The Brooknerian

Reviewing with disfavour a book about fathers and daughters ( Fathers: Reflections by Daughters , ed. Ursula Owen, London Review of Books , 22 December 1983), Brookner is moved heavy-heartedly to offer her own report from the front: My father, who has been dead for some years, was a man for whom I felt none of the standard daughterly emotions, either ancient or modern. An exile, modest, diffident, as honest as a child in a world of adult considerations, he seemed to me to compare unfavourably with the capricious, handsome, successful men of my mother’s family. These uncles, as tirelessly expansive as he was reticent, could not bother with a man whose only comment on his translated life was that he missed the smell of pine forests. It seemed to me that he was completely unhappy. This unhappiness did not recommend itself to me, for his vision of the world appeared unlovely when set beside the exciting games of favour, of pleasure, of cynical appraisal, to which the men of my mother’s f...

Julian Barnes once said of Anita Brookner that it was hard to imagine a novelist less likely to write an autobiography. She was, he implied, too private, too discreet. And yet she wrote all those novels, none of which pull any punches. And though she gave few interviews, those she did allow are among the most honest and extreme writerly exchanges on record. Brookner's memoir about her early Paris experiences, 'Mme de Blazac and I',* is extraordinary, unprecedented and sadly unrepeated. It's a long essay describing the author's years in the French capital and her interactions with a number of eccentric landladies. Mme de Blazac, 'rather than formidable and omnicompetent, as I had imagined from the aristocratic name' proved 'small and tremulous', 'subdued and incompetent' and 'clearly more nervous than myself'. Brookner thus inaugurates a character portrait that wouldn't look out of place in one of her novels. Mme de Blazac i...

It's funny what can put you off a book. Harold Macmillan, it is said, liked to go to bed with a good Trollope, and indeed was often of an afternoon to be found lolling around Downing Street with an old novel. (David Cameron emulated Macmillan - but he called it chillaxing, and Trollope probably wasn't involved.) I once went to a play in London about the Profumo affair, and the Macmillan character waxed patricianly lyrical about Trollope, saying he was currently flicking through Cousin Henry and finding it awfully jolly. I'm a bit of a Trollope fan, or I was once. In fact I've read most of his novels, but some time back. The ones I haven't managed are the early ones ( Castle Richmond and the like) and one or two from the later period that simply haven't appealed. Cousin Henry is one of these. It may be I just find its World's Classics cover slightly repellent. Cousin Henry is one of Trollope's shorter novels. This is actually a point in its di...

Over the years The Next Big Thing has come to be, for me, not just my favourite Brookner but the novel I consider her masterpiece. It's an analysis of the effects of the Holocaust on different people: Herz, who has lived his whole life 'as if it were under threat', and Fanny Bauer, who has chosen forgetfulness, who has 'dropped out of history'. It's a study, rarely matched in modern fiction, or indeed in any fiction, of age and then the only end of age. It's a misalliance tragedy, a study of disastrous love. One reads the Sophie Clay episode with one's heart in one's mouth. And yet towards the end of the novel Brookner humanises Sophie, makes her vulnerable, turns the tables. It's a novel about the inner life - 'his own interior drama took precedence' - with pages of deep analysis of which Henry James would have approved. But it's also a novel in which art fails: Herz, as if suffering a loss of faith, favours, at the last, natu...

Flowers in the botanical gardens, Bonn The Next Big Thing  (2002), like many Brookners, seems to be set in the present day of the book's publication. (The recent Penguin photographic covers, however, generally suggest vaguely antique - 1950s, 1960s - settings.) There's a mention of email (or 'e-mail', as Brookner puts it) and mobile phones. But Fanny's letter from Bonn (admittedly received after a delay, but only a short one) in chapter 13 complains of property prices having rocketed since so many government agencies set up shop in the city. Yet by 2002 German reunification was well established, and such bodies would surely have departed. Nowadays Bonn has a sleepy, sedate, slightly posthumous air. But dating problems of this kind are not unusual in the novels of Anita Brookner. One learns to glide over them. What is important is the atmosphere of the novel, the texture - here the whole mittel -European world Fanny's letter so richly creates. Or do I ...

He knew that he was in danger of losing his head, may already have lost it, but submitted to the experience, even welcomed it. The arrival of Ted Bishop, accompanied by his infant grandson, roused him from what may have been a brief trance.  There may even have been jealousy behind the iron closeness that united Fanny and her mother; neither was allowed to break their primitive agreement. Anita Brookner,  The Next Big Thing , chapters 10, 11, 17 Now reread those sentences. Is there a problem? I'm not so sure. Plainly they're in the past tense. And 'may' is certainly the present tense modal of which 'might' is the past tense version. Yes, yes. But should Brookner really therefore have written 'might' instead of 'may'? Many writers would, without misgivings, have written those sentences. The problem, I think, is with the additional meanings or functions of 'might', i.e. its use not just as the past tense of 'may...

He saw his madness for what it was, the final upheaval of an unlived life... Anita Brookner, A Private View , ch. 10 Such signs, such frustrated gestures, were surely evidence of a cruel joke, perpetrated on him by his own unlived life.  The Next Big Thing , ch. 11

...an arresting image from the National Portrait Gallery of a dressmaker pinning the skirt of an impassive client who resembled Fanny Bauer (black hair, dark eyes, prominent crimson mouth, and bad-tempered expression)... Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 9 Brookner in her late work - when, as it were, a decent time had passed since her retirement from the Courtauld - returned in something like earnest to her earlier calling*. There were the books of criticism,  Soundings and Romanticism and Its Discontents . And there were novels like The Next Big Thing , with its numerous art references. Here Herz is looking through his collection of old art postcards. But I confess I can't identify the image of a dressmaker and her impassive client. Can anyone help? * though Julian Barnes believes art criticism and novel writing occupied quite separate parts of her mind. He speaks of how she would light up and be transformed when asked over dinner her views on, say, the painter B...

One can turn up the most surprising things in this game. Take this recent Chinese edition of Brookner's Providence , which I discovered by chance on Amazon. The summary is rather brilliant, though with a flavour all of its own: Born in an immigrant family, Kitty Maule is a half-French and half-English intellectual beauty teaching in a London college and studying on the romantic tradition in literature works. She longs to blend in the environment as a pure English and she falls in love with her handsome and charming colleague Maurice Bishop, a famous professor who undoubtedly conforms to her ideal about love and identity. However, they have the ambiguous partner relationship after the short love affair. The indifferent attitude of Maurice makes Kitty who wants to get rid of loneliness and comfort her grandparents with a marriage feel lost and anxious. For the ideal new life, Kitty takes the initiative to get close to Maurice. Can she win Morrison ( sic ) in the invisible war?...

After examining the photograph he had the fleeting feeling that he was in the wrong country. Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 6 The Next Big Thing links most obviously with Strangers and A Private View , but in its subtle and reticent treatment of the Holocaust its truest confrère is probably Latecomers . In particular one thinks of the restaurant scene between Hartmann and Fibich in that earlier work. It is so understated that one can almost overlook it as the novel's climax: He dropped his head, made a helpless gesture with his hand and knocked over a glass of water. 'Fibich!' said Hartmann warningly, summoning a waiter. 'I should have gone back,' whispered Fibich. 'I should not have left. I should have got off the train.' (Ch. 14)

I continue my random survey of Muriel Spark's works in her centennial year with her 1974 novella The Abbess of Crewe , 'A wicked satire on Watergate', as the cover teasingly but rather heavyhandedly puts it. Soon to be re-released (by Polygon in summer 2018),  The Abbess of Crewe  occupies a truly bizarre and striking place in Spark's bizarre and striking middle period. Scandal has hit the Abbey of Crewe. Reporters are at the gates; police patrol the grounds. There has been an election: Sister Alexandra was victorious and is now the Abbess. Her rival, the younger Felicity, has run off with a local Jesuit and told her story to the papers. The new Abbess is accused and indeed guilty of orchestrating a robbery and of covertly and extensively electronically bugging the convent... Abbess Alexandra is Miss Jean Brodie reborn: patrician, charismatic, amoral. Secretly, it is hinted, she believes in nothing - nothing but power. Or nothing, perhaps, but literature, which s...

'I found your address in a letter from your mother to mine; it was tucked between pages 123 and 124 [*] of Buddenbrooks [**]   which Mother was reading before she died. I have been unable to read the book since that awful day, but I recently took it down when I asked Doris, my maid, to dust the shelves.' Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 13 (Letter from Fanny Bauer to Julius Herz) Who does not enjoy a family saga? Virginia Woolf, never a populist, had much success with The Years , and Buddenbrooks (1901)   remains Thomas Mann's best-loved novel. It covers the years from high Biedermeier 1835 to the very different 1870s in the lives of the Buddenbrook family, a bourgeois*** north-German clan. I've visited Lübeck and the Thomas Mann museum (the ' Buddenbrookhaus ') several times, but in my pre-blogging days, when I took no photographs. But I remember a sedate city, autumn leaves underfoot, and a vaguely marine atmosphere, as of cold seas not too ...

Not since Anita Brookner has such an accomplished novelist so skilfully put forward such a wrongful, damaging, view of life. David Sexton, review of The Only Story by Julian Barnes, London Evening Standard , 18/1/18 David Sexton has form in this area. There are varied references to Anita Brookner in his reviews over the years, including a complimentary one of Strangers in 2009. But his major contribution came in 1991 with a full-page article on Brookner in the Standard , 'Daring to question the morals of Miss B'. I was a newish fan in those days, and this was probably the moment when I fully realised Anita Brookner was a controversial writer, a subversive writer, a writer who could provoke outrage. I've covered Sexton's 1991  J'accuse in an earlier post here .