The Centauress by Kathleen Jones

‘The biographer, Alex thought, was always the observer, the outsider, the one whose job it was to be objective and impersonal. But how was she to do this in Zenia’s case, when she was getting more and more involved? Drawn into the story and in danger of becoming part of it? Wasn’t this what anthropologists feared? That the very act of observation affected the behaviour of those observed, the chain of events?’

When biographer Alex Forbes travels to Istria to research the life of eccentric artist Zenia de Braganza, she can have no idea how personally significant the experience will be. Alex, still suffering the after-effects of a terrible personal tragedy, is gradually drawn deeper into the life of her subject, and the unconventional household that has formed around Zenia. Zenia herself is now elderly and in poor health – though her spirit is as strong as ever – and is keen to tell her story to Alex before she dies. And what a story it is, encompassing war, death, secrets, familial disputes, tangled love affairs, and the tortured question of sexual identity.

Though she has lived her entire life as a woman, we learn that Zenia was in fact born intersex, with both male and female characteristics. Like many intersex children, past and present, she underwent surgical intervention designed to make her definitively one sex or the other. Zenia was transformed entirely into a woman – at least on the surface. The experience has left her feeling incomplete, and yet it also gives her an outlook that few others have: ‘This is what makes me unique, because I can see things from both sides.’

The issue of intersex – still little understood, and rarely discussed – is explored sensitively, sympathetically, and never pruriently. Nor does Jones present it in unduly simplistic terms; another writer might have been tempted to characterise Zenia as a straightforward heroine, or an uncomplicated victim. Jones resists this temptation: Zenia is reckless, vain, mercurial, and occasionally cruel. She is as flawed and fickle as any of us. She is not a heroine, and she is certainly nobody’s victim.

Fittingly for someone who is neither entirely one thing nor entirely another, Zenia has made her home in Istria, a region of Croatia which once belonged to Italy and retains a distinctly Italian culture and feel. Istria exists, appropriately, in both worlds. It is brought to life in beautiful detail here; reading, you can almost hear the church bells ringing and see the Adriatic in the distance. Yet, for all its beauty, it is also a place of sadness and horror, ravaged by war and tainted by remembered atrocities. Zenia’s story is, in part, the story of the twentieth century, and of the wars that ravaged Europe in that century.

Zenia’s personal history is also, as soon becomes clear, something of a warzone: friends and relatives do not necessarily want all the facts to come out, and often for very good reasons. Zenia insists that she wants the biography to tell the truth; but she herself, as Alex finds out, is not necessarily always reliable: ‘I often wonder just how much of the truth she told. Does memory lie, or does it just accommodate itself to the conventions of story-telling? Or does it, as in dreams, create narratives of its own?’

Certain loose ends in the story are never quite tied up, but I think this is probably a reflection of the frustrations inherent in biography. How does one arrive at the truth? How do you decide which one of several competing narratives is most accurate? (Kathleen Jones no doubt knows more about this than most. She is herself a biographer, having written about Norman Nicholson, Katherine Mansfield, and Christina Rossetti.) But the story has a strong narrative drive, not least because Alex, far from remaining a passive observer, becomes deeply involved in events.

And, despite all the uncertainty that arises during the story, there is a happy ending, at least for Alex. Coming to terms with past tragedies and disappointments is a theme throughout the novel, and a matter of great personal significance for Alex. We’re happy for her when, at the end, she succeeds in triumphing over her own past and can finally look forward to a happier future. A perceptive, beautiful, and ultimately inspirational novel, The Centauress is highly recommended.

The Centauress can be downloaded from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Between the Mountains and the Sea: Ruth Sutton's Cumbrian Trilogy

Reviewed by Kathleen Jones

I knew from the opening sentences that I was going to like these books - something to do with the voice of the narrator - you know that you’re going to enjoy listening to it.  I was also intrigued by the situation and full of sympathy for the feisty young protagonist, Jessie Thompson.  From the first page, I wanted to know what happened to her. But it wasn’t entirely to do with plot or character construction - it was language.  The prose is effortless and a pleasure to read. I realised I was in safe hands.

A Good Liar

The first book in the trilogy is A Good Liar, which opens during the first world war.  Jessie is very much in love with Clive Whelan and they plan to marry as soon as the war is over and Jessie has finished her teacher training course.  But Clive is killed in an accident in the shipyard and Jessie finds herself in the same predicament as many young women in the first decades of the twentieth century. They say that you can’t go back three generations in any family without encountering illegitimacy.  Jessie’s harsh mother is unsympathetic and Jessie eventually gives birth in what were once euphemistically called ‘mother and baby’ homes.  Her child is adopted and Jessie is expected to go back into the world as if nothing has happened.  For the sake of respectability, no-one must ever know.  It’s the beginning of a lie that will have repercussions for the whole of her life.

Jessie works in a factory for the rest of the war and then applies to complete her teacher training course.  She changes her name and relies on records being lost in the chaos of war.  Her past is conveniently buried.  By 1937 Jessie Whelan is headmistress of Newton School and a pillar of the local community.  She is part of a generation of single, independent women who lost their partners in the first world war. But she longs for a close relationship.  She begins a secret affair with a much younger man, knowing that if it becomes public she will lose her job.  At the same time her illegitimate son begins to track her down after the death of his adoptive parents.  Andrew, Jessie’s lover, becomes his new boss.  When John reveals his identity to Jessie, she is panic-stricken because she has so much to lose.  John agrees to say that he is her nephew in order to preserve appearances.

Forgiven

The second novel in the trilogy - Forgiven - opens in 1946.  There are big social changes all over Britain.  Men are returning from the war expecting women to give up their jobs for them.  The new vicar at Newton and head of the education committee, is an ex serviceman and resents the fact that Jessie, as headmistress of the school, occupies a family house even though she is unmarried and has no children.  He puts pressure on her to give the school house up for one of her subordinates - another ex-serviceman.  The vicar begins to hint that perhaps it’s time she retired and made way for others.  Jessie loves her job and doesn’t want to think about giving it up.  But she has begun to make a tentative relationship with a widowed doctor and sees the possibility of an alternative future.

However, Jessie’s lies are beginning to find her out. The moral climate is still cold and the liberal sixties a long way away.  Andrew has emigrated to Canada and asks her to join him, and make their relationship public.   Her son John has fallen in love and is going to get married.  He tells his new wife the truth about Jessie.  His fiancée Maggie goes to confront her, accusing Jessie of abandoning her child and being a bad mother.  Jessie is forced to make a difficult decision.

Fallout

In Fallout, the third of the trilogy, time has moved on ten years.  Jessie, having retrained as a secretary, has a responsible job at Windscale, the nuclear plant on the Cumbrian coast.  She now has grandchildren and leads an independent life.  Her relationship with her outspoken daughter-in-law is still fiery.  Jessie, uneasy about some of the things she sees at Windscale, is beginning to become involved with the anti-nuclear movement.  This brings her into conflict with her employer and her son, who also works at the plant.   Jessie leaves to devote more time to activism and takes a lodger to earn money.  Laurence is a physicist seconded to Windscale - a married man unofficially separated from his wife - and, though at first he and Jessie keep their lives separate, eventually the barricades come down and a dangerous friendship begins to develop between them.

We, the readers, know that there is a nuclear accident on the horizon, but we don’t know how Jessie and the community are going to deal with it, or how it will affect her friends and family. Ruth Sutton writes very clearly about Britain’s only major nuclear event - a reactor fire that could have been as serious as Chernobyl, but for the courage of several individuals.  She is also very good on the tug of loyalties within a community that has always been forced to earn a living from dangerous industries and where people have learned to take risks many of us would consider unacceptable in order to feed their families.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this trilogy.  The industrial communities of the Lake District so often get overlooked by literature - the Cumbrian west coast is a fascinating landscape ‘between the mountains and the sea’.  Ruth comments that, “most people’s impression of the Lake District and Cumbria is green hills, sparkling lakes and Beatrix Potter. For those of us who love the wild west coast, that image needs a challenge, and I think – I hope – that my three novels portray real life here, not some romanticised idyll”.  They certainly do, and - with Windscale transformed into Sellafield - there were some local shops who wouldn’t carry Ruth’s third novel with its graphic cover image of the original disaster.

The three novels are packed with interesting characters and they cover a crucial period of social upheaval - the aftermath of the first world war, the depression and the subsequent de-industrialisation of northern Britain.  Having followed Ruth’s characters through the good and the bad times I was very glad that Jessie, after a lifetime of struggle and concealment, finally gets a happy ending.  

Kathleen Jones is a novelist, poet and biographer and a native of the Cumbrian Lake District.  She blogs at www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com and you can find out more about her books at her website www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Water, Paper, Stone by Judy O'Shea, reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Water, Paper, Stone

Judy O’Shea

In 1991 Judy left her job as a senior executive in the USA for a sabbatical year with her husband Mike, who had taken early retirement at 51 to fulfill a lifelong dream to become an artist.  They made a bucket list and one of the items on it was to spend time in Europe and learn another language.  After several false starts, they found themselves in the south of France in the Haut Languedoc on a touring holiday and fell in love with a village on the Tarn river.

Back in the states and ready to go back to work, Judy discovered that her sister Linda was critically ill following a cardiac arrest.  She had sustained significant brain damage.  ‘Linda’s courage and struggle to recover gave me the guts to get off the treadmill of my high-pressure career,’ Judy writes.   The book is written as a series of letters and emails to Linda as well as extracts from Judy’s personal journal.

Driven by a new sense that time was running out, Judy and her husband retired to France and bought a derelict water mill on the Tarn river - totally uninhabitable - and began to restore it and live their dream.

The memoir reminds me a little of ‘A Year in Provence’ - I could taste the cheese and the wine and share the drama of every catastrophe.  Living without mod-cons stretched Judy to the limit - ‘I learned I can pee in positions unknown to womanhood’.  They had a backhoe in the living room, no bathroom, rising and falling damp, rats, and incompetent builders, but they were reassured by their neighbour that ‘Avec l’argent tout est possible’ (with money anything is possible).  And so it proves.

I got involved with the fortunes of the Blanc family, where Judy goes to learn how to kill a sheep and make duck au confit.  I learned about the process of making Roquefort, the marital difficulties of the local restaurateur, and the plight of Christelle - a mail-order bride from Madagascar imported by one of their workmen -  who consults Judy about his lack of personal hygiene (how do you tell a large Frenchman that he needs a bath?)

Judy learns carpentry, stone masonry and the art of paper-making and discovers her own creativity as well as her husbands.  Before long she is being asked to take part in exhibitions in France and the United States and is setting up fascinating installations. It’s an amazing achievement.  How much personal creativity is wasted in corporate culture?

I enjoyed the glimpse into someone else’s life - the book is honest and well-written.  But it is also, for someone whose views are well to the left, an illustration of what has happened all over Spain, Italy and France, where wealthy colonisers have moved in from outside - Russians, Germans, Scandinavians, English, Americans - and driven prices up beyond the threshold for the local population.  It’s a dilemma - ruinous buildings are rescued and restored, but it often has a negative impact on the local community.  There are both pros and cons.  Judy’s book gave me much food for thought.

Amazon link to Water, Paper, Stone

Kathleen Jones is a poet, novelist and biographer and blogs at www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com

You can find her books at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Harvest, by Amanya Maloba, reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Harvest

Amanya Maloba

Amanya was a guest on Roz Morris's Undercover Soundtrack blog and I liked what she said about her book of short-short stories.   I don't read much flash fiction - so much of it reads like cryptic jokes you might find in up-market Christmas crackers, or like prompts for a creative writing class.  But the best Flash Fiction reads like prose poetry, which I do have a taste for.

I also fell in love with the cover of Harvest, the contrasting colours and the image - covers are very important for me - they have to attract and I often buy a book for its cover.  In this case, the cover didn't lie.

Amanya's stories centre around food and appetite and they have quite a bite! 'We are what we eat' and so much of our lives revolves round food and its rituals. The stories are written in lyrical prose (the author is also a poet), sometimes with an edge, sharp observation and memorable lines.  "The sizzle of beignets frying in the back of the outdoor cafe has more timbre and raw emotion than any note to come out of Christopher Breaux's larynx.  The shake of powder sugar over the nearly square pillows of dough is sweeter than any kiss wrapped in foil or on lips." [Beignets and Trumpets]

Coffee becomes a series of associations and character changes.  "A cup of coffee, skidding tires of an airbus, and the frigid temperatures of a window seat, shift me into someone I don't know, someone fragile, someone that terrifies and kills me, exposing me to all my possible selves and all of yours. . . . What does the coffee in Tokyo taste like?  Bali?  Accra?  And why doesn't the coffee I brew in my place, whereever it is, always taste like shit, flat and fundamentally lacking?"

Amanya is an American whose family originally came from Kenya, but she has also lived in Europe - these stories have a global reach and are full of colour, with characters like Mango, Persimmon and Lime and titles like 'Pancakes at the 2893 World's Fair', 'The Watermelon Man', 'Habanero Lips', 'Cookie Woman', and 'George Washington's Black-Eyed Peas'.  One of my favourite stories concerns the Avocado Whisperer.  'I squish and mash them into bowls of black beans, onions, and corn, throw the whole lot in tortillas for the kind of meal that sits at the bottom of your stomach like the coked-out kids on the Red Line at four a.m... I'm an avocado racehorse - a thoroughbred sure bet. . . nothing short of what God binged on when She got the munchies on the seventh day'.

I loved 'Termites' - the story of a childhood visit to Nairobi to visit relatives, but one story in particular continued to haunt me.  'Dinner is served (Karibu)', which is narrated by the animal on the plate.  'I am consumable.  I do not belong to myself.  I am designed solely for your gratification.  You can stuff your greedy minds with my words and lick my tears off your dry hands . . . I exist only for your gluttonous pleasure. . .  I will kill you with every bite you take, but you will continue to eat because I am the finest cuisine you've ever had.  I will be your last meal.  Dinner is served.'

If you like to try something different, then Harvest is definitely one to read.

You can find out more about Amanya Maloba at www.amanyamaloba.com

Harvest 

"The food of coastal Africa has long nourished the bodies and fed the spirits of many as it moved, along with a people, from its original continent across seas. Harvest echoes this original journey as it follows a young girl recalling childhood and discovering adulthood all while navigating different spaces and times. Amanya Maloba’s debut collection of contemporary African American vignettes is told in a voice that echoes generations of these stories, but is resolutely her own—personal and raw. Maloba has watered the soil of her imagination with laughter, tears, and centuries of wisdom, and the harvest she has brought forth is every bit as rich and rewarding as those nutrients promise. Perfect to savour one at time, but you may find yourself devouring these sweet and sour vignettes in one sitting."

Reviewed by Kathleen Jones, poet, novelist and biographer who blogs at: www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com

You can find her books at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Chasing the Rose: Andrea di Robilant, reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Chasing the Rose: An Adventure in Venetian Country

by Andrea de Robilant

a Kindle Single

One of the most beautiful of old Italian roses - Tuscany Superb

I love roses, particular the old varieties with names that suggest a long history - who was Madame Albert Carriere?  Does Paul’s Himalayan Musk really come from northern India?  Did Cardinal Richelieu own the rose that is named for him?  And I love the Chinese species roses like Rosa Moyesii imported by travelers hundreds of years ago – and the Persian roses mentioned in the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Rosa 'Omar Khayyam'

‘Look to the blowing Rose about us--"Lo,
Laughing," she says, "into the world I blow,
At once the silken tassel of my Purse
Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw." ‘

So I was immediately intrigued by this Kindle single.

Andrea di Robilant had an ancestor, Alvise Mocenigo, who lived at the end of the 18th century and who had a wife called Lucia who became a friend of Empress Josephine after Napoleon had divorced her.  Lucia caught Josephine’s obsession with roses - the rarer the better - and carried many of them back from Paris to the family estate at Alvisipoli in the hills between Trieste and Slovenia in what used to be the Venetian Republic.

The family estate has long since dissolved into ruin, but on a nostalgic visit to the village, Andrea is taken into the gardens - now returned to wilderness - and shown a shrub rose covered in silvery pink flowers.  It smells of peaches and raspberries.

Rosa Moceniga copyright http://www.cadellerose.blogspot.com

For Andrea, there's a moment of recognition.  ‘Although I did not know much about roses, everything about it, the delicate color, the sweet fragrance, the way it carried itself - suggested this was an old rose of some importance that had been growing wild in these woods for a very long time’.

Locally it’s known as Rosa Moceniga, but no one knows it’s true name.  Andrea plants a cutting in his garden and thinks nothing more of it until one day, researching family history in the Venetian archives, he finds the diaries of Lucia Mocenigo, written while she was in Paris and in the grip of her passion for roses - what was called ‘rosemanie’, an affliction that gave rise to a worldwide rose smuggling operation and a lot of rose snobbery - rivalling ‘tulip fever’ in Holland.

It’s the beginning of a long journey for Andrea, as he becomes obsessed with finding a name for the rose that is the only remnant of Lucia’s love affair with the species.  It takes him to France, Slovenia and Umbria, where he meets some of the characters who collect roses.  This includes Eleanor and Valentino (a retired Italian bus driver and his green-fingered wife) who - although both old and without money - maintain a rose garden that has become famous for its beauty and the number of forgotten species that bloom there.  Eleanor even has an ‘orphan’ section’ for roses whose names have been lost, and it’s there that Andrea finds another Rosa Moceniga.

Altogether only two or three plants on a Parisian list of roses imported from China as the ancestors of modern roses, can still be identified by their original names. We know only a handful of species.  Why are names so important?  After all, ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, as Shakespeare put it - so he already knew about the business of naming roses.  All the plant’s history is in its name - where it came from, the family it belongs to, the person who first cultivated it in Europe.  Without a name it has no identity and no story.  And that is the situation with the temporarily christened Rosa Moceniga.   I was happy to find that, at the end of Andrea’s journey, he is successful in naming his rose.

I found this book absolutely fascinating and heartily recommend it to readers who are interested in travel, gardening, roses and particularly stories!

Kathleen Jones is a biographer, novelist and poet as well as a keen gardener!  You can find her website at www.kathleenjones.co.uk  and she blogs regularly at 'A Writer's Life'.

The Death Game by Chris Longmuir; reviewed by Kathleen Jones

T

The Death Game

by Chris Longmuir

Missing children, black magic in a graveyard, and an orphan’s refuge that is anything but . . .  The beginning of Chris Longmuir’s new novel promises a compelling plot. Add in a fascinating historical setting and you know you’re in for a good read.

The Death Game is set in Scotland just after the first world war.  The police force is a male enclave, handling matters deemed unsuitable for a decent woman to know about.  It was still a period when women were treated like children, to be protected and kept innocent and naive - though in reality rendered helpless and ignorant.  But at the end of the war a new women’s police force was set up - called the Women’s Police Patrols, drawing its recruits from the Women’s Police Volunteers and the Voluntary Women Patrols.   Many of the women in these groups were suffragettes.  The Women’s Police Patrols were more formal, wearing a uniform designed by Harrods. Soon its trained members were being deployed to regional forces, although not without a considerable amount of resistance. They were usually given the job of escorting lost children and dogs, dealing with prostitutes and taking statements from women.

Chris’s heroine (I will use that word dammit!), Kirsty Campbell, is sent to Dundee, where she encounters not just the hostility of the men she’s supposed to be working with, but also has to confront one of the most traumatic episodes from her past.  We soon see why she had to leave Dundee and why she chose the police service as a career.

I thoroughly enjoyed finding out about how the first police-women worked and the barriers they had to break down to be accepted (though modern police-women might suggest that some are still there). The historical setting is authentic and well-researched.  Kirsty Campbell is a fascinating character and I’m glad that there are going to be more novels featuring her as one of the first female detectives.  Kirsty’s personal situation is suitably complicated too - another hook to draw the reader into the next book.

A good read and well-recommended.

Chris Longmuir lives in a small seaside town on the east coast of Scotland. She considers herself a Scot because although she was born in Wiltshire she has lived in Scotland since the age of two. She is a crime novelist as well as a short story and article writer and has also published a very well received saga - 'A Salt Splashed Cradle'.   In 2009, Chris won the Dundee International Book Prize with her crime novel 'Dead Wood'.  She admits to ‘a lifetime addiction to the written word’.
You can find out more about Chris and her books at her website which is http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/

Kathleen Jones writes novels, biography and poetry and is published both traditionally and independently.  You can find her website at www.kathleenjones.co.uk  and she blogs regularly at 'A Writer's Life'.  

To the World of Men, Welcome, by Nuala ni Chonchuir: reviewed by Kathleen Jones

To the World of Men, Welcome

Nuala Ni Chonchuir

Published by Arlen House

This is one of the most original collections of short stories I’ve read in a long time.  And it’s by an Irish writer.  What is it with the Irish and their love of words and stories?

These are all about relationships with men - both weird and wonderful.  She focuses on the transitional moments - the beginning of an affair, or the end of it, and they can be both romantic and bizarre.

In The Last Man, Francine is married to a man who no longer loves her, who is manipulative and controlling, but often away on business trips.  Francine begins a series of casual affairs to alleviate the boredom.  The last man has a tattoo on his back of Our Lady of Guadeloupe and he doesn’t turn out quite as expected.

There is also real horror here.  In The Trip, Edward is ‘a raw, open wound of a man’.  He and his male friend Pat go off for the weekend into the country to take Edward’s mind off the fact that his girlfriend has just dumped him.  ‘I should have given her a slap,’ he says ominously.  Pat plans a lively break, but Edward seems to be determined to kill off any prospect of enjoyment for either of them.  His attitude to women also seems to leave a lot to be desired.  Pat realises that he doesn’t know Edward as well as he thought he did.  The ending is truly horrific.

Then there is the story of The Mercy Fuck - where a man persuades his girlfriend to take pity on their dying, virginal friend.  Things don’t turn out as expected there either.

Pascha from Chechnya is seduced by a painter who exploits his memories of violence, and, in One Hare’s Foot, casual misfortune leads to tragedy on a summer afternoon on a boat.

These stories are all so good and so different it’s difficult to single any of them out for comment.  Each narrator has their own ‘voice’ and they compel you to listen, like the wedding guest in the Ancient Mariner.  They also demonstrate superbly what can be achieved in the short story form.  Just when you thought it had all been done!

Nuala ni Chonchuir is a poet - winner of the Templar Poetry Pamphlet awards in 2009 and published by Salt, and has several other collections of short fiction as well as two novels published by New Island Books in Dublin - You in 2010 and the Closet of Savage Mementos in 2014.  This is definitely a writer to watch (and read!).

Although published by small independent presses, Nuala’s short fiction doesn’t seem to be available on Kindle so I had to read it as a paper edition, but her novel Closet of Savage Mementos is an E-book as well as a paperback. (I loved it and will be reviewing it soon) Let’s hope the others follow!

She has a blog which you can find here.  

Kathleen Jones is a biographer, novelist and poet both traditionally and independently published.  You can find her blog and links to her books here. 

Diving For Pearls - A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt, Reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt

by Kathleen B. Jones (the Other Kathleen Jones!)

‘This is the story of my thinking journey with Hannah, a tale at once political and personal, singular and common.  Diving below the surface of her writing, the narrative arches and bends, assembling vignettes about Hannah and me into a collage of life stories, a kind of intellectual and emotional scrapbook.’

That is how Kathleen B. Jones describes her unusual biography.  I read it with great interest - not only because it’s by my American name-sake, a writer, feminist and academic who has often covered similar ground, but also because I've followed the progress of the book on the internet for a couple of years, particularly the fraught process of publication.

Kathleen B. Jones is trained in political theory and a Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies at San Diego University, California.  But these days not even the phrase ‘leading academic’ means that you can get your work published by university presses, and the unusual structure of this book didn’t meet any of the academic norms.  Increasingly, ‘leading academics’ are turning to self-publishing to get their work in front of the public and it’s something to be grateful for.  One of the books I contributed to, published by Ashgate Press, is currently only available at a cover price of £56.00 - You can buy Diving for Pearls for a mere £7.97.

The book had its beginning in personal memoir.  Everyone wants to make sense of their lives, Kathleen B. Jones begins. ‘Some of us do that by telling a story’, but for Jones it was different.  ‘In the dusk of middle age, I chose a peculiar path.  Surprising myself by reversing directions, I took a road I’d abandoned, and found myself exploring again the thinking and life of Hannah Arendt’.

As a young woman, Hannah Arendt (1906-75) was a disciple (and lover) of the pro-Nazi German philosopher Martin Heidegger.  She was a Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany to live in America, where she established herself as an eminent contemporary philosopher.  It was a title she often denied, choosing to describe herself instead as a ‘political theorist’.  She became the first female lecturer at Princeton and a fellow at Yale and was the subject of a 2012 film in Germany.

David Strathairn and Melissa Friedman as Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt in Kate Fodor’s play ‘Hannah and Martin’.

Her views were often controversial - Arendt wrote a book on the Eichmann trial subtitled ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil’ which criticised Jewish leaders for their actions during the Holocaust and appeared to suggest that the Nazis were not necessarily the monsters of popular thought - they were ordinary people who acquired power and did evil things because they didn’t think enough about what they were doing, and neither did the people who put them in power.  Evil can arise from mere thoughtlessness, unthinking conformity and obedience.  According to Arendt ‘it was “ordinary people,” neither stupid nor necessarily ideologically motivated, who committed the great atrocities of the Holocaust’.

Defining herself as both a German and a Jew, Arendt wrote about identity and human rights. She was very clear-sighted and pragmatic. ‘The right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself.  It is by no means certain whether this is possible’.  But Arendt’s insistence on retaining her German identity, the events of her own life, and particularly her relationship with Heidegger, gave her critics a great deal of fuel for their opposition.  Arendt described love as ‘perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces’.

Arendt was, as Jones points out - ‘A brilliant political philosopher, who refused to call herself a philosopher, a woman who never considered her sex an obstacle in her life, a Jew who was called anti-Semitic, and a rigorous thinker who wrote passionately about hatred and love’.  As a feminist and a writer, Jones found herself fascinated by the apparent contradictions in Arendt’s writing ‘no matter how much I argued against her, I had to admit I admired her writing . . . I found myself circling around and then diving deeper into Arendt’s writing , each time retrieving some pearl of insight, which shifted my understanding and made me reassess my position’.   Hannah Arendt’s voice became particularly insistent when Jones began to write a memoir of her own unusual and complex life.  ‘She wouldn’t leave me alone.  Every time I penned a line bordering on an all too confident assertion, I’d hear her voice in my head.  “Dive deeper, you’re not really thinking,” it said.’

The form of both Jones’ biography of Arendt and her own memoir changed as they merged into one - ‘a disquieting dialogue between two women one long ago dead, about what and how the heart knows yet prefers to keep to itself.  I let my imagination go visiting, entering her life and her work, and began to see the world and my own place in it from an altogether different perspective’.

The result is an unusual book - a thoughtful, penetrating (and sometimes painful) account of a life lived that uses the insights of this life to illuminate that of another. ‘I began to retrieve anecdotes from her life and mine, finding meanings in them I believe are more universal than applied only to my particular case’. What Jones learns from her experience informs her view of Hannah Arendt both as a woman and a philosopher and what Arendt wrote about herself teaches Jones how to think about her own.

One of the things that Jones learned was that the past is not necessarily ‘a set of events determining my present, as if one’s life was fully fashioned at its beginning, as if only time and circumstance were needed to create the equation that produced a person as its inevitable result.’  She abandoned the idea of Fatalism and accepted that a human being must admit their own limitations and ‘accept responsibility’ for what is theirs to control. Human beings are much more than ‘a leaf in the whirlwind of time’.

When Jones re-read Arendt’s book on Eichmann, it made her think ‘about monsters and the hold I’d let them have in my life’.  Reading about Jones’ monsters made me think about mine too and some of the terrible relationships and bad decisions I have had to take responsibility for.  That’s one of the things about this book - it makes you think, as both Jones and Arendt intended.

Jones is also interesting on the bias of the biographer - how we interpret the lives of the people we study according to events in our own.  Someone called Elzbieta Ettinger had previously written about Arendt’s life and used her subject’s relationship with Heidegger to provide the biographer herself ‘with a thinly veiled means of self-laceration, a confession, never made public of ever having become such a man’s prey’.  Ettinger had had a similar relationship.  As biographers we bring our own lives, our own judgements and prejudices to the text.

But there is more - Arendt’s position as an exiled German Jew makes Jones think about our own precarious position in an increasingly unstable world.  ‘We have all become refugees, wandering far from some imagined promised land of our ancestors, searching for a new way to be at home in a world where we might connect with and live with others with whom we have no evident or common ties binding us together as a people, except the shared fact of having been born.’ 

This book is indeed a thinking journey, written in beautiful prose, bringing together two women whose lives have made me think again about my own.  But beware, as Arendt warned, ‘There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity’.

Reviewed by (the English) Kathleen Jones

whose website you can find at http://www.kathleenjones.co.uk

You can find more about Kathleen B. Jones on her website here.

And you can buy Diving for Pearls on Amazon.co.uk

And in Paperback

And from Amazon.com

Norman Nicholson: the Whispering Poet by Kathleen Jones. Reviewed by Dennis Hamley

Kathleen Jones chooses the subjects of her literary biographies very carefully. She concentrates on writers whose circumstances threaten to hobble the full development of their talents. There's Christina Rossetti, whose whole life experience told her she would never be first. Then the women, all talented, Dorothy Wordsworth especially so, unlucky enough to be the wives, sisters or nearly-lovers of that dangerous trio of Lake poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. After them was Margaret Forster, quietest of novelists. Katherine Mansfield struggled with circumstance for the whole of her short life.  And now here is one who, at first sight, seems the most self-abnegatory of them all, the fourth Lake poet Norman Nicholson.

It's remarkable that Nicholson's reputation as a major poet was so insecure for so long.  The fourth Lake poet? Well, though it is on the Cumbrian coast, Millom, a place of mines and industry, is hardly the Lake District. But Nicholson is always aware of its looming presence: for example, he writes of Scafell Pike, in ten thousand years when Millom is dust, as 'Still there' and still watching.

He endured near-contempt from the literary establishment during most of his lifetime. However, he felt the same about them and fiercely resented their attitude. Kathleen Jones mentions John Betjeman dismissing him as an 'untechniqued poet', one of the 'silly fools' who 'like to see themselves in the Daily Herald'. To Betjeman's credit, however, he later recommended him for the Queen's Gold Medal. By the time Nicholson died he was at last accepted as a poet of some stature.

He never left Millom, the town which saw its industry decline and die during his lifetime. He chronicles this decline in quiet but profound elegies but always there is the solidity of permanence counterpointing the evanescence of human endeavour - the drystone wall, Scafell Pike. He is the poet of place and of man's relationship to nature - just as much as was Wordsworth. Nicholson knew the tradition he was part of and was never afraid of Wordsworth's reputation. He recognised, quite rightly, how uneven Wordsworth's achievement was. It is not surprising that Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney were among his champions.

Nicholson was a chronicler of decline, yet a quiet, unassuming prophet of hope. His poetry celebrates even as it shows decay.  He was a poet of understatement with is both memorable and resonant. Kathleen Jones's title The Whispering Poet captures perfectly this quiet, subtle power which can creep into the mind and lodge there for ever.

Was he merely a regional poet?  Only in the sense that Hardy was. Like Hardy, his sense of place is specific but his themes are universal. The description 'eco-poet' sometimes given him has a certain truth but makes him sound almost a sort of propagandist. Far from it. There are few poets who illustrate Keats's principle of 'negative capability' so perfectly. But he didn't seek fame: he was not attracted to the metropolitan literary world and success in his lifetime was modest.  He wrote plays, mainly religious, as well as poetry, often for E Martin Browne's Pilgrim Players. Towards the end of his life he did talks for the BBC and even appeared on television, an event which showed the inhabitants of Millom that a celebrity had lived among them for so long and they never knew! It could be assumed that his life was, to paraphrase Thoreau, one of quiet desperation. But no: Millom was his microcosm of the world, he was content with it and sought no other inspiration.

Every biography by Kathleen Jones that I have read has been completely absorbing. Here, she shows her usual sympathy and extreme powers of empathy, which get inside the minds of her subjects and make us feel, as we close the book, that now we know these people not just as writers but as intimate friends. For long parts of his life Nicholson was not a well man: she understands his struggles with illness and the effects they had on his life and work. She analyses the influence of his close but sometimes inimical family. Her critical insights are balanced, sensitive, piercing and, one instinctively feels, utterly dependable. My knowledge of Nicholson before I read this book was sufficient to, say, write a more or less decent supervision essay which might pass muster in a seminar. I now feel, if not an expert, then certainly able to make proper critical judgements and place them in the context of a particular life - a state of mind in the reader to which all good biography aspires. 

And, of course, one of the great strengths of this book, as with all Kathleen Jones's biographies, is the lucidity and quiet elegance of the prose. Unassuming yet transmitting sharp insights and engaging our feelings with its eloquent simplicity, its qualities resemble the poetry of its subject.

A lovely book. I shall return to it often.

Norman Nicholson: the Whispering Poet is published by The Book Mill (ISBN 978 0 9574332 4 3). It is also available on Kindle.

Virginia Woolf - A Critical Memoir by Winifred Holtby, reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir 

by Winifred Holtby

Published by Continuum International

Winifred Holtby, although herself a successful novelist, was very afraid of Virginia Woolf.  So much so that when she began to write her memoir she talked to everyone but Virginia, until she received a royal command to appear at Hogarth House to take tea.  Holtby was right to be nervous. Virginia Woolf’s first impressions of her were typically caustic;  ‘a Yorkshire farmer's daughter, rather uncouth, and shapeless’.  In a letter to a friend Woolf called her ‘an amiable donkey’. But if Woolf had ever troubled to read what Holtby wrote, she might have been very surprised indeed at the way her contemporary had understood what she was trying to achieve in her novels, as well as the contradictions of her character.

Winifred Holtby

The book is constructed as a series of essays on various aspects of Virginia Woolf’s character and writing. Written by a clever novelist, they are light and easy to read. The first, called ‘The Advantages of being Virginia Stephen’, focusses on Woolf’s birth and upbringing.  Winifred Holtby quotes the portrait of Katherine Hilbery in Night and Day, drawn from Woolf’s own childhood as the daughter of an eminent scholar and critic living at the heart of literary society.  ‘Again and again she was brought down into the drawing room to receive the blessing of some awful distinguished old man who sat apart, all gathered together and clutching a stick’.

Woolf  lived her life at the centre of the literary hub - Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin were among the formidable old men who sat in the parlour. Later she was a contemporary of TS Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, EM Forster and Lytton Strachey - the Bloomsberries, as Mansfield called them.  For Woolf, literary legends were people you met at dinner alongside Cabinet Ministers, judges and titled aristocrats.  It was a world apart, but it was also an education - as Holtby says, Woolf ‘lived among people before whom the whole range of European literature is spread like a familiar map’.

Virginia Woolf

The fact that Woolf didn’t have a conventional education (she was home-schooled) and allowed free run of her father’s library, shaped her future as a writer and critic.  Holtby, for once, gives Woolf’s critical writing equal status with her fiction.  For Woolf theory and practice were closely tied together; more people have read A Room of One’s Own than have read To the Lighthouse or The Waves, and her critical essays - Three Guineas, Letter to a Young Poet, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, have had considerable influence on her successors and are still relevant.

But Holtby, writing in 1931, is quick to point out their underlying prejudices - ‘Every second Englishman reads French’, was a ridiculous thing to say, at a time when only 15% of the English were educated beyond the age of 14.  Woolf  didn’t understand the uneducated.  Whenever she tries to draw a working class character, Holtby writes, ‘she loses her way. They are more foreign to her than princes were to Jane Austen.’

Holtby also writes about Woolf’s complex relationship with suffragism.  Many women involved in the Suffrage movement were her friends.  They appear in her novels and their ideals are expressed in Woolf’s non-fiction. Characters like Orlando in the novel of the same name change gender, revealing prejudice and hypocrisy.  In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf  coined the expression ‘reflecting men at twice their normal size’.  But she did not take part in the campaign herself and, in most of her essays and reviews, she uses the male pronoun as convention demanded. The artist/writer is always ‘he’.

Winifred Holtby not only discusses Woolf as a woman and a writer, but also Woolf as a reader - the author of pithy reviews and essays of writerly instruction. Even though her own books were consumed by a literary elite, Woolf knew who the ‘Common Reader’ was, though she erred on the gender.  ‘The Common Reader differs from the critic and the scholar.  He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously.  He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge.’  This is the person that we are all writing for - someone of only average education, neither a scholar nor a critic, reading for pleasure, and sometimes also a woman. (Statistically more often than not)

According to Woolf there are strict rules.  Ideas, morality, historical lessons, can only be presented in terms of character and plot.  Any research has to be invisible.  ‘Whatever facts, emotions and experiences the artist tastes, he must digest completely . . . There must be no foreign matter unconsumed.’  And she hates novels with a message that seem to encourage people to ‘join a society’ or ‘write a cheque’. The ‘business of the artist’, Woolf says, ‘is to provide one with a vivid and complete experience’.  There must be a reality - and reality is ‘what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of the past time and of our loves and hates ...  It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.’

Form must always serve the material - and here Woolf was extremely subversive.  ‘Mrs Woolf does not really like plots’, Holtby observes.  Nor does she like traditional ways of establishing character by description.  Woolf asks the Edwardian novelists how she should present her character Mrs Brown and gets this answer:
‘”Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate.  Ascertain the rent.  Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878.  Discover what her mother died of.  Describe cancer.  Describe calico.  Describe . . .”  But I cried “Stop!  Stop!”  And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs Brown, that vision to which I cling . . . would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.’

Woolf threw plot and narrative out of the window too and explored new ways of telling stories, taking ideas from Katherine Mansfield and adopting the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique developed by Dorothy Richardson.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Winifred Holtby’s short memoir is a real delight (which is probably why it’s been re-issued) and, if I had my way, I’d put it on the list for every creative writing student in the country.  It’s one brilliant writer’s take on another - illuminating and useful.  Woolf apparently told her friends that it had made her ‘scream with laughter’, but there’s no evidence that she ever read it.

Kathleen Jones  

Kathleen blogs at 'A Writer's Life'
and has a website at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Firelight and Woodsmoke: Claude Michelet, reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Firelight and Woodsmoke

Claude Michelet

This is a great doorstop of a trilogy, which I cut into its three component parts with a Stanley knife and have been carrying around with me on my travels, abandoning each section as I finished it. I’d like to think that they got adopted by a traveller on a train, a curious customer in Costa’s, or a bored passenger at Stansted Airport.

The Firelight and Woodsmoke saga was recommended to me by a friend who knows how much I enjoy European literature. Claude Micheletis one of France's most distinguished authors. The books are translated into English, but aren’t currently in print in the UK or available as e-books. I managed to get an omnibus edition second hand for 82p. Worth committing book murder for though. It’s the story of a village and four generations of the Vialhe and Dupeuch families, in the Limousin region of France. They are peasants in a community that still has a medieval structure - the Vialhes are relatively prosperous; the Dupeuchs at the bottom of the heap.

The first novel opens with three children tracking a wolf on the last day of 1899. A few hours later, a baby girl is born, Mathilde Dupeuch - the first child of the 20th century. The story takes the inhabitants from the oppressive (and often heart-breaking) observance of centuries old traditions and superstitions to a modern age of international flights and mechanisation. We see the arrival of the first car, the first train, the first electric light, and observe the effects of two world wars and the ravages of economic boom and bust - all through the eyes of this small rural community.

It’s difficult to summarise such a wide ranging plot with so many different characters. The narrative focuses mainly on the children - Pierre-Edouard, Louise and Berthe Vialhe, Leon and Mathilde Dupeuch. Pierre-Edouard and Leon are of similar age, but very different temperaments. They are all the children of uneducated peasant farmers and their parents expect them to conform to traditions they believe to be written in stone. But times are changing fast and there is considerable conflict between the generations. Berthe escapes the oppression of her family to become a fashion designer in Paris; Louise runs away to marry the man she loves rather than accept the marriage her family have arranged for her. The friendship of the two young men soon turns to enmity in a clash over land and politics.

Pierre-Edouard stays on the farm, marries and creates a new generation of Vialhes. His eldest son Jacques excels at school and quarrels with his father over the way the farm is being run - wanting to introduce more modern farming methods. Jacques marries Mathilde, the youngest sister of his father’s enemy, Leon Dupeuch. Leon, whose father committed suicide when he was young, comes from a family who barely had enough to eat, sometimes living like gypsies. As an adult, he becomes a successful cattle dealer, wealthy enough to buy out the local gentry who have been impoverished by the Great Depression.

Jacques and Mathilde quietly consolidate the family land as their neighbours, less willing to adapt to 20th century innovations, are forced to sell off their ancestral acres. But the grandchildren they are preserving the land for want something different. They are interested in other careers, not the back-breaking life of a rural farmer.

There is real poetry in Claude Michelet’s prose, and the narrative has the quiet quality of a French film. It’s a beautiful account of how life changed forever in a dramatic fashion during the 20th century - how moving away from our roots in the land that ultimately sustains us has created a fractured society that, although economically more prosperous, is otherwise impoverished. The Correze has wifi now, but there are no more wolves left to track.

Kathleen Jones is a biographer, novelist and poet who blogs at ‘A Writer’s Life’.  She has a new novel called The Sun’s Companion, and a biography of the poet Norman Nicholson. You can find out more about her books at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

'The Sun's Companion' by Kathleen Jones

‘Tamar Fell’s a bastard! Tamar Fell’s a bastard!’ Bertie McAffery was jumping up and down on the pavement in front of her, ginger hair flopping over his forehead, mouth pulled wide, screwed into a goggle-eyed gurning face as he taunted her...

The opening sentences of The Sun’s Companion are indicative of what is to come. Kathleen Jones tells her story with unflinching honesty, never shying away from the occasional cruelty of both life and people; but her beautiful use of language, vivid narrative, and compassion make for a satisfying and poignant (but never maudlin) story.

How can I describe this novel? My first thought would be that it falls under the umbrella of literary fiction, though admittedly there’s some debate about what exactly literary fiction is (I feel another blog post coming on...). Is it, then, general fiction? Genre fiction? – no, probably not, though it shares elements of both romance and historical fiction.

Of course, none of this matters in the slightest. It’s undeniably useful for booksellers to be able to classify products, but most of us care less about how a book is labelled than whether it’s a good story. And The Sun’s Companion is a very good story indeed.

It’s 1935, and the shadow of Nazism is beginning to spread across Europe. In England, young Tamar Fell is eking out a precarious existence with her reckless mother Sadie. Together they move from town to town, from lodging house to lodging house, constantly running from debt, failed jobs and relationships, and their neighbours’ disapproval. Tamar has no other family that she knows of; her father, she has been told, is dead. Tamar, though she loves her mother, yearns for stability and a family, and feels suffocated by the limitations imposed on her by her upbringing and circumstances.

Meanwhile, in Germany, another girl, Anna, is also coming to terms with being an outcast. Being ethnically Jewish, even though she doesn’t feel herself as such – her mother is English, her father a German Jew who converted to Christianity – she is the frequent target of the taunts, and worse, of her one-time neighbours and schoolfriends. Early in the novel, her English mother takes the momentous, desperate decision to take Anna to live in England, leaving her father and other relatives behind.

Anna’s new home in North Shields is, however, not a great improvement from her point of view. She is homesick, and misses her father. She feels like an outsider in the strange surroundings of the industrial North, and does not have a particularly close relationship with her mother or grandparents. Her only real pleasure is painting, which gradually becomes both her passion and her projected career path.

She and Tamar have dissimilar characters, and come from very different backgrounds, but when they meet they soon become close friends. Their situations, after all, do mirror each other to an extent: both are outsiders, and both have ambitions that are stifled by their circumstances. We follow their intertwined stories through the late 30s and early 40s, as Europe tips over the brink into war. Jones charts the war’s effects on their lives and their relationships as they grow into women; we learn about their first loves, their stifled ambitions, and their attempts to make their own lives in difficult circumstances. Both characters are vividly-drawn and realistic; Anna, with her sharp tongue and barely-suppressed inner rage, is not always pleasant, but she is ultimately always sympathetic.

Also vivid and lifelike is the novel’s background of wartime North Shields and rural Cumbria. The story takes us to various and quite diverse places – grimy lodging houses, internment camps and lonely farms, to name but a few – and all are realistically drawn, and immediate. A great deal of research must have gone into The Sun’s Companion, but – as with so many good books – the sheer hard work is lightly worn, and barely noticeable.

Honest, engrossing, moving but never sentimental – The Sun’s Companion is highly recommended.

In the Beginning: Catherine Dunne Reviewed by Kathleen Jones

In the Beginning

by Catherine Dunne

Published by Fado Fado

£2.62 on Kindle

I'm a great fan of Irish writing - the tiny damp isle seems to have bred so many fine writers and poets. Catherine Dunne was recommended by an Italian friend who'd read her in translation and loved the novel. It's a great plot - Rose strives to be the perfect executive wife - immaculate home, pampered children, beautifully cooked meals - and she believes her world, though not ideal (what marriage ever is) to be stable and secure. But one morning her husband, off on a business trip to Europe, turns round at the door and tells her that he's leaving and he won't be back.

The shock of the announcement brings everything that Rose had believed to be rock-solid, tumbling in rubble around her ankles and there are a series of unpleasant discoveries waiting for her. What do you do if you put your card in the wall and no money comes out of the cash machine? How do you feed your children and pay the bills when the bank account is empty?

The novel also gives us the back-story of Rose's relationship, slices of narrative between the contemporary story which gradually reveal the layers of sand that her marriage had been built on.

But Rose is more resourceful than she realises and she's surrounded by loving friends. Day by day she grows stronger and, when she discovers the enormity of what her husband has done to her, she is able to deal with it.  I loved the way the book was written - lived each episode with the characters and enjoyed every moment of Rose's revenge. I'm going to be reading more of Catherine Dunne's books.