"Three Lives" by Gertrude Stein

Three short stories/ novellas by the famous American ex-pat novelist who also write Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.

Despite Stein's privileged upbringing, the stories focus on ordinary folk. The Good Anna and The Gentle Lena are both servants, Melanctha is a girl of mixed heritage who "liked to wander" rather more than is good for her. Trigger warning: some of the characters conform to racial stereotypes. 

The prose style is not nearly so difficult as in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. However it does contain some very rambling paragraphs which use recursiveness and quasi-repetitiveness to interesting effect, both in and out of dialogue:

“That certainly is the way always with you, Jeff Campbell, if I understand you right the way you are always acting to me. That certainly is right the way I am saying it to you now, Jeff Campbell. You certainly didn't anyway trust me now no more, did you, when you acted so bad to me. I certainly am right the way I say it Jeff now to you. I certainly am right when I ask you for it now, to tell me what I ask you, about not trusting me more then again, Jeff, just like you never really knew me.” (Melanctha)
“All he knew was, he was an easy now always to be with Melanctha. All he knew was that he was always uneasy when he was with Melanctha, not the way he used to be from just not being very understanding, but now, because he never could be honest with her, because he was now always feeling her strong suffering, in her, because he knew now he was having a straight, good feeling with her, but she went so fast, and he was so slow to her; Jeff knew his right feeling never got a chance to show itself as strong to her.” (Melanctha)

The Melanctha story itself loops back to the beginning and repeats itself, except the third person of Rose Johnson becomes a first person in her dialogue.

Classic stories by a writer with a distinctive (unique?) style.

Selected quotes:

• “The languor and the stir, the warmth and weight and the strong feel of life from the deep centres of the earth that comes always with the early, soaking spring, when it is not answered with an active fervent joy, gives always anger, irritation and unrest.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “The sharp bony edges and corners of her head and face were still rounded out with flesh, but already the temper and the humour showed sharply in her clean blue eyes, and the thinning was begun about the lower jaw, that was so often strained with the upward pressure of resolve.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Her bearing was full of the strange coquetry of anger and of fear, the stiffness, the bridling, the suggestive movement underneath the rigidness of forced control, all the ways the passions have to show themselves all one.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “It was wonderful how Mrs Lehntman could listen and not hear, could answer and yet not decide, could say and do what she was asked and yet the things as they were before.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Anna was never daring in her ways. Save and you will have the money you have saved was all that she could know.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Friendship goes by favour. There is always danger of a break or of a stronger power coming in between.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Melanctha had not found it easy with herself to make her wants and what she had agree.” (Melanctha)
• “In these next years Melanctha learned many ways that lead to wisdom. She learned the ways, and dimly in the distance she saw wisdom. Those years of learning led very straight to trouble for Melanctha, though in these years Melanctha never did or meant anything that was really wrong.” (Melanctha)
• “It was very early now in the Southern springtime. The trees were just beginning to get the little zigzag crinkles in them, which the young buds always give them.” (Melanctha)

November 2025; 224 pages

First published in 1909

My paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar

The Pantheon in Rome was built by Hadrian

The fictionalised autobiography of Hadrian, one of the better Roman Emperors. He is old and dying and writes these memoirs of a way of advising Marcus Aurelius, whom he has designated as successor to his designated successor Antoninus Pius.

It is beautifully written, in crisp and elegant prose. There are some wonderful insights into the human condition (see Selected Quotes). But it is not a particularly entertaining example of historical fiction, like Hawker and the King's Jewel by Ethan Bale. This is no sword-and-sandals epic of the Roman Empire, no Gladiator or Ben-Hur or Spartacus. But it is thoughtful and, to the best of my knowledge, thoroughly researched. To that extent it reminded me of I, Claudius by Robert Graves and, like that novel, it suffers in that it has to stick to the history (which is sometimes just one damn thing after another) rather than being able to develop with plot, character and theme, like a novel can.

The chapter headings are in Latin, I have provided my best translations:

• Animula Vagula Blandula = Young soul, wandering, enchanting. This comes from the first line of a poem supposedly written by Hadrian in later life in which he asks the soul where it is going now it is leaving his body; it is a philosophical reflection on life and death.
• Varius Multiplex Multiformis = Varied, manifold and of many forms. This is a quote from the historian Sextus Aurelius Victor, used to describe Hadrian's curiosity and many talents.
• Tellus Stabilita = the firmly established earth. This was a phrase used by Hadrian on some of his coins with a depiction of the earth goddess Tellus, also known as Terra Mater or 'Mother Earth.
• Saeculum Aureum = The Golden Age. In the novel it refers to his time with his lover Antinous.
• Disciplina Augusta = military discipline. It was another phrase used on Hadrian's coins.
• Patientia = patience, endurance or suffering. Yet another legened from Hadrian's coins, these showing the figure of Patience seated and holding a shallow libation bowl and a staff. 

Selected quotes:

• “I have ... reached the age where life, for every man, is accepted defeat. To say that my days are numbered signifies nothing; they always were, and are so for us all. But uncertainty as to the place, the time, and the manner, which keeps us from distinguishing the goal toward which we continually advance, diminishes.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “I recall my childhood races on the dry hills of Spain, and the game played with myself of pressing onto the last gasp, never doubting that the perfect heart and healthy lungs would re-establish their equilibrium.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “An operation which is performed two or three times a day, and the purpose of which is to sustain life, surely merits our care. To eat a fruit is to welcome into oneself a fair living object, which is alien to us but is nourished and protected like us by the earth.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys ... until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favourite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up for sale morsels of meat attractive to flies.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “A part of every life, even a life meriting very little regard, is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “The most benighted of men are not without some glimmerings of the divine: that murderer plays passing well upon the flute; this overseer flaying the backs of his slaves is perhaps a dutiful sun; this simpleton would share with me his last piece of bread.” (Varius Multiplex Multiformis)
• “Different persons ruled me in turn ... I played host successively to the meticulous officer ... the melancholy dreamer ... the lover ... the haughty young lieutenant ... and finally the future statesman.” (Varius Multiplex Multiformis)
• “Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “I have a little faith in laws. If too severe, they are broken, and with good reason. If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net. ... Any law too often subject to infraction is bad.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “All nations which have perished up to this time have done so for lack of generosity; Sparta would have survived longer had she given her Helots some interest in that survival; there is always a day when Atlas ceases to support the weight of the heavens, and his revolt shakes the earth.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “The condition of women is fixed by strange customs; they are at one and the same time subjected and protected, weak and powerful, too much despised and too much respected. In this chaos of contradictory usage, the practices of society are superimposed upon the fact of nature, but it is not easy to distinguish between the two.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “From without came the few sounds of that Asiatic night: the whispering of slaves at my door; the soft rustle of a palm, and ... snores behind a curtain; the stamp of a horse's hoof; from farther away, in, the melancholy murmur of a song.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “On many points, however, the thinking of our philosophers also seemed to be limited and confused, if not sterile. Three-quarters of our intellectual performances are no more than decorations upon a void.” (Disciplina Augusta)

November 2025; 237 pages

First published in French in 1951

I read a Penguin paperback translation into English by Grace Frick 'in collaboration with the author' which was issued in 1959 and reprinted in 1982

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Hawker and the King's Jewel" by Ethan Bale

 A classic thriller based in late mediaeval Europe. After the defeat of Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth, Yorkist knight Sir John Hawker has to protect Sir Giles, Richard's bastard son, and deliver a valuable ruby to the Doge of Venice. Together with a motley band of warriors, including at least one who will betray him, Hawker travels across Europe to encounter more duplicity in the city whose streets are canals. 

And whatever happened to the Princes in the Tower?

It's a classic of its kind. The research is obvious, allowing the reader to wallow in authentic reenactment. The scenes of fighting are regularly delivered. There are good characters with whom the reader can identify and hope will survive (Jack the squire and Sir Giles) and there are villains (Dieudonnee). The plot is perfectly paced on the four-part model, even if the final quarter is split in two so that a final twist can be delivered. 

My only complaint? Referring to cheese (I presume) as the "the white stuff" in a too obvious attempt to avoid repeating the word 'cheese'.

Selected quotes:

• "Even an arsehole has its purpose." (Ch 3) 
• "Marriage comes from love as vinegar comes from wine." (Ch 21)
• "You are like the scribe who can see nothing more than the page his nose touches." (Ch 22)

November 2025; 337 pages

Published by Canelo in 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Never saw you coming" by K L S Fuerte

 Not happy ever after. The marriage of two young teachers in London starts with romance but swiftly descends into frenzy.

The prologue is a first person narrated back story which summarily explains that the narrating protagonist is a young French woman living in England and studying education at Cambridge. Chapter 1 begins the narrative proper. It is written in a diary style, although each entry is a summary of the events of a week, or a month.

Chapter 2 heralds a sudden change. It starts with Edward masturbating to online porn and continues with email evidence of his relationship with a student. The narrator responds with shock and horror and fractured sentences, a sort of stream of consciousness style.

As the story continues, it becomes clear that Edward has mental health problems, perhaps suffering from bipolar syndrome. The narrator  seems to live on the edge of hysterical melodrama and their relationship veers from wild sex to fury. She is enormously self-centred and shows almost no empathy ("The man was so inconvenient with his poor diabetes management. I felt so many times like his nurse, rather than his wife"; Ch 9). I found it difficult to believe she could be a mother to two very young children (whose care seems delegated to au pairs) and a senior teacher. 

Sometimes the story is detailed and at other times it proceeds at a breakneck speed. For example, the narrator's first pregnancy lasts for a few pages and Edward's year teaching in Hackney gets three paragraphs. I found it difficult to keep track of a large cast of characters and I was also confused by some of the details of the plot. For one brief moment Edward seems to suffer from diabetes ("Edward’s hypos in the middle of the night. Why does he always have to go hypoglycaemic when I really want to sleep, or when it is really late and there is no sugar in the kitchen"; Ch 9) but this does not seem to be mentioned outside this chapter. The events of the prologue also seem unrelated to the rest of the book. The moments of narrative incoherence gave a sort of verisimilitude; there was a feeling that this must be a true story because real-life can be chaotic.

Whether it is autobiographical or not, it is told with enormous energy and passion. It ends on an amazing cliff-hanger. While my own novels feature unresolved endings (such is life), the fact that the sequel is immediately advertised makes me think that this is might be a novel which has been chopped into two novellas. 

If you enjoy reading about a stormy relationship in which all emotions are perpetually at boiling point, this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• "We make love like there is no tomorrow, every night."
• "I’m a control freak! I am always in the power position; well not anymore."
• "one of those mum-to-be magazines, which said that the father determined the sex of the baby, but the mother passed on the intelligence."

November 2025

Published in 2021; I read the Amazon kindle edition

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God