The Themed Reading Challenge has been graciously hosted by Wendy at Caribousmom.
I loved searching the shelves to find a set of books that would fit a theme, and I finally decided on four books by women from the 20th century, all with birds in the title.
Here they are:
All finished and written about!
Virago Modern Classics #177
Jenny Wren is the first of a pair of novels about a pair of sisters – Jenny and Dahlia Redfern. This book takes Jenny as its main subject and it’s sequel, The Curate’s Wife, takes Dahlia. The two sisters have completed their eduation and both are now looking for their paths in life. They have a close bond but are very different.
As the story opens their father, Sidney Rendall, has recently died. He came from a good family, but they cut him off when he married Louisa, a farm girl from a much lower class.
And class is at the very heart of this novel….
The widowed Louisa tries to build a new future for her family by borrowing money to open a boarding house. But, while Jenny and Dahlia have the eduation, manners and accents of their fathers class, their mother does not. And that leaves them in social limbo.
Dahlia is pragmatic about her family’s uncertain situation, but Jenny finds things more difficult and lives in fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.
The story is simple. Jenny and her family deal with family, neighbours and lodgers. The joy is in the details, the nuances and the wonderful characters.
There’s Mr Grishaw, the countryman who lent Louisa money and now wants more from here; Miss Jewel, a morally upright and most disagreeable neighbour, Mr Cummings, the first lodger, Mr Sproat, the curate who tries to help the family; Miss Cummings, a charming lady lodger. All are perfetly drawn and you an understand and empathise with all of their points of view.
And then there is Mr Merriman, a young country squire, who Jenny meets in the countryside. They form a relationship but, though she longs for a different life, Jenny does not tell him her real identity. She is sure that her status would be an insurmountable object.
Would it?
Jenny Wren is a wonderful story – slow-moving and dense, but always with a small detail or inident to draw you into the Rendalls’ lives
And E H Young could just be the missing link between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym.
“A serial killer is terrorising the students of Bologna. Rookie female detective Grazia Negro is determined to solve the case. Only one eye witness can positively identify the killer …and he’s blind. Simone spends his days in solitude, listening to Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue” and scanning the radio wave of the city to eavesdrop on other people’s lives. He likes to imagine what people are like – based on the tone and “colour” of their voice – and his acute hearing sets alarm bells ringing upon hearing the voice of the killer.”
It’s not my habit to begin review type posts with a synopsis, but in this case I wanted to explain just what drew me to the book.
First it was the title. I thought of the song and I was pleased to discover that there was a connection. The synopsis looked interesting and the mention of a CWA Golden Dagger nomination seemed like a good sign. And when I turned to a page at random I found a lovely passage about Simone’s response to Chet Baker’s music. So I dismissed my reservations about the word “noir” and brought the book home from the library.
When I turned to the first page I wondered if I had made a mistake. What I read was a short acount of the visceral recation of two police officers to a crime scene. It wasn’t graphic but there were strong insinuations of unspeakable horror. I thought about throwing in the towel, but I decided I should give the author the benefit of the doubt and at least read a little further.
As the story progresses three strands develop:
Simone is blind. He is isolated from the world, living alone on the top floor of his mother’s house. He spends his days playing records that he loves devotedly and listening to a radio scanner that picks up the voices of people all across the city. Listening to the people of Bologna inhabitants, and imagining their lives from what he hears. One day, though he hears the voice of the murderer.
This strand is excellent. Simone is a wonderful creation and his world and his inner life are so well evoked, and utterly believable.
Then there is the strand following the police investigation and the strand following the killer. Both are competently executed, but the former lacks depth and the latter lacks originality.
The darkness of the city streets is palpable as the story progresses and escalates towards a dramatic conclusion.
Almost Blue is by no means a bad book, and Carlo Lucarelli is by no means a bad writer, but nothing else hits the same heights as the story’s central character.
Simone is staying with me, but the rest of the book is already fading.
Translated by Oonagh Stransky
Virago Modern Classic #149
Ellie Parsons, the heroine of The Doves of Venus, captivates from the very first page. Early in the 1950s she is at the point in life where everything seems possible and she is walking, maybe dancing, home across London.
She has left her home and her conventional mother and sister for a bedsit in Chelsea.
She has a job in the art world – painting “antique” furniture.
And, best of all, she has Quentin, her middle-aged lover.
It is soon clear, though not to the besotted Ellie, that Quentin is not such a wonderful catch. He has a history of short term relationships with young girls and, while he is charmed by Ellie, he certainly isn’t going to get too involved with a penniless girl living in a bedsit.
Quentin’s life is complicated by the return of Petta, his estranged wife. She has fallen out with her new lover and has attempted suicide. Now she has decided she wants to settle back into her own life and though Quentin does not want her back he cannot quite let her go.
Eventually though, and without making the break absolute, Quentin does disappear from Ellie’s life. She slowly comes to terms with his loss and, with the resilience of youth and an undiminished faith in life’s possibilities she moves on. Ellie makes new friends, and she discovers new worlds and new possibilities. And maybe, just maybe, she will eventually find her place in the world.
The Doves of Venus is pack full of themes and ideas, about youth, about ageing, about how to life, and much much more. Yes, it is busy, but it is a joy to read.
London, in all of its colours, is brought to life on the page, and the world, caught between the conventions of life before the war and new and exciting possibilities, is wonderfully evoked.
Olivia Manning writes beautifully, and with great understanding of the inner life of all of her diverse cast of characters.
And, best of all, there is Ellie. She matures before your eyes without ever losing her vitality and charm.
It was lovely to meet her.
I haven’t been reading much this week – I’ve been in knitting and cleaning mode – but there were three library books that I just had to add to the pile:
The Tricking of Freya by Christine Sunley
“High-spirited and precocious Freya is the only child of her late-in-life, widowed mother, who waits until Freya is a coltish seven to finally return to Manitoba, Canada, to visit her mother and her sister, wild and beautiful Birdie. Freya’s grandfather was a revered poet, and her family is proud of their Icelandic heritage, especially Birdie, who insists that her niece learn Icelandic and memorize the ancient sagas, a mission that turns disastrous. Freya tells the story of her strange, nearly catastrophic girlhood years later, an act that liberates her from a lonely and smothering life. This wounded daughter of a land of the midnight sun recounts a journey to Iceland as dramatic, dangerous, and mysterious as any ancient epic adventure, and retraces her ardent quest for the truth about a staggering family secret.”
I read so many positive reports about this book that I had to order a copy.
The Captain’s Wife by Eiluned Lewis
“A novel about Lettice Peters, the captain’s wife of the title, who has travelled the world on her husband’s ships but has now settled with her children in the little cathedral town of St Idris in Pembrokeshire.”
Isn’t that a wonderful cover?! And the book looks lovely. It’s part of the Honno Classics series – reprints of out of print books by Welsh women writers in English. I hadn’t heard of Hono before, but they definitely look like a small press worth investigating.
“In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is a personal one: to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, one of the most dangerous teenagers in the country, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake. Raised on a diet of evangelistic hellfire, Bethany is violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters – a claim which Gabrielle interprets as a symptom of doomsday delusion. But when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany has predicted, and a brilliant, gentle physicist enters the equation, the apocalyptic puzzle intensifies and the stakes multiply. Is the self-proclaimed Nostradamus of the psych ward the ultimate manipulator, or could she be the harbinger of imminent global cataclysm on a scale never seen before? And what can love mean in ‘interesting times’?
Liz Jensen has written some wonderful books, so this is another one I had to order as soon as I heard about it.
Have you read any of these? What did you think of them?
And what did you find in the library this week?
See more Library Loot here.
Posted in Library Talk
“As she stepped away from me
And she moved through the fair
And fondly I watched her
Move here and move there
And then she turned homeward
With one star awake
Like the swan in the evening
Moves over the lake”
From She Moved Through The Fair
by Padraic Colum
Beutiful words, but they, and in particular the image of the lone swan, are weighed down by sadness. And that fits this work by Rosamond Lehmann exatly.
Its subtitle, Fragments of an Inner Life, is fitting too. The facts of Rosamond Lehmann’s life and career are missing from this, her only autobiographical work, but the emotional events that shaped her are at its heart.
The first memories are of childhood and they are so vividly told. But the sense of loss is there from the very start. A teacher who leaves to marry and is seen years later in a restuarant, a shadow of her former self. A longed for perfume bottle that is wonderously received as a consolation prize, but loses its lustre when Rosamond is told that she doesn’t deserve it.
Wonderful tales, beautifully recalled and related, but an underlying sadness is always there.
The story then moves forward to tell the story of Rosamond’s beloved daughter Sally, and of the tragedy of her death at the age of just twenty-four. The love that pervades the story of Sally’s life and death is so, so moving.
And what mother can accept the loss of her child? Although she is a non-believer Rosamond enters the world of spiritualism. Her words are honest and emotional as she strives for understanding of what has happened.
Then finally there is a letter from the author to her grandchild. If not peace then at least acceptance.
I have written little about the latter chapters of this book. It would be wrong to pick out bits, you need to either make the decision to read the whole or not read at all. The writing is deeply personal, and all I could do was feel and be deeply moved.
An extraordinary piece of writing.
Just quote a couple of spoiler-free sentences the book you’re reading to tempt other readers.
Here is mine:-
“Among the many fatalities attending the bloom of young desire, that of blindly taking to the confectionery line has not, perhaps, been sufficiently considered. How is the son of a British yeoman, who has been fed principally on salt pork and yeast dumplings, to know that there is a satiety for the human stomach even in a paradise of pink jars full of sugared almonds and pink lozenges, and that the tedium of life can reach a pitch where plum buns at discretion cease to offer the slightest enticement?”
Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by MizB
I am visiting Brigford with my uncle. He is a butler at the great house. We have seen the most wonderful shop, and now I am quite certain that I must become a confectioner. Confectionery is so beutiful to behold and provides the very best of eating. Confectioners must be the happiest and the foremost of men.
It’s Tuesday, where are you? is hosted by raidergirl3.
This all comes courtesy of Brother Jacob by George Eliot.
