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Autocorrect by Etgar Keret

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A few years ago, one of my favourite reads was Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret – so when I saw that a new collection had been published, I was keen to get a copy. Autocorrect (2024; English translation 2025) was sent as a review copy, and I loved getting back into Keret’s strange mind. The stories in here were published in various places over the past few years, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and Jessica Cohen. (Only one was written after the 7 October attacks in Israel, and the subsequent extreme violence upon citizens in Gaza, and this story does look at the aftermath of the October attacks in a fairly oblique way. He is not the sort of writer you’d expect to write un-obliquely about it.)

What I love about Keret is his matter-of-fact surreality. The first story ‘A World Without Selfie Sticks’, for instance, opens like this:

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have yelled at Not-Debbie. Debbie herself always said that yelling doesn’t solve anything. But what is a person supposed to do when, a week after saying a tearful goodbye at the airport to his girlfriend, who was flying to Australia to do her doctorate, he bumps into her at an East Village Starbucks?

From here, things just get weirder. We quickly learn that Not-Debbie is from a parallel universe. She is taking part in a gameshow where five contestants are ‘sent to a universe that contains everything they have in their own world, except for one thing’ and their goal is to figure it out. (The last episode was the one with selfie sticks – the solution to this particular iteration is in the final line of the story.)

I don’t think anybody would describe Keret as sci-fi, but there are elements he borrows from that world. Another story, for instance, is about overcorrection when trying to make robot boyfriends have the right level of sensitivity. The title story, ‘Autocorrect’, is about somebody continually restarting their day to make subtle changes, hoping to evade her father’s death. In all of these odd scenarios, what makes Keret so good is how little time he spends on world-building. He gives us a couple of sentences about what’s going on, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and we are thrust into the plot for a handful of pages that are disorienting in the best possible way.

He’s very good at opening lines. The example above is a good’un. ‘Gravity’ starts “Three days after they moved into their new apartment, the woman who lived upstairs jumped out of her window.” How could you not want to read on? But he is not all stark sentences – ‘Present perfect’ opens rather more philosophically, with rather a striking image:

It’s about time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artifical orchid smell of fabric softener.

There were some stories I thought less successful than others. Quite a few are extremely short – three pages, say – and that feels too abrupt to try and do something that leans into the unusual as much as Keret does. Others have pay-off with a comment on faith or politics that feels trite and undergraduate-y – can he really think he’s being profound in these moments? For those reasons, I still prefer Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. But it’s also true that our first encounter with a striking, new-to-us authorial voice can be the one that we retain the greatest fondness for, with the glow of discovery.

That voice is sparse and conversational, which makes the strangeness work. I’m glad to reacquaint myself with him, and glad to know there are others I’ve yet to read.

Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro

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Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro cover

I wanted to join in Women in Translation month, so was looking around my shelves for possible candidates – and chose Follow Your Heart (1994) by Susanna Tamaro, translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni. I picked it up in a nearby charity shop a couple of years ago without knowing anything about her – I was attracted by the slimness of the book first and foremost, but the description also intrigued me: a grandmother writing a long letter/diary/confession to her estranged granddaughter. And, wow, it didn’t disappoint.

Apparently this was a huge international bestseller in the mid 90s, so possibly everyone knows about it already – I was only nine years old when it was first translated into English, so it passed me by. I’m always slightly suspicious of bestsellers (can they truly be good when that many people are reading it?) but I was blown away by the way Tamaro captures the voice in this novella.

Olga is an 80-year-old who has raised her granddaughter (I think unnamed?) almost single-handedly, since Olga’s daughter died in a car crash when her daughter was only a few years old. She describes moments of beautiful synergy, as they experience and love the magic of the natural world together – and how she naively hoped this would last forever. But the granddaughter is now newly an adult and has decided to study abroad – splintering an already fragile relationship.

I remember the day you left. What a state we were in! You wouldn’t let me come with you to the airport, and every time I reminded you to pack something or other you told me, ‘I’m going to America, not the desert!’ As you walked through the door, I shouted in my odiously shrill voice, ‘Look after yourself,’ and you, without even turning round, left me with the words, ‘Look after Buck and the rose.’

At the time, I must confess, your words left me with a deep sense of frustration. Sentimental old woman that I am, I had expected something more banal: a kiss or a word or two of affection. Only later that night, when I had given up trying to sleep and was wandering round the empty house in my dressing gown, did I understand that looking after Buck and the rose meant looking after the part of you that still lives with me – the happy part.

The first section of the novella is really just Olga walking around her home, remembering, thinking, reflecting. It is in the form of a letter to her granddaughter, but in the same way that Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a letter to John’s son (and, indeed, Gilead is the book I was most reminded of – a very big compliment from me, of course). That is to say, Olga’s granddaughter is the one being continually addressed, but we have no idea if this letter will ever be sent – it’s really a way for Olga to frame her thoughts. And it’s beautiful. She is painfully honest with herself, not allowing the refuge of any comforting lies – whether about her own behaviour, the future of this relationship, or even about the lifespan of the birds and beasts she delights in seeing.

Tamaro’s (and Bardoni’s) major achievement is that capturing of voice. That’s what carries you through a book like this, and there is a rich gentleness throughout.

As the novella progresses, there is more plot – specifically about a past lie that Olga told, and an affair she had. We learn more about her marriage, about the man she had an affair with, and about the long shadow of implications this had on her relationships with her husband, daughter, and granddaughter. I think I preferred Follow Your Heart when it was less tethered to specific incidents, but Tamaro manages to get plot in without losing the strength of the novel – that voice. And, like anybody coming towards the final years of their life writing to a much-loved, younger person, she wants to share wisdom.

I kept thinking that Follow Your Heart is the sort of novel that people claim The Alchemist is. I wrote in my review of The Alchemist that ‘the novel tries to become extremely profound, and succeeds in sounding rather silly. There’s an awful lot about following your heart and the truth being in all of us etc. etc., and it began to feel a bit like a thought-a-day desk calendar’. Despite Tamaro having chosen exactly a ‘follow your heart’ title – well, in fact, the original Italian translates as Go Where Your Heart Takes You – there is so much more profundity and depth in her novel. In isolation, it may not show all of that depth – but, in context, it was beautiful. But I’m going to isolate it, nonetheless…

Little by little the music faded into silence, and with it went the profound sense of joy that had been with me in my first years. The loss of joy, I must say, is the thing I have mourned more than any other. Later, indeed, I felt happiness, but happiness is to joy as an electric light-bulb is to the sun. Happiness is always caused by something; you are happy about something, it is a feeling that comes from the outside. Joy, on the other hand, is not caused by anything. It possesses you for no apparent reason; it is essentially rather like the sun, which gives off heat thanks to the combustion of its own core.

Over the years I abandoned my self, the deepest part of me, to become another person, the person my parents wanted me to be. I exchanged my personality for a character. Character, as you will find out for yourself, is valued much more highly than personality.

From the opening pages, I fell in love with Follow Your Heart. As I say, it reminded me a lot of Gilead, and I’m always looking for books that have that exceptional creation of character – and especially ones that manage to be gentle without being saccharine. Tamaro has written a lot, though only a few of her books seem to have been translated into English – I’ll certainly be looking out for more.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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I had a few days where I couldn’t get into this blog, and the advice I got in various forums was kind but totally incomprehensible to me (PHP error log, who she?) – but the good people at the hosting company were able to sort me out, and I’m back. And I do have a pile of books to review, as per, though I’ve been doing more listening than reading quite a lot of the time. Anyway, hopefully will tell you about some of those soon – for now, it’s a book, a link, and a blog post.

1.) The blog post – Caro does such wonderful reviews of many of the British Library Women Writers titles, and I love her enthusiasm for G.B. Stern’s The Woman in the Hall.

2.) The link – in case any of you can get to the excellent (and chaotic) Hurlingham Books in London, they currently have piles of Virago Modern Classics going at £3 each.

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks

3.) The book – how did I not know about And How Are You, Dr Sacks? by Lawrence Weschler? I love memoirs by people who knew and loved the great and the good. This one has been out for a few years, but my friend Rachel mentioned it this week and I knew it would have to be in my hands at some point.

 

Project 24: Book 16

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The Pink House by Nelia Gardner White cover

I’m always excited when a new reprint publishing house pops up – and there are so many out there now, whether imprints from big publishing houses or tiny indies. Obviously I think the British Library Women Writers list is the best one out there, but there are plenty of others doing wonderful things – and I love it when they are specialising in something specific. So when I heard about Quite Literally Books, I was very intrigued.

You can see plenty of intel on their website. I chortled at their header ‘Reader, we reprinted them’. Yes, we’re among friends here. And they say ‘We are a heritage press devoted to discovering and reissuing ought-to-be-in-print books by American women authors—and occasionally others—who’ve been shelved for far too long.’ You can tell it’s American because their email address begins ‘writeus’. Then again, Jane Austen used that sort of phrasing too.

I’ve listened to the two co-founders on a couple of podcasts, and they seem to have delightful curiosity about the literary past, a taste for books that are both enjoyable and have something to say about a moment in time – and (this will help) clearly have enough funding from somewhere to make Quite Literally Books a very chic concern.

Their first three titles are The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset and The Pink House by Nelia Gardner White. Perhaps they will always publish books exclusively by women with doubled-up surnames. Anyway, of course I already have the Persephone edition of The Home-Maker, so I had to choose between the other two titles for my exploration into Quite Literally Books. My weakness for books about houses made The Pink House the obvious choice. It was actually only after I ordered it that I joined the dots and realised it was a book (under an earlier edition) that Gina had raved about.

One problem: their books aren’t (yet) available in the UK. And shipping from the US is extremely expensive. And that’s where my friend Jo stepped in! She was visiting a mutual friend in Seattle, and so I got the book shipped to my friend’s Seattle house, and Jo brought it back in her suitcase. Thank you, Jo! (I wonder if this qualifies for the ‘has anybody asked you pack anything?’ question that airports always pose.)

I haven’t started it yet, but I love the quality of the physical book, the beautiful cover design, and the very promising blurb. Watch this space! I’m so interested to see what they bring out next – and, for once, I’m writing about something that American readers will find much easier to locate.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend, everyone! I will be hither and thither for much of it, so I’m glad the heatwave is over. I’m also finding myself not super in the mood for reading at the moment, which is very unlike me and will hopefully pass soon. (Not an eye issue this time, thankfully, just not always able to get into a book – more like the reader’s block I wrote about for Vulpes Libris years ago.)

But here is a book, a blog post, and a link to entertain you this weekend, whatever you are doing:

1.) The blog post – I loved Brona’s reminder of why Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill is so good.

2.) The book– I love Jenn Ashworth’s writing, particularly her novel Fell and her memoir Notes Made While Falling. She now has another memoir out – tellingly, given the recent Salt Path debacle, it’s about walking as a way of healing. I’m really keen to try The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North.

The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North : Ashworth, Jenn: Amazon.co.uk: Books

3.) The link – and, just in case that mention above is baffling and you’re the one person in the bookish community who hasn’t read the exposé on The Salt Path – here is some brilliant journalism from Chloe Hadjimatheou.

Huffley Fair by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

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Huffley Fair by Dorothy Evelyn Smith | Goodreads

Ever since discovering the miraculously good O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, I’ve been steadily making my way through her other novels – wondering if anything will be equal to it. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by her, though that extraordinary spark seems to have only struck once. The other novels are very good but not classics. So, what of Huffley Fair (1944), the most recent I’ve read?

The novel covers quite a long time period and several generations of a family, and we are back in a similar setting to several of Smith’s other novels – the moors and the surrounding villages. Here is the opening paragraph, with Smith’s ability to capture place beautifully and invite you in.

Up on the hill-tops the day was broad awake; warm with sun, bright with gorse and hawthorn and star-eyed daisies, loud with bird-song and the hum of bees, washed with dew and wind. But deep in the valley, where the Huff was a dark-and-silver thread between two towering hills, the day still slept, waiting for the sun.

Into this scene comes a group of travellers – of gypsies, in the language of the novel. I say ‘family’. There are quite a few tangential relationships between these people, but they are bonded together by their work and their lifestyle as itinerant fair-workers – rather disdained by all the communities they go to, and perhaps disdaining them in return, but accepted for their brief period of their work. The fair offers entertainment to the children and to the townfolk doing long hours at tedious jobs. Among them is Lou, a pretty, unsociable young woman who will come to the centre of the novel.

One family unlikely to be found at the fair is Abel’s. He is a serious-minded craftsman, opening the novel finishing off a chair. Unorthodoxly, he intends to use it to propose to Hilda, a neighbour for whom he feels no love and little affection, but who seems the inevitable choice as a wife. She, in turn, considers him her last hope (more on her in a minute). But while Abel gets his living from building furniture and the like, his passion is as a preacher at the Mission. He preaches fury and fire, the love of God swept up more forcefully in the wrath of God. It is the passion that draws people: his church is exhilirating, and far more people come than to the tamer churches nearby.

The kindest, loveliest characters in the novel are Abel’s parents – Alfred, who also preaches, and Eliza, who bakes and cares and worries. The evilest character in the novel is Hilda’s father – who brings out the sharpness of Smith’s pen:

Years ago, Samuel Berridge had come to Huffam to die. That he was still living was a matter of some regret to a number of people, not least of whom was his daughter Hilda.

Fat, timid, a good hosuekeeper and willing slave, and foolishly fond by nature, Hilda had been marked down from birth as her father’s lawful prey. Her mother departed this life at the earliest possible moment, thankful in the knowledge that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Her brothers bolted from home as soon as they knew how to turn a penny, honest or otherwise. Her sisters leapt into the arms of the first young men who looked at them, safely entrenching themselves in homes of their own. On Hilda’s shoulders fell the task of caring for her father’s declining years, and it was a task no one wished to wrest from her.

Samuel is such a dark character in the novel, and some of the abuse was really difficult to read.

The moment that changes the trajectory of the novel – and Hilda’s future among others’ – is Abel stumbling across Lou on the moors, who has sprained her ankle. He tends to her, somewhat unwillingly, and somehow they go swimming together. Smith gives us three ellipses for what happens next – but when we see Abel come to the Mission (late for preaching), she gives an extraordinary scene of his preaching. We feel whipped up in the furore his congregation experience, and it’s clear he is driven by some new force. It’s hard to convey sermons (I remember two others in fiction, very different – Lease of Life by Frank Baker and Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck) but Smith does it with brio.

What has made him so animated? If we hadn’t guessed, we can piece it together a little while later – when Lou reveals to her fellow fair-goers that she is pregnant. They reason that she can get some money from the father and so, reluctantly, she allows herself to be taken to demand it. What they don’t expect is Alfred insisting that his son marry the woman he has made pregnant. And so a marriage takes place that nobody truly wishes, least of all Lou. And there goes, it seems, Hilda’s chance of security.

The next section of the novel shows Abel and Lou living together in Huffley, Abel having refused to stay with the family – and, indeed, he cuts himself off completely. They live a few miles away but may as well be at the other end of the universe. Absurdly, Abel blames Lou for all of this – for tempting him to sin, and ruining his life. Smith doesn’t overly editorialise, but any reader will be deeply frustrated by him: he makes everything worse for everyone through his stubbornness, unkindness and selfishness. Lou believes that she has wronged him and, in a subdued, sad way determines to ‘make it up to him’ through her lifelong obedience. Huffley Fair keeps going into the next generation too, and beyond, with their child and her future. But I shan’t reveal any more of the plot because we’ve gone far enough.

So, what was Huffley Fair like to read? Smith writes beautifully, and her characters are so well-realised and believable. It’s that believability which makes them so painful to read at times. As elsewhere, she captures the landscape in a memorable and evocative way and, as the novel takes place over several decades, we see the shifts that come with modernisation and the approach of war.

There is brightness in the novel – chiefly Eliza, and perhaps her other son, Walter, whom I haven’t mentioned. I thought Huffley Fair was very well-written and I did like reading it but, gosh, what a heaviness to it all. I often say how surprising it is that O, The Brave Music is such an uplifting novel when so many sad things happen to the characters. The opposite is true for Huffley Fair: it is such a melancholy novel. The aftermath of one man’s stupid, cruel choices is drawn out through years and years, and it is bitterly sad. Maybe that’s the difference between the triumph of hope over unavoidable tragedies in O, The Brave Music versus the very, very avoidable tragedies in Huffley Fair where hope is deliberately trampled under pride.

It’s still very good, but goodness me it won’t cheer you up. I’m not sure I’ll reread, certainly not as often as I know I’ll return to O, The Brave Music throughout my life, but I’m glad to continue expanding my relationship with Smith.

Roofs Off! by Richmal Crompton

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Ten years ago, I wrote a blog post about my changing relationship with Richmal Crompton. She’d gone from being a favourite author I raced through in my late teens to being an author I felt a little less sure about – though a lot of that was probably connected with having read her best work so early. And yet I keep returning to her every few years, making my way through the collection of her adult novels that was compiled because I managed to get in there in the sweet spot – when secondhand booksellers online made her novels accessible, but before they became prohibitively expensive.

I’ve recently finished Roofs Off! (1928), which I bought back in 2010 and which seems now more or less impossible to source online. Which might make it annoying to say that it’s one of the best Cromptons I’ve read in a while – or, perhaps, simply that I was in the right mood for it. Because her writing is seldom nuanced or deep – but, at the right moment, it is compulsive and wonderful in a slightly soapy way.

That’s perhaps a bit unfair. Her characters are often interestingly constructed – she just reuses the same types over and over again. There are always posh people who aren’t happy; poor, honest folk with hearts of gold; stiff, loveless marriages; children who don’t understand the machinations of the adults around them – and, most specifically and most frequently, a pair of retired women in a toxic friendship with hidden lesbian undertones.

All are present in Roofs Off! but it takes a while to get to them. For a long stretch at the opening of the novel, we remain with one character: Martin Evesham. He is in his early 50s and recently widowed – mourning his wife, but also free for the first time in many years. Mary was clearly strict about rules, behaviour, and social climbing. Martin had to set aside his artistic ambitions for a respectable and lucrative career in business. I’m not sure Crompton ever convinces us that Mary had her up-sides (though she often tries to) – but she does convince us, on the other hand, that Martin is better off without her.

I always love house hunting scenes, and Martin starts looking at homes on a newish housing estate – not with any intention of buying, but swept along by an estate agent (who evidently knows Martin’s mind better than he does).

“Is this all the Estate?” he said; “Chestnut Drive and Woodlands Avenue?”

“There’s Fairview,” said the agent with a slightly pained expression. “Bungalows and cheapish houses. Quite distinct. No, you couldn’t do better than Woodlands Avenue. It’s between. It’s neither the one thing nor the other. It’s safe. It hasn’t the expenses of Chestnut Drive and it hasn’t the – I won’t say commonness – but you know what I mean – of Fairview.”

The British class system is thus rigorously delineated! Though when Martin moves to Woodlands Avenue – because of course he does – there is a wider range of class than you might expect from the estate agent’s description. At its pinnacle is a young woman engaged for years to a young man who will receive a title – but who strikes up a friendship with the working-class, shy man who lives next door. There are children who are dear friends but know they must hide it from their parents, because of their class difference. And Martin discovers (in a rather unrealistic coincidence) that the woman who lives at the manor, whose estate has been sold off for land to build these houses, is the woman whom he loved before he got married. Class runs like a seam through almost every dynamic in the novel.

When I was 17, I took Crompton’s enormous casts in my stride. Nowadays, I do struggle when we are suddenly introduced to 20+ people over a handful of pages. To be honest, I was quite enjoying the focus on Martin. And yet, in Roofs Off!, I did manage to work them all out and keep them in the correct places in my mind. The budding friendship/romance between the engaged woman and the working-class man was particularly lovely, and done better than such things often are.

The title is explained quite late in the novel, when Martin and other characters are discussing a child’s game with some cardboard dolls’ houses – where the roofs had to be remoed on the signal of ‘Roofs Off!’ to reveal the hidden and interesting lives of the dolls therein.

“I wonder,” said Martin dreamily, “which would be the most interesting life in Woodlands Avenue if someone said, ‘Roofs Off!'”

Mrs Glendower shot him her quick smile.

“They’d all be indescribably dull,” she said.

“I doubt it,” challenged the doctor. “I believe that there isn’t such a thing in the whole world and never has been such a thing as a dull life. What you see of it may be dull, but you only see a part of the pattern or a back side of the pattern. If you could see the whole you’d be amazed. You’d be thrilled. A life may be sad or even uneventful, but it can never be dull.”

Crompton’s characters are not dull – and nor are they especially memorable, particularly in the early- to mid-career. Her best novels do seem to have come in a run at the end of her writing. I think what makes many of her novels enjoyable romps rather than particularly nuanced works is that no characters ever act ‘out of character’. Once they are established as a type, you know they will behave precisely in that manner on every single page. I think the best writers of character are those who can make somebody act inconsistently, and make it both believable and significant.

I’ve also realised what marks out my least favourite Crompton novels: overuse of ellipses. So many of her earlier novels put ‘…’ at the end of almost every sentence, I suppose with the intention of adding airy poignancy. It quickly becomes too much. In Roofs Off!, she uses it sparingly – and that alone is enough to elevate it.

The cast of Roofs Off! has no real external reality to the novel, but sometimes that’s fine. Crompton is clearly very interested in her characters, even when they are strikingly similar to people in many of her other novels. There is enough entertaining stuff about houses and housing estates to mark this one out for me, and certainly plenty of plot to race through. In the right mood, in the right place, I think Roofs Off! can head up towards the upper half of Crompton’s prolific output – and it might even be one I return to when and if I finally get to the end of her many novels. But if you can’t find it for sale, you’ll find very similar things in almost any of her novels – and have a lovely, inconsequential time doing so.

Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay

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It was only towards the end of reading Snow Road Station (2023) by Elizabeth Hay that I realised it was a sequel to an earlier book but, you know what, I don’t think it mattered. I bought it in Oxford’s loveliest independent bookshop, Caper, drawn by the cover, by the fact Elizabeth Hay is Canadian, and by the recommendation from Mary Lawson on the cover. I also have one of her books which I bought in Canada (not the prequel to this) but I think that came a bit lower than those other recommendations.

I was also very drawn by the opening to the blurb:

In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat to Snow Road Station – a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.

Now, that is good marketing copy! Consider me sold. The actor in question is Lulu. She has had a fairly celebrated career on the stage, but now she is in her sixties – still very attractive and with lots left to give, but with fewer and fewer professional demands, and a life that is looking increasingly lonely.

Beckett’s plays are notoriously difficult for actors, and Happy Days most notorious of all. As you may know, it is one long monologue for a character called Winnie who, as the acts progress, becomes steadily more and more buried in a pile of sand. Beckett demanded total precision in his plays, down to the ums and ahs, and Lulu cracks. She corpses on stage, forgetting her lines. And her confidence is gone. She decides to abandon rehearsals and retreat to visit her friend Nan.

Now, if I’d read His Whole Life, I’d doubtless be totally up to speed with the relationship between Lulu and Nan – as it is, I was piecing it together. Lulu is visiting for the wedding of Nan’s son, Blake, to a woman he doesn’t want to marry. Lulu sees the word through the lens of theatre, and Hay uses this in a way I found effective – not too often, to feel laboured, but giving you an understanding of her vantage on reality when so much of her day-to-day experience is understood through a prism of stage character.

Blake’s limp hair fell into his eyes. It could use a good wash, Lulu thought, but maybe that’s how it looked after a good wash. He was a blend of Nan and her brother Guy, but morose and much more confrontational in his born-again life as an evangelical preacher. She would have cast him as Iago or Angelo, a blend of hot and cold, an agitated man whose blood is very snow-broth, and Nan as some gaunt queen who’s in the dark.

I’m always interested in how writers create Christian characters (usually very badly), but I found Blake quite a successful portrait. He has the stubbornness that comes of a fixed morality, and perhaps the melancholy that can accompany sacrifice, but his happiness or otherwise stems from his beliefs and behaviours much as everyone else’s does. He is not marked out, by Hay, as particularly victim to his worldview – and, frankly, in modern literature that is up there with the better portraits of Christians.

There are a range of other characters – Jim, Blake’s half-brother, who was apparently the central character of the earlier novel; Lulu’s brother Guy, who still lives nearby and with whom she has a rocky relationship; Hugh, a piano tuner and handyman who is perhaps a little idealistically kind and wholesome.

The villain of the piece is Nan’s ex-husband, John. There is a harrowing scene where he gives Lulu a lift and expects them to sleep each other. It seems to be the ‘price’ of this favour. When she resists, he responds with a cruelty that is not physically violent – but so vile, and so precise, that you’ll remember it for a much longer time than most portrayals of abuse.

The novel is set in three ‘acts’ – called Snow, Road, and Station – and there is a lot that feels play-like in its structure. It is firmly set in a particular time and place, and time – 1995 – is significant because the second Quebec independence referendum is taking place, and characters align themselves on either side. But in another way, it is eternal. Snow Road Station is about relationships – between old friends, between parents and children, between somebody’s life and the life they had hoped to live. Hay has extraordinary control over her plot and her characters. Not in the sense that there is a tightly orchestrated set of story points, but in her clear, total understanding of who these people and how they will act – within language that feels loose and thoughtful, but is clearly chosen with absolute exactitude. I can see why Mary Lawson loved it. Hay is an expert storyteller.

Lulu thinks, of the town’s history, “Snow Road Station was an arrival, a departure, a long wait — a place of rest, a stoppage, yet a road.” In the novel, it is all those things. Hay certainly resists any hokey ‘Town good; rural bad’ or ‘Town bad; rural good’ dichotomy – though she recognises that there are certain places that allow and encourage you to develop different facets of yourself. It’s a beautiful, dark, curiously affirming portrait of a group of people who are seldom totally honest with themselves or each other, but whom we end up understanding totally. A triumph – and now I clearly need to read the previous book.

Woman Alive by Susan Ertz

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I have only read one Susan Ertz novel before Woman Alive (1935) and it was a good, fairly traditional novel about generations of a family tangled up in domestic disputes and hopes. Nothing very unexpected, though a good version of that kind of thing. Ertz was pretty prolific, and nothing in that novel would have led me to imagine what I’d find in Woman Alive – which is a sci-fi dystopia.

It starts off in the present day, with a man sent by time machine into the distant future (erm, 1985). I’d say Ertz lingers a little too long on the mechanics of the thing – or, rather, it’s done pretty quickly but with more details than we need, because the time travel is pretty irrelevant and just a way to get us into 1985. (Two things to note: isn’t it interesting that it’s only one year off Orwell’s more-famous Nineteen Eighty-Four? and also, more personally, to the year I was born.)

What is happening in 1985, in the United States of Europe(!)? Well, our narrator can explain:

A new gas has been secretly manufactured by the attackers against which the people attacked had no defence. It was called, from its greenish-grey colour – it was not, like most gases, invisible – celadon gas, and it poisoned as well as burned. The destriction of property had ceased to be one of the objects of war; only the destruction of life was aimed at.

[…]

The bodies of those it killed generated a disease – a sort of by-product of the gas itself – which proved to be highly contagious and invariably fatal, but – and was the fact with which the entire world was now faced – fatal only to women. Within twelve hours of the launching of that brief war, which lasted only eight, women began to drop dead in the streets, in their houses, in the fields, in aeroplanes, everywhere. Some of them succumbed at once; others lingered on for days.

There is no escape from this sudden plague. ‘Women were isolated, sent up in captive balloons, taken to the tops of high mountains, injected with every known serum, but death came to them all.’ Across the whole of the earth, all women and girls perish.

And, of course, this means that the human race will be over – not immediately, not for the life-span of the youngest boys alive at the time of the crisis, but eventually. Much of the world grinds to a halt, and Ertz is interesting on the professions that continue and those that give up:

Only the painters and the scientists, it appeared, were going on with their work as before. The happiest, most absorbing, and pleasantest of all the arts furnished its own rewards. The world might end, but painters went on painting because it was so much pleasanter to paint than not to paint. Scientists, too, were able to forget mankind’s doom in their researches, their almost divine interest and passion for truth providing momentum enough to carry them through even such a monstrous tragedy as this. 

It felt quite telling, in current discussions of AI, that the very creative professions that AI is trying to replace are the ones that Ertz sees as essential no matter waht.

BUT – the title of the novel might have clued you in that all is not as it seems. There is one woman alive after all.

Again, Ertz is keen to give us some back story about how this woman has survived – something to do with an all-purpose innoculation given previously by a doctor, who then sadly died before he could pass it on to anyone else – but, again, it scarcely matters. The important thing is, the narrator and a couple of other men discover the existence of the woman: Stella. She is the sole woman in the world. And what a predicament to be in.

Soon, the world’s nations are feuding for the chance to have a man from their country be the father of the new generations of humankind. Things quickly turned militaristic. Stella finds herself celebrated as a queen – and yet expected to do the whims of powerful men. Her wishes are scarcely considered – until she takes a stand.

I enjoyed the ways in which Ertz thought through the likely responses to something of this nature, not least the proliferation of nay-sayers and conspiracy theorists. Leaflets are distributed denying that Stella truly is a woman, and can’t you imagine this sort of faction existing? We’ve already discovered they exist in almost any crisis. The leaflet reads…

“Men! You are easily fooled. This is not a woman at all, but a boy dressed up. It is a shameful trick on the part of the British Prime Ministre [sic] for the glory of Britain. There are no women. Go back to your homes. It is nothing but a hoax, perfidious and indecent.”

I haven’t even mentioned the boy in Stella’s care, and the other men who feature – there are villains and heroes – because this is really Stella’s book. She is forthright and determined, while also ill-equipped (as who would not be?) to deal with this mantle. Ertz has created a memorable heroine you’ll certainly be cheering on.

Woman Alive is an enjoyable, well-written, often rather clever novel that whirls past. Written during a period where the next world war seemed likely if not impossible, it does also respond well to the rising emnities between countries. My only wish is that Woman Alive had been a little more substantial. It’s a novella and is over almost as soon as it has properly begun – not least because we spend precious time, as discussed, on the mechanics of the sci-fi. It is very rare that I ask for a novel to be longer, but I think Ertz’s ingenious idea deserved more space for exploring it, and more development for the people involved.

But what an unusual find for 1935! And how (almost) totally forgotten it seems to be. I think Woman Alive makes interesting reading alongside dystopian sci-fi classics of the period – and is certainly more atuned to the specific plight of women in these sorts of futures than most books are. It does not have the substance of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other novels that are better-remembered, but it is still very much worth remembering as a moment in the history of early/mid-century dystopian fiction.

Oh, and one final point – throughout are wonderful illustrations by Bip Pares that I think do a brilliant job of combining futurism with a distinctively 1930s Art Deco style, with hints of Fascism in there too. I think Woman Alive is worth hunting out for the illustrations alone – here are a couple of them.

Project 24: Book 15

StuckinaBook All 5 Comments

I have a handful of ‘want’ alerts set up at abebooks – books that aren’t currently available anywhere, at least not affordably, so that I get an email when they turn up. It’s how I got my hands on Cynthia Asquith’s novels, it’s how I’ve added some rarer A.A. Milne and E.M. Delafield titles to my shelves, and numerous other books have wended their way to me via those exciting ‘We’ve found the book you wanted’ emails to my inbox.

I don’t remember why or when I added Iris Barry’s Here Is Thy Victory to that list, but I daresay I must have been sold by the description of the novel somewhere: it is about a plague of involuntary immortality. That’s so up my street – something fantastic, but in the real world, and able to comment on human behaviour and anxieties – and I patiently waited until it could be mine.

Even better, as you’ll see if you swipe in this Instagram link – it came signed by the author!

 

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