Tag: fiction

SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby

To show there has been a book written about everything, here is one on local government.  It is a touching story of a Yorkshire community in the 1930s, covering the rich, the poor, and everything in between. 

It’s shockingly contemporary in many ways.  Most affecting is the story of a very bright teenage girl whose mother dies giving birth to an eighth child, and who thus has to drop out of school at 15 to look after the other kids  Note, the doctor had told the mother she should not have another child, and she did not want one, but I guess she could not refuse her husband, who got a bit drunk and after all it wasn’t his death sentence and THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.

Also THANK GOD FOR VACCINATION.  The author, Winifred Holtby, died at 36, of kidney issues from the Scarlet Fever she had as a child.  She knew she had only about two years to live and dedicated it to finishing this book.  It was her fifth, and she was disappointed none had been very warmly received.  This one, published posthumously, was a huge hit and is now considered a twentieth century classic.   

Side bar, this Winifred Holtby was a dear friend of Vera Brittain (whose TESTAMOUNT OF YOUTH I read a couple of years ago).  They lived together when they moved to London after university, and then, touchingly/weirdly, carried on doing so even after Vera got married.  To answer your question, the husband did not like it, no. 

How much do you love this line from the introduction, about how Winifred was in 1935 “staying in Hornsea on the Yorkshire coast in order to escape the distractions and fatigue of life in London  . . .”  The distractions and fatigue of a life in London!  I hear you Winifred, I hear you. 

AT FREDDIE’S by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald is such an extraordinary writer that I really did not care this novel did not have a plot.  It is about a childrens’ theatre school in the 1960s, run by a woman call Freddie, who is an institution, and knows it. She gets away with a lot :

. . . only because Freddie cared so much, and so relentlessly, for the theatre, where, beyond all other worlds, love given is love returned.  Insane directors, perverted columnists cold as a fish, bankrupt promoters, players incapable from drink, have all forgiven each other and been forgiven, and will be, until the last theatre goes dark, because they loved the profession.  And of Freddie – making a large assumption – they said: her heart is in it.

The story, which does not matter much, is about a new young teacher in whom Freddie discerns: “that attraction to the theatre, and indeed to everything theatrical, which can persist in the most hard-headed, opening the way to poetry and disaster.”

This made me laugh, as did her first flat in London where:

The interior smelled powerfully of feet.  Still she hadn’t come to London for the fresh air there, there was enough and to spare of that at home. 

What a writer!

OLAV AUDUNSSON: VOWS by Sigrid Undset

I just had to quit this book, even though it was well-written and impeccably researched.  It was set in thirteenth century Sweden, and was fun journey into that very different world.  It starts with a teenage couple having sex after a night of drunken feasting.  They know they shouldn’t be doing this, as they aren’t formally engaged, but they do it anyway.  And things start to unravel from there.  It may sound unreasonable, but I just had to stop.  Like I appreciate that if you make a bad decision you have to pay the price, but do I need to read a whole book about it?  Like I get it okay ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES and it sucks. 

Especially actions you take when you are young.  When you’re young you end up writing these blank checks (I’ll choose this career, I’ll marry that person) and then life, like some kind of loan shark, just keeps cashing it for decades.

NORMAL WOMEN by Ainslie Hogarth

There were lots of bits of this book that I liked. Try this:

One of the cats levitated to the porch railing, where it lifted its leg, long and straight as a geometry compass, and made a noisy, jubilant feast of its asshole.

Or this, in a mall food court:

They saw men’s pale legs. Frail as roots. Buried all winter. Exposed, now, too soon. Cold. Tortured. Standing in line for fast food. Bringing their trays to small tables, tucking in the attached chairs, alone, knees pointing in opposite directions. Too much thing. Unsettling tendons. Dry knees. Leg hair. White socks. Sneakers.

But in the end I could not finish it. I just got too irritated. It was about a rich woman who never organized herself to have a real job, and now that she is married and a full-time mom, is anxious about unlikely scenarios in which her husband can no longer earn money. I mean I sort of feel for her but on the other hand she is so checked out she doesn’t even know whether their mortgage is expensive for them or not. I mean?!? It just seemed super-whiny. Suffragettes did not go to jail for this I can tell you that much.

POOR THINGS by Alasdair Gray

Here is an very fruity book about SPOLIER ALERT someone creating a living woman from the body of a dead woman and the brains of her fetus. 

It was pretty interesting as a concept, but I found I struggled to care on some level.  Everything was so wild and magically real that it was hard to feel that anything meant anything or would have any consequences. It made me think about FRANKENSTEIN, and especially why the monster in that book is male and not female.  Because, let us face it, if some mad scientist in the nineteenth century thought he could bring someone back to life he would 1000% have tried with a woman because, obviously, sex slave.  Perhaps because Mary Shelley was female it did not go in that direction, but you know realism-wise it ought to have.  Also, I’ve just been in a Wikipedia deepdive about Mary Shelley, and let me give you the sobering reflection that she wrote FRANKENSTEIN when she was just 19! However she had already led a big life, having got together with Shelley when she was 16 (and he was married), after meeting him secretly at her mother’s grave (why), and then running away with him because even though it’s 1819 she believes in FREE LOVE.   What a baller. 

THE TRIO by Johanna Hedman

I had a lot of confused feelings about this book. On the one hand, it was quite more-ish, and I finished it very quickly.  On the other hand, I felt kind of annoyed, and I can’t really explain why.  It tells the story of a sort of love triangle involving undergraduates in Stockholm.  If this is giving you fun TWILIGHT vibes, let me stop you right there.  It is way more tortured than that, and ends with the girl getting with the wrong guy.  Mostly because they DON’T COMMUNICATE.  I was like: just talk to each other! How hard is it to say: are you my boyfriend?!  Or: my feelings were hurt when . . .

Not to sound like I’m so perfect at relationships, but jesus.  Also annoying was the almost mind-boggling level of safety in which these Swedish people live.  It is deeply disorienting to read a book, especially a book about young people, that is not drenched in economic anxiety. 

I spent a good 4000 pages in Stockholm a few years ago (shout out to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s MY STRUGGLE) so I feel eerily familiar with the upper-middle class of this city that I have never even visited.  This book is very much of that world. There is a lot of describing grocery story visits and eating simple and healthy foods (grr!).  There’s also a lot of this kind of writing:

That summer, August and I would bike to Djurgarden in the mornings, and pick a tree close to the water where we’d park our bikes and lay out our towels and then spend the day swimming, sunning and reading.  I’d bring a thermos of coffee and August would come with tuna sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil.  The empty wrapping glittered in the sun after we’d eaten.

That last sentence in particular gives you a flavour of what we are dealing with.

DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT by Diana Athill

Athill’s writing is just so completely clean and unpretentious it feels like a near-miracle. I am close to having read all her books, and am going slow, because I don’t want them to be over. Her memoir INSTEAD OF A LETTER was a searing story of getting dumped, while SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END is an only slight more searing story of what it is like to get old. This is not memoir, but fiction, and I did not like it quite as much.

It tells the story of a young woman who gets to move to London after the second world war. The freedom that I, fifty years later, take for granted, is for her and her friends completely unexpected and thrilling. She gets a job (!), has sex (!!), and meets immigrants (!!!). She is also a pretty cold-hearted tease. She’s a very pretty woman, and is not too bothered about making it clear when she is not interested. I don’t want to be too judgmental, but I found it really pretty mean.

Let’s close with a lovely snippet, about her arguing with her mother as a child: “If I sulked and cried I could usually make my mother cry too – during our rows we would sob rage and frustration at each other – but she always won because an adult’s tears are more frightening than a child’s . . “

GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER by Caroline Blackwood

It’s incredible how any time a book is really weird you can tell it is written from life. This one is really loopy, being a thinly fictionalized account of the author’s great-grandmother and grandmother. The great-gran is pretty intense, being a rigid and lonely old woman who spoke to no one but her one-eyed servant for months at a time. Eerily she spends most of all day in a hard-backed chair, in total idleness, not even reading a book. Her grandmother meanwhile appears to have had some kind of post-partum psychosis, believing in fairies and elves and trying to kill her son who she thought was a changeling. A lot of the action of the book takes place in a crumbling Irish stately home, which her grandfather does not have the money to keep up. I find it strange how many books there are about how difficult it is to have an inheritance. I’d like to give it a try.

This book apparently was denied the Booker because Philip Larkin, chair of the committee, thought it could not be classified as fiction. I have no evidence but you just know he thought women talking about their own lives was low value. It’s a good thing I love AN ARUNDEL TOMB so much or I would have a lot more to say on this.

MONKEY BOY by Francisco Goldman

It is strange how few books there are by immigrants, and how many by immigrants’ children. My theory is we immigrants are busy, trying to assimilate or live the capitalist dream or whatever, and it’s the children who have the free time to try and understand what just happened.

In this book an American man, the child of a Guatemalan and a Ukrainian Jew, puts the effort in. Some parts of it I found pretty interesting, like his flashbacks to middle school, and a particularly epic high school crush. Other parts were less interesting, like where he visits his mother in her retirement home, tirelessly grilling her about Guatemalan history despite her advancing dementia. I mean I get it: he is deep in middle age, and wants it all to have some meant something. Good luck with that I guess.

MOSCOW STATIONS by Venedikt Yerofeev

It boring to listen to other peoples’ dreams. It is also boring to be with drunk people babbling away while you are sober. This book is kind of a mix of these two kinds of borings. I feel bad to have to say it, as this is a famous classic of 20th century Russian literature, and the author had an eccentric, impressive, and difficult life. Like GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, it circulated on samizdat for many years before the government allowed it to be published (appearing in a magazine dedicated to education on the evils of drinking, though its unclear if the editor meant this as a joke or not). It tells the story of a man getting progressively drunker as he rides the train from Moscow to the suburb where his son lives. One interesting point to learn was how really rough Soviet alcoholism was. At one point the narrator tells us about one drink he makes, called ‘Dog’s Giblets,’ which involved mixing floor varnish and brown beer. This is not an exaggeration – apparently the author’s girlfriend used to hide her perfume when he came round, for he would drink it. I literally can’t imagine that status you have to reach to seriously consider the floor varnish, let alone the perfume