Cornflower Books

Back in print - soon

    Good news from Bloomsbury: under the title The Bloomsbury Group, " A new library of books from the early twentieth century chosen by readers for readers", they are to be reprinting some of my favourites, and they are due out in a few months' time.
    I was very taken with Miss Hargreaves, loved The Brontes went to Woolworths, and as for Henrietta, she is a complete delight and I'll write about her when the book comes out.

Escaping

    I could do with some escapist literature just now. Not froth, nothing so light it blows away in a breeze, but something solid and nice and warm and comfortable that transports you happily from the here and now.
    A quick search suggested Dorothy L. Sayers, Georgette Heyer and Neil Gaiman. Any more? 

Later: thinking the post could do with a picture, perhaps by way of inspiration for your suggestions, I did an image search for 'escapist literature', and this came up (here's the source) -

 

What can I say?

In paperback

     Just a quick reminder for anyone who has been waiting for the paperback edition of Justine Picardie's Daphne: it's out next week. I read the book last summer and was mightily impressed (my thoughts are here). I also had the privilege of hearing Justine talk about it, and that's a bit like getting a glimpse of the vast mass of the iceberg which is below water level - the amount of research which was then expertly distilled and reduced to its essential elements to form the work of fiction is staggering.

New voice

     I'm pleased to read that one of Waterstone's New Voices (the books from emerging writers it tips for success) is Francesca Kay's An Equal Stillness. As you'll see from this post, it impressed me very much.

A colony of Penguins

     Next year will see Penguin celebrating its 75th. birthday, and its archive has been called "a window into 20th. century British culture". You can read the full article about it here - and visit the archive project here.
     One of the latest books to appear on the Blog a Penguin Classic site (which many Cornflower readers contributed to in recent months) is our Book Group book for February, The Lost Estate. You'll see the reviewer wasn't as keen on it as many of us were!

Folk tale

    This is an enormously impressive book. It has been hailed as Philippe Claudel's masterpiece, and though I don't know his other work, Brodeck's Report is so extraordinarily fine that it would be hard to better it. I finished it on Saturday and read another novel straight through yesterday, but mentally I am still in the mountains with Brodeck and in this book which is both beautiful and terrible.

     Apparently set just after the second world war and in the border lands between France and Germany, it reads more like a fable or a Brothers Grimm fairytale from nameless mountain country where a village is almost cut off from the outside world. Apart from a few modern references, it could be describing life a century or two ago, and this timeless quality and the village's remoteness is part of the book's strange magic.

    Brodeck has survived truly dreadful events, and now in more settled times he has returned to his home and subsists as a recorder of natural data for a faraway Administration. When a mysterious and eccentric visitor to the village meets a violent death, Brodeck is charged by the mayor with writing a report of the incident; in doing so, his own story and that of the village is revealed.

    At once simple and profound (and all credit to the translator who has produced a seamless work), the book dissects with the sharpest of scalpels and so with great delicacy the idea of 'otherness', of what it is to be a stranger, someone from 'the outside', and in its spare, lucid prose it is extremely powerful. I can't recommend it too highly.

Hard sums

   Confession time: I've skipped bits of this book!! The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt is about a number of mathematicians, and it has equations and things here and there, and I didn't even begin to try to understand them as I have no time just now (and doubtless not enough knowledge anyway), but that apart, it is a fascinating insight into a very cerebral world.
   Set in Cambridge just before and during the first world war, it's a stark portrait of a time and place, and more importantly, of a group of brilliant individuals, foremost among them being the Indian clerk of the title, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a man of little formal education and great genius who comes to Trinity College from Madras at the behest of the famous Hardy and Littlewood.
    A couple of passages struck me for what appears to be their summing up of this unusual breed of men and their work:

"....unlike Littlewood or Bohr or...any other great mathematician whom Hardy has known, [Neville] is happy. Almost carefree. Perhaps this is why he will never amount to anything. He does not embrace solitude, much less suffering. He loves the world too much".
and,
"All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That's the biggest paradox of all - all this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell".

    Whether it's the maths or the war or their personal frustrations, and with the possible exception of Neville (above) what an unhappy bunch they all were, and how guarded their personalities seem. Still, it's an extremely detailed, densely written account, which reads very true and is highly illuminating.

Grand book, shame about ...

....the cover!
    What relevance this cover has to the excellent novel it contains I cannot begin to understand. Ignore it - and the title, which was changed from the hardback one of "The Winter Sea" (which is relevant to the story), and read this engrossing mix of historical fiction and contemporary romance.
      Sophia's Secret by Susanna Kearsley features Carrie McClelland, a best-selling novelist who comes to Cruden Bay on the Aberdeenshire coast to research her next book. The heroine of her eighteenth century story proves to have more in common with Carrie than she first suspected, and as events unfold in both the present day and in 1708, the plot twists in a most satisfying way. Here's a book with masses of historical detail, interesting use of the concept of genetic memory, and true romance, all perfectly pitched and consequently a real page-turner. I loved it, but with all due respect to the cover designer, was this image meant for another book?

This week's reading

    Here is what looks to be very varied reading for the next few days.

Having just read one book in translation, I've got another: Philippe Claudel's Brodeck's Report is "literature of the highest quality", "a magnificent book", and "free of the least sentimentality, Claudel's writing is of an astounding beauty and grace". High praise, then, for a story set just after the Second World War on the borders of France and Germany where the solitary Brodeck lives in the mountains, collecting data on every aspect of the natural environment. Called upon to write a report of a very different kind - one into the atrocious death of an outsider - Brodeck's calm is disturbed and his own life becomes the subject of record.

Irish novelist Josephine Hart's The Truth About Love is next on the pile. I have a proof copy of this, so no blurb to give the gist, but I see John Banville rates this 'dangerous' love story very highly.

A contender for the Romantic Novel of the Year Award, Susanna Kearsley's Sophia's Secret features Slains Castle in the north east of Scotland; the mysterious place is used by bestselling writer Carrie McClelland as the setting for her latest novel, but...."the lines between fact and fiction become increasingly blurred"! Historical fiction with a twist, this is a chunky book to kick off with.

Last but not least, The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt begins in Cambridge in 1913 when G. H. Hardy, considered the greatest British mathematician of his age, receives a rambling letter from a self-professed mathematical genius who claims to be on the brink of a huge breakthrough in the field. With the First World War as backdrop and a cast including D.H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell, this sounds very interesting and intriguing.

CBG : thankyou!

    A quick post to thank everyone who commented on The Lost Estate (below). Such excellent remarks, full of insight, give us all a fuller appreciation of the book, and make being part of a group very worthwhile.

Cornflower Book Group - The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

 

  I'm not sure quite what to make of The Lost Estate. It was Alain-Fournier's first novel, and parts of it read as if they are the writer's collected oddments: vignettes, descriptive passages, overheard lines, which suggest he was using his magpie hoard of bright and shiny things to decorate his story, but in a self-conscious and not very coherent way. On the other hand, there are episodes which speak of greater skill and maturity, where its stiltedness gives way - despite the limitations of translation - to much more fluency and clear-sightedness.

    It seems to have a sum greater than its parts in that it demands of the reader much more than the writer in his turn is giving - the lost estate itself, something which immediately conjures fabulous images in our mind - is in fact ramshackle, shabby, ill-defined. We are expected to believe that, fairy-tale like, there is enduring love at first sight between Meaulnes and Yvonne de Galais, and yet he is all too ready to leave her later, so the lengthy love-lorn seeking was misplaced, and she, like her home, is eventually no more. Despite the sadness, the desolation, I was left feeling that what was lost wasn't described as quite wonderful enough to warrant being found, and that gives me pause.

    What was much more interesting and poignant, though almost completely undeveloped, were Francois' feelings for Yvonne, described in the line "... I loved her with that deep, secret love that is never spoken". Now there's a thing.

    Some sections of the book have a languid, filmic quality to them, but that controlled detachment then recedes, and while the main characters shift back and forth in thought and behaviour between boyhood and manhood, so scenes go from an appreciation of beauty, say, to impatience, anxiety, a sense of loss - adolescent mood swings, almost - and there is no discernible unifying, harmonising 'key'.

     The implausibility of much of it perplexed me, too, but that and its melodrama may be a product of its time and place, and yet, despite all this, it is lingering in my mind and a second reading might well fix it there. Its effect is as of a conjuring trick - you can't see how it's done, yet something has been done. I'm still not sure, though prepared to be persuaded. How about you?

(For this book's "Books and Cakes" post, look here).

News from Corduroy Mansions

    Followers of Alexander McCall Smith's online daily novel "Corduroy Mansions" will know that today's is the final episode. However, here is good news from the author. Fans may also care to see fellow readers' favourite moments and characters (I do like Freddie and Terence!).

                         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Less good news from me: I fell on the ice, aggravating an old back injury. It's now quite painful to sit here at my desk so I'm off to try and get comfortable. Fortunately, I've already written tomorrow's posts!).

Pace

 

    I've had something of a reading lull over the last few days in that my pace has dropped markedly. There's no particular reason for that that I can identify, the books I have on the go are perfectly good and interesting, but a few pages at a time just seems to be enough, and I feel the need to work with my hands (so maybe this is the culprit?).
    Over the next ten days - deadlines are tight - I have to read six novels. Of these, one is a 500-pager, and the others while shorter are still of good length, so I have a lot to do, and my pace must adapt accordingly.
     But what I wondered was whether anyone else ever feels 'read out', sated, needing a rest from reading, or maybe just a complete change of style, subject matter, etc.? I find myself asking how on earth I can be so slow just now and feel as though almost nothing (and I have a great deal of promising material to choose from) quite hits the spot and makes me feel like racing ahead at my usual rate again.
     Anyone similarly afflicted, and is there a known antidote?

Do you read me?

     We are experiencing very erratic mail deliveries just now, all the more vexing when I'm waiting impatiently for a book to arrive. But Postman Pat at his best could hardly compare to this amazing story about getting a book to a reader!
                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      Not nearly as impressive, apparently, is the content of the reading scheme many UK children learn to read with. My primary school used "Dick and Dora" (anyone remember them? - Nip the dog and Fluff the cat were members of the family, too, as I recall).
                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     And still on readers, does anyone use Google Reader? I'm finding it very untrustworthy! It tells me emphatically and repeatedly (when I 'refresh') that a favourite blog has "no unread items" when I know because I've visited it directly that it certainly has got new posts on it, and what's more, on occasion it will only reveal the latest post two days after it has been published. So I am missing good things unless I check every site manually, which means there is no point in using the wretched Reader.
Disgruntled, Cornflower Books.

To be read - Earth and Heaven, The Art of Falling

   Lots of books have arrived here lately and deserve a preliminary mention before I read them, but when I chose these two from the TBR pile, I was forgetting that I had put their authors side by side once before. You may remember this post about covers; I felt the designers had done both Sue Gee and Deborah Lawrenson a disservice with the covers chosen for their superb books. I wonder if I shall feel similarly when I come to read these two.

       I was enormously impressed by Deborah Lawrenson's Songs of Blue and Gold so I am very keen to read The Art of Falling. A love affair in wartime Italy sets in motion events which will culminate fifty years on when Isabel Wainwright goes in search of her missing father, Tom. "Evocative", "uplifting", "intriguing" say the reviews; it's part love story, part detection, but whatever the content I know it will be beautifully written. 

Then Sue Gee: for me The Mysteries of Glass was close to perfection, and I loved Reading in Bed too.

 
Earth and Heaven  is "an exquisite and haunting evocation of life in the aftermath of the Great War", and "its emotional tenor remains buoyant and unfaltering from the first page to the last" - so says the TLS. It features a painter and an engraver who meet at the Slade and find happiness together until ....
     "Shot through with a shimmering apprehension of the natural world, Earth & Heaven is about life's fragility, and the power of love and painting to disturb, renew and reveal us to ourselves".

Both books sound excellent; I'll need avizandum for the covers.

Cornflower Book Group 2009 : Volume 3

     I metaphorically sort through piles of books when I'm choosing the next Book Group title - I revisit my list of suggestions, think about what has appealed in the past and try to come up with something which I hope will elicit a positive and interested response. This month's book had been out there in my peripheral vision for a while, but then all of a sudden it just came sharply into focus and seemed the perfect choice; it's J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country which won the Guardian fiction prize in 1980 and was shortlisted for the Booker.
 "A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a medieval wall painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on that idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years."

    It's a very short book - not even 100 pages in this edition, and it is prefaced by a line from Dr. Johnson, a verse by Housman and the following by Herbert Trench:
"She comes not when Noon is on the roses -/ Too bright is day.
 She comes not to the Soul till it reposes/ From work and play.
 But when Night is on the hills, and the great Voices/ roll in from the sea
 By starlight and by candlelight and by dreamlight/ She comes to me."

    It should be easy enough to get hold of; libraries appear to have it and apart from the Penguin shown here there's an edition produced by Carr's own Quince Tree Press. I hope the choice meets with everyone's approval - and do join us if you'd like to but haven't done so before - and we shall reconvene on Saturday 14th. March to discuss the book.

Literary ailments

     Browsing the book programmes section of the Radio 4 website I came upon the "Open Book Reading Clinic" which apparently prescribes the right book for your "literary ailment". As someone suggested to me the other day that I could offer an 'agony aunt' service on Cornflower (not too sure about that) perhaps nevertheless we could pool our resources here to help anyone in need of literary guidance?
    Joking apart, it could be useful - e.g. if you love a particular writer's work but you've read everything they've written, you may be looking for someone similar, an "if you like that, you'll like this" sort of thing, or if you're tempted to try a writer for the first time and don't want to choose an off-putting 'lesser' book, you could get a steer in the right direction.
   I'm always amazed by the wealth of reading experience visitors to this site have and by their willingness to share their knowledge and suggest titles, (look, for instance, at just a couple of comments on yesterday's post) so this may well be something we could do on a regular basis. So anyone for a game of doctors and nurses at the Cornflower Clinic? Bags I the stethoscope!

The dagger in the library

    Did you know that library users can nominate their favourite (living) crime writer for "The Dagger in the Library Award", given by the Crime Writers' Association? Full details can be found here on the CWA website, and as you'll see, it is awarded for a body of work, not an individual book.
     If you look at the list of winners of that and other 'Daggers', you may well find some excellent additions to the TBR pile - it certainly looks like a good resource.
    I ought to get into crime a bit more (there speaks a lawyer who never practised criminal law, but did teach it for a time) - it's an area in which I'm not at all widely read, though we have much of it on our own shelves. I loved Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke which went down well with the book group, and I have her Flowers for the Judge waiting in the pile, but I'm not nearly as well up on the whole huge subject  - particularly contemporary writers - as many Cornflower readers are, so you experts should get your nominations in!

Wonderland

 

     The picture is "Wonderland" by Adelaide Claxton (1835-c.1905), and I found it on this site. Do you think the cat is real, or has it been conjured out of the book? Either way, it's a wonderful evocation of total absorption in a story, something I remember from childhood and still experience now, though far less often. What was the last book you read which caused you to miss your stop on the bus/train, or burn the toast, etc.?

Stormy weather

   

      Unlike most of the rest of the country we are not blanketed in snow, though it may yet come; here in Edinburgh we have rain and a cold wind. But just for fun, how about some books with weather in the title?

Here are a few to start with:
The Weather in the Streets - Rosamund Lehmann
The Right Attitude to Rain - Alexander McCall Smith
Frost in May -Antonia White
The Mist in the Mirror -Susan Hill
Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson

Any more?