Tinkers by Paul Harding – #NovNov Day 13

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Another late post today, because I was out this evening – seeing the film Early Summer – but today I read 2009’s Tinkers by Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. I bought it in 2012, possibly because of the enthusiastic quote from Marilynne Robinson on the back. The novel opens:

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.

Great opening line, isn’t it? From here, we occasionally go back to the hospital bed and the disorienting world of the present – but George is much more at home in the past, by now. And not only his past. As he lies there, memory and invention swirl together as the narrative takes us into his past and into his father’s. George is a watch-mender, and the story feels like taking apart a watch – tinkering with it, and finding out how every small part works.

His own upbringing was in poverty, with an unreliable mother and a father who abandoned the family one day. Before this, the father’s most unpredictable quality was his seizures. In an era before any medication to help these, they were both frequent and alarming – though George only witnessed one once.

One of the unusual things about Tinkers is how it wanders in and out of first and third person. It all seems to stem from George’s memory, but sometimes we are in the first person of Howard’s (his father) narrative, seeing things that George couldn’t possibly have witnessed.

He had spoken no words to himself. No conscious thought precipitated his action, as if spending the whole day contemplating what he was going to do, had already done by the time he fitted words to the actions, which was to ride past the kitchen window that framed his family and leafed them in its gold light, would have diluted his resolve, would have led him to turn himself over to a fate that, had he thought about it, he would have accepted rather than acknowledge its implications. He could not have let himself be witness to the simultaneity of his wife passing him a plate of chicken or a basket of hot bread as she worked out her plans to have him taken away. Howard had assumed that their silence over his fits, over everything, stood for his gratefulness to her and her loyalty to him. He had assumed their silence was one of kindness offered and accepted.

It works because of the almost dreamlike ventures into memory that are the premise of the novella. And I particularly enjoyed when another piece of the puzzle was added, and we see Howard’s relationship with his own father – an other-worldly minister, not realising when his mind starts to depart. I can see why Marilynne Robinson liked the novel; in its structure, it has elements of Gilead and the legacy that can be passed through generations of experience.

The only bits that didn’t work quite so well for me were where it goes too stream of consciousness, and entire pages would be single paragraphs. And there was a collage-y feel at times, with quotes from other places – possibly fabricated, I’m not sure. Some on watchmaking worked well, but I had no idea what was going on with the sections on Borealis, which are sort of numbered entries of poetic experiences. Mystifying.

All in all, another Novellas in November success. I think Harding’s writing suffers a little in comparison to Robinson’s in a similar line, but it’s hardly a far comparison as Robinson is superlatively good at this. I still really liked Tinkers a lot, and would happily re-read it.

Heritage by Vita Sackville-West – #NovNov Day 12

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I think Vita Sackville-West is a really underrated writer – because she is still chiefly remembered for her connection with Virginia Woolf. No, she isn’t in Woolf’s league as a writer – who is? – but she is very good indeed. Except, erm, in her first novel, Heritage (1919). This is my first real disappointment of Novellas in November.

Here are some thoughts in bullet points…

  • The novella is about Ruth Pennistan, a characterful farmer’s daughter who is torn between a conventional husband option and a wild Heathcliff-type. And a third character, who narrates – sort of. More on that in a mo.
  • It is very, very of it’s time. The sort of bucolic novel where rural folk are all tempestuous or stupid, and say things like this: ”I sometimes feel I can’t escape Rawdon,” she cried out. ”He’s always been there since I can remember, I think he always will be there. There’s something between us; it may be fancy; but there’s something between us.”
  • It’s a layered narrative – the actual narrator is relating something an acquaintance, Malory, told him once in Italy – so we get all the dialogue given at one remove. I really dislike the device which assumes someone has memorised days and days of conversation, and relays it, and the rest of the narrative, in an enormous monologue.
  • The middle section IS the narrator visiting the farm himself – that felt much more immediate, and did work better for me…
  • …but the third section is a letter, written by Malory, and we’re back to the weird distancing effect.
  • All the emotion is heightened and a bit silly – I wonder if Sackville-West had been on a diet of D.H. Lawrence, without his lyricism – or Mary Webb, without her dialect.
  • (The best thing Heritage has in its favour is that there isn’t any dialect.)

I should say, plenty of reviews online disagree with me and think this is a fine novel. I think she hadn’t found her voice as a writer at all yet, and this is a derivative and emotionally alienating novella that shows little of the promise of the brilliant novelist Sackville-West would become. Well, she got it out of her system, and only three years later she would publish the extraordinary novella The Heir. My advice: skip over Heritage and seek out her best work.

Notes From An Island by Tove Jansson – #NovNov Day 11

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What a lovely book. My brother got me Notes From An Island (1996, translated 2021) by Tove Jansson for my birthday – knowing my love of Jansson – and I couldn’t wait to dive in and enjoy this beautifully produced tale of an island where Jansson lived with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, known as Tooti, who created the lovely copperplate etchings and wash drawings of the island that are reproduced in this edition. You can see some atmospheric examples on the Granta website.

The island is Klovharun, and Notes From An Island is a short book following the couple from their early decision to move to this fairly unwelcoming island – until they realise they have leave it behind. They had previously lived on a much more idyllic island – but this skerry, though it seems unprepossessing and sparse, turns into an idyll of their own making. Readers of the novella Fair Play will be familiar with their life there.

An intriguing additional voice to the notes in this volume is Brunström’s – a man whose gifts were in constructing Jansson and Pietila’s house (evading authorities and their regulations where possible), and not in poetic writing. The contrast between his plebeian descriptions and Jansson’s beautiful diary entries are brought out wonderfully in Thomas Teal’s translations. Thank goodness he is on hand to translate again, as he has done for Jansson for decades.

Jansson is incapable of writing a bad or unevocative sentence. I loved her snapshots of life on this island – of companionship with Tooti, of battling the elements, of never quite knowing what nature will do – whether flora, fauna, or the unpredictable sea. Here is a small moment that I loved:

Every summer there was the same wait for swallows. Brunström had told us that they nest only in houses where people are happy, but not if the house is painted with Valtti or Pinotex. The swallows came and, as expected, put on a great show, ripping through the air like shrieking knives, around the cabin again and again, to our admiration – and then, presto, they were gone, leaving no promises behind. If only we could be like that come back only when people no longer expect us! That would be so elegant.

Oh, I love Jansson’s writing so much. And I loved this addition to Jansson’s oeuvre in English. It is short, but it is not a minor work. It is perfect.

The Story of Stanley Brent by Elizabeth Berridge – #NovNov Day 10

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The Story of Stanley Brent (4) (Zephyr Books): Amazon.co.uk: Berridge, Elizabeth: 9780648690986: BooksI read a book published by Michael Walmer yesterday, albeit in a different edition – and today I read one that was published by his imprint and sent to me as a review copy last year: The Story of Stanley Brent by Elizabeth Berridge, from 1945. It is so short a novella that it is practically a long short story – coming in at only 75 pages.

In it, it tells the story of Stanley Brent from the moment he proposes to Ada all the way to his death, and a little beyond. It encapsulates the ordinary life of a fairly ordinary man in the early 20th century. He is unimaginative and conservative, struggling to make an impression at work and barely making a mark on the wider world. Even his engagement and early marriage are a little awkward and understated. This is not a great romance. And, like so many women of the era, the mechanics of marriage are an unpleasant surprise to Ada:

Ada pushed a corner of the pillow into her mouth, nearly overcome with nausea. Her mother had told her nothing of what she might expect. That her body, washed meticulously and yet ignored by her, should attain such an importance, should cause a good and decent man like Stanley to be so – so bestial and undignified, was shattering. If Stanley could not be trusted, who could? And yet her friends who were married seemed happy enough, they had children… at this a fearful doubt struck her. Suppose they, as Stanley had said, taut and angry, his patience gone, suppose they enjoyed this hateful and frightening thing?

But they do have children, and Stanley is an affectionate but oddly passive father. The household economics do not thrive, and Berridge sketches out a decline.

It is all very brief – a pencil portrait that gives the outline of a life, with occasional forays into deeper detail. In it, we get glimpses of post-natal depression, of the General Strike, of alcoholism. It flashes past.

All in all, it is a curio. Berridge writes well, and I think could easily have turned this cast and the span of the lives here into a full-length novel. The fact that it instead blurs the line between novella and short story perhaps echoes the very insignificance of Brent’s life.

The Poor Man by Stella Benson – #NovNov Day 9

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I first read Stella Benson when I was writing about witches for my DPhil – Living Alone is perhaps her best known novel, and is certainly well known in particular academic circles. I was so beguiled by her quirky worldview and witty writing style – and so I was delighted when Michael Walmer started reprinting her novels. He has done The Poor Man, I only just realise, though my copy is a paperback from the 1940s. The novel was originally published in 1922.

The poor man of the title is Edward Williams – a Briton in California, overlooked and ignored by all. He is self-pitying and feeble, and on the outskirts of a society made up of fashionable bohemian types who speak authoritatively and often stupidly about any manner of art. There is a glorious scene where he hosts a party at which each guest submits a poem anonymously – they are read in turn, mocked and disparaged by everyone except the poet in each case. The only one which meets with wide approval turns out to be a letter that had been submitted by mistake. And how could anyone resist this portrait of Rhoda:

Rhoda Romero never asked people what they thought of her pictures. She thought she knew. They were mostly studies of assorted fruits in magenta and mustard-colour running violently down steep slopes into the sea. They were all called still life, curiously enough. Rhoda Romero also, I need hardly say, wrote poetry. It was, of course, unrhymed and so delicately scanned that often there was not room in a line for a word unless it were spelt in the newest American manner; the poems were usually about dirt or disease, and were believed in Chicago to have an international reputation.

You either love this sort of thing or you do not – and I emphatically do. In all the novels I’ve read by Benson, she has that cutting authorial voice undermining all her characters – including her ‘hero’. Edward falls for a woman called Emily – self-assured and impressive, though not obviously besotted with Edward.

She doesn’t hang around when he has a sudden illness – unclear exactly what – which requires immediate operation on his brain and some time of recovery. Indeed, she heads off to China to be the assistant of a noted journalist. And, when recovered, Edward decides he must follow her there.

He doesn’t have any money (the ‘poor’ of the title has multiple applications), and so we enter perhaps my favourite section of The Poor Man: where Edward tries to raise money to travel to China. And the most glorious way in which he tries to do this is with ‘a company that seemed inexplicably anxious that young America should become acquainted with the works of Milton’ – albeit in prose because poetry is ‘unhealthy for children, unmanly for Our Boys’. I have been giggling about the ‘inexplicably anxious’ line most of the day. Just perfect.

Edward does eventually get to China, and so the adventure continues, but that’s probably enough of the plot for now. The main thing with Benson’s writing in the exuberant ridiculousness of the prose, particularly the way that everyone’s intentions and impressions of themselves are consistently proved to be absurd and false. I loved The Poor Man, and I think it’s a shame that such an astonishing tour de force ever fell out of print. Thank goodness Michael Walmer is restoring her works steadily, and fingers crossed he is going to bring us the next of her books soon…

The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden – #NovNov Day 8

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Thank you for all the birthday good wishes for yesterday – Colin and I had a lovely time, successfully escaping an escape room with some friends, then seeing fireworks. There are always handy fireworks displays near our birthday, courtesy of Guy Fawkes Night.

Today I was back on my novellas in November challenge, with Deirdre Madden’s second novel, The Birds of the Innocent Wood from 1988, when she was only 28. It starts at quite a pace – rattling through the tragedy of Jane’s childhood, with both parents dying in a house fire and being sent to a convent. We see that she thrives on making others react emotionally to her tale of woe – and it’s something she tries on James, the man she starts dating and whom she will marry.

She had a deep contempt for all those who had known from birth what it was to be loved. She did not believe that they could ever know how strange and wonderful it was to watch another person gradually fall in love with them. She certainly watched James, and watched him with a steady fascination, as a naturalist might watch a butterfly uncrumple itself from a chrysalis, or wiltingly die in a killing jar. She would always make a point of arriving early for their meetings, so that she could conceal herself at a distance and covertly watch him arrive and then pace the street disconsolately, looking at his watch, as he waited for her. Then she would leave her hiding place and approach him, her eye steadily fixed on his, so that she would not miss the moment when he caught sight of her. Because to see that moment was the whole point of the exercise: to see his face change, to see the relief and the tenderness and the love with which the mere sight of her filled him was the highlight of the entire evening. It made her feel dizzy with power.

It did all feel a bit dizzying at the beginning, to whip through so much plot so quickly. I feel like Madden might space it out more, as a more mature writer. But things settle a bit once it’s established that she is in an unsure and discontented marriage to James – living in remote countryside, with the only neighbour being a woman oddly like Jane, with whom she has an instant and lasting antipathy.

And then chapters begin to alternate – half is Jane’s young married life, and the other half are adult twin sisters Sarah and Catherine. They are Jane’s daughters – we learn early that Jane has died, though don’t know how. Madden does well at delineating the twin sisters – what they have in common and what they don’t. And something they do have in common is a hidden secret.

This is the first of my Novellas in November project that I think would have been better if I hadn’t read it one day. Perhaps because it covers so much time, perhaps because her writing is gentle and subtle, The Birds of the Innocent Wood is really a novella to linger over. I wish I’d spent a bit more time in the eerily described landscape, inhabiting these awkward, haunted lives.

I really love Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday. This earlier novella is evidently not as mature – the writing is very good, but doesn’t have the same piercing precision. She does manage to weave images of birds well through the novella, deliberately but not disruptively. On its own, The Birds of the Innocent Wood is very good – it’s only because I have read her later work that I see the ingredients are there for the extraordinary novelist she will become.

A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham – #NovNov Day 6

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Today is definitely cheating, because A Wild Swan and other tales (2015) is, as the full title suggests, not a novella. It’s very definitely a collection of short stories, but it does come in at around 130 pages, so at least that bit fits the bill.

I’ve reviewed a lot of Cunningham books here, and he is definitely one of my favourite living writers. As far as I know, this is his only book of short stories – and they are all twists on fairy tales. Often they take the well-known story and see it from another point of view. What is the backstory for the witch in Hansel and Gretel? Was there a good reason that the Prince had been cursed in Beauty and the Beast? Did the Giant really deserve to have everything stolen by Jack, or to be killed?

It’s a mercy of sorts. What, after all, did the giant have left, with his gold and his hen and his harp all gone?

The book has wonderful illustrations by Yuko Shimizu – fanciful, surreal, exuberant, a little dark. You can see some of them on Shimizu’s website.

Cunningham is so good at delving below the surface of the mundane that it feels quite odd to have his take on the fantastical. There is definitely a little of his dry reflections, such as this bit from a take on Rumpelstiltskin:

He believes, it seems, that value resides in threes, which would explain the three garish and unnecessary towers he’s had plunked onto the castle walls, the three advisers to whom he never listens, the three annual parades in commemoration of nothing in particular beyond the celebration of the king himself.

And…

If the girl pulls it off one more time, the king has announced he’ll marry her, make her his queen.

That’s the reward? Marriage to a man who’d have had you decapitated if you’d failed to produce not just one but three miracles?

I did find A Wild Swan enjoyable and quirky. Maybe my only reservation is that, creative as it was, this is nothing new. People have been reworking fairy tales for generations, and it no longer feels very fresh to rewrite them from the antagonist’s perspective. If Cunningham had been the first to do anything like this then it would have been amazing. As it is, the book felt a little unnecessary.

I often find myself thinking of a line from Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne, about his long poem about faith and philosophy The Norman Church: ”it was the sort of book which publishers accept ‘only out of deference to a writer who has supplied them through many years with better, more marketable books in other fields’.” I think about it for all sorts of books, and this was one of them. A new author would have a hard time justifying this book, but maybe his publishers thought Cunningham deserved to write what he fancied – and his name on the cover would sell plenty of copies.

So, I did enjoy this, in the same way I enjoy anything a little predictable and unchallenging. But did it need to be written?

By the way, I’ll be taking the day off a-novella-a-day tomorrow – because it’s my birthday, and I’ll be spending it with my bro. Back, maybe even with a proper novella, on the 8th!

Murder Included by Joanna Cannan – #NovNov Day 5

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A murder mystery is a fun choice for my novella-a-day challenge, because I always wants to finish a murder mystery in one day – and it’s only the length that stops me. Quite spontaneously, I took Murder Included by Joanna Cannan off the shelf this morning. It was published in 1950, though seemed to me to be set a decade or two earlier. Confusingly, it has also been published as A Taste of Murder and Poisonous Relations, which could be handy information if you want to track it down – and I recommend you do, because I thought it was really excellent.

Perhaps the title has been changed because it isn’t instantly obvious what it means, at least to more modern eyes. It refers to the idea of ‘breakfast included’ or ‘baths included’ – whatever features and facilities might be mentioned by somebody advertising rooms. Because the setting is Aston Park, a palatial ancestral home that has recently opened up to ‘paying guests’. I.e. it’s a hotel retaining a veneer of titled pride.

Sir Charles d’Estray lives there with his new wife Barbara, known as Bunny, a fairly highbrow novelist. They haven’t been married long, but it’s long enough for Bunny to realise that an overhaul is needed to avoid bankruptcy – so she spearheads the paying guests venture. Both halves of the marriage have at least one child – Sir Charles has three, all horsey and disdainful, while Bunny’s daughter Lisa is the main reason she has agreed to a marriage that never particularly appealed. She wants stability. They have lived in France for a long time, poor and with an unsalubrious crowd, and seeing Lisa expertly resurrect a drunken man at the age of twelve has convinced Bunny to take her to English respectability.

All has been going well, with various fairly long-term paying guests – some relations of the d’Estrays and others strangers – when one of them is found dead. Elizabeth – one of the relatives; a cousin – has been poisoned.

A death in a crowded country pile is hardly a novelty for the murder mystery, but there were various things that made Murder Included stand out for me. One is the cleverness of the solution, which naturally I won’t spoil – but it does include a neat trick that I don’t remember seeing used anywhere else. But the main reason I loved this book is Cannan’s writing. Here’s the police detective, Price, arriving at the scene:

He had kept silence as a loutish local constable drove him through the October dusk over hills to wrought-iron gates, yew hedges, and Elizabethan gables. A doddering parasite of a butler had shown him into this large, over-crowded, shabby, so-called study, where Colonel Blimp, after nearly wringing his hand off, had turned ‘Susie – little woman’ out of a chair and expected him to sit down in it. Now, fussing about with cut-glass decanter and silver cigarette box, he was doing his best to turn an important conference into a cosy chat.

(Susie, for the avoidance of doubt, is a dog – and Colonel Blimp is a reference to the archetype, not a character in Murder Included.) Price has been sent in from Scotland Yard because the local police are too biased in favour of the respected family and the house’s servants, many of whom are related to police officers. And Price doesn’t have any time for this sort of set up. He has his prejudices about rural people, titled people, and more or less anybody who isn’t a left-wing urbanite like himself.

Cannan can be very funny, and she spears characters so mercilessly well. That means she can make us really like the people we’re meant to like, such as Bunny and Lisa. But others are definitely victims of her pen. I’m not sure if we are meant to actively dislike Price, and she apparently did use him for other murder mysteries, but he definitely isn’t the sympathetic detective hero that many novelists would use. Here he is questioning teenage Lisa…

‘I’m sure you’re a very clever little girl. I’m sure if anyone – even a grown-up person – annoyed you, you’d get the better of them.’

Lisa looked puzzled. ‘I’m not in the least clever. I’ve never got the better of anyone. Actually if someone annoys me I answer back, but I generally get the worst of it.’

‘And then do you brood over it and think out your revenge?’

‘Good gracious no! I’m not a character out of Wuthering Heights,’ said Lisa, laughing merrily.

Elizabeth isn’t the last person to die in the story – it would hardly be a classic murder mystery if she were. And perhaps the book is published a little late to truly be of peak Golden Age, though it’s up there with the best examples I’ve read in terms of economy, style, and plot.

In fact, I would give it that great accolade, which is all too rare of detective fiction: I’d have loved it just as much if there hadn’t been a murder at all.

The Lonely by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 4

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The Lonely by Gallico, Paul | eBay

I bought a book ten years ago that I thought was called Ludmilla and the Lonely – turns out it is two novellas, the second and longer of which is called The Lonely. That’s what I read today – a rather lovely little wartime story, published shortly after the war in 1947. I say lovely. It starts out not so much, but things definitely improve.

Lieutenant Jerry Wright is an American stationed in England on an airbase. He is young, quite naive, a little inclined to be carried away emotionally – but popular with the men and keen to be liked by them. Back home he has doting parents and a fiancée, Catherine, whom he has known since they were both very young children. His whole life is mapped out for him, and he has never really questioned it.

Jerry has a fortnight’s leave lined up, and a fellow airman boisterously suggests that he might take a woman away for a week of no-strings passion. In his normal life, this isn’t something he’d countenance. But a mix of being in England (!) and being at war begin to make it seem possible. And he decides to ask Patches – real name Patrice – a ‘plain girl’ in the WAAF. She isn’t one of the go-getters that others are taking away for their dirty weeks. She is quiet, sweet and – unknown to him – in love with Jerry.

Now that he was with her again he was aware that there was about her an aura of innocence that made impossible the thoughts he had had of her the night before. For if she was a little nobody, a girl he had met casually through the war, who had helped him to pass the time, yet she was also a person with dignity and some unfathomed inner life of her own, which stood as a barrier between him and the use he wished to make of her.

I didn’t love Gallico’s madonna-or-whore approach to women at the beginning of the novella, though it’s never clear how much is the foolish perspective of Jerry and how much is the author. Certainly, as the story continues, it becomes much more nuanced. Not least because some of the story is told from Patches’ point of view, albeit in the third person.

They do go away together. Gallico becomes suddenly coy about actually mentioning sex, but clearly their relationship has advanced. And, yes, the ending of this story is never in doubt. All the ingredients are there that are still the ingredients of every trashy Netflix romcom, and what fun they are to watch/read.

The exact path to get to the end isn’t entirely predictable, and possibly not entirely plausible, but it was all very entertaining. And, you know what, even quite moving. I don’t often get swayed by a love story on the page, but in not many pages, Gallico has created two characters I really grew to care about. I was cheering them on.

Often I Am Happy by Jens Christian Grøndahl – #NovNov Day 3

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Like Amsterdam that I read yesterday, Often I Am Happy by Jens Christian Grøndahl opens with a death.

Now your husband is also dead, Anna. Your husband, our husband. I would have liked him to lie next to you, but you have neighbours, a lawyer and a lady who was buried a couple of years ago.

The novella is narrated by Ellinor as one long address to Anna, the first wife of Ellinor’s husband Georg – he has just died, and Anna has been dead for four decades. Anna and Ellinor were friends, and Ellinor has now been stepmother to Anna’s twins for far longer than the seven years that Anna knew them. Ellinor is now 70. Her life is far from over, but many of her ties to the past are disappearing.

This novella was published in 2016 and translated from Danish by the author in 2017. It is certainly very short – 167 pages in my edition, but with a large font and enormous margins. In that space, Grøndahl covers an impressive amount. We start in the present, with Ellinor detailing the way that her stepsons and their families have reacted to Georg’s death. Or, moreso, how they have reacted to her reaction. Ellinor has sold the house even before the estate has been properly settled, and she is moving to a house in a disreputable part of town – the part that she came from.

Ellinor’s narrative wanders further back – to the friendship she and Anna had, as well as how she met the man she married to before Georg. And to the event that led to Anna’s death. Without losing a certain gentleness in her reminiscences, Ellinor slowly shows us that the relationships were more complicated than they might seem at first:

You must allow me to place that image here, Anna. We must look at it together; please don’t lower your eyes. The worst thing was to lose you, but the second worst thing was that you never got a chance to ask for my forgiveness. You don’t hear what I am saying, and that is the worst. You don’t remember; you are not. I speak to you only because I want to be something more than an accumulation of facts and their succession.

And Ellinor goes further back still – as though, having begun to explore the past, she can’t help go further still. To her own childhood, to her mother’s younger days – as told to her, of course. As she considers a new start in the present, Grøndahl shows us all the ways that Ellinor is tethered to events in her past and those that happened before she was born. As with his brilliant novella Virginia, the war shows the long shadows it can cast across generations.

This is the third book I’ve read by Grøndahl – two very short, and one quite long. From that sample size, I prefer him in novella form. He can get so much of life into a short span, told sparsely but in such a way that we sense the depth behind the brief accounts we hear. Ellinor’s story isn’t told in many words, but there is a whole life in Often I Am Happy.