Earlier in the year, I experimented with different book recommendation websites – you can read my exploits here. My favourite was Which Book, and I had great fun playing with the different sliders to determine what sort of book would match my mood. The results aren’t the usual fare, and they include a lot of translated fiction. I definitely recommend having a go.
I don’t remember which sliders I used to get the result of Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by Dimitri Verhulst, though I’m pretty sure ‘short’ was among them. This novella is only 145 pages and there’s with a big font. Definitely up my street! I think it might also be the first Dutch novel I’ve ever read – with thanks to the translator, David Comer. [A commenter has told me that it’s actually translated from Flemish – be more precise, publisher!]
Madame Verona lives in an isolated house on top of a hill, on the outskirts of a small village. ‘As far as anyone knew, it had always been inhabited by outsiders, people from elsewhere, who came here with a romantic view of isolation and paid for it later with large chunks of their mind.’ But there is no sense that Madame V has particularly suffered from her isolation, even though her husband has been dead for more than twenty years. She has the gift of dogs loving her, as the first chapter dwells upon. They have been a constant, and a dog is accompanying her as she comes down the hill.
In terms of plot in the ‘present day’ section of the novella, the title pretty much sums it up. Snow is thick on the ground, and Madame Verona has slowly made her way down the steep hill. And she knows that she won’t make it back to the top. She is too old and too tired. She has, in essence, come down the hill to die.
We flit to and from this present day, but the novella is really a mixture of memories and reflections – sometimes clearly Madame Verona’s thoughts, and sometimes a broader and more philosophical narrator’s voice. These aspects go together well. We see the specifics of the village and of Madame Verona’s marriage – and we hear more general considerations of time and community and particularly age. Here’s a rather lovely passage I noted down:
Silence is often more intense after its return. When a tree accepts its defeat, creaks and capsizes, all life flies up and off. There’s crowing and cawing, branches crack, it rains feathers and down, rabbits flee to their underground shelters. All things considered, the titan’s contact with the actual ground is quiet; people generally expect it to be louder. It’s mainly the rest of the forest that kicks up a fuss and makes a racket. And once the creatures have assessed the damage, silence comes back. Eyes and leaves turn to the light that has never shone so brightly here. A place has come free, the struggle can begin, because the space will be occupied, by something or someone. It’s like that for trees, it’s like that for people.
I might have appreciated a little more about Madame Verona in the present day, because it is a bit sparse there, but this is a very enjoyable little book. It has aspects of melancholy, but Verhulst’s thoughtful exploration of little facets of life mean it doesn’t feel bleak – helped by the beautiful descriptions of the landscape. There is a lovely tone to it that comes through the translation. That translation can be a little clunky (‘She wasn’t brave enough to go downstairs herself. And what if she did, and found herself eye to eye with a person of bad will, how would that lead to a better outcome?’) but that is the exception rather than the rule.
Thanks, Which Book, my first read based on your recommendations certainly went well!
Sheree: I think I grew up in a house that loved books in theory – my parents worked extremely hard, which left little time for recreational reading, but my father always had a book of some kind on the go. As a very young girl, my Nana read to me a lot, and I suspect that’s how I came to associate reading with comfort and fun.
Rebecca: My mum was a primary school teaching assistant and has always shared my love of books and reading. She read picture books to me and took me to the public library frequently. Once I started reading for myself, I was unstoppable, filling every spare moment with the written word, even if the only thing that was available to me was a cereal box over breakfast. The Chronicles of Narnia were a birthday gift from my father and the first books I read on my own, starting on that very day I turned five. The Silver Chair was always my favourite, but I’m sure I must have read the first few books 10 or 20 times each. In those years I couldn’t get enough of series fiction and reread books compulsively, whereas nowadays I shy away from series or sequels and rarely reread a book.
Sheree: When I became a precocious, opinionated teenager, my father thrust a copy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four into my hands. It was the first book to reveal to me that my mind and experiences could be shaped by power structures beyond my imagining, and not always benevolent ones. It definitely prompted my ongoing interest in politics and identity. It’s still one of my favourite books, and I’ve re-read it dozens of times.
Sheree: Well, I’ve not yet reached my early 30s :) so this answer might be premature, but looking back over my 20s, I think the most impactful book I read was Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Funnily enough, it’s not even a book I liked or enjoyed that much. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to every reader; it’s one heck of a slog! But reading that book, finishing it, unlocked something inside of me. It changed my approach to reading, and from there my approach to writing about books, and from there my approach to life. I’m not sure where I’d be had I never read it.
Sheree: I started blogging about books almost by accident. I realised I’d been in a rut of re-reading my old favourites over and over again for years, and I hadn’t read any of the books that it seemed everyone else had: Wuthering Heights, To Kill A Mockingbird, and so on. So, I sat down and made a list of books I thought I “should” have read already, and committed to reading them all. I started taking notes on them as I went, and those notes became reviews, and those reviews became my blog.
Rebecca: My favourite book I’ve read in the last year and a half is Priestdaddy. In that it’s a memoir of growing up in a conservative religious setting in suburban America, it could have been my story – but Patricia Lockwood’s family was anything but conventional. She glories in her father’s quirks but never reduces him to a caricature, and highlights the absurdities of fundamentalism while remembering it fondly as her home and source. I admire her lack of bitterness, and it helps that she writes with a poet’s verve – and she’s hilarious. There’s not one dull sentence here. This is among a handful of books I wish I had written.
Sheree: Oooh, Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky! If you’d asked me a couple of years ago, I’d have said there was no way I would have read that book, let alone be recommending it to others, but here we are. I read the McDuff translation, and I was amazed at how engaging it was, how accessible, how funny, how relatable! I know those are strange adjectives to use for a story about a literal axe murderer, but I stand by it. Raskolnikov is one of my favourite characters in literature.
Karen: 
Bibi: My parents didn’t read to me and the minute I learnt to read I was off on my own with books and didn’t want them read to me. My mother would make up brilliant bedtime stories off the top of her head (usually suspiciously related in circumstance to my own life with some sort of lesson involved – not as terrible as it sounds!) The house had a lot of books, but mainly my Dad’s non-fiction hardbacks, which I didn’t read much. He would take me to the library every Saturday and I’d get my books there. My mother adored books and poetry and I did read her beloved Virginia Woolf novels, but one of the great ironies of our family life is that it was giving birth to her bibliophile daughter that stopped her reading due to lack of time. Possibly why I’ve never had children, although friends assure me it is possible to combine the two!
Karen: The first grown-up book I remember reading was Gone With the Wind, in the sixth grade. I’m a fast reader and it didn’t take me very long, but it’s not a difficult novel, though I’m sure parts of it went over my head. I’d seen the movie on TV so I knew the basic plot, which helped. I don’t remember much about myself at that age other than I was really bookish, and there wasn’t much to do where I grew up. I was a library aide in middle school and I was always reading.
Bibi: This is the only question I’ve had to really ponder and its made me realise how much of my formative reading was in my younger years! Reading Jeanette Winterson as a teenager set me off down an experimental fiction path, reading Isabel Allende around the same time was what got me into translated fiction, these alongside Margaret Atwood when I was in sixth-form were strong feminist voices and saw the start of my collecting Virago Modern Classics – picking something from the years after that has proved much more tricky! 
Karen: 
Bibi: This year I read A Month in the Country and I thought it was just beautiful. My edition comes in at slightly over 80 pages and the fact that JL Carr can write about such immense themes with so much humanity and concision is just astonishing.