#1944Club: One Week To Go!

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Just a quick warning to get those 1944 books off your shelves – starting next Monday, Karen and I will be running the reading challenge where we ask everybody across the blogosphere to grab one or more books published in the same year. This time, it’s 1944 – our first wartime year – and together we’ll hopefully build up an interesting picture of 1944.

Any sort of book is welcome – novel, non-fiction, short stories, poetry – and any country or language, so long as it was first published in 1944!

I’ve got zillions of unread books from the year, it seems, so I’ll have to see what most appeals…

The Oakleyites by E.F. Benson

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I’m not doing well for A Century of Books choices at the moment, because I keep deciding that I ABSOLUTELY MUST read something written at the wrong time. Recently I was convinced that nothing would suit except for an E.F. Benson, and all the remaining slots of my ACOB list come after he died – so, sorry ACOB, but I turned to 1915’s The Oakleyites. For context, this falls roughly in the middle of Benson’s extraordinarily prolific output, and a few years before he started what would become the Mapp and Lucia series.

There are definitely marks of Lucia et al all over this, particularly in the first half of the novel. Oakley-on-Sea has the same sort of community – dimly aware that the rest of the world exists, but also certain that the only part of the world worth considering is Oakley. People vie for dominant position in society, and a newcomer is treated like the epoch-altering event that it is – especially when the newcomer is a noted (albeit not necessarily respected) novelist, Wilfred Easton.

There are even events in The Oakleyites that are directly repeated in the Mapp and Lucia series – such as an exhibition of paintings in the village hall that are judged by the community. A brief mention of a guru shows that Benson had such things on his mind. I don’t recall a replica of the three daughters squabbling over what they’ll receive as inheritance when their father dies (even while one of them, a Christian Scientist, maintains that he is not ill and could not be) – but it’s all of a piece. And it’s all great. Benson has such an eye for politely feuding communities. And that seeps in the narrative, as well as the dialogue – as a vegetarian, I self-deprecatingly laughed at the following:

Mrs Andrews had a sharp nippy way of movement and speech, and the brightness of eye which is noticeable in vegetarians and is attributed by them to their perfect health and entire absence of toxic ferments in the blood, might apart from that be supposed to have a sort of hungry look about it, which no amount of cauliflowers wholly dimmed.

Our focal point is Dorothy, who is nobler and less ambitious than other Oakleyites. No Lucia she. She is a bit subtle in her interest at Easton’s arrival, but not deceptive – and furiously embarrassed that she once read a paper about how unworthy his novels were to be feted. If Oakley has a moral compass, it is Dorothy.

It is also Dorothy who takes us into a different world within Benson’s oeuvre. For she is a spinster (of all of 35) and wishes that her life had not turned out quite as it has – and starts to wonder if Easton might make her a suitable husband. In Dorothy’s storyline, Benson gets rather more serious and earnest than one might expect. Increasingly so, as Dorothy’s sister Daisy arrives – selfish and dramatic, and not necessarily in an amusing way.

Benson was not a novice novelist at this point, but I did find that The Oakleyites wasn’t a universal success. It’s a curate’s egg. But too many scenes – whether comic or not – lingered too long, so it felt a bit odd to move between them. And the mix of sombre and comic tones didn’t quite work, for me. They remained too separate, as though they belonged in different novels.

I still enjoyed reading it, and it’s always interesting to see a novelist do something a bit different – but I wouldn’t recommend you seek it out over Benson’s zillions of other novels, and I doubt I’ll re-read. But, still – a mediocre Benson is better than no Benson at all.

The Pelee Project by Jane Christmas

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When Post-Hypnotic Press sent me codes for various Betty MacDonald audiobooks, they kindly threw in one for The Pelee Project (2002) by Jane Christmas. Having listened to it, I can see why – it has a very similar premise to Onions in the Stew. But it is also extremely different – largely, I think, because of when it was written.

Jane Christmas is in a car crash that should have killed her, but somehow she walked away unscathed. But it was one of those wake up calls that happen more often in fiction than in memoir – she realises that she has been living on the edge for too long, with a fast-paced Toronto career, several failed marriages and relationships, and children that she doesn’t manage to spend enough time with.

Long story short – she moves to Pelee Island for a year, with her teenage daughter, with a contract to write a column about the experience for the newspaper at which she had previously been a copyeditor.

On the island, she has to get accustomed to its vagaries. Milk (bagged! Canada!) has to be pre-ordered, and the shop is only open at certain, fairly unpredictable, times. Everybody knows everybody, and many of them have lived on the island all their lives. It is a close-knit community that also has to serve tourists in season – but she is not there in season; she has come during winter.

Christmas writes engagingly and often amusingly about her experience – her confusion, her settling in, and the friends she makes. It quickly becomes clear that she is changing her views on life, and only her engaging tone stops it becoming too twee in its “rural life saved me” aesthetic. If it were fiction, it might have crossed that line.

This was the early days of the internet (or at least the early days of it being a big deal), so she gets instant feedback on her columns in a way that Betty MacDonald could never have done. But a more significant difference is the tone. MacDonald highlighted all the hilarious mishaps of her life on an island – whether a fridge floating away or a neighbour dumping her savage children on her – while Christmas is all about psychological transformation.

She keeps talking about the ‘new simplicity’. As somebody who has lived in villages and a city, I can tell you that nothing is simpler in the countryside. Christmas’s fast-paced career-driven life seems entirely like a normal job, and her ‘new simplicity’ is simply a long holiday. For people who have jobs on the island (i.e. all of them), their life is just as likely to be fast-paced, except they have less access to shops.

As somebody who loves living in a village, I do find the whole city vs village thing (where ‘city’ is all modern and ‘village’ is all atavistic) somewhere between disingenuous and insulting. I didn’t mind too much in this book, as I had to just choose to let it go, but it’s all rather odd – and not something you’d find MacDonald doing. There are only two main differences I’ve noticed about the way people live in a village and the way they live in a city – people are friendlier to each other in a village, and it’s not as convenient to get a pint of milk.

Perhaps an island is a bit different, and maybe it was even more different in the early 2000s – I don’t know. But it is interesting that Christmas (admittedly winningly) turns her memoir into some sort of self-help book, whereas MacDonald just writes a very funny book. Christmas later became a nun, and wrote the brilliantly-titled book And The There Were Nuns all about it, so perhaps the island was one step on some sort of spiritual journey? Whatever it was, it was enjoyable to listen to – even if not wholly convincing as an exploration of the ‘new simplicity’. (And, yes, I listened to it as I commuted from my village to my not-at-all-fast-paced career in the city.)

On needing a frame of reference

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My book group recently read Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto – published in Portuguese in 1992 and translated by David Brookshaw in 2006. It was chosen by a member of the group who is from Mozambique – and the novel is about the Mozambican civil war. Sort of.

It takes place in the midst of the civil war, at least, mostly in an area that has been devastated by it. An older man (Tuahir) and a young boy (Muidinga) are travelling together – it is not clear what the relationships between them is, and Muidinga doesn’t remember all the details of his recent past – though he does remember his lost brother Juney. They have left a refugee camp, and wander until they find a bus to camp out in, even if it is filled with massacred bodies and has been burned.

In that bus, Muidinga finds a notebook detailing the adventures of Kindzu, and Muidinga reads the story aloud to Tuahir. Later, he continues the story as they leave the bus and walk on – though Tuahir has manipulated a path that leads them in circles.

The writing is rich and deep with imagery. It is evocative even while it doesn’t quite cohere into understandable patterns. Here’s a quick example:

After all, I was born at a time when time doesn’t happen. Life, my friends, no longer lets me inside it. I am condemned to perpetual earth, like the whale that gives up the ghost on the beach. If one day I try and live somewhere else, I shall have to carry with me the road that doesn’t let me depart from myself. 

I don’t speak Portuguese, but certainly the translation never felt awkward – it seemed to mimic the right sort of confusion for the narrative, if you see what I mean. And what I have not mentioned is this is also a work of magical realism – so, fantastic things happen to the characters (both in Kindzu’s notebook and in the ‘real’ world of Muidinga and Tuahir). People turn suddenly to dust; dead people come back to life. Nothing is quite as it seems, and there is no sense that anything is expected to be. Unlike fantastic fiction, where these moments would surprise the characters, the tenets of magical realism mean that everything is accepted.

And so on to my title. I realised that I’d never before read a book so utterly foreign to me, in every sense of that word. And I hadn’t before realised that I need some frame of reference in order to work out what I think of a novel – and how I react to it.

This is partly (but only partly) because I don’t know anything about Mozambique. Except the capital, since I learned all the world capitals! It was useful having the guy in book group who could explain the context – not just of the civil war, but of many moments that was allusions to Mozambican myths or sayings or historical figures. It added to the tapestry. But my main issue was the magical realism – because, I realised, I have never read a magical realist novel before.

Fantasy, yes. Sci-fi, yes. And fantastic fiction – to the extent of writing a doctoral thesis on it. And I’ve read academic works about the concept of magical realism – but I can’t remember ever reading a real example. And I found it unsettling.

I eventually realised why. It wasn’t that I dislike fantastic things happening in literature – it’s that I need there to be rules around them. In, say, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker (of course!), Norman accidentally conjures Miss Hargreaves into being. His whims dictate her personality and traits – and that is the limits of the fantastic. The novel’s rules are not our rules, but they a consistent and bound. If anything can happen at any point, then there is no consistency in the world’s rules – but, more importantly, there are no bounds for what our emotional response is intended to be. There are no stakes, because there is no firm foundation.

I’m sure plenty of readers can emotionally engage with magical realism and the characters in them. There are probably plenty on my side of the equation. But I felt, without a frame of reference either in the world of the book or outside it, that I had no clue how to engage with Sleepwalking Land. I finished it without even knowing if I’d like it or not. I’d certainly read something else by Couto, if he ever wrote/writes something non-magical-realism – otherwise, at least I have more frame of reference for my next one.

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Guess who has a cold? It’s ME. Doh. But I’m hoping that it’ll be out of the way before I see SHANIA TWAIN next Tuesday. I’m very excited about that. First in line for tickets, gotta see that show for sure. (Full marks if you know that Shania reference.) Anyway, I hope you’re having a great weekend – and here’s a book, a link, and a blog post to help you along.

1.) The book – Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is now out in paperback, so I thought I’d let you know if you were waiting for a less heavy edition to read! (And you can check out the ‘Tea or Books?’ episode where Rachel and I discussed it alongside Agatha Christie.)

2.) The link – is sneakily also a blog, but it’s a piece in the Guardian about Sophie Baggott’s blog, reading 200 books by women from different countries across the world. Presumably not all different countries, since I don’t think there are 200 countries.

3.) The blog post – check out JacquiWine’s excellent review of Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple. If you’ve not read it yet – please do!

In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm

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After reading Two Lives by Janet Malcolm, you may recall that I went on a Malcolm buying binge. Four of her books arrived more or less at once, none of them matching remaining A Century of Books years, but I allowed myself to cheat on ACOB with In the Freud Archives from 1984. Sadly my edition is not the lovely NYRB Classics edition pictured, but it’s much nicer than mine.

I researched quite a lot about Freud for my DPhil – or, more specifically, how his ideas permeated to the middlebrow public of the 1920s and ’30s, and how they often ridiculed his ideas. Malcolm is looking at rather a different world connected to Freud – fast forwarding a few decades, and exploring the in-fighting between the various custodians of his ideas and legacy.

I think Malcolm might be a Freudian herself, and takes his legacy seriously – but it would difficult to take it as seriously as the people in this work of reportage. (But it is more than reportage.) Kurt Eissler is a respected psychoanalyst and head of the Freud archives. He brings in a young scholar, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who has a background in Sanskrit but the sort of personality that can make people believe he should be in control – and he is lined up as the next Curator of the Freud Museum (waiting only for Anna Freud’s death). And then there is Peter Swales, the self-styled ‘punk historian of psychoanalysis’, whose modus operandi is writing people enormously long letters detailing their failings (and then circulating these letters widely).

As a cast, they feel like they belong in a Muriel Spark novel or something by Beryl Bainbridge. They are forthright, obsessed, and deeply distrustful of one another. And much of their rivalry and animosity stems from whether or not they believe that Freud went back on the concept of the ‘seduction theory’. Of such matters are careers and lives made, it seems. Dramatic papers are published; people are fired and sued and verbally attacked. While 99% of us don’t care either way, this is the lynch pin of the fraught relationships between Swales, Masson, and Eissler. The former pair are particularly astonishing creations – because, while real people, one feels they must have been put through Malcolm’s eye for the absurd.

And yet this is an earlier work than Two Lives, and Malcolm feels a little less adventurous in her writing. She is still very much a presence, but (perhaps because her subjects are alive) she is more of an observer than a shaper of her topic. Long sections are devoted to the words of her subjects, and I felt that I missed her unique view of the world in those moments – I wanted her to intervene and twist things slightly, bringing the shock of the new in her muted way. That talent of hers is definitely there, but a little too muted; too restrained.

If her style and interventions are more cautious, she has still done an exemplary job of showing us who these people are – letting them be hoist by their own petard, perhaps. It’s all a bit dizzying, and her genius shows itself best in that she discovered the issue and focalised it in the way she did. Whether or not you have the remotest interest in the legacy of Freud, I recommend you discover how it has obsessed these lives – and it confirms my belief that I will read absolutely anything Malcolm turns her eye to.

A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel is up there with Oliver Sacks as one of those writers who exudes so much warmth and humanity in simply writing about himself and the world he observes. I’ve loved reading his books about reading – and he seems to have an inexhaustible store of them – and stalled in his book on curiosity, but I had yet to read A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books (2004). In it, he revisits twelve of his favourite books – from June to the following May, slightly oddly. Maybe he had the idea in June and couldn’t wait.

Manguel has an amazingly eclectic taste. While my favourite books would span a couple of countries and the best part of a century, Manguel’s cover centuries and the whole globe. Margaret Atwood mingles with Goethe; Cervantes with H.G. Wells; Sei Shonagon with Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Each chapter is an enjoyable, curious meander through a book and Manguel’s life – heavy on the book and light on the life, but certainly a bit of both. Often Manguel will throw us right into the middle of his thoughts, not pausing to explain what the book is (and I’d be very impressed if anybody was familiar with all twelve disparate books). It feels a bit like a notebook of jottings – rather like Wittgenstein’s notebooks – because observations follow observations; a few pages of analysis are followed by a couple of quotations and then the gossip from the postwoman. What holds it all together is Manguel’s inquisitive personality – his clear love of literature, and the vitality he sees in it, and passes on to the reader.

Undeniably, I enjoyed the chapters most where I’d read the book in question. That was only three – The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I was familiar with a couple of others (who doesn’t know Sherlock Holmes?) but some meant nothing to me at all. That made me feel a bit more lost at the opening of each chapter, but I wasn’t here for specific literary criticism – more for the immersion in the delight of a life of reading. On that front, Manguel more than delivers.

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

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The always-reliable Daunt Books have recently reprinted Cassandra at the Wedding (1962) by Dorothy Baker – and it inspired me to get my copy down off the shelf. Mine is a Virago Modern Classic that I bought in London in 2011 – not my first Baker novel, that was Young Man With a Horn, but I’d heard great things about this one. And it is, indeed, great.

I told them I could be free by the twenty-first, and that I’d come home the twenty-second. (June.) But everything went better than I expected – I had all the examinations corrected and graded and returned to the office by ten the morning of the twenty-first, and I went back to the apartment feeling so foot-loose, so restless, that I started having some second thoughts. It’s only a five-hour drive from the University to the ranch, if you move along – if you don’t stop for orange juice every fifty miles the way we used to, Judith and I, our first two years in college, or at bars, the way we did later, after e’d studied how to pass for over twenty-one at under twenty. As I say, if you move, if you push a little, you can get from Berkeley to our ranch in five hours, and the reason why we never cared to in the old days was that we had to work up to home life by degrees, steel ourselves somewhat for the three-part welcome we were in for from our grandmother and our mother and our father, who loved us fiercely in three different ways. We loved them too, six different ways, but we mostly took our time about getting home.

This is the long, winding opening paragraph – it’s Cassandra speaking. She is driving home for her twin sister’s wedding – and she hasn’t seen her twin, Judith, for nine months, after previously being constantly together. In case that “only a five-hour drive” didn’t clue you in, they’re in America. Cassandra hasn’t met her sister’s fiancee, and she hides her uncertainty and wariness behind a show of ironic bravado.

The plot of the novel is pretty slight – though there are also a few dramatic moments in among the everyday. It is all about the characters, and the way they try to understand and relate to each other. Cassandra is spiky and a little unkind, pretending not to remember Judith’s fiancee’s name and dropping in hints that she could still give up on the wedding; Judith is patient but also keen to assert her independence. Their grandmother hovers in a manner that is both conciliatory and domineering. There is always the spectre (not literally) of their dead mother – whom they always refer to only by her first name.

It’s a truly extraordinary novel. Baker is so subtle, so brilliant in both the narrative and the dialogue. Inch by inch, she unveils the characters and their similar but slightly colliding worlds. And, my goodness, she is good at twins. I was surprised to discover she was an only child, as she she perfectly understands the complex relationship of twins. How they (we) tread the path of being separate people but with identities that cannot be entirely separated – and the joy and, occasionally, the pain of establishing those dynamics in adult life. Cassandra’s fears of losing her sister, and self-destructive methods of trying to maintain their relationship, are drawn so perfectly.

Impressively, Baker is equally good at the moments of high drama. I won’t spoil what those are, but one in particular is dealt with so expertly – showing us the range of emotional responses in finely-observed style. Fine observation while maintaining pace and drama is a very admirable feat.

It’s a short book, but must be read slowly to be truly appreciated. The writing is so rich, so beautiful, and so intelligent that it feels like a reminder of what literature can achieve in exploring and depicting humanity. If that feels like a wild overstatement, I apologise – but reading it felt like a revelatory experience. Don’t be surprised if you see this one on my end of year Best Books list…

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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I’ve got another pretty busy weekend, though hopefully also enough time to finish off some of the books I’ve been reading. I’m reading so many at the moment, including some really good ones – it feels like 2018 has been a great reading year. I hope you also have a fun weekend planned – and here’s a book, a blog post, and a link to accompany you on it…

1.) The book – people keep writing books about reading, and I keep lapping them up. The latest I’ve spotted is Book Girl by Sarah Clarkson, which I think looks at a love of reading from a specifically Christian perspective. Um, hi book that puts together my two favourite things!

2.) The blog post – the Persephone Readathon has kicked off over at Dwelling in Possibility! Do go and check it out, and join in. I’m planning on reading Tory Heaven by Marghanita Laski.

3.) The link – you might well know Kate Beaton for her hilarious Hark, A Vagrant! cartoon. If you follow her on Twitter, you probably know that she recently lost her sister after a protracted and hideous experience of cancer. She has written movingly about it at The Cut.

Brewster’s Millions by George Barr McCutcheon

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Claire’s review of Brewster’s Millions (1902) by George Barr McCutcheon made it sound so delightful and funny that I couldn’t resist tracking it down myself – and decided that it would be a good candidate for an audiobook from Librivox. (For the uninitiated, Librivox offer free audiobooks of out-of-copyright titles, read by members of the public.) And what a curious book it was.

I believe it’s famous, or at least filmed versions of it are, but I hadn’t heard of it before. Two people have read it for Librivox, and I have to admit that neither of them have the most engaging delivery, but I picked one and went with it. As usual with audio, I can’t quote from it – but bear with me.

The premise of the novel is totally absurd, but you can just about buy it. Monty Brewster is a jolly young man out for a good time, when he discovers that he’s been left a million dollars by his grandfather – which, of course, was an even more enormous amount in 1902 than it is now. Happy days! But there is a complication – when, shortly afterwards, he inherits $7 million from an uncle he barely knew… but only if he is penniless after a year. And then the money will be his. There is some back story about a family feud meaning the uncle doesn’t want to mingle his money with another part of Brewster’s family, and all sorts of additional clauses – Brewster must show himself to be good with money, he mustn’t tell anybody etc. – that chiefly serve the purpose of giving the book a plot.

This absurdity out of the way, we can settle back to watch Monty try to squander $1 million while also seeming to be (for the cross-examination of his uncle’s lawyer) responsible with his finances. He throws large dinners. He buys expensive cutlery. He treats his friends left, right, and centre – and they are, at first, appreciative. Before long they start to think he might be mad.

And, quelle surprise, things start to go comically awry. He tries to gamble away money (playing fast and loose with the ‘sensible with money’ bit) but ends up winning more; he tries to invest unwisely, and becomes the toast of Wall Street. And, all along, he is dealing with – guess what? – a love triangle!

Well, a love triangle of sorts. Barbara and Peggy are both objects of his affection – and, unusually for this sort of novel, both seem like equally good options to the reader. Both are fond of him, like him for himself rather than his money, etc. etc. Naturally enough he does make a choice, but it could have gone either way without derailing the novel.

It was all great fun, and McCutcheon obviously had a lot of fun writing it. I could have enjoyed a whole novel about his financial escapades, so it was rather a surprise when it suddenly became much more dramatic and an evil sheik appears on the scene. And then there’s a battle at sea. Yep. And it all predates the (in)famous novel The Sheik by 17 years, so there was clearly something in the water. This whole section felt like it was just added to make the novel longer, and detracts rather than adds to it, but it’s not like the previous bit had clung to stark realism – so I’ll forgive it.

So, all very silly – some of it sillier than other bits – but as much fun as Claire suggested, and McCutcheon clearly has an able hand at taking the reader on a joyful, absurd journey.