Books

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.18

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Across the Common – Elizabeth Berridge (1964) 186 pages

Back in 2023, I started off Novella a Day in May with Elizabeth Berridge’s The Story of Stanley Brent. I ended the post by saying I had Across the Common in the TBR and maybe I’d get to it later in the month 😀 Just two short years later…

Across the Common is told from the point of view of Louisa as she returns to her suburban childhood home, after leaving her artist husband Max.

“My grandfather had built the house in the eighties. It was tall and big and excelled in useless crenellations; in the front an immense stretch of holly hedge gave the house its name.”

Her two aunts, Seraphina and Rosa, still live in this Gothic pile and they are soon to be joined by Aunt Cissie:

“Since the war, which had robbed her of her second husband and her only son, something had shifted in her. A new, unbalanced cynicism revealed itself by a sarcastic twist of the mouth, a semiquaver of a shrug.”

Quite a contrast to Aunt Seraphina:

“it was all in her sigh: her lost opportunities for adventure, for love, for self-expression. She was more of a child than I had ever been, and I loved her again for her wild and illogical longings, her aching desire for drama.”

They live in an insular world. Cissie had left, so her worldliness means she wants a television on her return, but otherwise the aunts are preserved in a world long gone. The Hollies has always existed as a refuge for the women in the family, such as Louisa’s grandmother:

“She had merely withdrawn into the world of The Hollies, where unpleasant things like passion and unworthy emotions and reality were kept out by the high walls, lapped by the half tamed acres of the common.”

Louisa initially returned to her aunts for their familiarity and the need she feels to unravel who she is, based on experiences in her past which led to her leaving:

“I only wanted to remember it in order to remember something else, like turning the cut-glass top of a decanter bottle in the sun, to catch the sudden prismatic dazzle. This something lay with the aunts; it was an unease that spoiled relationships, a strange Braithwaite ambiance that lay like fallout over the family.”

However, she begins to realise that her past may be more complex than she realised, and there are secrets within the family to understand. The Gothic atmosphere is heightened when a solicitor passes on a sinister warning in a letter from her long-deceased father:

“Don’t, for your own sake, be misled by the cultivated exteriors of your aunts. They can smother, they can crush, they can exterminate.”

There’s also the fact that Louisa’s aunts are among the few people her husband struggles to tolerate:

“It was the Braithwaites, my mother’s family, who came outside Max’s indulgence. They filled him with a kind of detached horror. He was ruthless about them. Is ruthless. For he blames them for everything awry in me.”

Yet they are never caricatures of eccentric older women, but carefully drawn and fully realised. All three aunts were fabulous creations.

Berridge builds an atmosphere that feels both stifling and menacing, without being overtly threatening or devoid of love. There is humour here too, and I particularly enjoyed Aunt Seraphina’s habit of pilfering plant cuttings from Regent’s Park.

The Big Family Mystery is believable, providing enough plot to draw the story along, with Louisa’s growing understanding of her family history and herself being well-paced.

I have another Berridge in the TBR so hopefully it won’t take me two more years to get to it! She is so accomplished and her idiosyncratic characterisation is a joy.

“The Braithwaite way of life was a kind of anarchy that could scarcely be contained within one house.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.17

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The Snow Ball – Brigid Brophy (1964) 196 pages

Brigid Brophy is an author who I’ve been meaning to try for a while, and The Snow Ball was a compelling introduction. It has an otherworldly quality, set over the course of one evening at the titular event and based on Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

An eighteenth-century fancy dress ball is being thrown by Anne and her fourth husband Tom-Tom at their Georgian London residence.  We follow Anna, Anne’s friend and confidant, throughout the evening. She is dressed as Donna Anna.

“Everyone grew a year older at once on New Year’s Eve, even those whose birthdays had been the day before. They gathered, Anna decided, for consolation: wearing historical costume to offset the advance of history.”

The incongruity and inaccuracy of the visual experience is used by Brophy to great effect, emphasising the unreality of the evening and showing how easily appearances can crack.

“Anna descended the grand staircase, knowing that Voltaire and Lady Hamilton were waiting for her in the crowd at the bottom. The noise, the scents, the very warmth of the people’s skins came to her as unmistakably twentieth century.”

Brophy has some startling images too, truly original turns of phrase. The décor is somewhat Rococo, with crumbling gold cherubs adorning the walls:

“It was as though between this room and Anna there was a genetic resemblance, a line of descent: as though it were a womb: into which, a newly born cherub in her early forties, she was always welcome to creep back.”

As this middle-aged cherub moves around the party she draws the attention of a man dressed in a black mask as Don Giovanni. She is also watched by Ruth, young and inexperienced, attending her first ball dressed as Cherubino and writing in her diary throughout the night:

“Feel there is something awful about all the people in the world, can’t think what they are here for—they don’t seem to matter—they are like atoms—they just move around without aim attracted or repelled by each other; hardly matters which. Anna K. is the most attractive woman I have ever seen. I detest her.”

We follow the seductions of the night, the dances people engage in both literally and metaphorically. Anna is a slightly subdued character next to the driven sexuality of Don Giovanni or the gregarious sociability of her friend Anne. Yet she is compelling as she tries to work out what happiness looks like for her as a recently divorced woman, against a background of revelry.

(Unlike its source inspiration, the seduction in The Snow Ball is explicitly successful and mutually consensual.)

The Snow Ball is eerie and unnerving while being recognisable. Its characters take pragmatic decisions surrounded by elevated theatricality – at one point peppermint creams rain down. It felt like a masque, but grounded in believable people rather than stock caricatures. It was hugely clever but not alienating and it’s definitely made me keen to pull Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country out of the TBR.

“‘Have you noticed what a metaphysical ball this is?’ he said. ‘All these people bumping into one another and asking “Who are you?” even when they’ve known each other for years.’”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.16

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Tokyo Express – Seichō Matsumoto (1958 transl. Jesse Kirkwood 2022) 149 pages

Tokyo Express is very much a howdunit and whydunit, as the whodunnit is seemingly fairly obvious from the start. This was my first time reading crime master Seichō Matsumoto and I was hugely impressed.

A young couple are found dead on Kashii beach near a shrine, having drunk cyanide. The local Fukuoka police are quick to decide a double suicide. There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but one of the team, Torigai Jūtarō, a long-standing and rather dishevelled detective, isn’t so sure.

“His overcoat was as battered as the clothes beneath it, his face unshaven, and his tie twisted and worn.”

Reminiscent of Lieutenant Columbo (whom he predates), Torigai is sharp-minded and unegotistical too. He starts trying to unravel how the couple came to be on the beach at that time. The young woman called Toki is dressed in a kimono and was a waitress at a restaurant in Akasaka; the man in Western clothes was Kenichi Sayama, an employee at Ministry X, currently under investigation for corruption. They were witnessed getting on the titular train by two of Toki’s colleagues, and it seems pretty clear that their bearing witness was engineered by a businessman called Tatsuo Yasuda.

Quicky Torigai establishes that a lot rests on that train journey and the timings of what happened when. He’s also baffled by a receipt from the buffet car found on Sayama’s body which recorded a food order for just one person.

“A scene formed in Torigai’s mind: the dark silhouette of a man, silently and briskly leading a woman to the beach, and the woman saying: What a lonely place.”

When Kiichi Mihara turns up from Tokyo, an outwardly very different detective takes over. The case is attracting attention due to the corruption in the Ministry, and Mihara works for the Second Division which investigates white collar crime.

“There was something in his cordial tone that reminded Torigai of an insurance salesman.”

The two investigators agree that the deaths are suspicious, and they also realise Yasuda is likely involved. However, trying to crack his alibi about where he was and when proves extremely difficult.

“Yasuda was always consulting the railway timetable. Did that perhaps mean he knew it secrets? In any case, his familiarity with the train times had to signify something. What if Yasuda’s entire alibi was built on it?”

This is one of the most procedural of police procedurals I’ve ever read. Everything hinges on the tight timing of trains, ferries and planes (a premise that would not remotely work in the UK as it depends on all the transport running to time, which as Magnus Mills pointed in out in my earlier read this month, will never occur). Torigai fades into the background, as Mihara tries to pick it all apart but keeps hitting brick walls.

“That crack in the wall had been nothing but a mirage. Mihara felt crushed. He held his head in his hands and, for a moment, could only stare at the piece of paper in front of him.”

I knew a bit about Tokyo Express before reading it, including that all the timings are based on the actual timetables of the time in the novel, and I wondered if it would be impossible to follow/bogged down in the logistics. But Seichō Matsumoto does a great job of carrying the reader along and there’s even a few surprises in store. The relationship between the two detectives is warm and endearing. I don’t know if they appeared in his subsequent novels, but even if not, I’d be keen to read more by this author.

“Mihara liked to ride the trams of Tokyo. Often, he would board without a specific destination in mind. Odd as it might seem, whenever he was at a loss for ideas, he would simply sit on the tram and allow his thoughts to roam. The tram’s steady trundle, its gentle swaying, induced in him an almost euphoric state of contemplation.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.15

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The Skin Chairs – Barbara Comyns (1962) 200 pages

I really enjoy Barbara Comyns. Her voice is so distinct, uniquely hers. She can present traumatic events – in The Skin Chairs, parental death, bullying and poverty – with an equanimity of tone which offers an idiosyncratic resilience.

The Skin Chairs is narrated by ten-year-old Frances. It opens with her going to stay with horrible relatives to give her mother a break from her six children; four girls and two boys. Frances’ Aunt Lawrence is a bully and her daughter Ruby is completely cowed by her, while her daughter Grace is her favourite and as such, completely unbearable.

“It was no wonder that the Lawrence family were so spiteful; it was dreadfully catching and gave one such a feeling of power.”

Frances’ stay with her relatives is extended as while she is away, her father dies. Ultimately her mother and her siblings move into a new house nearby called The Hollies. This gives the Lawrences a distressing amount of power over Frances’ mother, who struggles to adapt to her straitened circumstances.

“She never went shopping, although she ordered meat when the butcher called at the house (the fishmonger soon stopped calling because he said it wasn’t worth it when we always ordered herrings), and I think she would have considered it the final degradation to have been seen carrying a shopping basket.”

Her mother does learn to cook, but even that isn’t quite right:

“Mrs Hand prepared vegetables and we washed up, so she had none of the drudgery. Delicious iced cakes appeared on the table at teatime, vol-au-vent, lobster croquettes and chicken soufflés at midday and savoury supper in the evening. The little ones became bilious and, when Polly discovered that we had spent nearly a month’s supply of money in a week, we went back to stews and rice puddings, fish pie and baked apples.”

There isn’t much plot, except as Frances takes us through her days. Dramas are generally short-lived. The family struggle for money, and Frances struggles with her schoolwork.

We get to know others on the village. There is an appalling ongoing thread with a mother neglecting her child so she can have an affair with a Major. There is also the utterly eccentric Mrs Alexander who bombs around in a bright yellow car, wears gold shoes polished daily by her chauffeur, and keeps a menagerie of animals in cages:

“She had once kept a bear, but people had complained because it used to break into church during the services, and it had to be given to a zoo. ‘I sometimes wonder why I ever returned to England, so many unpleasant things happen here’.”

As with all the Comyns I’ve read there is cruelty present. Not least with the chairs, belonging to a General and said to be made from human skin. The cruelty is never dismissed although no-one is demonised, and Frances’ child’s view doesn’t obfuscate. It is presented without sensation.

Thankfully there is kindness too. Mr Blackwell arrives in the village, incredibly rich and kind to Frances during a time of acute distress. He doesn’t meet the Lawrences’ standards however:

“Then Aunt Lawrence told us the man was not a ‘gent’ at all, but a retired brass-founder. He was rolling in money, he owned an appalling Birmingham accent and would be quite impossible to know. I imagined him rolling in brassy coins all alone and felt sorry for him planning to live in a village where no one would know him.”

The horrible central image of The Skin Chairs suits Comyns well. She is so clever at presenting the domestic, but making it unnerving and almost Gothic. Yet The Skin Chairs is also gentle, and the characters – even the dreadful ones – treated with compassion. I’ve a few other Comyns’ languishing in the TBR and this made me keen to get them!

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: