Tosca’s kisses: #RIPxx

‘Nemesis (The Great Fortune)’ by Albrecht Dürer, 1501-2.

Codename Villanelle
by Luke Jennings.
John Murray, 2018 (2017).

Compiled from four serial ebook novellas appearing between 2014 and 2016, Codename Villanelle was the first of a trilogy (which was to include the sequels No Tomorrow and Die for Me) before being adapted and expanded to four seasons for BBC television under the blanket heading Killing Eve.

Which is why, when arriving at the last page of this opening title, there’s a distinct lack of resolution just as we appear to be getting to the heart of the cat-and-mouse narrative. And yet there’s enough detail to give us an inkling of where matters might be progressing.

It concerns the relationship between the increasingly isolated London-based spycatcher Eve Polastri as she attempts to unmask and apprehend a deadly female assassin, a killer whose role is to deliver Tosca’s kiss to selected targets who’ve grown too big for their boots. When an innocent colleague of Eve’s becomes collateral damage the MI5 operative can’t help but transform her investigation from professional to profoundly personal.

A neverending story: #ReadingAusten2025

Anne-Louise [‘Alix‘] de Montmorency, Duchesse de Talleyrand (1810-1858): detail of painting by Henri François Riesener (1767–1828).

Lesley Castle: An Unfinished Novel in Letters
by Jane Austen.
Introduction by G K Chesterton (1922).
Renard Press, 2024 (1792).

That it is unfinished, I grieve; yet fear that from me, it will always remain so . . .

Composed in 1792 when Jane Austen was still only sixteen years old, Lesley Castle is an epistolary novel – a series of letters pushing a plot on as if from a variety of viewpoints, namely the letter writers themselves. It was a common form for fiction which Austen was to customarily use before she switched in her later published works to the stance of an omniscient author.

She dedicated this entertainment, written to be read by members of her immediate circle, to her brother Henry who’d just graduated from St John’s College, Oxford, subtitling it as ‘an unfinished novel in letters’ (though whether its incompleteness was deliberate or came about because she’d not planned a conclusion is not known).

Its title doesn’t refer to a person but to an imaginary Scottish mansion in Perthshire; it’s worth noting that this was long before Walter Scott started publishing his Waverley novels. Though Austen’s story also ranges between London, Sussex and Bristol the initial setting may have been partly inspired by Anne Radcliffe’s 1789 romance The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, in which the action takes place in 15th-century Scotland.

Password Emil! #WorldKidLitMonth

Postcard of 1930s Berlin.

Emil and the Three Twins
by Erich Kästner.
Emil und die Drei Zwillinge (1933),
illustrated by Walter Trier,
translated by Cyrus Brooks.
Red Fox Classics, 2002 (1935).

From the paradoxical title to the twin prefaces (one for ‘beginners’, the other for ‘experts’) Kästner’s sequel to Emil and the Detectives is both more of the same and yet completely different.

It also seems largely devoid of action till halfway through, when we get to the mystery of how there can be ‘three twins’ and everything kicks off; up to this point I, doubtless along with most readers, was wondering what this wandering plot, the equivalent of the perennial school essay ‘What I Did in my Holidays’, was playing at.

But, as I’ve now come to expect from Kästner’s children’s fiction, at its heart is a very human story, one of hopes and fears, joy and pain, friendship and love, which to my mind makes it worth pursuing to the very end.

Matter most horrid: #RIPxx #ShortStorySeptember

Roche Castle, Pembrokeshire.

Transformation by Mary Shelley.
‘Transformation’, ‘The Invisible Girl’ and ‘The Mortal Immortal’.
Penguin Archive, 2025 (1831-4).

These three Gothic romances by the author of Frankenstein – ‘Gothick’ I should rather call them – simultaneously attract and repulse me; they are ‘horrid’ in the antique sense of a heightened awareness of the supernatural and the workings of Fate, but also horrid in the modern sense of composed of overly melodramatic language and plots.

But then, so too was Frankenstein which, one might argue, is redeemed in posterity’s view of it as being as much about philosophy as it’s about a dramatic narrative. But is there much of philosophy here in these short stories? If so, I’m afraid I’m not detecting it. Their nature is rather, I think, primarily about the audience they were aimed at.

They were published between 1831 and 1835 in The Keepsake, a quality illustrated annual which appeared every Christmas from 1827 to 1856 featuring short stories, essays and poetry. Aimed at a readership of young women, the contributions mayn’t necessarily have been intended as high literature, but many were by key writers such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Southey and, of course, Mary Shelley.

How to become happy

The Courage to be Disliked
(Kirawa reru yūki, 2013)
by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga.
Allen & Unwin, 2018.

On the outskirts of the thousand-year-old city lived a philosopher who taught that the world was simple and happiness was within the reach of every man, instantly. A young man who was dissatisfied with life went to visit this philosopher to get to the heart of the matter . . .

Taking the form of a Socratic dialogue between a Philosopher and a Youth, The Courage to be Disliked probably needs little introduction, let alone promotion, from me – my copy has ‘The 10 Million Copy Bestseller’ plastered over the cover, indicating its impact a decade after it first appeared in Japan.

It is an introduction to the philosophy of Alfred Adler, the Austrian doctor who – in contrast to Freud’s psychoanalysis and Jung’s analytical psychology – developed individual psychology. His approach rejected the aetiological stance of his two predecessors who looked to traumas from the past to explain where we might be now; instead, it focused on teleology – that is, one’s purpose or goal from this point on rather than on accepting a cause and effect explanation that we are merely products of the past.

Moreover, Adler advised being concerned with the here and now while still having end goals (even if they’re never obtained) as a way to become and remain happy and content with oneself. And that involves not just a change in attitude but a change in behaviour. For those baulking at these ideas – “It’s surely somebody else’s fault who I am now?” – the authors make it clear that, though a difficult and maybe lengthy process, having the courage to change is not impossible.

Lies, spies and jeopardy: #RIPxx

© C A Lovegrove.

Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler.
Introduction by James Fenton.
Penguin Modern Classics, 2009 (1938).

The village of St Gatien sprawls decoratively in the lee of the small headland on which the hotel stands. The walls of the houses are, like those of most other Mediterranean fishing villages, coated with either white, egg-shell blue or rose pink washes. Rocky heights, whose pine-clad slopes meet the seashore on the opposite side of the bay, shelter the miniature harbour from the mistral which sometimes blows strongly from the north-west…

The Hotel Réserve on the Côte d’Azur – where Josef Vadassy had chosen to spend his summer break from teaching in a language school – sounded idyllic: a quiet unassuming spot overlooking the Med during the otherwise very busy vacation week of le quinze août. But within a couple of days his week’s holiday had turned from dream into nightmare when he was arrested for spying.

For this is the late 1930s – in fact 1937, from the precise dates given – and tensions in Europe were high: Soviet Russia’s ambitions, the Spanish civil war, the rise of Nazi Germany all meant it took little to arouse suspicions about anyone whose true identity was in doubt.

Josef Vadassy is one such individual. Born Hungarian in a place now designated as part of Yugoslavia, he normally resides in Paris teaching languages including German, Italian and English as well as his native Hungarian. While waiting for his French citizenship he has saved up enough to buy a Zeiss Contax camera and book a pension on the Riviera for his first holiday in five years. Both investments will unfortunately rebound on Vadassy in ways he could never imagine.

Death and the maiden: #ShortStorySeptember

Johann David Schubert’s ‘Leonore’.

‘The Spectre Bridegroom’ and ‘The Pride of the Village’
by Washington Irving,
from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), 
in ‘Rip van Winkle’, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ & Other Stories.
Wordsworth Classics, 2009.

Two tales about true love, yet one’s a tragedy and the other a comedy; one is set in rural England, another in a fairytale German barony, yet both also involve a degree of duplicity. ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’ is by far the longest, and worth a longer consideration; though slighter, ‘The Pride of the Village’ is worth a mention to compare and contrast with its companion.

Both appear in Washington Irving’s collection of short stories, first appearing as separate items between 1819 and 1820 and then together as ‘sketches’, as if under the authorship of one of his jokey aliases, a ‘gentleman’ called Geoffrey Crayon, when the American was then living in England.

Though not as familiar as his popular ‘Rip van Winkle’ and ‘Sleepy Hollow’ offerings – also included in the Sketch Book – both these tales, despite the differences in detail, have the virtue of retaining the expected mix of antiquarian whimsy and sentimental humour that generally characterise Irving’s short stories.

Jane’s Bristol: #ReadingAusten2025

Blaise Castle, Henbury, Bristol © C A Lovegrove.

I’ve previously enjoyed Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen before reviewing it in my Calmgrove blog: in fact, my post (entitled ‘Irony and Ingenuousness‘) has had a good innings after first appearing 5th June 2013: it was reposted to coincide with the bicentenary of its posthumous publication in 2017 and then again for Austen in August in 2023.

But that was then, and this is now – that’s to say, 2025 is the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth (the 16th December, 1775, since you ask). And of course this year is a good time to be reacquainting ourselves with Austen’s œuvre, with #ReadingAusten2025 stretching over twelve months and allowing us ample time not just for the canon of six novels but for anything else we can sneak in.

So, having just read Austen’s youthful epistolary fiction Lesley Castle (1792), with a review to come, and in preparation for revisiting Northanger Abbey, I thought I’d offer a few thoughts on a city not normally associated with the author, a city which nevertheless I still regard as my home town: Bristol.

Summer-tome quiz

WordsAndPeace.com and Annabookbel.net.

Back in June I decided I was going to read more chunky doorstoppers over the summer, including Middlemarch by Marian ‘George Eliot’ Evans, and the summer reading challenge (originally hosted by Cathy of 746books, now by Emma and Annabel) was set at a modest goal of 10 spread over three months.

Then I lapsed into my usual habits of (a) reading shorter books in tandem with a longer novel and (b) getting attracted by anniversaries and reading events plus the latest literary novelties, so upped my goal to 15.

Finally, I got sidetracked by even shorter works and found 20 Books of Summer wasn’t a hitherto unobtainable achievement, so here we are with a score of pelts titles under my belt. By this stage I found that Emma had posted the third of her monthly questionnaires about our individual progress, and though I’d already published an August Bookwise post I couldn’t resist this summative summer-tome quiz!

Snark or Boojum? #ReadingRobertsonDavies

© C A Lovegrove.

The Lyre of Orpheus
by Robertson Davies (1988).
No 3 in The Cornish Trilogy,
Penguin, 2011 (1991).

“The lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld of feeling.” — E T A Hoffman.

The third volume of Robertson Davies’s Cornish Trilogy follows The Rebel Angels and What’s Bred in the Bone in being mostly set in Toronto, mainly in the entirely fictional University of St John and the Holy Ghost (familiarly known as ‘Spooks’) during the 1980s. 

Like its predecessor titles our main characters are board members of the Cornish Foundation for the Promotion of the Arts and Humane Scholarship, based in Spooks, and during the course of this volume we get to hear how the legacy of a certain Francis Cornish will involve more than merely handing out grants and bursaries to arts-related ventures.

But, this being a Robertson Davies novel, we can expect to be led down all kinds of intellectual avenues, occluded byways and dark thoroughfares before matters draw to a close. At the heart of it, as with much fiction, there will lurk the perennial question of whether or not verisimilitude masks reality – whether, as key characters surmise, the holy grail they’re questing for will be a Snark or a Boojum.

Bookwise 2025/8

Former Book~ish bookshop van, Crickhowell. © C A Lovegrove.

Two-thirds through 2025 and, bookwise at least, I feel I’m motoring along quite comfortably. In terms of mileage Goodreads tells me I’m at the ’50 titles read’ mark, approximately six books a month, which for me is an acceptable pootle. Poop-poop! as Toad would say. And I’m pleased to say that I estimate that by midnight I will be well on the way to completing my 20 Books of Summer!

In fact, August has in fact been quite a busy month: a handful of literary anniversaries to acknowledge, one or two titles plucked randomly off my TBR pile, plus titles related to Book Lovers Day, Women in Translation Month, Moomins at 80, Reading Austen 2025, and Reading Robertson Davies.¹

Nor must I forget to mention that I’m making steady progress on my close reading of Middlemarch after years of shilly-shallying: I’m now around a third of the way through . . . Ah well, better late than never, and I may even have finished in time for Doorstoppers in December! And now, on to September.

Thought reading

View of the south side of Piccadilly beside Arlington and St James’s Streets, March 1923.

‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’
by Virginia Woolf,
first published in The Dial,
Volume LXXV No 1, 20-27, July 1923.
The Dial Publishing Company, Greenwich, CT.
www.Gutenberg.org

Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway was published in 1925, but Clarissa Dalloway made earlier appearances in 1923, in a short story entitled ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, and before that in The Voyage Out (1915).

As an introduction to reading Mrs Dalloway in its centenary year I thought I’d give some attention to its earlier iteration as a short story (as published in a prestigious American literary magazine) and consider what Woolf was intending to achieve.

I’ll just mention the obligatory phrase used of Woolf’s fluid style here – stream of consciousness – and then ignore it, as others have expounded on this aspect in greater detail and more accuracy than I ever will; instead I intend to focus on my general impressions of reading this brief narrative, with maybe (as is my wont) the occasional digression.

Isolation: #WITMonth

‘Futurity.’ © C A Lovegrove. Image created using Wombo.Art app.

The Last Children of Tokyo
(The Emissary in North America):
Kentōshi (2014) by Yōko Tawada,
translated by Margaret Mitsutani.
Granta Books, 2018.

The first reaction to Tawada’s novella might well be, as it was in my case, confusion. What is it really about? What is the author trying to say or achieve? And what exactly is going on? For The Last Children of Tokyo might be taken as science fiction, except that there’s not much science, or as dystopian fiction, except that the inhabitants of this future Japan don’t seem to be dehumanised or particularly oppressed, or even as out-and-out apocalyptic, though it’s merely the spectre of a past environmental disaster that hangs over the story.

Nor is it really an example of magical realism, for all that apparently fantastical elements aren’t fully explained. A way I could see to make sense of this was to see it as future historical fiction, one in which elements of Japan’s past and present are reframed as both a commentary and a warning. These elements seem drawn from the country’s early modern Edo period when the policy of national isolationism or sakoku – literally meaning ‘closed or locked country’ – held sway, and also from the 7th and 9th centuries when Japanese emissaries were sent to the Tang Dynasty of China.

In Tawada’s narrative, though, it’s not history, future or otherwise, that we readers are primarily focused on but on a centenarian and his great-grandson.

About Miss Woodhouse: #ReadingAusten2025

Maria Bicknell in 1816, painted by her husband, John Constable.

Emma by Jane Austen.
Edited by Brian Reeve.
Alma Classics, 2015 (1816).

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

I’ve been trying very hard to work up the enthusiasm to re-read Jane Austen’s Emma, an 1816 novel which she famously (notoriously?) declared that it featured “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”

Why have I procrastinated? Is it because I don’t have much sympathy for a story of a poor little rich girl who commits gaffs so serious that she jeopardises many individuals’ future happiness? Probably. Is it partly due to having watched three of at least four recent adaptations of the novel (Gwyneth Paltrow in 1996, Romola Garai in 2009, and Anya Taylor-Joy in 2020) and thus suffering a televisual surfeit of unbridled matchmaking? Possibly. And could it be because I’ve already written at length about the novel in several blog posts? Indubitably.

But I have at least been thinking a lot about Austen’s narrative, and mulling ideas over in my mind; in particular my thoughts have been stimulated (1) by Edward Whitley’s study of links between Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, and (2) by scholarly commentaries which have brought out themes in Emma that grabbed my attention — hence the following rather rambling and at time possibly incoherent observations.

The freedom to choose wrongly: #WITMonth

Travel poster advertising Compagnie des Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée (PLM) in the 1930s.

Bonjour Tristesse
by Françoise Sagan.
Translated by Irene Ash (1955).
Penguin Books, 1998 (1954).

“How infinitely desirable those two years suddenly appeared to me, those happy years I was so willing to renounce the other day . . . the liberty to think, even to choose wrongly or not at all, the freedom to choose my own life, to choose myself. I cannot say ‘to be myself’, for I was only soft clay, but still I could refuse to be moulded.” — Part One, Chapter 6.

Seventeen-year-old Cécile and her widower father Raymond, 40, are renting a villa overlooking the Mediterranean for the five weeks of summer as a break from his work and their Paris apartment. Though she knows she’s spoilt she’s also bright, and when days of leisure and potential boredom stretch out in front of you that intelligence must have something to work on.

Her mother died when Cécile was only two, since when her father has been a serial monogamist, having a new live-in girlfriend every six months or so. Having left her convent school two years before Cécile has pretty much been allowed to follow her own inclinations, smoking, drinking, accompanying her father on social occasions and, in his words, being his “little accomplice”.

Elsa Mackenbourg, Raymond’s current squeeze, is staying with them at the villa; though only in her twenties and thus just a few years older than his daughter, she’s pleasant enough and inoffensive. Cécile tolerates her because Elsa’s only likely to be around for a few more months and no threat to her own easygoing relationship with her father. And then Raymond announces some unexpected news: he has invited Anne Larsen, an old friend of his wife who helped steady Cécile when the girl dropped out of convent school, to stay. Cécile admires her but finds her aloof and distant. The unfortunate repercussions of Raymond’s ill-advised invitation will play out to their bitter end.

The liberty to utter

Vintage engraving of a hoopoe.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
by Salman Rushdie.
Granta Books / Penguin Books, 1991 (1990).

‘To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it—well, that’s a way of bringing the said body into being.’
— Water Genie to Haroun, in chapter 4: ‘An Iff and a Butt’.

In The Conference of the Birds, a 12th-century poem from Persia by the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, the birds of the world congregate to decide which avian should be their sovereign. The hoopoe, judged to be the wisest of birds, suggests they should ask the Simurgh, who can only be reached by passing through a succession of perilous valleys.

We are meant to understand that the poem is an allegory for the self seeking for the beloved, the soul, and that the thirty birds who eventually make it to their goal will discover that the Simurgh is actually themselves, for the fabled creature’s name in Persian actually means ‘thirty birds’.

Eight centuries later the author Salman Rushdie, under sentence of death from the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for writing The Satanic Verses, sat down to write his own allegory Haroun and the Sea of Stories as a satiric response to the fatwa. Does this novel, partly inspired by Attar’s poem, work either as a caustic satire it plainly is or the children’s story under which it masquerades?

A genus with many species: #ReadingAusten2025

Cassandra Austen, ‘Portrait of Elizabeth I’ (c. 1790), from Jane’s The History of England (1791).

Plan of a Novel according to Hints from Various Quarters [1816]
by Jane Austen,
in Catharine and Other Writings.
The World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1993.¹ 

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists [1856] and other essays
by George Eliot.
Renard Press, 2023.²

“Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.”

So began an anonymous 1856 essay by Marian Evans in The Westminster Review – the periodical that she then also edited – castigating a literary genre then very popular, in whatever guise it offered itself. She continued “But it is a mixture of all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species.”

Though I have yet to read a contemporary example of the species – whether frothy, prosy, pious, pedantic, or in combination – her characterisation tells us how we may recognise it, namely as a “drivelling kind of dialogue, and equally drivelling narrative, which, like a bad drawing, represents nothing, and barely indicates what is meant to be represented […]”

Yet how delighted she would have been if she’d known of and even read a yet-to-be-published spoof, written forty years previously by Jane Austen and entitled ‘Plan of a Novel’, in which that earlier author lampooned many of the elements common to such ‘fatuous drivel’ as the future George Eliot was to critique so severely!

An elemental childhood

The Ahlbergs, by Janet Ahlberg, from ‘Peepo!’

The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood
by Allan Ahlberg.
Illustrated by Janet Ahlberg, Fritz Wegner, Charlotte Voake, and Jessica Ahlberg.
Viking / Penguin Books, 2013.

As someone who, although a decade younger than Ahlberg, also has a bucketful of varied memories of the years leading up to the dreaded teens and all clamouring to be organised into a memoir, I was both entertained and enlightened by The Bucket.

In fact (to change the metaphor) Ahlberg’s little book, described as his first for adults, is a verbal quilt: fashioned from scraps and rags – some authentic, others borrowed, a few threadbare and fragile but still retaining vivid colours – it’s been sewn together in seemingly random patterns yet with adjacent pieces often entering into a kind of dialogue with each other.

Actually, ‘vivid’ is probably the best description: aided by illustrations, photographs and documents, The Bucket was for me a pleasing assault on the senses, evoking a time gone by dominated by smells, sights, tastes, sounds and experiences not so dissimilar to those I remember from my own childhood.

Untethered: #ToveTrove #Moomin80

Tove Jansson’s illustration of the lighthouse island in the Gulf of Finland, for ‘Pappan och havet’ (‘Moominpappa at Sea’).

Moominpappa at Sea
by Tove Jansson.
Pappan och Havet (‘The Father and the Sea’, 1965)
translated by Kingsley Hart (1966).
Muminsaga No 8. Puffin Books, 2019.

It’s August in the corner of the world where the Moomin family lives, and Moominpappa is restless – it’s hot, he’s worried about forest fires, and anxious about any underlying peat lying smouldering, ready to burst out into flame and threatening their stove-like home.

This family of småtrollen or small trolls – father, mother and Moomintroll – have lived in Moominvalley ever since their journey here was recounted in The Moomins and the Great Flood, building their home, making friends, having adventures; but now Moominpappa seems to be having a midlife crisis, feeling a change of scene might well help alleviate his angst.

So when an apparent smudge on the Moomins’ map indicates an island in need of a lighthouse keeper, Moominpappa declares it’s time for the family and their adopted daughter Little My to up sticks and sail beyond the Hattifatteners’ island to their new home. Will his wanderlust thus be satisfied?

A crick in the neck

Bookshelves by Giuseppe Maria Crespi.

“Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them.

Is this you?

“They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment.

This is definitely me.

“The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy.”

Putting aside for now the unlikelihood that you or I will have a housemaid – whether she specialises in dusting or not – have these quotes from a Montague Rhodes James short story shone a light into the deepest recesses of our irredeemable souls? I do hope so.¹

You have been warned

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme: ‘Dom im Winter’ (1821).

A Warning to the Curious (1925)
by M R James,
in Collected Ghost Stories,
Wordsworth Classics, 1992.

‘The Festival‘ (1925) by H P Lovecraft in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
edited by S T Joshi.
Penguin Books, 1999.

Linguist, palaeographer, medievalist, antiquarian and biblical scholar –  Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was all these, but the plain fact is that he was best known, even in his lifetime, as a writer of ghost stories. The last of his four collections of supernatural tales, entitled A Warning to the Curious, included six pieces and was published in 1925, eleven years before his death, aged 73.

But he wasn’t the only exponent of short stories in the supernatural genre, and across the Atlantic in the same year pulp writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) had one of his many stories published in Weird Tales: ‘The Festival’, though set in New England, owed much to the writer’s Anglophile leanings, so it seems apt to consider it alongside James’s contemporary collection.

A century on, do the contents of these intentionally spooky narratives still occasion the same thrills and shivers of anticipation as was offered in the period between two world wars? Only a plunge into their contents can confirm or contradict the reader’s assumptions or expectations.

An unexpected lifeline: #NordicFINDS

Detail from the Hell panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’.

I am David by Anne Holm.
David (1963) translated from the Danish by L W Kingsland.
Mammoth / Egmont Children’s Books, 2000 (1965).

When, in 1963, Anne Holm’s children’s novel first came out in Denmark it was just after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the closest the world came to all-out nuclear war. But even after urgent talks defused the crisis, anxiety remained in the West over the intentions and ambitions of Soviet Russia and its satellites behind the Iron Curtain.

It’s difficult to fully appreciate Holm’s novel without some familiarity with this context, for despite Nazi Germany being defeated here we have a postwar concentration camp in an unnamed East European country; here too we have a child on the cusp of his teens who’s fully aware things are not right but yet knows nothing about his parents, where he’s from, or why he’s in the camp.

Despite the harsh and at times brutal conditions in the camp, David has found kindness among his fellow internees – most presumably incarcerated for political reasons – and particularly from an older French lad: Johannes in fact helped give him a humanistic and moral grounding. But Johannes has died and David has somehow to survive alone – until one day he’s offered an unexpected lifeline.

Bookwise 2025/7

© C A Lovegrove.

When, in 46 BCE, Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar the fifth month was known as mensis Quintilis, quite literally ‘the fifth month’ of the year – which at that period began in March. But just two years later Caesar was assassinated on the 15th March, and the fifth month (for us, now, the seventh month) was renamed mensis Iulius or July in his honour, after his patrician family the gens Iulia.

This historic snippet is intended as an introduction to Bookwise, the monthly meme in which I look back over the preceding four weeks or so of my reading activity and, as with all true historical research, see what lessons one may learn from the past to inform the future as well as the present.

And what a busy July it has been – two books read for Paris in July (one actually from the library), lots of discussion posts and reviews regarding Reading Austen 2025, some children’s fiction – one the subject of my last scheduled review for the month – miscellaneous short stories and novels, and some literary criticism. Thanks to a seaside break sans smartphone I even managed to largely complete and draft reviews for five books! Could there possibly be a message here about my phone use?!

Growing in grace

© C A Lovegrove.

Elizabeth and her German Garden
by Elizabeth von Arnim.
Introduction by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Virago Press, 1985 (1898).

May 16th.—’The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house—it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse than they feel, it is there that all my sins and silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and weed is a friend and every tree a lover.’

First published anonymously in 1898, and quickly becoming a bestseller, Elizabeth and her German Garden remains a delightful piece of autofiction by the woman who was born Mary Annette Beauchamp, called May by her family but best known today as Elizabeth von Arnim.

Aged 24, May married the widowed Graf Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin in 1890, and after a few years languishing in stuffy Berlin society managed to persuade her reluctant husband to spend more time at the family’s Pomeranian estate of Nassenheide (now part of Rzędziny village and located in Poland).

Here the young woman was to spend much of her time alone (‘alone’ only if we discount her three daughters, governess and resident staff) planning and planting her English-style garden in what was then part of Germany. The literary upshot was that she published a novel thinly disguised as a faux memoir faintly echoing Gothic fiction, using her experiences as basic material but excluding the kinds of details that would identify her real-life husband as the old-fashioned Man of Wrath.

The rule of the sea

‘Das Eismeer’ (1823-4) by Caspar David Friedrich.

Every Man for Himself
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Abacus, 1996 (1996).

When a common phrase used as the title of a book about one ship’s sinking brings to mind another common phrase about another ship in distress, one might wonder if there’s a link. For, according to a report in the Somerset County Gazette just one day after the Titanic sank, Captaim Smith’s last words were said to be “Well boys, you’ve done your duty and done it well. I ask no more of you. I release you. You know the rule of the sea. It’s every man for himself now, and God bless you.”

Yet Beryl Bainbridge, herself a Liverpudlian, must’ve been familiar with the Birkenhead evacuation drill – “Women and children first” – adopted after the Royal Navy troopship HMS Birkenhead foundered on a rock in 1852, and followed on RMS Titanic after it was hit by an iceberg sixty years later.

The combination of chivalric intent and chaotic evacuation meant 20% of male passengers survived compared to the 75% of female passengers (the ratio was 22:87 for adult crew members) which helps to give context to Captain Smith’s reported final command and suggests one of the narrative directions Bainbridge intended to follow in this her historical fiction.

If not innocent, then crimeless

© C A Lovegrove.

Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark.
Penguin Books, 1974 (1971).

“Clovis says, ‘We’ve got nothing to hide. We’re innocent.’
‘Well, we are crimeless,’ Lister says.”
— Chapter 4.

When the reader gets to the end of this novella they’re likely to be bemused, even confused. Are we meant to side with the unscrupulous or the apparent victims? But in fact isn’t everybody in some way culpable for the tragedy that soon makes itself evident?

And then there’s the title. Does Not to Disturb refer only to Swiss baron Cecil Klopstock telling his English butler Lister not to disturb him, his wife and their secretary in the library after it’s locked on the inside? Or is it kindly advice to the reader not to be disturbed by reading about events as they unfold?

But given the inevitability that a crime passionel will take place, surely there’ll be no crime in taking opportunistic and economic advantage of what will come to pass? That at least must be the thinking of the below stairs staff from several nations, established in a Gothic Revival mansion on the shores of Lake Leman, close to Geneva.