Author: madamebibilophile

Novella a Day in May 2025 No.14

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La Femme de Gilles – Madeleine Bourdouxhe (1937, transl. Faith Evans 1992) 122 pages

La Femme de Gilles is a curious read from a twenty-first century perspective. The protagonist Elisa is entirely bound up in her husband Gilles. Her existence is wholly for him: cooking for him, keeping his house, bearing his children that she loves only as an extension of him, sexual pleasure derived solely from pleasing him. It’s the extremity of these feelings at the obliteration of any personal motivation for her actions outside of Gilles that make her so extraordinary to my eyes.

So when Gilles starts an affair with Elisa’s sister Victorine, outwardly Elisa does very little:

“Whatever happened, whatever had already happened, the main thing was not to make a fuss, simply to watch, and act in subtle little ways to keep intact the love with which she’d surrounded him, and to which he would return one day. There was no escape from a love as strong as hers.”

Elisa’s initial realisation is heartbreaking, as she turns her back on Gilles and Victorine to get ready and accompany them to the cinema:

“One by one she fixed her gaze on some of the objects around her, things that made up her familiar world, then her eyes lit on her own hands as they closed the bag, and she saw they were trembling. Precisely at that moment Elisa knew that behind her back there was another world, a world that was complicated, threatening, unknown.”

In a such a short space, Bourdouxhe creates an acute psychological portrait, primarily of Elisa, but also of her unintentionally cruel husband and her vacuous sister:

“Afterwards it’s a question of trying to make sense of things, sense of life, and life doesn’t touch Victorine, it will never mark her smile or her eyes, which will stay young, clear, innocent for a long time. Unconscious offenders are the most dangerous of criminals.”

Yet she also sustains a real momentum to a story which primarily takes place in Elisa’s tortured head, and follows her inaction. It feels pacy and tense, even as Bourdouxhe steps outside of the narrative to directly address her characters:

“You are alone with the greatest pain you have ever known.”

Poor Elisa really is isolated. She can’t speak with her husband, her sister or her mother. The villagers in the remote area where she lives become aware and gossip about her. But Elisa doesn’t really want to leave, she just wants things to be as they once were:

“Going from one place to another – is that really the world, or is it rather something very small, invisible, confused, something buried inside of us, something that we always take with us wherever we are, whether we’re here, or whether we are there? Whether we are far away or at home?”

La Femme de Gilles is an immersive read with incisive characterisation. Apparently Simone de Beauvoir was a fan (I tried to find what she said about it in the The Second Sex but my edition has a rubbish index). In her first novel, Bourdouxhe created a haunting narrative which I’m sure will stay with me.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.13

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Bear – Marian Engel (1976) 167 pages

Back when I was an undergrad in English literature, my tutor accused me of being squeamish on the subject of incest in Jacobean drama and skirting round it. My argument (and he did like it when I argued with him, he was a very sweet man) was that it was more interesting to consider incest as metaphor for Jacobean political corruption and the decay of society rather than just a play about a brother and sister with a warped relationship. The reason I mention this now is that in Bear by Marian Engel, a woman has sex with a bear.

Now maybe my tutor would think I’m being squeamish about bestiality here, but I really don’t think that it is what Engel is writing about or interested in. For me, Bear is a novel about a woman learning self-acceptance, and how to live her life on her own terms.

Lou is a librarian and archivist working for the Historical Institute, where she stays buried in her basement office:

“For although she loved old shabby things, things that had already been loved and suffered, objects with a past, when she saw that her arms were slug-pale and her fingerprints grained with old, old ink, that the detritus with which she bedizened her bulletin boards was curled and valueless, when she found that her eyes would no longer focus in the light, she was always ashamed, for the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast.”

She is lonely and her life is unsatisfying, particularly romantically. When the Institute is bequeathed an estate in a remote part of Canada, Lou is asked to travel there in order to take an inventory. What she isn’t told until she gets there is that the inventory includes a bear.

The house of Colonel Jocelyn Cary is isolated and strange, octagonal and filled with ephemera. Lou works steadily and there are some lovely descriptions of the library. Gradually she and the bear grow used to one another. Throughout the story the bear remains unknowable, quite a sad creature. He isn’t anthropomorphised and in this way Lou has to take responsibility for all her actions. She can’t claim to be responding to the bear.

“In case the bear was disappointed (for she had discovered she could paint any face on him that she wanted, while his actual range of expression was a mystery), she went out, plastered with mosquito lotion, and took him down to the shallowest part of the channel, where the water was warm.”

The main healing that occurs for Lou is through having to leave her basement office and interact with the natural world to survive. She has to run a boat, cook from scratch, fish, and share her environment with various creatures for company.

“She settled into a routine. She worked all morning, then in the afternoon disappeared into the bush to walk on carpets of trilliums and little yellow lilies; hepatica and bunchberries. The basswoods had put out huge leaves. Often, scarved and gloved against the black flies, she lingered by the beaver pond. The goshawks stared at her from their barkless elm with impenetrable eyes.”

Bear is the story of Lou reconsidering her choices and learning to listen to her own voice when she experiences the world away from other people (particularly men), surrounded by wildness. Her vulnerability is moving and emotionally engaging. What psychological change occurs for her is believable and unsentimental, while remaining hopeful.

From looking online, it seems a shame in a way that Bear features bear sex, because although it’s actually a tiny part of the story, of course it’s that for which the novel is known. It is a fable – in real life Lou would have likely been killed by the bear fairly quickly. Engel’s writing is much more subtle and the themes so much more complex than some summaries would suggest. Probably I have obfuscated a bit, but I’m certain my tutor won’t read this post 😉

“Is a life that can now be considered an absence a life?”

Those of you who follow Dorian Stuber on social media will know he’s a great advocate for this novel. You can read an essay he wrote on it here.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.12

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The Maintenance of Headway – Magnus Mills (2009) 152 pages

I remember quite clearly when Magnus Mills’ first novel The Restraint of Beasts, was published in 1998 and shortlisted for the Booker. He was a London bus driver, and so the story made the regional news and I realised he actually drove my local routes. In The Maintenance of Headway, Mills draws on this occupational experience and there was plenty I recognised, as well as thankfully some I didn’t!

The title refers to “the notion that a fixed interval between buses on a regular service can be attained and adhered to.”

This deceptively simple idea is in fact impossible to achieve.

“In this city it’s different. The streets are higgledy-piggledy and narrow; there are countless squares and circuses, zebra crossings and pelicans. Go east from the arch and you’ve got twenty-three sets of traffic lights in a row. All those shops, and all those pedestrians pouring into the road. Then there are the daily incidentals: street markets, burst water mains, leaking gas pipes, diesel spillages, resurfacing road works, ad hoc refuse collections, broken-down vehicles, troops on horseback, guards being changed, protest marches, royal cavalcade and presidential motorcade. Shall I go on?”

This was already starting to sound very familiar 😀

The bus drivers know maintaining headway is impossible, but they are subject to the inspectors, who also know its impossible. Various measures are taken each day to attempt to meet the impossible. At one point, one of the managers tells the narrator off for arriving six minutes late, in theory.

“’See how it accumulates? See the potential for outright bedlam? Your failure to be punctual could make a million people late for work!’

Frank sat behind his desk and bristled with imaginary rage.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘That’s alright,’ he replied. ‘Don’t let it happen again though.’”

Similar surrealism exists away from the depot on the bus journeys themselves:

“Strictly speaking there existed an imaginary line in front of which passengers weren’t supposed to stand. This was difficult to enforce, however, when people simply kept piling into the vehicle. In the past I tried making announcements in which I’d asked them ‘not to stand forward of the imaginary line,’ but they never took any notice.”

The city is never specified but there are various allusions to London: three stations, one Gothic flanked by two utilitarian “Cinderella and her ugly sisters” sounds like St Pancras, King’s Cross and Euston; the “southern outpost” is Crystal Palace; the “bejewelled thoroughfare” is Oxford Street. There are also frequent references to the obsolete, conductor-staffed “Venerable Platform Bus” which are the much-missed Routemaster buses. These various allusions add to the atmosphere that Mills is so adept at creating, of a world at once recognisable and oddly disconcerting.

If you’re yet to try Mills then Headway may not be the best place to start as I didn’t find it quite as sparkling as some of his other work. However, I’ve been a fan of his since The Restraint of Beasts, and if you are too there’s plenty to enjoy: the deadpan humour; the surreal quality never quite articulated; a dark edge questioning free will; a bleakness offset by a light touch. I’ll read anything he writes and it always feels like time well spent. Ironically, this is often an elusive quality to his characters.

“If the bus happens to arrive on schedule it’s good for the public record but little else. Nobody believes the timetables. Waiting for buses is therefore paradoxical.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.11

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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 – Cho Nam-Joo (2016, transl. Jamie Chang 2018) 163 pages

I’m hard to please with issue-driven novels. Often I find them clunky and unconvincing, which leaves me wondering why the authors didn’t write an essay or long-form article instead.

And yet, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which was very clear on the issues driving the novella to the extent of providing footnotes at various points, worked for me. Possibly because, as the title suggests, it almost presents like a piece of reportage or a case study.

The book opens in Autumn 2015, where young married mother Kim Jiyoung has started behaving oddly. At times she speaks like someone else, such as her mother. Her husband Daehyun is worried:

“Her odd behaviour continued sporadically. She’d send him a text message riddled with cute emoticons she never normally used, or make dishes like ox-bone soup or glass noodles that she neither enjoyed nor was good at.”

We are then taken back through Kim Jiyoung’s life in chronological order: Childhood 1982-1994; Adolescence 1995-2000; Early Adulthood 2001-2011; Marriage 2012-2015; before being brought up to date in 2016.

Jiyoung’s upbringing is fairly traditional. Her mother is bright and capable, and worked low-paid jobs which helped send her brother to medical school. Similarly, Kim Jiyoung’s brother is favoured:

“The brother had chopsticks, socks, long underwear, and school and lunch bags that matched, while the girls made do with whatever was available. If there were two umbrellas, the girls shared. If there were two blankets, the girls shared. If there were two treats, the girls shared. It didn’t occur to the child Jiyoung that her brother was receiving special treatment, and so she wasn’t even jealous. That’s how it had always been.”

And yet, in many ways her parents are progressive:

“Growing up, the sisters were never once told by their parents to meet a nice man and marry well, to grow up to be a good mother or and good cook. They’d done quite a lot of chores around the house since they were young, but they thought of it as helping out their busy parents and taking care of themselves, not learning how to be good women.”

Yet as she grows older, Jiyoung has to manage a different type of male entitlement, for which she is blamed:

“Entering high school meant a sudden expansion of her geographical and social world, which taught her that it was a wide world out there filled with perverts.”

One of the most challenging periods in Kim Jiyoung’s life is trying to find a job. It proves practically impossible:

“Jiyoung went to countless interviews after that, where interviewers made references to her physical appearance or lewd remarks about her outfit, stared lecherously at certain body parts and touched a gratuitously. None of these interviews led to a job.”

So the issue driving Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is pretty clear: the socio-cultural pressures exerted on women – and more specifically, South Korean women – from birth (or even before, as her grandparents wanted her to be a boy) and throughout their lives.

The footnotes actually work really well, demonstrating the wider context of Kim Jiyoung’s life, and also how those wider forces can impact the individual.

The bestselling nature of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 and its translation into 18 languages (according to my edition, it may be more now) is indicative of the relevance and reality of Kim Jiyoung’s life. Somehow it isn’t depressing or bleak, possibly given the matter-of-fact style, but it does demonstrate the ongoing need for change.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.10

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Marzahn, Mon Amour – Katja Oskamp (2019, transl. Jo Heinrich 2022) 141 pages

Marzahn, Mon Amour is a novella I’d been meaning to read for a while and I’m delighted to have finally got to it. Based on the author’s experience of retraining as a chiropodist in her middle-age, it is essentially a series of character sketches of her clients.

Initially her training is a struggle and she’s unsure of her new career:

“We had reached a low point, at people’s feet, and even there we were failing.”

“From writer to chiropodist – what a spectacular come down. I had forgotten how much people, the looks on their faces and their well-meant advice, got on my nerves.”

But on qualifying she gets a job in a salon in the titular area of Berlin, and begins to find her vocation:

“As always, the weather here in Marzahn, once the biggest expense of plattenbau prefab tower blocks in the former East Germany, seems more intense than in the centre. The seasons have more of a smell about them.”

Her boss is Tiffy “a grandmother, albeit a non-practising one”; Flocke is the chaotic nail technician. The chapters take the names of her clients, and Oskamp expertly captures a sense of the person in very few words:

Herr Paulke: “whenever I laughed at something that Herr Paulke said in his matter-of-fact way, emotion almost imperceptibly flashed across his face, a mix of incredulity, pride and shame. He was no longer used to anyone paying him any attention.”

The Mon Amour affection the author feels for her clients shines through. Often these are elderly people, disregarded by society, and Oskamp gets to know them over a period of months and even years. The act of caring for their feet is intimate, especially for those who may now be alone and not have much gentleness in their lives.

They all have stories to tell, such as Gerlinde Bonkat, who arrived as a refugee:

“She formulates crystal clear, quotable sentences and speaks an accentless German, with a faintly Nordic hint to its melody.”

Which isn’t to say Oskamp likes all her clients. Herr Pietsch is a former government worker who fails to realise his days of power are over: “All your life you’ve mistaken your position for your personality.” And there’s a disturbing portrait of a mother and daughter who visit where there is a query of elder abuse.

But generally Marzahn, Mon Amour is a gentle read.

“Frau Frenzel is seventy years old. She views the world with a cheerful contempt and won’t let anything or anyone spoil her mood. She reminds me of a hedgehog, with her nose perkily pointing upwards, lively button eyes and grey spiked mullet straight out of the 80s […] Amy, with whom Frau Frenzel shares her life, is a short haired dachshund.”

A lovely read and a wonderful tribute to the writer’s clients.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.9

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Blue Postcards – Douglas Bruton (2021) 151 pages

Earlier in the month I read With or Without Angels and I’d thought I might save Blue Postcards by the same author until the end of May, but in the end I couldn’t wait 😊Especially as Simon read this as part of his #BookADayInMay and loved it. You can read his review here.

Having now read three of Douglas Bruton’s books the word that comes up for me is tender. His writing is so gentle and subtle, entirely without sentiment but so careful in its construction and treatment of his characters. His tenderness is not a way to turn away from difficult feelings or events, but rather a way to look at them clearly and compassionately.

Blue Postcards is made up of 500 numbered paragraphs/postcards, split into five sections of 100. Almost all of them contain the word ‘blue’ (I recognised one which didn’t, there may be more). If this sounds overly contrived, it really isn’t. As you read, it flows easily and the various story threads are woven together seamlessly.

The contemporary thread involves a man who buys a blue postcard from a stall near the Eiffel Tower. The postcard is by Yves Klein, the French artist who created International Klein Blue. It is addressed to his tailor Henri, and they form the threads in the 1950s.

The narrator of the contemporary thread describes himself as ‘old’. He is aware that as he ages, his eyes perceive yellow and blue differently:

“31. Sometimes I wonder if going back to Nice I would find the sky so blue or if the blue that I found there back in 1981 had something to do with being young or something to do with memory.”

He begins a tentative relationship with Michelle, who sold him the card. Or perhaps not; he is an unreliable narrator and a theme of the book is truth, lies, fiction, and the fallibility of memory.

Henri the tailor sews blue Tekhelet threads secretly into all his suits, to bring his patrons luck.

“109. […] When I am talking about Henri I hope it is understood that we are in his time and not really in our time. If this was a film we might see Henri through a blue filter to show that his time is different.”

Yves Klein is building international success and needs a suit to look the part:

“184. Henri stands in front of the mirror next to Yves Klein in his tacked and pinned-together new suit. ‘You have to imagine it finished and pressed as sharp as knives and not a loose thread anywhere to be seen.’ Henri holds onto the sleeve of the jacket and his blue dream is briefly real.”

The postcards move back and for the between the timelines but this is never confusing or disorienting. There is a reflective, almost melancholic (blue?) tone running through both. They explore the transitory; how our experiences are constantly shifting as we rewrite the past from a changing present and our changing understanding.

The tone is lightened by the Yves Klein strand; his self-promotion and blatant lies therein are audacious, and even breathtaking with his Leap Into the Void.

There is also tragedy that we know exists in Henri’s past. A Jewish man in 1950s France is going to have unspeakable recent memories. The theme of grief runs across the timelines, both for those who have died and for what can never be regained.

I’ve not done any justice to this novella at  all. It is so rich in themes and style, and yet so approachable and readable. I can only urge you to read it for yourself!

“267. I do not think a stone can be said to belong to a person. I tell her about the stone and how I picked it up out of a river and it was blue until it dried and then it was only blue in possibility. I tell her that I like that most especially, that blue can be something that adheres in a thing and at the same time can be something hidden. I do not tell her that I think love is something the same.”

To end, the author reading from his work:

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.8

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Eve Out of Her Ruins – Ananda Devi (2006, transl. Jeffrey Zuckerman, 2016) 164 pages

I picked up Eve Out of Her Ruins as I hadn’t read any Mauritian literature before and I’m enjoying seeking out new-to-me authors as part of my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge.

The story is told from the point of view of four young people: Eve, Saad, Savita and Clélio who live in Troumaron, a cité geographically close to and societally far away from the capital Port-Louis. As Saad observes:

“Our cité is our kingdom. Our city in the city, our town in the town. Port Louis has changed shape; it has grown long teeth and buildings taller than its mountains. But our neighbourhood hasn’t changed. It’s the last bastion.”

Saad runs with the gangs to not draw attention to himself, but he loves poetry ever since he discovered Rimbaud, and he dreams of being a writer and escaping the ghetto.

“Just as the island unfurled it’s blues and oranges, so the words unfurled still more vividly purple rages in my head.”

He is in love with Eve, who learnt early on that although she had nothing, she still had something to sell. She has been trading her body to boys and then men, for school supplies and other things she needs, since she was a child. At 17, she is still a child, but a worn-out one.

“Saying no is an insult, because you would be taking away what they’ve already laid claim to.”

“I think I look like lots of things — organic, or mineral, or strange and sloughed off, but I don’t look like a woman. Only a reflection of a woman. Only an echo of a woman. Only the deformed idea of a woman.”

Eve’s sex work is portrayed carefully. It’s not explicit but nor is it obfuscated. I thought this was responsible without being overly harrowing or voyeuristic.

Clélio likes to sing from the rooftops, but is bewildered at how to escape the cité when he is already known to the police. He pins his hopes on his elder brother who has escaped to France, while simultaneously recognising that his brother’s life may not be going well, and he is unlikely to return to collect Clélio as he promised.

“I am Clélio. Dirt poor bastard, swallower of everyone else is rusty nails. What can you do? Nobody changes just like that.”

Eve and her friend Savita are in love, and it is Savita who recognises that Eve is getting more and more closed off as she tries to protect herself from the impact of her sex work and the domestic violence her father metes out at home. It is also Savita who recognises that as they get older, the boys’ anger is growing and the girls are increasingly vulnerable.

Saad sees this too, but knows Eve won’t listen to him however desperately he tries to reach her. There is real tension in the narrative as the sense of imminent violent explosion grows.

Eve Out of Her Ruins is a tough read and a million miles away from the paradisical tourist resorts of Mauritius. It is not poverty porn though, or voyeuristic. The voices of the young people ring true and lack any self-pity. The reader is not asked to pity them, but recognise their resilience and feel the desperation of seeking a way out when the odds are against you.

“They tell me I’ll succeed. But success does not mean the same thing for everyone. It’s a slippery word. In my case, it simply means that locked doors could open just a bit and I could, if I sucked in my stomach, slip through and escape Troumaron.”

In the Author’s Preface, Devi explains “I loved them and wanted to find a way out for them. I couldn’t, not for everyone. So I have left a trail of crumbs for some of them to follow.” Hence, there is hope in Eve Out of Her Ruins, it is not relentlessly bleak. But neither is it unrealistic or sentimental. It definitely doesn’t promise a happy-ever-after for the youngsters of Troumaron.

“I read in secret, all the time. I read in the toilets, I read in the middle of the night, I read as if books could loosen the noose tightening around my throat. I read to understand that there is somewhere else. A dimension where possibilities shimmer.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.7

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Weather – Jenny Offill (2020) 201 pages

I have broken my self-imposed page limit for defining a novella (70-200 pages) by including Jenny Offill’s Weather, which breaches by one whole page. I regret nothing: I had really enjoyed her Dept. of Speculation when I read it for this project back in 2020 and was pleased to be picking her up again.

Lizzie is a college librarian, looked down upon by other librarians because she doesn’t have formal qualifications. She has a lovely husband Ben, and a son Eli. Her brother Henry, now sober, reappears and her mother rings occasionally causing tensions but nothing extraordinary. Still, family life can be exhausting:

“I’m too tired for any of it. The compromise is that we all eat ice cream and watch videos of goats screaming like women.”

Lizzie takes a job with her old college professor Sylvia, who hosts a podcast about climate change.

“Once I took Eli. We stood and looked at some kind of meadowland. He waited patiently until we could go back to the car.

Children cannot abide a vista, Sylvia said.”

Wading through Sylvia’s email correspondence is heavy-going “I’m really hoping all these people who write to Sylvia are crazy, not depressed.” and in the wake of ongoing environmental destruction and the election of a President whose second term we are now in, Lizzie starts to become a doomsday prepper.

“My book ordering history is definitely going to get me flagged by some evil government algorithm. Lots and lots of books about Vichy France and the French Resistance and more books than any civilian could possibly need about spycraft and fascism. Luckily, there is a Jean Rhys novel in there and a book for Eli called How to Draw Robots. That’ll throw them off the scent.”

But while Weather is absolutely about anxiety and fear of what is happening now and what will happen in the future, Lizzie’s voice remains witty and self-deprecating:

“Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.”

Like the Dept. of Speculation, Weather is written in a fragmentary style, with the focus primarily on the female narrator. We remain inside her head as she struggles to sustain family life, work, and the wider demands of living now. I thought Offill balanced all of this expertly.

The humour never detracted from the seriousness of the wider issues, but it also carefully portrayed Lizzie trying to find a way to live when the world – both big and small – seems overwhelming.

“My husband is reading the Stoics before breakfast. That can’t be good, can it?”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.6

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Brian – Jeremy Cooper (2023) 180 pages

Brian by Jeremy Cooper is a book which I knew I would absolutely love. I’m always in the market for tales of loners finding their tribe and building tentative friendships, and Brian had the added bonus of being largely set at the British Film Institute (BFI) cinema on the South Bank. I’m not sure how long I’ve been a member of the BFI but I think it’s about 25 years. Like Brian, when I joined it was called the National Film Theatre (NFT) and it’s a place that has brought much joy over the years.

Brian works at Camden Council, enjoying the predictability of his self-devised filing system and trying to avoid socialising with his colleagues. He lunches every day at the same place with its friendly but unobtrusive manager Lorenzo, and heads home to his flat. He just about keeps his anxiety at bay, most of the time.

“Keep watchful. Stick to routine. Protect against surprise.”

We later learn of Brian’s early childhood trauma that has contributed to his way of living, without him being overly pathologized.

“Learn quick as lightning from your mistakes or die, his mother melodramatically threatened him as a boy. And meant it, he had come to understand.”

He changes his routine one day to attend a revival of a film he’d missed the first time round, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales. This outing changes his life, as he finds the joy of the BFI programmes and how to not be in his flat, or entirely in his own company, in a way which isn’t overwhelming.

“Brian made the vital discovery that night that something he needed to be true proved to be so: that a nakedly emotional film on themes and feelings close to his own story did not necessarily shake alive his stifled memories of the past.

He was safe. The narratives of others were not his.”

In the foyer he notices a group of regulars chatting:

“Participation in the gathering of buffs appeared to be unconditional – the fact that they were all white males, no women, was more a matter of endemic social habit than the individual prejudice of the buffs, Brian felt, in recognition of his own narrow conventions.”

Cooper’s creation of the buffs is carefully balanced. They are enthusiasts, who welcome other enthusiasts. There is no gate-keeping of film, no declarations of what is a ‘good’ film. Any snobbery is side-stepped. As Brian discovers and develops an abiding love of mid-twentieth century Japanese film, he does so with feeling, without having to intellectualise it, although he always reflects and makes notes afterwards.

“Brian tended to experience film in the moment of watching, for what it meant to him right then, regardless of when it was made or set or how accurate in pretension it might or might not be.”

Time passes, and the BFI becomes another of Brian’s routines, but with the new contained within it: all the films to experience and explore. Alongside this, his relationships with the other buffs develop, albeit at snail’s pace:

“To Brian the most extraordinary occurrence during the first decade of his every-evening visit to the BFI was the incremental formation of what he had come to accept as friendship.”

Brian definitely had an extra resonance for me, describing a London I recognised, journeys I’ve undertaken and a particular place which has a special place in my heart. There were so many echoes, from grieving the closure of the Museum of the Moving Image to Brian being an inpatient at UCLH the same time as I worked there. But I hope my response won’t alienate anyone reading this post. It has such wide-ranging appeal beyond the specifics.

Brian is a beautifully tender novel about community, friendship, and passion. It shows the deep value of a life well-lived, when outwardly that life seems unremarkable, because it is quiet and deliberately demands so little of others. It is a novel about the value of art in our lives and the value of people in our lives, accepted on their own terms.

“Brian recognised for that his entire pre-BFI life he had been a mouse, a termite, shut in dark tunnels of his own creation. Not that he had now become a lion, of course not. More of a squirrel.”

There’s a lovely interview with Jeremy Cooper about writing Brian on the BFI website here.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.5

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Minna Needs Rehearsal Space – Dorthe Nors (2013, transl. Misha Hoekstra 2014) 89 pages

I really enjoyed Dorthe Nors’ Mirror, Shoulder, Signal as the final novella when I first undertook this month-long challenge back in 2018. Since then I’ve read her short story collection Karate Chop, and was delighted to find Minna Needs Rehearsal Space in my beloved charity bookshop. I think it has been published in editions with Karate Chop, but this Pushkin Press edition was standalone.

This is definitely a novella where the style will alienate some readers. It’s written entirely in a series of short sentences.

“Minna walks around in bare feet.

The flat is full of notes.

Bach stands in the window.

Brahms stands on the coffee table.

The flat’s too small for a piano, but

A woman should have room for a flute.”

At first I wasn’t sure I could read a whole novella like this, but then I suddenly clicked with the rhythm and it seemed a lot less jarring.

Minna is a musician living in Copenhagen, trying to write a “paper sonata” and struggling to find a place to work. She is struggling more widely too: with ambivalence towards potential motherhood; with her tightly-wound sister; with her boyfriend who has just dumped her by text.

This spurs Minna to do some dumping of her own, as she unfriends people on social media.

“Minna eats a cracker.

Karin’s missive awaits.

Karin wants to be nasty.

Karin wants to upset her applecart, but

Minna’s cart has no apples.”

She ends up packing Ingmar Bergman’s Billeder as the director becomes almost a Greek chorus/silent interlocutor, when Minna heads for Bornholm and the sea.

The short sentences act as constant present-tense status updates, a commentary on our online living. Yet by piling on the banal observations, gradually a more subtle picture emerges between the sentences. Minna’s frustrations and vulnerabilities shine through.  It’s a brave approach which for me worked well, but I already knew I liked Nors’ observations, characterisation and humour.

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space is a reminder to look beyond what is immediate to a whole picture; one that is always changing in the present and is much more complex than the surface would have us believe.

“Minna’s broken heart dwells in the breast of an optimist.”