Tag: novella

Author, Book review, Cesare Pavese, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Beautiful Summer’ by Cesare Pavese (translated by W.J. Strachan)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 112 pages; 2018. Translated from the Italian by W.J. Strachan.

The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) won Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize for fiction, in 1950. (The author sadly died by suicide a couple of months later.)

It’s the story of a teenage girl whose friendship with an older woman draws her into a bohemian artistic community in 1930s Turin, showing her an alternative way of life.

It has been reissued as part of Penguin’s European Writers series.

A girl’s life

Sixteen-year-old Ginia works at a dressmakers and lives with her brother, Severino, a nightshift worker, for whom she cooks and cleans.

To alleviate the mundane nature of her work and home life, she’s keen to go “gadding about”, as she describes it, so when she develops a friendship with 20-year-old Amelia who works as an artists’ model, her social life opens up. They go to dance halls, visit cafes and see films at the local movie house. But there’s always tension between them, because Ginia is cautious, whereas Amelia throws that all to the wind.

In public, Amelia dares to go bare-legged (because she can’t afford to buy stockings), making Ginia anxious and worried about what people might say. Yet this also holds an allure for her, because she’s fascinated by Amelia’s way of being in the world, her freedom and her carefree attitude.

‘Being free in the world in the way I am, makes me mad,’ said Amelia. Ginia would have gladly paid money to hear her hold forth so eagerly on many things which she liked, because real confidence consists in knowing what the other person wants and when someone else is pleased by the same things, you no longer feel in awe of her. (page 14)

Loss of innocence

In her short introduction to the novella, Elizabeth Strout explains that Pavese described it as “the story of a virginity that defends itself”. For most of the book, Ginia acts chastely but she’s fascinated by the adults around her and wages an internal battle to overcome her disgust and shame associated with what she sees and what she wants to experience for herself. She knows she has power over men but is fearful of wielding it.

When Amelia gets a new job posing naked for an artist, Ginia asks to watch, not for any voyeuristic tendencies but to observe the artist at work.

They discussed the question for a short part of the walk and Amelia laughed because, dressed or undressed, a model can only be of interest to men and hardly to another girl. The model merely stands there: what is there to see? Ginia said she wanted to see the artist paint her; she had never seen anyone handling colours and it must be nice to watch. (page 12)

When she gets to watch the proceedings, she finds she’s disgusted by the whole sexual objectification of her friend and her friend’s inability to understand that this is what is happening.

Once more she saw Amelia’s swarthy belly in that semi-darkness, that very ordinary face and those drooping breasts. Surely a woman offered a better subject dressed? If painters wanted to do them in the nude, they must have ulterior motives. Why did they not draw from male models? Even Amelia when disgracing herself in that way became a different person; Gina was almost in tears. (page 23)

Later, Amelia introduces her to two artists, Guido and Rodrigues, who share a studio. Ginia is intrigued by the enigmatic Guido, a soldier who is an artist in his spare time, and a love affair develops — ushering her into a more complex adult world.

Compelling novella

The Beautiful Summer has a simple set-up and follows a predictable outcome. But it’s written in such a rich, lyrical language, with an undercurrent of suspense and danger, it makes for a compelling read.

Strout suggests there are hints of Elena Ferrante in the narrative style, to which I concur. Its depiction of female friendship, including its petty rivalries, quarrels and sharing of confidences, is pitch-perfect, and I loved the melancholia at its heart.

It not only explores themes of youth, desire and loss of innocence, but it also poses questions about the male gaze, sexual objectification and women’s position in Italian society at the time. It demands a reread to properly unpick it, but has certainly made me keen to explore more of Pavase’s work — I read, and loved, The House on the Hill last year.

Author, Book review, Bruno Lloret, Chile, Fiction, Giramondo Publishing, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘Nancy’ by Bruno Lloret (translated by Ellen Jones)

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The cover of X by Bruce Lloret

Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 144 pages; 2020. Translated from the Spanish by Ellen Jones.

It’s widely acknowledged that the letter X holds a special place in Elon Musk’s heart (assuming he has one). There’s SpaceX, Tesla’s Model X and the social media channel X (formerly known as Twitter). He even has a child named X AE A-XII, known as “X” for short.

The letter X is also popular with Chilean author Bruno Lloret if his debut novel, Nancy, is anything to go by.

First published in Chile in 2015 and translated into English by Ellen Jones in 2020, this striking novella uses X as literary “decoration” and a form of punctuation designed to slow the reader down, to force us to find the words amongst the proliferation of crosses and to contemplate them in a more regarded way.

The blurb on the back of the book, suggests X can be read “as multiplication symbols, scars, locations on a map, or as signs of erasure and the approach of death”.

To show you how the author uses the letter, here’s a relatively extreme example (from page 6) — not all the pages are as heavily marked as this:

Initially, this might seem visually intrusive to the reading experience — it’s certainly unconventional — but if you’re prepared to give it a try, you’re in for a real treat: Nancy is a beautiful and bittersweet novella about a woman looking back on her troubled life, and can easily be read in one sitting.

Looking back

Nancy is a widow who is dying of cancer. As she confronts her mortality, she reflects on her life and relationships, including her marriage to a “gringo”, who died in a tragic industrial accident, and her childhood and difficult adolescence in northern Chile.

Her teenage years were marred by the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the unexplained disappearance of her beloved older brother, Pato — whom she describes as a “superhero” — outside a nightclub when he was 19 years old.

Basically left to fend for herself, Nancy keeps house for her father and her alcoholic uncle Aarón who moves in with them. She goes to school in the morning and spends her afternoons secretly swimming with friends at Playa Roja under the watchful eyes of a group of creepy old gringos. This is despite her father’s decree that she never leave the house (except to go to school) for fear something might happen to her.

He told me that the bodies of women had been showing up on the beach. Some of them washed in by the waves, others just buried up to their necks in the sand, their heads blue in the open air X Five had shown up that week alone X It’s best if you stay home, Nancy. You’re pretty, and we’ve no idea who’s behind it X (page 34)

Cover image of the Two Lines Press edition
Two Lines Press edition

Courage and determination

Against this background of endemic violence and the threat of being “disappeared”, Nancy’s father discovers religion when two young Morman missionaries come knocking at the door. Eventually, Nancy, who is a non-believer and sexually active (she loses her virginity to a gipsy called Jesulé, whom she adores), is also baptised into the Church of Latter Day Saints — even though her heart is not in it.

When she unwittingly stumbles upon the two young male missionaries locked in an amorous embrace, she films them for potential blackmailing purposes. This is but one example of Nancy’s canny way of holding power in a world that largely denies her this control.

The most striking thing about the story, however, is Nancy’s sexual agency and streetwise view of the world, her unwavering commitment to her father (even though he doesn’t always treat her kindly) and her quiet determination to just get on with things. “Feeling sad won’t change anything,” she claims (page 30)

Nancy is a sensitively told tale of living life in the margins against a backdrop of death and violence. It explores themes of trauma, identity, religion and the search for meaning, yet despite the oppressive nature of the narrator’s life, it feels empowering and optimistic.

Lisa from ANZLitLovers has also reviewed it.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Giramondo Publishing is fast becoming my favourite indie press. It’s an Australian university-based publisher, which was founded in 1995 “to publish innovative and adventurous literary work that might not otherwise find publication because of its subtle commercial appeal”. You can find out more about them here.

Author, Book review, Daunt Books, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Natalia Ginzburg, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Valentino’ by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Avril Bardoni)

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Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 80 pages; 2023. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni.

What is it to be a “man of consequence”? And what happens if you don’t live up to that descriptor?

This is the focus of Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino, the tale of a much-doted-upon son who fails to live up to his parents’ expectations.

The titular Valentino, the only son of a retired school teacher, is lazy, vain and selfish. But there’s more to his story than meets the eye, and what is left unsaid in this carefully crafted novella, first published in 1957, is almost more important than what is.

A man of consequence

Valentino’s family has made many sacrifices to ensure he can go to medical school and buy all the necessary books and equipment to support his studies. When his father proudly states that this will make his son a “man of consequence”, what he really means is that he is counting on Valentino to lift them out of poverty and boost their social standing.

So it’s somewhat of a shock when Valentino finds a shortcut to riches by announcing he is betrothed to a wealthy older woman called Maddalena. The family are upset because they believe Valentino is getting married for the wrong reasons.

‘That woman is as ugly as sin,’ said my mother quietly. ‘She’s grotesque, Valentino. And since she boasts about being wealthy, everyone will assume that you are marrying her for her money. That’s what we think too, Valentino, because we cannot believe that you are in love with her, you who always used to chase the pretty girls, none of whom was ever pretty enough for you. Nothing like this has ever happened in our family before; not one of us has ever done anything just for money.” (page 11)

His older sister, Clara — who is married with three young children — is so angry about the situation, she calls him a dog under her breath.

But despite his family’s opposition, Valentino can’t see what the problem is — he thinks Maddalena “has lovely black eyes and the bearing of a lady”.

He was bored of all those pretty girls with nothing to talk about, while with Maddalena he could talk about books and a hundred other things. He wasn’t marrying her for her money; he was no pig. (page 12)

He settles into his new married life as if he were born into it and is at ease among Maddalena’s wealthy friends as he is his own family.

A caring daughter-in-law

And while his parents struggle to readjust — his father has a debt hanging over his head because he took out a loan to ensure the family was suitably attired at Valentino’s wedding — Maddalena proves to be a caring and thoughtful daughter-in-law.

When she finds out that Clara’s young son is sick, she arranges costly medical care for him. Later, she offers lodgings to Valentino’s younger sister Catarina, so that she can continue her teacher training studies. And all the while she runs her busy agricultural interests, continues to pay for Valentino’s long-dragged-out (neglected) medical studies, buys him lavish clothes, and bears him three sons.

But she keeps him at arm’s length and soon the quarrels start, where she accuses him of being a “layabout and a failure”.

Sister’s perspective

It is through Catarina’s eyes that we see how events unfold. She’s the put-upon daughter who looks after her parents and gives up any hope of finding a husband of her own. But as much as she’s disappointed by Valentino — she constantly worries that he’s not devoted to his studies and will fail his exams — she still loves him very much.

Without wishing to reveal plot spoilers, the story is neatly, and shockingly, upended in quite a profoundly unexpected way.

It’s a delicious treat of a book, written in Ginzburg’s typically understated but direct style. She’s so perceptive about family life, human behaviour and societal expectations, and every page offers up something frank and forthright. And she’s adroit at mixing the bittersweet with the poignant, with a dash of Italian fury thrown in for good measure.

Claire at Word by Word has also just reviewed this.

I have previously reviewed Giznburg’s All Our Yesterdays and The Dry Heart.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Daunt Books Publishing, which was founded in 2010, grew out of Daunt Books, an independent chain of bookshops in London and the South-East of the UK. You can find out more about them here.

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Samantha Harvey, Vintage Digital

‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage Digital; 138 pages; 2023.

Orbital, by British writer Samantha Harvey, is a beautiful, thought-provoking love letter to our planet. It will probably be my book of the year for 2023.

Sometimes you need to leave a country, or a situation, to write about it, because the distance offers a broader perspective or new insights that you can’t see when you are too close. It’s that idea that Harvey has exploited here. She celebrates the beauty and fragility of our planet from the perspective of outer space.

Her novella charts the experiences of a group of astronauts orbiting the globe in the first 24 hours of a nine-month stint onboard the International Space Station.

It’s not science fiction; rather, it uses the device of literary fiction to delve into the well-documented “overview effect” — the profound change in perception, or consciousness, that astronauts undergo when observing Earth from space.

They look down and they understand why it’s called Mother Earth. They all feel it from time to time. They all make an association between the earth and a mother, and this in turn makes them feel like children. (p8)

Orbiting our planet

The book is divided into multiple chapters, one for each orbit of the Earth on a single day in October, and each of those orbits (both ascending and descending) is told from the point of view of a different astronaut.

There are two women and four men on board. Four of them are astronauts from the US, Japan, Britain and Italy, and two are Russian cosmonauts.

Anton–quiet, and dry in his humour, sentimental, crying openly at films, at scenes outside the window–Anton the spaceship’s heart. Pietro its mind, Roman (the current commander, dextrous and capable, able to fix anything, control the robotic arm with millimetre precision, wire the most complex circuit board) its hands, Shaun its soul (Shaun there to convince them all that they have souls), Chie (methodical, fair, wise, not-quite definable or pin-downable) its conscience, Nell (with her eight-litre diving lungs) its breath. (p18)

From their vantage point — and travelling at an astonishing seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour — they see the sun rise and set with mechanical-like precision, observe the passing of continents and island states outside their windows, see the shifting weather patterns and cloud formations, taking as many photographs as they can along the way.

Their individual and collective sense of awe is palpable. The Earth looks  “so spectacular, so dignified and regal” and yet there’s a dissonance at play:

They think: maybe it’s hard being human and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s hard to shift from thinking your planet is safe at the centre of it all to knowing in fact it’s a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerably many, and that the whole thing is going to explode or collapse.

Time for self-reflection

But the astronauts aren’t just fixated on what they can see outside; there’s a lot of introspection too. Shaun puts it like this:

What the hell am I doing here, in a tin can in a vacuum? A tinned man in a tin can. Four inches of titanium away from death. Not just death, obliterated non-existence. (p49)

And there’s a preoccupation with their past individual histories  — after all, there’s a lot of time to think — and current situations down on Earth.

For instance, just a short time into the flight Chie discovers that her mother has died, which revives memories of her childhood in Japan and forces her to contemplate that she’s now an orphan. But here, cocooned from the stark reality of her loss, she finds solace in looking at Earth from up above and wishes she could stay orbiting it forever:

Don’t go back. Stay here ongoing. The creamy light of the ocean so exquisite; the gentle clouds rippling in tides. With a zoom lens the first fall of snow on top of Mount Fuji, the silver bracelet of the Nagara River where she swam as a child. Just here, the perfect solar arrays drinking sun. (p14)

While Harvey slowly fleshes out the backstories of her individual characters, it’s the way they interact as a collective being that is really the point of the story. Here, living in the space station, their survival is wholly dependent on how they cooperate, collaborate and work together. Above all, they must curb their own independence and put the crew’s needs ahead of their own desires.

It’s hard not to see this as an allegory for what needs to happen on the Earth below:

They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that’s what they begin to see when they look down. The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want. (p75)

A novel of ideas

For such a slim volume, Orbital is fat with ideas. It eloquently examines geopolitics, human greed and environmentalism, using the beauty of the Earth spinning in space as a way to take a high-level look at issues that deeply affect us all.

The writing is eloquent, and filled with lush, vivid descriptions. Only occasionally I thought they were beginning to wear thin (there are only so many ways you can say the same thing using different words, right?), but what held the narrative together and maintained my attention was the emotions it evoked in me. These ranged from awe to delight, anger to sadness — and everything in between.

But I came away from it feeling a real sense of hope. There’s a review at The Guardian which puts it better: “It’s an Anthropocene book resistant to doom”.

(Australian readers please note, this won’t be published here until early February. I purchased my copy via Amazon.co.uk after I read Harvey’s 2018 novel, The Western Wind, last month and then went looking to see if she had written anything new since then.)

Author, Book review, Fiction, Giramondo Publishing, Japan, Jessica Au, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Cold Enough For Snow’ by Jessica Au

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Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 108 pages; 2022.

Quiet books seem to be having a moment in my reading life. These books focus on introspective storytelling, nuanced character development and everyday life, rather than dramatic events or high-stakes plots.

Books I have read recently that are “quiet” include David Park’s Spies in Canaan, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (yet to be reviewed), Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person and Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. All are highly recommended.

Into that same category comes Australian writer Jessica Au’s much-lauded novella Cold Enough for Snow. This quiet, contemplative story about a woman who takes her mother on holiday with her to Japan won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction last week.

It’s won a slew of other awards and nominations, too (check out the Australian publisher’s page for a full listing), and even its humble beginnings came about because the manuscript won the inaugural 2020 Novel Prize, a joint venture between three international independent publishers who selected it from more than 1,500 entries.

Hypnotic prose

I had put off reading it because I had heard so much about it, but from the first page, I was lulled by the understated, hypnotic prose and the way it jumped about from one quiet reflection to another, stream of consciousness style, without ever losing its flow or rhythm.

I was so effortlessly drawn into the lives of these two characters, all told from the perspective of the daughter, that I almost felt I was there on holiday with them, crisscrossing Japan by train, eating out in small cafes and restaurants, visiting art galleries, buying hand-selected gifts to take home, and doing my best to ignore the rainy autumn weather.

The narrative is largely told in chronological order but does include some minor flashbacks that reveal the daughter’s past (she studied literature at college and used to work in a Chinese restaurant) and her relationship with her boyfriend, Laurie, with whom she’s considering having children. There’s a brief mention of a sister.

Seeking to connect

The story explores connections — whether between people, such as mother and daughter, and the deeply felt emotional connections we might experience with art and nature. Travel, of course, is the perfect prism to explore this idea, because when we travel, we temporarily lose our familiar social connections and routines, but often develop new connections — cultural, historical, environmental and personal — which make the experience so rewarding and memorable.

In Cold Enough for Snow, the daughter is desperate to reconnect with her mother in a way she can’t quite articulate. They both live in different cities, in an unnamed country (which is presumably Australia because that is where the writer is based), and speak different languages, so the trip to Japan is a chance to spend rare time together, renew their bond and enjoy each other’s company.

I wanted more of those moments, to feel fluency running through me, to know someone and to have them know me. I thought too of how my mother’s first language was Cantonese, and how mine was English, and how we only ever spoke together in one, and not the other.

But the daughter, who narrates the story, is angst-ridden, frustrated and often talks down to her mother in a patronising tone of voice.

There’s a feeling that they are dancing around something. Something vague and nebulous that is the very crux, or essence, of the story. (When you figure out what it is, it turns the whole narrative on its head.)

Quiet presence

Meanwhile, her mother’s presence is so unobtrusive as to be ghostlike. A reluctant traveller — “I had pushed, and eventually she had agreed, not in so many words, but by protesting slightly less, or hesitating over the phone when I asked her” — she is introverted and passive, rarely, if ever, expresses an opinion, and doesn’t much care for anything they do or see.

She’s easygoing, which makes her the ideal travel partner in my books, but the daughter wants more — she doesn’t want to have to carry the mental load of every decision about where to eat, what to see and do each day.

Visits to art galleries, temples and churches form the heart of their itinerary, but the mother remains frustratingly unresponsive to what she sees. In one instance, she doesn’t even want to go inside, choosing to wait for her daughter outdoors instead. And then she forgets to bring her walking boots, which means she must forgo a planned hike into the mountains, which was probably an unsuitable exercise for her anyway. The daughter, in a fit of pique, goes off alone.

This story leaves so many questions unanswered that it lingers in the mind for a long time afterwards. Cold Enough for Snow is the kind of book where not much happens, but everything does — if you read between the lines.

There are plenty of other reviews online, both good and bad, if you search for them.

I read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Classic, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, William Trevor

‘Two Lives’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 384 pages; 2016.

Two very different women, with different attitudes, personalities and lived experiences, star in William Trevor’s novellas, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, which are brought together in one volume under the title Two Lives, originally published in 1991.

It’s perhaps drawing a long bow to suggest the two female protagonists in this volume share commonalities, or are linked in any way, but reading each story, one after the other, it’s hard not to draw comparisons.

Both Mary Louise Dallon, who stars in Reading Turgenev, and Emily Delahunty (Mrs Delahunty), from My House in Umbria, are childfree and financially secure, but they are lonely and yearn for romance.

And perhaps because they don’t fit into the templated lives that society deems “normal”, both experience a kind of insanity. Mary Louise, moves into an attic to escape her much older alcoholic husband and his controlling sisters, and is later committed to an asylum, while Mrs Delahunty’s behaviour, fuelled by drink, becomes increasingly more unhinged as her past comes back to haunt her.

Innocence versus experience

Of course, they are also vastly different. Mary Louise is sexually inexperienced, having entered a marriage that has never been consummated, while Mrs Delahunty was sexually abused as a child and once supported herself through prostitution.

Mary Louise is quiet and introverted; Mrs Delahunty loud and convivial. Mary Louise longs to escape the family she married into; Miss Delahunty dreams of finding a family she can call her own.

The tone, style and setting of both novellas are also different. Reading Turgenev employs a third-person narrator to tell Mary Louise’s sad and melancholy story. It also features a dual timeline that intertwines the story of an unhappy marriage with Mary Louise’s confinement in a psychiatric institution for more than 30 years

By contrast, My House in Umbria is narrated in the first person using a jolly, upbeat and deeply intimate voice.

The former is set in Ireland in the mid-20th century, the latter in Italy in 1987.

So, what are the stories about? Let me briefly explain each in turn.

Reading Turgenev

Reading Turgenev is about a farm girl who secures her future by marrying Elmer Quarry, a man much older than her — “the only well-to-do Protestant for miles around” — who runs a drapery store in town with his two (meddling and not very nice) spinster sisters, Matilda and Rose.

And why should they put themselves out by the slightest iota for a penniless creature whom their brother might have bought at a fun-fair if they’d all been living a hundred years ago? He’d married her to breed with. He’d married her because of his sentimental notion that the name should continue above the shop.

The marriage does not get off to a good start, because Elmer, who is normally a teetotaller, gets drunk on their honeymoon and passes out. The pair never consummate their relationship, even when they return home, and consequently never have children, to the puzzlement of many, including family (his and hers), village residents and busybodies.

But the issue is never discussed between the pair. Instead, Elmer deals with it by drinking in secret, while Mary Louise begins bicycling out to visit her impoverished aunt and her invalid cousin, Robert, with whom she has been in love since she was a young girl.

It is Robert who reads the works of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev to her, hence the novella’s title, but their relationship is a clandestine one, which is what makes it all so heart-rending when he dies unexpectedly.

In her bereavement, Mary Louise becomes increasingly more introverted and isolated, with dire consequences for her own sanity. When she is seen buying rat poison, the sisters believe their lives are being put at risk… but is that really the case?

Reading Turgenev was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.

My House in Umbria

My House in Umbria is about a romantic novelist who survives a terrorist attack on a train in Italy and invites fellow survivors from her carriage to spend their convalescence at her villa free of charge.

This brings together a diverse group of individuals, including a British general, a German man whose fiancee was killed in the bombing, and Aimee, a young American girl who has been orphaned and has now retreated into silence.

Mrs Delahunty delights in the company of this new “family”, especially as their imagined lives and backstories will provide fodder for her next novel, but everything is thrown into disarray when Aimee’s uncle, a rather aloof man called Thomas Riversmith, arrives to take his niece back home.

Our narrator, who has a troubled past — her sideshow parents sold her to a foster family and her foster father later “satisfied his base desires” with her — becomes infatuated by Mr Riversmith and sets her amorous sights on him. When she overhears him saying not very nice things about her, she’s even more determined to have her way with him.

He was remarking, when I lifted the receiver, that he had never before encountered a romantic novelist. Then, distressing me considerably, he referred to as ‘trash’ what last night he had called most interesting. He referred to the grappa we’d enjoyed together as an unpleasant drink. The word ‘grotesque’ was used in a sentence I couldn’t catch.

The book ends with all the patients returning to their respective homes and Mrs Delahunty renting out her spare rooms once again to tourists, but something has irrevocably changed in her: “Perhaps I’ll become old, perhaps not,” she muses. “Perhaps something else will happen in my life, but I doubt it.”

My House in Umbria was adapted for American television in 2003, starring Maggie Smith.

Trevor’s trademark best

Together these two novellas pack a powerful punch and demonstrate Trevor at his trademark best: showing us the remarkable interior lives of two ordinary but highly resilient women getting by as best they can. The first showcases his melancholy life-in-an-Irish-village style, the second his black comedic style.

If you have not read him before and want to get a taster for his different types of writing, this would be a good one to start with.

Both are highly engaging reads, but if I had to choose between the two, I preferred My House in Umbria, only because the voice was more comedic and the story less gloomy. I found Mrs Delahunty larger than life and her antics ludicrously entertaining, somewhat reminiscent of Mrs Eckdorf in his 1970 novel Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, and also Miss Gomez in Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971).

Finally, there’s an eloquent review of both published in the New York Times, which describes Two Lives so much better than I ever could.

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. 
Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy also reviewed ‘Two Lives’.

♥ Next month Sadly, December will mark the end of ‘A Year with William Trevor’. Cathy plans to read ‘Last Stories’ (which I have previously reviewed here) and in a slight change to our schedule, I plan on reading the novella ‘Bodily Secrets’, which was published as part of Penguin’s Great Love series.

I also read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Emma Glass, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Wales

‘Peach’ by Emma Glass

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Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 102 pages; 2019.

I’m not sure what to make of Peach, the debut by Welsh writer Emma Glass, which portrays the aftermath of a teenage girl’s unreported sexual assault.

Told in the first person in a stream-of-consciousness style, it uses disjointed language and repeated words and phrases to mirror the girl’s thought patterns.

It is not an easy read. That’s because of the gruesome subject matter and the style Glass employs to tell the story. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish what is real and what is not and whether Peach (that’s the name of our narrator) is hallucinating or simply imagining events because she’s been so traumatised.

I am not a proponent of censorship, but I do think Peach should come with a trigger warning. It deals with sensitive issues that some readers may find upsetting. This review may do likewise, so please bear that in mind if you decide to continue.

Returning home

When the book opens we are thrust right into the aftermath of the girl’s assault as she returns home and sneaks into the house so her parents won’t question what has happened to her:

I  slip inside. I don’t open the door wide. It still squeaks. They will hear. They will corner me in the hall. They will ask questions. He won’t ask about the blood. She won’t ask about the rips in my clothes. She will say the rose in my cheeks looks pretty. He will kiss my head and say dinner is at seven. I swallow a mouthful of sick and slip silently up the stairs still chewing my mitten.

I’ll refrain from going into details, but she sews herself up down there and then has dinner with her parents as if nothing has happened.

Her parents, by the way, are odd and a little creepy. They have a baby (who is called Baby) and speak openly about sex. Her dad goes as far as to say he’s proud Peach sleeps with her boyfriend (who is called Green):

It is good to get experience, and well, if you get blessed with a baby, that’s even better.

That fear of pregnancy hangs over Peach like a dark shadow. Her belly is swollen and tight, and she thinks it is getting bigger. She never tells Green that she’s been raped, so when they go to a pharmacy to buy a pregnancy test, he doesn’t realise that anyone else could have fathered a child with her.

Grim and gruesome

Yes, it’s all rather grim. And gruesome. But it is also suspenseful and intriguing.

When a series of “love letters” turn up, supposedly from her perpetrator (whom she dubs “sausage man”), it suggests he is obsessed and dangerous.

Other horrible things happen — the family cat goes missing, for instance, and Green is beaten up so badly he must go to hospital — for which Sausage Man seems to be to blame. But how much of this is in Peach’s head and how much of it actually happens is difficult to determine.

Toward the end, Peach goes on a wild rampage and butchers her assailant, offering up chunks of meat to her parents who delight in cooking it on the barbecue unaware that it is human flesh. But again, is this real? Or is Peach projecting?

I’m not sure what the point of the story is other than to suggest that when we don’t properly deal with trauma it impacts our mental and emotional well-being, leading to severe psychological distress.

But Peach left me with more questions than answers. Why were her parents so blind to her condition? Why didn’t Green suspect something was wrong? And why was her stomach so swollen?

The author, who is a children’s nurse, cites James Joyce and Gertrude Stein (among others) as influences. I thought the work was also reminiscent of Eimear McBride’s ‘A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing’, with a dash of Laura Jean McKay’s ‘The Animals in that Country’ thrown in for good measure.

But there’s no doubt that Peach is wholly original — and profoundly disturbing. It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted.

I read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Richard Ford, Setting, USA

‘Wildlife’ by Richard Ford

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Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 159 pages;  2018.

Richard Ford’s Wildlife is a beguiling novella told from the perspective of a teenage boy, Joe Brinson, whose parents are going through a little “bump” in their marriage and behave in unfathomable and self-destructive ways.

The opening paragraph sets the scene:

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom, and my father had brought us there in the spring of that year from Lewiston, Idaho, in the belief that people — small people like him — were making money in Montana or soon would be, and he wanted a piece of that good luck before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind.

But the luck runs out quickly, when, first, Joe’s father, Jerry, is dramatically fired from his job as a golf instructor at the local country club, and two, a wildfire in the nearby Rocky Mountains casts a pall of smoke over the entire town and doesn’t look like it will be extinguished any time soon.

Instead of looking for a new job, Jerry joins a local volunteer crew fighting the fire, leaving his small family behind, almost as if he’s using the escapade to avoid confronting the reality of his own crumbling marriage and dissatisfaction with his life.

Meanwhile, Joe’s mother, Jean, who has been unable to find work as a substitute teacher or bookkeeper since moving to Montana, is angry at her husband because she thinks he is ill-equipped for firefighting and is putting his life in danger for no good reason. “This is a stupid idea,” she tells him.

Yet no sooner has her husband headed off to do his community-minded duty, than Jean’s jumping into bed with Warren Miller, an older man who is rich, influential and owns two local grain elevators. But because the story is filtered through Joe’s eyes, it’s hard to tell whether his mother is using Miller to get a job at his company, or whether she’s just looking for a romantic interlude while her husband is away.

Human drama

A lot happens in this novella, which condenses most of the action in just a few short days, using pared-back language and short, active sentences. Yet somehow the book brims with emotion. It feels like a lifetime of living, loving, pain and misunderstanding are played out in this one short period.

And Joe’s confusion, his inability to understand his parents’ behaviour and actions, bring him up short. He’s sensitive, confused and doesn’t quite know whose side to take, especially when both Jerry and Jean drag him into their dramas.

When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what’s in their hearts. This can save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again — which is a loss. But to shield yourself — as I didn’t do — seems to be an even greater error, since what’s lost is the truth of your parents’ life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.

Yet the self-destructive behaviour and the deliberate wilfulness of both parties doesn’t seem entirely believable. It’s almost as if both Joe’s mother and his father lose their minds momentarily and live out their individual fantasies — his of macho “escape”, hers of sexual wantonness — with no regard for the consequences.

Gripping narrative

Despite these misgivings, the story is a gripping one. It’s fast-paced, full of narrative tension and suspense, and looming over it all is the threat of a natural disaster that puts the Brinson’s drama into perspective.

Ford paints an evocative picture of Montana Falls — “you could see mountains on clear days from the streets of town” — and the wildfire threat that rumbles on for months at a time, casting a haze so you could “sometimes not see the mountains or where the land met the sky”.

Wildlife is essentially a coming-of-age tale, one that uses the metaphor of an uncontrollable fire to explain how some people live their lives. It’s both bittersweet and explosive.

The book was first published in 1990, and it was adapted for the screen in 2018.

I read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, France, literary fiction, Maclehose Press, Paris, Patrick Modiano, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Black Notebook’ by Patrick Modiano (translated by Mark Polizzotti)

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Fiction – hardcover; MacLehose Press; 160 pages; 2016. Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti.

This is my third review of Patrick Modiano’s work this year, for which I make no apologies. He’s fast becoming a new favourite writer.

The Black Notebook, first published in the French language as L’herbe des nuits in 2012, bears striking similarities to an earlier 1992 novel, After the Circus, which was the first Modiano book I had ever read and reviewed.

In that novel, the narrator, Jean, reveals that as an 18-year-old he was interrogated by police about a man and a woman he claimed not to know. He also tells us about a woman named Gisèle who he met and fell in love with, but she had many closely guarded secrets and lured him into a world beset by dangerous unseen forces.

In The Black Notebook, the narrator, who is also called Jean (although whether it’s the same Jean isn’t made clear and probably isn’t important), explains that about 20 years earlier he was interrogated by police about his involvement with a woman called Dannie, who had a dubious past and was wanted for a homicide committed three months before they met.

His relationship with her years earlier had unwittingly drawn him into a world of dangerous men where the threat of violence ran like an undercurrent beneath their loose acquaintanceships. He had never truly known who they were or what they did, but he would meet them at the Unic Hôtel, the Cité Universitaire cafeteria or empty cafés for drinks and conversation.

Exploring the streets of Paris

Fast forward 40 years and Jean is now a middle-aged man and a successful writer. He acts like a flâneur, wandering the streets of the Montparnasse district of Paris, but he has a goal in mind. Using his notebook from his youth as an aide–mémoire, he wants to piece together clues about who Dannie was, what crime she had committed and how he truly felt about her.

The notebook includes “as many small details as possible concerning this short, turbulent period of my life” but often lacks context or explanation. It’s all snippets of information to jog the memory, which he describes as akin to a train rushing by

… too fast for you to read the name of the town. And so, with your forehead pressed against the window, you note down other details: a passing river, the village bell tower, a black cow ruminating beneath a tree, removed from the herd. You hope that at the next station, you’ll be able to read the name and find out what region you’re in.

The narrative, told in a simple, straightforward style, explores notions of memory and time — “For me, there has never been a present or a past” — and seamlessly blends Jean’s recollections of the past with his present experiences.

Through the looking glass

There are recurring motifs — a red car, a camel-coloured overcoat, a black briefcase, various train station platforms and lights left on in rooms — throughout the text, while multiple references to glass — in windows, mirrors, windscreens and even aquariums — are used as a metaphor for a barrier, a place to look at the world but remain separate from it.

This is how he describes seeing the gang of men, for instance, as he stands on the pavement and watches them through the hotel window:

They were only a few centimetres from me behind the window, and the second one, with his moonlike face and hard eyes, didn’t notice me either. Perhaps the glass was opaque from the inside, like a one-way mirror. Or else, very simply, dozens and dozens of years stood between us: they remained frozen in the past, in the middle of the hotel foyer, and we no longer lived, they and I, in the same space of time.

Towards the end of Jean’s stroll, he runs into Langlais, the police officer, now retired, who interrogated him all those years ago, and they sit in a cafe and enjoy a coffee together. And that’s when Langlais offers to share the case file he filched as a “souvenir” of his retirement and which offers up most of the answers Jean has been looking for.

The Black Notebook is a thrilling and tense read, but it’s also a hypnotic one.

Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014 and has more than 40 books to his name.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, France, Patrick Modiano, Publisher, Setting, Yale University Press

‘Sundays in August’ by Patrick Modiano (translated by Damion Searls)

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Fiction – paperback; Yale University Press; 168 pages; 2017. Translated from the French by Damion Searls.

Patrick Modiano’s Sundays in August is essentially a jewel heist with a difference.

First published in 1986 under the French title Dimanches d’aout, it was translated into English — by Damion Searls in 2017 — after the author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014.

Set in Nice, on the French Riviera, it is a perfectly paced and plotted noirish crime novella involving a photographer, his lover, her husband, a mysterious American couple — and a giant diamond known as the “Southern Cross”.

Setting the scene

When the book opens, the unnamed first-person narrator meets an acquaintance, Villecourt, from seven years earlier, a man he has never liked. They go for a drink. Villecourt wants to talk about Sylvia. Our narrator does not. We, the readers, do not know who Sylvia is — and so Modiano starts off as he means to go on, drip-feeding us clues and snippets of information, carefully holding things back and only revealing important facts when he thinks they are relevant.

We find out Sylvia was once married to Villecourt, but she ran away with our narrator and took a hugely valuable diamond with her. The pair hoped to sell it to someone who was rich enough to afford their asking price of more than a million — Francs? American dollars? It’s not specified, but it’s a lot of money.

For days and days, Sylvia and I had been waiting, motionless in places people were moving through: hotel bars and lobbies, café tables along the Promenade des Anglais. It seems to me now that we were weaving a gigantic, invisible spiderweb and waiting for someone to find their way into it.

Stumbling into the “web” comes a rich American, Virgil Neale, and his English wife, Barbara, who befriend the young French couple and court them with dinners out and invites for coffee. Later, comes a generous offer to buy the diamond which Sylvia wears around her neck, too scared to leave it unattended in the shabby pension they are living in.

Neal asked Sylvia, “So, you really want to sell your diamond?”
He leaned over to her and took the stone between his thumb and index finger, to examine it more closely. Then he gently placed it back onto her black sweater. I chalked it up to the offhand way Americans had. Sylvia hadn’t budged an inch; she looked off in another direction as if trying to ignore Neal’s gesture.
“Yes, we do,” I said.

From this one conversation, a series of events unfold in which things do not go according to plan — for either party.

Evocative and atmospheric

Sundays in August is an incredibly atmospheric tale and there’s a feeling of foreboding throughout. Who are the mysterious Neals? Where does Villecourt fit into the picture? And why has our narrator returned to the scene of the crime some seven years later?

The last few chapters deliver most of the answers, but even so, there’s no neat resolution; the reader is left to make up their own mind about what transpired.

What I loved most about Sundays in August is the way the narrative keeps shape-shifting so that the reader is never quite sure who to trust. Is the narrator reliable, for instance? (Plot spoiler: I think he is.)

Through the use of carefully timed flashbacks and foreshadowing, Modiano delivers a superlative story arc that comes completely full circle so that it’s not until the very end that we can see how the events that occurred seven years earlier played out.

I totally loved this book. It does everything I look for in a crime novella. It has great, morally dubious characters, snap-fire dialogue, a slow build-up of suspense, an evocative setting, expert plotting and an unpredictable storyline. Five stars.

Patrick Modiano is fast becoming a favourite author; my other reviews of his work are here.