Faber Editions

“Every night he tried himself and every night he acquitted himself.” (Emeric Pressburger, The Glass Pearls)

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Well, it’s only February but I already think that I’ve read one of the most extraordinary books of my year: The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger (1966).  Most pleasingly, it was a twofer for reading events this month, #ReadIndies hosted by Kaggsy as it is published by Faber as one of their Faber Editions series; and Hungarian Literature Month hosted by Winston’s Dad as Emeric Pressburger was born in Miskolc, Hungary.

Pressburger studied in Prague, moving to Weimar-era Berlin and then escaping the Nazis by moving first to Paris then London. It was there he met Michael Powell, and the powerhouse filmmaking duo was formed. I’m a big fan of Powell and Pressburger films, and it was this that led me to read The Glass Pearls (and a nice chat with the bookseller who is also a P&P fan.) But it absolutely stands on its own terms, not simply as curio for cinephiles.

At the start of the novel, Karl Braun is moving into a lodging house in Pimlico, unloading a few items from a piano tuner’s van. His neighbours are curious, but mild-mannered Karl soon fits in. His fellow lodgers, Strohmayer who always has a deal on the go, and Kolm, a concert-loving chemist, are also European émigrés who escaped Hitler’s regime and assume Braun is the same. But the reader soon knows something the characters don’t: Braun is a Nazi escaping justice from the trials.

“I have lived for twenty years according to self-imposed rules; it wasn’t easy and I’m not going to change my ways now. I denied myself everything I used to enjoy most.”

Pressburger’s mother died at Auschwitz, as did many members of his extended family. In this astonishing novel he writes from the point of view of a Nazi doctor who carried out atrocities at Wittau concentration camp.  It is so brilliantly done. The third-person narrative means it is presented as this is the man, this is what he did and how he now lives, which means as a reader you can stick with it where a first-person narrative would be too much to ask. But in writing from Braun’s point of view, it is also made personal, and you are asked to spend time alongside someone who has repeatedly taken unforgivable actions, for which he feels no remorse.

Braun frequently has nightmares about pursuit and capture, and justifies himself at imagined trials thusly:

“He would never do anything to serve only his own purpose unless it served the common purpose as well. He would go to any length to help others, disregarding his own interest. He loved his work; he was a good family man; adored his wife and child; he was religious, prayed to God and respected his laws. He was a romantic and romantics were the salt of this earth.”

And in this way Pressburger consistently shows us the man, his complete and utter delusion, his cruelty and vanity, and also makes him recognisable.

Braun leads an ordinary life in post-war London. He has a love interest who he takes to concerts in a sedate courtship; he has to navigate his workplace politics; he chats to his fellow lodgers. No-one knows he is Dr Otto Reitmüller.

“He made enough money for his needs, he even had a little in the bank. He enjoyed a good book, a good play, a good concert, a good talk. What else does a man want from life?”

We know one thing he wants: his wife and child back, killed in Hamburg bombings. Braun wasn’t with them, called back to camp to continue his horrors, which are portrayed clearly, sickeningly, but not sensationally.

Braun isn’t pretending to be cultured, or bereaved. He is both those things and an unrepentant torturer. It is powerful portrait that demands responsibility from those who enact war crimes, but also from those who witness, to acknowledge how it could happen again when the people who did it were ordinary – friends and neighbours.

His paranoia steadily grows as the newspapers report on the trials, the deadlines are extended, and a fellow fugitive urges him to get the money they stashed in Swiss bank account and join ‘the Brotherhood’ to live out their days in Argentina.

“He knew he could never have stuck it out in prison. His strong sense of justice would have reared up against petty persecutions by his warders.”

Braun becomes more fearful and restless. Two men seem to be watching him, the tension mounts, and while I didn’t want him to escape, The Glass Pearls absolutely worked on the level of a thriller where you are speeding through it to know the outcome.

“One had to be careful about the deductive powers of a fertile brain. Once trained for critical examination and to present the fullest picture of possible dangers to its master, the brain tended to overdo things were not watched too closely.”

It felt Hitchcockian in many ways, but a reversal of the innocent man pursued by shady forces.

“Suddenly he knew that all he was yearning for was peace.”

There’s a very interesting Afterword in this edition from filmmaker Kevin Macdonald, who is also Pressburger’s grandson. He movingly describes Pressburger’s survivors guilt and how when he developed dementia, he had delusions of being chased by Nazis. Astonishingly, he also says:

“Emeric went so far as to imbue the Braun character with certain traits of his own; such that, to some degree, Braun is a self-portrait.”

To end, a trailer for a delightful Powell and Pressburger film that is slightly less well-known than some of their big hitters. I’m not the biggest fan of romance but it would take a heart of stone to resist the charm of I Know Where I’m Going!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.30

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Mrs Caliban – Rachel Ingalls (1982) 117 pages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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