I read five
books in May.
Read on Kindle
for book group. Set around the movement for women’s suffrage in Scotland and
the hard core of militant Scottish suffragettes prepared to fight for
the vote with any weapon to hand, it’s mainly the story of Donella and her
troubled marriage to a doctor who has been force-feeding suffragettes in
prison. The descriptions of force-feeding are not for the squeamish … but this
is brilliantly written with some great characters.
If you have
never read Elaine Dundy’s first and most famous book The Dud Avocado, then I would urge you to – it’s a treat. The
heroine of The Old Man and Me is as
quirkily individual as Sally Jay Gorce (‘hellbent on living’) in TDA, but while Sally Jay was an American
girl in Paris in the 1950s, Betsy Lou Saegessor is in London in the swinging
60s.
Her pursuit of the ‘old man’, the reclusive rich Englishman C D McKee
(‘fat and ugly – but boy is he sexy’), has a very ulterior motive, stemming
from her troubled childhood. Their relationship is sparky – great dialogue –
and believable and Betsy Lou tells her first-person story in a most original
style. ‘There isn’t a dull line in it,’ P G Wodehouse, no less, said in a
review.
But how can C D McKee be an 'old man' when he's younger than I am ... ?? That's one perspective that means that for me the book hasn’t
stood the test of time as well as the The
Dud Avocado. Or perhaps it's because C D has more health problems than
you’d expect a man in his mid-fifties to have now (the book was first published
in 1963; my copy is in the Virago Modern Classics series); or maybe it’s the
swinging 60s thing that make it seem a period piece. But I’d still recommend it
for the brilliance of Elaine Dundy’s writing and because as Jilly Cooper says
of this edition it is ‘a gloriously funny novel … ’
I read an extract from this online somewhere and thought his
writing was wonderful. He’s best known for his biographies of literary greats
(none of which I’ve read) but this is an autobiography.
Tolstoy’s famous quote ‘All
happy families
are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way' was never more apt than in Michael Holroyd’s case. When his parents
died in the 1980s he felt the need to find out more about them and their
immediate ancestors. His father and his mother had each been married and divorced three
times and young Michael spent a lot of time with his father’s family, the only
child in an eccentric and often very unhappy household.
He’s very amusing about his own perceived
shortcomings and accident prone-ness. Once, when he was an articled clerk for a
solicitor, he was spending a boring afternoon in court and somehow managed to unleash (fortunately tepid) water from a radiator over some witnesses.
Loved it.
First of this year’s haul from Christian Aid.
Published in 1999, it’s about four friends, now aged thirty-five, who met at
university and are planning a big party for the millennium. Didn’t really take
to it, unfortunately. There were so many viewpoints, not just those of the four
friends, that it wasn’t ‘Katherine’s’ story any more than anyone else’s. It was
all like looking through a glass darkly – if there was something interesting
happening in there I couldn’t make it out.
This Robert guy – he can write. I loved the
first book in this series, Cuckoo’s Calling, and the second, Silkworm,
but this one is even better; what a joy to know that s/he’s planning another
four. Slightly disturbed though to read that there’s going to be a TV series – who
will be cast as Cormoran and Robin??
