twentieth century literature

“Who could be frightened in as wide and bright, as clean and quiet a house as this?” (Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road)

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One of the benefits of taking part in events like the 1961 Club, hosted by Kaggsy and Simon this week, is that it encourages me to finally get to novels languishing in the TBR, such as Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

I have enjoyed Richard Yates when I’ve read him previously but I also know that I kept putting off Revolutionary Road because he can be so bleak. And it is bleak, good grief. But Yates is such a great writer that reading this was never a slog, and I whizzed through his first novel.

The two protagonists, married couple April (“A tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty”) and Frank Wheeler (“the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise”) are just shy of thirty and living in suburban Connecticut in 1955.

Frank would probably take issue with the authorial description above, as he sees himself as “an intense, nicotine stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man,”.

Frank and April are monumentally smug and pretentious, seeing themselves as living in suburbia with two children, a job in the city for him and role as a homemaker for her, but somehow above it all and different to their neighbours, all of whom are doing exactly the same:

“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”

A crisis early on forces April to feel that she cannot continue. She feels their life needs enormous change and that she is to blame for holding Frank and his immense mind back.

“this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families. It’s the great sentimental lie of the suburbs, and I’ve been making you subscribe to it all this time. I’ve been making you live by it!”

What she fails to realise is that her husband is deeply ordinary, no great thinker, and with no discernible talent at anything so far. So her plan that they move to France and she work while he simply lives off her while he decides what to do, is fundamentally flawed.

Yates expertly portrays these two young people bound up in each other’s idea of who they are; feeding one another’s vanities and delusions. They become excited at the plan and for a while it rejuvenates their relationship:

“He felt tense and keyed up; the very act of sitting on a coffee table seemed an original and wonderful thing to do.”

However, the reader is more aware than April that her husband is not entirely convinced of the plan. Deep down, he knows his inadequacy, and his play-acting.

“he found he had made all his molars ache by holding them clamped too long for an effect of  grim-jawed determination by candlelight”

When April finds herself pregnant again, Frank sees a way out. They will have to stay in suburbia to raise their third child. April disagrees, and the strain and tension in their marriage gradually tightens to breaking point…

Revolutionary Road is an absolute masterpiece and it is astonishing that it was Yates first novel. The characterisation is unblinking; the post-war American Dream with all its materialistic conformity is minutely dissected.

What I found so clever was that having found April and Frank vain, shallow, and condescending for almost all the novel, by the end I felt desperately sad and sorry for both of them. Yates has written a tragedy, and suggested it is occurring daily behind the manicured lawns and bright smiles of middle-class, mid-century America.

“It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. Proud floodlights were trained on some of the lawns, on some of the neat front doors and on the hips of some of the berthed, ice-cream colored automobiles.”

To end, a trailer for the 2008 adaptation, which I know I’ve seen but don’t really remember. Time for a rewatch:

“Every woman who writes is a survivor.” (Tillie Olsen)

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Simon and Kaggsy are running one of their marvellous Club events all week, this time it is the 1961 Club. I’m hoping to do a few posts, and I’m starting with a short story.

Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen is a collection of four stories, with the titular tale published in 1961, so that is the one I will concentrate on. But all four are expertly realised with distinct narrative voices and I really recommend the whole collection.

Tell Me a Riddle looks at the last year or so together of a couple who emigrated from Russia (as the author’s parents had done). It opens:

“For forty-seven years they had been married. How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could say – but only now, when tending to the needs of others no longer shackled them together, the roots swelled up visible, split the earth between them, and the tearing shook even to the children, long since grown.”

This antagonistic couple are not mellowing with age. He wants to move to supported accommodation, the Haven, she is determined to stay put. The fury of the sacrifices she has made throughout married life spill out, as he tries to entice her:

“A reading circle. Chekhov they read that you like, and Peretz. Cultured people at the Haven that you would enjoy.”

“Enjoy!” She tasted the word. “Now, when it pleases you, you find a reading circle for me. And forty years ago, when children were morsels and there was a Circle, did you stay home with them once so I could go? Even once? You trained me well. I do not need others to enjoy. Others!” Her voice trembled. “Because you want to be there with others. Already it makes me sick to think of you always around others. Clown, grimacer, floormat, yesman, entertainer, whatever they want of you.”

Having not spoken her resentments previously, she now digs her heels in:

“Enough. Now they had no children. Let him wrack his head for how they would live. She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.”

The impasse escalates, with neither seeming to be anywhere close to winning, until events overtake them and her health begins to deteriorate:

“A bellyful of bitterness and every day the same quarrel in a new way and a different old grievance the old quarrel forced her to enter and relive. And the new torment: I am not really sick, the doctor said it, then why do I feel so sick?”

They move around the USA, visiting children and grandchildren, both reflecting on what they left behind and what lives they have enabled their children to create. Olsen analyses the promises and shortfalls of the American Dream through ordinary lives.

At the start of the story the husband has called his wife “Mrs Word Miser”, among other epithets. But by the end, as she lays dying in bed:

“The week Lennie and Helen came, the fever returned. With it the excited laugh, and incessant words. She, who in her life had spoken but seldom and then only when necessary (never having learned the easy, social uses of words), now in dying, spoke incessantly.”

The deathbed scenes are vivid and affecting. In a short space of around 50 pages Olsen brings her characters into noisy, awkward being and achieves what takes some writers ten times the space. She has absolute command of the short story and uses it expertly.

I realise I’ve made the story sound quite depressing, but while it is sad, I didn’t find it bleak. The characters are so strong and determined, and the voices so true and clear, that Tell Me Riddle conveys an energy which isn’t depleting.

I have Olsen’s novella Yonnonido in the TBR which I keep putting off – I’m really looking forward to picking it up now.

To end, a song from 1961 that I thought was much later in the decade, probably because it is such a timeless classic:

“At seventy-one dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged.” (Colette, My Mother’s House)

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Although I mentioned in my previous post that I rarely write about memoir, here is another post on the same genre, as I thought it would be perfect for Mother’s Day (today in the UK). A short while ago I picked up a little hardback which had Colette’s meditations on her mother in one volume, My Mother’s House and Sido (1922/1929 transl. 1953 Una Vincenzo Troubridge and Enid MacLeod/Enid MacLeod).

Image from here

Colette clearly adores her mother and admits in the preface the limitation of what she is attempting in these volumes:

“I am not at all sure that I have put the finishing touches to these portraits of her; nor am I at all sure that I have discovered all that she has bequeathed to me. I have come late to this task. But where could I find a better one to form my last?”

My Mother’s House is a series of vignettes which have an energetic immediacy, while Sido perhaps has more of a sense of the older Colette looking back, split into Sido (her mother) The Captain (her father) and The Savages (her siblings).

Colette is the youngest child of her mother’s second marriage, born to parents who adore one another. My Mother’s House is formed through a series of brief chapters, intensely readable, as Colette evokes the late nineteenth-century Burgundy landscape of her childhood beautifully, with a love of the natural world she inherited from her mother Sido.

“I shall never be able to conjure up the splendour that adorns, in my memory, the ruddy festoons of an autumn vine borne down by its own weight and clinging despairingly to some branch of the fir-trees. And the massive lilacs, whose compact flowers — blue in the shade and purple in the sunshine — withered so soon, stifled by their own exuberance.”

Sido is shown as a woman intricately bound with her surroundings, tending her garden with love and knowledge.

“She was already out of sight, but her voice still reached us, a brisk, soprano voice full of inflections that trembled at the slightest emotion and proclaimed, to all and sundry, news of delicate plants, of graftings, of rain and blossomings, like the voice of a hidden bird that foretells the weather.”

She is also a hard worker, running her house and rearing her children.

“Why did no one ever model or paint or carve that hand of Sido’s, tanned and wrinkled early by household tasks, gardening, cold water and the sun, with its long, finely tapering fingers and its beautiful, convex, oval nails?”

There’s nothing saccharine in Colette’s fond reminiscences, and Sido emerges as a feisty, determined character. There’s a very funny chapter on her run in with the locate curé where it’s not totally clear who has emerged victorious (Sido is a non-believer) and I also enjoyed how she dealt with the upset which the precocious Colette experiences by reading beyond her years:

“There’s nothing so terrible as all that in the birth of a child, nothing terrible at all. It’s much more beautiful in real life. The suffering is so quickly forgotten, you’ll see! The proof that all women forget is that it is only men—and what business was it of Zola’s anyway?—who write stories about it.”

Colette’s father is also written about with love, particularly in The Captain section of Sido:

“And he would fasten on his chosen one that extraordinary, challenging, grey-blue gaze of his, which revealed his secrets to no one, though sometimes admitting that such secrets existed.”

These two volumes are just gorgeous: gentle, loving, funny, real. Colette’s parents are portrayed as strong individual characters, brought together by a deep and enduring love, raising a family in circumstances that are not always easy.

My favourite aspect of Colette’s writing is always her evocation of the natural world and there is so much to savour here. However, I’ll end with this mention of how Colette the writer started to emerge, under the sceptical eye of Sido:

“Beautiful books that I used to read, beautiful books that I left unread, warm covering of the walls of my home, variegated tapestry whose hidden design rejoiced my initiated eyes. It was from them I learned, long before the age for love, that love is complicated, tyrannical and even burdensome, since my mother grudged me the prominence they gave it.”

To end, a track from the CD I bought my mother for today (yes a CD, she is 82 and while she embraces much of modern technology streaming music would not go down well 😀 ):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am capable of whim only within order” (Colette, The Evening Star)

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Happy Colette’s birthday! I love her writing, and so I somewhat erratically try and post on her birthday. This year I decided it was a perfect impetus to finally get to her memoir The Evening Star (1946 transl. Peter Owen 1973) which has been languishing in the TBR for too long…

Image from here

This memoir was written when Colette was in her seventies and experiencing significantly reduced mobility, due to arthritis. She remains sanguine:

“If we are to be shaped by misfortune, it’s as well to accept it. We do well to adapt misfortune to our requirements and even to our convenience. This is a mode of exploitation to which the young and robust are ill-suited, and I can well understand the difficulty of making them appreciate, for instance, that near-immobility is a gift.”

She is at home in the Palais-Royal:

“When I am alone, my apartment relaxes. It stretches itself and cracks its old joints. In fine dry weather it contracts, retracts, becomes immaterial, the daylight shows under all its doors, between its every hinge and joint. It invites the wind from outside and entrusts my papers to it, they go skimming off to the other end of the room. I shan’t unwind my cocoon of bed clothes for their sake. Greedy for air, I am a coward when it comes to cold.”

Her humour remains undimmed, such as after a long, poetic contemplation on pink in nature, she concludes:

“Enough of this blandness. I could enjoy a pickled herring.”

And I also enjoyed this reflection on her process:

“On the strength of those writers who do make notes, I had made notes on a sheet of paper, and lost the paper. So I bought a notebook, American style, and lost the notebook, after which I felt free, forgetful, and willing to answer for my forgetfulness.“

Written in 1946, Colette considers her home and city in the immediate aftermath of Nazi occupation:

“In its urbane, sly, stubborn fashion, the Palais-Royal began its resistance and prepared to sustain it. What resistance, what war can I speak about other than those I have witnessed?”

(Colette’s husband was Jewish and had been taken by the Gestapo, but subsequently released. He remained in a degree of hiding with the help of her Palais-Royal neighbours).

“All that offered itself insidiously, or made use of violence, Paris rejected equally. Let us caress with a happy hand it’s still-open wounds, it’s upset pillars, it subsided pavements: its wounds apart, it emerges from all this intact.”

Memories ebb and flow, and Colette reflects this in her writing. This is not an ordered – either chronologically or thematically – memoir. It is more a series of reflections and reminiscences, the past and present layered upon each other. There were times when I lost the thread of exactly what she was saying but just let her hypnotic prose wash over me. This felt an appropriate way to experience her memories and a clever way for Colette to align the reader with her experience as she reflects and writes from her bed.

I find some of Colette’s views problematic but these passages are short-lived. My favourite part of Colette’s writing is always how she captures her love of nature, and even from within her Parisian apartment she engages with the natural world. (Her husband occasionally intervenes in the narrative and is referred to as “my best friend”):

“My best friend, how can you think that I might have been bored? Why, the sky alone is distraction enough.”

There’s plenty here I haven’t mentioned and Colette’s discussion of friends and colleagues would also be of interest to anyone who enjoys early twentieth century French literature. It’s a short work, just over 140 pages in my edition, but such a joy to spend time with Colette.

I’ll leave you with this short quote, helpful for those of us in the Northern hemisphere currently enduring a January at least 84 days long…

“What should I wait for, if not the spring?”

“I suppose we don’t know much except from the books we have read, but at least we want to live.” (Barbara Comyns, A Touch of Mistletoe)

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I’d planned to read Barbara Comyns’ A Touch of Mistletoe (1967) in December for obvious reasons, but I fell behind with my plans as always. Despite the title it’s not a Christmas book at all, and instead it’s got my 2026 reading off to a great start.

A Touch of Mistletoe is thought to be semi-autobiographical, as it follows sisters Vicky and Blanche Green from teenagers in the 1920s, to extreme poverty in the 1930s, through to marriage and motherhood in wartime, ending in the 1950s. Certainly a semi-feral childhood is something Comyns has explored before:

“Our mother rather lost interest in us after the thirst got hold of her and, although our grandfather was vaguely fond of us, he certainly wasn’t interested.”

While their brother Edward seems fairly content in a disengaged way, the sisters are desperate to leave their Warwickshire home. Vicky wants to go to art school, but the solicitor who controls her inheritance from her father does not think this is an appropriate use of funds. Blanche is yet to come of age:

“Blanche could not draw, but she had the very special gift of romantic beauty. She was extremely tall and willowy, with a flowing mass of almost black hair, classical features and a pale moon face, her skin as fine as the skin inside egg shells.”

Comyns is so adept with those arresting similes. Another that struck me later was:

“He looked like an ugly bird who had been given beautiful dogs eyes by mistake”

And:

“He was a great admirer of Cézanne and I did not say that he usually left me feeling rather cold and I thought his paintings looked as if he lived on sour apples.”

Vicky escapes to Amsterdam but finds herself an unpaid housekeeper for a filthy home, looking after bull terriers. (I must admit I skim-read some of the passages to do with the dogs, it was pretty awful.) She escapes, and after briefly returning home where her mother has swopped alcohol for incessant cleaning, the sisters finally get to London.

“It took us months to get used to the insidiousness of London grime and the hard water.”

They live in poverty, sharing a bed in boarding house, along with cockroaches and rats. They very nearly starve entirely, and the descriptions of hunger, inadequate clothing and squalid rooms put me somewhat in mind of Jean Rhys. Unlike Rhys the sisters are less dependant on men for money favours, and Comyns retains a cheeriness all of her own:

“Our bed sitting room was in a large Victorian house in quite a pleasant square with a garden in the centre where lime trees grew. Our room was on the hall floor and was painted a brilliant orange and blue, even the cheap china was orange and blue. The divan cover was a large damask table cloth dyed black. We thought it a wonderful room with its gas fire and ring with a little tin kettle on it.”

A striking detail of this time was their meagre meals: “To avoid spending shillings we used candles; but it was a slow way to cook—about twenty minutes to get an egg to boil.”

The situation doesn’t last forever, as Blanche finds work as a lady’s companion and Vicky falls in love with an art student. The description of married life here is very similar to Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. While Vicky’s husband Gene initially seems just as selfish as Charles in Spoons:

“Our marriage was such a happy one, perhaps partly due to the fact that Gene always had his own way over everything”

It gradually emerges that in fact he is very unwell. I thought the portrayal of serious mental illness – along with their mother’s alcoholism previously – was dealt with without judgement. There are parts of A Touch Of Mistletoe which are of their time and while I don’t think intended to be derogatory, are not language we use now. But the descriptions of Gene are sympathetic, and the outdated treatment he has sounds horrific but is never sensationalised.

Vicky worries about providing for their son Paul:

“He needed so much—good food, fresh air, clothes, education—there was no end to it and all I had to offer was love.”

Yet somehow they muddle through, with the help of kindly friends and neighbours, as well as Marcella, the family’s housekeeper of many years. Throughout it all Comyns retains her signature tone of unnerving guilelessness.

Later, Vicky remarries but her husband Tony also struggles with alcohol. Blanche has also had marriage troubles, and both feel they are entering old age as 40 looms (!)

The experience of London during the war is brilliantly evoked, as it was in Mr Fox, with enormous terrors sitting alongside the surprising smaller details:

“One evening, I think it was our wedding anniversary, we went to a famous restaurant where they had pheasant on the menu, but, when the waiter brought it to our table, it was only Spam pressed into the shape of a bird’s wing.”

A Touch of Mistletoe is longer than other Comyns I’ve read (336 pages) as she usually tends towards novella length, and I wondered if her beguiling, eccentric tone could sustain a longer novel. I needn’t have doubted. It was an absolute joy to spend longer than usual with a captivating writer whose voice is entirely her own.

To end, I can’t think of an appropriate 80s tune, so instead here’s the trailer for a film I saw twice last year, once at my local Odeon and then again with a Q&A with the writers/lead actors and director at the wonderful Prince Charles in December. It’s a gentle, beautifully observed film about grief and regret, friendship and kindness, and it’s got some silly jokes in it too. If you’ve not caught The Ballad of Wallis Island yet I do recommend it:

“A quintessential English village will prove to be a hotbed of murder, mystery and intrigue” (Martin Edwards)

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Continuing my cosy mystery reads for Christmas, it was Kaggsy’s tempting review at the start of the month which alerted me to Death in Ambush by Susan Gilruth (1952), republished by the British Library Crime Classics imprint.

It opens with Liane – Lee – Crauford reflecting on what happened when she accepted her friend Betty’s invitation to stay at Christmas:

“As far as the murder went, we all disliked the victim so heartily that nobody could screw up much actual grief on that score; but all the same it was an upsetting thing to happen and caused a good deal of distress one way and another in the village.”

Betty is the doctor’s wife and has two small children. Lee is married but her husband will be joining her later, so she heads to the small village of Staple Green alone. It’s the sort of place where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and Lee soon meets several of the neighbours when Betty throws a drinks party.

Sir Henry Metcalfe is the local retired hanging judge and landowner who is given to pronouncements like:

“No wonder the Empire’s going to the dogs when people of our standing—the very ones who should know better and set an example to the working classes—behave like a set of hedonistic escapists.”

As well as smaller scale observations:

“Once a week, not to mention Sundays, we are left stranded and servantless while they frivol away their time and my money in the vulgar and overheated precincts of some neighbouring picture palace.”

In other words, his staff go to the cinema at Tunbridge Wells.

His wife Diana is universally acknowledged to be entirely lovely, not least by the land agent John Wickham – rumours abound but no-one can quite believe it of the irreproachable lady of the manor.

His tenants are the Qualnoughs, Lewis and his bright young daughter Ann, a slightly affected actress who calls everyone Darling. Sir Henry is threatening to turn them out of their home, and Ann is deemed an unsuitable match for Sir Henry’s son Michael, who also wants to pursue a career on the stage, against his father’s wishes. So it’s hardly surprising that when Sir Henry is found dead at home, Ann speaks for many when she pronounces it:

“The best bit of news we’ve had in Staple Green since they put in the main electricity cable”

While her father refuses to be hypocrite and freely admits, most entertainingly, that he found the deceased to be “a fraudulent nincompoop”  and “a pedantic popinjay”.

It soon emerges that Sir Henry was poisoned, and given that Betty’s husband Howard leaves his surgery unlocked with all manner of medications freely available, any of the neighbours could have wandered in and helped themselves, including the mysterious and glamorous newcomer Sonia Phillips…

Scotland Yard arrive in the form of Detective Inspector Hugh Gordon and Sergeant Spragg. Hugh and Lee know each other and there are clear references to a previous mystery, although I didn’t feel I needed to have read that one to enjoy this. Hugh stays at the Blue Boar in the village with its “depressing air of frowst and aspidistras” and he and Lee are soon charging about in his flashy new Lancia to find the murderer.

I thought it was entirely obvious from some heavy clues at the start who the murderer was, and mostly how they’d done it too, apart from some logistics a twenty-first century reader is unlikely to pick up. But this didn’t detract from my enjoyment at all. These types of stories are comfort reads for me, and the detectives working everything out and tying it all up neatly is soothing escapism.

Lee is an entertaining narrator, clear sighted and witty. She is grumpy at not being a full confidante of Scotland Yard which seemed a bit presumptuous to me, while she lets being called “a good girl” by men who want her to be convenient slide by (no doubt a sign of the times). She and Hugh have a flirtatious relationship which provides an additional frisson to proceedings while never becoming anything more.

The story is well paced, believable and entertaining. There are also some lovely details to convey the Christmas setting:

“It was only a short distance to the village green, and we strolled up the lane admiring the wonderful patterns of filigree lace made by the spiders webs which hung festooned all over the high hedges, sparkling in the chilly sunshine, and the way each blade of grass on the verge stood out stiff and encrusted with thick frost.”

I hope this is the start of more Gilruth issues from BLCC – fingers crossed!

To end, mine is a secular Christmas, but I still have a favourite carol:

“She had adored her husband, and was very fond of her French pepper-mill.” (Margery Sharp, The Foolish Gentlewoman)

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It’s been a busy month trying to get to grips with my new job, but I’m delighted to contribute to Dean Street December, hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home. This reading event provides a lovely end to the reading year, and it encouraged me to get The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp (1948) off the TBR, which Dean Street Press publish as part of their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint.

I really enjoy Margery Sharp’s comic eye, and there’s a perfect example early in this novel in a description of the family’s Sealyham:

“His shaggy eyebrows and meditative gaze gave him an old-gentleman look; he sat there like a retired Colonel, newspaper laid aside, contemplating Socialism.”

The terrier’s family are hodgepodge: widowed fifty-five year old Isabel Brocken, “sentimental, affectionate, uncritical,” and her priggish brother-in-law Simon:

“Mr Brocken was not conceited enough to perceive in himself any compensating charms. To be loved without reason did not flatter him. He put up with Isabel’s affection, as he put up with Isabel, because he had to.”

As well as two younger people staying at the house: Isabel’s nephew Humphrey and her companion Jacqueline, both recovering from the recent war.

This unlikely group live a life of very little strife, ensconced in Isabel’s old family home of Chipping Lodge, sat in a suburb of London which escaped the bombs. (Unlike Simon’s house which is why he finds himself having to tolerate other people, while it is rebuilt.)

Keeping them in domestic order are the self-contained housekeeper Mrs Poole and her teenage daughter Greta.

Their domestic peace is shattered when Isabel invites her old school friend Tilly Cuff to stay indefinitely. The motivation stems from a perceived injustice she did to Tilly years ago, and a plan to make amends. For Tilly does not seem to have thrived:

“No-one ever fell in love with Tilly, not even curates.”

Simon, Humphrey and Jacqueline are horrified. Firstly by Isabel’s plan to leave Tilly all her money, and secondly by Tilly herself:

“Is she to be allowed to beggar herself for the sake of a peculiarly offensive incubus?”

Sharp is always good at villains without caricature, and Tilly is a perfect example. She is manipulative and mendacious, particularly towards Greta Poole. It is Greta and her mother that provide the greatest emotional engagement in the novel: Tilly’s treatment of them shows her to be a real threat, and Simon’s attitude towards them shows him not to be irredeemably hard-hearted.

Yet Tilly is also shown to be vulnerable, lonely and defensive. Although she is powerful in her ability to completely destabilise the entire household, really she has less resources, personal and financial, to draw on than anyone else.

I found The Foolish Gentlewoman to be a surprising page-turner, as I wanted to see how the household would escape Tilly! And yet, things didn’t quite pan out as I expected. Sharp has fun with confounding reader’s expectations:

“To set one’s foot on a tragic stage, and find that the part thrust into one’s hand belonged to a domestic comedy: to read on, and perceive in prospect a crisis after all potentially tragic: to turn the last page upon anticlimax. How inartistic, and yet how life like!”

Yes, anti-climatic in a sense, but wholly satisfying and enjoyable. I particularly liked the happy ending arranged for Simon:

“With no less than five persons had Mr Brocken narrowly escaped, if not intimacy, a degree of acquaintance that would have allowed any one of them to become a nuisance to him.”

A gentle joy made readily available thanks to the excellent Dean Street Press and Furrowed Middlebrow.

“I am merely the canvas on which women paint their dreams.” (Rudolph Valentino)

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

I’m going through a bit of a reading slump at the moment, not a terrible one as I’m finding I can focus on my comfort reads, but I’m struggling with anything that needs more concentration. It’s very frustrating.

I wanted to take part in August’s Women in Translation Month, so I was hoping to recover my reading mojo in time. Having enjoyed All Our Yesterdays and The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg previously, I thought her direct style would suit my addled brain well. Valentino (1957 transl. Avril Bardoni 1987)) is essentially a short story, just 62 pages in my edition (a Daunt Books reissue) and I whizzed through it on a short train journey to visit a friend in Sussex.

The story is narrated by Caterina, sister of the titular character:

“My father believed that [Valentino] was destined to become a man of consequence. There was little enough reason to believe this, but he believed it all the same and had done ever since Valentino was a small boy and perhaps found it difficult to break the habit.”

Valentino is vain and feckless, entirely undeserving of the faith his parents put in him and the sacrifices the whole family have made to finance his medical studies. He fritters away his time and routinely gets engaged to ‘teenagers wearing jaunty little berets’.

So when he announces his latest engagement, no-one takes it particularly seriously:

“It had happened so often already that when he announced he was getting married within the month nobody believed him, and my mother cleaned the dining room wearily and put on the grey silk reserved for her pupils’ examinations at the Conservatory and for meeting Valentino’s perspective brides.”

However, this engagement to Maddelena sticks. She is older, unattractive and incredibly rich. Valentino’s parents are heartbroken at his avariciousness being made so apparent. Caterina is more equanimous and she soon realises that Maddelena is caring and hard-working. Valentino is not worthy of his bride.

“It was not easy to explain to my sister Clara the turn that events had taken. That a woman had appeared with lashings of money and a moustache who was willing to pay for the privilege of marrying Valentino and that he had agreed.”

What follows is a carefully realised study of the family members and their dynamics, particularly around Valentino’s marriage. Caterina’s direct voice conveys the hurt Valentino inflicts, not through cruelty but through utter obliviousness and self-focus, without demonising him.

In such a short space, Ginzburg achieves a really moving portrait of familial relationships and how these exist under the pressures exerted by society.  There is sadness in the tale but also a deadpan humour. Caterina presents the situation without judgement, enabling a real depth to the characterisation.

Ginzburg is such an intelligent, insightful writer who never seeks to alienate readers with her cleverness. She presents knotty complexity with a deceptive simplicity of style. If you’ve never read her, Valentino is a good place to start.

“My emotions at that time were neither profound nor melancholic and I was confident that sooner or later things would improve for me.”

To end, Rudolph Valentino playing ‘a youthful libertine’ and dancing a tango, over 100 years ago:

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.30

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

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.