1996

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

StuckinaBook All , , 13 Comments

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.

Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl

StuckinaBook All , , , , 3 Comments

I bought Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl in 2011, and have been intending to read it pretty much every October since. Finally I managed to schedule it in! It needn’t be read in October, of course, but it felt too apposite to miss.

The novel was published in Danish in 1996, and translated by Anne Born four years later. Grøndahl has a long and prolific career in Holland, but only a handful of his novels have been translated into English – including the excellent Virginia, which I read not long before I bought Silence in October. That slim novel is all about regret caused by a childhood decision in wartime. Silence in October is rather a different kettle of fish.

As the novel opens, the narrator’s wife, Astrid, has just left him. He doesn’t know exactly where she is, but can trace where she has been by the credit card receipts that trail behind her. They’ve been together for more than eighteen years – ever since he was her taxi driver, as she fled her abusive husband with their young son.

This premise is almost all the action that happens in the novel. For almost 300 pages, what we witness is the unnamed (I think!) narrator’s thoughts, recollections, philosophising. We move back and forth in time, often with little warning – but equally often the memories are not dramatic, but lend a layer to the profundities that the narrator is compiling. Whether you find them profound or not may depend a lot on the mood you’re in while you read it.

It’s difficult to write about Silence in October, because it really did depend on my mood. The writing is beautiful, and Born translates in such a way that no awkwardness is ever apparent. It deserves – it requires – slow and patient reading, letting the unusual images and stumbling thoughts wash over the reader. Grøndahl is excellent at the minutiae, and bringing small moments and reflections to new, vivid life. To pick something at random from early in the book, here is when Astrid says she is leaving:

She had announced her decision in such a run-of-the-mill and offhand way in front of the mirror, as if it had been a matter of going to the cinema or visiting a woman friend, and I had allowed myself to be seduced by the naturalness of her tone. And later, in bed, when I thought she was asleep,there had been a distance in her voice as if she had already gone and was calling from a town on the other side of the world.

So, yes, I read much of Silence in October in patient appreciation, recognising Grøndahl’s ability as a prose stylist. And then there were other times – when, sensibly, I usually put the book down and picked something else up – where I had less patience. I don’t need a book to have a lot of action, but this amount of introspection is a little low in momentum. Pacy, it was not. Also – my tolerance for the self-absorption of the middle-aged, middle-class, white, male narrator wore thin at times. He is obsessed with his own thoughts, awarding them significance, whatever they are. His mindset is a bit like one you see on Twitter a great deal. I rolled my eyes when we got to the inevitable women-don’t-realise-they’re-prettier-without-make-up moment. He writes about women’s bodies a lot.

Could I really not meet a woman who thought and talked on the same frequency as myself without immediately getting ideas from the sight of her thighs just because they were lovely, and because she unwittingly exposed them to my ferocious gaze?

Of course, the author need not be the narrator. Indeed, I know from Virginia that Grøndahl can take his writing talents to a far worthier topic than the self-importance of an adulterous art critic.

I always say that the writing is more important than what is being written about. There are exceptions, of course – and you know that I will read more or less any novel about people opening a cafe – but Silence in October is a good instance where I enjoyed it despite its premise and its ‘plot’. Grøndahl is a fine writer and Born is clearly a very good translator. I look forward to read more of his novels, and hope that they’re about people I’m readier to spend time with.

Reality and Dreams – Muriel Spark

StuckinaBook All , , , 7 Comments

I’m away with my family for a few days, out of range of internet – the vicar escaping, post-Christmas Day!  I’ve scheduled some posts to appear, but I shan’t be able to reply for a bit – and hopefully I’ll be back with internet in time to write a post about the only one of my Century of Books that I’ve not yet finished!

If you were thinking that I’d had enough of Muriel Spark during Muriel Spark Reading Week, then think again!  One of the final books I’ve read in 2012 is her last of the 20th century, and third last overall – Reality and Dreams (1996).


Tom Richards – presumably a deliberately bland name – is a famous film director.  The first line of the novel, and thus the line which kicks off our impression of him, is archetypical Spark: ‘He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.’  And, with Spark’s panache for combining surreality with restraint, she goes no further with that paragraph.  It hangs, so strangely, and we are shepherded straight to the second paragraph – where we learn that Tom Richards is recovering in hospital, having fallen out of a crane whilst directing a scene.  He broke nearly all his bones, but is lucky to be alive.

For the first few pages, reality and dreams swirl, as Tom fades in and out of lucidity.  I often have problems with the ways in which authors try to convey any mental distortion – whether disorientation or illness – as it usually seems clumsy and heavy-handed, or simply unreadable.  Spark, reliably, does it brilliantly.  Even something as simple as this conveys the disjointedness of time:

She poured out some milky tea.  He opened his eyes.  The tray had disappeared.
And then the complicated family arrive.  His wife Claire is patient and unshockable – and has affairs as often as he does, quite casually.  There is his angelically beautiful, but unvivid, daughter from his first marriage (Cora), and stolid, moaning, unattractive daughter from his current marriage (Marigold).  And there is the squabbling, self-absorbed cast of his film, originally called The Hamburger Girl – inspired by a brief sighting of a young woman at a campsite, who captivated Tom.

The various marriages in the family (some disintegrating), the cancelled and re-commissioned film production, the disappearance of one of his daughters and ensuing police search – all come together and interweave, creating a curiously mixed structure.  I think one of the most distinctive qualities in Muriel Spark’s writing is that everything is always on the same level.  She refuses to get overly-dramatic about anything – possible kidnap and murder is treated in the same matter-of-fact way as Tom’s physiotherapy, or the workings of the film shoot.  For it is, of course, the sphere of cinema which influences Spark’s title:

that world of dreams and reality which he was at home in, the world of filming scenes, casting people in parts, piecing together types and shadows, facts and illusions
Apart from the mental disorientation at the beginning of the novel, there is never any wider suggestion that reality and dream might have been exchanged – but there is the possibility that fictitious events are starting, in a distorted way, to become true.  It’s never overdone, but is a clever thread through a clever novel.  It’s all quintessential Spark, and a perfect reminder of why she’s one of my favourite authors.

Joy Street

StuckinaBook All , , , 14 Comments

I’ve mentioned on here before that I like to have a diary or collection of letters ‘on the go’ most of the time – and yesterday I finished the current read. It’s Joy Street: A Wartime Romance in Letters by Mirren Barford and John Lewes (ed. Michael T. Wise), and was a gift from my dear friend Phoebe, who always knows what to buy me.

These letters were sent between Mirren Barford, studying at Somerville College in Oxford, and Lieutenant John Lewes, also known as Jock, who was away fighting. They take up less than two years, in 1940 and 1941, but cover a whole spectrum of emotions, thoughts, philosophies, and document the growing relationship between the young letter writers. What starts out fairly cool becomes a romantic exchange – with all the peaks and troughs that might suggest – and eventually more or less an engagement. ‘Joy Street’ became something of a symbol between them – as a destination for their future, united happiness. From the letters we grow to understand so much about Mirren and John – their differences (they almost split over his intense desire to be a soldier, and her hatred of warfare), their connections, their subtle steps towards one another and their backward glances. This between two people who only had the chance to meet ten times – the reader knows from the outset that John did not return from war. The letter Mirren writes to his parents, months after his death, is quite incredibly moving. I have never lost anybody very close to me, but I shall return to this letter when I do.

It’s always a little uncomfortable reading people’s private letters, especially without their permission. Mirren was dead when this correspondence was discovered in the 1990s by her son. Here are three interesting excerpts on this topic:

[Mirren] Once I thought I could write a pretty phrase or two, but your letter with its magnificence has shattered all my illusions and makes me feel really weak. It was a fine letter; one day I hope my great-grandchildren will take the trouble to have them published for many people would read them gladly if they had the chance.

[John] Your reception of my letter is gracious and generous; your praise is very dear to me always and on this occasion it could not have been higher than by saying that many people would read my letters gladly if they had the chance. And yet the publication of our correspondence is unthinkable, for it is so essentially private to us as almost to be written in code undecipherable to others. Readers may detect a felicity of phrase and even at times magnificence, but the significance of Penelope’s design, wherein surely its chiefest value lies, must inevitably escape them unless they are supplied with a key

[John] It is a very great loss to all who read and write letters and journals that considerations of security forbid the detailed description of the lives that are being led in the multiform war. That is a loss to history and scientific record but it is no loss to literature, for writing is only worthy of that name which submits to a discipline both of substance and of form. and so perhaps, when this war’s writing comes to be read and reckoned up as literature, it may be placed in a higher norm than the indiscriminate journalism which is so well thought of now. The things that matter are not the things that happen, but rather things that grow, and literature if it is to live must deal with life directly and not indirectly through its accidents. […] And so the Journal to Mirren is not for the curious, who would find it dull indeed. It is for a lover of life, and its purpose is to try and present another life as worthy of that love.

Usually, reading collections of letters, there are all sorts of meetings or ‘phone calls which we only hear about in passing; visits which are referred to, or the building blocks of a relationship which the reader cannot grasp decades later. With Joy Street, although there are a few meetings between the couple, we are privileged to witness the majority of their growing attachment. Almost everything that was built between them was built through these letters. And because they are real, they naturally have an authenticity that no novelist could fully craft.

In a letter which John never read, sent but not received before his death, Mirren writes:
Indeed, I want you to go on being alive. Maybe we’ll never marry, but that isn’t the most important thing. You’ll go on, and you’ll give of yourself to the world, for you have the power. And I’ll go on too. If I’m ever capable of loving someone more than I love you, then there is no reason why my little ideal should be wrecked. If you die before we have had time to be together, at least I shall have the faith and love you have given me, deep rooted and eternal in my soul. And with that knowledge, I’ll never be defeated; I may fail to do as much as I hoped but I’ll never be defeated. And if I’m killed and you still love me as you do, then – I don’t know how you’ll feel. But I do know John, that you have given me something, and I, perhaps, to you, that no man or god can ever destroy. We call it faith, ideals, hope, but do we really and truly know what it is? I don’t think so, and I don’t think it matters, either. But it does matter that it is present, unforgettable, a part of my own self.

Books to get Stuck into:

–In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill: the best book about grief that I have read, or can imagine reading.

–Love Letters by Leonard Woolf & Trekkie Ritchie Parsons: the letters between Leonard and the woman he loved after Virginia are perhaps more revealing than Leonard would have liked, and a fascinating portrait of an unusual coupling.