“I was born in 1949, which seems like a long time ago… actually, it is a long time ago.” (Rick Wakeman)

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When Kaggsy and Simon announced the 1949 Club I went scurrying off to the TBR to see what I could find:

As it turns out, I missed one  – I also have The Far Cry by Emma Smith.  I’ve read some in preparation for the week and I’m hoping to read a few more throughout, although I won’t get to them all, so any suggestions gratefully received!

Knowing how highly JacquiWine rates A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor, this was my first stop. I thought it was an absolute knock-out, and filled the short novel with page markers which I’ve tried to picture, but was impeded by Fred taking a great interest and headbutting my phone repeatedly, so this is the best I managed:

It opens:

“Afternoons seem unending on branch line stations in England in summer time. The spiked shelter prints an unmoving shadow on the platform, geraniums blaze, whitewashed stones assault the eye. Such trains as come only add to the air of fantasy, to the idea of the scene being symbolic, or encountered at one level while suggesting another even more alienating.”

And so I settled in, knowing I was in the hands of a masterful writer. On first reading I found it striking, now looking back on it I think it’s perfect. English summertime: so often memorialised, sentimentalised, filled with nostalgia for warm, temperate days… and immediately Taylor has identified spikes, shadows, assaults, alienation. It concisely and expertly introduces everything about A Wreath of Roses.

Camilla Hill is catching a train to spend her holiday with her schoolfriend Liz and Liz’s governess Frances, now a painter. On the way there she witnesses something shocking, and so she finds herself talking to the other witness, Richard Elton, a man she initially judged as too obviously good-looking and too young for her.

She also recognises that he is not entirely honest, as does Liz when she meets him:

“I thought he seemed to be acting. It was as if he had learnt the words by heart first. They seemed not to belong to him, nor to match the look in his eyes.”

Yet Camilla finds herself drawn towards him. Liz and Frances have both changed a lot since the previous year; Liz now has baby Harry and despite her protestations that “Marriage is such a sordid, morbid relationship!”, she and her husband Arthur, a vicar, reach renewed understanding. Frances is aloof, and is embracing “ferocity” in both her changing painterly style and her enormous bull mastiff dog Hotchkiss. But her arthritis is getting worse and she is fearful she will not paint for much longer:

“So intent was she on being a normal elderly woman, so much trouble did she take, that she would always rather be praised for her crab-apple jelly than her painting, for the first was a marvel in her, the other natural to her and inevitable.”

Camilla barely admits her sexual attraction to Richard, but it is there, as he manipulates her with dishonesty and dissembling. She scarcely believes his stories of wartime heroics, yet she is so desperate for change, romance and hope that she recognises her cognitive dissonance as she continues to seek him out.

“No man would understand what life is like for so many women. How can we take any of the things we want, that you expect to have—freedom, adventure, experience—without being taxed intolerably, or making ourselves ridiculous in other people’s eyes, or in our own?”

There is a constant sense of menace in A Wreath of Roses. Richard is clearly sinister and unpredictable, but there is anger in the domestic scenes too. The three women talk to each other quite brutally at times, even when they are not in disagreement. Camilla observes to Frances about Liz’s husband:  

“Arthur seems to have a genius for cutting himself up into little pieces. He hands himself round among the ladies as if he were a plate of scones.”

When Morland Beddoes arrives, he simultaneously provides some relief but also racks up the tension. He is a gentle, quiet, observant middle-aged man and an admirer of Frances’ work. It’s a masterstroke by Taylor, as Beddoes recognises Richard’s danger and brings both the power and the vulnerability of kindness to the situation. The story remains entirely believable as it becomes unbearable.

I absolutely loved A Wreath of Roses. Every sentence is carefully crafted, yet the novel still flows and never feels overwritten. Taylor’s descriptive powers for scenes and acute insights with people mean she is precise and perceptive, without being cold. I’ve not done justice to her brilliance at all, but I’m delighted to have made such a memorable start to the 1949 Club.

“There are great paintings which offer everybody, and then there are lesser pictures which will reflect the light only here and there, rather capriciously, to individuals. Life itself shifts round a little and what we had thought all whiteness, or all darkness, flushes suddenly, from this new angle, with violet and green and vermillion.”

“On the whole it seems to be English women who don’t marry.” (Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels)

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Earlier in this month of #SpinsterSeptember hosted by @pear-jelly, I read The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym. I wanted to try and squeeze in another Pym before the end, and I really enjoyed reading Less Than Angels (1955), an earlier novel and more typical in tone, with its comic portraits of a group of anthropologists and their small dramas of daily life.

The novel opens with one spinster, Catherine Oliphant:

“she earned her living writing stories and articles for women’s magazines and had to draw her inspiration from everyday life, though life itself was sometimes too strong and raw and must be made palatable by fancy, as tough meat may be made tender by mincing.”

I wondered if that was a commentary by Pym on her own art? Who knows, but it was striking for its visceral imagery which felt untypical to me.

Meanwhile, Deirdre Swan is nineteen years old and living with her spinster aunt Rhoda and widowed mother Mabel.

“Deirdre was different, clever and moody, rather like she herself had been at the same age, before marriage to a good dull man and life in a suburb had steadied her.”

Deirdre is desperate for life to begin: to get away from the London suburb, to fall passionately in love rather than go on boring dates with suitably staid suitors. When she sees handsome young anthropologist Tom Mallow, she hopes there is opportunity for dramatic change. But Tom lives with Catherine…

“On the bus she wondered whether Tom had high principles, like Bernard. She was sure, somehow, that he had a delightful lack of them.”

In fairness to Deirdre’s suburb, it’s not entirely dull. Her neighbour is Alaric Lydgate, an anthropologist refusing to share his (likely useless) notes with Tom, closely observed by Mabel and Rhoda, confounding them by undertaking eccentric behaviour such as leaving rugs out on his lawn overnight.

Pym has a lot of fun exploring the department where Tom has returned after time overseas, where academics jostle for grants and wonder if they are spending time writing up interminable theses which will be forever unread.

She also draws parallels between daily life of women in post-war Britain and the more lauded anthropologists. Rhoda and Mabel are close observers of societal structure and ritual, and of a way of life that is disappearing rapidly. They just aren’t making a career from it. In fact, they feel guilty for not being serious-minded and instead borrowing novels from the library:

“And so it came about that, like many other well-meaning people, they worried not so much about the dreadful things themselves as about their own inability to worry about them.”

Tom, part of landed gentry, later wonders:

“When really, when one came to consider it, what could be more primitive than the rigid ceremonial of launching a debutante on the marriage market?”

We follow the department’s inhabitants for a time, their gentle professional and personal frustrations and triumphs. Less Than Angels is a quick read, expertly drawing the reader in to this small circle.

For Pym fans, there are references to other works here. Everard Bone and Mildred from Excellent Women are mentioned, and Catherine reflects:

“I’m not one of those excellent women, who can just go home and eat a boiled egg and make a cup of tea and be very splendid, she thought, but how useful it would be if I were! She thought wistfully of herself like this.”

To me this didn’t quite have the sparkle of that novel, or my favourite Pym so far, Quartet in Autumn. But there was still so much to enjoy here: the astute but compassionate characterisation, the close observation, the gentle humour. I’m so pleased to have got back to Pym throughout #SpinsterSeptember and it’s encouraged me not to leave it so long in future.

“What odd turns life does take! And how much more comfortable it sometimes was to observe it from a distance, to look down from an upper window, as it were, as the anthropologists did.”

“As a psychologist she began to suspect she was a very good teacher of French.” (Josephine Tey, Miss Pym Disposes)

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I dithered a bit about posting on Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey (1946) as although I enjoyed it, I wasn’t really sure if I could recommend it onwards. It’s an unusual novel written by an established author of the era of golden age detectives, where the murder doesn’t take place until page 157 of 208. There’s also a lot of dated stereotyping and language so do bear that in mind if you decide to pick it up.

My edition is from what I think of as the golden age of soft-focus cheese from the Penguin art department, circa mid 1970s-1980s.

But it’s perfect for #SpinsterSeptember hosted by @pearjelly, set as it is in Leys Physical Training College for young ladies, where the teachers are single women, and with a titular character who is also a spinster. Lucy Pym initially works as a French teacher:

“But after four years of that her remaining parent had died, leaving her two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and Lucy had dried her eyes with one hand and given in her resignation with the other.

[…]

She read her first book on psychology out of curiosity, because it seemed to her an interesting sort of thing; and she read all the rest to see if they were just as silly. By the time she had read thirty-seven books on the subject, she had evolved ideas of her own on psychology; at variance, of course, with all thirty-seven volumes read to date. In fact, the thirty-seven volumes seemed to her so idiotic and made her so angry that she sat down there and then and wrote reams of refutal. Since one cannot talk about psychology in anything but jargon, there being no English for most of it, the reams of refutal read very learnedly indeed.”

I did enjoy Tey’s humour around Lucy leaving her job! Clearly she was highly sceptical of psychology though, which is quite surprising given that in many ways this is a psychological study. Much of the novel is spent building her cast of characters and the insular environment of the college.

“College was a bright gateway to the future for deserving youth; and if one or two found the gateway a hazard rather than an opening, then it was unfortunate but no reflection on the builders of the gateway.

“Like a convent,” Nash had said yesterday morning. “No time to think of an outside world.” That was true. She had watched a day’s routine go by. She had also seen the students’ two daily papers lying unopened in the common-room last night as they went in to supper. But a nunnery, if it was a narrow world, was also a placid one. Uncompetitive. Assured. There was nothing of the nunnery about this over-anxious, wildly strenuous life. Only the self-absorption was the same; the narrowness.”

Lucy is there because she was asked by old schoolfriend Henrietta to give a talk, and at first the 5.30am bell ringing and horrific institutional food means she plans to leave as soon as possible. But gradually she begins to enjoy herself, and decides to stay for the end of term gymnastic demo. She enjoys the company of the senior girls, including charismatic head girl Pamela ‘Beau’ Nash; her best friend, the accomplished but self-effacing Mary Innes; and Teresa Desterro who is there to study dance only and hone her considerable talent. There is also Barbara Rouse, who people are wary of although it’s not clear why, and is the favourite of the headmistress, also for reasons unclear.

“In the last few years [Lucy] had been ignored, envied, admired, kow-towed to, and cultivated; but warm, personal liking was something she had not had since the Lower Fourth said goodbye to her, with a home-made pen-wiper and a speech by Gladys Someone-or-other, shortly after her legacy. To stay in this atmosphere of youth, of liking, of warmth, she was willing to overlook for a space the bells, the beans, and the bathrooms.”

The girls are waiting to find out which jobs have been found for them by their headmistress, and there’s a shock when the plum job at “Arlinghurst. The school for girls, of course. A sort of female Eton.” goes to an unexpected candidate.

So, someone gets killed, and Lucy uses, I would say, one and a half pieces of flimsy evidence to work out who did it. But actually, I don’t think the puzzle element is of particular interest to Tey. There’s a great Backlisted podcast episode on this novel from back in 2021, with Val McDermid who is really enthusiastic about Miss Pym Disposes. She argues Tey is more interested in morality; the motivations of it and the conundrums around it, and I think she’s right. The reasons I find golden age detective novels a comfort read – a puzzle worked out neatly, justice and order restored – are not present here. The ending is really quite stark, and readers are unlikely to find the outcome reassuring although it is believable.

I do recommend Miss Pym Disposes, but surprisingly, not as one to be read when you’re in the mood for a golden age mystery!

To end, initially nothing sprung to mind for a suitable song, before I realised that because Teresa is Brazilian, I could include a legendary musician from that country, Caetano Veloso:

Blog Tour: The Butterfly House – Teresa Solana (2014, transl. Peter Bush 2025)

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Today I’m taking part in a blog tour for Corylus Books, a lovely indie publisher with a focus on translated crime fiction. I really enjoyed Black Storms, the first in Teresa Solana’s stories featuring Norma Forester of the Barcelona police, when I read it back in 2024, so I jumped at the chance to catch up with her – and her wonderful family! – again.

Here is the summary from Corylus Books:

“No money, no future – a motive for murder?

The economic crisis has hit Barcelona hard, and a personal crisis might be about to hit Deputy Inspector Norma Forrester’s family.

When a body is found in the grounds of a former grand villa, now a student squat, Norma finds the case uncomfortably close to home. The downturn has turned the city into a breeding ground for crime, or is the motive more personal? Unable to stay away, although this case may represent a conflict of interest, Norma can’t even count on the support of her forensic pathologist husband Octavi, who has more than enough to cope with following a major incident at the city’s Prat Airport. When a face from his past appears, he and Norma are faced with choices and conflicts – just as her focus should be on finding the killer.

With her trademark dark humour, Teresa Solana paints the portrait of a contradictory vibrant Barcelona, where nothing is ever black and white.”

At just over 200 pages The Butterfly House gets on with the story, doesn’t waste a word, isn’t overly convoluted and still manages believable characterisation. I really enjoyed it.

Norma’s daughter Violeta is still living in a squat, when her new maybe-boyfriend finds a woman’s body in the grounds. She calls her mother, despite the other squatters concerns. I found the particular history of the distrust of the Mossos d’Esquadra interesting, stemming from the time of Franco:

“quite the opposite of the caricature of the inept … force in Franco’s time. Deputy Inspector Carrasco was definitely an exception, but even with his coarse manners, he didn’t harbour the slightest sympathy for the dictatorship. Educated by the clergy, he oozed a deep hatred for anything smelling of sacristies, and, given the choice, he preferred the company of petty criminals”

Carrasco is supposed to lead the investigation due to Norma’s personal involvement, and you can practically smell him off the page:

“The moment she opened the car door, Norma had the dubious honour of verifying the urban myth according to which Deputy Inspector Carrasco’s vehicle was a mobile laboratory of biological warfare. Inside the policeman’s car were all kinds of organic material in various stages of decomposition, from crumbs and bags of mouldy food to mutant insects, ash, fag-ends, tins and empty bottles, dirty, screwed-up paper, filthy clothes, sand, dust and an alarming amount of unclassifiable objects”

But of course Norma isn’t staying away, and she finds present day socio-political forces exerting their power too. Not even the area around Sagrada Família with all its tourist money can escape:

“Before going into the premises, they took a look around the area and saw that many businesses had closed, with signs advertising that their premises were up for rent or leasing. On that side of the street alone they also counted six balconies with boards advertising flats for sale or rent.

‘Soon or later, this is all going down the pan,’ said Norma, shaking her head.

‘I thought it already had. Do you think things can get any worse?’

‘People’s patience has its limits. Never forget that despair can be a powerful lever.’”

Yet at the same time Norma and her team wonder how much money can be a motivator when everyone is in the same corrupt, broken boat:

“‘But it doesn’t really make much sense. The whole country is in debt and everybody owes someone money,’ said Norma. ‘People aren’t killing to avoid paying debts on money that was almost certainly dirty.’”

As Norma investigates, the reader is aware of more going on with her family than she is. I was concerned that my favourite characters from the first book weren’t going to make an appearance, but her mother Mimí arrives in one of the novel’s funniest scenes, with the incomparable Aunt Margarida not far behind:

“For a moment Norma imagined the expression on her colleague’s face if she’d told him her own private hacker was a nun in an enclosed order who lived in Pedralbes, and who, coincidentally, was a relative of hers.”

The story balances humour alongside the seriousness of the investigation perfectly. The pace is rapid but not overwhelming and I whizzed through The Butterfly House. As previously, I loved the characterisation of Norma’s family, and her colleagues were well-realised too. I’m so grateful to Corylus Books for translating this entertaining, astute series.

“‘For the moment the husband hasn’t asked for a lawyer. That’s a good sign,’ remarked Norma as they left the interview room.

‘Maybe, or perhaps he just doesn’t watch much telly,’ hissed the deputy inspector.”

Here are the stops from the rest of the tour, so do check out how other bloggers got on with The Butterfly House:

“Being unmarried has its own status.” (Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died)

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I’ve been meaning to get back to reading Barbara Pym, and what better time than #SpinsterSeptember, hosted by @pear-jelly. Pym fills her novels with ‘excellent women’ spinsters, although the character of Leonora Eyre in The Sweet Dove Died (1978) is a bit of a departure. Pym observed in a letter to Phillip Larkin “I didn’t try to make it so, but tended to leave out boring cosiness and concentrate on the darker side.”

The novel opens with Humphrey Boyce, a middle-aged antique dealer and his young nephew James, helping Leonora Eyre from a Bond Street salesroom and taking her to lunch. Leonora has been overcome placing the winning bid for a Victorian flower book (!)

Everything about Leonora is performatively Victorian, summed up brilliantly in this description of her bedside table:

“Browning and Matthew Arnold—her favourite poets—took their place with her Guerlain cologne, a bottle of smelling salts, soft aquamarine paper tissues, a phial of brightly coloured pills to relieve stress and strain, and presiding over all these the faded photographs of a handsome man and a sweet faced woman in late-Victorian dress. Leonora had long ago decided that her grandparents were much more distinguished looking than her father and mother whose photographs had been hidden away in a drawer.”

Her romanticising of the bygone era doesn’t ever acknowledge that during that time, she would not have been allowed to inherit her parents estate or own property, two things which allow her to live out her entirely self-focussed twentieth-century life.

There is absolutely no generosity to Leonora, everything and everyone is about meeting her own needs. Thus as a love triangle of sorts emerges between the three, her motives are not inspired by who Humphrey or James are, but what they can do for her.

In fairness, James has no idea who he is either. He is in his twenties but remains curiously unformed, even allowing for his young age.

“James was not yet sure what he wanted from life, and had so far tended to avoid violent extremes of any kind.”

He has sexual dalliances with Phoebe, a young woman who he cares for very little, and Ned, a visiting American academic who is entirely uncommitted to him despite James wanting more. There is a lack of intimacy in James’ closest relationships, which is perhaps why he and Leonora are well-suited. She likes the flattery of an attentive younger man, but really wants very little else. Proud of her history of male suitors, none of them seem to actually have amounted to a relationship.

Aware she is losing her looks, Leonora still has admirers:

“One day, Humphrey flattered himself, she would become bored with the novelty of James’s youth and realise the more lasting qualities—virtues, almost—of a man nearer her own age who was tall and kept his figure and was bald only in the most distinguished kind of way.”

But even Humphrey is beginning to lose interest towards the end of the novel.

As we follow these curious three for a while, there is all of Pym’s brilliant social observation around English niceties and the exposure of character in the smallest of details. Yet there is more cruelty portrayed in this novel than I expect with Pym. Leonora behaves appallingly at times, and is truly unpleasant. Ned is in many ways her match, a young man at ease with hurting others to get what he wants. However, the author’s eye remains compassionate to them all, and so there is never a bitter taste left by what the reader witnesses. Rather it is all the foibles and follies Pym usually turns her attention to, but with a darker edge.

Although less humorous than some of her earlier novels, there is still humour to enjoy here, such as Humphrey’s vanity over his baldness, or the check he places on one flight of fancy:

“But he soon dismissed the picture from his mind as impossible and ludicrous. A woodland seduction scene between two middle-aged protagonists could only end in disaster.”

Towards the end, there is a real sense of impending, true sadness for Leonora, unless she mends her ways:

“She had always cared as much for inanimate objects as for people and now spent hours looking after her possessions, washing the china and cleaning the silver obsessively and rearranging them in her rooms.”

But Pym’s light touch remains, and so situations and people remain unresolved but not without hope.

This would be a great choice for a book group, as the characters remain somewhat enigmatic. No great insights or changes occur, their motivations and feelings oblique and unknown even to themselves. It would be interesting to hear a group discussion of how they each interpreted them…

I really enjoyed returning to Pym’s world, masterfully drawn, sharply observed, sympathetically portrayed without sentimentality. I’m hoping to get to Less Than Angels before the month is out!

“Without a watch, there’s just a spinning on through alcohol and human entanglements.” (Irmgard Keun, Ferdinand)

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I really enjoyed my first experience of Irmgard Keun when I read Child of All Nations last year, and so I was looking forward to picking her up again. Women in Translation Month provided the perfect opportunity. Ferdinand, The Man With the Kind Heart (1950, transl. Michael Hoffman 2020) was her final novel, written not long after the end of World War Two, and just a year after the division of Germany. (There is some dated language in the novel).

The story is told from the point of view of titular Ferdinand as he somewhat listlessly makes his way around war-torn Köln (Cologne). The privations continue and the illicit economy thrives. Keun is so witty and gives her narrator an inventive turn of phrase:

“The Moselle tastes as flaccid and murky as the decayed philanthropy of an unhappily married vintner. The Belgian cigarettes taste of rancid hay.”

His landlady Frau Stabhorn is thriving in her own way, renting her hallway to him as a room, making jam to sell and caring for her grandchildren.  Ferdinand’s experience of this brood is expressed with a degree of tolerant irony:

“Children are the bonny little blossoms in the mouldering garden of life. As I write, a couple of the bonny little blossoms are trying to spread a mixture of jam and plaster of paris all over my arms and legs.”

The book is really a series of portraits, with the plot mainly existing as the passage of time. We meet fellow lodgers:

“Lily is the victim of her beautiful feet. She studies chemistry and earns money on the side from knitting sweaters and writing.”

And poverty-stricken Ferdinand is later employed by a snake-oil salesman:

“Liebezhl draws horoscopes, reads palms, swings crystals, lays cards, sells amulets, and does a little podiatry.”  

Who offers him work as a sort of agony uncle:

“Waiting for me outside my office I had, among others, a man with broken fingernails, a wine grower who wanted to get married for the fourth time … five deserted wives, and a sixth who wished to be deserted because her husband snored. I had my work cut out for me.”

Meanwhile, Ferdinand is trying to work out how to get out of his engagement, again observed with a certain ironic detachment:

“There are three items that Luise managed to hang onto throughout the war: a stove, an electric iron, and me. All three of us are a little impaired, and not quite good as new. But Luise is hanging tenaciously, not to say grimly, on to all of us. Her favourite is the stove, and next, even ahead of the iron, is me.”

So, there is a lot of humour in Ferdinand, but there are some very serious points that Keun makes too. And in fact I found the listless, plotless, artless quality to the character and the story to be a serious point too. Ferdinand was a solder and a prisoner of war. To me, his narrative style, his detachment, numbness, ironical distancing, lack of real interest in anything, was a portrait of trauma.

He doesn’t dwell on his past, but when mentioned it is striking:

“My only feeling was fear. I was swimming in an ocean of fear… I was afraid of the NCOs, headquarters, uniforms, barracks, corporals, the officers’ voices—the whole massive machinery of it.

I no longer saw human beings, all I saw were the mechanical manifestations of a force that hypnotised me to the point of crippling despair.”

There is also disgust and cynicism regarding former Nazis living their daily lives, such as Luise’s father:

“He settled down among the spoils of his wife and pouted. His wife and daughter waited on him, the household was his to command, and gradually he clambered back up to the temporarily vacant throne of the family dictator, and everyone tried to be as satisfied and dissatisfied as they’d been previously, in the good old days.”

And sadly of course, his observations have not dated, although specifics change:

“Dictatorships are always very strict about what they understand as morals and public ethics. Our former unlimited German dictatorship has, in the way of lower life forms, procreated by simple fission, and is now called democracy.”

All in all, I found Ferdinand an intriguing read. There was a sense at the end that despite being the titular character and first-person narrator, he had slipped through my fingers. But as I thought about how this was the point, I found this very affecting. Cologne and its citizens were in a process of recovery, trying to understand what remained and how to live after devastation (60% of the city was bombed). As an exploration of the aftermath of war on individuals and on society, it was skilled, subtle and truly moving.

“There are people to whom the whole world is a toy, and who love it and take it as seriously and carefully as they take their toys.”

“Human nature is essentially unpredictable in the long run.” (Muriel Spark, The Fortune Teller)

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I cannot wait for autumn. I completely reject the idea that our fifth heatwave is pending: it’s been one long, hot, horrible summer interspersed with some cooler days on occasion. In an effort to be less grumpy about the humidity and try and embrace it to some extent, I read Stories for Summer and Days by the Pool. This short story collection is published as part of the marvellous British Library Women Writers series, edited by Simon at Stuck in a Book who provides a great Introduction.

Short story collections can be variable but this is consistently strong, as you would expect from big-hitters including Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Maeve Brennan, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Muriel Spark…

While, as previously established, I despise London in summer, it is an appealing setting in Black Cat For Luck by GB Stern.

“The sea has its enchantment, and the woods have their witchery, and even a meadow full of cows shambling down to drink from the brook is all very well; but there is that about a big city in early June which can surpass all these via magic of its own: a promise in the flicker of sunshine through the flat leaves, and on the pale, shining, mottled trunks of the plane trees, more exciting than the broadest fulfilment.”

It follows the intrigues of a summer garden party in the more exclusive areas of the city: an ambitious young man called Maurice Jodelet, a savvy young woman named Barbara, and Sir Nicholas Broadfoot “of the Foreign Office” are drawn into a wittily conveyed, slightly twisty tale of small-scale drama.

This was a great example of how a plot-driven tale can be set-up and perfectly executed in a short space.  The characterisation, particularly of the two young people, was well realised. I have some GB Stern novels buried in the TBR somewhere and on the strength of this story I’m keen to dig them out.

Phyllis Bottome was an author I didn’t know among such lauded company, and her story The Shark’s Fin is a more typical summer setting, with a newly married couple on honeymoon in the Caribbean. Dorothy is young and pretty, and fully aware of her appeal:

“Her eyes were not quite the blue of the Caribbean sea, but they sustained the comparison.”

In just eight pages Bottome creates a perfect mini-portrait of a spoilt, naïve young woman, and the significant ramifications that self-centred, impulsive actions can have even when a situation appears outwardly unchanged. It’s the sort of story perfectly suited to the short-form.

I highly recommend this collection; a carefully chosen range of great writing which is hugely enjoyable.

To end, my local lido is not as glamorous as the Caribbean, but it is the largest freshwater outdoor pool in the UK and has been incredibly warm this summer (I’m not one of the hardy types who swim there all year round, when they smash the surface ice in winter):

“Life is to be found on the other side of that gate.” (Virginie Grimaldi, All That Remains)

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It was Claire at Word by Word whose blog post last year alerted me to All That Remains by Virginie Grimaldi (2022, transl. Hildegarde Serle 2025). This story of inter-generational friendship was so appealing, and it turned out to be a lovely read for Women in Translation Month 2026.

Jeanne’s husband of many years has died, leaving her spiralling through the disorientation of immense grief. Each day she visits him:

“That was her husband’s habit, cluttering up his stories with superfluous details. How often had she switched off while he was talking to her? Jeanne’s parents had taught her only to open her mouth when it was strictly necessary. And here she was, at seventy-four, telling a gravestone about the TV programme on the dangers of sugar that she’d watched yesterday.”

At the bakery near her house, eighteen-year-old Théo is an apprentice baker. Each chapter is headed with one of three character’s names and told from their point of view. I loved Théo’s voice, so bolshy and insecure. He goes to a karate class each week and tries to partner with younger boy Sam, who is still better than him at the martial art. One day his teacher takes charge of the pairs:

“Laurent, a guy who’s two heads taller than me and has shoulders I could do the splits on. Only the fenders are missing to mistake him for a 4×4. He’s not a man, he’s scaffolding. A wardrobe with feet and arms. But a large wardrobe, right, the sort Beyoncé would have.”

When Jeanne realises she needs to do something drastic or she risks losing the home she had with Pierre, she takes in lodgers. And so she ends up sharing her apartment with Théo and thirty-three year-old Iris.

At first Iris and Théo butt against each other almost like siblings:

“I left home at the same time as Theo, who is always as pleasant as a pap smear. From the very top step, I sensed I wasn’t going to reach the ground floor in a vertical position. My foot slipped without asking my permission, the rest of my body didn’t have time to register the information, it fell limply.”

But gradually the three of them feel-out how to live together. At first it is logistical adaptation, around meal times and use of the bathroom. Théo takes on Jeanne’s lack of housekeeping:  

“I’ve seen some right messes, but on this scale, never. Every time I open a drawer, it looks like burglars have rifled through it. You’d never think it, entering the apartment … But don’t open the cupboard, unless you want your brow busted by a Breton bol.”

While Iris overcomes her apathy to Boudine, Jeanne’s dog.

Then slowly, they start to become friends. Watching the relationships grow between the three is undoubtedly feel-good, without being sentimental. All have secrets: Jeanne is seeing a psychic and receiving strange letters; Théo has left the children’s home where he largely grew up but has found his troubled past less easy to shake; and Iris is skulking around the city, working as a carer although she loved her vocation as a physiotherapist – why?

Together they learn all that friendship can offer, from the most surprising people in the most unlooked-for places. I found it genuinely moving, a comfort read without being saccharine or fantastical. A major contrivance occurs at the end but by that time I was so won over I couldn’t have cared less.  

“My mother always preferred people with flaws to those without. She’d often say that two smooth surfaces slide over each other, whereas two dented surfaces catch on to each other and become stronger together. She wasn’t always wrong.”

A little gem.

“It’s the mystery that’s important, somehow very important.” (Tove Jansson, Art in Nature)

/ madamebibilophile / 18 Comments

Those of you who follow Paula’s Book Jotter blog will know what a huge fan she is of Finnish author Tove Jansson, creating the wonderful resource Tove Trove. When Paula pointed out 9 August was Tove Jansson Day, I resolved to read the two collections of short stories I had in the TBR, also perfect for Women in Translation Month. I read one, then promptly forgot all about today until this morning, so apologies in advance for this hastily written post!

Art in Nature (1978, transl. Thomas Teal 2012) and Letters From Klara (1991, transl. Thomas Teal 2017) are both published by Sort Of Books, who have done such a brilliant job of making Jansson’s work readily available in English translation.

I’m going to pick one story from each, as I find writing about short story collections really difficult.

Art in Nature was the collection I preferred, with some truly unnerving psychological studies within it. However, I’ll choose one of the lighter stories, White Lady.

Three women in their sixties are dressed up and slightly tipsy, ready for a good time at a restaurant on an islet. Ellinor is a writer who “loved similes” and is tempting to read as a self-portrait; nostalgic Regina and troubled, girlish May make up the threesome.

“They were going to eat and drink well, and for this one evening they had left everything behind and were going to enjoy themselves in a new, unusual place, an island from the turn of the century, a building that was almost old when they were children.

‘That’s what’s so exciting,’ Regina said. ‘Having it all ahead of us. I’ll have a White Lady. I’m wearing a white dress, so I want a White Lady.

‘Is that strong?’ May asked. ‘I’ll have the same.’”

Over just fourteen pages, Jansson conveys so much. The women are fully realised as individuals. Their determination to have a good time is underpinned by grief and pain, yet is resilient more than sad. Their coming to terms with aging and lost time is sensitively portrayed. It has moments of humour and moments of great pathos.

“The young people were not dancing. Why should they? They could afford not to. Wherever they went, their own music followed them.”

In Letters from Klara, the titular story opens the collection in great style. Klara is spiky, affectionate, clear-sighted, uncompromising. As she explains to her solicitor, she has decided to change her will to give an annuity to a retirement home:

“The idea –  as I’m sure you understand, cunning as you are – is that, with this income in mind, the home will try and keep me alive as long as possible. I will be their mascot and will be allowed certain obvious liberties. Whatever is left when I die will be distributed exactly as specified earlier.

I will only add that I am at the moment in excellent health and hope you are the same.”

But as she explains to her sad friend Cecilia, clearing out belongings towards the end of life isn’t so easy:

“The little treasures you try to give young people just make them uncomfortable – more and more polite and more and more uncomfortable. Have you noticed that?

You know what? There’s now a flea market on Sandvik Square every Sat and Sun. What do you think of that? People can wander around and find stuff for themselves and no one has to feel ill at ease or grateful. Brilliant idea.”

I could have read a whole book of Klara’s letters, she was such a forceful joy. Alas, I had to make do with just ten pages.

I highly recommend both these collections. Jansson has a perfect understanding of the short story form and doesn’t waste a word. They are precisely written yet never feel lacking; each is story is fully realised in itself. Concision is never at the expense of depth or insight.

To end, I didn’t know the Moomins had a YouTube channel! As well as their own adventures they’ve uploaded this lovely clip about the tradition of Tove’s birthday flower wreath:

“Here they were, wrecked together on the edge of Europe as on an island and she was learning to keep her thoughts to herself.” (The Spoilt City, Olivia Manning)

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

It was a conversation with Marcie in the comments of Jacqui’s Levant Trilogy post which led to us doing a buddy read for all three volumes of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy this year. We started with The Great Fortune (1960) in June, and now onto the second instalment, The Spoilt City (1962).

It took me a while to get into The Great Fortune, but by the end I was whizzing through and couldn’t wait to start The Spoilt City. I’m clearly in the rhythm of Manning’s writing now because I sank right in and absolutely loved this second volume.

(What I decided I didn’t love was the omnibus edition I started with, so I’ve bought these Windmill Editions now and I’m much happier).

The city is Bucharest in 1940, and we follow still-fairly-recently married Guy and Harriet Pringle as the physical and social environment they are used to disintegrates around them.

“On the pavement the Guardist youths with their banners and pamphlets, were still trying to rouse revolt. Although a sense of revolt agitated the nerves like an electric storm that would not break, the city was lethargic, the palace dormant, its white blinds drawn down against the tedium of the afternoon.”

This volume is increasingly tense, the Nazi threat growing ever-closer. Guy is still teaching English at the university, but both students and the staff group are rapidly dwindling.

“With uncomplaining enthusiasm, Guy did much more than was expected of him; but he was not imposed upon. He did what he wanted to do and did it, Harriet believed, to keep reality at bay.”

Guy’s boss Inchcape is also determined to keep the Department open, even as dangers grow. This volume is more emotionally affecting than the first, I found this particularly true in a scene with the older single women of the department being forced to leave for their own safety, as well as Inchcape having to face his vulnerabilities to a shocking extent.

This forms the shifting and stressful background to the Pringles’ early marriage. Both Harriet and Guy have to acknowledge their profound differences in how they approach life and see things:

“It was probably significant that he was physically short-sighted. He could not recognise people until almost upon them. Their faces were like so many buns. good-natured buns, he would have said, but Harriet did not agree. She saw them in detail and did not like them any the better for it.”

“He saw her muddled and lost in anarchy and a childish mysticism.”

Guy’s belief in communism gives him more certainty, a grounding as the ground constantly shifts beneath them. Still, their marriage seems underpinned by a great deal of love for each other, although the reader is not privy to any declarations.

My favourite character Yakimov is still racketing around, trying to sell his beloved Hispano-Suiza car even as no-one has money for fuel. He is still living with the Pringles and Harriet despairs.

“If she wanted to get rid of him, she would have to pack his bags herself and lock him out. And if she did that, he would probably sit on the doorstep until Guy brought him back in again.”

Yaki behaves appallingly in the first part of the novel, before redeeming himself beautifully at the end, making his portrayal one of the most comedic, disturbing and complex in The Spoilt City. Apparently based on Julian Maclaren-Ross, I really should learn more about this Fitzrovian dandy poet. Anthony Powell based X Trapnel on him in A Dance to the Music of Time, and he certainly seems a character…

What struck me most in this volume, apart from the evocation of physically crumbling environs, was the ambivalence, or perhaps resignation, of most of the people Harriet interacts with. As long as they are safe and their lives continue in a way that works for them, they don’t seem to particularly care who is in charge. This made me realise the oppositional Second World War narratives I’ve taken for granted until now; I am used to films and books where people are firmly on the side of the Allies or the Axis powers, not indifferent between the two.

This is brought into sharp focus by Harriet’s English friend, Bella:

“Her skin apricot, her hair bleached by the sun, Bella was looking extremely handsome and seemed almost intoxicated by the night’s happenings.

‘How wonderful to have a strong man in power!’ she said. ‘Everyone is saying that Romania will regain her territory.’

‘What makes them think that?’

‘Because Antonescu is a real dictator. He knows how to deal with Hitler and Musso. He’s one of them. I don’t mind betting, within three months, this country will be on its feet again.’”

Later they meet again, Bella delighting in all she can buy as prices tumble, when they run into each other under a newly erected swastika flag:

“Elated by her rising fortune, she looked up and smiled at the flag and the clear pale sky beyond it. ‘I love this time of year,’ she said. ‘so delicious after the fug of summer. It makes one feel so alive.’

She seemed aglitter with life, almost dancing in her new green lizard skin shoes.”

Astonishingly, it is only Guy who overtly acknowledges what is behind the flag, the only one who says “I couldn’t stand it. I kept thinking of the concentration camps.”

Manning leaves spaces in her narrative so we assume Harriet is of a similar mind, although her primary worry is for the safety of Guy, vulnerable under the new regime because of his communist beliefs and willingness to teach Jewish students.

The Pringles are also at risk as they still have sweet Sacha Drucker in their flat, and early on we know they have been betrayed and are likely to be raided…

“Truth is a luxury. We can only afford it now and then.”

The Spoilt City is a novel which conveys the physical and human devastation wreaked by war for those not directly caught in conflict. It is deeply moving without being remotely sentimental, and feels entirely believable. I found myself completely caught up in the Pringles’ lives and even (shock horror!) warming to Guy. I’m impatient to read volume three, Friends and Heroes.

I wound up googling Hispano-Suiza cars as Yaki describes his so lovingly. I can’t drive and I’m entirely uninterested in cars, but even I can see this is a lovely machine: