The Parent Trap by Erich Kästner for #1949Club
Simon and Karen’s classics reading weeks are always a good excuse to pick up an older book or two. The mistake I sometimes make is to have just one option lined up; if I don’t get on with it, I can’t participate. I read the first 20 pages of Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, which promised to be a psychologically astute picture of awakening to homosexuality in a repressive culture (“in this house it was tacitly required that I act like a boy. The reluctant masquerade had begun”) but also had the makings of a queer tragedy, which I couldn’t bear just now. Then I found a nearly new copy of The Parent Trap in the Little Free Library a few days ago and spotted that the twins share my birthday! Of course, I could have reviewed it for German Literature Month and Novellas in November, as I did with Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives last year, but instead I treated myself to the delightfully cosy, if far-fetched, story.
You likely know the story from a film adaptation starring Hayley Mills or Lindsay Lohan. I don’t think I’ve seen either, though they are culturally familiar to me. In Kästner’s original, separated twins are rejoined by chance at a summer camp in Bavaria. Luise Palfy has come here from Vienna, where she lives with her single father, a music director. One day an additional group of 20 little girls arrives from southern Germany, including Lottie Körner, who resides in Munich with her single mother, a journalist. It’s immediately evident that the two nine-year-olds are identical twins – same birthdate and -place – but with different hairstyles and their own personalities. They decide to switch places, partly as a trick to teach their parents a lesson, but partly to regain a long-lost and much-missed mother / father.
The girls have to be quick studies to cover up that ‘Lottie’ has ‘forgotten’ how to cook and that ‘Luise’ has suffered a horrendous decline in her handwriting and schoolwork. But there’s no fooling some, such as the doctor’s pug, Peperl, who is suspicious of a blonde stranger pretending to be an old friend. The girls are canny and stubborn, envisioning a new future and then doing whatever it takes to achieve it, but the emotional strain starts to show. I found myself upset with the parents’ Solomonic decision to split up their twins at their divorce. It’s just cruel; who would do such a thing?! In a sense, the whole premise of the novel is as hard to believe as the fantasy ending (“Catching up with lost happiness as if it were a missed lesson at school”), yet I gave myself over to it. Kästner’s tone is just right, shrewd and playful, and Walter Trier’s illustrations are charming. I recommend reading something middle grade every once in a while as an antidote to the awfulness of adulting and the occasionally depressing nature of modern literature. [Translated from German by Anthea Bell] (Little Free Library) 
(The whole Pushkin Children’s classics range is brilliant – see also From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsberg and The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius.)
Here are other famous 1949 titles that I’ve read (just 3 of the top 20 on the Goodreads list of the most popular books published that year):
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
- A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
- 1984 by George Orwell
I’ve previously participated in the 1920 Club, 1956 Club, 1936 Club, 1976 Club, 1954 Club, 1929 Club, 1940 Club, 1937 Club, 1970 Club, 1952 Club, 1925 Club, and 1961 Club.
Book Serendipity, August to September
From Jennifer Croft’s superb Notes on Postcards (forthcoming in November):
I’d heard that story of Horace Walpole and the etymology of “serendipity” before. Tying together dangling threads is a good description of what I try to do with these posts, which arise from my reading.
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I have read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away!
The more accurate keyword would probably be “synchronicity,” which according to Carl Jung, who “believed in a universe of mysterious connections,” is “a meaningful coincidence in which an internal mental state somehow attracts a real-world parallel” (quotes from The Spirituality Gap by Ali Millar). An intriguing idea, that: somehow, by thinking about these ideas or details, I might be … luring repeat incidents to me?!
The following are in roughly chronological order.
What’s in a name?
- Girlfriends named Maddie (in Year of the Drought by Roland Buti) and Mattie (Tom’s in Pardon Our French by Alex Durand and Tom Carles); plus a granddaughter (in The Typing Lady and Other Fictions by Ruth Ozeki) and niece (in The Land and Its People by David Sedaris) named Maddy.
- A character named Hattie in Leaving the Yellow House by Saul Bellow and The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
- A character named India in Leaving the Yellow House by Saul Bellow and Family Family by Laurie Frankel (our second The Marriage Plot/Literary Wives club read this year in which the protagonist was named India, after Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell).
A daughter named Rebecca in Switzy by Emma Cline and Family Family by Laurie Frankel (where she’s known as Bex); and sisters named Rebecca (known as Becks) in one story of The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales by Kirsty Logan and The Long Road to Holy Island by Austin Suggs. Those are both nicknames I’ve had, by the way. The one nickname I detest is Becky.- A mother named Monica in The Summerhouse Trilogy by Alice Thomas Ellis and Apt Pupil by Stephen King.
- A Hilda in The Given World by Melissa Harrison and one story of Self-Help by Lorrie Moore.
- A Clare in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin, The Leveret by Anna Goldreich and The Given World by Melissa Harrison.
- A Sergio in Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong and a Serge in So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak.
- A son named Silas in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin and So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak.
- Compensation for run-over chickens in Year of the Drought by Roland Buti and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller.
- “Enough is enough” is a slogan in The Land and Its People by David Sedaris (where it’s also an essay title) and Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins.
Telluride, Colorado features as a setting in Almost Animal by Amy Irvine and in one essay of The Land and Its People by David Sedaris.
- A trip from Paris to see Chartres Cathedral in The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham and Shadow of a Man by May Sarton.
- Fleeting references to the Donner Party in Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins and The Nightingales by Emil Wilson.
- An essay about an Icelandic sheep ram, and the idea that one should ride geldings because they’re calmer and more reliable than mares, in Animals Taught Me Everything by Pam Houston and The Land and Its People by David Sedaris.
- The protagonist’s work performance declining due to dementia, and a tweed jacket, in Switzy by Emma Cline and Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer. (There’s also a tweed jacket mentioned in Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami.)
- German artist Käthe Kollwitz is mentioned in Seed Corn Must Not Be Ground (the title is from one of her works) by Pat Browne and The Book of Mating by Laksmi Pamuntjak.
- Child brides and incestuous rape are mentioned/feature in Almost Animal by Amy Irvine and The Book of Mating by Laksmi Pamuntjak, both of which I was reading early for Foreword Reviews.
- The keeping of goats in Almost Animal by Amy Irvine and American Daughter by Era Bell Thompson, both of which I was reading early for Foreword Reviews.
- In August I unwittingly started rereading two books that I’d first read in April 2013 (is 13+ years the ideal interval?!): I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron and Flush by Virginia Woolf.
- Men by the name of Christmas: the narrator’s parents wanted to name him Noel (but the German state didn’t allow it?!) in Botany of Madness by Leon Engler; and a main character is named Joe Christmas in Light in August by William Faulkner.
- To the narrator’s question of whether something awful has happened / they’ve done something wrong, a reply of “it very likely had but she hadn’t heard about it yet” in Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns and “Most likely. You know that better than I do” in Botany of Madness by Leon Engler.
- The idea that human–animal communication/connection is deeper than that between humans because it is beyond language plays a major role in three books I read around the same time: Animals Taught Me Everything by Pam Houston, Mitz by Sigrid Nunez, and Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer. (The Houston and Orringer both publish on 13 October and I was reviewing them early for Shelf Awareness.)
- The fact that children of alcoholics feel they have to make everything perfect to avoid conflict appears in Botany of Madness by Leon Engler and Animals Taught Me Everything by Pam Houston.
I encountered lines from the song “Closing Time” by Semisonic in Here We Are at the End by Sara Barnard (a specific reference to the pop song accompanied “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end” – which I was amused to learn is actually a quote from Seneca!) and Family Family by Laurie Frankel (“You don’t have to go home. But you can’t stay here.” – not attributed, but I can’t but think she had the song in mind.)
- The stereotype of overachieving Asian Americans is mentioned or discussed in Family Family by Laurie Frankel, Miracle Creek by Angie Kim, and To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time by Matthew Salesses. There are Korean Americans in all three, and Korean children adopted into a white family in the Frankel and Salesses.
- A young woman is aghast at her mother getting rid of loved pet(s) in Nightjar by Emily Ruskovich and The Nightingales by Emil Wilson (both titled after birds!)
- A mention of the practice of buying single cigarettes from a city corner shop for 50 cents in Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad and Miracle Creek by Angie Kim.
- Saving turtles from the road in Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins and then a mention of someone else doing so in To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time by Matthew Salesses.
The lines “Leave as soon as you think to yourself, ‘This is a great party. I’m having a wonderful time’” from Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck are echoed in Emma Cline’s Switzy.
- A holy well is mentioned in The Given World by Melissa Harrison and Shiver by Brigid Lowe.
- A sexy pastor’s wife features in one story of Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw.
- A flawed pearl is mentioned in Apt Pupil by Stephen King and A Desert between Two Seas by A. Muia.
- A mention of hara-kiri (literal) in Death in Midsummer by Yukio Mishima and A Better Death by Jonathan Romain; and as a metaphor in What I Don’t Know about Animals by Jenny Diski.
- Camel cigarettes appear in Miracle Creek by Angie Kim and Apt Pupil by Stephen King.
- A woman remembers being nicknamed an “ice queen” in one story of Everest by Ashani Lewis and Plum by Hollie McNish.
- A woman has to have a bowel movement in the labour ward in Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong and Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens.
- The challenge of being a mother in the film industry is discussed in Family Family by Laurie Frankel and So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak.
A three-year-old gets their own cereal breakfast in Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong and So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak.
- A woman feels guilty of neglect due to her eight-year-old son’s death in a lake in Under Story by Cloe Benjamin and The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
- A viral scandal where photographs/video footage are misconstrued to make a woman look bad in Hum by Helen Phillips and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw.
- A misunderstanding causes a mother to be investigated for child neglect in one story of Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong and Hum by Helen Phillips.
Shirley Temples (the non-alcoholic cocktail) are mentioned in Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw.
- A woman impulsively takes a dishwashing job in Under Story by Cloe Benjamin and Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.
- A scene of putting out sandbags in Rattlebone by Maxine Clair and The Long Road to Holy Island by Austin Suggs.
An unwanted mince pie in Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford and I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron.
- A child in hospital with acute appendicitis in one story of Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark by Celia Fremlin and Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens (and with suspected appendicitis in Shiver by Brigid Lowe).
- The Tennyson poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is mentioned in Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford and Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus.
- Having to get off an elevator at the previous floor because it doesn’t go up to the destination in Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel and Blood Is Dripping onto the Courtyard by Elvira Navarro.
- Realizing one’s bed is unmade in one story of Everest by Ashani Lewis and A Very British Midlife Crisis by Rob Temple.
- Confusion over the name of a possibly abused dog (with special powers!) adopted from a shelter in Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus and Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer.
- I encountered the phrase “She’s not worth it” in both Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw within 10 minutes!
Someone being pulled back into the womb in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin and Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 by Mirko Ilić.
- An apple orchard as a setting in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin and one story of Apple and Palm by Patricia Henley.
- “Little Nemo in Slumberland” as an image and metaphor in Switzy by Emma Cline and Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 by Mirko Ilić.
- A lost twin sibling – lost at birth in Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus and H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald; lost later on in one story of The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales by Kirsty Logan.
- A portal to another timeline, and characters who are doubles of each other, in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin and Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.
- A lesbian couple moves to a new house and the one woman feels isolated and sad because she’s recently had a miscarriage in the debut novels The New People by Andrea Uptmor (reviewed for BookBrowse) and then The Leveret by Anna Goldreich.
- Nagging a woman to use lotion on her hands as they’re the first place to show signs of ageing in Hum by Helen Phillips and one story of Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams.
A couple of visual ones:
- I was reading The Land and Its People by David Sedaris at the same time as Country People by Daniel Mason, one of whose blurbs happens to borrow Sedaris’s title phrase.
- I was reading Botany of Madness by Leon Engler and encountered this passage on the day of the solar eclipse in Europe (12 August):
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
#ShortStorySeptember: “Death in Midsummer” by Yukio Mishima (1952; 1966)
Tomoko Ikuta is on a beach vacation with her three children and sister-in-law, Yasue, who is their de facto nanny and housekeeper. The trip soon turns nightmarish when three family members die in quick succession.
{BEWARE SPOILERS IN THE REMAINDER}
Tomoko is taking a well-deserved nap to escape the punishing sun. Yasue is an attentive babysitter who has already chased after the children and warned them about going any deeper. She’s barely looked away for a second when the six-year-old boy, Kiyoo, and five-year-old girl, Keiko, disappear. Yasue runs into the ocean to find them and is hit by a massive wave that seems to trigger a heart attack. In the ensuing chaos, the missing children are forgotten – even by Tomoko – until it’s far too late.
All of the above happens within the first six pages; the rest is aftermath. The idyllic setting introduced in the story’s first few paragraphs (the beach “unspoiled for sea bathing,” the hotel’s “beautiful” view, the placid image of the mother asleep) feels like mockery when set against the “ridiculous” and “excessive” tragedy that has befallen the family. The husband, Masaru, on the train from Tokyo to join his diminished kin, wishes he could “shout at the other passengers: ‘Listen, everybody. You don’t know it, but I have just lost my sister and two of my three children.” The season itself seems to have betrayed them: “If only summer would end. The very word ‘summer’ carried with it festering thoughts of death.”
Mishima’s vision is of fate as cruel and capricious. As the bereaved parents undertake the necessary funeral preparations, he explores the practicalities and the ironies of the situation:
A death is always a problem in administration. They were frantically busy administering.
Tomoko listened to the subdued humming of the autumn cicadas, and smelled the incense and the cool, shady grass. ‘What a nice place. They’ll have room to play, and they won’t be bored. I can’t help thinking it will be good for them. Strange, isn’t it?’
She’s found a perfect, peaceful spot for her children to spend eternity, since they’ll never get to grow up.
As time passes, the memory of the incident is less painful. What had been unbearable becomes simple reality. But then something curious happens. One family’s losses take on legendary status, transformed into a widespread cautionary tale:
Rather than an injury it became a moral lesson, and it changed from a concrete fact to a metaphor. It was no longer the property of the Ikuta family, it was public. … You have to watch children constantly when you take them to the beach. People drown where you would never think it possible. Not that Masaru and his wife had sacrificed two children and a sister to teach a lesson. The loss of the three had served no other purpose, however; and many a heroic death produces as little.
Yet Mishima also extends an opportunity for redemption when, two years later, the couple returns to the same beach with their remaining son, five-year-old Katsuo, and their new daughter, Momoko. It’s an act of faith and an acceptance that danger is always present and that no parent, however protective, can completely eliminate risk. By inscribing a full circle like that, Mishima emphasizes the severity of the loss but also somehow atones for it.
I found this story so powerful – emotionally charged but understated – that I’m surprised I’d not come across it before in my constant quest to find the best classic grief literature. At 29 pages, it feels just right; a note at the end mentions that it was abridged by translator Edward G. Seidensticker. I’ll be sure to try more by Mishima.
From Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (1966) (Secondhand – Better World Books)
Blog Tour: Literary Landscapes, edited by John Sutherland
The sense of place can be a major factor in a book’s success – did you know there is a whole literary prize devoted to just this? (The Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, “for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place.”) No matter when or where a story is set, an author can bring it to life through authentic details that appeal to all the senses, making you feel like you’re on Prince Edward Island or in the Gaudarrama Mountains even if you’ve never visited Atlantic Canada or central Spain. The 75 essays of Literary Landscapes, a follow-up volume to 2016’s celebrated Literary Wonderlands, illuminate the real-life settings of fiction from Jane Austen’s time to today. Maps, author and cover images, period and modern photographs, and other full-color illustrations abound.
Each essay serves as a compact introduction to a literary work, incorporating biographical information about the author, useful background and context on the book’s publication, and observations on the geographical location as it is presented in the story – often through a set of direct quotations. (Because each work is considered as a whole, you may come across spoilers, so keep that in mind before you set out to read an essay about a classic you haven’t read but still intend to.) The authors profiled range from Mark Twain to Yukio Mishima and from Willa Cather to Elena Ferrante. A few of the world’s great cities appear in multiple essays, though New York City as variously depicted by Edith Wharton, Jay McInerney and Francis Spufford is so different as to be almost unrecognizable as the same place.
One of my favorite pieces is on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. “Dickens was not interested in writing a literary tourist’s guide,” it explains; “He was using the city as a metaphor for how the human condition could, unattended, go wrong.” I also particularly enjoyed those on Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. The fact that I used to live in Woking gave me a special appreciation for the essay on H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, “a novel that takes the known landscape and, brilliantly, estranges it.” The two novels I’ve been most inspired to read are Thomas Wharton’s Icefields (1995; set in Jasper, Alberta) and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005; set in New South Wales).
The essays vary subtly in terms of length and depth, with some focusing on plot and themes and others thinking more about the author’s experiences and geographical referents. They were contributed by academics, writers and critics, some of whom were familiar names for me – including Nicholas Lezard, Robert Macfarlane, Laura Miller, Tim Parks and Adam Roberts. My main gripe about the book would be that the individual essays have no bylines, so to find out who wrote a certain one you have to flick to the back and skim through all the contributor biographies until you spot the book in question. There are also a few more typos than I tend to expect from a finished book from a traditional press (e.g. “Lady Deadlock” in the Bleak House essay!). Still, it is a beautifully produced, richly informative tome that should make it onto many a Christmas wish list this year; it would make an especially suitable gift for a young person heading off to study English at university. It’s one to have for reference and dip into when you want to be inspired to discover a new place via an armchair visit.
Literary Landscapes will be published by Modern Books on Thursday, October 25th. My thanks to Alison Menzies for arranging my free copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
