women – findingtimetowrite

#GermanLitMonth: Marlen Haushofer forever!

Yes, I know I’ve written about Marlen Haushofer before and I know that not much of her work is available in English, but I’ll never stop writing about her since I first discovered her via her best-known (and translated) novel The Wall. She has become not just one of my favourite writers, but also the one I’d most like to translate from the German-speaking world, and I’m pleased to say that the work I wanted to translate most, the novella We Kill Stella, will be published in the translation of the wonderful Shaun Whiteside in 2025 by New Directions. I also really rate (and have reviewed) two other short novels Die Mansarde and Die Tapetentür, but even her children’s literature and her short stories are exceptional. I’ve translated two of her short stories and need to be more proactive about sending them to literary magazines after a couple of rejections.

But today I’d like to talk about her very first novel, which is in many respects autobiographical. In fact, the author of the Haushofer biography relied quite a bit on passages from this book to describe her childhood, and is an excellent companion piece to Himmel, der nirgendwo endet.

Marlen Haushofer: Eine Handvoll Leben (A Handful/Fistful of Life), 1955

This book has the same premise as Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, i.e. a mysterious, wealthy stranger shows up in town and invests in failing businesses for somewhat opaque reasons. It can’t have been influenced by the play, however, because the premiere took place in 1956. The play is also much more sinister, and focuses on revenge.

In the case of Haushofer’s novel, it’s not so much revenge as reminiscing. Mrs Betty Russel comes from abroad and shows interest in purchasing the family home of small-town entrepreneur Anton Pfluger, who died in a car crash. She is invited to stay overnight by Pfluger’s family and she starts rummaging through drawers and finds postcards and pictures neatly arranged in chronological order. This is when we discover that Betty is actually Elisabeth, who grew up in the area and was in fact Anton’s first wife and the mother of his son, now grown up.

We see Elisabeth as a child (known then as Lieserl) roaming around the countryside, then see her struggling to adapt to convent school, follow her first passionate yet conflicted love for a girl, then her marriage, and then a love affair which shakes her to the core, wakes her up from her unquestioning bourgeois existence and makes her run away. The chronology provides some structure for what is in essence a kaleidoscope of experiences, sensations and thoughts, some fleeting, some deeper. The author describes her own process in this passage:

Everything she’d gathered throughout her life was meaningless, a mosaic of tiny life-particles, shimmering in all colours, with great swathes of grey and black, but a meaningless mosaic nevertheless. Maybe an eye from very far away might have been able to discern some kind of pattern or message from this mountain of fragments, but that was no comfort, since she could not figure out the pattern herself, and she never would.

They say some writers already show signs of all of their future topics in their very first novel, and that is certainly true of Marlen Haushofer: we have here the close observation and unsentimental yet loving descriptions of nature that we see later in The Wall, the sophisticated understanding of the complexities of love, desire and marital life, the feeling of suffocation when living up to societal expectations, and ways in which to run away or retreat from those very expectations and demands.

The following passage (in my rough and ready translation) describes, I think, many of her female characters, living on the fence, half-frozen, yearning for something yet not daring to act. Just before the quote, there is an instance when her lover, Lenart, lays his arm around her in broad daylight – a gesture that she really doesn’t expect, as they never had a close relationship other than in bed.

The feeling of triumph quickened her breath momentarily, but the feeling ebbed quickly: the thought that Lenart might start loving her was claustrophobic and frightening. All of a sudden, she realised that she had never really wanted to be loved. She herself could only love what was difficult and unattainable, the thing that always withdrew from her. There was nothing more disappointing than to reach a goal, to fulfil a longing, and then be left with nothing to yearn for.

While this is not as accomplished as her later work, it is still an extraordinary novel in its candid depiction of a woman’s sensuality and defying of all social conventions. Marlen Haushofer always rejected being labelled a ‘feminist’, but I can imagine few other people writing like that about women’s innermost thoughts and desires in the early 1950s, even Shirley Jackson and Doris Lessing got there a little bit later than that.

#GermanLitMonth: Ingrid Noll

Ingrid Noll: Der Hahn ist tot (The Cock Is Dead), 1991

Yes, I’ll stick to the double-entendre of my translation of the title, because this is very much about the relationship between men and women, about men’s libido and one woman’s obsession with a man. I was also surprised to see that the book came out more than thirty years ago, because its style, the black humour and preposterous murderous storyline remind me very much of contemporary thrillers such as My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwhaite, How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie or the author who started this trend (in my mind) Helen Fitzgerald and her Bloody Women. The book was apparently translated and published by HarperCollins in 1997 as Hell Hath No Fury, although I was unable to find the name of the translator.

Rosemarie (Rosi) Hirte is a straitlaced insurance broker, considered an old-fashioned old maid by her colleagues. But then she falls for a handsome lecturer whom she calls by his second name Witold (and she prefers to be called by her second name Thyra by him as well) – and is prepared to grab this last chance at happiness and make him her own. This might include a couple of murders, some accidental, some more deliberate. Rosi changes from victim to active participant, from downtrodden Ms. Average and Jimmy-No-Mates to a vengeful go-getter. The plot just gets weirder and weirder, as the main protagonist gets more and more carried away with her mission and, as the readers suspect, more delusional.

Written in the first person, from the main character’s POV, I found that for the most part the author had an assured tone which just about steered clear of bathos. Rosi/Thyra inspires our pity at times (even if we might think that her obsession with having a man in her life is not all that healthy):

‘Look here,’ I plead with her in my mind, ‘I’ve never fallen so hard for anyone as I have for Engstern. You’ve already had everything in life: friends in your youth, marriage at a suitable age, children. Now you have an interesting job, a boyfriend and a huge circle of friends. I never had nor have now any of that. Please let me have him, Beate! I’ve never begged you for anything, I never beg anyone for anything. It’s hard for me to admit, but have a little mercy for an old maid, burning with love!’

At other times, there are moments of clarity, when she realises her would-be lover’s flaws and we hope that she will come to her senses:

Before he showed up, before I met up with him, I was always on high alert. I could picture our meetings clearly: full of soulmate stuff, love and erotic tension. But afterwards, there was nothing but disappointment and doubt. Was he really all that special? Did I really want him that fiercely as a lover?

There are similarities with the previous German book I read about a (somewhat younger) spinster, Mon Cheri und unsere demolierten Seelen: they both feel like they were written to trigger heated discussions at women’s book clubs, filled with clueless men, wisecracks about relationships and the failure to understand each other. By introducing a murder theme rather than a pregnancy one, this book more neatly avoids sentimentality, and I also felt that there was a more earnest heartbeat beneath the flippant surface, for example, when Rosi admits to herself why she is doing all the problematic things she’s doing:

Having power over other people is almost better than love, although in fact it’s the exact opposite. When you love, you are powerless, impotent, dependent. And yet I wouldn’t be without my lovesickness, it had entered my life too completely, given me youth, energy and drive, a new feeling in my body, a new level of self-esteem. I wanted to continue to fight for it, to experience that happy, carefree day when we went hiking in the Oden Forest at least once more.

One of the other characters in the book also makes a very salient point when she scolds her dog for chasing after a bird that is far too big for it, comparing it with all of us chasing after a goal, without realising that it might be the wrong size or shape for us, that we wouldn’t know what to do with it even if we did achieve it. The book makes us wonder what dark desires lurk within each one of us, what hateful things we might be prepared to do to achieve our goals, if we thought we could get away with it.

These hints at a more serious story beneath all the frivolity made the book more interesting, and it certainly was a quick, entertaining read and didn’t outstay its welcome – unlike the longer and more repetitive Mon Cheri.

NB: The smirk on the face of Eve on the front cover (as painted by Hans Baldung Grien in 1525) is very appropriate for the tone of the book and the sense I got of the main protagonist.

NNB: All the translations from German are my own.

#WITMonth: Claudia Piñeiro – Time of the Flies

Claudia Piñeiro: Time of the Flies, transl. Frances Riddle, Charco Press, 2024.

I no longer need to emphasise how much of a Claudia Piñeiro fan I am, as I’ve mentioned it on other occasions. I particularly like the way she takes common crime fiction tropes and turns them on their heads, allowing for a far broader social commentary, without ever becoming preachy or boring. It’s something I aspire to do in my crime fiction – but I have a long, long way to go still.

Time of the Flies is the longest novel by this author that I’ve read to date – and is in fact a sequel of sorts to the novella All Yours (published a long time ago in translation, in 2005, by Bitter Lemon Press). That novella (which I haven’t read) tells the story of Inés Pereyra, a self-satisfied wife and mother, who becomes obsessed with her husband’s infidelity and finally snaps. This novel opens 15-16 years later, when Inés has been released from prison for murdering her husband’s lover. She is now a reformed character, less chatty, more frozen, and she has started a business with another former inmate Manca, an agency called FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies, dedicated to pest control and private investigation.

Life on the straight and narrow was never going to be easy, especially when a client suddenly asks for a deadly dose of pesticide (and for Inés’s expertise), ostensibly to kill her own husband’s lover. Inés is tempted by the money – and she also has unresolved business with her daughter Laura – but something about the client and her nefarious purposes doesn’t quite add up. And so the novel becomes something between a thriller and a romp, interspersed with comments from an Ancient Greek drama type choir, except the voices are not unified, but constantly disagreeing or debating.

Inés is a bitch, she never took care of Laura, only pretended to. Like mother like daughter. I don’t think either one of them is a bitch. I love my kids and I enjoy them, but I still ask myself every day what my life might’ve been like without them. I don’t ask myself that question because I don’t dare to consider the answer. In my case, I make a mental list of all the things I would’ve been able to do if I hadn’t had kids. Would you have actually done those things though? That’s counterfactual. It’s absurd and misleading, you’re just blaming them for your failure. Who said I was a failure? Your face says it all. Let’s keep it cordial, please.

Funny though these comments often are, they also underline the crimes committed against women – both the small ones (being judgmental, stereotyping women, demanding too much of them, double standards) as well as bigger ones such as violence, rape, mental abuse. Angry women such as Medea are mentioned, and a roster of feminist writers are quoted, but it always comes back to flies – of various shapes and sizes, each with their own characteristic. Flies, that are some of the most despised creatures on earth, yet Inés refuses to kill them. Instead, she has studied them during her time in prison and gives us a potted history of each type of fly and our relationship with them. But not before she suffers through an agonising story about the death of a fly by Marguerite Duras. (This made me laugh out loud).

The French author described how she sat on the floor and watched as a poor fly died. And then she had the revelation that when a fly dies, it dies (wow)… And she describes the fly as ‘polite’ even though it ’causes cholera and the plague’. A fly causes cholera and the plague? Really? She spent over fifteen minutes watching a creature die and the fly is the bad guy!

This novel is experimental enough to displease those who prefer more standard crime fiction fare, and possibly too page-turning and full of melodramatic flourishes to please fans of literary fiction. However, I found the streak of cruelty beneath the fun quite compelling, and enjoyed this stylistic mash-up.

#JanuaryInJapan: Rereading ‘Territory of Light’ by Tsushima Yuko

Tsushima Yuko: Territory of Light, transl. Geraldine Harcourt, first published in the original in 1978-79, this edition published by Penguin in 2019.

My second contribution to the Japanese Literature Challenge as hosted by Meredith at Dolce Bellezza is another favourite author, and in fact a reread (sticking to the tried and tested so far). The first book I read by Yuko Tsushima was Territory of Light and I was instantly captivated by her unfussy, unsentimental yet utterly compelling voice. Since then, I’ve read all of her books available in English, and even remembered to review a couple of them, the short story collection The Shooting Gallery and the slightly autobiographical stories The Watery Realm and Of Dogs and Walls. They were all translated by Geraldine Harcourt, who certainly seemed to have an affinity with the author, but is sadly no longer with us. I would love to see her later work get translated as well, since her work touched upon social and ecological issues too.

At the time I first read Territory of Light, however, I felt unable to review it because it was too close to what I was going through in my own protracted divorce. Rereading it now, I can engage more with the stylistic subtlety rather than be overwhelmed with emotion. The book has been compared to Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, but it is in fact the antithesis of that, despite the similarity of its subject matter. In both books, we encounter women whose husbands suddenly walk out on them and who have to find a way to keep going and create a new life for themselves and their children. However, this is what I wrote about Ferrante’s work at the time: ‘It sweeps the reader (and all else before it) away in a relentless turmoil and maelstrom of emotions. This is bold, brassy, uncensored description of wallowing in self-pity, anger, desire for revenge, confusion and loss of self-esteem. And it’s all described in Technicolor, not in a genteel, quiet way.’

In Tsushima’s work, much is withheld, implied, hinted at, half-hidden between the lines. This is polite but not detached, a style that is ostensibly lady-like and restrained, but easily swerves into the disturbing. This sudden shift into uncomfortable territory makes perhaps for even more shocking reading than when we are constantly assaulted with excess. For example, there is an unsettling sentence in the middle of a several paragraphs about the neighbourhood, the building the mother and daughter live in, the fact that no intruders can get up to their fourth floor:

Instead, living at that height meant it was a long way down.

Immediately, our senses are on high alert. We have already seen that the mother finds it difficult to get up in the morning and that her daughter is left to her own devices, that the daughter has briefly gone missing in the park and that she throws objects out of the window. I can’t be the only reader who was on tenterhooks (when I first read the book) that this was foreshadowing a major tragedy. It does not, but it gives us a powerful, yet understated insight into a certain state of mind.

The narrator’s progress over the course of the year is not always linear, and she makes many mistakes along the way as a woman and mother, but we have the sense she is emerging from the chrysalis and still figuring out the shape of her life. The extended metaphors used by Tsushima are brilliant:

I had before me an invisible, rickety, misshapen mass that not only kept its precarious balance but was actually sending out roots and even tentative new shoots that only my eyes could see. Having been presented with this unstable object, I was starting to grow too attached to it to be able to slip back into married life with Fujino as if nothing had happened. The way he spoke to me, as my husband, didn’t feel right any more. Must I go on, still, listening to that distant and increasingly incomprehensible voice until he decided to break off ties?

Of course, this being 1970s Japan, it goes against what society, her friends and work colleagues are all telling her – and yet those things still sound so familiar. I heard them myself in the so-called progressive, feminist Western societies in the mid 2010s.

No doubt there are circumstances no one else is privy to, but perhaps you should calm down a little and listen to what young Fujino has to say. There are several divorcees among my own circle, and it’s turned out to be a sad mistake in every case… I can assure you: you won’t meet a better man than Fujino. The type of man you’ll meet will go steadily downhill. That’s a given. You have nothing to gain. Every woman thinks it’s going to be different for her, but she ends up at the bottom of the heap all the same.

Although I know that some readers have felt that the narrator is a neglectful mother – and she certainly has some close escapes – it feels quite true to life. The behaviour might not be something I personally condone but it feels consistent with what might happen when someone is depressed, overwhelmed, exhausted and helpless. There are hints throughout that the mother is feeling in equal parts resentful and guilty about her child’s problem behaviour, which might be attributed to the sudden disappearance of her father from her life. There are moments when she clutches to her daughter in bed with animal ferocity and love. There are moments when she wants to be nowhere else than with her child, and yet she has dreams of sexual longing at night: ‘Why didn’t I ever dream of joyfully hugging my child?’ And yet… ‘the pleasure they brought was too intense for me to disown them.’

What is striking about the story is how utterly alone the narrator is: she has no close friends, she can’t go to her mother for comfort, the other mothers and carers at the nursery are often judgmental. The much younger family friend Sugiyama (a student of her ex-husband) at first turns up on Sundays and even cooks with them and plays with the daughter, but is ultimately frightened off, either by the ex-husband, or else by the feeling that too much might be expected of him. In her desperate need for comfort and closeness, no wonder the narrator makes some bad decisions, like the one-night stand with a father from nursery. The only real comfort is the apartment itself: that light-flooded, red-floored apartment high above the street, where the narrator and her daughter can nest in the tiny bedroom (less than two tatamis, so roughly 1.8m by 2m, like a burrow), and where, despite flooding, winds, illness and the emptiness of the building at night, she feels safe. Until she finally feels ready to move on.

Tsushima’s candour about the conflicted feelings of being ‘unmoored’ as a young divorcee and mother still feels fresh and relevant. In theory, we have moved on and are more accepting of this ambiguity, yet we see how quick the media and the public rushes to condemn and label mothers who have fun during a custody battle - in 2023. The narrator is as flawed as we all are, and she is captured here during a year of crisis. The one-star reviews of this book saying that the narrator is an abusive, horrible mother with no redeeming or sympathetic features proves that many of us are still not capable of empathy or forgiveness, nor of distinguishing between fictional and real characters.

#20BooksOfSummer: Women from Different Generations

The two books below came at me out of left field, to use a baseball term that I don’t understand at all, but I assume it means completely unexpectedly. They were not part of the #20BooksofSummer, but I might swap them for two from the original list. And maybe I should have waited for #WomenInTranslation in August, but sometimes you just have to go with where serendipity takes you. And I’m very glad it did, because both books are right up there as my favourites of what I’ve read so far this year. I read first the Ernaux and then immediately after the Alba de Cespedes, because I thought they went so well together, but because they talk about two different generations of women, I will start with the Italian book first.

6. Alba de Céspedes : Forbidden Notebook, trans. Ann Goldstein, Astra House, 2023.

By all accounts, de Céspedes (1911-1997) was a remarkable woman: a resistance fighter, journalist, novelist and screenwriter, divorce and remarried, but refused to follow her diplomat second husband abroad for the sake of her career. But fashions change and she has been somewhat forgotten in the Italian literary canon – although many Italian women will tell you that their mothers were surreptitiously reading and commenting on this particular book in the 1950s.

This book is a novel rather than semi-autobiographical, like most of Ernaux’s work. The narrator, Valeria Cossati, seems reasonably content with her bourgeois life in post-war Italy. Although her husband doesn’t make enough money as a clerk at a bank, and she has to go out to work herself, and although the family live in a rather small apartment with their grown children. She had never previously doubted the purpose of her life, her love and sense of duty towards her husband, son and daughter… until she acquires this notebook, in which she starts keeping a diary, and soon engaging in almost superhuman acrobatics and covert operations to keep the notebook hidden from the rest of the family, when she has no room or even desk to call her own. The dawning realisation of the limitations of her role in the family, the sacrifices she has made, the way she has given up on herself at quite a young age, is shown so subtly and gradually – a masterpiece of gradual self-awareness with occasional uncomfortable denials.

…I wonder if my character began to change the day my husband, jokingly, began calling me ‘mamma’. I liked it a lot at first, because it seemed to imply that I was the only adult in the house, the only one who knew about life. That increased my sense of responsibility… but now I see that it was a mistake; he was the only person for whom I was Valeria…

Valeria is of my grandmother’s generation – the kind of woman who went through so much during the Second World War, that they longed for the safety and material benefits of a middle-class life. And yet the world around them was shaken out of its foundations – Valeria and her mother can no longer understand each other – while the younger generation of women, like Valeria’s daughter Mirella, aspire to something different than the traditional gender roles, a career and a passion, an equal partnership.

The past no longer served to protect us, and we had no certainty about the future. Everything in me is confused, and I can’t talk about it with my mother or my daughter because neither would understand. They belong to two different world: the one that ended with that time, the other that it gave birth to. And in me these two worlds clash, making me groan.

However, it is clear that the family finds it very hard to be honest with each other about their own feelings and aspirations: they feel trapped in their roles. Michele the husband feels like a loser in his humble bank role with no further career aspirations, and dreams of becoming a screenwriter. Valeria initially seems to revel in her role as a martyr (and the complaining associated with it):

On those rare occasions when I happen to take a nap for half an hour before Michele and the children return for dinner… I never confess it. I’m afraid that if I admitted I’d enjoyed even a short rest or some diversion, I would lose the reputation I have of dedicating every second of my time to the family. No one would remember the countless hours I spend in the office or in the kitchen or shopping or mending but only the brief moments I confessed I’d spent reading a book or taking a walk. Michele is always urging me to take a rest… they often repeat, severely, ‘You should rest, as if not resting were a whim of mine. But in practice, as soon as they see me sitting and reading a newspaper, they say, ‘Mamma, since you have nothing to do, could you mend the lining of my jacket? Could you iron my pants?’ and so on.

Valeria soon realises that by writing things down, she is also giving words and a concrete presence to her inchoate feelings and frustrations. Fleeting moments of anger, sadness, pain become permanent and she no longer has the luxury to forget or reinterpret anything unpleasant, that she would rather not remember. She also begins to realise that people are constantly changing but that the others around them might prefer to stick to an outdated image of what they are, clinging to what is comforting and familiar, rather than discussing and perhaps changing alongside them.

There is a constant tension in the book about whether Valeria’s dangerous, subversive, forbidden notebook will be found by any of the family members – but there is the additional tension as to whether the family will implode: will either Michele or Valeria have an affair and abandon the family, will the fragile understanding between parents and offspring break down completely?

Although many aspects of women’s lives have changed since the book was written – the church no longer has such a hold on most people’s lives, it is no longer the exception that women ‘need’ to go out and work, divorce and pre-marital sex are no longer big issues that families refuse to acknowledge – there are still many aspects of Valeria’s life which ring true, at least to a woman of my generation brought up in a more patriarchal culture. One of the narrator’s conclusions seems particularly sad, however, but perhaps more pertinent than ever before in an age where we bare all our frustrations and fleeting thoughts, our successes but also increasingly our failures online: ‘All women hide a black notebook, a forbidden diary. And they all have to destroy it. Now I wonder where I’ve been more sincere, in these pages or in the actions I’ve performed…’

7. Annie Ernaux: A Frozen Woman, trans. Linda Coverdale, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995. (Now available from Seven Stories Press)

I had resisted reading Annie Ernaux because I very foolishly did not discover her while I was living in France and could easily access her books in the original. I thought that her famously flat and factual style would not translate well in English. Luckily, my university library had a few of her books in French as well as in English, so I borrowed the original French La Femme gelée but also a translation so I could give proper quotes rather than my roughshod translations (the book has been reissued recently by Seven Stories Press, after Ernaux won the Nobel Prize) – and I thought the translation was a bit American for my taste (Kiddo, diapers, strollers), but quite good.

What is interesting is that Ernaux’s narrator could easily be Valeria’s daughter Mirella, growing up and losing some of her idealism about what is possible as a woman. The narrator has a career and appears to have married a man who is sympathetic to her having a career rather than just earning a bit of extra money. Yet it’s the ‘small’ things, everyday division of labour in the household, that cause her so much frustration.

I’ve lost something I’ve known since childhood, the rhythm of time devoted fully to a task, followed by moments in which mind and body suddenly open and float free, in repose. He has not lost this rhythm. At noon, in the evening, on weekends, he finds time to unwind, read Le Monde, listen to records, balance the checkbook; he even finds time to be bored… My time is now constantly cluttered with a hodgepodge of jobs… The inventory that has never moved or amused anyone. Sisyphus and that rock he rolls endlessly back up the hill – at least it’s dramatic, a man on a mountain outlined against the horizon, whereas a woman in the kitchen tossing some butter into a frypan three hundred and sixty-five times a year, that’s neither heroic nor absurd, that’s just life.

This becomes even more untenable when the wife and mother also has literary (or other creative) ambitions, which Valeria did not but the author of the Forbidden Notebook clearly did. I think de Céspedes would certainly have resonated with Ernaux here:

Do the same work as a man but never lose sight of your home… I feel as though my life were cluttered right up to the brim, with no room for even the tiniest drop of the unexpected, the slightest curiosity… And to read for pleasure, to write poetry during the peace of naptime… a modern woman, practical but not a stay-at-home, creative around the edges… Kiddo’s asleep. Paper, pen. Anything, diary, poem, novel. Dreading his awakening. But more than that, I cannot manage to believe in the reality of what I’m writing, just a form of relaxation between the avocado-shrimp salad and taking my son to the park.

Ernaux’s narrator is of my mother’s generation and, because she comes from a working-class family with unconventional and strong female role models, she seems closer to the apparently more progressive gender politics of socialism, where women were very active and visible in the workplace (and there were state-sponsored crèches to encourage them to never leave the workforce). However, when they came home, it was very often to do the full second shift of housework, cooking, keeping the husband and children happy. Yes, bourgeois aspirations and materialist culture put an added gloss on these traditional gender roles, but they exist in other conditions as well.

There were so many passages that I could have underlined (if this hadn’t been a library book, not that it stopped previous readers from doing it). Ernaux is such an astute observer, she perfectly describes things that so many of us woman have experienced but not been able to be quite so eloquent. Here she is, for example, discussing boys and girls in their late teens.

The boys seem almost as wild and ridiculous as they did in their snowball period. And surprise: always talking about themselves, their likes and dislikes, their classes, their detentions, their motor scooter, and their balls. Listening to men, paying attention to them – now it starts, You can let them talk, or you can laugh. Unless you choose to play dumb, saying silly things on purpose to crack them up… They never imagine we might also have our own world… I must get used to the idea that for a long time, no boy, no man, except my father, will attach any importance to what I do.

What I really liked about Ernaux’s style in this book is the very informal way in which she addresses the reader, intimately, as if in a conversation with a female friend. The way she mixes indirect speech with direct speech, narration with sudden interjections, nicknames and humour and anecdotes with universal observations. It feels like she is addressing each one of us directly and urgently, making me want to laugh, roll my eyes and tell her my own experiences over a glass of wine.

I kept telling myself that perhaps the book resonated so much with me because I come from a more old-fashioned patriarchal culture, and so I am almost one generation behind her. But the truth is, she describes both my mother’s generation and my own – it was simply that the rhetoric was more compelling, the dreams more daring, the possibilities seemed endless when I was young… but motherhood and dual careers soon reduced us to more of the same.

Will it be different for our daughters’ generation? When I see the identical Instagram pouts, the almost universal use of fillers from a young age, the gender pay gap not reducing nearly as much as it should, the backlash of traditionalists/anti-abortionists/alpha-males/porn-entitlement and so on, I can’t help feeling that we are really not progressing all that much… These two books are valuable reminders that we have still not come as far as we could.

#GermanLitMonth and #NovNov: Die Mansarde by Marlen Haushofer

It’s an amazing feeling, isn’t it, when as a reader you discover an author who seems to really speak both to and for you, whose writing you admire but who also makes you squirm a little because how could they possibly have gained such an insight into the deepest recesses of your soul, even those bits you want to hide because they are too embarrassing, too sad, too dark? This is how I felt about Marlen Haushofer after reading her masterpiece The Wall in the summer of 2020. I fell deeply in love with her voice, and at first I thought it was because of the circumstances: we had just experienced a world of emptiness, where time stood still. But then I read The Wallpaper Door and We Kill Stella, and I was blown away by both of them.

Plunging into a Haushofer book is like a cold dip into an Austrian alpine lake – bracing and potentially deadly, but oh, the clarity of the water! As you can see from the amount of post-its that I used for Die Mansarde, I want to remember almost every single sentence and this author has now joined my select band of favourites like Tove Jansson, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and Shirley Jackson (I am trying to imagine a dinner party with them, but suspect they were all such introverts they would not have enjoyed it much).

This latest foray into her work is a novella (a little on the longer side, but still under 200 pages), the last work published by Haushofer before her untimely death. The title can be translated as The Loft or The Attic, which is the place where the narrator, the typical strange, middle-aged, oddly passive Haushofer heroine, retreats to work on her illustrations of birds. She is married to Hubert, an uncommunicative lawyer who likes reading about historical battles. They barely touch and they never talk about anything important. They have two children, but the son, mother’s favourite, has left home and the daughter is oblivious to her parents, as all teenagers are. Outwardly, everything seems to be very average and fine in this Viennese family, albeit dull and predictable: every Sunday the couple goes to the Arsenal Military Museum, every weekday the husband goes to work, while the narrator either prepares his lunch or else has social obligations of her own – people she doesn’t really want to meet, and with whom she doesn’t have much in common. The narrator feels safe in this boring routine, even though she has no one with whom she can really talk properly. Her only escape valve is her sketchbook in the loft.

It turns out that the narrator used to be a book illustrator specialising in birds and insects, but something momentuous happened and she no longer does this professionally. All she strives for now is to draw a bird that does not look so isolated – surely birds by and large operate in flocks, so why do her birds look so lonely? (This lone bird motif seems to crop up quite a bit in Haushofer’s writing.)

In the first part of the book, the narrator teases us with multiple hints of ‘before and after’ a calamitous event, which completely changed the married couple’s life when their son was just three years old. The narrator suddenly went completely deaf upon hearing some sirens, perhaps as a trauma response after the war (the couple met and got married during the war, so the story takes place in the mid 1960s, we suspect)). Instead of going to a hospital, her husband paid for her to ‘recover’ at the house of a hunter in the countryside for eighteen months, while her young son stayed with her mother-in-law. In the countryside she met a man who used her deafness as way to purge himself of his guilt, confessing things to her that he knows she cannot hear, crying and shouting at her, to the point where she doesn’t know whether to fear or pity him. She wrote a diary during that period of self-imposed exile, and now fragments of this diary are showing up in envelopes in her letterbox. Forced to remember and reflect upon the past, which she has successfully avoided thus far, the narrator finally gets to understand her real nature and the emotions she has been suppressing for the sake of an ‘easy’, comfortable life.

The story doesn’t sound like much, yet there are so many beautiful passages, such psychological insight, that I don’t quite know how to share with you. Let me try and give you a flavour by sharing a few favourite quotes. In the first, the narrator wonders at how she and her husband have changed over the years – we have seen this in their minimalistic, dull interactions, but the narrator’s reflections add a heavy layer of… what is it exactly? Depression? Anxiety? Extreme self-consciousness?

It used to be different. Back then, Hubert was not so concerned about his dignity, we laughed a lot and invented games, something he has forgotten about and which is becoming an increasingly hazy memory for me too… That time ‘before’ would seem so unusual to me if I were to glimpse it through a key-hole: so strange, that I would have to cry, and I no longer know how to cry.

I’ve changed too, but not completely, because every time Ferdinand [her son] praises my desserts, I could jump in the air with glee. Somewhere locked inside of me there is a little girl who wants to warm her toes and dance around like all the other children. But she has been locked up, this is what happens to little girls who don’t know how to stop being little girls. It’s really my fault, that I cannot cope with the present day.

Another reoccurring theme in Haushofer’s work is the relationship between people and animals, with the author frequently seeing humans as the evil partner. Here the narrator is debating whether she should tame a kitten who is visiting her in the hunter’s house. The cat runs to hide in a bush when the narrator tries to stroke her.

It’s better like that. She must never learn how pleasant it is to be stroked. It could confuse her healthy little cat brain far too much. She should remain free and brave, full of hatred against those who make her suffer; only hatred and caution can keep her alive. I say to her: ‘Don’t trust anyone, Cat, they only want to torture you and kill all your babies. Stay all by yourself, Cat. At some point they will catch you and try to sell your hide, but it’s not as bad to be killed by your enemy as it is to be killed by your friend.’

There is something in the very simple, clear German text (I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in conveying that in my quick translations) that just skirts tragedy but is not at all self-pitying or self-indulgent, something that feels so profoundly true and human. Reading this while also reading Cărtărescu’s Solenoid, which is also a deep dive into a troubled psyche, I couldn’t help but think how much more concise and pared down the woman writer is – and thus all the more effective (to my mind).

I read it in German, but the book is available in English from Quartet Books, translated by Amanda Prantera. Also, you don’t want to miss Vishy’s superb review of this book (Vishy has loved her for far longer than I have), while Anthony from Time’s Flow Stemmed describes it as ‘close as you can get to immaculate’. Dorian Stuber has also written a great review of her more famous work The Wall.

I was planning to read some other novellas for Novellas in November and for German Literature Month, but I might end up reading Haushofer’s biography instead.

Two German-Language Books About Womens’ Rage

Mareike Fallwickl: Die Wut, die bleibt (The Lasting Rage)

Anke Stelling: Schäfchen im Trockenen (Keeping Your Sheep Safe – translated as ‘Higher Ground’ by Lucy Jones, Scribe)

Back in 2014, I read Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs and encountered a woman’s raw, unfiltered anger for the first time. I loved it, although it divided readers and led to an upsurge in debate about ‘unlikeable’ characters (which seems to be even more of a no-no when it comes to female characters). There have been other books since which explore what might happen when women refuse to go along with the script handed to them, live up to people’s expectations, be meek, silent people-pleasers: Naomi Alderman’s The Power, Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. Generally, these women are condemned, viewed as unnatural, earn a bad reputation that lingers on for centuries (Medea, anyone?). No one likes a loud shriek of rage, too shrill, too hysterical, right?

Yet I can’t help but be fascinated by these books, where women are suddenly allowed to enact those fantasies of verbal (and in some cases physical) revenge that we daren’t let ourselves think about. I think I have a natural predisposition to be very gentle and kind, but I occasionally wonder if my tendency to be so forgiving is merely cowardice and conflict avoidance.

The two German-language novels I recently read both start with women being perceived as victims and then transform into women as avenging creatures (angels or demons? up to you to decide). Both Germany and Austria are more conservative when it comes to women’s place in society, so it is refreshing to see that this literary trend is making its way there too.

Austrian writer Fallwickl’s novel is set in Salzburg and at the very start, Helene, a mother overwhelmed by family demands during Covid lockdown, commits suicide by jumping from the balcony while the family is having dinner. Her best friend Sarah, a childless writer, used to slightly envy but mostly pity Helene, but she steps in to help out with the children, thereby making the widower’s life far too easy, as Helene’s teenage feminist daughter Lola keeps scolding her. Lola and her friend are assaulted by some boys at the skatepark and the two girls resolve to learn how to fight to protect themselves… and soon become part of a group who call themselves #WeAreKarma, taking revenge on the men who have wronged women. It’s an interesting glance at generational differences in interpretation of feminism, and how the desire for stability or family makes us compromise our most treasured principles and values as we grow older.

Unlike Lola, who seems more concerned with the wider social oppression of women, from domestic violence issues to abuse of minors, from body shaming to gender fluidity, Sarah is discovering how motherhood in a society where the political and domestic issues mirror each other, and that doesn’t offer much support for mothers, often spells the end of self-realisation:

‘You can’t imagine how bitter you can become about the father of your children… motherhood is a ship and at some point you realise that you are sitting in it all on your own. You are surrounded by dark currents, you have no oars, no compass.’

‘But who is steering the ship?’ asks Sarah.

‘You realise that only later,’ replies Helene, ‘It’s the men. The politicians, society. We mothers have no power. We have the entire burden, but no power.’

The moment of awakening, when Sarah chooses to replace the rhetoric of self-pity and doubts with a fighting spirit, comes when she is called into school because Lola pushed her PE teacher, who was insulting her and another classmate about their body weight. Sarah’s initial reaction is to apologise, to smooth things over, but suddenly the resentment that has been building up over the years spills out of her and she stands up for Lola, even threatens to create a scandal for the school.

When they were told back then that it wouldn’t hurt to give in, to apologise, to not kick up a fuss, to keep your head down, how did they know that it wouldn’t hurt? Maybe it did hurt them. Maybe it hurt them greatly.

German writer Stelling’s novel is set in Berlin, against the backdrop of the city’s increasingly problematic housing situation but has some similarities with Fallwickl’s story: an angry woman in her forties trying to explain things to a teenage daughter – except in Stelling’s case we don’t get to hear much of the daughter talking back and educating the mother.

Resi is an author, married to an artist; they have four children but not all that much disposable income, and are subletting from one of Resi’s old schoolfriends. However, Resi’s latest book took a swipe at her friends, for their bourgeois attitudes and love of material comforts, upon which she is served an eviction notice and, unsurprisingly, her friendships unravel. The novel is in fact the narrative she writes for her teenage daughter, reminiscing about the past, how she always felt less accepted by the group because of her social background. It is a howl of disappointment, self-justification and social critique, entertaining, relatable, but also quite revealing of a stubborn character with a chip on her shoulder, keen to emphasise her ‘higher moral ground’.

Just like in Fallwickl’s novel, we can understand the frustrations of the character up to a certain point, but we might question some of her choices or her interpretation of events. Resi recognises that she has fallen victim to society’s expectations of what a happy family should look like and what they should do, but she cannot help building up her expectations every weekend, and then being bitterly disappointed. The description of the Saturday breakfast is funny – but the laughter is painful, because so recognisable. Nobody wants to come to the table, nobody cares about the fresh pastries from the bakery, they sit silently and glumly, or complain about the food, or they make noises while eating.

I’ve fallen for the Weekend Lie again: the one that says it’s nice to have breakfast together on Saturday, when no one has to rush off anywhere, with fresh pastries and smiling faces, with Nutella and love and fruit…

The Weekend Lie is powerful indeed.

It operates on the basis of a ruthless causality: If I’m not sitting with you, it means I don’t like you.

It operates on the basis of simple contrasts: If it’s stressful during the week, the weekend will be blissful at last.

It operates with dogged obstinancy: reappears every five days, all year round, come sun, come rain.

Two interesting though problematic books, with flawed characters but relatable rants. I’ve seen some readers say that these women are speaking from a position of privilege and entitlement that they don’t even recognise – and it is true that compared to women in other parts of the world (or in other generations), their lives are not that hard. But they are, quite rightly, comparing themselves to others closer to them in their own society: rich or childless women, or simply men. Perhaps they also feel a sense of betrayal that earlier feminists told them that once they were working, earning their own money, once employment legislation stopped discriminating against them, they would have it all and be able to do it all. If only they would lean in more… Meanwhile, they’ve leaned in so far that they are toppling off balconies, yet structural problems in society and other people’s attitudes are still not changing enough.

Coincidentally, some of the themes also resonated with a film I’ve recently watched Everything Everywhere All at Once: what happens once women stop being overwhelmed victims or hankering after lost, often illusory possibilities? Can anger be used in constructive as well as destructive ways? I enjoyed the chaotic energy and genre mash-up of the film, as described by the title. This sense of overwhelm and general assault on the senses, thoughts, feelings, memories is what we are all perhaps feeling at the moment, although the film’s resolution was understandably (for we all desire some clarity and simplification) a little too pat. In real life, there are far too many people, including mothers, who never achieve any insight into themselves, and never have a fully-developed character arc. As for using rage constructively, well… we’ve seen how bad we humans tend to be at that.

French in June: Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed, transl. Patrick O’Brian.

[Also Book 1 of my #20Books of Summer – I forgot to add her to the original list. Honestly, not cheating!]

I strongly identified with Simone de Beauvoir ever since the age of ten or thereabouts – she was a powerful role model to me. Of course, upon growing up and reading more about her life, I realised that there were plenty of contradictions too. But aren’t we all flawed? Isn’t there always a gap between what we profess and the aches of our heart? Nevertheless, I still love her intellect and her writing. Above all, I love her psychological insight. She can see right through into the hearts of women, even the darkest, most secret nooks which we want to hide from others.

This book is a collection of three novellas, all featuring women at a later stage in life, all facing old age, rejection, and loss of filial or spousal love.

The Age of Discretion is the story of a mother whose son has not turned out the way she would have liked him to be. At the same time, she faces the prospect of aging, regrets, coping with obsolescence in both the personal and professional realms. At times she seems almost content with her long years of experience:

I have discovered the pleasure of having a long past behind me… a background to the diaphanous present: a background that gives its colour and its light, just as rocks or sand show through the shifting brilliance of the sea. Once I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feeling and my joys are smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of time past.

But she has to learn to cope with the limitations of her body, her intellect, her family, and her ability to shape people. She has to learn to not look too far ahead, to live a short-term life, to cope with loneliness in a strange world that we no longer understand and that would carry on without us.

No, he did not belong to me any more… It was I who moulded his life. Now I am watching it from outside, a remote spectator. It is the fate common to all mothers; but who has ever found comfort in saying that hers is the common fate.
Because he was very demanding I believed I was indispensable. Because he is easily influenced I imagined I had created him in my own image… I was the one who knew the real Philippe. And he has preferred to go away from me, to break our secret alliance, to throw away the life I had built for him with such pains. He will turn into a stranger.

She cold-heartedly turns him away because she feels she cannot respect his life choices anymore. He is the one who demonstrates unconditional love. It is a shocking story because of her intransigence about her son and his choices – an unfashionable attitude nowadays, but perhaps more common for that generation:

This is what her son says (quite rightly, it seems to me):

For my part I have never wondered whether I respected you or not. You could do bloody-fool things as much as ever you liked and I shouldn’t love you any the less. You think love has to be deserved… and I’ve tried hard enough not to be undeserving. Everything I ever wanted to be… they were all mere whims according to you: I sacrificed them all to please you. The first time I don’t give way, you break with me.

The Monologue, the second story in the volume, reminded me of one of Dorothy Parker’s tour de force monologues, which reveal all of the deepest fears, foibles, and insecurities of the woman speaking. In this case, we have a frankly rather unpleasant, bitter woman left all alone on New Year’s Eve, resenting her neighbours for celebrating. Her lover has abandoned her, she was estranged from her own daughter (who subsequently died), and considers herself to be wronged by all around her. A real howl of a rant, a mix of pity and disgust – but it also makes us wonder if we are judging her more harshly because she is both middle-aged and a woman. Once again, we encounter here fear of abandonment and loneliness – if the first narrator at least had a partner in old age, this one does not.

She’s dead and so all right what of it? The dead are not saints. She wouldn’t cooperate, she never confided in me at all… Blind with fury just because I was doing my duty as a mother. Me the selfish one when she ran away like that would have been in my interest to have left her with her father. Without her I still had a chance of making a new life for myself.

The third, longest story is The Woman Abandoned, describing the breakdown of a marriage in the form of a diary over the course of several months, as the narrator seeks to come to terms with her husband’s affair, to keep the marriage going, while her two grown daughters have moved away – one to the States, one in a bourgeois marriage. A woman who, while not entirely blameless or likable, is certainly more relatable. She has tried her best to be accommodating and understanding, but constantly questions herself and ends up losing everything. Her sense of desolation is so beautifully conveyed:

Every night I call him: not him – the other one, the one who loved me. And I wonder whether I should not prefer it if he were dead. I used to tell myself that death was the only irremediable misfortune and that if he were to leave me I should get over it. Death was dreadful because it was possible; a break was bearable because I could not imagine it. But now in fact I tell myself that if he were dead I should at least know whom I had lost and who I was myself. I no longer know anything. The whole of my past life has collapsed behind me, as the land does in those earthquakes where the ground consumes and destroys itself… Even if you survive there is nothing left.

I have to admit I could not help but identify with some of the dialogue in this:

The worst thing you did was to let me lull myself in a sense of false security. Here I am at forty-four, empty-handed, with no occupation, no other interest in life apart from you. If you had warned me eight years ago I should have made an independent existence for myself and now it would be easier for me to accept the situation.
‘But Monique!’ he cried, looking astonished, ‘I urged you as strongly as I possibly could to take that job as secretary of the Revue medicale seven years ago.’

This is a powerful description of her descent into depression – no longer able to distinguish between day and night, not washing, not going outside, drinking, smoking, lying in bed all day, wanting to die. Nothing escapes de Beauvoir’s unsentimental eye, for example, the limited amount of sympathy or interest that friends can conjure up for you.

They are all sick of me. Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn’t advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.

In summary, not the cheeriest of reads, but so insightful and so well written. Simone conquers my heart all over again!

Louise Bourgeois: More than Spiderwoman

The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois is widely known for her gigantic spider sculptures, like the one at the Tate Modern in London, but she is so much more than that. I had never seen much of her art in person before, and since the exhibition of her late work The Woven Child at the Hayward Gallery will be closing on the 15th May, I made it a point to go there last week to see it.

Of course, spiders were involved. This work combines her use of cages/enclosed spaces in her later work and her love of spiders. She associated spiders with her mother: hard-working, patient, creative, resilient. Her family had a tapestry restoration business, and you can see fragments of tapestry scattered around the edges of the cage.

I am not necessarily a huge fan of installation art, but there is something so visceral and moving about Bourgeois’ work that you feel you want to immerse yourself in it. Certainly step into her cages or cells, touch those floating bits of gauze, lace and other silk, which feel so vulnerable.

Another spider/mother sitting on an embroidered chair, in a cell. To me it represents hard-working women and mothers everywhere, being constrained in the domestic sphere, whether they choose it or not.

Many of the nightdresses and underwear were either the artist’s own (like shedding her skin, she described it) or her mother’s.

The contrast between the formal little black dress and the disarmingly innocent and fragile underclothes.

It is impossible not to be struck by the symbolism of the work. Some of it was too disturbing, too powerful for me to want to take a picture to share with others: couples embracing where the woman had a maimed limb, bodies hanging in various stages of distress… I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising. But others were more benign and profoundly moving.

The Good Mother. The imagery of unspooling (which appears quite frequently in her work), lactating and being tied down would have made me cry when my children were very young.

The woman toppled over. The curvaceous woman reminded me of Niki de Sainte Phalle’s Nanas. Niki was another French-American woman artist, only a little younger than Bourgeois. Unlike the smooth, colourful papier-mache Nanas, Bourgeois has created Frankenstein women, by sewing together pieces of sometimes rough, sometimes smooth fabric

Then there were the fabric heads with gaping mouths and flattened features – like a zombie army. So many ways to interpret this!

Not just two-faced – this one had four faces – dark and light, demonic and innocent.

There were ‘prettier’, less visceral works on display too, full of literary allusions or nostalgia for long-gone places.

Bourgeois repurposed old teatowels or handkerchiefs to create this mood board for Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, a novel about the few choices open to women at the time, and a journey from innocence to bitterness, illusion to disenchantment.

Ode a la Bievre, a series of fabric drawings in memory of the river Bievre. The family moved next to the river when she was a child, and she reminisces about the family’s beautiful garden and exploring the river (which contained tannin, an important ingredient for dyeing fabric). The last panel says that when she returned with her children to show them the river, it had disappeared (been filled in) and ‘only the trees planted by my father along its edge remained as witness.’

LATE ADDITION: I’ve just been made aware that there is a video of someone much more eloquent than me who can talk you through this wonderful exhibition, namely Deborah Levy.

Autumn-Spring Friendships, or In Praise of Women Aged 60+

I have always enjoyed befriending and talking to older ladies (older gentlemen too, although the relationship was occasionally tinged by complicated dynamics and disappointments). I suppose this comes from the excellent (although in one case far too brief) relationship I had with my grandmothers and my father’s eldest sister (from a big family, with my father being the youngest child, so she was more like a second mother to him). It’s easy to say that I had a better relationship with them than with my own mother (perhaps because I only saw them once or twice a year) as I was growing up, but they always felt much less conventional, with a more modern outlook than my mother.

I could not get enough of hearing the stories of women of their generation – their lives spanned most of the 20th century, so they experienced so many political, social, economic and technological changes. I felt I wanted to preserve and honour their memories, but they were also funny, wise and reassuring, providing me with so much food for thought and guidance on my own life. Perhaps this is what drove me towards studying social anthropology!

I like to think that the ladies in question also got something out of their friendship with me, that they occasionally caught a glimpse of the genuine love, interest and desire to amuse them lurking beyond my gauche manners and ignorant remarks. Of course, the downside of such friendships is that they are sadly all too brief, and that they leave you with a sense of regret that you didn’t listen more, meet more frequently, appreciate them more at the time.

Here is a small tribute to the very special ladies that lit up my life:

In November/December 1983 I was in hospital with a very nearly ruptured appendix. I was underweight for my height and was given too much anaesthetic when they operated on me, so that complicated matters a little and I ended up having to spend roughly a week in hospital. During that time there were two other ladies on my ward, and we became a fun-loving trio, getting so rowdy with laughter at times, that the nurses would come in and shush us, for fear we might tear our stitches.

Margareta Steriade – poet and painter, born in 1897, she studied in Paris, as was fashionable at the time, and had her first public exhibitions in 1929. She was ver much involved in the artistic circles of the 1930s and, being of Jewish origin like Mihail Sebastian, became a great friend of his and designed the cover of his hugely controversial novel For Two Thousand Years (made even more controversial because he chose to publish it with the virulent anti-semitic preface signed by his hitherto mentor Nae Ionescu – an early example of naming and shaming with their own words). She was the one who told me about Lilith being Adam’s first wife, thereby introducing me both to feminism and to questioning of myths and traditions. I was very unhappy with my looks at the time, felt my nose was too ‘fat’, that I was too tall and gangly, but she made me feel beautiful, said I had the perfect oval face and asked me to model for her.

Mrs Angheliade – I don’t think I ever knew her first name, I just felt it was disrespectful to call her anything less than ‘Doamna’ (Mrs). She was a couple of years older than Mrs Steriade. Her husband was descended from a Greek family and was a highly regarded lawyer or judge in the 1930-40s. After the Communists came to power following the 1947 elections in Romania, her husband was perceived as a hated remnant of the old regime and was sent to a labour camp. She had been a lawyer herself, but was not allowed to practice in her profession after her husband’s arrest. Their home was nationalised, and for a while she had to do manual work on the factory assembly line, and was severely criticised at every weekly workers’ meeting because of her background. She was quite open in telling us about all this, as if she was past caring about what any Securitate might do to her.

2. Betty – this was my landlady when I moved to London and lived in Golders Green for the first year of my Ph.D. I’ve written about her before, how full of life, film knowledge and romantic notions she was. A big child with a booming laugh. I still miss her so much!

3. I met several inspiring ladies at the Geneva Writers Group in 2012 (by which point, I could no longer be described as Spring, by any stretch of the imagination, but these ladies were still way ahead of me in terms of lived experience and wisdom). Many of them were outstanding writers, and I always enjoyed listening to them share their work. Ginny, Sally, Kathy, Susan and Karen in particular stand out. Ginny was funny, lively, always one of the ringleaders when it came to organising Christmas parties, and her little dog was almost as much loved as she was. Sally was what I imagined Barbara Pym to have been: quiet, with a very English reserve at first glance, but a wicked sense of humour and a very observant eye. Kathy was such a true international that for a long time I thought she was from an entirely different country – she was so warm and caring that I’d have liked her to have been my mother. Susan Tiberghien I have talked about before (and reviewed): she was the founder of the Geneva Writers’ Group, a woman with formidable energy and generosity of spirit. And Karen was my wonderful mentor, artist, poet, in whose house in Provence I found so much creativity even at a very low point in my life.

Incidentally, I am only using the past tense because, sadly, my stay in Geneva ended five years ago. The ladies themselves are still delightful and active, and wonderful friends (even if I haven’t been great at keeping in touch).

4. Nordic walking group – As I get older, so the age gap between me and my older friends gets smaller. Nevertheless, I am the youngest of my Nordic walking group, even if some of them are only 10 years older than me. They have grown-up children, have been through all the worries engulfing me now, and have an endless reserve of anecdotes and good humour. They are also much fitter than me on the whole, it has to be said – so excellent role models on how to keep active and social in the years ahead.