1970s

The Driver’s Seat

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I’ll kick off with the first novella I read at the weekend… although, first, a detour via the word ‘novella’. Peter questioned the criteria for a novella – and he has a point. In the research I did once about short stories, the general consensus seemed to be that there was no strict definition for the novella. It’s basically just a short novel, without necessarily any structural differences from a novel proper – and who can determine what qualifies as ‘short’? Rather arbitrarily, I said 200 pages – but font and margin sizes can mean that 150 pages of one book would be 300 pages of another, and I didn’t have time or energy to make word count estimates… so 200 pages was the number I chose to signify novella! As it turned out, of the seven I read The Driver’s Seat (1970) by Muriel Spark was the thickest, at 160 or so pages – although I suspect it had fewer words than some of the others.

The Driver’s Seat came with recommendation from Simon S, as did one of the other titles this week – so thanks Simon! It was also, apparently, recently in contention for the ‘lost Booker’ of 1970. I have read some Muriel Spark before (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means) and, while I certainly enjoyed them, they didn’t quite click. The Driver’s Seat definitely did.

It tells the story of Lise, a woman who leaves work to fly south on holiday… but Lise is an oddball of the oddest variety. She is looking for her ‘type’ and isn’t afraid to accost strangers to tell them so – but, when pressed, isn’t sure what her ‘type’ is – just that she’ll know when she finds him. We first meet Lise whilst she is buying clothes for her holiday – settling on a dress: ‘a lemon-yellow top with a skirt patterned in bright Vs of orange, mauve and blue’ along with a red/white striped coat. “Of course, the two don’t go well together” says the salesgirl – but Lise thinks otherwise, and welcomes the attention such a brash outfit gives her.

About thirty pages in, the reader gets a bit of a shock. Although it comes quite early on, I won’t mention it here – suffice to say, it throws the rest of the novel into some sort of waiting game, the reader never being quite sure where they stand. Spark’s prose is deliberately – and deliciously – disorientating. We move in and out of Lise’s thoughts, never quite grasping hold of her perspective, nor yet letting it slip entirely out of reach. Eventually Lise takes a ball-point pen from her bag and marks a spot in a large patch of green, the main parkland of the city. She puts a little cross beside one of the small pictures which is described on the map as ‘The Pavilion’. She then folds up the map and replaces it in the pamphlet which she then edges in her hand-bag. The pen lies, apparently forgotten, on the bed. She looks at herself in the glass, touches her hair, then locks her suitcase. She finds the car-keys that she had failed to leave behind this morning and attaches them once more to her key-ring. She puts the bunch of keys in her hand-bag, picks up her paperback book and goes out, locking the door behind her. Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell? The ending didn’t come as a huge surprise to me – Spark leaves an enormous clue – but, as with Lise’s travel throughout the mysterious city, the journey is easily as important as the destination. I finally see what is so special about Muriel Spark, and will definitely be on the hunt for more of her work now. Suggestions welcome…

And my favourite title is…

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What a wonderful selection of favourite titles you all came up with! I’m almost reluctant to put my review up, as I loved hearing them all – do keep letting me know your favourite title, on the previous post, and perhaps I’ll do a post on my favourites from them, sometime next week.

A few of my favourites, before I tell you my *absolute* favourite, and then tell you that the novel was pretty good too…

I love:

Tea Is So Intoxicating – Mary Essex
We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery
But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes – Anita Loos
The Brontes Went To Woolworths – Rachel Ferguson
Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead – Barbara Comyns
No One Now Will Know – EM Delafield

But the one that comes out on top, because it works on at least two levels, and is intrinsically funny, is… Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by PG Wodehouse.

Ok, wonderful title aside, this is also a great little novel. To be honest with you, I haven’t met a PG Wodehouse novel I haven’t devoured happily. According to my little drop-down author menu, the only Wodehouse I’ve written about on here was Indiscretions of Archie, another fab title, and enjoyable, but probably the worst of the Wodehouses I’ve read. Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen is back on form – and the first Jeeves and Wooster novel I’ve read.

Wooster is sent off to the countryside by a doctor because of his ‘young man about town’ lifestyle has had a disastrous effect on his general health. He plumps for an Aunt in Worcestershire (land of my upbringing!)

“Is the air pure there?”

“Excursion trains are run for people to breathe it.”

“Your life would be quiet?”

“Practically unconscious.”
Sadly, said Aunt Dahlia is herself off to Maiden Eggesford, Somerset (she’s following me around the country!) and so Wooster decides to follow her there, Jeeves in tow, naturally.

It is one of those villages where there isn’t much to do except walk down the main street and look at the Jubilee watering-trough and then walk up the main street and look at the Jubilee watering-trough from the other side. This bit amused me, because whenever Mel and I visit a little village, we look out for their Millennium Project. Every village has one, usually fairly humble, and generally unveiled in mid 2003. I’ve seen Millennium benches, signposts, woods, stones… all sorts.

This being Wodehouse, all sorts of coincidences have come together to make more or less everyone Wooster knows turn up in Maiden Eggesford. There’s a woman he once asked to marry him, as well as her more recent beau; there’s a man he once cheated and gave a fake identity to; there is even Jeeves’ own aunt. It all gets a little complicated as two rival households are going in for a horse race, only one of the horses is closely attached to a cat, and is inconsolable without it… and Aunt Dahlia (betting on the other horse) decides to have the cat kidnapped. Or catnapped, if you will. Hence the title – it’s not cricket, she is not acting like a gentleman. And so it all begins.

I love Wodehouse’s writing, with its mixture of hyperbole and litotes – I love the unbreakable calm of Jeeves, against Wooster’s exaggerations and whimsical turn of phrase (I love that he always cheerfully calls Aunt Dahlia either ‘aged relative’ or ‘old ancestor’ – but don’t think I’ll be trying this out on my own aunts. Who are not, for that matter, particularly old):

“Have you ever seen a garrison besieged by howling savages, with their ammunition down to the last box of cartridges, the water supply giving out and the United States Marines nowhere in sight?”

“Not to my recollection, sir.”
I just find Wodehouse endlessly funny. But I must confess – I thought Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen would be my favourite ever Wodehouse, centring (as it does) around a cat – but, for some reason, the cat is given very little personality. I love reading about cats, and I’d have thought Wodehouse would be on top form writing about one… but perhaps he is not a cat person. Shame.

But, even though this doesn’t reach the dizzying heights of its feline potential, it is great fun and very good – sometimes a Wodehouse just hits the spot in a way that no other book can. If you’ve never read one before – well, firstly, I’m a little horrified – secondly, why not start with this one?

In The Springtime of the Year – Susan Hill

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In the run up to Christmas, we briefly discussed Festive Reading, and I was relieved to see that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t prepare that much, and had never really thought about it. It doesn’t get much more unseasonal than the book I was reading in late December – Susan Hill’s In the Springtime of the Year. Look, another season is right there in the title… and, do you know what, I rather wish I had read it in Spring now. (I also rather wish I knew whether or not seasons should be capitalised, so answers on a postcard please. Or, alternatively, in the comments box.)

I’ve made no secret about my love of Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing, and shortly after reading that I made my first acquaintance with one of her novels, the captivating and unsettling The Beacon (more here) – I can’t remember who recommended I try In The Springtime of the Year next, but thank you whoever it was – it’s another short, sad, and often rather brilliant book. Published in 1974, it’s theme is eternal – the loss of a loved one. In this instance, it is the sudden and accidental death of a young man called Ben, killed by a falling tree in the opening pages of the novel. The novel follows his wife Ruth, in her early twenties, coping with his death, and coming to terms with it.

I daresay that sounds quite slight as a synopsis, but some of my favourite writers are those who can weave an involving narrative without huge set pieces or plot turns. The biggest event having happened in the first few pages, this novel is more a study of grief than a rollercoaster of events. From the immediate aftermath; the funeral; Ruth’s difficult relations with Ben’s family; closer kinship with Ben’s younger brother; dealing with Ben’s possessions; moving onwards to the future without him – each stage is subtly and intimately shown – never too much introspection, and always writing of so high a standard that it doesn’t feel like cliche. This sort of writing (especially in the days of soap operas) must be incredibly difficult to do, for the path is so strewn with cliches, but Hill makes it look easy.

She thought suddenly, I am alone, I am entirely alone on this earth; there are no other people, no animals or birds or insects, no breaths or heartbeats, there is no growing, the leaves do not move and grass is dry. There is nothing.

And this was a new feeling. No, not a feeling. Loneliness was a feeling, and a fear of the empty house and of the long days and nights, and the helpless separation from Ben – feelings. This was different. A condition. A fact. Simply, being absolutely alone.
My one problem with the novel was that everybody in the village seemed to feel Ben’s death incredibly deeply – the novel states that even those familiar with death were especially affected by his. I suppose that isn’t a problem, but it might have been more realistic to contrast Ruth’s deep grief with those around who, though sad, cannot feel it to the same extent. For that is how such deaths affect neighbourhoods, is it not?

Nobody very close to me has ever died, not yet, and I still found this novel incredibly affecting. I also felt – though, again, I cannot support this from my own experience – that In the Springtime of the Year could be a huge comfort to anyone going through that. Or perhaps to those around them, to help them understand. I’m in danger of getting emotional here, aren’t I? And I shouldn’t forget that Susan Hill hasn’t set out to write a grievance counselling book – though there may be overlap, this is primarily a very well written, subtle, and touching novel, and that is certainly achievement enough.

Mrs. Palfrey

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I read Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont a few weeks ago, but was waiting until I’d seen the film as well before writing about it here. Consequently I’ve forgotten all sorts of details, but I’ll do my best…

The novel concerns Mrs. Palfrey at, you guessed it, the Claremont – ‘One rainy Sunday in January Mrs. Palfrey, recently widowed, arrives at the Claremont Hotel in the Cromwell Road. Here she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are a magnificently eccentric group who live off crumbs of affection, obsessive interest in the relentless round of hotel meals, and undying curiosity.’ So says the blurb on my beautiful Virago edition (I used a postcard of David Hockney’s My Parents for a bookmark, see below, and his mother is startlingly similar to the Virago cover Mrs. Mabel Whitehead by Margaret Foreman. Same pose, same hair, everything.)

The characters sharing the Claremont with Mrs. Palfrey are all in various stages of boredom and hopelessness, but Elizabeth Taylor is subtle enough with her pen to show these states as brittleness or insatiable nosiness or indulging in risque jokes. Mrs. Arbuthnot is bossy; Mrs. Burton drinks; Mrs. Post gossips; Mr. Osmond complains of the lack of male company. Into this web Mrs. Palfrey stumbles, her daughter too busy and grandson too selfish to care much about her. Again, Taylor doesn’t lay it on too thick – there are no villains in this piece, only humans. The life in a hotel, which acts as a retirement home in all but name, is beautifully observed, and perfectly nuanced. As an example (but how can one exemplify subtlety?) here is a couple of paragraphs from early in the novel:

The chief gathering-place for the residents was the vestibule where, about an hour before both luncheon and dinner, the menu was put up in a frame by the lift. People, at those times, seemed to be hovering – reading old church notices on the board, tapping the barometer, inquiring at the desk about letters, or looking out at the street. None wished to appear greedy, or obsessed by food: but food made the breaks in the day, and menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and dissatisfactions, as once life had.

When the card was fixed into the frame, although awaited, it was for a time ignored. Then, perhaps Mrs. Arbuthnot, on her slow progress to the lift, would pause nonchalantly, though scarcely staying a second. There was not much to memorise – the choice of two or three dishes, and the fact (which Mrs. Arbuthnot knew, but Mrs. Palfrey had not yet learned) that the menus came round fortnightly, or more often. There were permutations, but no innovations.

The stumbling minutiae of their lives, delicately and acutely portrayed. The central interest in their lives is the visitation of relatives. Each has a store of potential visitors, and an even more valuable reserve of reasons why they haven’t been able to visit. Mrs. Palfrey naively makes known that her grandson Desmond lives near the Claremont, and is sure to come and see her… which he does not do. When she falls outside a flat, and a young man comes to her aid, she finds in many ways a substitute grandson. Ludovic Myers (for it is he) gives her a cup of tea, and is kind. A writer, and a bohemian of sorts, he is enough unlike Mrs. Palfrey to make their friendship diverting, and enough like her to prevent it being ridiculous. Both alone, in their own ways, it is somehow not long before he is masquerading as her grandson.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont does not go in for high drama, and this fraudulence never provides it. What the unusual pairing does offer is a touching, but not saccharine, breath of life into Mrs. Palfrey’s old age – but this is no Disney transformation. Elizabeth Taylor brilliantly continues to tread the line between fairy tale and misery literature – the line, I suppose, of reality. And never has reality been more beautiful written nor more honestly and unmanipulatively told.

So, I loved the book. Come back tomorrow to see what I thought about the film…

Enchanting

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Following on from my recent post on the new Winnie the Pooh, I had a couple of other things to mention. Firstly, thanks very much to the two people who pointed me in the direction of this Radio 4 programme (accessible UK readers only, I’m afraid) about Winnie the Pooh in Russian (Vinni Pukh, apparently) – its popularity and the changes they made. I haven’t listened to it yet, but what a fascinating idea. I’m going to be big and ignore the fact that the blurb says EE Shepherd instead of EH Shepard…

The other item related to the world of Winnie is no.25 on my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. That’s right, we’re half way. Let’s go into big font for that, actually.

25. The Enchanted Places
by Christopher Milne

Well, I say The Enchanted Places but I’d actually like to put forward three titles, Christopher Milne’s autobiographical trilogy. The Enchanted Places is the first one, and the most widely available; the second is The Path Through The Trees and the third is The Hollow on the Hill. They all have rather different characters, but should all be read…

Christopher Milne, to start at the beginning, is Christopher Robin, AA Milne’s son and the only human allowed into the Hundred Acre Wood. The Enchanted Places is mostly centred around the Pooh books and characters, and what it was like to grow up as the child millions of children wished and pretended to be. At the same time it is a memoir of his father, honest but affectionate – and, a brief snapshot of what Christopher Robin grew up to be. To quote the introduction, ‘I am making a double appearance, first as the boy I am describing and secondly as the adult through whose eyes I am seeing him’.

There’s a danger that, to the cynical heart, this all sounds mawkish and sentimental, but those are two words I should never apply to Christopher Milne. He writes about meeting journalists, being the star at a pageant, preferring Euclid to a sponge cake – but all with a dry and sensible hat on. Nor, contrary to some widespread belief, does he loathe everything connected with his father – I believe there were some years when he wanted to distance himself, but by the time he wrote The Enchanted Places, he’d changed his mind. For anyone even remotely interested in Winnie the Pooh, I do encourage you to find this memoir – it’s currently out of print, I think, but lots around secondhand. Parts of sad, much will feel nostalgic, all reveals writing talent to run in the Milne family.

I suspect some will have already heard of The Enchanted Places, but it’s less likely that you’ll have read the sequels. I’ll only mention them, but they’re definitely worth finding and buying and loving.

The Path Through The Trees – actually my favourite of the three, this volume looks at Christopher Milne’s time in the army, his marriage, and running a bookshop. I loved the chapters on the different ventures the bookshop made, the decision over whether or not to stock the Pooh books, the customers he got – it would be fascinating if written by any bookshop owner, but Milne’s account is even more interesting.

The Hollow on the Hill – Milne’s first love, Nature, takes centre stage in this volume, writing about the Devon countryside and his garden. I don’t remember this one so well, to be honest, which makes me think I might try and re-read the whole trilogy this year…

With the Woolfs

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Glad you all took a trip down memory lane with me – I’m sorely tempted to buy the DVD of The Herbs… but probably shouldn’t.

That book I was going to talk about… A Boy at the Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy, which my friend Barbara gave to me, and which (I hear) is being republished by Slightly Foxed. I’ve had my eye on this for a while, but somehow hadn’t got around to buying it when Barbara sent me a copy, and so I was rather delighted. The list of Woolf-related books I’ve read isn’t small, and it is growing – I like to dip back into Bloomsbury waters every now and then, especially the books which are first-hand, but from the peripherals. The most recent addition to 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About was one of these – and while Kennedy’s isn’t *as* good, it’s still rather wonderful.

Richard Kennedy was just what the title suggests – a boy at the Hogarth Press, the small publishing venture started by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Kennedy did the day-to-day tasks, but was also occasionally asked his opinion about the books people sent in – winning something of a victory when he (with the help of his uncle) called Ivy Compton-Burnett a genius, while Leonard Woolf dismissed her as being unable to write. His book was written about forty years after his time there, but is still in the form of a diary, which leads to a rather odd mix of naivety and disingenuosness – but an uncomplicated eye amongst the complicated which is difficult to resist. All new angles of Virginia are welcome to me, but perhaps especially one who wasn’t all that afraid of her, and judged her by such standards as it being ‘bad form to laugh at your employees’. Love Virginia Woolf though I do, sometimes contemporary accounts of her can be a little nauseating. How much more precise is: ‘I think she is rather cruel in spite of the kind, rather dreamy way she looks at you.’

Richard Kennedy would never rival his employers in terms of writing – the boyish charm is needed to carry a patchwork of recollections, tied together by similarly boyish sketches – but A Boy at the Hogarth Press is a refreshing and amusing addition to the canon of Bloomsbury onlookers.

The Bookshop

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I’m SO glad that Enid Blyton provoked such a joyous reaction in you all; not even one derogatory comment. She obviously helped us all become obsessive readers. Though I’m on a St. Clare’s binge at the moment, my favourites are either Famous Five or The Naughtiest Girl in the School or the Six Cousins… tricky. Our Vicar’s Wife, and probably Our Vicar too, organised a Famous Five party for us once. Brilliant.

Now (and watch closely here, to see if you can spot the seams) Enid Blyton books could be bought in a bookshop, which brings me to The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. Lynne Hatwell, aka dovegreyreader, very kindly gave this to me when we met earlier in the year, and it was just the right size to slip into my bag on the train today.

I tried a Penelope Fitzgerald novel last year, Human Voices, but not sure I got round to writing about it on here. It was one of those books which I finished before I quite felt that I’d got into it – the style was a little jabby and awkward, and somehow it didn’t click. And The Bookshop felt the same for the first thirty pages… but then, thank goodness, how wonderful, it all fell into place and hallelujah, I raced right to the end. From being a book I couldn’t get on with, it became one of my favourite reads this year.

Slim and simple, The Bookshop is about Florence Green setting up a bookshop in a small town called Hardborough, in 1959. The business meets genteel opposition from several quarters of the town, but also support from others. Christine, a stubborn and resilient young girl, comes to work as an assistant – and between Christine and Florence a rather touching, but unsentimental, friendship develops. If that sounds remotely mawkish, trust me, it isn’t. Penelope Fitzgerald doesn’t do mawkish. Her writing is spare, very spare, and there isn’t room for emotions – we simply see the people interact, and can quite easily understand the emotions they must be experiencing. How Florence faces opposition, how she accepts Christine’s characteristics and how she changes as a result of the bookshop.

The denouement is subtle and devastating – it involves neighbours acting as they would in a Mapp & Lucia book, where it would be a gentle comedy. Here it is understated tragedy. The Bookshop is a triumph of a novel, and I’m so glad Lynne gave it to me, and that *something* clicked whilst I was reading it.

Thrown To The Woolfs

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Today’s Woolf-pun wasn’t my own invention, though a trawl through past posts on Woolf will reveal quite a medley of ’em – as does today’s sketch, which is once more recycled. What can I say, I’m fond of it. And I’m also fond of Virginia Woolf, always on the look out for other things to read by and about her.

Can’t remember where I first saw Thrown To The Woolfs by John Lehnmann, but I have a feeling it was mentioned in Hermione Lee’s exhaustive biography Virginia Woolf – it appealed immediately; an account by Lehmann of being manager and later partner of Hogarth Press. He worked there between 1931 and 1946, with a sizeable gap in the middle – both chunks of time there, totalling almost eight years, ended in a rift with Leonard Woolf.

Although it is Woolf, V. who sold this title to me, Woolf, L. takes more central stage. Not in Lehmann’s opinion, certainly, but rather in the length of time spent together and consequent impact on Lehmann’s life. Like almost everyone else who has documented meeting Virginia, Lehmann was entirely bewitched by her, both as a person and a writer. He describes reading her final novel, Between The Acts, in manuscript: ‘It was a thrilling experience, and I was deeply moved. It seemed to me to have an unparalleled imaginative power, to be filled with a poetry more disturbing than anything she had written before, reaching at times the extreme limits of the communicable’. She herself died believing it to be “too silly and trivial”, but in her mental state also called To The Lighthouse ‘inconceivably bad’. It is a further tragedy that one of the century’s greatest writers died believing her work to be awful.

So, though Virginia was undoubtedly Lehmann’s preferred Woolf, it was Leonard who dominated the running of the Hogarth Press. The Press was important to both Woolfs – Lehmann describes it being treated ‘as if it were the child their marriage had never produced’ – but Leonard was far more concerned with the managerial side. He was notoriously parsimonious, going into a rage if a halfpenny could not be accounted for in, er, accounts. Thrown To The Woolfs, as the title suggests, does not tell a wholly happy tale, and it was (Lehmann suggests) Leonard’s over-bearing attitude, especially regards vetoing authors Lehmann wished to publish, which led to the eventual break up of their partnership. Much of the third section of this book is taken up with settling scores – quoting from Leonard’s autobiography and then refuting and repudiating. Though the final paragraph begins ‘it is absurd, and deleterious, in one’s later ages, to harbour enduring resentments about the struggles and tribulations of one’s younger career’ – but this feels a little like lip service to good nature. The tone becomes a trifle bitter, with light coming only in references to Virginia and other authors about whom he is passionate.

Despite these unresolved squabbles, Thrown To The Woolfs is a well-written and interesting account of a unique viewpoint on the Woolfs, and as such is well worth seeking out. Just don’t expect Happy Families all round.

By the by, I’m off to Snowdonia for a few days – see you when I get back!

Critically speaking…

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Mencken, apparently, said that “Criticism is prejudice made plausible”.

I always think erudite blog entries should begin with a relevant quotation, so there you go – and useful things, quotations are. What is it about them which makes argument futile?

Before I wander off into unknown territory, I’ll make the point of today’s entry obvious. In my bid to become a Well Rounded Member of the University, I write sporadically for the student newspaper (enterprisingly labelled The Oxford Student). I wrote a couple of book reviews – you can see why this might be my area of choice – but then they shunted me over to drama. In fact, the previous drama editor was unceremoniously sacked, for giving his own plays large and positive reviews, and the rest of the staff went on strike. I was the calm after the storm, and asked to be drama editor for the dubious merit of knowing very little about drama. On the page, fine. On the stage, it was a learning curve.

Anyway, that was all a while ago – I did a couple of terms, and now am just part of the Writing Team. And today I was sent off to review a student production of Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party. The press previews show 45mins-1 hour of the production, in various stages of costume and prop preparation, and with the occasional prompt. Bribery varies, from nothing, to wine and sweets. I’ve done a LOT, from Educating Rita to Berkoff’s dreadful Decadence, to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to The Threepenny Opera, with obligatory stops at Shakespeare, Coward and Marber. It’s always great fun, though I hate writing anything too cruel. On the other hand, it’s a lot easier to be funny when being critical – my ‘favourite’ in this line was when, in Coward’s Design For Living, one actor “paraded his over-enunciated consonants through a stage-school portrayal of anxiety”. Or “One feels it is only a matter of time before the audience is informed that there is a Hero Inside Every One of Us, or at least witness cameos from the surviving cast of Watership Down.”

Enough of me. I wanted to say how much I LOVED Abigail’s Party. I have seen it before, but this production didn’t disappoint – Mike Leigh’s script is a masterclass in incidental inanity made captivating. The character satires are faultless, though remain pleasingly gentle, and it’s simply the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages. If you don’t know the plot – Beverley and Lawrence hold a drinks party for new neighbours Angela (Ange) and monosyllabic Tony (Tone). Slightly awkward, classier neighbour Susan (Sue) comes a little later, to be out of the house when the eponymous Abigail has her party. Not a lot else happens – until the twist, that is – but while they bicker, discuss make-up application, debate the merits and demerits of olives, the unknown happened: we poker-faced reviewers started loudly guffawing. So much for keeping them guessing until newspaper publication date.

One of the downsides to reviewing, though, is that I’ve seen almost all of the play – I don’t fancy paying to watch the rest next week. So I’ll order the DVD instead…

50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About

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1. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
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I don’t think I’ll be causing too much of a literary storm if I suggest that Chaucer and Tove Jansson are odd bedfellows. But, nevertheless, they share the dubious acclaim of being the first authors to be heralded. And Tove is kicking off something I hope to continue intermitently for quite a while: 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.

Hopefully I’ll be able to bring a few to people’s attention, which they wouldn’t discover on the 3 for 2 tables, and of course I welcome recommendations – which will be ingested, and perhaps appear in this countdown (which is, I hasten to add, in no particular order) in the future. I played around with HTML for a while yesterday, but failed in adding a third column – so a list will be kept of the 50 Reads, down there somewhere on the far left.

I’m easing you in with The Summer Book, which I think has already done the rounds of blogs – certainly spotted it on Cornflower. Translated from the Swedish, and by the author of the Moomin Books, this falls between being a collection of short stories, and a fragmented-but-continuous narrative of the relationship between Sophia and her grandmother. More than anything else, it is a mesmerically beautiful evocation of Summer. Maybe it’s because it was originally written in another language, but there is an atmosphere of ethereality and airiness throughout this work. Finding it difficult to put my finger on why this book is so evocative, but I’m going to give up and just say: it is! Rarely have I left a novel, especially one not especially comedic, loving the characters so much, and appreciating the style of an author more.

Here’s the first line, to entice you:
‘It was an early, very warm morning in July, and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colours everywhere had deepened. Below the veranda, all the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rainforest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.
“What are you doing?” asked little Sophia’
…

Do read on. And it’s a beautiful book to look at, which can’t be a bad thing. That’s right, folks, two days in and I’m already judging a book by its cover.

Anyone read it? Or The Winter Book, the sequel currently sitting on my shelf?
Countdown begins…