Tag: classics

Review 2463: The House Opposite

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I didn’t like the main character of The House Opposite at first. Elizabeth is having an affair with her boss, a married man with two children, and she sees his wife and children only as people who get in the way of her happiness. She’s dating a young serviceman, Bob, simply to hide her affair. She apparently referred to the boy across the street as a “pansy” in his hearing, and the remark has made him doubt his sexuality.

Nevertheless, she’s friendly to her coworkers and as she begins to help with the war—working as a warden and helping in the hospital—she begins to grow on me. As warden, she is partnered with Owen, that same boy she insulted, and it is the developing friendship between the two that is a focus of the novel—that and her own self-evolution.

One of the interests of this novel is the detailed descriptions of what it was like to live through the Blitz in London. Although other novels recount an incident or two, most of the characters in this novel have chosen to stay in London and sustain many attacks, most of them even staying in their homes and feeling a little superior to those who seek shelter.

Although Elizabeth takes a long time to recognize that her lover is a stinker, she otherwise shows herself to be quite likable. There are a lot of themes, involving Owen growing up, Elizabeth humanizing her lover’s wife and children, Owen’s father’s involvement in the black market, and so on.

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Review 2459: The Book of Dede Korkut

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Whenever I make up a new Classics Club list, I try to include some very early works. This one was probably written in the 12th or 13th century, but it draws from much earlier stories of the Oghuz Turks. The stories are said to be told and assembled by Dede Korkut, a shaman and bard.

The book comprises twelve stories and an additional work called “The Wisdom of Dede Korkut.” It seems that all of these early heroic stories, no matter what country they come from, are very similar, mostly concerned with fighting. Although the stories vary between more formal language, slang, and poetic language, they have formulaic sections. For example, several stories begin with a formula like this, only varying the names:

Beyindir Khan son of Kam Ghan had risen from his place. He had pitched his white pavilion on the black earth. His many-coloured parasol had reared toward the sky. In a thousand places his silken carpets had been spread.

All of the stories are addressed to the Khan, and most end with a sort of religious blessing directed at him. The characters often declaim, and when they do, there is a formula I found quite charming. It says something like “Thereupon Kanli Koja declaimed; let us see, my Khan, what he declaimed.”

Most of the stories, as I said, are about fighting. Sometimes a warrior is captured, and then years later a brother or son goes out to get him back. It seems that the captive is always sent out to fight the warrior, and once they figure out who they are, they unite and kill the captors. In one story, a hero informs his mother that he’ll only take a bride who will jump on her horse before him, ride before him to his enemies, and then chop off their heads before he gets there. When he finds a girl who does just that, he gets mad at her. But they make up.

All these heroes seem to have very short tempers and kill almost everyone they meet. One guy spends about six pages boasting of his exploits but inserts into the boasting several times how much he hates warriors who boast. I suspect there’s a sense of humor involved in that.

If you’re interested in reading a couple hundred testosterone-filled pages, this is the book for you.

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Review 2458: Miss Granby’s Secret or the Bastard of Pinsk

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I was thrilled to learn that Dean Street Press was continuing its Furrowed Middlebrow imprint. This novel is an entertaining entry in that line.

In 1912, Pamela receives a bequest from her great-aunt Addie Granby of a house and a box of keepsakes and papers. Aunt Addie had been a well-known romance writer, but her modern great niece doubts that her spinster aunt ever understood the facts of life. Pamela finds hints that Addie had a romance when she was 16 with someone named Stanislaw. She also wrote her first novel.

The entirety of the novel, entitled The Bastard of Pinsk, is included within this novel. It begins with a conscientious list of terms that some polite young man has given her definitions for. As an example, “bastard” is given as “a very noble Hero of Royal Blood.”

The novel within the novel is made funny by the naïveté of its author, who writes in a Romantic, florid style and flings about words she doesn’t know the meaning or connotations of. Her Romantic upbringing and reading in the Gothic tradition are manifest in the ridiculous plot. If I have any criticism, it’s that it’s a bit too long. However, it picks up as it goes along.

Twenty years later Pamela learns that her friend Adey has been nursing an old man—her Aunt Addie’s Stanislaw! Now, she thinks, is her opportunity to find out about Aunt Addie’s past.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2457: Westwood

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Margaret Steggles is a girl who yearns for beauty in her life. She is a schoolteacher moving to London for a new job, and she has been taught by her mother not to expect marriage. She tends to drift into reveries when contemplating beautiful scenery, literature, or music.

A small accident brings her into the chaotic household of Hebe and Alex Nislund. She finds Hebe beautiful but rude and is disappointed by Alex, who is a famous painter, because he seems so ordinary. Their housekeeper, Grantey, learning where Margaret lives, walks her home, because Grantey is returning to her primary place of employment, where she is an old retainer of Hebe’s parents, the celebrated playwright Gerard Challis and his wife Seraphina. Grantey invites her to stop by to visit at their home, Westwood, which is just up the hill from Margaret’s Highgate neighborhood.

A famous playwright is heady stuff for Margaret, who loves Challis’s plays. Although she doesn’t drop in on Grantey, she meets Zita, a German refugee and servant from Westwood, in the hardware story trying to find someone to mend a fuse before a party begins. The store can’t help, but Margaret can. She meets Gerard Challis and is struck by hero worship.

But Gerard is a pompous, humorless, unaffectionate, and selfish man who delights in carrying on chaste affairs with beautiful young women until they become demanding, at which point he dumps them without ceremony. He has coincidentally set his eye on Hilda, who just happens to be Margaret’s best friend. Hilda has plenty of admirers, though, and isn’t impressed, even though he is clearly wealthy and has told her he is single and his name is Marcus. This rejection of course makes him more eager.

Margaret is accepted into the Challis household as a friend and visitor, especially after the Nislund house is bombed and they all move in, too. Margaret enjoys being there even though they mostly treat her as a convenient person for helping take care of Alex and Hebe’s three small children. Margaret’s friendship with Zita can also be difficult because Zita is volatile, but they go to beautiful concerts together.

Margaret has also started helping John, a coworker of her father. He has been struggling to care for his mentally challenged daughter while his housekeeper is ill.

This novel made me laugh out loud sometimes, especially at the descriptions of the plots of Challis’s plays. The introduction tells us that Challis is based on a real person. I’d like to know who! (It turns out to be some guy named Charles Morgan.) In other respects, I really enjoyed this novel about Margaret’s development in self-respect and her shedding of her romantic myopia. This is a good one!

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Review 2454: The Shutter of Snow

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The Shutter of Snow is a remarkable work. It is Emily Holmes Coleman’s only novel, written after she was interred in a mental hospital for postpartum psychosis. As you can imagine, therapy in the 1920s was not sophisticated.

Sometimes Marthe Gail believes she is God, sometimes Jesus Christ. She thinks her husband and the doctors are keeping her baby away from her, or maybe she didn’t have a baby. Or maybe he is dead.

She is injected in her spine, wrapped in sheets and submerged in water for hours. Imprisoned under a canvas sheet with only a hole for her face.

She makes improvements and is moved to a freer ward, gets in a fight with a patient or hangs like a monkey from pipes or dances naked through the ward and is moved back. She begs to see her husband but then is angry with him when he comes.

Her story is told from her own point of view, which is sometimes angry, sometimes hallucinogenic, sometimes filled with humor. The writing style does not break out speech from thought, so it is occasionally briefly confusing, but propels the reader along with it.

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Review 2448: Ferdydurke

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I thought that Ferdydurke would be something different that I could read for the 1937 Club, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. When I returned to it, I still couldn’t make any headway. I didn’t finish it but read about 70 pages.

The unnamed narrator is turned from a middle-aged writer into a juvenile boy by an old schoolmaster and forced to go back to school. The sense of humor is juvenile, jokey, and forced, and I didn’t think it was funny. I quit reading during the mock introduction to a story (the first of two, apparently) that Gombrowitz chose to interrupt the flow of the novel. Not that the flow was very interesting.

Gombrowitz uses a Polish word, “pupa,” which means the butt or core of the body, to signify the concept of infantilization. He uses the word so often that I never wanted to hear it again.

This novel is supposed to be a masterful satire, but I couldn’t stand it.

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Review 2445: Illyrian Spring

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This is a lovely book. In some ways, it compares to Elizabeth Von Armin’s The Enchanted April, but I think it is deeper and more thoughtful.

Grace Kilmichael has left her family. Although she is a famous painter, her husband Walter treats her art like a little hobby. He has always teased her about being stupid, but lately there seems to be an edge. He constantly makes admiring remarks about a female coworker and spends a lot of time with her.

Grace’s children are grown and don’t seem to need her, and she has lately had a poor relationship with her daughter Linnet, who no longer confides in her and acts impatient with her.

Accepting a contract for some drawings on her travels, she leaves without telling anyone where she’s going. She simply writes Walter a letter offering him the opportunity to leave her for Rose.

Lady Kilmichael has avoided meeting any of her friends in Europe, because she wants no one to know where she is. However, she runs into her friend Lady Roseneath in Venice. Lady Roseneath is traveling with her nephew, and when he appears, Grace realizes that she met him the day before on Torcello, where they had a conversation about architecture and he helped her correct a drawing of mathematical design that she plans to send to her archeologist son.

His name is Nicholas Humphries and he’s a little older than her sons. On an expedition the next day, he confides that he wants to be an artist but because he made the decision late and he wanted to be an architect as a child, his father is determined he will study architecture. The situation is made worse because his sister decided to be an artist before him, although she has little talent, and his father won’t stand for two artists in the family. When Grace sees his work, she realizes he needs to develop but has talent. So, eventually she agrees to help him learn.

She has told Lady Roseneath she is going to Greece because she doesn’t want her family to find her, but actually she goes to Spalato (Split) on the coast of Croatia, and the boy comes with her. Grace feels that he is giving her insights into her relationship with Linnet, and Nicholas, who was sulky when she met him, begins to be more happy.

As well as containing gorgeous descriptions of the towns and countryside of 1935 Croatia, the novel thoughtfully explores the relationship between the two protagonists. It describes Grace’s own personal growth and her insights into her relationships with her family members. It’s a lovely novel about personal development.

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Review 2439: Classics Club Spin Result! The Prophet’s Mantle

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I picked this book out of my collected works of E. Nesbit for the Classics Club as one of her first novels for adults. In fact, it is her first novel. So, I wasn’t aware until I looked for a hardcopy that it was publicized under the name of Fabian Bland. In fact, I was confused, because some editions showed both names, so I thought they were two different people. I don’t agree with the custom some publishers use of listing works under the most well-known name just to make more money, but I have had to revise my listings of this work because of this error and listed both so as not to confuse.

In the prologue to this novel, Count Michael Litvinoff prevents Armand Percival from drowning himself after gambling away all his money. Litvinoff takes Percival as his secretary to Russia. But Litvinoff is the author of a pamphlet that the Russian authorities deem dangerous, so the two have to flee. On the trip, it is reported that the secretary is killed by their Cossack pursuers.

It takes a while to see the connection between this story and the body of the novel, which begins with two brothers, Richard and Roland Ferrier. Their father leaves his mill to both of them, hoping to keep them friends, as they are rivals for the same girl, Clare Stanley. If they can’t run it together, the business will fold.

However, Richard believes a rumor in the village that Roland is responsible for the disappearance of Alice Hatfield, the assumption being that she left because she was pregnant. When Roland learns this, the two become unreconciled and the mill is closed. It’s clear from the beginning that Roland knows nothing about Alice, though.

In London, we again meet Count Litvinoff, a Nihilist (although Nesbit doesn’t seem to understand what one is, and although there is a lot of discussion about revolutionary principles, no one actually states what the characters believe) who has published several books and has been speaking around town. Clare Stanley is in town, and she is trying to attract the count, but after she hears a talk by another Russian, Mr. Petrovich, she begins to be interested in the cause. It soon becomes clear that it is Litvinoff, not Roland, who is responsible for Alice’s plight.

It’s not long before several plots are going. Who will win Clare? What will happen to Alice? Who is the mysterious Petrovich? Is Litvinoff a hero or a villain? Will Richard and Roland make it up? And what about the poor mill workers?

Despite its revolutionary theme and good intentions, I fear the mill workers get the short shrift. This novel goes in too many directions to really do a satisfactory job in 159 (small print) pages. I guessed all its secrets almost immediately, and only Litvinoff has anything approaching a rounded character. The novel is supposed to have a stunning romantic ending, but I wasn’t interested enough in the characters to care much. I think Nesbit’s young revolutionary fervor (she was a Fabianist) gets in the way of this being effective fiction.

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Review 2434: Family Ties

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The Monsoon family was once better off but now not so much. The family consists of Charles Monsoon, now an old man, and his younger wife, who seems to be always referred to as Mrs. Monsoon. They have two grown sons, George, who is a solicitor but prefers to work on a book about butterflies, and Stephen, who is a market gardener. Both sons live at home with their wives. Stephen’s is Vivienne, who helps Mrs. Monsoon keep the house, and George’s is Amy, who, now that her two boys are away at school, does nothing at all.

At first, the novel introduces so many characters that I kept confusing them. There are the Rockabys, whose daughter Lavinia is engaged to Mr. Swan, the doctor’s son, who has come to the village to handle his father’s estate. There are also the Tyces. Mrs. Tyce has become eccentric, so her son Rupert has been summoned to take care of some problems. Then there is the vicar and various other characters. However, the novel eventually settles down to being mostly about the Monsoons, particularly Amy.

Amy is finding herself dissatisfied, not wanting to be thought of as only a wife and mother. She wants some other identity but doesn’t really do anything about it except mope. The time period is not specified, but later it is clear that it’s 20 years or so before the time the novel was written in 1952, so there probably isn’t much she could do, and Mr. Monsoon and the other characters keep making remarks about a woman’s place. Then she meets Rupert Tyce, who is surprised to find her reading Baudelaire in French. Rupert fancies himself a cultured man about town, so they begin spending time together.

George and Amy drift apart, and eventually the question becomes whether the marriage will survive.

This isn’t a serious novel, though. The characters are eccentric, and most of them do very little. A lot of attention goes to a stinking ditch and the excess of pigeons on the property. Mr. Monsoon does less and less, and when he hands the household affairs to his sons, they are shocked at how he has mismanaged them. Mrs. Monsoon is unappreciated and keeps taking to her bed. It’s all fairly silly in an entertaining way.

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Review 2431: Forest Silver

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Forest Silver is a love story but not the kind you might expect. It is steeped in the love of the Lake District, particularly Grasmere.

It’s early in World War II, but Wing-Commander Richard Blunt has already been invalided out. He has received the Victorian Cross but been told his heart is not up to much. He has also broken off his engagement. Aware that the engagement news will be published soon, he jumps on a train to the Lake District to get away from everything.

Arriving in Grasmere, he finds it stuffed with evacuees as well as vacationers. He manages to get a room, but noting an island in the lake, he decides he’d like to live there and asks who owns it. He is directed to Bonfire Hall to speak to Miss de Bainriggs.

Much to his astonishment, he finds his prospective landlord is a tall teenaged girl who dresses like a boy. She agrees to lease him the island, which is occupied by a sort of barn called a hogg-house. However, there is some unpleasantness because a Gypsy woman named Jownie Wife has been living there and has to be evicted.

Corys de Bainriggs takes seriously her ownership of the estate and is determined not to sell an inch of it even though she is broke and a wealthy evacuee is offering large sums, foreseeing that the local hotels will be commandeered. However, Jownie Wife takes her revenge on Corys by burning down the house of one of her dependents, Old John. Old John refuses to live anywhere but his own home, and because she’s afraid he will die, she sells some lake acreage to Mr. Lovely so that she can rebuild Old John’s house.

Blunt befriends Corys and eventually understands himself to be in love with her. But Corys is much too young for such things. Things are made more complicated by the appearance on the scene of Gerald Lovely, a university student, and of Maimie Ozzard, Richard’s ex-fianceé, whose parents have been killed by a bomb and has no one to turn to.

The descriptions of the area are beautiful and the picture of wartime life in a place that has to adjust to so many new people is interesting and different than the wartime stories I have read. Ward is an evocative writer and storyteller.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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