The Brooknerian

Further to earlier posts ( here and here ) on Brookner's writing style, I note a review from 2009 of Strangers in the Oxford Mail (see here ): Since the perfection of her grammar and use of language is a subject often commented on by reviewers ('Brookner’s writing is meticulous, impeccable and full of simple grace,'  Sunday Times ) I cannot resist pointing out that on the evidence of Strangers she does not know the meaning of either ‘dilemma’ (page 25) or ‘fulsome’ (pages 37 and 44). I would also suggest there is an otiose comma in her brief author’s note: 'All the characters in this novel are imaginary. But I do not doubt that somewhere, out there, they, or others like them, exist.' Dilemma There are five examples of the word in Strangers (none of them on p. 25 of the British edition). The reviewer's complaint appears to centre on Brookner's use of the word to mean 'difficult situation or problem' rather than 'a situation in which a choice must...

This mere four-minute piece ( click here for the BBC Archive #OnThisDay feed ) should be top of the list for any Brooknerian, not least because it is, to my knowledge, the only video of the author freely available. Anita Brookner made only rare media appearances. Buried in archives are, I know, a Channel 4 interview with Hermione Lee and a programme (in the 100 Great Paintings series) Brookner made in 1980, still only an art historian, on, I think, Delacroix. We should be gladdened by this marvellous vouchsafement. There she is: stylish and a-swagger; trenchant in her commitment to the truth.

The finished product is attired in a cunning little violet wool dress with a peplum, shiny high-heeled shoes, and a great deal of Schiaparelli's Shocking dabbed behind her ears and on her wrists. Anita Brookner, Family and Friends , ch. 7 By all accounts elegant in real life, if not dressy, Brookner in her writing always goes to town with her clusters of clothes-modifying adjectives, but here I want to point to the specificity of her references to scents and perfumes. Even Brookner's men get their smells. Think of George Bland and his  Eau Sauvage . The precise significations of such aromas is beyond me, but might be worthy of study. Brookner herself, we know, was always fragrant: The fact that there was one woman there – called Anita Brookner – who you used to go up for private, individual tutorials with her and she was in the top of the building of number nineteen next door. And she was always feeding the pigeons, had an open window and feeding the pigeons, and I r...

regret > verb ( regretted , regretting ) [ with obj. ] feel sad, repentant, or disappointed over (something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity): she immediately regretted her words ¦  [ with clause ] I always regretted that I never trained.   [...]  archaic : feel sorrow for the loss or absence of (something pleasant): my home, when shall I cease to regret you! The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998 I've now and then noticed this about Brookner: her odd use of the verb to regret . I find it in Chapter 1 of A Friend from England (1987): ...Oscar sometimes regretted his little office and his box files... or this similar line from Chapter 3 of Strangers (2009): He regretted ... the structure of the working day. As you might imagine, I'm all in favour of  Brooknerese , but this is perhaps a step too far, especially as Brookner often and more frequently uses the more common meaning of regret . There are twenty-...

Rereading dredges up memories. Rereading Chapter 1 of A Friend from England , I was a student again and it was a sleepy afternoon in a lecture hall in the early 1990s. I attended a traditional university. English Literature meant Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. The canon crept tentatively into the twentieth century and finished in about 1950. There was a seminar called Contemporaneities, taking in Derrida, Lacan, et al , but it was after hours and considered rather daring. I went several times, and left baffled. But I remember a linguistics course I took, and one amazing session when our lecturer carried out a close reading of a Brookner passage. It was the paragraph in Chapter 1 of A Friend from England that runs from 'The house - a substantial but essentially modest suburban villa' to 'For she was daintily houseproud'. The lecturer (who is, I think, now a presenter on BBC Radio 4) wanted to show how Brookner communicated her sophisticated horror at the ...

... I decided that I could only get by on style ... Look at Me , Ch. 10 He would go to Paris, if only to prove himself as good as his word. It was all a question of style. Strangers , Ch. 26 I cannot emphasise enough the complex pleasures of Strangers . I wonder what a reader new to Brookner would make of it. On almost every page there are echoes of earlier novels. As for the plot, what there is of it is stretched so thinly that Brookner must rely at times only on her formidable style. This is, of course, what we really want.

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...