2000s

Dear Austen by Nina Bawden (25 Books in 25 Days #2)

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When I first picked this off the shelves at a lovely bookshop in Clevedon, I was thinking what you might be thinking – that Dear Austen (2005) is about Jane Austen. In fact, Austen was Bawden’s husband – who died in the Potter’s Bar railway accident in 2002. This short book takes the form of Bawden writing a letter to him, which is used as a device for explaining everything that happened in the aftermath of the crash. I suspect everybody in the UK will be familiar with it – to anybody not, I refer you to Wikipedia!

“So this is to be a personal letter about the events as I see them, telling you what has happened since that bloody accident on 10 May 2002 to all those who loved you and to some of the other stupidly trusting passengers whose lives were ended or destroyed. A year after they killed you, the contractor who was supposed to maintain that stretch of railway track declared a profit of sixty-seven million pounds.”

This is no ordinary book about grief, if such a thing exists. There certainly is grief, but there is also anger and frustration – at the maintainers of the railway who wouldn’t take responsibility; at the government that decided a court case wasn’t in the public interest; at previous governments who had privatised the railways and thus let upkeep slip.

It’s a moving and personal book, held tightly together with Bawden’s authorial control, her eloquence, and her ability to analyse her changing emotions with wisdom and insight. Not the most cheerful of books, of course, but well worth reading.

Looking for Enid by Duncan McLaren

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I love books where the writer discusses how authors have shaped them, or where they find parallels between their lives and the books they’ve read. Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm was fab; Katharine Smyth’s All The Lives We Ever Lived is likely to be on my best books of 2019. So I’ve been quietly keen to read Duncan McLaren’s Looking for Enid (2007) ever since I bought it in 2011 – and Project Names finally elevated it to the top of the pile. Well, colour me disappointed. If you don’t like reading negative reviews, then stop reading now.

Enid Blyton (which other Enid could it be?) was one of the founding authors of my childhood. She was practically the founding author – I was obsessed with her, and read almost nothing else for a handful of years. So a book following her life, and relating the author’s own memories of reading Blyton, was really promising.

We do get some of that. As McLaren takes his friend/maybe more than friend Kate on travels around the country, we learn about Blyton’s marriages and how she behaved as a mother. We marvel at her prodigious output. Much of this is openly taken from Barbara Stoney’s biography, but that’s fine. It’s quite entertaining to see McLaren pop up at Blyton meet-ups, join internet forums, and hunt for Blyton books in charity shops. Much of the format of the book could have worked (with some notable exceptions that I’ll get to).

My main and overriding problem with Looking for Enid is that McLaren is not a very good writer. That doesn’t usually matter as much in non-fiction as it does in fiction, because the interest of the topic can support workmanlike prose, but McLaren’s sentences are flat and awkward. The tone aims at informal and just ends up sounding like notes for a draft. Here’s a representative paragraph:

Well, no, I shouldn’t read it aloud! The librarian would be sure to think I was taking the mickey. The tiny little knock comes from a fairy, of course, and the second and third verses tell how the fairy stays for a glass of milk but is the scared off by the crying of the baby. Charming. I wish I did have the guts to read it aloud. Or perhaps I should read aloud the first verse of the facing poem: ‘Lonely’. In this, the poet goes out into the garden, as lonely as can be, and finds a fairy sitting beneath a chestnut tree. Would that have been the chestnut tree at Elfin Cottage? Anyway, tears were rolling down the fairy’s cheeks because he was lonely too. So the poet played bat and ball with him and they had a lovely time together. Eventually the poet’s healthy appetite meant that she had to go in for tea. She walked indoors, conscious that the fairy at the bottom of the garden was much happier now that he had got a friend like her. Charming, once again!

I made it to the end of the book, but it really is mediocre. And that’s even before we talk about the more unusual additions that profit neither man nor beast. The most obvious is that he ends each chapter with lengthy sections in the style of the Five Find-Outer series, which are mercifully marked out with small pictures in the margin, so I could skip them after a bit. A similar technique sneaks more insidiously into the rest of the book, as he often imagines conversations between Enid and others – usually in the style of her characters’ exchanges – and will flit in and out of these. Then there are images reproduced from the books which he has labelled ‘This is her…’ where the ‘…’ is replaced with different names – such as Bets, George, Father. I didn’t have a clue what that was meant to achieve. Some of his conclusions are bizarrely wrongheaded – like the seemingly genuine belief that Theophilus Goon is an intentional anagram of ‘O Hugh spoilt one’…

He mentions along the way that Looking for Enid is intended to be about her relationships with the different men in her life, but that doesn’t feel an especially dominant theme. And when he gets prurient about Enid’s sex life (and wildly oversharing about his own), I despaired. I was going to quote some of it, but, honestly, why would I put you through that? Besides being present for his sexual self-revelations, Kate – presumably a real person – is only there to say “Oh, do go on” as he puts all sorts of ramblings about Enid into extremely unlikely long-form dialogue. I hope, for her sake, that their conversations didn’t quite go like that.

I chiefly find it a shame that potential was so wasted. And it’s unlikely that anybody else will feel they can write anything similar anytime soon, because McLaren has taken this corner of the market. Frankly, don’t bother – seek out Barbara Stoney’s biography instead.

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

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Having surprised myself by how I loved Pigs in Heaven last year, I was keen to read more by Barbara Kingsolver. I wouldn’t have read Pigs in Heaven if it weren’t for A Century of Books, and I was glad to find it still on my shelf – as I’d got rid of a few Kingsolver novels when I moved house. Mostly because they’re usually chunksters, and take up too much room on my limited shelves. Well, I ended up kicking myself for that, didn’t I?

After asking around, I decided to give Prodigal Summer (2000) a go – and I also decided (shelf space still an issue) to listen to the audiobook, read by Kingsolver herself. I didn’t know a lot about it, except that it had multiple narratives. And that it was very many hours long.

Unlike many books with multiple narratives, these weren’t separate perspectives on the same central story. Rather, these are tales of three people living different lives in the same broad area in Virginia. It covers a single summer, transformative for each of them in different ways. They are:

  • Deanna, a woman who lives alone in the mountains, working as a park ranger, fascinated by predators. Her role is to protect the area, and she is very content without human intervention – which is, of course, exactly what she gets in the form of a passing young man…
  • Lusa (pronounced Luther) has recently moved to the area, living with her husband Cole and feeling ostracised by his extensive family. As the oldest brother, he has the most land – and Lusa is used to an urban life, where she was an entomologist.
  • Garnett, an old and widowed man whose remaining passion is cultivating chestnut trees to try to restore the lineage of the extinct American Chestnut. He has an ongoing enmity with his neighbour Nannie, who grows organic apples and hates pesticides.

It is a rich a complex novel. Each of the characters has enormous depth, including most of the many secondary characters, and Kingsolver unfolds this in a leisurely way over the course of the book. I particularly appreciated that Deanna is not a lonely spinster type, and that she loves the solitude – or, rather, the human solitude. One of my favourite moments in the book is the line that “solitude is a human presumption’, because of course she is always surrounded by any number of creatures, large and small.

Even characters who initially seem a little cartoonishly drawn, through the eyes of Lusa or Garnett, grow as Lusa and Garnett learn more about them – whether that be tragedies in Nannie’s past, or Lusa discovering more about her siblings-in-law, nephews, and nieces. I shan’t say the enormous moment that affects Lusa’s journey, but it happens very early on and sets the tone for all of her sections.

So, I loved almost anything which involved more than one (human!) character. Kingsolver is brilliant at the gradual evolving of human relationships (romantic or otherwise), and paces them wonderfully. What I didn’t love so much were scenes with only one person in – and there are a lot of them. Equally, some polemical scenes are rather overdone.

The reason for these introspective scenes is often because of biology. As you may have spotted, all three of the main characters are fascinated – even obsessed – by one element of nature. Lusa the entomologist, Garnett and his trees, Deanna and coyotes. If you are also interested in biology, then this might also fascinate you. I am profoundly uninterested in bugs, trees, or predators. Nothing in science has ever really captivated me, and biology was always bottom of the list. Kingsolver evidently shares these interests, and explores them at length, but I would have preferred more about the human interactions and less thinking about food chains or cross-pollination.

And there are some scenes where one character will elaborate to another why their biological perspective is wrong – the lack of subtlety here reminded me of Kingsolver’s lack of subtlety in The Poisonwood Bible, which had initially put me off reading anything more by her. Deanna, particularly, with her lectures on why you shouldn’t kill coyotes, really began to pall at times. It was narratively interesting to me.

On the other hand, what did work with an impressive subtlety was the interweaving of the narratives. It was very occasional, and didn’t lead to any enormous revelations or substantive changes in the direction the novel was heading, but we gradually learn about the connections between these seemingly distinct lives. It helped give greater reality to this world she’d created.

Ultimately, then, I don’t think this book is ‘for me’ in the way that Pigs in Heaven was. But I think it would be the perfect book for somebody interested in biology and novels with real human depth – and, despite its faults or elements that put me off, I’ll be thinking about those wonderfully realised characters for a long time.

 

The Book of William by Paul Collins

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It’s only February, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read one of my books of the year – The Book of William by Paul Collins, published in 2009. The subtitle is a little misleading, but it gives you the gist: ‘How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World’.

I bought it in 2013, when I was working for the Rare Books department at the Bodleian and had been commissioned to write a very short biography of Shakespeare (and accounts of various portraits, false portraits, etc.) to accompany a DVD of adaptations of his plays. I never found out if that text was used (though I do remember that my first draft of the biography was rejected for “having too many facts” and “not being swooning enough”). But it did reignite my interest in Shakespeare – I picked up this book and James Shapiro’s excellent Contested Will around this time.

Collins’ book looks at various stages in the First Folio’s history – starting, understandably, with its creation. Shakespeare died a few years before it was printed, and there wasn’t much precedent for printing plays on such a grand scale – but he had champions of his work who saw that it happened. I’d learned quite a lot of this section before, at university and in other books, but Collins puts it together excellently. My attention was already caught.

My favourite sections of The Book of William were the next few chapters – more or less the bulk of the book, I suppose – looking at the waxing and waning of Shakespeare’s popularity. And these ups and downs sometimes, but not always, coincided with the popularity of the First Folio in the secondhand market. Collins’ accounts of rival editors in the 18th century is brilliant. One of them was Alexander Pope, no less, and his hacking away of Shakespeare’s plays led to a bitter back and forth with an editor, Theobald, who had a much more rigorous respect for the original – and wasn’t above publishing a book which highlighted hundreds of Pope’s errors.

We dart all over the place, as the account moves on. There is the gentlemen in the middle of nowhere, who stopped being a successful businessman to launch an exhaustive project to discover all the differences between the remaining First Folios, and their ownership, in an enormous five-volume series. There is the Folger Library’s collection of folios, as well as the mirror machines they use to trace distinctions between them. It’s all worlds away from a man from Stratford writing out blank verse, and fascinating to see how many chance or unlikely steps in between that moment and the present have led to his reputation – and that of this first printed collection of his plays (albeit incomplete).

I can join the ranks of those who have held a First Folio. Again, the Bodleian – I was able to look through a copy, and was amused that a previous ownership had amended the list of plays, adding or removing them according to their own beliefs about canonicity. Most of the editions Collins looks at have been similarly desecrated by earlier owners, unaware of how sacred these books would become. And some of the most tantalising moments are those that come from a similar unawareness – plays lost to history, or First Folios that disappear. As Collins points out, it’s not a particularly rare book (as these things go), with over 200 known to still exist. I own books with shorter print runs than that. A combination of things – Shakespeare’s genius, lore about the book, and of course demand – make it so valuable.

I have to admit that the end of the book sort of petered out for me. We are taken to Japan, and left there. I suppose it would be difficult to resolve something that can never truly end – for the history of the First Folio will continue and continue. And any scholars will be frustrated using this book, because there are no footnotes or sourcing – all the statements are doubtless well researched, but have to be taken at Collins’ word.

The accounts would be interesting in any writer’s hand, but Collins brings something special to this book. I love anything which foregrounds the author’s own experience of researching the book – so he is always present as we journey with him around the world. His tone perfectly captures reverence, fascination, and amusement at the absurdity of many moments in the history he relays. It’s made me all the keener to read his book about Hay-on-Wye – and also to find more and more to read about Shakespeare’s legacy. A real treat.

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.)

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.

Two Lives by Janet Malcolm

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What an extraordinary little book. A while ago I read Blood on the Dining Room Floor by Gertrude Stein and found it more or less unreadable – the sort of High Modernism that renders every sequence of words gibberish – but I wanted to read more about her life. So when I saw a copy of Two Lives (2007) by Janet Malcolm, about Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, I bought it – and thank goodness I did, because I have been introduced to a rather wonderful writer. And that writer is Malcolm, not Stein.

It’s quite an odd start. We are thrown immediately into comparing three different accounts of Stein and Toklas trying to rent a house that belonged to a lieutenant in France in World War Two. It’s a bit dizzying, this in media res, where we are exploring the details of competing versions of the story – two from different autobiographies Stein wrote; one from Toklas – before we’ve been told anything about them and their lives. And, indeed, Malcolm never writes about the women’s childhoods or lives apart from one another, nor do we see how and when they met, or anything that you might expect in a normal biography. This is not a normal biography.

For a long time I put off reading The Making of Americans. Every time I picked up the book, I put it down again. It was too heavy and too thick and the type was too small and dense. I finally solved the problem of the book’s weight and bulk by taking a kitchen knife and cutting it into six sections. The book thus became portable and (so to speak) readable. As I read, I realised that in carving up the book I had unwittingly made a physical fact of its stylistic and thematic inchoateness. It is a book that is actually a number of books. It is called a novel, but in reality it is a series of long meditations on, among other things, the author’s refusal (and inability) to write a novel.

Indeed, it’s not really a biography at all. It has elements of that, alongside literary criticism, literary history, investigative reporting, and all shades in between. I found it beguiling and exciting. We would dart from Stein publishing a 900+ page novel that nobody could understand (and which Malcolm writes about brilliantly) to Malcolm’s own reluctance to read it, and then to notes on the discovery of manuscripts to the chequered history of interviews with Toklas. In between is much on the way Stein has been posthumously treated by critics, academics, and publishers – shown alongside conversations Malcolm has with other Stein enthusiasts.

If I loved Stein and wanted to know all about her life, it might have been frustrating. As it was, it was a wonderful experience – Malcolm is such an intriguing companion to walk alongside. Her thoughts are original and vivid, and her voice is so distinct. I immediately went to see what else she wrote, and ordered four more of her books – on Freudianism, journalism, and writers and artists.

It made me think of Julia Blackburn’s quirky and wonderful book about John Craske, and is in that category of non-fiction where all the usual tenets of biography are thrown out the window – or, rather, stirred and rearranged and made clear and new. It was a wonderful reading experience – and, while I still don’t know many details about the lives of Stein and Toklas, I feel as though I know their characters and personalities well and brightly. I’m really looking forward to reading more by Malcolm.

25 Books in 25 Days: #18 Mr Thundermug

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I read Caroline by Cornelius Medvei a few years ago, lent to me by my friend Mel cos it was about a donkey and she knows how much I love donkeys. Since then, I’ve bought a couple other of Medvei’s novels – but not til now have I read another, which is Mr Thundermug (2006). Incidentally, I love the cover illustration on my copy, by Richard Bravery.

It’s a novella about a baboon who has learnt English (nobody is quite sure how; it seems to have arrived complete) and tries to integrate in everyday life.

Nobody ever established where it was that the baboon came from, or what had brought him to this unnatural habitat. The basic facts are confusing – clearly, baboons are not native to this region; but, on the other hand, Mr Thundermug spoke our language perfectly, with no trace of an accent, and there is no evidence that he knew any foreign languages.

There were in fact numerous theories as to the baboon’s origins, but it was impossible to know which, if any, was true; all they had in common was their lack of supporting evidence. This in itself was not surprising, as our city excels in the manufacture of rumours. Nevertheless, the theories I heard were so often attributed, at various removes, to Mr Thundermug himself, that I began to think the baboon must have taken a perverse delight in providing contradictory accounts of his origins – tailored perhaps to his mood and the company.

He is hampered by having a wife and children who are non-speaking baboons, and by the discrimination he faces by those around him. For instance, the council try to evict him from his home as it is inhabitable because of a cockroach infestation – though, as he points out, he and his wife ate the cockroaches, so that problem is dealt with. As the novella goes on, he gets embroiled in an unlikely legal case.

I enjoyed Medvei’s writing, which plays with the surreal in a matter of fact way, and Mr Thundermug is an excellent character. His combination of optimism, disappointment, occasional grumpiness, and common sense in the face of bureaucracy, would be winning whatever sort of creature he were. I don’t think I entirely understood the point of the story – there might be a meaning to the parable that passed me by – but Medvei is an engaging storyteller with a vivid and unusual point of view.

 

Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras

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People often say that the best thing about book groups is getting to read things you wouldn’t usually pick up. To be honest, I’m not often looking for new things to pick up – I’m in a book group so that I get to talk about books with people and, more often than not, I’m not particularly bowled over by the book choice. Which is why it was a lovely surprised that I enjoyed Kamchatka by Marcelo Figeuras so much. Published in Spanish in 2003, and translated into English by Frank Wynne in 2010, this didn’t sound at all like something I’d like – but I really did. (A thank you to Annabel for giving me her copy!)

The novel concerns the political crises in Argentina, specifically the coup d’etat, in the 1970s. Now, you’ve quite possibly either thought “Oo, sounds intriguing” or “Um, no ta” right off the bat – but the latter group of you should keep reading. I knew almost nothing about Argentina in the 1970s, or any other period, and had rather conflated Evita with the disappearances. But this puts me rather in the same place as the young boy who is at the forefront of Kamchatka (in a narrative that is simultaneously from his young perspective and from that of a his adult self, looking back on events – a dual perspective that is handled extremely deftly). He also doesn’t really know what’s going on around him, and is swept up in events that control his life without being comprehensible.

His parents are evidently on the wrong side of the new ruling power, and they must go into hiding – though at first his mother maintains her work as a scientist (I love that this was her role), and they don’t travel too far. They do assume new names, though. The unnamed narrator becomes Harry, after his idol Harry Houdini. His funny, wild younger brother (known as ‘Midget’, which wasn’t very comfortable to read) chooses Simon – hurrah! And an older boy, on the cusp of adulthood, also joins the family. He says he is called Lucas, and Harry and Simon shift from an initial distrust of him to a really beautiful love for him.

And why is the novel called Kamchatka, when that is nowhere near Argentina? You (like me) might know the placename only from its appearance on the Risk board – the board game where your figures battle each other to achieve world domination. But it’s also the word that Harry uses for his mental escape – his imaginary refuge – and thus what he labels the strange place they’ve gone.

I loved how well Figueras built the story from a collage of what Harry would have found important – Houdini, Risk, his family – and from the stuffed toys, school uniforms, and other everyday objects that created his world. We never quite see what the dangers are, or hear about what has happened to those who vanish – but we see enough to feel his fear, or his shame when his old best friend can no longer see him. In short, short chapters – often no more than two or three pages – we enter his world.

And another thing Figueras does well is combine narrative and philosophy. We’ve probably all seen this done badly enough times to know how difficult it is to achieve. But Figueras will move from the general to the specific, or draw out the essential human truths of a situation, masterfully – and without making it feel as though we have lost touch of the narrator’s striking voice and unusual angle on things. Here’s an example that I found affecting, even with an abiding dislike of geography:

Sometimes I think that everything you need to know about life can be found in geography books. The result of centuries of research, they tell us how the Earth was formed, how the incandescent ball of energy of those first days finally cooled into its present, stable form. They tell us about how successive geological strata of the planet were laid down, one on top of the other, creating a model which applies to everything in life. (In a sense, we too are made up of successive layers. Our current incarnation is laid down over a previous one, but sometimes it cracks and eruptions bring to the surface elements we thought long buried.)

Geography books teach us where we live in a way that makes it possible to see beyond the ends of our noses. Our city is part of a country, our country part of a continent, our continent lies on a hemispheres, that hemisphere is bounded by certain oceans and these oceans are a vital part of the whole planet: one cannot exist without the other. Contour maps reveal what political maps conceal: that all land is land, all water is water. Some lands are higher, some lower, some arid, some humid, but all land is land. There are warmer waters and cooler waters, some waters are shallow, some deep, but all water is water. In this context all artificial divisions, such as those on political maps, smack of violence.

A word should also be said for Wynne, the translator, of course – who manages to keep not only the poetry and vividness of Figeuras’s writing, but also coped with all the wordplay that recurs in the novel. Well done, Wynne!

So, yes, something rather out of my comfort zone, but a real success – I very much recommend it.

Who Was Sophie? by Celia Robertson

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I can’t remember why I ordered Who Was Sophie? (2008) online, but I can tell you that it arrived on 6th June 2011 – and, while I was browsing and looking for some unusual non-fiction to read, I picked it up. Since I also didn’t remember anything about the what the book was about, it all came as rather a surprise – strange, intriguing, and rather special.

Having now read it, I have to assume that it was the Virginia Woolf connection that led me to pick up this book. It concerns Joan Adeney Easdale who, as a teenager, became an unexpected prodigy – published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. This biography (by Easdale’s granddaughter) looks at her life – and what led from her being feted by the literati to being a destitute, lonely, eccentric old lady by the 1970s. As for the ‘Sophie’ of the title? That’s Joan too – a name she went by much later in life, and a fact that is only properly addressed after about 200 pages. Suffice to say, I don’t think I’d have called the book Was Was Sophie? if it had been my decision!

Robertson doesn’t include footnotes or references (beyond a broad list at the end), so it’s not always clear where all her information came from – but we follow Easdale from childhood, and presumably she has gathered good research. Indeed, we start a bit earlier – looking at Easdale’s parents, and particularly her pushy mother Ellen. Ellen was determined that Joan and her brother would become successful – and not just successful, but be recognised as geniuses. And her brother did, indeed, end up as a renowned musician. Joan started earlier – when Ellen optimistically sent off her poetry to the Hogarth Press, it was recognised as special.

Some of her poetry is included in the book (and, indeed, the final section is the entire facsimile of her long poem Amber Innocent, which she works on for many years – a lovely touch). I don’t particularly enjoy it myself, but it’s fascinating to read how Joan considered her own work – and to compare Ellen’s letters to friends with Virginia Woolf’s diary entries. Woolf was, it turned out, rather laughing at the family as people (though respectful of Easdale as a writer).

I found all of this section really interesting – though there also looms over it the knowledge that things will change. I shan’t type out all of the rest of Easdale’s life, but it can be broadly summed up by the effects of mental illness. It spoils her marriage and alienates her children; it destroys her relationships with those around her, and perhaps also contributed to the end of her writing. As she gets older, she seems not to want to consider herself a writer at all – despite her husband’s fervent encouragement – and it is one of many leaves that drop from the tree.

Robertson documents the life extremely well (even though I would have loved footnotes!) – sensitive, and combining a good level of objectivity and subjectivity. We do not forget that she is the subject’s granddaughter, but we still feel in the safe hands of a biographer. My only criticism, in tone, is that she occasionally writes about her own journey as a biographer – particularly when travelling to Australia to follow Easdale’s life – but not enough. Some biography purists would prefer the biographer to be completely absent. I really love biographies that integrate the journey of discovery into the narrative itself, but it has to be done to a sufficient amount to feel deliberate. In Who Was Sophie?, it was perhaps a bit too sporadic.

Ultimately, I’m still not quite sure what brought this to my shelves – nor how Robertson managed to persuade somebody that this forgotten writer was worthy of a biography – but I am very grateful that both things happened. It was exactly the sort of unusual non-fiction I was looking for.