This is the fourth of five novels written about an English family during the second world war.  It gives the strange thrill of time travel, because it was written by a woman who was an adult during the war, and so can remember it well, but who only wrote about it fifty years later.  It thus combines detailed historical record with a modern sensibility; it bursts with period detail but also with lesbians, abortions, and urine.  I’ve never felt so much like I was actually getting chance to know what the past was ‘really’ like.  

The cast is huge and covers multiple years.  It’s a remarkable feat of imagination and detail.  At the end, when a character mentions a childhood prank, I felt myself tearing up, as if it was my childhood; in fact it was only about two thousand pages previously.  I sped through these books at disgusting speed.  It was like I  was mainlining plot.

I had assumed in reading it that it must be in some part autobiographical. The characters are so specific and eccentric, that I felt it could only be drawn from life.  I learn from Google that indeed it is largely based on the author’s family.  A central character is married at 19 to a man of 32, just as the author was.  Unsurprisingly, this did not work out (though bizarrely her real life husband was the son of Scott of the Antartic, whose journals I read just before this – it’s a small world among the wealthy British).  

I learnt a great many things from these books about the middle years of this century, including that people had abortions without making a big deal about it; that women entered the workforce in huge numbers; that most girls didn’t expect to enjoy sex; that the war meant most homes were very cold and that powdered eggs are a thing.

The patriarchy and sound commercial judgement mean these novels are packaged like some kind of particularly twee and mumsy chick lit (just like Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy), but don’t let that put you off – these are wonderful books.

See summary of this quartet here

See summary of this quartet here.

See summary of this quartet here.

This is a doom-laden little book.  From the first page, you know things will go wrong: and not in a good way; not in a the-evil-will-be-punish’d kind of way.  It’s more in a modern, literary kind of way, that is: life is unfair and we are all incapable of making change in ourselves or in the world.  Utterly unsurprisingly, this book was shortlisted for the Booker.  The Booker loves to reward novels with this kind of message. 

I can’t deny it is well and tautly written.  It draws you horribly into the tale of a deeply pathetic attempt to organise an outing at a Factory.  The outing is organised by a girl named Freda, and as she is the only hopeful or impactful character in the piece naturally Bainbridge ensures she is punished by the narrative.  She dies on the outing, and of course not through any actual choice, but just in a stupid accident.  Then the other workers are afraid this will get them into trouble, so they cover up the death.  And that’s it.  God I loathed this book.

Sometimes after I have greatly enjoyed a book by a little-known author, I am tempted to read more from them.  This is almost always a mistake.  I really enjoyed Diana Athill’s story of her big break-up, INSTEAD OF A LETTER, and so threw caution to the winds and purchased STET, the story of her career in publishing.  I should have held on tight to that caution.   I can’t quite tell why it was so dull, as the raw material is promising: plucky young Hungarian (ie Andre Deutsch) and disappointed English debutante create publishing start-up that goes on to big success. 

“The story began with my father telling me: ‘You will have to earn a living.’  He said it to me several times during my childhood (which began in 1917), and the way he said it implied that earning one’s living was not quite natural.”

I wonder if this is part of the problem.  She was not of a class or a gender that ever had to work, so doesn’t seem to regard work as part of her own personal story.  She is bizarrely disconnected from the highs and lows of the journey, and descends to that lowest low of the upper class English memoir, name-dropping.  (Nadir of this style: Antonia Fraser’s horrifying MUST YOU GO: MY LIFE WITH HAROLD PINTER).  I did however find it useful for recommendations on what to read next, and so am picking my way through Deutsh’s back catalogue, finding such gems as the deeply obscure Zimbabwean memoir THE TOE-RAGS.  So that’s something.

The subtitle says it all: “The story of a strange upbringing in Southern Rhodesia.”  Strange it certainly is.  South Rhodesian, not so much – at least today – as Southern Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe.  I would summarise by saying this is basically a story about being a poor white.  But I mean a really poor white.  The author and her siblings grow up in the rurals outside Rusape.  They get close to starving.  Their mother walks out on them when they are in junior school, to run off to Joburg with her husband’s brother.  Now there’s a novel I’d like to read, and I don’t find her behaviour so very indefensible in itself, except she runs off when both her husband and her domestic worker are away.  Luckily the worker comes home early, so the kids end up at the police station rather than the morgue. 

Then its on to their relatively wealthier aunt’s home in Salisbury, and then on to better schooling (at the Convent, my high school), and finally an almost white collar job.  As an adult the author leads a strange social life in Salisbury before the second world war, providing an interesting window into a largely forgotten world.  During the war she marries a soldier on leave who she has known for just nine days, and on this bizarre decision this strange novel ends.  (After all, don’t most women’s stories end with marriage?  What else could there be?) 

I enjoyed this book, both because it is well written, and because it is rare.  If you are a tiny minority from a tiny country it is almost never you read a book by your demographic, but here we are: a book by a white Zimbabwean woman.  Admittedly, the bar is high, as this small group includes Nobel laureate Doris Lessing; but this is a worthy addition.

These are Sedaris’ diaries from 1977 when he is in his early twenties, on through 2002.  What I mostly learnt from them is that you can waste a lot of years on hard drugs and still end up achieving something with your life.  I’m not really sure why I’ve been putting so much effort in.  I also learnt that he had a lot of free time.  It made me reflect on my own life.  He has time to ponder very (and I do mean very) minor events, and write them up to mild comic effect.  Having read quite a lot of his essays, especially in 2011, it’s interesting to see the raw material of his life that he massaged into money.    Here’s an example of what formed the basis of  the SANTALAND DIARIES.  It’s from when he was working as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s.  Here’s some men leaving the grotto:

“And, hey, Santa,” one of them said.  “Look after our boys in the Gulf, will you?”  He said it with such gooey poignancy, Santa and I laughed merrily after they’d left.

And here he is working as an entrance elf:

The job amounts to hustling up visitors, and I thought I did a pretty good job.  “Patronize Santa,” I said.  “Behold his chubby majesty.  Santa was born and raised in a small home.  Hail him.  Santa’s patience is beyond your comprehension.  Come test it.”

I tend to love a diary, for the intimacy it gives you with someone else’s life.  These dairies are not like that.  They hold you at arm’s length.  But I didn’t mind.  They were entertaining at a distance, which is quite how I like relationships in real life.

This is a book about a grand passion that goes nowhere. Frederic Moreau is a law student who falls madly in love with a another man’s slightly older wife. He then pines after her for a couple of decades, and when she is finally available, decides she is now too old for him. He tries the law for a while, but then comes into a small fortune after which he rotates variously through arts, journalism, and politics, all with limited commitment. Meanwhile, major historical events are taking place in France: revolutions and so on. He is only tangentially involved.

So by the end of the 500 plus pages, you seem to have got precisely nowhere. At the end he is talking to his high school friend about a silly teenage prank, and the last lines of the book are them agreeing that that was “the best time we ever had”. This an unexpectedly tough ending for a book that covers virtually the whole of someone’s adult life, a life which was apparently – but I guess in the end not really – crammed with incident. It’s pretty harsh.

Many contemporary critics hated the book, finding it meandering and meaningless. Others loved it, such as Theodore Banville who commented that it was’sad, indecisive and mysterious, like life itself, making do with endings all the more terrible in that they are not materially dramatic’. One of his friends wrote to Flaubert to say the book was popular among his generation:

Do you know . . . the great catchphrase of the day? It comes from your book. You say: “THE LAST PAGE OF Sentimental Education!”And you cover your face with your hands.

This tells me Flaubert’s contemporaries were having a lot of issues we could relate to today. It’s focus on a broadly meaningless life, while dressed up like a nineteenth century novel, makes it seem oddly modern.

This is not to say it is not boring. It is kind of boring. However the academic who wrote the introduction feels that that is the point:

Flaubert further complicates his scene by staging a confusing abundance of major characters. The inner circle, the fictional space just around the hero, is crowded with figures whose names we struggle to recall. . . . This is undoubtedly deliberate artistic practice, a trick of composition aptly called de-Balzac-ification. True to his exacting sense of the artistic vocation, insulated from the pressures of the market by his modest private income, Flaubert understood that the serious novel, the art novel, must detach itself from popular taste.

Next time I create something people don’t like, I’m just going to say that I have detached myself from popular taste. That said, in among the meaninglessness and meander, there is lots of lovely writing. Let’s end with this taster, of a life I am so grateful feminism has saved me from:

She was one of those Parisian spinsters who, every evening when they have given their lessons or tried to sell little sketches, or to dispose of poor manuscripts, return to their own homes with mud on their petticoats, make their own dinner, which they eat by themselves, and then, with their soles resting on a foot-warmer, by the light of a filthy lamp, dream of a love, a family, a hearth, wealth—all that they lack. So it was that, like many others, she had hailed in the Revolution the advent of vengeance, and she delivered herself up to a Socialistic propaganda of the most unbridled description.

This book is surprising in its honesty. I find it surprising Athill is willing to be this frank with strangers; and really surprising she is willing to be this honest with herself. She lays down a real challenge to me in how to think about myself, to myself. The book tells the story of a break-up Athill suffered in her early twenties; and in another way, it tells the story of her whole life – because for her this break-up was . . . let’s just say, it was a bad one. And not a couple of weeks of ice-cream in your jammies kind of a bad one. More a twenty years of despair kind of a bad one.

While at University, Athill got engaged to a man she had known since she was fifteen. He went to Egypt for work, while she completed her last year at Oxford. He wrote to her regularly, and warmly, and then one day stopped writing to her. There was total silence for two years, until he wrote formally, asking to be released from their engagement, because he was going to marry someone else. I mean, that’s pretty bad. But for her it was enough to send her into a two decade long tail-spin. Here she is, reflecting on what kept her going:

I believe, however, that I owe to Oxford much of the stability and resilience which enabled me, later, to live through twenty years of unhappiness without coming to dislike life. I already had the advantages of a happy childhood and a naturally equitable disposition, and three years of almost pure enjoyment added to those advantages confirmed in me a bias towards being well-disposed to life without which, lacking faith, lacking intellect, lacking energy, and eventually, lacking confidence in myself, I might have foundered.

And:

Lazy and self-indulgent, I was a lively girl only in my capacity as a female, and once I was wounded in that capacity I became, to face the truth, dull. (Since I believe that any recognition of truth is salutary, this should be a bracing moment, but it does not feel like that: it feels sad.)

See what I mean about a piercing, uncomfortable, honesty? That said, the despair is hard to understand. Perhaps in the 1940s, marriage was just that important to a woman’s esteem. After that thought occurred to me, I thanked god on every page for the luck of being born now.

It’s strange to read about someone who feels she has written off so much of her life. Despite what she says was a lack of interest in a career, she was for many years one of the most important book editors in London. But even this she does not claim as making her life worthwhile:

Eight years younger than myself, my cousin was an exceptionally pretty girl with a haunting personality, so that her life was considerably fuller than mine, and I slid prematurely into an attitude common among good-natured middle-aged women: that of taking so strong an interest in other people’s lives that it largely fills the emptiness of one’s own. I was comfortable in the routine of those years, and when on rare occasions I felt a stab of misery my reaction to it was not revolt against my circumstances but a deliberate attempt to become resigned to them. But to say that satisfying work was something that made me happy – that I could not have done. Something else, occupying only a fraction of each year and appearing to be marginal, made more difference to the colour of my days than did my work. My holidays.

In her forties, she slowly begins to recover. This is in part, as she says above, due to her holidays; in part, I think, because of her work; in part, because she wins a small writing prize, which makes her feel that perhaps after all she is not a failure. And failure she is not. This lady is a lovely, lucid writer. Enjoy these snippets:

After the late shift the tiny sequins of the traffic lights, reduced by masks during the blackout, changed from red to amber to green down the whole length of empty, silent Oxford Street. They looked as though they were signalling a whispered conversation, and they were the kind of thing with which I filled my days.

and

. . . the olive is the tree I would choose to keep if I could have only one: for the variety of shape, for the comforting roughness of its bark, for its minnow leaves, dark on top and silver underneath, which cast a shadow more delicately stippled than any other, and for its ancient usefulness, which makes it, like wheat, a symbolic thing.

INSTEAD OF A LETTER is full of these beautifully observed moments, which make you feel as if you have traveled deep inside her head. So much so that if one met her, it would be hard to act appropriately – i.e., like a stranger.

The book is remarkable to read today, but I can only imagine how remarkable it was when it first came out, when the genre of the ‘memoir’ barely existed. Let’s end with a little snippet of her teenage fantasy – can you imagine how this must have knocked their 1940s socks off:

I lay sprawled on the parquet in my sage-green art-silk tunic and bloomer and my salmon-pink lisle stockings, thinking, ‘If a stevedore’ – why a stevedore? I am sure I had never met one – ‘If a stevedore would come and rape me at this minute, I would let him’

The intimacy between people working together is an agreeable thing and very real, in spite of the disconcerting way in which it vanishes as soon as the same people meet each other in different circumstances.