A Work in Progress

Women in Translation: Hoping to Read

Why is it when I am busy at work I can only think how wonderful it would be to have a whole day with nothing to do but read.  But when I have a long weekend I, in fact, read very little.  So crazy.  I have this bad habit of when I have free time thinking I need to 'earn' time for pleasure reading.  First I will take a walk and exercise, and then I will do laundry and then the grass needs mowing, and then my weekend is gone.  Do you have that problem, or are you sensible and just not worry about the mundane tasks that don't need to be done all at once?  Apparently I am in the worrier group.

So here I am once again with a lovely pile of new books from that list of women's writing in translation which my library has slowing been getting in.  The books cross my desk and I have to admit I have started accumulating a small pile.  Most have gone out to the shelves but I have checked out a few that are of particular interest to me, so I thought I would share them here in case they might also be of interest to you, too.

Teffi's Subtly Worded was a 'must look at' as I am slowly working my way through her Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea.  I have been quietly chipping away at it and passed the halfway mark now.   This is a collection of short stories, and while I am in the market for a new story collection to read, I will most likely just dip into this one.  Amongst other things, this collection has "stories of people misunderstanding each other or misrepresenting themselves."  She writes with "sly, sardonic wit and a deep, compelling intelligence", which I have already come to know to be true!  (Translated from the Russian).

More stories to explore in Regina Ullmann's The Country Road.  Ullmann is a famous Swiss author and this is her first work translated into English.  According to her publisher, New Directions, "Regina Ullmann, considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, was known for her honest portrayals of rural peasant life. Ullmann was no stranger to these settings, spending much of her life in Swiss rural landscapes—supplementing her income by basket weaving, beekeeping, and making wax figurines."  She sounds interesting and her writing quite unique.  (Translated from the German).

I am most keen to start with Elvira Dones's Sworn Virgin.  It is the winner of the European Pen Award and is an & Other Stories book that I just mentioned.  "Hana Doda is an Ambitious literature student in cosmopolitan Tirana.  Mark Doda is a raki-drinking, chain-smoking shepherd, living alone deep in the Albanian mountains.  In fact, they are the same person.  Apparently this is an Albanian tradition--Hana turns down an arranged marriage and live independently.  She is allowed to do so by her family, but in return she must live the rest of her life in chastity--as a man!  She becomes a 'sworn virgin'.  When she decides later to reintegrate into society in the US she must transition back into life as a woman.  I have no idea yet what the time period this is set in but it sounds like a curious book with a look into how disorienting it would be to change gender identities.  It might also be a perfect choice to read for The Literary Others readalong.  Dones was born in Albania but moved to Italy.  This is her first book written in Italian ("She adds her voice to the burgeoning new generation of "blended" Italians, who deliberately adopt a "dirty" immigrant/exile approach to their language").  She is now based in the US.

Elke Schmitter's Mrs. Sartoris would be a perfect pairing with Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.  "An international sensation, Elke Schmitter’s explosive debut novel presents a modern-day twist on Madame Bovary.  Margarethe can remember very clearly the last time she was happy: she was eighteen, prized for her beauty, and swept off her feet by her wealthy, dashing boyfriend. Then he left her. For the last twenty years she has lived in a provincial German town with her dependable husband, her self-directed daughter, and her adoring mother-in-law. Her life has been one of numbing predictability–until she meets Michael, a married man who stirs her from her resignation, delivering her to heights of rapture only to ignite far more destructive passions."  I've read Madame Bovary a number of times and in various translations and think it is a brilliant novel.  I'm not sure I can manage a reread just now, but I very much want to read Mrs. Sartoris.  (Translated from the German).

I've had my eye on Jenny Erpenbeck's works for a while, but The End of Days is the book most appealing to me.  The novel is made up of five books, each with the same female character and each leading to her death under varying circumstances  and at different periods in her life and in history.  The novel "offers a unique overview of the twentieth century."  It sounds a little familiar--similar to Kate Atkinson's work, but maybe not exactly the same.  This won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize and is set during the early part of Europe's 20th century. 

I'm not quite sure where to start, but one of these is going to be in my bookbag next time I pack it!  And I swear I am going to work on balancing the need to earn reading time and guilt-free reading time.  Life is short, read more books surely . . .

Short Story Round-up: Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman and something new the title should read.  I finished The Music at Long Verney by Sylvia Townsend Warner but I don't think I'll write about the last of the stories other than to say that I enjoyed the collection and find her writing whimsical and inviting.  I'll be looking for some of her longer fiction as well.  I'm working on Alice Hoffman's The Red Garden now and as that is a collection of interlinked stories am in the market for a new story collection to read or perhaps I will begin dipping into books at random and seeing which stories catch my fancy.  The beauty of short stories--the come in manageable bites.  And hooray we are now into August so it is time to think about cooler weather (fantasize only at this point I admit, but we are making progress) and ghost stories just around the corner. 

Firs a few words on the last couple of Alice Hoffman stories I read.  The collection is moving along nicely.  Last weekend 1863 and the war between the states and this weekend finally into the twentieth century with a story in 1903.  "The River at Home" sees the residents of Blackwell, Massachusetts dealing with the War between North and South.  Every able-bodied man enlisted all the way down to boys of no more than fourteen and fifteen.  This must be true since it is almost too morbid to think up as a fiction, a tintype of fallen soldiers might make its way back to the wives and families and more than one widow might clip it to her dress as one might a corsage!  This is a story mixed with love and death and ultimately life.  If I mentioned and you still recall a previous story where a young girl drowned, she returns here, or maybe it is just her ghost or maybe there are lots of ghosts with so many war dead and what is one more. 

Sometimes bad things happen in these stories but there is always some spin on them.  It's not all dire and hopelessness.  It is that dash of magical realism that buoys the stories up.  In "The Truth About My Mother" a girl of only ten witnesses awful violence perpetrated on her mother and worse by her father.  She does the only thing a woman can do at the time, the only think that will make the violence stop irrevocably.  And then the pair flee, but in order for the mother to support the daughter by passing herself off as a teacher, she must leave behind the girl with strangers.  Unknown to her, to the mother, the daughter has followed her and she does what any young girl in a magical story such as this, who sleeps in the barn of a great house, can do.  She helps the owner right the world and line up the planets just so, so that her mother will fall for the man who has seen her and it is love at first sight for this woman so much abused. 

I'm ready for the next story of 1918.  Then 1935, 1945, 1956, 1961, 1966, 1986 and then the last undated story.  I am so curious now to be in the modern age I want to keep going and think I will dive in and keep going sooner rather than later with the rest of the stories.  And on the horizon, is the unknown answer to the question "what next?". 

I've just received a book in the mail from author A.C. Moyer which is a collection of four longer stories called All Sleep.  The tagline is "a lineup of psychopathic short stories" or psychological thrillers which, no pun intended I promise, calls out to be read in September and October when the leaves are falling and begin to crunch underfoot. 

I'm sort of leaning towards pulling out once again The Complete Fiction of Francis Wyndham from last year.  I had been reading and writing about the stories in the collection in the spring when I stopped just before a longish (novella length) story called "Ursula" which I think I might be in the mood for finally.  We'll see.  There are always those poor New Yorker stories which have been so terribly neglected or maybe those O. Henry stories that will be released in the fall.   By the way, I just realized (looking at my sidebar of books read this year) that I have read no less than five collections of short stories this year.  Not too bad at all!

Short Story Monday: The Listening Woman

I am winding down in the Sylvia Townsend Warner story collection.  Only forty pages left to read, but five stories.  I am hoping to finish the book in the next few days.  I like to spread out my short story reading and not take them in a big gulp, but as much as I have enjoyed her writing, I think I am ready to move on to something different.  I have been thinking of returning to Elizabeth Jane Howard or maybe something entirely different.  Or perhaps an anthology of stories collected by theme.  As much as I am 'into' a book I am currently reading the promise of something new very soon is always a temptation I cannot resist.

I read two STW stories this weekend.  The last two Mr. Edom/Abbey Antique Gallery stories were published in the late 1960s/early 1970s.  "The Listening Woman", which I will tell you mostly about was written in 1965 but not published until 1972.  Apparently the then editor of The New Yorker had wearied of the series.  I've enjoyed them and quite like those interlinked sort of stories, but perhaps for a literary magazine it was just too samey?  Her stories can be very quiet sorts of stories but sometimes they are quietly sly, if you know what I mean.  A little jab at the end a satirical twist.

I think what I like most about these stories set in the world of antiques is the character of Mr. Edom who tends to take a person by surprise.  He can come off rather curmudgeonly sometimes, but then a customer comes along and he'll treat her with such deference you wonder what it is about her that softens his heart.

"It is common experience how the possessions of one's childhood vanish . . ."

The narrator is thinking along the lines of a white mug with the letter D on it and whimsical pictures that illustrate it, or a marionette or a high chair.  These little trinkets are long forgotten from "your ungrateful memory" until some small thing, like a thimble case in an antique store brings the memories flooding back.  Miss Mainwaring, now an old woman, is highly regarded by Mr. Edom (high praise indeed his assistant Mr. Collins thinks).  Miss Mainwaring is what we might term low maintenance.  She is happy to browse without having to handle all the items and will usually buy something if only for manners' sake.

And then she spots "the candlelit woman"--a painting that was once owned by her parents and hanging on the walls of her childhood home.  "So here you are" she says.  Her father called it "Lucy's painting" as Miss Mainwaring liked to look at it as she grew up.  The more she looked the more it seemed there was to see and think about.  Her father died, the books went to her great aunt along withe books and she lost track of it.  And here it is hanging in an antique shop, sadly in need of a good cleaning.  And worse, a married couple are looking at it, too, contemplating purchasing it if only for the frame.  They can always remove the painting since it is so dirty . . .  Miss Mainwaring stands patiently waiting yet her desire for it is almost palpable.  When she mentioned to the shop assistant that it was once her family's painting, you can tell he is thinking "poor mad woman".

***

I am very much enjoying the Alice Hoffman collection of interlinked stories, The Red Garden.  I'm up to 1848 in "Owl and Mouse".  There are common themes, aside from the stories' setting of Blackwell, Massachusetts over the centuries.  Hoffman tends to write about women, women who tend towards the unconventional, often solitary and independent and always smart.  There is a nod towards nature and the natural world.  Blackwell is still so new as to be rugged yet the same families carry on and have established themselves.  Some of the original homes are there and recognized. 

Emily is one of my favorite characters so far.  A student at Mount Holyoke Seminary, she is being removed by her family as she's not been happy there.  "Her views were her own, and educators did not always appreciate free thought."  On her last day before returning home she decides to go for a walk as she "often would go rambling as a child", and she had been known to collect flowers.  Over time she had as many as six hundred different species. 

"She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people.  It was a talent, as it was a curse.  There was something that came between Emily and other people, a white linen curtain, hazy.  It made the world quieter and farther away, although occasionally she could see through to the other side."

I understand her restless feeling.  She fears if she goes home she will never get away again.  "There was something inside her, beating against her ribs, urging her to do things she might not otherwise attempt."  And consider this is 1848!  Her ramble is a serious ramble that lasts more than ten hours before she stops--just outside the town of Blackwell.  I won't give away all the best bits of this story, which I think is a really lovely read and perhaps my favorite so far, but it involves a man who is blind, yet sees and understands her (a man who is also drawn towards to the horizon and discovering new worlds) and it involves the making of a fragrant garden. 

Next week hopefully will see the end of the Sylvia Townsend Warner collection and I am now up to 1863 with "The River at Home" in the Alice Hoffman collection.

Short Story Monday: English Mosaic

I have both a biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner and a book of letters she and William Maxwell (editor of The New Yorker at the time she was publishing stories in the magazine) exchanged from 1938-1978.  I tried to find reference to "Tebic" or any of the stories that I read for this weekend but no luck on either count.  Alas the function of poor tebic must remain a mystery.  I do look forward to reading (or dipping into-in the case of the latter) both books.  So, two  more stories from The Music at Long Verney.  In both we have returned once again to Mr. Edom's Abbey Antique Galleries, which is indeed an eccentric London establishment--rather the proprietor, Mr. Edom, is very "singular".  He's quirky and I like him.  Apparently there are five of these stories in this collection.  Definitely one from last weekend was a Abbey Antique story.

In "English Mosaic" written in 1964 Mr. Edom will resort to drastic measures to get rid of both a most appalling item that has been left for possible purchase as well as a 'know-all' shop assistant whose motives Edom seriously questions.  This is a brutal and clever story.  Trademark Townsend Warner I'd say. 

"When a stranger walks into an antique shop, an experienced dealer doesn't need to ask himself whether the entrant has come to buy or hopes to sell.  Mr. Edom, who kept the Abbey Antique Galleries, in St. John Street, could tell at a glance, or even without glancing--by a footfall, by the timbre of a cough--what was in the air."

When his normal assistant is taken ill, the employment agency sends round a young lady who grates something awful on Mr. Edom.  It gives him great pleasure to ask her that when he is out of the shop she is to refrain from making any decisions at all and simply write out a receipt to anyone wishing to sell their antiques.  "No comments please." 

Miss "Know-All Hartley" as Mr. Edom dubbs her receives an item she proclaims a "marvelous speciman"--an English mosaic.  Looking at the item, literally spellbound, circling the object, filled with anguish he moans--"how perfectly appalling!" and "the ignoramous!".  You see, it is in fact . . . 

". . . cylindrical as a length of earthenware drainpipe--which, in fact, it was--and gay as a Joseph's coat of many colors.  The drainpipe having been plastered with some sort of bitumen, a medley of broken china and pottery had been pavemented all over it.  The labor and ingenuity expended  must have been prodigious; the aim, he supposed, to enrich a home of ornamental umbrella stand.  In short, a labor of love."

Hah.  Pavemented.  What makes it so shockingly awful to Mr. Edom is the fact that the china used happens to be of a variety of the most exquisite of pieces, so many amazing examples of the very, very best and all "immolated on the altar of Home Art".  Not only does Mr. Edom believe that surely this atrocity Must Surely have been at the hands of a woman (he can see the hammer raised in her hands even now), but he verbally expresses his views with a high degree of consternation to Miss Know-All, um, Miss Hartley. 

Oh, dear.  Yes, it is going to be as you may expect.  He's annoyed and now she's annoyed, too.  But how, she will demand could he possibly know this?  Butting of heads.  Displeasure, annoyance, anger.  This assistant must go.  He can already see her with a hammer in hand.  He looks about his gallery and vivid images come to mind.  Well, I won't spoil it by telling you how the matter is resolved.  Technically speaking it is a happy ending on both counts. 

This is a most delightful story and scathing in the descriptions, satirical- and amusing-scathing, that is.  In "Candles" the next Abbey story that I also read, the tone takes on a very different hue.  Written in 1966, Mr. Edom has a new shop assistant, it's a nasty cold snowy January day and the lights go out.  Candles are lit and the shop becomes a different place for just a little while.

"For in the diffused candlelight, everything had become mysteriously beautiful and enriched."

It's the sort of ambiance that invites childhood reminiscences.  Elegiac in tone, something very different after the wittiness of "English Mosaic".  Lovely and quiet, and a little different from STW.

Next weekend: "Furnivall's Hoopoe" and "The Listening Woman".

***

I've also continued on in the Alice Hoffman collection, The Red Garden, which I am very much enjoying.  Once again the Tree of Life makes another appearance as do the descendants of some of the original settlers in the 1816 story "The Year There Was No Summer".  It is a freak summer month of June when sunshine has been superseded by clouds and cold.  It is not blossoms from the trees that are floating about the air but snowflakes.  On such a strange, surreal day when the townspeople's attention lies elsewhere a young girl goes missing.  And of course, it is the gypsy camp that draws attention.  Always people look towards strangers when something awful happens.  This is a melancholy sort of story where there will be no real winners yet the story ends on a hopeful note.  I love how Hoffman pulls that thread through the stories--from the first onward with recurring characters and themes and of course the town and that tree.  I look forward to seeing where things are headed, what will happen and how the town will grow and change.  Next week: 1848 in "Owl and Mouse".  I am very fond of collections with interlinked stories and I know Alice Munro has at least one.  I may look for more as I near the end of my STW reading.

Short Stories: Tebic & A Flying Start

Three good short stories this past weekend, starting with two by Sylvia Townsend Warner first.  Both in a way are about gift giving, though with STW there is always more to the story than meets the eye.  So, "Tebic" first.  Tebic.  Tebic?  What is a tebic?  She dangles it in front of the reader's eye and then leaves us hanging as to its particulars, but then maybe its purpose isn't exactly the point of the story.

Humphrey takes great care in his gift giving, and wife choosing since he is discerning about both.  Lydia, his wife, is engagingly eclectic so he can be sure of her tastes.  In this case, Tebic was bought ages ago and set aside for later.  So much so that when she unwrapped it he had forgotten  both its use and its benefits (or so he says, maybe he never really knew) and thought to smuggle it out of sight and into the garbage.  But Lydia got to it first and saved it.

" . . . I'm sure that when we've found out what its meant to do, it will be an answer to a prayer [Lydia says].  Perhaps it's for withering away that immovable tape people will do up parcels with--in which case, what a godsend!  Or for putting in damp cupboards, or mending china, or adding vitamins to soup."

Now that such a fuss is being made of it, he wants to hear no more about it (being rather sensitive to his gift choices and easily wounded by the recipient's reactions, or lack thereof).  He'd been burned before you see.  Just then a friend of Lydia arrives, shrieks in excitement over Tebic, of which she also has one.  Humphrey knows Lydia will never tell a fib and so fully expects to hear her friend explain Tebic's purpose, when Lydia replies "I can't imagine myself without it."  A shout of laughter and a realization that maybe he doesn't know his wife so well after all.  And Tebic?  I'm still not sure its purposes.  Lydia ruined it for all of us by her little fib (how often do we agree or pretend we know when really we don't . . .).

"A Flying Start" is a treat of a story and one of my favorites so far.  A young couple visit a favorite an antiques shop, the husband with exquisite taste, but the wife . . . well, perhaps a little more flawed in her choices.  The trinket she picks up in admiration is shot down after "a brief but careful scrutiny" and a "I don't like it" by her husband.  With tranquility of countenance, cool, calm and collected and not a word of protest she returns it to its display. 

I won't tell you how it ends, but I'll just throw out the word "larceny" and you can imagine the rest (though you might be surprised by the ending).  Mr. Edom, who appears in several stories in this collection, undertaking the guise of gallery owner is a delight and a careful observer of clientele and their foibles.  And apparently he will let slip a little infraction of the rules if he likes you.  In thinking about the title and its meaning I had to contemplate for a while, but a flying start must surely mean the wife's flying start of, um, collecting (or maybe thievery if she's not careful).  STW is quite whimsical and sly in her storytelling.  I wonder what she must have been like in real life (must read that biography of her I bought). 

***

I've continued on in my Alice Hoffman collection, The Red Garden, (actually it is a series of interlinked stories) with "Eight Nights of Love, 1792".  I can see that the characters, or rather descendants of characters are going to pop up in the stories along down the line.  The last 'dated' story is set in 1986 so I have a ways to go.  When I first started reading this weekend's story, it had a whiff of strong religious beliefs about it and I almost thought, not today--I'm not sure I am in the mood for this, but I kept reading and found myself quite taken with the story in the end. As a matter of fact I wanted to keep going yesterday with the next story, but my bookbag was already full and I couldn't allow even one more stowaway.

Two events set the tone of the story.  The story's focus is a Tree of Life planted in the center of Blackwell.  Story has it that when the tree blooms, if you are standing beneath it you can ask for mercy for your sins.  People would secretly cut bits from the tree to plant in their own yards.  The story is about the two young men, brothers, who plant the tree--no one can remember who the original planter even was really.  But Minette could tell you.  The second event--she is on her way to hang herself after the deaths of her husband and child to illness when she encounters the brothers.  One older and the other just a boy.  Each helps the other in ways that show mercy and hope.  Of course the townspeople are wary of the two men.  How odd for them to plant trees and to stay with a widow (even if only in her yard) is unseemly.  They are ready to run the pair out of town.  The elder brother, shoeless and will long hair (and so thin because he barely eats and the faintness brought on by hunger makes him feel even closer to God) promises their work is nearly done and the people of the town will thank them later, long after they have moved on. 

When the tree blooms out of season, of course it is nearly miraculous.  Indeed the men have a lasting effect as they plant trees all the way to the opposite coast.  It was fitting to read a story about planting trees across America on a day when I visited a place important to tree planting. 

Next weekend: "English Mosaic", "The Candles" and in the Hoffman: "The Year There was No Summer."

Short Story Monday: Afternoon in Summer

A story called "Afternoon in Summer" sounds like a perfect summer Sunday sort of read.  Cannibalism?  The story included cannibalism?  How did I miss that?  Must go back and skim.  One moment please, I'll be right back.

Oh yeah.  Now I remember.  A young couple sits together--she's reading a book and he's just noticing her looking up from it with a look that says she's about to share something.  The book she's reading (this story was published in 1972 by the way) is about murders in the past twenty years. 

"Murder is an occupational risk for prostitutes."

"Hmmm, said he, clinging to the thread of his calculations.  They grew so engrossing that when next she spoke it took him by surprise. 

"And for wives, too--though not so much."

"Inwardly assenting, Willie asked, "What on earth are you reading now?"

Wait, though, it gets better.

"Are there any cases in your nice book about husbands who ate their wives?  I'd like to know their sentences."

"Oh, Willie, are you hungry?"

Hah.  This is Sylvia Townsend Warner we're talking about.  Such a wacky and humorous conversation is par for the course in her writing.  You see the pair are on summer vacation in cottage rental and all the food contained in the fridge consists of "a heel of cheese, some rye biscuit, on tomato."  And upon further consideration she added salt.  What sort of grocer closes on a Thursday?  Apparently a grocer in a small town. 

So the two set off on their bicycles to a pub where the plan is to have an enormous tea.  One puncture later they arrive only to find the pub isn't yet open and on the door a big sign letting them know "no teas".  Well, they are legally bound to open at six, Willie says?  Is that true?  Pubs in England being legally bound to open--ca. 1970!? 

In any case, this is where the story really gets good.  (In case that little exchange didn't get your attention).  So, now a church is in order.  Some place cool they can sit and pass the twenty minutes or so before they can have a proper tea.  Okay, another perfect conversational exchange.  I like Sally and Willie.

"I can't understand why people don't make more use of their churches."

"Sectarianism," said Willie.  "I don't suppose anyone will come near this place till Harvest Festival."

"Which is phallic, isn't it?"

Hah.  Don't answer that.  Willie didn't get a chance in any case as just at that moment the couple is joined by a coffin and a crowd of "partially blackened mourners".  I won't tell you what happens next, considering the very tongue-in-cheek representation of Sally and Willie.  You may or may not guess.  I will just say why does sex and death seem to always go together?  

A little light comic release this weekend.  Just what I needed.  Nothing like a good story to elicit a nice guffaw or two. 

I did read another story in The Music at Long Verney.  "A Scent of Roses" come to think of it, was a perfect pairing.  Another story from 1972 which is set, or rather begins, some time just after WWI.  An only son who lives with his widowed mother.  Surely that must have had an effect on his personality.  Howard spends the better part of his adult years in a relationship with a, ah, um, a mistress?  Okay, a lady of the evening who keeps slippers for her clientele.  So when Howard spends time with her, out come his particular pair of slippers.  Who can judge a relationship that works?  He even buys her expensive gifts on their anniversaries.  Sorry, have to share the last bit, if you don't want to know, turn away now. 

Another, hah, moment.  Why shouldn't a prostitute look to her future?  And as a lady who is a cut above the rest (maybe even a cut above Howard!) it's something of a shock when she announces her retirement to France with her longstanding betrothed!

***

So, I gave into temptation and ordered Alice Hoffman's The Red Garden, which is a set of interlinked stories about the residents of Blackwell, Massachusetts over the course of centuries.  I have not read much of Hoffman's work.  Actually the only thing that comes to mind is another book of interlinked stories, which I really liked. 

The first story is set in 1750 when Blackwell was first known as Bearsville when there "were nearly as many black bears in the woods then as there were pine trees."  Blackwell might never have even been founded had it not been for a seventeen year old woman from England who married the first man who asked her (having been in the Americas for only a few months), and he turned out to be a ne'r do well.

Hallie Brady, an orphan in England, does what she needs to do to survive and save for a ticket to the new world where she can make a new start.  A woman who would prefer to die trying to save herself than do nothing at all waiting for death to arrive.  A small group of settlers, led by William Brady, makes the bad plan of setting out for a good place on the other side of the mountains to settle their small new town--a place where there is endless land and they can have it for free.  But who has the bad sense to begin this journey in October?

I fear that while ultimately the stories may be good, they are going to be marked by hardship and tragedy, which is what happens in "The Bear's House" the first of more than a dozen stories.  If this first one is anything to judge by, the stories are going to have Hoffman's trademark dash of magical realism.  Circumstances might just challenge a reader's perceptions on reality and a little suspension of disbelief might be called for, but I think this is going to be a great collection.

The next story will jump about forty years ahead and has the curious title "Eight Nights of Love".  Next up for Sylvia Townsend Warner is "Tebic" and "A Flying Start".  Lots of good short story reading for my upcoming long weekend!

Short Story Monday: Love and Stay Corydon

Two more short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner who is not only accomplished in the art of understatement but is also such a fey writer I am often not sure what I think or am meant to think when I finish my weekend reading.  Then again more often than not I have the tendency to want to read more into what I am reading than is either actually there or even intended by the author.  The stories in this collection are not presented chronologically by the year they were written or published, so I am not sure if the order has any significance.  The first of the two stories "Love" was written in 1976 and the second "Stay Corydon, Thou Swain" came out much earlier, in 1929.  It's interesting to try and understand how Townsend Warner changed in the ensuing decades either in subject matter or in style.

"Love" is about marital felicity.  It is told from the perspective of an older couple who are looking to rent a little cottage.  The wife looks about the cottage on offer and thinks how it smells of woodsmoke, which always makes her sentimental.  The current owners, a young couple, are getting ready to move to Rhode Island.  The most curious thing happens when the couples are chatting.  A fire breaks out and throws everyone into a frenzy as they try and remove as many belongings as they can.  The fire is brought under control by two men in a passing lorry, so it was a frenzy that was all for nought. 

Later the older couple are in their hotel room the husband muses over his "strange wife" and how even such a long life together doesn't make him know her any better.  She will be as "unknown" as ever.  Whatever house they end up in will become familiar-he will know the light switches and come to know all the little creaks and noises, yet this woman sleeping beside him will remain unknowable.  I understand that familiarity and also that lack of familiarity, too.  The story seems sort of random yet I think Townsend Warner was very calculated in the writing--from choosing woodsmoke as the smell from the wife's memory to the search for this unknown new home that will be known and familiar at some point while his wife will remain just slightly out of reach.  There is a nicely interesting balance to the story though it is presented in a quiet--understated manner. 

"Stay Corydon, Thou Swain" was written more than forty years earlier.  The title is  taken from a madrigal by by John Wilbye that is a rif on classical metamorphoses.  This is a story that would be perfect either as a 'Once Upon a Time' read or even for RIP reading later this fall.  Very fey and even a little eerie if you let your imagination run away just a bit.  Mr. Mulready, a draper by trade, with two daughters and the ability to read music at sight has an active imagination indeed.

"The moon was at her full, and the Choral Society of Wells in Somerset was holding a practice.  Moonshine had to be consulted, for many of the singers lived outside the town and would not venture from their homes by night unless they could see the ruts and puddles.  Mr. Mulready, however, was independent of the moon; he lived in the market place, and a gas lamp shown in at his bedroom window until 10:30 P.M., when all the street lamps gave a little jump and died."

So, the choral society is practicing the madrigal which shares the the title of this story.  It is a song he knows well but that never dims in pleasure no matter how many times it is sung.  One of the lines reads "thy nymph is light and shadowlike".

"He wished to see a nymph again: not from motives of curiosity, not because he thought a nymph would be a pretty sight to gaze at, not for any reasonable, pleasure-seeking reason--for how could anyone entertain a rational wish about mythological fancy?  What he felt was more than a whim; it was an earnest  desire, a mental craving somehow to re-create a bright image that Time had once timelessly given, and then by course of time effaced."

So, what does a nymph, a real one that is, look like?  Apparently like one of the young women who works in his drapers shop.  The same one he invites to go cycling with him, who he looks upon with pleasure--not in a lustful way, but simple appreciation.  They stop by a wood and decide to take a walk inside.  A wood that palpably seems to breath and upon entering seems to darken and make Mr. Mulready a trifle sick . . .

I'll only say that Townsend Warner practices more of that understatement here.  Left up to your own imagination it could be a frightening and malicious outcome or hints of something dark happening after this encounter.   She leaves it up to the reader to finish the story . . .

(Cue scary music!). 

Next weekend: "Afternoon in Summer" and "A Scent of Roses".  By the way I ordered a biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner by Claire Harman, which I am hoping might shed some light on her stories, or her writing in general.

Short Story 'Monday': An Aging Head

Sylvia Townsend Warner is such a curious writer.  To be honest I'm not always entirely sure what it is that lurks beneath the surface of a story by her, but I always enjoy the journey to that final destination.  She is whimsical and witty and she cracks me up with her oddness.  I like her.  This will give you an idea.  Two characters in a story are lighting a fire and a third character who is in the kitchen smells something singeing.

"Good Lord, have I set fire to your hair?" he exclaimed.

"Oh, it's nothing," Antonia said.  "Frizzy hair like mine catches fire so easily".

Hah.  Must mind my own frizzy tresses.  Do you see what I mean?  Not exactly out of nowhere but sort of.

I read two stories from The Music at Long Verney this weekend.  In "Maternal Devotion" a daughter pawns off unwanted suitors on to her welcoming mother.  Nothing odd there, really.  She's not a cougar mother looking for a young conquest but more an enthusiastic conversationalist in search of an 'eager' audience.  What young man in love/or admiration of a young lady doesn't want to impress her mother, eh?

"As kittens bring in the mice that are too much for them to be finished off by the cat, Cordelia Finch had the habit of depositing any inconvenient suitors with her mother and leaving the rest to nature."

When Mr. Weatherby finally escapes Cordelia comes in with a revivifying pot of tea and plate of sandwiches.  She may not be the most honest of girlfriends, but she is most appreciative of her mother telling her, "my gratitude no words can express."  Amusingly done.

My favorite however is the singeing hair story.  STW's stories are always just the tiniest bit satirical (sometimes not so tiny at all) and the characters play off each other in the most amusing ways.  Sometimes they are awfully curmudgeonly, rather back biting or short tempered.  Definitely quirky. 

In "An Aging Head" a very helpful niece takes care of a favorite aunt who is down with influenza.  Actually Auntie Georgie (Georgina) sees Antonia as more of a busybody and is only too happy to see her leave with the "bronchitis kettle" in hand.  It is the things she thinks when Antonia has left for home (after eliciting a promise that Auntie George will ring up when after she has "rested") that makes this story especially entertaining and amusing.  As Auntie George is quite the Tartar, let's face it. 

Antonia gives her detailed instructions on where to call after she has rested.  And Georgina's mental reply . . .

"'No, don't bother.  She's in the book [referring to the phone number where Antonia shall be].  And anyhow, I shan't want to go to bed.  I'm up for good and all.  Thanks to your nursing, my child'.  How many more times must I thank you? thought Georgina.  And will you never be gone?  But the Devil tweaked her tongue  . . ."

It is with a "luxuriating sigh of relief" that Georgina returns to her solitude and does all the things she normally would, certain that she is much improved health-wise.  At the same time she dismisses all of Antonia's good will, the soup and tea she made, Auntie George disdainfully slurps down!  She goes out to garden (having lost a whole week's worth of work when she was kept in bed by that prying niece) and she calls a favored friend, who has on occasion asked her to marry him.  And they are indeed a pair.

"Where she was brilliant and malicious, he was placidly savage.  Where she went to work with a dancing, prancing stiletto, George would aim one accurate condemnation and chop a head off." 

A proper meal and conversation out is just the ticket.  George takes her home later, telling her she does look a little wiped out and surely not quite recovered.  After their evening filled with biting bantering anyone just over influenza would look worn out.  The last laugh is on Georgina, however.  Antonia, worried over the failure on her aunt's part to call and give a health report, comes over and an overheard tete-a-tete between her niece and George rather puts her in her place.   And worse (or maybe better and predictably) the pair seem to hit it off even as they criticize Georgina.

Townsend Warner certainly turns a mean sentence.  Next week "Love" and "Stay, Corydon, Thou Swain".  Doesn't that latter story sound most intriguing?!

By the way I must mention the forthcoming collection of this year's O. Henry Prize Stories which I have as a galley copy loaded onto my tablet.  I read the first of twenty or so stories, "Irises" by Elizabeth Genovise which was first published in Cimarron Review.  If it is anything to gauge the collection by, this should be a good read indeed.  The story is told from the perspective of a child, a baby in the womb telling the mother's story and you wonder just whether the baby will be born and what the circumstances will be.  The mother is unhappily married and begins an affair with the intention of leaving husband behind (and maybe baby) behind and starting her life somewhere else.  It was quite well done.  I'm new to Genovise's work but it looks as if she has had stories published in a number of literary magazines and has a couple of collections of stories published.  I will be on the look out for her other work now.   

Short Story 'Monday': Inside Out & Flora

I've decided that Sylvia Townsend Warner is the queen of understatement.  She gives you just enough 'information' in her stories for you make of it all what you will--you can decide for yourself what it means.  Those intentions or emotions are open to interpretation.  So she makes the reader work just a little bit, which I like very much.  I may  not always know for sure what the meaning of a story is, but I can think about it and return to it.  And with any writer worth her salt, the stories can be revisited and the outcomes change according to the mood of a reader and what she or he brings to it from their own experiences.  So, two stories from The Music at Long Verney this weekend.  Both relatively short and both small masterpieces of brevity. 

"The Inside-Out" from 1972 is a story told from the perspective of two adolescent siblings, Clive and Stella, who are moving into a new house called Ullapool and set off to the garden to explore.  The garden seems "endless and directionless" and when they turn back to face their house it seems a very long way off.  The garden is overgrown and all the noises of the outside world that had been screened by the traffic seem somewhere just in the near distance now.  The house itself is a semidetached home with its neighbor, Sorrento, right up against it yet the gardens are separated by hedges and bushes. 

"Dense laurel hedges secluded them from the gardens on either side.  A slimy network of bindweed hung on the Sorrento hedge like lace curtains, and strands of barbed wire ran inside it.  Spiked iron railings backed the other hedge.  Considering his reaction to this Clive summed it up as an inside-out feeling.  You couldn't get out; nobody could get in; and you wore the feeling not quite sure whether you liked it or didn't like it.  Inside-out.  It depended which way you put it on."

They look for a opening to look over into the neighboring garden which is proper and manicured--so neat compared to their own.  It is by surprise that they encounter their neighbor, a young boy who is their own contemporary, hidden up in a tree watching them.  Although friendly overtures are made he responds with silence first and then a scowling reply of "I loathe you".  Make of that what you will.  I like the juxtapositions in this story--of the 'savage' garden with its polite inhabitants and the neatly manicured one with its hidden and taciturn neighbor; as well, the noise of the greater world that makes the reader think of an entirely different sort of wild than the one they are encountering.  You can only wonder at the boy in the tree and feel just a tinge of sympathy since he is looking down into this 'lost paradise' which formerly offered him 'succoring shelter'.   How peeved he must be now that it is closed off to him.

"Flora" written in 1977 has a wonderful sense of ironic humor to it.  It reminds me in some of the details of one I read by Elizabeth Taylor (though only in small details and not in the actual plot), since it also concerns a letter written by someone important and of value to someone other than the current owner.  Edward and Flora trek across a heath to visit a boorish scholar who is living in happy (for him) seclusion.  "He was a short, sturdy old man with bushy eyebrows and a trimmed beard" who turns an 'unseeing eye' on Flora (who tells the story).  He gets on well with Edward but not so much with Flora.  As a matter of fact he cannot even get her name right.   Dora, Flora, whatever.

"I was sufficiently tired by my walk to feel chilled, and, from feeling chilled, to feel intimidated.  To rouse my spirits, I began to nurse rebellious thoughts."

And what delightfully (for the reader anyway) rebellious thoughts they are.  Just to be contraire (a woman after my own heart) she cuts into their conversation about calligraphy (!) and asks about the lack of wastepaper basket in the room.  Surely it is a necessary item to all scribes/calligraphers.  What would they do with all those spoiled copies--a page with a duplicate word or "misplaced twiddle". 

"I forgot my place and broke into the conversation.  'When was the wastepaper basket invented"? 

"Edward emerged from calligraphy, laughed, and said, 'God knows'."

"Mr. Tilbury, too godlike for such an admission, impaled on me a glare and said, 'That would take too long to answer, young lady'."

"I realized that I had foxed them both."

Months later she returns to the cottage on an errand Edward would have approved of--to give him a letter written by a famous man that surely Mr. Tilbury would appreciate, if only he would answer the door.  Alas, the cottage appears empty and the scholar is nowhere to be seen.  She leaves the letter on the doorstep with the intention of returning and getting a dose of revenge in the form of a little humor and embarrassment (to our Mr. Tilbury of course), but an unsurpressed sneeze gives him away and foils her plan.  This is a story you really have to read to get the full effect of the humor since her internal conversation is absolutely priceless.

"I had been summoned, slighted, left to kick my heels in the cold, while Mr. Tilbury sat warming his malevolence; and no possible revenge was in my power.  Attaining the garbage bin, I gave it a kick".  

How fitting, yet so unsatisfying for our Flora.  But her 'rebellious thoughts' totally make this story!

Next week: "Maternal Devotion" and "An Aging Head".  (I am thoroughly enjoying these stories and might have to at least pull my copy of the Virago edition of her Selected Stories, which has until now been glanced at but passed over due to its chunkiness).

Short Story 'Monday': The Music at Long Verney

So in the end I have settled on Sylvia Townsend Warner as my next short story writer to tackle.  And she wasn't even in the running, but isn't that how it goes so often.  I have yet to read any of her novels, though she is a Virago Modern Classics author and I have more than one of her novels on my shelves.  I have, however, dabbled in her short stories.  I saw a lovely, cloth copy of The Music at Long Verney just sitting very unobtrusively and with some dignity on a pile of short story collections and decided it was calling out in its own quiet way.  Besides the collection is twenty stories mostly published by the New Yorker during the William Maxwell years and decided she surely must rank up there with Elizabeth Taylor in terms of style and quality.  I love New Yorker stories in general and particularly those published during the William Maxwell years (to say nothing of his writing, too).  I will only try and do my reading of her justice.

The stories span the years from 1929 to 1977 and a little teaser from the book blurb of what I can expect:

"They are crowded with irrepressible, living characters and equally animated objects and incidents.  There are stories of romantic love and the mysteries of marriage; of artists who speak the truth even as they distort reality; of gardens and houses and very find things and of those who fancy themselves the owners.  The centerpiece of the collection is a series of five linked comic episodes concerning an eccentric London establishment, the Abbey Antique Galleries, and its singular proprietor, the urbane Mr. Edom--not to mention its uncontrollable inventory, staff and clientele."

The first and titular story, "The Music at Long Verney" is one of those houses and it is indeed peopled with those who fancy themselves the owners.  It is one of her later stories published in 1971 and according to William Maxwell she told him "I saw this couple standing outside their own house and had to know how they got there."  So this must be her imagining of it.

Long Verney is a great house on one of those great estates entailed to its roof.  The only son of the Furnival family has decided he won't go on there as "England's sinking under lovely old houses with lovely old paupers creeping about in them like maggots in nutshells too large for them."  No matter since two years later he is to die in Cyprus and the heir next in line decides to break the entail as he doesn't want it either.  So seventy and sixty-eight respectively Oliver and Sibyl find themselves unquestionably in possession of Long Verney.  Living frugally they might just manage ("their chief pleasure was reading and Oliver was a lifetime member of the London Library"), but when Sibyl cracks her knee in a automobile accident, all bets are off and to the gamekeeper's lodge it is.  A tenant being much more preferable to selling.  "Less abrupt."

It's the characterization of this story that makes it so memorable.  Townsend Warner turns a razor sharp eye towards Long Verney's residents.  None show to the best light really.  There is certainly a feel of age and class but it's not as though in the end one is better or more worthy than the other.  It's certainly most entertaining for the reader however.

"With their move, Oliver and Sibyl suddenly became a matter for public concern.  It was as if they had been brought out into the light of day and revealed as much older, thinner, dimmer, than was supposed; as if Long Verney were an attic in which they had been stored--inventoried, known to be there, hereditary objects on their way to becoming family portraits."

Their tenants, the Simpsons, one gets the feel that they are 'new' money perhaps.  Certainly a younger crowd and decidedly uncouth.  They aren't nature lovers and not walkers.  Worse, the husband is a director of one of those firms that makes weed killer (no wonder there are not as many nightingales as there used to be).

"Anthony Simpson was hand in glove with the Labour Party.  He was not a Jew but his wife was.  They bought nothing locally; they had sent away old Jules the onion man.  Their son drove through the village at a hundred miles an hour, wore bracelets, had been sent down from Cambridge for peddling cannabis.  They filled the house with ballet dancers, opera singers, photographers, and intellectuals.  They were never at home for two weeks running."

As for the music at Long Verney?  Well, it is a night of music, of finding just the right music for the space that brings them all together--a clash of orbits you might say. 

Next weekend: "The Inside-Out".  I think I am going to like this collection of stories very much.