Good evening!
Back again after a week off -- I was busy getting (very) drunk for my friend’s leaving do last Friday, soz
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
Much to get through so this might be a bit more slapdash than usual! Last time I was here I was talking about how I wasn’t super into Oxblood by Tom Benn (2022), and that feeling did continue, unfortunately. I actually took a break from it and went back to it after reading two other books because I was finding it a slog, but I did want to finish it. It wasn’t as bad as I remembered it to be when I did go back to it, but I still didn’t like it. I found it incredibly laboured with very little rhythm to it, and I’m a bit bamboozled by how many awards and nominations it’s gotten.
While I was taking a break from Oxblood, I read Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater (1962), which was much more my vibe. It’s about a woman who is on her fourth husband at age 32, with a numberless (and ever-growing) army of children. Her fourth husband is a penniless scriptwriter on the verge of making it big in the film industry, who shows small hints at the man he will become after his big break and a few more years of marriage. Overall, this is a very, very good look at emotional manipulation. It allows a lot of room for how women who are caregivers and are unhappy in their marriages can be made to feel, and how they often don’t know how to express this unhappiness without coming off like a nag. It was great at capturing smaller, almost nameless emotions -- but I should also say that it is very often funny, it’s certainly not a bleak book. I liked this book a lot but I didn’t absolutely love it. I read it in two sittings and because of a weird break in setting when the protagonist looks back to her youth, it felt like two different novels almost. I don’t think the links between settings were set up enough, and so it wasn’t a seamless read. I did enjoy it a lot though.
The next novel I read was another Elizabeth Taylor, this time Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971). It’s not like me to read multiple novels by the same author in a very short period of time, but A View from the Harbour (1947) was so great that I really wanted to read some more by her. This was just as good, and now I need to read everything by her. Mrs. Palfrey is about the titular Mrs. Palfrey moving into a London hotel as a long-term resident for the convenience of having room and board at one set (and seasonally reduced) price. She meets a host of other older people doing the same, and the novel largely becomes a character study on how these other people move around the hotel and their lives that are becoming gradually more limited as they age.
A bit of excitement enters Mrs. Palfrey’s life when she falls over on an icy road, and a young man called Ludo living nearby attends to her. They strike up an unlikely friendship, and Ludo becomes complicit in a strange plot concocted by the older woman. Mrs. Palfrey’s grandson Desmond is yet to visit her, despite living in London, and to save face among her peers at the hotel, Ludo comes for dinner and pretends to be Desmond. Ludo goes along with it because he believes that Mrs. Palfrey has more money than she actually does, and he is practically penniless while he writes a novel (mostly in the banking hall of Harrods, to save on electricity for heating).
Even though it sounds like this would be a sad book about some rather intense acts of cruelty, it isn’t at all. What I like very much about Taylor is that she doesn’t sensationalise and allows some things to be what they are. Ludo isn’t an evil person, he’s just young and doesn’t have a huge amount of patience or thought. Mrs. Palfrey isn’t a sad charity case, she’s a bored woman with quite a strong personality but a bit of inner self-esteem issues. Taylor’s resistance to having overtly good or bad characters (although there are a couple of exceptions) makes room for characters who have realistic points of view and personalities. Something that I find comparable to Jean Rhys in her writing is the recognition that sometimes people don’t really like each other, which is masked with cordiality, sometimes even ‘niceness.’ Rhys has her characters as much more sharply cruel, as in many of the older men who have affairs with younger women and are shown to practically despise them by the end but mask it up with politeness. Taylor has her characters be polite to one another, but harbour thoughts about how they’re not very much interested in what the other person is saying, and how they’d like to leave. It sounds simple, but you don’t actually find that very often -- usually characters have complex and nuanced reactions to everything that is said to them that often border on hyperbolic emotions like hate or envy or love. Most of the time, we don’t feel like that because we’d be exhausted. Sometimes we just get bored and want to leave.
I’m now a little more than half-way through Dinah Brooke’s Lord Jim at Home, which was originally published in 1973 but has recently been reissued by Daunt Books (thank you for sending it to me). I absolutely love this book and quite frankly don’t want it to end. The reissue is introduced by Ottessa Moshfegh, which is absolutely not surprising. Even by the end of the second page you can see the influence it has had on her, especially in Lapvona (2022) -- it has that same kind of out-of-time narrative style that adds modernity to a past setting. More next week!
Books on my radar
I read Mrs. Palfrey in one day when I went to London to attend my dear friend Rachel Connolly’s book launch. Her debut novel Lazy City is published now and I urge you all to read it. It was a wonderful launch and I ended up having such a nice day, reading Taylor, seeing my friends, etc.
While I was there I visited the LRB bookshop, which I really liked -- it had a great selection of books, especially translations. I like to buy a book I’ve never heard of when I visit a new shop, and so I picked up Ruth by Guillem Viladot (2022), translated by P. Louise Johnson. It is made up of letters from Ruth, an intersex person and the blurb says it culminates in a ‘shocking ending.’ Gorge.
I also bought Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour (2022) because I’m maybe the last person to read it.