2016

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.

This Census-Taker by China Miéville #ABookADayInMay No.4

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A boy ran down a hill path screaming. The boy was I. He held his hands up and out in front of him as if he’d dipped them in paint and was coming to make a picture, to press them down to paper, but all there was on him was dirt. There was no blood on his palms.

So opens This Census-Taker (2016) by China Miéville, a strange little novella set in an uncertain place and uncertain time. Those first couple of short sentences are representative of what the narrator does throughout – sometimes he is in the first person, sometimes the third person when he wants to distance himself from the memory, and sometimes even the second person. It’s all part of what makes This Census-Taker unsettling and unsure. You never know where you are, literally and metaphorically.

As he runs down the hill, he has a message to shout to people who live at the bottom of the hill. They are technically in the same town, but they are worlds apart. The people at the bottom of the hill think of those further up as savages living in some sort of wilderness, peopled by monsters. And the boy’s shout is unlikely to dispel that idea – “My mother killed my father!”

But as soon as he says this, he is unsure. Is that what he saw? Or did he see someone else being killed? Or was nobody killed at all? Nothing is clear or still.

The novella has a lot of moments of death. The boy’s father is given to killing – a stray dog, a goat, anything that gets him into the silent, taut rage that sometimes comes across his face. He throws the bodies into a seemingly bottomless pit in a cave. The boy believes that there are some humans in there too. But is he right?

The actual census taker of the title doesn’t turn up to take a census until p.110 of 138 pages, and it is a sort of climax that doesn’t do a lot to make things less ambiguous. The whole novella swirls in menace and mystery, and there’s never really a sense that anything will resolve.

I did find This Census-Taker compelling and interesting, though preferred the much-longer The City and the City, which has an equally strange premise though more resolution. In this novella, I thought Miéville was brilliant at moments of high tension, but that his sentences were a bit meandering and overwritten at other times. It’s certainly a successful exercise in creating an atmosphere, but I’m not sure exactly what else I’m meant to take from the book.

Two novels about female friendship

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At my book group last month, we talked about novels about friendship – how surprisingly few of them there are. It’s something Rachel and I often mention on ‘Tea or Books?’. While there are many, many children’s books where friends are front and centre, it’s an area that novels for adults have curiously overlooked. And yet, for many people, they are just as important as romantic relationships – and likely to last longer.

But I have read two books in recent weeks that are about the intensity, highs and lows of friendship between two women.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?: Amazon.co.uk: Moore, Lorrie: 9780571268559: BooksWho Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994)  has a dreadful title but a very good novella about the friendship between Berie (the narrator) and Sils – starting as children, and both deepening and splintering as they head towards the cusp of adulthood.

The girls work together at Storyland – a sort of theme park, where local teenagers dress up as storybook characters, and younger local and visiting children go on the kind of lacklustre fairground attraction that is only a draw in a small town. The crux of the shift in Berie and Sils’ friendship is the different rate at which they mature. Sils is clearly readier for adult life, or at least believes she is. She is more attractive to men, more confident in her sexuality, more willing to explore a new stage in life. We see all this from Berie’s perspective – which is, in fact, the adult, married Berie looking back on her adolescence. The layers of knowledge and regret cover over the naivety and confusion that teenage Berie felt, and the whirlwind experience that knowing Sils was.

“How yew girls doin’?” was inevitably how it began, and then usually the guy fussed with the front lock of Sils’s hair, pulling it out of her eyes, or he sat next to her, hip to hip, or he asked what she was drinking or did she want to dance to this song, it was a good song for dancing, it was a good night for dancing, didn’t she think so?

Usually it was a humid night, the boards of the place dank as a river dock. Sometimes I protected her with gruffness or a smirk or a cryptic look to make the guy think we were making fun of him. That he was too old. “It’s only teenage wasteland,” wailed the jukebox during the band’s breaks. I would nudge her.

But sometimes I got up and went to the bathroom, let her deal with him, and sometimes later he would give us a ride home at eleven-thirty, hoping for her, dreaming, waiting for us at the corner while we went to one or the other of our houses, said good night to our mothers, went to our room, stuffed pillows under the covers, making curved and lumpy bodies, then climbed out the window.

I’d only previously read some of Moore’s short stories, which I didn’t love, so I wasn’t prepared for the brilliance of this book. Everything is slightly off-kilter, and I thought the tone of Berie’s narration was done so well. There’s a matter-of-factness to it that is belied by the emotional intensity – which, again, is softened by the years that have passed before she narrates the story. It melds expertly, and Moore plays with memory in a way that gives Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? extra depth and nuance.

And all this in under 150 pages! (The cover quote from Dave Eggers says she is one of the funniest writers alive – there is a dry humour at times to this, and the humour of looking back at another self, but I don’t think I’d have called it a comic novel.) I heartily recommend this one, and would be interested to know which other of her novels or novellas to try.

Swing Time (Smith novel).jpgSwing Time by Zadie Smith

If Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is an example of a book that manages to achieve greatness in a short span, then Swing Time (2016) is one which should have had a much more ruthless editor. Or, indeed, should simply have been two novels. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it – I thought it was very good, but could have been much better.

The unnamed narrator is friends with Tracey from childhood. Both are mixed-race girls in London, and unite over their shared passion for dancing – not just as a hobby, but as something which could really be a career. But both are held back by their mothers, for different reasons. Tracey’s is unambitious and can be snide; the narrator’s is so abstract and intellectual that she has little maternal care. Smith is clever at giving two mothers who are very different without simply making them opposites of each other – and without making one a good mother and the other a bad mother. Rather, we see how their richly detailed characters leave a legacy on their daughters.

Tracey and the narrator have a tempestuous childhood friendship – characterised by friendship, love, envy, competition, and everything in between. Both have to learn that their lives cannot follow the same path, for any number of reasons.

Swing Time moves about in time and place a lot, and Smith handles this incredibly well – it is never confusing about where and when we are, even though there are no headings to tell us. And a lot of the novel shows the narrator as an adult, working as an assistant and confidante to Aimee, a worldwide superstar pop icon. Think Madonna. She has been famous for many years, since the narrator was a child, and the narrator is now caught in the strange unreality of the long-term celebrity – a network of people working for Aimee masquerading as a friendship group. It includes long periods in an unspecified African country, where Aimee is trying to Do Good.

The weakness of Swing Time, for me, was that there is a brilliant novel about an intense and important female friendship, and a really good book about working with a celebrity – but, together, they dilute each other. There is little to connect them, except for the narrator’s confused nostalgia when she is no longer close to Tracey. I think it’s fine for a novel to cover a wide time span and be about two stages of life, but when they form two tonally distinct novels with seemingly different purposes, it doesn’t work to fuse them. They do reunite as adults, with a long, silent period of resentment and uncertainty between them.

This is my first Smith novel, and I was a bit surprised by the style – which is assured, but not very distinctive. I don’t think anybody could show me a sentence that I would be able to identify as showing Smith’s style. It is very good, but in the blandly accomplished way that many other novels are written very well.

Of the two books, I think Moore’s is a greater success – though both tackle a neglected topic well, and more interestingly than most of the romantic relationships I read about.

A couple of recent audiobooks

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I go back and forth with my Audible subscription. I’m currently back in – and have discovered the Audible Plus catalogue, where you can download free audiobooks that have been added to that collection. There are thousands of the things, with no clear criteria why they’re in – some classics, some look to be self-published with audiobook covers designed in Paint. It takes some scrolling through, but I have managed to find some books of interest. (Any recommendations?)

And here are a couple of books I’d already added to my Audible wishlist – and I was pleased to see, when I re-joined, that they were labelled as freely available to me.

The Elephants in My Backyard eBook by Rajiv Surendra | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster UKThe Elephants in My Backyard by Rajiv Surendra

If you know Rajiv Surendra’s work at all, it’s probably as the rapping mathlete Kevin G from teen classic Mean Girls. I think I read about this 2016 memoir in a Buzzfeed article – but I’m really glad I did. Perhaps against the odds of that opening description, it’s really very good.

Surendra was on the set of Mean Girls when a member of the crew recommended that he read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – because it’s “a book about you”. Naturally intrigued, Surendra reads – and is instantly captivated. While he doesn’t live the same life as Pi, a Tamil boy in India who is shipwrecked with a tiger, there are other things the same. Surendra’s parents are Tamil and from Sri Lanka; Surendra matches the physical description of Pi. He becomes determined to play the role of Pi in a film.

At this point, there isn’t even a film in the offing. But Surendra starts planning – and even gets in touch with Martel, who proves a remarkably kind and patient correspondent over the coming years (his emails are included in the book). The determination to play the role really becomes an obsession. Over the next few years, Surendra moves for a period to India, he learns some Tamil, he learns to swim, he turns down other acting work on the off-chance that casting for Life of Pi will happen.

In the background to all of this, he naturally shares his own life. And much of that is quite desperate. An alcoholic father, prone to violent outbursts, haunts his home life. His work is mostly playing a character at an interactive historic farm. We get to know him, and he is mostly likeable and interesting – able to laugh at himself, and to convey what it’s like to be so single-minded in pursuit of a goal. (There are some regrettable body shaming moments, and some of the humour doesn’t quite land, but those are only small annoyances in the grand scheme of the book.)

Usually this sort of book is written by someone explaining how they got to where they are. But if you’ve seen Life of Pi, then you’ll know… Rajiv Surendra doesn’t get the part. In the end, despite having a good chat with the casting director, he doesn’t even get an audition. Six years of his life have been dedicated to something that didn’t work out. His lasting acting credit on iMDB is 2005. It’s fascinating to listen to a book like this from the perspective of someone who didn’t make it. There are, of course, any number of actors who commit utterly to their dream and end up not making it. Those stories are probably more valuable to hear. The ones who didn’t luck out.

And it’s a really good, interesting memoir. I’ve never read or seen Life of Pi, but I think all you need to enjoy it is an interest in people and what motivates them.

 

The Wall cover artThe Wall by Marlen Haushofer

I’ve not managed to track down who recommended this Austrian novel from 1963 (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside). I must have seen it somewhere and found the premise interesting enough to pop on my list. And that premise is: an unnamed narrator is visiting a couple friends in a remote farmhouse. They go off to a nearby town for an evening meal, leaving her behind. In the morning, they still haven’t returned.

On her wandering to see what’s happened to them, she finds something impossible. An invisible wall is stopping her going any further. Beyond it, she can see that people and animals are all frozen – clearly having died instantly.

Within the wall are acres and acres of empty land. It’s never clear quite how big it is, but she can travel for hours and find nobody and nothing – except animals. There are enough trout and deer for her to eat, and there is a dog (Lynx), a cat (Cat), and a cow (Bella). From the vantage of a couple of years on, she documents her experiences in surviving, and in developing a deep kinship with those animals.

Haushofer’s story is told quite slowly and gently, never flashing past an experience that she can detail. She is particularly good at the behaviour of animals – well, she’s very good at cats, and I assume she is good at dogs and cows. But over it all is a sense of looming dread – because the narrator has told us that the animals die, and that something bad has caused it.

I did find the end weirdly rushed and odd, after the gentle pacing of the rest of the story. I’m assuming it is a parable for something, or done with deliberate effect, but I am not at all convinced that it worked. Similarly unsuccessful (to my mind) were the occasional attempts to rationalise why she thought the wall was there, and who might be to blame – it worked better as something inexplicable.

These quibbles apart, it is a very impressive work. I do find that fine writing doesn’t work as well for me in audio as on the page. Maybe I’m more into story than prose when I’m listening? And the reader of the audiobook was a bit breathy and soft, which didn’t feel quite right. ANYWAY in summary perhaps I should have read this one as a book, but I still found it really interesting and would recommend. Not least because I want to talk to anyone and everyone about that ending, to try and understand why she did it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

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My book group recently read Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, from 2016 and shortlisted for the Booker prize that year. Let’s experiment with a review in bullet points. This doesn’t reflect the style of the book – it reflects how much time I want to spend writing this review.

  • Look at that cover. It’s not my usual fare, is it?
  • Beautiful writing of a psychological portrait of Eileen – an old lady looking back on her young days in an unhappy home, alcoholic dad, sister who has escaped with a marriage. Eileen works at a boys’ prison, lusts after one of the guards who works there, doesn’t really engage with anybody.
  • It is a nuanced portrayal of a dislikeable woman – but why was it in the crime section of the library?
  • (Maybe the only time that library shelving has constituted a major spoiler for me?)
  • Eventually, perhaps three-quarters of the way through this novel, the enigmatic and beguiling Rebecca Saint John appears. She is very Hitchcockian and not at all fleshed out.
  • (Isn’t Rebecca Saint John such a femme fatale name?)
  • Things start to get really silly…
  • Oh, a series of twists, increasingly dark, clearly wanting to be the next Girl on the Train…
  • Perhaps the cleverest thing about the book is the reveal about what’s happening on the cover.

Ultimately, I found that Moshfegh was a really clever and interesting writer, but Eileen is a silly and melodramatic novel. Or, rather, becomes one – perhaps because Moshfegh lacked confidence that a quiet and poignant portrayal of an eccentric woman would bring her a publishing deal or success. Which does seem to be the case – have a look at this interview in the Guardian. The most baffling statement in it is “Trying to protect its [the novel’s] reputation as a postmodern work of art would not only be arrogant, but pointless.” It would also not be remotely true?

Have you read Eileen? I certainly found it pacey and compelling, even when it wasn’t clear why I was being compelled, but ultimately it felt like fast food you regret the next day.

To The Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey

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My book group doesn’t really have any rules, but there are a couple that people have voiced support for. I would love if we implemented a 350-page-maximum rule, and there are others who think we should only recommend books we’ve already read. I am vehemently anti this rule, because my choices for book group are broadly made for one reason: because I own them and want to read them, but not quite enough to do so off my own bat.

Step forward To The Bright Edge of the World (2016) by Eowyn Ivey, which I got as a review copy a few years ago. I’d read and loved The Snow Child – I say ‘loved’, but in fact I found it so emotionally vivid and painful that I had to stop for about six months in the middle. But Ivey was a brilliant storyteller and I wanted to try her again.

And then the book arrived. And it was enormous. And historical. And about icy exploration. That is not a list of ingredients that warms my heart, even despite Claire’s very enthusiastic review. So – book group it was!

There are two main characters who narrate To The Bright Edge of the World, and they don’t spend a lot of time together on the page despite being married. Colonel Allen Forrester has been sent off to the uncharted territories of Alaska with a band of men in 1885, tasked with reporting back. For a while it looks like his wife Sophie might join him, and I was quite excited about seeing a woman doing something adventurous. As it turns out, though, she’s pregnant and she stays behind – so the novel is told through their diaries and occasional letters.

Look, I’m not that interested in icy exploration. I keep calling it that because I don’t know what we call non-polar exploration in the ice… frontier exploration? And Ivey writes very vividly about this trip, taking us inch by frustrating inch along their journey. I did find Forrester a very warm, lovable character, unafraid to express how deeply he loves and admires his new wife – as well as his affections and frustrations with the various other men on his trip. But I suppose I’d have found him a more enjoyable character in a drawing room than in a makeshift camp. I will confess that I ended up reading some of these sections very quickly, not necessarily picking up every single detail…

And when I say ‘exploration’, I should add that they weren’t the first people there. Along the way they encounter several native Alaskans, and it’s interesting to read the meeting of cultures – particularly when Alaskan myth and miracle is woven into the novel. And one of the men strikes up a very close relationship with a native Alaskan. Like many historical novels, twenty-first-century morality guides which characters are admirable. I suspect we wouldn’t find many explorers of the time who were quite so considerate to native Alaskans, nor who had such feminist sensibilities.

Speaking of, mine were rather more invested in Sophia back home. She is a brilliant mixture of intelligent determination and uncertainty – keen to face life bravely, but also young and naive. She has a lot to contend with in the pregnancy (and there are some heartbreaking sections where he writes joyfully about her pregnancy while she is finding it terrifying and difficult), and she has plenty to content with in the patriarchal society. And then her interest in photography blooms. That’s much more up my street than exploration! I loved reading about her processes, and her intent attempts to capture stunning wildlife photography.

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly for me, I found the novel wildly too long. It would have been a better novel with at least a hundred pages shaved off it. Unless sections of it were meant to reflect the wearying, slow process of getting through inhospitable Alaska?

But I enjoyed it nevertheless. The strength of it is the characters. And for those who like exploration, that will be an addition rather than an obstacle. In fact, just go over and read Claire’s review? I didn’t have quite her experience with it, but I got plenty vicarious enjoyment from her enjoyment of it. And if I were a rating man, I’d give it a solid 7/10 myself.

David Sedaris and the female David Sedaris

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One of my books for A Century of Books is David Sedaris’s 1997 collection Naked. One of the other books I’ve read recently, albeit not for A Century of Books because 2016 was already taken, is Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman – which I read on the strength of seeing her described as being the female David Sedaris. One might think that Amy Sedaris fit the bill there – or, more accurately, that the description was primarily marketing copy – but it convinced me, and I’m glad it did because Miss Fortune was great.

But Naked first. It’s exactly what you expect to get from David Sedaris, if you’ve read anything by him before. Like all his books, it has funny, bizarre, moving, and self-deprecating stories from across his life. I assume everything in all the collections has at least a foot in the truth, and I don’t quite know how one life has fit all of this in.

Then again, perhaps it is just his talent for turning the ordinary into the quirky and unusual. He writes about living with his injured grandmother, about finding a dirty book, about working in a cafeteria. Quite a few are about hitchhiking, at times with a quadriplegic friend. Each has its bizarre moments that Sedaris frames with deadpan sardonicism. Nobody could call him cheerful. His persona is mildly grumpy and cautiously optimistic – only to hit brick walls of people everywhere he goes.

Here’s a good example of how he writes – in this instance, about his experiences while experimenting with mime as a child:

I went home and demonstrated the invisible wall for my two-year-old brother, who pounded on the very real wall beside his playpen, shrieking and wailing in disgust. When my mother asked what I’d done to provoke him, I threw up my hands in mock innocence before lowering them to retrieve the imaginary baby that lay fussing at my feet. I patted the back of my little ghost to induce gas and was investigating its soiled diaper when I noticed my mother’s face assume an expression she reserved for unspeakable horror. I had seen this look only twice before: once when she was caught in the path of a charging, rabid pig and then again when I told her I wanted a peach-coloured velveteen blazer with matching slacks.

I think my favourite Sedaris remains Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, but that is chiefly because it’s the first one I read – and I think there is a lot to say for the first time one discovers his humour. It’s such a joy (without being remotely joyful in tone) that happening upon it is something to treasure. Naked was written a while before Dress Your Family, but the tone and the world are unchanging.

And what about Lauren Weedman? Well, I can certainly see why she is described as the female David Sedaris – she definitely has his way with a pithy sentence (“You know what bothers me about the idea of death? It’s so hard to look forward to, and I love planning”), shrugging at the absurdity of the world and contributing her own heavy doses of ridiculousness. In Miss Fortune (subtitled ‘fresh perspectives on having it all from someone who is not okay’), she focuses mostly on her the past decade of her life, with a few jumps further back in time. And that part of her life is dominated by marrying, gaining a stepson and a biological son, and getting divorced when her husband has an affair with the babysitter.

One of my favourite chapters/stories was about a stranger on Facebook contacting her to say that he’d killed nine people and would she write his life story. She takes this in her stride – getting in touch with their mutual friends to find out how likely he was to murder her, and then engaging in an occasional conversation with him. Like Sedaris, she refuses to sound too surprised.

It has been three days since Scott entered my life, and I can think of nothing else. “What would you do if someone told you that they had killed nine people?” has replaced “How much sand can a kid eat before it becomes a medical emergency?” as my opener in all social situations.

There’s also a lot about being pregnant and having a baby, about struggling as an actress, and about body image. Almost all of these stories – not so much the pregnancy ones – are, indeed, things I could imagine Sedaris writing about. She also writes about being adopted, and having two mums (since she reunited with her birth mother) – there is relatively little about this, and I think it might have been covered more thoroughly in her previous book, A Woman Trapped in a Woman’s Body. I have to say, this snippet about her (adoptive) family makes me want to read much more about them:

My mother and father had decided that instead of leaving us money after they died, like nice parents do, they wanted to spend their money while they were still with us. Our inheritance would be the memories we created together of touring vanilla bean factories and learning how to make a coin purse out of a coconut.

All in all, I think the Sedaris comparison is warranted and isn’t undue praise – indeed, I actually liked Miss Fortune even more than Naked. Her comedic balance of a sentence is exemplary. I guess the book is confessional, though with so much observational humour that you only realise afterwards that it has been confessional. It’s certainly extremely funny, and I hope she writes a lot more.

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

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Mothering Sunday by Graham SwiftI think (though I haven’t checked) that Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift might be the only novel written in 2016 that I read last year – I read a handful of non-fiction titles published last year, but no other novels are coming to mind. It was given to me by my dear friend Lorna, because she thought it sounded like my cup of tea. And she was right – I mean, it’s set in the 1920s, for starters.

More specifically, it is set on 30 March 1924 – guess which festival falls on that day? Yes, it’s Mothering Sunday – and clever, thoughtful Jane Fairchild is given the day off to visit her mother, like all servants up and down the land are doing. Only Jane is an orphan. She tells her master that she will spend the day reading, but instead cycles off for an afternoon of passion (if you will) with Paul Sheringham. He is a well-to-do man, friends with the Nivens, the family for whom Jane is a housemaid; he is also engaged, but is spending the time before he drives off to see his fiance having sex with our Jane, using the Best Sex Toys for this.

This is sounding a bit tawdry, but Mothering Sunday is nothing of the sort. Yes, my 1920s mindset had to get to grips with the 2016 novel’s willingness to throw in explicit words of an anatomical nature – but this is not a morality tale, or even a tale of rebelling against morals. It’s more a beautifully written depiction of one significant afternoon in a girl’s life – told in the third person, but throwing in moments where the 90+ year old Jane is clearly looking backwards.

And secret love. And secret friend. He had said that once to her, ‘You are my friend, Jay.’ He had said it so announcingly. It had made her head go light. She had never been called that, named that thing so decisively by anyone, as if he were saying he had no other friend, he had only just discovered, in fact, what a friend might be. And she was to tell no one about this newly attested revelation.

It had made her head swim. She was seventeen. She had ceased to be a prostitute. Friend. It was better perhaps than lover. Not that ‘lover’ would have been then in her feasible vocabulary, or even in her thinking. But she would have lovers. In Oxford. She would have many of them, she would make a point of it. Though how many of them were friends?

Swift layers his story, giving hints of what is to come – both on that afternoon, and in the rest of Jane’s life – building up a narrative piece by subtle piece. For that reason, I shan’t give any spoilers. I was really impressed by the way he did this with a sort of rhythmical structure. It reminded me of a needle sewing through a fabric, but occasionally looping back a bit – or a piece of music, where motifs are repeated or alluded to now and then. The same phrases appear again and again, or variants on them; we are told something we already know so that the narrative can build on it a little, putting together a portrait incrementally. It’s very cleverly done – the sort of not-straightforward writing which isn’t showy or off-putting, but like waves on the shore coming in and out.

So, there you go; the prose is like sewing, music, and waves! Put together those images and you might get an idea of what the reading experience was like. Better yet, give it a try. It’s a slim novel, only 132pp in my edition, and occasionally it feels like a luxuriously extended short story – whatever it is, I really enjoyed reading it.

Terms and Conditions by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

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It’s no secret that I’m madly in love with Slightly Foxed Editions, and covet having the whole library on my shelves one day. So far I have this lovely bundle of them…

slightly-foxed-circle

The one I’m going to talk today is not a reprint, though; it’s Terms and Conditions by Ysenda Maxtone Graham – a history of girls’ boarding schools from 1939-1979. It’s basically the perfect stocking filler for the bookish person in your life, and I’ve already given one copy to a friend who was thrilled with it. I wrote about Terms and Conditions in more length in Shiny New Books – you can read the whole review here. And please do – this book is a real treat.