The Brooknerian

The Spectator Annual 1992 Lived through, the Nineties seemed a dull and disappointing decade after its glitzier predecessor. Now one looks back with longing on an era of civilised quietude and gentility. The cover says it all: Mr Major temporarily distracted from a game of cricket on a sunny afternoon. Within: a time capsule; names long-forgotten or still very much with us; antique attitudes (Auberon Waugh's 'Why we over-50s are quite happy with Europe'); Jeffrey Bernard's incomparable 'Low Life' columns; and a piece by Anita Brookner, 'How to be very, very popular', a review of a novel by Mary Wesley. (I get confused between Mary Wesley and Rosamunde Pilcher, whose nostalgic countrified books were also once very, very popular. They continue to be so, oddly, in Germany: at Christmas in Stuttgart I had a stilted conversation with an old lady who knew little of England other than what she had gleaned from the work of Rosamunde Pilcher.) I find M...

Liliane Louvel's scholarly essay  'Reading with Images: Anita Brookner's The Next Big Thing as Memento Mori ' is recommended. It takes an 'intermedial' view of the novel, comparing it with a range of  memento mori artworks. The essay sheds fresh light on several key relationships in the book - with Herz's brother and with his neighbour Sophie Clay. It is heartening to find such a sympathetic and respectful reading of a Brookner novel, and intriguing that it comes from outside the anglophone literary world.

I've been re-reading Cheryl Alexander Malcolm's excellent book Understanding Anita Brookner (University of South Carolina, 2002). Malcolm examines, in sequence, Brookner's first nineteen novels, which were published yearly from 1981 to 1999. She breaks them into contiguous groups, headlining them as follows: Can't Buy Me Love: A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me, Hotel du Lac What Child Is This...: Family and Friends, A Misalliance, A Friend from England, Latecomers Happily Ever After? Lewis Percy, Brief Lives, A Closed Eye Starting Over: Fraud, A Family Romance, A Private View Journeying to the End: Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Altered States, Visitors Back to the Beginning? Falling Slowly, Undue Influence In 2000 there was a break. The five novels of the 2000s were published in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2009. It would be interesting to see how Malcolm might characterise these works. They seem less easily categorisable, less homogeneous. In fact they...