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Nothing Grows by Moonlight – Torborg Nedreaas (tr. Bibbi Lee)

I hadn’t heard of Norwegian author Torborg Nedreaas until Penguin published a rather enticing edition of her novel Nothing Grows by Moonlight this year and I decided to make it my first book for WIT Month. What an excellent novel it turned out to be! In Norway, Nedreaas was already an acclaimed writer and as the Penguin website states, “a committed communist heavily involved in women’s advocacy.”

Originally published in 1947 and presented with the framing device of a story within a story, Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas is an intense, powerful, and gripping tale of female desire and reproductive rights unfurling against the backdrop of the hardships of working-class life. 

In an opening scene drenched with hallucinatory vibes, a man, our narrator, wanders in search of a woman who once spent a night in his apartment, pouring out the story of her life in a frenzied, almost confessional monologue. He remembers neither her name nor her face with clarity, yet something about her presence has lodged itself deep within him.

The man recalls how one dusky spring evening, the kind that brings a little rain, he is immediately drawn to a solitary young woman at a railway station (“A young girl was standing there. I imagined her to be nineteen or twenty years old. A complete stranger to me, whose face I could not even see”). Struck by her loneliness and the mysterious aura around her, the man offers to help, and she suggests they walk through the city together.

When you experience something, an event or a human being, that forces itself into your life, giving it meaning, you often notice the little things most. Everything that connects you with the experience, even the most inconsequential detail, takes on a life of its own and demands something of you.

Their wandering eventually brings them to his home, where over the course of a single night filled with wine and cigarettes, the woman launches into an intense confession, telling him the story of her life – a story whose very core is an all-consuming love that will mark and unravel her life. Entreating him to pay attention and not get judgmental, the man obliges, readily donning the role of a largely silent and peripheral listener, letting her voice fill up the silence of the night.

As she plunges into her narrative, we are first told of her family and their constricted existence in a mining town known simply as The Mine – a place of backbreaking work, narrow horizons, and unyielding poverty.

Such a small town. It shapes its people, dictates their character, terrorizes every single individual. You’d think a person was a person and that he’d be the same, wherever he ended up, right? You know they say that your character is your destiny. You might add that environment is character. The environment in a larger town is sufficiently varied so that people have the space to be different from one another. While such a small place… oh.

In this environment, at the tender age of seventeen or eighteen, the woman falls in love with Johannes, her teacher; she is at an impressionable age when strong emotions or passions are often overwhelming. At that age, the woman is too inexperienced to put her feelings in perspective, and her infatuation with Johannes becomes all too consuming. While her peers engage in harmless flirtations with men their age, the woman’s obsession with Johannes leaves little room for anything else.

Johannes takes advantage and is more than willing to embark on an intimate relationship with her, provided he does not have to deal with consequences. Of course, in that mining town, their affair can never be known; it would be a disgrace, especially where a teacher-student relationship is concerned, and where the women mostly bear the brunt of any scandal.

Meanwhile, for the woman, life in The Mine begins to get increasingly difficult. Her father’s earnings are never enough, and the workers’ strikes, rather than improve their financial position, only hamper their livelihood. Every time the miners go on strike, the mother worries about putting food on the table, while the lack of income drives the father to indulge in drink and fierce quarrels.

Mother and father were done with one another. She was done as a woman before she was forty. Not just because she was broken and not worth much, but they were bitter toward each other; I suppose it had to do with money….And he didn’t drink either, my father. Only when there was a strike or during a time when he was out of work. Then he’d get drunk sometimes and we had an awful time. But things were bitter nevertheless, hateful nevertheless. There was a quiet and restless hatred between those two people who had once been young and tender toward each other and who had once glowed for one another. No great drama, you mustn’t think that. It was the insidious murder by everyday trivia.

To complicate matters, her sister’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy plunges the family into shame, revealing the double standards of a patriarchal society where a woman’s “mistake” becomes her lifelong burden in the form of forced marriage. The woman laments this cruel fate, recognising how little power women possess in determining the course of their lives, and who find themselves at the mercy of a judgemental, unforgiving patriarchal society.

As the days slip by, the woman’s obsession with Johannes colours much of her world. She clings to any gesture of tenderness from Johannes or any slight indication of reciprocity. When he suggests going on a trip together, away from the prying eyes of the town, the woman readily relents, and those days are some of the happiest of her life, as she revels in his company and in the ecstasy of their forbidden romance. For the woman, those are the first heady days of the affair when the world is seen through rose-tinted glasses, but these are soon followed by moments of desperation and longing when they must depart.

Because everything was so beautiful. The sun had to break through a purple wall of morning fog and that wall had a golden edge at first and the smaller clouds turned to gold for a while. And everything green woke up and became even greener, and the blue lake below The Mine became a blue explosion just before the sun came out and transformed it to molten gold. Whenever a small breeze came across the surface, the lake boiled with gold.

Back home from the trip, the endless struggle, poverty, and harshness of their circumstances only exacerbate the woman’s claustrophobia, and she decides to leave, giving up her job in The Mine and relocating to a town to be closer to Johannes, where she finds a room in a boardinghouse. When she lands unannounced at Johannes’ house one day, she is disturbed by his anger and unwillingness to see her; later, the woman begins to feel increasingly tormented about Johannes seeing another woman.

When the woman discovers she’s pregnant, she recognizes she can’t keep the child despite her wishes to the contrary. Knowing that her child’s illegitimate status will only make his/her future more difficult, the woman is also painfully aware of being branded a pariah by society. When she informs Johannes of her pregnancy, he reacts with alarm and presses money on her for an abortion, a gesture that fills her with revulsion. Yet, she goes ahead with the abortion much against her wishes after a considerable internal struggle.

As the novel unfolds, the woman remains haunted by Johannes and her conflicted feelings for him, yet she also discovers solace and companionship in Morck, an older, lonely, alcoholic outcast who introduces her to the transcendent beauty of piano music and to books that awaken her to the injustices of an unequal world, the struggles of the working class, and the ideals of socialism.

Haunting and melancholic, Nothing Grows by Moonlight crackles with a plethora of themes such as female desire, bodily autonomy, abortion when examined in the context of a working class background, class struggle and social injustice, the paucity of growth in the face of abject poverty, and the societal hypocrisy and constraints placed upon women with many of these themes often intertwined.

As the woman dwells on the horribly claustrophobic life in The Mine, we see how her family is trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that they can’t quite break out of, despite endless toil and hard work. Going about their lives amid such financial constraints, even striking to demand better pay and working conditions, is a gamble they can’t quite afford.

Up there where we live. It’s different. Maybe it’s the same other places too, but up at The Mine and in our town especially you have to be like everyone else. You can’t hurt, not any worse than others. You can’t have fun; you can’t show you’re having fun, at any rate. Yes, it’s worse than anything, showing you’re happy. And above all you must never be different than you normally are; they can’t take any surprises from anyone.

Female desire pervades the novel and in the woman’s portrayal of her passion for Johannes – a one-sided affair that traces her love and longing for him, however doomed. That yearning and obsession define the texture of her narrative, infusing it with a feverish, sorrowful vibe that is maintained throughout the novel. Interspersed with her narrative (as she pauses for breath to puff on her cigarette, collect her thoughts or take a sip of the wine) are short paragraphs in italics peppered throughout that bring the reader back to the present, to the man’s apartment, the density of the night outside as silence reigns absolute punctuated by the occasional shrill sound.

More importantly, Nedreaas highlights the sorry plight of working-class women; not only do they find their outlook dimmed by the closed contours of their world, but they must also grapple with hypocrisy and a rigidly patriarchal society that heavily validates the behaviour of men, always absolving them.

But their wives cannot get around to making life better for themselves. That’s why I can’t stand them. They become stupid and they become petty because their world does not reach beyond the shop and the kitchen and the well. They become mean because they cannot stand the kind of happiness they themselves cannot participate in. They become malicious because they think someone else’s accident elevates them a little from their own wretchedness.

In stark contrast, women are relentlessly judged: the shame of illicit affairs, the condemnation of pregnancies outside marriage, the double standards of being forced into impossible choices (abortion is condemned, yet having a child outside marriage is condemned even more leading to abortion).

Thus, abortion and reproductive rights is another core theme, but here readers might find Nedreaas treading on murky ground. For instance, when the woman finds herself pregnant for the first time, she clearly wishes to keep the child, yet aware that her circumstances (lack of financial and moral support) prevent her from doing so.

This thing about the child’s father and marriage by force, you understand, made me aware with every nerve-ending that nothing good would come of it. It couldn’t possibly be what it was supposed to; there was something wrong with the whole marriage bit, I thought. At the same time I realized you couldn’t have a child without it. But I’d begun to wonder why you couldn’t. Why is it such a shame and misfortune? Oh, well, morality. Falling in love and craziness. But what’s so morally right about a man being forced to go to bed with a girl he’s no longer in love with? Well, what’s the point in the whole act of lovemaking when it’s been stripped of love and craziness and is almost being performed with aversion?

But as readers, we sense that the woman herself does not truly believe in abortion (“She wants the doctor to help her commit another offence. It is really an offence”). Yet for women from working-class backgrounds, confronted with shame, ostracization, and the absence of any real support, terminating a pregnancy becomes a harsh necessity. Nedreaas thus frames abortion not as a matter of unconditional reproductive freedom, but as something shaped by class struggle and the hypocrisies of society.

Back then I didn’t quite understand him when he said that no one made a fuss about these pogroms, only about the accompanying criminality. People wanted to believe that quacks and unhappy women were the cause. They did not want to admit that they were just a result. He told me who opposed public information about birth control and adequate medical treatment. The same ones who oppose decent living conditions for full-term babies.

For the woman, further pregnancies follow, and with them more abortions, portrayed in stark, harrowing detail as she is driven to desperate and dangerous methods of ending them. These scenes, though difficult to read, are nevertheless powerful in their revelation of the brutal realities endured by women with little privilege or protection.

Later, when the woman starts frequenting Morck’s place, she becomes assailed by myriad thoughts and ideas that heighten her awareness of the injustices of society and wealth inequality. But Morck, a seasoned veteran by now, while acknowledging the truth of the problems, can’t quite dispel the sense of futility that tinges his views.

Morck smiled. I didn’t like that smile. He said, “Yes, they can strike. Except for what it costs them to strike. Often their wages increase a little, then prices go up. Wages don’t go any further than before. So they strike again. And the Last Holy Men can then wring their hands and point to the impossible workers: ‘Look my friends, these greedy souls will never be satisfied.'”

“Nothing grows by moonlight,” he tells her, insinuating that nothing can flourish in an environment of darkness and despair. Nothing Grows by Moonlight is also awash with striking imagery and rich descriptions of natural surroundings that mirror the woman’s sense of loneliness and isolation.

And so I waded through the dew across the field, the deep green aftergrowth was bathed in a glittering veil of dew; it was a burning membrane of millions of diamonds hissing and sparkling with blue and gold and red and purple lightning, and I fractured them under my shoes. And never has the aftergrowth been so newborn and so infinitely green as it was in my tracks, and Johannes lived in my skin and my soul, but I was lonely and couldn’t share my experience with him.

It’s an atmospheric novel laced with a dreamlike, haunting quality; a narrative filled with long, aching passages suffused with a fervent tone that enhances the propulsive nature of the novel as the woman recounts her story. In a nutshell, Nothing Grows by Moonlight is a compelling depiction of desire and despair, powerful and striking in the way Nedreaas binds the private tragedies of one woman to the larger injustices of class and gender. Highly recommended.

Posted on by Radz Pandit · 4 Comments

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia – Joan Chase

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is one of those NYRB Classics that has been languishing on my shelves for a pretty long time, and which I finally pulled out to read thanks to Kim’s wonderful “NYRBWomen24” reading project. And what an absolutely terrific read it turned out to be!

First published in 1983, Joan Chase’s During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is a stunning, heartrending tale of family, sisterhood, childhood, love and loss spanning three generations of women and set on a rural farm in Ohio in the 1950s.

At the heart of this tale is the indomitable, feisty matriarch Lil Bradley known as Gram to the family, a tough-as-nails, resilient woman who has led a difficult life but rules over her household with an iron fist. This household comprises her daughters and her granddaughters (“Gram had survived more battles than we had dreamed of, a regular old war-horse, Uncle Dan called her”).  We learn that Gram has five daughters – May, Elinor, Grace, Libby, and Rachel – who over the years come and go from the house depending on circumstances and how their lives take shape, the house a refuge from the trauma they would endure.

The story is told by Gram’s granddaughters, this unique narrative voice is one of the most striking features of the novel – a collective “we” featuring Celia and Jenny (Libby’s daughters) and Anne and Katie (Grace’s daughters), a quartet of cousins whose individual experiences are blended into a unified perspective; through their eyes, we witness the joys, tensions, and heartbreaks of their childhood unfolding in a household of strong-willed women and violent men.

Most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.

Divided into five parts, each section focuses on a different family member, encompassing a different period, yet taken as a whole reveals a composite picture of the entire family. The novel opens with the chapter called “Celia” and takes place after the death of Grandad (Gram’s husband) and Aunt Grace. Here, the spotlight is on Celia, who has now blossomed into a striking woman, her good looks a magnet to the boys who flock to her like moths to a candle flame.  Celia lives with Gram, her parents Dan and Libby, and her sister Jenny in Gram’s farmhouse, often frequented by their cousins Anne and Katie during the summers. Jenny, Anne, and Katie are fascinated by Celia’s blooming sexuality, envious that she is now in the thick of the action when they are mere observers.

Anxiously we tried for Celia’s attention, wanted fiercely to be included. But it was no use, that desire; we could not reach her, or be content without her. So we watched her life ravenously while waiting for her to make some slip.

Celia is at the cusp of womanhood, and at that stage of experimenting with boys, irreverently flitting between relationships. Her frequent outings with a string of men put her on a warring path with Aunt Libby, who remains distressed about her daughter to the point that she often experiences stomach pains. Despite her marriage to Uncle Dan who appears to be the only steady man in the novel, Libby nevertheless is wary of men and the hardships women experience as a consequence, having witnessed the deteriorating marriage of her parents, and based on the tumultuous experiences of her sisters. Yet, she hopes for Celia to marry well so that her mind is at ease. When Celia starts dating Phillip an older, sophisticated boy with good career prospects, it’s a match Libby approves of, happy at the chance her daughter has of finally settling down…but will she?

The subsequent chapters rewind to the past to an earlier period in the cousins’ childhood, dwelling on Gram’s history and that of her five daughters.  Particularly, in the second chapter titled “Grandad”, Gram who was otherwise a peripheral character in the previous section has the spotlight shine on her in this chapter as more of her character and history is fleshed out. It’s a tale of a gritty, hardened woman who navigates loss, poverty, neglect, and abuse, single-handedly raises her daughters, and unexpectedly comes into an inheritance that will give her financial independence and prosperity, and set her free from the dominance of her husband, Jacob Krauss. We are told of how Gram loses her parents at the tender age of eleven and is forced into domestic labour caring for the children of a tuberculosis-afflicted woman. Ensconced at her sister’s place, Gram is desperate for a change of fortune, to be away from her sister’s home, to chart her own life.

When Jacob Krauss, a farmer enters the scene, Lil/Gram is entranced as is he, yet marriage massively disappoints Gram as she suffers Jacob’s abuse, heavy drinking, and anti-social behaviour. Despite not being keen on motherhood, giving birth to five daughters gives her the impetus to carry on, caring and providing for them when marriage has failed to provide much by way of companionship or money.

It satisfied Lil to do so well without Jacob and for him to see it plain when he came home. Their girls were nicer than there was reason to hope for. They helped her, were bright in school, and all of them were good-looking. And they were with her, set against Jacob, ashamed of his ways and determined to better themselves.

Unwilling to relent, Gram relies on sheer hard work until an out-of-the-blue development dramatically alters her fortunes and the trajectory of her life. Gram becomes an independent woman owning considerable land, with ample means to educate her daughters and ensure that they always have a home to come to when they in turn struggle with their respective marriages and motherhood.

The third chapter “Neil and Grace” focuses on Grace’s tenuous, off-and-on marriage with Neil, an utterly despicable character who leaves no stone unturned in rousing Gram and the sisters with his brand of sarcasm laced with hidden meanings, but it is the fourth chapter titled “Aunt Elinor” that is the finest of the book completely centred on Grace’s cancer, its emotional impact on the family and her eventual death. In this chapter, Chase’s writing simply soars as she captures the devastating final days of Grace life’s – her immense suffering fuelled by the cruelty of the disease, her wish to be released, while Aunt Elinor, harping on the tenets of Christian Science, eggs Grace to hold on and not give up creating considerable tension between the two sisters.

This is such a richly layered tale with a slew of brilliantly imagined characters. First is the choral quartet, the cousins Celia, Jenny, Anne, and Katie who despite telling this story collectively, are nevertheless individual personalities. Celia is the sensual, redheaded beauty, increasingly remote to her cousins and mother Aunt Libby once she blooms into a woman, yet also displays a sensitive nature particularly when she comes into contact with unfortunate people or animals. Jenny is the sensible, pragmatic girl, a blessing to Aunt Libby, while Anne and Katie are wild and fiery, often engaged in fierce verbal and physical fights, they are the unfortunate pair of the lot having to endure an emotionally abusive father and the death of their mother Grace.

The book’s vital force is, of course, Gram, the Queen of the title, mistress of the den, the matriarch around whom the fates and the fortunes of the family will revolve. Right from the very beginning Gram displays a hardened resolve, and unwillingness to readily accept defeat at the cards dealt to her by Fate. When neglected and abused by Jacob, Gram is determined to show her indifference (“She wouldn’t ever give Jacob the satisfaction of showing that she cared, that he could hurt her”), her refusal to bow down, and when she finally comes into money makes sure that Jacob is put in his place in the household – he no longer holds any authority over the house and Gram. Having endured loss, hardships, and the trials of marriage and motherhood, Gram now is fed up with cooking, cleaning, and caring, and is fierce about her independence and living life on her terms. Impervious to what her family thinks of her activities, Gram unfailingly plays Bingo every evening, even the unravelling tragedies in her daughters’ lives will do nothing to deviate her from this – armed with her pocketbook and pile of cash stacked under her beloved Persian rugs, Gram does what she wants and tells things as she sees them. Yet, despite that tough exterior, there’s a sense that Gram loves her daughters, and ensures that the farmhouse is always a place they can return to when they are grappling with their own burdens and problems.

Elinor becomes one of the central figures in the fourth chapter, the stylish, chic, New York-based sister with a penchant for cheese, salads, and Christian Science, a way of life she tries to push on the family with varying results. The young girls are fascinated and even inspired by the positivity of her religion in the face of insurmountable odds, but Gram is having none of it. She is unimpressed with what she calls her daughter’s “airs”, although Gram herself had no qualms about inheriting money from her rich uncle who was also from the big city, even pushing Elinor to take on piano lessons at the time. Particularly when confronted with Grace’s terminal illness, one wonders whether Aunt Elinor’s focus on her newfound religion is more of a coping mechanism and a shield for her refusal to accept the inevitability of Grace’s death. This comes to the fore in a particularly poignant, beautifully depicted scene where Grace, in immense pain, wishes to die and end her suffering and lashes out at Elinor for not accepting this hard reality.

Of all the sisters, Libby seems to have fared better in marriage; Uncle Dan despite his career not having panned out as envisaged still seems happy and easy-going and dotes on his wife. Then, there’s the eldest sister May, a widower with a daughter, a gentle person with a motherly disposition who Grace turns to in her dying days. And last but not least is Aunt Rachel, who having divorced her first husband with whom she has a son, finds herself in a relationship with a married man, a development that infuriates Gram.

The men in the novel are largely characters on the fringes, outsiders to the women, unable to break into their close-knit circle and in large part fuelled by their despicable behaviour – Grandad and Neil are particularly the epitome of ghastliness, consumed with violence and alcoholism, and venting out on the women and children.

Sex is a potent force in the novel, the first chapter particularly laced with the trimmings of desire when Aunt Libby talks incessantly about sex, love, and betrayal and the girls lap it up with rapt attention; Celia’s sensuality and preoccupation with men light the kindling of desire in the other three girls too.

She spoke to us incessantly of love. Endless betrayal, maidens forsaken, drowned or turned slut, or engulfed by madness. Most chilling were the innocent babes—stabbed with scissors and stuffed into garbage cans, aborted with knitting needles. In all this, love was a blind for something else. For sex. Sex was trouble and when a girl was in trouble, sex was the trouble.

Then, the foundation of Gram’s marriage to Jacob Krauss lies in the intense desire they feel for each other rather than compatibility. But sex and desire come tinged with danger taking on the garb of domestic abuse, violence, and even rape.

This is a novel about childhood explored through the lives of the four girls growing up in a family with all its messy complications and moments of innocence and joy while trying to fathom the murky world of adults. But it’s also a novel that explores sisterhood – five sisters who share an unbreakable bond, part of a tight circle, and are always there for each other despite the different trajectories their lives would take. And of course, the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, particularly seen in Celia’s relationship with Libby which oscillates between intense outbursts and shared confidences, and in Gram’s turbulent relationship with her five equally headstrong daughters. Themes of death and loss permeate the novel – the loss of a child, the toughest loss of all, the loss of a mother and a sister and a wife – as well as endurance and the relentless suffering of women…

Looking around, who had it any better? It was the lot of women. Who among them wasn’t stuck with something she couldn’t abide?

Always in the background but unmistakable all the same, we witness the subtle transformation of the American Midwest – the rural landscape paving the way for waves of commercialisation and development, which towards the end of the novel Gram with all the land at her disposal is more than happy to capitalise on.

As mentioned earlier, Chase tells the story using the first person plural where the “we” adjusts throughout the book in a fluid, effortless storytelling style that is simply superb. One could say that all four girls are narrating the tale together, or that one or two of the girls acts as the speaking voice for the rest of the group based on certain peculiarities that stand out – for instance, the narrating group refers to Gram’s daughters as “Aunt Libby” and “Aunt Grace” and yet each woman is a mother to at least part of the group of cousins, and while Celia is part of the chorus for much of the book, it is obvious that she’s outside of it in the first chapter where she is the central figure.

Particularly, in the chapter that focuses on Grace’s illness and death, Chase’s writing reaches new heights – her sensitive, pitch-perfect portrayal of the process of dying makes this a deeply sad and heartbreaking section accentuated by the tensions between the family members and their response to the finality of Grace’s death. But it’s also a section laced with vivid imagery – the wintry vista speckled with driving snow and hard frost against which Grace’s death unfolds is dreary and mysterious but also a symbol of serenity when Grace breathes her last.

The house had become surrounded again by unbroken snow and seemed mysterious and melancholy. Right then the granite sills at the window, the solid walls of maroon brick and the towering spruce at the back gave it the appearance of an ancient asylum, as if once committed we wouldn’t get out.

In a nutshell, in During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, Joan Chase masterfully weaves a tale of complicated familial bonds and relationships – tragic yet incredibly immersive and rendered in a wonderfully evocative, singular prose style. Highly recommended!  

Posted on by Radz Pandit · 13 Comments

Rhine Journey – Ann Schlee

Recently reissued by both McNally Editions and Daunt Books Publishing, I read Ann Schlee’s Rhine Journey as part of #SpinsterSeptember hosted by the wonderful Nora (@pearjelly) on Insta and Twitter, and it turned out to be such a gorgeous, evocative read. I loved it!

First published in 1980 but set in the Victorian era, Rhine Journey is a hypnotic, beautifully written tale of repressed desire, memory, and awakening unfolding over the course of a languid German summer in 1851.

The protagonist of the story is Charlotte Morrison, a spinster in her mid-forties, however, while she might be the central character for the reader, it is quite clear from the opening lines that to her family, Charlotte plays second fiddle…

“The luggage has simply been left on the deck,” said the Reverend Charles Morrison. “I had thought, Charlotte, that you were with it.”

Charlotte’s family comprises her brother Charles Morrison, a devout priest, his cold, uncaring wife Marion, and their impressionable teenage daughter Ellie. The family has arrived in Germany for a holiday for Marion’s sake, whose health has recently suffered. Her husband, despite a busy church schedule, hopes that a restorative break will do wonders in bolstering her energy.

Charlotte’s role, meanwhile, is secondary in nature – minding the family baggage, chaperoning Ellie, and being a companion to Marion – not that she has any problems with this arrangement, in the beginning at least. But there’s an undercurrent that makes itself felt of the sparseness of Charlotte’s existence, the narrow contours of her life.

We learn that before she began staying at her brother’s house, Charlotte was employed as a housekeeper to a certain Mr Ransom at Ditchbourne. She comes into some money after his death, income that guarantees her some financial freedom, only that she now has no place to go and no place to stay. Charles and Marion decide that Charlotte come and live with them.

Thus, Charlotte’s life is constrained, defined by ‘pressures’ of Victorian respectability and other conventional mores broadly determined by Charles and Marion. Charlotte unquestioningly accepts this, until a chance sighting on the landing stage at Koblenz prompts a searing pain in her heart triggering memories of a past she thought was buried.

Charlotte spots a tall, handsome man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Desmond Fermer, a man she had intense feelings for in her youth.  A miller by profession, Fermer had wished to marry Charlotte, but this chance at a new beginning was snuffed out even before it began by Charles and Marion who considered Fermer beneath them in terms of class and status. Charlotte’s opinion was never taken, she was deemed too young to decide for herself.

Overcoming those piercing seconds of sadness, Charlotte realises that this man, of course, is not Desmond Fermer who would now be approaching sixty. This stranger who seems to be in his late forties, just like Charlotte, is a married man with two teenage sons, and his name is Edward Newman. When Newman starts appearing frequently with his family at the same hotels and destinations as the Morrisons, Charlotte’s obsession with him begins growing alarmingly – she sees him as Edward Newman, for what he is but also as a stand-in for Fermer, a symbol of a love she lost all those years ago.

Edward Newman seems to be present everywhere – at Konigswinter, on the ascent to Stolzenfels and the summit at Drachenfels as well as their passage to Cologne, to the point that he begins to invade Charlotte’s dreams and imaginings. The first outline of these dreams is revealed to us in the earlier chapters where Charlotte is walking with a man arm in arm through a shrubbery marked by dark foliage, a man whose face she can’t quite see clearly, where the conversation ends abruptly because even in her dreams Charlotte’s inexperience in romantic matters prevents her from getting a hold on how these conjured up situations will pan out. Subsequently, as her dreams and flights of fancy heighten, the rumblings of desire become all too palpable frightening even Charlotte who worries that these perplexing emotions will be outwardly seen.

Running parallel to Charlotte’s story is that of Ellie, Marion’s excitable and impressionable daughter who during their trip is subject to the full force of Marion’s passive-aggressive nature. For poor Ellie, Charlotte is her confidante, but she pines for the young soldier who has fallen for her, the latter persistent in meeting Charles to ask for Ellie’s hand. Unwittingly Charlotte is pulled into their orbit, and this scenario feels disconcertingly familiar to her own thwarted situation when she was a young girl. Out of no choice, Charlotte sides with Charles and Marion on this issue; unsurprisingly they have no intention of encouraging any alliance between Ellie and the soldier. Will Ellie’s fate, then, play along the same lines as that of Charlotte’s all those years ago? Meanwhile, as the novel progresses and certain unexpected events take place, tensions between Charlotte and her family reach their peak, hurtling towards an immensely satisfying conclusion.

Charlotte Morrison is a wonderfully realised character. Schlee artfully conveys the turmoil raging within her, and the sense of conflict she feels. For much of her life, Charlotte’s world has been devoid of colour, her behaviour and attitude moulded by the dictates of society and a rather rigid upbringing, where because marriage did not materialise, she is relegated to the role of a caregiver as part of her duties.

On the one hand, Charlotte is grateful to her brother for immediately letting her stay with them the moment her employment ends, but she’s well aware that there are strings attached; it is insinuated if not actively expressed that her views and behaviour must align with those of Charles and Marion’s. On the other hand, the journey through the Rhine mirrors Charlotte’s internal journey – not only the reawakening of hidden passions and desires but also a growing internal rebellion against her status and role within the Morrison family as she increasingly begins craving independence.

Known for penning historical fiction, Schlee has expertly woven in the essence of the political landscape against which Charlotte’s story is set. At the beginning of the novel is a historical note that provides some context – the 1848 revolutions in Prussia where workers revolted against Frederick Wilhelm IV’s regime for censorship of the press, restrictions on the Church, and other freedoms all of which were curtailed in the ensuing years as Wilhem’s regime pushed harder to suppress the workers’ movement. Into this environment, the Morrisons arrive in Prussia on holiday with Charles constantly reminding them of their English liberties in stark contrast to the distressing upheaval in that part of Germany. Specifically within Charlotte’s sphere and on their journey, certain events unravel that are tied to the discontent in the region, and Schlee’s craft lies in how she subtly incorporates these elements into the broader plot all the while ensuring that Charlotte’s personal journey remains the heart and pulse of the novel.

Stunning, exquisitely crafted, and reverberating with tension, Rhine Journey, then, is a layered, richly visualised tale exploring the themes of confinement and freedom, desire, memory, family, and female independence. As the boundaries between Charlotte’s dreams and memories begin to blur, she is gripped with fear that is fuelled by the tussle between her inner turmoil (she wants to see Newman but also wishes to avoid him), and the stress of keeping up a normal façade.

But more importantly, Charlotte internally rebels and undergoes a sort of awakening of herself depicted not only in how she keenly experiences the slivers of desire but also in terms of a strong yearning to break away from the shackles of the Morrisons’ restricted, sparse and stunted world.

And all the time – so oddly the mind veers – she pictured to herself those whitened cottage rooms where she might quietly extend herself, and moving from room to room, meet and recognise herself in forms unaltered by the pressures of others upon her.

In a way, Rhine Journey is a classic example of a holiday novel where the unfamiliar but confined boundaries of a holiday setting clash with a notional sense of freedom, revealing the fine fractures in familial relationships hitherto dormant but now keenly felt.

Schlee is brilliant at capturing the vivid experience of travel, the rich texture of the early days, the excitement and newness that causes the spirit to soar, but then as the days progress, the sheen wears off to be replaced by a sense of tiredness and sameness and the longing to go back home to more familiar surroundings…

So Charlotte Morrison: to her journal at an early halt in their tour, when all the freshness of the journey was still upon her and the cares and duties of her former life still sufficiently real in memory for her to be delightfully aware of their absence. She woke each morning with a sense of their weight which had settled again perhaps in dreams, only to feel it lift and vanish so that she lay afloat with very lightness above the surface of the bed, her mind unable to imagine the sights they would visit during that day. Only on that first night in Coblenz, seeing herself haunt the corner of a glass given over to charms of Ellie’s brushing out her hair, did she suddenly long for the safe confines of home, the hard edges of her old identity.

Then, in the later chapters, the solitary wanderings of Charlotte through the streets of Cologne (“Without the weight of those other personalities pressed against her she felt limitless, unreal”), lend a hallucinatory quality to the novel where danger lurks in the air and where Charlotte’s tumultuous imaginings reach its zenith in, paradoxically, a light-and-sound drenched cathedral.

Her sight was channelled down the narrow aisle through the strange grey mist of masonry. When the sun shone in the outer world it was visible in great sparkling diagonal shafts. Tremulous disks of colour cast from the windows hovered on the surfaces of the pillars. When the sun went in, all this was instantly withdrawn and she was left with a frightened sense that the aisle had narrowed. Indistinguishable fragments of sound washed to and fro over the expanse of stone flooring, threatening all the time to rise and extinguish the ordered sounds of the organ. With sound and sight so baffled it seemed that, at any minute, some alien and pernicious thought might lodge in her and she in confusion admit it. 

The novel also pulsates with vivid imagery particularly in how the beauty of natural surroundings add depth and meaning to the essence of her thoughts and feelings, whether it’s the pang of love she experienced for the first time as a young woman or the certainty she feels later to break away from the family.  

A full moon had enchanted all colour from the garden. Freed from its bright distractions she had felt intensely all around her the life of plants, which seemed a cold moist persistent thing, griping and sucking its survival, far more akin after all, to the moon than the sun. She had felt drawn in among them, had stooped to smell the peony and, feeling its cool vigorous flesh brush her cheek, had pressed lips among the petals and kissed them repeatedly. It astonished her to remember that she had done such a thing, a prey at the time to love of Desmond Fermer, but ignorant entirely of what love might be other than a succession of joys and sorrows experienced exclusively inside herself.

The other striking aspect of Rhine Journey is the masterful use of language given the story’s setting in the Victorian era. Schlee penned the novel in 1980, but her rendering of the tone and style of speech of that era is so astonishing and pitch-perfect that she might as well have written the novel in that period.

Like a delicately strung musical instrument, Rhine Journey shimmers with a restrained energy that threatens to erupt; a beautifully expressed, introspective novel where Schlee’s nuanced and carefully calibrated prose reveals multitudes and enhances the book’s narrative power. Highly recommended!

Posted on by Radz Pandit · 8 Comments

Last Words from Montmartre – Qiu Miaojin (tr. Ari Larissa Heinrich)

Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre is one of those books that had been languishing on my shelves for a long time, and one I wouldn’t have read had it not been selected by Kim for her marvellous “NYRBWomen24” group read. This is a very difficult book to write about given its style and subject matter, but here is an attempt nevertheless…

Last Words from Montmartre begins on an ominous note signaling the author’s intention to commit suicide, evident not only from the title but also from this epigraph – “For dead little Bunny and Myself, soon dead.”

Deeply confessional and an intense, lyrical book about betrayal, heartbreak, passion, breakdown, and death, the novel is structured as a series of letters and diary entries addressed by the unnamed narrator to various lovers, friends, and family members, offering an intimate glimpse into the protagonist’s inner world. Based on the subject matter alone, it is not always an easy read, but the fierce tone and richness of the writing make it pretty compelling.

Qiu Miaojin mysteriously committed suicide after writing Last Words from Montmartre but before its publication fueling discussions about the ‘autobiographical” nature of the novel. This ambiguity is further heightened by these cryptic words at the beginning of the novel…

“If this book should be published, readers can begin anywhere. The only connection between the chapters is the time frame in which they were written.”

The novel begins with a chapter called “Witness” where the unnamed narrator is addressing Yong, one of her earlier lovers, about being betrayed by Xu with whom the narrator was in a passionate relationship.  Xu, it seems, abandons the narrator suddenly one day, leaving her with their rabbit Bunny (“the crystallization of our three years of marriage”). Soon thereafter, Bunny dies, and our narrator is now bereft and on the verge of a mental collapse.

“For a month my body and mind were on the verge of total collapse, and Yong was the one who took me in and cared for me. For the first time she opened up to me, lightening the load of my longing and anguish and offering the passion and connection that I desired so desperately. Only then did I suddenly see what had actually happened this past year.”

Possibly as an act of catharsis, our unnamed narrator begins composing a series of letters written specifically to Xu, the love of her life, enumerating in detail and with piercing analysis, the nature of their relationship characterised by an all-consuming passion (“We can only be either wholly together or wholly apart, otherwise you’ll just keep hurting me and, wounded, I will hurt you again. This is the fundamental pattern of the love we share”), the narrator’s mercurial personality and possessiveness, which likely drives Xu away, but also a relationship that lays bare Xu’s passivity and resistance to volatile confrontations. Seen through the narrator’s lens, the character of their relationship is marked not only by deep love and intense passion but also by insults, cheating, heartbreak, misunderstandings, and lack of communication.

“I welcomed the care you showed me but whenever I sensed that deep down you didn’t love me, I lost it. That’s why my “desire for love” could grow even stronger while I also became suspicious of you, lashed out at you, and developed a neurosis and deteriorated. . . . As this happens, the hostile side of you that you’ve kept hidden began to be cruel, selfish, unfaithful, and declared relentlessly that you were leaving me and, most chilling words of all, that you didn’t love me. I turned into a sniper, as we both became so entrenched in our adversarial relationship that the most negative qualities of our personalities were pushed to their extremes. The sad thing is that neither of us could stop the momentum of careening toward the abyss, though ironically we still yearned to treat (or “love”) each other with kindness…”

As the novel progresses, more characters enter the fray, and it quickly becomes clear that all chapters aren’t necessarily letters, some seem to be diary entries…and not all of them are addressed to Xu but a series of people comprising earlier lovers, and friends and family members (an elder sister is mentioned as are the narrator parents Ma and Ba).

But while our narrator seems to be staring into the depths of an abyss, we are given a glimpse of various moments of happiness in her life too, however fleeting. She has her writing to sustain her, finding solace and expression through her art in a novel infused with references to literature, philosophy, creativity, and music. Repeated references are particularly made to the joys of watching movies made by filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, and to the enchanting quality of Paris. With a circle of friends and an involvement in politics, she isn’t entirely alienated from society, although inwardly her loneliness only deepens. But for the most part, the narrator grapples with feelings of despair, and disillusionment as she mulls on a variety of themes such as trust, definitions of sex and love, cowardice, emotional maturity, or even finding an anchor, always revealing a mind that is gradually unraveling as she toys with the idea of death and relief. In these letters, the narrator is not afraid of exposing the various facets of her personality – sometimes poignant, sometimes horrifying – and even the erotic quality of her desires, the act of writing evolving into a dialogue with herself.

Throughout this enigmatic text, the identity of the narrator remains slippery. The book’s opening pages feel deceptively straightforward – the narrator is a woman in Paris writing letters to her lover Xu who has abandoned her, Xu being probably now in Taipei. But as the book progresses, this allegedly clear picture begins to get hazy. The reader’s assumptions are always questioned – for the most part, it appears that the narrator is female, sometimes it seems that the narrator has a male identity. Then the figure of Zoë makes a presence – Is Zoë male or female? Is Zoë the narrator or another person altogether? More importantly, is this ambiguity around gender deliberate on the author’s part? Does gender really matter when examining the universal themes of sex, love, infidelity, and heartbreak?

If you are looking for linearity in this novel, there isn’t any, as it flits between Paris, Tokyo, and Taipei, the past and the present; plot has no relevance here, it’s a novel with impressionistic vibes, a piece of art to experience; the only consistent factor is the essence of its themes of love, passion, and despair.

“If a couple’s resentments aren’t vocalized, then their love can’t flow. The mutual resentment in our hearts is the main reason our love cannot move forward.”

Then, there is a lush feel to Miaojin’s descriptions, particularly palpable in her evocative portrayal of a wintery-spring Paris evening (“Dusk in the Latin Quarter was like a fairy tale or a love poem, like a Klimt mosaic, like glowing, rose-colored clouds reaching toward the heavens . . . a swath of gold ringed in a misty-blue halo, this was the Paris that most entranced me”), or while conveying the essence of Tokyo (“And Tokyo is the cherry blossoms, the sunset at dusk, dawn sunlight through her windows, the cry of the crow, the cityscape of darkened rooms on a rainy evening, the depth of feeling in her eyes”), or even while expressing the simple pleasures of companionship…

“I want to take her on my bike to the woods. I want to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her; listen to music with her before bed; read poetry to her, and while I work during the day she can wander away and do whatever she likes until dusk when we’ll walk along the Seine or stroll through the streets…I want to go to the Louvre with her, and at night visit the park in Villette; I want to take her to see Angelopoulos movies and to listen to Argerich’s wild concerts; I want to take pictures of us around the fourth arrondissement as we sweep the dust from the cracks of our everyday lives…If she could stay longer, I would finish my novel and write poetry for her, and make art for her.”

In a nutshell, in Last Words from Montmartre, Qiu Miaojin’s lyrical prose and raw, frank, introspective storytelling captures the emotional intensity of the protagonist’s journey, making it a heartfelt exploration of love and identity. Don’t be fooled by the length – though short, this isn’t a novel that can be breezed through but rather like wine is meant to be sipped slowly and savoured. A book I’m very glad to have read and would recommend!

Posted on by Radz Pandit · 3 Comments

Cold Nights of Childhood – Tezer Özlü (tr. Maureen Freely)

On our recent travels to the Czech Republic, we had a long layover in the Turkish city of Istanbul. But not so long that we could go outside and explore the city although I would have definitely loved to. Some day in the future perhaps, but in the meanwhile I was happy to immerse myself in some Turkish literature instead with Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood.

In the early pages of Cold Nights of Childhood, our unnamed narrator is toying with the idea of suicide (“Thoughts of death chase after me. Day and night, I think about killing myself”). She is unclear why, but to the reader, her reasons are not entirely obscure. She longs to escape the stifling environment of her home, a conservative society ruled by patriarchal norms. Her father is driven by nationalistic and monetary fervor constantly espousing success and the call of duty to the nation. Her brother enjoys freedom in the house in a way she does not, and he uses that power to his advantage. These thoughts of ending her life suddenly transform into action, and our narrator consumes a bunch of pills wishing for death but wakes up in a psychiatric unit instead. She’s very young then and admits to this incident being her last suicide attempt, and yet it marks the beginning of a series of fear-inducing stints at psychiatric wards in the subsequent years.

Cold Nights of Childhood, then, is an unflinching portrayal of a woman’s quest for independence, freedom, sex and love, as well as her struggles with mental illness told in a writing style that is cinematic and impressionistic without conforming to the rigid structures of conventional storytelling. Originally published in 1980, the novella is filled with autobiographical elements as indicated in the introduction by Ayşegül Savaş and the translator’s note by Maureen Freely.

At barely 70 pages and set between 1950 and 1970, the novella is divided into four chapters and begins with a flavour of our narrator’s childhood and school years in the Turkish town of Fatih. We get an idea of her conservative upbringing, the lack of love between her parents (“what binds them together are their weighty petit bourgeois responsibilities”), soul-crushing daily family routines, and her deep yearning to break free, to travel to big cities and faraway lands. Evenings are spent with a friend reading Russian classics (“how very much these novels resonate with our own world”), while schooling years are spent in a lycee run by nuns whose mysterious workings are beyond our narrator’s grasp.

Later, the novella begins focusing on our narrator’s years in Istanbul and Ankara, and abroad in Europe’s great capital cities (Berlin and Paris). We learn of her string of lovers, her unsuccessful marriages, and above all her incarceration in mental asylums. This predominantly forms the essence of the book, and yet the narrative is not as linear as it seems.

Timelines blur as do places that often merge into one another like colours in a watercolour painting. For instance, in the third chapter titled “The Leo Ferre Concert”, in one moment our narrator is residing in an artist’s residence in Berlin, a house with high ceilings, wide wooden stairs, huge rooms filled with paintings, rich furniture and thousands of books, and in the next moment we find her in a grim hospital room minimally furnished with a dismal wardrobe, iron bedstead and a night table. The time shifts also come without warning. For instance, in the first chapter where our narrator dwells on her childhood, we learn of her grandmother Bunni, ancient in every sense, both in terms of thoughts and deeds, and her untiring attempts at running the daily household, and then we come across a sentence that describes Bunni’s funeral attended by our narrator with her young child.

Cold Nights of Childhood is also remarkable for its frank depiction of sex, not in terms of describing the act itself but the joyful experience of it. Flitting between a stream of lovers, our narrator is uninhibited when talking about the pleasures of sex, and freely expresses the wild desire that gnaws at her. We also get a glimpse of her freethinking personality when she muses on the nature of relationships.

Why can’t we find our way out of all this? Why do we rush into marriage and relationships, without first becoming friends? Is this what people in their early twenties should be doing? Do we have to sign the marriage register in order to have sex? Or live alone, longing for sex and masturbating? Do men have to find sexual excitement not in actual women but in their images? Must the first woman they know carnally be in a brothel? Must husbands and wives regard each other’s bodies as property? It contradicts our physical make-up entirely, all this. From earliest childhood, they stop us from being ourselves, from loving others, from caressing them. They twist us. Rob us.

Some of those fleeting relationships culminate in marriage, but married life proves unsatisfying. In fact, the reason she marries one of her husbands is because of his promise to not subject her again to the frightening yet eerily familiar experience of psychiatric wards, the loss of freedom and sense of self that it entails. All she asks of him if she falls ill is “to stay at home with my books and my records and a few of my favourite things, drinking tea.” The husband, unsurprisingly, breaks that promise.

Interspersed throughout the text are our narrator’s struggles with mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder (“The illness that begins with such joy soon falls into a dark abyss”), and the dehumanising effects of electroshock treatments. She internally resists but is also outwardly aware of the futility of doing so. The isolation of being shut up in a space of utter silence with occasional voices floating in, when just a few steps away from the hospital, the noisy, outside world carries on unabashedly is wonderfully conveyed. This resistance to a kind of torturous imprisonment is also a cry for life, to witness its joys, to fight for individuality, freedom, and the wonder of brand new experiences.

In addition to the main themes above, the novella is also about the clash between conservative ideals and a more progressive, liberal way of thinking as seen in the striking contrast between our narrator’s childhood and life in her twenties. Turkey’s political turmoil and its impact, while not the central focus of the novella, nevertheless remains on the fringes, filtering into the lives of our narrator’s friends and family.

Cold Nights of Childhood reverberates with striking sensory images, atmospheric descriptive passages that evoke the finer things in life as well as a sense of sadness and melancholia – rooms full of books, cafes spilling onto pavements, the languid summers and the blue-green Mediterranean, the streets of Paris gleaming wet with rain, penthouse apartments with paintings on the walls, melancholic Bach violin concertos.

In these great European cities, friends don’t drop by unexpected. When their day’s work is done, when they’ve left their cafes and restaurants, they have the habit of immersing themselves in deep solitude.

A lot of the descriptions also focus on interior spaces, particularly pieces of furniture that define and distinguish one setting from another. There’s a vivid sense of place specifically when it comes to Turkey – the green waters of the Bosphorus, a Turkish village where the sand is golden with sunlight, Istanbul’s bohemian enclaves, yalis (water mansions) lining the shore, lively meyhanes (taverns) where students gather to discuss art and politics.

Our narrator’s wasted years in psychiatric wards pretty much mirror the five years that Tezer Özlü spent in a psychiatric hospital for bipolar disorder. While helpless in an environment that greatly restricted her freedom, at least when it came to writing Cold Nights of Childhood, Özlü fiercely resisted being tied down by the norms of established narratives. This is why when I began reading the book, I found the first couple of pages a tad disorienting but then I nicely settled into its rhythm. Written in a spare, lucid style, the novella is an amalgam of thoughts and impressions where boundaries with regard to timelines and settings do not exist and where occasional instances of dreams blending with reality reflecting our narrator’s drug-induced stupor crop up.

Moody, evocative, teeming with rich visuals and a palpable Jean Rhys vibe, Cold Nights of Childhood is a beautifully penned novella that I’m glad to have discovered. Very much recommended!