Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.5

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Following on from yesterday’s post on Gentleman Prefer Blondes, today I read the sequel But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes by Anita Loos (1927).

(Please note – some spoilers for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes!)

I’ll start with the negatives: I don’t think this quite has the sparkle of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and it has less of the vignette style which suited Lorelei’s voice so well. I would hesitate to recommend it as a standalone novel, but as a short, diverting companion-piece to Blondes, there is still much to enjoy.

It opens with Lorelei expressing some quite modern views on marriage:

“I am full of ambitions and I think that practically every married girl ought to have a career if she is wealthy enough to have the home life carried on by the servants. Especially if a girl is married to a husband like Henry. Because Henry is quite a homebody and, if a girl was a homebody to, she would encounter him quite often.”

As Lorelei settles into married life and motherhood, Dorothy is still on hand with cynical commentary:

“And even Dorothy says that “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” I mean sometimes Dorothy becomes Philosophical, and says something that really makes a girl wonder how anyone who can make such a Philosophical remark can waste her time like Dorothy does.”

When Lorelei decides to follow a career as a writer, she heads to the Algonquin Round Table. I don’t know what Loos’ relationship was with this group, but she’s pretty biting about these literary wits:

“So then they all started to tell about a famous trip they took to Europe. And they had a marvelous time, because everywhere they went, they would sit in the hotel, and play cute games and tell reminisences about the Algonquin. And I think it is wonderful to have so many internal resources that you never have to bother to go outside of yourself to see anything.”

Lorelei decides to write about her friend Dorothy’s life, from travelling carnival, to school:

“Well, the Principal went down to Dorothy’s class and told all the girls that Dorothy had not had the advantage of a pure home, so they must form themselves into a little Committee, and help her not to stray. And after that, Dorothy really became the center of attraction, until one of the girls took a false step with a visiting football team and Dorothy lost her novelty.”

To joining the Ziegfeld Follies:

“Because hardly any broker seems to have enough Psychology to realize that the real ideal of his dreams is some small town village bell that he used to weave a romance around when he was age sixteen. But Mr. Ziegfield knows all about Psychology so that is the kind he picks out. And Dorothy says that about all Mr. Ziegfield does to “glorify” them, is to get them to comb the hay out of their hair, and give up starch in lingeray.”

For a story about Dorothy, there’s quite a lack of her biting observations, which was a shame. However, there are still some good lines:

“Gloria warned Dorothy that it would be fatal to marry a saxaphone player, without giving yourself an opertunity to get sick of him first.”

(Very reminiscent of Some Like It Hot!) And one that had a slightly Wodehouse turn of phrase:

“I mean, he could not take to drink, because he had already done that for years.”

So all in all, Loos’ wit means there is enough to enjoy if you enjoyed Blondes, and at novella-length Brunettes doesn’t outstay its welcome.

To end, we’ve had blondes and brunettes, now an extremely famous redhead, who like Dorothy was part of the Ziegfeld Follies:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.4

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I knew of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) from the iconic 1952 filmed musical, but somehow I never got round to reading it. I found this Penguin edition of the novella plus the sequel with the original illustrations by Ralph Barton, and realised now was the time for me to spend with Lorelei Lee, gold-digging flapper.

Told in diary form, we follow Lorelei around New York and then Europe, as she dates a series of men, trying to get them to spend as much money on her as possible.

“So by the time Piggie pays for a few dozen orchids, the diamond tiara will really seem like quite a bargain. Because I always think that spending money is only just a habit and if you get a gentleman started on buying one dozen orchids at a time he really gets very good habits.”

Lorelei is also on a constant quest to improve her mind, aided by Mr Eisman who suggests she keep a diary, although it never quite works. Her attempt to host a literary salon ends thusly:

“So Sam asked if he could bring a gentleman who writes novels from England, so I said yes, so he brought him. And then we all got together and I called up Gloria and Dorothy and the gentleman brought their own liquor. So of course the place was a wreck this morning and Lulu and I worked like proverbial dogs to get it cleaned up, but Heaven knows how long it will take to get the chandelier fixed.”

She does, however, attract a novelist:

“As soon as he found out that I was literary. I mean he has called up every day and I went to tea twice with him. So he has sent me a whole complete set of books for my birthday by a gentleman called Mr. Conrad. They all seem to be about ocean travel although I have not had time to more than glance through them.”

Ultimately though, she asks her maid to read Lord Jim and then tell her what happens.

The diary forms a series of vignettes as Lorelei and her acerbic friend Dorothy ricochet from one party and one man to another, before they travel to Europe. Dorothy is quick-witted and incisive, but also much more romantic. While she falls in love on the ship to England, Lorelei bemoans the lack of spending opportunities.

“I mean I really hope I do not get any more large size imitations of a dog as I have three now and I do not see why the Captain does not ask Mr. Cartier to have a jewelry store on the ship as it is really not much fun to go shopping on a ship with gentlemen, and buy nothing but imitations of dogs.”

It is this humour and the guilessness of Lorelei’s tone that make this such an enjoyable read. She is relentlessly materialistic,  but there is nothing vicious about her.

Loos also has some serious points to make among the light comedy. Lorelei was sexually assaulted in the past, and shot her assailant. In court, she was subject to misogynistic destruction of character. As she observes:

“I mean a gentleman never pays for those things but a girl always pays.”

There is a sense that she feels that men are still getting the better deal, when all they lose is money.

“I mean I always seem to think that when a girl really enjoys being with a gentleman, it puts her to quite a disadvantage and no real good can come of it.”

The reader also questions who is using who. Lorelei wants money, but what do this succession of men really want – do any of them truly care for Lorelei and are they even taken in by her?

When she and Dorothy are in London, they are mistaken for rich and subsequently invited to a series of aristocratic homes because people want to flog them things:

“So we went to tea to a lady’s house called Lady Elmsworth and what she has to sell we Americans seems to be a picture of her father painted in oil paint who she said was a whistler. But I told her my own father was a whistler and used to whistle all of the time and I did not even have a picture of him but every time he used to go to Little Rock I asked him to go to the photographers but he did not go.”

This is a perfect example of how Loos captures Lorelei’s ignorance but she is not the butt of the joke. Not knowing who Whistler is stops her being ripped off. Similarly, I usually dislike non-standard spellings to demonstrate a character’s poor education as condescending, but with Lorelei it serves to remind the reader that she is young and naïve and not to judge her actions too harshly.

“The Eyefull Tower is devine and it is much more educational than the London Tower, because you cannot even see the London Tower if you happen to be two blocks away. But when a girl looks at the Eyefull Tower she really knows she is looking at something. And it would even be very difficult not to notice the Eyefull Tower.”

I mean, she’s not wrong…

The other way Loos achieves balance is through Dorothy’s reported comments, cutting through any suggestion of whimsy:

“Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really said she thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.”

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a clever, entertaining satire on early twentieth century materialism, relationships between the sexes, and the choices available to women. Lorelei is somehow charming, and Loos never loses sight of the comedy – a protracted farce with a diamond tiara is particularly entertaining!

I think I’ll try the sequel for tomorrow, but I understand its not quite as accomplished. Fingers crossed that it is still enjoyable…

“I mean champagne always makes me feel philosophical because it makes me realize that when a girl’s life is as full of fate as mine seems to be, there is nothing else to do about it.”

The tone of the film is frothier, but of course I’ll end with the trailer of Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei and Jane Russell as Dorothy:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.3

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I hadn’t heard of Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter (1945, transl. Elizabeth Mayer, Marianne Moore 1945) before, despite the fact that according to the back cover, Thomas Mann called Stifter “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature”.  I picked it up because NYRB Classics always prove interesting, and this was no exception.

It opens with beautiful descriptions of its alpine setting:

“Among the high mountains of our country there is a little village with a small but needle-fine church-spire. Conspicuous above the green of abundant fruit trees, this spire—because the slates are painted vermilion—can be seen far and wide against the faint blue of the mountains.”

Rock Crystal is a Christmas story, and so the weather is very different:

“On the mountain, in winter, the two pinnacles called ‘horns’ are snow white and on clear days stand out in the dusky atmosphere with blinding brilliance; all the alpine meadows at the base of the summits are white then, as well as their sloping shoulders; even the precipitous rock faces or walls as the people call them, are coated with a white velvet nap of hoar-frost and glazed with ice tissue.”

And so the scene is exquisitely set for a fable, almost a fairytale. Certainly Rock Crystal’s central premise is a fairytale trope: two young children Conrad and Sanna, live in a village high in the Alps and walk through the forest to visit their grandparents in the valley.

They visit, collect their presents, and their grandmother warns them not to dawdle as they head back home. On the way home, the clear bright day changes rapidly with snow fall.

“There had descended upon everything a pervading sense of peace. Not the sound of a bird, although a few birds usually flit about in the woods even in winter, and the children on their way to Millsdorf that morning had heard them twitter.”

I thought the detail of the birds was so clever, horribly foreboding even as the children enjoy the snow.

Gradually the snow obliterates everything, so they lose their markers and without realising it walk onto a glacier.

“It was entirely dry, and they had smooth ice to walk on. But the whole cavern was blue, bluer than anything on earth, a blue deeper and finer than the vault of heaven itself, blue as azure glass with a faint light inside. There were massive ribs overhead, and more delicate ones, with pendant icicles, point lace, and tassels, the way leading further still—they knew not how far but they did not go on.”

Stifter places the reader alongside the children as they find some shelter as night falls and struggle not to fall asleep, knowing the dangers of doing so. I really couldn’t determine how this would work out.  

And so the story, beautifully told, becomes unbearably tense. The complete disorientation is vividly conveyed, and these two small children against the immensity of the environment seem utterly lost.

In the introduction, WH Auden amusingly observes that Stifter takes “breathtaking risks of appalling banalities” yet somehow avoids them all. Who am I to disagree?

Rock Crystal quietly evokes the power of love of family, of community, and of place. A truly memorable read.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.2

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Stefan Zweig is a favourite writer of mine, I find him so insightful and compassionate. I also really like Pushkin Press Classics published in the smaller editions with the French flaps, so I was pleased to find just such a copy of his 1927 novella Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman (transl. Anthea Bell 2003).

It opens at a guesthouse on the French Riviera, “ten years before the war” with the unnamed first-person narrator remembering the arrival of an attractive single man who quickly absconds with Henriette, the wife of a manufacturer. Her absence causes quite a stir:

“Silently, one by one, as if put to shame by so shattering an emotional outburst, we crept back to our rooms, while that stricken specimen of mankind shook and sobbed alone with himself in the dark as the building slowly laid itself to rest, whispering, muttering, murmuring and sighing.”

The narrator takes a more liberal view of Henriette’s conduct, which puts him at odds with the other guests. I enjoyed Zweig’s gentle humour here:

“Well, it’s of no importance here to go back in every detail over the stormy course of an argument conducted between soup and dessert: only professionals of the table d’hôte are  witty, and points made in the heat of a chance dispute at table are usually banal, since the speakers resort to them clumsily and in haste.”

The narrator’s assertion that “I’d rather understand others than condemn them.” attracts the attention of Mrs. C, who from the way she’s initially described sounded easily in her nineties, but as it turns out is sixty-seven! She deliberately builds an intimacy with the narrator in order to tell her story, and he becomes the silent interlocutor to her tale.

“It is intolerable to spend one’s whole life staring at a single point in it.”

She describes how, at the age of forty-two, grieving her husband and with her sons fully grown, she arrived at Monte Carlo.

“I came there out of tedium, out of the painful emptiness of the heart that wells up like nausea, and at least tries to nourish itself on small external stimulations.”

She is not a seasoned gambler, but her husband enjoyed the casinos so she visits, and there becomes consumed by the vision of a young man compulsively placing bets.

“His face spoke the same fantastically extravagant language of extremes as the hands”

[…]

“A fear of something dreadful, something I had felt invisibly enveloping the young man like a miasma from the first moment.”

What follows is a character study of Mrs C and a portrait of addiction which is entirely believable. With his characteristic humanity, discernment and understanding, Zweig considers the supressed tragedies of people’s lives and how we continue to live.

Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman possibly felt more dramatic on initial publication – for twenty-first century readers nothing especially unpredictable takes place. But that is not to diminish it in any way. The evocation of strong feeling, and of trauma, is so sensitively realised that it remains a deeply affecting read.

This story has been filmed several times, including a made for television version with Ingrid Bergman. However, in its depiction of the glamour, seediness, seductions and betrayals of gambling, it also reminded me of a film I saw recently with lovely JacquiWIne, Bay of Angels:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.1

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Douglas Bruton is a relatively recent discovery for me, thanks to the blogosphere. It was only last year that I read With or Without Angels, Hope Never Knew Horizon, and Blue Postcards. His writing weaves real lives with fiction and is strongly concerned with art, human relationships, and the quality of silence that exists in these. He is sparsely poetic, unpretentious and experimental without being alienating. I knew I would start NADIM this year with his 2025 novella, Woman in Blue published by Fairlight Books.

The novella takes its title from the seventeenth century portrait by Vermeer of the same name, sometimes also called Woman Reading a Letter, housed at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The unnamed male narrator is a writer living in the city with his wife. He visits the museum daily to gaze at the painting.

“There is almost no sound in the gallery, for I am the first. Then it is just the Woman in Blue and me, and I come upon her as though I have turned a corner in a house and seen her through an open door.”

He becomes obsessed with the painting, and yet somehow it isn’t pitiful or creepy. He is trying to understand, and the enigma of the painting means he is always fully aware of the limits of his understanding.

“Things belong in their own time and space and taking them out of that time changes everything.”

His chapters are interspersed with the chapters of Angelieke, the model for the painting. As she describes the process of being painted by Vermeer, she also exists metaphysically, able to comment on all the people who come to visit her portrait, including the other narrator.

If this sounds overly whimsical, it really isn’t. I think this is due to Bruton giving Angelieke the most grounded, earthy voice in the novel. She is from a poor family, she needs money. She sees Vermeer and knows how to attract him. She holds the most agency and the most knowledge. This means that while she is necessarily objectified by Vermeer in the act of painting, and by the narrator in the act of viewing, she is never diminished.

Bruton carefully balances plot driven aspects around the male narrator and his wife, and Angelieke and her family, with wider considerations about viewpoint, acts of art, acts of love.

I think ‘tender’ is always the word I arrive at when writing about Bruton, and Woman in Blue is no exception. But I think I could also mention his elegance and beauty. Both these qualities can be distancing, but in his writing they never are. He closely examines lives and evokes them with such care and compassion that we are always placed alongside.

“Watching the woman in blue reading her letter it is as though I stop existing and I’m just the pared-back pure act of looking.”

StuckinaBook and I go Book Shopping!

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I very rarely do book haul posts but as many of you know, I had the pleasure of book shopping with Simon from StuckinaBook last Saturday, and his post was a great reminder of his excellent buys and the day itself. So without further ado:

I need to say from the start that I am going to misallocate some of these books to the wrong bookshops!  I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned on the blog that I’m planning a move this year, but it means my constant preoccupation with utterly dull DIY/house selling/house buying has made my already poor memory absolutely diabolical and completely destroyed my capacity for nouns 😀

Some of them I’m certain about, and we started the day in Greenwich Oxfam, where I know I bought two Virago essay collections, Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter edited by Lorna Sage; and The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews by Rebecca West. Both writers I find intriguing, sometimes alienating, always interesting! I’m looking forward to these.

And already we run into my terrible memory because I think I bought three books here, but I can’t remember which one was the third! No doubt I’ll claim it came from another bookshop later…

We were so lucky with the weather, it was a gorgeous sunny day so we walked through part of Greenwich Park over to Bookshop on the Heath (Blackheath). I think these two areas are so pretty, some of my favourite parts of south London. This is where I bought Cucumber Sandwiches: A Novella and Three Stories by J.I.M Stewart, whom I’ve enjoyed as Michael Innes writing GA crime stories. I was enticed by the title (yes I am that shallow) and the lairy yellow Gollancz jacket which I always enjoy (really shallow). I also got Living on Yesterday by Edith Templeton which I didn’t know at all but according to the jacket it’s a Bohemian social comedy highly rated by Anita Brookner, which sounds very tempting. I’m pretty sure that’s all I bought here because the prices are so eye-watering for a lot of the stock, but a lovely shop nonetheless.

We had lunch in Blackheath – although it was busy we found a table at Madeleine’s Creperie and thus fortified we walked to Halcyon Books. I remembered (possibly incorrectly, the theme of this post) there being more fiction hardbacks, but they still had a very reasonable selection of paperbacks. Cal by Bernard McLaverty was tempting after I recently enjoyed Midwinter Break so much, and I was surprised to find a copy of Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by EW Hornung, because I’d looked online for some collected stories about this gentleman thief a little while ago and struggled to find what I wanted. This is lined up for when I next need a light read. And I think it was here I bought Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman. Having cleared out my Women’s Press books a few decades ago in a misguided attempt to control my book acquisition, I really regretted it and now buy them back when I see them. The downside is that the glue TWP used is giving up the ghost these days, so they are definitely not a public transport read, for fear of losing the pages forever!

Then a bus trip through some less salubrious streets than those in Greenwich and Blackheath but perhaps more typical of south London… I hadn’t been to Crofton Books before but I think it’s possible they have many gems, if you can scale the stacks to get to them! I still managed to come away with Cindie by Jean Devanny (I’m at the point in my VMC collecting where I always seem to see the same books, but it must be my imagination because I did very well with VMCs this day); David Blaize by EF Benson because I keep meaning to read more by the Mapp and Lucia author and this is compared to Wodehouse on the back (but so much is…) Also Apple of my Eye by the irrepressible Helene Hanff – I’d been looking at Vivian Gornick’s NYC memoirs and was definitely in a New York mood! Also I like the dated, kitschy cover (my taste is as bad as my memory) which as it turns out is from the year I was born – not noted for its good taste, except in babies:

Finally to Kirkdale Books where I picked up some more VMCs; The Playroom by Olivia Manning which Simon had mentioned earlier in the day, and The Orchid House by Phyllis Shand Allfrey.  Also in similar livery but published by Abandoned Bookshop, Appius and Virginia by GE Trevelyan. I’ve been really enjoying the reissues of this author from Boiler House Press’ Recovered Books imprint so hopes are high.

Train cancellations meant that rather than travel from the train station right by Kirkdale Books, we walked to the next nearest, which had one of those free libraries in the waiting room. (There was no donation pot so I need to pop by and drop off a book). Here I picked up a curiosity, The Champagne Sandwich by Christian Miller. I’ve never heard of it but its from 1969 and apparently the author’s only novel, although she also wrote stories and memoir. It sounds silly and fun, about a mother and two daughters living with their dog and a canary in a London flat. The back flap of the jacket tells me Miller had “a somewhat erratic education” on her childhood Highland estate and was a debutante who studied engineering. I’m intrigued…

So, two books with sandwiches in the title, two with cricket scenes on the front covers despite me knowing very little of the game, a handful of VMCs and some novellas snuck in there too… which brings me to May plans. I’m not at all confident I can do Novella a Day in May this year, I haven’t done any advance reading to give myself a buffer and halfway through the month I need to move the contents of my flat into the bedrooms for floor repairs to take place. But… I do have lots of novellas I’m really keen to read. So I think I’m going to go for it, but probably won’t post every day, even if I read a novella every day. Simon has taken this approach previously with his Book a Day in May posts, so for this idea, and for a lovely bookish shopping day, thank you Simon!

To end, back where we began (almost). Deptford is next to Greenwich and has some similarly historic and beautiful buildings, including townhouses. This one is Queen Anne, relatively untouched and stuffed, stuffed full of books (which admittedly I couldn’t read, I think they’re mostly in medieval Italian.) Sadly very much out of my price range but I enjoyed the look round and the sheer volume of books is aspirational – hopefully this post demonstrates I’m well on my way…

“Who could be frightened in as wide and bright, as clean and quiet a house as this?” (Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road)

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One of the benefits of taking part in events like the 1961 Club, hosted by Kaggsy and Simon this week, is that it encourages me to finally get to novels languishing in the TBR, such as Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

I have enjoyed Richard Yates when I’ve read him previously but I also know that I kept putting off Revolutionary Road because he can be so bleak. And it is bleak, good grief. But Yates is such a great writer that reading this was never a slog, and I whizzed through his first novel.

The two protagonists, married couple April (“A tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty”) and Frank Wheeler (“the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise”) are just shy of thirty and living in suburban Connecticut in 1955.

Frank would probably take issue with the authorial description above, as he sees himself as “an intense, nicotine stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man,”.

Frank and April are monumentally smug and pretentious, seeing themselves as living in suburbia with two children, a job in the city for him and role as a homemaker for her, but somehow above it all and different to their neighbours, all of whom are doing exactly the same:

“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”

A crisis early on forces April to feel that she cannot continue. She feels their life needs enormous change and that she is to blame for holding Frank and his immense mind back.

“this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families. It’s the great sentimental lie of the suburbs, and I’ve been making you subscribe to it all this time. I’ve been making you live by it!”

What she fails to realise is that her husband is deeply ordinary, no great thinker, and with no discernible talent at anything so far. So her plan that they move to France and she work while he simply lives off her while he decides what to do, is fundamentally flawed.

Yates expertly portrays these two young people bound up in each other’s idea of who they are; feeding one another’s vanities and delusions. They become excited at the plan and for a while it rejuvenates their relationship:

“He felt tense and keyed up; the very act of sitting on a coffee table seemed an original and wonderful thing to do.”

However, the reader is more aware than April that her husband is not entirely convinced of the plan. Deep down, he knows his inadequacy, and his play-acting.

“he found he had made all his molars ache by holding them clamped too long for an effect of  grim-jawed determination by candlelight”

When April finds herself pregnant again, Frank sees a way out. They will have to stay in suburbia to raise their third child. April disagrees, and the strain and tension in their marriage gradually tightens to breaking point…

Revolutionary Road is an absolute masterpiece and it is astonishing that it was Yates first novel. The characterisation is unblinking; the post-war American Dream with all its materialistic conformity is minutely dissected.

What I found so clever was that having found April and Frank vain, shallow, and condescending for almost all the novel, by the end I felt desperately sad and sorry for both of them. Yates has written a tragedy, and suggested it is occurring daily behind the manicured lawns and bright smiles of middle-class, mid-century America.

“It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. Proud floodlights were trained on some of the lawns, on some of the neat front doors and on the hips of some of the berthed, ice-cream colored automobiles.”

To end, a trailer for the 2008 adaptation, which I know I’ve seen but don’t really remember. Time for a rewatch:

“Every woman who writes is a survivor.” (Tillie Olsen)

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Simon and Kaggsy are running one of their marvellous Club events all week, this time it is the 1961 Club. I’m hoping to do a few posts, and I’m starting with a short story.

Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen is a collection of four stories, with the titular tale published in 1961, so that is the one I will concentrate on. But all four are expertly realised with distinct narrative voices and I really recommend the whole collection.

Tell Me a Riddle looks at the last year or so together of a couple who emigrated from Russia (as the author’s parents had done). It opens:

“For forty-seven years they had been married. How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could say – but only now, when tending to the needs of others no longer shackled them together, the roots swelled up visible, split the earth between them, and the tearing shook even to the children, long since grown.”

This antagonistic couple are not mellowing with age. He wants to move to supported accommodation, the Haven, she is determined to stay put. The fury of the sacrifices she has made throughout married life spill out, as he tries to entice her:

“A reading circle. Chekhov they read that you like, and Peretz. Cultured people at the Haven that you would enjoy.”

“Enjoy!” She tasted the word. “Now, when it pleases you, you find a reading circle for me. And forty years ago, when children were morsels and there was a Circle, did you stay home with them once so I could go? Even once? You trained me well. I do not need others to enjoy. Others!” Her voice trembled. “Because you want to be there with others. Already it makes me sick to think of you always around others. Clown, grimacer, floormat, yesman, entertainer, whatever they want of you.”

Having not spoken her resentments previously, she now digs her heels in:

“Enough. Now they had no children. Let him wrack his head for how they would live. She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.”

The impasse escalates, with neither seeming to be anywhere close to winning, until events overtake them and her health begins to deteriorate:

“A bellyful of bitterness and every day the same quarrel in a new way and a different old grievance the old quarrel forced her to enter and relive. And the new torment: I am not really sick, the doctor said it, then why do I feel so sick?”

They move around the USA, visiting children and grandchildren, both reflecting on what they left behind and what lives they have enabled their children to create. Olsen analyses the promises and shortfalls of the American Dream through ordinary lives.

At the start of the story the husband has called his wife “Mrs Word Miser”, among other epithets. But by the end, as she lays dying in bed:

“The week Lennie and Helen came, the fever returned. With it the excited laugh, and incessant words. She, who in her life had spoken but seldom and then only when necessary (never having learned the easy, social uses of words), now in dying, spoke incessantly.”

The deathbed scenes are vivid and affecting. In a short space of around 50 pages Olsen brings her characters into noisy, awkward being and achieves what takes some writers ten times the space. She has absolute command of the short story and uses it expertly.

I realise I’ve made the story sound quite depressing, but while it is sad, I didn’t find it bleak. The characters are so strong and determined, and the voices so true and clear, that Tell Me Riddle conveys an energy which isn’t depleting.

I have Olsen’s novella Yonnonido in the TBR which I keep putting off – I’m really looking forward to picking it up now.

To end, a song from 1961 that I thought was much later in the decade, probably because it is such a timeless classic:

“You have to know a full story before you can get a feeling about a thing, and you can never judge anyone.” (Donal Ryan, Heart Be at Peace)

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Donal Ryan is one of my favourite contemporary writers so I’m delighted to be squeezing this post in on the final day of Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books.

It’s been seven years since I read his polyphonic debut, The Spinning Heart, so I came to the follow up, Heart, Be At Peace, with only a hazy recollection of the characters and plot. Like its predecessor, Heart, Be At Peace has twenty-one chapters, each narrated by a different inhabitant of a County Tipperary town.

While the first novel considered the fallout of the economic crash on a cross-section of the town, Heart, Be at Peace looks at how illegal drugs and associated money, violence and desperation impact so many.

Both books are centred on, and begin with, Bobby Mahon. He is struggling, and there is a sense of it only being a matter of time before he either explodes or implodes:

“There’s this thing that happens me now nearly every day. It feels like a stab of something in my middle, not pain exactly, just a kind of force that takes the air out of me so that I have to stop what I’m doing for a few seconds until it passes. It only comes on me when I let my thoughts drift.”

This is the uniting thread that pulls the various narratives together. Gradually a picture builds of Bobby becoming more and more enraged at the audacity shown by the shameless drug dealers. Despite the different narrators and their varying concerns, bubbling in the background is Bobby and his Achilles’ heel, observed by older man Jim:

“Bobby Mahon Is one of these rare men who measures himself against the well-being of the people around him.”

I was glad to see Lily the witch/sex worker return, this time worrying about her granddaughter Millicent who is caught up with abusive dealer Augie Penrose. It’s not just Lily who has a sixth sense though – I thought this had more supernatural beliefs and encounters than its predecessor, but maybe my memory is failing!

Although this novel included one chapter narrated by a ghost, if you’re not keen on the supernatural in books, rest assured there are many grounding elements. Lily herself observes “belief itself is a kind of magic.”

While later in the novel Brian realises: “I always work off impressions, and my impressions, it turns out, are mostly shite.”

There’s a lot of sadness in Heart, Be at Peace as is to be expected given the themes, but Ryan leaves it to the reader to piece some events together and draw their own conclusions, which stops it being sanctimonious or sentimental. A reported death is truly sad, and to the reader seems suspicious, but is accepted as a heart attack by the characters.

There’s also the endurance of Pokey Burke, instrumental in the in local desolation caused by the building crash and now finding ways to make money off the poorest people again. His is a cynical presence but an entirely believable one.

There is resilience too. Rory, one of Bobby’s young workers, is madly in love and expecting his first child:

“all things tend towards chaos. I close my eyes against the mad torrent of panic. This is okay, I think. This is life, this is life, this is how it’s meant to be.”

And also humour. A standout voice for me was Trevor, self-aggrandizing and clinically delusional but with an interesting turn of phrase:

“the bus stopped and he was gone, and I was left to writhe beneath the gaze of some kind of a working-class Medusa.”

And there is kindness, experienced by Vasya, an immigrant camping on land at the edge of town. His observation suggests Bobby may not be wrong in seeing himself inextricably bound to his community:

“I was reminded of how small this world is, how closed-in this country is, like a bowl containing berries that you can pick up and swirl so that each berry touches another berry in the space of an instant.”

By the end I felt there was a possibility Ryan may revisit this town and the people again. I hope so.

“The first words of every story tasted fresh.” (Bernard MacLaverty, Midwinter Break)

/ madamebibilophile / 29 Comments

I read Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty when it came out in 1997 – nearly 30 years ago! I really loved it and although generally with books I remember themes, atmosphere and how I felt reading it, I rarely remember specifics such as characters or plot. With Grace Notes I can still remember some of the exquisite sentences, so it is a mystery to me why I have only just returned to this writer. Thank goodness for Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books giving me a push!

Midwinter Break (2017) follows Gerry and Stella, a long-term couple now in late middle-age, as they spend a short city break in Amsterdam. Without explicitly stating their situation, but rather presenting it for the reader to observe, MacLaverty conveys their shared history, love and sense of humour.

“I suppose we’re lucky to have each other to ignore.”

They are entirely used to each other’s presence as a constant, both used to considering the other as much from habit as from affection.

“He had to cross the main road rumbling with traffic and reached out to take Stella by the hand before realising she wasn’t with him.”

Yet over the space of the weekend, tensions from deep-rooted differences and past trauma will come to the fore. Stella is undergoing an existential crisis:

“There are important questions to be answered. How can we best live our lives? How can we live good lives?”

She is a lifelong Catholic, while Gerry is an atheist. There is a sense that this need not be an insurmountable difference, except Gerry is dismissive of her beliefs and his drinking is becoming problematic. He foolishly believes his various deceptions go unnoticed by his wife. She has given up trying to get him to understand what religion gives her:

“Prayer was summoned intensity, held there in the head and in the heart. Something good, something spiritual. Articulated, spoken inwardly, wished to the point of aching.”

As they visit tourist destinations such as the Rijksmuseum (where a long description of the old woman reading portraits sounded very much like my avatar picture!) they talk, bicker, laugh, eat, drink. It is a testament to MacLaverty’s excellent characterisation and subtle evocation of their relationship that these surface behaviours exist alongside deeper crises without lessening their seriousness.

He portrays this couple with such a light touch, so although the reader feels they have reached a point of no return in their marriage, where after this mini-break nothing will be the same, it never feels melodramatic.

Similarly, MacLaverty crafts passages of such precise beauty, yet Midwinter Break never feels overwritten.

“Gerry’s hands lay in his lap and his eye was drawn to the window. The end of the daylight striking the glass obliquely created a glittering, grisaille effect. Like ground glass, a layer of dust activated by almost horizontal light transformed the window into Waterford crystal. No expense spared for the Irish pubs of Amsterdam.”

I thought that was just stunning: perfectly evoking an everyday scene so clearly, so poetically, and then undermining it with the gentle comedy of the prosaic final line.

Another description I found so tenderly observant was Gerry meeting his son for the first time:

“You are mine and I will love you till the day I die. He kissed his fingertips and conveyed the kiss to the baby’s face slowly, as if it could be spilled on the way down.”

Midwinter Break is just shy of 250 pages yet it captures the big questions of life alongside finely observed evocations of the everyday. I thought it was entirely wonderful.

The adaptation of the novel is in cinemas now and I’m going to see it on Sunday. Given the two leads, I have high hopes…