Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Mary Costello – The China Factory

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I review a début short story collection from the Irish writer, Mary Costello. I had the pleasure of first reading Costello in an issue of The Stinging Fly, an Irish literary journal, and have now come to really admire her work after reading this entire collection. The book is called The China Factory.

Here is a short except from my review:

Again and again Costello creates stories in which the human connections are both delicate and tender. Stretched thin and raw. Connections that contain an ache. Most of her characters are endowed with an almost painful empathy—attuned to the mysteries of their loved ones and bound to the intricate emotional structures of their own inner landscapes. In “The Patio Man,” a gardener is witness to his boss’s miscarriage and the event, clearly life changing for the woman, is as deeply afflicting for this quiet and watchful man. He is shaken to the core. While never neglecting the woman in the story, Costello actually explores the effects of this man’s empathy to a far greater degree.

I make it very clear in my review how much I enjoyed these stories but I can add a bit of personal anecdote here in this less formal reviewing place. I finished reading The China Factory in a local café, just across the street from my daughter’s daycare. My childcare schedule is somewhat inconvenient and so most Tuesdays and Thursdays, when she goes only for a few hours in the afternoon, I drop her off and head directly across the street to work, so as not to lose any time. In any case, I’m usually reading or writing or translating and I’ve gotten quite good at working in public (which is, I believe, an acquired skill).

Now, I am a seasoned reader. I read all kinds of beautiful and/or difficult literature and although I do engage with it deeply, I usually have no trouble reading anything in public. This was not the case with The China Factory. I re-read “Insomniac,” the second to last story and then blithely read on into “The Sewing Room.” By the time I realized what this quiet story was about, it was too late. I was sobbing. I put the book down, got myself under control and picked it up again. I told myself I could get through it. I took a quick peek around the café, which was about one-third full, and decided to go for it. Before I had turned that last page, the café owner had come over, put a kindly hand on my shoulder and asked me what on earth I was reading. She was visibly disappointed when she saw I was reading in English and wouldn’t get a chance to see for herself, but she quickly re-filled my teapot and hovered until it was clear that I wasn’t going to fall apart.

This all makes for a good story now, but the point I’m trying to make is that it is difficult to do this kind of poignancy nowadays. I admit that my being a relatively new mother made that last story particularly devastating for me—and the fact that it’s only through the support of my husband and family that I can continue working and be a Mom, something that wasn’t, or isn’t, available to many women around the world and so there were/are other, sometimes horrible, choices to be made—but Costello is so restrained in her depiction of these characters and their lives. There is no melodrama. She says it all in the simple handover of an apple from an 18-month-old child to its mother, and how that mother looks at this piece of fruit two days later, and my heart literally broke for these fictional people.

That particular story touched me quite personally and so remains my strongest memory of the collection. But the other stories were all as simple and profound. I cannot recommend this book more highly. Read the entire review here.

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Carson McCullers – Reflections in a Golden Eye

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Tomorrow starts the very first discussion of the newly established Dead Writer’s Book Club—a discussion I’m very much looking forward to—and so I thought I would write out some of my thoughts on this first book, Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, as a way to organize my thoughts before the lovely chaos of a Twitter and Facebook and blog discussion.

What strikes me first and foremost about Reflections in a Golden Eye is how contemporary it feels, especially in terms of language and style. Without some of the older dialogue formulations, I would have had to continually remind myself it was written 70 years ago, and not last week. Even the subject—a bizarre love triangle (actually a love hexagon or heptagon, depending whether you count the horse) set on an army base and leading to a murder is as classic as it is contemporary. There is obviously a reason that McCullers has continued to speak to contemporary writers and readers. She engages with timeless elements of human nature.

And yet there is something wonderfully particular about her writing. For me this comes from her fascination with loneliness and how it brings out the unusual, even the freakishly bizarre, in a person. McCullers makes loneliness as destructive and devastating as any kind of real disease. Her first novel, and probably her most famous, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, features five such desperately lonely people. I’ll never forget how McCullers renders each of those five characters, especially the young girl Mick Kelly and all that music floating around in her head and making her nearly crazy. Or Jake Blount who loses himself completely in an enraged attempt to communicate his understanding of the world to anyone who will listen. Of course no one does. This kind of loneliness portrait is done more quietly in Reflections in a Golden Eye, but it’s extremely sinister. Just look at these lines from early in the book, after Private Williams sees Leonora Penderton walk naked through her house before a dinner party:

The four people at the table had not been alone. In the autumn darkness outside the window there stood a man who watched them in silence. The night was cold and the clean scent of pine trees sharpened the air. A wind sang in the forest near-by. The sky glittered with icy stars. The man who watched them stood so close to the window that this breath showed on the cold glass pane.

There is a lot of paralyzed surveillance in the novel. Private Williams goes every night to the Pendertons, Captain Penderton follows Private Williams around during the day, Alison Langdon stares out of her window every night instead of sleeping. For different reasons and with varying levels of self-awareness, these three individuals are almost completely cut-off from all normal human interaction and McCullers reveals how painfully they suffer.

The different reasons for their isolation are fascinating to me. Captain Penderton and Alison Langdon seem to share a similar heartbreak; they both love and want something from life that they cannot have. Private Williams is infinitely more mysterious. Indeed, if I’m not mistaken, McCullers does not let her narrator go into his mind. She details his often peculiar actions—like riding a horse naked in a hidden meadow or sneaking into Leonora Penderton’s room to watch her sleeping—but doesn’t give the reader the satisfaction of an understandable motivation. It’s almost as if he has suffered an enchantment and the sensual has taken over the rational.

Thinking about the book in terms of McCullers’s thematic development as a writer is interesting as well. It was her second novel and she followed it with The Member of the Wedding. However, she stopped in the middle of that third novel to write her novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café. Thematically, there is a lot to connect these four works: the loneliness as physical and psychological destructor, the troupe of social misfits with unfulfillable wants, the idea of jealousy and vengeance, and finally, the problem of gender and sexual orientation.

For its publication date, Reflections in a Golden Eye is extremely forthcoming about sexual orientation. The word homosexual doesn’t appear once in the book, but McCullers asks some very direct questions about the painful nature of loving someone that society tells you it is wrong to love. Captain Penderton feels only disgust for his wife’s body and a passionate but painful longing for the other men in the book, especially Private Williams. Looking at this relationship with a view to the ending shows where the real tragedy lies.

I haven’t read her autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, or what appears to be an excellent biography of McCullers, The Lonely Hunter by Virginia Spencer Carr, but from what I’ve gathered online and in articles about McCullers, she knew first-hand what she writing about. Reflections in a Golden Eye is actually dedicated to Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer and photographer, who was openly gay. (N.B. I would highly recommend The Cruel Way by Ella Maillart—a famous Swiss adventurer and travel writer—it’s about her trip through the Middle East with Schwarzenbach and it details Schwarzenbach’s struggle with drug addiction as the two women traveled alone from Geneva to Kabul in 1939. It is a fantastic book.) McCullers and Schwarzenbach must have met sometime in 1940 and McCullers apparently fell in love, but Schwarzenbach didn’t. This is all I know and I’m curious what her autobiography and any biographies of her have to say further.

So without further ado, I’ll stop here knowing that tomorrow’s discussion of Reflections in a Golden Eye will bring me back in a few days with more thoughts.

Cross-posted at: Dead Writer’s Book Group

 

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Tove Jansson – The True Deceiver

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A few months back, the lovely Helen of Gallimaufry sent me a copy of Tove Jansson’s The True Deciever. She suspected I would like it and was she ever right! Discovering Jansson’s fiction is one of the highlights of my reading year. I loved the book. Loved it.

The True Deceiver is strange and dark and interested in human nature and animal nature and how the two get confused with each other or confront each other. The book is about Katri and her brother Mats and their relationship with Anna Aemelin, a wealthy woman who lives alone in a big house at the edge of the forest.

When the novel opens, Katri and Mats, who have a ten-year age difference, are living above the local shop. Katri is definitely a guardian figure for her brother and both Katri and Mats are outsiders, although for very different reasons. Katri is feared by the villagers because she doesn’t want their friendship, because she trusts no one, because she wields an uncanny authority over a giant but nameless German Shepherd. She is also a math genius. Mats, on the other hand, is considered simple-minded. He loves reading adventure stories. He loves working on boats and members of a family of local boat builders give him odd jobs from time to time.

For her part, Anna is a strange character indeed. A famous children’s book illustrator, she lives alone in the big house her parents left her when they died. She draws eerily intricate paintings of the forest floor which are then superimposed with bizarre, almost cartoon rabbits. Anna lives very much outside the local community, and so in their shared outsider status it is quite fitting that Anna, Katri and Mats are finally connected.

That connection is engineered by Katri for purely financial means. She wants to find a way to give Mats something he desperately wants. It begins with Katri working as a kind of assistant to Anna, and following a break-in (faked by Katri) the two move into the big house. Katri approaches the relationship on purely economical terms – what can be gained? what must be given up? Despite her constant mental calculations, she can’t factor in the other person’s personality quirks. And Anna is unable to think in such mercenary terms. If Katri’s modus operandi is hostile honesty, than Anna’s is overly gracious pretence. The two are worthy opponents and their “battle” will work profound changes on each side.

Just as fascinating as this uncommon story is the way in which Jansson tells it. She wavers between the 3rd person and the 1st person, switching at will and using the 1st to give us snippets of Katri’s thoughts and less often, Anna’s. The 3rd person narrator has a “knowing” tone as well, further complicating the mix of voices and opinions.

The book is set in the deepest darkest winter, when the villagers practically tunnel through the streets to get around town. The weather continues to reflect certain of the book’s events, although this isn’t a heavy handed technique in any way. As the story ramps up and Anna and Katri discover previously unknown parts of their personalities, Jansson’s winter descriptions shift to mirror their inner and outer struggle. It’s wonderfully done.

The True Deceiver was my first experience with Tove Jansson’s fiction for adults, but it certainly won’t be my last. Let me just finish up here with a bit of the writing, taken from a sample in Katri’s 1st person voice:

Every night I hear the snow against the window, the soft whisper of the snow blown in from the sea, and it’s good, I wish the whole village cold be covered and erased and finally be clean… Nothing can be as peaceful and endless as a long winter darkness, going on and on, like living in a tunnel where he dark sometimes deepens into night and sometimes eases to twilight, you’re screened from everything, protected, even more alone than usual. You wait and hide like a tree.

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Jürgen Fauth – Kino

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Atticus Books is a fairly new publisher doing some wonderful things. First off, they published The Bee-Loud Glade, a book by a very good friend of mine, Steve Himmer, and which I’ve talked about several times already (here, for starters). They’ve also put out an e-novella by Himmer called The Second Most Dangerous Job in America, which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read yet. I plan to correct this mistake very soon.

There are several titles in their catalogue that I’d like to read, namely John Minichillo’s The Snow Whale and Nazareth, North Dakota by Tommy Zurhellen.

However, I had the pleasure of reviewing one of their latest titles for Necessary Fiction recently. Kino, by Jürgen Fauth, is somewhat hard to describe succinctly. The book is about a young woman out to uncover a few family secrets, it’s about the German film industry of the 1930s, it’s also a little bit about contemporary politics and media, and it’s also a little bit about love and marriage.

Here is a little bit of what I had to say in my review:

Much of the joy in reading this kind of novel comes from an admiration of the author’s research and skill in putting that research together into a coherent story. Kino is filled with real historical characters and events—people like German filmmaker Fritz Lang, actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge and many others, and of course Goebbels and several events pertaining to the Third Reich’s negotiation of German art and culture during the 1930s and 40s—but the novel cleverly inserts itself as a fictional footnote to this period of film history, even going so far as to suggest that the discovery of Klaus “Kino” Koblitz’s films will necessitate a re-evaluation of the merit of certain film makers previously credited with the development of revolutionary techniques. Suddenly, deliriously, the “real” and the “possible” begin to merge. Fauth becomes Kino—or is it the other way around?

You can read the entire review here.

Emily St. John Mandel – The Lola Quartet

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Last week over at Necessary Fiction I wrote about Emily St. John Mandel’s most recent novel, The Lola Quartet (Unbridled Books, 2012). This is a carefully scripted story with a large cast and some very interesting commentary on how youthful mistakes can haunt a person’s life. Mandel has a simple but elegant style that suited the novel’s sometimes difficult subject matter. I’ve never read Mandel before and really enjoyed discovering her writing. I’m also curious now if she always writes as she did in The Lola Quartet, or if some of her style came about as a reflection of the way she incorporated elements of literary noir into the novel. On to read her first two novels as soon as I get a chance.

Here is a small excerpt from my review:

Like any good homage to literary noir, The Lola Quartet deals in suspense. From the opening chapter with Anna waiting for help on a playground while that dangerous wad of cash hangs heavy and toxic from the bottom of her infant baby’s stroller, to the final “handoff” with its complicated moral implications, The Lola Quartet cultivates the reader’s sense of dread. These characters, mostly vulnerable to us for their relative youth and precarious lifestyles, move through different levels of danger. They are all at-risk from the dangers of the self as well as from various perpetrators of exterior menace.

Read the full review here.

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Anne Korkeakivi – An Unexpected Guest

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Books that involve politics while keeping sight of the personal issues are a favorite of mine, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I really enjoyed Anne Korkeakivi’s An Unexpected Guest. Here is a book that very elegantly mixes politics and history with a complicated personal story.

Quick story summary: Clare Moorhouse is the American wife of a high-ranking British diplomat. They live in Paris; their two teenage sons are at different boarding schools in Britain. Clare has a big secret in her past, a secret that has formed her exterior personality for the last twenty-five years and a secret that could ruin her husband’s career were it to get out now. The book is concerned with a single day—a neat time limitation that makes for a close and intense reading experience—and a day in which, obviously, the threat of her past looms larger than it ever has before.

The political intrigue of An Unexpected Guest deals primarily with The Troubles between Northern Ireland and England, and especially with the American perspective on that issue during the 1980s. However, while these events work mostly in the novel’s past, Korkeakivi manages to make some provocative parallels to contemporary political struggles – namely the American invasion of Iraq and the current War on Terror. The book involves a very interesting subplot that deals specifically with these contemporary issues, but also, subtly comments on how the War on Terror has fueled a dangerous kind of racism.

The scenes of An Unexpected Guest that work to grease the wheels of this political story are what make it somewhat of a thriller. Korkeakivi creates a very palpable sense of impending danger. It is to her credit that the book doesn’t stop there, as the exploration of Clare’s personality is a fascinating one. Here is a woman that committed a grave mistake in her youth—a mistake that caused her to lose someone she loved, but also required her to relinquish a part of herself. Giving up aspects of one’s personality may be a normal part of the growing up process, but Clare must enact a permanent about-face. After what happens in her youth, she must choose to be someone very different and she must guard herself very carefully.

Early on in the novel, Clare remarks on this process. Her thoughts come about after a comment made by her husband, which he intends as a compliment but which hurts her very much, when he says that she fits so perfectly into the orderly and composed diplomatic residence.

She was pale, smooth, beige, a sea pebble of the kind one picks up along the beach and slips into one’s pocket to run one’s fingers over while pondering the meaning of life—or where to eat dinner. She knew it, she had even cultivated it—as much as she had ever manufactured anything about herself, for her development had been more like an act of erosion, a sanding away of all extraneous or undesirable elements, and this was how she felt more and more, as though each year were a grand wave washing away a little more of her.

Clare is in an interesting position since what drove her toward the life she has now was a solid quest for safety, for predictability, and more than anything else, civility. She admires her husband for his capacity for rational thinking and for his belief that the world’s problems can and must be resolved through clear-headed negotiations. Knee-jerk emotional reactions will never save the day. And yet she still secretly harbors a passionately emotional individual beneath her unruffled exterior and she cherishes the memory, however painful the memory might be, of a man who functioned in a much different manner. In this way, the book goes beyond its bombs and diplomatic maneuvering and conducts a very careful examination of this woman’s psyche.

An Unexpected Guest is a curious hybrid of a book. It has elements of a thriller, it contains several echoes of Mrs. Dalloway, and it is set in a posh world of diplomacy and expatriate families. Even Korkeakivi’s writing is a blend of straightforward storytelling and the gently lyrical. Yet despite these fascinating variations, more than anything it is an intelligent book. Emotionally intelligent and politically astute.

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Julie Otsuka – The Buddha in the Attic

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Those of you who’ve been following this blog might remember that I was born in Japan and that I lived there again for several years after finishing university. I tend to think of Japan as my second home—home in the sense of one’s origins, the place that helped create you. The US and Japan tend to flip-flop with Switzerland at the top of my list of countries that I think the most about – politics, history, literature. I’ll never have a Japanese passport and my Japanese has become woefully rusty in recent years, but the fact of my being born there means that I read books about Japan with more than just my usual curiosity.

This is the context that I couldn’t help carrying with me into my reading of Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. I read an excerpt of this very slim novel back in the Spring 2011 issue of Granta; it was called “The Children” and it absolutely stunned me. I’ve studied a considerable bit of Japanese history, especially the Pacific War and the issue of The Comfort Women, but I’ve never done much looking at the Japanese immigrant experience, which is the central question of Otsuka’s book. It begins with a boat full of young Japanese brides, clutching photographs of the men they’ve married but never met. Each chapter then moves forward through what happens to this collective body of women: meeting their husbands, working in American fields or as servants or running laundries, having children, raising first-generation Japanese-American children, and relationships with “white” people. Eventually Otsuka makes her way to World War II and the internment of the Japanese-Americans.

Perhaps the most unique characteristic of the book is that Otsuka writes this novel in the first-person plural with the occasional bit of italicized dialogue to conjure up an individual voice. When I encountered this in the Granta excerpt, it is part of what gripped me, perhaps because it ends up reading like a long prose poem and creates a sustained emotional involvement in the narrative:

We laid them down gently, in ditches and furrows and wicker baskets beneath the trees. We left them lying naked, atop blankets, on woven straw mats at the edges of the fields. We placed them in wooden apple boxes and nursed them every time we finished hoeing a row of beans. When they were older, and more rambunctious, we sometimes tied them to chairs. (…) But when they tired and began to cry out for us we kept on working because if we didn’t we knew we would never pay off the debt on our lease. Mama can’t come. And after a while their voices grew fainter and their crying came to a stop. And at the end of the day when there was no more light in the sky we woke them up from wherever it was they lay sleeping and brushed the dirt from their hair. It’s time to go home.

Before starting the entire book, however, I worried that this particular narrative perspective would start to wear after fifty pages or so, but that isn’t the case, at least it wasn’t for me. I admit that my interest in Japanese history might make me less objective than others. In any case, the book reads really quickly (it’s only 129 pages) and is quite beautiful. Otsuka presents the diversity of the immigrant experience through a first-person plural narrator that manages, quite cleverly, to be both many women and one woman all at the same time. At the very end she affects a subtle shift in perspective that closes the story in a meaningful way; I thought this was really well done.

Apparently her earlier novel, When the Emperor was Divine, is more specifically about the internment experience. It is fitting then that The Buddha in the Attic doesn’t go further than the packing and the leaving and the subsequent emptiness. The disappearance of the Japanese from their homes.

My final comment about the book is that it was curiously uninterested in anger. Otsuka is writing about the treatment of “foreigners” in American society but she does this without laying blame at anyone’s feet. It’s quite fascinating how she manages to do this. It’s all very gentle, really. And yet still provocative.

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Dead Writer’s Book Group

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Wanted to announce a new project coming up called The Dead Writer’s Book Group. This idea came up last week between myself, Myfanwy Collins (of Echolocation, I book I loved and wrote about at Necessary Fiction but also here) and Anne Korkeakivi (of An Unexpected Guest – this book is just out and I am reading right now and will write about soon!).

The idea is quite simple: each month we will host a group discussion of a work by an author who has (unfortunately!) passed on. Our first pick is Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers. Discussions can take place in two places – either on the blog The Dead Writer’s Book Club or on Twitter, and will run for the entire day on the first Monday of every month. We aren’t starting in May but in June, so we will be discussing McCullers on Monday June 4th.

I will for sure be posting about the book on the DWBG blog just before the first “meet-up” on Twitter, so whether you prefer a blog discussion or tweeting, anyone and everyone is welcome to join in. And I hope you will!

For the Twitter discussion look for: #ddwritersbkgp .

I’ve read all three of McCullers’s best known works: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, which is probably my favorite. This will be a chance to read one of her lesser known works and discuss it. I can’t wait.

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J.A. Tyler – Variations of a Brother War

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This week’s review at Necessary Fiction is by me, of a lovely novella written by J.A. Tyler. Variations of a Brother War is actually a novella-in-verse, each page containing a triptych of 100-word stanzas bound together by a common theme. The book has about fifty* different themed triptychs, and together they tell of two brothers, Miller and Gideon, and their love for the same woman, Eliza. The book is set during the American Civil War and so it is also about fighting between “brothers” in that symbolic sense.

Here’s a small excerpt from my review:

As the title suggests, there are many stories here in Variations of a Brother War, and of course there is only one story told in myriad ways. Gideon and Miller will die several deaths, Eliza will love both men and reject both men. She will love many times. She will be happy. She will be alone. Mothers die and fathers leave, both become ghosts who then return again and again to Tyler’s valley of cabins and rage and love-gone-wrong. Despite the strictness of the structure, the book offers a freedom of story and meaning, a chance to be read again and again in the joy of new discovery.

Variations of a Brother War is the first book to be published by a small press out of Portland, OR called Small Doggies Press and based on this first selection, I’m really excited to see what they’ll come out with next. This was a fun, thoughtful and beautiful book to read; it took me only a few hours and so I had the chance to read it again twice over the next couple of days.

Read the full review here.

*I’d have to check for the exact number and maybe there are only 34 or 36 different triptychs, which would be a neat connection to the Civil War since this is how many states there were at the beginning and then at the end of the Civil War – but my memory of the book tells me there are more…

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Barbara Pym – Quartet in Autumn

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After discovering Barbara Pym earlier this year, I went on a mini Pym binge and read several of her books in quick succession – Excellent Women, No Fond Return of Love and Jane and Prudence. Then I jumped ahead and read her “come-back” novel, Quartet in Autumn, which is markedly different from those earlier books. In those earlier works, Pym is often laugh-out-loud funny. Although many of her characters are lonely, they are almost always able to take an ironic stance toward that loneliness, which lightens it – at least for the reader.

However, Quartet in Autumn, although it has some traces of humor, is a thoroughly serious book. I’d even go so far as to consider this short novel a quiet tragedy. Much of Pym’s usual preoccupations are present, including unmarried men and women and clerical life, but she isn’t teasing anyone with these ideas. The focus of her revelatory concern goes beyond these smaller social issues; she exposes the very nature of loneliness.

Quartet in Autumn is about four office colleagues – Marcia, Letty, Edwin and Norman – and their respective solitary lives. Much of what Pym describes is heartbreaking. Marcia storing up empty milk bottles and canned food, Letty listening to the radio alone in her room in the evening, an angry Norman watching young people play in a park at lunch, and Edwin’s cultivated obliviousness. These four individuals are horribly, horribly lonely, but so stuck in their mode of living that they are unwilling to do anything that might rumple the surface of that loneliness. Each time an offer comes about (and there are several throughout the book) that might somehow decrease someone’s isolation, it is always immediately rejected.

Pym has an incredible eye for character differentiation. With a less careful writer, these four people could all start to resemble one another because, at least on the surface, they really do all have a lot in common. But no, Marcia and Letty are so different they can hardly speak to one another and Edwin and Norman also sit on different ends of the “old bachelor” spectrum. Watching these four interact, first at the office and then later after Marcia and Letty have retired, is somewhat funny at its lightest, but quite painful at its worst.

I must say that one of the things I find curious about Pym is her complete and utter lack of sensuality. These four people are lonely, yes, but she doesn’t really push their loneliness outside of an intellectual representation. How do I put this? There is never much concern for the physical reality of being lonely. The issue of never being touched for a person who lives alone is mentioned once, via another character, a social worker who checks on Marcia actually, but Pym never allows her actual characters to express themselves through this filter. What is remarkable to me is that Pym is so effective at conveying the loneliness of her characters without really resorting to an investigation of their physical loneliness.

Although, having said that, one of the characters in this novel, Marcia, manifests her loneliness through anorexia, which could be considered a physical representation. Yet this is also about control, about denying the physical. So it’s almost an extreme version of what I just said above.

Quartet in Autumn has a typically Pym-like ambiguous and perhaps frustrating ending. A possible reprieve from loneliness is again on offer, but Pym doesn’t tell the reader whether it will come to anything.

I am not usually very interested in the life of a writer – I prefer to take the whole of their work and let that sit with me – but the trajectory of Pym’s writing career intrigues me, especially the forced 13 year hiatus she took because no one was interested in publishing her after she’d finished her sixth novel. She was resurrected apparently because two prominent male writers championed her work. I’m curious how she managed those 13 years – I know that she continued to write because what she wrote was eventually published. Her diaries are published as A Very Private Eye and there is a biography of her by Hazel Holt called A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym.

Has anyone read either? Thoughts?

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