Persephone in the mail

This is apparently the week for posting about lovely publishers. My Persephone Biannually arrived in the mail on Monday, which is always tremendously exciting. Mail all the way from England!

It includes information about their new books, blurbs from bloggers, and a short story by Eva Ibbotson (who died recently, you may remember), which I'm super excited to read. Persephone Books makes me so gleeful, and I really couldn't tell you why.

Review: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

I was possessed of an urge to read a Persephone book, so I wandered through the library catalogue to find one I wanted to read. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, by Julia Strachey, sounded appealing.

It's a novella, really, about a woman named Dolly on her wedding day, and the various family members and wedding guests. The back of the book calls it a mix of Katherine Mansfield, Cold Comfort Farm, and EM Forster. I've not read Forster, and only a little Mansfield, and it's been a while since I read Cold Comfort Farm. What Cheerful Weather for the Wedding reminded me of most was Evelyn Waugh. Something about the humour of it, the subtle absurdity of events and and actions, is very Waugh to me. All the characters, too, might have walked straight out of Put Out More Flags.

One passage in particular speaks to both the similarities to Evelyn Waugh and much of what I like about this book:

'"We have seen Two Men who are willing to Throw the Bones with reference to Heaven!" recited Lob, pointing his fork upwards into the air, and rolling his r's sonorously.

What he said was merely one of the many passages he had picked up out of Joseph's anthropological textbooks, and which he was fond of reciting aloud at odd moments, and without any apparent rhyme or reason.' (pg. 30)

It's random little things like this, that people say or do, which make the story absurd without being unreal, which, actually make it more real. For all the silly little bits like this, it was a rather subdued silliness.

The title was perfect, especially once you've read enough of the book to know what it means in a less obvious sense. This may not be a book that I will remember forever, but it was a book for lovely moments--both the moments in the short period of time covered by the book, and those moments I spent reading it.

Greenery Street

So it's a week since the end of Persephone Reading Week, but I've finally finished Greenery Street, by Denis Mackail. It's a lovely, lovely book, my third Persephone read, definitely confirming my love for these books.

Greenery Street is a road full of identical houses inhabited by newly married couples, who inevitably have children, find their homes too small to accommodate them, and move away. These are houses which no one these days would find too small for a family, and which might even be split up into flats. But in 1925, they were impossibly small for husband, wife, two servants, and children. Greenery Street is sort of its own character, with little gobliny gods who sit on the mantelpiece and laugh at all the couples who think they'll live there forever.

It's an interesting book because it's told in such a variety of styles. Sometimes it's just ordinary prose, sometimes it looks like a script, complete with stage direction. One section is an itemized list of 23, Greenery Street's library, which contains 24 books.

"Item. Cheap edition of The Three Musketeers. Still cheaper edition of Twenty Years After. Bought with present owner's pocket-money, and read almost to pieces.
Item. An exquisitely-bound volume with a gilt lock. Owner was given this by her grandmother, and intended to keep a diary in it. May have actually begun it, but lost the key about seven years ago and so cannot be sure. A very choice specimen." (pg 147)

Felicity and Ian Foster are the very young newly married couple who live at 23, Greenery Street. They have small domestic disputes, money troubles, servant troubles, encounters with family and neighbours, and a continuing inability to retrieve the fish-kettle (whatever that is) or the step-ladder from the neighbours, who borrowed them and never returned them. Few of their difficulties are particularly dramatic, but they're all entertaining. Denis Mackail has a lovely turn of phrase, which can make the most ordinary things very funny. Here is one passage I particularly liked:

"But in Felicity's mind, as she waited to hear his voice on the line, it was Ian's office and Ian's office alone. A composite picture which drew something from her mother's bank, something from the stationery department at Harrod's, and a great deal from the business scenes in American films. Ian would thus be sitting at an enormous roll-top desk, covered with telephones and paste-bottles and cardboard boxes, in a vast apartment with a quantity of glass-panelled doors. A tape-machine would be disgorging into a high, narrow waste-paper basket, and a number of minor characters - vaguely identified as 'the staff' - would keep running in and out of the glass-panelled doors, rather like people in a farce. As for the atmosphere of the place, that would be charged with a tense, electrical excitement. The words 'My God, I'm ruined!' or 'Thank Heaven, we're saved!' would be heard there twenty times a day, but in either case Ian himself would remain imperturbably at his desk, calm, serious and - and perfect. The last adjective was for private consumption only." (pg 2a)

As Rebecca Cohen's preface tells us, Greenery Street is semi-autobiographical. Denis Mackail obviously has a very personal connection to the story, though he also sees the ridiculousness inherent in Greenery Street. This combination is, I think, what makes this book so good.

Persephone

It's Persephone Reading Week, hosted here and here. I actually have no time to read anything that isn't for class, but I was seduced by the lure of Persephone, so I am rebelling against my lack of time and reading anyway. Which is kind of dangerous, because I've started Greenery Street, by Denis Mackail, and I already love it and am going to have to continue reading it.

I can already tell this is going to be one of those books that winds up with numerous post-it notes in it of paragraphs I want to quote. A compulsive reading aloud book, is what this is. It's the story of the first year of a happy marriage, basically, so it's nice and cheerful and funny. Here's one of the paragraphs I've already marked. It's on the occasion of Ian meeting his future father-in-law.

'How do you do, sir?' said Ian, courageously. As before, he extended the right hand of salutation.

But old Humphrey, who was at least ten times more embarrassed than anyone else in the room, found himself incapable of making the necessary contact. Instead, he nodded at Ian with an odd kind of familiarity - rather as though they had secretly spent the whole day together in not very respectable surroundings - and began rubbing the tips of his fingers against each other. (pg 27)

This entire scene is quite hilarious, really, tense in the way scenes like this are tense in a movie or on stage (which makes sense as Denis Mackail was in theatre), almost farcical.

It really is a lovely book, and I'm so excited to read the rest of it despite my utter lack of time.

The Slightest Move

It's funny how a book will work for you perfectly at one time, and not at all at another. This is how Someone at a Distance, by Dorothy Whipple, has been for me. I got it for Christmas last year and read about 150 pages of it, and I don't remember what else I was reading or doing at the time but I got distracted and stopped. It just wasn't capturing my attention, and I was skeptical of all the blurbs about it calling it "unputdownable". I was, in fact, afraid all my high expectations of Persephone Books were going to be disappointed so soon.

It's a good thing I didn't decide that was the case for sure, since it would have been premature and very sad. I started the book Monday and finished it Wednesday, which for a 413 page book and my recent reading habits is a bit amazing. It was unputdownable; I now believe everything good anybody's ever said about it. Sometimes I had to force myself to put it down and do other things, because it was overwhelming.

As the story goes, the North family, father Avery, his wife Ellen, their children Hugh and Anne, live comfortably in a house in the country in the early 1950s. Ellen keeps house and gardens, Avery takes the train back and forth to London where he is a publisher, Hugh is doing his compulsory military service, and Anne, at 15, rides her beloved horse Roma when she is home from school for the holidays. It's all very lovely and idyllic. When Avery's mother, old Mrs. North, engages a French girl called Louise to come and keep her company, however, things begin to go wrong. Louise is rather a masterpiece of a character. She compares herself to Madame Bovary, and understands and really likes Madame Bovary. It is, in a way, possible to admire her, because she knows what she wants and how to get it, and she takes pleasure in things, in her artfulness about clothing and about manipulating people. But she also hates things the rest of the characters love, doesn't understand why provincial, simple, artless life is appealing, and expects everyone else to grasp that her way of life is better. She just doesn't care about other people's feelings. She has absolutely no sympathy.

I spent almost the entire second half of the book (which I read in one day) feeling like crying, which surprised me; this kind of story doesn't usually make me cry. But I think I must have discovered one of the few stories that does have this effect. It's stories where the characters could be happy, they could fix what's gone wrong, but they are stubborn or proud or both, they make assumptions about what other people want, and they just don't communicate. They let it go because they assume that's what other people want them to do. When of course it never is. While this story was painful to me, it was very, very satisfying. The characters are so real, and their desires (even Louise's, usually), are understandable.

"If we could be seen thinking, we would show blown bright one moment, dark the next, like embers; subject to every passing word and thought of our own and other people's, mostly other people's." (pg. 181)

It is in this that Dorothy Whipple understands her characters, and that we understand them (even when we want to grab them and shake sense into them). This is a good book, one that I put down after the last page and had to recover from. I went to bed and laid there thinking about how much I wanted to fix things for the characters, and about the ending, which works and provides hope without being exactly happily ever after. It's the sort of book that's left me at a loss for my next reading choice, because how do you follow it? It's not a large story, it's not very out of the ordinary, it's making tea late at night and cleaning out a house, dead-heading the flowers in the garden and mailing a letter, but that's what makes it so good.

Great Britain Postage Paid

Getting mail is always exciting (unless it's just ads, of course). Getting mail all the way from London is even more exciting.I bet that little logo looks rather familiar to some people. A while back I filled out the form on the Persephone Books website to receive their catalogue and biannually. I'd rather forgotten about it, but I came home on Friday to find it waiting for me. Already open. Silly father, opening my mail (I suppose he wanted to know what I'd ordered all the way from London).

And inside this nice white package (my address all written out, looks like a fountain pen, first name semi-illegible, the 8 in my zip code all smudgey, and with "Printed Papers" stamped on it from somewhere in the maze of the post) we have several exciting things. First, a bookmark, for The Casino by Margaret Bonham, the excerpt of which sounds extremely intriguing. Then there's a "We are very pleased to be sending you..." letter, which talks about their latest books and how to buy them. (You're reading this, by the way, in the order I came to each item. Just so's you know.) Then the The Persephone Catalogue, No. 10. It's the most lovely catalogue I've ever seen. Information about all 86 books (oh dear, and I've only read one and a half), pictures of and blurbs about all the endpapers (which, if you didn't know, are images of fabric from the era of the book), some of them have images of manuscript pages or other relevant illustrations. I'm looking so looking forward to reading through this, though I'm sure it's going to make me want all these books desperately.

Lastly I uncovered the biannually, but first let me mention the order form. The paragraph about the cost is the most convoluted thing I've ever read, but it's also sort of whimsical. It's certainly far from buying books on Amazon. "Please send books No:___ at a cost of £10 for each of the 86 grey Originals or £9 for each Classic or £27 for three, + £2 p&p per book within the UK eg one book including UK postage is £12 (but £11 for one Classic), two books are £24 (but £22 for two Classics or £23 for one Classic and one Original, or any three books are £33."

The biannually talks about their three newest books, has some blurbs from various readers, reviewers, and bloggers (many of whom I read, so it's funny to see them in here) about some of their books, very short summaries about all 86 books, a short story by Dorothy Whipple, and a lot of nice illustrations.

So this was definitely much more exciting than the sorts of catalogues you usually get in the mail, and I can't wait to have time to read it (not looking likely in the very near future, it's nearly the end of the quarter and work is building up). Not to mention, time to read all these books. And of course now I've foolishly started looking through the UW library website to see which they have or could interlibrary loan, having realized that now I have access to it it's the perfect way to get British books I couldn't get otherwise. Oh, it's all so tempting.

Here comes the Christmas post.

For Christmas, I got Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, The Father Christmas Letters by J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Original Girl's Handy Book by Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard. Villette I already have, but this is a considerable smaller copy which may aid in my actually getting around to reading it. Apparently I cannot go a year without getting something related to Tolkien for Christmas (I was once a rampant Tolkien fan, and still am when I think of it).

I've started reading Someone at a Distance, which is another of those published by Persephone Books. I had never heard of it before, but Ducky asked me what books I wanted for Christmas and for once I thought of an answer, so I told him Persephone figuring they'd all be good. It looks very likely to live up to my expectations. The back of the book calls Dorothy Whipple the "literary heir to Mrs. Gaskell" which is very interesting. I love Elizabeth Gaskell entirely, and I don't quite yet understand the comparison but can see how it could be true.

As for what I've been reading over Christmas--I've had an awful cold all week, and what with that and the snow I haven't been able to go anywhere, so I've been doing quite a bit of reading. I finished Emma, which I was surprised to find is now battling it out for my favourite Jane Austen novel (along with Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, which have all been battling for ages with no results). Emma is an extremely well-crafted novel, the characters all develop very naturally and very pleasingly. I expected to find Emma herself annoying, but she's so human and so well-intentioned that I never did. This book is somewhat more class-conscious than the others are, which is a little weird, but it's not too hard to look past that. It was an extremely satisfying novel, and I love it very much.

I also finished The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute, which is a Senior Lit book that has been getting pushed out of my view by Emma for ages. I read it in rather odd clumps, with a fair amount at once and then none of it for a week, although I don't think that hurt it particularly. The Beans are a family of the poorest class, not always with electricity, not always (or ever) what is usually called couth, but always rather interesting. It's a strange little book, but the writing is very interesting. I enjoyed it, even though I was never really into it because I always wanted to be reading something else.