{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.

{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

{misc.} international anita brookner day

Head on over to the International Anita Brookner Day blog! 

I've written a review of Lewis Percy (here).

Here's another fan:

Roger reads Anita Brookner's Lewis Percy (July 16th 2011)

{review} lewis percy for international anita brookner day

This is a post for International Anita Brookner Day, hosted by My Porch and Savidge Reads. 

Anita Brookner Lewis Percy (1989)

The appropriately muted cover of my copy. 

Other covers include:

 

He was disgusted with himself, with his life. He was also confused. Why had it been his lot to become involved with such implacable women? He had looked to women for mercy, not for conflict. Since his earliest days he had thought of women as kindly creatures, benevolent, well-disposed. This had apparently been all wrong.

Paris. A student. An intense mother-child relationship. The London suburbs. An emotional half-life spent in libraries, taking the safest option. Ah, we say - an Anita Brookner novel. Indeed. But this one has a twist, for our quiet, timid, repressed protagonist is male. I am almost sure that I haven't encountered a Brookner with a male protagonist in the dozen or so I've read. Are there others?

It is 1959 and the twenty-two year old Lewis Percy is a graduate student working on his PhD in Paris. Lewis Percy is a self-centred only-child, raised from an early age solely by his widowed mother. He rooms in an apartment in the Avenue Kléber in Paris, in a household of women. When he's at home in suburban London, he lives with his mother. The subject of his dissertation - quietly integral to the irony and humour of Brookner's book - is heroism in the nineteenth century novel.

Lewis Percy is a novel about a man finding his feet as a man. He is offered stereotypes of masculinity: his gay best friend with an antique-dealer boyfriend (BTW, how many gay characters are there in Brookner?); his womanizing hypermasculine trend-chasing boss; the successful wealthy American academic with trophy wife (a nod - or a wink - to David Lodge here?); and, not least of all, the heroic male subjects of his research.

But Lewis Percy is also (and I suspect that I mean "really") a novel about women. Women dominate every aspect of Lewis Percy's existence and a full range of 'types' are presented to the reader: the saintly mother; the suffering virgin student flatmate from Paris; the hearty single professional girl flatmate whose answer to every problem is "Faites de la gymnastique ou faites-vous baiser" (a paler blue translation might be 'Work out or make out'); Miss Clarke at the library growing old and blowsy as she seeks a rascal to mother; the slatternly cleaning lady; the cousin's boorish wife (with her "necklace, of even smaller pearls… too modest to be anything but real" [Ouch!], "the type of wife who would collect her husband from the station, not out of her desire to see him, but so that he should not deviate on the way home to her"); the agoraphobic wife who discovers women's liberation but retains the virginal aloofness of the lady in the Unicorn Tapestry; the swinging singleton who destroys Lewis Percy's marriage ("a genuinely amoral woman, although he understood that they were not called that any more"); the daughter whom he wants to name Dorothea Brooke (a neat Brookner joke); his wife's Sphinx-like mother (a "red-lipped smouldering creature" brilliantly described as the "Messalina of the suburbs") who has given her best years - and respectability - to a man who won't reciprocate.

Brookner plays with great success with a number of her usual tropes in Lewis Percy. There were a couple of places where I was almost moved to wonder whether - heresy! - she was having a bit of a leg-pull with her own generic signifiers: the libraries; the lonely women; women's books; even the London through which her hero unwearily tramps. One specific example of this playfulness is the book's references to 'women's fiction'/'women's novels'. When Lewis Percy's book-loving mother dies, leaving him alone (and, more importantly, helpless without someone to deal with the mundane day-to-day domestic drudgeries), he revisits the library she loved and borrows the types of books she loved to read: the Elizabeth Bowens and Margaret Kennedys. The allusions to these books slip so easily from playful to denigratory:

He found himself drawn to the books his mother loved, as if reading them he could get in touch with her in a way of which she would have approved. In any event such reading seemed to him salutary. He began to think that his official reading, which involved him in grown-up theories about heroism, and nineteenth-century heroism at that, might have led him, not exactly astray, but perhaps a little too far from normal concerns.

Brookner, of course, is an heir of these women's novels, so it is somewhat amusing that her hero soon finds that "he had felt a certain distaste for all those women's novels with which he had comforted himself, and was at present immersed in The Eustace Diamonds."

Lewis Percy - the man - has two fundamental problems. First, he perceives gaining the sort of woman who would enable him to attain domestic bliss as a quest along the lines of his heroic "official reading". Perhaps as a consequence too of the "climate of femininity" in which he was raised he must, he thinks, swoop down and rescue a woman and make her his own. Only then will he be granted a reward: the losing his virginity and the gaining of a clean house.

Certainly his two earliest attractions are to women who fit a type that requires rescuing: Cynthia in Paris with her "kind of invalid sex-appeal", and the pale, repressed Tissy in his local library. When he carries his "quest" out - rescuing the agoraphobic librarian Tissy from her mother - we can already see disaster looming. He then compounds his problems by acting honourably (heroically: "faithfully but joylessly") when the enticing Emmy attempts to seduce him away from the satisfactory but colourless wife he compares to a fastidious automaton, a kind of unfulfilling Stepford Wife who leaves his dinner "on a plate in the oven, like a message in a tomb" and who regards the time spent on the book he is writing as a kind of infidelity to her own home-making.

Second, despite what he would perceive as his empathy towards and, indeed, liking for women - "a congenial and compassionate sex" - he does not in the least understand them:

It was all easier in books, he thought, especially in books written by women. They knew their feelings so well. He was more than ever unsure of his.

Again:

He was aware that he loved women in general too much to hurt them, and that his mother's stricture - 'I don't think we want to be unkind, do was, Lewis?' - would always inhibit him from the measure of decisiveness that might be conclusive. And he was also aware that to offer a woman sympathy was not always an heroic tactic. Yet what he felt for women was precisely a kind of yearning sympathy, rather than anything bolder or more straightforward.

But you can't learn everything about life from books, can you? Even if you are writing a book that champions the archetypal male hero? (Oh the lovely, lovely irony).

'You fantasize too much. You've probably read too much.'

'Yes, I have. I see that. I've had unrealistic ideas, antiquated notions. All wrong - I see that too. But were the ideas wrong? Or did I just misapply them?'

Life requires living: "Sometimes he wanted to leave the library and run for his life." What happens when you decide no longer to take the path of least resistance? As we have come to expect from a Brookner heroine hero, Lewis Percy must make a stand and be a man when the critical moment arrives. Can Lewis Percy change his life and escape the Brooknerish fate of each day being "another unmomentous day"?

(That phrase so brilliant captures the Brookner aesthetic, doesn't it? Elsewhere Lewis Percy notes, of an afternoon's tentative courtship, that "he did not see how much time had passed when so little had happened." Again, this is almost a summary of the Brookner corpus and reflects a quite self-reflexive bent in this book; indeed, Lewis Percy thrice refers to himself in terms of a character in a book).

Lewis Percy is a book about becoming a man without losing the ideals of a hero. I very much enjoyed it. I thought it offered a different way of looking at a typical Brookner character list. I found its in-jokes on its own genre quite delightful. It was also, as always, beautifully written. Brookner can sum up the entire 'class' characteristics of a room or a person with a mere handful of words. It was all quite charming in that monstrously sad Brookner way. Then again, I sometimes suspect that I would be affronted to find happiness in an Anita Brookner novel.

For what had his youth yielded, apart from a modest ambition and a mistaken confidence in women?

How do I rate it among other Anita Brookner novels? Right up there with my favourites, Hotel du Lac, A Start in Life, and Fraud.

My edition? (image at the top) I picked up my very secondhand copy at Sappho Books in Sydney when I was there on holiday in May. I was deliberately seeking an unfamiliar Brookner and can honestly say that my wildest expectations were exceeded.

{wishlist}

My Porch and Savidge Reads are hosting 

International Anita Brookner Day 

on the 16th of July 2011.

Thomas at My Porch makes the oh-so-true comment that, "her novels are so similar in theme and tone that it is a little hard for me to keep them straight. Perhaps closer readers with better recall can more easily differentiate one from the other, but I really can't." This made me laugh in recognition, as I often think "Have I read this one?" It is almost too hard to tell without re-reading. But there are a couple that I'm pretty sure I haven't read, so these are going on my wishlist for International Anita Brookner Day:

 

   

They are: 
Lewis Percy (1989);
Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995); 
Undue Influence (1999);  
The Rules of Engagement (2003);  
Leaving Home (2005); 
and Strangers (2009).

On second thoughts, I'm sure I've read Leaving Home. 
Oh dear...