“Loitering with Intent“ by Muriel Spark - review

 “Loitering with Intent” by Muriel Spark:

The novel was first published in 1981 and is Muriel Spark’s 16th novel. It centers around Fleur Talbot, who lives on ''the grubby edge of the literary world'' in postwar London and tries to write and publish her first book, musing upon ''how wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.’’

Fleur has no job and no prospects and little money. She rents a dreary bed-sitting room from a swinish landlord and has an affair with handsome Leslie, the self-centered husband of her friend Dottie. Leslie also has an affair with a male young poet.

Fleur acquires a job as secretary to the Autobiographical Association, the members of which are an eclectic bunch of upper-class twits who meet under the roof and the supervision of Baronet Sir Quentin Oliver to compose their dreary memoirs. 

Then strange and obscure things begin to happen. Fleur starts to notice that the plot of her novel-in-progress seems to presage the activities of Sir Quentin and his pathetic gang. Fiction and reality seem to merge, Fleur's closest friends accuse her of libel and plagiarism, Dottie even steals the only typescript of the novel from her flat. The members of the Association begin to act like the characters in her book and then, as predicted by Fleur's book, they begin to meet untimely deaths.

This is a wise, economic and brilliantly mischievous book, a fine metafictional meditation on the work of writers and the fine line between fiction and reality. Where does art start or reality end?

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“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie“ by Muriel Spark - review

 “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie“ by Muriel Spark:

The novel, published first in 1960, centers on the downfall of the fascinating schoolmistress Jean Brodie who ultimately and tragically will suffer for her hubris. 

Miss Brodie is a passionate, free-thinking and unconventional teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of “special girls“ at Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh in the 1930s. They are the Brodie set and she wants them to be the crème de la crème. The novel’s theme is the education of six distinctive girls and the drama that leads to Miss Brodie’s “betrayal” which results in the dismissal from Marcia Blaine by her great enemy, the headmistress, Miss Mackay. 

Miss Brodie is a complex person, she is narcissistic, excessively self-confident, kind, selfish, considerate, moody and happy all at the same time. With her gift of mysterious glamour and charm she dazzles and seduces her girls, but these qualities lead also to her downfall. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” she boasts, “and she is mine for life.” She needs her girls as an extension of herself to live out missed dreams of her own. 

Like many of her contemporaries in the aftermath of World War I, she found that eligible men were rare. Having lost her first love to the war, Miss Brodie transforms her sexual affection into an affection for her students. In her unconventionality she spins out ever and ever more elaborate tales to them of her dead lover, she insists that Giotto was the greatest Italian artist and Mussolini a subject for adoration. She introduces them to the secrets of cosmetics, visits concerts, ballet and theater performances with them and tries, in short to make them Europeans instead of dowdy little provincial Edinburgh dwellers. Her undisciplined and unstructured pedagogical approach includes unreflected fascism as well as Tennyson. She is a product of her time.

She preaches that art, beauty and goodness should come before philosophy and science. What Miss Brody is looking for is the absolute, an endeavour bound to fail. Although Brodie claims education is “a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul”, she is actually a rigid dogmatist centered in calvinistic thinking.

Miss Brodie has triumphantly entered her "prime." Of this she speaks with such great conviction that to her girls it becomes a great vitality, a visible presence. 

The novel moves back and forth in time. We follow the six girls (Monica, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, and Eunice) of Miss Brodie's "set", all famous for excellency in something, be it mathematics, sex, insight or sport. We follow them from year ten to their eighteenth, but we also get glimpses of their middle age and look back at Miss Brodie from beyond her prime, after her betrayal and finally learn of her death. Gradually we piece together the lastly fateful connection between the domineering teacher and her favourite pupil Sandy who, before she becomes Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, initiates the betrayal that will doom her teacher to an embittered and solitary spinsterly retirement, brooding on who could have betrayed her. She never finds out and dies soon after. 

As much we find fault in Brodies character and convictions, we cannot help but like her. There is lightness as well as dark to Jean Brodie. The point of the novel is not to give solid answers on what is right  and what is wrong. The reader is left with the task to work out a way for himself to deal with moral ambiguity. In this the book, like any great classic, is ageless and pleases and perplexes with every new reading.

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“Await Your Reply“ by Dan Chaon - review

 “Await Your Reply” by Dan Chaon:

“We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves.” And what if that story is a lie? 

Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?

This entertaining page-turner, focusing on fate, circumstance and family dynamics, is a gripping journey on the quest for identity and a meditation on what is what defines us and what happens when we loose it.

It all begins with a fast-paced gruesome, maybe a little too calculated cliff-hanger chapter that makes you realize right away you’re in for a rough ride. This feeling of unease and lurking threat never leaves. 

The book is composed of three strands of seemingly separate narratives. Their main protagonists are each driven by the desire to become someone else and each have a central need for someone’s unconditioned and complete love.

The first narrative is about Ray, a college dropout who feigns his own death and learns that the man he thought was his uncle and who recruited him for criminal activities involving identity theft, is really his biological father. 

The second narrative is about Lucy, an orphan who runs away from her dreary hometown and life in Ohio with George, her high-school history teacher. 

The third narrative is about Miles who, for almost a decade now, is in search of his twin brother Hayden, a paranoid schizophrenic, charismatic drifter who spent most of his life switching from one identity to the next and occasionally sends messages to his brother but refuses to be found.

For a long time, even though there seem to be similarities and parallels, these narratives don’t intersect until they do and then the novel gains enormous momentum and leads to a finale, stunning in its result and inevitability, as devastating as the opening cliff-hanger chapter of the novel. 

The book is written with an eloquence and grace of style not frequently encountered in the field of page-turners and a joy to read. 

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“Glyph” by Percival Everett- review

 “Glyph” by Percival Everett:

This is a book by Percival Everett which I hadn’t so much fun with as with his other books. It is a satire on poststructuralism that features a sarcastic infant genius, a baby born with an IQ of 475. The baby’s name is Ralph and he is hyper-intelligent, linguistically competent, and has, mostly firmly founded, opinions on almost everything. He reads books of philosophy, science and mathematics. He wisely does not speak but communicates with scribbled, often sarcastic, very insightful notes. He is the son of Eve, a failed painter and Douglas, a failed academic. Ralph introduces his parents with the line "My father was a poststructuralist and my mother hated his guts". 

Glyph could have been a mischievous and very funny satire on poststructuralist thought and literary theory - if there wouldn’t be those endless, tiring theoretical excursions into just this poststructuralism. So the book is only partly funny and I resigned myself to the enjoyment of the plot and story. 

The plot gains velocity when Ralph is abducted by a mad psychologist, after a series of psychological tests have revealed that he is in possession of an incredibly exceptional IQ. From his abductor he is further abducted by the FBI and then furthermore abducted by a well-meaning Mexican guard and his wife. He finally escapes the grabbing pedophilic hands of a catholic priest and makes it back into his mother’s arms. 

In the end the satire appears to develop too many targets and sidelines and sort of eats itself. For example is Ralph not just the narrator of his adventures but also a novelist, who offers up his own "Theory of Fictive Space", a sort of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for novels, which contains a huge list of ideas about the novel (or fiction in general) and fictitious dialogues between historical figures like Socrates, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Zeno, Thales or Wittgenstein, to name a few. It is all very theoretical and thus, while quite interesting and philosophical, even comical, it also becomes tedious. It is a stew of metafictional reflection and enjoyable comedy, which makes it finally a matter of taste, some like it, some don’t. I did partly. 

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“Erasure” by Percival Everett - review

“Erasure” by Percival Everett:

In this truly brilliant, deeply thought-provoking novel, first published in 2001, Everett created a cutting, excellently executed satire on how books by authors of colour are categorised and defined by race.

Everett’s novels are all distinctive in terms of form and content and most of those I’ve read are very good. Most of them are playing with, satirizing or bending the rules of a different genre. 

Along with Wounded, The Trees, So Much Blue and I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Erasure is perhaps one of Everett’s best novels. 

Race has always been a central theme in Everett’s work and so here it is again, distilled and concisely brought to focus. In Erasure we follow the story of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who, much as Percival Everett himself, is a black writer and academic and who is increasingly frustrated by how his being black alters readers’ expectations of his work.

Novels such as Wounded or So Much Blue acknowledge race and even examine some of its causes and effects, but do not make it the central or pivotal point. This is different in Erasure. Here race is the primary concern and shows how completely the term has been conflated with non-whiteness in the United States and how whiteness is existentially dependant on this conflation. 

To quickly sketch the plot: 

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is frustrated about the tremendous success of the so-called authentic and raw novel “We's Lives in Da Ghetto” of a young black female author, which he considers below and devoid of all aesthetic and artistic value. 

And so in response, meant as a satirical parody, he writes under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a searing diatribe, a distilled little pulp novel titled at first My Pafology and finally published as Fuck which appears in full length as a story-within-a-story in Erasure. 

Monk‘s intention was to expose the publishing industry’s racial pigeonholing, but publishing this book backfires and sets loose a wizard’s apprentice storm of success and fame he cannot control anymore. The book, written in ghettospeak, painfully funny and plain painful, with simplistic characters and soap melodrama, uses racial stereotypes to strengthen the satire and is completely misunderstood and gushed over as the authentic new voice of the black people and praised as a true description of the African-American experience. It brings its author substantial and much-needed monetary compensation, a six-figure movie deal included. 

 

Now Monk is in a dilemma, a moral conundrum and what will he do about it? 

He refuses to let his true identity be known but meanwhile there are serious difficulties and problems which he must cope with. There is his mother's rapid mental decline, the sudden hostility of his gay brother who for a long time lived in the closet and just came out and the shocking shooting of his sister who worked as a doctor in an abortionist clinic. Not to forget the discovery among his dead father's papers that Dad once had a white mistress and Monk now all of a sudden has a half-sister his age. While he struggles to cling to his own identity and trying to maintain what is left of his family, his wicked creation soars higher and higher and Monk is forced to compromise his integrity and redefine himself.

Erasure is a peculiar mix of literary satire and emotional domestic fiction, original, hilarious, sharp, genuinely moving and tender. One of Everett‘s best. 

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“Assumption“ by Percival Everett - review

 “Assumption” by Percival Everett:

As the title suggests rather obviously, Assumption is about making assumptions in criminal investigations where things are not as they seem. It is about how we grew accustomed to the inner logic and dramaturgy of narratives and thus form expectations. On another level It might also be the author’s mild personal refusal to be pigeonholed. One only becomes aware of this, though after having read a couple of his other novels which all are playing with, satirizing or bending the rules of a different genre. If this is the first Everett one reads it stays just what it is, a nice entertaining story.

In this trilogy of interwoven murder mysteries the investigator is the enigmatic Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff in Plata, a fictional county in the northern part of the state. Ogden is an ordinary guy, almost to the point of being dull. He likes fly-fishing and gets along well enough with the town folk and with his sheriff and fellow deputy. Ogden is a cop for want of anything better to do. For him it is just a job but he does it well.

In the first case Ogden investigates the strange murder mystery of a young woman’s mother which leads to other strange casualties. In the second Ogden is lead on a trail of the murder of several prostitutes who rebelled against their pimp. And in the third and ultimately strangest case Ogden follows the murder of one of his friends that leads to a bunch of meth addicts. The ending comes as a surprise and everything to say about it would be a spoiler. Still, it somehow felt anticlimactic.

All in all a nice little set of interwoven stories which twist into a surprising end and as such make a good entertaining tale and a mild reminder to be careful with too much confidence and trust in our acquired sense of how stories should go. 

This has been my sixth novel by Everett in a row, now and I honestly have to admit that I much favour his other novels, most of which have my boundless, absolute admiration. This one here, while not quite a disappointment, did not live up to my expectations (and thus makes one in favour of the authors titular argument).

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“Percival Everett by Virgil Russell“ by Percival Everett - review

 “Percival Everett by Virgil Russell” by Percival Everett:

This is my fifth book by Percival Everett and all his other books so far I have immensely enjoyed, they all were great, entertaining stories and were, if not by their topics, then by their style, quite easy to digest. Statistically there had to come the moment where I might stumble upon a book by him a little bit more demanding. Well, this one is it. 

That is not to say I don’t like it. I do, I really do. It is just very different from what I expected. 

It is a comedy, it has fantastic elements, it is very confusing at first, it has many narrative strands and one really has a hard time to figure out what’s going on, who exactly the narrator is and where this all will be leading at. It is a story inside a story inside a story. 

The whole thing is offered in a relaxed voice, spiced often with Percival Everett‘s trademark of deadpan comedy and wordplay. It is a very intellectual and philosophical novel, not really plot-driven. Mostly we find us in the mindset of some person, the narrator, who is either Dad or Son. There are natural transitions from one mind state to the next, without it being clear what mind exactly we are in at the moment, there is no reliability, no one to trust, once a statement or a fact is uttered, the next moment it will be renounced. There is an unconventional mixture of different styles that gives the work a distinctive air. It sometimes frightens, sometimes upsets and often baffles the reader. 

At some point it becomes clearer that we are following an old man’s mind, a dying man’s mind, who passes his last days in an old peoples institution called Teufelsdröckh. The little plot that gives the story momentum comes from sketching the every day life at such an institution, fellow senile residents and mean-spirited orderlies and nurses and a mild insurgent of the old people against their oppressors included.

The old man is or was a writer (or photographer?, or horse trainer?, or doctor?) and in his mind entertains conversations with a (perhaps) dead son, or it is vice versa. Or the son lives. Be it as it may, they both seem to wish to reconnect, the father and the son. The old man, having lived quite a life, is a wise man. And so we are giving snippets and snatches of memory, short flashbacks into the past, encounters and historical events known and unknown, we are following someone’s life which could easily be our own. Or not. 

I think, I assume, I imagine this novel to be an attempt at giving a home, a contextual ground for contradiction and irreconcilabilties. Many ideas and concepts, many soft blossoming beginnings of narratives are laid down as rhizomes and the reader allows them to either flourish or wither. So there might also be the intentionally and wanted participation of the reader as another factor in the development of the novel. 

The desire to express oneself artistically, say as, a painter or writer or composer, stems from the attempt to move beyond the base and vulgar, purely animal, and very short existence on this planet. To a certain degree, it varies from individual to individual, the artist reaches a point were he realises to have said all there is to say, all there is to express. This is a tremendous shift in perspective on life itself. As it is for non-artists who reached the same conclusion. Everything after that revelatory moment, everything else must be regarded as gloss, as repetition, embellishment, elucidation or reissue, in other words, it is redundant. 

So, how do we go on living with this knowledge? What do we make of it? The only new thing left to us is cessation, suspension, conclusion, preferably conclusion with a promising enticing solution. We are left to play with and within tenebrous shadows of memories. Some call it redemption. 

A very good book. A wise book. It is about language, about writing, it is an investigation into the nature of narrative, it is a play on self-reference, it is about concepts and ideas, about reliance and truth, it is philosophical. It is about a life, about the absurdity and incongruity of life. It is a strong, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations. And about dying. And about living. 

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“So Much Blue“ by Percival Everett - review

 “So Much Blue” by Percival Everett:

“A painting has many surfaces.” And so has this novel which is by turns shocking, funny and touching.

Kevin Pace, a 56-years-old abstract painter lives in an artsy, idyllic home in New England, together with his loving wife and his 2 kids and paints, among many others, over a long stretch of time one very personal, very intimate and secret painting he won’t allow anyone to see, not his children, not his best friend Richard, not even his wife, Linda. The painting might or might not be a representation of the quest in a frustrating life, a life that moves without moving, changes but hardly alters. The painting might also be just a symbol for a secret we never allow anyone else to see and how this takes a toll on us.

Is life similar to a painting in which things are really no more than tenebrous representations of tenebrous recollections of reality?

Kevin, in a dispassionate voice, tells of mostly past events. The novel is perfectly structured, there are really three novels in one. The narration shifts between three time lines, easily recognizable by their labels: 1979, Paris and House:

In a very thriller-like narrative, 30 years ago in Salvador in 1979, we follow Kevin on a dangerous and formative quest for the lost brother of his best friend Richard.

In a captivating love-story, some 12 years ago on a business trip in Paris, we watch Kevin, already a successful painter and married with 2 kids, falling in love with a young watercolorist.

In a piece of domestic fiction the present of Kevin unfolds at his home with his family and all the troubles of their own. 

As different in voice and mood these captions are, they all have one thing in common and that is Kevin. The three stages of his live slowly begin to coalesce and show, that the past and what we did, will for ever have an impact on our life and those we live with and that time and experience do have the power to alter us. Change is possible.

While still using his inimitable sense of deadpan humor and slapstick, his way of fast-paced entertaining narration, Percival Everett with So Much Blue delivers here one of his more somberly serious novels. It is in spirit closer related to Wounded and different but not less great, than his satires I Am Not Sidney Poitier and The Trees. My personal disposition connects more with the somberness, the lugubriousness and the gravity of it. 

This is an often frank and honest look into marriage, into fatherhood, into love, deception, self-deception and responsibility, into art, the mistakes we made in the past and how honesty and truth can be simultaneously crushing, destructive and hurtful but also redemptive. It is also about keeping secrets and the diabolical power they exert on us and on those close to us. 

So Much Blue is so far my favorite of Percival Everett’s books. 

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“I am Not Sidney Poitier“ by Percival Everett - review

 “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” by Percival Everett:

Again, a great novel from Percival Everett, as irresistible and hard to put down as The Trees and Wounded.

In I Am Not Sidney Poitier young Not Sidney Poitier sets out on a quest in search for his identity and authenticity in the absurd country of the United States of America. He is surrounded and obstructed by a culture where other people’s perceptions of race, wealth, and so many other issues do not make this an easy task. As he stumbles from one misadventure into the next mishap young Not Sidney slowly gets to know more about himself.

How does a name define a person? Not Sidney Poitier is forced to ask himself this question constantly. The name was given to him by an eccentric mother and the origin and cause of the name stays obscure. He certainly has a great resemblance to the real actor Sidney Poitier but is not him, he is Not Sidney. 

And with this unusual name there are bound to be confusions at every new encounter. Everett never gets tired to vary these inevitable confusing difficult introductions to every new person and delivers them every time slightly altered. It becomes a running gag and a never ending source of word play. But it also raises the question every time anew who Not Sidney really is.

As the classical young American innocent, young Not Sidney goes to school, is bullied, is sexually abused by a white woman teacher, has to leave school because of the incident, goes to college, joins a fraternity, drops out, gets arrested by racist law enforcement in racist southern states for driving alone and being just what he his, a black young man. Not Sidney is smart enough to know what is really going on but also kind enough not to turn away from terminally stupid people the moment he encounters them.

Not Sidney has one great advantage, he has come into the inheritance of a lot of money, he really is very, very rich. That is sometimes helpful, but mostly he tries to conceal the fact and prefers to leave others in the dark about it.

Not Sidney at college finds a girlfriend, is invited to Thanksgiving to her parent’s home only there to learn that he is too dark for their lightly skinned daughter and the family. The mother is a climber, the father a prosperous attorney and they feel they have strived and worked too hard to be set back on their imaginary course to whiteness. But then they find out that he has money and all their bigotry and hypocrisy comes to the fore: They suck up to him. He disdainfully refuses. He has learned more at this Thanksgiving weekend than in all the weeks of "The Philosophy of Nonsense“, a class given by his professor in college, a certain Percival Everett, whom Not Sidney sort of adopts as a father figure but the character Percival Everett plays hard to get. As in real life the writer Percival Everett seems to refuse easy categorization of his work as that of a Black author.

Many many events lead to the end of the book, not all questions are answered, but a lot has been gained on the journey. This is another delightful mix of fury at the world and the hilarity and absurdity which we call life or, in a more localized definition, the funhouse America. This is a brilliant, provocative and very funny book and a greatly entertaining satire.

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“Wounded“ by Percival Everett - review

 “Wounded” by Percival Everett:

John Hunt, the laconic, black protagonist of this novel is a horse trainer and lives on a farm in Wyoming in self-imposed isolation with his old uncle Gus. Six years ago John lost his wife in a horse accident and still grieves. To John his blackness is almost incidental, he is well integrated and respected in the small community and his race is not an issue. He is an outsider in being a black horse trainer and in being a Berkeley-educated, modern art loving individual.

Just after the cruelly murdered body of a local gay man was found, "strung up like an elk with his throat slit“, the gay son of an old university friend, David, and his boyfriend come to visit the town to attend a gay rally in response to the killing and are met by some of the locals, the usual share of rednecks, bigots and bullies, with hostility. The couple soon after leaves, soon after they return back home they break up and David, looking for an escape from his love misery, believing that working on the ranch would do him good, returns to the farm. Slowly David and John become friends, John in a caring, fatherly way, aware that David has a crush on him. He has to face some difficult questions about himself and deal with his own complicated feelings about homosexuality. At the same time he falls in love, proposes and lives together with the neighbor woman Morgan, also a ranch owner.

One day David, sent out on an errant, does not return and the search for him ends up in catastrophe.

As in The Trees, Everett deals with themes of racism and culture clash and crafts this gripping western whodunnit into a dramatic and unsparing inquiry into contemporary prejudice. 

This is a highly entertaining, albeit sad and shocking story that addresses the toughest issues with humor and grace. The novel is as much about the withholding of emotion and the struggle to identify one's deepest needs as it is a political novel, asking the question of responsibility for those around us. 

Another beautiful novel by Percival Everett. 

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“The Trees“ by Percival Everett - review

“The Trees” by Percival Everett:

First things first: This is a very funny novel. And it’s driving theme is American racism.

The Trees is the genre satirization of a detective story involving a series of grisly murders related to America’s long, horrifying history of lynching people of color. It makes a great story and fast-paced page-turner. Everett aimes at racism and police violence and his style ensures suspenseful and entertaining reading.

The story opens in the backwater small town of Money, Mississippi, a “shithole semi-town“. For those in knowledge of American history, a historical location. The matriarch of the Bryant family, Carolyn, called Granny C, now an invalid, dottering octogenerian, is the woman whose false accusation led to the horrific lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, in 1955. Till, a Black boy, visiting relatives from Chicago, was kidnapped, tortured, lynched and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. In the novel the fictional Carolyn regrets her accusations, of the real Carolyn Bryant exists the disputed version, that she recanted her accusation in the 2000s. 

Now her close male descendants are found cruelly, beastly murdered and mutilated in a manner similar to that of the lynching victim. Their testicles have been cut off and placed in the hands of a disfigured, bloated, ghastly beaten dead, unidentified Black body, dressed in a suspicious Depression-era outfit. This body soon after mysteriously disappears from the scene only to reappear at another ghastly crime scene with another White victim’s balls in his hand. There seems to be no other explanation to the who-dunnit than otherworldy powers. Nevertheless, the narrative stays generally grounded in realism.

Soon all over the States more castrated bodies turn up, and not only dead Blacks but Asians, too are involved and we begin to believe that something takes its revenge on the crimes of America, that some moral reckoning is unfolding. 

The MBI, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, much to the chagrin of the very white and very racist local police force, sends two Black detectives, Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, to aid the investigation. They are later joined by a Special Agent of the FBI, a Black woman named Herberta Hind. In most other stories of the South the Black characters are often one-dimensional and have to rely on the grandiosity of their white counterparts. Here it is the Black characters who have to deal with the not-so-suprising simplicity of White folks. 

In detective fiction, in general it is good guys vs. bad. There is the hero who chases and catches the bad guy. Justice is clear and obvious, it is neatly black and white. In The Trees the direction towards where the moral compass points is not so clear anymore.

The real satire takes place in the sketching of the locals, the law enforcement and people in “power“ (even Trump has a cameo appearance) as white trash laughingstock. There is often dialogue in the local vernacular, uneducated pidgin English, that renders them even more as slapstick figures sadly based on reality. The naming of most of the characters, too is done in slapstick manner, there is a Junior Junior, there is a Pick. L. Dill, there is even Triple J, the son of Junior Junior. His mother is called by her family Hot Mama Yeller, her CB handle.

Enter Mama Z, the Black local root doctor with a big knowledge of everything and about everyone. She is over a hundred years old and has been accumulating over the years a huge collection of every recorded lynching that took place since 1913, chronicling “the work of the devil”. “If you want to know a place, you talk to its history”. At one point the lyrics to the old song “Strange Fruit” appear in their entirety and remind us that this narrative about America’s race problem has been told already for decades and not much since has changed. 

Everett has a great talent for wordplay and it is a joy to follow his characters in their verbal interactions. He also has a great sense of satire which is hilarious but also often quite hurtfully gut-punching. He puts a finger on the sins of the Nation and accuses all white Americans who have benefited from the terror and systematic repression. In choosing the masquerade of a detective novel and satirizing it he is able to perform the difficult task of approaching a very sensitive topic, the shameful conduct, the inhumanity and cruelty of America towards Blacks, and makes it easier to digest. 

The story unfolds in ever and ever more slapstick manner but in the end catharsis does not come, there is no offering of solutions and we are left to our own conclusions. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The Trees manages to evoke a dream of retribution that pays justice to all the sadly lost lives in the file cabinet of Mama Z.

A great book!

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“Excellent Women“ by Barbara Pym - review

 “Excellent Women” by Barbara Pym:

Barbara Pym was an English writer who died in 1980 and was best known for her social comedies Excellent Women and A Glass Of Blessings. Her career suffered a long stretch of oblivion after her publisher dropped her quite brutally after her sixth novel. It was revived, though by the praises of the historian and biographer Lord David Cecil and the celebrated poet Philip Larkin who both claimed her to be the most under-rated writer of the century. Her novel Quartet in Autumn was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1977.

In a series of snapshots of human life Excellent Women is narrated by one of these typical English women Barbary Pym seems to be so much in favour of: spinsterly, smart, supportive, repressed, lonely, almost contented and resigned in their realization that their life has come to a still point with no perspective of future drastic change. The only exciting things happen outside of their own lives, in the parish they belong to, with the people they know there and with the dreary “good work“ they do to keep such a congregation and community going. 

Mildred Lathbury is one such woman, a clergyman’s daughter, a left-over spinster in the England of 1950. Through her we are drawn into the small habitat of a typical English parish and all the little excitement that comes with it. There are old neighbours and new neighbours, there is Rocky, a dashing young husband with a not-so-well-doing marriage, there is Julian Malory, the respectable and presentable vicar who almost gets lured into marriage by a clergyman’s widow but narrowly escapes. There are other spinster women friends and one or two might-be admirers which Mildred hardly considers as suitable or doesn’t even realize the true intentions with which they approach her.

All is written in low-key irony and as usual, a dark undercurrent of social mirroring of morality and class. And quite a dash of good English black humour, as exemplary in following passage:

Two office workers have a conversation on the topic of change:

“It’s rather pleasant to be unlike oneself occasionally.“

“I don’t agree. They moved me to a new office and I don’t like it at all. Different pigeons come to the windows”.

It is this thing about English humour, it delights in tiny little things, in the transforming of something ordinary into the extraordinary. As in A Glass Of Blessing, Excellent Women is a most endearingly amusing very English novel, much in the spirit of Jane Austen’s society reflections. There is again a lot of interesting, sharp observation about the self-centred pomposity of men and all the details of smallish, distinctly English lives are laid out and form a parade of beautifully sketched minor egotists and misfits. A very good book. 

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“A Glass of Blessings” by Barbara Pym - review

“A Glass of Blessings” by Barbara Pym:

Barbara Pym was an English writer who died in 1980 and was best known for her social comedies Excellent Women and A Glass Of Blessings. Her career suffered a long stretch of oblivion after her publisher dropped her quite brutally after her sixth novel. It was revived, though by the praises of the historian and biographer Lord David Cecil and the celebrated poet Philip Larkin who both claimed her to be the most under-rated writer of the century. Her novel Quartet in Autumn was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1977.

In A Glass of Blessings, first published in 1958, the central character and narrative voice is Wilmet Forsyth, the often self-absorbed, attractive thirty-three-year-old wife of a civil servant who lives a well-to-do, comfortable life and slowly becomes bored with the leisure of it. As befits her class and status, she simply does nothing and when not out lunching  or shopping with a woman friend she occasionally, at the instigation of her mother-in-law Sybil, an eccentric agnostic, dry-humored person in whose house she and her husband reside, does “good works“ at her parish of St. Luke.

One day she secures the vacant job of the housekeeper for the clergy house for a former colleague of her husband, a Mr. Bason, who had to resign his former job in the ministry, and thus  becomes drawn into the social life, the secrets and foibles of the congregation of the parish. Mr. Bason is a kleptomaniac who is drawn to all things beautiful and steals, albeit only for a couple of days, the precious Fabergé egg of one of the pastors. In the end, he leaves the clergy house to run an antiques shop in Devon that serves teas in the season which proves to be Heaven for him.

She also supports her mousy friend Mary, who, after the death of her mother, goes to live for a trial period in a convent but in the end decides against the life of a nun and marries the attractive Father Ransome.

Wilmet herself is attracted to Piers, the not-so-well-doing brother of her close friend Rowena but must discover in the end that his romantic attractions lie more with a beautiful, black-haired  lower-class-man with whom he shares an apartment. She receives a painful lesson when Piers mentiones that Wilmet might be too circumscribed by her own ‘narrow select little circle’ and might be one of those who are ‘less capable of loving their fellow human beings.’ 

Her mother-in-law late in life, decides to marry again and Wilmet and her husband Rodney are forced to look for a new home where Keith, the lover of Piers, is very helpful in choosing furniture and interior design. The move brings Rodney and Wilmet closer together while at the same time troubles are resolved for some of the other characters.

Despite the surface triviality this is a book with a darkly serious undercurrent about class and morality, often spiced with bracingly bitter remarks. The characters, a parade of minor egotists and misfits, are beautifully sketched and despite all the deficiencies of Wilmet’s personality one cannot help but like her. There is a lot of interesting, sharp observation about the self-centred pomposity of men and for that time (1958), a fresh outlook on gay relationships.

This is a restrained, delicate, low-key novel, not very plot-driven but vivid and engaging for its characters and their inner monologues. Rules are a main theme. Wilmet, stuck in her class and as that a perfect mirror of distinct English society, is always wondering about whether she can do this or that, or what people might think. Her life seems to be constructed of rules that ought better not be broken. Another recurring theme is the home which people try to find and build for themselves. She for Rodney and herself, Piers for him and his boyfriend, Mary for her and her future husband, Mr. Bason for a little while as the manager of the clergy household and also the retiring pastor who secures a villa in Italy for himself after he quits the service of the church.

A Glass of Blessings is written in a gentle and affectionate tone and moreover, is blessed with a small cast of gay male characters, quite a rare thing from this time period. 

A mild, warming and delightful little novel.

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“Burntcoat” by Sarah Hall - review

“Burntcoat” by Sarah Hall:

This is not your run-of-the-mill dystopian pandemic novel although there is a virus and all and everything is breaking apart. The narrator in this minimalistic epic is Edith, a sculptor of monumental, award-winning wooden sculptures and her story is by far not easy to digest but revelatory in its cruelty. Themes of art, sex, violence and difficult relationships play against a background of disaster in the form of a deadly pandemic. 

Edith lives and works in Burntcoat, a former vast warehouse which she transformed into a combination of home and studio space. Her narrative moves between the north of England and Japan where she once learnt the traditional woodwork burning techniques she employs in her art. But the narrative also travels back and forth in time, from her childhood (she was raised by a single mother who was disabled by a brain haemorrhage) to her art-school years and present artistic fame. 

In Burntcoat she begins a love affair with Halit, an immigrant chef. Lockdown comes, society collapses and Halit moves in with her. One day he goes out to get food from his former restaurant and comes home bleeding. In relentless prose we are forced to watch as a few days later he develops lesions and his illness and rapid decline begins. From this moment on we see the dissolution of the self by disease, we feel the dehumanizing, transformative power of the virus, so much more vicious than the one we had to endure during the last two years, and it affects everything dear to us: security, love, sexuality and creativity. We suddenly realize that we, that the whole world, had been spared a much more cruel fate and we suddenly see Life for what it always was: ephemeral. 

This is as much a tale of love as of death, of anguish and hurt, of loss and hope. As the wood which Edith burnishes in her art she became burnt, damaged but also more resilient.

 “A life is a bead of water on the  black surface, so frail, so strong.“

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“Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell“ by Susanna Clarke - review

“Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke:

I have been lured into reading this book by the author’s latest one, Piranesi, which I liked for its scope, its phantastical metaphors and, not least, for its concise, precise brevity.

This book now, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, is all but brief. It is a hefty monster of over 1000 pages. And I struggled through every one of them. It has not always been a pleasure. While at first amusing, it soon, over wide stretches, lost its charmes, grew tedious and boring until only towards the end it recovered its drive. 

It was and is not a bad book. I would even go as far as saying that it is a brilliant tale. The language is superb, witty, full of dark humour and glee, the descriptions of situations, landscapes and people sparkling and full of insight, the evoked images and phantasies plentiful and often truly surprising. The prose is classical sophisticated, nostalgic and yet timeless. I personally found it a tiny bit too long. Nevertheless, the book had me, true to its nature, under its spell. I could never, as often as I wished, put it away. So, in the end the satisfaction to have, together with the protagonists, gone through the labour, to have, despite all agonies, endured, prevailed and succeeded, now stays with me. I am not so sure that the novel itself will.

I shall not go through the plot. Suffice it to say that it is a truly ingenious tale, set in an Old England in a very British society, roughly 18th century Victorian, complete with obedient servants and conceited, callous, snobbish masters. The book is plot-driven, the story itself is not all light and bright, there is dark magic and cruelty, too. The two main protagonists, carefully crafted like most of the other characters, are two magicians, who are, one easily guesses it, the titular Mr. Norrell and Mr. Strange. Very different in character they at first work together, then oppose each other only to come back together in the end in a quest and fight against some evil which has befallen them personally and the country in general. Much happens and they, their loved ones and England, prevail. 

All in all a nice, sometimes surprsingly entertaining and ingeniously crafted book. I could have done with a shorter version but I am sure that for the phantasy inclined reader it will be a brilliant and rewarding indulgence.

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