Meticulous, Impeccable and Full of Simple Grace

Further to earlier posts (here and here) on Brookner's writing style, I note a review from 2009 of Strangers in the Oxford Mail (see here):

Since the perfection of her grammar and use of language is a subject often commented on by reviewers ('Brookner’s writing is meticulous, impeccable and full of simple grace,' Sunday Times) I cannot resist pointing out that on the evidence of Strangers she does not know the meaning of either ‘dilemma’ (page 25) or ‘fulsome’ (pages 37 and 44). I would also suggest there is an otiose comma in her brief author’s note: 'All the characters in this novel are imaginary. But I do not doubt that somewhere, out there, they, or others like them, exist.'

Dilemma

There are five examples of the word in Strangers (none of them on p. 25 of the British edition). The reviewer's complaint appears to centre on Brookner's use of the word to mean 'difficult situation or problem' rather than 'a situation in which a choice must be made between two or more unfavourable possibilities'. A true pedant, defining dilemma, would insist on only two alternatives.

Fulsome

'...he hoped that the call would not be answered, so that he could leave a message of fulsome good wishes which involved no loss of face.'

'"...How nice to hear from you." He could hear himself becoming fulsome...'

I refer to Kingsley Amis in his book on style, The King's English (1997):

This once useful word meant 'disgustingly excessive, cloying' as applied to compliments, apologies, etc.; Roget lists it between gushing and stagy. Undereducated persons, perhaps foggily supposing fulsome to be a posh form of full (from which it does partly descend), have in recent years taken to using it to mean 'ample' or possibly 'cordial'. Not to be used henceforth by careful writers.

I think we can absolve Brookner in the second quote.

The otiose comma

Comma use fries my brain, and when using MS Word I am often at odds with its schoolmasterly admonishments. But I can't begin to understand what the Oxford Mail reviewer means here. 'An' otiose comma? Brookner's sentence contains two pairs of commas. One or even both pairs might be removed (though with considerable loss of clarity), but not a single comma. I reckon Brookner got it right.

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Top Ten Brookner

The much-loved Backlisted podcast ( here ) returns with a 'lockdown' episode that includes a lot of Anita Brookner talk. Prompted by discussion about Hotel du Lac , never the most representative Brookner, the chat meanders pleasantly on to the potential for compiling an Anita Brookner 'Top Ten'. At a loose end myself, though this week at the chalkface entertaining the children of keyworkers, I considered the question myself. I'm sure there are similar such lists elsewhere on this blog - I forget, and I don't particularly want to consult them anyhow. Of course, Brookner - like Henry James, like Trollope, indeed like many prolific authors - passed through phases. Brookner's novels, I contend, fall into three, neatly divided by the decades she wrote in: the raw, vital 80s; the settled magisterial 90s; the bleak, experimental 2000s. A Brookner novel from the 80s seems very different from any of her final works - just as 'James I', 'James II' ...

'Proustian in scope'

...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,...

A Thing to Live up to

‘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.

'Spikier, sharper, cooler than anyone had noticed'

(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.

Brookner Biography Announced

A brief post to let Brooknerians know the moment has arrived: a biography commissioned by Chatto & Windus, to be written by Hermione Lee. Hermione Lee interviewed Brookner on television in the 80s. Brookner joins illustrious company. Lee has lifed, among others, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.

Secretive as a Heron

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.

Further Soundings #2

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...

Montagu Mansions

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.

Christopher Hampton's Hotel du Lac

However often I watch it, I'm always surprised. A film of an Anita Brookner novel seems as outlandish as an adaptation of, say, late James. But The Golden Bowl and, more skilfully, The Wings of the Dove have been successfully translated to the screen in recent decades. Their plots, though, underneath the verbiage, are very simple, even sensational. Hotel du Lac , similarly, is one of Brookner's more structured, plotted works. Rights to the novel were bought before its Booker success. Initially Anita Brookner had been approached to write an original screenplay, but she said she wouldn't know how to. Instead she offered the soon-to-be published Hotel du Lac . (This is revealed in the 2002 commentary that accompanies the DVD of the 1986 TV film. The commentary is a dull, low-powered affair. No Brookner, of course.) Anna Massey plays Edith. I've often found Massey a distractingly distinctive actor. Like Judi Dench she manages somehow, in any role, alwa...

'What I too fatally lacked was her tone.'

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...

The Brooknerian

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