Today I’m taking part in a blog tour for Corylus Books, a lovely indie publisher with a focus on translated crime fiction. The novel Murder at the Residence offers an enduring mystery aside from the story: Stella Blómkvist is the name of the protagonist, not the author. Apparently there’s lots of speculation but it’s never been confirmed who writes this popular series. Murder at the Residence was published in 2012, the first of a second wave of Stella books, after a break since 2006.
Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:
“It’s New Year and Iceland is still reeling from the effects of the financial crash when a notorious financier is found beaten to death after a high-profile reception at the President’s residence. The police are certain they have the killer – or do they? Determined to get to the truth, maverick lawyer Stella Blómkvist isn’t so sure.
A stripper disappears from one of the city’s seediest nightspots, and nobody but Stella seems interested in finding her. A drug mule cooling his heels in a prison cell refuses to speak to anyone but Stella – although she has never heard of him. An old man makes a deathbed confession and request for Stella to find the family he lost long ago.
With a sharp tongue and a moral compass all of her own, Stella Blómkvist has a talent for attracting trouble and she’s as at home in the corridors of power as in the dark corners of Reykjavík’s underworld.
Stella Blómkvist delivers an explosive mix of murder, intrigue and surprise, and is one of Iceland’s best-loved crime series.”
The start of the novel sees Stella cruising for a New Year hook up. Her voice throughout is direct and no nonsense, and this includes articulating her sexual needs clearly. Sadly for Stella she doesn’t find a hottie to see the year in with, but she does meet Dagnija and Ilona, two Latvian women brought to Iceland on empty promises and finding themselves dragged into sex work. When Ilona disappears, Dagnija asks for Stella’s help.
Stella’s pretty busy, what with a dying man asking her to find his adopted daughter, a drug courier to defend, a young injured activist to support, and a family christening ending with the discovery of a dead body:
“The murder in the church at Bessastaðir was naturally the lead news item on both TV channels. Understandable, as it’s been a few centuries since there was last a murder at Bessastaðir. That’s as far as we know. And the President was in residence that weekend.
The body is that of a well-known financier.”
The financier Benedikt Björgúlfsson seems no great loss, but the story is bound up in the political situation in Iceland at the time:
“There were anonymous claims online that Benedikt must have been murdered by someone who had been with him at the President’s reception on Friday. The conclusion is that the guilty party has to be among society’s most powerful individuals. Others argue that this murder is the man on the street fighting back, that this is a foretaste of what other wealthy banksters can expect if the courts don’t get round to locking them up.”
As the various strands of Stella’s work start to come together, Murder at the Residence brilliantly portrays how political machinations and police corruption should concern everybody, because they affect everything. And while the story evokes its Iceland setting beautifully, it is sadly universal.
“Presumably you know the Icelandic politicians never, ever, resign due to poor judgement in their work. Taking responsibility for their own mistakes is something that simply missing from their genetic makeup.”
“Are wealthy playboys with reputations in ruins still Iceland’s heroes?”
Living in the UK means I’m not sure there was really a need to specify Iceland(ic) in those sentences….
Anyway, while Stella is (rightly) cynical regarding those in power, she’s not embittered like me 😀 So her voice remains clear-sighted and resolute but never alienating.
“It’s the familiar old song about bad foreigners making every effort to destroy Iceland’s innocence. But it’s on the overblown side this time. Our own homegrown criminals have long been perfectly capable of shovelling illegal drugs into the country. Not that they haven’t formed a few alliances along the way with European mafiosi.”
She has a softer side too – there is a budding romance, and also her young daughter Sóley Árdís to provide some work/life balance.
Murder at the Residence is expertly plotted and I just about kept up! If you’re the sort of reader who keeps notes and makes character lists when they read, those habits would serve you very well here.
The personal and political, plot and characterisation were all finely balanced. The story was also clear about the violence and corruption in the world Stella was investigating, but never gratuitous. I really enjoyed Stella’s distinctive voice and I’d love to spend more time with her. Fingers crossed more translations will follow.
Here are the stops from the rest of the tour, so do check out how other bloggers got on with Murder at the Residence:
Daunt Books are such an interesting publisher and I was keen to read Natalia Ginzburg having heard wonderful things in the blogosphere, so I swooped on All Our Yesterdays (1952, transl. Angus Davidson 1956) when it turned up in my local charity bookshop. I think I’d read somewhere that this wasn’t the best place to start with this author, but I absolutely loved it.
The novel follows two families living in a northern Italian town from the 1930s, through the war years to peacetime. Although the blurb on the French flaps of my edition suggests Anna, the daughter of the poorer family, is the protagonist, really Ginzburg follows them all to a greater or lesser extent, with no overarching plot other than the sequence of years.
Although this approach sounds like a shortcoming, it works so well. It’s not a documentary novel but it gestures towards this with an omniscient neutral(ish) viewpoint and only reported speech. This felt unusual to read, but is so clever in capturing the everyday experiences of those living through extraordinary circumstances.
Anna’s siblings are Concettina, Ippolito, and Giustino. Concettina is popular with boys but struggles to find a purpose in life; Ippolito channels his energies into anti-Fascist activities with his friend from the richer family across the road:
“Emanuele and Ippolito did not even know Italy, they had never seen anything except their own little town, and they imagined the whole of Italy to be like their own little town, an Italy of teachers and accountants with a few workmen thrown in, but even the workmen and the accountants became rather like teachers in their imagination.”
Their lives are equally dictated by world events and by commonplace ones. Anna falls pregnant by her boyfriend and marries an eccentric older man, Cenzo Rena, moving with him to the southern village of Borgo San Costanzo. Her affair with her self-involved, callow boyfriend was no great passion, and while her marriage to Cenzo Rena attracts approbation, he is a warmer, more generous man than the one her own age.
“She was alone with Giuma’s face that gave her a stab of pain in her heart, and every day she would be going back with Giuma amongst the bushes on the river bank, every day she would see again that face with the rumpled forelock and the tightly closed eyelids, that face that had lost all trace both of words and of thoughts of her.”
These are people destined to be on the outskirts of war. Cenzo Rena holds a lot of sway in his local area and does help Jewish people fleeing the Nazi occupation, but on the whole the story of All Our Yesterdays is not one involving soldiers or revolutionaries. It is about ordinary people and for them the conflicts of war are reported facts not lived experience. The latter for them includes a lot of mundanity:
“And the bread in town was rationed and was a kind of soft, grey dough that you couldn’t ever digest, the bread was like the soap and the soap was like the bread, both washing and eating had become very difficult.”
Yet this doesn’t mean the story isn’t affecting, or that the characters avoid tragedy. There are some truly tragic events that are hugely affecting. Ginzburg manages to be even-handed in her treatment of her characters but not detached. Her writing is warm but unsentimental as she demonstrates that flawed people are as worthy of love and mourning as idealised ones.
In case I’ve made it sound unremittingly serious, I should mention that there humour in All Our Yesterdays too. There are romantic entanglements that are treated with a degree of levity, and eccentric housekeepers/family retainers with various foibles. All life is here.
I can’t think of another writer who approaches Ginzburg’s style, and looking back on it I can’t explain how she does what she does. This was a story that snuck up on me, the deceptively simple storytelling drawing me in more than I realised until I was totally immersed. An extraordinary novel.
“Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was away fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exultation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.”
To end, of course there’s a very famous song I could post on the theme of Yesterday, but instead, to continue the mix of despair alongside levity: have you seen a parrot singing Creep by Radiohead?
Life has caused me to fall behind on blog writing, so unusually I’m writing this a few weeks after having read the book. Thankfully I found this one really stayed with me and I can get it in just in time for the last week of Women in Translation Month 😊
Having really enjoyed Mieko Kawakami’s Miss Ice Sandwich (2013) during my novella reading in May, I was delighted to find a copy of All the Lovers in the Night (2011, transl. Sam Bett and David Boyd 2022) in my local charity bookshop. It’s very different to my previous read of hers, and while I didn’t enjoy it as immediately as Ms Ice Sandwich, it did grow on me.
Fuyuko Irie is in her thirties and lives alone. She used to work in an office but her alienation from her colleagues means she prefers working at home. Her colleague/friend Hijiri is supportive of her talents and sends her regular work as a freelance proofreader, this work suiting her precise and solitary nature.
But this means that Fuyuko is even more isolated and achingly lonely. Kawakami is so good at capturing that modern urban alienation for people living surrounded by others but unable to connect, the feelings compounded when in the midst of a crowd.
“As I passed below the haloes of green and red traffic signals, I was taken by this strange view of the evening, the city streets full of people – people waiting, the people they were waiting for, people out to eat together, people going somewhere together, people heading home together. I allowed my thoughts to settle on the brightness filling their hearts and lungs, squinting as I walked along and counted all the players of this game that I would never play.”
It looks like things could change for Fuyuko when she meets Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher. Light is important to Fuyuko – every Christmas Eve (her birthday) she walks the streets at night looking at the illuminations. As Mitsutsuka explains the workings of light to her, they begin a tentative friendship, with brief points of connection offering glimmers of hope:
“‘Um, do you think the light you’re thinking about and the light I’m talking about are, um, the same thing?’
‘Of course they are, Mitsutsuka said with a smile. ‘We’re talking about the same light.’”
In a flashback chapter we learn more about Fuyuko’s background, and why she finds herself in the situation she does. There is an event in the past that Fuyuko describes without naming it in the way that I think most readers would, suggesting she doesn’t fully recognize her trauma or why she is making subsequent self-destructive decisions.
Kawakami subtly demonstrates how Fuyuko could change things for herself, but also how wider society makes this extremely difficult for her. She and Hijiri are women who have made very different choices and present themselves very differently to the world, but both struggle under the expectations placed on women and the fact that these are not an easy fit for either of them. A brief meeting with old school friend Noriko suggests traditional choices are not always happy ones either.
“I’d been on my own for ages, and I was convinced that there was no way I could be any more alone, but now I’d finally realised how alone I truly was. Despite the crowds of people, and all the different places, and a limitless supply of sounds and colours packed together, there was nothing here that I could reach out and touch. Nothing that would call my name. There never had been, and there never would be. And that would never change, no matter where I went in the world.”
All the Lovers in the Night is a slow burn novel, despite being only just longer than novella length. As I mentioned at the start, it was a story that grew on me and I found Fuyuko’s voice more compelling the more I read. A few weeks on and she’s really stayed with me.
Despite the sadness and alienation running through All the Lovers in the Night, I thought it ended with a suggestion of hope. That incrementally things can change, and improve. That imperfect people can make poor decisions but might still be moving towards a brighter time while doing so.
When I took part in a blog tour for Corylus Books earlier in the year, it was for a novella, which helpfully chimed with my Novella a Day in May reading. The bookish stars have aligned again for my taking part in a Corylus Books blog tour, as Deadly Autumn Harvest (2020) by Romanian author Tony Mott fits perfectly with my plans for #WITMonth reading, translated as it is by lovely blogger Marina Sofia (2023).
Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:
“A series of bizarre murders rocks the beautiful Carpathian town of Braşov. At first there’s nothing obvious that links what look like random killings. With the police still smarting from the scandal of having failed to act in a previous case of a serial kidnapper and killer, they bring in forensic pathologist Gigi Alexa to figure out if several murderers are at work – or if they have another serial killer on their hands. Ambitious, tough, and not one to suffer fools gladly, Gigi fights to be taken seriously in a society that maintains old-fashioned attitudes to the roles of women. She and the police team struggle to establish a pattern, especially when resources are diverted to investigating a possible terrorist plot. With the clock ticking, Gigi stumbles across what looks to be a far-fetched theory – just as she realises that she could be on the murderer’s to-kill list.”
I don’t read much contemporary crime because I don’t want to read about women being killed in various gruesome ways. I’m relieved to say I thought Deadly Autumn Harvest got the balance right between giving enough detail so that the horrors were realised, but with nothing being gratuitous. There was a responsibility in how the victims were portrayed, so you got a sense of them as people and the injustice in how their lives ended.
Forensic pathologist Gigi Alexa is an intriguing figure too. Cascading curly blonde hair and resolutely dressed in bright colours, I thought she was an idiosyncratic and believable investigator, good at her job and super-committed, yet not entirely detached:
“Usually, by the time she got to see the bodies, they had been drained of any semblance of life or a back story, they were mere puzzles to be solved. But today it had all been a little too close for comfort.”
She’s also a scientist who is not above a bit of superstition:
“Three bad omens. She counted them. First, she stumbled over her slippers as she got out of bed, so she went to the bathroom in her bare feet. Then she stepped into the sand that Morty had scattered from his litter tray. Thirdly, once she got into the kitchen, her coffee machine refused to get going so she would have to boil up Greek coffee instead. Three signs of bad luck on a Tuesday – no doubt more would follow.”
As Gigi and her team investigate the murders, she has to contend with various frustrations in the male-dominated environment. She’s not surrounded by idiots though. I liked her relationship with her boss CI Matei, and Emil, her colleague in pathology. There was also some humour (alongside remembrance of previous toxicity) in the reappearance of her impeccably turned-out ex, Superintendent Vlad Tomescu. (Slight spoiler, skip the next sentence and quote if you don’t want to know!) Gigi becomes single during the novel and her sardonic reflections on this state also lightened the tone:
“She didn’t miss him at all. It would be a while yet before she started missing the warmth of someone to curl up with in bed. Maybe during the winter. Except maybe by then she would have invested in an electric blanket.”
The mystery is very well-paced and the novel isn’t overlong at just 225 pages. We are there at the moment of the killings at various points, before we are returned Gigi and her team’s investigation. Although I’d be amazed if anyone guesses the connection before Gigi, we’re given a fair chance to guess the perpetrator. I’d like to proclaim I worked out who did it, but I suspected absolutely everyone at some point 😀
Deadly Autumn Harvest is a quick, compelling read with a truly chilling murderer pursued by a team of believable, well-rounded investigators.
Finally I should just say that Deadly Autumn Harvest definitely made me want to visit Braşov! I’ve never been, it sounds absolutely beautiful and with Gigi and her team on the case there won’t be any serial killers left to spoil my holiday – perfect.
Here are the stops from the rest of the tour, so do check out how other bloggers got on with Deadly Autumn Harvest:
I had such a book hangover after Bleak House. I couldn’t settle to anything. A friend of mine who loves a certain 80s singer has a phrase when she hears other warblers: “He’s alright, but he’s not George Michael.” Well, I kept picking up books that were alright, but they weren’t Bleak House. So few books are, I find…
Then I remembered that when Simon did his books of the year round up last year, I’d recognised two were on my TBR pile. Surely books good enough to make the final cut would see me right? Of course they did 😊 Hooray for bloggers and their brilliant recommendations!
Firstly, the novella which made the top of Simon’s list, A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence (1966). This was the second in Laurence’s Manawaka sequence, but thankfully they can all be read as standalones as I’d not read anything by her before. On the strength of this, I’ll definitely be seeking out her writing again.
A Jest of God is an intimate character study of Rachel Cameron, a thirty-four-year-old teacher who lives with her emotionally manipulative mother above the Manitoba funeral business her father ran until he died.
The novel is narrated in the first-person, and Rachel’s mind is an oppressive and tense place to be. She is highly anxious and self-censoring:
“There. I’m doing it again. This must stop. It isn’t good for me. Whenever I find myself thinking in a brooding way, I must simply turn it off and think of something else. God forbid that I should turn into an eccentric. This isn’t just imagination. I’ve seen it happen. Not only teachers, of course, and not only women who haven’t married. Widows can become extremely odd as well, but at least they have the excuse of grief.”
This anxiety and second-guessing is not helped by her mother’s behaviour, which is self-pitying, judgemental and highly manipulative. Rachel recognises this, but is at a loss as to how to extricate herself:
“Her weapons are invisible, and she would never admit even to carrying them, much less putting them to use.”
“All such words cling to the mind like burrs to hair, and I can never seem to brush them away, as I know I should do.”
Rachel’s mother is not an out-and-out baddie though, and Laurence expertly demonstrates the vulnerability and fear that underlies her machinations. Similarly, Rachel does not always behave well. In one particular scene early in the book, she actually behaves despicably and doesn’t make amends despite her instant remorse. She is a complex, contradictory character, wholly believable. Laurence treats her tenderly but unflinchingly; without judgement but also without sentiment.
Rachel could so easily be a stereotype: a lonely single woman, living with her mother. But Laurence side-steps clumsy characterisation, or easy dismissal of Rachel, by delicately exploring the true meaning of the adjective so often attached to unmarried women approaching middle-age: she is desperate. She is absolutely desperate and despairing. She is lonely, and feels trapped in the life she has always known, with no way out. She wants things to be different, but she doesn’t know how. She is deeply, existentially sad.
1966 is a time of societal change, when women like Rachel could feel stifled by convention and also have some sexual freedom. So when Nick, and old schoolfriend appears, there are brief moments of physical connection. But in only seeing things from Rachel’s point view, the reader is able to realise how little intimacy there is. And that is what Rachel needs, more than the sex which Nick offers. Yet she doesn’t know how to achieve this:
“I talk to him, when he is not here, and tell him everything I can think of, everything that has ever happened, and how I feel and for a while it seems to me that I am completely known to him, and then I remember I’ve only talked to him like that when I’m alone. He hasn’t heard and doesn’t know.”
In some of Nick’s reported speech, the reader picks up on things Rachel ignores. She is so bound in her own intense feelings, she can’t really hear the cues Nick gives, over her relentless inner voice.
“He’s thirty-five, not fifteen. His past such gauche public performances. What he worried about Rachel? I’m not worried. I’m perfectly alright. Well, relax, then. I am relaxed. Oh? Shut up. Just shut up.”
A Jest of God is such an accomplished novel that is also so approachable. I found Rachel’s voice got under my skin very quickly and distinctly, and I had to read on. I think it works very well as short novel, longer would have been too oppressive and difficult to sustain I suspect. But at the length it is it remains powerful and impactful, and not as depressing as I’ve made it sound!
Ultimately there is resilience and change for Rachel, even some defiance. And there are brief moments of humour, such as Rachel trying to duck her colleague Calla’s constant invitation to attend Tabernacle with her:
“At least I have postponed it, and perhaps by that time some reasonable excuse will come along, or I’ll be dead.”
A stunning novel: a precise and compassionate character study, clever and humane. I’m so glad to have discovered Margaret Laurence at long last.
“Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fixed on a detail and see it as though it were magnified – a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on the back of a man’s hands – or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world.”
Secondly, after being in Rachel’s head, I looked forward to some comic relief from an author I always enjoy: Margery Sharp. Four Gardens (1935) was number ten in Simon’s list. But this wasn’t as comic as some of her other novels; it had a slightly elegiac tone and the relationships included a certain sadness. But it wasn’t a sad novel overall, and I sunk into Four Gardens with pleasure.
Four Gardens follows the life of Caroline Chase from late teens to middle-age and the titular spaces she finds herself in. The device with gardens isn’t remotely heavy-handed and for a significant section of the novel they barely feature. But Caroline is a gardener, given half a chance, and it is instinctive and natural to her:
“Her step, as she now redescended to the rose garden, was therefore a proper gardeners tread – slow, considerate, with long abstracted pauses for survey and meditation. She also, without thinking, removed her hat and gloves.”
This is her first garden, one she trespasses into, and as she meets her first love there, it has a dreamlike quality. Perhaps this is why her love of gardening is so easily disregarded when she leaves behind youthful folly to marry the determinedly sensible Henry:
“For all these things in themselves – love at first sight, undying devotion, and general aloofness – were very exciting indeed; it was only in connection with Henry that they became so curiously prosaic.”
And so for many years Caroline doesn’t garden at all. She runs a house and she raises her son and daughter in the town where she has always lived. She is the creator of a safe space for her children and an unwavering routine for her staid but affectionate husband.
Despite the love she feels for her family and the tranquillity of her home life, I did find an element of melancholy to Caroline’s domestic arrangements. Her family are near and dear, but there seemed to be very little intimacy: she and Henry rarely communicate about anything beyond practical considerations, and she doesn’t really understand her children at all. She also despises her closest friend in the village, Ellen Watts – a monstrous and wholly believable creation. Caroline reflects very little though, and so any concerns are quickly subsumed in the relentless demands of domesticity:
“Thinking – the deliberate exercise of the brain – did not come naturally to her.”
But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that Four Gardens is ponderous or heavy-going in any way. It felt quite a realistic presentation of Edwardian contentment, though not without Sharp’s gentle jibes, such as this discussion of wallpaper where Caroline evokes her husband’s approval to counteract her mother’s reservations:
“Mrs Chase was at once silenced. […] It would have seemed perfectly reasonable to her that Caroline, who was in the house all day, should have suited her surroundings to the taste of a man who was out of it.”
I did want Caroline to exert herself in some way, to stake a claim beyond her roles meeting everyone else’s needs. Finally she does it, when she starts growing runner beans during World War I, and realises how much she is nurtured by time with her plants:
“there was usually a quiet space, between twelve and half-past, when the first work of the house was finished and before the children’s dinner became a pressing consideration; and these thirty minutes Caroline began to guard and cherish as a precious treasure.”
The war years are beautifully evoked by Sharp, with all their worry alongside self-serving censorious behaviour of some in the village. After the war, everything changes. Caroline finds herself mistress of a large house, with a garden she can’t touch unless she wants to incur the wrath of a succession of gardeners:
“The garden was looking well. But it always did look well, and gave her no special pleasure […] It was perfectly designed and perfectly kept, and to Caroline completely uninteresting.”
Meanwhile, her children are vaguely affectionate, patronising strangers. They change the names she loves, Lily becoming Lall and Leonard, Leon. They are academically accomplished and having had money their whole lives, utterly contemptuous of it. These Bright Young Things live by a morality that is absolutely baffling to Caroline, and there is a lovely echo of an earlier scene between Caroline and her mother in a later conversation between Caroline and Lall. The reader can see they are so much more alike than either realises, dramatic irony at its lightest.
I’m not one for biographical readings of novels but something of the tone of Four Gardens – affectionate, gentle, slightly sad – did make me consider the dates. In Caroline, Sharp is writing about her parents’ generation, so maybe that explains it… or maybe it has nothing to do with it at all, who knows?
Caroline’s fourth garden finally sees her able to do as she pleases. I couldn’t help feeling she might really surprise her children, and herself 😊 A warm, engaging story of a woman’s outwardly ordinary adult life during great societal change.
To end, Paul Newman adapted A Jest of God as Rachel, Rachel for his directorial debut. This very odd trailer doesn’t make it seem overly appealing:
I’m not a fan of Dickens. I don’t like his caricatured villains, I don’t like his insipid virgin heroines, I don’t like his sentimentality. This may explain why it’s taken me thirty years to open the copy of Bleak House given to me as a teenager by my mother, as it’s one of her favourite novels. It begins:
“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.”
And that’s how long it took me to absolutely love Bleak House. Which just goes to show that as always, my mother knows best 😀 (as do the bloggers who recommended I choose this as my tome reading after a month of novellas – many thanks!)
Bleak House follows the fortunes of three young people caught up in a long-running legal wrangle:
“Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.”
Esther Summerson, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone find themselves under the guardianship of John Jarndyce, a benevolent older distant relation of the latter two. Ada and Richard fall in love, but it is Esther rather than the young lovers who is the focus, her first-person narration alternating with that of an omniscient narrator.
She is from a mysterious background, not knowing who her parents are and raised by an abusive godmother. “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers”. Esther is a Victorian heroine though, so rather than becoming defensive or angry, she decides she will:
“strive as I grew up to be industrious, contented, and kind-hearted and to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could. I hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these tears as I think of it. I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help their coming to my eyes.”
Although tediously self-deprecating at times, generally I found Esther really likable. Her narrative is can be witty and some of her portraits of others almost sharp, so I did wonder if the reader wasn’t supposed to take her modest protestations entirely at face value, at least not consistently.
The omniscient narrator widens the tale to explain the various legal dealings of Chancery Lane and all its hangers-on, alongside the situation of the Dedlock family:
“there is no end to the Dedlocks, whose family greatness seems to consist in their never having done anything to distinguish themselves for seven hundred years.”
The current incumbent Sir Leicester Dedlock does little to change this history of his family as he “is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so inexhaustible a subject. After reading his letters, he leans back in his corner of the carriage and generally reviews his importance to society.”
He is devoted to his beautiful, fashionable, remote wife Honoria, who the reader quickly realises has A Big Secret in Her Past. Hmm, based on what we know of the other characters so far, what on earth could it be…?
It’s not hard to guess what it is as the clues are laid on pretty thickly, and I thought the imagery when Esther first sees Lady Dedlock was so striking:
“It was easy to know that the ceremonious, gouty, grey-haired gentleman, the only other occupant of the great pew, was Sir Leicester Dedlock, and that the lady was Lady Dedlock. But why her face should be, in a confused way, like a broken glass to me, in which I saw scraps of old remembrances, and why I should be so fluttered and troubled (for I was still) by having casually met her eyes, I could not think.”
Dickens weaves together the various strands of the story, the main plots and all the subplots with brilliant dexterity. Sometimes with these big Victorian baggy monsters (to steal a phrase from Henry James) the stories can flag a bit, as the authors are trying to keep them going for a number of episodes in the serial. I really didn’t feel this with Bleak House. The story kept driving forward and all the various plots came together so cleverly, contriving to make a well-paced page-turner.
What really struck me about Bleak House though, is that it is a story of great compassion. Of course I knew Dickens had a strong social conscience and his work has a social message to it. But Bleak House demonstrated a degree of understanding and sympathy that I wasn’t expecting. Unmarried mothers, those struggling with addictions, human weakness and vulnerability – none are judged. Those who are judged are the ones who seek to profit from such.
Which brings me on to Mr Tulkinghorn… I said at the beginning I’m not usually keen on Dickens’ villains, finding them too caricatured. The lawyer Tulkinghorn was medacious, conniving, cold as ice, completely believable and completely terrifying. Truly villainous.
Although there are romantic elements to Bleak House, it is not an overly romantic tale. It is a novel much more concerned with the fall-out on the vulnerable members of society from immovable and self-serving institutions. Perhaps the main way in which the novel has dated is an engagement that seemed highly questionable to me, but as it remains chaste and ultimately everyone comes to their senses, it didn’t overly offend my modern sensibilities 😀
If I’ve made Bleak House sound a heavy read though, I’ve done it a disservice. I found it very often funny, whether satirically critiquing the legal system or broader nonsense like Mrs Guppy trying to throw John Jarndyce out of his own home and resisting all attempts to explain the illogicality of such a move. It has its sad moments too, and is genuinely moving in places.
And just in case a Victorian novel may seem to have no relevance to our modern world, I leave you with this exchange between Esther and Miss Flite:
“I said it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great, unless occasionally when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money.
“Why, good gracious,” said Miss Flite, “how can you say that? Surely you know, my dear, that all the greatest ornaments of England in knowledge, imagination, active humanity, and improvement of every sort are added to its nobility! Look round you, my dear, and consider. YOU must be rambling a little now, I think, if you don’t know that this is the great reason why titles will always last in the land!”
I am afraid she believed what she said, for there were moments when she was very mad indeed.”
This is an excessively long post and I’ve barely scratched the surface of Bleak House. But in summary: funny, sad, socially engaged, well-paced, emotionally affecting, entertaining, original. An absolute masterpiece.
To end, I remember watching the BBC adaptation of Bleak House when it came out and thinking it very well done. Now I’ve read the book I might go for a rewatch, as I don’t remember it that well and it does look entertaining (especially Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn):
After a focus on cats last week, I thought this week I’d look at a book with dog, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018).
The novel is addressed to ‘you’ throughout: a friend and mentor of the narrator who has died by suicide. They were friends for many years and her grief is deep.
“The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they’ll say even before I write them.”
The person was a writer and teacher, as is the narrator. What I thought worked well was that the dead person didn’t sound particularly likeable – a vain, slightly arrogant man who used his moderate fame and academic position to sleep with lots of women, and became angry and bitter when his looks faded and the world moved on. The narrator doesn’t seek to excuse or validate this behaviour. She didn’t approve of it, but she valued her friend and the relationship they had for many years. She is grieving an imperfect person and she is wise enough not to try and make him anything other than who he was.
Wife Three visits her and pulls a guilt trip about the man’s Great Dane dog, who is pining.
“You can’t explain death.
And love deserves better than that.”
And so Apollo, the only named being in the story, moves into her tiny apartment, where her lease forbids dogs. And he is a lot of dog:
“Thirty-four inches from shoulder to paw. A hundred and eighty pounds. Attached was a photograph of the two of you, cheek to jowl, the massive head at first glance looking like a pony’s.”
The descriptions of the grieving dog, of his subdued, baffled silence are heartbreaking, and an effective display of grief alongside a human who is expected to get up, go to work, smile and be polite, do her shopping, clean her home. Apollo can behave more honestly:
“He walks with his head lowered, like a beast of burden.”
As the narrator talks to her friend, we get a sense of her emerging relationship with Apollo, his learning to trust her, and their deepening bond. There is no doubt the relationship is bound up in her deep grief and Apollo becomes a focus for her feelings.
Unlike the narrator’s friends though, I didn’t think it was particularly unhealthy or dysfunctional. There is a sense of the narrator as a writer trying to work through her feelings, sometimes intellectually by falling back on the writers and books she has spent her entire working life with, (including JR Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, which I thought documented a much stranger relationship with a dog) and at other times by physically massaging the enormous canine.
“The friend who is most sympathetic about my situation calls to ask how I am. I tell him about trying music and massage to treat Apollo’s depression, and he asks if I’ve considered a therapist. I tell him I’m sceptical about pet shrinks, and he says, That’s not what I meant.”
This gentle humour runs throughout The Friend and stops it becoming mawkish. As the story is one writer talking to another, there are some spiky observations about the literary scene, such as at his funeral:
“It was not very different from other literary gatherings. People mingling at the reception were heard talking about money, literary prizes as reparations, and the latest die, author, die review.”
And also a repeated motif of the relief of writers who have found Something Else to do:
“Are you kidding? says a friend who raises goats on a farm upstate and makes award-winning chèvre. Writers block was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
I’ve seen The Friend described as stream of consciousness. It is a conversation with a silent interlocutor (apart from one section, the only part that felt a bit clunky to me) but it has a structure, if not a plot. To me this was an effective portrayal of grief, which isn’t linear or logical.
“Is this the madness at the heart of it? Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo – beautiful, ageing, melancholy Apollo – I will wake one morning to find him gone and you in his place, back from the land of the dead?”
Nunez mentions more than once: “There’s a certain kind of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?” I am definitely that kind of person. If you are too, I don’t want to give spoilers but what I will say is that The Friend is a book about grief, and so it is a sad read, but it’s not a traumatic one.
The Friend isn’t a book to read for plot, or even for story. It is a reflection on friendship, writing, reading, aging; and a meditation on grief and grieving, and joys and pains of sharing our lives with humans and with animals. There is sadness and there is humour, and there is never a sense that grief is a price not worth paying, however painful.
“Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I’ll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.”
Mallika at Literary Potpourri’s wonderful event Reading the Meow has been running all week, do check out all the great posts prompted by our feline friends! Here is my post just in time…
I’m grateful to Reading the Meow for finally getting me to pick up The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (finished in 1940, published in 1966) which is part of my Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century Reading Challenge and has been languishing in my TBR for years. Although not ostensibly a book about cats, one does feature prominently as these various edition covers will attest:
The reason it had lain unread for so long was because I’m (aptly) a big scaredy-cat. I was really intimidated by this classic of twentieth-century fiction and I thought it would be far too complex and clever for me to understand. Which as it turned out, was broadly correct. I’m sure I didn’t pick up all the allusions and references, even with the notes in the back of my edition to help me (Alma Classics, trans. Hugh Aplin 2020 – I definitely recommend this edition and translation). However, I still found it very readable and a lot to enjoy, especially regarding Behemoth, the character that meant I was reading it this week particularly.
The Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow as a Professor Woland, along with his entourage: red headed, bizarrely dressed Korovyev; sinister vampiric Azazello; beautiful Hella; and Behemoth, an enormous cat that walks on his hindlegs, talks, drinks vodka and plays chess.
The proceed to wreak havoc for three days in a series of carnivalesque scenes, using the greed and corruption of people against them. It’s absolute chaos and carnage, but brilliantly Bulgakov shows that the devil doesn’t have to push very hard for all this to occur.
At the start of the novel, Woland predicts the shocking and absurd death of Berlioz, head of Massolit, a literary organisation. Once people hear of his death, this description of a barrage of statements in order to get Berlioz’s apartment is a good example of how Bulgakov balances social realism, satire, the comic and the desperate throughout:
“In them were included entreaties, threats, slanders, denunciations, promises to carry out refurbishment at people’s own expense, references to unbearably crowded conditions and the impossibility of living in the same apartment as villains. Among other things, there was a description, stunning in its artistic power, of the theft of some ravioli, which had been stuffed directly into a jacket pocket, in apartment No.31, two vows to commit suicide and one confession to a secret pregnancy.”
Meanwhile, Margarita, beautiful and unhappily married, is distressed because her lover, The Master, has committed himself to an institution and renounced his writing.
This is interspersed with the story of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua (Jesus), with the two stories echoing one another, and it emerges that this was the novel The Master was writing.
It is through the titular characters that Bulgakov prevents his satire becoming too bitter and alienating. Their devotion to each other and Margarita’s belief in The Master’s work is truly touching.
I don’t really want to say too much more as The Master and Margarita is such a complex, riotous piece of work that I think the more I try and pin it down the more I’ll tie myself in knots! It tackles the biggest of big themes; religion, state oppression, the role of art, love, faith, good and evil, how to live… It is a deeply serious work that isn’t afraid to be comical too.
But as this post is prompted by Behemoth, here is my favourite scene with him, getting ready for Satan’s Grand Ball on Good Friday and trying to distract from the fact that he is losing at chess:
“Standing on his hind legs and covered in dust, the cat was meanwhile bowing in greeting before Margarita. Around the cat’s neck there was now a white dress tie, done up in a bow, and on his chest a ladies mother-of-pearl opera glass on a strap. In addition, the cat’s whiskers were gilt.
‘Now what’s all this?’ exclaimed Woland. ‘Why have you gilded your whiskers? And why the devil do you need a tie if you’ve got no trousers on?’
‘A cat isn’t meant to wear trousers, Messire,’ replied the cat with great dignity. ‘Perhaps you’ll require me to don boots as well? Only in fairy tales is there a puss in boots, Messire. But have you ever seen anyone at a ball without a tie? I don’t intend to find myself in a comical situation and risk being thrown out on my ear! Everyone adorns himself in whatever way he can. Consider what has been said to apply to the opera glasses too, Messire!’
‘But the whiskers?’
‘I don’t understand why,’ retorted the cat drily, ‘When shaving today Azazello and Korovyev could sprinkle themselves with white powder – and in what way it’s better than the gold? I’ve powdered my whiskers, that’s all!’
[…]
‘Oh, the rogue, the rogue,’ said Woland shaking his head, ‘every time he’s in a hopeless position in the game he starts talking to distract you, like the very worst charlatan on the bridge. Sit down immediately and stop this verbal diarrhoea.’
‘I will sit down,’ replied the cat sitting down, ‘but I must object with regards your final point. My speeches are by no means diarrhoea, and you’re so good as to express yourself in the presence of a lady, but a series of soundly packaged syllogisms which would be appreciated on their merits by such connoisseurs as Sextus Empiricus, Martianus Capella even, who knows, Aristotle himself.’
‘The kings in check,’ said Woland.
‘As you will, as you will,’ responded the cat, and began looking at the board through the opera glass.”
I think overall I probably admire The Master and Margarita more than love it, and I enjoyed Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook more. But there is so much in this extraordinary, unique novel that will stay with me, and I’m sure it will reward repeat readings too.
To end, I tried to get my two moggies to pose with the book. With typical cattitude, they flatly refused 😀 So it’s back to 80s pop videos:
I was disappointed to miss posting for Ali’s annual Daphne du Maurier Reading Week this year, due to the demands of blogging on novellas every day for a month, so once that madness was over I thought I would enjoy a visit to this ever-readable author.
(Also, thank you to everyone who commented on which Big Massive Tome I should pick up after so many novellas. Bleak House was far and away the winner, so I’m embarking on Dickensian legal wrangling next 😊)
Apparently DDM said that Frenchman’s Creek (1941) was the only romantic novel she wrote. This meant I went into it expecting a similar experience to when I read Jamaica Inn, that is: enjoying it but wishing I had read it as a teenager. Now I’m older I’m more inclined towards the psychological darkness of My Cousin Rachel and her frankly terrifying short stories.
However, these expectations were confounded. Frenchman’s Creek can definitely be read as a romance: a young beautiful noblewoman leaves her stifling court life and starts running around the Cornish coast with a sexy French pirate. But I thought there were some much more interesting themes being explored in this novel too.
Dona St Columb is married to the ineffectual Harry, and is part of the indulgent court of Charles II. After a particular prank that she regrets, she leaves London and makes her way to Harry’s country pile in Cornwall.
“The sense of futility had been growing upon her for many months, nagging at her now and again like dormant toothache, but it had taken Friday night to arouse in her that full sense of self-loathing an exasperation, and because of Friday night she was jolting backwards and forwards now in this damnable coach, bound on a ridiculous journey to a house she had seen once in her life and knew nothing about, carrying with her, in anger and irritation, the two surprised children and their reluctant nurse.”
Once there, her pompous neighbour lets her know that dangers lurk amongst the beautiful countryside and coast, in the form of a successful pirate from Brittany.
“‘No lives have been lost as yet, and none of our women have been taken,’ said Godolphin stiffly, ‘but as this fellow is a Frenchman we all realise that it is only a question of time before something dastardly occurs.’”
Throughout the novel anyone expressing xenophobia is shown to be monumentally stupid, which is not always what I expect in novels of this period and it was certainly refreshing.
It isn’t long before Dona crosses paths with the captain of La Mouette, Jean Benoit Aubréy. Undoubtedly his portrait is romantic: he sketches birds, reads poetry, and of course is extremely handsome. Dona finds she has much in common with Jean Benoit, namely the search for an authentic life and personal freedom. As his loyal man William explains:
“’Approve and disapprove are two words that are not in my vocabulary, my lady. Piracy suits my master, and that is all there is to it. His ship is his Kingdom, he comes and goes as he pleases, and no man can command him. He is a law unto himself.’”
Dona longs for something similar, but it is clearly demonstrated how limited she is due to being a woman. She has to meet the expectations of domestic roles, and also of her class. It is the insistence of her male neighbours that brings Harry to Cornwall, and his mendacious friend Rockingham, who poses a real threat to Dona.
Du Maurier expertly builds the tension as a trap is laid for the pirate, and he takes phenomenal risks to outmanoeuvre his enemies. Frenchman’s Creek is real page-turner, but it is also a believable exploration of a woman’s search for meaning and personal agency in her life. Her romantic partner is fully portrayed but not overly dwelt upon – this is Dona’s story and the romantic relationship is one that brings her back to herself:
“She felt, in a sense, like someone who had fallen under a spell, under some strange enchantment, because this sensation of quietude was foreign to her, who had lived hitherto in a turmoil of sound and movement. And yet at the same time the spell awoke echoes within her that she recognised, as though she had come to a place she had known always, and deeply desired, but had lost, through her own carelessness, or through circumstances, or the blunting of her own perception.”
Du Maurier really is so good at what she does. In Frenchman’s Creek she creates a compelling adventure alongside some lovely evocations of the natural world while highlighting the enduring challenges of the expectations placed on women. Dona’s quest for a life that will enable a fulfilling expression of self remains as relevant and compelling as ever.
“Much will be forgotten then, perhaps, the sound of the tide on the mud flats, the dark sky, the dark water, the shiver of the trees behind us and the shadows they cast before them, and the smell of the young bracken and the moss. Even the things we said will be forgotten, the touch of hands, the warmth, the loveliness, but never the peace that we have given to each other, never the stillness and the silence.”
I wanted to end with a trailer for the 1944 film adaptation with Joan Fontaine, but alas I couldn’t find it anywhere. So here is a clip from the 1998 BBC adaptation, which for reasons best known to itself has moved the story to the time of the Glorious Revolution and completely invented a scene. Has anyone seen this version? It doesn’t look very enticing but I do think Tara Fitzgerald is a good actor:
Earlier in the month I read A Simple Tale, the first of two novellas by Claire Messud collected under the title The Hunters. I was so impressed I wanted to read more by her, so on this last day I decided to return and read the titular tale.
It is very different to the previous story, although there are thematic links, and while I didn’t love it quite so much, it definitely convinced me that Messud is a skilled, versatile writer that I should explore further.
An unnamed narrator, whose gender is never revealed, takes a flat in Kilburn for three months while they undertake some research into poetic considerations of death. (There were extended descriptions of Kilburn which as a Londoner had me rolling my eyes at the snobbery/inaccuracy but I’ll be generous and say Kilburn has changed a lot in the 22 years since this was written so maybe it was a bit less lovable in 2001).
They are recovering from a broken heart, and desire nothing more than to be left alone. In Rear Window style, the flat looks out onto other flats, and this is what most appeals:
“I was at a time in which I desired exactly that: the suggestion of society, without its actual impingement into my carefully controlled existence. This is why, also, the people flitting among their trappings in the houses opposite so appealed to me: they were at once there and not there, a sign that life continued, even if it had nothing to do with me.”
Unfortunately for the narrator, they are unable to keep a pane of glass between themselves and other people, because their downstairs neighbour arrives on their doorstep. Ridley Wandor is a woman who lives in the ground floor flat with her mother and three rabbits (the titular Hunters). She is not glamorous; she has greasy hair, indistinct features, and a worn garish shellsuit. She smells of her pets. Her awkward manner is irritating and the narrator refers to her as an “oblique suet of a woman”.
Yet Ridley has power. She explains to her neighbour that as a carer, all her clients keep dying. The narrator is fearful of her:
“As if I knew – I did know, of course I knew; whether that knowing was a premonition or a predetermination – that I would not be able to escape her. That’s assault of the doorbell, which had so set me to trembling, was but the first of many such assaults;”
I can’t say too much more about what happens for fear of spoilers, but what Messud does in the story is to brilliantly confound expectations. The echoes of well-known horror/suspense films are there: Rear Window, Misery, possibly even Psycho. The narrator falls for these tropes and takes the reader with them.
Then, the narrator is very clear in explaining, they were wrong. They met Ridley at a time when they were vulnerable, defensive and not very generous. They thought of her as an “oblique suet”; a cruel and unthinking, dehumanising conclusion. Once they are in a better place, they view the story differently. They stop falling back on tales already told and subsequently see Ridley as an individual, deserving of respect:
“Which is why, you see, it must be told. Precisely in order to transcend its storyness, to make clear that this is not the invented story of a woman who existed only in my imagination, but the real story of a flesh-and-blood, breathing, sentient creature, someone far more real than I ever wanted or allowed her to be.”
The destabilising of the narrative isn’t remotely frustrating. Rather it widens the story to demonstrate the need to see life afresh and also to remember Anaïs Nin’s assertion: “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”
The Hunters is a plea to not lose compassion at those times when we are not feeling compassionate; to be kind to those who encroach when we really want to be left alone – because we never know what is happening for someone at the times when they cross our path.
The positioning of the reader is very cleverly done in this respect. I didn’t like the narrator much at the start: snarky, judgemental, selfish. Yet as they had explained clearly, they were in a bad place, a place of pain. By the end of the story they are happier, and more pleasant as a result. So I shouldn’t be so quick to judge…
The Hunters is an evocative, sad, unnerving story that I’m certain will stay with me.
So that’s it – another month of novellas that has gone by in a flash! It was definitely looking unlikely at several points that I’d manage it but I’m glad I did. Thank you so much to everyone who has liked, commented and shared, I really do appreciate it.
It’s been great to see Simon doing his BookADayinMay posts too, and his achievement is far more impressive because he reads and posts the same day, whereas I give myself a headstart that somehow never manages to offset the panic/feeling of impending failure 😀
Last year after I’d finished I decided to read a massive tome, namely Ulysses. I thought I’d do the same this year (but first a Daphne Du Maurier novel, because I was disappointed not to manage Ali’s #DDMReadingWeek) and I’d appreciate some guidance from the lovely bookish blogosphere…
The chunksters longest languishing in the TBR are: The Magic Mountain; Parade’s End; Bleak House; Sophie’s Choice. I also have a recent acquisition of the thousand-page, single sentence Ducks, Newburyport. I think I’m tending towards Parade’s End but any and all opinions on which I should choose are welcome! If it’s Ducks… I have a seven hour train journey to Aberdeen at the end of June, so it may even get read 😀
madame bibi lophile recommends 