Miriam Toews: Irma Voth

Of all the book bloggers out there (and there are quite a lot of us), there are few more established and respected than the Dovegreyreader. Prolific yet discerning, this Devon-based woman of letters tears through books at the rate that most of the rest of us Brits go through cups of tea. 

So when I read that Miriam Toews was one of the Dovegreyreader’s favourite writers, it seemed obvious to include Toews’s latest novel on my list of books by women writers  for this year.

Set in the arid plains of Mexico, the novel draws on Toews’ own Mennonite background to provide a portrait of a young woman struggling to build an identity for herself after she is shunned by the closed and traditional community in which she was raised. When a film crew comes to shoot near her home, Irma Voth finds herself caught up with a crowd of people who think and act in ways she has never experienced before and begins a journey that will lead her to question and confront the rules and memories that have held her captive.

I can see why the Dovegreyreader rates Toews. Packed with striking insights and unusual perspectives, Toews’s writing is at once powerful and delicate. On the surface, nothing very much happens for long stretches of this novel, but the narrative is alive and thrilling, feeding off Irma Voth’s sublimated fury and grief and the thousand thoughts and impressions that make the wilderness sing.

Toews is one of the best writers of dramatic irony I have ever read. Time and again, she sets up and plays out misunderstandings that the reader can see through before the character does, wringing a great deal of tension and poignancy from her scenes in the process.

It’s a tough book, but it’s not without humour. Drafted in to translate for the German Mennonite actress, Voth finds herself getting creative with the script, so that the words the character says are often a wry comment on the male-authored script (as well as an expression of Voth’s fears and desires).

The book also yielded the second description I have come across this year of a woman embroidering secret, subversive messages into clothes (the first was in Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer without Men). I’m not sure if anyone has made a study of subversion and sewing in women’s literature, but it seems that this might be a rich seam for inquiry (if you’ll pardon the pun).

There were one or two moments that felt slightly contrived – particularly some of the more philosophical pronouncements from the film director Diego and the revelation of the fate of Voth’s father at the end.  All in all, though, this was an engrossing read that managed to illuminate a little-known way of life without any of the voyeurism usually attached to such works. Highly recommended. 

Picture by crowderb

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Jennifer Egan: A Visit from the Goon Squad

It was only when I got stuck into chapter two of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad that I realised I’d read some of it before. As the narrative zoomed in on the impotence, guilt and cringe-making memories of ageing music producer Bennie, I had that weird feeling you get when you recognise a celebrity in the street and raise your hand to wave only to remember they’ve got no idea who you are at all. I’d seen this somewhere before, but it wasn’t connecting with me in quite the same way.

The reason, I worked out after a bit of head-scratching, was that the chapter was featured in Granta‘s new writing anthology number 110, the issue entitled Sex. And, while I had enjoyed the portrait of a somewhat seedy yet touchingly bewildered bloke struggling to keep up with the modern world when I first read it, its inclusion in a collection of writing about sex had slanted my reading of it, pushing the focus on to Bennie’s preoccupations with physicality and downplaying some of its other aspects.

Chapter two wasn’t the only section to have gone solo. Surprisingly for a book celebrated for its experimental structure (which, similar to David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, sees a series of linked stories weaving characters in and out of one anothers’ lives) a large number of Egan’s chapters appeared in publications such as The New Yorker and Harper’s prior to the book’s launch.

Although the quality of the writing would be more than enough to ensure readers enjoyed the extracts wherever they found them, context is so crucial to the work as a whole that it’s hard not to feel that the isolated chunks must have presented slightly different faces to the world through being separated from their companions in this way — much as people in varied social contexts present modified versions of themselves to the world.

With each chapter told over the shoulder of a different character, the book trades off the gap between our perceptions of the people around us and the reality. Its wide timeframe, sweeping from the seventies through to fifteen years or so in the future, allows Egan to play with some impressive effects, from bathetic flashes forward into characters’ lives (reminiscent of the deflationary techniques of Muriel Spark in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) to a compelling vision of the NYC of the future: malaria-ridden, patrolled by helicopters, ruled by consumer babies and with trees that bloom in January. There are some startling insights too, particularly into the way that various people get ‘lost’ as their lives drift off the course predicted for them while their contemporaries power on by.

However, the structure is not without its problems. One of the more annoying is that if, like me, you struggle with remembering names, the opening pages of most chapters are spent in a haze of frustration as you try to place the figure who is set to guide you through the next stages of the story.

But far more serious still is the fundamental conflict between the book’s vision and the structure through which it is presented. Setting out a lonely cast of characters, all so walled up within their own perspectives that they can only be brought to a brief moment of unison by a corrupt marketing ploy, Egan gives an incredibly bleak prognosis for humankind. Yet, this is undercut by her own skill in realising the viewpoints of her characters.

Surely if one person can recognise the conflicting needs and secret loneliness of the world around us there is more hope for humanity than Egan leaves room for. If it’s possible for readers to perceive the good, the bad and the ugly in so many people, then it’s possible for human beings to connect more deeply, meaningfully and frequently than they do in Egan’s book. And if that’s the case, then A Visit from the Goon Squad is a magnificent, elegant and deeply heartening failure. And we should all be very glad.

Picture by it’s tea

EM Delafield: The Diary of a Provincial Lady

If proof were ever needed that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, then EM Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady provides plenty. Looking particularly chintzy in the rose-covered jacket of its excellent new four-volume edition from Virago, this prim-sounding  tome from the 1930s seems to promise a gentle stroll through everything that is genteel, correct and charming…

In other words, dull. In fact, had it not been recommended by a friend who’d already put several other great reads my way, I’d probably have slotted it straight back on to the shelf and moved on. So it was a delight, on settling down on the daybed one Sunday after giving the servants the afternoon off,  to find wit and sharp perceptions where I’d expected find fluffy generalisations and tweeness.

Told through the diary entries of an anonymous Provincial Lady, the novel unfolds the triumphs and frustrations of domestic life in the early twentieth century. It documents the trials of its narrator as she struggles to keep up appearances in the face of mounting debts, squabbles among children and staff and the unreasonable demands of contemporaries.

‘Why are non-professional women, if married and with children, so frequently referred to as “leisured”?’ she muses at the end of one entry. ‘Answer came there none.’

Yet this is no catalogue of woes. Bursting from the same stable as Stella Gibbons, Delafield uses comedy to fence from behind the accepted forms and social mores of upper-middle-class society, spearing the hypocrisy, inconsistencies and oddness of the world around her. Each character is revealed in all his or her contrariness, from Our Vicar’s Wife, who is always saying how busy she is and yet always outstays her welcome, to the stormy Mademoiselle, who has a mauvais mot for every occasion. Not to mention the Provincial Lady herself,  with her talent for selective blindness when it comes to domestic economy versus shopping sprees.

Revelling in the ludicrous, Delafield, who originally wrote the book in instalments for Time and Tide — itself a recurring theme in the book — exploits the diary form for comic effect, puncturing expectations with the bathetic reality that follows. So ‘dear old school friend’  Cissy Crabbe turns out to be on a punishingly strict diet that throws the household into chaos, and the bulbs that are puffed so persuasively in their marketing pamphlets moulder in their pots.

The comedy lives in the space between the way things are supposed to be and the awkward reality, much like the novel itself. And this is what makes it such fun to read. Far from being the narrow story of a cossetted woman in a very particular time and place, this is a work that resonates far beyond the boundaries of its setting and subject matter. It is anything but provincial in scope. Cosmopolitan men, women and children everywhere will find it a joy.

Which books have surprised you ? Leave a comment and let me know.

Picture by Ms Bailey

Rosamond Lehmann: The Weather in the Streets

One of my favourite things about reading books from eras past is those rare flashes of insight that remind me that I’m really no different from people who’ve gone before. ‘Stop thinking you’re so sophisticated,’ the best writers say, ‘Stop thinking that you invented sex, irony, hair removal [or whatever it might be]: you’re much more similar to these folk than you can even begin to imagine.’

That doesn’t happen in Rosamond Lehmann‘s The Weather in the Streets. There is not one single, isolated insight. Instead, the whole book is soaked in universal female experience; so much so that you forget you’re reading and feel rather as though you have been granted privileged access to the interior monologue of the woman sitting across from you on the bus as she thinks through the things that happened to her last year.

Told from the perspective of Olivia, an early thirty-something who has separated from her husband and rents a room in a wealthy single friend’s London pad, this 1936 classic unfolds the germination, blossoming and consequences of her affair with a married childhood friend. It charts her progress from emotionally fettered, overgrown adolescent to seasoned woman, throwing up startling glimpses of the mental cages that the people around her live in along the way.

Lehmann is a fearless writer. Not only does she lay bare the terrors and neuroses that riddle us all and wade freely in the waters of the forbidden — homosexuality, drug use and back-street abortions being just a few of the topics she takes on — she also takes the rules of writing and snaps them in two.

Her promiscuous use of both the first and third person voice would make a creative writing tutor weep. Indeed, it would make nonsense of most writer’s work, but Lehmann’s style is so distinctive, and her touch so deft, that it merely serves to heighten our sense of being in Olivia’s world by showing us the ambivalent way she sees herself — sometimes ‘me’, sometimes ‘she’. At its most magnificent, Lehmann’s writing has the fluidity of an impressionist painting, yet with all the details picked out in astonishing clarity.

She’s really funny, too. Best of all are the flashes of steel that puncture the pomposity and smugness of minor characters. A case in point is Olivia’s private response to a prudish acquaintance’s plans to embroider a set of eight chair covers for her dining room chairs.

‘I think it will be gay’  she said meekly, holding up the square with her dear little old-fashioned head on one side.

Nothing you did or conceived of could ever be gay; and do your children know yet they hate you?

That’s not to say the book’s perfect. The wrapping up, involving a host of secondary Bohemian friends who engineer a possible next step for Olivia, feels thin after the heady emotion of the preceding chapters. Although it does contain some nice touches and wicked vignettes — the scene where the drunk Adrian tries to chat up the beautiful teenage boy who features as the back end of the bull in the amateur play is great.

Taken as a whole, though, this book is extremely impressive, elegant, engaging and a lot of fun. Much like the lady who recommended it (thanks Jo).

Picture by jaybergesen.