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Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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It’s sunny! I don’t have a cold! All the ingredients for a nice weekend are there. I hope your weekend is looking similarly nice, and that you have a nice pile of books ready to go. I’m finishing off a doorstopper for book group (note: set up a page limit for book club). Here’s your usual weekend miscellany trio:

 

1.) The book – The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman has just come out – it looks like a really interesting and accessible look at all the scientific and sociological implications of our skin. And, sidenote, Monty is a friend of mine. I’m gearing myself up to read it and hope that it isn’t too much for my squeamish soul.

2.) The link – is a month old now, but it’s a fun and encouraging look at the booksellers who are refusing to be beaten by Amazon.

3.) The blog post – is a follow up to a previous one – a round up of Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week. Lots of great links to reviews to hunt out!

The Shoreless Sea by Mollie Panter-Downes

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There’s a corner of the blogosphere that is very familiar with Mollie Panter-Downes’ brilliant novel One Fine Day – about a woman experiencing her life and village on one day just after the Second World War. And this corner (yes, it’s the one I’m in, of course) has probably also read some of the Panter-Downes short stories that Persephone have reprinted – and hopefully London War Notes too, non-fiction reporting on WW2. We might even have read some of her later non-fiction. But it’s not often that her earlier fiction is mentioned.

One good reason for that is that it’s nigh-on impossible to get hold of. One of her novels wasn’t even mentioned in her bibliography on Wikipedia until I added it recently – but, yes, she wrote four novels before One Fine Day. They are My Husband Simon, The Chase, Storm Bird – and this one, The Shoreless Sea (1923), published when she was only 17. It was apparently a bestseller, and certainly seems to have gone into many editions quite quickly. So why are there no copies around? What happened to them all?

Well, what happened to mine, mysteriously, is that somebody tore the board cover off. Even more mysterious, the dustjacket survived. Unless it was taken from one copy and put on another? Who knows. But it’s rather lovely to have this pretty dustjacket intact – and The Shoreless Sea has been waiting on my shelves since 2004. It was about time I read it, if only because there are so few copies about that it shouldn’t be left languishing on mine.

The novel is about Deirdre. As the novel opens she is a teenager, and the chief passions in her life are a fondness for all things romantic and a distaste for her mother. Her mother certainly seems quite selfish, and views her children only as a constant reminder of her age. Her escape is into romanticism – including wandering through the woods at the end of their grounds. It’s here that she meets Guy.

This is a real meeting of minds. They are breathlessly poetic with each other, while also realising that they are kindred spirits. It’s essentially love at first sight, though one propelled by not having met a sympathetic mind before. They agree to meet again – but, when Deirdre returns, Guy is not there…

We fast forward a bit, and Deirdre has agreed to marry a jolly sort called Terence. He is kind, fun, a little stupid, and not at all her kindred spirit. But circumstances have led her to this marriage, and she wishes to make the most of it. A couple of years into their marriage (while she is still about 20), and Guy turns up again…

Deirdre laughed a little.

“Wasn’t it Swinburne who wrote ‘Fate is a sea without shore’? That;s exactly what I feel – as if I’m battling all alone in a stormy sea, and that any minute I may sink. Dahlia, if Guy doesn’t go away soon I – I, the last wave of all will swamp me.

That’s where the title comes from if, like me, you aren’t up to speed with your Swinburne. I thought it might be a misquotation from Coleridge, fool that I am.

It was fun to see what Panter-Downes was like as a teenager – and she certainly has the gift for compelling storytelling right from the start. There is a lot less subtlety in this book than in her later work, and it’s very evidently written by somebody whose only experience of romantic love came from reading about it – but, at the same time, there are plenty of novels published in the 1920s by older authors which have much the same feeling. I suppose each period has its variety of dialogue that sounds right in a book but not in real life, and the 1920s lent towards stoical hysteria. An oxymoron of sorts, perhaps, but one that sums up the 1920s for me.

Is this her best book? No – but it’s great fun, not completely predictable, and with some moments of beauty that peek through the heightened saga and give promise of what was to come.

Yes, I bought some more books

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Maybe I need to return to the ban on book buying, because I’ve been on a bit of a spree recently. But I also made space for a new bookcase (bookcase still to be bought), so maybe it’s all fine? Anywhere, here’s a bunch of books I bought recently…

I was in Portsmouth last week for a training course, and I had time after it finished to pop to a nearby bookshop. It was very crowded and very reasonably priced. Curiously most of their older fiction seemed to be in ‘pocket sized’ editions, albeit for people with enormous pockets. And I bought a small handful of interesting looking books.

Proud Heaven by Ethel Mannin

Anybody who’s read much about middlebrow novels in the interwar period has probably seen Mannin’s name pop up, but I have very little idea about what her novels are actually like. This is the second of hers on my shelves, so I must give her a proper go sometime soon.

Thin Ice by Compton Mackenzie

OK, I won’t buy any more Mackenzie until I read some of the ones I have. He says.

My Favourite Books by Robert Blatchford

I couldn’t resist a book about books, even if this one is published so early in the century that it’s unlikely to coincide with my favourite books.

The Lack of the Fairfaxes by Katharine Tynan

I’m sure I’ve seen Tynan’s name around. I can’t remember where, but this looked fun – and has a name in the title, so I might even read it under Project Names.

Just those four in Portsmouth – but I was meeting a friend in Woodstock for lunch today, and there’s a lovely little independent bookshop there. So I had a browse, and bought a couple of things that have on my wishlist for a long time, because I like to support independent bookshops. I’m altruistic like that. The third of these came from a charity bookshop in Woodstock.

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr

This has been getting great reviews, and anything that can make me a better writer can’t hurt. Though, having recently finished writing a novel, I’m hoping this won’t make me have massive re-thinks about structure…

Ghosting by Jennie Erdal

Slightly Foxed often send me their lovely Editions as review copies, so I thought I’d offset that by buying one for myself – which is a memoir of ghostwriting. Fascinating, no?

I For One by J.B. Priestley

A few years back, Priestley’s essay collection Delight was republished – and it was a delight. This collection of essays appears to be things that he wants to complain about – which could well end up being equally fun.

The Innocent and the Guilty by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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When Helen announced Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, I thought I’d pick up one of the volumes of short stories I have waiting. I bought lots in an impulsive moment during my DPhil, and am now slowly working my way through them. Little did I think that Helen would also be reading The Innocent and the Guilty (1971) – you can read her thoughts on her blog.

This was the last book of short stories that Warner published that wasn’t themed – the ones that followed were about elves or about childhood. And, indeed, innocence and guilt aren’t the dominating themes of this collection – I love Helen’s idea that they are linked by the concept of escape.

Certainly that is the keynote to the most arresting story of the collection – ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’. It is in very much the same area as Lolly Willowes – her 1920s novel about an unmarried woman who decides to stop being dependent on her brother, moving to the middle of nowhere (and, er, other things happen that I won’t spoil). In this story, though, Lucy is married – and we initially see her disappearance from the vantage of her concerned, confused, slightly helpless husband. And then the story becomes about dual identities, as well as searching for self definition.

It’s interesting that, in the approximately five decades between Lolly Willowes being published and ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’ appearing, Warner has turned an already ambiguous escape into something even more ambiguous. There are no definite emotions, let alone a conclusive ending.

And that lack of conclusion, or perhaps lack of clarity, permeates the collection. There’s a story about drinkers meeting, and the final moments suggest (half-suggest) that one of them has a very troubled life; there is a story about a devastating flood; there is one about a widow guarding her writer-husband’s legacy. In earlier collections, Warner might have shown us a moment where they changed. She is brilliant at those tiny moments that make lasting differences – or the tiny moments that illuminate whole lives. Here, I found the tiny moments didn’t really make anything illuminated. They happened (or perhaps didn’t); they confused the reader into an impressionistic sense of what the story felt like, rather than anything imprecise about what it actually was. This reader, at least. ‘The Green Torso’, for instance, has some wonderful moments about false friendships and pride – but they are in a whirl of other elements. I finished most of the stories feeling that they hadn’t quite coalesced into one radiant beam.

I think there are two outliers, in this. The final story, ‘Oxenhope’, is gentler and more lovely than the others. And ‘Bruno’ is more confusing, more unsatisfactory – to me, that is. I didn’t know what was going on or how the people were delineated.

Warner always writes great sentences. She is a delicious stylist, and often very funny. And these stories might be right up some readers’ streets. For me, having discovered what exceptionally striking, immersive, satisfying stories she could write, in the other collections I’ve read – The Museum of Cheats and Swan on an Autumn River – these ended up being the smallest bit disappointing. And I think that’s because those other two collections rank among my favourite ever short stories.

I set a tall order for Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, and it couldn’t quite be met. If this is where you start with her stories, you’ll probably appreciate the many gems and insights, and so you should. But, let me tell you, there are greater delights in store!

Pen in Hand by Tim Parks

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You KNOW I love a book about books/reading, and apparently Will from Alma Books has also caught wise on that front. He kindly emailed to offer me a review copy of Tim Parks’ Pen in Hand (2019), which is a collection of columns that Parks wrote for the New York Review of Books – subtitled ‘reading, re-reading, and other mysteries’, though there aren’t a huge heap of mysteries in there. I don’t need mysteries. He had me at ‘reading’.

The title comes from the idea that one should always read with a pen in the hand – ready to annotate, scribble, question, and respond to the book. Now, I don’t do this. I will occasionally make light, minuscule pencil markings in a book, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go. No matter, we can tolerate each other’s differences and move on together. And I was very happy to move on – I loved this collection.

I’d previously read and reviewed Parks’ Where I’m Reading From, which I understand to be essentially an earlier version of the same thing – columns from the New York Review of Books. I had certainly enjoyed it, but described it ‘maddeningly repetitive’. The same ideas and examples came up time and time again, and D.H. Lawrence was quoted so often that it felt a little absurd. Wonderfully, this has all changed in this collection. Lawrence barely gets a look in! And, more to the point, Parks manages to avoid repetition with a cat-like agility.

True, he comes back to the same authors a lot. Just as you always know that an Alberto Manguel book will talk about Borges, so it seems that Parks is never more than a few feet from a Beckett reference. But he has a fascinating range of topics that he discusses – gathered under the loose categories ‘How could you like that book?’, ‘Reading and writing’, ‘Malpractice’, and ‘Gained and lost in translations’.

The second of these is a coverall for anything literature-related that doesn’t fit in the other categories (samples: ‘Do Flashbacks Work in Literature?’, ‘How Best to Read Auto-Fiction’), and the others are relatively porous. An article about the pleasures of pessimism could have fitted anywhere. His thoughts on reading and forgetting are fascinating and, again, could have been anywhere in the book. And so forth – who cares about classification, it’s all an opportunity to get to know Parks’ readerly persona. Which is someone with a wide knowledge of literature in several languages, open to most different periods of literature, but unafraid to spike the balloon of an overly-inflated writer. His targets are not just E.L. James and her ilk (though they do get a mention), but people like Elena Ferrante, usually held protected from such things.

The final section of essays does justify its classification, as they are all about translation. Parks has lived in Italy for decades, and works as a translator – and has some pretty interesting things to say about translation. Unlike the superlatively involving and captivating This Little Art by Kate Briggs, though, Parks doesn’t have all that much to say about the theory of translation. Rather, he takes apart various different translations of Primo Levi – and it does feel a bit mean-spirited. How could it not, when he is pointing out how other translators have done the job badly, and suggests his own versions? I can’t comment on how accurate the translations are, though Parks’ versions did often read less elegantly and more ambiguously in English than the ones he was ‘correcting’. Nevertheless, I love reading about translation – and you certainly can’t accuse Parks of making his criticisms without examples.

All in all, this is a brilliant collection to dip in and out of – or to binge in one go, if you like. It’s a little more academic than the here’s-why-I-love-books-and-tea style book about reading, but certainly not to the level of alienating the general reader. I can certainly see myself reading and re-reading this – and who knows where or when the ‘mysteries’ will come into things?

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Apologies for a very quiet week on the blog – consider it the reaction to 25 Books in 25 Days! It’s also because I’ve come down with a horrible cold. Which I also did last time I read 25 Books in 25 Days… coincidence?! So, despite the sunny weather forecast this weekend, I’ll probably be spending my time inside feeling sorry for myself. Though, tbh, that’s what I’d be doing during hot weather even if I didn’t have a cold. Hope you’re having a good one, though!

1.) The blog post – is really a reminder, that Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week is kicking off in a couple of days! At the time of writing, I haven’t quite picked what I’ll be reading. But I think it’s going to be one of her collections of short stories. More info here – let me and Helen know if you’ll be joining in!

2.) The book – my friend Claire is a fantastic writer, and I really liked her novel The Runaway. Her next novel, A Map of the Sky, isn’t out yet – but I’m excited for when it will be. There’s more info on her website.

3.) The link – I’m excited about the film Vita and Virginia coming out, and I’m even more excited after reading this interview with its two stars. And it turns out the director studied English at Oxford at the same time as me.

 

Naomi by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (25 Books in 25 Days: #25)

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Finished! Hurrah! I managed a book a day for 25 days, even though one of those wasn’t read in the single day, and two were under 50 pages. And 23 of them have had people’s names in the title, for #ProjectNames! I’ve gone out on a rather more respectable 233 pages, because I’ve been on public transport for quite a lot of the day – specifically, Naomi by the Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.

It was serialised in the 1920s, finishing in 1925 (after a brief time in the wilderness when one magazine stopped publishing it), and translated by Anthony Chambers in the 1980s. Sakura (who blogs at Chasing Bawa) very kindly gave me a copy when we met up in 2016, and she was right to think that I would really like it.

The narrator Joji is 28 when he meets the 15-year-old Naomi. He is an ordinary office worker, but is beguiled by the concept of the ‘modern girl’ – which, in the Japan of the 1920s, was apparently somebody who had Western facial features, wore Western clothes, admired Western furniture, and ate Western food. (Goodness knows what counted as Western food in 1920s Japan, because I can’t think of a lot that American, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish food has in common.) I should say I am lifting the word ‘Western’ from the novel – it is repeated often, in a way that is quite uncomfortable to read. The narrator takes for granted that everything Western is better than everything Japanese, and I couldn’t work out whether Tanizaki was satirising this viewpoint or passing it on without question.

Taken by her sophisticated name, he believes that Naomi can be moulded into the sort of person he would want to marry – and moves her into his house as a sort of maid, until such time as they know each other well enough to be wed. As she begins to develop and learn, and have access to more money and opportunities, the power dynamics of their arrangement subtly and very gradually start to shift…

That’s a very brief look at a psychologically fascinating novel. The modern reader is a lot more in sympathy with Naomi and her independent spirit than with Joji – who is somehow both affectionate and controlling, naive and modern, conservative and cultural. He is not a straightforward villain by any means, and I’m sure he was still less meant to be in 1924/5. This is a really nuanced and intriguing look at what happens when people live together whose outlooks and purposes are not quite compatible – and all about how power and effect work within a marriage. And how illusions can fade, but still be too appealing to abandon.

On the train, I deliberately sat opposite her so I could take another good look at this woman named Naomi. What was it about her that made me love her so much? Her nose? Her eyes? It’s strange, but when I inspected each of her features in turn that night, the face that had always been so appealing to me seemed utterly common and worthless. Then, from the depths of memory, the image of Naomi as I’d first met her in the Diamond Cafe came back to me dimly. She’d been much more appealing in those days than she was now. Ingenuous and nave, shy and melancholy, she bore no resemblance to this rough, insolent woman. I’d fallen in love with her then, and the momentum had carried me to this day; but now I saw what an obnoxious person she’d become in the meantime. Sitting there primly, she seemed to be saying, “I am the clever one.” Her haughty expression said, “No woman could be as chic, as Western-looking as I. Who is the fairest of them all? I am.” No one else knew that she couldn’t speak a syllable of English, that she couldn’t even tell the difference between the active and the passive voice; but I knew.

I think the novel was a bit shocking when it was first serialised. It’s not now, but the tautness and captivation of the writing has remained, and I thought this was wonderful. Thanks Sakura!

Mrs Fox by Sarah Hall (25 Books in 25 Days: #24)

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Can you tell that the books are getting shorter as I get to the end of my 25 days? Mrs Fox (2014) by Sarah Hall is certainly short – it is, indeed, the winner of the National Short Story Award 2013. Faber turned it into a book all of its own, with wide margins, huge font, and only 37 pages.

Sarah Hall acknowledges that it was inspired by David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox – a 1922 novella that I’ve read a lot, because it was a major part of my DPhil. She also claimed not to have read it.

I’m not going to call her a liar, but Mrs Fox follows the same beats of Lady Into Fox to an astonishing degree. I found a useful blog post that details all of those common factors – but, in brief, a lady turns into a fox. Hall’s version is more visceral than Garnett’s, and certainly more grounded in the now (while Garnett deliberately used an eighteenth-century style for his). Her writing and pacing are excellent, but I found it so hard to judge it – because it is so, so similar to Lady Into Fox in plot. To the point that it’s a bit embarrassing that the competition judges let it win, if I’m honest – and probably the reason that the inspiration is acknowledged. It’s even acknowledged in the book, where the main characters’ surname is Garnett.

So, yes, it’s used in an interesting way to examine the dynamics of a marriage. And thank you Annabel for sending me this copy! But what an interesting case of not-actually-plagiarism.

The Romance of Dr Dinah by Mary Essex (25 Books in 25 Days: #23)

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I stumbled across Mary Essex’s books in a charity shop a long time ago, and started with the delightful and funny Tea Is So Intoxicating. I’ve read a few since then, and the final one waiting on my shelves was 1967’s The Romance of Dr Dinah. With the cover you see, the title, and being published by the Romance Book Club, I was a bit wary that it might not be quite as up my street…

Mary Essex was one of the pen-names used by Ursula Bloom, who wrote a staggeringly high number of books. Over 500, I believe, which is some sort of record. And this one turned out to be rather enjoyable – though definitely her with a different persona than some of her other novels.

Apparently one of the genres she wrote in was medical romance. One of her many pen-names specialised in this, while this authoritative site tells me that the later Essex novels also fell into this sphere. Taking a look at some of the titles she wrote as Essex, we can see a theme: The Love Story of Dr Duke, Doctor on Call, Date With a Doctor, Nurse from Killarney, The Hard-Hearted Doctor, A Strange Patient for Sister Smith, Doctor and Lover etc. etc.

Before you get visions of fluffy Mills and Boon, The Romance of Dr Dinah isn’t quite like that. Indeed, the book is much more about her career than her love life. Dinah is the daughter of a doctor who doesn’t think much of her prospects. Keen to prove him wrong, she becomes a medical student – which is where she meets and falls in love with another medical student, Mark. But when he lets her take the blame for a potentially fatal mistake (and also gets grumpy even when she does), she starts to see him in a new light. At which point she heads off to cover for a rural doctor who is having an operation.

There is a romantic element to the novel – or, more accurately, a relationship one. But it is never gushing, and she is pretty clear-eyed about the flawed Mark. I found it much more interesting as a novel looking at the way female doctors were perceived in the 1950s (when this is set), and there are also an interesting section on plastic surgery – it’s not all stuck in a Lark Rise to Candleford world, by any means.

But the main difference between The Romance of Dr Dinah and the Mary Essex novels I’ve enjoyed most is that this one isn’t funny. It’s not trying to be funny, but the dry wit of the other books was sadly missing. At the same time, the writing is good, and would fit perfectly well alongside other middlebrow novels of the period.

Right, four Ursula Bloom names to go – only 496 to go!