In her Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, author Fay Weldon calls the Regency era “by our standards, a horrible time to be alive.” She also writes that the class society was “fair enough if you were Jane Austen, but supposing you were the maid?” That is what Jo Baker’s Longbourn does: supposes you were the maid. And it does the supposing brilliantly. For me, this was one of those books where the reading experience is so emotionally magnificent, it seems like a […]
The Uninterested Reader
Every once in a great while you encounter a book that has all the right ingredients to appeal to your taste, but that nevertheless leaves you somewhat unsatisfied. The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones was like that for me. It has so many things I like: An English manor house, a disastrous dinner, early 20th century English vernacular, an eccentric child, unresolved sexual tension, and a mystery. And yet I did not love it. It’s an easy book that most readers will probably breeze trough […]
Never Trust a Man Called Gaston
My grandmother loved Victoria Holt, and I must have read my fair share of these historical romances from her stash when spending summers at her place, back in the day. The only one I can actively remember is The India Fan, but there must have been others. How else would you explain the fact that I could predict much of the plot of Seven for a Secret by the end of the first chapter? Holt has her patterns, her beloved tropes, and she turns to them […]
From Walls of Troy to Berlin Wall
In Cassandra (1984), German writer Christa Wolf retells the familiar Greek myth of the daughter of Priam and Hecuba, the seer and prophet who was doomed to know the future and have everyone not believe her. Wolf’s novel takes place during the last few hours of Cassandra’s life, as she’s being taken in a carriage towards her death in Argos, after Troy has fallen. During that last trip, Cassandra remembers her life, and tells it in a very conversational style, going back and forth in time […]
Melancholy and Infinite Sadness
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had a bad marriage, and were probably both rather difficult people. I don’t know. I do know that I love their poetry, and reread both their work often. Hughes’ last collection, Birthday Letter, might not be his best, but it’s impossible for me to resist. As a commentary on Plath’s life and poetry, I don’t like it, because it seems to simplify and reduce her work, but as a collection of poems in its own right, I adore it. Birthday […]
I Like You Very Much. Just As You Are
Falling in love with a work of fiction or a fictional character can be a tricky business, and in many ways it resembles and reflects the experience of falling in love with a so called real person. Which is why Dustin Rowles comparing the Veronica Mars movie experience to briefly reuniting with an old lover was so apt, and also why I’m going to shamelessly steal that analogue for the purposes of writing a review for The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, the first in the […]