Books – My Own RE:public

One Lady’s Birthday

On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Miss Jane Austen.

Written “By a Lady” is a very special, even enigmatic, byline of sorts; and as thus did Jane Austen identify herself on the title pages of the four novels published in her life time. Was it modesty that prevailed or common-sense? To name herself; an unnecessary exposition perhaps, a vanity well suited to the social aspirations – and frivolities – of the landed class of Regency England from which she was not so far removed but not something to be trumpeted from the genteel surrounds of Chawton beholden to the conventions of village life? But, whilst closeting most of herself in anonymity, her gender Jane Austen seemed obliged to share – written “By a Lady”. As if to say: Please know that what you are about to read comes with all the sensibilities of a woman.

Depiction of Austen from *A Memoir of Jane Austen* (1871) written by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, and based on the sketch by her sister Cassandra.

So it is that today we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the remarkable Jane Austen. In some respects the Brits and greater Anglophone world have been celebrating her all year with exhibitions, lectures, new editions, commentaries, etc., but in many respects very many more people all over the world pay tribute to her all the time in a multitude of ways: generation upon generation reading, studying, analyzing her work; being inspired by her literary genius, her gifts of observation, her humor, her optimism; translating her work, adapting her work into other art forms. A more beloved writer, a more iconic literary figure, is difficult to find. And how enigmatic she remains! We don’t really know what Jane Austen looked like nor have we an unprejudiced version of her personae and manner, and must depend on her sister, Cassandra’s depiction and hearsay and portraiture of other young women from the period. Much of her extensive correspondence was destroyed (again, Cassandra!) and all has been shaded in the last century of so by various factions competing for the right to define her narrative, and in more recent times all the countless cinematic portrayals of her work and pertaining to her person that show no sign of abating.

Earlier this year The Morgan Library and Museum in New York City had an exhibition dedicated to Austen, spotlighting the manuscripts in their possession and those held at Goucher College in Baltimore (both bequeathed by Alberta Hirshheimer Burke.) A video promotion is still available on YouTube:

A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 that ran from June 6 through September 14, 2025 at the Morgan Library and Museum.

Miss Austen does have of course a significant presence in the internet, but very many sites do seem to be, either directly or not so, selling something! (Well, why not?) This one not: Jane Austen’s World, a personal blog out of the United States, appears to be simply a labor of love. To be found a bevy of information and links, not just specific to Austen but also the world and society in which she lived and wrote. (Unlike Jane’s narratives and characters, some of the links are as dead as Regency era door nails, but many are not!)

Happy birthday Jane! (If I may be so bold as to address you as Jane?)

Mrs. Dalloway: 100 years is no time at all…

when taken one day at a time

A centenary of note: Mrs. Dalloway was published on 14th May 1925! Perhaps the most beloved of Virginia Woolf’s works; this finely wrought ‘one day in the life of’ has not aged a bit, rather lived each day through the last century and beyond into this. Still, today, it radiates lightness and warmth, as that June day in 1922 itself, and at the same time teases with things darker; the aftermath of war, the damaged souls, betrayals of oneself and others. The past is omnipresent and the future unsure – for surely there will be new fights to be had … but that’s for another day; today we wander the streets of London, buy flowers, observe, reminisce, and be the perfect hostess.

*Mrs. Dalloway* (first edition, 1925). Cover art by Vanessa Bell via Wikimedia Commons

JSTOR Daily has an interesting piece to celebrate Mrs Dalloway, that includes access to other material. And a companion piece, with suggested readings on Bloomsbury.

Stark reminder

Given that Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men has maintained its reputation as one of the most lauded of American 20th century works of political fiction, I abstain here from too much (unqualified) comment. But I feel like I have to write something for it is a work of such merit and is, in my opinion, incredibly relevant to the contemporary political landscape.

A couple of years ago I saw a 2006 movie adaptation of the novel on Netflix with Sean Penn as Willie Stark; presumably a box-office flop and only tepidly received by critics but liked immensely by this person (that is, ME). Watching it at the time, I recall only being able to think of Donald Trump; by then out of office if not out of mind (HIS or mine I am not sure!), and confined to the annals of history one could have thunk. Well, one could have…! Alas. After his reelection in November, I was reminded again of Warren’s book and so, over the holidays (and for the first time), turned to the original stuff. And I had not been deceived, he (TRUMP) ghosts his way through the entire narrative. But not only does HE, but also a particular brand of populism that once set alight, blazes, may diminish, but continues to smoulder, ever ready to flare up again.

Now I have no idea when Trump became TRUMP, but one can follow Willie Stark as he progresses from an ambitious wannabe to THE BOSS, and one can follow, too, those around him facilitating his ascendancy. For instance, I was particularly taken by this exchange between the still-fledgling candidate and his runaround Jack Burden (the novel’s narrative voice) who, in an attempt to salvage the floundering gubernatorial campaign, launches into a rare tirade in an effort to persuade Willie to change tack – to forsake his formulaic, heavy-on-detail speeches for an oratory style with more, shall we say, entertainment value:

[…Willie says:] “They didn’t seem to be paying attention much tonight. Not while I was trying to explain about my tax program.”

[Jack:] “Maybe you try to tell ’em too much. It breaks down their brain cells. […] Just tell ’em you’re gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff.”

[Willie:] “What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio between income tax and total income for the state gives an index that -“

[Jack:] “… they don’t give a damn […] Hell, make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ’em think you’re God Almighty. Or make ’em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ’em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”

-“All the King’s Men” (Penguin Modern Classics) [p.108]

Now if that ain’t the winning formula for a Trumpian scorched earth rally! A major difference of course is that nobody has needed to nudge Trump; what Willie had to learn, Trump seems to know instinctively.

Embedded below is a sample reading of the first chapter of this legendary novel from the U.S. publisher’s website. For the uninitiated: Think Faulkner just not as difficult, the Deep South almost palpable – the heat, the poverty, the religious (irreligious, and anything else) fervor, the politicking, the corruption. Then exchange Louisiana for Queens, rural poverty for urban wealth – inherited both, Willie Stark or Huey Long (an inspiration for Stark, though one which Warren sought to minimize) for Donald Trump, and you can imagine your way to the here and now. Mag(a)nificent (sic) – to imagine, that is. In reality anything but.

Once bitten…

“Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer” by Cordelia Edvardson, 2023.

Übersetzt aus dem Schwedischen von Ursel Allenstein, Hanser Verlag.

In his afterword, Daniel Kehlmann, describes the sheer visceral horror of reading this slight memoir of fragments of a childhood culminating in an actual horror; of confusion, betrayal and a young girl’s fight for survival – from the creeping Nazi terror of Berlin, to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. And having survived, reflections on the just that: the burden of being an Überlebende. It didn’t have to be, but Cordelia Edvardson had a life; a long, productive life – in Sweden, in Israel as the Jerusalem correspondent for Svenska Dagbladet, as a mother. I hope she also found some happiness and peace of mind.

I did not know Cordelia Edvardson (1929-2012), and her Wikipedia entry is brief and the accuracy of which I can not vouch for. (The German entry is longer but also confusing. At the Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon, a Swedish site, is a good biographical overview.) But her mother is Elisabeth Langgässer, a writer of some renown in the post-war years who has mostly disappeared from literary discourse in Germany – for good reason, Kehlmann says; has not dated well, he says; Catholic mystic, he says. Her name is only known to me through acquaintances that live in a street with her name in the Rhineland. I must say, after reading her daughter’s book and Kehlmann’s remarks I feel absolutely no inclination to pursue her any further. Only to wonder why there are streets, schools and literary awards in her honor.

Daniel Kehlmann makes the case for Edvardson’s book being one of the rare and most powerful first hand accounts of the industrial killing machine of the Holocaust, and one wonders why after its original publication in 1984 it did not find its place in the culture of remembrance. Or why it does not seem to have been translated into English (?). One wonders whether her familial situation, as a precursor to the events she describes or in the aftermath, was not just a little too complicated; whether she was just not Jewish enough; or was it that a mother’s betrayal, or at least her egocentricity, was not just too contrary to the maternal norms?

Above I referred to this book as a memoir, the publisher’s call it a Roman, that is, a literary novel; this something Kehlmann also wonders at. Edvardson does write in the third person, a narrative device most associated with fiction, but one could imagine she did so to create some distance from people and events and the emotions they gave rise to and that she had learnt to live with, but which no doubt loomed large still in her inner consciousness, ever threatening to overwhelm. In other words, there is no reason to doubt that das Mädchen in the telling is Cordelia Edvardson.

“Once bitten … twice shy” so it is said in English ; in German the expression is: “Gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer”- literally, a child once burnt will tend to shy away from fire. But this child, das Mädchen, seeks it out – Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer. The imagery is devastating. The flames may no longer burn but the damage caused is never extinguished, nor is the urge, the necessity, to return to the source of her suffering. As if willing the flames to consume her as they did so many others.

An extraordinary account that, however horrendous the content, deserves much wider recognition.

Pas de deux

Le Pays des autres 2: Regardez-nous danser (read by me in German as Schaut, we wir tanzen, and available in English translation as Watch Us Dance) continues Leïla Slimani’s family saga; a fictional dive into the colorful, often murky and treacherous depths of her own dynastic history, the first part of which I wrote enthusiastically about here and which ended with the beginning of the end of colonial rule in Morocco.

When the story continues, it is the summer of 1968 and more than a decade has passed since Morocco gained its independence from France (in 1956), but the country is struggling now under another – this time home-grown – brand of tyranny: defined through its authoritarian monarch, a brutal police and judicial system in cahoots with a corrupted elite and a patriarchal hegemony. It is to this Morocco that Aïcha, who so entranced with her intelligence and originality as a little girl, returns after some years studying medicine in Strasbourg. For one summer – and then perhaps a lifetime. One is tempted to say: she returns to the fold. But that is something for sheep, and an instinctive follower is this young woman not. Nor lost, nor castout. Rather it is to the bosom of her family in Meknès that she returns; their fortunes having risen in the ensuing years and now with a place amongst a burgeoning new marocaine bourgeoisie. The reader remains alert still to Aïcha’s contrariness: her self-possession and her selflessness; her wanting to please and her not giving a fig; her intellectual rationality and discipline and her emotional inner-life and flights into religious mysticism. One empathizes with Aïcha, with each dilemma she faces (and faces down) – her love of family, of friends and two nations; and the loyalties demanded and the conflicts that ensue – always knowing that the latest will be not the last.

And because she so fascinated me in In the Country of Others, I concentrate on Aïcha (and I suspect Slimani developed her character to be the focus – clearly inspired by her mother but also with a good dose of self one could think), others in the Belhaj family have central moments; both individually and in their interactions amongst each other. (The changing perspectives are – along with her blissfully short and elegant sentences – a defining quality of Slimani’s writing.) Aïcha’s parents, Amine and Mathilda, of course: the very personification of two nations in co-habitation; each with their own truth, intimately attached and profoundly detached, forgiving and unforgiving in equal measure. It is not always clear who is controlling whom. But there is a sort of love, that is frayed, tested, rarely acknowledged – and a lot of regret. The radical choices of Amine’s siblings, Omar and Selma, have only become more so since the first book. But this story here is one of more youthful years spent during a time of immense social and political upheaval, and so Aïcha’s path is very much juxtaposed against that of her younger brother Selim – restless, sexually awakened in ways unexpected. As Aïcha returns to the nest so does Selim take wing.

Aïcha pursues her career in obstetrics. Aïcha marries Mehdi – once, theoretically, a Marxist, now, practically speaking, beholden to the government. The book ends in 1971; the king has survived an assassination attempt, and Aïcha has brought her own child into the world.

Explicit in the title, dancing can be extended from the very reality of the clubs and bars of Casablanca and beyond where the young of Morocco gather to a metaphorical place; for it is a heady time of post-colonial uncertainty when power dynamics have changed and can be visualized as two parties skirting around each other, conscious of their position in any one moment, but unsure of their next step, and this reflected in the age-old story of when boy meets girl, of codes and signals, of swirling skirts and feigned youthful insouciance. Dualities abound in Leïla Slimani’s narrative, and this series could be well described as a pas de deux, whereby here there are no clear partitions; each blends into the next; from the entrée to the adagio and with some variations. I await with anticipation the continuation and culmination (coda) – presumably due from Gallimard this year or next.

Did I mention the translation? No, I did not. Translators should always be credited. I know enough to be quite confident that Amelie Thoma captures Slimani’s literary voice beautifully in German. (Of the English translation I cannot say, but Sam Taylor has creds so to speak!)

After-world & Afterword

My blog entry below in which I write on Zadie Smith’s novel, The Fraud, ended before it should have. I did have a couple of things to say to do with the book’s end … well, two and a bit actually:

In the final chapter: As William Ainsworth lays dead on his study floor, he is already entering Eliza Touchet’s memory, and she knows not whether it will be as the truth or as a false memory, or if ultimately there is any difference. Will the real Ainsworth stand up, please! With William’s death comes Eliza’s last shot at freedom; he is now just one of the cast of characters imagined in her own secret manuscript with the title, The Fraud. Or will ‘dear William’, in death, be party to another fraud, or at least another’s truth?
From the Afterword: If one were to doubt her existence, it is useful to know that in 2009 Eliza Touchet’s 1842 edition of A Christmas Carol, signed to ‘Mrs. Touchet’, was sold at auction for the highest ever price for a Dicken’s work.
Apropos Dickens: In Chapter 29, the Ainsworths and Eliza Touchet visit the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and later Mrs. Touchet reads Dickens and Horne’s review of the event in Household Words. Now this piece I have mentioned before (and here it is)! Eliza’s reaction to the article, in which the two good gentlemen hail to the hilt the virtues of western progress (machines) and mock the traditional ware (crafts) of the east, and which is contrary to her own aesthetic reception of the items on display, has the touchiness of all her interactions with Dickens (as given in Smith’s fictional rendering). (Why do I think with Eliza T., the Boz had met his match? And knew it!)

Fakery is afoot

Zadie Smith’s latest work of big F fiction is anything but fraudulent but (The) Fraud is writ large on its cover and permeates the narrative – bold faced is the text even when writ small.

To my mind, a veritable romp of a read, but not one to be deconstructed to an allegoric tale of he who was once (and god forbid not future) American president as some – particularly on the other side of the Atlantic – would have it. I mean to say, contemporary comparisons and reflections are always warranted but, loathe as I am to repeat myself, Trump is far less of an aberration than many would have it – rather just the latest in a line of crooks and con-artists – yes, frauds! – who have, and in various incarnations and with various degrees of success, elbowed their way to center stage for times long and short. (Granted, an encore performance there did not have to be!)

The Fraud is Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction, and she does it with aplomb, perhaps not with the absolute Leichtigkeit that she brings when her subjects occupy a space she so totally gets – the northern London suburbs, for example, and characters pulled from that landscape spreading their wings near and far. Here is a writer exploring what is, for her, new (literary) terrain. But I think she succeeds in constructing a 19th century tale that does not feel so distant in time nor in space, rather, has the immediacy of now; certainly, her main protagonist, Eliza Touchet, and those who rotate about her, and whether they be in London or the Home Counties, don’t present as somehow being stuck in a Dickens or Thackeray door-stopper but, instead, read as having the potential to be time-shifters in a Netflix show-stopper. (By the way, these two aforesaid gents I mention not by chance, but because they and others and most especially Eliza’s cousin, William Harrison Ainsworth, are of the cultural and social milieu from which the narrative springs. As a reviewer said, do keep Google at the ready, behind the Fiction are various degrees of Fact. There they are: those F words again!) The success of the novel may also have something to do with style; the post-modern realism in which Zadie Smith writes fits with the uglier, even brutal, side of the burgeoning global world and the intertwined strands leading from Andrew Bogle to the slave plantations of Jamaica and from The (Tichborne) Claimant to the still colony of Australia where England could still banish its unwanted or troublesome and make capital in the process. Suggesting that almost two centuries on, the ghosts of colonialism still haunt the global ambitions of both the once oppressed and the oppressors.

And F can stand for more than (just) Fraud. Recently, I read Daniel Kehlmann’s novel ‘F’ (Rowohlt, 2014), and I see now that, presumably on the back of his previous successes (especially this one) in the international market, it was indeed translated (Vintage, 2015). In any obvious way Kehlmann’s work, set in a contemporary German-speaking space somewhere (if specified, I seem to have missed it), would not necessarily have too much in common with Zadie Smith’s historical novel.

But then there are these damnable F words that call out to me to consider. And it is Fortunate for this comparison some words map quite nicely from German to English, and interconnected F words are prevalent in both languages. The now universality of Fake, for instance; after all just a shade of Fraud (or, is it, Freud?), or the other way around. And Fame and Fortune: Fortune-telling (show me the Future) and changing Family Fortunes for a Father and a Fraternity of three, each with a life defined by Finance and (non-) Fidelity, (not so) Fine Art and Forgery, Food and (feigned) Faith, This, again, is a novel about deception, the power of suggestion and, yes, Fälschung – about Fakery (or something more carnal) being afoot and other forms of Foolery.

And Fate. Towards the end of the novel, the mostly absent Father – he by whom the die was cast, Iacta alea est, and who casts his shadow from the first pages – says:

“Fatum” […].”Das grosse F. Aber der Zufall is mächtig, und plötzlich bekommt man ein Schicksal, das nie für einen bestimmt war. Irgendein Zufallsschicksal […”

“Fate” […] “The big F. But chance is a powerful thing, and suddenly you find yourself living a destiny that was never meant for you. Some random fate […]”
F by Daniel Kehlmann; my own translation

An imperfect book, but an interesting (and often funny) novel in which Kehlmann uses his narrative talents to philosophize on the blurring of lines between that which is true and that which is imagined and that which is just plain false. At the time of publication almost a decade ago, I am not sure that the range of possibilities for bad players to prey upon a digitalized, connected world were fully understood, nor the repercussions; ‘fakery’ mostly remained still in the realm of the classical and obvious forms of deception – human beings telling human lies in very human ways; even a charlatan or trickster of whatever persuasion, peddling whatever their wares is but a sophisticated version of this. Now, a new breed of ‘mover’ – regionally or globally – is sowing seeds of discontent – or just after the next quick buck; harnessing digital technologies to open up new fields of activity beyond the obvious – and anybody can just as easily be the next perpetrator as the next victim.

And F is for Fiction. Two really good works of fiction, from two terrific writers. I think I am correct in saying they are friends.

Emma B. & Elizabeth F.

Over a festive season that stretched my resources, I turned to a German translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; translated by Elisabeth Edl (admired by me for her translations of Patrick Modiano) and much lauded at the time of publication in 2012. And, I must say it seems to have left a greater impression upon me than whatever English version I may have read in the past (but not the one by Lydia Davis, also from 2012) did; for I don’t remember previously having been as stimulated … or, as moved … as this reading has left me.

To be said on this particular edition: Beyond the literary work, the notes throughout are extensive, as is Edl’s translation essay; included also in the volume are the proceedings from the law case brought against Flaubert for … what? … obscenity, shall we say … by the French public prosecutors of the day. This latter inclusion was a first in the German language, and whether it has found its way into any of the English translations to date I don’t know. At least, it – the trial, the outcome (‘case dismissed’, so to speak), the repercussions (for society, for literature) – lives, still, in academia. This essay by Christine Haines published in French Politics, Culture & Society Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp 1-27 and available on JSTOR is just one example.

Of an evening (that is, in bed!) my seriously serious book reading is intermittently interrupted by other forms of Lektüre, sometimes of a more frivolous nature and sometimes not. Definitely belonging to the latter; the latest (or the one before that) issue of the LRB. And, it was there, around about this Christmas time, that I was interested to read a review piece by Julian Barnes (Vol. 45 No. 24 · 14 December 2023) inspired by a new Monet biography by Jackie Wollschläger. With that, I won’t flex my (puny) Impressionist muscles; Julian Barnes may be able to get away with being an amateur art critic/historian/connoisseur, but, I not! It just reminded me that Barnes and Flaubert appear to have taken up firm residence in a similar crevice of my brain. Hardly surprising says she (to herself), recalling a stuffed parrot. But, amongst other things, I also remember his essay (also in the LRB) on the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary, and that it was far from complimentary. And, this I remember because I remember it having coincided with my reading of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in a then new translation and also from Davis, and I further remember having been momentarily concerned that I wasn’t getting the best of Proust. What, if anything, Barnes has had to say about her Swann’s Way, I don’t know. Or, just can’t remember!