or another. The first is about her father – an alcoholic who won’t admit the severity of his problem, and who has escaped his family in Ireland to live a chaotic life on Corfu. Pine flies out when she hears that he is desperately ill.

They call him ‘the Corpse’. He’s attached to machines that monitor his heart and other major organs. He has two IV lines, though the nurses struggle to find a vein that will take them as he has lost so much blood. He is barely awake most of the time. We’re oblivious to his nickname until a Greek visitor lets us in on the joke. Typically, as with most things concerning Dad, it’s both funny and not funny. Nobody, not even the nurses, thinks he’s going to live through this. And yet – he refuses to die.

Like all the essays in the collection, this one – ‘Notes on Intemperance’ (which, fittingly, I misread as ‘Notes on Impermanence’) – is a beautiful, steady unravelling of a topic. Pine’s writing is so steady. Even when she is discussing deeply emotional topics, she takes her time to unwrap them, layer by layer. By the time she has exposed the heart of the issue, whether that be her father’s alcoholism or her parents’ separation or rape and sexual assault, it is the logical conclusion of a series of keenly observed steps. And it is all the more striking because of that.

Pine writes plainly and without many literary flourishes. It means, when the occasional metaphor or imagery comes, it is extremely powerful. She waits until there is exactly the right one to illuminate the moment, and it jolts the reader in the way that really good imagery should. Sometimes it is isn’t even a metaphor, really, just a powerful combination of words. I noted down this excerpt from an essay on trying to have children, as an example of writing which comes together so neatly and effectively:

Maybe if I were more easy-going. More placid. More, well, more maternal, all cuddly and warm. Maybe if I were completely different, if I could swap out every cell, and gene, and chromosome in my body, maybe then this would work. In the early hours of the morning, unable to find sleep, I realise that what I’m trying to be cured of is being me.

That essay, ‘From the Baby Years’, is perhaps the best in the collection in my opinion. She manages to convey the sustained periods of hope and disappointment, as well as a miscarriage and other friends and relatives experiencing trauma related to childbirth. Pine never wallows in despair, but recognises it as the fundamental part of human experience that it so often is. Indeed, it’s impressive that a book this weighted with grief and trauma doesn’t feel heavy – even when it is heartbreaking or infuriating. And I think that’s because of the careful simplicity with which Pine writes the essays.

All in all, a brilliant book – not for every mood, but it is an oddly beautiful experience to share these pages with someone as vulnerable and honest and profound as Emilie Pine.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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The sun is out! I’ve been delighting the neighbourhood with my neon teal garden lounger, and some bright yellow short shorts. Summer clearly brings out the classy in me.

Hope you’re having a good weekend, and here’s a book, a blog post, and a link to help you along the way.

1) The book – I love Fitzcarraldo’s non-fiction – which I only specify because I haven’t read any of their fiction. Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton sounds like a wonderful addition to the series: it is about Barton’s time living in Japan, ‘an exceptional debut about the quietly revolutionary act of learning, speaking, and living in another language’.

2) The blog post – is really a link, I suppose, but Lucy Scholes’ ‘Re-Covered’ column for the Paris Review feels like a blog. In this column, she talks about the wonderful Barbara Comyns – including her own history of reading Comyns, and the fact that she is always on the brink of being rediscovered again.

3) The link – I was late to the fan club for Janet Malcolm, but my goodness she is extraordinary. After her recent passing, the Guardian published Helen Garner’s wonderful tribute to her.

Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer by Molly Clavering

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Sometimes it does feel like the corner of the book internet I occupy is really just Scott’s kingdom, and we live in it. Scott being Furrowed Middlebrow, of course, both blog and the series of reprints from Dean Street Press. One of the things I really like about his series is that, most of the time, they don’t just bring out one or two books by an author – they drop a whole load at once. The most recent author to get a job-lot of reprints is Scottish mid-century writer Molly Clavering – and I started with Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer from 1953. She wrote a bunch of novels in ’20s and ’30s, and this was the first of seven novels after a break of fourteen years.

It was generally considered that Mrs Lorimer, that quiet woman, was not at all a sentimental person. Therefore when Nan Gibson, her valued and trusty and frequently tiresome cook-housekeeper, announced one morning as she twitched back the bedroom curtains, ”I hear Harperslea’s been sold,” the pang which her mistress felt must have been simply because another suitable house – a house she would have liked for herself, had been bought by someone else.

There are shades of Netherfield being let at last at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – but Mrs Lorimer is not looking for an eligible young man. She is looking for enough space to host all her adult children and their spouses and offspring. There are quite a few of them, so I shan’t go into all the details – one of the most prominent is the son-in-law obsessed with his car, and his wife (Mrs Lorimer’s daughter) who feels neglected in comparison. She decides to make her own entertainment, which she does by finding the daughter of the house at Harperslea – a Nesta Rowena Smellie. There is a lot of discussion about the name ‘Miss Smellie’, and it is a name of course, but it did all feel like an unnecessary tangent. They re-Christen her Rona, which has become rather less acceptable as a nickname in the past eighteen months…

The bulk of the tension and romance of the novel comes from the various young married couples – and it doesn’t take a genius to work out what might happen between the sole unmarried child, Guy, and this Rona girl. There are some obstacles connected with her nouveau riche family and his inability to stick to any career, but the writing is on the wall from the first moment they are mentioned.

Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer is, indeed, quite packed with incident – a great deal of which crops up and is resolved throughout the novel, rather than tidying everything away at the end. But the beating heart of the novel is Mrs Lorimer herself, and what makes the book more than the sum of its parts. She is patient and consistently underestimated by those around her – who see her as a mother and not as someone with passionate feelings and thoughts herself. Her life is broadly happy and she is not demanding of others, but I enjoyed how Clavering showed the layered life behind the dependable matriarch.

Clavering doesn’t demand much of her reader, and this is definitely a cosy read where the stakes never feel quite as high to the reader as they do to the characters – but it’s cleverer than it might seem at first, and I’m glad to have found another fab new-to-me author from Furrowed Middlebrow.

J is for Jansson

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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.

It was really difficult to decide whether to use Tove Jansson or Shirley Jackson for ‘J’ – two authors I love, and two authors I’ve read widely. But I went for Tove Jansson because I’ve loved her longer – and because there ARE some books I haven’t read by her. (By the by, if you’re concerned about my windowframes in the pic – fear not! A painter is coming to sort them out soon.)

How many books do I have by Tove Jansson?

I’ve got 12 books by Jansson, which I think includes all of her works for adults that have been translated into English. I’ve only actually got one of her Moomin books which, in the fine tradition of these posts, I forgot to include in the picture. I might have one or two more Moomin books that I’ve forgotten about, but my children’s books are under the bed so who knows.

How many of these have I read?

I’ve read almost all of the novels and short story collections – and Moominpappa at Sea. Let’s say 9 in total. I know she is best loved for the Moomin books, but maybe I came to them too late, or maybe I just prefer her (and all writers) when she is writing about real people. I will go onto her other Moomin books at some point, I’m sure, but to be honest I often forget that she wrote anything for children.

From the stack pictured, I haven’t read the collected letters yet, and I’m saving Sun City. It’s not in print, and I can’t bear the idea of getting to the bottom of my Jansson novel pile. There is a novel that hasn’t been translated yet – Stenåkern or The Field of Stones – but I don’t know if Sort Of are planning to bring out an edition. I do hope so! I’m also not entirely sure I’ve read Sculptor’s Daughter all the way through – quite a lot of the stories appear in the collection A Winter Book, and I seem to remember reading the others at some point.

How did I start reading Tove Jansson?

I did watch the Moomin cartoon growing up, but it was in about 2003 that my friend Barbara lent me her copy of The Summer Book and I became an instant fan. At that point, very little had been translated – so it’s been good fun waiting for them to appear in bookshops.

General impressions…

Jansson is one of my favourite writers, and I love pretty much everything she’s written. Her stories are often beautiful, observant gems, and I love her experimental epistolary or fragmented stories too. She can do dark brilliantly, in The True Deceiver, and her sweeter books remain uncloying because she never has a moment of sentimentality.

Of course, I have only read her through her translators – usually Thomas Teal, but also Silvester Mazzarella and one or two others. Teal and Jansson are ideal collaborators, and I sincerely hope he’ll finish off anything remaining. And if he doesn’t – well, of course I have the Moomins waiting for me.

The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen by Elizabeth von Arnim

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The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904) by Elizabeth von Arnim was the result of my BookTube Spin #2, and a book I bought back in 2012. It’s the second sequel to Elizabeth and Her German Garden – I haven’t read the first sequel, but it didn’t seem much to matter. Indeed, I don’t think you really need to have read the first – ‘Elizabeth’ is just a handy way of crafting a persona, without any significant call back.

I love von Arnim a lot, but was a bit lukewarm about Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which I read for an episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ a few years ago. Perhaps that’s why The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen had been neglected on my shelves for a fair while. But I actually ended up liking this sequel rather more.

Elizabeth is off to Rügen – spelled Ruegen on the cover of my edition, but Rügen inside. Don’t know where it is? Fear not – the opening paragraph is here to guide us:

Every one who has been to school, and still remembers what he was taught there, knows that Rügen is the biggest island Germany possesses, and that it lies in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Pomerania.

In the next paragraph, she says she wants to do a walking tour of the island. She seems to spend more of the book on wheels of one sort or another, but that is the declared intention. Nobody wishes to go with her, so she heads off with only an accompanying servant.

It has been a conviction of mine that there is nothing so absolutely bracing for the soul as the frequent turning of one’s back on duties. This was exactly what I was doing; and oh ye rigid female martyrs on the rack of daily exemplariness, ye unquestioning patient followers of paths that have been pointed out, if only you knew the wholesome joys of sometimes being less good!

That gives an indication of von Arnim’s tone, which is in quite dry mode. Some of her novels are more earnest or melancholy, but this is one where she is using a tone of voice I much prefer – wry, dry, and quite ready to see the ridiculous in everybody she encounters. (One might also note, from a 21st-century point of view, that Elizabeth might be taking a break from her duties but the accompanying servant certainly is not…)

I don’t know about subsequent editions, but my copy comes with a lovely fold-out map in the front, as you can see at the top of this post. As the book progresses, Elizabeth continues to tour the island and mention the places on it – though my initial worries that it would turn out to be simply a list of places and sights turned out to be groundless. The tour is really only a premise for a very enjoyable story about Elizabeth trying to escape her life – and finding her life waiting for her, in the form of an unexpected meeting with Cousin Charlotte. My favourite sections of the novel dealt with her trying to avoid this burdensome cousin, who apparently longs for Elizabeth’s company while also judging everything about her life.

“I know you live stuffed away in the country in a sort of dream. You needn’t try to answer my question about what you have done. You can’t answer it. You have lived in a dream entirely wrapped up in your family and your plants.”

“Plants, my dear Charlotte?”

“You do not see nor want to see farther than the ditch at the end of your garden. All that is going on outside, out in the great real world where people are in earnest, where they strive, and long, and suffer, where they unceasingly pursue their ideal of a wider life, a richer experience, a higher knowledge, is absolutely indifferent to you. Your existence – no one could call it a life – is quite negative and unemotional. It is negative and as unemotional as -” She paused and looked at me with a faint, compassionate smile.

“As what?” I asked, anxious to hear the worst.

“Frankly, as an oyster’s.”

One of my favourite things to read about it is someone who is unashamedly rude, so long as the person they’re rude to is witty and blithe about it. The exchanges between Elizabeth and Charlotte reminded me a bit of Elizabeth and Lady Katherine in Pride and Prejudice, though the power dynamics are certainly different and Elizabeth-in-Rügen saves her outbursts for reflections in the narrative. Having said that, Charlotte is blunt and a nuisance, but she is not always wrong – she has a wonderful speech about how men don’t do any of the ‘female’ roles in the house, and rails against ‘smug husbands’ who ignore the ‘miserable daily drudgery’. Again, it’s hard not to feel that this would hold more weight for women without servants, but the general point holds.

Along the way, Elizabeth also meets some tourists she can’t get rid of – again, they seem unaware that they are unwanted – and she is very funny about them too. The whole book appeals to the sense of humour of the slight misanthrope – or those of us introverts who would be misanthropes if we allowed ourselves to be. I’m not sure I learned anything about Rügen in this novel, but I greatly enjoyed the journey and, for my money, it’s a rather more enjoyable book than Elizabeth and Her German Garden.