Tag: 20th century

Review 2544: Island

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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.

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Review 2543: The Feast

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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.

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Review 2542: The Scapegoat

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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.

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Review 2533: The Stone Angel

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When I was looking for books to fill a hole in my A Century of Books project, I found this one. I thought I had read a book by Laurence before, but apparently not. The Stone Angel is the first in her Manawaka series.

Hagar Shipley is 90 years old. She is a proud, tough woman who has never expressed any of her gentler feelings. Now she finds that her son Marvin and his wife Doris are thinking she needs to move to a senior home. She understands this idea as greed for her home and possessions, although that is not the case. She is fighting the idea as best she can.

Hagar, though, is prone to falling and has memory lapses. In between the scenes from her current life, she returns in her memory to important events and tragedies in her life.

Hagar is not a pleasant person, but Laurence makes us interested in her and manages to make us understand and even sympathize sometimes with this complex character.

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Review 2531: The Bell Jar

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I’ve meant to read The Bell Jar for years, so when I saw it would fill a hole in my A Century of Books project, I got it from the library. I was also interested in it after reading the biographical fiction Euphoria, about Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes.

In 1953, Esther Greenwood has earned an opportunity from a major fashion magazine, an internship with a group of other girls in New York. At first, she studiously applies herself to her assignments, but she becomes distracted by her fascination with Doreen, who seems more worldly than the other girls. She is tempted out by endless partying until Doreen gets a boyfriend and Esther has several unfortunate encounters with men.

She returns home from her internship suddenly adrift. She has not been accepted into a writing program, she doesn’t want to live with her mother, and none of the careers she can think of are appealing. Everything seems gray and uninteresting.

Of course, this is the story of Esther’s fall into mental illness, wrapped up in her inability to see a path for herself aside from marriage, which she clearly fears.

The novel is clearly based on Plath’s own experiences. It is clearly and vividly written and looks deep into the psyche.

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Review 2530: The Islandman

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I read The Islandman to fill a hole in my Century of Books project. It is the memoir of a man who was born in the Blasket Islands in far Southwest Ireland, in 1856. The Irish edition of this book was a big seller in Ireland after it was published in 1929. The islands are now unpopulated as the government removed the last inhabitant in the 1950s.

The memoir is written as a series of anecdotes but in order of time. The existence of the inhabitants was a difficult one of mostly subsistence living. The people worked hard. Fishing was a major source of food, but scavenging shipwrecks was a source of subsistence and some income (money wasn’t much in use). Most families had a cow or two, hens, maybe pigs, and a donkey for hauling peat and seaweed. Patches of land were cultivated for potatoes and grain.

Although the people were poor, because of the fishing, they did well enough during the potato famine. However, they had many more difficult periods.

O’Crohan took to schooling but only had six years of school because there was no teacher on the island the other years. He of course spoke Irish but didn’t write it well until later in his life, when people started coming to him to learn the language.

This is an interesting account, especially as I’ve been interested in life on remote islands for some time.

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Review 2528: The Home

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Eleanor is moving. She’s doing this because after 26 years of marriage, her husband is leaving her. Their marriage had been an open one, which translated to her husband Graham being serially unfaithful while she had two affairs that ended in friendship because she loved Graham. The last few years have not been happy, but still it’s hard for her to accept that he has left her—without really talking about it—for a woman who is younger than her oldest daughter.

Now she is trying to make a home for children who, all but one, are adults living on their own. Nevertheless, they return in ones and groups to stay with her.

Eleanor struggles in this novel with the idea of what home is, with loneliness, with her desire to mother children who don’t really need it anymore, with desire and love for Graham, and with the need for someone to take care of her. The novel looks unflinchingly at the situation that many middle-aged women found themselves in beginning in the 1970’s, when divorce rates began to rise. For example, Graham (who in my opinion is an unrelenting jerk) supposes Eleanor can get a job when she has been trained for nothing and has no work experience for the last 26 years except being a wife and mother.

This is sometimes a rough read but always an insightful one. Mortimer has an unfailingly observant eye.

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Review 2527: The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes

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I knew this book might not be a good fit for me, because I usually feel that mystery short stories are too short to do much but pose puzzles, but more importantly, because I usually think it is unsuccessful when an author continues another author’s work. However, I have generally enjoyed Lyndsay Faye’s books, so I tried this one.

Purporting to be lost stories, notes, and diary entries, most by Dr. Watson but some by Holmes, this book’s 15 stories span the time from before the two met until 1902.

I am not going to run through a description of each story. Instead, I’ll comment on how authentic Faye’s stories seemed as stories about Holmes, keeping in mind that I haven’t read a Holmes story in years.

First, how much like the originals are Faye’s Holmes and Watson? Faye clearly is very familiar with the books (this applies to pretty much all the things I’ll look at, not just this one) because she makes lots of references to other cases and certainly has down Holmes’s characteristics. However, it seemed to me that her Holmes is more of a Benedict Cumberbatch Holmes than an Arthur Conan Doyle one. For one thing, he is much more expressive of emotions, more so even than Cumberbatch, especially as the book goes on. Watson seems himself, only even more flowery of description, but smarter. Also, like in the B. C. version mentioned above, his war service is stressed a lot more.

What about the mysteries? Well, you’re reading the words of a person who never once guessed the solution of a Sherlock Holmes story—until now. On the one hand, Faye’s stories are not nearly as ridiculously overcomplicated and unlikely as Doyle’s (spoilers for ACD!)—teach a snake to crawl down a rope? while dying, say “the speckled band” instead of “a snake bit me”? On the other hand, it seemed ridiculously easy to guess at least portions of the solution for most of the stories (unlike in Faye’s other mysteries—this is what I mean by mystery short stories—they’re either totally opaque or too easy). For instance, in “The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness,” I guessed immediately that (spoilers) gaslighting was involved and who was doing it. I just didn’t know how. Later in a story about identical twins, I knew immediately that the twins had switched.

Faye writes well and keeps up the interest. I just wish she’d write more of her own stuff.

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Review 2525: The Camomile

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As Simon Thomas points out in the Afterword, The Camomile is a novel that “sets out to be distinct from the ‘marriage plot’.” This although its heroine, who says she strains for Reality, thinks sometimes that marriage is a way to achieve it.

That heroine is Ellen Carstairs, who has just returned to Glasgow after four years in Germany studying music. She knows herself not to be a prodigy, but she begins giving music lessons to contribute to the household, that of her religious Aunt Henry and her brother Ronald, an architecture student.

Apparently, Ellen’s mother wasted a lot of money publishing her writings, to the point where it seems to be considered a mental disease, so Aunt Henry dreads the possibility that Ellen may be writing. Yet, that’s exactly what she begins doing. She gets herself a room where she can practice the piano undisturbed, but she also spends a lot of time at a library, where she meets an impoverished scholar she calls Don John, who helps her with her writing.

The novel, which is related in letters to her friend Ruby and in diary entries, deals with fairly innocuous social engagements, but Ellen spends a lot of time pondering ideas and trying to understand people’s relationships with each other. First, there is the marriage of Laura, one of Ellen’s friends, who doesn’t seem to love her fiancé at all, while being determined that people think she does. Ellen herself doesn’t mind not being married but on the other hand seems to accept that it is a goal of a kind, a way to achieve Reality.

Ellen pretty much dissects every idea she comes across, and after a while, I felt it was too much, especially after she herself (spoiler!) becomes engaged. However, over all I found the novel engaging with Ellen a lively heroine.

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Review 2516: The Fountain Overflows

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Rebecca West based The Fountain Overflows on her chaotic family life when she was a girl. I understand it is the first of an unfinished trilogy. If so, I’m interested in reading all of it.

Rose Aubrey is a daughter of an unusual couple. Her father Piers is a writer and editor whom many consider a genius, but he is a gambler who continually impoverishes his family. He has a pattern of collecting followers or benefactors who at first seem to worship him, but eventually they break with him, usually after lending him money. However, his family adores him. Her mother is a gifted pianist, formerly a famous concert performer, who is teaching Rose and her sister Mary with the expectation that they will become concert pianists, too. Their oldest sister, Cordelia, has no talent for music but doesn’t know it. She takes up the violin. Their younger brother Richard Quin is adored by all, a toddler at the beginning of the novel.

The novel covers about ten years of the family’s life. There is plenty of incident, from Mrs. Aubrey’s struggles to keep the family financially afloat to the girls’ struggles at school because they’re considered peculiar but also because they hate wasting time at school when they could be playing piano. Cordelia finds a mentor in one of her schoolteachers who encourages her in the idea that she is talented, which Mrs. Aubrey and the other girls deplore. Rose and Mary meet poltergeist activity at a friend’s house, and the family gets involved in a murder case. Also of importance is the girls’ cousin Rosamund.

It’s difficult to summarize this novel, but this family is so interesting, brilliant, chaotic, well-intended, and right behaving. I found the novel delightful.

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