Category: Uncategorized

The Provincial Lady in Russia (I Visit the Soviets) by E. M. Delafield (Cassandra Editions/Academy Chicago, 1985; originally published by Harper Brothers, 1937)

The Provincial Lady is tasked by her American publisher to spend several months in the Soviet Union and write a funny book about her visit: a brilliant idea.  Delafield accepts the challenge and acquits herself triumphantly: the resulting book is a vividly rendered and keenly observed account of (what tourists were allowed to see of) Soviet life in the 1930s, when the USSR was but twenty years old.

The P.L., who had heretofore proven herself an amusing and sharp observer of English rural and urban life, now sets her gimlet eye upon a very different environment and society.  She travels (laboriously) to Leningrad, Moscow, Rostov, and Odessa, spends several weeks on a communal farm, and visits countless hospitals, factories, schools, and museums, always accompanied by official government guides who constantly spout propaganda (often blatantly contradicted by what is being observed) and are inevitably late.  The glimpses of Soviet life and the wry yet sympathetic portraits of people are fascinating, and everything is observed and recorded with Delafield’s shrewd eye, intelligent mind, and empathetic heart.

Harper and Brothers, 1937

 

 

 

 

Is He Popenjoy? by Anthony Trollope (Oxford University Press, 1973)

Because I so enjoyed reading Barchester Towers, I searched abe.com and bought several Trollope novels I haven’t yet read.  Among them was Is He Popenjoy? and being intrigued by the title (as mentioned elsewhere, I like titles with question marks and other punctuation) I began reading it, and was hardly able to put it down over a very few days.

Perhaps it was my mood and my current disenchantment with life, but I found that being immersed in Trollope’s world was far preferable (and pleasurable) to languishing in my own.  Is He Popenjoy? is, like Barchester Towers, broader and more consistently comic than the Palliser novels, and, although it features a Dean in a primary role, it is less ecclesiastically concerned than the Barchester novels.  This Dean is quite merry, and spends as little time as possible at the Deanery or in the Cathedral, much preferring to seek social pleasure and amusements in London.

The plot — the main plot; there are, of course, several — concerns the Dean’s daughter, Mary Lovelace, who inherits a small fortune from a wealthy Great Aunt, which allows her to marry into the aristocracy.  She weds Lord George Brotherton, a second son, who lives with his somewhat senile mother, the Marchioness, and his four pious and cheerless spinster sisters.  They are all dependent upon Mary’s money, for the family’s fortune belongs entirely to Lord George’s older brother, Lord Brotherton, the Marquis, who lives in Italy and shuns his native land and family.  His sudden and unexpected return to Cross Manor, the family estate, with a perhaps illegitimate Italian Italian wife and correspondingly illegitimate son, not only displaces his family but causes a scandal concerning the Brotherton legacy.  The Dean, born of humble origins and socially ambitious and eager for his daughter to become a Marchioness and his (expected) grandson to one day become a Marquis, instigates and funds an investigation into the legitimacy of the present Marquis’ marriage, hoping to disqualify his son (Popenjoy) from inheriting the title, which would then pass to Lord George.

This central plot is refracted in several subplots involving the difficulties of reconciling love and economic reality in terms of marriage; too often a mutual attraction is not supported by the financial means on either side to enable a prosperous (or even possible) marriage, and the resulting matches, often made on purely pecuniary grounds, destabilize the society around them.

Both Mary and her father are flawed characters, and Lord George is a rather a dreary and unlikeable man.  Despite this — or perhaps because of it — the book is addictively compelling and I enjoyed reading it very much.

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (Literary Guild, 1945)

Barchester Towers is set in the upper echelons of the clerical world in Barchester, a fictitious cathedral city in England.  A spineless new Bishop arrives to the consternation of the Warden and the Archdeacon, and upsets the status quo.  He is controlled by his formidable wife, Mrs. Prudie, and his revoltingly ambitious Chaplain, Dr. Slope.  A triangularized romantic plot centering around an independent and wealthy young widow (the Archdeacon’s daughter) allows happy endings for all the good characters, and appropriate come-uppences for all the bad.

Perhaps because the edition I read (published by the Literary Guild in 1945) featured several cartoonish color illustrations (by Donald McKay), this book seemed considerably less  nuanced and complex than other Trollope novels (especially the Palliser novels), and therefore less satisfying — but entertaining and fun to read nonetheless.

illustration by Donald McKay

 

Notes from the Underground  by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Hated it.  An endless rant by an inordinately uninteresting crazy man followed by a very brief inconsequential narrative about his liaison with a gold-hearted prostitute.  This book seemed, like Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as  Young Man (another supposedly great book that I hated), especially designed to discourage young readers from ever wanting to pick up another book.

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble (William Morrow and Company, 1964)

Having recently re-read The Garrick Year, which I believe was Drabble’s second novel, I decided to revisit her debut, which I first read in 1979 (fifteen years after it was first published in 1964).

A Summer Bird-Cage — the title is never mentioned in the book, but it must be a reference to something* — is a rather tepid, underdeveloped story about two sisters, one who is recently married to a somewhat famous but completely undesirable author (he might be queer).  Neither sister is very sympathetic, but there is something bracing about their nastiness, and Drabble’s intelligence and eloquence are both fully displayed, especially as manifested in the first-person narrative voice.  One feels that Drabble is, at this very early stage of her career, an excellent writer but a facile observer of human life.  She is ahead of herself technically, which results in a polished but minor book.

*According to Wikipedia, the title of the novel is taken from a quotation from the play The White Devil by John Webster:  ‘”Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.”

The Siege at Krishnapur  by J. G. Farrell (Modern Library, 2012; originally published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973)

The Siege at Krishnapur is an odd, dark, rather brutal book about a native Indian mutiny in the 1850s that traps a small community of British citizens and their servants and hangers-on in a poorly fortified compound for several grueling months, where they all suffer (and many die) from warfare, lack of water and food, cholera and other diseases.

Farrell seems to find most of these people (justifiably) reprehensible and ridiculous, and takes much humorous delight in their ever-worsening suffering.  Yet the reader can’t help feeling a little sorry for them, as the hardships and discomforts they endure are so thoroughly and vividly described.  So the book has a strange, off-putting yet extremely engaging tone, and reading it is an intense and discomforting experience.

Farrell is an excellent writer — good with both characters and place, all of which are described, or actually recreated and enlivened, with complexity and brilliance.

Told By An Idiot by Rose Macaulay (Boni & Liveright, 1924)

Told by An Idiot is a social history of England disguised (not all that successfully) as a family saga.  It follows the Gardner family from the final  years of Victoria (1890) through the fin de siecle, and into the Georgian and Edwardian Ages, detailing much of the politics, social mores, fashions, and culture of these periods — sometimes interestingly and sometimes (often?) not.

The Gardner patriarch is the least believable character, a caricature of a religious man who cannot settle upon a religion, and so tries them all.  This allows Macaulay to satirize many sacred cows (and other religious flora and fauna), but it quickly seems like the gimmick it is and becomes tiresome.  The mother, a sort of Christian martyr, supports her husband’s fecklessness with unwavering (and unbelievable) devotion and good cheer.

There are six children, whose different characters allow Macaulay to conveniently explore different topics: Victoria, Marcus, Sydney, Rome, ?, and Una.  Because there are so many of them and so much of the book concerns itself not with the family but with general socio-political lectures, none of these second-generation characters are very much developed, except for Rome, a free-thinking and passionate woman who decides not to mary and leads a sensuously indulgent and independent life (a self-portrait of the author?).

This book retains Macaluay’s witty and irreverent style of narration, but is encumbered, and finally undone, by its ambitious yet misguided premise.

 

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2021

This trilogy of memoirs (individually titled Childhood, Youth and Dependency) was originally published in Denmark in the 1960s and 70s and only now translated and published in English.

They are unique and fascinating books, mostly because Tove Ditlevsen is a unique and fascinating person, and an original and captivating writer.  As a small child in an impoverished and emotionally repressed household, she takes a sudden interest in language and poetry, and vows to become a poet, a goal she quickly achieves by augmenting her talent with fierce ambition.  This drive to publish plays havoc with her personal life, and she ends up addicted to painkillers, a debilitating habit she seems unable to break.

All the attention paid to her drug dependency in the last volume causes her to lose all her agency and much of the reader’s sympathy, and the world of the books, which heretofore was complex and engaging, loses dimension and becomes much less interesting.  As the sequence of titles suggests, this the rather sad story of fiercely autonomous child who loses her independence as she matures.

Faster!  Faster!  by  E. M. Delafield, Harper & Brothers, 1936

I bought this book because it was by E. M. Delafield, the author of The Provincial Lady series of books, which I, like so many, enjoyed.  This novel, while interesting, was less accomplished and enjoyable than the PL books, perhaps because its rather ordinary third-person narrator lacks the sparkle and wit of the PL’s first-person voice.

The (tragic) heroine* of Faster!  Faster! (I love titles with punctuation marks, especially exclamation points) is a bright, attractive, accomplished, 40-ish English woman of good breeding (there’s a family house) but small means (no money to upkeep the mortgaged house).  . Her husband is a sometimes charming but mostly irritable and annoying fellow who is unemployed (it’s the Depression and jobs are scarce).  They have three pleasant and intelligent children who they are raising in a modern way, allowing their two daughters and one son to make their own choices (and subsequent mistakes).

What makes this book interesting is that it very directly explores a social dilemma that is common today, but was less prevalent a century ago: Can a woman be equally devoted to and invested in her career and her family?  That challenge is the undoing of our heroine, who, partly because her husband isn’t winning any bread but mostly because she’s good at it and enjoys it, runs a successful agency in London called Universal Services.  This small agency, which is staffed exclusively with competent and hard-working women,  does all the things no one wants to do themselves (the ultimate women’s work): schlepping children to schools and doctors, paying bills and filling out forms, dealing with bureaucracy, translating documents, cleaning up literal and figurative messes, nursing the ill, and burying the dead.

Our heroine runs Universal Services with tireless energy and microscopic attention to detail, and tries to devote equal time and care to her husband and children.  But of course that can’t be done, and everyone realizes she is exhausted and must take a rest.  And the reader begins to wonder if her hands-off approach to child-rearing is not a philosophical choice but a desperate coping technique, as her hands are full of work.  And so we observe, along with her family and friends, as she drives herself (quite literally — a traffic accident) to death.

This strange and tragic conclusion to a book that is often sunny and delightful might seem jarring, bit it is appropriate, for we all know that it is impossible to be  a perfect wife and mother and  have a successful career, unless one has made a bargain with the devil or is Amy Coney Barrett (or both).

 

*Of course I have forgotten her name.

 

Siam, Or The Woman Who Shot A Man by Lily Tuck, The Overlook Press, 1999

Lily Tuck is one of the few contemporary writers I am always excited to read, and Siam is yet another cool, elegant, and intelligent novel about women coping with personal dramas in foreign countries, where the personal and the political artfully merge (or collide).  

This is the story of Claire, a young American woman who travels with James, her government/military contractor  husband, to Thailand in 1966, where he is overseeing the construction of runways in the northern jungles to facilitate the bombing of Viet Nam.  His frequent trips to the north leave Claire alone in Bangkok, in a house with a pool and several not-entirely cooperative servants.  She becomes obsessed with the mysterious disappearance of Jim Thompson, the (real) American man who reinvigorated the Thai silk industry.

The United States’ corroding involvement in Southeast Asia is slowly and slyly revealed as Claire’s activities and liaisons make her more aware of her own and her country’s nefarious presence in the larger world.  As always Tuck writes with stylish aplomb — her view of the world, even seen through (or slyly around) Claire’s rather deluded eyes, is always crystal clear and bracingly complex.  Her writing is assured, sensual, and compelling.  I’d read anything by her.