The publisher and date listed always refer to the edition of the book that I read; illustrations are chosen for the graphic appeal and may not correspond to the edition that is cited. Photographs are always of the author (unless otherwise indicated).
Bring Home the Bride by Gale Wilhelm (Morrow, 1961)
Another beautifully etched book by this extraordinary and sadly forgotten author, who writes in a brilliantly honed and elegantly succinct style about how people relate to one another and the world around them.
Carol is a a young, beautiful, and wealthy woman — she is independent, spirited, sexually experienced and effortlessly charismatic. While vacationing with her disengaged mother at a mountain hotel in what appears to be the Pacific Northwest, she meets a beautiful young man named Hans who lives in a house he has built for himself on a large compound owned by his father, a famous playwright with whom Carol had a brief affair a year or so before.
Carol and Hans fall immediately and completely (and completely convincingly) in love and get married, and begin living together in Hans’ chalet-like house in an idyllic setting. But secrets from both their pasts (SPOILERS) — Carol’s affair with Hans’ father and the potentially dangerous genetic nature of Hans’ mother’s mental illness — encroach upon their edenic solitude with eventual tragic results.
Bring Home the Bride is a masterful example of a short novel. Wilhelm imbues her characters — through their speech, their actions, and their internal monologues — with exact and vivid life. She writes so perfectly and tersely that the book has an authenticity and incandescence that is invigorating and exciting. Her prose seems to be mentholated and gives the reader (me) a rush.
A rare, curious, perfect book.
Note: it’s interesting to me that Wilhelm’s books — published by Knopf and Morrow — were gorgeously and expensively produced. These publishers must have known how special Wilhelm’s books were, and obviously strove to present them to readers in the most beautiful and sumptuous way.
A memoir by this fine writer about two years he spent in Sydney’s bohemian ghetto when he was 16 and 17. Jon Rose leaves his unloving and thwarting family in Melbourne at the tender age of 16 and travels with a couple — a man and a woman who both are (sexually) interested in him — to the “Cross,” an enclave in Sydney that is home to artists, homosexuals, and other outliers. Jon quickly moves in with Bella, a middle-aged prostitute, who guides him with kindness and wisdom through the complicated and sometimes dangerous world of the Cross. Jon meets and befriends a wonderful gallery of eccentric and vividly drawn characters, and learns a lot about life and love before being drafted into the army at the age of 18, in the midst of WWII.
Rose’s writing isn’t as luminous as in Peppercorn Days, but it is wonderfully engaging and vivid. Like Denton Welch, Jon Rose was a vulnerable young man with an amazing sense of empathy for both objects and animals. He’s less adept at understanding people than Welch, but his experiences related in this book move him towards a more mature understanding of human nature.
This is a funny, wise, heartbreaking book — a brilliant depiction of a rare young individual growing into himself in a long-lost but memorable time and place.
This is a beautiful little book, an imagistic memoir about early childhood that is as vivid and untethered as a dream. It is utterly transporting; I felt not as if I were reading it but as if I were floating in it.
Peppercorn Days takes place in a small town in coastal Australia sometime in the 1930s. Parents have gone away for a few days leaving their four children — three girls and a boy — home alone, to be casually supervised by a local woman who as 19 sons. The book is narrated, or more accurately deeply felt, by the boy, the youngest child. He lives in a kind of ecstatic erotic freedom — he is frequently stripping, or being stripped and fondled, and experiences the world in constant sensual pleasure. He exists as much in an imagined future or remembered past as in the present, and flows amongst these equally vivid and alive realities effortlessly.
Peppercorn Days recreates the lost kingdom of childhood as brilliantly as any book I know, and brought me back to something in myself I had lost or forgotten.
I must have read something about this book somewhere, otherwise why would it have ended up on my bookshelf? But of course I just forgot what and where…
Red Pottage (the terrible title refers to a lentil stew mentioned in the Bible) is a wonderful book — smart, funny, engagingly plotted and charactered. It’s about two young women, Hester Gresley and Rachel West, who are close friends and both unmarried at 28. Hester lives with her brother, who is a self-deluded and narrow-minded vicar, and his equally petty and vindictive wife and their mewling children; Rachel, who has recently inherited a fortune and ascended into aristocratic society, travels from one country house to another. Hester has published one novel to considerable success and is trying to finish a second, but family life at the vicarage makes it difficult for her to write. Rachel is pursued by two men and falls in love with one, despite his having had an affair with her new friend Lady Westhaven. Both Hester’s novel and Rachel’s romance come to a tragic end.
Chomondeley not only creates two strong, independent, smart, and sympathetic heroines but also uses her finely-honed satirical wit to delightfully and delicately skewer many of the clerical and aristocratic characters. The book has an insouciance and freshness that makes for delightful reading. I look forward to reading more Chomondeley, which is apparently (and disappointedly) pronounced “Chumley.”
Bruno’s Dream by Iris Murdoch (Viking Press, 1969)
Bruno’s Dream is one of the less interesting and satisfying Murdoch novels that I have read. This may be because it’s rather brief and episodic; it doesn’t have much depth or texture, and the characters are all rather vague and underdeveloped, palely colored. What drives what little plot there is, is love — or rather, the fickleness and instability of love. The tensions mount but are are resolved not by any development of character, but by a natural disaster — a terrible rainfall and flood. Because it’s Murdoch it’s engaging to read — she seems to know and tell the truth about her characters, it’s just that in this case their truths are not very complex or interesting.
As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann (Harcourt/Harvest Original, 2021)
I read about this book somewhere recently were it was heralded as a terrific novel about homosexuality, which it is. It is also a very engaging and ambitiously conceived and executed historical novel, and I read it as quickly and avidly as any book I’ve read. The reader (me) is drawn into the world of Civil War (17th century) England and finds it difficult to break out of the book — a result, I think, of the fascinating characters, the vividly-evoked time and place, and the sensual and beguiling writing.
Our (anti-) hero is Jacob Cullen, a young man born to a respectable family who lose their social and financial standing due to the father’s compounding debt, and are reduced to working as servants — first exhaustively in the fields, later more comfortably in the manor house — for a family of rural aristocrats. Jacob cannot control his violent temper, which causes him, again and again, to destroy his happiness and separate him from those he loves. Although I was totally engaged with this book and very much enjoyed the experience of reading it (it did seem like an experience), two things about it somewhat perplexed me, and perhaps detracted from my enjoyment and high regard for this book.
The first was Jacob’s character, most specifically his hot, uncontrollable temper, which causes him much travail (and obviously propels the somewhat melodramatic plot). He is as hot-headed at the end of the book as he is in the beginning, which might be realistic, but is narratively disappointing.
The other thing that made me pause was the, for want of a better expression, “sexual orientation” of the two main characters. Introduced as heterosexual men who have both passionately married women, they become passionate lovers themselves. I suppose this is a reflective of the murkier sexual world of the 17th century, when sexual orientation was not a concept, and people did not think of themselves as hetero- or homosexual. Perhaps what made me question this was the fact that I was not sure if this was a clever manifestation of the sexual culture at the time, or a failing by the author to create coherently sexual men.
Arthur’s Whims by Herve Guibert (Spurl, 2021, originally published in 1983)
I haven’t read anything else by Herve Guibert, but I’ve know about him because I’ve had his book To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which was a very early book about AIDS (Guibert died of AIDS in 1991, at the age of. 36) on my shelf since it was originally published in 1990.
Arthur’s Whims is a kind of James-Purdian fable set in a fantastic world that is both magical and menacing. Arthur and his young protege and lover, Bichon, travel around the world in various incarnations — bird trappers, magicians, religious charlatans — encountering dark sexual perversions and erotic violence. The writing (in Daniel Lupo’s poetic translation) is sumptuously beautiful, and reading the short hallucinatory chapters is as pleasurable as devouring a box of French bonbons.
There is an increasing and disturbing flowing of blood as the book progresses, which I attributed to the nightmarish early (and late) days of the epidemic, when one’s own blood and body fluids seemed potentially lethal. And so I was surprised to learn that this book was first published in 1983, and written even before then when Guibert would not have known about AIDS and his medical situation. It seems as if in this case art eerily prefigured life (and death), as it often seems to do.
Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson (Europa, 2008)
This is the third in JHP’s series of comic novels about Gerald, an eccentric homosexual Englishman who has lived most of his adult life abroad, pursuing artistic and culinary fame. I read the first book, Cooking with Fernet Branca, many years ago and remember it is as being quite clever and funny but tiresome. Rancid Pansies (the title is an anagram of Princess Diana, whose ghost figures in the screwball plot) finds our hero now living in Tuscany (although his secluded villa has collapsed in a landslide) inventing new recipes featuring field mice and black ink, and writing an opera about Princes Diana.
Chapters written by Gerald in first person are cleverly alternated with emails written by Gerald’s younger (and saner) boyfriend, an oceanographer, to an academic colleague. These emails give a slightly more straightforward account of the action.
Gerald is a brilliantly entertaining narrator — clever, funny, and delightfully deluded. The book is very silly and very smart, a combination that seems better sustained and more engaging here than in Cooking with Fernet Branca, where silliness seemed to predominate (if my memory serves, which it probably does not).
JHP is a accomplished and talented writer, and I’d like to read one of his less incessantly comic novels, to see how his intelligence and talent inform a more serious work.
The Firewalkers by Frank Cauldwell [Francis King] (John Murray, 1956)
Published as a memoir written by Frank Cauldwell, The Firewalkers is actually a novel written by Francis King. I’m not sure why it was published in this manner — perhaps because of the benign but overtly homosexual content?
Frank Cauldwell is a rather enigmatic and personality-free young English man living in Athens and supporting himself by giving “lessons” — one assumes in English. Although he lives with his wealthy Greek friend Dino, who is somehow connected to the international diplomatic community in Athens, Frank spends most of his time at the home of General Theo Grecos, an elderly Greek man who had been a heroic flying ace in the first World War and is presently haplessly striving to establish himself as a celebrity in the artistic world, failing as fashion designer, composer, and assemblage artist.
Theo seems to be bisexual and lives apart from his glamorous and hectoring White Russian wife. Also living in Theo’s crumbling house, which is stuffed with junk and artifacts, is Herr Joquim Gotz, a brutally ugly young German man whose disfigurements (a hairlip and albinism) does not deter him from relentlessly pursuing young Greek women. The third occupant of Theo’s house is Cecil, a young upper-class English homosexual who is drawn to the Mediterranean in pursuit of Greek sailors.
This short amusing book — a sort of Hellenic Christopher and his Kind — loosely revolves around Theo’s attempts to establish himself as a celebrated artist. This pursuit of fame involves the four men with many many colorful characters and scenic excursions. A delicate web of melancholy (and death) is deftly woven into this minor, but delightful and accomplished book.
All I Wanted was Company by John Hopkins (Arcadia Press Ltd., 1999)
Two beautifully written and extremely engaging and transporting books by a writer I increasingly admire the more I read him.
Both of these novels (they read like auto-fiction) feature the same rather stoic and affectless narrator who leads a solitary and frugal life in an undeveloped country. The Attempt is set in Peru, with our narrator based in Lima but frequently traveling to the interior of the country. All I Wanted was Company (I love this title) finds a similar character traveling to Morocco with a wealthy older woman, and then having a dispassionate but poignant affair with a charismatic Moroccan woman of Spanish and Jewish descent.
Like all great travel writers, Hopkins is a brilliant observer of landscapes, architecture, and people. He recreates them all with a clear-sighted sympathy and appreciation that makes his books very pleasurable to experience, for one doesn’t read them so much as one exists within them.
