All

Sweet Desserts by Lucy Ellmann #ABookADayInMay Day 8

StuckinaBook All , , , 4 Comments

Like, I suspect, a lot of people, I first heard of Lucy Ellmann when her behemoth, one-sentence novel Ducks, Newburyport made a big splash. I was and am intrigued to read it, but rather put off by the length. So when I came across a copy of her first novel, Sweet Desserts (1988), and it was only 145 pages – well, that felt much more manageable. A quick few thoughts about it… but also please watch Rick’s video and Jill’s response.

The novella is about Suzy and Franny, sisters from Illinois who grow to adulthood in a curious kind of dependent competition. They are forever watching what the other is doing, perhaps sabotaging it, and self-destructively bound by something that must be quite close to love.

Over the course of the novella, they move to Oxford with their academic father and develop as adults. Suzy is perhaps the dominant voice, and we see her failing career as a would-be academic alongside her erstwhile relationships with unsuitable or uncaring men – some of which last years, and none of which seem wise or happy. But Ellmann finds the humour in this bleakness. I’m not sure I’d necessarily call Sweet Desserts a comic novel, even a black comedy, but it is strewn with bitterly funny lines and observations.

Suzy is drawn with some depth, but is also driven as a character by her dual appetites: for food and for sex. Binging food is a way she copes with trauma, and seeking sex is a way she tries to find self-worth. The through-theme about her eating and her weight is curious. I don’t think it would be written about in quite the same way today, but nor is it a disparaging or mocking portrayal. Rather, Ellmann explores Suzy’s relationship with eating and weight with a sort of wry detachment.

It was in Oxford that the secret eating began in earnest: I caught Franny hovering around the fridge with suspicious frequency and started to copy her. My hips soon seemed enormous in their circumference. It was all a great revenge on Daddy, fascinated as he was by his own repugnance towards Rubens’ women.

Sweet Desserts jumps around timelines a bit, but the most distinctive thing about it is the way the narrative is interspersed with a miscellany of other texts. From art criticism to recipes to self-help books, they make the novella feel a bit like it is found in a maelstrom of the everyday. It is immersed in the world of Suzy and Franny, whether that is cereal boxes or radio programmes.

Frachipan Fancies

Fill the boat with the franchipan mixing, and then pipe lines across the sweet paste which has been previously thinned with water to piping consistency. When baked, wash over with hot apricot jelly.

It’s an ambitious and interesting first novel, and I think Ellmann has a brilliantly distinctive voice. I’m not sure why she chose to make it so short – Sweet Desserts doesn’t feel like it needed to be a novella, and could easily have sustained another 100 pages or more. But then who knows if I’d actually have picked it up – and I’m definitely glad I did.

Elizabeth Goudge and Maggie O’Farrell

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , 17 Comments

As with previous A Book A Day in May challenges, sometimes I’m doubling up on days – and in the past two days I have finished a 407pp book (The Heart of the Family by Elizabeth Goudge) and a 484pp book (This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell). Before you think I am some sort of reading superhero, I should tell you that I had read most of both of them already. One of the bonuses of having lots of books on the go at once is that it lines up quite a few candidates for this May challenge. Anyway, some quick thoughts about the two books in turn…

The Heart of the Family: Book Three of The Eliot Chronicles

The Heart of the Family (1953) by Elizabeth Goudge

The Heart of the Family is the third in the trilogy about the Eliot family. The first, The Bird in the Tree, was one of my favourite reads last year – I loved the family dynamics, the warmth and clarity with which Goudge wrote about them, and the no-longer-fashionable theme of self-sacrifice. I went onto read the second in the trilogy (though didn’t get around to blogging about it), and really enjoyed that one too – people often single out The Herb of Grace (also published as Pilgrim’s Inn) as their favourite in the series. I can see why, as I loved the theme of setting up a new home, but I missed Lucilla – the matriarch who rather fades into the background.

In the third of the trilogy, Lucilla is somehow still with us – well into her 90s, a little less dominant over her family’s decisions, and in a period of reflecting back on her life and all its triumphs and sorrows. David, the young man with youthful naivety and fervour in The Bird in the Tree, is now an older family man, less impetuous and emotional but still making strained decisions. He has also been successful in his career as an actor, and it has brought him a secretary – Sebastian Weber is the most significant new character in this book. Sebastian intensely dislikes David – and his arrival at the family home challenges both of their views of each other.

But this is truly an ensemble piece. We have grown to know and love (or at least understand) such a wide cast of characters, and it is a poignant pleasure to see more of them. I found myself more drawn, this time, to Margaret and Hillary – two of Lucilla’s children whom she has not loved with extravagant affection of other children and grandchildren, but who are such solid people that I couldn’t help empathising with them intensely.

As before, there is Goudge’s mix of serious Christian spirituality and wry humour. It’s such a pleasure to read a novelist who takes faith seriously, and she is also often great fun. I loved this bit…

For Meg’s religious ideas at this time had been formed more by Mrs. Wilkes than by her mother, and Mrs. Wilkes leaned more to the Old Testament than the New. Sally told Meg shyly and beautifully about the Baby in the manger and the lambs carried in the arms of the Good Shepherd, and Meg listened courteously but was not as yet very deeply impressed, but Mrs. Wilkes’s dramatic accounts of the adventures of the Old Testament heroes sent her trembling to her bed and were quite unforgettable.

“And up to ‘eaven ‘e went,” Mrs. Wilkes would say of Elijah, “with such a clanging and a banging of that fiery chariot that you could’ave ‘eard it from ‘ere to Radford. And all the angels shouted, ducks, and all the archangels blew their trumpets till the sky split right across to let ‘im in. Like a thunderstorm it was, ducks. Somethink awful.”

So, yes, I enjoyed The Heart of the Family – but I did find it very much the worst of the trilogy. The characters were delightful to re-encounter because of my fondness for the family, but the pace and momentum was a bit lacking. It’s a long novel to more or less meander, and there is some hard-to-pin-down quality missing in this book that was there in the other two. It was good, but for some reason it felt a bit like a faint shadow of the other two.

This Must Be The Place (2016) by Maggie O’Farrell

And talking of faint shadows… I won’t bury the lede this time. I really enjoyed this long novel but, again, it’s not as good as the others I’ve read by O’Farrell. I think this is my sixth book by O’Farrell and it’s my least favourite – excellent writing and fascinating characters, but something is missing in the momentum here too. (Sidenote: this beautiful cover was hiding behind the dustjacket.)

It’s too complex a novel for me to cover everything going on – but the gist is that Claudette went missing. She is a world-famous French actor and director who disappeared one day. By the time it became clear that she’d faked her own death, she was away – people knew she was alive, and presumed she was a recluse. In actual fact, she had ended up married to Daniel, an American academic who studies speech development.

Daniel has previously been married to another woman. He has also broken off a previous relationship with a woman who was later found dead. There are children from different stages of his life, some of which he is estranged from.

In typical O’Farrell fashion, we dart all over the place – many, many different relationships and different time periods, from the 1940s to the 2010s. Sometimes we are in America and sometimes in Ireland. A lot of the story has to be pieced together, bit by bit, as more and more is revealed. I’ve described some of it in linear fashion, but that absolutely isn’t how the novel is presented.

I can cope with a bit of jumping around if there is something to keep us hooked. I thought she did it brilliantly in Instructions for a Heatwave, for example. And I did enjoy This Must Be The Place – her writing and characterisation are superb. But I wasn’t really sure what the reason for reading was. In other books of hers, there has been one or more central questions that we want answered. In This Must Be The Place, I wasn’t really sure what that was. It’s in many ways an excellent novel, but I got to the end unsure quite why she’d written it.

As I say, the writing is beautiful, so I want to end with a section that I noted – this is 1940s, with Daniel as a very young man:

Daniel looked at the man. The man looked at him. In later years, he will recollect only dimly the trip he and his mother took on the ferry. He will recall it as a series of sensations: a sock that kept slipping and wrinkling under his heel, the startling white undersides of gulls as they wheeled above him, a girl throwing pizza crust up into the air for them, the amber beads of rust on the rails. And this: the unaccountable sight of his mother sitting with a man who was not his father, her skirt with the sailboat print arranged around her, the man turning toward her and whispering words that Daniel knew were unsettling words, persuasive words, frightening words, her head bowed, as if in prayer.

So perhaps I was a little disappointed by both these books, while also thinking them rather good. It’s a case of expectations being very high, and quite hard to express justly in a quick review! I’m glad to have read them.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner #ABookADayInMay Day 5

StuckinaBook All , , , , 10 Comments

Helen Garner Joe Cinque's Consolation Audio Book mp3 on CD | eBay

Today I had an action-packed day in London, and I did get through quite a lot of a book on the train to and from, but not a whole book. Luckily I only had 40 minutes left on an audiobook of Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) by Helen Garner, and I finished it as I was driving into the railway station.

I’m making my way through everything available by Garner on audiobooks – well, everything non-fiction – and Joe Cinque’s Consolation has a lot in common with This House of Grief, published ten years later. It is about a tragic death and the impact it has on those in horrendous mourning, and it closely follows the trial of somebody accused of murder. In this case, though, it’s pretty unambiguous that they committed the killing: one of the central questions is whether or not they have diminished responsibility.

Joe Cinque was in his 20s when Anu Singh, his girlfriend, drugged him with rohypnol and injected large quantities of heroin into him while he slept. During the night, he dramatically died. I’ll spare you some of the more graphic details (which Garner does not spare the reader). Anu Singh had told various friends that she planned to kill him and then kill herself – various motives flew around, from her fear that he would leave her, to her own hypochondriacal (and incorrect) obsession that she had a muscle-wasting disease. None of the friends reported what Anu had said until it was too late, and one of the friends (who had been involved in getting the heroin) is also tried for murder.

Garner got involved in the story after a previous joint trial of both murder-accused broke down, and the decision was made to do separate cases. The book is very Garner: she is interested in the minutaie of the trial, down to the expressions and foibles of each witness. She is as compelled by the way in which people on the stand might make a half-hearted joke as she is with the finer points of law.

Beyond the courtroom, she interviews various people, including Joe Cinque’s distraught parents. (Anu Singh refused to be interviewed.) The scene where she first meets them is fascinating – not only for what she learns from them, but for how she frames it and reflects on it. “Her voice was heavy with the authority of suffering” is a brilliant and concise observation of Mrs Cinque. And afterwards she goes over the mistakes she made as an interviewer – and for sitting, unawares, in the chair that had usually been Joe. Garner takes us so far behind the scenes of reporting that the reporting becomes almost the heart of the book – without retracting from the seriousness of the crime.

A mix of criminology, psychology, elegy and character study, almost nobody else could have written a book like this – Janet Malcolm is the only other name who comes to mind (someone Garner is often compared to, and she does mention The Silent Woman, Malcolm’s brilliant book about the aftermath of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes). I think I’ve almost run out of Garner’s full-length non-fiction, but it’s been a fascinating journey.

A delightful reread for #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

I read Ashcombe (1949) by Cecil Beaton back in 2012, sitting in the Bodleian Library. I quickly knew I needed my own copy – and this beautiful edition arrived. Here we are, 12 years later, and I have re-read and re-loved Beaton’s tale of finding, renovating and loving a beautiful countryside home in Wiltshire. Will I still feel the same as when I first wrote about it?

I think I must have been drawn the book initially because of its inclusion of Edith Olivier – I certainly read it during my DPhil, which included a chapter on her novel The Love-Child. It was while staying with Olivier in 1930 that Beaton made the decision to go and visit Ashcombe – a sizeable house left in some disrepair, hidden at near-inaccessible lengths in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside. (It is clearly a mansion, however homely Beaton tries to make it sound.)

I do not know if the others spoke during the trek up the hill. I was perhaps vaguely conscious of their eulogoies, but I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand. Some people may grow to love their homes: my reaction was instantaneous. It was love at first sight, and from the moment that I stood under the archway, I knew that this place was destined to be mine. No matter what the difficulites, I would overcome them all; considerations of money, suitability, or availability, were all superficial. This house must belong to me.

As it happened, the house never did belong to Beaton. The subtitle to Ashcombe is ‘the story of a fifteen-year lease’ – and Beaton did indeed lease the house and its significant grounds from its owner, who hadn’t thought it quite habitable. And indeed it wasn’t. The nominal rent of £50 per year was so low because Beaton would spend so much money on restoring the house – and, in the days before listing restrictions (or maybe even planning permission?), he went much further than restoring. Ashcombe has lots of (black and white) photographs included, and some of these are before and after sets – where he’s clearly extended windows, added walls and doors, and knocked things about at whim, as well as extensive landscaping. The landlord certainly got good value, but also seems incredibly tolerant for Beaton to pursue any whim at all. How many of our landlords would let a tenant have every visitor sketch their hand on the bathroom wall?

The photographs also show many of the people who came to stay. While Beaton leased Ashcombe for 15 years, he never lived there full-time. It was a retreat from a week in London, and he was often away abroad for months at a time. But while he was there, he brought packs of the great and the good from London (and even, before he was sure of the cook’s ability, all the catering from London too). We get to sneak into their lives, which seem to be a whirlwind of costume parties, charades, artistry and camaraderie. Quite what the locals thought we never discover – these are privileged, wealthy, often titled men and women who have seemingly endless energy and opportunity for antics. Many are names you’ll probably recoginse – Augustus John, Salvador Dali, Rex Whistler, Siegfried Sassoon. Even Tom Mitford gets a look-in, which he seldom does in books about his sisters. Naturally, I relished the times he spoke of Edith Olivier – older than most of her famous friends, and relatively new to this world, having been oppressively sheltered until her father died when Olivier was already firmly middle-aged, if not old.

Of the neighbours on whom I grew to rely more and more, Edith Olivier was perhaps the most cherished. It was she who, by bringing me into contact with so many new friends, was so largely responsible for my having blossomed into a happy adult life: and it was she who continued, without effort on her part, to discover your people of promise and bring them to her house. So many of the young writers, painters and poets came to her with problems about their work and their life, and they knew that after she had listened intently to their outpourings, her advice would be unprejudiced, wise and Christian. Edith’s youthfulness and spirit were of all time: she had unlimited energy, vitality and zest for life. Interested in every strata of humanity, she had never been known to be bored. After a strenuous day she would retire to bed, not to sleep, but to read at least three books, one of which she was to review, in addition to writing a most detailed journal of all that had happened to her during the previous twenty-four hours.

Having sat in Wiltshire Record Office with volumes of the journal, I can attest that it is ‘most detailed’. She wrote at enormous length and in horrendous handwriting.

So much of Ashcombe is joyful: the joy of home and the joy of friends. Beaton writes brilliantly about the pull of a beautiful place, and about the frenetic happiness that a group of carefree people can bring out of each other. They are unafraid of simple silliness. But the book does have its mournful edge. Nine years after the lease began, the Second World War started.

I remember I was about to step into a hot bath when I was informed that Poland had been invaded. The news was like a death knell. We had to wait one endless day more before we heard, from a calm but tired voice on the radio, that Hitler had refused the last request for a peaceful solution to his demands.

At Ashcombe, as we sat listening to the Prime Minister in the small parlour, my mother wept a little. The speech was soon over. We were now at war.

Beaton writes with sensitivity about the impact on war – mostly on fatalities among his friends, particularly Rex Whistler, since Beaton’s own wartime experience was clearly easier than others. Ashcombe is something of a retreat from the worst of the bombing and devastation in London, but is not left unaffected.

Almost equally sombre is the end of the lease. Beaton hoped to continue living there (at least for some of the year) for the rest of his life – but, after the lease had been extended a few times, I finally came to an end. The landlord wanted it back and there was nothing Beaton could do. Houses are often important in fact and fiction, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a better account of the heartbreak of leaving a home you have truly loved, against your will. It only happened to me once (when all my housemates rather suddenly chose to leave Oxford), but it is devastating and takes a long time to get over.

Beaton may have had other homes and I daresay they were palatial and beautiful – but Ashcombe clearly caught and kept his heart. In this delightful, poignant, effervescent book, he has given the house an excellent tribute.

The Camomile by Catherine Carswell #ABookADayInMay – Day 3

StuckinaBook All , , 6 Comments

Off to 1920s Scotland for the latest in my A Book A Day In May journey – and The Camomile by Catherine Carswell. The narrator is Ellen Carstairs, a clever, slightly cynical woman in her early 20s. She is a gifted musician – though currently using this talent to teach reluctant children – and lives in a slightly bleak flat in order to escape the oppressive attentions of her religious aunt. Deep down, and growing steadily less deep, is her ambition to write professionally rather than play the piano.

I say she is the narrator – this is sort of an epistolary novel, though Ellen seldom seems to pay any attention to any letters she might get from her correspondent, long-term friend Ruby. We learn very little about Ruby, and I do wish she was less of a shadowy construct. The letters that Ellen sends her are intentionally in the style of a detailed journal – so it’s really just a conceit for Ellen to share her reflections on the people and events she encounters, not quite at the openness that a diary would reveal, though not far off. (And, indeed, the latter part of the novel becomes a diary instead of these letters.)

The novel gets off to a slightly slow start. Well, a very slow one initially, with a reminiscence of a long-ago music lesson – it’s a bizarrely anticlimactic way to open a novel. Luckily it’s tidied away quickly, and we get into the novel proper. Ellen is clearly very naive and immature in some ways, still in the hinterland between childhood and adulthood, but it is impossible not to warm to her. Carswell has created a heroine with tried-and-true traits that will endear her to most readers: Ellen is bookish, more familiar with life from literature than experience; she is slightly stubborn and judgemental but quick to repent and try to do better; she has high standards and expectations, and we want her to achieve them. I suppose it is a coming-of-age novel, even though she is older than the usual age for such heroines.

I am for ever straining after Reality with a capital R, and life seems to fob me off continually […] I don’t of course know what reality is, but I do hope some day I shall. I suppose getting married and having children would bring one face to face with it. But then that may never happen to me. Anyhow not for years and years.

As the novel progresses, this reality comes closer to home. What starts as wry observations and gradually emerging ambitions becomes more about the genuine prospect of marriage – and whether or not it is possible to pursue her hopes of being an author with the particular man who has proposed.

The title of the novel comes from Shakespeare – ‘The camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows’ (1 Henry IV). Carswell makes it overt that the camomile in question is Ellen’s aim to become a successful, published writer. But it is also broader than that: Ellen is herself the camomile. The way she responds to being trodden on by repressive relatives and acquaintances is treated comically – but the prospect that she will be more permanently trodden down by marriage, and whether or not she will have the resilience to grow despite this, becomes a more serious theme in the novel.

I think The Camomile gets better and better as it keeps going. For a while it’s not clear what the point of the book is, but once that becomes clear, the fine writing and perceptive character study have something firm to cling to. And, throughout, it is funny in the slightly barbed way that an Austen heroine can be. For example:

My other new pupil is Sheila Dudgeon, who wants a course of ‘finishing lessons’. The only difficulty about her ‘finishing’ is that she has omitted the formality of beginning.

This was a re-read for me, and I’ll leave you to guess why I might be re-reading a 1920s novel. It’s an interesting, deceptively deep read, and I’d love to hear more people’s opinions on it.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“No surprise that this novel was chosen by feminist press Virago for republication in the 1980s, for it is all about female self-determination in the face of almost universal societal disapproval.” – Leaves and Pages

“Sometimes I read a book and think ‘How dare the author assume that I want to know what is going on in her head in such detail?’ – and I can think this while simultaneously enjoying the book.” – Clothes in Books

“I wasn’t really able to whip up any sympathy for her and was glad when this book was finished.” – Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home

Valentino by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay Day 2

StuckinaBook All , , , , 11 Comments

Happily, day two of A Book A Day in May was much more successful – and, somehow, even shorter. Only 62 pages! And yet Ginzburg gets a whole world into Valentino (1957), translated by Avril Bardoni. It contains a great deal, both in terms of character and plot, and yet doesn’t feel like it should have been any longer. It’s a miracle of concision.

The narrator is Caterina, writing with love and yet some detachment about her brother, Valentino. He is a young, selfish man who has been brought up to believe that he will become an exceptional man. He has been given an expensive education and most whims have been answered by his parents – even while Caterina and Clara, his sisters, have been expected to get by on scraps. Caterina sets off to a distant market early every morning, to get marginally cheaper vegetables, while Valentino takes exams in a half-hearted way and obsesses with his appearance. As the novel opens, Valentino is doing something he apparently does often: bringing a fiancée to meet the family:

Many times he had become engaged and then broken it off and my mother had had to clean the dining room specially and dress for the occasion. It had happened so often already that when he announced he was getting married within the month nobody believed him, and my mother cleaned the dining room wearily and put on the grey silk dress reserved for her pupils’ examinations at the Conservatory and for meeting Valentino’s prospective brides.

But Maddelena is different from the line of pretty young students that Valentino brings home. She is at least a decade older than Valentino, very wealthy, and not at all attractive. On meeting her, Valentino’s mother bursts into tears.

As the novella continues, this curious mix of characters go through months of their lives in not many lines. Ginzburg shows us Clara’s thawing resentment, Maddelena’s generosity and her subdued pride, Valentino’s much less subdued pride, the mother’s stubbornness, and the enchanting new character – a cousin of Maddelena who starts to charm Caterina. She is perhaps the only character we aren’t able to observe properly – because she is primarily the observer. The other characters are drawn with their competing emotions, while Caterina’s motives and feelings are a little less clear. She is a substitute for the reader and, being a daughter or sister to most of the characters, makes us feel fully immersed in the family dynamics.

Ginzburg is so good at families, at least in the two novellas I’ve read by her (the other being Sagittarius). And she is very funny too, with a wry humour that is exentuated by the sparseness of the prose. For example…

My father said he would go to have a talk with Valentino’s fiancée, but my mother was opposed to this, partly because my father had a weak heart and was supposed to avoid any excitement, partly because she thought his arguments would be completely ineffectual. My father never said anything sensible; perhaps what he meant to say was sensible enough, but he never managed to express what he meant, getting bogged down in empty words, digressions and childhood memories, stumbling and gesticulating. So at home he was never allowed to finish what he was saying because we were all too impatient, and he would hark back wistfully to his teaching days when he could talk as much as he wanted and nobody humiliated him.

The humour gradually ebbs from Valentino as the tone becomes more serious – and there is a development in the plot that is hardly given any space to grow, but works its way backwards through the story so that it transforms everything we’ve read.

Valentino is a brilliant little book, showing what a master of economy Ginzburg was. I’m keen to keep reading her, and glad to have at least one more book (Family Lexicon) on the shelves to try.

#ABookADayInMay is back! And I didn’t like the first one!

StuckinaBook All , , , , 10 Comments

It’s May again, and that can only mean one thing – I’m doing A Book A Day in May again! I don’t know if Madame Bibi is planning to do a novella a day in May again, as I am merely following her lead with this challenge.

To refresh memories – my aim is to finish a book every day in May. I say ‘book’ rather than ‘novella’ because it’ll almost certainly include some non-fiction, and it’s ‘finish’ rather than ‘read a full book’ because I have a whole pile of half-read books that will come into play. Besides those, I haven’t made any specific reading plans. Part of the fun is choosing the book each morning, spontaneously, matching the mood of the day. (And the number of pages I think I’ll have time to read.)

And I started with Antwerp by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño – written in 1980, finally published in 2002, and translated into English by Natasha Wimmer in 2010. I think my copy was actually a review copy in 2010, thinking about it. The cover boldly quotes Bolaño saying, “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp“, which is bold for a publisher who was also issuing a bunch of his other stuff. And also because it’s not really a novel?

Antwerp: Amazon.co.uk: Roberto Bolano: 9780330510585: Books

Antwerp is a series of 56 short vignettes. I’m quite drawn to this sort of fragmented way of crafting a book, as some of my favourite reads of last year demonstrate – though In The Dream House and The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer are both non-fiction. Antwerp is fiction, whatever else it might be, and these vignettes do paint some sort of collective picture – albeit one with such porous edges that the only really safe thing you can say about it, formally, is that it is made of words.

Actually, before we get onto the main part, there is a quick preface by the author – which starts like this:

I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can’t be sure of. For a long time these were just loose pages that I reread and maybe tinkered with, convinced I had no time. But time for what? I couldn’t say exactly. I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

I think that can help us know what we’re dealing with. It’s the sort of experimentalist think-speak that I had a lot more time for when I was 19 than I do now. So I entered the novel (?) proper fearing I might not know what was going on, and so it proved to be. The 55 vignettes take up less than 80 pages in my edition, and many of those pages are only half-filled. Certain characters recur, such as a nameless woman, a pornstar (?), various police officers, and Roberto Bolaño himself, or at least an author of the same name. There are clear themes: police investigation, violence, circuses, rather grubby sex. Maybe there’s even the detective of an actual crime, though I rather failed to pick up the pieces.

I started treating each vignette as a tiny short story, without trying too hard to connect it with what went before and after. And considering they’re things like this, you can perhaps see why:

10. THERE WAS NOTHING

There are no police stations, no hospitals, nothing. At least there’s nothing money can buy. “We act on instantaneous impulses” … “This is the kind of thing that destroys the unconscious, and then we’ll be left hanging” … “Remember that joke about the bullfighter who steps out into the ring and then there’s no bull, no ring, nothing?” … The policeman drank anarchic breezes. Someone started to clap.

But there were some parts that I loved and went back and re-read, like a poem. I noted down this opening to a vignette:

Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we’ll later call the work. Silence reads letters sitting on a balcony. Birds like a a rasp in the throat, like women with deep voices. I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors. Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird. And no work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles.

I keep using the word ‘vignette’, though I have no idea if Bolaño would like it. I got to the end having really appreciated some of the writing, and not at all knowing what the point of Antwerp was. (The city is mentioned, finally, in the 49th of the 55 vignettes – with an anecdote about a man in Antwerp being killed when his car was run over by a truck full of pigs.)

It’s probably the sort of book that would reward a year’s careful studying. Each line could be debated and played with and appreciated. Certainly Bolaño has his admirers. I don’t think I’m likely to become one of them.

Summer Half by Angela Thirkell – belated #1937Club guest post!

StuckinaBook All 22 Comments

I normally don’t post ‘club’ reviews after the week has finished – but we all make exceptions for our mothers, and here is my Mum (Anne – also known as Our Vicar’s Wife, for longterm blog readers) writing about Angela Thirkell’s Summer Half. Over to you, Mum!

This taste of 1937 is a typical example of Thirkell’s work – the Barsetshire setting, restricted to a few houses and a boys’ school, gives scope for Thirkell’s themes of domestic management (the problems with ‘staff’) boys (and their tendency to do ridiculous things) masters (either shackled to teaching or biding their time before entering a ‘real’ profession) romance (and ‘being engaged’ almost before the first kiss) and the ridiculousness of life. Mothers are depicted as slightly dotty, schoolboys and schoolgirls, awkward and annoying, men (either in one of the professions or in the military – preferably the Navy) and Fathers as slightly distanced figures, whose powers are seldom domestic and usually connected with committees, dinners, pipe-smoking, and clubs.

At least one figure must be tormented by love, another by pride, and yet another by unfulfilled ambition. All this with the witty, droll, and occasionally what we would judge as prejudiced and offensive attitudes, expressed in the vocabulary of that time.

There is a clear social structure in the book – those who dress for dinner v those who make it. The Young People appear privileged and indulged by parents who, at times, seem to have lost the upper hand. They both annoy and amuse the reader – as do the themes and plot twists. However, it is worth reading, if only for things like this:

‘I say,’ said Lydia, ‘you know it’s summer time tomorrow. Has anyone put the clocks wrong?’

Mrs Keith looked conscience-stricken.

‘I did speak to cook this morning,’ she said, ‘just after I had read it up in The Times, but I don’t know if I said put them backward or forward. I must have known at the time, because I had just read it, but I can’t think now. It’s forward, isn’t it?’

‘Backward, I think,’ said Mr Keith.

‘I know it breaks my watch to do it one way and not the other way,’ said Mr Merton, ‘but I can’t remember if it breaks it in spring and doesn’t break it in autumn, or the other way round.’

‘If you go to China you keep on gaining a day,’ said Colin. ‘Or is it losing it?’

 Having not long since changed the clocks, and felt weird for weeks afterwards, this was very soothing.

Thirkell may not hit all the ‘spots’ for a good read, but as light relief from duller reading, makes for a pleasant afternoon – with tea, of course – and cakes.

No Peace for the Wicked by Ursula Torday – #1937Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

In the final afternoon of the 1937 Club, I’m writing about the most obscure of my choices this week – Ursula Torday’s No Peace for the Wicked. It’s one of three novels that Torday wrote under her own name in the 1930s – and she started writing again the 1950s, turning then to gothic romances and mysteries under the pseudonyms Paula Allardyce, Charity Blackstock, Lee Blackstock and Charlotte Keppel. Having gleaned that from Wikipedia, I wondered what her early novels would be like – particularly with a title like No Peace for the Wicked.

As it turns out, the title doesn’t seem to have any particular significance for the characters. The heroine is Lynn. As the novel opens, she is 16 years old and living with her Aunt Beatrice and cousin Stephen, who is not her contemporary (he’s 29) but behaves rather like a slightly resentful older brother. Lynn has been there for many years, because her parents were killed in an accident. Beatrice has provided for her material needs, and offered some affection – but strictly on her own terms, which are laden with expectations that Lynn will be ladylike, respectful, and grateful.

Stephen and Beatrice often squabble, but they are united in ridiculing Beatrice. She has pretensions to art patronage, forever inviting promising young musicians to the house whose promise never seems to come to much. Beatrice gathers the local great and good to concert parties, which nobody besides herself seem particularly to enjoy. Torday is often a very funny writer, and I enjoyed the close observation she uses in highlighting the absurdities of Beatrice and her circle.

Aunt Beatrice sat still and upright, her hands folded on her lap. There was a faint smile on her mouth; once perhaps it had really been a smile of pleasure, now it was merely an expressionless elongation of the lips. Miss Martin also clasped her hands, but her head was thrown back, displaying her corded throat and flat breasts to the utmost disadvantage. She always tossed her head back when listening to music; Stephen once remarked that she seemed as if she were gargling with melody. Colonel Ingelby had shut his eyes. This looked like concentration, but was actually acute boredom. On one memorable occasion he had fallen asleep, and a Chopin nocturne had been cut short by a huge snore. Lynn had laughed so immoderately at this that she had been sent up to her room in disgrace. The Colonel’s wife, a plump little woman whose main interest lay in bridge parties, cared as little for music as he did, but to show that she knew how to appreciate it beat an audible tattoo on the arm of her chair, in the wrong tempo.

Lynn is at an age where she is starting to push against the bounds that Aunt Beatrice has put on her life. In this, she is sometimes aided and sometimes thwarted by Stephen. One of the main things I wish Torday had done differently in No Peace for the Wicked is Stephen’s age. He is 13 years older than Lynn, and it’s important for the dynamic that he is older and has more independence – but he could have done that at 21. It’s not clear how he has spent his 20s, living with his mother and not developing very much – and he acts so much like Lynn is a contemporary that the disparity in their ages feels a very odd decision.

The first half of the novel is a lot about the dynamics between this three characters – usually with a comic tone, and occasionally a bit more melodramatic. The melodrama overtakes the comedy around the halfway mark: it is the eve of Lynn’s interview to study at Oxford (where Torday studied herself), and… Stephen has run away with a vampish young woman.

One thing leads to another, and Lynn (now 21) and Aunt Beatrice move unhappily to a boarding house. Beatrice is hurt and angry, but continues so determinedly to idolise Stephen that she turns her ire on Lynn. Everything she does is wrong and wicked. And Lynn continues to push against these restrictions – particularly when she meets an egotistical young pianist, Richard, and falls suddenly in love with him. Much of the second half of the novel is about the on-again-off-again of their relationship, which is tempestuous and slightly ridiculous, in the way of many romances for 21-year-olds.

Melodrama again takes over, and the dialogue and responses sometimes feel a bit borrowed from the more hysterical reaches of 1930s cinema. It makes sense because they are so young, and I don’t think the reader is expected to think either Lynn or Richard is behaving very well. I read the whole novel on the train to and from London, so I think it would have felt less repetitive if I’d read it over a longer period.

I think the plot and character development could have done with a bit of finessing, but I still really enjoyed reading No Peace for the Wicked because of Torday’s style. It reminded me a bit of Stella Gibbons non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels. It’s often very amusing and wry. Here, for example, is a funny bit about an incidental character who only appears for a couple of pages:

Mr Crane had fed his imagination for many years on the kind of novel where the hero beats the heroine with a sjambok, and after he has so dealt with her, covers her face with passionate kisses. He was a vehement preacher of the creed that all women like to be ill-treated. (At the age of forty-six he was still unmarried.)

Alongside the humour and melodrama is also a certain darkness. Lynn is often occupied with the limits of her own morality, and what wicked acts she might consider doing (and perhaps that is where the title comes in). Whether or not that comes to anything, I shan’t spoil – but it introduced a note of tension that it’s unusual in a 1930s domestic novel.

My 1937 Club reading has been a bit sub-par overall – but I’ve ended on a high note. I think Ursula Torday is an interesting and enjoyable novelist, and it’s a shame that her novels under her own name have disappeared so much. If you spot one in a bookshop, grab it and give it a chance.