1980s

Mrs. Hat

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

There are a few books I’ve finished over the last month, and not blogged about, but they’re now all in boxes… I’m moving house on Wednesday, to the other side of Oxford, and my bookcase is moving tomorrow – thus I had to empty it, and consign all my books to boxes. I did, however, see my new bedroom for the first time today, and it has lots of shelves already there! Hurray! My books need no longer be in piles by my bed. I’m sure they will be, but at least it will be out of volition rather than necessity.

I can just about remember the book I finished early this morning, without fishing it out of the box, and it strays a little from normal Stuck-in-a-Book territory: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. I started reading this two or three years ago, simply because the title captured me, somehow it got shelved (I think termtime and essays got in the way) and now I’ve finished. For those who don’t know, it’s non-fiction, described by Wikipedia thus: “The book comprises 24 essays split into 4 sections which each deal with a particular aspect of brain function such as deficits and excesses in the first two sections (with particular emphasis on the right hemisphere of the brain) while the third and fourth describe phenomenological manifestations with reference to spontaneous reminiscences, altered perceptions, and extraordinary qualities of mind found in “retardates”

Gosh, doesn’t that sound dull. Well, it isn’t. Each chapter looks at certain patients/clients (as they were called, though Sacks rather disparages the term) and their medical predicaments – Sacks documents his interaction with these people, and his discovering why their conditions occur, without being too blinding-with-science. A woman who can only see the left-hand side of any object; twins who can identify the day of the week for any date over a span of 8000 years; the man, indeed, who mistook his wife for a hat. What makes this book interesting is twofold – the amazing things which the brain can do or cease to do, or ways in which illness can manifest itself, but secondly, and more importantly, the compassion and humanity with which Sacks describes the cases under consideration. One feels he was bucking a trend in his field of medicine in 1985, when the book was published, and has hopefully led the way. A unique compendium, perhaps, and one which is sometimes upsetting, often enlightening, and always fascinating.

L’arbretrary

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

Back to books, and back to Barbara Comyns – she appears in the 50 Books with her excellent, surreal novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, and I previously read an autobiographical novel Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, which is told through the childlike voice of a naive young wife and mother – and I couldn’t resist The Juniper Tree when I discovered that it was adapted from a tale from the Brothers Grimm. One of my pet interests is myths turned into domestic literature i.e. the fantastic transferred to the everyday, contained so that it plays out through human emotions rather than the mystical or extreme.

I didn’t know ‘The Juniper Tree’ (by Brothers Grimm) before I read The Juniper Tree (by Barbara Comyns… this is going to get confusing…) and I think it’s best to approach it that way. Reading about the Grimm’s tale on Wikipedia afterwards, I was stunned by how Comyns managed to work the tale into the novel, weaving aspects in subtly and artistically. I could appreciate this in retrospect, but if I’d known the tale beforehand then the plot would have held no secrets. Whether or not you know it, I urge you to seek out The Juniper Tree.

Bella, estranged from her mother and with illegitimate young daughter Tommy in tow (yes, daughter), takes up work in an antique store in Twickenham. In the first paragraph, she encounters a mysterious woman:

‘I noticed a beautiful fair woman standing in the courtyard outside her house like a statue, standing there so still. As I drew nearer I saw that her hands were moving. She was paring an apple out there in the snow and as I passed, looking at her out of the sides of my eyes, the knife slipped, and suddenly there was blood on the snow. She turned and went into her house before I could offer to help.’

As the blurb writes, the first glimpse of Gertrude Forbes is at once fairytale and sinister. Gertrude and her husband, Bernard, befriend Bella – she becomes a regular visitor at their large house, complete with extensive garden and juniper tree. The Forbes’ long for a child; Bella longs for friends and love; Tommy longs for a family. Longings collide and events grow gracefully macabre.

Having read three novels by Comyns, I am astonished that they all come from the same pen – they are so different. The Juniper Tree doesn’t have the vulnerability of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, or the surreal humour or Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead; in their place is a haunting domesticity – everything calm on the surface, but an awareness throughout that the relationships between each character simmer with potential change and tragedy. The majority of the novel can be read as a simple domestic tale, until a twist which cannot be ignored towards the end, but the whole work is fraught with an intermingling of the fairytale and the sinister. The Brothers Grimm tale, read either beforehand or subsequently, brings out even more layers in The Juniper Tree. I don’t think there is any other novelist I’ve come across who writes so subtly the disturbing and the domestic, or whose oeuvre is so brilliantly varied. If that is not too bold a statement to make on the basis of three novels.

Reading Between The Covers

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments
How much of a review is written before I read the book?
I wonder if that has you leaping for your lorgnettes, keen to inspect my words for heresy against the sacred code of yakking about books? Perhaps you are already deleting Stuck-in-a-Book from your links or your favourites, and rehearsing such lines as “Well, I always knew he was a bad ‘un; I only went to his website to watch the evidence accrue.”

Fear not, SiaB regulars. This isn’t a Middle English tutorial; I have read the books being discussed. I want to talk about a different type of paratextual mind-up-making (no ending on a preposition for me, one notes).

This started because I wanted to write about J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country. I daresay I still will, if you’ll bear with me for a while. Carr’s novel was my not-so-Secret Santa present from work colleague, friend and hurdy-gurdy enthusiast Clare (along with Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent and the DVD of The Go-Between) and was duly read back in December. And, yes, I loved it. But I realised that I’d more or less loved it before the first sentence had been read… and for these reasons:

a) it was a present from a friend
b) the cover was beautiful – just look at it. One of my favourites
c) the title was also beautiful. Rurality was promised
Now, none of these would have helped the novel survive if it had been awful. But they all helped me along the analysis process – and I think this happens whenever we pick up a book. Even if said book is chosen arbitrarily from a secondhand shelf, we must be influenced by the design, the shop, the title, the author’s name (even if unknown) – all subtle but certain steps towards making what might be called an Uninformed Decision… personally, if I buy a book arbitrarily, without any prior knowledge of any constituent, then I am quietly determined to enjoy it. Serendipity must be heralded. “Oh, this,” must say I, “Just found by accident – and it’s wonderful!” Sometimes I’ll buy a book simply because I’ve liked the bookshop, and I want a souvenir of the visit. And I find it makes a huge difference, whether or not I start a book with the steely glint in my eye that refuses to be left unentertained.

So what qualified a book for privileged pre-treatment in my world?

a) a gift or a recommendation from a friend

b) found in a good bookshop, or chosen on a hopeful whim

c) design/cover

d) from 1900-1949

e) I should really be reading something else….

I’m not proud of these prejudices, and I don’t suggest that they should be in place, I merely suggest that they are. When I need to, I can turn them off – and that’s what I try to do for book reviews on here, and definitely do for the times I’ve written for (student) newspapers. But I’m sure I’m not the only one open to these foibles. They certainly don’t mean my mind can’t be changed, but they push it in a certain direction.

A Month in the Country proved to be heading in the right direction from the off. I experienced a certain Uninformed Decision setback when I discovered the book was from 1980, and thus not my period of ease, but this proved immaterial to my enjoyment of the short, largely-autobiographical novel. Tom Birkin arrives by train to a rural community in the north of England, hired by a reluctant Rev. Mr. Keach to uncover and restore a medieval mural on a church wall. Nearby, Charles Moon (like Tom, a war veteran) is digging for the grave of an ancestor of the church’s patroness. The process is slow, and the narrative winds along with Tom, exploring his relationships with the other villagers, and Moon, and a gentle passage of discovery. The most interesting scene is that when Tom visits the vicar and his amiable wife, Alice, only to discover their monstrous and secluded vicarage seems to alter both their personalities. Like the rest of the novel, this is shown subtly and calmly, but is a fascinating glimpse into one facet of the village, which could be explored much further. Even without all my preconceptions, this is one to look out for.

Book Group: The Results

StuckinaBook All , 2 Comments


I’ve talked so much about Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, without actually saying anything, that many of you will probably think Book Group was months ago. Well, I’ve just come back from it, and nine other people who had read Jansson’s book over the past six weeks. So here is my opinion of Fair Play, and what the group thought of it, so pile in with your feedback too, please! The cartoon is recycled, and not as appropriate to the topic for today, but I like it as an image of the bookish blogging community, and it’ll appear whenever I report back from my terrestrial Book Group.

I’ll start off a little defensively – I don’t think Fair Play was as good as Tove Jansson’s other works, those I’ve read anyway. Have a look at A Winter Book and The Summer Book by searching in the blog searcher, if you like – short stories and a sort of vignettey-novel respectively. Having said that, Fair Play was still a delight. Marketted as a novel, it is in fact a series of short stories/ideas/vignettes/snapshots featuring the same characters. Jonna and Mari live on the same, small Scandanavian island, artist and writer, and… well, that’s about it. Jonna rearranges Mari’s pictures; a girl obsessed with Mari’s mother comes to visit; they discuss their fathers; they watch an old film; edit one of Mari’s stories, and so forth. Each chapter has a small incident occur, and Jansson wraps her delicious prose around it. By the end she has provided a beautiful portrait of an unconventional couple, co-dependent and close rather than affectionate. Jansson doesn’t allow the narrative to become twee, but she does give beauty. This was especially true on my re-read (the first time in many years I have re-read a novel immediately) where I could just wallow in the prose.

So, what did the Book Group think? I must confess, I was worried whilst I was reading it. Plot is quite far down on my list of priorities when evaluating a book, but I know that’s not the case for a lot of people – Jansson’s novels are either viewed as beautiful writing, or just fairly pointless. One guy definitely took the latter view – just couldn’t see the point, engage with the characters, or be bothered to read on. A few others agreed to a lesser extent. That’s fine – I deliberately suggested one I hadn’t read already, so that I wouldn’t be too sensitive about people’s reactions. Most of the group found the writing to be very good, the novel to be gentle and evocative, and the characters intriguing, if slightly distant from a depiction of ‘love’, which the introduction suggested. Nobody loved it, desperate to read more (if only they’d started with The Summer Book!) but a few said they would if they came across some.

So, not a failure, not a success – but people were happy to have read something they wouldn’t otherwise have come across, and that is, after all, one of the main reasons that people join Book Groups.

Over to you! As far as I know, Curzon and Carole have read Fair Play – and of course anyone else is welcome to join in. Thoughts?

Making Humans

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments


I don’t read Science Fiction, but I think it’s true to say that a lot of it is about making humans. Or creating beings as near as possible to humans – whether robots, or anthropomorphised objects and animals, and so forth. Even games companies are intent on making dolls as much like humans as possible. Don’t they realise that literature is several steps ahead?

I’ve just finished reading Claire Tomalin’s Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, which has been languishing on my shelves for a few years. Having blogged about short stories the other day, I thought I’d go back and read about the woman behind some of my favourites – and while doing it, I started pondering the whole sphere of biographies. They’re a strange commodity, aren’t they? A writer is given three hundred pages to package up an entire life… what a feat. And what a liberty. Tomalin can be on safe ground when listing the dates of publications, names of relatives etc. etc., but then you get something like this:
“Although Katherine and Murry often presented their relationship as the most important element in both their lives – and it did absorb a huge amount of their energy – there is a sense in which neither sought true understanding of the other. For each of them, the other became a symbolic figure very early on: she the good, suffering, spontaneous genius, he the ideally beautiful scholar-lover without whom neither life nor death could be properly contemplated.”
Sorry, a bit of a long quotation there, potentially breaking all sorts of copyright laws. It was reading this section that made me think “hold up, what?” Tomalin is a very good, sensible writer, on the whole, but strident sentences like this one seem so difficult to justify. How do we know? Even with letters and diaries and the memories of friends, this sort of confessional psychoanalysis could only ring remotely true if it were in the mouth of Mansfield or Murray. And yet it is routine for biographies to depict relationships and mindsets in detail which must be subjective and conjectural.

I don’t have a problem with this sort of biography-writing – there doesn’t seem to be any other sort – but it did make me think, and I thought I’d share my ponderings, and see what people think. With scientists trying to make life, are biographers doing it better, or simply wishing they were?

And onto Tomalin’s Katherine Mansfield, more specifically. As I said, Tomalin is a very competent writer – but I felt the book was quite hollow, in the end. Not in the sense of vacuous, but that Mansfield continually avoided the spotlight. I finished the book without really getting to grips with Mansfield’s personality, though the opinions of all around her were quite vivid, and the biography is perfectly readable. She didn’t seem particularly pleasant, which was sad, but… even so, the big gap in the biography was often the subject herself. Mansfield remained elusive. Which kind of negates everything I wrote above… but surely not Tomalin’s aim?

One final note. You might remember my wish to get the ‘right’ postcard bookmark for each book – for this one, I chose Edward Hopper’s ‘Hotel Room’ (1931)