Read Indies

“Two English meals a day would have done for me.” (Antal Szerb, The Pendragon Legend)

/ madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

This month I started off my reading for Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event with an author that the event had led me to discover last year: Gertrude Trevelyan. So it seemed apt to end this month’s reading with another author #ReadIndies had introduced me to last year: Antal Szerb. In 2024 reading Love in Bottle in February led to Journey by Moonlight for the 1937 Club in April. This time I’m looking at The Pendragon Legend (1934, transl. Len Rix 2006) which is published by the always reliable Pushkin Press.

The Pendragon Legend is Szerb’s first novel, and utterly bonkers. As I was reading it I remembered why I had enjoyed my previous Szerb reads so much: his wit, fun, intelligence without superiority, gentle ribbing without malice, make him such a joy.

The narrator Janos Bátky is a young scholar who spends his time hanging around the British Library Reading Room. Luckily for him, he has no need for money:

“My nature is to spend years amassing the material for a great work and, when everything is at last ready, I lock it away in a desk drawer and start something new.”

His current interest is Rosicrucians: “Nothing interests me more than the way people relate emotionally to the abstract.”  This ancient secretive organisation’s interests include: “Changing base metals into gold, deliberately prolonging the life of the body, the ability to see things at a distance, and a kabbalistic system for solving all mysteries.”

This leads to him being introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd who invites Janos to stay at Pendragon Castle and make use of his library. Janos heads off to Wales with some acquaintances in tow, unheeding the warnings of a mysterious telephone call… (why do people never heed mysterious telephonic warnings??)

Shortly into his stay there are both earthly concerns when bullets are stolen from his gun and metaphysical concerns where he seems to be haunted:

“Just to be clear on this: not for a moment did I think it could be any sort of ghostly apparition. While it is a fact that English castles are swarming with ghosts, they are visible only to natives – certainly not to anyone from Budapest.”

(This isn’t the only time Janos confuses England and Wales, despite the fact he encounters similar ignorance when people insist he must be German and that Hungary doesn’t exist: “’Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.’”)

There are femme fatales, reluctant heroes, knowing castle staff… my favourite character was the capable and blunt Lene Kretsch:

“This was how our friendship began: I set myself on fire and she put me out. I’d been sitting by the hearth with The Times. I’ve never been able to handle English newspapers – apparently one has to be born with the knack of folding these productions into the microscopic dimensions achieved by the natives – and, as I flicked a page over, the entire room filled with newsprint.”

And so The Pendragon Legend is a mystery, a thriller, a Gothic ghost story, a fable, and with the arrival of the Earl’s niece Cynthia, a romance, despite Janos’ callowness:

“I can never feel much attraction to a woman whom I consider clever – it feels too much like courting a man.”  

Maybe Cynthia has more tolerance for him as she comes from a family where: “At most, the Pendragons tolerate women within the limits of marriage, and even then without much enthusiasm.”

Szerb satirises romance along with all the other tropes and genres he employs, but always with affection and never with any disdain. Somehow Janos and assorted friends bumble their way through the mystery, despite the poisonings, blackmail and hauntings which dog their steps.

My one reservation is that it became a bit too esoteric towards the end, but this is a matter of personal taste and feels a bit mean-spirited in the face of such an affectionate and fun tale.

If you fancy a pacy, ridiculous, learned adventure, The Pendragon Legend is for you.

“I was filled with the tenderness I always feel – and which nothing can match – when I encounter so many books together. At moments like these I long to wallow, to bathe in them, to savour their wonderful, dusty, old-book odours, to inhale them through my very pores.”

“Words burst forth, recognised at last, while underneath other silences start to form.” (Annie Ernaux, The Years)

/ madamebibilophile / 17 Comments

#ReadIndies is running all month hosted by Kaggsy and Lizzy and it has meant I’ve finally got to a book that I’ve been meaning to read for ages: The Years by Annie Ernaux (2008, transl. Alison L. Strayer 2018) published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

A further incentive was that I really want to see the theatre adaptation which is currently running, and now I’ve read the book I have bought my ticket 😊

The Years is a book which deliberately avoids categorisation. Told in chronological order from 1941 to 2006 but in a fragmentary style, it is a memoir/autobiography/autofiction where Ernaux never uses the first person. She refers to ‘she’ for the more personal memories triggered by photographic images, and ‘we’ for considerations of the society and cultural influences experienced by ‘she’ at the time.

Growing up, she is aware of the poverty of her family, and dreams of escape. Ernaux captures so well the confusion of trying to find an authentic escape, trying to determine what she truly wants, alongside what advertising tells her she wants:

“Meanwhile, as we waited to be old enough to wear Rouge Baiser lipstick and perfume by Bourjois with a j as in joy, we collected plastic animals hidden in bags of coffee, and from Menier chocolate wrappers, Fables of La Fontaine stamps that we swapped with friends at break time.”

“It seems to her that education is more than just a way to escape poverty. It is a weapon of choice against stagnation in a kind of feminine condition that arouses her pity, the tendency to lose oneself in a man.”

There are strong feminist themes running throughout The Years, as she grows up on the brink of societal change. At the start:

“Nothing, not intelligence, education, or beauty mattered as much as a girl’s sexual reputation, that is, her value on the marriage market, which mothers scrupulously monitored as their mothers had done before them.”

Yet the 1960s are on their way… Ernaux pulls no punches in detailing the tyranny of menstrual cycles, and of “kitchen table abortions” before the contraceptive pill arrives and pregnancy terminations are legalised.

“Between the freedom of Bardot, the taunting of boys who claimed that virginity was bad for the health, and the dictates of Church and parents, we were left with no choices at all.”

The Years is lightened by humour too, such as this wry observation regarding her young feminist:

“Two future goals coexist inside her: (1) to be thin and blonde, (2) to be free, autonomous, and useful to the world. She dreams of herself as Mylène Demongeot and Simone de Beauvoir.”

The Years is a powerful evocation of a woman’s life at a specific time. Ernaux demonstrates so clearly how lives are bound up with the culture and the wider political forces in which they take place. It is impossible to consider the life in The Years without considering France in the same period. Yet this is an observation which occurs as she looks back, not at the time:

“Between what happens in the world and what happens to her, there is no point of convergence. They are two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received them forgotten, the other all static shots.”

But as she grows older:

“What is most changed in her is the perception of time and her own location within it.”

And yet,plus ca change plus c’est la même chose, as Ernaux notes consumerism and its false promises endure:

“More than a sense of possession it was this feeling people sought on the shelves of Zara and H&M, instantly granted upon acquiring things, a supplement of being.”

The fragmentary style in The Years is perfect example of an experimental style being grounded by the story it wishes to tell, rather than being employed just for the sake of being different or to demonstrate the author’s cleverness. It conveys the experience of memory as well as the memories themselves. As a reader you are drawn into the layering of images, feelings and experiences in such a direct and immersive way, with all the intimacy of a first-person narrative despite the fact that Ernaux never articulates ‘I’.

“Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and death bed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.”

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.” (Emily Dickinson)

/ madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

This week as part of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event I’m looking at book published by Taproot Press, “an Edinburgh-based publisher committed to presenting challenging, contemporary voices from both Scotland and beyond.”

I was keen to read Hope Never Knew Horizon by Douglas Bruton (2024) as Susan’s review and Kaggsy’s review were both glowing. It sounded truly inventive and unlike anything else I could remember reading.

There are three strands to the story, united by the theme of hope. It opens in 1891 with the Wexford Whale, beached off the coast of Ireland, caught and ultimately sent to the Natural History Museum. One of the locals is sure there is money to be made, but his love interest is sceptical:

“And all Ned Wickham’s spittle-words slap against the walls of the Wexford Arms like the sea in a breached harbour, and they fall back on Ned Wickham and wash over him, and soon enough he slumps in his chair and falls into sleep. And if you lean into the sleeping drunk and listen sharp as pins, you can sometimes still hear the man talking, all his words sluiced and slopping”

The second strand follows Emily Dickinson in the 1850s, through the eyes of her housekeeper Margaret. She sees what no-one else seems to, that Emily is in love with her sister-in-law Susan:

“If I delayed in passing the letter on to Miss Emily it was only briefly and only so I might have something of that love to myself a while.”

The third strand is set in 1880s London, narrated by Ada Alice Pullen, model to famous artists of the day and stage actress under the name of Dorothy Dene. She is painted by Frederick Leighton for the most part, and enters into a Pygmalion-type relationship with him (there is an amusing scene where they are visited by George Bernard Shaw who apparently did base the famous play at least partly on their experience):

“How could I not love the man who made that possible, who took me to the highest point of the world and showed me what was to be conquered – now that I had conquered his heart?”

But it is George Frederic Watts who will capture her as Hope forever.

Bruton is so good at evoking the various voices in his tale. Cheeky, knowing Ada; reverential Margaret, and the various voices that make up the whale strand, which runs up to the twenty-first century, where the whale skeleton has been cleaned and repaired and reinstated at the Hintze Hall. Throughout the bones’ history, people have heard their “hopeful song”:

“Do not think for a moment that the bones in those boxes sat quiet and still […] and if you asked that museum assistant what that sound was he would shrug and say it was like the shushing of the sea, the same that you hear when holding a seashell to the ear, and it was the kick and kick of water and a moaning sound, like music that is wayward and wordless and wild.”

Historical fiction can be hard to pull off and in this short novella Bruton avoids info-dumping. The historical details emerge organically from the narratives, keeping the various stories’ momentum throughout. Similarly, his beautiful prose style never weighs the stories down. There is stunning imagery but it always serves the characters voices.

He also manages the issue of fictionalising real people and events adroitly, not only through an epilogue but also in Margaret’s acknowledgement of her narrative’s shortcomings:

“She din’t actually say that about her heart surely breaking but in what she did say was the sense of what I have written or the feeling anyway.”

“I have perhaps invented a life for her that is more to do with my hopes than hers.”

Which of course aren’t shortcomings at all. We all have faulty memories and we all interpret. Margaret’s story may be hers as much as Emily’s, and it is so moving in her love and hopes for her mistress.

The narratives are united by a theme of love as well as hope. Ada and Frederick’s relationship is filled with love even when not expressed; the whale strand ends on a very moving evocation of the love of teaching and learning. The various parts are finely balanced and I found Hope Never Knew Horizon immensely moving across all three timelines.

What Bruton shows is that hope is an enduring and fundamentally human experience. We live with uncertainty and while there is uncertainty there is hope. He demonstrates that hope can exist alongside the realities of the life that has to be lived. Hope Never Knew Horizon is a gentle, compassionate book to be treasured.

Hope the Whale

“Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson

Hope by George Frederic Watts

“An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.” (William Manchester)

/ madamebibilophile / 13 Comments

Last year Kaggsy and Lizzy’s brilliant #ReadIndies event led to me discovering Gertrude Trevelyan’s novels Two-Thousand Million Man-Power (1937) and William’s Wife (1938). These are published by Boiler House Press, part their Recovered Books series edited by Brad Bigelow, founder of www.neglectedbooks.com, which brings “forgotten and often difficult to find books back into print for a new generation to enjoy.”

#ReadIndies 2025 felt a perfect opportunity to return to Gertrude Trevelyan and her 1934 novel, As It Was In The Beginning, also part of the Recovered Books series.

This was quite different in style to her other novels I’d read, sustaining stream-of-consciousness. This approach lent itself perfectly to the story, as a woman lies dying in a nursing home, remembering her life.

“Alone with the white sheets and the polished floor and the fire crackling jerkily in the sunken grate and the sun beating against the yellow blinds, and the dull white furniture. All quite clean. Everybody finished up and gone.”

Millicent is well-to-do, formerly Lady Chesborough. She isn’t particularly likeable: she is grouchy, ill-tempered, and rude to the nursing staff. We are privy to her dismissive, judgmental thoughts about those who care for her.

“Oh, so it isn’t the pink-cheeked one this time. Thin and sallow. Dark. Sister, that’s it. Scrubbed all the pink out with the carbolic. Suppose a Sister has been scrubbed longer than a nurse.”

Millicent is also vain about looking younger than she is, about her slender frame and her hair. The reader is aware that she may no longer look as she thinks she does. In this way her vanity is almost defiant, a refusal to accept what is happening to her. It is also bound up in her affair with a younger man, Phil, who used her for money after her husband died.

“That slow smile that seemed to pick things up and weigh them and find they weren’t worth your while and put them down with gentle derision: knowing it was nothing, but not wanting to hurt too much.”

Millicent’s awareness of Phil’s caddishness comes and goes. Her reminiscences are interwoven with her present, muddling her memories with visits from her niece Sonia, the doctor on his rounds and the nurses she is so rude about.

This so well done, meaning the reader becomes a detective, working out what is real, what is imagined, what is memory; what is Millicent’s self-delusion from the time and what is delusion now.

We are then taken back to her marriage with Harold, and Trevelyan deals frankly with Millicent trying to fit in with the expectations for a privileged woman at the start of the last century, and how this stifles her needs and wants, including sexual desire.

“It wasn’t a woman Harold married, but a shell: that’s the truth of it. Something correct in white satin, labelled The Bride.”

Trevelyan doesn’t demonise Harold, but shows how he and Millicent are both products of their time. (Although never specified, I’ve assumed Millicent was born around the 1880s, to be in her fifties or thereabouts when the novel was published, and coming of age in Edwardian England.) They are unable to voice what is lacking for them, and struggle to understand this lack when they have done all that is expected. Millicent has a brief outburst of passion which shocks Harold, and they retreat into distance.

“It was that way of appropriating his surroundings; everything having to fit into a relationship with himself. My house. My wife. Yes, that’s it: Harold’s wife, not myself. That’s what I felt, all those years. My wife, my dog: though he was courteous enough: I’m not fair to Harold. Never could be fair to him. He was too fair himself in that cold way. Not that I ever wanted him to be anything but cold: it was just that which made things bearable: that routine of courteous remoteness we’d settled into.”

This leaves her vulnerable to the later manipulations of Phil, who offers her sexual passion in return for her money.

As Millicent leaves the present further behind, the narrative focuses more and more on her reminiscences. It is expertly done, as the nurses and the clinical surroundings fade further away.

We learn of her childhood, and her struggles as she is taught societal expectations. Her relationship with her first love, a childhood friend, is affected negatively when she becomes old enough to have to put her hair up and can no longer play with him as they used to, as she is now considered a woman rather than a girl.

Millicent’s past explains her choices – and lack thereof – so clearly. As a child she found her body cumbersome. She feels she failed Harold by not giving him a child. She worries she is not enough for Phil because she is nearly old enough to be his mother.

“Don’t want to be a little girl. Don’t want to be a grown up either, grown-ups are silly. They don’t know anything. Don’t ask so many questions: that’s when they don’t know things. Don’t be silly, you’ll know that when you grow up, you’ll find that out soon enough, plenty of time for that when you’re older, little pitchers have long ears, little girls should be seen and not heard curiosity killed the cat.”

Trevelyan uses Millicent to explore the disproportionate focus put on (privileged Edwardian) women’s appearance as their main role and contribution. She has her vanities because society has told her this is her value. There is a sense that as she leaves her body behind, Millicent is achieving the freedom she always wanted.

“I don’t know why people should look at me like that. I suppose they can see I’m not anything. I don’t see how they can see I’m not anything. They’re all solid and I’m hollow, but they can’t see that.”

I would absolutely urge anyone to pick up Trevelyan, but As It Was In The Beginning is probably not the best starting point. I’m fine with stream-of-consciousness, but I thought the first part with the memories of Phil was slightly too long and could have done with an edit. The other two novels I have read by her I thought were stronger, and more approachable in style.

However, I thought stream-of-consciousness was perfect for this story. As It Was In The Beginning provides a powerful exploration of the role of women at that time in a way that is intensely personal, while making astute observations about society. Trevelyan is such an accomplished writer who always manages to drive home her wider points without ever losing sight of her characters. I’m so glad Boiler House Press have rescued three of her novels as she deserves to be so much better known.

“Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.” (D. H. Lawrence)

/ madamebibilophile / 18 Comments

For this final week of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s brilliant #ReadIndies event, I’m focusing on three books from Boiler House Press, and their Recovered Books series edited by Brad Bigelow, founder of www.neglectedbooks.com, which brings “forgotten and often difficult to find books back into print for a new generation to enjoy.”

Five years ago, I read Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar and it’s a novel that really stayed with me. The portrait of an isolated woman’s descent into serious mental illness, told from her own perspective, was deeply unsettling. I was put very much in mind of it when reading William’s Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan (1938).

At the start of the novel Jane is in her twenties and marrying the older, widowed Mr William Chirp, a local business owner.

“Jane had worked for her money, she knew the value of it. Knew how to save, and knew how to spend, too. All good quality, all of the very best. Mr Chirp might have done worse for a manager.”

But this is near the turn of the last century, and women are not managers of shops, they are managers of homes which are not as easy to leave. Jane is not a pleasant manager; she is quick to judge her maids and condescending, such as this early interaction over a fire:

“‘Why isn’t it laid,’ she asked haughtily, ‘this time of year?’ All alike.

‘The master wouldn’t never have it laid, not unless someone come. Will I lay it now, mum?’

Jane turned round sharply. ‘And quite right too. Wasting coal. No, certainly not.’”

Jane soon learns that it doesn’t matter if she knows how to spend on quality items, her husband will not have her spending at all. He is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. His want of generosity is spiritual as well as financial: he has no hobbies, no interests and no friends. His inability to value anything beyond material wealth accumulation for its own sake is brought into shocking focus during World War I:

“What the war was costing, that was what upset him. All those millions they wrote down in the papers. Though what was that to the government? The same as a few shillings to people like them. His face getting longer and longer, while he read about it. You’d think he was paying for it himself.”

Told in the third person from Jane’s perspective, the novel brilliantly builds the oppression of her marriage to this appalling person. Having Jane as not likable but still very sympathetic is a masterstroke by Trevelyan. It stops the tale becoming sentimental or easily dismissed as unrealistic. Instead, it is horribly believable.

The portrait of William is comical at times too, and this is finely judged. It doesn’t detract from the horror of Jane’s life with him at all. His reported speech is so minimal and trite as to be almost nonsensical. But his ridiculousness adds to the oppression: she is stuck with this man whose ignorance is so extensive as to make him absurd.

“At the end of April they stopped having the fire laid; the grate was filled in with crinkly blue paper in a fan. William sat with his feet in the fender and his hands, when he forgot, cupped over the paper fan.”

We see Jane scrabble to accumulate her own wealth through various small deceptions, necessary as her husband controls all her money and monitors it minutely. After he retires, William extends his miserliness to the time Jane spends away, commenting on the time whenever she returns from town. There is no physical violence in the marriage and no suggestion of what he will do if she takes longer than he thinks appropriate, but the control is absolute.

SPOILERS ahead: But further horrors await Jane when William dies. Her feelings of oppression do not dissipate, nor does her tight hold of money.

“It wasn’t until she found her money in the bag at the bottom of the basket and tipped it out carefully, with a cushion under, on the table, so that it shouldn’t chink, that she remembered William wasn’t about to hear it. It did seem queer, not having to be careful. Though it was all for the best, taking care; you never knew who might be about outside, listening to what was going on.”

She has taken on William’s prejudice, paranoia, and inability to spend. This escalates steadily, resulting in Jane moving several times and living in more and more straightened circumstances:

“She was so happy, having got away to herself, away from all that peeking and tittle-tattling, you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t likely she was going to give away where she was, and have them all coming round again, like flies around a honeypot.”

This is heartbreaking – there is no ‘all’. She has no friends, has alienated her step-daughter, and is entirely alone. As she stops washing herself and her clothes, she is far from a honeypot for anyone. We are kept inside Jane’s unhappy mind, recognising far more than she does about her behaviour and how she is viewed by others.

William’s Wife is a novel that really gets under your skin. The oppression that Jane suffers, firstly through her marriage and then through a mind traumatised by all the years she has endured within that institution, is subtly evoked but relentless. It is a novel of great compassion written with such clear-sightedness that its power – eighty-six years later when women in the UK have far greater financial rights – remains undeniable.

“Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” (Albert Einstein)

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

For the final week of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s brilliant #ReadIndies event, I’m focusing on three books from Boiler House Press. Specifically their Recovered Books series edited by Brad Bigelow, founder of www.neglectedbooks.com, which brings “forgotten and often difficult to find books back into print for a new generation to enjoy.”

My second read from the series is Two-Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan (1937). The title is the only part of this novel that feels cumbersome; Trevelyan writes with fluency and deftness that is so readable.

She follows Katherine and Robert from 1919 to 1936, from their meeting as young idealists through the strains of their marriage and the economic pressures exerted by forces beyond their control.

They belong to “The half-generation between the war and the post war. They had been brought up in one world and jerked out into another” and the novel explores this notion of them being somewhat lost, even from each other. They both struggle to know what to cling to in a time of rapid change.

When they meet, Robert is working as a cosmetic scientist during the day, and on his own formula for the nature of time from his dingy lodgings in the evening:

“He ate quickly, with appetite, undiscriminating. Turning his back on the meal he lit the gas over a small table near the window and felt in his pocket for the scrap of paper with the dotted figures. As the gas came up, the roofs outside the window turned dark grey. The drawer of the table stuck, half open. He banged it back and wrenched at it and found a wad of notes and pulled in his chair. The roofs outside turn black against the sky and then the sky blacked out.”

Katherine believes in lots of things that need capital letters:

“Katherine believed in progress. She believed in the League of Nations and International Goodwill, in Gilbert Murray and Lord Robert Cecil and H.A.L. Fisher, and in the wonders of Science.”

And so she gifts Robert these capital letters, deciding he is “Working Something Out.”

But gradually the societal forces they both wish to resist make themselves felt. They decide to marry, despite Katherine’s disdain:

“She had, besides, a contempt for married women – content with homes and babies and indifferent to the things that mattered: happy, she thought with a slight sneer, in an emotional and humiliating bondage – which made her, illogically, despise even their efforts to escape.”

She is monumentally judgemental of people. Katherine is an intellectual snob, but her love of ideas doesn’t involve any examining of her own life. This means she can stay secure in her absolute belief that she is somehow better and different to those she looks down on, despite appearing remarkably similar to them externally:

“‘We didn’t marry for bourgeois conventional reasons. Our marriage isn’t bourgeois. We married because we wanted to, that’s quite different, not because we were afraid.’”

Katherine loses her teaching job because married women weren’t allowed to continue in posts. Robert then loses his job due to the world economic crisis. This puts immense strain on them both. Katherine takes a private teaching job she despises; Robert very nearly breaks down entirely.

Throughout, Trevelyan weaves in summaries of world events before returning to the tight focus on Robert and Katherine. I’m not entirely sure how she managed it, but somehow this never felt gimmicky or jarring.

“Agricultural machines in France were grading and marking eggs at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Escalators were speeding up, the biggest building in the Empire was in course of construction at Olympia, Katherine and Robert were in their white-enamelled kitchen one Sunday afternoon, washing the tea things in instantaneous hot water and hanging them to dry in an electrically heated rack.”

The fault lines in Robert and Katherine’s marriage, exposed by the economic strain, only widen. Hilariously, Katherine believes herself to be a communist, when she is in fact a relentless materialist. Trevelyan doesn’t judge her too harshly for this:

“She wanted security and comfort and a Life Worth Living. She wanted Robert to get a sound, decent, progressive job.”

Nothing wrong with any of that, except it does also involve Katherine thinking the world owes them some sort of moral obligation – that they “ought to have” things, and sustaining a consumerism that she entirely fails to see as such. Unable to see how her ideals of progress and modernity have become warped, she continues to position herself as intellectually and morally superior, when really it is only tastes in furnishings that separate her from those she is so condescending towards.

Robert meanwhile finds a way to survive in his work while his big idea amounts to very little, as the reader always knew it would. He has insight but no energy, Katherine the opposite. Two-Thousand Million Man-Power isn’t depressing, but I did find it sad. Ultimately Robert and Katherine seemed so isolated and stymied in very different ways.

I came away from this perceptive, clever and compassionate novel keen to read more by Trevelyan, so I was pleased I’d also ordered William’s Wife (1938). Of which more tomorrow!

“A gentleman is simply a patient wolf.” (Lana Turner)

/ madamebibilophile / 23 Comments

During this final week of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s brilliant #ReadIndies event, I’m going to focus on three books from Boiler House Press, and their Recovered Books series, which brings “forgotten and often difficult to find books back into print for a new generation to enjoy.”

I bought these books last year after Brad Bigelow, founder of www.neglectedbooks.com and inspiration for the series, tweeted about how precarious things were. This is why #ReadIndies is such a great event for encouraging support and celebration of indie publishers, whose survival is never guaranteed.

 In this first post, I’m looking at a tragi-comic novella, Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (1937).

Henry Preston Standish, “one of the world’s most boring men”, is aboard the SS Arabella steamship en route from Hawaii to Panama. When he slips on some grease he finds himself plunged into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with hopes of rescue looking pretty slim.

When he first falls overboard, he finds it hard to raise his voice to shout for help, so deeply ingrained is his social conditioning.

“Men of Henry Preston Standish’s class did not go around falling off ships in the middle of the ocean; it just was not done, that was all.”

As he treads water waiting for the Arabella to notice his absence, he reflects on a life where “He did all the proper things, but without enthusiasm.” It’s a real masterstroke that Lewis makes Standish so ordinary, and places him in a situation that is both extreme but also unchanging – a vast expanse of calm ocean. Rather than making the novella dull, it enables a tightly-focussed narrative with a protagonist that inspires sympathy precisely because he is an everyman.

“The whole world was so quiet that Standish felt mystified. The lone ship ploughing through the broad sea, the myriad of stars fading out of the wide heavens – these were all elemental things that both soothed and troubled Standish. It was as if he were learning for the first time that all the vexatious problems of his life were meaningless and unimportant; and yet he felt ashamed at having had them in the same world that could create such a scene as this.”

Poor Standish takes time to realise the hopelessness of his situation, veering from imagined conversations with his family – still framing his experience within his social milieu even when the nearest person is miles away –  to considering drowning as an abstract notion rather than an impending reality:  

“It would not be so terrible to drown if a man went about it sensibly, without losing his head.”

Back on the Arabella, the remaining eight passengers take time to realise Standish is missing. Once they do, they invent a trauma for him – his loyal wife has, in their minds, run off with a “gigolo” – and start rewriting their experience of him in this light.

The humour in Gentleman Overboard is finely balanced. Standish’s desperate holding onto behavioural norms which are gradually shed as the enormity of his situation dawns on him, and the entirely fictional life story the other passengers invent for him, poke fun at the ridiculousness of human behaviour. But Lewis never suggests it is funny that Standish is in mortal danger, or that his dullness should mean it’s any easier for the reader to bear witness to his imminent death.

Brad Bigelow’s Afterword explains reviewers thought Gentleman Overboard both too short (The Saturday Review) and too long (Evelyn Waugh). I agree with those who felt the length was just right. It was long enough to create a moving portrait of a man, but short enough that the tight narrative’s commentary on human existence was made with the lightest touch. Truly memorable.

“But now he saw clearly that life was precious; that everything else, love, money, fame, was a sham when compared with the simple goodness of just not dying.”

“While there is life there is always the chance that something might happen.” (Antal Szerb)

/ madamebibilophile / 19 Comments

This week I’m focussing on Pushkin Press as part of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event in order to read four books that have long been in the TBR. For this final post, my read is Love in a Bottle by Antal Szerb (1922-1943, transl. Len Rix 2013)

This was a really interesting collection, because the stories are presented chronologically and there’s a big gap whereby Szerb’s style changes considerably.

The first three stories are from 1922-23. Ajandok’s Betrothal, The White Magus, and The Tyrant all have a fable-like quality. Told in the third person, they are set in a timeless period and within realities that verge on mythical. While they were very well written, and diverting enough, I didn’t find them hugely interesting.

The rest of the stories are from 1932-1943 and these I found much more original and compelling. The first is Cynthia, a fragment which Pushkin Press omitted in a previous edition as Szerb probably didn’t intend it for publication. It begins:

“When they threw me out of Cambridge for my poor taste in neckties and generally immoral conduct, I enrolled at University College London, whose chief claim to fame (though they kept this private) was that its Dean was obliged, as a matter of principle, to see off any clergymen who dared set foot on the premises.”

I immediately felt hopeful that this change in tone and setting would be much more to my liking 😀

The tale itself is told from the point of view of an unpleasant but believable lothario who doesn’t seem to like women very much. This persona recurs through some of the other stories. In A Dog Called Madelon, a man laments that he has never been able to sleep with aristocratic women, despising the shop assistant he is with:

“He had been reflecting on the way his whole life had been frittered away on a procession of frightful little Jennys, when ever since boyhood he had yearned for a Lady Rothesay. History held the sort of erotic charge for him that others found in actresses’ dressing rooms – a truly great passion required three or four centuries historical background at the very least.”

In Musings in the Library, an “anti-Don Juan” who finds “women rarely please me” manages to completely fumble a fledgling love affair.

What stops these characters from being completely alienating to the reader is firstly, the wry humour that runs through the stories, and secondly the deep inadequacy of the protagonists. They are not meant to be heroic in any way, but rather deluded and sad. The stories all end in their failure, often with ironic circumstances.

In the titular tale, Szerb returns to mythology with Sir Lancelot and his love for Guinevere, but this is markedly different to the previous myth-like stories. Love in a Bottle has a more individual, authentic voice to the narration, and the humour of the contemporary-set tales is evident here too.

Szerb seems to view romantic love in these stories with some scepticism, but not disdain. It is the flawed characters which mean love is never fully realised, rather than problems with the idea itself. In fact, there is a feeling of hope towards love in the way Szerb consistently returns to the theme, but it is the humans involved who make it become ridiculous.

His tone is never bitter though, and he doesn’t judge his characters too harshly. To me Szerb seemed to be highlighting foibles while suggesting no-one was above them.

I also enjoyed Fin de Siècle where Szerb seemed to be having a lot of fun satirising writers. Thus Dr Johnson is noted for his “immortal banalities” and a group of writers who gather together include:

“Lionel Johnson, who would deliver his observations about the weather in the manner of a revelation: ‘There was a thick fog in Chelsea this morning.’ he would regularly announce, and glare balefully around the room, his hand clapped on some invisible sword.”

The humour, intelligence and readable style of the stories in Love in a Bottle has made me keen to explore Szerb more. Fortuitously I have Journey by Moonlight lined up for Kaggsy and Simon’s 1937 Club which is running 15-22 April – can’t wait!

“Looking back on the blissful days of my youth, as they begin to slip away from me, I can see now the best of them were those spent in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.”

“My world was small and terrible.” (Isaac Babel)

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

This week I’m focussing on Pushkin Press as part of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event to finally read four books that have long been in the TBR. For this third post today my read is Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel (1916-1937 transl. Boris Dralyuk 2016).

The Introduction to this volume by translator Boris Dralyuk is really informative and provides some fascinating context to Babel’s writing. Odessa was a booming port when Babel was born in 1894; in 1900 around 140,000 of its 400,000 population was Jewish. Babel was part of a well-to-do family but was drawn to Odessa’s underbelly, writing stories about the legendary gangsters of the city.

Dralyuk also explains about translating the melting-pot language of Odessa, so I highly recommend reading the Introduction before you start on the stories (I often read Introductions at the end). Babel was only 45 when he was killed in Stalin’s purges.

The volume is divided into three parts: Gangsters and Other Old Odessans; Childhood and Youth; and Love Letters and Apocrypha. I always struggle to write about short story collections and generally Babel’s stories are so short that I don’t want to give spoilers. Here I just want to give a flavour and you can see if you might want to seek out these stunning stories for yourself.

The first part is mainly told in the third person and weaves together tales of violence and corruption, with recurring characters including “Benya Krik, gangster and King of the gangsters”. The tales are colourful and carnivalesque, but Babel never allows the broader strokes to obscure the unlawful methods that so many live by:

“At this wedding they served turkey, roast chicken, goose, gefilte fish and fish soup in which lakes of lemon glimmered like mother-of-pearl. Flowers swayed above the dead goose heads like lush plumage. Does the foamy surf of Odessa’s sea wash roast chickens ashore?”

At the same time, he doesn’t position the reader above the gangsters or way of life. Babel suggests that this side of Odessa is as it is because this the logical way to be, and it has emerged as part of the society, laws and political structures that surround it:

“Let’s not throw dust in each other’s eyes. There’s no one else in the world like Benya the King. He cuts through lies and looks for justice, be it justice in quotes or without them. While everyone else, they’re as calm as clams. They can’t be bothered with justice, won’t go looking for it – and that’s worse.”

The second part of the stories in Childhood and Youth becomes more personal, with first-person tales that follow on from one another in some instances. I understand The Story of My Dovecote is the most famous, and rightly so. Within this brilliant collection, it still stands out. (Skip the next two paragraphs if you don’t want to know any details in advance.)

A young boy has spent five of his ten years coveting a dovecote. He manages to find ways around the anti-Semitism at his school to do well academically and get the reward of finally being able to buy his doves. He sets out to the market with his money and gets his beloved birds, tucking them into his jacket. If your heart is sinking at this description, you are absolutely right…

The story is fifteen pages in this edition and completely devastating. I would urge anyone to read it, but it will absolutely stay with you. It will rip your heart out and stamp all over it. The final word of this story is “pogrom”.

There are lighter stories in this section too, such as The Awakening, about a precocious young man:

“Writing was a hereditary occupation in our family. Levi Yitzchak, who went mad in his old age, had spent his whole life composing a tale titled A Man With No Head. I took after him.”

Odessa Stories was my first experience of reading Babel and I was blown away. Babel clearly enjoyed the almost fabulist tales of Benya the King, but somehow never glamorised him. His writing is hugely entertaining but also truthful – the violence towards people and animals suddenly appears in the midst of the stories and jolts the reader to remember the visceral realities of what is being described.

In evoking the worst of human behaviour in Dovecote, Babel is restrained and absolutely drives home the tragedy.

Babel’s writing is intensely human, marrying together humour, violence, pathos and beauty seamlessly. I will definitely seek out more by him on the strength of Odessa Stories. Sadly, there isn’t much as his life was cut short. However, Pushkin Press publish Red Cavalry, another short story collection.

“For the first time I saw my surroundings as they actually were – hushed and unspeakably beautiful.”

“I had a lion inside me that wouldn’t shut up!” (Ingrid Bergman)

/ madamebibilophile / 12 Comments

This week I’m focussing on Pushkin Press as part of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event to finally read four books that have long been in the TBR. Today it is a book of two essays, City of Lions by Józef Wittlin and Philippe Sands.

Pushkin Press’ website describes the volume: “Lviv, Lwów, Lvov, Lemberg. Known by a variety of names, the City of Lions is now in western Ukraine. Situated in different countries during its history, it is a city located along the fault-lines of Europe’s history. City of Lions presents two essays, written more than half a century apart – but united by one city.”

The book comes with maps of Lwów and Lviv within the French flaps and photographs throughout which are both useful and illustrative, making a really lovely edition. It also forms another stop on my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge.

Józef Wittlin was a poet and novelist and his essay My Lwów (1946, transl. Antonia Lloyd-Jones 2016) beautifully evokes his longing for a city he knows has gone forever, with his writing full of nostalgia and loss.

Wittlin is completely aware of his skewed view of the city, having left in 1922 and writing his essay sat in New York so many years later:

“Nostalgia even likes to falsify flavours too, telling us to taste nothing but the sweetness of Lwów today. But I know people for whom Lwów was a cup of gall.”

Yet still he longs for city of his past.

“Alright, so Lwów hasn’t got a decent river, or a legend. What would it need a river for? The urban planners and tourists say that if Lwów were graced with a river, it would be a second Florence. In my view Lwów has more greenery than Florence, though less of the Renaissance. Moreover, it resembles Rome…”

But as Wittlin evokes the cityscape, its smells, food and people with great artistry and passion, world events – recent at the time of his writing – do filter through. In his evocation of a culturally mixed European city in the early twentieth century, he would have been aware that the Jewish population which had made up around a third of Lwów’s inhabitants had been almost entirely wiped out.

“It is not Lwów that we yearn after all these years apart, but for ourselves in Lwów.”

Philippe Sands essay My Lviv (2016) is written in conversation with My Lwów and views the city through the eyes of someone who never lived there, but whose family history – and the reason they had to leave –  is firmly rooted there.

“I could have chosen to turn away from the stories stuffed into the cracks of each building, or what was hidden behind freshly plastered walls. I could have averted my gaze, but I didn’t want to. Observing with care was part of the reason for being there, seeking out what was left, traces of what came before.”

Sands essay is deeply personal as he revisits his grandfather Leon’s home city. It is an experience he feels deep in his bones:

“I understood it to be part of my hinterland, one that was buried deep because Leon would never speak of that past. His long silence hid the wounds of a family that was left and then lost, but from the moment I set foot in the place it felt familiar, a part of me, a place I had missed and where I felt comfortable.”

At the same time, Sands is visiting with broader knowledge of devastation wreaked by the Holocaust, and he sees these layers within Lviv, even when they aren’t overtly commemorated:

“The first time I stood in the courtyard behind the school, in the autumn of 2012, I had no idea what that yard had been used for. Now armed with that knowledge, that this vast and empty place was a gathering point for thousands of final journeys […] it was a place of terrible silences, the expression of a conscious desire not to remember.”

I found City of Lions a deeply moving read. It is an elegy for a lost time, a eulogy for those lost, and a stark reminder that history is lived and died through by ordinary people. Cities grow and change, but they build upon and contain all that has gone before. It is all there if we take the time and care to look.

At the same time, what these two very different evocations of the same city demonstrate so well is that we experience our surroundings through ourselves. Wittlin and Sands are writing as much about themselves as they are about the city, but the essays are no less fascinating for that.