Actually called 'What Shall I Read?' (a dilemma that will be familiar to most of us), this very Edwardian-looking painting is by one Florence Marlowe, who I know nothing about.
My Books
Harriet Devine: Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court, 1956-2006
Harriet Devine Jump: Nineteenth Century Short Stories by Women: A Routledge Anthology
Harriet Devine Jump: Women's Writing of the Victorian Period 1837-1901: An Anthology
Harriet Devine Jump: Women's Writing of the Romantic Period, 1789-1836: An Anthology
05 May 2012
Girl Thinking About Reading
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01 May 2012
Beryl Bainbridge Week
Several people who commented on Muriel Spark last week compared her to Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010). And now Annabel has been inspired to host a Beryl Bainbridge week (more info here). I've only read one of BB's novels, her last one (The Girl in the Polkadot Dress), which I liked very much. I said when I reviewed it that I wanted to read some more and now I will -- probably starting with Harriet Said..., for obvious reasons. So I am definitely on board. See you there?
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30 April 2012
Somebody Read The Mandelbaum Gate!
...and it wasn't me, though I actually ordered it on Amazon today. It just seemed so sad that MSRW had gone by without this novel getting a look-in. That's what I thought, and that's also what Chris of The Book Trunk thought and, bless her, she read it and reviewed it today. Sadly she didn't like it very much so her post is called A Spark Without Sparkle but never mind. You can't win them all and we are very grateful to her for giving it a go, and bringing the final count, I think, up to 80, which is a good round figure and a fantastic ending to a really successful week.
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Spark Round-Up! (Monday's update)
This is Monday's update to yesterday's post -- changes in blue and red.
MSRW has been a roaring success. So far I have counted 79 reviews, covering all but one of the novels (The Mandelbaum Gate -- wish I had a copy as I'd have read it myself -- don't like to see it being left out!). And of course there have also been many interesting comments from non-bloggers telling us what they have read this week. If the purpose was to get people reading some of the lesser known novels, or re-reading the better-known ones, we have definitely succeeded. Speaking for myself I am going to go on with Spark as there are several novels I now really want to read.
Here's the score as far as Simon and I have managed to compile it. If you have reviewed something which doesn't appear on this list, please let us know.
Statistics -- things have changed since I posted yesterday. There's now an out and out winner, with 8 reviews -- A Far Cry from Kensington. There's a tie for second place, with Loitering with Intent, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Girls of Slender Means and The Driver's Seat having six reviews each. The Finishing School and Memento Mori got five each. Four each for The Abbess of Crewe, and Territorial Rights. Three for Robinson and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, two for The Takeover, The Bachelors, The Hothouse by the East River, and The Only Problem, and one each for all the others. This could still change of course. But anyway, well done everybody and do send us any late additions! More from Simon today and maybe more from me too.
The Novels
The Comforters (1957)
Robinson (1958)
Memento Mori (1959)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Bachelors (1960)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
The Public Image (1968)
The Driver's Seat (1970)
Not to Disturb (1971)
The Hothouse by the East River (1973)
The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
The Takeover (1976)
Territorial Rights (1979)
Loitering with Intent (1981)
The Only Problem (1984)
A Far Cry From Kensington (1988)
Symposium (1990)
Reality and Dreams (1996)
Aiding and Abetting (2000)
The Finishing School (2004)
Non-novels and Miscellaneous
Emily Brontё: Her Life and Work (1953)
The Go-Away Bird (1958)
Curriculum Vitae (autobiography) (1992)
Miscelleanous Posts on Spark
My Porch (biography)
My Porch (2) (On Spark covers)
Stuck-in-a book (Spark covers again)
My Porch (3) (contains the Quirktensity Monitor)
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28 April 2012
Woman with Book
This totally gorgeous painting is actually called The japanese mask (1884), painted by Gustave Claude Etienne Courtois, a French artist (1852–1923).
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27 April 2012
Two More Sparks
Everybody seems to be reading A Far Cry from Kensington. Well, maybe not everybody, but several people have mentioned or reviewed it, favourably I am happy to say. Because this is a most interesting as well as entertaining novel. Like many of Spark's novels, it has what you might call a double time-scheme -- or at least it is narrated in the present, or rather the 1980s (it was published in 1988) by someone who is looking back to 1954, when she was living in furnished rooms in a tall house in Kensington. This, and the fact that her life has changed beyond recognition in those 30 years, is one reading of the novel's title, and she does in fact make that point at the beginning and also at the end -- it is a far cry from Kensington and the early 1950s. Yes, but the title has, I think, another resonance -- an actual physical cry for help, which comes much later in the novel and which the narrator chooses to ignore. The narrator is Mrs Hawkins, a widow of twenty-seven. Here's what she says about what she was like in those days:
There was something about me, Mrs Hawkins, that invited confidences. I was abundantly aware of it and indeed abundance was the impression I gave. I was massive in size, strong-muscled, huge-bosomed, with wide hips, hefty long legs, a bulging belly and a fat backside.
As the novel progresses, though, we see Mrs Hawkins gradually transforming herself into Nancy, slender and attractive, which she does, rather charmingly, by eating exactly half of what she used to eat before. In the 1950s, though, she works for a publishing company, and indeed, in the novel's world anyway, working for a publishing company seems to be the most desirable job available and several of the characters including Mrs H are constantly getting sacked and trying to find new jobs with new publishers. Her own reasons for getting sacked are connected with someome she meets during the course of her work, a man by the name of Hector Bartlett. Hector Bartlett is unpleasant, pretentious, and a terrible writer, and into Mrs H's mind springs a phrase she thinks she read in some 19th century French symbolist writer, who described a very bad journalist as a pisseur de copie - a urinator of bad prose, in other words. Unfortunately it not only springs to her mind but also to her lips, and every time she says it, either to Hector himself or to anyone else, it has disastrous repurcussions, though she decidedly won't stop.
That's one strand of the story. The other strand, or perhaps another strand, is the goings on in the boarding house where Mrs H lives. All the tenants have become very friendly, and thus she gets to know Wanda, a Polish dressmaker, who, as the novel begins, is becoming very distressed by some unpleasant anonymous letters she has been receiving. Nobody can figure out who on earth could be sending them, but as time goes on it seems possible that the sender is none other than the pisseur de copie himself. Why and how this might be I will leave to you to find out. But for me this was one of the best of MS's novels, though perhaps not in the absolute top rank.
And what is in the absolute top rank? Well, I love Loitering with Intent to bits, but I tell you, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is, I think, an astonishing piece of work. Interestingly enough not many people have reviewed it yet*, and I suspect that might be because they read it ages ago, or they saw the film, and they think they know all about it. Well that's what I thought too, and I might not have read it at all if Open Books had not kindly sent me a free ebook, which I read on my iphone (yes, sadly, I do do this from time to time). And I now think it is a deservedly important novel. Because of the format, I'm not sure how the length compares to other of MS's books -- perhaps someone will tell me -- but it seemed to me to be much fuller than most of them, which tend to be on the short side.
I hardly think it necessary to tell you the story of this novel, but of course I will anyway. We are in a select school in Edinburgh (based, apparently, on the school Spark herself attended), between the wars, and Miss Jean Brodie, powerful and charismatic, has gathered around her a small group of girls whose minds she is setting out to form. As she tells the girls constantly, she is in her prime -- a statement that becomes more and more questionable as the novel goes on. Her little group -- the creme de la creme -- does indeed get an excellent education in one sense, as Miss Brodie scarcely ever sticks to the curriculum, instead telling them stories about her own life and her love affairs as well as broadening their minds in more literary, artistic and political ways. The politics, as we soon realise, are a bit of a problem, as Miss Brodie admires Hitler and Mussolini, and indeed she does in some ways resemble a dictator herself, as Sandy, the most complex of the group, comes to realise: the Brodie set was Miss Brodie's fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need . At the beginning of their association with Miss Brodie the girls are ten-year-olds, but as the chronology progresses they become teenagers and their attitude to their teacher gradually modifies as they start to see her as perhaps she really is and to resist her attempts to form them in her own mould. This is very obvious when she sends one girl to be painted by her erstwhile lover, art master, and hopes she will become his lover. She does not, though Sandy later does. Miss Brodie is hated by the headmistress who is longing to get rid of her, and finally does so when one of the girls "betrays" her.
A chronological account of this novel is very hard to give, because of the way it is constructed. Spark constantly moves back and forth in time, so that we know things that are going to happen in the future and things that have happened in the past, all more or less simultaneously. Introducing Rose Stanley, for example, Spark comments who six years later had a great reputation for sex, and Mary Macgregor, we are told, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire. This has a most peculiar effect, and I don't remember any other writer using it in exactly this way. This, I think, is one very important reason for reading the novel rather than making do with the film which, as far as I remember, doesn't try to reproduce this quite unsettling effect. And of course you miss so much when you turn a novel into a film, and great though Maggie Smith was, I don't think she had quite the multi-layered extraordinariness of Jean Brodie. What Spark does so brilliantly here, I think, is to make you simultaneously admire her and be somewhat repelled by her. My own final reaction was to feel deeply sorry for her -- despite her obviously strange and sometimes misguided opinions, she had the most remarkable qualities, and the girls, though many of them rejected her and her teachings, generally came to realise this long after her death.
I was hoping that by now I might have got a handle on Spark and would be able to say in some succint and wise words what the overall characteristics of her novels were. But right now I don't feel able to do that, which is a shame! Perhaps by Sunday, the end of MSRW, I may have come to some conclusions. In any case, there'll be a round-up of some kind, and please do keep reviewing and sending us the links.
*but see Rachel's great review!
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26 April 2012
The Comforters (reprise)
Another novel I read and reviewed last year and my final reprise for MSRW.
Spot of post-modernism, anyone? If your heart, like mine, immediately sinks at the very idea, think again. For Muriel Spark's The Comforters -- amazingly enough her first novel -- manages to combine wit, charm, and a highly entertaining plot with the most bizarrely experimental techniques which will make your head spin in the nicest possible way.
The novel begins realistically enough:
On the first day of his holiday Laurence Manders woke to hear his grandmother's voice below.
'I'll have a large wholemeal. I've got my grandson stopping for a week, who's on the BBC. That's my daughter's boy, Lady Manders. He won't eat white bread, one of his fads.'
Laurence shouted from the window, 'Grandmother, I adore white bread and I have no fads.'
She puckered and beamed up at him.
'Shouting from the window', she told the baker.
'You woke me up', Laurence said.
'My grandson', she told the baker. 'A large wholemeal, and don't forget to call on Wednesday'.
A charming but you might think rather innocuous beginning -- however it reveals a great deal about Laurence, his grandmother, and their relationship and, though we don't realise it at the time, also contains hints of future developments. For Laurence soon discovers that his adored grandmother appears to have a rather peculiar "gang", consisting of three gentlemen, including the baker, who meet regularly at her house and have odd and coded discussions. When Laurence discovers a cache of diamonds in the white loaf, he is seriously worried.
Meanwhile Laurence's ex (though still much loved) fiancee Caroline is away at a Catholic retreat, rather to his mother's surprise.
'But Caroline isn't a Catholic.'
'She's just become one.'
'I thought she was looking thin. How does that affect you, dear?'
It is Caroline, in fact, who is really the centre of the novel -- indeed it is Caroline's novel in a sense, since she soon starts hearing the tapping of a typewriter in her Kensington flat as an unseen figure she starts calling 'the Typing Ghost' writes down her thoughts, sometimes even before she has had them herself. Caroline wonders about her own sanity, but also about the reality of the world she lives in and indeed the vey existence of free will. It becomes clear to her that a novel is being written, of which she is the centre, but who is writing it is entirely mysterious to her -- though it soon appears that the novel we are reading is in fact that very novel....
The book is full of wonderful characters, including Caroline's friend the Baron, who runs a seedy secondhand bookshop, is obsessed by Satanism, and seems to be involved in some way in the diamond smuggling business, and the truly horrific Georgina Hogg, suspected by some of being a witch, who dogs Caroline's footsteps and, having 'no personal life', disappears from view when she goes to sleep in the back of Lady Manders' car.
So what's it all about, really? I actually have no idea. But I enjoyed reading it enormously. Though the copy I read was an old hardback I found on a friend's bookshelf, it's been republished by Virago (with a new introduction by Ali Smith), so it's easy to get hold of. Highly recommended.
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25 April 2012
The Girls of Slender Means (reprise)
Here is another reprise -- I read this one in January 2010 but thought I'd give it another airing to celebrate MSRW.
Have you ever read an amazing poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called The Wreck of the Deutschland? Written in the 1870s, it is dedicated to five nuns who died in a terrible shipwreck, one of them chanting the Psalms as the ship went down. You can read the whole poem here, but this is just a part of it:
17
They fought with God's cold --
And they could not and fell to the deck
(Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled
With the sea-romp over the wreck.
Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,
The woman's wailing, the crying of child without check --
Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,
A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.
Ah, touched in your bower of bone
Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,
Have you! make words break from me here all alone,
Do you! -- mother of being in me, heart.
O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth,
Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start!
Never-eldering revel and river of youth,
What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?
Sister, a sister calling
A master, her master and mine! --
And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling;
The rash smart sloggering brine
Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one;
Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine
Ears, and the call of the tall nun
To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm's brawling.
You are probably asking yourself why on earth I am quoting this poem in a review of Muriel Spark's celebrated novel, The Girls of Slender Means. If you have read the novel you will of course remember that it is one of the poems used by Joanna, an elocution teacher and one of the girls who lives in the May Teck Hostel where the story is set. But there's a bit more too it than that, though it will be hard to explain without giving too much away to anyone who has not yet read it.
Set in 1945, at the end of WW2, this great novel tells the story of a group of young women who live on very low incomes in this large Victorian house overlooking Kensington Gardens in London. They work in menial office jobs, scrounge for food and clothing coupons, gossip about boyfriends, and share one glorious Schiaparelli evening dress. There's beautiful Selina, who is sleeping with three men but keeping other, richer, ones dangling in the hope of marriage; Pauline, who seems normal but disappears out in the evening from time to time pretending she is going for dinner with the actor Jack Buchanan; Joanna, a clergyman's daughter, who has come to London to escape her tendency to fall in love with curates and is channelling all her passion into the poetry she uses in her elocution classes; and Jane, really the central character, who works for a seedy small-time publisher but is highly respected by the other girls for her work in what she refers to as "the world of books". Jane is fat -- not a politically correct term in this day and age but this is how she, and the other girls, think of her. As the novel begins Jane is falling in love with a moody intellectual author, Nicholas Farringdon, who strings her along but soon starts an affair with Selena. On his many visits to the hostel, however, it is Joanna who most fascinates Nicholas -- she can often be heard declaiming her favourite poems to her pupils, and the novel is studded with short extracts from poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and of course Hopkins.
The setting, in a London devastated by the war, is wonderfully evoked. All over the city are bombed out buildings, some still standing but with their sides torn away so that you can see each room, its wallpaper still intact, exposed to the elements. An unexploded bomb is indeed rumoured to be buried in the hostel garden but no one has ever succeeded in finding it. However this does have a bearing on the dramatic events at the end of the novel, during which Joanna is heard proclaiming from the Psalms in her wonderful, powerful voice. If you have read it you will see what I mean about the Hopkins poem and if you haven't read it you really should. During the course of the book we learn that after these events Nicholas has converted to Catholicism -- something Spark herself did -- and this too seems connected in some way with Joanna and with Hopkins. I'm sure someone has written a learned article or ten about all this. But don't let that put you off. This is an absolutely delightful, witty, perceptive, thought-provoking book and you will be glad you have read it.
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Another Spark Poem
I think I promised you a poem a day and then forgot to put one up yesterday. Anyway here's another one. I don't think Spark is as good a poet as she is a novelist, but the poems are well worth reading and perhaps might give some insight into the novels? I expect someone has done a PhD on this but right now I don't feel qualified to comment. However I rather liked this one:
'Anger in the Works'
Anger filled her body and mind, it
permeated her insides, her throat
and heart throbbed with anger. ('Beware
the ire of the calm.') There was
anger in her teeth, nails, and hair.
It drummed in her ears.
'How lovely to see you,' she said,
'Do sit down'.
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A Couple of Sparks
As I think I've already said, I've read four novels for MSRW, and another three over the past two years. I had been thinking that seven in all wasn't bad going but I have already been amazed by the (to me) totally unknown corners of the Spark oeuvre that people are uncovering. Anyway, today I'm going to say something about two of the ones I've come to fresh, as it were, and they are:
I'm not really sure why I chose The Finishing School. I suppose I may have liked the sound of the plot, or the fact that it was set in Switzerland, but I have a feeling it was a fairly arbitrary choice. I certainly hadn't realised until I picked it up that it was MS's last novel, published in 2004 when she was 86. Briefly, the novel tells the story of the events of a term at College Sunrise, a mixed-sex finishing school. Run by would-be novelist Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina, the school started in Brussels but has become a 'mobile school', moving first to Vienna and now located in Switzerland. Rowland's teaching speciality, not surprisingly, is creative writing, and one of the students, seventeen-year-old Chris, is writing a novel which is proceeding at a tremendous rate. Rowland, meanwhile, has a complete writer's block and sits day after day in his office staring at a blank page. This is the central concern of the novel, and very entertaining it is. Rowland hates Chris and would like to drown him in the lake, especially when publishers and film-makers start to take an interest in him and his work. Chris meanwhile resents Rowland's interference, but at the same time is unable to work unless he is somewhere in Rowland's vicinity. Nina is fed up with Rowland and falls into an affair with an attractive local art dealer, while Rowland rather feebly pursues one of the French maids, who is also sleeping with Chris.
I found the novel really charming and often funny. Certainly it's not the best of Spark's work, but even slightly less wonderful Spark is still well worth reading.
The Driver's Seat is quite another kettle of fish. First published in 1970, it was advertised as a 'metaphysical shocker' and is sometimes described as a psychological thriller. Clearly, as you'll know if you are a regular visitor here, this was what attracted me to the novel, but believe me this is quite unlike any psychological thriller I've ever read before. Set somewhere in Northern Europe, perhaps Scandinavia, this novel concerns a young woman called Lise who, at the start, is buying clothes to take on a holiday to warmer southern climes (Italy?). She is trying on a dress which is patterned with green and purple squares on a white background, with blue spots within the green squares, cyclamen spots within the purple. Delighted with the colours she is all set to buy it until the salesgirl says 'And it doesn't stain'.
"Doesn't stain?" The customer has flung the dress aside.
The salesgirl shouts, as if to assist her explanation. "Specially treated fabric...If you spill, like, a drop of sherry you just wipe it off. Look, Miss, you're tearing the neck'.
"Do you think I spill things on my clothes?" the customer shrieks, "Do I look as if I don't eat properly?"
Clearly, Lise has severe psychological problems which become increasingly apparent as the story proceeds. But as the narrative is told from her point of view (and in the present tense) the reader is caught up in her bizarre logic and forced to some extent to go along with it. Her strange taste in clothes, which have to be violently brightly coloured, her sparse room with its interior straight out of, presumably, Ikea, her sudden bursts of anger, and her insistence that she is going on holiday to meet somebody, a gentleman, who she is sure she will recognise once she sees him -- all these and more add up to a very disturbing and disturbed young woman. What's more, Spark tells us at the beginning of Chapter Three that
She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is now travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.
If you are at all familiar with Spark's novels you will recognise this kind of time-shifting as a very common method of hers -- she uses it a lot, for instance, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Here of course it powerfully affects our reading of what follows. Who is going to perpetrate this act? Could it be macrobiotic Bill, who she meets on the plane, and who wants to sleep with her because his strict diet and lifestyle includes the requirement of one orgasm a day? Or will it be the businessman, also on the plane, who she feels sure is her gentleman but who moves seats quickly to get away from her? Or what about old Mrs Fiedke, who she drags around a department store, tormented all the time by the thought of never knowing exactly when or where he's going to turn up?
As you can probably tell, I really loved this novel. Yes it does contain violence and so some people (Simon for example) may not want to read it. But that is, I would argue, secondary to the brilliance of the characterisation of this extraordinary woman who, for all her borderline insanity, became for me strangely loveable. Highly recommended!
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What I'm Reading
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