Short intro to this blog: I choose my reading material haphazardly – I hear about a book; or it catches my eye in a bookstore or library or on a friend’s bookcase; or I remember a book I’ve read and want to revisit, or a book I tried to read and failed, and want to try again.
The order in which I read the books is also haphazard, and has partly to do with library due dates. Sometimes, uncannily, I read several books together that seem to be similar in terms of theme, plot, style. I suppose that has more to do with our tendency to find links between things than with the presence of literary poltergeist in my house.
It is therefore less of a coincidence than I’d like to think that the last two books I’ve read, written over forty years apart, are both about adult women looking back at their friendships when they were schoolgirls, and about secrets in the past, viewed from the revised perspective of adult eyes. The novels are also about loss and about what goes on under the surface, what gets buried (literally, in both novels!) yet continues to haunt. The two novels are Elizabeth Bowen’s The Little Girls and Edeet Ravel’s Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth.
These are not reviews – they’re personal notes about books/movies I’ve liked. My intended audience is friends and family, but if anyone outside that circle stumbles upon this blog, comments are more than welcome.
The Little Girls
The Little Girls is an ElizabethBowen novel I’d never heard of. I found it on a library shelf and it was a treat from start to finish. I’ve always found Bowen’s language almost physically pleasurable – there is something so crunchy and tasty and satisfying about it. I don’t know why this novel is not as well-known as some of her other work; it’s remarkable. It’s about burying treasures for some future race, or a future self; but it turns out to be about burying parts of ourselves. There is more going on than appears at first, and this ties in with the plot, as there is constant tension between good and bad manners – the implied codes of good social manners of English society between the World Wars, and the emotions that break through continually and result in transgressive, subversive behaviour which shocks. The transgressions are usually comic in this novel, but there are very dark undercurrents, and the shadow of two wars, which swallow up the very shadowy and undefined men in the novel, hovers over the characters’ lives. Betrayal is another theme – of ourselves, our futures. This is a complex novel and I plan to reread it. Just as the characters stubbornly resist many social rules, and yet cannot come out and say exactly what they want to say, and just as they bury their secrets, so secrets are buried in the plot itself. One must read between and through and into the lines. I am now inspired to read a biography of Bowen.
Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth
A bookseller friend acquired an advance copy of this novel, in draft format, and recommended it. I’d read A Wall of Light and loved the diaries that follow a gay or bi boy from around ages ten to twenty. The book as a whole was fascinating, as I know so little about that part of the world, and I was only frustrated that there wasn’t more about the bohemian actress Anna – we only see her through letters and others’ eyes. But on to this novel – the narrator here is a lesbian woman living alone, unable to commit, though recently a relationship with real potential has been hovering at the edges of her life. The novel is about her friendship with her first love, Rosie, when she was a teenager. It’s also about growing up with damaged, overwhelming parents. How does one survive the survivor? How does one resist getting pulled into their world without becoming cruel? I knew a child of survivors who was cruel to her anxious, traumatized mother (back in high school). I didn’t know at the time that the mother was a Holocaust survivor, but now I find it sad to remember. Maya, this novel’s narrator, tries to steer a middle ground between cruelty and yielding completely (in both cases there is a cost). And this gets her into the habit of steering a middle ground – as does the fact that she’s surrounded by heterosexuals and knows that she can’t act on her feelings towards Rosie. But this holding back dooms her. I don’t want to give away the plot, which is full of surprises, but like the Bowen novel, it’s complex and there is much more going on than one thinks at first. The writing is beautiful, and the themes are universal. The characters are very interesting – four main characters and four parents, all of them complicated and with that combination of familiarity and novelty that is so appealing in fiction. There is a section at the end that had me in tears. But the novel is full of hope.
A Room With A View (2007)
The brilliant Andrew Davies, along with director Nicholas Renton, has/have transformed A Room With A View for me. In the new TV adaptation, Forester’s novel is interpreted as a moral tale about society’s repression of homosexuality. I liked the Ivory-Merchant version (screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala), with its spectacular acting, perfect casting, visual beauty and fine editing, but this version added a dimension that while giving the story a lighter touch, offered a wonderfully original (on screen, anyhow) perspective. Two of the characters (Mr Beebe, Cecil) are now gay, but unable to act upon their desires in Edwardian England. Lucy Honeychurch’s dilemma becomes a metaphor for the desirability of breaking out, coming out, breaking free of society’s fetters. The movie seems to want to push her forward. And then there is Sophie Thompson (her Miss Bates in the otherwise misguided Emma is unforgettable, a classic) – I love her acting, I think she’s a genius. I will now go back to the novel, which I haven’t read in years, and see whether all the clues are there in the text. I’ve read a negative review in imdb, and I see that the viewer didn’t connect to this version. As always, these things are so incredibly subjective.
