ReadingPresently

Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs – Jeremy Mercer

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First things first: I added an Oxford comma to the title of this book in the subject line, and I’m going to be doing the same throughout.  That’s just how I roll.

Secondly – I’ve found that any exercise which makes one turn to unread books on one’s shelves, whether that be the TBR Double Dare, A Century of Books, or Reading Presently, brings up all sorts of unexpected joys.  That’s hardly a surprise, perhaps, but it does give me pause for thought – how many wonderful books are waiting for me in my own room?  I have about 1000 unread books, probably – if a tenth of them are as good as Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs (2005) is, then I’ve got some definite treats ahead of me.  Thank you Charley, for buying this for my birthday in (gulp) 2010.

Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs was published as Time Was Soft There in the US, but for some reason the publishers decided we Brits couldn’t cope with such high-flown language, and gave us this variant title – rather unfairly, since at one point it is made clear that there weren’t any bedbugs.  I’m getting ahead of myself – this is Mercer’s non-fiction account of living in Paris’s famous Shakespeare & Co bookshop for a year.  I’ve visited it myself – indeed, the first ever photograph I put of myself on Stuck-in-a-Book is outside the shop – and although it isn’t much of a treasure trove for the secondhand bibliophile, being mostly new books now, it is an amazing place to visit.


But I was a few years too late to move in.  Although (unbeknownst to me) George Whitman was still alive when I visited in 2010 – he died in 2011 – it was no longer a haven for artistic types from around the world.  When Jeremy Mercer arrived at the turn of the 21st century, he could not really be considered an artistic type.  Before I started reading Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs, I’d rather assumed it would be about cosy, literary folk, and that Mercer myself would be the sort of bespectacled, cardigan-wearing book-fiend that I am myself.  Turns out, no.  He was only in Paris (from his native America) because someone had threatened his life after some criminal confidences were broken.  Mercer was a crime reporter who also wrote trashy true crime books, and his past exploits include attacking a neighbour and drug dealing.  Not exactly a lovable guy – and, although he is mostly repentant, I have to say I had a hard time reading the bits where he complained about being judged for attacking the neighbour.  Hmm.

But, if Mercer isn’t exactly a man I’d invite round for a night watching As Time Goes By, he certainly knows how to write an engaging memoir.  In exchange for bed and board, he was chiefly expected to help out around the shop, and follow George’s often curious whims:

The official store hours were noon to midnight, but most days George opened earlier to accommodate the crowds.  The major rule was that residents were expected to be out of bed in the morning to cart out boxes of books for the sidewalk display and sweep the floors before the customers arrived.  Beyond that, George liked everyone to help out for an hour each day, whether it be sorting books, washing dishes, or performing minor carpentry chores.  More idealistically, George also asked each resident to read a book a day from the library.  Kurt said many chose plays and novellas to meet the quota, but he was still tackling novels.
George does sound rather a strange taskmaster, expecting everyone to live on food taken from restaurants as they close for the night, criticising anyone for spending any money at all – but then losing thousands of francs by leaving the till unattended or hiding wads of notes behind books (some of which ended up being a nest for mice.)  George is 86 at the time that Mercer moves in, and as eccentric as they come – but still with an affection for young ladies.  This isn’t romantically reciprocated by any of them, but it does explain why so many young women find themselves working curious hours at Shakespeare & Co.  And then Mercer discovers that George has a teenage daughter, and decides to reunite them…

That’s quite a big moment in the memoir, engineering significant upheaval, but for the most part Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs just tells of Mercer’s everyday experiences with the hopeful, but yet slightly hopeless, artistic people surrounding him – from the ageing poet Simon to handsome, lost Kurt.  It;s not at all the portrait of Shakespeare & Co that I was expecting, but it is a fascinating glimpse into a small society that has only recently disappeared, and yet stretches back to the camaraderie and ethos of another time.

Four Hedges – Clare Leighton

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I have no recollection why I put Clare Leighton’s Four Hedges (1935) on my Amazon wishlist, but I’m assuming it was either because of a blogger or something Slightly Foxed mentioned (any guesses/answers?) – but it was enough to get my good friend Clare (not Leighton) to send this beautiful Little Toller edition to me for my birthday last year.  And where better to read a book about a garden, thought I, than in a garden.  So over the past few days, I’ve been reading it in study breaks from doing DPhil editing.  And reading it in a hammock.  Jealous at all?

It really wouldn’t have worked to read Four Hedges in a city, because it is such a hymn to nature.  It’s non-fiction (I always seem to forget that you can’t know these things unless I mention them), and tells of Leighton’s experience creating a garden, through the course of a year – the year isn’t dated, but the garden is about three years old, and presumably it wasn’t long before the book was published in 1935.

As you might have guessed by the cover, the book is filled with Leighton’s woodcuts (I assume ‘engravings on wood’, as they are termed in the book, are the same as woodcuts?)  It was this that undoubtedly attracted me to Four Hedges – there is something so simply and dignified about a woodcut; such a celebration of the forms and movements of nature.  Leighton writes at one point that people don’t appreciate the feel of nature enough, valuing only sight, sound, and smell – and, later, writes that flowers are considered too much for their colours, rather than their shapes.  Woodcuts are a rebuttal to both these errors, aren’t?  Without colour, they somehow offer texture as well as appearance – at least, they do in the hands of a craftswoman like Leighton.

As you would suppose, a lot of her woodcuts show plants – and I can only presume that they are accurate, and might well be of especial interest to the botanist.  For my part, I particularly appreciated the ones with people or animals in them.  For I am almost entirely ignorant about nature.

That’s a shocking thing to confess, for a country-boy who is desperate to get away from the city (even a city as beautiful as Oxford) and live in the countryside.  Right now I’m in my parents’ garden in Somerset, listening to the cows in the adjacent field eating parts of the hedge (indeed, I can see a couple about two metres to my left) and I love it.  One day I will write properly about my deep love for everything about villages.  But, with nature, my love is passionate but uninformed.  I love nature in the way that I love friends – joyously living alongside them, discovering more about them when they want to share, but not needing to know everything in order to love.

But I was a bit nervous before starting Four Hedges.  A few years ago I read some letters between gardeners and, while I enjoyed the camaraderie and friendship, I didn’t have much of a clue what was going on.  I don’t know when certain plants need bedding, or when others need pruning.  Latin names are so many Flowerus floweriori to me.  I love gardens, but I love walking through them and not doing an ounce of work in them – because I loathe gardening.

Luckily, Four Hedges was still perfect for me.  True, Leighton took it for granted that her reader loved gardening, and would be entirely unable to resist weeding (believe me, I resist it very easily), but she also writes in a way that can be loved by anybody.  She writes about watching birds being reared and caterpillars metamorphosing; she writes about a baby goat moving into a nearby field, and the perils of windy days – most importantly of all, she writes about her thoughts, feelings, and responses.  It is a delight to hear how thrilled she is about bulb catalogues, and I was swept away with her admiration for certain weeds, reclaiming them from gardeners’ snobbery.

It struck me how timeless this book was.  No mention is made of experiences outside the garden – barely even the house, to the extent that I thought there wasn’t a house for a great part of the book.  Certainly no hints of a forthcoming war (which was obvious to most by the mid-’30s) or anything like that.  Everything in Four Hedges could be happeningin 1835, or today – the only anachronism would be the non-electric mower and the scythe.  (Having said that, in the last place I lived in Oxford, our landlords only gave us a non-electric mower – one of their very many oddities.)

Although Leighton does not write humorously (nor intends to), there is a great deal in common between joyful writing and comic writing.  They reach towards the same goal, of sharing and bringing delight – and Leighton is so joyful, so able to find excitement and hope in the smallest detail, that it is a lift to the spirits to read her words, even for the non-gardener.  And which entirely humourless gardener, after all, would write this:

We should never take our gardens too seriously.  It is hard to curb ourselves in this, if we have any love for our plants, even as it is difficult to take a walk round the garden without pulling up weeds.  But too professional an attitude is apt to give us the same taut, strained feeling that comes into the faces and lives of all specialists.  It is better to have a few weeds and untidy edges to our flowers beds, and to enjoy our garden, than to allow ourselves to be dominated by it.  To be able occasionally to shut our eyes to weeds is a great art.  Let us relax in our gardens, and as a dear old countrywoman used to say, let us “poddle” in them.  We waste else the very beauty for which we have worked.
I am never in danger of taking gardening too seriously, but it is refreshing to hear Leighton say this nonetheless – any expert or avid hobbyist should include humour and self-awareness in their activities, shouldn’t they?  Now excuse me while I tend to my book collection – it’s getting rather overgrown, and it’s threatening to take over the floor.  A bit of weeding, and it’ll be fine.

The Help (in which I step off my high horse)

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I recently read The Help by Kathryn Stockett – I shan’t bother giving a full review, since I’m so late to the party that nearly everyone seems to have read it already, but it does provide a useful opportunity to talk about a general trend in my reading.

Very briefly, for those not in the know, The Help is about 1960s America – Jackson, Mississippi, specifically (which to me is chiefly notable for producing Eudora Welty and this wonderful song) – and the racial tensions of the time.  Particularly those between maid and employee – the cast of characters is almost exclusively women, including the three narrators Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter Phelan.  All three narrators are marvellously engaging, the whole novel is a terrific page-turner without sacrificing any narrative polish, and all in all it’s a very good novel.  If it weren’t tremendously popular already, I would be waxing evangelical about it to all and sundry.

It’s not a flawless novel.  You think the characters are complex (and some are) but then you realise that some of the racist characters are unrealistically bad in all ways – and there is an incident involving a naked man and a poker which needn’t have been in the novel at all (and isn’t nearly as unpleasant as I’ve realised that sentence sounds.)  But it’s an extremely impressive debut novel, and it’s bewildering that 50 agents turned it down.

Simply to create three characters so empathetic and engaging (that word again; but it is appropriate) is an exceptional achievement.  Novels were multiple narrators usually end up having one who isn’t as vibrant as the others, or one who is head and shoulders above the rest – not so, in Stockett’s case.  I was always delighted to see any of them turn up in the next chapter – with perhaps a slight preference for irrepressible Minny. No, wise Aibileen might come top. Oh, but what about Skeeter’s enthusiastic confusion and determination?  Oh, hang it, I love them all.

So why am I writing about The Help without reviewing it properly?  To expose one of my failings, I’m afraid.

I had assumed, since it was so popular, that it would be very poor.  If it hadn’t been for my book group, I wouldn’t have read it – and I’m grateful to the dovegreybooks ladies for giving me a copy (although I don’t know which of the group it was!)

You can excuse me – or at least understand where I’m coming from.  If you’ve found your way to Stuck-in-a-Book, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve experienced a similar thing.  Seeing Dan Brown and his ilk at the top of the bestseller charts, it’s difficult to believe that anything of quality could sell millions of copies, in the way that The Help has.

I did love The Time Traveller’s Wife, but other bestselling representatives of literary fiction have proven singularly disappointing to me.  Ian McEwan’s recent output has been rather ‘meh’; Lionel Shriver’s fantastically popular We Have To Talk About Kevin was so dreadfully written that I gave up on p.50.  Things like The Lovely Bones and The Kite Runner weren’t exactly bad, but I found it difficult to call them good, either.  Bestselling literary fiction is usually vastly better than bestselling unliterary fiction (yes, Dan Brown, I’m looking at you) but it doesn’t excite me.

Remember a little while ago I posted that quotation from Diana Athill, about the two types of reader, and how the second type created the bestseller?  Well, my experience had led me to believe that I’d never find a chart-topping novel that I really loved and admired.  Perhaps a few would be page-turners, but I couldn’t imagine any would actually bear closer analysis too.

Well, reader, I was wrong.  While Kathryn Stockett isn’t (yet, at least) on the scale of great prose writers like Virginia Woolf, she is certainly a cut above the usual.  I’m delighted that I stepped down from my high horse long enough to enjoy it – or, let’s face it, that I was pushed off against my will.

The Library at Night – Alberto Manguel

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I have already included quite a few excerpts from Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night (2006) on Stuck-in-a-Book, and I might well include some more in the future (you can read them all here), so this review has been spread thinly over many months!  Suffice to say, I loved it – thank you Colin for giving it to me! – and it’s not a book to read quickly.  I started it about 18 months ago, picking up and reading a bit here and there, soaking in Manguel’s thoughtful brilliance, and have only recently finished.  I’ve had A Reader on Reading on the go for even longer, so… look out for a review of that sometime in 2018!  Basically, this preface is a warning that I’m not going to write a proper review; I’m going to give you some more of his quotations, and a brief glimpse of the myriad world Manguel has created.

Manguel considers libraries from many different angles – having shared, at the beginning, that ‘libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places’. With this delightful proviso, Manguel devotes chapters to ‘The Library as…’  Myth, Order, Space, Power, Shadow, Shape, Chance, Workshop, Mind, Island, Survival, Oblivion, Imagination, Identity, and Home – each starts in his own library (pictured at the top of this post) and gradually unfolds to the world – encompassing incredible amounts of research and information about libraries around the world and throughout history – as well as branching out into all manner of philosophy, psychology, and memoir.

Paramount is Manguel’s interest in the very concept of a library – of giving order to books.

Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God’s creatures, order alphabetically or by number or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations.  Such eclectic classifications rule my own library.  Ordered alphabetically, for instance, it incongruously marries humorous Bulgakob to severe Bunin (in my Russian Literature section), and makes formal Boileau follow informal Beauchemin (in Writing in French), properly allots Borges a place next to his friend Bioy Casares (in Writing in Spanish) but opens an ocean of letters between Goethe and his inseparable friend Schiller (in German Literature).

By which we realise that Manguel is, unsurprisingly, a polyglot.  My entire non-English section rests in one copy of Harry Potter et la prisonnier d’Azkaban, but it’s still a topic I find amusing and interesting, even if it is essentially a case of coincidence.  I even blogged about it, with some photos from my shelves, back here.

Manguel isn’t interested solely in the arrangement of books, of course. He is a phenomenally well-read and bookish man, who would probably feel quite at home in the blogosphere – albeit probably the most highbrow member of it, because his intellect and knowledge is rather dizzying.  And yet… how could someone who writes the following excerpt not be at home with any and every bibliophile?

Some nights I dream of an entirely anonymous library in which books have no title and boast no author, forming a continuous narrative stream in which all genres, all styles, all stories converge, and all protagonists and all locations are unidentified, a stream into which I can dip at any point of its course.  In such a library, the hero of The Castle would embark on the Pequod in search of the Holy Grail, land on a deserted island to rebuild society from fragments shored against his ruins, speak of his first centenary encounter with ice and recall, in excruciating detail, his early going to bed.  In such a library there would be one single book divided into a thousand volumes and, pace Callimachus and Dewey, no catalogue.

As I say, this isn’t a thorough review of The Library at Night – it’s too wide-ranging to permit that – but it’s a general rallying call to any of you who haven’t got a copy yet.  We all love reading, and most of us also love books and libraries too – well, friends, Manguel knew this, and has written a book just for us.

Bassett – Stella Gibbons

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When I attended a middlebrow conference last year, my friend Terri was talking about boarding house novels – and one particularly grabbed my attention.  As you’ll have guessed from the title of this blog post, it was Bassett by Stella Gibbons – whose Cold Comfort Farm I, of course, love, and whose Westwood was wonderful in a very different way. Clicking on those titles will take you to reviews which explain what I loved about them… and now I can add Bassett to the fold, thanks to my friend Barbara giving it to me for my birthday last November.  Indeed, if it had just been about the boarding house, this would be on my 50 Books You Must Read list, and I’d be screaming from the rooftops.  Read on, dear reader…

Bassett (1933) kicks off with the glorious Miss Hilda Baker, and I think the best way to describe her is: imagine Paul Gallico’s Mrs. ‘arris if she were written by Stella Gibbons. Which, of course, she is. ‘She dressed neatly and badly in ugly little hats and ugly little necklaces’, works cutting patterns for a dressmakers, and her one vocation in life is identifying when other people are ‘sassing’ her, and reprimanding them for it. Miss Baker has managed to save some money, and is intrigued when she sees in a paper that another lady is looking to turn her home into a boarding house, and is looking for someone to run it with her.  Determined not to be cheated out of her savings, but intrigued, Miss Baker writes to The Tower, Crane Hill, Bassett – and receives this wonderful reply, which is too wonderful not to quote in full (with strong reservations about one racist sentence, of course):

Dear Miss Baker,
After much earnest thought I have decided that yours is the most suitable letter I have received as a result of the notice which appeared in Town and Country.  I am sure that the house could be made a success.  It is not damp.  Some of the letters were most unsuitable.  There was one from a Mr. Arthur Craft.  Frequent buses, but rather a long walk to them! ! !  It is so difficult, in these days, to know what to do for the best.  Mr. Craft suggested a Club.  I have a geyser and there are beautiful views.  Perhaps we could lay out the tennis court again in the field behind the house.  We are six miles from the station, but the buses run past the bottom of the hill.  I thought we might take Indians (not Negroes of course) as guests.  Is afternoon tea included do you know?  I believe not.  Perhaps you will let me know what you think.  Or perhaps it would be better if you came down one Saturday.  It is easier to go to Reading and take the bus.  I could meet you, if we decided to meet in Town, at half past three in the Clock Department.  Perhaps you would suggest a day, if Saturday doesn’t suit you. (This Saturday is not good for me I am afraid, as I have my W.I.)  But of course, they close on Saturday afternoons.  Will you let me know, by return if possible, whether you will meet me as arranged.
Yours faithfully, Eleanor Amy Padsoe.
P.S. – It is on clay soil, but some of it is on chalk.  Very healthy! ! !
That, ladies and gentlemen, is Miss Padsoe – and isn’t she a wonder?

As with Scoop, which I wrote about recently, incompatibility makes a great start for a comic novel.  Long story short, after going to see The Tower (and finding Miss Padsoe as barmy as the letter suggests), Miss Baker decides against the venture – but is then made redundant and can’t think what else to do.  So, off on a train she hops to Bassett once more.  Here’s an indication of their current assessment of each other…

And she thrust herself half out of the window again, waving vigorously and giving a false, toothy smile, and wishing Miss Padsoe looked a bit smarter.  Like a rag-bag, that’s what she was, and an old-fashioned one at that.

And Miss Padsoe, greeting Miss Baker with a convulsive flutter of her umbrella-less hand and an equally false and toothy smile, found time to wish amid much mental distress that Miss Baker did not look exactly like an under-housemaid.
Miss Padsoe’s mental distress is caused chiefly by her mother-and-daughter cook and maid, who have been cheating and neglecting her, and have now locked her out of her own house.  The sass of servants is like a red rag to a bull for Miss Baker, and she goes off to sort things out… It’s all very funny, filled with the sort of nonsensical dialogue I love (“‘Remember’? I’ll give her ‘Remember’!”) and all rather touching too – the first signs that Miss Baker and Miss Padsoe will become friends.  It’s not as rammed-down-your-throat heart-warming as that sounds (and as it might threaten to be in the hands of Paul Gallico, much as I love him!) but it’s rather lovely.

As I said at the beginning of this review, had Bassett concentrated exclusively on these ladies setting up their boarding house, with Gibbons’ delicious turn of phrase and moments of irony, this would be one of my all-time favourite novels.  Sadly, Bassett is diluted by the goings-on of another family in the village, and this takes up most of the second half of the novel…

Queenie is a 20-something girl who has come to live as a companion to Mrs. Shelling – and gets to know her children George and Bell, who are about her age.  They have progressive views about morality and romance, as does Queenie, and… well, one thing leads to another, and it becomes about Queenie falling in love with George, and the struggles this causes, involving class, morality, aspirations…

Apparently Queenie and her situation was very autobiographical, but I have to say that I found the whole thing a bit of an unnecessary addition.  It certainly wasn’t awful, and my response might well only be my impatience and boredom with any novel focuses on the anxieties of youthful ardour, but it seemed such a shame to take the attention away from such interesting and amusing protagonists.  And despite some attempts to combine the two strands, Gibbons’s seems to give up at one point, and from then on just writes about Queenie et al – the two storylines don’t blend at all neatly.

But that is a fairly small reservation, caused chiefly by the excellence of the first half of Bassett – so not a bad fault to have, all things considered!
Vintage Books have brought Stella Gibbons’ books back into print, some with absolutely glorious covers – Bassett is one of those which is only (I believe) Kindle or print on demand, so doesn’t get the same beautiful cover illustrations, but I’m not going to quibble – I’m so grateful to Vintage for making this brilliant novel accessible, and to Barbara for giving me a copy!

Skylark

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43. Skylark – Dezső Kosztolányi

I’ve been reading some pretty brilliant books recently, and not finding time to write about them, so prepare yourselves for some enthusiastic reviews coming up soon.  And let’s start the ball rolling with Skylark (1924) by Hungarian novelist Dezső Kosztolányi, translated into English by Richard Aczel, and a heartfelt köszönöm to him for doing so.  It’s gone on my list of 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.

Skylark came to my attention when Claire/Captive Reader put it in her Top Ten Books of 2011.  I added it to my Amazon wishlist, and waited… it felt, for some reason, like the sort of book which should really come as a gift.  Lucky for me, Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife spotted it there, and it arrived in my Christmas stocking last year.  So, consider this a tick on the list for my Reading Presently project (where I’m intending to read, in 2013, 50 books which were gifts.)

Before I get on to the wonderful writing and moving story in Skylark, I have to talk about the book itself.  If I’m ever asked why I don’t want a Kindle, my one word reply will now be: “Skylark“.  This NYRB edition is quite stunningly beautiful – not just the lovely colours and image on the front, and that turquoise/mint green I love so much on the spine, but the feel, the flip-flop of the pages, the perfect flexibility-to-sturdiness of the cover… the physical book is a work of art here, and I am so pleased that the content matched up.

The novel starts as a not-quite-young-any-more woman called Skylark leaves her provincial town for a week, to stay with relatives.  Actually, it starts while her parents are packing for her departure:

The dining-room sofa was strewn with strands of red, white and green cord, clippings of packing twine, shreds of wrapping paper and the scattered, crumpled pages of the local daily, the same fat letters at the top of each page: Sárszeg Gazette, 1899. 
The stage is set for the importance of the home – and the way that it is subverted and disturbed by Skylark’s departure.

One might expect (I did expect) that a novel which starts with a character getting ready to leave her home will follow that character on her travels.  Particularly so in a novel whose title bears the name of that character.  What Kosztolányi does so cleverly is, instead, focus on the effects of her absence, leaving the reader to bear witness to the unsettled lives of Skylark’s father (Ákos) and mother (known simply as Mother or ‘the woman’ throughout.)

They have a very obviously unhealthy dependency upon their daughter – but, at the same time, long more than anything for her to marry.  A man who has been polite enough to smile at her is built up into a potential – and then a definite – suitor; when he fails to follow up on this non-existent intimation, he becomes a figure for bitter hatred, much to his confusion.  Mother and Father can barely cope with Skylark leaving town for a week, let alone forever, but this is still their aim in life, even while they realise that it is almost impossible.

And why?  Because Skylark is ugly.  Extremely ugly.  Not horrendously disfigured or anything, simply deeply unattractive.  From what we see of her before she leaves, and hear about her, Skylark also seems domestically very capable (if unambitious), unimaginatively kind, practical, and pretty dull.  But her parents, of course, love her dearly.

This narrative is so clever and subtly written.  It is a mixture of quite pathetic inability to manage in their daughter’s absence, with a glimpse of what life would be like without her.  They eat interesting foods at restaurants and talk to their neighbours; Ákos gets drunk at a local club (which resembles the Freemasons in some fashion), and this leads to the most moving, vital, and brilliant scene of the novel – where all the couple’s unspoken fears and thoughts come tumbling out.  Kosztolányi gives the viewpoint of both husband and wife, so we see the scene through two sets of eyes simultaneously.  It is heartbreaking and extraordinary, but it is not the sort of confrontation that ‘changes things forever’.  Things cannot really ever, we sense, be changed.

They had given her that name years ago, Skylark, many, many years ago, when she still sang.  Somehow the name had stuck, and she still wore it like an outgrown childhood dress.
That passage is from early in the novel, and I marked it as being the one which suggested to me that I’d be onto something special.  It was also the first sign of something I thought throughout Skylark, which was that Kosztolányi’s writing reminded me of Katherine Mansfield’s – which is about the highest compliment I can pay to writing.  He has the same delicate touch, and the same way of showing ordinary people stepping outside of their normal routines, even slightly, and finding that everything is changed thereby, however unnoticeable this is to others.  The subtlest shift in the way acts are performed – the way Skylark holds a birdcage; the seasoning Ákos puts on his risotto – are shown by Kosztolányi to hold enormous significance.

Like a short story by Katherine Mansfield, I imagine Skylark would benefit from being read in one sitting.  At 221 pages, it could be done.  I, sadly, seemed to read almost all of it on bus journeys to and from work, and thus the reading experience was too broken up.  I will have to read it again when I have an entire afternoon to spare.

The only part of this edition I didn’t much like was the introduction by Péter Esterházy, since it barely spoke of the novel at all.  Apparently he is one of the most significant contemporary Hungarian writers, but I wish he’d written this introduction more as a fan of Skylark, and less as a fan of his own thoughts.

I’ve been thinking about the style I aim at on Stuck-in-a-Book, and how I want my posts to be a bit amusing – but it’s very hard to be funny when I have nothing but praise for a novel.  So instead, I’ll finish by saying that I went to a 1970s murder mystery party on Saturday (the one I mentioned I was writing), and somebody said that I looked like a fraudulent spiritualist from an Agatha Christie novel – must have been the floral bandana that did it.  With that image in your mind… go and buy a copy of Skylark; make it this beautiful NYRB Classics edition.

Books lost in the mind

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Do you ever read a book so slowly, over so many breaks, that you sort of lose any sense of what you thought about it?

No?  Really?

Well, I do.  (And maybe you did say ‘yes’ too.)  This is a side effect of reading so many books at once – some will, inevitably, be lost along the way – and picked up later – and finally finished, some months after they were started.  Dozens of books will have been read in between, and even a short narrative will have had hundreds of other characters tangled into it.

It’s a fascinating idea, actually – the narrative, which should ideally go from page to brain in a more or less straightforward matter of read-interpret-remember, actually encompasses many other characters and stories along the way (and is clever enough to separate them) – and that’s not even thinking about the millions of other stimuli along the way.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I enjoyed The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, very kindly given to me by Nichola (an internet book friend, whom I have met a couple of times, but who seems to have disappeared – Nichola, are you out there?), but I didn’t read it in ideal circumstances.

Which is to say that I didn’t simply lose the book in my mind… I literally lost it.  For about 18 months, it disappeared – and turned up when I moved house, as things tend to.  I was about two thirds of the way through when it disappeared, so… I just finished it, without going back to the beginning.

The Saturdays is a children’s book about a family of siblings who form a club, to pool their pocket money and do something exciting together with the proceeds each week, taking it in turns to decide.  It’s good fun, very charming, and with all the over-the-top events and mixture of morals and cynicism which characterise the best children’s books.  It’s probably better read as a child, or to a child, but I certainly enjoyed it a lot.  I think I finished it off during one of my headachey periods, and it’s the perfect sort of light book for that.

But I’m not equipped to write a proper review, so this is instead mostly a pondering on how the reading (and losing) process affects the way we take in a book.  And how each novel comes with the illusory promise of a narrative we can ingest – but that no reader is ever the ideal reader in that sense; stories and characters must weave their way around all the other narratives (real and fictional) in our lives, and cope with all the broken moments of reading, and distractions and forgetting.  And, out the other side, we usually still think of the book as a whole, entire and separate from our haphazard methods of reading.

All a ramble, and not put together with any forethought (I have broken up my blogging as well as my reading; I have been answering people on Facebook and writing a murder mystery party) but perhaps something interesting to think about and to discuss…?

The Easter Party – Vita Sackville-West

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Hayley has a good track record of giving me books that she hasn’t hugely enjoyed, which I end up loving. First off was Marghanita Laski’s Love on the Supertax (which remains my favourite of her novels, although I’ve only read three); now is Vita Sackville-West’s The Easter Party (1953). I couldn’t get a good photograph in the light, so I played around with the image instead.

It certainly isn’t an unflawed novel.  It is melodramatic and improbable.  But, with the odd reservation or two, I loved it.

The Easter party in question is a gathering at Anstey, the beautiful country home of Walter and Rose Mortibois.  In the party is Rose’s dowdy, contented sister Lucy, with her husband Dick and 22 year old son Robin; eccentric, flirtatious Lady Quarles, and Walter’s witty, intelligent brother Gilbert.  It is a curious group of people, all a little wary of the situation, each with their own private or public anxieties.  Which sounds a very trite way to describe the scenario – and, truth be told, Vita Sackville-West doesn’t wander too far from the trite, at times.

This is especially true in the comparison of Rose and Lucy.  Rose is in a loveless marriage – or, rather, an unloved partner in a marriage, for she devotedly loves Walter.  He, however, never made any bones about what he was offering her.  He prefixes his proposal with “I will not pretend to be in love with you,” which is, of course, what every little girl dreams of happening.  By contrast, Lucy and Dick have a delightful marriage.  It is very rare to come across a lovely, loving couple in fiction, and Vita S-W has to be congratulated for creating a pair who, in middle-age, still call each other ‘Pudding’, and are adorable rather than nauseating.

So, yes, we have the rich, unhappy woman and her poor, happy woman.  (By ‘poor’ I mean, naturally, ‘only has one bathroom’ – they’re not on the streets.)  It’s not the most original set-up, and I did wonder whether Vita was writing this in a rush – it was her penultimate novel, and I already knew that I hadn’t been much of a fan of her final one.  But this turns out to be more than a collection of amusing, exaggerated characters and well-worn, inevitable moral lessons.  Vita Sackville-West weaves something rather wonderful from this material.  For starters, it is amusing – here is Gilbert’s faux-horror at the idea of meeting Lady Quarles:

Are you trying to tell me that Lady Quarles is cosy?  If so, I don’t believe it.  Nothing that I have ever heard of her indicates anything of the sort.  It is true that my cognizance of her is limited to the piles of illustrated papers, all out of date, which I contemplate only when I visit, in a state of the greatest apprehension, my dentist or my doctor.  I am perhaps then not in the best of moods to appreciate the charm of irresistible, lovable ladies propped on a shooting-stick in tweeds or entering a theatre by flashlight in an ermine cloak, but on the whole I think I had better not risk transferring my acquaintance with Lady Quarles from the printed page to the flesh.  I might be disillusioned.
She is a wonderful character when she arrives – garrulous, excitable, somehow loved by all despite being an almighty nuisance.  I found her a little less tolerable when she started bearing her soul – because she started declaiming things in a very third-act-Ibsen way.  Thinking of The Easter Party in dramatic terms was very helpful for these segments…

It is, however, with the host and hostess that The Easter Party gets more interesting and original – and stand above similar novels.  I don’t know about you, but I find passion between humans in novels rather dull to read about – it’s so apt, if not done perfectly, to smack of the third-rate melodrama.  Perhaps it’s my diet of soap operas which has made me so intolerant of these unconvincing sounding conversations.  But what I will run towards, eagerly, are novels where a human is has a passionate love for something non-human.  I was going to say inanimate, but that’s not true for the central passions in The Easter Party.

For Rose, it is (besides her cold husband) Anstey and its gardens.  In Vita Sackville-West’s exceptionally brilliant novella The Heir, a man develops a loving obsession with the house he inherited.  Thirty years later, Vita Sackville-West is still exploring the relationship between person and property.  She, of course, had this deep bond with her family home Knole (and was justifiably pained and outraged that the laws of primogeniture meant her gender precluded her inheriting it.)  This affection, along with her expertise as a gardener, enables her to write beautifully and movingly about Anstey and its grounds:

The beauty of the renowned Anstey gardens!  Rose stood amazed.  Svend [the dog] brought one of his little sticks and dropped it at her feet and stood looking up, waiting for her to throw it, but she could take no notice.  She was gazing across the lake, with the great amphitheatre of trees piling up behind it, and the classical temples standing at intervals along its shores.  It was one of the most famous landscape gardens in England, laid out in the eighteenth century, far too big for the house it belonged to.  The house, however, was not visible from here, and, but for the temples, the garden might not have been a thing of artifice at all, but part of the natural scenery of woods and water, stretching away indefinitely into the countryside, untended by the hand of man.  Already the legions of wild daffodils were yellowing the grassy slopes, and a flight of duck rose from the lake which they frequented of their own accord.  The air was soft with the first warmth of spring, which is so different from the last warmth of autumn; the difference between the beginning and the end, between arrival and departure.
But this is familiar Vita territory; I was not surprised to encounter it.  A more unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, passion was the relationship Walter has with his Alsatian Svend.  (And in case you’re worrying, based on my previous reading of Lady into Fox and His Monkey Wife, fear not – their relationship is entirely unsuspect.)  Walter, who cannot express affection for any human, including his wife, is devoted to his dog.  The scenes describing their companionship and mutual trust could have felt like a mawkishly over-sentimental Marley and Me intrusion, but are done so cleverly and touchingly, that I doubt anybody could censor them.  And that’s coming from a cat person.  Svend even becomes an important plot pivot…

There are enough lingering secrets and unlikely speeches to make The Easter Party feel like a throwback to theatrical melodrama, but Vita Sackville-West combines these with gorgeous description, genuine pathos, and a web of delicate writing which bewitches the reader.  It’s a heady mixture, and one I doubt many authors could pull off – but I loved it.  Vita Sackville-West will never be in the same stable as Virginia Woolf, the author with whom she is still most often mentioned.  She wasn’t trying to be.  She was a talented writer, crafting something unusual – somehow both willfully derivative and original, and (for me, at least) an absorbing, delightful, occasionally tragic, read.  Thank you, Hayley!

Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn (a blog post with a twist)

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About 15 months ago, I got a gift from a lady at my book group: Ella Minnow Pea (2001) by Mark Dunn. Fast forward a bit, and I finally got around to it, and found it a surprisingly brilliant small book.

I did know Ella Minnow Pea‘s main, and most original, ‘gimmick’, if you will – that Mark Dunn gradually lost a, b, c, so on and so forth, throughout his book – and had thought that it was simply a witty structuring and a prolonging of a trick. It had a possibility of growing a touch dull or awkward (thought I) but was still worth trying out.

And, it turns out, my worry was wholly without basis.  Ella Minnow Pea is a fairly brilliant out-working of a good trick – but it is also dark and disturbing, on occasion, and not at all a throwaway, whimsical sort of book. I hadn’t thought it would turn out so dark…

Dunn’s story all occurs on an island known as Nollop, in honour of Mr. Nollop, famous for composing an important pangram – which you might know (follow this link.)  I don’t know if Nollop is fictitious or not – Wiki is willfully ignoring him, if not – but Nollop is akin to a god for folk on his island.  So much so, that Town Councillors await his laws from on high – although Nollop is, sadly, long lost to this mortal world.  His command is, (so Councillors say), shown by Nollop Island’s local bust of his body – or, particularly, wording put by a sculptor on it, of Mr. Nollop’s pangram.  As parts of its wording fall off, Councillors claim that it is a dictat from Mr. Nollop, that island inhabitants must drop that part of vocabulary – by mouth or by writing.  If inhabitants do not comply: a warning for a first infraction, whipping for an additional slip, and banishing from Nollop for a third.

At first, as ‘z’ falls from Nollop’s famous pangram, nobody thinks much about it.  It will not significantly adjust island inhabitants’ communication – for how much do folk say ‘z’ anyway?

As ‘q’ follows ‘z’, and ‘j’ follows ‘q’, things start to grow in difficulty – and angst among inhabitants, many of whom unwittingly infract Nollop’s laws, with postliminary warning, whipping – or having to sail away from Nollop for good.  Many Nollopians opt to abandon an unhappy island voluntarily…

Fourth to go is ‘d’, which brings with it appalling frustration.  Ella Minnow Pea all consists of writing from inhabitant to inhabitant, mum to child, aunt to young girl – scrawlings which Councillors scan for contraband words, but nothing apart from that, so this lady’s inclusion of painful or incautious topics won’t occasion Councillors burning or taking a communication:

My sweet Mittie, it is strange, so terribly strange how taxing it has become for me to speak, to write without these four illegal letters, but especially without the fourth.  I cannot see how, given the loss of one letter more, I will be able to remain among those I love, for surely I will misstep.  So I have chosen to stop talking, to stop writing altogether.
I found it a tiny bit difficult to work out who was who (or whom was whom, mayhap) always, but Ella Minnow Pea is primarily about a girl with that lmnop-sounding alias, maintaining a campaign against Nollop’s Councillors – trying (with similarly stubborn island folk) to craft a rival to Nollop’s pangram, which will (curiously) abolish Nollop Island’s Town Council’s dominant control of vocabulary.

It was surprisingly moving, actually. I think Dunn might aim for Ella Minnow Pea to imply an analogy with a Fascist nation, or any sort of dictatorship which bans individual autonomy. It was chilling, as inhabitants of Nollop lost rights, all books in Nollop’s library – burnt, straightaway, for invariably having ‘z’ – and, following from that, inhabitants lost all availability for articulation.

As I said at this post’s start – Ella Minnow Pea is surprisingly dark – but not gratuitously so at all.

Mark Dunn isn’t original in writing a book which avoids using a particular part of A-Z – in fact, a book using this cunning trick is known as a ‘lipogram‘ (Dunn’s book is, if you will, lipogrammatic) – but not many authors could discard so many words and still craft a story so brilliant, almost as though this linguistic loss had no ability to limit his writing or imagination.  Only Dunn could craft a book so moving and full of wisdom, with this handicap – thank you so much, Ruth, for giving it to Simon’s Book Gift Mountain.

And now, that twist – did you spot that this blog post – I think! – was built (apart from citations and quoting ‘Ella Minnow Pea‘ in full), without using any ‘e‘s at all…?  Not with Dunn’s brilliant cunning at doing so, although I must admit that it was oddly tiring!

Congratulations, if you did spot that!

Room at the Top (a pleasant surprise)

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If you read my recent appearance on Danielle’s blog, taking you on a tour around my bookshelves, you might have noticed this picture:

Being observant people, you will have spotted all sorts of things.  Half the Queen’s head, on my breakfast tea mug, perhaps.  David’s eye (David being the teddy bear), maybe?  A little bit of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, if you’re very astute.  But what you won’t have missed is that book slap-bang in the front of the photo – one which scarcely seems to accord with my reading tastes.  It was, in case you hadn’t guessed, a choice for my book group.

Could there be a less promising cover?  A louche man in a trench coat; a cover design which combines the worst excesses of ClipArt with the block capitals of a child learning to write; worst of all, the tagline (which mercifully you wouldn’t have been able to read on Dani’s post): ‘The famous novel of the drivingly ambitious, sexually ruthless Joe Lampton, hero of our time.’

It sounds absolutely ghastly, doesn’t it?

It’s fair to say, dear reader, that I approached Room at the Top with some trepidation.  Yes, it was given to me (so it’s on the Reading Presently list) but by a man who, inexplicably, had about two dozen copies in his garage, and I don’t think had read it.

But – but – as with A Confederacy of Dunces, another book group choice, I misjudged it.  Although Room at the Top isn’t in the same league as John Kennedy Toole’s superb novel, every moment of which I relished, it’s certainly much, much better than I’d dreaded from the cover, tagline, blurb…

I think Room at the Top compares interestingly with Francoise Sagan’s Sunlight on Cold Water, which I savaged recently.  Both novels are about men sleeping with various women, falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat, and trying to discover their futures – but somehow Braine’s was engaging, while Sagan’s was an overly-introspective bore.  If I were to describe the plot of Room at the Top in detail, I really don’t think it would appeal to many of my readers.  A recently demobilised soldier works his way through fairly menial financial jobs, feeling bitter about the rich and lustful about their daughters.  He falls in love; he falls out of it.  He seeks parent-replacements.  And he has a fair bit of sex.

So why did I like it?

Basically because John Braine can write well.  He’s in that school of writing which I always think of as the Orwell-school, simply because he was the first author I read from that stable.  The similarities aren’t in topic or genre, but in the use of language.  Orwell has a prose style that is somehow both beautiful and plain.  Sentence by sentence, it seems serviceable, even a little utilitarian, but it builds up into a richness which is hard to pinpoint.  At its best, every word is just right – without the elaborate tapestry of a Woolf or even an Elizabeth Taylor, or the entrenched humour of a von Arnim or Austen.  Of course, the only excerpt I noted down is rather more ornamental than most of Room at the Top, but… well, here it is.  Lampton is visiting the bombed-out house where he and his parents had lived:

I stepped forward into the bareness which had been the living-room.  I was sure about the cream valance, the red velvet curtains, the big photograph of myself as a child which had hung over the mantelshelf; but I couldn’t be quite certain about the location of the oak dining-table.  I closed my eyes for a moment and it came into focus by the far wall with three Windsor chairs round it. […]

The walls had been decorated half in fawn and orange paper and half in imitation oak panelling.  The paper was reduced to a few shreds now, the imitation oak panelling was pulped with dust and smoke and weather.  There had been a pattern of raised beads; I struck a match and held it close to the wall and I could still see some of the little marks where as a child I’d picked the beads off with my fingernails.  I felt a sharp guilt at the memory; the house should have been inviolate from minor indignities.

My predominant impression is that John Braine was too good a writer to write this sort of book.  He was one of the Angry Young Men, but the anger in Room at the Top feels rather tepid – and as though it has been put on for show, trying to join in with the big boys.  Lampton rails against the corporate system for a bit, and talks about ‘zombies’ in all areas of life – people from his despondent hometown who hopelessly go through the motions of living.  But I never really felt that his heart was in it.  What Braine chiefly wants to do, it feels, is write a good novel – regardless of the topic or the didactic rage of Angry Young Men.  Well, this was his first – I have no idea how his other novels turned out.  Perhaps he took the unassuming beauty of his prose and turned it to topics I’d find more palatable.  Perhaps not.  Either way, Room at the Top was a very pleasant surprise.