Buddy Reads: Kilmeny of the Orchard by L.M. Montgomery & The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble
Buddy reading and other coordinated challenges are a good excuse to read the sort of books one doesn’t always get to, especially the more obscure classics. This was my third Lucy Maud Montgomery novel within a year and a bit, and my first contribution to Ali’s ongoing year with Margaret Drabble.
{SPOILERS IN BOTH OF THE FOLLOWING REVIEWS}
Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery (1910)
I’ve participated in Canadian bloggers Naomi of Consumed by Ink and Sarah Emsley’s readalongs of three Montgomery works now. The previous two were Jane of Lantern Hill and The Story Girl. This sweet but rather outdated novella reminded me more of the latter (no surprise as it was published just a year before it) because of the overall sense of lightness and the male perspective, which isn’t what those familiar with the Anne and Emily books might expect from Montgomery.
Eric Marshall travels to Prince Edward Island one May to be the temporary schoolmaster in Lindsay, filling in for an ill friend. At his graduation from Queenslea College, his cousin David Baker had teased him about his apparent disinterest in girls. He arrives on the island to an early summer idyll and soon wanders into an orchard where a beautiful young woman is playing a violin.
This is, of course, Kilmeny Gordon, her first name from a Scottish ballad by James Hogg, and it’s clear she will be the love interest. However, there are a couple of impediments to the romance. One is resistance from Kilmeny’s guardians, the strict aunt and uncle who have cared for her since her wronged mother’s death. But the greater obstacle is Kilmeny’s background – illegitimacy plus a disability that everyone bar Eric views as insuperable: she is mute (or, as the book has it, “dumb”). She hears and understands perfectly well, but communicates via writing on a slate.
There is interesting speculation as to whether her condition is psychological or magically inherited from her late mother, who had taken a vow of silence. Conveniently, cousin David is a doctor specializing in throat and voice problems, so assures Eric and the Gordons that nothing is physically preventing Kilmeny from speech. But she refuses to marry Eric until she can speak. The scene in which she fears for his life and calls out to save him is laughably contrived. The language around disability is outmoded. It’s also uncomfortable that the story’s villain, an adopted Gordon cousin, is characterized only by his Italian heritage.
Like The Story Girl, I found this fairly twee, with an unfortunate focus on beauty (“‘Kilmeny’s mouth is like a love-song made incarnate in sweet flesh,’ said Eric enthusiastically”), and marriage as the goal of life. But it was still a pleasant read, especially for the descriptions of a Canadian spring. (Downloaded from Project Gutenberg) #ReadingKilmeny
The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble (1969)
This was Drabble’s fourth novel; I’ve read the previous three and preferred two of them to this (A Summer Bird-Cage is fab). The setup is similar to The Garrick Year, which I read last year for book club, in that the focus is on a young mother of two who embarks on an affair. When we meet Jane Gray she is awaiting the birth of her second child. Her husband, Malcolm, walked out a few weeks ago, but she has the midwife and her cousin Lucy to rely on. Lucy and her husband, James, trade off staying over with Jane as she recovers from childbirth. James is particularly solicitous and, one night, joins Jane in bed.
At this point there is a stark shift from third person to first person as Jane confesses that she’s been glossing over the complexities of the situation; sleeping with one’s cousin’s husband is never going to be without emotional fallout. “It won’t, of course, do: as an account, I mean, of what took place”; “Lies, lies, it’s all lies. A pack of lies.” The novel continues to alternate between first and third person as Jane gives us glimpses into her uneasy family-making. I found myself bored through much of it, only perking back up for the meta stuff and the one climactic event. In a way it’s a classic tale of free will versus fate, including the choice of how to frame what happens.
I am no longer capable of inaction – then I will invent a morality that condones me.
It wasn’t so, it wasn’t so. I am getting tired of all this Freudian family nexus, I want to get back to that schizoid third-person dialogue.
The narrative tale. The narrative explanation. That was it, or some of it. I loved James because he was what I had never had: because he drove too fast: because he belonged to my cousin: because he was kind to his own child
(What intriguing punctuation there!) The fast driving and obsession with cars is unsubtle foreshadowing: James nearly dies in a car accident on the way to the ferry to Norway. Jane and her children, Laurie and baby Bianca, are in the car but unhurt. This was the days when seatbelts weren’t required, apparently. “It would have been so much simpler if he had been dead: so natural a conclusion, so poetic in its justice.” The Garrick Year, too, has a near-tragedy involving a car. Like many an adultery story, both novels ask whether an affair changes everything, or nothing. Infidelity and the parenting of young children together don’t amount to the most scintillating material, but it is appealing to see Drabble experimenting with how to tell a story. See also Ali’s review. (Secondhand – Alnwick charity shopping)
Dressing Up for the Carnival by Carol Shields (Buddy Reread)
Marcie of Buried in Print and I have spent the first few months or so of 2024 rereading Carol Shields’s short stories: one volume per month from the Collected Stories. (Previous reviews: Various Miracles (1985) and The Orange Fish (1989).) Dressing Up for the Carnival was a late collection, published in 2000 – just a few years before the author’s death. Like Various Miracles, it’s a long book; in fact, at 22 stories, it’s the longest of the three. And, just like the other two, it opens with the title story, which is itself akin to “Various Miracles” with its pile-up of seemingly random happenings. All the examples are of how the things that people wear, or carry, create a persona. I noted pleasing symmetry in that “Dressing Up for the Carnival” opens the book, while the final story is “Dressing Down,” about a married couple divided by the husband’s devotion to naturism for one month out of each year.
I hadn’t realized that Unless, Shields’s final, Booker-shortlisted novel, arose from one of these stories: “A Scarf.” It took me just two paragraphs to figure it out, based on her narrator’s punning novel title (My Thyme Is Up). I’d also forgotten about the fun Shields pokes at literary snobbishness through her protagonist winning the Offenden Prize, which “recognizes literary quality and honors accessibility”. (There is actually a UK prize that rewards ease of reading, the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award.)
Many main characters throughout Shields’s work are artists, musicians, writers or poets. When windows are subject to an exorbitant tax, two painters decide to create their own, a joint project that brings the couple closer (in “Windows”). The elevated diction and proliferating French phrases skewer the narrator’s pretensions. Edging towards surrealism is another custom of Shields’s, seen here in “Weather,” where meteorological phenomena – or the lack thereof – are literal and a metaphor for marriage. This one finds an echo in “Stop!”, a fable about a queen who avoids all risk and change and thus disallows weather.
A number of the flash-length stories are similarly allegorical, or linguistic experiments, e.g., “Absence,” which is lipogrammatic (no “I”). “Flatties: their Various Forms and Uses” is a faux-anthropological one about flatbreads that reminded me of “Today Is the Day.” “The Harp” looks at the aftermath of the freak accident of a harp falling from the sky. “Keys” is a daisy-chain type of story (like “Home” et al.), with the keys symbolic of access, ownership, secrets, home, and more. Academia is another frequent subject for Shields. “Ilk” has the same academic jargon (“narrativity is ovarian, not ejaculatory”) and mockery of a predominantly male preserve as in “The Metaphor Is Dead–Pass It On” and “Salt.”
A topic shared with The Orange Fish is the biographer’s art. I loved “Edith-Esther,” about a biographer who becomes so obsessed with the expression of spirituality in his subject’s works that he completely skews her life story towards it, even though she tells him flat out she doesn’t believe in God. What a nightmare for an author to be so misunderstood; it’s no accident, of course, that it’s a male critic doing it to a female writer. “Invention” imagines creation scenarios for everything from steering wheel covers to daydreaming.
In “Dying for Love,” an early standout for me, three wronged women consider suicide. The vocabulary quickly alerts the reader to a change of time period after each section break. All three decide “Life is a thing to be cherished”. My three favourites, though, were the final three – all slightly cheeky with the focus on sex (and naturism). They were together an excellent way to close the volume, and the Collected Stories. In “The Next Best Kiss,” single mother Sandy meets a new paramour at a conference. She and Todd share garrulousness, and a sexual connection. But he doesn’t’ see the appeal of her biography’s subject, a Gregor Mendel-meets-John Clare type, and she is aghast to learn that he still lives with his mother.
“Eros,” set at a sexually charged dinner party (and you know from Larry’s Party that Shields is brilliant at party scenes), spools back through Ann’s erotic life, all the way to childhood ignorance and curiosity. “Everyone knew this awful secret which was everywhere suggested but which for Ann lay, still, a quarter-inch out of reach.” That Ann has lost a breast to cancer treatment made me ponder whether this story reflected Shields’s own experience – she died in 2003 of a recurrence of breast cancer.
There were a few too many second-tier stories here compared to The Orange Fish, but several gems; and I always appreciate Shields’s wordplay and insider’s satire on being an academic and/or a writer.
My original rating (c. 2008): 
My rating now: 
Bonus
Shields’s final short story, “Segue,” is printed first in the Collected Stories. Dutiful Marcie read it first, whereas I saved it for last to try to preserve a sense of chronological order. Max Sexton writes novels, the latest of which sounds exactly like The Corrections – a 2001 publication, and Shields also references 9/11. Jane Sexton, the narrator, writes sonnets (“little sounds”) and thinks about ageing, routine, and the transmutation of life into art. A sonnet typically involves a “turn,” which I suppose is the origin of the title. Coming to the end of her life, did Shields think of herself primarily as a poet? This line did strike me as autobiographical: “Forget you are a sixty-seven-year-old woman with a girlish white pageboy.” The Oak Park, Illinois setting inevitably reminded me of Hemingway, but Shields, too, was from Chicago. The final line captures the bittersweet nature of so much of her work: “if it weren’t for my particular circumstances I would be happy.”
Rereading Shields is a habit I plan to keep up. For my next reread, I fancy Mary Swann.
The Orange Fish by Carol Shields (Buddy Reread)
Marcie of Buried in Print and I are rereading Shields’s short stories for the first quarter of 2024: one volume per month from the Collected Stories. My review of the first one, Various Miracles (1985), is here. The Orange Fish followed four years later. It’s a shorter book – 12 stories rather than 21 – but again opens with the title story, which features a gentle slide into absurdity. The members of a select group think their possession of an orange fish lithograph makes them special, and the sense of being chosen enlivens and rejuvenates them. But when the artwork becomes widely available, it devalues their joy in it. This reminded me of a statistic I’ve often heard: experiments show that people don’t want to be earning a particular amount of money; they want to be earning comfortably relative to others.
“Today Is the Day” stands out for its fable-like setup: “Today is the day the women of our village go out along the highway planting blisterlilies.” With the ritualistic activity and the arcane language, it seems borne out of women’s secret history; if it weren’t for mentions of a few modern things like a basketball court, it could have taken place in medieval times.
European settings recur in a few stories, and there are more third-person POVs than first-. And surprise! A character from Various Miracles is back: Meershank, the writer from “Flitting Behaviour,” stars in “Block Out.” Here Shields inverts the fear of writer’s block: for this prolific scribbler it’s a welcome break. “The suffering of the throttled was his, and he felt appropriately shriven, haunted, beset and blessed.”
In both “Collision” and “Family Secrets,” Shields muses on the biographer’s art, asking what passes into the historical record. The former involves a brief encounter between Martä and Malcolm, a visiting consultant, in Eastern Europe. I loved the mischievous personification: “Biography, that old buzzard, is having a field day, running along behind them picking up all the bits and pieces.” In “Family Secrets,” the narrator remembers that, before marriage, her mother took a year off teaching for “sickness,” and wonders if it was actually a pregnancy, hidden as assiduously as two amputations in the family. “Lies, secrets, casual misrepresentations and small failures of memory, all these things are useful in their way. History gobbles everything up willy-nilly”. Ernest Hemingway also makes a fun cameo appearance in this one.
I had three favourites: 1) “Hinterland” has a married couple visiting Paris at a time of terrorist activity. (There’s a fantastic list of the random things Roy might have thought of while fleeing the bomb threat, but didn’t.) The combination of that and a museum setting of course made me think of The Goldfinch. But it seems like the greater threats here are ageing and potential breakdowns within the family. “Milk Bread Beer Ice,” the last story in the collection, is also travel-based and contrasts the wife’s love of words with this marriage’s fundamental failure of communication. 2) “Hazel,” one I mistakenly read last month, is an example of Shields’s abiding interest in happenstance and how it changes a life’s direction.
And my overall favourite, 3) “Fuel for the Fire,” a lovely festive-season story that gets beyond the everything-going-wrong-on-a-holiday stereotypes, even though the oven does play up as the narrator is trying to cook a New Year’s Day goose. The things her widowed father brings along to burn on their open fire – a shed he demolished, lilac bushes he took out because they reminded him of his late wife, bowling pins from a derelict alley – are comical yet sad at base, like so much of the story. “Other people might see something nostalgic or sad, but he took a look and saw fuel.” Fire is a force that, like time, will swallow everything.
Being a significantly shorter collection than Various Miracles, The Orange Fish seems to contain less filler and so struck me as stronger overall. There were only maybe one or two stories that I was less engaged with, and the themes of art, biography, coincidence, marriages and writers reminded me of works by some of my favourite authors, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt and David Lodge.
My original rating (c. 2008): 
My rating now: 
Various Miracles by Carol Shields: The Start of a Buddy Rereading Project
In 2020, Marcie of Buried in Print and I did a buddy read (reread in some cases for me) of six Carol Shields novels and found it very rewarding – my write-up is here. For the first quarter of this year, we’re rereading Shields’s short stories: one volume per month from the Collected Stories. I believe it was 2008–10 when I first binged on Shields’s work from Surrey Libraries – that was my modus operandi at the time, finding a reliable author and devouring everything I could find by them (Curtis Sittenfeld was another of my prized finds) – and I know I did get hold of her complete stories even though I was no great story reader, but I’ve retained no memory of them. Now that I’ve read so much more by Shields, sometimes twice, I’m better able to track her themes across the body of work.
Various Miracles was published in 1985, when Shields was 50. She was still a decade from finding success for her best-known works, The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party, and so far had published poetry, criticism and several novels. The title story’s string of coincidences and the final story, sharing a title with one of her poetry volumes (“Others”), neatly express the book’s concerns with chance and how we relate to other people and imagine their lives. I was disoriented by first starting the UK paperback (Fourth Estate, 1994). I had no idea it’s a selection; a number of the stories appear in the Collected volume under her next title, The Orange Fish. Before I realized that, I’d read two interlopers, including “Hazel,” which also spotlights the theme of coincidence. “Everything is an accident, Hazel would be willing to say if asked. Her whole life is an accident, and by accident she has blundered into the heart of it,” stumbling into a sales career during her widowhood.
The third story, indeed, is explicitly called “Accidents,” and “Scenes” echoes the opening story by presenting Frances’ life as a process of arbitrary accretion. “There are people who think such scenes are ornaments suspended from lives that are otherwise busy and useful. Frances knows perfectly well that they are what a life is made of, one fitting against the next like English paving-stones.” I asked myself whether such a vision of life rang true for me, comparing with two comedians’ diaries I’m reading at the moment (A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris and Went to London, Took the Dog by Nina Stibbe) and with my mother’s journals, and pondering what’s more important: Random happenings and encounters? (That’s mostly where those authors locate humour.) Or what one does, thinks and feels? I prefer self-reflection on who one is becoming, but the recording of one’s life and times is also valuable. There’s a balance to be struck there somewhere; I’m still working on it in my own journal.
I noted a few other recurring elements in the stories: travel, especially to France (4 stories); male narrators or main characters (5 stories); and an obsession with language. The irony to “The Metaphor Is Dead—Pass It On” is that the professor’s diatribe is full of figurative language. The writer antihero of “Flitting Behaviour,” Meershank, is insufferable with his puns and lavish prose, but learns the worth of simple phrases as he and his loved ones compare their hearing of his wife’s last words. “Words” started out like a climate fable, but I decided it’s more of an allegorical satire about words as so much hot air. Such flash fictions, also including “Pardon” (a spate of apologies), “Invitations” (a feast-or-famine social calendar), and “Purple Blooms” (everyone’s reading the same Mexican poet), felt slight. In a book of 21 stories, some are always bound to pale.
By contrast, my favourites went deep with a few characters, or reflected on the writer’s craft. “Fragility” has a couple moving from Toronto to Vancouver, starting a new life and looking for a house that gives off good vibrations (not “a divorce house”). The slow reveal of the catalyzing incident with their son is devastating. With “Others,” Shields (or editors) saved the best for last. On honeymoon in France, Robert and Lila help a fellow English-speaking couple by cashing a check for them. Every year thereafter, Nigel and Jane send them a Christmas card, winging its way from England to Canada. Robert and Lila romanticize these people they met all of once. The plot turns on what is in those pithy 1–2-sentence annual updates versus what remains unspoken. “Love so Fleeting, Love so Fine,” too, involves filling in an entire backstory for an unknown character. Another favourite was “Poaching,” about friends touring England and picking up hitchhikers, whose stories they appropriate.
This doesn’t always feel like a cohesive collection; I think it could stand to lose a good 5–6 stories and perhaps group the others more effectively. But for the way her central subjects were starting to coalesce, and for a handful of very powerful stories, I’d rate it more highly than I originally did, and can recommend that Shields fans seek it out.
My original rating (c. 2008):
My rating now: 
This and That (The January Blahs)
The January blahs have well and truly arrived. The last few months of 2023 (December in particular) were too full: I had so much going on that I was always rushing from one thing to the next and worrying I didn’t have the time to adequately appreciate any of it. Now my problem is the opposite: very little to do, work or otherwise; not much on the calendar to look forward to; and the weather and house so cold I struggle to get up each morning and push past the brain fog to settle to any task. As I kept thinking to myself all autumn, there has to be a middle ground between manic busyness and boredom. That’s the head space where I’d like to be living, instead of having to choose between hibernation and having no time to myself.
At least these frigid January days are good for being buried in books. Unusually for me, I’m in the middle of seven doorstoppers, including King by Jonathan Eig (perfect timing as Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day), Wellness by Nathan Hill, and Babel by R.F. Kuang (a nominal buddy read with my husband).
Another is Carol Shields’s Collected Short Stories for a buddy rereading project with Marcie of Buried in Print. We’re partway through the first volume, Various Miracles, after a hiccup when we realized my UK edition had a different story order and, in fact, different contents – it must have been released as a best-of. We’ll read one volume per month in January–March. I also plan to join Heaven Ali in reading at least one Margaret Drabble book this year. I have The Waterfall lined up, and her Arnold Bennett biography lurking. Meanwhile, the Read Indies challenge, hosted by Karen and Lizzy in February, will be a great excuse to catch up on some review books from independent publishers.
Literary prize season will be heating up soon. I put all of the Women’s Prize (fiction and nonfiction!) dates on my calendar and I have a running list, in a file on my desktop, of all the novels I’ve come across that would be eligible for this year’s race. I’m currently reading two memoirs from the Nero Book Awards nonfiction shortlist. Last year it looked like the Folio Prize was set to replace the Costa Awards, giving category prizes and choosing an overall winner. But then another coffee chain, Caffè Nero, came along and picked up the mantle.
This year the Folio has been rebranded as The Writers’ Prize, again with three categories, which don’t quite overlap with the Costa/Nero ones. The Writers’ Prize shortlists just came out on Tuesday. I happen to have read one of the poetry nominees (Chan) and one of the fiction (Enright). I’m going to have a go at reading the others that I can source via the library. I’ll even try The Bee Sting given it’s on both the Nero and Writers’ shortlists (ditto the Booker) and I have a newfound tolerance of doorstoppers.
As for my own literary prize involvement, my McKitterick Prize manuscript longlist is due on the 31st. I think I have it finalized. Out of 80 manuscripts, I’ve chosen 5. The first 3 stood out by a mile, but deciding on the other 2 was really tricky. We judges are meeting up online next week.
I’m listening to my second-ever audiobook, an Audible book I was sent as a birthday gift: There Plant Eyes by M. Leona Godin. My routine is to find a relatively mindless data entry task to do and put on a chapter at a time.
There are a handful of authors I follow on Substack to keep up with what they’re doing in between books: Susan Cain, Jean Hannah Edelstein, Catherine Newman, Anne Boyd Rioux, Nell Stevens (who seems to have gone dormant?), Emma Straub and Molly Wizenberg. So far I haven’t gone for the paid option on any of the subscriptions, so sometimes I don’t get to read the whole post, or can only see selected posts. But it’s still so nice to ‘hear’ these women’s voices occasionally, right in my inbox.
My current earworms are from Belle and Sebastian’s Late Developers album, which I was given for Christmas. These lyrics from the title track – saved, refreshingly, for last; it’s a great strategy to end on a peppy song (an uplifting anthem with gospel choir and horn section!) instead of tailing off – feel particularly apt:
Live inside your head
Get out of your bed
Brush the cobwebs off
I feel most awake and alive when I’m on my daily walk by the canal. It’s such a joy to hear the birdsong and see whatever is out there to be seen. The other day there was a red kite zooming up from a field and over the houses, the sun turning his tail into a burnished chestnut. And on the opposite bank, a cuboid rump that turned out to belong to a muntjac deer. Poetry fragments from two of my bedside books resonated with me.
This is the earnest work. Each of us is given
only so many mornings to do it—
to look around and love
the oily fur of our lives,
the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
Days I don’t do this
I feel the terror of idleness
like a red thirst.
That is from “The Deer,” from Mary Oliver’s House of Light, and reminds me that it’s always worthwhile to get outside and just look. Even if what you’re looking at doesn’t seem to be extraordinary in any way…
Importance leaves me cold,
as does all the information that is classed as ‘news’.
I like those events that the centre ignores:
small branches falling, the slow decay
of wood into humus, how a puddle’s eye
silts up slowly, till, eventually,
the birds can’t bathe there. I admire the edge;
the sides of roads where the ragwort blooms
low but exotic in the traffic fumes;
the scruffy ponies in a scrubland field
like bits of a jigsaw you can’t complete;
the colour of rubbish in a stagnant leat.
There are rarest enjoyments, for connoisseurs
of blankness, an acquired taste,
once recognised, it’s impossible to shake,
this thirst for the lovely commonplace.
(from “Six Poems on Nothing,” III by Gwyneth Lewis, in Parables & Faxes)
This was basically a placeholder post because who knows when I’ll next finish any books and write about them … probably not until later in the month. But I hope you’ve found at least one interesting nugget!
What ‘lovely commonplace’ things are keeping you going this month?
Novellas in November 2023: That’s a Wrap!
This was Cathy’s and my fourth year co-hosting Novellas in November. We’ve done our best to keep up with your posts, collected via four Inlinkz post parties. We had 52 bloggers take part this year, contributing a total of 175 posts. You can look back at them all here. See also Cathy’s wrap-up post.
Claire Keegan continued to get lots of love this year, and it was great to see people engaging with our weekly prompts and buddy reads, and cleverly combining challenges with German Lit Month, Nonfiction November and Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week. Other books highlighted more than once included Cheri by Jo Ann Beard, They by Kay Dick, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Two Lives by William Trevor.
We’d love to get your feedback about what worked well or less well this month…
- Did you like having the prompts? Or would you rather go back to themes?
- Was it good to have a choice of buddy reads? Or do you prefer having just one?
- Did Inlinkz work okay for hosting the link-up?
Thank you all for being so engaged with #NovNov23! We’ll see you back here next year.
The Story Girl by L. M. Montgomery (1911) #ReadingStoryGirl
Six months after the Jane of Lantern Hill readalong, Canadian bloggers Naomi (Consumed by Ink) and Sarah Emsley have chosen an earlier work by Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Story Girl, and its sequel The Golden Road, for November buddy reading.
The book opens one May as brothers Felix and Beverley King are sent from Toronto to Prince Edward Island to stay with an aunt and uncle while their father is away on business. Beverley tells us about their thrilling six months of running half-wild with their cousins Cecily, Dan, Felicity, and Sara Stanley – better known by her nickname of the Story Girl, also to differentiate her from another Sara – and the hired boy, Peter. This line gives a sense of the group’s dynamic: “Felicity to look at—the Story Girl to tell us tales of wonder—Cecily to admire us—Dan and Peter to play with—what more could reasonable fellows want?”
Felicity is pretty and domestically inclined; Sara knows it would be better to be useful like Felicity, but all she has is her storytelling ability. Some are fantasy (“The Wedding Veil of the Proud Princess”); some are local tales that have passed into folk memory (“How Betty Sherman Won a Husband”). Beverley is in raptures over the Story Girl’s orations: “if voices had colour, hers would have been like a rainbow. It made words live. … we had listened entranced. I have written down the bare words of the story, as she told it; but I can never reproduce the charm and colour and spirit she infused into it. It lived for us.”
The cousins’ adventures are gently amusing and quite tame. They all write down their dreams in notebooks. Peter debates which church denomination to join and the boys engage in a sermon competition. Pat the cat has to be rescued from bewitching, and receives a dose of medicine in lard he licks off his paws and fur. The Story Girl makes a pudding with sawdust instead of cornmeal (reminding me of Anne Shirley and the dead mouse in the plum pudding). Life consistently teaches lessons in humility, as when they are all duped by Billy Robinson and his magic seeds, which he says will change whatever each one most resents – straight hair, plumpness, height; and there is a false alarm about the end of the world.
I found the novel fairly twee and realized at a certain point that I was skimming over more than I was reading. As was my complaint about Jane of Lantern Hill, there is a predictable near-death illness towards the end. The descriptions of Felicity and the Story Girl are purple (“when the Story Girl wreathed her nut-brown tresses with crimson leaves it seemed, as Peter said, that they grow on her—as if the gold and flame of her spirit had broken out in a coronal”); I had to remind myself that this reflects on Beverley more so than on Montgomery. From Naomi’s review of The Golden Road, I think that would be more to my taste because it has a clear plot rather than just stringing together pleasant but mostly forgettable anecdotes.
Still, it’s been fun to discover some of L. M. Montgomery’s lesser-known work, and there are sweet words about cats and the seasons:
“I am very good friends with all cats. They are so sleek and comfortable and dignified. And it is so easy to make them happy.”
“The beauty of winter is that it makes you appreciate spring.”
This effectively captures the long, magical summer days of childhood. I thought about when I was a kid and loved trips up to my mother’s hometown in upstate New York, where her brothers still lived. I was in awe of the Judd cousins’ big house, acres of lawn and untold luxuries such as Nintendo and a swimming pool. I guess I was as star-struck as Beverley. (University library)
#NovNov23 Buddy Reads Reviewed: Western Lane & A Room of One’s Own
This year we set two buddy reads for Novellas in November: one contemporary work of fiction and one classic work of short nonfiction. Do let us know if you’ve been reading them and what you think!
A version of the below review, submitted via their Facebook book club group, won me a pair of tickets to this year’s Booker Prize ceremony!
You may also wish to have a look at the excellent reading guide on the Booker website.
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (2023)
In the same way that you don’t have to love baseball or video games to enjoy The Art of Fielding or Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, it’s easy to warm to Western Lane even if you’ve never played squash. Debut author Chetna Maroo assumes reader unfamiliarity with her first line: “I don’t know if you have ever stood in the middle of a squash court – on the T – and listened to what is going on next door.” As Gopi looks back to the year that she was eleven – the year after she lost her mother – what she remembers is the echo of a ball hitting a wall. That first year of mourning, which was filled with compulsive squash training, reverberates just as strongly in her memory.
To make it through, Pa tells his three daughters, “You have to address yourself to something.” That something will be their squash hobby, he decides, but ramped up to the level of an obsession. Having lost my own mother just over a year ago, I could recognize in these characters the strategies people adopt to deflect grief. Keep busy. Go numb. Ignore your feelings. Get angry for no particular reason. Even within this small family, there’s a range of responses. Pa lets his electrician business slip; fifteen-year-old Mona develops a mild shopping addiction; thirteen-year-old Khush believes she still sees their mother.
Preparing for an upcoming squash tournament gives Gopi a goal to work towards, and a crush on thirteen-year-old Ged brightens long practice days. Maroo emphasizes the solitude and concentration required, alternating with the fleeting elation of performance. Squash players hover near the central T, from which most shots can be reached. Maroo, too, sticks close to the heart. Like all the best novellas, hers maintains a laser focus on character and situation. A child point-of-view can sound precocious or condescending. That is by no means the case here. Gopi’s perspective is convincing for her age at the time, yet hindsight is the prism that reveals the spectrum of intense emotions she experienced: sadness, estrangement from her immediate family, and rejection on the one hand; first love and anticipation on the other.
This offbeat, delicate coming-of-age story eschews the literary fireworks of other Booker Prize nominees. In place of stylistic flair is the sense that each word and detail has been carefully placed. Less is more. Rather than the dark horse in the race, I’d call it the reader favourite: accessible but with hidden depths. There are cinematic scenes where little happens outwardly yet what is unspoken between the characters – the gazes and tension – is freighted with meaning. (I could see this becoming a successful indie film.)
she and my uncle stood outside under the balcony of my bedroom until much later, and I knelt above them with my blanket around me. The three of us looked out at the black shapes of the rose arbour, the trees, the railway track. Stars appeared and disappeared. My knees began to ache. Below me, Aunt Ranjan wanted badly to ask Uncle Pavan how things stood now and Uncle Pavan wanted to tell her, but she wasn’t sure how to ask and he wasn’t sure how to begin. Soon, I thought, it would be morning, and night, and morning again, and it wouldn’t matter, except to someone watching from so far off that they couldn’t know yet.
The novella is illuminating on what is expected of young Gujarati women in England; on sisterhood and a bereaved family’s dynamic; but especially on what it is like to feel sealed off from life by grief. “I think there’s a glass court inside me,” Gopi says, but over the course of one quietly momentous year, the walls start to crack. (Public library) [161 pages]
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
Here’s the thing about Virginia Woolf. I know she’s one of the world greats. I fully acknowledge that her books are incredibly important in the literary canon. But I find her unreadable. The last time I had any success was when I was in college. Orlando and To the Lighthouse both blew me away half a lifetime ago, but I’ve not been able to reread them or force my way through anything else (and I have tried: Mrs Dalloway, The Voyage Out and The Waves). In the meantime, I’ve read several novels about Woolf and multiple Woolf-adjacent reads (ones by Vita Sackville-West, or referencing the Bloomsbury Group). So I thought a book-length essay based on lectures she gave at Cambridge’s women’s colleges in 1928 would be the perfect point of attack.
Hmm. Still unreadable. Oh well!
In the end I skimmed A Room of One’s Own for its main ideas – already familiar to me, as was some of the language – but its argumentation, reliant as much on her own made-up examples as on literary history, failed to move me. Woolf alternately imagines herself as Mary Carmichael, a lady novelist trawling an Oxbridge library and the British Museum for her forebears; and as a reader of Carmichael’s disappointingly pedestrian Life’s Adventure. If only Carmichael had had the benefit of time and money, Woolf muses, she might have been good. As it is, it would take her another century to develop her craft. She also posits a sister for Shakespeare and probes the social conditions that made her authorship impossible.
This is important to encounter as an early feminist document, but I would have been okay with reading just the excerpts I’d already come across.
Some favourite lines:
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in”
“A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she [the woman in literature] is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.”
“Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.”
(Secondhand purchase many years ago) [114 pages]
Getting Ready for Novellas in November!
Novellas: “all killer, no filler”
~Joe Hill
For the fourth year in a row, Cathy of 746 Books and I are celebrating the art of the short* book by co-hosting Novellas in November as a month-long challenge. This time we have five prompts, adapted from ones commonly used for Nonfiction November. (*A reminder that we suggest 200 pages as the upper limit for a novella.)
Here’s the schedule:
Week 1 (starts Wednesday 1 November): My Year in Novellas
- During this partial week, tell us about any novellas you have read since last NovNov.
Week 2 (starts Monday 6 November): What Is a Novella?
- Ponder the definition, list favourites, or choose ones you think best capture the ‘spirit’ of a novella.
Week 3 (starts Monday 13 November): Broadening My Horizons
- Pick your top novellas in translation and think about new genres or authors you’ve been introduced to through novellas.
Week 4 (starts Monday 20 November): The Short and the Long of It
- Pair a novella with a nonfiction book or novel that deals with similar themes or topics.
Week 5 (starts Monday 27 November): New to My TBR
- In the last few days, talk about the novellas you’ve added to your TBR since the month began.
We also have two buddy read options, one contemporary and one classic. Please join us in reading one or both at any time in November!
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (2023) is on this year’s Booker Prize longlist; whether or not it advances to the shortlist on Thursday, it promises to be a one-of-a-kind debut novel about an eleven-year-old girl coming to terms with the loss of her mother and becoming deeply involved in the world of competitive squash.
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929), an extended essay about the conditions necessary for women’s artistic achievement, is based on lectures she delivered at Cambridge’s women’s colleges. This feminist classic is in print or can be freely read online (Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg Canada).
It’s always a busy month in the blogging world, what with Nonfiction November, German Literature Month, and Margaret Atwood Reading Month. Why not search your shelves and/or local library for novellas that count towards multiple challenges? You might also consider participating in Annabel’s Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week (the 18th through 26th) as most of Bainbridge’s novels were under 200 pages.
We’re looking forward to having you join us! From 1 November there will be a pinned post on my site from which you can join the link-up. Keep in touch via Twitter (@cathy746books) and Instagram (@cathy_746books), and feel free to use the terrific feature images Cathy has made plus our new hashtag, #NovNov23.
Love Your Library, May 2023
Thanks to Elle for her monthly contribution, Laura for her great reviews of two high-profile novels, Birnam Wood and Pod, borrowed from her local library, and Naomi for the write-up of her recent audiobook loans, a fascinating selection of nonfiction and middle grade fiction. I forgot to link to Jana’s post last month, so here’s her April reading, another very interesting set.
My biggest news this month is that we now have a Little Free Library in my neighbourhood. This project was several years in the making as we waited for permissions and funding. The box (and a wooden bench next to it) were hand-crafted by my very talented neighbours, and the mayor of Newbury came to officially open it on the 7th. There are also a few planters of perennials and a small cherry tree. It really cheers up what used to be a patch of bare grass next to a parking area.
I’m the volunteer curator/librarian/steward so will ensure that the shelves are tidy and the stock keeps turning over. I try to stop by daily since it’s only around the corner from my house. We’ve ordered a charter sign to link us up with the organization and put us on the official map. Anyone visiting Newbury might decide to come find it. (I, for one, look out for LFLs wherever I go, from Pennsylvania to North Uist!)
My library reading and borrowing since last month. I’m back in the States for a visit just now, so don’t currently have any library books on the go. It felt prudent to clear the decks, but I’ll have a big stack waiting for me when I come back!
READ
- I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé by Michael Arceneaux
- Shadow Girls by Carol Birch
- The Cats We Meet Along the Way by Nadia Mikail
- Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery
- My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor
- The Boy Who Lost His Spark by Maggie O’Farrell
- Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
- Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road by Sara Wheeler
- In Memoriam by Alice Winn
SKIMMED
- Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
- You Are Not Alone by Cariad Lloyd
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- All the Men I Never Married by Kim Moore – I hadn’t heard of the poet and had never read anything from the publisher, but took a chance. I got to page 16. It’s fine: poems about former love interests, whether they be boyfriends or aggressors. There looks to be good variety of structure. I just didn’t sense adequate weight.
- The Furrows by Namwali Serpell – My apologies to Laura! (This started off as a buddy read.) I pushed myself through the first 78 pages, but once it didn’t advance in the Carol Shields Prize race there was no impetus to continue and it just wasn’t compelling enough to finish.
What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?
Share a link to your own post in the comments. Feel free to use the above image. The hashtag is #LoveYourLibrary.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 