Emeric Pressburger’s Lost Nazi Novel
In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
Showing posts with label Lucy Scholes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lucy Scholes. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
Bohumil Hrabal / The Torment of Cats
RIGHT, HRABAL WITH ONE OF HIS CATS (COURTESY OF NEW DIRECTIONS)
The Torment of Cats
In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
“If you want to write, keep cats,” Aldous Huxley famously said. As I read Bohumil Hrabal’s haunting but strange slip of a memoir, All My Cats, I wondered if the Czech writer would have agreed with him. Hrabal’s book was originally published in 1986, as Autičko—which translates as “the Little Car,” the nickname Hrabal gave first to his Renault 5, a small white car with ginger-colored seat covers. He later gave the same name to one of his cats, a kitten with “white socks and a white bib, and the rest of it had a tabby pattern, but in ginger.” The volume has only recently been translated into English, excellently so by Paul Wilson. Do not be fooled by the cuteness of the book’s original title, though. In it, we encounter a cat lover trapped in a hell of his own making, driven to the brink of madness.
Saturday, July 27, 2024
Muriel at Metropolitan by Miriam Tlali / Review by Lucy Scholes
Re-Covered: The Protest Writing of South Africa
In her monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
“The Republic of South Africa is a country divided into two worlds,” wrote Miriam Tlali in the opening chapter of her debut novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, which was published in 1975. “The one, a white world—rich, comfortable, for all practical purposes organized—a world in fear, armed to the teeth,” she explains. “The other, a black world; poor, pathetically neglected and disorganized—voiceless, oppressed, restless, confused and unarmed—a world in transition, irrevocably weaned from all tribal ties.” Set at Metropolitan Radio, a busy furniture and electric-goods store in Johannesburg, Muriel at Metropolitan depicts the collision of these two worlds. It is narrated by one of the white-owned store’s black employees, a typist named Muriel, who recounts, in dogged, meticulous detail, the reality of life in the “black world,” the residents of which live on “shifting sands” as every parliamentary session brings in “fresh, more oppressive laws” that seek to dehumanize nonwhite South Africans while maintaining the power and privilege of their oppressors. The book is fictionalized autobiography, the verisimilitude of which can be traced to Tlali’s own experience working as a clerk-typist in a Johannesburg store. “The sunny Republic of South Africa,” Muriel notes derisively, “the white man’s paradise.”
The Sky Falls by Lorenza Mazzetti / Review by Lucy Scholes
LORENZA MAZZETTI, 1950S. (UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER, COURTESY OF SHELLEY BOETTCHER)
Re-Covered: The Sky Falls by Lorenza Mazzetti
In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
In 1956, in a central London café, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti wrote a manifesto for what they termed the “Free Cinema” movement. Among the aims of these four young, avant-garde filmmakers was a belief in “the importance of people and the significance of the everyday.” They eschewed traditional box office appeal in favor of authentic depictions of the quotidian, particularly that of the ordinary working man and woman. Mazzetti, who died this past weekend at the age of ninety-two, was then only twenty-eight years old—she’d recently moved to England from her native Italy, and first gotten work as a potato picker. Later that year, her second film, Together—which follows two deaf-mutes through the bomb-wrecked streets of London’s East End, or as Mazzetti described it, “fields of ruins overrun by children”—would win the Prix de Recherche at Cannes Film Festival. Her first film, K (1954), “suggested by” Kafka’s Metamorphosis and made on the most shoestring of budgets while she was a student at the Slade School of Art, anticipated the Free Cinema movement, and her signature appears first on the manifesto. And yet today she’s the least commemorated of the four, and her name is often little more than a footnote to the group’s history.
Saturday Lunch with the Brownings By Penelope Mortimer
Re-Covered: Saturday Lunch with the Brownings
In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, the 1960 short-story collection by British writer Penelope Mortimer, carries a note of gratitude to the editor of The New Yorker, “in whose columns the majority of these stories first appeared.” Three years earlier, Mortimer had signed a contract with the magazine for six stories a year, after which she provided them with what she describes as a “steady stream” of pieces drawn from her day-to-day experience. “There was no need to look for ideas,” she explains in About Time Too (1993), her second volume of memoirs. “I mined my life for incidents with a beginning, a middle and an end, finding even the dreariest days contained nuggets of irony, farce, unpredictable behaviour.” Mortimer—who, by the time she died, at the age of eighty-one in 1999, had published nine novels, one short-story collection, two volumes of memoir, a biography of the Queen Mother, screenplays, and an abundant body of journalism—drew more heavily on her lived experience than most, not least because it proved such a reliable source of creative stimulus. “None of the stories could accurately be described as fiction,” she goes on to confess in About Time Too; “the moment I fabricated or attempted to get away from direct experience The New Yorker regretfully turned it down.”
Inez Holden’s There’s No Story There /
CANADIAN MUNITIONS WORKER DURING WORLD WAR II
Re-Covered: From Bright Young Thing to Wartime Socialist
In her column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. This month, she looks at Inez Holden’s There’s No Story There.
In the late twenties, London’s Bright Young People were on a mission to ensure that each of their many parties was more opulent and riotous than the last. At the “Impersonation Party,” for example, guests were asked to come dressed as well-known personalities. “London’s Bright Young People have broken out again,” announced the Daily Express in July 1927, reporting on the soiree. “The treasure hunt being passéand the uninvited guest already démodé, there has been much hard thinking to find the next sensation. It was achieved last night at a dance given by Captain Neil McEachran at his Brook Street House.” There’s a famous group portrait from the evening that serves, according to the biographer D. J. Taylor, as “a kind of Bright Young Person’s symposium.” It includes the brightest of them all, the socialite Stephen Tennant; his hedonistic partner in crime, Elizabeth Ponsonby; the photographer Cecil Beaton; the writer and aesthete Harold Acton; Georgia Sitwell; and the American actress Tallulah Bankhead. Despite the obvious visual draws of the scene—Ponsonby’s wig, Sitwell’s false nose, Tennant elaborately dressed as Queen Marie of Romania—one can’t help but be intrigued by the beautiful young woman wearing a Breton top in the very middle of the tableau. Her name was Inez Holden.
Friday, July 26, 2024
The Orlando Trilogy by Isabel Colegate / Review by Lucy
Re-Covered: The Orlando Trilogy
In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
The Orlando Trilogy—which has just been reissued in the UK by Bloomsbury (under the title Orlando King)—is British novelist Isabel Colegate’s masterwork about personal, political, and public mythmaking. Colegate takes the scaffolding for her tale from Sophocles’s Theban plays. Her Oedipus Rex is Orlando King, a young man who scales the greasy pole of power and privilege in the thirties. “We know the story of course, so nothing need be withheld,” she writes on the opening page. “We choose a situation in the drama to expose a theme: passing curiosity must look elsewhere, we are here profoundly to contemplate eternal truths. With ritual, like the Greeks. With dreams, like Freud. Let us pray.” The trilogy spans the middle of the twentieth century. By the end of the thirties, Orlando is a wealthy businessman and respected politician; he’s also inadvertently killed his biological father and married the dead man’s widow, and she has borne him his beloved daughter, Agatha. But the Second World War brings with it our hero’s downfall. Agatha, like Antigone before her, stumbles around in the wreckage—that of both the wider nation and her individual family—and finds herself forced to choose between her country and her kin.
The Tree and the Vine by Dola de Jong
More Than Just a Lesbian Love Story
In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
“Shameless” and “unpublishable”—this was the reaction of her publishers when the Dutch writer Dola de Jong first submitted her novel The Tree and the Vine (De Thuiswacht) in 1950. Four years later, it made it into print, thanks in large part to the backing of prominent literary figures such as the Dutch poet Leo Vroman and the Belgian writer Marnix Gijsen, both European exiles living in America (as was de Jong by this point in her life). She also had the support of renowned New York editor Maxwell Perkins, the man who’d discovered both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and who’d published de Jong’s And the Field is the World (1945), the story of a young Jewish couple who flee the Netherlands for Morocco on the eve of the Second World War.
To the One I Love the Best by Ludwig Bemelmans
Re-Covered: To the One I Love the Best
In her monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
“She weighed about ninety pounds without her jewels, and when I met her she was ninety years old.” So Ludwig Bemelmans’s introduces Lady Mendl, Elsie de Wolfe in his 1955 memoir To the One I Love the Best. De Wolfe seems almost too eccentric to be true, a “wonderful living objet d’art,” her “crepy throat” festooned with jewels and her “arthritic hands” encased in her trademark spotless white gloves. Bemelmans—a celebrated illustrator and writer—first encountered de Wolfe in Los Angeles in 1945, a city in which they’re each more unmoored than most. He’d been working for MGM but the “elegant world of Hollywood” had left him feeling jaded, longing to take to the road as an “itinerant painter,” while de Wolfe had been living out the war in Beverley Hills after having fled her beloved Villa Trianon in France.
The World My Wilderness by Lucy Macaulay
Re-Covered: The World My Wilderness
In her new monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print books that shouldn’t be.
Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) was one of the most prolific English writers of the first half of the twentieth century. She published twenty-three novels, twelve nonfiction volumes, and an abundance of journalism. I could make a case for the republication of any number of her novels, especially since the only one currently in print in the U.S. is The Towers of Trebizond (1956). Perhaps Potterism (1920), an entertaining, if now slightly dated, murder mystery that satirizes tabloid journalism—it was a best seller in both England and America. Or the intriguingly titled Told by an Idiot (1923), one of Macaulay’s most successful novels of ideas, in this case the examination—via three generations of one family—of sexual politics. Maybe Crew Train (1926), which tells the story of Denham Dobie, a young woman trying to adapt to life with her highbrow London relatives, and skewers the pretensions of the literary establishment. But of all Macaulay’s books, it’s one written much later that we most need to reread today: her penultimate novel, The World My Wilderness (1950), an elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of World War II.
In the Ditch by Buchi Emecheta / Review by Lucy Scholas
Re-Covered: In the Ditch
In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print books that shouldn’t be.
“Who will be interested in reading the life of an unfortunate black woman who seemed to be making a mess of her life?” This was the question Buchi Emecheta asked herself in the early seventies before she began writing what would become her first published novel: In the Ditch (1972). Closely based on Emecheta’s own life, it’s the story of Adah (the author’s fictional alter ego), a young Nigerian single mother living on a London council estate. Like the other “problem” families around her, Adah’s doing her very best, but life is a daily struggle. Unable to work because there’s no one else to look after her children, she’s entirely dependent on the welfare state. There’s never enough money to make ends meet, and the apartment block she lives in is a site of almost Dickensian squalor: the stairwells are “smelly with a thick lavatorial stink,” the trash chutes are blocked and overflowing, and the apartments themselves are damp and poorly heated, the cupboards all “carpeted” with mildew. It’s a world rarely brought to life on the page with the candor and intensity of firsthand experience. “She, an African woman with five children and no husband, no job, and no future, was just like most of her neighbours—shiftless, rootless, with no rightful claim to anything. Just cut off … none of them knew the beginning of their existence, the reason for their hand-to-mouth existence, or the result or future of that existence. All would stay in the ditch until somebody pulled them out or they sank under.”
Thursday, July 25, 2024
The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble / Review by Lucy
Re-Covered: Margaret Drabble’s 1977 Brexit Novel
Margaret Drabble is so well known that seeing her included in this column might confuse some readers. Writing in the New York Times only two years ago, when Drabble’s most recent novel, The Dark Flood Rises, was published, Cynthia Ozick described the then seventy-eight-year-old as “one of Britain’s most dazzling writers,” and the work in question—Drabble’s nineteenth novel—as “humane and masterly.” In her sort-of memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet, Drabble describes writing as a “chronic, incurable illness,” one she caught “by default when I was twenty-one”; her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, was published three years later when she was only twenty-four. And yet, though she herself is not forgotten, certain of her works have fallen out of print. Perhaps it’s inevitable that in a career as long as hers, some of what she’s written would, despite its brilliance, have slipped through the cracks.
Not So Quiet by Evadne Price / Review by Lucy Scholes
Re-Covered: Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War
In her new monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
Lucy Scholes / Hijastras de la guerra
When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front, by the German World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque, became an international best seller. The blackly brutal account of life in the trenches touched a nerve with readers who were still reeling from the aftershocks of the Great War. Hoping to cash in on some of Remarque’s success, the following year Albert E. Marriott, an enterprising London-based publisher who was new on the scene, approached the children’s writer and journalist Evadne Price and asked whether she’d be willing to write a spoof response about women at war. He had in mind a title—“All Quaint on the Western Front”—and a pen name for her, Erica Remarks. Price had a talent for pastiche—she was the author of a popular series of girls’ stories that mimicked Richmal Crompton’s hugely successful Just William books—but she had no intention of making light of such a serious subject. Instead, she offered to write a realistic account of a woman’s experience in Flanders.
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
W-3 by Bette Howland / A review by Lucy Scholes
RE-COVERED
In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
When I began writing this column two years ago, I initially restricted myself to discussing only titles that were out of print. But over the past year, as publishers continue to increase their efforts to resurrect lost classics, I’ve begun including pieces about previously neglected books that have been rediscovered and repackaged for a new generation. There are many success stories: the unexpected triumph of the Vintage Classics edition of John Williams’s Stoner, a book that sold less than two thousand copies when it was first published in 1965 before falling swiftly out of print, but as a reprint went on to become the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2013; or Lucia Berlin’s unforeseen posthumous literary stardom in 2015 after her selected short stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (edited by Stephen Emerson for Farrar, Straus and Giroux), became a New York Times best seller. But there’s no more interesting tale of neglect and rediscovery than that of Bette Howland.
Thursday, June 27, 2024
A Time & A Time / A Blisteringly Honest Lesbian Suicide Memoir
PHOTO: LUCY SCHOLES
Re-Covered: A Blisteringly Honest Lesbian Suicide Memoir
In her monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t
In April 1962, after a day of sailing in Dorset, the fifty-year-old English writer and teacher Rosemary Manning got into her car and drove inland, up a long river valley and into the chalk country of the South Downs. She stopped briefly, to eat some biscuits and two bananas and to post a letter to a solicitor acquaintance in London, after which she continued up a deserted track. Parking her car under some trees, she took a short walk in the moonlight before burning a stash of personal letters. Manning then climbed back into her car, locked the doors and poured herself a whisky, which she washed down with over seventy sleeping tablets. Waiting for the drugs to take effect, she began to read T. H. White’s The Goshawk, but after about twenty minutes she became worried that the car’s interior light shining in the otherwise pitch-black night might attract unwanted attention. She switched it off and settled back in her seat, and, “with the suddenness of a tropical night, blackness overwhelmed me.”
Thursday, January 4, 2024
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami, book review / The unassuming quietness of these stories
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami, book review: The unassuming quietness of these stories doesn’t mean they don’t hit home with when they need to
A new collection of short stories by Murakami explore the lives of men who find themselves alone
Lucy Scholes
Wednesday 17 May 2017 16:21 BST
I have something of a love/hate relationship with short stories. Too many mediocre offerings leave me despairing of the genre, but then a collection like Men Without Women comes along and all is forgiven, my faith restored in the recognition of how utterly perfect the medium can be – in the right hands.
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
Tove Ditlevsen / A Danish Genius of Madness
Re-Covered: A Danish
Genius of Madness
In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
Lucy Scholes
December 9, 2020
It was the Danish writer Dorthe Nors who first introduced me to the work of her countrywoman, the poet, novelist, and memoirist Tove Ditlevsen. This was in spring 2018, when I was commissioning features for the first issue of The Second Shelf: Rare Books and Words by Women, the rare books catalogue–cum–literary magazine of which I’m the managing editor. “She is loved by generations of women and put down by generations of men,” Nors wrote in an email. “She was also nuts and quite extraordinary in her personal life. Many men, drug addictions, often submitted to mental institutions, and LOVED by women readers. I mean: LOVED!”
FSG’S FORTHCOMING EDITION OF THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY.
This was more than enough to intrigue me, but Nors’s finished piece, “The Suicide of Tove Ditlevsen,” only left me all the more fascinated. In it, Nors describes Ditlevsen—who was born in Vesterbro, a working-class district in Copenhagen, in 1917, and killed herself at age fifty-eight in 1976, after many years battling depression and addiction—as “the Billie Holiday of poetry, accessible, complex, and simple all at the same time. There’s a special mournful sweetness in the earlier poems that belongs to the girlish. Later, her prose turned the dreams and disappointments of life as a woman inside out.”
Saturday, March 7, 2020
The Peripatetic Penelope Fitzgerald
| Penelope Fitzgerald |
The Peripatetic Penelope Fitzgerald
The 100 best novels / No 95 / The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
Lucy Scholes
Lucy Scholes on the highs, lows and package tours of Booker-prize-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald. ‘Fitzgerald’s life can only be attributed to the caprices of fate.’
When Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker for Offshore in 1979, she spent the prize money on a trip to New York for herself, her daughter Tina, and Tina’s husband Terence Dooley (Fitzgerald’s future literary executor). It wasn’t the no-expense-spared jaunt of a lifetime one might assume an unexpected, sixty-three-year-old recipient of the world’s foremost literary prize would take, but rather a package holiday, flights and hotel included.
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