dovegreyreader scribbles

Anna Kavan

I can only apologize for being so distracted by bath plugs the last time I mentioned Anna Kavan.It can't have been helpful so now I plan to dedicate myself to the cause of Anna and ensure you all know about her without any deviation,hesitation or repetition whatsoever.
A new writer, one I've never heard of has me scurrying to the online Oxford DNB first port of call, library ticket number in hand and there you will find a full and fascinating entry on Anna Kavan by Virginia Ironside. This I assume to be the one and the same Virginia Ironside who has for years been an Agony Aunt and now writes a weekly column for The Independent. If it's a different one then apologies. Virginia Ironside along with Doris Lessing and others are real champions of the writing of Anna Kavan.
Anna could certainly have done with a Virginia in her life because it was not without its agonies and there is much in her early life that seems to underwrite  the tribulations of her adulthood.
Born Helen Woods in 1901, put out to a wet nurse and soon into boarding schools where she was often left alone during the holidays, you can only begin to imagine the loneliness of her childhood. Her father drowned when she was ten years old. As Helen Ferguson she weathered a violent marriage and wrote six novels before heading for divorce and heroin addiction in quick succession.Things seemed to settle if you could call it that, but in the process there were six suicide attempts,several attempts at detox and at one time in 1949, Helen, now renamed Anna, was one of only 200 registered heroin addicts in the UK. Thereafter entitled to the drug on prescription, as Virginia Ironside elaborates, sufficient was found stashed in her house after her death to flatten the whole of the street.
From this crucible of trauma must have emerged much of the writing of Anna Kavan and Guilty, a recently discovered manuscript published by Peter Owen, has been my first foray into her work. Once you know her history it's but a small step to recognizing that pain reflected in the lives of her characters and perhaps a touch of the drug-fuelled narrative here and there.But the book works just as powerfully without this information, I'm just nosey.
I've hardly read any Camus, just The Outsider, or Kafka, just looked at the cover of Metamorphosis, so it's a bit risky to try and make  existential comparisons when I don't really have a clue what I'm talking about, though I now see, having looked to Jennifer Sturm's introduction for some assistance, that Kafka gets an airing. Guilty follows the life of the son of a pacifist at the end of WW II who assumes much of the guilt for his father's actions through the excruciatingly lonely early years of his life. Mark remains isolated and excluded from life around him and there is a bleak chill to this book that goes far beyond melancholy. As Duncan Fallowell has astutely observed,
" Kavan's is a dangerous frightening world - you don't go there for laughs".
Too right, not a single moment of humour but a profound sense of the inner workings of the self-persecuting mind finally reduced to its barest essentials as the truth finally dawns for Mark,

"In a sense, guilt has evolved me;without it neither I nor my other self could exist...I can accept my guilt now that I recognize it as my own creation"

Despite the grief and sadness there is an intensity to Anna Kavan's writing that is all a bit must -read -more -ish and I can't wait to start Ice and Who Are You which are sitting at ready.Yes, I'm with Virginia and Doris on this one, I'm delighted to have discovered Anna and she deserves a much wider audience than the three of us, oh and not forgetting Jennifer and Duncan of course.

Happy Birthday to...

May 30th so always the day the Tinker and I remember my mum who died ten years ago.Well we probably remember her most days actually but especially on her birthday.
Born Vera Griffiths on May 30th 1926, just after the General Strike and raised in The Dingle, Liverpool 8, my mum was always very proud of her home city and the fact that eventually Billy Fury,Cilla Black, Gerry Marsden, Ringo Starr and countless other Merseybeat stars emerged from those same streets down by the docks.I don't remember her ever having a natural scouse accent but she could turn it on full in the blink of an eye.
I only really know odd facts about her early life...
Vera was born and grew up at No.4 Elswick Street.
Vera had diphtheria as a baby.
Vera's older sister (by several years) disliked her so much she dropped her on her head.
Vera so adored Mickey Mouse as a child her family nickname for years was Micka.
Vera's mum (Nellie) wouldn't let her use a knife to cut her food with until she was about twelve.
Vera's dad was killed in an accident on the docks in Liverpool.
Vera's maternal grandfather was a Maguire and a journeyman for Barker & Dobson's the sweet makers.We still have the recipe to make Coconut Ice for the five thousand...take 20lbs of sugar.He eventually went to work for Victory V Lozenges, we don't have the recipe for those but presumably he used to take 20lbs of liquorice, mixed it with ether and chloroform and stood well back.
Vera loved school, St Edmund's, but the war interrupted everything.She was very sad on going back to look for it to find it had been replaced by the Nelson Mandela flats.
Childhood holidays were always spent at Countersett Hall in the Yorkshire Dales, counting the arches on the Ribblehead viaduct from the train meant they had nearly arrived.
Vera was evacuated to Chester during the war to a childless family who adored her and wanted to keep her, her dad was sent to fetch her home.Read Doreen by Barbara Noble and just call it Vera.
Vera was given this book on her 16th birthday and I posted about it almost a year ago here.
There must be so much more. All her history has gone with her so I realise now I only know snippets compared to the Tinker about whom I now know far more than I ever did.
Here's the thing, make sure they write it all down.

MiPod

Large confession...I've gone Nano.
Random Jottings recently did likewise and it seemed meet and right to follow.
An iPod Shuffle was not going to get me through a cruise and back with it's customary muddled approach to listening so with Offspringette home it was but an easy step to take.
There was a delivery problem based on the absence of a street name so once we'd convinced UPS that our lane doesn't have a name but just set the satnav to our postcode and he would find that ours is the only house here.
So there it was waiting for me when I arrived home from work and everyone gathered around for the arrival. A gorgeous little turquoise "juke box" (this from Bookhound) wrapped in a little incubator of its own, nestling on a bed of earphones and it took about a minute to plug it in and load up with the entire contents of my iTunes file.
This wasn't what I had quite intended to happen, I'd planned to be discerning, but I hate reading instructions, plug and play person me, and now I think I might need a case, and better headphones, and a plug in charger and... and...

The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

As judging time comes around again for the Long Barn Books First Novel Prize I dig out my notebook from last year to remind myself exactly how I approached this strange new world of actually judging a book to win a prize.
It was very exciting to be asked because I have spent years pretending to be a Booker judge. All sad billy-no-mates on my own, no pile of free books, just a fight down at the library and a fortune spent buying up the shortfall. As a result I still hold a 100% record for never choosing the winner based on books I've loved. Conversely I have frequently been spot on choosing the winner from the books I've loathed.I'm quite proud of that and I fully expect this year to be no different.
Bookerthon 2007 still some way off but Long Barn First Novel is upon us and the submissions are starting to come in.
I've lost count of how many I read last year but you have to read with a slightly different hat on, in fact you have to read with a whole load of hats on because, amongst other things, the book must have wide appeal.I was pleasantly surprised to find that my favourite was everyone else's too and as The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam by Chris Ewan hits the shelves and takes Borders by storm it's good to look back at my notes and remember what I said at the time
The first thing I loved was Chris Ewan's narrative voice. It drew me in from the first page, personal, friendly, impossible to dislike, just as if Charlie Howard was talking to me.I liked him and was going to forgive anything he might do.
The sense of place was immediate and excellent, if you didn't know Amsterdam ( which I don't) then the book gives you a brilliant feeling for the city and its moods. All much more informative than Bookhound's excellent, but it must be said descriptively limited, Max Bygraves impersonation of Tulips From Amsterdam which I have lived with for thirty two years now. (I love it really)
Complete page turner, not a tulip in sight but plenty of diamonds and I had real trouble second-guessing what would happen;clever twists and even towards the end I was still in a state of unknowing about certain events that really had me on the edge of my seat. It was all pretty complex to pull off and within this was the clever business of how difficult it is to write a book as Charlie the caper novelist / career thief tries to tie up the plot flaws in his own novel.
Following those three monkeys had me thinking I was watching that trick with the up-turned cups on the table with the pennies underneath.
I loved the insight into the criminal mind, how they think, body language, how astute they are about each other and I also loved all the practical stuff about locks and keys.Even better as Charlie heads off to Paris you realise there's the chance of a sequel, so more Charlie, brilliant.
So there you have just a few of my thoughts which I took along to the meeting that chose the winner and where I was also made to eat a gourmet lunch and stuff myself to the gunwales with sticky toffee pudding.It probably all reads like very appropriate double dutch if you haven't read the book which you will now have to if you are to make any sense of this post.
I promise you won't be disappointed. A great review over on It's a Crime and doubtless more to follow.
Meanwhile I'm back into this year's reading and making notes in that notebook ready for decision time and I'll eat that lunch again because I suppose someone must.

Forty years ago today...

Today is the anniversary of one of those events that for some reason we used to get really excited about and all gather round the TV to watch.
Forty years since Francis Chichester sailed into Plymouth after completing his circumnavigation of the world in Gipsy Moth IV and that means it's forty years since one of those seemingly insignificant but memorably funny family occurrences.
We lived in a very nice little house on the banks of the River Wandle in Surrey.The horse chestnut lined river bank was at the end of the garden (conkers of our own at last) and we used to paddle and fish for sticklebacks and generally mess about in the river all day.The football / tennis ball / shuttlecock / whammo superball was always heading upstream.Ducks and ducklings wandered around the garden all the time and it was all very waterlandish.So I've never really figured out why my mum wanted a fish pond and why the Tinker dug one out in the middle of the lawn, thus messing up our badminton "court" for ever more.
But having dug the pond it then had to be populated which it quickly was by every frog from the river and beyond and that's a real squirrel in the background.
Tinker Senior (father of Tinker) and seen here with me ( I think I went everywhere in a smocked frock) my brother and a youthful Tinker in a jumper he may still wear, had by this time moved from London to a lovely old cottage near Crediton in Devon when cottages in the country cost £600.Tinker Senior had a fishpond par excellence so he drove up from Devon to Surrey with a bucket of goldfish in the boot of his Austin A30 (PGU114... never forget that number but can I remember where I park my car?).I used to love that car, red leathery seats and I was allowed to sit in the front and do the indicators. A switch on the dashboard and out would pop the little illuminated flag on the side of the car.
You may wonder how the fish remained in the bucket all the way up from Devon but there was really no risk of spillage. Tinker Senior was of the considered opinion that if you drove a car at more than 40mph you were aiming it not driving it, so the journey probably took about fifteen hours but the fish would just have thought it was a windy day, they were fine.
Anyway the pond was now inhabited and the Tinker was bursting with pride and delight.
So a few weeks later we all settled down in front of the TV on that May evening to watch Sir Francis Chichester sail into Plymouth, bated breath until he eventually appeared round the Breakwater and we all cheered like mad, jumping up and down along with all those thousands of people on The Hoe.
It was on one of our synchronised jump ups that we all as one happened to glance out of the window to the pond in time to see a flotilla of ducks sailing around in formation and the very last fish disappearing down the gullet of a very plump well-sated mallard.
I expect they heard what happened next all the way down in Plymouth and I assume Sir Francis Chichester set foot on dry land eventually but we missed it all.

Give me my coloured socks, my amazing Joseph socks

1 Cup Final + 2 Joseph's + 3 Castaway's + I Apprentice = 1 & a bit socks.
For the knitters amongst you, Noro Silk Garden 45% silk 45% kid mohair 10% lamb's wool 2x 50gms. Random, the socks are not going to match, I like that.
40 stitches on 5mm circular needle (30mm long)

Meanwhile, the ultimate sock-knitter's crime, all these in need of a matching friend

And yes I too I am weeping over last night's Joseph decision but there's hope because Jon or Francie may yet win Castaway tonight and it is but only a matter of time before Sir Alan demolishes Katy the bunny boiler on The Apprentice because if he doesn't she'll roast him and take over his empire. Then Tre's head will have got so big it will explode and when it finally all kicks off it will make brilliant television and I expect the wonderful Nick and Margaret will smile on benignly before sweeping up the mess, oh yes and Kristina will sneak in and win.

Sunday Confessions

I often wonder whether to keep Sunday Confessions going but owning up does help me start the week with a clean book buying slate, a sort of purging, a regular weekly biblioholic irrigation, so needs must.
I did actually do a rare and unusual thing this week and bought some books in W.H.Smith's because he used to attend school in Tavistock (there's a blue plaque to prove it) and because I wanted them yesterday as it were. Suddenly I couldn't wait a minute longer to start reading The Observations by Jane Harris, not a minute longer. The need reached a crescendo through my morning baby clinic for some reason, so I ushered the last little person out of the door, left the toys all over the floor for the district nurses to trip over as they came in for their sandwiches and leg ulcer discussions, and dashed down to town in my lunch break.
I do this hand money over the counter for books thing so rarely nowadays since The Book Depository fairy has her sat.nav. permanently set to our house so I was a bit shocked to pay £19 + for three books even given the buy one get one half price offer.
"Surely not" I said.
"Surely yes" said the little girl behind the till.
When I said I'd be back on the internet for my next batch she said "oh is it cheaper then?" so clearly WHS keep their staff locked away in a back room.
I gave her a quick lesson on internet book buying and she looked deeply shocked possibly about to cry, as if I'd just told her Father Christmas wasn't real or something...which of course I wouldn't have done because he is.
More Orange shortlist reading with Digging to America by Anne Tyler and Sovereign by C.J.Sansom came in with that batch too. If I could get hold of Dissolution I'd be able to make inroads into Shardlake et al which I'm desperate to start and perhaps continue into holiday reading.
A parcel from Marion Boyars and Chocolate & Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier which is a blog - turned - book - turned - mouth - watering gathering of beautiful pictures and drooly recipes which makes you want to go and live in France because it all looks so clean and tidy and civilized and chocolatey and they have lovely handwriting. Also from Catheryn at MB The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet. French, died at 20 of typhoid but managed this fine and delicate adolescent love story before he succumbed.Perhaps it's not so clean in France after all?
A  copy of Rant by Chuck Palahniuk (am I saying that right?  Palarneyuck?) arrived from the publishers and here we will be in virgin territory, I'm new to Chucky so we'll see what happens.I don't know the first thing about him but I expect I will soon.
Finally as you know I can't bear not to read a book if Adele Geras recommends it, they never fail.We must be tuned into the same reading frequency or something, so Shame by Karen Alvtegen has arrived and looks suitably thrillery, snowy and Nordically inclined as to be right up my bobsleigh run.
Talking of Marion Boyars, blogs, Adele Geras and books per se, take a look here.Yes a dgr Sunday Confessions pic has made it onto a book cover and I think we may get a mention inside too.
Excuse me while I just push David Bailey out of the way.

Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing and bath plugs

Anna who? Hmm is it just me again? Anna Kavan nee Helen Woods, then Ferguson, born in Cannes probably in 1901, two divorces, nervous breakdowns, heroin addiction, name changes.Frequently compared favourably with Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys.
Have you all been reading her books for years when I've never heard of her?
Then I had one of those serendipitous random reading connections that just drops out of the sky.
Among the books I heaved upstairs for ongoing and occasional perusal was a collection of the writing of Doris Lessing.Time Bites is an eclectic mix of reviews and occasional writings covering a wide range of subjects and I have been enjoying dipping into this for ages now.
I must stop doing this.
I start the bath running and then go and sit on the bed and pick up one of these reads and before I know it we're heading for overflow,always too much hot water in the bath, no room for the cold and too hot to put hand in and pull plug out.
Then I must explain that no plugs are attached in our house and few have chains on them.
This is historic and based on a near-miss casualty attendance with the baby Gamekeeper.He sat in the bath playing with a spare plug on a chain, whizzing it back and forth in his mouth and managing to thread a loose open link in the chain through the underneath of his tongue where it locked into place as firmly as if he was  fish caught on a hook.Then, amidst the gallons of blood that you get from a small mouth wound, he proceeded to try and pull it out thus pulling his tongue further out of his mouth than any of us had thought anatomically possible.It was like something out of a horror movie and mass hysteria followed from the siblings also in the bath and rising panic from dgr kneeling by the bath.
I'm ashamed to say my first thought as a nurse was the embarrassment of walking into casualty with a child with a bath plug hanging out of his mouth.However, because I'm a caring mother really, I quickly dismissed that thought as I then imagined what was going to follow on once he'd pulled his tongue out.
Bookhound to the rescue as always with a handy pair of pliers.
PLIERS I hear you shriek!
Worry not, first he cut the chain short which offered a momentary lapse in the screaming for us to ponder the next stage.Piercing may be seen as a new and modern beauty aid but this pierced tongue was not going to be an asset.In the end we wrapped the baby gamekeeper up in a towel (much like the cat when we're trying to give it tablets) while bookhound pretended this baby was a fish and unhooked the chain appropriately and painlessly.Had I been a gin drinker I would then have downed a full bottle and been an alcoholic within hours but instead all chains on plugs were removed and they still give me nightmares to this day.
Where on earth was I?Yes sorry Doris.
As I browsed I came across a piece on Anna Kavan;Doris Lessing is great advocate for her writing. Coincidentally I had just looked just at the Peter Owen website and discovered that they are about to publish a book recently discovered  in the  archives at the University of Tulsa, Guilty by Anna Kavan. I now have a selection of Anna Kavan's books before me and I'm quite excited at the discovery of another new writer for me.Much more about her soon I'm sure.
Further on in Time Bites a piece by Doris Lessing on the novel that Peter Owen says is the best he has ever published and yet another new writer for me but that needs a post of its own I think and will necessitate us all trotting off to the fjords.
Stream of consciousness or what.

Upstairs Downstairs

I seem to spend half a lifetime carting books up and down stairs because the bedside table must be kept replenished. How awful to be comfortably esconced with pillows plumped only to find that you absolutely HAVE to read that book which you know is downstairs.This last week I've had a bit of a reorganise because in the scheme of things plenty of really good dip-into books get neglected so I took an armful upstairs and have offered them permanent bedside residence and already it's paying dividends.

I revisited The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby the other night, ostensibly while the bath was running but I carried on reading long after the bath would have overflowed.There are some great reading suggestions in this book, it's one of the most useful books to have around and now I know that I must get to grips with Gilead by Marilyn Robinson very very soon.I have given up on this twice on a wrong-time-wrong-place basis but Nick Hornby rates it off the scale.
Then I took another look at 13 Ways to Look at a Novel by Jane Smiley and was reminded all over again just why I'd loved this book so much when it first came out.I have still not read Possession by A.S.Byatt and Jane Smiley reckons I should.
How Novels Work still impresses me as a handy vade mecum when you just can't figure it out for yourself.I stopped reading this as a cover to cover read as there were too many books I hadn't read, so now I dip into it every so often to see if my reading is anywhere on a par with John Mullan's, which seems unlikely as he's a Prof and I'm not.
Talking of Profs I have Stanley Wells in there and the ever helpful and very readable Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare.
I also added into my selection some Collected Writings of various authors, among them John Betjeman, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Jorge Louis Borges and current favourite Susan Sontag.
The Paris Review Interviews are still keeping me absorbed and interested,leading me towards some new reading trails. I'm working up to a Rebecca West phase I just know it.Her interview, done in her 80's, was candid and honest in that disarmingly forthright way that is the life-earned right of the octogenarian.I can't wait for the next volume of these.
Finally Chin Up Girls is a great selection of obituaries of remarkable women and scattered in there a few diaries and journals and other books that are telling me fascinating things in nice bite-size chunks.
All in all a good selection of occasional reading.

The Touchstone

Despite having a stack of varied and engrossing books on the go I suddenly felt the need to break into more of that tempting display of Hesperus books I waved in front of you last week.I decided on comfort zone, familiar territory and readable in one sitting because those sort of reads offer a unique experience, it was to be The Touchstone by Edith Wharton.
The house was quiet, which is rare at the moment, but the kitchen was a bit of a mess, which is not rare. I'd been left strict instructions not to waste precious home-alone time clearing up but to indulge in other more pleasurable tasks.
Who am I to disagree? So I closed my eyes as I walked through, made a pot of tea and settled down with Edith.
I hadn't read The Touchstone before but I knew, just knew, that I was in the familiar waters of an Edith Wharton read.
Down on his beam ends Glennard has failed to cadge a free night out from amongst his wealthy friends
"As he turned into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored there, but because one must pay for the experiment"
Who else writes about New York society like our Edith?
In a previous life in the UK, Stephen Glennard has been the object of infatuation of a celebrated lady novelist.  Eventually fleeing the continent to escape the unwanted attentions of Margaret Aubyn of whom Glennard felt "genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair" the letters of adoration appear thick and fast and all unrequited.
Following her death Margaret Aubyn has become a national treasure and the public is hungry for anything and everything about her. With this sudden interest in her life comes a call for any available letters and of course Glennard has drawers stacked with them.
Selling anonymously he may as well have sold his soul as the full extent of his turpitude and perfidy (I've lifted these two wickedly expressive words from Salley Vickers foreword and plan to use such gems on a daily basis) becomes apparent to all and sundry who read the book of letters when it is published.
This is vintage Edith with a fascinating debate about some of the moral issues surrounding the publication of personal correspondence and having read Salley Vickers foreword and then substituting George Eliot for Margaret Aubyn I saw the book in a whole new light.
Lest I stood accused of perfidy and turpitude myself I did wander off and sort out the kitchen but hardly noticed I was doing it as I pondered this remarkable little book.

In Search of Adam

Perhaps its a subject you think you understand, perhaps it's a subject you just don't want to read about, perhaps it's all a bit too painful to read? That's fine, nothing's compulsory here and I realise this book may be just more than many people can cope with.
In fact I have a feeling that In Search of Adam is going to be one of those books that readers will either heart or hate and there may be no middle ground.
I'm going to declare forthwith that I'm in the heart department and that's very unusual because it's a book about my pet- hate- subject- to- read- about- for- pleasure, child abuse. After all these years of working in child protection I'm more of an expert on it than I'd ever choose to be.
Next time round I'm going to be a librarian.
Jude Williams at six years four months and two days old finds her mother dead in bed from an overdose and by her body a note
"jude, I have gone in search of Adam, I love you baby"
You can hazard a guess at this point that Jude's problems are only just beginning and what unfolds makes truly harrowing reading because it could be argued that Caroline Smailes has done for child abuse what Mark Haddon did for autism.Through the limits of Jude's childlike understanding things happen over which she has no control and no understanding and it's all very very real.If you didn't understand the impact of all this on an innocent child beforehand you most certainly will by the time you have finished In Search of Adam. Don't be put off by ideas of a misery memoir, this is subtly different and there is a powerful redemption of sorts that for some reason should but doesn't leave you in the depths of despair.Just sad.
If nothing else the book clearly shows how childhood abuse can lead insidiously to patterns of obsessive compulsive behaviour, self-harming, isolation, low self-esteem, bulimia and worse.
For Jude these are rooted in the events of her childhood and that is when the problems start; you clearly understand exactly why she does what she does even at such a young age.
There were some telling moments of huge importance for me,
Jude's silent pleas to her teacher

"The summer came and went. The summer when I left primary school. I left the watching eyes. Miss Waters was getting nearer to the truth. I was leaving her little clues, She was clever. She was picking up the clues.But. I left.I left before she figured it all out"

Her explanation for her bulimia

"They were right. I wasn't normal. A reet strange bairn. I'm not normal. But they never asked the questions. They never allowed the words to escape from me. They never realised that I was trying to communicate. Sicking up the words that I couldn't voice. Trying in the only way that I could find. Trying to tell them all the things that were eating away inside of me"

The writing style is unusual and often cleverly limited by an authentic age-appropriateness for Jude's thoughts and language, but I quickly got used to that and it worked well as an additional means to emphasise what was happening to her.
Dust jackets important as always to me and the design of this one would seem to be the result of a collaboration between The Friday Project and Snowbooks.You can look at a dust jacket and think "oh yes very nice" and barely notice it for the rest of the read or you can have a dust jacket like this one that somehow carries you through the entire book. As I was pondering what I'd read this dust jacket became a really important focal point as did the endpapers, but I'll let you discover those for yourselves.
A word about the words, often strangely laid out on the page.
This could easily be dismissed as a gimmick but I understood it as something else. If obsession is about repetition and patterns of behaviour and often a means of gaining control in uncontrollable situations then the order  that Jude aches to find in her life is being cleverly reflected visually in the unusual use and placing of words on the page.
I feel I have barely scratched the surface of this book's significance but I have emerged feeling suitably reminded that there is always more to learn on a subject I thought I understood quite well.
Books like this must be agonizing to write and equally difficult to promote and sell but for starters I'd love to prescribe it as compulsory reading for all those professionals like me who find themselves on expensive multi-agency child protection courses, teachers, social workers, police, health visitors, child and mental health workers etc.
There's always a session on the effects of abuse on the child, bit of a powerpoint intro, off into groups, groan, talk about the lunch, flip charts, felt pens, last five minute rush to have something intelligent to feedback to the group.Plenary.No one ever wants to do the feeding back.Usual story.
We could all have the day off instead to quietly read this book, save a fortune and learn far more, and for that reason, amongst many others, it gets 5* from me.

Sunday Confessions on Tuesday

I haven't owned up for quite a while so best get it all out in the open and be done with it.
Yes, yes I know I shouldn't order from The Book People because they buy in books for pence and nobody makes any money but how can you not buy ten original Vintage Classics for £9.99? Even if you have a few of them, which I have, it's still worth it for the others.Quite a few I've been meaning to read and to do that it helps to have the book on the shelf which I now do.
Offspringette immediately made off with The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin but that's fine because I've read that one.The Phurstborn (that was the name of her band many moons ago) is home for a few months inbetween university, a traineeship and career with the BBC, a charity skateboard roadtrip across Australia and an entirely new career in...well I'll tell you when it's certain. Meanwhile I've almost been prevailed upon to allow her to guest blog here for a week while I go off to sunnier climes in July.
Brace yourselves, these young media types have a wicked way with words and she might let slip a few truths about  life behind the scenes in live TV (Jeremy Paxman combing his hair, that sort of thing) and Bill Oddie's Springwatch of course,she loved getting into work for 6am to do that.
A welcome pile of books arrived from Mark Thwaite for me to review for The Book Depository. I'm starting to look forward to these, they are like magical mystery coach tours in a padded envelope. I never know where I will be going or what I need to pack but it's invariably different and unusual.In amongst them Nada by Carmen Laforet (and translated by Edith Grossman who got a favourable mention in comments yesterday) which looks darker than dark and Missing by Walter De La Mere which looks unsettling but in an empty deckchair sort of way if the cover is anything to go by.It's yet another of the Hesperus titles which are going to earn a shelf of their very own soon.
Jon at Orion sent me the most luxurious new edition of Rebecca, sufficiently luxurious to make me want to read it again and perhaps this is the one Daphne Du Maurier that doesn't tarnish with the years.
Restless by William Boyd is the choice of my other book group and I'm looking forward to this one as much for the people I meet at that evening as for the book.Not many of us but all with a lively approach to reading.This the group I failed to read Dr Zhivago for last time and as they only gave it a reluctant 3/10 they said it hardly mattered and I was much better off with Omar Sharif's version.
Finally a book from Camilla at Macmillan, The Missing Person's Guide to Love by Susanna Jones.This arrived on Thursday, my first day off of the week and so conditions were favourable for an immediate start and now I'm on the home run.More about that one soon.

Stefan Zweig and let's hear it for the translators.

I'm sure there are plenty of writers who can turn out a good story in less than seventy pages but to mind nobody did it better than Stefan Zweig this weekend.
John Self over on Asylum had done a great review of Chess by Stefan Zweig, not only reminding me of the version I have of this, The Royal Game published by Pushkin Press, but also that I had plenty of unread Stefan Zweig on the shelves to catch up on.The Royal Game is one of those unsettling reads that stays in your mind for years.You spot oblique references to it all over the place, others have read and carry it with them too.
One Stefan Zweig title has been beckoning me for ages. In fact so alluring was the title that I had conjured up all manner of plots and content to the point where I had actually put off reading it for fear of disappointment.
Twilight Moonbeam Alley is actually two separate stories but don't the two together conjure up magic therein?
Since I first discovered him I have been fascinated by Stefan Zweig in a Joseph Roth sort of way. Mittel-European, that melancholy wistful feel to the writing, something just out of reach,the unexplainable atmosphere of literature in translation.
Born in 1881 in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family, living in Salzburg between the wars and becoming a rising literary star, Stefan Zweig moved to London during the ascent of Nazism. He took out British citizenship before he finally settled in Brazil where he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide in 1942. By this time he was a banned writer in Hitler's Germany and his books were in ashes.
Twilight is one of the best short stories I've read in ages.First published in 1910 it is set in France and is a strange mixture of the real and the invented.The main characters did exist, Madame de Prie was the mistress of the Duke of Bourbon, Louis XV's prime minister and did broker the king's marriage.She was indeed exiled to the country.
Stefan Zweig then adds in all the imagined and fictional detail and you have a perfect delineation of a woman so full of her own importance that the disintegration is like sitting watching a road accident about to happen.
Moonbeam Alley likewise a compact offering on the agonies of private passions cleverly told to an onlooker who becomes the recipient of probably far more information than he ever wanted to know.His own illusions about the magical nature of this alley of moonbeams as shattered as mine in the end. Once the light has shone on life behind the closed doors it is not quite the dreamy place you had imagined.
The reading was timely because Susan Sontag has more interesting things to say on the subject of translation and I'd just read her lecture on literary translation, The World as India , published in the newest posthumus collection At the Same Time. It has all given me some real gems for thought about a genre I relish.

"It is often taken for granted that the aim of translation is to make the work "sound" as if it were written in the language in which it is being translated...to efface as much as possible the evidence of foreignness"

Susan Sontag cleverly weighs that against the other side of the argument

"The translator's primary duty is to stay as close as possible to the original text with the understanding that the result will, precisely, read as a translation.To naturalise a foreign book is to lose what is most valuable about it: the spirit of the language, the mental ethos out of which the text emerges"

I've simplistically condensed twenty four pages into two quotes, the rest is worth seeking out because perhaps I now understand why some translations seem to fail with me and it is almost certainly because I'm not really aware I'm reading a translation, somehow I need to sense that difference.
I certainly do with anything by Joseph Roth that Michael Hofmann gets his hands on, definitely did with my reading of Colette and Andrew Brown last week and likewise with Stefan Zweig and Anthea Bell at the moment.
Little wonder that I now feel I've been very remiss and must start to credit the translators too.

Not jolly hockey sticks

With apologies to Miss Dormer and I don't know why this has come to light today but it has and I must share it.
Do you remember that moment when any enthusiasm you might have had for PE suddenly withered and died? Like me you might have been strangely mad-keen on school sports.Centre Forward of the school hockey team, first in the queue at the long jump pit, dashing to the notice board to see if you'd made it into the tennis team (never).
Suddenly and almost overnight it dawned on you that going out in the pouring rain in a skimpy skirt to get covered in mud and clouted around the ankles was not actually that much fun?

Bugle Boy update from the kitchen table

I've probably shot myself in the foot this week after highlighting an error in a book because we've been doing proof reading of our own here and if anyone mentions proof-reading to me any more I really might have a fit of the vapours.
I must bring you up to date on happenings though because this is the bit of the finished book the likes of us don't usually witness.I always thought the labour-intensive process of giving birth to a book was the writing of it, well don't believe a word of it, it's the proof reading.
Bugle Boy by Len Chester (aka the Tinker and father of dgr all her life) and to be published by Long Barn Books in October is all going along very nicely.Everyone is working very hard on it.
Ages ago photos and all sorts of precious documents were entrusted to the Royal Mail and off to Long Barn  via Hilary at the Village post office, she loves it all.Utter the words, "this is very important/ precious/ must not get lost" and it gets her full attention, you sense she'd almost like to walk it there herself.
Then the edited manuscript with the photos in place came back and we had the first chance to read it in book-ish form as a pdf file complete with the Duke of Edinburgh's foreword which is something very special indeed and now we've proof read it all.
This involved four of us this end, the Tinker, Bookhound, Offspringette and moi reading it hundreds of times, over and over again and then sitting around the kitchen table on a wet Thursday afternoon for yet another of those sessions that will be a long-cherished memory.
The Tinker arrived with cakes and so fortified with a pot of tea we started.
"That should be an apostrophe"...
"why?"...
"because it should"...
"did you mean to say that?"...
"yes"...
"is that really how you spell that?"...
"yes"
"P86, line 8, word missing...where's it gone?"

Offspringette and her million words per minute typing skills creating a table of corrections.
There were some very funny moments as we had the primary historical source in our midst and not least a very arduous working out of an old £sd sum of money that taxed us heatedly to our limits.This times that times that divided by 240, then with 75 left over we took an age to make that into 6s3d.How on earth did we used to calculate that money?
Glimpses of dust jacket ideas became definitive designs and that means it's really definitely happening and it will be in shops and it will be a real book.The Tinker fancies a life-sized picture of himself in the bookshop in town, we've said he might as well just go and stand in there all day...which he probably will if he sees his very own book on the shelf.
Who'd have thought it? First book at 82 years young.
Only a few months to go and we're all a little bit excited and if you find any mistakes please don't tell me.

Widgets and Adam

I've been hearing about In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes here and there and I've linked to Caroline's blog  for some time under the Writer Blogs section here .It's been fascinating to watch the evolution of the book into print (to be published by The Friday Project) and with it Caroline's realization that she has acheived her ambition to become a published author.She is very open and honest about what the whole experience has involved (including giving up the funding to do her PhD)and I have enjoyed reading it enormously.
The scary bit comes next because now the baby has to be released into the wild to fend for itself and that will be very soon.
I had the good fortune to receive an e copy of the book to read via Me and My Big Mouth himself.
I made a great start at an e read and then stopped because actually it was shaping up into a really good book and I knew that meant I wanted to read it as a book in my hand because I'm an old fuddy duddy who gets much more out of the book in the hand experience.The book in the hand is on its way.
I'm getting better at e reading and will do much of the Long Barn First Novel Prize judging that way this year to save on the ridiculous costs of paper, printing and postage incurred otherwise. When it starts to narrow down though I will need paper and pencil in my hand.I haven't yet found a way to underline, annotate and marginalia-ise the screen on my laptop.I now write in every book I read, that's how bad it is.
Meanwhile a great pre-publication countdown widget for In Search of Adam has appeared on Scott's blog and there's nothing I love more than a good widget.
I have explored the In Search of Adam widget and installed it here.It's such a clever way of marketing a book online.Viral is the right word but in a nicer way than an infectious disease, which incidentally could spread no faster, and it would seem to be spreading the word very effectively.You can place your own pin on the world map if you want to but take care, I think I may have clicked too soon and I'm stuck in Latvia with no escape, was their Eurovision song any good?

It's Old Peculier time again

It's Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year time again and congratulations to Susan Hill for The Pure in Heart and Sophie Hannah for Little Face both shortlisted, both read and loved on here.
Let the voting commence here and this is where I shall look to the great crime fiction blogs for a lead on this one.Euro Crime is already on the case and although quieter lately I bet It's a Crime will be out there taking fingerprints.
Another day, another list but all a great way to discover the books out there and worthy of a read.

Endsleigh Salon update

I've held off posting about last week's reading group at Hotel Endsleigh just long enough for the SAS to clear out of the woods and for our airpsace to go quiet because anyone who reads the Daily Mail will know that Hotel Endsleigh was the venue chosen by Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall as base camp for their three day visit last week.
We sort of had an inkling because suddenly our quiet lanes seemed to be riven with slow-moving vehicles crawling along in convoys, and if one more helicopter had swooped low over the house giving us the once over we might well have gone mad.It's not so much the airborne divisions but our four dogs who know their valley and feel they must defend it against all-comers.They definitely sniffed the legions of sniffer dogs in the air and kept up a fairly constant and very defensive 72 hour Tamar-wide barking rota which no amount of explaining to them seemed to halt.
Should we perchance have been blind to those rather overt clues there was back-up, every delivery person kept the entire valley nicely informed.
So we all discreetly went about our business and it was book group as usual a few days before the visit and the onset of impenetrable security cordons.
Departing from our themed read we had all read the same book this time, Mistress of the Arts by Rachel Trethewey.I've mentioned it here before I know but it tells the very relevant local account of the life of Georgina, Duchess of Bedford. Endsleigh was her baby (she had twelve others) and much of what is there today is a direct result of the 1810 collaboration between the architect Jeffry Wyatt and landscape gardener Humphry Repton with plenty of Georgina's vivacious personality shining through.
As I steered my carriage (Ford Fiesta) down the long twisting driveway it was easy to envisage Georgy and the Duke doing the same journey 200 years previously.The rhododendrons were in full flower, glorious shades of neon technicolour, the arboretum fantastic and suddenly through the trees you get a tantalizing glimpse of the Tamar far below.
Georgina was another of the 'it' girls of the day and no wonder I had been confused in the past, there were Georginas vying for the post of Duchess of Bedford around every corner.
Once I'd unravelled my Georginas it was time to get in a tangle about the Dukes because having fallen head over heels for Francis, the filthy rich 5th Duke of Bedford, Lady Georgina Gordon had to rapidly switch allegiance to the newly installed 6th Duke, John, when the 5th Duke succumbed to a fulminating bout of peritonitis. Add in Georgina the deceased wife of the 6th Duke...I do hope you're keeping up... it's no wonder confusion reigned.
Later in the book enter the dashingly good catch Edwin Landseer the artist, in this portrait cleverly keeping his painting hand warm.Georgina astutely kept him out of the marriage market by bewitching him with her charms.There seems little doubt that her last child was Landseer's.
This led to much speculation about what exactly may have occurred 200 years ago in the exact room we were sitting in.Landseer was a frequent visitor to Endsleigh and the Duke seems to have settled happily for a menage a trois.
Following the 6th Duke's death various members of the family had their revenge and Georgy was forbidden ever to visit Endsleigh again, having to make do with lesser quarters in Scotland.Her native country welcomed her back with open arms which I felt a bit relieved about, anyone who provides a ducal family with that many heirs deserves better care than the family gave her.
All in all a book that we all felt we had enjoyed for the local colour and relevance but perhaps for this occasion we could have managed without the complex political information. It's a difficult balance this combination of personal and public spheres and in this instance we all wanted much more of the personal, 1800's Hello magazine stuff. In the end we invented a whole load of completely outrageous but very entertaining copy for ourselves.

Bright young things

An interesting list has appeared and you all know how I love a list.
This one from Waterstone's with predictions about the young authors to watch, Literary Britain - the next chapter.
Quite a few on the list that have been read, reviewed and loved here including
Jon McGregor - So Many Ways To Begin
Peter Hobbs - The Short Day Dying
Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Maggie O'Farrell - The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Charlotte Mendelson - When We Were Bad

A few more waiting in the wings
Naomi Alderman - Disobedience (I ground to a halt with this but haven't given up yet)
C.J.Sansom - Shardlake series (need to start at the beginning)

Several been meaning to
Louise Welsh - The Cutting Room
Jane Harris - The Observations
Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

Several never heard of but now think should have
Chris Simms -Outside the White Lines
Robyn Young - Brethren Trilogy
Siobahn Dowd - A Swift Pure Cry

Uncertains here
Jasper Fforde - can't fathom these at all
Marina Lewycka - great start, unsure about second, for me much will depend on number three.
Gautami Malkani - Londonstani haven't read but have followed the goss about the £300,000 advance for a book that did not live up to critical expectations.

Plenty there to look out for.

So Many Ways to Begin

Anticipating a year ahead of prize-list reading to which I'm addicted and won't be able to resist, I thought I should really deal with some of last year's unread books before I gather in any more.Having bought them in a fit of over-excitement and hard-back extravagence they have glared at me malevolently ever since.
From last year's Booker long list, So Many Ways To Begin by Jon McGregor seemed like a good place to start; not only for the title and the allure of the monochrome cover with that strangely compelling design but also because it has a nice burgundy ribbon bookmark.
Completely swayed by a tiny piece of ribbon, that's all it takes.I suppose that probably added at least £1 onto the price of the book but a ribbon is a clever bit of marketing to my mind, it already suggests
Class and refinement.
Old fashioned learning
History and tradition.
Cripes, it's only a bit of ribbon.
That aside I was instantly wrapped up in the book and quickly realized that this might have been a contender for the dgr Booker prize last year had I read it at the right time, sorry about that Jon.
David Carter is a museum curator who has had a lifelong passion for collecting and preservation. Married to Eleanor and with a daughter Katie. It is a chance and unguarded remark from that classic source, the slowly dementing relative, that sets David's life on a new course and one from which he will emerge having made some startling and unexpected discoveries,mostly about himself.
Ann over on Patternings recently made a very interesting observation when she read Ian McEwan's latest novelette, Chesil Beach.There was a glaring mishap in the timing of certain contemporaneous events that completely jolted her read.Perhaps it had been intentional, perhaps a copy editor's slip but it was enough to distract from the read. I had a similar occurrence with So Many Ways To Begin.
It was to all eyes such a minor detail as to be of little consequence and may seem a bit pedantic of me to hold it up for public perusal but it was enough to stop me reading and...well, this is it

"He wondered if his mother even knew about it.
    A hospital admissions card, headed Royal London Hospital Whitechapel, 29th March 1945.
    Brisk blue handwriting, the details spread neatly across the dotted lines..."

The addition of Royal to the hospital's name is very recent for a hospital that has been known as The London since its inception in 1740 to serve the population of the East End of London rapidly increasing with an influx of Huguenots and Jewish immigrants into Spitalfield's and Bethnal Green.
Alright, so I looked that history bit up, but I do remember feeling midly cheated to be seconded off to a hospital with such a boring name as a third year student nurse when there were exciting places like Addenbrooke's to go to.
Incidentally, great book on the hospital for anyone who is interested London Pride, The Story of a Voluntary Hospital by A.E.Clark-Kennedy and when we arrived we quickly realized it was a hospital as steeped in history and tradition as Gt Ormond Street and we loved it.
OK so no big deal, perhaps to writers these things don't matter in the grand scheme of things, but it quite put me off my stride for a while. I didn't go out for the four hour walk that Ann did to think about it all, but I do know exactly what she means.
I was however soon back in the groove and had one of those page turning reads of complete immersion.One of the superlatives about this book is the title because it resonates on just about every page, so many many ways to begin and Jon McGregor explores them all. I even appreciated the lack of speech marks as this astutely seemed to give the book the freedom to flow which it did.
I've now finally picked up The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai and yet again, the first 30 pages haven't worked any magic, plus there's no ribbon marker and the cover does not match my mood or my decor, but I will persevere because everyone tells me I must.

Francoise Sagan

Francoise Sagan, well there's an author to conjure up from my youth.1970's to be exact and these actual books did the rounds of our student nurse's flat time and time again.
Four of us lived on the middle floor of a house in Haringey, round the corner from the dog stadium and though it seemed palatial to all of us after the confines of a Nurse's Home it was probably nearer to squalid than we cared to admit. We did fly at it with lashings of lurid paint which compensated somewhat but waking up to find mouse droppings on your pillow was a sign that perhaps all was not well.
The house belonged to a very large Greek family who lived like sardines on the ground floor and were always excruciatingly helpful in the most persistent ways. If ever they caught us lugging our washing off to the launderette they insisted, absolutely insisted that we used the very ancient rusty old pram that they kept expressly for the purpose.
Yes it was me you saw looking like a furtive bag lady in Haringey High St in 1973.
The arrival of a pristinely new copy of The Unmade Bed by Francoise Sagan from Hesperus took me right back to those days.
We were all avid readers in our humble abode and books would whizz around us all at the rate of an infectious disease.Nurse training at a top London teaching hospital in the 1970's required A Level standard education and we'd all interestingly done English Literature and loved it whilst flogging wearily through Human Biology.This did not bode well for the hours and hours of Anatomy & Physiology we had to embrace and so recourse to fiction was our salvation and our escape from a world that had suddenly narrowed alarmingly.
I often look back and have to remind myself that we were only nineteen but all dealing with tragedy on an enormous scale and on a daily basis.Serious illnesses and frequently the death of our young patients and we were only young ourselves.You needed to learn very quickly how you were going to cope with all that.Most of our schoolfriends were whooping it up at university, it was often very tempting to go and join them.
Reading fiction was and still is an incredibly precious resource.
Some books are etched on my consciousness from this time.There was one called Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon that we were almost killing each other to get our hands on.
H.E.Bates, John Galsworthy,Nevil Shute, Joseph Heller all had their day but  favourites were the Francoise Sagan's, Bonjour Tristesse, Aimez-Vous Brahms..., La Chamade, The Heart-Keeper. All so precious that I still have my old 25p Penguin editions.
Every time I think it's time to throw them all out I can't.They are too faded, foxed and yellowed even for a jumble sale but the covers so of their time I only have to see them on the shelf to be back there...sitting in the launderette on Haringey High Street hoping against hope that someone, anyone would steal that rusty I'd pram left outside.
Honest as the day was long they were in Haringey in those days.

The Life of Bosie

New and interesting territory for me as I read Alfred Douglas: A Poet's Life and His Finest Work by Caspar Wintermans and published by Peter Owen.This a very readable account of  the infamous but lesser known life of Bosie, the cause of all Oscar Wilde's troubles.Oscar's revenge came in the shape of De Profundis and by this was Bosie judged for ever more.
Much maligned and scorned for a great deal of his life poor Bosie took to litigation for redress more times than was good for him. Bruised and battered after dragging Arthur Ransome unsuccessfully through the courts, Bosie then found himself mixing with the big league.To my complete surprise it was no less than a litigious encounter with Winston Churchill that finally sent Bosie the way of Oscar and a term in prison disentangling some oakum of his own.
Caspar Wintermans sets out to revoke the considered opinion of Bosie as "the most complete cad in history" and to a large extent I think he succeeds.
Two sides to every story and like many I only knew one and that was Stephen Fry's.It's years since I read Richard Ellman's biography.
Tragically Bosie's early life of beauty and privilege as the son of the Marquis of Queensbury did not endow him with many coping mechanisms.It was prison that reformed him by all accounts and he emerged a changed man, though he still aroused a great deal of suspicion and animosity.
When John Betjeman's mother discovered her son's correspondence with Bosie you can only begin to imagine the scene. John was ordered by his father "to concentrate on outdoor athletic activities rather than reading decadent verse".John resumed his friendship with Bosie and his wife Olive some years later and found Bosie to be "a gentleman with beautiful manners"
Which brings me nicely onto Bosie's poetry contained in its entirety in this volume.
It had little impact on me before I'd read the biography but following on afterwards and with an impression and a context now firmly established there are moments of real poignancy to be found.
The poems mirror the events of Bosie's life much as a diary might have done.
It's impossible to read the sonnet Behold, Your House is Left Unto You Desolate without picturing the distraught Bosie sitting in his empty house after his wife has left him and his soul-searching admission in another poem entitled To Olive

"I have been profligate of happiness
And reckless of the world's hostility,
The blessed part has not been given to me
Gladly to suffer fools, I do confess
I have enticed and merited distress,
By this, that I have never bowed the knee
Before the shrine of wise Hypocrisy,
Nor worn self-righteous anger like a dress"

The notes that accompany the poems are something I would usually skip but therein some nuggets of new knowledge for me.
I now know what a St Martin's Summer is and how exactly Edward II may have been tortured and susequently died.
A St Martin's Summer that period around his feast day on November 11th often characterized by a period of mild weather in England apparently.
Regarding the fate of Edward II, well, astounding.No plans to elaborate here, you'll have to research that for yourselves but I recounted it at the dinner table and there were groans all round.
Moving very swiftly on before I'm compelled to talk about the fate of the Plantagenet intrailes...
All a completely enjoyable, unusual and interesting read.Once I'd read the biography and then the poems I found myself in complete agreement with George Bernard Shaw to whom Bosie sent his collected poems in 1936
"For this be all thy sins forgiven thee".

Claudine's House

Reading my way to Paris from my armchair / bed /car /desk is proving to be full of that je ne sais quoi atmosphere and kicked off by a delightful book by Colette.
I'm very new to Colette and so Claudine's House from Hesperus looked like quite a gentle start.First published in 1922 and Colette's account of her childhood "In an idyllic countryside woodland setting...surrounded by a warm and loving family".
Her child's eye view of the world is remarkable for its detail and the recollection and interpretation of events going on around her.A constant flow of innocent and unrecognised truths about girlhood emerge.
"It doesn't often happen that little girls recognise beauty in one of their number and pay homage to it. But the undeniable beauty of young Bouilloux disarmed us"
There's another perfect little piece on a rural wedding that puts a different perspective on that memorable one portrayed by Flaubert in Madame Bovary. Colette views it all through the magical eyes of a little girl and suddenly you have a much more satisfying vision of the event than you ever had from Flaubert.
Colette's mother is the epitome of wisdom and steadfastness always ready with sage down to earth advice that must have stayed with Colette all her life.In the final few stories you see Colette as a mother to her daughter Bel Gazou passing much of it on.
Altogether a really satisfying read and to keep it company I dipped into Paris Was Yesterday 1925-1939 by Janet Flanner who was the Paris-based columnist for The New Yorker in that time.
Janet Flanner has something interesting, ascerbic or insightful to say on just about every famous and less famous person who ever frequented Deux Magots,walked the Champs Elysees or ended up in Pere Lachaise.
Her perceptive assessment of Ernest Hemingway after his death casts him in an entirely new light and of course she had something interesting to say about Colette too
"French literature is peculiarly devoid of nature - indeed, there is hardly a tree in the whole lot of it;and to the French, despite their instinct to appreciate him, Hardy reads rather like the pages from a seed catalogue.In their fine letters Colette is the first dendrophile they have possessed, the first writer to give them news of nature; she has the strangeness of a traveler who tells of an unknown land".
Every story in Claudine's House has a little kernel of something special wrapped up in some of the most endearing writing and I suspect it's to the credit of Andrew Brown's translation that I experienced a read very close to the original.

Berlin next via the coffee table.

Thanks to Steerforth I'm not going to linger too long in Paris this time round, bit of Colette, some Zola, a snippet of Sagan and then I must dash off to Berlin without more ado.Might this be the spur I need to finally succeed with Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz? Perhaps Meyrink's The Golem will have its moment?
The reason being his suggestion that I might like to take a look at the latest offering from Thames & Hudson, Berlin in the 20's by Rainer Metzger.No sooner looked than coveted I'm afraid and then it's but a small sin to command the Book Depository fairy to deliver it forthwith.
Another gargantuanly sumptuous book with 398 pictures of a city I know even less about than Paris.I think not speaking a word of German has always been a bit of a handicap, I don't even know what the shop signs say whereas at least I can hazard a good guess in French.
Coffee table books are an odd genre to my mind and I think Berlin in the 20's certainly fits the mould.I suspect the books are supposed to sit in a pile on  just looking pretty, giving visitors a key to your erudition but perhaps remaining largely unread.Well I have a very lovely long low coffee table that sits in front of me and coffee is the last thing that goes near it.
It is for books, books and more books and always an ongoing book like this one that is opened often randomly at a different page.
I have had so much pleasure from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die which sits at one end on a book stand. As well as being a constant reminder of how much I still have to read it seems like a travesty to keep books like this closed and so it sits open at a book relevant to a current reading project or an anniversary.
My recent Art Deco purchase is always open and piling up around will be the books that are accumulating as a new reading journey beckons.
I love my coffee table and it's really for my eyes only but I'll let you have a peek.

Happy Birthday to...

In celebration of the centenary of the birth of Daphne Du Maurier born on 13th May 1907, I thought I'd celebrate with a Daphne read this week.The plan was then to write a wildly enthusiastic birthday post urging the world and its mother to Pick Up a Daphne... but something strange happened.
My interest had been piqued by The Daphne Du Maurier Companion edited by Helen Taylor which I discovered on my trip to London a few weeks ago.It hasn't appeared on the shelves down here yet which confirms the wisdom of an occasional journey to the big smoke to hang out in bookshops and browse.
Rebecca is the definitive book that I consider to be my first read as a grown up, when I was fourteen and on a family holiday in St Ives.
I knew once I'd finished it that I'd never read as a child again.It then became imperative to read whatever I could lay my hands on and My Cousin Rachel was next.
So I embarked on another read of My Cousin Rachel last week;we're talking nearly forty years on and gallons of reading water under the bridge and somehow it didn't work. I could feel the disappointment rising as I read the first sixty pages and so I did something completely unheard of here and skipped to the last sixty because I knew instantly I was in danger of breaking the spell that Daphne Du Maurier's writing had cast all those years ago.
I needed to remind myself of the plot but that was all.
Sally Beauman's piece in the companion cites My Cousin Rachel as Daphne Du Maurier's final great bestseller, "a last throwing down of the novelistic gauntlet" although it came only halfway through her writing career.
I'll read the Companion because it's a fascinating insight into Daphne Du Maurier's life and work and of course browse again through Margaret Forster's seminal biography but beyond that for now I think I may just let Daphne rest in peace.
Retain precious and intact that memory of the impact her writing had on me as a teenager.
But please don't let that put anyone else off picking up a Daphne and reading her with huge enjoyment because she richly deserves to be read and remembered.
Happy Centenary Daphne.

The Orchard

Each year, in the absence of a Greek gardener (I want one of those) we try and work out (as in the royal we) how to make what is basically a corner of a field as light on the labour as possible. Cultivation is limited by the firm wish of said field to revert to its natural state the minute your back is turned.
We've been ambitious in the past, vegetable gardens, specimen plants, roses (we are the kiss of death to roses, they hate it here) things that will grow really fast and just cover everything and then you can't move and the Clematis Montana is lifting off the shed roof and so it goes on.
Finally perhaps we understand that we must obey and so in the last few years we have given the garden its freedom and now it's looking what you might call natural.
This year Bookhound has a new plan for the Millenium Orchard.
As you might expect, this is an overly grand name for a dozen or so fruit trees, it's tiny but has been desperately pretty in an understated way until recent stormy weather, so this is going to be the year of the mown-winding-paths-through-the-wild-meadow look. Building work a couple of years ago resurrected all those strewn-with-hope but consistently dormant wild flower seeds in true Somme poppy fashion and so now it looks perfect with very little help.
Being a graphic designer by training you can always expect something well-thought out from Bookhound. Hedges aren't just trimmed any old how, grass isn't just mown.He's already delighted with early efforts and we took a turn around his extensive network of interlinking routes last week. We (royal again) reinstated most of the lawn areas last year from over-ambitious but failed vegetable plots and currently the direction of the mown stripes is being laboured over, this in true Alan Clark motte and bailey style.

In a fit of generosity we've given up the summer house to the Gamekeeper for storage and a BBQ area of his own, now I see this picture I'm thinking that was a tad hasty, but needs must.
Traps and Young Farmers indoors? No thanks.

Then I had to go and gaze at Bookhound's log shed of which he is inordinately proud.

and all sealed with yet another beautiful sunset, we are very lucky children indeed.

Why go to Hay-on-Wye?

I was going to ration LitFests this year after quite a disappointing round of them all last year.It all left me feeling jaded and a bit cheated.
Not wishing to be controversial or cast aspersions or insult anyone or get knee-capped, but in my very humble opinion, as a consumer rather than a provider, my extensive research seems to show that writing a great book doesn't automatically turn you into a great public speaker.Truth be told, this aspect often needs a bit of application and I'm afraid I went to some grossly under-prepared and ultimately dull and god-awful dreary events last year.
I understand it must be enormously difficult to emerge from the seclusion of writing the masterpiece and have to thrust yourself out into the world of readers.But it's not rocket science,do the rounds and promote your book to within an inch of its life but please add a bit of zing to your voice and some interest to your story because I'm travelling long distances, paying a lot of money and really looking forward to hearing you speak.
I actually also want more than to just hear you read a large chunk of your great work.I may have already loved your book or I may be about to queue at the table afterwards to buy it, so you have the god-given opportunity to win me over to anything you may ever write again in your entire life.
On the other hand all I may remember is the occasion you disappointed me so much that I may need a great deal of persuasion to read you again.
I got the distinct impression many writers found it all a bit irksome and it showed.

NB Can you tell that I've had one of those weeks at work that has involved my having to be VERY assertive with a GP? I can only apologise to any writers reading this, blame the NHS.

There are a few honourable exceptions, people who I would put myself out to listen to,
Hilary Mantel, passionate and exciting
Penelope Lively, quietly measured but hugely intelligent, well-prepared and interesting
And then there was Julia Blackburn and that memorable occasion a few years ago when she read from her biography of Billie Holiday to a background track of Billie singing.Such a simple thing to set up and as she read the shivers went down every spine in the room, acres of goosebumps and hair standing on end. You suddenly realized you were in the midst of something very special.The atmosphere was charged beyond electric, the presence of Billie in that room and the pain and the anguish of her life all palpable as Julia read and Billie sang.We all had tears streaming down our cheeks.Prior to that day I had barely taken any notice of this great singer, from that day to this I have never forgotten the power of that moment.
Ask me what I saw last year and I can barely remember.

NB Can you now tell that the District Nurses who share my office (because it all happened in front of them) made a big pot of tea and we all had a big moan together and so now I'm feeling better?

So the Hay Festival programme arrives and I flick through in a rather desultory fashion.All a bit ungrateful considering there are literally hundreds of events to choose from and I'm sure you'll all have words with me and tell me not to be so churlish and judgemental.
Isn't that all very sad for a bookaholic like me? I should have been jumping up and down with excitement but I wasn't.
While I'm in this revelatory and seeringly honest mood I might as well own up, I really don't enjoy the Hay Festival tented venue, it doesn't have the soul that I have found at other LitFests (goodness I can hear the hit being taken out on me right now)
Far too much canvas.
You all know how I hate anything that makes me think I'm camping.Tents and marquees have a gloom and a smell of their own, the sight of a guy rope gives me the heebie jeebies, makes me feel depressed.I associate it all with latrines and burnt baked beans.
But I suppose Hay is do-able in a day from here.Early start, lovely drive up via Tintern Abbey and the Wye Valley. Bookhound's speciality LitFest picnic in a field and a wander round the bookshops.Can't all be bad and eventually I capitulated, because I found a couple of potential gems in the programme.
We'll drive home very late but Bookhound says that's alright, we're grown ups so no one will tell us off.

In Other Words

On the subject of Indie bookshops closing at the rate of one a week I was mortified to see that In Other Words in Plymouth will be closing its doors after 25 years.
I was worried the last time I went.I sensed the shop was in its death throes, something didn't feel right when I walked in.
Was it the rows and rows of books facing outwards to use up more shelf space suggesting diminishing stock? Was it the lack of up to the minute titles?
Was it just in the air amongst the staff?
It's out of the city centre admittedly and may have suffered from the fact that it is no longer on the doorstep of the old Plymouth hospitals of Freedom Fields and Greenbank.The demographics of the area have changed beyond all recognition.It was a borderline shabby shopping area but in an acceptable way, now it can't even support a Spud-u-like.That's a takeaway baked potato business for the uninitiated which we all used to pronounce as Spaduleekay, it sounded much better.
Having been esconced in the hospitals as parent of a patient on several occasions In Other Words used to be walkable too and back again while the little post-tonsillectomy child had an afternoon nap.
Now of course everything has moved out to Derriford and you have to make a special effort to visit, which we do on every Plymouth trip.
I wonder how many other cities no longer have an independent bookshop?
The premises that I had earmarked for a lovely big bookshop in Tavistock has been snaffled by Witherspoon's pub chain (rents so astronomical we knew it would be something national) which will bring the total number of hostelries in a very small,concentrated market town centre area well into double figures.
I suppose it's all still got to go before the Town Council and the planners so we will all be watching keenly to see what happens next.
How much do they really value the uniqueness of the town?
Is Witherspoon's progress?
Am I getting old?
Is the moon round?
Meanwhile tomorrow the town has royalty visiting, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall are dropping by for the 150th anniversary of the local paper.
They'll be excited about it all no doubt and here are this week's headlines.

Book-to-book transfusion

Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner proved to be a good but bizarre read in the end.
Good in that I enjoyed it, plot, atmosphere and sense of place which has sent me scurrying back to some Parisian reading.Set at the opening of the tower at the 1889 Universal Exposition and an outbreak of the killer bees...perhaps.These translations from Gallic Books will give us some of the latest contemporary reads from France.You have to wonder whether they get any of ours?
Bizarre in that I was reading two other books at the same time, not exactly the same time but in my usual rotational fashion and, in that rather surreal way that can happen, they all transfused into each other.I was getting more and more confused and had myself down for early Alzheimer's by last Friday especially as I'd also forgotten where I'd parked my car at the surgery one day last week too.
In fact the car park had been full and the surgery empty which meant everyone had nipped in, had their blood taken and cheekily gone off shopping for the morning (hope none of you do that) so I'd had to sneak a spot in the Social Services car park next door (where no one wants anyone to see their car parked, but I'm not fussy)
But book-to-book transfusion is an odd thing. Two books, Murder on the Eiffel Tower and Season of the Witch by Natash Mostert had characters with the fairly unusual name of Isidore and both books had a scene about a life drawing class.Then Season of the Witch and Self Help by Edward Docx both had main characters called Gabriel and featured scenes where characters are paralysed by a stroke.Self Help also had a life drawing class scenario and was partly set in Paris.
Confused?
I did that little check-the-faculties quiz they use on the elderly.
Can you name the prime minister?
Can you count back from 100 subtracting 3 each time?
It's really worth starting to practice this in your 50's so that it trips off your tongue because it will be sprung on when you least expect it when your children are wanting to stash you in a home.I got stuck on the PM question and my maths is hopeless so I may as well book my room now.
Murder on the Eiffel Tower has the benefit of a fabulous cover and a writing partnership between two sisters and of course Season of the Witch is about two sisters but they aren't booksellers on the banks of the Seine whose next book will be The Pere Lachaise Mystery.
I can't wait for that one but meanwhile how to fuel my Parisian reading?
I'm still not feeling brave enough to tackle Balzac but do have Cousin Bette waiting when I have amassed the courage.Could someone hold my hand and tell me it'll be fine?
So it's back to old faithful Emile Zola and this time Nana which I'm loving, so far no one called Isidore and no life drawing classes but give it time.I've yet to read a Zola which isn't instantly accessible,readable and entertaining yet in a previous life I may have considered him way out of my reach.
I'm also on my first encounter with Colette courtesy of Hesperus Press and Claudine's House, very impressive read and more on that soon.
Another book off the shelf that came via Sharon at Ex Libris Waiting for Gertrude A Graveyard Gothic by Bill Richardson, felines in Pere Lachaise so perhaps life drawing classes even less likely and then finally I must read the book that Offspringette told me about ages ago Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs The Left Bank World of Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer.

Self Help

There can be little doubt that by the time you reach the end of Self Help by Edward Docx (due for publication in July) you have been on  a very long and chilly Dostoevskyan Russian journey with some latter-day New York, Paris and London thrown in.
At 500+ pages in proof copy it's the length of a Russian novel too and in many ways it takes this long for the cast of characters in this book to sort themselves out.Several of them seem to be following in Raskolnikov's footsteps and probably other Dosty characters but I've only ever read Crime and Punishment so that's the only comparison I can safely make.It's also the only real image I have in my mind of St Petersburg so any hint of it in a novel and I lock onto it.
That said this is also a thoroughly modern novel of our times.
Gabriel and Isabella, twin children of Masha and her estranged Paris-based husband Nicholas Glover, are called to St Petersburg following Masha's sudden death.
The family has its roots in the spy set of Cambridge University where Nicholas's father Grandpa Max first joined the ranks.I never quite grasped who had spied for who but really that's not what this book is about.
Each member of the family and some add-ons, including the talented pianist Arkady Artamenkov and his mentor the drug-raddled Harry, have to work out how best to help themselves extract whatever it is they want and need from life and all in amongst the tangled web of intrigue that Masha has left behind.
Several moments of great pathos stick in my mind, you will be hard-pushed to read a more heart-rending account of the hopelessness of heroine addiction for a start...unless of course you've read Some Hope by Edward St Aubyn in which case you'll be able to make evidence-based comparisons between the privileged and the down-and-out approaches.Both have similar outcomes.No veins, no money and death hovering around every fix.
Self Help did not feel like a page-turner to me, more a slow burner of a book that gets under your skin and takes hold as you follow the undulating course of all these lives as they move towards an unexpected twist in the tale that I hadn't really seen coming.One of those twists that was clever enough to make me go back over the long and chilly Dostoevskyan Russian journey with some New York, Paris and London thrown in and interpret first thoughts into second thoughts and come to some quite different conclusions about everyone.
That makes it a good read but prepare yourself, it's quite a cold one, you will need chocolate and blankets.

Season of the Witch

I get lots of lovely e mails now asking me to read books and all I can say to that is happy happy joy joy. I make it clear that I only post on here about books I have really enjoyed so a free book is absolutely no guarantee but thank you anyway and yes, I eventually give them all a go.Strangely though I desperately want to enjoy every book that arrives because I love books per se, this isn't paid employment so each one feels like a present.
So I set out my ground rules with a PR company who contacted me last week whilst secretly thinking good grief, a book about "love, death,alchemy, the power of the human mind to transform and transcend reality"...do I have to? But hold on, that's what I love about reading and why I do this.
Send me the book and I'll go there.
Next morning at warp speed a copy of  Season of the Witch by Natasha Mostert arrives inviting me to "enter a world of beauty and darkness...two sisters, a mysterious house" and actually my house is a tip and I have a pile of ironing to do but I'll read the first few pages and see whether it's a now or later book.
To be honest, I'm preparing for the worst and fully expect to have the ironing done within the hour, though I do quite like the cover,in fact, I really like the cover.
An unusual but obscure poem kicks things off and I don't heed that too much, then a rather surreal prologue, bit of a drowning episode and onto the first section titled House of A Million Doors with a quote from Johannes Trithemius, Steganographia 1499.
Oh careful, careful Natasha, I'm still interested but things now have the potential to go either way; too much New Age crystal gazing or a whiff of a sandal and I'm out of here, please no Victorian pastiche either, so imagine my relief when I get to the first sentence
"Was there anything as cool as rush hour traffic on a hot day?"
Praise be, this is going to be grounded in 21st century reality, I think I'll cope.
I've more than coped, to be honest I think I've been taken over by powerful forces beyond my control.This is one of those truly mesmerizing reads that seems to have appeared from nowhere.Other novels about sisters and mysterious houses and with massive advances have come and gone and disappointed here (though not elsewhere I know) and I hadn't heard a whisper about this one, no hype, nothing.
I know this is the back of beyond but news usually filters through.
It's a tightly plotted, well-structured and finely written gothic novel that never lost me.Hacking into the mind features alongside the computer-hacking industry and it's only a small step to seeing the similarities.I was happily suspending disbelief very early on and this is a writer's skill much appreciated here.Had I once thought "do me a favour!" this book would have sunk, but by the end you actually believe the whole thing could almost be possible, that's how convincing it is.Back to the beginning and that poem and the prologue now have greater significance.
Season of the Witch must also win the prize for the very best named sisters ever...the enigmatic and alluring Minnaloushe and Morrighan Monk, fictional descendants of John Dee the Elizabethan alchemist, beat that.
Natasha Mostert has certainly written a great read with her fourth book and at £12.99 sensibly priced for a 400+ page hardback and doubtless available a good deal cheaper if you shop around which might not please the publishing or bookselling world but it's the reality out here at the book buying end.
I don't know who to tell to get them to take the slightest bit of notice but when a hardback novel comes priced at £16.99 or more it has an uphill struggle here until it comes out in paperback.
I shall be hunting down more by Natasha because I love her style, meanwhile you can visit her at MySpace and her website and risk madness with that memory game if you dare.
Just guard your portals and lock down your firewalls whatever you do and I'll sit here and await the hired help that I'm sure the PR person agreed to send if I read this book and posted about it because now the kitchen floor needs washing, the hoover could do with going round, more ironing...

Art Deco is still me

I'm sorry to be a nuisance and go on about it but I'm still suffering the pangs of the Art Deco craze at the moment in fact I'm not sure I've ever really grown up where crazes are concerned.The enthusiasm just grips me feverishly, not that different from all those school crazes, French skipping (one packet of elastic bands knotted together) juggling balls, cat's cradle,(did anyone know beyond the first three moves?) jacks.
So now I'm seeking out Art Deco everywhere and badgering Bookhound for a trip to Burgh Island over at Bigbury Bay. Hot on the heels will be a bout of the Agatha's I'm sure. All stirred into action by my V&A trip, and the sight of this book.
Firstly I can confirm that it does weigh a full 6lbs and this could be why I didn't buy it at the V&A thinking sensibly for once about the journey home.So in moments like this it seems wise to let The Book Depository take the strain, post free and 2/3rds of the cost.The reality was that the postman refused to lift it out of his van and made Bookhound walk out and get it.
But you only have to gaze to know what a treasure trove it is.
The older I get the more I seem to be realizing how much I still need to discover and how many things I thought I knew enough about but actually know very little. Then I'm off on a wild forage for anything I can find.
I'm looking forward to finally seeking out the real origins of Art Deco and how and where it developed once I can get past the ravishing pictures and onto the words.Once I've got a grip on that I think it will be possible to sift out some great Art Deco novels. F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is probably a good place to start.Such a vibrantly strong design style that seems to have dictated a whole way of life must have found its way into fiction every which way.Suggestions welcome.

Not a jot of Art Deco in the house I thought until I suddenly remembered this little powder compact which belonged to my mum and was brought back by her brother-in-law from the 1939 New York World's Fair and still some powder inside.

We're all going on a summer holiday

Every summer I book a fortnight's holiday from work and it's become quite a big joke at the surgery.
"So where are you going this year then ?" they all ask me at coffee time.
"Oh just pottering around at home" says I because that's what we tend to do.It's too lovely to leave and to be honest we rarely feel the need to get away far.No need to send any postcards, put dogs into kennels, get cats fed...
Some years I'll jokingly say "
"Off on a Carribean cruise" and everyone has a jolly good laugh.
Well I hope someone asks me this year because guess what?
Bookhound has offered me a week watching him fly-fishing on the Tay in Scotland where it will probably rain and be freezing cold and the conversation will consist of "pass me the landing net....quick" or "did you see the size of that one?". A deckchair, thermos and curly sandwiches on the river bank and an evening meal in the company of lots of avid fishermen all with stories to tell of the ones that got away.Lovely.
The Tinker on the other hand has offered me a week cruising around the Carribean with him and friend Podge in my own Junior Suite with a private balcony and a 3000 book library at my disposal.I'll have to meander around the Gulf of Mexico, hop off to Montego Bay, nip into Grand Cayman and pop by Mexico.There will be sunshine, a lounger by the pool, a mint julep or two and more food than I normally eat in a year for me, whilst the two 82 year old ex-Royal Marines down in steerage busy themselves scrubbing the decks,splicing the mainbrace, watching out for icebergs, sending morse code messages and going on runs ashore.
What a tough call this is...how I'd love to sit on the banks of the River Tay watching the fishing, wrapped up in my waterproofs and wellies (he reads this) but really we must look after our retired folk too. In fact I'm sure it's a government Health of the Nation priority, Every Pensioner Matters.If the document hasn't been published yet expect it any day.
So I gave it all a great deal of thought, a good ten seconds, before I dashed off to check my passport was in date and started to amass my cruise wardrobe to accompany these two on a life on the ocean wave.
Now several months will be spent anguishing over which books to take in case 3000 is not enough to choose from.
Oh yes, and I couldn't leave the blog behind, I'm welded to you all, so I shall be taking you along for a little holiday too.
Meanwhile please start the reading suggestions.

Last Sunday's Confessions On Saturday and Oscar's Conker

Time for some more Fidra Books I decided so I whizzed off an order and I intentionally haven't shown the cover of The School on North Barrule by Mabel Esther Allan to make you all go to the Fidra website and take a look and then you'll see why I had to have it.
Who could possibly resist it? Nothing like a good boarding school story especially if set on an island, this one the Isle of Man.My last one of these was a Dorita Fairlie Bruce, The Girls of St Bride's from Girls Gone By Publishers.I've also added another Olivia Fitzroy, Steer by the Stars, more children's camping, fishing and sailing and plenty of free-spirited adventures.
Thanks to Gallic Books for a copy of Murder on the Eiffel Tower which has been much enjoyed around the blogs.Bringing translations of contemporary French authors to a British readership seems like such a simple and sensible idea you wonder it hasn't been done before.Perhaps it's taken this long for us to own up as a nation that, much as we'd like to think French learnt at school equipped us to tackle French novels, actually it hasn't...well mine hasn't and Mademoiselle Deadman did tell me as much.
A Little Blue Jacket by Lucy Ann White arrived from Lucy and I can't wait to start this one, another perfect cover and a lovely website to match.Lucy blogs here and her latest post offers some fascinating background to this book.I think when a book comes with a whole package such as this I'm even more interested.
Any new book from Adele Geras is gratefully received and so a proof of her latest A Hidden Life won't be lying unread for very long.Family feuds and a bookish inheritance with an explosive secret and that's me hooked.
Finally a wondrous challenge of a read from Peter Owen, Alfred Douglas, A Poet's Life and His Finest Work by Caspar Wintermans.This will be catapult me into a completely new reading galaxy and a probable return foray into all things Oscar.Bosie's story often overshadowed by Oscar Wilde's and this book described as "Greek tragedy with elements of soap opera" looks eminently readable.I always feel desperately sad for Oscar Wilde when I read that account of his death in Richard Ellman's biography, the loneliness, the agony of an abcess in his ear and that wallpaper.
Then I'll have to dig out my pics of the trip to Pere Lachaise in 1998 and Oscar Wilde's grave and I hope you didn't think I'd come away without a souvenir. Here's Oscar's Conker, I did try to grow a horse chestnut tree out of one of these but fortunately nothing happened.
What with this and Sylvia's Borage you'll think I've got a bit of thing about grave memorabilia.

The Bluebell Pilgrimage

Friday evening, time for a Tamar Valley walk.
On with the boots and I'll take you on the Bluebell Pilgrimage.
Just a ten minute stroll across the fields and we find ourselves heading up to what has been fondly termed The Mushroom Wood, because it just looks like one, that's all...not because it's a great source of mushrooms.

As you walk up through four fields of clover you get a lovely view of the little Methodist Chapel behind you.

But the speciality of this woodland is the bluebells and though we can walk up there any time we want to, we make a point of going up in early May.

It's always worth remembering to look upwards, the atmosphere is quietly soporific

Testing out the settings on my camera I am mastering Macro, often wondered what that flower symbol was for

Sometimes a cat or two will stroll along with us but not this evening, far too nice on the sunny verandah

And here's me, not doing a dance to the trees but taking my treetop canopy pictures.

Margaret Calkin James

Undaunted by the closed textile galleries at the V&A I was browsing in the shop when I came across a delightful book about a designer from the 1930's. I had never heard of her by name but of course I knew her work.Instantly recognizable and this was the book that I read on the train home.
The Sign of the Rainbow by Betty Miles about Margaret Calkin James born in 1895, a truly gifted artist and one of those whose work just appeals to my eye instantly.
Enrolling in Central School of Arts and Crafts was unusual for a woman in the early 20th century and the emphasis was on "secure technique as the pre-requisite for confident self-expression". Add in Margaret's "lively freedom of expression and awareness of new ideas" and you have a recipe for something very special indeed.
The Rainbow Workshops in Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury, established after the Great War and very much in the tradition of the Omega Workshops of Roger Fry, became one of the first galleries opened by a woman to promote art,craft and design.The idea of selling directly to the public was innovative and a way of avoiding the conservative retail trade and thereby promoting new ideas.
Like me you may have unwittingly been looking at Margaret Calkin James's work for years and not realised, how about these London Transport posters?

Or this endpaper from a republished edition of  The Runaway by Elizabeth Anna Hart? This School Room fabric incorporates some of Margaret's favourite motifs, the ark on the waves,stylized plant forms, a Dutch boy and a dancer and a Christmas tree to remind them all year round of family togetherness.
There were a series of beautiful book jackets for Jonathan Cape which almost make me think it is time for the return of the Art Deco dust jacket, somehow they seem timeless.
Perhaps Art Deco has never quite slipped from our consciousness?
Later in life Margaret suffered a stroke which deprived her of speech and the use of her right arm.You can only begin to imagine the devastation.However reading this book one thing becomes quickly apparent, Margaret Calkin James was a quietly determined lady with an indomitable spirit. Nothing was ever going to stop her creativity and she embarked on a series of designs in wool embroidery using her left hand.
One very remarkable and exceptionally talented artist whose work deserves to live on and who now merits an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (head to the website and log on with your library ticket number ) and I am grateful to Elizabeth Argent, Margaret's daughter, for permission to share some of the images here.

Hesperus

Wish my Latin was a bit more up to the mark.
Trouble was I moved schools when I was 13 and the new school was a full year ahead on the syllabus, ie moving on from textbook one, Principia, to textbook two, Pseudolus Noster.I'd missed out a whole load of conjugating and I never quite caught up eventually fielding a miserable F grade at O Level.
There are advantages, I can spell 'necessary' and the school motto, Qui Cessat Esse Melior Cessat Esse Bonus has proved a useful quote at many a stressful moment.Oliver Cromwell apparently found it so handy he wrote it in his Bible.You can bring a staff meeting to a grinding halt with such wisdom, ah yes that's all very well but but he who ceases to be better ceases to be good.
Arriving at the new school I felt a bit undersold with Serve God and Be Cheerful.
So I was stumped and grateful to Hesperus Press for a little help with their motto, Hesperus et remotissima prope, to bring near what is far. This both in space and time making little known or unjustly neglected works accessible through new translation or a refreshing editorial approach, great care taken in production from cover to paper, printing to binding.
I can vouch for that because the widest selection of books has arrived and plenty of uncharted reading territory for me.Colette's Claudine's House, Rosamond Lehmann's The Gipsy's Baby, Prosper Merimee's Carmen, a lesser known Edith Wharton The Touchstone and even a Jonathan Swift Polite Conversation. This latter forcing me voluntarily onto a road most certainly less travelled.
Why has 18th century literature always seemed like the literary equivalent of pulling teeth without anaesthetic?  It has just never interested me so I'm relying on you all to step in and berate me heartily telling me how much I'm missing and where to start because of course my dislike is based on nothing at all really.
All the Hesperus forewords are by the names of the moment, Salley Vickers, Philip Pullman, Toby Litt thus bridging the time gap and placing these books firmly in a 21st century setting.
However you can doubtless see the little treasure in that stack,The Platform of Time : Memoirs of Family and Friends by Virginia Woolf. This one a hardback and containing some unfamiliar and previously unpublished material including a memoir of Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf's nephew. Unfinished but written in the days immediately after news of Julian's death in 1937 whilst fighting in the Spanish Civil War.
It's written with Virginia's particular eye for the ordinary which she has a way of making sound quite unique and unusual, creating as clear a picture with her painterly words as Vanessa, Julian's mother, would have surely created with her brushes.

"He had a peculiar way of standing:his gestures were, as they say characteristic.He made sharp quick movements, very sudden considering how large and big he was,& oddly graceful. The reminded one of a sharp winged bird...I remember his intent expression..he had a very serious look"

Even more poignant some of Vanessa's own memories of her son written at about the same time

"When I first held him in my arms - the softness of his dark brown silky hair. All pain had become worthwhile.
Confused overwhelming feelings one did not understand.
Pain.Distress. Invasion of one's life.
     Then danger to him and Knowledge of what I felt"

This is altogether a varied and wonderful collection of Virginia Woolf's writing on friends and family and no Bloomsbury shelf should really be without it so I'm glad I've got it on mine.

Little did I know...

I'm putting a link here to the brand new blog of an old friend and in a way this was bound to happen.
I've done quite a lot of reading around the subject of breast cancer lately with Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto and Take Off Your Party Dress by Dina Rabinovitch and I know it's touched a chord with quite a few of you judging by all the messages I received both on and even more off the blog.
In the back of my mind hovered that thought, what if ? As it does.
Perhaps it could happen to me? Perhaps a friend? Has all this reading really prepared me for what I might do or say? I thought it had...but had it?
So when a friend broke the news a few weeks ago that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer it made for an interesting conversation.Thanks to Dina I could sound quite knowledgeable about Herceptin and Her2 type cells etc.for a start.
Like me she's an avid reader who also writes, but she's also a recently retired nurse and health visitor who knows the profession and the NHS inside out.We know all there is to know about evidence-based research and outcomes so we also tend to suffer slightly differently to other mortals when we find ourselves in the system.
In the end we actually know far too much.
It's nigh on impossible to hide anything from us because we know all the tricks.But I also knew that of all people,once the initial shock had subsided, this friend would see it from quite a unique angle because she has a huge sense of humour.
Of necessity things get off to quite a serious start but watch that space.
I think her take on this will be quite unusual so I wish her a warm welcome to blogdom at http://gettingitoffmychest.typepad.com.

Reinterring The Unburied and Two Caravans left on site.

Like Nelson I have a column of my own except mine's not in Trafalgar Square but in that lovely reading magazine of the people, newbooks. It used to be called newbooksmag and having written a few pieces for them in the past I have now been given a regular slot which I love doing.They will also send you a complimentary copy so head to the website and take a look.
In fact if you get the latest edition and only decide to keep p38, a lovely piece by Adele Geras, then you get me as well because I'm over on p39.
For the next edition a piece on...well perhaps that's a secret and you'll have to get the magazine but suffice to say it led me to thinking about the whole thorny subject of book failures in recent weeks.
It's a strange thing when a book comes highly lauded and then you struggle with it and I've just had a second time of asking with The Unburied by Charles Palliser which kept Susan awake until 2am and had plenty of other staunch supporters but sent me to sleep at 3pm last Sunday afternoon.I suspect Susan may be finely tuned into the subject matter of this one, ghosts, elusive eleventh century manuscripts, ecclesiastical setting  and an historical complexity that has defied me.
This time I gave it as far as p91 which is forty pages beyond my normal cut off and I'll admit that at p50 I still felt in touch with proceedings, then I really did just lose the plot which became even more convoluted and then I was quickly in a mess with all the names and who lived when, who had double-duped who 200 years ago and finally I surrendered.I'm loath to do this because I keep thinking perhaps I'll get it in the next few pages but sometimes you just have to make the decision and stop.That always leaves me with a strange feeling of unrequited book completion and I now I'll be wondering about it for weeks.
Then I picked up the weekend literary section just to get the drift of what's what and opened at a full page advert for another very recent reading failure and started to feel like I was being slapped in the face with a wet cod.This one I had awarded four valiant attempts and up to p64 before abandoning in an effort to enjoy it and it absolutely would not happen no matter how hard I tried.Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka, the second novel after the brilliant and much-loved A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. I read that one long before it hit the bestseller lists and loved so much about it.
The review clips for Two Caravans (which for some reason I keep typing as Tow Caravans) were eulogisingly wonderful "Brims with comedy, her last book was entertaining but this one is better"..."the fictional equivalent of chocolate laced with chilli"..."a comic triumph, funny clever and well-observed" and then you start to feel as if you live on a different planet.Obviously this one is another Captain Corelli's Mandolin and I've cut it off a page or so too soon.
Doubtless I'm going to be billy-no-mates and you'll all read it, laugh and cry like drains and adore it while I sit here and just don't get it so I hope you'll all drop by and explain it to me when you've read it and then perhaps I'll try again.
Meanwhile The Unburied is to be reinterred on the shelves until it's next resurrection and I'm a bit disappointed with myself because I really did want to enjoy it.

May Day 1950's style, don't laugh!

May Day so certainly time to dig and delve into the photo album for the old Box Brownie May Queen pictures.
I must hastily add that I never reached the dizzy heights of May Queen,a purple velvet cloak, a crown and a carriage of my own.However Mitcham in South London used to take all this very seriously in the late 1950's so you joined the ranks at a very early age as an attendant with ambition.
I was thankful to have missed the Fairy stage which was for the very youngest girls.Sadly my friend down the road Jacqueline hadn't but may wish she had looking at this now.
I do remember being quite envious of the wand and wings idea but not the little sticky-out frock.
Most exciting was going to bed in hair rollers the night before in an effort to make my dead straight hair curl.This was worth every minute of agony to get a fringe like that.
I started as a Rosebud with a pink sash, you then moved up to Buttercups the following year and a yellow sash.This then qualified you to be a Lily of the Valley with a green sash the next year, quite a senior position, with a final move up to top ranking Forget-Me-Nots and the coveted blue sash for your last year as a walking attendant.
The next year you graduated and could be an actual personal assistant to the May Queen herself, thus getting the must-have short purple velvet cape, a modest tiara and a go at holding her train.I actually retired with a fragrant Lily of the Valley qualification and went back to my roller skates as a better option.
We'd all parade around the Green so here's the action shot of me doing that, leading off at the front there and the old Mitcham Town Hall in the background.Then we sat for hours to watch the Maypole dancing which I thought I was probably best out of. With no clear knowledge of my left from my right hand to this day, even at that tender age I could see it would be utter misery.I would certainly have created a lovely round turn and two half hitches on that maypole instead of the very clever spiralled ribbon effect.
The only other lead-off-at-the-front experience I can remember in my life was at a school gymnastic display to a hall full of parents.I was the smallest and so had to run out first with the whole team following on behind and my pride knew no bounds.
Thankfully such overweening self-aggrandizement was nipped in the bud as I led off and ran out gathering pace round the hall nicely, tripped over the edge of the mats, went flat on my face and the whole gym team, by now going at quite a lick, sprawled on top of me.
It was one of my finest moments and I've lurked at the back ever since.