Here are some quick reviews of other books that I’ve had waiting on my finished-but-not-blogged-about pile. All three are enjoyable, and I’d recommend hunting them out – though only one of them is particularly easy to get hold of, I’ll admit.
The Seven Good Years (2015) by Etgar Keret
I really loved Etgar Keret’s short stories in Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, and wanted to try something else by him – and so I was delighted when my friend Clare got me a copy of his memoir The Seven Good Years for my birthday last year. Published in 2015, I’m a bit confused about what language it was written in. His stories are usually translated from Hebrew, and the title page of The Seven Good Years lists Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen, and Anthony Berris as translators – but the introduction also says ‘I have decided not to publish this book in my mother tongue (Hebrew) or in the place where I live (Israel), but to share it only with strangers’. So did he write it in Hebrew but never publish it? Who knows.
The reason he wants to keep it only available at a certain distance from himself is that this is much more personal than his surreal stories. The seven good years are the seven years between the birth of his son and the death of his father – the time during which there were three generations. And these figures certainly recur in the memoir, but it is not really a book about them. The incidents he highlights are more likely than the events of his short stories, but told with the same disjointed surreality. He is the master of arresting, register-hopping sentences – my favourite being ‘The period when my sister was discovering religion was just about the most depressing time in the history of Israeli pop’. It is a personal book, but odd and spiky, rather than straight-forwardly revealing. It has confirmed my affection for Keret as a writer.
Spring Always Comes (1938) by Elizabeth Cambridge
I was desperate to read this ever since reading Barb’s 10/10 review, and had an alert out for its availability for years – so snapped it up as soon as it became available. Like Cambridge’s best-known novel, Hostages to Fortune, it’s about a middle/upper-middle-class family living in the countryside – but here they are shocked into independence by the death of the patriarch. He leaves behind him a family down on their luck financially, and he also leaves a literary legacy.
The novel is about how the surviving family copes – there are four children moving in different circles, including as a literary assistant, one up at Oxford, another about to become a teacher and so forth. The most interesting and successful, to my mind, was the daughter working as the literary assistant who writes her own novel. It becomes very successful, though is taken as a satire – when she meant it seriously. Cambridge writes expertly about the tensions between success and self-esteem.
I really enjoyed Spring Almost Comes, but the only drawback for me is that Cambridge spreads herself a bit too thin over all the characters. A couple of them seem to dominate, but I’m not sure if that was deliberate. By the time we get back around to the widow, I felt we’d forgotten her. But Cambridge writes well and insightfully, and any of her books are worth reading.
The Patience of a Saint (1958) by G.B. Stern
This is exactly the sort of novel I love and hunt out. St Cedric was martyred a thousand years earlier, and there is a legend that he will return on that anniversary – firmly believed by Lady Eileen Francis, who patiently waits at the ruins of Abbey where St Cedric once served. Seeing an opportunity for money (which, for slightly complicated reasons, he needs for a friend – I suppose to make him more sympathetic to the reader), Ceddie Conway decides to impersonate him. At which point he is called upon to do the miraculous healings that St Cedric is famed for – and it works!
Only it turns out that Ceddie-the-impostor is being helped from the sidelines – by the genuine St Cedric, who has come back to life after all. Stern has created a lovable character in both Cedric and Ceddie, and this slim book plays out the conceit just long enough to keep it entertaining and tense.
I think I got sent Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2010) as a review copy in 2012, when it was translated from Hebrew into English – by Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston and Nathan Englander. It’s a collection of short stories, which is perhaps why there are three translators. I certainly couldn’t detect which story was translated by whom, which suggests that they all did a good job of letting Keret’s distinctive approach come through.