All

The next club is announced!

StuckinaBook All 20 Comments

Thanks so much for all your wonderful contributions to the 1965 Club! Any latecomers welcome – I’ll add any remaining reviews to the list, though it might be a bit delayed. And thanks as always to my wonderful co-host Karen!

Karen and I had a chat about to do for the next club, in October, and we’ve plumped for 1930. We haven’t done any beginning-of-a-decade years yet, and there are quite a few big hitters you can turn to if needed. And I’ll almost certainly be re-reading Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield for the zillionth time…

You have six months to think about it, of course. We look forward to seeing all the contributions then – the new badge we’ll be using is to the right.

Stoner by John Williams #1965Club

StuckinaBook All , , , , 12 Comments

Everybody was reading Stoner by John Williams about seven years ago, largely because Vintage Books sent a review copy to pretty much everyone in the known universe. According to Kim’s review for the 1965 club, it was also the toast of the book blogging world around 2005, but that was before I joined it. Well, better late than never, I’ve finally read it – and isn’t it brilliant?

I had put it off for ages because all I knew about it was (a) it was set in a university, and (b) it was called Stoner. So perhaps naturally, I’d assumed it was about drug-taking. Mais non – Stoner is, rather, the lead character in this novel that looks at his life from studenthood and though the following decades.

Stoner has left a farming family for the bright lights of university – leaving the agriculture course for the English literature course, once he discovers his deep love for that subject. At the same time, he thinks he may have fallen in love with the beautiful, distant Edith. She gives him little encouragement, but he is beguiled, and they marry.

It is not a successful marriage – but it does produce a daughter, Grace, to whom Stoner is patiently devoted, and whom he almost single-handedly looks after in her infancy.

The trials of an impetuous marriage are one strand of the novel; the other is Stoner’s career as an English lecturer. He is, at first, competent but little more. I loved reading about his transformation into an inspiring teacher:

When he lectured, he now and then found himself so lost in his subject that he became forgetful of his inadequacy, of himself, and even of the students before him. Now and then he became so caught by his enthusiasm that he stuttered, gesticulated, and ignored the lecture notes that usually guided his talks. At first he was disturbed by his outbursts, as if he presumed too familiarly upon his subject, and he apologised to his students; but when they began coming up to him after class, and when in their papers they began to show hints of imagination and the revelation of a tentative love, he was encouraged to do what he had never been taught to do. The love of literature, language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print – the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

I suspect Williams shared Stoner’s love of literature and of studying it – or, if not, is very good at conveying it. It reminded me of the most glorious moments of revelation I felt while studying. Any writer who can manage to put across the wonder of literature is doing something great in my book.

But things are not so simple here, either. He has friends in the department, but he also makes an enemy – one with long-lasting effects on his personal and professional lives.

Those lives are distinct throughout much of Stoner, not least because his wife has very limited interest in his career. I wondered if this was a fault of the novel, but I suppose it rings true. Many of his find that the traits we have in the workplace do not quite translate outside of it, and perhaps it is accurate that Stoner’s determined enthusiasm in the classroom finds its opposite in his passivity within marriage. He is certainly a rounded and convincing character – so sympathetic, and yet often frustrating.

Above all, Stoner is stunningly written. The prose is somehow beautiful and poetic without ever seeming to stray from everyday language. It is an amazing combination, and I don’t know how he achieves – nor how he makes this gradually unwinding portrait of a man and his environment so compelling to read.

The only significant criticism I have it is that Edith, his wife, is less well drawn. Her character is always a little undeveloped, and her nature changes so often and so violently that she often seems only a foil for the next stage of Stoner’s life. The psychology behind her actions is often explained, but never quite as convincing as the totally believable motivations (good or bad) behind everything Stoner says and does.

But, yes, I can see why this was such a success when reprinted – and I’m thrilled that the 1965 Club meant I finally read it.

I. Compton-Burnett by Charles Burkhart – #1965Club

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 17 Comments

Ivy Compton-Burnett didn’t publish a book in 1965 – indeed, she didn’t publish one after 1963, except posthumously – but that’s no reason why I can’t find a way to sneak her into the 1965 Club. Because thankfully Charles Burkhart published a book all about her in that year. He seems to have written several books about ICB, and who can blame him, but this one is stridently called I. Compton-Burnett. (Incidentally, he is not the musicologist, so far as I can tell.)

This book is low on pages (about 130), but each is jam-packed with text, so it’s not quite as short as it initially seems. In it, Burkhart attempts an overview of all of ICB’s writing, identifying the main characteristics of it and, fairly often, defending her against prevailing opinion. His expertise in her work is quite dizzying, and it makes for a very satisfying inquiry – even if I did have to skim past quite a bit, having still got nine of her books to read,

The opening is of especial interest for the 1965 Club, as it attempts to set the literary scene. While asking why she is so well-reviewed and so little read, Burkhart also makes a few comments about the state of 1965:

Advertising is one of the typical arts of our age; and since it is a noisy age, there is a sustained shout of superlatives for every new product, whether of the literary imagination or the soap manufacturer. On the dust jackets of their books, all writers are praised; because the ‘soft sell’ has not yet reached the publishing world, the same tired troop (“remarkable”, “powerful”, “stirring”, and so on) are deployed for every first novel about sensitive adolescence, every raw and wriggling specimen of neo-romantic neo-brutalism. The babble of adjectives is sustained at such intensity, especially in America, that it tends to move right out of the range of human hearing. It is charity to suppose that this was the intention.

Every age considers itself frighteningly modern, of course, and these censures have only increased. But what is interesting is his identification of her novels as portraying the ‘eccentric family’, and doing so eccentrically – and seeing how eccentricity is considered by the critics and the masses. It is a very intelligent and well-judged exploration that makes no assumptions.

He goes on to consider the archetypal plots of ICB novels – tyrants, secrets, secrets being revealed, neighbours prying etc. – but is quick to say that they are not all the same, and nor are all the characters or their dialogue amorphous. I have been guilty of saying that her novels are all alike, but Burkhart is correct. Compton-Burnett’s signature is always clear, but the characters are almost always fully-formed, and the dialogue filled with individual traits. They perhaps all have the same unworldly register, but retain their own idiolects nonetheless. As he points out, in disputing the idea that her characters are characterless, the reader is never in any doubt about what any one character thinks about any other. Considering her households are always filled with many people (often around 20), this is extremely impressive. He also quotes Frank Kermode, who describe how conversations progress in ICB’s novels perfectly: “by exploiting in each remark unobvious logical and syntactical implications in the previous one”.

After looking at various themes (religion, ethos, money etc.), the final chapter looks at each novel in turn – assessing their quality, highlighting their successes, and reminding me of which I have or haven’t read.

I. Compton-Burnett is certainly not an introduction to that author – it only really works if you’ve read a substantial number of her novels already, and perhaps is only truly for the person who has read everything ICB wrote. But I loved it. Such an indulgence to read somebody who appreciates ICB as much as I do, and knows her work far more intimately. How I agree with him when he says “in comparison with her writing[,] most other modern writing seems unfinished, its aim diffuse and its style impure”. I’m not sure he answers the question that you might be able to make out in the photo above – Burkhart makes no grand conclusions about ICB’s greatness or the likelihood of her longevity. Judging by the fact that she is completely out of print in the UK (I think), it’s not looking good for her posterity in 2065 – but she has her devoted audience still, and this book would be a welcome addition to any of their libraries.

The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark #1965Club

StuckinaBook All , , , , 13 Comments

I hadn’t realised I was quite so close to the end of Muriel Spark’s prolific output – having read The Mandelbaum Gate for the 1965 Club, I’ve now read 19 of her 22 novels. Yep, I like Spark a lot. And one of the things I tend to like about her is how much she packs into a short work. Many of her books are around 200 pages or fewer – whereas The Mandelbaum Gate is just a few pages shy of 400. How would I feel about one of her longest books?

Sometimes, instead of a letter to thank his hostess, Freddy Hamilton would compose a set of formal verses – rondeaux, redoubles, villanelles, rondels, or Sicilian octaves – to express his thanks neatly. It was part of his modest nature to do this. He always felt he had perhaps been boring during his stay, and it was one’s duty in life to be agreeable. Not so much at the time as afterwards, he felt it keenly on his conscience that he had said no word between the soup and the fish when the bright talk began; he felt at fault in retrospect of the cocktail hours when he had contributed nothing but the smile for which he had been renowned in his pram and, in the following fifty years, elsewhere.

That’s the opening paragraph, and we are immediately in Spark territory. Who else would have written that final bit? And who else would start off a novel with a quirky, irrelevant meandering about different forms of poetry. Freddy has something like diplomatic immunity, and crosses back and forth between Israel and Jordan – through the Mandelbaum gate – through which many others cannot pass. (By the way, the gate was named after a man who owned a nearby house, and so it sneaks into #ProjectNames by stealth.)

One of the people who probably should be more cautious about passing through the gate is Barbara Vaughan, a ‘half-Jewish Catholic’ who has followed her archaeologist fiancé out to the Holy Land. As a character points out, you can’t be half-Jewish – as her mother was Jewish, so was she – but Barbara is a keen Catholic who is awaiting confirmation about whether or not her fiancé’s first marriage can be annulled by the church.

And, indeed, something happens to her. In true Spark style, the moment is thrown into conversation casually, sometime after it has happened – before we dart back and forth in time and location. To add to the confusion, Freddy suffers temporary memory loss (perhaps because of sunstroke; perhaps because of something more sinister), and so when he is the ‘future’ section, he can’t remember what we have yet to learn in the ‘past’ section.

If you’ve read much Spark, you’ll be familiar with how she plays fast and loose with narrative conventions, and particularly the idea that things should be relayed in chronological order. In most of her novels, the narrator will throw in prolepsis that reveals, in a darting moment, something that might have been the denouement in the hands of another writer. Well, if she does that in a 200 page novel, she does it doubly so in a 400 page novel. I’m not going to lie – I was often quite confused, but I went with it.

Because what made The Mandelbaum Gate enjoyable is what makes most of her novels enjoyable – the peculiar characters, never quite behaving how you expect. The wry narrative voice that doesn’t trouble to make things too easy for the reader. And delightful turns of phrase. Always expect the unexpected.

It did feel to read something set in Israel and Jordan, and it is very concretely set in a particular time – 1961, to be precise, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which makes occasional appearances in the background. The cast of characters goes far beyond Freddy and Barbara, and I was particularly fond of Alexandros, a shopkeeper who has befriended Freddy.

As I said, I didn’t always know what was going on, and the disorientation is at least partly deliberate. And I don’t think The Mandelbaum Gate is quite the same success that her shorter novels can be – but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I might. I thought Spark’s powers and peculiarities might be spread far too thinly over a longer book – but she sustained them in an admirable, if not quite as perfect, a way.

 

-time

The #1965Club is here!

StuckinaBook All 34 Comments

Six months rolls around quickly, doesn’t it? The #1965club has arrived! This week, Karen and I are asking everybody to read and review books published in 1965. Put your reviews on your blogs, GoodReads, LibraryThing, YouTube, in the comments here, or wherever you like! Pop the link in the comments, and I’ll do a round-up. Together, we can put together a picture of the year.

To whet the appetite, you can hear me talking about the club years on The Book Club Review Podcast – it was lovely to be invited along. Listen here, or via your podcast app of choice.

The Drought by J.G. Ballard

Annabookbel

A Season in the Life of Emmanuel by Marie-Claire Blais

Buried in Print

I. Compton-Burnett by Charles Burkhart

Stuck in a Book

At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie

Booked For Life

Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

Staircase Wit
She Reads Novels

Helen Keller’s Teacher by Margaret Davidson

Staircase Wit

The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

Book Jotter

The Flight of the Falcon by Daphne du Maurier

Lizzy’s Literary Life

Georgy Girl by Margaret Forster

Finding Time To Write

The Magus by John Fowles

Booked For Life
Typings

Hotel by Arthur Hailey

Dolce Belleza

Dune by Frank Herbert

Becky’s Book Reviews

Frederica by Georgette Heyer

What Me Read

The Young Spaniard by Mary Hocking

HeavenAli

After Julius by Elizabeth Jane Howard

JacquiWine

Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal

A Fiction Habit
Shoshi’s Book Blog

Trixie Belden and the Mystery of the Mississippi by Kathryn Kenny

My Reader’s Block

Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš

Winstonsdad’s Blog

The Looking-Glass War by John le Carre

Pining for the West

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette Leduc

Bag Full of Books

A Spaniard in the Works by John Lennon

Briefer than Literal Statement

Acts of Worship by Yukio Mishima

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Lie by Albert Moravio

1st Readings

Accident by Nicholas Mosley

Mr Kaggsy

The River Between by James Ngugi

Typings

Modesty Blaise by Peter O’Donnell

Annabookbel

Lost Empires by J.B. Priestley

Pining for the West

The Blue Flowers by Raymond Queneau

1st Reading’s Blog

Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

Booked For Life

Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Walloo

Harriet Devine
Lizzy’s Literary Life

The Town in Bloom by Dodie Smith

Karen’s Books and Chocolate

The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark

Stuck in a Book
HeavenAli

Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart

Staircase Wit

Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Finding Time To Write

The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff

She Reads Novels
Pining for the West

The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Lunatics by Ion Vinea

Finding Time To Write

Stoner by John Williams

Reading Matters
Stuck in a Book

The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

StuckinaBook All 0 Comment

I hope you’re having a wonderful Easter weekend. It’s beautiful weather here as I write this, on Good Friday, and I’ve spent a happy hour or so reading The Hours while pulling out weeds. More exciting plans to follow during the rest of the weekend! For now, the usual miscellany.

1.) The link – is a wonderful article about Persephone Books in the New York Times magazine, including some really beautiful photographs of the shop. It probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know, if you’re a Persephone devotee, but it’s lovely to read nonetheless. And, as a bonus, here’s a video for a pilot of ‘Fran’s Book Shop’, featuring bookish interviews in the Persephone shop.

2.) The blog post – another reading week opportunity! In the first week of July, Helen from A Gallimaufry will be running a Sylvia Townsend Warner reading week. I’ll certainly be joining in, probably with some more of STW’s exceptional short stories.

3.) The book – The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. It’s another of those books I’ve seen mentioned on Twitter and can’t remember who by – but lots of people are saying that it’s already one of the best books about how to write. “If you want to write a novel, read this book,” say the Sunday Times, and reader, I do want to write a novel.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

I knew Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (2017) by Gail Honeyman had been successful, but I’d no idea how successful until the book stats came out last year. This was a runaway bestseller, getting hundreds of thousands more purchases than the next novel in the list – at least according to the list I read. When my book group chose to do it, I was a little dubious. Other mammoth bestsellers of recent years have definitely been low on quality – i.e. The Da Vinci Code. Well, I was happy to be proved wrong. This is a case where I think the hype was pretty justified.

In case you’re one of those others who’ve yet to read it – the novel is from the perspective of Eleanor Oliphant, who works in finance administration and lives alone. She isn’t very at ease socially, largely because she doesn’t understand the ways that people choose to spend their time. She has very little popular culture knowledge, and tends to speak as a mix between an eighteenth-century novel and a computer manual. (Her dialogue – never using abbreviations; overly elaborate sentences – never quite made sense to me as a concept, but we’ll leave that be.)

It’s also clear that she is not completely fine.

Gradually we piece together that something traumatic happened to her as a child, and it has continued to affect the way she engages with other people. She also longs for a way out of the loneliness she experiences. It was an interesting coincidence that the epigraph was from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, which I’m reading at the moment. Living alone definitely doesn’t have to mean loneliness, but Eleanor feels isolated from the rest of humanity. And her attempts to cross this divide are usually frustrated by her inability to understand social codes – and often not particularly liking the range of options in front of her.

This changes when she sees a handsome young singer. She realises she is in love, and destined to be with him. He will be the solution to her problems.

Honeyman takes us on a compelling journey with Eleanor, as she tries to orchestrate ways to get closer to the singer. At the same time, she has made her first friend – Raymond, a colleague who can see past her off-putting traits. At the same time, we continue to learn more about her past. Honeyman gives us enough info to guess and make assumptions, and little enough that we’re desperate to get more answers. It’s really impressively judged. So often, this sort of bread-crumb-dropping is just annoying, whereas Honeyman knows exactly how much info to give, and when. And even when I thought I’d worked it out, I hadn’t.

It’s a relatively long book, but very compelling – I raced through it in a couple of days. As mentioned, I’m not sure all the verbal tics quite made sense, but I did like that Eleanor is an anomaly but not repellent. Plenty of people in the book think she’s being funny when she’s really just answering their questions differently from how they anticipated. Her colleagues find her hard to talk to, but warm to her when she tries different approaches.

Oh, and there is the most wonderful CAT!

For a debut novel, it’s very impressive. I’m intrigued to see what comes next – and what the film will be like. It’s good to be a part of the zeitgeist sometimes!

The Overhaul #1

StuckinaBook All 24 Comments

One of my favourite varieties of blog post to write, or to read, is a book haul. It’s always interesting to see what sorts of books people select when many are on offer – and I love writing and receiving the comments that cheer on one of the books, or ask what a book is about.

But what happens next?

Well, I decided to start a series looking at previous book hauls, called ‘The Overhaul’. It’s a really clever pun if you don’t think about it for too long and discover that it’s kinda meaningless. In this intermittent series, I’ll be looking back at previous ‘haul’ blog posts, seeing what I have and haven’t read (and why), and generally chastising myself, I suspect. IS my brother correct that I should read the books I have on my shelves rather than buying more? All that to come. FUN.

Feel free to borrow the idea and the image, if you fancy doing anything similar. I’ll keep doing it if people like the idea and/or if I enjoy the retrospective.

The Overhaul #1

The original haul post is here.

Date of haul: July 2011

Location: Hay-on-Wye

Number of books bought: 19

Now let’s take a look at the books individually…

  • Jenny Wren by E.H. Young

I have yet to read this, though I have read a handful of other EHY books over the years since 2011.

 

  • The Vicar’s Daughter by E.H. Young

Er, see above. I should totally read some more E.H. Young. A couple have names in the title, so maybe they’ll come next.

 

  • Through a Glass Darkly: the life of Patrick Hamilton by Nigel Jones

Not only have I not read this, I haven’t even read another novel by Hamilton since 2011. C’mon, Si!

 

  • The Letters of Evelyn Waugh ed. Mark Amory

Erm, I’ve used it to rest my laptop on. Does that count?

 

  • The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Hurrah! One I’ve read! Though sadly I hated it. Lots of people really rate this many-centuries look at a nunnery, but I’m afraid I found it really dull. I held onto it, because I want my STW collection to be in tact, but I’m not sure it’ll stay forever.

 

  • Jill by Philip Larkin

Ermmm ok, I might read this for Project Names.

 

  • The Second Mrs Tanqueray by Arthur Wing Pinero

OK, I’d actually read a library copy of this before I bought it, but I’m still putting it in the ‘read’ pile.

 

  • The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski

I’d already read this too. This was a Penguin edition, which I have since discarded in favour of the Persephone edition.

 

  • The Swan in the Evening by Rosamond Lehmann

Not read it – but I have read two of her novels now, whereas I was accumulating her in 2011 and earlier without having read a word she’d written.

 

  • Safety Pins by Christopher Morley

I read this one, and in 2011 too! It’s delightful.

 

  • Shaving Through the Blitz by G.W. Stonier

AND I read this one in 2011 – observational essays from WW2, from a very unusual character.

 

  • The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

I read this one in 2012, during the Muriel Spark Reading Week that Harriet and I held (maybe it’ll be time for another before too long?) It’s Spark on strong form, about a man who arrives in town and may or may not be the devil.

 

  • A Reckoning by May Sarton

I haven’t seen this for a while, but I’m going to assume it’s on my shelves somewhere… unread.

 

  • Messages From My Father by Calvin Trillin

I’ve read three books by Trillin since 2011, but this was not one of them.

 

  • A Baker’s Dozen by Llewelyn Powys

While I never got around to blogging about this, I did read and very much enjoy Powys’ reflections on life growing up as the son of a Montacute vicar.

 

  • The Shakespeare Wallah by Geoffrey Kendal

Unread. I did start watching the film and it was terrible.

 

  • The Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks

There are plenty of unread Sacks books on my shelves, but I *have* read this one! Not my favourite of his, but very interesting nonetheless – looking at an island where a high percentage of the inhabitants are colourblind.

 

  • Gin & Ginger by Lady Kitty Vincent
  • Lipstick by Lady Kitty Vincent

I think I read these almost immediately, and they’re great fun. When a book starts “No, my dear, I cannot say that I really know the Bishop of Runnymede”, you know you’re in for a treat, don’t you?

 

Total bought: 19

Total still unread: 9

Total no longer owned: 1

Marriage of Harlequin by Pamela Frankau

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

Look, I try not to be the envious type. But when I discovered that Pamela Frankau had oublished 20 novels before her thirtieth birthday, I confess I was rather incensed. Checking the maths, I had zero novels published by the time I was 30. Or, indeed, subsequently.

I’d only read one of her novels – A Wreath for the Enemy, published quite late in her career. It’s brilliant. Are all her books brilliant? I decided to rewind by almost three decades, and read her very first novel, Marriage of Harlequin (1927). So, over the course of a few lunch times sat in the Bodleian, I read it.

Well, I really enjoyed it, but it does feel like an entirely different writer. I suppose that isn’t hugely surprising, since she was only 19 when she wrote Marriage of Harlequin, and didn’t have the nuanced and wry look at life that charactertised the later novel. In Marriage of Harlequin, instead, we are thrown into the whirlpool of a first love – along with a heavy dose of 1920s gaudy cynicism.

Sydney is the heroine, and we first meet her as a teenager at school. She is queen of her circle, and expecting much from life. Part of this expectation is met when she inherits a large fortune – making her quite the eligible match on the marital market. At the same time, she is writing a novel. This is where things doubtless get a bit autobiographical, and it was fun to read about this ingenue writing a novel that is snapped up by publishers – at the hands of a writer about to experience the same thing. Her novel is a big success, making her still the more eligible. In the background is her protective cousin Gerard – in her foreground, though, is a cynical 30-something man who works for the publisher. He is tired of life, has disappointed his father, and badly needs money to cover his debts. His name is Lionel de Vitrand, but he is also the Harlequin of the title. He proposes to her, and is accepted.

“I’m not going to be polite, de Vitrand. I’m warning you – I can’t stop my cousin marrying you if she wants to, but the very second you behave badly I’ll come round to your house and knock your head off.”

“How crude.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“That’s my business.”

“It’s mine too.”

Lionel yawned behind his hand. “My unworthy father’s port must be stronger than I’d imagined.”

“You’d better be careful.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

Silence. Lionel stepped from the fender on to the hearthrug, and bowed elaborately. “Well, have I your permission to retire?”

“No, you haven’t,” said Gerard bluntly. “You’re marrying Sydney for her money, and you don’t intend to be faithful to her. You couldn’t even if you did intend to, because you aren’t that sort. I’ve done all I can do to stop this business -“

He paused. Lionel said, still unmoved: “I don’t want to hit you in my house but I’m afraid I shall have to if you don’t shut up.”

“Come on, then. Hit me.”

“Unfortunately, I have a few manners. They linger, an expiring force, in uncongenial surroundings. What else have you to say?”

“Only what I’ve said before.”

You get a sense of the style, I suspect. It’s on the tightrope between melodrama and Wildean callousness. Nobody has ever spoken quite like this, but it is controlled so well that it feels deliberately stylised rather than poorly judged. Some of the weaker passages are when we are supposed to feel genuine sympathy for Sydney (because the truth, of course, comes out – though you can doubtless anticipate what happens after that). She is a bit too flimsy to warrant empathy, but certainly sturdy enough to be the heroine of a frothy, mildly melodramatic novel.

Taken on that level, Marriage of Harlequin is very fun, amusingly and skilfully written, and quite an astonishing achievement for a 19 year old. By the 1950s, she was writing much more complex, subtle novels – so I do wonder what the trajectory of her writing career was like in between.

Holidays are an exception to book-buying bans. Right?

StuckinaBook All 19 Comments

I’ve just been away for a wonderful week in Dorset, staying in a beautiful Georgian mansion with 24 other people. It was the best. It also involved little trips to Bridport and Lyme Regis, and those places have secondhand bookshops. I decided that holidays were exempt from my ban on buying books (that was already, let’s face it, a pretty flimsy ban). And so I bought fourteen books…

The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford
I’ve been keeping my eye out for this book for years. It’s quite easy to get online, but I’d decided to wait to find it in the flesh. Thank you, Bridport charity shop.

The House by the Sea by May Sarton
I’ve got a few unread Sartons on my shelves, but this is a memoir about staying alone in a house by the sea – and that sounds irresistible to me.

Interim by R.C. Hutchinson
R.C.H. is one of those names from the early-to-mid 20th century that I have seen pop up all over the place, but have never read. (Have you?) I liked this little paperback edition, and Interim is hopefully as good a place to start as any.

The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp
Again, I have quite a few Sharps unread, but I’m always happy to add to that number – and was intrigued by this one being a ‘services edition’. I wonder what an exciting life this copy has led?

The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham
There is a definite theme to this haul – of finding books by authors I like, when I already have books by them waiting. I don’t have that many by Cunningham unread (one or two), so… better? Maybe?

The Winged Horse by Pamela Frankau
You may remember that I wrote a blog post asking if book recommendation sites worked – and LibraryThing’s #1 recommendation was The Winged Horse. Where LibraryThing advises, I listen. Thank you Sanctuary Books in Lyme Regis for aiding and abetting.

Carnival by Compton Mackenzie
Look, yes, I have lots of Mackenzie unread. This is another. I will not be judged!

The Women’s Side by Clemence Dane
I didn’t know anything about this – though Dane is another author I have on my shelves unread, and I read a lot about her when I was researching The Book Society. This is a short book about women’s rights in 1926, from education to the vote to ‘sex and the business women’. Sounds so interesting! Totally up my street.

The Man on the Pier by Julia Strachey
I love Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Strachey. This is her only other book, so hopefully it’s just as good.

Lions and Shadows by Christopher Isherwood
I have SO many unread Isherwoods, but I couldn’t put this one back on the shelf once I’d started to flick through it. It’s a fictionalised account of Isherwood’s early writing career, and the literary scene of the 1930s. Fun, no?

Novelists in Interview ed. John Haffenden
This collection of author interviews from 1985 includes people like Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch etc. It should be an interesting look at the 1980s literary scene! So many literary scenes.

The Glass of Fashion by Cecil Beaton
The lady in Bridport Old Books was laughingly cross that I was buying this – she has a rule that she leaves everything on the shop floor for a week before buying the books she has her eye on, and I swooped in during that week. It’s a history of fashion in the first half of the 20th century through the eyes of Cecil Beaton, so how could I leave it?

Life Among the English by Rose Macaulay
English Country Houses by Vita Sackville-West
Two slim and rather lovely books by authors I love, in a series called ‘Britain in Pictures’. Er, yes please.

So I’m very happy with this haul, even if it breaking all sorts of self-imposed rules! And now I do need to give proper consideration to where all my new books can fit… or come to the realisation that they can’t.