Paul Auster: Winter Journal

Late for the memoir February, late for the Auster reading week, but I’d borrowed this from the library and was intrigued enough to continue reading. It’s a rather lovely continuation of The Invention of Solitude, this time the mother’s side of the story, as well as more about both his first and second marriage. He certainly seems smitten with his second wife, a companionship and meeting of minds which sounds very appealing – although clearly there was a lot of friendship with the first wife too, but perhaps not quite so much love.

I’m not really in the mood for reviewing, so I’ll just list below a few quotes which stayed with me.

[about his mother] There were three of her, three separate women who seemed unconnected to one another… you never knew which mask she would be wearing on any given day. At one end, there was the diva, the sumptuously decked-out charmer who dazzled the world in public, the young woman with the obtuse, distracted husband who craved having the eyes of others upon her and would not allow herself – not anymore – to be boxed into the role of traditional housewife. In the middle, which was far and away the largest space she occupied, there was a solid and responsible being, a person of intelligence and compassion, the woman who took care of you… competent, genberous, observant of the world around her… At the other end… there was the frightened and debilitated neurotic, the helpless creature prey to blistering assaults of anxiety, the phobic whose incapacities grew as the years advanced

Aren’t we all made up of such contradictory multitudes? He is far less critical of his wife, however:

Little by little… you discovered that you saw eye to eye on nearly everything of any importance… Much to your relief, your personalities were nothing alike. She laughed more than you did, she was freer and more outgoing than you were, she was warmer than you were… you felt that you had met another version of yourself – but one that was more fully evolved than you were, better able to express what you kept bottled up inside you, a saner being.

And his description of their celebration of the 30th anniversary of when they first met sounds like my ideal relationship: they go to a hotel, eat the restaurant, drink champagne and talk and talk and talk ‘the long uninterrupted conversation that started the day you met’. Sharing ideas and feelings, especially about personal and cultural things, are what makes me dreamy… But I was most amused by his rant about the dangers of nostalgia.

You have no use for the good old days. Whenever you find yourself slipping into a nostalgic frame of mind, mourning the loss of the things that seemed to make life better then than it is now, you tell yourself to stop and think carefully, to look back at Then with the same crutiny you apply to looking at Now… Of course you have manifold grievances against the evils and stupidities of contemporary American life… the sacendency of the right, the injustices of the economy, the neglect of the environment, the collapsing infrastructure, the senselss wars, the barabarism of legalized torture and extraordinary renditions, the disintegration of impoversihed cities like Buffalo and Detroit… the ever-gorwing crevasse that divides the rich from the poor, not to speak of the junk films we are making, the junk food we are eating, the junk thoughts we are thinking…And yet, go back to the year of your birth and try and remember what America looked like in its golden age of postwar prosperity: Jim Crow laws in full force throughout the South, anti-Semitic quota restrictions, back-alley abortions… the trials of the Hollywood Ten, the Cold War, the Red Scare, the Bomb… Every moment in history is fraught with its own problems, its own injustices, and every period manufactures its own legends and pieties.

Five Things to Sing About

It’s easy to get caught up in the panicky bad news cycle, scrolling blindly on Twitter to see if London Book Fair is still on, what the latest spread of the virus is, speak to the phone with worried elderly parents (and be secretly relieved that they’ve decided to cancel their trip to the UK next week, as they would fall into the vulnerable categories), try and plan summer holidays for the boys with an ex who tries to sabotage you every step of the way. More than ever, we need to remind ourselves of all that is good and lovely or even just OK in our lives. So here are five things which gave me joy this last week or so.

This kimono looks like something out of Genji Monogatari

Anne Enright in conversation with Andrew O’Hagan about her new book Actress (which has just been longlisted for the Women’s Prize)

I’ve only read a few books by Anne Enright, and haven’t read this one yet (but am eager to, it sounds exactly my sort of thing – tricky mother/daughter relationship, the dangers of celebrity culture, theatre world etc.) The author in person was very funny, very opinionated, not at all shy and does not suffer fools gladly. I think quite a few people would describe her as spiky and remorseless and are slightly afraid of her. At which she rather brilliantly replied: ‘Why are writers described as ruthless? We just sit (and observe) and write.’ Another thing she said also struck me: that England is currently going through that nationalist rhetoric and identity trumpeting that Ireland went through in the past century… and we all know what that led to.

The perfect kimono for a crime writer, translator and publisher

Watching and debating films with my boys (OK, mainly the older boy who is getting very ambitious about his viewing of classic films, but the younger one occasionally participates too) – this weekend it was La Haine (which the older one is studying for A Level French) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which instantly made his top 10 list). The frightening thing about La Haine (made in 1995) is how little things have changed for the banlieue and its inhabitants since then, although the French PM at the time made his entire cabinet watch it. I’d love to see Johnson getting his cabinet to watch a Ken Loach film!

A kimono combining two of my greatest loves: the silk manufacturers of Lyon produced the material, which was given as a present by the French ambassador to a local daimyo after the opening of Japan in the Meiji era.

Analysing The Great Gatsby with my older son while working out at the gym. He borrowed it from my bookcase on Friday afternoon, had read it by Saturday evening and, knowing that it’s one of my favourite novels of all time, was keen to discuss it with me while we were puffing away side-by-side on our cross trainers. I have to admit that this comes pretty close to how I thought parenthood might look like ideally before I had children! (It has seldom lived up to that level of expectation.)

Not to neglect the younger son, who also suprised me very pleasantly. Just as I was moaning about him not doing enough reading and that I wish he would read anything, comics, non-fiction, I’m not fussy, as long as he reads rather than just plays computer games all the time etc. etc., the doorbell rang and it was a delivery for him from Amazon (well, we’ll work on the buying from independent bookshops angle later) of a trilogy of books Bakemonogatari (Tales of Monsters) by Japanese author Nisioisin. He’s been busy devouring these ever since and I am tempted to read them myself.

Wedding kimonos – the white at the start of the ceremony, the red outer kimono at the end.

The Kimono Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert – there are no words to describe how happy this made me! I studied Japanese, taught Japanese anthropology, cultural history and literature for a while and have spent several (sadly, far too short) periods in Japan at summer schools etc. I always meant to buy a kimono but could never afford a proper one. I could have spent hours analysing every single pattern, weave, material, detail. I photographed nearly every single one of them and two thirds of the pictures are utter rubbish, but I’ve used some of them, no matter how rubbish, to illustrate this blog post.

My kind of kimono: I rather like monochromes and this has the elegance and modern look I would wear regularly.

Finishing the translation of Sword – I still have to get a third-party edit and proofreading sorted, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. This is going to be such an exciting political thriller, unlike any other the English-speaking world has seen so far!

Monthly Summary – Comfort Reading

I know February has got 29 days this year, but I’m ready to end this month early. It’s been soggy and dark and with far too few signs of spring. All the more reason to indulge in escapist reading, not just Mary Stewart but also things such as:

Seishi Yokomizu: The Inugami Curse (aka The Inugami Clan, which would be closer to the original in Japanese) – a sort of And Then There Were None but all in the family, thanks to a rather strange and spiteful will. Much more about psychology than closed room puzzles and therefore more enjoyable to me than last month’s Japanese mystery.

Elizabeth George: A Banquet of Consequences – I used to pounce on each new novel by E. George as soon as it came out, but I somehow lost the plot a little after Careless in Red and have struggled – not very hard – to get back in. I’d previously put up with the suspension of disbelief that class still matters in the Metropolitan Police and the sometimes slightly touristy view of Britain (like Martha Grimes), also with the great length of the novels (because they made for interesting character development). But lately I’d been feeling they were getting too baggy and ever so slightly repetitive. While this one is not perfect (the Havers finding her groove sub-plot seems a little tagged on, for instance), the description of one of the most manipulative mothers in fiction and a truly dysfunctional family meant that I just couldn’t put this down and read it straight in two days.

Louise Penny: The Nature of the Beast – Purists might be shocked that I’ve read Louise Penny all out of order. I just read whichever book I can get my hands on and always enjoy a trip to Three Pines and becoming reacquainted with Gamache and his family and friends. This one came out in 2015/16 and I have a suspicion I had too many other things going on in my life at the time to be fully on the ball. It strikes me that there is a deep, deep sadness at the heart of Penny’s work, which contrasts with the cosy village atmosphere.

Brian Bilston: Diary of a Somebody – Many of you will have enjoyed Brian’s irreverent Twitter poetry. This is his first novel, about a hapless, bumbling middle-aged poet trying to navigate work, divorce and sharing custody of his son, book club and poetry club, and his arch-nemesis, the pretentious rival poet with the completely opaque poetry. It was trying a bit too hard to go for the laughs, so it gets a bit repetitive after all, but in small doses, it is very amusing.

Nicola Upson: London Rain – The mystery series featuring Josephine Tey has always been one of my (not so secret) pleasures, another one that I’ve read out of order. This one is set at the time of the coronation of George VI and features the BBC at the start of its glory period. Not my favourite of the series to date, but the recreation of the period feels very authentic.

Nick Bradley: The Cat and the City – a quirky, strange book with a series of interconnected characters and stories, all showing a rapidly changing Tokyo on the eve of the 2020 Olympic Games. On the whole, it manages to avoid most of the cliches about Japan that foreign authors are prone to fall into and does a good job of conveying the loneliness of the huge, anonymous city. It left me thoughtful and dreamy for a few days after finishing it. But be warned: there is a distressing scene involving a cat getting hurt!

In a way, I’ve continued the Japanese reading challenge theme – although sadly I won’t have time to reread The Makioka sisters with Meredith. If you do get a chance to read it, I’d really, really recommend it: imagine Chekhov’s Three Sisters blended with an unforgettable portrait of a rapidly modernising Japan in the early 20th century.

Helen Phillips: The Need – not strictly speaking the most comforting read, especially when you are a single mother with two children alone in a creaky house (luckily, my children are a bit older than the ones in this book). Less of a ghost or horror story than a sort of postmodern feminist tale, which will probably up your anxiety levels… about almost anything really!

To summarise: I read 16 books this month, of which 7 fall roughly into the memoir theme I had envisaged (if we count Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard and Kate Brigg’s This Little Art as quasi-memoirs too). I took part in #Fitzcarraldo Fortnight with just one book – the beautiful essay on translation as the ‘little art’ – and in the Paul Auster reading week with his early memoir The Invention of Solitude. 9 of the books I read this month were pure escapism, comfort reads, reflecting a much needed break for my poor brain after lots of translation and editing work. 11 of the books were by women authors, and only 2 were in translation (a deliberate choice, so that my head would be full of native English speakers and writers while I was trying to render a Romanian text into colloquial English).

Plans for next month? I’ll have finished editing the translation so can continue with my geographically themed reading. I’m thinking possibly Spain…

#FitzcarraldoFortnight: This Little Art

Kate Briggs: This Little Art

This delightful, quirky essay about literary translation by Kate Briggs, based on her own translation of Roland Barthes’ lecture notes (but moving far, far beyond that) was the perfect book at the perfect time for me, as I myself embark upon a journey as a professional literary translator. I have stuffed it full of little post-it notes, and will probably return to it again and again. It’s the kind of book that you never really finish reading – it is designed to stimulate your thought and your passion for words, language, for finding the right word.

There are far too many ideas here for me to do them justice, but here are some of the things that most resonated with me:

1. The translator is always demanding a suspension of disbelief from the reader – asking you to go along with the fiction that these characters are talking or thinking in English, that what you are reading is in fact the language of Barthes or Thomas Mann or anyone else.
2. Helen Lowe-Porter was Thomas Mann’s first translator into English and at the time her translations were phenomenally successful, but she has since been criticized for making mistakes, for changing things around, misleading the readers. There is a fierce rivalry (as well as comradeship) between translators, especially when it comes to classic writers, because it is quite hard to get funding for a new translation, how hard it is to fight copyright issues and publishers’ interests – and so to see someone else do a far worse translation and thereby block your chances of doing another one for perhaps 20-30 years… But, Briggs argues, who are we to decide what makes a good or bad translation? While it should be possible to correct obvious mistakes and offer alternatives, it should be done in a spirit of improvement – because can we really be sure that we are getting better at translation over time, rather than merely following a current fashion?
3. Translators may wish to transmit the original author’s voice as much as possible, but they will never be entirely neutral and impersonal instruments. They are always putting all of themselves – their background, experience, personality, emotions, associations – into the final work.
4. Yet translators need to be humble – the work itself humbles them every single time. Regardless of how much experience you might have translating, you always start each fresh work from a position of not knowing. You are opening yourself up to learning, to interpreting, to being curious and honest and self-critical.
5. A bit of a reality check: A translator’s work ‘is celebrated if and only if the work she is translating is worth celebrating; there is no celebrating her achievement from that of its original author. As a consequence of this… mediocre translators of successful books sometimes get unduly praised, while those more talented translators translating less visible works hardly get noticed at all.’
6. Some argue that there is one perfect translator for a particular book – or at least the right translator, who can truly get under the author’s skin. (I have the tendency to believe that about myself and Mihail Sebastian and am somewhat miffed that he has already been translated into English, see point 2 above). But Kate Briggs argues that books don’t come with designated translators, they don’t have built-in protocols or rules that you have to obey for success, otherwise you will be a failure. It’s about a million different tiny choices, and the same translator might make different choices a day or two later.

I hope that gives you a flavour of the book – and yes, it does refer to Barthes a lot, but it was never Barthes himself that I objected to, merely the pretentious young men at university who were forever quoting him as scaffolding for their own hastily built, shoddy work. I’ll end with a wonderful plea for more translated work, which chimes so well with my own beliefs:

Yes… do translations, for the simple reason that we need them. We need translations, urgently: it is through translation that we are able to reach the literature written in the languages we don’t or can’t read, from the places where we don’t or can’t live, offering us the chance of understanding as well as the necessary and instructive expereince of failing to understand them, of being confused and challenged by them.

Paul Auster Reading Week: The Invention of Solitude

When I was a student, Paul Auster was all the rage in Romania. My fellow students of languages and literature were all going through a post-modern craze at the time (literary currents tended to reach our shores a decade or two later). Boys and girls were wearing black roll-neck jumpers and smoking, discussing Derrida and Foucault, reading The New York Trilogy and Umberto Eco, John Fowles and Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. [Yes, I wonder too sometimes about those strange juxtapositions.]

But I have to admit I haven’t read Auster since the late 1990s. When Annabel announced that Paul Auster is her favourite writer and that she would dedicate a whole week to reading and reviewing his books, I idly checked the catalogue at my university library and came away with three books. (I can seldom stop at just one – that goes for both cakes and books. Maybe that’s why I never started smoking, even in my postmodernist university days…) And this one fits nicely with my memoir reading month this February.

The Invention of Solitude is his debut work, a memoir and a meditation on what makes us the people that we are, especially men and writers. It’s made up of two parts: Portrait of an Invisible Man, a description of Auster’s distant, apparently cold and unemotive father as Auster goes through his belongings in an attempt to clear the house after his death. The second part, The Book of Memory, is a mix of memoir and fiction, an exploration of Auster’s own relationship with his son, but also of all fathers in art and literature, mixed in with a sense of grief and loss as the narrator waits for the death of his grandfather. Pascal Bruckner, who wrote the preface to the 25th anniversary edition, claims that this is Paul Auster’s ars poetica and that there is a theme of remorse running through all of his work. How painful it is to be an individual today when we no longer have the protective shells of any ideologies or beliefs, Bruckner says, and of Auster’s characters, he has this rather striking description: ‘Their chaotic odyssey never ends in peace, and they always fail to regain their lost innocence.’

Back to the ‘Invisible Man’. After his parents’ divorce, his father refused to budge from the house that had become far too big for him. He was also a rather stingy man, who tried to do all the repairs himself, even where he was not really qualified to do so. Auster sees the house as mirroring his father’s inner world and the indescribable blankness or emptiness at the centre of it.

.. although he kept the house tidy and preserved it more or less as it had been, it underwent a gradual and ineluctable process of disintegration. He was neat, he always put things back in their proper place, but nothing was cared for, nothing was ever cleaned.

As he delves deeper into his father’s life, he finds it seems to be all about appearances, that there appear to be no depths – deliberately so. This is a man who seems to find life tolerable only by staying on the surface of things – his relationships with women, with his children. It’s all about preserving that superficiality, not having to reveal himself, waiting hat at the ready and walking stick in hand, ready to escape at any given time. After describing some of the typical disappointments of his childhood, and how he felt unseen and unappreciated, Auster concludes that:

…even if I had done all the things I had hoped to do, his reaction would have been exactly the same. Whether I succeeded or failed did not essentially matter to him… Like everything else in his life, he saw me only through the mists of his solitude, as if at several removes from himself. The world was a distant place for him, I think, a place he was never truly able to enter…

The reason for this aloofness and solitude is revealed when Auster finds an old family portrait amongst his family belongings. His father is the baby in the arms of his mother, surrounded by an older sister and three brothers. He notices that the photograph had been torn and stuck together again, as if a certain person (his grandfather, he later realises) had been taken out of the picture. One of his cousins finds out by coincidence the real story about his grandfather’s death and the family’s subsequent life. A traumatic episode which certainly must have contributed to his father’s sense of insecurity and transience, ‘no enduring points of reference’, his conviction that no one is to be trusted, that you cannot expose your vulnerability by loving someone, that it is best not to want anything too much.

As he attends his father’s funeral, as he tries to cling on to a few of his objects, Auster finds his father slipping away from him again, becoming invisible once more. Except now he has started to understand him, perhaps even forgive him, as he struggles with the challenges of fatherhood himself. I had somehow missed this book when I was going through my Auster phase, I only read his fiction, but I found it oddly moving and quite understated.

I’m not sure if I will have time to read the other books this week (Winter Journal and Timbuktu, in case you are wondering). I also think that taking Paul Auster in smaller doses is probably more sensible at my age. These days, I also think I prefer the writing of his wives, Lydia Davis and Siri Hustvedt. But thank you, Annabel, for reminding me of his existence!

Memoir Month: Maggie Gee and Beth Ann Fennelly

Women’s memoirs are bringing great comfort and inspiration to me at the moment, especially those of women writers. (To be honest, I seem to read very few memoirs by people who are not writers or dancers… and that has been the case since childhood.)

Maggie Gee: My Animal Life

Unusually for a writer, Maggie Gee focuses not so much on her interior life, but on what she calls her ‘animal life’ – the life of the body, the senses, sex and love, birth and parenthood, illness, aging – all the things which make Jinny in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves so irresistible.

Not to degrade my life, but to celebrate it. To join it, tiny though it is, to all the life in the universe. To the brown small-headed pheasant running by the lake in Coolham. To my grandparents and parents, and my great grandparents who like most people in the British Isles of their generation wore big boots, even for the rare occasions of photographs, and lived on the clayey land, and have returned their bones to it, joining the bones of cattle, horses and foxes.

Her accounts are frank and fresh, humorous and without an inflated ego. She is content with her husband, her daughter, her writing, but she constantly asks herself questions: How can we bear to lose those we love most? How do we recover from our mistakes? How do we forgive ourselves – and our parents? What do men want from women, what do women want from men? Why do we need art and why are we driven to make it? On the whole, she attempts to answer these through personal observations and reflections, acknowledging her luck but also detailing those near-misses. After a clear, deftly-rendered memory, she will often start a more general musing on the subject.

Above all, I enjoyed her observations about the life of a writer (creatives in general, but she singles out writers and storytellers in particular). For example, she describes how her writing career nearly derailed when she became too complacent. She admits that the literary world can feel like a jungle, that it is bowing down to commercial reality. Yet I like the way she refuses to be bitter about it – and seems to have a very kind word to say about book bloggers without an agenda other than sharing their love of books.

In the jungle, writers are opportunists. We are show-offs, trying to display our coats. We need to be the most beautiful and youthful, we need to have novelty, we need to have mates… If we fall, we must be sure to get up quickly, for if we lie there, bleeding, we will die down there… Of course, some good writers do well in the jungle… But it isn’t inevitable, it isn’t even normal. If you want to know where the best writers are, you can’t tell by reading the literary pages, or going to big bookshops, or looking at prize lists. You must read for yourself, and think for yourself, or listen to voices you know and trust: private readers: truth-tellers…

And then there is the work. Come back to that. Get up on the wire, walk the line in the sunlight. Breathe, concentrate, find the nerve.

Beth Ann Fennelly: Heating and Cooling. 52 Micro-Memoirs

If Maggie Gee is inspirational in terms of content, then the second memoir I read was inspirational in terms of form. Beth Ann Fennelly is in fact the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and these micro-memoirs (ranging in size from one sentence to 3-4 pages) are almost like prose-poems. Poignant observations, tiny vignettes, which make you suddenly see the world in a new way. The poet describes herself as being bad at remembering, so these memoirs come out higgledy-piggledy, some of them with addendums, some of them on topics she keeps coming back to (like Married Love). But of course that is all carefully and deliberately constructed.

She was recommended to me by poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, when I attended her workshop on the ‘Home Movie’ (writing about house and home). They are very funny and quirky, some seem just casual throwaway remarks, but they build up over the length of the book into something far more coherent and touching. Here are just three very short ones which I love:

I Knew a Woman

Everything she had was better than everything the rest of us had. Not by a lot. But by enough.

Mommy Wants a Glass of Chardonnay

If you all collected all the drops of days I’ve spent singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ to children fighting sleep, you’d have an ocean deep enough to drown them many times over.

I Come From a Long Line of Modest Achievers

I’m fond of recalling how my mother is fond of recalling how my great-grandfather was the very first person to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on the second day.

Jolly Escapism: Travel Mysteries of Mary Stewart

I cannot for the life of me remember who it was on Twitter who a week or so ago raved about the page-turning qualities of Mary Stewart’s novels while she was on holiday, reviving her passion for reading. It wasn’t one of my regular blogging friends, but I thought the novels sounded like my cup of tea: a bit of mystery, a bit of romance and a LOT of travel and local atmosphere. So I checked if my local library had any of her books. Of course, they had her Merlin and Arthur books (which I’d read in my childhood), but there were only two available in that dreaded reserve stock section in the basement (where good books go to die).

Nine Coaches Waiting

Set in Haute Savoie, in a remote castle above Thonon, a short car ride from Geneva, this novel was published in 1958 and I think reflects the passion for exotic locations that was growing in 1950s Britain and also gave birth to the James Bond series. In many ways, this is the feminine way to travel the world as a woman of mystery, with some mortal danger but without the gadgets.

A French orphan who has grown up in England, Linda Martin, is hired as a governess and English conversation partner for a little boy, heir to a great estate in the Haute Savoie region. She soon strikes up a friendship with her ward Philippe, but has reason to suspect someone is planning to kill him. Of course I loved the familiar landscapes – and the French language, which is sprinkled liberally throughout the text without any translation. But what I liked above all is that the heroine is no milksop, this is no bodice-ripper (although there are some… hmmm, rather stalkerish moments, shall we say?), the characters are intelligent and witty, full of literary allusions. It’s like travelling with a good friend, but one who is also acutely aware (and resentful) of class differences.

Of course it all ends happily ever after (I’m sure that’s not a spoiler – although I still think she ends up with the wrong man), but I enjoyed the non-saccharine escapism.

Airs Above the Ground

This time we are in Austria, in a complicated story of espionage, missing husbands, travelling circuses and Lipizzaner horses (the title refers to the complicated acrobatic leaps that these fantastic creatures do in dressage). This was published a little later, in 1965, and this time the heroine Vanessa March has a proper job (she is a trained vet) although she is married and prepared to give her career up to have children. As in the previous novel, she establishes a good relationship with a young boy who becomes her travel companion and we get a lot of the local atmosphere (less of the language, because Vanessa does not speak German).

So you might say that these books are written to formula. Looking at the blurbs on some of the others, they all involve an intrepid young woman going somewhere abroad, stumbling across a puzzling situation, solving it after hair-raising adventures, often helped by a younger brother-type figure. It might become a little stale if I were to read 5-6 books like this in quick succession, but with two set in different but equally familiar and beloved locations, I really enjoyed them.

There is a mix of old-fashioned machismo that her heroines seem content to put up with, and views which must have been quite progressive for her time. Let me give just one example of each. In the first passage, Vanessa is talking to her husband.

‘I love you very much, Lewis.’

He made the kind of noise a husband considers sufficient answer to that remark – a sort of comforting grunt – then reached across the pocket of his jacket where it hung over the chair, for cigarette and lighter…

Yet the author also expresses concern about the poisoned environment in England (compared to the Alpine meadows teeming with insects and life), or feels a burden of guilt when she encounters a secondary character who has dwarfism and she tries a little too hard to react ‘normally’. She is also spot-on about the Viennese ‘that warm, easy Viennese charm, which – as Vienna’s friends and enemies both agree – “sings the song you want to hear”‘. Some of her best observations in fact are throwaway remarks about secondary bit players and she makes them sound like online trolls:

… was one of those angry natures that feeds on grievance; nothing would madden her more than to know that what she complained of had been put right. There are such people, unfortunates who have to be angry before they can feel alive…’

Hodder & Stoughton have reissued many of Mary Stewart’s ‘modern’ fiction over the past few years under the Beloved Modern Classics label. They are set in Corfu, Crete, Madeira, Lebanon, Provence, the Pyrenees and various Scottish and English locations. They look eminently collectible, as you can see from the two covers above, although I believe most of them are only available on Kindle. I read them on a rainy, stormy weekend in bed and they proved to be great escapism. But I think they’d also be the perfect books to take along with you on a lazy summer holiday, to read in your deckchair on the terrace in the shade, while sipping your iced coffee or pastis.

Bastide de la Paix in Luberon