Category: Book reviews
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Marghanita Laski (1915-1988) published ‘Little Boy Lost’ in 1949. It concerns Hilary Wainwright, an English poet and intellectual, whose wife, Lisa, has been murdered by the Gestapo in Paris. Just before her capture, she managed to smuggle away their baby son. Now, after the War has ended, Hilary revisits France to find his son. He…
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Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) was born in Ukraine to Jewish parents who emigrated to Brazil in 1922. She published her first novel in 1943, aged just 23. It is known in English as ‘Near to the Wild Heart’, from the book’s epigraph, which is from Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. I…
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Céline was the nom de plume of Frenchman Louis Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961). ‘Voyage au bout de la nuit’ was his first and most celebrated novel, published in 1932. I read the 1983 English translation by Ralph Manheim. Destouches was a medical doctor whose later anti-semitism and Nazi sympathies have undermined his literary reputation. Even so,…
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Muriel Spark published ‘Memento Mori’ in 1959, two years before ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’. The novel is about several old people whose earlier life paths have crossed in different ways. Now, as they approach their final years, they begin to receive anonymous telephone calls. The caller sounds different to each, but always relays…
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Journey by Moonlight (1937) is the English translation of a novel by Hungarian author and academic Antal Szerb. Mihaly is honeymooning in Italy with Erzsi. He is still haunted by his youthful relationship with brother and sister Tamas and Eva, and their friends Janos and Ervin. They form a death cult, holding that the end…
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‘Excellent Women’ (1952) is probably the best-known novel by Barbara Pym (1913-1980). It deals with the humdrum middle class existence of one Mildred Lathbury, part-time charity worker and pillar of the local church. She mostly interacts with the vicar and his sister, two new neighbours and a spare anthropologist. These characters revolve around each other…
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William Dean Howells (1837-1920) published ‘A Hazard of New Fortunes’ in 1890. It deals with the lives of several inhabitants of New York, most of them connected in some way with the publication of a fortnightly review called Every Other Week. The owner, Dryfoos, was once a farmer but has made his fortune from natural…
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Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) published her second novel ‘The Long View’ in 1956. It tells the story of a middle class marriage in five episodes, arranged in reverse chronological order. We first encounter heroine Antonia Fleming in 1950, when her coercive husband Conrad has become almost completely detached. We trace their story back, through infidelities,…
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I intended my next book to be Maurice Baring’s ‘Cat’s Cradle’, but soon discovered that I’d read it already! So I switched to ‘Marcella’ by Mrs Humphry Ward, aka Mary Augusta Ward. This is her. Previously I’d read only her ‘Robert Elsmere’, which I very much enjoyed. ‘Marcella’ was written six years later, in 1894.…
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As you can see from the cover, William Boyd (no less) rates ‘The Polyglots’ (1925) as: “The most influential English novel of the Twentieth Century.” I would be inclined to award that prize to ‘Ulysses’, perhaps, or else ‘To the Lighthouse’. Those are both great literary masterpieces, while this, emphatically, is not. The narrative, such…
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This is Mary Cholmondeley (1859-1925) whose novel ‘Red Pottage’ (1899) is, in my opinion, a neglected classic. It tells the story of two very different female friends, Rachel West and Hester Gresley. The main plot revolves around the consequences of adultery: at the husband’s behest, he and his rival draw lots. The loser is honour…
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Storm Jameson published these three novellas in the early 1930s – and they are heavily redolent of that period. Each examines the life of a woman who struggles to overcome her circumstances: First, a novelist, increasingly overshadowed by her less talented but more charismatic, beautiful (and promiscuous) childhood friend. Second, a wealthy heiress who, escaping…
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Here’s my latest report from some of the less frequented avenues of literature. Boleslaw Prus was the pen name of Polish author Alexsander Glowacki (1847-1912). He first published ‘Lalka’ (‘The Doll’) in serialised form between 1887 and 1889. It is panoramic and ambitious, reflecting the development – and arguably the decay – of Polish society…
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This is Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (1823-1902). She published her first novel ‘The Morgesons’ in 1862. We follow the development of heroine, Cassandra Morgeson, and her unworldly sister Veronica. Cassandra develops a taste for the wrong kind of man, falling in love with her married cousin Charles. After he dies when their carriage overturns, she becomes…
Eponymous 