1990s

Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido

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We all say it often, but it really is true that our bookshelves can hold hidden gems just waiting to be discovered. Back in 2009, Bloomsbury kindly sent me all six of Barbara Trapido novels that had recently reprinted (a seventh novel would be published the next year). I read Brother of the More Famous Jack and liked it a lot – then in 2019 I read Noah’s Ark and didn’t like it much. At this rate I could be reading Trapido for the rest of my life – but I have now read my third, Temples of Delight (1990) and it is my favourite so far. It’s really something special.

Temples of Delight is a coming-of-age novel of sorts, following Alice Pilling from her childhood into early adulthood. She is a shy, clever girl, made nervous by her stutter and by not being widely loved by her classmates. There is a stubborn, determined streak in her – she certainly won’t conform to the mould of the girls around her, though that would perhaps make her life easier. And this only develops when she meets Jem, a nice girl in her class who is a whirlwind of a personality. Her stories of her life, her parents, her relatives are all extraordinary, eccentric and vivid – her parents meeting over a wall after a snowball fight, for example, or her sister Patch meeting Modigliani while shading in her sketch of Michelangelo’s David‘s unmentionable parts. Even her name is a curio – she is called Veronica Bernadette, but nicknamed Jem after P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘jem-sengwiches’.

The opening line says ‘Jem was a joyful mystery to Alice’. She is a joyful mystery to the reader too. It’s very hard to pull off the idiosyncratic, ebullient character, but Jem is a complete success. We observe her with the same fascination that Alice does. For a girl who has lived an ordinary life, with ordinary, kindly parents, Jem is a revelation. It is thrilling to Alice that Jem should even pay her attention.

Alice loved the way Jem talked, even when she couldn’t understand half of what Jem said. It was infectious the way Jem grooved on words.

The opening section of the novel is a wonderful ode to the power of female friendships, even when they are founded on an enigma. I was reminded of Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore and, to a lesser extent, Swing Time by Zadie Smith.

Jem is such a vivid, captivating, brilliant creation that we miss her as much as Alice when, one day, she disappears from Alice’s life. She announces that she must leave immediately, on the next train.

“I’ll write to you,” Jem said again. “Alice, you will always be my dearest friend.”

“What?” Alice called, because she couldn’t catch the words and Jem was getting further away.

“I’ll never forget you,” Jem called out, but the sound of her voice was drowned in a roar of gathering speed.

With Jem gone, Alice has to concentrate on her studies – and she exceeds expectations by getting a place at Oxford University. As a long-term resident of Oxford (now Oxfordshire), I enjoyed the section of the novel set there – which focuses little on Alice’s studying of Classics and more on the strange family household where she rents a room, and the confident Roland who becomes her boyfriend.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot – unlike, it must be said, the blurb on the back of my edition. But it continues with different people and places intervening into Alice’s life, and throughout it all she thinks often and deeply about Jem. She still has with her the dramatic, oddly capable childhood novel that Jem wrote in school exercise books. She refers often to what Jem might think or do in any given situation – there is a feeling that Alice is simply biding time until she meets Jem again. Despite the brevity of their friendship, there is a sense that she is a light guiding the rest of Alice’s life. It is testament to the power of Trapido’s writing that Jem’s light shines bright enough to illumine many pages and chapters after her mysterious exit.

Generally, I am most impressed by novels that are short and spare – that make a big impression in a low number of pages. Every now and then, I am bowled over by a book that does the opposite. Trapido is never in a rush. There are chapters devoted to characters who, in the scheme of things, don’t matter hugely. We delve particularly deeply into the life of schoolmate Flora and her miserly, unkind father and loyally downtrodden mother – indeed, some of the scenes with them are the most memorable and dramatic. Does Flora need to be in Temples of Delight? Not really, but it is all part of Trapido’s leisurely, expansive way of writing this novel. A review on the front says ‘fizzes along at a cracking pace’, but I think the opposite is true. Trapido envelopes us in a world and makes it whole. We move steadily through it, never wanting to increase the pace, taking it all in eagerly.

Alongside this world-building, and her perfectly drawn characters, Trapido is very funny. Her prose is often dry – I noted down ‘The school was not one which attracted bookish girls on the whole, and there was no one in the third form who appeared athirst for a greater understanding of the English Revolution.’ She is witty, often unsparing of her characters, in that mould of delightfully eccentric prose writers like Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jane Bowles. But she is a little more grounded than they are, a little more accepting of hope and optimism.

I will say that the final third of the novel was not quite as good, in my eyes. I wrote in my review of Noah’s Ark that ‘Trapido writes about sex in a jarring way, with sudden and momentary explicitness’ – that isn’t quite so true, or quite so jarring, in Temples of Delight, but I did find that, tonally, the final sections weren’t quite as successful as the rest. But it doesn’t diminish my love for this book, or the likelihood of finding it on my best books of 2023. I’ve found it hard to do the novel justice. I loved it so much.

It turns out I’ve been reading Trapido’s novels in order, which wasn’t necessarily intentional, and it also turns out that her next book, Juggling, is a sequel. And then her next, The Travelling Hornplayer, combines characters from these books with those from Brother of the More Famous Jack. Will I read them while I remember enough about the characters to recognise the connections? Possibly not, at this rate, but I know that one character I won’t forget is Jem.

The Leper’s Companions by Julia Blackburn #ABookADayInMay No.26

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I normally have little interest in historical fiction, particularly set during the medieval period, but I decided to have a gamble on The Leper’s Companions (1999). That was partly because it is such a beautiful book, and partly (moreso) because I’d read and enjoyed Julia Blackburn’s very unusual biography of John Craske. I thought if anyone could get me to enjoy a book set in 1410, it would be Blackburn.

We are thrown into a community of people who are mostly poor and ill, and often on the edge of some disaster. The miraculous and unexplained is commonplace – whether that be a mermaid washing up on the shore or a baby being born with the head of a fish (because of the mermaid’s curse, they assume). Things we’d recognise as severe illness sit alongside things that don’t make sense to a 21st-century audience. What I appreciated about Blackburn’s writing is that we are in this world on its own terms. There aren’t attempts to show what was really happening now that we have more medical and scientific knowledge, or a rationalising of medieval stories – rather, we see it all in modern English but contemporary understanding:

I walked through the village. Walls were pulled back like curtains so that I could see inside the houses. In one there was a woman lying in the sour stink of a dark room while a mass of devils crawled over her naked body. Her husband was with her, and even though his face was turned from me, I was suddenly afraid of him.

In another room in another house a woman was sitting upright while all her life walked before her eyes, fast and then slow, the years unfolding into each other as she watched them.

I appreciated how connected everyone was to their environment, and how open they all were to signs – whether from nature, from God, or from a mix of local and international beliefs. For instance, even those who would dismiss various of the omens that matter to this community would respect their recognition of the following omens. For the community, there isn’t a distinction:

Everyone in the village was filled with a sense of impending dread. They knew that the approaching winter was going to be very severe because there were so many warning signs. The geese were flying off in great creaking crowds even before the month had come to its end. The trees were much too heavily laden with fruit, anticipating that they couldn’t presume to survive and so had to trust in the scattering of their seeds. There was a feeling of time itself closing in, of a gate being clanged shut while the world waited with growing apprehension.

After various traumas and tragedies, as well as vows and wonders, three of the community decide to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Off go the leper of the title, a priest, the shoemaker’s wife, and fisherman’s daughter and the narrator of the book.

Here’s where I confess that I didn’t really get on with The Leper’s Companions. In the early sections, thanks largely to no attempt to put it in Ye Olde English, I was quite enjoying it. But I don’t think the quest narrative is for me in any of its myriad forms. The second half of the novel is basically the people travelling (though surprisingly little is told about the mechanics of this), meeting various people often in states of extreme misery, and going on their way. I have to admit that I didn’t find it particularly interesting.

I think Blackburn is a really good, interesting writer and she certainly creates vivid scenes. For me, there wasn’t quite enough to sustain interest in what she then did with those scenes strung together.

But it’s quite likely that I’m the wrong audience for The Leper’s Companions, and the fact that she got me to read to the end of a book set in 1410 is nothing short of miraculous in itself!

The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner #ABookADayInMay No.1

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I was really hoping that Madame Bibi Lophile would do her A Novella a Day in May challenge again, and lo and behold the first post has gone live. I’ve joined in the past couple of years – I’m going to start this year too, though won’t make promises of completing. (My eyes are so, so, so much better than they were in December/January, when the thought of being able to read a book a day would have been completely impossible.) I’ve decided to call mine A Book a Day in May because they won’t all be novellas – for instance, the first book I’ve chosen is non-fiction.

I hadn’t heard of Joan Givner when I picked up The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer (1993) in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago. I haven’t even read anything by either of the authors that Givner wrote biographies of – Katherine Anne Porter and Mazo de la Roche. But I’m so glad I read this memoir, because it is brilliant.

It’s very unconventional, in a way that intrigued me enough to buy it in Richard Booths’ bookshop. The portrait is told through 381 numbered short sections – rather like 381 different note cards. Indeed, it sounds like that’s exactly what they are. Often there is a short series of sections which connect and tell more or less the same story, but equally the next one might splinter off to a different theme, different country, different time. They aren’t in chronological order by any means, and we follow Givner at various times through a childhood in northern England, through an unsuccessful first marriage in America, through the research and publication of her biographies, and through their reception.

Though the title tells us this is a self-portrait of a literary biographer, Givner’s work isn’t given priority over her experiences as a wife, a mother, a teacher, a colleague – and perhaps most of all, a daughter. With unflinching honesty – and it does seem honest, even while it is deeply subjective – Givner portrays her parents’ keenness for respectability, their pride in her getting into grammar school, their bewilderment at many of her life choices (including her divorce). And most vivid of all is the portrait of her mother in the present – given to slightly foolish sweeping statements, or contradicting her past self. It is a fascinating depiction of a mother/daughter relationship throughout the decades that is neither close nor estranged, but inescapable even with an ocean between them. Givner looks at family, and her place in it, with the same remorseless quest for precision that she apparently had as a biographer:

When I went to the U.S. I spent the summer with my first husband’s family. It was my first experience of a peaceable, harmonious family in which members went their own ways uninterfering, and uninterfered with, treating each other with a kind of friendly respect.

In my own home, relations were combative, adversarial. Every act – even the simplest one of eating a meal, choosing a helping of this over that – was subjected to criticism, moral disapproval, and ultimately, strident quarreling. Granted, this sometimes – not by any means frequently – dissolved into laughter.

I think I had always suspected that my family life was more unpleasant than most and something to escape from. I did escape and yet was crippled by it, still.

But the title of the book isn’t lying. As it progresses, we see more and more about her experiences as a biographer. If I had read one of her biographies, or even knew a bit more about Katherine Anne Porter (who figures much larger than Mazo de la Roche) then maybe this would have been even richer, but I still loved it. There isn’t much about how she went about writing the biography, or what to include or exclude, but there is a lot about the research – about the people she meets and interviews, and often leaves feeling embittered or affronted. No less a figure than Eudora Welty writes to say that she is concerned that Givner’s motives are malice and busybodiness.

Givner does not spare herself in Self-Portrait. Though she may defend herself at times, she also includes negative reviews of her writing without comment. We get fascinating glimpses of a Katherine Anne Porter conference where she is berated from the stage by more than one speaker. Evidently she is a controversial figure in this world, and records the controversy.

Somehow, even with a format of those 381 different sections, Self-Portrait never feels disjointed. Givner expertly always gives us enough information to know where we are at all times, or at least to manage without knowing all the context. I suspected that I would find the book maddening or sublime, and it was the latter. More than that, it was a compelling page-turner. I was reminded of Kate Briggs’ excellent This Little Art about translation, which is written in a similar way, with vignettes following one another. In fact, I could see Self-Portrait fitting in well as a Fitzcarraldo reprint.

What an experience, and what a great start to A Book a Day in May!

Two novels about female friendship

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At my book group last month, we talked about novels about friendship – how surprisingly few of them there are. It’s something Rachel and I often mention on ‘Tea or Books?’. While there are many, many children’s books where friends are front and centre, it’s an area that novels for adults have curiously overlooked. And yet, for many people, they are just as important as romantic relationships – and likely to last longer.

But I have read two books in recent weeks that are about the intensity, highs and lows of friendship between two women.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?: Amazon.co.uk: Moore, Lorrie: 9780571268559: BooksWho Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994)  has a dreadful title but a very good novella about the friendship between Berie (the narrator) and Sils – starting as children, and both deepening and splintering as they head towards the cusp of adulthood.

The girls work together at Storyland – a sort of theme park, where local teenagers dress up as storybook characters, and younger local and visiting children go on the kind of lacklustre fairground attraction that is only a draw in a small town. The crux of the shift in Berie and Sils’ friendship is the different rate at which they mature. Sils is clearly readier for adult life, or at least believes she is. She is more attractive to men, more confident in her sexuality, more willing to explore a new stage in life. We see all this from Berie’s perspective – which is, in fact, the adult, married Berie looking back on her adolescence. The layers of knowledge and regret cover over the naivety and confusion that teenage Berie felt, and the whirlwind experience that knowing Sils was.

“How yew girls doin’?” was inevitably how it began, and then usually the guy fussed with the front lock of Sils’s hair, pulling it out of her eyes, or he sat next to her, hip to hip, or he asked what she was drinking or did she want to dance to this song, it was a good song for dancing, it was a good night for dancing, didn’t she think so?

Usually it was a humid night, the boards of the place dank as a river dock. Sometimes I protected her with gruffness or a smirk or a cryptic look to make the guy think we were making fun of him. That he was too old. “It’s only teenage wasteland,” wailed the jukebox during the band’s breaks. I would nudge her.

But sometimes I got up and went to the bathroom, let her deal with him, and sometimes later he would give us a ride home at eleven-thirty, hoping for her, dreaming, waiting for us at the corner while we went to one or the other of our houses, said good night to our mothers, went to our room, stuffed pillows under the covers, making curved and lumpy bodies, then climbed out the window.

I’d only previously read some of Moore’s short stories, which I didn’t love, so I wasn’t prepared for the brilliance of this book. Everything is slightly off-kilter, and I thought the tone of Berie’s narration was done so well. There’s a matter-of-factness to it that is belied by the emotional intensity – which, again, is softened by the years that have passed before she narrates the story. It melds expertly, and Moore plays with memory in a way that gives Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? extra depth and nuance.

And all this in under 150 pages! (The cover quote from Dave Eggers says she is one of the funniest writers alive – there is a dry humour at times to this, and the humour of looking back at another self, but I don’t think I’d have called it a comic novel.) I heartily recommend this one, and would be interested to know which other of her novels or novellas to try.

Swing Time (Smith novel).jpgSwing Time by Zadie Smith

If Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is an example of a book that manages to achieve greatness in a short span, then Swing Time (2016) is one which should have had a much more ruthless editor. Or, indeed, should simply have been two novels. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it – I thought it was very good, but could have been much better.

The unnamed narrator is friends with Tracey from childhood. Both are mixed-race girls in London, and unite over their shared passion for dancing – not just as a hobby, but as something which could really be a career. But both are held back by their mothers, for different reasons. Tracey’s is unambitious and can be snide; the narrator’s is so abstract and intellectual that she has little maternal care. Smith is clever at giving two mothers who are very different without simply making them opposites of each other – and without making one a good mother and the other a bad mother. Rather, we see how their richly detailed characters leave a legacy on their daughters.

Tracey and the narrator have a tempestuous childhood friendship – characterised by friendship, love, envy, competition, and everything in between. Both have to learn that their lives cannot follow the same path, for any number of reasons.

Swing Time moves about in time and place a lot, and Smith handles this incredibly well – it is never confusing about where and when we are, even though there are no headings to tell us. And a lot of the novel shows the narrator as an adult, working as an assistant and confidante to Aimee, a worldwide superstar pop icon. Think Madonna. She has been famous for many years, since the narrator was a child, and the narrator is now caught in the strange unreality of the long-term celebrity – a network of people working for Aimee masquerading as a friendship group. It includes long periods in an unspecified African country, where Aimee is trying to Do Good.

The weakness of Swing Time, for me, was that there is a brilliant novel about an intense and important female friendship, and a really good book about working with a celebrity – but, together, they dilute each other. There is little to connect them, except for the narrator’s confused nostalgia when she is no longer close to Tracey. I think it’s fine for a novel to cover a wide time span and be about two stages of life, but when they form two tonally distinct novels with seemingly different purposes, it doesn’t work to fuse them. They do reunite as adults, with a long, silent period of resentment and uncertainty between them.

This is my first Smith novel, and I was a bit surprised by the style – which is assured, but not very distinctive. I don’t think anybody could show me a sentence that I would be able to identify as showing Smith’s style. It is very good, but in the blandly accomplished way that many other novels are written very well.

Of the two books, I think Moore’s is a greater success – though both tackle a neglected topic well, and more interestingly than most of the romantic relationships I read about.

Two books about heatwaves

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During the recent heat wave in the UK (and elsewhere, but I experienced it in the UK) I decided to get two relevant novels off my shelves – Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave and Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave. Partly because it amused me, I’ll admit. And partly because it would feel odd to read a novel about a heatwave in any other temperature – though there is a good argument for doing it in midwinter, to warm myself up. It was also interesting to see how the two writers treated heatwaves differently – beyond Lively treating heat wave as two words, and O’Farrell using heatwave as one…

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively

Let’s start with Lively’s novel – or perhaps novella, coming in around 180 pages. Published in 1996, she doesn’t give a specific date for the heatwave in question, though it seems contemporary. It opens with Lively’s characteristically detailed, observant writing:

It is an afternoon in early May. Pauline is looking out of the window of her study at World’s End. She looks not at the rich green of the field sweeping up to the cool blue of the sky, but at Teresa, who stands outside the cottages with Luke astride her hip, staring up the track towards the road. Pauline sees Teresa with double vision. She sees her daughter, who is holding her own son and waiting for the arrival of her husband. But she sees also an archetypal figure: a girl with a baby, a woman with a child. There is a whole freight of reference there, thinks Pauline. The girl, the child, the sweep of the cornfield, the long furrowed lines of the rough track reaching away to elsewhere.

When I think of Lively, I think of fine writing – though I also think I’d struggle to identify her writing if I saw a group of examples. Perhaps it is that lack of a writerly idiolect that makes her a very good, but not a great, writer? Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself – let’s talk about what Heat Wave is about. Pauline is a middle-aged copyeditor (not, she is keen to note, an editor), separated from her husband and living for a summer in a cottage adjoining her daughter Teresa, Teresa’s husband Maurice and their baby Luke. None of them are permanent residents of this isolated rural pair of houses – but Pauline is living there for the summer, and has invited Teresa and family to take the larger cottage next to hers. Both seem quite small, and there is a claustrophobia to this proximity of family that is both feared and longed for.

The novel is about the experiences of this stifling summer, but also looks back to earlier stages of their life – of Pauline’s motherhood, of her unsuccessful marriage, of the stages of infidelity that led to the separation. The novel is third person, but Pauline’s own recollections do a good job of combining the close-up and the far away. She is both live-r and observer of her life. This is described in one memory, where she tried to burn a manuscript:

Each time she revisits this scene it becomes like a Dutch interior. She sees it with interested detachment: the quiet room across which lies a wedge of sunlight from the open door, beyond which can be seen the pram in the garden, in which a baby sleeps, the young woman who stoops before the fireplace, doing something with paper and matches.

Pauline is an exceptionally good character, and I suspect one with whom Lively has a good deal of empathy. She is intelligent and has moments of being determined and forceful. But these are anomalies in a life that is often passive – passive for fear of alienating her daughter, for fear of saying the wrong thing, for fear that she might indeed be wrong. Lively has built a strikingly complete and layered heroine. The other characters are perhaps not quite so layered, but neither are they flimsy. And this book is much more about people than plot. There are dramatic incidents, but mostly it feels calm and gradual, the long, hazy summer spreading itself wider than the 180 pages.

And the heat? Something I’ve learned from reading these two novels together is that it’s very hard to sustain the feeling that a story takes place in intense heat – because, after all, you can hardly have characters constantly saying “Gosh, I’m hot.” Or, rather, you can, but it would be terribly tedious. So in both novels I didn’t feel the continual oppression of a heatwave, but I liked how Lively threaded it through with occasional paragraphs describing the environment – often the fields behind the cottages, recognising the way the countryside is both romantically beautiful and dispassionately practical.

There is a day of such sledgehammer heat that no one ventures outside. And something curious happens to the wheat. It seems to hiss. Pauline keeps all her windows open, and through them comes this sound, as of some furtively restless surrounding sea.

As I said earlier, I think there is something, for me, that keeps Lively from being a truly great novel. Perhaps it’s that her style is not wholly distinct; perhaps it is simply that the 1990s is far from my favourite period for literature. But I only mention this because Heat Wave is such a good book that it’s surprising I don’t love her more. I wouldn’t be surprised if others called it a masterpiece.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'FarrellInstructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

While Lively’s novel is in an unspecified time, O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) is set firmly during the 1976 heatwave – including using quotes from the Drought Act 1976 as epigraphs for the different sections. The story starts in Highbury, with an Irish Catholic family who are first generation Londoners.

The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome, it lies along the corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into into the floor, against the side of the table.

Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.

Gretta is driven by tradition and routine, and she has made soda bread three times a week for her entire married life – and won’t let something like a heatwave get in the way of that. Her love of tradition has not been passed down to her three adult children. There is Michael Francis, whose marriage to Claire is falling apart (which he blames on her Open University degree, and the way that studying and her new friends are taking her away from him). There’s Monica, a recent stepmother to two girls who seem to despise her. And there’s Aoife, the one who escaped, living in New York and working as a sort of amanuensis for an artist. The children do not go to mass, to Gretta’s sorrow. Nor are they happy or satisfied. Each is suffering from something or other – which, perhaps a little artificially, comes to a head for each of them during this heatwave.

But the first crisis is that Robert – Gretta’s husband, and the father of these three – goes missing. He says he is going out to the shop, and he doesn’t come back.

If Lively’s contemplative novel is about character, then O’Farrell’s is about plot. That’s not to say the characters aren’t well thought through and interesting, but this is a pacy book about revelations, secrets, and decisions that will make life-long differences. It doesn’t really make sense for all of them to have epiphanies during such a short period, but we roll with it because O’Farrell is such an enjoyable writer.

She is great at making characters who are filled with flaws, and yet we want the best for. It’s not even the sort of flaws that are usually used to make a character realistic but still reassuringly empathetic. Between them, Michael Louis, Claire, and Aoife are selfish, jealous, resentful, deceitful, and thoughtless. Gretta’s failings are considered more with the frustrated affection that one might feel towards a clingy matriarch. I was relieved that her Catholic faith wasn’t treated as something that made her cruel or stupid (as so many novelists would do) – her sadness that her children don’t go to mass is recognised as an understandable human trait, even if not one the novel seems to agree with.

I found Aoife the most interesting character, not least because of her undiagnosed dyslexia. Or at least that’s what I assume it was, from the way she describes letters in words jumping around in different combinations, refusing to stay linear and safe. This is the 1970s, and she was at school in the ’50s and ’60s: her inability to read was just seen as her being wilfully naughty. O’Farrell takes this lifelong difficulty and sees how it might affect relationships, friendships, work – and the tangled web Aoife gets herself into (while still being a bullish, often bombastically unthinking character, rather than a quiet victim of circumstance).

Both novels concern heatwaves, and both have familial relationships at the heart – particularly the fraught relationship between a mother and her adult child(ren), trying to combine closeness and distance. From this starting point, it’s interesting how differently O’Farrell and Lively treat the material. It’s hard to even compare them – they are very different experiences, both rewarding and worthwhile.

Novella a Day in May: Days 20 and 21

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There’s a bit of a theme to the two novellas I’ve read in the past two days… or at least their titles.

Year of the Hare, The: Amazon.co.uk: Paasilinna, Arto: 9780720612776: BooksDay 20: The Year of the Hare (1995) by Arto Paasilinna

This novella, translated from Finnish by Herbert Lomas, starts with a journalist and a photographer hitting a hare in their care. The journalist (who is called Vatanen, we later learn) gets out to see if it’s ok.

The journalist picked the leveret up and held it in his arms. It was terrified. He snapped off a piece of twig and splinted its hind leg with strips torn from his handkerchief. The hare nestled its head between its little forepaws, ears trembling with the thumping of its heartbeat.

Tired of waiting, the photographer leaves the journalist in the forest – assuming that he’ll catch up to their hotel. But he doesn’t. Instead, he decides to abscond. He doesn’t like his wife anymore, he doesn’t much like his life, and he sees the opportunity to go off wandering through Finland – with the hare.

From here is a quite episodic novella, featuring all kinds of over the top acts – from bear hunting to dangerous fires, threats of pagan sacrifice and more. I’m going to be honest… it all left me a bit cold. The blurb and puff quotes all talk about how funny it is, but I didn’t really understand the wit. I found it all a little drab – big events but very little to make the reader invest in them. Even the hare is curiously characterless. I suppose it’s a sort of deadpan humour that I have enjoyed in other contexts, but for some reason this one didn’t move me.

Juan Pablo Villalobos's “Down the Rabbit Hole” - Words Without Borders

Day 21: Down the Rabbit Hole (2010) by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, Down the Rabbit Hole comes in around 70 pages – all about a drug gang in Mexico. If I’d known that, I might never have bought it, because I really hate reading about gangs or the Mafia or anything like that. And I’d have missed out on a really brilliant little novella.

It’s told from the perspective of Tochtli, the eight-year-old son of a druglord. This is how it opens…

Some people say say I’m precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating. There aren’t really that many people who say I’m precocious. The problem is I don’t know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I’m precocious.

He is indeed pretty precocious, and he does return to those words a lot – particularly sordid and pathetic, which he uses to dismiss a lot of people. (He also uses the f-word a lot, which I rather wish hadn’t been included in this translation.)

Tochtli isn’t shielded from the things happening around them, but he sees them with a child’s incomplete understanding and lack of empathy. He knows that people become corpses at their compound, but is more interested in how many bullets are needed for different parts of the body than thinking about any morality. He is amoral; the people around him are immoral. He is more interested in his various obsessions – Japanese samurai films, a collection of hats, and getting a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia.

Tochtli’s voice is brilliantly realised in this novella, and Villalobos has created a wholly convincing viewpoint on this horrible world.

Screens Against the Sky by Elleke Boehmer (Novella a Day in May #5)

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I bought Screens Against the Sky (1990) by Elleke Boehmer in 2008 – just weeks before I started my Masters, because Elleke was running the course and I thought it would be fun to read her book before I met her. And here we are, a short 14 years later, and I’ve finally read it! I haven’t seen Elleke for almost a decade, but it was fun to think of her as I read her debut novel.

I’m not sure how autobiographical Screens Against the Sky is, but it would certainly fit – like Boehmer, Annemarie is a teenager in 1970s South Africa. She lives with her mother, Sylvie, and towards the beginning of the novel they mourn the death of Sylvie’s husband, Annemarie’s father. And begin the next stage of their relationship – as the only two people in the household, in a mother/daughter relationship that sometimes seems unhealthily close, sometimes is threatened by Annemarie’s leaps towards independence, sometimes in the sanctuary they need in grief. The title is literally about some hail-screens that are attached to the windows, but is also about Sylvie’s wish to keep the scary, vast outside world out.

The long slope of the veld leading up towards the hills drew her [Sylvie’s] own eyes towards the sky and the bleak white sun. There was too much space about. She preferred not to see it. With the chicken wire netted across the windows, she could focus on something close at hand. The screens made a web to which her skittering eye might cling.

They are not quite the only people in the household, in fact. There is also Simon – the garden boy, not far off Annemarie’s age. He is Black, and he introduces Annemarie to a world she had known nothing about. Her father taught her only to read world news, not local – and so she was almost entirely ignorant about apartheid, and how things were beginning to change. The most significant moment is the murder of Steve Biko, a victim of police brutality. Shamefully, I didn’t know anything about this real event – if you’re the same as me, then I recommend reading the Wikipedia article. It is a discovery that changes Annemarie’s outlook, and one of many contemporary events that leads Simon to leaving their employment. I wouldn’t say that Screens Against the Sky is a novel about apartheid, but it is unavoidably the background against which the novel is set.

But front and centre is that tortured relationship of mother and daughter – with some ups and rather more downs. The novel alternates between third and first person, the latter being Annemarie remembering this period from an undefined future. As a teenager, she rigorously recorded journals – though she no longer has them, her recollections often involve the journaling, and an approximation of what she thought she’d written. The differing perspectives come together well, often changing in a few paragraphs. It works as a patchwork.

I was a bit worried when I started Screens Against the Sky that it would be very overwritten. The style of the first few pages is certainly leaning that way, with sentences like ‘On the bedside table, painted buff eggshell off-white, lies a New English Bible, abutting on a colonnade of pill phials.’ More of this does appear later, occasionally, but the style calms down for the most part. And quite a lot of it is told in spare, effective sentences – like this:

The Reverend Guthrie brought relief. Within an hour of his eventual coming, he and Mother retired to the seclusion of her bedroom to pray. I heard her voice rising, falling and rising. I heard them pray together, prayer after prayer. I feared they might at some stage call me in to join them, so I went walking. There was an errand I had to run for which I had not yet had the time. I walked to the edge of town, a place not far from the bus depot, the site of the municipal dumping grounds. It was a wide piece of land, covered with slowly smoking ash and hidden from the road by dense bramble bushes. It smelt distinctively of rust and pus. I did not spend very long. As soon as I arrived, I felt I had to hurry home. I was right in doing so. At the gate Mother was waiting: she wanted me to be with her during the Reverend’s closing prayer She said it would help her. I walked with her to the bedroom, she behind me. She asked where I’d been. I said to town and back – for air. That was, I think, the first lie I consciously told my mother.

Screens Against the Sky is a novel written in a place and a decade that I know little about in literature, and it was rewarding to spend time there. I’d certainly be intrigued to read more by Boehmer, and found the different elements of this book very rich – I think it would merit rereading, exploring all the depths.

Notes From An Island by Tove Jansson – #NovNov Day 11

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What a lovely book. My brother got me Notes From An Island (1996, translated 2021) by Tove Jansson for my birthday – knowing my love of Jansson – and I couldn’t wait to dive in and enjoy this beautifully produced tale of an island where Jansson lived with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, known as Tooti, who created the lovely copperplate etchings and wash drawings of the island that are reproduced in this edition. You can see some atmospheric examples on the Granta website.

The island is Klovharun, and Notes From An Island is a short book following the couple from their early decision to move to this fairly unwelcoming island – until they realise they have leave it behind. They had previously lived on a much more idyllic island – but this skerry, though it seems unprepossessing and sparse, turns into an idyll of their own making. Readers of the novella Fair Play will be familiar with their life there.

An intriguing additional voice to the notes in this volume is Brunström’s – a man whose gifts were in constructing Jansson and Pietila’s house (evading authorities and their regulations where possible), and not in poetic writing. The contrast between his plebeian descriptions and Jansson’s beautiful diary entries are brought out wonderfully in Thomas Teal’s translations. Thank goodness he is on hand to translate again, as he has done for Jansson for decades.

Jansson is incapable of writing a bad or unevocative sentence. I loved her snapshots of life on this island – of companionship with Tooti, of battling the elements, of never quite knowing what nature will do – whether flora, fauna, or the unpredictable sea. Here is a small moment that I loved:

Every summer there was the same wait for swallows. Brunström had told us that they nest only in houses where people are happy, but not if the house is painted with Valtti or Pinotex. The swallows came and, as expected, put on a great show, ripping through the air like shrieking knives, around the cabin again and again, to our admiration – and then, presto, they were gone, leaving no promises behind. If only we could be like that come back only when people no longer expect us! That would be so elegant.

Oh, I love Jansson’s writing so much. And I loved this addition to Jansson’s oeuvre in English. It is short, but it is not a minor work. It is perfect.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan – #NovNov Day 2

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I bought Amsterdam (1998) by Ian McEwan around the time I read Atonement – so probably around 2003, i.e. half my life ago, more or less. I’ve been up and down with McEwan, but have somehow never read this Booker prizewinner – and now I have, it is right up there with my favourites of his.

I had assumed – you can see why – that the novella took place in Amsterdam. While there are moments there, the full impact of the title isn’t clear for a while, and much of the novel takes place firmly on English soil. It opens with the funeral of Molly Lane, and conversation between two of her former lovers. Clive is a composer, writing a symphony for the millennium; Vernon is the editor of The Judge, a newspaper that has been slowly declining for a long time and may be on its last legs.

Vernon and Clive have more in common than their mutual lover (deceased). They have been friends for a long time, and have still a friendship that is equal parts affection, competition, and disdain. McEwan is very good at the spiky sort of witty unpleasantness of a certain sort of man, and both these men are in that category. He’s also good about creative processes, and I think he writes well about musical composition. I say ‘I think’, because I can’t do it and have no idea what composers would say, but it worked for me.

Creation apart, the writing of a symphony is physically arduous. Every second of playing time involved writing out, note by note, the parts of up to two dozen instruments, playing them back, making adjustments to the score, playing again, rewriting, then sitting in silence, listening to the inner ear synthesize and orchestrate the vertical array of scribbles and deletions; amending again until the bar is right, and playing it once more on the piano. By midnight Clive had extended and written out in full the rising passage, and was starting on the great orchestral hiatus that would precede the sprawling change of key. By four o’clock in the morning he had written out the major parts and knew exactly how the modulation would work, how the mists would evaporate.

I shan’t say too much about the plot, but both men come up against moral quandaries – harming someone, or at least not preventing harm, in the name of their art/profession. McEwan’s spin on this is that neither of them really see the moral dilemma in their own lives, but only in each other’s. And neither is nice enough for this to be a learning experience. Amsterdam is perhaps a dark comedy. Or maybe a light tragedy.

So, I thought it was brilliant – and a page-turner too. The only reservation I have is what a blank space Molly is. Yes, she is dead before the book begins, but McEwan never really gives us any sense of her vitality before she died, or why so many men were attracted to her. Or maybe she is meant to remain an enigma.

Another great Novellas in November read – keep checking out Cathy and Rebecca‘s blogs to see what everyone else is reading!

Nothing is Black by Deirdre Madden

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I absolutely loved Molly Fox’s Birthday a year or so ago, and so over Christmas I thought I’d treat myself to one of the other Deirdre Madden novels that I’d since been stockpiling. I went on Twitter for advice, but nobody seemed to have read the ones I had – so I picked the shortest one: Nothing is Black from 1994.

Claire lives in a remote coastal area of County Donegal. I have to admit that, until now, I hadn’t realised that Ireland had a north coast – but turns out that Northern Ireland is really only the north-east of the island. You probably all knew that. She lives in a stark and sparsely populated area, living an almost perversely minimalist lifestyle – only the barest, most functional furniture; few local friends; few efforts to stay connected with her past. She’s an artist, and practices each morning by making a quick watercolour sketch of the ever-changing landscape outside the window of her ugly, practical house.

Rather reluctantly, she lets her cousin Nuala come to stay. She lives in Dublin, but it might as well be a thousand miles away. This is the idea of Nuala’s husband. Neither of them are particularly enthusiastic about the idea – which Nuala combats with talking, and Claire with silence.

They drove out along the coast road. Claire would have admitted that the place where she had chosen to live was bleak, but she thought that it had its own magnificence too. It certainly didn’t have the lushness and prettiness people often expected to find in the countryside. To appreciate this area properly required a certain way of seeing things. Because of the wind coming in off the Atlantic, it was never static. Claire liked that about it, and she liked the colours, not bright, but often vivid, with the contrasts of the low, soft plants against stone.

This isn’t an ‘Enchanted April’ type of novel, where unlikely companions become firm friends. But Madden expertly takes us through the paths and wounds that have led to these two women’s unhappy circumstances. Nuala has started shoplifting. Claire has deliberately isolated herself. But these are only the outer signs of much deeper matters – and, even in a very short novel, Madden finds space to gently develop them.

Do you ever get that ‘difficult second novel’ feeling with an author you love, even if isn’t actually their second novel? This was Madden’s fourth, and actually written fourteen years before Molly Fox’s Birthday – but I suppose I was no longer surprised that she was such a wonderfully perceptive writer. Which is to say, Nothing is Black is beautifully, poetically, sensitively written – but at this point I’d have been surprised if it weren’t.

Throughout, Claire’s painterly mindset influences the narrative. Just as the playwright in Molly Fox’s Birthday was always thinking of words and staging, even if this only came through to the surface of the narrative in the subtlest ways, so colour and form threads through everything in Nothing is Black. It’s done so cleverly and naturally – it matches the world and characters that Madden has created, and their preoccupations and concerns. Unusually for me, I think this could have been longer. I suppose, because she has created fully realised people and is showing us their existence, rather than a particular set of plot points they go through, there is no end to the interesting things she can tell us about them.