The Joyces in Paris, 1924. From left, James, Nora, and their children, Lucia and George.

Lucia by Alex Pheby review – in search of James Joyce’s daughter

This extraordinary novel inspired by the life of Lucia Joyce tells the troubling story of a woman who is confined and abused

Ian Sansom

Thu 12 July 2018

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his book”, reads the prefatory note to Alex Pheby’s third novel, “is intended as a work of art. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in an artistic manner. Any representations of actual persons are either coincidental, or have been altered for artistic effect.” Erm, OK.

Great dynasties of the world / The Brontës

Great dynasties of the world: The Brontës

Ian Sansom on three literary sisters and their 'hopeless' brother

Ian Sansom
Saturday 24 July 2010

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or the Brontës of Haworth, west Yorkshire, 1847 was a big year. In October, Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre was published. "We can cordially recommend Jane Eyre to our readers," ran one enthusiastic review. "It is sure to be in demand." The reviewer was right. Two months later, both younger Brontë sisters also published novels: Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Wuthering Heights was an instant bestseller. The Brontës – under their male pseudonyms, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – had achieved what they had always sought. Fame.

Everyone now has heard of the Brontë sisters, of course – the "three weird sisters", Ted Hughes called them. They have been memorialised in films and biographies, and their work is drummed into students at school and university. There are academic conferences, Penguin classics, box sets and leather-bound collectors' editions. Isabelle Huppert plays Anne in André Téchiné's Les Soeurs Brontë. Olivia de Havilland played Charlotte in the 1946 biopic Devotion. A 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heights starred Juliette Binoche. Brontëana available at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth includes jewellery, mugs and cross-stitch kits. But what of the fourth Brontë sibling, the only brother, Branwell? He was the fourth of the six Brontë children – two older sisters died young. As he was the only son, expectations were high.

The Brontës' father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, had come a long way from a two-room cottage in Drumballyroney in County Down to study theology at St John's College, Cambridge, and then be appointed to a perpetual curacy in Haworth. Branwell was not expected to fail. Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, claimed that Branwell was "a boy of remarkable promise, and, in some ways, of extraordinary precocity of talent". Douglas A Martin, in his novel based on the brother Brontë's life, Branwell (2006), writes that "Childhood was Branwell's kingdom to rule over." It was: he and Charlotte collaborated as children in the invention of a complex fictional world they called Angria. It proved an ominous name.

As the sisters began to achieve recognition – a joint collection of their poems was published to critical acclaim in 1846 – Branwell sank deeper into depression and despair. He began drinking heavily, and taking laudanum. He had failed to gain admission to the Royal Academy, failed as a portrait painter, and had begun working variously as a tutor, and as a clerk at a railway station, posts from which he was dismissed for incompetence, or worse – in one case for conducting an affair with the mother of one of his pupils. Daphne du Maurier, in The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960), her brilliant and bizarre biography of Branwell, hints darkly at Branwell leading one of his young charges astray. Emily described her brother at this stage of his life as a "hopeless being".

Branwell's one and only famous painting is the only known portrait of the three sisters together: see left, now at the National Portrait Gallery. He had originally painted himself in the centre, but obliterated his image. The paint has faded, so that his ghostly presence now hovers ominously beside his sisters.

After Branwell's death in 1848, aged only 31, Charlotte wrote to her friend William Smith Williams: "I do not weep from a sense of bereavement – there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost – but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light."

The current exhibition on Branwell at the Brontë Parsonage Museum is titled Sex, Drugs and Literature.

THE GUARDIAN

Imre Kertész

Dossier K by Imre Kertész – review

From Budapest to Buchenwald to the Nobel prize … Read Kertész, says Ian Sansom

Ian Sansom

Sat 13 Jul 2013 08.30 BST

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n an essay about the work of the Nobel prize-winning Hungarian author Imre Kertész, his English translator Tim Wilkinson quotes a letter from a publisher, politely refusing Wilkinson's offer of a translation: "It's certainly not a question of the merit of the work being insufficient, but simply a keen awareness of the difficulties involved in introducing a new European writer to the UK market." The publishers Melville House either don't recognise the difficulties, or simply don't care. Either way, out of ignorance or in bliss, they have done us all a favour by publishing Wilkinson's translation of Dossier K. Though exactly what kind of favour is not entirely clear.

In his prefatory note, Kertész describes the book as "a veritable autobiography". He then adds: "If one acknowledges Nietzsche's proposition that the prototype of the novel as an art form was to be found in the Platonic dialogues, then the Reader is in fact holding a novel in his or her hands." So, novel, or autobiography? Both, perhaps.

Structurally, the book is also rather ambiguous. Apparently inspired by a series of conversations between Kertész and his editor, Zoltán Hafner – and yet not a transcript of those conversations – Dossier K takes the form of an interview with an unnamed interlocutor.

This, of course, is the characteristic Kertész method – simple and direct, yet somehow also swerving, like a dog across a field. His novel Fiasco (in Hungarian, A kudarc), for example, begins: "The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet. He was thinking … He had plenty of troubles and woes, so there were things to think about." And at the beginning of Liquidation (Felszámolás) the hero of the story, the dim, dull, troubled Kingbitter, stands at his window and looks out into the street below: "He was quite capable of frittering away whole half hours of his (as it happened, worthless) time by the window." Kertész, like his characters, stands before the window, or before the filing cabinet, before the facts, and thinks about them. It's an obvious way to begin. An interesting way to proceed. And it certainly leads to some unexpected conclusions.

Born in 1929, Kertész was taken from Budapest at the age of 14 and transported first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald. In a memorable phrase in Dossier K he says that he eventually realised it was his job to reclaim his life, "which I had to take back from 'History', this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone". This life's work of reclamation has provided Kertész with his great theme, and a fascination with what he calls fatelessness, sorstalanság – the title of his most famous novel – which he defines here as "that specific aspect of dictatorships, the expropriation, nationalisation of one's own fate, turning it into a mass fate, the stripping away of a human being's most human essence".

Kertész's presence is extraordinary. It consists of a number of attributes and strongly held ideas and opinions. He famously objects, for example, to the word "Holocaust" – "a euphemism, a cowardly and unimaginative glibness". Quizzed by his interlocutor – himself? – about Theodor Adorno's statement that "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," Kertész responds clearly and robustly: "Well, if I may give a straight answer, I consider that statement to be a moral stink bomb that needlessly pollutes air that is already rank enough as things are." The stink comes from what he sees as "the assertion of an exclusive right to suffering, the appropriation, as it were, of the Holocaust". Always forthright, he also remarks – as again he has illustrated many times in his novels – that "the only thing two Jews have in common is their fears".

Throughout Dossier K he is unsparing also about his work – "art is nothing other than exaggeration and distortion" – and about himself. "All in all, I'm on the side of cheeriness. My error is that I don't elicit that feeling in others." He even grows impatient with his own questions: "It's been done to death. I've already covered that a hundred times."

And yet Kertész's harsh objectivity – severity, one might say – is matched by a rather sweet strain of melancholy and nostalgia, and much of the pleasure of the book derives from his recalling of details of his early life in Hungary, of matzos crumbled in coffee, and Herzegovina cigarettes, the sound of his father crunching garlic on toast, his childhood enthusiasm for CS Forester's Hornblower novels.

It's important that Kertész should remember and rehearse all of this, because it's being forgotten in Hungary. In a recent, short but important article in the New Yorker, the novelist Hari Kunzru interviewed a number of writers, musicians and intellectuals who expressed grave anxieties about the tendencies and policies of the country's rightwing government. George Szirtes, the Hungarian-born British poet, sounded the most serious warning: "In effect, it wants to return the country to the condition of the 30s … the atmosphere is full of hatred … inimical to the country I have loved and admired. Little by little, I find every part of it is being dismantled and banished." Heed Szirtes. Read Kertész.

• Ian Sansom's new novel The Norfolk Mystery is published by Fourth Estate

THE GUARDIAN

Portrait / Imre Kertész
Getting Started with Imre Kertész
Imre Kertesz / 'Schindler's List? Kitsch'
Dossier K by Imre Kertész / Review
Obituaries / Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész / A man apart
Imre Kertesz / Raw Materials
Imre Kertész / Against what, if nothing is resisting?
Imre Kertész / Europe’s Oppressive Legacy