ACOB2024

Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

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!)

A Meeting By The River by Christopher Isherwood

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

Christopher Isherwood is one of those authors everyone knows about, and you sometimes see mentioned, but whose wide-ranging catalogue of books doesn’t seem to get as much attention as you’d expect. Beyond the sexy German-set novels, what else did Isherwood write? A few years ago I loved Prater Violet, and recently I read one of his much later works – A Meeting By The River (1967). It’s one of his only novels not to be given a Wikipedia page, which might or might not speak to its general reception – but I thought it was really excellent.

The novel (or perhaps novella) is told entirely in letters and diary entries written by two brothers – Oliver and Patrick. They are somewhat estranged. There is clearly a history of power struggles between them, and neither trusts what they read or hear from the other. But, as the first letter shows, Oliver re-opens correspondance because he has something significant to say.

I’m only writing because of a stupid misunderstanding which has now got to be cleared up without further delay. I admit I was responsible for it in the first place, though I must say I don’t see why I or anyone else whould be expected to account for his actions to people they don’t really concern. The point is, Mother is still under the impression, and I suppose you and Penelope are too, that I’m here working for the Red Cross in Calcultta, just as I actually was working for them in Germany, up to a year ago. Well as a matter of fact I’m not. I’m in a Hindu monastery a few miles outside the city, on the bank of the Ganges. I mean, I am a monk here.

Oliver is about to be fully received into the Hindu monastery, renouncing the world (though, as he points out to Paddy, this wouldn’t prevent him receiving letters – he is not totally disappearing). Patrick/Paddy writes back an enthusiastic letter full of bonhomie – and the reader thinks it’s going to warm up to being a cheerful tale of brothers reuniting. It is received more or less as such, and Oliver writes back explaining the monastic process a little more. And then Patrick writes back, suggesting that he come and visit Oliver in Calcutta.

And this is the first of many times that Isherwood pulls the rug from under our feet a bit. Because, after this exchange of letters, we get our first taste of Oliver’s diary.

Patrick’s first letter fooled me completely to begin with, because it worked on my guilty conscience. I was ashamed of my silly childish secretiveness. I wanted him to tell me he understood perfectly what made me behave like that, then assume the responsibility for putting everything right again, like a true Elder Brother. So I accepted what he wrote at its face value and believed what I wanted to believe.

But this second letter shows the first one up. It’s obvious to me now that he was just playing with me, as he always used to. He hasn’t changed a bit. And why should I have expected it? You don’t change unless you want to, and it’s clear that nothing has happened to make him the least dissatisfied with himself as he is.

The reader has also probably ‘accepted what he wrote at its face value’, and I felt quite wrong-footed here. Who was correct? Was it charming, bombastic Patrick – or Oliver, whom I now knew was mistrusting and wary?

This all accelerates when, despite Oliver trying to put him off, Patrick does arrive on the scene. He alleges he’s there to support his brother and find out more about Oliver’s new life and future – but we know from Patrick’s letters to his wife and his mother that he’s trying to dissuade Oliver from taking this step. Oliver is suspicious himself, but goes back and forth on whether he can trust what he’s hearing.

In some ways, A Meeting By The River is quite a simple story of feuding brothers miscommunicating, worn down by years of mistrust and rivalry – yet also bonded in a way that cannot be dismissed. What makes it unusual is the setting in an Indian Hindu monastery. What makes it so brilliant is the way Isherwood constantly wrong-foots the reader. After each letter or diary entry, I felt on firmer ground – then you’d gradually discover how Patrick was lying in a letter, or how Oliver jumped to the wrong conclusions in his diary. Later, Oliver reads some of Patrick’s letters, and the plot thickens further when he suspects Patrick left them out on purpose, so his brother would read his lies.

It’s done so well. Isherwood is so, so good at the ways that people deceive each other (and themselves) – not in big, gradiose, elaborately crafted falsehoods, but in the small, thoughless moments the suit the occasion, without thinking about the wider implications. And that’s before I get to the affair that Patrick is trying to keep hidden…

A Meeting By The River is a slim novel, deceptively simple – but I think it is a masterpiece in miniature. Isherwood may be more remembered for the showy subversion of books like Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, but for my money his real brilliance can be seen on show in quieter, cleverer works like this one.

My Darling Villain by Lynne Reid Banks

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

It’s well-documented that I deeply love Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room and its sequels – and somehow it has taken me quite a few years to properly explore the rest of her output. Partly that’s because of how much I enjoy re-reading The L-Shaped Room, and partly it’s because I’ve been worried that the racism and homophobia that I’ve learned to expect and overlook in The L-Shaped Room might be too off-putting in a novel I’m not familiar with. Over the past few years I’ve been taking a deep breath and reading more Lynne Reid Banks.

Well, in 2021 I read The Warning Bell and it was super racist. Last year I read An End To Running and really liked it, with the caveat that it felt like two novels, barely hinged together. Onto My Darling Villain (1977) – which has ended up being the most successful of the lot for me, I’m pleased to say.

Firstly – look, my copy is signed! (Hopefully I have successfully embedded a post from my Instagram here.)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Simon Thomas (@simondavidthomas)

My Darling Villain is, I supposed, a young adult novel – inasmuch as the characters are teenagers and the prose is suitable for a slightly younger audience – but I don’t think I’d have blinked an eye if it were marketed to adults. The main relationship may be between people on the cusp of adulthood, but the whole book is drenched in topics that could work at any age – at least any age in Britain. Because this is a book about that perennial British theme: a relationship between different classes.

The narrator of My Darling Villain is Kate. She has recently turned 15 and is (like so many heroines of such books) not in the first echelon of popularity at her school. She’s probably not in the second either, but she does have some good friends – and, together, they devise a party. It’s intended to catch the attention of a boy she has her eye on, and to be a quiet affair with a handful of people from school. She even invites a girl she actively despises, because they are curious about her mature-sounding boyfriend.

It turns out, of course, that the party is beset with gate-crashers. In an era before the internet, word doesn’t spread as disastrously far as it might – but certainly some unsavoury types come along. Crockery gets broken, food is smeared on the wall, unspeakable things happen in the bathroom, and far too much alcohol is drunk. It’s a disaster. Except for one thing – Kate meets Mark Collins.

At first, she categorises him among the unwelcome hoodlums who are doing dastardly things to the house. But he, in fact, is the one who stays behind to help clean up while others flee. And here is her first proper encounter, earlier in the evening.

“Let’s dance.”

“No thanks.”

“Why not?”

Ridiculous as it seems, I couldn’t find an answer. Except, “Because you’re an erk and I don’t dance with erks.” Maybe I should have said that. But all my life I had seen my father and mother behaving with perfect politeness to everyone who came to our house. They were even polite to the awful men who came to ask for our television licence (we had it all the time), and to the angry father who came to complain that Bruce had knocked his son off his bicycle (a lie) and even to the vicar, whom Dad afterwards described as an oily antediluvian old hypocrtie. Well, maybe Dad himself was the hypocrite, for welcoming the old fellow to his face and being rude behind his back; but I’d got the idea that the important thing was courtesy, especially in one’s own house, and because of that I was too inhibited to tell Mark Collins to get lost. So I danced with him,

He danced very well. You could say he was an expert. I’m crazy about dancing and very few boys I know really can. We danced apart, facing each other, and he fixed his eyes on mine in a strange way I wasn’t used to – our boys don’t look at you when they dance.

It’s clear from the outset that Kate categorises herself and Mark in different, well, categories. He is not one of ‘our boys’. Kate is very middle-class – slightly unconventionally so, since her father is an actor who has made a name for himself in a popular TV drama, but middle-class nonetheless. Mark is very working-class. He rides a motorbike everywhere, lives in a small house with a wide extended family, and is expected to follow his father into working as a mechanic. (Kate’s brother, meanwhile, would love to be a mechanic – but their parents aren’t unconventional enough to allow a career path that involves dropping out of higher education.)

If Mark had been in a very slightly different class, perhaps he could be snubbed. But he is so different from Kate’s that she feels she has to be ‘polite’ to him, and show ‘courtesy’. It is the performative friendliness of the middle-class. But it comes alongside the heart and hormones of a teenager. It isn’t long before Kate is smitten with Mark.

And, reader, I suspect you will be too. I fell rather hard for this pairing too. Perhaps Mark is a bit of wish-fulfilment – he is kind, honest, articulate and, of course, handsome. But Lynne Reid Banks does it well. She has crafted exactly the sort of young man that a heroine like Kate needs to open up her horizons, and to challenge her expectations.

The path isn’t plain sailing, of course. Both families have problems with them dating. Her parents are worried that her schoolwork will suffer if she is too distracted, and anxiously forbid her from getting on the motorbike – but Kate rightly suspect that class prejudice is part of their objections (and, indeed, has hardly shed her own). Mark’s family, meanwhile, feel awkward and unsure around Kate, and can feel the judgement that could come from her side. Lynne Reid Banks is so good at making a relationship – even one between teenagers – feel real and authentic, so that the obstacles they encounter seem organic rather than merely plot points.

Alongside this story are others that feel more uncomfortable – particulary one about a young woman lodging with the neighbours who claims the son of the family has got her pregnant, while nobody (including Kate) believes her. Then there’s the nearby Jewish family who face some anti-Semitism, and Lynne Reid Banks goes awkwardly over the top in her pro-Jewish descriptions, so that it somehow goes full circle and feels a little anti-Semitic itself.

I suppose what I’m saying is that there are plenty of elements in this 1977 novel that wouldn’t appear in a 2024 novel. But nothing terribly objectionable, and certainly nothing to match the racism of The Warning Bell. And Kate and Mark’s rocky teenage relationship feels timeless – certainly class remains a topic that British writers will return to, and Banks doesn’t offer any easy answers. She does give us two very appealing protagonists – flawed, absolutely, but people I ended up caring very deeply about. I can only imagine how heavily I’d have fallen for My Darling Villain if I’d read it as a teenager. I fell pretty hard as a 38-year-old.

 

The Visitors by Mary McMinnies

StuckinaBook All , , , 16 Comments

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.

How is A Century of Books going, then?

StuckinaBook All 37 Comments

We are somehow halfway through 2024 (which doesn’t SOUND real, but the calendar says it is) – and that means I’m halfway through my timeline for A Century of Books. For the uninitiated, that’s a year where I’m trying to read a book published every year between 1925-2024 throughout 2024. Not in order, naturally. As I read them, I’m adding reviews to my masterlist. It’s not quite up-to-date, but I’m not doing badly on the review front.

But how am I doing with dates? Where are the gaps? You’d think I should be at about 50 books – but it’s quite that easy, as the further through the year we get, the more likely I am to be doubling-up on my reading. For example, I read nine books in June and… none of them qualified for A Century of Books. They were all repeats. Eek.

Ok, here’s how I’m doing – spliced into decades:

1925-1929: 4/5

1930-1939: 7/10

1940-1949: 5/10

1950-1959: 6/10

1960-1969: 5/10

1970-1979: 3/10

1980-1989: 4/10

1990-1999: 3/10

2000-2009: 6/10

2010-2019: 9/10

2020-2024: 4/5

In total, that means I’ve read 56 of my 100 books. Bear in mind that includes quite a few from A Book A Day in May, so I had hoped to be a little far ahead – but the numbers above also reveal my tricky eras. As I might have predicted, I am rather behind in the 1970s-1990s, so might have to dwell in that period for a while.

Incidentally, I’ve read just under 100 books so far this year, so I really need to be more disciplined in the books I’m taking off the shelves… Can’t afford a repeat of my no-qualifying-reads of June.

But we don’t need to panic yet. I think it’s very doable. Wish me luck!

Everything’s Too Something! by Virginia Graham

StuckinaBook All , , , 19 Comments

Towards the end of A Book A Day in May, I read Virginia Graham’s Everything’s Too Something! (1966) and said I wanted to write about it a longer length – because it is such a delightful book, and I didn’t want to short change it.

I first came across Graham because Persephone Books publish her poetry – and that led me to her absolutely delightful correspondence with Joyce Grenfell, published as Dear Joyce, Dear Ginnie. From there, I turned to Here’s How and Say Please, which are a spoof how-to guide and a spoof etiquette guide respectively. She has that Provincial Ladyesque humour, combining self-deprecation and wry wit, and I relish it.

Everything’s Too Something! is a collection of essays that were originally published in Homes and Garden. Do magazines like that still have humorous columns in them? Are they of such joyful quality? Across the 36 short essays in this book, Graham covers some topics that link to Homes and Garden – though, curiously, they include how awful it is to have to tour around somebody’s garden. But really she turns her attention to anything – anything, that is, that would fall into the attention of a middle-class, middle-aged woman in the 1960s.

This ‘review’ is likely to end up being simply a list of quotes that amused me, so let’s just go with that. I think she (again, like E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady) is very good at the comic list, getting exactly the right balance of relatable observation with the slightly outlandish. For instance, here on friends of friends whom you haven’t met…

The friends of friends are always a problem. Some can be ardently welcomed into the circle, but there are always a number who not only do not get loved but are more or less mythical. Joyce can go on talking about Enid for years; how well she cooks ravioli, how she has composed a trio for horn, bassoon and drums, how sweet her chilren are, how ill her mother is, what she said to the magistrate, where she gets her corsets and a host of other intimate details relating to her life. And yet one never gets round to meeting the woman. ‘You would love her I’m sure,’ says Joyce. ‘I’m sure I would,’ you reply half-heartedly.

I’m not sure Graham would have considered herself at the forefront of 1960s feminism, but she does her bit for exposing the foibles of the patriarchy – mostly by satire. There’s a funny section on not trusting male drivers, for example, and there’s this from an essay on men and women living together:

It is unfortunate how many women are idea-prone. A man is an impractical creature, and a woman often can’t help having an idea which would get him out of the mess he is in – and, incidentally, the mess she will have to clear up. She might, for instance, have an idea about getting out the step-ladder instead of balancing the telephone directory on a stool on a table.

She might have an idea that it is better to start a bonfire with small sticks rather than full-grown trees. She might even go so far as to have an idea that the nails she has been handing one by one to her husband for an hour, might to advantage be parked on some adjacent shelf, or even in his pocket.

Then there’s this little snapshot of courtship vs marriage:

I remember my husband, when he was my fiancé, licked down, with his little pink tongue, all the envelopes for our wedding invitations. When it came to our first post-marriage party he refused to lick down one because, as he confessed, it made him feel sick and always had. The only thing a wife can deduce from this is that love wanes on marriage, and that her dear one is not prepared to feel sick for her now the nuptial knot has been tied.

Graham was 56 when the book was published, and had got to a time of life when she could write this next excerpt, though from the vantage of 38 I feel much the same some days:

The nice thing about getting to my age is that there are so many nice things to complain about. Of course, the young complain too, but their grumbles are usually concerned with more cosmic things such as the Condition of Man. The Condition of the Roads doesn’t worry them at all.

Most non-fiction published nowadays is described as ‘important’, and there’s definitely space for books which challenge our worldview, shows us about lives we know nothing about, educate us and so forth. I’m not sure how often, today, books are published like Everything’s Too Something! – that is to say, trivial and diverting, but also exceptionally well written. Caitlin Moran is the closest that comes to my mind, though even her writing has become increasingly keen to be important. I love that there is also room on the shelf for someone like Graham – whose writing couldn’t possibly be considered important, but is absolutely wonderful nonetheless.

Tea or Books? #128: Do We Read Plays? and Fifty Sounds vs The Housekeeper and the Professor

StuckinaBook All, Tea or Books? , , , 3 Comments

Polly Barton, Yoko Ogawa, and plays – welcome to episode 128!

In the first half of today’s ‘Tea or Books?’ episode, Rachel and I revisit a topic from years ago – plays! Specifically, do we think that plays should be read on the page, as well as seen on the stage. In the second half, we compare two books with a Japanese theme: Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, a non-fiction about moving to Japan and learning the language, and Yoko Ogawa’s novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, translated by Stephen Snyder.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton
The Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Weather by Jenny Offill
Conventional Wisdoms by Jocelyn Brooke
The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi
One Good Turn by Dorothy Whipple
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple
They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple
The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
J.B. Priestley
Tennesse Williams
The Dover Road by A.A. Milne
The Second Mrs Tanqueray by Arthur Wing Pinero
Private Lives by Noel Coward
Hay Fever by Noel Coward
Still Life by Noel Coward
Dear Octopus by Dodie Smith
Caryl Churchill
Lungs by Duncan Macmillan
People, Places and Things by Duncan Macmillan
Infinite Life by Annie Baker
Paula Vogel
White Noise by Suzan-Lori Parks
Posh by Laura Wade
The Watsons by Laura Wade
Jane Austen
Miss Elizabeth Bennet by A.A. Milne
Mr Pim Passes By by A.A. Milne
A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

Finishing off #ABookADayInMay

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 19 Comments

Well, here we are! For the third? fourth? year in a row, I’ve finished a book a day in May. I’ll get onto some thoughts about this year’s experience in a moment, but let’s rattle through the final three books…

24 for 3

24 for 3 (2007) by Jennie Walker

This novella is strong competition for ‘review book that sat on my shelves for the longest period’, as Bloomsbury sent it to me in 2008. It was independently published by the author the year before, so I’m considering it a 2007 title. And the author is in fact poet Charles Boyle – ‘Jennie Walker’ is a pseudonym he has used only once, so far.

24 for 3 is from the perspective of a middle-aged woman and her musings over the course of a week – mostly about her stepson, her husband, and the man she is having an affair with (whom she refers to as ‘the loss-adjustor’). As the title suggests to those in know, this is also a novella about cricket. But her husband and the loss-adjustor are cricket fanatics, and some matches between England and India recur through the week.

What’s the equivalent of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for a middle-aged man who wants a woman to have an affair with him AND ask him the rules of cricket? It did feel a bit wish-fulfilment at times, and when you know the author is a man, perhaps even less convincing as a real person.

Having said that, it is a rather beautifully written novella – a lovely observant voice, calmly exposing all sorts of truths about human nature. I marked out one paragraph, which is really more about the stepson.

Then his stepmother apologises for speaking to him the way she did and this is sad, almost as sad as the way his parents spend years of their lives fussing about his table manners or whether he’s cleaned his teeth or his toenails need cutting or he’s getting enough vitamin A or B or Q and then suddenly they stop, they ignore him completely, as if the whole family thing has just been a game to pass the time, like throwing balled-up socks. Although after they’ve dropped out oft he game they still insist, when they bother to notice that he’s still around, that the rules apply to him, and that his vitamn levels are the most important things in his life.

I did find the cricket sections more tiresome, as I find pretty much anything about sport in any context. But otherwise it was a really good little book, and it’s a shame there aren’t any more novellas under Walker’s name. Better late than never?

Everything’s Too Something! (1966) by Virginia Graham

This is a collection of short humorous essays collected from Homes and Garden, of all places. I love Graham’s writing, and I want to review this collection properly – rather than in a speedy A Book A Day in May fashion – so watch this space. She deserves to be better known, and I think she might have been if she’d written this sort of thing thirty years earlier. To tide you over, here’s a paragraph that gives a sense of her tone (and probably, on reflection, couldn’t have been written in the 1930s):

Individualists naturally ahve this tendency to think that laws are not made for them, but in a crowded world, and certainly in this sardine tin of an island, it is difificult to be illegal without inconveniencing somebody else. Contemporary youth, of course, asserts its freedom from conventionality by hitting people over the head with milk bottles, and this causes no little inconvenience too; but even the nonconformists who do not go as far as breaking the law often break the code of good manners by which we painstakingly live with each other.

The Thirteenth Tale (2006) by Diane Setterfield

Everybody was reading this when I started blogging and look, only the best part of 20 years later, I’ve listened to the audiobook!

The premise is fun. Vida Winter is the most famous writer in the UK and famously secretive about her life. Whenever she’s been asked about her history, she’s made up one after another fanciful tales. It’s become part of her lore. But, out of the blue, she writes to Margaret Lea requesting – well, more or less demanding – that Margaret write her biography. So off Margaret goes to Vida Winter’s mansion, kept in residence and regularly taken into Vida’s past with long accounts of her childhood, told by Setterfield as a separate narrative. Margaret is your classic heroine of any book like this: bookishly obsessed with the Brontes, feisty when needed, introspective and clever.

The title of the book, incidentally, comes from a collection of Vida Winter’s stories called Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, which only has 12 stories in it. What happened to the thirteenth tale?

I enjoyed the book, and Setterfield is definitely an excellent and involving storyteller. I’m always a bit dubious of narratives-within-narratives but it captivated me more than I thought it would. It wasn’t always immediately obvious (in the audiobook) whether we were in present-day with Margaret as ‘I’ or in the distant past with Vida as ‘I’. Perhaps it is marked out more obviously in the print edition?

I think the narrative-within-narrative device was stretched a bit far when it turns into somebody’s rediscovered diary late in the book, but perhaps Setterfield was harkening to her gothic antecedents. Anyway, it was a fun and diverting novel. I wouldn’t necessarily race to read another by her, but I’m glad I finally read The Thirteenth Tale.

A couple more #ABookADayInMay books (Sylvia Townsend Warner + Marjorie Stewart)

StuckinaBook All , , , , 6 Comments

We’re nearly there, everyone! The end is in sight, and it looks HOPEFUL that I’m going to make it. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been harder this year for various reasons – but we can save those thoughts for another day. Today, let’s look quickly at my choices for Day 27 and Day 28.

Image borrowed from Scott’s excellent review

A Garland of Straw (1943) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

I bought most of Warner’s short story collections in one fell swoop in 2011, and since then I’ve been rationing myself – and I have hardly any left. This collection was published in 1943 and most of the stories are war-centred, and chiefly set in the UK. Because they were published in the New Yorker rather than at home, she doesn’t assume too much knowledge about the home front in England – which means they can be accessed easily by the 21st-century reader.

Some of the best stories in here are very much wartime experiences. I loved ‘From Above’, about a woman evacuating her home because a time-bomb has been discovered nearby. ‘Noah’s Ark’ – about child evacuees in the countryside, and their disdain for rural animals in comparison to the city zoo – is brilliant on the spitefulness that can lie deep in adults. There is a sly horror in a story about a woman returning to her ancestral home, which was requisitioned for soldiers to be stationed there, and finding it so badly damaged that people think it’s been bombed. She’s excellent on the bland, friendly truisms that cannot forge any emotional comfort in a crisis, however kindly meant. Another strong story, very Warner, is on a political firebrand who cannot stop himself getting Jane Austen novels out of the library.

At their best, the stories have Warner’s inimicable airy sharpness. She can so incisive about people without any malice – a searing description with the objectivity of a photographer and the subjectivity of a gossip. This isn’t quite an example of that, but it is a very Warner opening (to ‘Out of My Happy past’):

When I was young there were two thigns that I lived for. One was music and the other was advice. In the matter of music I was fairly eclectic; I liked listening to it, performing it, transcribing it, and composing it. In the matter of advice my tastes were purer; I only liked giving it and, to itnerest me, it had to be uncontaminatedly my own.

The stories in A Garland of Straw seem shorter than most of her work (though I’d have to flick through some others to check that) – and it is a little to their detriment. Some short story writers really thrive on the incredibly brief story (Marjorie Barnard was great at that), while others make full use of 40-50 pages (Alice Munro, anyone). I think Warner is best at about 20-25 pages, and most of the stories in A Garland of Straw are under 10 pages. It doesn’t quite give her enough room to breathe, in some cases. She doesn’t really do stories that rely on shock or the striking moment. Rather, her stories are representative pieces of lives.

Some of the stories in A Gardland of Straw are a bit forgettable, and others don’t have time to flourish to their potential. And then there are some that are brilliant. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, and not a collection which shows her at her absolute best – for that, I’d recommend Swan on a Autumn River (published in the US as A Stranger With A Bag). But middling Warner short stories are still a good read, and there’s a lot to admire.

I Will Hold My House (1950) by Marjorie Stewart

I Will Hold My House is one of those novels that could be brilliant if it had been rather less ambitious. Or maybe the issue is with my memory. There are just SO many characters that it’s impossible to keep track of them all.

The novel is about a series of houses along the coast in Sussex, each with occupants facing their own crises and triumphs and regrets and hopes. I counted 26 major characters. We go in and out of the houses for the first chapter or two, and I made copious notes on the inside cover of what the houses were called, who lived in them, which was next to which. Often we learn these things in several stages…

There are so many that, each time Stewart cycles through them, they barely have time to do more than express a single motion before the whole whirl starts again. Gradually, some stood out more than others – but I can’t say I particularly cared about any of them. The writing was good enough – a better-than-average domestic novel, but without any bite or sharpness to set it apart. I enjoyed it enough to finish it, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill #ABookADayInMay Day 26

StuckinaBook All , , , 27 Comments

Dept. of Speculation: Jenny Offill (Best of Granta)

I can’t remember who first recommended Dept. of Speculation (2014) to me, but it was on one of the posts where I talked about loving books told in fragments – specifically Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Joan Givner’s Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer. Those are all non-fiction – until I read Offill’s novel, I hadn’t tried anybody doing anything like that for fiction.

Dept. of Speculation is told in hundreds of fragment paragraphs – most over a few lines, though the longest are about a page and the shortest are one or two words. Together, they tell the story of a relationship, from dating to marriage to a lost pregnancy to a child to an affair. I don’t know if there is any autobiography in there – the unnamed female narrator of the fragments is a writing teacher who has published one novel and struggles to write the second. Offill was certainly all those things, though I couldn’t speak to her relationship.

Something I love about this splintered approach to writing is that there are no restrictions on tonal consistency. You might dive suddenly into the most heart-piercing moment of a relationship breakdown, or the joyful surprises of motherhood, or the painful fears of the same. And, next to this emotional peak, Offill will write something entirely objective – about the Voyager space mission, for instance (it is relevant in context), or – well, this is the opening fragment/vignette/call-it-what-you-will:

Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.

This approach builds up a composite picture of the relationship that a more traditional, linear novel could do, but it will feel less fresh and perhaps a bit laboured. I don’t think you could get away with the same sharp philosophy or character insight that Offill can use – for instance, this next fragment works because of the format of the book. I think it would feel awkward in a less formally innovative novel:

There is such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

I wasn’t sure that a novel in vignettes could sustain the level of character development one would hope for – particularly over the course of several years. But somehow Offill manages to portray the shifting state of the marriage, and the similarly evolving relationship of mother and daughter. You can convey so much in snapshots.

Stop writing I love you, said the note my daughter wrote over the one I had left in her lunchbox. For a long time, she had asked for a note like that every day, but now a week after turning six, she puts a stop to it. I feel odd, strangely light-headed when I read the note. It is a feeling from a long time ago, the feeling of someone breaking up with me suddenly. My husband kisses me. “Don’t worry, love. Really, it’s nothing.”

There is so much nuance in the novel. It’s not a case of marriage-collapsed-by-adultery. There is a complex response to it, with some of the complexity being what falls between the vignettes. The absence of every detail doesn’t diminish the novel. Somehow it elevates it.

I was so impressed by Dept. of Speculation (incidentally, the curious title refers to the faux ‘return address’ both the man and the woman would put on the back of letters). I think it’ll stay in my mind for a long time, and I’ll doubtless re-read. If you have any other recommendations of fiction or non-fiction told in vignettes, or fragments of paragraphs, I’d love to hear them.