Anita Brookner

Thursday

29 Aug 2013
Anita Brookner

A seamless whole

This short memoir deserves a longer review than this, encompassing, as it does, migration, intellectual excellence, a successful professional life, two marriages, children and an honesty and contentment not usually found in close proximity. Miriam Gross (née May), with a Jewish legal background (both her parents, who left Nazi Germany in 1933, were lawyers), was brought up in Palestine, then under the British Mandate, where she stayed until 1947. In Jerusalem she felt little affinity with other exiles, only with the landscape. From the start, she seems to have been clear-sighted to an unusual degree. Unfazed by her unmaternal mother, she drew close to her father, from whom she derived an understanding of men which was to be useful in both her public and emotional future lives.

A seamless whole

Thursday

30 May 2013
Anita Brookner

Last Friends, by Jane Gardam - review

Any writer who embarks on a trilogy is either extremely confident or taking something of a risk. The danger is that the reader will have forgotten the first two volumes and will have lost any memory of the story and the characters who now occupy the foreground of what might be a fairly mystifying account. So it is with Jane Gardam’s present novel which forms the conclusion to her foregoing Old Filth and The Man with the Wooden Hat, which featured Terence Veneering and Edward Feathers, lawyers and rivals not only in their professional lives but in most other matters, both trivial and significant. They’re not sympathetic characters, and time and distance have not improved them. Last Friends is concerned with their back stories, which add a further layer of confusion to what is already complicated and at times jauntily improbable.

Saturday

14 Jul 2012
Anita Brookner

Shy of the crowd

Elizabeth Taylor, the best-kept secret in English fiction, wrote novels and short stories in the 1950s and 1960s and thus contributed to the nostalgia for that modest period so keenly felt today by those who lived through it. She is an honourable writer; no publicity, no interviews, no mission statements — merely an unwavering production of impeccable work. Writing before feminism became encoded in dogma, she nevertheless had an unfailing and unmistakable female intelligence: wry, observant and discreet. She herself, whatever secrets she may have harboured, is invisible behind the screen of her impeccable style. Taylor appears to have had no problem with the discrepancy between her utterly conventional life — which encompassed an early marriage, a village setting, the birth of a son and a daughter — and her life as a writer, with its silences and withdrawals.

Friday

9 Dec 2011
Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner’s books of the year

My reading this year has been retrospective, dominated by Stefan Zweig, the most gentlemanly of writers. Beware of Pity, translated by the estimable Anthea Bell, remains powerfully shocking, yet classically restrained, while The Post Office Girl, in a less memorable translation, is queasily convincing. Both are published by Pushkin Press. Zweig seems unfazed by the horrors he implies, and indeed his understated worldliness is a corrective to contemporary fashions. I make exception for two of those contemporaries: Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)  and Colin Thubron (A Mountain in Tibet), both of whom do an excellent job of dealing with fears all the more potent for being largely concealed.

Saturday

8 Oct 2011
Anita Brookner

A mystery unsolved

This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency.This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency. It features Simon Serailler, the author’s usual protagonist, investigating a cold case of a missing teenager who was last seen waiting at a bus stop some 16 years previously, and whose skeleton was found when heavy rain washed down sludge and rubble from a neighbouring hillside. But it also has a secondary theme — rather more serious than its ostensible subject — that of assisted suicide. Hypochondriacs are warned. What is examined, in admirable detail, somewhat overshadows the police procedural which is intricate and convincing.

Saturday

30 Jul 2011
Anita Brookner

A singular voice

Barbara Pym, now thought of as a reliable and popular novelist of the 1950s and 1960s, has almost disappeared from sight, overshadowed by the more explicit and confessional writers we are accustomed to reading today. Indeed her eclipse was sudden and unforeseen: her mature novels were rejected by three major publishers when she was only midway through her career, and it was only through the generous comments of two of her admirers, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977, that she was brought again to public attention.That her admirers in this instance were men rather than women was a more than welcome reversal of her perceived appeal to a public composed mainly of readers much like herself: domestic ironists of no great ambition but some accomplishment, with a perceptible debt to Jane Austen.

Saturday

10 Apr 2010
Anita Brookner

The people and the place

Where to begin? Graham Robb, like all dedicated Francophiles, begins early, when his enlightened parents made him a present of a trip to Paris and sent him off with a map and a voucher for a free gift at the Galeries Lafayette. For a week, and then two weeks, and then six months, he did what all visitors do: he walked the length of the city, he bought books, he sat in cafés and listened to the conversations of strangers. This apprenticeship made him the historian and biographer he is today, and this book is a form of homage to Paris and to those who choose to see it as their home.To adapt Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum, one is not born a Parisian, one becomes one. Many of the characters in this chronicle were not born in Paris: all they had in common was the language and the agility that denotes the true Frenchman.

The people and the place

Saturday

3 Apr 2010
Anita Brookner

Missing link

In times of anxiety or confusion the most effective palliative is a good detective story. The requirement is that a sense of justice be restored, and, paradoxically, given the fictional events portrayed, a much desired sense of order. The effect is transitory but reliable. It is also necessary that the protagonist be a man of principle. Such a one is the unassailably virtuous Simon Serrailler, Susan Hill’s detective hero, now making his fifth appearance in this agreeable series. He is, of course, no stranger to melancholy, largely in connection with his equally high-minded girlfriend from whom he is momentarily estranged. And he lives in Lafferton, a small fictional town which nevertheless boasts a cathedral, a college of further education and a hospice.

Missing link

Saturday

2 Jan 2010
Anita Brookner

Prize-winning novels from France | 2 January 2010

After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents.After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents. Trois femmes puissantes (Gallimard) was already established as a favourite with the reading public. One suspects that the majority of those readers are women, for we are in feminist territory here, and it feels a little old-fashioned.The three powerful women of the title — Norah, Fanta, Khady Temba — rebel against the circumstances of their lives and are praised for doing so in a style that found favour with the jury, although it reads awkwardly and is deliberately abrupt.

Wednesday

18 Nov 2009
Anita Brookner

Nightmare in Dublin

Caroline Wallace, a journalist specialising in book reviews and the occasional travel piece, is asked, or rather told, to go to Dublin to interview Desmond FitzMaurice, a once famous playwright and foreign correspondent, in order to revive interest in his now forgotten work. Fitzmaurice is nearly 90, and so there is no time to be lost. She will listen to his reminiscences and with luck fashion a major article. There is no reason why she should not do this. All she leaves in London is a house in Notting Hill which she shares with her partner of ten years who has never suggested marriage. She is over 40, so time here is also of the essence. One day she will give up her job and write a proper book. This assignment, she thinks, will be her last.

Wednesday

2 Sep 2009

Wednesday

27 May 2009
Anita Brookner

Familiar and unfamiliar

Gillian Tindall has had the ingenious and sympathetic idea of combining biography and topography in an overview of British visitors to Paris from 1814 to the present day — an enterprise of formidable research and enviable lightness of touch. Selecting various members of her own extended family, she traces their temporary residence in Paris and the reasons for their displacement. In so doing, she maps the various quartiers, along with deft reconstructions of the forces that drove these characters to seek enlightenment or advancement in the city that promised them both. Their time in Paris was instrumental in the achievement of careers that brought both wealth and satisfaction of a professional kind, and led to the widening of horizons in ways which could not have been entirely foreseen.

Saturday

28 Feb 2009
Anita Brookner

Pure, but never simple

Here at last is a novel informed by exceptional intelligence. The blurb states that the author, Simon Mawer, was born in England, but it seems likely that his ancestry was Czech, since he is acquainted with the language and the customs of pre-war Czechoslovakia and has learned of its travails during the German and Russian occupations. And it is clear from his narrative that the country was both sophisticated and cultivated in its manifestations, influenced perhaps by its position at the heart of Europe and subject to both the best and the worst of its fashions. This alone would mark it as unusual: the clarity with which it is written is almost unfamiliar and certainly to be admired. The Glass Room of the title is part of a futuristic house designed by a German architect, Rainer von Abt (this is not quite a fiction, since a prototype certainly exists).

Pure, but never simple

Friday

12 Dec 2008

Wednesday

17 Sep 2008
Anita Brookner

A crisis of confidence

The Believers, by Zoë Heller Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal won wide publicity and was deservedly praised for its depiction of female malice and the unhappiness that fosters it. Her present novel is so markedly different that it might have been written by another hand. This is no mean feat, but the effect is disconcerting. To begin with, it is completely Americanised, not only in its setting but in its locution, so that the reader must constantly adjust to different idioms, different references. This too is no mean feat, but somewhat alienating, as are the characters, who are universally charmless. The title is only one indication of their unreliability: they have beliefs which turn out to be misplaced and which have little connection with their behaviour.

Saturday

6 Sep 2008
Anita Brookner

A far cry from Paradise

This strange novel is described as a ghost story, although it reads like a nervous breakdown in which both writer and reader are embedded. So constricted is the narrative that the central figure, Jim Smith, delivers no opinion of his own, although his past life appears to have been full of incident: extensive travel, a business career, apparently successful, in London, a certain level of worldly experience which has vanished, leaving him without attachments or points of reference. He has, for no apparent reason, bought a house, Paradise Farm, in an unspecified part of the country, and proposes to live there without company, devoting himself to farming his land and tending his animals, his only help that of an almost silent handyman and a cleaner, both of them taciturn and incurious, when not actively hostile.

Saturday

22 Mar 2008
Anita Brookner

Not going to London to visit the Queen

It is a pleasure to encounter a new writer, particularly if that writer is modest, competent, and above all unheralded. Frances Itani is Canadian and recognisably from the same background as Alice Munro, although lacking Munro’s wistfulness and emotional delicacy. She is unknown in this country, although the author of a previous novel. On the strength of Remembering the Bones she has it in her to reach a wider audience. Her story is simple. Her protagonist, Georgina Danforth Witley, has been invited to Buckingham Palace, one of a handful of Commonwealth citizens who share their birthday with that of the Queen. Her house is locked up, her suitcase is in the car, and she is on her way to the airport when she collides with another car and is knocked over a cliff into a ravine into which few passers-by will venture.

Not going to London to visit the Queen

Saturday

19 Jan 2008
Anita Brookner

Vagabonds in Paris

Patrick Modiano is a nostalgic novelist who has consistently shown courage in investigating the boundaries between duty and loyalty. This ambiguity has featured in all his novels and seems to have had its roots in the character of his own father, whose activities in the troubled era of wartime and post-war Paris have left their mark on his writing. Conscious of his flawed moral inheritance, Modiano has applied himself to testing the limits of his own freedom and has found that shame is not so easily dispersed. It is a quality that inhabits all his elegantly written novels and is equally present in Dans le Café de la Jeunesse Perdue which reverts to the same troubled era as its predecessors and occupies a doubtful position on the periphery of the natural order.

Saturday

21 Jul 2007
Anita Brookner

Linked by an oblique sadness

Connoisseurs of the short story will welcome this new collection by William Trevor, his first since 2004. Trevor has been compared with Chekhov, not without justification. He works by indirection, avoiding judgment, his sense of tragedy well concealed by a partiality for unfulfilled lives left free to exist on the page without the author’s intervention. Here destinies may be thwarted but the process will be a reflective one, mercifully free of irony. It is the absence of irony that gives these stories their pre- as opposed to post-modern stamp, and the scrupulous neutrality that refuses to pander to the reader’s expectations. Certainly his characters lack ardour, but that is the price one sometimes pays for dignity and even a sort of wisdom.

Linked by an oblique sadness

Saturday

21 Apr 2007
Anita Brookner

What Henry knew

In October 1875 Henry James moved to Paris to advance his nascent career as a man of letters, specifically as a novelist. This was not his first visit: his enlightened family encouraged travel, but the desire to take up residence was intimately connected with his ambitions: Paris, after all, was the epi- centre of forward looking artistic endeavour. He was funded by his father and also by the reviews and articles he wrote for various American magazines, notably Tribune and the Atlantic Monthly. He was 32 years old, and therefore not so very young, but his impressionability and a certain innocence that was to mark him for life caused him to marvel at everything he saw and heard, even when an inner resistance turned every reaction into a matter for further study, as if it could be understood only after a long period of maturation.

Saturday

2 Dec 2006
Anita Brookner

Prize-winning novels from France

The Prix Goncourt was awarded, as of right, to Jonathan Littell for Les Bienveillantes (Galli- mard). Les Bienveillantes, the Kindly Ones, is the name usually given to the Furies. The narrator of this masterly novel, Max Aue, the director of a lace factory, is writing his account of the second world war, in which he served on the wrong, i.e. German side. Notable for his sane and reasonable tone of voice the narrator divulges, without much compunction, that he is a former Nazi, an SS officer who was present in all the main theatres of war, initially in Lithuania and the Ukraine, and latterly in a devastated Berlin. He is also notable for his imperturbable sense of right and wrong, or rather his conviction that these terms are implausible.

Saturday

4 Nov 2006
Anita Brookner

This side of the truth

In the Foreword she writes to her new book Alice Munro, Canada’s best known and most admired short story writer, states that some 10 or 12 years ago she began to study the history of her family and envisaged a memoir, unlike the fictions which have engaged her all her working life. She was thorough in her researches and unearthed a great deal of material, almost all of it in the Selkirk and Galashiels public libraries. She even spent some months in Scotland, where the Laidlaw branch of her family had its roots. She then attacked the subject but discovered that she was not merely the legatee of her own family but Alice Munro, writer of fiction, whose stories exist in their own right and appear to owe nothing to her ancestry.

Wednesday

9 Aug 2006
Anita Brookner

The eyes have it

Early in January 2000 the art historian T. J. Clark arrived in Los Angeles for a six-month stint at the Getty Research Institute. He was fortunate to see, in the Getty Museum, two great pictures by Poussin, the Getty’s ‘Landscape with a Calm’ and the National Gallery’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, on loan from London. Over a period of weeks Clark visited the pictures almost every day and was able to register the tiny but memorable changes brought about not only by the process of intense contemplation but the traces left in memory and dream fragments which could only be clarified by more looking.Attempts to translate these experiences stimulated but never dogmatically proposed a new form of art historical writing.

Wednesday

7 Jun 2006
Anita Brookner

A meeting of true minds

Listing page content hereThese letters record a friendship that proceeded, unmarred, for 40 years. It began as a simple transaction; in 1938 Sylvia Townsend Warner, as a dare, submitted a short story to the New Yorker. Her editor was William Maxwell. They proved sympathetic to each other, so sympathetic, in fact, that 150 stories followed, and, more important, 1,300 letters, in which it is possible to distinguish real love, albeit of a rare and disembodied variety.Their circumstances could not have been more different. Sylvia Townsend Warner, an immensely popular writer, now diminished by the fate that awaits all once popular writers, lived in Dorset with her female companion Valentine Ackland, while Maxwell was a contentedly married man with two children.

Saturday

31 Dec 2005

Saturday

10 Sep 2005
Anita Brookner

Take-over bid by a stranger

This is a novel on a rebarbative theme: incapacity. Not the sort of incapacity one observes in others; rather, incapacity as a curse one suffers on one’s own. Paul Rayment, a man of 60, is flung off his bicycle by an oncoming car and loses part of his right leg. He recovers, more or less, and is returned home to his solitary flat, in the charge of a nurse, Marijana, a Croatian immigrant. He refuses a prosthesis and is reduced to an even lonelier and more circumscribed existence than he had previously experienced. He becomes acutely aware of his childlessness, which torments him. He also becomes aware of Marijana, yearns for her, for her children. In a fit of the only love permitted to him he offers to put her son Drago through college, does not much mind that she seems unaware of his generosity.

Saturday

9 Apr 2005
Anita Brookner

A nest of ungentle Essex folk

Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, is the author of 12 novels which deal with extremely aberrant behaviour treated on the easiest and most companionable terms. There is no doubting that the author herself is on the side of the sane, the balanced, and the well-behaved: this is apparent in the clarity of her sentences, which proceed without flagging from the outset of a complex narrative to its eventual resolution. Her astonishing productivity is another matter altogether. This is not so much devotion to the task as obedience to an impulse with which she is on enviably relaxed terms. She is in many ways qualified to be our foremost woman writer. Her peculiar virtue, apart from her lucidity, is her ability to create alarming but familiar characters and situations: streets are itemised, habits well established, dilemmas revealed as unexceptional.

Saturday

29 Jan 2005
Anita Brookner

A day in the life of a surgeon

As a foreword to this excellent novel Ian McEwan quotes a passage from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, in which the bedevilled protagonist launches a passionate indictment of the moral disorders of his time, extracting from them a small nugget of hope, or rather of value, to set against his justified despair. Bellow or Herzog is explicit: McEwan’s Henry Perowne is more measured, is even mandarin, in his survey of the life he is living. Like Herzog, Perowne lives in interesting times. It is February 2003, and the peace marchers are gathering in Gower Street, near to Perowne’s spacious Bloomsbury house and within walking distance of his hospital, which is presumably in Queen Square. Perowne is a neurosurgeon and it is here that we receive the first intimation of McEwan’s preferred method, which favours the set-piece extravaganza.

Saturday

1 Jan 2005
Anita Brookner

General fiction from France . . .

On 30 August 2004 a woman wrote a letter to Le Figaro registering her dismay at the number of novels scheduled for publication in the three months that constitute the rentrée littéraire in France each autumn. She confessed that, although an assiduous reader, she rarely found anything of distinction in what was on offer and deplored the lack of true literary worth, let alone devotion to the task in hand. She perceived that this volume of production is little more than sheer economic activity. This was a worthy and pertinent comment, an alternative reading to the literary pages, in which reviewers are often more complimentary than is entirely justified. It is certain that of the many novels published this season few will merit genuine and serious attention.

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