Thanks again to Rachel at Book Snob for the photo.

I couldn’t believe my luck in getting a copy of this out of print Whipple. I thought that I would hold onto it for a while–save it for a rainy day if you will–but I think I had it for only about a week before giving in. As with all Whipples, Because of the Lockwoods is a wonderful book and a wonderful read. I ended up staying up to almost 2:00 AM (on a work night!) to finish it.

The story centers around the Hunters (mother and three children) and their diminished circumstances after husband/father passes away. The Lockwoods, the Hunters’ previous neighbors, appear to be, and certainly think of themselves as a benevolent force in the lives of the Hunter family. Mrs. Lockwood insists that Mr. Lockwood help Mrs. Hunter make sense of her husband’s estate. In the process Mr. Lockwood perpetrates a swindle upon Mrs. Hunter that further diminishes her circumstances. The swindle, however, is not appartent to Mrs. Hunter and she lives her life in perpetual gratitude and obesiance to the Lockwoods. With very few resources to fall back on, the two eldest Hunter children are eventually forced into accepting jobs they abhor because the seemingly munificent Lockwoods insist that they have no other prospects. But Thea, the youngest, manages to pursue her dreams both despite and because of the Lockwoods. In the process she finds herself a social pariah and her hopes for the future dashed. That is until working class neighbor Oliver Reade manages to provide opportunities for the upper class Hunters that they never would have expected or contemplated.

As much as I love them, there is a certain deus ex machina aspect to most of Whipple’s novels. Chapters and chapters of privation are wiped clean with a fairly quick succession of fortuitous events. Perhaps this tendency in her fiction is one of the reasons Whipple never moved beyond being just a popular–and now largely forgotten–author. While my literary expertise falls squarely into the “I know what I like” school of thought, I think if one is going to critique Whipple’s fiction one certainly has to at least acknowledge her joyously ham-handed approach to making everything turn out. Having said that, while things end up looking rosy for the Hunters there is in the final pages of Because of the Lockwoods perhaps the darkest thread that I have yet to find in Whipple. I don’t count too much on the darkness in Someone at a Distance because the characterizations in that novel just don’t ring true to me as they do in her other works.  (In fact the more distance I have from Someone at a Distance, the less I like it.)

Still, I loved Because of the Lockwoods. I am chuffed to note that I have a copy of Every Good Deed coming from an ebay buy in Australia and that Persephone will be reissuing Greenbanks soon.

And by the way, has anyone else noticed a superficial similarity between Because of the Lockwoods and Barbara Comyns’ The Skin Chairs? Diminished circumstances, telling off the snooty folks who were supposedly their benefactors, the self-made man rescuing the family from drudgery?

I am not sure I ever would have picked up this book if not for the fact that Simon at Stuck In A Book raves about Tove Jansson’s work. And a good thing too. These are brilliant, beautifully written short stories that make me look forward to reading Jansson’s longer fiction.

I am always at a loss as to how to review a book of short stories–and this collection of Jansson’s stories seem particularly hard to capture by an amateur such as myself. Although Jansson’s writing is fairly straightforward, there is something kind of otherworldly about these stories. As I reflected on the collection, I was thinking that its other worldliness had to do with the words themselves. I started to remember her writing as poetic. But then I looked back and sampled some of her prose and realized that it was not the source of the other worldliness. On a superficial level there is something very European about the stories that feels otherworldly to me, but that doesn’t seem to be the source of it either. I think what it really comes down to is that each of the stories, no matter the details, feels infused with a contentment and restlessness that seems only knowable through the lens of old age. There is a perspective that either rises above, or rebels against, the mundane details of life.

Among the varied stories included in this collection their were a few that I particularly liked. A couple alone in a little cottage on a gull-filled island. An old man who arrives at his destination only to forget where he is staying. A woman unhinged by the death of an acquaintance. An old man (another one) in a silent skirmish over a park bench unwittingly makes a friend.

As it is for me with many short stories, there were a few that made me scratch my head a bit, wondering if I really understood what was going on. I think sometimes my way of thinking requires a single answer, one correct, officially author-authorized way to interpret a story.  The obsession for clarity abates with a little discussion, but sometimes when I am in the middle of such abstraction it makes me wonder why I don’t get it. But alas, that says much about me, and not much about these stories.

Now I can’t wait to see what Jansson does with a novel.

When I picked up Stones for Ibarra, all I knew about it was that I had seen the title many times over the years and it was only $1.50. Now I look, and the googles tell me that Stones for Ibarra was Harriet Doerr’s first novel; that she wrote it at the age of 73; and that it won the National Book Award. Even more fascinating is that she went back to college after a 30-some year absence to get a Bachelor’s degree in history at the age of 67.

Originally written as short stories, Stones for Ibarra tells the story of Richard and Sara Everton who move from San Francisco to Mexico in the 1960s to revive a family copper mine that has been out of use since 1910. While somewhat episodic, and despite its beginnings as a few short stories, the novel hangs together and has more of an arc then you would normally encounter in a book of linked short fiction. Early in their struggle to bring new life to the old mine Richard is diagnosed with leukemia. Told from Sara’s point of view, their struggles and those of the people and the world around them is described with straightforward but rather atmospheric and somewhat abstract detail. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but Doerr’s writing has a poetic quality that doesn’t compromise comprehension. It offers enough detail that one doesn’t scratch one’s head wondering what is going on.

The reader is told early on that Richard and their efforts to revive the mine only make it six years past his diagnosis. Those years, autobiographical on the main points, are described by Doerr like a memoir that is as grateful as it is elegiac. Doerr’s writing brings impoverished rural Mexico to life and looks at the humor and frustration of being a fish out of water. Although sympathetic to the culture and the plight of the community around them, there is a certain amount of the colonizer evident in Doerr’s tale.

I am glad I picked this one up not knowing much about it. I tend to veer toward novels that are comfortable and Euro-centric so it is always a happy surprise to read about something out of my comfort zone.* I enjoyed the descriptions of ways of life that are so foreign to mine. Not just the foreigness of the lives of Mexicans, but the lives of Richard and Sara as they embark on a rather difficult adventure and confront a fatal illness. (knock on wood)

*I have become so confused about when to use the British ‘s’ and when to use American ‘z’ in words like cozy/cosy that I almost went back and changed ‘zone’ to ‘sone’.
   

I am convinced that my interest in the work of Wilkie Collins has something to do with all the letter writing involved. Of course there is also intrigue and suspense and all sorts of other goings on that make his novels page turners. But I love the fact that despite the fact that the action of the books clip along at a quick pace, if you think about how it would have played out in real time, it would have been like watching paint dry. Imagine trying to get to the bottom of any mystery without the aid of the telephone, car, email, Internet, forensic science and any number of other methods of investigation. And think about it on a personal level. Have you ever had something that you needed answered immediately and the time it took to get an email reply, even though it may have just been minutes, felt like an eternity? Imagine if you had to wait 14 days to get an answer via mail from Zurich. That would certainly slow down your plans wouldn’t it? And it is all those furious letters and documents and meetings with solicitors and trusting interviews with landladies, coach drivers and servants, that make these “detective” stories so enjoyable for me. I am willing to suspend my disbelief for these Victorian mysteries in a way that I cannot for more modern mysteries.

Like other of Collins’ sensation novels No Name takes place on the fringes of propiety. Those ruffled edges of polite society where perfectly moral people teeter on the edge of social oblivion due to some technicality that turns them into pariahs overnight. This is my third Wilkie Collins novel and my fourth sensation novel (Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret) and they all rely heavily on the fact that women had so few independent rights at the time. How awful to be in a position to not be able to earn your living because a man is going to take care of it and then something happens to the man and you left with nothing and no way to do anything about it.

In No Name Magdalen (18) and her sister Norah (22, I think) find out after losing their parents that they are technically illegitimate children and are now destitute thanks to an evil uncle and cousin. So for six hundred pages the plots thicken and thin and then thicken again, the letters fly, and in the end it all comes up roses. Most, of Collins’ novels were written as serials so verbal economy is not the order of the day. For anyone who has ever liked a costume drama but wants to read something a little more racy than Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins is your man.

When looking for an image to include with this post, at the bottom of the tenth page of a Google image search using the terms “no name wilkie collins” one stumbles across a picture of Rachel from Book Snob. That photo led me to Rachel’s much more complete (and well written) review.

I have an extra copy of No Name to give away. Just let me know in the comments if you are interested. (US only please, the older Dover edition I have to give away is kind of heavy.)