bibliolathas

{review} mrs. miniver

2012-03-05T12:24:00.000+10:30

Jan Struther Mrs. Miniver (1939)

She rearranged the fire a little, mostly for the pleasure of handling the fluted steel poker, and then sat down by it. Tea was already laid: there were honey sandwiches, brandy-snaps, and small ratafia biscuits; and there would, she knew, be crumpets. Three new library books lay virginally on the fender-stool, their bright paper wrappers unsullied by subscriber's hand. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed, very softly and precisely, five times. A tug hooted from the river. A sudden breeze brought the sharp tang of a bonfire in at the window. The jig-saw was almost complete, but there was still one piece missing. And then, from the other end of the square, came the familiar sound of the Wednesday barrel-organ, playing, with a hundred apocryphal trills and arpeggios, the 'Blue Danube' waltz. And Mrs. Miniver, with a little sigh of contentment, rang for tea.

Mrs Miniver had me from the moment I read that perfectly contrived description of an idyllic English "tea". This book offers a perfectly worded and eminently quotable gem of propaganda-worthy hearth-and-home sentiment on almost every page. This could prove somewhat glutinous (especially given that, unlike her peer The Provincial Lady, Mrs. Miniver is financially secure in her world), except that Mrs Miniver is leavened by an often quite startling commentary on these idyllic pictures.

When Mrs Miniver has described the post-Christmas scene ("The room was laced with an invisible network of affectionate understanding"), this is cut with the comment that,

This was one of the moments, thought Mrs. Miniver, which paid off at a single stroke all the accumulations on the debit side of parenthood: the morning sickness and the quite astonishing pain; the pram in the passage, the cold mulish glint in the cook's eye; the holiday nurse who had been in the best families; the pungent white mice, the shrivelled caterpillars; the plasticine on the door-handles, the face-flannels in the bathroom, the nameless horrors down the crevices of armchairs; the alarms and emergencies, the swallowed button, the inexplicable earache, the ominous rash appearing on the eve of a journey; the school bills and the dentists' bills; the shortened stop, the tempered pace, the emotional compromises, the divided loyalties, the adventures continually forsworn.

Astonishing, isn't it?

Rating: 5/5. Loved it.

If you liked this... I don't think Mrs. Miniver will overtake The Provincial Lady for top place in my affections. There are less laugh-out-loud moments (except those swans: "Conceited brutes. They always look as though they'd just been reading their own fan-mail"). Must watch the film again. I retain the impression that I didn't like it.

That is a truly horrid cover.

{weekend words}

2012-03-03T12:07:00.000+10:30

"Genius can write on the backs of old envelopes, but mere talent requires the very best stationery that money can buy."

Jan Struther, 'Pens, Ink and Paper',

quoted in Valerie Grove's 1989 Introduction

to Mrs Miniver (1939)

{review} the best of everything

2012-02-27T12:23:00.000+10:30

Rona Jaffe The Best of Everything (1958)

You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls. Some of them look eager and some look resentful, and some of them look as if they haven't left their beds yet. Some of them have been up since six-thirty in the morning, the ones who commute from Brooklyn and Yonkers and New Jersey and Staten Island and Connecticut. They carry the morning newspapers and overstuffed handbags. Some of them are wearing pink or chartreuse fuzzy overcoats and five-year-old ankle-strap shoes and have their hair up in pin curls underneath kerchiefs. Some of them are wearing chic black suits (maybe last year's but who can tell?) and kid gloves and are carrying their lunches in violet-sprigged Bonwit Teller paper bags. None of them has enough money.

The whole time I was reading The Best of Everything (set in 1952) I realised that I would never be able to separate it in my head from Mary McCarthy's The Group ({REVIEW}; set in 1933). The characters could easily walk in and out of each others' books, despite the twenty year difference in their setting. Both are books in which women struggle to achieve their goals in a world where men hold nearly all the aces (I think I need to reassess my metaphors, but you get the picture).

Girls always think, ‘I am going to be the exception,’ Caroline thought; it’s a weakness of the species, like a collie’s tiny brain.

If you liked The Group, you will love TBOE. The office settings of the novel are also very, very 'Mad Men'-like (especially the drinking: "Waiters were moving through the crowd with trays of highballs, and everyone was drinking as if he were about to be set adrift on a raft").

In essence, The Best of Everything traces the lives of a group (there we go!) of women in New York. All are in some way associated with a publishing house. The main character, Caroline ("sensible and compassionate"), is determined to work her way out of the typing pool and into an editor's office but is not sure she possesses what it takes:

She was troubled, and thinking. She didn’t want to be a success if that meant watching out for people with dark lives who were afraid of you for no reason you could fathom.

Other girls in the office represent other 'types' of women, for instance, "the girls who thought life stopped on their wedding day in that one moment of perfect achievement, like the figures in Keats’s poem about the Greek vase." Then there's April, naively in search of a man to look after her; and Gregg, the part-time typist/actress - with "the sort of mouth that made smoking a cigarette look somehow sinful". The common theme is love - Caroline's inability to move on from the fiancé who dumped her; April's doomed pursuit of a spoiled playboy:

She was ninety-eight per cent in love with him already. It was a real New York success story, she was thinking, and now she knew what she had come to New York to find. Not business success, but love. Success in love was every bit as important as success in a career – even more so for a woman.

Then there's Gregg's obsession with a cold playwright ("The only thing in the world was this man she was following secretly, keeping him always in sight because he meant warmth and life and cheerfulness even in this bleak, empty landscape of the park"); Barbara, the divorcée single mother, surrounded by men who confuse love "with another four-letter word that people don’t mention in polite company" and fated to fall for a married man; Mary Agnes, entirely bound up in the plans for her wedding ("The office was a place to work and earn money, that was all... Her real life, the things that mattered to her, was at home on Crescent Avenue, in her cedar hope chest").

There were some lovers you could have once, and only once, and then you never wanted to have them again. Not that they weren’t skillful and considerate, because they usually were. But they had held each other out of loneliness and fear and curiosity and lust and hope that this time they would find something beautiful. And in the morning they would find sheets that looked like a geographical terrain, and perhaps an overturned ash tray on the rug beside the bed, and no trace whatever of the face of love.

One thing I admired about The Group was the precision with which McCarthy managed to weave the multiple protagonists' lives together, and this too is an admirable feature of The Best of Everything. If anything, TBOE lacks the crispness and the hard editing of The Group. It was a bit long and in places somewhat indulgent, I thought:

Daydreams are harmless and they do make a great difference; sometimes all the difference in the world while you’re waiting for something real and good.

It was interesting to read in the Introduction that The Best of Everything was a first novel and was published almost without any editorial input.

Rating: really enjoyed it, but it did go on a bit - 4/5.

If you liked this... I though The Group was better {REVIEW: where I also suggest Helen Gurney Brown's Sex and the Single Girl}

{weekend words}

2012-02-25T12:06:00.000+10:30

'What do you think about when you weed?' she said to me one day, as she sat and watched me busy among the onions. 'Well, all down that row I worried about the Linnet, and all down this one I'm worrying about Bill, and for the first three rows I worried about Libya, and for the next two our shipping losses, and - ' 'Stop!' said Lady B. 'I am an old woman,' she went on, 'and nobody expects me to do more than knit, but I'd never take a knitting needle in my hand again if I couldn't read at the same time and thus occupy my thoughts.' 'I wonder if one could read and weed?' I said. 'Of course you couldn't,' said Lady B. 'But it's time you snapped out of all this gloom, Henrietta. I think you'd better enter for the Bowling Tournament.' 'But I haven't played bowls since the war began.' 'That doesn't matter. I shall enter, too,' said Lady B recklessly. 'It will be unfortunate for our partners, but good for their self-control.'

Joyce Dennys (1986 [2010])

Henrietta Sees It Through:

More News from the Home Front

{review} until the final hour

2012-02-20T12:22:00.000+10:30

Traudl Junge (with Melissa Müller) Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary (2003)

Joachim Fest Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (2005)

Both of these books proclaim on their covers that they were the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie Downfall, which I have on whatever is the TBR equivalent of a To-Be-Watched pile.

Now all the self-delusion is over. Finally, at last, that desperate, seductive voice in me is silenced, the part of me that wouldn't see and know reality, that wanted to believe. At the same time I suddenly feel very sorry for Hitler. A hopelessly disappointed man, toppled from the greatest heights, broken, lonely... I feel guilty all of a sudden.

Traudl Junge, as the title suggests, was Hitler's last secretary. Junge was only 22 in 1942 when she began this role. This book is structured as a journal (although it was composed in 1947 rather than contemporaneously) of her time with Hitler. It is an extraordinary read, primarily, I think, because it offers such an intimate perspective on day to day life at the highest echelons of power as the Reich and its leader began to crumble.

Traudl Junge on her wedding day, June 1943 (source)

I approached it with a somewhat cautious eye: after all, this was someone who lived at close quarters with Hitler for three years; who was remarkably lucky to escape with her life when Berlin fell; and who presumably had a vested interest in denazification. Junge, in general, manages to walk a fine line between criticism ("But this time it did disturb me a lot to find someone describing himself as a genius") and enthusiasm (as when Hitler survives the von Stauffenberg - Valkyrie - bombing). Incidentally, she notes "he looked like a hedgehog" post-explosion.

Mostly, however, her memoir captures the viewpoint, concerns and enthusiasms of a young woman and offer rich details about, for instance, Hitler's views on lipstick (negative), smoking (ultra-anti), food preferences (bland and vegetarian), his health fads (many), marriages (a keen matchmaker), fondness for tea-parties, music ("The only pop music he would let us play was the 'Donkey Serenade'"), lederhosen (his knees were too white: see here), and avoiding provincial hotel rooms without en-suites because of the embarrassment of returning from the loo along a corridor lined with saluting yokels. There are also odd insights like Eva Braun's dislike of fat women and her desire to be a "beautiful corpse". As the end draws near, Junge captures moments of great pitifulness: the look on the face of the eldest Goebbels' child, or Frau Goebbels declaration that "Our children have no place in Germany as it will be after the war." The Goebbels will, of course, kill themselves and their six children.

One cannot help thinking about Arendt on the banality of evil. Junge has stated elsewhere that Hitler was "a pleasant boss". This boss sometimes seems far more like a Chaplinesque Great Dictator than a monstrous psychopath who would refer to his decision not to eliminate "thousands" back in 1934 coup thus: "Afterwards one regrets having been so benevolent."

It was salutary therefore to read Junge's memoir alongside Joachim Fest's account of the last days in the bunker, which retold the entire story from a rather more black-and-white viewpoint.

The bunker as photographed by William Vandivert, the first American photographer
to access the bunker after the fall of Berlin (source)

This is a very readable, almost popular, account of the last days, with plenty of structuring of the events within with those outside Berlin to give a broader historical perspective. Fest asks very interesting questions, the most significant (I thought) being - was what happened in Berlin inevitable? Fest's book is nearly as good as Junge's memoir at capturing the claustrophobia of those last days, trapped in a concrete bunker thirty-three feet below ground with a madman and an entourage that veered wildly between sycophantic and downright treacherous: "With treachery all around me, only misfortune has remained faithful to me - misfortune and my shepherd dog Blondi" (Hitler).

I felt depressed for days after reading these books, but the consequences of evil on this scale must never be allowed to be forgotten.

Rating: both 4/5.

If you liked this... for me it will be Downfall the movie, and probably The Great Dictator to restore my equilibrium.

source

{weekend words}

2012-02-18T12:00:00.000+10:30

‘Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’ Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘. . . Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly. ‘You are ignorant, boy,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘This is bad. And you are content to be ignorant, which is worse. Repeat after me, there are the living and the dead, there are day-folk and night-folk, there are ghouls and mist-walkers, there are the high hunters and the Hounds of God. Also, there are solitary types.’ ‘What are you?’ asked Bod. ‘I,’ she said sternly, ‘am Miss Lupescu.’ ‘And what’s Silas?’ She hesitated. Then she said, ‘He is a solitary type.’

Neil Gaiman (2008)

The Graveyard Book

{review} henrietta sees it through

2012-02-15T12:00:00.000+10:30

Joyce Dennys Henrietta Sees It Through: More News from the Home Front (1986 [2010])

The sequel to Henrietta's War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942 is almost as delightful as its predecessor.

Things on the home front are, of course, rather less lively by 1942, as the war drags on and more and more of the inhabitants of the little West Country village feel its effects. They are particularly irked that outsiders seem to think that they exist in a lost Eden of peacefulness.

This is a light-hearted book, which makes the small tragedies of war all the more poignant as everyone tries their hardest to maintain a stiff upper lip. As heartening morale-boosters, these well-crafted little letters to the mysterious 'My Dear Robert' are spot on. On the aftermath of enemy raid in the vicinity,

If it was Hitler's idea to strike terror into the hearts of sleepy West Country folk, then the whole thing was a failure, because it has simply made everybody very angry indeed. Lady B came round that evening, quite pink with annoyance. 'I'm in such a temper,' she said. Charles said he wished he could give her a little something, but there wasn't a drop in the cupboard. When we asked Lady B if she had been upset by the Incidents, she said no, she had got under the piano and taken some of Fay's Dog Bromide mixture, which had worked wonders. Lady B said Fay had been quite unmoved by each shattering explosion, and had remained in her basket with a bored expression on her face.

Henrietta (with her "two faithful hairpins, Castor and Pollux") is a delightful, scatty heroine, with her ability to get into all sorts of minor and very funny scrapes. Lady B. - Henrietta's companion in these scrapes and also her bulwark against the world's troubles - is a one of my absolute favourite characters.

Lady B.

'What do you think about when you weed?' she said to me one day, as she sat and watched me busy among the onions. 'Well, all down that row I worried about the Linnet, and all down this one I'm worrying about Bill, and for the first three rows I worried about Libya, and for the next two our shipping losses, and - ' 'Stop!' said Lady B. 'I am an old woman,' she went on, 'and nobody expects me to do more than knit, but I'd never take a knitting needle in my hand again if I couldn't read at the same time and thus occupy my thoughts.' 'I wonder if one could read and weed?' I said. 'Of course you couldn't,' said Lady B. 'But it's time you snapped out of all this gloom, Henrietta. I think you'd better enter for the Bowling Tournament.' 'But I haven't played bowls since the war began.' 'That doesn't matter. I shall enter, too,' said Lady B recklessly. 'It will be unfortunate for our partners, but good for their self-control.'

It is not all fun ("Watching me garden is one of our gardener's favourite pastimes. He never seems to tire of it…") and games: there are losses, constant worries about the children's safety, and so many small but significant sacrifices to make (pulping one's books!). There are also a couple of interesting little bits and pieces: I didn't realize that doctors were exempt from having to take in evacuees. I would like to know more about a passing reference to women being compensated less than men for war injuries. And now I shall pronounce Noel Coward as "Nole Card"!

Dennys' wit is so sharp:

"At the Labour Exchange I was interviewed by a Young Person whose lips were painted where her lips were not."

On war on the English character: "Perfect strangers, they say, make each other cups of tea."

We nearly won the Dog Race (Owner to Run Backwards), too, but just at the finish Perry caught sight of the spaniel and twisted his lead round my legs. Some people fall elegantly and gracefully - I am not one. When I got back to my chair, Lady B said, 'Fancy those knickers lasting all this time. Didn't you get them before the war?'

Perry, incidentally, is the dog who "did catch a mouse once, but only after Charles had hit it with a telephone directory"!

Rating: lovely, lovely book. 10/10.

If you liked this... a different kettle of fish, but Mollie Panter-Downes' war stories {REVIEW}.

{i ♥ books}

2012-02-14T08:00:00.000+10:30

Well, it is Valentine's Day...

juniper books via design*sponge

{review} the diary of a killer cat

2012-02-13T12:22:00.000+10:30

Well, I'd be lying if I said this was a review.

I was comparing 'worst-ever-cat-and-whatever-it-has-brought-inside' stories on Facebook, and a Friend said that I must read Anne Fine's The Diary of a Killer Cat (1994).

It's a 64 page Puffin for "younger children", available on the Kindle too, and it is very funny (um, if you are a cat lover - the rest of you had better just click onwards and don't hold it against me too much).

{weekend words}

2012-02-11T12:18:00.000+10:30

God, how difficult he was making it! Why couldn’t he have said right out that she was a slut and he’d see her damned before he married her? Well, there was the cauldron of boiling oil; there was nothing to do but to shut one’s eyes and jump right in.

W. Somerset Maugham (1941)

Up at the Villa

{miscellaneous} book bag

2012-02-09T12:00:00.000+10:30

I don't belong to a bookclub

and I've pretty much given up drinking,

but I had to buy this...

Source: the joy of ex foundation (etsy)

{review} the medici conspiracy

2012-02-06T12:21:00.000+10:30

Peter Watson & Cecilia Todeschini The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums (2007)

I might still be laughing over this book, if the blatant turning of a blind eye by major museums to the provenance of antiquities was not so serious. It is a cross-over book; sort of popular non-fiction, I suppose. I read it because I read a few blogs about looting (for example, looting matters) and because I am hopeful that we are witnessing a cultural shift in practices. Hopefully.

The core of this book is the story of the attempt to unravel the back-story of the "Euphronios vase". In 1972 the Metropolitan Museum in New York purchased the "Euphronios krater" for a million dollars. This was, at that time, an unparalleled sum for an ancient Greek vase.

The Euphronios Krater, c. 515 BC:

Sleep and Death carry off the body of

the dead warrior Sarpedon (source)

From the moment this vase appeared in the Met., a cloud hovered: where did this astonishingly well-preserved (and restored) vase come from? How did it make its way to the Met.? How many pockets were lined along the way? Which country had lost an apparently unrecorded part of its cultural heritage? Was it a fake?

'New' really good quality, previously unknown Greek vases most certainly are either fake or have come from illegal excavations. Most of the best examples of ancient Greek vases do not come from Greece, but were export wares to the Greek vase-loving Etruscans in Italy (just north of Rome). These people were buried in underground tombs carved from the soft stone of the region and they were buried with rich grave offerings including many Greek pots. One question we ask when a vase like this turns us is, what else might have come from a tomb which had contained such a splendid item?

Etruscan tomb at Cerveteri (source)

Etruscan wall-painting at Tarquinia ('Tomb of the Leopards'; source)

If an ancient object is taken from its original context in an illegal excavation, it is likely that all knowledge of this original context will be lost forever. We lose incredibly important information about the ancient culture when we lose the find spot of an object. We lose the ability to get as close to the ancient possessor of the object as we can get without actually being able to speak to them.

There are other couple of consequences: if the Met. is prepared to cough up a record price for an antiquity, the ripples are felt throughout the antiquities trade. A price like this encourages further illegal excavation; it encourages fakes; and it brings in a nice big fat commission to the middle men in their protected warehouses in Switzerland and to the auction houses. As the authors note, a new record for an antiquity with a dubious provenance quickly overcomes any moral impediment to the sale of further items.

From the Met.'s dodgy vase, the scene shifts to the purchasing practices of the John Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. The Italian government's painstaking work in building a case against the Getty curator Marian True is carefully laid out. True and the Getty were placed in an unfortunate position when a warehouse full of antiquities were discovered in the Geneva Free Port in 1995. The warehouse was associated with Giacomo Medici, an antiquities trader who had also been associated with the journey of the Met.'s vase to New York.

In the warehouse, authorities found a hugely detailed record of what had passed through Medici's hands, and this record included 1000s of polaroids showing the same antiquities in various states from fresh from the earth from their illegal excavation to partially restored to - unfortunately for certain museums - in their display cases.

The charges against True have been dropped by the Italian government but not before they had made their point that all future trade in antiquities illegally excavated from Italian soil would be pursued with a vengeance. A number of museums have since decided to return (sometimes as face-saving 'loans') items of dubious provenance, and it is likely that more will follow.

The authors build up a convincing picture of how the trade works and how it is possible to get around things like the 1970 UNESCO agreement (Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970) that should protect new discoveries.

I thought it most interesting to see how auction houses (not necessarily unwittingly) participate in the laundering of antiquities: although bidding on your own lot is forbidden, your own shell company might buy it and the dodgy antiquity will then effectively be laundered - passed back to you with a pile of legitimate paperwork to go with it and thus assist in its sale onwards. Another trick is to provide a fake provenance that ensures that the antiquity was apparently in an obscure private collection somewhere before 1970.

This is all fascinating (could have done with more images of the antiquities though) but this book is completely let down by its stereotyped players. I may be exaggerated a trifle, but almost all of the good guys (those trying to stop the trade or reclaim their country's lost patrimony) are short, jovial, witty, ebullient and dress with the style of Italians (even if they are Greek). They possess "a slightly academic temperament".

All the bad guys (tomb-robbers, middle-men, dealers) have lank hair but are tall, virile, dressed in leather, sweaty (no wonder) and/or closet homosexuals. They don't wear seatbelts. The bad girls use hair dye and fly to their philandering spouses' rescues with briefcases of cash.

The writing style is a form of modern sensationalism that one recognises from The Da Vinci Code. There are a lot of italics, just in case you don't get the point of things. The spelling is variable (Basle/Basel). There are some sentences which really ought to have been edited out, including my favourite: "Not everyone agrees with [X] in his judgments... but his... sheer resoluteness, has a certain magnificence."

I kept waiting for a self-flagellating albino to appear on the scene.

Bad writing and overcooked dramatics aside, this book is important because it offers a popular look at a really important issue - and one that is even more pertinent in the wake of the looting from, e.g., the Cairo Museum during the riots or the situation in Libya at the moment. What will happen to these stolen antiquities? You might think that the items are too well known to ever be passed on the antiquities market. However there are always people willing to acquire items of dubious provenance for their private collections. This book makes it clear, furthermore, that the curators of public collections are not immune to similar corner cutting when the collecting bug strikes.

You'll never look at a Greek vase in a museum in the same way again.

Rating: points for issue-raising; demerits for writing style, um 7/10?

If you liked this… I want to read the Jason Felch & Ralph Frammolino's Chasing Aphrodite. The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum (2011), a further exposé of the Getty Museum.

{weekend words}

2012-02-04T12:05:00.000+10:30

Henrietta found she did not read by herself. The two years away from school made it difficult to start. Perhaps it may seem strange that a girl who had been so eager at school, should not care to work by herself at home. But when there are no competitors and no Miss Arundel, work loses much of its zest for everyone except the real student, who is rarely to be found among men, still more rarely among women. And the last thing Henrietta would ever be was unusual. Clever, interesting schoolgirls are not at all uncommon, though not so general as clever, interesting children. But there are few who remain clever and interesting when they grow up. Uninspiring surroundings, and contact with life, or mere accumulation of years, take something away. Or perhaps it simply is that when they are grown up they are judged by a more severe standard.

F. M. Mayor (1913)

The Third Miss Symons

{bookplate love}

2012-02-02T12:21:00.000+10:30

bookcalendar.blogspot.com via skiourophile on Pinterest

{review} mrs ames

2012-01-30T12:11:00.000+10:30

E. F. Benson Mrs Ames (1912 [2010])

The smaller a piece of news was, the more vivid was her perception of it, and the firmer her grip of it: large questions produced but a vague impression on her. [on Mrs Altham]

Ah, the familiar vicissitudes of village life. But Mrs Ames is no charming Mapp and Lucia prequel. As the novel opens, Mrs Ames has seen off all rivals and is the undisputed queen-bee of Riseborough. There is some wonder among their set about how she has accomplished this:

In appearance she was like a small, good-looking toad in half-mourning; or, to stated the comparison with greater precision, she was small for a woman, but good-looking for a toad.

Mrs Ames is now 55 years old; her husband ten years younger. Her character is neatly summed up:

She felt that there was no call on her to gratify any curiosity that might happen to be rampant. She also felt that the chief joy in the possession of a sense of humour lies in the fact that others do not suspect it.

And this, one might suggest, will be Mrs Ames' downfall, for trouble looms on the horizon with the new doctor's wife Mrs Evans - "the fortunate possessor of that type of looks which wears well": "To fire the word 'flirt' at her, point-blank, would have been a brutality that would have astounded her." But, flirt she does, and a slowly drawn out version of chaos - and scandal - is the result as she attempts to capture a new male interest in her honeyed traps.

Unfortunately, her main target - the handsomest man in Riseborough - is Major Ames: "Merely an Odysseus who had never voyaged wondered what voyaging was like."

Major Ames was not really an untruthful man, but many men who are not really untruthful get through a wonderful lot of misrepresentation.

How will Mrs Ames extricate her husband from Mrs Evan's coils? And what role do the suffragettes have to play in the denouement? The suffragettes, incidentally, give Benson an excuse for a long rant on the topic, not all as positive in tone as this little bit:

Most of the members were women, whose lives had been passed in continuous self-repression, who had been frozen over by the narcotic ice of a completely conventional and humdrum existence.

E. F. Benson has the art of the vicious caricature down pat and I found the misogyny of Mrs Ames a bit hard to take in places (yes, yes, of the times, but I still don't have to like it). This is quite a mournful little tale all in all.

Rating: 7/10.

If you liked this: the Mapp and Lucia series - tonally more irresistible.

{weekend words}

2012-01-28T12:17:00.000+10:30

L to R: MacNeice, Hughes, Eliot, Auden, Spender; source

Re kittens, one must be called Old Foss after Mr Lear's famous cat. The other two might perhaps be called Barocco and Rokoko (Anthony [Blunt] read a paper on these last night). But cats have little interest in architecture, so perhaps Rodillardus and Chat Botté would be more appropriate -- though French is so difficult to pronounce. Other charming names that occur to me are Malinn, Fanfreluche, Cydalise, Poll Troy, Dobbin, Queen Anne, Pactolus, Parthenon, Laidronette, Midas, Oenone, Quangle Wangle (Mr Lear again), Amanda, Passionata and Perhaps. You may select from these -- but remember Old Foss.

Letter from a teenage Louis MacNeice

to his stepmother (?1926) quoted in

Nick Laird 'Chianti in Khartoum'

Review of Jonathan Allison (ed.)

Letters of Louis MacNeice (2010) in

London Review of Books

3 March 2011, vol. 33, no. 5., p.31

On the gerundive origins of 'Amanda' ("she who must be loved"),

see this nice piece at audio video disco.

{review} diary of a nobody

2012-01-23T17:38:00.000+10:30

George & Weedon Grossmith The Diary of a Nobody (1892)

I have finally read this wonderful, funny book. Why did I ever put it off so long?

The Diary of a Nobody presents the reader with the putative diary of a lower middle-class London clerk, Charles Pooter. Hence, 'pooterish':

A person resembling or reminiscent of the character Charles Pooter, esp. in displaying parochial self-importance, over-fastidiousness, or lack of imagination. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Poor Charles Pooter: nothing ever goes right or comes off as planned. All of his attempts at bettering his position or helping family and friends or entering society or fixing things or almost anything he attempts are doomed to go bizarrely wrong. Pooter is so terribly serious ("I don't often make jokes" - this is quite untrue, since he invents many, many poor witticisms) about getting things right and doing things properly. Yet nothing goes to plan and he is constantly humiliated. At the theatre his bow tie drops off over the balcony - so many of his clothes malfunction:

I was a little vexed at everybody subsequently laughing at some joke which they did not explain, and it was only on going to bed I discovered I must have been walking about all the evening with an antimacassar on one button of my coat-tails.

His DIY is doomed: his love of red enamel paint results in a personal coating of the aforementioned. He can't even buy a Christmas card without disaster. Mr Pooter is the Mr Bean of the Victorian era: "I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat."

His attempts to negotiate with those whom he perceives as lower in status are doomed to disaster:

...Borset, the butterman, who was both drunk and offensive. Borset, on seeing me, said he would be hanged if he would ever serve City clerks any more—the game wasn't worth the candle. I restrained my feelings, and quietly remarked that I thought it was possible for a city clerk to be a gentleman. He replied he was very glad to hear it, and wanted to know whether I had ever come across one, for he hadn't. He left the house, slamming the door after him, which nearly broke the fanlight; and I heard him fall over the scraper, which made me feel glad I hadn't removed it. When he had gone, I thought of a splendid answer I ought to have given him.

At every step he is foiled by his dreadful, unreliable sponging friends, his wastrel son, the son's dubious fiancée and friends, and - mostly - his own incompetence.

I wrote a very satirical letter to Merton, the wine merchant, who gave us the pass, and said, "Considering we had to pay for our seats, we did our best to appreciate the performance." I thought this line rather cutting, and I asked Carrie how many p's there were in appreciate, and she said, "One." After I sent off the letter I looked at the dictionary and found there were two. Awfully vexed at this.

The Pooter son is a ne'er-do-well only child who brings mayhem into the family home and nearly destroys the firm for whom his father works - despite Pooter's fond hopes for his son to follow in his footsteps into respectable toil:

I lay awake for hours, thinking of the future. My boy in the same office as myself—we can go down together by the ’bus, come home together, and who knows but in the course of time he may take great interest in our little home. That he may help me to put a nail in here or a nail in there, or help his dear mother to hang a picture.

The 'diary' is also a wonderful evocation of Victorian daily life: the decor of the rented house at "The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway", the endless reappearances of mutton and blancmange, the making-do with clothing and DIY home repairs, the parlour games (Pin the Tail on the Donkey), and what a loving Victorian wife must put up with ("Carrie back. Hoorah! She looks wonderfully well, except that the sun has caught her nose.")...

The last few weeks of my diary are of minimum interest. The breaking off of the engagement between Lupin and Daisy Mutlar has made him a different being, and Carrie a rather depressing companion. She was a little dull last Saturday, and I thought to cheer her up by reading some extracts from my diary; but she walked out of the room in the middle of the reading, without a word. On her return, I said: “Did my diary bore you, darling?” She replied, to my surprise: “I really wasn’t listening, dear. I was obliged to leave to give instructions to the laundress..."

Rating: 10/10. Must read.

If you liked this... I want to read another 'G' of the era, namely George Gissing: either New Grub Street or - one that's got some blog love of late (here; here) - The Odd Women.

{review} warm bodies

2012-01-23T12:20:00.000+10:30

Isaac Marion Warm Bodies (2010)

None of us are particularly attractive, but death has been kinder to me than some. I’m still in the early stages of decay. Just the grey skin, the unpleasant smell, the dark circles under my eyes. I could almost pass for a Living man in need of a vacation. Before I became a zombie I must have been a businessman, a banker or broker or some young temp learning the ropes, because I’m wearing fairly nice clothes. Black slacks, grey shirt, red tie. M makes fun of me sometimes. He points at my tie and tries to laugh, a choked, gurgling rumble deep in his gut. His clothes are holey jeans and a plain white T-shirt. The shirt is looking pretty macabre by now. He should have picked a darker colour.

Customarily I don't watch zombie films and I don't read zombie novels. Until now.

I couldn't resist curiosity killed the bookworm's recommendation, and I did enjoy this book a lot. It is a sort of zombie love story set in a post-apocalyptic American city - a "post-human, posthumous age". Something happened (we are never quite sure what) and zombies (the Dead) now roam the destroyed cities feeding on the surviving humans (the Living) who have been foolish enough to leave the shelter of their fortified encampments in a stadium and so on.

We start to smell the Living as we approach a dilapidated apartment building. The smell is not the musk of sweat and skin, but the effervescence of life energy, like the ionised tang of lightning and lavender. We don’t smell it in our noses. It hits us deeper inside, near our brains, like wasabi.

Warm Bodies is narrated by 'R', a zombie. Out on a hunting trip from the zombie nest in an abandoned airport, 'R' is happily eating the brain of a human when the memories of the victim (yes, you get a sort of TV image of people's memories as you munch their brain: "the good part, the part that makes my head light up like a picture tube... Flashes of parades, perfume, music . . . life. Then it fades") about a young woman, Julie, trigger some sort of change in 'R' and he finds himself beginning to alter. It is a feeling perhaps akin to coming to life. One manifestation of this is that he does not kill the young woman in question but takes her, still living, back to the airport to live with him.

The narrative is wonderfully funny (particularly on the theme of "I distracted myself with some groaning"; and "speed-lumbering") and bizarre ("I reach into my pocket and pull out my last chunk of cerebrum") to start with, but the introduction of a more serious authorial tone made the final third a bit of a drag for me as the funny love-story got bogged down in moralizing about how we humans had stuffed up and it was all our fault (the symbolism of 'rottenness' gets a good workout) and we needed to be redeemed by the outcast (Messiah?) zombie and the fallen human woman fighting against the patriarchal fun-censoring Father.

The 'message' takes itself a bit seriously with regards to this harsh world without literature where only survival matters (an interesting subplot is how zombies can't read):

No one I know has any specific memories. Just a vague, vestigial knowledge of a world long gone. Faint impressions of past lives that linger like phantom limbs. We recognise civilisation – buildings, cars, a general overview – but we have no personal role in it. No history. We are just here. We do what we do, time passes, and no one asks questions. But like I’ve said, it’s not so bad. We may appear mindless, but we aren’t. The rusty cogs of cogency still spin, just geared down and down till the outer motion is barely visible. We grunt and groan, we shrug and nod, and sometimes a few words slip out. It’s not that different from before. But it does make me sad that we’ve forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic.

The message can seem somewhat deliberately forced. There were also various elements in the narrative that didn't make much sense to me about the structure of the zombie society too but maybe that's because I'm a naive zombie user. The book is very cinematic with a vivid narration and action sequences (no surprise that it is being made into a film). The writing is very good.

All in all: mostly a very funny book with some great one-liners and plenty of zombie action. It didn't develop in quite the way I thought it might go.

Rating: 7/10. It is very funny.

If you liked this... I don't know. I've not read The Road, but I suspect it's that territory but with jokes. I recently enjoyed reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which also deals with the question of what makes one human.

{weekend words}

2012-01-21T12:17:00.000+10:30

Henry, I have a good mind to treat Mrs Ames as if she had not been so insulting to me that day (and after all that is only Christian conduct) and to take round to her after lunch tomorrow the book she said she wanted to see last July. I am sure I have forgotten what it was, but any book will do, since she only wants it to be thought that she reads.

E. F. Benson (1912)

Mrs Ames

{review} berlin

2012-01-19T12:15:00.000+10:30

Pierre Frei Berlin (2003 [German]; tr. 2006)

Berlin is a high quality crime novel, which I'd recommend if you like historical crime fiction set in Germany (post-war in this case, unlike so many of the similar efforts around which riff on the 1930s).

It had been like that the first time, and it was the same whenever his craving grew too strong and there was only one way to satisy it: with a young, blonde, blue-eyed woman and a cattle chain.

Yes, Berlin is another serial-killer novel, but is raised above the usual beautiful-woman-hacked-to-death-with-nasty-sexual-angle by detailed characterisation of the characters and their settings. This is a book where you can smell and feel the brutalised post-war city. It is jammed packed full of details about the workings of the occupied city as the Germans and Americans attempt to liaise about what may or not be a serial killing crime-wave imported straight from the States with the military occupiers.

This could have been a very ordinary book, given the basic serial killer premise (indeed, if you know any German, the killer's identity doesn't take long to figure out). But what worked really well for me in this - very long - book was how Frei took one victim at a time and transported the reader back in time to the character's early life (and a nice chunk of 1930s' Germany as well) and her journey towards that moment when her path crossed with that of the killer. The victims come (um, briefly) alive in these biographies and it is a really effective means of ensuring that the apparent randomness of their murders evokes our full sympathy for rich lives cut brutally short. This is classy historical crime fiction.

There are many other threads which stitch this book together: the life of the German detective who has to figure out what is going on; the life of the American liaison officer as he falls for - you guessed it - a potential victim; and a quirky little strand about the the life of the son of the detective which should really be quite extraneous to the narrative but which manages both to add depth to the depiction of the city and to stitch up the plot. Incidentally, this youth is exactly the same age that Frei would have been in Berlin in 1945.

A small[type] warning: Berlin is a big book and the writing is very, very small in the Atlantic Books paperback (2006). The font is hideously narrow. It was painful to read. Maybe this explains proof-reading slips such as would/wound, acused, fourth/forth.

Rating: not the most original of crimes, but the settings and characters push it to the next level. 7/10.

If you liked this... I am very sentimental about M. M. Kaye's Death in Berlin (1955) - a rather gentle post-war Berlin detective novel/romance.

{review} do androids dream of electric sheep?

2012-01-16T12:20:00.001+10:30

Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Never in his life had he personally seen a raccoon. He knew the animal only from 3-D films shown on television. For some reason the dust had struck that species almost as hard as it had the birds - of which almost none survived, now. In an automatic response he brought out his much-thumbed Sidney's and looked up raccoon with all the sublistings. The list prices, naturally, appeared in italics; like Percheron horses, none existed on the market for sale at any figure. Sidney's catalogue simply listed the price at which the last transaction involving a raccoon had taken place. It was astronomical. 'His name is Bill,' the girl said from behind him. 'Bill the raccoon. We acquired him just last year from a subsidiary corporation.'

I'm a huge Blade Runner fan but have never read the story on which it is very, very loosely based. This is due partly to laziness and partly to a perception on my part that I do not like the sci-fi genre very much. I do, however, appreciate a good story (almost) regardless of genre.

Set in 1992 (changed to 2025 in later editions!), our hero Rick Deckard inhabits a post-apocalyptic San Francisco Bay. A nuclear war has killed off almost all the animals and many of the humans. Most of the survivors have emigrated to colonies in space. A major status symbol for the remaining humans is to own a real animal, and animals are integral to the story as a key to comprehending what it is to be human in a world where humans can dial-your-own emotion on waking in the morning before spending the day tuned in to mindless TV and religious brainwashing:

From the bedroom Iran’s voice came. 'I can’t stand TV before breakfast.'
'Dial 888,' Rick said as the set warmed. 'The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it.'

Deckard is a bounty hunter who executes rogue androids who make it to earth and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? represents one day in his life, in pursuit of six rogue androids of the latest, most humanoid type, who have escaped from Mars.

Rick said, 'You compare favourably to Schwarzkopf.'
'Who are you?’ Her tone held cold reserve - and that other cold, which he had encountered in so many androids. Always the same: great intellect, ability to accomplish much, but also this. He deplored it. And yet, without it, he could not track them down.

The ability to empathize, we find, is basically all that separates humans from the androids built as a slave workforce for the colonies. But the search for these particular androids will test every belief that Deckard holds about what makes us human and our perceived superiority over other beings.

He shook his head, as if trying to clear it, still bewildered. 'The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.'

This is such a rich book, with its elaborate religio-mythologizing and double-crossings and cul-de-sacs and pseudo-science (how do you test empathy?) and moments of quiet sadness vs. brutal violence, and I am glad that I didn't let my dislike of the genre prevent me from reading what is a classic work of sci-fi.

Rating: 9/10.

If you liked this... I want to read Dick's Minority Report now. And watch Blade Runner again (although now I know that the book is better). Have you seen Sean Young's Polaroids from the filming?

Rutger Hauer & Sean Young

{weekend words}

2012-01-14T12:04:00.000+10:30

I spent the week over Christmas/NY trying to catch up with a monstrous pile of neglected LRBs.

In wartime Los Alamos, there was a conversation piece known as the Fermi Paradox, posed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Given the high overall probability that intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe, why hadn’t the extraterrestrials made contact? ‘They are among us,’ Leó Szilárd replied, ‘but they call themselves Hungarians.’ The story was told by the Hungarians themselves and it went like this: the Men from Mars were a restless sort and, in search of new worlds to colonise, they long ago came to Earth, landing on the banks of the Danube. They had effectively concealed their true identity, but there were several signs that could give away their Martian origins. One was their wanderlust: they loved to travel and they readily upped sticks; second was their language, which had no known earthly relation; and third was their supernatural intelligence – they knew things, and could think in a way, that no other people did. One could add a corollary: though they often had a profound understanding of the whole spectrum of mere earthly culture, they seemed to understand it, as it were, from the outside. When one of the Martians, the mathematician John von Neumann, was appointed to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study at the age of 29, a story went around that he was ‘a demigod but had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly’. In Britain and America, the Martian-English accent was much loved and, sometimes, much played up by its speakers, adding both to its charm and its otherworldly weirdness.

Steven Shapin
'An Example of the Good Life'

[Review of Michael Polanyi and His Generation by Mary Jo Nye]

London Review of Books 15/12/2011 [vol.33, no.24, p.23]

{d.m.} ronald searle

2012-01-12T12:12:00.000+10:30

D.M.*
Ronald Searle

{obits: guardian; telegraph}

A 1975 Searle postcard from flickr

Searle loved books and cats,
which places him very high up in my Pantheon.

On my family's bookshelves we have - as well as a handful of St Trinian's and the Molesworth (the latter written by Geoffrey Willans) books - Ronald Searle's Cats (1967; rev. 2005) and the wonderfully crazy Slight Foxed - But Still Desirable (1989), Searle's illustrations of the terminology of antiquarian book catalogues (appropriately, given the context, first editions aren't cheap). There are some images from the book on flickr (and there's an amazon preview).

*Note: "D.M." is a reference to the Manes.

{review} i could never be lonely without a husband

2012-01-09T12:03:00.000+10:30

Djuna Barnes I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes (Virago 1987)

"Well, let's stop it."
"We can't, not yet; I have at least three pages more to fill."
"Have you been making notes?"
"I don't have to. My memory always makes a paragraph out of a note automatically." ['The Confessions of Helen Westley']

This is an extraordinary book.

I wanted to read more of Djuna Barnes' writing after I read Nightwood (1936) {REVIEW}, and I was very pleased to stumble across this Virago [the book, not Barnes!] in a second-hand bookshop. In theory, this volume collects some of Barnes' interviews with celebrities in a variety of predominantly New York magazines and newspapers from 1913 to 1931. In practice, this volume is very much about Barnes herself, by herself. I initially wondered if this impression was because I had heard of so few of these once famous people she interviewed - boxers, nightclub singers, evangelists, stage actors, Russian dancers, film producers, - and so I had only Barnes' voice to cling to in these little pieces. But, no, I think it is about Barnes in the end.

The editor of the volume suggests that Barnes almost certainly tidied up her interviewees' impressive bon-mots: "Sometimes I regret I was not a Roman. They had such a lot of time and baths." ['Diamond Jim Brady'] She also apparently didn't take many notes.

The interviews are witty (veering not infrequently into that dangerous Aristotelian region of 'wit' as 'educated insolence': thus someone has "a laugh like a submerged French pastry shop"), racy, incredibly broad in scope (ranging from the Great War to lingerie in a space of sentences) and very, very smart. She has a wonderful ear for both the absurd and the truly melancholy.

I could never be lonely without a husband, but without my trinkets, my golden gods, I could find abysmal gloom. [Lillian Russell in 'I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband, Says Lillian Russell']

Well, unless you are a master at suicide, can do it nicely without messing the furniture up or spoiling your collar, I should say no, because at some time a chance to be great comes to us all. Even if it is at the last moment, one still has a chance to change his will or say something in Latin, Latin being the language of those about to cross the river. [Irvin Cobb in 'Irvin Cobb Boasts He Is Still Just a Country Boy']

She is capable of completely subverting the form of an interview (so 'Lou Tellegen on Morals and Things' is written in the form of a play!). I would not like to be on the receiving end of a Barnes' interview: "With hands outspread in hope of collecting profit, I came into the presence of Wilson Mizner, and therein he threw the tinsel of his wit" ['Wilson Mizner - of Forty-fourth Street'; ouch]. She is occasionally openly hostile ['The Tireless Rachel Crothers'], sometimes openly jealous of others' success ['Donald Ogden Stewart Confides the Secret of Worldly Success'], and she possesses a rapier sharp eye and a dogged determination to dig in deep. How many interviewers could get away with writing that their subject "droned on" [on 'Mother' Jones in 'I'm Plain Mary Jones of the U.S.A.']! Or this:

"Really, Djuna, you are sort of clever, aren't you?"
"I am only a little less conceited than you yourself, Helen." ['The Confessions of Helen Westley']

Djuna Barnes

It often seems as though it is Barnes' own persona being crafted through these interviews as much as her subjects'. Her pronunciations tend towards the obscurely oracular (which can be irritating): "Her silences are organic bickering; when she does not speak she is profoundly articulate." [on 'Mother' Jones, again].

Someone has told me that I have a peculiar habit of noticing mouths. I have, and when I see one that does not merge into the rest of the face, I want the world to know about it, a mouth that is a personality upon a person. [in 'Alfred Stieglitz on Life and Pictures: One Must Bleed His Own Blood' {incidentally, there is a most interesting article on Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe in the NYRB here}

As contemporary documents of an era, they contain interesting material: for instance, there is the stage actor who reflects on the new world of cinema and offers thoughts on the new art as a means of conferring immortality ['John Bunny']; or the black actors of the controversial The Green Pastures Broadway hit. Many of Barnes' subjects were exiles from a Europe at war or Russia in revolution - trying to establish themselves in America away from their loved ones. Many have seen or experiences extremes of brutality. Barnes is undoubtedly attracted to survivors. There is a lot of abrasive rubbing of the old vs. the new as these exiled cosmopolitans encounter the [from their perspective] limited cultural fora of the New World. There are interviews with a couple of super-stars (from our perspective) - James Joyce (the writer of greatest importance to Barnes' style) and Coco Chanel. The book ends with a lovely Coco-ism: "Personally, nothing amuses me after twelve o'clock at night!" ['Nothing Amuses Coco Chanel After Midnight', 1931].

Rating: a collection of interviews more interesting because of the interviewer than the subjects! Most of the pieces also have a very free drawing by Barnes of her subject. I wish the editor had included full publication details. 7/10 (too many boxers).

If you liked this: Nightwood?! Maybe some Fitzgerald jazz age short stories?

{weekend words}

2012-01-07T08:49:00.000+10:30

"And there was also of course Rebecca West, whom [H. G. Wells] called his 'panther', and by whom he had a son (whose middle name was Panther) in 1914. West was particularly critical of his writing about sex: 'His prose,' she wrote, 'suddenly loses its firmness and begins to shake like blancmange.' She had a tendency to associate Edwardian male writers with jellied substances: she described being kissed by Ford Madox Ford as 'like being the toast under a poached egg.'

Colin Burrow 'Big Head, Many Brains'

[Review of David Lodge's A Man of Parts]

London Review of Books 16/6/2011 [vol.33, no.12] p.19