Cornflower Books

Reading the map

    Our friend Harriet is soon to set off on a big adventure. Over the course of six months next year she and her family will travel - by car, boat and train - from 'Tweed to Tokyo', that is from their home in Scotland's Tweed Valley all the way to Japan. You can see the route above, and here on their blog is a provisional list of stopping points.

    Culture will be one of the pillars of the trip, and Harriet is looking for appropriate reading for as many of the countries/cities she visits as possible. I thought we might be able to provide some pointers, so if you can suggest some fiction (including children's) or non-fiction which you feel in some way captures the essence of any of the places on the route or is a 'must read' from a country's literature, please leave a comment below and I'll pass it on.

   To get us started here are one or two ideas in no particular order (with links to posts): for Finland, A Winter Book by Tove Jansson; Russia, Eric Newby's The Big Red Train Ride; the Netherlands, I was a Stranger by John Hackett; Hungary, Embers, Sandor Marai; Japan, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell ... 

    Let's see how far we can get!

This and that

    Carolyne Larrington's interesting talk on The Poetic Edda makes reference to William Morris, Wagner, and Game of Thrones (as yet unread and unwatched by me - anyone here a fan?).

                                                ~~~~~

    Here's an article to add to our occasional writers' notebooks series of posts - Robert Macfarlane on his 'underground' stationery.

                                               ~~~~~

    Sir Tim Waterstone was a recent guest of Georgina Godwin's on Meet the Writers; listen to his interview here.

Looking forward

   

    Publishers' catalogues usually provide something to look forward to, and today it's Sort Of Books' list for next spring which has had me adding to my wish list in the shape of Ice by Ulla-Lena Lundberg, "the epic of island life that has gripped Finland", which will be out in February.

    "In the summer of 1947, a young priest, his wife and baby daughter arrive by mail boat at a tiny church island. They are to take over its draughty homestead from where Petter is to minister to the scattered and subtly divided community. In this deeply evocative tale, Ulla-Lena Lundberg draws us into the minutiae of an austere yet purposeful life where the demands of self-sufficiency - cows to milk and sheep to graze - are tempered by the kindness of neighbours. With each season, the family's love of the island grows, and when the winter brings ice a new and tentative link is created. Told through the eyes of Petter, the wholehearted if naive novice priest, and Mona, his tough-minded wife, a story unfolds that is as immersive as it is heartrending.

    Winner of the Finlandia prize and nominated for the Nordic Critics Prize, Ice was a huge bestseller in Finland."

    While we're waiting for that to be released, you might care to read Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg (there's a post on it here) and Cecilia Ekbäck's all-enveloping Wolf Winter (post here) both of which are in a vaguely similar vein.

Good lines: good penmanship

    "Ségolène ... expressed herself in a more delicate, more graceful Italic hand than Bilodo had ever had the good fortune to admire. It was rich, imaginative handwriting, with deep downstrokes and celestial upstrokes embellished with opulent loops and precise drops - a clean, flowing script, admirably well-proportioned with its perfect thirty-degree slant and flawless inter-letter spacing. Ségolène's writing was a sweet scent for the eye, an elixir, an ode. It was a graphic symphony, an apotheosis. It was so beautiful it made you weep. Having read somewhere that handwriting was a reflection of a person's soul, Bilodo readily concluded that Ségolène's soul must be incomparably pure. If angels wrote, surely it was like this."

    From The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Thériault.

Cornflower Book Group - The Pillow Book

   

    What did you make of The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon?

    "I have written in this book things that I have seen and thought, in the long idle hours spent at home, without ever dreaming that others would see it. Fearing that some of my foolish remarks could well strike others as excessive and objectionable, I did my best to keep it secret, but despite all my intentions I'm afraid it has come to light."

    Genuine? Disingenuous? Calculating? We shall never know, but whatever the purpose of these writings or the intentions behind them, they have endured and been read for 1,000 years.

    Part diary (and The Diary of a Provincial Lady came to mind on occasion), part series of still lifes, a commonplace book, a social history, its anecdotes akin to episodes of a soap opera, its gossipy comments not far from tweets at times, its lists much like those often seen on blogs; elsewhere the author's keen observation and appreciation of a scene make for entrancing reading, and as the translator Meredith McKinney says in her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, from "deep inside the moment of experience", she teaches us to see.

    Caustic, snobbish, prone to extreme and sometimes crass juxtapositions, condemnatory, dogmatic, Sei Shōnagon lived in a rarefied world where appearance was everything, but if as she says above she set down her thoughts for herself alone, then she had no need to temper her words and moderate her feelings in consideration of others' sensibilities. Allowing her the scope that that intended privacy permits, what she gives us across the centuries in her "handbook of poetic references" is largely a thing of beauty. She finds rain "so unpoetic", so I part company with her there, but I smiled at her dislike of sloppy diction and language unbecoming to the speaker, and I admire her eye - and memory - for detail, and love her evident genuine delight in so many things, and that she finds it "fascinating that things like [the effect of dew on foliage] can utterly fail to delight others"! She is unique in her mindful attention to the slightest thing, and so while in some lights the book is, as the translator says, "a crazy quilt", it also has its own sense of order and identity.

    Which parts - if any - caught your interest? Did you love her lists, enjoy her minute observations, become involved in her narratives? Did you warm to her enthusiasm and appreciation of beauty, or did you find her uncompromising attitudes uncongenial? Would this book prompt you to read more Japanese literature or discover more about Japanese culture, either in the present day or in the past? Are you tempted to begin a Pillow Book of your own - a diary or scrapbook of things which catch your attention and engage the senses?

A thousand years ago ...

   

     "... in a world in many ways unimaginably different from ours, a lady at the imperial court of Japan settled herself in front of a precious bundle of paper and began to write the extraordinary work later called Makura no sōshi, known to English readers as The Pillow Book. In it she wrote about her world, in a voice so vividly alive that we find ourselves in the presence of a woman we recognize as we would a friend.

    The world Sei Shōnagon lived in and wrote for us was the intimate world of the court ... As we read her apparently crazy quilt of vignettes and opinions and anecdotes, we find ourselves deep inside this world, and feel her responses along our own nerves.

    ... Sei Shōnagon's writing revels in the nuances of sound and scent - the soft tap of a lid placed on a kettle, the faint sussuration of fire tongs gently stirring ash in a brazier, or the lingering scent from someone's incense-impregnated clothes resonate with peculiar intensity. Visual awareness is also acute; the glint of firelight on a metal clasp or the glow of a glossed-silk robe receives loving attention.

    This is perhaps to be expected, in a dark interior lit largely by an occasional oil lamp or brazier fire, or pale daylight filtered through fine blinds. What is unexpected and astonishing, however, is the vivid and detailed visual awareness of clothes. A figure some distance away, in a poorly illuminated room, will be recalled years later with an enthralled description of the details of clothing, colour and fabric. It is undoubtedly the case that Sei Shōnagon was particularly finely attuned to and observant of such matters ..."

    That's from Meredith McKinney's introduction to The Pillow Book, and this is just a gentle reminder that it's our book group book for this month, and we'll be talking about it here from Saturday, 23rd. November - everyone is welcome to join in.

What to look out for

    OUP have brought out a centenary edition of Alain-Fournier's The Lost Domain: Le Grand Meaulnes translated by Frank Davison and with an introduction by Hermione Lee, and you can see Dame Hermione talk briefly about the book here. What she says is very interesting, especially in the light of our CBG discussion on the book; had I not already read it, her summing up would draw me in.

    This leads me to wonder whether there is not a place for the equivalent of a set of signposts at the beginning of certain books - in addition to the conventional introduction which I always read after the text as it so often gives away crucial parts of the plot - more a 'what to look out for', a pointer towards key themes, stylistic quirks, and so on, which would inform your reading, as Hermione Lee does in her short video, with the detailed analysis and contextual exposition and comment being left for later.

Cornflower Book Group - our Autumn books

   

    The Cornflower Book Group already has its September book, that is Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam (full details here), but I thought it might be helpful to plan ahead and choose something now for us to read and talk about in October and November, and I hope you'll feel well-disposed towards the books I have in mind.

    October 2013 seems the most fitting month in which to read The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate for it is set in October 1913. It's about a shooting party at Sir Randolph Nettleby's Oxfordshire estate: "opulent, adulterous, moving assuredly through the rituals of eating and slaughter, [the guests] are a dazzlingly obtuse and brilliantly decorative finale of an era." And from a review: "Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry ... I have seldom enjoyed a book so much."

    If anyone baulks at the £12.99 UK cover price of the paperback (and I'm sorry that it is comparatively expensive), The Book Depository is selling it for rather less, and there are cheap secondhand copies available at Abebooks. For those in the US, your edition is more reasonably priced. Libraries should have the book, too, of course, and I hope no-one has any difficulty getting hold of a copy, whatever their preferred source.

    On now to our November book which is something a bit different. A work of non-fiction, written in Japanese 1000 years ago, it is The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon. The author was a Court gentlewoman whose dates were c.966-1017; she wrote the book for her own amusement but it is "one of the greatest works of Japanese literature. A fascinating exploration of life amongst the nobility at the height of the idyllic Heian period, it describes the exquisite pleasures of a confined world in which poetry, love, fashion and whim dominated, and harsh reality was kept firmly at a distance. In sections ranging in size from brief reflections to longer, lyrical tales, Shōnagon moves elegantly across a wide range of themes including nature, society and her own flirtations and frustrations, to provide a witty, unique and deeply personal insight into a woman's life at Court in classical Japan."

    So there are our three Autumn books and their discussion dates are below; please join us in reading them.

Crusoe' Daughter - from Saturday, 28th. September

The Shooting Party - from Saturday, 26th. October

The Pillow Book - from Saturday, 23rd. November.

Some recent arrivals

    Nicola Upson's novels featuring Golden Age crime writer Josephine Tey are very popular, and here is the latest, The Death of Lucy Kyte. "When Josephine inherits a remote Suffolk cottage from her godmother, it comes full of secrets. There's the infamous Red Barn murder, committed nearby a century before, and still casting a shadow over the village. And there's Lucy Kyte, the mysterious beneficiary of her godmother's will, whom no-one in the close-knit village will admit to knowing.

    As Josephine settles into the house, she knows that something dark has a tight hold on the heart of this small community. Is it just the ghosts of the Red Barn murder, or is there something very much alive that she needs to fear?..."

    

    Two novels from acclaimed Icelandic writer Jón Kalman Stefánsson next, first Heaven and Hell:

    "In a remote part of Iceland, a young man joins a boat to fish for cod, but when a tragedy occurs at sea he is appalled by his fellow fishermen's cruel indifference. Lost and broken, he leaves the settlement in secret, his only purpose to return a book to a blind old sea captain beyond the mountains. Once in the town he finds that he is not alone in his solitude: welcomed into a warm circle of outcasts, he begins to see the world with new eyes."

    Its sequel is The Sorrow of Angels: "it's three weeks since the boy came to town, carrying a book of poetry to return to the old sea captain. Three weeks since he lost his best friend Barður to the sea and already his ghost has faded. Meanwhile, the snow falls so heavily that it binds heaven and earth together.

    As the villagers gather in the inn to drink schnapps and coffee, Jens the postman stumbles in half dead having almost frozen to his horse. On his next journey to the wide open fjords he is accompanied by the boy, but along the way both must risk their lives for each other in the quest to save an unusual item of mail."

    From the reviews: "The author has a lyrical, poetic style ... the action unfolds vividly and dramatically, and the reader feels part of the scene. The combination creates an unusually intense reading experience."

 

    Changing the scene and the tone, next up is Jennifer Close's Things We Need. " 'In the Coffey house, there was always a list taped to the refrigerator. At the top, it was titled THINGS WE NEED. The title was always capped and underlined, as if to stress that yes, this is important, these aren't just things we want, these are things we need.'

    Will and Weezy Coffey thought they'd prepared their three children for the challlenges and hurdles of adult life. But being a grown-up isn't easy. Claire's engagement has been called off and she's hiding from her debts. Martha's in a career crisis and even her sympathetic therapist is losing patience. And Max, the baby of the family in his final year at college, has got himself into a serious girlfriend fiasco.... A story about modern life and the place we return to when things go drastically awry: home."

 

     "The perfect piece of escapism for all women from eighteen to eighty," that's Catherine Alliott's My Husband Next Door: "When Ella married the handsome, celebrated artist Sebastian Montclair at just nineteen she was madly in love. Now, those blissful years of marriage have turned into the very definition of an unconventional set-up. Separated in every way but distance, Sebastian resides in an outhouse across the lawn from Ella's ramshackle farmhouse.

    With an ex-husband living under her nose and a home crowded by hostile teenaged children and a hyper-critical mother, Ella finds comfort in the company of the very charming gardener, Ludo. But is he the answer to her prayers? Then Sebastian decides he must move away, but how much longer can Ella hide from what really destroyed her marriage, and the secret she continues to keep?"

 

    Finally today, Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami. Amy Sackville (The Still Point and Orkney) describes this as "a dream-like spell of a novel, full of humour, sadness, warmth and tremendous subtlety," and with its author likened to a young Haruki Murakami, the novel has been called "a mature and more subtle Norwegian Wood".

    It is about a woman's relationship with an older man "that blossoms against the odds. Tsukiko is in her late 30s and living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, 'Sensei', in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired and, she presumes, a widower. After this initial encounter, the pair continue to meet occasionally to share food and drink sake, and as the seasons pass - from spring cherry blossom to autumnal mushrooms - Tsukiko and Sensei come to develop a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love.

    Perfectly constructed, funny, and moving, this is a compelling tale of modern Japan and old-fashioned romance that can be consumed in a single sitting."

Book of the day - The List of my Desires

 

    The List of my Desires by Grégoire Delacourt, translated by Anthea Bell, (and out early next month) popped through the letterbox this morning. This "gem of a novel" has been a huge success in France with massive sales and rights sold in 27 countries, and it does sound as though its story may 'chime' with many of us. Here's the blurb:

    "What would it take to change your life?

    Jocelyne is 47. She lives in a small provincial French town, runs her own dressmaking shop, has been married to the same man for what seems like an eternity, has had two children and lives a very ordinary existence. In fact so ordinary that she is beginning to wonder what happened to her, to all those dreams she had when she was seventeen.

    Then comes the chance to change her life completely - but should she? For when Jocelyne begins to look at her life and its small pleasures, her friendships, her weekends away, her knitting and needlecraft blog through which she has gathered a community of like-minded women - she realises that maybe 'ordinary' isn't so bad. Until the decision is taken out of her hands ...

    The List of my Desires is a wonderfully heart-warming novel about what we value in life and the search for happiness."

    Grégoire Delacourt's first novel L'Ecrivain de la Famille (2011) won five literary prizes in his native France.

Books of the day

   

    I must be the only person in the world who hasn't read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything (or seen the film), but I have watched Elizabeth in action as a speaker - most notably in her famous TED talk, to which I've linked before - and I find her very engaging, and having heard tantalising snippets about her forthcoming novel I am very keen to read it. It won't be out until October, but The Signature of All Things looks set to be one of the 'big' books of the autumn, and I'm delighted to have an early proof and to be able to get to it soon I hope. It is a historical novel about a female botanist (click here for more on that) and incorporates - see this short video - "wonder, marvel, travel, curiosity, spirituality ..." themes close to Elizabeth's heart.

    Mr Darwin's Gardener by Kristina Carlson (translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah) will be out on the 1st. of June, and is the latest book from Peirene Press whose short, European fiction is quality stuff, as you'll see from this post and this one. The new book is "a postmodern Victorian novel about faith, knowledge and our inner needs," and is set in the late 1870s in the Kentish village of Downe. "The villagers gather in church one rainy Sunday. Only Thomas Davies stays away. The eccentric loner, a grief-stricken widower, works as a gardener for the naturalist Charles Darwin. He shuns religion. But now Thomas needs answers. What should he believe in? And why should he continue to live?"

    If you listened to BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour this morning you may have heard Jenni Murray talking to Kate Manning about her novel My Notorious Life by Madame X which will be published on the 6th. of June. The book is set in 19th. century New York and is based on a true story as it follows the life of an Irish orphan, Axie Muldoon, from child beggar to the most succesful and controversial midwife of her time. "From the gutter to the glitter of 5th. Avenue", Axie's is a story of "freedom, family and the many faces of love, and above all, of one indomitable woman making her way in a difficult world." Another book I'm greatly looking forward to reading.

This week's books, part 2

         Following on from yesterday's post, here is the balance of this week's arrivals:

    A Commonplace Killing is the last novel by Siân Busby who sadly died in September. The book has an introduction by the BBC's Robert Peston, Siân's husband, who transcribed the final part of the handwritten manuscript in the days after her death, and you can read it here. The novel itself will be broadcast on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in June, and is about the discovery of a body, that of Lillian Frobisher, on a bomb site in north London in 1946. How did she come to be on the site? Whay was her husband unaware that she hadn't come home that night? "In this gripping murder story, Siân Busby gradually peels away the veneer of stoicism and respectability to reveal the dark truths at the heart of postwar austerity Britain."

    Next, "a Victorian gothic thriller by a master of the genre," The Asylum by John Harwood. "A young woman wakes in a strange bed... a sickly light filters through a metal grille. Dr. Maynard Straker steps into the room, and speaks. 'Have no fear, Miss Ashton. I am entirely at your service.' But that is not her name and she should not be here - in the Asylum. She is Miss Georgina Ferrars, of Gresham's Yard, London. And she can prove it. But when Dr. Straker sends a telegram to her uncle, the reply is swift: 'Georgina Ferrars here. Your patient must be an imposter.'"

    A Girl Like You by Maureen Lindley begins in 1939 in rural California. Thirteen-year-old "Satomi Baker is used to being different, being half American, half Japanese. When war is declared, Satomi's father Aaron is one of the first to sign up and is sent to the base at Pearl Harbor. He never returns. The community which has tolerated its foreign residents for decades suddenly turns on them, and along with thousands of other Japanese-American citizens, Satomi and her mother are sent to a brutal labour camp in the wilderness ... At Manzanar, Satomi learns what it takes to survive, and what it means to be American. But it will be years before she will discover who she really is under the surface of her skin."

    Winner of the Athens Prize for Literature in 2008, What Lot's Wife Saw by Ioanna Bourazopoulou, translated by Yiannis Panas, is a story of betrayal, sacrifice and unconditional love in a post-apocalyptic world. "It's been twenty-five years since the Overflow flooded Southern Europe, drowning Rome, Vienna and Istanbul, and turning Paris into a major port. At the Dead Sea, the earth has opened up to reveal a strange violet salt to the which the world has become addicted, and a colony has been established by the mysterious Consortium of Seventy-Five to control the supply. Run by murderers, fugitives and liars, the Colony is a haven to those fleeing Europe, but when its governor dies suddenly and mysteriously, the six officials turn on each other, sparking a terrifying chain of events which threatens its very existence. In Paris, Phileas Book, the greatest crossword compiler of his age and creator of the Epistleword, is recruited by the sinister Consortium. Presented with the epistolary confessions of the six, he is ordered to sift truth from lies to find out who killed the governor. But as Phileas starts to unravel the mystery, he begins to realise that these are no ordinary letters and that nothing less than the course of human history is at stake."

This week's books, part 1

    There is a gremlin making mischief in Typepad at the moment which means that I can't add any books to the sidebar lists, so here, 'manually', are some of the latest arrivals.

    Six books by Diana Souhami are at the top of the pile, and of them it's Gluck: Her Biography, on the artist Hannah Gluckstein, which I shall probably pick up first.

    The Uninvited by Liz Jensen comes next: "part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare", this book "engages deep emotions to spine-chilling (and suspenseful effect", says Lawrence Norfolk.

    Manu Joseph's The Illicit Happiness of Other People is a darkly comic story set in Madras in the 1990s involving "an adolescent cartoonist's dangerous interpretation of absolute truth, an inner circle of talented schizophrenics and the pure love of a twelve-year-old boy for a beautiful girl."

    Winner of The Terry Pratchett Prize, David Logan's Half-Sick Of Shadows is "a comical tragedy, a tale of childhood wonder (and despair), of familial dysfunction, of poetry, of the imagination and theoretical physics ... and more besides."

    Then comes Every Promise by Andrea Bajani, translated from the Italian by Alistair McEwen, "a brave and honest novel about what it means to be a man in the modern world; [the author's] imagery is wonderfully, uniquely imaginative, and his open approach to male vulnerability both moving and refreshing."

    More in part 2.

Lost and found and gone astray

 

    This coming Wednesday, 15th. May, is European Literature Night and there are events taking place simultaneously in capital cities including one up here in Edinburgh and another at the British Library in London - click there for full details, and see also the panel discussion, Writing, Creativity and Translation, on the role of translation in European fiction.

    Among the writers giving readings and in conversation in London on Wednesday evening is the Catalan author Jordi Punti whose book Lost Luggage has been translated into 15 languages and won the Spanish National Critics' Prize in 2011. I have it on my TBR pile, and was drawn partly by the compliments it has received in reviews - "A conjuring trick. Incomparable literature", "an astonishing literary artefact. Marvellous...", and also by the blurb:

    "Christof, Christophe, Christopher and Cristòfol are four brothers - sons of the same father and four very different mothers, yet none of them knows of the others' existence. They live in Frankfurt, Paris, London and Barcelona and they unwittingly share the fact their father, a truck driver, abandoned them when they were little and they never heard from him again.

    Then one day, Cristòfol is contacted by the police: his father is officially a missing person. This fact leads him to discover that he has three half-brothers, and the four young men come together for the first time... Divided by geography yet united by blood, the "Cristobales' set out on a quest to find their father, one that is painful, hilarious and extraordinary. They discover a man who during thirty years of driving was able to escape the darkness of Franco's Spain and to explore a luminous Europe, a journey that, with the birth of his sons, both opened and broke his heart."

                                                           ~~~~~

 

    Now for some pure escapist reading. I picked up Mary Stewart's Thornyhold late last night and quickly became happily engrossed in it. Here's the gist:

    "To Gilly, Thornyhold is an enchanted cottage, a bequest from her cousin whose magical visits had brightened a lonely childhood. And it comes just in time to save Gilly from a bleak future after the death of her parents. Thornyhold has a resident black cat - and a reputation for magic; as she learns more about her cousin's herbalist skills, her abilities to foresee events and to heal, Gilly realises that she has inherited more than just the house itself ..."

    That suits my reading mood perfectly.

                                                           ~~~~~

 

    Thanks to everyone who entered the draw to win a copy of Emma Donoghue's Astray, and who named a favourite book about travelling or journeys in so doing. It is Nicky's name which has come out of the hat, so I'll get the book on its way very soon, and I hope we'll have another draw before long.

Books in brief: The President's Hat

    

    Mr. Cornflower writes:

    Thirty years ago I was living in Paris, on the Left Bank, in a little side street near the Seine. Our side of the street was rather scruffy and down at heel; the other side was already being transformed by wealthy landlords and residents. I stood at my window and looked from shabby carpet tiles and cheap furniture across to a world of polished floorboards and tasteful bibelots. Part of the magnetic attraction to investors was the location, in the next street, of the pied-à-terre belonging to the most powerful man in the country: François Mitterrand, President of the Republic. In France, as elsewhere, money follows power.

    I had pushed this brush with greatness far back into the attic of my memory until Cornflower kindly put into my hands the charming and evocative novel by Antoine Laurain, The President's Hat. He imagines an ordinary man who by accident finds himself in possession of Mitterrand's hat, and from this spins a series of delightful tales about how the hat transforms the lives of the various people through whose hands it passes. The wit and elegance of Laurain's book should win him a much wider audience - you don't have to know anything about French politics in the 1980s to enjoy it.

Power Re-arrangers

    I happened to be in a bookshop this afternoon, and during my brief browse I spotted a favourite novel from last year and took the opportunity of moving its neighbours slightly further along the shelf so that the book in question was face out. It's not the first time I've done a bit of 'guerrilla book-adjustment' like this making me - as Mr. C. coins it - a 'power re-arranger', but although it's only a tiny gesture of support for something I rate, I hope it results in the book catching the eye of a shopper who will buy it and enjoy it. For the avoidance of doubt, no other novel was 'disadvantaged' in the process, and I wouldn't dream of any major interference to a bookseller's display, just a wee tweak here and there!

                                                    ~~~~~

    Did any fans of the Moomins or The Summer Book and A Winter Book watch the documentary Moominland Tales: The Life of Tove Jansson which was shown the other night (and is still available on iPlayer)? It was fascinating to learn of all the autobiographical elements in the books, I thought, and watching it might even (slightly) enhance a reading of the 'Summer'/'Winter' stories.

The Confidant

    

    The Confidant by Hélène Grémillon, translated by Alison Anderson, is a first novel that is a bestseller in France, an intriguing and atmospheric story about maternal instinct and identity, manipulation and conflict. Its epigraph is from The Premonition by Federico García Lorca: 'The past wears its armoured breastplate and blocks its ears with the wind's cotton wool. No one will ever be able to tear its secret away', and it's the past which, for the main character, will now inform and explain the present, as will be seen.

    The book begins in Paris in 1975 with Camille Werner reading the many letters of condolence she has received after the death of her mother. Reflecting on the fact that up to this point she had had little mail of any consequence, certainly nothing of the life-changing variety that she might idly have hoped for, Camille is puzzled to notice that one of these missives is unsigned and refers to people she does not know; she dismisses it as a mistake. But similar letters then arrive every Tuesday, and taken together they seem to tell the story of lives changed and loves lost during the Second World War and the German occupation of Paris.

    Camille is an editor at a publishing house and as she is drawn in by this tale told weekly she begins to suspect that it is a clever ruse by a writer, someone sending her chapters of their book aiming to get her attention, for what she is reading is a gripping, unsettling account of passion and obsession - but then comes the realisation that the story is not fictitious but true, and that the life-changing moment she had anticipated has actually arrived.

    The narrative moves back and forth between characters' viewpoints and the two time periods (the '70s and '30s/'40s), so by its very nature it is arrhythmic and fragmented, but still with sufficient coherence and a well-controlled building of suspense to hold the reader and keep them turning the pages. It's intricately plotted and at times relies perhaps too heavily on coincidence or contrivance, and the pull to the dramatic is strong, but I'd say that the odd 'rough edge' there is to Hélène Grémillon's style will be smoothed and polished as her work progresses because the promise is clearly there; in a book which relies on detail and necessary obfuscation, all the clues are carefully hidden and there's considerable satisfaction when the dénouement finally comes.

    For more on the book, read Stu's post or David's, see Hélène's writing room at Novelicious, and tomorrow pop over to Curiosity Killed The Bookworm.

More good reading

    Here are a few more books from the arrivals pile for your delectation:

    Mesmerized by Alissa Walser, translated by Jamie Bulloch, is "a luminous, sensual tale of an episode in the lives of Franz Anton Mesmer and a blind musical prodigy". Set in Vienna and beginning in 1777 in a world of scientific experimentation and courtly intrigue, its focus is on Mesmer's controversial, alternative cures for body and mind and what happens when he is asked to help restore the sight of a blind musician favoured by the Empress. Fame is within his grasp, but at what cost?

    The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber is a novel written in blank verse, "an enthralling, innovative and exceptionally accomplished debut which combines the grip of a thriller with the emotional force of a sonnet". It concerns the death in a tavern brawl of playwright Christopher Marlowe on the 30th. of May, 1593, but here his demise is revealed as an elaborate ruse to avoid being convicted of heresy, and spirited off to lonely exile, he continues to write, "hiding behind the name of a colourless man from Stratford - one William Shakespeare".

    Beautiful Lies by Clare Clark is set in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, a time of economic uncertainty, riots and tabloid scandal-mongering. Its central character is Maribel Campbell Lowe, the wife of a radical MP, but she's very much a person in her own right, outspoken, opinionated, passionate and intent on making her mark in the world. However, Maribel has a secret, and when a notorious newspaper editor takes an interest in her .... well, we shall see what happens. (I'm about a quarter of the way through this book and enjoying it hugely.)

    John Mullan's What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved offers an intriguing analysis of the world of Jane Austen's novels to show that her brilliance can best be appreciated by looking at "the quirks and intricacies of her fiction". Do we ever see the lower classes? What do characters read? Why is it risky to go to the seaside, and how experimental a novelist is Jane Austen? The answers to these questions and many more are to be found in this new book by the Professor of English at UCL.

    An Absolute Deception by Lesley Lokko is "a spellbinding tale of secrets, love and friendship", a blockbuster of a novel set in the world of fashion. Anneliese Zander de St. Phalle is one of the world's most celebrated designers with a global empire to match, but she's also a reclusive perfectionist who rarely gives interviews and never talks about her past. Then at a party at her island hideaway, a woman whom Anneliese has done her best to forget appears and brings with her a story that demands to be told; the past is now part and parcel of the present.

    Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Rosalind Harvey, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award last year and was a great hit with readers including book groups. At under a hundred pages, it's "an exquisite little fable about Mexico's narcoculture", a  darkly comic chronicle of "a delirious journey to grant a child's wish" when young Tochtli, son of a drug baron, wants more than anything else to have a pygmy hippo from Liberia for his private zoo!

Book of the day - a love letter to the novel

 

        "A hymn to fine literature."

        " ... a declaration of love for the art of the novel and its effects on human history."

        "An Agatha Christie-style mystery bolstered by a love story worthy of Madame de la Fayette."

Reviewers' comments on A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé drew me to the book. Due out in the UK in early January, it's a literary thriller, and here's the gist:

"Ivan, a one-time world traveller, and Francesca, a ravishing Italian heiress, are the owners of a bookstore that is anything but ordinary. Rebelling against the business of bestsellers and in search of an ideal place for their literary dreams to come true, Ivan and Francesca open a store where their passion for literature is given free rein. Tucked away in a corner of Paris, the bookshop offers its clientele a selection of literary masterpieces chosen by a top-secret committee of like-minded connoisseurs. To the owners' amazement, after only a few months, the little dream store proves a success. And that is precisely when their troubles begin. At first, both owners shrug off the anonymous threats that come their way and the venomous comments concerning their store circulating on the internet, but when members of the supposedly secret committee are attacked, they decide to call the police. One by one, the pieces of this puzzle fall ominously into place as it becomes increasingly evident that Ivan and Francesca's dreams will be answered with envy and violence."

L'écrivain

 

    One of the most impressive books I read in 2009 was Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel (if you haven't read it and want to know more, there's a post on it here). When I saw that the author was coming to Edinburgh to talk at the Book Festival about his 2005 novel Monsieur Linh and His Child, published in English this year, I was very keen to hear him and to learn something of what lies behind his work. A professor at the University of Nancy (he told us that the somewhat sniffy attitude of his colleagues to his successful writing career - they believe that "the best authors are the dead authors" - had led him to move from teaching literature to teaching film studies!) he has written a film script, a play and a novel in the last year alone. In conversation with James Runcie*, he spoke mainly in French with an interpreter there to translate, but what a pleasure he was to listen to.

    Philippe Claudel read the opening pages of Monsieur Linh and His Child, a book which his interviewer described as "full of resonance and with a fantastic twist", its themes loneliness, mourning, and the redeeming power of love and friendship. Straightaway it was obvious that the language is very simple and pared down, but very powerful; ecomonical in all things, the novel has only three characters, an unnamed location, and is in effect "a closed universe". Asked whether he "writes long and then reduces down", Philippe Claudel mentioned his novel Grey Souls, a book brimming with characters and plot, after which Monsieur Linh was for him an exercise in refining, like a craftsman chiselling away at a piece of sculpture to reach a stark minimum. The other challenge with this book, as with his earlier novels, was to use beautiful language to describe dreadful events or to express the emotions they engender, but ironically here the book also shows how useless language per se ultimately is as the two main characters, Monsieur Linh and Monsieur Bark, do not share a common tongue but nevertheless forge a strong bond without speech.

    James Runcie asked whether there was a moral purpose behind his writing - the expression of hope and grace as well as suffering; is he, then, an optimistic writer? Philippe Claudel said his work was not a form of preaching, but humanity is at the heart of what he does, and despite portraying characters injured by life, compassion and redemption figure too. In a novel where the protagonists are dispossessed, marginalised people, thrown up by turbulent events like so much flotsam and jetsam on the shore, he shows how a deep and tender friendship can be a source of healing.   

 

*For a glimpse of James Runcie's work click here.