The Brooknerian

‘Brookner’ was a thing to live up to, even for Anita Brookner, a formal elegance, a field of intelligence, which conditioned both her life and her art. An long, extraordinary review from Andrew O'Hagan in the LRB - see here . O'Hagan is the author of the very fine Caledonian Road , and on the BBC Radio 4 show Take Four Books he cited The Princess Casamassima as an influence. Brookner would have approved.

...now her account is closed the novels may be seen for what they are: a literary chronicle of life's journey from middle to old age... If this sounds unexpectedly Proustian in scope, it shows how ill-served she was by her detractors and the orthodoxies of the sales cycle. Andy Miller's review of the Brookner biography in this week's Spectator is the one I've been waiting for. It's no exaggeration to credit dedicated readers such as Andy Miller with the reassessment of Brookner's literary reputation in the decade since her death. I'd suggest it's the tireless curatorial and promotional work of Miller and other influential fans that permitted a biographer of Hermione Lee's stature to consider adding Anita Brookner to her list of illustrious subjects. Authors usually take a posthumous dip in popularity and visibility; some never recover. It took Henry James more than half a century to find his readership. That Brookner is now being taken so seriously,...

(But we noticed, we might rejoin.) We continue our selection of British reviews of the Brookner biography: see the Literary Review here . The cover is of interest too.

Series 5 of the BBC's A House through Time,  available on the iPlayer in the UK, features Montagu Mansions, home to Claire Pitt in Undue Influence. The first UK edition of the novel shows the location on the cover.

It is hardly surprising that even such an eminent life-writer as Lee might wonder whether Brookner would have given this book her blessing. Brookner was as secretive as a heron. The fine mystery of the writer, to quote Dickens on Shakespeare, must surely be left undisturbed. ー From an excellent review ( here ) by Laura Cumming in the Observer of Hermione Lee's forthcoming biography.

In a post a while back ( here ), I recalled pitching unsuccessfully a volume of Brookner's essays... *** Anita Brookner Mme de Blazac and I: Memoirs, Essays and Reviews 1981-2011 1.      ‘Mme de Blazac’, memoir, LRB , 19 June 1997 2.      On Abel Gance’s film Napoleon, film review, LRB , 16 April 1981 3.      ‘The Bibliotheque Nationale’, essay/memoir, TLS , 5 October 1984 4.      ‘The People and the Place’, review of Parisians by Graham Robb, Spectator , 10 April 2010 5.      ‘Repose is Taboo’d by Anxiety’, review of Migraine by Oliver Sacks, Spectator , 23 October 1993 6.      ‘Even Less Fiction than Stranger ’, review of Le Premier Homme by Albert Camus, Spectator , 14 May 1994 7.      ‘The Master of the Indirect’, review of Henry James: Collected Stories , Spectator , 11 Dec 1999 8.      ‘Sexual Tour...

I've been listening to a couple of Brookner audiobooks. Joanna David's take on The Rules of Engagement is competent, and her middle-class tones suit the character of the novel's narrator. But there's a complacency to her reading, too cosy for a novel as dark and late as this. Diana Quick is the ideal reader of  Undue Influence . Her accent is RP, but less strident than David's. Quick's tone has a lowered, falling quality, appropriate for this sad novel. There's also a slight accent, not traceable, possibly just the effect of clipping. There are other actresses who display this: Eleanor Bron, say, or Siân Phillips. Quick's is an older woman's voice. Claire, the narrator of Undue Influence , is meant to be twenty-nine. Yet her storytelling always feels as if long in retrospect, though the novel is set in the modern day. This isn't the only example in Brookner of an unsettling freewheeling as to chronology. There's no evidence of Anita Brookner...