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The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

StuckinaBook All April 21, 2008April 26, 20152000s, Rice 11 Comments

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice was given to me as a Christmas present by my friend Lorna, who’d read and loved it. I passed it on to Our Vicar’s Wife, who also loved it, and has passed it on to a lady in our village in Somerset… isn’t it great when a recommendation goes along a chain like this? It’s only fair that I pass it on to all of you, too.

Please don’t let that fact that it was a Richard & Judy Book Club choice put you off. They choose some fine books. And, more importantly, don’t be discouraged by the cover, which falls firmly into ‘chick lit’ territory. Today’s sketch shows the importance of distrusting cover images…

Right. Now we can consider the book itself. The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is set in the 1950s. Penelope lives in one of those crumbling old mansions only found in literature, and is (of course) the daughter of a beautiful widow, and has a mildly eccentric brother, obsessed with music. She meets Charlotte at a bus stop, and is invited, out of the blue, to visit Charlotte’s aunt (not, we must note, the same as Charley’s Aunt) who lives in a book-crammed room, and is dictating her own book to Charlotte. Charlotte is the driving force of this novel, though we follow Penelope’s viewpoint – in Charlotte, Rice has enfused such an energy, such a good-natured whirl of sophisticated absurdity and capriciousness. She reminded me of Miss Hargreaves, not in sharing character traits, but in her unique energy; in the unwearying delight it is to read about her.

Penelope and Charlotte dash from socialite parties to the aunt’s flat to the disintegrating mansion – sharing crushes, aspirations, occasionally squabbling – all with a pace and joy that is contagious. Rice includes a couple of significant plot twists, which is all to the good of the novel’s structure, but when she produces characters so brilliant, it scarcely matters what the plot is.

The debts to Nancy Mitford and Dodie Smith are there, and cheerfully confessed to in the blurb, but this novel restored my faith in the modern novel. I’ve read a fair few good modern novels, but all of them were sombre much of the time. The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is the first unapologetically amusing and incandescently happy novel I’ve come across in ages.

Books – What Books?

StuckinaBook All April 20, 2008April 26, 2015 8 Comments

I’ve just come back from visiting The Carbon Copy in Bristol, which was great fun. What is more, I went with the firm resolve to buy nothing. Well, as little as possible. Certainly not 2 DVDS, a CD and 7 books…

Oops.

But, in my defence, Colin did take me to Fopp (an amazing discounted entertainment shop) and Amnesty Books, a bookshop with the sublime combination of cheap and good and charitable. So I didn’t spend much. But indisputably more than nothing. The films were An Affair To Remember (with Cary Grant & Deborah Kerr) and Brief Encounter, as someone borrowed my copy then moved to Japan, chortle.

And the books?

The Brontes Went to Woolworths – Rachel Ferguson : I’ve been keeping an eye out for this one for a few years, actually, and especially since Karen wrote about it, though I can’t find her exact post now. Surreal, amusing, domestic = my kinda thing

The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly – Jean-Dominique Bauby : read the book for Book Group a while ago, saw the film the other day – liked both, and wanted a copy of my own.

Yellow – Janni Visman : this one actually came through the post. I barcoded a copy of it in the Bodleian the other day, was struck by the stark cover, and enticed by the blurb. “Yellow is the colour of gas, of fear, of jealousy”. Domesticity and paranoia…

Private Papers – Margaret Forster : at 20p, this is an author I can afford to explore

The Night Watch – Sarah Waters : enjoyed Affinity when I read it some years ago, and £3 for a new hardback…. it would have been rude to say no.

Bobbin Up – Dorothy Hewitt : all this Virago anniversary hullabaloo has made me look more closely at the old bottle green ones. Anybody heard of this one?

The Dark is Bright Enough – Christopher Fry : a playwright I’ve been meaning to read. At 20p…

Discipline – Mary Brunton : a contemporary of Jane Austen, I read Brunton’s novel a couple of years ago, from the library. Loved it, and been keeping an eye out for a cheap copy.

All in all, a successful splurge!

A-Z Favourites

StuckinaBook All April 18, 2008April 26, 2015 22 Comments

You know how sometimes an idea will pop into your head, and you can’t ignore it? I imagine that’s how Einstein and Newton and… and those other science guys… felt. On a similar, potentially less significant, scale, I have been pondering – if I had to pick a favourite author for each letter of the alphabet, and the accompanying novel, how would that go?

Expecting me to tri-sect the angle, were you? (I maintain that this is easily performed with a ruler, but The Carbon Copy and Our Vicar, both holders of Maths degrees, assure me that it’s trickier than that) Sadly not. But this might be fun. And once you’ve read mine, I’m sure you won’t be able to resist making your own…
And I should have included? Some you’re surprised to see? Let me know!

AUSTEN, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
BAKER, Frank – Miss Hargreaves
CROMPTON, Richmal – Frost at Morning
DELAFIELD, E. M. – The Provincial Lady
ELIOT, George – The Mill on the Floss
FADIMAN, Anne – Ex Libris
GIBBONS, Stella – Cold Comfort Farm
HANFF, Helene – 84, Charing Cross Road
I……. haven’t read anything by anyone whose name begins with I… not even Ishiguro.
JANSSON, Tove – A Winter Book
KENDAL, Felicity – White Cargo
LINDSAY, David – The Haunted Woman
MILNE, A. A. – It’s Too Late Now
NOBLE, Barbara – Doreen
OLIVIER, Edith – The Love Child
PARK, Ruth – The Harp in the South
Q……. there must be some ‘Q’ authors out there? Q himself, I suppose.
ROWLING, J. K. – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
SMITH, Dodie – I Capture the Castle
THWAITE, Ann – A. A. Milne : His Life
U……. guess what?
VOLTAIRE – Candide
WOOLF, Virginia – Mrs. Dalloway
X……. who’d have thought?
YOUNG, Angela – Speaking of Love
Z……. should have seen that coming…

Dear Dictionary

StuckinaBook All April 17, 2008April 26, 2015 12 Comments

It’s been a while since I did a Booking Through Thursday, usually because Thursday happens without me noticing… cunning, but true. Today was spent cataloguing auction catalogues (my first Full Level Cataloguing, and very attractive things to flick through, filled with paintings I can’t afford and odd owl figurines I wouldn’t want to) – then I went to a cake party (yum) and finally my Church Small Group had dinner together. The only thing I read today (aside from the auction catalogues) was my driving theory book… oh dear. Will tuck myself up with a good book soon.

Before I do, will turn my attention to this week’s question:
I’ve always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they’ve never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?

Dictionaries! When I did my English Language section of my degree, one of my coursework pieces was on dictionaries – specifically the illustrative quotations which accompany definitions. It sounds dull… but was absolutely fascinating, and really fun. Sadly, when my computer decided that its hard drive was a little blasé and wiped itself, my essays disappeared. And that was one of the ones I hadn’t printed, except to hand in to The Powers That Be, so I shall never again know as much about dictionaries as I did then.

What I do know, however, is that I have a dictionary to hand whenever I’m reading a book. Well, not to hand – but on the shelf, and it is referred to often. Dictionary.com sometimes offers a hand, but there’s nothing quite like skimming through a real live dictionary, and having a sentence make sense.

Oddly, and irritatingly, there are certain words which I read over and over again, and look up over and over again, and which refuse to stick in my mind. Of course, none spring to mind now… but for a long time ‘importunate’ and ‘sedulous’ were two of these. They’d crop up time and again in books I read, and every time I was stumped… now, eventually, I know what they mean. But then there are words like ‘vicariously’, the meaning of which I always *thought* I knew, but turns out I didn’t…

Howsabout you? Do you ignore the words you don’t understand, or immediately scurry away to a dictionary, or note it down for later? Or are you just better than me, and haven’t encountered an unfamiliar word for years?!

Not Just William

StuckinaBook All April 15, 2008April 26, 20151950s, Crompton 13 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write about Richmal Crompton for absolutely ages, and have finally been propelled into doing so by the Family Roundabout book group I went to last week. You may well know Richmal Crompton as the author of the ‘William’ (or ‘Just William’) stories, written between 1922 and 1969, when she died. I, like many others, devoured these hilarious books as a child (alongside Thomas Henry’s brilliant illustrations – mine very much with apologies to him. Though mine looks rather more like a Chinese woman…) What I didn’t know until 2002 was that Richmal Crompton had written over 40 novels for adults. Scandalously, Family Roundabout is the only one in print (step forward Persephone Books – and it was actually via Crompton that I found this publishing house).

Richmal Crompton’s novels have fans across the internet – notably Elaine, who has joyfully borrowed many of the thirty or so Crompton novels I’ve managed to find, and who wrote about RC here – but she remains famous primarily for the William books she considered ‘potboilers’. These come under the category of “difficult to explain how wonderful they are”, so I can only say that they spark booklust in the unlikeliest candidates, and nothing else can quite satiate the thirst for another Crompton novel. Their scarcity may be frustrating, but hunting down the elusive novels is quite a fun pasttime…

Crompton’s novels are all quite similar, and there is some overlap. Children grow up together; people in a village exist alongside each other; parents are disobeyed or thwarted; beautiful people take advantage of others; wise, older women dispense advice to all and sundry; unhinged authors write dozens of romance novels whilst being wholly unconnected with reality… not all of these appear in every novel, of course, but they represent the mixture of fun and pathos which characterise Crompton’s books. She is perenially the author of William, and cannot avoid that tone forever (one of my favourite quotations concerns an author, in Family Roundabout: ‘Of his own novels there was no trace [in his room]. Their absence impressed his modesty on people, and Mr. Palmer spent a lot of time and thought impressing his modesty on people.’) – but this humour is balanced with characters who experience understated struggles or genuinely touching revelations. I can’t do them justice – the only thing you can do is read one. I can’t encourage you to do so enough.

Shall I pick one for you? Ok. Frost at Morning. Let’s put it in the 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. If you prefer the easy route, or don’t like secondhand books (is this possible?) then go for the one in print, Family Roundabout, but I don’t think it’s the best. It’s in Frost at Morning (1950) that Crompton demonstrates her most subtle understanding of children and their vulnerable position in families; it also has her most amusing of the crazed-authors, in Mrs. Sanders, who dictates several novels at once, and muddles them all. A group of children are gathered as companions for a Vicarage daughter – their personalities shine through the opening section, as they play with modelling clay. Angela, Philip, Monica and Geraldine are all immediately unique personalities, and continue to be so as we witness them separately and together throughout their childhood and into adulthood. Read it, you won’t regret it. Lots available at abebooks here, and Amazon here.

Oh, and special mention to Our Vicar’s Wife, who took these photos from my RC pile in Somerset.

Sketchy Behaviour

StuckinaBook All April 14, 2008April 26, 2015 3 Comments

I decided to triple my Bijou Prizette, since there is a little stockpile of previous sketches on my desk, and thus there are three lucky winners of Stuck-in-a-Book doodlings. Glad they’re going to a good home – so, without further ado (drumroll, please)…

Book Reviews Made Easy goes to – Linda!

Karen at Cornflower was next – and I thought this one was particularly appropriate, drawn for the day when I met Karen in Magdalen, almost a year ago:

Catherine at Juxtabook was the third winner – I chose this one for her:

Ladies, if I don’t already have your address, please email it to me at simondavidthomas@yahoo.co.uk. Congratulations!

The Red Leather Diary Book Trailer

StuckinaBook All April 13, 2008April 26, 2015 1 Comment

The Book Trailer to go with today’s book review.

Who is Florence Wolfson?

StuckinaBook All April 13, 2008April 26, 20152000s, Koppel 9 Comments

What do you really expect to find when looking through a skip?

Probably not the inspiration for a book, unless that book happens to be “Travels With My Refuse” or “Binbags I Have Known”. Lily Koppel, a young journalist at the New York Times, did rather better – on 6th October 2003, all sorts of old trunks were thrown away from where they’d been languishing in unclaimed storage. Spotting an opportunity… no, wait. “I felt a pang of longing. I was seized by the impulse that at this moment, nothing mattered but seeing what lay inside the trunks.” Well, what lay inside one of them was an old red leather diary. A Milestone Five Year diary, 1929-1934. The property of one Florence Wolfson, given to her on her fourteenth birthday.

Every single day had an entry. These ranged from the trivial – ‘Played piano for Mother this evening & enjoyed myself enormously’ – to the deeply emotive: ‘It’s really pitiful that I love George so much – I’m absolutely nothing in his hands’ and more or less everything in between. Most significantly, it was true. Even if Florence’s was the most mundane of lives (and it was not), its detailed preservation for so many decades makes it a significant social document.

What is it which moves Florence’s diary to a higher level? Perhaps it is mostly that Florence is still alive. A nonagenarian, married for 67 years to a boy she met in her diary days, she was tracked down by Lily Koppel, and writes in the Foreword that “a forgotten chunk of my life, full of adolescent angst and passion, is handed to me… my striving, feeling, immature self [seen] through my now elderly eyes”. (I’ve changed the second person to the first person – the original is perhaps symptomatic of this disconnection Florence Wolfson, now Howitt, must feel after so many years distance).

The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Journal is certainly not simply the publication of Florence’s childhood journal. Lily uses the diary as a basis, and, having also spoken at length to Florence and surviving family & friends, constructs a third person narrative of the years 1929-34. Florence did, after all, only write a sentence or two per day. Koppel favours quite an arty prose – people say things with ‘wide gray eyes void of emotion’; things don’t happen immediately, rather ‘she didn’t have time to take a sip before they pulled up at the canopy of the forty-one-story white granite Hotel Pierre looking down on the Plaza’. Difficult to demonstrate Koppel’s writing style without artificially isolating it, but hopefully you get the picture. Alongside this, Florence’s diary entries (which are cited between paragraphs, an ongoing thread of the primary material) are starkly factual and unadornedly expressive: ‘Planning a play on Wordsworth – possibilities are infinite’. These two styles intertwine, and play out against each other to mutual benefit, I think. It is Florence’s voice I cherish in The Red Leather Diary, yet her distinctive day-to-day accounts are too sparse to exist without Koppel’s elaboration.

For me, the idea behind the book was enough to make me want to read it. A rediscovered journal; an encounter between young journalist and nonagenarian (which, to my mind, is the most interesting section of an interesting book). These are events to be treasured, and worth a book, whatever the youthful Florence was like. What makes her journal, her biography, her narrative so compelling is her character. Not always likeable, she is nonetheless a creative spirit – writing, painting, loving. She presents mature philosophical reflections even while she declares every crush to be a great love affair and bewails the strictures imposed by her parents. The Red Leather Diary is an honest portrayal of teenagerdom in an evolving world, but by showing Florence approaching the end of her life too, it is a true narrative of reflection and change. You couldn’t make it up.

Year One Book Reviews

StuckinaBook All April 11, 2008April 26, 2015 11 Comments

As promised, the first year of book reviews is posted below! From now on there will be a link in the left-hand column. Thanks so much, Ber, for asking whether sketches would be treated with a similar post – I hadn’t thought of it, but will get onto it soon…

Speaking of sketches, thought I’d give away a very little birthday present – I’ll pop the ‘Book Reviews Made Easy’ sketch in the post to someone, as a souvenir. If you’d like it, just comment in the comments – shall we say a couple of days to enter? It’s only, as Elaine at Random Jottings would say, a Bijou Prizerette.

Have just made a coconut cake, which can be considered a birthday cake…