twentieth century fiction

“Happiness is a very fragile thing.” (Barbara Comyns)

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It was JacquiWine’s review of The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns (1985) last month that encouraged me pick this from the TBR in time for Novellas in November, hosted by hosted by Cathy and Bookish Beck.

I really enjoy Comyns’ individual voice. She can give a sharp edge to stories presented seemingly without guile which works well within the premise here, taking as a starting point the Grimm Brothers fairytale of the same name:

My mother she killed me,
My father he ate me,
My sister, little Marlinchen,


Gathered together all my bones
Tied them in a silken handkerchief,


Laid them beneath the juniper-tree,
Kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird I am.

Thankfully Comyns writes a less cannibalistic/abusive version but there are fairytale motifs from the story scattered throughout. This gives the novella a somewhat unreal, atemporal quality, although references are made to the 1980s.

The striking opening scene directly draws on the Grimm tale, as Bella Winter (physically similar to Snow White, although she feels highly self-conscious of a facial scar) travels to Richmond in search of a job:

“I noticed a beautiful fair woman standing in the courtyard outside her house like a statute, standing there so still. As I drew nearer I saw that her hands were moving. She was paring an apple out there in the snow and as I passed, looking at her out of the sides of my eyes, the knife slipped, and suddenly there was blood on the snow.”

The affluent woman is Gertrude, married to Bernard.  Bella ultimately gets a job over the river in Twickenham with Mary:

“Her teeth were small and pointed rather as an animal’s, indeed she resembled an animal with her delicate boned face with its merry expression, perhaps a squirrel.”

But this doesn’t prevent Bella becoming more and more entwined in Gertrude and Bernard’s life. It’s not surprising that she is in search of a family. Her mother is cold and judgemental:

“There was one shadow that I kept in the back of my mind as much as possible, and that was my mother. To me she was almost like a wicked fairy, poor woman.”

Bella also left behind a selfish lover Stephen, who was driving when the accident occurred which left her with the scar on her face, for which he blames her.

But Bella has a young daughter Marline, also known as Tommy, who she loves dearly. Tommy is biracial and both she and her mother face racism throughout. However, they build a happy life, living above Mary’s antique/junk shop and transforming a “gritty” back yard into a pretty walled garden.

They regularly cross the river to Gertrude and Bernard’s abundant, if carefully curated, home. Bella enjoys sitting with Gertrude under the titular tree, where territorial magpies build their nest and watch the comings and goings.

It’s hard to say more without venturing into spoilers, but if this is sounding a bit contrived and fey, there are enough prosaic details to ground the story, and humour too:

“I was glad to return to the freedom of the shop and to be queen of my own home—eat cornflakes or baked beans for supper, wear a dressing gown for breakfast and read books that did not improve the mind in bed.”

I also thought there was scepticism regarding relationships between the sexes here, no guarantee of happy-ever-afters. As well as positive portrayals, both Stephen and Bella’s mother are abusive to partners, and Bernard is in an ambiguous Pygmalion role. Families are shown as places of anger and destruction as well as nurturing, and Bella has to chose her people to create a happy life.

The undercurrent of death also stops the story feeling whimsical, and there is a very upsetting death which takes place, precipitating Bella needing inpatient mental health care. Although not gratuitous or gruesome, it is something some readers would want to avoid so if you want to know, DM me!

The introduction to my NYRB edition mentions the ending being abrupt, but I have to disagree. The ending ties up everything as much as it can and I can’t see anywhere further the story could go, having fulfilled its fairytale basis and continued into a pragmatic 1980s conclusion.

To end, a very young Björk making her film debut in an adaptation of the Grimm Tale:

“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.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.29

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Another Marvellous Thing – Laurie Colwin (1986) 130 pages

Last year a Waterstones opened up a few minutes walk from where I live. I try and ration my visits but you can probably guess how that’s working out 😀 Browsing there was how I found out about Laurie Colwin, who until now had somehow passed me by. I tend to treat jacket blurbs with a mountain of salt, but anyone described as “The Barbara Pym of 1970s New York” (Jonathan Lethem) was going to have me snatching their work from the shelf.

In Another Marvellous Thing Billy and Francis have an affair, despite both being married to other people. Francis is quite a bit older than Billy, though we’re never really told their ages. Both are involved in the field of economics but have wildly different views. They are wildly different in just about every way.

“It would never work. We both know it. She is to relentlessly dour, and too fond of silence. I prefer false cheer to no cheer and I like conversation over dinner no matter what.”

The first chapter is narrated in the first person by Francis, before shifting to a third person narrator for the remainder:

“In movies men have mistresses who soothe and pet them, who are consoling, passionate, and ornamental. But I have a mistress who is mostly grumpy. Traditional things mean nothing to her. She does not flirt, cajole, or wear fancy underwear.”

Despite the bafflement they both have for why they are involved with one another, their affair is rooted in love.

“We are as faithful as the Canada goose, more or less. She is an absolute fact of my life.”

“She did not want to have these feelings: she had been so much happier when she had been unaware she had them.”

Billy and Francis are also markedly different to each other’s spouses:

“Billy, unlike my gregarious party-giving wife, thinks that there is no hell more hellish than the hell of social life.”

“He has the body of a young boy in the air of a genius or someone constantly preoccupied by the intense pressure of a rarified mental life. Together he and Billy look not so much like husband and wife as co-conspirators.”

In other words, they are both much better suited to those they are married to. This means that Another Marvellous Thing avoids the pitfalls of a will-they-won’t-they get together plotline, and instead is more interested in these two disparate characters, and a year or so of their lives together.

“The topic of her dissertation turned Francis glassy-eyed: his passion for Billy did not mitigate his indifference to the medieval wool trade.”

Despite Billy’s interiority keeping her somewhat unknown to Francis, as a reader I loved her character. She was so idiosyncratic and believable, with her refusal to conform to societal expectations:

“‘A vision of radiant loveliness,’ Francis said.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Billy said. ‘The laundry ruined my filmy peignoir.’”

Unlike Francis who is quite equanimous about being unfaithful, Billy feels horribly guilty. Later in the book the affair has finished and the chapters focus on her life afterwards, where we see much more vulnerability than she allowed Francis to witness.

“In one of her snootier moments, my mistress said to me: ‘My furnishings are interior. I care about what I think about.’”

All in all I enjoyed my first experience of Colwin’s writing. There were so many great one-liners and it did feel very New York. But the wit didn’t stop emotional truth being fully realised, particularly with Billy and her husband Grey in the later chapters. I’ll look forward to exploring her further.

“Being in love, he often felt, was like having a bird caught in his hair.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.28

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The Lady and the Little Fox Fur – Violette Leduc (1965, transl. Derek Coltman 1967) 80 pages

I found this novella, only slightly longer than a short story, incredibly moving. It follows the daily life of a frail, impoverished woman, living in a dilapidated attic room in Paris which shakes every few minutes when the Métro passes overhead.

Violette Leduc is not an author I know, but in the Introduction to my edition Deborah Levy describes her novels as “works of genius and also a bit peculiar.” Certainly Leduc has a way of skipping between images and realities that continually pulled me up short. Despite its brevity The Lady and the Little Fox Fur can’t be read quickly; the sentences have to be considered.

“Her coat was turning green with age. So much the better: it was a proof that her verdigris candlesticks in the pawn shop had not abandoned her. When the sun came out, there were two torches to light her way, the sun itself and its reflection in the window of Joris’, the shop that accepted la Semeuse coupons.”

That strange logic about the candlesticks demonstrates the frayed reasoning of The Lady, but also Leduc’s skill in layering images to evoke scenes and draw elements of her story together so clearly.

Her stylistic skill never distances the characters. A long time is spent on the hunger of The Lady, both physical and psychological. She is desperate for food, and she is desperately lonely. Every day she roams around her home city, unseen and disregarded.

“Wheat pancakes, fifty francs. The batter was spreading across the hotplate, the woman was scraping away the drips and making the edges neater with the point of her knife. But she would draw her nourishment later on from the crowd in the Métro: one cannot have everything.”

“They were workmen whose job it was to keep the flagstones level, and they put up with her there because they didn’t know she was there. The bollard she was sitting on had such stability, the place itself was so historic that she became a peasant woman who had ridden in from the Perche country to sell a farmhorse many centuries ago.”

The second part of the novella sees her take out a raggedy fox fur, which she found in rubbish when hunting for an orange to eat, to sell for food.

“There were moments when she had no saliva left to remember with, not even the pale pink water ices that her parents used to eat.”

It is desperation which drives her, as the fox fur provides warmth and companionship. Like a child, she anthropomorphises the inanimate object (as she does bugs in the floorboards and some of her furniture), showering him with kisses and affection.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur could have been unbearably sentimental, but Leduc’s way of writing meant it wasn’t so. The Lady doesn’t pity herself and the portrayal evokes compassion and empathy rather than sympathy. She endures, repeatedly, throughout the challenges of her daily life.

“Happily, she noted, it was still not six o’clock: she was the ribbon in a little girl’s hair, fluttering in the breeze. After six, the wind in Paris grows stronger and disarranges all our principles.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.26

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A Friend from England – Anita Brookner (1987) 172 pages

Anita Brookner is one of those authors I keep meaning to get back to. I was too young when I read Hotel du Lac; when I read Family and Friends for this project back in 2019 I knew the time was right. Despite this, I keep failing to pick her up! Hopefully A Friend from England signals the start of my more consistent reading of this striking and clear-sighted author.

The novella is essentially a character study of Rachel, a typical Brookner heroine.She is solitary and somewhat spiky, with the reader sensing more loneliness that she admits to.

She inherits her financial advisor Oscar from her deceased parents. When Oscar retires after winning a lot of money on the pools, Rachel visits him at home rather than his office.

“All the rooms seemed to repel both light and weather; they were designed to keep one’s thoughts indoors, resigned and melancholy.

[…]

I found it all very cosy. Although their life seemed to depress Oscar and his wife, both of whom had a vaguely disappointed air, I could see myself transformed into just such a virtuous member of just such a successful but melancholy family.”

Rachel starts attending Oscar and his wife Dorrie’s home regularly for dinner, and meets their daughter Heather, who it is clear the family are keen to see married and settled. (There was something oddly old-fashioned about A Friend from England, so much so that I went back to the beginning to double-check I hadn’t missed something about it being set in the early 1960s.)

No-one does a bitchy character summation like Brookner, and here is Rachel’s assessment of Heather:

“I could feel the force of her passive temperament, and I say temperament rather than personality, for there was little personality in evidence.”

Ouch!

Oscar and Dorrie seem keen for the two women to become friends, and Heather regularly drives Rachel home, but remains unknowable. This doesn’t particularly bother Rachel:

“I felt a genuine love for Heather’s parents, while feeling rather little for Heather herself. When I say rather little, I mean that I felt a full complement of boredom, irritation, tolerance, and reluctant affection for her.”

However, then Heather does what everyone expects, and gets engaged. Rachel is unsure of her choice:

“My first impression of Michael Sandberg was that he was blessed with, or consumed by, radiant high spirits. My second impression was that a man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.

[…]

Michael had a sort of sunniness about him which seemed to preclude any baffling depths of character: I thought that was probably just as well, for Heather, despite her shrewdness,  seemed to have very little curiosity and might not have much patience with a difficult or troublesome man.”

The “shrewdness” which Rachel frequently attributes to Heather is a masterstroke by Brookner. As readers we never see any evidence of such a trait. No-one else observes Heather as being shrewd. We are more aware than Rachel that she has proclaimed this motivation to Heather’s behaviour because it makes sense to her. This misjudgement has a significant fallout later.

“I felt a spasm of distaste for her and for all those women like her, women who work for fun and marry for status, and still demand compensation. The only excuse for such women is incurable frivolity. And Heather was not even frivolous.”

[Slight spoilers ahead]

Heather’s marriage does fall apart (again, for a reason I found somewhat out of keeping with its late 1980s setting, unless the reason we’re shown is supposed to be a signifier of a deeper incompatibility.) But it is Rachel who begins to unravel. She has been insistent all along that her solitary life suits her, but this seems grounded in pain and avoidance rather than a life choice which makes her happy and fulfilled.

“The process of thinking does not become me. I feel my face growing longer, my eyes sinking deeper. Thinking, for me, is accompanied by a wave of sadness. Therefore I try to avoid introspection. I long ago decided to live my life on the surface, avoiding entanglements, confrontations, situations that cannot be quickly resolved, friendships that lead to passion.”

When Heather’s subsequent decisions do not fit with Rachel’s judgements of who she is or what she should do, we witness Rachel behaving more and more extremely, despite her distaste for drama. This observant, clever, discerning woman has completely failed to recognise that others could have considered and reached different values and different aspirations from her. The destabilisation which occurs suggests that Rachel wasn’t as secure in her life choices as she liked to believe.

A Friend from England is such a cleverly paced novel. The acerbic, domestic everyday gradually becomes something much darker and more devastating, with all the fault lines set up to fracture from the very beginning.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.25

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Krane’s Café – Cora Sandel (1946, transl. Elizabeth Rokkan 1968) 173 pages

Back in November Kaggsy reviewed some of Cora Sandel’s shorter writings and reminded me that I had Krane’s Café languishing in the TBR. I’m really pleased to have finally got to it, with its sly humour and incisive characterisation.

“There’s a lot to be heard before your ears drop off.”

Set just after the First World War, it opens with Katinka Stordal sitting in the titular café. She is the dressmaker in a small coastal town in northern Norway, and there is a big event coming up. Her orders are piling up, and Mrs Krane, the owner of the café with her husband, is trying to move Katinka on.

“’I’m going, I’m going,’ said Mrs Stordal. She looked up listlessly for a moment, and stayed where she was. It was one of those days when she looks much older than she really is.”

The narrative voice has this slightly bitchy, judgemental tone, which works so well. In implicitly proclaiming an alliance with the attitudes of the townsfolk, she draws attention to their pettiness and their lack of humane understanding.

People come in to try and chivvy Katinka along, with absolutely no interest as to why she is unable to move from the café or has her head in her hands. Their only concern is getting her back to work.

“As usual Mrs Brien was magnificently equal to the situation. ‘Now then, we mustn’t get hysterical, you know. We mustn’t give up. Everyone has worries. I don’t know anyone without worries. This really is naughty of you, Katinka.”

Then a man called Bowler Hat arrives…

“And he went over to Mrs Stordal and said in that low, one might almost be tempted to say melodious voice, if it were not so ridiculous, and offensive and bold into the bargain, ‘May I offer you something? Something you’d fancy? What about a little wine? The wine you’ve just been drinking? And then you can go on listening to me for a while? You mustn’t stop listening yet, you understand so well. I expect you know too how it feels to be lonely?’”

So the situation becomes scandalous. Katinka is in the back room of the café, drinking with a male stranger. She is complaining about her selfish family, her enduring fatigue with life, her lack of choices. Bowler Hat is an unnerving figure and I did wonder at times if he was a representation of the devil.

Mrs Krane feels overwhelmed without her husband to help her manage the situation, and her staff, Larsen and Sønstegård, are thoroughly enjoying the drama while pretending not to.

“Children and drunkards will tell you the truth. Both Larsen and Sønstegård admitted later that at that point they were almost afraid of more customers coming. For it was exciting to listen to Mrs Katinka, who scarcely ever gave you an answer in the normal run of affairs, sitting there giving rein to her tongue. Even though it was so dreadful to hear her gossiping like that about her own children. Throwing them to the wolves, you might almost call it.

And even though it was all a lot of nonsense.

What else could you call it?”

What emerges is a picture of real sadness. Katinka is lonely and disregarded by her family and by the town, while expected to fulfil their expectations of her. She is teased by the town’s children for her drinking, and in this small community no-one really truly acknowledges anyone else’s pain, despite how closely they all live together.

“And surely she couldn’t have thought of going and drowning herself, with all those orders, she the mother of two children besides? Nobody did that sort of thing in this town.

Suddenly it struck Mrs Krane that that sort of thing was just not written up in the paper about people in other places. Grieve the chemist had taken prussic acid in the cellar of his shop, though that had happened a long time ago and he was even scolded at his graveside by Mr Pio the curate […. ] and Iverson the tailor, who had such a spiteful wife, had walked out into the sea until it went over his head, and he never came up again, even though it was ebb tide and the sea was far out.”

In this way Sandel satirises society and its unthinking complacency towards others; the hypocrisy; and the self-interest. Yet unlike some satire, it doesn’t have a bitter edge. The characterisation is compassionate towards Katinka and Mrs Krane; and even Katinka’s daughter. The narrative voice is humorous and by aligning itself with the attitudes of the town, it avoids the superior tone of some satire.

I felt the ending was compassionate, though the town and its inhabitants remain largely unchanged…

“And all of a sudden Katinka shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Here comes the madness, the great, wonderful madness. The liberator from everything, who opens the gates and makes all spacious about you.’”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.24

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Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf (1941) 159 pages

Between the Acts is Virgina Woolf’s last novel and was published after her death. I’m a bit wary of posthumous novels; a note at the beginning from Leonard Woolf suggests it was pretty much as Virginia intended and only small corrections would have been made had she lived. This is somewhat contradicted by a letter she wrote to her publisher, so it’s impossible to know.

It is set over one day in 1939, before the war starts. It’s summertime, and at Pointz House somewhere in the middle of England, a pageant is taking place as it does every year.

The manor house belongs to the Oliver family: retired Bartholomew Oliver; his endearing, somewhat flaky widowed sister Lucy Swithin, his son Giles and Giles’ wife Isa.

A thread that pulls through the story is Isa’s attraction to gentleman farmer Rupert Haines. Woolf introduces this with startling synaesthetic imagery:

“Isa raised her head. The words made two rings, perfect rings, that floated them, herself and Haines, like two swans downstream. But his snow-white breast was circled with a tangle of dirty duckweed; and she too, in her webbed feet was entangled, by her husband, the stockbroker. Sitting on her three-cornered chair she swayed, with her dark pigtails hanging, and her body like a bolster in its faded dressing-gown.”

I so enjoy Woolf’s inventiveness, and this early passage also stood out, as she sets this tranquil, middle-class, midsummer scene:

“The nurses after breakfast were trundling the perambulator up and down the terrace; and as they trundled they were talking—not shaping pellets of information or handing ideas from one to another, but rolling words, like sweets on their tongues; which, as they thinned to transparency, gave off pink, green, and sweetness.”

But beneath the tranquillity, big emotions are brewing:

“”He is my husband,” Isabella thought, as they nodded across the bunch of many-coloured flowers. “The father of my children.” It worked, that old cliché; she felt pride; and affection; then pride again in herself, whom he had chosen. It was a shock to find, after the morning’s look in the glass, and the arrow of desire shot through her last night by the gentleman farmer, how much she felt when he came in, not a dapper city gent, but a cricketer, of love; and of hate.”

In true British stiff-upper-lipped style, love and hatred are subsumed by social convention and the need to host the pageant. The director Miss La Trobe arrives. My edition has a quote on the back suggesting this is self-portrait by Woolf, which if true is pretty startling:

“Rumour said that she had kept a tea shop at Winchester; that had failed. She had been an actress. That had failed. She had bought a four-roomed cottage and shared it with an actress. They had quarrelled. Very little was actually known about her. Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language—perhaps, then, she wasn’t altogether a lady? At any rate, she had a passion for getting things up.”

The pageant dramatises scenes from English history, and Elizabeth I is a sight to behold:

“Everyone was clapping and laughing. From behind the bushes issued Queen Elizabeth—Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco. Could she be Mrs. Clark of the village shop? She was splendidly made up. Her head, pearl-hung, rose from a vast ruff. Shiny satins draped her. Sixpenny brooches glared like cats’ eyes and tigers’ eyes; pearls looked down; her cape was made of cloth of silver—in fact swabs used to scour saucepans. She looked the age in person. And when she mounted the soap box in the centre, representing perhaps a rock in the ocean, her size made her appear gigantic. She could reach a flitch of bacon or haul a tub of oil with one sweep of her arm in the shop. For a moment she stood there, eminent, dominant, on the soap box with the blue and sailing clouds behind her. The breeze had risen.”

Large portions of the novel are given over to the script of the pageant, written in verse. Yet astonishingly, Woolf still manages complex characterisation between the acts. There’s a small scene between two characters dismissed by those around them which I found so touching. Lucy Swithin is seen as something of an elderly fusspot; William Doge is a visitor subject to homophobia from Giles, in thought if not in deed but still recognised. At one point Lucy notices William is struggling with the company and takes him off for a tour of the house:

“Mrs. Swithin put her hands to her hair, for the breeze had ruffled it.

“Mr…” she began.

“I’m William,” he interrupted.

At that she smiled a ravishing girl’s smile, as if the wind had warmed the wintry blue in her eyes to amber.”

As always with Woolf, the text is so rich and multilayered and these are really just initial impressions. I’m sure I’d pick up so many other elements on a re-read, or even writing this post again. I just hope that however Woolf felt about Between the Acts, she judged her work more kindly than Miss La Trobe’s view of her pageant:

“She hadn’t made them see. It was a failure, another damned failure! As usual. Her vision escaped her.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.23

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Comedy in a Minor Key – Hans Keilson (1947, transl. Damion Searls, 2024) 108 pages

Yesterday I posted on a German novella written just before the war, and today I’m looking a novella written just after the war but set during those years.

Hans Keilson was a remarkable man. His wiki page opens:

“German-Dutch novelist, poet, psychoanalyst and child psychologist. He was best known for his novels set during the Second World War, during which he was an active member of the Dutch resistance.

Keilson, having worked with traumatized orphans, mainly wrote about traumas induced by the war.”

Both his parents died in Auschwitz and Keilson had to go into hiding with a married couple for part of the war. In Comedy in a Minor Key, he explores this set-up, albeit primarily from the point of view of the couple.

Wim and Marie are a young Dutch couple who are approached to take someone into hiding in their house. Nico is older than them and the three of them live in restricted secrecy.

“The beginning was always exciting, no matter how many times a person had already lived through it.”

Wim and Marie are determined that no-one else will know about Nico. This doesn’t last long as they tell people, and others know already. For almost a year, the three of them live together in awkward domesticity.

What Keilson captures so well is the complexity of feelings around this living arrangement. So Nico isn’t unreservedly grateful; he’s also angry and scared and frustrated:

“Safe? Protected? Since they had taken him in? No, no, he was being unfair. But their house, their home, there things – their world – how it all had attracted him and soothed him at first. And now: how vain, how inflated, how worthless! For he measured things now with the cosmic measure, which gripped him tight and shook him back and forth. What trust in each other? What danger? And what a gulf between people! Consolation! Consolation?… was there any such thing?”

And for Wim and Marie there is bravery and kindness and also some vanity:

“You don’t get the chance to save someone every day. This unacknowledged thought had often helped them carry on when, a little depressed and full of doubt, they thought they couldn’t bear this complicated situation any longer and their courage failed them.”

The three of them muddle along together, and I found this description of their nightly snack and coffee very touching:

“There was gratitude in this habit, and a little tiredness, from the night to come that they were about to enter alone or as a pair, and a furtive, sad happiness in the smiling, incomprehensible futility.

But these scenes occur in flashback, as the novella opens with Nico having died of pneumonia, and Wim and Marie faced with what on earth to do now.

“How the neighbours and everyone on the street would look when he suddenly walked out of their house and strolled up and down the street with them. It would give them a little sense of satisfaction, and everyone who makes a sacrifice needs a little sense of satisfaction. And then you’d feel that you, you personally, even only just a little bit, had won the war.

It had all gone up in smoke. It wasn’t even a dream anymore. None of the three of them had any luck. But really, him least of all.

Poor Nico!”

Keilson never laughs at Nico’s death. What Comedy in a Minor Key shows is the enormity wartime in a domestic setting and how the mundane and silly can endure in the worst of circumstances. It shows how ordinary people can be so brave and also a little bit self-serving. It shows how the inbuilt hopes of a large gesture towards saving a life are entirely undermined when the person dies anyway.

I didn’t find this novella laugh-out-loud funny and I don’t think that’s what the title refers to. Rather I think the comedy refers to the ultimately comedic undermining of best intentions being a resistance in itself, as the war fails to destroy the ridiculous.

“Behind her curiosity there was a burning pain that cried out for more consolation than it was possible to give.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.22

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Child of All Nations – Irmgard Keun (1938 transl. Michael Hofmann 2008) 183 pages

I’m sticking with a child’s perspective with today’s novella, by an author I’ve been meaning to read for so long. Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun is told from the point of view of nine-year-old Kully as she and her parents ricochet around immediate pre-war Europe.

“We left Germany when my father couldn’t stand it anymore, because he writes books and articles for newspapers. We emigrated to find freedom. We’re never going to go back to Germany. Anyway, we don’t need to, because the world is a very big place.”

There’s no doubt that Kully’s father is an important and talented writer, as we see from the responses he gets from other adults. However, he is also self-centred, feckless, and disregards his wife and child to the point of cruelty.

“Sometimes my father loves us, and sometimes he doesn’t. When he doesn’t, we can’t do anything about it, my mother and me. Nothing is any good when he doesn’t love us. Then we’re not allowed to cry in his presence or laugh, mustn’t give him anything, or take anything from him either. Any steps we might take only have the effect of delaying even more the time when he will love us again. Because he always comes back to us.”

From my twenty-first century perspective, they’d be better off without this man and his relentless need for the stimulation of the new, spendthrift ways and constant affairs with other women.

“I look a lot like my mother, only she has bluer eyes than me, and bigger legs, and she’s bigger all round. She wears her hair combed back, and in a knot at the back of her head. My hair is short and unruly. My mother’s much prettier than I am, but I don’t cry so much.”

However, the child’s perspective is so clever in the characterisation of the father, because he is never demonised. Thus, trailing round various countries; being abandoned as surety in various hotels and restaurants; and dragged into his schemes to get loans on promises of work which never appears; are not judged, because Kully just accepts things as they are.

He is also complicated in that his uselessness with money comes from a total material disregard. So while he gambles and drinks away their money, he also gives a lot of it away to people in a worse position than he is. This behaviour, and his writing, shows a compassion for others which unfortunately doesn’t extend to those closest to him.

“My father often tells fibs to get a bit of peace and quiet… Sometimes, though, he performs miracles and everything he says comes true.”

What Keun also does well is presenting Kully’s voice directly, so that while it is unmediated and so distinct, adult readers are still able to pick out where she echoing what adults have said to her:

“We only eat once a day, because that’s cheaper, and it’s perfectly adequate. I’m always hungry anyway, even if I eat seven times a day.”

You just know that an adult, most likely her father, has told her that one meal is “perfectly adequate”.

Written in 1938, the shadow of war looms large. Unsurprisingly, Kully only just grasps some of it and her naivete is heartbreaking:

“I’m not afraid, because I’ve got my mother with me, the waiter who brings us our breakfast in the morning has said he’s not afraid either, and there isn’t going to be any war. And if there is, and we’re put in a camp, then he will continue to bring us our meals.”

What is apparent to the reader now, too, is that some of the countries Kully’s family head to as places of safety are not going to remain as such.

There’s a heartbreaking scene where just briefly, Kully’s mother gets what she wants: a small place with a kitchen where she can cook her own food. But inevitably, Kully’s father is bored within days and it is all taken away again.

What Kully recognises, which her father fails to understand, is that constant movement does not automatically mean freedom:

“Because we never have any money, we feel imprisoned by any hotel in any city, and from the very first day we think of our liberation.”

Child of All Nations documents an episodic, transitory life and the lack of plot is reflective of this, with the novella form suiting the story well. Kully’s voice was so clear from the first page and she remains resilient and with astonishing equanimity to the end. Knowing that the Europe in which Kully moves was about to change beyond all recognition gives it an extra resonance, and I think Keun already knew this too.

So, my first Keun read was a success, and I’m keen to read more!