De mulieribus

Three books with a common theme: flawed female characters and relationships, and female friendship

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Described as a 'modern masterpiece' from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.

The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila. Ferrante is the author of three previous works of critically acclaimed fiction and with this novel, the first in a quartet, she proves herself to be one of Italy’s great storytellers. She has given her readers a masterfully plotted page-turner, abundant and generous in its narrative details and characterizations.


The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is one of those books where, suddenly, everyone was talking about it. Gone Girl a psychological mystery with similar themes.

A psychological thriller, it debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2015 and remained there for 13 consecutive weeks.  Many reviews referred to is as the next

The story is a first person narrative told from the point of view of three women: Rachel, Anna, and Megan.  Rachel, a 32-year old alcoholic reeling from the dissolution of her marriage to Tom, who left her for another woman, Anna has lost her job.   catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She’s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. ‘Jess and Jason’, she calls them. Their life – as she sees it – is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy.  And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough.  Now everything’s changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she’s only watched from afar.

Now they’ll see; she’s much more than just the girl on the train…Rachel Watson is a 32-year-old alcoholic reeling from the dissolution of her marriage to Tom, who left her for another woman, Anna Watson. Rachel's drinking has caused her to lose her job.  Concealing her unemployment from her flatmate, Rachel follows her old routine of taking the train to London every day; her train slowly passes her old house, which is now occupied by Tom, Anna, and Evie. She also begins watching from the train an attractive couple who live a few houses away from Tom, fantasizing about their perfect life together. Rachel has never met them and has no idea that their life is far from perfect, or that the woman, Megan Hipwell, helps Anna care for her child.   Thus we have the basis for a convoluted plot.  Megan goes missing and Rachel involves herself in the case.  After the denouement which involves a stabbing, when the police arrive, former adversaries Rachel and Anna coordinate their stories to support their actions' having been in self-defence.  In a very rapid turn-around this 2015 novel has premiered in 2016 as a film.

In Astonishing Splashes Of Colour, Kitty is a 32-year old woman, still grieving for the baby she lost. She also suffers from synaesthesia, a condition in which feelings are experienced as colours, so Kitty sees all her family members as different colours. As Kitty's obsession with children leads her to begin to unravel emotionally, she tries to reconstruct her own past. Her mother died when she was three, but when Kitty begins to question her father and siblings about it and other events of her past, the truth seems contradictory and elusive. As bits and pieces of her past come together, the mystery that became Kitty's life begins to take shape. She tries to construct the story of her life, to find out more about the other significant loss in her life - her mother, who died in a car crash when she was three - her four brothers and painter father seem unable or unwilling to help. What was her mother like and why did her older sister run away? Her brothers and father are evasive and tell widely various versions of the 'truth'.   Central to her life is her feeling that she is overlooked, unimportant and 'missing' - from pictures, from her brother Adrian's thinly disguised 'novel' about his upbringing. In fundamental ways, her very existence seems to be denied. Something is wrong and Morrall reveals her mystery artfully and convincingly.  Clare Morrall's novel was nominated for the 2003 Man Booker Prize and has received rave reviews. The Observer says of Astonishing Splashes Of Colour, "Morrall reveals her mystery artfully and convincingly, telling a story that is shocking, heart-stopping and completely absorbing."

Splinter

I have had a few goes at sustaining membership of a Book Group.  My best success was remaining part of a group of residents of Godalming and surrounding villages over a period of six years.  We started in October 2004 and one of our number maintained a list of our reads up to a point......

BOOK GROUP (from October ‘04)

Middlesex – Jeffrey Euginides

Regeneration – Pat Barker

An Instance at the Fingerpost – Ian Pears

Climbing Mount Improbable – Richard Dawkins

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingslover

The Trumpet Major – Thomas Hardy

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Reuz  Zofon

Persuasion – Jane Austen

Silk – Alessandro Baricco

Small Island – Andrea Levy

And Quiet Flows the Don –Sholokhov

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein

Plainsong – Kent Haruf

A  Short History of Tractors in the Ukranian – Marina Lewycka

The Sea House – Esther Freud

The Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi

The Sea – John Banville

The Fall – Simon Mawer

The Colour – Rose Tremain

The Accidental – Ali Smith

On Beauty – Zadie Smith

The Night Watch – Sarah Waters

A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

Two Lives – Vickram Seth

Restless – William Boyd

To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Spies – Michael Frayn

Catcher in the Rye – Salinger

An Interpretation of Murder – Jed Rubenfeld

Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

The Weekend in September – R.C. Sherrif

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Black Swan Green – David Mitchell

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox – Maggie O’Farrell

The Other Side of the Bridge – Mary Lawson

The House of Orphans – Helen Dunmore

A Spot of Bother – Mark Haddon

Salmon Fishing on the Yemen – Paul Torday

Mr. Pip – Lloyd James

On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan

Possession – A.S.Byatt

What was Lost – Catherine O’Flynn

The House of Stone – Christina Lamb

Resistance – Owen Shears

Engleby – Sebastian Faulks

The Gathering – Anne Enright

Notes on an Exhibition – Patrick Gale

Stuart – A Life Backwards – Alexander Masters

The Welsh Girl – Peter Ho Davies

A House by the Thames – Gillian Tindall

Bad Science – Ben Goldacre

These Foolish Things – Deborah Moggach

Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

Here we are at the end of the world – Lloyd James

The Secret Scripture – Sebastian Barry

The White Tiger – Aravind

The Namesake – Jhumpo Lahiri

The Outcast – Sadie Jones

Brooklyn – Colm Toibin

The Behaviour of Moths – Poppy Adams

American Pastoral – Philip Roth

The Lieutenant – Kate Grenville

The Mysteries of Glass – Sue Gee

Catch 22 – Joseph Hillier

Water for Elephants – Sarah Gruen

The Hand That First Held Mine – Maggie O’Farrell

Sex and Stravinsky – Barbara Trapido

The Hare with Amber Eyes – Edmund de Waal

Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – David Mitchell

Trespass – Rose Tremain

The Sword of Honour Trilogy – Evelyn Waugh

Homer and Langley – E.L. Doctorow

The Painted Veil – Somerset Maughan

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

Snowdrops – A.D. Miller

Cutting For Stone – Abraham Vergese

Pure – Andrew Miller

The Saffron Kitchen – Yasmin Crowther

Mosquito – Roma Tearne

Painter of Silence – Georgina Harding

Song of Achilles – Madeleine Miller

A Woman in Berlin - Anon

The Garden of Evening Mists – Tan Twan Eng

This list is incomplete which is a pity. The compiler failed to keep track and I think there must be at least a dozen titles which have never made it onto the list.  Then, within a relatively short period of time several of us moved away.  I continued to drive from my Dorset home to Godalming to participate.  This was helped by the fact that my daughter now owned and lived in our family home.  A bout of illness disrupted my pilgrimages and the Book Group slowly disbanded.  Someone in the village to which I moved had not long started a book group locally when we moved to the village in September 2010.  Organised rather differently from my Surrey one (where we met in the evening with wine and nibbles and reasonably regular intervals of four to six weeks) the Winterborne K group met on the second Tuesday of the month at 4 p.m.  We chose books from a list provided by the Wareham library.  The ethos was different in many ways and I slowly lost my enthusiasm. 

But others from the WK group were beginning to feel a bit disenchanted with the rather limiting and lack-lustre choices offered in the library Book Groups catalogue.  Today four of us ate lunch round my table and we talked about the books we would like to read and how we might organise ourselves.  We will choose a day at regular but not fixed intervals, we will take it in turns to host a soup and cheese lunch, we may choose one or two books that we would all like to read, and we will bring and talk about other titles.  It will be all about the love of books and reading. 

So if it all works out, at our next get-together we will talk about our set book, Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel Night School. Other titles in the frame for optional reading and discussion are Bad Blood by Lorna Sage, The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters and Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. 

So where does Splinter come in?  That is what we will call ourselves!

Bonus discipulus

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish novelist and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.  In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

During the 70s, 80s, and 90s I read several of Murdoch's novels and then I found new authors and moved on.  It is only with my self-appointed challenge to read the entire Booker Shortlist that some titles unread by me have come to my attention.  The Good Apprentice, her 22nd novel published in 1985,  is one such.

Edward Baltram, a college student living in London, gives his best friend Mark a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug for a joke. After Mark, still high, falls to his death from a window, Edward is wracked with guilt and depression — worsened by daily letters from Mark's mother cursing him as a murderer.  All this action takes place in the first chapter and is a memorable  opening.  I am reminded of the opening chapter in Enduring Love where a devastating and irrevocable event changes the course of personal histories.

In search of his father, Jesse, Edward sets off for Seegard, the family home, away from the harsh reality of London. As Edward progresses through the novel, he revives somewhat, thanks to the love of his eccentric father and his extended family of supportive women. He eventually finds, however, that he must come to terms with Mark's death.

Meanwhile, Edward's stepbrother Stuart Cuno decides to give up his studies and goes in search of the "pure" life of an aesthete, to his family's bewilderment.   He abandons a promising academic career and takes up celibacy and chastity.  Interfering friends and relations question his sincerity, his sanity and his motives.  Stuart has a close bond with thirteen-year-old Meredith, the son of Thomas and Midge McCaskerville.

While Edward in order to become Good seeks redemption and sometimes contemplates suicide, Stuart seeks salvation, and Midge is having an affair with her husband's best friend, Harry Cuno - stepfather to Edward and father to Stuart. Her passionate love affair comes to a head after two years when she is disgraced publicly and falls unexpectedly in love with Stuart. Left with a difficult decision, Midge turns to Edward for support.

A convoluted web of complicated family relationships.  This is the stuff of Murdoch. 

An Officer and a Spy

Paris, 1895: an army officer, Georges Picquart, watches a convicted spy, Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of a baying crowd.

Dreyfus is exiled for life to Devil's Island; Picquart is promoted to run the intelligence unit that tracked him down.

But when Picquart discovers that secrets are still being handed over to the Germans, he is drawn into a dangerous labyrinth of deceit and corruption that threatens not just his honour but his life...

"The Dreyfus Affair constitutes one of those moments of history that a lot people know of rather than much about."  How true, I have heard The Dreyfus Affair referred to over the years but never really known what it concerned.  Because even among well educated people, amongst which I am fortunate to count myself,  there's often little more than a headline understanding of the issues of anti-Semitism that it embodies and a French miscarriage of justice, Devil's Island and Emile Zola's famous attack on the French establishment's conspiracy against the Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus: J'accuse.

But the real story is like something from the imagination of Alexandre Dumas, full of intrigue, wrongful imprisonment and heroic effort to establish the truth. In other words, it's a thriller and there is no more deft hand at work in that genre than Robert Harris. However unlike previous Harris thrillers, An Officer and a Spy is not a hypothetical historical account, but, save for a few small fictional details, an almost documentary-like assemblage of what actually took place.

Dreyfus was convicted of passing secrets to the Germans in 1895 and sent to solitary confinement on Devil's Island, where he was forbidden even to speak to his guards. But he was an innocent fall guy, fingered by the military and the government because he was conveniently Jewish, while the real culprit was allowed to continue at dissolute liberty to avoid the embarrassment of the public knowledge that there was a non-Jewish – ie authentic French – spy in the army.

          
The hero of the piece, however, is not Dreyfus, who despite his dreadful suffering, is a minor and not particularly sympathetic character. Instead, Harris unearths the tale of Georges Picquart, the French officer who initially played a part in Dreyfus's arrest, only to be struck by a growing suspicion that the wrong man had been sent away. Although not without his own flaws, including a glint of antisemitism, Picquart is a man who can't let anything lie – even when it is beneficial to him. After Dreyfus's incarceration he is made head of a secret intelligence unit called the "statistical section". But he finds himself a victim of a sinister campaign when he begins to ask uncomfortable questions.
While finely attuned to modern resonances of surveillance, cultural identity and patriotic loyalty, Harris stays true to the atmosphere and morals of the period. He has crafted a compelling narrative of state corruption and individual principle, and a memorable whistleblower whose stubborn call can still be heard more than a century later.

Reading this in these post-EU-Referendum days, and in the immediate aftermath of the election of Trump to the White House and the stomach-churning images of Farage cosying up to the President-elect, the cover-up that the French military and secret service exacted makes me think of the turmoil within and outside our own Parliament over the result of the vote, the apparent determination of the Prime Minister and her immediate entourage to railroad Brexit through and most disturbing of all for me is the unprincipled stepping into line of all those MPs in the Tory Party and Labour who are trotting out the lame expressions 'the people have spoken' and 'respecting the will of the British people'.  It makes my blood boil.  That they put the power of their political parties before the good of the country is incredible.  "But that's politics" someone said to me the other day.  The dark side of politics...........