The Brooknerian

'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...

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...

...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:

...this country, by all measures one of the wealthiest in the world, appears to be so dilapidated, destitute, shorn of hope ... The UK is rich; there is wealth inequality, but that alone doesn't explain why the country is so mean . Robinson , ch. 3 Just over a year ago the UK voted to leave the EU. There are still some who celebrate this decision. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719. Many people still think of it as a charming and harmless tale, even a book for children. Jack Robinson's Robinson , with quiet subtlety and in detail, links and dismantles both these conceptions. 'Jack Robinson' is Charles Boyle of CB Editions  and this is the companion volume to An Overcoat , earlier appreciated on this blog . It is as good and as brilliant as An Overcoat . Each is the A-side of the other. Novel? Memoir? Literary criticism? Diatribe?  Robinson politely requires that we abandon such labels. But what is the book about? It's certainly a...

...I am averse to falsely intelligent summaries, such as seem to be prevalent nowadays, and prefer long moments of reverie and speculation, which seem to me more conducive to satisfactory conclusions. Altered States , ch. 1 They are, I realise, those falsely intelligent summaries, what I must avoid here. Let me trust instead to speculation and reverie, to indirections that might perhaps find directions out. In any event, I often think I have little choice. How I envy those who can put together regular, cogent, recognisable (I'm trying to avoid the word 'normal') reviews and summaries of books they've read. I'm given, rather, to the power of impressions. At one time I would write essays, long essays, dissertations. Not now. My initial impressions of Altered States : a ghost story; and a Sebaldian quest story: ...I lingered, a substantial English ghost, haunting the woman in the German hat ... I felt that this person on the platform might hold the key to t...

For W. G. Sebald, in Vertigo * (English translation, 1999), the life of Stendhal offers insights into 'the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection'. Visiting the scene of the Battle of Marengo, Stendhal, or Beyle as Sebald correctly but playfully insists on calling him throughout, experiences a 'vertiginous sense of confusion' as he acknowledges the gulf between his fantasy and the stark reality before him. Thus Stendhal is put to work for Sebald; Stendhal becomes a Sebaldian. Stendhal has other functions for Anita Brookner. In Soundings (1997), in a review of a Stendhal biography, Brookner emphasises his contributions to Romanticism, his commitment to the 'supreme emotional adventure'. In Strangers (2009)   he is invoked several times. Stendhal, Sturgis's one-time favourite author, collapsed in the street and was taken to a cousin's house, where he died. 'That was the way to go, the relative, whether liked or disliked, put in char...

'He intends to join Médecins sans Frontiéres. As I should have done at his age. Live all you can, as Henry James said.' So says Dr Philip Hudson, over salmon, in Chapter 10 of Leaving Home . He is speaking of his son, whose sleeping form had such a powerful effect on Emma earlier in the novel. I do not know the significance of any of this, and, gathering inscrutable congruences, I feel a little sub-Sebaldian, but here's Brookner's death notice in The Times from a year ago, in my mind at this anniversary time:

For her spiritual death had taken place some time ago. Her removal to unfamiliar places, one after the other, had so undermined her that only a memory of home, or an illusion of home, had kept her intact for a while. The Bay of Angels , Ch. 15 The Bay of Angels (2001) and The Next Big Thing (2002) are companion pieces in their way. Zoe's mother's exile is of a lesser order than that experienced by the Herz family, but it is exile all the same. In both novels, too, the dispossession continues into the present. One thinks of Herz's anxieties over the lease on his flat, or Zoe's expulsion from Les Mouettes. These are terrifying novels, edgier than what has gone before. One thinks of Zoe's nightmare, of being imprisoned in a dilapidated, roughly papered room, which has a 'breach in one of the walls, rather like a cat-flap, covered with yet another strip of wallpaper, but of a different pattern' ( Ibid .). This is writing of a new kind, inducing unease in...

What will be Anita Brookner's future literary existence? It seems unlikely either that she'll sink without trace like the once-lauded Angus Wilson, or that she'll benefit from a series of posthumous publications, as in the cases of Barbara Pym and W. G. Sebald. Authors usually experience a dip in the period after their deaths. Kingsley Amis was all but out of print for a while, before being reissued with new covers that recast him as a writer not of the present but of some vaguely 'classic' or vintage yesteryear. The same may already have happened with Brookner.  As I've noted previously,  the new Penguin covers depict Fifties and Sixties scenes, even for novels plainly set in more recent times. Jane Austen didn't become established until the mid-Victorian era. Trollope went into decline after his death, only to go through a renaissance in World War II, when his tales of a gentler world were newly attractive. And Sir Walter Scott, in his day one of the...

I grew cold and sick reading this remarkable narrative, which embodies a sense of displacement so radical that it would seem to preclude a safe return to everyday existence. This is not vulgar Holocaust literature, still less a witness statement: this is dislocation of a kind most of us are privileged not to know. Spectator, review of Sebald's Austerlitz, 2001 Cold and sick ... displacement ... dislocation . High praise indeed, from Brookner. Time and again in her reviews, especially in the later ones, she commends novels for the unease they induce in the reader. Followers of this blog will know I'm of the opinion that in her writings on other writers Brookner is really writing about herself. I'm a few chapters into a re-read of The Bay of Angels at the moment, and already my heart is in my mouth. In no way is it a cosy or comforting read. The critic John Bayley was of the opinion that even the gloomiest art could be comforting, 'by the paradox implicit i...