Project Names

Mr Emmanuel by Louis Golding

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I have a feeling I first bought Mr Emmanuel (1939) by Louis Golding when I was looking for novels by Louis Bromfield and got confused. And I’ve decided to try both Louises – Louis? Louiss? – recently. Unsurprisingly, they are very, very different. And Mr Emmanuel is very different from what I thought it would be when I started it.

The novel was published in 1939, but I’d be intrigued to know whether it was before or after September 3rd. That is, was it after war had been declared between England and Germany, or after? It is certainly very concerned with the situation in Germany, and is set in the period shortly before the war.

But we start out in England. Mr Emmanuel is a Russian immigrant who is now a British citizen and very proud of it. He lives in a close-knit suburb, where he is well-liked and respected by the neighbourhood. And rightly so. He is an upright, thoughtful, kind man – often depicted as being on the older side of things, in the novel, but I suspect no more than 50. (I also discovered that Mr Emmanuel is the second novel in a series of four, and so many of these characters should probably be familiar, but I think it’s fine to read this book independently.) The setting appears in quite a few of Golding’s novels, I think. It’s an interesting depiction of nineteen-thirties segregation beginning to blur.

Magnolia Street is a small street in the Longton district of Doomington, in the North of England. It is one of several streets called after the names of flowering shrubs, that run parallel to each other right and left across the central thoroughfare of Blenheim Road. It is mainly Jews who live in the streets south of Magnolia Street, though some Gentiles live there. The converse holds of the streets north of it. Magnolia Street itself is different from those others because Jews and Gentiles live there in equal numbers, the Jews in the odd-numbered houses on the south side, the Gentiles in the even-numbered houses on the north.

That has been the situation for several decades, and there was a time when it would have been as unthinkable for a Jewish family to live on the Gentile pavement as for a Gentile family to live on the Jewish pavement. The two sides of the street virtually did not exist for each other, excepting when certain major public occasions, like the Great War, or certain dramatic private occasions, like a wedding or a death, reminded the folk they were made of pretty much the same stuff, spirit and mind and flesh. There had even been one or two marriages between people from the opposite sides of the street, but on the whole these had not much affected the general situation, though they had caused a good deal of chatter at the time they happened.

In rather a protracted opening, he learns that some friends are looking after German Jewish refugees, and would appreciate his help. Mr Emmanuel is Jewish himself – as was Golding – and he is very conscious of the need to help these refugees. He is less conscious about the situation for Jewish people in Germany, at least in terms of specifics.

While staying with these refugees, he befriends a young boy called Bruno. He is unpopular among the other children, and clearly very anxious. He misses his mother, and wants to know whether she is dead or alive. And Mr Emmanuel promises Bruno that he will go to Germany and find out. Against the advice of everybody else… that is exactly what he does.

This is quite a long novel (over four hundred pages) and a sizeable portion of the first half feels like set up for the novel proper. I never quite disentangled who all the figures were in this section, and it’s quite possible that they are bigger players in the previous novel Five Silver Daughters. I kept reading, but it was only when Mr Emmanuel went to Germany that I really thought the novel started working well.

He has the name of Bruno’s mother and a potential address – which no longer exists. Golding does an excellent job of sustaining the tension for a long time as Mr Emmanuel gently, persistently tries to find Bruno’s mother’s whereabouts. We get a sense of the fear and anger on the streets of 1939 Germany. Mr Emmanuel is oddly naive in her determination, scarcely recognising the danger he is in. He firmly believes that being a British citizen will protect him from the anti-Semitism that is clearly rife.

This is where the novel gets quite grim. I was surprised how graphic the scenes were when he gets on the wrong side of the Gestapo and is imprisoned. Seeing this lovable, kind, innocent man being mentally and physically tortured is really hard. (When I say ‘tortured’, I mean beaten often and without knowing when – in case, like me, your mind replaces that word with far worse things if no details are given.) It is also illuminating about what people knew was happening, as early as ’39.

The denouement of the novel is unexpected, though it is difficult for such a long novel to sustain something that changes how we have perceived what comes before, if that makes sense. I shan’t give away more. And, while it is on the long side, Golding has a measured and steady style that makes for a good reading experience. I still think he should have cut quite a lot of the beginning, but perhaps it was necessary for getting the uninitiated reader to love Mr Emmanuel.

 

The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg by Louis Bromfield

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I bought The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928) by Louis Bromfield back in 2011, after reading Rachel’s review of his novel Mrs Parkington. I do also own that novel, but had yet to read anything by Bromfield. Both would have qualified for Project Names, but the reason I picked up Annie Spragg was (a) because the title was so intriguing and (b) because I read a review that said it was like reading an Alfred Hitchcock film.

Well. Hmm.

This might be the worst structured novel I’ve ever read. Or cleverly experimental in a way that I really don’t understand. And yet it was sufficiently well written – in its constituent pieces – that I still liked it. All very confusing.

The novel opens with Mr Winnery, who is living in a small town in Italy and slowly, laboriously writing a long book about miracles. He believes there is always a rationale explanation for them, and that is the gist of his book – but it has taken him years, and he doesn’t imagine he’ll ever finish it. Instead, like almost all of the English-speaking society he moves in in Italy, he has stayed in this exile because he can’t afford to leave. The one wealthy woman is the doyenne of the society, Mrs Weatherby, and she has a matriarchly abusive relationship with her companion – who loathes her but cannot leave. Throw in some Roman Catholic colour – nuns, priest – and you have the contemporary set up. Annie Spragg is not part of this set, but she is known to them – an odd, sad older woman.

But when Annie Spragg dies, the nun attending her deathbed finds that stigmata have appeared on her. Her palms and feet bear the scars of nails; her side the sign of having been cut. A miracle has happened – she has the same scars as the resurrected Christ.

I think this is a fascinating set up for a novel, and I was enjoying reading about the group of ex-pats in Italy. There was enough tension for an interesting and moving novel. But instead…

For approximately the next two hundred pages, Bromfield gives us detailed, scattered portraits of other people. We do see a bit of Annie Spragg’s childhood – one of many daughters of the leader of a religious cult. I find this sort of painstaking flashback a little irritating, but worse was when he goes off into detail about characters we’ve not met yet. Often these would end with some tangential connection to the present day events, sometimes impacting them. Occasionally they’d only link to a whole other chapter of back story that would then link to the present – which we didn’t see, we just had to remember it existed.

It’s a patchwork of stories that all feel like they should have been notes he made, to work out a history in his head. But they are compiled in such a disjointed way that we have to wade through many pages that have no emotional connection for the reader, because we don’t have a clue who he’s talking about. Or we get a chapter of back story that could equally well have been achieved with a couple of sentences of context.

It’s frustrating, because his writing is excellent. He manages to get moments of dark humour and observational humour into the scenes, and is incisive about human behaviour. I was really enjoying the beginning – and, indeed, I really enjoyed the end, when we were back in the present. (And all is… sort of explained?) In each chunk, once he’d finally established where we were and what was going on, I enjoyed a lot. But it was all so maddeningly arranged.

Perhaps people had more patience in the 20s, or perhaps this was all a formal experiment in storytelling. It didn’t really pay off for me, not least because I had to wait so long before the characters I was interested turned up again. BUT – because the page-by-page writing was so good, I’m quite likely to give him another go sometime. And Mrs Parkington is still on the shelf.

Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen

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I read a second book for Women in Translation month, but didn’t get around to reviewing it. But here are some quick thoughts about Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen (2013), translated by David McDuff.

I read Boel Westin’s excellent biography of Tove Jansson when it was translated a few years ago. It was one of those times like buses, where you wait ages for a biography to come out and then two come at once. I’m not sure why I leaned towards the Westin – maybe it came out first? It was also the authorised biography, I believe, though I’m not sure I knew that at the time.

Karjalainen certainly didn’t go rogue with her lack-of-authorisation and spread all sorts of salacious rumours. Instead, she takes us on a journey through the work and love of the title. And it’s a steady, methodical journey.

I really enjoyed reading this book, but here is where we come across the main reason that I think Westin’s biography is better. Karjalainen compartmentalises Jansson’s life so thoroughly that it’s as though she were living four or five parallel lives, without overlap. She writes at length and sensitively about Jansson’s relationships with men and women, but at such length that for a while her career disappears completely. The Moomins are cautiously not addressed for half the book, except for an accidental stray mention that doesn’t make sense since she’s given no context. I can understand that this sort of makes sense, but it means jumping back and forth in time, and pretending that Jansson’s love life was completely unrelated to her career, or that her success as a strip cartoonist had little bearing on her painting. And so on and so forth. Then again, when I reviewed Westin’s book, I complained about repetition… maybe there’s no way to deal with the complexity and overlaps of Jansson’s life and career within the confines of a conventional biography.

I will add, in each of her compartmentalised areas Karjalainen writes interestingly – though leaning perhaps a little too much towards the ‘Jansson must have felt…’ school of biography. As with Westin’s, there isn’t as much about the adult books I love so much, but I suppose that’s inevitable. And thankfully, as with Westin’s book, there are lots of beautifully reproduced examples of the paintings being talked about – even if Karjalainen evidently didn’t know which would be there when she was writing it, as the composition of some paintings are described in unnecessary length when we can just looked at them on the page opposite.

Oh, and the book itself – beautiful! I love the design and the solidity of it. Surely one of the nicest-looking and -feeling books I have on my shelves.

Overall – yes, I’d forgotten enough about Jansson’s life since I read Westin’s biography that I enjoyed learning it all again. But for my money, if you only read one biography of Tove Jansson, this should be your second choice.

Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst

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Earlier in the year, I experimented with different book recommendation websites – you can read my exploits here. My favourite was Which Book, and I had great fun playing with the different sliders to determine what sort of book would match my mood. The results aren’t the usual fare, and they include a lot of translated fiction. I definitely recommend having a go.

I don’t remember which sliders I used to get the result of Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by Dimitri Verhulst, though I’m pretty sure ‘short’ was among them. This novella is only 145 pages and there’s with a big font. Definitely up my street! I think it might also be the first Dutch novel I’ve ever read – with thanks to the translator, David Comer. [A commenter has told me that it’s actually translated from Flemish – be more precise, publisher!]

Madame Verona lives in an isolated house on top of a hill, on the outskirts of a small village. ‘As far as anyone knew, it had always been inhabited by outsiders, people from elsewhere, who came here with a romantic view of isolation and paid for it later with large chunks of their mind.’ But there is no sense that Madame V has particularly suffered from her isolation, even though her husband has been dead for more than twenty years. She has the gift of dogs loving her, as the first chapter dwells upon. They have been a constant, and a dog is accompanying her as she comes down the hill.

In terms of plot in the ‘present day’ section of the novella, the title pretty much sums it up. Snow is thick on the ground, and Madame Verona has slowly made her way down the steep hill. And she knows that she won’t make it back to the top. She is too old and too tired. She has, in essence, come down the hill to die.

We flit to and from this present day, but the novella is really a mixture of memories and reflections – sometimes clearly Madame Verona’s thoughts, and sometimes a broader and more philosophical narrator’s voice. These aspects go together well. We see the specifics of the village and of Madame Verona’s marriage – and we hear more general considerations of time and community and particularly age. Here’s a rather lovely passage I noted down:

Silence is often more intense after its return. When a tree accepts its defeat, creaks and capsizes, all life flies up and off. There’s crowing and cawing, branches crack, it rains feathers and down, rabbits flee to their underground shelters. All things considered, the titan’s contact with the actual ground is quiet; people generally expect it to be louder. It’s mainly the rest of the forest that kicks up a fuss and makes a racket. And once the creatures have assessed the damage, silence comes back. Eyes and leaves turn to the light that has never shone so brightly here. A place has come free, the struggle can begin, because the space will be occupied, by something or someone. It’s like that for trees, it’s like that for people.

I might have appreciated a little more about Madame Verona in the present day, because it is a bit sparse there, but this is a very enjoyable little book. It has aspects of melancholy, but Verhulst’s thoughtful exploration of little facets of life mean it doesn’t feel bleak – helped by the beautiful descriptions of the landscape. There is a lovely tone to it that comes through the translation. That translation can be a little clunky (‘She wasn’t brave enough to go downstairs herself. And what if she did, and found herself eye to eye with a person of bad will, how would that lead to a better outcome?’) but that is the exception rather than the rule.

Thanks, Which Book, my first read based on your recommendations certainly went well!

Eve in Egypt by Stella Tennyson Jesse

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A year ago, Michael Walmer sent me a review copy of Eve in Egypt (1929) by Stella Tennyson Jesse. And look, here I am, I finally read it! It turns out it needed another August before I could turn to so vibrant a cover.

This was Tennyson Jesse’s only book – and, as you may well have surmised, she was the sister of the more-famous F Tennyson Jesse. Her sister wrote novels like A Pin To See The Peepshow and The Lacquer Lady that weren’t connected to her own life. Stella, on the other hand, drew influence straight from her own experiences. I suspect she was not much like Eve, but she certainly went to Egypt. And, boy, you’ll know it by the end!

Here’s how we meet Eve:

The funny thing was that Eve woke up that morning rather depressed than otherwise. “ If,” as she said to herself afterwards, “ I had had that wonderful feeling that something beautiful was going to happen, I could
have understood it; but to think that everything lovely in life began that morning, and that I never guessed it !
I only woke up with that horrid feeling of there being something unpleasant in the background. That does
really seem odd.”

And, after all, the something unpleasant had not been so very bad. To be exact, it was two proposals ; and
though Eve, like all nice-minded young women, deprecated the idea of a proposal that she couldn’t accept,
nevertheless there remained in her mind, as in the mind of every woman similarly situated, a pleasant residue — a sort of nice sugary sediment, as it were. After all, every proposal is a tribute to one’s charms, there’s no
getting away from that.

She is quintessentially 1920s – or at least a certain sort of 1920s. She is quite flighty and superficial, though with a heart under it all. The reason she goes to Egypt is largely to get away from having to respond to those two unwelcome proposals. And so off she goes with her sister Serena (charmingly ignorant), Serena’s husband Hugh, and the knowledgeable Jeremy.

It’s entirely obvious to the reader from the outset that she will fall in love with Jeremy, and this plot chugs along nicely in the background as we take a tour of Egypt. And this is where STJ’s experience certainly comes into play.

I’m always a little reluctant to read The Brits Abroad novels. I would rather read a novel set in Egypt written by an Egyptian (any recommendations?). But I was drawn in by the insouciance of this one, and it does deliver. Tennyson Jesse does an admirable job of making the info-dumps feel like they’re part of the conversation, and even gives humour to them and uses them to develop character. But it’s hard to deny that there are sections that scream “here’s my research!” Yes, Jeremy is educating the party – but perhaps we didn’t need quite as much of an overt history lesson.

Having said that, I was very interested by some temples that were left to flood when a new dam was built. As Jeremy explains, the locals need water and sometimes artefacts have to suffer the consequences. I went to Wikipedia. Turns out the UNESCO came along and thought that maybe the temple shouldn’t suffer the consequences, and dismantled and moved it. If I could remember the name of the temple, I’d put a link…

The experience is enhanced by some photos spread throughout the book, which I’m assuming were taken by Tennyson Jesse. As the back of this new edition says, it’s both ‘Literature – fiction’ and ‘travelogue’. I don’t tend to get on with the latter, but there was enough of the former to beguile me – and this was a fun, delightfully predictable story. And – again – what a stunning and happy cover!

Uncle Samson by Beverley Nichols

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I was looking through my Beverley Nichols books, trying to decide which one to read next – and only one of them was eligible for Project Names. And so that’s the one I chose! Step forward Uncle Samson (1950), which I hadn’t even heard of until I found it in an extremely disorganised bookshop in Cheltenham earlier in the year.

Apparently it is a sequel of sorts to the excellently-titled The Star-spangled Manner and, like that former book (which I have not read), it is Nichols’ impression of America. And those impressions are certainly varied and interesting!

America is, of course, an enormous country. Nichols can’t hope to encapsulate everything there is to say about it, or even a hundredth – but the selection of chapters he writes are certainly fascinating. It’s worth starting by saying that this is not primarily a funny book. Nichols is a delightful humorist, but in Uncle Samson he is much more in journalistic mode. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t the odd moment of levity in his phrasing. I particularly enjoyed this, from when he goes to visit a funeral home of the sort that Evelyn Waugh pastiches in The Loved One:

It would obviously be impossible to encompass all these attractions without exhaustion, so I contented myself with a brief visit to Lullaby Land, and then went on to the “Mysteries of Life” garden, containing a large statue by Ernest Gazzeri, which suggested that though the sculptor might have known a lot about the mysteries of life he knew little about the mysteries of anatomy.

A glance at the American death industry comes after sections on religious cults, including a notable one led by Father Divine (I had to Wikipedia it, but it’s definitely interesting!) and on the horrors of socialism.

The most animated Nichols gets is the section on race. While many of Nichols’ views were not particularly progressive for 1940s/1950s England (particularly as regards class), he was certainly ahead of the curve on racism compared to the lawmakers of 1940s/1950s America.

Every year 30,000 light-skinned [African-Americans] “crossed the colour-line” and began a new life as whites. If we were told that every year 30,000 Americans broke the barbed wire of concentration camps and regained their freedom we might sit up and take notice, for America is a great democracy and does not incarcerate her citizens unless they have committed a crime. Yet America runs the greatest concentration camp the world has ever seen, and the only offence of its occupants is the crime of having been born.

I think he writes more about race than anything else, and he is baffled and angry about it – recounting his own embarrassment that he hadn’t considered the obstacles that would be in the way when he tries to meet up with a black friend. America still has a terrible problem with racism, and a President who is openly racist without seeming to suffer from his voting base – but Uncle Samson does remind us that at least some progress has been made. And I’d have written a rather more hopeful sentence there under the previous President, as opposed to the one who thinks black American women should “go home”.

Let’s move onto cheerier things. He meets Walt Disney! That is rather an enchanting chapter. I don’t know how accurate it is as an overall portrait of Disney, but Nichols certainly seemed won over by him – particularly his childlike enthusiasm for Fantasia – and tells of employees who are similarly devoted. I hadn’t expected an interview with Disney when I started reading Nichols’ work, but why not?

Another surprise, and a fascinating section, is Nichols visiting Alcoholics Anonymous – as an observer rather than a participant. He writes glowingly about what a wonderful initiative it is, and wishes that something similar existed in the UK.

What a curious and beguiling set of topics Nichols addresses! It’s interesting to compare this with modern-day America, and the topics that Nichols would write about now. Race and the movies would both still be there. Funeral homes probably wouldn’t (while guns and the lack of a national health system certainly would). Some things have changed a lot and some things don’t seem to have changed at all.

I was a little disappointed when I started and it wasn’t a comic work, but I was quickly won over. It doesn’t rank up there with Merry Hall, but it’s very good in a different mood. Nichols is a great journalist/essayist – nothing here pretends to be objective, and it’s all the better for it. For a very singular trip to mid-century America, track down a copy now.

Miss Carter and the Ifrit by Susan Alice Kerby

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When I was offered some review copies of the new Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, top of my list was Miss Carter and the Ifrit (1945) by Susan Alice Kerby – and not just because it qualifies for #ProjectNames. It’s just the sort of premise I absolutely love – and, as it turned out, also a novel that I loved.

Possibly my favourite genre of books is the fantastic – books set in this world, but with an element of fantasy of them. It’s the sort of book I did my DPhil on, but I hadn’t heard of Kerby or her novel – thankfully it was published a bit too late to match the focus of my thesis, or otherwise I’d have been anxious about leaving it out.

To look at Miss Georgina Carter you would never have suspected that a women of her age and character would have allowed herself to be so wholeheartedly mixed up with an Ifrit. For Georgina Carter was nearing fifty (she was forty-seven to be exact) and there was something about her long, plain face, her long upper lip, her long, thin hands and feet that marked her very nearly irrevocably as a spinster. That she wore her undistinguished clothes well, had a warm, human smile, was fond of the theatre and had never occasioned anyone a moment’s trouble or sorrow, were minor virtues which had never got her very far.

That’s the opening paragraph, and that’s the Miss Carter who is the mainstay of the narrative. She has lived a quiet, unassuming life. As it’s wartime, she is working for the government’s censorship department – blacking out bits of letters – but, otherwise, she has spent years in middle-class isolation. She has one good friend, and that’s about it. The rest is propriety, boredom, and a little loneliness.

Into this life comes the Ifrit – whom she names Joe. He emerges from wood that she is burning on her fire, freed from a curse of centuries. And he is to obey her every whim. (I had heard the word ‘ifrit’ somewhere before, but didn’t know exactly what it was – the OED says it’s an alternative spelling of ‘afrit’ – essentially a genie.)

What I loved about Kerby’s novel was how she takes this fantastically unlikely scenario and makes every subsequent step believable. Joe is enthusiastic and bombastic, and is gradually taught to behave in a way more befitting the 1940s. The extent of his fantastic abilities is rather elastic and not always coherent – he can shape-shift and conjure up any foods required, but he has to dart around the world at lightning speed to gather clothing.  But it doesn’t really matter – if anything, it makes the reader feel as enjoyably dizzied as Miss Carter.

And Miss Carter is a wonderful character. Kerby starts with the isolated spinster trope, and gives us added dimensions – of ‘might have beens’ and ‘maybe still could bes’. She is sharp but uncertain – independent but unsure of this strange new thing happening to her.

It’s such a fun book, and Kerby handles the absurdities and humour well alongside a genuine pathos. I heartily recommend it, and if the other new Furrowed Middlebrow books are this unusual and winning, then we’re all in for a treat.

Diana Tempest by Mary Cholmondeley

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I’ve mentioned before how great Simon Evers’ narration is at Librivox – the free audiobook site where out of copyright books are read by members of the public. Understandably, it’s a mixed bag – but Simon Evers is brilliant, so I’ve been downloading whatever he reads. And the latest was Diana Tempest (1893) by Mary Cholmondeley.

This wasn’t completely at random. I have previously read Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage, and thought it was brilliant. Diana Tempest does something similar – mixing sensation fiction with the sort of observational comedy of manners that we expect from a Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope. It feels like it shouldn’t work, but it does, and I found Diana Tempest very funny and often nail-bitingly intriguing.

We don’t meet either Diana for a while – for there are two of them. One is Colonel Tempest’s wife, who died in childbirth. The other is his daughter. She, Colonel Tempest, and his son Archie are all left without a fortune when Colonel Tempest’s brother dies. The money, instead, goes to his brother’s son, John – whom everybody knows is illegitimate. Everybody except the infant John, of course, and it is a fact he is not told.

Colonel Tempest is a very unpleasant character – greedy, unfeeling, and with the sense that the world is very hard on him. It’s unclear what the dead Diana saw in him, because she is described as rather wonderful – not only that, she was engaged to his brother before he whisked her away. You can see why there’s no love lost.

And Colonel Tempest gets carried away, saying that he’ll give £10,000 (about £850,000 is today’s money, according to the National Archives calculator – or 1031 cows) to anybody who can redirect the fortune to him. In effect, he has put a bounty on John’s life.

Fast forward a few years, and daughter Diana has grown up. She is a charming, witty, wise, and rather delightful heroine – in the mould of Lizzie Bennett. Like Lizzie, she despises the idea of marrying for money alone, and has a friend who is clearly doing this. And like Lizzie, she finds herself admired in several quarters.

One of these quarters is John – who has grown up to be a rather serious, moral man. He tries to keep his cousin Archie is check, but is usually paying off his debts. Oh, and he keeps having brushes with death – whether that be almost burning to death, nearly being shot, etc. etc. It seems that the people who are trying to win that £10,000 aren’t super good at their job.

I loved listening to this. Cholmondeley has such a witty, ironic turn of phrase. Of course, because it was audio I have no examples – but imagine Austen’s way of exposing the ridiculousness of society in general and hypocrites in particular. On the one hand, we wait to see if she and John will discover that the other has fallen in love – on the other, we follow Colonel Tempest as he tries to track down the would-be assassins and undo his command. Will the relationship succeed, or will the killers get their target?

My only criticism is that, like many Victorian writers, Cholmondeley is never in a hurry. Chapters often begin with several minutes (/pages) of general thoughts about mankind, ambling through enjoyable aphorisms before we get to the crux of the matter. It all added to the enjoyment of the style, but sometimes I did wish she’d just get on with it, and curtail the flourishes a little.

I’m sure it would be fun to read – and it’s definitely a delight to listen to. Much recommended!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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