Foster by Claire Keegan. Faber & Faber, 2022 (2010).
At the end of the lane there’s a long, white house with trees whose limbs are trailing the ground.
‘Da,’ I say. ‘The trees.’ ‘What about ’em?’ ‘They’re sick,’ I say. ‘They’re weeping willows,’ he says, and clears his throat.
It’s the hot summer of 1981 and a young girl is being taken by car in her father’s car from her family farm, near where County Carlow becomes County Wicklow, to stay with relatives on another farm not far from the shores of the Irish Sea.
Why is being taken away from her several siblings? It seems to be because her mother is imminently expecting another child, but there may be more to this than what meets the eye: we are only told matters from the child’s point of view and have to read between the lines.
But if there are unspoken mysteries about her family, what are the secrets kept by the kind couple who have agreed to take her in?
Peter Camenzind by Hermann Hesse, translated by W J Strachan (1973). Penguin, 1974 (1904).
Born in an isolated German-speaking Alpine village in the last half of the 19th century, Peter Camenzind is a solitary lad who loves communing with nature, walking and climbing in the mountains, and rowing on the lake adjoining the village.
But he’s also fond of books and jumps at a chance to be educated at a nearby religious institution. This proves to be a springboard to a life spent travelling and writing, but also an existence in which he searches for meaning and direction, not always successfully.
Written in his late twenties, Peter Camenzind was Hesse’s first published novel. A certain sense of aimlessness at first makes this a confusing read until the reader realises that Hesse drew heavily on aspects of his own life for this fictional first-person account; and though the narrator appears to be approaching twice the author’s real age at the turn of the century there is little doubt that in Peter’s story we learn much about Hesse’s own hopes and fears.
The Basque Ikurriña flag (photo credit Muhamedmesic)
The Dinner Guest by Gabriela Ybarra. El comensal (2015) translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Harvill Secker, 2018.
‘My mother was many of the things that are said about the dead, but in her case they were all true.’
XVI
As a teenager staying with a French family from southwest France in the sixties I seem to remember seeing the slogan 4+3=1 occasionally painted on walls. I thus became aware then of a nationalist movement of the Basque people on either side of the Franco-Spanish border and learned to recognise words related to the region such as Biscay, Gascony and, later, Euskadi and its Spanish equivalent, País Vasco.
All this was brought to mind when I considered the abstract cover design of the English translation of Gabriela Ybarra’s El comensal: it mingles the gold and red of the Spanish flag with the green, white and red of the Basque flag the Ikurriña.
Not insignificantly the splashes associated with the painted scrawl of the red stripe hint at blood, for this novel is focused on death, whether by assassination, suicide or, especially, from metastasis.
The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin. Picador / Pan Books, 1982 (1980).
This novella opens in the modern African Republic of Benin, sometime in the 1970s. A Marxist-Leninist government is in control, potentially making life difficult for an extended family of mixed heritage.
The descriptions are vivid and so circumstantial that it’s easy to believe that the author, Bruce Chatwin, who was in Benin at the time researching the patriarch of that family, is giving us a detailed factual account of a moment in history.
But something isn’t quite right. The Francisco Manoel da Silva whose life forms the focus of this narrative never existed. What at first appears to be a piece of creative nonfiction – a true history garlanded with imagined details – is soon revealed as faux nonfiction, an example of historical fiction masquerading as a true story. And yet, and yet…
After Midnight by Irmgard Keun. Nach Mitternacht, translated by Anthea Bell (1985). Penguin Classics, 2020 (1937).
‘The roofs that you see are not built for you. The bread that you smell is not baked for you. And the language that you hear is not spoken for you.’
March 1936. Nazi Germany’s Führer is visiting the town of Frankfurt, bringing disruption to the streets, exhilaration to some, anxiety to others. 19-year-old Susanne – Sanna to her friends – is increasingly feeling as though everyone she knows is living on borrowed time.
Her friend Gerti is infatuated with a Jewish boy while being pursued by a soldier in the Sturmabteilung; her other friend Liska (who’s married to Sanna’s older brother) is trying to attract the attentions of an outspoken intellectual; and Sanna herself is quietly despairing of hearing from her cousin Franz in Cologne.
And it’s not just Sanna who feels she’s living on a knife edge: rumours abound, almost anyone could be an informer, people disappear, sudden deaths occur; there’s a feeling that if you don’t salute, or declaim Heil Hitler! at every opportunity, or join in enthusiastically with the Horst Wessel Song you will be suspected of being unpatriotic, or even of treason.
A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark. Introduction by Ali Smith. Virago Books, 2009 (1988).
Spark’s novel is a deliciously piquant story about truth-telling, told by a character one almost suspects at times to be an unreliable narrator when her account is so spiky and vicious. Yet how can one doubt that war-bride Mrs Hawkins, whose training as a copy-editor is to shear away redundant prose, is giving us the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
Her nemesis is Hector Bartlett, a dreadful literary hack whom she calls to his face un pisseur de copie, an act which will have repercussions in the form of lost employment, subterfuge, conspiracy, pseudoscience and suicide.
But A Far Cry from Kensington is far from being a satirical revenge tragedy involving a pisseur de copie and a copy-editor. Set in postwar London in the mid-50s during a period when Spark was herself beginning to establish herself as a novelist, this evokes conditions in the capital and the personnel she was then familiar with, even fictionalising a vendetta she’d been involved in, so that it’s easy to accept this account as reflecting veracity.
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. Granta Books, 2019 (2018).
A vivid image comes to me: a rudimentary fence of thin branches stripped of leaves, two or three sheep skulls perched atop uprights. It’s the 70s, on a Welsh hillside, and the kids – this is a family holiday after all, though some of us adults are excavating an early medieval site – have, unconsciously imitating The Lord of the Flies, fashioned their ramshackle barrier to keep us out of their den.
This memory emerged like a body exhumed from a peat bog as I read Sarah Moss’s novella. Set in the late 80s or early 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall Ghost Wall describes a poorly organised experimental archaeology summer school in Northumberland where a professor and three students are joined by Silvie, her cowed mother and her bus driver husband who fancies himself an expert in Iron Age prehistory.
But the opening pages take us back a couple of thousand or so years, when a community is about to ritually kill a young woman and then pin her down in a bog. Details echo what came to light when Lindow Woman was discovered in Cheshire, and of Danish bog bodies such as Haraldskær Woman and Huldremose Woman. How may this relate to Silvie as the modern group attempt to re-enact prehistoric life on an upland Northumbrian moss near the North Sea coast?
And will a ghost wall be sufficient to keep outsiders out, or will it fall just as the Berlin Wall did?
Nursery Rhymes. An essay by V Sackville-West. Illustrated by Philippe Jullian. Michael Joseph, 1950 (1947).
“Coleridge had a proper appreciation of the preposterous, astounding, yet entirely acceptable propositions which go to make up the thaumaturgy of the nursery. No one lacking that appreciation is advised to read any further in this essay.”
p 7
Well, I’m one of those who, like Coleridge, appreciate the preposterous thaumaturgy of nursery rhymes, so Vita Sackville-West’s enthusiastic paddling in the shoreless pool of childhood lore naturally appealed to me. That she does it with humour yet without condescension was a bonus, and that there were unexpected delights hiding under various rocks she turns over satisfied my abiding curiosity.
Surprisingly, for what now counts as a period piece, she’s prepared to be critical of antiquarian ‘explanations’ concerning the origins of these rhymes and what they supposedly signified, but her mockery is gentle and she’s even prepared to admit to her own mistakes, as first appeared in an earlier limited edition.
The whole is embellished by Philippe Jullian’s whimsical drawings all printed in plum-coloured ink, their style very much conforming to contemporary adult attitudes regarding nursery lore – genteel and aloof but maybe not absolutely reflecting their historical origins.
Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen) by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Granta Books, 2019 (2016).
Quirky. Hilarious. Weird. Funny. Comical. Cute. Dreamy. Just some of the adjectives from press reviews littering the cover of the edition I read of Sayaka Murata’s Konbini Ningen. Yet, strangely, these wouldn’t have been the words I’d’ve used, which perhaps only goes to show that I’m an atypical reader.
Sad. Affirmative. Blistering. Honest. Critical. Familiar. Unconventional. These are the terms that come to my mind after having completed this first-person novella of a woman in her thirties who works part-time in a Japanese convenience store. Not a trace of dreaminess, quirkiness or real comedy did I detect. It really matters who’s in the audience for this little drama.
For the fact of the matter is that Keiko Furukura doesn’t fit the norm of a woman approaching middle age in Japanese society; and her attempts to fit in as best she can lead to rather mixed results. Can she – or rather should she – be “fixed” or “cured” of her thinking and behaviours? That’s the crux of this thought-provoking piece of what one might class as autobiografiction.
‘The Two Sons of Edward, 4th Earl of Dorset’ by Cornelius Nuie, and ‘Angelica as the Russian Princess’ by Vanessa Bell (Charleston Trust)
Orlando. A Biography, by Virginia Woolf. Introduction and notes by Merry M Pawlowski. Wordsworth Classics, 2003 (1928).
Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades.
The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet.
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
As Orlando is a welter of vignettes, a kaleidoscope with multiple patterns, and a diorama with many scenes, so might a consideration of this ‘biography’ be a sequence of thoughts, reflections and digressions.
Orlando being so well-known as an extended fantasia on Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West means only occasional reference to that fact needs mentioning; it’s as a piece of literature and, above all, storytelling that I think Orlando needs to be remembered, and whether it works as a satisfying experiment or not addressed.
And what is the outward show of this narrative, its material appearance? It tells the history of a young Elizabethan noble whose life, career, gender and obsessions go through a series of transformations over several centuries till we arrive at the year 1928, in the month of October, with Orlando now a woman together with, one hopes, the love of her life. Accept this wild proposition, therefore, and things start falling into place.
Fludd by Hilary Mantel. Fourth Estate, 2010 (1989).
‘Patterns can alter,’ Fludd said. ‘A soul is a thing in a state of flux. Your fate is mutable. Your will is free.’
Chapter Ten
This short novel by the late Hilary Mantel is all about the state of flux that the title character alludes to. The anticipated call in the waiting room. That moment when you realise that all it takes to emerge from that rut is that first step; the point at which you finally decide to stand up to the bully, to change the trajectory of your life for the better.
Fetherhoughton in the mid-fifties, with its adjacent village Netherhoughton, is a community in limbo. Like the Derbyshire villages of Hadfield and Padfield near Glossop where the author grew up it is a liminal place on the borders of what is now Greater Manchester; a place of mists and rain, of freezing cold, of decaying industries, and of a profound conservatism.
Can Father Angwin, Sister Philomena, and housekeeper Agnes Dempsey respond to the door swinging open and transform their lives forever? And what are they to make of the new curate, Father Fludd, who seems to be the catalyst?
The days are getting shorter and the nights … well, longer, and my thoughts are heading towards considering what to read as the dark gathers outside the window. Of course there is Annabel’s readalong of The Dark is Rising sequence which is due to take us up to midwinter, but what else beckons?
So, there’s Witch Week 2022, an annual meme run by Lizzie Ross and myself, focused on fantasy themes that suit the period between Halloween and Bonfire Night. This year highlights Polychromancy, a theme looking at fiction related to diverse cultures and stories, and runs till 6th November after the schedule of posts is revealed on 30th October. The featured book is Black Water Sister by Zen Cho.
#NovNov22 746books.combookishbeck.wordpress.com
1st November also sees the start of Novellas in November run by Cathy at 746books.com and Rebecca at BookishBeck.wordpress.com. They’re basing their weekly schedules on four headings – short classics, novellas in translation, short nonfiction, and contemporary novellas – and I’m considering possible titles to read and review through the month, all chosen from books I already have on my shelves. Of course I reserve the right to change my mind at the last minute!
• Short Classics: Good Morning Midnight (Jean Rhys) OR Orlando (Virginia Woolf)
• Novellas in Translation: Strait is the Gate (André Gide) OR By Night in Chile (Roberto Bolaño) OR Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Gabriel García Márquez).
• Short Non-Fiction: We the People (Timothy Garton Ash) OR The Viceroy of Ouidah (Bruce Chatwin).
• Contemporary Novellas: The Lost Daughter (Elena Ferrante) OR Ghost Wall (Sarah Moss).
@SciFiMonth
November is also when SciFiMonth (curated by Imyril at https://onemore.org and a couple of other bloggers) reaches its tenth anniversary. I’m generally on the periphery of bloggers marking the annual event but I shall attempt to read one or two titles at some stage during the month.
So that’s me. Are you planning to join any of these events? Have you read any of the novellas mentioned? Pray tell!
Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans by Luis Fernando Verissimo (2000), translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jill Costa. The Harvill Press, 2004.
Edgar Allan Poe. Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Dr John Dee. Jorge Luis Borges. The King of Bohemia. How exactly are they and others linked? What does the angel Israfel’s lyre signify? And what precisely happened in Buenos Aires early in 1985 when a victim was found stabbed in a locked hotel room?
Brazilian author Verissimo (the surname translates as “very true”) has concocted a metafictional crime novel in which he – or rather his literary alter ego – conducts conversations with his idol Borges before the latter’s death in 1986, with a view to solving the riddle of how and why a certain Joachim Rotkopf was murdered.
As the novel abounds in literary and historical references, the fact that the murder happens at an Edgar Allan Poe conference naturally leads to discussions about Poe’s The Gold-Bug and The Murders in the Rue Morgue in Borges’s own library. Curiously, and perhaps notably, the Argentine’s own writings, particularly Death and the Compass, are rarely specified.
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. Preface by Hermione Lee, introduction by David Nicholls, 2013. 4th Estate 2018 (1978).
“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
John Milton, ‘Areopagitica’
It is 1959, and Florence Green is minded to open a bookshop in Hardborough, a town on the Suffolk coast. She finds vacant premises for sale, a building of some antiquity but unloved and neglected, and proceeds to buy it with financial assistance from the bank.
However, as the adage goes, though you can lead a horse to water you can’t make it drink, and Hardborough proves resistant to her well-meant plans. In particular Mrs Gamart, who reigns among the town’s upper echelons, decides she wants the premises for an arts centre.
Florence, a war widow who wants to give people the benefit of the doubt, at first seems amenable to giving up ownership; but when she realises Mrs Gamart is trying to preempt what is Florence’s own decision she digs her heels in and sets up shop. Has she misjudged Mrs Gamart’s steely determination, along with where the town’s sympathies may lie?
St Paul’s Cathedral on the night of VE Day, 8th May 1945 (Daily Herald)
The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark. Penguin 2013 (1963).
“The frown of his face Before me, the hurtle of hell Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?”
—Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland‘
With flashbacks to 1945, specifically the period between VE Day and VJ Day, Muriel Spark’s novella has one character – JaneWright, who’s now a news columnist – responding to news of the fate of another by contacting some of her former acquaintances for their reactions.
What starts off as a mildly askant look at a group of mostly young things in a women’s hostel slowly assumes a bleaker hue as we start to get their measure, but we never lose sight of Spark’s razor-sharp asides which, while encouraging us to sympathise with the principal actors, allow those of us dissimilar in age to these girls to view them with a degree of detached compassion.
One might ask how Spark achieves a sense of detachment. It’s essentially to do with the term ‘slender means’ referring here not just to their relative impecunity – this was a time of general rationing, after all – but also (another reflection of the times) to their limited horizons, goals, and even imaginations.
Anita Loughrey's blog. This is my journal about my experiences and thoughts on writing. As well as news about me and my books, it includes writing tips, book reviews, author interviews and blog tours.
For more information about me and my books see my website: www.anitaloughrey.com. Follow me on Twitter @amloughrey, Facebook @anitaloughrey.author and on Instagram @anitaloughrey
Because life is better served with a good book and a cup of tea. Book reviews and general bookish writings. I love many genres, so all manner of books may appear on my blog.
For award-winning, internationally-acclaimed author Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). By Anthony Lawton: godson, cousin & literary executor. Rosemary Sutcliff wrote historical fiction, children's literature and books, films, TV & radio, including The Eagle of the Ninth, Sword at Sunset, Song for a Dark Queen, The Mark of the Horse Lord, The Silver Branch, The Lantern Bearers, Dawn Wind, Blue Remembered Hills.
Calmgrove 