The Brooknerian

That world no longer existed, or if it did would have undergone a change... Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 6 With almost Nabokovian ardour Brookner conjures Herz's past, that ride down the Lichtenthalerallee in Baden-Baden, coffee in the Kurhaus gardens. A remarkably similar scene occurs in Falling Slowly , suggesting perhaps an autobiographical origin. Baden-Baden is indeed different now: a resort for the super-rich, no longer for the merely bourgeois. The bourgeois past, Herz finds, is to be found only in his reading: in Thomas Mann's short stories or in  Buddenbrooks . Elsewhere in The Next Big Thing the modern world intrudes. Mobile phones, email. Globalisation. People trafficking? The seamstresses who work in a neighbouring flat at the start of the novel appear to be illegal immigrants. Their employer, Mrs Beddington, admits as much to Herz. He notices the girls' absence during the summer: perhaps they've gone home ('to homes he had difficult...

As for the written word, this disciple of Marcel Proust and Henry James re-reads the classics, but scorns the 'negligible' fiction of today. Nabokov – dandy, émigré, melancholy wit – is the last great novelist for her. 2002 Independent interview Taking it slowly, savouring its Jamesian rhythms, I've at last got to the end of my reread of A Family Romance . Dolly, its focus, appears at intervals throughout the novel, in different iterations or manifestations. Take this memorable vignette from chapter 7: ...her bitter European face, as revealed in sleep, in the half light of the car, the effervescent mask for once cast aside and the grim working woman revealed. And in chapter 8 we see her later still, at sixty-eight, reduced, all but friendless, with navy-blue hair and no make-up and wearing flat shoes. This late incarnation of Dolly is very striking and the scene well handled. One is reminded of Nabokov and the end of Lolita, when   he presents Lolita as gro...

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...

David Lodge, in The Art of Fiction , discusses Nabokov's 'fancy prose'. ('You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.' - Lolita ) Philip Larkin, in Required Writing , speaks of Anthony Powell's style: A formal, slightly comic view of life requires a matching style: Mr Powell's is Comic Mandarin, a descendant of Polysyllabic Facetiousness. [...] it imparts a glaze to the action, as if one were not getting it first hand, an illusion most novelists strive to preserve. Anita Brookner has been described as mandarin, also Augustan, Jamesian, dandyish. 'Nobody else will ever write like Anita Brookner,' said  Michele Roberts  of The Rules of Engagement . I have looked at 'Brooknerese'  in a previous post . Brookner herself, however, was careful not to be presumptive: Interviewer: I would like to talk about your style, which has rightly been praised as exceptionally elegant, lucid, and original. You explain it somewhat in  Provi...