A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore...

Pages: 511 Original date of publication: 1935 My copy: 2008 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: Joseph Fox Books, January 2012 Patrick Hamilton covers very similar themes in his books. His plots are comprised of characters from the lowest strata of London society: drunks, prostitutes, etc. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is set in and around a central London pub called The Midnight Bell. Bob is a waiter who falls in love with a young prostitute named Jenny and loses all his money in the process; Ella is a barmaid in love with Bob who nonetheless begins a relationship with an older man. The story consists of three novellas, each of which takes you on a tour of the characters’ stories, offering, as it does so, alternate looks at the same situation within the same time frame. The shape shifting is what makes the plot of the book interesting, and each of these characters is unique in their own right. Hamilton is skilled at depicting th...

Pages: 302 Original date of publication: 1932 My edition: 2000 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: Joseph Fox Books, Philadelphia, January 2012 Hindoo Holiday is an account of the time that the author, JR Ackerley, spent in india working as a secretary to the Maharajah of Chhatapur (jokingly changed to Chhokrapur, apparently meaning “City of the Boys,” for this book). The Maharajah is an eccentric old man who enjoys riddling conversations and the company of boy actors. The setting is the British Raj, when Indian rulers had a fair amount of autonomy—but in the wake of peace, there was very little that the Maharajahs could actually do. So, in possession of vast amounts of wealth, according to the introduction to this book, these rulers spent their money on untold luxury. It was amidst this environment that this book is set, and the Maharajah Sahib of Chhokrapur is one of these. The diary covers roughly six months in 1923 and 1924; appa...

Pages: 250 Original date of publication: 1941 My edition: 1999 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: Joseph Fox bookstore, Philadelphia, January 2012 Herself Surprised is the story of Sara Monday, who narrates her story from girlhood onwards. The novel opens in a courtroom, where a middle-aged Sara is on trial for a crime of which we’re not given the details, so I thought it was interesting to see how Sara gets to the place she’s in. As a young woman, she works as cook, where she attracts the attention of Mr. Monday, who marries her; many years later, Sara develops a relationship with an unreliable bounder and artist named Gulley Jimson, who continues to plague her life despite not being all that good for her. On the back of the book, Sara is frequently compared to Moll Flanders, another kind of fallen woman. There are certainly a lot of similarities between the two stories for it to be coincidental: the servant who marries the master of t...

Pages: 236 Original date of publication: 1970 My edition: 2007 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: Joseph Fox bookstore, Philadelphia, February 2012 In 1928, a young Canadian named John Glassco set out for Paris with his best friend. The two set out to explore all that the city had to offer: the cafes, bars, and brasseries that the Americans of the Lost Generation would have been familiar with as well. Glassco set out to have a literary career and along the way rubbed shoulders with some of the greats (at one point in this memoir a man walks into a bar and someone calls him “Ernie;” it took me a while to realize that yes, it was that Ernie). Glassco wrote this memoir as truth, although it’s not completely factual. For example, Kay Boyle and Djuna Barnes, both important figures of the literary expatriates of Paris at the time, receive new names; and there is a certain sense of scintillism to Glassco’s account—probably because the author w...

Pages: 224 Original date of publication: 1940s-1990s My edition: 2010 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: The Strand, NYC, July 2011 The New York Stories is a collection of stories that Elizabeth Hardwick published between 1946 and 1993—years that spanned nearly her entire career as a writer. Hardwick grew up in Kentucky and lived for many years in New York City, working as an essayist for the New York Review of Books . She was married briefly to the poet Robert Lowell, who after their divorce married Caroline Blackwood , leading Hardwick to quip, “he never married a bad writer.” She was also friends for many years with the writer Mary McCarthy and lampooned her 1963 novel The Group . There is a theme to these stories; all of them deal to some extent with the idea of escape, whether a character escapes from New York back to her Kentucky childhood home or escapes a sour relationship. Although Hardwick claimed that she couldn’t write much ...

Pages: 252 Original date of publication: 1957 My edition: 2012 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: Amazon.com, March 2012 This is the third of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels that I’ve read: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont , which I enjoyed and In a Summer Season , which I couldn’t finish. However, Angel is amazing—probably one of the best novels I’ve red all year. Set at around the turn of the century, the novel’s heroine, if such she can be called, is one of the most fascinating characters I’ve come across in a long time. Angelica Deverell lives in a drab English town with her mother. A girl with irrepressible imagination, Angel grows up to become a famous novelist who churns out bad novels that her reading public nonetheless loves (Elizabeth Taylor apparently modeled Angel’s novels on those of Ethel M. Dell, who was a famous writers of romances in the early 20th century). Angel has an inflated sense of her own importance. She is obstinate, self-righteous, narcis...

Pages: 285 Original date of publication: 1817 My edition: 2010 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: it’s an NYRB Classic How I acquired my copy: Joseph Fox Bookshop, Philadelphia, January 2012 Eliza Fay was 23 when she accompanied her husband Anthony Fay, a lawyer, to India in 1779. Not much is known about her early life, but her editor, EM Forster, surmises that her father might have been a sailor. On her first journey out to India, she traveled through France and Egypt, and she and her husband were imprisoned when they arrived in Calcutta. Due to Anthony Fay’s mismanagement of money and infidelity, Eliza Fay split from her husband a few years later, and set herself up briefly as a milliner. Over the next 30 years she was to travel to India a few more times, and each time she traveled, she kept a journal of her journey. It was a time when the British turned from mere merchants and traders in India to a major imperial power. Eliza Fay wasn’t of the wealthiest class, but she nonethele...

Pages: 133 Original date of publication: 1959 My edition: 2003 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: The Strand, NYC, July 2011 Barbara Comyns’s novels are hard to explain. They’re very dark and macabre; she writes about very tough subjects with a very detached eye, unemotionally writing about people and the things that happen to them. The Vet’s Daughter is one of them. The story is told from the point of view of Alice Rowlands, who lives in a London suburb with her abusive father and sick mother. When her mother dies, her father takes up with a bad woman, who attempts to lead Alice down the wrong track, so to speak. Eventually, Alice discovers that she has a secret talent, which eventually leads to what might be her salvation. As I’ve said, Barbara Comyns’s novels are very unemotional, despite the fact that she writes about tough subjects. What I liked about Alice’s character is that she’s so detached from all the horrible things that happen to her. I think a...

Pages: 108 Original date of publication: 1977 My edition: 2002 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: It’s on the list of NYRB Classics How I acquired my copy: Joseph Fox bookstore, Philadelphia, February 2012 What an odd novel. Caroline Blackwood was an heiress to the Guinness family fortune, a 1950s socialite, and, at one time married to the poet Robert Lowell. Great Granny Webster is a semi-autobiographical novel. In it, the narrator tells the story of several generations of her family: her Scottish Great Granny Webster, who lives in a mildewed cottage in Hove; her grandmother’s descent into madness; unstable, freewheeling Aunt Lavinia; and the narrator’s father, who died during WWII. Our unnamed narrator is not so much a well-rounded character as she is an observer of her family history. At the heart of it all is the family seat, Dunmartin Hall, a dilapidated pile of stone in Scotland. The novel is full of dysfunctional characters, and the only one of them that seems to have it all...

Pages: 452 Original date of publication: My edition: 2007 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: at the time it was the sesquicentennial of EW’s birth How I acquired my copy: Amazon.com gift card, April 2011 The New York Stories of Edith Wharton is a collection of 20 stories that Edith Wharton wrote over the course of her career. The stories are presented in the order in which they were published, so you get to see how Wharton’s style grew over time. Her stories cover a wide range of people and places, from industrialists to artists and from ballrooms to tenements. In her novels, such as The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence , Wharton tends to focus on the upper classes of turn-of-the-century New York, but what I like about her short stories is that she focuses on a wide range of people. Many of the stories have been published in other volumes (ie, “Pomegranate Seed” also appears in the Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton ), but what I like about this collection really shows how she ...

Pages: 135 Original date of publication: 1980 My edition: 2000 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: it’s on the list of NYRB Classics How I acquired my copy: The Strand, NYC, July 2011 In A Month in the Country , a young art conservationist comes to the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgoodby to restore a medieval wall mural. The novel is set in the summer of 1920 andTom Birkin is still scarred by the Great War and the breaking-up of his marriage. A Month in the Country is written in almost poetic language and in a slow, lazy style, almost like the summer month in which the book is set. As JL Carr says in his introduction, “my idea was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree.” There’s definitely a feeling of reminiscing about this book and wistfulness on Tom’s part as he looks back on that summer form a distance of several decades. The novel is populated with a number of interesting, rounded characters, not the least of whi...

Pages: 194 Original date of publication: 1940 My edition: 2006 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: It’s on the list of NYRB Classics How I acquired my copy: The Strand, NYC, July 2011 What is The Strangers in the House? A mystery? Noir? I had a hard time figuring this dark tale out. In it, a alcoholic, reclusive is woken out of his rut when a murder is committed in his house. It turns out that Loursat’s daughter, Nicole, has been keeping company with a whole host of shady characters, including the dead man. Interestingly enough, Loursat, once a successful attorney, decides to defend the accused man at trial. Loursat isn’t particularly what you might expect from the hero of a story. Drunk, overweight, dirty, and ugly, it takes a singular event to wake him out of the stupor he’s lived in since his wife abandoned him eighteen years ago. Shutting himself up in his rooms in one part of the house, he’s virtually a stranger to his daughter and their servants. The characters are the drivin...

Pages: 201 Original date of publication: 1959 My edition: 2010 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: it’s on the list of NYRBs How I acquired my copy: Borders, March 2011 Tun-Huang is a modern re-telling of an old myth. In the early 20th century, a hoard of early Buddhist sutras was discovered in the Tun-Huang caves of western China. This story attempts to recreate the story of how they got there, and it’s the story of Chao Tsing-te, a young man in the 11th century who mistakenly, and serendipitously, sleeps through an important qualifying exam for a government position and ends up in the wilds of northern China and the Silk Road. It’s a short novel, and in some ways I wish it had been longer. The author literally takes his reader over a lot of ground and a large period of time, and Tsing-te experiences a lot (from distinguishing himself in battle to falling in love). The story itself was interesting, but the author spent a lot of time describing battles, over and over again. There’s...

Pages: 380 Original date of publications: 1919 My edition: 1980 (Dial) Why I decided to read: read it for All Virago/All August How I acquired my copy: the Philadelphia Book Trader, February 2011 Man, how I wanted to like this book! The only other May Sinclair novel I’ve read is The Three Sisters , which I loved, so I expected to love this book just as much. I found Mary Olivier to be a tough slog, the kind of book where I was putting it down to read something else. Mary Olivier is the youngest child and only girl in a large Victorian family. She grows up in the shadow of her brothers, father, and overbearing mother. The story follows Mary’s point of view from early childhood in the 1860s up through middle age in the first decade of the twentieth century. The story is told from the sensibility of the child, but the author’s handling of this style of writing is clunky. A skilled author can tell a story from the point of view of a child and tell us exactly what happened, ev...

Pages: 241 Original date of publication: 1962 My edition: 2004 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: found it through the VMC list How I acquired my copy: Barnes and Noble, April 2011 Cassandra Edwards is a French literature graduate student at Berkeley, who returns to her childhood home for her twin sister’s wedding. She loves her sister Judth fiercely, and although she’s never met her fiancée, Cassandra is determined to stop the wedding from happening. This is a very difficult novel to explain, because although short, and taking place over the course of a couple of days, there’s a lot going on. Cassandra is one of the oddest people I’ve run into in literature in a long time; although the book is told mostly in the first person from her point of view, I’ve never seen a character who is less self-aware. There are also a number of contradictions to Cassandra’s personality, which makes her an intriguing character. For example, if she loves her sister so much, then why is she hell-bent o...

Pages: 346 Original date of publication: 1952-1980 My edition: 2008 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: it’s on the list of NYRB Classics How I acquired my copy: Borders, April 2011 Don’t Look Now is a collection of nine short stories that Daphne Du Maurier published between 1952 and 1980. Daphne Du Maurier’s writing runs the gamut from straight historical to suspense/thriller, so I was intrigued to see what her stories would be like. These stories cover much of Du Maurier’s career, and they’re all stunning. She takes what are seemingly ordinary people and subjects and turns the story into something far more sinister. From the arresting opening story, in which a couple are grieving the loss of their child and take a holiday to Venice, to a story in which England’s birds attack the human population, to a story in which a woman has eye surgery and wakes to view the inner beast in humans, these stories are amazing and contain a lot of significance, even though some of them are a coupl...

Pages: 263 Original date of publication: 1982 My edition: 2010 Why I decided to read: it’s on the list of NYRB Classics How I acquired my copy: Borders, March 2011 In the midst of Royal Wedding Madness, I incidentally picked up a copy of Wish Her Safe at Home , set during another time of Royal Wedding Madness (thirty years ago). Rachel Waring inherits a house in Bristol and moves there from London, abandoning her old job and roommate for a life of idle dissipation. She becomes obsessed with her 20-something gardener, as well as the first owner of the house she lived in—who lived and died two hundred years ago. At first, the story is quirky and charming, a kind of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day . Going in to the novel, I liked Rachel right away; she’s youthful, exuberant and carefree, and doesn’t seem to care what the people around her think of her. Rachel seems socially awkward, saying and doing things that are “off” (in fact, for a while while reading I thought tha...

Pages: 361 Original date of publication: 1922 My edition: 1993 (Virago) Why I decided to read: I participated in All Viragos All August How I acquired my copy: Ebay, May 2010 In The Enchanted April , three Englishwomen—strangers to one another—impulsively decide to rent a medieval house in Italy after seeing an ad in a newspaper addressed to “those who appreciate wistaria and sunshine.” There are Mrs. Wilkins, a housewife wanting a break from the rainy monotony of London; Mrs. Arbuthnot; Lady Caroline Dester, young and fickle; and Mrs. Fisher, older than the rest but also in need of a break. Elizabeth Von Arnim’s descriptions of Italy, and the castle’s gardens, are superb; you actually feel as though you’re in Italy with the women as they enjoy their holiday. But the women never seem to lave San Salvatore, and so the action of the novel seems a bit stagnant at times; I felt while reading this that the characters were running around in circles. You get lots of descri...

The Slaves of Solitude has been sitting on my TBR shelf since April 2008. The other day, when nothing else really appealed at the moment, I picked this one up. I enjoyed it immensely. Written in 1947, The Slaves of Solitude is set at the height of WWII, in a suburb of London. Miss Roach is an imaginative, nearly-forty-year-old spinster, living in the Rosamund Tea Rooms (though they’re no longer “tea rooms”). The book is told from her point of consciousness, but the novel is also about the other residents of the boarding house. There’s Mrs. Payne, the landlady; tyrannical Mr. Thwaites; and Miss Steele and Mrs. Barratt. Later, a German woman moves in to the room next to Miss Roach’s, and monopolizes the attentions of a young American lieutenant. It’s a short novel; only about 240 pages, and a quick read. But it’s not an inconsequential one. Hamilton’s writing style is sparse; he tended not to waste words on needless description. He depicts the deprivations of the War perfectly. It’s ir...

In the brutally hot summer of 1900, Leo Colston, aged 12, is invited by his friend Marcus Maudsley to stay at his family’s estate, Brandham Hall. Marcus’s sister Marian enlists Leo to carry letters back and forth between herself and her lover, Ted Burgess, a local farmer. At the same time, Marian becomes engaged to Lord Trimingham who, in the eyes of “polite” society, is a much better match for her. Looking back, fifty years later, Leo’s memory tries to piece together the particulars of what happened that summer. Leo’s story is superficially a coming-of-age tale and the marking of the loss of innocence, but its also a story about perception and deception. Leo’s friendship with Marian is a lot stronger than his friendship with Marcus, who initially brought them together. There’s a lot that 12-year-old Leo can’t figure out, especially when it comes to sex and love—for example, he assumes that when Marian becomes engaged, that the notes to Ted will stop. Its clear that Leo can’t quite con...