Books

“Why don’t words come automatically with threads that we can yank to pull them back inside ourselves?” (Jokha Alharthi, Bitter Orange Tree)

/ madamebibilophile / 12 Comments

For this year’s Women in Translation Month I’m trying to focus on countries I’ve yet to visit on my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge. This meant I was delighted to find a copy of Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi (2016, transl. Marilyn Booth 2022) in my much-frequented local charity bookshop, as I’ve not read a book by an Omani author before.

I had completely missed Celestial Bodies for which Alharthi and Booth won the Man International Booker Prize in 2019. At that time Alharthi was the first Omani woman to be translated into English.

Bitter Orange Tree is a short novel, just 214 pages in my edition with quite large type, which I read entirely during a train journey back from Newcastle. (In fact, everyone around my table was reading a print book – it was like the olden days! For balance, I should say on the journey up I was sat next to someone who spent the whole time scrolling through TikTok and Insta, never watching any of the short content through to the end. I found it exhausting and had to mind my own business in the end 😀 )

The story is told from the point of view of Zuhour, a young woman who has left Oman to study in a nameless, cold, foreign city (most likely Edinburgh). She balances descriptions of her current life where a friend’s sister has fallen in love with a man her family wouldn’t approve of, with memories of Oman and particularly her grandmother-figure, Bint Aamir.

Zuhour harbours guilt regarding not staying with her grandmother, who has now died. A comment to a friend is the starting point for memories and reflections on Bint Aamir’s life:

“She always longed to own some land… just a tiny patch, with date palms growing on it, even if there was only space for five or so. And a few little fruit trees – lemon, papaya, banana, bitter orange. She would even plant those herself. She would water them and take care of them. And eat from them. And rest in their shade.”

Bint Aamir’s life is not easy, expelled along with her brother from her father’s house, she struggles for money. Gradually she finds a role in a relative’s home and while owning nothing, she provides almost everything.

“Bint Aamir’s feet were submerged in the soil that was the ground of our lives. She built the walls that made this household exist and thrive, mud brick by mud brick.”

Zuhour’s past and present conflate frequently, and I thought Alharthi conveyed so effectively the way memories underpin and inform the present. The conflation and the movement back and forwards between different times was seamless and never confusing.

“Tears run from my eyes, from both my eyes, from my two sound eyes. My tears spill over her one eye, which is damaged; over the herbal concoctions that were prescribed by ignorance; over the violence and harshness of childhood; over children orphaned by their mothers deaths and thrown out by their fathers, and over their brothers tragic ends; over a field she did not possess; over a companion she was never fortunate enough to have; over son who is not hers; over the grandchildren of a friend who died before she did.”

There’s also some humour, and I particularly liked this description of Zuhour’s friend Christine:

“Her cup of decaf coffee with soy milk was tall and skinny: it looked just like her. Here at this party, she was an exact scan of the figure I always saw at the university: T-shirt jeans running shoes ponytail nose ring tattoo long skinny cup.”

There were aspects of the story that were less successful for me though. Alongside the friends’ illicit relationship that Zahour has complex, unresolved feelings about, there is also a story of domestic violence involving her sister Sumayya. Both these sub-plots were too shallowly explored, before they petered-out. I felt that either Bitter Orange Tree needed to be longer, or one of these sub-plots needed to be cut and the other further developed.

While I liked the imaginative style, sometimes it became overly sentimental, particularly with regard to Bint Aamir. Although Zahour acknowledges “All her contentment was drawn from the happiness of the people for whom she cared.” she sometimes goes on flights of fancy regarding what her grandmother didn’t have in life, without knowing how her grandmother felt. These seemed clunky to me, although in fairness this may have been deliberate, to emphasise Zahour’s callow inexperience and inability to think beyond cliches at times.

But I only blog about books I like and I did like Bitter Orange Tree. The handling of past and present was so deft, and the style so readable. From looking online I think a lot of people preferred Celestial Bodies so I’d be keen to give that a try. If you’ve read Celestial Bodies I’d love to hear how you found it.

“Everything alters, yet does remain the same.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 19 Comments

This is the eighth instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The eighth volume, The Soldier’s Art, was published in 1966 and is set in 1941.Unlike the previous few novels, this only had three chapters, the middle one depicting Nick’s leave in London, bookended by his experiences in the army while still billeted in Northern Ireland.

As I mentioned in the previous volume’s post, Nick doesn’t really fit in with army life. But he doesn’t particularly labour on this, or feel sorry for himself. I enjoyed this exchange when he runs into Bithel again:

“’Told me you were a reader – like me – didn’t you?’

‘Yes I am. I read quite  a lot.’

I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications. At least admitting to it put one in a recognisably odd character of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run.”

In this volume I felt I saw a much fuller picture of Nick’s touchstone Widmerpool. Is machinatious a word? If it isn’t, the character of Widmerpool suggests it should be, because his machinations inform his behaviour through and through.

Nick is acting as his secretary, desperate to get away.

“Indeed, it was often necessary to remind oneself that low spirits, disturbed moods, sense of persecution, were not necessarily the consequences of serving in the army, or being part of a nation at war, with which all inclusive framework depressive mental states now seemed automatically linked.”

Nick manages to stay out of Widmerpool’s connivances due to the latter’s egomaniacal need for control. However, he can observe his senior officer’s behaviour at much close quarters than before, including:

“An amateur soldier in relation to tactical possibilities, and … a professional trafficker in intrigue”

“[My] incredulity was due, I suppose, to an underestimation, even after the years I had known him, of Widmerpool’s inordinate, almost morbid self-esteem.”

By the end of the novel Widmerpool is moving on, and I had a horrible feeling that by the end of this novel sequence he might be Prime Minister…

Another of Nick’s schoolfriends is present in the company. Stringer, maintaining his sobriety, turns up as a mess waiter.

“Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward – in contrast with love – is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment”

Stringer is an intriguing character, with a deep sense of sadness about him. We’ve never learnt what led him to self-medicate with alcohol, and now he is sober he seems to have an extreme resignation to life. He seems too equanimous, knowing no joy. I find him quite haunting.

In the middle chapter Nick uses his leave to visit friends in London. His wife Isobel and young child get a passing reference. If I was Isobel I’d be mightily annoyed that my husband spent his army leave in Blitz-torn London rather than in the country with his newly-expanded family, but maybe she’s more tolerant than I am.

This middle section was hugely moving. Powell conveys the tragedy of war, of lives cut short without warning. Of the senseless waste and cruel arbitrariness of it all. He does it all with understatement which perfectly drives home the horror, and how this became a regular occurrence for so many. It was an astonishing chapter.

It is in army life that Powell finds his comedy and satire. This was probably the most sad, most moving, and most silly and funny of all the volumes I’ve read so far.

I particularly enjoyed a completely daft dinner scene between two Colonels, one called Eric, one called Derrick. Powell uses the rhyming names to full effect, having both of them end their sentences with the other’s name, as they engage in a furious, but politely mannered argument.

“Both habitually showed anxiety to avoid a junior officer’s eye at meals in case speech might seem required. To make sure nothing so inadvertent should happen, each would uninterruptedly gaze into the other’s face across the table, with all the fixedness of a newly engaged couple, eternally enchanted by the charming in appearance of the other.”

There’s also Nick’s experience of inciting the wrath of a General, when he admits he doesn’t like Trollope and prefers another author:

“‘There’s always Balzac, sir.’

‘Balzac!’

General Liddament roared the name. It was impossible to know if Balzac had been a very good answer or a very bad one.”

The more I read of this sequence the more impressive I find it. Powell’s wit, humanity, clear-sightedness, and ability to balance the various aspects of life are really extraordinary. And he does it all with such a light touch.

“All the same, although the soldier might abnegate thought and action, it has never been suggested that he should abnegate grumbling.”

To end, I’m feeling quite smug for working out that I can shoehorn in an 80s pop video by choosing one by some of the Blitz Kids (and fair to say 80s pop videos did not generally follow an Anthony Powell-esque light touch 😀 ):

Shrouded – Sólveig Pálsdóttir (transl. Quentin Bates) blog tour

/ madamebibilophile / 6 Comments

I’m always a bit trepidatious about agreeing to blog tours, which is why I don’t do many. What if I don’t enjoy the book? I only blog about books I like so what if I have to drop out? Thankfully Corylus Books have never done me wrong, consistently offering excellent crime novels in translation.

When they suggested Shrouded by Sólveig Pálsdóttir (2023, transl. Quentin Bates 2023), I had two questions: did it matter that I hadn’t read the others in the series? Was it gory (I can’t do gore)? Reassured on both counts, I’m so glad I took the opportunity to join in because I found much to enjoy in this novel.

My allotted date for the tour was 1 August so this is also my first post for Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth), a wonderful and well-established event running for the whole of August.

Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:

“A retired, reclusive woman is found on a bitter winter morning, clubbed to death in Reykjavik’s old graveyard. Detectives Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún face one of their toughest cases yet, as they try to piece together the details of Arnhildur’s austere life in her Red House in the oldest part of the city.

Why was this solitary, private woman attending séances, and why was she determined to keep her severe financial difficulties so secret? Could the truth be buried deep in her past and a long history of family enmity, or could there be something more? Now a stranger keeps a watchful eye on the graveyard and Arnhildur’s house.

With the detectives running out of leads, could the Medium, blessed and cursed with uncanny abilities, shed any light on Arnhildur’s lonely death?”

The story opens with Arnhildur preparing to go to a séance. We are privy to her thoughts, her frustrations and her little vanities. In a very short space, Pálsdóttir creates a sense of Arnhildur so that when she is murdered, the injustice is fully realised. Although the reader is witness to the murder, it isn’t remotely gory or gratuitous. It’s a responsible and carefully balanced portrait which insists that the murder of an older woman, someone seemingly entirely ordinary, is taken seriously.

Having not read the rest of the series, when police detectives Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún arrive to investigate I was expecting some clunky exposition to bring readers up to speed. This never happened, and instead we are presented with an established working relationship, respectful and gently teasing, in which we are expected to draw our own conclusions regarding the personalities of the individuals and the dynamic between them.

“‘It’s never this dark in Akureyri,’ Elsa Guðrún assured him, a tie between her teeth as she pulled her brown hair back into a ponytail.

‘Really?’ Guðgeir grinned. This north country pride that some would describe as conceit had always amused him. ‘All the same, it’s a good way further north than Reykjavík.’

Elsa Guðrún wasn’t going to accept Guðgeir’s straightforward geographical point.”

The relationships with the wider team are well drawn, with a sense of professionals rubbing along together as best they can with some tensions and frustrations – in other words, most people’s working lives. There is humour too, and I particularly enjoyed tightly-wound senior officer Særós’ penchant for Insta-type inspiration:

“As always, the week’s aphorism hung on the wall behind her, a print out with black letters on white in a simple IKEA frame. This week it said, Always be the best possible version of yourself.”

Arnhildur was resistant to change and technology, which means no mobiles with sophisticated GPS, laptops or tablets of hers are available to aid the investigation. This made for a police procedural that felt pleasingly traditional while still rooted in the modern world.

One shortcut that might have been available was the presence of Valthór, a medium. I know some readers whose hearts sink at the presence of a psychic in detective stories, but Pálsdóttir never uses the character as an easy way to resolve any plot, despite one of her detectives being open to the possibility of Valthór’s skills:

“Growing up in the west of Iceland, he had been aware that most older people had some belief in an afterlife, and that there were a few people with the ability to converse with the dead. Many of them also believed in premonitions, dreams and prophecies. The people with whom Guðgeir had grown up had fought for their existence, in close touch with the brutal forces of nature that regularly demanded people’s lives. These people had been more down-to-earth than any Guðgeir knew today, and he was still convinced that there was much about the world that could be neither felt nor seen.”

Valthór is a really affecting character, truly suffering in the aftermath of Arnhildur’s death and he enables a continued emotional resonance within the story as Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún pragmatically and doggedly work to solve the crime.

They discover aspects of Arnhildur’s past that led to her estrangement from her family, and truly disturbing events touching her life before she died. There are a couple of very sinister characters that are deeply unnerving in their believability.

Shrouded is a quick pacy read that I whizzed through on a train journey to Liverpool. Initially I was smugly congratulating myself that I’d guessed certain elements and I was somewhat surprised that a novel which seemed so accomplished had resolved things rather straightforwardly. However, I was far too quick to pat myself on the back 😀 I’d made all the assumptions and deductions Pálsdóttir had guided the reader towards, and I’d missed others entirely, which meant the very end made for a surprising and really satisfying conclusion.

Shrouded is responsible in its treatment of the victim, it’s never sensationalist. It has plenty to say about how people who don’t easily fit in are treated. It demonstrates the complexities of relationships between flawed people (ie all of us) without having characters behave in ridiculous ways.

I realise I’m making it sound dull when it really isn’t! It makes important points without losing sight of the story. I really enjoyed Shrouded and now I need to read the preceding novels in the series; my TBR is never going down, is it…?

Here are the rest of the stops on the blog tour so do check out how other readers found Shrouded:

“The story of our lives still isn’t finished, and it never will be.” (Beatriz Bracher, Antonio)

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

Trigger warning: mentions mental illness and infant death.

Stu over at WinstonsDad’s blog is hosting Spanish Portuguese Lit Month for the whole of July and so this was the perfect opportunity to get to a novella by Brazilian author Beatriz Bracher which had been languishing in the TBR: Antonio (2007, transl. Adam Morris 2021) published by the wonderful Pushkin Press.

I want to start with the disclaimer that I don’t think I’ve really got to grips with Antonio, so this post is just some initial impressions. Although only 187 pages long it is incredibly densely written and it took me a week to read. Admittedly work has been really demanding lately, but usually it still wouldn’t take me that long to read a book of that length.

Also looking online, there are many effusive reviews praising the socio-political commentary of Antonio, which I’m sure I didn’t fully comprehend. I did pick up some, but I’m certain I need to re-read Antonio at some point.

The novella is told through the alternating viewpoints of three people: Raul, Isabel and Haroldo. Their silent interlocutor is Benjamim, who is awaiting the birth of his first child, the titular Antonio. The imminent arrival of his son has prompted Benjamim to probe into his family history in more depth.

“I’d like to think your mother was also a free person, and maybe you can hold onto that thought, instead of clinging to fear and rage.”

Benjamim knows that his father was Teodoro and that his mother was  Elenir.  Elenir had a son with Benjamim’s grandfather Xavier first, who they also called Benjamim and who died very young. The second Benjamim was raised by his father after his mother died in childbirth.  

Raul is his father’s friend, Isabel is his paternal grandmother, and Haroldo was Benjamim’s grandfather’s friend. They all provide histories of Benjamim’s family that echo and contradict each other, and none seem any more reliable or authoritative than any other. Each has their own truth.

The family is well-off and privileged in São Paulo, but their history is a troubled one. Both Xavier and Teodoro had periods of intense mental illness.

For Xavier, this occurred after the death of Benjamim. As Haroldo recalls:

“[Elenir] looked like a bent piece of wood. She didn’t cry. She received each condolence with correct politeness. Xavier was the total opposite: he was in pieces […] I managed to gain entry to that hell three times. The last time, I brought a team of nurses, to drag my friend out of there and take him to a sanatorium.”

Later, Xavier meets and marries Isabel and they raise a family. They are the generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, idealistic and, in Isabel’s case, driven:

“In a family we’re always a me or and I who’s scattered and complex. It’s only at work, especially work that has to do with ideas, but it’s possible to feel ourselves out and let the contours assume the shape.”

Their youngest son Teo rejects the urban privilege he is born into and goes to live in rural Minas. He throws himself into village life but ultimately becomes rudderless and unwell. Isabel reminds Benjamim of his early childhood:

“You’re from this family, so you are this family. Your father wanted to be rid of all that, and shed himself along with it. The history that he crafted for himself in Minas was a non-history. He went too deep. By the time I brought him back, there was nothing left to hold onto, no handle I could use to hoist him back out: only damaged pieces.”

This is one of central themes of Antonio: how to live an authentic and conscious life, but not be overwhelmed by the search for meaning. How to truly find who you are, alongside the demands of daily life. Isabel believes the answer is hard work, but only Big Work. Haroldo points out:

“She raised a bunch of irresponsible ingrates who are incapable of the most basic displays of solidarity, like visiting their dying mother. Isabel cultivated a true horror of responsibility in them, and at the same time overloaded them with the responsibility to be nothing but the best.”

Isabel recognises that privilege brings responsibility, but she also remains an elitist. When she observes: “I never understood any language that wasn’t well spoken Portuguese.” she is being both literal and metaphorical. The family’s wealth isn’t what it once was and she is unhappy at her children’s middle-class existence.

To me Isabel was the strongest of the three narrators and I got a real sense of her. But Raul, living an ordinary life and baffled by what happened to his childhood friend, and the somewhat reprehensible, colourful Haroldo were also distinct characters if not entirely differing voices, and Bracher balances the three viewpoints well.

I’ve focused on some of the ideas rather than the events of Antonio and that is partly because the novella has some graphic scenes in it – of extensive mental breakdown, one of pig-killing and one of caring for a dead body by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing. None of these are gratuitous but they mean Antonio can be very difficult to read in places.

Bracher avoids conclusions about the causes of Xavier and Teo’s ill health and whether there is a genetic component or whether it is the demands of society on the individual. She vividly, sometimes viscerally, evokes the pressures of family and the search for self in late twentieth-century Brazil.

“To live long and stay well, stay away from your relatives.”

“Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

This is the seventh instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The seventh volume, The Valley of Bones, was published in 1964 and is set at the start of World War Two, when Nick has joined the army as an officer.

I’ve said when reading previous novels in the sequence that I’m intrigued by Nick’s outsider’s view, as it’s not clear where it comes from since he seems so much a part of the society he portrays. In the army, the distinction is clearer. Nick finds himself billeted to South Wales within a company made up mostly of bankers, very different to his bohemian artsy London life.

“I indicated that I wrote for the papers, not mentioning books because, if not specifically in your line, authorship is an embarrassing subject for all concerned.”

Nick casts his sharp eye over these new associates in the same way he has for his friends, family and acquaintances up to this point. A central character is Captain Rowland Gwatkin, a man who seems simultaneously devoted to the army and entirely bewildered by it too:

“Gwatkin lacked in his own nature that grasp of ‘system’ for which he possessed such admiration. This deficiency was perhaps connected in some way with a kind of poetry within him…Romantic ideas about the way life is lived are often to be found in persons themselves fairly coarse- grained.”

Gwatkin is really tightly wound, and there is a sense of impending doom at best, destruction at worst with him.

Nick is an indifferent soldier, neither very good nor absolutely awful. There is some consideration of philosophical theories of war, but primarily Nick is interested in those who surround him:

“It is a misapprehension to suppose, as most people do, that the army is inherently different from all other communities. The hierarchy and discipline give an outward illusion of difference, but there are personalities of every sort in the army, as much as out of it.”

Powell brilliant portrays the simmering tensions in the company, both from the mix of personalities attempting to work together within and the increasing threat from Hitler without. There are those with alcohol problems, death by suicide, and broken hearts, yet the days mostly pass in utter tedium. Nothing changes even after the company is uprooted to a posting to Northern Ireland:

“At Castlemallock I knew despair. The proliferating responsibilities of an infantry officer, simple in themselves, yet, if properly carried out, formidable in their minutiae, impose a strain in wartime even on those to whom they are a lifelong professional habit; the excruciating boredom of exclusively male society is particularly irksome in areas at once remote from war, yet oppressed by war conditions.”

As Adjutant Maelgwyn-Jones observes: “That day will pass, as other days in the army pass.”

Yet there is some light relief too, such as an inspection from a visiting General, seemingly obsessed with breakfast foodstuffs:

“The General stood in silence, as if in great distress of mind, holding his long staff at arm’s length from him, while he ground it deep into the earth the surface of the barnhouse floor. He appeared to be trying to contemplate as objectively as possible the concept of being so totally excluded from the human family as to dislike porridge.”

And Nick does get some weekend leave in order to catch up with his family. There he finds people thrown together, behaving oddly and under strain. In other words, not so very different from his army posting. As his pregnant wife Isobel observes: “the war seems to have altered some people out of recognition and made others more than ever like themselves.”

In The Valley of Bones Anthony Powell shows himself uninterested in the glorification of war or in any sort of jingoism. He also doesn’t fall into the trap of a wholly satirical, detached point of view either. He manages a delicate balance between conveying the seriousness of war alongside the human inadequacies and frailties of those expected to enact it.

He also pulls an absolute masterstroke at the finish. The boredom, the admin, the essentially unthreatening – if somewhat self-destructive – colleagues are turned upside down in an instant, and Nick finds himself carried forward, powerless in a situation about which he has a deep sense of foreboding. It’s a chilling ending and I’m anxious to see how it plays out in the next volume, The Soldier’s Art.

“In the army – as in love – anxiety is an ever present factor where change is concerned.”

To end, a song absolutely synonymous with wartime Britain for many, which seems particularly apt for Nick as he’s always running into people he met previously:

“People are better inside your head.” (Donal Ryan, The Thing About December)

/ madamebibilophile / 15 Comments

I never take enough books away with me. So having finished The Garden of Evening Mists during my New Forest weekend, I ducked into the Oxfam Bookshop in Lymington and was gratified to find a copy of The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan (2022). Ryan is one of my favourite contemporary authors and I was yet to read his most recent novel.

Characters from his previous novel Strange Flowers make a reappearance here, but they are not the main focus. The story belongs to Saoirse Aylward, her mother Eileen, and her paternal grandmother Nana who all live together in Nenagh, County Tipperary.

We follow Saoirse from her 1980s childhood to her thirties, with the tensions and strains, and unwavering warmth and love that the women create within their family home.

Saoirse’s father died a few days after she was born and she sometimes feels guilty for not feeling his loss.

“Every other house in the small estate that had children in it also had a father, a living one.

None of them looked like they were of much use except for cutting grass with the same shared lawnmower, taking turns to cut the verges in the small green area at the front of the estate and the smaller green at the back.”

The Aylward women are an enclosed, loving unit, viewed as somewhat eccentric by the rest of the town. Eileen is uninterested in men for the most part, her heart lying with her dead husband. She is sweary and gruff and no-one understands why she and her mother-in-law are living together.

“She realised that she and her mother rarely spoke properly at all. That most of mother’s speech was indirect, utterances flung around like fistfuls of confetti, vaguely aimed and scattering randomly. But she supposed this to be the way of all parents and child relationships. Her mother told her every single night that she loved her.”

Nana might be less sweary, but in her own way she is just as direct, such as when speaking to Saoirse about her Uncle Chris:

“Whatever he was at inside me he made a pure hames of my pipework. He started as he meant to go on, anyway, that’s for sure.”

His brother Paudie has a dramatic and mysterious life, helping on the farm until he is suddenly arrested and sent to prison.

“They never looked comfortable down here in the angular lowlands of the estate. They were shaped to the contours of hills and hedgerows, their feet only sure on giving ground.”

Yet it is Saoirse’s teenage years that bring the most disruption to the house. Ryan is excellent at capturing this time, such as this description of Saoirse’s first boyfriend:

“His miasma of Lynx and sweat and stolen cigarettes, his uncertain swagger, his damp hand in hers.”

But Saoirse is learning about the darker sides of life too, which have previously not infiltrated her safe home: self-harm, domestic abuse, suicide, sexual assault. Her mother and Nana can’t protect her from everything.

And within her family, there is a threatening presence: her uncle Richard. He is her mother’s brother, and while Eileen is estranged from her family, her father has left her the titular land. Richard wants it back, and this tension bubbles in the background through the years.

The tone of The Queen of Dirt Island felt very well-balanced, not shying away from trauma but not unrelentingly bleak either. Nana in particular provided humorous moments. The women all felt fully realised and believable, their voices beautifully evoked.

This is not a novel to read for positive portrayals of men, however. Nana advises young Saoirse:

“You only get one life, and no woman should spend any part of it being friends with men. That’s not what men are for.”

The Queen of Dirt Island is a warm-hearted book, compassionate to its flawed characters, which was a joy to read. I could have spent another 200 pages at least with the Aylward women.

Ryan writes with a poetic restraint, and the story is told through a series of vignettes. Each section is 500 words including a title, and at just 242 pages it’s a really quick read. Thankfully I’d also found a collection of Dorthe Nors short stories in the Oxfam bookshop so I managed to keep myself going on the return journey home 😉

“She was glad of mother’s unwavering impolitic nature, her peculiar loving manner, and she knew that Nana loved mother with the same gruff constancy.”

To end, the author reading one of the vignettes, which I read in an interview was based on a childhood experience with his mother:

“The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man.” (Tan Twan Eng)

/ madamebibilophile / 16 Comments

Continuing my plan to try and take my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge by the scruff of the neck, today I’m off to Malaysia. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (2012) has been hugely lauded and it had completely passed me by. I rectified this situation by taking it with me on a long weekend in the New Forest recently, and it definitely suits those moments when you have a decent amount of time to commit to it.

Back at the end of May when Kim at Reading Matters very kindly invited me to take part in her Triple Choice Tuesday, I chose The Secret Garden as a book that changed my world due to its themes of gardens and healing. So The Garden of Evening Mists was always going to be a winner for me as it explores these themes.   

The story opens in the 1980s, Yun Ling is a high court judge, just about to retire. This means she is leaving the bustle of Kuala Lumpur to return to her home in the Cameron Highlands.

“Most people in Kuala Lumpur couldn’t bear the stench, especially when the river was running low between monsoon seasons, but I had never minded that, in the heart of the city, I could smell the mountains over a hundred miles away.”

She hasn’t been back for years, and her return encourages her to reflect on her past:

“The garden’s name in English: Evening Mists. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.”

The main focus of her reflections is the time she spent as apprentice to a gardener who had been employed by the Emperor of Japan. Nakamura Aritomo is a mysterious figure, best known to his South African neighbour Magnus Pretorious, who still doesn’t know him hugely well, or why he seems to be in self-imposed exile in this remote part of Malaysia.

The past narrative begins in 1951 and Teoh Yun Ling is the sole survivor of a Japanese POW camp, where her sister died. She wants to build a Japanese garden in memory of her sister:

“Yun Hong kept our spirits up by talking about the gardens we had visited in Kyoto, describing even the smallest details to me. ‘This is how we’ll survive,’ she told me, ‘this is how will walk out of this camp.’”

In order to build her garden, Yun Ling is going to need the help of Aritomo, and for that to happen she needs to learn to trust a Japanese man despite associating him with her torturers.

“The imminent rain in the air smelt crisp and metallic, as though it has been seared by the lightning buried in the clouds. The scent reminded me of my time in the camp, when my mind had latched onto the smallest, most inconsequential thing to distract myself: a butterfly wafting from a patch of scrub, a spider web tethered to twigs by strands of silk, sieving the wind for insects.”

The relationship between Yun Ling and Aritomo is undoubtedly the centre of the story, but this is an ambitious novel and covers a great many themes, including the aftermath of World War Two and pre-independence Malaysia. (There are a few info-dump moments but not many.) It shows how power is achieved through violence, during British colonialism and beyond.

Within a carefully evoked historical context, Tan Twan Eng explores how we heal from trauma; how we reconcile to ourselves and to others; how we find redemption, and how we can forgive. It’s an immensely powerful story, and Yun Ling has to navigate her survivors guilt and overwhelming anger, to try and work out how on earth she is going to continue with her life.

“Walking in the garden I had heard about almost half a lifetime ago, I wished Yun Hong were here with me. She would have enjoyed it more than me. I wondered what I was doing here, living the life that should have been my sister’s.”

From goodreads I know some readers found Yun Ling too detached and remote a voice within her own story. Although some of the characterisation in the novel felt thin at times, I didn’t have a problem with Yun Ling’s voice. I thought it worked well in conveying her detachment through trauma, and it also balanced the style of storytelling. The descriptions are so richly detailed (sometimes a bit too much for my austere tastes) that to have a highly emotive voice amongst it all would have been too much.

“Birdsong song sparkles the air; mists topple over the mountains and slide down their flanks, slow and soundless as an avalanche witnessed from miles away. Instinctively I turn to look behind me, expecting Aritomo to chide me with a look or a scathing word. I see only my own footprints on the dusty floorboards as the bamboo blinds creak softly in the wind.”

Amongst this beauty are some gruesome scenes too, both in the 1950s setting and in Yun Ling’s memories of the camp. I didn’t find this gratuitous at all and thought they were responsibly handled, but wanted to warn any readers late to The Garden of Evening Mists like me that it is certainly not an unrelentingly pretty read.

Underpinning all periods is the theme of memory, effectively evoked through the shifting back and forth between timelines. Tan Twan Eng demonstrates how we cling to memory, how important it can be despite its unreliability. He shows how this can limit our knowledge of ourselves, others and circumstances, yet it remains vitally important.

The Garden of Evening Mists presents complex people and situations and demonstrates how, even when we don’t know everything and can’t rely on what we do know, all are worthy of compassion.

“Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”

To end, has anyone seen the adaptation from 2019? From this trailer I can’t decide if I want to watch it…

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” (Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest)

/ madamebibilophile / 29 Comments

Summer seems to have finally arrived here in the UK, for a few days at least 🙂 So I thought I would post about a summer read which I really enjoyed recently. The Feast by Margaret Kennedy was published in 1950 and it’s set in 1947. Republished by Faber in 2021, they’re definitely marketing it as a summer read:

To describe the premise of The Feast is to do it a disservice in a way, because it sounds so trite and contrived. But I promise you that Kennedy is such a skilled writer that it works beautifully.

She sets it up the plot enticingly in the prologue. Two clergyman are holidaying together, but one of them has to work. Within Reverend Bott’s Cornish parish, there has been a catastrophe. A cliff has subsided into the sea, burying Pendizack Manor hotel and several of its inhabitants. Others escaped as they were at the titular picnic at the time, and they’ve told him quite a story… we then go back to seven days before the event to meet all the guests and staff who were there in run-up to the disaster.

It’s here that the overarching contrivance occurs – among the characters are representations of the seven deadly sins. We have the guests: Lady Gifford as greed; Mrs Cove as covetousness; Mrs Lechene as lechery; Canon Wraxton as wrath; and Mr Paley as pride. Amongst the staff we have owner Mr Siddal as sloth and housekeeper Miss Ellis as envy. Some of these characters are monstrous in their behaviour and yet Kennedy always keeps them recognisably human.

Lady Gifford is comparatively benign, albeit entirely self-serving, self-pitying and unconcerned with the impact she has on her family. Her husband no longer loves her, and the holiday brings their marriage to breaking point:

“For a few minutes he could not reply. At last he said, “I shall never live with you again. There’s nothing in life you value more than your saucer of cream.”

“Why shouldn’t I? I can afford cream. Why shouldn’t I go to live where the cream is?”

“I won’t live with you any more. You’re not human.”

Lady Gifford closed her eyes and lay back upon her pillows. Hard words break no bones, as both of them knew very well. He left her and went downstairs.”

While the Gifford’s children are disregarded, Mrs Cove actively wishes her children harm. She is one of the most disturbing characters in the book, neglecting her children to the point of abuse. As her daughter Blanche reflects:

“She did not love her mother. None of them did, nor had it ever occurred to them that they ought to do so. She had never asked for their affection. But neither did they criticize or rebel against her. She pervaded and ruled their lives like some unpropitious climate, and they accepted her rule as inevitable, evading its harshness by instinct rather than by reason. […] Nothing of importance had ever been said to them in their mother’s voice and many characters in their favourite books were more real to them than she was. They seldom thought about her.”

The younger members of the Gifford and Cove families join forces and provide some solace – and danger – for each other.

“The children vanished, rising up like a flock of starlings immediately after luncheon and betaking themselves to some hidden place. They retired into their own world, as children will when their elders misbehave. Bewildered, unable to judge, they turned their backs upon the ugly memory.”

Meanwhile, among the adults, alliances are forged and romances begun. The biggest change occurs in Canon Wraxton’s brow-beaten daughter Evangeline. At the start of the novel she has deeply worrying habit:

“Perhaps it was a waste of time, to grind up glass with a nail file, but surely nothing worse? Because she would never use it, she would never do anything wicked with it. And that little pill box full of powdered glass was such a relief to possess. They said it could never be detected in a person’s food…It was a very powerful little treasure, that box. She kissed it sometimes.”

But she develops a really touching friendship with Mrs Paley, whose marriage to the prideful Paul is utterly dead, and things start to change for them both:

“They found a comfortable little hollow in some heather close to the shelter and lay upon their backs, side by side, watching the stars come out and discussing the best way to make the tea ration last. Neither felt the least impulse, just then, to confide in the other. But they knew what united them. They were a little astonished at themselves and inclined to giggle, as women will when they embark upon some daring adventure.”

But if I’ve made The Feast sound very dark, I’ve done it a disservice. Kennedy doesn’t shy away from the worst of human nature and her astute characterisation makes the behaviour all too real. But there are lighter moments too. Those of you who dislike historical fiction might enjoy Mr Siddal’s description of Anna Lechene’s craft:

“She writes well. Everybody does nowadays. She writes this biographical fiction, or fictional biography, whichever you like to call it. She takes some juicy scandal from the life of a famous person, and writes a novel round it. Any facts that don’t suit her go out. Any details she wants to invent come in. She’s saved the trouble of creating plot and characters and she doesn’t have to be accurate because it’s only a novel, you know.”

I also enjoyed this description of Sir Henry’s politics, breaking up a tense scene:

“Everybody seemed to be very angry. They were saying many things which Sir Henry himself had thought during the course of the day, but with which he now began to disagree. For he was a Liberal – the kind of Liberal which turns pink in blue surroundings and lilac at any murmur from Moscow.

In Pendizack Lounge he inclined to pink.”

The tension in the narrative occurs precisely because the reader knows what is going to happen and as the portraits of the various characters built over the week, I really hoped some of them ended up under the cliff while others survived!

The Feast is an enjoyable, compelling read with plenty to say and plenty to entertain.

To end, an English PEN event took place when Faber re-released The Feast. The discussion is really interesting particularly in giving some wider context around Kennedy’s writing:

“Love is at once always absurd and never absurd.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

This is the sixth instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The sixth volume, The Kindly Ones, was published in 1962 and is set around the start of World War Two. This felt a bit of a departure from previous volumes in some ways. We learn a lot more about Nick in this novel; he features much more directly in his own narrative. Powell also shockingly almost approaches a plot in The Kindly Ones, confounding my expectations 😀

The volume starts by looking back in time, with Nick remembering his childhood at Stonehurst, just before World War I broke out. My favourite character from At Lady Molly’s makes a reappearance: General Alymer Conyers, proving himself good in a crisis and kind to those who need it most.

He is visiting Nick’s parents, and I was interested to learn more about them. They are presented with the same clear-sighted economy with which Powell treats so many of his characters, which I found striking in consideration of close family. Nick doesn’t seem to like his father particularly, but there is no rancour or resentment there either:

“’I like to rest my mind after work,’ he would say. ‘I don’t like books that make me think.’

[…]

The one thing he hated, more than constituted authority itself, was to hear constituted authority questioned by anyone but himself. This is perhaps an endemic trait in all who love power, and my father had an absolute passion for power, although he was never in a position to wield it on a notable scale.”

Powell has a knack of presenting his characters with discernment, but without the heavy moral judgement which would make the volumes pretty unreadable. It’s an intelligent, sensitive approach and I think it contributes to writing that is so of its time still managing not to date badly.

It’s hard to see where Nick’s objectivity and distance from his entirely conventional upbringing has occurred, although his friend Moreland suggests maybe Nick’s life wasn’t as conservative as it seemed, in comparison to his own:

“’Ours was, after all, a very bourgeois Bohemianism,’ he used to say. ‘Attending the Chelsea Arts Ball in absolutely historically correct Renaissance costume was regarded as the height of dissipation by most of the artists we knew. Your own surroundings were far more bizarre.’”

Moreland isn’t doing so well, and in the second part of the novel Nick and Isobel have gone to stay with him and Matilda in the country.

“It became clear these fits of ennui were by no means a thing of the past. He would sit for hours without speaking, nursing a large tabby cat called Farinelli.”

They end up at a party with Sir Magnus Donners, where Nick’s old schoolfriend Templar is present with his wife Betty, who is thoroughly depressed. I was struck by the portrayals of female mental illness in this volume. Within this tale are two women who are suffering greatly and Powell treats them with understanding and compassion, never dismissing it with misogyny around ‘hysteria’ which I suspect was much more prevalent at the time.

At the start of the novel the Jenkins’ housemaid Billson has what we would probably now call a dissociative episode, which is where General Conyers intervenes in the manner I mentioned above. At Donner’s party years later, Nick’s compassion is with Betty rather than his friend:

“She had been shattered by the unequal battle. The exercise of powerful ‘charm’ is, in any case, more appreciated in public than in private life, exacting, as it does, almost as heavy demands on the receiver as the transmitter, demands often too onerous to be weighed satisfactorily against the many other, all too delicate, requirements of married life. No doubt affairs with other women played their part as well.”

The plot I was so surprised to find occurs in the next part of the story. During the childhood episode that begins the novel, we encounter mystic/charlatan Dr Trelawney. He reappears as Nick makes a visit to sort out his Uncle Giles’ effects at a seaside hotel and a somewhat dramatic scene ensues, which Nick helps to resolve by dredging up childhood memories. Dr Trelawney is a sinister character, as Nick observes in his room: “A scent vaguely disturbing, like Dr Trelawney’s own personality.” But he is not a comic creation, rather adding to the sense of foreboding around world events:

“There was something decidedly unpleasant about him, sinister, at the same time absurd, that combination of the ludicrous and alarming soon to be widely experienced by contact with those set in authority in wartime.”

If I’ve made The Kindly Ones sound very heavy though, I’ve done it an injustice. There are still plenty of comic moments to enjoy, such as the reappearance of the fortune-telling Mrs Erdleigh, who had met Nick’s late mother-in-law:

“’Lady Warminster was a woman amongst women,’ said Mrs Erdleigh.’ I shall never forget her gratitude when I revealed to her that Tuesday was the best day for the operation of revenge.’”

There is also Nick’s continued gentle ribbing of his brother-in-law: “Erridge, a rebel whose life had been exasperatingly lacking in persecution.”

And Widmerpool behaves with pomposity, even though he is always underscored by a sense of menace:

“I recognised that a world war was going to produce worse situations than Widmerpool’s getting above himself and using a coarsely military boisterousness of tone to which his civilian personality could make no claim.”

The novel ends with Nick getting his longed-for commission in the army as an officer. He could have joined as a squaddie but obviously that would never do 😀 (I can’t be too scathing about Nick’s reluctance/snobbery, given I’d be terrified to join the army and utterly useless if I did.)

I expect the next volume will cover the war years which have been building throughout the last few volumes. Given its title of The Valley of Bones, I wonder if Powell will allow Nick to sustain that ironic distance. I’ll be intrigued to find out.

“At the back of one’s mind sounded a haunting resonance, a faint disturbing buzz, that was not far from fear.”

“A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.” (Toni Morrison)

/ madamebibilophile / 29 Comments

Many of you will know that Ali who blogs at heavenali is doing a year with Margaret Drabble throughout 2024. Ali’s posts of her Drabble reading so far have been really enticing and so I was determined to pick up this author whom I had never read.

A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) was Drabble’s first novel and was published when she was just 24. It’s a really impressive achievement and has definitely encouraged me to read more by her. (Which is lucky as someone cleared out their Drabble collection into my local charity bookshop recently, so there were several Penguin paperbacks with appalling 1980s covers available. Yes, I know it was preposterous to buy them all, but there was something about them all coming from the same reader and staying together that I liked. Also I’ll justify my book-buying any which way 😀 I think the same reader also cleared out their Penelope Livelys and I’m trying to resist…)

(I am genuinely perverse because I honestly wish, if I am going to have these monstrosities, that they were all the same style and the worst one, which to my eyes are the ones with the faces and the dark backgrounds. I just have to reassure myself that they’re all pretty terrible 😀 )

A Summer Bird-Cage is the examination of the relationship between two sisters, from the point of view of the younger one, Sarah, recently graduated from Oxford. She feels directionless and is returning from tutoring in Paris to see her older sister married. Louise also went to Oxford and she is academically less successful than Sarah; she is also breathtakingly beautiful.

A Summer Bird-Cage is an interesting period piece in many ways, as it captures that time when women had more freedom and more choices, but not quite enough. The expectations and pressures towards domestic fulfilment are still significant.

“I thought about jobs, and seriousness, and about what a girl can do with herself if over-educated and lacking a sense of vocation. Louise had one answer, of course. She was getting married.”

The sisters are not close at all and A Summer Bird-Cage is written with a refreshing lack of sentimentality but also a lack of any real jealousy. (Drabble’s sister was AS Byatt and they were both quite open about the fact that while they had a reasonable relationship most of the time, they also weren’t close.) At times Sarah may envy Louise her beauty, and the choices brought by her husband’s wealth, but most of the time she has a bemused indifference.

“There is just this basic antipathy, this long rooted suspicion, that kept us so rigorously apart.”

Sarah is definitely not jealous of Louise’s cold, snobbish husband Stephen, and I really liked this scene from a conversation she has with him at the wedding reception as Stephen pontificates on Art with a capital A:

“ ‘No no, the well-observed norm, that is what art is about. The delicacy of the perception will compensate for any lack of violence.’

 I think he was quoting from one of his reviews.”

We don’t really get to know Louise because Sarah doesn’t know her, and Drabble resists the temptation for fully-drawn, psychologically rounded portraits which would compromise the first-person point of view. Instead the novel portrays the unknowingness of other human beings, even those who are consistently in our lives to a greater or lesser degree.

“I wondered why she was such a mystery, why she didn’t fit together, why she was so unpredictable.”

There isn’t a plot as such, rather we follow Sarah through her first year out of university while her boyfriend is at Harvard; the unhappy lives of her friends; and the unhappy marriage of Louise. Sarah is young, and she can be snarky and judgemental. But what stops her being unbearable is that she fully acknowledges her own shortcomings, and will direct her snarkiness towards herself as much as anyone else:

“Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.”

It’s astonishing to me that Drabble wrote A Summer Bird-Cage at just 24. There is the occasional sentence that is a bit too clever-clever and clunky, and the denouement felt a little bit clumsy given the way the sisters’ relationship had been portrayed up to that point, but these are really minor quibbles. If this is what she achieved in her first novel I can’t wait to see what heights she climbs to later in her writing.

“I don’t know why, but it was only then that I began to realise she was vulnerable. It seemed at the time like a clever and perceptive discovery, but I suppose that in fact it was extremely belated.”

You can read Ali’s wonderful review of this novel here.

To end, a trailer from the RSC’s 2014 production of The White Devil by John Webster, which is where the title of the novel comes from. Of course Sarah would name her book through a literary reference: