Reading

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Vol. 1)

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Mansfield Park book covers
Mansfield Park book covers

This year my Jane Austen group is doing a slow read of Mansfield Park, which involves our reading and discussing the novel, one volume at a time, over three months. This month, we did Volume 1, which, for those of you with modern editions, encompasses chapters 1 to 18. It ends with the return of the patriarch, Sir Thomas Bertram, from his plantation in Antigua.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Every time I re-read an Austen novel, I “see” something new, something new to me that is, because I can’t imagine there’s anything really new to discover in these much loved, much pored-over books. Sometimes my “new” thing pops up because in a slow read I see things I didn’t see before while I was focusing on plot, or character, or language, or … Other times, it might arise out of where I am in my life and what experiences have been added to my life since the previous read.

I’m not sure what is behind this read’s insights, but the thing that struck me most in the first volume this time is the selfishness, or self-centredness, of most of the characters. It’s so striking that I’m wondering whether Austen is writing a commentary on the selfishness/self-centredness of the well-to-do, and how this results in poor behaviour, carelessness of the needs of others, and for some, in immorality (however we define that.)

Mansfield Park has been analysed from so many angles. These include that it is about ordination (which Austen herself said was the subject she was going to write about); that it is a “condition of England” novel; and that it is about education. In the first chapter, in fact, Mrs Norris, the aunt we all love to hate, says

Give a girl an education, and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without farther expense to anybody.

The irony of course is that the sort of education that Mrs Norris supplies to the Bertram girls does not do them any favours. That’s not exactly where I’m going now, though we could argue that poor education – or poor upbringing – is behind much of the selfishness we see in the novel. So, maybe, I will end up talking about education by the end of the novel.

For now, however, I will share why I am thinking this way. For those of you who don’t know the plot, it centres around Fanny Price who, at the age of 10, is taken in by her wealthy relations, the Bertrams of Mansfield Park, to relieve her impoverished parents of one mouth to feed. Fanny Price is the Austen heroine people love to hate, but I’m not one of those haters. I believe that if you truly look at her character and her life, within the context of her situation and times, you will see a young girl whose good values and commonsense enable her to make the best of a very difficult situation.

That it is a difficult situation is made clear in several ways, including the fact that we are told in the opening chapter that she is to be treated as a second class citizen in the family. A “distinction” must be preserved; she is not her cousins’ equal. In the second chapter, we are told

Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of their way to secure her comfort.

As the novel progresses, and the characters are introduced, they are, one by one, shown to be self-centred and/or selfish in one way or another. I won’t elucidate them all, but, for example:

  • Lady Bertram (her aunt) is, from the start, lazy and careless about the needs of others. Her own comfort, and that of her pug, supersedes all.
  • Mrs Norris (another aunt) is judgemental and parsimonious, ungenerous in mind and matter in every possible way.
  • Cousins Maria and Julia show no generosity to Fanny, unless it’s something that doesn’t materially affect them; they are “entirely deficient in … self–knowledge, generosity and humility”.
  • Cousin Tom “feels born only for expense and enjoyment”, and exudes “cheerful selfishness”.
  • Visiting neighbour, Henry Crawford, is “thoughtless and selfish from prosperity and bad example” and amuses himself by trifling with the feelings of Maria and Julia who provide “an amusement to his sated mind”.
  • Henry Crawford’s sister Mary is unapologetic about her selfishness, asking Fanny to forgive her, as “selfishness must always be forgiven…because there’s no hope of a cure”. This surely takes the cake!

And so it continues … the clergyman Dr Grant is an “indolent, selfish bon vivant”; and the self-important Mr Rushworth and the self-centred Mr Yates show no interest or awareness of the needs of others.

There are, of course, some redeeming characters. Cousin Edmund, in the first flush of love, can be thoughtless at times but it is his overall kindness that keeps Fanny going, and Mrs Grant also comes across as sensible and kind.

A couple of significant events occur in this volume – the visit to Mr Rushworth’s place at Sotherton, and preparations for staging a play, Lovers’ vows. These provide ample opportunity for the characters to parade their self-centredness. You can’t miss it. Fanny certainly doesn’t, as she watches those around her jockey for position in terms of their roles in the play:

Fanny looked on and listened, not unamused to observe the selfishness which, more or less disguised, seemed to govern them all, and wondering how it would end.

Fanny, however, also questions her own motives in refusing to take part in the play: “Was it not ill-nature, selfishness, and a fear of exposing herself?” But, in fact, she is the only one who is truly alert to the dangers within.

This “selfishness” theme is not, of course, the only issue worth discussing when thinking about Mansfield Park, as other members in my group made clear with their own discoveries. It is simply the one that stood out for me, during this re-read.

Thoughts anyone?

Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (#BookReview)

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Question 7 is the fifth book by Richard Flanagan that my reading group has done, making him our most read author. That surprised me a little, but he has produced an impressive body of work that is hard to ignore – and, clearly, we haven’t.

We always start our meetings with sharing our first impressions. For this book they ranged from those who were somewhat bemused because of its disjointed nature to those who loved it, one calling it “extraordinary”. My first impression was that it’s a book full of paradoxes, and that these started with my experience of reading it. By this I meant that it was both easy and hard to read, easy because it was so engrossing and moving I was compelled on, but hard because the paradoxical nature of the ideas being explored kept pulling me up to ponder what he meant. What I didn’t add, because I feared overstaying my “first impressions” time, was that Question 7 felt like a humane book, a book about who we are and how we are, about what we do to each other and why. 

“The words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything”

I can see how Question 7 can feel a bit disjointed – an effect of its stream of consciousness style – but there is a clear structure underpinning it, one provided by three interwoven threads. The first comprises the Hiroshima story, the role of Wells’ novel The world set free, in which he imagined “a new weapon of hitherto unimaginable power”, and the scientist Szilard. Flanagan uses novelistic techniques to link Wells, his lovers, Rebecca West and Little e (aka Elizabeth von Arnim), and Szilard, whose reading of Wells’ novel set him thinking about an atom bomb, and conceiving the idea of a “nuclear chain reaction”. The idea of a chain reaction becomes one of the novel’s connecting motifs or metaphors. One things leads to another, and, as Szilard was to find out to his horror, once started chain reactions are very hard to stop.

The second concerns the colonisation of Tasmania and, bringing in Wells again, his statement that his novel, The war of the worlds, was inspired by the cataclysmic effect of European colonisation on Aboriginal Tasmanians. Wells’ invading Martians become the novel’s second metaphor, Flanagan equating them with the colonising British. In a neat additional link, we learn that Szilard and some of his Hungarian Jewish scientist peers called themselves the Martians.

The third thread encompasses the story of Flanagan’s Tasmanian-based family, particularly his father’s life and his own. The way these threads, and their linking metaphors, coalesce to explore and expose life’s unanswerable questions makes for involving reading, as Brona and Lisa also found.

And yet, there’s more… There is another less visible connecting thread which provides the novel’s backbone and guide to meaning. It comes from Flanagan’s understanding of an essay by a young Yolnju woman, Siena Stubs, in which she discusses “a fourth tense” in Yolnju thinking. As I understand it, this encompasses the idea – in my words – that all time can coexist. For the Yolnju, for example, this means the ancestors were here, are here, will be here. Flanagan uses this concept as a refrain throughout his book, but in different contexts so that we can see its relevance. Thinking about his near-death experience on the Franklin, for example, he writes that “though it happened then it’s still happening now and won’t ever stop happening”. Or, to universalise it, “life is always happening and has happened and will happen” (p. 99). 

A little later on, reflecting on the Hiroshima atrocity, he says:

what if vengeance and atonement both are simply the lie that time can be reversed, and thereby some equality, some equilibrium, some justice had? Is it simply truer to say Hiroshima happened, Hiroshima is still happening, and Hiroshima will always happen? (p. 140)

Further on again, he delves into the horrors of Tasmania’s colonial past and uses the refrain, “we were, we are, we will” to encompass not only the continuation of First Nations culture but the fallout from “the System” that the Martians had created. He concludes this section with another of his paradoxes:

And thereafter it was we who bore the inescapable, ineradicable shame that was not ours and which would always be ours. (p. 230)

Question 7, then, explores some of the toughest imponderables of our existence. It reminds us that once something happens, it doesn’t go away, but is part of the past, present and future, is part of the fabric of our being.

And so, we get to a related idea of memory, which also recurs throughout the novel. Writing about his childhood in Rosebery, Flanagan eschews checking some facts, saying,

This is an account of memory, not fact, and facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory – its tricks, its invasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions – is who we become as we shuffle around in a circle …. (p. 151)

There’s that circle – or non-linear time – again, because, in Flanagan’s mind “only fools have answers”. It is far better to keep questioning. This might be the appropriate place to share Flanagan’s two perfect epigraphs, as they provide a guide to how to read this book:

The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama, or fantasy. It maybe myriad, it may not. The question is put, but where is the answer? 
– Hobart Town Mercury reviewing Moby Dick 1851

and

No, this is not piano. This is dreaming.
– Duke Ellington.

It might also be the time to share book’s framing question, which comes from a short story by Chekhov, “Question posed by a mad mathematician”, in which he parodies a school test problem:

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

Ha! This unanswerable non-sequitur of a question, “who loves longer, a man or a woman”, is another of the novel’s framing motifs, alongside the (almost) throwaway line he uses at the end of particularly tragic or egregious situations, “that’s life”.

So, where does this all leave us, the reader? With a challenge, I think, to reckon with our personal histories and the wider histories we are part of – and to do so with a sceptical attitude to logic and rationality, because “the world  from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world … beneath which an entirely different world surges.”

Near the end of the book, Flanagan shares some of the rather bizarre responses he received to his first novel, Death of a river guide, and writes,

After that I knew that the truth wasn’t the truth even when it was.

Here, then, another paradox, one that quietly snuck up on me but that embodies the book. Truths, of one sort or another, come thick and fast as you read, but always there are questions. We cannot, in other words, measure Hiroshima or the impact of colonialism. We cannot pretend

… there is some moral calculus to death. There is no equation of horrors … Who do we remember and who do we forget?

Ultimately, as Flanagan wrote part way through his book, the words are not the book, its soul is everything. In Question 7, we see into Flanagan’s soul and, inevitably, have a light shone on our own. Where to from here?

Richard Flanagan
Question 7
Knopf, 2023
280pp
ISBN: 9781761343452

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (#BookReview)

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Barbara Kingsolver’s latest – and multi-award winning – novel, Demon Copperhead, was inspired, as I’m sure most of you know, by Charles Dickens’ autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. Indeed, Demon Copperhead opens with an epigraph from that novel:

“It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”

This could be an argument for writing historical fiction, and is certainly relevant to Kingsolver’s political intent, but for the novel’s protagonist it’s far more personal. Several times through the novel Demon refers to the point at which things changed – usually for the worse – but it’s two-thirds through where he makes it clear

Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you. […]

In my time I’ve learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we’re born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they’ve always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.

But, I’m jumping ahead here … so let’s back up a bit. I started by referencing the fact that the novel was inspired by David Copperfield, and it was inspired by it for one very good reason, which Kingsolver explains in her Acknowledgements:

I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.

So there you have it. Kingsolver has transferred Charles Dickens’ London of the early to mid-nineteenth century to Lee County Virginia from around 1990 to 2004 or so. While Demon struggles to make something of his life against all odds, not recognising or accepting until later that those odds were stacked against him from the start, Kingsolver, like Dickens, is a reformer doing her best to ensure that we will see from that start just how stacked those odds are at every level. I was expecting the book to be primarily about the OxyContin/opioid addiction crisis but it is much broader than that. It’s about poverty and the intergenerational trauma that this engenders – and how this helps lay the foundation for something like OxyContin to take hold.

“What matters in a story is the heart of its hero” (Demon)

I admit that I was not initially keen to read this novel. Not only is it very long, but I’ve read (and, yes, enjoyed) Barbara Kingsolver before, and I have higher priority books on my TBR. However, it was my reading group’s first read of the year, so of course I read it. It’s not a perfect novel, but Demon’s voice was so engaging and the translation of Dickens to Appalachian America is so pertinent to contemporary politics, that I’m glad I read it.

I can see, though, why it’s one of those divisive novels that engenders strong feelings one way or another. For a start, translating Dickens to contemporary times is risky. Dickens’ novel, being published in serial form, is long and episodic, with a large cast of characters, a touch of melodrama, and a lot of detail. A big, baggy, monster in other words. This style does not necessarily suit contemporary readers, but this is what you get with Demon Copperhead.

Like Dickens’ novel, Demon Copperhead wears its heart on its sleeves, meaning it’s not subtle. It can be didactic at times, as in Mr Armstrong’s lessons on capitalism and coal mining companies and Tommy’s discussion of historical truths. Its large cast of characters aren’t quite stereotypes but many are clearly typified by their behaviour – the bad characters who manipulate and use others (like stepfather Stoner, foster-father Crickson, and anti-hero Fast Forward), the weak characters who are well intentioned but can do more harm than good (like Coach), the kind hearts who pick Demon up when he’s down but can’t properly guide him (like the Peggotts), and the shining lights who try to set him on the right path but know he has to decide for himself (namely June and Angus).

In other words, Demon Copperhead is an in-your-face novel, which could be alienating. However, what kept me engaged was the character of Demon himself. Born to a junkie mother and orphaned at 11 when she ODs on oxy, he has a vivacity, an openness, and a heart that you want to see survive, despite setback after setback after setback. He’s “resilient”, a survivor, which is something those around him see early on. This is not to say, though, that he will survive, because even survivors need a hand, and this is what Demon sometimes gets, sometimes doesn’t, and, distressingly, sometimes eschews because he is determined not to be helped, to make his own decisions, to be his own man.

Regardless, once Demon had me, I was in. I have lived in Virginia (albeit very middle-class northern Virginia) and I have driven through various parts of Appalachia. I am interested in the culture, and, having recently read JD Vance’s Hillbilly elegy (my review), I am interested in how it is playing out in contemporary America. Kingsolver explores the role played by big pharma in targeting poor Appalachian regions with their painkillers, at a time when the region was suffering from the callous withdrawal of coal companies*. She shows how socioeconomic factors like these, combined with systemic failures in child welfare, not to mention poor educational opportunity, and the ongoing ostracism of “hillbillies”, contribute to the rise of MAGA politics in the USA.

She also shows the opposite, because while Demon is aware of the factors that work against him, he also sees what can sustain – good people offering the right support, the best parts of rural traditions, and nature, whose benefits are both spiritual and practical. The question is, are these enough? Or, what is needed to make them enough?

You have probably noticed by now, that I am not doing my usual sort of review here. This is partly because, being a multi-award winning Barbara Kingsolver novel, Demon Copperhead has already been written about ad infinitum, and partly because I wanted to tease out my own feelings about such a polarising novel. Yes, I can see – even agree with – some of the criticisms. It’s long and detailed, is didactic in places, and is not what you’d call subtle – rather like Dickens, in fact. However, the power of the story and its accompanying messages, combined with Demon’s utterly captivating voice, got me over the line. Kingsolver, I’d say, does her epigraph proud, whichever way you read it.

* One of my reading group members share an article about this very issue in a January 28 article in The Guardian.

* For a more traditional review of the novel, do check out Brona’s.

Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead
London: Faber & Faber, 2022
644pp.
ISBN: 9780571376490 (eBook)

Nell Stevens, Mrs Gaskell and me: To women, two love stories, two centuries apart (#BookReview)

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It’s a bit of a stretch, I admit, to submit Nell Stevens’ strange hybrid biography-memoir, Mrs Gaskell and me, as my second contribution to Bill’s (The Australian Legend) Gen 0. But, having read Elizabeth Gaskell’s two novellas, Lizzie Leigh and Cousin Phillis, for the week, and having had Stevens’ book on my TBR for a few years, I decided it was now or never to get it off the shelf. After all, as I wrote in my Two Novellas post, Mrs (Elizabeth) Gaskell (1810-1865) is a good example of a nineteenth century independent woman because, despite being a wife and mother, she managed to forge a career for herself as a writer.

So, let’s leap in. The reason this book is a bit of a stretch for inclusion in Bill’s week is not only because it is one of those hybrid biography-memoirs or bibliomemoirs, but because of Stevens’ statement in her disclaimer at the beginning of her book:

I have changed names, scenes, details, motivations and personalities. Every word has been filtered through the distortions of my memory, bias and efforts to tell a story. This is as true of the historical material as it is of the sections about my own life: studies, letters and texts excerpted here are not always faithfully quoted. This is a work of imagination.

So, it’s a work of imagination that tells two alternating stories. In first person, we have Stevens’ own story, which goes from 2013 to 2017, and encompasses her love affair with an American and the writing of her PhD on Mrs Gaskell. This is the memoir bit. In second person is Stevens’ story of Mrs Gaskell primarily covering the years 1855 to 1865 which encompass her three-months-long trip to Rome in 1857 and its aftermath. This is the biography bit.

Now, regular readers know my attitude to the fiction versus nonfiction question. I am more interested in truths than I am in facts. Facts on their own don’t always tell us a lot, and when we are talking a person’s life, they can be limiting. Knowing when a person married, for example, is far less relevant or interesting than how they felt about their marriage and the person they married, but, it is hard to get facts about those feelings. Even if the subject wrote letters and/or diaries, how truthful were they? And, did what they wrote one day in a fit of passion (positive or negative) reflect the truth of the relationship as a whole? And so on. All this is to say that I am happy to accept Mrs Gaskell and me as an imaginative bibliomemoir, but if you’re not, this book will not appeal to you.

Because of the reason I chose to read this book now, I’m not going to write the usual sort of review. There are several out there, if you are interested. Instead, I am going to focus on how it fits into Bill’s Independent Woman thesis, which is to look at non-Australian writers “whose work influenced, predated or paralleled the first wave feminists of AWW Gen 1”. This means, to me, that we can look at the works of these women writers and at their lives, and Mrs Gaskell had an interesting life.

“all of a sudden you had a career” (Stevens)

It was also, I think, though I haven’t read a true biography of her, a divided life. There was the traditional “Mrs Gaskell”, the well-brought up and educated wife and mother, but there was also this:

“Nature intended me for a gypsy-bachelor; that I am sure of. Not an old maid, for they are particular and fidgety, and tidy, and punctual – but a gypsy-bachelor.”

Gaskell wrote this in a letter in 1854. I checked its accuracy, given Stevens’ disclaimer, and it is, I believe, a true quote. Stevens goes on to write that Gaskell “played the role of wife and mother so very well, and so lovingly, but she was a ‘gypsy bachelor’ nonetheless”. So, while she was not one of those nineteenth century adventurers, like Isabella Bird and Flora Tristan, she was nonetheless independent. In her writing, this came through her “industrial” or “social novels” or what Stevens calls her “philanthropically motivated condition-of-England novels”. In these, she identified and questioned some of the significant social and moral issues of her era: in North and South, for example, she was among the first to explore conflict between employers and workers, and in Ruth (see Bill’s review), she preached compassion for “fallen” women. (I have read both of these, but before blogging.)

However, she also exhibited a level of independence in her personal life, despite its conventional trappings – and this is something that Stevens conveys (albeit with different motivations) in her bibliomemoir. Early in the book, Stevens writes, using her second person voice,

“You were always lucky, Mrs Gaskell; you were always grateful for what you had, and yet, all the same, you were restless” [my emph].

She then briefly chronicles Gaskell’s career trajectory from writing for herself, to sending articles and then short stories to magazines, to, finally, writing her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1853. Stevens writes that it “became the sort of book that people bought and reviewed and talked about, and all of a sudden you had a career”.

This is the background, but Stevens’ focus is Gaskell’s visit to Rome in 1857, when she was 46 years old, and what it meant to her. She went to escape, says Stevens, the potential fallout (of which there was plenty) from her Charlotte Brontë biography*. She found an energising community of artists (authors, poets, sculptors, painters, musicians) and met the seventeen years younger American author and critic, Charles Eliot Norton. They saw each other constantly, and remained in contact afterwards. It was, we believe, an unconsummated relationship, and not all agree it was a romance, though Stevens argues so. Whatever it was, it was clearly intense and significant, and given the (documented) ongoing years of contact that followed, it satisfied some of Gaskell’s intellectual yearnings and fed into her subsequent writing. Beyond this, Rome was, overall, argues Stevens, “transformative for her, to meet Norton, to be in Rome, to be treated as an equal by other artists”.

The other point I’d like to make is Stevens’ story that, at the end of her life, Gaskell bought and renovated a house in Hampshire without telling her husband. Sounds independent to me.

The Nell parts of the book, which chronicle Stevens’ own love affair and her struggles to write her PhD, mostly engaged me, particularly the academic life satire, but, I’m leaving it here because Mrs Gaskell was my theme. It’s an unusual book, but I’m glad I read it. I may not remember the details, which is fine given they may not all be exact, but I will remember how Stevens successfully transformed this intriguing author from her “Mrs Gaskell” persona to a living, feeling, independent woman.

* Wikipedia reports that in 2017 The Guardian named The life of Charlotte Brontë one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time.

Nell Stevens
Mrs Gaskell and me: Two women, two love stories, two centuries apart
[Published in the USA as The Victorian and the romantic]
London: Picador , 2018 (e-Edition, 2019)
256pp.
ISBN: 978-1-5098-6819-3

Reading highlights for 2023

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With the year’s end, we come to annual highlights posts – my reading highlights post which I like to do on December 31, and my blogging highlights one on January 1. I do my Reading Highlights on the last day of the year, so I will have read (even if not reviewed) all the books I’m going to read in the year. I call it “highlights” because, as many of you will know, I don’t do a list of “best” or even, really, “favourite” books. Instead, I try to capture a picture of what my reading year looked like. I also include literary highlights, that is, reading-related activities which enhance my reading interests and knowledge.

Literary highlights

I got to a few literary events over the year, though by no means all I would have liked to. I was disappointed, though, to not get to any of this year’s Sydney Writers Festival: Live and Local events, partly because of my busy-ness but partly because I didn’t realise until too late that our usual venue had changed this year and I couldn’t seem to make the new multiple venues work in with my commitments.

Reading highlights

As I’ve said before, I don’t have specific reading goals, just some “rules of thumb”. These include reading women writers, reading more First Nations authors, reading some non-anglo literature, and reducing the TBR pile. In recent years, I haven’t made major inroads into any of these but … here’s the thing …

Last year I foreshadowed that this year could be a tricky one with our major downsizing project (along with regular trips to Melbourne) – and so it turned out to be. Decluttering and preparing our house for sale took until July, with our house being sold in mid-August. This was followed by a long settlement which saw us having to maintain the house and garden until early November. It’s been a truly long haul, but we got there. It’s just as well I love short stories because they are ideal for busy, distracted times, and as it turned out, they ended up forming a much larger percentage of my reading diet this year. And, a goodly proportion of that ended up being stories by First Nations authors. Not only did I read more First Nations authors than usual but I read more diversely I read several First Nations American authors, and I read some First Nations Australian speculative fiction – all in short story form.

Each year I present my highlights a bit differently, choosing approaches that I hope will capture the flavour and breadth my reading year. Here are this year’s observations which I hope might entertain, and maybe even enlighten, you. I start by focusing on works/writers/writing, and end with characters (mostly):

  • Great finds: A three-way tie between two (older) American works and one (more contemporary) French novel – African-American writer Gwendolyn Brooks’ wonderfully warm but pointed novella Maud Martha; American writer Susan Glaspell’s short story, “A jury of her peers”; and French Nobel prize-winner Patrick Modiano’s novel, Sundays in August.
  • Dearest to a librarian’s heart: Anthony Doerr’s Cloud cuckoo land made the librarians in my reading group cheer (as would “Special collections” in Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreaility, had they read it. Review to come, but here is Bill’s)
  • Most surprising speculative fiction: A bit of a misnomer because, almost by definition, speculative fiction is surprising, but the first work I read this year, Ambelin Kwaymullina’s short story, “Fifteen days on Mars“, was not only a great read but surprised me by being my most successful post written this year.
  • Most mystifying book: JD Vance’s Hillbilly elegy. How can someone with such a story end up aligning with you-know-who?
  • Truthtellers of the year: Many writers increased my understanding and thinking about First Nations’ issues this year but I’ll share two, First Nations Australian writer Debra Dank in We come with this place, and my (non-Indigenous) brother Ian Terry with his book and exhibition Uninnocent landscapes.
  • Weirdest voices: I love writers who can pull off writing from unusual or surprising perspectives, and I read two experts this year, both through their short story collections – Carmel Bird’s Love letter to Lola, and Chris Flynn’s Here be Leviathans. I love how these writers can use fresh voices to grapple with meaningful-to-me issues, including but not limited to climate change and the ecology.
  • Strongest women: There were many women in my reading diet this year who managed to steer a way through the patriarchal societies they found themselves in, but I’ll name three standouts, Briseis in Pat Barker’s retelling The women of Troy, Lucrezia de’ Medici in Maggie O’Farrell’s The marriage portrait, and Elizabeth Zott in Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in chemistry.
  • Most challenged mother: Parenting is hard, so who am I to criticise, but patriarchy can make the lives of mothers particularly hard. There were several challenged mothers in my reading this year, such as Frankie’s mother in Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls, but the one who struggled most was poor Veda Grey in Edwina Preston’s Bad art mother.
  • Sweetest man: Most men are decent, and Ned in Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, is one such, but there were some close runners-up, including Will in Eleanor Limprecht’s The coast.
  • Most clueless man: Cathal in Claire Keegan’s short story “So late in the day“.
  • Best neighbours: The quiet women in Susan Glaspell’s above-mentioned story mentioned have to be the winners here, but runners up are the neighbours in Holly Throsby’s Clarke. Gossipy yes, but when the chips are down they are there for you.
  • Most interesting sportspeople: The Tucson basketballers in Jack D. Forbes’ story “Only approved Indians can play made in USA” showed up their northern opponents by being able to speak their own language, but young pedestrian-cum-jockey, Johnny, in Robert Drewe’s Nimblefoot captured my heart.
  • Best trees: There is a beautiful old cottonwood tree in Leslie Marmon Silko’s story “The man to send rain clouds“, which took me back to my days America’s southwest, and Tasmania’s gorgeous huon pine features in Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, but the trees that brought home humanity’s impact on the land won me over – in Ian Terry’s Uninnocent landscapes (colonialism), and Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (climate change)

Each of these books … is a door, a gateway to another place and time. (Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land, p. 216)

These are just some of 2023’s highlights in a very strange but, because of that, quite wonderful year of reading … I’m just sorry I can’t list them all.

Some stats …

I don’t read to achieve specific stats but, as I’ve already mentioned, I do have some reading preferences which I like to track. However, this year was so whacky in terms of those preferences, that I’m not even going to bother sharing them, except to reiterate two big positives to come out of the whackiness:

  • I read more short stories and novellas than usual (and I usually read a good number): over 60% of this year’s reading (as individual stories, collections, anthologies, and linked short stories)
  • I read more First Nations writers than usual (largely because I read several short stories by First Nations American writers): 30%

Sometimes strange years have silver linings.

Tomorrow, I will post my blogging highlights.

Meanwhile, a huge thanks to all of you who read my posts, engage in discussion, recommend more books and, most importantly, keep me on my toes. Our little community is special, to me! I wish you all an excellent 2024, and thank you so much for hanging in this year.

What were your 2023 reading or literary highlights?

William Trevor, The hill bachelors (#Review)

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Well, Kim (Reading Matters) and Cathy’s (746 Books) “A year with William Trevor” project is all but over, and I’ve only done one post – on the titular story in the little The dressmaker’s child collection. The second story, “The hill bachelors” (as in bachelors living in the hills), was first published in his collection titled The hill bachelors.

William Trevor (1928-2016), as most of you will know, is an Irish writer of novels and novellas, short stories and plays. He is particularly good at writing about marginalised people, or those who are loners or outsiders, and writes authentically about them, regardless of their age or gender. “The hill bachelors” is another of these, though perhaps more a variation on the theme. Is the protagonist Paulie marginalised? In a sense perhaps? Is he a loner or outsider? Again, it depends on how you see him, and the choices he makes.

Trevor is one of those writers who lets the reader work out who’s who, what’s what, as we go. The first two paragraphs of this story describe a 68-year-old woman, wearing mourning clothes, waiting for “them” who will decide her future. Very little is overtly explained, but by the end of the second paragraph, we know that she has worked hard and got on with whatever life has thrown at her – and, it seems, she will continue to do so with a calm resignation.

Then, we are introduced to a man we come to realise is her 29-year-old son, Paulie. He is coming for his father’s funeral/wake. He is the youngest of five children, and had not had a good relationship with his “hard” father. It soon becomes apparent that the mother expects the children to work out what will happen to her now – and what will happen to her now, as soon becomes apparent, is that Paulie will return to the family farm. After all, “he was the bachelor of the family”, and his job as a lorry driver “wasn’t much”. However, to do this he will have to give up the woman he loved as she is not interested in a farm life.

While he is working out his notice back in town, his mother is helped by neighbours, the bachelor Hartigan and his sister. It is this sister who introduces the idea of the hill bachelors. She suggests that Paulie would not want to come back because

“It’s bachelors that’s in the hills now. Like himself,” Miss Hartigan added, jerking her bony hand in the direction of the yard, where her brother was up on a ladder, fixing a gutter support.
“Paulie’s not married either, though.”
“That’s what I’m saying to you. What I’m saying is would he want to stop that way?”

Seeing bewilderment in Paulie’s mother’s face, she goes on to explain that “the bachelors of the hills found it difficult to attract a wife to the modest farms they inherited”.

And so Paulie comes back. He “harboured no resentment … it was not the end of the world”. What was “the end of the world”, however, was hearing the woman he loved say that life on a farm did not attract her. He works hard, and he starts dating local women, but Miss Hartigan seems to have known whereof she spoke.

The story is told third person, through the alternating perspectives of the mother and Paulie. We hear what the the rest of the family thinks, or has done, mostly through Paulie’s and his mother’s thoughts and assumptions, through their deep knowledge of how their family works and of the rural traditions within which they live. There is a little dialogue, but not much. Paulie and his mother are both “types” and yet quietly individualised too.

There’s no big drama in this story, just ordinary people making the decisions that seem right at the time. Paulie’s mother is not unkind or demanding. Indeed, she offers to move in with a married daughter, and, in a little revelatory moment, Trevor lets on that she’d shed some private tears in her early days on the farm. She would do her best to make it easy for a new wife, unlike her own experience. However, marriage to a man from the hills has taught her passivity, to do what she’s told, so she resigns herself – as we are led, from the opening paragraphs, to expect she’d do – to see out her lot. Paulie, too, seems resigned, like his mother, to play out the role set for him, even if it means joining the titular hill bachelors.

All this makes it a far more complex story than it might seem on the surface. It means that, as much as we’d like to, it’s hard to see Paulie as a victim, because he does have a choice, difficult though it may be. But the pull of tradition and responsibility is strong, and while Paulie is aware of what is happening to him, he is resigned to it. Ultimately, as he himself realises, “guilt” and “goodness” have nothing to do with it, it just is what it is, “enduring, unchanging” – and he is not going to buck it.

Trevor thus leaves it for us to think about – to think what the different choices might mean for his mother, for Paulie, and, more widely, for the rural way of life that, regardless of their decisions or their own thoughts about it, does seem to be on its way out. It is up to us readers to ponder the bigger picture, to wonder where that will get him, them or the farm. After all, if he doesn’t marry, what will happen? In continuing their rural traditions, will anything be ultimately achieved, or will this be another sad little life?

Cathy (746 Books) has reviewed the collection.

William Trevor
“The hill bachelors”
in William Trevor, The dressmaker’s child
London: Penguin Books, 2005
pp. 21-39
ISBN: 9780141022536
(First published in The hill bachelors, 2000)

My reading group’s favourites for 2023

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As I’ve done for a few years now, I am sharing my reading group’s top picks of 2022. This is, after all, the season of lists, but also, I know that some people, besides me, enjoy hearing about other reading groups.

I’ll start, though, by sharing what we read in the order we read them (with links on titles to my reviews):

This year’s schedule was reasonably diverse but with some differences from last year. Our overriding interest is Australian women writers, but not exclusively. And, in fact, this year we read fewer Australian women than is often the case, just Preston, Dank, Au and Throsby. We also, somehow, didn’t read a classic which we try to do each year. However, like last year, we read a translated novel (from France) and a First Nations work. We read five non-Australian books, same as last year; one work of nonfiction (versus two last year); and four by male authors (one more than last year). The status and condition of women’s lives featured particularly strongly in this year’s fiction – with Maggie O’Farrell, Bonnie Gamus, Edwina Preston, Pat Barker and Holly Throsby putting the challenges women face front and centre.

The winners …

This year all of our twelve active members voted, meaning the maximum a book could get was 12 votes, and that there were 36 votes all up. The rules were the same. We had to name our three favourite works, and all were given equal weighting. This year like two of the last three years, we had a runaway winner, with second and third spots being close:

  1. The marriage portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (8 votes)
  2. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr and Limberlost by Robbie Arnott (5 votes each)
  3. Lessons in chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and We come with this place by Debra Dank (4 votes each)

Very creditable highly commendeds, sharing three votes each were Bad art mother by Edwina Preston and Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow.

As for my three picks, I’ll start by saying that I found it really tough, though I managed to identify six reasonably easily. Those six were the books by Doerr, Arnott, Preston, Dank, Au and Modiano. No, not O’Farrell, much as I also enjoyed that book. It’s been a very good year. My final three were Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, Debra Dank’s We come with this place, and Patrick Modiano’s Sundays in August.

At the big reveal last night, some in the group asked me why The marriage portrait wasn’t in my list of tops. I said, off-hand, that it was because it was “just historical fiction”, but that’s not exactly it. As I quickly qualified, I didn’t mean by this that it is typical genre historical fiction, because it’s not, though it does have elements of the historical romance trajectory. No, it’s because it wears its heart on its sleeve. You may not know exactly how it’s going to end, but you know pretty much from the start what it’s about, what the author’s intentions are. I enjoyed it immensely. It’s an engrossing and moving read, but the fiction that earns top billing for me is fiction that has me wondering from the start what it’s all about, fiction that through language, tone, and/or structure challenges my brain to engage with the author and go on a journey with them. Modiano’s and Au’s books, in particular, were like this. This sort of writing can be nerve-wracking because I can worry I’m missing the point. But, it’s the sort of writing that excites me.

[In the end I narrowed my choices down to Arnott because his ability to convey with such brevity a full, complex, oh-so human life was breathtaking; to Dank because among other things her generous truth-telling has helped me better articulate, to myself and to others, my understanding of First Nations connection to country; to Modiano, because, well, I’ve explained that already.]

Selected comments

Not everyone included comments with their picks, and not all books received comments, but here is some of what members said about the top picks:

  • The marriage portrait: Commenters used descriptions like “lush”, “descriptive”, and mentioned the relevance of its themes, particularly regarding the vulnerability of young women.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Land: Comments included “intelligent”, “immersive”, “huge in scope”, “fabulous for its sweep”, “complex”, with a couple enjoying how Doerr created connections between the stories and different eras.
  • Limberlost: Commenters mentioned the quality of its writing, and its evocation of the Tasmanian landscape.
  • Lessons in chemistry: A dog lover in the group loved the dog Six Thirty’s role, and the humour.
  • We come with this place: Commenters loved the generosity of its truth-telling, its explanation of the relationship between story and place to understand country, and found it “deeply moving”.

And, a bonus again

Since 2019, a good friend (from my library school days over 45 years ago (and who lives just outside Canberra) sent me her reading group’s schedule for the year (in the order they read them):

  • Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to tell the tale
  • Tom Kenneally, The Dickens boy
  • Susan Orlean, The library book
  • Andrew McGahan, The rich man’s house
  • Ian McEwan, Machines like me: And people like you
  • Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
  • Claire Thomas, The performance (on my TBR)
  • Maureen Cashman, The Roland Medals
  • Shokoofeh Azar, The enlightenment of the greengage tree

Links on titles (this year, just one) are to my reviews, where I’ve read the book too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly if you were in a reading group this year. What did your group read and love?

Holly Throsby, Clarke (#BookReview)

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My reading group’s last book of the year, Holly Throsby’s third novel, Clarke, was a popular end-of-year choice. It’s a straightforward but compelling read that was inspired by a story we were all across, the Lynette Dawson story. Inspired, though, is the operative word, as Clarke is not Lynette Dawson’s story.

For a start, while Clarke’s missing woman disappears in the same decade as Lynette, the 1980s, Throsby’s story is set in a different location (a regional town not a capital city) with a different sort of husband (a physiotherapist, not a teacher). Further, there is some sort of resolution a few years, not forty years, later. This was a wise choice by Throsby. It decouples the story from Lynette Dawson, which encourages us to see it as part of a bigger story. And, setting it in a smaller environment lets Throsby explore regional town life. This latter is one of the strengths of the book.

The novel opens with fifty-something Barney being visited by the police at the house he is renting. They have a warrant to excavate the backyard as the result of their having received new information concerning the disappearance of Ginny Lawson five years previously. Clarke tracks this new police investigation through the eyes of the neighbourhood, primarily Barney, his next-door neighbour Leonie, and Dorrie and Clive across the road. Leonie, Dorrie and Clive all knew Ginny and believe her husband Lou, now living in Queensland, is implicated. They have wanted this investigation ever since Ginny disappeared, but the police at the time weren’t much interested in missing women.

The main joy in reading the novel comes from Throsby’s handling of the relationships between her characters, and the way she conveys how neighbours and communities chat or gossip about and try to second-guess situations like these. They phone each other, visit each other, talk over the fence, and discuss it with their workmates. It’s so realistic, you can hear yourself doing the same over similar scenarios.

It’s a fundamentally tough story – a disappeared wife with its hints of domestic abuse, among other griefs – but Throsby handles it with a light touch, including occasional black humour. Here, for example is Leonie talking to her workmates about some concrete in Barney’s backyard that the police are now excavating. It’s clear that it had been a topic of conversation at the time of the disappearance:

The suspicious concrete’, said Varden.
‘Yes, because that’s what you do when your wife and the mother of your child has just disappeared’, said Leonie. ‘You landscape.’

There is also some subtle wordplay. For example, Ginny’s husband Lou’s “disturbing the dirt and who knows what else” in his back yard after his wife’s disappearance mirrors the disturbance felt by the neighbours. And there are some wonderful descriptions, like Leonie’s on her tricky relationship with her mother: “Leonie remembered the warmth of her mother as a heady storm that blew in fast but never stayed long”. Or on sad Barney: “His skin was kind of grey and rough and reminded Leonie of an egg carton”.

“It would be fantastic to be able to choose one’s memories. It would make life so much more bearable.” (Barney)

There are, as I hinted above, other layers to the the narrative besides the disappeared-Ginny plot line. Barney is no longer living with his wife Deb (but why?) and Leonie has her four-year-old nephew Joe living with her (why too?). Both people, it’s clear, are dealing with some sort of grief. Throsby drip-feeds us their backstories as we get to know them, and as they get to know each other. Dorrie, across the road, provides a voice of reason for Leonie, while also engaging in the neighbourhood speculations about Ginny.

I’ll leave the narrative there, and move onto the form. Clarke is fundamentally a crime story or mystery, but it doesn’t fit those genre expectations. It’s a cold case, but the criminal investigation occurs in the background. There is no protagonist detective, and we only meet the police through their interactions with the main characters. There is, admittedly, an element of the amateur-sleuth cosy-mystery going on. Our main characters do a little of their own “amateur surveillance”, as Barney calls it, and we would, of course, like to know what happened to Ginny. But, the main focus is on what is going on for Barney and Leonie, personally, and whether they will resolve the griefs in their lives that are holding them back. It reminded me of that idea that if you scratch just beneath the surface of most people’s lives you will find a sadness or tragedy.

So, my overall assessment? I thoroughly enjoyed the read. Throsby’s language, excellent characterisation, and authentic evocation of suburban 80s-90s Australia made it a compelling read. However, the twist near the end felt a bit forced, and the ending is a bit neat, albeit there was some restraint. Generally, I prefer edgier books, books that keep me thinking about where they are going. With Clarke, I wondered about what happened to Ginny, whether we’d find out, and whether a relationship would develop between Leonie and Barney, but it didn’t, for example, delve deeply into the fundamental issues that brought about the situation in the first place. As a result, it called more on my emotions than my mind, and I do like both.

Nonetheless, Clarke is an enjoyable read – and I’d happily recommend it to readers looking for generous stories about real people grappling with life’s challenges.

Holly Throsby
Clarke
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2022
346pp.
eISBN: 9781761185540

Margaret Atwood, The Labrador fiasco (#Review)

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Although I am an Atwood fan from way back, I haven’t, to date, taken part in Marcie’s (Buried in Print) MARM (Margaret Atwood Reading Month) event. But I promised her I would this month, albeit with just one little short story probably, this one. I have had The Labrador fiasco on my “little book” TBR shelf since it was produced as a Bloomsbury Quid back in the 1996. I have no idea why I have not read all my little books, but, there you go!

Most of you will know Margaret Atwood (b. 1939). I read several of her books before blogging – including her dystopian novel, The handmaid’s tale; her historical fiction novels, Alias Grace and The blind assassin; and her more contemporary novels Cat’s eye and The robber bride – and I have more on my TBR. But, I have only reviewed her twice here, her novella, The Penelopiad (my review), and her recent poetry collection, Dearly (my review). Now, I bring you a short story. This woman is versatile.

As far as I can tell, “The Labrador fiasco” was first published in this edition. Many of my “little books” comprise previously published short prose works, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here. I have three other Bloomsbury Quids, two of which were previously published, with the other, Nadine Gordimer’s Harald, Claudia and the son Duncan (my review), also seeming to have been first published as a Quid. Interesting, but not relevant to my discussion of Atwood’s story, so let’s move on. The Quids, though, are gorgeous little books.

“The Labrador fiasco” is a “story-within-a-story” story. (Ha!) The framing story concerns the narrator and her aging father and mother. (The narrator’s sex is not provided, but let’s go with female as Atwood is female.) The father, in particular, is declining, having experienced a stroke six years before the story’s opening. It is told first person by the daughter, who regularly visits her parents.

The story within comes from Dillon Wallace’s The lure of the Labrador wild, published in 1905. Wallace was, says Wikipedia, “an American lawyer, outdoorsman, author of non-fiction, fiction and magazine articles” and this, his first book, was a bestseller. It tells of an exploratory trip through Labrador undertaken by Wallace and a man called Leonidas Hubbard, with their Cree Indian guide, George. The Cree bit is important as the Cree are not from the region they were travelling in. Anyhow, the aim was to explore a part of Labrador that hadn’t been explored by Europeans, with Hubbard wanting to “make his name”. However, as Wikipedia (and Atwood’s story) explains, they took the wrong river from the start, with tragic consequences.

Atwood’s story opens with:

It’s October; but which October? One of those Octobers, with quick intensities of light, their diminuendos, their red and orange leaves. My father is sitting in his armchair by the fire. He has on his black and white checked dressing gown, over his other clothes, and his old leather slippers, with his feet, propped up on a hassock. Therefore it must be evening.

There’s so much going on here, besides the gorgeously structure sentences. We are immediately put on the back foot with “which October”, and “it must be evening”, but at least the father is very much present. The uncertainty suggests that the story is being told from a later time. Whichever October it is, however, it is autumn – or fall – and that means the season of decline. Within a couple of paragraphs, we learn of the father’s stroke, and know he is declining. But, the question, “which October”, also hints at the October in the Wallace-Hubbard story when things have really started to sour – because not only is it cold of course, but our explorers have taken the wrong route and are running out of supplies.

This is the set up. As the story progresses, the narrator’s father, who was an experienced outdoorsman himself in his day, provides a running commentary on the explorers, with the narrator adding her own layer. “They took the wrong supplies”, the father says, pleased because he would have known what to take. However, our narrator wonders “what supplies could they have taken other than the wrong ones” … “No freeze-drying then” or “nylon vests”, for example.

“harsh and unmarked and jumbled”

What Margaret Atwood does in this story, then, is parallel the deterioration in the condition of the explorers as their expedition goes awry, with the narrator’s father’s decline as he ages. The explorers leave things behind, their feet suffer because they don’t have effective footwear. The father leaves hobbies behind, and says his feet are too sore to walk. The father thinks he would have done the expedition better, but he faces his own “forest” and in fact, like the explorers, he and his supporters are not fully equipped to deal with it.

And so it goes. In under 40 (very small) pages, Atwood combines commentary on a failed (colonial) expedition, conveying the poor planning and hubris of those involved, with a tender family story of an adult child and mother coping with a failing father. To do this she calls on her obvious love and knowledge of Canada’s history and “wilderness” (a contested term now, I know), and her keen interest in humans and how our lives play out.

We are all explorers, I think Atwood is saying, and the way, at least some of the time, can be “harsh and unmarked and jumbled”. It takes all our energy to traverse it. Good planning and the help of others can ease the way, but in the end, we each have to do it on our own. A clear-eyed, clever and tight story with an ending that encompasses genuine warmth with an acceptance of life’s realities. Beautiful.

Read for MARM 2023

Margaret Atwood
“The Labrador fiasco”
London: Bloomsbury, 1996 (A Bloomsbury Quid)
64pp.
ISBN: 9780747528890
Available online at Independent, 1996

Patrick Modiano, Sundays in August (#BookReview)

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Disappointingly, I ended up missing my bookgroup’s discussion of the book I had encouraged us to read, Sundays in August by 2014 Nobel prize-winner Patrick Modiano. I have no-one else to blame but myself, since I did the schedule and should have remembered that I was going to be in Hobart for my brother’s exhibition. C’est la vie.

I recommended this book for a couple of reasons, one being high praise from Kim (Reading Matters) and the other being to include translated fiction in our reading diet. Also, the book intrigued me. Kim described it as a “jewel heist”, albeit qualified by “with a difference”. That seemed unusual subject matter for a Nobel prize-winner. Having now read it, however, I see that he is a skilful writer. I loved reading it. But the subject matter?

According to Wikipedia, Modiano (b. 1945) is “a noted writer of autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction”. He has published over 40 books, and in them, Wikipedia continues, has “used his fascination with the human experience of World War II in France to examine individual and collective identities, responsibilities, loyalties, memory, and loss. Because of his obsession with the past, he was sometimes compared to Marcel Proust”. I’m not sure about the “was” here, as he is still alive. Anyhow, it is this obsession with the past, with its associated exploration of memory and loss, that made Sundays in August (Dimanches d’août) so fascinating. I am drawn to stories about the past that are told in well-controlled melancholy tones, stories that involve a later reflection on what had happened and the implications for the protagonist’s present. (By the way, this does not appear to be one of Modiano’s autofiction works.)

The novella is set in Nice, and starts with a first person narrator (identified partway through the book as Jean) spotting someone he’d known seven years ago. The man is Villecourt, and he is selling leather goods in the market. Neither man, in fact, has done well in the years since they’d met. Both are alone, and not living the apparently secure lives they had been. We quickly realise that this is not a case of old acquaintances happily re-uniting. Instead, there is palpable tension. After they meet for a drink, Jean makes clear he wants nothing more to do with Villecourt, while Villecourt tries to keep the contact going. He does little to ingratiate himself, however, reminding Jean that he, Villecourt, was the only man someone called Sylvia had loved. He also says that he and Sylvia had not been married. Why had she lied to him about that, Jean thinks to himself?

In this way, in the first few pages, we are drawn into a mystery involving these three. Soon after, the aforementioned jewel – a diamond, with a “long and bloody history”, called the Southern Cross – is introduced, and we learn that Jean and Sylvia had been on a mission to sell it. Then, a little further down the track we meet the mysterious Neals, who seem to live in a grand home named Château Azur, and who all too soon offer to buy the diamond.

It sounds like a simple story involving a love triangle and a heist, but in fact, it is a complex crime story in which it behoves readers to attend carefully for hints and clues about what’s really going on. These are conveyed through the narrative, as Jean tries to “rejoin the invisible threads”, and through gorgeously written imagery that creates an oppressive, foreboding atmosphere, occasionally lightened by the Riviera’s bright sun, and blue skies and water.

“blurred … dissolving”

As we read, the ground constantly shifts beneath our feet. People appear and disappear, and sometimes shapeshift. Virgil Neal, for example, sounds American, then he doesn’t, then he does again, before finally turning out to be someone else. Cars and buildings, too, aren’t always what they seem. Nonetheless, through cleverly managed flashbacks and foreshadowings, we gradually start to see – or, think we see – the set-up. It is all complicated, however, by that tricky beast, memory. Jean writes:

I don’t know anymore whether we met the Neals before or after Villecourt arrived in Nice. I have searched my memory, looking for points of reference, but am unable to sort out the two events. Anyway, there’s no such thing as “events.” Ever. It’s a false term, suggesting something definitive, spectacular, brutal. In fact it all happened gently, imperceptibly, like the slow weaving of a design into a carpet…

Soon after this reference to meeting the Neals, Jean says

The word “meet” doesn’t apply, any more than “event.” We didn’t meet the Neals. They slipped into our net.

Who slipped into whose net is the question. And how many nets were there? Jean will probably never know it all, but by the end he’d learnt that “our anxiety didn’t come from our contact with that cold stone with glints of blue – it came from life itself”.

Typical for a novella, the book is tightly written. Every word counts, and is worth noticing. I loved, for example, that Jean was a photographer who now can’t seem to remember the necessary details, and that Sylvia’s last name is (ironically?) Heureux. These little details aren’t casual, and make us readers think and question at every step, as we are alternately unsettled then proffered glimmers of light.

Sundays in August is an accessible, noir-ish tale about loss and the emptiness that accompanies it. It explores life’s shadows and uncertainties, shows how innocence can be so easily taken advantage of, and it doesn’t wrap everything up neatly, leaving us to ponder the possibilities. I won’t spoil the ending, but it is spot on, and explains, at last, the title, leaving us on a little up despite it all. I’ll be reading more Modiano, if I can.

POSTSCRIPT: I believe we know the main culprit in it all, but the question is, who else was in on it and who else was taken in. It would take more reads to work through that, but in the end I think we can’t ever know it all because we can only know what Jean saw and tells us.

Read for Novellas in November.

Patrick Modiano
Sundays in August
Translated from the French by Damion Searls
New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2017 (Orig. French pub. 1986)
156pp.
ISBN: 9780300223330 (Read on Kindle)