Let me tell you about these four novels featuring older women looking back at their lives, and forward, some with dread, to what’s left of it. The first is a translated novel set in Belarus. The second and fourth are set in care homes around the middle of the twentieth century. The third is a contemporary novel set in a London hospital with flashbacks to a glittery Alexandria. All illustrate the vulnerability of old age, but also the strength and spirit of the central characters.
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Red Crosses by Sasha Filipenko translated by
Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner
Tatiana Alexeyevna has had a long, hard life. So perhaps it’s just as well she’s losing her memory to Alzheimer’s. Fortunately we can discover her story of the hardships of twentieth century Russia before she goes. Torn from her young daughter and sent to the Gulag, it’s a painful account of state terror, but an important one.
Working as a typist in a government office during the Second World War, Tatiana is instructed not to respond to communications from the Red Cross. To Stalin, prisoners of war are traitors; there’s no responsibility to pass on news of their whereabouts to their relatives, or to take them back.
Indeed, the wives and families of servicemen taken prisoner are also deemed guilty, as Tatiana discovers when her husband is captured in the Balkans. In time, she is taken in and interrogated under torture before being sent on the arduous month-long journey from Minsk to Siberia. Meanwhile, her daughter is packed off to an orphanage; as Tatiana points out, separating children from their mothers is an inefficient way to run a country regardless of the morality.
For me, the framing of this tragic history weakened it for me. Tatiana tells her story to her new neighbour, a young widower with a sad tale that could have earned him a book of his own. It’s also peppered with Ministry reports and telegrams which have a distancing effect. Thanks to publishers Europa editions for my review copy.
Working as a typist in a government office during the Second World War, Tatiana is instructed not to respond to communications from the Red Cross. To Stalin, prisoners of war are traitors; there’s no responsibility to pass on news of their whereabouts to their relatives, or to take them back.
Indeed, the wives and families of servicemen taken prisoner are also deemed guilty, as Tatiana discovers when her husband is captured in the Balkans. In time, she is taken in and interrogated under torture before being sent on the arduous month-long journey from Minsk to Siberia. Meanwhile, her daughter is packed off to an orphanage; as Tatiana points out, separating children from their mothers is an inefficient way to run a country regardless of the morality.
For me, the framing of this tragic history weakened it for me. Tatiana tells her story to her new neighbour, a young widower with a sad tale that could have earned him a book of his own. It’s also peppered with Ministry reports and telegrams which have a distancing effect. Thanks to publishers Europa editions for my review copy.
Blog post on older characters in fiction
As We Are Now by May Sarton
After a heart attack that meant she couldn’t live alone, and with an antipathy towards her sister-in-law that meant she couldn’t live with her brother, former schoolteacher Caro is dumped in her version of Hell. It’s a care home in an isolated farmhouse, resentfully run by a mother and daughter for a small group of bedbound men, plus Caro. The place is dirty, the regime mean: in the summer, no matter how dark it might be outside, Caro isn’t allowed a light in her room until six in the evening.
So far, so miserable. But there are moments of lightness in the vicar’s genuine willingness to listen and in the unfussy kindness of the woman who stands in for the owner when she goes on holiday. Unfortunately, none of these are enough to combat the darkness of Caro’s situation.
The novella presents a bleak picture of old age:
The trouble is that old age is not interesting until one gets there, a foreign country with an unknown language to the young, and even to the middle-aged.
I sometimes think that I feel things more intensely than I used to, not less. But I am so afraid of appearing ridiculous. People expect serenity of the old. That is the stereotype, the mask we are expected to put on.
But, it isn’t so bad for everyone. For example, Caro’s brother, with his younger wife, is protected. For me, what distinguishes this story is its articulation of the perils of institutional care, or dependency in any form, for those who can’t conform, and have no-one to advocate for them. Caro isn’t particularly difficult, but the carers are threatened by her professional background and European travels -- note this was first published in the US in 1973 -- and treat her with sarcastic politeness. She responds with anger, and then appeasement and the gradual erosion of the self.
I don’t think Caro is exaggerating when she likens her experience to the concentration camps. And I don’t think an institution needs to be as dreadful as the one Caro pitches up in for humanity to be lost. I’ve studied this theme, but never seen it so well expressed in fiction:
There is a connection between any place where human beings are helpless, through illness or old age, and a prison. It is not only the heroic helplessness of the inmates, but also what complete control does to the nurses, guards, or whatever. I wish I could have seen Harriet and Rose as they were before they opened the ash heap for the moribund. It may well be that they began not only with the idea that a nursing home is a sure-fire investment but with the thought that they could enjoy taking care of the old whom families abandon for one reason or another.
If keepers are corrupted by having absolute power, what about those they keep? We learn to ingratiate ourselves, to pretend we do not notice the slights and humiliations. Or we close ourselves off into that terrible place of anger, rage and despair
Since Caro is losing her mind, and keeping a journal in an attempt to hang onto it, readers have the option of treating her, as do the carers, as an unreliable narrator. If she is, what is the psychic mechanism that makes her this kind of unreliable? Paranoia doesn’t arise out of nowhere. Perhaps she’s transferring an earlier state of dependency on to the present. There are hints that her childhood wasn’t filled with love.
I hadn’t heard of this author until my friend D Avery suggested As We Are Now as an example of fiction about older people. I’m glad she did. There’s so much depth in this novel, I’m going to reread it, and highlight the best bits. Hopefully it will help me manage the trauma of my own dreaded care home years.
So far, so miserable. But there are moments of lightness in the vicar’s genuine willingness to listen and in the unfussy kindness of the woman who stands in for the owner when she goes on holiday. Unfortunately, none of these are enough to combat the darkness of Caro’s situation.
The novella presents a bleak picture of old age:
The trouble is that old age is not interesting until one gets there, a foreign country with an unknown language to the young, and even to the middle-aged.
I sometimes think that I feel things more intensely than I used to, not less. But I am so afraid of appearing ridiculous. People expect serenity of the old. That is the stereotype, the mask we are expected to put on.
But, it isn’t so bad for everyone. For example, Caro’s brother, with his younger wife, is protected. For me, what distinguishes this story is its articulation of the perils of institutional care, or dependency in any form, for those who can’t conform, and have no-one to advocate for them. Caro isn’t particularly difficult, but the carers are threatened by her professional background and European travels -- note this was first published in the US in 1973 -- and treat her with sarcastic politeness. She responds with anger, and then appeasement and the gradual erosion of the self.
I don’t think Caro is exaggerating when she likens her experience to the concentration camps. And I don’t think an institution needs to be as dreadful as the one Caro pitches up in for humanity to be lost. I’ve studied this theme, but never seen it so well expressed in fiction:
There is a connection between any place where human beings are helpless, through illness or old age, and a prison. It is not only the heroic helplessness of the inmates, but also what complete control does to the nurses, guards, or whatever. I wish I could have seen Harriet and Rose as they were before they opened the ash heap for the moribund. It may well be that they began not only with the idea that a nursing home is a sure-fire investment but with the thought that they could enjoy taking care of the old whom families abandon for one reason or another.
If keepers are corrupted by having absolute power, what about those they keep? We learn to ingratiate ourselves, to pretend we do not notice the slights and humiliations. Or we close ourselves off into that terrible place of anger, rage and despair
Since Caro is losing her mind, and keeping a journal in an attempt to hang onto it, readers have the option of treating her, as do the carers, as an unreliable narrator. If she is, what is the psychic mechanism that makes her this kind of unreliable? Paranoia doesn’t arise out of nowhere. Perhaps she’s transferring an earlier state of dependency on to the present. There are hints that her childhood wasn’t filled with love.
I hadn’t heard of this author until my friend D Avery suggested As We Are Now as an example of fiction about older people. I’m glad she did. There’s so much depth in this novel, I’m going to reread it, and highlight the best bits. Hopefully it will help me manage the trauma of my own dreaded care home years.
My novel about institutional care
The Girls from Alexandria by Carol Cooper
Seventy-year-old Nadia has been admitted with unexplained symptoms to a London medical ward. When she tells the staff she needs to trace her sister, Simone, they think she’s confused. But with fond memories of their childhood in Egypt, Nadia knows her sister is real, even if they haven’t seen each other for fifty years. But it’s not only nostalgia that drives her to track down her only living relative. Unless someone comes to the rescue, Nadia’s afraid she’ll be shunted to a care home.
Carol Cooper’s highly entertaining third novel draws on her Egyptian childhood and her career as a London doctor. I’m sure she listens to her patients more carefully than the fictional doctors in this novel, but I imagine she had great fun creating the characters Laura Ashley and Fritz. Having been to Egypt, although unfortunately not to Alexandria, I particularly enjoyed the flashback scenes for an insight into the privileged cosmopolitan culture and the political changes during the second half of the twentieth century. Needless to say, things aren’t so rosy under the surface glitter.
Overall, this is an engaging novel about memory, family and hospital care, providing interesting insights into a little-known culture. The publisher, Agora Books, is new to me, but I’m sure I’ll be back for more.
My debut novel, Sugar and Snails, about a woman who has kept her past identity secret for thirty years, is partly set in Egypt, while my third novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is about siblings separated for fifty years. Click on the image to learn more.
Carol Cooper’s highly entertaining third novel draws on her Egyptian childhood and her career as a London doctor. I’m sure she listens to her patients more carefully than the fictional doctors in this novel, but I imagine she had great fun creating the characters Laura Ashley and Fritz. Having been to Egypt, although unfortunately not to Alexandria, I particularly enjoyed the flashback scenes for an insight into the privileged cosmopolitan culture and the political changes during the second half of the twentieth century. Needless to say, things aren’t so rosy under the surface glitter.
Overall, this is an engaging novel about memory, family and hospital care, providing interesting insights into a little-known culture. The publisher, Agora Books, is new to me, but I’m sure I’ll be back for more.
My debut novel, Sugar and Snails, about a woman who has kept her past identity secret for thirty years, is partly set in Egypt, while my third novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is about siblings separated for fifty years. Click on the image to learn more.
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At the Jerusalem by Paul Bailey
Mrs Gadny does not want to be at the Jerusalem. Who would? Although well-resourced by contemporary standards, with a team of qualified nurses for around a dozen residents, only two of whom are bedbound, the green and white tiled old folks’ home in a former workhouse seems bleak. But, following the deaths of her husband and daughter, and a few disastrous weeks with her stepson and his wife, she has little choice.
But you have a choice whether to follow her there, as numerous reviews would recommend. But not mine. Simply because it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already, but then I’ve studied, and worked in, crazy systems that consistently fail, despite the staff’s best intentions, to provide adequate psychological care.
Mrs Gadny’s unravelling mind is nicely revealed through her letters to a former neighbour but otherwise I didn’t find this short novel entertaining enough. Perhaps I’m being harsh - I am being harsh, given women of her generation’s lack of agency - but she lost my sympathy when I learnt how she’d made no attempt to curtail her husband’s brutality to his son.
First published in 1967, At the Jerusalem was recently reissued by Head of Zeus.
But you have a choice whether to follow her there, as numerous reviews would recommend. But not mine. Simply because it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already, but then I’ve studied, and worked in, crazy systems that consistently fail, despite the staff’s best intentions, to provide adequate psychological care.
Mrs Gadny’s unravelling mind is nicely revealed through her letters to a former neighbour but otherwise I didn’t find this short novel entertaining enough. Perhaps I’m being harsh - I am being harsh, given women of her generation’s lack of agency - but she lost my sympathy when I learnt how she’d made no attempt to curtail her husband’s brutality to his son.
First published in 1967, At the Jerusalem was recently reissued by Head of Zeus.
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