Author: madamebibilophile

“I am merely the canvas on which women paint their dreams.” (Rudolph Valentino)

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I’m going through a bit of a reading slump at the moment, not a terrible one as I’m finding I can focus on my comfort reads, but I’m struggling with anything that needs more concentration. It’s very frustrating.

I wanted to take part in August’s Women in Translation Month, so I was hoping to recover my reading mojo in time. Having enjoyed All Our Yesterdays and The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg previously, I thought her direct style would suit my addled brain well. Valentino (1957 transl. Avril Bardoni 1987)) is essentially a short story, just 62 pages in my edition (a Daunt Books reissue) and I whizzed through it on a short train journey to visit a friend in Sussex.

The story is narrated by Caterina, sister of the titular character:

“My father believed that [Valentino] was destined to become a man of consequence. There was little enough reason to believe this, but he believed it all the same and had done ever since Valentino was a small boy and perhaps found it difficult to break the habit.”

Valentino is vain and feckless, entirely undeserving of the faith his parents put in him and the sacrifices the whole family have made to finance his medical studies. He fritters away his time and routinely gets engaged to ‘teenagers wearing jaunty little berets’.

So when he announces his latest engagement, no-one takes it particularly seriously:

“It had happened so often already that when he announced he was getting married within the month nobody believed him, and my mother cleaned the dining room wearily and put on the grey silk reserved for her pupils’ examinations at the Conservatory and for meeting Valentino’s perspective brides.”

However, this engagement to Maddelena sticks. She is older, unattractive and incredibly rich. Valentino’s parents are heartbroken at his avariciousness being made so apparent. Caterina is more equanimous and she soon realises that Maddelena is caring and hard-working. Valentino is not worthy of his bride.

“It was not easy to explain to my sister Clara the turn that events had taken. That a woman had appeared with lashings of money and a moustache who was willing to pay for the privilege of marrying Valentino and that he had agreed.”

What follows is a carefully realised study of the family members and their dynamics, particularly around Valentino’s marriage. Caterina’s direct voice conveys the hurt Valentino inflicts, not through cruelty but through utter obliviousness and self-focus, without demonising him.

In such a short space, Ginzburg achieves a really moving portrait of familial relationships and how these exist under the pressures exerted by society.  There is sadness in the tale but also a deadpan humour. Caterina presents the situation without judgement, enabling a real depth to the characterisation.

Ginzburg is such an intelligent, insightful writer who never seeks to alienate readers with her cleverness. She presents knotty complexity with a deceptive simplicity of style. If you’ve never read her, Valentino is a good place to start.

“My emotions at that time were neither profound nor melancholic and I was confident that sooner or later things would improve for me.”

To end, Rudolph Valentino playing ‘a youthful libertine’ and dancing a tango, over 100 years ago:

“It was not a bad life, while things happened fast. And they usually did.” (Ursula Parrott, The Ex-Wife)

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When I saw The Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (1929) in my local charity bookshop I snapped it up, remembering JacquiWine’s review. Faber Editions are always reliable too, and it’s great that they’ve brought this back into print (as have McNally in the US.) It evokes a young woman navigating independence during Jazz Age New York so vividly.

Pat is twenty-four when her marriage to Pete falls apart, with extra-marital dalliances on both sides, aided by alcohol and parties.

“In the three weeks we had been to six parties, three first nights, five speakeasies, four night clubs, two operas, and a concert”

These young people are so inexperienced and naïve, and the collapse of their marriage seems inevitable as neither have the first clue how to save it:

“I thought: “I will try to make it up to Pete by being good tempered always, and looking as pretty as possible, and following all his stories, and not being extravagant anymore.” I felt very grown up.”

From my twenty-first century view I wouldn’t want to save a marriage to someone who pushed me through a plate-glass door because he wasn’t happy about the pregnancy he was equally responsible for, but Pat is very attached to her husband and wants him back.

She moves in with her friend Lucia, five years older and also divorced, who tries to persuade Pat of the advantages of their situation:

“‘We are free. Applesauce! Free to pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one husband.’”

We follow Pat as she navigates single life as woman in the Roaring Twenties: working, socialising, happy and unhappy. She is attractive and young, and men are interested in her. Parrott has some wonderful turns of phrase and a way of crafting sentences that is so arresting.

“Hoping sometime to wake and find I had slept beside a lover and friend, I slept to wake beside a stranger exigent, triumphant, or exasperated, or perhaps as bored and polite as I.”

Pat enjoys parties and manages a successful career. She also has genuine friends both male and female, but there is an undercurrent of sadness with some of her male friends who are older than she is, and so fought in the war.

“Kenneth looked as if he would understand about Peter, and the men one kissed cure one of the memory of Peter, and the little hope one cherished about Peter, in spite of judgement and the common sense and the well-meant advice of one’s friends.”

Pat is a fashion copywriter who enjoys spending money and there are some gorgeous descriptions of clothes throughout The Ex-Wife. New York is obviously another love, and this passage made me wonder if it inspired the opening scene of Woody Allen’s Manhattan:

“Sam gave Lucia an Orthophonic Phonograph for a birthday present. Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was almost the only record we ever played on it. We turned that on, about once an hour when we were at home.

‘That tune matches New York,’ Lucia said. ‘The New York we know. It has gaiety and colour and irrelevancy and futility and glamour as beautifully blended as the ingredients in crepes suzette.’

I said, ‘It makes me think of skyscrapers and Harlem and liners sailing and newsboys calling extras.’

‘It makes me think I’m twenty years old and on the way to owning the city,’ Lucia said. ‘Start it over again, will you?’”

Apparently the novel was a scandalous sensation on first appearance and had to be published anonymously. There is much in it that feels very modern and I was surprised that a 1929 novel was so open in discussions of sex, domestic violence and abortions. The difference in grief responses from Pat and Pete regarding their young child felt very real and heartbreaking, despite Parrott not overly exploring it.

There are also some pithy observations about what increased freedom for women at this time really means:

“The principal thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity did, was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in return for love, fidelity and so on.”

Yet really what makes The Ex-Wife still so readable after nearly a century is the closely-observed characterisation of Pat. She is so endearing: young in many ways, older in others. She is frank about her loneliness and vulnerabilities; unapologetic about her enjoyment of bars, dancing and shopping. She is wise and naïve and she really grows throughout The Ex-Wife.

“Enclose with that decree a complete assortment of young illusions, a beatific confidence, an entertaining lack of common sense, and an innocent expression—and I shall be—just as if I had never married.”

To end, a scene from the film adaptation made just a year later, which won Norma Shearer an Oscar:

Murder Tide – Stella Blómkvist (transl. Quentin Bates) Blog Tour

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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.

Murder Tide (2017, transl. Quentin Bates 2024) is the third Stella Blómkvist mystery I’ve read as part of Corylus’ blog tours and I enjoyed reacquainting myself with her world: her daughter Sóley Árdís; the deepening relationship with Rannveig; her cousin Sissi; newshound Máki; and of course her antagonistic relationship with the local police.

Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:

“Left to drown by the rising tide at the dock by Reykjavík’s Grótta lighthouse, the ruthless businessman with a murky history of his own had always had a talent for making enemies.

The police have their suspect – who calls in Stella Blómkvist to fight his corner as he furiously protests his innocence. Yet this angry fisherman had every reason to bear the dead man a grudge.

It’s a busy summer for razor-tongued, no-nonsense lawyer Stella. A young woman looking for a long-lost parent finds more than she bargained for. An old adversary calls from prison, looking for Stella to   broker a dangerous deal with the police to put one of the city’s untouchable crime lords behind bars at long last.

Is the mysterious medium right, warning that deep waters are waiting to drag Stella into the depths?”

Murder Tide is grounded in the realities of Iceland in 2011. Grímúlfur, the murdered man, was nicknamed the ‘Quota King’ and made a lot of money out of Iceland’s financial crash in 2008. People who took out enormous foreign currency loans had to hand over their businesses to the banks, who then sold on the loans to their cronies who had the loans written off. Grímúlfur was one of the cronies and he bought fishing quota rights too.

“‘The quota system has split the country for the last two decades, as it has provided a chosen few with great wealth just as it has wrecked many rural communities and added to the inequality and injustice in Icelandic society,’ Máki writes.”

Stella’s client is a fisherman who suffered under this system, and she soon finds out that as well as the many who Grímúlfur ripped off, his family bear him some pretty significant grudges too.

At the same time she is helping a young woman called Úlfhildur find her birth father, who unfortunately for Úlfhildur seems to be a truly sinister man married to a threatening woman, who together run a cult.

Her third client is the decidedly dodgy Sævar whose case highlights police corruption and reinforces Stella’s cynical world view:

“Bitter experience has taught me that there’s nobody in this world who can be trusted. It’s all about uncertainty and coincidence.”

The three strands in Murder Tide are woven together well and even my poor brain managed to keep track of what was happening. The societal commentary felt intrinsic to the plot rather than slowing it down, and I whizzed through this pacy story.

Stella felt more likable in this book and the habit she has of referring to brand names and labouring over material possessions has eased off a bit. She’s leading a slightly more settled life as she and Rannveig continue the relationship which began in Murder Under the Midnight Sun. But Stella’s domestic life is generally in the background, as she tears around working just as hard as ever.

She really does need to stop sexually assaulting people though. This time it was for a different reason than her own gratification, but for a character who is supposed to follow her own moral compass in opposition to self-serving businessmen and corrupt police officers, I would really welcome her incorporating informed consent into her world view.

However, this isn’t a significant part of Murder Tide so please don’t be put off! What worked especially well was the menace of characters and genuine sense of danger, alongside humour. Chapters frequently end with a quote from Stella’s mother, a woman who seems to have had an aphorism for every occasion, ranging from the insightful to the clichéd, the incomprehensible to the remarkably plain-speaking. These really made me smile and kept the character of Stella grounded in a more recognisable reality, while she rode motorbikes at speed, visited career criminals in prisons and exposed corruption with the help of Sissi’s technical expertise.

The tone is also carefully balanced. There were some very dark aspects to Murder Tide, and Blómkvist is expert at conveying these clearly, without ever being gratuitous or voyeuristically gruesome.

As always with Stella’s stories, the pace and plotting worked seamlessly. But what I especially enjoyed in Murder Tide was the deepening characterisation of Stella, and I’m looking forward to seeing where she goes next.

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

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.31

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The Catch – Mick Herron (2020) 105 pages

For the final post of this year’s Novella a Day in May project: a bit of a departure for me, as it’s a spy thriller.

I don’t read spy novels at all really, but a million years ago, Lady Fancifull who sadly no longer blogs, recommended the Mick Herron Slough House series to me, and she was absolutely right. They are evocative, pacy, politically engaged, and funny. They are gaining even more attention now due to the wonderful Slow Horses adaptation with Gary Oldman in the lead (a casting I wasn’t sure about until the first moment he appeared on screen and all doubts immediately dissipated.) I highly recommend the series both in book and television formats.

The Catch is a standalone novella, part of the world of Slow Horses but only featuring the formidable Diana ‘Lady Di’ Taverner from MI5 as a familiar character (“reaching Desk level required drive, ambition, contacts, dress sense and at least a glimmer of sociopathy”.)

John Bachelor may not be a Slow Horse but he’d fit right in – a washed-up spy, trying to keep his head down. “Squeezing his feet into socks produced the kind of hyperventilation that running upstairs once triggered.”

He’s employed by the service as “a milkman”, which means he does the rounds of other old spies, checking in on them and keeping track. Except he’s lost one of his charges: Benny Manors, who has a history of blackmail.

One day John wakes up to find two Service agents in the flat he’s been living in illegally, and – he thought – under the radar.

“It was all very alarming. If they’d been thugs, he’d have known he was in for a kicking. But they were suits, which suggested a more vicious outcome.”

For reasons they refuse to divulge, they want Benny found. John is inept, out of practice, and he has two days.

I can’t say much more except it is just so impressive how Herron manages to weave a pacy spy novella, complete in itself, in so few pages. All his usual commentary and humour was evident, as well as a plot that piled machination upon machination.

Somehow Herron always evokes a recognisable London too, which so few novelists seem to achieve. He does it while writing about a side of life I know nothing about (and never will, I’d be the world’s most useless spy):

“Seven Dials. He seemed to recall an Agatha Christie with that in the title, which suggested he might encounter the usual suspects in the usual places: spinsters in the kitchen, colonels in the bar. Maybe a vicar or two in the library. As it was, Monmouth Street was just another London thoroughfare, cheerful in the sunshine and grubby round the edges, and peopled by the usual young, the usual old, the former acting like they owned the place while the latter actually did.”

To end, the trailer for the first series of Slow Horses, an absolutely pitch-perfect adaptation:

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.30

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Mrs Caliban – Rachel Ingalls (1982) 117 pages

Earlier in the month when I reviewed Bear, Cathy mentioned Mrs Caliban. Well, it was just sat there as part of the same Waterstone’s display where I picked up Another Marvellous Thing, and it would take a stronger reader than me to walk away… 😀 It is also part of the lovely Faber Editions series and so a very pleasing thing in itself. By coincidence, Jacqui reviewed her favourite Faber Editions yesterday, including Mrs Caliban, so do check out her post.

In the opening passage of the novella Dorothy’s husband Fred is leaving for work:

 “He remembered that he had wanted to take the paper with him. Dorothy didn’t bother to say that she hadn’t finished with it yet herself. She just went back and brought it to him.”

I thought that was such an immensely clever detail. In so few words Ingalls has conveyed the distance between the couple, Dorothy’s domestic role, her apathy, and her lack of met needs.

Dorothy is a homemaker, but that home is hanging on in appearance only. She has experienced two immense bereavements – her young son Scotty during surgery, and a subsequent miscarriage. It is this grief which has largely contributed to forcing her and Fred apart.

“And so it went on: silences, separateness, the despair thinking out conversations that they knew would be hopeless.”

We quickly learn that unsurprisingly, Dorothy’s mental health may be suffering. She is hearing messages directly addressed to her from the radio:

“She hadn’t thought she was going crazy, not straight away. She believed it was just her own thoughts forcing themselves into the low pitched sounds and their insistent rhythm.”

This affects the reading of the rest of the novella: it is Dorothy’s perception of events, but did it actually happen? This is left ambiguous and works well, because in a sense it doesn’t matter. What does matter is Dorothy’s experience.

When Dorothy hears that “Aquarius the monster man” has escaped from a nearby facility, she isn’t sure if it is a general news alert or one of her personal messages.

“She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen when the screen door opened and a gigantic six foot seven inch frog like creature shouldered its way into the house”

Again, I thought that was so clever, moving immediately from the small domestic concern to something so fantastical, linking the two together in that immediate moment with the ‘And’.

Dorothy and the creature become friends and almost immediately lovers, with her nicknaming him Larry. He lives in the house and is easy to hide because Dorothy and Fred essentially have separate spheres.

(Incidentally, I’ve seen Dorothy referred to as Dorothy Caliban, including in the Foreword to this edition, but I don’t remember Dorothy and Fred’s surname being mentioned in the story. More than likely I missed it, but I thought the title was a reference to her bond with Larry, a Caliban-type creature, with him ambiguous in the way that Shakespeare’s creation could be too.)

What is interesting is that if Larry is Dorothy’s fantasy, what that fantasy says. He is physically strong and they have a sexual bond, but he is also unfailing polite and respectful, is interested in her, and enjoys helping with domestic tasks. The feminism running through Mrs Caliban is evoked skilfully and is undeniable.

Additionally, if he is Dorothy’s fantasy, Larry is violent towards those who seek to harm him. Although we never see Dorothy especially angry, why wouldn’t she be? Both her children died, her husband runs off having affairs, and she’s left with a house to manage – for whom?

“She had no interests, no marriage to speak of, no children. Now, at last, she had something.”

In case I’ve made this sound very heavy, there is plenty of humour in Mrs Caliban too:

“Most of the time, if she couldn’t explain something to him straight away, he didn’t push it. The last time she’d been stuck was when he said he didn’t understand ‘radical chic’.”

Although ultimately I found it a sad novella. In the same way that The Tempest doesn’t fit easily into particular genres, neither does Mrs Caliban. Like the play with the ‘monstrous’ Caliban, this story can be comedic, tragic, dramatic, and fantastical. Like The Tempest, it features a lot of grief and loss.

Prospero, main protagonist of The Tempest, is a man and a sorcerer, who is able to own his anger and command his environment. Dorothy commands her environment – it is domestic and it is what she is expected to do. But she is denied so much agency, and her relationship with Larry is the start of her claiming some back.

Ingalls is such a skilled writer and Mrs Caliban has enough ambiguity that it can be read a number of ways. Ultimately I read Mrs Caliban as a grief narrative,  where the grieving person starts to find their way in the world again after it has irrevocably changed, but the sadness remains.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.29

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Another Marvellous Thing – Laurie Colwin (1986) 130 pages

Last year a Waterstones opened up a few minutes walk from where I live. I try and ration my visits but you can probably guess how that’s working out 😀 Browsing there was how I found out about Laurie Colwin, who until now had somehow passed me by. I tend to treat jacket blurbs with a mountain of salt, but anyone described as “The Barbara Pym of 1970s New York” (Jonathan Lethem) was going to have me snatching their work from the shelf.

In Another Marvellous Thing Billy and Francis have an affair, despite both being married to other people. Francis is quite a bit older than Billy, though we’re never really told their ages. Both are involved in the field of economics but have wildly different views. They are wildly different in just about every way.

“It would never work. We both know it. She is to relentlessly dour, and too fond of silence. I prefer false cheer to no cheer and I like conversation over dinner no matter what.”

The first chapter is narrated in the first person by Francis, before shifting to a third person narrator for the remainder:

“In movies men have mistresses who soothe and pet them, who are consoling, passionate, and ornamental. But I have a mistress who is mostly grumpy. Traditional things mean nothing to her. She does not flirt, cajole, or wear fancy underwear.”

Despite the bafflement they both have for why they are involved with one another, their affair is rooted in love.

“We are as faithful as the Canada goose, more or less. She is an absolute fact of my life.”

“She did not want to have these feelings: she had been so much happier when she had been unaware she had them.”

Billy and Francis are also markedly different to each other’s spouses:

“Billy, unlike my gregarious party-giving wife, thinks that there is no hell more hellish than the hell of social life.”

“He has the body of a young boy in the air of a genius or someone constantly preoccupied by the intense pressure of a rarified mental life. Together he and Billy look not so much like husband and wife as co-conspirators.”

In other words, they are both much better suited to those they are married to. This means that Another Marvellous Thing avoids the pitfalls of a will-they-won’t-they get together plotline, and instead is more interested in these two disparate characters, and a year or so of their lives together.

“The topic of her dissertation turned Francis glassy-eyed: his passion for Billy did not mitigate his indifference to the medieval wool trade.”

Despite Billy’s interiority keeping her somewhat unknown to Francis, as a reader I loved her character. She was so idiosyncratic and believable, with her refusal to conform to societal expectations:

“‘A vision of radiant loveliness,’ Francis said.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Billy said. ‘The laundry ruined my filmy peignoir.’”

Unlike Francis who is quite equanimous about being unfaithful, Billy feels horribly guilty. Later in the book the affair has finished and the chapters focus on her life afterwards, where we see much more vulnerability than she allowed Francis to witness.

“In one of her snootier moments, my mistress said to me: ‘My furnishings are interior. I care about what I think about.’”

All in all I enjoyed my first experience of Colwin’s writing. There were so many great one-liners and it did feel very New York. But the wit didn’t stop emotional truth being fully realised, particularly with Billy and her husband Grey in the later chapters. I’ll look forward to exploring her further.

“Being in love, he often felt, was like having a bird caught in his hair.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.28

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The Lady and the Little Fox Fur – Violette Leduc (1965, transl. Derek Coltman 1967) 80 pages

I found this novella, only slightly longer than a short story, incredibly moving. It follows the daily life of a frail, impoverished woman, living in a dilapidated attic room in Paris which shakes every few minutes when the Métro passes overhead.

Violette Leduc is not an author I know, but in the Introduction to my edition Deborah Levy describes her novels as “works of genius and also a bit peculiar.” Certainly Leduc has a way of skipping between images and realities that continually pulled me up short. Despite its brevity The Lady and the Little Fox Fur can’t be read quickly; the sentences have to be considered.

“Her coat was turning green with age. So much the better: it was a proof that her verdigris candlesticks in the pawn shop had not abandoned her. When the sun came out, there were two torches to light her way, the sun itself and its reflection in the window of Joris’, the shop that accepted la Semeuse coupons.”

That strange logic about the candlesticks demonstrates the frayed reasoning of The Lady, but also Leduc’s skill in layering images to evoke scenes and draw elements of her story together so clearly.

Her stylistic skill never distances the characters. A long time is spent on the hunger of The Lady, both physical and psychological. She is desperate for food, and she is desperately lonely. Every day she roams around her home city, unseen and disregarded.

“Wheat pancakes, fifty francs. The batter was spreading across the hotplate, the woman was scraping away the drips and making the edges neater with the point of her knife. But she would draw her nourishment later on from the crowd in the Métro: one cannot have everything.”

“They were workmen whose job it was to keep the flagstones level, and they put up with her there because they didn’t know she was there. The bollard she was sitting on had such stability, the place itself was so historic that she became a peasant woman who had ridden in from the Perche country to sell a farmhorse many centuries ago.”

The second part of the novella sees her take out a raggedy fox fur, which she found in rubbish when hunting for an orange to eat, to sell for food.

“There were moments when she had no saliva left to remember with, not even the pale pink water ices that her parents used to eat.”

It is desperation which drives her, as the fox fur provides warmth and companionship. Like a child, she anthropomorphises the inanimate object (as she does bugs in the floorboards and some of her furniture), showering him with kisses and affection.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur could have been unbearably sentimental, but Leduc’s way of writing meant it wasn’t so. The Lady doesn’t pity herself and the portrayal evokes compassion and empathy rather than sympathy. She endures, repeatedly, throughout the challenges of her daily life.

“Happily, she noted, it was still not six o’clock: she was the ribbon in a little girl’s hair, fluttering in the breeze. After six, the wind in Paris grows stronger and disarranges all our principles.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.27

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History. A Mess. – Sigrún Palsdóttir (2016 transl. Lytton Smith 2019) 173 pages

History. A Mess. Is narrated by a young unnamed PhD student. As the story opens, she is ecstatic as the research drudge job she had been given by her supervisor, transcribing the journal of a seventeenth-century artist known as SB, seems to have yielded a tremendous discovery: evidence of the first female artist in England.

“Frenzied jubilation thrilled through my body, words burst within me freighted with tremendous power, inside my head sentences and then pages formed one after the other so that by the time I stepped out of the building into the outside courtyard, my introduction was well underway.”

However, we soon learn that something went badly wrong. Five years on, she hasn’t handed in her thesis and she is back in Iceland with her husband Hans, barely leaving her house.

“Even if that person can seem occasionally distant, like Hans, so lost in his world that if you don’t reach out, grasp hold of him, he floats away, as he’s doing now, as I’m letting him do. I’m still trying to figure out what his reaction would be if I reached out for him and laid my cards on the table. Cards on the table. I suspect that his reaction would be sensible. And prudence is no use to me now. My problem calls for a radical solution.”

The fractured, repetitive quality to the sentences are indicative of the narrator’s struggles. The story becomes more hallucinatory and untethered as she seems to unravel further and further.

Some scenes are described that are so florid as to be clearly unreal. Others are grounded in the everyday so we don’t know whether have occurred or not – a skilled positioning of the reader alongside the narrator.

The story can be hard to follow at times, but from the hallucinations we’re able to unpick that she seems to be locking herself in a cupboard in her living room for much of the day. Her parents are around, and her mother is a major figure in her life.

Later in the novel she does leave her home to visit her mother for help in working out what to do about her thesis. Her walk there through the Reykjavik streets collapses reality and hallucination and seems never-ending, like a walk in dream.

“How often can you go over and over a dream in your mind until the scenario begins to crack apart, its images crumbling, their lifetime becoming nothing more than the moment it takes to call them up?”

History. A Mess. Is not an easy read. It is disorienting and confusing, but the writing is taut and so skilled that it never seems to be losing sight of itself. There also remains enough plot to keep pulling the story through, as well as a neat twist at the end.

A repeated refrain in the book is from Andre Breton, and summarises the novella succinctly:

“Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind where the real and the imaginary will cease to appear contradictory.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.26

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A Friend from England – Anita Brookner (1987) 172 pages

Anita Brookner is one of those authors I keep meaning to get back to. I was too young when I read Hotel du Lac; when I read Family and Friends for this project back in 2019 I knew the time was right. Despite this, I keep failing to pick her up! Hopefully A Friend from England signals the start of my more consistent reading of this striking and clear-sighted author.

The novella is essentially a character study of Rachel, a typical Brookner heroine.She is solitary and somewhat spiky, with the reader sensing more loneliness that she admits to.

She inherits her financial advisor Oscar from her deceased parents. When Oscar retires after winning a lot of money on the pools, Rachel visits him at home rather than his office.

“All the rooms seemed to repel both light and weather; they were designed to keep one’s thoughts indoors, resigned and melancholy.

[…]

I found it all very cosy. Although their life seemed to depress Oscar and his wife, both of whom had a vaguely disappointed air, I could see myself transformed into just such a virtuous member of just such a successful but melancholy family.”

Rachel starts attending Oscar and his wife Dorrie’s home regularly for dinner, and meets their daughter Heather, who it is clear the family are keen to see married and settled. (There was something oddly old-fashioned about A Friend from England, so much so that I went back to the beginning to double-check I hadn’t missed something about it being set in the early 1960s.)

No-one does a bitchy character summation like Brookner, and here is Rachel’s assessment of Heather:

“I could feel the force of her passive temperament, and I say temperament rather than personality, for there was little personality in evidence.”

Ouch!

Oscar and Dorrie seem keen for the two women to become friends, and Heather regularly drives Rachel home, but remains unknowable. This doesn’t particularly bother Rachel:

“I felt a genuine love for Heather’s parents, while feeling rather little for Heather herself. When I say rather little, I mean that I felt a full complement of boredom, irritation, tolerance, and reluctant affection for her.”

However, then Heather does what everyone expects, and gets engaged. Rachel is unsure of her choice:

“My first impression of Michael Sandberg was that he was blessed with, or consumed by, radiant high spirits. My second impression was that a man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.

[…]

Michael had a sort of sunniness about him which seemed to preclude any baffling depths of character: I thought that was probably just as well, for Heather, despite her shrewdness,  seemed to have very little curiosity and might not have much patience with a difficult or troublesome man.”

The “shrewdness” which Rachel frequently attributes to Heather is a masterstroke by Brookner. As readers we never see any evidence of such a trait. No-one else observes Heather as being shrewd. We are more aware than Rachel that she has proclaimed this motivation to Heather’s behaviour because it makes sense to her. This misjudgement has a significant fallout later.

“I felt a spasm of distaste for her and for all those women like her, women who work for fun and marry for status, and still demand compensation. The only excuse for such women is incurable frivolity. And Heather was not even frivolous.”

[Slight spoilers ahead]

Heather’s marriage does fall apart (again, for a reason I found somewhat out of keeping with its late 1980s setting, unless the reason we’re shown is supposed to be a signifier of a deeper incompatibility.) But it is Rachel who begins to unravel. She has been insistent all along that her solitary life suits her, but this seems grounded in pain and avoidance rather than a life choice which makes her happy and fulfilled.

“The process of thinking does not become me. I feel my face growing longer, my eyes sinking deeper. Thinking, for me, is accompanied by a wave of sadness. Therefore I try to avoid introspection. I long ago decided to live my life on the surface, avoiding entanglements, confrontations, situations that cannot be quickly resolved, friendships that lead to passion.”

When Heather’s subsequent decisions do not fit with Rachel’s judgements of who she is or what she should do, we witness Rachel behaving more and more extremely, despite her distaste for drama. This observant, clever, discerning woman has completely failed to recognise that others could have considered and reached different values and different aspirations from her. The destabilisation which occurs suggests that Rachel wasn’t as secure in her life choices as she liked to believe.

A Friend from England is such a cleverly paced novel. The acerbic, domestic everyday gradually becomes something much darker and more devastating, with all the fault lines set up to fracture from the very beginning.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.25

/ madamebibilophile / 8 Comments

Krane’s Café – Cora Sandel (1946, transl. Elizabeth Rokkan 1968) 173 pages

Back in November Kaggsy reviewed some of Cora Sandel’s shorter writings and reminded me that I had Krane’s Café languishing in the TBR. I’m really pleased to have finally got to it, with its sly humour and incisive characterisation.

“There’s a lot to be heard before your ears drop off.”

Set just after the First World War, it opens with Katinka Stordal sitting in the titular café. She is the dressmaker in a small coastal town in northern Norway, and there is a big event coming up. Her orders are piling up, and Mrs Krane, the owner of the café with her husband, is trying to move Katinka on.

“’I’m going, I’m going,’ said Mrs Stordal. She looked up listlessly for a moment, and stayed where she was. It was one of those days when she looks much older than she really is.”

The narrative voice has this slightly bitchy, judgemental tone, which works so well. In implicitly proclaiming an alliance with the attitudes of the townsfolk, she draws attention to their pettiness and their lack of humane understanding.

People come in to try and chivvy Katinka along, with absolutely no interest as to why she is unable to move from the café or has her head in her hands. Their only concern is getting her back to work.

“As usual Mrs Brien was magnificently equal to the situation. ‘Now then, we mustn’t get hysterical, you know. We mustn’t give up. Everyone has worries. I don’t know anyone without worries. This really is naughty of you, Katinka.”

Then a man called Bowler Hat arrives…

“And he went over to Mrs Stordal and said in that low, one might almost be tempted to say melodious voice, if it were not so ridiculous, and offensive and bold into the bargain, ‘May I offer you something? Something you’d fancy? What about a little wine? The wine you’ve just been drinking? And then you can go on listening to me for a while? You mustn’t stop listening yet, you understand so well. I expect you know too how it feels to be lonely?’”

So the situation becomes scandalous. Katinka is in the back room of the café, drinking with a male stranger. She is complaining about her selfish family, her enduring fatigue with life, her lack of choices. Bowler Hat is an unnerving figure and I did wonder at times if he was a representation of the devil.

Mrs Krane feels overwhelmed without her husband to help her manage the situation, and her staff, Larsen and Sønstegård, are thoroughly enjoying the drama while pretending not to.

“Children and drunkards will tell you the truth. Both Larsen and Sønstegård admitted later that at that point they were almost afraid of more customers coming. For it was exciting to listen to Mrs Katinka, who scarcely ever gave you an answer in the normal run of affairs, sitting there giving rein to her tongue. Even though it was so dreadful to hear her gossiping like that about her own children. Throwing them to the wolves, you might almost call it.

And even though it was all a lot of nonsense.

What else could you call it?”

What emerges is a picture of real sadness. Katinka is lonely and disregarded by her family and by the town, while expected to fulfil their expectations of her. She is teased by the town’s children for her drinking, and in this small community no-one really truly acknowledges anyone else’s pain, despite how closely they all live together.

“And surely she couldn’t have thought of going and drowning herself, with all those orders, she the mother of two children besides? Nobody did that sort of thing in this town.

Suddenly it struck Mrs Krane that that sort of thing was just not written up in the paper about people in other places. Grieve the chemist had taken prussic acid in the cellar of his shop, though that had happened a long time ago and he was even scolded at his graveside by Mr Pio the curate […. ] and Iverson the tailor, who had such a spiteful wife, had walked out into the sea until it went over his head, and he never came up again, even though it was ebb tide and the sea was far out.”

In this way Sandel satirises society and its unthinking complacency towards others; the hypocrisy; and the self-interest. Yet unlike some satire, it doesn’t have a bitter edge. The characterisation is compassionate towards Katinka and Mrs Krane; and even Katinka’s daughter. The narrative voice is humorous and by aligning itself with the attitudes of the town, it avoids the superior tone of some satire.

I felt the ending was compassionate, though the town and its inhabitants remain largely unchanged…

“And all of a sudden Katinka shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Here comes the madness, the great, wonderful madness. The liberator from everything, who opens the gates and makes all spacious about you.’”