#1962Club: A Dozen Books I’d Read Before
I totally failed to read a new-to-me 1962 publication this year. I’m disappointed in myself as I usually manage to contribute one or two reviews to each of Karen and Simon’s year clubs, and it’s always a good excuse to read some classics.
My mistake this time was to only get one option: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, which I had my husband borrow for me from the university library. I opened it up and couldn’t make head or tail of it. I’m sure it’s very clever and meta, and I’ve enjoyed Nabokov before (Pnin, in particular), but I clearly needed to be in the right frame of mind for a challenge, and this month I was not.
Looking through the Goodreads list of the top 100 books from 1962, and spying on others’ contributions to the week, though, I can see that it was a great year for literature (aren’t they all?). Here are 12 books from 1962 that I happen to have read before, most of which I’ve reviewed here in the past few years. I’ve linked to those and/or given review excerpts where I have them, and the rest I describe to the best of my muzzy memory.
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken – The snowy scene on the cover and described in the first two paragraphs drew me in and the story, a Victorian-set fantasy with notes of Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre, soon did, too. Dickensian villains are balanced out by some equally Dickensian urchins and helpful adults, all with hearts of gold. There’s something perversely cozy about the plight of an orphan in children’s books: the characters call to the lonely child in all of us; we rejoice to see how ingenuity and luck come together to defeat wickedness. There are charming passages here in which familiar smells and favourite foods offer comfort. This would make a perfect stepping stone from Roald Dahl to one of the Victorian classics.
Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill – This was Athill’s first book, published when she was 45. An unfortunate consequence of my not having read the memoirs in the order in which they are written is that much of the content of this one seemed familiar to me. It hovers over her childhood (the subject of Yesterday Morning) and centres in on her broken engagement and abortion, two incidents revisited in Somewhere Towards the End. Although Athill’s careful prose and talent for candid self-reflection are evident here, I am not surprised that the book made no great waves in the publishing world at the time. It was just the story of a few things that happened in the life of a privileged Englishwoman. Only in her later life has Athill become known as a memoirist par excellence.
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – (Read in October 2011.) Quite possibly the first ‘classic’ science fiction work I’d ever read. I found Ballard’s debut dated, with passages of laughably purple prose, poor character development (Beatrice is an utter Bond Girl cliché), and slow plot advancement. It sounded like a promising environmental dystopia – perhaps a forerunner of Oryx and Crake – but beyond the plausible vision of a heated-up and waterlogged planet, the book didn’t have much to offer. The most memorable passage was when Strangman drains the water and Kerans discovers Leicester Square beneath; he walks the streets and finds them uninhabited except by sea creatures clogging the cinema entrances. That was quite a potent, striking image. But the scene that follows, involving stereotyped ‘Negro’ guards, seemed like a poor man’s Lord of the Flies rip-off.
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson – Carson’s first chapter imagines an American town where things die because nature stops working as it should. Her main target was insecticides that were known to kill birds and had presumed negative effects on human health through the food chain and environmental exposure. Although the details may feel dated, the literary style and the general cautions against submitting nature to a “chemical barrage” remain potent.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson – I loved the offbeat voice and unreliable narration, and the way that the Blackwood house is both a refuge and a prison for the sisters. “Where could we go?” Merricat asks Constance when she expresses concern that she should have given the girl a more normal life. “What place would be better for us than this? Who wants us, outside? The world is full of terrible people.” As the novel goes on, you ponder who is protecting whom, and from what. There are a lot of great scenes, all so discrete that I could see this working very well as a play with just a few backdrops to represent the house and garden. It has the kind of small cast and claustrophobic setting that would translate very well to the stage.
Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson – Moomintroll discovers a dragon small enough to be kept in a jar; laughter brings a fearful child back from literal invisibility. But what struck me more was the lessons learned by neurotic creatures. In “The Fillyjonk who believed in Disasters,” the title character fixates on her belongings, but when a gale and a tornado come and sweep it all away, she experiences relief and joy. My other favourite was “The Hemulen who loved Silence.” After years as a fairground ticket-taker, he can’t wait to retire and get away from the crowds and the noise, but once he’s obtained his precious solitude he realizes he needs others after all. In “The Fir Tree,” the Moomins, awoken midway through hibernation, get caught up in seasonal stress and experience Christmas for the first time.
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats – A perennial favourite from my childhood, with a paper-collage style that has influenced many illustrators. Just looking at the cover makes me nostalgic for the sort of wintry American mornings when I’d open an eye to a curiously bright aura from around the window, glance at the clock and realize my mom had turned off my alarm because it was a snow day and I’d have nothing ahead of me apart from sledding, playing boardgames and drinking hot cocoa with my best friend. There was no better feeling.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – (Reread in 2021.) I probably picked this up at age seven or so, as a follow-on from the Chronicles of Narnia. Interplanetary stories have never held a lot of interest for me. As a child, I was always more drawn to talking-animal stuff. Again I found the travels and settings hazy. It’s admirable of L’Engle to introduce kids to basic quantum physics, and famous quotations via Mrs. Who, but this all comes across as consciously intellectual rather than organic and compelling. Even the home and school talk feels dated. I most appreciated the thought of a normal – or even not very bright – child like Meg saving the day through bravery and love. This wasn’t for me, but I hope that for some kids, still, it will be pure magic.
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing – I read this feminist classic in my early twenties, in the days when I was working at a London university library. Lessing wrote autofiction avant la lettre, and the gist of this novel is that ‘Anna’, a writer, divides her life into four notebooks of different colours: one about her African upbringing, another about her foray into communism, a third containing an autobiographical novel in progress, and the fourth a straightforward journal. The fabled golden notebook is the unified self she tries to create as her romantic life and mental health become more complicated. Julianne Pachico read this recently and found it very powerful. I think I was too young for this and so didn’t appreciate it at the time. Were I to reread it, I imagine I would get a lot more out of it.
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer – More autofiction. Like a nursery rhyme gone horribly wrong, this is the story of a woman who can’t keep it together. She’s the woman in the shoe, the wife whose pumpkin-eating husband keeps her safe in a pumpkin shell, the ladybird flying home to find her home and children in danger. Aged 31 and already on her fourth husband, the narrator, known only as Mrs. Armitage, has an indeterminate number of children. Her current husband, Jake, is a busy filmmaker whose philandering soon becomes clear, starting with the nanny. A breakdown at Harrods is the sign that Mrs. A. isn’t coping. Most chapters begin in medias res and are composed largely of dialogue, including with Jake or her therapist. The book has a dark, bitter humour and brilliantly recreates a troubled mind.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – This was required reading in high school, a novella and circadian narrative depicting life for a prisoner in a Soviet gulag. And that’s about all I can tell you about it. I remember it being just as eye-opening and depressing as you might expect, but pretty readable for a translated classic.
A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye – Tangye wasn’t a cat fan to start with, but Monty won him over. He lived with newlyweds Derek and Jeannie first in the London suburb of Mortlake, then on their flower farm in Cornwall. When they moved to Minack, there was a sense of giving Monty his freedom and taking joy in watching him live his best life. They were evacuated to St Albans and briefly lived with Jeannie’s parents and Scottie dog, who became Monty’s nemesis. Monty survived into his 16th year, happily tolerating a few resident birds. Tangye writes warmly and humorously about Monty’s ways and his own development into a man who is at a cat’s mercy. This was really the perfect chronicle of life with a cat, from adoption through farewell. Simon thought so, too.
Here’s hoping I make a better effort at the next year club!
September Releases by Chloe Lane, Ben Lerner, Navied Mahdavian & More
September and October are bounteous months in the publishing world. I’ll have a bunch of books to plug in both, mostly because I’ve upped my reviewing quota for Shelf Awareness. There’s real variety here, from contemporary novellas and heavily autobiographical poetry to nature essays and a graphic memoir.
Arms & Legs by Chloe Lane
I reviewed Lane’s debut novel, The Swimmers, a black comedy about a family preparing for an assisted suicide, this time last year. It seems there’s an autobiographical setup to the author’s follow-up, which focuses on a couple from New Zealand now living in Florida with their young son. Narrator Georgie teaches writing at a local college and is having an affair with Jason, an Alabama-accented librarian she met through taking Finn to the Music & Movement class. She joins in a volunteer-led controlled burn in the forest, and curiosity quickly turns to horror when she discovers the decaying body of a missing student.
There’s a strong physicality to this short novel: fire, bodies and Florida’s dangerous fauna (“To choose to live in a place surrounded by these creatures, these threats, it made me feel like I was living a bold life”). Georgie has to decide whether setting fire to her marriage with Dan is what she really wants. A Barry Hannah short story she reads describes adultery as just a matter of arms and legs, a phrase that’s repeated several times.
Georgie is cynical and detached from her self-destructive choices, coming out with incisive one-liners (“My life isn’t a Muriel Spark novel, there’s no way to flash forward and find out if I make it out of the housefire alive” and “He rested the spade on his shoulder as if he were a Viking taking a drinks break in the middle of a battle”). Lane burrows into instinct and motivation, also giving a glimpse of the challenges of new motherhood. Apart from a wicked dinner party scene, though, the book as a whole was underwhelming: the body holds no mystery, and adultery is an old, old story.
With thanks to Gallic Books for the proof copy for review.
The Lights by Ben Lerner
I’d read fiction and nonfiction from Lerner but had no idea of what to expect from his poetry. Almost every other poem is a prose piece, many of these being absurdist monologues that move via word association between topics seemingly chosen at random: psychoanalysis, birdsong, his brother’s colorblindness; proverbs, the Holocaust; art conservation, his partner’s upcoming C-section, an IRS Schedule C tax form, and so on.
The vocabulary and pronouncements can be a little pretentious. The conversational nature and randomness of the subjects contribute to the same autofiction feel you get from his novels. For instance, he probes parenting styles: his parents’ dilemma between understanding his fears and encouraging him in drama and sport; then his daughters’ playful adoption of his childhood nickname of Benner for him.
A few highlights: the enjambment in “Index of Themes”; the commentary on pandemic strictures and contrast between ancient poetry and modern technology in “The Stone.” I wouldn’t seek out more poetry by Lerner, but this was interesting to try. (Read via Edelweiss)
Sample lines:
“When you die in the patent office / there’s a pun on expiration”
“the goal is to be on both sides of the poem, / shuttling between the you and I. … Form / is always the answer to the riddle it poses”
“It’s raining now / it isn’t, or it’s raining in the near / future perfect when the poem is finished / or continuous, will have been completed”
This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America by Navied Mahdavian
Mahdavian has also published comics in the New Yorker. His debut graphic novel is a memoir of the three years (2016–19) he and his wife lived in remote Idaho. Of Iranian heritage, the author had lived in Miami and then the Bay Area, so was pretty unprepared for living off-grid. His wife, Emelie (who is white), is a documentary filmmaker. They had a box house brought in on a trailer. After Trump’s surprise win, it was a challenging time to be a Brown man in the rural USA. “You’re not a Muslim, are you?” was the kind of question he got on their trips into town. Neighbors were outwardly friendly – bringing them firewood and elk kebabs, helping when their car wouldn’t start or they ran off the road in icy conditions, teaching them the local bald eagles’ habits – yet thought nothing of making racist and homophobic slurs.
I appreciated the self-deprecating depictions of learning DIY from YouTube videos and feeling like a wimp in comparison to his new friends who hunt and have gun collections – one funny spread has him imagining himself as a baby in a onesie sitting across from a manly neighbor. “I am shedding my city madness,” Mahdavian boasts as they plant an abundant garden and start learning about trees and birds. The references to Persian myth and melodrama are intriguing, though sometimes seem à propos of nothing, as do the asides on science and nature. I preferred when the focus was on the couple’s struggles with infertility and reopening the town movie theater – a flop because people only want John Wayne flicks.
This was enjoyable reading, but the simple black-and-white style is unlikely to draw in readers new to graphic storytelling, and I wondered if the overall premise – ‘we expected to find closed-minded racists and we did’ – was enough to hang a memoir on. (Read via Edelweiss)
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
(Links to full text)
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
Enright’s astute eighth novel traces the family legacies of talent and trauma through the generations descended from a famous Irish poet. Cycles of abandonment and abuse characterize the McDaraghs. Enright convincingly pinpoints the narcissism and codependency behind their love-hate relationships. (It was an honor to also interview Anne Enright. You can see our Q&A here.)
When My Ghost Sings by Tara Sidhoo Fraser
This lyrical debut memoir is an experimental, literary recounting of the experience of undergoing a stroke and relearning daily skills while supporting a gender-transitioning partner. Fraser splits herself into two: the “I” moving through life, and “Ghost,” her memory repository. But “I can’t rely only on Ghost’s mental postcards,” Fraser thinks, and sets out to retrieve evidence of who she was and is.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
(Already featured in my Best of 2023 so far post.) Groff’s fifth novel combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep as it chronicles a runaway Jamestown servant’s struggle to endure the winter of 1610. Flashbacks to traumatic events seep into her mind as she copes with the harsh reality of life in the wilderness. The style is archaic and postmodern all at once. Evocative and affecting – and as brutal as anything Cormac McCarthy wrote. A potent, timely fable as much as a historical novel.
Zoo World: Essays by Mary Quade
A collection of 15 thoughtful nature/travel essays that explore the interconnectedness of life and conservation strategies, and exemplify compassion for people and, particularly, animals. The book makes a round-trip journey, beginning at Quade’s Ohio farm and venturing further afield in the Americas and to Southeast Asia before returning home.
The Goodbye World Poem by Brian Turner
The lovely laments in Brian Turner’s fourth collection (a sequel to The Wild Delight of Wild Things) dwell in the aftermath of the loss of his wife and others, and cultivate compensatory appreciation for the natural world. Turner’s poetry is gilded with alliteration and maritime metaphors The long title piece, which closes the collection, repeats many phrases from earlier poems—a pleasing way of drawing the book’s themes together. (My review of the third volume in this loose trilogy is forthcoming.)
And a bonus review book, relevant for its title:
September and the Night by Maica Rafecas
[Translated from the Catalan by Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall]
A new Logistics Centre is to cut through Anaïs’s family vineyards as part of a compulsory land purchase. While her father, Magí, and brother, Jan, are resigned to the loss, this single mother decides to resist, tying herself to a stone shed on the premises that will be right in the path of the bulldozers. This causes others to question her mental health, with social worker Elisa tasked with investigating the case. Key evidence of her irrational behaviour turns out to have perfectly good explanations.
Certain chapters alternate Jan’s and Anaïs’s perspectives, recreate her confusion in a psychiatric hospital, or have every sentence beginning with “There” or “And” – effective anaphora. Although I didn’t think Jan’s several romantic options added to the plot, this debut novella from a Spanish author was a pleasant surprise. It’s based on a true story, though takes place in fictional locations, and bears a gentle message of cultural preservation.
With thanks to Fum d’Estampa Press for the free copy for review.
20 Books of Summer, 5: Crudo by Olivia Laing (2018)
Behind on the challenge, as ever, I picked up a novella. It vaguely fits with a food theme as crudo, “raw” in Italian, can refer to fish or meat platters (depicted on the original hardback cover). In this context, though, it connotes the raw material of a life: a messy matrix of choices and random happenings, rooted in a particular moment in time.
This is set over four and a bit months of 2017 and steeped in the protagonist’s detached horror at political and environmental breakdown. She’s just turned 40 and, in between two trips to New York City, has a vacation in Tuscany, dabbles in writing and art criticism, and settles into married life in London even though she’s used to independence and nomadism.
For as hyper-real as the contents are, Laing is doing something experimental, even fantastical – blending biography with autofiction and cultural commentary by making her main character, apparently, Kathy Acker. Never mind that Acker died of breast cancer in 1997.
I knew nothing of Acker but – while this is clearly born of deep admiration, as well as familiarity with her every written word – that didn’t matter. Acker quotes and Trump tweets are inserted verbatim, with the sources given in a “Something Borrowed” section at the end.
Like Jenny Offill’s Weather, this is a wry and all too relatable take on current events and the average person’s hypocrisy and sense of helplessness, with the lack of speech marks and shortage of punctuation I’ve come to expect from ultramodern novels:
she might as well continue with her small and cultivated life, pick the dahlias, stake the ones that had fallen down, she’d always known whatever it was wasn’t going to last for long.
40, not a bad run in the history of human existence but she’d really rather it all kept going, water in the taps, whales in the oceans, fruits and duvets, the whole sumptuous parade
This is how it is then, walking backwards into disaster, braying all the way.
I’ve somehow read almost all of Laing’s oeuvre (barring her essays, Funny Weather) and have found books like The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City and Everybody wide-ranging and insightful. Crudo feels as faithful to life as Rachel Cusk’s autofiction or Deborah Levy’s autobiography, but also like an attempt to make something altogether new out of the stuff of our unprecedented times. No doubt some of the intertextuality of this, her only fiction to date, was lost on me, but I enjoyed it much more than I expected to – it’s funny as well as eminently quotable – and that’s always a win. (Little Free Library) 
Women’s Prize Longlist Reviews (Croft, Grudova, O’Farrell) & Shortlist Predictions
The Women’s Prize shortlist will be announced on Wednesday the 26th. I’ve managed to read a few more novels from the longlist and started another (Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks), which would take me up to 6 read out of 16. I have a couple of others on order from the library (Kennedy and Patel), but will only bother to read them if they are shortlisted.
Homesick by Jennifer Croft
I was intrigued by the publication history of this one: Croft first wrote it in Spanish, then produced an English-language version which, in the USA, was marketed as a memoir illustrated with her own photographs. Here in the UK, though, Charco Press published it as part of their new range of untranslated fiction – with no photos, alas. So, it’s clear that this is thinly veiled autobiography; literally all that may have been changed is the character names.
The protagonist is ‘Amy’, who lives in a tornado-ridden Oklahoma and whose sister, ‘Zoe’ – a handy A to Z of growing up there – has a mysterious series of illnesses that land her in hospital. The third person limited perspective reveals Amy to be a protective big sister who shoulders responsibility: “There is nothing in the world worse than Zoe having her blood drawn. Amy tries to show her the pictures [she’s taken of Zoe’s dog] at just the right moment, just right before the nurse puts the needle in”.
The girls are home-schooled and Amy, especially, develops a genius for languages, receiving private tutoring in Russian from Sasha, a Ukrainian former student of their father’s. Both sister are more than a little in love with Sasha. They alternate between competing for attention and indulging their joint passions – such as for the young Russian figure-skating couple who sweep the Winter Olympics. Amy starts college at 15, which earns her unwanted attention among her classmates, and struggles with her mental health before deciding to see the world. Despite periods of estrangement, her relationship with Zoe is what grounds her.
In a sense this is a simple chronological story, told in a matter-of-fact way. Yet each of its vignettes – some just a paragraph long – is perfectly chosen to reveal the family dynamic and the moment in American history. Detailed chapter headings continue the narrative and sometimes contain a shocking truth. What Croft does so brilliantly is to chart the accretion of ordinary and landmark events that form a life; Amy realizes this as she looks back at a packet of her photographs: “laid out step by step like this, more or less in order, the pictures also form a kind of path.”
Initially, I had my doubts as to whether this should have been eligible for the Women’s Prize. In the end it didn’t matter whether it was presented as memoir or autofiction, so true was it to the experience of 1990s girlhood, as well as to sisterhood and coming of age at any time in history. It reminded me strongly of Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso, but felt that little bit more universal in how it portrays family ties, ambition, and life’s winding path. (See also Annabel’s review for Shiny New Books.) 
With thanks to Charco Press for the free copy for review.
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
In 2017 I reviewed Grudova’s surreal story collection, The Doll’s Alphabet, describing its tales as “perverted fairytales or fragmentary nightmares.” Okay then, let’s continue in that perverted, nightmarish vein. Holly, new to the country/city, finds a room in a shared flat and a job as an usher at the Paradise Cinema, which shows a random assortment of art films and cult classics. The building is so low-rent it’s almost half derelict, and the staff take full advantage of the negligent management to get up to all sorts of sexual shenanigans, as well as drinking and drug-taking, while on duty. Holly and her co-workers are truly obsessed with the cinema, watching every showing at work but also hosting all-night movie marathons in their apartments. “The outside world, all of its news, faded away, and the movies became my main mirror of the world,” she confesses. “They were a necessary evil, customers, so that we, the true devotees, could have access to the screen, our giant godlike monument.”
The title is simultaneously ironic and an homage to Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), and the chapters are named after particular films. A change of ownership forces the Paradise to become more mainstream – hello, Marvel flicks and hipster snacks – but a series of horrific accidents and deliberate acts makes it seem like a cursed place. Aping movie genres, perhaps, Children of Paradise starts off as an offbeat stoner comedy and by the end approaches horror to an extent I didn’t expect. The content becomes increasingly sordid, visceral, with no opportunity missed to mention bodily fluids and excretions. I’m not notably opposed to gross-out humour, but the whole thing felt quite distasteful as well as miserable. (Public library e-book) 
My general feeling about these first two books, and probably a few others from the longlist (Crooks, McKenzie, Paull, et al.), is that the judges are trying to showcase the breadth of women’s writing: ‘Hey, guys, women can write autofiction and horror and humour and patois and speculative fiction and everything in between!’ But I don’t think these more niche or genre fiction representatives will make it any further in the race, especially because each may have been championed by a different judge.
Where the judges will find common ground will be on the standard stuff that always gets shortlisted: fairly run-of-the-mill character- and issue-driven contemporary or historical fiction. That makes it sound like I’m being dismissive, but in fact I do generally like much of the fiction that gets shortlisted for the WP: it’s readable book club fodder. It’s just maybe not inventive in the way that certain longlist titles can be. On which note, er, see the below!
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
What a relief it was to wholeheartedly enjoy this sumptuous work of historical fiction, after the disappointment that was Hamnet (though perhaps I’ll feel more kindly towards the latter when I reread it for Literary Wives in November).
Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici is a historical figure who died at age 16, having been married off from her father’s Tuscan palazzo as a teenager to Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. She was reported to have died of a “putrid fever” but the suspicion has persisted that her husband actually murdered her, a story perhaps best known via Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess.”
The focus is on the final year of Lucrezia’s life, but in flashbacks we meet her as a rebellious girl with a talent for drawing and a fascination with animals. At first it appears that Alfonso esteems her for her spiritedness – he gives her a painting of a stone marten as a betrothal gift, after all, and has her depicted with paintbrush in hand – but as the gradual storyline meets up with the 1561 spotlight, it becomes clear that she is only valued for her ability to produce an heir. However spacious and opulent they are, it is impossible to forget that Lucrezia, as a noblewoman, is confined to the edifices owned by her father or her husband.
O’Farrell’s usual present-tense narration is engaging throughout, and the two long chapters either side of the midpoint, one concerning her wedding day and the other the preparation for her portrait, are particularly absorbing. I was convinced I knew how this story would end, yet the author pulls off a delicious surprise. This is ripe for the miniseries treatment, not least because it is so attentive to visuals: the architecture of the main buildings, the lavish clothing, the colours, and the eye for what makes a good painting. Scenes are even described in terms of a spatial arrangement appreciated from afar: how three figures form a triangle in the centre of a room; how two people on a balcony bisect the view from a window.
Despite the length, this was thoroughly engrossing and one I’d recommend to readers of Geraldine Brooks and Tracy Chevalier. (See also Laura’s review.) (Public library)
The other nominees I’ve read are:
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
My ideal shortlist (a wish list based on my reading and what I still want to read):
Homesick by Jennifer Croft
Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel
Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow
vs.
My predicted shortlist:
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow
Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin
An overall winner? Perhaps Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, or an unprecedented repeat win from Barbara Kingsolver or Maggie O’Farrell.
(See also Laura’s predictions post.)
What have you read from the longlist so far? Which of these books are calling to you?
Sapphira and the Slave Girl & Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (#1940Club)
(I was disgusted by the ad-ridden appearance of my blog, and defeated by the task of culling my media library, so I’ve upgraded to a paid plan for a trial year. I had until now vowed not to spend any money on the site since I don’t make any money from it, but WordPress hooked me in with a 30% off deal, and I’ll appreciate the no ads and extra storage space. I hope it looks better now!)
A year club hosted by Karen and Simon is always a great excuse to read more classics. One of these was a winner, if peculiar; the other was so-so, but helped clarify for me what a particular literary prize is looking for.
Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather
{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}
I was surprised to find that this was my seventh book by Cather, so I’ve actually read over half of her novels now. I think all her other works I know were set on the prairies of the Midwest (or in Santa Fe in the case of Death Comes for the Archbishop), so Sapphira and the Slave Girl feels like an odd one out not just for its antebellum historical subject matter but also for its setting in Cather’s hometown of Winchester, Virginia.
In 1856, the Colberts’ is a house divided: Henry, a miller from Quaker stock, disapproves of slavery; his wife, Sapphira, grew up with slaves and treats them severely. While the other Colbert brothers’ meddling with Black women is an open secret – one of them is assumed to have fathered Henry and Sapphira’s mixed-race teenage slave, Nancy – Henry looks fondly on Nancy and thinks of her almost like a second daughter. Sapphira resents that attention. When her Colbert nephew, Martin, a known cad, comes to visit, she arranges, or at least allows, convenient opportunities for Martin to be alone with Nancy.
Nancy appeals to the Colberts’ adult daughter, Rachel Blake, to accompany her on her walks so that Martin will not “overtake” her in the woods. Although none of the white characters take the repeated threat of attempted rape seriously enough, Henry and Rachel do eventually help Nancy escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad. When Sapphira realizes her ‘property’ has been taken from her, she informs Rachel she is now persona non grata, but changes her mind when illness brings tragedy into Rachel’s household.
Had this been written 40–80 years later, it would have been completely different: first of all, I would expect it to much more graphically recount Black suffering, rather than depicting generally happy “darkies” with folksy accents and quirky character traits; secondly, there would be either a redemptive or a punitive plot arc for Sapphira. Instead, Cather paints her as a flawed human being who accepts the status quo but is also graceful in disability (she has dropsy and is in a wheelchair) and accepting of the approach of death.
I wish I remembered from the Hermione Lee biography more about the immediate inspiration for this novel, and its reception. Simply taking an interest in Black characters must have set it apart. For instance, there is a whole chapter on Nancy’s grandmother, Aunt Jezebel, the first generation kidnapped from Africa; and the final section has Nancy, now a sophisticated Montreal housekeeper dressed in silk and fur, visiting her mother 20 years after the Civil War. That Cather’s characterization otherwise doesn’t rise above cheerful mammy stereotypes can hardly be counted against her given the time period, right? It was good to experience a lesser-known American classic that I can imagine appealing to fans of Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton as well. (From a Little Free Library in Queen Camel, Somerset; April 2021)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas
Published when Thomas was in his mid-twenties, this is a series of 10 sketches, some of which are more explicitly autobiographical (as in first person, with a narrator named Dylan Thomas) than others. There is a rough chronological trajectory to the stories, with the main character a mischievous boy, then a grandstanding teenager, then a young journalist in his first job. The countryside and seaside towns of South Wales recur as settings, and – as will be no surprise to readers of Under Milk Wood – banter-filled dialogue is the priority. I most enjoyed the childhood japes in the first two pieces, “The Peaches” and “A Visit to Grandpa’s.” The rest failed to hold my attention, but I marked out two long passages that to me represent the voice and scene-setting that the Dylan Thomas Prize is looking for. The latter is the ending of the book and reminds me of the close of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” (University library)
I was a lonely night-walker and a steady stander-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and alive on the glistening tram-lines in dead and empty High Street under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer Chapel. And I never felt more a part of the remote and overpressing world, or more full of love and arrogance and pity and humility, not for myself alone, but for the living earth I suffered on… [etc.]
For a long time he waited on the stairs, though there was no love now to wait for and no bed but his own too many miles away to lie in, and only the approaching day to remember his discovery. All around him the disturbed inhabitants of the house were falling back into sleep. Then he walked out of the house on to the waste space and under the leaning cranes and ladders. The light of the one weak lamp in a rusty circle fell across the brick-heaps and the broken wood and the dust that had been houses once, where the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.
(I’ve previously participated in the 1920 Club, 1956 Club, 1936 Club, 1976 Club, 1954 Club and 1929 Club.)
Eighth Blog Anniversary! & Thoughts on the Women’s Prize Longlist
Last year, in the manic busyness that preceded moving into our house, I completely forgot to mark my blog anniversary. This time (8 years!) I wanted to be sure to remember it. Why have I not noted before that it coincides with International Women’s Day?! I’m pleased with that.
By Հայկ Ափրիկյան, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday evening the Women’s Prize longlist was announced.** Of my predictions, 4 were correct, which is pretty good going for me. I got none of my personal wishes, however. Of course, I would have preferred for us to have one of my lists. Still, overall, it’s a fairly interesting mix of new and established authors, with a full half of the list being debut work. Seven of the authors are BIPOC. I’ve read 2 of the nominees and would be amenable to reading up to 7 more. My library always buys the entire longlist, so I’ll eventually get the chance to read them, but not soon enough to add to the conversation.
Read:
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (CORRECT PREDICTION): Follows the contours of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, transplanting the plot to 1990s southwest Virginia to uncover the perils of opiate addiction. Ten-year-old Damon Fields lives in a trailer home with his addict mother, who works at Walmart, and his new stepfather, a mean trucker. Tragedy strikes and Damon moves between several foster homes before running away. His irrepressible, sassy voice is reminiscent of Holden Caulfield’s in this Appalachian cousin to Shuggie Bain.
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris: Drawing on her own family history, Morris has crafted an absorbing story set in Sarajevo in 1992, the first year of the Bosnian War. Zora, a middle-aged painter, has sent her husband, Franjo, and elderly mother off to England to stay with her daughter, Dubravka, confident that she’ll see out the fighting in the safety of their flat and welcome them home in no time. But things rapidly get much worse than she is prepared for. It was especially poignant to be reading this during the war in Ukraine.
Requested from the library:
Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks – Sounds good, if too much like this year’s Opal & Nev.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (CORRECT PREDICTION) – I was going to skip this because I wasn’t keen on Hamnet, but I do love O’Farrell in general, so I guess I’ll give it a try.
Interested in reading (but can’t find):
Homesick by Jennifer Croft – N.B. This was subtitled “A Memoir” at its U.S. release.
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel (CORRECT PREDICTION)
Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin
Not interested in reading:
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo – Like I said when it was nominated for the Booker, I have to wonder why we needed an extended Animal Farm remake…
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes – I really should have predicted this one. It’s a hard pass on the Greek myth retellings for me.
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (CORRECT PREDICTION) – I avoid anything set during The Troubles. (Sorry!)
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh – The Water Cure was awful.
The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie – The Portable Veblen was trying too hard.
Pod by Laline Paull – Her novels always sound so formulaic.
The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff – Nah.
See also the reactions posts from Cathy, Clare, Eric and Laura.
**The announcement has traditionally been on International Women’s Day, but I’m guessing that this year they brought it forward to pre-empt news of the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction longlist. This prize is open to novels, short stories and graphic novels by women, published in calendar year 2022, with parameters otherwise quite similar to those of the WP except that it’s only for U.S. and Canadian residents. {EDITED} To be honest, I was not convinced that the literary world needed an additional prize for women’s fiction, especially as North Americans tend to do well in the WP race. However, at first glance, its longlist is a lot less obvious and more interesting, with 11/15 BIPOC and some short story collections as well as a graphic novel in the running. It remains to be seen if I’ll follow both prizes or switch allegiance. Some of the CSP books may prove difficult to access in the UK. So far I have read Brown Girls and can get The Furrows from the library. Of note: the Carol Shields Prize is worth a lot more ($150,000 U.S. vs. £30,000).
What have you read, or might you read, from the longlist?
Winter Reads, Part I: Patrick Gale & Tove Jansson (#NordicFINDS23)
This winter has been a disappointment: it’s bloody cold, but with no snow. It’s impossible to keep our house warm, even with extra loft insulation and new double-glazed windows (home ownership is boring and overrated), so I’m ready for signs of spring. Maybe by the time I review a second batch of seasonal reads in February, winter will truly be on its way out.
A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale (2015)
This was our January book club read. We’d had good luck with Gale before: his Notes from an Exhibition received our joint highest rating ever. As he’s often done in his fiction, he took inspiration from family history: here, the story of his great-grandfather Harry Cane, who emigrated to the Canadian prairies to farm in the most challenging of conditions. Because there is some uncertainty as to what precipitated his ancestor’s resettlement, Gale has chosen to imagine that Harry, though married and the father of a daughter, was in fact gay and left England to escape blackmailing and disgrace after his affair with a man was discovered.
There are very evocative descriptions of the pioneer life, lightened for Harry by his relationship with his closest neighbours, siblings Petra and Paul. The novel covers the First World War and the start of the Spanish flu epidemic, which provide much fodder for melodrama, but somehow I don’t mind it from Gale. Harry himself is so diffident as to seem blank, but that means he is free to become someone else in a new land. My other main criticism would be that the villain is implausibly evil. Some of our book club members also thought there were too many coincidences. Gale really makes you feel for these characters and their suffering, though. Sexuality and mental health, both so misunderstood at that time, are the two main themes and he explores them beautifully. In that both are historical fiction where homosexuality is simply a fact of life, not a titillating novelty, this reminded me a lot of Days Without End by Sebastian Barry. (Free from mall bookshop)
A Winter Book: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson (2006)
[Translated from the Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella, David McDuff and Kingsley Hart]
A brief second review for Nordic FINDS. It’s the third time I’ve encountered some of these autofiction stories: this was a reread for me, and 13 of the pieces are also in Sculptor’s Daughter, which I skimmed from the library a few years ago. And yet I remembered nothing; not a single one was memorable. Most of the pieces are impressionistic first-person fragments of childhood, with family photographs interspersed. In later sections, the protagonist is an older woman, Jansson herself or a stand-in. I most enjoyed “Messages” and “Correspondence,” round-ups of bizarre comments and requests she received from readers. Of the proper stories, “The Iceberg” was the best. It’s a literal object the speaker alternately covets and fears, and no doubt a metaphor for much else. This one had the kind of profound lines Jansson slips into her children’s fiction: “Now I had to make up my mind. And that’s an awful thing to have to do” and “if one doesn’t dare to do something immediately, then one never does it.” A shame this wasn’t a patch on The Summer Book. (Free from a neighbour)
Original rating in 2012:
Rating now: 
Averaged rating: 
And a DNF:
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin (1983)
Laila (Big Reading Life) and I attempted this as a buddy read, but we both gave up on it. I got as far as page 53 (in the 600+-page pocket paperback). The premise was alluring, with a magical white horse swooping in to rescue Peter Lake from a violent gang. I also appreciated the NYC immigration backstory, but not the adjective-heavy wordiness, the anachronistic exclamations (“Crap!” and “Outta my way, you crazy midget” – this is presumably set some time between the 1900s and 1920s) or the meandering plot. It was also disturbing to hear about Peter’s sex life when he was 12. From a Little Free Library (at Philadelphia airport) it came, and to a LFL (at the Bar Convent in York) it returned. Laila read a little further than me, enough to tell the library patron who recommended it to her that she’d given it a fair try.
Any snowy or icy reading (or weather) for you lately?
Best Books from 2022
I’m keeping it simple this year with one post covering a baker’s dozen from all genres: the 13 current-year releases that stood out to me the most. (No rankings this time; anything from my Best of First Half post that didn’t make it through to here can be considered a runner-up.)
Fiction
Groundskeeping by Lee Cole: In Cole’s debut novel, two aspiring writers meet on a Kentucky college campus and form a romantic connection despite very different backgrounds. There are stereotypes to be overcome as Owen introduces Alma to Kentucky culture and slang. Trump’s election divides families and colleagues. The gentle satire on the pretensions of writing programs is another enjoyable element. Three-dimensional characters, vivid scenes ripe for the Netflix treatment, timely themes and touching relationships.
Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana: Fofana’s novel-in-stories orbits a Harlem apartment complex and spins bittersweet tales of ambition and disappointment in a range of vibrant voices. Endearing scoundrels are the focus in a number of stories. Minor characters from some go on to have starring roles in others. Though these tenants’ lives are filled with difficulties, their optimism and sheer joy shine through in their picaresque antics. A stellar debut from a very talented writer; Fofana should win all the prizes.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel: This dazzlingly intricate novel blends historical fiction, up-to-the-minute commentary and science-fiction predictions. In 2401, the Time Institute hires Gaspery-Jacques Roberts to investigate a recurring blip in time. Fans of The Glass Hotel will recognize some characters, and those familiar with Station Eleven will find similarities in a pandemic plot that resonates with the Covid-19 experience. How does Mandel do it? One compulsively readable hit after another.
Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso: The aphoristic style of some of Manguso’s previous books continues here as discrete paragraphs and brief vignettes build to a gloomy portrait of Ruthie’s archetypical affection-starved childhood in the fictional Massachusetts town of Waitsfield in the 1980s and 90s. The depiction of Ruthie’s narcissistic mother is especially acute. So much resonated with me. This is the stuff of girlhood – if not universally, then certainly for the (largely pre-tech) American 1990s as I experienced them.
Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić: This intense work of autofiction is all the more powerful due to the second-person narration that displaces the pain of breast cancer from the protagonist and onto the reader. Coming of age in a female body was traumatic in itself; now that same body threatens to kill her. Even as she loses the physical signs of femininity, she remains resilient: Her body will document what she’s been through. As forthright as it is about the brutality of cancer treatment, the novella is also creative, playful and darkly comic.
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken: Is it autofiction or bereavement memoir? Both and neither. In 2019, an American writer wanders London, seeing the sights but mostly reminiscing about her mother, whom she describes through bare facts and apt anecdotes. London had been a favourite destination, their final trip together falling just three years before. As well as a tribute to a beloved mother and a matter-of-fact record of dealing with ageing parents and the aftermath of loss, this is a playful cross-examination of literary genres.
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka: Otsuka’s third novel of the Japanese American experience again employs the first-person plural, as well as the second person – rarer perspectives that provide stylistic novelty. The first two chapters are set at a pool that, for the title swimmers, serves as a locus of escape and safety. On the first page we’re introduced to Alice, whose struggle with dementia becomes central. I admired Otsuka’s techniques for moving readers through the minds of the characters, alternating range with profundity and irony with sadness.
Which Side Are You On by Ryan Lee Wong: Wong’s dynamite debut novel weaves timely issues of racism and protest into a pacy, funny story of idealism versus cynicism. Reed, an Asian American college student committed to social justice, rethinks how best to live out his values in the real world when he goes home for a few days. Wong probes the generational gap between him and his parents through snappy dialogue and enjoyable scenes that constitute an incidental tour of multi-ethnic Los Angeles.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin: Sam and Sadie’s friendship, which over the years becomes a business partnership that also incorporates Sam’s college roommate, Marx Watanabe, is a joy. Their creative energy and banter are enviable. Marx is the uncomplicated, optimistic go-between when Sam and Sadie butt heads and take offense at betrayals. Underneath their conflicts is a love different from, and maybe superior to, romantic love. An immersive story of friendship and obsession; nostalgic, even cathartic.
Nonfiction
In Love by Amy Bloom: Bloom’s husband, Brian Ameche, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in his mid-60s, having exhibited mild cognitive impairment for several years. Brian quickly resolved to make a dignified exit while he still, mostly, had his faculties. This achieves the perfect tone, mixing black humour with teeth-gritted practicality as Bloom chronicles their relationship, the final preparations, his assisted suicide at Dignitas in Switzerland, and the aftermath. An essential, compelling read.
Sinkhole: A Natural History of a Suicide by Juliet Patterson: This gorgeously written family memoir approaches its subject matter with brave tenderness. In December 2008, poet Patterson’s father died by suicide near his Minnesota home. He wasn’t an obvious risk. Yet there was family history: both of Patterson’s parents lost their fathers to suicide. She returns to Kansas on research trips to unearth her grandfathers’ lives. Throughout, sinkholes, common in Kansas, are both reality and metaphor for the chasm a suicide leaves.
Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion by Louise Willder: A delightful bibliophile’s miscellany about ways of pithily spreading excitement about books. Over the last 25 years, Willder has written jacket copy for thousands of Penguin releases, so she has it down to a science as well as an art. (Reviewing is an adjacent skill.) The art of the first line, serialization and self-promotion, guidelines for good writing, differences between British and American jacket copy, the use of punctuation, and so much more. Very funny to boot.
Poetry
Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble by Carolyn Oliver: Carolyn used to blog at Rosemary and Reading Glasses and won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize for this debut collection. Every line feels tirelessly honed to elicit maximal meaning and a memorable sound. Traditional forms are adapted to great effect. Chronic illness, gardening, and everyday sexual danger are themes, but the poems that pierced me most were about her son: quirky things he says, but also the reality of modern parenting, where active shooter drills are de rigueur.
This year’s best-of selections (the ones I own in print, anyway; the rest were read on Kindle or have already gone back to the library).
Have you read any of my 2022 favourites?
What releases do I need to catch up on right away?
Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić: A Peirene Press Novella (#NovNov22)
This is my eleventh translated novella from Peirene Press* and, in my opinion, their best yet. It’s an intense work of autofiction about two years of hellish treatment for breast cancer, all the more powerful due to the second-person narration that displaces the pain from the protagonist and onto the reader.
This is a story about the body. Its struggle to feel whole while reality shatters it into fragments. The gash goes from the right nipple towards your back, and after five centimetres makes a gentle curve up and continues to your armpit. It’s still fresh and red.
How does the story crumbling under your tongue and refusing to take on a firm shape begin to be told?
You knew on that day, sixteen years ago, when your mother’s diagnosis was confirmed, that you’d get cancer?
Or
Ever since that day, sixteen years ago, when your mother’s diagnosis was confirmed, that you’d never get cancer?
Both are equally true.
In 2014, just a couple of months after her husband leaves her – making her, in her early forties, a single mother to a son and a daughter – she discovers a lump in her right breast.
As she endures five operations, chemotherapy and adjuvant therapies, as well as endless testing and hospital stays, her mind keeps going back to her girlhood and adolescence, especially the moments when she felt afraid or ashamed. Her father, alcoholic and perpetually ill, made her feel like she was an annoyance to him.
Coming of age in a female body was traumatic in itself; now that same body threatens to kill her. Even as she loses the physical signs of femininity, she remains resilient. Her body will document what she’s been through: “Perfectly sculpted through all your defeats, and your victories. The scars scrawled on it are the map of your journey. The truest story about you, which words cannot grasp.”
As forthright as it is about the brutality of cancer treatment, the novella can also be creative, playful and even darkly comic.
Things you don’t want to think about:
Your children
Your boobs
Your cancer
Your bald head
Your death
Almost unbearable nausea delivers her into a new space: “Here, the only colours are black and red. You’re lost in a vast hotel. However hard you try, you can’t count the floors.” One snowy morning, she imagines she’s being visited by a host of Medusa-like women in long black dresses who minister to her. Whether it’s a dream or a medication-induced hallucination, it feels mystical, like she’s part of a timeless lineage of wise women. The themes, tone and style all came together here for me, though I can see how this book might not be for everyone. I have a college friend who’s going through breast cancer treatment right now. She’s only 40. She was diagnosed in the summer and has already had surgery and a few rounds of chemo. I wonder if this book is just what she would want to read right now … or the last thing she would want to think about. All I can do is ask.
(Translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth) [165 pages] 
With thanks to Peirene Press for the free copy for review.
*Other Peirene Press novellas I’ve reviewed:
Mr. Darwin’s Gardener by Kristina Carlson
The Looking-Glass Sisters by Gøhril Gabrielsen
Ankomst by Gøhril Gabrielsen
Dance by the Canal by Kerstin Hensel
The Last Summer by Ricarda Huch
Snow, Dog, Foot by Claudio Morandini
Her Father’s Daughter by Marie Sizun
The Orange Grove by Larry Tremblay
The Man I Became by Peter Verhelst
Winter Flowers by Angélique Villeneuve
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken (#NovNov22)
The hero of this book is Elizabeth McCracken’s mother, Natalie (1935–2018).
Is it autofiction or a bereavement memoir? Both and neither. It’s clear that the subject is her late mother, but less obvious that the first-person narrator must be McCracken or that the framework she has set up – an American writer wanders London, seeing the sights but mostly reminiscing about her mother – is other than fiction.
In August 2019, the writer rents a hotel room in Clerkenwell and plays the flaneuse around the city. Her tour takes in the London Eye, a ferry ride across the Thames from one Tate museum to another, a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so on. London had been a favourite destination for her and her mother, their final trip together falling just three years before. McCracken is so funny on the quirks of English terminology – and cuisine:
The least appetizing words in the world concern English food: salad cream, baps, butties, carvery, goujons.
Always, though, her thoughts return to her mother, whom she describes through bare facts and apt anecdotes. A twin born with cerebral palsy. A little disabled Jewish lady with unmanageable hair. An editor and writer based at Boston University. Opinionated, outspoken, optimistic; set in her ways. Delightful and maddening in equal measure – like all of us. (“All mothers are unknowable, being a subset of human beings.”)
The writer’s parents were opposites you never would have paired up. (Her father, too, is gone now, but his death is only an aside here.) Their declines were predictably hard to forecast. The New England family home has been emptied and is now on the market; an excruciating memory resurfaces from the auction of the contents.
As well as a tribute to a beloved mother and a matter-of-fact record of dealing with ageing parents and the aftermath of loss, this is a playful cross-examination of literary genres:
I hate novels with unnamed narrators. I didn’t mean to write one.
My mother was known to say with disgust, “Oh, those people who write memoirs about the worst thing that ever happened to them!” I said it, too. Some years later a terrible thing happened to me, and there was nothing to do but to write a memoir.
That was An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, about the stillbirth of her first child. As bereavement memoirs go, it’s one of the very best and still, 10 years after I read it, stands as one of my absolute favourite books, with some of the strongest last lines out there. McCracken has done it again, producing a book that, though very different in approach and style (this time reminding me most of Jenny Offill’s Weather), somehow achieves the same poignancy and earns a spot in my personal hall of fame, for the reasons you’ll see below…
The hero of this review is my mother, Carolyn (1947–2022).
I find it hard to believe that she’s been gone for three and a half weeks already. One week after her funeral, I was reading this book on my Kindle in London, waiting for a climate march to start. So many lines penetrated my numbness; all could pertain to my own mother:
[Of a bad time when her mother was in hospital with an infection] Those days were a dress rehearsal for my mother’s easy actual death seven years later.
My mother was a great appreciator. It was a pleasure to take her places, because she enjoyed herself so much and so audibly. That was her form of gratitude.
My mother all by herself was a holiday, very good at buying presents and exceptional at receiving them.
Quirky, somebody once called my mother. What a colossally condescending word: I hate it. It means you’ve decided that you don’t have to take that person seriously.
My mother’s last illness was a brain aneurysm.
The dead have no privacy left, is what I’ve decided.
The adrenaline of a busy week back in the States – meeting up with family members, writing and delivering a eulogy, packing up most of her belongings, writing thank-you notes, starting on paperwork (“sadmin”) – has long worn off and I’m back into my routines of work and volunteering and trying to make our house habitable as winter sets in. It would be easy to feel as if that middle-of-the-night phone call in late October, and everything that followed, was merely a vivid, horribly extended dream and that tomorrow she’ll pop back up in my inbox with some everyday gossip.
Reminders of her are everywhere if I look. Clothes she gave me, or I inherited from her, or she sent me the money to buy; a box of extra-strong Earl Grey teabags, left over from what we handed out along with memorial cards at the visitation; her well-worn Bible and delicate gold watch; the five boxes of journals in my sister’s basement – 150 volumes each carefully labelled with a number and date range. I have the first few and the last, incomplete one here with me now. What a trove of family stories, precious or painful, await me when I’m strong enough to read them.
With Thanksgiving coming up tomorrow – a whole holiday devoted to gratitude! nothing could more perfectly suit my mother – I’m grateful for all of those mementoes, and for the books that are getting me through. Starting with this one. [192 pages] (Read via Edelweiss)
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 