Category: Novellas

Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor – Short Nonfiction

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Appointment in Arezzo: A friendship with Muriel Spark by Alan Taylor

Polygon| 2017| 169| e-book| My own copy| 5*

Description:

This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark’s life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life.

Alan Taylor here sets the record straight about this and many other things. With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh’s premiere novelists. The book was published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel’s birth in 2018.

My thoughts:

This is a short nonfiction book of 169 pages on Kindle, so it’s just right for both Nonfiction November and Novellas in November. It’s a book I’ve had for a few years after a friend recommended it to me. I didn’t read it straight away because at the time the only book by Muriel Sparks I’d read was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which I loved. Since then I’ve read Loitering with Intent, (review to follow in due course), so I thought it was time I read Appointment in Arezzo.

Muriel Spark was born on 1 February 1918, in Edinburgh, the daughter of Bertie Camberg, a Jew who was born in Scotland and her mother, Sarah who was English and an Anglican. Alan Taylor touches on her early life and teenage years in Edinburgh in a middle -class enclave , where she attended James Gillespie’s High School for Girls – immortalised as Marcia Blaine School in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

In July 1990 Alan Taylor first met Muriel Spark and her friend Penelope – Penny – Jardine in a hotel in Arezzo for dinner. The two women had shared a rambling house deep in the Val di Chiana 15 kilometres from Arezzo in Tuscany for twenty years. Penny is a sculptor who has exhibited at the Royal Academy in London; she supplied the domestic and business circumstances which allowed Muriel to flourish. Alan Taylor, a former deputy editor of The Scotsman and the founder-editor of the Scottish Review of Books, was there to interview her on the publication of her novel Symposium (1990). Their meeting led to a friendship and since then they met frequently during the last fifteen years of her life. She died at her home in Tuscany in April 2006 and is buried in the cemetery of Sant’Andrea Apostolo in Oliveto.

Following that first meeting, over the next fifteen years they met many times, when Taylor visited her in Tuscany, New York, London, Prague and finally in 2004 in Scotland and Edinburgh as well as exchanging many letters and telephone conversations. Taylor outlined details of her brief marriage in 1937 to Sidney Oswald Spark, which only lasted until 1940 when they separated, and about her son, Robin and their disagreement over her Jewishness. Robin believed that one must be either a Jew or a Gentile, whereas Muriel believed:

It was impossible ‘to separate’ the Jewess within her from the Gentile. In her mind, the two coexisted in harmony’ ‘uncomplainingly amongst one’s own bones’. Was she a Gentile? Or a Jewess? ‘Both and neither. What am I? I am what I am.

But Robin couldn’t cope with such ambiguity; he wanted certainty – in his mind one must be either Jew or Gentile. Their beliefs were irreconcilable. The full details are in Chapter 6, A Question of Jewishness.

Amongst many other topics they talked about her writing:

Fleur in Loitering with Intent spoke for her when she said: ‘I’ve come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little. (page 17)

She had no idea when writing a book how it might turn out. Its theme built of itself and if it did not develop, it ramified. I wanted to know what she saw as her achievement, her legacy. ‘I have realised myself, ‘ she replied. ‘I have expressed something I brought into the world with me. I have liberated the novel in many ways, shown how anything whatever can be narrated, any experience set down, including sheer damn cheek. I think I have opened doors and windows in mind, and challenged fears – especially the most inhibiting fears about what a novel should be. (pages 98-99)

In a very real sense Muriel’s life is to be found in her work. She always said that if anyone wanted to know about the person behind the prose and poems they had only to read them closely and imaginatively. She is there, in the times and places and characters, in the choice of words and the construction of sentences, in the tone of voice, above all in the philosophy of existence. (pages 141-142)

There is so much more in this book. It is a fascinating insight into her life, and what she thought about writing, as well as reflecting on her books, as well as much more. I’ve really only touched the surface of this very readable book and I finished it knowing a lot more about Muriel Spark and her books – and keen to read more of them. And it’s illustrated with many photographs making it a warm, personal and affectionate account.

The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

The Maigret books are also a good choice for Novellas in November, they’re all under 200 pages. I’ve been a Maigret fan for a long time, ever since I was in my teens, watching the TV series with Rupert Davies in the title role. And I’ve been reading the Maigret series as I’ve come across the books in libraries, bookshops, and more recently as e-books, so not in the order they were originally published.

Penguin| 2014| 164 pages| My own copy| 3*

This is a short review because, once more I’m behind with writing reviews. The Yellow Dog is the 5th book in the new Penguin Maigret series, translated by Linda Asher. It was first published in 1931 and also published in a previous translation as A Face for a Clue. It’s a tale of small town suspicion and revenge.

In the windswept seaside town of Concarneau, a local wine merchant is shot. In fact, someone is out to kill all the influential men and the entire town is soon sent into a state of panic. For Maigret, the answers lie with the pale, downtrodden waitress Emma, and a strange yellow dog lurking in the shadows…

It’s only 134 pages but with a slow start it did seem longer than that. It begins with the shooting of Monsieur Mostaguen, a local wine merchant, followed by the appearance of the yellow dog, a big, snarling yellow animal, and then an attempt at poisoning for Maigret to investigate. I wondered what the significance of the yellow dog was and who it belonged to; no one seems to know. The locals had never seen it before and they all viewed it with fear and suspicion. I’ve read some of the earlier Maigret and have noted before that I’ve been confused and baffled, with little idea of what was going on and it was just the same with this book. Maigret doesn’t seem to be very concerned about the man who was shot and seriously injured, nor about the attempted poisoning until there’s a murder and another man disappears. He walks around the town, observing but not actively investigating.

Simenon is good at conveying atmosphere and skilled at setting the scene and drawing convincing characters in a few paragraphs.  As the book begins there’s a south-westerly gale slamming the boats together in the harbour in Concarneau and the wind surges through the streets. Contrast the weather at the beginning of the book with the change by the time Maigret is getting close to clearing up the mystery – the weather turned fine, with a vibrant blue sky, the sea sparkled, and ‘the Old Town’s walls, so gloomy in the rain, turn a joyful, dazzling white.‘

I don’t think this is one of the best Maigret book, but it is puzzling with Maigret keeping his thoughts to himself until the end of the book, when like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he explains it all.

The Christmas Book Hunt by Jenny Colgan

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Summary from Amazon:

A heartwarming meet-cute short story from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Christmas Bookshop. A Christmas mission…

Mirren’s beloved great-aunt Violet is seriously ill. Her one Christmas wish is to be reunited with a long-lost hand-illustrated book from her childhood, a challenge Mirren gladly accepts to give Violet some much-needed festive cheer.

An enchanting journey…

With no sign of the cherished volume online, Mirren falls into the fascinating world of rare books. From London to snowy Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh’s cobbled streets, she chases leads from bookshop to bookshop—and bumps into mysterious, charming Theo, who, unbeknownst to her, is searching for the same book for reasons of his own…

The start of a new chapter?

As the two join forces to track the book down before time runs out for Violet, will Mirren find her Christmas miracle—and maybe even a kiss under the mistletoe… ?

I normally don’t choose to read romantic stories, and I’m not a fan of short stories but The Christmas Book Hunt by Jenny Colgan sounded interesting because of the book connection. Although it’s described as a short story, at over 100 pages I think it is really a novella. It looked at first as though I was going to find it too cutesy but once the story got going I began to enjoy it. Mirren is looking for a copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, a particular one that had belonged to her Great Aunt Violet. It was a special edition, with hand-drawn plates by Aubrey Beardsley and now Great Aunt Violet, who is in hospital seriously ill would love to see the book for Christmas. I loved that book as a child, so this is what made the story irresistible for me. It’s easy reading and I read it quickly.

I also liked the story of Mirren’s search in various bookshops in various places in England and Scotland trying to track down what had happened to that particular version of the book. She went to the book town Hay-on-Wye, bookshops in Edinburgh and a secondhand bookshop in Northumberland that sounds very like Barter Books in Alnwick, my favourite bookshop. I was not so keen on the romance element as the relationship develops between Mirren and Theo, who is not the person he appears to be. There are one or two coincidences that cropped up towards the end of the book that I thought were rather remarkable and conveniently tied up all the ends. But overall it was the book element that I found most satisfying.

The Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton, a Novella

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Rating: 3 out of 5.

This has been on my TBR list for several years, so I thought it was about time I read it. It was written in 1898, but not published until 1916, one of the short stories in Xingu and Other Stories, set in a working class neighbourhood in New York.

In the days when New York’s traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a single show-window was intimately and favourably known to the feminine population of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square.

It was a very small shop in a shabby basement, in a side-street already doomed to decline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the window-pane and the brevity of the sign surmounting it (merely ‘Bunner Sisters’ in blotchy gold on a black background) it would have been difficult for the uninitiated to guess the precise nature of the business carried on within. (page 1)

As the title indicates it’s about two sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, who have a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles. The sisters, both unmarried, have fallen on hard times.They meet Herbert Ramy, a German immigrant who also has a small shop, when Ann Eliza buys a clock from him as a birthday present for Evalina.

This is a sad tale, very readable and very descriptive. The characters are memorable, well drawn and are clearly distinguishable. Their lives are mainly filled with daily routine. But there’s a growing sense of foreboding and mystery, especially surrounding Ramy. As he gradually becomes an important part of their lives, the sadness becomes overwhelming, eventually turning into tragedy.

Asking for the Moon by Reginald Hill

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Asking for the Moon is described on the cover as a Dalziel and Pascoe novel, but it is actually a collection of four novellas. According to Wikipedia the collection was first published in 1996 in hardback by HarperCollins.

The first story is The Last National Service Man which tells how Dalziel and Pascoe first met. Neither of them are impressed by the other. Dalziel thinks Pascoe is everything he dislikes – a graduate, well spoken, and a Southerner from south of Sheffield. Pascoe thinks Dalziel is an archetypical bruiser who got results by kicking down doors and beating out questions in Morse code on a suspect’s head. When Dalziel and Pascoe are kidnapped by a madman with a serious and justifiable grudge against the Superintendent they need to get over their differences and work together to escape their jailer.

The next two stories both feature ‘ghosts’ – Pascoe’s Ghost and then Dalziel’s Ghost (both first published in 1979 in another collection of short stories). In Pascoe’s Ghost a man whose wife has been missing for a year gets some strange phone calls—as well as a visit from Detective Inspector Pascoe—in a novella that pays homage to Edgar Allan Poe, with each chapter headed with a quotation from Poe’s poetical works. This is the longest story and reminded me of Agatha Christie’s Golden Age Mysteries as Pascoe interviews the suspects in the library.

Dalziel’s Ghost is a brief and rather odd story in which the two detectives keep a nightly vigil in Sandstone Rigg farmhouse, an isolated house that had been renovated, apparently disturbing a ghost. In Dalziel’s experience there are three main causes of ghosts – ‘One: bad cooking. Two: bad ventilation and Three – bad conscience.’ Things aren’t what they seem and Dalziel is once again his devious self. But I think this one is the least convincing of the four stories.

One Small Step, was originally published in 1990 by Collins Crime Club.The story is set in 2010, when a French astronaut, one of an international space team from the Federated States of Europe, became the first man to be murdered on the moon. Retired Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, suffering from gout and Peter Pascoe, now Commissioner of Eurofed Justice are called upon to investigate – on board the space ship. In his Foreword I gather that Hill wrote this to celebrate the twenty years he’d been writing the Dalziel and Pascoe novels.

I think the best story in the book is the first one, The Last National Service Man.

If you haven’t read any of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, don’t start with this one. It’s not the best, but still an enjoyable 3* book for me.

Two Novellas in Now and Forever by Ray Bradbury:#NovNov22

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

HarperVoyager| 25 June 2012| 240 page| e-book| 4*

Now and Forever is the first book by Ray Bradbury that I’ve read. It contains two novellas – Somewhere a Band is Playing, in which a young writer discovers that all is not as it seems in a nostalgic community, and Leviathan ’99, a retelling of Moby Dick set in space. Two very different stories, each one fascinating, and both with a long history, as Bradbury wrote each one over several decades. They contrast both in style and content. I enjoyed both, but Leviathan ’99 is my favourite.

In the first, Somewhere a Band is Playing, (102 pages) a reporter James Cardiff arrives in Summerton, a small town in the middle of Arizona, a town which seems perfect, a quiet peaceful place. He can hear in the air the quiet sound of a band playing. But the more he explores the more mysterious Summerton becomes. For one thing there are no children and no hospitals or doctors because no one gets ill and even stranger the graves in the cemetery are empty. The story has a nostalgic feel, a sense of melancholy and myth as James, under the guidance of a beautiful young woman, Nefertiti, discovers the truth about Summerton.

Bradbury’s introduction to Somewhere a Band is Playing explains that he begun writing a screenplay and short story about a small town somewhere in the desert and how he had kept encountering Katharine Hepburn either in person or on the screen and was attracted by the fact that she remained youthful throughout the years. Then in 1956 she had made the film Summertime and this had led him to put her at the centre of a story and so Somewhere a Band is Playing slowly evolved. Another element of the story came when he saw the film, The Wind and the Lion and was so taken with the score that he wrote a long poem based on the enchanting music. He then put these elements together to produce this novella, which he dedicated to Anne Hardin, who had encouraged his work and to Katharine Hepburn.

Leviathan ’99’ (101 pages) is dedicated to Herman Melville because after spending a year writing the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick he’d fallen under the spell of Melville and his ‘leviathan whale’. Bradbury then wrote his first script of Leviathan ’99’, which was eventually produced by BBC Radio in London, then as a longer version as a play in 1972. Finally thirty years later he finished writing it as a novella as his ‘final effort to focus and revitalize what began as a radio dream.’

I haven’t read Moby Dick, but I enjoyed this story about spaceships instead of sailing ships, mad astronaut captains instead of seafaring captains and the blind white comet instead of the great white whale. It’s set in 2099 and begins as Ishmael, an astronaut joins the Cetus 7, the largest interstellar ship ever built. The spaceship is on a mission, travelling beyond the stars. His cubicle roommate is Quell, a seven feet tall, green spider who is a telepath. The captain is mad, obsessed with finding the comet, Leviathan, the largest comet in history that had blinded him thirty years earlier. As Quell described it ‘the universe set off a light-year of immensity of photographic flash. God blinked and bleached the captain to this colour of sleeplessness and terror.’

It is an incredible achievement transposing Melville’s 19th century epic into a hundred page novella set in the future.