Review 2545: This Real Night

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

This Real Night is the second book in West’s Aubrey family trilogy, which starts with The Fountain Overflows. I put The Fountain Overflows on my Top Ten list for last year, and this novel is just as good.

The novel begins just after the girls’ father leaves them. He is beloved by all, but he is a gambling addict who has lost all their money many times, and when he leaves, goes with a collection of jewels he had hidden from their mother. Since he left, their mother has sold some paintings that she pretended were worthless, so they, although nowhere near well off, are comparatively comfortable.

Their mother was once a famous concert pianist, and she has trained the twins, Rose and Mary, to become pianists. Soon they will start music school. Their older sister, Cordelia, who was convinced by a teacher that she was a talented violinist, has finally realized that she is not, but she decides she wants to become an assistant in an art gallery. She begins studying art history. Their brother Richard Quin is still a schoolboy.

Their household is expanded because their Aunt Constance and beloved cousin Rosamund have moved in. Constance’s husband, although wealthy, is so stingy that they can’t support their household, as he only spends money on his spiritualism hobby.

One advantage of their father’s absence is that they can continue their friendship with Mr. Morpurgo. He had been a great supporter of their father, hiring him to be an editor of his paper, for their father was a brilliant political writer. Like all of their father’s past supporters and friends, Mr. Morpurgo broke with him, probably over a series of unpaid debts.

The novel begins with a visit from a strained, ill-looking Mr. Morpurgo, lately returned from a trip abroad. It is Richard Quin and Rosamund who figure out that their father has died, probably a suicide, but they don’t tell anyone. Rose only learns after she overhears them talking sometime later.

The family story continues relating fairly mundane events, but they are made interesting by the vibrant narration and the perceptions of this highly intelligent and gifted family. They are also very loving with each other except for Cordelia, whom Rose thinks hates them all and who definitely processes information differently than the others. For example, they all deeply love Richard Quin, who is attractive, charismatic, and kind, but Cordelia thinks he is going to be a failure.

The family faces difficulties such as the girls’ sense that people, especially men, don’t like them, the problems of Aunt Lily, whose sister is serving time for murder, and the revelation by Rose’s new professor that she has been trained wrongly for her talents. They are a family you fall in love with. The novel ends at the beginning of World War I.

Related Posts

The Fountain Overflows

Family Roundabout

The Big Music

Review 2544: Island

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

Alastair MacLeod is considered a master of the short story. Island collects all 14 of his stories into one volume. Most of them are set on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, where he was raised. Almost all of the stories are concerned with the lives of the working-class, often Gaelic-speaking descendants of Scots who immigrated to Canada during the 18th century clearances.

The stories are arranged by date from 1968 to 1999. Many of the early ones are about young men dreaming of or actually leaving the island. Later, they become more about older men who stayed.

The difficult and sometimes bleak lives of the islanders were interesting to read about. Since childhood memories would have been set in the 1940s, and some of the stories are about fathers or grandfathers, the life is often fairly primitive.

All of stories are well written and hold the attention, but I found several deeply touching. In “In the Fall,” a man’s wife makes arrangements to sell an old horse behind her husband’s back. The horse had been her husband’s faithful companion and co-worker but is no longer able to work. Of course, he’s being sold to the knackers.

In “The Road to Rankin’s Point,” a young man’s family gathers to try to convince his 90-some grandmother to move from her isolated farmhouse to assisted living. He himself has found out he only has a few months to live.

In “Winter Dog,” a man looks back to when he was a boy, to a dog who saved his life. And another one about a man and his dog, “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun.” And one about the results of a brief love affair, “Island.”

MacLeod only wrote one novel, which I’ll be looking for.

Related Posts

The Berry Pickers

Sweetland

The Islandman

Review 2543: The Feast

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

At the beginning of The Feast, we’re informed that a cliff came down near a resort town in Cornwall, obliterating a bay and a hotel beneath the cliff. Some of the people from the hotel survived.

With that information in hand, Kennedy begins the novel a week before the cataclysm. So, she cleverly sets out a source for some suspense while the readers form an opinion about which people they hope will survive.

The small hotel is owned by the Siddal family, run somewhat incompetently by Mrs. Siddal. Mr. Siddal is an educated man who has done nothing for years. They have three grown sons, the oldest of whom, Gerry, is the most helpful and least appreciated.

Other characters do almost nothing, too. Miss Ellis is supposed to be the housekeeper, but she does nothing but spread vicious gossip and order the maid around. A character who acts like an invalid is Lady Gifford. The Giffords have adopted three children, but Lord Gifford works all the time and Lady Gifford spends all her time in bed. She seems to dislike her mischievous daughter Hebe.

Mrs. Cove has three young daughters who yearn to give a feast like one they’ve read about in books. In reality, they have very little. Their mother is so stingy that she sells any candy they’re given, saying it is to buy children’s books. But they have no books. Blanche, the oldest, has problems with back pain but has never seen a doctor.

Two women are abused by their male relatives. Evangeline is at first so shy that she can barely utter a sentence. But her father, a Canon, accuses her of chasing after men and berates everyone else. At the beginning of the novel, they have been tossed out of another hotel because he is so obnoxious.

For his part, Mr. Paley seems to be holding something against his wife, but she doesn’t know what it is. Instead of talking to her about it, he bullies her.

These are a few of the characters, which also include a lady author who likes to take on younger male writers as protégés, her chauffeur being one. And there is Nancibel, the housemaid who does most of the work in the hotel . . . and others.

Despite pending fate, I enjoyed this novel very much. It shows a lot of insight into human nature. I have only read one other book by Kennedy, but I enjoyed it as well.

Related Posts

Troy Chimneys

A Wreath of Roses

Grand Hotel

Review 2542: The Scapegoat

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

It’s been some years since I read du Maurier’s The Scapegoat, so when I saw it filled a hole in my A Century of Books project, I took it down from the case and placed it on my project pile. I find I remembered the plot fairly accurately.

John, an English lecturer in French history, is finishing his yearly vacation in France. This year, he feels dissatisfied with his life. He has no close connections and lives alone. He suddenly feels a lack of purpose in life and decides to drive to a monastery. But first he stops for the night in LeMans.

There, he bumps into a stranger who looks exactly like him. This man introduces himself as Jean and invites him for a drink and then to spend the night at his hotel. When John awakens, he is in the other man’s room with his things. The man is gone and so are all John’s own things, including his car. John finds a chauffeur has arrived to collect him in the new identity of Jean, Comte de Gué. He realizes that he has no proof of his own identity to convince the police, so he goes along.

At the Comte’s home, no one suspects a thing. He must guess who all these people are, but when he makes mistakes, he finds that no one expects him to behave nicely. His counterpart is apparently prone to cruel jokes.

John finds himself slowly becoming involved in the lives of the Comte’s family, who have secrets and problems from events during World War II. In addition, the family fortunes depend upon the Comte’s pregnant wife bearing a boy—or dying.

As usual with du Maurier, there aren’t very many unshadowed characters in this novel. It’s quite dark despite John’s intentions to do good for the family. The plot is interesting and involving, though.

Related Posts

Jamaica Inn

Rebecca

Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of a Renowned Storyteller

Review 2541: Erasure

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

If you’ve seen the movie American Fiction, you already know the plot of Erasure. I haven’t seen it yet, and I read this book for my A Century of Books project.

Thelonius (Monksie) Ellison is a writer of high intelligence whose dense, uncompromising novels have failed to make a hit with the general public. He has just put out his latest book, but his agent, Yul, is having difficulty placing it and has been told that Ellison is too far from his ethnic origins as a Black man.

Ellison lives in California, where he is a university professor, but on a visit to Washington, D. C., for a conference, he finds that his mother isn’t doing well. Eventually, he is forced to move back to D. C. to take care of her. That means taking a leave of absence, but he hasn’t sold his book. His mother’s affairs are in poor shape, so he finds he needs money.

He is infuriated by a recent book that is making a splash, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. It’s written by a middle-class midwestern Black woman based on one week that she spent with relatives in New York, and it employs every known cliché about the lives of Black people.

On a whim, Ellison sits down and writes a parody of this kind of novel, which he titles My Pafology. He submits it to Yul, who is horrified, and asks him to submit it to publishers under the name of Stagg Leigh. Shockingly, Random House takes it as straight and offers him lots of money.

This novel produces spoof upon spoof. Even Everett’s character Ellison takes himself so seriously that I think he’s being mocked. Certainly, he starts out mocking academia with the learned talk he gives at the beginning of the novel. This talk is incomprehensible, and yet it makes another academic leap up and shout, “Bastard!” at him. He also hits the publishing industry, the reading awards organizations, and television interview programs.

The novel is presented as Ellison’s diary, so it includes learned jokes (most of which I didn’t understand), imagined conversations between various dead people in the arts, recollections from his past, especially about his father, and the entire text—about 50 pages—of My Pafology.

As My Pafology gains attention, Ellison begins to lament that he ever compromised his standards. Forced occasionally to masquerade as Stagg Leigh, he feels as if his own persona as a cultured Black man is being erased. Maybe he feels that that whole culture is being erased.

Parts of this novel were above my head, particularly some of the little scribbles in the diary. Also, when I say Everett is heaping on the satire, I’m not saying that the novel is funny (although some of it is). Most of the time I felt sorry for Monksie, who is too unyielding for his own good and knows it, but cannot stop.

Percival Everett is having a moment lately, which has resulted in four of his books being in my pile, of which this is the second. I’m not sure if I like his work, but it is at least interesting.

Related Posts

The Trees

Flights

Ferdydurke

Classics Club Spin #40!

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club spin! How does it work? You post a numbered list of 20 of the titles from your Classics Club list. The club picks a number, and that determines which book you read before the end of the spin.

If you want to participate, post your list before Sunday, February 16, and read the book and post your review by Sunday, April 11. That gives you two months to read the book. If you’re not a member of the club, all you have to do is post a list of 50-100 classic books you would like to read and set a deadline for yourself. Then sign up for the club at the Classics Club blog site. If you are having a hard time thinking of that many classic books, the reviews on our website or the Big Book List will help.

And here’s my list, with repeats, because I have fewer than 20 titles left to read:

  1. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  2. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  3. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  4. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
  5. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  6. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  7. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  8. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  9. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  10. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
  11. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  12. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini 
  13. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  14. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  15. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
  16. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini 
  17. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  18. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  19. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  20. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I’ve got some hefty ones in there, and I have been reading a series of tomes, so I hope I get one of the shorter ones!

Review 2540: Elizabeth and Essex

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Years ago, I read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and found it both informative and entertaining—full of scandalous information about some of the Victorian age’s most prominent citizens. I was hoping for something similar from this book, but it is a little more serious, although Strachey gets some zingers in.

The book is the 1928 version of history written for the general public. There are a very few footnotes and a couple of pages of bibliography at the end. It is written in Lytton’s liquid, sometimes sardonic style.

This book is about Queen Elizabeth and her last favorite, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex. He was more than 30 years younger than she and the stepson of her earlier favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Elizabeth’s relationships with her favorites, at least with this one, seemed more like volatile love affairs than anything else, with fulsome compliments expected and fiery spats, which usually resulted in Essex stomping out and being forgiven after an apology. In fact, considering her own temper, I’m surprised that Elizabeth put up with him, because he certainly treated her less respectfully than he would if his sovereign was a man.

You have to get used to Strachey, because he starts out right away by making assertions about Elizabeth’s character without giving examples or showing how he is right, as a modern historian would do. And his depiction seems pretty sexist. Over time, he demonstrates some of these characteristics, though. Still, Elizabeth’s main problem with Essex seemed to be that he didn’t behave as if she was his sovereign. I think he had an inherent assumption that he was superior because he was a man, not surprising in that time.

Without going into all the details of the story, which Strachey labels “tragic,” I’ll say that it boils down to temperaments. Essex was proud and fiery, and he valued his family name. He had poor judgement about who to take advice from and was actually incapable of taking any that involved caution and circumspection. He was brave in battle and pictured himself as a great war commander, but he was not. In fact, he seemed to me like a charismatic, well-liked bear of little brain. But he wrote wonderful letters.

Strachey clearly didn’t like Sir Walter Raleigh, but I don’t know why. He just hinted around about him. According to Strachey, no one liked him.

Essex was a loyal friend to many, among them Francis Bacon. It was Bacon’s Machievellian advice that Essex was unable to follow. Despite Essex having supported him for several positions, Bacon did his best to put the nail in Essex’s coffin when he was tried for treason.

This is an interesting book and even though Essex seemed to me like a spoiled baby most of the time, I saw by the end that indeed it was a tragic story.

Related Posts

The Marriage Game

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and the Marriage That Shook Europe

Mary Boleyn

Review 2539: A Morbid Taste for Bones

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

I didn’t really like the Cadfael series on TV, and I thought I had read at least one book long ago and decided not to pursue it. However, I saw that the first book filled a hole in my A Century of Books project, so I thought I’d give it another try. Now, I’m not sure I ever read any, because this book is pretty good!

In 1137, Brother Cadfael is a Welsh monk in a Benedictine order in Shrewsbury. He has led an exciting life, but now a quiet one taking care of the monastery garden suits him. He has two young assistants. Brother Columbanus is from a family of high Norman blood who seems almost too devout and eager to please. Brother John is practical and full of mischief.

Brother Columbanus is stricken with something that seems like epilepsy, so Prior Robert, an ambitious, proud man, suggests sending him to the Shrine of Saint Winifred in nearby Wales. When Brother Columbanus is miraculously cured, Prior Robert suggests that what the order needs are some relics, and Saint Winfred’s bones may answer the case.

Although Prior Robert wouldn’t normally include Cadfael in his expedition to get the bones, he needs him as a translator. Brother Columbanus is allowed to go as the subject of the miraculous healing, and Brother John offers to take care of the livestock. After getting permission from the Welsh authorities to remove the bones, the party encounters opposition from Rhisiart, the major landowner in the area, and thus from the rest of the locals.

Prior Robert meets with Rhisiart to try to talk him around, but he mishandles this discussion badly by trying to bribe him. They schedule a second meeting, but Rhisiart never arrives. Once they learn he left home for the meeting and never returned, everyone goes out to look for him. They find him shot in the chest with an arrow that belongs to Engelard, a Saxon boy who wants to marry Sioned, Rhisiart’s only child and his heir.

Suspicion immediately focuses on Engelard, but to Cadfael that doesn’t make sense. Even though Rhisiart opposed the marriage, he has treated Engelard like a son since he arrived, in a country where you usually must belong to a family to get work.

Does the murder have to do with the marriage? with Sioned? a love triangle? the monk’s expedition?

I enjoyed this mystery. It seems well-researched and is written with a wry sense of humor. Although I did guess the murderer, Peters tricked me enough to move my guess to two other people before I returned to my original suspect just about the time Cadfael did.

Related Posts

A Murderous Procession

Grave Goods

The Serpent’s Tale

Review 2538: The New Life

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

The New Life was a slow read for me. It took me almost a week, which is unusual for me with fiction. I read it for my Walter Scott Prize project.

The novel is loosely based on two men, John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, who in the early 1890s wrote a book together. When I looked them up, it didn’t seem as if it was very loosely based—Crewe gives his characters almost identical names. But then I realized it is set after Symonds’ death in order to bring in the trial of Oscar Wilde.

John Addington is a gay man who is married and has three grown daughters. He is known for writing about a vast array of subjects. Henry Ellis is an idealistic, naïve younger man, a doctor. He marries a good friend, Edith, and their intention is to lead the way to the New Life. I wasn’t exactly sure what that entailed, but at minimum it seems to be that spouses are equal partners. Unfortunately for Henry, they never discussed the sexual side of marriage. He thought there would be consummation; Edith, a lesbian, did not. So, Henry continues a virgin with a fascination for the subject of sex. They live separately, and soon Edith has a new friend, Angelica.

Henry wishes to make a scientific study of sex and publish the results, and since he knows some gay friends, referred to at that time as “inverts,” he decides to start with them, having a theory that rather than an illness or perversion, inversion is natural. He decides to invite John Addington to join him in his project, not because he thinks he is gay, but because of his reputation as a writer about various topics.

John has been getting more tired of keeping his secret as an invert. He has confessed to his wife and occasionally has brought a man home for sex, an action that I thought was breathtakingly cruel. Now he meets Frank, a much younger, lower-class man who wants to be his friend. When John sees Henry’s proposal, he thinks such a project will change people’s ideas about inversion so that he can be free to do what he wants.

The men write the book and begin looking for a publisher. However, just at that time, Oscar Wilde is found guilty of inversion and is sentenced to jail. The backlash is such that the two fear their work is unpublishable.

If you are not a fan of graphic sex scenes, this won’t be the book for you, especially the first few hundred pages. The novel opens, for example, with a very explicit and detailed wet dream. I am not really a fan of explicit sex scenes in novels, so I found the first half of the novel hard going, despite it being well written and having vivid descriptions of life in Victorian London. (It has a wonderful description of a day that is so smoggy no one can see where they’re going.)

The novel picked up for me after the book, entitled Sexual Inversion, is published and the police go after a bookseller for selling indecent material, their book. Then it becomes about the reactions of the various characters once there is a threat to their own lives.

Related Posts

After Sappho

Murmur

The Children’s Book