I’ve done it again. I borrow books by Alice Hoffman, thinking that it’s Alice Walker… and it’s not. I did that with Practical Magic and I’ve done it again with The Invisible Hour. I thought from the blurb that I was borrowing a book about a young woman and her daughter breaking away from a cult, only to find that I was reading a time travel book about Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. Now, I’m not opposed to time travel books, but I do feel that they are a bit of a guilty pleasure and that there’s something almost adolescent about them. For me, they are plots built on a rickety foundation that can collapse quickly if I start thinking about them too much. [Having said that, I’m really enjoying Life after Life on ABCTV- more than the book, in fact].
Ivy, a sixteen-year old girl from Boston, is estranged from her family who cannot accept her pregnancy. She runs away and joins a cult in rural Massachusetts, and the leader of the cult, Joel, takes her as his wife and, although theoretically all children belong to the community, takes a particular interest in her daughter Mia. Born into the community, Mia knows no other life than this one, controlled by Joel and his rules and punishments, where members work on the apple orchards that fund the commune and are kept in ignorance of the outside world. Ivy, yearning for the world that she has left behind but too frightened to leave the community, encourages her daughter to go to the town library, located in an old building, and staffed by conscientious and sensitive librarians who, aware of the rarity of a community child coming to a library, turn a blind eye to Mia’s theft of books. There Mia comes across The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne which, curiously, has an inscription to her– Mia- in the frontispiece. She steals this book too, and becomes enamoured of its author, who died in 1864. This book, and the death of her mother Ivy, emboldens her to run away and to seek the help of the librarians. She is stalked by Joel, determined to bring her back to the community and to find a paper which he believes she has stolen.
Somehow, and don’t ask me how, this book transports her back to the 1830s where she meets Nathaniel Hawthorne and falls in love with him. He has not yet written The Scarlet Letter, and she knows that Hawthorne will marry Sophia Peabody and have children, and that although suffering writer’s block at the moment, he will become a famous author. Meanwhile, she is stalked by Joel, who manages to travel through the same time portal that she does. She is aware that she needs to distance himself from Hawthorne in order for him to fulfill the life that he does have, and the menace represented by Joel insinuates itself into both her 1830s and present-day lives.
As I said, it doesn’t bear to think too hard about the logistics of all this. In many ways, the book is a paean to the power of books and reading, and parts of it are beautifully written. I haven’t travelled much in America, but I did travel to Boston and (for my sins) Salem, and I enjoyed her descriptions of them both. It’s the sort of book that would make a good, if rather lightweight film and it’s the sort of book that might attract a ‘Womens Weekly Good Read’ sticker if such things still exist.
Well named, because this is exactly how I felt about this book. Yeah, I like to listen to William McInnes, who tells anecdotes so well in his mellow, very Australian voice. I could listen to him for hours, but when I think about it, it’s the sort of listening you do in the car, or when working around the house, when you’re not particularly paying attention.
And so Nah, my reading time is so limited, I’m not going to live forever, and there are so many other books that I could be reading instead. I gave it 100 pages, and then decided Yeah Nah. It was too much like listening to someone rabbitting on without getting anywhere. Might be worth looking for an audiobook version, if he was narrating it.
This book is an autofictional telling of the virtual extermination of a Jewish family by the Vichy regime. It stands almost as a companion piece to Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise and indeed, Nemirovsky appears as a shadow character in this book. For me, it is a strong story betrayed by some lacklustre telling of the frame story.
Expectant mother, Anne, is fascinated by a postcard that is delivered to her mother’s family home in Paris in 2003. On the front is a photo of the Opera Garnier in Paris. On the back written in an awkward hand are the names of the author’s great-grandparents and their children, all of whom had died in concentration camps. Given that court cases were underway over reparations for Nazi confiscations, was this an anti-Semitic taunt? Was there someone who knew more of the family history than the family did itself? Why was it sent?
And so, framed as some sort of detective story/ researcher-as-hero search, Anne turns to her mother who has herself been undertaking her family history research for years before the arrival of this postcard. Her mother co-operates to a point, but then withdraws once it gets close to her own part of the family history, leaving Anne to continue the search alone.
The novel (at least, it describes itself as ‘fiction’ on the copyright page) alternates between the current-day search and the findings of that search. I have no problem at all with Berest’s telling of her great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ story. She captures particularly well the gradual tightening of the Nuremberg Laws and stripping away of rights, wealth and independence described so well in Saul Friedlander’s Nazi Germany and the Jews. Ephraim and Emma, Anna’s great-grandparents had already fled once, from Moscow to Latvia, and then had moved briefly to join Ephraim’s parents in Palestine, before returning to Paris where Ephraim sought ceaselessly to obtain French citizenship for himself and his family. He did not succeed, but in any event it would not have saved the family: although at first directed against ‘foreign Jews’ the racial laws against Jews would have trumped any citizenship claims anyway. Living away from Paris, the family seems to be existing in a summer bubble, until all of a sudden the Nuremberg laws come right to their door. The family is separated, with two children sent off on the pretext that they were going to work, the parents left to desperately search for them, and one married daughter, Myriam, sent away by her father to avoid deportation as well. The story follows Myriam, who is the only one to survive as she lives in isolated places and joins the resistance. But this is not a ‘derring-do’ resistance type story: her activities are spasmodic and often in abeyance. Her marriage, which in many ways was her salvation, takes her to strange places and experiences that she would never have anticipated. It is Myriam who haunts the Hotel Lutetia, where prisoners released from the camps are sent, searching for the family that she will never find.
So strong was the Myriam story that the frame story seemed insipid and banal in comparison. Heavily conversation-based, I found myself resenting when it intruded on the main narrative, and I wished that the narrator and her mother would just get out of the way. One part that was interesting was the modern-day Jewish parents’ outraged response to anti-antisemitism experienced by the narrator’s daughter at school, and the discussion of inter-generational trauma. But for me, this just distracted from the main story. After all, does the world really need another family history as quest novel? I ask myself. It has been done over and over and over again.
So, I have mixed feelings about the book. The story of Miriam and the loss of her family was excellent: the frame story (which may well have been true) less so.
My rating: 8/10 (high because of my regard for Miriam’s story)
The first Palestinian Festival of Literature was conducted in 2008, and this volume of writing was produced to celebrate its tenth anniversary. We in Australia take for granted that if we want to go to a writing festival in our own city, or regional area, or interstate for that matter, then there is nothing to stop us. That isn’t the case for the residents of the Gaza Strip (especially now) or the West Bank, who face checkpoints and turnstiles and outright prohibitions against travelling from one place to another. So the founders decided that if people couldn’t go to the festival, then the festival would come to them. Attracting noted Western authors, the presenters were bussed from region to region, intentionally exposing them to what the Israeli government does not want outside visitors to see, with the hope and expectation that these authors would return home and use their words – their tools of trade- to expose what is happening.
So who are some of these authors? Among others: J. M. Coetzee, Geoff Dyers, Alice Walker, Deborah Moggach, Henning Mankell, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Palin, Chinua Achebe, and China Mieville, and many other Middle Eastern writers I am not so familiar with.
Most of the contributions are only about 4 pages in length, or else single-page poems, and I must confess to feeling a bit as if I were reading a lot of “What I Did on my Trip” responses. As you might expect from writers of this calibre, they are all well written, but the length constraint (and perhaps the task itself) imposed a sameness and almost a banality in most of the short chapters. In spite of this, certain images repeated: the Allenby Bridge and Qualandia checkpoints where unseen young Israelis surveil the waiting lines through CCTV; the wire netting constructed over markets where settlers in high rise buildings throw their rubbish, urine and faeces onto the street below; the incessant tunnelling conducted by Jewish settlers (facilitated by the Israeli government) under Palestinian homes and mosques, with the risk (expectation?) that the honeycombed land will collapse completely. For me, the power of a book can be measured by how much I tell other people about it, and I have been bailing up anyone who will listen with “Hey, there’s this book I’m reading and did you know….?”
The most powerful pieces in the book for me where when the author was able to exceed the word limit, particularly China Mieville’s piece that was actually illustrated with photographs of the checkpoints, even though photography at checkpoints is prohibited. It was followed by a longer chapter by one of the current trustees of the festival, Omar Robert Hamilton who speaks of the importance of J. M. Coetzee’s short half-page contribution where, after resisting attempts to urge him to name the situation ‘apartheid’, he defines South African apartheid then describes Palestine in exactly the same words and invites us to “draw your own conclusions” (p. 35). Hamilton highlights the importance of words in describing what is happening in Palestine, resisting the neutrality of language that we use for fear of being labelled ‘anti-Semitic’.
I’m struck by the injustice and the sheer vindictiveness of small power plays against the Palestinian people, carried out over and over again, day after day. This book was published years before October 7, but it’s all of a piece. I’m so far trying to resist seeing what is happening in Gaza in binary terms, but it’s becoming harder to do so, and this book has largely contributed to this.
My rating: Hard to say. As individual stories, perhaps an 8/10 but taken as a whole, and in terms of impact on me, 9.5/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: of my distress about what is happening in Gaza
Whenever I read a Christos Tsiolkas novel, I come away wondering whether it’s him or me. Does everybody else think constantly of sex, appraising every random interaction as a possible liaison? Are everyone else’s eyes drawn immediately to groins or other sexual parts? Or is it me? Do I lack that whole sexual lens through which to view the world? Or am I too old? Have I forgotten? Was I ever like this? It’s as if the entrance price to a Tsiolkas novel is forced viewing of scenes that would certainly be designated for mature audiences only.
Yet, I think that there is a shift here as Tsiolkas himself, now in his late 50s, is ‘in between’ the shock value of his earlier novels, and something more mature (older) and reflective. The two main characters in The In-Between are middle-aged too, and embarking on a new relationship after both being burnt by previous relationships. Perry’s relationship in Europe with the urbane, educated Gerard ended when Gerard, largely because of his daughter, decided to commit himself exclusively to a heterosexual marriage with his wife, with whom he had a strained relationship. Back in Australia, Ivan’s relationship with Joe had more a suburban tenor, as the landscape gardener is ‘taken to the cleaners’ financially by Joe, much to his ex-wife’s fury. Both men are starting again, nervously and warily.
The book is told in five long chapters. Chapter 1 starts with Perry, 53 years old, catching a tram to their first date. Their restaurant meal leads to lovemaking at Parry’s inner-northern suburbs apartment. Chapter 2 focusses on Ivan, who is househunting in Frankston with his daughter Kat, who is planning her own daughter’s birthday. She wants Ivan to invite Perry, but her mother Dana, still furious about the financial shakedown by Joe, does not want Perry to attend. We follow Ivan to two of his landscaping jobs: one to an elderly Greek woman being bullied by her son, and the other to Clarissa and Simon in their Californian Bungalow, who make him feel dismissed and put down. Chapter 3 returns to Perry, and a dinner party held by lesbian friends Cora and Yasmin. This egg-shells dinner party, pure Tsiolkas in its incisiveness, sees Ivan being appraised by Perry’s friends, and the presence of straight couple Jed and Evelyn leads to too much drink, loose words and a confession. Chapter 4 has the most graphic and rather gratuitous sex in the book, I thought. Ivan breaks up with Troy, a long term male prostitute who he has been seeing for many years. Chapter 5 mirrors the previous chapter’s letting go of the past as Perry and Ivan travel to Europe to meet with Gerard’s daughter Lena. Lena has found a letter that Gerard wrote to Perry, but never sent but, receiving it years later, Perry decides not to read it.
When you’re in-between, things need to shift, and this book captures well the process of making space for a new person. It involves re-evaluating friendships, changing priorities and establishing new priorities. As Tsiolkas does so well, he captures Melbourne life crisply, with its suburbs and class distinctions played out through language, politics, interests and location. But there is also the element of age and maturity which, I think, is less often addressed in books with men (as distinct from women) as main characters – and often from an end-of-life backwards reflection rather than from this in-between stage. [ However, as I write this, a whole lot of other examples spring up: George Johnson’s books? Phillip Roth? ] In keeping with the title, this book looks both backwards and forwards; to letting go and building. It’s not just the sex: this is a book for grown-ups.
I’ve never read The Iliad. I knew bits of it, most particularly the final scenes where the enraged Achilles is dragging the body of Hector around behind his chariot, but I’ve never read the whole thing. I’m not a big audio-book listener either, but in this case I decided to listen to it, knowing that it was originally an oral story. I had audios of the Fagles translation downloaded from who knows where, but they were many separate files and I kept getting lost. So in the end, I succumbed to the prose version by W.H.D. Rouse which felt a bit like cheating. However, I had first been drawn to finally tackle it after listening to a podcast on Achilles, where extracts from The Iliad were read out, and if that narrated version was not prose, then it certainly sounded that way. (The show notes don’t reference the translation). At the same time, I listened to an excellent series of lectures by Michael Dolzani at the Expanding Eyes podcast Episodes 44 to 56, which I have referenced in my I Hear With My Little Ear postings between 23 Oct 2023 and 16 January 2024.
It took me several weeks. Was it worth it? For much of the time, I would have said ‘no’. There are whole books devoted to call-outs to various warriors and their families: you can just imagine the listeners sitting, waiting for their family’s name to be called out, and their triumphant glances when it was. There are many chapters devoted to battles as men are run through the shoulder with swords, eyes plucked out etc etc etc. There are oddly placed chapters that describe ceremonial games held to celebrate a fallen warrior, with the results told in tedious detail.
Above all, there is the image of the hero: brave, fearless, unswervingly loyal. The obverse of the coin: proud, arrogant, stubborn. The image of hero has lured whole contingents of men to their death in its wake.
But there are also moments where we see the heroic ideal held up against other more human traits, most particularly the bond of father and son. This plays out most strongly in the last books of the epic, and these books alone make the rest of the testosterone-driven gore worthwhile.
It has never really occurred to me to question whether Jesus actually existed. There are many things that I doubt about him- miracles, resurrection, second coming for a start- but his actual existence, no. In fact, having spent a lot of the last three years or so catching up on the history of Rome that I missed out at school and university, it seems to me that the sparse references to Jesus himself and the response of Roman authorities to this small apocalyptic sect are just as you would imagine them to be.
However, as this book makes clear, there is a body of thought (albeit small) that asserts that Jesus never existed at all and was instead a myth that conflated Jesus with existing fertility gods and sun gods. According to this view, no textual evidence of Jesus emerged during the 1st century, having dispensed with the Jewish historian Josephus as a forgery. In his introduction Ehrman namechecks the major current proponents of these views: Earl Doherty, Robert Price, Frank Zindler, Thomas L. Thompson and George A Wells. While acknowledging that several of these authors have academic qualifications in classics and the Hebrew bible, according to Ehrman only one of these- Robert Price- has the intellectual chops in New Testament studies to be a serious contender. Ehrman then launches into his own rebuttal to the ‘mythicist’ position by looking at non-Christian sources for the life of Jesus, the Gospels themselves as historical sources, and other Christian writings that did not make it into the biblical canon. He presents what he considers two key arguments for Jesus’ existence: first, Paul of Tarsus’ personal association with Jesus’ followers and brothers especially Peter and James; and second, the common knowledge that Jesus had been crucified. The crucifixion was an affront to any perception of Jesus as a ‘messiah’, not unlike us finding out that David Koresh at Waco was really the Messiah. He then moves to dismantling the mythicists’ claims through either weak or irrelevant argument, and grappling with the ‘pagan myth’ hypothesis for Jesus’ non-existence. In the last two chapters of the book he spells out his own view of the historical Jesus as a 1st century apocalyptic Jewish preacher- a view that I largely subscribe to as well.
Looking at the list of ‘mythicists’ that he is taking on, one thing stands out to me: they are all men. I rarely mentally link the words ‘testosterone’ and ‘biblical studies’, but the first part of the book reminded me of chest-bumping, shirt-fronting, put-up-your-dukes academic skirmishing. The argument, carefully laid out with centred headings and subheadings felt to me like an extended exercise in man-splaining, complete with the repetition and put-downs. All rather unedifying, I thought.
However, I enjoyed the last two chapters of the book, where he stopped attacking and began presenting his own considered and backed-up views of the historical Jesus. Here is where he and I concur:
The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes…When we create him anew we no longer have the Jesus of history, but the Jesus of our own imagination, a monstrous invention created to serve our own purposes. But Jesus is not so easily moved and changed. He is powerfully resistant. He remains always in his own time. As Jesus fads come and go, as new Jesuses come to be invented and then pass away, as newer Jesuses come to take the place of the old, the real, historical Jesus continues to exist, back there in the past, the apocalyptic prophet who expected that a cataclysmic break would occur within his generation when God would destroy the forces of evil, bring in his kingdom, and install Jesus himself on the throne. This is the historical Jesus. And he is obviously too far historical for modern tastes.
Sometimes you just have to shut a book when you reach the end and say “Wow!” That’s what I did when I finished reading Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution, a dual biography of Thomas Henry (T. H.) Huxley and his grandson Julian Huxley that also drew in all the ‘little’ Huxleys as well. Not that there was anything ‘little’ about this family: it lay at the heart of 19th and 20th century British intellectual life, with links that extended to other illustrious families of science and letters like the Arnolds, Darwins, Galton and Wells.
While family biographies are nothing new, Bashford shapes her approach through two particular Huxley family members: T. H. Huxley (often known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’) born 1825, and his grandson Julian, born 1887. This jump between generations, largely skipping the intervening generation, breaks up the linear progression of the narrative:
The younger man constantly fashioned himself after his Victorian grandfather, pursuing those signature Huxley knowledge-quests, some profound, others simply grandiose. They were both remarkable and both, on occasion, tortured. Writing these natural scientists together permits a kind of time-lapse over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, precisely because they were so similar. We might even think of them as one very long-lived man, 1825-1975, whose vital dates bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the age of sail to the space age; from colonial wars to world wars to the Cold War; from a time when the Earth was 6,000 years old according to Genesis, to a time when it was 4.5 billion years old, according to rock samples returned from the Apollo missions.
p. xxiii
T. H. Huxley was born into an “educated but struggling and socially declining” family (p.xxx) and had only two years of formal education before being thrown on his own resources as an autodidact. He was apprenticed to anatomists in the family, but did not complete his medical degree. He joined the navy and was made Assistant Surgeon on H.M.S. Rattlesnake, which embarked on a voyage of discovery and collection in Australia and New Zealand. (Actually, there are several references to Australia in this very English biography- perhaps reflecting Alison Bashford’s current position at UNSW). His work on jellyfish and other marine creatures gained him admission to the Royal Society but despite the acclaim he received for this work, he still had to fight for his position as professor of paleontology and natural history at the Royal School of Mines. His grandson, Julian, had a much easier path. His father, Leonard, had benefitted from the upward social and financial mobility of his father, and so Julian attended Eton and then Baillol College at Oxford from 1906. He, too, studied marine life, but he made his scientific name in his study of grebes (birds). He was invited to set up a Department of Biology at Rice University before World War I intervened, and he later moved to Kings College London as Professor of Zoology. He resigned this position to work with H.G. Wells and his son on a book The Science of Life before travelling to East Africa to continue his ornithological work . He returned to London to take up a position running the London Zoo in 1935, followed by a role in the creation of UNESCO and the WWF. He was a fore-runner to David Attenborough in popularizing the natural sciences and conservation through radio and television broadcasts and documentaries.
But both men’s work was broader than this. Their shared interest in evolution, albeit separated by the discoveries in the decades between their work, involved them in the intense debates of their times. Darwin’s theory of evolution (which T. H. Huxley was not initially convinced by, despite later becoming one of its major exponents) led to explorations and assertions about Homo Sapiens, anthropology, political biology and finally led to eugenics, of which Julian was a leading figure although distancing himself from its use in Nazism. Julian looked forward to transhumanism: a landscape that we have yet to traverse.
Both men were interested in the psychic and spiritual realm, particularly in later life. T. H. Huxley coined the religious term ‘agnostic’, meaning a humble ignorance and openness to further knowledge rather than its more hard-edged nature today. He approached the Bible as a historical document, and during his life wrote as much on Biblical themes (albeit critically) as he did on some of his natural science interests. He enjoyed jousting on religious matters with his sister-in-law, Mary Augusta Ward nee Arnold, who as well as writing rather dire ‘improving’ literature and being active in the anti-suffrage movement, was also a strong supporter of women’s education and settlement houses as part of the social reformist movement. His grandson Julian also developed an interest in neo-romanticism and was attracted to the ideas of the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin with whom he shared a quest towards cosmic unification.
But both men shared the family inheritance of mental illness, in particular an immobilizing depression which saw Julian committed to psychiatric hospitals at various times during his life. This combination of family brilliance and family mental illness is perhaps what gives the title – An IntimateHistory of Evolution its unusual adjective. Here the theory of inheritance becomes personal.
The structure of the book reflects Bashford’s rejection of a single line of chronological narrative. The book is divided into four parts thematically: Genealogies; Animals; Humans and Spirits, and although dealing first with T.H. and then Julian in each of these themes, the timeline and focus does jump from one man to the other. Nor does the book focus on them alone: the women of the family, particularly T. H.’s wife Henrietta, Mary Augusta Ward, Julia Arnold are also referenced throughout. Other Huxleys especially Julian’s brother Aldous, and the religious writer Francis Huxley are also present. Bashford captures well the network of knowledge and intellectual influence which shaped, and in which the whole family moved.
Bashford’s own grasp of T. H. and Julian Huxley’s work is impressive. As a historian of science, she traces the contours of their scientific work, making it intelligible – and even, when you’re reading about jellyfish, interesting. She is just as comfortable teasing out their philosophical and religious work, which does become rather esoteric at its edges. It is not a particularly easy read, although I made it harder for myself by stopping for about a fortnight to read other things. But she is talking about big ideas – indeed, the biggest of ideas- and as a reader you have to work as well. She is writing about a family who were a tour de force in their intellectual milieu, and this book is Bashford’s own tour de force of biography, science, philosophy and history as well. Brilliant
I was rather startled to see that my CAE bookgroup had chosen Marina Warner’s book for our December 2023 read. We’re a rather cosy bookgroup, once condescendingly designated ‘middlebrow’ readers, more drawn to fiction than non-fiction, and I was familiar with Warner’s rather erudite contributions to the London and New York Review of Books magazines. From the Beast to the Blonde is a hefty tome, both physically, and intellectually. I raised an eyebrow at the notewriter’s opening paragraph in the CAE notes that accompanied the book:
Perhaps the book should be approached by reading the lucid and interesting introduction and conclusion, which summarize all the themes developed at length in the main text, then glancing through the text’s handsome and liberal illustrations, which will give a visual impression of the contents.
CAE notes p. 1
Once I felt that I had ‘permission’ to skip bits, I actually ended up reading most of the book, even though I only started reading it about four days before the meeting, as is my usual practice. It was very dense, with long sentences and a forbidding vocabulary (autochthonous? peripeteia?). It was very digressive, as if Warner couldn’t allow a possible association to go unremarked. Most of her material was focussed on European fairy stories. Some Islamic stories do get a look in, but few Asian or indigenous stories are mentioned. In fact, I’m not sure that she ever really defined what a fairy story is, and the distinction between a folk tale and a fairy story.
The book is divided into two parts: The Teller and the Tale. In the first part of the book, she highlights that most fairy stories originated in women’s talk, especially in women-only places like child-bed, washing, kitchens etc, even though they were generally published under men’s names (e.g. Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang). Wrested into the male realm, they often display a disparagement of the original women tellers, drawing on the imagery of the old crone, or a bird to declare them “Mother Goose’s” tales or a grandmother’s stories.
In the second part of the book she moves on to specific stories, particularly Cinderella and the rather disturbing Donkeyskin fairytale (where a young girl has to disguise herself in a donkey skin to avoid her father’s incestuous designs on her) among others. She discusses the Disneyfication of fairy stories, especially ‘The Little Mermaid’, and the cultural stereotypes of blondness and step-mothers that are conveyed through them. But this division between the two sections is not clear cut. For example, although name-checking Marie-Jeanne L’Heritier, Henrirette-Julie de Murat, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy as women writers of fairy stories prior to their absorption into the male-author canon in Part One, it is only in Part Two that she actually gives biographical details about the women and their part in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century French circles. She reveals her indebtedness to Angela Carter, whose adult fairy stories have extended and subverted the genre.
To her credit, she does give a good plot summary of the various stories and their variations, as few readers would be familiar with them, and she does the English reader the courtesy of translating French quotations from them. But it is still a very dense, difficult text. In the conclusion, she embarks on a discussion about a historical as distinct from psychoanalytic reading of fairy stories, arguing that they need to be read within their historical context in both their authorship and allusions, rather than as representatives of archetypes (at least, I think that’s what she was arguing).
The proliferation of anti-fairy stories, even more so in the decades after this was written, have picked up on the feminist emphasis on this book which no longer seems particularly radical or new. They certainly do not call on the same intellectual fortitude and commitment that this book requires of its reader. And it did remind me to one day introduce the original versions of the stories to my grandchildren (yes, it will probably only be my granddaughters) from my own mother’s ‘The Children’s Treasure House”, which will test their attention spans with its dark themes and its black and white art-deco line drawings. Just like my attention span was tested with this book. I recognize its contribution and I admire its breadth and erudition, but it was hard work.
My rating: 7/10
Sourced from: CAE for my CAE Book Group (AKA ‘The Ladies Who Say Ooooh’)
If I were better versed in chemistry, I would start off with drawing parallels between this book and some sort of chemical reaction where there’s a big confident beginning, petering off into a spluttering little anti-climax. Alas, although I can think of parallels in other spheres (political movements? relationships?), I don’t have the chemical knowledge to think of a chemical metaphor. But that’s how I felt about this book: it started off well, then just sagged into a gloopy sentimental mess.
Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist working at the Hastings Research Institute in the early 1960s, the only woman in an all-male working environment (except, of course, for the admin). We now know enough about the side-lining of women in science through Rosalind Franklin and movies like ‘Hidden Figures‘ to recognize the institutionalized injustices that see Elizabeth’s work appropriated and assumed to be the work of the men surrounding her. Almost against her own better judgement, she falls in love with her co-worker Calvin Evans and when her life suddenly falls apart, she finds herself unemployed, unmarried and with a fractious baby. Fiercely independent, she has to learn to accept help from an older neighbour and the father of her daughter’s school friend when he offers her a job to host a TV cooking show. She makes this job her own by introducing the chemistry that she is shut away from professionally to her viewers, housewives at home watching afternoon television. She does not talk down to her viewers and she attains a cult following.
And at this point, my own chemical reaction starts to fizzle out. Yes, we had our professor Julius Sumner Miller in the 1960s, but it stretches credulity to think about a cooking show veering into academic territory like Elizabeth’s ‘Supper at Six’ does. Then there’s the dog (yes, the dog) Six Thirty who is anthropomorphized to the point of having his own dialogue. And the precocious child. And the angelic neighbour. And the mysterious benefactor. Oh stop.
I liked the tone of this book at the start, but it seemed to get lost by the end. The narrative voice was one of those ‘Voices of God’ commentaries, slightly ironic and comforting and imbuing the book with the sense of being a morality tale, or a fairy-tale. There were many one-liners which were sharp and pointed, and certainly coming from a 21st century feminist-ish perspective. But the ending was just a sentimental ‘everything-works-out-in-the-end’ hash. Elizabeth deserved more.
My rating: 6/10
Sourced from: purchased (!) Only because there were too many holds on it at the library
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 