Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich #ABookADayInMay No.10

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I haven’t read any of Louise Erdrich’s novels, which I know are well-regarded, but that didn’t stop me being very interested in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), which Daunt Books have now republished and sent me as a review copy.

It’s a memoir-travelogue-history in which Erdrich takes her 18-month-old daughter to Ojibwe Country – the area in southern Ontario where her ancestors have lived for years, and where the father of her daughter lives (a man she calls Tobasonakwutiban). It’s never easy to arrange to meet up with him, but somehow they manage.

And it’s like entering another world – one more connected with the past, with the surrounding islands, lakes, and land, and with their identity. Perhaps it is the precariousness of that identity that makes it so vivid – it is an identity that had been routinely attacked by schools that sought to remove anything distinctive from this people, to quash out their language and force them to assimilate.

In the book, Erdrich has been running a bookshop in Minneapolis. It is a world away from Ojibwe Country, but she has some connection – she is Turtle Mountain Ojibwe (as well as half-German) and her grandfather had been a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. If there is a clash of cultures when Erdrich comes to visit Ojibwe Country, it is not the clash of an outsider coming to the place – the clash is within her. Here’s her reflection on the system of deities, and propitiating them with tobacco:

There was a time when I wondered – do I really believe all of this. I’m half German. Rational! Does this make any sense? After a while, such questions stopped mattering. Believing or not believing, it was all the same. I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as it if contained sentient spiritual beings. The question of whether or not they actually existed became irrelevant. After I’d stopped thinking about it for a while, the ritual of offering tobacco became comforting and then necessary. Whenever I offered tobacco I was for that moment fully there, fully thinking, willing to address the mystery.

There are also elements that are unconnected with her tribal connections or her visit – the fact that, at 48, she is quite old to have a toddler. The girl’s father is in his mid-60s. Erdrich has three teenage daughters too. It’s an unusual life to lead, and Erdrich examines the situation and her reflections on it with the same respect and intelligence that she turns to Ojibwe Country and its customs and history.

My favourite bits of the book, unsurprisingly, were those that dealt with language. In the 2014 afterword Erdrich reveals that one of her teenage daughters (now adult) has invested many hours to a whole-hearted learning of Ojibwe, which is apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the hardest language to learn. I am very much not a polyglot, but I enjoy reading about language learning:

Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb, there are countless forms. This sounds impossible, until you realize that the verb forms not only have to do with the relationships among the people conducting the action, but the precise way the action is conducted and even under what physical conditions. The blizzard of verb forms makes it an adaptive and powerfully precise language. There are lots of verbs for exactly how people shift position. Miinoshin describes how someone turns this way and that until ready to make a determined move, iskwishin how a person behaves when tired of one position and looking for one more comfortable. The best speakers are the most inventive, and come up with new words all of the time. Mookegidaazao describes the way a baby looks when outrage is building and coming to the surface where it will result in a thunderous squawl. There is a verb for the way a raven opens and shuts its claws in the cold and a verb for what would happen if a man fell of a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and drove the stem of it through the back of his head. There can be verb for anything.

I found the historical sections a little less interesting, even though the explain the 11,000 books that were brought to the island, many of which are still housed in a custom-designed library island. It is the fresh immediacy of Erdrich’s experiences and responses that most captivated me.

Books and Islands of Ojibwe Country is an unusual little book. I like its brevity. This is not an exhaustive examination of the region – rather, it is a short and compelling snapshot of one woman’s reconnection with a shared past. And, because of her small daughter, also the forging of an understanding of a shared future.

Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley #ABookADayInMay No.9

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Last year everyone seemed to be reading My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley. I couldn’t decide if it was likely to be my cup of tea or not, but I decided to take a chance on Cold Water (2002) when I stumbled across it in a bookshop in Cheltenham. It’s Riley’s debut novel, published when she was only 23.

It’s about a young woman called Carmel McKisco who works in a run-down bar in Manchester. She has recently broken up from a cheerful man called Tony, and she has vague plans of moving to Cornwall for a fresh start. She and a friend also make a plan to track down a musician they used to obsess about, after his bandmate turns up in the bar.

It’s hard to find much to say about Cold Water, if I’m honest. It meanders through different scenes and people, telling you about some of the locals, or what it’s like to walk the nearby streets. The Guardian review called it ‘a series of well-wrought sketches’, and that’s a good description. They are interesting, well-written vignettes that felt consistently like building up a world in which something could happen… but nothing really does. I think a certain sort of reader will love it. I’ve realised that I don’t need a lot of plot in a novel, but I do need some sort of momentum. And I suppose the absence of momentum is sort of the point of Cold Water, so it didn’t make a huge impression on me.

Here, anyway, is a bit I did like – to give you a sense of her writing:

Margi first started having nights out in Manchester when she was fifteen. At the Hacienda they called her ‘the garage flower’ and would let her in for free. Not unpredictably, she fast acquired a much older boyfriend. Mark Dalton. He was thirty-six. He liked people to see them out together at clubs so everyone would wonder what a pretty young thing like her was doing with him. And Margi liked the idea of this too. She liked him to look old, crumpled and unshaven. They went out together and had drunken, jealous rows. They caused scenes. She started staying at his place in Chorlton most nights, and she says every morning they’d take their caff breakfast, beans on toast in a polystyrene tray and cups of thick tea, into Southern Cemetery, sitting together on the wet grass and talking lofty nonsense. I’m sure it wasn’t every morning, but what the hell. And it was this Mark, so she says, taught her the importance of always making a good entrance and a better exit. “The entrance is important,” he’d say, “but the exit is crucial.” When he finished with her, unceremoniously, she returned to his flat and left an orchid on his doormat, with a note instructing him to think of her while he watched it wither and die. “Well, I was seventeen, I was a romantic…” she shrugs.

Was this a good exit from Margi? Maybe it was. Where was she? My heart thrummed in my stomach all afternoon. I felt uneasy and a little ashamed that I was thinking about it so much. I knocked on the door of her flat that evening on my way into work but there was no reply.

I don’t know how this sort of style and structure compares to My Phantoms or Riley’s other work – but she is good enough a writer here that I would try her again in a different mode.

How To Be a Deb’s Mum by ‘Petronella Portobello’ #ABookADayInMay No.8

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Hayley/Desperate Reader gave me her copy of How To Be A Deb’s Mum (1957) by Petronella Portobello a couple of years ago – she wrote about it on her blog – and rightly thought that it would be up my street. The author name sounds very unlikely and is indeed a pseudonym – albeit for the also unlikely name Lady Flavia Anderson. It’s told in letters from Petronella to an old friend, Pris, and does exactly what the title suggests: it’s all about being a Deb’s mum.

‘Deb’ here is, of course, debutante. And the book feels a little anachronistic since debutante balls were far less a feature of the 1950s than of the generation earlier. Indeed, Petronella harkens back often to her own debutante season in the ’30s – because, though often describing herself as practically decrepit, Petronella is only 38 herself. Though she is also a widow, and we hear very little about the departed husband.

There are some questions about why Petronella is bothering with this old-fashioned tradition – especially since she lives in the highlands of Scotland, and has to travel to London and rent a house to host all the requisite dinner parties of the season. The question comes chiefly from Alice Hardcastle, a friend who really seems to be a nemesis.

“After all,” I go on, “you may ask what it did for us, Alice, but we shouldn’t be sitting in this train talking, if we hadn’t got acquinated twenty years ago in the same racket.”

“Ah! Then you do admit it’s a racket?”

“No I don’t,” I protest. “I have friends in every corner of Britain, and I want Jane to have the same. Go to a cocktail party in Cornwall or take a job in Manchester, and there’s always someone you know to rescue you from being left high and dry.”

I realise too late that I am using just the wrong argument with Alice, because if we were both honest we should admit that neither has gained anything by association with the other, and that each would probably prefer the loneliest corner of the Midlands to making small talk together. But I cannot carry honesty far enough and say, as I am tempted to do, that only by making a large number of acquaintances can one weed out the incompatibles and cultivate the congenial among one’s fellow human beings.

If you’re sensing some Provincial Lady-esque tone from that, then I’m with you. There is a lot in How to be a Deb’s Mum that certainly feels in that world, with the same self-effacement and mild mockery of others, and ultimately good-humoured beneficence.

And, to be honest, a lot of the novel does feel very much older than the 1950s. There are a few stray things that date it to the period – the young women wear lipstick and nail polish without any fear of censure; somebody brings along a man who is a ‘bearded Existentialist from her Chelsea art class’ – but for the most part it does feel unaffected by anything else happening in the world in 1957. The focus is entirely on how to make this Deb season the perfect one for young Jane. I have to say that Jane doesn’t come off the page as fully as her mother, and I’d be hard-pressed to say anything about her character except that she is excited, a little overwhelmed, obliging and occasionally able to be swayed into something unwise by other people her age.

I thought the book was really fun. The only thing that stops it being a classic is that it is rather one-note – a steady walk through everything involved in the Deb season, and the politics of whom to invite to what, which invitations to accept, and how to be appropriately quid pro quo among the hundreds of young women (and their mothers) who are also fighting to give their daughters the best chance in life. ‘Chance’ does seem to mean social success and other opportunities, not solely a husband (and men are given rather a scant look-in in the novel). Though, of course, a good deal of consideration is also given to ensuring Jane dances with the right young men, and dodges the wrong ones. There is some japery about men who are Not Safe In Taxis, which feels rather dated and unpleasant.

The only other plotline is Petronella’s own relationship with family friend Freddy – who steadily goes from being a reliable friend to perhaps something more, and I was certainly more invested in this than in anything that might be going on in Jane’s life.

So, thanks Hayley for sending to me! It is rather a curiosity – a period piece that probably would have felt oddly out of sync with 1957 even in 1957. It is a window on a very small part of society at a time when their traditions were fading away from dominance – and a really fun time to be had reading it.

 

Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham #ABookADayInMay No.7

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Today was a lovely sunny day, and I spent quite a lot of it sat in the garden reading Margery Allingham’s 1931 detective novel Police at the Funeral. Something I discovered in previous book-a-day challenges is that reading a murder mystery in a day is really fun and rewarding – because you don’t have to wait very long to discover whodunnit.

Police at the Funeral is a curious title for a novel that doesn’t include any funerals, though it does have more than one death. At the outset, though, series detective Albert Campion is prevailed upon to look for a friend’s fiancée’s missing uncle. Campion thinks the thing is likely to be a case of someone getting het up over nothing, but when he meets the fiancée, Joyce, he recognises that she is not given to hysteria. Her uncle is missing, and it rather looks like he could be dead.

We soon get to know about her family. While she is looked on kindly by most of the relatives she has grown up with, the same cannot be said between the rest of them. Her great-aunt rules a household with a rod of iron, despising and pitying her various adult offspring who still live with her, and still feud and squabble as though they were in the nursery. Great-Aunt Caroline thinks ill of the modern era and the household still behaves as though Queen Victoria is on the throne. It’s a very Ivy Compton-Burnett set up, though of course the style of the novel isn’t remotely like one she’d have written.

“There they are, a family forty years out of date, all vigorous energetic people by temperament, all, save for the old lady, without their fair share of brain, and herded together in that mausoleum of a house, tyrannised over by one of the most astounding personalities I’ve ever encountered. […] There’s no vent to the suppressed hatreds, petty jealousies, desires and impulses of any living soul under that roof. The old lady holds the purse strings and is the first and final court of appeal. Not one of her dependants can get away without having to face starvation, since not one of them is remotely qualified to earn a sixpence.”

Before long – and not remotely to the reader’s surprise – it turns out that the uncle is dead. His body is found in the river – hands and feet having been tied together, with a shotgun wound through the head. Nobody truly mourns him, since none of the family likes or respects each other, but they still want the truth to come out.

But… this death is quickly followed by another. (Unlike the blurb to my edition, I shan’t spoil more than that!)

Albert Campion is a fun detective. I’ve read a couple of other books in which he appears – I have to admit the schtick of him looking vacantly stupid is a bit unnecessary, and I’ve not read the books where he is apparently most openly a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but once you get those things out the way, there’s a lot to like. He has a funny way with words, and a rather sweetly teasing relationship with the inspector on the case – Inspector Stanislaus Oates, whose son is Campion’s godson. His actual detection is all rather hurried at the end, but that’s fine.

And it’s a very satisfying solution, with enough clues along the way that we don’t feel cheated. I loved the set up with the horrendous family, and Great-Aunt Caroline is just the right amount of terrifying and formidable for the reader to actually quite admire her dominance. Joyce is a very likeable character to have along the way too, and both insider and outsider to the family, so we don’t feel too buried with a group of appalling adult-children. I don’t remember finding Allingham’s writing so enjoyably funny and dramatic before, so this was a goody.

I think this is my favourite of the Allinghams I’ve read – which is your favourite Allingham?

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck #ABookADayInMay No.6

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My friend Matt recommended Cannery Row (1939) by John Steinbeck back in 2009, and I ordered a copy which has sat on my shelves for 15 years. Now it is neglected no longer! And I really enjoyed the atmosphere and tone of Steinbeck’s tribute to a small Californian town.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries or corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.

Cannery Row is quite a leisurely tour of the different inhabitants of the street – a mix of vignettes of their lives and something of an ongoing plot, though it is really more of an ongoing set of characters. Chief among them are Lee Chong the grocer, Dora Flood the brothel madam, ‘Doc’ the research scientist, and Mack and his gang of men who are something between gangsters and disciples. It is a close-knit individuals that don’t seem much to need the outside world, and Steinbeck portrays a cocktail of mistrust and reliance.

I think that’s one of the things I most liked about Cannery Row. It’s a tone I haven’t really come across before. Certainly this is not an idyll of human goodwill – but everybody knows when anybody else is lying or cheating them, and it is accepted as a necessary part of being neighbourly. At the outset, Lee Chong becomes the owner of a warehouse, and Mack suggests it could be a place where he and the other men live – to stop it having windows smashed, or burned down, by children. Lee Chong knows that there is an implied threat – that Mack himself will smash windows and commit arson if his offer isn’t accepted. Lee Chong also knows that he won’t receive any of the proposed rent.

And if it be thought that Lee Chong suffered a total loss, at leas! his mind did not work that way. The windows were not broken. Fire did not break out. and while no rent was ever paid, if the tenants ever had any money, and quite often they did have, it never occurred to them to spend it any place except at Lee Chong’s grocery. What he has was a little group of active and potential customers under wraps. But it went further than that. If a drunk caused trouble in the grocery, if the kids swarmed down from New Monterey intent on plunder, Lee Chong had only to call and his tenants rushed to his aid. One further bond is established – you cannot steal from your benefactor. The saving to Lee Chong in cans of beans and tomatoes and milk and watermelons more than paid the rent.

Steinbeck depicts a curious kind of contentment in this ecosystem. And nobody seems above or below anyone else. Even the brothel madam is accepted with the unspoken rule that she will be the largest donator when public funds are needed. The man who might seem the most of an outsider is Doc – he is cleverer, wealthier, more cultured than the other inhabitants of Cannery Row. His work is with snakes, rats and frogs and it’s unclear who he is working for, or why he is living in this place, but he too builds a relationship with all the others. There is a base understanding that, when push comes to shove, people on Cannery Row will help one another – and then go back to cheating each other the next day.

The main action that happens away from the row is when Mack, for convoluted reasons, decides to take his gang away to secure hundreds of frogs for Doc. Mack often wants to do Doc a good turn, and it invariably turns out to make Doc’s life much harder. There is a seam of farce in the plotting of Cannery Row, though in reading it feels gently comic and rooted in the earthy relationships between all the characters, rather than silly.

I’ve not read huge amounts of Steinbeck, but I know some of his books can be very sombre, dealing with great injustices. But Cannery Row, even while showing limited lives of people pretty close to poverty, seems to be filled with hope. Not hope for big changes, but hope that there is goodwill and respect somewhere beneath the surface of even the most brazenly selfish and opportunistic communities. It’s an unusual mix of grim reality and optimism, and I really enjoyed spending time in this short book.

Mystery at Geneva by Rose Macaulay #ABookADayInMay No.5

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Today’s book is a curio by a relatively well-known writer. Lots of us love Rose Macaulay’s novels, whether that be her famous Towers of Trebizond or the delightfully funny, wry books she wrote in the 1920s – Crewe Train, Dangerous Ages, Keeping Up Appearances, Potterism and so forth. Not so much talked about is Mystery at Geneva (1922)

It starts with an author note that we certainly shouldn’t take at all seriously:

Note: As I have observed among readers and critics, a tendency to discern satire when none is intended, I should like to say that this book is simply a straightforward mystery story, devoid of irony, moral or meaning. It has for its setting an imaginary session of the League of Nations’ Assembly, but it is in no sense a study of, still less a skit on actual conditions at Geneva of which indeed I know little. The only connection I have ever had with the League being membership of its Union.

Let’s be clear – this is not at all true. Macaulay is at her most satirical in this novel – a satire of detective novels, to an extent, but particularly a satire of the League of Nations. The hero is Henry Beechtree, a journalist for The British Bolshevist – and he has been sent to Geneva to cover a meeting of the League (which, at the time Macaulay’s novel was published, was still very much in its infancy.)

Along the way, Macaulay has a great time poking fun at newspaper men and the rivalries between them, as well as the mutual hysteria of journalists who cling to the far-left or far-right of the political spectrum. Macaulay is always wonderful when she is at her driest, and if the characters are very exaggerated then that doesn’t stop the prose being very funny.

Similarly broadly drawn are the delegates from different nations. Macaulay mostly manages to avoid anything that would feel uncomfortably racist today – the divisions are drawn chiefly along political lines (Irish Republicans vs Loyalists, for instance) and the good-humoured rivalry of adjoining European countries.

All is going more or less dully, and Henry is sending back sarcastic reports to the Bolshevist, when the mystery kicks in. The President of the assembly goes missing.

And then, over the next few days, more and more of the delegates disappear. We often see their final moments before disappearance – coaxed away by appealing to their particular weakness, whether that be wanting to help the poor, or getting involved in a political discussion, or finding a rare copy of their own book for sale. Rumours start to circulate that the whole thing is being done to undermine the League itself.

For what would be the use of getting rid of one man only, however prominent? The Assembly, after the first shock, would proceed with its doings. But what if man after man were to disappear? What if the whole fabric of Assembly Council and Committees should be disintegrated, till no one could have thoughts for anything but the mysterious disappearances and how to solve the riddle, and how, still more, to preserve each one himself from a like fate? Could any work be continued in such circumstances, in such an atmosphere? No. The Assembly would become merely a collection of bewildered and nervous individuals turning themselves into amateur detectives and, incidentally, the laughing-stock of the world. 

It should be noted that nobody is trying very hard to preserve themselves, as they do continually wander off into places where they are likely to be abducted. And there are so many characters, many of whom disappear before we know very much about them, that it is certainly more comic than tragic when they vanish.

Henry muses about the motives and perpetrators, but there isn’t really a sense that the reader is being given clues to disentangle. There is a solution, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. This is first and foremost a satire on political and national grounds. The teasing of detective fiction is less successful because detective fiction was routinely so outlandish in the period that it’s almost impossible to satirise the lengths to which a plot can go. Of course, with most of the satire resting at a point in time in 1922, it is hardly a novel for all the ages. Some elements are recognisable, but others feel very much of a moment.

Something that does feel quite perennial is Macaulay’s (/Henry’s) comment on the way that magazines and newspapers write about women. It’s a theme she returns to often in her fiction and non-fiction, often in near-identical phrasing – but I love it every time, particularly the frustration that seethes beneath the surface humour:

All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Take Orders? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humour, of honour, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men. How few persons discuss superfluous bachelors, or whether the male arm or leg is an immodest sight, or whether men should vote. For men are not news.

Mystery at Geneva is an odd, slightly silly and ultimately rather enjoyable book. I should think it would entertain anybody with an interest in 20th-century political history, particularly the way the League of Nations was considered by the everyman/woman. It’s not up there with Macaulay’s most accomplished and satisfying novels, but it does feel intended to be a jeu d’esprit rather than a substantial work. On its own terms, it’s a lot of fun.

This Census-Taker by China Miéville #ABookADayInMay No.4

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A boy ran down a hill path screaming. The boy was I. He held his hands up and out in front of him as if he’d dipped them in paint and was coming to make a picture, to press them down to paper, but all there was on him was dirt. There was no blood on his palms.

So opens This Census-Taker (2016) by China Miéville, a strange little novella set in an uncertain place and uncertain time. Those first couple of short sentences are representative of what the narrator does throughout – sometimes he is in the first person, sometimes the third person when he wants to distance himself from the memory, and sometimes even the second person. It’s all part of what makes This Census-Taker unsettling and unsure. You never know where you are, literally and metaphorically.

As he runs down the hill, he has a message to shout to people who live at the bottom of the hill. They are technically in the same town, but they are worlds apart. The people at the bottom of the hill think of those further up as savages living in some sort of wilderness, peopled by monsters. And the boy’s shout is unlikely to dispel that idea – “My mother killed my father!”

But as soon as he says this, he is unsure. Is that what he saw? Or did he see someone else being killed? Or was nobody killed at all? Nothing is clear or still.

The novella has a lot of moments of death. The boy’s father is given to killing – a stray dog, a goat, anything that gets him into the silent, taut rage that sometimes comes across his face. He throws the bodies into a seemingly bottomless pit in a cave. The boy believes that there are some humans in there too. But is he right?

The actual census taker of the title doesn’t turn up to take a census until p.110 of 138 pages, and it is a sort of climax that doesn’t do a lot to make things less ambiguous. The whole novella swirls in menace and mystery, and there’s never really a sense that anything will resolve.

I did find This Census-Taker compelling and interesting, though preferred the much-longer The City and the City, which has an equally strange premise though more resolution. In this novella, I thought Miéville was brilliant at moments of high tension, but that his sentences were a bit meandering and overwritten at other times. It’s certainly a successful exercise in creating an atmosphere, but I’m not sure exactly what else I’m meant to take from the book.

The Portrait by Willem Jan Otten #ABookADayInMay No.3

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I bought The Portrait (2005) by Willem Jan Otten because of that beautiful cover, which is blending in well with my throw. I also fancied reading something translated from Dutch – in this instance, by David Colmer. And it’s a strange, rather good little book.

I’m coming to a tragic end; that seems almost certain now. The sliding doors are open. I can hear fire raging; it crackles. The wind is blowing directly from the north and into the studio. Sparks shoot towards me, turn to ash, and drift in like flakes of snow. I am on the easel and can only expect the worst.

That’s the opening paragraph. By the end of it we realise who are narrator is – it is the portrait of the title. It’ll take a while before we discover who the portrait is of…

First, the narrator thinks back to a time they can’t really recall – just part of a long roll of canvas, buried somewhere in the middle. Life really begins when an artist comes to the shop and buys a stretch of material to turn into a specific canvas.

If I had the gift of speech, I would now describe what it feels like to finally be a canvas, a canvas with dimensions, a piece of linen that has been measured out, cut with the most razorish Stanley knife and irrevocably stretched tight around a sturdy frame with six-centimetre stretchers no less than three-point-six thick, with wedges and a cross at the back.

A kite that is being flown for the first time might feel more majestic, a kettledrum about to start its premiere performance of Beethoven’s Fifth might feel mightier, a newly raised mainsail filling with wind while its ship heels beneath it might feel more ecstatic – but we, the unpainted, silent and as white as chalk, enter a world that promises us more than kite, drum, or sail. Who could be more on edge with curiosity? More willing? More receptive?

The artist is Felix Vincent, usually referred to as Creator by the narrator. At first he clearly doesn’t know what to do with the canvas, and it (he?) lies against the wall. It is larger and better quality than most of the other canvases in the room, and can’t be thrown away on just any commission. Vincent is a portrait painter of growing renown, though still has to fulfil commissions from people who are willing to pay him. From the narrator’s admittedly inexperienced point of view, Vincent seems to be waiting for something more special, personal for this canvas. He is waiting for his masterpiece.

And the opportunity finally comes when Valery Specht comes to the studio.

Your work is fascinating, Specht continued. You have a rare skill. You can bring someone to life.

(Yes, the novella doesn’t have speech marks – it just about worked, partly because there is very little dialogue and partly because it is, after all, from the point of view of a painting.) Specht, it turns out, wants Vincent to paint Specht’s son. And his son is dead.

I shan’t spoil more about the plot, but it’s impressive how many surprises and turns Willem Jan Otten can get into 185 pages. And I found it quite beautiful and intriguing, though one of the most memorable moments feels a bit at odds with the tone of the rest of The Portrait.

And that narrator? Once you get past the curiosity, it works well. It’s really a fly-on-the-wall point of view, I suppose, with a few novelties – like describing the feeling of a fine paintbrush across one’s surface. I also enjoyed that it can ‘see’ everyone else but not itself. It’s best not to demand too much logic from the choice (why does the portrait understand the news on the radio without context but has never seen a ‘thumbs up’ before?) but just to enjoy the strange depth of reality created by having a painting narrate a book about a painting.

And novella length is perfect for this sort of conceit, so the novelty doesn’t outstay its welcome. I really enjoyed the simple beauty of Otten’s writing (in Colmer’s translation) and spreading out the horizons of my European reading a little more.

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe #ABookADayInMay No.2

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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty: Amazon.co.uk: Keefe, Patrick Radden: 9781529062489: Books

Day two of this project will reveal two things that I had previously left unstated. My aim is to finish a book each day in May, but that doesn’t mean that I have also started that book. I did not read all 560 pages of Empire of Pain (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe in one day. In fact, I didn’t actually read any pages at all – I listen to the audiobook, and finished the final hour of it today.

When I downloaded the book, I thought it was about the opioid crisis in America and the court cases surrounding it. And it sort of is about that, but opioids don’t even exist until we’re a considerable way through the book. While a large chunk of the end of the book is about attempts to address the terrible cost of opioid addiction through the courts, Keefe takes us decades and generations back in the first half of the book. He is documenting the Sackler family’s rise from nobodies to billionaires right from the beginning.

As I’m writing this quite late in the day, and it’s an enormous book, I’m not going to detail all that much of it. But Empire of Pain is certainly a book of two halves. The first is about Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler and their humble origins – and how Arthur Sackler’s genius for advertising led to him being the first to advertise medication directly to doctors. He was, indeed, the first in many fields of advertising – he basically appears to have invented the idea of medical advertising, which still has such a stranglehold on the American healthcare system.

This half of the book documents every rung of the brothers’ steps to success, as well as all their feuding and pride. Their various marriages, dalliances, children and personal tragedies. Arthur’s obsession with art collections is dealt with in astonishing detail. Everything is dealt with in astonishing detail.

In the second half of the book, the Sackler family and their in-fighting gets a little sidelined as Purdue takes centre stage. This company developed research into opioids which would then turn into Oxycodone – and Keefe shows us, again in rigorous detail, how the marketing of the drug in a completely ruthless way led, incrementally (Keefe argues), to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – and how the company sought to tarnish those who were lost as wilful addicts rather than victims of their determination to prescribe higher doses for longer to as many people as possible. The end of the book looks at how the untouchable family start to become hate figures, as the truth about their tactics and deceit becomes wider known. It also shows how they’ll probably get away with everything.

I’ve skimmed the surface of this book. It really is researched to an astonishing degree. It will leave you furious about the total lack of ethics behind this company, and the granular way in which Keefe unpacks their lies and manipulations, and the way that good lawyers will let you get away with everything, will certainly infuriate most listeners. Even if, like me, you thankfully don’t have any connection to the opioid crisis. (It is worth noting, though this comes late in the book, that Purdue weren’t the only company to market opioids aggressively – apparently they never had more than about a third of the market – so Purdue and the Sackler family are certainly huge in this arena, but not lone wolves.)

Is all the detail necessary? I will say that, like almost any book over 500 pages, it would have been better if it were shorter. In the first half, where the level of granular detail has no bearing on showing injustices, I’d say that two out of every three sentences is extraneous. We hear about the lighting that someone chose to hang above their artwork. We hear about the graffiti on an archaeological item that Sackler paid to ship to the US. There is seemingly nothing that Keefe learns that he doesn’t include.

In the second half these details feel more like they are building a court case – and, in this half, Keefe leans a little towards repetition. We hear the same lines repeated over and over again – for instance, that Purdue marketed Oxycodone as giving pain relief for 12 hours even though their own studies had shown it wore off after eight. That fact must have been in the book at least six times.

It’s hard to fault somebody who has done years and years of research, and risked the notoriously litigious Sackler family, so I will say that this overlongness doesn’t lessen from Empire of Pain being a masterful and extraordinary work. It doesn’t make for fun reading – but, since opioid addiction is now the leading cause of preventable deaths in the US, it fees like essential reading.

The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner #ABookADayInMay No.1

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I was really hoping that Madame Bibi Lophile would do her A Novella a Day in May challenge again, and lo and behold the first post has gone live. I’ve joined in the past couple of years – I’m going to start this year too, though won’t make promises of completing. (My eyes are so, so, so much better than they were in December/January, when the thought of being able to read a book a day would have been completely impossible.) I’ve decided to call mine A Book a Day in May because they won’t all be novellas – for instance, the first book I’ve chosen is non-fiction.

I hadn’t heard of Joan Givner when I picked up The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer (1993) in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago. I haven’t even read anything by either of the authors that Givner wrote biographies of – Katherine Anne Porter and Mazo de la Roche. But I’m so glad I read this memoir, because it is brilliant.

It’s very unconventional, in a way that intrigued me enough to buy it in Richard Booths’ bookshop. The portrait is told through 381 numbered short sections – rather like 381 different note cards. Indeed, it sounds like that’s exactly what they are. Often there is a short series of sections which connect and tell more or less the same story, but equally the next one might splinter off to a different theme, different country, different time. They aren’t in chronological order by any means, and we follow Givner at various times through a childhood in northern England, through an unsuccessful first marriage in America, through the research and publication of her biographies, and through their reception.

Though the title tells us this is a self-portrait of a literary biographer, Givner’s work isn’t given priority over her experiences as a wife, a mother, a teacher, a colleague – and perhaps most of all, a daughter. With unflinching honesty – and it does seem honest, even while it is deeply subjective – Givner portrays her parents’ keenness for respectability, their pride in her getting into grammar school, their bewilderment at many of her life choices (including her divorce). And most vivid of all is the portrait of her mother in the present – given to slightly foolish sweeping statements, or contradicting her past self. It is a fascinating depiction of a mother/daughter relationship throughout the decades that is neither close nor estranged, but inescapable even with an ocean between them. Givner looks at family, and her place in it, with the same remorseless quest for precision that she apparently had as a biographer:

When I went to the U.S. I spent the summer with my first husband’s family. It was my first experience of a peaceable, harmonious family in which members went their own ways uninterfering, and uninterfered with, treating each other with a kind of friendly respect.

In my own home, relations were combative, adversarial. Every act – even the simplest one of eating a meal, choosing a helping of this over that – was subjected to criticism, moral disapproval, and ultimately, strident quarreling. Granted, this sometimes – not by any means frequently – dissolved into laughter.

I think I had always suspected that my family life was more unpleasant than most and something to escape from. I did escape and yet was crippled by it, still.

But the title of the book isn’t lying. As it progresses, we see more and more about her experiences as a biographer. If I had read one of her biographies, or even knew a bit more about Katherine Anne Porter (who figures much larger than Mazo de la Roche) then maybe this would have been even richer, but I still loved it. There isn’t much about how she went about writing the biography, or what to include or exclude, but there is a lot about the research – about the people she meets and interviews, and often leaves feeling embittered or affronted. No less a figure than Eudora Welty writes to say that she is concerned that Givner’s motives are malice and busybodiness.

Givner does not spare herself in Self-Portrait. Though she may defend herself at times, she also includes negative reviews of her writing without comment. We get fascinating glimpses of a Katherine Anne Porter conference where she is berated from the stage by more than one speaker. Evidently she is a controversial figure in this world, and records the controversy.

Somehow, even with a format of those 381 different sections, Self-Portrait never feels disjointed. Givner expertly always gives us enough information to know where we are at all times, or at least to manage without knowing all the context. I suspected that I would find the book maddening or sublime, and it was the latter. More than that, it was a compelling page-turner. I was reminded of Kate Briggs’ excellent This Little Art about translation, which is written in a similar way, with vignettes following one another. In fact, I could see Self-Portrait fitting in well as a Fitzcarraldo reprint.

What an experience, and what a great start to A Book a Day in May!