Tag: literary fiction

Book Review: Carol by Patricia Highsmith

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Carol BloomsburyAbout the Book

Therese is just an ordinary sales assistant working in a New York department store when a beautiful, alluring woman in her thirties walks up to her counter.  Standing there, Therese is wholly unprepared for the first shock of love.  Therese is an awkward nineteen-year-old with a job she hates and a boyfriend she doesn’t love; Carol is a sophisticated, bored suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce and a custody battle for her only daughter.  As Therese becomes irresistibly drawn into Carol’s world, she soon realises how much they both stand to lose…

Format: Paperback (312 pp.)           Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2015 [1952]                     Genre: Literary Fiction, Romance

Purchase Links*
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*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Carol on Goodreads

My Review

Carol was first published under the pseudonym Clare Morgan in 1952 with the title The Price of Salt. In the book’s afterword, Patricia Highsmith, writing in 1989, explains the story’s real life inspiration: a woman wearing a fur coat she glimpsed whilst working in the toy section of a New York department store shortly before Christmas in 1948.  She writes: ‘Perhaps I noticed her because she was alone, or because a mink coat was a rarity, and because she was blondish and seemed to give off light.’   Highsmith recounts how she was left feeling ‘odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision.’

From the germ of this idea was born The Price of Salt, published under a pseudonym because by that time Strangers on a Train had been published to great success and Highsmith was now considered a ‘suspense’ writer.  Her publishers wanted more of the same and The Price of Salt was anything but.  As it happens, The Price of Salt did turn out to be a commercial success, selling nearly one million copies when it was published in paperback in 1953.  And so the story of Carol…

Raised in a children’s home following a difficult upbringing, Therese has ambitions to be a stage designer.  Finding it hard to obtain openings in that profession, she reluctantly takes a job in a department store for the Christmas period.  It makes her feel trapped and she fears a future like some of the worn out, drab women she sees around her:   ‘…She knew it was the hopelessness that terrified her…the hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and doing the things that person would do.’  Therese’s disillusion with her job is equalled by her dissatisfaction with her relationship with her boyfriend, Richard.    She finds she cannot return Richard’s love or relish the future together for which he hopes so fervently.  ‘She was cold, and felt rather miserable in general.  It was the half dangling, half cemented relationship with Richard, she knew.  They saw more and more of each other without growing closer.’

Therese’s first glimpse of Carol in the department store is life-changing; it awakens an overwhelming but quite unexpected attraction to this cool, stylish, beautiful woman.  When Therese initiates contact, it becomes apparent that the attraction is mutual and the two embark on a relationship that will become all-consuming and have consequences for them both.  For Therese, the relationship with Carol brings a sense of freedom and adventure.  As time goes on, it also seems to bring about a new maturity in Therese.  For Carol, a woman going through a divorce and custody battle, the relationship means agonising choices.  For them both, it means the opprobrium of society.  ‘In the eyes of the world it’s an abomination.’

It is difficult now for most of us to imagine the prejudice two women in such a relationship faced.   However, as Highsmith reminds us in the afterword, those were the days  when ‘gay bars were a dark door somewhere in Manhattan, where people wanting to go to a certain bar got off the subway a station before or after the convenient one, lest they be suspected of being homosexual.’

The story is told from the point of view of Therese so Carol always remains something of an enigma, slightly distant and often unreadable.  So, like Therese, the reader, is left to try to interpret the extent of Carol’s feelings for Therese from her actions and her often opaque comments and unexplained moods.  Therese wonders, ‘Was life, were human relationships always like this… Never solid ground underfoot’. At times, it feels as if Carol is afraid of the intensity of Therese’s feelings for her, of what loving her might mean for Therese.  Unspoken thoughts, not being able to say the right words are something of a theme of the book.  ‘She [Therese] did not want to talk.  Yet she felt there were thousands of words choking her throat.’

In her foreword to my edition, the Val McDermid writes: ‘Some books change lives.  This is one of them.’  She describes how Carol, the story of a lesbian relationship, didn’t so much fill a niche as ‘a gaping void’.  It may well have been groundbreaking at the time but, in the end, Carol is simply the tender, emotional, passionate story of two people exploring the attraction they feel for each other.   I found it a wonderful book and the ending simply beautiful.

Carol is part of my TBR Pile Challenge and one of the books on my Classics Club list.  It also forms part of my From Page to Screen reading project.  I will be posting my thoughts on the comparison between the book and the film (starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara) in due course.

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In three words: Passionate, stylish, intimate

Patricia HighsmithAbout the Author

Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921.  Her parents moved to New York when she was six, and she attended Julia Richmond high School and Barnard College.  In her senior year she edited the college magazine, having decided at the age of sixteen to become a writer.  Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.   The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, was awarded the Edgar Allen Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America and introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, who was to appear in many of her later crime novels.

Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, on 4 February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously a month later.

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The Classics Club TBR Challenge 2018From Page to Screen

Book Review: Shadows on the Grass by Misha M. Herwin

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ShadowsontheGrassAbout the Book

Every family has its secrets. In the nineteen-sixties Bristol, seventeen-year-old Kate is torn between the new sexual freedom and her rigid Catholic upbringing. Her parents have high expectations of her. She, however, is determined to lead her own life.  Mimi, her grandmother, is dying. In her final hours, Mimi’s cousin, the Princess, keeps watch at her bedside. Born in the same month, in the same year, the two women are bound by their past and a terrible betrayal.

Meanwhile, caught between the generations, Mimi’s daughter Hannah struggles to come to come to terms with her relationship with her mother, and struggles to keep the peace between her daughter and her husband. She too must find her own way in a land foreign to her, in a new post-war world, where the old certainties have gone and everything she knows has been swept away.

Format: ebook (220 pp.)                 Publisher: The Penkhull Press
Published: 11th January 2018        Genre: Literary Fiction

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

Find Shadows on the Grass on Goodreads

My Review

Set in Bristol in 1965, the book focuses on three generations of women who are each in their own way struggling to come to terms with their past, their Polish heritage and the modern day.

Mimi is dying and, as she moves in and out of consciousness, events in the past prey on her mind: memories of bereavement, exile, love, loss and betrayal.  The carefree girl she once was has grown into a disappointed, bitter old woman who tests the bounds of family loyalty to the limits with her cruel words and intransigence.   Even her old friend, the Princess Marianna, is not spared.

Hannah, Mimi’s daughter, is weighed down by the mental and physical strain of caring for her ailing mother.  Yet there is nothing Hannah would not do for her family – her husband Gregor, daughter Kate and young son Peter – putting their needs before her own desires and aspirations, hiding her own fears and worries.  Having never experienced affection from Mimi, whose favourite was Hannah’s older brother Jan, Hannah is determined her own family will not want for love or care. ‘Her family was the most important thing in her life.  If any of them were unhappy, or in pain, so was she.  She wanted nothing but the best for them.  And what about you? the demon cried and her stomach lurched, as she saw that to give everything to her husband and children was to leave herself bankrupt.’

Moody and rebellious, Kate is conflicted between the strict Catholic faith she has been brought up in and her desire to explore sexually and venture beyond the expectations of her family.  ‘There was no way she was drowning in religion like her mother.’

One of the themes of the book is the convergence of past and present, the idea that a thin veil exists between the two.   “I think that maybe,” Kate grappled with the concept, “we’re all part of the universe and sometimes things get muddled and slip through the cracks.”  Often characters see or experience things that immediately transport them in their mind’s eye to the past, evoking memories of childhood and adolescence.   Some of these memories are happy but many are traumatic – such as the wartime experiences of Mimi and Marianna (the Princess) and their exile from Poland.  Other memories are unwelcome, bringing to the surface secrets that were better left buried or feelings of guilt for past actions, even for escaping death.

Marianna’s way of coping with these memories is to transform them into fairy tales, merging fact with fiction, rewriting past events as she would have liked them to happen.  ‘The facts of my life are all there, yet how much of what I told her was true and how much was not?  I doubt whether even I know, after all this time.  Besides, what does it matter?  We all do it.  We weave our fantasies about ourselves, because the truth is too cruel and constructing our own reality is the only way we can survive.’ It is only Mimi’s impending death that forces Marianna to face the demons from the past.

There is some wonderfully descriptive language in the book.  ‘The afternoon sun hung hot and furious above the street; its heat collecting on the small walled courtyard.  The only relief was where the shadow of the house sliced across the stone flags bisecting the area into light and dark.  Geraniums wilted in their pots, the ivy clung limply to the wall and the climbing rose dropped, its leaves white with dust.’

The writing has a sensual quality to it with evocative descriptions of bodily sensations – scent, touch and taste.  ‘Kate sat back and pressed her bare legs against the statue.  The bronze flank of the lion was smooth and warm between her thighs.  Her dress was so short it scarcely covered her pants.  Her sandals were sticky against the soles of her feet.  The leather sucked at her skin as she moved.  She hooked her hair behind her ears and felt the night air slip in under her arms, sweet as honey over her breasts.’

The author switches from past to present tense in the book with the scenes in the past being in present tense and those in the present in the past tense (I think, because I only noticed it part way through the book).  Sometimes this occurred within chapters as events, sights and sounds triggered memories for the characters. Personally, I’m not sure this stylistic device added anything to the book although it didn’t affect my enjoyment.

I found this a fascinating book, full of interesting ideas, rich in detail and characterisation.  I received an advance reader copy courtesy of the author in return for an honest review.

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In three words: Emotional, intimate, expressive

Try something similar…Letting Go by Maria Thompson Corley (click here to read my review)

Misha HerwinAbout the Author

Misha M Herwin is a writer of books for adults and (as Misha Herwin) for children. She has had a number of short stories published in anthologies, in UK and US including The Way to My Heart, Voices of Angels, The Darkest Midnight in December, The Yellow Room and Bitch Lit, among others.  Misha blogs regularly at http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/ and is available for Q&As and interviews.

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