Three quick reviews

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Here are some quick reviews of other books that I’ve had waiting on my finished-but-not-blogged-about pile. All three are enjoyable, and I’d recommend hunting them out – though only one of them is particularly easy to get hold of, I’ll admit.

The Seven Good Years eBook : Keret, Etgar, Silverston, Sondra, Shlesinger, Miriam, Cohen, Jessica, Berris, Anthony: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

The Seven Good Years (2015) by Etgar Keret

I really loved Etgar Keret’s short stories in Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, and wanted to try something else by him – and so I was delighted when my friend Clare got me a copy of his memoir The Seven Good Years for my birthday last year. Published in 2015, I’m a bit confused about what language it was written in. His stories are usually translated from Hebrew, and the title page of The Seven Good Years lists Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen, and Anthony Berris as translators – but the introduction also says ‘I have decided not to publish this book in my mother tongue (Hebrew) or in the place where I live (Israel), but to share it only with strangers’. So did he write it in Hebrew but never publish it? Who knows.

The reason he wants to keep it only available at a certain distance from himself is that this is much more personal than his surreal stories. The seven good years are the seven years between the birth of his son and the death of his father – the time during which there were three generations. And these figures certainly recur in the memoir, but it is not really a book about them. The incidents he highlights are more likely than the events of his short stories, but told with the same disjointed surreality. He is the master of arresting, register-hopping sentences – my favourite being ‘The period when my sister was discovering religion was just about the most depressing time in the history of Israeli pop’. It is a personal book, but odd and spiky, rather than straight-forwardly revealing. It has confirmed my affection for Keret as a writer.

Spring Always Comes (1938) by Elizabeth Cambridge

I was desperate to read this ever since reading Barb’s 10/10 review, and had an alert out for its availability for years – so snapped it up as soon as it became available. Like Cambridge’s best-known novel, Hostages to Fortune, it’s about a middle/upper-middle-class family living in the countryside – but here they are shocked into independence by the death of the patriarch. He leaves behind him a family down on their luck financially, and he also leaves a literary legacy.

The novel is about how the surviving family copes – there are four children moving in different circles, including as a literary assistant, one up at Oxford, another about to become a teacher and so forth. The most interesting and successful, to my mind, was the daughter working as the literary assistant who writes her own novel. It becomes very successful, though is taken as a satire – when she meant it seriously. Cambridge writes expertly about the tensions between success and self-esteem.

I really enjoyed Spring Almost Comes, but the only drawback for me is that Cambridge spreads herself a bit too thin over all the characters. A couple of them seem to dominate, but I’m not sure if that was deliberate. By the time we get back around to the widow, I felt we’d forgotten her. But Cambridge writes well and insightfully, and any of her books are worth reading.

The Patience of a Saint (1958) by G.B. Stern

This is exactly the sort of novel I love and hunt out. St Cedric was martyred a thousand years earlier, and there is a legend that he will return on that anniversary – firmly believed by Lady Eileen Francis, who patiently waits at the ruins of Abbey where St Cedric once served. Seeing an opportunity for money (which, for slightly complicated reasons, he needs for a friend – I suppose to make him more sympathetic to the reader), Ceddie Conway decides to impersonate him. At which point he is called upon to do the miraculous healings that St Cedric is famed for – and it works!

Only it turns out that Ceddie-the-impostor is being helped from the sidelines – by the genuine St Cedric, who has come back to life after all. Stern has created a lovable character in both Cedric and Ceddie, and this slim book plays out the conceit just long enough to keep it entertaining and tense.

A little Saturday bookshopping

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I took a trip to the excellent bookshop in Wantage this morning and, as ever, came away with a lovely little haul. Here’s what I bought…

Aftermath by Rachel Cusk
I have to admit that I didn’t love the only Cusk novel I read, which had beautiful writing but seemed almost determinedly aimless – but I was more drawn to this memoir about the end of her marriage.

Long Distance by Penelope Mortimer
This is one of Mortimer’s novels that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody talk about – having discovered how brilliant The Home was last year (coming out very soon from British Library Women Writers!) I am intrigued. It does sound very experimental – a woman who is ‘without a past, or without any clear memory of her past’ who is ‘taken into a strange community living in the mansion of a huge estate. Are these people part of her forgotten life? Is she part of theirs? Or are they meeting for the first time, as strangers?’ Colour me interested!

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
I’ve been meaning to get hold of this for years, and really enjoyed Heartburn last year – this is the one I hear people talk about most when they celebrate Ephron.

The Fly on the Wheel by Katherine Cecil Thurston
I hadn’t heard of this until I heard that Manderley Press were reprinting it in a beautiful new edition. I may well end up with one of their editions, but this Virago Modern Classic can be testing ground if I want to spend a bit more on something lovely!

Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
As I just wrote earlier this week, I really loved The House by the Sea – and had gone to my shelves intending to read Journal of a Solitude. Turns out I didn’t own it, but I was pretty confident that I would stumble across a copy soon. And hey presto, I did!

London Street Games by Norman Douglas
I collect the Dolphin editions – by which I mean I buy them when I stumble across them, rather than anything more purposeful – so I was pleased to find this one. My first dustjacket in the collection, in fact!

Not a huge haul, but really pleased with everything I found. Have you been buying anything recently? And which of these books would you go to first?

The House by the Sea by May Sarton

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There is always something rather fun about spontaneously choosing a book to read next. You can forget the urgent pile of books that should logically be the next on the list and go, instead, for something that absolutely meets the mood of the moment. And so it was the other night when I was walking along my bookcases, pulling off various titles and deciding they weren’t quite right, that I decided to read Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. Until I got to the ‘S’ section of my autobiographies/biographies bookcases and discovered that… apparently I didn’t own it. But I did have a later volume, The House by the Sea (1977) and so I chose that instead.

The journal takes place a couple of years after she has moved to the house of the title. The previous house saw an extremely difficult and sad period of her life – she doesn’t go into detail about this, and I assume it is the topic of earlier journals.

If there is one irresistible piece of magic here among many others, it is the slightly curving path down to the sea that begins in flagstones on the lawn, cuts through two huge junipers, and proceeds, winding its way down to Surf Point, through the wood lilies in June, to tall grasses in summer, the goldenrod and asters in September, leading the eye on, creating the atmosphere of a fairy tale, something open yet mysterious that every single person who comes here is led to explore.

I am drawn to any fiction or non-fiction about houses, and Sarton certainly gives us a sense of the idyllic remoteness of this home. She is still in touch with the world, still travelling for lecture series and communicating with a wide number of friends, but has this place to retreat to. But the beautiful place is not treated like a fairytale escape. In this volume, Sarton details her anxieties – about ailing friends, about her legacy, and often about the encroaching signs of old age.

Growing old… what is the opposite of ‘growing’? I ask myself. ‘Withering’ perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. 

Sarton was only in her early 60s when she wrote the journal, and would live for another two decades, but she writes often about her fears of losing faculties – and, more than once, worries about falling and not being found. This is a precise honesty to the way she writes about fears that so many people must have, particularly if they live alone. It is not written with self-indulgence or false attempts to cheer herself up – rather, she documents her experiences and reflections with the emotion of a memoirist and the rigour of a historian.

But this is not a sad book by any means. The reflections are often more content, and nowhere more enjoyable than when Sarton is writing about the natural world around her. I loved this beautiful paragraph on snowfall:

I woke late … it was nearly seven when Tamas began licking his paws, his gentle way of saying, “It’s time to get up.” I woke to a world thickly enclosed in walls of big-flaked snow falling very fast. Now it is thinner, there is more wind, and it looks as though for the first time in this house I’m to be snowed in for the day. How exciting and moving that is, the exact opposite of an outgoing adventure or expedition! Here the excitement is to be suddenly a self-reliant prisoner, and what opens out is the inner world, the timeless world when my compulsion to go out and get the mail at eleven must be forgotten. How beautiful the white field is in its blur of falling snow, with the delicate black pencil strokes of trees and bushes seen through it! And, of course, the silence, the snow silence, becomes hypnotic if one stops to listen.

Sarton makes clear that she was writing the journal for publication, and so it doesn’t feel intrusive to read her day-by-day experiences. I’ve only read her novels before, and have now built up a much closer portrait of their author. She can be cross, particularly with fans who arrive at her door without warning and disrupt her day. She can go to great lengths to do kindnesses for others, and think little of it. She warmly appreciates the fine work of other artists and writers, and feels guilt when she has to censure any work that is sent to her – and values creativity too highly to ever lie or even prevaricate.

I really warmed to Sarton, and I loved reading The House by the Sea. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on my favourite reads of 2023. She generously invites the reader into a fully realised world, without artifice or exaggeration, and I think it is that thorough reality that makes the book so beautiful to read. It felt like time spent with a friend.

A Bachelor’s Comedy by J.E. Buckrose

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After I enjoyed J.E. Buckrose’s novel The Privet Hedge, my friends Kirsty and Paul bought me a few other of her novels. She’s one of those writers who could so easily be a Persephone or a Virago, but has yet to be rediscovered. I’m hoping to keep reading and find one that could be good enough for the British Library Women Writers series – or, rather, which fits all the criteria. Because I think A Bachelor’s Comedy (1912) is really good, but the protagonist is a man so it doesn’t fit the Women Writers series.

Here’s how it opens…

This was no comedy to those most concerned, of course, for comedy is like happiness – directly a person knows he is in it, he is out of it. Tragedy, on the other hand, can only touch those who do not take themselves seriously enough.

No man, however, could take himself more seriously than did the Reverend Andrew Deane as he travelled down alone in a third-class railway carriage to his new living of Gaythorpe-on-the-Marsh.

You might need to dispense with some of the stereotypes that come into your mind straight away. Reverend Andrew is not some white-haired, kindly old man – he is fresh from theological training, in his 20s, and quite unsure how to take up his position leading a rural parish. At the same time, he has a certain bullishness. He doesn’t want to show weakness to this new flock, and is keen to get their respect as soon as possible. No more being called ‘Andy’ by people who can’t see him as a proper, responsible grown up.

One of the first things he wants to do is fire the gardener, on the advice of the churchwarden who gives him a lift from the railway station.

“Those Petches are none of ’em models. They don’t seem to know when they’re speaking the truth and when they aren’t. And young Sam drinks a bit too. No, I can’t really advise you to keep him on.”

“I shall certainly not do so after what you tell me,” said the new Vicar, sitting very erect. “I have the strongest feelings about the households of the clergy – they should be above reproach.”

Of course, these fine resolves don’t hold up when Reverend Andrew is faced with the Petches themselves. Sam Petch is one of my favourite characters in the novel. The churchwarden’s assessment is accurate, and Petch doesn’t think twice about lying if it will get him out of trouble – is that alcohol on his breath, or is it that his coat has been cleaned with spirits? – but is affable and generous in his turn. He is prepared to respect and help Reverend Andrew where he can, and his deceit and laziness don’t seem to factor into his own interpretation of the equation. Reverend Andrew tries to get Sam Petch to give up alcohol by making a pact to give up his favourite thing in return – butter. This has the effect of spreading rumours around the village that the new vicar is eccentric… and Sam doesn’t really think beer counts as alcohol, so doesn’t have much effect on the gardener.

Reverend Andrew often finds that his ideals aren’t born out by the real life of a parish priest. There are some funny moments – such as his bidding for an ornately ugly sideboard that his housekeeper has to sell, intending to give it as a present. It won’t fit in her new, smaller home, so he reluctantly ends up having to have it in ‘safe keeping’ for her. Buckrose is very good at finding the genuine emotion of silly moments like this. In a Wodehouse novel, it would be a sprightly knockabout moment. In A Bachelor’s Comedy, it is certainly amusing, but we also feel the pathos of the situation – and the awkward frustration that a good deed has not gone quite to plan.

At the auction, Reverend Andrew was almost outbid for the sideboard by a young woman – who later turns out to be a local called Miss Elizabeth Atterton. It is instantly obvious that they will fall in love… and, of course, the course of true love never did run smooth. Not least because everyone expects her to marry another man in the village, including the man himself.

As I wrote in my thoughts about The Privet Hedge, I think Buckrose is more enjoyable and interesting when she is talking about village life and all its myriad relationships than when she is writing about romance. But it’s also true that I tend to find romantic storylines a bit tedious in general. I certainly enjoyed Reverend Andrew’s enamoration with Elizabeth to be more engaging than the love affair in The Privet Hedge, but I still think it was less engaging than all the rest of the book. (Though, at the same time, I was cheering them on as the novel drew to a close.)

What I’m trying to say is – Buckrose is fresh and witty when she writes about shirking workers, gossipy neighbours who flit comfortably between friend and nemesis, chaotic village events, and all the other things that make up the eternal patchwork of village life. She is perfectly capable when writing about romantic love, but less original and less vibrant. Though it is a nice change for a vicar to be a feasible romantic hero in a novel – and, indeed, unusual for a vicar to be a hero at all, and one who doesn’t fall into any stereotypes. Some of the sweetest moments were when he thought back across the centuries to a previous incumbent, also a bachelor, and considered him a brother.

Overall, this is a real delight of the sort of well-written, amusing domestic novel that is often being rediscovered. Maybe J.E. Buckrose will be the next rediscovery, and I’m glad to have more of her books on my shelves to try.

Tea or Books? #113: Do We Like Literary Retellings? and South Riding vs Ruth

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Elizabeth Gaskell, Winifred Holtby, and more – welcome to episode 113!

In the first half of this episode, we look at literary retellings – by which we mean authors using fairy tales or Greek mythology or basically whatever we fancy including in this very loose definition. It feels like a topic we’ve done before, but apparently we haven’t?

In the second half, we compare two doorstoppers – South Riding by Winifred Holtby and Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Do get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com – you can also support the podcast on Patreon, and listen to it above or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The books and authors we discuss in this episode:

Mad, Bad And Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignanesi
The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge
Circe by Madeline Miller
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
Ulysses by James Joyce
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
Introduction to Sally by Elizabeth von Arnim
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Longbourn by Jo Baker
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns
A Wild Swan and other stories by Michael Cunningham
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
Anthony Trollope
Lady Audley’s Secret by M.E. Braddon
Winter in the Air by Sylvia Townsend Warner
A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen

A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley

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A Perfect Woman by L. P. Hartley | Hachette UK

About ten years ago, John Murray did some rather lovely reprints of L.P. Hartley’s novels – and it was around that time that I read their edition of his brilliant novel The Boat. And then Harriet wrote a wonderful review of A Perfect Woman (1955), and I was all set to read it asap. I suspect most of you will understand that somehow more than eight years went past before I finally read it. And it’s another excellent book.

L.P. Hartley is known best, of course, for The Go-Between – which holds the distinction of being one of the relatively few novels that me, my brother and both my parents have read. He’s not entirely considered a one-hit wonder, as quite a few people know The Shrimp and Anemone and the rest of that trilogy, and quite a few of his books turn up in secondhand bookshops – but there is still a wide range of his books that don’t get mentioned. And I haven’t seen many people talk about A Perfect Woman.

For quite a long novel, the plot is simple and the cast list is short. There are four main characters: Harold and Isabel, a middle-class couple who have married fairly contentedly for a fair number of years. Alec Goodrich, a novelist. And Irma, the Austrian barmaid.

How do these four come to know each? It starts when Harold – respectable accountant, unimaginative and (for that reason) broadly happy – is on a train journey. He finds himself oddly interested by a man sitting in his carriage/

Yet there was nothing so remarkable about the man. He was above the average size, loosely built and inclined to corpulence; he was wearing a good brown tweed suit, a brown and white check shirt, a knitted brown tie and pair of heavy brown suede brogues. So far so good: all was in rural symphony. But there was a discordant note, the socks. Dark blue and of cheapish material they were obviously meant for town. In his vacant mood the discrepancy worried Harold. Cautiously he lifted his eyes to the stranger’s face. There, at a first glance, everything seemed to match., The general impression was sandy.

The gentleman is reading After the Storm by Alexander Goodrich. And is, it transpires, Alexander (Alec) Goodrich himself.

“Well, yes I am.” He leaned forward, put his hand on his knee, and said with great intimacy, as to an old friend, “It’s always been my ambition to find somebody in the train reading a book of mine. I never have, but sometimes I read one myself in the hope that someone will connect me with it.”

Alec is boyishly open, and yet with an undercurrent of something else. He is clearly used to getting his own way, and expects no obstacles in his path. Luckily his own way is usually pretty harmless – in this instance, for example, he wants Harold to take over his tax affairs. The offer is made with spontaneous enthusiasm. Harold, who is seldom spontaneous, agrees with some misgivings.

Back home, he relates the tale to his wife Isabel – who is, it turns out, a big fan of Goodrich’s writing. It is characteristic of their marriage that he would not know that. She, in turn, has dampened down the evidence of her intelligence and literary leanings – as, the narrator drily notes, ‘was likely to happen when a woman of slightly superior social standing, decidedly superior brains and greatly superior imaginative capacity married a dullish man and lived in the provinces’. She is also expected to devote most of her energies to motherhood – Hartley is brilliant at observing children, and giving proper weight to the depth and strength of their emotions and fears. Jeremy and Janice are both drawn so distinctly and believably. Jeremy – eight, I think – is serious and worried. Janice (6) is obsessed with marriage and much less anxious, but still with a fragility that is very moving.

When Alec comes to stay, he befriends Harold and Isabel happily – but the woman who really bowls him over is Irma, the barmaid of the local pub. She knows she is a figure of fun to many of the locals and regulars, and takes it in good part – but Alec sees something different, and asks Harold to connect the two. Reluctantly, Harold agrees to try and woo Irma on Alec’s behalf.

From here, the tangle of the four characters gets tricky. Secrets and lies abound, and the worlds of literature and tax affairs provide an unlikely but wonderful background. Hartley’s theme is eternal, but I loved the way he bedded it firmly in the clash of 1950s middle-class stability and a kind of relentless bohemia. These four are not likely friends, and the whirlwind of their experiences together will loom long in all of their lives. But there is nothing sensational in the way Hartley presents this novel. He resists anything that would make this melodramatic, and it is instead moving and rather beautiful.

What a storyteller. I haven’t mentioned that A Perfect Woman is also a page-turner. The way Hartley combines reflective insight and tense pace is very impressive.

Hartley seems to bubble under as one of those authors who doesn’t need rediscovery – he certainly isn’t forgotten – but he is one of those mid-century novelists who hasn’t received their proper due. I’m already looking forward to reading my next book by him.

The Overhaul #8

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Has it really been a year and a half since I did an Overhaul post? How did that happen? For those who haven’t seen the others in the series (click the tag for more), I go through previous ‘haul’ blog posts and see how many of the books I’ve ACTUALLY read. It’s basically a form of self-reproach. Enjoy!

The Overhaul #8

The original haul is here.

Date of haul: April 2015

Location: Washington DC and environs

Number of books bought: 33 (!!)

One of my best friends moved to Washington DC for a few years in the mid-2010s, and I took a couple of trips out there to see her. While I was there I also got to meet quite a few bloggers, some of whom are still blogging and some aren’t. On my own, with my friend, and with those bloggers I bought a whole heap of books. Here’s what I got in my second trip, in 2015.

So, what did I buy, have I read them, and what are my excuses if I haven’t…

The World in Falseface – George Jean Nathan
I haven’t seen this book about the theatre for a while. Do I still have it?? Let’s assume yes, and I think I even started it once, but didn’t get very far.

The Small Room – May Sarton
I don’t think this is regarded as one of Sarton’s best works, but I liked this novel about a teacher facing a moral dilemma more than the other two Sarton novels I’ve read.

Last Leaves – Stephen Leacock
I have read more books by Leacock in the past few years, but I don’t think this is one of them.

Nabokov’s Butterfly – Rick Gekoski
A book about books – specifically book dealing with 20th-century classics – and I read it on the plane on the way home! I really enjoyed it, with the usual caveat that I don’t much care how much books are worth, or about first editions etc, and that was something Gekoski did care about.

The Pilgrim Hawk – Glenway Wescott
Haha, at some point I somehow ended up with three copies of this book? Well, clearly I thought it would be something I’d like – and I was right. A beautiful, sinister book about a relationship with a bird becoming all-consuming.

Alien Hearts – Guy de Maupassant
I didn’t read this, and I culled it when I realised I was just gathering NYRB Classics because they were beautiful and was hardly ever reading them.

Portrait of an English Nobleman – E.F. Benson
Janet – E.F. Benson
I’ve read lots of Benson since this haul – I’m reading one now! – but not these.

The Shelf – Phyllis Rose
Oh how I loved this book, about choosing to read books just from one shelf of a library. I read it while I was in DC and it was one of my best reads of the year – maybe my favourite of all.

Soap Behind the Ears 
Nuts in May
The Ape in Me 
Dithers and Jitters 
Family Circle – Cornelia Otis Skinner
This wasn’t a lucky stumble across a pile of Cornelia Otis Skinner books in a bookshop. I love her writing and she’s hard to find here, so I had a parcel of them sent to my friend’s apartment before I arrived. The problem is that they’re all so similar that I don’t really know which I’ve read. I know I haven’t read Family Circle, which is a memoir rather than a collection of sketches. But I’ve definitely read at least three of the others. Who knows which three.

Barrel Fever – David Sedaris
Naked – David Sedaris
Sedaris is another one who is readily available in the US, and a little less so here, so I bought up a couple – and I’ve read Naked.

Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House – Eric Hodgins
I watched the Cary Grant / Myrna Loy film the other day! And I read the book on a lovely holiday in January 2019.

Classics for Pleasure – Michael Dirda
WHY haven’t I read this book about books? But I have not.

Why I Read – Wendy Lesser
I think I have read this one, but I wouldn’t swear 100% to it. Except for sake of totalling up this blog post, in which case let’s say I’m certain.

Benefits Forgot – G.E. Stern
G.B. Stern had languished on my shelves for a long time, but last year I had a bit of a Stern binge and read a few – including this volume of her idiosyncratic memoirs. Which are really just a series of thoughts, references, memories, allusions tethered loosely around a theme, and very enjoyable.

Bookends – Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern
Another book about books which I have not yet read…

The Ironing Board – Christopher Morley
I must read more Morley. I have not read this one. But PLEASE believe I have bought others since. And not read those either.

By Nightfall – Michael Cunningham
Oh Michael Cunningham, PLEASE write more books. I have read everything he’s written now, including this one – not among his best, but still excellent. I particularly remember the affectations of the conceptual artist, and the moment when they come crumbling down.

Mr Whittle and the Morning Star – Robert Nathan
The Enchanted Voyage – Robert Nathan
Robert Nathan’s books are so easy to find in the US and so hard to find in the UK. They’re always short, light, fun and these two were no exceptions. I’ve read them both, and enjoy the wonder he can somehow bring to something as silly as ‘sailing’ a boat across land.

Absence of Mind – Marilynne Robinson
I’ve not read it, and now that I have read another book of Robinson’s essays, I can’t imagine I’ll race to it… I didn’t understand very much of When I Was a Child I Read Books.

Family Man – Calvin Trillin
Remembering Denny – Calvin Trillin
Yessir, I’ve read these! And particularly got a lot out of Remembering Denny, about a high school friend whose promise didn’t (in Trillin’s eyes) materialise.

Literary Feuds – Anthony Arthur
This was so fun! A non-fic book about different feuding authors through time. Gossipy and probably unnecessary, but I lapped it up.

Letters from the Editor – Harold Ross
Turns out you can be the editor of the New Yorker and still write incredibly boring letters. I read this, but I don’t have it anymore.

The Year of Reading Proust – Phyllis Rose
Another book by Rose that I bought and read while in America – as with The Shelf, she writes about a reading project in such an interesting way, bringing her life into the mix just as much as the books.

The Faithful Servants – Margery Sharp
Another author I’ve read a lot of in the eight years since this haul, but not yet The Faithful Servants.

Two-Part Invention – Madeleine L’Engle
A favourite of Claire the Captive Reader, I also really got a lot out of this moving memoir. The third in a trilogy, it turns out, so I’ll have to read backwards through them.

Overall, I don’t think I’ve done too badly from this haul!

Total bought: 33

Total still unread on my shelves: 12

Total no longer owned: 2

The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence

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If you read my favourite books of 2022 list, you’ll know that Margaret Laurence came out on top – with A Jest of God, a brilliant short book about a woman called Rachel living a claustrophobic, hopeless life in a small Canadian town. I also read The Diviners last year, and read The Stone Angel many years ago – which meant that I only had two novels from Laurence’s Manawaka sequence left. One is a collection of short stories that I don’t own, and one is the book I recently finished: The Fire-Dwellers (1969).

There are a few connections between the books in the Manawaka sequence (though they can be read in any order). Perhaps the clearest link is between A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers – as The Fire-Dwellers is the story of Rachel’s sister, Stacey.

Stacey appears in the peripheries of A Jest of God as the sister who managed to get out of the town. Her life is only sketched in fragments, but she is held up as a contrast to Rachel’s stultifying inability to develop. In The Fire-Dwellers, we discover that her life has been far from ideal.

I’ve imagined myself getting away more times than I can tell you
Then do it.
Stacey looks at him, appalled and shaken by the suggestion of choice. Then she turns away again.
If I had two lives, I would. You think I don’t want to?

Yes, she has the husband, Mac, and the children – but she feels trapped and lost. Her marriage is hollow and sad, her children don’t bring her the fulfilment that she hoped they would, and the drudgery of daily life is overwhelming. As a theme, it is hardly unique – but Laurence brings her trademark insight to the telling. She is so good at getting beneath the skin of the everywoman. Her searing insights are remorseless. No character can hide behind pretences, even as we see their attempts at dissemblement – which might, indeed, fool the people around them, if not the reader. Her husband, for instance, is so fixated on an affair that he wrongly believes she’s had that he doesn’t notice the affair that she might have. The children are at an age where it is inconceivable that their parents might have independent personalities outside of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ – though the oldest daughter is beginning to recognise this, and clearly finds it troubling.

Several of the side characters are drawn really well. There is Thor, the head of the vitamin company for which Mac is salesman – a company that is only millimetres away from being a cult, and Thor is every bit the darkly boistrous cult leader. There is Mac’s boorish best friend – a trucker whose chief pleasure comes from playing ‘chicken’ with other truckers, both facing each other down in the middle of the road, daring the other truck to last as long as possible before pulling to the side. And then there is the enigmatic man that gives Stacey a new lease of life – a kind, clever, funny man who is not unlike the man who intervenes in Rachel’s life in A Jest of God. Across the span of Manitoba, the sisters were experiencing similar epiphanies that they never communicated about. And neither is a panacea, because Laurence is too realistic for that.

So, did I love The Fire-Dwellers as much as A Jest of God? Well, I’ve made it sound wonderful – and I know that others have found it brilliant, including Barbara’s Book Obsession recently, but I’m afraid I didn’t love it. And that’s for one reason which may or may not matter to you, and which might have been clear from the quote at the top. For some reason, Laurence decided not to use speech marks in this novel.

Normally I give up on a novel immediately if I see it doesn’t have speech marks. I only persevered because I love Laurence. Some people don’t mind this increasingly common authorial choice, but I find it maddening – an affectation that doesn’t add anything to a book, and simply makes it harder to read. They might as well leave out spaces between words. (I did, actually, find Laurence’s technique of sometimes leaving several spaces between words rather more effective.)

Here’s a section that illustrates it as well as any other bit. When she uses a dash, it is internal thought.

Duncan, for goodness sake shut up and quit making such a fuss about nothing.
Leave him, Mac. He was scared. Ian told him a rusty nail would
Scared, hell. He doesn’t need to roar like that. Shut up, Duncan, you hear me?
Duncan nods, gulps down salt from his eyes and the mucus from his nose. His chest heaves and he continues to cry, but quietly. Mac clamps a hand on his shoulder and spins him around.
Now     listen here, Duncan. I’ll give you one minute to stop.
Duncan stares with wet slit-eyes into his father’s face. Stacey clenches her hands together.
-I could kill you, Mac. I could stab you to the very heart right this minute. But how can I even argue, after last night? My bargaining power is at an all-time low. Damn you. Damn you. Take your hands off my kid.

Perhaps you think this is a silly reason not to enjoy a book as much as I’d hoped. (Someone on Twitter certainly did!) Or perhaps you’re on the same page as me. I just found it frustrating that The Fire-Dwellers could have been a brilliant novel, in my opinion, if she hadn’t tried this affected stylistic avenue. I understand that people like to play with the limits of literary form, but the absence of speech marks would have looked a little ‘done’ by the 1930s, and brought nothing to the table in 1969.

So this is comfortably my least favourite of the Manawaka sequence, though there is enough of Laurence’s brilliance to keep me going. Ultimately I found it a frustrating read, but it still hasn’t dinted my belief that Laurence is one of the best writers of the second half of the 20th century.

The Benefactress by Elizabeth von Arnim

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If I told you I had read an Elizabeth von Arnim novel in which a woman decides to invite three other women she’s never met to live with her in a European country, and that they all start off a bit prickly but gradually warm to each other, then you’d be forgiven for thinking that I meant The Enchanted April. It turns out, though, that von Arnim had a bit of a trial run for that novel – 21 years before The Enchanted April was published was The Benefactress (1901).

The heroine is introduced in the opening lines in von Arnim’s characteristically witty, slightly cynical prose:

When Anna Estcourt was twenty-five, and had begun to wonder whether the pleasure extractable from life at all counterbalanced the bother of it, a wonderful thing happened.

She lives in some privilege, after her brother married a nouveau riche young woman, but even from her youngest years Anna has been drawn towards a more honest, hard-working life. Which is somehow immortalised in the idea of sweeping crossings.

When she was younger and more high-flown she sometimes talked of sweeping crossings; but her sister-in-law Susie would not hear of crossings, and dressed her beautifully, and took her out, and made her dance and dine and do as other girls did, being of opinion that a rich husband of good position was more satisfactory than crossings, and far more likely to make some return for all the expenses she had had.

There is a lot of delightful stuff about the contrast between forthright sister-in-law’s wealth and the meek family’s own heritage, all the sort of class vs money material that can be treated in any number of ways and was treated in more or less every conceivable way by novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. In the case of The Benefactress, it is all a little frothy and enjoyable, and even Anna’s conception of honest hard work probably bears little comparison to the hard working of the servant classes. Von Arnim is not a writer of gritty class realism, and that’s fine. But it’s also all slightly immaterial to what follows, because Anna’s brother and sister-in-law are not big players in the novel. I rather missed them once they were gone, but the whole thing is really just leading up to her mysteriously receiving a legacy of a house in Germany.

This bequest comes from a German uncle whom Anna spends time with shortly before his death – and seems to be impelled by a shared exhaustion in relation to the sister-in-law as much as anything else. Anna sees it as a providential way of avoiding having to marry someone, and heads off to this house…

A low, white, two-storied house, separated from the forest only by a circular grass plot and a ditch with half-melted snow in it and muddy water, a house apparently quite by itself among the creaking pines, neither very old nor very new, with a great many windows, and a brown-tiled roof, was the home bestowed by Uncle Joachim on his dear and only niece Anna.

As the title of the novel is The Benefactress rather than The Heiress, you’ve probably guessed that this isn’t the end of the story. Anna decides to use the home as a refuge for gentlewomen who are down on their luck financially. She has hopes of eventually helping dozens of such women, but starts small – with just three women, from the many who answer her advertisement.

Frau von Treumann and baroness Elmreich are quite similar at first – snobbish women who may have fallen on bad times, but have no intention of letting that warm them to their less fortunate neighbours. Their good name, good families, and good past are more or less the only things they have to cling to. Anna may be doing them a good turn, but they see it as little less than their due, and certainly don’t show much gratitude. The third woman, Fräulein Kuhräuber, comes from less elevated stock – and there is little friendship between the three recipients of Anna’s generosity.

Alongside all of this is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a romantic plot. Several people think that beautiful Anna must be in want of a husband – this leads to the arrival of one of the gentlewoman’s horrendous son, an entanglement with a local curate, and a genuine friendship with local landowner Axel. He is drawn with beautiful restraint, and von Arnim knows how to give him exactly the qualities that will charm the reader while also being the dependable companion that Anna will inevitably realise she needs. I will quote Claire’s review (linked below):

Axel is my favourite type of male hero – quiet, calm, responsible, stable – and my sympathies were all with him as he struggled to counsel Anna on her project, though in her enthusiasm she refuses to listen to any warnings, and then to conceal his love for her, knowing that any offer he made would be rejected.

I’d normally feel a bit short-changed if a feminist tale of independence and marriage-resisting led to a woman realising that, actually, she should get married after all. But von Arnim earns the pairing, and I felt more than usually keen that they would end up together. I was a little less invested in the fortunes of the house for gentlewomen, and got the three women living there mixed up a few times. The plots involving them get resolved quite quickly, and it’s all entertaining but not especially memorable. The introduction of Axel’s sister is similarly a bit of a distraction, though did lead to one of my favourite lines in the novel:

Anna thought Trudi delightful. Trudi’s new friends always did think her delightful; and she never had any old ones.

As you can see, von Arnim’s slightly caustic wit is certainly present in The Benefactress, and I enjoy the contrast of Anna’s naïve goodness and the narrator’s more cynical take on proceedings. I suppose, ultimately, the novel suffers a little by being so clearly a prototype for The Enchanted April – and I also think that’s why it doesn’t necessarily need to be a priority for reprinting – but it is a lovely read nonetheless.

Others who got Stuck into this Book

“Never before have I finished one of her books caring so much about the characters, as I did for the genuinely sympathetic Anna and Axel.” – Claire, The Captive Reader

“In The Benefactress, Von Arnim has given us a fascinating mix of characters with decidedly mixed moral standards, from whom Anna learns much in the course of her social experiment.” – Chris, Tales from the Landing Bookshelves

“I enjoyed The Benefactress very much. It’s another of those beguiling books where a house is inherited & we follow the attempts to make the house a home.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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It’s been a busy week, and eyes have been a little ropey again, so haven’t really done any reading. It’s going to be up and down, I’m sure, but hopefully it will continue to tend towards improvement. But I will pop down my first miscellany of 2023 – hope you have a lovely weekend ahead of you.

1.) The link – a brilliant article by Lucy Scholes on being an ‘archive mole’, hunting out titles for reprint publishers. While I didn’t contribute, there are many things I’d say the same from my perspective as Series Consultant for the British Library Women Writers. (My only disagreement is about keeping possible authors’ names secret – though have definitely seen some reprint publishers act like they’d rather be spies!) There’s also a great list of recent reprint highlights, and I was delighted to see A Pin To See The Peepshow made the list.

Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive's Tour of the Bookshops of Britain : Ince, Robin: Amazon.co.uk: Books

2.) The book – I saw Bibliomaniac by Robin Ince mentioned on Liz’s blog and it could scarcely be more up my street. Someone touring the bookshops of the UK and writing about it? Yes please.

3.) The blog post – James – known to many of us as Caustic Cover Critic – has written his overview of 2022 reading as one of the guest posts at Dorian’s blog. It’s a list that could hardly have less in common with my reading tastes, and a fun and interesting blog post.