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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)”
Tag: Novel
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”
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,”
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”
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”
The rainbow bubble came along and I grasped it
Dear Capel, Painted Clay (1917) is centred on Helen Somerset, an Australian girl coming of age in Melbourne, in the years before WWI. As the story opens,…… Read more “The rainbow bubble came along and I grasped it”
Stolen waters are the sweetest
Dear Jessie, Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928) centres on Angela Murray, a middle-class girl from a black family in Philadelphia. Angela and her mother, Mattie,…… Read more “Stolen waters are the sweetest”
A fire around my soul
Dear Frances, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) centres on the eponymous heroine, Iola Leroy, the daughter of a white slave owner and one of his slaves.…… Read more “A fire around my soul”
So much humanity quelled down and buried beneath a concrete of inflexible obedience
Dear Geraldine, The Half Sisters (1848) is this puzzling thing: it peels off the layers of Victorian convention and throws a sharp light over their underlying lack…… Read more “So much humanity quelled down and buried beneath a concrete of inflexible obedience”
The fathomless ocean on which they had set out with such unknowing fearlessness
Dear Amy, The Romance of a Shop (1888) is all about framing: depending on the way we turn our lens and the point where we choose to…… Read more “The fathomless ocean on which they had set out with such unknowing fearlessness”
We can be an army of two
Dear Isabel, Patience and Sarah (originally self-published in 1969 as A Place For Us) reads like going on a journey outside the closet while remaining firmly locked…… Read more “We can be an army of two”
A creature of strength and grace and beauty and softness
Dear Florence, Her Father’s Name (1876) features the best (and worst) of what a Victorian Sensational novel has to offer: an exotic location, murder, a cross-dressing heroine with…… Read more “A creature of strength and grace and beauty and softness”
