A mysterious little gothic novel about an abusive father and levitation. The arc of the story did not really work for me, so I won’t go into it, but the joy is in the world. Let me quote extensively from the first page, where the main character, a young woman, meets a strange old man on the street:
. . . I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet’s house with a lamp outside. I said, “You must excuse me,” and left this poor man among the privet hedges. I entered the house. . . . In the brown hall my mother was standing; and she looked at me with her sad eyes half -covered by their heavy lids, but did not speak. She just stood there. Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so, if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.
What a wonderful writer she is! I am totally inspired by her biography too. Unlike many other writers, this is not because of the number of books she wrote, or the contributions to literary salons, or the generally impressive CV, and etc, but because she was poor (in the introduction she tells us what the flat she is living in costs to rent, I LOVE this) and married the wrong people and had tons of jobs and lived in multiple countries and wanted to be a painter not a writer. I just find it inspirationally and wonderfully messy.