Heinrich Böll’s novella, The Train Was on Time, was first published in 1949, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, two years after its translation into English. Aside from one book of his which I did not much enjoy (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum), I was not hugely familiar with Böll’s work. I chose to reserve a very old hardback, and slightly battered, copy of this book from my local library. The edition I borrowed had been translated from its original German by Leila Vennewitz. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, although I admit the blurb did appeal to me and my more depressing reading tendencies.
The protagonist of the piece, Private Andreas, is a 24-year-old who finds himself on a train heading from Germany to rejoin his unit in Poland during the Second World War. On said train, Böll writes: ‘… it is suddenly borne on him that he has very little longer to live.’ On his journey, despite the crippling knowledge that dawns upon him, Andreas is ‘shocked to find that he can still make friends, play cards, sleep, eat and drink… Most of the time life goes on despite Andreas’ knowledge that he is to die soon.’
We first meet Andreas when a chaplain is asking him to board the train; the response he gives is as follows: ‘“Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert… What’s the hurry? I might go crazy, I’ve a perfect right to… I don’t want to die, that’s what’s so horrible – that I don’t want to die.”’
The Train Was on Time is certainly not a cheerful read, but I found immense power in its 110 pages. Böll’s prose is incredibly visceral: ‘As Andreas was slowly groping his way back into the center of the car, the word soon entered him like a bullet, painlessly and almost imperceptibly flesh, tissue, cells, nerves…’. This concept of ‘Soon’ goes on to haunt the remainder of the novella: ‘Soon. Soon. Soon. Soon. When is Soon? What a terrible word: Soon. Soon can mean in one second, Soon can mean in one year… Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything.’
Andreas becomes more and more convinced that his time on earth is nigh: ‘Soon I’m going to die, before the war is over. I shan’t ever know peacetime again. No more peacetime. There’ll be no more of anything, no music… no flowers… no poetry… no more human joy…’.
The Train Was on Time really probes its protagonist; against the context of a real conflict, it describes the internal conflict he is constantly experiencing, too. This is such a powerful topic, particularly to explore in the brief space of a novella. I found Böll’s character study fascinating from the outset, and liked the author’s approach of a continual narrative, which has the odd paragraph break but no chapters as such. The omniscient perspective, with flashes of our protagonist’s thoughts, was a really satisfying approach. The novella feels momentous; it propels its readers forward at speed, and has an unmistakeable intensity to it. The story is a little peculiar at times, but overall, I found it quite moving. I would not describe The Train Was on Time as an easy read by any means, but it is a story that I believe will stay with me for a long time to come.
John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down was first published in 1942. Its title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and on reflection, it suits the piece marvellously. Unlike much of Steinbeck’s other work, no concrete setting has been decided upon within The Moon is Down. Even the country in which the action happens is ambiguous, with many believing that it is set somewhere in Scandinavia.
The informative afterword to the novella, which has been written by Donald V. Coers, tells the reader that in The Moon is Down, Steinbeck ‘had decided to write a work of fiction using what he had learned about the psychological effects of enemy occupation upon the populace of conquered nations’. In doing so, Coers goes on to say that Steinbeck ‘refused to adopt the contemporary Teutonic stereotype’ for either his setting or his protagonists. He also believes that The Moon is Down ‘demonstrates the power of ideas’, and one can only concur with this.
The first sentence is striking, and leads on wonderfully to the main thread of the story: ‘By ten forty-five it was all over. The town was occupied, the defenders defeated, and the war finished’. At the beginning of the novella, six of the soldiers who have been involved in a brutal spur-of-the-moment shootout ‘became dead riddled bundles’, and three others are deemed ‘half-dead riddled bundles’. This repetition of violence makes it all the more chilling.
Steinbeck goes on to write about the way in which, in the occupied town, ‘The days and the weeks dragged on, and the months dragged on… The people of the conquered country setled in a slow, silent, waiting revenge’. Steinbeck exemplifies the solidarity of the community throughout, particularly with regard to the attitudes rallied against the outsiders. The community in question is centered around mining, and the colonel who infiltrates the town tells the Mayor that his people ‘will be in danger if they are rebellious. We must get the coal, you see. Our leaders do not tell us how; they order us to get it… You must make them do the work and thus keep them safe’. The Mayor responds that the ‘authority is the town… [and] when a direction is set, we all act together’. The point of view of both sides has been considered throughout, a technique which works marvellously in a novella, and which makes the whole an incredibly rich read despite its deceptively short length.
As with Steinbeck’s other work, I was struck immediately by the quality of his writing and his deft skill, both at building characters and rousing compassion for them. The scenes which he crafts are unfailingly vivid, and everything which he turns his hand to describing comes to life before the very eyes: ‘Beside the fireplace old Doctor Winter sat, beared and simple and benign, historian and physician to the town… Doctor Winter was a man so simple that only a profound man would know him as profound’. Joseph, the serving-man belonging to the Mayor, on the other hand, had a life ‘so complicated that only a profound man would know him to be simple’. The divisions, like this one, which he creates between his characters have all been so marvellously realised: ‘Joseph had tried carrying Doctor Winter’s remarks below-stairs before and it had always ended the same: Annie always discovered them to be nonsense’. Such juxtapositions, which can be found at various points throughout the novella, allow Steinbeck to make his work and his characters so distinct. His perceptions in such matters are always intelligent.
The Moon is Down is a sage novella, written by a man who is a master at creating believable dialogue and conversational patterns between his characters. He captures their thoughts and feelings in the most sublime of manners; it feels, in consequence, as though he knows them inside out. The way in which he captures the foreboding which hovers above the town is stunning, and the entire novella is eminently human and thought-provoking.
Despite being relatively popular in her day, Winifred Holtby shot to the limelight in the United Kingdom last year. This is due in part to Virago’s beautiful reprinted editions of several of her novels, and also because of the delightful BBC adaptation of her most famous book, South Riding. The Yorkshire-born author always writes with such astonishing clarity which allows the thoughts and feelings of her characters to rise to prominence as her stories progress. She writes about those situations which she has experience of, and the characters which feature in her novels seem all the more real because of it.
Anderby Wold takes place in the small village of Anderby in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The novel opens with the formidable character of Sarah Bannister who seems intent upon bossing her husband Tom around. Sarah has ‘too much respect for her own judgment to acknowledge an error’ in her character. Details like this which feature heavily throughout Holtby’s narrative set her writing apart from other novels. She is not too blatant or obvious with the details which she mentions, and her writing certainly benefits as a result.
The inhabitants of Anderby Wold, John and Mary Robson, are soon introduced. They are cousins who are currently trapped in a loveless marriage with one another. Sarah, John’s sister, and Tom are travelling to their farm for a celebratory ‘tea party’. The plot revolves around the Robson family, all of whom are used to rural life and are intent upon preserving the familial intermarrying which has occurred for generations. Mary is discontent with her lot in life until she chances upon the young, rebellious author David Rossiter, sixteen years her junior. The relationship between Mary and David is crafted wonderfully. They mock each other and bring a real sense of joviality and comradeship to the novel. A wonderful example of this is when David tells Mary: ‘as it is, every time you are nice to me, I have to recite little pieces of Marx to myself to convince me what an abomination you really are’.
The novel sparkles from the outset. The reader is in the company of a wonderful author who crafts such believable stories and peoples them with rich and wonderful characters. Despite using the third person perspective, Holtby is able to capture the most in-depth thoughts and intricacies of feelings of each of her characters. Her descriptions are sublime. She builds up marvellous pasts for her characters and uses these to build friction and tension between them. The characters in Anderby Wold are all diverse and range from self-important Sarah and clumsy maid Violet to quiet John and keen-to-please Mary. Mary is intent upon being her own person in the village and not becoming like the women around her who fill their lives with empty chatter about ‘maids, their sisters… [and] the price of wool for socks’. Sarah is obstinate and disapproving and is unable to see the positive side in any given situation, but she is a vivid character from the outset. Even without Holtby’s character descriptions, one can imagine each of the people she has created as realistically as if they had just passed them by in the street.
The dialects used throughout are written well. They are not over-exaggerated and do not detract from what is actually being said. The conversations between characters are often amusing and, by the same token, incredibly heartfelt. Holtby’s choice of vocabulary and the order in which she puts them are often surprising. Among the best examples of this are a character who ‘bowed severely’ and ‘Mrs Toby’s four unattractive little daughters possessed the sole talent of acquiring infectious diseases’.
As in South Riding, many characters feature in the novel, some of them briefly and some throughout. Similarly, the sense of community is incredibly strong, and clashes exist between the people and the County Council as well as those of differing classes and social standings. Like South Riding’s Sarah Burton, Anderby Wold’s main protagonist Mary is a teacher. Both novels are stylistically and thematically similar.
Many themes gain prominence throughout Anderby Wold. These include ageing, family, presuppositions, the building of relationships, life and death, community, the notion of outsiders, altering perceptions, class and social change. Social nuances, many of them rather silly, are included throughout to build up a realistic feel of the period in which the novel is set. Anderby Wold is a many-layered book which intrigues and informs in equal measure.
Anderby Wold was Holtby’s first novel and was published in 1923. There is nothing old-fashioned about it, however. The issues which she addresses are still of interest to the majority and the characters which she has fashioned so lovingly are fresh and continually intriguing. The novel is a must read.
The plot of Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea so intrigued me that I could not wait to start reading. Mishima is an author whom I have been meaning to get to for years, and I am pleased that I have finally had the chance to read some of his work, despite not really enjoying it.
The novella takes place in Yokohama, Japan. I found the storyline rather odd, and very creepy indeed. A young boy, Noboru, has been schooled in sexual practices by ‘the Chief’, the head of his group of privileged schoolfriends. He sees nothing wrong or shameful in secretively watching his mother sleep with a man, a sailor, whom she has only just met, through a hollow space in the wall between their bedrooms. He then delights in telling his friends all about what he has witnessed – behaviour which I personally find incredibly weird. The novel was also a little too erotic at times for my personal taste. One of the scenes in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, which details the murder of a cat, made me feel sick to my stomach. I had to skip the rest of the section with dealt with the murder, and then force myself to read on.
I did not personally warm to any of the characters, and I really came to dislike young Noboru for all of his horrid and odd actions. He was cold and calculating, and uttered one untruth after another. The emotions of the protagonists particularly jolt around a little too much at times, rendering their actions and reactions rather unbelievable. The way in which the relationship between Noboru’s mother, Fusako, and the sailor, Ryuji, develops appears to be rather rushed on the whole. Some of the technical details – about sailing, or the stock which Fusako’s mother keeps within her shop – are a little wearing after a while, and do not add anything whatsoever to the story.
In The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, Mishima makes use of all five senses beautifully. In so doing, he is able to build up incredibly vivid scenes in the mind, and creates a marvellously sensuous novella in consequence. I loved his descriptions at times, but this, when coupled with my dislike of the story, renders me unable to give the novella anything more than two stars. I will be reading more of Mishima’s work in future, as he is an author who has very much intrigued me, but I am hoping that he has penned some books which are not quite so graphic in their scenes.
On the whole, this novella was far darker than I imagined it would be. Whilst I did not enjoy it overall, Mishima has still crafted a tale which I will be unable to forget for a long time to come.
I have read, and rather enjoyed, quite a large chunk of Sarah Hall’s oeuvre to date. When I saw a copy of her debut novel, Haweswater, in my favourite local charity shop for just 50 pence, I had to pick it up. I hadn’t read any reviews of Haweswater before I started to read, and I admit that I was rather intrigued by it. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award just after its publication in 2002.
Set in 1936, in the ‘old, northern county of Westmorland’, which has since been absorbed into Cumbria, Haweswater is described as a ‘first novel of love, obsession and the destruction of a community told with grace and artistry.’ In the dale, there arrives a man named Jack Liggett, a ‘spokesman for a vast industrial project to create a new reservoir.’ Based in Manchester, Jack soon begins ‘a troubled and intense’ affair with a local woman, Janet Lightburn. Janet is ‘a woman of force and strength of mind, [and] her natural orthodoxy deeply influences him.’
This is not just a novel about a relationship; rather, it focuses more on the valley itself, and the changes brought upon it. All of the villagers are forced to move away before the reservoir can be completed, with their houses, many of which have been lived in by their families for generations, forecast to be completely underwater.
In the novel’s prologue, Hall sets up the changed landscape: ‘This was a monumental flood, water of epic proportions. It turned through the wooden spokes relentlessly, and as it did so it became like a music that is accidental, deeply beautiful and made only once. Somatic music that fills in space and time. A corrugated harp of orchestral rivers… And even as the man hated this water, he could not help but find it beautiful. It stood for more than itself and it sang of its presence.’
From the first, I was struck by the way Hall has with words; her descriptions are quite unusual, but perfectly capture things. She is particularly skilled at doing so with the emotions of her characters: ‘Then there is the matter of his heart. Inside his old heart a new one was growing and pushing to get out, and inside that one another one, and another, all pushing to get out. So many hearts. And that was how grief worked inside the man. Filling his chest cavity he stooped over with the weight. So much of his life was gone. More than his home and his fields, more than the valley…’.
Haweswater is not the most action-packed novel; however, I personally love reading about small, rural communities. I found Hall’s perspective on this particular village, in the face of a huge amount of change, very interesting indeed. In my opinion, Haweswater is not her best novel, but I did really enjoy the reading experience.
Set during the summer of 1952, Zoe Somerville’s The Night of the Flood focuses on protagonist Verity Frost, who is on the cusp of going to University. Verity, ‘stranded on her family farm on the Norfolk coast’, is utterly beloved by Arthur, her childhood friend, whom she has a strange new desire’ to escape from. Arthur, whom she has known since ‘he was a skinny eight-year-old evacuee, brought home by her mother’, also longs to escape from his similar existence, ‘but only with Verity by his side’. The Night of the Flood centres around something of a love triangle, when ‘charismatic American pilot’ Jack is stationed at an airbase in the local area.
I found Somerville’s scenes to be well evoked, and effective in capturing this particular period in time: ‘Pollen caught in her nose, making her sneeze. It had been a day like this then too, the day her mother died. The same sudden heat and sunlight. The same grass-green and dazzling white sprung up on all sides. The same tang of manure from the fields. Everything erupting, spilling over with life. It had been the wrong kind of day to die.’ Somerville focuses on the landscapes of Norfolk, her home county, very well, and infuses so many of the scenes with its landscapes. For me, this was a real strength of the novel; for instance, the way in which Somerville evokes the flood: ‘Breathing heavily, they looked at the water, ruining the winter-sown crops. She could smell it too – the smarting salt of the sea. Saltwater… glistening in the moonlight, beautiful and destructive.’
The character dynamics are interesting here. During their first meeting, Somerville writes that Arthur finds Jack has ‘a litheness and swagger that spoke of complex confidence’, and feels ‘a shiver of something close to dislike’. I also liked how Somerville explored Verity’s inner world: ‘I have all these separate boxes inside me, she thought. And in all of them are bits of me but I don’t know in which one is the important bit. I don’t know how to choose the right box.’ I did find there was a lot of depth to Verity, but perhaps the same cannot be said about the other protagonists here.
I found The Night of the Flood very readable, and found the omniscient perspective worked well. However, I perhaps would not have remembered a great deal about the minutiae of the story had I not made extensive notes for this review. In terms of the historical novel genre, I would not say the novel is entirely gripping at any point. The historical setting also became a little unmoored at times; it felt as though the characters could have been transported to a different decade without too much trouble on the author’s part.
I first encountered Barbara Pym’s work some years ago now, and became aware that I was quickly reaching the end of her oeuvre. A Few Green Leaves was one of the few outstanding titles I had to read, and late spring felt like just the right time to read the newly reissued Virago edition.
A Few Green Leaves, Pym’s final novel, was published in 1980; this was the year she passed away, as well as thirty years after her first book, Some Tame Gazelle, was released. Although Pym’s early books achieved commercial success, her work remained unpublished between 1963 and 1977; at this point in time, she was ‘rediscovered’, and wrote a ‘comeback novel’, the quietly beautiful Quartet in Autumn.
Our protagonist is Emma Howick, an anthropologist who has just moved to her mother’s cottage, charmingly named Robin Cottage, in the West Oxfordshire countryside. We meet Emma during her first weekend in the village; Pym describes that although ‘she had been planning to observe the inhabitants in the time-honoured manner from behind the shadow of her curtains’, she is unable to resist the lure of the Low Sunday walk an annual occasion where ‘villagers were permitted to walk in the park and woods surrounding the manor.’
As ever, Pym takes rather a deep dive into her characters’ backstories, which largely end up being rather revealing. Emma has never married, ‘or formed any other kind of attachment’. Amusingly, the village rector observes Emma ‘only as a sensible person in her thirties, dark-haired, thin and possibly capable of talking intelligently about local history…’. Pym is an excellent guide, who leads us into the microcosm of village life: the organising of a jumble sale, flower arrangements made especially for church services, and involvement in the local history society, which the rector is keen for ‘meek’ women in their later years to attend. Emma begins to make ‘social studies’ of such events; of a bring-and-buy sale, for instance: ‘No doubt there was plenty of criticism of others’ efforts, even if not openly expressed – who, for example, was the bringer of the not-quite-right marmalade which had been boiled past the setting point and gone syrupy? Whoever it was could have saved face by buying it back herself and in the general bustle this ruse might not be spotted.’
One thing I love about Pym’s writing, alongside her sharp and often funny observations, is summed up perfectly in the Virago blurb, which notes that she is ‘an incomparable chronicler of ordinary, quiet lives’, who writes with ‘warmth, humour, precision and great vividness.’ As ever, Pym was on great form in A Few Green Leaves.
Reading a new-to-me novel by Barbara Pym gives me a feeling akin to settling down with an old friend I haven’t spoken to for a while. A Few Green Leaves is an excellent, character-driven novel, as all of Pym’s works have proven to be. Pym portrays such multidimensional relationships between her characters, which are continually shifting. I, for one, thoroughly enjoy her writing and approach, and I’m very much looking forward to seeking out the remaining couple of books from her back catalogue which I have not read yet; perhaps I will do so sooner rather than later.
This is my first Book Trail in such a long time; I feel a little rusty, if I’m honest! As ever, I have used a recent read as a jumping off point on Goodreads, and the ‘Readers Also Enjoyed’ function has helped me to generate this list. Have you read any of these titles?
1. The Scent of Flowers at Nightby Leila Slimani
‘Night is the land of reinvention, whispered prayers, erotic passions. Night is the place where utopias have the scent of the possible, where we no longer feel constrained by petty reality. Night is the country of dreams where we discover that, in the secrecy of our heart, we are host to a multitude of voices and an infinity of worlds…’
Over one night, alone in the Punta della Dogana Museum in Venice, Leila Slimani grapples with the self as it is revealed in solitude. In a place of old and new, she confronts her past and her present, through her life as a Moroccan woman, as a writer, and as a daughter. Surrounded by art, she explores what it means to behold and clasp beauty; enveloped by night, she confronts the meaning of life and death.
2. Happening by Annie Ernaux
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child.
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.
In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
3. Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel
For readers of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, Still Born is a profound novel about motherhood, creativity, and the power of friendship and community to make caretaking easier from “one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature” (Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive).
Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura is so determined not to become a mother that she has taken the drastic decision to have her tubes tied. But when she announces this to her friend, she learns that Alina has made the opposite decision and is preparing to have a child of her own.
Alina’s pregnancy shakes the women’s lives, first creating distance and then a remarkable closeness between them. When Alina’s daughter survives childbirth – after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite – and Laura becomes attached to her neighbor’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, their needs, and the needs of the people who are dependent upon them.
In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon’s touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.
4. The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier
A painter contends with the ghosts of the French countryside in a psychological literary thriller by a major French writer.
Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.
5. Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
A taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete’s struggle to transcend herself.
Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo.
But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.
An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.
6. Pearl by Sian Hughes
Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’ s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’ s disappearance and the secrets she’ s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete. Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?
7. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and Claire-Louise Bennett, a haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction.
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.
Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs – collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies ‘just beyond the garden gate.’ And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.
With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.
8. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
Sunday lives with her sixteen year old daughter Dolly, the same house she has lived in all her life. She does things differently from other people, but mostly it works. On her “quiet days” she must eat only white foods. For social situations, she has her etiquette hand book, and for solace her beloved treasury of Sicilian folklore. But the one thing very much out of her control is Dolly – beautiful, headstrong Dolly who is on the cusp of leaving home.
Into this carefully ordered life step Vita and Rollo, a glamorous London couple who move in next door, disarm Sunday with their wit and charm, and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in her etiquette manual. Soon the two families are in and out of each others houses, and Sunday feels loved and accepted like never before. But beneath Vita and Rollo’s charm and wealth there is something else, something darker. And Sunday has something that Vita has always wanted for herself, a beautiful, clever daughter of her own.
Here is a collection of three quite different books, which I read recently, and very much enjoyed. I apologise for my lack of full reviews for these titles, but life has been very busy of late, and I just can’t keep up! Regardless, I highly recommend picking these up (especially if you have a little more time than I do!).
Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski
Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide—a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of Andre Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst.
When university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp, he is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. But a chance meeting by the river soon becomes an intense, exhilarating, and all-consuming affair. After their camp duties are fulfilled, the pair spend a dreamlike few weeks camping in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Inhabiting a beautiful natural world removed from society and its constraints, Ludwik and Janusz fall deeply in love. But in their repressive communist and Catholic society, the passion they share is utterly unthinkable.
Once they return to Warsaw, the charismatic Janusz quickly rises in the political ranks of the party and is rewarded with a highly-coveted position in the ministry. Ludwik is drawn toward impulsive acts of protest, unable to ignore rising food prices and the stark economic disparity around them. Their secret love and personal and political differences slowly begin to tear them apart as both men struggle to survive in a regime on the brink of collapse.
Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart, Swimming in the Dark is a potent blend of romance, post-war politics, intrigue, and history. Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski has crafted an indelible and thought-provoking literary debut that explores freedom and love in all its incarnations.
A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
From Sigrid Nunez, the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, comes A Feather on the Breath of God, a mesmerizing story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.
A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents’ stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet–these are the elements that shape the young woman’s imagination and her sexuality.
The Scent of Flowers at Night by Leila Slimani
‘Night is the land of reinvention, whispered prayers, erotic passions. Night is the place where utopias have the scent of the possible, where we no longer feel constrained by petty reality. Night is the country of dreams where we discover that, in the secrecy of our heart, we are host to a multitude of voices and an infinity of worlds…’
Over one night, alone in the Punta della Dogana Museum in Venice, Leila Slimani grapples with the self as it is revealed in solitude. In a place of old and new, she confronts her past and her present, through her life as a Moroccan woman, as a writer, and as a daughter. Surrounded by art, she explores what it means to behold and clasp beauty; enveloped by night, she confronts the meaning of life and death.
I read this again recently, and was charmed by it all over again.
Rumer Godden’s The Lady and TheUnicorn, which was first published in 1937, is the 630th entry upon the Virago Modern Classics list. As with The River and The Villa Fiorita, both republished by Virago at the same time, The Lady and The Unicorn includes a well-crafted and rather fascinating introduction penned by Anita Desai.
After setting out the author’s childhood, lived largely in India, Desai goes on to write about the influences which drove Godden to write over sixty acclaimed works of fiction, for both children and adults. Desai states that Godden ‘cannot be said to have been ignorant, or unmindful, of her society and its role in India. In no other book is this made as clear’ as it is in this one, a novel written ‘in the early, unhappy days of her first marriage’. Desai then goes on to write that ‘the contact with her students [at the dance school which Godden opened in Calcutta], their families and her staff taught her a great deal about the unhappy situation of a community looked down upon both by the English and by Indians as “half-castes”‘. The Lady and The Unicorn faced controversy upon its publication, with many English believing her ‘unfairly critical of English society’, and others viewing ‘her depiction of Eurasians’ as cruel. Her publisher, Peter Davies, however, deemed the novel ‘a little masterpiece’.
The Lemarchant family are Godden’s focus here; ‘neither Indian nor English, they are accepted by no-one’. They live in the small annex of a fading ‘memory-haunted’ mansion in Calcutta. The widowed father of the family is helped only by ‘auntie’ and a servant of sorts named Boy, an arrangement which causes misery for all: ‘There were so many ways that father did not care to earn money that the girls had to be taken at school for charity and the rent was always owing… No matter how badly he [father] behaved they [auntie and Boy] treated him as the honourable head of the house, and auntie complained that the children did not respect him as they ought’. The way in which the family unit is perceived within the community is negative, and often veers upon the harsh: ‘The Lemarchants are not a nice family at all, they cannot even pay their rent’ is the idea which prevails.
The three daughters of the Lemarchant family could not be more different; twins Belle and Rosa are often at odds with one another, and the youngest, Blanche, is treated no better than an outcast. Blanche is described as ‘the family shame, for she was dark. Suddenly, after Belle and Rosa, had come this other baby like a little crow after twin doves. Auntie said she was like their mother, and they hated to think of their mother who was dead and had been dark like Blanche. Belle could not bear her, and even Rosa was ashamed to be her sister’. Of the twins, Godden writes that Rosa, constantly overshadowed by her twin sister, ‘could never be quite truthful, she had always to distort, to embroider, to exaggerate, and if she were frightened, she lied’. The family in its entirety ‘were sure that Belle was not good, and yet at home she gave hardly any trouble; it was just that she was quite implacable, quite determined and almost fearless… Belle did exactly as she chose. When she was crossed she was more than unkind, she was shocking’. The divisions within the family therefore echo those which prevail in society.
The sense of place is deftly built, particularly with regard to the house in which the Lemarchants live: ‘There was not a corner of the house that Blanche did not know and cherish, all of them loved it as if it were their own; that was peculiar to the Lemarchants, for the house did not like its tenants, it seemed to have some strange resentment’. Of their surroundings, of which the girls know no different, Belle sneers the following, exemplifying her discontent: ‘We know a handful of people in Calcutta and most of them are nobodies too. What is Calcutta? It is not the world’. There is not much by way of plot here, really, but the whole has been beautifully written, and the non-newsworthy aspects of the girls’ lives have been set out with such feeling and emotion.
The Lady and The Unicorn is a captivating novel, which captures adolescence, and the many problems which it throws up, beautifully. Part love story and part coming-of-age novel, Godden is shrewd throughout at showing how powerful society can be, and how those within it often rally together to shun those ‘outsiders’ who have made it their home.
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