twentieth century literature

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

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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

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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.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!

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.20

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The Shooting Party – Isabel Colegate (1980) 191 pages

I’ll get my complaint about The Shooting Party out of the way first: there were about eleventy-million characters, far too many for a novella, and trying to keep them straight made my brain hurt. If ever a book needed a family tree/character list at the beginning it was this one. But other than that I really enjoyed it, so on with the post!

The Shooting Party was written in the latter part of the twentieth century but captures a bygone age just before the outbreak of World War I.  Colegate relies on our knowledge as readers that the lives she presents are on the brink of being changed irrevocably.

“I can’t say I positively want a war; and yet one gets the feeling sometimes – life is so extraordinarily pleasant for those of us who are fortunate enough to have been born in the right place – ought it to be so extraordinarily pleasant? – and for so few of us? And isn’t there sometimes a kind of satiety about it all – and at the same time greed?”

The titular event is taking place at Sir Randolph Nettleby’s Oxfordshire estate. Over the course of three days a group of privileged people will convene in the slaughter of hundreds of birds. It is absolutely grotesque, but thankfully Colegate spends very little time on the details of bloodsports, being more interested in the relationships between the characters. There were a few passages I skipped but it remained very readable.

Sir Randolph is aware that the world is changing. He despairs at the falling away of the old order as the world becomes increasingly mechanised and industrialised. The country estates are losing workers and he worries at the decline of the countryside.

He is quite a gentle patriarch in many ways, despite being so much a man of his time. Colegate doesn’t laugh at her characters, but there is humour throughout and I don’t think we’re supposed to take them entirely seriously all the time:

“Sir Randolph, unlike Minnie who aspired to it, considered cosmopolitanism a vice. It was alright to know your way around Paris, Sir Randolph thought, and to visit Italian picture galleries or the relics of the classical world, but generally speaking a man should stick to one country and be proud of it. If one wanted to travel there was always the Empire.”

His grandson Osbert doesn’t do well at school and the family are despairing at getting him ready for Eton, yet it is Sir Randolph who sticks up for him:

“Sir Randolph said, ‘Leave him alone. There’s no malice in him. Give him time and he’ll come along all right.’ He spoke as he might have spoken of one of his black, curly-coated retrievers, and like the retrievers Osbert in due course came along.”

Osbert has a pet duck named Elfrida Beetle and a source of tension throughout the novel is whether she will survive or get caught up with the wild ducks that the party are determined to shoot to pieces. There is also an impending sense of doom, beyond the war, as we know from the start of the novel that there is “an error of judgement, which resulted in a death”. Yet the final day of the shoot starts peaceably enough, as Sir Randolph reflects in his study:

“Freed from time, he felt influenced towards the familiar state of watchful calm, from which he was aroused by the slow crescendo and then rapid diminuendo of the breakfast gone being sounded by Rogers, an acknowledged master on the instrument.”

His wife Minnie was a favourite of the now-dead King, (another character reflects: “A pity English royalty was always so philistine.”) and like her husband she has a strong sense of duty and decorum. Unlike her husband she’s also quite a frivolous character, but this suits her role as hostess and she sees more than she says. She gets on well with her granddaughter Cicely, who shares her silliness, if not her circumspection.

“Olivia did not find Cecily boring. She liked her liveliness and suspected her of having more courage than she herself had ever had. Cecily might well choose to be unconventional; something to which Olivia had never aspired, in her actions at least. Her thoughts, generally speaking, she kept to herself.”

Olivia is Lady Lilburn married to Bob, a man so dull that even as I’ve just finished the reading the novella I can’t remember anything about him except a funny scene with him fussing over cufflinks. Another couple are Lord and Lady Hartlip, long married and quite prepared to indulge each other’s extra-marital dalliances. Where Lord Hartlip draws the line is Lady Hartlip’s compulsive gambling, which she has learnt to hide from him. Thus Colegate shows that privilege and comfort don’t equal happiness for all. In fact, happiness seems elusive to so many of these characters.

Apparently one of criticisms of The Shooting Party on publication was that it tried to shoehorn in all the Edwardian political issues and the characters were ciphers in service of these. I think this is a little unfair. As I mentioned at the start, there are soooo many characters that I can see where this criticism came from: a rich Jewish businessman subject to Anti-Semitism; a member of European aristocracy; bored wives; flighty debs; gamekeepers entrenched in the social order; a new generation coming up of self-made men… but I found them all believable and Colegate is interested in the person behind the type.

Colegate evokes the daily routines of life in a large country estate so well, and balances the inevitable elegiac quality with the practicalities of living; the sad desperation of some of the characters with humour. As the day moves on personalities are exposed and relationships change forever.

Novella a Day in Day 2025: No.19

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Siblings – Brigitte Reimann (1963, transl. Lucy Jones 2023) 129 pages

Summarising Siblings makes it sound incredibly clunky. A brother and sister living in the GDR find themselves separated ideologically as one of them wants to leave for the West. However, Brigitte Reimann’s writing is so skilled that the relationship between the siblings is rounded. The novella never feels like a construct in order to explore two forms of government in opposition to one another.

We know from the start that there has been some sort of significant betrayal. It opens:

“As I walked to the door, everything in me was spinning.

He said, ‘I won’t forget this.’ He was standing very straight and not moving in the middle of the room. He said in a cold, dry voice, ‘I’ll never forgive you.’”

The story is told from the point of view of Elisabeth (Betsy/Lise) and each chapter opens with the current situation (1960, prior to the Berlin Wall being built) before looking back in time. We learn of her close relationship with her brother Uli.

“I trusted him in every way and was vain enough to think I knew everything or almost everything he thought and planned. But in truth, back then, which was only the day before yesterday, I didn’t have a clue about the person closest to me.”

They are young people from a previously privileged family (who voted for Hitler), although they no longer have access to their industrialist family’s assets or wealth. Elisabeth is an artist and has a job working in an industrial plant painting the workers and teaching, which she enjoys despite the frustrations of dealing with colleagues and pressures from the Stasi.

“As soon as I’ve warmed myself in the lap of my family for a few days, I feel homesick for its adventurous, daring atmosphere; and for the sight of the huge, white and yellow excavators; for the mountains of sand blown haphazardly by the wind, under which lies the dark brown, damp coal seam; and for the drivers up in their peaceful cabins, shields lowered, patiently shovelling tonnes of earth…”

Uli is an engineer but he is unable to get a job due to being blacklisted by association with a professor who defected, despite him knowing nothing about the defection. Unlike Elisabeth and her boyfriend Joachim who works for the Party, Uli struggles with the immense bureaucracy and lack of choices he has in the GDR.

The siblings’ brother Konrad went to the West with his wife, and Elisabeth sees this as a huge betrayal, despising the materialism she feels drove the decision.  He was part of Hitler Youth, while Elisabeth and Uli were both small children during the war. Hence her feelings about the West and her immediate family are bound up with and complicated by Germany’s recent past.

A further complication is that Elisabeth and Uli have stayed close throughout their lives and she describes Uli romantically, dwelling on his handsomeness and appealing qualities more than on those of Joachim. I found her response in this way to her brother odd and unnerving, but I don’t know if that is a cultural difference or a deliberate decision by Reimann to make the siblings’ bond overly intense.

Uli tries to explain to Elisabeth the difference between him and Konrad; why he needs to leave, despite still believing in socialism:

“‘Before I’m ground to pieces here,’ he added, not quite as loudly, not quite as confidently. ‘I’ll always stand up for the public ownership of industry over there.’

‘Even in your shipyard?’

‘Even in my shipyard.’ He paused then smiled uncertainly.

‘How come your shipyard?’ I said quickly. ‘You’ll have to stop using communist phrases, you know.’”

Having Uli still believe in the system of government but finding himself unable to live under it complicates the opposing views of the siblings and exposes the layers of experiences which can lead to vastly different life decisions.

Another clever decision is to not paint the GDR as a bleak wasteland. As well as Elisabeth’s romantic view of the plant, the natural environment is beautifully evoked:

“The morning sun had moved on, and the sky stood flat and pale blue above the trees lining the avenue; from the kitchen window, above the cottages, I could see stables and small courtyards nestling closely together in this bucolic area of town. Raindrops sparkled on the walnut tree branches and the tips of its leaves in the slanting sunshine.”

The narrative circles back to end where it began, perhaps indicating the circular nature of the political arguments that neither Uli or Elisabeth will win. By the time we return, the reader is fully aware of the various ambivalent, contradictory bonds which tie Elisabeth and Uli. Siblings is a heartbreaking portrait of how wider political pressures can fracture the closest of relationships, irretrievably.

“‘I can’t explain anything to you,’ he said after a while. ‘Because our views on freedom, among other things, are too far apart.’”