Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Reading

Last week we had a painting of a woman reading painted by the Canadian artist Helen McNicholl(1879-1915) and here's another of hers, this time complete with a baby. She was only 35 when she died, but had become celebrated internationally.

Woman Reading

A photo for you today instead of a painting. Don't know who it's by but it shows the great American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937). She didn't start publishing novels till she was forty but became hugely successful. Have you read her? If not, please do!

Woman with Book

This one is by Robert James Gordon (1845-1932). He seems to have been English (though with that name probably Scottish) but I can't find a biography.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

This year is the 10th anniversary of the Wellcome  Book Prize,which celebrates the topics of health and medicine in literature. IN celebration of this important event, a blog tour is taking place with reviewers paying tribute to two books from each year of the prize. By chance I happened to have just read State of Wonder, shortlisted for 2011. So here's my review.

The protagonist of this wonderful novel is a 42-year-old research scientist by the name of Marina Singh - her name is a clue to her origins, as she was the child of an American mother and a long departed Sikh Indian father. She works for a large pharmaceutical company in Minnesota and is having a slightly lukewarm affair with her boss, Mr Fox. Her research partner, Anders Ekerman, has recently been sent to a remote part of Brazil to investigate the progress of a groundbreaking research project which the company hopes will soon be coming to fruition. The research is led by the formidable Dr Annik Swenson, who has made a remarkable discovery:

"She found a village of people in the Amazon, a tribe,” Anders had told Marina, “where the women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. . . . Their eggs aren’t aging, do you get that? The rest of the body goes along its path to destruction while the reproductive system stays daisy fresh. This is the end of I.V.F. No more expense, no more shots that don’t end up working, no more donor eggs and surrogates. This is ovum in perpetuity, menstruation everlasting. . . . Pretend for a moment that you are a clinical pharmacologist working for a major drug development firm. Imagine someone offering you the equivalent of ‘Lost Horizon’ for American ovaries.”

Anders has been gone for some weeks, and is expected back soon, but almost as soon as the novel begins, upsetting news arrives in the form of a letter from Dr Swenson: Anders has died of a fever. Marina is deeply shocked: There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.

Marina is given the unenviable job of informing Anders' wife of his death, an agonising task especially, perhaps, because the bereaved woman refuses to believe her husband has died and demands to know the full details. Marina is going to get the chance to find out, as her employers decide she is the person to go and complete Anders' investigations.  She unwillingly starts taking a malaria drug she remembers from her childhood visits to India and which gives her horrendous nightmares. Soon she is on a flight heading to Brazil, where the moment she arrives she is overwhelmed by the difference in the climate:

The outside air was heavy enough to be bitten and chewed. Never had Marina's lungs taken in so much oxygen, so much moisture. With every inhalation she felt she was introducing unseen particles of plant life into her body, tiny spores that bedded down in between her cilia and set about taking root. An insect flew against her ear, emitting a sound so piercing that her head snapped back as if struck ... They were not in the jungle, they were in a parking lot.

After a long period of uncertainty she manages to meet Dr Swenson who very unwillingly agrees to take her back to the research centre deep in the Amazonian jungle. The journey, in a primitive motor boat, accompanied by a profoundly deaf young tribal boy named Easter, a protégé of the doctor's, takes them past the dwelling place of a tribe thought to be cannibals and eventually deposits them in the heart of the jungle where the research centre is located. Dr Swenson is cold and unwelcoming - Marina has been dreading meeting her as the doctor was once her supervisor and the two had parted on difficult terms after a serious accident - however Swenson does not seem to recall this incident or indeed Marina herself. The secret of the substance that extends childbearing is soon revealed, and Marina wonders if she should participate - she is nearing the end of her own childbearing years. It's also proved to have a secondary effect as a inoculation against malaria. Meanwhile she is pulled more and more deeply into the dreamlike quality of life in the depths of the jungle, where the tribe is unexpectedly welcoming - the women spend many hours each day combing and plaiting each others hair, and happily include her in their hair-dressing rituals.She loses her suitcase with all her clothes in it and is forced to wear native dress. And Dr Swenson is extremely unwilling to divulge the details of Anders' death or the site of his burial.

This is a brilliant, magical novel. It has obvious echoes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and also touches of A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, but it also raises important questions about the role of large pharmaceutical companies on indigenous life. And at the centre of it all is Marina, facing her own big questions about her future, her childlessness and her career.

I've read two of Ann Patchett's novels before - Bel Canto in pre-blogging days and Commonwealth (reviewed here) and I'm longing to read more of this great novelist and am very pleased to have stumbled upon this one.

 

Man Reading

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Not just any old man - this is the novelist Emile Zola (1840-1902), painted in 1868 by Edouard Manet (1832-1883). Zola was just at the start of  his literary fame - his first major novel. Therese Racquin, had been published the previous year.

Reading but not Blogging

I've been lamentably silent since the before Christmas break apart from one review I'd scheduled for its publication date a few days ago. I've done a lot of reading since I went quiet so I thought I would do something I've seen on other blogs - 3 Ws. So here we go:

What I've Read 

Tombland as I'm sure you know is the latest of CJ Sansom's wonderful Shardlake series. This one is set largely in Norwich, a town I happen to know slightly. I listened to this as an audiobook, and the whole thing took 27 hours of listening, but I enjoyed every minute. If you've never read Shardlake you don't know what you've been missing. Impeccable history combined with an exciting and immersive plot. Brilliant.

I've been a long-time fan of Barbara Pym and thought I'd read all her novels but this one, A Unsuitable Attachment, had managed to pass me by. It was a lateish novel and took many years to find a publisher. I must admit that I thought it not quite up to the standard of her best, but still enough of her wit and charm to give me some happy hours of reading and several quiet giggles.

True to my love of classic crime I happened on a novel I don't think I'd read before. A Private View by Michael Innes, who is a great favourite of mine. He has his ups and downs - at his best he is brilliant, if you like thrillers with a literary subtext, but this one, though entertaining, is not top notch. However the period detail is great - set in artistic circles in London of the early 60s, with plenty of rather dodgy artists, dealers and junk shop owners. Fun.

Dramatic Exchanges is a collection of letters, cards and emails exchanged over the lifetime of London's National Theatre. Famous names abound here - whatever actors, playwrights, directors and other theatre practioners you admire are sure to be found in here. I've written a full review of this, which I enjoyed hugely - it should be popping up on Shiny before too long so I'll post a link on here.

What I'm Reading

Romantic Outlaws is a double biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. I'm reading it for a book group I'm in and it's rather a strange experience as a long time ago I wrote a book about Mary Wollstonecraft (now sadly only available on abebooks) and various articles about Mary Shelley. On the whole given the circumstances I'm quite enjoying it.

I'm a huge fan of Elly Griffiths Ruth Galloway novels but didn't take to the second series she launched, set in Brighton in the 50s. The Stranger Diaries is a standalone (so far anyway) and I'm quite enjoying it though it has a gothic theme running through it which I'd be just as happy without. I like the characters, including the chirpy British Asian detective Harbinder Kaur - I'd be happy if she appeared in another novel.

 

What I'll Read Next

I'm  about to  launch  myself at  Zelda  Fitzgerald's  only  novel,  Save Me the Waltz, in a lovely new edition from Handheld Books. Very much looking forward to it - watch this space.

Girl Writing

This is Homework by Charles Edward Wilson (1854-1951). 'His paintings capture the picturesque and romantic aspect of his subject and at the same time display an inspirational power' says one biography I found. He lived in the English Midlands.

Run You Down by Julia Dhal

It was only a few months ago that I read and hugely enjoyed Invisible City, Julia Dhal's 2014 debut novel featuring young newspaper reporter Rebekah Roberts, and here now is her second, newly reprinted by Faber. I was really happy to get my hands on this, as it promised not only a further exploration of the strict Jewish community Rebekah has ties to but also, hopefully, of her reunion with the mother who deserted her and her father when she was just a few months old.

Born and raised in Florida, Rebekah was the product of an unusual union, between Rob, a strictly Christian boy, and a girl, Aviva, brought up in a Hasidic Jewish community in New York. Still in their teens, the two had fallen deeply in love and, when Aviva discovered she was pregnant, they had fled to Florida planning to marry. But though Aviva was having grave doubts about the religion she had been raised in, she panicked at the prospect of living as a new mother in a firmly Christian community. So she ran away, leaving Rob to bring up their daughter, and has made no attempt to contact them for more than twenty years. However, at the end of the previous novel, Rebekah has heard that her mother is trying to get in touch, something which is filling her with a mixture of excitement and dread. She's deeply conflicted about meeting this woman, who deserted her so long ago.

In this second novel, Dhal solves the mystery of what Aviva has been doing since she left Florida - the novel is written in alternate chapters narrated by mother and daughter, though we don't know until nearly the end whether they are going to meet. Meanwhile Rebekah has been contacted by a young Hasidic Jewish man whose wife Pessie has died in mysterious circumstances. As in the previous case Rebekah wrote up, there has been no autopsy, and the girl's family say the cause of death was natural. But her husband refuses to believe this is true, and asks Rebekah to investigate and write something in her paper. The incident has taken place in a town a couple of hours north of NYC, so she borrows a car, persuades the paper to give her expenses. and sets off to see what she can discover.

One of the first things she finds out is that Pessie's best friend was a troubled young man called Sam Kagan, who she realises must be her mother's much younger brother, her own uncle in fact. Sam has had a hugely difficult life - he was abused as a child by a teacher at the strict Jewish school he attended, and his father refused to take action for fear of upsetting the community. As a teenager Sam has turned completely away from Judaism and the oppressive rules he has been raised under. He's realised he's gay and has fallen in love with a young man whose father is a prominent Far Right activist who has no idea of Sam's origins or that he and his son are in a relationship. All this leads to a hugely volatile situation, and it seems clear that these Neo-Nazis may have something to do with Pessie's suspicious death, though what the link could be is unclear.

The investigation takes Rebekah into the heart of two completely opposite communities, both upsetting for her in different ways. She learns a lot about the numerous people raised in Hasidic Judaism who have abandoned the belief system and who attempt to support each other in the difficult readjustment they have to make. And the reader learns even more because of course this is what has happened to Aviva, whose life story illuminates the problems of feeling no longer a part of the powerfully controlling world view in which you were raised.

Like the first in the series, this is a compelling and thought-provoking novel. Central, of course, is Rebekah, who has her own problems and is deeply conflicted about the mother who abandoned her. It's great the way Dhal manages to combine the emotionally tense finding your lost mother plot with an exploration of issues which are at least as relevant today as they were in 2014 when the book first appeared in the US. Hooray for Faber for bringing us this important update.