Thank you for all your messages of sympathy - I am feeling very drained, but much better. But - to add insult to injury - my laptop chose yesterday to die. Few people understand computers less than I do, so I shall be begging my friend to 'have a look at it' (somehow I feel a stern glance from someone who Knows What He's Doing will cause the computer to work). My housemate has kindly lent me her laptop, but it's got the world's teeniest tiniest keyboard. That's all right for her, because she is herself teeny and tiny, but it will lead to me making all manner of typos, methinks...
I have not been entirely inactive during Persephone Reading Week. I'm not, perhaps, quite as far as I'd hoped to be - but I have managed to re-read Miss Ranskill Comes Home (1946) by Barbara Euphan Todd. I know, I know, re-reading when there are so many Persephones I've yet to read - but my book group are discussing the novel this month (and I didn't even suggest it!) and I felt like revisiting.
Miss Ranskill Comes Home was the third Persephone book I read, after Family Roundabout and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and it's just over six years since I read it. Is it as good as I remember? In a word: yes.
Miss Nona Ranskill is returning to England after four years on a desert island. If that sounds far-fetched, then run with it anyway - somehow Todd is able to make you accept the situation and see what happens. She had fallen overboard, whilst trying to rescue a hat (which she didn't much like anyway) and was washed up on the island - where 'the Carpenter', also known as Reid, had been for some time already. The novel opens with Miss Ranskill having a makeshift funeral for the Carpenter, so we never meet him firsthand, but his voice permeates Miss R's mind and his kind and sympathetic voice recurs throughout the novel.
And so Miss Ranskill heads off in the boat the Carpenter had made, and is eventually rescued and brought back to England. The desert island idea, though interesting, is really just a way of having Miss Ranskill turn up at home in the middle of the Second World War without any idea that it is going on. For this is the main gist of the novel: how surreal and foreign the war seems to one not in the know.
The first person she re-encounters is a school-friend Marjorie, who seems never to have heard of Nona's 'death', and is described as 'her development being arrested midway through the last term in the sixth form'. She reminds me a little of the women in E.M. Delafield's The War Workers, who are selfish in their 'self-sacrifice', although Marjorie is probably just caught up in the excitement of regulations and hierarchies - able to relive her school days through them. And of course, these are all mysterious to Miss Ranskill. She doesn't understand rationing or black-out curtains; 'prohibited area' or air raid sirens. Having anticipated coming home for so long, she is disturbed to find home so very different.
And alongside all this, of course, Miss R is comparing everything to her island experience. I liked the odd unexpected touch Todd threw in, such as:
A flash of red in a draper's window caught her eye and she stopped to look. The sight of a jersey-suit in soft vermilion made her realise how much she had missed all the red shades of the world and how tired she was of blue and grey.
I think Miss Ranskill Comes Home was a very brave book to publish in 1946, in its unusual perspective on a very recent war: it refers to soldiers as 'hired assassins', for instance. And yet, the novel was apparently extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. And has it translated to the 21st century? Possibly it is even more appropriate now. For people like me, whose parents weren't alive in the Second World War, our only knowledge of it can be second-hand. We experience some of Miss Ranskill's confusion, as she encounters wartime England, and perhaps feel ourselves equally uncertain and alien. While Todd's 1946 readership would have been amused by Miss Ranskill's cluelessness, as the years continue the reader can empathise more and more with her uneasiness.
Miss Ranskill Comes Home was chosen for book group after a discussion between myself and another member as to whether or not any of the Persephone books were out-and-out funny. This seemed to me to be the biggest dividing line between Persephone and the Bloomsbury Group reprints - both are excellent, but the latter is, in general, much funnier. And I think that's probably still true for me - Miss Ranskill has plenty of comedy, but it is comedy heavily dosed with pathos and even a tinge of the tragic. Certain scenes, such as that where Miss R tries and fails to give a speech to a local society on Life on a Desert Island, are painful to read in their awkward sadness. But the novel still manages to have plenty of light-hearted moments alongside - all the rush of emotion of encountering a 'brave new world', I suppose.
And, which is more important, there are some very cute kittens. Now, that's the kind of hard-nosed reviewing you've come to expect, isn't it?
I've been struck down with food poisoning or a bug or something, so I'm afraid Persephone Reading Week is going to be on hold here for a bit, until I feel human again... but do keep voting in the poll (or, rather, vote if you haven't voted yet!) and I'll concentrate on being healthy enough to attend the UK Book Bloggers' Meet-Up on Saturday...
I was intending to write my first Persephone review tonight, but have been distracted by various things today and thus not finished my first yet, not by a long chalk... so instead, I thought I'd experiment with a poll.
Here it is - let me know which Persephone Books you've read! You should be able to check as many as you like. I haven't included cookery books, as they're more for reference than read-all-the-way-through, and I haven't included authors' names - for reasons of space. Get ticking!
Which Persephone Books have you read?
Happy Bank Holiday to those it affects - and Happy Persephone Reading Week, which is just kicking off! Thanks to Claire and Verity for organising it. For those not in the know, we'll spend the week reading as many or as few Persephone Books as we can, posting reviews and thoughts and competitions etc. - all in praise of that very wonderful publisher. In the incredibly unlikely event that you don't know who Persephone are, see more here.
So, this post is to see which Persephone Books you're planning on reading? I was going to be all spontaneous, 
but got less so as I thought about it. I'm definitely re-reading Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd, because my book group are discussing it in a fortnight's time. I'm keen to read Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, and it's getting ridiculous how often I've intended to read Saplings by Noel Streatfeild. What with Jude the Obscure on the go, that might be more than enough for the week... we'll see.
Let me know if you're joining in (those four of you who I already know won't be, don't worry about letting me know!) and which books you're considering... or if you fancy a recommendation, I'll do my best!
This week's miscellany comes to you on a Saturday morning, because I was a dirty stop-up last night, and didn't get back from London until about 2am. What *would* my mother say. Whilst in London, I had the very great pleasure of dinner with the lovely Claire (Paperback Reader) and the equally lovely Teresa (one half of Shelf Love - a pun it took me two years to get). Teresa was over visiting from the US of A - a brief discussion ensued which revealed my total lack of geographical knowledge about the US; 
thank goodness we didn't start on the counties of England - and it was very nice to meet her, and see Claire again - thanks guys! When we left each other, we went to the extremes of the cultural spectrum. They went to see Macbeth at the Globe; I went with my friend Phil (also responsible for my blog feed appearing on Twitter, thanks Phil!) to see The Room: 'The Best Worst Film Ever Made'. It's written, directed, and starred in by Tommy Wiseau, a man without any discernible talent - unless unquashable self-belief is a talent. They hold screenings for people to mock it - and the cinema was sold out. Audience Participation includes:
- Throwing plastic spoons at the screen whenever a framed picture of a spoon appears. Which they do. A lot. There were literally hundreds, probably thousands, of spoons.
- Shouting 'Meanwhile, in San Francisco' whenever another shot of San F appears.
- Shouting 'Hello, Denny!' and 'Bye, Denny!' whenever said character enters or leaves a room.
- Shouting 'Who the heck are you?' when a character is replaced half-way through the film by another actor, who looks nothing like the first guy.
- Mocking the film's misogyny by shouting 'because you're a woman' at the end of many and various lines of dialogue.
- One character says how much he likes 'The candles, the music, and your sexy dress.' None of these things are in the scene - so, naturally, it provokes the united audience reaction "What candles? What music? What sexy dress?"
- Joining in with this particular scene...
- etc. etc. etc.!
So, yes, lots of shouting. And not remotely literary. But one of the most fun evenings I've had for a while...
Oh dear, I've just got distracted by looking up The Room on Wikipedia, and then reading interviews and articles about it... when instead I should be telling you about a book, a blog post, and a link...
1.) The blog post - is over at Cornflower Books, where Karen is trying to create a profile for the 'typical' reader of her blog, by asking three questions... go and answer, it's fun!
2.) The book - arrived yesterday, courtesy of Hayley at Desperate Reader, as I won it in a competition. Thanks Hayley! It's Andrina and other stories by George Mackay Brown. I'm always on the look-out for more short stories, and keen to read more Scottish writers too, so I'm intrigued by this one. Despite my love of some short story writers, somehow I hardly ever get around to reading collections - I'll make sure I do better with this one. Read what Hayley had to say about the book here.
3.) The link - I'm afraid I haven't come across anything notable and bookish this week. So, on the off-chance that you're still intrigued by The Room... click here.
And don't forget that Persephone Reading Week kicks off on Monday... I just hope you haven't been foolish and scheduled in Jude the Obscure for the same week...
Thank you all for vindicating my purchase yesterday - you lot are probably a poor choice for the voice of my conscience, but I'm certainly happy to stick with it(!)
Ever onwards, ever in - and onto The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams. Everyone else read this ages ago, I think, and indeed I had a review copy from Virago languishing on my shelves - but it wasn't until the novel was picked for my book group that I got around to reading it myself.
The Behaviour of Moths should have been a perfect novel for me - all about the tensions in families, Gothic houses, and an unreliable narrator: tick, tick, and tick. Ginny is a lepidopterist (moth expert, in case the title doesn't give the game away) still living in the old family mansion in her sixties. The novel centres around her younger sister's return home after 47 years - Vivien arrives, but there are all sorts of unanswered questions and secrets between the two, which the reader hopes to disentangle...
That's the novel in a nutshell - I won't elaborate, partly because there are reviews all over the internet where you can read about the plot; partly because not a huge amount happens. Instead, we are left to piece together the sisters' lives (and try to understand their parents, from the piecemeal information which emerges) as the narrative jumps back and forth from present day to their childhood and adolescence. One of the first recollections is when Vivi fell off the bell tower:
My heart leapt but Vivi must have lost her balance. I watched her trying to regain control of the toast that danced about, evading her grip like a bar of soap in the bath. For those slow seconds it seemed as if repossessing the toast was of utmost important to her and the fact that she was losing her balance didn't register. I've never forgotten the terror in her eyes, staring at me, replayed a thousand times since in my nightmares, as she realised she was falling.
The fall leaves Vivi unable to have children; another catalyst for the events which unfold. And so it ambles on, with secrets gradually becoming exposed, and the relationship between the sisters coming to light.
But I was unconvinced. And not just because it was set near Crewkerne, close by where I live in Somerset - which Adams claims is in Dorset, and has a bowling alley. No, it doesn't, Poppy, love! No, the reason I was unconvinced is because The Behaviour of Moths tries to do the unreliable narrator thing, but it all comes in a huge rush with a big twist towards the end. And then you wonder quite how we were supposed to read the rest of the novel - but there weren't enough clues laid down, and the picture isn't properly developed. All the details about moths are doubtless engaging, but they seem to have taken the place of a coherent narrative arc.
The Behaviour of Moths has done very well, and my lack of enthusiasm for the novel won't trouble Poppy Adams particularly, but I do wonder quite why it's been so popular. I found the whole thing... how shall I put it... quite bland. The blurb talks about 'Ginny's unforgettable voice', but that's the problem: it wasn't unforgettable, it was literary-fiction-by-numbers. The style is almost ubiquitous across novels of this type - and though there were Gothicky elements (especially in the depiction of the house) which impressed and set the novel a bit apart, for the most part The Behaviour of Moths was a common-or-garden specimen. Not a bad novel by any means, and passes the time adequately, but could have been so much better. I do look forward to seeing what Adams does next, but if she couldn't win me over with a novel which has all my favourite ingredients, then I don't hold out huge hope.
Simon S has started suggesting similar reads at the bottom of his reviews, and I love the idea - and asked him if he wouldn't mind me nabbing it! So from now on, I'll try and think of books which I think did similar things better - or, with positive reviews, do similar things equally well! And link to my thoughts on them, naturally...
Books to get Stuck into:
- Angela Young: Speaking of Love - family secrets and tense relationships are as subtle and engaging as they get in this wonderful novel
- Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle - the unreliable narrator and the Gothic house taken to a whole new level in this brilliantly addictive novel
Project 24 - #9
Just when it was getting to the end of April, and I was congratulating myself by being on track with my book count, I made the foolish mistake of wandering into the £2 bookshop in Oxford... and being confronted with this:
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, may I make my defence?
- it's Sylvia Townsend Warner, an author I love (and who has made an appearance in Project 24 already, you may recall, with Summer Will Show)
- it has a foreword by William Maxwell, another much liked author in these parts.
- it was only £2
- it's so preeettttty
I rest my case. I think.
