The Brooknerian

I haven't yet been able to find the covers, but these are apparently the fresh spines of some Brookner novels to be republished in June: An intriguing selection, focusing on the 1980s ( A Start in Life , Look at Me* , Latecomers ) and the 2000s ( The Bay of Angels , The Next Big Thing ). I am pleased to see The Next Big Thing , a late masterpiece and as raw and edgy as anything she ever wrote. I should perhaps reconsider The Bay of Angels . But what of the great, settled, magisterial novels of the 90s - A Family Romance, A Private View, Visitors ? *Disappointing to see the continuing capitalisation of the preposition, inaugurated in the cover refresh of ten years ago.

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)

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...

New to Anita Brookner? Let me suggest a route into and through what a critic (unfavourably but memorably) once called the long dark corridor of her fiction . Start with a late-period novel. Brookner's fiction divides roughly but usefully into three phases: the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. The early work is inconsistent but often brilliant; the middle period is more settled, more even. In Brookner's last works we see a return to the unpredictability she started with, now allied to a greater assuredness of form and style. Start with The Next Big Thing ( Making Things Better ) (2002). Also try The Bay of Angels (2001) and The Rules of Engagement (2003). Scarier than the scariest horror story. Next try the essential early Brookner: Look at Me (1983). A remarkable and quite extreme laying out of the Brookner manifesto. The final chapters contain some of the bleakest and most unsettling passages in the whole of English literature. Temper this with the novel of the followi...

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...

Latecomers (1988), Ch. 13: It was dusk when he reached Berlin,and a huge dark blue sky, moonless and starless, stretched over the curiously silent city. He realised that he was unaccustomed to these quiet wide streets, these blank-faced apartment houses with their austere windows, this isolation of a landlocked place far from the winds of the sea and the subtle odours of grass and river water ... His taxi took him efficiently to the Kurfürstendamm, where the sky was momentarily obliterated by city lights, high buildings bearing advertisement signs like heraldic devices or the badges of ancient guilds, the outline of a ruined church which reminded him of a rotten tooth, and cautious tables outside cafes at which nobody sat. At the Kempinski the welcome was efficient, smiling, deft, but lacked, he thought, effusiveness. ... Dahlem was much more like what he expected to remember, a suburb of silent villas painted yellow, with pitched roofs and green shutters. The museum, like a gia...

Brookner rated Latecomers highly. It, rather than Hotel du Lac ,  she said in interview , should have won the Booker. Latecomers is for sure a confident book, and it has an 'important' Booker-pleasing theme. But I find it, along with Lewis Percy , published a year later, a little  over -confident: Olympian, indulgent. There is less sense in these books of Brookner's affinity or kinship with the lives she so omnisciently appraises. There is some dilution too, some sense of a diffuse focus. There are too many characters, too much multi-plottedness. But Fibich's realisation towards the end of Latecomers , that he wishes he had stayed with his mother rather than getting on the Kindertransport , is finely handled and powerfully affecting: 'I should have gone back,' whispered Fibich. 'I should not have left. I should have got off the train.' (Ch. 14) But it is Fibich's return visit to Berlin in Chapter 13 that interests me currently. I've been t...

Brookner's father, meanwhile, had come to England from Poland at 16: 'From Piotrokow Tribunalski; sorry, I can't even spell it. We couldn't pronounce his Christian name, either, and called him Newson.' 1994 interview ( Link ) What strikes me about this quote is the foreignness, even the exoticism of Poland and the Polish in those days. Berlin, too, in Latecomers  (1988), seems outlandish. How far we have come in a few decades. When I was growing up, the likes of Poland or East Germany were indeed scary places, but now I visit them without a second thought. The Brooknerian world has truly opened up.

He thought of Hartmann, whom he now saw to be lively, exuberant, festive, not stricken by this fatigue du nord which hung over Berlin. Hartmann, of course, was from Munich, an elegant and already southerly city. Latecomers , Ch. 13 I once, from Munich, took a suburban train to Starnberg, to see the Starnbergersee, solely because of its mention in the opening lines of 'The Waste Land'... Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. The resort, I recall, gave off a sort of civilised reticence, the lake high, a large inscrutable presence. The day was drizzly, murky, and I didn’t tarry long; I'd just wanted to be there for a time. It was very Brooknerian behaviour. (I have looked through Latecomers for mentions of the Starnbergersee, which I seem to retain, but can find only memories of the Englische Garten and of ...

Comparisons have a bad rep. Reading Villette , I'm reminded of an early review of Look at Me : 'a novel sufficiently distinguished to make you blink twice at "Brookner". Blinked at once, it might be "Bronte".' Other early comparisons included Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and of course Jane Austen - whom Brookner excoriates on more than one occasion. Comparisons with male novelists - Henry James, especially - come a little later. Later still - into the new century - we see references to the great Europeans. '[Brookner's] characters, reflective, displaced and intransigent, are more like those of Camus than of any contemporary British novelist. Her style has a similar purity. Increasingly, Brookner reveals herself as a European novelist, and a major one,' wrote Helen Dunmore of The Bay of Angels (2001), a judgement she repeated in her 2010 Introduction to Latecomers ( Link ): 'Anita Brookner is...