March reading round up

It’s been a stop start month for reading. I put two books down half read because they weren’t doing it for me. I bought a few books, I cleared a few out and sold them to World of Books. And it feels like a long time since I read the first two books in this list. But here’s what I did read this month:

Esther Waters – George Moore

Quite the coincidence this month that I read two books about being a single mother, written about 150 years or so apart but otherwise covering very similar attitudes. I heard about this on A Good Read on Radio 4, a Victorian novel about a servant who gets pregnant (by another servant) and has to manage bringing up her baby alone. Esther is the servant in question and she’s driven by a clear sense of justice and good throughout and by love of her son. With a combination of honesty, support from kind people and hard work, she manages to keep her son and herself in work, so it’s a straightforward Victorian morality tale in some ways, especially with regard to the subplot, about the evils of gambling on the horses which is a pastime which eventually does for the family Esther originally servants for and her husband, the father of her child who comes back later and convinces her to marry him. What redeems it from being irritating and preachy is Esther herself who’s a strong character and no sap.

The Best of Everything – Kit De Waal

And so to the second single mum, Paulette, a nursing auxiliary from St Kitts, working in London and dreaming of marriage and children with Denton. When Denton is killed in a car accident, she discovers he’s already married. Paulette eventually transfers her affections to his friend Garfield and has a son, Bird. Despite Garfield being a good dad, Paulette cannot love him and after he leaves, she discovers that the father of the girl who killed Denton (who also died) lives close by with his grandson Cornelius. So it’s all about the back and forth while they all sort themselves out. What I liked about this, and also notable in Esther Waters too, was that the men weren’t totally reprehensible cads but there was an exploration of good fatherhood in both. While I didn’t think this was as strong as De Waal’s previous books (it’s just been longlisted for the Women’s Prize so what do I know) it’s still a good read.

What Are You Going Through – Sigrid Nunez

I picked this up on a whim in the library, having liked The Friend by the same author. This is an odd book, one that flies in the face of all publisher and editor advice to authors. It is about an unnamed narrator who lives alone and is called to visit a friend who has terminal cancer. The friend asks the narrator to do something for her which is the main force of the plot, but along the way, the narrator tells stories of people she meets or has met, she recalls a lot in that anecdotal way that some people have. So the main plot is a background thread that ambles along as you get all these stories, and the book becomes rather like spending an evening with a raconteur. The observations are sharp, but you do feel a little distanced from it all. It’s interesting as an exercise.

Clara Reads Proust – Stephane Carlier

You know how baseball movies are better than watching a game of baseball? Well, in my opinion, books about Proust are better than reading Proust. I only managed to get through 100 pages of Swann’s Way, with a break in the middle to read Alain De Botton’s book about Proust, and found the entire exercise incredibly frustrating and painful. Clara Reads Proust was sent to me as part of an anonymous package from an indie bookshop who was running a promo to boost their coffers. It’s a slim volume, translated from the French, and is about a hairdresser called Clara who picks up a volume of Proust left behind in the salon one day. It changes her life, giving her the confidence to try new things and dump her awful boyfriend. We learn about the others in the salon too, who tolerate her new passion for long winded novelists who don’t like to get out of bed a lot more than I was ever able to. This is rather charming.

Multitudes – Lucy Caldwell

Caldwell is one of Britain’s great modern short story writers but because we don’t seem to prize short stories, doesn’t get a lot of wider recognition. This collection is all about childhood, teenagerdom and rites of passage in Britain, something I always have trouble writing about myself as I appear to have forgotten everything about being a child. Some of these are excellent, and what Caldwell does well is to write about an incident or moment without necessarily getting tempted to add a twist or ghoulish weird bit. If you read a lot of flash or short fiction online you get sucked into thinking everything needs to have a twist or deep meanings. This captures the awkwardness and bad choices that define people’s growing up. I really enjoyed it.

Happiness – Amanitta Forna

This was one of my books of last year and the reading group chose it this month so my plan was to skim over it. But I ended up rereading it properly and enjoying it just as much. It’s an intelligent read that treats its audience like adults, which feels a rarity these days, especially when discussing immigration. It’s also great to read a book that looks at this country through the eyes of people who weren’t born here, and who want to be here. Still recommended.

Twentieth Century books

Operation Heartbreak – Duff Cooper

A slim volume that I picked up in St Pancras Hatchard’s. Duff Cooper is one of those early Twentieth Century politicians you don’t seem to get any more. I mean, obviously there’s still loads of posh boy aristos who get into the cabinet, but something about Cooper (by the way, if your surname’s Cooper I’m going to question your aristocratic roots, someone clearly made their way up the classes at some point) that marked him out as a fairly decent chap, war service, academic writing, as well as politics. We’ll just have to conveniently ignore the womanising and drinking, like his wife had to. Anyway, this is a novel based around the Second World War Operation Mincemeat (we’re going to see the musical later in the year) and is all about the life of an orphaned chap who is brought up in a posh-ish family and who wants to fight but just misses the First World War and is deemed too old for the Second. If you know what Operation Mincemeat was about, you may be able to guess what happens, but I was quite dense and only realised near the end and exclaimed “oh no!!” in a distressed voice. This is a rather bittersweet novel and gets the main story across in an admirably short number of pages. Recommended.

Quartet in Autumn – Barbara Pym

Pym’s reputation is excellent and one where you do feel you should like her work. This is another slim volume about a group of four people who all work in an office together, before two of them – the women, Letty and Marcia – then retire. The story, such as it is, takes in the work, the retirement plans, and then what happens next. It’s a light look a loneliness and isolation and covers just how hopelessly pointless a lot of modern work feels. The characters were on the whole difficult to like but you did feel for them, in the way that you feel for a nearby neighbour – give them a nod, but don’t get too involved. Which was the point of the book in a way.

Underfoot in Showbusiness – Helene Hanff

A reread as this has just been reissued by Manderley Press in a lovely hardback edition with matching bookmark and introduction by Hanff’s niece Jean Hanff Korelitz. It tells the story of Hanff trying to make it as a playwright in Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s, and all the things she had to do to pay the rent and keep her foot in the door. A lot of bad quality jobs but all of them vaguely related to theatre work and, despite being a poor unperformed playwright, often recommended by connected people who liked her. This is not a rags to riches tale, and as such does feel like it’s still as hard to get into theatre now, but I wonder if it’s actually harder. Hanff outlines a lot of ways she managed to exist on barely any money at all, none of which I imagine are possible now. This is full of youthful exuberance though and tales of funny people, including her friend Maxine, who pops up in 84 Charing Cross Road.

A Long Way from Verona – Jane Gardam

Asking people for recommends from the twentieth century, this would come up a lot. Gardam died recently and there was a lot of recognition for what a great writer she was so I summoned this from the library with great anticipation. And she was clearly a good writer. But still this left me a little meh, if I’m honest. It was alright. It’s a coming of age story of Jessica Vye, who was told she will grow up to be a writer so decides to fulfil her destiny. But she’s going to a strict day school during the Second World War in the North East, and having to adjust to rationing, bombs, being told off, parties and expectations. I was unclear as to whether Jessica was a fantasist who made up extra details because she was training to be a writer, if weird things did actually happen or if I’d completely missed the explanation.

Moments of Pleasure

I’ve been to the theatre twice this month, the first time to see the RSC’s touring Hamlet and the second time to see Punch at Nottingham Playhouse. Hamlet was set on the Titanic for no real reason that I could understand and rattled along at quite a pace, with very little procrastinating on Hamlet’s part. This messing about with the text is quite an interesting exercise for Hamlet nerds such as myself, but I do think if I’d never seen it before I’d be pretty confused.

Punch was good too, but based on a true incident that happened here in Nottingham, a single punch that killed a man, and the perpetrator went to prison for a time. The victim’s parents sought restorative justice, met the protagonist and the interaction helped him turn his life around. The play is part of their awareness raising about violence and as such, by the end it felt quite educational.