Persephone Secret Santa Revealed!

The very first item beneath my Christmas tree,



Is once again a book from Persephone!



This is my second year participating in the Persephone Secret Santa Event, kindly hosted by Verity at CardiganGirlVerity and Claire at Paperback Reader. It’s quickly become a highlight of my book blogging year!

Yesterday when I opened the pretty pink Persephone wrappings I found a gift from Katherine at A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore. And I’m thrilled to say it’s a book I’ve had on my TBR pile for quite a while: Dorothy Whipple’s Someone at a Distance. The really funny thing is that I wanted this book so much that I sent it to my own “Secret Santee,” and I hope she’s just as thrilled as I am to receive it. I’m hoping to save it for Persephone Reading Weekend in February, but I’m not sure I can wait that long!

A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore is a completely new blog to me, and I’m very happy to have found it because of Persephone Secret Santa. If you aren’t familiar with it (although I assume many of you are), Katherine reviews a wide variety of contemporary and classic fiction. It’s a lovely blog and you should really take a look!

I can’t wait to see who everyone else was paired with in 2011 – there will be a listing of posts at CardiganGirl today. I hope my last-year Santa (Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza) and Santee (Astrid of The Literary Stew) were able to participate this year! I’ll reveal my 2011 Santee once I make sure her post is up!

EDITED THIS MORNING: Now I can reveal that my Secret Santee was Allie from A Literary Odyssey! Her post is here. I am so happy she is looking forward to reading her Whipple too!

With warmest wishes for a peaceful holiday season,
Col

Book Review: Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue

Once I decided to try to read four books, my plan for this year’s R.I.P. VI Challenge, kindly hosted again by Carl V. of Stainless Steel Droppings, was to slowly increase the peril level throughout the challenge. I started with a vintage mystery, moved to an early 20th century real life ghost story with some mildly perilous moments, and then read a contemporary Japanese ghost story with a really eerie perilous vibe. I was worrying if I’d gotten the order right after that one, but Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue really scared me, so in the end I got the order right.

Melanie, a young, 20th century mother with tuberculosis, sits on an antique chaise-longue to rest. She wakes up in 1864 – long before doctors realized that what she needed most was sunshine and fresh air. She recognizes no one – but they know her. She’s Milly, soon to die of tuberculosis. And they’re waiting for her confession. But she doesn’t have one to give, which contributes to the tension of the book.

So why was a book with no monsters, no ghouls, and no brutally murdered innocents so scary? The horror of Lanski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue comes from Melanie’s growing realization of her abjectly hopeless situation:

But things can’t happen twice, she told herself wearily, closing her eyes, the momentary relaxation over, the racking torture established again, I must always have been Milly and Milly me. It is now that is present reality and the future is yet to come. But if I have to wait for the future, if it is only in time to come that I shall be Melanie again, then that time must come again too when Sister Smith leaves me to sleep on the chaise-longue, and I wake up in the past. I shall never escape – and the eternal prison she imagined for herself consumed her mind, and she fainted or dozed off into a nightmare of chase and pursuit and loss. p. 58-59

This book creeped me out – there’s not one graphic moment, but it’s the kind of book that makes you think. What would it be like if no one believed you? What would it feel like to be without the people you love most when you are ill? What if the person who was supposed to love you most really didn’t? Powerful and horrible themes that pushed my peril-meter higher than I usually like!

Okay – four perilous reads for the R.I.P. VI Challenge – and just in time! Thanks so much, Carl V., for another great autumn of perilous reading. I am already looking forward to next year! This was one of my favorite Persephone Books so far.

Audiobook Review: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

If a book can be distilled to a chapter, a chapter distilled to a sentence, and a sentence distilled to a word, then the word for Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is “charming.” I listened to Frances McDormand’s narration of the audiobook, and I have to say it was wonderful.

Miss Pettigrew is the literary equivalent of a screwball comedy, and it’s easy to see why Persephone Books chose to pluck it from obscurity. Unemployed and unaccomplished governess Guinevere Pettigrew reports to what she believes is an interview for another dull position, only to be thrust into the glittering high society world of actress Delysia LaFosse. Miss Pettigrew quickly becomes an ally to Miss LaFosse, and an asset to her circle of friends, because of her quick wits and straight-forward style.

The book takes place over a one-day period, and we watch the dowdy, downtrodden Miss Pettigrew blossom with every small triumph. She can hardly believe her luck, and dreads the end of the wonderful day, when she believes all her fun must come to an end:

For years she had lived in other people’s houses, and had never been an inmate in the sense of belonging. And now, in a few short hours, she was blissfully and serenely at home. She was accepted. They talked to her. And how they talked. She had never heard the like before. Their ridiculous inconsequence. Every sentence was like a heady cocktail. The whole flavor of the remarks gave her a wicked feeling of sophistication. And the way she kept her end up. No one would ever dream that she was new to it. “I never believed,” thought Miss Pettigrew with pride, “that I had it in me.” (1:54:58, Audiobook).

You can’t help but root for Miss Pettigrew to embrace this new lifestyle on a permanent basis!

I imagine this was a rather racy book when it was first published in 1938, what with Miss LaFosse maintaining three love affairs at one time – I suppose that’s what makes it feel so “modern,” overall. However, it also contains some shocking cultural signs of its times, including ethnic slurs aimed at Italians and Jews, that are decidedly out of step in 2011. The character of Miss Pettigrew – the spinster who’s sure life has passed her by, only to find she may have one last chance at happiness – is truly timeless.

Frances McDormand, who played Miss Pettigrew in the 2008 movie (I haven’t seen it, but would really like to), reads this book beautifully. You can practically watch prim Miss Pettigrew’s hair come down through her narration. The men are gruff, but not overdone. The women’s voices are all very unique, and capture their personalities perfectly. This was really a perfect match between book and reader – McDormand’s comic timing enhances the book tremendously. I highly recommend it for those who love literary fiction, humor, and fiction about women. And if you’re thinking of trying an audiobook for the first time, I would definitely suggest this one – it will give you an idea of how pleasant the experience of listening to a book can be. This is one of only four Persephones available as audiobooks, and I certainly hope they will do more.

This book counts for a Life Stage in the What's in a Name 4 Challenge. Thanks to Beth Fish Reads for hosting. I'll be posting a link to this review on Audiobook Jukebox – if you’re looking for audiobook reviews, that’s the best place to start!

Book Review: Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

I have spent a lot of entertainment time in Second World War Britain lately: watching The King’s Speech, listening to Old Filth, and now reading Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. More than that, the book that made me realize how very much I had missed reading for the sheer pleasure of it – enough so that my tenure gift to myself was to start reading things I wanted to read, and not things I had to read – was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, a beautiful and heartbreaking novel about the German occupation of the Channel Islands. So that book, in a way, led to Col Reads.

Aside from Good Evening, Mrs. Craven, all of these are relatively recent works, and I spent some time during this Persephone Reading Weekend thinking about why the theme seems so pertinent right now. And I had the uneasy realization that it’s probably because the people who actually remember that critical time in history are about to leave us forever. And while many of them – and us, their children and grandchildren – spent a lot of our lives thinking that the Second World War was the last large-scale war the world would ever see, it’s probably a good time to revisit the ugliness that our parents and grandparents lived through and tried to protect us from, before we get to feeling too smug and wind up having to live the nightmare all over again.

Which is an extraordinarily long introduction to why I thought Good Evening, Mrs. Craven was one of the most wonderful book I have read in a while, and why I appreciated the ersatz ethnography of wartime England that Mollie Panter-Downes short stories for The New Yorker has left us all.

Panter-Downes’ stories are not “pretty.” In fact, I’d say they’re quite the opposite: they focus on the “ugly” side of the homefront, the inner turmoil beneath the calm. Since the book is arranged chronologically, we can see shifts in the dominant emotions expressed as the war goes on, from enthusiasm and earnestness in the earliest stories to hopelessness and fear in the middle, to resolve and exhaustion near the end.

Reviewing a collection of short stories is difficult – they are each so different, touching on distinct emotions and situations. They were never meant to hang together, especially by Panter-Downes, who apparently never thought as much of her fiction work as she did of her journalism. And yet I do think the stories hang together, if only because the author chose to focus on small, intimate moments of (mostly) women’s lives, at a time when everything they knew – social roles, class, family – were changing.

So, I thought I would share one of the moments that remains with me most after reading the anthology. “Goodbye, My Love,” was published on December 13, 1941. Newlyweds Ruth and Adrian are spending the last few days before his deployment doing what needs to be done, visiting his parents, seeing friends, keeping up a brave front. When Adrian finally departs, Ruth is devastated. She spends two days trying to get hold of her new situation, and she’s actually optimistic. As she lets herself into her flat on the third day, the phone rings – Adrian’s deployment has been postponed for 10 days, and he’s on the way home:

Ruth heard the click as he hung up, and she hung up slowly, too. For a moment she sat quite still. The clock on the table beside her sounded deafening again, beginning to mark off the ten days at the end of the tunnel. Then her face became drawn and, putting her hands over it, she burst into tears.

Devastating, isn’t it? And yet, although it’s not written, there’s no doubt that Ruth was fabulous when Adrian got home – stylish, sweet, and brave when he left again. This anthology reminded me of what my family went through. My great-grandmother had eight sons, grandsons and sons- and grandsons-in-law in various theaters of battle during the war – one of her sons was lost at Normandy. My father, the youngest child in his family, remembers letters from his older brother (my godfather) fighting in the Pacific. It wasn’t so long ago, but to my children it’s ancient history. As a history student, I know the danger of this – if we don’t remember our history, we may repeat it! I am so glad Mollie Panter-Downes work stands as a testament to the real heartbreaks of war, so real, so intense, so sublimated.

I don’t read a lot of short stories, and reading Good Evening, Mrs. Craven has reminded me what a mistake that is. My hectic life really lends itself to them. I loved reading this book, and can’t wait to read my next Persephone. Thanks to Claire at Paperback Reader and Verity at CardiganGirlVerity for hosting this wonderful weekend of reading! And baci to Bellezza for sending me this lovely Persephone Santa Gift!

Best,

Col

Persephone Reading Weekend: Saturday Update

My Persephone Reading Weekend began with a whimper, I’m afraid – I finally got some time to read, got the house all quiet, cuddled up, read the Preface to Good Evening, Mrs. Craven, and promptly fell asleep. Gregory LeStage’s Preface was fascinating, though, as it prepared me for what’s to come: he notes that Panter-Downes’ stories focus on the psychological aspects of relationships, in a style akin to journalism – not surprising, considering her long relationship with The New Yorker, in which all the short stories in this collection were originally published.

An early bedtime meant I was up before the sun, however, and I enjoyed the beginning of the book with a cup of coffee before the rest of the house was awake. The Persephone edition of the book actually begins with the “Letter from London” that Panter-Downes wrote the week the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in 1939. It was especially interesting reading that piece having recently enjoyed The King’s Speech, which brought that time to life so vividly.

So far my favorite story is “Mrs. Ramsay’s War,” published in the winter of 1940, when it was unclear if this would be a prolonged conflict. It’s the second story featuring Mrs. Ramsay, a woman whose outer placidity doesn’t match her inner turmoil. This story focuses on the onerous nature of houseguests during the War. A friend’s family (along with their annoying Pekinese dogs) descends on Mrs. Ramsay at her country home during the first winter months of the evacuation of London. Like the patriotic woman she is, Mrs. Ramsay keeps a stiff upper lip in the face of shared hardship – but her inner dialog is anything but serene:

All autumn Mrs. Parmenter had run out between the showers and picked the asters, saying brightly that an old woman must be allowed to do something around the house. Opposition would hardly have been hysterical if she had offered to make the beds, but her tastes appeared to be floral. Now it was January, and the snowdrops, and before you knew where you were, Mrs. Ramsay thought morbidly, it would be May and the tulips. Somehow she had never expected to spend the war having a Battle of Flowers with Mrs. Parmenter.

Even this far in I see LeStage’s point: there’s very little plot in these stories. They’re all about what’s going on beneath the surface. I love the humor in her writing. It’s so subtle and understated and, well, British. Bellezza certainly nailed this gift – it’s absolutely my style. I have to admit, I’m surprised that I had never encountered Panter-Downes until now, but I’m thrilled to be reading her work now.

I hope everyone else has enjoyed a wonderful day of reading. Thanks again to Claire at Paperback Reader and Verity at CardiganGirlVerity for hosting!

Looking forward to the rest of this Gray Weekend,

Col

Persephone Reading Weekend Begins: Chill Out, Open Book, Insert Nose

Today began with a yearly female medical ritual that requires taking the “roundest” part of a woman, flattening it into a pancake, and then taking pictures of it. Necessary and important, but not so awesome. That was followed by a luncheon at which I was asked to make a short speech -- and although I am the chattiest person in the world in a small group, and I love nothing more than being in front of a classroom, speaking in front of a hundred people, some of them luminaries in their field, still makes my legs feel like jelly. Again, not so awesome.

Next came an unusually stressful dinner, because tonight was my younger daughter’s SLAM (Science, Language Arts & Music) Fair. She signed up to play Für Elise on piano, and was really nervous about it, but she wasn’t willing to admit it, so she was cranky instead. (She played beautifully, of course, but until she was done, not so awesome!)

So here it is, Friday evening. The not-so-awesome day is done. The heels are off, the jammies are on, and the wine is poured. Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, the incredibly thoughtful gift from my Persephone Secret Santa, Bellezza, is on the couch. And I am going to spend a couple of quiet hours reading.

Life gets crazy on its own -- no need for me to go with it!

Thanks so much to Verity and Paperback Reader for hosting Persephone Reading Weekend. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone’s reviews and getting ideas for my next Persephone title!

Looking forward to a Gray Weekend!

Col

My Persephone Secret Santa Revealed: Or, How Bellezza Sent the Perfect Book

This is what Christmas is supposed to feel like! I got a wonderful surprise, but it was just what I wanted. It isn't too shocking though, since my Secret Santa is one of the few (and highly valued) followers of my little book blog: the wonderful Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza.

(Here's the back story. I only started my book blog because I wanted to participate in the "What's in a Name 3" reading challenge. Looking for inspiration to complete my categories, I clicked on a link to one of Bellezza's reviews. Hers was the first blog I ever followed, and since then I have enjoyed some wonderful book (and life) discussions with her. So it's pretty fun that Claire of Paperback Reader linked us up!)

Bellezza sent me Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Painter-Downes. It was a fabulous choice. Social history is a favorite genre of mine -- little known fact in the blogosphere, as an undergraduate I was a History major, although I study Communications now. In fact, the only other Persephone Book I had read before this year was A London Child of the 1870s, another autobiographical account of a woman's life in England. I cannot wait until my grading is done and I can dive into this book!

So a million thanks to Bellezza for finding the perfect present, and to Claire Boyle at Paperback Reader for hosting this year's Persephone Secret Santa event!

I haven't heard from my own Santee yet -- the book I sent had a LONG way to travel, so I sent it very early. I hope to read that it has arrived safely somewhere in the Pacific sometime tomorrow! [UPDATE: I have heard from my Santee, and she got the book I was so worried about -- Yeah! It was a pleasure and a challenge to find a new book for someone who's read as many Persephone titles as Mrs. B at The Literary Stew, and I'm looking forward to reading her review of The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens.]

Sending Happy Holiday wishes from beautiful Happy Valley, Pennsylvania!

Colleen