The Brooknerian

Read Trollope . For decent feelings, she said. In her own novels she references  He Knew He Was Right and Orley Farm . I'm not keen on either. I love the later works, not all of which are the gloomy old things of repute. I think the likes of Ayala's Angel are among my favourite novels of any writer. Read Roth and Updike . And the rest of the great American warhorses. Brookner always made a thing of her devotion to these most unBrooknerian writers. She was putting it on a bit, no doubt; but she made a good case. Read Wharton . Brookner made a case for Wharton too. But I'm not sure she was right. She said she thought of herself as much more like Wharton than James. Again, I don't think she was right. Read Sebald . She valued Sebald's sudden emergence, fully formed, on to the literary scene. She liked especially his evocation of old-style life and feelings. For much the same reason, read Mann . The bourgeois past, European angst - and Switzerland. Read Stendha...

'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 ...

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...

...their new cramped quarters. Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 3 Dispossession - 'translation' from one home to another lesser home - is a major theme from the beginning. As in Latecomers , the Holocaust - ghettoisation - isn't directly referenced, but nevertheless is present throughout, Brookner's reticence and subtlety only serving to intensify the Herzes' despair. The Next Big Thing , like Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks , is about the decline of a family, and there are sundry other comparisons to be drawn in this most literary of Brooknerian openers. Published the previous year, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz is possibly an influence. Reading of Herz and his family in Hilltop Road and later in their inferior flat above the shop in the Edgware Road, one thinks of Austerlitz in Bloomsbury:

The novel's new tone - darker, less ironic - continues here. The season has changed; we're heading towards winter. Then there's a scene with the Puseys: Alain, the young waiter, has been (wrongly) accused of impropriety. 'Of course, he'll have to go,' says Mrs Pusey. The Puseys are no longer comic characters. The scene isn't played as farce, as might have been the case earlier. Instead we see the Puseys' carelessness, their misrule, their disregard of others, and also Mrs Pusey's fear of change. That Jennifer Pusey may have one or two secrets is hinted at. The mystery of the opening and closing door is again invoked. 'I wonder,' thinks Edith. 'I wonder.' 'My patience with this little comedy is wearing a bit thin,' she says to herself, confirming the change that has been in the air of the novel for some time. Breakfastless - for the hotel is at sixes and sevens - she heads into town, turning into Haffenegger's,* where...

Followers of this blog will know I recently read, with great pleasure, Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann. Another largely hotel-focused story, the novel takes place in the early nineteenth century but reveals its modernist credentials towards the end, when Mann gives us Goethe's thoughts and feelings in a long stream-of-consciousness chapter. Edith Hope, in Hotel du Lac , though she may look a little like Virginia Woolf, is no modernist, and nor is her creator. Chapter 6, though reflective, introspective, and set deep in Edith's consciousness, nevertheless could have been written by Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope. Not least because Brookner gives us Edith's letters to her lover. This is a successful and fitting technique, and there will, I recall, be a smart pay-off at the end of the novel, when Edith reveals she hasn't sent any of the letters. But it is old-fashioned. But again, perhaps fittingly so. *** Some additional points: 1. Balkanization [Mrs Pu...

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...

Brookner's repetitiveness - inevitable, perhaps, in a writer writing so copiously and at such speed - is, for some, a weakness; for the more committed reader it's a source of comfort, even of a certain perverse pleasure. Reading Altered States , chapter 12 - like chapter 10 , another tour de force - one cannot but recall Edith Hope's Swiss exile in Hotel du Lac . Alan Sherwood's exile is to a town on the Swiss/French border: The name of the small town to which [my father-in-law] had consigned me ... seemed appropriate, since my nerves were à vif , that is to say, flayed. He must, again like Edith, absent himself for decency's sake: ...somewhere, at some level, there may have been a hope that Aubrey's reasoning was sufficient, that all I needed was fresh air and exercise, and that if I absented myself I would expiate my fault ... and would go some way to being forgiven. His arrival, and indeed the subsequent details of the vacation, including observation...

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...

Twice in 'At the Hairdresser's' Elizabeth complains that she has nothing to read. She reads only the classics now, and is presently engaged with Thomas Mann. But he is found wanting. To have nothing to read may seem a minor grumble, but for Elizabeth the situation is grave. Her routines are important to her: 'any break ... held a superstitious indication of ultimate change' (Ch. 4). Having nothing to read means she has no way of filling her days. This leaves her perilously open to offers. For reading, read writing. There are some writers for whom writing is a compulsion: it is their drink, their drugs. Trollope was one, starting the next book notoriously soon on the heels of the previous. He continued writing right up to the wire, though he was in considerable distress. With 'At the Hairdresser's' Anita Brookner comes to an end. What was her life like when she had nothing to write?

On his desk he saw the letter which Simmonds had handed to him as they parted the previous evening, but instead took up his volume of Thomas Mann once more, and sank gratefully into the landscape, so well remembered, so totally familiar, of the bourgeois past. The Next Big Thing , Ch. 12 (A question for Brooknerians: Is Herz the only reader of Thomas Mann?) In Mann's Magic Mountain , one of my favourite novels, a young man Hans Castorp travels to a Swiss TB sanatorium to visit an afflicted cousin. But slowly he gets ill himself and ends up staying for seven years, during which time he engages with eccentric fellow patients and has philosophical discussions. The obvious Brookner analogue is Hotel du Lac . But one also recalls Zoe's mother's decline, her invalidisation, in The Bay of Angels .