Tag: Novellas

The Ha-Ha

~ Jane ~ 26 Comments

Josephine Traughton is 23, after her mother died she gave up her studies in English, with a particular interest in Anglo-Saxon, at Oxford University, and was admitted to hospital. From the window sill in her room she watches the hill on the horizon; she describes college life to the sister, the essay-crises and coffee-parties, tennis and afternoons on the river; she walks to Colonel and Mrs Maybury’s house everyday and helps them catalogue their library from an attic room; it’s on her walk that she finds she can jump the wall of the hospital quite easily and land on the soft green of the ha-ha and this becomes her favourite place. Alone among the poppies she can spend hours in the safety of the hospital grounds and in the safety of her own mind.

And then Alisdair finds her in her spot and joins her, he enjoys her refreshingly original way of thinking, her unwillingness to play the game of joining in and getting ahead. And then on a walk she meets a contemporary from university who says things like ‘let’s catch up’ and ‘I’m having a party, you must come’; and suddenly she has an invitation and Alisdair encourages her to go and the summer seems possible. It’s not that anyone is actually horrible, Josephine at pains to be honest, tells us, it’s just that she doesn’t know how to play the game, what should she say when Mrs Maybury kindly invites her into the garden should the attic become too stuffy? What are the girls in the corner at the party talking about so animatedly? She can hear the rhythm of the conversation but when does she say something?

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Daisy Miller

~ Jane ~ 19 Comments

It’s thanks to Rose’s review that I was finally inspired to pick this up from the pile and read in time for Cathy and Rebecca’s Novellas in November.

It’s the end of the nineteenth century and the small Swiss town of Vevey and then Rome, are filled with rich American tourists who have brought with them their stultifying air of polite society. Into this mannered world blows Daisy Miller with her mother and younger brother Randolph.

Natural, open, fresh and honest Daisy behaves as she wishes; she walks out alone or with a male friend, even an Italian; thinking nothing of a chaperone or her reputation. She flirts and laughs aloud, invites male friends to their hotel regardless of whether her mother is at home, or the hotel staff are gossiping.

Winterbourne, a young American living in Europe while he ‘studies’ is captivated. He loves her innocence, her naivity; but does her behaviour come from innocence, an unsophisticated flirtatiousness or is she actually ‘bad’, a dangerous coquette’?

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Clear

~ Jane ~ 14 Comments

Scotland in 1843 and the Reverend John Ferguson has left the established church of Scotland to join with the setting up of the new Free Church. Impoverished without his living he accepts work from the landowner Henry Lowrie, and agrees to travel North to a remote island and clear it of its sole inhabitant to make way for a thousand sheep. Strachan, Lowrie’s factor hasn’t been to the island for years, and needs John to survey the island for any deterioration while explaining to ‘the idiot son’ who has always lived there, that he’s to leave his home and livestock, which will be disposed of. John is given a pistol in case of any trouble and the address of William Flett, a school teacher in Orkney who can teach him some words of the ‘old vernacular’ spoken on the island. The boat will collect them in one month.

John Ferguson arrives at the island and puts his few things, a fruitcake made by his wife Mary, his satchel with a carefully prepared speech written with the help of the school teacher, a change of clothes and the pistol, into the Baillie House but being of a clumsy disposition falls almost as soon as he arrives and is found by Ivar unconscious and badly hurt on the sand. There’s no sign of a ship, Ivar has no idea who he can be or where he’s come from but takes him to his home and nurses him back to health. From here a fragile friendship begins while John Ferguson knows that at some point he has to own up to the reason he’s there.

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Seascraper

~ Jane ~ 18 Comments

Fog gathers over the beach, the faint grey sea is miles out, mizzle and wind are biting his face, salt stings his eyes and makes them weep; there’s the danger of sinkpits in the sand, the festering scent of bladderwrack, gnarls of driftwood and the crunch of razor shells. Dressed in oilskins, his skin smelling of fish and decay, Thomas Flett is the last of the shankers to use a horse and waggon to scrape up the shrimp, filling the whiskets to sell to a wholesaler. His knees crack and his ingrown toenails mean that he shuffles as he walks, but cigarettes and brandy help.

Barely 20 he left school at 14 when his grandpa died to keep the business going, inheriting the horse and wagon. It’s a demanding and lonely existence that he shares with his single mother, but he has two secrets; the guitar he’s taught himself to play and keeps wrapped in an old saddle cloth in the stable and his love for Joan Wyeth, who works in the bank and he’s known since school. It’s not that he doesn’t love his landscape; it’s shown in his detailed knowledge of the beach, the way the sand ridges and in the turn of the sky, but sometimes he feels as if he’s closer to the grave than marriage; if only he could pluck up the courage to play and sing and speak, his life might mean more to him. And then out of the blue, change does come along in the shape of Edgar Acheson. an American film director. He’s seen Thomas and his waggon on the beach and needs them for his film.

So into the heavy atmosphere of almost daylight, tiredness and gloom comes steak and a cheque for £100; the permanence of low cloud and drizzle is broken by shiny hotel lights and the promise of drinks in the lobby. And this is where the book takes off in a new direction that I wasn’t expecting at all and, reading for Cathy and Rebecca’s Novellas in November it’s fun to see how we’ve all been surprised by the turn of events. But whether the film gets made or not is neither here nor there, Edgar gives Thomas the chance to hope that his future can be different.

Sagittarius

~ Jane ~ 13 Comments

‘I washed and dressed beneath my mother’s attentive gaze. She was unhappy about my grey skirt which I had had for three years, and above all about my dark blue jumper with its baggy, threadbare elbows. How on earth had I got hold of such a garment? Surely to goodness I had something better to wear? And what happened to those two new dresses that she had had made for me?’

This domineering, disgruntled mother has two daughters and two sisters. It’s October when she moves into a new house with her daughter Guilia and her husband; Constanza, the daughter of her cousin; the maid Carmela and a tiny white poodle. Now that she’s in town she’ll be closer to her sisters who own a small china shop and to our narrator, her 23 year old younger daughter who’s managed to get a way and shares a flat with a girlfriend.

But is life in the town any better? She certainly wouldn’t organise the china shop like that, and her sisters never seem to be around when she calls (they’re hiding in the stock room); Guilia has now found herself a husband, but she just lies around doing nothing all day, fluttering her eyelashes as a response; and our narrator just doesn’t seem to wear the ‘animated expression’ she would like to see on a young women; and why doesn’t she go dancing? So she puts on her gloves and hat, lights a cigarette and visits the hairdresser where she dreams of the gallery she would like to open and is where she meets Signora Fontana.

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The Driver’s Seat

~ Jane ~ 14 Comments

Lise is buying a new dress. The one she chooses is patterned with green and purple squares on a white background, with blue spots within the green squares, cyclamen spots within the purple. It comes in a new stainless fabric. ‘Get this thing off me. Off me, at once.‘ she cries, tearing at the dress. She looks in other shop windows and eventually chooses one with a lemon-yellow top and a skirt patterned with bright V’s of orange, mauve and blue. She teams it with a summer coat in narrow stripes of red and white with a white collar. It’s 1970 and Lise is taking a holiday, flying to a southern European City.

At boarding gate 14, Lise watches her fellow passengers closely, crosses the tarmac and finds a seat between two men. One of the men gets up and changes seats, he’s afraid; the other one, Bill, is almost cultish about his belief in macrobiotic food. We know that something terrible is going to happen to Lise but this is a whodunit, a whydunit and a howdunit turned inside out. At only 100 pages this is a novella well worth reading in one sitting because the clues are dropped in amongst the almost fanatical detail. Does every item listed going into her hand bag come out? Why is she so garishly dressed? Why is the man afraid? Why did she react so strongly to a stain resistant dress?

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Valentino

~ Jane ~ 13 Comments

This is the second novella I’ve read from Daunt Books gorgeous reprints of Natalia Ginzburg and I’ve decided they make perfect travelling books. Neat enough to fit comfortably in a bag they’re intense hits of story that are easy enough to finish on anything but the shortest of journeys and yet leave you feeling completely satisfied!

‘I lived with my father, mother and brother in a small rented apartment in the middle of town. Life was not easy and finding the rent money was always a problem.’

So begins Caterina’s account of living with her handsome, vain and utterly self absorbed brother Valentino. A serial fiancé, what he most enjoys is dressing up, admiring himself and playing with the kitten, oblivious of the never ending expenses his parents face, trying to fund his medical studies. He’s a man who has never shown any signs of ambition and yet his parents are sure that he’s destined to become ‘a man of consequence’.

But one day Valentino arrives with a new fiancée and instead of a young girl in a jaunty beret Maddalena is at least ten years older than him, very wealthy and spectacularly ugly. The family are stunned, the parents hopes for their perfect son gone with one single moustachioed, cigarette smoking djinn.

But Maddalena turns out to be the perfect daughter and sister in law, generous with her time and money she invites Caterina to move in with them and with Maddalena’s cousin Kit often in their home too, the setting is in place for a story that challenges our prejudices and upends societal norms.

Told in Ginzburg’s direct, economical style the story of Valentino is often as funny as it is infuriating and ultimately devastating. Written in 1957, sexuality is never openly discussed but conventional gendered roles are questioned by the story that isn’t written, the one that’s lurking behind Caterina’s mundane narrative until it finally comes to the fore with a shock.

Quicksand & Passing

~ Jane ~ 15 Comments

I’m afraid I’ve been caught out, this is my final review for the TBR Challenge hosted by Adam at RoofBeamReader but I read these two excellent novellas at the beginning of the year, didn’t take any notes and now find myself relying on my memory, needless to say both of these stories deserve much more thorough reviews than this and while I have read some brilliant reviews, now that I want to pass them on I can’t find them; next year I’m going to be more organised. . .

Quicksand, first published in 1928 and Passing published in 1929, were the only published novels of Nella Larsen. Born in Chicago in 1891 to a Danish mother and West Indian father, she taught, trained as a nurse and worked in the Public Library in Harlem where she met the major writers of the Harlem Renaissance, so there is a sense of autobiography especially in Quicksand.

Quicksand follows Helga Crane, a young women, like Nella Larsen, with a Danish mother and West Indian father. When the novel opens she’s 22 and teaching at a school in the American South; she’s been there for 2 years and the initial joy and zest for helping her students has disappeared, the zest blotted out, by the trivial hypocrisies she finds so tiresome. She loves beauty and luxury, ”pride’ and ‘vanity’ her detractors called it‘ and she rails against the conservative values and mode of dress. The quiet outfits she’s expected to wear, are not so much to fit in with society, as not to stand out.

‘These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for. destruction.’

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Cannery Row

~ Jane ~ 11 Comments

1945, when Cannery Row was first published, was a bumper year for the Monterey Bay sardine and 237,000 tons were processed by the large canneries on Ocean view Drive. But what happens in such an industrial area when the final whistle has screamed and all the workers have gone home? This is when Cannery Row returns to its normal self and the people who live there emerge with their stories.

Doc who lives in the laboratory; Dora Flood, the Madam and her girls at the Bear Flag Restaurant; Mack and the rest of the boys in the Palace Flophouse and Lee Chong in his grocery. Mr and Mrs Malloy who moved into the boiler in 1935 have made it a dry, safe home and now have tenants living in the big copper pipes after the housing shortage of 1937; there’s Mary Talbot holding tea parties for the local cats while her husband Tom lies in bed worrying about money and Henri the French artist whose name isn’t really Henri, who isn’t French and not even a painter but is a wonderful craftsman living in a tent while he builds his boat, that he hopes he’ll never finish.

Humanity pours from every sentence as Steinbeck describes their lives, the humdrum and the misadventures. No judgement is made of any of the characters, not Mack and the gang who find work as a last resort or Doc who drinks beer all day, starting at breakfast.They all just rumble along joshing and arguing, falling out and making up until all together, they succeed in throwing Doc the party he deserves because he’s such a great guy.

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