The Evening of the Holiday, Shirley Hazzard
This was my last fling with Shirley Hazzard. I didn’t like it as much as all of the others that I read which I talk about here. Too slight for me! A man and woman meet in Italy and have an affair – that’s all really. I didn’t care about either of the characters much. Although the ending was good. Shirley is tough – no happy ever afters for her.
A Pocketful of Happiness, Richard E. Grant
In retrospect I don’t think I should have read this book – Richard’s memoir of the last years of his wife’s life as she dies from lung cancer. I follow Richard on twitter so knew the story – he is a very open character as he freely admits. Too much sharing, his daughter cries at one stage during these very hard times. His wife, Joan Washington was a voice coach which is how they met. She died in September 2021 after being diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer one or two years beforehand. She told both husband and wife to seek out a pocketful of happiness every day after she dies – hence the title. He is a great writer. I have read a couple of his books and seen his autobiographical film Wah-Wah (which is wonderful and worth checking out if you can stream it). The book describes the family’s daily struggle of dealing with treatments – ultimately unsuccessful, and which sounded a lot like my current one, hence my occasional thought I should not be reading this! Interspersed are lots of comic stories about how they got together, how he got to be Richard E Grant and other amusing anecdotes. Also a lot of name dropping. All very lightly done and worth a read – especially if you don’t have lung cancer!
Super Infinity, Katharine Rundle
I loved this book. I had been reading wonderful reviews from overseas and very keen to get hold of it. When I asked at Readings they had never heard of it! I should have bought the hard back from Amazon because when it finally got here it is only in this rather mean little paperback. Still it’s the content that matters and that is wonderful. Very little is known about Donne but she manages to evoke a whole life out of the scant records available. He was clearly a remarkable man. So sensuous as a young man t- famous for his poetry which was circulated amongst friends only. Then such a famous clergyman known for his thundering sermons. We studied him at school; our literature teacher loved his poetry which (contrarian that I was regarding Mother Gerard) put me off him. I still remember the poems though. Remarkable. There are plenty of quotations here as well as a clear picture of the period in which he lived. This is a wonderful book.
Clarke, Holly Throsby
I’d read Holly Throsby’s first novel, Goodwood, which I’ve written about here and her second, Cedar Valley, which I’ve written about here. So was interested to read this one. It’s not quite as good although once again it portrays relationships in a country town very well. It’s a little too enigmatic about the main character although bit by bit the reader puts together an accurate enough picture. She is a disappointed person – embittered is too strong a word – feeling rejected by her mother, fearful of romance after a failed one, working in a travel agency in a shopping centre. She is caring for her nephew as his mother has been killed in a car accident. She and her friendly neighbour are convinced their previous neighbour has been killed by her husband. In the newly tenanted house the police embark on a more thorough investigation of the disappearance. The new tenant has his own problems – an estranged wife with a brain injury acquired in an accident for which his estranged son blames him. It’s all quite well done although the final tying up of loose ends seems a trifle coincidental.
The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams
People have been recommending this novel to me for years and I’ve only just got around to reading it. I liked it very much. A beautiful evocation of an age – the period before the first world war. And of the people involved and the process they used in developing the first Oxford English dictionary. All the characters are lovely and their situations realistically drawn. We follow our heroine from a very young age to young woman; the constraints on women lightly drawn including the different factions in the women’s suffrage movement. The constraints on the lower classes also emerge. All very beautifully done. The author has just released another book, The Bookbinder of Jericho, which I’m now quite keen to read.
The Seine: The River That Made Paris, Elaine Sciolino
I’d read this review of this book in the TLS (may be behind a paywall) ages ago so I was very happy to be loaned it by Fran. It’s very good – snippets of geography, history, culture -artists, authors, myths and legends. Also darker memories of massacres and murders. As you know if you’ve been to Paris the Seine is very much a working river with barges constantly moving along it so its relevance to industrial developments is also covered. I recently saw photos of the new roof of Notre Dame being carried along barges on the river so that resonated. It’s the sort of book you can read a few times because it contains so much information. For instance the Seine is pronounced Sen not Sine! I’ve been doing that since and no-one knows what I’m talking about. I thought it was especially strong for the first three quarters but it ran out of puff a bit at the end. Still all very interesting about the river, about rural France and especially about Paris. I like these sorts of meandering books exploring a particular place, time, event, or person that draws in lots of different elements.
Yellowface, Rebecca F. Kuang
I didn’t think I would like this at all but found it very good indeed. Very contemporary with lots to say about social media – its uses and abuses and what’s involved in writing and publishing a novel. A budding author steals a manuscript from a dead friend / frenemy. Much drama ensues. Our narrator is not a very nice person; one measure of whether the novel works or not is whether you want her to get away with it or not. There’s a lot about the publishing industry – which sounds pretty awful. And lots and lots about the impact of social media – mostly for evil! I enjoyed it very much. I wanted the narrator to get away with it!
Cold Cream, Ferdinand Mount
I loved everything about this. He has such a droll sense of humour and is completely at ease making himself look foolish. His memories of his childhood are very funny. Later he gets involved with the Conservative party in Britain – showing it’s not what you know but who you know that’s important. He presents himself as a somewhat dim-witted outsider when of course he was nothing of the sort. He eventually gets hired by Mrs Thatcher and has very interesting views about her strengths and weaknesses. He believes she was misunderstood and mistreated by those around her. Just as I loved his later memoir about his amazing Aunt in Kiss Myself Goodbye which I’ve talked about here, I loved this.
Thaw, Dennis Glover
I really enjoyed Dennis Glover’s earlier novel about George Orwell, The Last Man In Europe, which I’ve written about here. His re-creation of Orwell’s life during the writing of 1984 was compelling. I was amazed at how he distilled the reams of material written about Orwell into such a relatively short and very accessible story. He’s done the same here, this time about the doomed Scott expedition to the South Pole in 1912. Once again reams have been written and Dennis refers to the books he has relied upon in his Author’s Note. I was not as interested in Scott as I was in Orwell but again, Dennis pulls you into the story – the tragedy of it all. He includes in this book a completely fictitious contemporary story linking the scientific discoveries made by Scott to the present challenge of climate change. Which works quite well – though I’m not sure he gets his romcom element completely right. Still, very enjoyable and recommended. I’m glad Dennis has added novel writing to his already distinguished career writing political speeches!
Sleeping on Islands, Andrew Motion
On a first trip to The Hill of Content I resisted buying this, but a second visit proved too much temptation! Supporting our local bookshops I say. A beautifully written memoir as one would expect from a poet. He’s written an earlier memoir, In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood that takes him to 17. This one begins at that age but focusses on his life as a poet and is more fragmented than an ordinary memoir – his memories are fragments but he prefers to think of them as islands, as his title suggests. He was drawn early to the pleasures of poetry and made concerted efforts to seek out places of importance to long dead poets as well as making determined efforts to meet living ones. We start with him and a couple of school friends hiking to Rupert Brookes’ grave on the Greek island of Skyros. He nearly gets sunstroke. He befriends a well known poet – who I’ve not heard of – who lives nearby and is mentored by him. From there we follow him through university with its glimpses of poets like Seamus Heaney and on to his first job in Hull where he hopes to – and eventually does – meet Philip Larkin. I liked all of this and throughout you get glimpses of the author, but it is not very personal. Wives come and go – he marries young to one woman who eventually moves to Hull for him. Then in the next fragment he is married to another. Later there’s another wife with whom he goes to America. We are only given their names. There’s nothing about his children. There’s a little about the conformity of his father’s milieu – conservative upper middle class – from which he is pleased to break free. And many references to his mother who was largely comatose for years after a horse riding accident. Although he is not explicit about that – it comes out in dribs and drabs. I knew about that accident, I don’t know how. In any event it was the defining event of his life which informs his poems and to which he returns again and again. He is interesting about the experience of being Britain’s Poet Laureate, the first to be given a time limited appointment – ten years was enough! The memoir took me to his poems; I found this volume in my library. many of the poems refer to his mother. And there is a long prose piece at the end that describes his re-creation of John Keats’ voyage in a sailing ship to Rome where he was hoping to be cured of the tuberculosis that killed him. He has referred to that only minimally in the memoir, this piece is riveting. Motion likes to inhabit the world of his heroes – there’s something slightly stalkerish about this. In any event I enjoyed this small book. I think the memoir is for those who know and like poetry. I’m now going to read Motion’s biography of Larkin. He became a good friend of his in Hull and was made Larkin’s co-literary executor and his first biographer.
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