I found this book in a display in my local library, thought I had heard of the author before (she wrote the Moomin books, which I have never read but ordered the first two for my son after reading the first few stories in this book) and saw that Ali Smith had written the introduction.
I am so glad I picked up this book. The stories in it range from quietly disturbing to life-affirming and offer fascinating insights about what it would be like to live on a deserted island in Scandinavia. There is such variety here and I enjoyed all of them. Jansson’s story Snow has all the claustrophobia of The Yellow Wallpaper:
“Now I could hear the snow. It was falling all the time, whispering and rustling to itself and in one corner it had crept onto the floor.”
The young girl is trapped in a strange house with the snow relentlessly falling, but eventually she and her mother are snowed in and she feels “absolutely safe and protected” so that when they finally hear the sound of shovels trying to dig them out and see light from outside, “the lamps were burning as if at a funeral.”
Jansson often uses a child narrator, but later in the book the stories are told from the point of a much older woman. The Squirrel was one of my favourites – a woman living alone on an island notices that a squirrel has washed up on the shore near her house, carried on a piece of wood from another island. Through her observations we find out “she hadn’t seen a living thing for a long time” and as the story goes on and her relationship with the squirrel changes, we find out just how lonely she is. It is one of the best stories I have ever read and, like the narrator, by the end of the story I was left “not quite sure whether or not everything had now utterly changed.”
These were some of the best stories I have ever read, and I will certainly be reading Jansson’s other fiction for adults as well as The Moomins when they are unwrapped later this week!
Moon Tiger is a book I have wanted to read for a while after hearing it discussed on A Good Read. It is a slim novel and won The Booker Prize in 1987. It follows the life of Claudia, who is on her deathbed and composing the story of her life. The narrative shifts around to show a kaleidoscope of memories which alter how the reader views Claudia – a charismatic but often dislikeable character. It is a wonderful book with a pacy plot and many surprises, and is especially good at revealing how experiences can form layer after layer of a person’s character.
The title refers to incense: “a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness.” It is only later into the book that I came to appreciate that this moment is at the burning heart of the novel, and I won’t spoil the story by describing what happens but the imagery and structure of the book all play on this idea of circularity with a single event at the centre. I haven’t read such a tightly and expertly crafted book in a while.
The book also felt very modern, although the main events of the novel span the second world war. A line which really stood out was when two characters are discussing their experiences of the war:
“When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it. One has this tendency to think oneself immune.”
But despite being centred around the war, this is not just a book about that. The novel is about lives lived and lost, opportunities taken or missed, and the many different ways of loving and being loved. For a small book, there is a lot packed in and I found it an easy book to get lost in which is probably the best compliment I can give. It is also a book I could happily re-read and I’m sure I would get more from it.
Two women who “had never yet spoken” see an advertisement for a castle to rent in Italy, and one persuades the other to spend their savings and take a month’s holiday there. To lower the costs, they advertise for some other ladies to join them and so four very different women find themselves thrown together in ‘heaven’.
At first the ladies find themselves at odds with one another, but during their stay the enchantments of their surroundings serve to bring out each person’s true character, buried beneath years of unhappy marriage and misunderstandings and the drudgery of daily life, and giving each of them “the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.” Each character is given time to reflect, each gradually changes and each receives their own realisation of happiness by the end of the book.
This is by no means a realistic plot, and many of the events seem contrived, but the humour and warmth with which the novel is narrated overrode any quibbles I had with the story itself. And the humour is what makes the story really magical, several parts made me laugh out loud but this was my favourite:
“Mrs Fisher had never cared for macaroni, especially not this long, worm-shaped variety. She found it difficult to eat – slippery, wriggling off her fork, making her look, she felt, undignified when, having got it as she supposed into her mouth, ends of it yet hung out. Always too, when she ate it she was reminded of Mr Fisher. He had during their married life behaved very much like macaroni. He had slipped, he had wriggled, he had made her feel undignified, and when at last she had got him safe, as she thought, there had invariably been little bits of him that still, as it were, hung out.”
This is one of those classics which felt effortless to read, is very uplifting and is also very funny. Highly recommended escapism.
Meridian is Alice Walker’s second novel, and the second novel of hers I have read. I first came across her on a list of recommended books when I was doing A-Level English, at which time I read The Color Purple (which I can now remember very little of now except that it was unlike anything I had encountered before). I picked up a new edition of Meridian in the library and I am very glad that I have discovered her work again as a result.
The story is set against the civil rights movement, and it ends just after the assassination of Martin Luther King. I have to admit that I didn’t understand all of the book’s references, knowing little about this time historically. But that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book, which is a powerful examination of what it means to be a revolutionary and a woman, and it has certainly made me want to read more of Walker’s work.
Meridian is the name of the title character, a black woman in the American South. The novel opens when an old acquaintance of hers, Truman Held, finds Meridian facing down a tank in a town square so that a group of children can see a preserved corpse which is touring the country and for which the admission is more than most of these families can afford. When Truman goes to Meridian’s dwelling place, he finds a cell-like room papered in hate mail from her mother and a former friend from college. Gradually, we learn about Meridian’s childhood and education and her journey into political activism. The story also follows the lives of Truman and his wife Lynne – a white Jewish woman, before returning in an arc to Meridian.
Meridian is a complex character who doesn’t seem to be understood by anyone, not even herself. At college, “Meridian appeared so aloof she could sit at a table for four in the dining room and never be asked to share it”, and she finds it difficult to open up to others. After she has faced down the tank in the opening chapter, she is carried home in some kind of faint/paralysis which never seems to be fully explained but which seemed to me to be some kind of ecstasy or illness such as that told in the stories of saints. Although we find out a lot more about her in the sections on her childhood and young adulthood, Meridian never loses that sense of not belonging:
“Rather, she sensed herself an outsider, as a single eye behind a camera that was aimed from a corner of her youth, attached now only because she watched. If she were not there watching, the scene would be exactly the same, the “picture” itself never noticing that the camera was missing.”
Yet Meridian does belong, and it is during the scenes narrated by Truman and Lynne that the reader comes to really appreciate Meridian’s ‘mid-point’ and the importance of her character to the story.
The novel also discusses motherhood and women and men’s roles in parenthood. Reluctant mothers are depicted very well here, with Meridian’s childhood blighted by the fact that “her mother was not a woman who should have had children” and “she could not forgive her community, her family, his family, the whole world, for not warning her against children.” Yet she fails to tell Meridian anything about sex or the facts of life, save for telling her to “be sweet”, and thereby Meridian seems for a while to be consigned to the same fate, that of:
“a person who is being buried alive, walled away from her own life, brick by brick.”
The more I think about this book, the more questions I have and the more I see in the narrative. It is a book which asks the reader difficult questions and sheds a light on an important time in history which I am keen to discover more about. It is also a book about not knowing I think – not knowing what is the right thing to do, or the right way to do it. And so, not knowing the right way to round up my thoughts about this brilliant book I will end it with Alice Walker’s words:
“It never occurred to her that her mother’s and her grandmother’s extreme purity of life was compelled by necessity. They had not lived in an age of choice.”
Thankfully, we do. And I think that reading Alice Walker’s writing is an excellent way to choose to spend it.
I loved Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, which I read last year, and when I discovered that she had also written three novels I was keen to read them. The Quarry Wood is the first of Shepherd’s novels and was first published in 1928. It follows a young woman named Martha Ironside who lives in a rural farming community near Aberdeen. Martha’s mother married ‘beneath her’ and no one has high expectations of Martha, but she is determined to study and make something of herself and has to work doubly hard in order to do so.
The novel is a coming-of-age story, and an overcoming-the-odds story and beautifully written. Martha is intelligent and tenacious, and her character is alive and kicking from the opening paragraph of the story:
“Martha Ironside was nine years old when she kicked her great-aunt Josephine. At nineteen she loved the old lady, idly perhaps, in her natural humour, as she loved the sky and space. At twenty-four, when Miss Josephine Leggatt died, aged seventy-nine and reluctant, Martha knew that it was she who had taught her wisdom; thereby proving – she reflected – that man does not learn from books alone; because Martha had kicked Aunt Josephine (at the age of nine) for taking her fom her books.”
Throughout the book, Martha has to overcome the obstacles put in her way by her family, her class and her sex. Going to school and university as a female was unusual at the time the book was written, and Martha faces a lot of obstacles as a result of her sex:
“She came home from long crowded days in schools and lecture-rooms to make the supper, set the house to rights, prepare as far as she could the next day’s dinner; and rose in raw black mornings to get breakfast ready and attend to Emmeline’s wants.”
As well as gaining a degree, Martha falls in love, cares for her relatives, is the subject of malicious gossip and builds herself a career. The events of the novel are not fast-paced, but I found it to be a very engaging story full of the exquisite details and images which populate The Living Mountain. The novel is set in the area where Shepherd lived for most of her life, close to where I now live, and I relished the details of life from a hundred years ago. Shepherd was an educated female and university tutor, and I imagine that a lot of the details concerning Martha’s education and the struggles of being a female scholar in a male-dominated world were also close to her own experiences growing up (though I in no way want to diminish Shepherd’s writing skills in supposing this – it is more that the story rang very true for me).
The only thing I struggled with reading this book was the dialogue; although the narration is in standard English the dialogue, of which there is a lot, is in Scots and a local dialect. There is a glossary at the end of the book but I preferred to let the dialogue wash over me a little – enjoying its rhythm and not understanding every word but coming away with the general jist. I especially enjoyed the hundred-year-old Scot’s version of telling someone who has left a door open that they were ‘born in a barn’:
“Ye wad think ye was born in a cairt-shed faur there wasna a door.”
And there is a lot of humour generally in the book, especially in the dialogue. It does get easier to read once you get into the rhythm of it, and I’m speaking as an English woman who has read a little in Scots but is certainly no expert.
I am not sure why The Quarry Wood is not more widely read, like Sunset Song, for example, which was written around the same time. But I know that The Living Mountain is being more widely read now and I hope to see more being made of Nan Shepherd’s small but tremendous body of work.
This is the first novel I have read by Nancy Mitford, and I didn’t know what to expect before I started. I knew that Mitford came from a upper-class family and that her siblings were involved in some scandalous behaviour but that was all. Mitford has written quite a few novels, and I have already embarked upon another. There is also a BBC adaption of The Pursuit of Love which I can safely watch now that I’ve read the book – I hate doing it the other way around!
I found The Pursuit of Love to be full of humour and fun but also very observant, of people and relationships in particular. The novel is narrated by Fanny, although she very much feels like an insignificant character in her own story – choosing a stable, uneventful existence over the glamour and drama of the paths taken by her mother, nicknamed ‘The Bolter’, and her cousin Linda, whose pursuit of love makes up the main narrative of the novel:
“These are the components of marriage, the wholemeal bread of life, rough, ordinary, but sustaining; Linda had been feeding on honeydew, and that is an incomparable diet.”
However, Fanny is perfectly placed to narrate the novel – a member of the Radlett family but removed enough that her yearly visits to Linda’s childhood home throw up endless comedy as she recounts the fierce behaviour of her Uncle Matthew and life at their country house Alconleigh:
“This violent, uncontrolled man, like his children, knew no middle course, he either loved or he hated, and generally, it must be said, he hated.”
Later, the girls grow up and marry, and we continue to hear of what happens to Linda and the other characters from Fanny’s perspective.
The Pursuit of Love is very funny, it reminded me a lot of Evelyn Waugh’s novels (which I love), and I read that Waugh suggested the title for this book. It is set in the time leading up to the second world war, a time which I think is fascinating – full of parties and glamour and excitement to begin with, and then the fear of the war coming and the immense changes which the conflict brought to everyday life.
On the surface, this seems a straightforward story about an elderly widow – Mrs Palfrey – who moves into The Claremont Hotel as a long-term resident. When she first arrives, she mentions to one of the other residents that she has a grandson living in London, who she expects to visit, but he does not come and Mrs Palfrey cannot bear to be pitied or thought of as lonely. One day she has a fall and is helped by Ludo, an aspiring writer, and to say thank you she invites him to dinner at The Claremont. He is mistaken for her grandson, Desmond, and the two continue the charade and in the process strike up a friendship of sorts.
Although the plot sounds simple, I found this to be a novel full of depth and also wickedly funny – I laughed out loud many times. The novel looks at friendship and loneliness, our obsession with appearances, relationships and aging. I found Mrs Palfrey to be extremely well-drawn and likeable, it is very rare you get an older female character who has such depth of character and is so perceptive:
“I must not wish my life away, she told herself; but she knew that, as she got older, she looked at her watch more often, and that it was always earlier than she had thought it would be. When she was young, it had always been later.”
Ludo, much younger but just as lonely as Mrs Palfrey, at first seems to continue their acquaintance for his own gain – Mrs Palfrey has money, and he doesn’t and he uses his meeting with her as material for the book he is writing. But as their relationship develops, it is clear that they share something special between them, something stronger than a familial bond; something which makes others uncomfortable because they do not behave as society expects them to:
“And now she began to think most bitterly of Mrs Palfrey – with all that wine-drinking, and her flushed cheeks, and the young man to whom she had offered smoked salmon at five-and-sixpence a portion. They had leaned towards one another over the table, their eyes on one another’s faces, like lovers.”
My only complaint about the book was that a few of the other characters seemed a bit one-dimensional, but this is only a very minor drawback in what was overall an extremely moving, thought-provoking and funny novel.
I read this book in February, and was expecting it to both ease and deepen my lockdown blues, which it did. The beauty of the descriptions of the Cairngorms, which are only an hour or so drive from where I live, were out of bounds during the lockdown and reading this made me long to escape there. But this book is also about small beauty, about spending time in a place and really getting to know it.
Nan Shepherd walked, lived and slept in the Cairngorms, in all seasons and all weathers. She makes so many beautiful observations in such a slim volume. It is part celebration of nature and part celebration of life. Even as she records her experiences Shepherd reflects that:
“…they are not in the books for me – they are in living encounters, moments in their life that have crossed moments of mine.”
Yet she has managed to capture so much in her writing, the book is full of moments set out for the reader – the fall of snow on the mountain, the changing light, the plants, animals and people who live there. She made me reconsider what it is to know a place, and one of the revelations for me was in how she talked about getting away from conquering summits and instead looked for what else she could find – hidden ridges or lochs or lower plateaus. I get summit fever whenever I go walking but over the past year have trained myself to look and listen to what is around me more, as Nan Shepherd advocates.
The part which did make me sad was Shepherd’s belief that:
“No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains.”
I am sure I am not alone in this, but whenever I go for a walk by myself – especially somewhere remote or quiet – I find myself looking over my shoulder from time to time, conscious that I am a female walking alone and I cannot completely relax or drift off in the way that Shepherd seems to. Perhaps things were different then, she does not mention dangers aside from the risk of death from a fall or getting caught in bad weather. Or perhaps the danger was there and she managed to not let it distract her.
Before I started to read The Living Mountain, I was delighted to discover that Nan Shepherd lived very close to where I live now, so close that I pass the house she lived in often. Despite not being able to visit the Cairngorms, I took great comfort in my local walks by the River Dee knowing that Nan Shepherd probably walked the same paths when she wasn’t climbing mountains. As beautiful and moving as Shepherd’s observations are, I felt this book was an invitation to go and see for yourself, go and experience for yourself, the natural world.
I studied some of these stories at university and, although I couldn’t remember them having a big impact on me at the time, the fact that I could remember a lot of the stories when I re-read them (a significant number of years later) suggests that perhaps I was wrong. This time around I definitely appreciated them more, much of her writing is subtle and focuses on character rather than events. Mansfield can sum up a character in a few words:
“Miss Anderson rustled, rustled about the house like a dead leaf.”
She also has a trick of completely turning a story on its head in the space of a page, or even a paragraph – revealing something new about a character or introducing a small event which turns the story abruptly on its axis and means that nothing she writes is predictable.
Another thing I loved about Mansfield’s writing is her humour, one of my favourite stories is The Daughters of the Late Colonel in which Mansfield reveals the relationship of the protagonists to their recently deceased father:
“Josephine had had a moment of absolute terror at the cemetery, while the coffin was lowered, to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did.”
Other stories, like The Doll’s House and Miss Brill are just perfect examples in the moment of revelation that a short story can execute so well – how a chance encounter or overheard remark can change a character’s life. Just looking through the book now I am reminded of how many of the stories I really enjoyed and how many of them demonstrate the short story at its best. The protagonists are often couples, sometimes with a young family, but the settings range from New Zealand to Europe. There is a tremendous scope and variety even in stories where only a single, otherwise insignificant event occurs.
I chose Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Stories solely because I already owned the collection, which I’d purchased second-hand when I was a student, but as a result spent a very frustrating week reading a segment of unfinished stories which often finished mid-sentence. The openings were excellent, but I could never work out where a Katherine Mansfield story was heading and I really struggled with the collection at this point. But, unfinished stories aside, the rest of the Collected Stories were well worth taking the time over. I am so glad I revisited Mansfield later in life when I can appreciate her subtlety more than I did when I was younger.
This blog, like many things lately, had fallen by the wayside. I read a few classics in 2020 but the year was mostly about keeping afloat and, although I did a lot of reading, it was mostly new or recent releases. Not that these haven’t been great, but I want to read widely and I want to read great books which have stood the test of time and, now that we’re entering another lockdown and another indeterminable period of home-schooling a six and three year old, I think it’s time I went back to school myself. At the very least, it should stop my brain from freezing over.
I’ve updated my classics club list and set a new target of fifty books, removing the ones I’ve read and diversifying a bit as well as writing down all the unread classics I’ve currently got sitting on my shelves. I’ve also chosen a few books I’ve read before, as I’ve discovered from re-reading others that there were quite a few I read at university and didn’t appreciate or ‘get’ at the time. This is supposed to be a re-education after all. And I’ve decided my blog posts will be a kind of reading diary rather than a review, because there are plenty of those already and I don’t want this to be another chore.
If anyone actually reads this and has any comments or wants to exchange opinions I’d love to hear from you, otherwise I will send this ahead into the void as a way of not letting myself back out of it…
A Literary Re-Education 