Susan Hill's Woman in Black

They had chided me with being a spoil-sport, tried to encourage me to tell them the one ghost story I must surely, like any other man, have it in me to tell. And they were right. Yes, I had a story, a true story, a story of haunting and evil, fear and confusion. But it was not a story told for casual entertainment, around a fireside upon Christmas Eve.

Susan Hill's The Woman in Black opens on Christmas Eve, a holiday when death, darkness, and the grotesque are furthest from the mind. (I'm not familiar with British Christmas rituals but telling ghosts stories seemed very odd. Maybe I'm just being Americentric?) The time of year for that stuff is October and the celebration of Halloween, which I remember one of my English professors discussing in a lecture analyzing Euripedes's The Bacchae. Many cultures, he said, have a holiday set aside as a time for release and liberation, when people can behave in ways they usually don't. (Another example would be Mardi Gras.) Christmas, by contrast, is a season for giving and politeness, when the dark or unsavory side of things comes up only as a problem to be solved through kindness and generosity. Something evil or frightening that appears in December is an intrusion, like the encroachment of the dead into the world of the living.

The Woman in Black is the story of one such a disturbance, not only between ghosts and humans, past and present, but also between fiction and reality. Arthur Kipp, who narrates the tale retroactively in old age, is a brash, young attorney who has been sent by his firm to organize the estate of the late Alice Drablow, a widow who had lived alone in Eel Marsh House, isolated out on a swampy causeway. The place is rumored to be haunted by a "woman in black," whose appearance always foretells the death of one of the town children. Kipp believes none of this, naturally. I had "the Londoner's sense of superiority in those days," he admits, further confessing to viewing the townsfolk as simple bumpkins who had unfairly demonized Mrs. Drablow.

Doubtless, in a place such as this, with its eerie marshes, sudden fogs, moaning winds and lonely houses, any poor old woman might be looked at askance; once upon a time, after all, she might have been branded as a witch and local legends and tales were still abroad and some extravagant folklore still half-believed in.

It actually sounds too good to be true: ghosts in this place? Huh, who would've guessed?

At first glance, Susan Hill seems remarkably unoriginal, but that was probably the point. The Woman in Black is a self-conscious ghost story (beginning with the title), akin to how Scream was metafictional satire. Arthur Kipps, in his attempts to understand the mystery of "the woman with the wasted face" and Eel Marsh House, constantly refers back to the fictional genre of the ghost story and, to a lesser extent, Gothic/romantic suspense. He notices, for example, how the wraithlike "woman in black" does and does not exhibit features typically associated with ghosts (she wears old-fashioned clothing but appears solid). He recognizes the abandoned graveyard and monastic ruins next to Eel Marsh House as having a clichéd Romantic ambiance and being precisely the kind of place where some Edgar Allen Poe type would enjoy sitting and composing "cloying sad verse." There is even a nod to "the madwoman in the attic," a timeworn Gothic trope used most famously in Jane Eyre.

Like Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game, Susan Hill's The Woman in Black functions on two levels: as an entertaining story and as a play on genre. I wonder if years of ghost/Gothic/horror novels and films have severely dampened our ability to come out with a ghost/Gothic/horror story that takes itself seriously and doesn't seem too much like fiction come to life. But I think the familiar elements of the genre have true staying power, and The Woman in Black is a great example of a tale that's been told yet still has the potential to thrill and delight.

The weirdest thing happened while I was reading this book. I got it from the library and it looks like the last time it was checked out was May 19, 1992. Anyway, a perfectly preserved maple leaf just fell out from between the pages! It actually freaked me out! Wonder where it came from? Was it put there deliberately?

This Book and I Could Be Friends

Envelope, please...

And the winner is (by a hair) The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.  Happy reading.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

I've been asked to select some titles for the next Slaves of Golconda. At first I hadn't the ghost of an idea. I mean, it really was murder coming up with a theme. It was a devil of an assignment that haunted me. I think you now get the drift.

Autumn is here at last. The nights are growing cooler and soon leaves will turn their most brilliant hues - their last hurrah before...Death. Why do we love to be frightened? In what was my most recurrent nightmare, I was being chased by a frightful, demonic figure. As I tried to flee, my feet became leaden and I slogged forward knowing that right behind me breathed a beast. I was always just outside his reach. And then one night I discovered that I could run as fast as the wind with one...big...catch. I had to turn around and run backwards, thereby forcing myself to face the creature that roared and raged, ready to devour me. The nightmare never returned after that night. I had learned to face my fear, and by facing it I had defeated it. Perhaps that is why stories of mystery and suspense, of ghosties and ghoulies and monsters under the bed hold a certain goose-pimply charm for us. So, in honor of Halloween (my favorite holiday) I thought a little mystery, murder, mayhem or "things that go bump in the night" might be in order. Follow me....if...you...dare!

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THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD by Agatha Christie

First published in 1926, and considered to be one of Christie's most controversial mysteries, the Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks all the rules of traditional mystery writing. A widow's suicide has stirred rumors of blackmail, and of a secret lover named Roger Ackroyd, who was found stabbed to death in his study. The case is so unconventional that not even renowned detective Hercule Poirot has a clue how to solve it. For many Agatha Christie fans, this was her masterpiece.

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THE MALTESE FALCON by Dasheill Hammett

The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel - one of the best ever written. It is also a brilliant literary work, as well as a thriller, a love story, and a dark, dry comedy.

It involves a treasure worth killing for, Sam Spade - a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, a perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammet's coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers. (from Google books).

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THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Published in 1886, this is one of the best known of Stevenson's novels. It concerns the way in which an individual is made up of contrary emotions and desires: some good and some evil. Through the curiousity of Utterson, a lawyer, we learn of the ugly and violent Mr. Hyde and his odd connection to the respectable Dr. Jekyll. A brutal murder is committed. The victim is one of Utterson's clients, and the murder weapon a cane which Utterson had given to Dr. Jeykill. And so, the lawyer becomes entangled in the strange world of the physician who has created a drug that separates the good in human nature from the evil - and the despicable Mr. Hyde.

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THE WOMAN IN BLACK by Susan Hill

Set on the English moor, on an isolated cause-way, at a mansion in the bleak, flat wetlands - with no neighbors in sight, the story stars an up-and-coming young solicitor who sets out to settle the estate of Mrs. Drablow. Routine affiars quickly give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister than any nightmare.

Often compared to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, the book starts peacefully and builds to a frightening crescendo that, according to one reviewer on Amazon, "will haunt" you."

Are you game to take a sojourn (perhaps foolishly) into Eel Marsh House? What awaits you there? If you do, will you ever be the same? (I'm getting all spine-tingly just thinking about it.)

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Happy Halloween! Oh, I haven't learned how to link yet - but you can always Google.  Shall we try for October 29th to begin the discussion rather than Halloween?  After all, we might want to dabble in spirits of another sort on the 31st!!

Small Town Dreaming

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'It was amazing about girls, how lofty and complacent they became when they got out in public with a man – any man – while a fellow shrank and felt ridiculous and prayed for the ordeal to end. It was amazing about women anyway, Grace over there, snickering behind her hand and Jen, stony-faced, remote, and Nettie, bending over his knes to pick up a handkerchief, fussing around in her seat, brushing her ankles against his and then hastily drawing them back, pressing her plump arms against him, then moving primly away.... God, how he hated the whole lot of them, Morry thought, the way they knew how to make a man squirm from old Mrs Delaney on down to the littlest girl. It was their function in life, making men feel clumsy and stupid, that was all they ever wanted to accomplish....'

Dawn Powell's novel, Dance Night, is concerned with various forms of rancour. Set in Ohio, in a small town sprung up around the dominant factory, it assembles a cast of naturally disadvantaged folk, adolescents, orphans, neglected wives, desperate young women and a whole lot of men who are obliged to live with the death or gradual decline of their ambitions. Everyone would get out if they could, if they had the money, or the education or the courage to do so. The railway bisects the town and the continuous thunder of the carriages is a temptation and a taunt that ultimately dies away into distant dreams. And so the inhabitants of Lamptown carry on with their diminished hopes and unruly desires, trying to squeeze what life they can out of small town claustrophobia. Smoking, drinking and doomed relationships take centre stage, with all excitement focused on the Thursday nights at the casino, where the dance master, Mr Fischer, offers classes and acts as master of ceremonies.

This is fundamentally the story of Morry Abbot, the most awkward, ungainly and emotionally disadvantaged of them all. He's a young man from a dysfunctional family in a novel that doesn't know of any other kind. His mother, the milliner of the Bon Ton hat shop, he loves, and Elsinore, in her absent, empty way is fond of him, too. But her hands-off care is no counterbalance to his father's ugly scorn. Charles Abbot is no good, a travelling salesman with a woman in every town, he returns to his family ever few months to exercise his demonic power over them. He sends a message in advance 'The Candy Man will visit you', as a threat rather than a promise. Elsinore loathes her husband and has fallen into a deep and all-consuming fantasy about Mr Fischer that keeps her locked inside her own head for most of the time. Nettie is the vicious young woman who also works in the store, and who acts like the worst kind of younger sibling to Morry, telling tales on him, ruthlessly pointing out his faults, demanding his punishment from his parents. Small wonder, then, that Morry wants out. He has a head full of romantic ambitions about becoming rich and famous and a disquieting yet compelling relationship with the young orphan girl, Jen St. Clair, who lives over the way. He's attracted to Jen because of her native courage and determination. And the worshipful audience she pays him makes him believe that one day he might amount to something.

If there's a dominant theme of the novel it's the quest for love in a strata of society depicted as being emotionally crippled. It begs the question of whether love is directly influenced by freedom, optimism, hope, potential. In the absence of these things, when self-love isn't a viable goal for many of the novel's inhabitants, love becomes something else altogether; competitiveness, lust, the engagement of fascinated hatred. There's a curious quirk that emerges time and again in Powell's characters, whose behaviour becomes a negative blueprint for the thing they think they want. In this way the extravagance of Morry's dreams match the intolerable constraint he suffers under, just as Nettie's endless carping is an expression of her desire for Morry, and Elsinore's fantasies about Fischer are there to balance out her horror of her husband. The drive for life repeatedly implodes in the protagonists of Dance Night, mutating into some dark, twisted alternative.

Whilst this may sound a sad or unappealing tale, it isn't like that at all. Powell writes exquisitely, and the ruinous landscape of Lamptown is transformed in her hands into constant action and vitality and a rich, evocative sensuality. Those nights at the dance hall are glittering jewels strung across the narrative, with the taut thrum of desire acting as the wire that holds them together. The novel shows how even under the most reduced circumstances, people find ways to thrive and to flourish, how even prisons of the soul provide security and stability and dependable company. And besides, if the inhabitants of Lamptown were free to act as they wish, they wouldn't have their dreams; if there's one thing this story insists upon, it's the power of dreams to keep us motivated, patient and hopeful.

I very much enjoyed this book, but was intrigued to find, yet again, another episodic narrative. Not a great deal happens in the novel, even though there's a death, several couplings and friendships broken and made. It's strange, the sensation of stasis that dominates, but perhaps it's a consequence of Lamptown being itself the most important character in the story. Lamptown may grow and even become prosperous, but there's no sense that it will change or develop; it won't be anything more than a one dimensional working class town that invites its inhabitants to dream and desire, to graft and to wish, and to never grow up. I was going to write a whole lot more about episodic narratives, as I've been thinking about this a lot, but I've run out of space here. So I'll devote the next post to it. In any case, I'll be seeking out more of Dawn Powell's work. Apparently her later novels are satires, and I can imagine her darkly amused voice working well in that context. Thanks to the Slaves (where you'll find several more reviews of this novel) for bringing another fine author to my attention.

Dance Night

Dawn Powell's 1930 novel Dance Night has me thinking about what it would be like to live in a small town with very little education, very few job opportunities, and only vague ideas about what life is like in other places. The characters in the novel go to the movies regularly, but other than that, the chief source of information they have about the world outside their town comes from traveling salespeople and a dancing master, and the reach of these people is very small. The people who travel the farthest and would therefore have the most information are also the book's most despicable characters. So everyone else is left with vague dreams and a strong pull to stay right where they are, doing the things their parents did.

Dance Night tells the story of Morry Abbott, a young man who is trying to figure out what he wants to make of his life. He lives with his mother behind the millinery shop she owns where he feels increasingly uncomfortable with the overwhelming femininity of the place. He is trying to find his way into the masculine worlds of the factory and the bar, but his youth and inexperience leave him uncertain and embarrassed. The novel also tells the story of Jen, a 14-year-old who has been abandoned by her mother and taken in by a local family. She feels isolated and alone and misses her younger sister, left behind in an orphanage. She turns to Morry for some companionship, and he is drawn to her, attracted by her hero-worship, but also repelled by her obvious neediness.

What has stayed with me about the book is all the unhappiness and the longing and the misunderstandings that haunt just about every character. Morry doesn't know what to make of the young women who surround him who make fun of him but also, very confusingly, flirt with him. Morry's mother is married to a man who is hardly ever home, but who makes her life miserable when he is. She is also desperately in love with the dancing master, who is hardly aware of her presence. The mother's friend is having an affair. Her assistant torments Morry but also wants to be seen with him. The most important man about town, the one with all the money and property, moves through a series of superficial relationships. No one, it seems, is content, and nobody has much of an idea of what to do about it.

The townspeople do have one outlet -- their weekly dance night, which begins with a dancing lesson, followed by the dance itself. Everyone, from old to young, looks forward to these evenings as a time to bring some lightness into their lives, but enjoyable as they are, they are also scenes of sexual competition and jealousy.

And there is also the problem of work. Morry gets a job in the factory and feels proud of himself for a while, but before too long he sees how builders are developing the town, has his own ideas of what kind of houses the town needs, and joins forces with a local architect to try to make his dream houses a reality. He becomes a big man about town himself, making plans and talking them up to the townspeople, shuttling about from person to person trying to make things happen. All this is immensely satisfying for a while, but it's also precarious and uncertain, and for all Morry knows, it could collapse on him.

Morry senses that his world is changing and that there are opportunities out there -- opportunities that could transform his life, if only he could get a proper hold on them. It's a place where hard work and industry and vision can take him places, but he just can't quite seem to make things work for him. His friend Jen is also full of dreams; she wants to sing and dance on stage and to live a busy and exciting life in some big city. But the problem, again, is how to make it happen. How can these people escape?

The picture Powell paints of a small town in changing and uncertain times is a grim one, but the portrait seems so real and the characters are so compelling that the book is a fascinating read. It makes me very glad I'm fortunate enough to live in an entirely place and time. Of course, we have our own uncertain times to deal with, but I think for a lot of people, it's become easier to imagine a way out of claustrophic small towns.

Dance Night by Dawn Powell

I have a picture in my mind of what Depression era America must have been like, no doubt aided by Dorothea Lange's famous documentary photographs of the period. Dusty dry towns awash in shades of brown, people with little money and few opportunities. If Dorothea Lange has given me the visuals, then Dawn Powell has given me the words. Dance Night's Lamptown, Ohio is as drab and dreary as any town that Lange may have photographed, and Powell has captured the small town claustrophobia of it in the days just before the Depression.

"But Lamptown! All railroad tracks and factory warehouses and for a
park nothing but clover fields with big signs every few yards."

"Rows of gray frame factory boarding houses on dusty roads in the east
and to the west the narrow noisy Market Street--choose your home between these
two sections."

Lamptown isn't so much a place to settle down in as a place to get out of, and most of the characters in Dance Night dream of bigger and more exciting lives elsewhere (elsewhere usually being NYC) but are caught in their tiny, oppressive lives with little chance of anything more than dreams. Dance Night centers around Morry Abbott, a young man on the cusp of adulthood who lives with his mother, Elsinore, above the Bon Ton Hat Shop that she owns. Morry's father Charles is mostly absent, which is actually a blessing in disguise as he's resentful of his son and jealous of perceived indiscretions of Elsinore. If thoughts are sins, she might be guilty, but he's mostly off the mark. He spends most of the year on the road as a traveling candy salesman, which is an ironic job for a man as disagreeable as he is. Postcards with the message "the candy man will visit you on..." mark his impending visits and are dreaded by both mother and son.

Morry spends much of his time alone in his room reading adventure stories or across the way with Jen St. Clair, an orphan, who's been adopted by the Delaneys, less for altruistic reasons than as an extra pair of hands to help with the housework. Mrs. Delaney's son runs the local bar and billiard room. Several years younger than Morry, Jen looks up to and admires him and eventually will fall in love with him. Time and again, however, Morry is run off by Mrs. Delaney who thinks of him as a good for nothing only out to ruin a nice, young girl, which in turn makes Morry angry with Jen. It's Jen's optimism and their mutual wish to escape that always brings him back. Her plans are always grand and she seems set to achieve them, the first being to get her younger sister out of the same orphanage from which she was adopted.

Morry is a senstive youth who feels a closeness to his mother that isn't always reciprocated. Elsinore has her own problems that she's always wrapped up in and will often gaze past her son as if he's not even there. He's not like other young men in Lamptown and often his intentions are misunderstood. He has ambitions, but it's always through the impetus of others that he's spurred in to action--from getting a job at one of the local factories to romantic liaisons. His dreams are always bigger and more accessible when they can be bounced off Jen, who always murmurs appreciation for them. He becomes more significant in not only her eyes but his own. Their romantic fumblings come to little yet he's unhappy when other men show her attention. They have a complicated relationship, but their lives are intertwined almost without each realizing how much.

Dance night refers to the weekly Thursday night dances held at the Casino Dance Hall complete with orchestra and handsome dance instructor who goes from town to town leading the dancers and giving lessons. It's the week's highlight for the town's residents who have little else in the way of entertainment. Things are beginning to boom for the little town of Lamptown, a town built around the railroad and filled with factories that employ most of the population. As outsiders come in to invest in the factories and in real estate, Morry becomes involved with a local architect. His grand plan involves building luxury homes for the wealthy who will settle in Lamptown and turn it into a first class town, but outside investors seem content to put up cheap, slapdash housing each one like the next, because 'that's what people want'. When the architect sells out to the outside investors, Morry is crushed and realizes finally it's time to move on.

Dawn Powell's story is gritty and doleful yet never totally despairing, and it ends on what I felt was a note of optimism. The story is told in a series of vignettes, but it still progresses in a brisk pace with fully fleshed out characters who aren't in the least perfect, and full of foibles, at times annoying, yet are complex in their makeup and in their interactions with each other. Even the secondary characters are rounded and interesting--Nettie, who works in the Bon Ton Hat Shop and is meddlesome and nosy but always prim and proper otherwise. Or Mrs. Pepper the corsetiere who's involved in a clandestine affair with the dance instructor, a married man, whom she can't live without. Each character has their dreams and desires but you doubt they will ever make much of them.

I think Dawn Powell was a talented writer, and some of my favorite passages are filled with wonderful imagery of the trains passing through to more appealing destinations fueling Morry and Jen's desires to get out.

"Morry and Jen looked quickly at each other--this was the thing that always
bound them--trains hunting out unknown cities, convincing proof of
adventure far off, of destiny somewhere waiting, of things beyond
Lamptown."

Dawn Powell got out of Ohio and found adventure elsewhere. I like to think Morry and Jen did, too.

Cross posted at A Work in Progress

Reading Reminder!

Just a little reminder that the Slaves will be discussing Dawn Powell's Dance Night on Monday August 31. Feel free to post your thoughts here. I've already set up a new topic at the forum. Please join in the discussion whenever you have a chance.

If you are interested in joining the Slaves please leave a message in the comment area along with your email address. If you already have left a message and did not receive an email--I'm unable to see the email addresses in Blogger--you will need to leave it in the actual comment. I will send out an invite so you can post here, and you can easily register for the EditBoard forum--it just takes a few minutes. Thanks!

August Read: Dance Music

Dawn Powell's Dance Night it is. Discussion of the book will begin Monday August 31. Anyone is welcome to join in the discussion. If you're not currently part of the group but would like to join, please leave a note in the comment area (with your email address please) and an invite to post here on the Slaves Blog will be sent. Thanks!

Time again for a new book!

Iliana has asked me to select a few book choices to read next. I've been wanting to read more American authors this year, and I'm hoping these titles will be of interest to the Slaves as well. I had a hard time deciding--I wanted to choose books everyone would have access to and that were still in print. I also wanted to stick with early twentieth century women authors. I believe all these authors are respected but not much read these days. I had other authors in mind as well, but unfortunately some titles were out of print (or their books were simply too pricey). So I ended up with four choices:

Dorothy Canfield's The Home Maker

"Although this novel first appeared in 1924, it deals in an amazingly contemporary manner with the problems of a family in which both husband and wife are oppressed and frustrated by the roles that they are expected to play. Evangeline Knapp is the perfect, compulsive housekeeper, while her husband, Lester, is a poet and a dreamer. Suddenly, through a nearly fatal accident, their roles are reversed: Lester is confined to home in a wheelchair and his wife must work to support the family. The changes that take place between husband and wife, parents and children, are both fascinating and poignant. The characters are brought to life in a vivid, compelling way in a powerful novel more relevant now than when it was first published. The Home-Maker is one of those 'time lost' novels whose recovery will entertain and intrigue whole new generations of readers." Persephone Books has reissued this title, but there is also an inexpensive American edition available as well.

Edna Ferber's So Big

"Winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize, So Big is widely regarded as Edna Ferber's crowning achievement.A rollicking panorama of Chicago's high and low life, this stunning novel follows the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges."

This was made into a movie three different times.


Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes began as a series of short sketches published in Harper's Bazaar. Known as the 'Lorelei' stories, they were satires on the state of sexual relations that only vaguely alluded to sexual intimacy; the magazine's circulation quadrupled overnight. The heroine of the stories, Lorelei Lee, was a bold, ambitious flapper, who was much more concerned with collecting expensive baubles from her conquests than any marriage licenses, as well as being a shrewd woman of loose morals and high self-esteem. She was a practical young woman who had internalized the materialism of the United States in the 1920s and therefore equated culture with cold cash and tangible assets. The success of the short stories had the public clamoring for them in book form." It was a runaway bestseller. Even Edith Wharton called it 'the great American novel."

Dawn Powell's Dance Night

"Dance Night portrays working-class Lamptown, Ohio, at the turn of the century. It's a hardscrabble place, filled with bitter factory girls whose dreams are unattainable. Every Thursday is dance night at the Casino Dance Hall, where residents escape their workaday lives, if only for fleeting moments."

Powell's novels had been out of print, but she was championed by the likes of Gore Vidal and Tim Page. Vidal wrote that Powell was a "comic writer as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens." Powell considered Dance Night her best work. It is one of her earlier novels based on her childhood and adolescence in small town Ohio and is a coming of age tale. Her later novels set in Greenwich Village are more satirical. I had a hard time deciding which group to choose from.

I'll count votes on Friday June 19. If there are no objections, would it be okay to move discussion back to the end of the summer? Would August 31st work for everyone? None of the novels are more than 350 (most far fewer) pages. This would give everyone time to get the book and read it in a nice leisurely manner.

The Slaves of Solitude

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles.

I think I may be a new Patrick Hamilton fan. I found his novel The Slaves of Solitude (which is the latest Slaves of Golconda pick) really dark and sad, but in a satisfying kind of way, the kind of satisfaction you feel when you've faced something difficult head-on, without flinching. The picture the novel paints of life generally, but especially life during war-time, is of isolation, irritation, boredom, misunderstanding, and deprivation.

The novel tells the story of Miss Roach -- we learn in the middle of the novel that her name is Enid but the narrator never calls her this -- who is 39 and single and has moved from London to the outer reaches of the suburbs to escape the bombings of World War II. She lives in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a boarding house, and commutes to her secretarial job in the city. The atmosphere in the Rosamund Tea Rooms is depressingly claustrophic, and most of the novel is set here, or, when the scene changes, it's to take us to a nearby pub where people drink to escape or to take us out on the streets where Miss Roach walks, again, in order to escape.

What she's escaping, besides the general claustrophia, are her fellow boarders, one of whom, Mr. Thwaites, is an absolutely horrible person. He terrorizes Miss Roach and intimidates everybody else. Here's how the narrator describes him:

In his large, flat, moustached face ... in his lethargic yet watchful brown eyes, in his way of walking and his way of talking, there could be discerned the steady, self-absorbed, dreamy, almost somnambulistic quality of the lifelong trampler through the emotions of others, of what Miss Roach would call "the bully." That steady look with which as a child he would have torn off a butterfly's wing, with which as a boy he would have twisted another boy's wrist, with which as a man he would have humiliated a servant or inferior, was upon him as he now looked at Miss Roach; it never entirely left him.

Miss Roach hates Mr. Thwaites, but it never does her any good; he can always win any argument they have and can always get a reaction out of her and force her to answer his questions even when it's the last thing she wants. He's a nightmare -- the kind of person you wouldn't mind strangling, and who knows you feel that way and enjoys it.

Into this situation come two new people who offer a chance for some diversion and change, and possibly even improvement. Given the darkness of the initial scenes, though, we should be suspicious. One of these is Vicki, a young woman born in Germany who has lived in England for many years now, but who is still under suspicion because of her accent and her origin. Miss Roach stands up for her and befriends her, and then brings her into the boarding house, thinking that not only can she help Vicki, but Vicki might help her by changing the atmosphere in the the Tea Rooms.

The other is an American soldier who flirts with Miss Roach and soon enough becomes "her" soldier, implying that he wants her to return to America with him and help him run his laundromat business. Miss Roach is uncertain what she thinks of all this, but so little has happened to her of any interest at all, that she goes along with it in a bemused kind of way, just to see.

But her hopes are dashed as she figures out what kind of people Vicki and her American soldier really are. The rest of the novel charts just how bad these relationships can get.

What I particularly loved about this book is the way Miss Roach is such a careful observer of the people around her and the way the narrator takes time to describe the characters' words and emotions so closely. It's a story told through small scenes and little conversations, the kind of novel where tone of voice and word choice and facial expressions carry most of the plot. It's a novel about war, but not about battles and armies; in fact, Miss Roach avoids hearing war news whenever she can. Rather, it's about how war infects everything, right down to the words people use in everyday conversation and to the words on street signs:

To the endless snubbing and nagging of war, its lecturing and admonitions, Miss Roach was subjected from the moment she left the Rosamund Tea Rooms in the morning to the moment she returned at night, and these things were at last telling upon her nerves and general attitude.

Immediately she stepped forth into Thames Lockdon ... the snubbing began with:

No Cigarettes

Sorry

in the window of the tobacconist opposite.

And such was Miss Roach's mood nowadays that she regarded this less as a sorrowful admission than as a sly piece of spite. The "sorry", she felt certain, had not been thrown in for the sake of politeness or pity. It was a sarcastic, nasty, rude "sorry". It sneered, as a common woman might, as if to say "Sorry, I'm sure", or "Sorry, but there you are", or "Sorry, but what do you expect nowadays?"

This passage indicates the book's sensitivity to language, which is another thing I loved about it. Miss Roach is always thinking about the language other people use and how that language tells her something about who they are. This is especially true of Vicki, who irritates Miss Roach horribly by using out of date slang in an effort to keep from sounding too German. And Miss Roach is very sensitive about the language people use to describe her, hating it when people imply she is an "English Miss," too prim and proper and uptight to have any fun. And she can't stand it when people make fun of her name. One of the book's worst moments is when Mr. Thwaites says,

"Enter Dame Roach! ... Dame Roach -- the English Miss! Miss Prim. Dame Roach -- the Prude ... the jealous Miss Roach."

The thought that Vicki might have overheard this horrible string of words is enough to make her sick.

So, no, this is not a happy book, but it captures the hardships of wartime, and also of loneliness and sadness and solitude, beautifully, brilliantly well.

Ditto

I'd like to say ditto to everything Stefanie said. I, too, found Slaves of Solitude a little difficult to get into, but once into it I found it to be a very engaging character study and a good read. Hamilton spent a lot of time developing his characters and was obviously very masterful at it. He wanted us to relate to and empathise with Ms. Roach, which I did, and despise the self-absorbed Vicki and the school yard bully, Thwaites, which I also did. As for Lieutenant Pike, I feel certain he was destined to return to America and open that laundry, but I'd be willing to bet money that the future Mrs. Pike (if there was to be one) would soon sadly discover that she was saddled with a boozy womanizer, and so become yet another Slave of Solitude. As often happens, one can be quite alone even when surrounded by people.

Muffled, Blundering and Muttering

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton is about one of those really nice people who tend to get pushed around or find themselves in uncomfortable situations because they rarely stand up for themselves and who also find themselves rather alone because they also tend to be bland in the personality department. Miss Roach is such a nice person. She is thirty-nine, single, mousy but not completely unattractive, believes in propriety and manners and doing the right thing. She wants to think the best of people and so gives them the benefit of the doubt when behavior, manners, or words are rude or mean.

Miss Roach began her career-life as a schoolmistress, fresh from university and full of passion, energy and ideas. She was not prepared for reality. When faced with it, she quickly abandoned all her idealism. As a schoolmistress she was liked but not very good and eventually she ended up working for a publishing firm in London. As the book opens it is the tail-end of 1943 and Miss Roach is living in a boardinghouse in a small town outside of London because she is terrified of the bombs. She takes the train into London for work and returns to the boardinghouse at night and generally tries to avoid thinking and reading about the war as much as possible.

The boardinghouse, known as the Rosamund Tea Rooms, presents a certain kind of hell for someone like Miss Roach. Ruled over by the petty tyrant Mr. Thwaites who has chosen Miss Roach as his special victim, it is a dreary and dull place that drags a person down. The other boarders try to provide support to Miss Roach as Mr. Thwaites pokes and prods and takes verbal swipes at Miss Roach during meals and tea, but they are all ineffective. Why Mr. Thwaites has chosen Miss Roach to bully is a mystery. We can only surmise that it is because he knows he can. Miss Roach cannot or will not defend herself, get angry, talk back, ignore, or counterattack. She is too nice.

Into Miss Roach's dull life comes the American, Lieutenant Pike, stationed in town while the Allies build up their forces for a second front in the war. Lt. Pike drinks too much but takes a shine to Miss Roach who neither likes nor dislikes him but goes along because it is better than not going along and because it is something that breaks the monotony of her days. But Lt. Pike is nothing compared to what's about to come along.

Miss Roach, being the nice person she is, made friends with a German woman, Vicki Kugelmann, when she defended the woman from anti-German attacks from some people in the town. Vicki had lived in Britain long before the war started and was a British citizen. Miss Roach felt it her obligation to defend the woman who seemed like she was unable to defend herself, and who Miss Roach imagined, could use a friend. So they met for coffee on Saturday mornings and sometimes for the occasional dinner. Miss Roach, thinking she was helping Vicki, suggested that Vicki come live at the Rosamund Tea Rooms. But when a room comes open and Vicki moves in, she turns out not to be the shy, needy person Miss Roach had imagined and Vicki had played up. Instead, Vicki turns out to be a bitch.

Miss Roach doesn't know what to think at first so she tries to overlook all the evidence that Vicki is not like she supposed. One thing leads to another and finally Miss Roach is pushed into a corner and has to fight back or lose every last shred of self-worth. What happens? What does Miss Roach do? Does Vicki get her comeuppance? And what about Mr. Thwaites? I won't say. You have to read the book to find out.

Overall I enjoyed the book. It's not exactly a page turner and took awhile before I felt engaged by it, but it was worth the time. It's a quiet book which is surprising for something set in the middle of World War II. But books set during a big war don't have to be about fighting and death and depravation. Certainly the war affected the lives of the characters, but the events of the war are not central to the book. There might be bombers flying overhead but people are people and life goes on. The bullies and bitches do their thing and the nice people do theirs.

Given the book's title, I could go on about how the characters are "slaves of solitude," and it would be true. Each of them are wrapped up and separate from each other. An image from early in the book sums it up nicely. Miss Roach is on her way home from the train station at the end of the day. People carry flashlights to find their way around in the dark because of the enforced blackout conditions. As Miss Roach makes her way along the river to the boardinghouse she observes,

She heard a couple of frozen people muttering and blundering behind her, and another couple muttering and blundering ahead of her. A solitary firefly-holder came blundering by her. The earth was muffled from the stars; the river and the pretty eighteenth-century bridge were muffled from the people; the people were muffled from each other.

Muffled, blundering, and muttering pretty much describes all the characters in the book in one way or another. It sounds pretty depressing, and it could be, but Hamilton offers something bigger than a firefly glimmer at the end of the book, a purification of sorts that allows a couple of the characters redemption from boardinghouse hell, a brief respite before the hell of war is let loose over London, on the beaches of Normandy and in the sky over Japan.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Next Book For Discussion...

It looks like our next book will be The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton.

Let's begin posting our reviews and discussing on Sunday, May 31. If you aren't currently a member of the group but would like to participate, please let us know in comments--we'll send you an invitation so that you'll be able to post on the blog.

Thanks for voting and looking forward to the discussion!

Time to Choose A New Book

For our next book selection I turned to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and Classics for Pleasure to get some ideas. So a bit of a mix with a classic, a short story collection, book in translation, etc. I hope you'll find something here you like. Here are the choices:

If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino (259 pages). This is a novel about the urgency, desire, and frustration bound up in the practice of reading novels. The novel, which is nonlinear, begins with a man discovering that the copy of a novel he has recently purchased is defective, a Polish novel having been bound within its pages. He returns to the bookshop the following day and meets a young woman who is on an identical mission. They both profess a preference for the Polish novel. Interposed between the chapters in which the two strangers attempt to authenticate their texts are 10 excerpts that parody genres of contemporary world fiction, such as the Latin-American novel and the political novel of eastern Europe.

Life Like by Lorrie Moore (192 pages). In these eight exquisite stories characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can’t quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.

Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett (320 pages). At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with the former slave? And how can anyone endure the memory of the wrongs that have been done?"


Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (256 pages). Iris Murdoch’s first novel is a gem – set in a part of London where struggling writers rub shoulders with successful bookies, and film starlets with frantic philosophers. Its hero, Jake Donaghue, is a likable young man who makes a living out of translation work and sponging off his friends. A meeting with Anna, an old flame, leads him into a series of fantastic adventures. Beneath the surface of the narrative lies a wealth of philosophical questioning: Murdoch contests existential ideas of freedom; she asks what it means to be in love; and she rigorously questions what makes a good writer and what constitutes good art.


The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton (272 pages). England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter. Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon, where she rents a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and seeks to relieve her solitude by going out drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelmann, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That's when Miss Roach's troubles really begin. Recounting an epic battle of wills in the claustrophobic confines of the boarding house, Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude, with a delightfully improbable heroine, is one of the finest and funniest books ever written about the trials of a lonely heart.

Let's leave the voting open until Thursday (16th) and I'll let you know which book "won" on Friday, April 17. Our discussion will then start on May 31st.

The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

I've cross posted my thoughts from dgr scribbles but am not used to the blogger site so my apologies if this is in the wrong font or you'd prefer not to have links back to my site, I'll quite understand and please could someone edit accordingly:-)
Many thanks
Lynne

The arrival of a book by Stefan Zweig is always a time for celebration chez dovegrey ever since I first discovered his writing the day I decided to explore some of the authors whose books had been banned in Nazi Germany. I think this in turn was a trail that had opened up after I had read Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi. It sounds like an odd reading trail to follow but I was intrigued, what had been so controversial about these books and their authors, I wanted to know.
I had unwittingly already read books by a few but I had never heard of Stefan Zweig and so began that little addiction and Pushkin Press to the rescue with The Royal Game, Twilight, Moonbeam Alley and Fantastic Night & other stories read in quick succession.
The Post Office Girl, translated by Joel Rotenberg, arrived from Sort Of Books, one chapter and I was instantly in it for the home run. The setting is perhaps classic Stefan Zweig, mittel Europe between the wars and Christina the Post Office girl of the title living a dull, miserable existence in rural Austria. Working in the Post Office by day and caring for her invalid mother the rest of the time Christina Hoflehner's life is a grey and joyless relentless grind until a letter from her mother's sister, who has fared altogether better in the marriage and wealth stakes, invites Christina to share a fortnight's holiday with them. Klara has suffered sudden onset pangs of guilt at her serial neglect of her sister over the years and this gesture towards her neice will surely make amends as she and gruff husband Anthony van Boolen travel from the US for a relaxing high society sojourn at a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps.
Christina's is the generation in Europe that stood to lose the most from the Great War and the sense of resentment and dissatisfaction is profound in this book,

'Surrounded by this coarse and lustful postwar generation she feels ancient, tired, useless, and overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to compete...the war stole her decade of youth. She has no courage, no strength left even for happiness.'

By the age of twenty-six Christina has already prepared to hunker down and accept her lot, until of course she samples life at the glittering Palace Hotel. Exposed to the silken smooth world of money and luxury, where the furniture gleams and the carpet suspires Christina steps in to sample a way of life that she eventually realises will change her forever.
It was always going to be a moment of extreme cruelty when the clock struck midnight and this Cinderella is catapulted back into the harsh reality of life at home, the cramped, musty little box-like garret flat smelling of vinegar and a lifetime of the dull day job and caring for her dropsical mother with the bloated feet.
The happily ever after bit will surely rely on the entrance of a cheekily handsome prince on a white charger galloping in stage left, so when the only man on the horizon is Ferdinand, a thin, bitter and angry down-at-heel survivor of the Russian front, wearing not a gold encrusted doublet and a pair of natty hose but a worn-out inverness coat, you start to worry for poor Christina and wonder quite what the rescue plan might be.
Right that's it, no more plot, enough is plenty, not a word more.
Stefan Zweig was a great friend of Freud so expect plenty of 'who am I really' deliberations and some wonderful character development in Christina but I also came away with a very clear idea of the despair, blame, anger and hatred that fuelled and propelled a generation towards another war. The portents couldn't be outlined with more precision as Stefan Zweig focuses on the inequalities and injustices that pervaded people's lives. If you know anything about Stefan Zweig's personal life also be prepared to identify other more sinister portents about which I will say no more either.
This was the archetypal page-turner of a book, the best I have read by Stefan Zweig to date even, people I cared about and just had to know how they fared so highly recommended.

Cross posted from www.dovegreyreader.co.uk - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 | Permalink

The Post-Office Girl

What stands out most to me about Stefan Zweig's novel from the 1930s, The Post-Office Girl, is rage. The novel starts off calmly and meticulously, however -- extremely so, with careful and precise descriptions of the Austrian post office where the main character Christine has worked for many years. Every item has its proper place and every item, down to every pencil and every sheet of paper, has been accounted for. The governmental bureaucracy knows everything about this place and controls everything. Stuck in the post office for the foreseeable future, Christine feels like an old woman with nothing to look forward to in her life. The tragedy is that she is only 28.

Into this stultifying atmosphere comes a surprise telegram, and it is one that will transform Christine beyond all recognition. It is from her aunt who wants Christine to join her at a posh Swiss hotel for a two-week vacation. Christine is initially reluctant -- what's the point? she thinks -- but she goes and what she sees there is a revelation. She has known she is poor -- she has spent her life barely scraping by trying to support herself and her sick mother -- but she realizes it now in a visceral way. She sees so much money so carelessly spent, and she realizes that just the tiniest fraction of the money swirling around her would have set herself and her mother up comfortably for the rest of their lives. Quickly, she's caught up in the social whirl, enjoying the attention brought by her youth and beauty, augmented by the fashionable clothes her aunt buys her.

She has become a new being, and it now seems impossible to return to the old life. But, of course, she has to return, and it's here that the anger starts to seep in. Why should Christine slave her life away? Why should some people have so much money and others so little, for no discernable reason except for luck? What's the point of working so hard, day after day, for nothing but the chance to keep doing it until the day she dies?

It's largely the war, World War I, that has caused Christine so much suffering. By the time we meet her in the novel, she has achieved a small amount of stability, but the path that led to this point was very rough. She has had to watch family members die as a direct result of war and has had to push herself to the breaking point just to survive. And now she looks around her and wonders just what the point of it all is.

The second half of the book takes us in new directions that I don't need to describe here, but it follows the ideas the first half introduces to their logical -- and chilling -- conclusions. One of the things I admire about the book is the way Zweig takes Christine through some remarkable transformations, and yet they all feel plausible and right. I was willing to believe everything that happened, even the startling conclusion.

The book asks some difficult questions -- about inequality, about struggle, and about whether the value we place on hard work and honesty really makes any sense in a world where those who deserve happiness often don't get it and those who enjoy wealth and comfort often haven't done anything to earn it. The book also describes the devastation war can bring to people who never wanted war in the first place and who had no say in the matter. There's a lot of anger here, but every bit of it seems justified.

A Study Of Self

As a first time Slave, I wasn't sure how the posting went. Here is a comment I made to Litlove's original post: (I think I get the hang of posting now.)

Your review of the artist as an artist is excellent. I knew he had committed suicide, but your review provided me with another dimension to the man behind the artist. (I do not necessarily agree with you that a belief in the humanity of the human race is seldom in evidence. But, that's a discussion for another day.) As for the book, I was impressed that Zweig could write about despair as clearly and grippingly as he could about joy...euphoria even. He was obviously a master at painting emotion. However, Zweig describes only the zenith and the nadir of fortune - but nothing in between. Although I truly found it hard to put this book down, there was something disturbing, almost annoying, about both Christine and Ferdinand. In varying degrees, what began for me as feelings of sympathy and empathy for each, eventually turned rather sour. I began to believe that Christine's apparent self-consciousness was rather more a self-absorption, not unlike the young wealthy crowd she so much aspired to. Whether you believe yourself to be entitled to the heavy cream at the top, or whether you feel forever destined to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop - it's still all about you. Teaming up with Ferdinand could not have been a worse blend for her - he saw the world as bleakly as she did. The best solution these two hopeless people could devise was suicide or larceny. Either way suggests a lack of effort and responsibility. Certainly poverty and failed dreams are difficult to overcome, but not impossible. We don't have to look too far to find someone who has it worse than we do. In the end, I just wanted to tell them to grow up and stop complaining about how awful life was treating them...to "do something about it." Something more productive than shooting themselves. If I had not already heard that Zweig took his own life, I would not have been surprised to learn of it after reading this novel. There is much about despair here, with the only hope presented being death or a life of dishonesty and fear. I loved the work itself; I am not fond of the message I found in it.

The Post-Office Girl: Something is Gone Forever

Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular writers of the first half of the 20th century and the most-translated German-language author of the 1920s and 30s, completed two manuscripts and sent them off to his publishers shortly before he and his second wife, living in exile in Brazil during World War II, took their own lives. The Post-Office Girl was found among his unpublished papers, "in considerable disarray," according to the eventually published Rausch der Verwandlung's afterward.

I mention this first since The Post-Office Girl as it is concludes in an open-ended manner; Zweig may well have intended a third part to the story that wouldn't leave the reader guessing.

The portion of the novel that we have tells the story of a pair of young people who have had their lives profoundly diminished by the Great War and its aftermath.

Christine, the postal clerk in an Austrian backwater, ekes out a living, sharing with her invalid mother what presumably would have been an attic storage room in earlier times --the war has left a housing shortage in its wake and few jobs. She was a lively, happy girl of 16 when the war started; twelve years later she is without father, brother, expectations, or youthful desires. When Christine is unexpectedly summoned to vacation in the Swiss Alps with an American aunt she's unaquainted with, she approaches the trip as "just more work and responsibility."

"She has no courage, no strength left even for happiness," the narrator tells us.

It is only upon arrival, after her aunt has styled her hair, outfitted her in becoming clothes and jewels, that Christine realizes that life has pleasures to offer and she transforms into a popular carefree beauty, Christiane von Boolen, with "sheet lightning in her blood," a presumed aristocrat who only has a snatched moment here or there to wonder who she really is.

Midway through the vacation, Christine's humble roots are exposed and her aunt, afraid that her own sordid past will be uncovered and her reputation damaged, abruptly tells Christine that in the morning she's being sent back to the provinces.

All night Christine sits motionless in the chair by the table, her thoughts revolving dully around the feeling that everything is over; not an actual pain so much as a drugged awareness of something painful going on deep down--the way a patient under anesthesia might be aware of the surgeon's knife cutting into him. She sits there in silence, empty eyes on the table, but something's happening, something beyond her benumbed awareness: that new creature, the manufactured changeling that had taken her place for nine dreamlike days, that unreal yet real Fraulein von Boolen, is dying in her. . . . The gloves on her hands, the pearls around her neck, everything belongs to that other one, that murdered doppelganger Christiane von Boolen who is no more, yet lives on. . . . All she knows is that something has been taken from her, that now she must leave that blissfully winged self to become a blind grub crawling on the ground; knows only that something is gone forever.

Life back home is worse than before; she knows what she's missing. Visiting her sister in Vienna, she meets Ferdinand, her brother-in-law's war buddy.

Ferdinand also knows what he's missing. Born to wealth that's turned to ashes, he wasted his own youth in the war and then in a Siberian prison, losing the use of two of his fingers in the process. His dreams of becoming an architect will never come to fruition; he cannot find more than odd jobs and the government has its ways of assuring he'll never receive any disability or financial assistance.

Drawn together by shared bitterness and lack of hope, kindred spirits Christine and Ferdinand eventually decide to take their own lives, but Ferdinand realizes they have another way out of their meaningless lives--if they're willing to risk failure:

. . . "Christine, we have to start thinking of everything now, I told you it won't be easy, the other way would have been easier. But on the other hand I've never known, we've never known, what it is to be alive. I've never seen the ocean, I've never been abroad. I've never know what life is--always thinking about what everything costs means we've never been free. Maybe we can't know the value of life until we are."

Whether Christine and Ferdinand take the risk, or in an unwritten portion of the book develop moral compuntions to counteract how justified they feel in acting, the reader just doesn't know.

The Post-Office Girl was my first exposure to Stefan Zweig, but it won't be the last. I'm thinking I may give his fictionalized biography of Marie Antoinette a try. . .

(cross posted at pages turned)

The Cinderella Who Wasn't

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig is a Cinderella story of sorts except she isn't rescued from her poverty after the clock strikes midnight and all the beautiful things are lost.

Christine, the post-office girl, is whisked away to a posh resort in the Swiss Alps on the invitation of her aunt who is feeling guilty for not helping her sister's family during World War I. Christine gets a glamor makeover, new clothes, and a borrowed aristocratic reputation. For eight days she gets to experience the freedom and pleasure that money brings. Her exuberance and gratitude combined with her artlessness make her a popular breath of fresh air among the young and the old. But the petty jealousy of a "friend" who reveals to all that Christine is really a penniless girl from a village near Vienna, prompts Christine's aunt to hastily send Christine back home.

The aunt, you see, is an imposter herself. She used to be as poor as Christine but through planning and scheming and the patronage of wealthy men, she was able to remake herself and land a wealthy Dutch husband who has no idea about her true past. Terrified that Christine will inadvertently lead the unforgiving spotlight of money and class to focus on her, she uncompassionately sends Christine home offering her nothing but a bald-faced lie.

Christine is devastated. She sinks into a deep depression until she is revived by Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran she meets through her brother-in-law. Ferdinand understands her loss and longing. Together they find a certain comfort in their mutual unhappiness and hopelessness which leads to a surprise ending.

Reading Christine's story is like watching the Wizard of Oz where everything is black and gray at the beginning and end, but in Oz, everything is in glorious technicolor. But technicolor turns out to be like crack and it is surprising how fast Christine becomes addicted. Her aunt's intended kindness in the invitation to the Alps turns out to unintentionally be even more cruel than neglecting her family during the war when she could easily have helped. The really sad thing is that Christine could probably have found some modicum of happiness had her aunt never sent the invitation. In Christine's village there was a man, equally as poor as her, who shyly but truly loved her.

The Post-Office Girl was a good book. It was not an uplifting read though. But are books about class, money and morals ever uplifting especially when they are about a person who learns what she is missing?

The Post-Office Girl

I finished The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig last night and the first words out of my mouth were “wow.” I didn’t expect that ending at all but it was perfect and has made me think constantly about the characters as I went about my day today. What did I think happened afterward? There are so many scenarios I can envision but let me start at the beginning so you’ll know what this book is about.

Christine Hoflehner lives in a small town in Austria and works for the post office. Every day it’s the same, work to make a meager living, take care of her invalid mother and live with nothing to look forward to. The Great War has left the family without some of their family members, without money and without dreams.

It seems that all around life is the same for everyone in the small town. Every thing is regimented and Christine’s days all fall into a pattern.

“Her hand with its pale fingers will raise and lower the same rattly wicket thousands upon thousands of times more, will toss hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of letters onto the canceling desk with the same swiveling motion, will slam the blackened brass canceler onto hundreds of thousands or millions of stamps with the same brief thump. Probably the wrist will even learn to function better and better, ever more mechanically and unconsciously, detached more and more completely from the conscious self. The hundreds of thousands of letters will always be different letters, but always letters. The stamps different stamps, but always stamps. The days different, but each one lasting from eight o’clock until noon, as the years come and go, always the same, the same, the same.”

Can’t you just feel the desperation at the monotony? Christine’s fortune is about to change though when she receives a telegram from her aunt, who due to a scandal had left the country and stayed out of touch for many years. Aunt Claire is now married to a wealthy man and as they take their vacation in the Swiss Alps they invite Christine to join them.

At first the young woman is a bit hesitant to go but upon arrival and after she is taken under her aunt’s wing, and is shown how to dress and how to live a different kind of lifestyle, a new Christine begins to emerge, a confident young woman who is finally living life.

“In her giddiness, unable to imagine that everyone isn’t burning with enthusiasm, isn’t in a fever of high spirits, of passionate delight, she’s lost her sense of balance. She’s discovered herself for the first time in twenty-eight years, and the discovery is so intoxicating that she’s forgetting everyone else.”

Unfortunately Christine’s newfound exuberance will be cut short. A bit of vile gossip and before she knows it, she’s back in her old life. But having tasted something new and so wonderful will only make her former existence even more unbearable to endure. The second part of the story is filled with all the hopelessness and bitterness that fill Christine’s thoughts but strangely this doesn’t feel like a depressive story. What happens next is that there is quite a bit of suspense as Christine meets a young man who is also filled with the same kind of desperation she feels and their lives will take some unexpected turns.

I really loved this story for the writer’s ability to capture such highs and lows in the characters and for giving us a picture of what Europe must have been like for many people after the Great War.

I have to say that in the couple of years that we’ve had this online book discussion group going on we’ve read some amazing literature and every year at least one of the Slaves choices ends up on my Favorites of the Year list. I’m sure this book will be on it for ’09.

Cross Posted at Bookgirl's Nightstand

Stefan Zweig

In lieu of a review as I mismanaged my reading schedule, a few biographical details about Zweig. Stefan Zweig is a little-known author these days, although when he was alive and at the height of his fame, he had to barricade himself in his house at Salzburg to keep his legion of fans at bay. His books were translated across the world, although he was better known for his biographical writings (on Erasmus, Balzac, Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, Kleist, Tolstoy, Dickens) than his fiction. He was also a friend of any number of famous cultural figures, including Freud and Rilke – after a conversation with Rilke he wrote ‘one is incapable of any vulgarity for hours or even days’. This excitable, idealistic Zweig is much in evidence in his youth. As the rich second son of a millionaire textile manufacturer, he was able to devote himself to the causes that interested him, and art was the guiding star of his life. He had joined with a group of aesthetes in Austria during his teenage years and was devoted not just to the concept of art but to a vague, if stirring, political belief in a united, harmonious Europe. He declared himself not Austrian, but a European, and in this optimistic frame of mind reported that ‘The world offered itself to me as a fruit, beautiful and rich with promise.’ It seems scarcely conceivable that less than thirty years later, he and his second wife would die in a joint suicide pact.

Part of the problem – although by no means all of it – was that Zweig was Jewish. Initially he didn’t think this counted for anything. His family was not religious, but they were prosperous, educated and assimilated. His memory of his youth was entirely free from anti-Semitic slight; indeed his race was something that he entirely discounted. Not that he was ignorant of the Jewish question, rather he dissociated himself from the Ostjuden, the Eastern Jews who were migrating from a hostile Russia into what would eventually become an even more dangerous Western Europe. Such distinctions were not destined to last. By 1933 the Nazis were burning his books, in 1935 an opera by Richard Strauss, The Silent Woman, was closed down after only two performances because Zweig had written the libretto. In 1938, the Nazis destroyed his library in Salzburg, but by that point, Zweig had been driven into exile in London. He had begun to believe that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was directed at him personally and he never really recovered from this paranoia.

But other discontents were stirring. It was in the thirties that his 20-year marriage to one of his fans, Friderike (they met through the letters that she wrote to him), broke down when he fell in love with his new secretary, Charlotte Altmann, who was a clichéd twenty-seven years younger. In her biography, Friderike explained how Zweig longed for space and for silence to create, something that her two children and her sociable lifestyle prevented him from enjoying. Zweig begged for a divorce on the grounds that he wanted to regain his ‘student’s freedom’, although within the year he had married Lotte. It might have been peace that Zweig was after, but given the brief interlude between this point and his suicide, peace regained clearly didn’t hit the spot. Instead it might be a blissful return to a former point in time that really appealed, nostalgia for his student days confused with a longing for a youthful, optimistic state of mind that he could no longer summon up. It would not be the first time that a man, feeling something had turned inexorably sour in his life, decided that a change of woman might provide the answer.

If it wasn’t love that went wrong on Zweig, if that was a smokescreen for a deeper discontent, we might look instead to the strongest guiding force in Zweig’s life, which was his belief in humanism. Humanism is a kind of moral philosophy, a perspective on life that affirms the dignity and worth of all people and the supreme belief in human intelligence as the source of all solutions to the problems that beset mankind. It proposes the need for a universal morality that would guide and inform all human conduct, but chooses not to trust to the supernatural or the spiritual for answers. The ultimate goal of humanism is to make life better for all individuals, but it doesn’t necessarily believe that is easily achieved; instead it looks to the community to work together to provide support and sustenance.

There is something beautiful and idealistic and almost noble about the humanistic stance. It’s also managed to be the dominant moral philosophy in the Western world between the Renaissance and, oh around about the end of World War II. All those years, people believed they held the key to the good life in their hearts, if they looked carefully enough. They believed as well that life was continually getting better, and that eventually, man would reach a state of perfection. Humanism was also deeply bound up with culture and the arts, the finest expression of humanist knowledge. Humanism had its problems, undoubtedly, not least of which was that this was a philosophy created by, held by and explored by men; half the world was rigorously excluded from its all-encompassing claims. But there is a nobility to it that our modern day philosophies lack. Now we’re in the era of post-humanism – the belief that the answers to all our problems lie beyond the human domain, in the world of technology and science. We’ve given up on ourselves as the agents of our own rescue.

Stefan Zweig believed in civilization – that beautiful faith in intelligence and artistic understanding to promote harmony, insight, communal well-being. He believed that there was a natural understanding between people of similar education and ability. He was thrilled to be part of an intricately interconnected group of artists whose mutual acclaim he assumed to be second nature. We might call him naïve, as much artistic achievement was ever fueled by jealousy, rivalry and enmity. But there is a fragility that Zweig always identified in his fictional characters as well as his biographical ones, a recognition that civilization might not always be the solution, that one might be too nice, too charming, too civilized for one’s own good. It provided the real spike of interest in his work, but it may also have tormented him in reality. The jury is out as to why Zweig and Charlotte took their overdose of barbiturates, in what should have been a peaceful exile in Brazil in 1942. Zweig ought to have had some inkling that the Nazis were not going to be allowed to overrun Europe as he feared. But the Second World War destroyed, for many artists, some fundamental belief in the humanity of the human race, and the possibility that truth and beauty might make a better world. Certainly those beliefs have been rarely in evidence ever since. The enormity of such a loss might well be behind the enigmatic words Zweig wrote in his final note, thanking the people of Brazil and saluting his friends:

‘May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.’

The next book for discussion will be. . .

Stefan Zweig's The Post-Office Girl.

Let's begin posting our reviews and discussing on Tuesday, March 31. If you aren't currently a member of the group but would like to participate, please let us know in comments--we'll send you an invitation so that you'll be able to post on the blog.

Time to select the next book!

Litlove asked me to prepare the next round of possibilites for the Slaves and I present them to you here. I don't believe there's any overriding theme to my selections other than that I'd like to read all of them this year and would love to have some company to discuss them with when I do.

Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia


One reviewer called this "a kind of post modern, sci-fi Bildungsroman or novel of education." Another compared it to Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale. Sputnik Caledonia's the story of an imaginative kid who wants to become Scotland's first cosmonaut who later finds himself living in a dystopian world with black holes. Crumey won the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award for Sputnik Caledonia. It's yet to be published in the U.S., but it's readily available in paperback via The Book Depository. I have to say it just looks like fun--of the head exploding variety--especially if Stefanie will help us with the physics.

Janet Hobhouse's The Furies


According to the publisher, "The four generations of women described in Janet Hobhouse's autobiographical novel rival the 'Furies' of Greek mythology in their capacity to love and hate with vengeance. At the heart of the story is a mother/daughter conflict that at times revolves around an innocent love affair between romantic co-conspirators and at others is a bitter and deforming contest of wills." Hobhouse died of ovarian cancer while still editing The Furies. Its been on my tbr list for years.

Doris Lessing's The Sweetest Dream

Doris Lessing substituted The Sweetest Dream for the third volume of her autobiography, although she claims no parallels to actual people in the novel. London in the 1960s, the nuclear disarmament controversy, contemporary Africa, and, according to reviewer Laura Miller, a merciless detailing of "the hypocrisies and selfishness of the party members and barricade manners" Lessing "knew during her days among Britain's radicals."


Stefan Zweig's The Post-Office Girl

And another NYRB classics reprint, of which the editor says: The Post-Office Girl is fastpaced and hardboiled—as if Zweig, normally the most mannerly of writers, had fortified himself with some stiff shots of Dashiell Hammett. It's the story of Christine, a nice girl from a poor provincial family who gets a taste of the good life only to have it snatched away; and of Ferdinand, an unemployed World War I veteran and ex-POW with whom she then links up. It's a story, you could say, of two essentially respectable middle-class souls who wake up to find themselves miscast as outcasts, but what it's really about, beyond economic and psychological collapse, is social death. Set during the period of devastating hyper-inflation that followed Austria's defeat in 1918, Zweig's novel depicts a country grotesquely divided between the rich and poor, so much so that it has effectively reverted to a state of nature."

Richard Marsh's The Beetle


This is the wild card of the bunch. I'd never heard of Richard Marsh's The Beetle before yesterday. A late-Victorian horror novel, it outsold Dracula in its day and it might be interesting to discuss why the Bram Stoker's become a classic and this one's faded into (no doubt deserving) obscurity. According to Amazon, "From out of the dark and mystic Egypt come The Beetle, a creature of horror, 'born of neither God nor man', which can change its form at will. It is bent on revenge for a crime committed against the devotees of an ancient religion. At large in London, it pursues its victims without mercy and no one, it seems, is safe from its gruesome clutches."

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Which should be our next selection? Vote for your choice in comments; I'll give everyone a week to make a decision and will announce the results on Wednesday, February 18.