from: Korakas by Anne Holloway – a novel about control

I burned the coffee this morning. He hates that. He didn’t speak but his face said it all. He was out late last night and he’s gone to meet someone today about ‘business’. I’m so nervous. Ally is playing outside in the yard and I’m trying to leave everything as if we have just walked down the road to the village.

I put Ally’s favourite toy on the floor by the television, a cup of milk half drunk, a biscuit on  a plate. I hear the chickens squawking and footsteps outside. The birds scatter as Karen thunders into the courtyard, leaping the ones which get in her way.

“I’ve left the car round the back, where’s the luggage?” She is breathless and distracted.

“In the apothiki,” I point to the door of the storehouse on my right.

Duncan arrives from the flower farm where he works.

“Alright Anna?” he grins showing an array of broken teeth. He seems sober enough today. He helps Karen carry our cases to her car down a track behind the house. She turns and waves. I wish we could travel with her, but she says we would be too conspicuous driving away in her tiny car  with suitcases in the back.

…a rush of wind comes up the alley

…a rush of wind comes up the alley and almost pushes me over, the noise is like the sea crashing onto rocks. I steady myself against the damp wall and turn to see Korakas. He stands tall, blocking the feeble light from the houses on the street. He has his arms raised, as I had done and he is screeching at them. His eyes are alight, his hair is flying in the strange wind and his features seem angular. Suddenly he is beside me and holds me close to him, snatching me away from the two men in front of me. He sweeps his other arm in front of his face and sends one of the men sprawling to the floor, where he lies limp, blood trickling from a cut on his head. The other man drops to his knees and crawls towards his friend, sobbing and begging. The others are crossing themselves and half run half crawl to aid their friends at our feet. Korakas sweeps his coat across in front of my face and moves towards the American. The men scrabble to get out of his way. He holds me around my waist. I can feel my legs weaken and I am glad of his support. . . . . . . . . . .

from: Korakas by Anne Holloway –   a novel about control

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

….and I love your covers!!!!

I love the movement, the vitality, the cleanliness…

and I’d love to feel you in my hands….

and see you on my shelves.

Sunday Salon: As Sunday draws to a close.. a Gale blows in

Less than an hour to go before Sunday is over and I’ve just read the first six pages of my next book. This one was recommended by my baby sister.

See you all in the salon next Sunday. Happy reading if you manage to get any done in the week. Be strong those of you who are on a book-buying diet.

Sunday Salon: Ruth didn’t drown

So I have done hardly anything today except read. You could say that Ruth has been drowning in “Drowning Ruth”. I’ve already seen a comment from someone who said that the they were annoyed by the book but that it redeemed itself by the twist at the end. Someone else, Ann, I think said that it split her reading group. I seem to remember that a lot of people raved about this book a month or two or a year ago. So where will I place myself or will I just sit on the fence? I can’t explain what it was that kept me reading so avidly. Maybe I just needed a reading day. Maybe I’m just back in a reading phase of my life, after all I did find it difficult to put “The Brief History of the Dead” down or have the really good books just worked their way to the top of the TBR pile? I have a penchant for books that are set in a Noman’s time. You know what I mean. It’s Little House on the Prairie time, Little Women time. Heidi time. We know the characters wear petticoats and don’t drive around in cars and a woman’s place is usually in the home apart from our heroine who is a bit tomboyish or feisty and knows deep in her heart that women are equal to men. So although the book clearly starts just after the end of the Second World War because Amanda tells us that “if I had not gone home that March in 1919, Mathilda my only sister , would not be dead” it is also in my favourite Noman’s time. The way that the protagonists deal with what arises is of course all due to social expectations and mores of the time but it isn’t really what people do but rather the feelings and relationships that feed into the situations that arise.

Initially the “cast list” is small, almost claustrophobic and for the majority of the novel it feels that it will stay that way but as we learn more the doors open up, it feels as though a breeze from the lake will blow some of the stuffiness away but disconcertingly this breath of new air just complicates the truth that we have come to believe or suspect.

Once again it is demonstrated that secrets hardly ever remain so. Once again we learn that a small adjustment of the truth leads to compound untruths and that every action we take is likely to have repercussions that can be good or bad.

This is just the sort of book that I would be pleased to find if I was  on holiday in a remote cottage somewhere and the weather turned nasty. Pile the logs on the fire, heat the milk for the cocoa and be pleased that Aunty Mandy isn’t sending you out to move the sheep.

Sunday Salon: Ruth is Drowning in Books

I’ve made a supreme effort in the last week and a bit to do more reading. It’s not that I don’t love books and reading it’s just that there are never enough hours in the day. Please don’t lecture me about how if I spent less time at the computer reading everyone’s blogs then I would have ample time for books. I don’t want to live in isolation. I enjoy being part of a community. When was at school it was a community that passed around absolutely anything by John Wyndham. Now I can see why I enjoyed his science fiction so much. Of course the central theme of each work was something strange and amazing but the setting and the people were so normal. Take out plants that can walk, children that can control your mind or a beauty product that can make you live for ever and the books are just about people living together and getting on with life.

I don’t enjoy adventure stories or films or rather I don’t unless how the protagonists go about getting through the adventure is an integral part of the novel/film.

So back to today’s reading, Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz. I heard this mentioned on at least one blog months or maybe even a year or so ago. With my name in the two-word title it was inevitable that I should take a look at it sometime.It sounds as though it will be a murder mystery but the simple storyline of one sister returning home, and moving in with her younger sister who never left, promises plenty of the quotidian domesticity that I love.

I am not quite at the halfway mark (page 105 of 276 pages) and the yarn is beginning to untangle but never at a pace too racey for my homely self. I have to get myself back into the book as I received my first ever uncorrected proof and I felt obliged to read that immediately. Luckily I had halted at a natural break in the narrative. So I could waffle on here for a few sentences / paragraphs /pages … or I could go away and READ!

98 Reasons for Reading

As I was heading towards the end of Margaret Foster’s “Private Papers” (see my previous post) I stumbled upon reference to a fictitious account of the life of Heinrich Hoffman during the period when he was doctor in charge of an asylum. Dr Heinrich Hoffman wrote the popular “Struwwelpeter” (Shock-headed Peter) a set of cautionary tales warning of the fate of children who literally played with fire, were Stuck-in-a-book or wouldn’t eat their soup. My mother, born in 1926, was given a copy of the English translation of this wonderfully illustrated volume which was one of the books that my sisters and I inherited from her. The book was published in 1845, over eighty years before my mother was born and I think I understood that it was not of our time but I probably enjoyed it all the more for that very reason. By the time I was born in the late fifties I’m sure that moral tales were not what they once had been, even if they existed at all. So Johnny Head in Air and Fidgety Phillip felt as though they friends of Mrs Do As You Would Be Done By who I believed to be a personal friend of Mamgee, my maternal grandmother. The engraved and coloured-in illustrations thrilled me and there there was no end to the number of times I could have the book read to me whilst I soaked up the pictures.

Once I knew this book, 98 Reasons for Being, by Clare Dudman, existed I had to have it and so I ventured out to Waterstones, in the Bentall centre, Kingston, at lunchtime and luckily they had a copy sitting on the shelf. So far it seems to be tale of poor Hannah who does not talk, rather than poor Harriet who played with matches. Dr Hoffman is asked to take in young Hannah who is probably suffering from severe depression but has been labelled as suffering from Nymphomania. We meet her as she enters the asylum and Hoffman decides upon the best course of treatment.

This is yet another book of alternate accounts. Life in the asylum is recounted with particular reference to the treatment of Hannah. In between are glimpses into Hannah’s thoughts. Far from being simple, her thoughts appear articulate and we begin to see something of her life before the asylum. The treatment she receives encroaches into Hannah’s private world but actions and people are transformed. I may have reached out for this fictitious account for the wrong reasons but I will continue to read because it stands up as a book in its own right even once the Struwwelpeter link is laid to rest.

 

 

 

The Lapsed Reader?

Once upon a time I was a lapsed reader but with the kindness and encouragement of a few good women I was brought back from the brink and felt able to participate all year round and not just on high days and holidays. I was welcomed into a caring group and was shown the way. I was tempted with old familiar themes and stories, words I knew and charming dwelling-places of the word. My old appreciation of virago-green and genteel paintings was rekindled and I could hold my head high and call myself a reader again. I carried the word with me in my bag and in quiet moments I sought solace with lovingly-crafted phrases. I read in public and felt no shame. I was proud to be a reader.

I will never be one of those who will sit in the front row. I am the reading equivalent of one who slinks into the back row of a service and leaves before the priest appears at the door to shake the hand of the worshippers. I have progressed from merely attending at Easter & Christmas and weddings and funerals but my practice is humble. Some days it is only a few words but if the train is delayed and I meet no friends on board I have been known to read more than a chapter a day.

I have just finished “Private Papers” by Margaret Forster which features the alternate voices of a mother and daughter. Rosemary, the daughter is reading what her mother calls her “private papers” which gives the book its title. Her view of events varies considerably from that of her mother ably demonstrating that there is no one version of any story. That is all too common in families. In my own my baby sis’s infamous tantrum in Mevagissey is legendary. Middle sis and I could not understand what set baby sis off. We laid out our reasons for considering her behaviour to be unnacceptable and smugly put her exhibition down to being spoilt. Years, even decades later, baby sis was articulate enough to put her side of events and at long last we had to admit that she had a point. Private papers doesn’t reach any such admissions. Orphaned mother Penelope’s lifelong yearning for a “real family” is never satisfied. Thinking her marriage will bring her wish, Penelope is sorely disappointed as soon after the birth of her third child she is left a young war widow with a disapproving yet demanding mother-in-law. The one daughter who gives her what she most approves of in theory is also the one who disappoints her the most.

Each episode of family life is seen in turns from the viewpoint of the mother and then the daughter. This puts me in mind of the extracts of my baby sis’s novel in progress. She also alternates between mother and daughter though her narrative differs in that mother’s voice tells of the past and daughter’s is more or less in real time. We learn from the daughters account what has become of the young girl in the mother’s account. There is much more to this oeuvre than an alternating voice but as it is very much a work in progress each version I receive via email has shifted to become something slightly different. I can’t wait to read the final version and maybe if you pop over to my baby sis’s blog she will drop the odd hint about this exciting project.

Oh, and if you want to find out what this lapsed yet born-again-reader is consuming now then you will have to look out for my next post. Watch this space.

Thought for the day

from Jan Struther, the author of “Mrs Miniver”

” HARD words will break no bones:
But more than bones are broken
By the inescapable stones
Of fond words left unspoken.”

Having finished ASH of T in U (see previous posts) I needed to start something quickly so, like a drowning man, I grabbed the nearest object. I suspect that many of you carry out the same good work that I do, I rescue old green Virago books. And so it came to pass that as I was in desperate need , “Try Anything Twice” by Jan Struther lay in reach on a tbr pile on the hall table.

This book is a collection of writings that were published in various places including The New Statesman (where my 2nd son, Greg works), and Punch. If you feel like finding out more, then you can read the whole book online.

This is ideal “train reading” and so I am already halfway through and in very good humour. Who cares if the train is 5 minutes late, it just means that I can get properly started on the next piece and know I will be able to complete it by the time I’m feeding my monthly train pass through the ticket monster. Perhaps the train companies should dole out similar “in transit” books to keep us all smiling. Speaking of going to work by train, I love it most of the time. I have a group of friends that I made because we travel in the same direction at similar times. I even have a lunch date with one of them tomorrow. Mmm can’t wait, we’re off to Giuliano’s in the Apple Market. Pumpkin ravioli here I come.

Young and slim is beautiful

Saturday morning brought ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ from DGR in deepest darkest Devon so you can guess what I did next. Yes, large mug of tea in hand, and a refill a bit later, I sat down and read SKELLIG by David Almond, cover to cover. By the end my T-shirt was dripping wet and the box of tissues empty. I must be getting soft in my old age. I don’t think I want to read any other books by DA for fear of them not living up to this.

Oh I forgot to say, this is a children’s book, whateverthat means.