{review} lucia on holiday

Guy Fraser-Sampson Lucia on Holiday (2012)

 

It is a brave writer indeed who would take up the challenge of adding to E. F. Benson's canonical 'Mapp & Lucia' series. Fraser-Sampson is up to the task - tonally he carries it off exceptionally well, and the element of over-the-top mayhem is never far from the scene. It is almost as cruel as the originals. As pastiche it is excellent. Fraser-Sampson's Georgie is a particular delight, but then Georgie has always been my favourite ("He crossed his legs and shot out his cuffs perfectly at the same time, and was disappointed that nobody appeared to notice"). 

Fraser-Sampson takes Lucia at co. to an Italian lake resort on the eve of the 1929 financial collapse. There is some nice use of near-contemporary events - the thoroughly irritating Gabriele d’Annunzio is beautifully done:

Amelia had no time for any of this and was prone to interject ‘Pah!’ or ‘Balderdash!’ into other people’s statements, and she seemed to have quite decided views on Italian politics which, while Lucia knew nothing of such matters, were clearly at variance with d’Annunzio’s. She was pro-Mussolini because he had made the trains run on time. D’Annunzio was anti-Mussolini because Mussolini had tried to kill him by throwing him out of a window. When this fact had been made clear, the party gathered around the dinner table in the saloon had fallen silent, clearly weighing the pros and cons of each position, and most siding mentally with Mussolini on the grounds of justifiable homicide.

There are some wonderful scenes involving hashish and Georgie's quite unwarranted reputation as a Lothario to either sex:

Francesco brought an ashtray over to the balcony table, and leant close to place it beside him, so close that Georgie could clearly smell his perfume. He wondered if it might be one of those new French colognes, and what it might be like to wear a daring cologne himself rather than just boring old toilet water.
‘I did enjoy your recital with Miss Bracely, sir,’ his valet murmured respectfully. ‘I had no idea you were such a talented pianist in addition to your painting skills.’
‘Thank you,’ Georgie replied awkwardly into Francesco’s shirt front. He found his heart was suddenly beating more quickly, doubtless as a result of his agitation.
‘Tell me, sir,’ Francesco enquired softly. ‘You are clearly such a sensitive gentleman. Do you possess any other particular ... artistic tastes?’
This at least was an easy question to answer. ‘Why, yes,’ Georgie said brightly. ‘How clever of you to guess. Actually, do you know, I’m very fond of needlepoint.’
Francesco moved away and said, ‘Indeed, sir’ as he gently closed the French window.

Rating: Decent entertainment. I love the originals and am deeply suspicious of sequels, but Lucia fans are in quite safe hands here.

 

{review} seducers in ecuador & the heir

Vita Sackville-West Seducers in Ecuador & The Heir ([1924 & 1922] 2011)

It was in Egypt that Arthur Lomax contracted the habit which, after a pleasantly varied career, brought him finally to the scaffold.

Two lovely, classy short pieces (novellas? novelettes?) in one book: what could be better for the time-strapped reader? Simon of stuck in a book recommended The Heir, and (as usual) he's spot on. The Heir is one of those wonderful stories about the magic surrounding the discovery of finding one's right and true place. It is spectacularly snobby in one sense, in that our clerk hero ("the alien clerk from Wolverhampton, who hesitated to go downstairs to dinner because he feared there would be a servant in the room to wait upon him") is emotionally, morally and almost physically transformed by the unexpected inheritance of a Knole-like pile in the country. It is all done so tenderly though, that it is impossible to sneer.

He reconsidered even the pictures, not as the representation of meaningless ghosts, but as men and women whose blood had gone to the making of that now in his own veins. It was the land, the farms, the rick-yards, the sown, the fallow, that taught him this wisdom. He learnt it slowly, and without knowing that he learnt. He absorbed it in the company of men such as he had never previously known, and who treated him as he had never before been treated – not with deference only, which would have confused him, but with a paternal kindliness, a quiet familiarity, an acquaintance immediately linked by virtue of tradition. To them, he, the clerk of Wolverhampton, was, quite simply, Chase of Blackboys. He came to value the smile in their eyes, when they looked at him, as a caress.

This is such a beautiful story. There is little doubt that Sackville-West was ideally placed to communicate the emotional bond between (wo)man and ancestral home; the anguish of her loss of Knole (which Woolf attempted to restore to her in Orlando) is vividly communicated through the growing feelings that Chase, the heir, comes to feel for the enormous financial burden that is Blackboys, "[m]ortgaged up to the last shilling, and overrun with peacocks". It has a touch of the magic of, say, The Secret Garden, about it, but expressed with that careful Sackville-West seductive sternness of vision.

Chase stood looking at the bowl of tulips; it seemed to him that he spent his days for ever looking at something, and deriving from it that new, quiet satisfaction.

Exactly. 

 *   *   *

Procrastination and a carefully chosen pair of spectacles would make him a very giant of decision.

Seducers in Ecuador is wonderfully eccentric; a bit like one of those stories where all decisions are made by the throw of a dice, however, in this case, it is a pair of coloured sun spectacles which lead their wearer into acts irrational, illogical, matrimonial and, eventually, murderous. 

Arthur Lomax goes on a yachting holiday with three companions:

It is now time to be a little more explicit on the question of the companions of Lomax. Perhaps Miss Whitaker deserves precedence, since it was she, after all, who married Lomax. And perhaps Bellamy should come next, since it was he, after all, for whose murder Lomax was hanged. And perhaps Artivale should come third, since it was to him, after all, that Lomax bequeathed his, that is to say Bellamy’s, fortune. The practised reader will have observed by now that the element of surprise is not to be looked for in this story.

Unfortunately, as they are going to hot climes, he brings along a pair of dark spectacles which rather alter his (inner) vision and, more dangerously, his value system. What is most intriguing about this is how little obvious change his hitherto unremarkable life will undergo, yet with such remarkable consequences.

There were moments when it seemed to Lomax, even behind the black glasses, perfectly ridiculous that he should suggest marriage to Miss Whitaker. He did not even know her; but then, certainly, the idea of marriage with a woman one did not know had always appeared to him a degree less grotesque than the reverse. The only woman in his life being inaccessible, one reason for marriage with anybody else was as good as another. And what better reason than that one had found a lonely woman in tears, and had looked on her through coloured glasses?

Ouch. The writing in this little story completely swept me away. Sackville-West does astonishing tiny little set-pieces of perfect observation; little bubbles of brilliantly worded near nature morte, such as the "The little Swiss waiter in his cupboard of a bedroom saw the sweat from his forehead drip upon the floor as he pared away the corn upon his toe. He sat, unconsciously, in the attitude of the Tireur d’Epines." 

This is a sad little story, yet Seducers in Ecuador is also very funny in a manner that is both cruel yet strangely empathetic. Really, quite an astonishing read. 

Rating: both quite extraordinary. 

If you liked this: The Edwardians (excellent); Pepita (odd). Incidentally, Seducers in Ecuador is introduced by one of my writing heroines, Lisa St Aubin de Terán {on whom see here}.

 

{review} the blue train

Agatha Christie The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)

 

‘You have been to the Riviera before, Georges?’ said Poirot to his valet the following morning. George was an intensely English, rather wooden-faced individual.
‘Yes, sir. I was here two years ago when I was in the service of Lord Edward Frampton.’
‘And today,’ murmured his master, ‘you are here with Hercule Poirot. How one mounts in the world!’

This is one of those books which I first read as a teenager and which provided fuel to my dreams of travelling through Europe (um, without being murdered en route). However, when I re-read it recently (on my Kindle), I realised that I had never actually read the beginning because my ancient second-hand ex-library copy was missing the first few pages! I didn't matter to the plot, but, really, why didn't I throw it out years ago?

Anyway, The Mystery of the Blue Train contains classic Christie ingredients - wonderful settings (South of France), characters (dodgy counts, transformed dowdy companions, American tycoons), fabulous clothes (red lacquer hats, mink), coordinating luggage, a fabulous jewel with a sinister reputation and a mysterious jewel thief who will stop at nothing... And we cannot forget Hercule Poirot, fortuitously travelling on the Blue Train from London to the French Riviera. 

Source

I've always wanted a travelling jewellery case, but that would presuppose that I had any jewels, let alone was silly enough to travel with them. This would do, I suppose:

Karen Blixen's fitted Hèrmes' suitcase

I thought that The Mystery of the Blue Train was a bit cliché-laden. Apparently Christie didn't like it. Even though I knew whodunnit from previous reads, I enjoyed revisiting this period piece. I recommend it for the settings and a pretty clever plot (I always give up thinking when anyone mentions train timetables as I know I'll never figure it out) and for featuring my favourite cliché of all, the dowdy companion who comes into money and is transformed by a good dressmaker. ;-) 

...she presently went out into the streets of London with a comfortable assurance that she could spend money freely and make what plans she liked for the future.
Her first action was to visit the establishment of a famous dressmaker. A slim, elderly Frenchwoman, rather like a dreaming duchess, received her, and Katherine spoke with a certain naïveté. ‘I want, if I may, to put myself in your hands. I have been very poor all my life and know nothing about clothes, but now I have come into some money and want to look really well dressed.’
The Frenchwoman was charmed. She had an artist’s temperament, which had been soured earlier in the morning by a visit from an Argentine meat queen, who had insisted on having those models least suited to her flamboyant type of beauty. She scrutinized Katherine with keen, clever eyes. ‘Yes–yes, it will be a pleasure. Mademoiselle has a very good figure; for her the simple lines will be best. She is also très anglaise. Some people it would offend them if I said that, but Mademoiselle no. Une belle Anglaise, there is no style more delightful.’

Rating: 3/5.

If you liked this… not my favourite Christie. Try The Moving Finger or A Murder is Announced or They Came to Baghdad.

   

{review} the language of bees

Laurie R. King The Language of Bees (2009)

 

The knife hilt grew warm in my hand, then damp. I moved it briefly to my right hand to wipe my palm, then took it back, my fingers kneading it nervously.
It is such an easy thing, to become prey. Especially for a woman, for whom biology and nurture conspire to encourage a sense of victimhood. When terror sweeps through the veins, we become rabbits, cowering in a corner with our eyes closed, hoping for invisibility. And a large man with a gun is a truly terrifying thing. I regretted coming, berated myself for not bringing someone with me; stood helpless, waiting for my death to come up the stairs. Bad judgment yet again, to face a gun with nothing but a sweaty-handled throwing knife.

It's ages since I've read a book in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. Every now and then I am overcome by the pressing desire to re-read the brilliant first book in the series (The Beekeeper's Apprentice), and late last year I read the short story Beekeeping for Beginners in which Laurie R. King presents a part of The Beekeeper's Apprentice from Holmes' perspective (very interesting indeed: {REVIEW}).

 

The Language of Bees is a decent addition (the ninth) to the series. There's a nice big fat shock to get the game afoot. The puzzle - involving a sort of Aleister Crowley figure and sacrificial murder - and the symbolic trappings (the bees) weave together nicely. I always feel that King manages to make her reader feel that they have never wholly penetrated all of the symbolic mystique. I rather like authors who can pull that off without making me feel either cheated or really dumb. The Language of Bees is primarily Mary's story, with Holmes popping in and out with necessary facts here and there. A good, solid read, though I can't say it is my favourite in the series. 

It ends with the sort of ending that has already made me buy the next one - The God of the Hive - although I have one little anxiety about this... A small child appears in The Language of Bees in a minor role but with the potential for this to develop in the future. I just don't like books with annoyingly precocious kids in them - especially books where almost everyone else in there already has quite alarming amounts of precocity! - so I hope things don't develop in that direction.

   

BTW, I loved this little wink to 1920s' crime-novel lovers:

If I could not prise what I needed out of them, I should have to pass the task to a certain friend, whose title would have the staff scraping the floor in their eagerness to serve. I wanted to avoid bringing him in, if I could manage on my own -- the fewer who knew... the better, and this particular amateur sleuth would put the whole picture together in a flash.

Rating: 3/5.

If you liked this: you have to start at the beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice. It is amazing.

{review} i could never be lonely without a husband

Djuna Barnes I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes (Virago 1987)

"Well, let's stop it."
"We can't, not yet; I have at least three pages more to fill."
"Have you been making notes?"
"I don't have to. My memory always makes a paragraph out of a note automatically." ['The Confessions of Helen Westley']

This is an extraordinary book. 

I wanted to read more of Djuna Barnes' writing after I read Nightwood (1936) {REVIEW}, and I was very pleased to stumble across this Virago [the book, not Barnes!] in a second-hand bookshop. In theory, this volume collects some of Barnes' interviews with celebrities in a variety of predominantly New York magazines and newspapers from 1913 to 1931. In practice, this volume is very much about Barnes herself, by herself. I initially wondered if this impression was because I had heard of so few of these once famous people she interviewed - boxers, nightclub singers, evangelists, stage actors, Russian dancers, film producers, - and so I had only Barnes' voice to cling to in these little pieces. But, no, I think it is about Barnes in the end.

The editor of the volume suggests that Barnes almost certainly tidied up her interviewees' impressive bon-mots: "Sometimes I regret I was not a Roman. They had such a lot of time and baths." ['Diamond Jim Brady'] She also apparently didn't take many notes.

The interviews are witty (veering not infrequently into that dangerous Aristotelian region of 'wit' as 'educated insolence': thus someone has "a laugh like a submerged French pastry shop"), racy, incredibly broad in scope (ranging from the Great War to lingerie in a space of sentences) and very, very smart. She has a wonderful ear for both the absurd and the truly melancholy.

I could never be lonely without a husband, but without my trinkets, my golden gods, I could find abysmal gloom. [Lillian Russell in 'I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband, Says Lillian Russell']

Well, unless you are a master at suicide, can do it nicely without messing the furniture up or spoiling your collar, I should say no, because at some time a chance to be great comes to us all. Even if it is at the last moment, one still has a chance to change his will or say something in Latin, Latin being the language of those about to cross the river. [Irvin Cobb in 'Irvin Cobb Boasts He Is Still Just a Country Boy']

She is capable of completely subverting the form of an interview (so 'Lou Tellegen on Morals and Things' is written in the form of a play!). I would not like to be on the receiving end of a Barnes' interview: "With hands outspread in hope of collecting profit, I came into the presence of Wilson Mizner, and therein he threw the tinsel of his wit" ['Wilson Mizner - of Forty-fourth Street'; ouch]. She is occasionally openly hostile ['The Tireless Rachel Crothers'], sometimes openly jealous of others' success ['Donald Ogden Stewart Confides the Secret of Worldly Success'], and she possesses a rapier sharp eye and a dogged determination to dig in deep. How many interviewers could get away with writing that their subject "droned on" [on 'Mother' Jones in 'I'm Plain Mary Jones of the U.S.A.']! Or this:

"Really, Djuna, you are sort of clever, aren't you?"
"I am only a little less conceited than you yourself, Helen." ['The Confessions of Helen Westley']

Djuna Barnes

It often seems as though it is Barnes' own persona being crafted through these interviews as much as her subjects'. Her pronunciations tend towards the obscurely oracular (which can be irritating): "Her silences are organic bickering; when she does not speak she is profoundly articulate." [on 'Mother' Jones, again].

Someone has told me that I have a peculiar habit of noticing mouths. I have, and when I see one that does not merge into the rest of the face, I want the world to know about it, a mouth that is a personality upon a person. [in 'Alfred Stieglitz on Life and Pictures: One Must Bleed His Own Blood' {incidentally, there is a most interesting article on Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe in the NYRB here}

As contemporary documents of an era, they contain interesting material: for instance, there is the stage actor who reflects on the new world of cinema and offers thoughts on the new art as a means of conferring immortality ['John Bunny']; or the black actors of the controversial The Green Pastures Broadway hit. Many of Barnes' subjects were exiles from a Europe at war or Russia in revolution - trying to establish themselves in America away from their loved ones. Many have seen or experiences extremes of brutality. Barnes is undoubtedly attracted to survivors. There is a lot of abrasive rubbing of the old vs. the new as these exiled cosmopolitans encounter the [from their perspective] limited cultural fora of the New World. There are interviews with a couple of super-stars (from our perspective) - James Joyce (the writer of greatest importance to Barnes' style) and Coco Chanel. The book ends with a lovely Coco-ism: "Personally, nothing amuses me after twelve o'clock at night!" ['Nothing Amuses Coco Chanel After Midnight', 1931]. 

Rating: a collection of interviews more interesting because of the interviewer than the subjects! Most of the pieces also have a very free drawing by Barnes of her subject. I wish the editor had included full publication details. 7/10 (too many boxers).

If you liked this: Nightwood?! Maybe some Fitzgerald jazz age short stories?

{weekend words}

Farewell 2011...

source

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.

Anaïs Nin The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 

Volume 3: 1923-1927 (1985)

{weekend words}

Some depressing Christmas words from Thomas Hardy:

Christmas: 1924

'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it,

And pay a million priests to bring it.

After two thousand years of mass

We've got as far as poison-gas.

More on this "sour little epigram" at war poetry.

{review} the blue castle

L. M. Montgomery The Blue Castle (1926)

Valancy wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding dawn. She had not slept very well. One does not sleep well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community and connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man. 

What can I say about this lovely, lovely book that hasn't already been said? I devoured it in almost one sitting, as though it was some light but luscious, slightly sickly choux pastry creation inhaled on the footpath outside a pâtisserie. Like a Ladurée violet religeuse.

This is one of those books that you pick up in the sure knowledge that everything is going to turn out alright for the likeable heroine and her hero, despite the very long odds:

"Oh, if I could only have a house of my own—ever so poor, so tiny—but my own! But then," she added bitterly, "there is no use in yowling for the moon when you can't even get a tallow candle." 

It's like a check-list of everything one wants in an L.M.Montgomery book: fab scenery, gruesome but dainty deaths from tuberculosis as punishment for moral infringement, a secret fortune, mistaken medical diagnoses, and, oh yes, Lurv with a capital L.

Valancy is that dreadful creature, a spinster with romantic longings, living under the thumb of a bullying mother and stern gossipy community.

People like prudish "Second Cousin Sarah Taylor, with her great, pale, expressionless eyes, who was noted for the variety of her pickle recipes and for nothing else. So afraid of saying something indiscreet that she never said anything worth listening to. So proper that she blushed when she saw the advertisement picture of a corset and had put a dress on her Venus de Milo statuette which made it look 'real tasty'."

The writing is so wickedly good, which carries what is really a roll-call of (delightfully grim) clichés. For example, the line, "After all their bright hopes at the funeral!", or "'Fun!' Mrs. Frederick uttered the word as if Valancy had said she was going to have a little tuberculosis."

"I don't know what it would be like not to be afraid of something". Valancy daydreams away her sorrows by living a secret life filled with romance in the 'Blue Castle' of her imagination. She is thoroughly annoyingly spineless: "Valancy never said what she thought". Her mother is thoroughly stereotypically an evil [step]mother.

And then something happens that I'm not going to tell you and Valancy is presented with an opportunity to live large. Will she take it?

Words to drop in conversation: lambrequin.

Rating: 10/10 for sheer, gorgeous escapist romance coupled with ingenious plot and lovely writing.

If you liked this... it's got to be Anne of the Island. I don't think I ever got over Gilbert's narrow escape from death. Montgomery writes a great near-fatal illness.

BTW: I read this on the Kindle via a not wholly typo-free $4 copy on epubebookeditions.com.au. Proof-reading, folks...

{review} grand hotel

I am away for a few days, staying - as it happens (she says, so casually but gleefully!) - in a grand hotel, so here is a little something from the archives:

Vicki Baum (1929) Grand Hotel:

Ideas of conventionality were elastic in the Grand Hotel.

I find Vicki Baum's books a bit hit and miss. Some have aged badly. Once in Vienna (1943), for example: total miss (tale of narcissistic overwrought suicidal lovesick junior opera divas who take far too long to meet their Maker). Grand Hotel, though: absolute hit. An astonishing read. Why has this gone out of print in English? Of course, I may be biased by my adoration of the film (Grand Hotel: 1932, starring Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and two Barrymores), but there is no doubt that Baum brilliantly captures the Weimar 'moment' of the late 1920s.

The copy which I'm reading was translated by Basil Creighton (from Menschen im Hotel [People at a Hotel] - a much better descriptive title) and published in 1930 in London by Gregory Bles. It too suffers in places from the stifling emotional atmosphere familiar from Baum's other novels, but the story-line's relentless progress towards inescapable disaster is so compelling that this book is unputdownable.

"Will you be kind to me?" he asked softly. And as softly with her eyes cast down to the raspberry-coloured carpet, Flämmchen answered: "If it's not forced on me----."

In a cold March week in Berlin in 1929 the lives of a disparate group of painfully lonely people are changed forever during their residence in the 'Grand Hotel'. The action is contemporaneous with a pivotal moment in history, as we learn from the newspapers: "Scandals, panic on the Bourse, colossal fortunes lost"; and the shifting fortunes of the cold world outside are mirrored in the transitions underway with those inside the comfortable hotel.

Will the ageing ballerina Grusinskaya (the role stunning recreated by Greta Garbo) find peace?

The bed was turned down, and a pair of little bedroom slippers were by the bed. They were rather trodden down and shabby - the slippers of a woman who is accustomed to sleep by herself. Gaigern, as he stood by the door, felt a fleeting tenderness of pity at the sight of these little tokens of resignation on the part of a famous and beautiful woman.

*

It had come to this, she thought. She poured out a cup of tea and took a packet of veronal from the bedside table. She swallowed a tablet, drank some tea, and then took a second. She got up and began to walk rapidly to and fro across the room, four paces this way, four paces that. What is the use of it all? she thought. What is the use of living? What is there to wait for? ...With a rapid gesture she took the bottle of veronal and emptied them all into her tea...

Will the aristocratic thief Baron Gaigern make his fortune and be redeemed by love?

"He's the handsomest man I've ever seen in my life - this Baron," she added in Russian. Her voice as she said it sounded as cold as if she spoke of some object displayed for sale in a saleroom.

*

Whenever he passed through the Lounge it was as if a window of sunshine were opened in a cold room. He was a marvellous dancer, cool and yet passionate. There were always flowers in his room. He loved them and their scent. When he was alone he stroked and even licked their petals - like an animal. He was quick to follow girls in the street. Sometimes he would merely look at them with pleasure, sometimes he would speak to them, and sometimes he would go home with them or take them to a second-rate hotel. Next morning the Hall Porter would smile, when with a feline and innocent air he made his appearance in the elegant and more or less irreproachable Lounge of the Grand Hotel and asked for his key.

Will Dr Otternschlag, the hideously scarred drug-addicted doctor, the "living suicide", escape the demon that is his eternal loneliness?

No, nothing happens, nothing at all, he muttered. He had once possessed a little Persian cat, called Gurba. Ever since she forsook him for a common street tom he had been obliged to carry on his dialogues with himself.

Will Otto Kringelein, the deathly ill lowly factory book-keeper, have one good time before he dies?

It is not very nice to go to one's grave at forty-six without having lived at all and only been harassed and starved and bullied by Herr P. at the works and by the wife at home.

*

He sat on the edge of the bed and talked, not like an assistant book-keeper... but like a lover. His secretive, sensitive and timid soul crept out of its cocoon and spread its small new wings.

Will the miserly Herr Generaldirektor Preysing save his Saxonia Cotton Company but lose his soul?

He had never yet committed the least irregularity. Nevertheless, there must have been a bad spot in him somewhere, a minute nucleus of moral disease which was destined to get a hold on him and bring him low. Yes, there must, in spite of all, have been just the merest trace of some inflammation, some microscopic speck on the irreproachable purity of his moral waistcoat. . .

Will the falling angel Fraulein Flämmchen escape a fate worse than death?

"You must tell me, too, what salary you ask," he said in a flattering tone. This time it took Flämmchen even longer to reply. She had to draw up a comprehensive balance sheet. The renunciation of the incipient affair with the handsome Baron figured on it, also Preysing's ponderous fifty years, his fat and his heavy breathing. Then there were one or two little bills, requirements in the way of new underclothing, pretty shoes - the blue ones were nearly done. The small capital that would be necessary to launch her on a career in the films, in revue or elsewhere. Flämmchen made a clear and unsentimental survey of the chances the job offered her. "A thousand marks," she said. It sounded a princely amount, and she was under no illusions as to the sums that were nowadays laid at the feet of pretty girls. "Perhaps a little extra for clothes to travel in," she added... "You want me to look my best, naturally."

"You need no clothes for that. On the contrary," Preysing said with warmth.

The fish out of water, Kringelein - the poor provincial clerk in the unfamiliar rich world of the hotel and the nightlife of Berlin (yes, a bit for Isherwood fans here) - is the main focus of the narrative, much of which we see through his eyes: "...eyes in which was so much yearning expectation, wonder and curiosity. In them was hunger for life, and knowledge of death."

Yes, this is a sad book but it is a wonderful book too. Baum captures the sights, sounds and even scents (she's particularly good on the smell of things) of the transitory inhabitants of that microcosm, the Grand Hotel, and the ephemeral world outside in a Berlin where, too, no one seems to have belonged since the end of the war.

These two had come together from the ends of the world to meet for a few hours in the hotel bed of Room No. 68 where so many had slept before them...

For readers with an eye to history, this book is even more rewarding. As the Baron says, "Nowadays being in Germany is like being in clothes you've grown out of."

Rating: 8/10

If you liked this... instead of the obvious (Isherwood) try something with a feel for European journeys of the era: Ethel Lina White's The Wheel Spins (1936: made into the 1938 Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes) or Graham Greene's Stamboul Train (1932: also filmed in 1934 as Orient Express). 

{weekend words}

Not only am I currently spending a long, long weekend interstate in lovely Melbourne, but I am lucky enough to be staying at The Windsor, a wonderful old hotel in the Grand Hotel tradition. Kerry Greenwood captured the Windsor so beautifully in her first Phryne Fisher mystery, Cocaine Blues (1989), set in  Melbourne in the 1920s.

'Where we goin' first?' yelled Bert. Phryne screamed back over the noise of the labouring engine, 'First to the Queen Victoria Hospital, then to the Windsor Hotel, and we aren't in a particular hurry.'

…

'You staying at the Windsor, Miss?' asked Bert, removing his pendant cigarette and flinging it through the rattling window of the taxi. 'Toffy, are you? The time will come when the working man rises against his oppressors, and breaks the chains of Capital, and. . .'

'. . . then there won't be any more Windsor,' finished Phryne. Bert looked injured. He released the steering wheel and turned his head to remonstrate with the young capitalist.

'No miss, you don't understand,' he began, averting death with a swift twiddle of the wheel that skidded them to safety around a van. 'When the revolution comes, we'll all be staying at the Windsor.'

'It sounds like an excellent idea,' agreed Phryne.

As this publishes, I shall be having Afternoon Tea.

{weekend words}

Ashenden sighed, for the water was no longer quite so hot; he could not reach the tap with his hand nor could he turn it with his toes (as every properly regulated tap should turn) and if he got up enough to add more hot water he might just as well get out altogether. On the other hand he could not pull out the plug with his foot in order to empty the bath and so force himself to get out, nor could he find in himself the will-power to step out of it like a man. He had often heard people tell him that he possessed character and he reflected that people judge hastily in the affairs of life because they judge on insufficient evidence: they had never seen him in a hot, but diminishingly hot, bath.

W. Somerset Maugham (1928)

Ashenden, or The British Agent

I reviewed this back in July 2010.

{weekend words}

Yet must we rate him as very foolish, that living thus with a fox, which beast has the same reputation for deceitfulness, craft and cunning, in all countries, all ages, and amongst all races of mankind, he should expect this fox to be as candid and honest with him in all things as the country girl he had married.

David Garnett (1922)

Lady into Fox

If you like foxy tales, 

you should read Dylan Meconis' 

graphic story 'Outfoxed' here.