Tag Archives: Rumer Godden

A Neglected Masterpiece:  Rumer Godden’s “Kingfishers Catch Fire”

Rumer Godden’s spellbinding novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire, has somehow escaped the attention of twenty-first-century readers. 

Published in 1953, this pre-hippie masterpiece is set in a village in Kashmir. Sophie, a single mother, decides to move there with her two children in order to live cheaply. 

Sophie is impulsive. When she gets an idea, she sticks to it. No one thinks this move is a good idea:  not Doctor Lachinval at the Mission Hospital, who has nursed her through a serious illness; not Profit David, a merchant who has sold her antiques and is owed money;  and certainly not Sophie’s daughter, Theresa, who is tired of adventure and wants an ordinary life in England. 

Sophie is a dreamer: she imagines living simply near the beautiful lakes and mountains and making friends with the other inhabitants, who, she is sure, live simply and healthily. In reality, the villagers live not only simply but in abject poverty. 

But it’s not just Godden’s fascinating plot that makes this a classic:  it’s her linguistic acrobatics, her glorious descriptions, and her mastery of the fluctuations of time.  Her flights from one time to another embellish the richness of her style.  On page 4, Sophie of the near future looks back on her life in Kashmir when she was 35 with amazement.

Virago edition

…afterwards she often wondered how she had managed to reach that age and remain as insouciant as she was.  “Insouciant is the right word,” said Sophie.  “Careless and indifferent.”  It was not that things did not go wrong.  They did, very often, though she could never see why.  “But what did I do?” she would ask when they had.  “I didn’t mean it to turn out like that.”

In the village, things do not go well at first. She has hired carpenters to fix the roof and do some renovations and is astonished to learn that they are cheating her: they substitute bent nails for the new ones she has bought. 

And then there are the two battling factions in the village: the rule is that she must have business dealings with one group and not the other.   When she decides she wants to live in peace and be friendly with both groups, she unwittingly puts her children in danger.  Even Theresa has a greater understanding of village politics.

There are problems, but there is much humor, too.  In the summer Sophie organizes an herbal medicine business, with no real idea as to whether or not the concoctions heal.  But the women of the village have come to her for medical help, and benefited from the herbal tea, they think, and they enjoy growing the herbs, gathering wild flowers, and packaging them. It’s fun for all of them.

But it’s odd, isn’t it, how easy it is to make enemies when one doesn’t understand the rules?  Sophie is blithe but oblivious to social cues in a foreign culture. The villagers have minimal contact with the outside world.

Godden’s autobiographical novel could easily be set in the ’60s or ’70s, but Kingfishers Catch Fire, based on Godden’s life with her two daughters in Kashmir in the early 1940s, smashes our belief in the clear demarcations between eras.

Time is… shall we say fluid?  It also flies.

N.B. This book is difficult to find, but the Virago edition (pictured above) is in print and is available at Amazon and Abebooks.

Rumer Godden’s “China Court”:  A Middlebrow Classic

It was difficult in the early twenty-first century to track down Rumer Godden’s out-of-print novels. Many were best-sellers in the 20th century, but had fallen out of fashion. Several of her books were adapted as films, including two versions of Black Narcissus, the first a movie starring Deborah Kerr in 1947, and the second a Hulu TV series in 2020.

Despite filmmakers’ interest in Godden’s novels (there is a long list of films at IMDB), most are “unadaptable,” in my opinion.  No one would dare adapt China Court, a labyrinthine novel published in 1960 about five generations of a family and the history of China Court, their house in Cornwall.   

The first American edition. Such old-fashioned cover art…

This is not a traditional family saga: Godden’s style is whimsically post-modern. She plays with time-lines, shifting back and forth, often in the same paragraph.  In the following paragraph, four characters of three generations appear in six sentences.

… the drawing room runs the the width of the house from front to back and needs two fireplaces to warm it.  “Central heating,” says Bella longingly, but there is no money for that.  A great deal of money has been spent; Eustace, for instance, builds on a conservatory that does not match the house at all; Mrs. Quinn pulls it down.  Eustace adds the nursery wing; Lady Patrick makes new stables, but now, for years, little even of repairs and painting has been done.  “It’s too expensive,” insists Bella.  “Too big.”

The central characters are Mrs. Quinn and the house itself. Godden begins with her death: “Old Mrs. Quinn died in her sleep in the early hours of an August morning.”  Mrs. Quinn, nicknamed Ripsi as a child, was drawn to the garden of China Court when she was a young girl; then befriended by the Quinn boys, Borowis, with whom she fell in love, and John Henry, whom she married. She especially loved the garden at China Court.

The characters’ relations to the house over two centuries form the structure of the narrative.  Ironically, Mrs. Quinn’s children cannot understand why she did not move to an apartment in old age. They consider China Court a white elephant and lament its lack of modern conveniences.  Tracie, Mrs. Quinn’s 21-year-old granddaughter, the daughter of an unstable American film star, Barbara, lived with her grandmother at China Court when Barbara’s schedule was hectic. Tracie is the only one who loves China Court.

One of Godden’s earlier novels, A Fugue in Time (1945), is also the story of a house, spanning 100 years.  I look at that as her apprentice work for the more sophisticated China Court.

China Court is a charming read, a book that has held up, and come to think of it, A Fugue in Time would be the perfect companion book. A Fugue in Time was published in the U.S. as Take Three Tenses.

A Rediscovered Classic: Rumer Godden’s “Breakfast with the Nikolides”

The fabulous Carnegie public library, still standing but long deserted, and now occluded by towering skyscrapers, was the destination of thousands of readers in our small town in the twentieth century. Here I discovered some of my favorite English books: Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Angela Carter’s bafflingly beautiful fairy tales, and Rumer Godden’s lyrical novels. 

Just as the old library building is obsolete, Godden’s books were out-of-print when I decided to reread them in the early 2000’s.  All of her adult books, except An Episode of Sparrows, which was reissued as a children’s book; In This House of Brede, a fascinating nun novel reissued by Loyola Press; and Kingfishers Catch Fire, a pre-hippie novel set in Kahmir, and reissued by Milkweed Editions, had to be hunted down at used bookstores and online bookshops.

 Godden is a complex writer, not given her dues. In some of her novels, she uses modernist techniques to connect scenes.  Her playful temporal jumps recall Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Years. And yet only Godden’s best-selling third novel, Black Narcissus (1938), the story of a convent in the mountains of India, seems to be remembered, perhaps because it was adapted as a film with Deborah Kerr, and more recently, as a TV miniseries.

Godden is a distinctly odd writer, a kind of pop-literary modernist, who breaks up her narratives with temporal antics and intersperses sudden switches to outsiders commenting on the situation.  The opening scene of her fifth novel, Breakfast with the Nikolides (1942), is told from the (third-person) point-of-view of a dog. The plot radiates from the axis of this tormented scene.

Don, a spaniel who spends his days romping with Emily and Binnie, the children who own him, becomes suddenly desperately ill,  befuddled, nervous, and excited. “There was nothing he wanted, but he could not be still, he could not feel or behave quite like himself. He had been a serene and normal dog, quietly engaged in completing himself from a puppy to an adult, but now, and all day, he was like the mirage of a spaniel, lifted out of himself and thrown distorted and heightened on the air.  He had to run and run and run.”

What a sad phrase, “the mirage of a spaniel.” There is nothing sadder than the death of a pet, and I was already crying on the first page. Then Godden switches scenes: she jumps back a few months. And we meet Charles Pool, a college professor and director of the Government Farm in Amorra in India, who has taught Indians to modernize agricultural methods.  Every night he listens to the radio news about the outbreak of World War II, but is surprised when his difficult wife, Louise, who left him eight years ago, writes that she is  returning with the children. Terrified of the war in France, she travels from Paris to India with their two daughters, Emily and Binnie, the latter of whom Charles has never seen, because she was born after the separation.   

Dismayed by the sight and smells of India, Louisa is appalled and remember why she left.  The children, however, love the large house, love being with their father, and especially love their dog, Don, whom Charles gives them against Louise’s wishes. Louise already has two Pekineses, but Emily and Binnie do not think they are “proper” dogs.

As so often happens in Godden’s novels, there is a conflict between man and wife and a tussle over the children.  When the dog gets ill, Louise is hysterically sure that it has rabies and insists that he be put down.  Charles is more sensible:  he sends for the vet, Narayan, who is another of the main characters:  Narayan is unhappily married to a young Indian wife, and is having an affair with a rich, beautiful young man, a college student, Anil.  Charles and Louise hustle the children off for breakfast with their Greek friends, the Nikolides, because they want to protect them from news of the dog’s illness. But Narayan is slow, in coming and Charles must go to work, so he tells Louise that the dog must not be killed before Emily and Binnie have a chance to say good-bye.

You will not be surprised to learn that haughty Louise disobeys:  she immediately orders Narayan to kill the dog.  Narayan is intimidated by this arrogant white woman, but he insists on examining the dog, says it’s too early to tell if it is rabies,  and they should observe him for a few days. Louise commands him to kill the dog – the murder, as Emily says –  and this decision leads to tragedy.  No one gets off unscathed, and Louise’s poor management of the situation has repercussions. Even when Louise is right, her inability to consider other people causes trauma. And, surprisingly, we see parallels between Louise and Anil, Narayan’s boyfriend: both are beautiful, arrogant, and disdainful of other people’s feelings.

One quirk I very much like: Godden inserts bits of remembered dialogue in parentheses. In a conversation between Emily and her father, she is trying to make sense of home.

(“What do you call people who live in a country always, Charles?”)

(“Natives, I suppose.”)

(“No, not natives.  People who come to it and want to belong to it and never go away.”)

(“Domiciled citizens.”)

(“Then Binnie and I should like to be domiciled citizens, Charles.”)

Breakfast with the Nikolides is one of Godden’s best novels, partly because of the ambiguity. White Louise survives while the Indian aristocrat Anil is quelched. Godden, who grew up in India and ran a ballet school there for many years, is aware of the racial issues. I also recommend her autobiographical novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire (1953), the story of a young, impecunious, pre-hippie mother, Sophie, who moves with her two children to a tiny village in Kashmir, having no idea that their presence will upset the alien culture. 

A Sentient Country House: “China Court” by Rumer Godden

The copyright page of Rumer Godden’s brilliant 1960 novel, China Court, says: “A serial version of this book appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal.”

Oh, my goodness! That means my grandma read it. She subscribed to McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The magazines were neatly stacked on shelves in the sun room and sometimes we spent an afternoon reading them and eating peppermints. The serialization of China Court, however, would have been before my time.

China Court is one of Rumer Godden’s best novels – and one of my favorites – and must have given enormous pleasure to home-loving readers and aspiring homeowners who pored over the women’s magazines for decor suggestions. In this stunning novel, Godden tells the story of five generations of the smart, turbulent, often unhappy Quins at China Court, their beautiful country house.

Godden’s layered, generous prose and temporal flexibility make this a modernist masterpiece – says I, though critics often dismiss her. At China House, inanimate objects are as important, sometimes more important, than the animate. Books and houses are characters in their own right. And each chapter opens with a page from The Book of Hours, which Mrs. Quin reads daily, and the book defines recurring time, from Lauds to Matins, and is a piece in the puzzle of China Court’s survival. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, shifting from one century to the next and back again in successive stories. There is a family tree in the front of the book for when you lose track of the characters.

The house and Mrs. Quin/Ripsie are at the crux of the book. Ripsie is an outsider and a lifelong friend of the boys; she marries into the family and becomes Mrs. Quin, and loves China Court more than any of them. But she, too, suffered an early grief: she was in love with Borowis Quin, a charming ne’er-do-well who dumped her after their affair and married another woman for money. His brother, John Henry, the kind, hard-working businessman who kept everything together, stepped up and announced his engagement to Ripsie at a dance, out of pity and without asking her first. She accepted, and the marriage is happy enough. Long after his death – she outlives him by thirty years, dying in 1960 – she loves and takes care of the house, making sacrifices for it, putting it ahead of everything.

The book begins with a death. Let me quote the beginning, to give you a sense of Godden’s style, and the sense that the house is a living, breathing, sentient character, even through death. It starts with the death of the central character.

Old Mrs. Quin died in her sleep in the early hours of an August morning.

The sound of the bell came into the house, but did not disturb it; it was quite used to death, and birth, and life.

The usual house sounds went on, but muted: footsteps, upstairs, Dr. Taft’s, though he did not stay long – “Cause of death, stopped living,” wrote Dr. Taft on the certificate and said he would call in at Mrs. Abel’s on the way home; then Mrs. Abel’s steps, as, quietly, she did what she had to do and, downstairs, Cecily’s as she carried up the coal and made up the kitchen fire, hers and Bumble’s, the old spaniel’s, padding as he followed her backward and forward, forward and backward;…

Births, marriages, and death dominate China House; and the women, who must tend to the stages of life, tend to be unhappy. For instance, the sparkling Lady Patrick (Mrs. Quin’s mother-in-law) adores her sexy husband Jared, but upon returning a few days early from a retreat at a convent, she discovers him cheating on her in their own bed, and she is shattered and embittered. Then there is Jared’s sister, Eliza, a brilliant but bitter spinster who, after she takes over the housekeeping from Lady Pat, cheats on the housekeeping money so as to buy first editions of rare books. Later, she meets a terrible death after the children and villagers see her visiting the gravestone of the clerk who taught her about rare books. They decide she is a witch.

Ah, poor Eliza! Reading women are always in trouble!

The question after Mrs. Quin’s death is: will her granddaughter Tracy take over, or will Mrs. Quin’s conventional, stuffy adult children have their way and sell?

Are you a fan of Godden? And, if so, what is your favorite of her books?

Do you like her writing, or does it grate on you?

I love it, of course.

Happy Godden reading!

A Marvelous Middlebrow Novel: Rumer Godden’s “The Greengage Summer”

There comes a time when we realize we are unlikely to visit Washington, D.C., again. Not that we were particularly drawn to the nation’s capital, but right now we are sickened by the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by violent white men in ball caps. Terrifying and crazy.

Once inside, they became distracted by taking selfies. Fortunately, this helped police track some of them on social media.

A very, very, very sad day for our country.

LIFE GOES ON.

I repaired my rumpled human spirit by curling with The Greengage Summer.

Rumer Godden is an underrated, once very popular novelist, and her 1958 novel, The Greengage Summer, was adapted as a film in 1961, starring Samantha York and Kenneth More. (I haven’t seen the film, but it is on Youtube.) Godden brilliantly portrays the culture of outsiders, and in this book the outsiders are English children on vacation in France. Though this is classified as an adult book, perhaps it could double as a children’s book.

The narrator, 13-year-old Cecil Grey, is in a unique position to observe adult behavior, though she does not always interpret its meaning correctly. On a family vacation in France, her mother is hospitalized with a blood infection, leaving Cecil in charge of her three younger siblings in the hotel while her older sister Joss, age 16, stays in bed with an unnamed adolescent malady. Cecil is the most level-headed, and even understands French, though she doesn’t speak it well. She is frustrated, however, by the powerless condition of being betwixt-and-between: “…now I was relegated to a no-man’s-land myself. I could see it was inevitable–thirteen is not child, not woman, not…declared…”

Godden has a lyrical, whimsical style. Her narratives zigzag from present to future to past, as she inserts dialogue from a different times to highlight an event in the vivid present. (Less of that here than in some of her books, though.)

And she clearly plans the structure from the first sentence to the last. The Greengage Summer begins literally and figuratively in a Paradisal garden, which is eventually invaded by sin. (Joss has a dress she refers to as “sin.”)

Here is the first paragraph:

On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness, because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did. Hester of course was quite unabashed; Will–though he was called Willmouse then–Willmouse and Vicki were too small to reach any but the lowest branches, but they found fruit fallen in the grass; we were all strictly forbidden to climb the trees.

To keep them from underfoot, the manager banishes the children into the garden by day. Sometimes they go to the river, but mostly they lounge in the grass and watch the adult goings-on from afar. Madame Zizi, the owner, is obsessed with her handsome, well-dressed English lover, Eliot, who, when he is the mood, takes the Grey children under his wing. After 16-year-old Joss recovers from her illness, Eliot, wants to be with them all the time, because she is beautiful. Joss knows that he is flirting, but remains innocent of the implications until Madame Zizi makes a unforgivable scene. Then Joss plays the person she is not–with calamitous results.

I esteem Godden for her knowledge of psychology as well as her expertly-woven plots. For instance, the emotional situation here is clear to the children–they recognize the love triangles within triangles, though the underlying personal histories of the lovers are not always clear. Okay, perhaps the end is a bit like a children’s book, with the plot rushing off in an almost ridiculous direction. But do you know what? I believed it.

Out of Time: Rumer Godden’s “The Peacock Spring”

Rumer Godden

Rumer Godden is one of my favorite middlebrow writers, and I’ve been thinking about her because of the lavish TV adaptation of Black Narcissus (the first of her three nun novels, published in 1939). I prefer Godden’s later nun classic, In This House of Brede (1969), but I am fascinated by the disturbing portrayal in Black Narcissus of the dazed nuns distracted by the beautiful Himalayan landscape.

I went through a Godden-mad phase in the zips, when I searched online for her (mostly) out-of-print novels. I was so impressed by these books, and so surprised that so few people read her. Like many women of my generation, I discovered her when I was a child: she wrote several books about dolls, but my favorite was An Episode of Sparrows, about a garden in London. And, as I have indicated above, I was absolutely crazy about In This House of Brede, to the point that I considered becoming a nun–for about an hour.

Now Virago has reissued most of Godden’s books, but I do have several older copies. The other day I was browsing my shelves and found an old book club edition of The Peacock Spring (bought for $1), which I had never read. I am lukewarm about her later books: 1974 is past the date of vintage Godden! This one is not quite as great as some of her others, but Godden’s style is lyrical and witty, and she always has something worth saying.

Born in England and raised in India, Godden manages to be quotidian and unconventional at the same time. Set in India, The Peacock Spring is partly a love story, partly a hate story. Two English half-sisters, fifteen-year-old Una and her frivolous younger sister, Hal, are yanked out of boarding school before the end of term. Their father, Edward, a diplomat in India, wants them to leave school immediately to live with him. The request is very odd, since they have been living with an aunt during vacations.

The situation is especially bad for Una, a math genius who does not want her education derailed. Her sister, Hal, who is completely unacademic, is enthralled by the exoticism of India. But beware fathers seeking their daughters: he has not been straightforward. He has invited them here only so that hisbeautiful Eurasian mistress, Alix, can be their “governess” and have a reason to live with him.

The hatred between Alix and Una grows as Una discovers her hypocrisy and ignorance. Alix simply does not know enough to teach Una. And when, during a battle over calculus, Una declares her enmity by flinging the math book into the garden, she earns the approval of Ravi, a handsome, college-educated gardener who is a poet and who dislikes the haughtiness of Alix. They become close friends, over calculus and poetry.

All of these relationships are muddled and complicated, and can stand in for the political misunderstandings between the English, Indians, and Eurasians. But none of these relationships remain static. Things shift as each discovers his or her strengths and weaknesses–especially weakenesses.

I love the way Godden inserts temporal speculation into the narrative–mostly in the subjunctive mood. This is characteristic even of her early writing.

Edward’s three or four days in Japan had stretched to a fortnight. “Didn’t you miss me?” he was to ask them. “We hadn’t time” would have been the truthful answer or, for Una, rather, “I was out of time.” She felt she might have been in India for an aeon. “Well, the Hindi words for ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ are the same,” Alix had told her, “and the ‘day before yesterday’ and the ‘day after tomorrow.'” Time seemed to have disappeared.

A good, if not great novel!

Loving Rumer Godden’s “Black Narcissus” & Dottily Reading to Blog

Oh, joy! The holidays are behind us and the days are getting longer.  I love sunlight, and if I lived in ancient times I would worship Helios. 

I took a middlebrow book break in December to cheer myself up in the dark days before the Winter Solstice.  I am now hooked on Rumer Godden, who is very high middlebrow.  I recently finished her engaging first novel, Black Narcissus, published in 1937. 

Godden weaves the fascinating story of five Anglican nuns who establish a convent in the Himalyas–a mission with very mixed results.  Distracted from their meditations, partly because of the altitude, partly because of the extreme weather, partly because of the constant noise of construction/revovations in the palace-turned-convent, the nuns become daydreamers.  It’s as if they are on a reluctant drug trip, escaping through fantasies of might-have-been marriages, exotic gardens, and tragic personal histories.  The mother superior, Sister Clodagh, tries to hold everything together, but even she finds herself slipping.

Godden’s whimsical descriptions of daily life in the convent and her character-revealing dialogue are charming.  In the following excerpt,  it is Christmas Eve, and the nuns have  returned to the convent soaking wet and freezing cold after cutting boughs in the forest on Christmas Eve and find a gift waiting for them.

‘It’s a parcel for us!’ cried Sister Honey.

‘Not for us,’ corrected Sister Clodagh. ‘Mr Dean knows better than to send us presents. It’s for the Order.’

‘That’s splitting a hair,’ said Sister Ruth boldly, but, as if she had not heard her, Sister Clodagh opened the parcel. Inside were five pairs of Tibetan boots, knee high and made of felt and worked with wool and lined with fleece.

‘Ahh!’ whispered Sister Briony, going down on her knees as if they were something holy. ‘Dear goodness! Just feel the warmth and the fleece and the softness. Blessings on the dear, dear man. Now I shall be able to get about on my poor feet without wanting to cry at every step.’

Middlebrow Book Break is over. I am in the middle (can’t get away from middle!) of  two big, relentlessly long books. I love them, but it will take a while to read them.  Meanwhile, as a  constant blogger, I wonder, What will I blog about?

I had a little talk with myself.  “You know better than that.  YOU DO NOT READ TO BLOG.”

 THAT IS JUST THE END if I start giving myself assignments.  No, Kat, you are certainly not an editor pitching books to yourself.

The dialogue between self as editor and self as writer goes like this.

“There’s a new book out; somehow we missed it; everybody else has reviewed it.  Can you read it overnight and do a quick phone interview with  the author?  Oh, and can you take five buses,  three trains, and walk a mile to pick up the book?”

Now you can get the books on Netgalley.  But is it a privilege to be a pinch hitter?  

Perhaps I’m going on another reading path now.  I want to get back to pre-Wifi days, when I savored Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks without worrying about getting it done.  I loved Buddenbrooks so much I went to a free showing of an old black-and-white German movie, and was enraptured even though I hardly understood any of it.

Before I began my book journal in the zips, I never thought about the number of books I read.  I recently looked through it, and you know what?  Reading the titles, dates, and authors means little to to me.  In the zips I discovered Monica Dickens and read a lot of her, in the 2010s I reread a lot of Charles Dickens.  What does it mean?  

Somehow, this doesn’t sum up those years for me.  Sometimes I can remember a particular day when I read a book, or the bookstore where I found it.  But it leaves me with the question, What was I like back then?  Wouldn’t it be almost better to write down the weather report?  Sunny…sunny…rained…misted.

Reading Short Books: Rachel Hadas, Rumer Godden, & Marjorie Wilenski

After a year of reading 155 books, including 17 nineteenth-century novels, I have given way to the temptation of short books.  I am now the trendy reader who finishes a new book every day before sunset (like a vampire) and walks it down the street to the Little Free Library.  I could, at this point, do a double Goodreads challenge.   

This seasonal break of reading slim volumes has been rewarding.  I particularly admired Rachel Hadas’s Poems for Camilla, a luminous collection of poems inspired by her rereading of Virgil’s Aeneid. Each poem begins with a quotation of Latin lines from the Aeneid, followed by elegant meditations on the lines. “Filing System” refers to the disarrangement of the Sibylline books and the scattering of the pages by the wind of Hadas’s own manuscript.  “The Cause” is a reflection on the princess Lavinia as the reputed cause of war (like Helen of Troy).  My own favorite  is “Stride by Stride,” a poetic commentary on the friendship of Aeneas and Fides Achates (faithful Achates).  Here is an excerpt from this poem. ( Sorry, the blog insists on double-spacing these lines!).

Fidus Achates: my Latin teacher taught us

to snicker at the epithet as too

predictable.  But that’s not how I see it

now. The companion, the fidelity,

the sharing of a burden

too heavy to be carried all alone–

far from predictable. Precious and rare.

Your younger brother is your dear Achates.

Worry matching worry, stride for stride,

you pace and talk together a long time.

I have also enjoyed several short novels.  Here are brief reviews of two.

Rumer Godden’s Breakfast with the Nikolides, set in India during World War II,  is a small masterpiece about a dysfunctional English family. The tragic arc of this  novel fans out from a single event, Louise’s decision to have her daughter’s dog killed when she thinks it has rabies.  Her two daughters, Emily and Binnie, who have been sent to have breakfast with the Nikolides, their neighbors, while the spaniel is put down, are devastated when they hear of his death.   To torment her mother, Emily insists that Don is still alive and half believes it.  And the ramifications  extend to the guilt of Dr. Das, the Indian veterinarian, for killing an innocent creature, and his attempts to share his doubts with his strangely manic, charming student boyfriend, who rebels against the college and writes poetry.  Godden’s style is lyrical, and she has an astonishing gift for structuring a novel like a poem.   The ring composition will make you gasp with admiration.  

I wish that all short books were equally stunning, but I found Marjorie Wilenski’s novel Table Two disappointing.    The book description hooked me, claiming Table Two was “as biting and funny as Barbara Pym at her crankiest, follows an office of women translators at the fictional Ministry of Foreign Intelligence in London [during World War II].”  

I am a fan of office novels, and at first enjoyed getting acquainted with the cast of middle-aged characters.  I thought that the heroine was Elsie Pearne, an intriguing, embittered, extremely smart but paranoid middle-aged woman who could have run the Ministry of Foreign Intelligence single-handed, if it weren’t for her gruff personality. She despises her co-workers and shows it. But then the narrative shifts to a bland, sweet young woman, Anne, a new employee who, because she she is from an aristocratic family, is assumed to be capable of quick promotion.  Elsie and Anne are briefly friends, despite  class differences,  until Elsie starts to resent Anne’s romance with a handsome RAF officer.  And since Anne is less interesting than the others,  I wish we’d stayed in the office.  Don’t expect Pym!  The book description here is better-written than the book.

Libraries, Rumer Godden, and Ovid

I didn’t have time to read Rumer Godden’s  Gypsy, Gypsy.  After 30 pages, I regretfully put it away. Set in France, this charming novel focuses on Henrietta, a young woman who has been raised by Aunt Barbe, a Colette-like debauchee with “gentlemen” friends. Henrietta wistfully wants a simple life in the country but her warped aunt has other ideas. The book is a study in the contrast between simplicity and dissipation. Published in 1940, this does not seem to be one of  Godden’s better-written novels, but I do intend to finish it someday (if I can find it). I predict the end will be (1) marriage, and (2) a move to the country.

I was at the library to do research for an article which is not exactly scholarly but perhaps a bit esoteric. It wasn’t exactly boring—I enjoyed much of the reading—but then I found some lighter books in the stacks that I prefer. There was Gypsy, Gypsy, as well as Dear Dodie, a biography of Dodie Smith, and Dodie Smith’s Look Back with Gratitude, a volume of her autobiography.  Such a treat!

But there is much to do when you’re on a brief “research” trip. If you don’t do research, the trip is not justified, let alone deductible, and I’m not at all sure about the “deductible” part anyway. You look up articles in a not very orderly way, you drag a lot of books to a table, you take a lot of notes.… and then decide to change the focus of your article.  I was delighted by Sarah Lindheim’s  Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides.  And so I wondered, Should I mention the Heroides, though I’ve always considered these poems substandard? This book  had caught my eye  in the stacks, and is  unusually well-written.  Some scholarly stuff really is not.

I was also astonished by what I could access on my tablet.  Free access to articles from obscure journals!  What? You don’t have to go up in the dark stacks and find the right journal? Oh, wait, this article is by a former friend and who knew how smart she was! Well, you did know… still. And it turns out you can subscribe to a service online and access these journals. But so much more fun to go to a library and get it free.

They try to make libraries “fun” these days.  The “fun” is on the first floor. There is a cafe, really more a market where you grab wrapped sandwiches and drinks. Then two TVs are on ALL THE TIME. I did not care for this concept. The sound was off, thank God.

The library IS a bit spooky at night. The lights are on a sensor system, so you walk miles in the stacks before the lights come on. I got the jitters one evening and got the hell out of there.  It’s a daytime place!

But then there are the books. Books and books and books, occupying four of the five floors, I think. Wouldn’t it be fun just to read at the library for a week?

The copy of Gypsy, Gypsy has that old-fashioned library binding. I like the feel of the cover and the library book smell. The dust jackets are not a part of a research library’s apparatus, even though the special library binding seems dead.

What is your favorite thing about the library?

What’s Twee & What’s Not?

I’ve been thinking about the kind of books I read.  Classics, pop fiction, poetry, biography–anything except romances.

Ten years ago I collected and perused many out-of-print British novels by Rumer Godden, Dodie Smith, D. E. Stevenson,  Rachel Ferguson, and Pamela Frankau.

It’s been a while since I’ve read these authors, but I  wonder:  is my taste twee?

What’s twee and what’s not?   The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says it is “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.”

Can writers be great and twee?  I love Rachel Ferguson’s Alas, Poor Lady, a brilliant novel about a distressed gentlewoman.  But an earlier book, The Brontes Went to Woolworths, is so fanciful that I conclude it is twee. As the book description at Goodreads says, the Carne sisters “live a life unchecked by their mother in their bohemian town house. Irrepressibly imaginative, the sisters cannot resist making up stories as they have done since childhood; from their talking nursery toys, Ironface the Doll and Dion Saffyn the pierrot, to their fulsomely-imagined friendship with real high-court Judge Toddington…”

What about the brilliant, underrated writer, Rumer Godden?  She is usually delegated to the rank of dead pop writers, but  I adore  Kingfishers Catch Fire, a kind of pre-hippie novel about a single mother and two children who move to Kashmir to live cheaply.  But there is occasionally something mannered about her voice, her rhetorical repetition, and chronological jumping around.  I happen to like that myself.   Twee or not twee?

George Eliot:  never twee.  Max Beerbohm:  always twee.  I am definite about those two.