In the wings...

Another couple of weeks and The Ragazzo and I will be on vacation in England, so I'll be selecting my vacation reads from among these (and anything I pick up along the way and since I know of two bookstores we will be visiting in London and we'll be visiting Hay-on-Wye, that is likely).

My Life as a Dog is one of my top 10 movies of all time, but I have never read the book. The paper I am writing now draws heavily on this story so I should have it at my finger tips. Ingemar is around 11 years old, growing up in late 1950s Sweden. His mother is dying and the film is about the anticipation and the aftermath of that event. His life is an absolute wreck. He has an angry adolescent brother, none of the relatives want to take him, and he is the type of kid to whom disasters constantly happen. He muses on the dog, Laika, sent up in Sputnik without any food. He feels it is important to experience life's tragedies in perspective, he tells us. The film is touching, but not a downer, I don't know what the book is like but I am about to find out.


All my English booky acquaintances have been going on about Sarah Waters latest, The Little Stranger but the book pictured left caught my interest first. The Night Watch is set near the end of World War II in London and moves backward in time through the lives of ordinary people. The Little Stranger is a Victorian era ghost story. They both sound like entertaining reads, and Dani seemed to enjoy The Little Stranger. It sounds like an addictive, wait I just have to read the end of this chapter kind of book. I hope so as The Ragazzo and I are planning on doing four things, hike, read, have tea, and see friends. Oh, and go to bookstores, and theatre, and opera. Ok, seven things.

What Dovegrey had to say about this Orange Prize shorlister also caught my fancy. The central character is a woman of the theatre and the writer, Deirdre Madden, is Irish. So between my first career, the theatre, and my weakness for the Irish narrative voice (as if there is only one, but that little wee green island has churned out an impressive list of story tellers) I should have a good read ahead of me. The playwright muses over the nature of acting and writing as sculpters of identity, and the results sound as though they are thoughtful and moving.



It's A. S. Byatt's latest, what more can I say. I just read her sister's (Margaret Drabble's) book on moths, so I guess it is her sister's turn with dragonflies. Actually I don't know know much about this book other than the fact that it has a gorgeous cover and that Cornflower books is anticipating its pleasures too. Even when I haven't liked a book by Byatt, I have had to admire it. This sounds like it chronicles the end of innocence as the Victorian era gives way to the Edwardian.



I just picked Night Train to Lisbon off the bookstore shelf. It tells the story of a man whose life is changed by a chance encounter, in a bookstore no less. It sounds like it could either be wonderful or awful. But Isabel Allende liked it, the cover said so, and who am I to challenge her!





I read Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy as part of The Outmoded Author's challenge a few years back and I tore through those 900 pages like wild fire. If you are not familiar with the book, you might know the television adaptation Fortunes of War. A young English husband and wife go to Bucharest on the eve of World War II. The community of ex-pats of which they become a part has some very memorable characters and in addition to the involving plot, the book is simultaneously a history lesson about how the war unfolded for the niaive. They escape to Greece and as the first trilogy ends, to the Levant where the aptly titled next three volumes take place.

Those are just some of the pleasures that await me in the wings. And now, I had better get working on that paper.

History Re-lived (The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning)

What was most impressive in The Great Fortune, the first of the three books in The Balkan Trilogy, is how Olivia Manning creates a story of suspense out of historical events to which we already know the ending. Set at the start of World War II as a newly wed English couple comes to Roumania, the story is -necessarily - the war. What will the Axis do? Will the allegiance with Russia last? Will they be able to return to England? Will the English protect Roumania as they had promised? Will the Nazi's invade France? We actually know the answers to these questions, but I care about the outcome because this story is really about the lives of a broad cast of warmly observed people and how their existence is affected by the world's events. My first post can be found here.

The story is related mostly from the perspective of Harriet Pringle, the young wife of a English lecturer at the University, and Prince Yakimov - of a Russian czarist father and an Irish mother. Harriet is new to Bucharest and her husband is the only person she knows there. She is naive and yet also tough. She is caught in the difficult role as a practical partner to a dreamer - her husband is a big softy who can never say no to helping an army deserter, a poor depressed orphan, or a drunken scrounging prince like Yakimov, who ends up living with the Pringles. Guy Pringle decides to direct a production of Troilus and Cressida at the university with the roles assumed by the broad cast of characters to whom Manning has introduced us. The production forms the unlikely but delightful climax to this first of three books in the trilogy.

what [was] is for - this expense of energy and creative spirit. To produce an amateur play that would fill the theatre for one afternoon and one evening and be forgotten in a week. She knew she could never give herself to such an ephemeral thing. If she had her way, she would seize on Guy and canalise his zeal to make a mark on eternity. But he was a man born to expend himself like a whirlwind - and, indeed, what could one do but love him?

The tumult of their domestic life is the foreground and the war the background and as a result, we follow a character walking down the boulevard who stops to look at the movement of troops on a map in the window of the German propaganda office with interest. What will happen next in the world happens to these people for whom we have come to care. Prince Yakimov has never worked a day in his life. He dances delicately between his role as a member of a royal family (long dead) and a master manipulator in a manner that works fiercely to maintain a facade of graciousness - even to himself:

He could also make a little pocket-money when he dined out with the Pringles. Guy, who over-tipped in a manner Yakimov thought rather ill-bred, always left a heap of small coincs on the table for the piccolo. Yakimov, insisting that Guy precede him from the table, would pocket all he could gather up as he passed.

Guy was absurdly careless with money. One noonday, when they were rehearsing alone, Yakomov saw him pull out with his handkerchief two thousand lei notes. Retrieving, and borrowing, these unseen, Yakov excused himself and went to Cina's where he sat on the terrace eating the aspragus of which he had been deprived and heard the orchestra play in the elegant chinois stand over which the Canary creeper was breaking into flower.

He is infuriating and Manning seems to have a delicious time devising his next plot to live one more day able to sleep till noon and have a hot bath. Both Guy and Harriet seem powerless to refuse him as he has no where else to go.

It's fascinating to observe the political and military progress of this well-known war through naive eyes. Manning has a talent for placing us back in that circumstance. Even though the events of the book are based on her life, it was written in the 1960s. The dissolving fortunes of a Jewish family who's wealth is tied up in German industry, the future of Bessarabia, fought over for centuries by the Russians and the Roumanian's, even the future of Paris become newly interesting amidst the domestic conflicts of the Pringles and the dissolved fortunes of a drunken hanger-on. I'm already 100 pages into the second book of this 900 page trilogy, The Spoilt City, but I've no doubt I'm going to finish it before Christmas. It moves swiftly and its cast of characters are well-known to me now. Which brings me to another more pressing question, I had really hoped to reach the meaningless goal of having read 50 books this year. When I complete this trilogy I'll be at 41. Think I can make it? Nine more books in about three weeks, it's going to be close.

Now I'm off to one of my two finals. The other is tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Arriving in Bucharest on the Eve of War (Books - The Balkan Trilogy by Olivian Manning)

I have begun The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning, my second book for the Outmoded Authors Challenge hosted by Imani. It and The Levant Trilogy are a fictionalization of Manning's life with her husband in which, as a newly married couple, they moved to Bucharest on the eve of World War II, staying there until the Germans invade Greece and then moved to the middle east. The six books are collectively titled Fortunes of War and were the basis for the Masterpiece Theater series of the same name.

Manning's ability to present the sweep of a scene in which many small dramas seem to be happening at once, and to people those dramas with detailed characters, is remarkable.

During the afternoon the receptionist rang through three times to say a lady wished to speak to Domnul Pringle. "The same lady?" Harriet asked the third time. Yes, the same lady.

When, at sunset, Guy's figure appeared in the square, Harriet's forbearance was not what it had been. She watched him emerge out of a blur or dust - a large, untidy man clutching an armful of books and papers with the awkwardness of a bear. A piece of pediment crashed before him. He paused, blinded; peered about through his glasses and started off in the wrong direction. She felt an appalled compassion for him. Where he had been a moment before, a wall came down. Its fall revealed the interior of a vast white room, fretted with baroque scrolls and set with a mirror that glimmered like a lake. Nearby could be seen the red wall paper of a cafe - the famous Cafe Napoleon that had been the meeting-place of artists, musicians, poets and other natural non-conformists. Guy had said that all this destruction had been planned simply to wipe out this one centre of revolt.

Entering the hotel room, Guy threw down his armful of papers. With a sasualness that denoted drama, he announced: "The Russians have occupied Vilna." He set about changing his shirt.
"You mean, they're inside Poland?" ask Harriet.
"A good move." Her tone had set him on the defensive. "A move to protect Poland."
"A good excuse, anyway."
The telephone rang and Guy jumped at it before anything more could be said: "Inchcape!" he called delightedly and without consulting Harriet added: "We're dining up the Chaussee. Pavel's. Come and join us." He put down the receiver and, pulling a shirt over his head without undoing the buttons, he said: "You'll like Inchcape. All you need do with him is encourage him to talk."

Another character has also been introduced, Yakimov. I don't really know who he is yet. He could be nobility fallen on hard times or a swindler.

He held a suitcase in each hand and his crocodile dressing-case hoisted up under his right elbow. His sable-lined greatcoat hung from his left arm. The porters - there were about a dozen to each passenger - followed him aghast. He might have been mobbed had not his vague, gentle gaze, ranging over their heads from his unusual height, given the impression he was out of reach.

When the dressing-case slipped, one of the porters snatched at it. Yakimov dodged him with a skilled sidestep, then wandered on, his shoulders drooping, his coat sweeping the dirty platform, his check suit and yellow cardigan sagging and fluttering as though carried on a coat-hanger. His shirt, changed on the train, was clean. His other clothes were not. His tie, bought for him years before by Dollie, who had admired its 'angelic blue', was now so blotched a be-yellowed by spilt food, it was no colour at all. His head, with its thin, pale hair, its nose that, long and delicate, widened suddenly at the nostrils, its thin clown's mouth, was remote and mild as the head of a giraffe. On top of it he wore a shabby check cap. His whole sad aspect was made sadder by the fact that he had not eaten for forty-eight hours.

A description like that and at once I want to know more. We are introduced to the Pringles and Yakimov on a train heading for Bucharest. In the first pages, a German refuge on that train loses his papers. At once the atmosphere of burgeoning war gripped me, a sort of hysterical tension. I've only read a few chapters but am already completely drawn-in to the world of Manning's novel.