The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Wishing our U.S. readers a Very Happy Thanksgiving!

Sarah Vowell is not your average historian, she’s quirky, funny and revels in irony. She hunts down the oddities in the past and presents them in glowing neon. Her previous bestseller, Assassination Vacation, was an irreverent account of trips made with her nephew to tombs and landmarks of slain presidents. Her latest is about the Puritans who emigrated to America and only she could make such stern folks amusing.
She tells us of the various sects and main personalities, such as John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts(whom she admires), Anne Hutchinson “the Puritan Oprah”, and Roger Williams, an upstart teacher who thought the original Plymouth Rock colony too lax, so went off and founded the state of Rhode Island with stricter rules. She mocks all of the infighting and power struggles saying participants would “..engage in the 17th century New England version of a duel: pamphlet fight!”
Vowell disputes the sexual repression of the Puritans with evidence of quotes and songs, many obviously influenced by Song of Solomon. Offering her own Biblical commentary, she calls the book of 2nd Samuel “…an otherwise R-rated chronicle of King David’s serial killer years.” She points out that “The United States is often called a Puritan nation. Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary.”
Anecdotes, popular culture references and puppet shows all play a part in Vowell’s writings, the reader laughs and learn. Her books are educational while being highly amusing and vastly entertaining. I can hardly wait for the next one.

Riverhead Books 2008, recently released in paperback    254 pp. ISBN 978-1-59448-000-0

A Review from the Soapbox – Stalin’s Nemesis: the exile and murder of Leon Trotsky, by Bertrand M. Patenaude

Stalin’s Nemesis came to me very highly recommended: a Radio 4 Book of the Week, it had met an enthusiastic reception in very diverse quarters. Richard Overy at the Literary Review liked it. The Socialist Party, with some reservations, liked it. Tariq Ali liked it, although I half suspect he liked it in order to make a point about Robert Service.  (We shall come back to Service at another time.) The TLS liked it, but liked Service even better.  The Scotsman liked it. All over the place, people liked it, even if their liking sometimes seemed to be more ideologically driven than anything.

I did not like it.

This was, of course, no Young Stalin.  But it was a book that – however well received – was not to my taste as a reader or as a historian, for two quite different sets of reasons.  Moreover, a great deal of my reaction to this book was not even necessarily specific to Patenaude’s text, but reflects my general dislike for certain conventions of historical biography.  That is why I am once again introducing Good Kirsty and Bad Kirsty (forgive the ridiculous aspect of moral judgment, but it was quicker that way), who appeared in a previous review of Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba.  Good Kirsty is my inner historian; the uptight one in charge of my thesis.  Bad Kirsty, who isn’t actually bad but merely mouthy and easily worked up, is my inner reader. (She doesn’t know much about Art, but she knows what she likes).

Their take on Stalin’s Nemesis, and biography in general, follows.

Good Kirsty: You start.

Bad Kirsty: No, you start.

GK: No, you… OK, I’ll start.  I had a lot of problems with this book, many of them practical.  As I work on Trotsky and more generally on memoir, biographies have two main uses for me.  I can use them to look at the various ways people write about historical figures, and I can also use them for reference.  I have issues with biography as a form of history; even the best ones risk placing the focus too much on that one person, and more often than not it’s the author’s preoccupations that end up colouring the whole picture.  But a well annotated and scholarly biography can be really useful for me in checking chronology and chasing up further sources.  I have a few biographies of Trotsky that I use for that purpose all the time.

This is the source of one of my biggest annoyances.  Stalin’s Nemesis isn’t footnoted/endnoted in the traditional sense.  Instead of numbered citations in the body of the text, the notes are organised by page number.  In other words, whenever you find yourself wondering “where did the author get that from?”  (a frequent question for me as Patenaude tends to go ahead and cite sources, directly or indirectly, without any further reflection) you have to flick ahead to the Notes section, find the page number, and you might see something like:

24  heroic defence of Petrograd: My Life, 423-435

Which technically does point you to where the author got the information – and there is a glossary of full titles – but still leaves you in the dark as to how that information was used.  (I can see where possibly the idea was to keep the main text uncluttered, but I don’t think this was a successful strategy, at least from a reference point of view).   Or worse yet, you might see:

137 strenuous time: Van, 104-5

referring to Trotsky’s secretary, Jean Van Heijenoort, by his nickname, or even:

27  bloodthirsty chorus: Natalia, 210

“Natalia” refers here, not to one of the millions of other Natalias populating Russia’s history, but to Trotsky’s second wife Natalia Sedova.  The constant repetition of “Trotsky and Natalia” throughout the text was already up for argument – why should Trotsky be referred to by his last name but Sedova exclusively by her first? – but in a citation it ought to be Sedova, surely.  That sits very badly with me.

BK: The Trotsky/Natalia thing irritated me too.  And it might be that you’ve brainwashed me, but I did find it hard to enjoy the narrative because so much of it was essentially a dramatic reconstruction of events.  I constantly found myself asking “but how do you know that?”  And so much of the language seemed unnecessarily florid, the speculation too intense.  I felt uneasy, as I did with Dancing with Cuba, at the idea that this version of events is presumably supposed to carry a certain authority (and Patenaude’s academic profile would suggest that it is).

I’m quite capable of reading Trotsky’s own accounts of his life for enjoyment, knowing that he’s the ultimately flawed source and seeing perfectly well where the narrative is a little too convenient or the narrator unrealistically omniscient; and his language is even more florid than Patenaude’s, come to think of it.  I can do the same for a historical novel or film if it’s really well done as entertainment.  But with biography I rarely if ever have that enjoyment, and certainly not with this particular strain of biography.

Perhaps the problem is the sense of disconnection.  Reading a memoir, you engage directly with that person’s version of events, which is of course inherently unreliable, but unreliable at first hand.  Whereas biography gives you the story at second or third hand.  It can feel very much like hearing someone gossip about a mutual acquaintance.  And Patenaude’s biography is deeply gossipy.  It has been praised for being frank about Trotsky’s sex life, for example, but of course that still comes down to speculation; necessarily so.  To me a passage like this one (on Trotsky’s plan of escaping to a neighbour’s house in the event of an attack) feels prurient rather than brave:

The young woman in question was Frida’s sister Cristina.  Before a rehearsal could be arranged, however, she approached Van and explained that during the previous several months Trotsky had on four or five occasions directly and insistently propositioned her.  She had managed to deflect these unwanted advances without raising a fuss.  She also told Van that Trotsky had divulged to her the escape plan and the anticipated rehearsal.  Van was angry that Trotsky would risk compromising his security for a sexual liaison, but he said nothing.  There turned out to be no need, because Trotsky stopped pushing for a rehearsal, possibly sensing that its true purpose had been discovered.  Yet how many times must the Old Man have raised the ladder and rehearsed the escape plan in his mind. (p. 64)

(Those first names and nicknames again!)

Not that the personal life of the subject isn’t to be written about.  It might even be a particularly interesting topic with someone like Trotsky, who so effectively obscured his personal life in his own literature.  But…

GK: But surely it’s one thing to write about the stories that emerge from the literature around Trotsky – or indeed any historical figure – weigh them up, analyse them, take them apart; and quite another effectively to retell them verbatim?

BK: Yes.  Although I do understand that instinct.  After all, it’s biography.  You’re writing a narrative, not a thematic discussion of the sources. If you choose that form, you’re bound by its constraints.  And surely the general reader doesn’t want or need to be swamped in a heavy-going discussion of what may or may not be reliable.

GK: I take the point – and freely admit traditional biography is not the form I would myself choose – but even so, there seems to be a trend in writing about Soviet history in particular that equates popular or accessible to sensational(ist).  Of course sensational biographies are old news; just look at Suetonius.  But there seems to be a gulf between what we now see as popular history and academic history that is arguably quite new.  Isaac Deutscher’s three volume Trotsky biography (published between 1954 and 1963)  was also addressed to a general audience, and it has certainly lasted the test of time as an accessible introduction to Trotsky as well as a reference for specialists.  But Deutscher’s books are dense.  They are deeply partisan, and of course they are limited by the context of the time, but they are monumentally well shored-up. Whereas Stalin’s Nemesis, to take just one example (*cough*Montefiore*cough*) has this emphasis on a slick, exciting narrative with plenty of colourful language.  Much closer to a historical novel than anything.

BK: I wonder how much of this comes from the authors, or the academic community, and how much from the publishers or even directly from the readership?

GK: I honestly don’t know.  I suspect a combination of all of the above (answers on a postcard please!). But the success of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: a History – to take one example in Russian studies – would suggest to me that people aren’t actually averse to buying and reading “difficult” history books.

BK: I agree.  I’ve come across a lot of individuals who are always ready to proclaim that people are somehow more stupid than they used to be (almost always over a matter of taste, and never including the speaker under “people”, of course).  I think that’s an extraordinarily bad place from which to start.

GK: Personally, I always wonder how a book like, for example, Geoffrey Swain’s biography of Trotsky (Longman, 2006) – which is very readable and succinct as well as scholarly – would fare if it had a “commercial” publisher and even half of the promotion accorded to “popular” biographies.

BK: Get you and your scare quotes.

GK:  Well, those terms are hardly written in stone… and while I certainly agree with your point above that someone buying a book to read for interest probably doesn’t want to be hit with the whole debate about the sources, I always think there’s something rather condescending about the idea that popular and academic history are somehow opposites, that one simply can’t present a complex subject to a general audience without streamlining it into something far simpler. The act of writing a biography already streamlines the various facts and perspectives around the subject into a narrative.  But that doesn’t mean a biography has to be simply a story.  The best biographies I have read are the ones that acknowledge the areas where there is doubt or confusion or a plain lack of evidence.  They engage with the sources, whereas Patenaude’s text looks rather like a patchwork of different accounts.

BK: And I think it does interfere with the readibility too.  I’m never sure quite what this kind of biography is supposed to be.  The subject itself is of course very serious, although with Trotsky there’s always wit.  But then this rather breathless, overexcited narrative and the cartoonish descriptions just make the whole thing seem over the top.  I suppose when you’re dealing with a subject who not only had a dramatic life but such a big, dramatic, personality – not to mention such a florid writing style – as Trotsky, adding even more hyperbole can just make it all too rich to digest.  At least, that’s the effect it had on me: I got tired of all the excitement.  I just wanted to engage with the story, which I know very well is an interesting one, and hear what the author had to say about it based on the evidence.  But no clear perspective emerges among all the colour and muddle.

GK: Well, I think we’ve probably gone on too long.  Time to sign off.  We’ll be back for Robert Service, though.

BK: Oh yes.  We certainly shall be.

Fade out with scary music.

Faber and Faber, 352 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0571228751

Roads Ahead, Edited by Catherine O’Flynn

Tindal Street Press is a small regional publisher based in Birmingham. With many prize-winning books on its lists (including three Booker Prize nominees: Clare Morall’s Astonishing Splashes of Colour,  Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost and Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in A Blue Dress) – it is well-known for punching above its weight.

Launched a decade ago with a collection of short stories called Hard Shoulder, Tindal Street put themselves on the map when it came to finding new regional voices – particularly from the Birmingham and Midlands areas.  Now, ten years on, they have brought out a new anthology, Roads Ahead.

Ok, first off, let’s get things clear. I am not a great short story reader. I am part of those much-moaned-about masses that tend to eschew the short story form in favour of other forms. Novels. Or plays. Or even non-fiction (shock horror). Anne Brooke is the great VL short story reviewer; I am just a pale pretender.

But when Tindal Street offered this collection for review,  I jumped at the chance. First, being from a publisher with a strong regional focus, I was hoping to find something different: some interesting settings and specificity of place. Secondly, Tindal Street  invited open submissions for this project – a rare and exciting opportunity for both writers and readers. As Catherine O’Flynn says in her introduction:

“Writers aren’t often invited to submit material. They’re more used to being explicitly asked not to and told that, if they do, their work will just be shredded, or recycled, or made into paper aeroplanes: but on no account read.”

The third reason is the fabulous cover (shallow of me, I know).

Editor, Catherine O’Flynn, likens this collection to a pick ‘n’ mix of sweets – or a “10p mixup” as was common when she was a child: the pleasure being that you don’t know what is coming next. Certainly this anthology is full of variety of locations: we have stories set in Birmingham, Buenos Aires and Nigeria; in locales such as a sealife aquarium, a deserted farm, a drug-riddled estate. There is also a satisfying mix of subject matter.

In general, the collection favours quite traditional stories: character over concept, realism over stylistic experimentation, ordinary life over mad fantasies.  The tone is predominantly young, urban, sharp and observant – and there is an accessibility and lack of pretentiousness to this whole collection that is very likable indeed.

However, despite all this variation of place and subject, there does seem to be a slight similarity of style and form. Most are accessibly written in traditional style. Most have a first person voice that is fairly casual and straightforward. Most use a bit of slang and modern references – but not too much; have a bit of comedy – but not too much; a bit of bleakness – but not too much. Many seem to go for a realistic setting that escalates either into a dramatic dark twist or towards a more downbeat note at the end.

Shooters by Michelle Singh and Six of the Best by Iain Grant both suffer a little from dark twist syndrome. Singh’s writing about place is impressive and Grant has a straightforward likable style laced with dark comedy moments that is very appealing. But the curiously realistic and believable situations in both stories are unbalanced by their slightly overblown endings.

A couple of stories used the macrocosm of outside events in the wider world to mirror the microcosm of personal relationships.

The most interesting and successful of these is Table Rock Lake by David Savill where a black American man tries to find out more about his  white male soldier lover’s  abuses in Iraq. The veil of secresy that hangs over the details of the case seems to mirror the taboo and the unacknowledged and unsaid  that surrounds their own private relationship.

There were some stories that I really enjoyed but wondered if they were more like beginnings of novels than complete stories – particularly those where character came more to the fore. The book opens with the lovely and likeable tale called The Chest. I loved this story – the characters are terrific, the style is easy, funny and engaging, and the premise is bizarre and original (two people squabbling over a chest they find in the street). However, I felt it was slightly let down by the rather predictable short story style ending – the “profound bit” if you like. I understand why it might have been rounded off in this way, but I couldn’t help feeling that the originality of the story and its comedy – yes, comedy – should have been allowed to stand alone. This was one story where I enjoyed the characters so much that I wanted to spend more time with them and I would love to see something longer by its writer, Kathryn Simmonds.

Two of the stories that really stood out for me took very different approaches to each other, yet both felt complete and right in the form. Both have stayed with me and both seemed to capture something true without seeming to try too hard.

Like a sudden burst of Beckett in the middle of all the traditional formats, Since Charlie Hadn’t Come by Chris Smith is like a breath of fresh air, very moving, and beautifully complete. About an elderly man living in rural isolation, this story  is richly imaginative and poetic, changing the tempo and acting as a contrast to the more naturalistic everyday tone  elsewhere. It is a confident story, balancing what it lets us know and what it doesn’t let us know with great skill. With its strong symbolic imagery and confident imagination, it shows how powerful the short story can be and it is the one that – for me – engages most with the form. I would have welcomed more stories that were less traditional in style and tone such as this one .

The other story that I admired greatly – for different reasons – is Kavita Bhanot’s A Float for Shez. This story is the other extreme – so normal, so everyday and very traditional in form, about the subtle shifts and power relations in friendships between schoolgirls, and yet the characterisation is so well done, the understanding of behaviour and emotions so perceptive that it is elevated above the usual. Bhanot has done that other thing that short stories can do so well– captured perfectly the small interactions between people, the seemingly small moments. She does this with her sense of realness – of time, of place, of people: of the way those people interact.  She does not throw it all away with a self-conscious ending, rather she has faith that that she has captured it well enough for it to deliver.  And it does.  Again, this story has a kind of uniqueness to it and a completeness. It just feels right.

Taking the book as a whole, I set to wondering about the considerations and problems of putting together such a collection.  How do we read short stories as readers? Do we take them one by one? Is there a sense of the whole in a book such as this or are we just expected to dip in and out of it? How important is the juxtaposition and placement of the stories? Should they flow together, go together – or should they rudely contrast with each other?

Short story collections, I decided in the end, should ideally be like music albums. Or concertos. Whilst the stories are all separate, there should be some sense of rhythm – even the rhythms of light and dark, comedy and tragedy, the rhythms of theme and setting even….that takes us through from one to the other, so that even whilst we pick and choose we feel our tastebuds watering in anticipation.

Roads Ahead is a lively collection of readable, likeable and interesting stories with a diversity of settings (both national and international), characters and ideas. For me, to have become a really great collection, it needed a wider diversity of writing styles and to have taken a few more risks.  But, as a  fitting way to celebrate 10 years of Tindal Street and as a manifesto of intent for the future, this collection certainly made me curious to find out what roads lie ahead both for the writers featured within its pages and for Tindal Street Press itself.

304 pages, published by Tindal Street Press (Sept 2009). ISBN-13: 978-1906994006

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Other links

Website of Tindal Street Press

Leena’s original Vulpes Libris review of Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost here.
RosyB’s  interview with  Catherine O’Flynn for Vulpes Libris

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When she’s not palely pretending to be stern and serious  for VL, RosyB writes comedy novels. You can find out more here.

Places Left Unfinished At The Time Of Creation, by John Phillip Santos

How little I knew about Southern Texas and the Mexican border country before I read this atmospheric memoir. Mention Texas, and Oil, Dallas, Houston, the Bush family would have come first to my mind. Only vaguely would I have remembered that for centuries the present day border between the US state of Texas and Mexico had been permeable, and in transmissible memory, shifting. Since the Conquest, John Phillip Santos’s San Antonio home in Southern Texas was part of Nueva España, later part of an an independent state, finally a late-comer to the Unites States. The people of Mexican origin that fate has cast up on one side of the border or the other naturally have a sense of heritage that transcends it.

In this passionately evocative memoir, John Phillip Santos weaves a fabric out of the threads of his Mexican ancestry, and considers how his family have come to make their home in Southern Texas, what they have brought with them, and what they left behind.

Santos’s way back to the history of his border-transcending land and cultural heritage is the family, through which near-direct connections can be made across more than one century, by family members who lived well into their nineties with recollection intact, repository of family memory – and family forgetting. The narrative is woven together from the strands of the four families that converged in his parents’ marriage.

On his father’s side, the families Santos and Garcia came north to San Antonio from the Mexican border province of Coahuila, when the revolutionary politics of 1914 threatened danger to homes and families. His mother’s family were Tejanos, from around Cotulla and Laredo, of whom he says

The long history of the Lopez and Velas in south Texas and the borderlands left them with that aloof quality that comes from seeing many nations come and go as would-be masters of the land. The United States of America was only one incarnation. They knew there had been other worlds before this one, even if they might not be able to name them.

For me this passage, even though it refers to just one element of a multi-layered narrative, has proved important in my understanding of the whole. The bigger picture is the centuries-old history of a greater Mexico and Nueva España, and the microcosm is the family, politics merely distant thunder. The revolutionary period in Mexico of 1910-14 is the event that changes the destiny of his father’s family, but this is not the book to read for the history of that revolution. The family became an American family, but we do not learn about the US political landscape here. Rather, we learn what it means to treasure and celebrate the mestizo heritage, its melded elements drawn from ancient pre-conquest knowledge and culture, and from the Conquistadores’ Hispanic culture and Roman Catholic christianity.

I had some difficulty with the structure of the narrative at first, as it seemed so fragmentary – only with a bookmark in the section of family trees, and with Google maps open in front of me, did I learn to cope with it for about the first 100 pages. But gradually, the idea of a tapestry being woven, and threads of narrative stretching out and looping back, became much clearer. Santos’s life takes him away from San Antonio to study and work, but a thread connects him to his family, and a tug on it will bring him back. His poetic imagination (so very vividly on display in this narrative) is fed by the disjointed memories, and the inherited knowledge of his extended family, brought up as he is in a tradition that revers ‘the Elders’. As a boy, he discovers the legendary Voladores, and their ancient pre-conquest ritual dance, when San Antonio hosted the exhibition ‘Hemisfair’. Later, in Oxford, he finds voladores in a pre-conquest codex in the Bodleian Library, and they follow him in his dreams to New York. So the structure rather ingeniously mirrors the patient piecing together of clues and shreds of memory and from parents and grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles.

There must have been frustrations on both sides, I feel. John Phillip in some cases wants to know about the past from people who are looking to the future, whose current prosperity has counted on them moving forward. They are reluctant to open up to him. In turn, he finds it hard to understand why anyone should want to forget:

It sometimes seems as if Mexicans are to forgetting what the Jews are to remembering. We have made selective forgetting a sacramental obligation. Leave it all in the past, all that you were, and all that you could not be. There is pain enough in the present to go round. Some memories cannot be abandoned. Let the past reclaim all the rest, forever, and let stories come to their fitting end,

This ‘long’ family of his, with nonagenarian aunts and uncles born in the century before last, trail their mestizo heritage with them, lovingly described. The first glimpse we have is of the world of the viejicitas (the English translation ‘little old ladies’ barely covers it, though it does have some nuance of indomitability and capability), who knew so many things, and could make so much right that had gone wrong. They grow herbs and wonderful culinary plants, cook fragrant dishes, make up remedies for ills. One aunt dismisses her healing powers as ’some things I heard when I was a little girl’, but these are skills that stretch back to before the Conquest. The men are ingenious, inventive with technology, knowledgeable about harnessing natural resources (mining coal, making charcoal), and wedded to the land – ranchers in spirit if not in fact.

To find the ties that bind these scraps of memory and knowledge to the past, the author travels deep into Mexico – to see what is left of Tenochtitlán beneath Mexico City (answer: more than we expect); to take La Ruta that tracks the advance of Cortes and his Conquistadores; and to trace his fascination with the pre-conquest dance-ritual of the Voladores to its roots, finding in these explorations the parallels and images to feed the context of his family history. He follows his need to go back, getting past this huge barrier in his family story to find his Mexican past:

It had always seemed that over the last one hundred and fifty years – from the time Texas was separated from Mexico in the 1830s, among the Lopez and Velas of my mother’s family, and then again during la Revolución, when the Garcias and the Santos crossed the border and left Coahuila behind – the story of Mexico had ceased to be a part of our family. Separated by eighty years, there had been a double betrayal of Mexico, the negation of a negation, repeated and reversed, across these four families’ pasts. Mother’s family was abandoned by Mexico – left behind in Texas – while my father’s chose to abandon their country, la tierra madre, for Texas, during Mexico’s hour of greatest need.

We became Americans, and as such, we were no longer a part of the ancient compromiso, no longer obligated to keep a solemn vigil over Mexico’s destiny, or, if necessary, sacrifice ourselves for it. By leaving Mexico, and being left by her, our forebears meant to free us from that endless cycle of sacred duties to dance and chant and make sacrifices and pilgrimages, so that the cosmos would continue to exist.

In particular, his search for family memory brings him constantly looping back to the untimely death of his grandfather, Juan José Santos, found by his brother and his son, Juan José Jr (John Phillip’s father). Suicide, accident or violence? Reluctantly, his family provide the pieces of this puzzle that ultimately has no solution. But to do so he constantly has to challenge the instinct for forgetting.

All this is told in a beautifully lyrical prose. The language is that of magic realism, but the story and the characters stay just this side of magic. He handles a macaronic mixture of Spanish and English in a masterly fashion, (something that is so difficult to bring off without a whiff of parody), scrupulously providing an English translation for all Spanish words and phrases, so readers with no Spanish need have no fears in picking up this book; all words and phrases, that is, except a recurring word compromiso, which, thanks to help from a friendly fellow-fox, I think here means covenant or commitment. It is an important word throughout the book, and I felt I needed to be clear about the meaning. The descriptive passages are almost photographic in their clarity, particularly the descriptions of the harsh landscape of Coahuila, with its small towns, mines and ranches.

Good friends of mine from San Antonio brought me this book as a gift on a visit to the UK. I am so grateful to them – I have never visited their part of the world, and this is such an enlightening picture of it. The Elders have died, taking their memories and forgetfulness with them, the large families of previous generations give way to smaller, with fewer people to receive the story, but John Phillip Santos has pulled it all together into one enduring poetic history.

Penguin Books Australia 2000. 298 pages including Penguin Readers’ Guide. ISBN 13: 9780140292022

Coming up on Vulpes Libris

This week the Bookfoxes are in celebration mode. We have a Thanksgiving-themed review, a selection of favourite recent reads and we finish the week in fine style with a review of a novel written by retired Bookfox, the fabulous Emily Gale. We also have a Soapbox article by Kirsty, as well as reviews of a memoir and short story collection.

Monday 23 – Hilary immerses herself in John Phillip Santos’s Places Left Unfinished At The Time of Creation and discovers a world that is new to her on the Texas-Mexico border.

Tuesday 24 – RosyB takes a look at the veritable forest of paths leading off from Tindal Street’s anthology of short stories: Roads Ahead.

Wednesday 25 – On Wednesday, Kirsty is talking to herself (again) about the trouble with biography.

Thursday 26 – Jackie celebrates Thanksgiving with The Wordy Shipmates by the incomparable Sarah Vowell

Friday 27 – Lisa talks about her favourite books of the autumn in a selection of mini-reviews.

Saturday 28 - Eve wants to share with you the fabulousness that is Girl Aloud by former Bookfox Emily Gale.

With thanks to IngridTaylor of Flickr for the image Gray Fox Kit which is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence.

What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

This is not my usual fare at all being slightly allergic to anything remotely historical but I was drawn to the red lipstick on the cover and once I began reading I was a gonner. 

Set on post-war America, in the late 1940’s, the setting is vivid and gorgeously realised.  I was completely sucked in by the almost film-noir atmosphere.  The main character is fifteen year old Evie who is desperate to break out of the shadow of her blonde bombshell mother.  A spur of the moment decision by her step-father, Joe, sees them hot foot it to an almost empty hotel in Palm Beach for the summer. Here Evie meets Peter, and falls hopelessly under his spell.  But all is not what it seems and beneath the warmth of the Florida sun something nasty is brewing.

This is a really simple tale, but the one thing that stands out more than anything here is the voice of the main character, Evie.  She picks you up on the first page and you are compelled to listen to her right to the end.  I was captivated. The language is appropriate to the era and adds so much to the atmosphere of the novel. Being a coming of age novel, Evie begins as a somewhat naive girl interested in pretend smoking and wearing heels. The way her voice changes as the novel progresses is outstanding, conveying the darkness and trauma she is experiencing as things go wrong and she is forced to grow up. 

I’m not going to reveal the storyline because it would really spoil the unspooling mystery of this book.  There are so many levels to the hints and pointers in the text that all is not right, some Evie isn’t wholly aware of (and some I totally missed!).  And once the questions are asked you’re turning pages like a madman to find the answers.  One of the main themes is anti-Semitism and in a world post Second World War this is extremely well placed and very subtly conveyed. 

I was completely captivated by What I Saw and How I Lied and raved about it to all my customers.  In a shop bulging with vampire novels, to find a 1940’s mystery was like a breath of fresh air.  So… what did Evie see?  And how did she lie?  I can bet you’re desperate to find out.

 

What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell.  ISBN: 9781407114958.

The Day Wall Street Exploded by Beverly Gage

A Story of America in its first age of terror.

The place is Wall Street,  New York.  The day is the 16th of September 1920 and the time is midday.

Hundreds of office workers are pouring onto the street for their lunch break and – for many of them – it will be their last moment on earth.

Virtually on the stroke of the hour a shrapnel bomb, made from dynamite loaded with iron sash weights, explodes outside the offices of J P Morgan, killing 38 people and maiming hundreds of others.  Those who weren’t killed or injured by the blast itself were caught by falling glass or trampled in the ensuing stampede.

Until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 it was the United States’ worst ever terrorist attack and yet in a comparatively short time, this act of mass murder was all but forgotten.

Beverly Gage’s minutely researched book looks at the bombing from every conceivable angle, giving us not just a reconstruction of the apocalyptic  moment of destruction itself, but also the historical background, essential for understanding that – as with the 9/11 attack – terrorism and extremism don’t grow in a vacuum.

We are not only carefully introduced to the main players – the chief suspects and the  investigators who descended on the scene -  we are also conducted painstakingly through the events leading up to the outrage,  because the attack on Wall Street was by no means an isolated incident.  Rather, it was the culmination of decades of industrial, political and world turmoil which saw the violent suppression of labour disputes and the mass deportation of anyone suspected of having ‘radical’ tendencies.

The United States came out of the Great War as the most dominant financial power in the world and the institution which effectively bankrolled that rise to global domination was the J P Morgan bank.  But where you find capitalism, you also find anti-capitalism and even as the House of Morgan consolidated its near stranglehold, the ripples from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution were spreading around the world.  There was a genuine belief that capitalism could and would fall and – inevitably – there were extremists who were more than prepared to help it on its way.

We meet characters like the young J Edgar Hoover – who was about the only person to come out of the whole ungodly mess with his reputation enhanced.  Others are the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and the union activists Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs.  We witness the rise of the FBI,  the nascent civil liberties lobby and the birth of the ‘reds under the bed’ terror that would  dominate US politics for years to come.

The investigation into the bombing dragged on for four years, with the Police, the FBI and private investigators virtually tripping over each other in their determination to be the first to get to ‘the truth’ – but no-one was ever charged, no-one ever claimed responsibility and eventually, the entire episode dropped quietly from the public consciousness.  Ironically, the most likely culprits – the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani and his followers – were ejected from the US in the mass deportation of ‘radicals’  immediately following the bombing.

The Day Wall Street Exploded is a thoughtful slow-burner of a book which expertly draws you into the paranoia and confusion of post-war America but doesn’t bombard you with so much information that you lose your sense of direction – a common failing of ‘popular’ history books.

At times, the modern resonances are so marked that you have to remind yourself that the events it covers happened nearly 100 years ago – not least in the roll-call of the victims.  With one exception, none of them worked for J P Morgan, and most were under the age of 40.  They were just ordinary people, going about their lives, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – a pattern that would  repeat itself over and over again in the century that followed.

Oxford University Press.  2009.  ISBN: 978-0-19-514824-4.  400pp.

Moira lives and works in the Lake District, which is not currently a terrifically good place to be, and apologizes for any inconsistencies, incoherencies or non-sequiturs this review might contain on account of having finally finished it at 1.00am this morning, with one ear on Radio Cumbria. She doesn’t, as a consequence, feel she really did this tremendous book justice.

Full steam ahead? – The People’s Train by Thomas Keneally

Artem Samsurov, a charismatic protégé of Lenin, makes an extraordinary escape from Russia to reach sanctuary in Australia. But he soon finds out that Brisbane in 1911 isn’t quite the workers’ paradise he was expecting. Though distracted by an infatuation with a beautiful lawyer, Artem launches himself back into the socialist cause, only to be imprisoned, then accused of murdering an informer. But he never loses his belief that the revolution will come – and, in 1917, he returns to Russia to join in the fight for it …

For this review I received an uncorrected proof copy of the novel, which has emblazoned on the front the warning: Not for resale or quotation. Not quoting from a book – any book – rather goes against the grain for this old English (and indeed Old English) literature graduate but, for fear of incurring the wrath of Sceptre Press, I will endeavour to refrain. Though I’m sure I will no doubt incur their wrath elsewhere.

I have to say I was looking forward to reading The People’s Train. Keneally is the author of Schindler’s Ark (which I’ve never read, nor indeed seen in film version – well, I’m not allowed out much really), so I had high hopes. Indeed it felt very much like preparing myself for first class travel to a rather exciting foreign country, so I did ensure that my hair was brushed and I had the appropriate underwear.

Arriving at the station was something of a disappointment however. I looked closely for the usual signposts of character, plot and general descriptive positioning, but perhaps I wasn’t looking closely enough? It all seemed rather … dare I say it? … dull. In fact as the main character, Artem, settled in opposite me, with his entourage of Mrs Hope Mockridge (that beautiful lawyer of the blurb) and assorted political keenies, and the scenery began to gather some kind of pace (though not much), I found that my attention was beginning to wander, and I kept looking out for the catering trolley, or perhaps even the guard asking to see my ticket, but no such respite appeared. I think the trouble was that Artem isn’t really terribly interesting, or indeed nice. So he wasn’t an ideal travelling companion. Not that nice really matters – though surely interesting does. Particularly in a novel. Though, that said, I’m not sure it actually is a novel – it certainly doesn’t read like one. It’s more a mixture of fiction and fact, thus – I suppose – making it “faction”. I kept turning over to look at the blurb and flicking through to the end acknowledgements to see if I could find a clue to help me know how to read it, but nothing leapt from the page.

And for quite a while nothing did.

During my long and rather slow journey through the text, Artem did a heck of a lot of talking. He really had a great deal to say. Mostly about himself and his politics. There’s a lot about politics here and a peculiar lack of heart somehow. If that is the sort of novel that you’ve been longing to read, then here it is at last. Issues that made the story very difficult to get into on any level for me included: (a) the lack of speech marks. Query: is this an Australian thing? I seem to remember some other classic modern Australian novel having no speech marks. I couldn’t bear it – there’s something about the lack of them which manages to create a peculiar sense of distance between the reader and the page. Speech marks are simply so much more dynamic. And (b) I haven’t been able to bring myself to make a serious study of it, but it struck me that an awful lot of the statements made in this book are in the passive voice, which again creates distance. It was much like attempting to read the story while someone was holding up a thin cotton sheet between the book and me. If that makes any sense at all.

It wasn’t all dull vistas and meaningless tannoy announcements however. Sometimes the sun brightened outside and the odd ray of light made its way into my carriage: I did rather like the concept of Mrs Hope Mockridge, though she was quickly swallowed up by the heaviness of Artem’s narrative (look – I’m using passive voice myself now. Must be catching …). And I fell totally in love with the cuckolded Mr Mockridge who was wonderfully sparky and catty in the one scene he appeared in. And pleasingly twisted up too. How I wish he’d been allowed to enter the fray more often. Oh, and I enjoyed the descriptions of the onset of the First World War and its effect on Australia – that was very interesting and allowed me to see a side of the war I hadn’t thought of before.

About three-quarters of the way through the trip, I did find that I had to change trains. Which was a surprise, and also something of a relief as it allowed me the chance to stretch my legs and change that underwear. Thank goodness. The narrative (if such it is) at that point leaves Artem – I shed no tears – and is taken up by his Australian friend and journalist, Paddy, as the two men move to Russia during the First World War. Paddy is much jollier on the whole and his sections are more gripping, but there’s still a great deal of politics. And a lot of famous people enter and have basically very little effect on me. There might have been Stalin and mentions of Lenin, but I was rapidly losing the will to live and hoping the train journey would hurry up and end at that point, so I didn’t linger. I did like the brief moments (alas, all too brief) spent on the delicately described relationship between Paddy and Artem’s sister however. Mind you, by then I was desperately in need of any human spark.

So, all in all, it was a relief when at last the final destination came into view. Until that moment, I fully intended to type here that the instant the train stopped, I grabbed my bags and ran for the door. However, like Wagner, Keneally has saved his best scene to last and that final note reverberated in my head for several days to come: the violence that takes place in the Winter Palace and, more specifically, Paddy’s honest and all too human reaction to it was, quite frankly, a tour de force of sparse strong writing. I loved it. Whether it was worth the rather humdrum journey is another question and surely the book would have been better if such writing could have been present throughout. Meanwhile, now that my companions have left the train, I’m scanning the timetables for a more pleasant means of journeying home. Wish me luck.

The People’s Train by Thomas Keneally (Sceptre, 2009), ISBN: 978 0340 951859

[Anne has no moral objections to the concept of foreign travel, as long as the companions are interesting. To avoid catching the wrong train, please click here.]

Light Reading by Aliya Whiteley

As part of my Arts Council England award, I am endeavouring to review novels written by authors living in either Devon, Cornwall or Somerset, or novels set in these counties. Light Reading is the first of these books that I’ve enjoyed enough to finish and review.

The blurb tells us that

“Prudence Green is a troubled woman. Stifled by her existence as an RAF wife, she’s dying for a bit of excitement. When one of the other women on the base commits suicide (having discovered that her husband is having an affair with a male comrade in Iraq), Pru and her best friend Lena are prompted to set off on a memorably surreal journey – a criminal investigation, a search for love and an exploration of Pru’s own dark past.

Which perhaps doesn’t sound a lot like ‘light reading’. From the cover image I was expecting a light-hearted comedy novel, so I was surprised to find myself confronted with some serious grit. Still, a seaside town in Devon, two RAF wives and a mysterious celebrity death sounded like an interesting recipe and I was certainly intrigued as to where this would all end up, particularly since I myself was once an RAF wife and I currently live in a small seaside town.

The book opens with a description of life on an RAF base. The boredom among the wives is pretty evident and the range of feelings regarding the RAF made me just a little bit nostalgic. There are those women who accept that detachments abroad are part and parcel of military life and there are those who feel bitterness towards an organisation responsible for taking a loved one so far from home and putting him in harm’s way. The book also touches on the resentment that can arise from a husband who adores the military lifestyle even though his wife abhors it. So far so accurate.

The detective story gets under way and Lena and Pru set off for Allcombe (a fictional town based on Ilfracombe) where they are to investigate the suicide of young TV star Crystal Tynee. They encounter po-faced locals, teenage thugs and a truly sinister care home owner (who still strikes fear into my heart). Somehow, however, the mystery element of the plot feels less important than the drama unfolding between the two friends.

Prudence and Lena make fascinating sleuths. Prudence is not a conventionally likeable character. She’s bitchy and mean-spirited and rarely has a good word to say about anyone or anything. Her main hobby is collecting suicide notes (she even swipes the note of the neighbour who commits suicide on the base). Lena is less prickly and puts up with a fair amount of verbal abuse from Pru but she’s also something of a train wreck, suffering from an eating disorder and struggling to come to terms with her husband’s betrayal. The dialogue between these two characters was riddled with tension and I very much enjoyed their interactions.

However, for me Allcombe was the real star of the show. Although buzzing in the summer, in the winter Allcombe is rather like a ghost town, with boarded-up shops, empty streets and rain-lashed promenades. ‘Place’ is where Whiteley really shines as a writer, often conjuring up settings that neatly reflect the emotional landscape of her main characters.

Light Reading is hard to categorise. There are moments of black comedy throughout the novel, but there is also deep bitterness and anguish. Earlier this year I was told about a new genre of fiction called ‘Chick Noir’, which is said to be postmodern chicklit with a dark edge, and perhaps Light Reading might fit that bill. Either way, Light Reading is a satisfying read with plenty of twists and enough conflict to keep the reader turning the pages. Although it’s probably far too early to be mentioning Christmas, I can’t help but think this novel would make an ideal Christmas present for fans of the detective and chicklit genres.

ISBN-13: 978-0230700628, Macmillan New Writing, 304 pages, £7.99, paperback.

* This is possibly a long shot but if any Vulpes Libris readers can recommend modern novels set in the Westcountry (or written by authors based in the Westcountry), I would be very glad to hear about them in the comments section below.

Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill

PUGS, PUBLISHING, PAINTING AND PROFUNDITY

As the other foxes will know from my dramatic teeth-gnashing in the den, I have found this review a hard one to write.

I sat up late last night looking at sentences like “I first encountered Miss Athill’s writing at the Borders Book Festival” and “this spare slim little volume” and just wanted to shoot myself for my boring pomposity.

I just want to do something simple about this book. Something meaningful. But it’s harder than it looks to write simply and meaningfully as Diana Atill does. I want to sum it up in one sentence. But not with the usual clichés. Just nail it. But I can’t.

When browsing Athill’s books at the Borders Book Festival where I saw her speak this summer, I did what you normally do when buying a new book – I read the opening lines. And it was these ones that won my heart and my £7.99:

Near the park which my bedroom overlooks there came to stay a family which owned a pack of pugs, five or six of them, active little dogs, one of them overweight as pugs so often are. I saw them recently on their morning walk, and they caused me a pang. I have always wanted a pug and now I can’t have one, because buying a puppy when you are too old to take it for walks is unfair.

To describe this book doesn’t exactly make it sound like a fun read. Its subject-matter, as alluded to by the title and by that opener – is getting old and facing death. Mooted as autobiography, it is in fact more meditative and fragmented – less to do with events and more like a series of ponderings on life and growing old. On what’s important. On dogs. On gardening. On taking evening classes. On realising that you will never be Rembrandt. On what makes good art. On the importance of young people. On clothing the older body. On watching the world change about you.

HOW TO “DO” AND NOT TO “DO” OLD AGE

Diana Athill was a respected editor at André Deutsch working with many famous literary figures. She speaks of it a little in Somewhere Towards the End, but more in relation to how some of our great writers have dealt with the problem of facing up to mortality: Jean Rhys, for example, “demonstrating how not to think about getting old” sinking into a world of drink and querulous complaint or “Bulgarian-born Nobel prize -winning writer, Elias Canetti” so filled with his own ego that he claimed he “rejected death”. Diana Athill has little truck with this, and has more sympathy for drunken Rhys than the arrogance of Canetti. For, despite rubbing shoulders with many great literary figures, Athill herself sets great store by taking a humbler attitude to life – to seeing yourself as part of something bigger. It is interesting how this attitude – something she puts down to a rather old-fashioned sort of notion that comes from her background – comes across almost as a release and a power. Athill freely admits she is an atheist and always has been, despite the religious beliefs of her siblings and parents. You need not mourn yourself so extremely. You are not special. You are taking your part in the bigger world, which is a source of awe and wonder. So, you get old and die. Athill may not be religious but her connection and wonder at the world shines forth. It is as though being honest and embracing that honesty about her predicament, being curious about it…gives her keener eyes through which to see the world.

ART, LIFE AND CAPTURING THE ORDINARY

For Athill has a great love and respect for ordinariness. She talks of her brother, determinedly sailing near his home in his eighties. A man who loved his life and the particular place he lived with a passion and who fought death because of it. He did not need an ego the size of Canetti’s to find meaning and profundity in living.

She talks of what she considers to be great art. She is not interested in stylistic quirks or experiments.

Only a person with a gigantic sense of self-importance, could, for example, produce a large number of canvases painted in a single flat colour, or even in two or three flat colours, without being bored to death.

But, again, seems to return to the idea of the ego lost in pursuit of truth and reality.

There are many ways in which a painting can be exciting , but a drawing that thrills me is always one that has caught a moment of life. Drawings are what artists, great or small, do when they are working their way towards understanding something, or catching something they want to preserve: they communicate with such immediacy that they can abolish time.

LUCK, SUCCESS AND SORE FEET

All this makes this book sound a little sombre. But it is anything but – full of wit and twinkle like the woman herself (whose interview at the Borders Book Festival was uplifting, thought-provoking and hilarious by equal turns).

She discovers this capacity for making others laugh late on in life. Gaining success when you are very old, Athill tells us, is really rather fun. You have none of the angst, your sense of self remains comfortably unaffected, you are not beginning an ascent up any greasy pole (haven’t the time) so it is pointless to get too self-conscious or careerist about the whole thing. Instead you can sit back and ENJOY. (As so many of those great writers she mentioned earlier seemed to fail to do.) Being a bit humble and not expecting immortality through others’ reverence or being plonked onto university syllabuses seems to help too. When her work is received well and she wins a few awards (indeed Somewhere Towards the End, itself, won the Costa Biography Award last year) she is obviously pleased, but it isn’t the be all and end all, and this allows her to enjoy it all the more.

It is in seemingly simple observations like this that she reveals how very observant she is of the human condition and how we so often don’t allow ourselves to be happy. Again and again we seem to return to this idea of not thinking too much of yourself – not as some irritating middle-class affectation – but as a joyous strength, as an acceptance of life that allows us then to engage with and enjoy life.

This is not to say that this book is all touchy-feely and worthy and ” life-is-wonderful-no-matter-what and let’s-all-sit-about-and-do-a-bit-of-meditation–and-get-in-touch-with-our-inner-nonagenarian”, or some other sort of sickening avocation of the selfless acceptance of old-age. Athill admits that a lot of it is down to luck. Luck in keeping your health. Luck in being alive at all. And luck in how you die. She is lucky, she says, to come from a family who are long-lived, and who – in the main – have had relatively unprotracted deaths. She mentions her own mother’s last words (said in relation to a trip to a garden centre to inspect a eucalyptus tree) and holds them up as hope for all of us that death may not always have to be a horror. But, on the other hand, she also acknowledges the pain of seeing your friends and relations disintegrate around you; the way that, as a very old person, you inevitably become a carer or a caree – whether suited to these particular roles or not; the way you ALWAYS have sore feet.

But she also sees the pointlessness in mourning things that you do not have, or – more importantly – do not WANT anymore.

This is particularly relevant in relation to sex: which by all accounts played an extremely important part of Athill’s life and which starts to recede until, suddenly, in her seventies, it disappeared completely.

SEX AND INFIDELITY

…very soon another voice began to sound in my head, which made more sense. “Look,” it said, “you know quite well that you have stopped wanting him in your bed, it’s months since you enjoyed it, so what are you moaning about? Of course you have lost youth, you have moved on and stopped wanting what youth wants.” And that was the end of that stage.

A woman of her generation, Athill believed she would marry and have children. But when marriage didn’t materialise she embarked instead on a series of affairs – often with other people’s husbands. I was put in mind of a recent interview on the Today Programme with French art critic, Catherine Millet, whose infamous “The Sexual Life of Catherine M” was a bestseller in “noughties” – chronicling her life of affairs and orgies and all things sexually extreme. Catherine Millet has now apparently released another book, which I haven’t read, but is about her extreme jealousy about her husband’s affairs, despite her own antics. In the interview, Millet stated that she had become monogamous and that the answer to “the free life” was to keep things secret no matter what.

This made me laugh: the way we all want to create grand overarching theories and moralities based on our own personal wants and foibles. But there is something honest about her assessment nonetheless. Catherine M believes rationally in the “free life” but admits she can’t handle jealousy – a very human emotion. She has come up with her own theory to suit herself. I – personally – can’t handle not knowing things so, for me, the idea of secret affairs is far worse than open ones. Diana Athill, who does not believe in the idea of possessing and being possessed, was, like Catherine M, faced with a situation in late middle age that similarly confronted her own beliefs. Her way of dealing with it was very different and, in my view, incredibly impressive. I won’t go into it all here as I don’t want to give away everything that happens in this book. But, her attitude, again, seemed born out of a sort of pragmatic lack of self-importance and even a selfishness with the realisation that perhaps she would gain more and be happier by taking this attitude than a more self-destructive one.

Athill’s clear-sighted honesty seems a little less sure of itself when it comes to the cheated on and I was less convinced she had totally worked out what she thought about infidelity in terms of the lies that need (or do they?) to be told.

Yes there are some things, sexual infidelities among them, that do no harm if they remain unknown – or, for that matter, are known and accepted, and which is preferable depends on the individuals and their circumstances.

Although, she claimed to feel no guilt about having affairs with married men as “the last thing I intended or hoped for was damage to anyone’s marriage”, she says she prefers the following attitude to the extreme opposite: the “attitude, often attributed to the French, that however far from admirable sexual infidelity is, it is perfectly acceptable if conducted properly. Vive la France!”

Athill’s idea that it is down to circumstances whether to be open or secret is interesting to me – although I can’t help but wonder at the fairness of making that decision for another woman or man and what s/he gets to know (or not) about their own relationship.  Similarly, it is hard to tell how much some affairs depend on the solidity of the marriage elsewhere to exist in the first place or are able to be “free” because other needs were met elsewhere. Athill is adamant that she did not want the kind of relationship with a man where she looked after him, made his meals, did his washing or allowed her own life to be taken over with other traditionally wifely duties. I have every sympathy with this (as my poor half-starved, neglected, and uwashed boyfriend can attest). But perhaps it is easier these days. I can shake off these expectations without a care (despite protestations from family and friends.) For Athill, you get the impression that in a funny way she couldn’t.

Perhaps, you could argue that it is all very well for someone with no children and who freely admits to not being a jealous person, to take up such a position – for many there may be greater complexities to their situations. On the other hand, I have to admit to having some sympathy with many of Athill’s points and I was left realising this is something I need to ponder further.

But whatever the ins and out of her attitude to infidelity and whether or not as a reader you agree, even on this subject, Athill is wonderful – again – writing about the pleasures of ordinariness. Of embarking on an affair in later life, for example, and the peculiar pleasures of sleeping with somebody else who has sore feet.

TO SUM UP

This is a short book full of thoughts and ideas and it would be unfair of me to outline every one of them here. Simply to say that in the thoughts, ideas, wit, honesty and feeling, this book is a real gem. I could spend many more hours listening to Athill’s beautifully measured yet always mischievous voice. And if she doesn’t  exactly make me wish I was in my nineties, she – at least – makes it seem less frightening and shows that (if you keep your mind) old-age can, for some, be curious and interesting.

It’s a cliché to say this turns out not be a book about old-age and facing dying, but about living – and perhaps that’s not totally true. For me – this book is more about the realisations and joys that old age brings into focus, that we often fail to see or embrace properly when we are young. It is more about how to look at things, and shows how being honest with oneself – even about unpleasantnesses – can be a power and a strength and maybe even allow one to enjoy oneself more.

And humour. Athill never loses that. And that – to me anyway – is a sign of someone still very much engaged with life.

Publisher: Granta Books (2008), 182 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1862079847

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For more of RosyB’s cheery death series, see her review of The Spare Room by Helen Garner

When not pondering death and old-age, RosyB writes comedy novels. Find out more here.