Since this is a message to the future me, I thought I would write it in the 2nd person.

This is what you thought of these two books:

Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar
You loved the cover as you love most of the covers issued by NYRB Classics. And you seemed to remember lots of other bloggers reading this one and generally praising it. Not one to jump on the band wagon you waited a considerable number of months, perhaps even a year or more to read it for yourself. (Putting it on your list for the A Century of Books challenge seemed to help assure that you might actually get around to it.)

At first you were charmed by the thought of middle agish (?) Rachel moving off to Bristol to start a new life after her aunt left her a big old house there. You were particularly taken with Rachel’s description of her work leaving “party” just before she moves. It had a kind of And Then We Came to the End kind of office vibe and introduced us to the notion that Rachel may be one of those people that is the butt of most of the office jokes. All going along great at this point. Quirky Rachel, exciting new adventure. Then Benatar ratchets things up a bit when it seems that Rachel longtime roommate may actually have thought that they were in a Lesbianic (albeit platonic) relationship. Then it is off to Bristol where it starts to become clear that Rachel might not be the most reliable of narrators. Not long after this she kind of keeps swimming and swimming to the deep end of the pool. Somewhere in there you started think of a Jane Gardam character with some seriously dark Muriel Spark thrown in to boot.

At first you worried that Rachel was going through her savings too fast and you wished that she would at least get a part time job to pay expenses. But when it became clear that she was headed for some sort of fantastic mental day of reckoning, you started to cheer her on in her spending. The mental climax would no doubt come when she reached the end of her economic tether.
And now, future Thomas, I must disappoint you. You waited too long to write about this book and the two week delay has rendered you unable to remember exactly how this finishes. You think it was mildly unresolved. Oh well, at least this way you won’t spoil the surprise for your readers.

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
You have a vague recollection of seeing part of the film adaptation of this book. You rented it decades ago when you couldn’t get enough of Merchant-Ivory films which all seemed to use book adaptation screenplays written by RPJ.  Not being full of Forster-esque tea sipping and such your youngish, untrained mind was bored. You decided to dust the book off (you didn’t intend the pun) when the year of its publication (1975) was one that you needed to fill for the A Century of Books challenge.

So when you picked up this Booker prize winning novel on your vacation in Maine, you were immediately drawn in–delighting in the fact that the cool Maine breezes were the antithesis of the heat and dust in book. For much of the book you couldn’t decide if you like the 1923 story line better or the 1975 story line better. You also kept wondering how anyone can live in such heat, especially in 1920s English clothing. Good lord, how about a sari or sarong.

You were intrigued by the possibility that women’s reproductive choices in the 1970s were in some ways less political than they are today and you wondered whether or not RPJ, who is Indian only by marriage, painted an accurate portrait of life in India in the 1920s and 1970s. But then you thought that that was kind of a dumb question because the sheer number of points of view (i.e., people) living in India, whether English or Indian, make words like accurate a little fraught.

In the end you enjoyed it and vowed to put Heat and Dust on your Netflix queue.

I tried to find a picture of the Queen Mum looking mean but they really don’t exist. This was the best I could come up with. But I thought the unwritten rule is that one doesn’t take photos of the Royal Family eating.

  
[3/19/12 Update: Boy, did I forget to proofread this. It should be better now.]

Was the Queen Mum cold hearted, or a hypocrite?  
I knew that would get your attention.  Am I about to trash the Queen Mum? No. At worst I am ambivalent about her, but I did wonder as I read Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary by Ruby Ferguson if the QM suffered from a little cognitive dissonance when it comes to marrying for love. In Ferguson’s 1937 novel, the heroine marries for love and ends up old and impoverished. Now, the Queen Mum is said to have been a great admirer of this book. So why did she love this book? Was she clueless to the fact that her life-long grudge against the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson was similar to the class-induced opprobrium Lady Rose faced? Or, more sinisterly, did she relish the comeuppance Lady Rose got for marrying below her? If either of these is true I tend to think it is more the former than the latter. Or was she so caught up in this romantic paean to Scottish life that she couldn’t think clearly?

I don’t really feel strongly enough to care one way or the other, but it was on my mind the entire time I was reading Lady Rose. And for the record I really enjoyed the book. Highly recommended for Persephone fans.

Why those ungrateful…
My second struggling woman for the week is Patricia Lindsay (née Crispin) the heroine of Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan. We follow Patricia as she gets her own lesson in marrying beneath her. She sacrifices much for her insecure husband and her ungrateful children. In a town and gown story as old as the academy itself, Patricia’s eldest gets the newsagent’s daughter preggers and marries her much to his mother’s horror. Patricia’s distaste over the marriage is not dissimilar to her mother’s, but Cannan does such a good job describing the mock gentility of the newsagent’s wife and daughter that it was hard not to chuckle at the characterization and sympathize with Patricia. Does that make me a snob? Yes, but so be it. I know I would have trouble if my (non-existent) son married a woman with all the crass, intellectual idiocy of Sarah Palin–albeit in this case non-political idiocy. The second son falls in love with his friend Peter, I mean with his friend Peter’s love of the Oxford Movement. This makes his high church, only on Sundays mother openly hostile. And then the daughter…what does she do that is so wrong…I don’t remember. Was it that she loved cars more than horses?

Thankfully we see Patricia at middle age (my age) seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.  Another Persephone I thoroughly enjoyed.

This story had very little to do with spoons
I think my third struggling woman for the week struggled more than the other two combined. In Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns, artist Sophia Fairclough her artist husband Charles marry young, and (surprise) against the wishes of his family. Unlike her marginally talented husband, Sophia takes work so she can keep them fed and housed, a task that becomes harder when she has a baby. There is much about Sophia’s fertility that I would like to talk about but that would be too spoilery. But I will say that it makes me even more crazy that Rick Santorum and idiots on the far right are talking about contraceptives these days as if we were about to enter the dark ages again.

One of the great things about this book is that you never quite know where it is headed. The only constant is that one keeps hoping for Sophia’s day in the sun. Whether or not she makes it is something you will have to find out for yourselves. I highly recommend this (and the other other Barbara Comyns book I have read The Skin Chairs).

Struggling is not just for women
My struggle these days has been to find time for blog reading and blog writing. Happily my work has my brain occupied such that I don’t have as much mental stamina for appreciating the blog world as I had when my work didn’t engage me so. I fear I have turned into a once a week kind of guy. Hopefully that will just make you all fonder of me rather than make you forget about me. I do know that I have too many blogs in my feed reader and the sheer number of unread posts makes me not want to look at anything. So today I am going to do a huge cull and only keep around those that regularly interest me. I might try and sequester the ones that only marginally interest me into a separate folder, but if the result is that the unread posts for those still show up in my total of unread posts–thus triggering my OCD–I might have to give them the boot altogether.

Struggling through the Century?
No. Even though I have only read 14 of 100 books for the A Century of Books challenge, I am kind of enjoying paying closer attention to when books were published. For a while I even entertained reading my TBR pile in chronological order. I was reading the oldest, then then newest, then the oldest, then the newest, etc. But then I bumped into Women in Love and that took away my desire for chronological symmetry. I still might try and finish “that bastard book” (to paraphrase Corky St. Clair from Waiting for Guffman, one of the best movies of all time) D.H. Lawrence, but it is going to be a slog. I also updated my Century list today with books from my larger TBR pile (i.e., outside the nightstand).