Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq (tr. Penny Hueston)

When I saw the description of Marie Darrieussecq’s book Sleepless in Fitzcarraldo’s promotional materials, I knew I had to read it, especially as insomnia is something I have experienced periodically over the past 15 years. Beautifully translated from the French by Penny Hueston, Sleepless is an erudite exploration of sleeplessness, weaving together the author’s personal experiences of the condition with those of other notable sufferers, typically writers. It’s a difficult book to describe accurately as so much of its power comes from being immersed in this dizzying condition, caught in the hinterland between restful sleep and waking up refreshed.

At times, in the madness of no sleep, it’s like oscillating between two worlds. Alive, but in a dead end life, without birth, without death, and moments that is both static and spinning. (p. 98)

Structurally, the book comprises a series of fragments and essays, supplemented by a wealth of footnotes, photographs and illustrations, all of which add texture to Darrieussecq’s eminently readable meditation. It’s a great book for dipping into, best read in small chunks to appreciate all the details in full.

As Darrieussecq notes, Proust is the literary king of insomnia. A longstanding sufferer himself, Proust opens In Search of Lost Time with a description of one of literature’s most famous failed bedtimes. It’s an experience Proust is intimately familiar with himself as we see from the following passage.

I’m living in a sort of death, punctuated by brief awakenings. Proust writes from within insomnia, and it is from insomnia that he elicits his writing. Insomnia is his laboratory, and it is first and foremost an experiment in time. It is the place where memory is written, the room containing the rooms of the past. (p. 46)

As I was reading this book, I couldn’t help but wonder why so many writers experience chronic insomnia – the distinguished roll call also includes Kafka, Kawabata, Huysmans, Philip Roth, Marguerite Duras, Virginia Woolf, Natalie Sarraute, Leonard Cohen, Celine and many more. While Darrieussecq doesn’t offer a definitive hypothesis or explanation, she does give us a fascinating array of examples, peppering her text with various stories and reports through the years. Proust, for instance, lined his walls with cork in the hope of creating an atmosphere conducive to sleep. Others, such as Huysmans and Hemmingway resorted to cataloguing and making lists when woken during the night – tactics played out thorough the characters in their books.

These discussions of literary insomniacs are supplemented by other representations of sleeplessness in the broader cultural arena, touching on portrayals in films – Solaris, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey feature prominently here – alongside books and other related media. As the hour between 3 and 4 am is often the most punishing time for poor sleepers, it seems no coincidence that the devil knocks on the door at 3.33 am in Stuart Rosenberg’s classic film The Amityville Horror…

Moreover, Darrieussecq occasionally extends her gaze into the political arena, highlighting some of the social barriers to conducive conditions for sleep. While everyone should have access to a safe place to sleep, many individuals are denied this fundamental human right through no fault of their own. Social inequalities and injustices are often to blame – and, as Darrieussecq points out, migrants, asylum seekers, the homeless and those living in poverty face significant challenges in this area, conditions the author observes first-hand when she reports on conditions in the migrant camps in Calais for French TV.

Living in a place that can be easily erased. Non-places, non-camps, situated in a country but also outside of it, outside political geography. Places peopled with non-subjects, at the same time detained and refused entry: non-people. Non-persons. And when you are a non-person, you non-sleep, non-sleeping is all there is. (p. 148)

As someone who frequently experiences bouts of acute insomnia myself, sometimes lasting up to two weeks, I found the author’s personal reflections on her experiences with the condition especially interesting. For Darrieussecq, her problems with sleeping began shortly after the birth of her first baby – a son born two months prematurely due to her malformed uterus, an issue triggered by her exposure to harmful drugs while developing in her mother’s womb. Sleeping tablets help a little, but these treatments come with their own problems and challenges, not least the requirement to persuade a doctor to issue the tablets in the first place!

Real sleeping pills, ones that work, are hard to obtain without a prescription. It means having a doctor, going through the ritual of seducing the doctor, and sometimes the pharmacist; it means having connections, conniving in some way. Whether you like it or not, you’re engaged in a relationship, you stick with the prescriber who comes up with the goods, you move on from the schmucks. (p. 40)

And because these medications affect people differently, overdoses of sleeping pills and elixirs can pose a significant risk – an issue compounded by the adverse impact of these treatments on our short-term memory. Once again, the literary world is full of near misses with these drugs – some accidental, others deliberate. In Brazil, Clarice Lispector almost perished while smoking in bed, when, under the influence of sleeping pills, her mattress caught fire. In another incident, Virginia Woolf had an early brush with death at the hands of Veranol, several years before her suicide by drowning.

Before she gave herself over forever to the stones and the river, Virginia Woolf was rescued, at the age of thirty-one, from an overdose of veronal, by an injection of strychnine, a lot of coffee, and whacks from a wet towel. (pp. 51–52)

Other writers deliberately overdose on sleeping aids to commit suicide, choosing ‘the big sleep’, often at an early age. Akutagawa and Cesare Pavese are notable examples here, but there are many more in the wider literary arena.

Musing on her own relationship with insomnia, Darrieussecq writes humorously about trialling a plethora of bedtime rituals and sleeping aids, from fasting, acupuncture, hypnosis and meditation to various acupressure mats, gravity blankets, and other weird and (not so) wonderful treatments. Sadly, none of these miracle cures deliver a sustainable solution for Darrieussecq despite the myriad of claims from enthusiastic manufacturers.

Following a polysomnographic analysis of her sleep patterns, Darrieussecq is deemed to be experiencing hypervigilance, a condition that means she wakes up to 20 times an hour (far more than the 2 or 3 micro-awakening per hour many of us experience in a typical night). Consequently, she must maintain a strict bedtime routine, getting up and going to bed at exactly the same time each day including weekends; otherwise, she will fail to connect with her ‘sleep train – the one that arrives approximately every two hours’. No more reading, listening to music or playing with the kids under the covers for Marie – her bed is for sleep and sex, but nothing else.

Thanks to this drastic scheduling of my time and space, I fall asleep. Deeply. It works. At midnight I rest my head on the pillow. At five past midnight the train arrives, and after a brief trip through the hypnagogic mountains, I am no longer there. It’s extraordinary. I often want to go to bed earlier, but no, midnight is when my locomotive turns into a pumpkin.

Alas, I continue to wake up at 4.04 a.m. In short, after two train cycles, I need at least one more for a restful night. (p. 208)

So much of this creative memoir / archive of sleeplessness resonates with me personally, particularly the horror of waking up between 3 and 4 at night, stranded in the interminable limbo of insomnia until the alarm goes off at 6. Moreover, the book’s vignette-style structure reflects the fragmentary nature of this condition, capturing the freewheeling association between a myriad of thoughts as the mind flits from one topic to another – once again, a feverish state I am intimately familiar with.

In short, this is a fascinating treatise on a frustrating condition that many of us will experience at some point in our lives. Recommended reading for any literary lover, especially those with an interest in the mysteries of sleep!

Sleepless is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions; my thanks to the publishers and the Independent Alliance for kindly providing a review copy.

Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir (tr. Terry Keefe)

Published posthumously and recently reissued By Vintage Classics, Misunderstanding in Moscow is an elegant novella by the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Deceptively simple yet infused without enough depth to intrigue readers, the story explores ageing, disillusionment, regrets, misunderstandings, and the evolution of a marriage with the passing of time. It’s my first experience of de Beauvoir’s fiction, and I’m looking forward to trying more.

The novella revolves around a married couple, André and Nicole, retired teachers in their early sixties, travelling from Paris to Moscow in 1966. They are in Russia to visit Macha, André’s daughter from his first marriage, who now works as a publisher and translator. While both Parisians are pleased to be in Moscow, André has especially high hopes for the trip, having only reconnected with Macha in the last few years.

Macha, who lives with her husband and child, has taken a month off work to show her father and Nicole around Russia, despite the couple’s familiarity with the capital from a previous visit. While André reconnects with Macha, bonding (and sometimes disagreeing!) over their interests in languages and socialist politics, Nicole is at a loose end, prompting a series of doubts and disappointments to resurface in her mind. In truth, Nicole is a little jealous of the time André is spending with Macha and his apparent lack of desire to be alone with Nicole herself.

And then, throughout their long life together, her need for him and the joy that he bought her had done nothing but grow. Now it was impossible to say which of the two of them was fonder of the other. Linked like Siamese twins: he is my life, and I am his. And yet there it was: it was not hurting him to never see her alone. Had his feelings cooled down? (p. 54)

Differences between the generations also fuel this discontentment. For instance, while Nicole likes Macha, she views her stepdaughter’s confidence and ability to have it all – a successful career and a contented family – with coolness, jealous perhaps that such opportunities were unavailable to her in the early years of marriage. Moreover, Nicole is acutely conscious of the inevitable erosion of her attractiveness and desirability over time – a decline reinforced by the responses of younger men.

He had shaken her hand with a kind of distracted politeness and something had definitely been undermined. For her, he was a young, attractive male: for him, she was as asexual as an eighty-year-old woman. She had never recovered from that look; she had stopped coinciding with her body, which was now an unfamiliar skin, a kind of distressing disguise. (p. 52)

De Beauvoir skilfully shifts her point of view between Nicole and André throughout the novel in a smooth, seemingly effortless way. While Nicole becomes increasingly bored during the trip, André is assailed by disappointments of his own – more specifically, regrets about his lack of accomplishments in life and a nagging dissatisfaction with the appearance of his body. For both partners, sexual intimacy has given way to companionship and habit, augmenting the sense of stasis lingering in their relationship.

The misunderstanding of the title is a relatively trivial one; nevertheless, it’s significant enough to be damaging if left unchecked. Something de Beauvoir does particularly well here is to show how a small sequence of miscommunications can spiral out of control, exposing deeper fault lines at the heart of a couple’s marriage. Once again, longstanding resentments and insecurities resurface for both partners, causing them to question their understanding of the relationship. For Nicole, there are grudges over the abandonment of her youthful ambitions and ideals, casualties of her devotion to marriage and motherhood. Now she is left wondering if André still loves or even needs her at this stage in his life.

The two images that she had of her life, of the past and of the present, could not be matched up. There was a mistake somewhere. This moment was a lie: it was not André and it was not Nicole; this scene was taking place somewhere else. […] How many women are wrong about their lives, throughout their lives. Her own had not been the one that she used to tell herself. Because André was impetuous, emotional, she had thought that he cherished her passionately. In truth, he forgot her as soon as he could not see her. (p. 86)

For André, there are doubts of a different nature – has he been enough for Nicole in their marriage? Is she bored with him? And if she is questioning his sincerity now, has she always doubted it in the past?

Naturally, there have been more serious arguments before, typically over extramarital affairs and their son Philippe’s education, but these rifts were resolved both passionately and swiftly. In some respects, the petty nature of this disagreement makes it more insidious – and potentially more lasting – as it lingers between them.

What will the future hold for Nicole and André? Friendship, familiarity and habit, or love, tenderness and affection? What remains between them now, and will it be enough to keep them together in the future? I’ll leave you to discover this for yourself…

This is an elegant, perceptive story of how longstanding relationships naturally evolve as we grow older, prompting us to change our expectations and face up to regrets. The novella also perfectly captures how the passing of time can seem both fast and slow at once, particularly for Nicole, as she laments the rapid erosion of her youth while grappling with the boredom of day-to-day existence. There are some interesting points about politics, too, as André defends China – a nation Macha fears – while criticising his daughter’s drive for peace at the possible expense of other values.

Misunderstanding in Moscow is published by Vintage Classics; personal copy.

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.

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth (tr. Charlotte Barslund)

A few years ago, the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth shot to fame with her allegedly semi-autobiographical novel Will and Testament, in which a middle-aged woman causes a deep rift within her family by claiming she was sexually abused in childhood by her father. The novel’s publication angered Hjorth’s family, who viewed it as a distortion of the truth. In fact, Hjorth’s sister, Helga, a lawyer, subsequently responded by writing her own novel, Free Will, giving a voice to the ‘wounded left behind’ when an author skews her family’s story to sensational effect.

In her latest novel, Is Mother Dead, Hjorth returns to the topic of family rifts, in particular the dysfunctional relationship between a daughter and her mother. It’s an intense, claustrophobic book, recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and widely admired by literary critics and readers alike.

The novel focuses solely on one woman’s perspective of events – that of Johanna, a successful, Norwegian-born artist in her late fifties. Thirty years have passed since Johanna abandoned her law degree, her respectable marriage to fellow lawyer, Thorleif, and her family by moving to Utah to live with an American artist named Mark, whom she had met at evening classes. The move led to a breakdown in communications between Johanna and her family, who viewed the young woman’s actions as foolish and misguided. In short, Johanna’s mother and younger sister, Ruth, have never forgiven Johanna for shunning the conservative social conventions she was destined to adhere to.

Following her move to the US, Johanna studied art at the University of Utah, ultimately forging a successful career as a visual artist. However, with their stark depictions of fractured mother-child relationships, Johanna’s artworks have caused her Norwegian family additional distress, bringing shame and humiliation on her mother, who seems to have interpreted the pieces as damningly autobiographical.

Now back in Oslo for a major retrospective of her work, Johanna is keen to re-establish contact with her estranged mother, who lives alone following her husband’s death. But the rift in the family remains, exacerbated by Johanna’s failure to return to Norway to attend her father’s funeral.

The day after the funeral I got a message sent from her [Ruth’s] phone, but it was from both of them, it said we, it was signed Mum and Ruth, a goodbye message. Mum had taken it very hard that I hadn’t come back to Dad’s sickbed, to Dad’s funeral, it had nearly killed her, it said, and in a way, I had killed her symbolically, that was how they phrased it, as far as I recall… (p. 8)

As Johanna openly admits, she had long wanted a strong sense of independence from her family, to live her own life as a creative artist, not the traditional one dictated by her parents. Hence her deviation from the ‘script’ they had envisaged.

I didn’t go to Dad’s funeral because I imagined Mum in black, the grieving widow, Mum’s face adopting the expression of her role, and I knew the role I had been allocated, the ungrateful daughter, disloyal, and I wouldn’t be able to escape it because everyone else was sticking to the script. (p. 168)

From her short-term rental in Oslo, Johanna constantly obsesses about her mother (now in her eighties), tracking down her contact details and hypothesising about what she might say if they ever happen to connect. Soon she is calling her mother on the phone, but no one responds, convincing Johanna that Ruth is acting as a gatekeeper in the relationship by blocking all her calls.

With little of substance to go on, Johanna fantasises about her mother, projecting various impressions onto a blank canvas in her mind.

Information we can’t access is especially tantalising. In the absence of information, I invent her. What is it I want to know? I wonder how she is. (p. 16)

In short, Johanna wonders how her mother is doing. Not because she cares about her per se, but because she wonders what her mother thinks of their situation, ‘the existential one’ that they have shared for several years.

Had I called Mum to get to know her again? To see who she was now? To talk to Mum as if she weren’t my mum, but an ordinary human being, a random woman at a railway station? That’s impossible. Not because she isn’t an ordinary human being with all the associated flaws, but because a mother can never be an ordinary human being to her children, and I am one of her children. (p. 12)

While the reasons for Johanna’s desire to see her mother are never explicitly stated, certain personal developments may be significant here. Firstly, Johanna’s American partner, Mark, died a few years ago; and with the couple’s adult son John – now a father himself – living and working in Copenhagen, the pull of familial bonds seems uppermost in Johanna’s mind. She knows that a fresh start with her mother is almost certainly out of the question, but maybe a truce would be possible, a lessening of the ‘constant internal tirade’ she imagines her mother experiencing as a consequence of her actions.

As the story unfolds, Johanna’s behaviour becomes increasingly unhinged, causing the reader to question her state of mind (and reliability as a narrator). Before long, Johanna is stalking her mother, parking outside her apartment, and hiding in nearby bushes to monitor Mum’s movements — developments that add significantly to the sense of tension inherent in the novel.

Hjorth punctuates her narrative with various memories from Johanna’s childhood – fragments that preoccupy the protagonist as she pursues her obsessive quest. There are hints of a more positive relationship between Johanna and her mother during this time, with both individuals sharing a talent for drawing. The girls’ father, however, is clearly the most dominant figure in the household, frequently chastising Johanna for her perceptive pictures.

As the novel approaches its denouement, more clues about Johanna’s mother emerge, hinting at a childhood trauma that has seeped into adulthood and marriage to Johanna’s father. These disturbing formative experiences appear to have fuelled the mother’s determination to stick to traditional moral codes when raising her children, including the ‘dutiful daughter’ script Johanna so forcibly rejected when she abandoned her life in Norway for a new one in America.

There were many secrets in the yellow house, I sensed it, Mum sensed it, but we closed our eyes because we couldn’t handle what we might see if we dared to look because if we saw it and gave voice to it, the bubble would burst, and we didn’t know what would come pouring out, most likely it would be something that would ruin the wall-to-wall carpet and then someone would have to get down on their knees to clean it up, and that someone would be Mum. (p. 221)

In summary, then, Is Mother Dead is an intense exploration of an estranged mother-daughter relationship and the psychological fallout of a seemingly irreparable breakdown in communication. The novel raises many questions (but few easy answers) about familial obligations and responsibilities. For instance, what can we expect from our parents, particularly our mother? And what do we owe them in return, especially when our desires and personal wishes diverge from theirs? There are questions too about the ethics of using intimate family details and history in works of art, a topic that remains a touchstone for several European writers working today. In truth, this is a book I admired rather than loved, but it’s very well executed, leaving readers with much to consider.

Is Mother Dead is published by Verso Books; personal copy.

Voyager by Nona Fernández (tr. Natasha Wimmer)

Last year I read and loved Space Invaders, a dazzling, shapeshifting novella by the Chilean writer and actress Nona Fernández. These qualities are also very much in evidence here in the author’s captivating memoir, Voyager, Constellations of Memory, a beguiling meditation on memory, family history, neurology and astronomy. This exquisitely-written book also weaves together elements of the personal with the political, delving into the dark heart of Chilean history – specifically the atrocities perpetuated under General Pinochet’s dictatorship in the early 1970s. It’s a tricky book to describe, partly because it’s so richly textured and imagined, but hopefully I can give you a flavour of it here. (I should also say upfront that I simply adored this book. It’s a luminous one-sitting read, full of fascinating observations, connections and ideas; another dazzling gem from Daunt Books, a publisher that consistently delivers the goods.)

When Fernandez’s mother experiences a series of brief blackouts, Nona takes her to the hospital for various tests, including a visualisation of the brain’s activity. As Fernandez watches the network of neurons lighting up on the screen, she is reminded of a starscape, an imaginary constellation of stars twinkling away in the sky…

I remember the electrical charges I saw in her neurological exam. Those constellations of clustered memories. And I muse, in a rather obvious way, that the parentheses in her brain are like the black holes of the cosmos. Dark, enigmatic spaces packed with hidden information. I have only the most basic understanding of them. (p. 87)

In some respects, these parentheses (i.e. the gaps in memory her mother experiences after she has briefly lost consciousness) can be likened to black holes. However, just because her mother can’t remember the details of these blackouts, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.

Moreover, Fernandez also recalls a story from childhood, a conversation she had with her mother about the stars in the sky, their origins and meaning. Irrespective of whether we notice them or not, the stars are always present, reminding us of their existence, transmitting messages and signals night after night after night.

When I was very little and I asked my mother about the stars, she responded with a crazy theory. Up in the night sky, she said, there were little people who were trying to talk to us with mirrors. In a kind of Morse code with flashes of light conveying messages. For a long time I believed her and I assumed that the messages sent by the little people in the sky were to say hello and remind us of their presence despite the distance and the darkness. Hello, here we are, we’re the little people, don’t forget us. (p. 44)

Using these two experiences as a springboard, Fernandez weaves a beautiful, effortlessly fluid meditation, establishing deep and meaningful connections between the constellations in the sky, our constellations of memories – both personal and political – astrology, motherhood, identity and more. Pivotal here are the author’s own personal experiences of stargazing in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the world’s leading areas for observing the night sky. It’s a location steeped in Chile’s history, some of it deeply troubling. In October 1973, shortly after Pinochet swept to power, twenty-six people were executed there by the dictator’s ‘Caravan of Death’ squad.

Around the same time as her mother’s neurological investigations, Fernandez is invited to sign an Amnesty International petition calling for twenty-six stars in a particular constellation to be renamed (one for each victim of the 1973 atrocity) as a permanent act of remembrance. Following her support of this endeavour, Fernandez agrees to become a godmother to one of the stars, Star HD89353, in memoriam of Mario Argüelles Toro.

In one of the most moving vignettes in the book, Fernandez visits Mario’s widow, Violeta, at her home in Calama. She hears how Violeta searched the Atacama Desert, day in day out for twenty years following her husband’s death, desperately seeking elements of his remains – a bone, a scrap of clothing, a belonging of any sort – something she could bury as a way of saying goodbye. These visits culminate in Fernandez joining Violeta and the other bereaved families on a pilgrimage to the desert, a deeply affecting act of remembrance that hopefully brings a modicum of solace to all involved.

If I think about the story of Mario Argüelles and his twenty-five fellow victims executed in the desert, if I think about all the people of Calama, their city, who have no information about them, I’m visited again by the image of those menacing black holes. Twenty-six lives and twenty-six deaths and twenty-six bodies hidden in some corner of history, in a blind spot where there’s nothing left to be found anymore. (p. 88)

In some ways, Mario’s story is a powerful reminder of the importance of individual acts of defiance and remembrance – a way of focusing on an individual death within the cumulative horror of Pinochet’s actions. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that each of these losses represents a unique person, an individual robbed of their life – each leaving behind a family destroyed by enduring grief.

Alongside these elements, Fernandez also touches on her own family history – most notably, stories of her mother and grandmother and their shared determination to vote ‘No’ in the 1988 national plebiscite, a crucial referendum on Chile’s political direction. A victory for the ‘Yes’ campaign would have strengthened Pinochet’s control over the country at the time, but thankfully the ‘No’ campaign prevailed by a comfortable margin, ushering in a more democratic future for the country.

Fernandez continues to revisit these themes throughout the book, weaving together a beguiling network of connections, alighting on personal family memories, her mother’s neurological condition, the mysteries hidden in the cosmos and episodes from Chile’s troubled history. By doing so, she seems to be highlighting the importance of the past to our present and future direction. In short, light from the past can illuminate our current situation. Only by remembering and preserving these stories, by learning from our history and previous experiences, can we hope to move forward, shaping the decisions and constellations of the future as positively as possible.

Voyager is published in the UK by Daunt Books; my thanks to the publishers for kindly providing a review copy. Interested readers should also check out Patricio Guzmán’s stunning documentary on the Atacama Desert, Nostalgia for the Light, which explores similar themes – the cinematography is dazzling.

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes (tr. Ann Goldstein)

Published in Italy in 1952 and freshly translated here by Ann Goldstein, Forbidden Notebook is a remarkable rediscovered gem of Italian literature, a candid, exquisitely-written confessional from an evocative feminist voice. Its author, Alba de Céspedes, was a bestselling novelist, poet and screenwriter of Italian-Cuban heritage. The granddaughter of the first president of Cuba, de Céspedes was born and raised in Rome. While working as a journalist in the 1930s, she was politically active, lending her support to anti-fascist activities for which she was imprisoned twice. Her writing, however, seems more concerned with the inner lives of women, their deepest feelings and desires, their preoccupations and discontents – topics that remain acutely relevant to this day.

The novel is narrated by forty-three-year-old Valeria Cossati, who experiences an irresistible urge to purchase a black notebook while buying cigarettes for her husband, Michele, one Sunday morning. Although the tobacconist is not permitted to sell such items on a Sunday, he does so in response to Valeria’s pleas – and this small act of rebellion sets the novel’s subversive tone from the opening scene.

Over the next six months, Valeria documents her inner thoughts in the notebook with great candour and clarity, laying bare the nature of her world with all its preoccupations. The act of writing becomes a confessional of sorts, an outlet for Valeria’s frustrations with her family – her husband Michele, a somewhat remote but dedicated man, largely wrapped up in his own interests, which Valeria doesn’t share, and their two grown-up children, Riccardo and Mirella, both of whom live at home.

At first, Valeria writes primarily about her children and the tensions in the relationships between the generations. At nineteen, Mirella is self-assured and growing in independence. Her older boyfriend, Cantoni – a successful lawyer – buys her expensive gifts, items that Valeria could never afford for Mirella. In a desire to protect her family’s reputation, Valeria repeatedly clashes with Mirella, urging her not to stay out late or to jeopardise her studies in law to spend time with this man. In short, Valeria struggles to understand her daughter’s values and priorities, capturing her concerns in the private notebook.

Sometimes I think I’m wrong to write down everything that happens; fixed in writing, even what is, in essence, not bad seems bad. I was wrong to write about the conversation I had with Mirella when she came home late and, after talking for a long time, we separated not as mother and daughter, but as two hostile women. If I hadn’t written it, I would have forgotten about it. (pp. 46–47)

Although Michele has a steady job with the bank, money is tight within the Cossati family, leaving little room for luxuries or new clothes. To supplement her husband’s income, Valeria works in an office – a responsible job that her old-fashioned mother frowns upon and belittles. This role, alongside all her domestic chores, leaves Valeria with virtually no time to herself. She must snatch precious moments here and there, often staying up late at night to document her thoughts in secret. In short, Valeria lives in constant fear that her notebook will be discovered, exposing her innermost feelings and transgressions. This relationship between secrecy and the risk of exposure invests the novel with a sense of tension as the narrative unfolds. Nevertheless, Valeria feels compelled to maintain the notebook, almost as a way of writing herself into existence.

As the diary entries build up, we see how Valeria has been defined by the familial roles assigned to her. In the eyes of her family, Valeria is seen purely as a daughter, a wife and a mother rather than an individual in her own right – even Michele calls her ‘Mamma’, never ‘Valeria’. More galling still is the implicit assumption that Valeria will simply stay at home to look after the baby when Riccardo’s insipid fiancé, Marina, falls pregnant – with absolutely no regard for Valeria’s own wishes or ambitions. In short, her identity has been subsumed by the family’s requirements – the very thought that she might want a life or some privacy of her own is mocked by those around her, cruelly devaluing her existence outside the domestic sphere.

Gradually the focus of the notebook entries shifts, illuminating Valeria’s frustrations with Michele. There is a realisation that she and Michele are no longer the people they once were when they first met. The nature of their relationship has changed over time, with intimacy giving way to familiarity and domesticity – the regular routines of day-to-day family life.

I wonder if, now, I’d know how to talk to him, tell him the many things I think about. Things that are mine and not ours, as at the time of our marriage, and that we’ve pretended, with our silence, still are. Often, in other words, I wonder what the relations between Michele and me have been for years. (p. 201)

Moreover, Valeria begins to question her own moral values – the codes she learned from childhood and the cues signalled by her husband. There’s an acute sense of destabilisation here, a kind of loosening or unmooring of the foundations of her world.

I’ve never had my own ideas; up till now I’ve leaned on a morality learned as a child or on what my husband said. I no longer seem to know where good is and where evil is, I no longer understand those around me, and so what I thought was solid in me loses substance as well. (p. 153)

With no room of her own at home, Valeria finds sanctuary at the office, going there on Saturday afternoons as an escape from her family. During these visits, she encounters her boss, a gentle, attentive man who is equally constrained by the demands of life at home. As her relationship with this soulmate deepens in intimacy, Valeria must decide where her loyalties lie – to her family and their endless requirements or to her own yearnings and desires…

Every time I open this notebook the anxieties I felt when I began to write in it return to mind. I was assailed by regrets that poisoned my day. I was always afraid that the notebook would be discovered, even if at the time it contained nothing that could be considered shameful. But now it’s different. In it I’ve recorded the chronicle of these last days, the way in which I’ve gradually let myself be drawn into acts that I condemn and yet which, like this notebook, I seem unable to do without. (p. 189)

In short, while Valeria experiences a gradual reawakening of her own yearnings, she is also consumed by guilt – torn between a compulsion to capture her deepest desires in the notebook and a fear of undermining everything she has built with Michele and the children over the past twenty years.

So, to summarise, Forbidden Notebook is a startling, exquisitely-written confessional – an illuminating exploration of a woman’s right to her own existence in the face of competing demands. It’s also a fascinating insight into women’s lives in post-war Italian society as the traditional gender roles of the past were being challenged by the desires for freedom and modernity. One of the most compelling aspects of this novel is just how candid and honest it feels, especially for a book first published in the 1950s. There’s an emotional richness to Valeria’s diary entries, an openness and truthfulness that will likely resonate with many readers, especially fans of Natalia Ginzburg, Anna Maria Ortese and Elena Ferrante.

As you’ve probable gathered by now, I absolutely adored this one and look forward to reading more by Alba de Céspedes in the future. Luckily, Pushkin Press plan to reissue another couple of her books over the next year or two, which is excellent news for lovers of women writers. (My thanks to the publishers and the Independent Alliance for kindly providing a review copy.)

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (tr. Lucy Jones)

Described by the publishers as ‘a ground-breaking classic of post-war German literature’, Siblings is the first of Brigitte Reimann’s novels to be translated into English, and what an interesting rediscovery it is – bold, edgy and evocative with a style all of its own! Originally published in Germany in 1963, the novel is narrated by Elisabeth Arendt, a young, idealistic painter whose steadfast beliefs in the possibility of building an egalitarian socialist future in the GDR bring her into conflict with her beloved older brother, Uli, a disillusioned engineer.

Set in 1960, before the construction of the Berlin Wall, the novel is bookended by snippets from the same conservation between the siblings, giving the narrative a circular feel. While Elisabeth is determined to fashion a fulfilling life for herself in the East, Uli feels constrained by the Party structures and ways of working, fuelling his desire to defect to the West. Following an earlier association with a radical University Professor, Uli has been left with a black mark against his name; consequently, he can only find work as a glorified draughtsman, despite his excellent qualifications as an engineer.

‘It’s like being pricked with needles every day,’ he said, ‘which is worse than being stabbed by a dagger…’ (p. 74)

In his desire to achieve creative freedom, Uli tells Elisabeth of his plans to cross the border, prompting the argument that kick-starts the book. From there, the narrative slips backwards and forwards in time, illustrating how the siblings have arrived at this point. 

With her keen eye for a painterly image, Reimann skilfully evokes the siblings’ childhood memories in a vivid, evocative style.

Blossoming cherry trees in the garden, the sandpit with our red and blue tin toys; a wall covered in ivy, and, at its foot between the broad-leafed, violet vines, we gather snail shells in the damp, black leaf mould; (pp. 4-5)

By her early twenties, Elisabeth is working at an industrial plant in the East, holding painting classes for the workers at her artist’s studio. There is some lovely descriptive writing here, capturing the stark beauty of the industrial landscapes and the workers in situ.

I worked urgently, haphazardly and unsystematically, drawn to the arc of the bridges and the prosaic curve of the cooling towers on delicately braced struts, or lured by the mellow colours under the blue September sky. I painted watercolours to catch the innocent colour of that man-made landscape; I sketched the welders on our factory floor, and the carpenters wearing velvet waistcoats over their suntanned, bare torsos, and the girls waiting and chatting on the road to the factory works, their hair tousled and skirts ballooning in sharp gusts of wind. (p. 81)

With politics playing a central role in the novel, Elisabeth soon finds herself at odds with the authorities when she criticises an older painter – a man favoured by the Party – for his outmoded depiction of activists. When the artist in question reports Elisabeth to the Stasi, she fights to defend her more modern style of creative expression – one imbued with layers of feeling. Moreover, it is rumoured that she has formed a bourgeois faction within the workers, a subversive group with the power to disrupt. Nevertheless, Elisabeth successfully defends her position, allowing her vivid artworks to speak for themselves.

Also of note is Elisabeth’s eldest brother, Konrad, whose earlier defection to the West has unsettled Elisabeth, prompting worries that this might have fuelled Uli’s decision to follow suit. Although Konrad is now relatively settled in Hamburg, his path to freedom was not an easy one, adversely affecting his marriage to Charlotte (a fellow defector) – a relationship that now feels somewhat ambivalent at best. In a particularly striking sequence, Elisabeth and her mother cross the border to meet Konrad in West Belin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, brother and sister clash over their contradictory political views and ideals, prompting Elisabeth to leave the reunion early. Only as she is waiting by the border for her mother does Elisabeth realise what a divided Germany really means.

By the novel’s conclusion, Elisabeth has enlisted the help of her boyfriend, Joachim, to persuade Uli to stay – a move likely to force a wedge between the two siblings, irrespective of Uli’s final decision. In many respects, the novel is about separations and divided loyalties – divisions that cleave open the fault lines between the East and the West, from the political and ideological to the emotional and physical.

Siblings unfolds through a jagged, fractured narrative, blending realism with flashes of modernism – an unusual style that makes this novella a highly evocative read. Reimann skilfully captures the atmosphere of Elisabeth’s world, complete with the sights, sounds and smells of life in East Germany. Interestingly, it’s not quite the grim, colourless picture one might expect.

In the evenings, Lukas came over from the neighbouring compound. He brought a few brigade people with him, and we nattered over peppermint tea and, sometimes, cheap, bitter-smelling miner’s schnapps. The window stood ajar, and the mild evening air drove in the breath of the forest, with its tangy smell of mushrooms and damp moss. We heard the deep, dark hum of the pine trees in the wind, the tootling of an accordion and, on paydays, laughter and drunken singing from the beer parlour. (pp. 35–36)

Like Elisabeth, Reimann had to balance her desires for creative expression and freedom against the constraints of the prevailing authorities. In the brief biography accompanying the Penguin Classics edition, we learn that Reimann was just thirty-nine when she died of cancer. As a passionate young writer keen to depict the realities of life in socialist East Germany, Reimann wished to live ’30 wild years instead of 70 well-behaved ones’. If Siblings is anything to go by, it appears she achieved her aim, making a case for cult status through her exciting feminist voice. 

(My thanks to the publishers for kindly providing a review copy.)    

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

I have written before about my love of Natalia Ginzburg’s fiction – most recently, All Our Yesterdays, a rich, multilayered novel of family life spanning the duration of WW2. The Little Virtues is a volume of Ginzburg’s essays, and what a marvellous collection it is – erudite, intelligent and full of the wisdom of life. Ginzburg wrote these pieces individually between 1944 and 1962, and many were published in Italian journals before being collected here. In her characteristically lucid prose, Ginzburg writes of families and friendships, of virtues and parenthood, and of writing and relationships. I adored this beautiful, luminous collection of essays, a certainty for my end-of-year highlights even though we’re only in January – it really is that good.

In the opening essay, ‘Winter in the Abruzzi’ (1944), Ginzburg describes the time she and her family spent living in exile in a village in Abruzzo during the Second World War. It’s a poignant, melancholy piece, particularly given what happens to Natalia’s husband, Leone – a Jewish anti-fascist activist – at the hands of the authorities.

There is a kind of uniform monotony in the fate of man. Our lives unfold according to ancient, unchangeable laws, according to an invariable and ancient rhythm. Our dreams are never realised and as soon as we see them betrayed we realise that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by. (pp. 12–13)

This palpable sense of melancholy is carried through to ‘Portrait of a Friend’ (1957) as Ginzburg reflects on her home city, the city of her youth, a place haunted by ‘memories and shadows’. Here she likens the area to an old friend, a poet who is now deceased.

Written in the immediate aftermath of war, ‘The Son of Man’ (1946) develops these themes further, with Ginzburg conveying how her generation — effectively the fugitives of war — will never feel safe in their homes again, where a knock in the middle of the night will almost certainly instil fear in the soul. In essence, the war has exposed a brutal truth, the darkest, ugliest sides of humanity in all their horror and cruelty. There’s a sense that the young have had to find a new strength or toughness to face the realities of life, something different from the previous generation – and hopefully the one to come. It’s a mindset that has led to a gulf between Ginzburg’s generation and that of her parents, especially in their respective approaches to parenthood.

They would like our children to play with woolly toys in pretty pink rooms with little trees and rabbits painted on the walls. They would like us to surround their infancy with veils and lies, and carefully hide the truth of things from them. But we cannot do this. We cannot do this to children whom we have woken in the middle of the night and tremblingly dressed in the darkness so that we could flee with them or hide them… (p. 83)

In ‘England: Eulogy and Lament’ (1961), the author relays her impressions of England and its people – a nation whose characteristics she documents with the directness of an outsider.

To Ginzburg, England is a civilised country, well governed and organised, serious and conventional, gloomy and dull, with occasional glimpses of beauty amid a largely homogenous environment. Many of these qualities are reflected in how the English dress – a style showing little imagination or individuality with the majority dressing alike. For women, the norm seems to be ‘beige or transparent plastic raincoats which look like shower curtains or tablecloths’, while businessmen opt for pinstripe trousers and black bowler hats. Moreover, Ginzburg is adept at capturing the demeanour of the English, how in conversation, they tend to stick to the superficialities of life (such as the weather and other banalities) to avoid causing others offence.

I couldn’t help but raise an ironic eyebrow at some Of Ginzburg’s observations about England’s principles. Oh, how this country has changed from the version portrayed here – in some areas for the better, in others for the worse!

It [England] is a country which has always shown itself ready to welcome foreigners, from very diverse communities, without I think oppressing them. (p. 36)

In ‘My Vocation’ (1949), one of my favourite pieces in this collection, Ginzburg traces her approach to writing over the arc of her creative life, from composing juvenile poems and stories in childhood to her maturity as a writer of the female experience in adulthood. It’s a fascinating piece detailing how her relationship with writing has changed through adolescence, marriage and motherhood. This beautiful, thoughtful essay also captures how the tenor of Ginzburg’s work is affected by her mood, especially the balance between her use of memory vs imagination.

When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality. Suffering makes the imagination weak and lazy; it moves, but unwillingly and heavily, with the weak movements of someone who is ill… (p.104)

Here, along with several other articles in this collection, we get the sense Ginzburg approaches her subjects obliquely or at an angle. In short, by writing about one aspect of a topic, she triggers reverberations elsewhere – like an echo reverberating around the landscape or stone skimming across a pond – adding a broader resonance to her insights beyond their immediate sphere.

‘Human Relationships’ (1953) is another piece that follows a timeline, tracing the nature of our relationships with others from childhood and adolescence to adulthood and parenthood. Ginzburg is adept at capturing how the subtleties of our interactions change as we move through each of these phases. As our values, needs and priorities shift, so do our thoughts and emotions, frequently manifesting themselves in our attachments to others. While all stages are brilliantly conveyed, Ginzburg writes especially well about the mysteries of the adult world from a child’s point of view, highlighting the joys and anxieties that consume us at this age. In addition, her reflections on finding a life partner in adulthood are just as insightful and beautifully expressed.

After many years, only after many years, after a thick web of habits, memories and violent differences has been woven between us, we at last realise that he is, in truth, the right person for us, that we could not have put up with anyone else, that it is only from him that we can ask everything that the heart needs. (p. 141)

Central to some of these essays are our relationships with others. In ‘He and I’ (1962), Ginzburg describes the relationship with her partner in terms of their many differences, from their personalities and character traits to their interests and pursuits. It’s a beautifully written piece, tinged with touches of poignancy, especially towards the end.

Finally, in the titular essay from 1960, Ginzburg sets out her approach to parenthood, arguing that we should put more weight behind the ‘great virtues’ of life, several of which spring from instinct, and less on the ‘little virtues’, typically born from a defensive spirit of self-preservation.

As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; nor shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know. (p. 151)

Moreover, she argues that by focusing too much on the little virtues, parents are in danger of fostering a sense of ‘cynicism or fear of life’ amongst their children, particularly if the great virtues are missing or downplayed.

While we might not necessarily agree with everything Ginzburg sets out in her essays, there is no denying her commitment to these principles 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 Little Virtues is published by Daunt Books; my thanks to the publishers for kindly providing a review copy.

The Trouble with Happiness by Tove Ditlevsen (tr. Michael Favala Goldman)

Back at the beginning of June, I wrote about Tove Ditlevsen’s 1952 short story collection, The Umbrella, which forms the first part of the recent Penguin reissue, The Trouble with Happiness. The book as a whole takes its name from the second collection included here – a volume of eleven stories, published in Danish in 1963. Ditlevsen experienced severe depression, addiction to drugs and alcohol, and several broken marriages during her life – she divorced four times. As such, many of these influences, alongside those of her austere childhood in working-class Copenhagen, have made their way into her books, these stories included.

The titular piece feels particularly autobiographical in nature, a quality augmented by its personal, almost confessional style. Here we see a talented, seventeen-year-old girl on the cusp of womanhood, desperate to spread her wings and escape the constraints of her family. The girl’s mother is severe and judgemental, while the father remains largely absent or asleep, adding to the fractured nature of life in the family’s cramped apartment. As an account, it’s shot through with a palpable sense of sadness – a melancholy mood that resurfaces now and again in the protagonist’s thoughts several years down the line.

But sometimes – when someone has left me, or I discover inadvertently in the eyes of my children a glimpse of cold observation, of merciless, unsurmountable distance, I take out my brother’s pretty little sewing case and slowly open the mother-of-pearl inlaid lid. Fight for all you hold dear, plays the worn old music maker, and an unnamed sadness swells inside my mind, because they are all dead or disappeared, and my brother and I no longer communicate. (p. 184)

Ditlevsen has an innate ability to convey the devastating effects of loneliness and isolation that women sometimes feel, especially when their marriages break down. In Perpetuation, one of my favourites in the collection, Edith finds that history is repeating itself when her husband, an academic in his mid-forties, has an affair with a much younger woman. Consequently, Edith cannot help but reflect on her father’s earlier desertion of his family under similar circumstances. Will Edith’s children blame her for the collapse of the marriage? How long will it be before their father forgets them?

What if she told her children the truth? The truth about a father whose love for a woman and tenderness for three children was diminished to a little prick in his conscience when once in a while – because it had to happen – on a street, in a trolley, or on a train, he saw a child who resembled one of them? A little pain that diminished with every embrace, every passionate night, and which in the end disappeared completely in the terrible power radiating from the body of a young, beautiful woman. (pp. 168–169)

The danger posed by youth is also a factor in The Little Shoes, another brilliantly-observed piece in this piercing collection of stories. When Helene employs Hanne, a rather self-important, insolent twenty-two-year-old girl, as a housekeeper, she begins to regret her decision, especially when the family’s stability is put at risk. With her air of working-class resentment and self-righteousness, Hanne might just be fooling around with Helene’s fifteen-year-old son, adding to a pattern of behaviour that Helene finds infuriating.

Helene had to fight back the impulse to fire her on the spot. She stood there until the girl slowly got up, wearing a shameless smile that radiated the consciousness of the sexual superior superiority of idiotic youth.

Helene took it as the kind of smile you give to an older, discarded fellow female, and she was infuriated. (p. 144–145)

Ditlevsen spares little in her withering depiction of men in these stories, many of whom are at best absent or neglectful and at worst cruel or deceitful.

In A Fine Business, a young couple, imminently expecting a child, are looking for a new house which they plan to buy with a recent inheritance. After several fruitless viewings, their estate agent alights on an ideal property, armed with the knowledge that the owner – a vulnerable mother – needs to sell quickly following the breakdown of her marriage. It’s a situation the male buyer is all too keen to exploit, working in partnership with the estate agent to secure a reduced price – an action that reveals a mercenary side to the buyer’s character. Only his heavily pregnant wife, Grete, can see the injustice of this scenario, empathising with the downtrodden seller, particularly given her own condition.

There is such a sad, hopeless atmosphere in this house, bereft as it is of much of its former furniture. And yet, this excellent story reveals so much about the characters, particularly through Ditlevsen’s insights into Grete’s private thoughts.

Why has he looked that way at the little stain on the ceiling? It was the same way he looked at the woman and a little girl, almost as if there were two defects in the house that could drive down the price. He probably wasn’t going to buy this house either. And when they got home, he would act as if he had made the most ingenious deal in his life. (p. 128)

Also rather troubling is the father’s behaviour in The Knife, an arresting story in which a mentally disturbed man feels constrained by his wife and son.

They existed like shadows inside him, thought foetuses he couldn’t get rid of, products of a weakness in him which he tried with all his might to overcome. (p. 96)

Other highlights include Anxiety, a terrifying tale of a woman cowed into submission by her intolerant husband – a newspaper copy editor who works nights and hates having his sleep disturbed during the day. Consequently, this woman is afraid to move around in her own home in case she makes a noise. Moreover, any occasional visits to her sister also come with their own problems, especially if she stays out for too long – who knows what her husband might need while she is away…

Two Women is also worthy of a mention – a beautifully observed story of a restless, depressed woman who fails to empathise with her hairdresser, despite experiencing similar anxieties and concerns. In truth, Britta has come to the beauty parlour for an escape from her own troubles, not to be dragged down by those of another.

So, in summary, a superb collection of stories, beautifully expressed in a spare, emotionally truthful style, perfectly capturing the underlying sadness and loneliness therein. Here we have stories of fractured minds, lonely, isolated women, marginalised or abandoned in their marriages by careless or cruel men. Supportive friends or family members seem few and far between, adding to the unhappiness that surrounds these protagonists. But as ever with Ditlevsen, the writing is brilliant, a factor that helps balance some of the heartbreak we find within. Very highly recommended indeed, especially for lovers of interiority in fiction.

Happening by Annie Ernaux (tr. Tanya Leslie)

I’ve been meaning to try more of Annie Ernaux’s work for the past six months, ever since I read her hugely impressive memoir, The Years, published in France in 2008. It’s a fascinating, distinctive book, a kind of collective biography in which the cultural and social history of a generation – Ernaux’s generation – is refracted through the lens of one woman’s experiences. So, with the imminent release of Audrey Diwan’s adaptation of Ernaux’s Happening (another memoir), I was galvanised into action. (The film picked up the prestigious Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, and I’m very eager to see it.)

First published in French in 2000, and translated into English in 2001, Happening takes us back to October 1963 when Ernaux was twenty-three, studying literature at Rouen University and living in the college halls of residence. Like most young women of her day, Ernaux uses the Ogino (or ‘rhythm’) method of birth control to minimise the chances of conceiving. (Other, more reliable forms of contraception were not legally sanctioned in France until 1967, four years down the line.)

Unfortunately for Ernaux, she falls pregnant, something she resists naming explicitly as this would feel like a validation of her status – for example, why use the word ‘expecting’ when she has no intention of giving birth? It’s a pregnancy that Ernaux is determined to terminate, partly due to the restrictions it would impose on her day-to-day life and partly for the associated stigma and sense of shame. (Ernaux’s desire to distance herself from her working-class background – her parents run a grocer’s shop – remains an important theme in her work.)

Somehow I felt there existed a connection between my social background and my present condition. Born into a family of labourers and shopkeepers, I was the first to attend higher education and so had been spared both factory and retail work. Yet neither my baccalaureate nor my degree in literature had waived that inescapable fatality of the working-class – the legacy of poverty – embodied by both the pregnant girl and the alcoholic. Sex had caught up with me, and I saw the thing growing inside me as the stigma of social failure. (p. 23)

Abortion was illegal in France in the early ‘60s, and the penalties for any involvement in such a practice were widely known to be severe. Consequently, Ernaux must find someone who is willing to perform a backstreet termination – something she manages to do through a contact of a friend. The abortionist is a nurse, a plain-speaking woman in her sixties who will conduct the procedure at her home in Paris, a small flat in the 17^th arrondissement. Interestingly, there is a quiet determination about this woman who simply focuses on the essentials at hand. She makes no judgments about Annie’s decision to abort; there are no awkward questions or feelings to be explored, just the practical details of what needs to happen and when.

In essence, Happening is an account of Ernaux’s experiences of the abortion – her quest to secure it, what took place during the procedure and the days that followed, all expressed in the author’s trademark candid style. While Ernaux wishes to convey a steady flow of unhappiness during this time in her life, she remains mindful of not clouding her experiences with any emotional outbursts – outpourings that would signal either anger or emotional pain.

What makes this account so powerful is the rigorous nature of Ernaux’s approach. There are no moral judgements or pontifications here, just the unflinchingly honest details of a topic that remains controversial even in today’s relatively liberated society. Ernaux spares us nothing about the messy details of the procedure itself and what happens in the aftermath. As such, readers need to be aware of the potentially triggering nature of some of the content in this book. Happening is a searingly honest account of a taboo subject, but it may cut too close to the bone for some readers depending on their own views and experiences.

Interspersed throughout the text are some of Ernaux’s reflections about writing the book, ruminations on what she is trying to achieve by exploring these events. There is a sense of her trying to immerse herself in a particular section of her life to learn what can be found there. It’s an experience that comes with its own challenges, forty years on. For instance, she talks about the process of accessing various memories, how certain objects such as a basin of water in the woman’s apartment remain vivid in her mind while specific emotions are much harder to recapture. Nevertheless, some general feelings remain accessible even if the finer details do not.

(To experience anew the emotions I felt back then is quite impossible. The closest I can get to the state of terror thrust upon me that week is to pick out any hostile, harsh-looking woman in her sixties waiting in line at the supermarket or the post office and to imagine that she is going to rummage around in my loins with some foreign object.) (p. 51)

By recounting this traumatic experience, one deeply connected to life and death, perhaps Ernaux is looking to translate the personal into something of broader social relevance. Towards the end of Happening, she wonders whether the true purpose of her life is to channel various experiences – both physical and emotional – into her writing. There is a desire to create ‘something intelligent and universal’ from her existence, reflections that may prove useful to others – an aim I think she has achieved with this powerful, uncompromising book.

Happening is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions; my thanks for the publishers and the Independent Alliance for kindly providing a review copy.