Dear Sarashina, I must confess that I have read your diary – and I did it twice. In my defense, I guess I could say that it is not exactly a diary, as we nowadays conceive of it; that it is highly imaginative rather than objective; and that it was meant to be a public…
Category: Scarlet Letters
It has a fascination of its own, that bend
Dear Lucy, At first, I felt skeptical about your novel Anne of Green Gables (1908). Anne seemed too chatty, too imaginative, too eager to please – too good to be true. Or perhaps I simply should have met her earlier, as a child of eleven, and on her own terms. But, gradually, so as it happened…
herself held underwater by her hair, snared around auburn-rusted anchor chains
Dear Margaret, As I was reading your novel The Fire-Dwellers (1969), I had the feeling of having been caught in the middle of a conflagration, a large fire, difficult to get through. There is smoke everywhere, and the reality of the surroundings seems to have gone into flames. As much as your protagonist, we seem…
In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor
Dear Deborah, Your novel Hot Milk (2016) has a physical quality that stung me like a blistering sunburn. Long after the last page had been turned, the heat could still be felt under the skin, like it usually happens at the end of a day spent under strong sun. The novel revolves around 25-year-old anthropologist…
The secrets inside her mind are like flowers in a garden at nighttime
Dear Fumiko, Your novel Masks, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (女面, Onnamen, 1958) reminded me of an intricate structure one is made to peel off, layer by layer, only to find out later that the layers only made more visible the core that they were to be hiding – they were, after all, the very things…
If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person
Dear Mary, Your novel The Charioteer (1953) is crossed over by what it seems to be a tense string, a rein held so tightly by opposing forces that we feel it is about to break. Drawing us into an atmosphere of war, blackouts, raids, transient relationships, urgent loves and forced secrecy – in short, an…
That loud music of the wild geese
Dear Ethel, Your novella Hetty Dorval (1947), about a childhood affection that gradually turns into a confrontation of good and evil, had a puzzling effect on me. It is a ‘tale of two readings’, as two confluent rivers, colliding. The story opens in the 1930s, when the mysterious Hetty Dorval moves to Lytton, a small…
She sounded like a killing wind
Dear Sarah, In your debut novel See What I Have Done (2017), we are brought inside the dysfunctional household of the Border family, only to be trapped, along with the characters, in a suffocating atmosphere of sweat, sweltering heat, mutilated pigeons, rotten food, a plate of leftovers, and ripening fruit. It’s claustrophobic. It’s salty, dirty,…
The delicacy of one’s intellect, one’s sanity, when it is laid open to the specialists
Dear Mary Jane, In your autobiographical novel The Snake Pit (1946) you throw us right inside the mind of a woman struggling to recover mental health. You make us feel in the heat of things, trapped in her delusions – to the point where it is very difficult for us to know where exactly, in…
It was her portion in that dower of genius which belonged to all her kindred; she carried it like a torch
Dear Margaret, In your novel The Constant Nymph (1924), you left open some carefully disguised questions you later explored once again in your book The Forgotten Smile (1961): can society truly accommodate art and genius? Or does it inevitably destroy it? Yours is also a question about where to locate true morality: is value created by social…
For this book is the talking voice that runs on,
Dear Stevie, Once I entered your Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), I immediately noticed three things: that I was being held captive; that I was complicit in my captivity; and that the thing that held me inside was neither plot nor character, but something less tangible. I had fallen in love with a voice. Yours,…
The taste of the fog was at the back of their throats
Dear Elizabeth, Do you know this feeling we have when we quite unexpectedly understand why a particular book is a classic? When we understand what it means; when we suddenly get to know what it feels like. Have you ever felt it? When a book draws from a tradition it so thoroughly understands that it…
