Month: May 2023

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.11

/ madamebibilophile / 12 Comments

Broderie Anglaise – Violet Trefusis (1935 trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. 1985) 120 pages

My main reason for picking up Broderie Anglaise was an interest in Violet Trefusis because of her links to Vita Sackville-West, and through her, Virginia Woolf, rather than the novella itself. Although I did enjoy Hunt the Slipper when I read it a few years ago, I was primarily interested to see the characters of Vita and Virginia as conjured in this novella, and the portrait of Knole, Vita’s ancestral home.

Alexa is a celebrated English writer (no prizes for guessing who she represents) who is having an affair with Lord Shorne (Vita). Casting a long shadow over their liaison is his broken heart from a relationship with Anne, a distant cousin (Violet).

“He said to himself that this was exactly the companion he needed – humane and sympathetic and at the same time rather sexless.”

It’s worth noting that Broderie Anglaise was published in French and only translated for the Anglophone market in 1985. Victoria Glendinning says in her preface to this edition that she doesn’t think Vita or Virginia were aware of the novella’s existence. So although the portraits can be quite acidic at times, it’s definitely an easier read knowing that no-one they represented ever read them.

It’s difficult to convey the mind of a genius when you are not a genius. Trefusis wisely glosses over Alexa’s writing and sticks to her anxieties around her affair, and more mundane concerns:

“Alexa went and sat by the window, at the mercy of the light, now no one else was there. A sluggish drizzle was falling. She looked up at the sky. Its full, baroque clouds were like a gathering of Marlborough’s contemporaries – all scrolls and whorls, from their wigs to their shoes. The sky’s not very imaginative, she thought, it always reminds me of something.”

The first part of the novella is Alexa’s anticipation of meeting Anne, when a mutual (oblivious) friend arranges a meeting. She reflects on her affair with John and what little she knows of Anne. The affair is not romanticised; it’s treated with some degree of irony and humour.

“Arm in arm they went up the slippery staircase that led to the state apartments. Alexa supported him. He was the Lord, the ravisher. She was about to become his mistress. They had to go through eight drawing rooms in all – a long way for a couple who had been drinking.”

Violet definitely doesn’t idolise either Vita or herself in the character of Anne. I felt she treated all three as flawed people, struggling to understand the circumstances they found themselves in.

Where she did portray a monstrous person was in the character of Lady Shorne (Lady Sackville). Controlling, intrusive, inappropriate, surrounding herself with trappings – she was truly malevolent.

“The tiny room, cluttered with carefully illuminated pieces of amber, each one lit up from within by its own mocking flame; her hostess, sitting motionless like a big spider in the middle of her web – all combined to make Alexa ill at ease.”

Broderie Anglaise is slight, but it’s definitely worth a read, particularly for those with an interest in Woolf/VSW. The portrait of Lord Shorne’s home Otterways has echoes of Orlando’s estate, being as they are both portraits of Knole. It’s also interesting to see how the Russian Princess of Orlando (Violet) chose to portray herself given a chance. She can be a witty and precise observer:

“‘I use up all my vital force in my books. There’s nothing left over for life,’ she suggested, with the famous touching smile which was so admired in the literary world but which John found exasperating because it was to be seen in all her photographs.”

Ultimately I felt Violet wasn’t overly settling scores here, but rather making a plea for not idolising lovers, even when they are from glamorous families, or are the foremost writer of their generation. She suggests that truly seeing people and situations may be painful, but it is really the only way towards enduring and authentic relationships.

Although she does use a play on words at the end to give herself the final say. And why not, it’s her novella after all 😀

“This was just the sort of thing that irritated him most. She was sentimental when she should have been satirical, obstinate when she should have been amenable.”

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.10

/ madamebibilophile / 8 Comments

Strange Hotel  – Eimear McBride (2020) 149 pages

Another day, another novella about hotels 😊

This is slightly odd review, because what I think works about this novella is also why I have reservations about recommending it. But it absolutely worked for me, so I decided to include it when I only write about books I recommend.

Eimear McBride writes stream of consciousness novels. I’m fine with this style but I know it’s really off-putting for lots of people. If you are one of those but were thinking of giving McBride a try, I would say this is not the place to start. Strange Hotel doesn’t have the verve of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing or The Lesser Bohemians. But these disclaimers aside, here is why I think it worked.

I would say Strange Hotel is a novel about grief. We follow an unnamed woman as she checks into hotels in Avignon, Prague, Oslo, Auckland and Austin. We never know why she is in any of these places. She drinks too easily and she sleeps with men she does not want to see again.

“Times have changed, she notes, as is her wont on those occasions of which, of late, there have been more than a few. Another unzipped bag, in another uninteresting hotel room, upon which she stares indifferently down at the folded clothes, or the shampoo congealing into them if she’s been unlucky which, on this occasion, she has not.”

She has a list of places she is working through, possibly as some sort of pilgrimage, possibly not.

She is both articulate and inarticulate, and the reader has to try and piece together what is going on for her. It’s not easy, and in that sense we are very much in the place she finds herself:

“Why is the world always such work? It’s harder to let the words into her body now or, maybe, out. They used to form and reform themselves in order to dole out whatever she had in mind, whatever meanings her body inclined to make them make. Now, they barely carry meaning beyond the literal wattle and daub. This does, occasionally, make her wistful for the savagery of before when, beholden to no one, the words did whatever they pleased. She wouldn’t mind going back to that.”

A lot of my job is concerned with grief and bereavement and I’ve recently experienced a personal bereavement. I think Strange Hotel brilliantly captures the disorientation, the unreality, the betweenness, the holding pattern of grief.

Hotels are a perfect setting for this theme, and stream of consciousness is the perfect style. The formality in tone that wasn’t apparent in McBride’s previous novels also captures the detachment and default behaviour the bereaved can find themselves experiencing.

I read Strange Hotel at exactly the right time, there was a lot that resonated. McBride is brilliant at what she does and she uses a difficult style expertly.

“The solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence.”

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.9

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

The Hotel – Elizabeth Bowen (1927) 175 pages

The Hotel ticks a lot of boxes for me: interwar setting, repressed Brits abroad, characters thrown together through transient living arrangements, and of course novella length. My concern was that it’s Elizabeth Bowen’s debut novel and her prose can be pretty impenetrable at the best of times, let alone when she’s still honing her craft. However that proved unfounded as I found this an easier read by Bowen standards – I really enjoyed it.

The titular institution is located on the Italian riviera and is filled with genteel Brits, mainly women. The novel opens with the fallout from a row between two perfect examples of such: the companions Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald. The former ends up walking to tennis courts with Mrs Kerr, quite a coup as Mrs Kerr holds all the power among the hotel residents. The reasons for her occupying this elevated position are never quite clear, but her absolute self-assurance and manipulativeness surely contribute.

Mrs Kerr is looking for Sydney Warren, a beautiful, studious young woman whose family are worried about her. Sydney has come away with her cousin Tessa Bellamy, who has a vague malady:  

“She was distressed by any suggestion of impermanence; she was a lonely woman. One had to have Something in one’s life. She lay on a velvet sofa in her bedroom with the head pulled round away from the window and wished that she were religious woman and that it would be time for lunch and that Sydney would soon come in.”

The start of the novel is full of these pithy sketches of the residents. I especially enjoyed the elderly sisters-in-law Mrs and Miss Pinkerton:

“They were more closely allied to one another in the memory of Edward’s than they had either of them been to Edward himself…. Cherished little animosities reinforced their ties to one another; Rosina maintained to herself implacably that if she had been Edward’s wife she would have borne him children; Louisa was aware enough of this to be a little markedly generous to Rosina, who was not in a position to refuse anything that might be offered.”

They are hugely affronted by the arrival of an Anglican clergyman, James Milton, who unwittingly uses their reserved bathroom. Bowen is a brilliant observer of the manners and social customs of the hotel, treating it all with a wry affection:

“Beyond, down the long perspective to the foot of the stairs, one could see visitors take form with blank faces, then compose themselves for an entrance. Some who thought punctuality rather suburban would gaze into the unfilled immensity of the room for a moment, then vanish repelled. Others would advance swimmingly and talk from table to table across the emptiness, familiarly, like a party of pioneers. Men came in without their wives and did not always look up when these entered. Women appearing before their husbands remained alert, gazed into an opposite space resentfully, and ate with an air of temporising off the tips of their forks.”

Romantic relationships are treated with a great deal of scepticism in the novel: the pretty Lawrence sisters look to make pragmatic marriages; Mrs Lee-Mitterson panders to her ridiculous self-centred husband; it’s mentioned more than once how incompatible men and women are. It wouldn’t be a stretch at all to take a queer theory reading to many of the relationships in The Hotel, and it could also be read as demonstrating the value and endurance of platonic friendship.

The early character sketches and scene setting of The Hotel were completely wonderful, but for me the novella didn’t quite live up to this initial promise.  I was drawn into the various relationships and shifting allegiances, and the disarray caused by the arrival of Mrs Kerr’s much anticipated, determinedly aloof son Ronald was very enjoyable.  I think what stopped me unreservedly loving this was that I did find the characters ultimately quite distancing – Sydney Warren is meant to be reserved and a bit cold but I felt this distance as a reader too.

But still there was so much to enjoy and I found it a real treat.

“Notwithstanding the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon she had been enjoying Jude the Obscure.”

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.8

/ madamebibilophile / 17 Comments

August is a Wicked Month  – Edna O’Brien (1965) 

Many, many years ago, decades even, when I was a sixth-former (that’s Year 12, kids) my English teacher gave out a list of suggested reading for A levels. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn’t finish it entirely (although just in case that seems worryingly off-brand, I should say my name still went round to the teachers on a list as the pupil who borrowed most library books that year) and I can remember the few that escaped me. One was August is a Wicked Month, and having read it now I’m a bit surprised it was on a sixth-form reading list. Because it is explicit. But it’s also very realistic so maybe my teachers thought it was responsible reading 😀

Ellen is in her late twenties and her ex-husband has taken their son camping. Ellen is not good at being alone and managing feelings:

‘I’ll just be,’ she said. A rare thing for her, racked as she was with anxiety, wondering always what would happen next, if an affair would be eternal, or if she loved her son over much, or if the wheels of a car they sat in would fly off and leave them half dead on the roadside.

So she decides to go to the south of France for sun and anonymous sex:

“She had been brought up to believe in punishment; sin in a field and the long awful spell in the Magdalen laundry scrubbing it out, down on her knees getting cleansed. She longed to be free and young and naked with all the men in the world making love to her, all at once. Was that why he ran?”

Written in 1965, this is not a tale of the joys of sexual liberation and freedom. Despite the setting, the tale is not glamorous. Ellen falls in with a crowd that includes a film star, but its all lonely and sad and isolating. She may as well have stayed away,

“She wanted to go home, not to London to the pipes of light but home to the race to which she belonged: and then she shivered uncontrollably, knowing that their thoughts were no longer hers. She had vanished back into childhood and the dark springs of her terrors.”

Everything Ellen does seems a misstep but not comically so. Her confused interactions with people, failed flirtations and disappointing sex just serve to highlight the inadequacy of human communication and the tendency to look for solace in precisely the wrong places.

This was the first Edna O’Brien I’ve read and I thought her writing was wonderful. She has a way of building images in a way that is so startling and disconcerting, but recognisable:

“Yellow all around, the lemons in the trees like lobes of light, the odd lit bulb, and his face yellow like parchment, from age. His blue eyes were not dead but were something worse. They had the sick look of eyes that will wounded and for whom death would be a relief.”

She can also be incredibly spiky and unforgiving:

“Her hands were long and white and soft. Hands into which cream and money had been poured and unlike the face they were able to be beautiful without showing the umbrage of the unloved.”

The only misstep for me was an event towards the end that seemed unnecessarily dramatic and as if there wasn’t enough faith in Ellen’s story as it stood to carry the novella. But a minor quibble overall – I’ll definitely be seeking out the Country Girls trilogy after this.

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.7

/ madamebibilophile / 10 Comments

A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray – Dominique Barbéris (2019, trans. John Cullen 2021) 152 pages

For the first Sunday of this month of novella reading, a novella set on a Sunday! I was alerted to A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray by Jacqui’s excellent review and so I was delighted when I came across a copy in my local marvellous charity bookshop.

“On Sundays, you think about life.”

The narrator (referred to as Jane on the French flap blurb although I don’t remember her being named in the text) goes to visit her sister in the Parisian suburb of Ville d’Avray for the afternoon. The sisters have intermittent contact and Jane’s urbanite boyfriend Luc seems to have an ambiguous relationship with both his in-laws and the suburbs. For this visit she is alone:

“And so I was full of memories, I was in the melancholy state of mind that often comes over me when I go to see my sister, and I think I started by getting a little lost in Ville d’Avray, by driving through the provincial, peaceful streets of my sister’s neighbourhood, past private houses their gleaming bay windows, their porches, their phony airs (Art Deco villa, Norman country house), their gardens planted with rosebushes and cedars.”

Nothing really happens, and yet the afternoon is full of significance. The sisters sit out in the autumn afternoon and Claire Marie recounts a chaste affair with a man called Marc Hermann. He has both a mysterious past and present:

“She was almost sure that he was lying to her about a great many things, but she felt certain that he was alone and that his solitude was complete, so dense that she could perceive the space it occupied around him, and that solitude touched her heart.”

It is the atmosphere rather than the plot that gives this novella its power. It captures perfectly that quiet, subdued feeling of a Sunday afternoon, anticipating the activity of the week ahead. There is also an unsettling quality to it: the fading light as the sisters sit, the repeated references to the forests that surround the suburb where Claire Marie and Marc would walk; the fear of burglars and invasion.

Jane is at once the first-person narrator and the silent interlocutor. This is a novella of liminal spaces: temporal, geographical and psychological. Barbéris expertly holds the reader between these spaces in the story, destabilising the narrative.  Nothing overt is said or done, but gradually there is a sense of not trusting what we are being told. But should Jane not trust Claire Marie or should the reader not trust the narrator?

I’m sure the atmosphere of this novella will stay with me. A perfect Sunday afternoon read.

“Ever since the neighbour had mowed his lawn, the whole street smelled of cut grass. I don’t know why the smell of cut grass can give you such a feeling of sadness, and also such a violent desire to keep on living.”

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.6

/ madamebibilophile / 12 Comments

The White Bird Passes  – Jessie Kesson (1958) 159 pages

Last year I read a short story by Jessie Kesson and I was so impressed I really wanted to try more of her work. Luckily I saw her novella The White Bird Passes in my local charity shop and swooped in. I wasn’t disappointed.

Eight year-old Janie lives with her mother in Our Lady’s Lane, aptly named because this side street is full of matriarchs, including Poll Pyke, Battleaxe and The Duchess. They live in absolute poverty, hand to mouth, and yet the story isn’t depressing because Janie isn’t depressed. She loves living where she lives.

The novella is based on Jessie Kesson’s early life and it is beautifully balanced portrayal. It doesn’t shy away from the realities (suicide, sex work, disease and infestations) but these sit alongside love, humour, enjoyment.

“The Green was as much part of the Lane as the communal pump in the causeway. If you weren’t in the Lane you were ‘down at the Green’. There is no third alternative. Even if there had been, you would have been out of your mind to have chosen it in preference to the Green.

The summer through, the Greens chair-o-planes, whirling high, blistered with colour and blared with music. The Devil’s Own Din was how the sedate residents of Hill Terrace described it in protest to the Lord Provost and the Town Council, but to the Laners who were the true lovers of the Green it was music.”

It authentically captures characters and dialogue, without ever descending into caricature. At no point is there any authorial judgement on the way the characters are living, it is simply as it is.

“Janie never had to beg for her own needs. There were better ways of satisfying them. The surest way to get a penny was to scour the football grounds for empty beer bottles and sell them back to the beer shops at half rate. A fair bargain, since the bottles hadn’t belonged to you in the first place. More remunerating but less infallible, was to stand outside The Hole in the Wall on Saturday night, bump into the first drunk man you saw, weep loudly, pretending he had bumped into you. That was usually a sure threepence forced into your palm. Sometimes it was sixpence if the man was drunk enough. For her other needs, Janie confined herself to the dustbins in High Street.”

Janie’s mother Liza comes from a reasonably well-off family who view her as a disgrace. When Liza takes her for a visit, we get a glimpse of a life away from urban poverty.

“Janie wondered at her mother’s easy intimacy with this country; her quick recognition of the flowers in the woodworkers’ gardens, with names unheard of in the Lane; Snow in Summer, Dead Man’s Bells, Love in a Mist, Thyme, yellow St. John’s wort, pink star bramble-blossom. ‘There’s going to be a good crop of brambles the year.’ Liza cast an experienced eye over them. ‘We’ll need to come for a day in autumn for the bramble picking.’ They wouldn’t of course. But Janie had learned to enjoy the prospect more than the reality.”

Eventually the Cruelty Man catches up with Janie and enacts the local opinion that “the bairn would be better in a home.”

This part of the story is not given the same consideration by Kesson. Again, there is no judgement. You can see why Janie was taken away and how it can be both the right and wrong decision. But the state orphanage is not Kesson’s consideration in The White Bird Passes. The story belongs to the Lane and the women of the Lane, especially to Janie and Liza.

“But Liza had been beautiful, Janie remembered. Almost like Shelley said. Her beauty made the bright world dim. Not quite the same though. All the other women of the Lane had been grey. Prisoners clamped firmly into the dour pattern of its walls and cobblestones. But Liza had always leapt burnished, out of her surroundings. And in the leaping had made the dim world bright.”

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.5

/ madamebibilophile / 16 Comments

The Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair (1922) 184 pages

I am very fond of Victorian novels. Those huge, sprawling tales of domestic realism suit me very well in the right mood. However, the heroines do have a tendency towards pious self-sacrificing virgins, whose superhuman goodness is rewarded in the end by a rich husband and/or massive legacy. So even while they profess a dedication to heavenly rewards, they can do so from the comfort of being hugely loaded in the earthly realm, alongside a hottie in a big white shirt (which admittedly does sound pretty appealing).

It is this premise that May Sinclair takes issue with in The Life and Death of Harriett Frean.

Early in the novel there is an example of how the child Harriett behaves in the way expected of little Victorian girls, and as a result does not get her needs met. The only reward is a sense of self-satisfaction:

“Being naughty was just that. Doing ugly things. Being good was being beautiful like Mamma. She wanted to be like her mother. Sitting up there and being good felt delicious.”

Sinclair shows how this conditioning is reinforced through insidious guilt-trips:

“Understand, Hatty, nothing is forbidden. We don’t forbid, because we trust you to do what we wish. To behave beautifully…”

And so Harriett grows up idolising her parents and never questioning whether this mode of behaviour is more about convenience for others than actually what is right.

Harriett’s biggest sacrifice is refusing to enter a relationship with the man engaged to her friend. It is this she consistently returns to, through a life that never truly sees or allows for others. Sinclair shows the vanity and self-centredness wrapped up in supposed self-effacement:

“When she thought of Robin and how she had given him up, she felt a thrill of pleasure in her beautiful behaviour, and a thrill of pride in remembering that he had loved her more than Priscilla.”

The Life and Death of Harriet Frean explores how this type of behaviour – inauthentic, fundamentally dishonest – can lead to unhappiness in big and small ways, from never having cutlets served how you prefer to destitution for some. But Harriett never really learns, sticking stubbornly to her frame of reference even as life repeatedly demonstrates the inadequacy of doing so and the damage that can be done.

For me the novella remained just the right side of didactic, but I think had it been longer it may have drifted into preachiness. As it was, it remained an interesting counterpoint to all those fictional Victorian heroines who may not have found things quite so clear-cut in real life.

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.4

/ madamebibilophile / 17 Comments

The Man Who Saw Everything – Deborah Levy (2019) 200 pages

I really love Deborah Levy’s work. Her writing is so clear and direct – both in fiction and non-fiction – but never feels simplistic or superficial. She’s incisive and thoughtful, managing to convey the complexities of human beings with such precision.

In The Man Who Wasn’t There, she explores the interplay between personal and political histories and how these are constantly being rewritten entirely subjectively.

The titular man is Saul Adler, a self-obsessed historian. At the start of the novel Saul is 23 years old and his lover Jennifer Moreau wants to take his picture on the Abbey Road crossing à la The Beatles and millions of subsequent Beatles fans. He is knocked down but only superficially injured. However, there are certain anachronistic details that don’t add up for an event taking place in 1988…

Saul returns home with Jennifer, they sleep together and then break up. He then visits the GDR as part of his PhD research into male tyranny, and becomes romantically entangled with a brother and sister.

“I told him that my mother’s fatal accident and my minor accident had become blurred in my mind and how I was still insatiably angry with the driver who had run her over. I regarded him as her assassin. Time passing had not made my mother’s death less vivid. All the same I had not really been paying attention when I crossed the road.”

The destabilising sense of time collapsing in on itself continues, as Saul knows things about his own future and East Germany’s future that he couldn’t possibly know:

“He did not believe me and neither did I totally believe myself. I had planted three types of tomato in another time. Someone had planted the tomatoes with me in the future soil of East Anglia. His hair is silver and he wears it in a bun on top of his head. His fingernails are bitten down. We are kneeling on the earth, his fingers on my back, massaging my spine while he tells me we should plant the apple trees before it rains and the fields flood.”

In the second half of the novel, Saul is knocked over again on Abbey Road, this time in 2016, and is hospitalised. As he drifts in and out of consciousness he tries to piece together his life from half-remembered events and the people that surround his bedside. There are recurring images and references linking the two timelines but these destabilise as much as they anchor.

“A wind from another time. It broke with it the salt sentence seaweed and oysters. And wolf. A child’s knitted blanket. Folded over the back of a cheerful stop time and place all mixed up. Now. Then. There. Here.”

The Man Who Wasn’t There is a political novel, raising questions about tyranny, patriarchy, state surveillance, internalised surveillance… but never at the expense of its characters. It shows how we cannot live outside of history and how the big issues end up intrinsically bound up in all our lives.

Levy captures with wit and compassion the drive to construct a coherent narrative in order to understand our lives and the world we live in, while showing how impossible such an undertaking is.

“It was true my wings were wounded. It was true I had no idea how to endure being alive and everything that comes with it. Responsibility. Love. Death. Sex. Loneliness. History. I knew he did not hold my tears against me. That was a big thing to know.”

To end, the glorious Nina Simone singing a track from Abbey Road:

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.3

/ madamebibilophile / 13 Comments

Lemon – Kwon Yeo-sun (2019 trans. Janet Hong Higgins  2021) 147 pages

I thought the cover of Lemon was absolutely perfect. The simple image of an absent woman suspended in sky strikingly captures the unsettling quality of this story about a murdered young woman.

Lemon is not a whodunit, although I think that central question is answered obliquely. There is no satisfying resolution with all the ends tide up neatly – that is not what this novella is about. Rather, it is about people struggling to find a way through life when it has been touched by a violent crime. It is about how to try and find peace when there are no easy answers.

The murder of 19-year-old Kim Hae-on in 2002 shocks the local community. The killer is not found, despite two local boys being suspected. Predictable tabloid sensationalism means it becomes known as the High School Beauty Murder, as Kim Hae-on was strikingly beautiful and somewhat unknowable. Yet beyond the cliches lies a life taken and a grieving family.

The various chapters in Lemon have different narrators between 2002 and 2019. It begins with Hae-on’s younger sister Da-on, struggling to understand who she is in the wake of her sister’s killing.

“Does this mean I’m still not free? That I’m not free, not one iota, from those smooth, fair, irrelevant details from 16 years ago, those endless memories of my sister’s loveliness, which had made me undergo plastic surgery, turning my own face into a crude patchwork of her features?”

We gain perspective on Da-on from the memories of a classmate, Sanghui:

“Da-on, the younger sister, was the one who looked after Hae-on, as one would after a little sister. She’d stop her big sister on the street before they reached the school gate and then circle her examining the front and back of her uniform to make sure nothing was out of place.”

[..]

“Then you could witness the older sister fleeing gracefully down the hall or across the school field with her long lithe limbs, while the younger one raced shrieking after her, like some wild animal. They seem never failed to give both teachers and students a good laugh. That was Da-on’s gift. She had a lively, bubbly kind of warmth that could pull Hae-ons devastating, otherworldly, even glacial, beauty into our reality, dissolving it in laughter.”

We learn later on that there was a clear reason for this protectiveness. Hae-on seemed unaware of the modesty expected in society and could forget to wear underwear, sitting in a way that exposed this. Da-on would try to ensure this didn’t happen but the external misreading of this behaviour probably played a part in her sister’s disappearance. There is never any sense of victim-blaming from any of the narrators in Lemon, with one exception and the reader is clearly not expected to align with those views.

More details of the day of the murder emerge through the shifting views, bound up in the lives that continued beyond. There is real sadness here, particularly in the grief of Hae-on’s immediate family and also for Han Manu, one of the suspects.

There is a haunting quality in Lemon. It is never so crass as to make the murder of a young woman anything other than it is; it is not gory entertainment nor is it made easier through a suggestion of any sort of metaphysicality. But by capturing the  fallout of the violence onto the everyday lives of those who knew Hae-on, Kwon Yeo-sun expertly demonstrates the ongoing destructiveness of a life taken.

“It will go on endlessly, until the end of Da-on’s life, or maybe beyond that. Not being able to put an end to an incident so horrific – I couldn’t begin to imagine that kind of weight on her life.”

Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.2

/ madamebibilophile / 25 Comments

Winter in Sokcho – Elisa Shua Dusapin (2016 trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins  2020) 154 pages

Day 2 and I’m delighted that yesterday Simon at Stuck in a Book posted that he’ll be joining me with his #ABookaDayinMay, surely adding many more titles to my TBR mountain 🙂

The narrative voice in Winter in Sokcho is an intriguing one: detached yet painfully intimate, ambiguous yet pragmatically clear. A nameless young woman records what happens to her, but it is up to the reader to decipher the meaning.

She works in a hotel in out of season Sokcho, a coastal tourist town sixty kilometres south of the border with North Korea. It is not a glamorous hotel even in peak season:

“Orange and green corridors, lit by blueish light bulbs. Old Park hadn’t moved on from the days after the war, when guests were lured like squids to their nets, dazzled by strings of blinking lights.”

“I loved this coastline, scarred as it was by the line of electrified barbed wire fencing along the shore.”

A guest arrives at the hotel, a French graphic novelist named Kerrand. Slowly he and the woman form a bond that is never quite articulated. It could be sexual. It could be father/daughter (her absent father is French too). He wants her to show him the area as she knows it, but it is a flawed premise from the start:

“He’d never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.”

The isolation both geographical and individual lends the story a bleakness that verges on Gothic, despite all the neon lights. A trip to the border is downright eerie; the other guest in the hotel is permanently swathed in bandages as she recovers from cosmetic surgery.

The pressures on women and their appearance bear heavily on the narrator. Her mother chastises her for eating too little, and she seems to have body dysmorphia/an eating disorder. Her boyfriend leaves for Seoul for a modelling career, casually accepting he’ll undertake facial surgery if that is what is needed for work, and urging her to do the same.

Like so much else in her life, she seems to feel somewhat detached from her boyfriend. There is a sense of everything in her life being a step removed. She has no friends, her mother is suffocating yet pitable and distances with her need to be carefully managed. The narrator speaks with Kerrand in English despite her French being more fluent.  

As her involvement with Kerrand grows, she feels an ambivalence around his drawings of women, which never make it into his published work:

“In bed later, I heard the pen scratching. I pinned myself against the thin wall. An gnawing sound,  irritating. Working its way under my skin. Stopping and starting. I pictured Kerrand, his fingers scurrying like spiders legs, his eyes travelling up, scrutinising the model, looking down at the paper again, looking back up to make sure his pen conveyed the truth of his vision, to keep her from vanishing while he traced the lines.”

This ambivalence moves towards an ending that is wholly ambiguous. It could be read several ways and I remain unsure as to what I think happened. This isn’t remotely unsatisfying but entirely apt. Winter in Sokcho is a compelling exploration of the unknown: in ourselves, in others, and in the forces of history we all live with. How we reconcile ourselves to this is for the individual to discover. I think the narrator did find a way, I’m just not sure what it was…

“You may have had your wars, I’m sure there are scars on your beaches, but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way at any moment.”