Review: Brief Lives

[Number 10 in my chronological re-read of Brookner's 24 novels.]

In the past I've accused myself of reducing Brookner's novels to just being about lonely, depressed people waiting to die. Re-reading the first nine of her novels has given me abundant proof that there is much more going on than that.

And then in Brief Lives, there's this:

Certain evenings I sat in the sitting-room without bothering to put on the lights, looking out at that street lamp.

That would by Fay. A woman in her early 60s, once a regular singer on the BBC, widowed, alone, and thinking that there really isn't much left for her but watching the timer on life run out. These are the Brookner characteristics I most remember from reading her 24 novels the first time. I alternate between taking comfort in this kind of character and deeply fearing her. Or more accurately, I fear becoming her.

Fay doesn't have much in the way of a social life. There's Millie her old flatmate and singing colleague at the BBC, but she lives in the country now and Fay doesn't see her much. Her husband's cousin and his wife occasionally invite her to dinner where she meets a man. But he is emotionally unavailable and keeps her as much at arm's length as he does seem to enjoy spending time with her. That is until she has a human emotion, at which point he fades quickly from her life.

For the most part though, Fay's life is consumed by Julia, a former actress whose husband Charlie was a business associate of her husband Owen. Julia is like a low-rent Norma Desmond character minus the glamour.

She lived on omelettes and whisky, maintaining that she liked neither, and appeared none the worse for it.

Julia surrounds herself with women who are devoted to her. I would call them sycophants, but that is too uncharitable. There's Pearl, her former dresser, and Maureen, a small town newspaper columnist who interviews her and ends up becoming a regular fixture in Julia's life. Both are essentially care givers and companions and never considered by Julia to be equals or even friends.

Fay's relationship with Julia is also unequal and it's complicated. With no real ties to Julia, Fay still feels compelled to ensure that the ungrateful Julia is okay which often means enduring Julia's deprecating, mean-spirited banter. Fay finds it impossible to break free from Julia and allows her to get under her skin. Julia manages to somehow poison whatever drive and determination Fay has for her own future happiness.

Even after Julia is out of her life, Fay is unable to see anything in her future but death. For those of us who look forward to retirement sometime in our 60s, Fay's outlook is a puzzle. I don't think it was Brookner's intention to depict someone who is clinically depressed, but it is hard to understand Fay's outlook. As she contemplates her life after the death of her husband--who she didn't really like--she sells their home contemplates moving into a new flat.

I could see myself in Drayton Gardens, going out with my basket on wheels, tempting my own appetite, keeping up appearances, and doing no harm, not even to myself. Lonely? Yes, I should be lonely, but in time I should see that this was to my advantage. I should be training myself for old age, which takes a certain amount of training; better to start as I meant to go on.

I used to worry about being this person before I met my husband. I was 33 and had come to terms with being mate-less for the balance of my life. Now, 14 years later, with a very happy married life, but no kids, I find myself thinking about a future, albeit a somewhat distant one, where the only people in my life are the ones I pay to take care of me. This horrifies me to my core. I've got 30 years to make some friends who aren't long distance. Although by Fay's standards I only have about 15 years to make some meaningful connections. Yikes.

As with all of Brookner's novels the prose is brilliant and precise. Unless you are looking for a big downer, I wouldn't recommend this for your first Brookner experience (try Lewis Percy). But if you do like a bit of a wallow, Brief Lives will not disappoint.

Review: Lewis Percy

[Number 9 in my chronological re-read of all of Brookner's 24 novels.]

When people ask me where they should start with Brookner, I never know quite what to tell them. Part of the problem is that after having read all 24 or them over the course of about a decade, I didn't really remember enough detail about any of them to really provide a recommendation. I would often default to Hotel du Lac merely because it was her best known and had won the Booker Prize.

Now that I am nine books into my re-reading of all of Brookner's novels I can say I am much more aware of the differences in the stories and much more appreciative of the variety and depth of her output. And perhaps no more so than with Lewis Percy. And I think, out of her first nine novels, Lewis Percy is a fantastic place to start. Slightly more plot driven than her other novels and with a much younger protagonist.

Our eponymous hero is a 20-something scholar working on his doctoral thesis in Paris. Not long after Lewis returns to London from his year in France, his mother dies and he finds himself a bit untethered. Perhaps having read too much of his mother's kind of fiction he comes up with a romantic, heroic, and ultimately misguided, notion that he is going to transform Patricia "Tissy" Harper, a young, virginal, agoraphobic librarian, into something much greater by marrying her. I don't have to tell you that things don't really work out that way.

Acting the part of the perfect Edwardian wife--albeit in the 1960s--Tissy achieves an outward transformation with updated clothes and hair befitting her age and the era, but it doesn't translate much beyond that. Not necessarily aware of the paternalistic idiocy of his plan Lewis senses the failure of his marriage but figures he has made his bed and needs to be faithful. Despite falling in love with Emmy, his gay best friend's actress sister, he repels her advances only to have Tissy believe he was unfaithful. She flees back to her mother's house, Lewis tries to be a responsible absent father, and no one is happy. Eventually Tissy finds her emotional feet, Emmy and Lewis realize they can't be together, and Lewis gets a generous academic job offer in the U.S.

And that, my friends, is a lot of action for a Brookner novel. Although her characters are fabulously old fashioned, I also loved Brookner taking on younger characters and nodding to the swinging 60s. In Lewis Percy the reader gets the opportunity to experience a hopeful ending while getting lashings of introspective, complacent, ennui typical of Brookner's characters. This could be the gateway drug of Brookner novels.

(On a completely unrelated note and apropos of nothing, I also loved the advent of the computer at the library where Lewis worked for years on an index (of what I don't recall). Lewis is unsure if he wants to stick around to learn the new technology. In trying to convince Lewis to embrace the future and the future of the index, his boss makes this fabulous statement:

'But my dear fellow!' exclaimed Goldsborough. 'This will be the index's finest hour!'

As with Pym's No Fond Return of Love, I do love an index in a novel.)

A Personal Tribute to Anita Brookner

The following personal tribute to Anita Brookner was written by blogger A Super Dilettante. Reposted with permission.

"Anita Brookner: of all the younger generation known to me, the rarest in quality both as friend and writer." Rosamond Lehmann
(Image credit: Rosamond Lehmann's Album, Chatto & Windus, 1987)

When I heard the news that the writer, Anita Brookner has died, on the wireless this morning, I felt as though I had lost the greatest teacher in my life. Although the majority of people in the literary world know her as a writer, Anita Brookner first came into my life as an art historian. The first book I read by her is a book of her art historical essays and reviews called Soundings published in 1997. This book had the profoundest effect on me when I was studying art history.

Her marvellous style, penetrating vision and her intelligent interpretation of the French paintings by Corot and Courbet made me realise that a well-written essay can be every bit as beautiful as the poetry or fiction. It was Anita Brookner, an exceptional scholar from London's Courtauld Institute, whom I greatly admired as an exemplar and a role model during my student days. She lived in France for a number of years. During that time, she wrote very insightful short essays and reviews of the exhibitions that made a regular appearance in the prestigious art magazine called The Burlington Magazine.

She later admitted in her rare radio interview, which must be her last interview, The Reunion: The Courtauld Institute, with Sue MacGregor (available to listen online) that the most meaningful period of her life was at the Courtauld Institute where she was trained and later appointed as a teaching fellow by then-Director, Anthony Blunt. One of her students at Courtauld (the artist, John McLean) later wrote about her: "She gave very elegant lectures. I had never seen anyone so metropolitan and poised."

It was her essays and reviews along with the writings of Benedict Nicolson, the elder son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West that inspired me to become an art historian. I would devour every word they wrote for The Burlington Magazine at the university's library.

Anita Brookner came into my life as a novelist was much later, during the darkest days, after I left the university when I felt my entire life was drifting in the sea of desolation. It was her novels that spoke to me and comforted (they still do) me. Through her writings, I found my mentor because I looked up to her as a survival from a vanished civilisation. Her extraordinary ability to write the most elegant prose makes most contemporary writing seem crude and sloppy. She was most perspective and insightful as a writer. Here is how she described an incompatible relationship in her book, The Misalliance: "Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes. Like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography." No one else would have written like that. Her subjects are about narratives of failures (after all, isn't literature all about failure?), lonely characters and exiles leading what she called "the unlived life". She wrote in her 1984 Booker Prize winning novel, Hotel du Lac:

"In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game."

Some literary critics were rather harsh and unfair in their judgment when they assess her works and complain that she repeatedly wrote the same kind of story. But then, they seem to forget the words of Tolstoy, one of the greatest writers of all time, when he said: "All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger come to town." You will find that Anita Brookner engaged in both aspects brilliantly and passionately in her novels.

Every sentence she wrote is a sheer beauty, made in the elegiac tone, full of subtle evocations of vanished ways of life. All these things made a powerful impression on me. But what makes me so sad is that her death was not even mentioned in the national 6 o’clock news. There were no headlines. Apart from the online social media and the tributes paid by her contemporaries and famous writers, there is very little statement about her death in today's press cover and news bulletin.

I thought that being an infinitely reticent woman, she would probably have preferred this quiet and dignified way of leaving this world. This evening, I read one of the most beautiful paragraphs from her novel, Look At Me. My voice slightly choked with emotion but I read it out loud as a mark of respect to her while I sat on my favourite reading chair and who knows she may even be listening….

I shall leave you with her words:

 "It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or "I hate" or "I want". Or indeed, "Look at me". And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory."

Remembering Anita Brookner

Based on the traffic stats for this blog, the passing of Anita Brookner has renewed interest in her and her work. It might be helpful for an introduction for newcomers to this site.

In 2011, to celebrate Brookner's birthday and her 30th year publishing novels, we created International Anita Brookner Day. At the time we had lots of readers and bloggers reading and writing about Brookner and her novels. The result was lots of first-time Brookner readers and lots of blogger book reviews. Follow the links below to find out more.

1. An index of blogger reviews of Brookner's novels. If you have a review of your own that you would like to submit to be included in the index, I would be delighted to add it here, both as a blog post and as a link in the index. Shoot me an email at hogglestock [at] outlook [dot] com.

2. An index to London place names in Brookner's fiction. If you have ever read any of Brookner's novels, you know that London plays a prominent role, especially as her characters love to walk. As I re-read all of Brookner's 24 novels and 1 novella in chronological order, I have been keeping a list of all the London place names I come across. So far I have indexed the first 8 and am about to start on number 9, Lewis Percy.

3. A chance encounter with Brookner at Marks and Spencer. Writer Sophie Smith gave us a firsthand account of her running into Brookner while out shopping. Compared to other authors, there is relatively little known about Brookner's personal life. We did hear a bit of gossip back in 2011 that she was aware of IABD and had contemplated acknowledging it but didn't like the fact that we had appropriated her birthday for our celebration. A very private woman indeed.

Anita Brookner Dead at 87

Sad news.

Anita Brookner

July 16, 1928 - March 10, 2016