What I read in April
Wishing I was at the Miu Miu Lit Club
Hello!
Books
On The Calculation of Volume II, by Solvej Balle
I did not do a very good job of ekeing out part II, unsurprisingly. Potentially light spoilers ahead, but with seven parts in this series, I imagine you’ll not be expecting Tara to have escaped her November day just yet.
Throughout the majority of part II, she’s travelling to create a sense of seasons — south for warmer weather to remind herself of spring and summer, and then back north to travel back towards winter. As she goes, she’s recording places in her notebook, keeping track of guesthouses and people she meets. She meets a meteorologist, hugely helpful in her weather-driven journeying, and she seems - for the most part - to have stopped expecting to wake up on November 19th.
Part II ends of, I think, a bigger cliffhanger than part I, and now I have to wait until (did you guess??) November for the next part. Boo.
The Door, Magda Szabó
I picked this up in Melbourne when I was there in February, based purely on the cover. Originally published in Hungarian in 1987, it was translated in 1995 by Stefan Draughon, and again in 2005 by Len Rix, so I am very late to the party.
It follows the relationship between a woman and her housekeeper Emerence, over the course of twenty-ish years. Just before the start of the book, the woman and her husband, both writers, have had a ban on their work lifted (similarly to Szabó herself), and they are back to their respective careers, and so, are now in need of a housekeeper. Slowly, Emerence — an astonishing, constantly surprising woman — takes over the house she cleans and cooks for, keeping the narrator and her husband fed and well, and becomes the central focus of the narrator’s life. Emerence knows everything about everyone, and has many families dividing her attention as housekeeper, laundress, snow-shoveller, babysitter, dog-trainer, and friend. She comes and goes without any fixed hours, but somehow, everything is always done; Emerence has anticipated the needs of everyone around her. She’s a mysterious character, giving away only tiny snippets of herself over a long period of time, and telling slightly different stories to everyone she trusts, so no one has the full picture of her.
It’s a strange book. It opens with a dream, and then it recounts of the everyday lives of those in the house — presumably leading up to the dream — and the comings and goings of the people they interact with in their small Hungarian village. As much as Emerence is mysterious, the narrator, too, remains elusive throughout the book. We learn almost nothing about her marriage, despite being inside it for the duration of the novel. We never know what strange and debilitating illnesses her husband suffers from; we never see any of their history, or really, any of their interactions. The woman is slow to realise how reliant she is on Emerence, but their relationship takes on a peculiar codependency, cemented when the narrator and her husband adopt a dog, and it attaches itself firmly to Emerence,1 and then again, when Emerence reveals the details of her will.
And yet. It’s also a fascinating character study, somehow a page-turner. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time.
Also: bell hooks’ feminist theory: from margin to center, Eileen Myles’ A “Working” Life, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights for May’s buddy read!
Online reads
Honestly I’m obsessed with Miu Miu’s Literary Club - this year’s theme was A Woman’s Education, reading the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Fumiko Enchi.
I read this a long time ago, but it’s always worth a re-read: bell hooks’ Women Artists: The Creative Process:
Jeff Bridges does morning pages.
I’ve got quite a big reading backlog for next month, starting with new Catherine Lacey(!!!) How about you?
Terri-Jane x
A note here, that poor Viola is not dealt an easy hand from his acquired master. His beatings from Emerence are numerous and a bit off-putting. He’s not real, but it’s still an ick. Be warned!
This post finally made me crack and order On The Calculation of Volume I!