Category: Book reviews
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Romain Gary (1914-1980) was born Roman Leibovich Kacew in Vilnius, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents, both Jewish, divorced in 1925. After periods in Moscow and Warsaw, he and his mother arrived in Nice. He studied law before joining the French Air Force in 1938, training as a pilot. Following the French Armistice…
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If last year was lively on Eponymous (aka timdracup.com), 2025 has been positively manic. In 2024, I published 26 posts and thought that was good going. But this is my 41st post of 2025. That includes 15 book reviews, 12 musical posts in my Ouroboros series, five posts devoted to our progress along various English…
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Paul Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was born in Lübeck, Germany. His father was a wealthy Lutheran grain merchant; his mother, a Brazilian-born Roman Catholic with German and Portuguese ancestry. When his father died in 1891, the family moved to Munich, where Mann lived until 1933. In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a Jewish mathematician…
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John Maxwell Coetzee was born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa. He attended a Catholic school and then the University of Cape Town. After three years working as a computer programmer in England, he completed a PhD on Samuel Beckett at the University of Texas, Austin, then spent a further three years teaching English…
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William Trevor Cox (1928-2016) disposed of his surname for writing purposes. He was born in County Cork, Ireland, to James Cox, a bank manager, and Gertrude, nee Davison, originally from Ulster. They were a Protestant family. It was not a particularly happy childhood and, owing to his father’s postings, Trevor spent it in several different…
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Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was born in rural Minnesota, the youngest child of a doctor. When he was six, his mother died and his father remarried. Lewis attended Yale, graduating in 1908, after which he worked as editor for a variety of newspapers and publishers. His first serious novel appeared in 1914 but success eluded…
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Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010) was born into a privileged family of businessmen, lawyers and stockbrokers. Though, according to him, the Auchincloss menfolk owed their wealth, not to inheritance, but to advantageous marriages and their personal acumen. He studied at Yale but, midway through his degree, transferred to read law at the University of Virginia, eventually graduating…
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Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was born Penelope Knox, her parents being Edward Knox, a poet and later Editor of ‘Punch’ and Christina, nee Hicks, daughter of the Bishop of Lincoln. She graduated from Somerville College, Oxford in 1938, and in 1942 married Desmond Fitzgerald, a barrister. Ten years later he was caught forging signatures on cheques…
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Dame Penelope Lively was born Penelope Margaret Low in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933, to Roger Low, a bank manager, and Vera, nee Greer. When her parents divorced in 1945, her father sent her to an English boarding school, from which she proceeded to St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she read modern history. Shortly after graduating…
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Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, at the south-eastern extremity of the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is an alluvial floodplain of some 7,000 square miles, spreading across north-west Mississippi, between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. Welty studied at the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University before returning…
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Heinrich Böll (1917-85) was born into a Roman Catholic, pacifist family in Cologne, Germany. He was conscripted in 1939, shortly after beginning a degree in German and Philology at the University of Cologne. He served for five years in several countries and was four times wounded. On leaving hospital in August 1944, he tried to…
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A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was born Antonia Susan Drabble, the eldest child of a barrister (later a QC) and an academic. One of her younger siblings was the novelist Margaret Drabble (b. 1939). Byatt was born in Sheffield, but the family moved to York to avoid German bombing during WW2. Shortly after graduating from the University…
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William Keepers Maxwell (1908-2000) edited the New Yorker magazine from 1936 to 1975. He wrote six novels over roughly the same period, the penultimate being The Chateau (1961). Maxwell married a painter called Emily Gilman Noyes (1921-2000) in May 1945. In 1948, three years into their marriage, the couple took a trip to France. He…
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Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) wrote some twenty novels, ‘The Present and the Past’ (1953) coming relatively late in her career. Her parents were the medical author James Compton-Burnett and his second wife, Katharine. She was the seventh of twelve children: eight girls and four boys. Despite the hyphen, their origins were relatively humble. Home educated until…
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Novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is best known for ‘Au Rebours’ (Against Nature) (1884), widely regarded as a seminal work in the French Decadent tradition. ‘La-bas’ (The Damned) was published seven years later in 1891. I read the 2001 translation for Penguin Classics by Terry Hale. Huysmans was employed as an administrative civil servant in the…
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This is John Meade Falkner (1858-1932), best known as the author of Moonfleet (1898), a riproaring tale of smuggling and derring-do. I remember it being read to us in primary school. Sometimes, when he was tired, Mr Smith, bespectacled and ginger-bearded, would ask me to take his place, reading aloud to the class. It was…
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Emily Hilda Young (1880-1949) enjoyed an unconventional life. She married a solicitor, John Arthur Daniell, settling in Clifton, Bristol. But she also began a lifelong affair with Ralph Bushill Henderson, a married teacher, theologian and fellow mountaineer. Henderson had married Beatrice Mansfield in 1901. Although well into his 40s, Daniell served as a Sergeant Instructor…
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It’s been a lively year here on Eponymous (aka timdracup.com) This is my 26th post: I’ve been writing the equivalent of a new post each fortnight. Exactly half have been book reviews. There were also ten travelogues, one Dracup family history blockbuster and one bereavement-related post in memory of my late wife, Kate. Starting with…
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Paul Scott (1920-1978) won the Booker Prize shortly before his death and acquired posthumous fame when the ‘Raj Quartet’ – his tetralogy of novels about the final years of British rule in India – was televised in 1984. The first in the sequence is ‘The Jewel in the Crown’ (1966), which gave its name to…
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Despite half a century’s engagement with literature, Hermann Broch (1886-1951) was completely new to me. Between 1931 and 1932 he published a trilogy of self-contained novels, collectively called ‘The Sleepwalkers’. Together they span a period of thirty years, set in 1888, 1903 and 1918 respectively. Each is intended to capture the zeitgeist: in 1888 this…
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