In this themed post for April, I have chosen ten favourite books strong on feminist themes. In these books, the women yearn for independence, to break away from the conventional roles of marriage and motherhood, to focus on creative pursuits, to rise from the depths of obscurity, to challenge, question or fight against societal constraints placed on them, and to live on their own terms.
So without further ado, here are the ten books. Barring one, you can read the detailed reviews on the rest by clicking on the title links…
Here is the intriguing blurb from NYRB Classics – “Shirley and Coenraad’s affair has been going on for decades, but her longing for him is as desperate as ever. She is a Toronto housewife; he works for an international organization known only as the Agency. Their rendezvous take place in Tangier, in Hong Kong, in Rome and are arranged by an intricate code based on notes slipped into issues of National Geographic. But something has happened, the code has been discovered, and Coenraad sends Shirley to Toronto, the last place she wants to go.”
Told from Shirley’s point of view, it quickly becomes clear that things are not what they seem, and we are left with a narrative that is surreal and disorienting, but all in a good way. Is this then a straightforward espionage tale or something deeper and complex? Weinzweig’s idea for this multi-layered novel was inspired by the Canadian artist Michael Snow’s Walking Woman sculpture series – the concept of a one-dimensional woman moving nowhere.
Lisa Tuttle’s My Death is a wonderfully uncanny, subversive tale of artists and creativity, identity, and the erasure of women in the world of art.
A writer by profession, we are told how our unnamed narrator has lost her mojo for conjuring up stories, especially since her beloved husband, Allan’s death. Utterly adrift but realising the need for change, she sets up a meeting with her agent Selwyn in Edinburgh. On the appointed day, our narrator visits the National Gallery where a painting stops her in her tracks. Titled “Circe” and painted by the artist W.E. Logan in 1928, we learn that Logan’s muse for this painting was the young art student Helen Ralston who, flattered by Logan’s interest in her, leaves America to study art in Glasgow. Our narrator is suddenly inspired to write a biography on Helen Ralston about whom not much is known or written, and is pleasantly surprised to learn that Ralston is still alive albeit quite old.
However, when the meeting between the creator and her subject takes place, things take a peculiar, unsettling turn, when uncannily the lives of Helen Ralston and our narrator begin to intertwine…
Published in 1919, but set in the late 19th century, May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life is a delicate and restrained portrayal of a woman’s struggle for selfhood and fulfillment, an exploration of her inner consciousness, while also brilliantly depicting her complicated relationship with her mother, her longing for intellectual pursuits, and the burden of being bogged down by family tragedy and societal expectations.
Autobiographical in tone, the book is divided into five sections – Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Maturity, and Middle Age – charting Mary’s life right from her childhood to the years when she is approaching fifty and in many aspects mirrors much of Sinclair’s own life. The Oliviers are a dysfunctional family, and we learn how Mamma, a strict Catholic, is openly critical of Mary, of her lack of religious fervor, and always contemptuous of Mary’s bookish leanings. The father is a tyrannical figure, particularly in the way he treats his sons, while Mary’s brothers are also a disturbed lot struggling for independence and to break away from the shackles of family ties.
By turns, heartbreaking, poignant, intelligent, introspective, and wise, Mary Olivier brilliantly touches upon myriad themes such as complex families, mothers and daughters, solitude and independence, fear and madness, the tussle between religion and philosophy, the tension between duty and personal fulfillment, the restricted roles for women in Victorian and Edwardian England, and the mysterious passage of time.
HER SIDE OF THE STORY by Alba de Céspedes (Translated from Italian by Jill Foulston)
After the resounding success ofForbidden Notebook, Her Side of the Story is another excellent novel by Céspedes – ambitious, intense, richly layered but also longer at 500 pages. Packed with astute observations, this is an absorbing internal drama of a deeply conflicted woman complete with her memories, reflections, turmoil, hopes, and frustrations. It’s a story that records her path to self-awareness as it satisfyingly hurtles towards a Ginzburg-reminiscent ending.
For Alessandra, our protagonist, the crux of her story is her unhappy marriage to Francesco Minelli, but to get to that core she feels it necessary to give the reader a flavour of her childhood, her upbringing, and the neighbourhood she grew up in. We learn of Alessandra’s adoration of her mother Eleanora trapped in a tumultuous marriage to a man they both despise, and which leaves scars on both women. When she grows up into a young woman herself, Alessandra marries Francesco, but her fate disturbingly begins to blend with that of her mother, although it must be said that while Eleanora falls out of love with her husband, Alessandra remains passionately and perhaps frustratingly devoted to Francesco. Set against a background of days leading up to the Second World War, the war itself, the rise of resistance, the fall of Mussolini, and the signing of the armistice, Her Side of the Story explores an array of themes centred on the stifling stronghold of patriarchy, the net it casts over the relationships between men and women ensnaring them in its fold, the concept of romantic love, feminism, alienation and also increasing resistance.
THE WALL by Marlen Haushofer (Translated from German by Shaun Whiteside)
This is a powerful book about survival, self-renewal, and the capacity to love. While holidaying in an Alpine hunting lodge, our unnamed narrator wakes up one day to an unimaginable catastrophe. She is possibly the last living person although she is yet to grasp the significance of this.
Against such a terrifying backdrop, the bulk of the book is all about how the narrator fights for survival and ekes out a living in the forest. The deep bond that she forms with her coterie of animals is very sensitively portrayed and is one of the highlights of the book. And there are some wonderful passages on existentialism and the meaning of life, love and caring, and the evolution of the physical and metaphysical selves. Ultimately, the narrator’s strength of will to forge ahead is what makes the book so beautiful.
Cold Nights of Childhood, then, is an unflinching portrayal of a woman’s quest for independence, freedom, sex and love, as well as her struggles with mental illness told in a writing style that is cinematic and impressionistic without conforming to the rigid structures of conventional storytelling.
At barely 70 pages and set between 1950 and 1970, the novella is divided into four chapters and begins with a flavour of our narrator’s childhood and school years in the Turkish town of Fatih. Later, we move on to the time our narrator spends in Istanbul and Ankara, and abroad in Europe’s great capital cities (Berlin and Paris). We learn of her string of lovers, her unsuccessful marriages, and above all her incarceration in mental asylums. This predominantly forms the essence of the book, and yet the narrative is not as linear as it seems. Moody, evocative, teeming with rich visuals and a palpable Jean Rhys vibe, Cold Nights of Childhood is a beautifully penned novella that I’m glad to have discovered.
Mrs Caliban is a tale of the disintegration of a marriage, love and sexual freedom, grief and loss, friendship and betrayal, and the re-invention of a woman having hit rock bottom. Our protagonist is Dorothy, a housewife residing in the suburbs of California stuck in a stagnant, loveless marriage. With the unexpected death of their son, Scotty, during a routine operation as well as a miscarriage thereafter, Dorothy is tormented by grief and despair. Her relationship with Fred has reached a breaking point. Resentment brews between the two as they silently blame each other for these twin tragedies. The sense of hopelessness has reached a stage where both are too tired to even divorce. And so they stumble along…staring into an uncertain future.
When one day, Larry, the frogman, lands in Dorothy’s kitchen, her life alters unexpectedly and in ways she has not imagined. The reader immediately senses the perceptible shift in Dorothy’s circumstances; a chance for excitement, love, and adventure…
What makes Mrs Caliban unique is not just its unusual premise but also how rich the novel is in terms of themes explored. Within the broader strange outline of its plot, the novel has an interior logic all its own. Mrs Caliban is a testament to Ingalls’ excellent storytelling ability in the way she blends the fantastical with the mundane to greater effect, and on the strength of her assured writing, the reader is willing to be led along in whichever direction she takes us.
When Olga’s husband Mario suddenly decides to opt out of their marriage, her life turns upside down, and so begins her downward spiral into depression and neglect.
What stands out in The Days of Abandonment is Olga’s voice – she is brutally frank in conveying her thoughts and feelings, minces no words, and is almost always angry, sometimes uncomfortably so. At its core, the novel touches upon the themes of how absurd conventional definitions of womanhood can be, while also highlighting the trials of motherhood.
Lolly Willowes is a wonderful tale of a single woman looking to lead an independent life by breaking away from the controlling clutches of her family. Till her late twenties, Lolly is shown to lead a pretty sheltered life in the country where her father has a brewing business and an estate called Lady Place. But once she is in her mid-forties, Lolly feels trapped and stultified and longs for a change. During one of her shopping trips, she chances upon a flower shop and learns of a village in the Chilterns called the Great Mop. Soon she begins poring over books and maps on the place. It’s a region that tickles her fancy and on a whim, she decides to establish herself there and live independently.
The first half of Lolly Willowes proceeds conventionally as Lolly sinks into domestic routines both at Lady Place and in London, her role in both these houses being taken for granted. It’s in the second half that the novel slips into a bit of whimsy and magic as ‘witches’ come into play, but it’s all quite charming, and more importantly, Sylvia Townsend Warner pulls it off. Not only does Lolly refreshingly choose to defy conventional societal roles, but the novel is also a statement that even in the mid or late forties, it is never too late for a woman to entirely change her course of life if she really wants to.
THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin
First published in 1899, The Awakening is a remarkable book and is widely seen as a landmark of early feminism. Set in Louisiana, Edna Pontellier is married to a conservative New Orleans businessman. Feeling increasingly stifled by the conventional role of a housewife, the dull existence of a society woman, and the demands of motherhood, Edna yearns for freedom. Until one day she meets Robert Lebrun and is floored by his devotion towards her. Their passionate, furtive encounters unleash in her the desire to chart a new life for herself and pursue her passion for art.
It’s a beautifully penned novel that encapsulates Edna’s inner thoughts as she struggles to find a balance between her duties as a wife and mother, and her newfound path of independence. Gender roles and societal constraints as well as a woman’s need for solitude and finding time for herself are some of the central themes explored in this unforgettable book.
And that’s it! I plan to write more such themed pieces in the future so watch this space.
One of my favourite themes in literature is mother-daughter relationships, all the more if they are complex or difficult. I’m currently reading May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life for #NYRBWomen24, which has been a wonderful read so far, particularly exploring the complicated relationship between Mary and her deeply religious mother, and it got me thinking of some of the other books I’d recently read and loved on this theme.
So without further ado, here are the eight books. You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking on the title links…
Set in the little, fictional prairie town of Manawaka, Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God is a wonderfully intense and haunting novel, an incredible character portrait of a shy, socially awkward schoolteacher capturing her solitary life, her life-altering affair and the ensuing crisis thereafter.
Our protagonist is Rachel Cameron, a 34-year-old single woman living with her ailing, overbearing mother in the Canadian town of Manawaka. As the years pile on, and the prospect of finding a man and bearing children appears increasingly dim, she feels trapped in her role as a daughter, a sister, and a teacher, unable to break free from the expectations placed upon her by others. Enter Nick Kazlik, a university professor one year older than her, and very soon Rachel finds herself entangled in a passionate affair, one that will affect her deeply and possibly set her on a path of self-discovery.
A Jest of God explores the themes of loneliness and fear, sexuality and desire, faith and religion, the courage to break away from conventional societal mores essentially those forced upon women, and the small-mindedness of a conservative small town where nobody’s business goes unnoticed providing rich fodder for gossip and judgment. It’s about the complex ties between mothers and daughters, and between siblings, and also between friends and lovers. But, it’s also about the unfathomable tricks of Fate (lending the novel its name), particularly on a woman whose greatest fear is being made to look like a fool.
FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes (Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)
There’s a scene in Forbidden Notebook where Valeria Cossatti, our protagonist and the narrator, is having lunch with her glamorous friend Clara at her place, a penthouse apartment in Rome. Divorced from her husband, Clara is now an independent woman and a successful filmmaker, but by then Valeria’s position has become much more complex. Her outward façade continues to be that of a traditional woman confined to the role of a homemaker and catering to the needs of her husband and two children, but inwardly Valeria has begun to seethe and resist these conventional norms she is expected to adhere to. Clara believes that Valeria has been lucky to achieve all that she wanted by marrying, but by then Valeria and the reader know the reality to be entirely different – Valeria has been experiencing a deep sense of disillusionment, a feeling she is unable to share with Clara.
It is this intense conflict, growing resistance, and the dual nature of her thoughts and emotions that forms the essence of Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook – a rich, multilayered novel of domestic dissatisfaction and awakening seen through the prism of a woman’s private diary. Set in 1950s Rome, not only does the book boldly challenge the validity of restrictive, orthodox roles thrust upon women, and the heartaches of motherhood, but it also dwells on writing as a powerful tool for a woman to find her voice and be heard when those closest to her fail to do so.
Billed as a feminist classic, Forbidden Notebook is a masterclass of insight and imagination, brilliant in the way it provides a window into a woman’s interior life, an internal struggle that oscillates between the desire to discover her true self and also keep it hidden.
Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is a brilliant, superbly crafted tale of a challenging marriage, abortion, and the difficulties of a mother-daughter relationship told in Mortimer’s customary haunting, absorbing style.
We are introduced to Ruth Whiting, a bored housewife who lives with her well-to-do dentist husband Rex, a bully, in the posh neighbourhood called the Common. Ruth dotes on her children – her eldest daughter Angela and the boys, Julian and Mike. But they are growing up and have reached that age where they have lives of their own – the boys away at boarding school and Angela, an undergraduate at Oxford. In the holidays, when her children come down, Ruth’s home is filled with chatter, activities and noise, but for the better part of the year, the hours lie empty and the monotonous days stretch endlessly before Ruth.
When Angela, who is unmarried, becomes pregnant, she confides in Ruth expecting the latter to help her. The gamut of conflicting emotions felt by mother and daughter and how they deal with this tough situation forms the backbone of this novel.
Cold Enough for Snow is a haunting, beautifully sculpted novella of the mysteries of relationships and memories, familial bonds, finding connections, and life’s simple pleasures. The novel opens with a woman and her mother embarking on a short trip together to Japan, a journey and destination that promises the opportunity for both to bond and connect. But we get a sense from the outset that mother and daughter are not always on the same page.
What’s interesting about this novella is the nature of the relationship between the two women, which remains elusive despite the hazy impression that they get along well. The book is largely from the daughter’s point of view and so the mother’s reminisces and flashbacks are told to us from the daughter’s perspective lending it an air of unreliability or conveying the idea that the mother’s experiences are filtered through the daughter’s eyes so that it fits her narrative.
There’s an elusive, enigmatic feel to the novella, of things left unsaid that might mean more than what’s been stated, a sense that things lie outside our grasp, that full knowledge is always on the fringes, on the periphery of our vision. To me Cold Enough for Snow was like a balm – the quiet, hallucinatory prose style and range of sensory images were very soothing and I could easily lose myself in the dreamy world that Au created.
ELENA KNOWS by Claudia Piñeiro (Translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle)
Elena Knows is a forceful, thought-provoking, unconventional crime novel where Claudia Piñeiro effectively explores a range of social concerns such as illness, caregiving, crippling bureaucracy and a woman’s choice regarding her body. Elena, a woman in her sixties, suffers from Parkinson’s, a progressively devastating illness, characterized by loss of control over everyday movements. However, the real burden weighing heavy on her soul is the sudden, recent death of her daughter Rita who was mysteriously and inexplicably found hanging from the bell tower in the local church. The police classify her death as suicide, but Elena is convinced it is murder.
What makes Elena Knows so compelling is the richness of themes explored, a gamut of hard-hitting social issues. First of all, the book is an unflinching portrayal of a debilitating disease and the loss of dignity that it involves. Other themes explored are the challenges of being a caregiver and abortion. It’s a brilliant novel and the fact that the author manages to address these issues without being preachy or sentimental only enhances the book’s power.
My Phantoms is a brilliant, engrossing tale that explores the complexity of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. Our narrator is Bridget Grant and through her eyes, we gradually begin to see a fully formed picture of her narcissistic father Lee and her emotionally detached mother Helen – parents who have continued to haunt Bridget’s psyche. The relationship with the mother forms the focal point of the novel, she is independent living in her own home, but portrayed as an insecure woman on many fronts and unable to really open up. However, we view the mother from Bridget’s eyes, and even if she is not someone you warm up to, Bridget is not always the ideal daughter either and comes across as cruel and deeply unsympathetic in certain situations.
Riley’s prose is biting and as sharp as a scalpel, but also suffused with tender moments. The primary characters are finely etched and the dialogues between them are superb, they feel very real. In My Phantoms, then, she explores the tricky terrain of fractured familial bonds with much aplomb.
IZA’S BALLAD by Magda Szabó (Translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes)
On the death of her husband Vince, Ettie goes to live with her daughter Iza in her flat in Budapest. Ettie is ecstatic at first, she looks forward to spending quality time with her beloved daughter, but alas things unfold quite differently. The first days of adjustment in the big, bustling city of Budapest are particularly hard for Ettie who has spent most of her time in a village taking comfort in its familiarity and sense of community. Pest frightens her, and with Iza too immersed in her career and social life, Ettie’s sense of isolation only heightens.
One of the biggest strengths of the novel is Szabó’s superb characterization. Ettie and Iza are such brilliantly etched, fully realised characters, and Szabó particularly excels in showing how their diametrically opposite personas and outlook set the stage for heartache and tragedy. The two are as unalike as chalk and cheese. Ettie is warm, Iza is frozen. For Ettie the past is an anchor, while Iza is forward-thinking, her gaze settled on the future. Ettie craves companionship, Iza wants to be alone. Iza’s Ballad, then, is a piercing, unflinching examination of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, a striking depiction of two women who are poles apart.
The Mirador is no ordinary biography. The byline below the title reads “Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by her Daughter” which is to say Gille has breathed life into her mother by giving her a voice and thus positioned this as a memoir. What we read, therefore, is a first-person narrative giving the impression that it is Irène herself who is speaking directly to us.
The Mirador comprises two sections – the first is Némirovsky’s imagined memoir penned in 1929 covering her childhood in Russia and Paris amid sweeping changes and a rapidly evolving political landscape; while the somber and hauntingly sad second section fast forwards to 1942, days before her arrest at a time when she was living in precarious circumstances with her husband and two young daughters in a small French village, isolated with a deep sense of foreboding with regards the future.
Élisabeth Gille traverses the zenith and nadir of her mother’s glittering but cruelly short life; The Mirador is not only a brilliant, immersive, and deeply humane account of Irène Némirovsky’s life lived in tumultuous Russia and France, but also a window into her legacy and fame as a writer par excellence.
And that’s it! I had fun compiling this post, and watch this space for more such themed pieces in the future. Happy reading!
2023 turned out to be another excellent year of reading, where quality trumped quantity, and I’m so glad I chose my books well.
I read more translated literature this year as planned of which 9 translated works made the cut covering 6 languages (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Icelandic, and Japanese). Again, I’ve read more women authors this year, and this is reflected in the list as well (women to men ratio is 17:3). Publishers in the spotlight include McNally Editions, NYRB Classics, Daunt Books Publishing, Virago, Vintage, Pushkin Press, Charco Press, Boiler House Press (Recovered Books imprint), Faber Editions, and Counterpoint.
One of the highlights of 2023 was the year-long reading project – #NYRBWomen23 – hosted by the lovely Kim McNeill on Twitter and other social media platforms. I intend to write more about this in an upcoming piece (given the gems I’ve discovered thanks to this readalong, it deserves a blog post of its own!).
Other readalongs I participated in were as follows – Novellas in November; WIT Month in August; Reading Ireland Month in March; #ReadIndies in February; January in Japan, #NordicFINDS23, and A Year with William Trevor, all in January.
Coming back to this list of 20 books; it is a mix of 20th century literature, contemporary fiction, translated literature, novellas, short stories, diaries, and an imagined memoir. I simply loved them all and would heartily recommend each one.
So without further ado, here are My Best Books of 2023 in the order in which they appear in the picture below (from top to bottom and then to the right). For detailed reviews on each, click on the title links…
TWO SHERPAS by Sebastián Martínez Daniell (Translated from Spanish by Jennifer Croft)
In the beginning, two Sherpas peer over the edge of a precipice staring at the depths below where a British climber lies sprawled among the rocks. Almost near the top of Mount Everest, the silence around them is intense, punctuated by the noise of the gushing wind (“If the deafening noise of the wind raveling over the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence”). Wishing to emulate the feat of many others before him, the Englishman had aimed to ascend the summit but that ambition now is clearly in disarray. Assisting him in the climb are two Sherpas, one a young man, the other much older, but with this sudden accident, the Sherpas are in a quandary on how to best respond.
Thus, in a span of barely ten to fifteen minutes and using this particular moment as a central story arc, the novel brilliantly spins in different directions in a vortex of themes and ideas that encompass the mystery of the majestic Mount Everest, its significance in the history of imperialist Britain, the ambition of explorers to ascend its summit, attitudes of foreigners towards the Sherpa community to Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Rome. This is a brilliant, vividly imagined, richly layered novel that gives the reader much to ponder and think about.
Two Thousand Million Man-Power is a brilliant, psychologically astute tale of a marriage with its trials and tribulations, the indignity of unemployment, and the wretchedness of poverty…in a seamless blend of the personal with the global.
The book centres on the relationship and subsequent marriage of Robert Thomas, a scientist at a cosmetics firm, and Katherine Bott, a teacher at a council school; both idealists who believe in progress and prosperity. As they marry, they enjoy a brief period of comfortable suburban living only to be followed by crippling poverty when Robert loses his job. Interwoven with Robert and Katherine’s lives and peppered throughout the novel are snippets of headlines depicting both national and international events. Encompassing a period from the early 1920s to a couple of years before the advent of the Second World War, Robert and Katherine’s relationship is placed in a wider context of astonishing technological advancements but also disturbing political developments. It’s this placing of the personal against a broader economic and political landscape that makes the novel unique and remarkable.
Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion is a wonderfully strange and unsettling novel about the trials of adolescence, tumultuous sibling relationships, isolation, alienation, and the alluring enigma of nature.
Ralph and Molly Fawcett, the novel’s pre-adolescent protagonists, reside in Covina, Los Angeles with their mother and their two elder sisters Leah and Rachel. That they are unlike the rest of the family is evident from the striking first chapter itself where we learn of Ralph and Molly’s tendency to get unexpected nosebleeds, the result of having suffered from scarlet fever. These nosebleeds often make them objects of ridicule, and they withdraw into their private interior world, but this shared affliction also forges a special bond between brother and sister. Once their beloved grandfather, Grandpa Kenyon, dies while on his annual visit to the Fawcetts, Ralph and Molly begin to spend the summers at his son Uncle Claude’s ranch in Colorado. For a few years, Ralph and Molly lead a double life flitting between Covina and Colorado, until a decision made by Mrs Fawcett to first travel the world with Leah and Rachel and then relocate with all her children to Connecticut, sets the stage for events to follow complete with the novel’s devastating conclusion.
Stafford’s writing pulsates with a dreamlike, cinematic quality evident in the way she depicts the interiority of her characters, particularly children when pitted against grown-ups, the intensity of emotions playing out against a mesmeric, unsettling, and sinister landscape; potent ingredients that make for an immersive reading experience.
GRAND HOTEL by Vicki Baum (Translated from German by Basil Creighton)
Grand Hotel is a resounding triumph, in which by focusing the spotlight on five core characters from varied walks of life brought together by fate, Baum dwells on their internal dramas as well as their interactions; these are tragic, haunting characters grappling with their inner demons and insecurities while also wrestling with some of the bigger existential questions. The novel sizzles with a vivid sense of place (1920s Berlin) and the language is wonderfully tonal and visual. Also, Baum has a striking way with words that capture the essence of her characters in a few sentences.
The Mirador is no ordinary biography. The byline below the title reads “Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by her Daughter” which is to say Gille has breathed life into her mother by giving her a voice and thus positioned this as a memoir. What we read, therefore, is a first-person narrative giving the impression that it is Irène herself who is speaking directly to us.
The Mirador comprises two sections – the first is Némirovsky’s imagined memoir penned in 1929 covering her childhood in Russia and Paris amid sweeping changes and a rapidly evolving political landscape; while the somber and hauntingly sad second section fast forwards to 1942, days before her arrest at a time when she was living in precarious circumstances with her husband and two young daughters in a small French village, isolated with a deep sense of foreboding with regards the future.
Élisabeth Gille traverses the zenith and nadir of her mother’s glittering but cruelly short life; The Mirador is not only a brilliant, immersive, and deeply humane account of Irène Némirovsky’s life lived in tumultuous Russia and France, but also a window into her legacy and fame as a writer par excellence.
If you thought a story centred on a 92-year-old protagonist was bound to be dull and depressing, think again. Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet is a delicious romp, a stunning feat of the imagination, and an iconoclastic book if you will that refuses to be pigeonholed into convenient definitions and genres; and in Marian Leatherby, the nonagenarian in this superbly off-kilter tale, Carrington has created an unconventional heroine who is charming, feisty and memorable.
The book begins in a quiet, residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of an unnamed Mexican city where Marian Leatherby, our narrator, resides with her son Galahad, his wife Muriel, and their 25-year-old unmarried son Robert. Marian is not welcome in the house and with the aid of a hearing trumpet gifted to her by her charming loquacious friend Carmella who has a penchant for conjuring up unrealistic and improbable schemes and ideas, Marian learns of her family’s plot to park her in an old age home.
The old-age home is unlike anything she had imagined, and Marian soon begins to settle in, gets introduced to her fellow residents, finds herself entangled in various adventures, and is caught up in the fascinating life of an abbess. The Hearing Trumpet could be considered an extension of Carrington’s identity as a Surrealist artist; the novel is a unique montage of styles and genres that resist the laws of conventional narration to brilliant effect. Just superb!
THE TWILIGHT ZONE by Nona Fernández (Translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer)
Using the motif of the 1950s popular science fiction/fantasy show The Twilight Zone, Fernández delves into the unimaginable spaces of horror, violence, and murkiness of the cruel Pinochet regime where beatings, torture, and unexplained disappearances disturbingly became a part of the fabric of everyday life.
In March 1984, Andres Morales, a government security services agent, labeled by our narrator as “the man who tortured people” walks into the offices of the “Cauce” magazine and offers his testimony in exchange for safe passage outside the country. After years of imposing torture tactics on Pinochet’s detractors – members of the Communist party, resistance movements, and left-leaning individuals -something inside Morales snaps (“That night I started to dream of rats. Of dark rooms and rats”). Possibly aghast at the monstrosity of the crimes committed, Morales wishes to confess and in the process hopes to be absolved of those horrific acts.
Much of the book highlights crucial moral questions at play, and the fate of the man who tortured people is central to it – Should he be absolved of his crimes because he had a change of heart and now wants to do right? It’s a powerful, unforgettable book about loss, repression, and rebellion where the premise of the TV show is used to brilliant effect – an exploration of that dark dimension where strangeness and terror rule the roost, and is often unfathomable.
Comprising a series of crystal clear, pristine vignettes with eye-catching titles and nuggets of distilled information, Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is such a joy to read – a book that brilliantly captures the panorama of a woman’s life on the Midwest racetracks where her sheer grit, fierce determination and unconditional love for horses enables her to make a mark in a tough field largely dominated by men.
Scanlan’s narrative is dexterously crafted, preserving Sonia’s distinctive style of speech (“there’s a particular language you pick up on the track”), a brilliant feat of ventriloquism if you will where Sonia’s engrossing storytelling skills artfully blend with Scanlan’s own style giving the impression of Sonia speaking through Scanlan. Lean and lyrical, the prose in Kick the Latch is stripped down to its bare essentials but it speaks multitudes, a whole way of life conveyed in as little space as possible but with remarkable tenderness and acuity.
THE WAITING YEARS by Fumiko Enchi (Translated from Japanese by John Bester)
Set at the beginning of the Meiji era, The Waiting Years is a beautifully written, poignant tale of womanhood and forced subservience; a nuanced portrayal of a dysfunctional family dictated by the whims of a wayward man.
Tomo, our protagonist, is married to Yukitomo Shirakawa, a publicly respected man holding a position very high up in the government ranks. In the very first chapter, she is sent to Tokyo to find a respectable young girl who will become her husband’s mistress, a terrible and heartbreaking task she is compelled to carry out. As far as themes go, The Waiting Years, then, is an acutely observed portrait of a marriage and a dysfunctional family, the heartrending sense of entrapment felt by its women who don’t have much agency, which is probably representative of Japanese society at that time. Enchi beautifully captures the internal turmoil that rages not just within Tomo but also within Suga, Yukitomo’s mistress. The subject matter might be bleak, but it’s a powerful book with unforgettable characters whose fates will forever be impinged on my mind.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is a wonderfully strange, surreal novel of entrapment and survival set in a place that may or may not be planet Earth. It’s a bleak but powerful book in the way it explores the concepts of humanity and community when placed against a dystopian backdrop.
The plot of this novel is fairly simple. A group of forty women of all ages lives imprisoned in an underground cage outside which armed guards keep an eye on them continuously. These women have no idea of the catastrophic event that led to their capture and have a vague recollection of the lives they led before imprisonment. The youngest prisoner in this motley group is a young girl, our unnamed narrator, referred to as “child” by the other women. But then one day, an ear-shattering siren goes off. All of a sudden, the guards disappear, vanishing into thin air. Our narrator quickly takes charge, frees the other women, and the group in sheer trepidation climbs up the stairs out into the open, welcoming and embracing their newfound freedom.
But are they really free? This is a beautiful novel, equally devastating and hopeful, and one that sizzles with compassion and humanity as the characters grapple with dwindling hopes and mounting fear, frustrated by the illusion of freedom that gives them a window of optimism but fails to completely transform their lives.
SALKA VALKA by Haldór Laxness (Translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton)
Salka Valka is a wondrous, 552-paged, ambitious novel; an immersive, brilliant, often harrowing tale of a beleaguered fishing community and the indomitable spirit of a woman who prides on her independence and strives to improve their lot.
In the opening pages of Salka Valka, a coastal steamer stops at the port of a small, remote fishing village called Oseyri. Nobody can envisage a life here, but on that cold, bleak winter’s night, two figures emerge from the steamer – a woman called Sigurlina and her 11-year-old daughter Salvor (Salka Valka). Sigurlina and Salka Valka have made this journey from the North, certain circumstances having driven them away, and while Reykjavik seems to be their final destination, Sigurlina reduced to a state of penury, cannot afford the cost of the trip further. Oseyri, then, becomes her destination for the time being, she hopes to find a job that will help her make enough money to embark on the journey south. However, fate as we shall see has other plans…
Salka Valka is divided into four sections, each section comprising two parts – the first section focuses on Salka’s time in Oseyri as a teenager, and the second section fast forwards to several years when she is a young woman, independent with her own house and a share in a fishing boat. One of the core themes that the novel addresses is the ugly side of abject poverty and the struggles of the working class, and the second half particularly becomes more political as the debate between capitalism and Bolshevism reaches a fever pitch. Epic in scope and ahead of its times, Salka Valka, then, is a simmering cauldron of various delectable ingredients – a coming-of-age tale, a statement on world politics, a strange beguiling love story, and an unforgettable female lead.
Barbara Comyns’ The Skin Chairs is a marvellous tale of family, abject poverty, and the bewildering, ghoulish world of adults seen through the eyes of a beguiling 10-year-old girl, a story that has all the elements of Comyns’ trademark offbeat worldview.
When the book opens, ten-year-old Frances is sent to stay for a few days with her ‘horsey’ relations, the Lawrences. Growing up in a family of five siblings (Frances has three sisters and two brothers), we learn that the mother often packs them off to various relatives so that she can have some respite and time for herself. However, Frances’ father dies unexpectedly and with this sudden development, the family is plunged into poverty after having led a life of comfort. Despite the subsequent horrors of their existence, Frances’ life is not without incident; she is an inquisitive, affectionate child and makes some unusual friends, and things do take a turn for the better led by a new arrival at the village which sees the fortunes of the family transform, while the holier-than-thou Lawrences finally get their comeuppance.
The Skin Chairs, then, has all the hallmarks of a characteristic Comynsian world – a child or child-like narrator whose unique, distinct voice manages to belie the hopelessness of the circumstances and take some edge off its horrors making the story not just easier to bear but also incredibly compelling. I was lucky to finally find a copy of this novel, it was so incredibly hard to find.
The Devastating Boys is a gorgeous collection of stories showcasing Elizabeth Taylor’s unmatched talent and remarkable range both in terms of the worlds she creates and her piercing gaze into the hearts and minds of her characters.
The title story in the collection – “The Devastating Boys” – is a subtle and beautifully written story of a marriage, of how doing things out of the ordinary holds the promise of joy and renewal, while “An Excursion to the Source” is a story about a diffident young woman Polly and her overbearing guardian Gwenda and the unexpected circumstances that confront them on a holiday. One of my favourites, “In and Out the Houses”, is a cleverly constructed tale focusing on the petty jealousies of village life complete with the unspoken disappointments and the secret tinge of envy that mark the lives of its inhabitants, while “Flesh” is another superbly crafted story of loneliness and the tragicomedy of middle-aged romance. It’s a collection that shows Taylor at the top of her game where each story is a joy to savour and treasure.
Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories is a brilliant collection of eerie, chilling tales where she uses the medium of spectral visions to explore the familiar terrain of her themes that are so central to her New York novels and stories.
The first story “The Lady Maid’s Bell” is a masterclass in narrative tension, a tale of isolation and loneliness, an unhappy marriage, and devotion. One of my favourites in the collection, “Afterward”, is a superb tale of guilt, moral failings, the repercussions of ill-gotten wealth, and women suffering because of the terrible wrongs of their men. “Bewitched” is a suspenseful story of religion and old, primitive folklore set in the icy wastes and the claustrophobic boundaries of a desolate village; while “Mr Jones”, set in an isolated country manor, dwells on the themes of patriarchal control and dominance both real and ghostly.
Besides the ghosts lurking on these pages, the richness and allure of these stories are further accentuated by the complexity of themes lacing them such as moral corruption, greed, domestic strife, control, entrapment, and abuse; themes that typically form the core of her New York stories but also explored in these ghost stories in a singularly innovative way.
Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin is a superb collection filled with stunningly crafted stories of unhappy marriages and slices of Dublin life. The book is divided into three sections, and the first section is possibly more cheery of the lot, mostly comprising autobiographical sketches of Brennan’s childhood in Dublin on Ranelagh Road.
The next two sections focus on the Derdon and Bagot families respectively and are some of the finest stories she has written. The Derdon stories are savage and heartbreaking in their depiction of an unhappy marriage; these are six exquisitely crafted stories of loneliness, bitterness, and misunderstandings, encompassing more than forty years of Hubert and Rose Derdon’s married life. Each story unflinchingly examines the nuances of their relationship from different angles and perspectives, always focusing on the growing alienation and resentment between the couple. In terms of tone, the Bagot set of stories is not as fierce as the Derdon bunch but are still beautifully rendered sketches of an unhappy marriage. The highlight of the collection is the last story which also lends the collection its name – an astute, razor-sharp character study, unlike the relative gentleness of the previous Bagot stories.
The stories in The Springs of Affection are quietly devastating, perhaps even bleak, but they are thrilling to read because of the sheer depth of their themes, Brennan’s psychological acuity, and exquisite writing.
Encapsulating the heydays of the Jazz Age, Ex-Wife is a wonderful, whip-smart tale of marriage, relationships, freedom, and women’s independence set in 1920s New York.
The book begins with Patricia, our narrator, telling us that her husband left her four years ago making her the ex-wife of the title. Through Patricia’s reminisces, we learn of her marriage to Peter at a very young age, the events leading up to their separation, and how her life pans out thereafter post that tumultuous period. Luckily, Patricia is not completely down and out; she has her job after all, and a new friendship with Lucia, another ex-wife five years older than her. The two women decide to rent an apartment together and thereby Patricia is flung headlong into a world of freedom, endless partying, men, and one-night stands. Slowly and surely, after many hiccups, Peter recedes into the background.
Ursula Parrott’s writing is sassy, wise, and sharp – snappy one-liners, easy camaraderie, and an air of irreverence are abundant and belie some of the darker moments in the book marked by heartaches, tragedies, disappointments, and wistful yearnings. Patricia’s narrative is laced with the wisdom of hindsight and there’s much humour in her retelling as there is poignancy and understated sadness.
Maxine Clair’s Rattlebone is a gorgeously written, heartbreaking compilation of eleven interlinked stories that capture slices of life of an African American community in 1950s Kansas City. It sensitively depicts the journey of Irene Wilson our protagonist from when she is eight years old to her last days in high school; she and her friends traverse a particularly rough terrain of tumultuous family life, challenges and heartaches of growing up, and the blight of occasional violence. Irene is often the central feature in each story, at other times she is on the periphery – the points of view sometimes shift and there are stories where the focus zooms on other members of her family or the black neighbourhood of Rattlebone where she resides.
These are beautiful, sharply observed tales with their tender portrayal of characters who display a quiet strength, an inner reserve that compels them to dream big and carry on despite obstacles and hardships.
THE OPPERMANNS by Lion Feuchtwanger (Translated from German by James Cleugh, revisions by Joshua Cohen)
Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns is a haunting, powerful story charting the rise and fall of a rich, cultured, liberal German Jew family during the years leading up to and during Hitler’s rise to power. The author takes his time setting up his cast of characters while simultaneously juxtaposing their situation with the broader grim political developments sweeping throughout the country making it an incredibly immersive read right from the very beginning.
The Oppermanns comprise the three brothers – Martin, Edgar, Gustav, and their sister Klara, married to the East European Jew Jaques Lavendel who is an American citizen but chooses to live in Germany. Established in Berlin, the family’s furniture venture is largely run and managed by Martin. Edgar is an eminent and respected doctor with a thriving practice of his own, while Gustav, the eldest brother, is relatively naïve and sentimental; a man of letters, Gustav is absorbed with his world of books and writing a biography on Lessing, fine dining and women, while oblivious and uninterested in matters concerning politics or economics.
As the Nazis come into power, the Oppermanns are shocked by the scale of the country’s moral breakdown while also unable to fathom the precariousness of their existence in this dramatically altered landscape of their homeland. In this volatile situation, the three brothers are faced with a terrible dilemma – should they flee Germany, or should they stay back?
FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes (Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)
There’s a scene in Forbidden Notebook where Valeria Cossatti, our protagonist and the narrator, is having lunch with her glamorous friend Clara at her place, a penthouse apartment in Rome. Divorced from her husband, Clara is now an independent woman and a successful filmmaker, but by then Valeria’s position has become much more complex. Her outward façade continues to be that of a traditional woman confined to the role of a homemaker and catering to the needs of her husband and two children, but inwardly Valeria has begun to seethe and resist these conventional norms she is expected to adhere to. Clara believes that Valeria has been lucky to achieve all that she wanted by marrying, but by then Valeria and the reader know the reality to be entirely different – Valeria has been experiencing a deep sense of disillusionment, a feeling she is unable to share with Clara.
It is this intense conflict, growing resistance, and the dual nature of her thoughts and emotions that forms the essence of Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook – a rich, multilayered novel of domestic dissatisfaction and awakening seen through the prism of a woman’s private diary. Set in 1950s Rome, not only does the book boldly challenge the validity of restrictive, orthodox roles thrust upon women, and the heartaches of motherhood, but it also dwells on writing as a powerful tool for a woman to find her voice and be heard when those closest to her fail to do so.
Billed as a feminist classic, Forbidden Notebook is a masterclass of insight and imagination, brilliant in the way it provides a window into a woman’s interior life, an internal struggle that oscillates between the desire to discover her true self and also keep it hidden.
Encompassing a period of one year, War in Val D’Orcia covers events between January 1943 and July 1944; an extremely difficult period for war-ravaged Italy fuelled by the intensity of the conflict and utter chaos in its political landscape. The author, Iris Origo, was an Anglo-American married to an Italian, and much before the war the couple bought and revived a derelict stretch of the Val d’Orcia valley in Tuscany and created an estate. At the height of the war, and at great personal risk, the Origos gave food and shelter to partisans, deserters, and refugees.
War in Val D’Orcia is a first-hand account of the complexity of Italy’s position, the politics prevailing at the time, and the difficulty of going about daily life. A compelling narrative laced with heart-stopping tension, these diary entries lose none of their edge even if we as readers already know how events will eventually pan out…the fact is that Iris Origo at the time did not; thus, the potency of the fear and stress felt by the Origos rubs on to the reader as well.
That’s about it, it was a wonderful year of reading for me and I hope it continues in 2024 too. What were some of your best books this year?
Earlier this month, I wrote a themed post on Sisters in Literature, where I showcased ten books that featured two or more sisters either as central characters or as part of an ensemble cast. I wanted to do something similar in this piece, and so here I am highlighting some of my favourite books in fiction that explore female friendship. These friendships either constitute the central storyline in the books in question or feature on the side. Some of these literary friendships are enduring but tumultuous, some are unsettling and eerie, while others are immensely therapeutic.
So without further ado, here are the ten books. You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking on the title links…
Encapsulating the heydays of the Jazz Age, Ex-Wife is a wonderful, whip-smart tale of marriage, relationships, freedom, and women’s independence set in 1920s New York.
The book begins with Patricia, our narrator, telling us that her husband left her four years ago making her the ex-wife of the title. Through Patricia’s reminisces, we learn of her marriage to Peter at a very young age, the events leading up to their separation, and how her life pans out thereafter post that tumultuous period. Luckily, Patricia is not completely down and out; she has her job after all, and a new friendship with Lucia, another ex-wife five years older than her. The two women decide to rent an apartment together and thereby Patricia is flung headlong into a world of freedom, endless partying, men, and one-night stands. Slowly and surely, after many hiccups, Peter recedes into the background.
Ursula Parrott’s writing is sassy, wise, and sharp – snappy one-liners, easy camaraderie, and an air of irreverence are abundant and belie some of the darker moments in the book marked by heartaches, tragedies, disappointments, and wistful yearnings. Patricia’s narrative is laced with the wisdom of hindsight and there’s much humour in her retelling as there is poignancy and understated sadness.
THE ICE PALACE by Tarjei Vesaas (Translated from Norwegian by Elizabeth Rokkan)
The Ice Palace is a haunting, unsettling tale of two Norwegian eleven-year-old girls, Siss and Unn, both as different as chalk and cheese but drawn to each other to form an unlikely friendship. Tarjei Vesaas’ prose is as clear as ice and as brilliant as a diamond in a narrative where things are implied, never explicitly stated. There is a dreamlike quality to the narrative that explores the themes of loss, friendship, redemption and recovery, and the power of nature.
If you thought a story centred on a 92-year-old protagonist was bound to be dull and depressing, think again. Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet is a delicious romp, a stunning feat of the imagination, and an iconoclastic book if you will that refuses to be pigeonholed into convenient definitions and genres; and in Marian Leatherby, the nonagenarian in this superbly off-kilter tale, Carrington has created an unconventional heroine who is charming, feisty and memorable.
The book begins in a quiet, residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of an unnamed Mexican city where Marian Leatherby, our narrator, resides with her son Galahad, his wife Muriel, and their 25-year-old unmarried son Robert. Marian is not welcome in the house and with the aid of a hearing trumpet gifted to her by her charming loquacious friend Carmella who has a penchant for conjuring up unrealistic and improbable schemes and ideas, Marian learns of her family’s plot to park her in an old age home.
The old-age home is unlike anything she had imagined, and Marian soon begins to settle in, gets introduced to her fellow residents, finds herself entangled in various adventures, and is caught up in the fascinating life of an abbess. The Hearing Trumpet could be considered an extension of Carrington’s identity as Surrealist artist; the novel is a unique montage of styles and genres that resist the laws of conventional narration to brilliant effect. Just superb!
Death and the Seaside is a terrific tale of failure, of being easily influenced, death, and writing that unravels in a rather unexpected way. Our protagonist is Bonnie Falls, a young woman about to turn 30. Bonnie’s life so far has been without any direction or purpose and she has not much to show for her half-hearted efforts. She is a college dropout having abandoned a degree in literature, which rather limits the job opportunities available. But she is an aspiring writer with potential and has already penned the beginning of a story that is dotted with sinister happenings.
Lost and adrift, Bonnie moves out of her parents’ home to a rented flat, where she becomes pally with her landlady, the mysterious Sylvia Slythe, an unlikely friendship that also seems eerie. Sylvia is unusually interested in Bonnie, especially in the story Bonnie has written, and arranges a seaside holiday for the two of them.
Why is Sylvia so deeply interested in an unremarkable person like Bonnie? Is there something sinister lurking behind Sylvia’s motives? This remains a mystery to the reader until it all becomes clear as the novel progresses and reaches its dark conclusion.
A View of the Harbour is a beautifully written, nuanced story of love, aching loneliness, stifled desires, and the claustrophobia of a dead-end seaside town. The main plotline revolves around Beth Cazabon, a writer; her husband Robert, the town’s doctor; and Beth’s friend Tory Foyle who lives next door and is divorced. However, like the wonderful The Soul of Kindness, this is a book with an ensemble cast where the lives of the other members of the community are interwoven into that of the Cazabons. This is a drab, dreary seaside town where for desperate want of drama and excitement, the lives of its residents become fodder for speculation and gossip.
Taylor is great at depicting the small dramas playing out in the lives of these ordinary people with her characteristic flair for astute insights into human nature. This is a community struggling to feel important, where an annual innocuous, humdrum festival becomes an event to talk about given the lack of entertainment otherwise, and where the inhabitants’ lives never go unobserved. This is one of her finest books, simply top-tier Taylor.
The Enchanted April is a delightful, charming novel centred on four women from different walks of life who decide to spend a month in summer holidaying in Italy. These women come from completely different backgrounds, but there’s one common thread binding them: they are disillusioned with the sameness of their days and are desperately seeking an outlet that will bring some colour to their lives along with the much-needed rest and solitude.
Once ensconced in the Italian castle, the four women begin to interact with each other and it is these exchanges that make The Enchanted April so delightful – the awkward dinner conversations, the various machinations to claim the best rooms and views for themselves, and their opinions of each other. The Enchanted April then is a gem of a novel with much wit and humour to commend it. Arnim’s writing is lovely and evocative and all four women in the novel are brilliantly etched, they come across as fully realized characters. This was a perfect book to read in April with a particularly feel-good vibe in these trying times.
Jane and Prudence is another wonderful, poignant read from Barbara Pym’s oeuvre. Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates, despite the gap in their ages, are friends. But the two could not have been more different. Jane, having married a vicar, has settled into her role of being the clergyman’s wife, although she’s not really good at it. Having studied at Oxford, Jane had a bright future ahead of her with the possibility of writing books, but that ambition fell by the wayside once she married. Prudence, also having graduated from Oxford, is elegant, beautiful, and still single with a flurry of relationships behind her. Prudence is getting older but has lost none of her good looks, and is an independent woman working in a publisher’s office in London.
As was evident in Excellent Women and Some Tame Gazelle, Pym excels in describing the eccentricities of parish life, its small-time politics, how a woman meeting a man can set tongues wagging, and how rumours of people’s lives fly thick and fast. She also raises the point of how in an era when women were destined for marriage, being single and living independently can bring its share of rewards.
Dusty Answer is a gorgeous, evocative novel of childhood friendships, thwarted love, and the intensity of hopes and expectations of youth. We follow Judith Earle, our protagonist, from her childhood to young womanhood, and the transformative relationships that leave a deep impression on her.
Through a stream of flashbacks reflecting Judith’s reminisces, the first few chapters move back and forth between the past and present, at first mostly dwelling on Judith’s childhood, particularly her fascination with the Fyfe children – Mariella and her four cousins, Charlie, Martin, Julian, and Roddy.
After the death of her father, Judith goes to Cambridge where she meets the charismatic and enigmatic Jennifer Baird. Judith is utterly enchanted by Jennifer to the point where her time in Cambridge is entirely defined by this more than platonic friendship and evenings spent with their coterie of friends. Judith is mesmerised by Jennifer and reciprocates her feelings, there’s a sense that her love for Jennifer doesn’t succeed in quelling her all-consuming passion for Roddy. Once she is out of Cambridge, the Fyfe men fill up Judith’s world again. This is such an exquisitely written, melancholic novel as the characters navigate the rough terrain of early adulthood filled with heartbreak, tenderness, joys, and disappointments.
MY BRILLIANT FRIEND by Elena Ferrante (Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)
Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels took the world by storm when they were published, and My Brilliant Friend – the first book in the quartet – is where it all started. Set in a poor and violent neighbourhood in Naples, these novels chart the friendship between two women – the fiery and fiercely intelligent Lila Cerullo and the clever and hardworking Elena Greco. Their story begins in My Brilliant Friend when the girls are eight years old and ends with the last novel The Story of the Lost Child when the two women are in their sixties. Intense, frenetic, cinematic in scope with richly drawn characters, all four books are fabulous. I came very late to these books, but it was essentially high-quality binge reading!
My perennial favourites and featured in quite a few of my themed posts, both of Olivia Manning’s stunning trilogies – at the core a brilliant portrayal of a marriage against the backdrop of war – helped me navigate some challenging times in 2019.
The first one i.e. The Balkan Trilogyhighlights the chaotic lives of Guy and Harriet Pringle – British expats in Bucharest and subsequently in Athens during the Second World War. In The Levant Trilogy, we follow the Pringles to Cairo in Egypt, followed by Damascus and then Jerusalem amid the raging Desert War.
In both the trilogies, Manning superbly brings to life different cities and their citizens during wartime – the increasing uncertainty of having to flee is nerve-wracking, and yet at the same time there’s this sense of denial that maybe the conflict will not impact day to day life after all.
While Guy and Harriet Pringle are the central characters with their marriage a focal point of these books, the supporting cast is great too…particularly Yakimov, an aristocrat fallen on hard times, and the wealthy, irreverent Angela Hooper who is forced to grapple with a personal tragedy. Angela’s friendship with Harriet in The Levant Trilogy, particularly, becomes important as the Pringle marriage is severely tested.
And that’s it! I had fun compiling this list, and plan to write more such themed pieces in the future. Happy reading!
August is Women in Translation (WIT) Month and I thought this was the perfect time to put together a list of some of my favourite WIT books read in 2022 and 2023 so far; more skewed towards the latter because I have been consciously reading more translated literature this year.
This list is a mix of 7 languages spread across 10 books – Turkish, Spanish (from Spain, Argentina, and Chile), Japanese, French, Norwegian, German, and Italian.
Cold Nights of Childhood, then, is an unflinching portrayal of a woman’s quest for independence, freedom, sex and love, as well as her struggles with mental illness told in a writing style that is cinematic and impressionistic without conforming to the rigid structures of conventional storytelling.
At barely 70 pages and set between 1950 and 1970, the novella is divided into four chapters and begins with a flavour of our narrator’s childhood and school years in the Turkish town of Fatih. Later, we move on to the time our narrator spends in Istanbul and Ankara, and abroad in Europe’s great capital cities (Berlin and Paris). We learn of her string of lovers, her unsuccessful marriages, and above all her incarceration in mental asylums. This predominantly forms the essence of the book, and yet the narrative is not as linear as it seems. Moody, evocative, teeming with rich visuals and a palpable Jean Rhys vibe, Cold Nights of Childhood is a beautifully penned novella that I’m glad to have discovered.
A LITTLE LUCK by Claudia Piñeiro (Translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle)
A Little Luck is a quietly powerful tale of damage, loss, second chances, and confronting one’s past once again displaying Claudia Piñeiro’s excellent storytelling skills to full effect.
When the book opens, our protagonist Mary Lohan is on a flight from Boston to Argentina, returning to the suburbs of Buenos Aires after a gap of around twenty years. Mary’s trip to the city is largely work-related; as a representative of the prestigious Garlik Institute in Boston, she has been appointed to thoroughly research the credentials of Saint Peter’s School in Buenos Aires and to gauge whether it is worthy of becoming an affiliate of the institute, a process that involves conducting a stream of interviews with teachers and assessing various other parameters.
However, she is on tenterhooks about confronting the demons of her past, a place so replete with tragedy that she was compelled to leave her life behind two decades ago and flee. Meanwhile, interspersed with Mary’s current story are short chapters of no more than a single paragraph describing a scene at a railway crossing. In these chapters, the essence of the scene remains the same, the only differentiating factor being the addition of one or two extra details that build up to a gradual reveal. The reader immediately perceives this particular scene to be the moment of that defining tragedy, the devastating event that forces Mary to leave everything behind in an act of desperation and start afresh. A Little Luck, then, is storytelling at its finest – emotional yet intelligent, immersive, and deeply felt.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is a wonderfully strange, surreal novel of entrapment and survival set in a place that may or may not be planet Earth. It’s a bleak but powerful book in the way it explores the concepts of humanity and community when placed against a dystopian backdrop.
The plot of this novel is fairly simple. A group of forty women of all ages lives imprisoned in an underground cage outside which armed guards keep an eye on them continuously. These women have no idea of the catastrophic event that led to their capture and have a vague recollection of the lives they led before imprisonment. A sense of apathy has settled over them as they see no possibility of ever being set free, or of ever gaining any knowledge about how they got here and what fate has in store for them. The youngest prisoner in this motley group is a young girl, our unnamed narrator, referred to as “child” by the other women.
But then one day, an ear-shattering siren goes off. All of a sudden, the guards disappear, vanishing into thin air. Our narrator quickly takes charge, frees the other women, and the group in sheer trepidation climbs up the stairs out into the open, welcoming and embracing their newfound freedom.
But are they really free? This is a beautiful novel, equally devastating and hopeful, and one that sizzles with compassion and humanity as the characters grapple with dwindling hopes and mounting fear, frustrated by the illusion of freedom that gives them a window of optimism but fails to completely transform their lives.
Woman Running in the Mountains is a stunning, immersive novel of single motherhood, loneliness, and alienation; a novel tinged with beauty and melancholia, with darkness and light, where haunting landscapes of the natural world offer pockets of relief from the harsh reality of a brutal family life.
The book opens with a scene of Takiko, a young, 21-year-old woman, at home in her bed grappling with an intense pain in her belly signaling she’s in labour. Takiko is hell-bent on going to the hospital by herself, trudging alone in the scorching hot midsummer sun, in pain but with a will of steel, determined not to let her mother accompany her. Once comfortably settled in the hospital, she gives birth to a healthy baby boy (called Akira). That’s the end of the first chapter, and the subsequent chapters move back and forth, dwelling on the daily challenges of new motherhood that Takiko must embrace, while at the same time dealing with her dismal family circumstances.
Single motherhood and its myriad challenges is one of the biggest themes in Woman Running in the Mountains, a topic obviously close to Tsushima’s heart given that she was also a single mother. It is a bracing, beautiful novel where Tsushima’s lyrical, limpid prose drenched in touches of piercing wisdom coupled with its range of vivid, haunting, dreamlike imagery makes it such a pleasure to read.
THE ISLAND by Ana María Matute (Translated from Spanish by Laura Lonsdale)
Against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, The Island is a dark, brilliant, deeply atmospheric coming-of-age novel set on the island of Mallorca where passions and tensions simmer, ready to erupt like lava from a volcano.
Matia, our narrator, is a wild, rebellious girl recently expelled from her convent school for kicking the prioress. She is adrift – her mother is dead since she was a little girl, and she has vague memories of her father who is at the front fighting on the opposite side – with the Communists – a fact that distresses the grandmother. Dona Praxedes, her grandmother, is a domineering woman, who takes matters into her own hands ensuring that Matia is sent to live with her. The grandmother rules her lands with an iron fist, by reputation if not in person. Matia has company though, if not always welcome. There’s her cousin Borja, a sly character and a petty thief, and his timid, vacant mother (Aunt Emilia to Matia) who is patiently waiting for her husband Alvaro to return from war. But cut off from the outside world, Matia and Borja are increasingly bored, fretful and biding their time, waiting for something the essence of which they can’t quite fathom.
It’s a very hypnotic, evocative novel where the languid heat of the summer and the vibrant kaleidoscope of colours lend a surreal, dreamlike quality to the book. Matute’s rendering of mood and atmosphere is superb – an air of menace and creeping dread pervades the island along with a sense of loss and deep lingering sadness.
GRAND HOTEL by Vicki Baum (Translated from German by Basil Creighton)
Grand Hotel is a resounding triumph, in which by focusing the spotlight on five core characters from varied walks of life brought together by fate, Baum dwells on their internal dramas as well as their interactions; these are tragic, haunting characters grappling with their inner demons and insecurities while also wrestling with some of the bigger existential questions. The novel sizzles with a vivid sense of place (1920s Berlin) and the language is wonderfully tonal and visual. Also, Baum has a striking way with words that captures the essence of her characters in a few sentences. I read this for #NYRBWomen23 and it was great.
THE WAITING YEARS by Fumiko Enchi (Translated from Japanese by John Bester)
Set at the beginning of the Meiji era, The Waiting Years is a beautifully written, poignant tale of womanhood and forced subservience; a nuanced portrayal of a dysfunctional family dictated by the whims of a wayward man.
Tomo, our protagonist, is married to Yukitomo Shirakawa, a publicly respected man holding a position very high up in the government ranks. In the very first chapter, she is sent to Tokyo to find a respectable young girl who will become her husband’s mistress, a terrible and heartbreaking task she is compelled to carry out. As far as themes go, The Waiting Years, then, is an acutely observed portrait of a marriage and a dysfunctional family, the heartrending sense of entrapment felt by its women who don’t have much agency, which is probably representative of Japanese society at that time. Enchi beautifully captures the internal turmoil that rages not just within Tomo but also within Suga, Yukitomo’s mistress. The subject matter might be bleak, but it’s a powerful book with unforgettable characters whose fates will forever be impinged on my mind.
WILL AND TESTAMENT by Vigdis Hjorth (Translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund)
Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament is a powerful, gripping, masterfully constructed novel about family feuds, abuse, trauma, and a woman’s fight to be believed and her story acknowledged, where Hjorth cleverly uses the set-up of an inheritance dispute to examine the deeper fissures that run in a dysfunctional family.
The novelopens with the news that Bergjlot’s dad died five months ago, a development that only exacerbates the ongoing property dispute between the four children and the mother. Bergjlot initially chooses to stay out of this clash and the modern reader will immediately discern the reason for this – she was abused by her father as a child and the scars from that incident made it easier for Bergjlot to completely sever ties with her family for more than 20 years to maintain her sanity. At its core, Will and Testament, is about a victim of abuse fighting back to be heard, about the legacy of abuse that can run down generations, and how it can irreparably damage relationships. The prose has a feverish quality that is compelling, the characters are brilliantly drawn and overall this is really a superb novel.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE by Nona Fernández (Translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer)
Using the motif of the 1950s popular science fiction/fantasy show The Twilight Zone, Fernández delves into the unimaginable spaces of horror, violence and murkiness of the cruel Pinochet regime where beatings, torture, and unexplained disappearances disturbingly became a part of the fabric of everyday life.
In March 1984, Andres Morales, a government security services agent, labeled by our narrator as “the man who tortured people” walks into the offices of the “Cauce” magazine and offers his testimony in exchange for safe passage outside the country. After years of imposing torture tactics on Pinochet’s detractors – members of the Communist party, resistance movements, and left-leaning individuals -something inside Morales snaps (“That night I started to dream of rats. Of dark rooms and rats”). Possibly aghast at the monstrosity of the crimes committed, Morales wishes to confess and in the process hopes to be absolved of those horrific acts.
Much of the book highlights crucial moral questions at play, and the fate of the man who tortured people is central to it – Should he be absolved of his crimes because he had a change of heart and now wants to do right? It’s a powerful, unforgettable book about loss, repression, and rebellion where the premise of the TV show is used to brilliant effect – an exploration of that dark dimension where strangeness and terror rule the roost, and is often unfathomable.
FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes (Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)
There’s a scene in Forbidden Notebook where Valeria Cossatti, our protagonist and the narrator is having lunch with her glamorous friend Clara at her place, a penthouse apartment in Rome. Divorced from her husband, Clara is now an independent woman and a successful filmmaker, but by then Valeria’s position has become much more complex. Her outward façade continues to be that of a traditional woman confined to the role of a homemaker and catering to the needs of her husband and two children, but inwardly Valeria has begun to seethe and resist these conventional norms she is expected to adhere to. Clara believes that Valeria has been lucky to achieve all that she wanted by marrying, but by then Valeria and the reader know the reality to be entirely different – Valeria has been experiencing a deep sense of disillusionment, a feeling she is unable to share with Clara.
It is this intense conflict, growing resistance, and the dual nature of her thoughts and emotions that forms the essence of Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook – a rich, multilayered novel of domestic dissatisfaction and awakening seen through the prism of a woman’s private diary. Set in 1950s Rome, not only does the book boldly challenge the validity of restrictive, orthodox roles thrust upon women, and the heartaches of motherhood, but it also dwells on writing as a powerful tool for a woman to find her voice and be heard when those closest to her fail to do so.
Billed as a feminist classic, Forbidden Notebook is a masterclass of insight and imagination, brilliant in the way it provides a window into a woman’s interior life, an internal struggle that oscillates between the desire to discover her true self and also keep it hidden.
My WIT Reading Plans for August
As part of the #NYRBWomen23 project, I will be reading The Mirador by Elisabeth Gille (translated from French), and Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó (translated from Hungarian). Plans on the anvil also include Inheritance from Mother by Minae Mizumura (translated from Japanese). I might just fit in one more book but I haven’t figured out which yet.
Radhika's Reading Retreat 