A few more Persephone reviews and a wrap-up

Oh my. Persephone Reading Week is over today and my eyes are sore from so much reading!

I finished Mariana by Monica Dickens yesterday and got It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst from the library today! It’s also been reprinted by Persephone, but I got it in a funny old edition published in 1970. Quick (hopefully) reviews of both will follow in a moment, but first, a few other things…

I started Every Good Deed by Dorothy Whipple last night and think I will definitely be reading more of her, she is my idea of an insightful yet not too difficult author. Persephone Books makes sure to reprint books that are neither too literary nor too commercial and that is exactly the type of book I have been looking for without knowing it! So many times I wander around in bookstores, hating most of the boring unknown new books that seem absolutely without the passion of Charlotte Bronte or the wit of Jane Austen (or the intelligence of either of them), wanting to enrich my soul with the classics, but knowing that they are a difficult diet to mentally digest exclusively. I want something interesting and moderately thought provoking, but also comforting. Dorothy Whipple is all of those things, hoorah! So come back on Tuesday and I will give you a few heapings of quotes from Every Good Deed, which is not yet published by Persephone… (on Monday I shall be busy resting my eyes)

Last night I began putting together the collection of links to reviews of Persephone Books that I’d talked about before, right here. I’ve only gotten to #5 of their books so far, but I’ll keep working at it! Maybe it can be ready in time for the next Persephone Reading Week. As I read the reviews for each of these books, I’m awed and interested by all of them. Hopefully this will help any and everyone find more great reading in the future.

I’ve also suddenly remembered today when I first came across Persephone Books. I thought it was since I’d started book blogging in the past month and had seen them being mentioned everywhere in connection with this reading week, but actually… earlier this year, I had been interested in the Greek goddess Persephone and when I looked her up in my library catalogue, all these books with lovely covers kept popping up as well! Except I started getting annoyed because it wasn’t what I was looking for! Now when I look up ‘Persephone Books’ I get stuff on the myth of  Persephone, but I don’t mind so much anymore. I like the name because it has meaning to me.

Now back to the reviews. I found the first half of Mariana to be quite nice, funny, nostalgic in the best way and very true to life, altogether everything everyone says it is. Mary doesn’t do well at school, she mouths off a teacher, has a crush on her cousin, she’s not even very pretty, she’s simply a regular girl with a quirky family caught up in the jumble of life. I especially enjoyed her interactions with her comedic actor uncle who takes her ‘on the razzle’ after she finishes writing her first deliciously melodramatic play. Eventually she heads off to Dramatic College herself, where she is, if not admired, at least remembered…

But then. Oh then to me the book began to take a turn for the worse. Mary goes to Paris to study dressmaking (nothing wrong with Paris, I like Paris) and a handsome, charming and rich Frenchie falls madly in love with her. I’m sorry but up to this point the only boy she’d managed to snog was her cousin (which is embarrassingly realistic), but suddenly and for no reason whatever the plot goes from a fairly faithful fictional rendition of Monica Dickens’ own life off into romantic daydreamland (who wouldn’t want to be charmed by a charming Frenchman who looks like Maurice Chevalier?) Monica Dickens herself studied acting, but not dressmaking in Paris (hence the lack of any funny stories about it), she instead worked as a cook, a nurse and a journalist instead of lounging around as a lazy debutant in London and eventually wrote about her experiences in those careers as well. Most of her life in fact, she wrote what she knew. But for some reason, the love story in Mariana is not. When Mary eventually meets someone who’s better suited to her, a perfectly perfectly casual Brit, both of them become mostly boring and saccharine. They pretty much decide to fall in love at first sight, for little reason.

The plot of Mariana is coming of age, not maturing into love, as Jane Austen writes about (so even though Jane Austen also writes about something that never happened to her, her stories ring clearly true to life), so they simply meet and are instantly perfect. No more conflict. Mary becomes far less interesting than she was as a child, she’s bland as a well adjusted adult. Even the first chapter of the novel, which shows her as an adult, bothered me somehow. Who she was as an adult didn’t seem to match up with the rambunctious child she had been. Monica Dickens seems to be writing about love and adulthood as she imagined it to be, but at 24 when she wrote it, she didn’t understand the continuing conflict at the heart of life (and a good story) itself. She herself didn’t marry until she was 35 and despite Mary’s idealistic refusal of anyone who will take her away from her beloved Britain, Dickens married an American and at his request, moved there with him and lived in Cape Cod for decades. If she could have written true love in a conflict like that, that would have been much more interesting to me. But Mary and her husband make no sacrifices for each other, no compromises. They don’t seem to change or grow, at least not as Elizabeth and Darcy do.

However, here are a few good quotes:

There was a window-seat too, looking out on to the drive, and a careless gathering of sofas and armchairs, whose springs were at the perfect stage of comfort — half-way between newness and decadence.

All along the gauntlet of armchairs, from behind the camouflage of knitting-needles and library books, peered the old eyes that never missed a thing.

In refreshing contrast to Mariana, It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty And Other Tragedies of Married Life offers, as you can guess from the title, a quite realistic view of marriage and love. Judith Viorst has obviously been there, done that in 1960s John Updike American suburbia and lived to write about it. The title alone made me laugh with recognition the first time I scrolled through the Persephone catalogue — I finally turned 30 last June, am also recently married (2 years tomorrow) and my husband and I will periodically talk about how it’s harder to relate to all our old indie bookstore hipster friends. Even though we don’t have kids and do still have a relatively downtown apartment with one fluffy black cat. I opened the book up today and immediately found a poem I could relate to:

Marriage and the Families

My mother was grateful
He wasn’t barefoot.
His mother was grateful
I wasn’t pregnant.

My father was grateful
He wasn’t a Negro or unemployed.
His father was grateful
I wasn’t tubercular or divorced.

My sister was grateful
Her husband was richer and taller.
His sister was grateful
She had a master’s degree and a better nose.

… I should be pleased.

But when I think of the catered wedding in Upper Montclair,
With the roast sirloin of beef dinner,
The souvenir photo album,
And the matches with our names in raised gold letters…
Then I wish
That they weren’t
So grateful.

A while later she writes about ‘The Other Woman’ with the gently repeating refrain of: “Because it’s easier to be a good sport /
When you’re not married” and “Because it’s easier to try harder / When you’re not married” and finally “Because it’s easier to want a husband / When you’re not married.”

When some friends get divorced, this line made me giggle: “He only likes women who’d rather make love than read Proust and / She only likes men who’d vice versa.”

Later she goes to France with her husband to have a dream romantic holiday, only that’s not perfect either:

I am (where else?) at the Deux Magots
Moodily drinking a pernod
And trying to think thoughts
Jean-Paul Sartre would respect
And trying to convey the impression
That I am someone with a rich full inner life
Instead of someone
Who gets palpitations
When the washer-dryer breaks down.

My honeymoon in Paris wasn’t so perfect either, I remember wild tears and much grumpiness our last day there on my part! Of course now it’s become just another funny story between my husband and I, so sharing the difficulties, as Viorsk writes in her last poem, True Love, does help.

In conclusion, here’s how I rate all of the Persephones I’ve read so far:

1. Hetty Dorval by Ethel Wilson is far and away the best

2. Mariana by Monica Dickens is, despite it’s faults, still quite readable and entertaining and funny and sweet

3. It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst: short, cheeky and telling

4. The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett just wasn’t quite what I was expecting… she seems to be experimenting with ways of telling a story that she hasn’t quite mastered yet

Altogether an enjoyable and enlightening week. I’ve loved meeting new people this week and talking about such delicious books and am already planning which Persephones to order for my birthday next month… I’ve got my eye on Tea With Mr. Rochester by Frances Towers and possibly the Classics edition of Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple since it’s such a nice cover!

Why I’m beginning to love Persephone Books

I am quite enjoying Mariana by Monica Dickens, but not at all wanting to race through it! Parts of it remind me of my own childhood (Mary and her cousins all sit on the Swing Tree and hurl insults at their nannies, while my siblings and I would all stand in our ‘airplane tree’ and shake the branches, pretending to fly it!), it seems so true of people I’ve known, including a rather disagreeable child like this:

Margaret had inherited this sticky trait from her mother but did not confine it to her father. She was always flinging herself on people, clinging round their necks with limp reptilian arms, and saying, ‘Auntay,’ or ‘Un-kerl, I want to speak chyou. D’you like me?’ If she got a snub, she would creep away and commune with her conscience, which was more than life-size. When she had no sins of her own to fret over, she would fret over somebody else’s. She would be a ‘good woman’ when she grew up, you could see it coming miles away.

It starts off in rather a Proustian way, the first chapter introduces Mary as an adult alone in a small country cottage during a storm, waiting to hear about her unnamed husband. As she lays in bed, unable to sleep, she starts to think about her past (just as In Search of Lost Time begins in the confusion of darkness and sleeping and long lost memories slowly rising up) and then chapter 2 starts with a memory of the smells of her past (just as Proust writes about too, in fact this reminded me of his ecstasy in Swann’s Way over smells “homey, human and enclosed, an exquisite, ingenious, and limpid jelly of all the fruits of the year that have left the orchard for the cupboard”), where I was hooked by this:

It was the smell of clean sheets that reminded Mary of what, when she was a child, she called the Charbury Smell. It was the first thing you noticed as you went in at the front door of Charbury; an indefinable pot-pourri of all the fragrant things in the house — roses, wood-smoke, polished floors, bread, and lavender-kept old linen. You were only conscious of it when you first came down from London. Once you had been there some time, it became a part of your country self, like the ragamuffin clothes you wore, and the grazes on your knees, and waking on Saturdays to the sound of the gardeners sweeping the gravel drive with brooms.

I grew up on a farm and so definitely had a ‘country self’, complete with old clothes the better to explore the woods in and scraped knees from learning to ride my bike on gravel.

One of the reasons I am beginning to love the Persephone books so much is that they speak to this earliest side of me, the country child self that learned to cross stitch and quilt and bake with my grandmas, that played in the trees and gardens, picking raspberries and fresh peas, that learned to read on old books lying around the farmhouse before I ever watched tv. I’m only 30, but I grew up in a rather old fashioned way and these lost old classics speak to me, to my first self.

In other Persephone news, I found a Dorothy Whipple novel at my library! She seems to be quite the favourite among Persephone readers, only the one I found has not been published by them yet… it is Every Good Deed. The beginning looks good, so I’ll probably start that after I’m done Mariana.

Also, I’ve been thinking of a plan to collect all the links to the various Persephone reviews around the internet and put them all in one place somewhere, perhaps on a separate page of my blog. It could become overwhelming, but I thought there’s so many of these books that are terrific but that you’ve never heard of, it’s hard to know what you’d like until you read a quote or review and then it would be easier to find all that info in one place. I feel like I’m caught in a whirlwind, going from review to review just now, plus looking over last year’s Persephone Reading Week too! Just an idea as of yet, but I’m already collecting links for one book at a time. What do you all think, would this be a good idea and where would it best be hosted?