New Books and some DNFs

Posted by litlove

It’s been a while since I last had a tally up of new books – at least, it feels like a while and I sincerely hope it is, given the number I seem to have acquired.

In paper form, there is: Judith Hermann’s We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, a book of autofiction I’m very excited about. The blurb says it melds psychology, writing and friendship, ‘reflecting on when life becomes fiction, how dependable memory can be, and how close one’s dreams come to reality.’ Conversations with Rilke, by Maurice Betz, is the memoir of Rilke’s French translator, who knew him well in his later life. I’ve been waiting for this to come out for months, but a first flick through the pages makes me a little nervous about the writing style. I hope it isn’t ponderous. Jenn Ashworth’s Notes Made While Falling, a collection of essays I’ve given to several people but don’t own a copy of myself. The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer, in which Dyer explores the ‘late achievements of a variety of writers, painters, athletes and musicians.’ I’ve enjoyed Dyer’s essays before and these look intriguing and, it must be said, structurally unhinged. And finally Business as Usual, by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, an epistolary novel about a young woman running the library in a thinly disguised Selfridges in the 1930s. It was a recommendation from both Susan and Jacqui that looked irresistible

In digital form I have:

Most of these will be familiar to book bloggers, I think. The Kate van der Borgh is a bit out of my comfort zone, genre-wise, but it’s set in Cambridge and I’m a sucker for novels in my home town. Careless People attracted me because of the effort Facebook’s lawyers put into trying to suppress it. And Fierce Appetites continues my interest in memoir writing, especially as this is by an Irish academic who specialises in Medieval literature. A brief review of it really caught my eye; it said ‘The next time I feel mildly embarrassed about bumping into my student in my gym kit, I will remember this young lady and her threesomes and problems with drinking.’ It made me laugh. I’m terrible about reading books in translation and at reading diversely and so when I saw the winner of the International Booker Prize as a deal of the day, I decided to try it. Sarah Manguso I’ve read before and admired, and Anna Hope I’ve never read before, but have seen her much admired.

The majority of these are recent publications and I’m hoping I’ll do better with them than some of the other new(ish) releases I’ve tried recently.

This sounded so attractive that I used a monthly Audible credit on it. The book is a series of linked essays by the obituary writer for The Economist. She is also, apparently, a poet and a biographer. The general idea, I think, is to consider how we capture life on the page, using material from her own long and illustrious career. I didn’t get very far with this at all, in fact, I haven’t actually managed to finish listening to the first essay. It’s just a splurge of details, with the author waxing lyrical about tiny artifacts or views of a person’s house or… well I can’t really recall because it all merged into one. I didn’t know where it was going or what it wanted to say and I found myself completely lost in the weeds. I find listening to books requires more effort than reading them, and a lot of the effort goes in hanging onto details while I fit them into the overarching plot. The plot creates the easy container and without it, the experience dissolved into a stream of tiny component parts that failed to create something larger than their sum. I feel bad about this book and in theory would like to try it again, starting on the second essay. But so far, I haven’t gone anywhere near it and I may have to assume my interest in it has died.

This was another disappointment. I’d never read Rachel Joyce, fearing that her books would be a bit sentimental for me. But this had an intriguing premise. It’s a dysfunctional family story that concerns the four grown children of popular artist, Vic Kemp. He’s a sort of Jack Vettriano clone, who has made a lot of money but craves critical acclaim. His wife died shortly after the birth of his fourth child, and the family has muddled along ever since, becoming this unusually tight and self-enclosed tribe. The novel opens as Vic announces to his offspring that he’s found the love of his life in a twentysomething influencer called Bella Mae, and he intends to marry her. This announcement blindsides his children in a way that seems remarkably excessive and they spend the next three hours (yes, this was another audiobook) discussing how awful it is and how much they love each other and how co-dependent they all are, and we get an absolute ton of back story anecdotes provided as evidence. Finally we get some plot: Vic marries his girlfriend at his fancy villa in Italy without telling anyone, and then is found dead. Cue children rushing out to Italy in states of horror and shock that they introspect a LOT about. By this point, my life was beginning to feel very short. I returned the book.

Happily this was just a 99p Kindle bargain that I took a punt on because I thought the cover was so attractive. And of course, the memoir angle again. Stroud has apparently written several memoirs and this is her fourth, I think. This book is all about the meaning of home – in this case the Ridgeway in Wiltshire, near to the extraordinary white horse carved into the landscape – as Stroud and her five children face the prospect of moving to America. Stroud’s husband, Pete, has some sort of important job that means he spends the vast majority of his time travelling abroad, and he has come to the decision that the family needs to settle in Washington, where he’ll be able to be more present. Clover is torn between wanting to spend more time with her husband, and the recognition that she is deeply attached to her home and the surrounding countryside. And besides, she’s spent the past six years bringing up the kids by herself, and there’s resentment here, inevitably, that grows with this peremptory seeming demand. I ought to have enjoyed this, but once again, the sheer wordiness of the prose – repeatedly described in many reviews I read as ‘fluid prose’ – defeated me. I accepted that the first chapter might linger over descriptions of the area and the relationship between Stroud and Pete, as a certain scene-setting might be necessary. But as I ploughed through the second chapter, in which Clover takes the kids to a nearby fair for the day, the pages of lyrical description about a field ground me down. I did look at the reviews online for this one and they are mostly full of fervent admiration, so don’t let me dissuade you. I think I just have to accept that the inner landscape of people interests me a great deal more than the outer landscape does.

Pathemata by Maggie Nelson

Posted by litlove

There is a dominant story of illness that goes something like this: you experience symptoms, and so you visit a medical professional. This skilled person interprets them and comes up with a diagnosis and a treatment plan. You follow the treatment plan and recover in a straight linear progression back to full health. It’s a simple story and such a powerful one that we cling to it and insist upon it, despite the fact that it’s rarely accurate. Diagnoses can be hard to come by, treatments often fail, and the graph of recovery is a line of manic peaks and troughs. Pain and illness often outstay their welcome and become chronic, until we reach the point where it’s hard to know how we feel or what the symptoms mean. At this point speculation and desperation go hand in hand, and the awful truth must be faced that this comforting story of illness and recovery is not going to work for us. We are in the fabulation wilderness, the story as broken as the sufferer, with a body that resists reading.

Maggie Nelson’s recent book charts just such an experience with chronic mouth pain, and is itself an attempt to tackle the problem of narration. ‘Each morning it is as if my mouth has survived a war,’ she writes. When the conventional route of the orofacial pain clinic can’t help her, Nelson sets off ‘into the uninsured wilds’.

I start a file on my desktop, wherein I catalogue the conditions of the pain’s onset, the doctors I’ve seen, the results of their imaging, the medications and physical therapies I’ve tried, the activities that seem to make it better and worse, and so on. I bring this document to each new appointment, hoping it might offer a useful summary of a confusing physical situation, as well as confirm my status as an organised patient, eager to participate in her treatment. […] It doesn’t take me long to realise that no one wants to read this pathemata.’

Instead, a colourful circus of alternative practitioners are altogether more fixated on offering their pet cures with alarming confidence. Anyone who has been forced down this route will recognise the kind of expert who, when Nelson expresses uncertainty about taking medications without ‘a firmer diagnosis’, snaps at her ‘Do you want to go on living with the pain or do you want to treat it and have it go away?’ Or the dentist whose glib explanation seems overly practiced, causing her to ‘marvel at my inability to know if the whole thing is a hoax, how the intensity of my desire to get out of pain vies with my intelligence, which, on a good day, I consider formidable’. Nelson spends more money than she can afford and does things she doesn’t want to do, aware that, ‘It feels reckless but the pain keeps demanding an answer.’

The medics may ignore her words, but there’s a gruesome satisfaction for the reader in Nelson’s taut and fragmentary account. Seeking root causes, she cycles back to childhood where she finds an unusual flu that left her with trouble swallowing, a history of tonsillitis, and speech therapy for taking too rapidly. She quotes the damning – if at the time good-humoured – comment of a family friend: ‘Does her mouth come with an off switch?’ A visit to the orthodontist brings the diagnosis of a ‘tongue thrust’ that must be quelled by means of a metal spike glued to the back of her front teeth. It’s a potent reminder that mainstream medicine can be utterly barbaric. But it also opens up a deep chasm of shadowy significance, in which our pains and ailments seem to arise out of the confluence of old unresolved trauma and the random variations in our individual bodies. The mind and the body are so tightly intertwined that even if the illness or pain is purely biological, our response to it and our experience of recovery is inevitably bound up with complicated hopes and fears. And on top of all that, Nelson is well aware of the ‘literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.’ So much of who she is and what she does converges on this site of pain and trouble that readings proliferate in the absence of medical boundaries.

If what I’ve written about this slim volume so far gives the impression of a straightforward memoir, however, that’s misleading. Maggie Nelson mixes her timelines and her situations in a choppy text that bounces around between the experience of pain, her search for treatment and the Covid pandemic which ends her quest in a way that brings a kind of almost-relief. Inevitably, the pandemic has its own pains, however, in the form of a partner made alien and unsupportive by distance, and the difficulty of getting hold of vaccines for her son. By the time she’s driven him to several pharmacies in a state of enraged agitation, her son is begging for her to stop and take them home.

I tell him that even though it looks like I’m a hot mess driving all over town begging for one little orange-topped vial of Pfizer, I’m really more like the mom in the animated movie we just watched who says, I have made the metal ones pay for their crimes while wiping robot blood from her face.’

The pandemic writ large a feeling state that Nelson has been living in isolation: a fear of our bodies and all that can go wrong with them, all the unbearable suffering they can put us through without even the vaguest hope of reprieve. As she jumps about in her narrative, Nelson abandons plot in favour of a kind of thematic deployment of emotion. It’s sheer craziness that links one fragment to the next and keeps us propelled onwards, a highly particular kind of craziness that soars away from reality while turning the body into a boiling crucible of rage, despair and fear. It’s the craziness that the prospect of physical extremis causes, and which can grow to become a self-perpetuating terrorist of the mind.

There’s another element to this text but it’s one I can’t quite make my mind up about. The pain – and I presume the trials of the pandemic – that Nelson is experiencing causes her to have terrible dreams and accounts of these crop up regularly across the 70 pages. Nelson’s trick here is never to signal that they are coming, and so it’s only halfway through a fragment, when you come across a logical impossibility or something so horrific or humiliating that it can’t be true, that you realise it’s a dream. You have to hand it to Nelson – I can’t think of another writer who could find such an innovative take on ‘I woke up and discovered it was all a dream’, only it’s the reader who does the waking up here from the dream of story she’s spinning. But does it really work? Does it really add to what we’re being told? I’m not entirely sure, though it does give Nelson an opportunity to scatter the text with her trademark line in graphic intensity.

Still, it’s only a niggle in what is an innovative and original contribution to the literature of illness. If we could accept a wholly different kind of story for the travails of the body, I can’t help but wonder whether we might find much relief in the process.

Three Things

Posted by litlove

This comes with thanks to Paula at Book Jotter for her Three Things meme!

The Book: Earlier this week I had a sudden yen for a Persephone title and picked up High Wages by Dorothy Whipple. I’m so happy that I did. I’ve enjoyed all my reading lately but this is the first novel in a long while that’s held me properly hostage, that I put down with the greatest of reluctance and pick up again at the first available opportunity. It’s the story of Jane Carter who, at 17, is obliged to make a living for herself, having trespassed on her stepmother’s goodwill for too long after the untimely death of her father. She finds work as a shop girl in Chadwick’s, a draper’s shop as it was called, where women came to buy material and trimmings that would then be made up into clothes by their off-site seamstresses. It’s 1912 and the great shopping revolution is underway. Selfridges having opened its doors onto an extravagant cornucopia of goods in 1909, and Jane, with her ‘good eye’ and determined ambition will be at its forefront. She will push Chadwick’s as far as she can towards the new, modern ways, and eventually set up a shop herself selling the fresh trend of ‘ready-mades’.

There’s a fascinating preface to the book that delves into the social history of shopping at this time, and the phenomenon that was the shop girl. Very few avenues of work were available still to women, and retail looked a great deal less arduous than either service in a house or factory work. In fact, it was as exploitative as most other forms of employment. Shop girls worked a solid 12-hour day with only 20 minutes for lunch and most lived in on the premises for a cut of their wages. Dorothy Whipple writes a brilliant villain, one of whom is the redoubtable Mrs Chadwick, who holds the domestic purse-strings in her tight fist:

Mrs Chadwick was rather mean. Not excessively so; but just mean enough to add interest to her days. She enjoyed exerting her ingenuity in the provision, for the girls, of suppers that did not cost more than threepence a head.’ And when the First World War comes, it ‘called Mrs Chadwick’s full powers into play; she lived vividly. She could now scheme and stint to her heart’s content…. She spent exciting moments stealing down to her own scullery, when the girls were out of the way, to take parings from their margarine allowances with a razor blade. She would pop the stolen pieces into the pot where her husband’s supper was cooking… with a greater satisfaction than she had known when she could put ounces of the best butter in and never miss them.’

Jane is permanently hungry while she’s at Chadwick’s, but the disadvantages of life there keep her motivated to move on. Shop girl literature – and there was such a thing – fell into two categories. On the one hand, commercial romances in which the pretty girl behind the counter is plucked from obscurity by a well-off prince and may return to buy goods on her own account; and the rags to riches and possibly back to rags tale, where dangerous social aspirations were met with scandal or worse. Whipple’s book takes a different, kinder, more optimistic path, although Jane’s route to better fortune is punctuation by misunderstandings, hardship and betrayals. And finally – finally – I have a book in my hands in which the main female protagonist chooses work over romance; I’m cheering her on.

The true story: Perhaps one of the best stories of a shop girl made good concerns the author of 101 Dalmations and I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith. Dodie’s first desire was to be an actress, and from 1914 she was a very bad actress indeed, one who, in her own words, was always ‘talking herself into a job and then acting herself out of it.’ She lurched from one bad role to another, until finally she seduced the director of the Windmill Theatre, Norman McDermott, in the hope that it would guarantee her steady employment. In fact he sent her abroad on tour and then, in her absence, sacked her. And so, Dodie decided that part of her life had come to an end and she needed a new direction. In 1923, she heard of a position in the London furniture emporium, Heal’s, and went and talked herself into that. ‘After years of selling myself as an actress to theatrical managers who didn’t want me,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘it was child’s play selling goods to customers who were pleased to have them.’

When she turned out to be a success, she went directly to the manager, Ambrose Heal, and (just like Jane Carter in Whipple’s novel) negotiated herself a pay rise. This was considered outrageous presumption, but Ambrose Heal was inclined to be charmed by it, and Dodie needed no more encouragement. She longed to be in love again, and had acquired a taste for sleeping with the boss. She’d unwittingly set herself a challenge, though, as Ambrose Heal had not only a wife, but a mistress too. When he pointed out how little time and affection he had to spare, she told him ‘half-a-loaf was better than no bread’. To his continued protests, she said ‘Then just crumbs from the rich woman’s table.’ So Ambrose Heal accepted defeat, and for the next six years they maintained a stable if clandestine affair.

During this time, Dodie was busy channelling her energies and ambitions into her writing. Ever since she was a child she had written stories and plays but acting had always been her passion. When Ambrose Heal gave her the rather splendid gift of a typewriter for Christmas 1929, she longed for something to type up. As it happened, she had an idea for a play. Playwriting braided together Dodie’s finest skills – a powerful sense of emotional melodrama inherited from her mother and grandmother, balanced by a rather delightful sense of humour. She had a fine ear for dialogue in a family that loved a punchline. Her aunt looking with dislike at her hat in the mirror had declared ‘Well, it’s a beast and that’s all there is to be said about it’. Dodie had been relishing dialogue for years, and she had her own wealth of stage experience into which she could pour her vivid imagination. She wrote her play quickly, loving the experience, and her triumph was complete when it was bought by a director who had once sacked her.

The first night was catastrophic – a rumpus in the audience ended with the gallery booing the play and the stalls booing the gallery. ‘I never heard a noisier, more disastrous, reception’ Dodie remembered, and she went to bed distraught, fearing the play had failed and thinking ‘But it can’t, because if it does I can’t bear it.’ Then in the morning, a miracle happened; the newspaper critics were uniform in their praise. Journalists rushed to Heal’s to get a glimpse of the latest sensation, a 33-year-old woman who ran her own department. By the evening news the billboards proclaimed: ‘Shopgirl Writes Play’.

For the next year, Dodie struggled to repeat her success, starting over and over with different ideas, none of which took fire. A journalist rang her up, asking whether she had anything new ready, and a theatre critic wrote a story claiming that no woman had ever written more than one successful play. ‘Perhaps,’ Dodie wrote acidly, ‘they felt “Shopgirl Writes Play” had been a pleasant fluke, but “Shopgirl Writes Two Plays” would be a bit like Cinderella getting two princes.’ It seemed to goad her on, though, and she had the inspiration of writing about a grand department store suffering in a time of slump. At the end of the first curtain call for Service, she was enticed on stage to take a bow before the audience. It was a heady moment, hearing their whoops and cheers, finally finding her place on stage in the limelight.

Dodie Smith would go on to have three more stage hits, making five in a row which was a record for a woman playwright. She had the success and the money that she’d longed for, and she realised that her interest in Ambrose Heal had faded away. ‘I partly longed for affairs as status symbols,’ she wrote in her journal many years later. ‘Women have for so long been conditioned to equate sex appeal with success.’ Her plays fed her ego far more than any mere man could, and in comparison the romance of an affair felt paltry. And so I keep banging the drum: women want work; stop giving them storylines that are all about the men.

The photos: A few weekends ago I was with my family, searching through the thousands of family photos we’d taken over the years for good ones of my Mum, when my brother remembered the slides up in the loft. He returned with four old boxes, each about the size of a large dictionary, each divided up into about a hundred tiny compartments, each of which housed a slide. We held them up to the light in awe of their antiquity, squinting to see the tiny figures. Well, my brother took them away and scanned them onto his computer, producing a very 21st century One Drive file with almost 500 photos on it. This, for me, was my family prehistory. The life they had together before I arrived in it – well, there’s a sequence towards the end of the slides of me as a baby, and a handful in which I’m a toddler. It is so very strange to see my parents and brother before I knew them. My brother at 5, 6, 7, wearing shorts and a little shirt with a tie (a tie!), taken on holidays and trips, playing with his model railway. Mr Litlove looked at the photos and sighed ‘He’s living the dream,’ he said. I did feel a tad guilty; my arrival must have been a bit of a shock.

But the pictures that fascinated me the most were the location shots. This was only the 1960s, less than a decade before I was born. But the small towns depicted look like they come from another world altogether, a world that is probably less distant from that of High Wages and Dodie Smith’s time at Heal’s than it is from the High Street as we know it today.

This was the world in which my parents were young and it makes me feel very old. I don’t know where these photos were taken, but think it might be from the area around Hay-on-Wye. If you recognise it, do let me know!

Literary novels about literary folk

Posted by litlove

Over the winter of 1848-9, George Sand brought her lover, Chopin, and her two children to the island of Majorca. She hoped that the climate would benefit the ailing composer, who was suffering from the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. The trip was an unmitigated disaster. They stayed in one of the former monastic cells in the Valledemossa Charterhouse, but shocked the deeply Catholic locals with their unconventional relationship, George’s unconventional dress sense, and their lack of religious observance. And this was before anyone figured out that Chopin was carrying a highly contagious disease. The winter was hard, the kitchen staff ripped them off, the doctors were useless, and the book Sand wrote subsequently was very rude about the Spanish. This history provides the basis for Nell Steven’s whimsical novel, which is narrated by a young female ghost whose spirit haunts Valledemossa.

Blanca, our narrator, died in 1473 at the age of 14 and has been hanging around the Charterhouse keeping an eye on her descendants ever since. Years of practice have given her the ability to slip into the living human minds of those around her, where she can read not only their memories of the past, but their predestined futures. When George Sand arrives, she initially mistakes her and Chopin kissing for two men, but the error rectified she falls in love at first sight with George. This leads her to become fascinated by the whole family, headhopping between strong, pragmatic George Sand, the ever more enfeebled Chopin, George’s loving but neglected son, Maurice, and precocious, headstrong Solange. Chopin is in the middle of composing his preludes and driven half insane by the old and out of tune piano he’s obliged to use, whilst his own is lost in transit somewhere in the Mediterranean. There are already the sparks of affection between Chopin and Solange that will later cause the rupture in his relationship to Sand. George is a wonderful creation here, a woman not always in full command of her restless power, but dedicated to preserving Chopin’s genius while doing her best to fulfill her own, a loving mother if a distracted one. And Maurice is… well, Maurice is just there. Though in fairness he’s a necessary part of one of the most gripping scenes in the novel, in which he and his mother travel to Palma in a winter storm in the hope of bringing Chopin’s finally arrived piano back to the villa.

But this is the problem that real history poses when you want to transcribe it into fiction. It doesn’t always mould itself to the shape of a good story. You get leftover characters and unresolved plot lines. I love a bit of whimsy myself, and this novel has it in bucket loads. The writing is often spectacular and Stevens is at her best when she’s inside the heads of Sand and Chopin, quite brilliantly evoking the creative process. Blanca is a delightful notion, sparky and funny and far too insightful for a 14-year-old, though perhaps it’s plausible in a 375-year-old which is her theoretical age. But what can they all do for one another? I can quite see how Stevens wanted to use the voice of Blanca – it’s a treat – but it’s also notably anachronistic at times. And it’s charming to portray her falling in love with Sand, though this sits oddly with Blanca’s back story, in which a clandestine relationship with a novice monk causes her downfall. And there can be no requiting her love, or exerting agency over Sand’s situation (though Stevens does her best). In fact, no one really gets to have a narrative arc, and the awful anti-climactic ending lays all these structural flaws bare. BUT, I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, which just testifies to the brilliance of Stevens’ prose. It was often a hoot, and at times, poignant. I will certainly check out other books by this author.

What a difficult book this is to write about. It begins with a fragment of a novel that is quickly abandoned for not being the book our narrator feels she should be writing. So she switches into the ‘real’ story, in which she declares it’s time to ‘stop fearing shame’ and ‘tell the truth.’ This story takes place in St Kilda’s in Melbourne, Australia, where our 24-year-old (mostly unnamed until the very end) Sri Lankan narrator is engaged in postgraduate studies on Virginia Woolf. It’s the late 80s and the campus is buzzing with critical theory. So far, so good. Let’s be clear, the writing in this novel is outrageously good and never falters, and the inclusion of critical theory, notoriously difficult to write about, is excellently done. But then our narrator meets Kit at a party, an engineering student already involved with the privileged Olivia although he claims it’s a ‘deconstructed relationship’. Well, I admit my heart sank a little, as the life of the mind is of course now ditched for the life of the clandestine relationship. Will no one ever think a story more interesting if the woman chooses work over sex? Oh well. This is, however, the part of the narrative where the title most readily makes sense, as our narrator fails to condemn Kit for his lack of moral courage in stringing two women along, but embraces instead a lively, even virulent, hostility towards Olivia. So much for the sisterhood.

The narrator’s studies are faltering, too, run aground on an ugly sentence in which Woolf describes a Ceylonese barrister as a ‘little mahogany-coloured wretch’. The poster of Woolf that she has on her wall is demoted to a lowly spot, and when it falls onto the floor and is accidentally trodden on, the footprint on Woolf’s face speaks volumes. Equally problematic is the narrator’s relationship to her mother, who intrudes into the narrative by means of plaintively affectionate letters full of impotent desires to care and coerce. The narrator at times realises that the reproaches she makes against her mother – most notably for assimilating into Australian culture – are a kind of double-bind in which their differing tastes are weaponised to no useful outcome. But she’s young, and trying to separate, and her resentment is just too strong.

This novel has been widely reviewed and praised for its innovative structure, envisioned (as we are told in the text) as a modern day take on Woolf’s failed intentions with The Years to create a book in which fiction and essay sit side by side. There are interpolated stories here, most notably a brief foray into the narrator’s childhood when she was quietly sexually assaulted in a piano exam, and a longish disquisition on the Australian artist and pedophile, Donald Friend. But for me, the choppiness of the text didn’t work. There is, I suppose, an underlying concern with power dynamics throughout, though this is something that has only occurred to me a week or so after reading it. At the time, I just didn’t understand how the different parts of this novel were supposed to work together, how they reflected on one another. And, if I’m absolutely truthful, I found the bitterness and resentment that infuse the writing rather depressing. Towards the end of the novel we skip forward several decades to find our narrator now a successful author. She’s giving a book event when she’s approached by a woman from her past who has something shocking to tell her about Olivia, and the narrator must finally realise that her perceptions about her rival were flawed. Just as the story was getting interesting again, the narrative swerved into the account of Donald Friend, and it felt to me as if the hatred that had been lodged in Olivia simply had to go somewhere else. It couldn’t be processed, it couldn’t be absolved. This is of course a damning indictment of the effects of racism and all the other despicable things that people across time can be relied upon to do to one another. But hatred keeps us enmeshed with all the wrongdoing, it’s a continuation of it, not an answer.

It’s only writing this review that I wonder whether the mention of ‘shame’ at the start refers to the narrator’s feelings about her relationship to Olivia. But I didn’t want her to feel shame. I wanted her to stop wasting her energy hating people and to find instead something to love and enjoy and be just plain old pleased about. Ultimately, it felt to me as if no amount of innovative structure was able to jolt the narrator out of her sense of oppression. And much as that probably isn’t at all the point of this book, I did sincerely wish it might happen.

A completely different novel to the other two, and one to park under the heading of utterly charming and foolish fun to read when the world seems a tough place. Though on the quiet, it’s also a rather salient satire of the publishing industry. Once upon a (recent) time in France, Jean-Pierre Gourvec is inspired by the (real) Richard Brautigan to start his own library of unpublished manuscripts in his hometown of Crozon, Brittany. It’s a place where unloved literary works can come for preservation and live out a blameless forgotten life. By the time Parisian book publicist, Delphine Despero, visits her parents in Crozon, Gourvec has died, leaving the care of the library to his assistant, Magali. Delphine visits with her new boyfriend, Frederic (whose own literary novel, The Bathtub, has just been published to resounding silence), and there among the shelves she comes across an abandoned masterpiece. The book is called The Last Hours of a Love Affair, and the author’s name is Henri Pick. This is odd, because a little digging informs them that the recently deceased Henri Pick used to run the local pizzeria, and the idea that he might have been a closet novelist is quite astounding. Delphine and Frederic visit his widow, Marianne, who is initially astounded, but slowly won over to the possibility, as is her divorced daughter, Josephine. And they give Delphine the permission she needs to go ahead and publish the book.

The story surrounding the discovery of the manuscript is such a good one, so enticing, that the book becomes a huge success. The success has reverberations of its own, affecting all the characters who have come into contact with it and changing their lives. Then along comes literary critic Jean-Michel Rouche, whose glory days are behind him, and who can only beg for invitations to minor book world events. He can’t swallow the story of Pick’s unlikely authorship and in the hope of a coup that will place him centre stage in the French world of letters again, sets off to discover who the real writer was.

There are two strands to this tale; one is a heartwarming comedy concerned with sorting out the lives of lonely people; the other is a sneaky snigger at the way publishing PR works, and how books require buzz to elevate them into the ranks of bestsellers. Because there are two strands, there are two endings to the story and Mr Litlove and I (we read this one together) felt that was perhaps one ending too many. But we couldn’t really be cross about it. This is a beguiling literary chase among bookish people and broken hearts that just wants everyone to end up happy.