Category: Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday

whatcathyreadnext6 Comments

ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk.  It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago. If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

I’ve decided to delve back into the earliest days of my blog (not that it’s that old) and share one of my first reviews. It’s for a collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield, an author I was introduced to whilst studying for my Masters with The Open University. If you like your short stories a little dark, then give this collection a try.

In A German Pension: 13 Stories by Katherine Mansfield

germanAbout the Book

In A German Pension was Katherine Mansfield’s first published collection of short stories. The stories were inspired by her stay at the Villa Pension Müller in the Bavarian spa of Bad Wörishofen in 1909.

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find In A German Pension: 13 Stories on Goodreads

 

My Review

The stories in this collection are divided between vignettes of guests staying at the Pension, which are gently mocking in tone, and much darker stories that often have a sting in the tail. A frequent theme of the latter is the social and sexual oppression of women.

In “German Meat”, the female English narrator is a sardonic commentator on the coarseness of the German guests who are constantly eating, perspiring and discussing their ailments and bodily functions. They, however, believe themselves superior to the English, particularly when they learn the narrator does not know what kind of meat her husband likes and, worse still, admits to being vegetarian. Mansfield deftly conveys the guests’ greed and grotesque habits in a few short sentences.

‘A glass dish of stewed apricots was placed upon the table. “Ah , fruit!” said Fraulein Stiegelauer, “that is so necessary to health. The doctor told me this morning that the more fruit I could eat the better.” She very obviously followed the advice.’

In “The Sister of the Baroness”, Mansfield exposes the snobbery of the other guests who cannot contain their excitement at the prospect of a relative of a wealthy member of the nobility staying at the Pension.

‘Coffee and rolls took on the nature of an orgy. We positively scintillated. Anecdotes of the High Born were poured out, sweetened and sipped: we gorged on scandals of High Birth generously buttered.’

Unfortunately their fawning regard for the new arrival turns out to be misplaced when it is revealed she is merely the daughter of the Baroness’s dressmaker.

In “The Advanced Lady”, the pretensions to intellectual superiority of a lady writer are lampooned.

‘“But Love is not a question of lavishing,” said the Advanced Lady. “It is the lamp carried in the bosom touching with serene rays all the heights and depths of…” “Darkest Africa,” I murmured flippantly. She did not hear.’

Amongst the darkest of the stories is “The Child Who Was Tired”, which recounts the unrelenting toil of a young girl and the dreadful act she is driven to by despair and exhaustion. Another notable story is “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding” in which the conventions of domestic bliss are satirised both in the descriptions of the pompous Herr Brechenmacher and the events of the wedding breakfast. The bride is described as having the appearance of “an iced cake, all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her”. There is a sense of violence underpinning the story which is realised in the final sentence.

Although Mansfield later came to regard this early collection of stories as having little merit, I enjoyed the precision of the writing and their dark humour.

mansfieldAbout the Author

Katherine Mansfield was born in New Zealand in 1888 and is widely considered the best short story writer of the modernist period. She left New Zealand for the UK when she was 19 and then travelled for a time in Europe. She was associated with a “new dawn” in English literature and together with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf made the London of the period the centre of the literary world. Mansfield’s stories were written without a conventional plot but concentrated on one moment, a crisis or turning point rather than a sequence of events. Often very dark, common themes of her stories include human isolation, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality. Katherine Mansfield died in 1923 at the age of only 34.

Throwback Thursday

whatcathyreadnext9 Comments

ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk. Throwback Thursday is designed to be an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that you’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago. If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

I’ve decided to delve back into the earliest days of my blog (not that it’s that old) and share one of my first reviews. It also happens to be a book first published in 1940.   It’s the first in a series that I’d planned to continue reading but, sadly, blogging has taken over and the lure of new books has kept me from reading any more of them. However, one day, eh?

World’s End by Upton Sinclair

worlds-endAbout the Book

World’s End is the first novel in Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series. First published in 1940, the story covers the period from 1913 to 1919. This is the beginning of a monumental 7,340 page novel, the story of young American, Lanny Budd, which starts in Europe in 1913. It is also an intimate record of a great world which fell victim to its own civilization. A new world was about to be born.

 

 

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find World’s End on Goodreads

My Review

Lanny is drawn to art, poetry and music but, as the son of an American munitions manufacturer, is exposed to arguments (some would say, cynical arguments) of commercial reality,  power-broking and real politik.  The conflict Lanny experiences as he struggles to make sense of these opposing forces is at the heart of the novel.   This is a long novel and at times, particularly in part five covering the attempts to arrive at a peace settlement, it seems more straight history than historical fiction but Lanny’s Forrest Gump-like ability to be at the centre of important events and several underlying stories stop it from feeling completely like a college course.  Upton Sinclair depicts the motives of the countries involved (particularly Great Britain, France and America) with brutal clarity:

“Now they were here, not to form a League of Nations, not to save mankind from future bloodshed, but to divvy the swag.”

That the war was fought for control of natural resources (coal, oil, steel) and territory is made very clear and, in this sense, the lesson of history is that nothing much has changed.

UptonSinclairAbout the Author

Upton Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.