![the [blank] garden](https://theblankgarden.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/cropped-lucas-cranach-the-younger-6.png)
Hi, folks! This is post 2 of Deal me In. For more about this project & my previous posts on it, go here: Reading Plans | Weeks 1 | 2 (you…… Read more “This restless craving for sun and love and motion”
Category: Scarlet Letters
A trail of books: on Carolina Nabuco’s A Sucessora (‘The Sucessor’, 1934) and the plagiarism charges against Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938)
The other Rebecca A Sucessora (1934, ‘The Successor’) opens with a couple returning from their honeymoon trip. The first chapter unravels through an extended scene that feels…… Read more “A trail of books: on Carolina Nabuco’s A Sucessora (‘The Sucessor’, 1934) and the plagiarism charges against Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938)”
Her heart is this red apple
Dear Irina, When Isolde (2019, tr. Bryan Karetnyk and Irina Steinberg. Original: Изольда, 1929) opens, it’s summer, sometime in the wild 1920’s, and we are in Biarritz.…… Read more “Her heart is this red apple”
Her perversities were as essential a part of her work as her inspirations,
Hi, folks, This is post 1 of Deal me In. For more about this project & my previous posts on it, go here: Reading Plans | Weeks…… Read more “Her perversities were as essential a part of her work as her inspirations,”
The music of life and living
Dear Dorothy, We are forever exiles of our childhoods, but sometimes the smallest details can bring us back to our neverland. It takes one song, a slant…… Read more “The music of life and living”
Such shifting winds in life
Dear Ida, A Change of Time (2019, tr. Martin Aitken. Original: En ny tid, 2015) is the record of a woman’s passage through grief. Told through diary entries…… Read more “Such shifting winds in life”
A kind of door in oneself through which it was necessary to pass
Dear Mary, The Friendly Young Ladies (1944. Published in the USA as The Middle Mist, 1945) is at its best when walking the tight rope of double…… Read more “A kind of door in oneself through which it was necessary to pass”
Happiness is so elusive it may as well be supernatural
Dear Marie-Helene, Much of the disturbing, off-kilter sense of humour in Parakeet: A Novel (2020) comes from a finely-drawn contrast between the strong sense of reality in…… Read more “Happiness is so elusive it may as well be supernatural”
It was under the sway of that force that I began to feel,
Dear Gabriela, A coming-of-age story, a road novel, a picaresque adventure, a piece of nature and travel writing, an epic, and a reinterpretation of Martín Fierro through a…… Read more “It was under the sway of that force that I began to feel,”
A small jewel that has always been hopelessly flawed
Dear Isobel, Every Eye (1956) is a novella that plays with the ideas of perspective and sight, narrated by a character who is trapped in her blind…… Read more “A small jewel that has always been hopelessly flawed”
The truth is a kind of regardless
Dear Ali, Spring (2019) begins with chorus of angry voices, a collage of social media rants and headlines, disrupted in the end by a voice that seems…… Read more “The truth is a kind of regardless”
Fauna smiles upon the love of intertwined women
Dear Renée, For the past couple of days, I’ve been trapped inside a stuffy Victorian room heavily decorated with rich furnishings, intricate pieces of furniture, some middle…… Read more “Fauna smiles upon the love of intertwined women”
Careering along like drunken drivers
Dear Shelagh, A Taste of Honey (1958) centres on teenage Jo and her mother, Helen. They are always falling behind on rent, and, as the story starts,…… Read more “Careering along like drunken drivers”
The unlived life is light, so light
Dear Marie Luise, Circe’s Mountain: Stories (1990, tr. Lisel Mueller. Stories originally written in the 1950’s and 1960’s) is a collection of 12 of some of your…… Read more “The unlived life is light, so light”
When will thy sublime maxim pierce the human hearts,
Dear Maria Firmina, Úrsula (c.1859) is a tale of two books. On the one hand, we have a doomed love story between the eponymous heroine and a…… Read more “When will thy sublime maxim pierce the human hearts,”
Things can be going on inside you without you even knowing
Dear Hanne, Love (2018, tr. Martin Aitken. Original: Kjærlighet, 1997), or the absence of it, unfolds on a single day in the lives of Vibeke and her eight-year…… Read more “Things can be going on inside you without you even knowing”
The world has dropped its petals
Dear Olga, Reading Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead (2018, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Original: Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych, 2009) is all about…… Read more “The world has dropped its petals”
But love—the real, everlasting love
Dear Marie, My reading of your novela Krambambuli (first published in Dorf- und Schlossgeschichten, 1883) comes colored by all the times I read it as a child. We…… Read more “But love—the real, everlasting love”
