1950s

The Man on the Pier by Julia Strachey

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Strange at Ecbatan: Old Non-Bestseller Review: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding/An Integrated Man, by Julia StracheyIf you know the name ‘Julia Strachey’, it’s probably for Cheerful Weather for the Wedding – reprinted by Persephone Books, and later made into a very enjoyable film. Or perhaps you know her connection to Bloomsbury Group regular Lytton Strachey, who was her uncle (though, until I googled it, I thought she was his sister). Well, either way, let me introduce you to another of her books: The Man on the Pier (1951), later republished as An Integrated Man.

“Everything in my life is well ordered and serene. I wake up in the mornings rested and refreshed! And above all with a feeling of virtue. My days are spent unharassed by pressures that torture and distort. At the age of forty-one, I’m bound to admit that I have become that fabulous beast an ‘integrated man’!”

So opens the novel, and you can see why they chose the later title. I’m not sure it’s the most promising opening, and it does sound rather artificial to me – thankfully the tone naturalises relatively quickly. Speaking is Ned Moon, staying with a friend Reamur Cedar (!) in an estate. The opening scene is quite a funny one of him trying to avoid a chaotic maid, and that’s about the most plot the first half of the novel has. The rest of this section is conversation and description, and Strachey does both very well.

Outside, a vast summer confusion was going on. Beetles, spiders, caterpillars, ladybirds, insects innumerable were crawling in and out of flower-pots, and leaping off the tops of grasses. Hedgehogs were stealing cautiously through the long clover in the fields. Amongst the corn, field-mice, rabbits and young partridges were scuttling, where already binding-machines joggled along, clogging the air with petrol vapour. In the little orchard, beyond the yew tree, thistles were seeding and the thistle seeds and the white butterflies came floating about over everything, whilst cows coughed grassily, cats sneezed fishily, and all of this and more besides was being recorded on the air in sound and smell.

Pages are devoted to beautiful descriptions, which do not contribute to any sense of momentum but which make the novel very enjoyable to sink into. Sometimes it is the surroundings – sometimes it is merely the day-t0-day lives and habits of those present:

After dinner, reading. And at last bed, with much discussion as to who would, and who would not, have a bath. Finally, Agatha Christie, owls, and the sounds, through the dark corridors, of gushing bath-taps behind locked doors, together with innumerable clickings and latchings of bedroom doors both near and far and… sleep.

So, why is Ned staying here? To discuss with another guest, Aron, the prospect of them opening up a private school together. Neither seem to have any particular aptitude for it – unless self-confidence is an aptitude – but I enjoyed all the discussions. Particularly good is the sibling relationship between Aron and his sister Gwen (Reamur’s wife), who, in that sibling way, is unafraid to poor cold water on his pronouncements. Every time they clash is believable. They bicker without restraint, knowing that no lasting damage will be done to their close brother/sister bond, and able say things that could end flimsier relationships.

Gwen is particularly unsure that Aron’s new wife Marina will be suited to the role of headmaster’s wife. Ned hasn’t met his friend’s wife, as he was out of the country when the wedding took place. It’s clear, from Gwen’s description, that she is of a class and disposition that will struggle to mingle with the wives of teachers – it will be considered beneath her, perhaps, and be awkward for everyone.

We hear a lot about Marina before she appears, and are predisposed to be intimidated by her. Preemptively, we imagine she will be a cat among pigeons. But when does come, with her daughter Violet, something more unexpected happens. Ned instantly falls in love with her. Not only that, he decides with very little hesitation that he must have an affair with her. Even more surprisingly, she feels the same.

It’s hard to see what this mutual infatuation is based on, and it felt like a stone flung in the calm waters of the novel – and not in a good way, at least in my opinion. There is nothing subtle about a stone being flung. The Man on the Pier was such a rich, detailed, calm novel – and the introduction of a would-be affair felt quite ordinary and boring in comparison. It did lead to some of the most beautiful scenes, describing the site of a planned tryst between them – an abandoned and decrepit mansion. Strachey wrote about that location with almost mythical beauty, like describing a fantasy land. But I don’t find the possibilities of an affair anywhere near as interesting as the dynamics of siblings, friends and potential entrepeneur colleagues.

That’s personal taste, of course. For others, the arrival of Marina and the romantic storyline might be when the novel began to pick up. I would so much rather Strachey had kept confidence in her ability to write a strikingly beautiful, often amusing novel about very little indeed. If the first half of The Man on the Pier had kept going in a similar vein, I think it could have been something very special. Either way, Strachey was an excellent prose stylist and observer of behaviour, and it’s a shame that her output was so limited.

Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson

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Moominsummer Madness

I started seeing Moomins popping up in reviews all over the place, and discovered that that it is #Moominweek! Literary Potpourri and Calmgrove have set this up, and even though I was late to the party, I rushed off to read Moominsummer Madness (1954) translated by Thomas Warburton – handily also ticking the Women in Translation Month box.

Tove Jansson is one of my favourite writers – you can click her name in the tags/categories section and find all of the other reviews I’ve done – but I’ve only read one Moomin book before. She is so brilliant in her adult novels and short stories at piercing relationships between people who aren’t quite able to communicate, whether that be the beautifully unsentimental meeting of grandmother and granddaughter in The Summer Book or the who-is-fooling-whom darkness of The True Deceiver. How does that translate to a world not about humans, but instead about moomins and their ilk?

In Moominsummer Madness, a nearby volcano causes tremendous flooding in Moominvalley.

In the fair night they could see something enormous rise high over the tree-tops of the forest, like a great wall that grew and grew with a white and foaming crest.

“I suppose we’d better go into the drawing-room now,” said Moominmamma.

They had no more than got their tails inside the door when the flood wave came crashing through the Moomin Valley and drenched everything in darkness. The house rocked slightly but didn’t lose its foothold. It was soundly built and a very good house. But after a while the drawing-room furniture began to float around. The family then moved upstairs and sat down to wait for the storm to blow over.

The whole house is soon under water. Somehow they rescue food from the kitchen (why is bread edible after it’s been floating around in floodwater? Maybe we shouldn’t ask such questions) and they don’t seem very perturbed by the turn of events. Calmness is key. And, calmly, they adopt another house that floats by.

At first they are worried that they are evicting someone else, or that the residents have perished in the flood. What the reader works out pretty quickly is that this is a floating theatre. The world of stage, props and backdrops is foreign to Moominmamma, Moominpappa et al, and it’s fun to see them discovering what’s going on – helped, sort of, but a grumpy rat (Emma) that lives in the theatre and speaks often of her late husband (who passed when the iron curtain fell on him).

Along the way, some of the gang get arrested for complex reasons, and there are various sidelines about combatting an overly authoritative park keeper and adopting a group of ‘woodies’. There’s a lot going on in quite a short book, and that’s partly because it is a constant chain of events – the characters seem to take most things in their stride, so there isn’t all that much describing their reactions. But there is some lovely humour along the way. I enjoyed Jansson’s riff on the theatre:

‘I want a lion in the play, at all costs,’ Moominpappa replied sourly.

‘But you must write it again, in blank verse! Blank verse! Rhymes won’t do!’ said Emma.

‘What do you mean, blank verse,’ asked Moominpappa.

‘It should go like this: Ti-dum, ti-umty-um – ti-dumty-um-tum,’ explained Emma. ‘And you mustn’t express yourself so naturally.’

Moominpappa brightened. ‘Do you mean: “I tremble not before the Desert King, be he a savage beast or not so savage”?’ he asked.

‘That’s more like it,’ said Emma. ‘Now go and write it all in blank verse. And remember that in all the good old tragedies most of the people are each other’s relatives.’

‘But how can they be angry at each other if they’re of the same family?’ Moominmamma asked cautiously. ‘And is there no princess in the play? Can’t you put in a happy end? It’s so sad when people die.’

‘This is a tragedy, dearest,’ said Moominpappa. ‘And because of that somebody has to die in the end. Preferably all except one of them, and perhaps that one too. Emma’s said so.’

Not being super family with the family and add-ons, I couldn’t remember much about people’s characters. They are sketchily reintroduced, so I know that Moominmamma is reassuring and calm, Moominpappa is kind and imaginative, Little My is angry and looking for affection etc. But I have to admit that I can’t quite get past them all being non-human, made-up creatures. I realise that it is an imaginative failing in me, but though I enjoyed reading Moominsummer Madness, I’d have enjoyed it more if they were all humans and the story was surreal rather than fantastic.

I’ll probably keep reading Moomin books now and then, because I want as much Jansson as I can get. And, yes, this was fun. But I’m so glad that there are plenty of non-Moomin books out there to show how brilliant Jansson was at her best. (Sorry not to write a wholly enthusiastic post for #Moominweek, but I’m glad to participate nonetheless!)

The Visitors by Mary McMinnies

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On 13 May 2018, Barb at the wonderful Leaves and Pages blog wrote about The Visitors (1958) by Mary McMinnies. According to the note I’ve made inside my copy, it arrived at my flat on 18 May 2018. If you go and read her original review, you’ll know why I had to snap it up instantly. ’10-carat diamond quality, people, 24-carat gold. This is very good stuff indeed,’ she wrote.

So, why did it take me six years to actually read the book? Upon opening it, I saw that it was 574 pages of miniscule font. I calculate that it’s about 275,000 words. And I was too nervous to dive into it.

But, after doing a novella a day in May, I was ready for something mammoth. It took me about six weeks to finish it (while reading lots of other things simultaneously, of course) – but what an experience it was. I so seldom enter this fully, exhaustively into a world.

What is that world? The city and country names are made up, but it is a thinly disguised Krakow, Poland. Larry Purdoe works for the British Foreign Office and has been stationed there – bringing with him the main character of the novel, his wife Milly. Also with them are two squabbling young children and their harassed, anxious, spiteful nanny, Miss Raven. They enter a world filled with rules that aren’t quite explained to them, wielding power from representing a powerful nation, but ultimately rather at sea.

There was one other hotel in the town, with many more rooms, although not so luxurious, but if a foreigner chance to go there first instead of to the Grand, he would invairably be told that all the rooms were occupied and be directed to the Grand, because the Grand was the foreigners’ hotel. Thus matters were simplified for everyone concerned.

Milly put on her nicest tweeds, her thinnest stockings and a new hat and penetrated the labyrinth of rooms. Eventually she stumbled upon Miss Raven buttoning Dermot into gaiters.

“How’s everything going, Miss Raven? All right?”

Miss Raven, who eschewed optimism on principle, and in particular the brand indulged in by employers, did not feel bound to make any such fatuous admission. All she said was: “I’m taking them out.”

Milly is the kind of character so richly complex that it is almost impossible to describe her. On the one hand, she is superficial and greedy. She gets over her head in the black market, so she can buy astoundingly expensive porcelain while people around her are starving. She is charmed and dizzied by the circles she’s in, particularly the Americans. But she is also headstrong – ruling the household, including her husband, and much more socially purposeful than he is. She befriends the impoverished Countess Sophie and snubs a taxi driver; she despises people a couple of rungs below her on the class ladder, but is drawn to a fraught friendship with her kind, impulsive maid, Gisela.

One of my fears, in opening such a long book, is that there would be thousands of characters. In fact, I’ve mentioned almost all the principle people already. I loved that McMinnies poured out all the detail and description over a small cast. We got to know them with such depth. Hardly anything of significance happens – there is an ominous mushroom-picking trip, a run-in with some dangerous types which could turn nasty, and a very funny dinner party. But mostly it is just the day-to-day life of a foreign official’s wife, not really fitting in with either the ex-pat community or the people from ‘Slavonia’ aka Poland. It is layered, layer upon layer, filling those hundreds of pages.

I’m not sure I agree with either of the assessments from the two reviews online – Barb says ‘I dove into it every chance I had, five minutes here, ten minutes there, not wanting to miss a sentence. It was positively addictive.’ Brad’s verdict, at Neglected Books, on the other hand: “It manages to be, at the same time, both highly realistic–indeed, drearily, tediously, relentlessly realistic at times, the kind of realism that’s so convincing that it can feel like the writer is holding your head under water and you want to struggle to break free–and utterly artificial.” I don’t think The Visitors is at all a page-turner – it was a novel to langour in, slowly over many days. And I can see why Brad says it is ‘drearily, tediously, relentlessly realistic’, but I found it simply deserved a different kind of reading. It couldn’t be rushed. You couldn’t expect something of note to happen on every page, or even in every chapter. It needs to be leapt into, wallowed in, enjoyed on its own utterly un-abbreviated terms.

Tonally, the novel is varied and rich. There is a slightly ironic detachment to much of the description, recognising that Milly is a little absurd – but not absurd enough to truly mock. Some of the novel is rather amusing – I noted down this exchange between Milly and her young daughter, Clarissa:

“There’s something I want to ask.”

Milly softened. “Go ahead.”

“Well, what I was wondering… you’re past your first youth, aren’t you? So–“

“Just say that again?”

“What? Oh… it’s all here… wait, I’ll read it… ‘She was a woman past her first youth, say twenty-six or -seven years old but still comely…’ So what I was wondering was–“

“What book is that?” said Milly weakly. “You know, you read so much.”

“It’s one Abe lent me… and he says I can’t read too much. I haven’t got into it yet. In fact I’ve only got to the first page.”

“Quite far enough, I should say.”

Occasionally, McMinnies will get more serious and even philosophical. There is a section where the narrator berates Milly for failing to identify happiness when she finds it – constantly searching and yearning for it, but not acknowledging it or expecting it in the right places.

And then there were some sections that felt quite experimental – taking advantage of the lazy slowness of the writing to explore details that would be summarised in a handful of words in other novels. Larry hates to see women cry. Those six simple words are transformed into this curiously beautiful passage, mostly one long sentence. It is redundant, in story terms, but it is somehow glorious for that.

He hated tears; all tears, no matter who shed them, he hated them in every way, shape, or form. He hated them in prospect, the quivering lip, the sighs, the twisted handkerchief, the slow welling up; je hated the aftermath, the blotches and hiccups and shininess; he hated them near at hand, snuffled into one’s own clean handkerchief or damping one’s shoulder, he hated them at a distance on the cinema screen. He hated the threat of them, the secret weapon concealed about each female person to be employed at the least hint of an attack; he hated them for the efficacy with which in seconds they could reduce him or any man to the rank of bastard, and whilst hating himself for the bastard he indubitably was, he hated the tears that washed it home to him far more. He hated them as the outward and visible signs of self-pity, as the preface to chapters of remorse which must be ploughed through, which they would freely punctuate before an evening night might be considered well and truly spent. Most particularly he hated those tears whose purpose was to provide ‘relief’; through a vale of tears one would be frog-marched beside her, the weeper, still humbly wishing to do her a service, acknowledging oneself to blame – whilst ‘something in the oven’ burnt to a cinder or one’s own passion grew cold – and when one was permitted to clamber up the other side, panting, when the river of woe had run dry, she, the Niobe, the source of it all, would park up and say brightly: “Now I could do with a sandwich” – or – “You know I’m always this way about this time…” Tears of rage, of fatigue, frustration, petulance, jealousy, boredom; tears for the act of love (shed, at least, after it), tears to accompany weltschmerz, at the sight of the moon, say, or as an agreeably salty appetiser to a re-hash of old letters; tears with a thousnad uses, as a threat, an excuse, an outlet, useful in prevarication, provocation, useful all around the clock – God, even in dreams! – buckets and buckets of crocodile tears. How he hated them. But he had never in his life seen any quite like these.

I’ve not had many experiences like reading The Visitors. Perhaps the closest reading experience was L.P. Hartley’s The Boat. I think it’ll stay with me a long time, as there can’t be many characters I have spent such time with – time both laborious and leisurely, and ultimately completely satisfying. What an unsual, ambitious and ultimately excellent, book.

Elizabeth Goudge and Maggie O’Farrell

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

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

The Heart of the Family (1953) by Elizabeth Goudge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentino by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay Day 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

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The Baron in the Trees (1957) is my first novel by Italo Calvino – and the description of it is a real tussle between something that really appeals to me and something that really doesn’t. On the one hand, it’s historical fiction – starting very precisely on 15 June 1767 – and that tends to deter me. On the other hand, it’s a novel about a baron who decides to live entirely in the trees. That very tethered version of surreality is exactly up my street. And it comes recommended by people like Karen/Kaggsy, so that was enough to push me in the direction of giving it a go – in an English translation by someone with the excellent name Archibald Colquhoun.

Cosimo is a young baron who, like many other teenagers, has an argument with his parents over the meal table. To escape them, he petulantly climbs into one of the trees in the garden. The event, like the whole novel, is narrated by Cosimo’s younger brother Biagio.

I have mentioned that we used to spend hours and hours on the trees, and not for ulterior motives as most boys, who go up only in search of fruit or birds’ nests, but for the pleasure of get­ting over difficult parts of the trunks and forks, reaching as high as we could, and finding a good perch on which to pause and look down at the world below, to call and joke at those passing by. So I found it quite natural that Cosimo’s first thought, at that unjust attack on him, was to climb up the holm oak, to us a familiar tree spreading its branches to the height of the dining­-room windows through which he could show his proud offended air to the whole family.

Little did Biagio suspect at the time – he will never encounter his brother on the ground again. Cosimo decides he won’t come down that night, sleeping in the dampness with little protection except the foolhardiness of youth and stubbornness. Everyone expects that he will come down the next day, but… he doesn’t. He never comes down again.

It’s a bizarre premise for a novel, but it works brilliantly. It’s such a simple conceit, and Calvino does interesting things with it. On the one hand, we see some of Cosimo’s exploits – meeting ruffians, courting a beautiful young woman, getting involved with some of the most significant personages of 18th-century Italy. He doesn’t skirt around the practicalities either – we gradually learn how he shelters himself, how he gets about great distances, and even (rather coyly) how he deals with bodily functions. It has some of the plotting of a ‘rattling good yarn’, and occasionally the cadence of it. But I found the novel rather more beautiful than adventurous. And I think that’s partly because we see things from the perspective of the left-behind brother, telling the story of his brother ‘sneaking around the edges of our lives from up on the trees’. For example, how lovely is this from Biagio, early in Cosimo’s exploits?

The moon rose late and shone above the branches. In their nests slept the titmice, huddled up like him. The night, the open, the silence of the park were broken by rustling of leaves and distant sounds, and the wind sweeping through the trees. At times there was a far-off murmur – the sea. From my window I listened to the scattered whispering and tried to imagine it heard without the protection of the familiar background of the house, from which he was only a few yards. Alone with the night around him, clinging to the only friendly object: the rough bark of a tree, scored with innumerable little tunnels where the larvae slept.

There is (presumably deliberate) self-consciousness to the way that any of Cosimo’s further-off adventures are described secondhand by Biagio. He hasn’t been present, and it’s not the most elegant way of portraying these things, but it feels part and parcel of Calvino’s satire of 18th-century literature. And thankfully the satire is largely in terms of plot and presentation, rather than style. The reason I didn’t mind the historical fiction element of it is that Calvino doesn’t try to make it feel at all historical. The dialogue doesn’t ape the 18th-century, and there is a vitality to the novel that comes largely because it would be improbable in any time period – its setting in the past adds to the oddness, in an excellent way.

My favourite parts of The Baron in the Trees were the beautiful descriptions or the sections about how his escape affects the family. The more bombastic bits were enjoyable but not, for me, the heart of the novel. And it is a novel that has such heart, despite its unconventionality.

I’ve finally started my Calvino journey, and better late than never.

Why I’m Not A Millionaire by Nancy Spain

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Nancy Spain has been having a new lease of life recently, with the re-issue of her detective novels. To a certain generation, she is also remembered as a regular on radio and TV panel shows. For me, I first came across her as a young journalist mentioned in Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne – and I knew that she talked about it in her 1956 autobiography, the eccentrically titled Why I’m Not A Millionaire.

The conceit of the title is that she explains how she has got to where she is – and why that path hasn’t led to untold riches. Along the way she covers her time at Roedean (a posh girls’ school), activities in war service, her big break in radio – adapting a novel by Winifred Watson, of all things, though not Miss Pettigrew – and her much-feted whirl through journalism, novel-writing, and celebrity. It’s such a delightfully insouciant and fun book which manages to bottle why she was so popular with public and stars alike.

We race through childhood rather quickly, though not without a few well-aimed barbs at Roedean and the type of woman who never moves on from her Roedean days. Quickly, we are thrown into her joyful 20s – moving with a wealthier crowd, but nobody appearing to give anything too much serious thought. Spain writes with exactly the right level of self-mockery, so you don’t dislike her younger self but also don’t particularly respect or envy her. Her abiding characteristic throughout the book could be described as ‘giving it a go’, and she doesn’t let experience, ability, or

All the West Hartlepool girls had a lot of money. They lived in big, prosperous houses with a full quota of maids cavorting in the back premises. They drank burgundy and fizzy lemonade for lunch and I was mad about them all. I thought they were a Very Fast Set Indeed. Considering that I was all the time mooning over Paddy or Michael they were very nice to me.

Then one day I ran out of money and couldn’t afford to pay for my round of gins-and-tonics. Bin pointed out in words of one kindly syllable how I mustn’t allow this to happen again. I had already spent the £50 Father had given me on rushing about to Liverpool and so on. (And my share of the petrol.) What was I to do?

Basically, she describes her life like we imagine the Mitford sisters lived (albeit a little earlier). She writes with the same exuberant flippancy of Nancy Mitford. It’s so fun – I wondered if it might get wearing over this number of pages, but I never stopped enjoying it. She’ll start a paragraph with something like ‘It was about this time I discovered all my savings had been swallowed up and I was in an advanced stage of insolvency.’ That might irritate someone who likes their fictional and non-fictional heroines to be sensible and wise, but I am not that person. This isn’t the book to read for soul-searching, but it is a constant delight.

Spain’s multi-faceted rise through the entertainment world is interrupted by World War Two, and it’s the nearest we get to genuine pathos – when she describes some of the men she knew and lost. But mostly she takes the opportunity to be very funny about her experiences in the W.R.N.S – exploring the well-meaning chaos behind the scenes, and her own comic incompetency in the midst of it.

The Recruiting Department was very grand, seeing as how it was all the time in contact with the general public. Recruiting Officers were so terribly smart to look at that it hurt: some of them wore almost royal blue uniform monkey jackets and all of them wore black satin ties bought at Hope Brothers. I joined a circus of Third Officers whose business it was to whip around the London medical boards, making brief notes on the character and personality of candidates in the teeny weeny space provided on the interview form. People who engrave the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin in their spare time might well take lessons from a W.R.N.S. Recruiting Officer. Contrary to general belief, however, all successful candidates for the Service were not (a) titled or (b) the Last First Sea Lord’s second cousin once removed.

Spain’s experiences in the W.R.N.S. were turned into his first book, a memoir (I haven’t read) called Thank You, Nelson. She details its chequered path to publication – and then its unexpected success. A copy was sent to A.A. Milne by some well-meaning publicist, and apparently he was livid at the idea of a woman writing a book about war – then read it, and considered it marvellous. His review in the Sunday Times was apparently responsible for Thank You, Nelson selling out its first and second editions more or less overnight. As Spain writes, “I knew the book must be a success when the Chief Officer Administration at W.R.N.S. Headquarters said, ‘The book was very disappointing after the review.'”

Spain wrote to thank Milne for his review and, in turn, he wrote to invite her to visit him at their home in Sussex. And thus we get the handful of pages which first led me to the book – and how I delighted in them. Not least because Spain is unaffectedly admiring of Milne. Her tone is often so light and unserious that her moments of genuine, unadulterated admiration are particularly noticeable. How I loved this paragraph, and how perfectly it describes any truly perfect, short period of time:

He said a lot more, that darling man, but I have forgotten the details. It has fused, shimmering into the golden light of that magic afternoon in the sun.

Once Spain was established as a successful writer, her adventures still seem surprisingly chaotic – jumping between different newspapers and periodicals, as well as different genres in her own books – the one after Thank You, Nelson was a biography of Mrs Beeton – always (at least in her depiction) moments away from some sort of literary or pecuniary crisis. A lot of 21st-century social media is taken up with self-deprecating humour, pretending that our lives and careers are forever on the point of collapse – and it’s a brand of humour I enjoy. It’s also a brand a humour that we see throughout humorous British writers of the early- and mid-20th centuries – particularly women. Think a more exuberant E.M. Delafield.

Something I particularly appreciated about Nancy Spain’s autobiography is that she is not ashamed to name drop. If you’re like me, you want the celebrity gossip – particularly about the authors and actors of the period. Many memoirists coyly pretend they never meet the great and the good, or treat them simply as everyday friends. Spain is canny enough to know her audience are starstruck by them, and treats each person as the Name they are. And she is delightfully pithy about some of them, without letting herself off the hook – here she is on Eudora Welty:

Eudora Welty still takes high marks as a Remarkable Author. She is very tall, pale, and slender, and she comes from Jackson, Mississippi, in the deep, deep South of North America. She has hands like graceful fish. Her books are always exclusively about those deep, deep parts and I cannot understand one single solitary word of them. In those days that pleased and impressed my very much. I longed to write a book that no one could understand. (Alas, when people read my books they understand me only too well.)

I started the dropped names. Here is an incomplete list of the authors, actors, and others that she writes about – just the ones she spends time with, not including those she relates about at second hand: Noel Coward, Osbert Sitwell, Clemence Dane, Barbara Beauchamp, Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Beverley Nichols, Wolf Mankowitz, Monica Dickens, Dorothy Parker, Cynthia Asquith, Mae West, Vivien Leigh, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Clark Gable, Henry Green, Francis Wyndham, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Joyce Cary, Angus Wilson, Noel Langley, Nancy Mitford, Colette, Christian Dior, Joyce Grenfell and Winifred Atwell. I daresay Spain was discreet, but she gives a wonderful sense of indiscretion – or at least a lack of artifice.

The only really heartrending moment is the final line of the book – which is this:

Whatever the next forty years turn out to be, I am sure of one thing. They couldn’t possibly be more fun than the forty years that have gone before: whether I manage to become a millionaire or not.

When Why I’m Not A Millionaire was published, Nancy Spain was just under 40. She wouldn’t get another forty years – she would, in fact, die in a plane crash at the age of 46. What a lot of life she managed to pack into those few short decades – and what a joyful record of it. Every moment of this autobiography is a breath of fresh air, and I thoroughly recommend you spend the time with her.

The Oracles by Margaret Kennedy

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It’s not often that I buy a book and read it straightaway, but I was so intrigued by The Oracles (1955) by Margaret Kennedy when I picked it up in Chipping Camden last weekend that I immediately started it.

Everybody has been reading The Feast in the past couple of years, and I enjoyed it a lot – but had to add it to the list of Kennedy novels that haven’t quite bowled me over. I’ve read four or five of her novels – I’ve liked some, admired some, disliked some, even given up on one. But I’ve finally loved one: The Oracles is my favourite of hers by some distance.

Also published as Act of God in the US, the cover of my edition tells you how the novel starts. We are instantly flung into a vicious thunderstorm:

The thunderstorm frightened a great many people in East Head. It came after a phenomenal heatwave, and it reached the Bristol Channel upon a Saturday night.

During the afternoon it had rumbled a long way off, to the north-east, over the Welsh coast. At ten o’clock the thunder-claps were coming fast upon the heels of the flashes. An hour later it was described by everybody as right overhead, although this hardly did justice to its menace. Had it remained vertical it would at least have kept to its own place; it became horizontal, a continuous glare, punctuated by short sharp cracks. It no longer descended from the sky, but sprang out of the earth – sizzling along the roads and blazing through drawn window curtains.

Little does East Head know the far-reaching effects this storm will have… more on that in a moment. East Head is a small village that is ordinary in almost every respect. The one thing that sets it apart is the presence of Conrad Swann, the noted sculptor. His name looms large in avant-garde circles and he is widely revered by a sizeable group of acolytes, all of whom long to be close to him but who receive minimal encouragement in return.

Swann is better as a sculptor than a husband or father. He is living in East Head with a woman who is not his wife (who is, in fact, the wife of his best friend) – though this scandal is no longer new, and the villagers don’t much care anymore. This is 1955, after all, not 1925. He has a sizeable brood of children and his mistress has brought a couple with her too – all the children are left alone to live more or less wild, looking after one another and playing out elaborate fantasies in their back garden. There is little money to spare, and neither the villagers nor the acolytes want anything much to do with them – but they are self-sufficient. Which is just as well, because Swann has absconded.

Conrad Swann has been working on a new sculpture – all anybody knows is that it is called Apollo. There is a group of local intellectuals who want to put their village (and themselves) on the map, and they want to secure the sculpture with local public funds. Other intellectuals think it should be taken to a more prestigious place. And most of the villagers are contentedly mystified by it, and anticipate being mystified by anything Swann produces.

What only the reader – and one of the young Swann siblings – realises is that ‘Apollo’, discovered in the shed, is not the sculpture Swann was working on. What is taken for ‘Apollo’ is actually… a garden chair that was struck by lightning in the storm. It has been melted and bent out of shape. And – deliciously – the intellectuals think it’s a wonderful piece.

“Mr. Pattison!” said Martha solemnly. “Here is a work of complete integrity. It makes no compromise, no concession, to what the public may demand, or think that it likes. To state his secret, private vision is all that concerns Conrad. Can’t you understand?”

“That,” put in Carter, “is something which you can’t expect anybody to understand but us, Martha. The artists are the only honest people.”

Margaret Kennedy has great fun throughout the novel in poking fun at this sort of person – but The Oracles is much more than a satire of artistic elitism. I’ve not mentioned them yet, but the real central characters are Dickie and Christina. They have only been married for a couple of years, but is evident that both of them think it was probably a mistake. He is a solicitor regarded as ‘bumpkin’ by the oracles and considered too clever by half by some of the villagers. He has an honest, unpretentious interest in Swann’s work and is keen to learn more – and, brilliantly, he doesn’t fall for the hype: he even reads several books on Apollo to try and see a connection between the chair/sculpture and the god, without success.

This pursuit of art makes Christina feel alienated and judged, though. He makes the mistake of suggesting she could be ‘provincial’, and this unintentional barb echoes throughout the rest of the novel – Kennedy expertly shows us how someone can return time and again to a word that cuts them to the quick, and Christina retaliates with increasing unkindness. Ironically, Dickie is quite provincial himself much of the time, and doesn’t seem to mind. It is a marriage of unequals in many ways, and it comes to a head over a seemingly unrelated question of art.

Kennedy’s talent is to make both Christina and Dickie quite sympathetic – certainly moreso than any of the other adults in the novel. Dickie is driven by a genuine wish to learn, and Christina has an intense compassion for others, particularly children. They are seeing the worst in each other, but the reader can see the best in them. Here’s Kennedy on the aftermath of one of their feuds, caused by Dickie getting embarrassingly drunk at an event:

He could not, in any case, have told her much, because he remembered very little. He was desperately ashamed of himself. He had been drunk before, once or twice in his life, but only upon excusable occasions and never since his marriage. It shocked him deeply to think that his wife should have been obliged to put him to bed – that he had left her all alone and frightened for hours while he made a beast of himself. She had, he felt, every right to be furious and he was most anxious to apologise, if allowed an opportunity. He got none. She would not even permit him to say that his conduct had been bestial. Not at all. If he must know what she thought when she found him lying on the mat, he had better understand that a man in such a condition is generally rather pathetic. No, she was not angry. She was sorry for him. He need say no more about it.

Free and full forgiveness is the good woman’s most formidable weapon. Nothing makes a man feel smaller; yet few husbands have the brutality, or the strength of mind, to reject it. Christina was aware of its essential unfairness, but she was really very angry.

The Oracles is a very funny book but it’s a book with a lot of heart to it. Towards the end, as we see more of Swann himself, it feels little less heart-filled – but I still really fell for it. The ingredients I’d enjoyed in different Kennedy novels come together here in the perfect recipe – for me, at least. I’m aware that I probably think it’s Kennedy’s best work (that I’ve read) because it is the one that is closest to my taste. If it sounds like it could be closest to yours too, then I recommend seeking it out.

Love and Salt Water by Ethel Wilson #SpinsterSeptember

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I haven’t actually read very much of the book I had decided to read for Spinster September – a brilliant brainchild of Nora aka pear.jelly – but one of the other books I was reading also qualifies. Ethel Wilson was one of the Canadian authors I was keen to find on my recent holiday, and while I was there I bought and read her final novel, Love and Salt Water (1956).

The novel follows Ellen Guppy through large sections of her life, starting in childhood. Of course, nobody would call a young girl a ‘spinster’, so not all of this novel qualifies – but it’s clear from the opening paragraph that Ellen doesn’t have the stereotypical views of marriage that other girls of her generation are expected to:

When Ellen Cuppy was eleven years old and sat on the foot of the bed, getting in the way of her big sister Nora who was packing her suitcases with great care, she thought how sad it was for Nora, who was so fair and pretty, to marry that old Mr. Morgan Peake who was all of forty; yet Nora did not seem to mind, but shook out the crêpe de Chine nightdresses and laid them on the bed and slowly folded them again with tissue paper in between, and Ellen thought that Nora was like a lamb getting ready for the sacrifice; and thinking of lambs and sacrifices she thought of garlands and timbrels and damsels and maidens and vestal virgins, such things as she read about and liked the sound of but did not understand.

Not long into the novel, Ellen’s mother dies – in fact, Ellen discovers her. Wilson is such a good writer that the scene of this discovery is haunting, and she shows us a reaction that is unusual and yet entirely right. In many ways, the Bildungsroman plot of Love and Sea Water treads some expected paths – but Wilson’s observant eye means that, within this, nothing is ever quite as you’d expect. I thought young Ellen’s response to her mother’s dead body was brilliant:

She stretched out her hand toward her mother’s telephone and drew it back, to defend her mother and herself – and her father too – just for a few more moments, against her mother having died. Yet she was sure her mother had died. This must be what that is.

When she had cried awhile, standing there in her nightdress in the stillness of the room, very frightened with this quiet stranger her dear mother, she managed to pick up the telephone because she must at some time pick it up, and all the while she never took her eyes off her mother whom she was now giving over to other people’s talk and arrangements (it was strange how strongly Ellen felt this as the minutes advanced).

The first hints of the ‘salt water’ of the title come to prominence when Ellen is whisked away by her grieving father on a cruise. She is disorientated and confused, and trying to behave well and keep her father happy. Wilson shows us this in the background, but swirling around is the life of the ship – including the tragedy of a bo’sun swept overboard. She balances Ellen’s internal narrative with reality: her grief is not as significant to the other passengers as the day-to-day gossip and drama that they are experiencing themselves.

As the years pass, Ellen’s sister Nora follows conventions – marrying an older man, having a child, relishing the trajectory that is held up as the ideal. Ellen, meanwhile, is not self-consciously maverick. Her character is fairly quiet and unassuming, and she doesn’t make ripples for the sake of it. But this conventional path doesn’t work for her. She meets some suitable men, but is not interested in them – or at least not sufficiently – despite the urging of her relatives. I think this passage, coming after a proposal from a man she is merely fond of, could be a mantra for a certain group of the fictional women being remembered during Spinster September:

[…] at once her freedom became essential to her again. This free life-without-an-object, which had become so boring, was suddenly necessary to her security. She knew this life well, and would not exchange it for some other life which might be only a new conformity, and then perhaps a prison far away with a stranger.

Will Ellen end the novel a spinster? Well, I shan’t spoil it for you – but I will say that it was a very satisfying ending, true to her character. My edition has an afterword by Anne Marriott and she mentions an alternative ending that Wilson wrote – and I’m very glad she didn’t use it. The one that was published is excellent.

I really enjoyed Love and Salt Water – a short novel, and where some scenes and stages of Ellen’s life are truncated and could perhaps have been explored in more depth. But also one which comes with the wisdom and clarity of a full life and a long writing career. And I particularly enjoyed recognising the settings, as parts of the novel take place in both of the cities I visited – Vancouver and Toronto.

An accidental addition to Spinster September, but glad I could contribute!

Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay No.28

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After a few days of feeling a bit lukewarm, or worse, about the books I’ve been reading, it was great today to read a really brilliant little novella. Sagittarius (1957) is my first Natalia Ginzburg, though I do have Family Lexicon on my shelves – and I also have Valentino, because Daunt Books have just republished Sagittarius and Valentino and sent me copies. Thank you!

This novella, translated by Avril Bardoni, is only 122 pages but manages to get so much into that short space. Here’s how it opens:

My mother had bought a house in the suburbs of the city. It was a modest house on two floors, surrounded by a soggy, unkempt garden. Beyond the garden there was a cabbage patch, and beyond the cabbage patch a railway line. It was October when she moved, and the garden lay beneath a carpet of wet leaves.

The house had narrow wrought-iron balconies and a short flight of steps down to the garden. There were four rooms downstairs and six upstairs, and my mother had furnished them with the few belongings that she had brought with her from Dronero: the high iron bedsteads, shaky and rattly, with coverlets of heavy flowered silk; the little stuffed chairs with muslin frills; the piano; the tiger skin; a marble hand resting on a cushion.

Like a curiously high number of narrators of my Books in May, this one is unnamed – as is, as far as I can tell, her mother. The narrator’s sister does get a name – Giulia – and much of the first half of this story is about the dynamics between the three women in their new home. The mother is domineering, determined, and relentless in her disparagement of her daughters – while simultaneously trying to praise them to others, and secure them husbands. The narrator is resentful and equally determined herself, though more often in what she refuses to be than what she actually does. Indeed, she is quite a passive character – an obstacle, rather than a catalyst.

In not many words, Ginzburg manages to show a complex, detailed, and wholly believable family group. Her little moments of seering observation are brilliant, and tell us so much about a person – for instance, the narrator comments on her mother that ‘when things were going badly for someone else, she always felt a little thrill of pleasure disguised behind an urgent desire for action’. There is love but little affection between the female characters.

The mother is ambitious for herself, as well as her daughters’ marriages, though in this case it is an ambition paired with inertia. She speaks a lot about her big plans for her future – opening an art gallery, say – but does little but talk. She relies on financial help from relatives, including her sisters who run a shop which she, the mother, believes she could run much more efficiently – though her brief stint there is unsuccessful.

Into their lives comes Signora Fontana and her curious coterie of hangers-on. She has connections to the great and the good (and, importantly, the rich) and Signora Fontana and the mother quickly encourage each other into an excitable friendship.

When we went back to the sitting room, my mother and Signora Fontana were already on first name terms. They had certainly had a good talk ranging over a multitude of subjects and had decided that the art gallery as projected by my mother should become a joint venture for the two of them; and it was going to be wonderful and exciting, a true intellectual centre in a city which had, up to now, catered so inadequately for the arts. They were sitting together on the divan like old friends, with an ashtray brimful of cigarette butts and mandarin peel beside them. Menelao was sitting on my mother’s knee, and as soon as we appeared she said that cats were better than dogs and Giulia’s puppy had tried her patience to the limit. Seeing the three of us enter together, Signora Fontana cried that she simply had to do a group portrait of us. My mother, agreeing, said that I should have to be decently dressed, however: she couldn’t bear that dreadful jumper, it made me look like a Russian factory worker.

As the novella continues, Signora Fontana and the mother are forever going for coffee together and making plans, but all the rich friends are busy all the time and the art gallery – or shop, named Sagittarius, hence the title – remains a discussion topic rather than an actuality. The reader has to wait and see whether dreams will become reality, or if there are reasons why it keeps being put off into the distance.

The plot is entirely unpredictable, but what elevates Sagittarius is Ginzburg’s clear-eyed understanding of human relationships. And particularly the lies we tell, and the lies we choose to believe. It all comes from the daughter’s perspective, and she is an interesting and well-constructed mixture of dispassionate and occasionally frustrated. Her passivity means we can go several pages where she seems objective, and then a flare up of resentment or confusion or pathos will remind us that we are reading a very personal view of the situation.

Sagittarius has made me keen to get to more Ginzburg. I was reminded of Stefan Zweig’s brilliant ability to sum up entire relationship dynamics through a crucial, feverish short period. And I thought of Sybille Bedford’s excellence at mother/daughter relationships. Both great authors to be reminded of, while being also very much her own writer.