Virginia Woolf-Alexandra Harris

Virginia Woolf 
Alexandra Harris
Thames &Hudson 
Biography 

As a bookseller and writer there are some unforgiving holes in my reading history: I’ve started but never finished any Nabokov; I don’t think I’ve even picked up an Evelyn Waugh with the intention of buying it, let alone reading it. So I decided to rectify this by choosing one ‘important’ writer whose work I would read chronologically from beginning to end. I had read Mrs Dalloway when I was much younger, when the words swept over my head, and A Room of One’s Own made me first appreciate the essay form but despite only having a skimp handle on her work I have always known that Virginia Woolf might be the most important writer to me. I wanted to test the water with Alexandra Harris’s biography and it bolstered my confidence in choosing Woolf.

 I have to take some time to write about the physicality of this book. If you take a slight glance at the cover, you can be forgiven for thinking the photo is black and white but there is a blush of dusky pink that brings to my mind quilted silk throws. This pink also bleeds onto the flyleaf. Thames and Hudson have resurrected the bookmark ribbon, here in complimentary and tasteful silver. The paper is thicker and creamier than you will find in most books. Its weight mirrors Harris’s words and the subject matter. Whole pages are sporadically given over to single photographs with short captions. I much preferred this to the lazy clumping together in the middle that is the normal layout. The amount of photos of original jacket covers for Woolf’s books is an indicator that for Harris the main point of Woolf’s life is the writing.

 At 170 pages it is slight but Harris manages to pack her words tightly without need for padding. For someone whose writing can be seen as being too trapped in the mind, Harris draws out the emotion and feeling in and behind Woolf’s writing. Harris does air the personal, private indiscretions but she gives them a quick shake before folding them away. Harris prefers to concentrate on the writing; she holds up all of Woolf’s life and pegs it to each major work. It is at these points that Harris really shows her skill by immediately pressing on the main line of each novel.

 So what of the person? Harris swiftly paints a picture of contradictions, of a personality who craved and shunned the limelight, of a wife who needed to be married but was almost forgetful of that marriage, of a wit and a worrier, of a woman plagued by nervous breakdowns who relished life in the rests between bouts, but mostly Harris shows that Woolf is the most important writer of the 20th Century.

The Brilliant World of Tom Gates-L. Pinchon

The Brilliant World of Tom Gates
L. Pichon 
Scholastic
Fiction 9-12 

 Tom Gates is a 9 year old boy in year 5 who is very naughty. He loves doodling when teachers aren’t looking and also reading comics in the back of the class. When his teacher asks him to add detail to his drawings, he draws a picture of his female teacher with very detailed facial hair! It’s a very good, humorous book. The funniest part of the book is the illustrations. They would make people who don’t usually like reading like the book! The book’s filled with bubble writing which, I think, is very creative. A tragedy of swapping chairs occurs which puts Tom Gates right in the teacher’s view. Will he still be able to do his beloved drawings without getting caught? Or will he have to behave and sit next to an idiot for the rest of the school year? Posted by Amelia Callanan :-)!!! (Daughter of Bookgannet)

What I Saw and How I Lied-Judy Blundell

What I Saw and How I Lied

Judy Blundell

(Scholastic)

Teen Fiction

I distinctly remember how alien the adult world seemed to me when I was a child. Even when something particularly adult was said or done in front of me I didn’t fully understand. It all seemed dark and mysterious being an adult, seedy and forbidding yet attractive. Maybe, as children, we know we have to break our way into that adult world at some point, so we keep trying to understand it. We play at being adults.  Looking at this child/adult divide from the other side now can be deceiving; as adults and worried parents we are programmed to think that children are growing up too fast and are too fast in other ways. Reading What I Saw and How I Lied revealed to me that childhood today is the same as in my day, is the same as in the 1940s/50s. For children, there will always be an urge to grow up but also a sense that no matter how hard you try, you are still not a fully paid up member. Evie Spooner thinks that the key to that adult world is in being more like her mother, wearing her glamorous dresses, making up her face and taking care of her hair. The obstacle that she has to get over is that her mother is movie-star beautiful and Evie feels she is too plain.

The war is not long over. The tight reins of conservatism that have been the driving force of America are beginning to slacken. Joe, Evie’s stepfather, has returned from fighting in the war and has reinvented himself as a businessman, setting up several electrical stores. It is never asked of Joe how he managed to accrue the capital to start his business but, then, it is a time of freedom where anything seems possible and plausible. One day and with no warning, Joe sweeps Evie and her mother out of the Brooklyn home they have been sharing with Joe’s mother, Grandma Glad, to the exotic humidity of Palm Beach, Florida. In all the excitement Evie seems to forget the closeted telephone calls that Joe has tried to avoid since his return and doesn’t pay too close attention as to why they are almost alone in holidaying out of season. The only other family staying in their hotel are the Graysons, a ‘swanky couple’, themselves hotel owners from New York. One night, getting some fresh air outside of the hotel, Evie spies Mrs Grayson crying and warning her husband that this time they are taking something ‘too far’. Evie doesn’t hear what that something is but it turns out that the Graysons are not the only people with secrets.

Peter, a young man, also from New York, arrives and attaches himself to their group. He claims to know Joe from the war but while Peter is charming to them all, Joe’s reaction towards the newcomer is one of contempt. When a hurricane hits Palm Beach it doesn’t just muddy the water but also every belief Evie has, of herself and of the people she loves. She comes to realise that as well as bright lights and glamour, the world she craves to be a part of also harbours deceit and anger in its shadows and also, possibly, murder.

One of my many bugbears is overly long books. A tendency towards the overwritten reigns in contemporary literary fiction, in the sense of needing heavier editing and a constant use of florid description. What I Saw and How I Lied does neither. It is tightly written and the perfect size. There are no sagging or unsightly bulges. There are shades of To Kill a Mockingbird in some of the themes explored but without its breadth and sweep. What I Saw and How I Lied works as teen fiction because it doesn’t have that knowingness that adult fiction has. Things are revealed to the reader only as and when they are to Evie and it does not patronise the reader with a clear outcome. Like the time they are living in, there is no black and white, only shades of grey. The novel does not feel unfinished because of it; it feels more real. The writing also doesn’t patronise its readers; Blundell confidently uses slang of the time and doesn’t worry that it won’t be understood by a young audience.

The texture and time of the novel is appealing. The book and its main character both sit immediately between the births of youth culture, as explained in Jon Savage’s Teenage: The Creation of Youth, and the Sexual Revolution. This is a time of Jets and Sharks but also Tonys and Marias, of T-Birds and Pink Ladies but also Dannys and Sandys. It’s a time of trying to stick to being good like you have been taught but torn away from that by wanting to be reckless. It is a time in close proximity to such horrors that nothing seems settled or makes complete sense. It is a time of James Dean shouting at his parents that they are tearing him apart. Evie Spooner too is caught in this limbo; her mother and step-father doing their duty by constantly reminding her she is a child but Peter’s compliments and her own curiosity are pushing her into womanhood.  The novel’s real triumph is in revealing that at the core of the adult world is not the withholding of secrets, as Evie first believed, but is in fact secrecy’s more difficult cousin: self-denial.