Category Archives: Books

Sarah Moss: Bodies of Light (2014)

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Bodies of Light

In January I read Sarah Moss’ first novel Cold Earth (here is the review). I liked it but had some minor reservations. I wasn’t sure how good a writer she really was. After having read her latest book, Bodies of Light, I think it’s safe to say that she’s evolved from a promising writer to an accomplished one.

I didn’t look at the author’s name when I saw the book at the book shop the other day. What caught my attention was the beautiful cover that reminded me of a Victorian wallpaper. As soon as I opened it, I discovered that they had used the same endpaper inside. When I read the blurb, I saw how fitting this was, as Sarah Moss has set her third novel in Victorian Manchester and London. This might not have been enough for me to buy the book, but I started browsing and what struck me was how often colors and light were mentioned. I did something I don’t do that often; I bought the book and started reading it right away.

The novel did keep its promise; it has a lot of a William Morris wallpaper. The descriptions and the writing are gorgeous. But what is really arresting is the combination and range of topics.

Bodies of Light tells the story of two generations of women. Elizabeth is married to the designer and painter Alfred Moberley. Beauty is most important to him. He pays attention to color and light, to fabrics and interior decoration, to every single detail in a furniture, wallpaper or painting. Elizabeth is quite different. She likes it sober. She doesn’t want to wear expensive, colorful clothes. Her mother taught her that she has to be modest at all times because there are so many poor women who have nothing. This strict, severe upbringing, in which every single minute is dedicated to helping the poor, has turned Elizabeth into a joyless creature. And she’s ill-equipped for motherhood. She hates being pregnant and once the girl is born she hates her and can hardly be forced to take care of her. On the other hand, her mother taught her to despise the ways of the rich. A nanny is out of the question. Whenever her husband, who is a kind man, wants to take care of Ally and pampers the child, Elizabeth tells him off. It’s easy to understand why this marriage isn’t a happy one.

May is born after Ally. While she will be treated in very strict ways as well, she will not be abused. Abuse is the ugly secret in the Moberly household. Ally is her mother’s mirror and instrument. Her mother mishandles and punishes her and forces her to become successful. What she calls strict is nothing bud thinly veiled sadism.

In spite of this – or because of this – Ally will become one of the first women doctors. When it’s time for her to study, she will leave Manchester and go to live in London. She’s learned from an early age that others have less, that women are mistreated and it seems natural for her to dedicate her life to the cause of women. But her family, especially her mother, looms like a dark shadow over her head. The question is – will she be able to free herself and find happiness?

The summary may seem gloomy and the parts dedicated to Ally’s upbringing, the many cruelties she had to endure on a daily basis, made me choke, but the book contains so much beauty. I liked how complex all the characters are. Even Ally’s mother, Elizabeth. She’s doing a lot of good, helping the poor selflessly, at the same time, she unleashes her sadistic impulses on her daughter. It’s something that we hear occasionally. A person famous for his/her altruism, is a tyrant, bully or even a sadist at home.

A major topic is women’s fight for the right to higher education, their fight to become doctors. The scenes at the hospital are quite drastic. Ally specializes in gynaecology at first but then discovers her interest in psychiatry.

At times it was shocking to see that, while we’ve come a long way, women still fight for many of the things they fought for in the 19th Century. Conflicting emotions about motherhood, for example, are still more or less taboo.

Bodies of Light is a remarkable book. The writing is taut and stylish and full of luminous descriptions. The topics range from art to motherhood, from medicine to women’s history, from psychiatry to abuse and, finally, to healing. The greatest accomplishment however, is that the opposing themes and characters of the novel are mirrored in the writing. The writing is at times pithy, at times lavish. It’s a fascinating, thought-provoking book from a very assured writer. We can look forward to her next books.

Claire Tomalin: Jane Austen – A Life (1997)

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Jane Austen

Last year I was in a Jane Austen mood for several months. I read the last of her novels I hadn’t read, watched movie adaptations, and even picked up the one or the other book inspired by her. Finally I also read Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen biography, which I’ve finished a while ago.

Jane Austen – A Life isn’t only an excellent biography, it’s very moving as well. There isn’t all that much we know about Jane Austen but Tomalin wrote about what little we know with so much empathy and compassion that, at times, I couldn’t help but feel deeply for Jane Austen. When you read a biography you’re never sure what you will get. Some biographers are too present in the book or, what is even worse, some seem not to like their chosen subject at all. I’m glad none of this was the case here. I felt Tomalin approached Jane Austen with a lot of admiration and sympathy.

It’s hard to review a biography and do it justice, especially when it’s so carefully done, including every aspect of an author’s life. There were chapters I devoured, others, like those on the Austen neighbours, were a bit dragging. Overall however this is a wonderful biography and I could feel on every page how much passion and dedication Tomalin put into the book.

Since the book is so comprehensive, I’d like to pick just a few elements and write about those.

Tomalin, as I just wrote, is a very compassionate biographer, which made her detect things that are never explicitly stated in the testimonies or letters. She writes that seen from outside one might think that Jane Austen had a happy childhood and an unproblematic life, but when you look more closely, it becomes apparent, that there was a lot of heartache and sorrow. Tomalin mentions for example that all the Austen children were given away for up to 18 months when they were just a few months old. They grew up in the village with a wet-nurse. This means that by the age of three, they had experienced two traumatic events. First they had to leave the mother and later they were ripped from the family they hade come to see as their own.

The movie Becoming Jane, gives the wrong impression with regard to Jane Austen’s siblings. She had only one sister, but more than one brother, and because the parents had a school for boys, she and her sister grew up among many other boys. Unfortunately, because  it was a boy’s school, the two sisters had to leave the family again and go to boarding school. This, it seems, was another traumatic event as the school was quite terrible.

When I watched Becoming Jane, I wondered, like so many others, how much of the love story was true. Why did Jane Austen never get married? Was she too heartbroken and could never get over Tom Lefroy? After reading Tomalin, I have the impression that the love story which is told in the movie, is quite close to reality. There was no elopement and, as I already mentioned, Jane had more than one brother, but the depiction of the unhappy love story between her and the Irishman Tom Lefroy is pretty accurate. She had more opportunities later in life but she turned all her suitors down. She didn’t have any feelings for them.

Jane and her sister Cassandra were very close and spent their whole lives together. Seeing how many of the women around them were either constantly pregnant or died in childbed, staying single must have been some consolation to them.

I wasn’t aware that Jane Austen stopped writing for almost ten years. The chapters on this silence are by far the most tragic and interesting. One could think that the cause for her silence was small, but for Jane Austen it was a catastrophe. She loved the house in the country in which she grew up and when her parents decided to sell it – without telling Jane or her sister anything about the decision, until it was executed – she was devastated. She didn’t want to move to Bath. She didn’t like it and the house would be much smaller. There would be no garden, and no possibility to be close to nature. The impact of this move was so intense that she became depressed, shut down and didn’t write anymore. I guess it was more than just the loss of the garden though. She had a certain routine, and lack of space would prevent that she could withdraw herself from company as easily as before.

Jane Austen died quite young and, according to Tomalin, it’s not entirely clear what illness she had. Some attempts at a retrospective diagnosis have been made. She might have died from Addison’s disease, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma or bovine tuberculosis. In any case, the deterioration was slow and she suffered for more than a year before she died.

The biography contains a lot more, of course. I focussed on the tragedies of her life, but Tomalin writes extensively about the books and the influence Jane Austen’s reading had on her writing. Dr Johnson is mentioned for example and that many of Austen’s famous sentences have been inspired by him.

At the end of her biography Tomalin writes about Jane Austen:

“She is as elusive as a cloud in the night sky.” (287)

That’s exactly how I felt when I closed the book. As if I’d been watching a shadow theater. It’s the first time, I close a biography and it leaves me this sad.

Literature and War Readalong May 30 2014: Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo

Posted in Books, Literature, Novel, Readalong by

Private Peaceful

Michael Morpurgo is a famous British Children’s author. Some of you may know him from the Spielberg movie War Horse, which was based on one of his novels. I’ve had Private Peaceful on my piles for a while and I’m really keen on reading it finally. I’ve always wondered how you write about war for children. Especially from the point of view of a soldier. We’ve read the Dutch novel Winter in Wartime last year, but that was set among civilians. So I’m curious to find out how explicit the book will be and where Morpurgo draws the line.

I’m glad that CarolineD made me aware that Private Peaceful and My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (our choice for September) have been chosen by CityRead London 2014. CItyRead London is a project to promote reading across the UK capital.

Here are the first sentences

They’ve gone now, and I’m alone at last. I have the whole night ahead of me, and I won’t waste a single moment of it. I shan’t sleep it away. I won’t dream it away either. I mustn’t, because every moment of it will be far too precious.

And some details and the blurb for those who want to join

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo (UK 2003)  WWI, Children’s Book, 192 pages

Heroism or cowardice? A stunning story of the First World War from a master storyteller.

Told in the voice of a young soldier, the story follows 24 hours in his life at the front during WW1, and captures his memories as he looks back over his life. Full of stunningly researched detail and engrossing atmosphere, the book leads to a dramatic and moving conclusion.

Both a love story and a deeply moving account of the horrors of the First World War, this book will reach everyone from 9 to 90.

 

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The discussion starts on Friday, 30 May 2014.

Further information on the Literature and War Readalong 2014, including all the book blurbs, can be found here.

On Valentina d’Urbano’s Il Rumore Dei Tuoi Passi – The Sound of Your Footsteps (2012)

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RumoreTuoiPassi.indd

Valentina D’Urbano is a young Italian novelist. Il Rumore dei tui passi (The Sound of  Your Footsteps) is her first novel. She won a publishing contract with Longanesi thanks to a competition. The novel has been translated into French under the title Le bruit de tes pas and into German Mit zwanzig hat man kein Kleid für eine Beerdigung. Hopefully an English translation will be next.

This novel is like a kick in the gut. It describes a world we dont know anything about, but it’s a world that the young writer knows all too well, as she grew up under similar circumstances.

The book is set in Rome, in La Fortezza – The Fortress -, in the late 70s and 80s. It starts with a funeral and a laconic voice telling us that her “twin” has died. Bea and Alfredo are called the twins because they are inseparable, not because they are siblings. They met because their families both live in La Fortezza – this is also a nickname. La Fortezza is some sort of abandoned housing project where the poorest of the poor land. Most of the families are squatters and their miserable, small apartments can be snatched from them at all times. “Never leave your apartment unattended” is one of the earliest lessons Bea, her brother Francesco, Alfredo and Arianna, her best friend, learn at an early age. If you leave the apartment, it’s possible that when you come back, you’ll find that all your belongings have been thrown from a window and another family claims the place.

La Fortezza is a place without hope. Most people have no job and will never have one; they drink or take drugs; they hit their children and their wives. They have no chance of ever getting out because when they apply for a job somewhere and have to say they come from la Fortezza, it’s over. People from La Fortezza are not hired. They are said to be criminals and drug addicts.

One way of dealing with a bleak situationlike this is domestic violence and addiction, another is to look the other way. Nothing is named in La Fortezza. People and things have nicknames. Bad situations are ignored. Arianna can get pregnant at 15 and abort and nobody will ever speak about it.

Bea’s mother got pregnant with Bea when she was only 15. She and Bea’s father were lucky to be able to live in La Fortezza. It’s one step from being homeless. They rarely have jobs, but at least they are kind and caring. The familial environment is rough; there’s a lot of swearing, the kids are slapped, but in spite of that Bea and Franceso know their parents love them and do everything for them. They even accept Alfredo in their home. Alfredo lives above and his father is anything but kind and caring. He’s a single parent, unemployed, alcoholic and beats up his three sons regularly. More than once, someone has to interfere and make sure he doesn’t kill them.

Bea’s and Alfredo’s feelings for each other are deep. But it’s a love-hate relationship, one that strengthens them as much as it weakens them.

From the beginning we know things go wrong, or Alfredo wouldn’t be dead and Bea wouldn’t attend his funeral.

Valetina d’Urbano’s book is written in an amazing, sparse style, told in a painfully laconic voice which isn’t devoid of tenderness. This is not the Rome tourists see. This world is far from anything most Europeans know. This is poverty at its ugliest. All they have is dreams. Some have the power to make them come true. Most don’t.

Interestingly it’s a book that contains a lot of beautiful passages and it certainly makes us think. People in this novel sit on the balcony in summer, making plans for holidays at the sea that they will never take. They are overwhelmed with joy when they own more than one sweater. Reading a book like this certainly shows us that we’re not as grateful as we could be. And it illustrates that this type of poverty is as bad as a congenital disease. Escaping it is almost impossible.

D’Urbano is particularly good at descriptions. We feel the suffocating heat in summer, the cold in winter, we experience the frustration and boredom they have to endure.

I admire that she was able to escape this world and that she didn’t turn this book into a pity-party. It’s a powerful account of a hidden world, a story I’m not likely to forget.

 

Pat Barker: Toby’s Room (2012) Literature and War Readalong April 2014

Posted in Books, Fiction, Literature, Novel, Readalong by

Toby's Room

I’ve been procrastinating all morning. Every time I sat down to write this review I had something very urgent to do. Read the afterword of Fire and Hemlock, read the news on the Ukraine, get a cup of tea, look for cat number 2, read more news on the Ukraine, read the guardian review of Toby’s Room, urgently hunt for a book voucher, read the NY Times review of Toby’s Room, call my best friend in Odessa. I think you get the drift. Anything but writing the review.

Why?  Because I’m far from happy about this book and because I’m going to say what the critics didn’t say: it’s a mixed bag and despite a lot of good elements – mainly the choice of topic – it’s pretty much a failure or – even worse – a dishonest attempt. Still, it would be a great book club pick, as its strengths are topics and characters. That’s why I think it was a good choice for our readalong and if a few people read it, the discussion should be interesting.

So what’s Toby’s Room about? Thanks to the Guardian review, I was made aware that the title is an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, the novel which she wrote after her brother Thoby died in WWI. It’s not surprising then that Virginia Woolf has a cameo appearance in Toby’s Room. I’ve read Jacob’s Room too long ago to make the connection, but I’m tempted to revisit it.

Elinor and her brother Toby are close, too close, one could say. One afternoon, in 1914 they spend a night together. This is deeply traumatizing for Elinor, although she’s not a victim in the whole encounter. Later when they are both in London, Elinor studying to become a painter, Toby to become a doctor, their relationship is strained.

In 1917 Toby’s reported “Missing, believed Killed”, which affects Elinor deeply. Until that day she tried to avoid thinking of the war but the death of her brother and the uncertainty of the circumstances, propel her right into it.

When Elinor finds a letter her brother wrote shortly before his death, mentioning Kit Neville, a famous painter, knows what happened to him, she barges in on Neville who’s at a hospital for soldiers with facial wounds. She disregards his state and unease and tries to force him to confess what happened. To no avail.

The second part of the novel sees Elinor join Tonks, her former teacher. Tonks is a painter and surgeon who helped a great deal in giving back some sort of face to those who had been severely disfigured. Part of his and Elinor’s work consists in drawing the wounded men before, during and after surgery. The gallery of this drawings can be visited online here (I managed to look at two).

Neville doesn’t confess to Elinor, he will confess to the far more sympathetic Paul, Elinor’s lover, whose story is told in Barker’s Life Class.

Pat Barker is famous for blending fact and fiction, for introducing us to important topics – I shy away from calling facial reconstruction “fascinating” as she herself does in her afterword – and for addressing the complexity of WWI. And she’s a very good plotter. The book reads like crime fiction. From the very beginning we are drawn along, running like donkeys after a carrot, to find out “Whatever happened to Toby?” I’m grateful for Pat Barker’s plotting skills, it made for quick reading, but when the juicy carrot I’d been hoping for proved to be a shriveled scrap, I felt let down. I didn’t buy the end. It wasn’t believable for me, but very much in line with the sensationalist beginning.

My biggest problem however was that she felt she had to start with an incest. Why was that necessary? I can relate to someone’s attachment to their brother, I didn’t need an incest to understand that they were very close and that their relationship was far from uncomplicated. This leads me to another problem I had with the book – heavy-handed foreshadowing.

Before I move on to the good parts, let me just say that I found Elinor a off-putting character. Not only did I despise her for blocking out the war, but for being so insensitive. In a way, the novel wants to tell us, it’s that character trait that made her useful. If she’d been more emotional, more sensitive, she wouldn’t have been able to draw the atrocities she saw. I don’t think that is true. I think there are people capable of deep empathy who can still do work like that.

What I liked about this novel, besides its suspenseful readability, was the choice of topics. I’d never heard of Tonks before and I found it interesting how the novel showed that the painters had to document everything in great detail but that they knew it would never be shown publicly. Some of the other painters mentioned painting landscapes as a metaphor. The war can be shown metaphorically but not realistically.

Neville isn’t a sympathetic character either but he’s a great character nonetheless. His story illustrates how hard it was for people to handle seeing facial mutilations. It was so hard that they often ceased to think about the person who was “behind” the disfigurement. They seemed to have lost their humanity with their faces and thus the repulsive reactions of the people were only occasionally questioned.

The more I read, the more I was wondering whether the fact that these injured men were sent to hospitals outside of cities was not so much for their own good as for the good of the population. These parts were done admirably well in the novel and the juxtaposition with scenes in which Elinor learns how to become a better painter through anatomy lessons and dissecting a corpse is great as well.

As a whole however I would say that this novel with its shifting POVs and sensationalist beginning and ending, is a failure. But a very thought-provoking failure.

I’m curious to hear the thoughts of others. Did you think the incest was a good choice? And what about the many different POVs and Elinor’s diary?

Other reviews

CarolineD

Danielle (A Work in Progress)

Maryom (Our Book Reviews)

The Mole

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Toby’s Room is the fourth book in the Literature and War Readalong 2014. The next book is the WWI novel  Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. Discussion starts on Friday 30 May, 2014. Further information on the Literature and War Readalong 2014, including the book blurbs can be found here.

Melissa Banks: The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999)

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The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

I mistook The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing for superficial “chick lit”. At the time when it came out I wouldn’t have picked it up but a week ago I stumbled over a review which made me curious and when I saw that there were some dirt cheap used copies on amazon, I ordered one. I’m so glad I gave in. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this witty book. It’s funny and moving, sad and true, all at the same time. However, I would hesitate to call this a novel. It’s a series of short stories, mostly about the same character – Jane. Some of the stories, like the title story have been published by renowned magazines like Zoetrope. Two have been combined and made into a movie called Suburban Girl, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin. While reading the book I remembered I’ve seen this film. It’s not a must-see. Luckily the stories are much better.

When it came out a few critics wrote harsh reviews, saying Jane was no real character and the book contained nothing but witty one liners. I agree that the book contains a lot of witty repartee and quotable lines but I thought it was anything but flat.

The story I liked best is the first in the collection. It’s called Advanced Beginners. Jane is a very young girl still and love and dating are confusing. Emotions are confusing and she understands how difficult it is to put certain feelings into words. They are too delicate; talking about them could destroy them. The following quote, which I found online, will give you a taste of Bank’s style.

My brother’s first serious girlfriend was eight years older—twenty-eight to his twenty. Her name was Julia Cathcart, and Henry introduced her to us in early June. They drove from Manhattan down to our cottage in Loveladies, on the New Jersey shore. When his little convertible, his pet, pulled into the driveway, she was behind the wheel. My mother and I were watching from the kitchen window. I said, “He lets her drive his car.”

My brother and his girlfriend were dressed alike, baggy white shirts tucked into jeans, except she had a black cashmere sweater over her shoulders.

She had dark eyes, high cheekbones, and beautiful skin, pale, with high coloring in her cheeks like a child with a fever. Her hair was back in a loose ponytail, tied with a piece of lace, and she wore tiny pearl earrings.

I thought maybe she’d look older than Henry, but it was Henry who looked older than Henry. Standing there, he looked like a man. He’d grown a beard, for starters, and had on new wire-rim sunglasses that made him appear more like a bon vivant than a philosophy major between colleges. His hair was longer, and, not yet lightened by the sun, it was the reddish-brown color of an Irish setter.

He gave me a kiss on the cheek, as though he always had.

Then he roughed around with our Airedale, Atlas, while his girlfriend and mother shook hands. They were clasping fingertips, ladylike, smiling as though they were already fond of each other and just waiting for details to fill in why.

Julia turned to me and said, “You must be Janie.”

“Most people call me Jane now,” I said, making myself sound even younger.

“Jane,” she said, possibly in the manner of an adult trying to take a child seriously.

Henry unpacked the car and loaded himself up with everything they’d brought, little bags and big ones, a string tote, and a knapsack.

As he started up the driveway, his girlfriend said, “Do you have the wine, Hank?”

Whoever Hank was, he had it.

I also enjoyed the two stories which were made into a movie, My Old Man and The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine. The narrator is a young editor who dates an older, very famous editor who tries to hide his alcohol problem. It’s just as witty as the first story, but more bitter-sweet.

The title story pokes fun at all those self-help books that promise women will find Mr. Right if they only stick to certain rules. The narrator follows such a rule book and at first the result is funny but then it becomes tragic and she turns into a parody of herself.

I can’t help it but I like a book with quotable lines. I enjoyed most of the stories and to me it even felt like a novel because we see Jane at various stages of her dating life. When it came out it was compared to Bridget Jones but that doesn’t do it any justice. It’s totally different, because tone and voice are so different. Jane sounds mostly laconic. I’d also say The Girl’s Guide … is more literary style wise but with less social/cultural commentary. One should really not compare them. It just goes to show that Bridget Jones was the 90s Gone Girl.

Susan Minot: Evening (1998)

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Evening

With two novels and one short story collection published to overwhelming critical acclaim, Susan Minot has emerged as one of the most gifted writers in America, praised for her ability to strike at powerful emotional truths in language that is sensual and commanding, mesmerizing in its vitality and intelligence. Now, with Evening, she gives us her most ambitious novel, a work of surpassing beauty. During a summer weekend on the coast of Maine, at the wedding of her best friend, Ann Grant fell in love. She was twenty-five. Forty years later–after three marriages and five children–Ann Lord finds herself in the dim claustrophobia of illness, careening between lucidity and delirium and only vaguely conscious of the friends and family parading by her bedside, when the memory of that weekend returns to her with the clarity and intensity of a fever-dream. 

It’s not easy to capture the beauty of Susan Minot’s gorgeous and ambitious novel Evening. If Virginia Woolf or Proust had written page-turners, that’s what it could look like.

In beautiful prose which explores how memory and consciousness work Evening captures the story of Ann Grant’s life. It is 1994 and Ann is terminally ill; she’s lying in her bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. Scent transports her back in time. The morphine induces hallucinations, which are rendered in brilliant stream of consciousness paragraphs. These chapters and paragraphs, are very short, fragments only; the main story however simply moves back and forth between 1994 and 1954, the summer in which she met Harris Arden.

She smelled the cushion and smelled the balsam and what happened to her then was a kind of wild tumult. The air seemed to fracture into screens which all fell crashing in on one another in a sort of timed ballet with spears of light shooting through and something erupted in her chest with a gush and in her mind’s eye she saw her hands forty years younger and heard the clink of rocks on a beach and the sound of a motorboat and rising behind that came a black night and a band playing in the trees and the smell of water in the pipes of a summer cottage and she raised her hand to keep the cushion there and breathed in and heard an old suitcase snap open.

While Ann is remembering four days in 1954, when she met Harris, her grown-up children, her friends and nurses flutter like moths in the periphery of her bed. Ann is given morphine and more often than not, she’s not lucid but hallucinating. One moment she remembers something that happened in 1954 and the next moment a noise in her bedroom changes everything, makes her imagine something; another moment later, she’s back with her visitors.

Her children hear her talk to an invisible stranger, Harris, but when they ask her about him, Ann denies knowing a person with that name.

The story is divided into several recurring elements. There is the story of the four days in summer 1954, the stream of consciousness elements in which Ann sees her whole life pass, the passages in which we hear her children talk, and very short passages in which Ann seems to be talking to Harris who has come to visit her. His visits take place in her imagination but for her this seems more real than anything else.

Evening questions what is left of a life when it comes to its end. Memories, dreams, illusions, are all the same, when you look back. Ann has been married three times. Some marriages were good, others were bad, but now that she is dying, Harris, the unlived possibility, is the strongest memory she has.

Evening explores the way memory works

First she was Ann Grant, then Phil Katz’s wife then Mrs Ted Stackpole then Ann Lord. Bits of things swam up to her, but what made them come. Why for instance did she remember the terrace at Versailles where she’d visited only once, or a pair of green and checkered gloves,  photograph of city trees in the rain?It only demonstrated to her all she would forget. And if she did not remember these things who would? After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it.

Although the narrative is fragmented and modernist in places, the book has the qualities of a page-turner. At the beginning we only know that Ann Grant met Harris in 1954 and that they both fell in love. It will take the whole book to reveal what has happened and why, after all these years, she still remembers him as if it had been yesterday but never told anybody about him.

Underlying this remembrance of things past, lies a very crucial topic: pain medication in palliative care. It’s briefly mentioned in the book that Ann Lord decided to be medicated although she knew she would probably spend her final weeks, days and hours not being lucid. Some cancer patients prefer lucidity and live their final moments with as much pain as they can possibly endure. Not Ann.

It’s a beautiful book and strangely uplifting. Possibly because it testifies how intense an interior life can be and that nothing is really lost. Everything we’ve ever experienced, imagined or dreamed is still somewhere. In its best moments Evening reminded me of Virgina Woolf’s The Voyage Out, in which we often see people or houses from outside. They are motionless or sleeping, but we catch a glimpse of their inner lives, which are rich and deep and passionate.

Evening has been made into a movie with Claire Danes, Vanessa Redgrave, Glen Close, Toni Colette, Natasha Richardson and Meryl Streep. It doesn’t capture what made the book so wonderful but it’s still a beautiful movie.