books release review new forbookssake reading literature – and so she thinks

In Pursuit: The Katherine Mansfield Story retold by Joanna Fitzpatrick

admin — Mon, 30 May 2011 15:02:48 +0000

The term they use in the television world is ‘edutainment’, a blurring of the lines between an entertaining tale and informative education.
And this is what Joanna Fitzpatrick has done with In Pursuit, an absorbing account ofKatherine Mansfield’s extraordinary life, from the moment she left New Zealand aged 18, through to her early death at 34.
Particularly captivating are the conversations with the Bloomsbury crowd, especially the intimate discussions between Virginia Woolf and Mansfield. For those accustomed to reading Woolf, it can be difficult to imagine that she speaks or thinks in anything other than flow of consciousness.
Whilst the conversation is never that of hair braiding and boy crushes, tender words expressed between the two women over a cup of chamomile tea adds a personal dimension so often missed in the image of this author’s persona.
Disputes between Lawrence and Mansfield, dinners with HG Wells and correspondence across the literary scene sweep out the pedestal from under these authors, illustrating their very human essence, whilst never removing the reverence that their literature deserves.
A rebellious young woman, Katherine was keen to not fit into society’s norms, and I’m sure would have admired this unconventional way of retelling her life. Lesbian love affairs, disobeying parents, a difficult marriage; Fitzpatrick manages to wrap the emotional reality of these events with the enigmatic author that Mansfield has come to be.
Fitzpatrick has clearly done her research, and the novel is peppered with excerpts from Mansfield’s journals and letters, sketches of her surroundings (‘on a wild hill slope, covered with olive and fig trees, and tall yellow flowers…and in the evening the cicada shakes his tiny tambourine’) and the vacillation between harmony and heartbreak of her marriage to Jack Murry (‘just wait till I get home…all the house ours and a perfect table and the new cups and saucers with their flowers and fluting’ and ‘I feel violently most physically sick’).
Fitzpatrick has so well drawn this multi-dimensional character, that by the end of it the reader is still not sure whether they like Katherine Mansfield. She is weak and frail, yet has such strength of character (‘I am the one who needs saving and only I can do it’).
She is selfish in her treatment of her ‘albatross’ carer LM, but at other moments she is warm and tender towards her, inviting her to be her companion and take tea at three in the morning.
Lifting the skin of minor characters can be difficult in novels such as this that have a very clear objective in tell the story of an already renowned character, but Fitzpatrick manages to reveal aspects of LM’s character through her conversations with Katherine, and her reactions to Katherine’s sometimes abominable behaviour.
Direct parallels have been drawn between Mansfield’s stories and her real life events, such as promiscuous love affairs resulting in a story titled Poison, but these do not feel forced into the narrative.
By carefully detailing the process of writing, and Mansfield’s desire to, in her own words ‘capture the magic of life’ through observance, it is clear that the writing does shed light on the writer. ‘My favourite readers are the ones who see my characters as real,’ says Mansfield, and this is because in so many cases they were drawn from life.
As well as a passionate writer, Mansfield was a devoted reader, and fond of Chekhov, whose writings and attitude as a fellow consumptive encouraged her through her illness.
Although it appears midway through the book, one quote that Chekhov gives, taken fromDaudet, seems to be to capture the essence of this novel, in its acceptance of the excellence of Mansfield and yearning for more, tinged with the poignancy that her young death meant she could never deliver:

‘Why are thy songs so short?’ a bird was once asked. ‘It is because they are short of breath?’
The bird answered, ‘I have very many songs and I should like to sing them all.’

http://forbookssake.net/2010/12/06/in-pursuit-the-katherine-mansfield-story-retold-by-joanna-fitzpatrick/

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

admin — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:58:48 +0000

What do you do when faced a moral dilemma? What about when it is one that also pushes the boundaries of legality? What is truth? How much of life is down to fate and chance, the result of ‘looking left when we should have been looking right?’
All these big questions are posed by Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress, but for many readers, after seeing the book on numerous 2011 must-read lists, the main question is going to be ‘does it live up to its hype?’
The Postmistress follows the lives of three women in the formative years of the Second World War – the feisty and passionate Frankie, an American journalist on the ground in London, sending nightly radio reports of the Blitz,Iris James, a Cape Cod postmistress, and Emma Fitch, a doctor’s wife new to Iris’s town.
An ambitious novel, Blake has successfully navigated the interweaving of these plot lines to avoid any overt feeling of engineering them together.
As well as posing these moral questions, Blake successfully explores the relationship between the individual and society, the micro and macro. The micro actions of Frankie and Iris, who through their choice of words and decisions to deliver post, are a metaphor for the wider question of how much America really knew about what was happening in Europe.
‘The French have had a hard enough time, without all these people, Jews and what have you…to deal with’ (Florence Cripps, the B&B owner in Cape Cod).
Similarly, Frankie’s radio reports focus on the individual in London, the boy losing a mother, the girl taking a wrong turning, each tale a microcosm for the devastation and destruction facing England’s capital.
Blake, through Frankie, is concerned with ‘the edges of a war photograph or news report into the moments just after or just before we read or see or hear’ and via the integration and narrative weaving of threads successfully builds a picture of lives connected in many ways, and a million other tendrils that we have yet to follow.
It is very clear throughout the novel that Blake is interested as much in the process of writing as she is in the journey of her characters.
Criticisms for its historical accuracy seem a little unfair. Historical fact would never describe the Blitz as ‘bombs were falling on Coventry, London and Kent. Sleek metal pellets shaped like the blunt tipped ends of pencils.’
In fact, such poetic description of harrowing events in themselves add to the ongoing dilemma of what is being communicated, and whether these words represent reality.
The language can be overly extravagant, Blake’s florid prose at times being more frustrating than descriptive, but as a writer as well as reader, I enjoyed this.
However, theme and style do take precedence over plot, which may be why opinion is divided as to whether it is an inaccessible exploitation of a well-formed vocabulary, or an emotional and compelling read.
Blake is certainly a talented wordsmith, and this is the abiding impression that one is left with. She allows unfinished threads, just like Frankie realises that ‘the story just whispers off in the dark.’
More a beautiful treatise on love, war, and choice, with no happy endings, this is no neat little piece of chick-lit. It is about life, and for that reason alone deserves to be read in 2011.

http://forbookssake.net/2011/02/22/the-postmistress-by-sarah-blake/

We Had It So Good by Linda Grant

admin — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:47:44 +0000

We Had It So Good

Linda Grant

Virago, Jan 2011
More than a portrait of growing up, this wonderful novel is a well captured landscape of the ever changing vista of life. Select and careful arrangement of words creates a lucid images, sounds and feelings of the experiences in life.
We follow Steven Newman over forty years, from the day he left America as a teenager in order to escape conscription, through his early student days at Oxford in the sixties, all idealism and visions of the future: ‘I know how we could turn the whole world on,’ until the inevitable happens, age creeps up, and the face in the mirror looks older than the face in your mind.
What happened we wonder? How much of the hope encapsulated in the baby boomer generation actually exploded into reality, and how much dissipated in to the ether.
It’s not a novel of plot, focusing on the actions of every day and the thoughts that accompany them. Grant challenges the beliefs we have about our capabilities and captures the enthusiasm of youth and the belief that every generation is its own zeitgeist. The positive, negative, ambiguities and fragilities of life are layered together like sedimentary rock.
A clever and enticing book, that seems to start somewhere through your own life, and remains with you long after the closing sentences.
http://forbookssake.net/2011/01/17/we-had-it-so-good-by-linda-grant/