Category: Uncategorized

The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens (The Book Club, Date Unknown)

Louise is left alone and almost penniless when her good-for-nothing husband dies.  She has three adult daughters and spends the year staying a few months with each of them, and the winter months at her old friend’s hotel on the Isle of Wight.  Her three daughters are all very different: Miriam is a snob with a barrister husband and a nice house outside of London and three children (one from a lover); Joan is a fat and lazy slob who lives with her patient and kind lower-class husband on a small farm, and Eva, the youngest, is a pretty actress trying to make it in London on stage and in the BBC. 

At the beginning of the book Louise meets a fat man who sells beds in a department store.  She is basically homeless, for the charity of  her daughters and her friends is grudging and stingy, and she longs to have the means to support herself and not be dependent upon others.  A little like a middle-aged Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, this book was very enjoyable to read with interesting (though often rather broad) characters.  It offers a nice view into many different English locales and a spunky, kind, and very sympathetic heroine.  The melodramatic and abrupt ending is the only real disappointment.

Lilacs Out of the Dead Land by Rachel Billington (Heinemann, 1971)

Terrible title.  I found this in a used bookstore in Cambridge (MA).  Published in 1971, this story of a very young woman on a holiday with her much older married lover in Sicily alternates scenes from the disastrous and ultimately violent stay in Italy with scenes from the past in England detailing the development of their doomed affair.  The writing (first person) is sprightly, vivid, and often funny.  April, our heroine, wanders through the book ineptly, in a sort of fog, clobbered by the sudden tragic death of her perfect older sister.  It’s very well done, for what it is, with some excellent supporting characters: Jenny, John, Emmie, April’s somewhat dim parents, and Laurence, her unappealing bombastic publisher lover.  Nicely evocative of Sicily and London.

I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck (Atlantic Monthly, 2011)

An exquisite, beautiful book, a real delight to read and savor.  After forty-two years of marriage, a husband dies suddenly after coming home from work — he’s a professor of mathematics.  He dies before dinner can be served, and his wife, Nina, stays by his body all night long, keeping a vigil and allowing herself to float back through the memories she has of their (mostly) happy, golden marriage: meeting as young lovers in Paris, living in stimulating and upscale academic communities in Berkeley and Cambridge (MA), vacationing (sailing) on beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, and raising their lovely daughter.  The book celebrates this golden life not by relying upon its surface charm and beauty but by always gently evoking the love that lies beneath that surface, the love that holds these two sympathetic and interesting people so surely together.  The writing is Salteresque: the form fragmented and mosaical.  An  unusual, personal (one feels), and very beautiful book.

The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal, translated by Richard Howard (The Modern Library, 1999)

Odd, lively, exasperating.  Our hero, Fabrizio, a young man of noble birth, makes a mess of just about everything in the very messed-up and disorganized Italy of the early 19th century.  His aunt, who is unnaturally attracted to her handsome and charming nephew, is the more interesting character here: an independent, intelligent woman who successfully manipulates the world around her to live as she desires.  The book is finally undone by its repetitive dynamic and the static flatness of the characters.

Morning by Julian Fane  (Reynal & Company, 1957)

A fictionalized memoir about a young boy growing up as a member of the English landed gentry at a country estate in 1938 – 1939.  The writing is lovely, sensitive and crystal clear.  Each chapter relates a different incident of some sort of misbehavior or moral shortfall.  The world of the house and its inhabitants — the boy’s distant but loving parents, his beloved Nanny and nursery maid, his adored and reviled older brother — are all completely and clearly evoked through Vere’s young eyes.  A delightful, softly heartbreaking book.

I Wish This War Were Over by Diana O’Herir (Atheneum, 1984)

A beautiful book, and very enjoyable to read.  Helen, 19 years old, has an affair with an ex of her beautiful alcoholic mother in Chicago and Washington D.C. during WWII.  (What year is it?)  Helen narrates her story with a panache and linguistic glee similar to Esther Greenwood’s, and there’s also something similar about the focus of each book: a young woman passing through the cauldron on her way to adulthood.  The book is full of terrific characters and indelible scenes, although it loses some momentum in its final quarter.  Like Plath, O’Herir was also a poet/novelist, and this book, like The Bell Jar, is a crackling good and admirable read.

The Call by Yannick Murphy  (Harper Perennial, 2011)

A lovely, idiosyncratic book with an original form that works quite well.  A veterinarian in rural New England lives with his charming family in a big house surrounded by nature.  All is golden until Sam, the son, falls out of a tree and into a coma as a result of a hunting accident.  As the vet goes about his calls (horses, cows, pigs, sheep), visiting his farmer neighbors, he searches for the man who is responsible for his son’s accident.  The book lightly and lovingly explores and celebrates the ties that bind people to their families and neighbors.  The narrative stalls half-way through the book, but re-establishes itself for a lovely homestretch.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell (Sceptre, 2010)

An impressively imagined (and researched) historical novel about the intersection of Dutch traders with Japanese culture in Nagasaki circa 1800.  The book is stuffed with character and plot, and much of it is engaging and interesting, but the tone shifts and the uninhabited vacant point of view ultimately distract and irritate the reader, who feels his investment (nearly 500 pages) in the world and these characters is betrayed by a writer who is giddy with his own inventiveness and ambition, and pushes the novel into cartoon/fantasy and dubious linguistic hi-jinks.  A disappointment then, but a compelling and unusual read.

The Cutting Edge by Penelope Gilliatt (Coward, McCann & Georgehan, 1979)

An odd, smart, witty, and touching book about two eccentric English brothers who are more in love with — or at least best attuned to — each other rather than any one else.  The closest they can come to loving one another is to love the same woman (consecutively).  Gilliatt tells their story, which spans decades and countries,  in wry, terse scenes that are both profound and glittering.  Another remarkable and singular achievement from this brilliant author.

The End of It by Mitchell Goodman (Horizon, 1961)

An amazing book.  Spectacular.  A gorgeously written account of the American/Allied invasion of Italy, beginning in Naples and moving north through Rome, Umbria, and Tuscany.  The descriptive writing of Italy rivals Salter’s impressionistic depiction of France in A Sport and a Pastime, and Mitchell brings a formidable sensitivity and intelligence — and decency — to this story of men at war.  There is something frighteningly essential about the concerns and attitudes of this book that make for a scintillating and profoundly moving read.