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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Claiming her life: The Lodger, The Drum Tower and Our Souls at Night

12/11/2015

7 Comments

 
A severe cold has meant very little writing in the last few days, but a copious amount of reading (completing my reading “challenge” of 100 books in the year), albeit with not a great amount of depth. These three short reviews of novels about three very different women’s quests for a life, and a mind, of their own is part of the result.
After her father’s bankruptcy and her mother’s death from suicide, Dorothy Richardson has come to London to work as a dentist’s assistant. Renting a room in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, she values her freedom, but life is hard for a single woman on a low income at the beginning of the twentieth century. Invited to spend the weekend at the coast with an old school friend, she is initially unimpressed by her husband, Bertie, a writer of some renown. But Bertie’s approval of her independent mind quickly beguiles her and, despite the guilt at betraying her friend, Dorothy embarks on a secret affair. When the sex proves a disappointment, Dorothy is unsure whether she should expect more, until a new boarder teaches her the meaning of sexual pleasure. But, in her liaison with Veronica while still involved with Bertie, Dorothy finds herself caught between two types of taboo. On top of this, Veronica is a suffragette whose involvement in the movement puts her at risk of imprisonment.
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I was more convinced by Dorothy’s romance with Veronica than with Bertie, although that might reflect the imposition of my own values on the pair’s disregard of the feelings of her friend and his wife. Yet the author had good reason for dwelling more on the former relationship, as the characters are based on significant figures in the literary world (although, I’m not generally enamoured of fiction about writers). Bertie – or HG Wells as he is more commonly known – I was aware of as the pioneer of science fiction and, according to my mother, a distant relative of ours (quite probably via one of his other extramarital affairs). But Dorothy Richardson was hitherto unknown to me so it was interesting to learn about this peer of Virginia Woolf and innovator of stream of consciousness writing, and poignant to witness a gradual sexual and authorial awakening within the novel while aware that, in the real world, she’d soon be forgotten.
In an afterword, Louise Treger tells us that she stumbled on Dorothy Richardson by accident while searching for a new angle on Virginia Woolf for her PhD thesis. I received my copy via her New York publisher, St Martin’s Press.

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Seventeen-year-old Talkhoon (meaning tarragon or bitter blood) lives in the basement of a crumbling property known as Drum Tower in Tehran. The Shah’s rule is collapsing and revolution is around the corner but Talkhoon, sequestered from the world since an undiagnosed psychosomatic illness some years before, has enough to contend with in a confused and conflicted family. Abandoned by her mother at three days old, visited intermittently by her fugitive father, she’s been brought up by her disturbing uncle Asaad, in a house also occupied by her sister, grandparents and numerous ghosts. Having dedicated his life to an as yet uncompleted tome on the mythology of the Simorgh, or Firebird, her beloved grandfather seems to have slipped into a coma, while her increasingly bitter grandmother stomps around the house or sits upstairs among the ghosts communing with her own dead father, the General. Seemingly oblivious to the madness in their home, Talkhoon’s elder sister, Taara, continues her schooling, plays her setar and goes looking for romance. As dissent mounts both in the household and in the city at large, Talkhoon discovers that she must overcome her mental health problems in order to escape the confines of her life. But Asaad has designs on her, and it’s only his increasing religiosity and disavowal of sex outside marriage, that protects her. But for how long?
Perhaps because of the element of magic realism, I didn’t find it so easy to connect with this novel as I did with others from Sandstone Press (e.g. The Zoo; The Insect Rosary; The Spice Box Letters; The Surfacing). Despite my interest in this historical period, which formed the basis of my short story “Elementary Mechanics”, I probably missed some of the nuances of the parallels between the in-the-house story and the political upheaval of the time. I was also curious about the author’s own story of political activism which led to her having to flee the country across the mountains with her two-year-old son, but maybe I need to check whether she’s fictionalised that elsewhere.

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This moving, deceptively simple, novel opens with Addie Moore, a seventy-year-old widow, inviting her neighbour, Louis Waters, to stay the night. Once he’s got over his initial shock, he agrees to the proposition, and a couple embark on a deeply satisfying friendship that, nevertheless, scandalises their adult children and neighbours in the small town of Holt, Colorado. It takes great skill to write about ordinary happiness, but Kent Haruf has it in spades (or did have; he died in 2014 and this novel was published posthumously), with an emotional depth below the surface simplicity somewhat reminiscent of Anne Tyler. Under the bed clothes, the couple review their pasts, acknowledging the unrealised, or even unidentified, ambition that characterises many lives, while, in the daytime, providing a safe haven from his feuding parents for Addie’s six-year-old grandson. Yet, while I’m not renowned for my optimism, I did wonder at the almost universal disapproval of their relationship (save for the more elderly neighbour in the house between theirs), and whether it was the author’s, or the characters’, failure of nerve that made Addie succumb to their spoiling envy. Until then, an uplifting tale that reminds us to make the best of the life we’ve got. Thanks to Picador Books for my review copy.

Our Souls at NightOur Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this quiet late-life love story as much on the second reading on publication in 2015. In the intervening years, I’d managed to forget the tragic ending when the couple succumbs to bigotry.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
7 Comments
Norah Colvin link
12/11/2015 12:24:26 pm

Even with a cold you read and write three reviews! No need to say I'm impressed. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about these three novels. I think the lodger may appeal to me more than the others, mainly because it's closer to biography. Trouble is for me, sometimes then I have trouble extracting the truth from the fiction. Or maybe even the other way round?

Reply
Annecdotist
12/11/2015 02:33:52 pm

Thanks, Norah, though I do feel a little guilty when some of my reviews aren't as thoughtful as others. But only a little guilty – these fluctuations are just part of life.
If you were to read The Lodger, the author does provide a postscript of where her novel deviates from the historical facts. Personally, I'm quite happy now getting my truth from fiction!

Reply
sarah
12/11/2015 09:36:45 pm

"Trouble is for me, sometimes then I have trouble extracting the truth from the fiction. Or maybe even the other way round?" Isn't that the fun part? ;-)

Reply
sarah link
12/11/2015 09:35:30 pm

The first one looks good. Doesn't say so, explicitly, but it's historical fiction and looks like an interesting read. That was a strange circle of "friends", wasn't it?

Reply
Annecdotist
13/11/2015 11:05:18 am

Strange indeed, but I was suspicious of Bertie from the moment I learnt that it changed his wife's name from Amy Catherine to Jane. What was all that about, I wonder?

Reply
Charli Mmills
13/11/2015 12:29:01 am

I almost envy you your cold and just taking a reading break, except for the cold part. Hope you are feeling better! All three are different yet compelling reviews. It's funny in writing my own historical fiction how dedicated I feel to getting the facts right so I can then deviate from them. Maybe it's more like embellish and color. Interesting, too what new angles one can discover about known people who've been under the microscope.

Reply
Annecdotist
13/11/2015 11:14:10 am

I identify with what you say about getting the facts right in order to deviate from them. I think there’s a huge difference between choosing to play fast and free with the historical record and sheer ignorance. It reminds me of a conversation I had at the weekend (on the first day of my dreadful cold – thanks for your sympathy) when I was doing a presentation on fictional therapists. Someone mentioned aversion therapy which crops up in my own novel, but I also admitted that I’d fudged things slightly as, even though I knew about the procedure, I didn’t know whether in the early 1970s it would have been used with a child. We then had a discussion with a range of opinions about how free you are as a fiction writer to make things up. I realised I was comfortable with my decision – even if at some point I’ll discover it was historically incorrect – because I knew enough about the context of behavioural interventions, having studied this and practised some more benign versions in my professional life. And it worked very well for the story. But others without this background might not get away with it.
PS. You COULD take a reading break without the cold, you know. You are talking about R&R on your blog!

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