Penny Scribbles

Before I Die by Jenny Downham

2011-11-07T06:46:00.000-08:00

I came across this paperback in the Oxfam shop; the young girl serving me enthused, ‘this is a really good book’. I didn’t realise how good, even for someone middle-aged like me. For teenagers confronting it it must be very powerful, almost shocking.
Tessa is 16 and dying of leukaemia; her journey is narrated in the first person as she draws close to her estranged parents, younger brother, best friend, Zoey and the unlikely love of her life, Adam, the boy next door. The author said it took two and a half years to write, often writing 40,000 words and keeping 2,000. She says, ‘I had to get rid of all the cliches by writing through them’. I cried reading Tessa’s matter of fact letter, Instructions for Dad, detailing her funeral wishes. Although unbearably sad, the novel is a celebration of life, expressing the contentment of falling in love, however fleeting that may be. It reminded me of the poignant poem Raymond Carver wrote when he was dying of cancer: And did you get what you wanted?
It seems that, at whatever age it happens, our dying wishes are to spend the time that’s left with those we love most.
Tessa’s choice of poem for her funeral is equally poignant:
Don’t under any circumstances read that poem by Auden. It’s been done to death (ha, ha) and it’s too sad. Get someone to read Sonnet 12 by Shakespeare.

So here it is.

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Before I Die is an intensely moving, accomplished first novel for all ages.

A Good Year by Peter Mayle

2011-10-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

There is nowhere else in the world when you can keep busy doing so little and enjoying it so much.
A Good Year is an easy read about an Englishman inheriting a run-down house and vineyard in southern France. All the stock characters are there: a reluctant Englishman in the shadow of his eccentric late uncle, his wine-buff friend visiting from London, an elegant female notaire, a mysterious man tending the vines who knows more than he’s saying, a young American girl fresh from Napa Valley, an eccentric cleaner and a local love interest. Despite humorous twists and turns, all ends happily in a haphazard yet predictable way but it is lightweight and fun and Max has some good chat-up lines along the way. Peter Mayle writes with authority on la belle vie and I enjoyed it as much as his collection of essays: Bon Appetit!
Just back from Bordeaux, I savoured his descriptions of the city:
He was particularly taken by the elegance and human scale of the eighteenth-century buildings… He admired the architectural set pieces – the Place de la Bourse, the Esplanade des Quinconces, the Grand Theatre, the fountains and statues – and he delighted in the tranquil surface of the broad, slow-flowing Garonne.
The film, although beautifully shot around sunny vineyards in the loveliest of settings, is really disappointing in comparison. The novel is much more entertaining.

One Day by David Nicholls

2011-08-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

One Day is a very readable modern novel spanning twenty years of an on-off relationship between two kindred spirits, albeit opposites, who met at university in Edinburgh on graduation day. We witness their lives spiralling both up and down, portrayed movingly in a recent film adaptation starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess.
I’m interested that David Nicholls was inspired by Hardy’s novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Emma and Dexter are a contemporary Tess and Angel Clare: soul mates, though poles apart in background and experience. I find myself thinking what if Angel had pursued Tess on meeting her by chance at that summer evening dance; their happiness would not have been so fleeting nor ended so tragically. And so it is with Emma and Dexter, but that is the stuff of which novels are made and why we love reading them. There are parallels: Dexter’s unsent letter from India (cut from the film) reminds me of Tess’s unread letter, pushed under Angel’s door the night before their wedding. Angel’s middle-class family and comfortable background mirror Dexter’s privileged upbringing. Both heroines are strong, yet fated by circumstance.
I loved reading their witty conversations and letters, made all the more poignant by the hands fate deals them, as it does all of us as we grow older in the game we glibly call life.

You’re gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.

The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons

2011-08-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

I read this novel recently following some sad news and it has been an easy comforting read. It is not a clever academic novel; much of it is predictable but it is carefully written and well researched. I found myself caring about the characters and what was to become of them as I quickly turned over the pages, travelling with the heroine, Elise, from Vienna to a country house in Dorset, shortly before outbreak of the Second World War.
There is a dream-like quality that embraces both emptiness and possibility as loss is explored in all its fullness.
Somewhere a clock ticks backwards and midnight is un-struck. Juliana plays and plays and it is every time at once. Burt is fishing in The Lugger on the Danube at dawn, and Mrs. Ellsworth and Hidegard bake a game pie together in the small kitchen of our old apartment.

Perhaps nothing is really lost; memories endure for those left behind. The accompanying Concerto in D minor for Viola, composed by Jeff Rona, expresses that beautifully in addition to these lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, 1590.
Nor is the earthe the lesse, or loseth aught.
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought...
For there is nothing lost , but may be found if sought...

All that remained were the stone steps leading down to the lawns. The lawns themselves had reverted to meadow grass and weeds tore through the lavender and thyme borders. Then the sun slunk out from behind a cloud, casting a watery light across the valley and catching a treasure-hoard of golden daffodils and the red flash of a kite’s wing. The song of a Dorset warbler punctured the stillness, and in a shaft of pale sun I glimpsed clusters of buttery primrose speckling the path leading to Flower’s Barrow.

The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse

2011-08-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

Pitiful old Winter has returned,
Limping up and down our roads,
Spreading his white blanket of snow
While the Cers wind cries in the
branches of the pine trees.
Traditional Occitan song

It is 1933. A young man walks into a deserted book shop in a quiet town near the Pyrenees. His quest: to ask the owner to translate a medieval letter written on parchment in the old Occitan language.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ he asks.

And so the story unravels… The solitary young man is mourning the loss of his older brother, missing, presumed dead in the Great War. Alone in his grief, he crashes his car in a snowstorm and seeks refuge for the night in a nearby town. He is invited to the local fete but takes a wrong turning… What follows is both possible and implausible: a masterly ghost story that weaves itself around the reader, drawing him in closer…
Freddie and Fabrissa take comfort in finding each other, across the centuries, worlds apart. A healing takes place; it is enough that their loss is recognised, their loved ones ‘known unto God’.
The next day I reread the account of their initial meeting to find out what really occurred. Had I imagined it? It seemed as clear to me as it was in Freddie’s memory. Or was it? And there I let it rest.

A sad tale’s best for winter: a moving story exploring love and loss. I shall look forward to reading it again in December.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

2011-05-18T06:32:00.000-07:00

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge…was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
I studied this short novel years ago; my paperback is yellow and falling apart. I had the urge to read it again after walking through Westminster and up Bond Street in the early summer sunshine. It takes place on one day in June, a device other writers have since borrowed, but being Virginia Woolf, her ‘stream of consciousness’ frequently breaks through so we are taken back in time to Clarissa Dalloway’s early love, Peter Walsh, at a country house party years before. He is back in London from India and accepts her invitation to attend a party at her Westminster town house that very evening. There is a dark side to the story that tempers Clarissa’s privileged life style: a young man, distressed from serving in the Great War, takes his life; she is deeply disturbed by it. And all in one day.
A masterful, mature story, first published in 1925: a novel to savour and re-read time and again.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. But age had brushed her; even as as mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves.

What is this ecstasy? He thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

2011-02-21T06:23:00.000-08:00

My late aunt was a solitary Miss Havisham-type figure; as the light faded on a winter’s afternoon she would sit in her armchair with her feet up re-reading Great Expectations.
This is probably my favourite Dickens novel. Although I grew to love Bleak House later on in life, Great Expectations was with me from childhood, immortalised in a black and white BBC serial on Sunday afternoons. I loved the opening scene in the graveyard, the pie missing from the larder and Pip playing cards with Estella, who calls him ‘a common, labouring boy’ under Miss Havisham’s haughty gaze. The novel stretches out far into the future, from 1812 to 1841, as Pip goes to London in anticipation of fulfilling ‘great expectations’ before returning to his roots, having grown mature and wiser through his misfortunes.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river…the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates…

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me…

She was dressed in rich materials – satins, lace and silks – all of white… But I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre long ago…Once I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out if I could.
Dickens completed the novel in 1860 and was persuaded to rewrite the ending, reuniting Pip and Estella in the ruins of Satis House:
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of that ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
I am going to sit in an armchair and read for an hour in the failing light this cold February afternoon. I owe it to my late aunt and myself to find the time to re-read Great Expectations.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

2011-02-14T03:43:00.000-08:00

The perfect novel for Valentine’s Day. I first read this novel when I was 14; Celia Bannerman was Elizabeth Bennet and Vivian Pickles her overbearing mother in a black and white BBC adaptation. Every time I watch another adaptation, and there have been several, I go back to the novel; there is so much to re-read and savour. ‘The course of true love’ never did run smoothly but all ends happily. Mr. Darcy is redeemed as a true hero and gentleman; Elizabeth has found true happiness at last. This story is so well constructed, so satisfying in its conclusion that most contemporary romantic fiction pales into insignificance.
They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.
I love the way Jane Austen constructs happy endings; all her heroines eventually find true love to last them a lifetime, like Emma and Mr. Knightley ‘in the perfect happiness of the union’. And that is how it should be, especially on Valentine’s Day. Life is too short and much too complicated to settle for less.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

2011-01-28T02:41:00.000-08:00

Waterstone’s windows in Piccadilly may be full of romantic books for Valentine’s Day but I am re-reading a novel so deep, so dark it takes my breath away. Published a year before her death in 1848, her sister Charlotte called it ‘moorish, wild and knotty as the heath’, ‘hewn in a world workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials’, ‘from no model but the vision of his (her) meditations’. ‘With time and labour the crag took human shape and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half-statue, half rock; in the former sense, terrible and and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.’
Emily Bronte died aged thirty; I recall seeing her poems in tiny spidery handwriting in the British Library and visiting the parsonage in Haworth years ago with its chaise-longue, covered in torn black leather, where she lay dying from consumption. What a masterpiece she achieved in such a brief life.
Two scenes from the novel have stayed with me over the years, as if I had read only them yesterday.
The first is when Cathy confides to their housekeeper, Nelly Dean, that she may marry Edgar Linton. Unbeknown to them, Heathcliff is listening at the door, but steals away before Cathy reveals her love for him.
‘I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.’
‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how much I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’

Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights to return a rich man but is only reconciled with Cathy, now married and living at Thrushcross Grange, as she lies dying.
How they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive.
'You teach me how cruel you’ve been – cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort – you deserve this…'
At the end of the novel the narrator encounters a young boy who has seen Heathcliff and a woman on the heath.
Wuthering Heights will be shut up ‘for the use of ghosts as choose to inhabit it’, the narrator says.
‘They are afraid of nothing. Together they would brave satan and all his legions.’
Or would they?
I sought and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor – the middle one, grey, and half buried in heath – Edgar Linton’s only harmonised by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot – and Heathcliff’s still bare.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

Selected Poems by Laurie Lee

2011-01-26T12:14:00.000-08:00

I've loved reading Laurie Lee for over forty years. I was standing on a crowded tube train recently, sifting through this selection in preparation for our poetry group. Each month we prepare poems on a different theme; next Thursday we read poems on 'Night'. I found a wonderful selection and have short-listed Night Speech, Town Owl, Sunken Evening, Twelfth Night and Christmas Landscape as some of my favourites.
Field of Autumn, the one I love best from this anthology, is sublime and reading it again makes me love it more.
This slim volume, reprinted in 1983, is compiled from three separate volumes. The poet wrote movingly, 'They were written by someone I once was and who is so distant to me now that I scarcely recognise him anymore. They speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me, but for which I still have close affection and friendship.' Laurie Lee died in 1997 but his work lives on.

Out of the Blue by Simon Armitage

2011-01-26T12:09:00.000-08:00

Written in memory of three separate conflicts: 9/11, VE Day following the end of war in Europe, and civil war in Cambodia, these poems are compelling reading: lean, strong, masterful.
I watched Out of the Blue, broadcast on Channel 5 to commemorate events five years before. It follows an English trader working in the World Trade Centre on the day of the terrorist attacks. I hope it is repeated later this year, when another five years will have passed. I visited Ground Zero in 2003 and a few years ago, across the river from Manhattan, observed the New York skyline without the twin towers we remembered from years before; re-reading this poem brings it all back. And so it should.
All lost.
Now all coming back.

We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing recalls VE Day, sixty years on. A work colleague once recalled feeling depressed when the War was over and going to her GP to be told that ‘the surgery’s full of people like you’. Simon Armitage explores the aftermath of war in this powerful poem.
Cambodia is close to my heart ever since our trip there eight years ago. I fell in love with this tragic beautiful land, ruined, wrecked but not totally ground into oblivion. I still weep for Cambodia, for those hacked to death during Pol Pot’s reign of terror and those still living through nightmares of the past as they scrabble in the dust, trying to survive. Armitage’s poem was commissioned for BBC Radio thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

2011-01-09T05:40:00.000-08:00

Do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me?
When Graham Greene died in 1991 Kinsley Amis called him ‘until today, our greatest living novelist’. Having re-read The End of the Affair I am inclined to agree. Published in 1951, it still reads well, evoking a war-time love affair that began in London during the Blitz. It is the perfect novel to read on dark January days and cold winter nights.
A memorable passage recalls Bendrix going to the cinema with Sarah to watch a film adapted from one of his novels.
At first I had said to her, ‘That’s not what I wrote you know,’ but couldn’t keep on saying that. Suddenly and unexpectedly, for a few minutes only, the film came to life. I forgot that this was my story, and that for one this was my dialogue and was genuinely moved by a small scene in a cheap restaurant.
For a few seconds I was happy – this was writing: I wasn’t interested in anything else in the world. I wanted to go home and read the scene over: I wanted to work at something new…
His obsession with his lost love draws him to find out the truth. Bendrix hires a private detective to find out what really happened to end his love affair with Sarah Miles two years ago.

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

2011-01-08T06:44:00.000-08:00

Back from a weekend in Geneva I decided to re-read this short novel and Booker prize winner, published in 1984.
A solitary writer takes time out staying at a hotel on Lake Geneva one late September, reflecting on past events and observing others staying at the hotel. This is Anita Brookner’s writing at its best: restrained, elegant, enigmatic.
Dressed for dinner in her Liberty silk smock, her long narrow feet tamed into plain kid pumps, Edith sought for ways of delaying the moment at which she would be forced to descend into the dining room and take her first meal in public. She even wrote a few paragraphs of 'Beneath the Visiting Moon', then on re-reading them, realised that she had used the same device in 'The Stone and the Star', and crossed them out.
She recalls a conversation with her agent discussing the changing romantic market, saying that women still prefer ‘the old myths’. ‘They want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought that all was lost, by a man who has battled across continents, abandoning whatever he may have had in his in-tray, to reclaim them. Ah! If only it were true…’
‘Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero… this is a lie, of course. In real life it is the hare who wins. Every time.’
‘In life, I mean. Never in fiction. At least not in my kind of fiction.’
Edith’s solitary existence is upset by the presence of Mr. Neville and she is forced to consider her future.
One rainy day, when I have time to spare, I will gather up all my second-hand copies of Anita Brookner’s novels and work my way through them, slowly, methodically teasing out her detailed descriptions of characters and places. I am in no rush; it is a project I am content to savour.

The Christmas Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini

2010-12-04T11:10:00.000-08:00

I bought this paperback at Boston airport a couple of years back and it is a very cosy sentimental Christmas read...
Sylvia Bergstrom, a quilter, single and in her 70s, of German descent, has moved back into the old family home of Elm Creek Manor, now that her estranged sister has died. A young friend helps her find decorations in the attic on Christmas Eve and discovers an unfinished Christmas quilt that stirs up memories of times past.

She had never forgotten the Christmas Quilt, nor had she expected to see it again. From what she could see of the folded bundle of patchwork and applique, not a single stitch had been added since she last worked upon it. And yet every intricate Feathered Star block, every graceful appliqued cluster of holly leaves and berries had been tucked away as neatly as if a conscientious quiltmaker had had every intention of completing her masterpiece. Even the scraps of fabric had been sorted according to colour – greens here, reds there, golds and creams in their own separate piles. The Christmas Quilt had been abandoned, but it had not been discarded.

Tonight in the last few hours of Christmas Day, Sylvia intended to work on the Christmas Quilt, to complete a task too long neglected. In her home full of memories, she felt the presence of all those whom she loved, blessing her and wishing her well. At last she understood the true lesson of the Christmas Quilt, that a family was an act of creation, the piecing together of disparate fragments into one cloth – often harmonious, occasionally clashing and discordant, but sometimes unexpectedly beautiful and strong. Without contrast there was no pattern and each piece, whether finest silk or faded cotton, would endure if sewn fast to the others with strong seams – bonds of love and loyalty, tradition and faith.

The Mysteries of Glass by Sue Gee

2010-12-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

I like all Sue Gee's novels but this is my favourite, just right for a wintry evening and frost at midnight.
It is 1860 and Richard Allen takes up his post in a remote country parish in Herefordshire. An amiable, devout young man and son of a clergyman, he finds parish life claustrophobic until he falls in love with an unhappily married woman who returns his love. Dramatic consequences follow; Victorian society is scandalised but true love knows no shame. Richard and Susannah are good people who deserve to find happiness in this fleeting world despite the hypocrisy surrounding them.
Gee's descriptions of the countryside are exquisite, like extracts from Kilvert's diary of the same period.
The lantern swung before them, shining on frozen ruts of earth, on bank and frosty hedgerow.

In the morning the window was thick with frost. Downstairs there was ice on every pane and the shutters in the snug cloaked a passage of freezing air. The world was yet in darkness: for a moment he felt like a ghost, returned to an unlit empty house, with no one to hear his voice or have any sense of his presence here at all.

Palm Sunday, 1861. The woods filled with paper-white anemones; catkins swaying over the stream; the birds a concert hall. The lambs and the ewes cried for one another long after dark, and Richard was woken by them long before the dawn.

And so, as the firelight played upon them, they went on gazing at each other's eyes, searching, finding, while outside the cold April wind stirred the trees, and across the darkening highway the house behind the laurels now was silent.

The Caves of Perigord by Martin Walker

2010-11-19T06:57:00.000-08:00

They looked at it together in silence, feeling the strength and nobility of a long-dead beast, and wondering about the mind and eyes and hands that had crafted it into something more potent than life. In ennobling the bull, the artist had somehow ennobled the early men who had hunted it.
I stumbled on this title by chance and ordered it second-hand from Amazon. This is a really gripping novel that moves seamlessly through three time zones, each one enriching the others as the story unfolds. A fragment of a stone painting, 17,000 years old, surfaces at a London auction house, kept secret by a British officer serving in France during the Second World War. What happened fifty years ago in occupied France in the Caves of Perigord is about to be revealed.
Each character is well drawn: Malrand, Horst and Chlothilde, for example, and there are light touches in the blossoming romance between Manners and Lydia in contrast to much darker, sombre episodes portrayed during the history of the Resistance.
The undiscovered cave paintings near Lascaux have the last word: portraits of the first children of Perigord, our ancestors, whoever they were, as observed poignantly by an ageing Malrand, for perhaps his last time.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

2010-11-12T03:54:00.000-08:00

I read this novel when it won the Booker Prize in 1987 and now it has surfaced again at the local library book club I’m reading it again. Like most novels I admire, it is short by today’s standards (208 pages) and beautifully written.
She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content.
The structure is masterful. Claudia, a successful and popular historian, is dying. From her hospital bed visitors come and go; fragments of streams of consciousness criss-cross back and forth: scenes from childhood, adolescence, all that has been and might have been had history not got in the way. Her lover Tom’s journal, sent to her after his death, is particularly poignant, even more so given that a dying woman, the woman he loved so fleetingly, would want to read it one last time.
I did not particularly care for Claudia but her relationship with Tom made her seem warmer somehow and perhaps excused her behaviour there after, having lost the love of her life.
Penelope Lively writes exquisitely about the every day, in contemporary London as in war-torn Egypt.
It is a grey winter afternoon, glittering with car lights, street lights, gold, red, emerald, the black rainy pavements gleaming, the shop windows glowing Wagnerian caves. He talks of events that have not yet come about and sees light and texture, the kaleidoscope of fruit outside a greengrocer, the mist of rain on a girl's cheek.

I saw the cluttered intense life of the fields and villages – and I saw the stark textural immensity of the desert, the sand carved by the wind, the glittering mirages, It has the delicacy of a water-colour – all soft grey-greens and pale blues and fawns and bright browns. I saw it through him and with him. Now, he and that place are one, fused in the head to a single presence of his voice and his touch, those sights and those smells.

My late father spent the war years in the Middle East and I find myself thinking of him and his time spent there. One day I too will visit Egypt and take a trip down the River Nile.

The Maid’s Request by Michele Desbordes

2010-11-09T06:58:00.000-08:00

He took the pen and trimmed it, tried it out on a corner of the page; sitting on the terrace he wrote in notebooks, drew, annotated drawings, went on doing what he had always done, he had always written in notebooks; in the evening he lined them up in a cupboard in his room, twenty-five small books and two bigger books and sixteen even bigger than that, six books bound in vellum, another covered in green chamois leather…

Beautifully written and translated from the French title, La Demande, this short novel tracks an elderly Italian painter’s journey across the Alps to a commission in the Loire Valley. Although unspoken, this is a fictitious story of Leonardo da Vinci and his close friendship with a French maid who cares for him. As they approach the twilight of their lives their proximity allows her to make an unusual request…

When he leaves a notebook in his bedroom or his studio, he asks her to go and get it. She rises to her feet and hurries, brings it back at arm’s length like the priest at the offertory handing the host to the faithful. In the corner of a page he adds an angel, curly hair, pale eyes.

In Italy they had talked about the angel, about the delicacy of the bruised and budding flower, the hollow of the shadow on the cheek, that sense of heat, of burning skin, emotion, pleasure; how one could tell, sometimes everything had been so magnificent.

The Maid’s Request is a slow, lingering tale to be read on a winter’s night, savouring one beautiful description after another.

The Madonna of the Almonds by Marina Fiorato

2010-11-09T06:48:00.000-08:00

I read a lot of historical fiction as a teenager: Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton et al and have read little since. But this is one I would go back to again and again.
Simonetta di Saronno has lost her husband at the Battle of Pavia in 1525 and subsequently falls in love with the young artist who paints her likeness for a fresco in the local church. Her fortune gone, she concocts a liqueur from the juice of almonds in memory of her new love…
Only then, when she let the remembrance of him help her, when she combined the bitter and the sweet, the very essence of their entire encounter, did she know she was done. She drank deeply of the finished draught, while she wrote rapidly with her quill the exact proportions and ingredients she had used. Her head nodded over her ink black fingers and as her brow touched the creamy pages of the ledger she thought of sharing a cup with him, laughing, somewhere where the sun warmed their skin as they drank in a way she knew could never be.
An intriguing, surprising yet satisfying read as characters’ lives criss-cross and take their own paths to an unimagined future.
This Christmas I will hunt down a bottle of Amaretto di Saronne, known as Disaronno Originale, and, one day, treat myself to a bottle of the limited edition perfume made by Floris in celebration of this stunning novel.

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

2010-11-08T07:18:00.000-08:00

Every year I use a hardback desk diary for planning and recording writing projects. Instead of buying a brand new one for next year I found an unused one that would be suitable with quotations from Frances Mayes’s book and beautiful accompanying photographs of sun-drenched Italy. A couple of days later my husband was home late from a fishing trip so I watched a film I hadn’t seen before based on that bestselling memoir of la dolce vita. And now I’ve read the book again. It’s an inspirational account of a divorced writer from San Francisco buying an old villa called Bramasole near Cortona and finding a new life there, abundant with pleasures associated with living in Italy.
Frances Mayes writes beautifully; no wonder her book was made into a film.

When I first saw Bramasole, I immediately wanted to hang my summer clothes in an armadio and arrange my books under one of those windows looking out over the valley.

At nine, a slab of sunlight falls into my study from the side window, my favourite window in the house for its framed view over the cypresses, the groves in the valley, and out into the Apennines.

When it rains or when the light changes, the façade of the house turns gold, sienna, ochre; a previous scarlet paint job seeps through in rosy spots like a box of crayons left to melt in the sun.
Poppies have lingered and the fragrance of spiky yellow broom is intense.

I like cut flowers in the house every day. We both love the currents of scents swimming through the garden and how they rise to the house early in the morning.

Magic. I simply fell in love – like you fall in love with a person – and schemed to find a way to stay there.

It is late afternoon, just after a thunderstorm, when the light turns that luminous gold I wish I could bottle and keep.

The Tuscan sun has warmed me to the marrow.

I think this will all keep me going very nicely and keep me writing in the new year ahead.

Memory Maps by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

2010-11-05T08:05:00.000-07:00

I am a wanderer: one with a hoarder’s love of houses and things… I am tracing here a memory map of all the places that have stayed with me and, since this is also a map of all the voyages of discovery, this is also the story of getting to those places.
I have followed this writer’s exotic life over the years through magazine and newspaper articles and, of course, her books, both fact and fiction. She is perhaps one of few writers left I would like to hear talk about her work.
Memory Maps trawls through a lifetime of travel and living abroad including South America, Venice, Umbria, the Caribbean and finally Montmartre. She writes beautifully, wistfully about leaving Venice and then the Villa Quarata in the Umbrian village of Morra. It was not meant to end in tears:
‘I thought I would live and die here, and yet, per forza, as they say in Italian, I am moving on.’
Having read A Valley in Italy, an inspiring memoir of renovating a ‘half-ruined palace in the woods’ I too felt devastated when she was forced to sell the home she loved.
Lisa St. Aubin de Teran writes movingly of failed marriages and crushed dreams but her spirit is intact:
‘Sorting out the maps and memories has been the large stage of clearing my decks.
I find as Anne Frank did before me, that, 'In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart'. Sometimes that goodness is buried so deep it takes a shovel to unearth it.
I used to think I was different. Now I feel I am not so different from anyone else: the time and the places have been different, that is all.’

A Chance to Sit Down by Meredith Daneman

2010-11-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

Just back from the Diaghhilev exhibition at the V and A and realised how much I loved ballet. I must have seen most ballets over the years and remembered Nureyev performing Nijinsky's roles: Spectre de la Rose, Petrouchka, L'Apres-midi d'un Faun. A favourite ballet was Ashton's A Month in the Country and anything choreographed by Kenneth Macmillan.
I love A Chance to Sit Down (1971) and have reread it many times. It allows the reader to go backstage and experience the blood, sweat and tears involved in being a professional dancer, seen through the eyes of Barbara who rebels against the restrictive discipline imposed. George, the set designer whom she marries is as lovely as Jack, her temperamental ex-lover and rising star of the company, is hateful. This novel was recommended to me years ago by a friend who had been a ballet dancer and it was spot on.
Curtain Fall by Jean Ure (1978) is equally poignant. A ballet dancer returns to England and meets her ex-lover and stage partner now suffering from MS. He wants to have nothing to do with her but when she refuses to be cast aside he lets her back into his life again. I especially love the scene when they go to the cinema, heavily disguised, to watch a film in which they were both starring at the peak of their careers. A wonderfully heart-breaking romantic story - the one paperback I would save from a fire to keep rereading!
Both these novels are probably out of print by now but are still available second-hand from Amazon.

Consequences by Penelope Lively

2010-09-15T03:40:00.000-07:00

I love all Penelope Lively’s writing but this is my favourite. She has beautifully constructed a story spanning three generations from 1935 to the present day. The lives of Lorna, her daughter Molly and granddaughter Ruth are woven together seamlessly, making it a very satisfying read. Ruth’s visit to the Somerset cottage where Lorna and Matt spent their fleeting time together brings the novel full-circle. The fresco Matt painted as an impoverished artist for Lorna has been recently uncovered: a testament to their blissful marriage before War intervened to part them.
The walls. Dancing figures. Pink. Nude, but discreetly so. Male and female. Who hold out their arms to one another, link arms, swirl around the walls of the room.

Why is Penelope Lively one of my favourite novelists?
She writes thoughtfully, beautifully, sparingly.

She turns and there is the postman, so she smiles, and waves.
But the postman is neither smiling nor waving. He has a new look on his face she does not recognise.

But I realise it is her characters I like, time and again. They are kind, sensitive and honourable and that is what draws me back each time.

My House in Umbria by William Trevor

2010-09-14T06:40:00.000-07:00

This short novel is one of two contained in the volume: Two Lives. My husband and I love William Trevor’s stories although they are unbearably sad. I once lent a neighbour a video of an adaptation of his novel Fools of Fortune and she was shocked by how heart-wrenching it was. How could we bear to watch it? It is one of my favourite films.
My House in Umbria was made into a film too starring Maggie Smith – the settings were exquisite but the ending spoilt by being much more cheerful than was portrayed in the novel.
Elizabeth Delahunty is flawed from childhood. This encourages her to write romantic fiction:
I fear abandonment and have instictively avoided it as a fictional subject. The girls of my romances were never left by lovers who took from them what they would. Mothers did not turn their backs on little children. Wives did not pitifully plead or in bitterness cuckold their husbands. The sombre side of things did not appeal to me; in my works I dealt with happiness ever after.
And so she lives in a beautiful house in Umbria, wears lovely clothes and stays in elegant hotels until one day she is seated on a train to Milan. A bomb explodes in her carriage and, on leaving hospital, invites a few others from Carrozza 219 to recuperate and stay at her villa. Her imagination as a romantic novelist knows no bounds as their lives become woven together through circumstance. And so she tells her story.
William Trevor writes beautifully, compelling that story to heard.
Except to write about that summer I have never since sat down at my black Olympia, and never shall again. I haven’t learned much, only that love is different among survivors.

The Small Hand by Susan Hill

2010-09-14T04:17:00.000-07:00

This book is ‘hot off the press’, unlike a lot books I enjoy reading and re-reading.
I admire Susan Hill’s ability to tell a story clearly and succinctly in 167 pages. So many new books are far too long and much less satisfying to read. A good short novel can be read, again and again, savouring descriptions of people and places. I always enjoy her books and this one is very special.
Susan Hill has a particular forte for writing ghost stories such as this one. I’m going to recommend it to friends so we can discuss it further – the strange meeting between Adam Snow and the old woman at the White House, the photograph albums and the tended garden is masterful in making the reader wonder what is really going on there… In fact I need to read it again, slowly, carefully a second time. But not yet, because I’m too scared!
It will make an excellent audio book as long as one is not listening while driving along country lanes in Sussex or the remote mountains of the Vercors!

Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther

2010-08-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

Having taken our young grandson on a trip to the Cabinet War Rooms in Westminster today I am in the mood to re-read something about the Second World War. This book is the obvious choice: a cosy comfortable read I turn to time and again.
Originally written for a column in The Times, then published as a book in October 1939, just after the outbreak of war, these essays reflect the author’s positive enthusiasm for life seen through the eyes of a Chelsea wife and mother determined to ‘keep calm and carry on’ in unsettled times.
I’ve always loved the first essay: Mrs. Miniver Comes Home best: turning the key in the familiar latch, arranging flowers in a vase, settling down to tea and library books in the drawing room.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed, very softly and precisely, five times. A tug hooted from the river. A sudden breeze brought the sharp tang of a bonfire in at the window.
And Mrs. Miniver, with a little sigh of contentment, rang for tea.
Weekends are spent at Starlings, their house in the country; Mrs. Miniver buys fireworks, goes Christmas shopping and treats herself to a green lizard engagement diary. They queue for gas masks at the Town Hall and life goes on. As indeed it must.
One is what one remembers: no more, no less.
Caroline Miniver comes into her own in four letters written to a friend , published in The Times in the autumn of 1939:
She observes people carrying gas masks with panache. You might think, walking around London, everybody was going off to a picnic with a box of special food.
Another noticeable thing is the way people are taking advantage of the wide sandbag ledges to sit comfortably in the sun and eat their lunch.
She describes the war-time concert at the National Gallery:
Everything she played seemed to have a double loveliness, as though she had managed to distil into it all the beauty of the pictures that were missing from the walls. It was quite unforgettable.
She recalls a quotation from a friend 'when it looked as if we were going to get no plays, films, pictures, music at all'. "We must live on stored beauty like a squirrel on nuts."
Mrs Miniver is an inspiration to us all.

The Beach Hut by Veronica Henry

2010-08-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

He passed along the line of huts, head down. Some people were still outside, enjoying the night air, smoking the last cigarette of the day. Others were inside, and he could see their shadowy figures through the glass, eating, drinking wine, reading a novel, playing cards.
Our older daughter and her family have a beach hut on the Essex coast so I couldn’t resist dipping into this book to capture those memories of sandcastles, wind breaks, grandchildren body-boarding in wet-suits, going crabbing, brewing tea in the hut and sitting outside, just like my grandparents did in a sepia photograph taken in the 1930s along the same beach.
The Beach Hut is a compilation of fourteen short stories, some of them skilfully interwoven, about the lives of those spending their summers on the north Devon coast.
Veronica Henry writes: 'It was a writer’s dream watching the dramas unfold behind the weather-beaten walls – the only problem was going to be where to stop…'
At first I found the stories too ‘full-on’: the bored young girl typing for a selfish novelist who seduces her, a married woman embarking on an affair, an alcoholic coming to terms with the past. But I persevered and other stories about a single parent and her handicapped son and a widow scattering her husband’s ashes seemed all the more poignant.
I liked the structure of the book – each story is given the title of the possible name of a hut – but I can’t say ‘I wished I was there’. Apart from Roy and Harry, I didn’t really care enough for any of the other characters to wonder what might happen to them once summer faded.

September by Rosamunde Pilcher

2010-08-11T07:56:00.000-07:00

Just home from my seventh holiday in Scotland and I want to recapture everything I love about the place: long winding roads alongside abandoned lochs, sombre glens, isolated cottages, bracken and Rose Bay Willow Herb, deserted beaches, pewter skies and fly fishing. Country houses with stags’ heads, tartan cushions and log fires, renovated castles, malt whisky and smoked salmon. And so I turn to Scott and Burns or rather, Rosamunde Pilcher’s Wild Mountain Thyme or September to evoke a splash of Tweed perfume once more.
September starts in May, as summer comes at last to Scotland. A September dance is planned in the Highlands as family and friends converge in Scotland. Old relationships are rekindled and the lovely, troubled Pandora returns to her childhood home for the first and last time.
September was passing, and soon the winter gales would begin. She made her way to the foot of the garden, to stand by the gap in the hedge, looking out to the south, over the incomparable view. The glen, the river, the distant hills: sunless today, sombre but beautiful.

As It Was and World Without End by Helen Thomas

2010-07-30T08:32:00.000-07:00

Thirty-seven years ago I wrote a student dissertation on the War Poet, Edward Thomas and these books penned by his widow, not originally written for publication, were obligatory reading. They tell a poignant, heart-rending story of lives caught up in uncertainty and poverty under the shadow of the Great War. It is a world away from the comparative wealth we take for granted in the 21st century: a slow existence punctuated by changing seasons and observing nature in the midst of the daily round.
I particularly love the description of the room in a gamekeeper’s thatched cottage in which the young couple stayed: a small room almost filled by the four-poster… The tiny window was draped with dimity curtains, and the window was kept open by a large dried sunflower head.
Their last night together at the cottage at High Beech before the poet soldier leaves for the Front is made especially poignant by knowing, with hind sight, that he too will be killed in action like so many of his comrades. The snow falls and he writes his final poem Out in the Dark for Helen. Despite all the difficulties they have encountered in their marriage they remain soul mates to the end. Love is enough, much more than the writer’s periods of depression, anxiety about money and being able to provide for his wife and children. Their separation is unbearably sad.
These stories make me count my blessings, slow me down to a more authentic life and make me realise how swiftly time passes. Time spent together, digging the garden or listening to a blackbird singing, must be treasured before it is too late.

The Poet’s Wife by Judith Allnatt

2010-07-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

It is 1841. Patty is married to John Clare: peasant poet, genius and madman.

A beautifully written, crafted novel telling the story of Patty Turner, the poet John Clare’s long-suffering wife. Judith Allnatt seamlessly weaves her historical research into a poignant story, so sad it could have been written by Thomas Hardy, as her husband returns to search in vain for his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce, to whom he believes he is married.
Clare walks home to Northamptonshire from the asylum at High Beech, Essex where he has been staying for the past four years. The poet’s life is well documented; Patty’s is less known. Judith Allnatt has given this strong, caring woman a compassionate voice, speaking for all those who have lost loved ones debilitated in body, mind and spirit.

The Botticelli Secret by Marina Fiorato

2010-07-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

Florence looks like gold and smells like sulphur…

I’m not usually attracted to books this thick (548 pages) let alone anything delving into mysterious Da Vinci type codes. But the subject matter intrigued me: Botticelli’s painting, La Primavera, that hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. And as I had previously enjoyed Madonna of the Almonds by the same author I added it to my 3 for 2, or rather 6 for 4 basket in Hatchards in Piccadilly, recently and started it a few days later.
I have to say I couldn’t put it down. The Botticelli Secret became the ultimate page-turner as I sped from Renaissance Florence to Pisa, Venice, Genoa and Rome in the company of a beautiful ‘lady of the night’, Luciana Vetra, the model for Flora in the painting, and her unlikely companion, Brother Guido della Torre, a novice at the monastery of Santa Croce.
One day I’m sure this book will make a stunning film and I will race through it again, albeit more slowly. Now I know how the story ends I can spend longer unravelling the code. La Primavera will never seem the same again, thanks to Enrico Guidoni, a professor at Rome University who attempted to crack the ‘code’ of this enigmatic painting, on whose work the novel is based. Did Lorenzo de Medeci really have a plan for unifying Italy through a network of alliances between warring city states? I must confess I was more interested in the unlikely developing relationship between Luciana and Brother Guido!
Food for thought, but this is only one interpretation amongst many others attempting to unravel the mystery of such a beautiful painting. I am content to remain unconvinced and there let it rest. But it was a Good Read!

The Great Lover by Jill Dawson

2010-07-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

It is forty years since my boyfriend (now husband) first took me to Grantchester Meadows, two miles along the river from Cambridge. We have been back many times, to walk along the river bank, picnic and take tea in the Orchard tea gardens, relaxing in old-fashioned deckchairs just as Rupert Brooke and his literary friends did before the Great War. The wide Cambridge skyline is unaltered; the river meanders on, green and lush with weeds and all is drenched in birdsong.
My mother passed on a leather-bound volume of Rupert Brooke’s poems, some of which I read to her when she, like Brooke, was dying of septicaemia years ago. I was familiar with his verse from school, even more familiar with sepia photographs of his handsome face but not too fond of his character, as revealed in letters and memoirs. Jill Dawson’s novel reinforces this; he is capricious, confused and complicated in his relationships with friends and lovers. In contrast, Nell Golightly, the fictitious maid with whom Brooke has a liaison, is grounded in hard work and a sense of duty to provide for her family despite her tender years. Although younger and of a lower class she is a much stronger character than Brooke and infinitely more attractive to the reader than his academic, privileged friends.
I love the familiar descriptions of the Old Vicarage and the Orchard at Grantchester: Byron’s Pool and lilac bursting through the poet's bedroom window. Similarly those of Tahiti, where we spent some time last year, abundant with tropical fish and fragrant tiare flowers. Brooke’s mistress, Taatamata, who bore him a daughter, is constant like Nell in her affection for the handsome poet, yet similarly abandoned when he returns to England.
I started this novel on a train to Cambridge yesterday on the way to meet my daughter and continued it on the train home to London. I finished it this afternoon, sitting in the garden; a gentle breeze, to quote Brooke was ‘sobbing’ through the trees. Time stood still as I was transported back to summer days before the Great War, recalled in those sepia photographs of long ago.
‘Was my father a good man?’ the poet’s daughter asks the elderly retired housemaid she contacts by letter years later.
The reader must decide. I would love to say he was but I am unsure. Another reading of the novel will help me make up my mind.

The Rose Grower by Michelle de Kretser

2010-07-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

Just back from France and the garden is sprawling with old-fashioned English roses, tumbling into the sunshine: Ophelia, Rosa mundi, Rambling Rector, William Morris, Albertine. I love their scents, soft, pale colours and heavy delicate petals that fall away in my hand… The novel I read on holiday couldn’t have been a better choice.
June brings roses. Roses that show carmine in the bud and open to reveal petals of the palest shell pink. Roses in every shade of white: ivory, cream, parchment, chalk, snow, milk, pearl, bone. Roses with nodding globular flowers, large as teacups.
The Rose Grower contains tales of unrequited love: a young doctor’s love for a self-effacing aristocratic woman; her secret love for a visiting American who has fallen in love with her married sister on recouperating from a ballooning accident.
Set against the background of the French Revolution, the novel follows the lives of those living in rural Gascony, caught up in the Reign of Terror, under which they have no control. Sophie’s passion to create a repeat-flowering crimson rose survives through the turbulent times in which they are living.
The end is inevitable… At eight o’clock the sun in the courtyard is like a blade.
The previous night they chalked a number on her door, so she knew that the footsteps would stop there this morning…
The Rose Grower is a sad, moving story I long to read once more. It is beautifully written and the writer’s descriptions are to be savoured time and again.

The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate

2010-06-08T04:12:00.000-07:00

A tragic accident during a shooting party at Sir Randolph Nettleby’s estate leaves the guests in sombre mood. It was an error of judgement which resulted in a death. It took place in the autumn before the outbreak of what used to be known as the Great War.
This is a novel my husband and I have enjoyed equally. I love its craftsmanship: the way in which both time and sense of place are portrayed with such poignancy. It marks the end of the Edwardian era; the long summer is over. Words spoken by Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, standing at a window of the Foreign Office at dusk watching the lamps being lit outside, the day before war was declared on Germany, are but a whisper away. ‘The lamps going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our time’.
The novel reads like a play, with a hand-picked cast of contrasted characters making up the house party, their lives intertwined with their below-stairs counterparts. Loyal Tom Harker, the game keeper, asks his employer to say a prayer for him as his life draws to a close. An ‘unutterable and infinite sadness’ hangs in the air.
The Shooting Party was successfully adapted for the screen in the 80s starring James Mason as Sir Randolph, John Gielgud and Edward Fox. I prefer it to other more well-known adaptations in the country-house genre such as Upstairs, Downstairs and Gosford Park and admire it as much, but for different reasons, as The Remains of the Day, beautifully adapted from Kazuro Ishiguro’s novel: an equally poignant story as war clouds the horizon once more although depicting another era and ‘gathering storm’.
The unspoken love of Olivia and Lionel deepens; they choose to remain close yet distant for the rest of their lives. After his death at the Battle of Loos in 1915 her letters were found in his possession. Their heart-felt restraint, coupled with his sad words, ‘But it is true that we love each other?’ allow the reader to consider what might have been, if circumstances had been different and fate had not intervened.

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford 1945

2010-05-26T04:04:00.000-07:00

This is the novel I turn to when I am in need of cheering myself up. It is such a cosy, comfortable read: just right as we enter a long period of austerity. I love all the eccentric characters: volatile Uncle Matthew, vague Aunt Sadie, Lord Merlin and my favourite, charming Davey Warbeck. I love Nancy Mitford’s humour, eye for detail and her descriptive, elegant style of writing that captures an era long gone.
I especially love the scene when Linda arrives back at her Paris home to find her two old friends waiting for her in the drawing room who invite her for lunch the next day at the Ritz.
One boiling hot afternoon in July she arrived home wearing a new and particularly ravishing straw hat. It was large and simple with a wreath of flowers and two blue bows. Her right arm was full of roses and carnations, and in her left hand was a striped bandbox, containing another exquisite hat.
The novel is bitter-sweet, funny and tragic, set against the uncertainties of war; Linda’s happiness is fleeting as she finds the great love of her life too late.
When I first read this novel I laughed and laughed but now I smile, as I do when someone tells familiar jokes I thought I’d long forgotten. My sister Sarah loves this story too and it’s created a bond between us, recalling ‘the thin end of the wedge’, the diseased fossils and Uncle Matthew’s disapproval of Linda’s tulle ball-gown, ‘on the grounds that he had known three women burnt to death in tulle ball-dresses’.
It’s very comforting to know this book will always be around, whatever the future holds.
So the winter slowly passed. The spring came with extraordinary beauty, as always at Alconleigh, with a brilliance of colouring, a richness of life, that one had forgotten to expect during the cold winter months

Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier

2010-05-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

I fell in love with this novel when I studied it for French A Level, aged seventeen, and it has haunted me ever since: comme des vagues sur un rocher desert, nos aventures…les jours les plus tourmentes et les plus chers de ma vie. I loved its wistful sadness evoking a ‘land of lost content’ in the misty French countryside – a place of abandoned chateaux and dovecotes at the turn of the century.
Yvonne de Galais, loved by both the adventurous Grand Meaulnes and his gentle friend, Francois Seurel, epitomised the heroine I longed to be: a princesse lointaine. The writer was inspired seeing a beautiful girl wearing a brown cloak by the River Seine one afternoon with whom he instantly fell in love, although she was already betrothed to someone else. She became his muse for Yvonne, the unrequited love of his life until he was killed in action in 1914 near Verdun. Yvonne de Galais has remained a constant role model, although thankfully my life has not been cut short so tragically as hers.
I loved Albicocco’s film, The Wanderer, based on the novel with its hazy photography of the Sologne and have seen it many times. Years ago I managed to buy a VHS copy of the film in Paris and had it converted to the English system. Thirty years after reading Le Grand Meaulnes my husband, daughter and I visited all the places associated with the novel; we made a little film, I wrote a long article, gave a talk and finally I was able to let it go. Or so I thought because it has surfaced again.
Later this year we are staying near Verdun and I hope to visit the writer’s grave at Saint-Remy la Calonne. His body was found in a mass grave in 1991 where he had been buried by German soldiers and has since been given a proper burial. It is time to read the novel again. In French, if I am brave enough.

The Mozart Question by Michael Morpurgo

2010-05-19T04:45:00.000-07:00

This author generally writes for children but, as his well-known tale War Horse demonstrates, his stories are loved by adults too.
The Mozart Question, a little hardback edition illustrated by Michael Foreman is one of my favourites. Paolo Levi, a world-famous violinist, grew up in Venice. Throughout his childhood his parents kept a dark secret. The violinist unfolds their story to a young reporter and, for the first time, reveals the answer to the Mozart Question he has never answered till now.
The sight of a small boy listening to a busker near the Accademia Bridge in Venice inspired the writer to develop his story. As the horrors of Auschwitz are revealed Mozart’s sublime music takes on a sombre tone. But in time it soars again to fly free. The violinist tells the reporter:
"At my fiftieth birthday concert in London I shall be playing Mozart, and I shall be playing it on Mama’s violin, and I shall play it so well that he will love it, they will all love it, wherever they are."
This story captures the atmosphere of Venice, one of my favourite cities, as much as others that have caught my attention over the years: The Wings of the Dove, Miss Garnett’s Angel, Don’t Look Now. It is a mysterious, compelling place that draws me back time and again.

The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

2010-05-19T02:02:00.000-07:00

It is not a story that falls easily into sequence.
For the sea has claimed its own and spreads its rippled blanket over the site, and the great white bird with the black-tipped pinions that saw it all from the beginning to the end has returned to the dark, frozen silences of the northlands whence it came.
The Snow Goose is a beautifully written, poignant tale set against the background of the Dunkirk invasion. Frith’s unspoken love for Rhayader, a lonely artist, the snow goose’s constant presence and the haunting landscape of the Essex coast all fuse together to make this story as memorable now as in 1941,when it surfaced.
Gallico’s spare, poetic writing evokes a desolate sadness of both time and space: the sense of place of a war-torn past.
Greys and blues and soft greens are the colours, for when the skies are dark in the long winters, the many waters of the beaches and marshes reflect the cold and sombre colour.

The Snow Goose gives me everything I need: a poignant story, a sense of place, beautiful descriptions and authentic characters drawn from the landscape. Less is more: forty pages to be read again and savoured with as much joy as when I first came across it in 1972.

Gigi by Colette

2010-05-18T03:41:00.000-07:00

Last week I spent a day in Paris with a couple of American friends from Massachusetts. I had forgotten how easy it is to travel there on Eurostar and so much more convenient now trains leave from St. Pancras and are even faster. In the old days we had to take a taxi to Waterloo to catch an early train – now we rolled on to the Victoria line around 6 and caught the 6.55 train. Despite losing an hour we arrived at the Gare du Nord at 10.15. A short taxi ride later we were sitting at a café in Montmartre as the bells of Sacre-Coeur rang out for Ascension Day. I was seventeen when I first visited the Place du Tertre and little has changed – it still reminds me of a film set from Mistral’s Daughter! The rest of the day was swallowed up with lunch in the Boulevard Saint Germain, tea in the Champs Elysees and taking the hop-on/off bus tour from the Eiffel Tower to the Trocadero. How lovely Paris looks from an open top bus – usually I walk miles through all the arrondissements but I was able to savour the impressive architecture on a grand scale and all the pleached horse-chestnut trees bursting into blossom along every boulevard. And then we passed Maxim’s, the famous belle epoque restaurant and I was reminded of Colette’s novella, Gigi.
Written in 1944, it describes a young Parisian girl, Gilberte, being groomed for a career as a courtesan by her grandmother at the turn of the century. Gigi’s transformation from ingenue is charmingly portrayed with a light touch throughout as when, for example, wealthy, handsome Gaston Lachaille buys her dresses for her prepared launch into Parisian society as his new mistress.
The full sleeves and wide-flounced skirt of blue-and-white striped silk rustled deliciously, and Gilberte delighted in pecking at her sleeves to puff them out just below the shoulder.
He laughs, and says she reminds him of a performing monkey, admitting to preferring her in her old tartan dress. Gigi is reluctant to enter into her new role; she loves Gaston, an old family friend, too much to be cast aside when he becomes bored with her, as may inevitably happen, but as she comes to terms with her future position he asks for her hand in marriage. For the first time in his life he has truly fallen in love.
Gigi was made into a film in 1958 starring Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan and Leslie Caron. My mother took me to see Gigi at the cinema and I fell in love with Cecil Beaton’s beautiful costumes, the elegance and ambience of Paris, the most romantic of cities. The city retains that charm for me, all seasons, all weathers. I long to return. And if you’ve been there many times before and seen all the monuments, museums and galleries one day could well be long enough to savour its charms again.

The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see again…

2010-03-08T01:35:00.000-08:00

How astonishing does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us. Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble', I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection of every flower I have known from my infancy - their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simplest flowers of our spring are what I want to see again.
John Keats: A letter to James Rice, 14 February 1820
A year later, in Rome, on February 23rd 1821, Keats died.

‘I would I had some flowers of the spring that might become your time of day’, said Perdita in The Winter’s Tale. On a country walk in mid-January we came across a bank of pale yellow primroses coming into flower that filled that dark drear day with the promise of spring: ‘bold oxlips’, 'violets dim' and ‘daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty’.

(Originally published in The Hedgerow, February 2003)

It is nearly forty years since I visited Wentworth House, where Keats lived in Hampstead. And now I have seen Jane Campion’s stunning film, Bright Star, it is all coming back to me again: the tree where the nightingale sang that inspired Keats to write his famous ode, delicate Georgian chairs and the poet’s letters to his dearest love, Fanny Brawne who lived next door. The film is visually beautiful and yet restrained: bluebell woods, bare trees. Butterflies fluttering in an airless room recall Keats’ poignant words: I wish we were butterflies and could live but three summer days…
I have lived with his poems for many years: autumn and nightingales and La Belle Dame sans Merci, evocative of Pre-Raphaelite paintings I loved in my youth.
A few years ago I visited the house where Keats died at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, stood in his bedroom, imagining the scene when he was bed-bound, haemorrhaging badly, longing for death.
Read Andrew Motion’s acclaimed biography and also his account of Sailing to Italy (published by Faber and Faber in Salt Water) undertaking the same voyage that Keats and his companion Severn took from Gravesend to live in a warmer climate for the winter months. Keats was dying of consumption. He recognised that first drop of blood he coughed as his ‘death warrant’. How little time was left.
The sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing...
But when the warm weather comes I will go back to Hampstead and find that tree, sit on the grass and read those poems again in the company of the youth who took me there years before.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

2010-03-06T04:15:00.000-08:00

I think this novel is very underrated and brilliantly done. I reread it so much as a teenager I could have given a guided tour of Manderley and the Happy Valley scented with azaleas. I loved the descriptive early scenes in the library and morning room when a vase is broken and later, as tension mounts, when Mrs. Danvers shows the young bride Rebecca’s evening dresses in the west wing of the house. It made me want to visit more stately homes and places associated with Daphne Du Maurier in Cornwall. And so I did. Lots. I fell in love with Cornwall and old houses such was the influence of this book. I enjoyed Susan Hill’s sequel: Mrs. De Winter, especially a scene in a London hotel when Jack Favell shows up again. More shattered harmony. I’m so glad I bought this novel when it first came out in hardback in 1993. I can’t wait to read it again. There have been some good television adaptations of Rebecca but I like Hitchcock’s black and white film best. But not half as much as reading the novel.

A Summer Birdcage by Margaret Drabble

2010-03-06T04:06:00.000-08:00

First published in 1963, this is a short, first novel about a girl coming home to attend her older sister’s wedding. I reread this lots when I was a teenager, identifying with Sarah in the shadow of an older sister and enjoying the glamorous descriptions of London. I loved the easy style in which the novel was written and eavesdropping on all the characters’ conversations. I knew I too wanted to learn Italian, visit Rome and have a friend like Simone. I loved the quote from Webster too: Tis like a summer birdcage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.
And so, as it happens, I went on to study Webster, visit Rome and learn some Italian. And tried not to end up like Stella, Louise’s friend, who married Bill, ‘the physics man’, and lived in Streatham.
I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed Margaret Drabble’s early novels and how they must have subconsciously influenced me over the years.
Perhaps that is also why I like short novels. And rereading them.

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

2010-02-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

Anne Michaels is a poet living in Toronto; her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, was published to great acclaim in 1997. I read the novel in one sitting. Like Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, I feared it might be too harrowing to read in instalments. And now I have read it again and again. It is one of the most powerful novels I have read in recent years: unbearably moving, compelling, beautifully written. I dip into exquisite passages that are painful, healing, tragic, uplifting: part prose, part poetry, that reel round in my head and must be re-read, savoured, like the chapter when the poet, Jakob Beer falls in love with the young Michaela. We too fear that she will reject him physically – he is too old and ugly – then share his wonderment as her returned love heals his severed emotions. He marvels at being ‘saved by such a small body’. Anne Michael’s sensual, tender prose is sheer mastery as she describes their fusion of body, mind and spirit. No wonder it took the author ten years to complete the novel.
Fast forward towards the end of the novel. Ben, a university teacher and researcher, explores the house Jacob and Michaela once shared on a Greek island. We engage with him, as intimate with those who lived there as he is with Jakob’s poetry. Anne Michaels’ attention to detail is totally absorbing and satisfying as she conveys the spirit of the place through Ben’s narration. He alludes to lines of Jakob’s poetry, describes objects left behind, even remarking on the impact his body had on the sofa or worn shoes left behind. I find myself affirming that one day I too must live ‘a life so achingly simple: days spent in thought and companionship’. Ben remarks, ‘You sat on this terrace at this table, and wrote as if every man lives this way’. Is this a wake-up call to follow our hearts and find fulfilment like Jakob, before we die?
Jacob Beer’s broken-ness and survival are a testament to the endurance of the spirit and the power of human love. His sudden death in a road accident fifty years after surviving the Holocaust reminded me of a survivor from Cambodia, ironically gunned down in Los Angeles years later. Reading Fugitive Pieces reinforced feelings that life is fragile, elusive, incredibly sad, complex, beautiful but above all, must be lived. Rarely does a first novel make this impact, but Anne Michaels is an extraordinary, accomplished writer. Read it and judge for yourself.

(Originally published in New Writer magazine)

Journey to the Sea edited by Sarah Brown published by Ebury Press

2010-02-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

Journey to the Sea is an inspired collection of short stories and travel writing. Alexander McCall Smith’s Bangkok, Ruth Rendell’s South America and Joanne Harris’ Blackpool surface in an eclectic fusion of fact and new fiction from 22 writers. A definitive sense of place, from Long Island to the west coast of Scotland, allows the reader to experience ‘the sun, the wind, the waves’ of Andrew Motion’s introductory poem. Tracy Edwards and Robin Knox-Johnson recall their adventures and surfers express their passion riding the waves. I particularly liked Libby Purves’ bitter-sweet story, set at the local leisure centre, and Gervase Phinn’s charming story of a retiring school teacher inspired by a traveller pupil’s gift for creative writing. This is the discerning reader’s ideal ‘holiday read’, admirably suited to armchair adventurers as well. £1 from each copy will raise funds for PiggyBankKids/Special Olympics Great Britain.

(Originally published in The Good Book Guide)

Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach

2010-02-24T02:52:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, entering rooms familiar from paintings by Vermeer or Pieter de Hooch, you are transported back to 17th century Amsterdam, A young artist, Jan van Loos, is painting a portrait of wealthy Cornelius and his beautiful young wife, Sophia. The scene is set. Sophia’s betrayal and the reckless lovers’ speculation on tulip bulbs trigger their undoing and bring down others around them. Nothing is quite as it seems. Passion burns beyond seemingly restrained facades; disguise and intrigue lurk behind heavy drapes covering chequered floors and Delft tiles. Tension builds, fuelled by anxiety, secrecy and deception. ‘Mankind’s hopes are fragile and life is therefore also short’: words etched on a glass in the opening paragraph recall life’s transience. Take time to study the sixteen paintings reproduced within the pages of the novel. Note the intimate relationship between mistress and maid, tall houses by the canal, mysterious interiors: rooms within rooms, still-life compositions of peeled fruit, foreboding skulls and billowing striped tulips as fresh as if painted yesterday. Tulip Fever is a wonderful read.
(Originally part-published in Women’s Weekly)

As it is in Heaven by Niall Williams

2010-02-24T02:19:00.000-08:00

I enjoy contemporary Irish writing, from William Trevor’s beautifully crafted stories to John O’Donohue’s exquisite prose, so it came as no surprise that I should be drawn to novels by Niall Williams. I first discovered his writing in a bookshop in Cork a few years ago: a biographical tale O Come Ye Back to Ireland that related leaving New York for a tumbledown cottage in Co. Clare. Forget Toujours Provence, Under the Tuscan Sun et al, this was Ireland, unfashionable, unhurried, wet. Wonderful.

As it is in Heaven reflects the rugged landscapes, pewter skies and mercurial spirits to be found there. Stephen Griffin is a solitary, introverted schoolteacher, living with his retired father. Their lives have been shadowed by the tragic loss of Stephen’s mother and sister in a road accident. Stephen struggles on, until his life is transformed by meeting a beautiful Italian violinist. Lured by the memory of Vivaldi, he retraces her steps to Venice in an attempt to find her again. As it is in Heaven is a book about love in all its aspects. Unspoken tender loyalty between father and son balances the tempestuous passion that overturns Stephen’s life. It is a beautiful fable, at times unbearably sad and moving, at others joyous and vibrant. It explores the joy and pain of love and loss, conveying a sense of healing and well-being to the reader. As it is in Heaven is enchanting.
(Originally published in Books and Company, edited by Susan Hill)