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…
Tag: Coming of age
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…
Home is a place in the mind
Dear Maeve, If your novella The Visitor (2000, originally written in the 1940’s) had a face, it would be one of a trapped animal, diverted from its burrow, silently showing its teeth to its predator. A strange and moveable mask that would convey a mixture of fear, loneliness, and ferocious anger. The story opens with…
his plunging spirit had got stuck in the glue of convention and hypocrisy
Dear Vita, You begin your novel The Edwardians (1930) with a very curious note: “No character in this book is wholly fictitious.” It gives us a hint to what the book will taste like: melancholic and ambiguous, both an imaginative expansion upon the life you knew well and a deep immersion on its contradictions. The…
And it could have been any street in the city
Dear Ann, How can one write a naturalist novel and still convey strong symbolic effect? I don’t know the answer, but I think you achieved that. The Street (1946) in your first novel is both a concrete space and a distorting mirror for a perverse version of the American Dream, a thin surface impossible to…
I do know how to behave – believe me, because I know. I have always known.
Dear Molly, If I had to describe your novel Good Behaviour (1981) in one word I would say: merciless. As merciless as the code of conduct in which your characters lock away lies, family secrets, sex, power struggles, and grief: the social mores, the rules of caste and patterns of good behaviour. Underneath this etiquette’s…
I don’t know what my limits are anymore
Dear Irmgard, The eponymous heroine of your novel Gilgi (2013, tr. Geoff Wilkes. Original title: Gilgi, eine von uns, 1931) is a twenty-one-year-old German middle-class girl who lives in Cologne, during the rise of fascism, in the 1930s. Gilgi, short for Gisela, is independent, matter-of-fact, and ambitious: she is determined to climb the social ladder and…
but thousands of bells clanged inside me
Dear Clarice, Rereading your stories after so long makes me feel as if I were looking through colour-stained glass: each story comes with the shadow of my previous reading of it. The shadow of how it felt like at the time; the stain of what I had not understood properly then, and do now; or…
material things could be altered by the light, or the absence of light, in which you looked at them
Dear Tessa, I felt as if I was entering this house, too, along with your characters – the old country house where your novel The Past (2015) is set. It is musty, cold, and it needs repairs which none of the four siblings who inhabit the story can really afford. They will spend a last…
They didn’t dare before; now they do, that’s all
Dear Anna, I was halfway through Manja (tr. Kate Phillips, 2003. Manja: Ein Roman um 5 Kinder, 1938) this past week, when your book acquired a new poignancy for me. Do you know that eerie feeling, when we overhear a stranger on the bus or out passing by us in the street, and, by accident,…
His writing was so extraordinarily beautiful that her eyes misted over
Dear Murasaki, This is just a quick note to let you know my experience so far with your Tale of Genji. Similar to the form as you yourself may have written the book, I am reading it in installments, chapter by chapter – mostly after work, at night, in between all sorts of modern and…
Pain never belonged to just one of us
Dear Affinity, As the title of your novel suggests, Mischling (2016) is an hybrid: revenge and forgiveness; horror and wonder; hope and despair – these opposites mingle here, escaping their entrapment in any fixed classification, and become one and the same formless thing. The novel’s background is Josef Mengele’s “Zoo” – Barrack 14 of Camp…
