Why is this book so appealing, why do we love Alison B’s work so passionately? It’s her unrelenting honesty, for one thing. Hiding is not an option. The political act of not hiding becomes an aesthetic advantage, because there is nothing more important in writing, I feel, than absolute, complete honesty, no matter how painful. But this isn’t about baring the soul without control. Alison B.’s strips have always been about controlling the medium, saying so much in such small spaces, creating an entire world within the very challenging medium of the comic strip. (Almost a metaphor for breaking through the prisons and confines imposed on us by the ignorance of what I keep calling society, for want of a better word – we will speak out.) This creation of a complex, coherent world in this limiting medium requires profound intelligence and sensitivity, as well as the kind of skill and talent that few have. In Fun Home, which is brilliant in every way, Alison Bechdel doesn’t hold back, and at the same time, she isn’t out for revenge. She never writes with anger, and that is the beauty of her work. She writes with so much compassion for everyone. And that’s why on her site fans agonize over every tiny detail of every panel, as if these were all real people. They seem real because they are so recognizable, so familiar, and once again, that has to do with the honesty that saturates everything this remarkable artist does. She is indeed one of the great artists of our time. I love the structure of Fun Home. Just as memory returns to the same images again and again, just as memory haunts us and we replay scenes in our mind, trying to understand them, to penetrate the mysteries, so AB does not go in chronological order, but looks at the story from different angles, expanding it each time. This is a deeply moving book of discovery, it’s a book about discovery and it’s a book that encourages us to face our own past, accept it, love it, forgive, understand, and embrace it, no matter how difficult it has been. I don’t know if AB knows just how much she has meant to how many people.

I often wonder why some books receive so much more attention than others, and whether time eventually weeds out the best. “Lost” books are constantly being discovered, so who knows how many gems have been buried… These two pieces (a short story and a novella) are so wonderful, yet a search on google for “Julia Strachey” came back with very few hits. Beautifully written, original, funny, complex – I was deeply entertained by this book. I hope it will be “rediscovered”. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is about a miserable bride and her frantic, controlling, unbearable mother who is blind to everything that is going on around her, determined to create a bright, cheerful reality for the sake of appearances – a satire on English society but also a view of its suffocating effects on women. It was published in 1932 yet could easily have been written in 2008. An Integrated Man is also, I think, ahead of its time, and here to the themes include repressed desire and repression in general. Julia was part of the Bloomsbury circle, a niece of Lytton Strachey. Which brings me to…

Carrington (1995)

I always feel that biographical films are nothing more than anyone’s guess. But this film was based n a carefully researched book and it lets us know that we really do not have access to the internal lives of these people, we can only view them, as we view anyone, from the outside. It refrains from judgement and asks the viewer to do the same. We do mad things for love and we ask others to do mad things for love. This is perhaps a movie about desperation. A comment on imdb: “There are some who will dismiss the whole group [of characters] as “immoral” or as an effete corps of impudent snobs, but we won’t be that narrow- minded and judgemental, will we? If you allow yourself into ‘Carrington’s’ world I think you’ll find it rewarding. It’s full of good actors but I believe its success is largely due to director Christopher Hampton’s screenplay. It’s a full two hour movie without the benefit of car chases, explosions or kickboxing matches, so it’s a big plus to have something nice to look at for all that time. We can thank cinematographer Denis Lenoir and production designer Caroline Ames for that.” The exquisite music by Nyman is another major player in this film. I think it opens up many questions about feminism and sexual fluidity and sacrifice. The makers of this movie are very aware of the disturbing elements in the story and do not try to gloss them over, explain them, or justify them. This is what happened, they are saying – we are not telling you how to feel about it. And this sensitivity is what appealled to me here.

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.