Tag: Alba de Céspedes

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Correspondent to A Little Trickerie

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate:  Books are my Favourite and Best

I have had a lot of trouble with this chain: It’s stumbled together, rather than gracefully evolved. And it begins with a book I haven’t read. The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans is a debut epistolary novel exploring the life of Sybil Van Antwerp, a prickly, 73-year-old retired Maryland lawyer navigating deteriorating eyesight and past grief.

I decided to go with a woman who writes – not letters, but a notebook. Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes and translated by Ann Goldstein, is set in 1950s Rome, about Valeria Cossati, a 43-year-old wife and mother who starts a secret diary. Her dreams are humble: to have space in the house for herself, and just a little time. Writing in this forbidden journal causes her to question her restricted domestic life, her husband’s patriarchal authority, and her own identity, leading to a profound personal awakening. 

What about a woman – and a man too, in fact – who hadn’t even known they were dissatisfied, until …. ? This story is told in André Aciman’s Room on the Sea.  Paul and Catherine are two married professionals in their 60s who meet during a sultry New York City jury selection. Over a week, their initial connection deepens into a secret, intense, and philosophical romance, exploring themes of yearning, regret, and the temptation to act on missed opportunities. This novella charmed me as much as this man, this woman charmed each other. Their easy teasing relationship, their way with words, their openness with one another had me rooting for them.

Maybe Paul and Catherine have an affair.  Maybe they don’t.  My next book, Phil Harrison’s The First Day begins with an affair and its consequences.  It’s a book of two halves. exploring a destructive affair between Samuel Orr, a married Belfast preacher with a twelve year old son Philip, and Anna, a young Beckett scholar. Anna falls pregnant, they keep the baby … and everything falls apart.  Fast forward thirty years to New York  where that baby, Sam is now living. He’s our narrator – actually it turns out he always has been. Why is he there? Why is he choosing to stay under the radar? Eventually, horrified, we find out. This is a very readable book about faith, about power-imbalance, about desire, about long shadows cast by single events. 

In The First Day, Samuel Orr is never referred to as anything but ‘Orr’.  In James Meek’s Your Life Without Me, the main protagonist, an English teacher, is only ever known as Mr. Burnham.  The story centres on him as he navigates the death of his wife Ada, and his strained relationship with his truculent teenage daughter Leila.  And there’s Raf, ex-pupil with whom he maintains close contact.  Is Mr. Burnham going to be implicated when Raf is discovered in a major act of terrorim?  Despite the perhaps over-neat ending, this is a well-delivered book about four flawed and compromised people, building into a compassionate and involving story.

Leila is an awkward and motherless teenager.  Let’s go back twelve centuries and find another:  Agnes, in Emily Maguire’s Rapture. Brought up and educated by her father in a world of men, Agnes renders herself unsuitable marriage material in 9th century Mainz. When her father unexpectedly dies, she disguises herself as a man and enters a monastery. The book catalogues her life as a respected scholar and scribe in an austere Benedictine monastery, and her subsequent adventures which see her travel to Athens, to Rome, where her scholarship, her piety ensure she’s always noticed by those who matter. She lives always with the fear of being found out for who she is, with the discomfort of her tightly bound breasts, with her tussles with herself over her austere faith. We come to know Agnes/John as a child, a scholar, a woman, a lover, a teacher… and finally a pope. An absorbing, well researched, imagined and audacious story, transporting me to the reality of religious life in 9th century Europe.

We’ll stay in the past, but in early Tudor England, and meet a young vagrant, Tibb Ingleby, in Rosanna Pike’s A Little Trickerie.  Her mother dies, and Tibb has to make her way alone in a world where vagrancy is a crime.  Meeting a young lad, Ivo, makes a big difference and the two team up.  One day he disappears, and her next adventure sees her falling in with a band of strolling players.  And on the story goes, vivaciously told by uneducated Tibb, who nevertheless has a way with words. Who knew that being naked was ‘wearing a no-clothes outfit’? Through her we meet the often horrifying prejudices and superstitions of early 16th century England, The last section of the book  is inspired by the story of a real woman known as the Holy Maid of Leominster who, like Tibb herself, engaged in fraud and ‘trickeries’ . Fraudster or not, Tibb is an engaging character, doing what she can to get through life as best she can, never hurting those she holds dear. The ending disappointed, but till then, I found it an involving story.

So there we have it. Six books, six or more characters with tales to tell about their ordinary – or not so ordinary – lives. Next month, we’re to begin with Charlotte McConaghy‘s Wild Dark Shore, set on a remote small island housing the world’s largest seed bank. That should give scope for next month’s Six Degrees to scatter in many different directions. If you don’t already … why not join in?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Theory and Practice to At the Bottom of the River

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate: : Books are my Favourite and Best

The starter book this month is Michelle de Kretser’s Theory and Practice.  I haven’t yet read it, but here’s something from the Guardian review:  ‘In Theory & Practice, De Kretser gradually, delicately, picks and plucks at the notion of “truth” in literature…’


Well, here’s a book that looks at two kinds of truth, in Forty Autumns by Nina Willner.  And it’s the story of her mother Hanna’s family she tells here. Her mother, aged 17, escaped from the newly-created and isolated East Germany, as Russia assumed responsibility for this area, while England, the US and France had West Germany.  She did well, making a career, then marrying and moving to America.  But her family was left behind, their lives increasingly constrained and isolated by the evermore authoritarian government there.  She was able to have little contact with them, not even hearing when two brothers died.  In the East, propaganda spoke of the degenerate and unsuccessful West, but prevented any contact.  Her family – particularly her schoolteacher father – was under the government’s spotlight because they clearly were not uncritical party faithful.  The fall of the Berlin Wall enabled them to reunite.  The love remained, the contact blossomed, but the differences between their former lives cast a long shadow of bitterness and regret

Here’s another family dealing with differences among them, although of course, not the same kind at all. Albion, by Anna Hope.There’s so much to like about this novel: an evocation of a family, fractured in many ways, but coming together because of the death of its oldest member: father, husband and lifelong liar, bully and philanderer,Philip. A picture of an English country house (complete with a Joshua Reynolds family portrait) and countryside: now in the process of being re-wilded by father and eldest daughter in a project named ‘Albion’, – but had he actually wanted to hand the baton over to his son to continue down a different path, for wealthy ageing hippies? A younger daughter, married to a good man, re-kindling adolescent friendships and more with estate workers … or not? A resident ageing hippy … All this is so well painted. Enter Clara, who might have been Philip’s illegitimate daughter and who fetches up for the funeral. What happens from now on – but no spoiler alerts here – when Clara makes a dramatic revelatory speech, which in truth shouldn’t have been such a total surprise, totally changes the tenor of the story. What should have been a fine book is spoilt by this rather facile, bland and unsatisfactory last part.

Family difference is the theme in Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, translated by Ann Goldstein.In November 1950 forty–three-year-old Valeria Cossati purchases a black notebook from a tobacconist – a ‘forbidden’ item as only tobacco could be sold from there on Sundays. This transgression informs the whole book. Valeria writes in her notebook only in secret: a good Italian wife devotes herself to home and family, without help from her husband or her two older children, both students. But unusually, Valeria also has a job, an office job. Her notebook becomes the place where she records her life, and that of her family. She vacillates between being critical and judgemental, and admiring. Her daughter enjoys freedoms she cannot dream of and in her diary she explores her conflicted feelings about this. Her son is academically lazy. Her husband calls her ‘mamma’. Her boss clearly finds her attractive, and she is not indifferent to him. All her tumult of feelings tumble onto the page of the book she must at all costs hide, because what if it were discovered and read? It’s a fascinating discourse in which we her readers feel as frustrated with her apparent acceptance of the role society has put upon her, as by her tangled ambitions to break out from these expectations. Her dreams are humble: to have space in the house for herself, and just a little time.

Another book about women and their families: The Coast Road by Alan Murrin. The novel, set in 1990s Ireland where divorce was still illegal, and revolves round three women (and Murrin is particularly skilled in bringing women to life) in different ways trapped by marriage, Colette – a bohemian poet – leaves her husband after her affair, and he won’t give her access to her youngest child. Dolores, married to a philanderer,  is pregnant with her fourth child. Izzy has an ambitious and controlling politician as a husband.The lives of the three women become entwined as the plot develops, showing each of the men being unlikeable in different ways. Only Father Brian, the priest, comes out well. Here is a novel describing vulnerable, limited lives held in check by fear of scandal. Characters are all brought convincingly and sympathetically to life. Murrin seems to know well the world about which he writes, and even the ending, highly dramatic as it is, is believable and compelling.

And here we are again.  Difficult family life, in Liars by Sarah Manguso. This is the story of Jane, writer and academic, who as a young woman meets John, a charismatic film-maker. They set out to construct a creative, equal marriage and apply together for artists’ fellowships, only for Jane to succeed and John to fail. At this early stage the warning signs are there. John fails and fails again, but they marry anyway. When they have a child together, Jane is doubly trapped. She and her (unnamed) son are dependent, because of the shrivelling of her career, on John’s income. The reiteration of a pattern, year after year after year is debilitating all round and exhausting to read about. Jane is increasingly a victim, increasingly two-dimensional. Finally – finally – John leaves them. A somewhat depressing book, in which the characters – there are only two really, as The Child only develops some kind of personality towards the end – deny the readers the possibility of liking them, or in my case, caring very much about them.

My last book, a series of short pieces, also often focuses on relationships: the mother and child. Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River,also writes about the natural world and achieving independence. The language is beautiful – often hauntingly so. There’s often wry humour: the first essay of all is a list – a long list – of how the daughter should behave in order not to become a slut. The entire piece is one sentence long… ‘This is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra – far from the house, because okra tree harbours red ants ….‘This was perhaps my favourite piece. Kincaid is very good at lists, and this one is the first among several that contain them.

Nevertheless, I didn’t find this easy reading, and I often struggled to follow the drift. I hugely enjoyed Kincaid’s use of language, but remained puzzled by the book as a whole.

So there we are. A chain about relationships: which is the theme of most fiction, I guess. And next month’s starter book is The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden. Kate’s review makes it sound an appetising read.

And here, nothing to do with this challenge, but everything to do with Becky’s Squares Challenge, #SimplyRed, is a surprise find in a flea market in Barcelona. Who knew that Just William was popular in Spain too?

Photo Credits:
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Evgeny Matveev: Unsplash
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Siona das Olkhef: Unsplash
Segi Dolcet Escrig: Unsplash