{review} joanna & ulysses

May Sarton Joanna and Ulysses (1963)

Not look back. For a month she was to give herself to joy, to paint, to think, to feel youth, buried so long, rising up in her like sap into the branches of a battered tree.

I think I cried almost all the way through this novella. It is beautiful - writing, themes, donkeys, everything. Joanna is a thirty year old Athenian. She has been looking after her father since she was fifteen - since that day her mother died during the German occupation of Greece, in circumstances which devastated the family. 

Joanna dreams of becoming an artist and snatches at a chance for a month to herself on the beautiful island of Santorini. She will paint and eat and sleep and discover a 'renascent self': "somewhere deep down inside her there was a being who was not the dutiful daughter she had forced herself to become."

Santorini offers an escape and a chance to be selfish about her own needs. But Joanna does not factor in discovering Ulysses, an overworked and neglected donkey, who will transform her life. This all sounds a bit Eat, Bray, Love, doesn't it? It is hard to say why it isn't, but it really is one of the most sad, lovely books I have read this year and I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

The young man slouched toward her, and spoke in an angry, whining singsong, "He might last to the top," he said, "We'll work him till he drops, and that's that. Do you think we are rich?" He spat again, "We can't afford to keep a sick animal. If he dies, all right, kaput!"

Joanna flinched before the German word. The memories of cruelty and violence swept over her, cruelty about which one could do nothing; she experienced again the corroding poison of helplessness before violence. She felt suddenly weak, as weak as the donkey. The donkey had no strength, it seemed, even to wag its tail at the flies. It waited, just barely able to stand, its head drooping a little. The patience and suffering of the donkey were awful.    

It is also SO nice to read a book where a spinster makes it to the end and things turn out happily!

If you liked this... This is the first May Sarton book that I have read, but it won't be the last by any means.

{review} swimming home

Deborah Levy Swimming Home (2011)

 

Swimming Home belongs to one of my personal favourite literary 'genres': short books set in France. I have experienced many happy instances of this, both 'authentic' - Chéri {REVIEW}, Zazie in the Metro {REVIEW}, Bonjour Tristesse, Le Silence de la Mer - or Anglophone (e.g., Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes {REVIEW}).

Swimming Home is a disturbing little book - one knows that it will never end well, but precisely how badly will things go? While I was reading, I kept thinking how familiar it all sounded: dysfunctional family holiday, adulterous father, distant mother, daughter vs. menarche, Maenadish mentally troubled interloper, hot sun, dangerous roads, poetry and loss (artistic, financial and personal).

To assemble such an overtly significant set of quasi-archetypes does run the danger of reworking cliché or rewriting tragedy-with-a-capital-T. Interestingly, I read Bonjour Tristesse just after I finished Swimming Home, which probably enhanced my sense of how familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt in the hands of an exceptional writer.

The writing of Swimming Home - the language, the repetitions, the ambiguities, the characterisation - lift it beyond the slightness these hackneyed themes might suggest. I thought it a very successful attempt. Its little tragedies do linger on in the mind. 

And it was short. Did I mention that?! ;-) Will this be the year that a short book wins the Booker?

If you liked this... there's that little French book list above. I am thinking about Vercors (aka Jean Bruller), because Le Silence de la Mer was a set text in my French class at university, and was thus the first 'real' French novel(la) I ever read. He also wrote a 'fox into lady' response to David Garnett's wonderful Lady into Fox, called Sylva. Anyone read that? 

Source

{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 turn of the screw

Henry James The Turn of the Screw (1898)

   

An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred...

Seriously, I'd forgotten the scariness contained within The Turn of the Screw and I beg you not to follow my example and reread it alone in an old dark house at night...

I keep persevering with Henry James although his sentence structure MAKES MY HEAD HURT. In an effort to work myself into a Jamesian mood, I picked up this novella again, after many years, and was reminded both why I want to persevere with James and why I find it so hard to do so.

Why I want to persevere: this novella is so spooky and most of the time you have no idea if it's because things are happening in the novella or things are happening in your head. It's a perfect mixture of obliquity of characterisation, not-quite-enough-information, and unreliable narrating, working to make the reader doubt every word on the page, then doubt herself for doubting.

Coupled with this is the classic set-up of an apparently innocent young woman sent into the country by a handsome but aloof employer to a spooky old castellated mansion to mind some freaky children (with "false little lovely eyes") with only the assistance of a seemingly loyal house-keeper. Oh, and the young woman is but the latest in a series of staff who've departed under mysterious circumstances. And there's plenty of candlelight...   

The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn't meet and measure him. I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not—I found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease—for the time, at least—to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life. I can't express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength—became the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.

Why I'm not so sure: as I would suggest is illustrated by the above passage, James' sentences are such hard work. My God, would it have killed him to shorten a clause or two?

Rating: 10/10

If you liked this... hard-core gothic, I think, rather than more James. Maybe some Poe?

   

{review} paris in july: zazie in the metro

This is a post for Paris in July, hosted by BookBath and Thyme for Tea.

 

Raymond Queneau Zazie in the Metro (1959; English tr. Barbara Wright, 1960)

There was about a twenty year gap between my becoming aware of Zazie in the Metro and my actually summoning up the courage to read it. 

 

O why o why o why did I wait? Well, my first meeting with Zazie was in a French lesson at university where a chunk was presented to see if we could make anything of it. [Answer: no.] And then - jump a few years - and I directly blame Roland Barthes for my further neglect of Zazie, thanks to his essay 'Zazie and Literature' (1959; republished in Critical Essays, 1972 [Google books link]). Zazie didn't sound much fun; indeed, Zazie sounded like hard work. But I was wrong (not unusual!) for Zazie is absolutely brilliant. (Um, at least in English.) 

The translator of anything by Raymond Queneau deserves whatever is the translator's equivalent of an Oscar combined with the Nobel Prize. This is the opening line:

Doukipudonktan, se demanda Gabriel excédé. 

(Howcanaystinksotho, wondered Gabriel, exasperated.)

The language of Zazie is filled with colloquialisms, elided strings of French words (the first word above is, thank you Wikipedia, meant to be D'où qu'il pue donc tant?) and dialectic in-jokes and, I won't lie, it is sometimes hard work to sort it out until you get into the swing and start talking like that yourself (OK, not quite...). It is well worth the effort: the book is hysterically funny and it is a wonderful celebration of Paris.

The young teenaged (anti-)heroine, Zazie, is sent to Paris to stay with her uncle Gabriel while her mother has some R&R with a lover. Gabriel's only wish is that having Zazie to stay does not interfere with his job as a cross-dressing nightclub performer (and that she does not get raped). Zazie is a foul-mouthed and far from naïve country-girl and her only wish is to travel on the métro; which is on strike. She escapes her uncle's apartment and so a whirlwind of bad language and behaviour is set loose on the inhabitants of the city as Zazie sets out to achieve her secondary ambitions of owning a pair of blue jeans ("blewgenes") and drinking Coca-Cola ("cacocalo"). There are run-ins with fake policemen, sleezy gents in raincoats, busloads of tourists, a flea-market, Gabriel's taxi-driving brother-in-law (who seeks love in the lonelihearts columns), and many unforgettable minor characters, until the grand and bloody finale with its deus ex machina surprise twist.  

Source

Zazie is an astonishing journey through a Paris where all of the landmarks take on a blurred sense of our disbelief in their very existence: are we really passing the Panthéon? We become discombobulated by the frenzy of inversions of our expectations - those of geography, architecture and the correct behaviour of young girls, elderly widows, taxi-drivers, gentle wives and proper uncles.

'How about that!' he roars, 'look!! the Panthéon!!!'

'The things you hear,' says Charles without turning around.

He was driving slowly so that the child could see the sights and improve her mind into the bargain.

'Maybe it isn't the Panthéon?' asks Gabriel.

There's something crafty about his question.

'No,' says Charles forcefully. 'No, no and no, it isn't the Panthéon.'

'Well what would it be then in your opinion?'

The craftiness of his tone becomes almost insulting to his interlocutor who, moreover, hastens to admit defeat.

'I don't really know,' says Charles.

'There. You see.'

'But it isn't the Panthéon.'

...

'And that,' he exclaims, 'that's . . .

But he's cut short by a eurequation from his brother-in-law.

'I've got it,' roars the latter. 'The thing we've just seen, twasn't the Panthéon, course it wasn't, it was the Gare de Lyon.'

'Maybe,' says Gabriel casually, 'but it's past history now...'

Zazie is unexpected and brilliant and farcical and sexy - and a must-read for lovers of Paris. Oh, and it's only really novella-sized.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... and can deal with more Queneau, I'm picking my way very slowly through his Exercises in Style in which he retells the same paragraph of narrative in umpteen different ways (e.g. Dog Latin, or in the persona of a woman; in the English translation there's even Cockney). There's an excellent review by Jenny at shelf love. Incidentally, Zazie - written on the cusp of the nouvelle vague movement - was made into a film in 1960; the heroine is cast as a much younger girl (she is firmly teenaged in the book).

 

{weekend words}

‘Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.’

Queen Elizabeth II, as imagined by

Alan Bennett (2007)

The Uncommon Reader