The Brooknerian

Further to my post of last week :

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

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.

I think I'd just finished my Finals and was heading off for a short break in Paris. I seem to recall seeing the book in the Paddington Menzies. I didn't in those days buy hardbacks (unlike Brookner, who was famed for it), but was first on the waiting list at my local library. By the end of the month I'd finished it, and it remains one of my favourites. I bought this copy recently. It is pristine. Brookner's dating of her signature is unusual.

You may have noticed I'm taking a break from Anita Brookner at the moment. Everything palls after a time, and of course there's nothing new. I remember the years when I read her year by year, the excitement of receiving those Jonathan Cape, later Viking, hardbacks. A Proustian vouchsafement is still mine whenever I hold, say, A Closed Eye , with its view of Lausanne, or A Private View , with its blue Ian McEwanish female silhouette. I get the very touch and taste of youth again. Where now? I'm reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene right now. ('The day is spent, and commeth drowsie night...') But I'm tempted perhaps to sink into middle Brookner sometime soon - A Private View, Incidents in the Rue Laugier ... What extraordinary novels they were and are. Almost unremarked at the time, except for the regulation polite or disparaging notices in the quality dailies. But no one seemed to recognise how truly odd they were, how strange and revolutionary the Brookne...

Brookner's Family and Friends (1985) British editions in approximate order. A veritable history of art - proof if ever it were needed that no one has yet quite worked out what to put on the cover of an Anita Brookner novel.

One can turn up the most surprising things in this game. Take this recent Chinese edition of Brookner's Providence , which I discovered by chance on Amazon. The summary is rather brilliant, though with a flavour all of its own: Born in an immigrant family, Kitty Maule is a half-French and half-English intellectual beauty teaching in a London college and studying on the romantic tradition in literature works. She longs to blend in the environment as a pure English and she falls in love with her handsome and charming colleague Maurice Bishop, a famous professor who undoubtedly conforms to her ideal about love and identity. However, they have the ambiguous partner relationship after the short love affair. The indifferent attitude of Maurice makes Kitty who wants to get rid of loneliness and comfort her grandparents with a marriage feel lost and anxious. For the ideal new life, Kitty takes the initiative to get close to Maurice. Can she win Morrison ( sic ) in the invisible war?...

I'm not really a fetishiser of my books. But at a loose end one of these drear days I decided to take stock of my rather limited collection and try to dedicate at least some of the year ahead to improving it. How I'd love some more of those 1990s Jonathan Cape hardbacks - the editions I first encountered, in my local library, during the earliest days of my fandom! Or maybe one or two from the Penguin posthumous reissue, of which I sadly own none. Those covers are really growing on me. But anyway, for those of you who are interested, here are my Brookners in all their questionable glory. (And I hope you like the collective noun in the title of this post. I don't. I've never approved of collective nouns.) Now for the different suits. A game of solitaire, you might say. The 1980s Triad Graftons: The Jonathan Cape hardbacks: The early 1990s Penguins: The Flamingo reissues: Some early-to-mid 90s Penguins: A new livery for the later...

I come, as I always knew I would, to Hotel du Lac . It's a faintly daunting prospect. You'll forgive me if I take it slowly, looking for the moment at some cover images. This is a fruitful enterprise, as Hotel du Lac is undoubtedly Brookner's most popular and reissued book. (I talked about its dominance in an earlier post .) To begin: the first UK edition, and the most famous. Are we in the South of France? The light seems too bright. Is that a palm tree? Now for some later UK editions, and the balcony motif has become established, even ritualised - to the extent almost that it has left the original behind. Look at the second, monochrome image below, from Penguin. It's a distant simulacrum. Is this a nineteenth-century novel? The posthumous republication of most of the Brookner corpus in 2016 yielded a set of largely successful black-and-white images. But Hotel du Lac 's dominance was signalled with a (faded, colour) cover, showing a (vintage) car tr...

And so I find myself rereading one of the  'lost' Brookners , long out of print in Britain, unavailable as an e-book. My copy is a Flamingo from the early 90s. It's all but falling apart: reading it I get a sense of its vulnerability. It's second-hand; originally I probably read a library copy. I start to wonder about the book's previous owner, whose name is written inside. I'm not keen on the cover image. Altogether too benevolent. I much prefer the original hardback, which showed Giorgione's Tempest .

I have  spoken before  about Brookner's covers, the many disappointments and misfires. Recently, when the cover for the forthcoming Penguin Essentials edition of A Start in Life was unveiled, there was consternation in some quarters. A Penguin Essentials publication has a certain cachet. Next stop Penguin Classics, one might have thought. An opportunity missed Studying Corot's Between Lake Geneva and the Alps for a recent post made me think of the cover of the UK hardback edition of A Closed Eye , which always seemed to me to get it right. It showed part of John Inchbold's View above Montreux , 1880, in the V&A. Not an outlandish choice, perhaps, but well judged. The image captures, I think, in its deadness, its pallor, some of the horrified sense of defeat Harriet feels in her Swiss exile.

Larkinian: UK first edition, 2009 Jamesian: UK paperback reprint, 2016 It's my belief that Brookner hasn't been well served by her covers, or rather that very few of them have captured the true Brooknerian vibe. The original edition of Strangers seems a case in point - a lazy cover, depicting a vaguely Brookner-style building, but one that, to me at least, looks too suburban. I do not like the lighting either. Brooknerians don't burn the midnight oil. The image has, to my mind, something of a sense of Philip Larkin's high windows. Paul Sturgis, the main character of the novel, is possibly a little Larkinian, but only a little. Far, far superior is the cover of the recent paperback reprint. We move from London to Venice, a minor setting in the novel but perhaps its touchstone. Brookner, as has been noted, is nothing if not European. And the image itself is very fine. One is reminded of those frontispiece photographs Henry James commissioned for his New York...

Brookner has been interestingly served  by her covers. Early editions showed either paintings mentioned in the text or images of pensive single women. Commissioned artwork was also seen, especially for Hotel du Lac , and the image of a table on a balcony became representative of the novel in later editions. In the 1990s Penguin took over the publication of Brookner's paperbacks and later, through the Viking imprint, the hardbacks too. Initially Penguin favoured paintings, but towards the 2000s they settled on photographic covers. The posthumous republication by Penguin of almost all of Anita Brookner's novels was a minor event, though the covers aren't always successful. Many of the images seem to be set in the 1950s and 60s, but A Private View (for example) is set, as we learnt in a previous post, firmly in the Nineties. A Private View - Cape hardback edition A Private View - first Penguin paperback A Private View - second Penguin paperback A Priv...