Hello!
September is done, finished -- for me personally, it was a terrible month, but you can’t deny the joy of the beginning of autumn, and the month that feels like the year’s Thursday. To paraphrase Tom Hanks in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, this time of year feels like new school supplies. (He was talking about New York City specifically but the point still stands).
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
An eclectic bag of reading this week: I finished Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819); began Penelope Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973), and skimmed over Thea Lenarduzzi’s Dandelions (2022) after reading it earlier in the year to prep for an event at West Kirby Bookshop, where I was ‘in conversation’ with her.
First of all: Ivanhoe. I read this because I am analysing a short story of Scott’s for my thesis (‘The Tapestried Chamber’, if you’re interested). The story is incredibly short and so I needed a bit more from him -- as the focus of my thesis is the appearance of textiles and textile industries in nineteenth-century fiction, I needed to scope out if the tapestry as an image is a recurring thing or a departure to his larger body of work. Ivanhoe is set in the mediaeval period so it seemed a pretty safe bet that if there was a tapestry to be found, it would be in there (and there were actually a couple). It started off incredibly fun; he takes time to describe the dress of every character (also useful for my project), he is incredibly flowery and the story, which is loosely about the knight Ivanhoe, who has been estranged from his father because he fancies his ward Rowena, who his father intends to marry off to a himbo prince to protect his Saxon lineage, starts off strong.
The main issue with the novel, however, is its relentless anti-semitism. The character Isaac of York, who finds himself embroiled in royal business, is a Jewish man, who is also a money-lender -- hmm. His daughter Rebecca is extremely beautiful and wishes she could be with Ivanhoe after tending to his wounds, but can’t because he is a Christian and is a bit disgusted by her. During my research of Scott himself, I had read that anti-semitism was an issue for critics; despite this, when Isaac first appears I have to admit I was hopeful that this was a mis-reading. Scott takes time to outline how Isaac and his daughter are unfairly maligned because of their ethno-religion, and that they actually have a lot to offer the people around them if they could move away from their prejudice. (This is a summary, obviously).
Unfortunately, however, he doesn’t sustain this energy -- Isaac and Rebecca are characterised in anti-semitic stereotypes in both their personalities and looks, Isaac especially. What is most jarring about it is how prescient it is in the text, as though Scott is fascinated with them and has to constantly put them in the story in order to pick them apart. Really, they don’t actually add much to the central plot, and yet they are almost constantly there, so that this aspect of the novel is really front and centre, pushing the much more fun and interesting bits to the side. Giving the topic a quick google, I was surprised to see that a popular reading of the text is the opposite; that this a sympathetic reading of Jewish people in English culture, where Scott is campaigning for acceptance.
It’s a difficult thing to read bigotry in a very old book. My own reaction to the text was disappointment; my gut feeling was that the representation of Jews was not a positive one. Reading other people’s reactions (which I think everyone should make the time to do, for most things that they read) puts a different slant on it -- of course, in context, this probably was seen as incredibly sympathetic. Rebecca is described as beautiful, otherworldly and noble, which is all very nice, but it does become a bit fetishishtic. Isaac may be downtrodden and unfairly maligned, but he is also cheap and obsessed with money. The negatives can’t outweigh the positives for me, but I appreciate what opposite readings of the text are looking at and concluding. Context is key, but my reading experience was uncomfortable overall.
[NB, this is not a comment on ‘cancel culture’, because I don’t really think you can cancel a canonised author and his 203 year old book, and I also don’t care about all that.]
In more positive news, I also started Penelope Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. I’m a huge fan of Lively; Moon Tiger (1987) is one of my favourite ever novels. Kempe is one of her children’s novels, none of which I have read before. It’s a lot of fun -- very 70s middle class, with lots of ‘I suppose I might’s and language that is probs too old for children to be using and reading, as well as a ghost who writes a lot of letters.
I also skimmed over Thea Lenarduzzi’s Dandelions, a book I read (and loved) earlier in the year, as I interviewed her last night. It’s a memoir-essay that chronicles her Italian side of her family, with most of the anecdotes provided by her Nonna. When putting down these stories about her family, she muses on methods of research, the fiction that is inherent in story-telling (especially when it is about your own relatives), subjects that are connected with her family’s history, and their movements between Italy and Britain. It’s such an interesting text, one that is both entirely engrossing and aware of itself, showing the workings-out and its progression. I asked about this process -- there was a lot of paper and a lot of tabs open, a lot of untangling fact from fiction, while acknowledging that is always part of history anyway -- as well as how she dealt with tricky subjects head on. She approaches fascist Italy in a way that I haven’t really seen before, by looking at the objects that made up her family’s lives that made it clear they were living under a fascist regime. There were booklets, school text books, arm bands and bunting, both physically in front of her and in photographs. ‘You can’t really talk about the twentieth century without talking about fascism…and you can’t talk about the twenty-first century without talking about it either, apparently.’ An illuminating conversation.
What’s on my radar (but don’t hold me to it)
Okay Days by Jenny Mustard. Jenny is a very sound person and I’m sooooo happy to see that her debut has been picked up by Sceptre. It’s out next June.
Deep Down by Imogen West-Knights. Imogen is behind the genius dive into all-inclusive holidays and a visit to a Viking festival, and this week her debut novel was given a cover. It’s out next March.