This rather luscious image came courtesy of Dark Puss. It's by Auguste Toulmouche (1829-90), whose painting The Reluctant Bride I showed you last September. A painter of society women in domestic interiors, and emphasising the richness of their clothes, he's often referred to as romantic and sentimental. I don't care if he is -- I think this is lovely.
Just one of a series of wonderful paired images taken by photographer James Mollison as part of a project on human rights. Click here for more of these fascinating and moving photos of children and their bedrooms, which are taken from a book of the same title which sadly seems to be out of print at the moment.
If you've been keeping your eyes open lately you will probably have seen a number of enthusiastic reviews of this novel, and also lots of discussion about Linda Gillard's reasons for bringing it out as an e-book. You can read about this in Linda's own words on I Prefer Reading here, and there's been lots of interesting discussion about it all -- see this post on Cornflower, for example. I see today that the book has sold just short of 1000 copies in three weeks. That's an amazing number and really does tell us something about the power of the blogs, as I assume that's the chief reason for the sales.
I don't have a Kindle but I discovered that I could download Kindle software onto my laptop so I read the book that way. The software was free from Amazon and the book only cost £1.90 so it was a terrific bargain all round. And it was an entertaining read. Gwen Rowland manages to persuade her actor boyfriend Alfie to take her to his family home for Christmas. This means a lot to Gwen, who is an orphan without any family of her own. But Creake Hall, an Elizabethan manor in Norfolk, turns out to be a house of secrets and lies, and Gwen finds herself increasingly puzzled and upset by the confusing family relationships and by the fact that Alfie doesn't seem to be quite the person she thought he was. So, if you like dysfunctional Christmases, snowy gardens, peculiar mothers, gothic houses, mystery photos, a bit of quilting, attractive Polish gardeners who play the cello, or any combination of the above, get downloading!
I've never got the hang of Emily Dickinson's poems. Not a terribly serious matter, you might think, but as I spent over twenty years teaching Victorian women's literature it's always seemed like a rather yawning gap. So I was really pleased when Virago sent me this biography. Lyndall Gordon is an extremely distinguished biographer and this book has been hugely praised so I plunged in with great enthusiasm, hoping I'd finally crack the poetry as well as learning about the life of this most famous but elusive poet.
And did I? Well, yes and no. I've taken ages to read it, mainly because initially I found I could only read a little at a time. Probably if I'd been a bit more familiar with Emily and her poetry I might have got on a bit faster, but I wasn't, so I had to go rather slowly and pause and think and put it aside and come back to it. But I say initially, because I absolutely whizzed through the second half of the book in record time. If that sounds a bit curious, it was because really this is a book of two halves, as by page 227, a little over halfway through, Emily has died, aged just 55. The remaining pages -- there are 397 of them in total plus copious notes -- tell the story of what happened to her poems after her death, and an extraordinary story it is, involving sexual passion, jealousy, divided families, court cases, hidden documents and more besides.
I've never read any of the various versions of Emily's life by the numerous biographers who preceded Gordon, but I suspect that this one is quite radical in some of its suggestions. Suggestions they have to be because this is a life lived in seclusion, and many of the facts will probably never be known. So, though it's clear that Emily had severe health problems, Gordon is the first to suggest that she probably suffered from epilepsy, and she makes a pretty good case for this, and in doing so also clarifies some puzzling passages in the poetry. Emily also emerges as a woman of great passion, and though Gordon hasn't been able to confirm the identity of the man she wrote to, and about, as 'Master', she certainly clears away some of the mist that has surrounded this episode in the poet's life, as well as writing interestingly and sensitively about Emily's later relationship with Judge Lord.
Fascinating though all this is, for me the book became absolutely unputdownable once we got onto the machinations surrounding the editing and publication of Emily's poems after her death. Here we are plunged into the extraordinary story of Mabel Loomis Todd, a beautiful, intelligent, powerful and ruthless young woman, and her intense, passionate relationship with Emily's married brother Austin. Married to the serially adulterous David Todd (who occasionally participated as a 'witness' in the sexual shenannigans of the lovers), Mabel got hold of a large number of Emily's poems and spent many years transcribing them and getting them published. In between times, she attempted to cheat Emily's sister out of a plot of land, and prayed incessantly for the death of Austin's long-suffering wife Susan. She never got her wish, but she did succeed in blackening the name and reputation of Susan Dickinson, who had been Emily's greatest friend and her first and most sympathetic reader.
It's impossible to like Mabel, but equally impossible not to admire her tenacity and to be grateful for her lifetime's work on Emily's poems, even if she did change them and 'correct' Emily's punctuation. But her feud with the family lead to many fudgings of the biographical facts which are only now being fully revealed.
As for Emily's poetry -- I am still puzzled by some of it, but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel, and shall continue to read it in the hope that the penny finally drops.
Another of Hans Silvester's photos of the decorated people of the Suri and Mursi tribes who live by the Omo river in Ethiopia -- see the YouTube video I showed you last week.
No, I didn't read it in French -- maybe I should have tried, given my dislike of clunky French translations, but I once did attempt a Colette novel in French and was defeated by the convoluted sentences and unfamiliar vocabulary. In English of course it's called The Cat, and I read it at the request of another cat, though happily a human one -- Dark Puss, who I had coffee with a few days ago. The only Colette novel I have ever read is the one called in English Ripening Seed, which I reviewed on here a couple of years ago.
At around a hundred pages this is a pretty short novel, but not really one you'd want to whizz through. The writing, even in translation, is delicious, lucious, sensuous, and you feel like taking it slowly, or I did. Actually as I read the first chapter I wasn't sure if I was going to like it, but goodness did I get sucked in. This is the story of Alain, who, as the novel begins, is about to get married to his beautiful, much younger, fiancee Camille. Alain has always lived in his mother's lovely house in the Paris suburbs, and for the past several years has shared his lfe with his much loved Russian Blue cat Saha:
As soon as he turned out the light, the cat began to trample delicately on her friend's chest. Each time she pressed down her feet, one single claw pierced the silk of the pyjamas, catching the skin just enough for Alain to feel an uneasy pleasure.
"Seven more days, Saha", he sighed.
In seven days and seven nights he would begin a new life in new surroundings with an amorous and untamed young woman. He stroked the cat's fur, warm and cool at the same time and smelling of clipped box, thuya and lush grass. She was purring full-throatedly and, in the darkness, she gave him a cat's kiss, laying her damp nose for a second under Alain's nose between his nostrils and his lip. A swift, immaterial kiss which she rarely accorded him.
You can imagine that in the hands of a lesser writer this could all become a little dodgy and I was afraid it might, but it didn't. But this passage does give clues about how Alain's marriage may turn out. We already know that though he appreciates Camille's beauty, he's also critical of her and finds her slightly coarse (her family is less aristocratic than his) but here, if he is thinking of her with desire, it seems strongly mixed with what seems like apprehension. And, as the story progresses, Camille's "amorous and untamed" qualities become increasing apparent to her new husband -- he's shocked, the morning after the wedding, to wake up and see that she is walking around the room naked, and is soon finding ways of evading her sexual demands. He escapes as often as he can to his mother's house and garden, where he finds Saha is pining for him and refusing to eat. At last he takes her back to the flat where he and Camille are living while they wait for the "alterations" which will enable them to live in an extension at Alain's mother's. But Camille is intensely jealous of the cat, and her jealousy eventually leads her to a shocking act which will have huge repercussions on his already shaky marriage.
There's so much going on here, and it is so skilfully done that I'm almost at a loss to tell you about it all. The story is told from the point of view of Alain, with whom it is tempting to empathise. But at the same time we come to realise that there's something rather worryingly under-developed about a man who would rather be in his mother's garden with his cat than at home with his beautiful young wife. As for Camille, we see her only through her husband's increasingly critical eyes, but her youth and innocence are also apparent, and it's impossible not to sympathise with her as she gets more and more out of her depth in this strangely three-sided marriage.
So all in all, an excellent, subtle and beautifully written novel. The copy I read also contained a short story called Gigi, which some people will remember became a film in 1958. This is the story of a fifteen year old girl who is getting groomed to be a courtesan by her ancient granny and great aunt. Actually she manages to marry the man they are trying to set up her with, but it's a little disturbing. The film was very glamourous, and starred Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, who sang a decidedly dodgy song called "Thank Heaven for Little Girls":
One of the photos from the youtube video I posted yesterday. The photos are by the German photographer Hans Silvester, who spent 6 years visiting the remote area of Ethiopia where the Omo tribe lives. Here's what the Amazon blurb has to say about the book of these photos, of which this is the cover:
These nomadic people have no architecture or crafts with which to express their innate artistic sense. Instead, they use their bodies as canvases, painting their skin with pigments made from powdered volcanic rock and adorning themselves with materials obtained from the world around them—such as flowers, leaves, grasses, shells and animal horns. The adolescents of the tribes are especially adept at this art, and Silvester's superb photographs show many youths who, imbued with an exquisite sense of color and form, have painted their beautiful bodies with colorful dots, stripes and circles, and encased themselves in elaborate arrangements of vegetation and found objects. This art is endlessly inventive, magical and, above all, fun. In his brief text, Sylvester worries that as civilization encroaches on this largely unexplored region, these people will lose their delightful tradition.
A few years ago, in a fit of enthusiasm, I joined BookMooch, uploaded a lot of books, and created a long wishlist. I hardly ever use the site any more, but I accumulated a lot of credits so now and again when a wishlist book pops up I generally order it -- free books are good, after all, even if I no longer remember why I wanted them in the first place. I put this one on the list shortly after I'd read Charlotte Mendelson's second novel, Daughters of Jerusalem. I'd loved that novel though now I can't remember much about it apart from the fact that it concerns a dysfunctional academic family in north Oxford and that I'd found it funny and touching.
Anyway, this one was offered to me a week or so ago and I was curious to see if I'd like it as much. But I didn't.
This is the story of Anna, who leaves university and has no idea what to do with herself. Stuck in Bath with her controlling mother, her vague father and her druggy sister, she is bored and miserable. So when her glamorous aunt Stella offers her a room in her London flat, she jumps at it. Stella is living in Paris, so Anna has the place to herself, and she imagines she's going to have an exciting social life and a stimulating job. Instead, she finds loneliness, frustration and work as a humble bookshop assistant. Increasingly the absent Stella, who she hardly knows, becomes the centre of her universe. Mysteries surround her aunt, and Anna sets out to solve them. She meets Richard, Stella's sometime lover, pores over mysterious photos, tries on Stella's clothes, takes baths in her bathroom. And increasingly she finds herself getting more and more obsessed and confused...
It sounds OK, doesn't it. But, though I found it mildly funny at times, and though I could sympathise with Anna's loneliness, I thought the writing was terribly overwrought and I found the plot got less and less plausible as it went on. I suspect I might not have finished it if I hadn't been looking forward to it so much for such a long time. But I think I'm in a minority here, so if you like the sound of it, don't let me put you off.
The people of the Omo Tribe in Ethiopia use colours from the earth, flowers and plants, to make themselves into living art. These are the most glorious and moving photos.