{housekeeping}

Yes, yes, slackest blogger IN THE WORLD.

Time for some housekeeping:

(Nancy's terrible tap-dancing summons a 50 foot demonic cat. Only kidding.)

• I've just read 48 Nancy Drew books in a row. I think there is probably a future blog post in there somewhere. There are a scant handful of references to pineapples in these books, so I think you'll escape more pineapples for a bit. But isn't that a great cover?

• I've put together a post of pictures for Paris in July over on my other blog skiourophilia. Hint: Paris is actually a synonym for "cake" in my world.

source

• I'm adding this book to my informal "Wow, who thought that was a good name for a book?" list.

• Even though I am the slackest blogger in the world, this has not stopped me starting another blog where I can collect all the lovely quotations about food and eating from the books I read and which I would otherwise forget: so, introducing reading feeding.

• I feel a particularly naughty blogger as I was given such a nice surprise by Barb of the oh-so-tempting-I-want-to-read-everything-she-reads-and-am-so-a-stalker leaves and pages blog, who has nominated me for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award. Thank you very much Barb! The rules are:

Thank and link to the person who nominated you.

List the rules and display the award.

Share seven facts about yourself.

Nominate 15 other amazing blogs and comment on their posts

 to let them know they have been nominated.

Optional: display the award logo on your blog 

and follow the blogger who nominated you.

So, SEVEN FACTS:

1. So far this year I have bought 10 egg coddlers on ebay. I may have a problem. But I can stop anytime... maybe at 12? 

2. I love Arnold Schwarzenegger films.

3. I can whistle really well. Tunefully. Annoyingly. Painfully. Endlessly.

4. Related to 3., all cats have a song of their own to which they will respond. I agree that this may not necessary be a fact, but I have (fact) spent a lot of time testing this theory. George [left] adores 'Hey, Big Spender'. I think I've finally nailed Roger [right] down to the William Tell overture. I wonder what the neighbours think?

  

5. I live with these two cats.

6. I enjoy eating in posh restaurants by myself. It's like a naughty secret enjoyment. (I love to share a great food experience too. I'm not weird, just comfortable with my own company. And single.) Sometimes it actually helps not to have anyone's eye to catch when your amuse-bouche is served in a cigar box. One of the great joys of food is how silly it can be.

(This was at Cutler & Co in Melbourne: crispy thin pastry rolls

 filled with a cheese curd and with 'ash' (olive tapenade) at one end 

and white balsamic jelly at the other.)

7. I spent Christmas Day 2012 on the Great Wall of China.

(Obviously I forgot to dress like Santa and carry a Christmas tree, 

but I think the very red nose proves that it is Christmas.)

And 15 other amazing blogs? Well, this is tricky, as every single name I thought of has been nominated already, so I am going to cheat here and just list 15, and you, dear reader, should go and check them out. Go on!

Bloggers who inspire me: Danielle at A Work in Progress; Anbolyn at Gudrun's Tights; Lyn at I Prefer Reading; Simon at Stuck in a Book; Brona at Brona's Books; Ali at Heavenali; Hayley at Desperate Reader; Teresa & Jenny at Shelf Love; Thomas at My Porch (I'm also infatuated by his home renovation blog); Lisa at TBR 313 (who was kind enough to mention my in her own VIB post); Tamara at Thyme for Tea (co-organiser of Paris in July); Moira at Clothes in Books; Jane at Fleur in her World; Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings; and Bernadette at Reactions to Reading. I could go on and on and not only with book blogs (I note that I have 178 book blogs in my reader and 627 subscriptions in all. I need to get out more.) 

And, again, thank you Barb for your kind nomination!

{come & visit} my life in books

Hey, come over and see me 

on Simon's lovely blog 

Stuck in a Book. 

I'm part of Day 3 of My Life in Books: Series Four. 

I promise you, it's filled with: 

shocking revelations, 

wild surmises, 

& attempts to smuggle in 

as many cats as possible!

Edward Bawden's cover for The Listener, 1961.

I note now that it is a Christmas picture. 

Sorry for that reminder.

{review} the gabriel hounds

Mary Stewart The Gabriel Hounds (1967)

This is a post for Mary Stewart Week, the brainchild of Anbolyn at Gudrun's Tights.

I went back to the bookshelf. It would be nice to be able to record that I was the kind of person who would pick up the Dostoevsky or the Huxley or even The Golden Bough and curl up with it for a glorious evening’s read. But when eventually Mr Lethman came for me as he had promised, he found me a few chapters into The Tiger in the Smoke, and half-wishing I had chosen something less exciting for a night in the deserted wing of a ruined palace.

     

Let me confess: the first image matches the lovely vintage edition 1967 Hodder & Stoughton edition I bought for this week. Then I opened it to discover the print was agonisingly small. So I bought the kindle edition with the ridiculously anachronistic cover. The book is set in the late 1960s, for heaven's sake! That camel will eat your hat and nosegay.

Apart from being a teensy bit incestuous for my tastes, The Gabriel Hounds is very much a classic Mary Stewart romantic suspense book:

Wonderful setting? – tick!

Adventure? – tick!

Proper old-school bad guys? - tick!

Some sort of morally abhorrent crime? – tick!

Heroine with lovely expensive mostly linen clothing which undergoes almost complete destruction without ever affecting the integrity of her innate daintiness? - tick?

Romance – tick!

The years rolled back more swiftly even than the crimson silk as he said, with exactly the same intonation with which a small boy had daily greeted his even smaller worshipper: ‘Oh, hullo! It’s you!’ I wasn’t a small girl any more, I was twenty-two, and this was only my cousin Charles, whom of course I didn’t worship any more. For some reason it seemed important to make this clear.

Let's get this out of the way first. Cousins! Any cousins here? How about you get out more and meet other people? Dilute that gene pool! Go on... You're both young, rich, gorgeous and set loose in an exotic location in the Middle East - go fall for someone to whom you're not related. Especially if you're also the off-spring of parents who were twins (not with each other, but you get the picture). Ick and yuck and aren’t there laws about that?

Anyway...

Christy (Christabel) Mansel is a "stinking rich" girl of independent mind on a tour of the Middle East when she runs into her cousin Charles, whom she has not seen for several years. As a child she had worshipped him. The two make a plan to meet up in Beirut after her tour and visit their wildly eccentric and rarely seen great-aunt Harriet, who has adopted the manner and the lifestyle of the early nineteenth century lady traveller Lady Hester Stanhope. Great-Aunt Harriet is holed up in a ruinous palace outside Beirut and is living the life of an orientalised nabob. Charles was a favourite of the dog-loving old lady, who wishes him to have her pair of Ming dynasty china dogs – the eponymous Gabriel Hounds.

There is a bit of a travel mix-up and Christy - always strong-minded – decides to visit her aged relative alone. The palace is falling to pieces and a personable but vague young man is living there with the great-aunt. When Christy eventually gains admittance, she is wholly horrified by exactly how crazy her great-aunt appears:

Her skin had a sallow pallor and her lips were bloodless and sunken, but the black eyes and well-marked brows gave life to the fullish, oval face, and showed none of the fading signs of old age. She had daubed powder lavishly and carelessly, and some of it had spilled over the scarlet velvet. Above this curiously epicene face she had twined a towering turban of white, which, slipping a little to one side, exposed what for a shocked moment I took to be a bald skull; then I realised she must have shaved her head. This, if she habitually wore a thick turban, was only to be expected, but it was somehow the final touch of grotesqueness.

But beyond this theatrical horror show, Christy fears that something is badly wrong in the palace. What is going on in the old dungeons (I do love a dungeon in a book!)? What was in those really very aromatic cigarettes? Where are the missing Gabriel Hounds? And, as the nearby river rises and she is cut off from civilization, is it too late for rescue? Well, of course not - this is a Mary Stewart book, after all – but how will Christy extract herself from danger? And what has happened to handsome Cousin Charles?

This is an enjoyable read with typical Stewart touches of darkness and mild horror. Her language is a joy: "Eastern-looking sheep" are "spatchcocked with black"; the iron bedstead "came across the cracked marble with a dot-and-carry-one screech of broken castors"; when drugged, one's thoughts "dislimned". I have quoted a passage on the intriguing contents of a bookcase in the palace, and there are plenty of small touches that increase the suspense. Among these I would particularly note: the atmosphere of being trapped in a proper old-school harem seraglio with all its white-slaving implications for nice young English ladies; the heroine's name, Christabel, with its Gothicky poetic overtones (I didn't figure this out for myself – Stewart likes to quote from Coleridge's spooky poem); and, of course, the mysterious Gabriel Hounds themselves – named after the pack of Hounds of Hell "that run with death, and when someone's going to die you hear them howling over the house at night."

An additional sense of melancholy suffused this reader too, thinking about Christy's mostly idyllic Syria and Lebanon and the terrible devastation those countries have suffered since.

I have previously been facetious about elements of the sameness in Mary Stewart's romantic suspense books. Nevertheless, I am a 100% believer that well-constructed beautifully written sameness can be one of the most comforting things about reading a beloved author.

If you liked this... I have now moved on to another Mary Stewart – Thornyhold – which I am enjoying, although it offers quite a change of pace to The Gabriel Hounds, and may be a tad witchy for my tastes. I think that my favourite Stewart (so far!) is The Ivy Tree (definitely one for fans of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar), with My Brother Michael battling it out for the next spot with the exciting Avignon-set (but unpleasantly domestically-violent) Madam Will You Talk. I have also commented briefly on Airs above the Ground, Wildfire at Midnight, and Touch Not the Cat (cousins again!). Curiously I have not reviewed any of my favourites. 

I hope everyone is enjoying Mary Stewart Reading Week, 

and thanks again to Anbolyn for hosting!

 

{misc.} mary stewart reading week

Next week is Mary Stewart Reading Week, the brainchild of Anbolyn at Gudrun's Tights. 

I've just finished reading The Gabriel Hounds (1967), and thoroughly recommend it for all the lovely things one expects from a Stewart book: location, mystery, romance, danger, and gorgeous writing. I'll hopefully get my review out next week, but I couldn't resist posting this taster, featuring a bookshelf. To give some context, our heroine is spending the night in a ruined palace in Lebanon as she waits to see an eccentric and aged relative who has adopted Lady Hester Stanhope's lifestyle. The servant has come in to collect her dinner things: 

Irritated now, and wishing she would finish her job and go, I concentrated on selecting a book. As light reading for whiling away an hour or two they were hardly promising. An Arabic grammar, a few books on Syria and the Lebanon which I had already read during my convalescence in Charles's room, and a collection which might be said to represent John Lethman's homework – some volumes (also familiar to me) about the original Lady of the Lebanon: Joan Haslip and Roundell and Silk Buckingham and the three old volumes of Dr Meryon’s diary about his redoubtable patroness. I looked at the fly-leaves. As I thought, they were Great-Aunt Harriet's own copies, presumably lent to her latter-day 'Dr Meryon' for his close study … I skipped along the row. T. E. Lawrence's Crusader Castles, Guillaume's Islam, the Everyman Koran, King-lake's Eothen … all Aunt Harriet's. No medical textbooks, which were presumably too bulky to carry on field work. The only things which carried his own name were – interestingly enough – Huxley's The Mind Changers, Fraser's Golden Bough, and a newish paper-bound copy of Théophile Gautier's Le Club des Hachachiens. No novels except Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke. The last volume in the row was de Quincey....
It would be nice to be able to record that I was the kind of person who would pick up the Dostoevsky or the Huxley or even The Golden Bough and curl up with it for a glorious evening's read. But when eventually Mr Lethman came for me as he had promised, he found me a few chapters into The Tiger in the Smoke, and half-wishing I had chosen something less exciting for a night in the deserted wing of a ruined palace.

{review} incidents in the rue laugier

hosted by Karen (Bookbath)
& Tamara (Thyme for Tea).

hosted by Ali at Heavenali

Argh! What happened to July? I've been reading a lot and writing near to zero. Fortunately in this post I can cunningly cover the two bases of Paris in July and Brookner in July. I feel wonderfully efficient...  

Anita Brookner Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) 

    

It took me a while to warm to this book, I have to say, and I think that this was due to my expectations about the structure being somewhat confounded from the beginning. When I finally became swept up in the narrative, something clicked, and by the time I had finished I rather thought I had just read something remarkable. 

At its most simple (which it isn't), Incidents in the Rue Laugier tells the story of the meeting and marriage of Maud Gonthier of Dijon and Edward Harrison of London. Since this is a Brookner, one expects - and finds - little evidence of great passion, profound happiness or exciting events. (I should say, at this point, that I would be horribly disturbed to find these in a Brookner.) 

It is 1971: Edward is trying to escape the burden of an unexpected inheritance (appropriately enough, a bookshop) that will put an end to his dreams of travelling the world. His Cambridge chum, the rich, charismatic and predatory Tyler (Apolline is an apt description his "atavistic" nature) has put him on to a good thing - he can stay in a room of an acquaintance's empty apartment in the Rue Laugier in Paris (for people like me who love to know if a place really exists, yes it does, in the 17th arrondissement near Place des Ternes). Then comes another invitation from Tyler - to join him at another house near Meaux. And it is at La Gaillarderie near Meaux that Maud is visiting her aunt and falls for... Well, I'm not going to give that away, am I?! 

There are a number of familiar threads running through this novel - the main characters possess a great deal of reserve (Edward "would not be adverse to celibacy"; Maud has inherited her mother's "natural hauteur"; she desires her "prelapsarian integrity"), both are trapped by a need to maintain a personal, almost physical integrity, and forced to do what is expected rather than enter into risk (risk is such a point of vulnerability in a Brookner). Hope must always be sacrificed to reality. Passion is to be sacrificed to respectability. Silence replaces communication. Love cannot save one from loneliness.

They were not marrying for love, whatever he might think. She had only to glance across the table and meet his unhappy smile to understand that. They were marrying because of one false step, one regrettable encounter, one shared shock; they were marrying because their lives were already going wrong, because they understood how and when they had gone wrong, because events that had taken place in the rue Laugier had bound them together, while at the same time making them incapable of explaining those events, and their prehistory, to a third party.

This is such an interesting quotation for me, because of what I have thus far omitted to tell you about the structure of the book. At the beginning and the end of the book, Brookner provides a framing device that overarches the narrative -- of Maud and Edward's daughter packing away her late mother's possessions and finding a notebook:

The notebook was old, slightly bent at the corner, the pages stuck together. There were only a few notations, apparently written on the same day. 'Dames Blanches. La Gaillarderie. Place des Ternes. Sang. Edward.' Further down the same page, and written with a different pen, a recipe for Sauce mousseline. Then a short list of book titles. Last of all Proust's opening line: 'Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.'

The daughter contemplates the impossibility "that a life could be covered by those so brief notations" -- this lack of knowledge is "frustrating": "Something predated me, and I had no idea what it was." What is this mysterious, missing "prehistory", from which the daughter is excluded, given that the "indelible" nature of her parents' histories is also an indelible part of who she is today? She wants their memories:

And the lives of those we love must hold some meaning for us, and if that meaning is withheld, who can blame the survivor for his or her curiosity, even if that curiosity holds as much mourning as celebration?

And, so, the reader comes to understand that the lives s/he has followed may well be "fantasy", the product of a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator; and this adds another level of uneasiness to the narrative itself. For it is, I think, an uneasy read when one remembers the structure and starts to think about who is really narrating these events: then the hints of sexual aggression, the strangely angry silences, the sense of entrapment take on other, darker shades of meaning. And how do we feel about recreating a parent's life when they've deliberately revealed nothing?

There's another little joy to be found in the text -- references to books. Apart from Proust -- of immense importance and likely the key to this book -- we are offered an image of the ideal European lady transposed to England reading "her Elizabeth Bowen and her Rosamond Lehmann and her Elizabeth Taylor". And Edward, owner of a bookshop, brings his wife home books with women's names:

Out of a delicate feeling for his wife, the feeling that subsisted when all others seemed stale and crude, he concentrated on French books, putting on one side for her books with the names of women, La Cousine Bette, or La Petite Fadette, or Germinie Lacerteux, books he thought suitable to her frail composure, having forgotten what quiet horrors such titles concealed...

I've gone on a bit longer than I anticipated, as I always think I need to defend Brookner from her detractors who note how little happens, how literary everyone is, how much the heroines needs a kick, how everyone seems a good twenty to forty years behind the times (there's sex, post-natal depression and aeroplanes in here you people!!). But what about how limpidly beautiful are her sentences, how quietly insightful and incisive her descriptions, how brilliantly constructed her narratives [and so on!]? I suspect that this particular Brookner will not convert anyone, but I came to think that it might be one of her best. 

Thanks to Ali for hosting Brookner in July and to Karen & Tamara for hosting Paris in July. I've thoroughly enjoyed this month of reading.

{paris in july} the sweet life in paris (and some cheese)

hosted by Karen (Bookbath)

& Tamara (Thyme for Tea).

Hmmmm... It's already way into July and I haven't posted anything yet for Paris in July. I suspect that this is because I know that as soon as I open my photo folder and see the pics I took last July when I was in Paris, then I'll get itchy feet for travel, and who knows what could happen... 

But, maybe if I eat some French cheese... that'd help? Have a cheese:

We are blessed with a wonderful market here in Adelaide, and some truly divine cheese shops. I can't resist a cheese that comes in its own little ramekin like this Saint Marcellin. It's a cow's milk cheese, very soft and gooey -- as David Lebovitz notes, St Marcellin has a tendency to try to escape. It can be eaten as is, but I think that one night, very very soon, this little pot is going into the oven and there will be some crusty bread and at least a couple of very nostalgic thoughts about France over a glass or two of vin rouge...

BTW, if you like cheese, you might like this very informative 'wheel' (appropriate!) for identifying cheese. It's not comprehensive, but it really helped me sort the sheep from the goats (and cows):

(you can magnify it at the pop chart lab site) 

Drooling is not really helping me think about my Paris in July reading, but I am reminded that I have not yet written about David Lebovitz's book, The Sweet Life in Paris (2009). I really enjoy his blog - he has a lovely sly wit, he adores food, and he lives in Paris. What more could one ask?

Lebovitz, a dessert specialist who worked at Chez Panisse (link plays annoying music!), moved to France to make a fresh start after his partner died, and his blog wonderfully details the day-to-day discoveries (and disasters) that he made settling down to a new life in Paris. The book is a deeper exploration of these days, and is a great light read for Francophiles. It is interspersed with some recipes and a lot of good practical advice on what Lebovitz calls "the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City."

This is a city where one dresses up to take out the garbage, always says 'Good Morning' on entering shops, and never cuts up salad leaves. Everyone wears a scarf "arranged with a complex series of knots so elaborate, I think some of them use a sailing primer for guidance." Lebovitz is great on the little, quirky details - the dynamics of the non-queue (carry a basket of vicious proportions!), the etiquette of hot chocolate, a (vain) attempt to overcome his fear of squid by working for a fishmonger, life in a socialized health system (less startling for Australians, who also have near-free access to healthcare), the fascination of foreign supermarkets and kitchenware shops, and the terrors of all those new French words to learn: "And a jug of wine can be a carafe, pichet, pot, décanter, cruche, or fillette, which is also a young girl. So be careful where you are when you order one."

I was a little surprised by the recipes - this seemed like the place for some classics, but Lebovitz has included an eclectic range of recipes drawn from far further afield than France alone: peanut slaw and chicken mole sit happily among mousse and clafoutis and dulce de leche brownies (the clafoutis - plum and raspberry - is definitely on my list of things to make). I rather liked the mix, though, as I say, it was surprising. One minor detail - macaron is rendered (in a translation context) as macaroon. Eeek! Oh là là!

In sum: a funny, anecdotal book - a delightful, quick read that will remind you of all the things that make visiting Paris so very, very sweet.

P.S. -- on a somewhat macabre and definitely non-food note -- last year I visited THE BEST PLACE IN PARIS I HAVE EVER BEEN, namely the Pet Cemetery (Cimetière des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques) at Asnières-sur-Seine. If you love animals, and you love a wander in a delightful green shady place, and you don't mind these two things being in a cemetery, then I urge you to visit when next in Paris: my post from last year is here.

{review} creepy, noir, & memoir

What have I been reading? 

Michel Faber Under the Skin (2000)

I cannot actually say anything about this book as almost anything could be a spoiler! Um, it's about Scotland, hitchhikers, and a woman with a lot of scars. The setting is contemporary. I loved it. Anything else? It is nothing like The Crimson Petal and the White. If you like well-written, creepy books with slow and horrible revelations, this is for you. (Hmm. That rather sums up The Crimson Petal as well!)

Dorothy B. Hughes The Blackbirder (1943)

A fine, albeit highly melodramatic read for noir fans. The Blackbirder is someone who smuggles people and other cargo in and out of the United States during the Second World War. If you can afford the service, the blackbirder will organize your escape – whether that be from Nazi occupied France, or from justice.

"I didn't even know there was a Blackbirder, not really. It's all been whispers, a legend, something a refugee believes in because he needs to believe in it, because he might have a desperate need for such a man some day."

"To escape a murder charge?" Schein pointed.

Her mouth hardened. "To escape Gestapo agents who somehow manage to reach this country despite the F.B.I."

Blaike's voice was quiet. "Couldn't it be they enter by such a method as blackbirding?"

This was why the F.B.I. was searching for the Blackbirder. They couldn't chance the entrance of dangerous aliens among honest refugees. Nor the escape dangerous aliens over the same route. Somehow she hadn't thought of it that way. The Blackbirder to her had been only a shadowy figure of refuge. He was still that but a sinister blackness darkened his shadow. His helping wings could be abused. She shook away the tremor.

The heroine of Hughes' gripping thriller has been in hiding in the States since her perilous escape from France. She cannot take her safety for granted, for she is connected to some very powerful and very bad people. Moreover, she has lost contact with the love of her life. Then, one night in New York, she is recognised, and must flee for her life – south to New Mexico to find the blackbirder and search for her lover. But the FBI is on her track, and it looks like the Gestapo is catching up too… 

The atmosphere of a country that may not be sanctuary it seems is brilliantly evoked by Hughes – who can you trust? If you want to read some Hughes, I suggest In a Lonely Place {REVIEW} -- one of the best books I read in 2011.

Molly Lefebure Murder on the Home Front: A true story of morgues, murderers and mystery in the Blitz (1954 [2013])

I had very high hopes for this book, hoping it might be a bit of a World War Two meets CSI with better frocks. And it is that. Molly Lefebure was a journalist in the early 1940s when she accepted a secretarial post with the not-quite-as-famous-as-Spilsbury pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. She took her type-writer and shorthand pad into the mortuaries of London and the surrounding areas to take down Dr Simpson's autopsy findings verbatim. Throughout the war she was witness to some of the most famous investigations of horrible crimes; then, in 1954 she published this book as a record of her wartime service. 

The reissue comes at an interesting time, I think – as the romanticized vision of Londoners in the Blitz is being subject to a bit of a more or less candid debunking. Yes, people were tremendously brave – but the war also allowed a lot of clandestine activity to flourish under the blackout. It was also often hard to bring criminals to justice – given the ease with which they might be shipped out or return overseas or be blown to bits before they could be charged. Lefebure's narrative is perhaps not for the squeamish, though I was more troubled by something else, namely her constant air of occupying the higher moral ground to her victims: she has little sympathy for a fifteen year good-time girl who is strangled by two US soldiers, "more a matter of sordid accident than murder". The same judgement is not applied to a fourteen year old innocent, assaulted on her way home from Sunday School. Her remarks on prostitutes (that 'ancient but abysmal profession'), the lower classes, and the poor in general are achingly snobbish ("I wondered… why the State cannot prosecute people for being dirty"). She's quite a fan of hanging. 

However, if you can swallow that as a product of its time (and as part of a journalistic love of sensation, where everything is to be regarded as 'material'), the book is a fascinating insight into the daily dangers of life in the Blitz for a professional woman. Her writing is occasionally absolutely striking – such as the shrapnel at Southend which "fell in little showers, more cruelly than the summer rain", or the corpses of babies, "like weary imitation flowers". This memoir is apparently being turned into a TV series, and I shall be fascinated to see if our heroine becomes more empathetic and less judgmental in the transition.

Oh, and some July things... I'm gearing up for my third year of Paris in July, hosted by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea. Sadly this year I won't actually be in Paris, as I was last year. But I'm prepared to make the best of it... ;-)  And HeavenAli is hosting Anita Brookner Reading Month too: I'm hoping to find a Brookner I haven't read, but, it's long been my problem that they all seem to similar (in a good way) that I can't remember what I've read... Something to work on!

{review} barbara pym reading week

‘Reading, were you?’ Rupert picked up the book which lay on the little table by the fire. It turned out to be the poems of Tennyson, bound in green morocco. Could she really have been reading that? he wondered, looking around for the novel stuffed behind a cushion.

‘Yes, but I was just going to make some coffee,’ said Ianthe. ‘Would you like some?’

How convenient women were, Rupert thought, accepting her offer, the way they were always ‘just going’ to make coffee or tea or perhaps had just roasted a joint in the oven or made a cheese soufflé. (A Suitable Attachment)

I'm very late to the (tea?) party - though I have been playing along on twitter a little - but I have been so enjoying reading everyone's posts for Barbara Pym Reading Week, the brilliant idea of Thomas at My Porch and Amanda of Fig & Thistle. However, my new computer finally arrived yesterday (the whole saga is worthy of an entry to white whine, but I shan't bore you), so I'm back in blogging action now.

But, hey, plenty of time for reading without all those distractions provided by functioning technology, and I was really pleased that I managed to read five books by Barbara Pym this week. I loved them all, although I think that Excellent Women is my favourite (so far!).

So which ones did I read?

Excellent Women (1952) as I noted: wonderful, so funny and so sharp and quietly catty. And I was so happy to see Mildred Lathbury pop up (in name) in two other of my reads, so I found out what happened to her. This was my first Barbara Pym read, and I am now hooked. I may even like her more than Anita Brookner. Oh, perhaps not, but it is close...

Which is interesting, as my second read, Quartet in Autumn (1977) was a book with really Brooknerish resonances - about people who fail to "make contact" - although also reminiscent of another magnificent book about ageing, friendship and loneliness, Muriel Spark's Memento Mori {REVIEW}. It also captured the hideous ugliness of the 1970s really well.

Of the four only Letty used the library for her own pleasure and possible edification. She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.

  

An Unsuitable Attachment (1963 - famously rejected by the publisher and not published until 1982) had a wonderful heroine in Ianthe, with her perfect little house and quiet careful life who is nevertheless prepared to take a chance on a happy ending rather than seek a safer alternative.

The man who had offered the seat had seen Ianthe as a tall fragile-looking woman in a pretty blue hat that matched her eyes. He might also have noticed that her dark hair was touched with grey and that although she was not exactly smart there was a kind of elegance about her. She saw herself perhaps as an Elizabeth Bowen heroine – for one did not openly identify oneself with Jane Austen’s heroines – and To The North was her favourite novel.

However, it was, obviously, the cat Faustina who really grabbed me in this one!

‘Yes – is that her coming now? I thought I saw somebody pass the window,’ said Sophia. Her tone was a little agitated for she had also just seen Faustina mount the refreshment table and pick her way delicately among the dishes of the cakes and savouries, sniffing the air, ready to pause and pounce when she came upon something that took her fancy.

After this I read Pym's first work, Some Tame Gazelle (1950), which was much more - like Excellent Women - obviously humorous in tone. I loved the sisters: Harriet, who likes to feed pale curates ("They were so immature and always made the same kind of conversation"), and the thoughtful Belinda who has loved the Archdeacon next door for thirty barren years.

She felt she could hardly agree that Agatha was elderly when she herself was a year older and thought of herself as only middle-aged. And yet, middle-aged or elderly, what was the difference really? Calm of mind, all passion spent … she had known that before she was thirty.

...

Belinda had decided to wear her blue chiffon. Henry had once said that he liked her in pale colours, and although that had been over thirty years ago it was possible that he still might.

The wicked one-liners in this book were quite wonderful. As a classicist, I am thinking of having this put on a t-shirt (perhaps in embroidery?): "I had a classical education and it isn’t a very good training for scintillating conversation."

‘Now, Ricardo, you mustn’t lose hope,’ said Belinda comfortably. ‘I know she is fond of you and even if she will not love you, always remember’ – her eyes lighted on the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson – ‘that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I always think those lines are such a great comfort; so many of us have loved and lost.’ She frowned: nobody wanted to be one of many, and she did not like this picture of herself, only one of a great crowd of dreary women. Perhaps Tennyson was rather hackneyed after all.

Finally, I read Jane and Prudence (1953) about two university women whose lives have taken quite different paths, while their friendship has remained true. Can Jane find Prudence a suitable husband from the unmarried men (perhaps the handsome leonine philandering widower Fabian who has a large photo of himself on his wife's grave!) in the village where she tries but always fails to live up to her (literary) expectations of the appropriate activities for a vicar's wife?

‘Yes, of course,’ Jane agreed. ‘The church is going to look very nice, I think.’

‘Oh, Mother, you always say that,’ said Flora, Mrs Glaze having left them alone together. ‘And you never really notice.’

‘No, I notice the things one shouldn’t,’ said Jane.

I quite liked how a little bit of life at the time crept into this book - rationed food, for instance. I love reading about food in books, and Pym's books certainly offered me a lot of treats (apart from liver). I felt like a nice very dry sherry quite a bit as I read too; but not, I think, a madeira:

‘This is Madeira,’ said Mervyn. ‘It seems a suitable present for a respectable unmarried lady who might be visited by the clergy.’

The 'excellent women' ("It was not the excellent women who got married...") who carried the parish / village / suburb / street along in all these books thoroughly resonated with me (over-educated spinster, perhaps even "comfortably indifferent to dress?"!).

Prudence’s flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone.

I also loved the literary allusions scattered so aptly through the texts. In addition, I was reminded that I enjoy books where nothing much seems to happen (so, my passion for Anita Brookner) and what does happen happens so quietly that it hardly creates a ripple. Of course, one doesn't want this in every book, but it is really very relaxing at times! It also amused me quite a lot that so many inhabitants of these books seemed to have jobs that no one quite knew what they were, including the employees, in a "vague cultural organisation" (J&P), or "something to do with records or filing, it was thought, nobody knew for certain" (Q in A). The ordinary, the everyday - these are the stars of these books.

I am so happy that I have the pleasure of eight more of Barbara Pym's books to enjoy in the future. Many thanks to Thomas and Amanda for creating Barbara Pym Reading Week!

Barbara Pym with cat