One From the Archive: Novella November: ‘The Moon is Down’ by John Steinbeck ****

First published in 2014.

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.

One From the Archive: Novella November: ‘The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea’ by Yukio Mishima **

First published in 2013.

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.

Women in Translation Month: ‘Grown Ups’ by Marie Aubert ***

I spotted Marie Aubert’s novel, Grown Ups, whilst browsing in my local library. I hadn’t heard of it before, but something about the bright, summery cover really caught my eye. The reviews on the front cover also piqued my interest; they call it, variously, ‘slim and powerful’, ‘pure escapism’, and ‘Venomous. Bitchy. Brilliant.’ The fact that Grown Ups was published by Pushkin Press, an excellent independent publisher who largely focus on translated works, was the final reason I added the book to my teetering stack.

Our protagonist is forty-year-old Ida, an architect living in Oslo, who is ‘single and starting to panic’. All she sees around her are ‘other people’s children, everywhere.’ When on a family holiday in Norway’s countryside, in order to celebrate her mother’s birthday, she finds herself ‘rapidly regressing, picking fights with her sister Marthe and flirting with Marthe’s husband’, culminating in ‘tensions rocketing’ between them.

In Grown Ups, we see everything through Ida’s eyes. In the first chapter, she embarks upon her holiday; in the second, she takes us back to a recent trip she made to Sweden, in which she was ‘spending my savings on having my eggs removed and banked, on opening an egg account.’ Her sister, Marthe, who is in a happy relationship with Kristoffer, has struggled with her own fertility, and Ida takes a strange kind of pleasure from her difficulties in becoming pregnant. When Ida therefore finds out that Marthe is pregnant, she retreats to the bedroom of the cabin which she has had since she was a child: ‘I wrap my arms around myself; my skin feels withered and dry, my body is a nonentity, it’s as if I’ve ceased to exist.’

Ida’s emotions are constantly oscillating; she displays a great deal of self-doubt, and then peps herself up, before the cycle inevitably begins again. One constant, though, is the amount of resentment she harbours toward Marthe. She indignantly voices this to the reader: ‘She has Kristoffer, and soon she’ll have a baby of her own and still she complains, that’s just what she’s like, always expecting other people to put things straight for her. Marthe can go around and be herself, she can do an admin job that she likes well enough, which I don’t think she’s particularly good at, she can say daft things and laugh at all the wrong moments and not even think about it, she can stuff herself with crisps and chocolate when she’s feeling down, give up on exercise, say she can’t be bothered with it, but there’s always someone there to comfort her.’

The translation from the original Norwegian by Rosie Hedger is very good indeed, and there is a definite flow to the prose. I felt immersed in Ida’s perspective, and the way in which she interpreted things. However, despite the first person perspective used throughout, I still felt a detachment from the characters. This was possibly because Ida was very difficult to like, and some of her opinions were rather odious. She is underhand and sneaky, and makes poor decisions, whilst blaming others for them. She also uses Kristoffer’s six-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, who is brought along on the holiday, to mock Marthe.

Ida is clearly very lonely, and Aubert captures this well: ‘Life for me is the same as it was five years ago, ten, even… I sleep alone and I wake up alone and I’m alone when I go to work and alone when I get back home, I won’t moan about it, you don’t want to become one of those people who moans on and on about things. But being alone is a circle that only ever expands… there might be ten or twenty or thirty years ahead of me just like this, all the same from here on in.’ Something else which Aubert does well in her debut novel is demonstrating how strained many of Ida’s relationships are.

Grown Ups is rather a thoughtful character study of a woman whose life has not turned out either as she imagined, or as she planned. In some places, the book lacks a little substance, and although Aubert deals with some serious topics, these sometimes do not make it past surface level. I wouldn’t say that Grown Ups is a must-read novel, but it is one which I largely enjoyed. If you are looking to expand your reading horizons, and want some recommendations for translated Nordic literature, then it wouldn’t be the worst idea to add this to your consideration list.

Women in Translation Month: ‘The Inseparables’ by Simone de Beauvoir ****

The Inseparables is the newly-discovered novel by legendary French figure Simone de Beauvoir. Never published in her lifetime, it was released in France in 2020, and in its English translation in 2021. Translated by Lauren Elkin, introduced by Deborah Levy, and featuring an afterword by Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir, The Inseparables was surprisingly the first of de Beauvoir’s works of fiction which I picked up.

The protagonist of The Inseparables is a young girl named Sylvie Lepage; we are first introduced to her when she is at school. At the beginning of term, Sylvie is ‘immediately fascinated’ when a new girl named Andrée Gallard, who ‘walks with the confidence of an adult’, joins her class. Andrée comes from a large, wealthy family; she is allowed to walk home alone; she is headstrong and speaks her mind; she seems worldly-wise. Sylvie reveals: ‘But what I admired most about her were the little habits she had that I never understood. Like when she saw a peach or an orchid, or even if someone just said one of those words to her, she shivered, and gooseflesh stood out on her arms. It was in those moments that I was most tremblingly aware of the gift she had received from heaven, which I found so enthralling: her personality. Secretly I thought to myself that Andrée was one of those prodigies about whom, later on, books would be written.’

Sylvie and Andrée soon become firm friends, talking for hours about ‘equality, justice, war and religion; they lose respect for their teachers; they build a world of their own.’ The relationship between the girls was based on an intense friendship of de Beauvoir’s with Élisabeth Lacoin, known as Zaza, which both ‘shaped’ and ‘haunted’ her. Sylvie (de Beauvoir) and Andrée (Zaza) attend a private Catholic school. Sylvie is swept up in her education, and relishes the role of Catholicism within it: ‘I couldn’t wait to get back to the classroom, solemn as a Mass; the silence in the hallways; the softened smiles of the teachers, in their long skirts and high-necked blouses…’.

Those around the girls call them ‘inseparables’. Sylvie, though, realizes that she feels the friendship more deeply than Andrée does: ‘… it seemed to me that her love for her mother made her other attachments pale by comparison.’ She later reveals: ‘… but above all, she didn’t see the extent to which I needed to share everything with her. That was what upset me the most: the realisation that she was utterly unaware of my feelings for her.’ In her introduction, Levy writes: ‘Sylvie is endearingly vulnerable because she risks loving Andrée – and of course, any kind of love involves a fair dose of fantasy, projection, imagination.’

The Inseparables contains its fair share of philosophising, particularly with regard to the way in which Sylvie learns about herself, and questions everything around her. Both protagonists feel so real, and their relationship shifts believably as they age.

Elkin has included her translator’s note as a preface to the volume, something which I do not see often, and which I appreciated. It was so useful as a reader to know the choices which Elkin made as a translator; for instance, her amendment of some of the longer conversations which the girls have into indirect speech. Of this novel, she writes: ‘It is more than good. It is poignant, chilling and eviscerating.’ She goes on: ‘… nowhere else does Beauvoir tell her story with Zaza so fully, imagining with such love (though utterly without nostalgia) the life they shared and the vanished world that contained her friend.’

The Inseparables is an absolutely charming, and beautifully sculpted, coming-of-age story, with its fair share of sadness. De Beauvoir had a searing understanding of youth, and separation; Sylvie tells us: ‘… I suddenly understood, in a joyful stupor, that the empty feeling in my heart, the mournful quality of my days, had but one course: Andrée’s absence. Life without her would be death.’ The Inseparables captures so much; it is tender, aching, and beautiful.

One From the Archive: ‘Lavinia’ by George Sand ****

First published in 2017.

George Burnham Ives’ 1902 translation has been used in Michael Wallmer’s lovely edition of George Sand’s Lavinia.  Sand was an incredibly prolific author; her oeuvre is something which most writers can only dream of.  Her work spans four decades, being published as she was between 1831 and 1876.  Lavinia is one of her earliest books, in fact, and was first published in its original French in 1833.

After a young and rather well-to-do English traveller, Sir Lionel Bridgemont, abandons well-born Portuguese Lavinia Buenafe, he breaks her heart.  She consequently marries a nobleman, and is soon widowed.  Some time later, after asking Sir Lionel – himself just about to be married – to return the love letters which she sent him many moons ago, she finds that they are near one another in the Pyrenees.  They thus decide to meet, and along with their present-day story, elements of their past are revealed.

Lavinia’s cousin, Sir Henry, who has accompanied his friend Sir Lionel to the Pyrenees, adds some humour to the whole.  When Sir Lionel berates him for telling Lavinia that her letters were in his constant possession, he says: ‘”Good, Lionel, good!…  I like to see you in a fit of temper; it makes you poetic.  At such times, you are yourself a stream, a river of metaphors, a torrent of eloquence, a reservoir of allegories…”‘.  Sir Henry has rather an adoring, if slightly tongue-in-cheek, view of Lavinia, calling her: ‘”… as fresh as the flowers, lovely as the angels, lively as a bird, light-hearted, rosy, stylish, and coquettish…”‘.  Sir Lionel is really his antithesis, in speech at least, holding as he does a very conventional, if amusingly relayed, view of womankind: ‘”… In the opinion of every man of sense, a lawful wife should be a gentle and placid helpmeet, an Englishwoman to the very depths of her being, not very susceptible to love, incapable of jealousy, fond of sleep, and sufficiently addicted to the excessive use of black tea to keep her faculties in a conjugal state…”‘.

Lavinia is a slim novella at its modest 71 pages; perhaps deceptively so, as there is quite a lot of depth to it.  The descriptions are perhaps the real strength of the piece: ‘… the lovely valley, bathed in sparkling dew, floated in the light and formed a sheet of gold in a frame of black marble’.  Lavinia is beautifully written, and so well translated; it is a real treat to settle down for an hour or two with.  There are amusing asides which pepper the text, and make it feel far more contemporary than it is in actuality.  There is a wonderful pace to the novella, and the structure of one singular chapter works well with regard to its length.  Strong and thoughtful, Lavinia is perhaps most interesting when one looks at the shifting relationships and passing of time within it.

‘Cold Nights of Childhood’ by Tezer Özlü ****

I borrowed Turkish author Tezer Özlü’s classic novella, Cold Nights of Childhood, from the library. Originally published in 1980, and translated into English by Maureen Freely, the edition which I read also features an introduction by contemporary Turkish author Ayşegül Savas.

The unnamed narrator of Cold Nights of Childhood is a young woman ‘between lovers’, who has spent her recent life ‘in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments.’ At first, she lives between Berlin and Paris, but decides to return to Istanbul ‘in search of freedom, happiness and new love’. Along with her present-day self, we see her childhood, spent largely in the Turkish provinces, ‘and the smoke-filled cafés of capital cities’.

On the opening page, the narrator tries to capture her place in time and space, recognising how much has changed for her since childhood: ‘We’re no longer in the provinces. We’ve abandoned these rambling orchards and large wooden houses to their silent towns. And we’ve abandoned those silent towns to the 1950s.’ From the outset, the sense of place is strong, as is the picture we are given of the narrator’s struggles with her mental health. She recalls that when she was young, ‘Thoughts of death chase after me. Day and night, I think about killing myself. My reasons unclear. To carry on with life, or to die – either will do. A vague disquiet, nothing more.’

Cold Nights of Childhood is filled with a cast of curious characters. Of the grandmother, who lives with the narrator and her family, our protagonist recalls: ‘Her eyes are blue-grey. It’s been seventy years since she last slept with a man. She loves life. Nothing interests her more than her own funeral.’

I appreciated the historical context including throughout, and the way in which the narrator interpreted pivotal events during her childhood. She tells us, for example, ‘I’m in the youngest class in middle school. Stalin’s death is celebrated like a holiday. We dance on maps. Plant tombstones for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Eisenhower is an angel.’

This story of Özlü’s is just over 70 pages in length, and was written over the span of a year. It was her first work of fiction, and the second of three books published during her short lifetime. What I most enjoyed about this novella are the blurred lines between the present-day narrator at the end of the 1970s, and her past selves. I also really admired the stream-of-consciousness quality of the writing: ‘This city never ends. I can go for kilometres without seeing anything to mark a beginning or an end. It has to sleep somewhere, somewhere beyond all these woodlands and lakes. I can almost see it. Nights here are like day. At night the sky goes grey, but never darker. Then it’s day again.’

The introduction discusses Savas’ wish to be a writer, and her subsequent exploration of Turkish literature: ‘The reading materials unravelled steadily, each writer connected to the next, building an impenetrable wall of influence and fraternity, in which I had to try and wedge myself…’. Of this novella, Savas writes: ‘… it confirmed for me that [Özlü’s] work didn’t belong to any school or style, that her voice was uniquely her own: consciousness distilled into narrative form.’ Savas gives a good amount of background information about the author, drawing parallels between this fictional story and Özlü’s own life: ‘… the interest of the book is not so much its autobiographical mirror but the way that life is endowed with an electric mutability. Madness, after all, disrupts the temporal narrative. Here, time is broken and reshuffled through the sharp edge of consciousness.’

Despite its brevity, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a rich reading experience. I found the style of the narrative, made up of a lot of interlinking fragments, rather beguiling. This is a novella which I would highly recommend.

‘Reconciliation’ by Naoya Shiga ***

Translated by Ted Goossen, Naoya Shiga’s Reconciliation is considered a classic of Japanese literature. First published in 1917, and written over the course of just 5 weeks, this novella is described as ‘an understated masterpiece of the Japanese “I novel” tradition (a confessional literary form).’ Shiga was the ‘most celebrated practitioner’ of autobiographical fiction in the country, and went by the ‘god of prose’.

The Translator’s Note, written by Goossen, adds a great deal of context, and information about the author himself. Goossen comments that the novella is ‘highly factual, at least on the surface.’ It was written ‘immediately after the culmination of the drama it describes’: the author’s firstborn daughter dying when she was just a baby, the birth of his second child, and the illness of his beloved grandmother.

For Goossen, the novella ‘is charged with an elemental force that renders the distinction between so-called fact and fiction quite irrelevant.’ One of the ‘most striking features’ of this story for its translator is ‘the close relationship between life and art… [It is] a novella about being unable to write, strewn with references to failed or abandoned works.’ He then goes on to speak about the difficulties of translating such deceptively simple prose.

At just 137 pages long, Reconciliation manages to pack in a great deal. It unfolds with the following opening sentence: ‘This July 31st marked the first anniversary of the death of my eldest child – she had lived just fifty-six days.’ At this point in the narrative, his second child is just 9 days old, and he is going to visit his daughter’s grave.

We learn from the outset that the narrator, Junkichi, has a difficult relationship with his father: ‘I personally disliked father. This was more than the inescapable tangle of emotion that binds most parents and children, I felt: at the root of our mutual animosity was a basic disharmony. But although I found it relatively easy to talk about these feelings, I found I couldn’t express them on paper. I didn’t want to use my writing to emotionally purge myself.’

I found the protagonist unlikeable, prone as he is to cruel outbursts, most of which are directed toward his wife. He shouts things like: ‘“If I were the kind of man who meekly gave in to whatever his father said, I’d never have married you!”’

The prose style is easy to read, as is the first person perspective. There are some distressing scenes here; there is a lot of detail, for instance, about his daughter’s illness and passing, and later his grandmother’s illness. Reconciliation is filled with rumination, but there is far less emotion on display than I would have expected. There are moments of care and sorrow, as displayed here, but these are few and far between in the narrative: ‘After the baby died, our house suddenly became very lonely. When we took our chairs out to the garden to enjoy the cool night air, the distant cries of forest birds drifted across the lake to us… Moments like this were unbearable.’ After this, however, the narrator recalls the following: ‘… what my wife had feared most was seeing a baby about the age of our dead child. I myself was quite unmoved by such a prospect. Sometimes when we were out together she would slip away without telling me. I would usually find someone there was holding a baby.’

In this translation, the narrator is very matter-of-fact. This is something I often find with literature translated from the Japanese; it is often stoic, in my experience, and not at all effusive. Whilst I found it interesting to read something from this period, and I did find the family dynamic an interesting element, I lacked a lot of sympathy for our protagonist, and was somewhat glad to see the back of him.

‘Going Back’ by Penelope Lively ****

I have been working my way through Penelope Lively’s oeuvre, rather slowly, over the last few years. My interest in her 1975 novella, Going Back, was piqued after I saw a brief but glittering review whilst scrolling through my Goodreads feed. Clearly easily influenced, I requested it from my library just moments afterward.

At just 125 pages long, with relatively large font, Going Back can be picked up and read in an afternoon. The entirety follows our protagonist, Jane, who reflects upon her wartime childhood spent at a farmhouse in a village named Medleycott, with her brother, Edward. She remembers days full of bliss, of ‘joyful indulgence’. Regardless, something seems to cast a ‘dark, chilling shadow over Jane’s remembrance, for the idyll came to an abrupt and painful end.’

In the first chapter, Jane tells us, with nostalgia: ‘It seems smaller, going back: the garden, the house, everything. But the garden, especially. When I was a small child it was infinite: lawns, paths, high hedges, the rose garden, the long reach of the kitchen garden, the spinney with the silver birches. It was a completed world; beyond lay nothingness. Space. Limbo.’ Jane goes on: ‘Remembering it like that. There’s what you know happened, and what you think happened… Things are fudged by time; years fuse together. The things that should matter – the stepping-stones that marked the way, the decisions that made one thing happen rather than another – they get forgotten. You are left with islands in a confused and layered landscape, like the random protrusions after a heavy snowfall… There is time past, and time to come, and time that is continuous, in the head for ever.’

Despite the brevity of Going Back, we learn a great deal about the siblings and their family life. The children’s mother passed away when they were toddlers; their father was largely absent. They are looked after largely by Betty, a woman ‘tethered to her kitchen.’ Jane and Edward spent a lot of time outdoors, amusing themselves: ‘The garden was our territory – the space within which we knew the arrangement of every leaf and stone and branch… and the world had stretched and stretched like elastic.’ Indeed, the outside world is alien to them, cocooned as they are within the vast garden: ‘There was a war on, people said… There was a war on, so you couldn’t have lots of sweets any more… and no more oranges or bananas. There was a war on, so we mustn’t waste things because there won’t be any more where that came from.’

I really admire Lively’s prose, and my experience with Going Back was no different. Lively consistently conjures up such specific imagery, seeing the beauty in almost everything. I particularly enjoy the way in which Lively captures the natural world, and the changing of the seasons in her writing: ‘Autumn. The hedge outside the gate has blossomed with spider-webs. All over, they are, from top to bottom, multi-faceted, strung between blackberry sprays or tacked to the dried heads of cow-parsley… We squat on our haunches, absorbed…’. Later, she writes: ‘And the year slid, somehow, into winter. The hot, harvest, blackberry days were gone and we were into November: white skies, dark spiny trees, hot toast for tea, cold hands, feet, noses. Darkness as we fed the chickens, the stable drive pale-fringed with grasses, the landscape huddled under a violet sky, the fields peppered with snow that fell this morning and melted too soon to be any use to us.’

I love the way in which the author views everything through the lens of a child, in a world at once enormous and tiny. Lively delivers complex topics filtered through the eyes of her young protagonist; when their father goes off to fight in the war, for instance, Jane and Edward are content, as they were able to make as much noise as they wanted in the garden, something not tolerated when their father was in residence. Instead, their farmhouse hosts land girls, and then evacuees from London, a period detail which works well, but which the children do not quite understand the reasoning behind.

Interestingly, Going Back was initially published as a children’s book. On reflection, Lively writes in her foreword of August 1990, ‘it is only tenuously so; the pitch, the voice, the focus are not really those of a true children’s book.’ Retrospect helped her to see this book differently. She calls it ‘a trial run for preoccupations with the nature of memory, with a certain kind of writing, with economy and allusion. I was flexing muscles… and it was only by accident that the result seemed to me and to others to be a book primarily for children.’

Despite being set during the Second World War, I found Going Back to be a very gentle, almost comforting, read. Lively has, yet again, managed to create a story which is at once brief, yet moving.

‘Hex’ by Jenni Fagan ****

Jenni Fagan is an author whose work I have enjoyed so much up until now that I no longer read the blurbs of her novels; rather, I just sink into the unknown, feeling sure that I will like what I find. Of course, the title of her newest novella, Hex, does bring with it a lot of punchy imagery, and it is surely not difficult to guess some of the themes which might be found within its pages.

Hex is Fagan’s shortest book by far, coming in at just over one hundred pages. It was published as part of a Polygon series entitled ‘Darkland Tales’, which aims to bring together ‘dramatic retellings of stories’ from Scotland’s history. This is the second book in the series; the first and third have been written by Denise Mina and Alan Warner, respectively.

Set on the 4th of December 1591, Hex weaves together a present day protagonist with a woman accused of witchcraft in Edinburgh. Geillis Duncan, a teenager from Trenant, Scotland, has been locked into a prison cell far below the city’s High Street, and is facing the final night of her life. However, this is not just a work of historical fiction, or an imagined narrative of real historical events. Fagan introduces, in the form of the novella’s narrator, a modern-day character named Iris from the summer of 2021, who tells Geillis that she ‘comes from a future where women are still persecuted for who they are and what they believe.’ Conducting a conversation across the centuries is a clever tool. Fagan reveals that in the vast swath of time which separates Geillis and Iris, not much has fundamentally changed. Fagan offers a simple yet very effective way in which to explore how and why women are still discriminated against almost 450 years later. Numerous parallels are drawn between the characters.

Iris essentially takes on the role of Geillis’ familiar, and directs much of her narrative is toward Geillis. The second chapter begins: ‘Your cell is several floors below the city. It is, far below footfall, or taverns, or flats; below beds, or kitchens, or hugs, or hope, or church, or prayer, or freedom, or laughter, or air; below shuttered windows, or dogs asleep in front of fires. It is so far below the seasons they might as well not exist.’ She goes on to comment: ‘Travelled time all my life’, and then: ‘Five hundred years between us, Geillis Duncan – it’s such a little leap really.’ Iris continues: ‘A woman’s voice is a hex. She must learn to exalt men always. If she doesn’t do that, then she is a threat. A demon whore, a witch – so says everyone and the law.’

When she first meets Geillis, Iris observes: ‘Head turned away, eyes toward me – the outline of your nose and forehead and chin is marked in moonlight; you look like a silver face on a ten-pence coin.’ Such sensual descriptions make Geillis almost tangible to the reader. Iris, otherworldly as she is, then begins to magick things up to help her new companion: a blanket, a meal.

We then transition from Iris’ perspective to Geillis’. As the time approaches dawn, Geillis tells Iris about how she came to be imprisoned, and offers a ‘visceral description of what happens when a society is consumed by fear and superstition.’ When she is tortured in her own home, before being thrown into her dingy prison cell, Geillis describes the following: ‘They turned me over, Iris… everything inside my body felt like it was burning, like I was on fire, like I was already in hell and they were the demons surrounding me, and it is for their crimes I will die!’ When asked why she was persecuted, Geillis responds: ‘I helped women birth… I knew how to pick the right herbs to cure a headache, and I had a terrible want in me to go out at night and see the stars.’

I found Hex to be entirely absorbing. Fagan manages to pack such a lot in, from death and murder, to race and expectations. There is a real brutality to this story, as one might surely expect. I liked the juxtaposition of both narrators, with Geillis’ sometimes old-fashioned turns of phrase, and the very current events given to authenticate Iris’ point of view: ‘If only she didn’t wear stilettos. If only she didn’t walk through a park. If only she didn’t go out at night. If only those smart, brilliant sisters had realised police officers would later take selfies by their dead bodies.’

Something which I admire about Fagan is the way in which her stories are not straightforward. Even in a work as short as this one, she is such a creative author, managing to insert quite original elements, and making for a very memorable reading experience. Another, quite moving, touch is that Fagan chose to dedicate Hex to the real Geillis Duncan.

One From the Archive: ‘The Shutter of Snow’ by Emily Holmes Coleman *****

First published in June 2019.

I have wanted to read Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow for years, but had never got around to doing so, as copies proved difficult to find, and rather expensive. Only the selection of the novel for my online book club pushed me to source a (thankfully free) copy from OpenLibrary, and I began it way ahead of time.

This novella, the only work published by American author Emily Holmes Coleman, is semi-autobiographical.  It focuses on a period of her life in which she was institutionalised due to contracting puerperal fever following the birth of her son in 1924, and suffering a nervous breakdown as a result.  Our protagonist, Marthe Gail, has postpartum psychosis, and is forced to spend her time away from her baby son in a mental hospital in New York.  Here, she tries, with varying levels of success, to persuade others that she is well.

Marthe’s condition, and its manifestation, is startling.  She believes herself to be a sort of amalgamation of God and Jesus Christ.  From the outset, The Shutter of Snow is unsettling, and quickly establishes a sense of the place in which Marthe is trapped: ‘The voice on the other side of her wall was shouting for someone.  It never stopped all night.  It became entangled in the blankets and whistled the ice prongs on the wind.  The rest of the voices were not so distinct.  It was very still out in the hall when the voices stopped.’ There is a sense, for Marthe, of being completely alone and adrift, whilst also being surrounded by many other people.

The imagery which Holmes Coleman creates often has a shock value to it: ‘She had been a foetus and had knitted herself together in the bed’, and ‘Clean cheeks and a little river in her teeth.  Pine needles dripping in the Caucasus’, stood out particularly to me.  I also found the following nightmarish scene incredibly chilling: ‘How could they expect her to sleep when she was going through all of it?  They didnt [sic] know.  She had swung about the room from the ceiling and it was a swinging from the cross.  There had been the burial.  She was lying quietly in the bed and being covered over her face.  She was carried quietly out and put in the casket.  Down, down she went in the rectangle that had been made for her.  Down and the dirt fell in above.  Down and the worms began to tremble in and out.  Always she had kept telling of it, not one word of it must be forgotten.  It must all be recorded in sound and after that she could sleep.’

As well as the horror which permeates it, there are moments of strange beauty in Holmes Coleman’s descriptions; for example, when she writes: ‘The only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.’  The use of recurring motifs within the novella was highly effective – for instance, Marthe’s dancing, and the unusual imagery of orange peel in the snow.

The Shutter of Snow presents a striking character study of a woman in the depths of mania.  Holmes Coleman’s prose is effective; she uses a stream-of-consciousness-esque style, with the subconscious and unconscious embedded within its omniscient perspective.  I’m not sure that I would categorise this as a stream-of-consciousness work, per se, but it certainly can be recognised as a Modernist work.  There is a real urgency to her writing.  I can see why her style, with its omission of speech marks and no clear delineation between what is real and imagined, might be off-putting to many readers, but as a huge fan of Modernist writing, I found it immediately immersive.  The mixture of reality and psychiatric episodes are chilling, and blend into one another seamlessly.

Given that The Shutter of Snow was published in 1930, it feels startlingly modern.  I agree entirely with the two reviews I read prior to beginning the novella.  Fay Weldon remarked that is an ‘extraordinary and visionary book, written out of those edges where madness and poetry meet’, and The Nation commented that ‘The Shutter of Snow is a profoundly moving book, supplying as it does a glimpse of what a temporary derangement and its consequences mean to the sufferer.’  I found the entirety of this book to be poignant and affecting, and it has become a firm favourite of mine.  I expected that it might be difficult to read, and whilst there are some shocking incidents at work in the novella, the constantly shifting prose works perfectly to demonstrate the fog in Marthe’s brain.

There are relatively few novellas that say so much as Holmes Coleman does so fluidly and fluently in The Shutter of Snow.  She speaks volumes about the human condition, and the frailty and fragility which go hand in hand with it.  The Shutter of Snow is a literary whirlwind, a completely absorbing and often quite frightening story.  An obvious comparison to give is its similarities to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, which deals with similar themes in that the narrator is forced to undertake a rest cure following childbirth.  There are flashes here of a similar beguiling style as Djuna Barnes’, and some of Virginia Woolf’s more complicated scenes – in Orlando, for example.  In some ways, however, The Shutter of Snow is quite unlike anything which I have ever read, and it is all the stronger for this unusual quality.  There is so much within it which is all its own, and it is a real shame that Holmes Coleman never again put her pen to paper following the publication of this staggeringly powerful and phenomenal novella.