Stern

Three quick reviews

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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 eBook : Keret, Etgar, Silverston, Sondra, Shlesinger, Miriam, Cohen, Jessica, Berris, Anthony: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

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.

For All We Know by G.B. Stern

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What a curious novel, which has left rather an impression on me, even though I find it a little complex to untangle. I bought For All We Know [1955] in 2011, based on having enjoyed her books on Jane Austen that she co-wrote with Sheila Kaye-Smith. She’s also one of those names you see a lot if you’re interested in women writers in the early/mid twentieth century – and years ago I did read her novel Ten Days of Christmas. But somehow it still felt like I was a Stern fiction newbie. Do Christmas novels feel substantially different? Like you haven’t really heard a singer if you’ve only listened to their Christmas album?

Anyway, I decided to see what was going on with For All We Know – the sort of title that isn’t really giving anything away. What I think of as an Alan Ayckbourn-esque title – trips off the tongue and doesn’t really mean anything.

I was daunted by a family tree in the opening pages. For me, a family tree in a book is a tacit way of admitting that they haven’t done a good job delineating characters. But onwards – the first section, of five, is a family group discussing Gillian’s recent biography of the whole dynasty. She has been working on it for years, and it has been a total critical and commercial flop. Gillian is a biographer of some note, and the family is well known in theatrical circles, so why has it not been a success? Well, because Gillian has ignored the noted Bettina, and devoted significant sections to Bettina’s son Rendal, who is of no public note.

This family gathering and sotto voce discussions over, we jump back a few decades – to an infant Gillian, encountering Bettina’s side of the family for the first time. Bettina is Gillian’s grandfather’s sister’s daughter, whatever that translates into in terms of cousins and removes. That side of the family has a whole range of siblings and cousins and whatnot, and you quickly work out why the family tree is needed. All you need to know is that Gillian’s grandfather is the head of the side of the family that isn’t famous, and Bettina’s mother is the head of the side that is.

It was Timothy, her cousin, who had casually referred to Gillian’s grandfather and her Uncle Conrad as the ‘failure branch’ of the family tree. Dear, dear Timothy! Happily able to say even worse than that, not to tease nor to be cruel but because he could not for the life of him see why she need mind, as it was true. Timothy had a thick blank spot, and though only twelve years old when he came forth with this chubby definition of Gillian’s immediate family as compared with his own, indisputably the ‘celebrity branch’, he would be just as capable of saying it to-day when he was sixteen, because the thick blank spot had not grown more delicately assailable and nor had he; just one of those get-away-with-murder-boys, every year handsomer, and brilliant at everything he undertook.

Gillian is a few years younger, and in awe of this daunting family – though also enamoured by them, and desperate for them to show her attention and affection. The strength of For All We Know is the Stern’s understanding of the power of embarrassing or upsetting moments. She is so good at children and the way they feel so strongly in the moment. There are a couple of incidents where young Gillian feels she is being laughed at by the family – and, even more powerfully, one moment of triumph that is later forgotten by the people she thought she’d impressed. In a biography, these moments wouldn’t even warrant a footnote – but in Gillian’s young mind, they are seismic. She decides that she will one day write the biography of the family, and begins to fill notebooks with observations and eavesdroppings.

The novel has a further three parts, jumping forward in time, seeing how Gillian’s life becomes more embroiled with the family. Timothy fulfils his early promise and becomes a big-name actor in Hollywood; Rendal has fulfilled the prediction that he will have a much less illustrious career. Gillian has grown in confidence, though still clearly in awe of what Bettina thinks, and capable of strong emotional reactions.

One of the interesting things about For All We Know is that, jumping in stages through this family’s history, Stern doesn’t land in the most significant places. We hear about marriages that have happened between sections, and of moments of success and fame. The chapters of narrative seem almost random, in terms of a timeline, but perhaps they are the places of biggest emotional impact – not the places that Gillian’s biography would highlight. Stern is more interested in the ways that relationships within the family change. And particularly between Gillian and Bettina. There is no big surprise twist or gotcha moment – I did wonder if Bettina would turn out to be Gillian’s mother or something, but there’s nothing like that. But there are times when their relationship shifts dramatically – largely because what they want and expect from it is so different.

Getting to the end of For All We Know, I was left with a really strong impression of the emotional weight of the narrative – and, yes, slightly disconcerted by the curious structure and the events that aren’t covered. I can see why Stern chose to pick the moments she did – and yet I feel a bit like Gillian in the early chapters. That I’ve been watching a family from the outside, not quite privy to their most significant memories. I like a novel to leave me thinking, and I’m not quite sure yet whether I’ll remember this novel as a brilliant success or as something a little off-kilter. Or perhaps both?

4 (pretty good) books I don’t have much to say about

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You know there are sometimes some books that are good, but you can’t think of much to say about them? Well, these four have all been in a pile waiting to be reviewed… but I don’t have a whole review in me. Now that I’ve set sufficiently low expectations…

where-theres-love-theres-hateWhere There’s Love, There’s Hate (1946) by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo
Where did I hear of this book? Maybe Kaggsy? Maybe in Martin Edwards’ The Golden Age of Murder? Well, I don’t remember – but this is now the third book I’ve read by Adolfo Bioy Casares (and the first by his wife Silvina Ocampo). They were the hallucinogenic The Invention of Morel and the confusing Asleep in the Sun.

Well, this short novel – with the long title that sounds like a rejected name for a country album – is a murder mystery of sorts. It’s supposed to be a spoof or a send-up or something, but tbh I didn’t really see how it was. Is it a genre that can’t be satirised, because all detectives and all motives and all approaches seem possible? (Having said this, I did enjoy Dr. Humberto Huberman’s insistent belief that he’d cracked the riddle every single time he came up with a new theory.) Perhaps Where There’s Love, There’s Hate will mean more to somebody with more of an expertise than I in Latin American literature…

At Wit's EndAt Wit’s End (1965) by Erma Bombeck
I have a feeling that this one was a gift from my friend Clare, from my Amazon wishlist, but how did it end up there… You can see that I’m not very good at remembering how I come across books, though I’m always interested to hear how bloggers discover and choose their reads. I suspect this one came when I was on the lookout for books in the mould of the Provincial Lady diaries and Shirley Jackson’s fictionalised domestic autobiography.

This one was fun, but didn’t stray far from the typical. The usual hopeless husband, hapless narrator, and helpless children – tales of domestic disorder and marital disharmony; that sort of thing. I read most of it on the plane up to Glasgow in January, and it passed the time very amusingly, if perhaps not in the same league as Delafield and Jackson. But I did love lines like this: ‘I was going into my eleventh month of pregnancy (the doctor and I disagreed on this point) […]’.

Dandelion WineDandelion Wine (1957) by Ray Bradbury
My friend Barbara recommended this one years and years ago, and I bought it back in 2009. I had intentions to use it in my DPhil thesis, but – clearly – didn’t read it at the time. Fast forward seven years, and I read it – yes – on the train on the way to Edinburgh. It’s the penultimate of the books I read in Edinburgh, guys! (I do feel like I’ve been writing about them for years.)

You might not be able to make out the description on the cover. It says ‘the haunting novel of a summer of terror and wonder’. Well, there is not a single moment in this novel that is haunting; there is not an ounce of terror. Nor is there intended to be. It’s such a weird tagline for a novel that is actually just the sunny, whimsical musings of a boy and his brother enjoying a summer of… well, a little wonder, I guess. It’s all quite hazy and dreamy and a bit overwritten, but enjoyable. It has some very devoted fans, I think. I may not be quite one of them, but I did like it.

Dolphin CottageDolphin Cottage (1962) by G.B. Stern
I’ve only read Stern’s books about Jane Austen, so I was excited to have a review copy of Dolphin Cottage, one of Stern’s later novels. So late that a middlebrow domestic novelist ends up talking about TV appearances, which feels a little out of the expected – like the Internet suddenly cropping up in a Richmal Crompton novel or something.

I enjoyed reading this one, but I don’t think I have ever read a novel that felt so very much of its type. Even though the plot was a little curious, the rest was mid-century novel by numbers. Matriarch, daughter seeking freedom, local woman whose ways are not the old ways… I think I might try one of Stern’s older novels next time.

 

Ten Days of Christmas – G.B. Stern

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I don’t usually do much in the way of seasonal reading, but I draw the line at reading anything with ‘Christmas’ in the title at any other time than Christmas itself.  So it was that I spent Christmas Eve and the next few days reading Ten Days of Christmas (1950) by G.B. Stern, very kindly given to me by Verity last December.

I forget exactly what the process was between me finding out about the book and being presented with it, but I’m pretty sure it started with spotting Jane’s review in 2011 (my eager comment is there below it).  Verity couldn’t have known, when she passed on her large print copy, that it would be exactly what I needed in my cold-ridden post-Christmas haze – not only because it was a rather lovely book, but because my eyes couldn’t cope with any smaller font size.

The novel opens with a vast number of characters and (ominously) a family tree.  I decided – as I always do when confused by characters at the beginning of a novel – to ignore all of this and plough onwards, reasoning that they would fall into place sooner or later.  And they did.  It isn’t important, for this review, to disentangle first marriages and second marriages, half-siblings, step-siblings, and cousins – but rest assured that they do all sort themselves out.

The central thrust of Ten Days of Christmas is the nativity play which the various children intend to put on for their family – and to raise money to replace a displeasing picture in the church.  I will cross oceans to read a novel about theatrics, and enjoyed all the to-ing and fro-ing this bunch of believable (if occasionally a little too wise) children go to in deciding who will take what part, which play to choose, and all that.

It was all shaping up to be an enjoyable and simple family-oriented story, but for one incident.  Rosalind – who, at 17, has forcibly transferred herself from being considered a child to being considered a grown-up – is given a pre-war ‘duck ball’ toy by an eager and proud cousin… and then given an identical one by someone else.  She believes she has handled the situation beautifully…

It is this simple incident, which could so easily happen, which spirals out of control to cause two painful arguments – one among the children, another among the parents.  Stern expertly shows how children and adults can feud in very similar ways – and how the variations often make the adults more childish than the children.

But, fear not, all is not dissent.  There is plenty of happiness sprinkled throughout.

Look, the influence of Jane’s recommendation is making me blog with her short paragraphs!

One thing I could not shake from my head throughout was how very, very similar it all felt to the premise of an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel.  How very easily she could have taken these characters and these incidents and crafted one of her works of genius!  The many children and adults, interrelated in curious ways; the single incident which becomes so immensely important; the back-and-forth discussions which spiral round and round.  G.B. Stern was friends with Sheila Kaye-Smith (they wrote these two celebrations of Jane Austen in collaboration) and Sheila Kaye-Smith (as we know from the very brilliant bibliophile-memoir All The Books of My Life) was a devotee of Dame Ivy – could I be right in concluding that Stern was also a fan, and that Ten Days of Christmas was her attempt to follow in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s hallowed footsteps?

Well, G.B. Stern doesn’t have anything like Ivy Compton-Burnett’s talent, and Ten Days of Christmas doesn’t come close to the quality of her novels, but (to my mind) that is true of all but the tiniest handful of novelists.  Setting Ivy aside, Ten Days of Christmas is a very good, insightful, amusing, and (despite the arguments) extremely cosy novel.  Perhaps it is too late to recommend a Christmas novel now (although, of course, neither the twelve days nor the ten days are over) – but for future festive fireside reading, I do heartily recommend indulging in this treat of a book.  Thank you, Verity!

Authors on Authors (Part 1)

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I’m away this week, off up to Newcastle to give a conference paper, then to one of very my best friends’ wedding in Worcester at the weekend (very exciting!) so I’ve prepared a mini-series of posts to appear in my absence.  It’s not another lot of My Life in Books, I’m afraid, but it isn’t too far away… the next three posts will be on books about books.  Or, more precisely, authors discussing authors: each of the three books/pamphlets are about famous authors, by our sort of middlebrow authors.  Fun!

First up, and taking the spot for 1943 in A Century of Books, is Talking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern.  My housemate Mel gave this to me for my birthday in 2010 (thanks, Mel!) knowing how much I’d enjoyed its sequel, More Talk Of Jane Austen.  Yes, I’m doing these things the wrong way around, but it doesn’t much matter which order you read these books in – except that I would argue Talking of Jane Austen is even better.

The book is divided into fifteen essays, alternatively by Kaye-Smith and Stern.  Proceedings kick off with ‘Introducing Sheila Kaye-Smith to Jane Austen’ and ‘Introducing G.B. Stern to Jane Austen’, where our esteemed authoresses recount how they first came to read Austen – sheepishly admitting their early disregard of her, and triumphantly rejoicing in the moments (both with Emma, incidentally) where they discovered their lasting affinity with Jane.  Their love of Jane shines through every paragraph – this is an appreciation, but one from calm hearts and careful minds.  They do not run mad nor faint, rather they love both wisely and well.

To enter that world is to visit a congenial set of friends, and I still find that in their company I lose my own cares, much as I lost them on my first visit, thirty years ago.  Jane Austen is the perfect novelist of escape – of legitimate escape, such as are our holidays.  She does not transport one into fantasy but simply into another, less urgent, set of facts.  She tells no fairy-tale which might send us back dazzled and reeling to our contacts with normal life, but diverts us from our preoccupations with another set of problems no less real than our own, but making no personal demands upon us.  In fact it is her realism which provides the escape, for the fantastic and improbable only irritate certain minds and send them hurrying back unrefreshed to their own business.

Amongst the topics addressed are the education of female characters; a re-evaluation (now a fairly standard argument) or Henry and Maria Crawford; dress and food in the novels; the device of letter-writing… a wide-ranging group of intriguing minutiae.

Perhaps the bravest section is where Stern and Kaye-Smith turn their attention to characters which they consider failed.  Avert your eyes if you consider St. Jane to be infallible.  Even more bravely, this is how Stern prefixes the discussion:

When an author fails with one of her characters, it must, I think, be defined as a lack of perception, a certain bluntness of outlook where this particular character is concerned.  For where the author is aware she has failed, she will be compelled to do something about it: alter it, cut it, add to it, so that it will remain an uneven lop-sided conception with some irrelevant good scenes and some hopeless; showing traces of exasperated tinkering.  Where a character is a plain failure, evenly spread, we can usually detect some slight complacency in its creator.

And whose names are suggested?  Well, Stern and Kaye-Smith cannot agree on some of them, but amongst their nominations are Colonel Brandon, Eleanor Tilney, Lady Russell, Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  Since those final three characters are amongst my favourite in all the novels, I shall maintain a dignified silence on the topic.  (How could they!)  Ahem.

Perhaps the most fun section is at the end, where is all becomes something of a miscellany.  There are twenty pages of incidental comments and observations, or thoughts which were not quite sufficient to be developed into a whole chapter.  Here’s just one of ’em, courtesy of Sheila Kaye-Smith:

No two authors, you might think, would be less likely to have their work mistaken for each other’s than Jane Austen and Aldous Huxley.  Nevertheless I have recently seen a quotation from the author of Pride and Prejudice attributed to the author of Eyeless in Gaza.  It was in a review of the screen version of Pride and Prejudice, for the script of which Hollywood, with its fine sense of fitness, had made Mr. Huxley responsible.  The critic, having congratulated him on the complete suppression of his literary personality in this task, goes on to say that one piece of dialogue, however, stands out unmistakably as his own.  He then quotes Sir William Lucas’s commendation of dancing as “one of the first refinements of polished society”, with Darcy’s reply: “Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world – every savage can dance.”

If you’re not already a Janeite, this probably isn’t a good place to start.   Indeed, you should probably have read all of Austen’s books at least once before you even consider reading Talking of Jane Austen.  The authors are contentedly aware of this themselves, and welcome anyone (is it you?) who fits the description below:

We are not prowling round, my collaborator and myself, searching for converts; only for those insatiable legions who find the same mysterious pleasure as we do in talking Jane, discovering Jane, arguing Jane, quoting Jane, listing Jane, and for ever and ever marvelling at Jane and grateful for her legacy.
And so say all of us!

Speaking of Jane

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The book I’m talking about tonight is one of those lovely books which just doesn’t seem to be written anymore. I bought it in Colchester as one of my first books under Project 24, and it’s as lovely as it looks and sounds: More Talk of Jane Austen (1950) by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern.

Now, of course, I’ve done things in slightly the wrong order, because I’ve not read Speaking of Jane Austen, the volume preceding this one. Nor, in fact, have I read anything by Kaye-Smith or Stern, though Stern’s A Name to Conjure With has been on my bookshelf for about a decade. But no matter – for anyone who has read Austen’s novels (and it is important that you’ve read all six before opening this book) More Talk of Jane Austen is delicious, self-indulgent fun.

The first chapter is called ‘What is it about Jane Austen?’ I don’t know if the scenario is real or imagined, but the question is posed by Barbara (age 17 and a half) to G.B. Stern, as Barbara’s beloved is mad on Austen: ‘”It’s his thing.” And Barbara added, being a tolerant girl: “Nobody can help their thing.”‘ Of course, the same misconceptions Barbara has are those which fly about nowadays – that she’s for ‘maiden aunts in drawing-rooms’ and so forth. And naturally Stern disabuses her – excuse the lengthy passage, but it’s too lovely not to quote in full. “She’s neither bitty nor boisterous about her people; instead, she has irony, tenderness, clear vision, and most of all a gorgeous sense of their absurdity which is never really exaggerated into more than life-size. You’re absurd, I’m absurd, and so in some way or other are most of the people we meet. She does not have to distort or magnify what they’re like; she just recognises them, delights in them herself, and then re-creates them for our benefit without illusion or grandiloquence, and without any array of special circumstance, of drama, for instance, or horror, or even topical events of the day; luckily for her and for us, to leave them out was natural and not forced for her period, unless you were a gentleman actively involved in war and politics and religion and the struggle for existence; at her period you could be one of an isolated group living in the same country neighbourhood in England, without in any way meriting the reproach of escapism. Escape need have no ‘ism’ when we escape into Jane Austen; and when we have to return there’s no wrench, no jolt, no descent from the aeroplane, no bump back to life with a shock, no subsequent daze and resentment; it’s escape from our reality into her reality, and we can fuse our world with hers which is curiously and essentially ‘unrubbishy’. So there they are, her characters, concentrated for our benefit into a small circle of time and space, deliciously giving themselves away not only in action but by the smallest working of their motives and pre-occupations; absolutely unaware, of course, that anyone is catching them out at it. It’s no crime to be a lover of Jane Austen; but if you aren’t, you can’t understand why we find her so restful, because you’re much too inclined to translate ‘restful’ into ‘soporific’; if we just wanted an author who would send us nicely to sleep, we should not go to Jane Austen; she’s restful from exactly the opposite reason: we’re alert all the time when we’re reading and re-reading and re-re-reading Jane, otherwise we might miss something, some tiny exquisite detail, an almost imperceptible movement in the mind of her characters. Her poise is unassailable; you can trust it, and that’s restful in itself. The same with her judgments; you can trust them, and relax; mind you, to be able to relax wit an author isn’t the same thing again as to say she’s relaxing; the air of Bath is relaxing, but the air of Jane Austen isn’t; she’s pungent, she’s bracing; you’re breathing good air while you read Jane, and so you feel well. Apart from her gorgeous sense of humour, her vision is so fairly and evenly adjusted that you don’t have to get distracted all the time by the author’s own prejudices and neuroses subconsciously creeping in to distort the whole thing, and having to make allowances for environment —“

“Darling, do you think you could stop talking like a handbook on psycho-analysis? Because if it’s just to please me —“

“Dear little girl, I’d forgotten for the moment that you were there.”
That should be required reading for any Jane doubters. In truth, the rest of the book doesn’t really have this tone – it’s not done ‘in conversation with’ anyone. Stern and Kaye-Smith take alternate chapters, and address topics like letters, beauty, servants etc. etc. It is well-researched but not unduly scholarly – More Talk of Jane Austen can only be described as an appreciation. There isn’t a hint of objectivity, nor would I have there be: this is the unashamed indulgence of Janeites keen to delve into every detail of Austen’s novels. Not with the mad (and maddening) conspiracy theories or secret-subtext theories so beloved of Edward Said and his chums, but a simple gleaning of all the details Jane Austen actually put in the novels.

The book never feels over-zealous or superfluous – perhaps it would, were they examining any lesser writer than Austen. Or perhaps, as a Janeite, I cannot see clearly – for I revelled in this delight of a book, and only wonder why such things seem to be so out of fashion. Or, perhaps, they’ve just transferred to the blogosphere?

ETA: after posting this, I saw Rachel’s abundantly lovely Janeite post here – transferred to the blogosphere indeed!

Things to get Stuck into:

Howards End is on the Landing – Susan Hill: unquestionably my favourite book-about-books, even if Jane Austen gets short shrift within these pages (everyone has their faults).

Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma – Diana Birchall: one must tread carefully when it comes to Austen sequels – but Diana Birchall’s witty and loving sequel is very respectful and an entire delight.