On Losing . . . and Finding Julia Hedges . . .

Hello.  It's been awhile.

It's the strangest of times to be picking up a blog again; does any of this minutiae really matter among all the global suffering and anxiety taking place amidst Covid-19?  I am feeling very lucky. My friends and family are all safe. My partner and I can both work from home so we still have our salaries.  I have a lovely back garden where I can sit on the grass, inhale the fresh air, look at the emerging growth and feel the sun on my face.  We have food in the fridge.

I know this isn't the case for thousands, and worries about how this world is going to look and act when this is all over are prevalent. But if this lockdown has taught us anything, it's to slow down, treasure the small things, and never to take anything or anyone for granted. It's given us the time to reflect, perhaps on what we've been, who we are and who we want to be in the future. And in some ways, this blog is a record of that for me.

I started writing this twelve years ago and back then I had a busy career in publishing, getting caught up in all the latest literary trends, discovering new authors and having early access to manuscripts from some of my favourites.  But I was also a bit sad that I'd had to give up on a PhD (impossible to combine with a full time job), and I wanted to keep my academic mind alert and indulge in my ongoing fascination with the literature written during Virginia Woolf's lifetime -  particularly books written by women about the suffrage movement, their participation in the First World War and life during the inter-war years - at a much more leisurely pace.  And that was the impetus for Julia Hedge's Laces - a reference to a character in Woolf's novel Jacob's Room, who is frustrated that all the names on the dome of the British Library Reading room are male.  I liked the fact that her laces were sloppily undone.  I wanted to tie them up into a neat bow, as we all want to do with our lives, while acknowledging that we will inevitably  trip up at times.

Fast forward to 2010 and I moved to the UK and this blog became a way to write about my new obsession with knitting and textiles, and to record the amazing walks I've been able to do all around the country.  And gradually the reading slowed down.  And almost stopped. Whether it was to do with my new activities or whether it was because my partner doesn't read at all, or whether I was secretly mourning the eighty percent of my book collection I had to give up in order to move, I still don't know. I went from someone who easily read over a hundred books a year to one who was struggling to finish ten. I had even stopped reading blogs - and I used to read dozens a day -  although over the last few years, I've noticed that lots of these have stopped too in favour of quicker forms of social media. And then my laptop mouse stopped working and I procrastinated on getting a new one and weeks went by and then months. . .

So what has spurred me on to this post? Two things really. I received a lovely comment on an old post from a complete stranger that really made my day (merci Catherine).  And then something unexpected popped up in a book I was reading that just seemed like a sign that I should log on again.

One positive about spending much more time at home has been the return of my reading mojo. I have been reading a lot over the past few weeks and thoroughly enjoying it again. So it seems apt that my first post after this break should be a round-up of some recent reads, all of which I'd recommend and, perhaps surprisingly, (perhaps not), rather reflect the reader I used to be ten years ago. Something old, something new, something translated, something re-read, something about women's lives in the inter-war years, yes, that feels familiar.

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade

The premise of this book really intrigued me, covering the lives of five women writers and thinkers - H.D, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf - but choosing to focus on the years in which they lived at various numbers in Bloomsbury's Mecklenburgh Square (not all at the same time). It's an ingenious way to write about a pivotal period in someone's life and also to consider how a similar, distinctly urban setting might influence or reflect a certain life stage.  Some of these women knew each other; some only knew about each other.  H.D. and Dorothy Sayers actually lived in the same room (years apart) which I found very pleasing (if those walls could only talk!)  They also had a relationship with the same jealous, overbearing and bitter man, (years apart) which was rather less agreeable. I certainly need to reread H.D's autobiographical novel of this time - Bid Me to Live.

And then, in the fascinating chapter on the classical academic Jane Ellen Harrison, I came across this timely passage:

". . . In her novel Jacob's Room, Woolf describes a female student staring at the ceiling of the British Museum Reading Room while she waits for her books, noticing not a single woman among the names engraved on the dome: the library's very architecture implies that only men have been and will ever be scholars. Aged nearly fifty, with honorary degrees from Aberdeen and Durham to her name yet no university appointment, Jane Harrison must have felt the same sinking conviction that the world was skewed against her. . . "

Was the character of Julia Hedge a nod to Jane Harrison? 

I like to think so. I was inspired by Harrison's life and work, and her attitude and principles of living and embracing a global world. I was also cheering on Eileen Power, another prominent academic who had to fight sexism and discrimination throughout her career, but whose love of travel led to a lifelong commitment to pacifism and internationalism. These brave, intelligent and ground-breaking women had boundless energy and resourcefulness and it was fascinating to get a glimpse into their lives.

Needless to say, I  loved this book.

Mac & His Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes

I've read Vila-Matas before and while I'm sure his writing may frustrate some readers, I find him rather funny. The Mac in question, who may or may not be the head of a construction company that has gone bust, decides to put his spare time to good use by studying the idea of repetition, in particular embarking on a project to rewrite the early novel of his celebrated neighbour in which each chapter is a pastiche of a famous short story writer. In the course of re-examining and commenting on each chapter, Mac also finds some eerie similarities to his own life.  This is comic literary angst at its best. And possibly its worst. Read and repeat.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.  

My workplace was having an online book club and this was the first selection. I hadn't read it since I was a teenager.  I also watched the 1940 film version again (apparently a new one is in the works with Kristen Scott Thomas playing Mrs. Danvers which looks intriguing).  I had forgotten that there was one crucial difference between the book and the movie; as a result, after this return to Manderley, I felt much less empathy for the narrator and less sorry for her fate after events unfolded.

There's nothing like a Persephone for comfort reading, and scanning my shelves, House-Bound by Winifred Peck seemed a perfectly appropriate title for our times.  The novel is set in Edinburgh during the Second World War and focuses on Rose Fairlaw, a middle class woman used to having a comfortable life with plenty of servant help, but with the current shortage, she makes a decision to attempt the majority of the house work herself with mixed results. There are many comic scenes within the story amidst the sorrows of wartime and I liked the recurring metaphor of the house enclosing - and in some cases imprisoning - change, progress and growth, personally and in families.  There was a subplot about Rose's fraught relationship with her daughter that was a bit unconvincing, but the story rips along and Rose was a very engaging and likeable character with a self-deprecating humour and a wry way of looking at the world that was endearing.   Winifred Peck was Penelope Fitzgerald's aunt and I think they share a sense of being able to closely observe an ordinary, everyday occurrence and mine it for its comic potential.  A very enjoyable, comfort read indeed.

Currently reading:

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

I'm about half way through this look at Shakespeare's home life in the events leading up to his young son's death from the plague. The story mostly unfolds through an interesting imagining of  Agnes/Anne Hathaway's early life and her relationship to her husband and his family.  So far, Shakespeare has barely made an appearance. 

and

The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J. Epstein 

I read an interesting review of this book,  a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel for adults, and ordered a copy on a whim. A young woman makes a Faustian-type bargain with the devil for a pair of ruby slippers and the chance to go travelling.  So far, I've had to make the choice to either stay in a tiny New York apartment or jump on a plane to Berlin (I chose the former).  It will be hard to tell when I've actually finished this novel, but we'll see how to go about reading the rest of it when I've got to the end of my current adventure.

That felt good.  Going to hit publish now. . .

Living Under the Fatwa. . .

Joseph Anton is written in the third person, which seems appropriate, not only because this is mainly the story of Rushdie's life living under this pseudonym concocted for the police who were protecting him, but as a skeptical but appreciative reader of memoirs, why not "construct" your life as a separate character? One is never going to discover the full truths of a person's life or personality through their autobiography and even less so, I imagine, if the author is a talented writer.

I was a bookseller when The Satanic Verses came out and yes, there was a copy sloppily set on fire in the store, and I well remember all the heightened security when we hosted an event  for The Ground Beneath Her Feet.  The ongoing story of the fatwa and the debates over the cost and need for Rushdie's protection were never as intensely covered in Canada as they were in the U.K. and it was this detailed account, as well as insight into the enormous and time consuming efforts by hundreds of people and organisations lobbying to remove the fatwa that made this an absorbing and important read. The nuances, egotism, political interests and manipulation of language in the taut tightrope that is international diplomacy are fascinating.  I also enjoyed the parts where Rushdie described his inspiration behind his novels and the difficulties - ironically -  his sheltered life created for his writing one.  The almost decade long struggle to get out the paperback edition of The Satanic Verses was also very interesting and disheartening to read about.  His agents were relentless and tireless in their support; sadly his publishers were not.

There is a lot of famous name dropping, some of it valid in terms of the writers and politicians who supported him (and those who didn't),  and a lot of it quite inconsequential; I didn't really care which celebrities he fleetingly bumped into at parties. His genuine concern for the safety of his family and friends, particularly his sons, is very moving; his views on the relationships with the women in his life leave a rather disagreeable taint, in the sense that none of them come off in a particularly positive light and it feels as if the reader is reluctantly forced into invading their privacy. But I gather that would always be a risk if one got involved with a writer.

His story will always be an important and celebrated one in the history of censorship and freedom of speech, and it has been well worthwhile to read his own account of it.  Here he sums up exactly what was and continues to be at stake:

Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before. Yet this was an age in which men and women were being pushed towards ever narrower definitions of themselves, encouraged to call themselves just one thing, Serb or Croat, or Israeli or Palestinian or Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Baha'i or Jew, and the narrower their identities became, the greater was the likelihood of conflict between them. Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, towards narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war.  There were plenty of people who didn't want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back. And yet they did what they had to do, even at the price of their own ease, and, sometimes, of their lives.

Plummer Panache. . .

How lovely for Christopher Plummer winning his first Oscar last night and what an elegant and touching speech.  I was really happy for him.  His memoir, In Spite of Myself, which came out a few years ago remains one of my favourite celebrity autobiographies, because the guy can really write!  This is such an enjoyable, intelligent read for anyone who loves the theatre or film world. It has a wonderful portrayal of Montreal in its cultural heyday, filled with fantastic anecdotes of working with all the theatrical greats, and Plummer's very honest, charming and quite funny observations about just how much fun and naughtiness he's had throughout his career.  You can picture a twinkle in his eye or a mischievous grin on virtually every page. He loves his work and it shows, and now there's this lovely Oscar coda to add.  I was so pleased that he got a standing ovation.

The BBC recently released a DVD of Hamlet at Elsinore which I simply must get my hands on.  It was filmed at Kronborg Castle and Plummer's performance is supposed to be one of THE definitive Hamlets. I've been lucky enough to see him live as Prospero, Lear and John Barrymore,  and I have a wonderful CD of him doing speeches from Henry V accompanied by Walton's score.  His presence is so commanding and I just love that deep and powerful and very sexy voice.

A Tale of Two Daughters. . .

Over at the wonderful Dovegreyreader Scribbles blog, there's a write-up of Dottor Of Her Father's Eyes, an  intriguing coming-of-age graphic novel about two daughters - Lucia Joyce, the troubled daughter of James Joyce, and Mary M. Talbot, the author herself, who was the daughter of an abusive Joycean scholar.  You can read dovegreyreader's blog post here and see some of the artwork, created by Mary's husband Bryan.  It doesn't seem to be available yet in Canada, but I'll be on the look-out as I'm always intrigued by narratives about living with writers or the writing life.

Into the Brilliance. . .

It's been a magnificent week so far for filling my head with awe and admiration for some of Canada's incredible writers and thinkers.  On Monday night, I headed over to Wade Davis's event at the Toronto Public Library. His new book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest is definitely in my top 10 books of the year.  He's an incredible speaker and accompanied by a slide show, he really brought the stories of the twenty-six men who were part of the Everest expeditions in 1921-1924 to life, particularly the horrors they'd suffered in the First World War.  The book is incredibly detailed and researched (he's been working on it for over ten years) but after hearing him speak, it's clear that his mission was to really honour the incredible lives of these men, each of whom could have had a biography all to themselves; attempting to climb Everest in many cases was the least of their accomplishments.  The grandson of Arthur Wakefield, a military doctor on the expedition who had spent a number of years in Canada working in the isolated communities of Newfoundland and Labrador, was in attendance and he brought a pair of thick mittens and Wakefield's wooden ice pick/pole that had gone to Everest with him. I got to handle the latter and it gave me goosebumps. Wakefield's story is really heartbreaking; he was working in a casualty station just behind the front lines during the Battle of the Somme where the Newfoundland regiment - many of whom he knew personally - was decimated during that horrific day.

Davis, who holds the wonderful title of Explorer-In-Residence for the National Geographic Society, also wanted to tell the story from the Tibetan point of view and he spent a couple of months living and researching in Tibet. It's as much a book about the arrogance of British imperialism as it is about exploration and the post-war culture of England. And yes, even the Bloomsbury set shows up. What I found engrossing about the talk was Davis' excitement at the strange turns his research took him. After all, this is definitely not the first book on George Mallory.  But by delving extensively into the war records of all these men, he was able to bring new perspectives to their motivations and actions. AND he was able to unearth the diaries of Canadian surveyor Oliver Wheeler who he credits with finding the approach to Everest that the expedition eventually used.  If you don't have time to read the book, you can hear the whole of his amazing talk (accompanied by slides) in three parts, Part One, Part Two and Part Three.  Well worth a listen.

Have you been listening to this year's Massey Lectures by Adam Gopnik ? (American born, but Canadian raised, so I'll claim him for this country).  His theme is Winter: Five Windows on the Season and while I've only heard three of the lectures so far, I know I'll definitely be buying the book.  Tuesday's lecture on Radical Winter and the culture of the polar expeditions, from the race across the Arctic of Frankenstein and his monster, to Apsley Cherry-Gerard's The Worst Journey in the World,  was fascinating, particularly in light of thinking about how heroism and exploration changed between those Antarctic journeys of Scott and Shackleton, and the Everest attempts outlined by Davis just a decade later, but with the horrors of the First World War sandwiched in between.  Davis notes interestingly, that several survivors of Shackleton's trip actually applied to join the Everest expedition; others of course had enlisted and been killed in the trenches. 

I think I need to go and buy Davis's The Wayfarers, his 2009 Massey Lectures.  Heck, in honour of the 50th anniversary I should go back and read them all.

Ambition, Folly, Originality: Fascinating Women. . .

There are so many interesting fall books landing in the office these days;  Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson by Susan Hertog, is one of them. There was a time when I was completely enamoured of all things Rebecca West, working my way through her novels (The Judge, for example is quite extraordinary) and journalism, particularly during her suffrage period.   I still think she's one of the greatest writers and most fascinating women of the 20th century.  I know nothing at all about Dorothy Thompson but after reading the jacket flap of this biography, I can see why the author has paired these two together (beyond their friendship). Thompson, an American, was also a journalist and the first female head of a European news bureau. And as West conducted a tempestuous affair with H.G. Wells, Thompson had a similar relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Both also had troubled relationships with their sons, who were jealous of their mother's success.  From Hertog's introduction:

. . . the lives of these women are important, not only in and of themselves, but because they are emblematic of female consciousness at a time of great social and moral upheaval and escalating scientific discovery - when psychological survival required the redefinition of one's relationship to oneself, society and the universe, both physical and divine. Few were up to the task, and the trajectory of most lives was an exercise in experimentation, frustration and failure. Thompson and West, however, had the extraordinary advantage of raw intelligence, along with the desire to make a difference in the world.

November also sees the publication of Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Richard Rhodes.  I was looking through her filmography and while I don't think I've ever actually seen any of her movies, her life could be a Hollywood script.  Fleeing Germany and her marriage to a Nazi arms dealer, she landed in Hollywood via 1920s Paris, and in addition to her successful career, she was also responsible for inventing technology that created a jam-proof radio guidance system for torpedos; it's also used in today's cell phones and GPS devices.

And speaking of Hollywood, though I usually shun celebrity memoirs, I'm making an exception for Diane Keaton's Then Again.  I've always loved her movies and admired her original style. The focus of this memoir is really about her relationship with her mother who kept these incredibly thick journals, part scrapbook, part honest accounting of her life and thwarted ambitions, right up until she succumbed to Alzheimer's.  The book is wonderfully designed (and you'll be awed when you see the photos of these journals) but I'll probably be listening to the unabridged audio which is read by Keaton herself, if only for the trademark laugh and quirky inflections.

For the WWI Collection. . .

Dovegreyreader has a lovely post about the recent team read she did with Matthew Hollis' new book, Now All Roads Lead to France, about the last few years of the poet Edward Thomas, focusing on his friendship with Robert Frost. You can read her post here.

The book sounds wonderful and I'll definitely be buying a copy. Reading about it sent me scurrying to my shelves in search of Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas To One Another, edited by Matthew Spencer. It's a collection of their letters which should be the perfect companion read. I've just opened it up near the end to read Frost's letter to Helen Thomas after hearing about her husband's death. It includes this bit:

I knew from the moment when I first met him at his unhappiest that he would someday clear his mind and save his life. I have had four wonderful years with him. I know he has done this all for you: he's all yours. But you must let me cry my cry for him as if he were almost all mine too.

To follow up, it's also worth digging out a copy of the Fall 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review - it contains the lost war poem by Frost entitled "War Thoughts At Home" and some essays on how the war and his relationship with Thomas influenced his writing. I knew there was a reason I hoard my books. A time and place for every one.

They'll Always Have Paris. . .

I recently spent a few days in the lovely city of Paris, having just read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (yes, I'm aware it's such a clichéd thing to do, but I'd actually never read this memoir of living in Paris in the 1920s, even though I'd been on quite a Hemingway kick as a teenager). And having also read Paula McLain's novel The Paris Wife, told from the point of view of Hadley, Hemingway's first wife, I was curious to see how the original compared. Even though it was written several decades after the events it describes, I found it oddly moving (particulary Hemingway's regret over the end of his relationship with Hadley), very funny at times, and inspiring in his dedication to the work that good writing takes. Here's one passage I liked on him discovering the great Russian authors in Sylvia Beach's lending library at Shakespeare & Company:

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

And no trip to Paris would be complete of course without a visit to the legendary bookstore that Beach inspired.
My hotel was in Montparnasse, just around the corner from La Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway liked to spend time uninterrupted, and where he wrote parts of The Sun Also Rises. It's now quite a swanky restaurant.

My favourite passage from A Moveable Feast was this one on writing in cafes and getting totally immersed in the process. He certainly worked at his craft:

Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake. A pencil lead might break off in the conical nose of the pencil sharpener and you would use the small blade of the penknife to clear it or else sharpen the pencil carefully with the sharp blade and then slip your arm through the sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the pack again, get the other arm through and feel the weight settle on your back and feel the pine needles under your moccasins as you started down for the lake.

Also accompanying me on the trip was Enrique Vila-Matas's Never Any End to Paris, translated by Anne McLean. It seemed the perfect literary companion with its title taken straight from Hemingway. However as Vila-Matas notes, while A Moveable Feast chronicles Hemingway's years in Paris when he was "very poor but very happy", Never Any End to Paris is about his own sojourn in the mid-1970s, when he was "very poor and very unhappy." It too is a meditation on starting out as a writer, given as a series of lectures, looking back on those early days when, following his literary idol, he rented a small garret (from Marguerite Duras no less), and set out to write his first novel. But as with tourists today, there's no getting away from the self-consciousness of it all:

I bought myself two pairs of glasses, two identical pairs, which I didn't need at all, I bought them to look more intellectual. And I began smoking a pipe, which I judged (perhaps influenced by photos of Jean-Paul Sartre in the Café de Flore) to look more interesting than taking drags on mere cigarettes. But I only smoked the pipe in public, as I couldn't afford to spend much money on aromatic tobacco. Sometimes, sitting on the terrace of some café, as I pretended to read some maudit French poet, I played the intellectual, leaving my pipe on the ashtray(sometimes the pipe wasn't even lit) and taking out what were apparently my reading glasses and taking off the other pair, identical to the first and with which I couldn't read a thing either. But this didn't cause me too much grief, since I wasn't trying to read the wretched French poets in public, but rather to feign being a profound Parisian cafe terrace intellectual. I was, ladies and gentlemen, a walking nightmare.

This passage gives a good example of the tone throughout; witty, self-deprecating, just a tad obnoxious at times, but always entertaining. He encounters a number of writers along the way, has a memorable encounter with an intense Isabelle Adjani at a party, and does a fair bit of posturing and pondering about his life, his first novel, cinema, and why nobody - especially his wife -seems to see his physical resemblance to Hemingway. Carrying at all times in his back pocket a crumpled list of writing tips given to him by Duras, this memoir is as much a reflection on the difficulties a writer has in finding inspiration and subject matter, as it is about recounting youthful life-shaping experiences. It's also inevitably about Paris, and that was feast enough for me.

Guess Who's Coming To My TV Screen?. . .

I just bought this fabulous DVD set of all nine movies that Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn made together - some of which, like Woman of the Year, Adam's Rib and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? I've previously seen, though not recently - and others which are new to me. I'm dedicating this week to watching them all in chronological order. I started tonight with the documentary that was included as an extra - The Spencer Tracy Legacy, made in 1986 and narrated by Hepburn. She doesn't talk about their personal life, but at the end she reads a letter that she felt compelled to write one night to Spencer, eighteen years after his death. It's loving and affectionate but full of questions - still - about the personal demons that haunted him. There are tears in her eyes as she reads, and I needed the kleenex as well. I'm looking forward to a marathon of this magical movie duo.

Knopf U.S. is publishing a huge biography of Spencer Tracy this fall, by James Curtis. It's over a thousand pages and to be honest, I don't know that I need such a detailed portrayal, but I am absolutely mesmerized by the cover. This is definitely not the first image that comes to mind when I think of Tracy, but the photo completely draws me in with its claustrophobic intensity.

A Book of Secrets. . .

Another book to add to the must-read pile. Michael Holroyd is a favourite author of mine - I've read several of his books, including his biographies of Lytton Strachey and Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. His books of memoir have also proved fascinating. This review in The Telegraph has peaked my interest in his latest book - especially as it continues the story of Violet Trefusis, in her post-Vita years.

Some Books I'm Lusting After. . .

Ah, this beautiful spring weather we're having - I'm just aching to wander the streets of Toronto, go out and buy books, and find a park bench in the sunlight. Here are some recent ones I've earmarked as must-reads.

The Letters of Sylvia Beach edited by Keri Walsh
Bookseller extraordinaire, founder of Shakespeare & Company - how can I resist? Plus, if you can't get to Paris. . .

A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War by David Boyd Haycock

I'm a fan of all of the artists profiled in this book - Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer - and have read bits of each of their lives. This collective biography sounds fascinating. Many thanks to Hannah Stoneham and her blog review for alerting me to this book.

Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman

I love book history and this tracing of the popularity of Austen's work over the last two centuries has gotten very good reviews. Certainly is my kind of book.

Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury Volume 1: Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice

Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury Volume 2: International Influence and Politics

Edited by Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari

News of this new anthology of scholarly essays went out on the Woolf listserv and the two volumes look terrific but I will probably have to wait until they come out in paperback before adding them to the Woolf shelf - bit pricey in hardcover.

What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy

A new collection of short stories from one of my favourite contempory writers. I love her edgy prose, always on the knife-edge between despair, danger and delight.

A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema by Emilie Bickerton

I subscribe to this magazine to improve my French even though I know it's not as cutting edge as it used to be. Which is why I want to read this book.

Added to the reading pile: More fascinating women's lives. . .

So my biography/memoir pile is growing. I have new biographies of Storm Jameson, Elizabeth Taylor (the author), Frances Partridge and Jean Rhys beckoning me. And now I've added Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman 1869-1955 by Angela V. John to the list. Her life touches on areas of this historical and literary period that fascinate me; she was a fairytale writer, a suffagette who was imprisoned twice in Holloway, and a pacifist during WWI, plus she had a long affair with the war journalist Henry Nevinson only able to marry him after the death of his wife, when she was sixty-three. There's a review of the book at the Times Higher Education site here. I also ordered Sharp's own autobiography, Unfinished Adventure, which Faber & Faber has reprinted through their Faber Finds series. Not sure which to read first - I may go with the biography first to get an overview and then get lost in Sharp's own voice. Or should I approach the writer first without any autobiographical preconceptions and then read the analysis? It's a tough call.


I can also hardly wait to read The Practice of Her Profession: Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism by Susan Butlin. My favourite painting in the Art Gallery of Ontario is Carlyle's The Tiff and I've long been wanting to see other examples of her work (turns out a good number of her paintings are in the Woodstock Art Gallery, so a road trip is imminent). Lots has been written about the Paris art scene at the turn of the century - it will be wonderful to read about the experiences of a spirited Canadian woman among them. I've already spent a rapt hour just gazing at the colour plates of some of her other paintings and my admiration for her work has only grown.

Reading challenges. . .

Long novels don't scare me; I usually relish them.
I've read Proust and War and Peace. One of my favourite books is A Dance to the Music of Time. Recently, I've tackled Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones and Roberto Bolano's 2666.
But long non-fiction? That's a whole other matter, and I don't know why this is so. It's not the genre of non-fiction itself, just any book that is over 500 pages. I painstakingly crawl through it, even when I'm enjoying the read (I took over a year to read Hermione Lee's terrific biography of Virginia Woolf and then spent another year with her equally impressive bio of Edith Wharton). Maybe I spend too much time reading the footnotes. Maybe biographies (in particular literary ones) send me off on other reading tangents. Maybe the books are too heavy to cart around and so they get relegated to the groaning shelves of my bedside tables to lie on top of more biographies, histories and litcrit tomes all with bookmarks sticking out at various spots. It's a crazy way to read - by the time I get back into the books, I've forgotten parts of what I've already read.

A friend from England just sent me The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and The Imagists by Helen Carr. This recently published book looks fabulous and right up my reading alley. But . . . it's 982 pages!


I've read the Prologue which is only four pages. It promises "rich drama, involving passion, betrayal, sexual jealousy, literary envy, bereavement, shell-shock, class antagonisms, friendship, adultery, cruelty, bullying and pique". I've looked at the photos. I'm really going to try to break my habits with this one and actually finish it in a reasonable time - maybe by Labour Day? HA!

Women Writers, Women's Lives. . .

Coming soon are three new biographies that I'm extremely interested in reading.
Once upon a time, I had grandiose notions of writing a PhD thesis on Storm Jameson (abandoned alas, because a gal has to pay the rent). I'm always fascinated by writers - particularly women - who lived through, and wrote about both world wars and Jameson's additional work in publishing and for PEN made her all the more fascinating to me. So I'm very excited about Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life by Jennifer Birkett. I've read Jameson's own memoir, Journey From the North, but while beautifully written, it's a bit coy about her personal life and doesn't focus as much on her books as this biography promises to.

I've dipped into Frances Partridge's diaries from time to time and have come across bits of her story as a minor figure in the biographies of Carrington, Lytton Strachey and various other members of the Bloomsbury Group. But I'm delighted she'll take center stage in Anne Chisholm's upcoming book, Frances Partridge: The Biography. I first heard about it listening to this delightful podcast from the Guardian, interviewing the indomitable Diana Athill, whose latest book, Somewhere Towards the End, is also on my to-be-read pile. At one point Athill talks about her love affairs with married men and mentions she is reading a proof of Chisholm's book. She admires Partridge's tolerant attitude to her husband's affairs and her disdain of the "geometrical approach to emotional relationships". This, Athill contends, closes one to the "tender curvaceousness" of life and love that is everywhere in the world. I love that phrase and as Athill acknowledges, "there was plenty of tender curvaceousness going on in that set!".

And finally, I can't wait for Nicola Beauman's biography of writer Elizabeth Taylor, being published by her own Persephone Books. There's no information yet on the Persephone site, but The Other Elizabeth Taylor is coming out in April, so I imagine one will be able to order it soon. I've read a few of Taylor's novels - Blaming, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, and At Mrs. Lippincote's - and have several more on my shelves. In particular, I want to read Angel, as I just saw the movie version, directed by François Ozon and starring a rather stunning Romola Garai. The story follows the rise of Angel Deverell, a poor girl with a vivid imagination who finds fame and fortune writing bestselling romances, but who lives in her own fantasy world, constructed like one of her plots, and face up to the reality that surrounds her, particularly turning a blind eye to her philandering husband who has only married her for her money. Ozon filmed it completely over the top - Anne Shirley meets Scarlett O'Hara - but I thought it worked wonderfully as a visual metaphor for the type of books Angel inhabited. And the costumes and make-up were incredible. If you liked Ozon's 8 Women, you'll enjoy this; it has some of the same - almost camp - humour. I find Ozon to be a very interesting director who clearly is fascinated with the ongoing relationships and resonances of the written word. I love his movie Under the Sand (the wonderful Charlotte Rampling plays a professor who teaches Woolf, trying to cope with the grief of her husband's disappearance) and The Swimming Pool (Rampling again, playing a thriller writer who escapes to a French house to try and write her next novel, but encounters more than she'd bargained for). Rampling also has a role in Angel.

My Favourite Reads of 2008. . .

Happy New Year!
I spent the day tidying up my apartment, ostensibly because my mother was coming for lunch, but also to start the year somewhat fresh and clutter free. And it was time to dust the bookshelves. Then I went through my reading diary for 2008. I finished 109 books last year, somewhat shy of the 125 I had hoped to complete but several of the books were over 800 pages so I'm not going to beat myself up about it. As I look over the list, I realize I've read mostly contemporary and new fiction (nothing wrong with that, I enjoyed most of it) but didn't tackle anywhere near the number of classics, books about Woolf, books set in the period of Woolf's life, Viragos, Persephones, and books about WWI that I've been madly collecting over the last few years. And they're now glaring at me from their shelves. So these are what I'm determined to focus on in 2009.
But I read some terrific books last year and here are my top 10 favourites (in alphabetical order by author - I just can't pick the best of the bunch)

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
This should have won the Man Booker prize. One can quibble about the ending, but I didn't see it coming and I was so enthralled in the story that I didn't even think to question it when it did arrive; I was completely caught in a narrative spell the entire time.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
One can't help but admire the immense writing skill behind this - a very long, but entertaining, thought-provoking and original novel.

The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
Probably the most beautifully sustained writing of any novel I read this year.

A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families by Michael Holroyd

One of the last books I read this year and I'll blog about it in more detail soon, but these lives were fascinating and I can only remain awed and grateful for the years of research this book must have entailed.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal
Just a perfect little gem about the wonders of childhood, the experience and wisdom of aging, and everything in between. This is a book I know I'll return to many times in the future.

Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance by Lloyd Jones
Two interconnected love stories spanning the world and decades. I am now hooked on Argentinian tango music.

In Spite of Myself by Christopher Plummer
What a storyteller - this book made me laugh and laugh, sometimes with an almost prudish horror and ultimately with delight. Plummer is a great writer as well as being a terrific actor.

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge, translated by Richard Greenman
I've always been fascinated by the interwar years, spies and the complicated relationships - political, personal, and ideological - that people had with communism, especially during the 1930s. This powerful novel was horrifying and unputdownable.

Between Each Breath by Adam Thorpe.
Thorpe is one of my favourite British writers who has a real ability to make readers feel morally uneasy about the smugness of our comfortable lives. This novel is about a frustrated composer and his guilt over sponging off his wife's money; his problems only escalate when he has an affair while visting Tallin, with an Estonian waitress. It's a novel about creativity and music, and the re-evaluation of one's life and values, and the writing is just so beautiful. Here is one of my favourite passages:
It's as if walking without looking where I was going - walking backward, heels first, virtually improvising - I have suddenly turned my head. I very much like what I see stretching out in front of me. It was always there too, I just didn't realize it. It just needed a turn of the head.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

2008 was definitely the year to finally read this masterpiece as I also managed to watch Sergei Bondarchuk's 7 hour plus 1968 film version all in one day at Cinematheque, and I also saw the Canadian Opera Company's production of Prokofiev's opera this fall. I was surprised by how immensely readable and gripping this was.

Ah, Paris. . .

A nice write-up in Maitresse on this new book by David Burke - Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light. As she writes:

Burke's book fills a certain niche on the shelf of books written about literary Paris: not only a walking tour of French literature, or of Paris in letters, Burke has produced a geographically organized catalogue of writers' writings on Paris. The reader is led street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, as Burke tracks the ghosts of writers past, pinning down what happened where in the long history of literature produced by Parisian writers, punctuated with citations of great Parisian moments in French literature.

It looks like a very interesting study. The most recent book I've read set in Paris was Zola's The Ladies' Paradise about the rise of a huge department store told through the stories of its visionary owner and a poor sales clerk who he falls in love with. It was fascinating on late 19th century consumerism and marketing ideas and gender, class and work issues, if the story was somewhat awkward and unconvincing.

New books on the First World War. . .

While browsing in my local independent bookstore this afternoon, I came across two interesting newish books. Doris Lessing's latest, Alfred & Emily is part novella and part biography of her parents - both of whom were haunted by the First World War. Alfred was injured fighting, losing a leg; Emily worked as a nurse at the front lines and lost her fiance. The novella imagines what her parents' lives would have been like if the war had never occurred. This is followed by biographical sketches showing the lasting results of the war on the rest of their lives - and how it affected her own relationship with them. This blend of fact and fiction is intriguing to me - in some ways it seems the perfect way to tackle a subject that is inevitably elusive in its dependence on memory, stories, and the clarity (or not) of thoughtful hindsight. I tend to think of the war as so far away; nearly all the people who lived through that horror are gone now. But how could it not affect their children and grandchildren? With the 100th anniversary not that far away, I imagine many of the next generation will be examining the war - both in fiction and non-fiction - over the next few years.

Michèle Barrett's Casualty Figures: How Five Men Survived the First World War, was the second book I discovered. It also examines the long-term psychological effects of the war on the five soldiers that she profiles. I imagine it will be a heart-breaking read.

One book being brought back into print that I'm quite excited about is Mary Borden's The Forbidden Zone which Hesperus is publishing at the end of this month. I collect women's writing of the First World War and have a 1930 edition of this book (first published in 1929). I think it's one of the best works of fiction to come out of the war by any writer, male or female. Borden was a nurse in France and this collection of short stories and prose pieces drawn from her experiences is so beautifully written and powerful; I hope this new edition will introduce her writing to a whole new audience. It makes a perfect companion piece to Hemingway's In Our Time, for example. "The Beach" is my favourite piece of hers. Borden led an absolutely fascinating life, actively participating in the Second World War as well. I wish someone would write a really good biography of her.