Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Canongate Books| 2 November 2023|257 pages| Review copy| 4*

Synopsis

Dolly Maunder is born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors are just starting to creak ajar for determined women. Growing up in a poor farming family in rural New South Wales, Dolly spends her life doggedly pushing at those doors. A husband and two children do not deter her from searching for love and independence.

Restless Dolly Maunder is a subversive, triumphant tale of a pioneering woman working her way through a world of limits and obstacles, who is able – despite the cost – to make a life she could call her own.

My thoughts:

Kate Grenville is one of my favourite authors, so I was looking forward to reading Restless Dolly Maunder. I was not disappointed.

This is the fictionalised life story of Kate Grenville’s maternal grandmother, Sarah Catherine Maunder, known as Dolly. She was the sixth child of Thomas and Sarah Maunder, born in Currabubula, New South Wales, Australia in 1881. She was not only restless but also clever and determined – she knew what she wanted and she did her best to achieve it.

As a child she longed to be a pupil-teacher but in a world where women were subservient to men she had to obey her father who wouldn’t allow it. She could marry or be a spinster. Eventually she married Bert Russell and began a life away from the farm and her family, moving from place to place and from one business to the next to better herself and her family – a shop, a boarding house, a pub, and a grand hotel.. But she was a difficult person, not easy to like and unable to show love. Hers was a success story but also a tragedy as her wanderlust impelled her to keep striving for more and better things in life.

Restless Dolly Maunder casts light not just on Dolly’s life but also on life in Australia for most of the 20th century. The book has a relentless pace as it tells her life story as she propels herself from place to place and from business to business, enjoying success whilst it lasted and enduring all else, not stopping to pause breath in her restless pursuit of what came next.

Many thanks to the publishers for a review copy via NetGalley.

I can recommend all of Kate Grenville’s books. One of my favourites is One Life:My Mother’s Story, her biography of Nance Russell, Dolly’s daughter. Hers was a happier and more fulfilled life.

Fair Stood the Wind for France by H E Bates

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Synopsis

When John Franklin brings his plane down into Occupied France at the height of the Second World war, there are two things in his mind – the safety of his crew and his own badly injured arm. It is a stroke of unbelievable luck when the family of a French farmer risk their lives to offer the airmen protection. During the hot summer weeks that follow, the English officer and the daughter of the house are drawn inexorably to each other…

My thoughts:

I bought Fair Stood the Wind for France by H E Bates in October 2018 when it caught my eye in Barter Books in Alnwick, mainly because of the title, which appealed to me. I knew nothing about it, but as it’s one of Penguins Modern Classics I added it to my Classics Club booklist. It’s my Classics Club Spin book for December, which is why I’ve read it recently.

I’m in two minds about this book. It begins really well and I was totally gripped by the first part of the book describing Franklin’s flight, with his crew of four sergeants, over France then the Alps and on to Italy. On his return flight when they were over France, they began to dive, rapidly losing height and he knew that the port engine had gone. The air screw (that’s a propeller) had broken, meaning they wouldn’t make it back to England and they crash landed somewhere in the countryside. They thought they were about west-north-west of the Vosges. From then onwards the story covers the period when Franklin whose arm had been very badly injured was cared for by Francoise and her family, hidden in their farmhouse. He falls in love with Francoise and she agrees to help him escape and marry him when they reach England.

But from then on as they made their way through Vichy France and eventually to Marseilles I felt the story dragged and I lost much of the interest I had had in the first part. Even though they encountered much danger and the tension rose, the action slowed down too much. I was relieved to finish the book.

As it was written and initially serialized weekly in the Saturday Evening Post from March 18 to May 6, 1944, and in Woman’s Journal (May-July 1944), it does give a contemporaneous account of the war portraying all dangers and the hardships they endured. It is really an extended short story, a love story, but one that didn’t particularly convince me. However, it does contain some beautiful descriptions of the French countryside and I loved the drama of the first part of the book.

  • Published by Penguin in paperback it’s also available as an e-book, published in 2005.
  • My Rating: 3.5 stars

Reading Beryl Bainbridge

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Annabel at AnnaBookBel is hosting the third Reading Beryl week from 18 – 26 November, enveloping her birthdate on the 21st.

In previous years I’ve read According to Queenie, a novel about the life of Samuel Johnson as seen through the eyes of Queeney, Mrs Thrale, and the other Master Georgie, set in the Crimean War telling the story of George Hardy, a surgeon.

Since starting my blog I’ve also read these books, which are linked to my posts:

I have copies of the following books of hers left to read:

  • Every Man for Himself – Recapturing the four crucial days prior to the sinking of the Titanic and the loss of fifteen hundred lives, this story is told from the perspective of Morgan, the American nephew of the owner of the shipping line, and reveals how his destiny is linked to other passengers.
  • Winter Garden – Ashburner’s wife had been sporting about his need for a rest, packing him off on a holiday to Scotland. But in the taxi he changed his luggage labels and checked in for a flight to Moscow. He was the official companion to the artist Nina St Clair – but within 48 hours Nina had vanished. I did start reading this but it didn’t appeal to me very much, so the book has gone back on the shelf for a while.

I’ve started reading Every Man for Himself, and may finish it in time to write about it – I hope so anyway.

Nonfiction November 2023 Weeks 2 & 3: Choosing Nonfiction and Book Pairings

Published on by Margaret24 Comments

Week 2 (11/6-11/10) Choosing Nonfiction: What are you looking for when you pick up a nonfiction book? Do you have a particular topic you’re attracted to? Do you have a particular writing style that works best? When you look at a nonfiction book, does the title or cover influence you? If so, share a title or cover which you find striking. (Frances at Volatile Rune)

I missed week two as I ran out of time. So these are just a few thoughts about choosing nonfiction.I like to read nonfiction to learn more about a topic that interests me. I’ve always loved anything historical and also autobiographies/biographies/memoirs. And these days I’ve become more interested in politics and world affairs, wanting to know more about the history leading up to the terrible times we’re living in. Other subjects I read are health/nutrition etc, nature, travel, painting and art history.

As for writing style, it has to be readable, narrative nonfiction really, written clearly without the use of jargon or with too much technical specialist knowledge needed. And book covers don’t really influence me that much – if I want to know about the subject anyway I’ll read the book.

However, here are two I do like:

Week 3 (11/13-11/17) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. You can be as creative as you like! (Liz)

Earlier this year I read The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell and I’m pairing it with The New Mrs Clifton by Elizabeth Buchan, historical fiction I read a few years ago. Both books are about life for ordinary people in the aftermath of World War 2.

The Dancing Bear set mainly in Berlin, covers the years from Autumn 1946 to Autumn 1949, with an Epilogue dated Autumn 1953. Frances Faviell (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. After the war, in 1946, she went with her young son, John, to Berlin where Richard Parker, her second husband, had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration. Berlin had been divided into four sectors by the Allies – Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union – and Frances is horrified by the conditions she found. There were deaths from hunger and cold as the winter approached and queues for bread, milk, cigarettes, cinemas, buses and trams.

It was here that she befriended the Altmann family. They lived on the ground floor of a large ruined house – the upper storeys had disappeared and just the twisted iron girders remained, sticking up grotesquely against the sky. The ground floor looked very shaky and the windows were covered in cardboard and the door had been repaired from odd pieces of wood. It was freezing cold, and although they had a stove they had no fuel to light it and because electricity was rationed they had to use candles. There were two bedrooms, a small kitchen, a sitting room and a bathroom. With the help of her driver, Stampie, she does what she can to help them.

It’s a moving memoir and I was fascinated by it all – the people, their situations, and their morale and attitudes as well as the condition of Berlin in the aftermath of World War Two. The realities of living under occupation are clearly shown, as well as the will to survive despite all the devastation and deprivation.

The New Mrs Clifton by Elizabeth Buchan. This begins in 1974 with the discovery of a skeleton, the remains of a woman, between twenty-five and thirty, buried beneath a tree in the garden of a house in Clapham, facing the Common. Her identity and why and how she was killed is not revealed until very nearly the end of the book and all the time I was reading I was wondering who the killer was and which woman had been murdered.

It then moves back in time to 1945 when Intelligence Officer Gus Clifton returns to London with Krista, the German wife he married secretly in Berlin. Krista is clearly devastated by her experiences at the hands of the British and their allies – all but broken by horrors she cannot share. For his sisters, Julia and Tilly, this broken woman is nothing more than the enemy. For Nella, who was Gus’s loyal fiancée, it is a terrible betrayal. Elizabeth Buchan paints a convincing and moving picture of life in both London and Berlin post-war, highlighting the devastation of the bombing, rationing and queuing, showing how people have to come to terms with the changes in their lives in both countries.

~~~

The main difference between these books is that The Dancing Bear is about real people, written soon after the end of the end of the war, whereas The New Mrs Clifton is about fictional characters set in the that historical period. I enjoyed and learned a lot from both of them.

~~~

I’ve enjoyed comparing these books – which books would you choose to compare?

Spell the Month in Books – November 2023

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The theme this month is Books about music/musicians. At first I thought I had so few books about music and musicians I wouldn’t use this theme, but when I checked I found that I’d read two with another two books in my TBRs waiting to be read. The rest I haven’t read.

The links in the titles of each book go to my posts on the books, where they exist, or to Amazon, or Goodreads for the books I haven’t read.

N is for Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro,  a quintet of stories exploring the themes of love, music and the passing of time. All have narrators who are musicians. These stories are full of longing and regret, something which I think Ishiguro does well. My favourite story is Nocturne, in which the narrator, a saxophonist whose manager has demanded he get plastic surgery in order to compete with less proficient but handsomer players, rooms next to a wealthy American woman while he is healing from his surgery. Their friendship results in absurdity, hilarity, and a surprisingly tender and devastating conclusion.

O is for Orfeo by Richard Powers

In Orfeo, composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab—the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns—has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive and hatches a plan to transform this disastrous collision with the security state into an unforgettable work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around it. ((Goodreads)

V is for  A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

 A book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to Powerpoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both-and escape the merciless progress of time-in the transporting realms of art and music. (taken from Amazon uk)

E is for An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, one of my TBRs.

A chance sighting on a bus; a letter which should never have been read; a pianist with a secret that touches the heart of her music … this is a book about love, about the love of a woman lost and found and lost again; it is a book about music and how the love of music can run like a passionate fugue through a life. It is the story of Michael, of Julia, and of the love that binds them. (from Amazon UK)

M is for The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce, one of my TBRs.

1988. Frank owns a music shop. It is jam-packed with records of every speed, size and genre. Classical, jazz, punk – as long as it’s vinyl he sells it. Day after day Frank finds his customers the music they need. Then into his life walks Ilse Brauchmann. lse asks Frank to teach her about music. His instinct is to turn and run. And yet he is drawn to this strangely still, mysterious woman with her pea-green coat and her eyes as black as vinyl. But Ilse is not what she seems. And Frank has old wounds that threaten to re-open and a past he will never leave behind . (Amazon UK)

B is for Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Opera is a centralising theme on many levels throughout the story; the operatic term bel canto literally means ‘beautiful singing.’

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxane Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. (from Goodreads)

E is for Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan

Lost and alone in a forbidden forest, Otto meets three mysterious sisters and suddenly finds himself entwined in a puzzling quest involving a prophecy, a promise, and a harmonica. Decades later, Friedrich in Germany, Mike in Pennsylvania, and Ivy in California each, in turn, become interwoven when the very same harmonica lands in their lives.(from Goodreads)

R is for The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

A sweeping history of twentieth-century classical music, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, is a gripping account of a musical revolution.

The landscape of twentieth-century classical music is a wild one: this was a period in which music fragmented into apparently divergent strands, each influenced by its own composers, performers and musical innovations. In this comprehensive tour, Alex Ross, music critic for the ‘New Yorker’, explores the people and places that shaped musical development: Adams to Zweig, Brahms to Björk, pre-First World War Vienna to ‘Nixon in China’.

Above all, this unique portrait of an exceptional era weaves together art, politics and cultural history to show how twentieth-century classical music was both a symptom and a source of immense social change. (Amazon UK)

The next link up will be on December 2, 2023 when the theme will be: Winter, Christmas, or Christian themes.

Six Degrees of Separation

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, a novella that is part of the read-along for Novella November 2023 (and it also made the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist!). Amazon describes it as A beautiful and moving novel about grief, sisterhood, squash and a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself.

1 – Saturday by Ian McEwan, which also has a squash player, a neuro surgeon. He is troubled by the impending war with Iraq, pessimistic after 9/11. On his way to his weekly squash match through London’s crowded street filled with anti-war demonstrators he gets into a quarrel with another motorist, Baxter, an aggressive young man.

2 Iraq is also the setting in Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie. It’s a Poirot mystery, but he doesn’t appear until about halfway. As the title tells you it is set in Mesopotamia, the area in the Middle East between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates (the area of present-day Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey).Her books set in the Middle East are based on the everyday life that she experienced on digs and on the people she met. In this one an archaeologist’s wife, Louise Leidner, the wife of the leader of the expedition, is found in her room, dead from a blow on her head, and suspicion falls on Louise’s first husband who had been sending her threatening letters, or so she had claimed.

3 The Chalk Pit by Elly Griffiths, the 9th Dr Ruth Galloway mystery – Ruth is a forensic archaeologist. It centres on the plight of homeless people and the maze of tunnels under Norfolk. Bones are found during the excavations when an underground restaurant in one of the tunnels is proposed. It becomes a murder mystery when two of the homeless, ‘Aftershave Eddie’ and then ‘Bilbo’ are found dead, both stabbed. Then two local women go missing and it soon becomes clear that all these events are linked.

4 A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel is also set in Norfolk. It mixes the past and the present, moving seamlessly between the Eldred family’s current life (in the 1980s) in Norfolk, with their earlier life in Africa in the 1950s. The Eldreds were missionaries, first in South Africa, then in Beuchuanaland (Botswana) where a terrible and horrific event occurred and they returned to England.  However, their memories of these traumatic events refused to remain buried, eventually bringing their lives and those of their children into terrible turmoil.

5 Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (translated from Afrikaans by K L Seegers) is crime fiction set in South Africa, DI Benny Griessel has just 13 hours to crack open a conspiracy which threatens the whole country. Rachel, a young American girl is running for her life up the steep slope of Lion’s Head in Capetown.  The body of another American girl is found outside the Lutheran church in Long Street. Her throat slit had been slit. An hour or so later Alexandra Barnard, a former singing star and an alcoholic, wakes from a drunken stupor to find the dead body of her husband, a record producer, lying on the floor opposite her and his pistol lying next to her.

6 Another book with thirteen in the title is The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie, a collection of short stories about the Tuesday Night club, whose members include Miss Marple. They tell sinister stories of unsolved mysteries.

Well, I didn’t expect where this chain was going at all beginning with the starting book, but as usually happens in my chains it includes a number of murder mysteries.

Next month (December 2, 2023), we will start with Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.