The thank-you notes have been written and mailed. The Christmas decorations have been stowed away for another eleven months. The house has not yet re-cluttered and feels a bit bare. The trees are mostly leafless, and the sky is dull and overcast. It’s damp and drizzly, but little snow.
This might be the perfect time to dive into a long book, but I find that I cannot settle enough to commit to anything longer than 200 pages. So I’ve been reading little books–little in terms of length, but heavy-duty in terms of emotional wallop. It’s just now as I start to compose this blog entry that I notice that there is a common theme among the novellas I’ve read recently. They all have a female protagonist who is non-conformist, and that non-conformity puts her in jeopardy. Each has some agency which serves her briefly and with varying degrees of success.
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt is published by New Directions in their Storybook ND series. Marguerite is raised by people who are not her parents. She was orphaned in infancy and the fortune she was bequeathed has disappeared by the time she reaches her majority. She has been taught how to avoid that worst of social sins–bad taste– in all matters–attire, talent, how to treat the servants, where to live, and who to trust. As a result, Marguerite, in her late teens, is abandoned by the people who raised her, questioned by the police, contracted to write her life story by an unethical publisher. Marguerite uses a life-time of learning to avoid penury.
I read this delightful little gem in a quiet afternoon, curled into a comfortable chair with a cup of hot tea by my side (cliched, I agree, but cliches are comfortable, too). New Directions “aims to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” The aim is fulfilled; I felt that pleasure of reading a book and then wanting to go back and read it again.
Re-imaginings of Greek myth seem to be coming fast and furious. Circe by Madeline Miller is one of my all-time favorite novels, which I’ve read several times and listened to twice. Galatea by Miller is a short story published in a small hardback, that like the DeWitt novel is a pleasure to hold as well as to read. Galatea narrates her own story from the confines of an institution. Galatea was created from marble by Pygmalion whose prayers gave life to her, but Pygmalion came to resent the agency exhibited by Galatea. Galatea acquires her independence at a cost, but she is free of Pygmalion’s constraints. Here is another little book that brought me through a bleak mid-winter afternoon.
On a recent wander through Barnes & Noble, I was drawn to O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker. The cover blurb by Ali Smith calls it “One of the best least-known novels of the twentieth century.” The introduction is by Maggie O’Farrell. Janet is the oldest of five children in post-WWII Scotland. The first thing we learn about her is that she has been murdered, but the novel is not a whodunit. A sort of coming-of-age novel, we learn that Janet is non-conforming to the expectations of mid-twentieth century society. She defies the expectations of her strict Calvinist Nanny, her social-climbing mother, the boys at her father’s prep school, her peers at her boarding school. Subject to various cruelties inflicted on her by those who fail to understand her, Janet, in her turn, imposes cruelties on those who would diminish her. The writing is amazing–engaging descriptions of the natural world in northern Scotland and subtly drawn characterizations of Janet and all who would try to shape her to their expectations.
And finally, Foster, by Claire Keegan. Keegan offers a series of observations on contemporary Ireland through the lens of a young child (the first person narrator) whose father has dropped her off at the farm of distant relations for the summer. She is bemused and confused, not sure how long she’s meant to stay here. Her father has driven off without leaving her luggage. John and Edna Kinsella, with a surfeit of patience and kindness bring the child out of herself and embrace her in affection. The child comes to recognize the signs of the ending of summer and anticipates, with pragmatic sadness, her return to her home. The home-going episode is a brief conclusion to the novella, but the contrast to her experience cannot be more compelling. As with Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Foster is a short work of deeply emotional engagement.
And so, in this bleak mid-winter, my time and my mind have been drawn to short works that have lightened the dim days and evenings. Through these stories, I’ve traveled to places of European elegance, to mid-century Scotland, to an out-of-time land of myth, and to rural Ireland. Even though winter is far from over, the days grow gradually longer and the mid-winter blues lessen.
Booked for Travel 