The woman who had her own war to fight during WWII
This week there’s the latest book from one of the most celebrated authors in the US, a collection of short stories and a novella. There’s a contemplation on grief and loss, healing and faith. There’s the reissue of a novel about another novelist on honeymoon in Germany. And there’s the story of a young Irishwoman who had her own war to fight during WWII, encountering danger and treachery at every turn.
Kitty’s War, Eimear Lawlor, Head of Zeus, €13.99
If you didn’t know that there were German POWs interned at the Curragh Camp during WWII, you know now. I didn’t know either and this is just one instance of how reading fiction can accidentally expand one’s education. But this story isn’t so much about history as it is about Kitty Flynn, who returns to her home in Ireland to escape the bombsite that London has become since the breakout of the Second World War. But fleeing one war zone only lands her in another, admittedly more pastoral and a lot quieter without the bomb shelters and the air raid sirens, but no less of a threat to Kitty.
Her estranged brother has returned from fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and their strained sibling relationship is further complicated by the presence of a German airman who is deemed as a threat to Irish national security. And, as in Sophie’s Choice, Kitty is forced to make an absolutely impossible choice. A humane and compassionate telling of what life was like here during The Emergency, it’s a novel about one woman’s courage and grace under fire.
Table for Two, Amor Towles, Hutchinson Heinemann, €16.99
If one was an emerging writer trying to persuade some publisher – any publisher – to print their first body of work, half a dozen short stories and a novella all in one volume, their manuscript would hit the slush pile immediately. But if you’re Amor Towles, you can do what you like. He has proven himself, in a track record that’s far from prolific, to comfortably straddle the breach between literary fiction and mammoth bestseller with an ease that’s rare. And these stories straddle both American coasts, east to west, from New York to LA (sounds like a song, doesn’t it?) with that same apparent ease. Although of course it’s not ‘ease’ at all, it’s genius and genius is hard dug, hard got and hard wrought.
In the novella, we meet Eve Ross again (first encountered in his marvellous Rules of Civility), navigating her new life as a would-be Hollywood film star in Los Angeles, where another starlet, Olivia de Havilland, is distraught at the actions of a blackmailer who’s got some naughty pics of her. Evie’s relationship with an ex-cop makes for a superb, often tongue-in-cheek yarn of golden era Hollywood. In his short stories we stumble on Pushkin, a Russian who has shown mercy on his fellow citizens as they queued for food, a second-hand bookseller, a Bach cello performance described so well it defies the best music critics, a mixed bag of wonder. Hard to say how many 21st century writers will be remembered, but I’d put my money on Towles being one of them.
Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin, Faber, €14.99
This novel first appeared in English in 1987 and this reprint by Faber includes Susan Sonntag’s introduction to the 2001 edition. It’s worth the purchase for Sonntag’s intro alone. The fictional story follows the great Fyodor Dostoevsky on his 1867 honeymoon in Baden-Baden with his new (and first) wife, Anna. The writer is in love but his private demons persist; gambling in the hope of clearing his mounting debts, his epileptic seizures, his obsessive jealousies. Fast forward to 1970s Russia and the story’s narrator is on a trip – a pilgrimage, really – to retrace Anna Dostoevsky’s journey across Russia from Moscow to Leningrad. The narrator and the great writer’s lives converge in ways the narrator couldn’t have foreseen.
This novel was smuggled out of the USSR in 1981 and subsequently translated into more than 20 languages. It’s not a particularly easy read (then neither is Dostoevsky!) but rather a fitting tribute to the great master, as well as an intricate feat of imagination for Tsypkin, who ended up creating a great modern classic of his own.
Sleeping Letters, Marie-Elsa R Bragg, Vintage, €14.50
Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg is Melvyn Bragg’s (South Bank Show) daughter and is a Church of England priest in the diocese of London, an Ignatian spiritual director, a psychotherapist and a duty chaplain of Westminster Abbey. People who know about her famous father’s life will know that his first wife, Marie-Elsa’s mother, killed herself when her only child was just six years of age. The trauma drove Bragg to a breakdown and has haunted his daughter throughout her life. This part-memoir, part long poem and whole exploration of grief at its very foundations, is a contemplative, beautifully wrought work and though it’s full of sorrow, it’s also full of hope, even of joy. It would especially appeal to the recently bereaved, although I think it would also be pulled regularly from anyone’s bookshelf when seeking consolation.
Bragg has devoted her life to her religious vocation, but she’s also got a vocation as writer, and through the power and elegance of her language, there are flashes of the divine. Someone recently observed that it reminds them of Max Porter’s work of genius, Grief is the Thing with Feathers. But for me, her writing is closer to that of our own John Moriarty, excavating with words, clumsy tools at the best of times, the sacredness within the pain of living.
Footnotes
Culture Night is Friday September 20 this year and there will be something happening at nearly every crossroads in the country (although hopefully it won’t be comely maidens dancing). Keep an eye on your local paper in print and online and, if nothing nearby takes your fancy, it’s always worth a trip to the big smoke, where entry to most things are free and every venue, gallery, museum and arts and cultural centre will be open late for business and for fun. See culturenight.ie for more information.