The #1962 Club – some reading recommendations for next week

On Monday 16^th October, Karen and Simon will be kicking off the #1962Club, a week-long celebration of books first published in 1962. Their ‘Club’ weeks are always great fun, and I’m looking forward to seeing all the various tweets, reviews and recommendations flying around the web during the event.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given my fondness for fiction from the mid-20^th century, I’ve reviewed several 1962 books over the years. So if you’re thinking of taking part in the Club, here are my favourites. It really was a stellar year for books!

The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith

A novel powered by Highsmith’s trademark interest in decency and morality, The Cry of the Owl appears to start in traditional psychological thriller territory, only to shift towards something a little more existential by the end. The story centres on Robert, a deeply lonely man who finds some comfort from naively observing a girl through her kitchen window as she goes about her domestic routine. What really makes this novel such a compelling read is the seemingly unstoppable chain of events that Robert’s relatively innocent search for solace kicks off. We are left with the sense of how powerless a man can feel when his actions are judged and misinterpreted by the supposedly upstanding citizens around him, especially when fate intervenes.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates

Probably one of my all-time favourite collections of stories, alongside those by Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Taylor and William Trevor. Yates’ canvases may be small and intimate, but the emotions he explores are universal and recognisable. Here are the frustrations and disappointments of day-to-day life, the loneliness that stems from rejection, acute uncertainty, and deep feelings of worthlessness. A superb set of stories for lovers of character-driven fiction – quite varied in style despite the overarching theme.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

I first read this novella for a previous Halloween, and it proved to be a highly appropriate read for the season – atmospheric, unsettling and sometimes quite humorous in a darkly comic way. What really sets this magical book apart from so many others is its highly distinctive style, much of which stems from the curious nature of the narrator’s voice, that of young Merricat Blackwood. It’s a book with much to say about our suspicions, prejudices and, perhaps most importantly, our treatment of people who seem unusual or different from ourselves. The sense of being an outsider – or society’s mistreatment of the outsider – is a prominent theme.

The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg (tr. Dick Davis)

A marvellous collection of essays by this brilliant Italian writer – erudite, intelligent and full of the wisdom of life. Ginzburg wrote these pieces individually between 1944 and 1962, and many were made available through Italian journals before being collected here. Nevertheless, I *think* it qualifies for the Club as the collection, titled Le Piccole Virtù, was first published in Italian in 1962. In her characteristically lucid prose, Ginzburg writes of families and friendships, virtues and parenthood, writing and relationships. And while we might not necessarily agree with everything Ginzburg sets out in her essays, there is no denying her commitment to the principles she shares and the reasoning behind them. There is so much wisdom and intelligence to be found in these pieces.  A fascinating collection to savour and revisit, a keeper for the bedside table as a balm for the soul.

The Light of Day by Eric Ambler

Jules Dassin filmed this wonderfully entertaining crime caper as Topkapi (released in 1964), and I can highly recommend both! The Light of Day is one of Ambler’s ‘fish-out-of-water’ stories, in which unsuspecting civilians, often short of money, find themselves caught up in various conspiracies. In this instance, the naïve everyman is Arthur Simpson, a petty thief who gets roped into driving a high-class American car from Athens to Istanbul, no questions asked. Naturally, the whole pursuit is as dodgy as hell, with poor Simpson getting sucked into the ensuing crime as the novel unfolds. A fabulous read with some great characters to boot!

The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns

Barbara Comyns’ fiction continue to be a source of fascination for me, characterised as they are by her unique worldview, a surreal blend of the macabre and the mundane. The Skin Chairs is a magical novel in which a bright, curious girl must navigate some of the challenges of adolescence. It is by turns funny, eerie, poignant and bewitching. What Comyns captures so well here is how children can often be excellent, intuitive judges of character without fully understanding the complexities or underlying motivations at play. A spellbinding read that reminds me a little of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle – and I can’t recommend it more highly than that!

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra, a graduate student at Berkeley, drives home to her family’s ranch for the wedding of her identical twin sister, Judith, where she seems all set to derail the proceedings. This brilliant novel features one of my favourite fictional women. If you like complex characters with plenty of light and shade, this is a novel for you. Cassandra is intelligent and precise, with the capacity to be charming and witty. But she can also be manipulative, reckless, domineering, self-absorbed and cruel. In short, she is a mass of contradictions, behaving abominably at times – and yet she also elicits my sympathies.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassini (tr. William Weaver)

An evocative, achingly poignant story of a privileged Jewish family from Ferrara in Northern Italy in the run-up to the Second World War. This haunting novel encapsulates the loss of so many things: the loss of a love that was never meant to be fulfilled; the destruction of a sheltered world of innocence and sanctuary; and perhaps most tragically of all, the sweeping away of virtually a whole generation of humanity. While the overall mood and tone remain dreamlike and elegiac, Bassani never lets us forget the terrible impact of events to come. Gorgeous and heartbreaking in equal measure.    

The Spoilt City by Olivia Manning

The second instalment in Olivia Manning’s remarkable Balkan Trilogy, a series inspired by some of her own experiences during the war. How to do justice to such a deeply rewarding series of novels in just a few sentences? It’s nigh on impossible. All I can do is urge you to read these books for yourself if you haven’t already. Ostensibly a portrait of a complex marriage unfolding against the backdrop of the looming threat of war, this largely autobiographical series is rich in detail and authenticity, perfectly capturing the tensions and uncertainties that war creates. As ever, Manning excels at creating flawed and nuanced characters that feel thoroughly believable. A transportive read with a particularly vivid sense of place.

Due to a Death by Mary Kelly

I think this might be the bleakest book I’ve encountered in the British Library Crime Classics series – absolutely brilliant, but as dark as a desolate wasteland on a cold winter’s day. The novel’s setting is Gunfleet, a fictional town inspired by Greenhithe in the marshlands area of Kent. It’s the perfect backdrop for Kelly’s story, a slow-burning tale of hidden affairs, family tensions and existential despair. This is a beautifully written, intelligent drama featuring realistic, complex characters with secrets to conceal. In terms of style, the book reminds me of some of Margaret Millar’s fiction – maybe Patricia Highsmith’s, too. Either way, this is an excellent book, shot through with a sense of bleakness that feels well suited to the chilly weather to come.

Flesh by Brigid Brophy

Brophy’s engaging novel concerns itself with a young couple’s relationship – a sexual awakening of sorts played out against the bohemian backdrop of 1960s London. When we are first introduced to Marcus, he appears to be a shy, socially awkward, gangly young man struggling to find his place in the world. But by the end of the narrative, he is transformed – infinitely more comfortable with himself and his relationships with others. The woman who brings about this fundamental change in character is Nancy, a self-assured, sexually experienced young woman Marcus meets at a party. This is a smart, sexy, thoroughly enjoyable novel by Brigid Brophy, an author who seems ripe for rediscovery, particularly in the current era of women’s empowerment. As in her marvellous novella The Snow Ball, Brophy demonstrates her natural ability to riff with the creative arts, this time alluding to Rubens’ women as symbols of sexuality.

A Murder of Quality by John Le Carré

Somewhat atypical in style for a le Carré, Quality is a murder mystery as opposed to a spy novel, the type of detective story that wouldn’t be entirely out of place amongst the British Library Crime Classics. The book can also be viewed as a barbed commentary on the English class system — particularly boarding schools with their cruelty and elitist attitudes. (Le Carré’s main setting is a public school.) What the author captures so brilliantly here is the snobbishness within the school environment, the internal politics between the masters and, perhaps more tellingly, between their wives. This is a very well-written, satisfying mystery with just enough intrigue to keep the reader interested – needless to say, there is more to the case than meets the eye. Moreover, it’s a darkly humorous book – worth reading for the satirical sideswipes at the upper classes, particularly the public-school set.

So there we are, a dozen choices for next week’s #1962Club! Do let me know your thoughts on these books if you’ve read any of them. Or maybe you have plans of your own for the week – if so, feel free to mention them here.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani (tr. William Weaver)

First published in 1962, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is the probably the best-known novel in the Italian writer Giorgio Bassini’s series of works about life in his native Ferrara, a city in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romana. You can find out more in these introductory pieces by Dorian and Scott who are co-hosting a readalong of the book over the course of this week.

The story opens with a prologue set in 1957 in which the novel’s unnamed narrator is out for the day with friends. On their way back from the seaside, the group decides to stop at an Etruscan necropolis near Rome, and a young girl named Giannina asks her father why these ancient tombs do not seem quite as melancholy as more recent ones. Her father replies that it is because the Etruscans died so long ago, almost as though ‘they had never lived, as if they had always been dead’. By contrast, we can still remember the people who died fairly recently; hence we feel closer to them and miss them more acutely. Giannina then points out to her father that by virtue of their conversation, she has been reminded that the Etruscans were also alive once – and so their lives are given weight and recognition in her mind, just as much as those of the more recently deceased. It’s a poignant scene, one that triggers a series of memories for the narrator as he reflects on the time he spent in the company of his own lost loved ones, the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy Jewish family from Ferrara, who played an important part in his youth. There was the kindly Professor Ermanno and his wife, Signor Olga, their rather sensitive son, Alberto, and, most importantly of all, the beautiful, mercurial daughter, Micòl, with whom the narrator (also Jewish) was so tragically in love.

At the end of the prologue, Bassani reveals that all the remaining members of Finzi-Contini dynasty perished at the hands of the Nazis in 1943, deported to the concentration camps where they were unlikely to have received any kind of burial at all. Hence the stage is set for this deeply poignant and elegiac novel, a beautiful hymn to a lost and gilded world, one that was ultimately swept away by the dark forces at play during WW2.

Winding back in time to the late 1920s, the Finzi-Contini household seems to have set itself apart from the rest of the Jewish community living in Ferrara at the time. The family are wealthy, privileged and rather aloof – or at least, that’s how they are perceived by others, most notably the narrator’s father who, among other things, pours scorn on Alberto and Micòl’s playful behaviour during services at their local synagogue. While the narrator and his contemporaries attend the public school, the young Finzi-Continis are privately educated at home, to be glimpsed only occasionally at exam time and, during the early years, at their place of worship. The family estate is magnificent, a large house surrounded by acres of land – the famed garden of the book’s title – all enclosed within a vast protective wall. To the narrator, there is an air of separation and rejection about the Finzi-Contini estate; and yet there is something fascinating and intimate about it too. Oh to be admitted to the secluded garden of Eden, what a privilege that would surely turn out to be!

Well, the young narrator almost gets his chance one day in 1929, while seeking an escape after a poor result in his maths exam he encounters Micòl Finzi-Contini peering over the top of the garden wall. It’s a glorious moment, one that lives long in his memory for many years to come.

How many years have gone by since that far-off afternoon in June? More than thirty. Nevertheless, if I close my eyes, Micòl Finzi-Contini is still there, leaning over the wall of her garden, looking at me, and speaking to me. She was hardly more than a child, in 1929, a thirteen-year-old, thin and blond, with great, pale, magnetic eyes. I, a little boy in short pants, very bourgeois and very vain, whom a minor scholastic mishap was enough to plunge into the most childish desperation. We stared at each other. Above her, the sky was a uniform blue, a warm sky, already of summer, without the slightest cloud. Nothing could change it, and nothing has changed it, in fact, in my memory. (p. 33)

In spite of Micòl’s encouragement to join her in the garden, the narrator never manages to make it over the wall that day, a point that foreshadows the arc of his future relationship with the girl. Instead, the narrator has to wait almost another ten years before being invited into the grounds, this time by Alberto, largely on the assumption that he has been forced to resign from the local tennis club on account of his status as a Jew. The time is October 1938, around two months after the declaration of the racial laws which, among other punitive measures, prohibit Jews from frequenting recreational clubs of any kind. What follows for our narrator is a luminous Indian summer, a glorious sequence of days spent playing tennis, relaxing in the sunshine, and exploring the Finzi Contini’s garden largely in the company of the alluring Micòl.

We were really very lucky with the season. For ten or twelve days the perfect weather lasted, held in that kind of magic suspension, of sweetly glassy and luminous immobility peculiar to certain autumns of ours. It was hot in the garden; almost like summertime. Those who wanted could go on playing till five thirty and even later, with no fear that the evening dampness, already so heavy towards November, would damage the gut of the rackets. At that hour, naturally, you could hardly see on the court any longer. But the light, which in the distance still gilded the grassy slopes of the Mura degli Angeli, filled, especially on a Sunday, with a far-off crowd (boys chasing a football, wet nurses seated knitting besides baby carriages, soldiers on passes, pairs of lovers looking for places where they could embrace), that last light invited you to insist, to continue volleying no matter if the play was almost blind. The day was not ended, it was worth lingering a little longer. (p. 56)

Earlier I alluded to the tragic nature of the narrator’s love for Micòl: tragic because we know from the outset that Micòl dies at the hands of the Germans; and tragic because this love is never reciprocated (or so it appears in the novel). There are times when the narrator could make his feelings known to Micòl, most notably when the pair seek shelter from the rain in a secluded coach house in the estate’s grounds; and yet he fails to seize the opportunity until it is too late. Like her family and everything they seem to represent, the beautiful Micòl remains somewhat elusive and out of the narrator’s reach.

Countless times, in the course of the following winter, spring, and summer, I went back to what had happened (or rather, had not happened) between me and Micòl inside Perotti’s beloved carriage. If on that rainy afternoon, when the radiant Indian summer of ’38 suddenly ended, I had at least managed to speak to her—I told myself bitterly—perhaps things between us would have gone differently from the way they went. Speak to her, kiss her; it was then, when everything was still possible—I never ceased repeating to myself—that I should have done it! (p. 81)

I don’t want to say too much more about the narrative. After all, this is not a plot-driven novel. It’s much more about character, atmosphere and mood; the recreation of a rarefied and evocative world, made all the more poignant because we know that virtually everything we see is about to be destroyed. Bassani’s prose is wonderfully evocative, rich in detail and ambience. There are some long, looping passages here which at times reminded me a little of some of Javier Marías’ writing.

While the novel has at its heart an intensely personal love story – imbued as it is with a strong aura of fatality – it is also a reflection of life for the Jews of Ferrara during the rise of Fascism in the 1930s. We gain an insight into the political developments of the day, particularly through the character of Giampiero Malnate, a Communist friend of Alberto’s from Milan, who debates politics with the narrator during their visits to the Finzi-Contini household.

All in all, this haunting novel encapsulates the loss of many things: the loss of a love that was never meant to be fulfilled; the loss of a sheltered world of innocence and sanctuary; and perhaps most tragically of all, the loss of virtually a whole generation of humanity. While the overall mood and tone remain dreamlike and elegiac, Bassani never lets us forget the terrible impact of events to come. I’ll finish with a final passage, one that captures a sense of that feeling. In the following scene, the narrator is attending a Passover supper with his family – the racial laws have been in place for a number of months.

I looked at my father and mother, both aged considerably in the last few months; I looked at Fanny, who was now fifteen, but, as if an occult fear had arrested her development, she seemed no more than twelve; one by one, around me, I looked at uncles and cousins, most of whom, a few years later would be swallowed up by German crematory ovens: they didn’t imagine, no, surely not, that they would end in that way, but all the same, already, that evening, even if they seemed so insignificant to me, their poor faces surmounted by their little bourgeois hats or framed by their bourgeois permanents, even if I knew how dull-witted they were, how incapable of evaluating the real significance of the present or of reading into the future, they seemed to me already surrounded by the same aura of mysterious, statuary fatality that surrounds them now, in my memory; (pp. 124-125)

Other bloggers participating in the readalong include Dorian, Scott, Nathaniel, Grant, Max, Bellezza, Frances and Anthony – I’ll add links to their reviews as and when they become available.

My copy of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was published by Harcourt.