It’s the first Saturday of the month- quite literally- and so it’s Six Degrees of Separation day. This meme, hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest involves her choosing a starting book, and then you linking six other books to it. This month she has chosen Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, which I haven’t read (as usual: I have rarely read the book she chooses!) but I have seen the movie, if that counts.
Dangerous Liaisons is an epistolary novel, and like probably everyone else, my mind leapt to other epistolary novels that I have read. But I’m going to start with a book that is not a novel at all: instead it is a collection of letters in Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag by historian Orlando Figes. Figes has drawn from an archive of over 1300 letters written between Lev Mischenko, imprisoned in a Soviet gulag, to his partner Svetlana Ivanova who lives outside. Figes provides maps, photographs, explanations, and explains not only the minutiae of labour camp life, but also the sweep of Soviet politics on the outside during the time that Lev was imprisoned (my review here).
An epistolary novel of a more modern kind is found in Susan Johnston’s From Where I Fell . By mistake, a woman sends an email to what she thinks is her husbands’ email address, only to receive a reply from 64 year old Chrisanthi Woods, from Schenectady, New York , and the email correspondence continues (my review here).
But the 64 year old woman Chris, who works at SUNY in student enrolments is a brusque and snippy woman, and a dead ringer for Olive Kitteridge, who features in several books by Elizabeth Strout (my review here). Olive and Chris would get on well, although on second thoughts they probably wouldn’t.
Olive Kitteridge lives in Maine, and another book that starts in Maine is Julie Cohen’s Together as 80 year old Robbie, married to his wife Emily for decades, wakes up in the morning and decides to die. He has been diagnosed with dementia, and as he finds himself sinking into a fog of confusion, he fears that he will let slip a secret that he has held for many years. The book then goes backwards as we learn this secret. (My review here).
Another book that goes backwards in Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, which traces through four main characters in London in 1947, 1944 and 1941. The heart of the book is the 1944 section set in London during the Blitz. (My review here).
A similar book is Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual but this book takes the real-life tragedy of 168 people being killed at a Woolworths store in New Cross Road in a V-2 attack during WWII. Fifteen of those 168 were aged under 11. Spufford fictionalizes five of these children: sisters Jo and Valerie, Alec, Ben and Vernon. Spufford drops the bomb in the first pages, then jumps forward as if the five children were not killed. In fact, they were not even in the store. Instead, they lived lives untouched by that November 1944 attack- and this is the story of their lives. (My review here).
Novels feature heavy in my Six Degrees this month, with only one non-fiction. Next month’s book that Kate has selected is Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, and I won’t have read that either because it’s selected for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle in September.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 