Tag: Spain

Review 2606: The Episode at Toledo

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I have read two books before by Ann Bridge, and although the second was more action-oriented, they were both about women discovering themselves. When I looked for another book by Bridge, I wasn’t aware that she had a series of books around the character of Julia Probyn. This is one of them, about the sixth or seventh in the series, but Julia is a fairly minor character.

Although not necessary, it might have helped me to have read the series in order. I say this mostly because of the beginning and ending of this book, where Julia is ensconced in Scotland among a throng of characters who are briefly introduced but who I couldn’t keep straight.

Julia receives a guarded letter from her Hungarian friend, Hetty, who has married Richard Atherley, British Counsellor in Madrid. Hetta has asked that Julia send either her husband or another friend in Intelligence out to Madrid but doesn’t explain why. However, her friends speculate that it might have to do with a visiting admiral from the U. S. Understand that this is definitely a Cold War novel, and that in an earlier novel Hetta was kidnapped and drugged by Hungarian Communists.

Hetta is worried because she thinks she has recognized the American ambassador’s chauffeur as a Hungarian Communist who years ago closed down the Catholic school that Hetta attended and took delight in harassing the nuns. However, when Hetta’s friends check into it, they find he has been vetted by American security, so they dismiss her fears.

Of course, he is a bad guy, so Hetta does her best to keep the American admiral out of the ambassador’s car. On a tour to Toledo, Hetta suffers a broken arm after she delays the car, which has an accident trying to get to a rendezvous in time to be blown up.

After that, Hetta’s husband arranges for her to go to Portugal to stay with friends, as she is pregnant. But danger follows her.

For a suspense novel, there is a lot more inactivity than activity. Somehow the balance wasn’t right. There is also a lot of repetition as one group after another discusses the same incidents. Frankly, the last 20 pages or so, in which Hetta’s husband arranges for her to return to Scotland and she does, seem to have no relevance except to return to Julia and her confusing pack of relatives and friends. I would estimate that 50-75 pages of this novel are unnecessary.

Was Bridge tired of writing this series? She seems to have been trying to replicate the kind of books Mary Stewart wrote, combining suspense with lovely descriptions of the country. But Stewart did it better. This book also reminds me of the Cold War books of Helen MacInnes, only they have more romance.

To really evaluate this series, I think I would have to start with the first one, which I plan to do. In the meantime, I prefer her other books.

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Review 2532: Beauvallet

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I am fairly sure I read Beauvallet to fill a hole in my A Century of Books project, but as has happened too many times already, once I had read it, I saw that I had already filled that hole. This book is one of Heyer’s earlier novels, and it is more of a swashbuckler than her other ones, showing a possible influence of writers like Dumas, Rafael Sabatini, or Baroness Orczy.

In 1586, Beauvallet is a privateer like his colleague Drake, a daring, laugh-in-the-face-of-death type guy. His ship is fired on by Don Juan de Narvaez, who wants to show off for his lovely passenger, Doña Dominica de Rada y Sylvan, who is traveling with her father, the ailing late governor of Santiago. They are returning to Spain because of his health.

Beauvallet takes their ship and puts the crew into a boat for shore. However, he promises to take Doña Dominica and her father to Spain, because of her father’s illness. Beauvallet immediately begins to court her. Dominica is at first hostile but eventually falls in love. When he drops them at a smuggling port in Spain, he vows to come get her within a year and make her his wife. Obviously, this poses difficulties because England and Spain are at war. Once Dominica’s father dies, things become worse because her relatives, into whose custody she falls, want her to marry her cousin for her fortune.

I don’t think this is one of Heyer’s best. Her main characters aren’t as appealing as usual, and I think her social comedies are more effective than her adventure novels. However, it’s always worth it to read Heyer. If you haven’t read her, I suggest you start with one of her Regency romances.

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Review 2444: Ibiza Surprise

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I know I must have read this novel back in the days when it was named Dolly and the <Whatever> Bird, Dolly being Johnson Johnson’s yacht and <whatever> being whatever they politically incorrectly called each book’s female narrator, thinking they were being hip. Anyway, I enjoyed this reread years later.

Sarah Cassels may be the daughter of Lord Forsey, but she’s been broke most of her life. She wants nice things, and the only way she can get them, she reckons, is by marrying a rich man. Although on the lookout, she is likable and doesn’t seem rapacious. In the meantime, she is working as a caterer and sharing a flat with a girlfriend.

Sarah gets word that her father has committed suicide on Ibiza. But when she receives a last letter from him, she’s not so sure it was suicide, because she doesn’t think he wrote it. She can’t imagine why anyone would murder him, though. He was just a harmless drunk who earned his way with his friends by his entertaining chatter.

Sarah meets Mr. Lloyd, the wealthy father of her school friend Janey, at her father’s funeral. That’s when he realizes she was Lord Forseys’ daughter and tells her that her father was staying with him in Ibiza when he died. Mr. Lloyd invites her to Ibiza to visit his daughter, but she only agrees if he’ll let her cook. She decides to go to Ibiza to find out why her father died.

Dunnett’s plots tend to be complicated, so it’s hard to provide any more of a synopsis. I’ll say one thing further. Sarah finds out that her brother Derek’s firm believed a piece of stolen machinery was taken by her father. Derek was in Ibiza the weekend her father died, so the family reunion is bumpy—and there’s more family than that.

She also, of course, meets Johnson Johnson, the internationally renowned portrait painter. He’s staying at the same yacht club where her father died.

These mysteries are written using a light tone with sharp dialogue and complex plots. The story involves jet setters and some wild parties, but it ends in an ancient religious ceremony. The descriptions of Ibiza are vivid and make me wish I could have visited 50 years ago.

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Review 2030: Down Below

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Leonora Carrington was a Surrealist artist who for years had an affair with the much-older Max Ernst. During World War II, Ernst kept being imprisoned as an enemy alien in France, and the resultant tribulations broke Carrington’s mental health. As she and some friends traveled to Spain to escape the German invasion, she became disassociated from reality. Down Below is her recollection of her state of mind and thoughts during her break from reality.

Reading this very short work is an odd experience, as Carrington’s delusions seem as surrealistic as any artwork. It also feels elliptical, reticent about the events that brought on her insanity and really about anything personal except her state of mind. It would have been almost impossible to understand without the background provided in the Introduction to my NYRB edition.

It’s pretty crazy. Unfortunately, this breakdown made her a heroine of Surrealism, which must have been personally difficult for her.

Just as a coincidence, shortly after I read this book, I read Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio, about Varian Fry, the man who helped many writers and artists, including Ernst, I think, escape the Nazis. Review coming in a few months.

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Review 1708: Leaving the Atocha Station

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Adam Gordon is an American pursuing a project in Madrid in 2004. He only hints at the project’s purpose, but he spends most of his time taking drugs, visiting museums, and doing what he calls “translating,” in which he takes lines from other people’s works, substitutes words, and moves things around. He is supposed to be a poet on a grant to write a long poem about how the Spanish Civil War has affected poetry, but he is not doing any research and knows very little about Spanish poetry.

In fact, Adam lies almost all the time. He doesn’t consider himself a poet but a fraud. He is self-loathing and is constantly manipulating his face or thinking up things to say to seem deep. He talks about not feeling anything or experiencing the experience of the event rather than the event itself.

This novel, which seems more like a disguised memoir, is funny at times. It asks a lot of its audience intellectually, and at times I got lost in its logical circumlocutions. The narrator is not very likable, but he grows on you, and he undergoes a sudden transformation at the end.

Would I recommend this book? Only to certain people. I would like to say, though, that its cover design, which starts with snippets from The Garden of Earthly Delights on the right and then smears the colors of each snippet into a shape of a train, is fabulous.

This is a book I read for my James Tait Black Prize project.

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Review 1539: Mary Lavelle

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It was interesting to me to learn that Mary Lavelle had been banned in Ireland as an immoral book, for in its own way, it’s very moral. Still, I guess it was shocking for 1936.

Mary is a young Irish woman who is engaged to be married to a kind and worthy young man who must wait to marry her until he can earn enough. His prospects are good, but he is paid a niggardly wage by his miser father.

Almost on a whim and despite her fiancé’s objections, Mary decides to take a governess job for a year in Spain, and the beginning of the novel finds her on the way there by train. Spain is not as she imagined it, but from the first she likes it. The Areavaga family are gracious and kind, and their three daughters soon like Mary very much. She makes some friends within a group of British governesses she meets at the local café, although she is sometimes shocked at their behavior and their airs of superiority toward the Spanish.

Mary is unconsciously beautiful and innocent. She is immediately attractive to Pablo Areavaga, her charges’ father, but he is too principled to show it. Trouble comes, though, with the arrival of Juanito, Areavaga’s married son, for Juanito falls in love with her at first sight.

I have read two books now by O’Brien, and both gave me a sense of a ferocious intelligence. Both are set in Spain, and in both, she examines the conflict between religion, principle, and emotional drives. The descriptions of the scenery and people of Spain are vivid and sometimes lyrical. This is another good book from my Classics Club list.

One comment on my new edition of Virago Modern Classics. Almost as soon as I began reading the book, the last six or eight pages fell out. Thereafter, I was constantly tucking them back in, afraid I was going to lose them.

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Review 1453: Station Wagon in Spain

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Years ago, I read several books by Frances Parkinson Keyes, although I was familiar with her as a historical novelist. Station Wagon in Spain is a contemporary novel for its time, set in 1959.

Allan Lambert is a Spanish professor who has come into an unexpected fortune from his uncle. He has moved into his uncle’s large house and has been ignoring his friend Charlotte’s hints that they get engaged. As term is out and it is the beginning of his sabbatical, he finds he is restless and realizes he is bored.

One day he receives a letter from Spain. It’s a Spanish Prisoner letter, very similar to the Nigerian Letter scam that is still around today. According to the novel, this scam has been around roughly since 1542. Allan recognizes it as a scam but thinks it would be fun to follow up on it and see what happens. He answers the letter and soon has purchased a station wagon and arranged to ship it and himself to Spain.

On board the ship, he meets an attractive woman named Ethel Crewe, who is traveling to Spain to meet her businessman husband. He is inclined to become more closely involved, but things don’t work out that way.

Upon arriving in Spain, Allan offers her and her husband, Anthony, a ride to Madrid. Later, when he meets the representative of the “Spanish prisoner,” he is astonished to find out it is Anthony Crewe.

Although this novel is billed as a romantic suspense and does have some action and skullduggery in it. the plot unravels slowly and at times is much more concerned with the romance after Allan meets a beautiful daughter of a newly impoverished aristocrat. Still, it’s a charming story even though I have my doubts that a Spanish duke, no matter how impoverished and grateful, would assent to his daughter’s marriage to an American academic, certainly not in 1959.

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Review 1401: The Muse

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In 1967 London, Odelle Bastien has been making her way with difficulty. Although she is well educated, her race and origins in Trinidad are keeping her from getting a job. Then she gets a break. Marjorie Quick hires her as a secretary in an art institute and makes friendly overtures.

Odelle finds Quick mysterious. She asks Odelle about herself but tells her nothing. She does, however, encourage Odelle to write.

Odelle has also met Laurie Scott, a young man who is interested in being more than her friend. His mother has just died, leaving him only an unusual painting. To support himself, he intends to try to sell it. Odelle encourages him to bring it to the Skelton Institute, her workplace. When Quick sees the painting, she has a strong reaction to it.

In 1935, Harold Schloss, an art dealer, has fled Vienna with his family. Unfortunately, he has chosen Spain, which will soon be little safer, to flee to. His daughter Olive has been accepted at Slade, but she hasn’t told her father. He believes that women can’t be artists, just dabblers.

Olive meets Isaac Robles, an artist, and his sister Irene. Both are servants for the house the Schlosses are renting. Olive is struck by Isaac’s good looks and begins painting in a new style with vibrant colors.

The novel follows these two time threads as it explores the mystery of the painting. Who painted it, and how did it end up in London? How does Quick know about it?

I was struck by Burton’s weird and wonderful The Miniaturist, so much so that as soon as I finished reading it, I bought this book. I found The Muse to be a bit more mundane, with few surprises. For a long time, I was much more interested in Odelle’s section than Olive’s, particularly because Olive makes a decision about her art that I found shocking and unbelievable. In theme, this novel is similar to The Blazing World, and in an action taken by an artist, but with a crucial difference.

Also, like some other bloggers, I am wearying of the dual time-frame format. I am beginning to think it is a little lazy. After all, it seems easier to write half a book about two historical time periods (or one depending upon the time chosen for the more recent period) than a whole book about one. One of the delights of The Miniaturist was how it immersed me in the period. This novel doesn’t really do that.

Mind, it’s not a bad novel, and many people will like it. I just found it a disappointing follow-up to Burton’s first book.

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Day 1284: Hot Milk

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Cover for Hot MilkSofia is an anthropology graduate student who has given up her job and her room in a storage cupboard to care for her mother, Rose, as she seeks medical help at a clinic in Spain. Rose has a myriad of symptoms, but no one has been able to diagnose a problem. Mostly, she is concerned about her legs. She can’t walk, at least when she doesn’t want to. She can’t feel anything, except when she does. She complains constantly, and nothing is ever right.

Sofia is unhappy with her life—her unfinished dissertation, her job as a barrista, the cubbyhole she lives in, her subservience to her mother. Her father left them when she was five and despite being wealthy, seems to feel no responsibility for them, even in the days when they could barely afford to eat. He has made a religious conversion and now has a young wife and baby daughter.

Sofia is dabbling in an affair with a German girl, Ingrid, from Berlin, but they seem to be at cross purposes.

This novel is intelligent and sometimes almost hallucinogenic as it explores Sofia’s attempts to wake up and take responsibility for herself. At times, I found it a little confusing and its incidents unlikely but mostly I was engaged in Sofia’s journey.

This is another book I read for my Man Booker Prize project.

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Day 897: That Lady

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Cover for That LadyThat Lady is another book I’ve read for my Classics Club list, and a good one it is, too. In the Preface to the novel, Kate O’Brien states that it is not a historical novel because, although all of the events are real, the scenes between characters are wholly imagined. But I would argue that this is the very definition of a historical novel, with the proviso that the author attempt to preserve the true nature of the peoples’ characters, if they are known. That Lady is based on a curious interaction between Philip II of Spain and Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli, that historians are still struggling to understand.

The novel begins in 1576, when Ana is a 36-year-old widow. Her husband was Ruy Gomez de Silva, Philip’s secretary of state. But Ruy has been dead for several years, and Ana has been living a retired life with her children on her country estate of Pastrana.

Philip comes to visit, however, and tells her he wishes her to return to Madrid. He and Ana have enjoyed friendship and a mild flirtation, and he misses her company.

Ana does not return to Madrid immediately, but she eventually does in the fall of 1577. There, she becomes reacquainted with Don Antonio Perez, her husband’s former protégé and friend, who is Philip’s current secretary of state.

Although Ana has heretofore been a virtuous woman, she begins an affair with Perez, partially because she realizes she has done nothing of her own volition for years. This relationship eventually becomes a complication in a political battle.

This novel is primarily a character study of a fascinating woman and to a lesser extent of Philip II, whose poor government of Spain has stricken with poverty the inhabitants of what was at the time the wealthiest country in the world. It is also a very interesting study of the politics of the region of Castille.

At first, I found it difficult to grasp Ana’s character, but the novel centers on her strong sense of principle and protection of her privacy. It is also about the tension between her religious beliefs and her principles. That is, having committed herself, she refuses to abandon her lover when he is in trouble, even to save her soul or her life.

That Lady is a powerful novel about an unusual, strong woman who struggles against the restrictions of her life based on sex and station. I highly recommend it. By the way, the picture on the cover above is of a painting of the actual lady.

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