Spring Reading, Part II: Helen Bain, Stephen King & Ivan Turgenev
When I posted for the first day of spring, I noted that it was already like early summer in the UK. Today it feels like summer is here to stay. After an April with just 18% of normal rainfall, our pond is looking half-empty. It was a surprisingly chilly mid-May, but really hot weather (low 30s C / high 80s F) is moving in just in time for the bank holiday weekend. Myriad insects find a haven in our lush, unmowed garden full of trees, wildflowers and so-called weeds. Benny is closely supervised on his three or four daily walks in this garden jungle. I love to see swifts wheeling through the sky, but I’d happily sacrifice the sun to get some more rain.
My three selections for this batch of seasonal reading are an excellent forthcoming novel about Sylvia Plath, a historical novella that’s become well known through the movie version, and obscure Russian classics about infatuations that end in heartbreak.
The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain
(A quick preview as my full review will be published on Shelf Awareness next month.) A bit of background: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath moved from London to Court Green, a thatched house with two and a half acres of land in North Tawton, Devon (southwest England) in August 1961. They had separated and each moved into lodgings in London – her with their two children – by December 1962, with Plath vowing to return to her beloved house and garden in the spring. Instead, she died by suicide in February 1963. This debut novel covers much of the last 18 months of Plath’s life, but in an inventive way: 16 linked short stories – each from the perspective of a different writer friend, family member, or local acquaintance – illuminate Plath’s personality and state of mind through the interactions they have with her. It’s everyone from her midwife to a washing machine salesman. We learn not just about Plath but also the norms of the time, e.g. through young women she meets at a dress shop and in a BBC recording studio. There are also glimpses into her literary milieu through a visit from Al Alvarez and reminiscences from the Kanes and Merwins. The title refers to her garden’s daffodils, so bountiful that she sells them, which strikes her neighbours as a typically American act of crass gumption. The really genius thing about this structure is that the vignettes go backward in time, so we aren’t approaching her inevitable end but anticipating her prime. Bain’s prose reminds me of Tessa Hadley and Andrew Miller. (Edelweiss) 
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King (1982)
This novella was published in Different Seasons under the heading “Hope Springs Eternal.” You probably know the story better through the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption.
“They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring’s crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.”
Andy Dufresne was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife and her lover in 1947. While he bides his time until the workings of justice or his own spectacular efforts can get him free, he makes himself useful as the prison librarian and an unofficial financial advisor (he was a banker back in the real world). He fights back against attempted sexual assaults, too. The narrator, Red, can get anyone anything on the black market, and Andy has made two very specific requests over the years: a rock hammer to continue his geology hobby, and a poster of Rita Hayworth to hang in his cell – replaced in turn, as years stretch into nearly three decades, by Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Raquel Welch, and Linda Ronstadt. All along, the hope of there being a life away from this place keeps Andy, and Red, going. Even though I knew what happened thanks to the movie, this was a quick, amusing, and heartening read. I’ll probably go on to read the other three in the omnibus. (Little Free Library) 
The Torrents of Spring (& First Love & “Mumu”) by Ivan Turgenev (1871; 1860; 1854)
[Translated from Russian by Constance Garnett]
I’ve found Turgenev to be a particularly readable Russian master whose novels are short and accessible enough as to not be daunting (unlike Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the like, who I’ve never attempted). I had a bit of confusion over this on, not realising my download included the novella First Love and the short story “Mumu” as well, so The Torrents of Spring ended sooner than I expected. It’s said to be highly autobiographical, but I haven’t looked into the links with Turgenev’s life. Twenty-two-year-old landowner Dimitri Sanin is in Frankfurt as part of a world tour. By chance, he rescues young Emil from a swoon and meets his family of Italian confectioners. Captivated by Emil’s sister Gemma’s simple beauty, he fights a duel to defend her honour and gets her to give up her tedious German fiancé for him. His plan is to stay and remotely sell his estate (complete with serfs) to a fellow Russian abroad – the wife of Polozov, a man he happens to know from childhood. But, as in Dangerous Liaisons, Maria Nikolaevna is a seductive schemer who steals his gaze away from Gemma just because she can. This was a gently Hardyesque tragicomedy about what’s fated versus the decisions and weaknesses that change everything. Turgenev explores what happens when money, love and lust don’t align, and leaves us with the aura of inevitable regret. 
The other two stories share that theme of capricious women. In First Love, sixteen-year-old Vladimir Petrovich is one of many suitors vying for the affections of his next-door neighbour, the young princess Zinaïda. He’s so smitten that when she says jump, he basically asks how high (and it ends up being 15 feet down from a wall). There’s an unexpected twist in this one that makes you question the young man’s family dynamic. The message can be summed up by the advice he’s given by another suitor: “The great thing is to lead a normal life, and not be the slave of your passions.” I was interested to note in both novellas that French is spoken as a marker of the upper classes.
“Mumu” started off promising, but I should know by now that when an animal is a central character in a classic work, it’s not going to go well. Mumu is a spaniel rescued by Gerasim, a giant deaf-mute man who labours on an old woman’s estate. His mistress observes that he’s sweet on Tatiana the laundress and quashes that budding relationship, at which point Mumu enters his life as a sort of replacement. Mumu is utterly devoted to him and suspicious of anyone else – including the mistress, who soon makes it her mission to silence the barking dog. It’s all disappointingly conventional and I wished it could have been otherwise, but I guess Turgenev, like so many other 19th-century authors – Dickens, Flaubert – felt duty-bound to keep women and peasants in their place. 
(Project Gutenberg)
Three for the First Day of Spring: Renkl, Sukegawa and Tucker
I suppose the best kind of spring morning is the best weather God has to offer.
~I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Happy spring! (Although the blossom is fading and, going by the temperature the past few days, you might think it was early summer here.) When I borrowed the psychological thriller The First Day of Spring from the library, I decided to consider that my built-in review deadline. As is my wont, I’ve turned it into a trio with two books more laterally related to spring: a lovely book of miniature autobiographical essays about interactions with family and the natural world, and a short Japanese novel about misfits who find belonging at a pancake restaurant.
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl (2019)
My favorite season is spring—until fall arrives, and then my favorite season is fall: the seasons of change, the seasons that tell me to wake up, to remember that every passing moment of every careening day is always the last moment, always the very last time, always the only instant I will ever take that precise breath or watch that exact cloud scud across that particular blue of the sky.
The memoir in flash essays is one of my favourite niche forms. (Beth-Ann Fennelly and Abigail Thomas also do it exceptionally well.) It took me a long time to promote this book from occasional bedside reading pile to daytime stack, but at a certain point it became impossible to let it out of my hands for very long. I had to smell it and browse her brother Billy’s collage artworks. Each piece is somewhere between a paragraph and several pages long, and they make up a rough chronology of a life, from her grandmother’s memories of the 1930s onward (the passages in italics are interview transcripts) through to the present day.
Renkl grew up in Alabama in the 1960s–70s, in the sort of mildly dysfunctional family that most of us probably have. She contrasts what she knew as a child with what she didn’t. It was a happy childhood but. (Her mother’s recurring mental health problems and racial tensions in the South would be two ways to finish that sentence.) There were hounds and porch seats and three kids in the backseat on vacations. There were funerals and old love songs and Bible verses and playing in the woods. Grandmother tells of births and deaths, and Renkl remembers life’s transitions: getting her first period, being so homesick that she couldn’t finish college in Philadelphia, adjusting to early motherhood and then to an empty nest – an appropriate metaphor because many of the essays are about birds Renkl watches feeding and nesting. She isn’t naïve; she knows nature is cruel. Not every fledgling will survive and majestic hawks will kill equally beautiful songbirds. She realizes how dire the situation is for monarch butterflies, too, but keeps planting milkweed at her Nashville home.
This balancing of appreciation for life and acceptance of death is at its finest in the late pieces on her parents’ death. Her mother, like mine, died suddenly after a stroke, and her words on that loss are exquisite as well as painful. Still, she asserts, “Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being.”
Like Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Renkl brings a poet’s eye for language and an amateur’s awe at the natural world to her micro-essays. She calls a cedar waxwing “An operatic aria of a bird. A flying jungle flower. A weightless coalescence of air and light and animation.” This is a book to cherish and learn from and reread. (Birthday gift from my sister from my wish list) 
{SPOILERS IN THESE NEXT TWO REVIEWS}
Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa (2013; 2017)
[Translated from Japanese by Alison Watts]
It was the colours (especially that wash of cherry-blossom pink) that first attracted me to this book, and the foodie theme that kept me reading. Sentaro manages a small shop on Cherry Blossom Street, Doraharu, which sells dorayaki – pancakes filled with sweet bean paste (“during cherry-blossom season petals sometimes drifted in, falling into the pancakes as they cooked”). He takes little pride in the work; it’s just a way to keep busy and pay off his debts from the time he was in prison for drug-dealing. When an elderly woman named Tokue offers to make the sweet bean paste for a pittance, he decides to give her a trial even though he usually orders it in bulk. Tokue’s homemade is so much better that the shop is soon making record profits. She trains Sentaro up in the art of making the perfect paste, which to her is a mystical process that involves listening to the beans. Not only does Tokue have new ideas for the menu, but she also makes troubled teenage customers such as Wakana welcome with friendly conversation. Along with Marvy the canary, these three form a fragile little family.
But then rumours start spreading about Tokue and her health, and Doraharu’s owner threatens to shut the place down if Sentaro doesn’t let her go. It turns out that she had Hansen’s disease (the preferred term for leprosy) and lives in a sanatorium. Even though she has long since been cured, there is still a stigma, and when she was young she could only find love and community among her fellow patients. In an Author’s Note, Sukegawa explains that the legislation keeping Hansen’s patients isolated was only repealed in 1996. His philosophy, made explicit in the letters Tokue writes to Sentaro after leaving the shop, is that one doesn’t have to be useful to have a meaningful life; simply being alive and observing is enough. I found Tokue saccharine: too wise, good and all-forgiving. This is easy reading, yet the dialogue felt stiff, the characterization thin, the letters unsubtle, and the detail of confectionery-making too technical. Secondhand – public library book sale) 
The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker (2021)
I’d very much admired Tucker’s first two books – The Time in Between, a memoir of her childhood anorexia; and especially That Was When People Started to Worry, case studies of young women’s mental health – so asked my library to purchase her debut novel. Tucker is a trainee clinical psychiatrist. The psychological insight she’s developed professionally and through writing about herself and others served her well in crafting this portrait of a deprived girl who murders other children. I could have included it in my Mother’s Day post because, as in the similarly dark Like Mother (by Jenny Diski), it’s the lack of a mother’s love that leaves the protagonist numb and unsure of how to bring up her own daughter.
It’s no whodunit because eight-year-old Chrissie admits in the novel’s first line, “I killed a little boy today.” The mystery is why, and how she’s ultimately caught. It’s the first day of spring when she commits that first murder, of a toddler who lives on the same rough housing estate. Her house isn’t much of a home with no money for electricity, no food in the cupboards, an emotionally absent mother and a father who comes and goes without warning. Chrissie is always hungry, always craving. She couldn’t stand that Steven was loved and coddled while she had nothing. Harbouring “a delicious secret” gives her a “belly-fizzing feeling … like sherbet exploding in my guts. … That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world.” She wants to tell people what she’s done, but knows she mustn’t.
It’s also the first day of spring when five-year-old Molly falls from a seawall and breaks her wrist. Her mum, Julia, panics when she gets a call from child social services. It becomes clear by the second chapter that Julia is the new name Chrissie was given when she left the residential home for child offenders to start a new life. Sure that they’ll blame her and take Molly away, she gets on a train back to her old neighbourhood to see Mam and her childhood best friend, Linda. “I remembered this in Mam – the pull and push, cling and reject.” The subject matter might have become unbearable had Tucker emphasized the salacious details. Instead, she casts a compassionate eye on generational patterns of neglect and incompetence – patterns that can be broken through hard work. It’s riveting reading, and Julia’s love for Molly and Linda’s enduring friendship brought tears to my eyes. (Public library) 
Spring Reading: Simon Barnes, Jackie Kay, and Michael Morpurgo
With all the roses in full bloom and the swifts back and nesting in the corner of our eaves, it’s been feeling more like summer than high spring as we approach the end of May. I didn’t amass many spring-themed books this year, but managed to piece together the below trio of library books. They feel quite England- (and Scotland-) specific; I wonder how well these authors are known outside the UK. All: 
May Day by Jackie Kay (2024)
May Day is a traditional celebration for the first day of May, but it’s also a distress signal – as the megaphone and stark font on the cover reflect. Aptly, there are joyful verses as well as calls to arms here. Kay devotes poems to several of her role models, such as Harry Belafonte, Paul Robeson, Peggy Seeger and Nina Simone. But the real heroes of the book are her late parents, who were very politically active, standing up for workers’ rights and socialist values. Kay followed in their footsteps as a staunch attendee of protests. Her mother’s death during the Covid pandemic looms large. There is a touching triptych set on Mother’s Day in three consecutive years; even though her mum is gone for the last two, Kay still talks to her. Certain birds and songs will always remind her of her mum, and “Grief as Protest” links past and future. The bereavement theme resonated with me, but much of the rest made no mark (especially not the poems in dialect) and I don’t find much to admire poetically. I love Kay’s memoir, Red Dust Road, which has been among our most popular book club reads so far, but I’ve not particularly warmed to her poetry despite having read four collections now.
Spring: The Story of a Season by Michael Morpurgo (2025)
I’d not read Morpurgo before. He’s known primarily as a children’s author; if you’ve heard of one of his works, it will likely be War Horse, which became a play and then a film. This is a small hardback, scarcely 150 pages and with not many words to a page, plus woodcut illustrations interspersed. As revered English nature authors such as John Lewis-Stempel and Richard Mabey have also done, he depicts a typical season through a diary of several months of life on his land. For nearly 50 years, his Devon farm has hosted the Farms for City Children charity he founded. He believes urban living cuts people off from the rhythm of the seasons and from nature generally; “For so many reasons, for our wellbeing, for the planet, we need to revive that connection.” Now in his eighties, he lives with his wife in a small cottage and leaves much of the day-to-day work like lambing to others. But he still loves observing farm tasks and spotting wildlife (notably, an otter and a kingfisher) on his walks. This is a pleasant but inconsequential book. I most appreciated how it captures the feeling of seasonal anticipation – wondering when the weather will turn, when that first swallow will return.
And a skim:
Spring Is the Only Season: How It Works, What It Does, and Why It Matters by Simon Barnes (2025)
This 400+-page tome has an impressive scope. Like Mark Cocker does in One Midsummer’s Day, Barnes retreats all the way back to the Big Bang and then slowly zooms in, via the evolution of plants and the phenology of birds and insects. He also covers every possible topic you could think of relating to spring: religious festivals, mythology, literature, art, farming, and so on. Had I never read another book on spring, perhaps I would find this compendium satisfying, but it is rather meandering and too many of its points of reference are familiar. Moreover, the overall project is too similar to Tim Dee’s extraordinary Greenery. Alas, Barnes isn’t half the writer Dee is, so this ends up being a rather workmanlike survey. I most enjoyed the chapter-ending “Signs of Spring” lists from his Norfolk home. These more than illustrate how seasonality has gone awry due to climate change; a whole chapter wasn’t necessary to spell it out.
Spring Reads, Part II: Blossomise, Spring Chicken & Cold Spring Harbor
Our garden is an unruly assortment of wildflowers, rosebushes, fruit trees and hedge plants, along with an in-progress pond, and we’ve made a few half-hearted attempts at planting vegetable seeds and flower bulbs. It felt more like summer earlier in May, before we left for France; as the rest of the spring plays out, we’ll see if the beetroot, courgettes, radishes and tomatoes amount to anything. The gladioli have certainly been shooting for the sky!
I recently encountered spring (if only in name) through these three books, a truly mixed bag: a novelty poetry book memorable more for the illustrations than for the words, a fascinating popular account of the science of ageing, and a typically depressing (if you know the author, anyway) novel about failing marriages and families. Part I of my Spring Reading was here.
Blossomise by Simon Armitage; illus. Angela Harding (2024)
Armitage has been the Poet Laureate for yonks now, but I can’t say his poetry has ever made much of an impression on me. That’s especially true of this slim volume commissioned by the National Trust: it’s 3 stars for Angela Harding’s lovely if biologically inaccurate (but I’ll be kind and call them whimsical) engravings, and 2 stars for the actual poems, which are light on content. Plum, cherry, apple, pear, blackthorn and hawthorn blossom loom large. It’s hard to describe spring without resorting to enraptured clichés, though: “Planet Earth in party mode, / petals fizzing and frothing / like pink champagne.” The haiku (11 of 21 poems) feel particularly tossed-off: “The streets are learning / the language of plum blossom. / The trees have spoken.” But others are sure to think more of this than I did.
A favourite passage: “Scented and powdered / she’s staging / a one-tree show / with hi-viz blossoms / and lip-gloss petals; / she’ll season the pavements / and polished stones / with something like snow.” (Public library)
Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) by Bill Gifford (2015)
Gifford was in his mid-forties when he undertook this quirky journey into the science and superstitions of ageing. As a starting point, he ponders the differences between his grandfather, who swam and worked his orchard until his death from infection at 86, and his great-uncle, not so different in age, who developed Alzheimer’s and died in a nursing home at 74. Why is the course of ageing so different for different people? Gifford suspects that, in this case, it had something to do with Uncle Emerson’s adherence to the family tradition of Christian Science and refusal to go to the doctor for any medical concern. (An alarming fact: “The Baby Boom generation is the first in centuries that has actually turned out to be less healthy than their parents, thanks largely to diabetes, poor diet, and general physical laziness.”) But variation in healthspan is still something of a mystery.
Over the course of the book, Gifford meets all number of researchers and cranks as he attends conferences, travels to spend time with centenarians and scientists, and participates in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. There have been some truly zany ideas about how to pause or reverse aging, such as self-dosing with hormones (Suzanne Somers is one proponent), but long-term use is discouraged. Some things that do help, to an extent, are calorie restriction and periodic fasting plus, possibly, red wine, coffee and aspirin. But the basic advice is nothing we don’t already know about health: don’t eat too much and exercise, i.e., avoid obesity. The layman-interpreting-science approach reminded me of Mary Roach’s. There was some crossover in content with Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine and various books I’ve read about dementia. Fun and enlightening. (New purchase – bargain book from Dollar Tree, Bowie, MD)
Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates (1986)
Cold Spring Harbor is a Long Island hamlet whose name casts an appropriately chilly shadow over this slim novel about families blighted by alcoholism and poor decisions. Evan Shepard, only in his early twenties, already has a broken marriage behind him after a teenage romance led to an unplanned pregnancy. Mary and their daughter Kathleen seem to be in the rearview mirror as he plans to return to college for an engineering degree. One day he accompanies his father into New York City for an eye doctor appointment and the car breaks down. The men knock on a random door and thereby become entwined with the Drakes: Gloria, the unstable, daytime-drinking mother; Rachel, her beautiful daughter; and Phil, her earnest but unconfident adolescent son.
Evan and Rachel soon marry and agree to Gloria’s plan of sharing a house in Cold Spring Harbor, where the Shepards live (Evan’s mother is also an alcoholic, but less functional; she hides behind the “invalid” label). Take it from me: living with your in-laws is never a good idea! As the Second World War looms, and with Evan and Rachel expecting a baby, it’s clear something will have to give with this uneasy family arrangement, but the dramatic break I was expecting – along the lines of a death or accident – never arrived. Instead, there’s just additional slow crumbling, and the promise of greater suffering to come. Although Yates’s character portraits are as penetrating as in Easter Parade, I found the plot a little lacklustre here. (Secondhand – Clutterbooks, Sedbergh)
Any ‘spring’ reads for you recently?
Spring Journeys with Edwin Way Teale and Edward Thomas
When I heard that Little Toller were reissuing their edition of Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring, I couldn’t resist pairing it with Edwin Way Teale’s book about the progress of the season up the United States, North with the Spring. These spring journeys, documented by authors delighting in nature’s bounty and responding with poetry, inspired mixed feelings in me: vicarious nostalgia, but also sadness for all that has been lost since they set out in the 1910s and 1950s, respectively.
It’s hard to live joyfully when evidence of the destruction of nature is overwhelming. Enjoying what still exists doesn’t seem like enough. But it’s a start. So this year I’ve been careful to note every phenological landmark: the first swift, the first hearing of a cuckoo, a rare sighting of a live hedgehog. One day in late April I stood on the towpath for hours watching a cloud of swallows and martins swooping for insects. I’ve also enjoyed watching from my office window as sparrows come and go from a nest box.
North with the Spring by Edwin Way Teale (1951)
I’ve previously reviewed Teale’s Autumn Across America and Springtime in Britain and consider him one of the classic – and most underrated – American nature writers. I was delighted to find a copy of this first seasonal volume on our trip to Northumberland a few years ago. As in the autumn book, he and his wife Nellie undertake a road trip, this time travelling from Florida up to New England, a total of 17,000 miles. Their journey lasted 130 days because instead of waiting for 21 March they started weeks before; spring comes early to the Gulf coast. Their time in Florida feels endless, constituting over a third of the book. Although it’s true that there are (were?) many peerless ecosystems there between the scrub and swamp, I grew impatient to move on to other states. The meet-up with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who took them on a picnic to ‘The Yearling country,’ was a highlight.
They travel alongside the spring warblers; past river deltas and barrier islands, by mountain meadows and forests. Other stops include Monticello and New Jersey’s pine barrens. A stopover in New York City dramatizes the difference between civilization and relative wilderness. I particularly enjoyed a pair of chapters set in Tennessee: first the wonder of Nickajack Cave, then the horror of the deforested and poisoned Ducktown Desert. Teale seems ahead of his time in decrying people’s wilful ignorance – one man they met denied the fact of migration, insisting the birds were always around – and failure to consider nature. His scenes and conversations feel fully natural; he’s as interested in people as in wildlife, and that humanism comes across in his writing.
“We longed for a thousand springs on the road instead of this one. For spring is like life. You never grasp it entire; you touch it here, there; you know it only in parts and fragments.”
(Secondhand – Barter Books, Alnwick)
In Pursuit of Spring by Edward Thomas (1914)
On Good Friday, 21 March 1913, Edward Thomas set off on his bicycle from his parents’ home in South London. He was bound southwest, toward Somerset and the height of spring. At cycling and walking pace, he would truly experience the development of the season, whereas
“Many days in London have no weather. We are aware only that it is hot or cold, dry or wet; that we are in or out of doors; that we are at ease or not.”
He prepares himself for hardship and slog:
“Spring would come, of course – nothing, I supposed, could prevent it – and I should have to make up my mind how to go westward. Whatever I did, Salisbury Plain was to be crossed”
It’s remarkable both how much and how little has changed in the intervening century and more. The place names, plant and bird species, and alternation of town and countryside are all familiar, but the difference is stark when you see Thomas’s black-and-white photographs that illustrate the text. These dirt roads are empty. You’d have to search high and low today to find the kind of unspoiled fields, rivers, churchyards, hedgerows and stone walls that he memorializes.
Everything he sees drives him back to poetry, with long passages quoted from authors who have fallen somewhat out of fashion, such as George Herbert and Alexander Pope. I loved the scene where he buys a book at a secondhand furniture shop (for two pence, mind you) and then ignores it to eavesdrop on fellow diners at a restaurant. He has words of high praise for W.H. Hudson:
“Were men to disappear they might be reconstructed from the Bible and the Russian novelists; … Hudson so writes of birds that if ever … they should cease to exist, and should leave us to ourselves on a benighted planet, we should have to learn from him what birds were.”
Thomas also mentions William Cobbett, whose Rural Rides this reminded me of strongly. Both are slow-paced journeys around a rural England that no longer exists. Today Thomas is better remembered as a poet; he would be one of the fallen in a First World War battle just four years after this expedition. It was great to have a chance to read his nature writing, too.
With thanks to Little Toller for the free copy for review.
We’re off to rural France on Wednesday for eight days of relaxation and nature-watching; it’s not a sight-seeing or foodie trip like our time in Paris back in December. Ironically, it seems that it may be cold and rainy for much of the holiday, having been gorgeous in both countries this past week. We will hope for some sun and warmth, but have packed plenty of books and board games (and will acquire much wine) for when the weather is to be avoided inside.
What signs of the spring have you been seeing?
Spring Reads, Part II: Swifts, a Cuckoo, and a British Road Trip
Despite ongoing worries about biodiversity loss after last year’s drought, I had the most idyllic late spring evening yesterday. On the way home from an evening with Alice Winn hosted by Hungerford Bookshop (more on which anon), I sat at the station awaiting my train. It was 8:30 p.m. and still fully light, warm enough to be comfortable in a jacket, and a cuckoo serenaded me as I watched swifts wheeling by overhead.
For my second instalment of spring-themed reading (see Part I here), I have books about those very birds, one a nonfiction study of a species that is a welcome sign of late spring and summer in Europe, and a novel that takes up the metaphors associated with another notable species; plus a narrative of a circuitous route driven through a British spring.
Swifts and Us by Sarah Gibson (2020)
We first noticed the swifts had returned to Newbury on 29 April. Best of all, we think ‘our’ birds that nested in the space between the roof and rear gutter last year (see footage here) are back. We’ve also installed one swift and two house martin boxes along the wall from the corner, just in case. Swifts are truly amazing for the distances they travel and the almost fully aerial life they lead. They only touch down to breed and otherwise do everything else – eat, sleep, mate – on the wing. I skimmed this book over the course of two springs and learned that the screaming parties you may, if you are lucky, see tearing down your street are likely to be made up of one- or two-year-old birds. Those tending to nestlings will be quieter. (They’ll be ruthless about displacing house sparrows who try to steal their space, so we hope the questing sparrows we saw at the gutter a few weeks before didn’t get as far as nest-building.)
Beaks agape, swifts catch thousands of insects a day and keep them in a bolus in their throat to regurgitate for chicks. The sharp decline in insect numbers is a major concern, as well as the intensification of agriculture, climate change, and new houses or renovations that block up holes birds traditionally nest in. There are multiple species of swift – in southern Spain one can see five types – and in general they are considered to be of least conservation concern, but these matters are all relative in these days of climate crisis. Evolved to nest in cliffs and trees, they now live alongside humans except in rare places like Abernethy Forest near Inverness in Scotland, where they still nest in trees, in holes abandoned by woodpeckers.
Gibson surveys swifts’ distribution and evolution, key figures in how we came to understand them (Gilbert White et al.), and early landmark studies (e.g. David Lack’s in Oxford). She also takes us through a typical summer swift schedule, and interviews some people who rehabilitate and advocate for swifts. Other chapters see her travelling to Italy, Switzerland and Ireland, the furthest west that swifts breed. If you find a grounded swift, she learns from bitter experience, keep it in a box with air holes and give it water on a cotton bud, but don’t feed or throw it up in the air. To release, take it to an open space and hold it on your hand above your head. If it’s ready to fly, it will. The current push to help swifts is requiring that nest blocks or boxes be incorporated in every new home design. (I signed this petition.)
This is a great source of basic information, though some of the background may be more detailed than the average reader needs. If you’re only going to read one book about swifts, I would be more likely to recommend Charles Foster’s The Screaming Sky, a literary monograph, but do follow up with this one. And soon we’ll also have Mark Cocker’s book about swifts, One Midsummer’s Day, which I hope to get hold of. (Public library) 
Favourite lines:
“It is their otherness that makes them so fascinating. They touch our lives briefly and then vanish; this is part of their magic.”
“The brevity of their summer stays enhances their hold on our hearts. The season is short, their bold, wild chases over the roofs and high-pitched screams a fleeting experience: they are a metaphor for life itself. We need to act now to ensure these birds will scythe across our skies forever; to keep them in our streets, to keep them in abundance and common. All of us can do something within the compass of our lives to help tilt the balance back in their favour. If the will to do it is there, it can be done.”
Cuckoo by Wendy Perriam (1991)
(We started hearing cuckoos locally last week!) My second by Perriam, after The Stillness The Dancing, and I’ve amassed quite a pile for afterwards. Frances Parry Jones, in her early thirties, is desperate for a baby but her husband, Charles, doesn’t seem fussed. He goes along with fertility treatment but remains aloof like the posh snob Perriam depicts him to be – the opening line is “Typical of Charles to decant his sperm sample into a Fortnum and Mason’s jar.” Their comfortable home in Richmond is cut off from the messy reality of life, as represented by Frances’s friend Viv and her brood.
Frances soon learns why Charles is unenthusiastic about having children: he already has one, a sullen teenager named Magda who lived with her mother in Hungary but has just arrived in London, “a greedy little cuckoo, commandeering the nest.” Though tempted to accept Magda as a replacement child, Frances just can’t manage it. However, they do find common ground through their japes with Ned, a free spirit Frances meets during her brief time as a taxi driver, and Frances starts to imagine how her life could be different. The portraits and sex scenes alike were a little grotesque here. I had to skim a lot to get through it. Here’s hoping for a better experience with the next one. (Secondhand copy passed on by Liz – thank you!) 
Springtime in Britain by Edwin Way Teale (1970)
I discovered Teale a few years ago through the exceptional Autumn Across America, the first volume of a quartet illuminating the nature of the four seasons in the USA; he won a Pulitzer for the final book. Here he applied the same pattern across the pond, taking an 11,000-mile road trip around Britain with his wife Nellie. It’s a delight to see the country through his eyes, particularly places I know well (Devon, the New Forest, Wiltshire/Berkshire) or have visited recently (Northumberland). They find the early spring alarmingly cold and wet, but before long are rewarded with swathes of daffodils and bluebells. Several stake-outs finally result in hearing a nightingale. For the most part, the bird life is completely new to them, but he remarks on what North American species the European birds remind him of. “We felt we would travel to Britain just to hear the song thrush and the blackbird,” he maintains.
Nellie develops pneumonia and has to convalesce in Kent, but otherwise personal matters hardly come into the narrative. Teale is well versed in English nature writing and often references classics by the likes of John Clare and Gilbert White that inspired destinations. (They spend an excessive number of days on their pilgrimage to White’s Selborne.) He also reports on perceived threats of the time, such as small animals getting stuck in littered milk bottles. While it was, inevitably, a little distressing to think of the abundance and diversity he was still experiencing in the late 1960s that has since been lost to development, I mostly found this a pleasant meander. Some things never change: the magic of prehistoric sites; the grossness of some cities (“we forgot the misadventure of Slough”). (Secondhand) 
What signs of late spring are you seeing?
Spring Reads, Part I: Violets and Rain
We had both rain and spring sunshine on a recent overnight trip to Bridport, Dorset – a return visit after enjoying it so much in 2019. Several elements were repeated: Dorset Nectar cider farm, dinner at Dorshi, and a bookshop and charity shop crawl of the main streets. While we didn’t revisit Thomas Hardy sites, I spent plenty of time at Max Gate by reading Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen. Beach walks plus one in the New Forest on the way back were splendid. This was my haul from Bridport Old Books. Stocking up on novellas and poetry, plus a novel by a Canadian author I’ve enjoyed work from before.
Now for a quick look at two tangentially spring-related books I’ve read recently: a short novel about two women’s wartime experiences of motherhood and an elegiac and allusive poetry collection.
Violets by Alex Hyde (2022)
I was intrigued by the sound of this debut novel, which juxtaposes the lives of two young British women named Violet at the close of the Second World War. One miscarries twins and, told she’ll not be able to bear children, has to rethink her whole future; another sails from Wales to Italy on ATS war service, hiding the fact that she’s pregnant by a departed foreign soldier. Hyde’s spare style – no speech marks; short paragraphs or solitary lines separated by spaces – alternates between their stories in brief numbered chapters, bringing them together in a perhaps predictable way that also forms a reimagining of her father’s life story. The narration at times addresses this future character in poems that I think are supposed to be fond and prophetic but I instead found strangely blunt and even taunting (as in the excerpt below). There’s inadequate time to get to know, or care about, either Violet. 
Can you feel it, Pram Boy?
Can you march in time?
A change, a hardening,
the jarring of the solid ground as she treads,
gets her pockets picked.
[…]
Quick! March!
And your Mama, Pram Boy,
yeasty in her private parts.
Granta sent a free copy. Violets came out in paperback in February.
Rain by Don Paterson (Faber, 2009)
I’d previously read Paterson’s 40 Sonnets, in 2015. This collection is in memoriam of the late poet Michael Donaghy, the subject of the late multi-part “Phantom.” There are a couple of poems in Scots and a sequence of seven nature-infused ones designated as being “after” poets from Li Po to Robert Desnos. Several appear to express concern for a son. There’s a haiku-like rhythm to the short stanzas of “Renku: My Last Thirty-Five Deaths.” I didn’t understand why “Unfold i.m. Akira Yoshizawa” was a blank page until I looked him up and learned that he was a famous origamist. The title poem closes the collection:
I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;
one big thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame
to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
I liked individual passages or images but didn’t find much of a connecting theme behind Paterson’s disparate interests. (University library)
Another favourite passage:
So I collect the dull things of the day
in which I see some possibility
[…]
I look at them and look at them until
one thing makes a mirror in my eyes
then I paint it with the tear to make it bright.
This is why I sit up through the night.
(from “Why Do You Stay Up So Late?”)
And a DNF:
Corpse Beneath the Crocus by N.N. Nelson – I loved the title and the cover, and a widow’s bereavement memoir in poems seemed right up my street. I wish I’d realized Atmosphere is a vanity press, which would explain why these are among the worst poems I’ve read: cliché-riddled and full of obvious sentiments and metaphors as she explores specific moments but mostly overall emotions. Three excerpts:
All things die
In the flowering cycle
Of growth and life
Time passes
Like sand in an hourglass
Feelings are changeful
Like the tide
Ebbing and flowing
“Love Letter,” a prose piece, held the most promise, which suggests Nelson would have been better off attempting memoir. I slogged (hate-read, really) my way through to the halfway point but could bear it no longer. (NetGalley) 
I have a few more spring-themed books on the go: Hoping for a better set next time!
Any spring reads on your plate?
Spring Reading, Part II: May, Moving and Swifts
Eight days after our move, there are still piles of boxes, but the furniture is in place and there are clear walkways, so we’ll call that progress. We got a lot of help on moving day from neighbours, one of whom built a tower of book boxes in the corner of the dining room! I had fun dismantling it last week and assigning each box to a particular bookcase. Arranging the contents on shelves will be for once we’re back from Spain.
What with moving and DIY, I haven’t had a lot of time for reading lately, so didn’t finish any more of the spring books I’d intended to include – except for one children’s book from the library. I’ll give a little rundown of some of what has been on my coffee table stack.
Busy Spring: Nature Wakes Up by Sean Taylor and Alex Morss; illus. Cinyee Chiu (2021)
This was a cute read about two little girls helping their father in the garden and discovering the natural wonders of the season, like tadpoles in a pond, birds building nests, and insects and worms in the compost heap. A section at the end gives more information about the science of spring – unfortunately, it mislabels one bird and includes North American species without labelling them as such, whereas the rest of the book was clearly set in the UK. The strategy reminded me of that in Wild Child by Dara McAnulty. This year is the first time a children’s book Wainwright Prize will be awarded, so we’ll see this kind of book being recognized more.
May reads:
Encore is my last unread journal of May Sarton’s. It begins in May 1991, when she’s 79 and in recovery from major illness. She’s still plagued by pain and fatigue, but her garden and visits from friends are a solace. Although she has to lie down to garden, “to put my hands in the earth to dig is life giving … it is almost as if the earth were nourishing me at the moment.” As usual, there are lovely reflections on the freedoms as well as the losses of ageing. This book, like the previous, was dictated, so there is a bit of repetition. I’ve been amused to see how pretentious she found A.S. Byatt’s Possession! An entry or two at a sitting helped calm my mind during the stress of moving week.
“In a funny way what drives me is the spring, the fleeting spring. Because of the enormous wind and rain we have had, a lot of the daffodils have blown down, though not as many as I feared. But the truth is that their peak is past. We shall have them for another week and then they will be gone. It seems quite unbearable but that is what spring is—the letting go. The waiting and waiting and waiting, and then the letting go.”
I started a reread of Snow in May by Kseniya Melnik and am partway through the second story. It’s a linked short story collection set in Magadan in northeast Russia – known for Stalin’s forced-labour camps. In “Love, Italian Style, or in Line for Bananas,” it’s 1975 and Tanya is on a shopping spree in Moscow. At a time of deprivation, she buys even things she doesn’t need or that aren’t quite right. Propositioned by an Italian football player on the plane ride over, she fantasizes about the exotic and romantic, juxtaposed against her everyday life.
“The pollen swirled around her like snow. There was a time when the distinctions between right and wrong seemed indisputable, and doing right felt good. When all the decisions had been premade and in her best interest. Back when she didn’t need so much to be happy.”
Belonging
I saw it on shelf at the library and knew now was the perfect time to read My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster, a memoir via the places she’s lived, starting with the house where she was born in 1938, on a council estate in Carlisle. There’s something appealing to me about tracing a life story through homes – Paul Auster did the same in part of Winter Journal. I’d be tempted to undertake a similar exercise myself someday.
The swifts come screeching down our new street and we saw one investigating a crevice in our back roof for a nest! In Fledgling by Hannah Bourne-Taylor, she is lonely in rural Ghana, where she and her husband had moved for his work, and takes in a young swift displaced from its nest. I’m only in the early pages, but can tell that her care for the bird will be a way of exploring her own feeling of displacement and the desire to belong. “Although I was unaware of it at the time, the English countryside and the birds had turned into my anchor of home.”
The Beginning of Spring with Penelope Fitzgerald & Karl Ove Knausgaard
(From To Star the Dark by Doireann Ní Ghríofa)
Reading with the seasons is one way I mark time. This is the first of two, or maybe three, batches of spring reading for me this year. The daffodils have already gone over; bluebells and peonies are coming out; and all the trees, including the two wee apple trees we’ve planted at our new house, are sprouting hopeful buds.
The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
My fourth from Fitzgerald. One of her later novels, this was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Its pre-war Moscow setting seemed to take on extra significance as I read it during the early weeks of the Russian occupation of Ukraine. Its title is both literal, referring to the March days in 1913 when “there was the smell of green grass and leaves, inconceivable for the last five months” and the expatriate Reid family can go to their dacha once again, and metaphorical. For what seems to printer Frank Reid – whose wife Nellie has taken a train back to England and left him to raise their three children alone – like an ending may actually presage new possibilities when his accountant, Selwyn, hires a new nanny for the children.
I have previously found Fitzgerald’s work slight, subtle to the point of sailing over my consciousness without leaving a ripple. While her characters and scenes still underwhelm – I always want to go deeper – I liked this better than the others I’ve read (The Bookshop, Offshore, and The Blue Flower), perhaps simply because it’s not a novella so is that little bit more expansive. And though she’s not an author you’d turn to for plot, more does actually happen here, including a gunshot. Frank is a genial Everyman, fond of Russia yet exasperated with its bureaucracy and corruption – this “magnificent and ramshackle country.” He knows how things work and isn’t above giving a bribe when it’s expedient for his business:
He took an envelope out of his drawer, and, conscious of taking only a mild risk, since the whole unwieldy administration of All the Russias, which kept working, even if only just, depended on the passing of countless numbers of such envelopes, he slid it across the top of the desk. The inspector opened it without embarrassment, counted out the three hundred roubles it contained and transferred them to a leather container, half way between a wallet and a purse, which he kept for ‘innocent income’.
I particularly liked Uncle Charlie’s visit, the glimpses of Orthodox Easter rituals, and a strangely mystical moment of communion with some birch trees. A part of me did wonder if the setting was neither here nor there, if a few plastered-on descriptions of Moscow were truly enough to constitute convincing historical fiction. That’s a question for those more familiar with Russia and its literature to answer, but I enjoyed the seasonal awakening. (Secondhand, charity shop in Bath)
Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2016; 2018)
[Translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey; illustrated by Anna Bjerger]
Knausgaard is a repeat presence in my seasonal posts: I’ve also reviewed Autumn, Winter and Summer. I read his quartet out of order, finishing with the one that was published third. The project was conceived as a way to welcome his fourth child, Anna, into the world. Whereas the other books prioritize didactic essays on seasonal experiences, this is closer in format to Knausgaard’s granular autofiction: the throughline is a journey through an average day with his baby girl, from when she wakes him before 6 a.m. to a Walpurgis night celebration (“the evening when spring is welcomed in with song in Sweden”). They see the other kids off to school, then make a disastrous visit to a mental hospital – he forgets his bank card and ID, the baby’s bottle, everything, and has to beg cash from his bank to buy petrol to get home.
Looming over the circadian narrative is his wife’s mental health crisis the summer before (his ex-wife Linda Boström Knausgård, a writer in her own right, has bipolar disorder), while she was pregnant with Anna, and the repercussions it has had for their family. Other elements echo those of the previous books: the formation of memories, to what extent his personality is fixed, whether he’s fated to turn into his father, minor health concerns, and so on. Although this volume is less aphoristic than the previous books, there are still moments when he muses on life and gives general advice:
Self-deception is perhaps the most human thing of all. … And perhaps the following is nothing but self-deception: the easy life is nothing to aspire to, the easy choice is never the worthiest solution, only the difficult life is a life worth living. I don’t know. But I think that’s how it is. What would seem to contradict this, is that I wish you and your siblings simple, easy, long and happy lives. … The advantage of having siblings is that it is a lifelong attachment, and that nothing can break it.
All in all, this was the highlight of the series for me. Each of the four is illustrated by a different contemporary artist. Bjerger is less abstract than some of the others, which I count as a plus. (New bargain/remainder copy, Minster Gate Bookshop, York)
This daffodil bookmark was embroidered by local textile artist Christine Highnett. My mother bought it for me from Sandham Memorial Chapel’s gift shop last summer.
A favourite random moment: A creeper coming through the tile roof of his office pushes a book off the shelf. It’s American Psycho. “I still found it incredible. And a little frightening, the blind force of growth”.
Speaking of meaningful, or perhaps ironic, timing: He records a conversation with his neighbour, who was mansplaining about Russian aggression and the place of Ukraine: “Kiev was the first great city in what became the Russian empire. … The Ukraine and Russia are like twins. … They belong together. At least the Russians see it that way. … The very idea of Russia is imperialistic.”
Any spring reads on your plate?
March Reading Plans
It’s beginning to look a lot like spring, with daffodils a-blooming, so I have amassed a set of appropriate reads and aim to report on them in two installments between April and May. I was already partway through Davidson’s novel, I’m getting stuck into the Fitzgerald and Knausgaard, and I hope to start the Woolf soon. I also have a review copy of Ghosts of Spring by Luis Carrasco.
Much as I tried with #FinishItFebruary, I still have some set-aside titles I couldn’t get through before the end of last month. It’s a good thing that (as I’ll never forget Damian Barr commenting) books are patient. I’ll reintroduce these to my stacks in the weeks to come, but NO MORE BOOKS can join them. I’m going to be strict with myself: keep going with a book or DNF it; no more limbo.
One of my informal goals for the rest of the year is to have a buddy read on the go with my husband at all times. I’d noticed that I happened to have duplicate copies of a couple of books, and then started to look out for extra copies at the free mall bookshop and Little Free Library in 2019–21, so I’ve ended up with 11 books in total: three nature classics, four travel books, three novels to reread, and one to read for the first time. Nature/travel is where our taste most often overlaps, but John Irving is our mutual favourite author and English Passengers is a novel we both loved. We’ll work out a schedule for 1–2 per month. He reads faster than I do (but has much less time to read overall), so we’ll agree on a time frame and chat either as we go or when we’ve both finished a book. Let me know if you fancy joining in with any of these.
Of course, it’s also Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy of 746 Books, and I’ve earmarked these fiction options for the next few weeks. So far I’ve started Maggie O’Farrell’s debut novel. Plus I just got Wendy Erskine’s story collection Dance Move out from the library, and I have Colm Tóibín’s forthcoming poetry collection on my e-reader.
I’m currently reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, a collection of autobiographical essays by Irish women writers that originated on the radio. I also got a jump-start in late February by reading these two short books by writers from Ireland:
Wild Child: A Journey through Nature by Dara McAnulty; illus. Barry Falls (2021)
I’d expected this to be just a picture book. Instead, it’s a guided tour through four landscapes – the garden, the woods, the uplands, and a river – and it combines Robert Macfarlane-esque poetry (the rhyming and alliteration are reminiscent of The Lost Words books) with facts and crafts/activities. It starts small, with the birds a child in the UK might be able to see out their window, and then ventures further afield. There is a teaching focus, with information on species’ classification, life cycles and migrations. I also learned to recognize hazel catkins and flowers, and then identified them on our walk later the same day! But the main aim, I think, is simply to encourage wonder and inspire children to get outside and explore the nature around them. I liked the illustrations, but wish the birds hadn’t been given slightly googly eyes. (Public library) 
To Star the Dark by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (2021)
Like many, I discovered Ní Ghríofa through A Ghost in the Throat, a genre-bending work of feminist autofiction. I treated myself to a copy of this, her sixth poetry collection, as part of a Waterstones haul with my Christmas book token. One poem actually mentions Eibhlín Dubh, subject of A Ghost in the Throat, and the work as a whole has some of the same attributes, blending biographical portraits and historical reflection with autobiographical material.
“Two Daydreams” connects a teenager in a history exam with the generations leading back to the Famine. “An Experiment to Engineer an Inheritance of Fear” wonders if there is an inherited Irish trauma: “Give her terror in a meadow. / Bind her fear to a black potato. … / When exposed to the ancestral scent, great-grandchildren will show signs of distress.” A newborn’s stay in the NICU occasions “Seven Postcards from a Hospital” (originally addressed to Sara Baume, Ní Ghríofa reveals in the Notes). Marine biologist Maude Delap is the subject of one multi-part poem.
Sensual imagery abounds, and there are several incantatory spells, including the spring one below. My favourite poem was “Craquelure,” likening cracks in a fellow bus passenger’s phone screen to the weathering old paintings develop. (New purchase)
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 