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Dear Penelope, The Pumpkin Eater (1962) is a disillusioned account of a woman’s emotional collapse, told from the fog of self-delusion and depression in which her mind seems…… Read more “I have tried to be honest with you,”
Tag: Marriage
You cannot live in armour all your life
Dear Maria, In Belinda (first published in 1801, revised in 1810), we can almost feel the double-edged sword you are playing with: while championing the idea that…… Read more “You cannot live in armour all your life”
Notes heard by no one reverberating against nothing
Dear Robert, Intimate Ties, tr. Peter Wortsman (2019. Original: Vereinigungen, 1911) comprises two novellas centred on repressed sexuality, taboo, and female desire. Both content and narrative style…… Read more “Notes heard by no one reverberating against nothing”
You’ve stayed where you were
Dear Agatha, Absent in the Spring (1944) is a character study and a psychological exploration of self-denial, crossed through by a growing sense of unease at each…… Read more “You’ve stayed where you were”
Hardness was probably his most distinctive quality
Dear Laura, Reading your novel Breathing into Marble, tr. Marija Marcinkute (2016. Original: Kvėpavimas į marmurą, 2006) feels like being trapped in a room of glass: it’s…… Read more “Hardness was probably his most distinctive quality”
Two half drowned things, clinging together in a shipwreck
Dear Elizabeth, Vera (1921) is the story of a toxic relationship which gradually unfolds into a full-blown tale of psychological horror, made ever more disturbing by the…… Read more “Two half drowned things, clinging together in a shipwreck”
What two people can make of the same view
Dear Elizabeth, In your novel A View from the Harbour (1947), we are sea watchers, guided by a faint beam. It feels very much as if we…… Read more “What two people can make of the same view”
I believe in the god of carnage
Dear Yasmina, Threading the thin line between civility and barbarity, you manage to convey, with acerbic wit, how civility and good intentions are slowly but steadily sacrificed…… Read more “I believe in the god of carnage”
Like a gifted mathematician set to paint a picture
Dear Dorothy, The Home-Maker (1924) does a good job at portraying a situation where people are forced into restrictive roles not only by external expectations and social…… Read more “Like a gifted mathematician set to paint a picture”
There was always a wind blowing
Dear Monica, Do you know this feeling of slowly being enveloped by coldness? Like at the end of a sunny day: with the faint memory of the…… Read more “There was always a wind blowing”
A small tear in the fabric of reality
Dear Nicole, Most of the time, we tend to think of fiction as a mirror held up, facing reality. Never mind if this is a clear mirror,…… Read more “A small tear in the fabric of reality”
The sky was red and all my life was in it.
Dear Jean, In your novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), you seem to be holding up a distorting mirror to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847): if we look…… Read more “The sky was red and all my life was in it.”
She was still her own indomitable self,
Dear Willa, A Lost Lady (1923) is a story drenched in melancholy. A short-lived world is coming of age and, caught in its remaking, its inhabitants seem…… Read more “She was still her own indomitable self,”
Virtue can sometimes be a little depressing
Dear Barbara, Excellent Women (1952) is a comedy of manners about a spinster surrounded by people who cannot see why she shouldn’t suffer for being single. She…… Read more “Virtue can sometimes be a little depressing”
Hope is a wound
Dear Marianne, The Weight of Things (2015), translated by Adrian Nathan West (Die Schwerkraft der Verhältnisse, 1978) is this odd thing: something in-between a horror story, a…… Read more “Hope is a wound”
She sensed a scream beneath the silence,
Review: The Beautiful Bureaucrat, by Helen Phillips
Dear Helen,
It is difficult to pin down your novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015): a dystopia that reads like a thriller with brief incursions into horror, literary modernism and satire? It’s hard to say. But, by trying too much, and rushing to the tidy end, it might have fallen short of being great in any of these categories.
It was the memory of a memory by now—the hallmark of happiness, that scene
Review: In a Summer Season, by Elizabeth Taylor
We are more porous than we know
Dear Emily, Although centred around a murder, your debut novel Idaho (2017) does not revolve around the questions of who might have done it or why; yours…… Read more “We are more porous than we know”
