"Near to the Wild Heart" by Clarice Lispector

 

This amazing novel is not so much a stream of consciousness as a raging ocean. It's hard to stay afloat but if you can keep you head above water you're in for the surfing experience of your life.

Lispector's debut novel, NttWH was hailed as a masterpiece when it was first published, in Portuguese, in Brazil, in 1943. It won a prestigious literary prize and was described as a “literary revelation”, “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in Portuguese” and “the greatest debut novel a woman had written in the literature of Brazil”.

My first thought was that it was like James Joyce on amphetamines. This impression was reinforced (or, perhaps, preinforced) by the title, which, as the epigram makes clear, quotes JJ in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But that was suggested by her mentor. In fact Lispector said she hadn't read JJ and was influenced by the works of early modern Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose works she had been reading. In the book Joana’s husband Otavio is depicted as reading Spinoza.

My second thought was that it reminded me very much of Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes which also consists of a series of fragmented impressions.

There isn't a plot, as such. We first encounter the protagonist, Joana, as a young motherless child. After her father dies, she goes to live with her aunt and later goes to boarding school. She marries Otavio who himself continues his affair with his earlier fiancee, Lidia. 

But the language! I was worried, at first, because Lispector herself said that rereading her work was like “swallowing my own vomit" and I had a feeling that NttWH is an outpouring of words, a sort of literary data dump, free association without structure. It's undoubtedly hauntingly original and beautifully expressed images but the torrent of words threatens to swamp the reader. Was I supposed to understand it or simply surf on the flood of language? 

So far I have only read it once, slowly, and I need to revisit it (after a bit of a break) and when I do I promise I will update this blog, but at the moment I think I can catch a few glimpses of understanding which I tentatively offer.

The first section is entitled "The Father ..." and although we do actually meet Joana's father, I think this title refers to God because this section seems to be about creation and God is traditionally, in philosophy, regarded as the creator of the universe, the first cause of everything, and the ellipsis after 'The Father' suggests this beginning and then continuing. 

The first thing mentioned is a typewriter (words are important as we shall shortly see) and then "the clock awoke"; this is the dawn of time. “There was a great still moment, with nothing inside it. She dilated her eyes, waited. Nothing came. Blank. But suddenly the day was wound up and everything spluttered to life again." This is a rewriting of Genesis, chapter one: “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep."

The next thing to happen in the Bible is that God speaks "let there be light". The power of language to create is one of the themes of the book. In the first section Joana writes childish poems and makes up stories about her doll and pieces of cardboard; in the second section she thinks: “The moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say.” (Joana’s Day) Words make things happen (but not necessarily correctly). It isn't exactly the word that does the creation but the articulation of the thought: “Something thought didn’t exist before it was thought ... What you thought came to be thought.” (The Aunt) Don't forget that first image: the typewriter. Metafictionally, of course, this is a story, which is to say something created using words.

The third thing to happen in Genesis is that God starts to separate things. He divides light from darkness and then separates the chaos of waters into the water above (the sky) and the water below which then in itself separates into land and sea. Joana does this too, reflecting the psychological development of a human child who has to learn to create structure from a stream of sense impressions and learn that things have boundaries and develop concepts such as 'me' vs 'the world' and 'subject' vs 'object'. To start off, Joana doesn't grasp this: “Between her and the objects there was something but whenever she caught that something in her hand, like a fly, and then peeked at it ... she only found her own hand, rosy pink and disappointed. Yes, I know, the air, the air! But it was no use, it didn’t explain things.” (The Father ...) But as she develops the stream starts to soldify into objects; this too is a process of creation. Even time is represented by a series of moments (all those ticking clocks!).

Later, she will see the process of creating boundaries to segment and fragment reality as having drawbacks. For example, when two people marry they draw boundaries which co-create each other: “Just as the space surrounded by four walls has a specific value, provided not so much because it is a space but because it is surrounded by walls. Otavio made her into something that wasn’t her but himself.” (Joana’s walk) This curtails freedom: “The freedom she sometimes felt. It didn’t come from clear reflections, but a state that seemed to be made of perceptions too organic to be formulated as thoughts.” (Joana’s Joys) But there can be ecstatic moments, such as during sex, when this separation is reversed and oneness can be achieved: “All of her body and soul lost their limits, mixed together, merged into a single chaos, soft and amorphous, slow and with vague movements like matter that were simply alive. It was the perfect renewal, creation.” (Otavio)

In the second chapter of Genesis, we have the story of the Garden of Eden. This also has its parallels in this book. Her aunt and uncle see Joana as a “viper”: is she the serpent in the garden of Eden? From the second section she feels “The certainty that evil is my calling ... goodness makes me want to be sick. " (Joana's Day) She tempts Otavio away from Lidia, his first love; Lidia later calls Joana “evil”. But after marrying Joana, Otavio continues to see Lidia, making her first his mistress and then pregnant. 

Is Joana not the creator God but the devil? After all, that first chapter was entitled "The Father ..." and it was the father who was using the typewriter. But Joana is also creating, for example, she writes little poems (scorned by her dad). The trouble is that Joana's creations are somehow false. We've already seen that she finds it difficult to express her thoughts accurately. We now learn that “In the imagination, for it alone has the power of evil, just the enlarged and transformed vision: beneath it the impassive truth. You lie and stumble into the truth.” (Joana’s Day)

Which is, I suppose, a definition for a work of fiction.

Whatever NttWH is meant to mean, there is masterful and spectacular use of language.

Selected quotes:

• “Her father’s typewriter went clack-clack ... clack-clack-clack ... The clock awoke in dustless tin-dlen. The silence dragged out zzzzzz. What did the wardrobe say? clothes-clothes-clothes." (first line)
• “It’s hard to suck in people like the vacuum cleaner does.” (The Father)
• “Goodness was lukewarm and light. It smelled of raw meat kept for too long. Without entirely rotting in spite of everything.” (Joana's Day)
• “Her thoughts were, once erected, garden statues and she looked at them as she followed her path through the garden." (Joana's Day)
• “Light black birds flew distinct through the pure air, flew without a single human eye watching them.” (Joana's Walk)
• “Circles were like the work of man, finished before death and not even God could finish them better. While straight, fine, freestanding lines - were like thoughts.” (Joana's Joys)
• “The wind had nested in her hair, making her short fringe flap about like mad.” (... The Bath ...)
• “Her aunt played with a house, a cook, a husband, a married daughter, visitors. Her uncle played with Maya, with work, with a farm, with games of chess, with newspapers.” (... The Bath ...)
• “Around the dark table, in the light weakened by the chandelier’s dirty fringes, silence had also taken a seat that night.” (... The Bath ...)
• “She had the feeling that life ran thick and slow inside her, bubbling like a hot sheet of lava.” (Otavio)
• “She laughed out loud and glossed at herself quickly in the mirror to see the effect of her laughter on her face. No, it didn't light it up.” (Otavio)
• “Sleeping was an adventure every night, falling from the easy clarity in which she lived into the same mystery, dark and cool, crossing darkness." (Otavio)
• “She was traversed by long whole muscles. Thoughts ran down these polished ropes until they quivered there, in her ankles, where the flesh was as soft as a chicken’s.” (The Marriage)
• “The dark circles under his eyes made him look like an old photograph.” (Refuge in the Teacher)
• “The teacher was like a large neutered cat reigning over a cellar.” (Refuge in the Teacher)
• “A clock’s chiming only ends when it ends, there is naught to be done. Either that or throw a rock at it, and after the noise of broken glass and springs, silence spilling out like blood. Why not kill the man?” (The Encounter with Otavio)
• “When the door opened for Joana, he ceased to exist. He slid deep down inside himself, hovering in the penumbra of his own unsuspecting forest.” (Refuge in the Man)
• “How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? ... Where does music go when it's not playing?” (Refuge in the Man)

February 2025

The original publication, in Portuguese ('Perto do Coração Selvagem') by A Noite, in Brazil, in 1943

My translation was by Alison Entrekin and issued as a Penguin paperback in 2012.

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

"A House and Its Head" by Ivy Compton-Burnett

A classic Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, a study in domestic tyranny. 

Duncan Edgeworth is a Victorian paterfamilias of independent means who controls his wife and family by keeping them short of money and by bullying them. The only thing beyond his power is that, not having a son, his estate will pass on his death to his nephew. Then his wife dies and he takes the opportunity to remedy this.

In the opening scene, Duncan throws Grant's Christmas present into the fire because it is a book of which he disapproves. I'm guessing it is Darwin's The Origin of Species still making waves years after its publication in 1859 (AH&IH is set starting in 1885). If my conjecture is correct it would fit the theme of the book which is inheritance in all its forms: physical, psychological and economic.

The setting is classic ICB: the Edgeworths live in a large house with servants in a village socialising with the other ‘respectable families including the local doctor, the village parson and a couple of families of independent means. The plot, which, despite lots of foreshadowing, sometimes seems to lurch unpredictably and opportunistically, is also typical. 

The style too is unique (?) to ICB: there is hardly any description and the characters communicate in formal and grammatically constructed sentences without any filter: they say what they are thinking. But their thoughts seem utterly bloodless. No one shouts or swears: opposition is by sottovoce asides. Shocking things (even murder) take place and no one seems shocked - their principal concern is to hush up any hint of scandal and continue with their cocooned existences. At the end, Nance, who is described by Hilary Mantel in the Introduction as the "moral centre" of the family, says: “We can’t be too thankful that Mother is dead ... How difficult it would be, if people did not die. Think of the numbers who die, and all the good that is done! They never seem to die, without doing something for someone. No wonder they hate so to do it, and plan to be immortal. ... I have been so ashamed of being alive and well, and having to be housed and clothed and fed and provided for.” The death of her Aunt has meant she now has financial independence. Of course, she isn’t providing for herself. Work? None of them (except the doctor and the rector) work.

It is an utterly artificial novel constructed about an utterly artificial world without a hint of verisimilitude ... and yet I love it. It is so very different. It is hard work to read because of the near complete absence of dialogue tags meaning that the reader has to use clues in the text to work out who is saying what. Characters must be constructed from what they say. And yet if you pay sufficiently close attention, the characters spring to life.

The key character is that of Duncan, the archetypal ICB domestic tyrant. His whole purpose seems to be to exert power over others. He does this by keeping his wife short of money and by bullying his (grown-up) children. There is a suggestion that he knew his wife was ill but refused to allow her to be treated because that would disrupt his routine and take the attention from himself. In one wonderful scene, he is in the process of leaving to stay with his sister when he delays and delays so that the kids are in despair that he will miss the train, sending them scurrying to look for things he already has. When he finally leaves we all breathe a sigh of relief ... and then he returns for something that has been forgotten. He enjoys watching them run around at his whim. This is a commanding portrait of a very unpleasant man.

The other characters are more or less window dressing. Even Sybil, his younger daughter, who seems to have learned from her father how to manipulate others, and whose moral compass seems to have been warped by the emotional abuse she has received at his hands, is a shadowy and insubstantial figure. Grant, Duncan’s nephew and heir presumptive, has learned to bend in the wind and is tossed about by the vagaries of the plot; his only independent feature is that he actually has a sex life, mostly with maidservants. Three of the neighbours deserve notice. Old Gretchen Jekyll, the vicar’s grumpy mother, is a truth teller and prophetess of doom who turns into a detective. Beatrice is a self-appointed missionary, forever thrusting her message (of Christmas, of light, of Jesus) at people whether they want it or not; she hopes and believes that people don’t regard her as “a preaching busybody” but that is what she is. Dulcia blunders in where angels and even fools fear to tread, the sort of person who likes to think they’re plain-spoken when they’re just rude, elevating gossip to a martial art, sometimes penetrating to the truth of things but much more often blurting out the wildly inaccurate conclusions to which she has jumped. I’m surprised she is tolerated but since none of the neighbours seem to have anything better to do than gossip (and they always turn up en masse at the most painful of times on the pretence that their nosiness is supportive), she is only the worst of a pretty awful bunch.

Selected quotes:

• “The day went on, silent, swift, at a standstill, without time.” (Ch 4)
• “It is good to serve other people and ourselves.” (Ch 6)
• “Better be a young man’s darling than an old man's slave” (Ch 8)
• “Women walking, women talking, women weeping!” (Ch 12)
• “My son is a substitute. I am too old to have a future, and my present is a sham: I feel as if I were a shadow. Well, I must live in the past, with the rest of the old.” (Ch 14)
• “Uncle seems to have contracted a habit of proposing. Perhaps he proposes to the first woman he meets after he is free. ... It is a mercy Miss Burtenshaw and Dulcia have not been about.” (Ch 15)
• “Thistledown in dispersing goes a good many ways.” (Ch 19)
• “Let us leave the village its rumours ...Don’t deprive the bumpkins of their diversions.” (Ch 19) This is almost the only acknowledgement that there are other people outside this privileged bubble (except for servants of course).

February 2025; 315 pages

First published by Eyre and Spottiswoode in 1935

My paperback edition issued by the Pushkin Press in 2021

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

An Ivy Compton-Burnett bibliography with links to those works reviewed in this blog:

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

Ivy by Hilary Spurling is a biography of ICB

"Fire and Fury" by Michael Wolff

 Subtitled "inside the Trump White House", this book chronicles the career of one of US President Donald Trump's advisers, Steve Bannon, during the first seven months of Trump's first presidency.

I used to love books like this. I adored All the President's Men and The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and John Dean's Blind Ambition, all of which were about the Watergate crisis that brought down Richard Nixon's presidency. But this book I found boring.

Part of the problem was that it seemed written for insiders. There were multiple references to people I didn't know, sometimes as part of explanations which meant that nothing, for me, was explained. There were references to American institutions and consumer goods and customs that, for me, obscured the story rather than enlightening it. I don't know to what extent a US citizen would understand what was going on but it certainly needed either translation or footnotes for me, and I think for a general reader living in the UK I am reasonably well-informed about US politics. 

But footnotes would have added even more to the clutter of detail. There was quite enough. There is a large cast of characters, all of whom seem to spend their time slagging one another off and eating (do political memoirs in other countries spend quite so much time listing restaurants and even menus or is this something characteristically American?). I was swiftly swamped by the minutiae.

I suppose it must be very difficult to tell this story without overwhelming the reader in a flood of specifics because this is fundamentally a story about chaos. The thesis of the book is that Trump's team never expected to win the Presidential election so they hadn't planned for what would happen afterwards. Add to this a President who isn't very intelligent and quickly gets bored with detail and who delights in rambling stream-of-consciousness speeches and messages with no-holds-barred. Then there is his team. It seems to be that in politics what matters most is access to the leader (and especially with this leader whose decisions seem to echo the thoughts of the last person he has spoken to). Trump's team contained his daughter and son-in-law who naturally had privileged access to him. The others - his chief of staff, his special advisers, his speech writers, his director of communications, his secretary of state, almost everyone except his vice-president - all seemed to spend most of their time in-fighting with the others. The result was chaos leading to an administration lurching from crisis to crisis.

Not a single one of them seems like a nice guy (not one of them can even control themselves) and that is a problem for any story.

In the end, I grew bored and started skim-reading. This didn't help me understand what was going on and so I became even more bored. Two or three times I was on the verge of giving up but I read it all the way to the end. Even the epilogue. But I didn't enjoy it.

Selected quotes:

• "Bannon ... was profoundly disorganised. ... You couldn't really make an appointment with Bannon, you just had to show up." (Ch 2) And he is the person trying to control the chaotic Trump.
• "If Halberstam [a political historian who write a best-selling book about the Kennedy presidency] defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it - and defiled it." (Ch 3)
• "There was no competition in the Trump Tower for being the brains of the operation." (Ch 4)
• "You can't rule by decree in the United States, except you really can." (Ch 4)
• "Trump ... could not really converse ... in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him, nor particularly considered what he said in response." (Ch 5)
• "Ivanka and Jared ... seemed less interested in bending to advice and more interested in shopping for the advice they wanted." (Ch 5)
• "If we have to be in Afghanistan, he demanded, why can't we make money off it? China, he complained, has mining rights, but not the United States?" (Ch 20) A pretaste of his demand for minerals from Ukraine for the US having supported them in their war with Russia?

February 2025; 310 pages

Published in the UK in 2018 Little Brown

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

"Death at a Shetland Festival" by Marsali Taylor

 When a famous folk musician is stabbed at a folk festival, supersleuth Cass Lynch and Gavin her policeman boyfriend are in the audience. Is the death connected with the diary Cass has found and with the lochside death of a young girl, both of which happened many years ago, when the murder victim was on the island?

This is the twelfth in the Shetland Mysteries starring Cass and Gavin and Cat and Kitten (and now Julie, Kitten's kitten). There is perhaps less sailing this time but the book is still full of the wonder of Shetland. The major change is that we, the reader, get to read extracts from the diary which Cass, full of concern for privacy, doesn't. This means that the reader is a step ahead of Cass and the police; it meant that I worked out whodunnit before they did (for almost the first time in the series). I think I enjoyed it even more because I could spot the tiny clues that Cass didn't spot until later. But I don't read the Shetland Mysteries books in order to solve the crime; they are much better than the run of the mill murder mysteries because I have grown to know the characters and I want to see them develop and I adore the setting and the storytelling is simply superb.

I loved the concept of the gorilla video too. It opens up realms of uncertainty in a murder-mystery. I've seen it before and I reacted just as Cass did.

As usual there are some beautiful descriptions and a nail-biting climax. Another page-turner from Ms Taylor.

Selected quotes:

• "A snake's wedding of black cables." (Ch 1)
• "She leaned back in her chair as if her bones wouldn't hold her upright." (Ch 3)
• "Kitten greeted me on the doorstep with a flourish of her pale-tipped tail, then bounded off into the garden. I wasn't sure whether she was supremely confident that Cat wouldn't let anyone kidnap their baby, or whether she was getting bored with motherhood and rather hoped someone would." (Ch 10)
• "You'd still take Gavin and him for twins, but from some eighteenth-century morality tale: the twin who'd embraced virtue, all glowing health ... and the twin who'd embraced vice, with dark pouches under his eyes and dragged-down corners to his mouth." (Ch 12)
• "The grass in the ponies' field was soft green, sprinkled with daisies, and the first yellow marsh marigolds fringed the chuckling burn." (Ch 17)
• "The bright spring greens and yellows  beyond our sit-ootery window were muted, and the trees loomed insubstantial in a sea of white." (Ch 21)

Many thanks to the author for providing me with a signed copy of this book!

February 2025; 316 pages

Published as a paperback in 2024 by Headline Accent

This is the twelfth novel in a crime fiction series that gets better and better. The books, in order, with alternative names, are:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival

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

"The Way of All Flesh" by Samuel Butler

 

The book that exposed of the myth of the Victorian happy family.

Published posthumously in 1903 and closely based on his own experiences, Butler's hero is a young lad whose parents are determined not to 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. The clergyman father (who was himself bullied into becoming a vicar) is obsessed with controlling every aspect of his son's life; the mother is an expert in emotional blackmail. Young Ernest is unhappy at home, unhappy at school, unhappy in his chosen profession and unhappy in marriage. 

It is narrated by Mr Overton, a sort of fairy godfather who is very much the author himself but older, observing the vicissitudes of his young self, which means that Butler is author, narrator and protagonist, which mostly works.

The plot is somewhat slow to get going in that we must first learn how Ernest's great-grandfather was a humble but happy carpenter; he and his wife were childless until late in life and consequently spoiled their son (Ernest's grandfather) who was swiftly taken up by a childless uncle and brought up to become his heir in his publishing business. He was focused on the business rather than his family and “When a man is very fond of his money it is not easy for him at all times to be very fond of his children also.” (Ch 5) Discovering the problem that a child have a mind of his (or her) own (the eternal problem of God giving mankind free will and no doubt swiftly regretting it, hence the Flood), “He thrashed his boys two or three times a week and some weeks of good deal oftener, but in those days fathers were always thrashing their boys.” (Ch 5). So Theobald, Ernest's father, grew up to become a clergyman, despite not really wanting to, became married without really realising what he was getting himself into, and replicated his father's behaviour with Ernest his eldest son in particular. 

It feels as if what should be a bildungsroman centred on Ernest has had an extensive prologue, as if Butler isn't quite sure where to start or on whom to focus. 

The end of the novel, in which a number of things are swiftly resolved in order to get us to the happy ending so beloved of the English novel (and that's not really a spoiler because there are authorial digressions in which the 'Mr Overton' discusses with Ernest whether to include certain evidence about his upbringing so we know that he at least survives). 

The only real tension is provided by the fact that Ernest has been left a substantial inheritance but isn't allowed to know this until he reaches 28 without becoming bankrupt and there are times in his chequered career when bankruptcy seems a strong possibility.

The characters tend to be a little one-dimensional. Theobald the father is fundamentally a control freak who uses money as both a carrot and a stick to keep Ernest obedient. Christina, Ernest's mother, is a dab hand at emotional blackmail and can extract any secret from Ernest. Ernest's brother and sister are little more than ciphers. Miss Pontifex, Ernest's aunt, is temporarily a fairy godmother, Mr Overton is a rather more distant god (perhaps he sees himself as the Duke in Measure for Measure, setting the game going and then watching to see what happens). Ernest himself is an innocent dupe of almost everyone.

But we're not reading this book for its characters or its sometimes over-constructed plot. It's talent lies in the cynical way in which Butler tilts at almost every Victorian shibboleth. For example: “I think the Church catechism has a great deal to do with the unhappy relations which commonly even now exist between parents and children. That work was written too exclusively from the parental point of view; the person who composed it did not get a few children to come in and help him ... nor should I say it was the work of one who liked children ... The general impression it leaves ... is that ... the mere fact of being young at all has something with it that savours more or less distinctly of the nature of sin.” (Ch 7) Not only is he taking aim at the 'family' as a sacred cow, in particular the idea (which we still have) that the young should kowtow to the old, but he is doing that by attacking Christianity. He continues with attacks on marriage (“I know many old men and women who are reputed moral, but who are living with partners whom they have long since ceased to love.”; Ch 9), education (“Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it.”; Ch 31) high culture and truth but he returns time and again to parenthood. There's even a moment when Theobald considers Ernest's death: “Then his thoughts turned to Egypt and the tenth plague. It seemed to him that if the little Egyptians had been anything like Ernest, the plague must have been something very like a blessing in disguise. If the Israelites were to come to England now he should be greatly tempted not to let them go.” (Ch 29) In the Exodus, when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, God sent a series of plagues to harm the Egyptians and to persuade them to release the Egyptians. The tenth plague was when God sent his angels to murder the eldest child in every Egyptian house. The angel passed over the houses of the Israelites because each Israeli household had killed a lamb or a young goat and daubed its blood on their door-frame as a sign to the murdering angel. This is the meaning of Passover: that God kills kids.

This can be funny, it is certainly refreshing.

Selected quotes:

• “We must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do.” (Ch 1)
• “In those days children's brains were not overtasked as they are now; perhaps it was for this very reason that the boy showed an avidity to learn.” (Ch 2)
• “Some poets always begin to get groggy about the knees after running for seven or eight lines.” (Ch 4)
• “He was too religious to consider Fortune a deity at all; he took whatever she gave and never thanked her, being firmly convinced that whatever he got to his own advantage was of his own getting. and so it was, after Fortune had made him able to get it.” (Ch 5)
• “He who does not consider himself fortunate is unfortunate.” (Ch 5)
• “It is far safer to know too little than too much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.” (Ch 5)
• “Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.” (Ch 6)
• “To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season - delightful if it happens to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruit.” (Ch 6)
• “He feared the dark scowl which would come over his father's face upon the slightest opposition.” (Ch 7)
• “Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he has wisely refrained from saying whether they are good things or bad things.” (Ch 8)
• “Papas and mammas sometimes ask young men whether their intentions are honourable towards their daughters. I think young men might occasionally ask papas and mamas with their intentions are honourable before they accept invitations to houses where there are still unmarried daughters.” (Ch 9)
• “Theobald was not the ideal she had dreamed of when reading Byron upstairs with her sisters, but he was an actual within the bounds of possibility, and, after all, not a bad actual as actuals went.” (Ch 11)
• “All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.” (Ch 19)
• “We forget that every clergyman with a living or curacy is as much a paid advocate as the barrister who is trying to persuade a jury to acquit a prisoner. We should listen to him with the same suspense of judgment, the same full consideration of the arguments of the opposing counsel, as a judge does when he is trying a case.” (Ch 26)
• “If I was a light of literature at all it was of the very lightest kind.” (Ch 27)
• “Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic policies.” (Ch 39)
• “I believe, that if the truth were known, it would be found that even the valiant Saint Michael himself tried hard to shirk from his famous combat with the dragon: he pretended not to see all sorts of misconduct on the dragon's part; shut his eyes to the eating up of I do not know how many hundreds of men, women and children who he had promised to protect; allowed himself to be publicly insulted a dozen times over without resenting it; and in the end when even an angel could stand it no longer he shilly-shallied and temporised an unconscionable time before he would fix the day and hour for the encounter.” (Ch 40)
• “Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new.” (Ch 46)
• “He saw plainly enough that, whatever else might be true, the story that Christ had died, come to life again, and been carried from Earth through clouds into the heavens could not now be accepted by unbiassed people.” (Ch 64)
• “Even Euclid, who has laid himself as little open to the charge of credulity as any writer who ever lived ... has no demonstrable first premise.” (Ch 65)
• “There are orphanages ... for children who have lost their parents - oh! why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost to them.” (Ch 67)
• “Surely if people are born rich or handsome they have a right to their good fortune.” (Ch 68)
• “Now her object was not to try and keep sober, but to get gin without her husband's finding out.” (Ch 74)
• “There is nothing an old bachelor likes better than to find a married man who wishes he had not got married.” (Ch 75)

February 2025; 430 pages

First published 1903

My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 1966

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

"Heartburn" by Nora Ephron

A roman a clef in which the author turns the break-up of her marriage into light comedy.

It's narrated in the first person and the past tense. The author disguises herself as a food writer but the husband/ villain is rather more thinly disguised as a Washington reporter (in reality he was Carl Bernstein, one of the investigative reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal). The novel was adapted into a film.

It is frenetically fast-paced and full of quips, like the romantic comedy movies Ephron wrote, directed and produced. It reminded me of an American sitcom. I didn't find it particularly amusing.

It starts with a great hook: “The reason I was hardly in a position to date on first learning that my second husband had taken a lover was that I was seven months pregnant.” (Ch 1) I should immediately have sympathised with the main character. But I couldn't. She didn't seem heart-broken, in fact even that hook itself is written as part of a joke. This should be a major tragedy in her life and she is wise-cracking. Perhaps her relentless humour is a defence strategy but it worked in the sense that I never had any sense that there was a vulnerable human underneath the robotic comedy. 

It helps that there are no financial pressures: she leaves her husband and takes her two-year-old son and heavily pregnant self to New York by air; here she squats in her father's apartment. The kid is never an inconvenience; she does what she wants and always finds a maid to take care of it. In New York she is held up at gunpoint but even this is scarcely traumatic. The book skated along on wisecracks and trivialities and never challenged my emotions at all. 

She describes a typical dinner-party conversation thus: “Then we would move on to the important matters. Should they paint their living room peach? Should they strip down their dining table? Should they buy a videotape recorder? Should they re-cover the couch?” (Ch 7) I suppose most life is fundamentally trivial and this contributed to the novel's verisimilitude. But basically I didn't care. It's not as if her trivialities are everyday trivialities, cocooned as she is in her privileged world as a best-selling cookery writer married to a heavily-syndicated journalist. There are no ordinary people in her social circle, even her therapy group has a famous actress in it. 

If you like lightweight froth (and it shouldn't be lightweight froth, it's about a marriage breaking up), this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• “My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone would do it for you.” (Ch 2)
• “If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.” (Ch 4)
• “There's a real problem in dragging a group into a book: you have to introduce six new characters ... who are never going to be mentioned again in any essential way but who nonetheless have to be sketched in.” (Ch 4)
• “That's what marriage is ... after a certain point it's just patch, patch, patch.” (Ch 4)
• “It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.” (Ch 7)
• “You know how old you have to be before you stop wanting to fuck strangers? ... Dead, that's how old.” (Ch 8)
• “When you have a baby you set off an explosion in your marriage ... all the power struggles of the marriage have a new playing field.” (Ch 11)

February 2025; 179 pages

First published in 1983 (by Heinemann in the UK)

My Virago paperback edition was issued in 2018

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

"Ravensgill" by William Mayne

Two families, related but divided by something that happened nearly fifty years ago. Can a new generation heal the wounds? First they have to solve the half-forgotten mystery.

Bob lives on Ravensgill farm with his brother Dick and his eccentric and bad-tempered grandmother (when we first meet her she is painting the curtains which is rather different from drawing them). Judith lives in another valley (there are hints of both Romeo and Juliet and Lorna Doone). A policeman's death arouses memories but the old generation won't talk to the kids. “Is it always right to find things out, to let things be remembered?” (Ch 9) But Bob starts to investigate and arouses buried resentments. Tension rises and tempers flare to the point of murderous violence.

It is a beautifully written novel, hugely evocative of the Yorkshire (England) countryside and the farming way of life. Mayne's plot is simple, what drives the story is the reader's desire to solve the mystery, tantalised by the ambiguities built into the dialogue, and the carefully constructed characters, full of very real complexities, driven by very human emotions of pride and jealousy, and curiosity.

Just as important is the setting. There is beauty in the landscape but it can turn dangerous at a heartbeat. There's a sense that something's not quite right, of otherness, and this is fostered by sentences that are lyrical but strangely shaped. For example:

• “Dick was unable to know what to do. Speech was ready in him, but there was nothing to say. Help was willing in him, but he did not know what to help.” (Ch 5)
• “There was a little feminine gossip from the hens ... In the sheath of sycamore trees at the end of the yard the insects held mart and bazaar. Way down the gill the water gently clattered. Round about the still sky full clouds formed and hung.” (Ch 6)

The story is as carefully and perfectly painted as Poussin's painting above but the shepherds are looking at a tombstone on which cryptic words are carved.

Selected quotes:

• “During breakfast the mist had melted. Already the walls of the house and of the farm buildings were sending back warmth. A small different mist was coming off the meadows, where the sun was drying the grass. The little mist was from the dew, rising a foot and then turning to invisible vapour.” (Ch 1)
• “She was a gentle cow, but silly, and could get lost when it was impossible to get lost. she was one of the more senior members of the herd, but she had never got very high in rank, and the others pushed her about.” (Ch 2)
• “The stars were not very much there to be known that night, because there was a high haze obscuring them.But they found The Plough, and Grandma discovered that the Pole Star was a long way out of position, and seemed to think it was the County Council's fault.” (Ch 3)
• “He always hoped that one day he would come in happy off the hill, and be allowed to stay happy. But always it happened that Grandma had some bitterness that made his joys of place and person shrink away again.” (Ch 4)
• “Dick and Tot walked down the lane together, deep in a conversation of silence.” (Ch 5)
• “Now he was frightened. When he thought he was blind he had been terrified, but blindness does not mean death. It is not a symptom of the end of life. The world is still with you in blindness; and all you have to do is feel for it in other ways than with your eyes.” (Ch 5)
• “He was spiting fate, giving himself up to it before it could do as it wanted, because fate takes you against your will. He thought he would swing with fate's direction, and perhaps be released out of pity.” (Ch 5)
• “The bus homewards ... had to wait at pubs on the way for customers to pour the last of the ale down their throats before they wallowed across and climbed aboard.” (Ch 14)

February 2025; 174 pages

Published in 1970 by Hamish Hamilton, my copy is the 1971 reprint.

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

"Self-Help" by Edward Docx

A woman dies in post-Soviet, gangster-run St Petersburg and her unacknowledged son, a divinely talented pianist, needs to contact her heirs in London to persuade them to continue paying his fees to study at the Conservatoire.

This novel, entitled Pravda outside the UK, is a book of cities, almost always in dreadful weather. Arkady lives in St Petersburg, Isabella his half-sister lives in New York, Gabriel, her twin brother, is a journalist in London. Their father Nicholas lives in Paris. The London scenes are informed by the inevitable Dickens and the Russian scenes by Dostoevsky (the scene in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov stands on a bridge is mentioned twice). As for Paris, there seem to be echoes from Zola's The Masterpiece: just like the hero of that novel, Nicholas is a painter who despairs of ever producing truly good work (“The fact that he was a profoundly mediocre painter might not have bothered him at all except ... that every time he closed his eyes, he could see quite clearly what it was that he wanted to achieve. ... The artist's vision without the accompanying artistry: a curse of the gods if ever there was one.”; Ch 20) and lives on the Ile St-Louis. 

The children, Isabella and Gabriel, are thrown into psychological crisis by the death of their mother. “When a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat, but rise from their sarcophagi instead.” (Ch 19)

The keeper of the secrets is their father, the man who controlled them throughout their childhood and emotionally and physically abused them when they were young. The man they hate. Nicholas is a towering figure, a truth teller who understands himself at the deepest level. “What interested him most of all in life was trying to understand the exact shape and weight of other people's inner selves, the architecture of their spirit.” (Ch 20) He is the villain of the piece but he is the most beautifully written character of the book, “a selfish cowardly bullying bastard and a charming intelligent thoughtful man at the same time.” (Ch 43)

But the other main characters - Isabella, Gabriel who has become outwardly a clone of his father, a faithless lover and a man capable of extraordinarily eloquent invective, Arkady and his protector, Henry the heroin addict - are all wonderfully written. The book is written with each chapter from the perspective of one or more of these characters, but always in the third person and the past tense.

For me, the most impressive feature of this book was the brilliance of the description. Time and again, Docx summarised a whole scene with a few words, often using language creatively or coining neologisms to do so, in phrases such as:

• “The road into town was as Stalin-soaked in the monochrome of tyranny as the centre of the city was bright and colourful with the light of eighteenth-century autocracy.” (Ch 1)
• “The cars were moving freely - the battered Czech wrecks and tattered Russian rust-crates, the sleek German saloons and the tinted American SUVs, overtaking, undertaking, switching lanes in a fat salsa of metal and gasoline.” (Ch 1)
• “His heart was pestling itself mad against the mortar of the present.” (Ch 1)
• “His slight scrappiness, his hassled hair, his loose shirt, his jeans, his battered boots, they somehow told against him; where before there had been a casual confidence dressing down, she now saw anguish dressing up. His manner no longer said, ‘I don't care to manage any better - take it or leave it,’ but instead, ‘This is the best I can manage.’” (Ch 16)
• “The pavement had turned into a thickening medley of slush and mottled grey ice. Pedestrians squelching, sliding, sloshing along. Hard to believe that from the moment the snow left heaven until the moment it touched the Earth, it was virgin white.” (Ch 30)
• “The roots of his teeth felt like a jagged line of glass splinters in his gums.” (Ch 30): Cold turkey.
• “The Sunday sky as raw and pale as fear-sickened flesh waiting at the whipping post.” (Ch 40)
• “Notre-Dame like some mighty queen termite, belly-stranded in the middle of the river by the sheer volume of her pregnancy.” (Ch 51)

Other selected quotes:

• “The head distrusts the heart. The heart ignores the head. The balls want to carry on regardless. It's a total and utter mess. Chaos.” (Ch 5)
• “Honesty ... is it not the most monstrous piece of excrement that mankind has ever come up with? Human nature, consciousness itself, is famously indefinable, mysterious, mobile, responsive - is gloriously less constant, this intrinsic than the imagining of rocks, trees, sheep. That's the whole point.” (Ch 5)
• “Alessandro enjoyed flattery more than anything else in the world and could tease it out of quick-drying cement if he applied himself.” (Ch 5)
• “In art we are in conversation with ourselves across the generations ... This is the lodestar of our humanity, the rest is chasing food and money.” (Ch 7)
• “He went on, the narrow angle of dead ahead all that he permitted himself.” (Ch 11)
• “The worst storm since the last one. skies of bitumen and creosote. there could no longer be any doubt about it: the planet was finally becoming angry - the wildest beast of them all goaded, poked, insulted once to offer.” (Ch 19) This was written in 2007 and now seems prophetic!
• “One day they may just about persuade you to believe that business is the engine and money the fuel ... but whatever they say, you can be absolutely certain that neither is the journey and neither is the view.” (Ch 19)
• “Our falsities are more eloquent than our truths.” (Ch 20)
• “Yet another avaricious, harrowingly insecure, narcissistic little claw-wielder who had recently about-turned into a guru of well-being and life-balance. How did any of these people expect to be taken seriously?” (Ch 22)
• “Even her own blood cells loathed her.” (Ch 22)
• “Creativity is a massive and serious lifetime’s endeavour to further humankind's fundamental understanding of itself.” (Ch 22)
• “Someone swore at a bottle of ketchup, which they could not bully into dispensing its chemical treasures.” (Ch 25)
• “Power may not corrupt every time, but it always isolates.” (Ch 25)
• “What they say - in fact what almost anybody says - is most often what they need to hear themselves say. Not what they really mean. We are all forever in the business of persuading ourselves.” (Ch 27)
• “Another day, here on Earth. Another day of attrition, murder, beauty and birth. Another day of six billion soloists at full lung, all hoping for some miracle of harmony.” (Ch 37)
• “All through the city, her brother's words stalked her. sinister clowns or blithe assassins she could not tell.” (Ch 43)
• “Now that it came right down to it, life turned out to be mostly about not flinching. Keeping going.” (Ch 45)
• “Strange that being human was never enough on its own. That the need went further. The need to belong. To belong to one tribe or the other ... which is where the trouble began. Why could we not be content with species-pride, the staggering good fortune of belonging to humanity itself?” (Ch 51)

Trivia:

• “The fifty filthy shades of grey were all gone, unimaginable, and instead the sky was uniform and blue.” (Ch 52) Is this where E L James found the title for her novel Fifty Shades of Grey, published 4 years after Self-Help?
• Early in the book, Arkady plays a brilliant jazz concert . He is described as feeling his way early on, so he can learn the piano and adjust his fingers to its inadequacies. Was this based on the legendary 1975 Koln Concert in which jazz pianist Keith Jarrett was forced to perform on a dodgy rehearsal grand and "was forced to adapt his playing for a shonky instrument" according to the Guardian?

This powerful novel was long-listed for the 2007 Booker and won the 2007 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Docx has also written:

• The Calligrapher
• The Devil's Garden
• Let Go My Hand

February 2025; 523 pages

First published in the UK in 2007 by Picador

My Picador paperback was issued in 2008.

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