1990s

Putting bread and butter on the table

StuckinaBook All , 14 Comments

You know that, even when you have hundreds of unread books, not a lot of spare cash, and no spare reading time – sometimes, even with these limitations, a book will make you buy it? Impossible-to-resist, head-straight-to-Amazon-to-buy sort of book? Well, my e-friend Lyn (from dovegreybooks Yahoo group, a source of many such books) mentioned one the other day, and, mere days later, it is in front of me.

It’s The Bread and Butter Stories by Mary Norton. For those who recognise the name but can’t think where, it’s probably because she is the author of The Borrowers, a back I’m shamefully never read, but indeed to do so soon. We grew up loving the TV series. I’ll tell you what Lyn wrote about it, not sure where it’s quoted from, perhaps the Virago website…

Reminiscent of Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor, these 15 recently discovered short stories by the author of The Borrowers are wonderful period pieces about being an upper-middle class woman in the 1940s and early 50s. Many are reminiscent of Brief Encounter with their longings for adventure or romance to break the stifling constraints on their lives. Here are respectable conventional women settled into dull marriages finding themselves entertaining the notion of an affair while on holiday; a dowdy woman who suddenly decides to have her face done and take the £1.00 post-office savings and blow it on a fine hat. Then there are funny, satirical pieces: useful knowledge like how to cure cold feet at bedtime, a sideways look at acting for a television drama and a very entertaining and fascinating piece on writing for children which includes dialogue with an editor who wants short words and happy stories. Written with a wry and gentle humour, the collection makes for fascinating reading.

Doesn’t it sound wonderful? I’ve yet to read them, but it will only be a matter of time… Lyn did only mention the book four days ago, after all. I have read the Introduction by Mary Norton’s daughter – apparently Mary Norton called these stories ‘bread and butter stories’ because they put bread and butter on the table – written for magazines, but not published together until the 1990s when found in the attic… I’ll report back when I’m done, but I’m willing to bet at least one person will already be scrambling to Amazon or abebooks to get their hands on a copy!

(Results) – Letters from Menabilly

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What a nail-biter the Dickens vs. Hardy match was – and the final result was… a tie! 9 votes each, and 3 going for neither. And, what was even more interesting, most voters seemed not to have to hesitate for a moment. I wasn’t sure which way it would swing, but didn’t expect it to be so close as to be identical. Which, I suppose, means that my vote will be the decider… and I choose Dickens. Something unique in his writing, so witty but grotesque, a world which is unmistakably his. I admire Hardy a lot, but… Charles wins it.

Onto a wholly different topic, I finished Letters From Menabilly today. These are letters from Daphne du Maurier to Oriel Malet (Persephone author; I read the introduction ages ago, so can’t remember the reasoning behind excluding Oriel’s letters. Perhaps they weren’t saved?) Bought it in the midst of my *intended* du Maurier spree, which ended up being just The Flight of the Falcon and My Cousin Rachel, and now this. Somehow it hasn’t worked out exactly as I’d hoped… instead of building on my deep love of Rebecca, and hopeful adoration of Daphne du Maurier, she has rather faded in my estimation, both as a writer and a person. I shouldn’t have expected her to be able to match Rebecca, but I found The Flight of the Falcon fairly tedious at times, though My Cousin Rachel was rather good. It was more on the personal front…

Others have read Letters from Menabilly and loved Daphne as a result. Lynne aka dovegreyreader rather liked it, I think Becca Oxford Reader was also a fan. I enjoyed reading it, but found Daphne to be rather cold-hearted, a little selfish, and not altogether charming. I think opinion shifted irredeemably when she wrote this to Oriel Malet: “If I had never married, and hadn’t had financial success with my books, I think I’d have lived the same life you do”. I paraphrase a little, because I can’t find the quotation, but that’s more or less it. How insensitive! Yes, perhaps I can’t judge the friendship from outside, but so many of these letters seem to gloss over Oriel’s concerns and talk about Daphne’s own.

And then the in-jokes and funny neologisms. We know, from reading the Mitford letters, that these can be adorable or witty – I just found them “tarsome”, as Georgie would say, in Daphne’s letters. Tell-him and crumb and a shilling and beeding and waine and pegging and Doom… incomprehensible without a glossary and so often used, and without any noticeable charm. Am I being contrary? Perhaps. But ‘Tell-Him’ (used to describe more or less anything Daphne found dull or lecturey, to the slightest degree) was a label for almost everything she encountered, and seemed a bit cruel.

There was one exciting bit, which I’d already read about in Lynne’s review – when she writes about Frank Baker, the author of my beloved book Miss Hargreaves. He sent Daphne du Maurier a copy of his novel The Birds, which predates her short story which Alfred Hitchcock adapted so memorably – Daphne writes, ‘So I began his, rather smiling derisively, thinking it would be nonsense, and it’s frightfully good! Much more psychological politics than mine, and going into great Deep Thoughts, I was quite absorbed!’ I have The Birds but have yet to read it…

One final thing I must say – Oriel Malet comes across as a lovely, lovely person. Not only the recipient of the letters, so intersperses letters every now and then with prose for context. Usually explaining where they both were at the stage of their lives when writing, but also with such interest and charm and I looked forward to these sections the most. Her experiences living on a houseboat are especially delightful. So, though Daphne comes across as no fairy godmother, the book is worth seeking out – and I shall be turning my Daphne-fest into an Oriel hunt.

Black Dogs

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments


Somehow, over the years, I’ve read five novels by Ian McEwan. Not such an astonishing fact, except that he is far from being my favourite novelist – I admire quite a few of them, really like some, dislike others. And, thinking about it, four of those five have been read for book groups or similar – including Black Dogs which I finished (and, indeed, started) today.

It certainly battles out with Atonement for being my favourite McEwan – people have recommended ‘early McEwan’ to me, and I can see why. The writing here is compact, tense – so often I’d finish reading paragraphs or phrases and think “wow” – quite the opposite of Saturday.

Black Dogs centres around an incident which happened on a couple’s honeymoon, involving the dogs in question. We spend most of the novel knowing that something took place, but not knowing what, so I shan’t spoil it for you – the novel is filled with the impact and effects of the event. June and Bernard are the central couple – both old by the ‘present day’, both recounting their lives to the narrator, Jeremy, who is writing a sort of biography. We flit back to their youth, forward to their separate old age, to Jeremy’s life and marriage (to their daughter). Bernard is an ex-Communist whose narrow ideology cannot be made compatible with June’s spiritual ‘conversion’. I give that word inverted commas as, though June is supposed to represent ‘religion’ in the novel, she never does much other than embrace a hazy spirituality.

Nevertheless, she is the novel’s most interesting character, one with more depth than the rest. It is particularly to see her in an old people’s home; how disorientated she is: ‘In the few seconds that it took to approach slowly and set down my bag, she had to reconstruct her whole existence, who and where she was, how and why she came to be in this small white-walled room. Only when she had all that could she begin to remember me.’ Makes me want to watch Away From Her again…

Perhaps the most intriguing bit of the book is something Jeremy thinks, when researching the lives of June and Bernard: ‘Turning points are the inventions of story-tellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by, a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth.’ If McEwan is anything, he is the novelist of turning points. And usually very good with this technique, I must say – why is he arguing against it here, I wonder?

All in all, I thought it was very good – not much of a linear plot, more vignettes pulled together by the centring force of the Black Dogs incident. Some incredibly taut language and effective writing. I should add, however, that the majority of the group’s response at book group was middling or negative – but we all agreed it was better than Saturday!

For the benefit of those who have found their way here from the book group, here are the links to other Book Group Books which I’ve written about here…. not as many as I’d thought. And, for anyone interested, this is the book group’s website. Very nice it is too.

Speaking of Love – Angela Young
Alva & Irva – Edward Carey
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

The Good Life

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

As promised, another book to add to my (in no order) 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About – and the sixth non-fiction book to make the list. White Cargo by Felicity Kendal was a book I picked up 20p in a local charity shop years ago, on the strength of loving her performance in The Good Life. For those who don’t know it (the programme was called Good Neighbors in the US) it was a 1970s sitcom about self-sufficiency in Suburbia. Felicity Kendal and Richard Briers kept chickens and a goat in their suburban back garden, much to the displeasure of their decidedly upper-class (and hilarious) neighbours, played by Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington.

So, I assumed Felicity Kendal’s autobiography might focus on this sitcom, and the British acting scene of the 1970s. I couldn’t have been much further from the truth. What I didn’t know about Felicity Kendal was that she was born and brought up in India, as part of an acting troupe led by her father Geoffrey Kendal – they toured from place to place, performing everything from (lots of) Shakespeare to (hurray!) A. A. Milne. These recollections are leant poignancy by the fact that Kendal writes her autobiography at the bedside of father Geoffrey, who is in a coma and slowly dying. It would be mawkish in fiction, but in non-fiction it is courageous and moving and gives Felicity Kendal a real drive to write her history.

And a compelling history it is. Having her father so near death doesn’t affect the honesty of her narrative – the loving/warring relationship between the two is represented with great truthfulness, and comes to a head when she decides to move to England to pursue her acting career. Before that decision is made, she describes a childhood surrounded by hand-to-mouth actors with a love of their trade – as well as a firsthand guide to living in India in ‘the long twilight of the British Empire’, as the Evening Standard described it.

Utterly fascinating, moving, witty and with a writerly skill which makes one wonder if the stage’s gain was the book’s loss. Certainly the best autobiography I’ve read by someone whose profession isn’t writing. Even if you’ve never heard of Felicity Kendal, this is a captivating account of an experience both extraordinary, and representative of a type of acting group whose story is seldom told, and which doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

Blinking, Bells and Butterflies

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Doing well on yesterday’s challenge, people – keep up the good work!

I read another Oxford Book Group book today – in fact, had to request it to a reading room and read it all in my tea breaks. Luckily it was quite short. That’s what happens when the entire book is dictated by the winking of an eyelid.

I don’t know how familiar people are with Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly? A film is coming out soon, so perhaps that has helped it leap to the public eye. It is basically the selective autobiography of an editor-in-chief of Elle magazine who has a major stroke and is left with locked-in syndrome. As he points out, the first (and he suggests, only) character in literature to have this condition is Noirtier in Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. He can no longer move any of his body, except his left eyelid, but retains total cognitive ability. The French term for it, “maladie de l’emmuré vivant”, literally means walled-in alive disease.

How does one make a book out of this? Well, if it weren’t true, it could only be used as a tasteless or lazy gimmick in the background of another narrative – as it is, Bauby writes an honest but witty account, heart-rending but not chest-beatingly gloom. Alongside day-to-day occurences, like the visit of his two children, Bauby intersperses nostalgic recollections, ironies, witty musings and a very human frustration and spirit. He is able to see the humour in a desperate situation – one of my favourite bits, which had to be translated for the version I read, was when he asked for his glasses, only to be stopped early and asked why he wanted the moon (lunettes; lune). And in some ways (forgive me if I stretch a point) that is what The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly performs – the mundane alongside the extraordinary; the glasses alongside the moon. Though a slim volume, Bauby has created a beautiful elegy to living and a pathos-filled account of life as an observer rather than participant. You will finish this autobiography recognising the fragility of existence, but laughing at the pomposity of any such idea in the face of Bauby’s humour and stubborn refusal to let even the most extreme situation crush him.

Letters, Pray

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Following on from yesterday’s post about my own personal letters, we’ll move onto published letters. I think the topic has come up here before, and Karen has definitely discussed it, but I had a slightly different angle on the matter today.

I tend to read letters when I’m, um, otherwise occupied – useful to have something to peruse in snatches, where the thread won’t be lost if five minute bursts are the only opportunity nature affords – and have recently finished Dear Friend & Gardener by Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd. This is two years of exchanged letters, covering a few topics but almost always gardens and gardening. The scenario is a little unlike most collections of letters, in that these friends appear to have been approached by a publisher before the two years exchange began: this is from the last letter –

I suppose this’ll be my last letter of the year, which means of the series, but it does not mean that we shall stop writing to or telephoning each other. Just that was shall no longer be going public. I don’t think that has inhibited us much. The main difference, from a totally private letter, is the extra explanatory matter that is necessary, as, in this letter, ‘the autumn-flowering Crocus speciosus’. Obviously ‘autumn-flowering’ would be omitted in a wholly private letter, as we both know this perfectly well. Apart from that, perhaps the odd indiscertion had to be forgone, but nothing much.

Quite. I know absolutely nothing about gardening. As I read the letters, I got the feeling I was one of the people Beth and Christopher would most pity – someone who likes seeing gardens, but is content to remain in total ignorance as to how and why it looks like it does. These letters are littered with Latin plant names, and at one point Beth professes quite sweet astonishment that the public might not know them all. For subject matter, I couldn’t grasp this book – I read on because of the friendship and the passion these two writers exchanged. Dear Friend & Gardener is a small window on a practice I know nothing about, but also a thriving love of gardening that is both alien and captivating to me.

Have you ever read a book about something about which you knew nothing, only to be enthralled by the writer’s passion? A biography, perhaps, or letters or just regular non-fiction. I’ve never picked up non-fiction before unless I was confident I’d be interested in the topic, but in this genre – like any other – good writing can be read for itself, and spark an unknown interest.

The next collection of letters I’ve started is Letters to a Friend: The Spiritual Autobiography of a Distinguished Writer by Rose Macaulay. The ‘Friend’ in question is a Catholic priest in America, whose guidance and wisdom helped Macaulay rediscover her faith. Only Macaulay’s side of the correspondance is published, but so far it is proving witty, touching and interesting. And has a beautiful cover…

Christmas BOOKings now being taken

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It’s the 25th, and you know what that means – only two months until Christmas. Yep, usually I’m there with the Grumpy Old Men and complaining that Christmas comes earlier every year, with tinsel going up as soon as the Easter eggs have been melted down for fondue. But I’ll make an exception for books, as it’s not their fault that marketing has to happen in October. Today I’m going to chat about two different Christmas books – very different, actually, but both worth mentioning.
This week, like a couple of other bloggers, I was sent Lynn Brittney’s Christine Kringle, described as a book for children of all ages. All the Gift Bringers from around the world are meeting for the annual Yule Conference, which debates such issues as whether Gift Days should be internationally universalised, or whether women can be become the hereditary Gift Bringer if a Yule family have no male offspring. This is especially important to Christine, daughter of Kriss Kringle, as she has no brothers and wishes to inherit her Yule duty. In the midst of this, the council of Plinkbury, a town in Worcestershire (hurray!) decide to ban Christmas. Off flies Christine and her Japanese and English friends to get Christmas reinstated… An enjoyable book, though not my usual fare, and was delighted to see Worcestershire get in print, as it was my homeland for thirteen years. Can’t work out if Plinkbury is based on a genuine town, though… there certainly isn’t one of that name. Unsurprising, really.
When I started the book, I was a little dubious at all the national stereotypes. You know – Italians in the Mafia; British sullen; Japanese polite and industrious; Americans saving the day. But Brittney melds these characters into a fun plot which keeps you turning the pages. I do have quibbles with the polemics Christine delivers – as a Christian, I didn’t like to see the Christ part of CHRISTmas swept under the carpet so much, quite openly, and I’m too British not to blush at some of the bits about loving ourselves and finding a hero inside every one of us and so forth. But if you’re feeling Christmassy and uncynical, give this one a go.

The second Christmas book I wanted to mention is Jostein Gaarder’s The Christmas Mystery, initially published in 1992. The book is divided into 24, being the first twenty-four days of Decemver – like a big advent calendar, in fact. The central character, a little boy called Joachim, is given a mysterious old advent calendar – each day opened provides a slip of paper and a picture. Through the story on the bits of paper, we follow Elisabet as she wends her way through the shepherds and wisemen as they journey towards Christ’s Nativity – and Joachim’s family try to connect it to the Elisabet who disappeared at Christmas 1948. This is a beautiful book, with mystery and atmosphere and the magic of Christmas without making the festival commercial or saccharine. I read it last year, a chapter a day through advent, and would definitely recommend reading it that way.

Oh, and don’t forget you still have a chance to get Miss Hargreaves!

7 Books You Will Have Heard About And Have Probably Read (Most Of)

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Never let it be said that I am out of touch with the populus. In a year where I’ve read more Middle English than your average preteen, I’ve also just finished a book nearly all of ’em will have read. Yup, having reached page 766, have completed my third read of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The film’s coming out soon, and I wanted to refresh my memory…

In the early days, when JK Rowling was producing one of the series a year, Harry Potter was the same age as me. I’ve had the opportunity to overtake him now, but even so, I wasn’t there from the outset. The first time our paths crossed was when I helped out on the school’s Carnegie Prize Panel (which didn’t have any effect on the actual procedure, but was rather fun) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter III) was one of the choices. This was when Harry was big, but not huge. And I was hooked – part of me wanted to loath the book, but… no, I was hooked. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has read any of the series, and still dislikes it.

So what is it about JKR’s writing? Well, if I knew that, I’d probably be a millionaire by now. But we did have a lecture on Harry Potter at Oxford once, in the first week that I was at university, and the lecturer pointed out that JKR rarely used descriptive language, or anything which veered from the action-action-action. This, said Dr. Purkiss (herself, with her son Michael, an author under the pseudonym Tobias Druitt), was either incredibly clever writing, or incredibly bad writing. True, take any chunk of prose and Virginia Woolf it ain’t – but Rowling’s ability to make you read on is unparalleled. Who would have thought children would willingly read 700+ pages? And I read it over a single weekend, so that I wouldn’t have the ending spoilt by friends at school on Monday. Perhaps I’m not the best example of someone who needed persuasion to read, but you get the idea.

So. Where do my musings point? Nowhere, to be honest, except to demonstrate myself not quite the literary snob I might seem, and to hope lots of others hold up their hands in solidarity. No reason why one can’t enjoy Woolf and wizards; Shakespeare and Sirius Black; Austen and Aurors… you get the picture. Speaking of pictures, there must be a thousand sketches I could have done to accompany a post on Harry Potter. But I’m tired… so I’ve copied this one, which is hopefully the way things are heading for the next generation. Fingers crossed.

50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About

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Thank you for all your comments yesterday, much appreciated! We’re still all very chuffed here – oh, and do keep contributing your name to the BAFAB draw until the end of the week. Will probably do the draw on Sunday.

It’s been quite a while since I added another book to the ’50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About’, which are listed down the left-hand column of this page – so today I’m going to add the eleventh. This one was a cert from the offset.

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman. This was the first book I ever bought new on impulse. That sounds like I have admirable restraint in book purchasing, but I think you know me well enough to despute that allegation – rather, my impulse-purchases are almost always secondhand books. But this one I couldn’t leave on the shelf.

The book is quite small, in length and height – a pocket book, if you will. The subtitle is ‘Confessions of a Common Reader’, and anyone who has manoeuvred themselves to a website with the words ‘Stuck’, ‘in’, ‘a’, and ‘Book’ in the title will be entranced. In bitesize chapters, just perfect for one-a-night-before-bed, Fadiman explores the foibles and activites of the book obsessed. You’ll recognise the lot.

My favourite section is ‘Never Do That To A Book’:

‘When I was elevn and my brother was thirteen, our parents took us to Europe. At the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen, as he had done virtually every night of his literate life, Kim left a book facedown on the bedside table. The next afternoon, he returned to find the book closed, a piece of paper inserted to mark the page, and the following note, signed by the chambermaid, resting on its cover:

SIR, YOU MUST NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK’

Don’t know about you, but I’m cheering on the chambermaid. The chapter divides readers into ‘Courtly Lovers’ and ‘Carnal Lovers’; the latter are happy to use their books as table-wedges, tennis rackets or surf-boards, the former wouldn’t let a biro within ten metres. I’m definitely Courtly… how about you?

Ex Libris is a witty, warm collection of essay-anecdotes, a perfect gift for something bookish, but equally a perfect gift to yourself. Find out about The Odd Shelf, Literary Gluttony, and the Joy of Sesquipedalians, and scream in recognition at every page.

Brrr…

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

I was going to chat about all the books I read on holiday, but I’m too sleepy to do so. Have just come back from a village pub quiz, to which I went with my family. We managed to come first, and I contributed about eight answers, two of which were ‘Dolly Parton’. Worrying. And only one of which wasn’t already given by someone else on the team. No literature round, you see.

ANYWAY I’m supposed to be talking about books, aren’t I? So I’ll kick off with my favourite of the four, Tove Jansson’s A Winter Book. Cue picture.
As you may remember, The Summer Book was the first book to feature in my ’50 Books…’ (though that list isn’t in any particular order), and so I was merely exercising my civic/blogic duty when purchasing this publication from ‘Sort Of Books’ (an offshoot of Penguin, I believe). I worried a little that sunny beaches wouldn’t put me in the right frame of mind for a wintery book – but I needn’t have worried. The lack of sun was a dampener on parts of the holiday, but put me in completely the right position to read about chilly Finland. Finland? One of the Scandinavian countries, I can never remember which.

On the other hand, the contents belie the title anyway – this collection of stories, taken from various other collections, aren’t all wintery. Some of them are positively scorching – and Jansson is so brilliant at writing about temperature and weather, that you feel it. In fact, the term ‘evocative’ could have been invented for Jansson’s writing – perhaps because it’s a translation, but every word in this anthology has such depth, and feeling, and is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Except for The Summer Book.

The stories are mostly from the perspective of Tove as a child, though some towards the end focus on old age. Each one is slight, with little of significance occuring – in ‘Jeremiah’, the child competes for the attentions of a foreigner collecting bits and pieces on the beach; ‘Snow’ describes moving house, and the consequent interpretations the child transfers onto the snowdrift; ‘The Iceberg’ concerns, surprisingly, an iceberg arriving at the coast, which the little girl can’t quite reach: “It lay there bumping against the rocks at the end of the point where it was deep. and there was deep black water and just the wring distance between us. If it had been shorter I should have jumped over; if it had been a little longer I could have thought: ‘What a pity, no one can manage to get over that’. Now I had to make up my mind. And that’s an awful thing to have to do.”

I get quite irritated by books which boast of how much you’ll learn about the nation, culture etc. When I read fiction, I don’t want a travel manual. But Jansson achieves something much better – the reader is immersed in the life of the child, country and all, and all sorts of local details flood in, without being obtrusive.

Perhaps it is underwhelming to end a review with simply “read it”. I’m sure Karen will do better when she reports back. But I’ve rarely had a more involving and beautiful reading experience than with Jansson’s short stories, and if I could have two books by the same author on my ’50 Books…’ list…

Second favourite short story writer. Can you guess the first?