Alison by Lizzy Stewart – #ABookADayInMay Day 8

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It’s been quite a while since I read a graphic novel, and A Book A Day In May seemed like an excellent opportunity to remedy that. I bought Alison (2022) by Lizzy Stewart last year, on the basis of having seen it mentioned on various blogs and Instagram accounts. And also because I was in the lovely Caper bookshop in Oxford, and I don’t feel I can leave there empty handed.

The Alison of the title is Alison Porter, our narrator. In the opening pages, she tells us that she was born in 1958 in Bridport, Dorset – a town, incidentally, that some of my relatives live in. At 18, she marries a local boy a handful of years older than her. “He was nice. I was fast-tracking my route to an ordinary life. It made sense; an ordinary life seemed like the right thing to do.”

Before long, a much older man called Patrick meets her – and woos her away from her short-lived marriage.

I loved Patrick Kerr as a trapdoor out of my life long before I found I could love him as a man.

She has only experienced provincial mundanity. He represents bohemia, London, art – and she is swept away. But even in Stewart’s first illustrations of Patrick, he seems creepy – almost vampiric. We suspect long before Alison does that this will not be a happy ending.

Patrick affects to encourage Alison’s art, while also using her as a model for his own paintings, but he doesn’t seem to want her to have her own artistic voice. He insists on hours a day of drawing practice, trying to turn her into an imitator of his own style. Disillusionment seeps into Alison’s mindset. But she is encouraged and enheartened by a friend she makes – Tessa, a young Black sculptor. She is the only true friend that Alison meets in the maelstrom of artists who gather around Patrick and (deliberately or otherwise) make her feel ignorant, wrongly dressed, and inadequate.

Alison doesn’t end at the disillusion there. It covers many years, and it’s really about finding and flourishing in your own identity – though remaining clear-eyed. Her self-discovery doesn’t prevent her having problems, whether that be detachment from her parents or tragedies that befall people she loves. It is a very honest book – so realistic that I had to look people up to see if they were real (which they are not).

In a graphic novel more than anywhere else, the medium and presentation are fundamental. For the most part, Stewart uses simple line-drawings with (I think) watercolours that are somewhere between sepia and grey. You can see some examples in the Guardian review. There are pages of many frames, where they hold a conversation. Others have chunks of first person text alongside the drawings, and these are written in a beguiling manner with enough psychological depth to lend weight to the overall story. And then some spreads in the book are wholly illustration, and the only moments of colour in the book; in these, Stewart has more opportunity to play with style and format. It all works together very well.

I found Alison a moving graphic novel, dodging some platitudes and cliches even while telling a familiar story – the naive woman who is taken advantage of by a powerful man, and creativity that has to force its way through conventions. My only query is why the cover art is chosen – so different from the style found inside. Why wouldn’t they have used one of the many illustrations of Alison herself?

Anyway, I very much enjoyed the experience, and I won’t leave it so long before I pick up a graphic novel again.

The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick – #ABookADayInMay Day 7

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I’m only buying 24 books this year, and so naturally I’m choosing them carefully. I knew I had to have The Odd Woman and the City (2015) by Vivian Gornick when Jacqui wrote a brilliant review in January (and it certainly didn’t hurt that it had been republished by Daunt Books, who have impeccable taste). Now I’ve read it, and Jacqui didn’t put me wrong – it’s brilliant.

The Odd Woman and the City has the subtitle ‘a memoir’, but it’s only a memoir in the loose sense that it’s non-fiction and in the first person. Don’t come here expecting to have anything you might traditionally expect in a memoir. Anything we learn about Gornick is picked up almost by accident, in amidst the things that she thinks are more important – or perhaps I should say, she recognises that things like friendship, city life, and literary appreciation are more significant markers of a person’s life than date of birth, list of publications etc. etc.

The Odd Woman and the City isn’t told in fragments in the way that Blue Postcards was – it feels more linear than that – but it is still built up impressionistically, weaving between reflections on friendship with a man she loves but brings out her negative side, to comments overheard as she walks through New York, to analyses of books she has loved from Middlemarch to Isabel Bolton to George Gissing’s The Odd Women that inspires Gornick’s title. Her main subjects are right there in the title: herself, and New York.

I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to ­arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center of the world and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby. 

At fourteen I began taking that subway ride, walking the length and breadth of the island late in winter, deep in summer. The only difference between me and someone like me from Kansas was that in Kansas one makes the immigrant’s lonely leap once and forever, whereas I made many small trips into the city, going home repeatedly for comfort and reassurance, dullness and delay, before attempting the main chance. Down Broadway, up Lexington, across Fifty-Seventh Street, from river to river, through Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, plunging down to Wall Street, climbing up to Columbia. I walked these streets for years, excited and expectant, going home each night to the Bronx, where I waited for life to begin.

I have never been to New York, and I don’t particularly want to. I am emphatically not a city person and I never intend to live in one again (my 13 years in a city as small as Oxford were proof that I wasn’t built for city living). Gornick even commits the cardinal sin of saying that the Bronx is ‘like a village’, which is the sort of thing people say about areas of cities if they have never lived in a village. And yet I loved reading about Gornick’s thoughts on city life – the people she knows, the people she overlaps with, the communities that have battled through modernity and the ones that have been lost. She scatters in amusing or unusual New York moments in between longer self-examinations, as though she is walking through the city, lost in contemplation, and occasionally interrupted by something significant in front of her.

On upper Broadway a beggar approaches a middle-aged woman. ‘I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I just need –’ he starts. To his amazement, the woman yells directly into his face, ‘I just had my pocket picked!’ The beggar turns his face northward and calls to a colleague up the block, ‘Hey, Bobby, leave her alone, she just got robbed.’

She is excellent at immersing us in different worlds, whether that is particular streets or particular milieus. Some are more sustained – towards the end of the book there is a poignant recollection of seeing a friend delivering a Samuel Beckett monologue after having been severely invalided by a stroke. Some are only in passing, but Gornick is brilliant are using all of the elements to build up a picture of her life. Her sense of rhythm and pace – whether of sentences, paragraphs, or whole sections – is exhilirating.

She is remorseless is self-examination – though I did enjoy the contradiction of nearby sentences that ‘It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are’ and ‘No one is more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am’. What an irony – to create a memoir while saying that she does not understand herself, and that you shouldn’t believe her even if she said she did. But somehow both those statements get to the heart of what The Odd Woman and the City is: more an exploration of the questions you could ask about your life, your friendships, your connections, your city, your home – and less about any concrete conclusions. Gornick resists writing the traditional, solid memoir on firm foundations, and the result is excellent. The book is somehow sturdy in its fluidity.

In conclusion, Jacqui was right, of course. This book is a marvel.

The Woods in Winter by Stella Gibbons – #ABookADayInMay Day 6

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Many people have spoken highly of Stella Gibbons’ The Woods in Winter (1970) – including when I ranked her novels. It comes very late in her body of work, though is almost entirely set several decades early than its publication date – and is one of several Gibbons’ novels that were republished by Dean Street Press. My parents kindly gave me a copy, and I finished it off for today’s book.

When I started the novel (when it was actually winter), I found the opening extremely promising. An unlikely friendship, of sorts, is struck up between middle-aged Ivy Gover and Helen Green, one of the people for whom Ivy is charwoman. Helen is gentle, intelligent, and moves in the literati without feeling fully confident there. Ivy, meanwhile, is fierce but fair, ruthlessly unsentimental (except perhaps about one of her three past husbands) and not very good at reading – which sends her to Helen when she gets a letter that she can’t decipher.

She [Helen] tried to get around her difficulties by murmuring the letter aloud.

“… Gardener, Elliot and Son, 24 High Street, Nethersham, Buckinghamshire… beg to inform you…”

“I don’t want nothing to do with beggars, Miss. Got no use for that sort. Bone-idle, mostly.”

“It doesn’t mean that kind of begging, Ivy. It’s just an old-fashioned way…” (here Helen was pulled up by remembering that, to Ivy, ‘old-fashioned’ would mean something quite different from what it would mean to herself) “… just a way of being polite.”

Ivy’s face said nothing and neither did her lips. But her eyes under the hat sent out an impatience to hear.

“… The late George Coatley, you great-uncle… deceased October the twenty-fourth… The cottage known as Catts Corner… vacant possession… leasehold… would be glad if you could call upon us at your convenience… They will then be pleased to hand over to you the key. And they sign themsevles your obedient servants.”

Helen looked up, tucking a plume of hair behind one ear with a slowly-moving finger.

“Reckon it’s a take-in?” Ivy demanded.

It is not a ‘take-in’, but you can see why Ivy is suspicious. Her life has not been one of good fortune or the generosity of man. This windfall is unexpected – and, once Ivy has visited the cottage, you’d be forgiven for seeing it as a mixed blessing. The home hasn’t been lived in for a while and it’s falling apart. It’s in the middle of nowhere, far from the city life she is used to. She would be totally isolated. And yet she craves all these things – in her no-nonsense, unsentimental way. She moves there.

And sadly we don’t see much more of Helen for the rest of the novel. I’ll confess I was disappointed that this unlikely pairing doesn’t get much space on the page – I thought it was very entertaining, as well as filled with potential to be eccentrically heartwarming. Instead, we are introduced to a whole host of other characters – Coral and Pearl Cartaret, who inexpertly run The Tea Shoppe; Angela Mordaunt, mourning her beau killed in war; the vicar; the Lord of the Manor. It all adds local colour, of course, but it also takes away from the central character, Ivy, who is left with a slightly predictable story about adopting an unloved dog – which does feel a bit of heavy-handed imagery.

I still enjoyed The Woods in Winter, but I had the problem I often have with Gibbons: she is so good at amusing, eccentric characters and the meeting of people who feel awkward with each other but grow into companionship. And then she ditches all that for a lukewarm romance story with some other characters, with very little at stake for the reader. (I’ve never got over how brilliant her novel Bassett started and how tedious it ended up. This one certainly isn’t that bad.)

Most readers seem to have fallen deeply for The Woods in Winter, and I wish I could have loved it more. It was an enjoyable novel but it could have been a really brilliant one – or perhaps I just mean that it could have been much more to my tastes. But I think I’m being a little more objective than that when I saw that the structure of The Woods in Winter doesn’t quite work – burgeoning out to a lot of characters in moments when narrowing in would have been more satisfactory. I’d certainly suggest you read Enbury Heath, Miss Linsey and Pa, or Westwood before you read this one – and, of course, Cold Comfort Farm. But I am quite an outlier on this one, so maybe try it and see for yourself!

#ABookADayInMay: Days 3, 4, 5

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I was away for the Bank Holiday weekend, which is why I’m behind with reviewing books for A Book A Day In May – but I did manage to keep reading, hopefully without being too antisocial to the friends I’d gone away with. Here are the three books I finished over the weekend…

Day 3: Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton

I hadn’t heard of Douglas Bruton when I picked up Blue Postcards (2021) in a secondhand bookshop in Portsmouth, but I was drawn by the nice design of the pocket-size Fairlight Modern – and, when I opened it, by the fact that it is written in 500 numbered vignettes. This fragmented style has been very successful for me in the past few years, and I’m always keen to try more. I can now firmly add Blue Postcards to the list of successes: I absolutely loved it.

  1. At the foot of the steps of Le Passage de la Sorciere in Montmartre sits a man in a blue suit, the sleeves of his jacket pushed up to his elbows, his shirt collar unfastened and his blue tie loose around his neck. He sits playing with three chased silver egg cups and a wooden ball the size of a pie. He asks passers-by if they would like to be on which egg cup the ball is under, after he does a dance of the cups, shifting the order and showing the wooden ball and then not showing it. It is a trick of course, but he does it so well it’s hard to see how. Once I saw him life all three cups and there was no ball at all; it has disappeared.

That is the first of the vignettes, and it sets the tone of the book, even if the man himself isn’t among the most significant figures (though it’s not the last we will see of him). I often find that novels that use this fragmentary style start with something more tonal than relevant – so we are immediately in a world of illusion, street artistry, customers, Paris and, of course, a stray mention of the word ‘blue’. They are all things that will become paramount in Bruton’s novella.

There are a trio of main characters, I would say: Yves Klein, Henri the tailor, and the narrator himself. I was aware of Yves Klein but would have struggled to tell you much about him – now I know that he was a French artist in the mid-20th century, famed for monochrome art – most usually in a vivid shade of blue that came to be known (and maybe patented, or maybe not) as International Klein Blue. As well as canvas paintings, he painted sculptures and other pieces in this same blue. His other famous art was a living piece – his claim that he could jump from a height and be temporarily suspended in the air.

Henri the tailor and the narrator are fictional people. Henri makes a suit for Klein, sewing blue thread into the pockets, as he does into every suit. He figures significantly in his role as tailor, but we don’t learn (or need to learn) much of him beyond this. And, about 50 years later, the narrator is interwoven with these two lives. He finds a blue postcard at a stall in Paris – an invitation that Klein sent out in 1952 to one of his exhibitions – and he returns often, hoping to discover more postcards, and also hoping to get to know the woman who sold him the postcard. All three of these men share an obsession with the colour blue.

It took me a moment or two to realise that we were working in two timelines. The paragraphs sometimes follow on from one another and sometimes jump between the main trio, or to some objective fact about the colour blue, or to a poetic image that is tangentially relevant. Like many of the books I’ve written in this form, it builds together a picture – using the contrasts and unexpected similarities between disparate paragraphs as a way of giving more depth to a story than is possible in something more linear.

As another example, here are a couple of paragraphs that segue between Henri and Klein – and also demonstrate the narrator/author’s intrusion, breaking the fourth wall and letting us into the secret of his techniques:

109. Henri writes in his ledger when the suit is finished and when it has been collecgted. He puts the day and the date and how much he charged the customer. I should say that ‘once’ he wrote these things down but when I am talking about Henri I hope it is understood that we are in his time and not really in our time. If this was a film we might see Henri through a blue filter to show that his time is different.

110. On 15 October 1955, Yves Klein staged an exhibition of twenty of his monochrome paintings at the Club des Solitaires at 121 avenue de Villiers in Paris. Those that took the time to see the show responded with derision. One can imagine that the air was blue and loud was the sense of frustration at the waste of time it had been. But it was this strength of public response that attracted the attention of a critic called Pierre Restany who would go on to become the champion for Yves Klein’s work.

These authorial intrusions, particularly towards the end, give Blue Postcards a slightly postmodern twist – but the author is also like the man with his cups and ball in Montmartre, seeming to reveal his tricks as a way of getting us more deeply under his control.

I think Blue Postcards is a brilliant book. Bruton has clearly researched Klein in depth, and has written about him in a form that allows freedom to make something much looser and more interesting than a traditional biography. I’m very keen to read more Bruton – and to discover what else has been published in the Fairlight Moderns series.

Day 4: Stay True by Hua Hsu

I’m going to rattle through the next two books, but only because I want to go to bed(!) I finished the audiobook of Stay True (2022) by Hua Hsu while I was away – read by the author – and I thought it was excellent. For the first half of the memoir, it is about Hsu’s experience as an Asian American who is second-generation American to immigrant parents – and particularly how this shapes his experiences at college. It is also a memoir about self-discovery through music, through zines, through exploring alternative identities and forming connections with other people.

At college, he forms a slightly unlikely friendship with Ken – also Asian American, but that’s where the similarites end. Ken is in a frat, popular and athletic, and unshrinkingly enthusiastic about music and films that Hua considers far too mainstream. And yet Ken’s keenness to learn about Hua’s tastes is a driving force in them becoming dear friends – with plenty of in-jokes, one of which leads to the title of the book. They have the sort of intense closeness that can only happen in your late teens, freshly away from home and into the adult world.

I almost don’t want to tell you what the second half is about, because I think the memoir is extremely strong on what has already gone – and doesn’t need the tragedy that happens next to make it an exceptionally good book. But I must tell you. Ken is 20 when he is murdered in a senseless car-jacking – killed by a trio who are easily caught, making no effort to cover their tracks when they use Ken’s credit card at the mall. And so Stay True becomes about dealing with that shock and grief – but also a revealing demonstration of how ill-equipped 20-year-olds are to process any of this. There is a sharp honesty to Hsu’s telling of the days and weeks following the murder, which are disorienting, futile, and sometimes curiously ordinary.

Stay True isn’t the sort of grief memoir to try and make sense of these experiences, or draw any significant conclusions from them. It’s not really even an attempt to create a tribute to Ken – because a murder like this removes so much that should be part of a tribute to a life. But is a beautiful, thoroughly human book about many different things that cohere somehow perfectly.

Day 5: The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley

I love L.P. Hartley, but The Brickfield (1954) is probably the weakest book I’ve read by him yet. Novelist Richard Mardick is relating his memoirs to a much younger man, Denys. The scenes between them are excellent, and there is an amusing badinage between them that is very hard to capture on the page – and Hartley is very good at the sarcastic exchanges that still contain a level of respect from secretary to Man of Letters. But I find framed narratives often kill the story dead, and this is no exception.

So much of what Richard relates about his childhood is scene-setting – telling us what he always did as a child, or the way that relatives always behaved, rather than making the story interesting with specificity. Once the scene is (finally!) set, it is more engaging – telling of his leaving school through possible ill-health and living with aunts in the countryside. But it often feels like a pale imitation of The Go-Between, and a waste of his excellent talents. And – shamefully – the blurb on my edition gives away a major plot point that happens in the final 50 pages.

The Happy Ending by Leo Walmsley – #ABookADayInMay Day 2

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The Happy Ending (1957) is the third book in Leo Walmsley’s trilogy of autobiographical novels – starting with Love in the Sun and followed (rather later) by The Golden Waterwheel. Clicking on those links will take you to my enthusiastic reviews, and I’ve read the whole trilogy within four years, which feels like breakneck speed considering how often I leave sequels until I’ve long forgotten the original.

As with the previous two books, the focus of the plot is on the unnamed narrator and his wife Dain buying and renovating a property. In Cornwall, it was a seaside shack. In Yorkshire, it was a bigger house with ambitions for a huge waterwheel. In The Happy Ending, they are in Wales – having bought, sight unseen, a sizeable property (and farmland) called Castle Druid that is in total disrepair. The Second World War has started and their Yorkshire home has been requisitioned, so this is something of an emergency plunge into the dark.

In the first book, it was just the couple (then unmarried, which ruffled feathers locally) and a kitten. By now, they have a brood of children who get added to by large numbers of evacuees. We have lost the intimacy of the original, which truly felt like an us-against-the-world situation. Here, it is more about a community – the growing community of the home, but also connecting with the local Welsh people who are pleasingly welcoming to these outsiders.

I love reading about renovations and discovering new features of an old property. The gradual repair and extension of Castle Druid – the discovery of the cellar, the introduction of a waterwheel, even the digging of drainage ditches – is written with the same steady fascination of the previous books, and I always love Walmsley’s wonder at what can be created by diligent work, imagination, and hope. He isn’t brilliant at all the tasks he undertakes, and I think it’s the realism of the arduous labour and unexpected obstacles that stop this seeming self-congratulatory and smug (unlike this book, which has the most angry comments of any review I’ve ever written!) His self-deprecation helps make the simple idealism seem relatable – because I loved the way he and Dain enivsage an idyllic life. Here’s Dain:

“You’re making me homesick. Of course I remember. It was all so lovely. But so was Adder Howe, and so is this, really. If we haven’t got the sea, we’ve got the country, and if we make the lake, it will be almost as good as having the cove at our front door, especially if we have fish in it. And couldn’t we have some sort of a boat? We can swim in it in summer, and if there’s a shallow end with a sandy beach, the little children can have it for paddling. It will be perfect if we do get the waterwheel. I think that as well as using it for electricity, we ought to grind flour with it. If we grew just a little wheat, we could grind that, and actually make our own bread from start to finish. We could make oatmeal anyway, so that we wouldn’t have to buy it in the shops. It would all be helping with the war.”

Having said all of this, The Happy Ending has a relationship at its heart, and it isn’t between the narrator and Dain. The most dominant character is Clow. He is a local man who can turn his hand to everything, and instantly offers to work on the renovations for a modest wage for as long as it takes. He insists that Castle Druid would, by rights, belong to him and his sister – but seems to hold that against fate, rather than against the couple.

The narrator takes him on, and Clow is indeed invaluable – but he also has a pretty negative relationship with him. Clow takes charge of everything, giving unsolicited advice and taking credit for anything that goes well. If somebody else comes up with an idea, he says that he could have told them that, if he’d asked. The narrator is frustrated by how often Clow takes the most significant moments in the renovation to himself – and there is something quite childlike but touching about the way the narrator and Dain keep the possibility of the cellar secret until they can unearth it without his gaze.

I was fascinated by the dynamic. I’m not saying there was anything homoerotic about it, or anything like that, but there is an intensity to the way the narrator and Clow clash and depend on each other that drives much of the emotion of the novel. I wonder how much Clow was based on a real person, and if Walmsley ever truly worked out what they thought of each other.

Like the other books in the series, The Happy Ending is peculiar for its total humourlessness. That’s not a negative thing – it’s just that humour isn’t one of the tools in Walmsley’s arsenal. Nor is it earnest – it’s just presenting what happened in a steady, clear-eyed, almost loving way. To be self-deprecating without trying to be funny about it is very unusual, and quite disarming.

I think this is probably my least favourite of the trilogy, partly because it doesn’t have the intense insularity of the earlier books that made them so vivid – and partly because the narrator hardly does any fiction writing in this book, which was a central theme of the others. But that’s only by comparison. I still loved it, and love this special trilogy. If you’ve not read them, I urge you to start.

People in the Room by Norah Lange – #ABookADayInMay Day 1

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It’s May, and that means it’s A Book A Day in May time! I’m delighted to see that Madame Bibi is back at the challenge too, and I thank her for inspiring me every year to take it up. It’s always quite chaotic, trying to read and review 31 books over the course of a month, but also always enjoyable.

People in the Room: Shortlisted for the 2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation: Amazon.co.uk: Norah Lange: 9781911508229: Books

My first choice is People in the Room by Norah Lange, published in 1950 and translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle in 2018. A synopsis of this book can do nothing to convey the experience of reading it – for what is the synopsis? A 17-year-old girl starts watching three women living in the house opposite, who never close their shutters.

They were sitting in the drawing room, one of them slightly removed from the others. This detail always struck me. Whenever I saw them, two of them sat close together, the third at a slight distance. I could make out only the dark contours of their dresses, the light blurs of their faces and their hands. The one sitting farthest away was smoking, or at least so it seemed to me, since her hand rose and fell monotonously. The other two remained still, as if deep in thought, before turning their faces in the direction of her voice. Then I managed to make out, beside one of them, the small flare of a match being struck. I longed to meet them. 

She fabricates what their dynamic might be – and gradually becomes involved in their lives. She does indeed meet them, and becomes a frequent visitor. They never go out, and so she is welcomed whenever she wishes. But she keeps it secret from her family (about whom we learn little). Neither she nor the reader learns the names of the three sisters, nor do we know the narrator’s own name. There is very little dialogue between them when they do meet, and I’d be hard pressed to tell you much about these mysterious women. There are a couple of apparently significant moments – an encounter in the post office; the delivery of a telegram; the instalation of a telephone – but these are few and far between, and seem much less significant in the scheme of things than the silent everyday.

And yet – and yet! What a mesmerising experience reading People in the Room is. In his introduction, César Aira says (of Lange’s work in general): “Lange withholds the subject at the beginning of a narrative, so the reader cannot know whom she is describing; the action therefore becomes central, and is isolated from those performing it. One side effect of this tendency is that characters become ghostly figures, subordinate to and almost hidden from the action.” It’s a very perceptive comment. Because we don’t know really what’s going on, or the motives behind it, and yet we are transfixed by the relationship between these women about whom we know so little.

The unnamed 17-year-old is constantly analysing their dynamic, even while revealing so little. The position of portraits in the room, the choice of chairs, the awkwardness whenever a specific home is referenced – these things are turned over and over in her narrative. But, more than that, she is fixated on what her observations tell her about herself. Why is she interested? Why does she never ask their names? Why does she orchestrate curious situations – lying about a trip; making a telephone call and saying nothing – and what are they to achieve? It’s interesting that telegrams and telephones play roles, because People in the Room has so little genuine communication in it – it is a novel about the silences between people that cannot be traversed, and yet the connections that can exist even when there isn’t any communication.

Another key thread is death. At times, perhaps simply as a way of codifying something in their relationship, the narrator hopes the women will die. At other times, she fears it. Most often, she seems to expect it – despite guessing that the three women are around 30 years old. Death winds tendrils through all her reflections, as though it were the inevitable companion of observation.

What makes People in the Room work is Lange’s writing (and Whittle’s translation). A novel where atmosphere is all demands a style that fits. Lange writes long, langurous sentences, filled with commas and clauses that pile up and seem to get longer as the novel progresses. Here is one single sentence:

I thought I should go home, and that for once, it didn’t matter whether they could see my anguish, my altered demeanor in the black dress, because I felt strong, and was happy to be leaving, since they were happy to have met me, still smoking, watching me as they moved their wine glasses in different ways, still having the same thoughts, keeping things to themselves, setting them aside, but happy all along to have met me even though I’d read the telegram and heard the voice in the gloom of the carriage, for, as indifferent as they were, I’d come to possess their three mysterious, placid faces, and—I swear—I never expected anything from them in return, and all that could be remembered, that was lasting, that no one else knew, was already mine, and could transform my life more than the fire, more than their own deaths, because they were happy to have met me and said nothing about my hands—even though they must have noticed everything—or my dress; and I loved them even though they were guilty.

And then there is occasional sharpness, which jolts in prose that is so fluid. I really appreciated the second of these sentences (with the first to give you some context), because it so simply pinpoints something about the way we choose words in fraught situations:

Then I turned to her and said, “I forgot to shake your hand. I was so afraid to come…” and offered her mine, thinking that if I didn’t, something terrible might happen. Then I regretted having said the word afraid, when I should have saved it for another time, for when I wasn’t afraid.

In the hands of a less capable writer, People in the Room would simply be boring. But Lange has an extraordinary gift to keep the momentum – nothing is going to happen but, like the narrator, we need to keep watching it. One of the reviews on the back describes it as having ‘the tension of a thriller’, which is an exaggeration, but there is tension nonetheless. It’s not the tension of a thriller, but the tension of sitting in a room with people whom you don’t know well, and who are not bridging the social gap. I don’t know how she does it, but People in the Room is a striking, eerie, almost poignant study in connection and disconnection.

Announcing the 10th Anniversary Reading Week Club!

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Thank you to everyone who took part in the 1952 Club and, yes, I still indeed to read lots more posts(!) – and thank you especially to everyone who submitted ideas for the special 10th anniversary club reading week in October. The idea that came up from quite a few people was a centenary celebration – hence the 1925 Club! Karen and I thought it was a brilliant idea, and also looks like an exceptional year for books. Here’s the new badge…

We all love efficiency in our reading challenges – so an added bonus to the 1925 Club is that you can also contribute your reviews to Neeru’s Hundred Years Hence reading challenge, which is going throughout the whole year.

I can’t believe Karen and I started the club 10 years ago, and I am so thankful that she said yes to my initial idea, and has so diligently co-hosted the clubs ever since. They go from strength to strength, in terms of numbers, and I’m excited to see how things go 20-26 October this year. (This will overlap with our first reading challenge – which was apparently a fortnight! Gosh, we were ambitious back in 2015.)

As a celebratory 10th anniversary, we’re adding a special anniversary element. Throughout the week, you’re welcome to celebrate favourite reads from past clubs (whether that’s over 10 years or one year, or anywhere in between – as usual with these challenges, it’s low pressure and highly flexible). We’ll be dedicating the Thursday 23 October to celebrating those.

We do hope you will join us and we’re very much looking forward to celebrating ten years of our ‘Reading the Year’ clubs! We will remind you nearer the time, of course, but do get hunting for books…

The next club… your suggestions!

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What a fun 1952 Club it’s been! I’ve tried to collect all of your reviews, though do let me know if I’ve missed anything – and I have an awful lot of them still to read, as it’s been a busy week at work and at leisure. But I am looking forward to keeping my own personal 1952 Club going by spreading out the reading as long as it takes!

I’ve definitely done more reading for the 1952 Club than for any previous clubs, as there were so many tempting candidates. And, indeed, I’m midway through a memoir by Victor Gollancz that I didn’t manage to get into the club in time. But I did read a few books that may well be on my Best of 1952 list – Catherine Carter by Pamela Hansford Johnson, Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson, and Treasure Hunt by Molly Keane. All brilliant in quite different ways.

For the next club, in October, Karen and I have decided to open up for suggestions – what year would you like the next club to do? Let us know in the comments (or on her blog), and why you think it would make a great choice.

And it’s going to be a special one – would you believe it, October 2025 will mark the 10th anniversary of our club years! I can’t believe it’s been going so long, and it’s really turned into a regular milestone of the book blogging year – for which I am very grateful to my co-host Karen, and to all of you who come back time after time with your fascinating reviews. And, of course, to those of you who’ve joined in for the first time for the 1952 Club!

We’ll try to think of ways to mark the 10th anniversary and make it special (and there are no plans to stop the clubs after that, fear not) – but, for now, do pop your suggestions  for the reading year in the comments. Bonus points if it has special anniversary significance! And any other way that you think would be good to mark the special 10th year – go for it!

Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison #1952Club

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My post about Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison is going to be short – because what on earth was I thinking, back in 2012, when I bought this Virago Modern Classic? Well, maybe I’ve answered my own question there. It’s a VMC, it’s slim, it has a lovely cover. Maybe I figured all of that would help me overcome the fact that a book could hardly appeal to me less?

It’s a sort of fable about a girl called Halla in some sort of faux-medieval pan-Scandinavia setting. She is the daughter of a king but thrown out of home as an infant, and raised by bears.

And then a very fortunate thing happened. Matulli and her bear husband were walking through the woods, looking for the last of the wild bees’ honey or a late fledgling from a nest, and Matulli’s husband was grumbling away to himself because he could feel that the snow was not far off and it was time to go home to the den and sleep and sleep. But Halla was running around like a crazy butterfly and clearly had no intention of sleeping. Sometimes the he-bear thought it would be both nice and sensible to eat Halla, but he did not dare because of Matulli.

Yes, I enjoyed the knowing whimsy of that phrasing. Maybe I could cope with this book. But as it goes on, and we get through dragons and the Wanderer and having to do quests and whatnot, I got more and more bored.

Mitchison’s tone is a sort of wink-wink update of mythology, with the mythology taking over increasingly as the novella continues. I simply don’t care for this sort of book. Her writing is able, but I have no interest in fantastical lands and ancient pasts (whether real or imagined). I slogged my way through 138 pages, not caring what happened to anybody, and it’s going to a charity shop – from whence it will doubtless find a much more suitable home.

No club year would be complete without a few duds. I recognise the fault is with me, for trying something so very unlikely to appeal. But at least it has that lovely cover.

Don’t Look Round by Violet Trefusis – #1952Club

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There was a time when I would indiscriminately buy almost any book connected to the Bloomsbury Group. To a certain extent, that’s a book-buying era I’m still living – but I don’t seem to read them as voraciously as I used to. Still, I was glad to finally get to Don’t Look Round by Violet Trefusis, which I bought in 2011.

Violet Trefusis (also famed under her maiden name, Violet Keppel) is probably best remembered now for her long love affair with Vita Sackville-West, but that isn’t information you’ll get from this autobiography. Apparently Nancy Mitford once said that the book should be called ‘Here Lies Violet Trefusis’ – though I haven’t been able to find any source for that quotation – and there is a sense permeating Don’t Look Round that Trefusis is being cagey with the truth, if not outright dishonest. Indeed, the paragraph-long preface says ‘I have not lied, I have merely omitted, by-passed the truth, wherever unpalatable.’ And once you’ve accepted that, it’s a fun read on its own terms.

The thing that quickly becomes clear is that Trefusis is a very enjoyable writer and doesn’t mind poking fun at herself. She grew up in extraordinary privilege (which she takes for granted – there are stories of visiting relatives, all of whom seem to live in stately homes) but in other ways her experience of parental love is much the same as anybody else’s might be.

My parents spoiled me disgracefully. My mother began as an atmosphere, a climate, luminous, resplendent, joyously embattled like golden armour; it was only later that I became conscious of her as an individual.

I basked in the climate of her love without asking myself any questions, until I was about give. Very soon she hit upon the right technique in dealing with me. Once, when I was very small, and of the opinion that I was not getting enough attention, I announced that I was going to run away. “Very well, run then,” came the bland reply.

I started on a singularly flat fugue, pushing my little wheel-narrow in front of me. Nobody called. Nobody came. It was a complete fiasco. (In later life, other fugues were to be nipped in the bud by the same method.)

I love that bit in brackets at the end. Trefusis always writes with a wink. She might be coy in her autobiography, but it is a knowing coyness, that accepts a reputation she might have without being willing to add fuel to the fire.

Like so many autobiographies, the author has probably more interest in her childhood and youth than the reader does. I’m always impatient for them to get to the bits that actually made them famous. Trefusis’s stories from her early years are a combination of relatable and very much the reverse, and it’s all very enjoyable, but I wanted to get to the writing career – and this is something she writes surprisingly little about. She introduces her first novel as a sort of afterthought, that happened in the background of more significant events in her life, and races through Echo in a couple of pages (which I think is a marvellous novel). Others don’t seem to be mentioned at all. Perhaps this comes from humility, perhaps as a simple way of dodging how much the novels echoed (!) her own complex romantic life, from which she borrowed heavily.

But if she doesn’t write much about writing, she is very enjoyable on the literary scene. Trefusis has a talent for summing someone up in a handful of words – I noted down her description of Rebecca West, ‘who has a voice like a crystal spring and eyes like twin jungles’, which I thought oddly marvellous. She does write about Vita Sackville-West in a way that demonstrates her deep affection, even if she gives away little else. Her most moving descriptions are for her husband Dennys. Naturally, she does not write about the fact they apparently never consummated their marriage, or the reluctance with which they came together. Yet it is clear that there is regard rather than passion, and it is that regard which makes the most moving section of the book about Dennys’ early death.

In reading Don’t Look Round, though, the chief love affair of Trefusis’s life is clearly France. She lived there for a long time, and her first novels were written in French. Her passion for the language, history, sights and culture of France permeates a sizeable section at the centre of the autobiography. Even after moving back to England, at the outbreak of war, it feels like Trefusis has been forcibly removed from a lover.

Who would be in sympathy with one, who, though English and proud of it, looked upon England as exile? The only bone of contention between my darling mother and myself was France. She considered we had been let down disgracefully; the subject was taboo. I twisted this way and that, longing for some kind of outlet, someone with whom I would not have to conceal my yearning for France as though it were an unsightly disease.

And, similarly, there is more love and poignancy in her eventual return to France than in descriptions of many reunited lovers:

Hélène came to fetch me in a borrowed car. We drove around a miraculously intact Paris, more beautiful even than I remembered it. A great many of the houses were pitted with bullet holes. In the façade of the Ministère de la Marine a few balusters were missing, negligible, almost coquettish damage, like scratches received in a duel.

Trefusis’s love of France also leads to my real major qualm with Don’t Look Round. There is SO much untranslated French in this book. Whether quoting dialogue in France or expressing herself with French, Trefusis piles it on – probably a sentence or every page or two, particularly (of course) for the large section set in France. In my 1989 edition, there are no footnotes or translations anywhere. I have basic French, so could struggle through quite a lot of it, but there was plenty that I didn’t understand – and I’m sure the nuance of a lot of it was lost on me. In the 1950s, and the 198s0?, I suppose fluent French was taken for granted in readers – and if you can read French, then this is no drawback. But I found it pulled me out of the flow constantly, and even the bits I could understand took some time to piece together. If you don’t read French at all, it would be even more frustrating. Maybe more recent editions, if there are any, put the English in.

Trefusis would live another 20 years after Don’t Look Round was published, though she didn’t publish any more novels. If you’re looking for the unvarnished truth about her life, then look elsewhere – but if you want to enjoy the distinctively characterful and entirely selective memoirs of someone on the peripheries of the Bloomsbury Group, then this book is a fun and often moving read.