Ethan Canin, Emperor of the Air (1988)

Dear Ethan,

By now it is almost certain, I will read all of your books. You got me; I’m a fan now. I was introduced to you last year through The Palace Thief. I continued this summer with Carry me across the water, and now I’ve finished the very first collection you published, The Emperor of the Air. I hear that this is the book that made you famous, at the early age of 27, and that you got prizes for it. No wonder. Perhaps I should be jealous, because you wrote these stories while attending medical school (Harvard) and got published in The Atlantic, but instead of that, I’m in awe. I’m in love with your delicate stories, and I can’t help but care about your male narrators, may they be teenagers or ageing men. I’ve noticed that the magic doesn’t work as well with female narrators, as in “Pitch memory”, but I suspect you know it as well, because your later works concentrate on male voices.

It would be difficult for me to name my favorite story in your collection. “The Emperor of the Air” reminded me of your other ageing protagonists in the other books I read. An older man with a heart condition launches a struggle with his neighbor who wants him to cut his bug-infested 200-year-old elm tree because he fears that it will contaminate his own trees. This seems like a useless, trivial power conflict, but the old man puts his energy and heart into it as if his life depended upon this tree. It reminded me of very banal situations in which we discover we are ready to go a long way to defend moral positions that we even didn’t know we had until they were attacked.

“The carnival dog, the buyer of diamonds” explores a son-and-father relationship, just like “Star Food” and “The year of getting to know us”. One scene that will stuck with me for sure is in this story when the son is hidden in the car’s trunk while his father has sex with his mistress on the back seat. There are abusive relationships and barely contained violence but the main characters mostly try to figure out a way to grow beyond that. Fathers are not very likeable but they leave an unforgettable imprint into their sons, even decades after. Coming-of-age stories don’t always present a positive epiphany, when young men discover how to lie, or how to compromise. But somehow the stories, while keeping a melancholy tone, are heart-warming and heart-breaking.

And the language, oh the language! What perfectly polished sentences! I wonder what you read to give you such a formidable technique. I read on Internet that you teach at Iowa Writers Retreat: your students are so lucky!

On my table I have “Blue River” and “America America” waiting, and I just ordered “For Kings and Planet” via Bookmooch. I guess that I might need to slow down, otherwise if I wolf down all of your books, there won’t be any left. So please get back to work and prepare us another collection, or another novel!

Yours truly,

Smithereens

I’m in! (Women Unbound Challenge)

I usually steer clear of challenges (because of the induced guilt when I abandon them midway), but I’m mellowing these days. They’re just too tempting. Danielle brought my attention towards the Women Unbound Challenge, hosted by Eva, Aarti and Care. The challenge’s ambition is to read a number of fiction and non-fiction books addressing feminist issues and women studies (a very broad subject indeed). And Emily frightened me with the very reasonable (but very very strict) “Attack the TBR Tome” Challenge. The sheer number of books (20) that need to be tackled before even thinking about getting a new one is way over any realist limit.

Being sure that I will fail Emily’s high standards, I’m mixing 2 challenges into 1, and selecting books on women or from women writers in my TBR pile for the end of this year and the next. I won’t have any problem to reach the “Suffragette” level, which is at least eight books, including at least three non-fiction ones.

I’m slightly cheating, because I’ll include books I was going to read very soon regardless of TBR pile and challenges, and that happen to be written by female authors.

• Let’s see on the fiction side:
• A Woman’s Eye, edited by Sara Paretsky: a collection of mystery short stories by women writers, to see if the noir genre is any different from the male or female point of view, after an interesting point raised by Dorothy.
• Short stories by Edith Wharton
• Short stories by Elizabeth Bowen (because I’ve mooched a collection and never read anything by Bowen)
• Miss Garnett’s Angel by Salley Vickers (got it through Bookmooch on Litlove’s recommendation – well she didn’t recommend this title in particular but I’ve never read Vickers anyway)

• On the non-fiction side, I’ll go heavily towards memoirs:
• One of the memoirs by Simone de Beauvoir (a must on women studies, right?)
• Virginia Woolf’s early diary – I’ve started it last year but was stuck midway.
• The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian by Amanda Vickery, that was highly praised ages ago by Dorothy.
• The diary of Sylvia Plath, that I have left unfinished more than 3 years ago.

Here are my 8, but I’m sure that if I carefully go through our shelves I’ll find a few more to add to my list. So in 2010 I’ll be a Suffragette with a shorter TBR pile!

Celebrating Nanowrimo (without Signing Up)

Ah, November… Rain and wind, night falling at 5, streets blanketed with wet yellow leaves, the long winter coat that doesn’t yet feel boring when you just take it out of the closet… and the Nanowrimo!

In 2005, I joined the crowd, after I had done the math of breaking down the 50,000 words into 30 days to make them a bit more manageable. But the total figure (as in FIVE-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO) remained frightening and completely out of reach. I wanted to prove myself that I was capable of writing so many pages, although my favorite format always had been (and still remains) the short story or the novella. I did most of the research during October. The more I invested into research, the more important the challenge became. I could not fail. I could not just give up, it would have been so disappointing. I wrote during work breaks, at lunch time, over dinner and in the evenings (and I am a big sleeper, so that doesn’t amount to much!). I plotted during my commute. I was elated, I was stressed, I obsessed over wordcount. I even made an Excel chart to record the progress towards the dreaded FIVE-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO. Mr. Smithereens was very very supportive, even though it meant one whole month of eating frozen mush, listening to a lot of crap about fictional people and watching tv alone on the sofa while I tried to concentrate in the next room. I never managed to join one of those real-life meetings and writing sessions organized in Paris’ Starbucks coffee, but I remember with fondness the forums, especially the mystery and history ones, where people exchanged tips and encouragement. The sense of community really gave me momentum to write on and let go of my doubts.

On November 30, I reached the great FIVE-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO (and maybe a dozen more, but just about so). I had over 80 single-spaced pages of adventures set in Manchuria back in the 1920s. I was among the 9,700 winners (on 59,000 participants). I felt so happy, and Mr. Smithereens seemed very proud to have a wife capable of writing so many words in such a short time.

Four years later, I still have the draft on my computer. The story has been left where it stood on November 30, 2005 (I suck at story endings, as a principle). I still have the Excel chart. I haven’t done really anything out of this project, but it still feels great. The lesson I got is that I needed to pay more attention to the plot and the steps towards the resolution of the mystery, and not just about the characters and the setting of the initial conflict. And for the record, I’m still stuck after page 3 of each short story I write.

November has taken a whole new meaning ever since, as I think about the thousands of people who struggle at writing like crazy for one whole month. I know I won’t be able to devote so much time to writing in such a short period for a while, but I’m okay with that. So I just want to cheer on all the 2009 Nanowrimo participants, especially Cam who regularly drops by. I remember that the second part of the month drags on and on and that writing seems harder and harder every day. Go writers! You can do it! FIVE-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO!

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951)

Two weeks ago we were all down with stomach flu while in Normandy, so I spent an inordinate amount of time in bed with a book… and lucky for me, my choice of books for the short holidays proved wise, The Daughter of Time is probably one of the most entertaining books I read this year! (There’s nothing worse than being stuck out of home, sick and without a proper thing to read… the only option left is then the midday tv rerun shows which are so bad you might find yourself even sicker).

But before that, let me tell you how I got to this book. The Daughter of Time is a mystery classics, deemed one of the 100 best mysteries of all time in a little guide book I have, but I’m generally fearful of those lists. So I got this battered copy from… Philippines, through a generous Bookmooch member. I like the fact that this copy (a US edition from 1977) has travelled half the world to reach me. It somehow adds to the mystery.

Now, for the story, it’s no less than a new take on Richard III murder of the Princes in the Tower. Inspector Grant (a recurring character in Tey’s mysteries, so I understand) is bed-ridden in a hospital and bored to death, when a friend suggests him to busy himself with portraits of famous historical criminals. Richard III, the ugly and evil hunchback from Shakespeare’s play, is given another chance when Grant discovers his portrait as a nice and rather dignified man. Grant’s intuition leads him to prove the King’s innocence, demonstrating that the murder of his own nephews in 1483 is more than improbable.

I will leave the details to you, but I got a refresher course in British history which I’d never bothered to pay attention to (royalties and dynasties are Mr. Smithereens’ forte, not mine). I’m normally completely impervious to complex family trees (the very notion of who is the cousin twice removed of the second daughter of my aunt escapes me even when there is an inheritance at stake), so I’m quite proud to have been able to follow the complexities of Richard III immediate parentage, although I skipped the part on the war of the Roses. (Isn’t it awful that history courses in high school are so focused on national history?)

I liked the sarcastic tone of the story, I really laughed out loud more than once. Here is a glimpse on the first chapter:

Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. […] He had suggested to The Midget that she might turn his bed around a little so that he could have a new patch of ceiling to explore. But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness. Anything out of this parallel was hospital profanity. Why didn’t he read? she asked. Why didn’t he go on reading some of those expensive brand-new novels that his friends kept on bringing him?
“There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It’s a horrible thought.”
“You sound constipated,” said The Midget.
The Midget was Nurse Ingham, and she was in sober fact a very nice five-feet-two, with everything in just proportion. Grant called her The Midget to compensate himself for being bossed around by a piece of Dresden china which he could pick up in one hand. When he was on his feet, that is to say.

Then Grant sets about describing the pile of bestsellers waiting to be read on his bedside table. Just to give a sample:

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas’s last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas’s fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steam downwards, Silas would have introduced it.

Sounds like a great book, isn’t it? Josephine Tey’s wit throughout the book was probably the best medicine.

A Reading and “Writing” Saturday

The books I got using my company’s gift cards are definitely on the dark side. The first one I got, a few weeks ago, is French and a recent release (unusual for me, if you follow this blog): “D’autres vies que la mienne” [Other lives than my own], by Emmanuel Carrère, a writer who has a reputation for being narcissist and realist (he writes about real and dark events and about his own life). It’s disturbing and quite a difficult read: within a year, he has witnessed death of 2 close people: a child who died in the 2004 tsunami while Carrère was in holidays in Asia, and his sister-in-law who died of cancer. The parents’ child and his brother-in-law both “asked” him to write their stories, so he reconstructs the lives of both families and the events with surgical precision. It’s heart-wrenching and not at all complacent.

On Saturday morning, I bought 2 more new books from my little bookshop nearby (that accepts big brand gift cards): The Road, by Cormac McCarty, because of the good feedback it got throughout the lit-blog world; and Gomorrha, by Roberto Saviano, a non-fiction book about the Naples mafia that reads like a gripping novel but gets even more horrific as you realize it’s true and personal. As I usually read several books in parallel, I plan to select optimistic, or cheerful (but not too pollyannaish) novels to re-balance this downright black series. Suggestions are welcome!

On Saturday afternoon, I had a strange misadventure at the library, when I discovered 5 unknown books on my personal card… Oops! Apparently a computer glitch had made it possible to register on my account books that went to another user (last time I went, there was indeed a system breakdown). I was really stressed out, because if the unknown user decided not to return the books, I would have to pay for all 5 of them, as I was unable to prove I didn’t have them myself. The librarian decided to extend the loan for another 2 weeks and hope for the best… I checked almost everyday from then on, and yesterday night the 5 books had disappeared from my account!

And to finish this glorious Saturday, I went to the writing group again! Our usual host, David, was not there (I guess he had some Halloween activity), but we had a female, Californian, motherly figure instead (a friend of his) to replace him, and the meeting was rather crazy. We heard hilarious pieces and obscure poems, stories with a Vietnam colonel in drag, and a lesbian pirate attacking Walmart (people are usually a little nervous about showing their pieces around and this one succeeded in relaxing the general atmosphere!). The writer of the lesbian pirate adventure offered each of us a queer audio-book on CD and a piece of chocolate. French people don’t celebrate Halloween, so the American expats in the room were a bit home-sick and ready for any kind of banter. Once again, I wrote nothing at all, but it was great!

Le Fanu vs. Collins: the match

With my deepest apologies for those who know anything about wrestling rules, my (twisted) imagination had Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins both stepping up for a Victorian mystery competition, with a parallel reading of The Evil Guest (Le Fanu, 1851) and The Dead Secret (Collins, 1857). This was my Halloween October reading project, so my little report is now overdue!

The best title: Le Fanu. I still can’t decide really who the evil guest is: the scheming aristocrat cousin who invites himself out of the blue to the Gray Forest estate, the treacherous French governess (French are treacherous by nature, right?) or possibly evil itself that invaded the mind of the father and lord of the house? This is obviously more troubling than the “Dead secret” which actually means nothing more than a deathbed secret, that is not so difficult to guess. You could have done better, Wilkie!

The best for creepy atmosphere: Le Fanu – The few first lines already give a very Halloween-esque setting:

About sixty years ago, and somewhat more than twenty miles from the ancient town of Chester, in a southward direction, there stood a large, and, even then, an old-fashioned mansion-house. [...]A certain air of neglect and decay, and an indescribable gloom and melancholy, hung over it. In darkness, it seemed darker than any other tract; when the moonlight fell upon its glades and hollows, they looked spectral and awful, with a sort of churchyard loneliness; and even when the blush of the morning kissed its broad woodlands, there was a melancholy in the salute that saddened rather than cheered the heart of the beholder.

The best for description of gory murders: ditto. Maybe Le Fanu is the grandfather of the slasher movie, who knows?

The best for heroes: Collins. The couple of newly-weds are suitably endearing (just to make you cry a little harder, the husband is blind and the generous heroin has recently lost her father in a shipwreck). The nervous lady’s maid who received the deathbed secret from the heroin’s dying mother is truly desperate and weak. The good guys in Le Fanu are just bland.

The best for evil enemies: Le Fanu. The cleverest thing about The Evil Guest is that the reader is left to guess the deepest treacheries that the bad guys have done in the past. Present characters allude to it, but nothing is for certain. Some may find it annoying, but I expected the worse! Collins’ bad guys are ridiculous and slightly pitiable, not downright evil. [Spoiler alert] In Le Fanu, bad guys get their comeuppance, but quite late and not by law. At the end of The Evil Guest, the bad governess who ran away with the master meets a terrible death during the French revolution. Here again the worst is only alluded to, to tease the reader:

But a day of reckoning was to come. A few years later France was involved in the uproar and conflagration of revolution. Noble families were scattered, beggared, decimated; and their dependants, often dragged along with them into the flaming abyss, in many instances suffered the last dire extremities of human ill. It was at this awful period that a retribution so frightful and extraordinary overtook Madame Marston, that we may hereafter venture to make it the subject of a separate narrative. Until then the reader will rest satisfied with what he already knows of her history; and meanwhile bid a long, and as it may possibly turn out, an eternal farewell to that beautiful embodiment of an evil and disastrous influence.

The best for mysteries: Actually, it depends how you like mysteries. If you want a clearly-cut rational explanation for everything, then it would be Collins. If you enjoy the titillation just for the sake of it, then Le Fanu is the best. It’s basically a locked room murder mystery, but in terms of police investigation it fails to be realistic.

The best for secondary characters: hands down for Collins. As The Dead Secret was published in weekly installments, there are quite a crowd of secondary characters with a voice and a full description, many of them comical or ridiculous [think Dickens, but less wry].

The best for location: a close call for Collins (Porthgenna Tower in Cornwall, with an abandonned wing full of mysterious rooms)

The best for time-line: Collins. Le Fanu’s notion of time is completely suspended, characters are stuck in limbo. Collins’ mystery spans over 2 generations, so there’s a good notion of how guilt (from the secret) expands over time and has implications over children as well as parents.

The best for Halloween thrill: Le Fanu. Somehow I felt the strong influence of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic mysteries, and I failed to see any influence of Le Fanu on Collins.

The best for plausibility and realism: no prize given. Both novels are completely far-fetched when you come down to the facts. Le Fanu borders to fantastic, so it may be an excuse, but Collins’ twists and turns are complete Victorian clichés, obsessing on status and relative ranks in society.

I felt that The Dead Secret was really not Collins’ best. As a matter of fact, I later read that the reception was rather cool; readers must have guessed the secret just like me! I’ll probably get back to a Collins’ novel I started before the Summer holidays: The Law and The Lady, which was a lot more intriguing.

Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher (2007)

My love affair with Tom Perrotta’s… books (no spicy revelation here) goes back to the movie Little Children, with Kate Winslet. I loved how he portrayed American suburbs (homogeneously white and well-off, probably North-eastern) and the feeling of emptiness in a golden cage. In a close parallel, the depiction of British well-off suburbia in Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park had put me off. Perrotta’s approach is kinder to his characters, bitter-sweet and laugh-out-loud funny when he decides to be satirical. But if you don’t like that theme, give The Abstinence Teacher a pass, because it’s the same world all over again.

Except that on top of it, he adds Born-again Christians, and the explosive confrontation of sex education and religion. I won’t enter this debate because as a European, and [full disclosure] atheist on top of that, I’m certainly too far away to have an informed opinion. Religion (and sex) just don’t have the same inflammatory role in French society as in America. Evangelist Christians are a tiny minority here, and society is so secular that a prayer on the football field would just be unthinkable, as would the hijacking of sex-ed programs in high school by abstinence supporters. [On the downside, I barely remember receiving any sex-ed information in high school except for the reproductive system of the fly]

It was a little after six on Friday evening, but already Bombay Palace was packed, the entrance overrun with cranky families who’d just been informed that they’d have to wait half an hour for a table at the town’s only half-decent alternative to Applebee’s. Tearing off a piece of alu paratha, Ruth registered a flicker of pleasure at her own free agent status. Is was one of the few compensations of divorce, she thought, the one night a week when Frank took the girls and she was able to do what she wanted, no babysitter to pay, no one to report to when she got home. A perfect opportunity to be bad, if she’d had anyone to be bad with.
“Look on the bright side,” Gregory told her. “At least you’re practicing what you preach.”
“I don’t think it qualifies as abstinence if it’s involuntary,” Ruth told him. “It’s just pathetic.”
“And it’s definitely not abstinence if a vibrator’s involved,” Randall added.
“You’re right about that,” she said. “The new curriculum clearly states that masturbation of any kind is strictly verboten. Apparently it’s habit-forming and interferes with your schoolwork.”
“Damn,” said Gregory. “So that’s why I didn’t get into Harvard.”

To me, Perotta is not on the evangelists’ side, but he has a respectful and in-depth view (except perhaps the sexy and ambitious “Virginity consultant”). He doesn’t make them any of them cardboard characters, they’re people of flesh and blood with a background, hopes and doubts. The path of Tim, the soccer trainer, divorced with one early teenaged daughter, ex-addict and alcoholic, ex-loser turned mortgage broker and member of the Tabernacle church, is not simple. His mother accuses him of “Using Jesus like a substitute for drugs, like methadone.” He wants to do the right thing for his daughter, to love his new Christian wife, but even books about Hot Christian Sex don’t help. Ruth, the liberal sex-ed teacher and divorced mother of 2 teenaged daughters is no less flawed. She compromises to teach abstinence in high-school even though she’s unconvinced. She’s shocked to find out that her daughters want to attend church. It’s “like the Invasion of the Body snatchers, or something. You never knew who they were going to get to next.” I found it funny and so true to life that children rebel in whatever way they can incense their parents, even by turning more conservative than them.

“Where’s Eliza?”
Frank jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Ruth turned to see her older daughter sitting at a picnic table beneath a fiery red maple that had already lost half its leaves. She was engrossed in a magazine, most likely a back issue of O or Martha Stewart Living that Frank’s lady friend, Meredith, made a point of passing along, knowing how much she enjoyed them. Ruth waved and called out a greeting, but Eliza didn’t notice – probably too busy boning up on recipes for low-fat crème brûlée or color schemes to beat those stubborn winter blahs. Ruth watched her for a moment, struggling against a combination of exasperation and pity that Eliza so often provoked in her. She was fourteen going on forty, for God’s sake. Wasn’t it past time for a little adolescent rebellion?

Certainly Ruth is more accessible to a European audience, but the whole book remains deliciously exotic to me, as if I were cruising the quiet streets of a Massachusetts suburb and wondering from afar about the strange rules of baseball. I’ve never met anyone like Tim, so to an extent he remains a totally fictional person. Of course, I get the references to Oprah, to Martha Stewart and others [although I confess an obscure reference to a “veejay cheerleader” totally lost me], from my personal experience and the global tv culture, but somehow this book reminds me of the persistent cultural gaps between both sides of the Atlantic.

The Return of the Writing Group

I wanted a very Halloweenesque title but this is totally misleading, the title should really be “return to”. I’m so happy to report here that I finally returned to my “official” writing group after nearly 1 ½ year.

It’s almost surrealistic how little it changed while I was away. It is held at the famous bookshop “Shakespeare and Co.” close to the river Seine and Notre Dame, and the meeting room is a very atmospheric library with rough benches, a frayed carpet and musty books that aren’t for sale: actually a perfect setting for a gothic short story! The group leader is still the same, bedraggled, pale and thin, hurried-but-always-ready-for-a-pint-afterwards, limerick-loving and with such a great theatrical voice for epic poems. And even though most of the group are American artsy students and au-pairs (a therefore transient and tortured – if not navel-gazing – little troop), I recognized a few members, the lyrical middle-aged female poet with a large golden mane and long, a bit spidery limbs, and Robert, a very nice middle-aged guy who shares his time between France and the US and who’s always ready to read aloud and comment but rarely brings his own pieces.

I stopped going, oh I don’t remember the exact last session I joined, but I was already very pregnant by then, and sitting there in the crowded little room (no toilet) wasn’t fun anymore. Everybody there suddenly seemed… I don’t know, so young, unattached, egocentric, rootless. The bookshop seemed very far from our home, the metro journey unbearably long and stuffy, and the baby had somehow sucked all my inspiration. I was dazed, but not in a creative way. And after that last session, well, I never found the time and energy on Saturday afternoons anymore. Not to mention that blog aside, I wrote nearly nothing, no fiction to speak of. Even less to consider presenting in front of 20 strangers.

But this month I found a good friend through Facebook, someone I met back when we were in a writing group together on the other side of the world, and she reminded me of the fun of this all. Mr. Smithereens kindly agreed to entertain our toddler during the meeting this weekend. I was elated, but it felt strange, it felt… bloody long (2 hours!! How will Baby S survive?? While I routinely let him with the nanny all day long…) and to say nothing of the guilt. But at the end of the session my brain was full of words and ideas, new ones, old ones. I had heard funny theater scenes, obscure poems, a page of a thriller. And nobody said it was worthless and futile. It’s worth it. Definitely. I’ll go again.

Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants (2007)

Don’t be fooled by the cover design, cute pink with girly drawings of a teapot and an iron! This is not a light book (no pun intended!), and decidedly not chick lit. I expected to be swept off my feet, but the result is somewhat harsher and more bitter than expected. I’m still not quite sure of what to think about it, so this post will probably be a mess.

Regarding the “Servants” part of the title, Light gives a rich overview of the transformations of domestic service in Britain, from the late Victorians to post-WW2, which actually covers Woolf’s lifetime. I was fascinated by this side of the book, how domestic service basically disappeared after being the first source of employment for women in Victorian England. Her approach is systematic, never ashamed of details, and close to another history book I loved, The Victorian House by Judith Flanders (especially the unappetizing bits about sewage management).

But things get a lot more difficult (for me, for the writer and her subject) when we get to the “Mrs. Woolf” part. The title can be read in many ways: who were Virginia Woolf’s servants? How did Woolf treat her servants? What did they do for her? What did Woolf write and think about servants in general? All these questions get contradictory answers: Virginia Woolf dreamt of being able to live without servants, but she actually never did (even when she claimed she was, and it was not before the late 1930s, she still had a daily char coming, but no live-in servants anymore). She (and Bloomsbury artists as a whole) treated her servants perhaps more liberally than in other milieus, but she was also stingy and possessive, and the words she used about them in her diary are often shockingly spiteful or even insulting. She dreamt that women would be equals and free, but she was deeply disturbed that such liberal views would make her servants, and other lower-classes people, her own equals. A detailed analysis of her novels show the nearly physical disgust for the women in charge of the messy parts of life, which resonates with her disgust for bodies. The only way she could describe them in novels was as exotic, distant creatures, in no way close to her.

I feel a bit sad to see Virginia Woolf under this angle of being insensitive and mean and ungrateful towards her domestic servants. While reading it came to me that it was an unfair indictment against her, that the fact that she kept such a minute diary (registering the bulk of daily life and conversations in a way that few others have done) made it possible to be picky in retrospect, while she may have been a mistress no worse or no better than her contemporaries. I understood that Alison Light’s project was to record the lives of those women who shared Woolf’s life in as much detail as Woolf’s diary (because they remain largely absent in her diary). But as much as the history of domestic service interested me, I didn’t so much care about the details of Nellie Boxhall’s or Lotte Hope’s ancestors and opinions as such. It may be very politically incorrect but even if servant and mistress are all equally respectable, in this case I’m not as interested in the former as in the latter.

Woolf’s diary is priceless not only for the insight it gives into Bloomsbury characters and history, but mostly because of the writer’s vision and writing, something that sets her apart from others. Her inconsistencies in treating the “lower classes” don’t make her a lesser writer. She professed high political ambitions, but it would be wrong to take her as a living icon for these ideas. And it’s not only her education and money (or gender, for that matter) that made her an extraordinary artist. In a disturbing page, Alison Light makes a parallel between depressive Woolf (always taken care of during her deepest crisis) and a borderline servant, “Mad Mary” who suffered from delusional “hysteria” (as it was called then) and who was quickly bundled off. Woolf never acknowledged in her writing that they may have both suffered from the same affliction and rather distanced herself from the “poor woman”. But placed in her shoes, who would? Was she expected to empathize while she struggled against her own demons? To my surprise, Alison Light rather underlines in the conclusion of this part that the maid couldn’t afford psychoanalysis: “in another life intelligent, inventive, artful “Mad Mary”, doomed to be a housemaid, might well have been a writer. But who knows what she actually was?” I was downright annoyed: Mad Mary might have been a writer, but she might just as well not be. Not all frustrated, deprived housemaids could have become writers. I was deeply uncomfortable with this relativism. To me, it’s about as useful as building castles in the air. Domestic service made social inequalities an obvious fact in every well-off home, but that doesn’t mean that all of them were abusive. It may be a quandary to live in a democratic society with high level of inequalities, where some people are bound to serve others, but… that’s life. Some socialist dictators have tried to force absolute equality but it was a disaster. There is a bitterness in Alison Light’s voice, a way to tell early on that her own grandmother was in service, a way to warn the reader that we all are being cared for in childhood and in our old age, so that the question of servants is never solved, that I didn’t find appropriate.

Maybe this rant is turning into an unfair indictment against Alison Light’s book, and unfair it is indeed, as this book is a fascinating read for all those interested in this period of Britain history and in Virginia Woolf.

Geraldine Brooks, March (2005)

I guess that some books should not be read during some periods in your life, but it doesn’t reflect at all on the quality of the book itself. It reminds me that I’d avoided reading “We need to talk about Kevin” by Lionel Shriver, while I was pregnant. This time, it’s perhaps not a very good idea to read this book before your own wedding, to offer it to newlyweds or to read around the time of your wedding anniversary (as it was the case for me). It just kills the idea of a good marriage. It makes you wonder how much you really understand your spouse. It shakes the foundations of your assumptions about great couples that you’ve seen and envied in literature.

Geraldine Brooks takes the iconic image of a family, the perfect March family of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and turns it into an adult novel. Not “adult” in the sense that there would be a lot of sex in it (there is some but we remain firmly in the 19C and feelings remain proper — although the violence is enough to rate it PG15 in my opinion), but because we deal with adults failing their own expectations, having their dreams shattered, misunderstanding each other, betraying each other, in short: having to deal with the messy parts of life, not just the ideal one of the Little Women.

In Alcott’s novel, the father is absent, a chaplain in the Civil War. A turning point of the book has Mrs. March called to his bedside because he has been injured, but we don’t know the circumstances. Geraldine Brooks turns this father into a man of flesh and bones and ideals, the Civil War into a messy business where North and South are equally bloody and compromised (the battle scenes remind me of Cold Mountain) and where nobody comes out nice, Mr. March included.

Didn’t you wonder if everything was just as perfect in the little cottage of Jo, Megg, Amy and Beth as Alcott wanted us to believe? Brooks tells us that most of it was fake, or at least really fraught. If the March lived in the 20C, I guess they would have divorced, and not become a children’s classics.

As previous books by Geraldine Brooks (I had loved Year of Wonders), the novel brims with information and research. Mr. March’s character is inspired by Alcott’s own father, who was a friend of Thoreau and Emerson. Somehow, because I didn’t learn American history on a proper timeline, I hadn’t understood till now that Thoreau and Emerson were actually contemporary with the Civil War. Brooks makes us painfully aware of the collision between idealism (to the point of naivety) and realism (Brooks was a war correspondent and obviously knows what she writes about). Because he doesn’t want to hurt his wife’s feelings, he lies by omission and his writing is falsely cheerful, flowery to the point of being annoying. He turns to nature descriptions because he can’t face writing about violence and destruction, his own guilt and mistakes, and the mix between these 2 voices just underlines how much distance there is between the father and the rest of his family.

It gives a sad and sobering undertone to the prim and proper Little Women I so loved as a young teenager, but revisiting the old classics in this new perspective is a chance rather than a betrayal. I was very lucky to discover this books thanks to Cam, who gave it to me when she came to Paris last summer!