Tag: Novellas in November

Book Review – Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton #NOVNOV24

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About the Book

Book cover of Blue Postcards

Once there was a street in Paris and it was called the Street of Tailors. This was years back, in the blue mists of memory.

Now it’s the 1950s and Henri is the last tailor on the street. With meticulous precision he takes the measurements of men and notes them down in his leather-bound ledger. He draws on the cloth with a blue chalk, cuts the pieces and sews them together. When the suit is done, Henri adds a finishing a blue Tekhelet thread hidden in the trousers somewhere, for luck. One day, the renowned French artist Yves Klein walks into the shop, and orders a suit. 

Format: Paperback (160 pages) Publisher: Fairlight Books
Publication date: 1st October 2021 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I purchased this slim little volume when it was longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2021. Sadly it has languished on my bookshelf ever since. Thankfully, the Novellas In November reading event hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca at Bookish Beck has given me the impetus to read it.

It has an unusual structure: 500 numbered paragraphs each including the word ‘blue’. Sometimes the word blue describes the colour of an object – a glass, a dress, a tie – or an element of nature – the sea or sky. At other times, it’s a phrase such as ‘out of the blue’ or ‘feeling blue’. Along the way, we also get historical detail about use of the colour blue such as the significance of its use in religious art.

Intertwined with this meditation on the colour blue are three interconnected stories. The first starts with the narrator’s purchase of an old blue postcard from a young woman named Michelle and goes on to describe their subsequent relationship (real or imagined). The second depicts events in the life of Yves Klein, the artist who originally created the postcard. The third is the story of Henri, a Jewish tailor, who makes a suit for Klein, a suit the latter considers lucky and associates with his increasing success in the art world.

Although Henri’s story is set in the 1950s, other events do not necessarily unfold in linear time, as the narrator himself admits. Some might not even have happened at all. Memory is a theme that runs throughout the book whether that’s the unreliability of memory, such as remembering things that never happened but you wish had happened, the pain caused by reliving certain memories or the memories evoked by an object – a sugar bowl, for example – or a place.

When it came to the story of Yves Klein, it wasn’t until I read a review of the book by another reader that I discovered he was a real person and that the seemingly outrageous works of art described in the book really existed and were not a satirical comment on the art world by the author. I’m not sure whether knowing Klein was a real person would have changed my view of the book’s inventiveness. I suspect it might have.

There’s a lot of humour in the book, in particular some of the means by which the author inserts the colour blue into certain paragraphs. Having said that, there is a degree of repetition.

I can see why Blue Postcards, with its imaginative structure, made it on to the Walter Scott Prize longlist, but I can also understand why it didn’t make the shortlist. Personally, I would have liked more of Henri’s story and why he takes the action he does in the final pages.

In three words: Imaginative, funny, poignant
Try something similar: Red Is My Heart by Antoine Laurain & Le Sonneur

About the Author

Author Douglas Bruton

Douglas Bruton has been published in various publications including Northwords Now, New Writing Scotland, Aesthetica and the Irish Literary Review. His short stories have won competitions including Fish and the Neil Gunn Prize. He has had two novels published, The Chess Piece Magician and Mrs Winchester’s Gun Club. (Photo: Publisher author page)

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Book Review – So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan #NOVNOV24

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About the Book

Boo cover of So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan

After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude – and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.

Format: Hardback (64 pages) Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 31st August 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

I included this book on my list for Novellas in November, an annual reading event hosted jointly by Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca at Bookish Beck. To be honest, you could argue So Late in the Day is more a short story than a novella but I’m sure I’ll be forgiven.

Cathal is having a bad day. The sort of day where you close down a spreadsheet you’ve been working on without remembering to save it first. Where you go home to an empty house, drop your clothes on the floor, prepare a meal of the first thing that comes to hand in the freezer, and drink alcohol straight from the bottle. After all, there’s no-one else there to see.

Cathal starts off as a sympathetic figure but, bit by bit, as we learn more about his past, especially about his relationship with a woman called Sabine, a different view emerges. It starts with small things like him being miffed at the cost of the cherries she buys to make a tart, his annoyance at how many dishes she uses when she cooks a meal, and the fact she insists on having a takeaway delivered even though he could save four euros by going to collect it. Okay, so he’s careful with money – what’s wrong with that? But when he quibbles about the cost of something – an unnecessary cost, as far as he’s concerned – despite it having special significance, it sets alarm bells ringing.

When Sabine moves in – at his suggestion – he is annoyed at the amount of stuff she brings with her, how she moves some of his possessions to make room for her own ‘as though the house now belonged to her also’. Annoyance turns to infuriation. ‘That was part of the trouble: the fact that she would not listen, and wanted to do a good half of things her own way’. And now we’re starting to see a distinctly unpleasant side to Cathal’s character. A chilling episode from his childhood shows the roots of this attitude, how ingrained it has become in the way he views women.

Even before we learn what should have happened that day but didn’t, and the void in his life it’s left, my sympathy for him was gone.

Claire Keegan wields her pen with the precision of a surgeon. As in Small Things Like These, she manages to convey so much in so few words.

About the Author

Author Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan’s stories are translated into more than thirty-five langiages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award and in 2020 was chosen by The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published in the twenty-first century. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the best work of literature, regardless of form, to be published in the English language. It won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Ambassador’s Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.