The Brooknerian

 Part of Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series, to be published later in the year:

'Mute oblongs' Brookner calls the photographs Herz lugubriously sifts in The Next Big Thing . A photo sets the ball rolling in Family and Friends;  and a Brookner favourite, W. G. Sebald, of course, began the vogue of actually interspersing tracts of text with wordless rectangles that at once somehow reveal and remystify the past. All photos, of whatever age, are both accessible and resistant. I've considered this in recent weeks as I've traded a collection of cartes de visite I picked up in a job-lot years ago. Patented in the 1850s, this species of visiting card became extremely popular in the following decade. (Oddly enough, I cannot think of references to cartomania in novels of the time, though the likes of Trollope and Thackeray both trotted down to one of the numerous studios that sprang up everywhere. There is an image of Thackeray wearing trousers so aged they have patches on them.) Suddenly the past bursts into the light. The thousands of people, famous and u...

What's your favourite Brookner line? Something positively freighted with many things Brooknerian. Something perhaps only Anita Brookner could have written. Look at Me A novel replete with quotability. I'm going to choose one of the most extreme, almost self-parodic lines, from the truly chilling chapter 11: Frances's desolate trek through a hostile nighttime London: This must be the most terrible hour, the hour when people die in hospitals. (Larkinian too. Think 'Ambulances' or 'The Building' - each room farther from the last and harder to return from.) Falling Slowly Miriam is imagining the thoughts of her contemporaries, those with lives more conventional than her own. You are not one of us, she imagines them thinking. You do not shop for cornflakes, fish fingers, baked beans. You will not grow fat. You do not take family holidays, the car loaded with junk. You only look astonishingly young, but you must be getting on. Too late for you, then. Y...

I wish there were a word-count facility on my e-reader: it might yield some interesting results. I noticed during my recent reread of Fraud (1992) something I'd only half-recognised before: how Brookner's chapters have a tendency towards being extremely regular in length. I reckon if I were to count the words in each of Fraud' s chapters the results would be remarkably close. How did she do this? She wrote in longhand, and cleanly, with few corrections (a page of the MS of Family and Friends (1985) is to be found online alongside the Paris Review interview) - so it was probably just a case of her allocating herself a set number of sheets of paper per chapter. But why did she do it? She was certainly a writer, and probably a person, who lived according to her routines. Imposing such structures and patterns on the job of composition would have given momentum to a writing process that, as John Bayley says somewhere, possibly wasn't experienced at the full fever p...

In Dickens what I marvel at more than anything is his management of different plot strands. He maintains control throughout, but there is also a freedom, an unpredictability, a sense of one plot merging into another. David Copperfield hasn't the wild free-wheeling quality of, say, a Thackeray novel ( Pendennis acts as an excellent comparison), but nor has it the rigidness of structure of early- and middle-period Trollope. ( Can You Forgive Her? is an example of this sort of schema at work: three women, three love plots, a few chapters given over to each in rotation.) Anita Brookner's plots, while never predictable, tend towards the schematic, especially in those that focus on a cast of characters. Olga Kenyon asked Brookner about this in Women Writers Talk in 1989, in relation to Family and Friends : Kenyon: You've chosen a family saga, but concise, controlled, through a series of family photographs. Why did you choose that form? Brookner: Because it was easier. It ...

  I am apostolic about the novels of Edith Templeton, a Czech who writes in impeccable English: they are extremely restrained and tell strong stories about life in old-style central Europe, with recognisable passions and follies. Lovely, lovely novels. Anita Brookner, interviewed by John Haffenden, 1985 In the 1980s Anita Brookner wrote introductions to several of Templeton's novels, published by Hogarth. I haven't read them, so cannot comment, but I recently got hold of The Surprise of Cremona  (1954), a travel book reissued in the 2000s with an introduction by Brookner: My only meeting with Edith Templeton took place in her flat in Bordighera some time in the mid-1980s. I found an isolated and eccentric woman: I saw from the expression on her face as we were introduced that the same judgement had been passed on myself. Earlier, in the  Spectator  ( here ), Brookner had spoken of this rather delicious encounter (and in Bordighera too, a setting for Brook...

Anita Brookner acquired a forbidding reputation during her writing career. Critical reception was strongly divided. So - where to start? It was possibly easier then, while she was still writing. If you had never read her, and wanted to, you could read her latest. Now that she's gone, and her body of work is complete, the uninitiated can be daunted by her sheer fecundity, the sheer volume of her fiction: twenty-four novels and a novella over thirty years. Where to start? It is a difficult question. There's no obvious stand-out novel, by which I mean one that stands out in terms of, say, length or critical appreciation. The obvious answer is Hotel du Lac , which won the Booker Prize in 1984. But Brookner herself didn't think it should have won. Her surprise or shock is clear in a press picture from the Booker event. She thought  Latecomers (1988) should have got the prize - a book with a serious and indeed Booker-friendly theme: the lifelong effects of surviving the Holo...

Art doesn't love you and cannot console you , said Anita Brookner. It's a discomforting assertion. When I examine my own intake or uptake of art - by which I mean my reading, for primarily I'm literary, verbal - I realise consolation is one of the chief things I look for. My sudden blogging, my sudden and tardy engagement with the Internet, after years of silence, has somewhat changed my reading habits. I now read more, and with more purpose. I look at what others are reading and am influenced. Or else I'm reduced, made to feel subtly inferior. These other folk - how quickly and how widely they read! Much of my reading is now rereading. I read new things infrequently. I try new authors hardly at all. I favour books about certain types or classes of character and set in certain locations. I'm really very choosy, very small-minded. I've come to the end of Trollope, an almost exclusive preference of mine through my twenties and thirties. I never thought I'd e...

Beyond the bridge lay the Paris I had known and loved, and perhaps should never see again with that lift of the heart that had once attended me every morning of my life. Altered States , ch. 10 Chapter 10 of Altered States is one of the most accomplished in the whole of Brookner. Significantly it is about Paris and significantly it's about a character travelling on his own. Alan goes to Paris, planning a clandestine meeting with Sarah at the George Cinq, but things go farcically awry. There's a bizarre travel-phobic man on the plane; it's raining heavily; the hotel is overbooked. From that point, Alan's attempts to meet Sarah develop from farce into Kafka-style nightmare. He reflects again on her unavailability; he's practically never had a proper conversation with her. She's rather like the love object in Mann's Magic Mountain , the woman with the Kirghiz eyes, whom Hans Castorp never so much as speaks two words to. The chapter ends in full-blown hor...

... he thought he might have done better, even prospered, in another era, or even another place, where the natives, the citizens, were more helpful, more curious, and indeed more candid. He longed to have lived in one of those confessional novels he had read as a young man - The Sorrows of Young Werther, Adolphe - in which whole lives were vouchsafed to the reader, with all their shame, yet as if there were no shame in the telling. Here, now, one was consciously checked by a sort of willed opacity, a social niceness that stalled one's attempts to make real contact. Strangers , Ch. 7 Once more, in Strangers , Brookner takes stock of her strange second career. Werther takes us back to  Family and Friends , Adolphe to  Providence . Brookner herself, though very private, was not known for the kind of vapid small-talk she deplored in the English. A recent diary piece by Julian Barnes amusingly makes this point: Towards the end of the first year of Anita Brookner’s d...

Missing from the archive, as it were, are Anita Brookner's short stories. One is rather glad she never wrote them. I've never much enjoyed short stories. Does anyone, really? In my earliest days as a Brookner fan, I became aware of what seemed to have been a Brookner story, 'A Wedding', published in an old copy of Granta . The 1984 date and the title suggested, perhaps, connections with Hotel du Lac or, more likely, Family and Friends . But I was hopeful for a lost classic. I searched old bookshops and the like. This was in that golden or that dark time before the Internet. I never found what I was looking for - but of course it's online now,  and only a click away . And of course it's only the opening chapter of Family and Friends . There were no more such 'stories'. There was 'At the Hairdresser's' in 2011, but that always seems like a short novel. One is indeed relieved Brookner steered clear of the short story form. At their wor...

I fight shy of rankings, league tables and the like, but from time to time I'm asked for recommendations. In purely chronological order, here are my five. ( Hotel du Lac , for reasons explored in a post of yesterday , is excluded from consideration (not that it would necessarily have made the list).) Look at Me (1983) Not by any means a perfect Brookner, but an essential one. Here we get our first full view of the battle between Brookner's insiders and outsiders. Just whose side is she on? Family and Friends (1985) Brookner's most stylish novel, published following the euphoria of the Booker win. Confident, magisterial, this is Brookner placing herself firmly beyond the parochial concerns of the traditional English novel. A Private View (1994) The story of ageing George Bland's reckless passion for an itinerant young woman. A dense, intense portrait of sexual obsession. Visitors (1997) Essentially the same story as A Private View , but here the passion i...

In my freshman prize copy of A Dictionary of Stylistics (Longman, 1991), by one of my old teachers, Katie Wales, I find the historic present defined as the 'special use of the present tense in oral or written, anecdotal or literary narrative, where the past tense might be expected, the shift creating a more dramatic or immediate effect'. Professor Wales cites the use of the form in jokes, in newspaper headlines, in Pope's Iliad,  and in Anita Brookner's Family and Friends . The form has continued its popularity with literary novelists. Consider Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels. There was a  minor media spat  a few years back, regarding the use of the historic present in BBC history programmes: 'It gives a bogus, an entirely bogus, sense of immediacy,' said John Humphrys. Brookner's deployment of the historic present in Family and Friends evolves out of the authorial voice's examination of a set of old photographs. In Brookner's han...

Outside the line of duty I reread Henry James's Portrait of a Lady , and once again found it matchless, a grave description of one of life's great traumas, the passage from innocence to experience. Spectator , 17 November 2001 Brookner's own characters are rarely depicted in a condition of innocence. We might watch them experience a moment of revelation, a moment of horror; the ending of Undue Influence comes to mind. But were they innocent before? No, more often than not they were beady and watchful, already (at however young an age) denizens of a fallen world. Family and Friends , in the character of Mimi, is an exception. We see Mimi sitting hopefully in a Paris hotel, waiting for Frank, who will not come. We witness what seems like a genuine loss of innocence, something that colours Mimi's whole life. Nothing afterwards is ever glad confident morning again. ...since that morning when, dry-mouthed and dry-eyed, she got up and dressed herself and lef...

Brookner has frequently been misread as a soft option, a wistful English lady writing short, tender, sorrowful novels a la Rosamond Lehmann, on broken hearts and lost loves. This is quite wrong. She is an obsessive, clinical, severely disenchanted writer. Hermione Lee, review  of A Friend from England , LA Times , 1988 I should like to focus today on Rosamond Lehmann, the dedicatee of Hotel du Lac . In Selina Hastings's 2002 biography of Lehmann, we learn that one of the most pleasurable consequences of Rosamond's late-flowering fame in the 1980s, following the inauguration of the Virago publishing house, was the personal friendships she formed as a result: with Carmen Callil 'whose generous and ebullient nature endeared her to Rosamond' and Anita Brookner, 'whose work Rosamond unreservedly admired - "my favourite novelist" - and of whom she became extremely fond'. Brookner, described by Hastings as 'elegant, fastidious, unusually perceptive...

Brookner makes reference now and again to Goethe. Family and Friends begins with an epigraph from Werther . At least one later Brookner novel ( Altered States ?) namechecks Elective Affinities . The Frankfurt Goethehaus looks at first like a genuine eighteenth-century house but like many old-looking buildings in Germany it is in large part a postwar reconstruction. In another part of the building there's a small art gallery: Tischbein, Fuessli, Hackert, minor Caspar David Friedrich. Brookner's comment somewhere about Friedrich's threadbare religious imagery apparently spoilt for ever  Brian Sewell's  appreciation of the painter.

The Paris we all know, or think we know, came into being with the arrival of the Métro, much admired by Proust, who never used it. This was followed a few years later by the telephone (Proust’s number was 29205). The Paris we can remember, or think we can remember, was the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court at the Flore, and when a new novel by Simenon appeared regularly every few months.  These were the last of the glory days, when it was possible to feel like a provincial, newly arrived, and undergoing a longed-for transformation, much as Robb, armed with his map and his gift voucher must have felt at the start of his own apprenticeship. New Paris, the Paris of today, is part of Europe, and its concerns are global. The charms of discovery must yield to a different kind of loyalty, to the planet, to the environment. The true Parisian will, of course, shrug this off, and remain embedded in his quartier, will be on polite if not ...

OK, so it isn't actually lost, but it is little known and hard to come by. Olga Kenyon in her interview with Anita Brookner in Women Writers Talk (Lennard, 1989) takes the following stance: 'Brookner revitalises the romance as she fictionalises its restricting of female potential'. The meeting, one senses, wasn't entirely harmonious, and later Brookner would be interviewed mainly by men. Kenyon: What were your mother's expectations? Brookner: She wanted me to be another kind of person altogether. I should have looked different, should have been more popular, socially more graceful, one of those small, coy, kittenish women who get their way. If my novels contain a certain amount of grief it is to do with my not being what I would wish to be.  [...]  K: Did your parents ever talk about their past - or the holocaust? B: No, and I'm grateful for that. K: I believe you made plans to visit Poland, but didn't go. Why? B: For a Jew, Poland is not exactly ...

James had three incarnations: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender. The novels of Anita Brookner (a writer who, at first glance, doesn't seem to 'develop' - to borrow a term from Larkin) fall perhaps into four phases. The four novels culminating in the Booker win ( A Start in Life , Providence , Look at Me and Hotel du Lac ) are sombre reads, solid, not starry, never presumptuous. Seemingly in receipt of dithyrambs for every subsequent effort, Brookner became in her second phase (beginning with Family and Friends ) a little - shall we say? - smug, a little complacent. Those novels of the mid to late Eighties feel over-assured, at times too ambitious. Brookner worked best in reaction against the prevailing culture. Critical opinion turned sour in the 1990s. Thus, with Brief Lives , begins her third phase. These are masterly books, Jamesian, the language as mandarin as James's, the themes unfashionable but enduring. The last phase comes i...