Elizabeth Baines

Bookmunch reviews Five Different Stories About One Thing, and a launch date.

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:54:00 +0000

Here's another very nice review of Five Different Stories About One Thing, this time from Bookmunch. It's very complimentary about the Confingo series of collaborative mini-collections to which the book belongs, and says that FDSAOT 'maintains the high standards'. 'You can play an interesting game,' says the reviewer, working out what the 'one thing' is that links the stories (each written in a different genre): 'Violence, Family? Betrayal? Secrets? Legacy?' Well, as they indicate, it's all of these things, but for me the most important are the first and last - the legacy of violence, the way violence can have an impact down the generations, and whether or not, in subsequent generations, it can be eradicated or overcome.

And we now have a launch date. We'll be celebrating the publication at the lovely Saul Hay Gallery in Castlefield (see picture below) on 27th May at 7.30. I'll read from the book, and writer and short fiction professor Ailsa Cox will quiz me about it. It's a free event - with a glass of wine! - but you are asked to book HERE.

Obviously the book will be available to buy at the event, but you can also get it HERE.

New Publication: Five Different Stories About One Thing.

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:18:00 +0000

It's a long time since I've posted on here anything but the reports of our reading group discussions, but the publication today of my new mini collection prompts me to do so. I'm really thrilled with this little book - it's so beautifully produced by Confingo, with such wonderful care and attention. It's the seventh in a series of collaborations between writers and artists, and I'm truly delighted with the stunning full-colour artwork by Laura Scott which echoes so thoughtfully the themes and ideas of the stories.

The stories can be read as self-contained yet are linked by their characters and a past trauma shared by all of them. Each story is cast in a different genre which illustrates the particularity of the effect on each character and on his or her outlook, and the way that, while the experience connects them it also isolates them from each other. So there's a ghost story, a love story (of sorts), crime, science fiction, and a postmodern story. Read as a whole, however, their connections and implications grow. (At least, I hope they do!)

This mixed-genre idea was in fact an idea I had a long time ago, and at one point thought of using for my novel Astral Travel, but abandoned it, as the story of Astral Travel was complicated enough in itself! So what I've done here is take a similar set of characters, but apply the idea to a less complex situation.

And publication day has come with a lovely review from Jackie Law who concludes 'The stories within are just asking to be reread. This is a book I will keep'. Thank you, Jackie!

Five Different Stories About One Thing is available from Confingo Publishing.

Reading Group: Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:32:00 +0000

Warning: Plot spoil

Margeret's latest suggestion was this widely acclaimed and International Booker long-listed book set in the People's Republic of Congo in the aftermath of the Marxist-Leninist Revolution of the late 1960s. In 1970 our first-person narrator is a boy in a harsh orphanage, taking succour from the pastoral approach of the visiting priest, Papa Moupelo. It is Papa Moupelo who has given him his name, a long name in Moupelo's own language, Lingala, which means 'Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors' - inevitably shortened to Moses - which imbues Moses with a fundamental if primitive sense of mission and justice. His sense of injustice will lead him to avenge his bullied best friend, Bonaventure, with chilli pepper, which earns him the nickname 'Little Pepper' (the title of the original French edition). One day Papa Moupela fails to appear: the new, anti-religion regime has taken over the orphanage, and there is a suggestion that he may have been disappeared. The harshness increases. Eventually Moses escapes with two others for the metropolis of Pointe-Noire (leaving Bonaventure behind), where their only choice is to join a street gang of petty thieves. Eventually Moses finds a kind of peace with a house of prostitutes, and the madam finds him a job in the docks and a hut in which to live. But then, during a purge of 'Zairian whores', Moses turns up one day to find the brothel house razed to rubble and the prostitutes 'disappeared'. Distraught, Moses descends into madness, vainly consulting various doctors, eventually dressing himself as a latter-day Robin Hood and setting out with a knife to avenge his 'little adopted family'.

On the whole we found the book an interesting and mainly enjoyable read. It is written with a kind of naif yet skewering wit we all enjoyed - Moses refers to his 'kilometrically extended name' - and Ann commented on the skill of the translator, Helen Stevenson, in capturing it. However, we all found the book 'front-heavy', as I think Clare put it. It is divided into two Parts of equal length. Part 1 deals with the time in the orphanage, covering in some detail the few years of Moses' early adolescence and the fascist idiocies of the regime. The pace is consequently measured, and in fact Doug said he found the section repetitive. It ends with Moses's escape. Part 2 opens when Moses has already been in the street gang for three years, and goes on to cover the years right into his middle age, its narrative sweep thus pacier and more eventful. There seems no real narratorial significance in the initial leap, and the absence of any portrayal of Moses's arrival in the city and his adjustment to life there seemed to all of us a lack after the detailed treatment in Part 1. In fact, as Doug pointed out, Moses's escape at the end of Part 1 seems rushed and inadequately explained, as if the writer was just impatient to get on with the street scenes, and it is perhaps telling that most reviews give the impression that the more eventful Part 2 constitutes the main bulk of the book.

Doug said that although Moses's mix of childish, sometimes clumsy, yet insightful vocabulary is amusing, there are sentiments and a political understanding expressed in Part 1 that wouldn't in fact have been available to a young boy, and which smacked of the author's own voice and perspective. Others agreed. I thought this could be excused to some extent by the fact that, as we discover at the end, the whole thing is a memoir written by Moses in a penitentiary for the criminally insane, and the problem perhaps was that there was no indication of this at the start to make us read the book in that context.

At the end of the book, Moses is back where he started: the penitentiary is built on the sight of the orphanage, and Bonaventure is still there (using a different name, rather than that of the father who abandoned him), still obsessed with the planes flying over and expecting one some day to take him away. That, as someone pointed out, should make for a very sad book - and on one level it does - but there is a feel of survival in the lively prose of this fictional memoir, and of course the very act of writing it constitutes for Moses a triumph.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:58:00 +0000

This book which has sold millions of copies worldwide was suggested by John as, I think, something of a provocation, since our group is deeply suspicious of hype, and several people in our group had consequently avoided reading it. Once it was suggested, however, everyone decided that we should give it objective attention and read it.

It is the first-person narration of Frances, who relates how, one summer when she and her female fellow student and ex-partner Bobbi are performing their poetry together in Dublin, they meet an older couple, the reasonably well-known and glamorous photographer Melissa and her actor husband Nick. Frances embarks on an affair with Nick, and the novel charts the push-me-pull-you course of their relationship, and the effects of it on their relationships with the other two.

Reactions to the book in the group were interesting. All but one of us who had read it found it a fairly quick, indeed compulsive read, with a smooth prose that pushes things along at pace. Margaret liked the book unequivocally, but she was the only one to do so. Clare said she did enjoy it as she read it (others, including me, agreed) but when she got to the end she questioned whether it had amounted to very much in terms of substance and theme. Others had substantial criticisms, and Ann said she really hated the book and wouldn't have finished it had it not been for our impending discussion.

What Ann said she hated was the characters - she really disliked every one of them - and much of the discussion centred on the character of the protagonist and narrator Frances. It was generally agreed that Frances was a very damaged character - self-consciousness and vulnerability seem to be what characterise her, and she self harms, pinching herself and even cutting a hole in her leg as a way of dealing emotionally with situations. However, people pointed out that this is simply laid out for the reader and never really addressed on any deep psychological level: there is no real indication of why she should be like this, apart perhaps from the fact that her father is alcoholic, with one possible hint that she and her mother had needed sometimes to avoid her father. Introducing the book, John had said that he found it interesting for Frances's masochism. At one point, when they are in bed together, Frances asks Nick to hit her, although he refuses. Clare pointed out that that's a known pattern, that abuse in childhood can lead to masochism, but none of us felt that the book made any conscious or satisfactory connection between these things.

I said that I thought a curious thing about Frances's character was that although she seemed so vulnerable much of the time, there was in fact a certain arrogance about her, although everyone else in the group was surprised at this idea. It is Frances, after all, who first makes a move on Nick, kissing him at a party with his wife nearby, and there is surely an arrogance about the fact that when she sends off her first short story after being introduced to an editor, she doesn't even bother reading through the draft before doing so (and of course it's immediately accepted.) As a result, a lot of her self-consciousness - the constant care about what impression she is making on people, what she should wear etc - seemed to me to tip over into self-obsession. When she and Bobbi are first invited to Melissa's house, as they travel with her in the taxi, Frances's thoughts are for herself rather than their new acquaintance:

I felt excited, ready for the challenge of visiting a stranger's home, already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions to make myself seem charming.

There's a lot of obsession with how beautiful and interesting Melissa keeps making Frances look in her photographs, however surprised Frances purports to be by this, constant stress on what she (or Nick) is wearing at each pivotal moment, and when Melissa's sponsor-publisher visits while the four are staying in her French house, her only interest for Frances, and, more importantly, for the novel, is how much attention she pays Frances (none, until she finds she is a writer). I have read quotes from reviews that call this novel funny, and I assume those reviewers were taking the characters' self-obsession as ironically intended, but our group had read it all as deadly serious. As the novel develops, Frances suffers severe and debilitating period pain which turns out to be caused by endometriosis, which can in no way be seen as ironically intended, but which seems to me to be the novel over-egging, indeed over-dramatising her vulnerability, since it is not integrated in any deep way with theme or even in fact plot.

Doug said, to the agreement of others, that in fact you never get to know the characters, they are cyphers. The novel is titled Conversations With Friends, but Doug said 'What conversations?' The title may be ironically intended since there is a lot not said between the characters and consequent unknowing, but it is problematic that there is little in the way of character-revealing dialogue between the characters. So little, too, is actually described, so that there is not much sense of atmosphere, and Doug and others said that as a result they just couldn't engage. Ann said she hated the way the novel simply named areas of Dublin without giving any indication of what they were like, which meant that if you didn't know them, which she didn't, you couldn't envisage them or know their atmosphere.

People said that they didn't know what the novel was supposed to be about. I said that my main problem with it is that I think a political point is intended which is not in fact fulfilled. Bobbi and Frances espouse leftwing politics, and I feel it's meant to be politically significant that Frances is relatively poor while the other characters are not: it's a fundamental part of her vulnerability. But the plot, such as it is, does nothing to promote the politics, indeed it undermines them, as it is focussed without critique on the retrograde scenario of a woman masochistically in thrall to a man. (It is true that Nick, it will turn out, has deep emotional problems of his own, but again these are not addressed.) Another problem for me, and others, was that the novel is lacking a narrative arc. Throughout, the relationship between Frances and Nick waxes and wanes and waxes once again, and there is never a sense of denouement or revelation. Everyone agreed that they thought they had got to the end of the novel at a point when the relationship finally seems over (and when we could perhaps draw a conclusion about the meaning of it all), only for the final scene to upend this, and for the last words of the novel to be Frances's phone request to a clearly compliant Nick: 'Come and get me'.

Margeret protested against our negativity, saying that the book was beautifully written. Mark, our ex-member back on a visit, pointed out that being beautifully written on the sentence level is not enough for a novel, that there are many other elements, such as structure, theme etc, that need to be successful, and Doug added, and yes, it needs to convince. Margaret laughed and said that she was convinced and she was engaged by the characters.

However, Ann asked why on earth the novel has been so very popular and successful, and others suggested that perhaps it appealed to a younger demographic than ourselves. I did wonder afterwards if it is the very self-obsession of the characters that had endeared them to a generation of TikTokers obsessed with lifestyle and image.

Finally, John noted the book's debt to Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (which we discussed here), another novel about two young girls, an introspective narrator and her more outgoing friend, in which the narrator becomes involved with a married man - and which Ann said roundly was the far superior book.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut.

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:38:00 +0000

I suggested this novel which takes the form of the confession of Howard W Campbell Jr, who is awaiting trial in an Israeli prison after the Second World War. His war crime has been to have made broadcasts in Germany for the Nazi regime, whipping up vicious hatred towards Jews. In fact, however, Campbell was an American agent, and his broadcasts contained coded messages for the Americans. His problem now is that this was so secret that there is no one to come forward and vouch for him and save him. The US government 'neither confirms or denies I was an agent of theirs.' Resigned to his fate, he writes his memoir-confession. Here he describes how, as an entirely apolitical playwright of German-American origin living in Germany, whose plays are enthusiastically patronised by the Nazis, he is approached on a park bench and recruited by an agent, Frank Wirtanen (whom the American government now denies ever served in any of their branches). Witanen suggests that he uses his Nazi connections to gain a position of influence in the regime. What follows is a tale of double-dealings, in which Nazis can turn out to be undercover Jews, a wife can turn out to have been replaced by an imposter who can then turn out to be a Russian agent, and a post-war leader of a right-wing cult with rabid hatred for Jews, Catholics and Black people can blindly recruit members from those very groups, all prefaced by a section in which Campbell describes his Israeli prison guards, some of whom turn out to be ex-Nazis.

All of this is told in Vonnegut's own wry, wise voice, rendering the deadly tragedy via black comedy. Introducing the book, I said that I consider it brilliant. I love Vonnegut's voice and the book's concern with moral ambiguity and its message that fascism does not die, which makes it very relevant to today. Everyone agreed. Ann said she thought that the fact that the book is blackly comic - thus engaging the reader - made the book particularly powerful and its message all the more chilling, and again we all agreed.

There was quite a lot of discussion of Campbell's attitudes. I said I thought that the book was a condemnation of apoliticism and political unawareness, and a warning of their dangers. It is Campbell's apoliticism which allows him to be recruited in the way he is (and for which he was probably recruited): he says he did it simply because he thought of himself as a 'ham', an actor. But there are terrible consequences: in bleakly comic and tragic scenes, Campbell discovers that people took up the racist suggestions in his broadcasts. Someone in the group noted the connection with Bolano's By Night in Chile, which we read recently, in which the protagonist blinds himself to the political atrocities around him.

While much of the novel operates as dark comedy, there are moments of deadly serious authorial passion, such as this vivid depiction of the totalitarian mind:

...a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random... The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined... The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases ... The wilful filing off of gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information ...

That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference towards slave women and love for a blue vase -

That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -

A stunning book, we all agreed, and went on to discuss our own political situation, which only goes to prove its contemporary relevance.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:11:00 +0000

Doug suggested this lively and linguistically inventive novel set in late nineteenth-century Montana and featuring two reprobate but disarming protagonists who run off together, pursued by a hired gang: Irish poet Tom Rourke, doper and drunk with existential yearnings, and Polly Gillespie, hard-bitten ex-prostitute and newly arrived wife of a mining company captain. Told in Barry's signature insightful prose - lyrical yet earthy and often comic - it traces their progress through the Montana forests and the dead of winter on their stolen horse and with their ill-gotten money, and charts their love for each other.

Clare and others said that they found the opening a little difficult. The author brilliantly employs the technique of free indirect discourse, slipping fluidly between a narrative voice and perspective and those of a character, with often a mix of the two within a sentence. At the start the prose adopts the baroque poeticism of Tom as, not yet having met Polly, he wanders the 'stations of the cross' - ie the bars along the main street of the mining town of Butte - wondering depressively if he will end up 'old and mad and forgotten on the mountain': 'He was appalled at the charismatic light '; 'He walked as charity. He walked under Libra.' However, the moment Polly appears with her new husband in the photography studio where Tom works as an assistant, things take an earthier, more ironic turn. Clare picked out as an example this sentence describing Polly, chiefly from Tom's point of view, but with a sly authorial injection: 'Eyes of wren's egg blue and one inclined to say hello to the other but not unattractively'. Soon after, we are inside the cynical, demotic verbal world of Polly as we learn how, herself purporting to be something she wasn't, she has unwittingly married a self-flagellating religious fanatic. Ironically, indeed hilariously, it is a situation in which Tom has had a huge hand, since, as a literate man, he provides a service for other, illiterate immigrants, writing for them disingenuously romantic and courteous offers of marriage, with misrepresentative promises of a comfortable life. From this point on, we all agreed, the novel is a compelling read, and most of us read it in two sittings.

To begin with, we didn't really have a lot to say about it apart from the fact that we had liked it so much, how brilliant we thought the narrative voice, and how, in spite of Tom's criminality and Polly's hardness, Barry makes us understand and care for them, and want them to escape and succeed in the end. I said I wasn't too sure that the novel was about very much more than love - that existential connection which the pair have, and which for Tom is the only thing worth living for, and for which he would be happy to die. Doug said he did think that was exactly what it was about, and no one demurred.

Ann, however, had said very little up to this moment, and now she said that she was obviously going to be the dissenting voice about the book: she hadn't been taken by it at all. Very surprised, we asked her why. She said that perhaps it was because she read so many Westerns when she was a teenager, but she felt it was cliched - the whole scenario of outlaws with hearts of gold on the run and coming across various quirky others on their travels.

We thought about this. Clearly, the distinctive prose sets the novel apart from others, but it occurred to me also that Barry was consciously using a well-known template (in which, as Ann herself pointed out, there's always a hero, and always a happy ending) and subverting it. The real interest of this book, unlike that of the traditional Western, is psychological, concentrating on Tom's existential longings and fears and Polly's more realistic though no less moving grasp on the world, and the telepathic emotional connection between them. Clare added that, in contrast with the heroic mode of traditional Westerns, the novel exposes the hardship for immigrants in such late-nineteenth-century mining towns - the cultural barrenness, the sense of scraping a living, the drugs, and above all the violence. Someone noted that there is no sense in the novel of the presence of Native Americans, but we felt that that was probably historically correct - they would have been long driven from such places.

All in all, a novel the group generally very much enjoyed.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 14:43:00 +0000

Clare suggested this novella narrated by Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who has also been a literary critic and poet. It is a deathbed confession, or more accurately an attempt at self-justification, as he recounts a compromised life in which he blinded himself to political atrocities going on around him by burying himself in literature - most notably Ancient Greek literature - and finally allowing himself to be seconded in service to the fascist Pinochet regime. Like Bolano's novella Distant Star, which we also read, it is deeply concerned with the role and place of literature in society and politics. While Distant Star depicts the way that art and literature can be used by fascist regimes and can itself be fascist, By Night in Chile is concerned with how literature - even leftwing literature - can be used by individuals as a smokescreen to hide from the reality of politics.

As a young newly ordained priest and aspiring literary critic, Sebastian is taken under the wing of the famous Chilean critic with the pseudonym Farewell and introduced to the leftwing poet and socialist politician, Pablo Neruda. Farewell, however, is conservative in nature and his literary interests apolitical, a landowner who is devastated when the socialist leader Allende is elected, and pleased at the return of his land after Pinochet seizes power. The young Sebastian, also conservative in nature and unsuited to the priesthood into which he has somehow drifted, flounders amid these conflicting influences, in awe of Neruda's greatness yet repulsed by the working people he encounters on Farewell's estate. Self-centred and inward-looking, he is no less lacking in insight or intellectual independence as his reputation as a literary critic grows, and, as the tale of his complicity with the fascist regime develops, his deathbed musings become more and more disingenuously self-justifying. 'A week later we would be back there again,' he says of the literary soirees held by the wife of a man who will turn out to have been a murderous agent of the secret police, adding quickly: 'By we I mean the group. I didn't go every week. I put in an appearance ... once month. Or even less often.'

Throughout the confession he has referred to a 'wizened youth', a figure who has dogged him from a certain distance through his life, challenging and judging him, and is now here beside him, and who is clearly his conscience or the shrivelled moral potential of his own youth.

Clare said she was very glad to have suggested and read this book. She commented on the fact that it reads almost as if it's written in one sentence - a stream-of consciousness outpouring lacking in paragraphs or pauses to mark shifts between events, with nested stories and disquisitions. Both Doug and John said they found tedious these apparent diversions, with which the first half of the book is heavily weighted, and which in fact are intended either to illustrate the impotence of art and literature or to show how Sebastian is sidetracking himself from important, contemporary issues. Margaret said she was finding the same, until she went back and read again from the beginning, after which she admired the book greatly. She noted, to my agreement, that these 'diversions', while deadly serious in intent, are at times wryly funny - such as Sebastian's tour of the churches of Europe where the bishops have taken up the elite and brutal sport of falconry (symbolic of fascism), to stop the pigeons - symbolic of the Holy Spirit, and perhaps of the congregations - from despoiling the church buildings, or this passage indicating Sebastian's retreat from the world after Allende is elected:

When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics... I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba... and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episode of the soap opera The Right to Be Born was broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochus of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stechoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreaon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favourites)...

I said that I had started reading the book in short bouts on train journeys, which didn't really work for a book that is basically one desperate exhalation. Initially therefore I too had had much the same reaction as John and Doug. But then I too started again and read it all in one session, and found that the book worked and, indeed in the end gripped me. Most of us felt that we would have got more out of the book had we been more familiar with the political background, and both Margeret and Doug felt excluded by not knowing the Chilean writers Sebastian refers to. I said that I felt it wasn't actually necessary to know about the poets, many of them obscure, the point being that, like the above list of Ancient Greeks, the lists of Chilean poets are part of Sebastian's smokescreen against other, pressing political issues, and indeed his own moral culpability.

Margeret noted that there is a very old-fashioned feel to the world of the book, and it was sometimes hard to remember that it takes place in the mid-late twentieth century. I agreed, saying that I was sometimes brought up short by a contemporary reference, such as that to the soap opera above, and see this as an indication of Sebastian's atavistic retreat from the world.

Ann said that we ought to pay tribute to the translator, Chris Andrews, and we all agreed. I commented that the translation brilliantly captures the way the prose will sometimes suddenly drop, in a way that feels authentic, from the somewhat formal, sometimes high-faluting style of Sebastian's self-justifications to the deflating demotic of dialogue, and everyone agreed.

Finally, someone asked, so what was the message of the book? If it was a plea for left-wing literature, as I suggested, there was nothing in the book to indicate any possibility for its power in society. After all, as happened in life, the leftwing poet Neruda dies, and while (in life) it is suspected that he was poisoned by the regime, both Farewell and Sebastian choose to believe the official line hat he dies of the cancer for which he was being treated. And finally, the 'wizened youth', who has always challenged Sebastian, is defeated:

The wizened youth has been quiet for a long time now. He has given up railing against me and writers generally. Is there a solution? That is how literature is made, that is how the great works of Western literature are made. You better get used to it, I tell him. The wizened youth, or what is left of him, moves his lips, pouting an inaudible no. The power of my thought has stopped him. Or maybe it was history. An individual is no match for history. The wizened youth has always been alone, and I have always been on history's side.

A depressing message, we all agreed.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: The Trees by Percival Everett

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:49:00 +0000

This is going to be a short post, as I don't want to plot spoil.

Ann had recently read this genre-defying book and had been unable to put it down, and very much wanted to discuss it with us all. Taking its title from the Lewis Allan/Billy Holiday song, 'Strange Fruit', it is based on a startling idea. In the small racist town of Money, Mississippi, brutal and mystifying murders are taking place. Beside each mutilated (White) victim is found what seems to be the corpse of a young Black man, Emmett Till, lynched sixty-five years earlier by the white racists of the town. Each time, the Black corpse somehow disappears into thin air from the grip of the local law enforcement, only to appear again at the next murder. Two Black detectives are sent from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to uncover the mystery, and what ensues is a pell-mell tale of knockabout verbal comedy and aching tragedy, as the seams of prejudice and brutal racism still existing to this day are revealed.

Like Ann, we all found it a breathless, gripping read. Part subverted detective story, part comedy, part supernatural thriller, it had us all in thrall as we read it. I said Everett's ability to deal with such searingly painful material with such a light touch was breathtaking, and everyone agreed. In a politically dynamic move, Everett, a Black writer, begins the novel with the racist family who will turn out to be at the heart of the history involved, and with a light, comic touch conveys not only their brutality but their humanity - in particular that of the women - which contributes to the poignancy of the underlying tragedy of racism. In short, snappy sections, the novel bats between the different parties involved as the murders go on: the family, the local law enforcement, the cynical bantering detectives from the MBI (who constitute a kind of send-up of the familiar tropes of the detective novel), and others who get involved - the local Klu Klux Klan, a local Black woman who is seen as a witch, her mixed-race waitressing granddaughter and the young White professor the granddaughter calls in to help, and the higher investigation officers who are eventually put on the case. Everett has a superb ear for dialogue, and all the characters are vivid and relatably human - apart perhaps from Mama Z, the so-called witch, who remains inscrutable to both the characters and the readers, and will be central to the outcome.

It is not really possible to report our detailed discussion, as it centred on points that would reveal the plot. Suffice to say that Doug was perhaps the most picky about the book. He said he found the depiction of the White racists a bit stereotyped, and when I said how great, and funny, I had found the meeting of the local Klu Klux Klan in which they try to pick up their lapsed game in the light of the murders, only to fall apart in incompetence and stupidity, he commented that he had found its stress on incompetent bureaucracy a bit cliched. I don't think any of the rest of us at all felt the same. I have to say that I was disappointed in the ending (John has since said he was, too), but won't say why as I don't want to spoil. It is true that once we got into a deep discussion we felt there were things about the plot that didn't make sense - or at least, that we didn't get - but in the end it didn't really matter, as this was a book intended to crash through the genres and blow traditional expectations into the air, and was so very engaging.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: The Waves by Virginia Woolf

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 10:51:00 +0000

This was the one book by Virginia Woolf that Margeret, who loved her work, had not read. Introducing it to the group, she joked that having now read it, she wondered what she had done in suggesting it, and everyone else - including former member Mark on a return visit - immediately said yes, they had found it extremely difficult to read. John had read only a few pages before giving up altogether and Mark hadn't read very much of the book at all. (It is recorded that on reading the newly completed manuscript, Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband, said that it was the best thing she had written, but that he doubted that many people would be able to read it.)

Famous as a key Modernist text, the whole book consists of a series of soliloquies by six people (apparently loosely based on members of the literary-artistic Bloomsbury Group to which Woolf belonged), made first when they are children, three girls and three boys playing in the garden of a boarding prep school by the sea, and then throughout their lives as they go their separate ways into late middle age, meeting up periodically. The sequential phases of these lives are prefaced by italicised descriptions of the phases of the sun from sunrise to sunset, light and shadow falling variously upon the garden and house in which the children first play. There is no plot apart from this progression: the major events of the characters' lives happen offstage; the substance of the book is their contemplations about themselves, each other and life, and indeed their own psyches, and the narrative development is the evolution of those psyches. The most significant offstage event, ie the most consequential for the group, is the death in India of the apparently charismatic Percival, a friend who was important to all six, and with whom the character Neville has always been in love. The key theme is identity, and the difficulty for most of the characters of retaining a sense of a single identity. As Bernard says towards the end of the book:

I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am - Jimmy, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.
For this is not one life; nor do I always know that I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda...

Bernard (apparently loosely based on the novelist E M Forster) is the storyteller of the group, the 'phrase maker'. Here at the end of the book he tries to tell the story of his life to someone he has met by chance, but ends up pondering the difficulty of representing reality, the uncertainty of language, and indeed the uncertainty of reality itself:

But how to describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red - even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe anything in articulate words again?
Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.
I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the reality here and now.

Doug said that there were beautiful sentences, but he couldn't get to grips with the book at all, and found it sentimental. Ann, a social historian, said that the one thing she liked about the book was the insight into the daily lives of that artistic upper-class set of people in the early twentieth century, but she said it as if in amelioration, and in fact she had failed to finish the book. Everyone agreed with her about this, but felt it was little consolation. The most critical, even damning, was Clare, who found the attitudes unforgivably snobbish, even prejudiced. She pointed to the moment when one of the male characters complains about the irritation, the disruption to his peace of mind, of the existence of the 'shop girls' in the street, and there are other less negative but certainly patronising references to the 'little shopkeepers'. I had very much the same reaction to this as did Clare. Margeret, who was staunchly defending the book against the rest of us, said, 'But the book was of its time!', an argument that has been used before in the group but can usually be demolished by reference to other, contemporary authors.

When the boys are at public school their soliloquies are objectionable in their (educated) developing sense of importance and social status, and the prose is very inflated. However, I pointed out that when the novel then moves on to the girls at their finishing school, the characters are more sympathetic and the prose less overblown, which contrast makes for criticism of patriarchy on the part of Woolf. In addition, although there is a certain contempt among the other characters for Louis, whose father is 'only' a banker, Woolf allows us, through Louis' soliloquies, to see the damaging effect on him. Percival, the person who has been so significant for all six of the characters, is a supreme example of the patriarchal male of Empire, admired by the boys when they are at school for his obvious militaristic and ruling future. We noted that there is no criticism of Percival, or of what he stands for, in any of the soliloquies; however, the author serves him an ironically ignominious death in the India he has been sent to help rule: he dies 'in the dirt' falling from his horse, rather than on any glorious battlefield as envisaged by the boys when they are young.

Margeret jumped on the difference in authorial treatment of the two sets of children/adults, and said, 'Yes, of course, Woolf was a feminist, she wrote A Room of One's Own!' Clare replied that it's very possible, even common, to hold radical views in one area (in this case sexual politics) and to have a blind spot in another area (in this case class prejudice). Some of the characters consciously struggle with their own prejudice, most notably Bernard with his novelistic interest in other people and things going on around him, but there is indeed an overall sense of other people as somehow threatening or contaminant to the sensitive souls of these six people. After Percival's death, as she walks along Oxford Street, Rhoda, the character closest to Woolf herself (and who commits suicide, prefiguring Woolf's own) is plunged into a sense of humanity as ugly and alien, a sense she embraces but which however reveals a certain prejudice:

...faces and faces, served out like soup-plates by scullions [note that word 'scullions']; coarse, greedy, casual, looking in at shop-windows with pendent parcels; ogling, brushing, destroying everything, leaving even our love impure, touched by their dirty fingers. [Note the 'our', with its Us and Them implication.]

I said that I would always make a point of not judging upper-class characters in novels simply for being upper class, but this novel was solipsistic - in the characters' obsession with themselves and their own psyches - to an extent that only the privileged can afford to be, so that it seemed like an upper-class indulgence. Ann pointed out that (unlike Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway) this novel makes no reference to the First World War, which ought to have affected the characters' lives, and this increases the novel's solipsism. (In fact, the First World War was a great catalyst for the Modernist movement of which the experimental form of this novel is an example.)

A big complaint right from the beginning of our discussion was that for a long time - indeed for most of the novel - you could not tell the characters apart, as they all speak in the same voice. Everyone said that they'd had to keep looking back to remember which character was supposed to be speaking. Even when the characters are children they speak in the same adult voice - abstract, Latinate and metaphorical. (Prep-schoolboy Neville decides to make a 'survey of the purlieus of the house' and declares 'the ripple of my life was unavailing'.) John said that this was one reason he gave up on the book so soon, and he could see that the rest of the book was the same. Ann said that she thought the novel would be improved by being read aloud by actors - this would distinguish the voices; but as Clare said, I think rightly, that would completely belie the nature of the novel: the whole point, as Bernard spells out, is that the characters are 'fuzzy', their identities in question and blending one into the other.

Unlike Doug, I didn't find the novel 'sentimental', more overinflated in its prose, and I found some of the sentences tortuous rather than beautiful. There is a tendency to pile one metaphor on top of another, and for the metaphors to be over-literal or over-elaborate to the point of clumsiness or distraction from the situation:

The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors, like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep.

What exactly are the turbans meant to represent (the crests of the waves, I suppose, though it's a bit of a stretch), or the poisoned assegais, or, especially, the white sheep? This slippage from reality through and out of metaphor and into fanciful imagination and away from the original focus, seemed to me a little unhinged. John now commented that the early single-sentence soliloquies of the children had reminded him of nothing more than the patients he had observed as a psychologist, stressed professional men who sat around a table making things from cardboard boxes and speaking in the same kind of disjointed sentences without referring to each other. Ann then wondered if this whole novel was indeed an expression of Woolf's problems with mental health. Margeret said strongly that that hardly mattered, she liked the result. And it is certainly true that whatever mental state powered this book, it resulted in a strikingly original form and in striking insights into the existential problems of identity and reality.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Wildlife by Richard Ford

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 14:21:00 +0000

Some time ago we read Richard Ford's The Sportswriter and I was surprised to find it, along with most of our group, fairly tedious and even in some ways objectionable. My surprise stemmed from the fact that I had previously read Ford's Wildlife and had liked it very much, so much that it had inspired one of my short stories.*

Wildlife is the story of an autumn in Great Falls, Montana when sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson's life with his parents is turned upside down. Wildfires rage in the mountains around the town; Joe's father, a golf pro who has lost his job, decides on impulse and without apparent consultation with his wife, to go off and help fight the fires, and while he is gone Joe's mother falls in love with another man. The story is told by Joe himself, a first person retrospective narration.

This time around (many years after my first reading) I found myself altogether less satisfied with the book, though some in the group who were new to it - notably Margeret and Clare - had the same reaction as my earlier one. They loved the depiction of sixteen-year-old Joe's confusion about what was happening, which is indeed psychologically very real - largely due, I think, to Joe's authentic, somewhat demotic voice (which is what inspired me) (and which may indicate that the stuffy, sexist voice of The Sportswriter we all disliked was after all a similar, if dubiously successful, act of ventriloquism on the part of the author).

However, quite a lot of the discussion circled around interpretations of the characters. People asked: what exactly was Joe's father's motive in taking off for the hills and the fires? Towards the end he appears to indicate a midlife crisis, but was that all? What had been going on in the parents' marriage? And what exactly was Joe's mother's motivation in involving Joe in her affair, sometimes in what seems a bullying way, sometimes pathetically? And what did she see in her lover, Warren Miller, who seems an especially unattractive man? It was hard to get a grip on those things. Margeret and Clare said, Well, we can't know because Joe doesn't know, that's exactly the point: we are inside his confused head. The fact is, however, that people were left wanting to know. Clare pointed to the film of the book, which makes things clearer, but others countered that such interpolations by a scriptwriter and/or director would of course be necessary for a film, and the fact remains that they are interpolations of things absent from the book.

I pointed out, to strong agreement from Anne and John, that, taking account of the overall structure of the novel, it's not exactly true that we are simply inside the teenage Joe's head. The book opens (and ends) with a much later, retrospective, adult viewpoint:

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom...

This sets one up to expect a more adult insight into the story and the characters - and maybe a more ironic or detached view of Joe's confusion - than is provided by the shift, as the story gets going properly, to his contemporary unknowing perspective.

At the end, the adult Joe states in a final sentence: 'God knows there is still much to it that I myself, their only son, cannot fully claim to understand.' It seems to me that this is an acceptable statement for a memoir, but not for a conventional fiction (which this is), where we require a certain insight and resolution of meaning or significance - unless the narrator is being ironised by the author, but that is not the case here: there's a close identification of narrator and author.

John commented that one result of this lack of authorial detachment is that we never see Joe from the outside or through the eyes of any of the other characters, so in fact it's quite hard to get a grip on him as a rounded character. He also seems strangely to have no friends, or much life beyond the hermetic setting of the family, though of course he was at school. Such elisions and omissions are more suitable to short stories, and John thought that this general lack of roundedness made the book an inflated short story rather than a novel. Wildlife is indeed a short book, and in fact Ford had previously written a short story, 'Optimists', about a similar situation also set in Great Falls and also featuring a family called Brinson.

Anne also pointed to what seems like a mismanagement of time. We get the impression that Joe's father is away at the fire for some time, indeed weeks, but after he returns we discover that he's only been away a day or so. We are also given the impression, through Joe's teenage perspective, that after the denouement, his mother goes away and leaves him with his father for a long time - the impression created is for years. It comes as a surprise when, as the prose moves back to the retrospective viewpoint, we are told that 'at the end of March, in 1961' - ie, only six months later - 'my mother came back from wherever she had been.' It's perhaps acceptable, as Clare I think said, that the troubled boy should have experienced the period in this distorted way, but the shift from the contemporary teenage viewpoint back to the retrospective adult one, occurs, like the shift at the beginning, subtly, so subtly that this seemed like an inconsistency. But perhaps it is this subtlety that made Clare and Margeret declare that they had hardly noticed that narrative frame, and were simply happy to share Joe's teenage experience.

* The story I wrote after first reading Wildlife is 'Holding Hands' which is included in my collection Balancing on the Edge of the World.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 17:57:00 +0000

This very short Argentinian novel, suggested by Doug, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. We were all immediately attracted to its compellingly intriguing style. It is narrated by a woman, Amanda, partly as internal monologue but chiefly, and ostensibly, to a young boy, David, sitting beside her as she lies in a hospital bed and urging her to remember and understand how she got into this position. She is physically uncomfortable, she can't see, and in fact we will soon discover that she is dying.

The tale that unfolds is one of the fatal combination of toxic pollution and traditional superstition, and of maternal anxiety. Holidaying with her young daughter Nina in a rural farming area, Amanda becomes friendly with the local Carla, David's mother. Carla immediately confides in Amanda her alienation from her own nine-year-old son David, on whom she doted when he was a baby and toddler. The change dates from an incident six years before, when she was meant to be keeping an eye on a stallion on loan to her horse-breeder husband. The stallion gets free, and she finds it drinking from a stream. The toddler David has followed, and she turns to see him sucking the hands he has dipped in the water. By next morning the horse is dead and David is very ill, clearly dying. In desperation Carla takes him to the local traditional medicine woman. He is saved, but the medicine woman tells her that the only thing making that possible is what she calls a 'migration' - an exchange of David's soul with an unknown other in which the poison would be 'split' and therefore weakened and 'lose the battle'. The body that is saved no longer houses David. From this point on Carla has been unable to think of David as anything but a 'monster'. Although Amanda expresses scepticism, she is also spooked. As soon as Carla has finished her story, she feels the need to check on Nina who is playing with David. With respect to Nina she has always had a sense of what she calls 'the rescue distance' - the distance she knows she can let her stray while still being confident of keeping her safe. But now that sense is disrupted. David comes to seem like a potential threat to Nina, and this comes to overshadow the real, environmental threat to both Nina and Amanda herself. It is only through the apparent present-time prompting of David that Amanda will come to clearly understand everything that has happened.

We were all very struck by this book, but some of us liked it more than others. Its structure is complex, and, despite having found its style so compelling, people in the group generally found the beginning disorientating or difficult. The book begins with a somewhat cryptic dialogue between Amanda and David: 'They're like worms./What kind of worms?/Like worms, all over./ It's the boy who's talking, murmuring into my ear. I am the one asking the questions.' (I'm not sure I ever resolved what the worms were exactly: a sensation in the poisoned body, the connections that make everything clear about what happened, or both?). And the present-time situation is only just established when we are launched into a narration-within-a-narration, as Carla relates to Amanda what happened to the toddler David. Margeret said she never got to grips with the book at all, and, if I remember correctly, Ann said she felt the same until she read it a second time, after which I think she was impressed. Its greatest admirer was Clare, who had also seen the film and was very clear about its message of traditional superstition clouding the simpler and in fact more horrifying reality of toxic pollution. This book, written by an author who was growing up just as there was an explosion of pesticide use in her native Argentina, has been described as 'uncanny', but we were clear that its intention was in fact to undermine the tendency to see things as uncanny and to show how that can divert one's attention from the dangers of reality, and so can be in itself dangerous.

There was some discussion about whether David is in fact really there at the hospital bed, especially as he seems more mature than a nine-year-old boy. In fact, all of David's speeches are qualified by being italicised, and it's clear that Amanda is in fact hallucinating him as a way of working things out in her dying moments, as indeed she finally hallucinates what will happen after she dies. I said I thought that if there was one flaw, it was that it's so clear to the reader early on that Amanda has been poisoned, that some of the tension around her own route towards the understanding of it is reduced.

All in all (apart from Margeret), the group found the book very clever and very moving.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:27:00 +0000

Clare suggested this 2024 Booker winner, and we were all very interested to read it for its unusual and extremely topical subject matter. Set on the International Space Station, it follows its sixteen orbits of the earth over a twenty-four hour period, each time moving a little more to its west. There is no plot beyond that orbital progression, but detailed descriptions of the conditions inside the craft and the day-to-day work and experience of the crew, and of the stunning views through the windows of the earth and of space, and meditations on the implications for the earth and for humanity.

There was much that impressed us - the descriptions of earth are beautiful, and the contemplations of its fate extremely moving, but several members of the group immediately questioned, as other commentators have done, if this is really a novel. There is no dramatic action. Astronauts are of course famously chosen for their coolness of mind and equable temperaments within a team. These astronauts know, for instance, that their bodies are atrophying in microgravity, and that the cells of their hearts are ageing fast, but they are sanguine about it; the Russian cosmonaut Roman picks up on his radio a woman on earth who asks him if he ever feels crestfallen or sad up there, and he finds the idea 'absurd'; within the first pages the Japanese astronaut Chie learns that her mother has died, but, neither she nor the others display any emotional reaction until, towards the end, when she speaks of her mother, the Russian Anton cries, but he and Chie have the presence of mind to catch his floating tears, since 'they're not allowed to let liquids loose in here'. The closest any of them comes to an emotion like existential fear is when one of them recalls the death of the astronauts on Challenger, and Shaun, the American, thinks 'for a split second', '...what the hell am I doing here, in a tin can in a vacuum? Four inches of titanium away from death'. But then: 'The thoughts run into a wall and expire.' John said that he'd at first decided that there was thus a lack of psychology, but had then realised that what was being portrayed was a group psychology. This was interesting, but led to a lack of conflict, which is of course the essence of dramatic action. As a result of this lack of affect and conflict, there is nothing to propel the kind of story arc we expect from a novel; instead, the book follows in shape the repetitive circular movement of the space station's orbit as the continents and seas appear again and the dawns and dusks follow fast on each others' heels. The question arises whether this is therefore a fit subject for a novel after all, and Ann said she thought it was more of a 'meditation' than a novel.

I did point out that the word 'novel' describes the adaptability and mutability of the form, so who were we to say what a novel should be? However, Ann said that even taking it just as a piece of writing she wasn't sure that she really admired the book, finding it pretentious. It hadn't struck me like that, and I found some of the passages both politically stunning and deeply moving. At one point the narrative charts the astronauts' changing attitudes to the view of the earth. Initially they are entranced by the view at night, when lights show up the evidence and pattern of human existence. But then they become taken by the daytime view, when all evidence of humanity seems bleached away, and the fundamental beauty of the 'blue marble' of the earth itself is revealed. Finally, however, they come to see the effect of human behaviour on the planet:

One day they look at the earth and they see the truth...they come to see that [politics] is a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought, from here, so human-proof.
Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic... Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier...every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every oil spill...the altered colour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed metre by metre and turned int land to house more and more people, or the altered contour a coastline where land is reclaimed metre by metre by the sea the doesn't car that there are more and more people in need of land...
...They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more...
...The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

(Meanwhile, they are tasked to photograph from their vantage point the biggest typhoon ever recorded, which is amassing over the Pacific and moving towards Malaysia and the Philippines.)

I was completely undone by the above passage and I said I thought that it alone was probably worth the book's Booker win. All of the group were impressed by the beauty of the descriptions of the earth and of the dawns and sunsets.

As they reverse south the colours change, the browns lighter, the palette less sombre, a range of greens from the dark of mountainsides to the emerald of river plains to the teal of the sea.The rich purplish green of the vast Nile Delta. Brown becomes peach becomes plum. Africa beneath them in its abstract batik.The Nile is a spillage of royal-blue ink.

However, while appreciating them, Clare found them repetitive, I think, and on the whole she said she found the book boring and felt that, although it's short, it could have been half its length and she found it hard to read - it was either Ann or Clare who said it had felt like wading through mud. One thing that really irritated Clare were the lists which the narrative frequently slips into, in particular the long list of things in a description of the development of life on earth, which culminates in this random way:

...industrialisation, fascism...crowdfunding...FloJo...Einsten...Bob Dylan...pizza...flying...dark matter, jeans...

and so on for a whole page.

Doug really admired the descriptions of earth and space and some of the the meditations, but on the whole he agreed with all the criticisms.

Margaret said when she first read the book she had felt exactly the same as Clare - bored - but then she read it again and liked it a lot. She had really enjoyed learning about space and the conditions on the space station, and she disagreed that there was no drama, feeling that the drama of the situation, and of earth itself was enough.

At which point we began to think about other Booker winners we had discussed and failed to appreciate as much as the judges...

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 11:44:00 +0000

The recent death of Edna O'Brien prompted Ann to suggest this, O'Brien's first novel - and the first in a trilogy of novels about Caithleen Brady and her friend Baba (Bridget) Brennan - which caused a storm on its publication in 1960 and was banned in her native Ireland. (The trilogy, which charts their progress from their time as schoolgirls in rural Ireland to life as young women in London, is now published in one volume under the title of this first novel, The Country Girls). We spent much of our meeting discussing the reasons for the book's dramatic reception.

The book is the first-person narration of the introspective Caithleen, and begins when she is fourteen, on a summer day that will be turn out, although she doesn't yet know it, to be her last day at the village school, and 'the last day of her childhood'. She wakes to find that, once again, her feckless and violent father has failed to return home (from a no doubt drunken spree) to the farm he is letting go to ruin, and to his long-suffering wife and daughter. At school Caithleen discovers that she has won a scholarship to a convent boarding school - Baba, her close though self-centred (and sometimes even vindictive) friend will be going there too as a paying pupil. After school, when she and Baba are wandering in the village, the grocer informs Caithleen that her mother has gone on a trip, a clearly unusual event, and as a result she must go to stay with Baba's family. That evening, while she is attending a play in the village with them, news comes that Caithleen's mother (escaping with a lover, it will turn out) has drowned. After this, Caithleen lives with the Brennans for the rest of the summer, before the girls leave for the convent, and afterwards during the holidays until the two girls eventually leave for Dublin. It is during this first summer that the fourteen-year-old Caithleen first becomes involved with a married man who lives in the big house and whom the villagers call Mr Gentleman.

This last was of course scandalous enough for the Ireland of the time (indeed, even for England at the time), but as our member Ann said, the real offence of the book was its implicit critique of the Catholic Church and its hold over Irish society. The weight of its repressive dominance and the sense of stifled lives are evident in all of the vividly portrayed scenes: the oppression and dissatisfaction of the women; the repressed male sexuality that finds its escape in what we would now see as paedophilic behaviour towards young girls (Caithleen and Baba spend a great deal of time dodging kisses from older men); above all, the harsh atmosphere and treatment in the convent - against all of which the feisty Baba is compelled to rebel, with Caithleen on her coattails. Someone, I think Ann, commented that it is probably hard, from our present-day perspective, to appreciate quite the impact this book must have had at the time.

I said though that, having read the book many years ago, this time it struck me as more harrowing. I think perhaps when I was very young, closer to Caithleen's age and to the time it depicts, I took more for granted the social and religious mores it portrays. I had indeed found the book uplifting: the prose is lively - economical and witty - and the story moves along at a fast past (everyone agreed with that), and I simply rejoiced in the girls' rebellion (and was all behind Caithleen in her romantic love for Mr Gentleman). This time around however, I was deeply struck by the tragedy of it all, and, in the first part especially, moved to tears by the atmosphere of longing and loss, however shot through it is by Caithleen's moments of ecstasy and Baba's hijinks. Here's Caithleen leaving for school on that first morning and looking back at her mother for what will turn out to be the last time:

She was waving. In her brown dress she looked sad; the farther I went, the sadder she looked. Like a sparrow in the snow, brown and anxious and lonesome. It was hard to think that she got married one sunny morning in a lace dress and a floppy buttercup hat, and her eyes were moist with pleasure when now they were watery with tears.

John said he was really struck by the fact that nowadays the general behaviour of men in the book, which goes unremarked in the community, and in particular, Mr Gentleman's relationship with Caithleen, would be regarded as paedophilic, and that this, in one way, makes the book particularly shocking from a present-day perspective.

We had gone a long way into the evening discussing the social significance of the book when I noted that we hadn't at all critiqued it as a novel. None of us four women, it turned out, had anything critical to say about this apart from the fact that we had loved the lively prose, the vividness and the way the story moves along at pace. The two men did have a slight criticism: John and Doug both felt that there was a gap in the middle of the novel. The beginning of the girls' stay at the convent is narrated in detail and told with the book's characteristic lively dramatic action. On the first night in the dormitory, Caithleen brings out a cake she has brought, but a nun enters:

"What is the meaning of this?"she asked...
"We were lonely, Sister," I said.
"You are not alone in your loneliness. Loneliness is not an excuse for disobedience"...
"What is this?" she asked, picking up one of the cups.
"A tea service, Sister. I brought it because my mother died."...
"Sentimental childish conduct," she said. She lifted the outside layer of her black habit and shaped it into a basket. Then she put the tea service in there and carried it off.

The rest of the time at school however is passed over, and, with only a fairly brief mention that in the holidays Caithleen takes secret boat trips with Mr Gentleman, the narrative fast-forwards to the day, three years later, that Baba engineers their expulsion in order to escape. Both John and Doug found this leap forward unsatisfying. The rest of us, four women, hadn't found it unsatisfying at all. Ann (who had been to boarding school) found it realistic - the first days at boarding school are seared on your mind, she said, but the rest of the time passes in a blur - and I protested that it's a perfectly acceptable novelistic convention - one of artistic selection - to pass over periods when not much happens that would be relevant to the theme or plot. But, countered Doug, he consequently found the change in Caithleen hard to take. We were taken aback by this, as we hadn't found Caithleen significantly changed beyond the kind of maturing you would expect in the three years of a girl's development. Margaret said that in fact she hadn't found her changed at all: she was still the tentative yet privately critical sidekick to Baba's exploits, and still as in thrall to Mr Gentleman.

John said that although the book has a very autobiographical feel (so that one is tempted to identify narrator Caithleen with the author), he didn't find it all that realistic that two such different girls would be such close friends. The rest of us had no problem with this - two girls of the same age in such a small place, their families connected, would be bound to gravitate together whatever their differences. However, it's true that I had read that O'Brien had once been questioned about this, and had replied that the two girls represented the two sides of herself, Baba being the side repressed by her Irish Catholic upbringing - which is itself a comment on the repressive power of the Catholic Church.

I think we all enjoyed this book and certainly appreciated the significance of its place in the canon. Ann said that having read it she could see its influence on Irish writers we had read previously, including Ann Enright and (perhaps especially, I thought: the grocery store scenes in Brooklyn seem like a development of those in The Country Girls) Colm Tobin.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Giovanni's Room

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:11:00 +0000

This book was the departing suggestion of Mark, who has been a member of the group since its inception twenty-two years ago but has now left to move abroad. In the event he left earlier than he had anticipated, so wasn't present at the discussion, but the email he sent implied that he hadn't liked the book too much, or at least that he had found it very gloomy.

The rest of us did find the book bleak, but our reactions were not entirely negative. Published in 1956 and set in late forties/early fifties Paris, it is the first person narration of David, a young white American. The book opens as he stands at the window looking out into the dark and blaming himself for being 'too various to be trusted', which has led to the situation in which his fiancee, Hella, is on her way back to America, the relationship over, and 'Giovanni ... about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine'.

His thoughts then take us back through the events that led to this situation. They begin with an innocent childhood sexual encounter with another boy, over which David, stifled by the values of a macho heterosexual father, is later crippled with shame. What follows is the story of David's denial of his homosexuality, and the tragedy for those with whom he becomes involved. In Paris he asks Hella to marry him, yet, while vowing heterosexuality, in return for drinks and money he is providing company for an older homosexual, Jacques, in his visits to homosexual night clubs. It is here, while Hella is in Spain deciding whether or not to accept his offer of marriage, he meets Giovanni, a handsome young Italian barman; he is immediately attracted, and the two very quickly become involved. Short of money and kicked out of his lodgings, David goes to stay in Giovanni's room which is symbolically stifling - small and dark with the window whited out to keep out the stares of passers by, the bed overlooked by the Victorian heterosexual couple on the wallpaper, one wall half demolished by Giovanni's unfinished/unsuccessful attempts at reconstruction. Due to the jealousy of the proprietor, Guillaume, Giovanni is fired from the bar. He is devastated and it becomes clear that he is entirely emotionally dependent on David, who privately intends to leave him, as Hella is due back from Spain. This is precisely what David does, and tragedy ensues.

The main thing that struck us all was the searing self-disgust running through this book. David is disgusted by his own homosexuality, and both he and Giovanni are repelled by the 'disgusting old fairies', Jacques and Guillaume, to whom they are yet in thrall, depending on them as they do for money. They are horrified at the notion that one day they will turn into those older men, seeking the attentions of younger men who will view them with the same distaste and cynicism, and by the end of the book David is resigned to that fate. It was clear to us that though a book conveying these sentiments would now be considered politically incorrect, it is a searingly truthful depiction of how it must have been in an age when homosexuality was so underground, so unacceptable to mainstream society, and indeed against the law. David's disgust however extends to the transsexuals that frequent the bar, whom he clearly sees as 'other': '[the] grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people's stomachs.' This did shock some of us, and perhaps it was this, along with David's self-confessed inability ultimately to love either Hella or Giovanni, that made Ann say she didn't actually like David, finding him self-centred, and others agreed. However, new member Margaret (Mark's replacement) strongly said she totally felt for David all the way, and indeed she loved the book.

The book does feel extremely autobiographical, yet takes an objective view of David's failings, which is perhaps unusual (and maybe creates cognitive dissonance), but is searingly honest. One thing I noted was that, in spite of his inability to love or truly give himself to others, David is however very good - perhaps almost too novelistically good - at understanding the thought processes and emotions of others. I was in great admiration of this, though wondered how psychologically realistic it was, and as John and others said, it does give rise to a great deal of introspection which forms the chief substance of the book, and which some found wearing. John said he found the book suddenly perked up in the scene in which David gives up the keys to the landlady of the house he and Hella rented together and which he is now leaving: there is dialogue and true dramatic action.

Some people wondered at a black author, James Baldwin, making his protagonist white. Ann and I had both read that Baldwin said that he did not want to confuse the issue of homosexuality with race. Someone said they didn't think it mattered, since the whole stress was on homosexuality. However, Ann pointed out that in the fifties someone like Giovanni would have been considered black, and it is his exoticism for the homosexual men around him on which his tragedy pivots.

All agreed that the depiction of the fifties Paris underworld was wonderfully vivid, yet the overall effect was summed up in the one written word of Doug (who had been unable to attend): bleak.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 17:11:00 +0000

Spoiler warning (for those who don't yet know the plot of this very famous book).

One day I caught a snippet of a Radio 4 programme in which Daphne du Maurier was being discussed, and the general thread of the discussion was that, although her books, in particular Rebecca, are thought of as romantic novels, they are in fact much more interesting and complex. I had read Rebecca as a teenager (and, though I have no real memory of it, I think I must have seen at least one of the many film adaptations), and I had indeed remembered it as a somewhat literary romance. So my interest was piqued, and when I mentioned it to the reading group theirs was too, and we decided to read it again.

The plot is of course well known: a young ingenue, unnamed in the narrative, marries the handsome but troubled and somewhat taciturn Max de Winter, the owner of Manderley, a Cornish ancestral home, whose previous wife was drowned while sailing in the bay next to which the house stands. Entering the house as its new mistress, she is a fish out of water, unable to command the servants, and easy prey for the housekeeper Mrs Danvers who is obsessively, if not pathologically, loyal to the memory of her beautiful previous mistress, Rebecca. That was as much as I had remembered. As for the outcome, all I remembered was that somehow all is well in the end, the evil influence of Mrs Danvers and the troubling ghost of Rebecca finally vanquished.

What I had somehow forgotten - or rather, overlooked, as on this second reading it started to come back to me, though vaguely enough to keep me reading to find out what happens - was that it will turn out in the course of events that Maxim, as our protagonist calls him, in fact shot Rebecca before sailing her body out in her boat and scuttling it. This is a startling thing to have forgotten, and I was interested to try and understand why I did.

The first thing I said in the meeting was that this time around I had found it a very strange book, with ambiguities and inconsistencies, and there were strong murmurs of agreement. The most obvious thing I had noted was that the book is pretty derivative in its basic tropes: the relationship between the protagonist and Maxim echoes that of Jane Eyre and Rochester, and both books conclude with a fire that destroys the ancestral home, started in the case of Jane Eyre by the first wife incarcerated in the attic, and in Rebecca by, it is suspected, the previous wife's proxy Mrs Danvers. In both books, there is a reversal in the central relationship, the female ingenue becoming the stronger and the carer of a physically or psychologically damaged man. There are also echoes of Henry James' Turn of the Screw in the sense of menace and haunting surrounding the housekeeper and the dead Rebecca, and of course of the Bluebeard story. What is distinctive about the book is its darkness - a darkness I had not remembered, and which certainly makes the book anything but a romance - and, as Ann pointed out, a kind of hysterical note that runs right through it.

I was also surprised to find the book quite morally dubious (and a bit shocked at my not having found it so before), and others in the group strongly agreed. Right from the start on this reading I found Maxim quite preposterous in his entitlement and sexism (in a way that I, as a teenager growing up in a culture where sexism was less questioned, presumably didn't), and his relationship with the protagonist ridiculous. (Everyone agreed, and I have to say that when John read the book I had to watch him laughing his way through it.) 'I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool,' Maxim says to the protagonist, and after indicating that she understands nothing about him (as she will eventually find out), goes on: 'You haven't answered my question. Are you going to marry me?' Ann couldn't see what he could see in her: she has nothing about her, her lack of a name seeming to underline the fact. People suggested that she was for him an antidote to the glamorous Rebecca, whom he will much later tell the protagonist was a secretly callous serial adulterer, in contrast to her public profile as a perfect wife. Someone in the group, Mark or John, cynically pointed out that when he proposes to the protagonist, suggesting she immediately leave her role as a companion and factotum to a wealthy American woman, he says, 'Your duties [to me] will be almost exactly the same'. The thing I found most deeply shocking was that when Maxim is forced (by events following a shipwreck in the bay) to confess to the protagonist that he shot Rebecca and sank her boat, her only reactions are terror that the truth will be uncovered and sheer relief that it turns out that he hadn't loved Rebecca:

[I] sat there on the carpet, unmoved and detached, thinking and caring for one thing only, repeating a phrase over and over again, 'He did not love Rebecca, he did not love Rebecca...' My heart, for all its anxiety and doubt, was light and free. I knew then that I was no longer afraid of Rebecca... Now that I knew her to be evil and vicious and rotten I did not hate her any more.

She will go on to be Maxim's willing accomplice in covering up the killing.

Later, Jack Favell, an old lover of Rebecca's who is onto the truth, tries to blackmail Maxim by threatening to expose him, and Maxim calls in the local magistrate, a colonel and dinner-party companion. The colonel is inclined to doubt Favell, who, though he has acknowledged good looks, the protagonist sees with revulsion in these moments as 'animal'-like ('I noticed how his neck bulged over the back of his collar and how low his ears were set on his head.') (She sees anyone standing in the way of her own comfort with contemptuous revulsion: Mrs Danvers' face is like a skull). On this reading the scenario struck me (as it does Favell) as nothing less than a bunch of prejudiced toffs closing ranks to subvert the law. And when it is discovered that in fact, just prior to her death, Rebecca had been diagnosed with terminal cancer (a fact she had told no one), Maxim decides that Rebecca wanted him to kill her, which of course gets him nicely off the moral hook. I guess as a teenager I swallowed this hook, line and sinker. As long as you are gunning for Maxim and the protagonist (and as a teenager I was), it diminishes the moral weight of the killing, which must be why it sank away in my consciousness.

Yet all of us in the group, even John, while agreeing about these things, found the book a compelling read, exerting a deep emotive pull.

The story is narrated by the protagonist herself some time after the final events of the novel, when the narrator and Maxim have 'come through' their 'crisis', and when she herself, she tells us, is now at last 'bold' and 'confident', with Maxim emotionally dependent on her. Since our discussion I have read feminist critical commentary pointing out that, as the narrator, the protagonist presents things as she wishes us to see them, and that the fact that she avoids revealing her name - something our reading group did find puzzling - means that she is in hiding from the reader: she is not intended as a reliable narrator. In the group discussion I mentioned the inconsistencies I had found in the book. After I had got to the end, I went back and re-read that first section with its later perspective. The narrator refers twice there to 'our Manderley' and to 'our drive', implying a past and lasting attachment to it, which surprised me, as during the whole of the retrospective narrative the protagonist never feels at home or at ease at Manderley. She also refers to her memories of 'the mists of autumn and the smell of the flood tide' at Manderely, yet in the retrospective narrative she is at Manderley only in the summer months: she arrives with the flowering of the rhododendrons (the menacing scarlet rhododendrons she associated with Rebecca) and in August Manderley is in flames and she and Max never return. Are these slips intended by du Maurier as signals that we are in the hands of an unreliable narrator? They are, though, hard to catch, and the inconsistency can only be detected by reading back after finishing the book. They felt to me, and the group, more like authorial errors. There is a greater inconsistency around the character of Rebecca. We learn that she ran the house beautifully, ensconced in the mornings in her beautifully curated morning room from where she would send back to Mrs Danvers the menu for the day, and was a famed hostess, holding memorable dinners and parties - all implying a hands-on approach that would require Rebecca's constant presence in the household. Yet when Maxim reveals the truth about her, it turns out that she has spent much time in a flat she keeps in London, and Jack Favell even refers to her having 'lived' with him for some of the time. And isn't it odd that she was able to keep so secret a life of such debauchery, with so many lovers? So is the narrator lying, painting a picture of Rebecca that suits her own ends? Rebecca was 'evil and vicious and rotten' she says, and the 'discovery' is her own liberation.

It is known that du Maurier intended the novel as a study of jealousy (and wasn't happy with its reputation as a romance). It has been suggested therefore by feminist critics that the narrator's portrait of her own former self as a nervous and naive ingenue is a smoke-screen. In fact, states one critic, when she meets Maxim in Monte Carlo, she practises a fairly hard-headed deceit as she makes her clandestine meetings with him. In the light of this theory the narrator's explicit insistence about her former timidity does read suspiciously as over-insistence, but I can't say that I noticed this as I read, or that I detected any other authorial irony or distance between narrator and author that would make one read those early scenes in that way, and I think no one in our group did. As a nervous teenager myself reading the book I totally identified with the protagonist in those scenes, and it still seems to me a searingly truthful portrait of the kind of excruciating timidity that would indeed force one into deceit rather than self-assertion. Indeed, Doug said how truthful he found the portrayal of her nervousness and inadequacy when she arrives at a house full of servants. It is true that it is hard to see what the protagonist saw in Maxim, other than a safety net away from her lonely, boring life, and the fact that since childhood she had been in love with the idea of the famous Manderley - and of course there are Maxim's good looks. But her attitude to marrying him seems less that of a scheming or self-directed character than the result of superficiality (falling in love with his good looks) and the inevitable weakness of a woman trapped in a class-bound sexist society. Ann said that even as a teenager she had despised the protagonist as a wimp, and I don't think she felt that the older narrator was deliberately misrepresenting her former self. One thing the protagonist does all the time in the retrospective narrative is create scenarios in her head - about what other people might be saying to each other or doing, or might in the future - and goes over scenes again already narrated. This does indicate that she is a dreamer and a story-weaver, but none of us got the idea from it that she is actually a liar, one who would deliberately misrepresent, and most people were simply a little irritated by these musings, feeling they held up the action.

There is one early scene that does bear out du Maurier's stated intention, though I have seen this only in retrospect. Up to now we have seen the protagonist as a tentative girl, and afterwards, when she gets to Manderley her abiding state of mind will appear to be fear, fear of Rebecca's influence and the malign presence of Mrs Danvers. But waiting in her hotel room while Maxim goes to tell her employer that she is to leave to marry him, she opens a poetry book he has lent her, and finds on the title page the inscription 'Max from Rebecca.' She cuts out the page and tears it into fragments and then sets fire to them. This is at a time when she knows nothing of Rebecca, and long before she encounters Mrs Danvers and the house in which Danvers keeps Rebecca's memory alive. In other words, the protagonist's 'fear' of Rebecca arises from within herself rather than as a reaction to an external malign force, and is indeed the manifestation of jealousy - unfounded jealousy. However, at the time of our discussion our group found the scene puzzling, as the action seemed so uncharacteristic of the person portrayed both before and after the scene. And when, after Maxim's confession, the other side of her is finally revealed, it comes as a surprise, or even as inconsistency, rather than feeling inevitable. 'I knew I didn't hate her any more,' she says when she learns that, after all, Maxim didn't love Rebecca. So the shrinking violet has been capable of hatred (not just fear) all along, but in the moment of reading this, that 'hatred' felt more like an overstatement because of the way she had previously been presented, without any hint of authorial irony.

Right at the end of the book, asleep in the car as she and Maxim drive back from the interview with the doctor which has confirmed that Rebecca was terminally ill (rather than pregnant by Jack Favell, taking the steam out of his blackmail threat and finally releasing them), the protagonist dreams this:

I was writing letters in the morning room [which Rebecca apparently did every day]. I was sending out invitations. I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long and slanting, with curious pointed strokes [ie Rebecca's]... I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting on a chair before the dressing-table in her bedroom, and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted like a snake, and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at Rebecca and put it round his neck.

During our meeting, Ann brought up the popular idea that Rebecca and the protagonist represent two sides of du Maurier herself. Like Rebecca, du Maurier was a free spirit who sailed boats and rode horses and seduced several men (and as a girl wished she had been a boy), and like the protagonist she was ill at ease as a wife (of a Commanding Officer) and unable to run their household. The passage above is loaded with an ambiguity that supports this theory. 'Rebecca had not won. She had lost,' the protagonist has said, on learning that Max did not love Rebecca after all. Yet the image in the mirror laughs with narrowed eyes, as if laughing in triumph at the protagonist. Has she won after all? The protagonist's reaction on waking seems to indicate so: she panics, saying that they must at once flee to Switzerland, as if feeling the need still to flee from Rebecca. Yet the image in the mirror, and the handwriting, are a replacement of the protagonist's own. Has the protagonist become Rebecca? Is there a merging of the two? Is this the way in which Rebecca has won? After all, the protagonist has come to be able to command the household - she has found she can even speak coldly and peremptorily to Mrs Danvers. She is capable, in becoming Maxim's accomplice, of even worse deceit: 'I would lie, and perjure, and swear. I would blaspheme and pray.' By the time she and Maxim have exiled themselves to Europe, Maxim will be as much in her control as he has said he was in Rebecca's - '...he will look lost and puzzled suddenly' - which seems symbolised in the rope of hair around his neck.

There is huge ambiguity too in the first section describing their after-life in Europe. They have come through their crisis, the narrator tells us, they are at peace now, 'I ride no more tormented, and both of us are free.' But there are constant qualifiers: '[we are] not unscathed, of course'; 'of course we have our moments of depression', 'we are sometimes bored - well, boredom is a pleasing antidote to fear.' And they seem truly exiled: they feel the need to avoid the hotels where people they know will be staying, and they appear to be living a difficult life, moving from one small hotel to another. 'Granted that our little hotel is dull, and the food indifferent, and that day after day dawns very much the same, yet we would not have it otherwise.' She talks of freedom yet she can only dream of the English landscape she longs for, and must not speak of it in case she upsets Maxim. She is, in other words, repressed.

'Odd, that resentment of servants, and their obvious impatience,' she says in this first section, thinking back to how it was at Manderley. When I first read this sentence this time, it struck me as outrageous (and alienating), and it was one of the things John laughed at (how could you not understand the resentment of servants?). But it did seem an odd statement itself, unfounded and without context. Only once I had read the whole book and gone back to look at that beginning, did I understand that this is an indication of the protagonist's change, an outrageous one, yes, since she herself has been a servant, to the American woman she was working for when she met Maxim. Yet it still didn't feel quite right, because the change in her during the story never felt quite convincing to me, due to a lack of authorial irony or distance in the earlier presentation. It is as if in the presentation of the earlier scenes the author herself is identifying with the protagonist, which in turn leads the reader to identify too with her and her Cinderella rags-to-riches situation. This I think is perhaps why the book has been taken as a romance rather than the darker project du Maurier intended (and which it is). My overall feeling, I said to the group, was that the book was indeed very much an expression, through those two characters, of the author's own psyche, written primarily intuitively (rather than with entire objective control) - and that it is from this that comes that compelling (and even, as Ann said, hysterical) emotive pulse - and everyone pretty much agreed.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 10:59:00 +0000

Clare suggested this translation by Jo Heinrich of a short, episodic and autobiographical German novel set in the east Berlin suburb of Marzahn, a large prefabricated high-rise housing estate of the former GDR. Narrated by a woman who took up chiropody when her writing career was failing, it is chiefly an observation of her mainly elderly clients and her co-workers, and a re-telling of their various stories, and amounts to a tribute to the place and its community.

Introducing the book, Clare commented on its light touch and atmosphere. The narrator is wryly tender and gently humorous in her attitude to her clients (and their feet), there is light and beauty in her descriptions of a neighbourhood traditionally associated with grimness, and there is nothing of the overt political criticism typical of fiction about the former GDR. Indeed, she counters those traditional associations explicitly:

It’s hard to shift preconceptions about the prefab housing estates in eastern Berlin. They say Marzahn is a concrete wasteland, but in reality it is exceptionally green. There are wide streets, ample parking spaces, good pavements and dropped kerbs at crossings. If you’ve got wheels, you can get around just fine.

Many people think Marzahn is teeming with former GDR bigwigs and SED party officials. It’s not true; I’d stake my life on it, especially as I work here. I look after the feet of former bricklayers, butchers and nurses. There’s also a woman who worked in electronics, one who bred cattle and another who was a petrol pump attendant.

Mark however quickly pointed out that the book is indeed political, in a way that is subtle and nuanced. While most of the narrator’s clients now live seemingly aspirationally Western-bourgeois lives, preoccupied with their feet, their holidays, hairdressers, and pampered dogs, the past keeps rising to the surface. Although the historical and political tensions potentially underlying the incident are not mentioned, a Russian woman throws herself from the tower block next to the salon. And ‘There is one dyed-in-the-wool party functionary who visits me regularly,’ ‘a walking cliché’ with an imperious manner, who expects subservience and gives her orders, though the narrative makes fun of his pretensions and sees his pathetic humanity:

The six-foot-three pensioner creeps off, checked flat cap on his bald head, back bent. Oh, Everard, you old child of the workers and peasants. All your life you’ve mistaken your position for your personality. Give my regards to the cardiac rehab group.

The narrator tells: ‘One preconception does hold true: the platenbau tower blocks aren’t soundproofed’. She goes on to recount the recent adventure of her ‘high-spirited’ client Frau Blumeier, a woman in her mid-sixties disabled by polio when she was a small child, who has rekindled a relationship with a boy from her youth:

While they were having sex, the bed collapsed… The next day, the man who lived in the apartment under hers got into the lift with a stupid grin on his face and said, ‘You have a blast at yours at night, don’t you?’

The narrator leaves hanging unsaid the fact that this amusing incident is the result of former SED measures to facilitate political spying on the part of the population (allowing people to hear each other through thin walls).

However the political message is not partisan. Perhaps more strongly, if mostly in passing, it is made clear that many of the characters have suffered from reunification and westernisation, having lost the benefits and even the lifestyle endowed on them by the former Socialist state. Frau Blumeier lost her job, as ‘the company she worked for went into liquidation. She was told she wouldn’t stand much of a chance in the West with her disability.’ Another also lost her job through liquidation of the handbag company she worked for, and her husband’s furniture-making business suffered and finally died: ‘The easterners paid. But the westerners didn’t… And then of course the easterners followed suit.’ Eighty-year-old Gerlinde Bonkat, who fled East Prussia as a seven-year-old refugee and worked hard in Germany all her life, found herself redeployed to west Berlin:

The bouquet of flowers that greeted every new colleague back in the old East seemed not to exist here… The ignorance and arrogance of her colleagues from the West made her hackles rise.

At which she gave up. ‘There was an exhaustion that went way beyond her feet.’

Yet what the chiropodist narrator sees as she tends the feet of these characters is their irrepressible spirit, and a picture emerges of the indomitable humanity of ordinary people in the face of any political regime. We all loved the book for this.

My only caveat was that I felt there was something missing. Although it is clear that the narrator’s change of career is prompted by a personal (mid-life) crisis, and that by the end of the book her personal circumstances have changed, we hear nothing in the meantime of her personal life and the ways in which those circumstances changed. I had however read something implying that when the book was originally published in German, it was published as a collection of short stories, and if I had read it as such I believe I would not have had this problem; it is only taking it as a novel that makes me want to know the narrator’s personal trajectory. John then said that he felt a lengthy section involving a works outing taken by the narrator and her two salon colleagues seemed a little out of place in the general schema of the book, and he wondered now if it had been added for the sake of length in order to publish the book as a novel. (It’s a publishing article of faith that novels sell better than books of short stories, and many a collection of linked stories has been dressed up in this way.) This however did not detract from our overall opinion of the book, which, as far as we could tell from a translation was beautifully written and brilliantly translated.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 16:01:00 +0000

Only four of us to discuss this book suggested by Doug (who couldn't be present), and all four of us found it a worthwhile, if not gripping read.

It begins with a Prologue relating the uncovering by university archeology students of a secret cemetery in the grounds of a Florida former boys' reformatory school, in which are buried the bodies of clearly mutilated boys. Not that the cemetery was secret to the boys once attending the school, nor the fact that behind the school's public profile as a place of education and rehabilitation, it was in fact a hell of cruelty, abuse and racism. The Prologue ends with a former back 'student', or more appropriately inmate, who 'goes by the name of Elwood Curtis', deciding to return from New York for the public inquiry.

The narrative now switches to 1962, when Elwood, a conscientious and studious boy being brought up by his grandmother, receives for Christmas a record album of speeches by Martin Luther King, which deeply affects him and colours his view of the world as he matures. We follow his maturing as he works in the local newsagents' (persuading the newsagent to stock anti-racist journals), studies hard (encouraged in his both his education and his idealism by his activist teacher) and dares to attend a protest. Until one day, on the way to attend the college in which he has enrolled for night-school, through no fault of his own he is picked up by the police and ends up in Nickel.

We then follow the horrors of life at Nickel through Elwood's perspective, a nightmare for all, but especially for the black boys who are segregated from the white boys in the school and treated even more harshly. Our member Ann said that a most remarkable thing about the book is the way in which Whitehead manages to lay completely bare the horror in an almost matter-of-fact way, never once being melodramatic or vying for the emotion strings of the reader - which keeps you reading, never needing to turn away from the horror, yet which somehow in the end makes it all the more horrifying. (It's also horrifying to read in the Author's Acknowledgements that the book is inspired by the story of a real Florida school.)

Whether or not the idealistic Elwood and the more cynical Turner, a fellow inmate who befriends him, will escape Nickel becomes a major plot point, and I think it would be wrong of me, for those who haven't read the book, to reveal what happens, and to discuss in specific detail what we made of it, since the outcome turns on a major (and quite stunning) revelation, knowing which would I think adversely affect how you read the whole book. Mark said he thought it was amazingly cleverly done. Ann and I both said that we had had inklings of it now and then throughout the book, but I simply wondered at those moments if these were narrative mistakes. My initial reaction when I came to the revelation was that it had been tricksy, though Ann and Mark argued for it convincingly on thematic grounds. I also commented that there was little psychological exploration of the fallout of this revelation for characters, but Ann and Mark felt that psychological exploration wasn't the purpose of this book, its purpose being more that of journalistic exposure. I always argue that the main political strength of novels is psychological and emotional, but I had to agree that this novel was compelling. However, John, who strongly agrees with me on this point about novels and psychology, said that he'd found it less compelling than did the rest of us, which may be because the material was very familiar to him from his work as an child psychologist, so that the exposure project didn't work so well on him. Mark did agree that the twist/revelation did actually smack of airport-type novels, but he thought that that was in fact another political strength, Ann corroborating this by saying that she felt far more people would read this novel than would read the more obviously literary Toni Morrison (books of whom we have discussed here, and here where we discuss Morrison's own view that novel readers need to be 'moved' rather than simply 'touched'). And the Nickel Boys is indeed beautifully written, in tough, clean prose.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: A Room with a View by E M Forster

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 12:42:00 +0000

Ann suggested this 1908 novel in which Lucy Honeychurch, travelling in Italy with her cousin and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett, struggles to accommodate Edwardian expectations of her as a young woman, but, due to an unsettling encounter in Florence, after her return home and an unsatisfactory engagement learns to thwart those expectations, to finally acknowledge her own feelings and think for herself.

Ann said that, having had little time to read this month, she had that day listened to an audio version of the book, and - to her surprise, I think - had found that she hadn't enjoyed it - in fact she seemed to think it was pretty awful. She acknowledged the comic episodes, and did enjoy those, but didn't at all like what she called the philosophical and purple passages. Mark - who instantly said he had loved the book - said with surprise, and to the agreement of others, that he hadn't noticed those, and Doug said he had skimmed them, passages in which the author comments on human nature in general, though often wryly and always in relation to the action and characters. We mused briefly then on the different experiences that listening to a book and reading it present - the possibility of skipping or skimming when you read a book for yourself, and the different emphases and indeed tone that an audiobook reader and producer can impose on a text. Ann's experience had made her dissatisfied with the book more generally: she felt she didn't know what it was, or what it was about. Was it a comedy or not? Was it a comedy of social manners, was it about class, or was it meant as a love story? I said that I thought it was all of those things, though chiefly, as I have indicated above, it was about the awakening of Lucy's consciousness, taking place in the context of class at a time of social change and challenges to the conventional role of women.

At the beginning of the book Lucy and Charlotte are newly arrived at the Pension Bertolini in Florence, and encounter the other exclusively English residents. At the dinner table the snobbery of the middle-class guests is directed at a father and son, the Emersons, who have no such pretensions and hold with none of their conventions: they are clearly 'lower class', and are suspected of being 'socialists'. Lucy has complained of her room not having the promised view, and the Emersons offer to change rooms with Lucy and Charlotte - a hugely indelicate intrusion in the middle-class codes of the day:

The better class of tourists was shocked at this, and sympathised with the newcomers. Miss Bartlett, in reply, opened her mouth as little as possible, and said:
'Thank you very much indeed: that is out of the question.'
'Why?' said the old man, with both fists on the table.

He insists heatedly, and:

Miss Bartlett, though skilled in the delicacies of conversation, was powerless in the presence of brutality. It was impossible to snub anyone so gross... she looked around as if to say, 'Are you all like this?'. And two little old ladies [...] looked back, clearly indicating, 'We are not; we are genteel.'

I had read this book many years ago at university and loved it. I said now, though, that this time around I had found these episodes much funnier than I did then. As the daughter of an engineer who at the time would probably have been termed lower middle class, I had had similar snobberies directed at me by more upper-class acquaintances, and I felt uncomfortable reading it and less able to appreciate the humour. We discussed the changing impact that books can have at different times. Ann said she appreciated how challenging this book must have been at the time of its publication, but felt that since the things it was pushing at - class snobbery, the subordination of women - have since been largely addressed (if not solved), its impact was inevitably much less now. Everyone present except John and me had seen the film, and I got the impression from what they said that the film, presumably because of this, very much pushes the love story element. With reference to Ann's comment about purple passages, I did have to say that on this reading I found one or two moments in the narration sentimental: describing the English village in which Lucy lives, the author comments on the 'tinkle' of church bells, which seemed utterly inaccurate - church bells don't 'tinkle' - so that however wry he is being about the tweeness of the environs, he ends up sound twee himself. Doug, who was nodding, said he didn't even think that there was any irony in the passage. It was interesting to me to note that none of this ever struck me when I read the book all those years ago, and it seemed like a mark of how the tenor of life has changed.

There was some talk about the characters. Ann said that none of the characters were likeable, not even Lucy, to, I think, general agreement - although I don't feel it's necessary to like characters to be interested in them, and unlikeable characters are of course a staple of satire. John commented, to more agreement, that the Emerson son George, the main love interest, is a mere cypher: we hardly get to know him at all. I said, to strong agreement from Clare, that the clergyman Mr Beebe had seemed the most sympathetic character, as he seems to see through Lucy and to have her interests at heart, especially in not wanting her to marry the dreadful Cecil who is compared by the author to a stiff medieval knight (Lucy's escape from him, along with her growing proto-feminist consciousness, is described as leaving the medieval world behind). But that when the elder Mr Emerson opens Lucy's eyes to her own truth, and she makes the choice of George, Mr Beebe is displeased. It turns out that he would rather Lucy didn't marry at all than follow her heart, which seems in the context mean-spirited. Some people in the group thought that Beebe was closest to the author, E M Forster, who was homosexual - necessarily closeted in that time - and that this explained it. However, it seems that the author is very much on the side of Lucy and George's union at the end: Mr Emerson, he says, had shown Lucy 'the holiness of direct desire' (which, as someone said, could be the author's veiled plea for homosexual love). The most obviously unlikeable character is the chaperone Charlotte, who is so restrictive with Lucy, so determined to make her conform to social expectations - and so falsely set-deprecating - and who quickly whisks her away from George when the spark first kindles between them. Some thought it seemed odd that right at the end it turns out that she had the chance to stop Lucy talking to Mr Emerson and changing her mind, yet didn't do so. Clare pointed out that this was in fact a significant change: Charlotte too had been repressing her true impulses in the need to conform to Edwardian society, and she too had rebelled, or been persuaded, in the end.

John particularly liked the ironic chapter headings - as did I - but he was perhaps the most dubious about the book beside Ann, unsure about the way that the tone becomes less comic as the book progresses and it concentrates more on Lucy's awakening - which perhaps links with Ann's feeling of not being able to work out what kind of book it was. This didn't trouble the rest of us, however, and I think most were pleased to have read it.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Assembly by Natasha Brown

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 13:04:00 +0000

Mark suggested this book enthusiastically, having previously read it and loved it, a debut that has been shortlisted for several prestigious political prizes.

A short book written in a spare, consciously fragmented style, it is the thoughts and experience of a young black woman, a high-flying financier, as she prepares to travel to a celebration at the home of the parents of her upper-class white boyfriend. It begins with a kind of prologue of short sections depicting the ways in which she has been subtly and not-so-subtly objectified and abused by the chiefly male colleagues who feel she has no right to her success, and which she has had to accept and even internalise in order to survive and advance in her career:

...when that mouth opened up and coughed its vitriol at her ... she understood the source of its anger... She waited for the buzz of her phone to excuse her and - in the meantime - quietly, politely, she understood him.

It was nothing. She thought this now, as she thought it each morning. She buttoned up her shirt and thought it ... She thought it as she pulled her hair back into a neat bun, smoothed down her stiff, grey pencil skirt.

Thus she assembles both her appearance and her psychology to fit into the world in which she is moving.

The third person in which this section is told serves the function of formulating her objectification - 'There was no we. There was he the subject and her the object'. After this section the narrative switches to the first person, 'I', as the narrator unpicks her situation and examines the ways in which she has been forced to assemble a persona in order to fit into a racist society, indeed to objectify herself, 'the person she has constructed'. The shift in narrative voice thus enacts the protagonist's psychological shift as she moves on from her adopted persona, comes to reject it and to want to disassemble it. The catalyst for this is her recent diagnosis of breast cancer, treatment for which she has rejected, weary of conforming and moulding herself to expectations.

Everyone in our group really admired the first part of this book - the spare, fragmented style acutely encapsulating the tortured psychology of the protagonist, and the searing and true depiction of the micro aggression with which she daily struggles. It's hard to pick out quotes to illustrate the depiction of the resentment of her colleagues - who are well aware of the unacceptability of racism yet believe her promotion is due only to the company's policy of 'diversity' - as it's so suitably subtley done.

Most people in our group were however less enamoured of the latter part of the novel in which she arrives at her boyfriend's family's country estate. Doug said he didn't believe for a moment in the relationship between the protagonist and her entitled, somewhat oblivious boyfriend, and I had to agree that I didn't find it entirely psychologically convincing. Someone suggested that this was because the upper-class characters of the boyfriend and his parents were stereotypes. Ann said there have been so many novels about the snobbery of the upper classes, set in such stately houses, that this didn't feel at all original, indeed it felt second-hand. Mark pointed out that it had not been done before from the viewpoint of a black protagonist, and Ann had to agree. Nevertheless, there was a feeling that there was something artificial about the depiction that left us unconvinced.

My view in retrospect is that the problem lies in the language of the book, which I did say in the meeting had rather troubled me. Towards the end of the book there is a section in which the narrator counterpoints English dictionary definitions of the words black and white, exposing the negative connotations of the first, and the positive connotations of the latter. She then asks: 'How can I use such language to examine the society it reinforces?' Which had prompted me to acknowledge that increasingly, as I read, I had felt a little uncomfortable with the language the narrator herself uses: at times it is highly abstract and Latinate, which indeed failed to convey to me her situation on an experiential level. While I found the beginning of the book so emotionally affecting, as it progressed the language became increasingly formal and distanced me from her experience, indeed objectified it. In the meeting, Clare strongly disagreed that there was any distancing of the narrator's experience, feeling, like many reviewers, that the fragmented form of the novel conveyed it beautifully. However, there was general agreement when I said that overall this is quite a cool, objective and distanced book, in spite of its fragmented mode and searing subject matter.

The beginning vividly conveys the attitudes of the male workplace colleagues via (remembered) direct speech:

No, but, originally. Like your parents, where they're from. Africa, right?
I mean it's - well, you know. Of course you do, you understand. You can understand it in a way the English don't.

Yet when the narrator later tells us that her mother gives her reports on the phone about old friends in their community, and that this bothers her, we do not share her experience any of these conversations, she merely sums them up briefly, as I have here, and then muses on her own reaction in this formal language:

I decided my complaint was primarily formal, the set-up and punchline she employed; making me remember knowing, invoking memories of a person, of a life, and then revealing the death.

When she comes to introduce into the narrative her friend and colleague Julie, her boyfriend, and her boyfriend's parents, she simply tells us about them, summing them up in that formal language - with little or no direct action or dialogue to illustrate or prove, or indeed make us experience what she tells us about them. Of her boyfriend's parents, she says:

It was a purity of lineage, of history: shared cultural mores and sensibilities. The preservation of a way of life, a class, the necessary higher echelon of society.

It could be argued that this formality of language is an aspect of the protagonist's need to assimilate, and of her colonisation by patriarchal culture, but it does seem therefore a mistake that as her disassembling progresses, the formality of the language should increase, and it seems to me now that it is this that made the later sections of the book less emotionally convincing for us than the early part.

Towards the end especially there are polemical sections outlining the black history that led to this moment (conveyed indeed in essay-like formal language), and everyone in the group felt that these marred it. Mark (the book's biggest champion) said he felt that it was perhaps the mark of a debut author who didn't trust the reader to grasp the subtext and message of her narrative, and others agreed.

I said that I also felt a bit troubled by the narrator's rejection of treatment for cancer. It seemed to me less of a rebellion, or 'Transendence', as the last section of the book is titled, than a capitulation. I couldn't help agreeing with the reviewer I read who asked 'Why not drop out rather than drop dead?' She questioned the implication that the only way to be is to be a high financier (otherwise you may as well drop dead). This chimes somewhat with what John said to me outside of the meeting, which is that he wondered how far a criticism of racism a book can be when the protagonist is so highly successful and rich, and when the crucial social problem is that society militates against such a trajectory for black people, though he felt uncomfortable wondering it. I said, but isn't the point that, however outwardly comfortable a black person may seem to be, however much they have managed to overcome the obstacles, they still suffer from racism (even a more insidious and thus poisonous racism), they still live their life seared by discomfort. This is a main point, made explicitly in the book: that it's just not possible to assimilate, however hard the protagonist has tried, and the conclusion of course is, why, in the final analysis, should she? Nevertheless, while I can see that, as Clare said, the protagonist's succumbing to death is an aesthetic choice that makes the point, I felt strongly disappointed by the suggestion that, psychologically, there was no other way.

However, in spite of our quibbles, everyone felt this was an impressive debut, and all had read it in a sitting.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 16:52:00 +0000

When John suggested this, Elspeth Barker's only novel, the members of our group who glanced at the beginning imagined it was going to be something of a grim read - typical Scottish Gothic, as Doug put it. In fact, the novel is a subversion of that genre, and is full of black humour and anything but a grim read. Everyone enjoyed it very much, and most of us were unable to put it down, and read it in a sitting.

It begins with the description of the stairs of a gaunt Scottish castle, on which, it will be revealed by the end of the first page, lies the body of Janet, a sixteen-year-old girl 'oddly attired' in her mother's black lace evening dress. The first chapter goes on to tell that she was mourned by none, even her parents, apart from her pet jackdaw who 'searched for her unceasingly' in the woods and glen, eventually killing himself by flying into a wall.

After the first chapter the novel switches immediately to an account of Janet's life, beginning with her birth during the Second World War. The tone becomes immediately wry, the rhythm of the prose lively, and the whole effect satirical as the author paints a picture of a girl growing up with distanced aristocratic parents and disappointing them with her lack of femininity and a passionate character expressed in a love of poetry and identification with the wildness of nature. There are moments that made us laugh out loud. Here are two ancient sisters at the village hall party, one of whom has been at the first sitting of the party tea, the other of whom has yet to eat:

Very old Miss Pettigrew came trembling up, leaning on her stick. 'Here you are then, Annie,' she said to her sister. Her jaw dropped loose, her mouth hung limp and open; in went her black-veined claw, out came a set of pinkly glistening false teeth. Her sister grabbed them; with no ado she popped them into her own mouth. She paused for a moment, sucking noisily. 'Macaroons!' she cried, 'Och, that's braw!'

The novel is full of this combination of grotesquery and hilarity, though, as Ann and Clare said, as Janet grows, the mood grows darker. Janet is indeed treated cruelly, by her distant, preoccupied mother (who only really likes babies, and keeps having them - children who turn out to be much prettier and more amenable), and by the boys of the boarding school her father establishes in his inherited castle. The feisty Janet is quite capable of taking revenge on the son of visitors after he tries to trap her and exposes himself to her, by pushing him into the poisonous giant hogweed in the unkempt garden at which he has sneered. But once she is forced to accept her own burgeoning sexuality and has to experience the horrors of boarding school, her feelings become more complex and difficult to deal with, and the mood becomes bleak. (Anne and Clare noted that there is no mention of menstruation which one would expect to be central to this crisis of identity for Janet. This book was first published in 1991. While some feminist authors had then been tackling such matters head-on for some time, they were still considered by many a subject unfit or too delicate for literature.)

Finally it will be revealed how Janet died on those stairs (which I won't give away here). The book is however no whodunnit, more of a whydunnit, though none of the four of us present were convinced by that ending. My main, and John's, doubt about the book was that there is no real story arc or thematic development propelling it - it's really basically a simple, linear account of a childhood - extraordinary and curious to most readers in its setting and milieu (the gothic castle and the eccentric aristocratic ways of the family), though in fact fairly typical of that social milieu, with the same point, Janet's role as a sore thumb in her family, illustrated repeatedly if entertainingly. We did in fact get a little frustrated, even wearied, by this, and it was the brilliant prose and sensibility that kept us reading. Ann made an interesting point. She said that when she was at boarding school herself she and her schoolfriends read scores of books beginning with this kind of setup, an ugly duckling made unhappy in a family. Jane Eyre, she pointed out, is a literary version of the same thing. (She imagined that this was what influenced O Caledonia, although in fact it is known to be strongly autobiographical.) However, in these books this setup was always the prelude to a story of escape from the situation and the transformation of the ugly duckling into a beautiful, successful swan (in fact Elspeth Barker herself did escape to London to become a successful journalist and member of the literary set). Here, however, no such transformation takes place, and this is what makes the book a subversion of the tradition, and its radicalism was why, no doubt, it was originally published by a feminist press. However, the fact that Janet remains in that establishing (and establishment) situation (which leads to her death), while making an interesting political point, did give the book for us a certain stasis, fortunately compensated for by the dynamic prose and the compelling insight into Janet and the family dynamics.

John did say afterwards that, in spite of the book's publication by a radical press, he felt uncomfortable with what seem some politically incorrect notes: the child Janet's attitude to the maimed soldiers living nearby (before the family move to the isolation of the castle) is one of horror. I said, Isn't it actually more complicated than that, more Janet's reaction to the horror of maiming (rather than just to the men themselves), which goes along with her empathy towards the animals that most people ill treat or kill? Also, it is Janet who befriends the grieving and mentally unstable aunt, Lila, who lives with them in the castle, while Janet's mother cruelly packs her off, committing her finally to a 'lunatic asylum', where Janet visits her during her Christmas holiday from boarding school. But John felt that the grotesque descriptions of the other patients in the mental hospital were lacking in empathy. And I didn't really have much argument against the fact that the hunchback gardener at the castle turns out to be evil, in true disablist tradition.

We discussed other, more minor points. Some people felt that, though most of the novel takes Janet's viewpoint via the close third person, there was the odd strange change of viewpoint that seemed to have no useful purpose, such as to that of Janet's mother in a somewhat prolonged and seemingly levered-in section about a Teasmaid that causes tension between the parents.

Overall, though, everyone very much enjoyed this book in spite of our early lack of expectation.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 13:25:00 +0000

I had left it far too long to suggest a book for our next meeting, so I plumped for this as something short that people would be able to read in the time left. The story of Gregor Samsa who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant beetle-like creature, it has been subject to many interpretations - Marxist, feminist, Freudian and autobiographical - and it is cited as a major influence by many current authors who consider themselves writers of the 'Uncanny', which last made me especially keen to re-read it.

Gregor lives with his family - his parents and sister Greta - all of whom he has supported with gruelling work as a travelling salesman since the family business collapsed. A conscientious but downtrodden worker, he is very distressed to find that, trapped on his back with his little legs flailing, he can't even get out of bed to get the train to work, although for a while he tries to believe against the odds that he'll manage it. Initially his family, calling though his locked door, are worried about him, but when they finally see him they are horrified, his father in particular. Only Greta his sister is able to make herself enter the room and care for him, bringing him the kinds of scraps of food she thinks in his transformed state he would like, though he is unable to eat them. The chief clerk from his company visits to berate him for not appearing at work, increasing Gregor's distress by warning him that he risks dismissal. Eventually even Greta turns against him, seeing the creature in the room as no longer Gregor, and pronouncing that it has to go.

I said that of all the interpretations I'd read - the feminist interpretation concentrating on Greta, the autobiographical and Freudian view of the father as echoing Kafka's own harsh and dominating father - I was most sympathetic with the Marxist reading. In this Gregor's transformation is an acting out or a metaphorical fulfilment of a situation in which workers are trapped in a capitalist system that treats them like vermin - Gregor becomes the vermin he is considered to be. He has also been used by the selfishly bourgeois unit of his family: he will overhear a conversation between his parents in which it will turn out that, while he has been under the impression that his father lost everything when his business folded, and has been flogging his guts out to keep his family, his parents have been sitting on a nest-egg saved in spite of the business collapse. English translations, of which there are several, present Gregor's transformation variously: in one he is 'a gigantic insect', in others a 'bug', or, in Michael Hofmann's most recent translation for Penguin Classics, a 'cockroach'. Some, however, stay closer to the original German, the literal translation of which I understand to be 'a monstrous vermin'. This less concrete phrase does conjure the all too common attitude of employers in a capitalist system to workers requiring payment - as drains on their own wealth and thus blights on their own lives. It seemed to me indeed that as Gregor's state is revealed, the insect he most strongly resembles is a bedbug, that most intentional and covert of bloodsucking insects, and the most difficult to eradicate. He does after all begin the story in bed; his 'brown' belly, like that of a bedbug, is 'sectioned off by little crescent-shaped ridges into segments'; when Greta enters his room he scuttles and hides under the sofa with the pointed end of his body sticking out, as bedbugs can do; when eventually he crawls on the walls and ceilings, he leaves dark trails like the blood-smears of bedbugs. A monster, in other words, that is condemned as feeding off others while in reality being starved.

It is interesting to note that, as Michael Hofmann records in the Introduction to his Penguin Classics translation, on publication of the book Kafka insisted that the cover should not portray an insect (as so many modern editions do), indicating a strongly metaphorical intention. Yet, as our group commented curiously, the story unfolds as a very literal development of a metaphor. There is that immediate anatomical description of his new body, and we are treated to an extended explication of Gregor's difficulties in adjusting to his new incarnation, his initial inability to get off his back, his surprise at finding that once he is on his legs they have the power to take him along fast, his lack of knowledge as to what he can eat, and, for a long while, his ignorance of his ability to crawl on the walls and ceilings. This is nothing of the kind of transformation occurring in fairytales, in which the prince turns magically and instantaneously into a frog or vice versa, and that's that: here it is something much more laborious and concrete, and indeed intellectualised. (And indeed both Clare and I did find it all got a little boring in the end.) There is much contemporary writing that self-consciously references Metamorphosis by using this literalising technique in portrayals of transformations, and it is usually labelled 'Uncanny'. Personally I don't think it merits the term, since the concrete nature of the mode dispels the sense of unease and the unknown that the uncanny - works such as Poe's or Shirley Jackson's - provokes in the reader. For this reason, I find, it is never successful unless it is used in service to a political point, drawing the reader towards it on an intellectual level, as here.

But what is that political point in Metamorphosis? Ann had an interesting take: she saw the whole thing in the context of Kafka's position as a German-speaking Jew in Czech-speaking Prague, and could see that it was about othering. Clare concurred, and saw it as possibly about disability. John, a psychologist with a particular interest in perception (ie how one perceives what one experiences through one's senses), read it all as deeply psychological: Gregor, downtrodden at work, used by his family and despised by his father, comes to see or feel himself as an insect: it is all inside his head. But because he yet retains his human consciousness (and is thus aware of the horror of the situation), John saw the piece as a horror story. We did all feel that the end of the story, which deals with Gregor's final treatment by his family and their subsequent progress without him, occurs in a hurry and the story fizzles out. It seems that Kafka was never satisfied with the end, which, since Kafka is known to have had a difficult relationship with his own family, does seem to support an autobiographical reading.

It seems to me that Metamorphosis encompasses all of those meanings: that the things in Kafka's life - his own employment as a cog in the wheel, his cruel and domineering father who saw him as weakling, his experience of antisemitism - would have contributed to its composition. Mark and others wondered why it has lasted and has become so vastly popular, and this is the reason, we decided: it is a story about power, capable via its metaphorical character of accommodating various schools of thought that have arisen since.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:07:00 +0000

Doug's suggestion, this novel by acclaimed linguist and novelist Diego Marani was received as a 'masterpiece' in his native Italy, and in its English translation (by Judith Landry), published by the small UK press Dedalus, it has provoked high praise as a brilliant - even 'genius' - study of the way that language and memory shape us and give us our sense of our place in the world.

The premise of the novel, indicated in the book's back-cover blurb, is that a man, found unconscious with a head injury on Trieste harbour in 1943, wakes from his coma having lost all memory and language and any sense whatever of his own identity.

However, the novel does not begin with this intriguing scenario, but with a Prologue written some years later in the words of Petri Friari, a Finnish doctor working in Hamburg's city hospital. This Prologue conveys a number of facts that float in mystery, presented in the following order. First, Friari states that in 1946 - ie at the end of the Second World War - he found a manuscript in a trunk in the military hospital in Helsinki, 'together with a sailor's jacket, a handkerchief with the letters S.K. embroidered on it, three letters, a volume of the Kalevala [the national epic of Finland] and an empty bottle of koskenkorva [a Finnish vodka]'. The manuscript, he tells us, is written in a 'spare, indeed broken and often ungrammatical Finnish, in a school notebook where pages of prose alternate with lists of verbs and exercises in Finnish grammar', and including headlines and cuttings from newspapers. He knows the facts behind this manuscript, Friari then tells us, and the story it is unsuccessfully trying to tell. He has therefore, he tells us, reconstructed its story in a 'more orthodox' form, filling in the gaps it leaves with interjections of his own. He now reveals that having fled Finland as a young man, he had returned to look for the author of this manuscript, but found only the objects enumerated above. His motive for reconstructing the manuscript, he says, is to honour and memorialise a man who, through 'a cruel misunderstanding' on Friari's part, had been 'unintentionally driven towards a fate that was not his own'. Friari hopes also to 'reconstruct my own story, my own identity, through other eyes'. However, the Prologue ends on a pessimistic note: having once briefly felt he could be reconciled with his own country, Friari now feels exiled once more by the (unidentified) tragic events of which he indicates he, Friari, was the agent, and he concludes: 'perhaps Massimiliano Brodar is merely an instrument of my damnation.'

What follows is the story of the author of the manuscript in the author's 'own' words ventriloquised by Friari, occasionally interrupted, as has been promised, by interjections of Friari's own. It begins as the author emerges from a coma to the indistinct sight of Dr Friari watching him. It is 1943. He is on a German hospital ship in Trieste harbour where he has been taken by some of its sailors after they found him on Trieste harbour. In the collar of the jacket he was wearing is a label bearing the Finnish name, Sampo Karjalainen, and in its pocket a handkerchief with the initials S K. Friari, exiled from Finland in his youth after his father was taken political prisoner and put to death, yet harbouring a lifelong longing for its culture and language, thus takes a special interest in the patient, caring for him constantly. As he very slowly recovers, Friari sets passionately about the task of re-teaching him Finnish, clearly relishing that re-involvement with his own native tongue. However, Sampo, as he must know himself - although the name has no familiarity for him - fails to recover his memory or any sense of his identity. Finally, Friari manages to secure a place for him on a journey to a military hospital in Helsinki, in the hope that once back in his own country, Sampo will begin to remember things and know who he is. Yet in Helsinki Sampo struggles. He works hard at the language, as the school exercise book will show, but the language fails to nourish him, he fails to feel he belongs in it, that it is part of him. The army pastor takes him under his wing, and Sampo attempts to absorb the Finnish lore with which the pastor is obsessed, and with which he constantly regales him. But the pastor's obsession sinks into a kind solipsistic madness and he leaves for the front and is very soon killed; Sampo is thus abandoned and goes on feeling anchorless. A young female military nurse becomes attached to him, but he is unable properly to relate to her - he has no concrete identity with which to relate - and he cannot even see the point of answering the three letters she sends when she is posted to the front.

One day he is sitting on the harbour and a German-made warship heaves into view. On its side is written the name it received after it was fairly recently requisitioned into the Finnish navy: Sampo Karjalainen. It is suddenly clear: the name he has come to think is his own, the name attached to the jacket in which he was found, is simply that of a ship (with which, he will assume, he was once associated, though he has no memory of it). The minimal identity he has managed to develop crumbles away. In despair, and because he must indeed be Finnish, he decides to join up and fight for Finland.

At this point, Friari tells us, 'Sampo''s manuscript ends. Friari now tells us that a War Office file carries the information that private Sampo Karjalainen 'fell in the battle of Ihantala'. He now knows who 'Sampo' really was, he tells us, and that the reason for his journey to Helsinki, made as soon as the war ended, was to tell him, though of course it was too late. In an Epilogue, Friari explains. The man found unconscious on the dock at Trieste was the victim of a German secret agent, Stefan Klein, a man with therefore the same initials and who had been serving on the ship Sampo Karjalainen. Klein had clearly attacked him in order to lay hands on an Italian uniform and equip himself to infiltrate enemy forces. 'Sampo' had in fact been Italian, not Finnish, born indeed in Trieste itself and serving in the Italian army. His real name, printed in the leave permit found in the lining of the jacket Klein was wearing when he was shot dead by the partisans, was Massimiliano Brodar. The novel ends on a note of remorse and deep sadness as Friari reflects on his mistake and 'arrogant' assumption, made through his 'blind attachment to his country', and his sense that now he can never after all atone for what happened to his father.

All of us in our reading group were fascinated by the theme of language and identity, and the insights about this provided by this linguist author. Without language, the mind of the recently injured 'Sampo' is 'a ship whose moorings had been shattered by a storm. I could see the landing stage bobbing not far off... A subtle veil, like a form of hypnosis, was shielding me from the colours of reality.' Imagining that the language he is teaching him is his native tongue, Friari puts his finger on the way our native language locates us in time, in our past and thus our identity: 'Think of each word as though it were a magic charm which might open the door to memory'. Mistakenly tutored (as we will finally understand) in the wrong language, in Helsinki 'Sampo' has the 'distinct impression that I was running headlong down the wrong road. In the innermost recesses of my consciousness I was plagued by the feeling that, within my brain, another brain was beating, buried alive'.

We did all however find the book something of a difficult read, and it seemed to all of us a lot longer than it is in terms of pages. John said to agreement that the book is written in a formal, almost old-fashioned style, which makes for ponderousness, with much telling rather than showing - although there are some lyrical descriptions - and others noted that it was repetitive. Everyone found the long disquisitions by the army pastor on the epic Kalevala somewhat wearing, and couldn't see the point of their portrayal in such detail and at such length. A main comment was that although there were ostensibly two characters narrating, there was no variation in the voices. This was of course excused by the fact that Friari is taking it upon himself to reconstruct and re-tell 'Sampo's' story for him, but this does make for a monotony of tone, and Friari's is something of a formal voice. (In fact, as I think Clare pointed out, Friari is imposing his own voice on 'Sampo', and thus committing an act of colonisation.) The only real indication of a change of narrator when it occurs is a shift to italics in the typography whenever Friari makes an intervention (and since these italicised sections sometimes last for several pages, they are less physically easy to read).

There were aspects of the structure that left me unsatisfied, which is why I have laid out the events above in the sequence in which they occur in the novel. In fact, the 'plot' is to some extent given away at the beginning: we know right from the start that the author of the manuscript is probably dead; we know that Friari feels responsible through having made some fatal mistake, and we are even twice within the Prologue given the author's name, Massimiliano Brodar - indeed it is given the prominence of being the final two words of the Prologue. However, that short Prologue sets up so many mysteries, and provides so many facts in such a short space and at a point when readers are still trying to orientate themselves in the situation, that the connection of that name with the writer of the manuscript slipped me and others by, or at least quickly fell away from our consciousness. And indeed the discovery by Friari of the real name seems to be presented in the novel as something of a 'reveal'. (Whether a consciousness of the fact that 'Sampo' is really Italian would have added to or detracted from the tension of the events I find hard in retrospect to judge.) There is another structural confusion: in the Prologue Friari refers to the document that will follow - his recreation of 'Sampo''s story - as having been written in the past: 'It was many years before I could bring myself to offer these pages to the public', he says, and tells how he was helped in his reconstruction by the nurse who became involved with 'Sampo' . Yet in Friari's final intervention, which reads as a continuation of the same running commentary, he is still in Helsinki, having only just found the trunk with its contents and discovered that he is too late to find 'Sampo'. I also found it hard to grasp Friari's need to 'atone' with regard to his country (at one point he talks of his father having been unjustly murdered, yet at another of needing to atone for his father's 'crime'), or of his sense that, having failed 'Sampo', he has forfeited the right or ability to atone: I felt a lack of resolution for this on a psychological, or maybe a cultural, level.

We all agreed that it was a very sad book, and although we had not found it an easy read, Ann said to the agreement of others that she was glad she had read it.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:59:00 +0000

Prior to this discussion, I and my writing friends had absolutely loved and admired this Booker-shortlisted novella. Set in the 80s in small-town Ireland, it concerns one of the notorious Magdalene laundries, those Irish institutions run by the Catholic Church, in which 'fallen women' - unmarried girls getting pregnant, or just being flirtatious or 'too' pretty - were, until as recently as 1996, incarcerated and treated with cruelty and even violence. As far as we were concerned, the book is beautifully written and extremely moving. I expected a similar reaction from the reading group.

Everyone in the reading group did agree that it was extremely well written if somewhat conventional in style, and, as Clare (who had suggested the book) said, vivid in its depiction of the small-town community and its culture of secrecy and constraint. All appeared, like me and my writing colleagues, to have read it in a sitting. However, I was surprised that everyone in the group beside me and John had some quibble or other, sometimes quite radical.

The novella centres on the figure of Bill Furlong, the town's coal merchant, and chiefly takes his third-person viewpoint. Brought up in the big house of a Protestant widow after her unmarried maid became pregnant with him, Furlong is now married and focussed on providing for and nurturing the talents of his five daughters who attend the Catholic school, 'the only good school in town', and take music lessons at the convent next door to the school. He has never found out who his father was, but supposes that it must have been one of the many middle-class visitors to the big house.

Christmas is approaching, and there are large orders of coal, and Furlong must make a delivery to the convent. The nuns at the convent run a laundry - well used and appreciated by the town's businesses and hospital - as well as what is understood to be a training school for young women. Little is known about the latter - at least in Furlong's understanding - and various rumours surround it, some saying it is a place for girls of low character to be punished and reformed, others that it is a mother-and-baby home for 'common' girls and that the nuns make good money out of having their babies adopted.

Furlong hasn't in the past liked to believe any of those rumours, and indeed has shown little interest, but one evening in the recent past he arrived too early with a coal delivery, and with no one to meet him, wandered into a garden and a chapel, where he encountered clearly browbeaten girls on their knees scrubbing. One girl dared to stand and begged him to take her to the river, where she could end her life, and when he refused, to take her home with him. The shocked Furlong refused once more, before they were interrupted by one of the nuns. Leaving, he noted things that one might associate with a prison: a padlock on an outside door, the way the nun locked the door behind her just to come out to pay him, and jagged glass embedded in the inner garden wall. At home, Eileen, his wife, told him to drop it, forget it, think of their own girls. Furlong couldn't see what their own girls have to do with it, although he did wonder, What if one of their own were in such trouble?

As Christmas approaches Furlong is feeling a vague existential unease, but he is a practical man, not having been given to speculation or making connections, and can't pinpoint the cause of his feeling. He takes his load to the convent, rising before dawn. He unbolts the coalhouse door and finds a young girl crouched inside, barefoot and weak and coal-blackened, the excrement on the floor showing that she has been there for longer than just one night. He takes her, stumbling, to the convent door, and as they wait there she asks him if he'll ask the nuns about her baby who has been taken away from her. The Mother Superior exclaims at the girl's foolishness in getting herself trapped in the coalhouse while 'playing', and insists Furlong comes in for a cup of tea.

Furlong's mother is long dead - she died when he was a teenager - but the farmhand Ned, on whom he relied as he grew, is still living at the big house, and Furlong, having heard he isn't well, decides to pay him a Christmas visit. He finds Ned isn't there, but in hospital, and the girl who answers the door assumes he is a relative of Ned's, saying she can see the family likeness. And a light is suddenly shone on the matter of Furlong's paternity.

Christmas Eve arrives. When Furlong goes to pay for his mens' Christmas dinner at the local cafe, the female cafe owner makes clear she knows about what she calls his 'run-in' with the Mother Superior, and warns him that the nuns 'have a finger in every pie'. He should watch what he says about what goes on up there, she says, as he could damage his daughters' chances at the school.

His work for the year done, he wanders through the town. He thinks of the extent of Mrs Wilson's kindness in saving his mother from the convent, so much greater, we are now to understand, when the father was none of her of circle but her farmhand. He thinks of how he refused the girl who asked him to take her to the river, and how he failed to ask about the coalhouse girl's baby as she had asked him to, and 'how he'd gone on, like a hypocrite, to Mass'. He keeps walking and goes on up to the convent, passing through the open gates to the coalhouse. He pulls back the bolt, and, as he clearly suspects, the same barefoot girl is imprisoned once more inside.

The book ends as Furlong is walking with her back through the town towards home, people staring or avoiding them. Ahead of him is all the trouble for his family that this will cause, but Furlong has done the thing that, if he hadn't, he would have regretted for the rest of his life.

Introducing the book, Clare said that she felt that Furlong had been used as a device in order to write about the Magdalene laundries. This statement left me taken aback, since the focus of the novella is not the Magdalene laundries as a subject in itself, but Furlong's psychological journey in relation to them. Later, Doug or Mark, or both, would say they felt unsatisfied that the novella ends where it does, that the real interest would be the consequences of Furlong's arriving home with the girl from the convent. Doug did agree however when I said that the interest of the novella was not so much what happens, but Furlong's psychological and moral progression (from lack of interest and identification with the goings-on in the laundry, to an understanding of his own early situation and the need to pay back the kindness that was done to him and his mother). Doug said he wasn't sure he found it convincing that Furlong, a practical, non-thinking man, would understand so quickly over his cup of tea with the Mother Superior that she was lying about the girl in the coalhouse, or that it was in character that he should consequently make a wilful point of hanging on when she tries to get rid of him. Or indeed that he would return to the convent to rescue the girl. Again, however, Doug agreed when I said that what alerts Furlong on the first occasion is a realisation that the Mother Superior, in asking significantly about his daughters' studies at the school and the convent, is making a veiled threat (to prevent him from talking about the coalhouse incident), and that it is the revelation about Ned and the consequent extent of the kindness that had been done his mother that prompts his final action.

Thinking back now, it occurs to me that the problem was that our group is very used to discussing novels (we don't do short stories), but this very short novella, written by an author who has only ever written in the two short prose fiction forms (short stories and novellas), uses very much a short-story mode, that is, the mode of glancing implication. It is never actually spelled out that Furlong has either of these revelations. The most that is replicated of Furlong's realisation about Ned is 'It took a stranger to come out with things'. This narrative mode of implication, it seems to me, is very potent in conveying the atmosphere and tenor of a society where things are indeed not stated, where secrecy and blind-eye turning are the norm, and truths thus easily buried. To Furlong, the implications of his own past having been buried, the connections are not obvious, but arrive subtly, 'stoking his mind'.

Someone said they felt Furlong was a bit of a cypher, not fully developed, which shocked me, since the substance of the book is basically Furlong's psyche, and Mark said that he felt the most underdeveloped character was Furlong's wife Eileen. I can only think that such criticisms come from a desire for the more objective, detailed and wide-ranging character depiction novels can provide, but which in my view is not the province of the shorter form. This novella too is internal; everything is filtered through Furlong's interiority, and Eileen appears only as she does in Furlong's thoughts.

Someone said, 'But this is only one person!'' (being rescued from the convent), implying, I think, that the book didn't address the real (and real-life) problem of so many young women and their babies being virtually disappeared. This left me dumbfounded, as, as far as I am concerned, the force of fiction is indeed that it can address the universal via the emotional impact of the particular, which to me this novella does indeed do.

Someone wondered why the author had chosen a male protagonist (presumably for such a female-orientated subject), until the rest of the group decided that a woman would never have been in a position to do what Furlong did. Ann said she found the novel anachronistic. It is set in the 80s, she said, but felt like the 50s (it was noted that semi-rural Ireland in the 80s was indeed like the 50s: witness the fact that the Magdalene laundries closed only in 1996), yet there is a reference to crows picking at takeaway pizza boxes: pizza takeaways would not have arrived in Ireland by the 80s. As a result, she said, she lost all faith in the book and didn't want to go on reading. Clare added that Furlong was anachronistically feminist in that when the Mother Superior suggests he must be disappointed that none of his children is male, he stands up for women. At the time of the discussion I found myself convinced by this, but having looked again at what he actually says - 'Sure didn't I take my own mother's name' and 'What have I against girls...? My own mother was a girl once' - I'd say that this is based in his realisation of what is going on in the convent, and how narrowly he and his mother escaped that fate. The burgeoning feminism implied seems to me a legitimate and believable response to his realisation. Sexism was of course dominant in the 80s, but it does not seem to me unbelievable that such extraordinary circumstance could prompt a man's developing feminist consciousness, even in small-town Ireland at that time. It seems to me that, rather than simply using a male character to facilitate a plot, as was suggested, the author's project is specifically to chart this growing male consciousness, and that this is indeed the novella's dynamic strength.

Finally, Doug said to my shock that he was surprised that the book had won all the prizes it had.

On the evening of our discussion I was suffering with shingles and was feeling pretty low, but I don't think it was just that that left me feeling a bit helpless to argue. Rather, I think, it was sheer surprise at these criticisms of a book that I - and John - had found frankly stunning.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:31:00 +0000

Another discussion I need to cast my mind way back to.

In general as a group we discuss contemporary novels, but Ann suggested that it might be interesting to read a children's classic for a change, and we plumped for Alice in Wonderland.

I think all of us had seen the Disney film, and all except Mark had read the book as children. I had the Ward Lock copy my mother bought me when I was five, unillustrated apart from a colour frontispiece depicting the Mad Hatter's tea party, and defaced with my own five-year-old drawings and scrawlings. Ann had an old inherited copy with the famous Tenniel illustrations (one of which above), but she had also bought the Annotated Alice, so was able to talk about the background to the book and the circumstances of its writing. It was written in 1865 for the children of the Dean of Oxford by the Oxford mathematician and logician Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, who originally illustrated the book himself.

The first thing we said was that we were surprised to find there were events in the book we hadn't remembered. Neither Ann nor I had at all remembered the Lobster Quadrille (in which all the sea creatures dance on the shore), and I think maybe Clare hadn't either. I hadn't remembered the puppy that appears from nowhere and which Alice chases into the wood, and I hadn't really remembered the incident when her neck grows so long her head emerges over the tops of the trees. We wondered if this were due to the influence of the film, but couldn't really say.

The book, we realised on this reading, is a stunningly prescient portrayal of the workings of the dreaming mind, pre-dating Freud. The surreal plot, famously, operates by dream logic (the whole thing is Alice's dream), with characters including Alice herself morphing or, like the Cheshire Cat, disappearing and reappearing. There is a riff on the subject of time, which is of course distorted in dreams - at the Mad Hatter's tea party it is always six o'clock, and his watch shows the day of the month but not the time. Characters operate madly inverted or false logic: according to the Pigeon, the fact that serpents eat eggs and that Alice has tasted eggs proves she's a serpent, and the Frog-Footman sitting on the outside of the door he is manning tells her there's no point in her knocking and being expected to be admitted, as he isn't inside to let her in. There is punning and play on word association, leading to confusion:

'Mine is a long a sad tale!'' said the Mouse, turning to Alice and sighing.
'It is a long tail, certainly,'' said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse's tail.

The Mock Turtle tells Alice that when he was little they went to school in the sea and that they called their master, an old Turtle, Tortoise:

'Why did you call him Tortoise if he wasn't one?' Alice asked.
'We called him Tortoise because he taught us,'' said the Mock Turtle a little angrily; 'really you are very dull!'

There is a concrete poem with diminishing typography, taking the shape of a mouse's tail, and there are tongue-in-cheek parodies of Victorian nursery rhymes: "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!/How I wonder what you're at!"

Throughout, Alice challenges the false logic of the characters, and the book amounts (among other things) to a take-down of the sentimentality with which Victorian children were regarded, and the irrational strictures placed on them. 'Why is a raven like a writing desk?'' asks the Mad Hatter, and Alice is supposed to answer when there isn't in fact any answer. "I think you might do something better with your time,'' Alice chides him, "than wasting it in riddles that have no answer." As Ann commented, Alice is a very feisty female protagonist, unusual in Victorian books for children.

Mark, who had never read the book but only seen the film, was very impressed by the book's verbal cleverness and liked it very much. John and Doug, however, were I'm afraid left cold by it, John saying that he knew it so well he could hardly judge it, but found it rather flat compared to the vividness of the film. (He read my unillustrated copy.). He wasn't as impressed as Mark by the verbal play, saying that it was only the same as that he would make with our own children - at which he was reminded that this is of course a book written, in similar circumstances, for three particular children. However, it has of course subsequently become part of the mental landscapes of generations of children worldwide, and has entered our language - we talk of 'going down a rabbit hole' and of people grinning like a Cheshire Cat - its name even taken for a neurological disorder*, so acute is it in its psychology.

*Alice in wonderland syndrome, a disorder of distorted perception and altered body image.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: The Girls by Emma Cline

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Baines) — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 07:43:00 +0000

Warning: plot spoilers.

Once again I have been too busy to keep up with the reports of our reading group discussions, and have catching up to do, and now I have to really wrench my brain to remember what was said in our earlier discussions, particularly this, the earliest, which took place as far back as June.

Mark suggested this American novel about a young girl who becomes involved with a cult based on the real-life Manson group who in 1968 murdered guests, including the film star Sharon Tate, at the home of film director Roman Polanski. A best-seller, due no doubt in no small measure to its sensational subject matter, the book is also rightly highly praised for its vivid, evocative and fluid prose style, and we did indeed all find it a compelling read.

Evie, the first-person narrator, looks back in the 80s to the summer of 1968 when, aged fourteen and living with her divorced and preoccupied mother, bored in the summer holidays and whiling away the time before she is sent to boarding school, she encounters a group of girls belonging to the cult, and is soon drawn into their circle.

The novel opens in stunning prose, with the image of the girls moving through the park, and their effect on everyone around them:

These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile... All their cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them through the park.

Evie is soon stealing from her absent mother's purse for the group and making daily visits to their ranch, and it isn't long before she moves in. The novel charts brilliantly Evie's progression from enchantment with the group and its lifestyle and cod philosophy of community and sharing to disillusion and the realisation that the charismatic Manson figure, Russell, is a controlling, indeed vicious and ultimately petulant narcissist who holds everyone in the group in his power. Slower but more devastating is her realisation that Susan, the girl with whom she is most fascinated and begins by hero-worshipping, is vulnerable and utterly trapped by Russell.

This is a debut novel and Emma Cline is a young author, and everyone in our group expressed admiration that she was able to capture so well the atmosphere and ethos of the 60s.

The main, and potent, message of the book is the lack of power of young girls in our society. It is their lack of power in the real world that leads to their involvement in a cult apparently offering a more equitable way of life, and it is of course their supreme lack of power within that group that will lead to their following Russell's instructions to carry out his revenge murders. In the end, Evie is not present at the murders, which is why now, in the 80s, unlike the other female cult members she is free - although psychologically scarred for life - and, at the time she is remembering it all, she is staying at a friends' house in his absence. The friend's son and his girlfriend turn up and it becomes clear to Evie that the girlfriend is just as lacking in power in relation to the son, indeed subservient to him, as any girl would have been back in 1968. Things have not changed.

In our discussion, I said that for me the book hadn't answered a fundamental question: while they were clearly in Russell's thrall, how could the girls have brought themselves to carry out the murders? Others said, Well, psychologists couldn't find out from the girls themselves in the real life case, but I felt it was the job of the novelist to work the psychology. In fact, looking back at the novel now, I see that Cline does provide an explicit explanation. Evie thinks back to the times she was abused as a young girl, and the sheer hatred it raised in her. It is indeed the powerlessness, she thinks, that would fuel the violence: 'The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl's face... Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife.'

We weren't unstinting in our praise. Just about everybody felt that, after the vivid and enthralling beginning, the book took a long time to get going again as it established the situation that primes Evie for her rebellion: the sterility and boredom of her middle-class life with an unhappy mother, and the events that lead up to her best friend ending their friendship and leaving her at a loose end and lonely. I felt that this section of the novel, though so very well written and ringing very true, felt too familiar, that I'd read too many similar portrayals of American middle-class teenagehood. I also said there were a couple of longueurs: the descriptions of life with Evie's father and stepmother after her mother finds out what
she's been up to and sends her away (and from which she escapes back to the ranch), and of life in the boarding school after she is finally severed from the cult. Others agreed. I also said that although I was very taken by the prose as a whole, the use of strings of short verbless sentences, though mostly vivid in effect, seemed after a while to turn into a tic bordering on affectation, and as far as I remember some people agreed.

And that is all I can remember of our discussion, which in fact is a lot more than I expected to be able to.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here