Life in Spite of Everything-Tales from the Ukrainian East by Victoria Donovan.

Posted on January 9, 2026 by mandywight

Victoria Donovan first visited the Donbas area in Eastern Ukraine in 2019, and found herself going back there time and again. Originally from Cardiff, she felt some affinity to the landscape in the coal producing regions, with their conical slag heaps, known as terrykony. She was also fascinated to discover that a Welshman called Hughes set up a coal and pig-iron extraction business in Donbas in the 19th century, one of many West European entrepreneurs at the time. As Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies at the University of St. Andrews, she became involved in several collaborative projects with colleagues in Ukraine. But it was the anger and distress she felt at the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2024 that prompted the writing of this book: not the academic work she first had in mind, but a more collaborative book written in consultation with the many Ukrainians who knew the Donbas and its history like the back of their hands.

The book is organised thematically, in chapters with titles like Mineral Worlds, Colonial Entanglements, Cults, Bright City, though there are overlaps. Each chapter is prefaced with a text written by a Ukrainian colleague and in Mineral Worlds it’s Mykhailo Kulishov, Misha, a researcher and caver, who guides her on a visit to the gypsum mine south of Bakhmut with all its intricate subterranean passages and strange sculptural formations. She visits with him the salt mines at Artemsil’ and the coal mine at Toresk. We learn that there were three kinds of coal produced in the Donbas, coking, lean and anthracite, of a quality rarely encountered in Europe. Her writing is not only clear and precise here on the geology—I’ve never read such an accessible account of the origins of coal—but she also conveys a sense of both the grandeur and uniqueness of the landscape. Seeing the salt swamps outside Kostiantynivka, it looks as though a makeshift ice rink has been laid in the middle of a sun-scorched steppe.

In Colonial Entanglements the writer goes deeper into the history of Donbas, which she characterises as one of colonisation. Given the wealth of natural resources described in the first chapter it’s not surprising that this region, in the centre of Europe, should be coveted by many. Before industrialisation it was known as Wild Field, which suggests an empty, unpopulated steppe. In fact, there were plenty of people living there, Tatars, Nogais and Cossacks. When Catherine the Great wrested back the area from the Turks, she encouraged Europeans to settle there—German Mennonites, French, Dutch and English—rather than Russians, because they had more sophisticated farming skills. For all that she called it Novorossia, New Russia, its population was hardly Russian, belying the myth that these lands always belonged to Russia.

Colonisation continued through the 19th century when foreign capital arrived in the Donbas, lured by cheap labour on the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and the ease of transportation with the development of the railway network. This continued until 1917, and the Russian revolution, when foreign capital was thrown out and industries nationalised. The Soviets renamed the plants and developed the myth that Joseph Stalin was the person who industrialised this area. Victoria Donovan comes across historians, archivists and journalists who want to tell people this earlier history, traces of which she sees in Bakhmut, a centre of Ukrainian trade and industry in the 18th and 19th century with its wide boulevard-like streets….lined with grand red-brick buildings, built in the neoclassical and Baroque style. Of course, she adds, since the recent Russian occupation and full-scale invasion in February 2024, attempts to look at 19th century history have again been suppressed.

One of the pleasures of this book is the writer’s keen visual eye. It’s not just the natural landscape that she portrays so vividly, but also the man-made spaces and their significance through time and political change. In 2019 she visits Sievrodonetsk in the Luhansk region, where she’s invited to a rave in a hangar, formerly part of the AZOT chemical plant. Sievrodonetsk was one of Ukraine’s best preserved monotowns, a City of Chemists, well known in Soviet times from Riga to Vladivostok, and the AZOT plant, built to produce ammonium nitrate for Soviet fertilizer. She’s shown round the city’s iconic buildings, like the Palace of Chemists, with its green and white colonnaded façade, where civic and cultural events are held, (a little like Berlin’s Palast der Republik?). Then there’s the huge Palace of Sports, an arena that held up to 7,000 people, the biggest stadium of its kind, barring Novosibirsk and Riga, when it was built in 1975. The writer notes the colourful murals that wrap round the building showing idealised scenes from Soviet sporting and cultural life. She not only describes them, but we can see them too, in one of several stunning colour photos at the centre of the book—many other black and white photos illustrate the text throughout.

One of the downsides of Sievrodonetsk was the pollution: fine dust and nitric-acid emissions from the chemical plant was linked to heart and pulmonary disease. Pollution from industry was even more of a theme in Mariupol. WhenVictoria Donovan visits in the winter of 2021 she’s hit by the pungent stench of metal-making…….. a smell which rolled regularly through the city like a noxious blanket being spread over a bed. The smell came from the two metallurgy complexes, the Azovstal and Ilych, owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who had failed to install filtering technology in either plant. The writer points out that only after the Chornobyl disaster in 1986 was it possible to talk about environmental damage. From then, there was a growing activist scene protesting about the levels of air pollution in Mariupol, including protests in Theatre Square in 2018, the very square where in 2022 people wrote DETI—children—in huge letters on the pavement, in the hope that Russian bombers would spare the theatre.  In vain. They bombed the theatre, killing 600 people, including children.  The city of Mariupol and the Azovstal works were also largely destroyed.

Though she doesn’t return to the Donbas after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the writer does go to Lviv in western Ukraine in April 2023. She’s attending a workshop on public history there, and spends time with museum directors Zhenia and Olha. She learns of the complicated museum funding in Ukraine, and is aware that many museum directors from the East brought their collections to safety in the west with little support or guidance. But this is just typical of the initiative shown by many Ukrainians. The writer’s film-maker friend Sashko is now unloading transit vans bringing donations from Western Europe, an example of volunteer networks supplanting the state. And an example of the stoicism, resilience and just-getting-on-with-it spirit we’ve seen from the Ukrainian people. Life in Spite of Everything.

I hugely enjoyed this book. It had real personal resonance for me, having read Natascha Wodin’ s memoir of her mother, Sie kam aus Mariupol—I so enjoyed the description of that shallow Sea of Azov she may have bathed in as a girl. But I also feel I have now a deeper understanding of the Donbas, its history, its geology and the richness of its natural resources. Let us hope peace can come soon to this battered and beleaguered region.

Posted in Books on Ukraine, History, Non-fiction, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

My ten Peak Reads of 2025

Posted on December 30, 2025 by mandywight

It’s been a year of eclectic reading for me, perhaps rather more politics and memoir than fiction. When I have read fiction, I’ve found myself gravitating towards fiction that looks beyond the personal, which deals also with the historical, personal and social context in which our lives play out. Each book mentioned here has a full review on my blog. I’ll start with:

Patriot by Alexei Navalny translated by Arch Tait with Stefan Dalziel – Half autobiography, half prison diary, this compelling book charts the life of Russia’s courageous and charismatic opposition leader, killed in a Russian prison in February 2024. The book is no misery memoir, but a witty and pacy text outlining how Navalny used social media to communicate with citizens, and garner support for his Anti-Corruption Movement. He loved his country and was astonishingly brave, choosing to return there from Berlin, where he’d been treated for Novichok poisoning, knowing this would lead to his arrest and imprisonment. He is sorely missed.

Las Mujeres Cuentan, Women Talk. I came across this collection of short stories by Chilean women in a hostel in Chile’s Lake District, and spent my evenings totally absorbed. Most of the stories feature disappearance and loss, which was the experience of women living through the 1973 coup and subsequent military dictatorship. Some stories deal with exile, and the price of return. The use of language, and superb craftsmanship, are often used for maximum impact. I’m hoping to find this moving collection in English translation soon.

The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem translated by Sinan Antoon. This short and powerful novel was longlisted for the International Booker Prize this year, but, to my amazement, did not make the shortlist. Amazement, because the story concerns relations between Palestinians and Jews in Tel Aviv, and so couldn’t be more current. But also because the event that triggers the narrative —the unexplained disappearance of the Palestinian community overnight—is so simple, yet so cleverly handled. This is storytelling at its best.

Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina. Victoria Amelina was already known as a writer of fiction for adults and children in Ukraine at the time of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. She began a war diary from that point of the experiences of herself and women friends during the war, which makes up the first half of the book. The second half concerns the work she then took up, as a war crimes researcher with the NGO Truth Hounds. The texts become more fragmentary here and have been edited by a team of her friends after her death: she was killed in Kramatorsk in July 2023 when the Russians bombed a pizzeria. The book provides moving accounts of the day-to-day experience of war, but also insight into the necessary and painstaking work of documenting war crimes.

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss. So here, it’s memoir and a personal story where it’s mostly looking inwards at the family dynamics, and young Sarah’s attempts to survive them. Her account of growing up is the story of her parents’ food control and their horror of being fat, which resulted in Sarah’s eating disorder. The parents were negligent in other ways too, but I must say I was shocked at their complete disregard for whether their children had enough to eat. Isn’t it basic?? Sarah does warn of course of the unreliability of memoir–family members see things from a different vantage point. Thank goodness she had her good, bright wolf, a kind of familiar, to see her through this unhappy childhood.

The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Sam Taylor. This is probably my best book of the whole year. It’s set in France and it’s about a heart transplant, tracing the 24 hours from the death of the donor, to the transplant into the recipient’s body. The feelings and reactions of many people involved are explored. The desperate, grieving parents, asked so quickly to make a decision involving their beloved son’s heart. The tact and sensitivity of the transplant personnel, aware of the enormity of their loss and the short window of time available.  And somehow both writer and translator managed to combine a technical account of the skilled surgery with a more mystical evocation of the heart as the source of life. An incredible book.

Endling by Maria Reva. Back in Ukraine, but this time it’s a novel, though the writer, Maria Reva also makes an appearance. This is another book that was on a long list—the Booker—and didn’t make the shortlist, to my absolute mystification. Why on earth not, with its unusual protagonist, whose passion is collecting snails, for which purpose she travels round Ukraine in her camper van, searching for rare and near extinct specimens? There’s some witty stuff about the Bridal Agency she and her sister work for, then the whole story gets darker and a little absurd when the full scale invasion by the Russians starts in February 2022 and the women end up driving a van load of bachelors hectically around the country.

L’Art de Perdre, The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, translated by Frank Wynne. This novel is a must for anyone interested in 20th century French history as it’s a multi-generational story about a family of Algerians who fled Algeria and came to France on independence in 1962. They were known as harkis, the group of Algerians who supported the French during the Algerian war of Independence in the 50s, though as the novel points out, the situation was a little more complicated than that for many people. We then see how the next two generations deal with their Algerian background in France, become more integrated in French society and how they relate then to their own family and modern Algeria. I found the book an absolute page-turner. I read it in French but it won the prestigious Dublin Literary Award in 2021 in the masterly translation by Frank Wynne.

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing. This is not a book about helping your garden survive the winter, though one strand is about the discovery and replanting of a once beautiful garden in Olivia Laing’s new house in Suffolk. They move in there at the start of the pandemic, so the practical creation of a garden is very much a lock down project. But each chapter also deals with other gardens and their creators—some literary like Milton’s Paradise Lost—others real, like the gardens of England’s stately homes, built on the profits of slavery. Olivia Laing evinces real scholarship over a range of topics—history, politics, literature—but doesn’t neglect the smaller delights in her exquisite description of fungus and flowers.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy. This was my last great book of 2025 and what a way to end the year. It’s memoir again, about the mother of the great Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, but in charting her mother’s life, it’s also about Arundhati’s own life and career. Both women were unusually independent, driven and non-conformist, striking their own paths in the complex and male –dominated society that is India. Arundhati’s mother, Mary Roy, was also cruel to both Arundhati and her brother as children. The book doesn’t shy away from that aspect of Mary Roy’s personality, and one can only admire Arundhati for her honesty here, while at the same time praising her mother for her achievements.

I hope you find something in my list that appeals to you too. Happy Reading in 2026!

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Woman in the Pillory by Brigitte Reimann, translated by Lucy Jones.

Posted on December 28, 2025 by mandywight

I really enjoyed Siblings by East German writer, Brigitte Reimann. That novel, set in the former East Germany of 1960, tells the story of three young people, with their divergent views and loyalties to the new communist state. While not directly autobiographical, this was the world that Brigitte Reimann herself grew up in: born in 1933, she lived and wrote in the German Democratic Republic, though was never a member of the SED, and died tragically young, aged 39. This novel, Woman in the Pillory, is set earlier, towards the end of the Second World War. It’s a love story, but has a broader reach too, showing the impact of the war and Nazi ideology more generally on a rural community in Germany.

The novel starts with Kathrin, now in her late twenties, rather dreading the return of her husband, Heinrich, on leave from the front. She’s been left to run the family farm with her sister-in-law Frieda, and it’s clear she doesn’t really care for her husband, suspecting his main motive in marrying her was to add her family land to his own. He’s a different sort of being, big and brash like his sister. Sitting between them, she feels crushed by their warm, bulky flesh, their loud remarks and ripostes, and her husband’s raucous laughter. Moreover, he prefers discussing farm business with Frieda, rather than with her, only adding to Kathrin’s feelings of misery and insignificance.

Working on the farm is relentless and exhausting for the two women, and, rather to their surprise, Heinrich agrees to them having a Russian Prisoner of War to work as a farmhand—a widespread practice in rural Germany, with the men away at the front. When Alexei arrives, there’s an immediate frisson between him and Kathrin, as she notices his eyes so deep blue, they were almost black. As time passes, their attraction deepens—there’s quite an erotic charge when she sees him strip-washing in the farmyard—and Kathrin sheds her former mousy self, puts on her brightly-coloured sweater and new grey skirt, admiring herself in the full-length mirror before going out.

Along with this awakening comes a new assertiveness. Alexei starts off sleeping in the barn and eating alone, but Kathrin, determined that the Russians be treated as human beings, first smuggles a blanket up to him, then stands up to Frieda, and insists he eat with them at the table. There are some tense scenes as Frieda first resists, then gets used to this new reality. Eventually she rather takes to Alexei, hard-working and courteous as he is, and the three of them get along fine working on the farm together. If Alexei and Kathrin spend a precious hour each June evening canoodling in the farmyard, Frieda doesn’t seem to realise what’s happening. Still, tension ratchets up for Kathrin, and the reader, when her friend Trude tells her what’s done to German women accused of having affairs with POWs: they end up sitting in the stocks, heads shaven, vilified by their communities—a practice I know about from the French femmes tondues, but had no idea happened in Germany too. And then Heinrich turns up, unexpectedly, on three days leave.

While the first half of the novel focuses on the farm dynamics, the latter half broadens out to give a picture of the wider community. This is a village, so of course nothing goes unnoticed, not least Kathrin’s newly found confident air and brightly-coloured sweater. There are people who have it in for her, such as Liesel Weckerling, given short shrift by Kathrin when Heinrich once made a pass at her. So there are plenty of folk ready to share the gossip and speculation about Kathrin and Alexei with Heinrich in the pub, which has predictably tragic consequences.

But beyond this small-minded nastiness, there’s an interesting range of attitudes amongst the villagers towards the Nazis and their ideology. For all his snooping around, the local Nazi overseer never gets to know about all sorts of goings on like black-market trading, and is the butt of the farmers’ jokes, as they laugh at him flashing the stupid badges on his lapels. Old Anders is appalled at the idea his granddaughter should be proud to carry the child of an S.S. man—though when he protests too much he’s badly beaten up by the local Nazis. Then there’s Kathrin’s friend, Trude, who keeps her head down, but insists the Russian POWs are not some sort of lesser being, but human beings with feelings and rights just like the Germans. And, most tellingly, at the final scene of Kathrin’s public humiliation, only one or two of the onlookers participate. The rest drift away in silence, sick of the war that’s dragged on now for four long years.

If the novel sounds a little didactic, the characters occasionally tending towards vehicles for exposition, I wouldn’t disagree. The novel was written in 1956, in the early days of the new Communist state, when Brigitte Reimann was just 23 years old, so it’s very much an example of her early work. In Siblings, written in 1963, characterisation, belief and plot are more tightly interwoven. And if some symbolism is a little heavy-handed, there’s some beautiful language too. I loved the growing sensuality between Kathrin and Alexei evoked here: June was hot. Pale red dog roses were in bloom on the railway embankment, and the scent of lilac and jasmine drifted through the garden. And there’s some striking descriptions of farm labour, more social realist than romantic: Kathrin standing on the hay cart, her dusty grey undershirt…exposed her round, tanned shoulders, arms and neck…her skin, raw and scratched by thousands of slender bristles from the awns swirling through the air. Flashes of language and imagery that vividly describe both setting and characters, a foretaste of the narrator’s painterly eye in Siblings.

Many thanks to translator, Lucy Jones, and Penguin Classics, for bringing us this early work by Brigitte Reimann. I’m looking forward to reading more of her.

Posted in Books in Translation, Books set in Germany, European Literature, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy

Posted on December 20, 2025 by mandywight

Arundhati Roy’s most recent book is a memoir of her mother, Mary Roy, who died in 2022. Mary Roy was a formidable and extraordinary woman, who founded and led a progressive school in Kerala, India, at a time when few women were single and had agency. The book is also about her mothering—she was often difficult, irascible and sometimes cruel to Arundhati and her brother. For me, the book is just as much an account of Arundhati’s own life: her independent student life in Delhi, the development of her career as a writer, her courageous engagement in different political struggles. It’s an inspirational account, because of the joy, energy and even humour Arundhati brings to her accounts of the projects and people she cares passionately about. And this against a background of misogyny and growing Hindu nationalism, which both dogs and endangers her, yet to which she shows remarkable resilience.

Mary Roy’s independent spirit is evident from an early age, when she leaves her husband in Assam and, together with her two small children, returns to her mother’s village, Ayemenem, in the southern state of Kerala. Determined that her dependence on family be short-lived, she sets up a school in two halls owned by the local Rotary Club, the sliding-folding school as Arundhati calls it, because each afternoon they slide the tables to one side and fold the chairs away for the club’s evening meetings. The school becomes popular, and Mary Roy is soon able to dispense with the support of the missionary Christians who help her set it up to pursue her own progressive ideas, which include disabusing boys of their sense of entitlement and giving the girls wings. After a few years, a new school campus is built, designed by the architect Laurie Baker, and over time, the campus is added to and updated. Mrs. Roy is a woman who never stands still.

Arundhati describes the school as her mother’s youngest and favourite child and Mary Roy certainly shows little love to her two older children. At best, it’s a case of neglect, Arundhati spending a lot of time as a small child alone, wandering the river bank and paddy fields. At worst it’s cruelty, Mary Roy flying into terrible rages, hitting the children, saying awful things to them, I wish I’d dumped you in an orphanage, you’re a millstone around my neck. Arundhati’s poor brother responds by absenting himself from home for whole days at a time, while she herself lives in a state of watchful anxiety, the feeling like a cold, furry moth on a frightened heart, an image she will return to many times in this memoir. At times, the cruelty seems to spring less from uncontrolled anger, but rather from cold, calculated vindictiveness: when Arundhati returns from boarding school aged thirteen she finds her mother has shot her beloved dog, Dido, for the simple ‘crime’ of mating with a street dog.  

Arundhati leaves home to study architecture in Delhi. It’s the seventies and she’s enjoying the freedom of living in a hostel with other young people, gets her ears pierced, converts her trousers to bell-bottoms, and wears a rope of fat glass cow-beads around her neck. Sometime during this period she suffers one more angry, and very public, dressing-down from her mother on a visit home, and quietly decides not to return. There follows seven years of estrangement, and, when they do make-up, her mother never asks her, not once, how she managed during those years, or anything at all about her studies.

After graduating, and briefly living with a boyfriend, Arundhati returns to Delhi, where she lives a hand-to-mouth existence for some years, living alone in temporary and makeshift rooms, working in a draughtsman’s office and then for the in-house magazine of the National Institute for Urban Affairs. Looking back, she says she’d become a person of a somewhat vagrant disposition…an off-grid drifter. Living this off-grid existence, she’s an object of fascination for weird, sleazy men, like the ‘uncle’ figure at work who stalks her, coming round to her place to harass her. She refuses to be cowed, and cycles to work to avoid men groping her on public transport, an experience suffered by Indian women on a daily basis.

Like many UK readers, I first came across Arundhati Roy the writer when she won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her wonderful novel, The God of Small Things. So I was fascinated to read that her early writing career was in film and T.V. and began when she had a non-speaking part in the film Massey Sahib, produced by a man called Pradip, who became her lover, best friend and collaborator over many years. From there she went on to write the screenplay of the film Annie and later a Channel 4 produced film called Electric Moon. There’s some fascinating detail about the challenges presented in filming, sometimes in remote, rural parts of India, and the responses to the films. The Indian state TV broadcaster Doordashan was just starting up at the time, the film Annie was seen by millions, and Arundhati Roy became a household name in India. It was after this that she sat down to write The God of Small Things, which took her four years, won her the Booker, and guaranteed her a decent steady income.

Political developments, and specifically the rise of Hindu nationalism, are a theme throughout the narrative. They become the focal point of Arundhati’s life when she starts walking across India, recording and writing about what she witnessed:  As I travelled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious traitor-warrior. The first of these was the essay The Greater Common Good criticising the construction of the massive Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmala river in Gujarat, which would result in the submerging of ancient jungle, the displacement of hundreds and thousands of indigenous tribespeople, as well as ruining the livelihoods of farmers cultivating the fertile plains. The essay unsettled people, not knowing what genre it fitted into, and she was publicly lectured by men on the inappropriateness of the subject matter for a woman writer: they wanted me to be quiet and nuanced when all I wanted to do was to shout from the rooftops. Already known as that woman for her outspoken views and unconventional lifestyle she shut them up with the self-styled sobriquet, the Hooker who won the Booker!

Towards the end of the book Mrs. Mary Roy regains centre stage. She’s been reading all Arundhati’s writing, with just the occasional criticism, you’re just being deliberately nasty (look who’s talking!!). Arundhati’s an attentive daughter during Mary’s hospitalisation after a life-threatening asthma attack, but, once off the life support machine, her mother returns to her demanding and imperious ways, and Arundhati finds her hard to be around. There’s a poignant account of Mary in the last years of her life, watching the schoolchildren walk past her wheelchair, where she sits like a barnacled rock or some kind of monument, aware her beloved school is carrying on just fine without her.

Both Arundhati and her brother are surprised at how badly she’s hit by the death of her mother, how overwhelmed she is with grief, given how they were treated as children. But while Arundhati admires her mother for all she’s achieved, even on her last day she says I never managed to get used to or anticipate the sudden shifts, the sunlight and shadow, the precipitous climate change in her moods. There’s an impressive honesty in Arundhati’s account of their relationship, but a generosity too, as she seeks to understand and forgive her mother’s behaviour. This is a beautifully written, vivid portrayal of both women, each seeking to forge their own path against the odds—for all the conflict between them, one can’t help feeling they share the same fierce independence and fighting spirit. But I wish Mary Roy could have been kinder to her two small children. The accounts of her cruelty are hard to read.

Posted in Biography, Books in English, Memoir, Non-fiction | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Posted on December 15, 2025 by mandywight

Ian McEwan’s latest novel is a book of two parts. The first is set in the post-apocalyptic world of 2119, and concerns a young academic, Tom Metcalfe, researching the early twenty-first century poet Francis Blundy. He’s particularly concerned with a poem Blundy wrote for his wife on her birthday in 2014, a Corona for Vivien, which the poet read in front of their assembled guests at the birthday dinner and which has now disappeared. The second part is a first person account, narrated by the eponymous Vivien, and set in the late twentieth, early twenty-first century. The two parts, though quite different, are linked, though to say how would be giving too much away.

Tom Metcalfe’s world and environment is brilliantly and intriguingly evoked. There’s been a combination of catastrophes—nuclear war, the Inundation of 2042 creating an inland sea in the centre of Britain—that has utterly changed the physical landscape. Britain is now a collection of islands and travel of any distance is arduous and undertaken by boat. The centre of power has shifted to Nigeria, and something called NAI dominates the lives of individuals—it’s a combination of Internet, AI and a surveillance tool, which has a dossier on each individual and yet has a friendly, ‘aunty’ type character that will also offer advice.

Despite this different world, Tom Metcalfe’s concerns will be familiar to contemporary readers, especially to university type readers. There’s the ups and downs in his romantic relationship with colleague Rose, and the trying conflicts with students—a nod to current tropes that students can’t be expected to read and write in any quantity these days. But Tom’s central preoccupation is the writing of Francis Blundy, and the narrative goes back and forth between 2119 and 2014, as he tries to reconstruct the evening of the birthday dinner, the who said what to whom, in an attempt to somehow recover the lost poem.

Of course, the whole account of the dinner is speculation on the part of Tom Metcalfe, and goes to the central thesis of the novel—what can we know about the past? This theme is explored in many different ways throughout the novel. First, there’s the sheer quantity of information. We see Tom working his way through the innumerable e-mails of our day, trying to tease out the significant from the trivial. We’re told that our times saw an outpouring of literature, poetry and drama—how to get on top of it all? It’s as if this excess is all part of the culture, a combination of brilliant invention and bone-headed greed. Tom, looking back,  is fascinated by the crazy music and fads..the thousand forms of music festivals…. the need for holidays….a hundred thousand at a football match. He’s seduced by the exuberance of it all, almost in awe of our continued consumption, knowing, yet disregarding, the effects on the planet.

Vivien’s story in the second half of the book also goes to the theme of what we can know. We read her account of the dinner that night, which is of course different from Tom’s speculative version. While it’s contemporaneous, and therefore surely more reliable than Tom’s, there’s doubt here too on Vivien’s reliability, pointed out by her when she says we can’t help but write with an audience in mind. So what is she revealing, what concealing? We learn here more about the relationships between people at the dinner that night and understand a little more why Vivien is content to rush round getting the dinner ready by herself as well as generally acting as Francis’ housekeeper and dogsbody. This characterisation of a woman in 2014 didn’t go down well with me and I wasn’t convinced by the events in Vivien’s life story that may have explained her domestic servility. However, what was done well here was the portrayal of an academic woman, marginalised by the male-dominated Oxford system. And this in part because of her caring responsibilities: there’s a very moving and authentic account of the decline of Vivien’s first husband with Alzheimer’s and the huge toll it takes on her as his carer.

In the end I had mixed feelings about this novel. I was gripped by the vision of 2119, which I see as an entirely plausible post- apocalyptic scenario. It’s of a part with Ian McEwan’s interest in the future of the human race, which we also see in his novel Machines Like Me. However, I was less interested in the rather precious and self-absorbed circle around the poet Francis Blundy and the world of the Oxford literati. I was also disappointed in the portrayal of women. Both Vivien and her sister-in-law Jane are presented as victims, their victimhood starting with an authoritarian father in childhood, and this, at least in Vivien’s case, is supposed to explain her later compulsion to plump up the cushions. Can we have a different representation of women, please Ian McEwan?

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What Remains by Brais Lamela translated from Galician by Jacob Rogers

Posted on December 2, 2025 by mandywight

Between 1946 and 1955 a huge dam and hydroelectric plant was built at Grandas de Salime in North-West Spain by Franco, the Spanish dictator. This project transformed the river Navia into a huge reservoir, flooding the valley, and leading to the relocation of the rural population to newly built housing projects in the flatlands known as Terra Ché. The displacement of these rural people from Negueira de Muñiz is the subject of What Remains. With a subtle, light touch he uses this narrative to ask broader questions about home, belonging, displacement and migration.

The first section, Those Who Leave, begins in New York, where the narrator is a graduate student. He’s on a one year scholarship to complete his thesis on the rural colonies he grew up in at Terra Ché. He’s attending lectures on ‘forensic architecture’ and we’re plunged into a world of fascinating ideas on the relationship between trauma and space. The professor cites the example of a woman helped to recall her experience of bombing by being led through the rooms of the house she was in when the bombing took place. There’s a discussion of the housing project design at Terra Ché, the white houses of the colonists, those rows of identical structures that looked stranger in our native land than a Martian spacecraft. The professor points out the political choices implicit in the small, modern American kitchen of those uniform houses, where a woman would make food in isolated kitchens designed to deter after-dinner talk, to dissuade people from inviting guests, to make them feel alone in their own houses.

Some of these ideas are echoed in the account of the narrator’s personal life. There’s a general awareness of space in the description of his tiny, thin-walled apartment, so very close to the throbbing noise of traffic from outside. There’s a feeling of fragility to the building, surrounded by scaffolding at present, which the narrator doesn’t dare tread out on to join his neighbours for a drink. And he later describes his furniture as shoddy, contrasting it with the solidity of a ledger he comes across in his research. When he moves over to his girlfriend Mariana’s, they started subverting the space to fulfil new functions—the radiators, never on during the warmer months, became shelves where we stacked our books. In contrast to the Galicians at Terra Ché, forbidden to decorate their American style dwellings to their own taste, they’re in a state of perpetual insurgency against inherited meanings as we tried to establish something of ourselves in these transitory rooms. And the feeling of impermanence is replicated in the brief snapshots of the friends he’s made in New York, a mostly hard up transient crowd, in the city for a limited period, sharing museum entry cards and tips for survival.

In the second section, Those Who Return, the narrator returns to Spain, and goes on a trip with his father, brother and Mariana back to Negueira de Muñiz. The narrator in the meantime has become intrigued by the story of a woman called Leonita whom he’s come across in his research. She was relocated to Terra Ché with her husband, but when he died she was ejected from her home by the authorities for reasons which are not entirely clear, but were probably because they saw her as a trouble maker. While her story gives us the readers an idea of how the relocation played out for individuals, it also serves to illustrate a meta theme in the novel, namely how to write about these events. The narrator’s thesis is on the links between the American agri business and Franco’s plans to introduce cattle ranching farming methods in the Terra Ché. But he’s found himself continually sidetracked by the stories of individuals—that of Leonita, but also of American Dr. Arthur Tannenbaum, whom he imagines visiting  Galicia in the 60s, his immaculate boots spattered with mud.  It’s as if the narrator can’t help himself responding to the story on an imaginative level, and we see this in full spate when they arrive at the village of Elnes and he discovers the house that surely was Leonita’s. There’s a wonderfully evocative description of the old, decaying house, vines in the attic creeping in through holes in the stone walls. Then the chaos of suitcases and cloth sacks upstairs, less like a bedroom than a customs storage, the hold of an ocean liner full of emigrants.

Emigrants again. People in movement. We’re brought back at the end of the novel to a new community, many of them foreigners, who’ve moved into the villages and houses abandoned by the people displaced by Franco. Different languages are spoken, and teachers are yet to catch up with the children speaking a hybrid tongue. I loved the way this reshaping of community is echoed in one of the final images: that of the narrator’s father in his workshop refashioning some metal tubing buried in the ground back at Elnes into something different, a bracket for a lamp, I could hang an old tractor’s headlights from them…His father never stops, he’s always making something new out of what remains.

So this beautifully written book tells a story of displacement, but also invites us to see movement and emigration on a wider scale, as a continually evolving and dynamic human story.  Rather than giving us an unremitting account of loss, it looks to the present and the future in its account of the community reforming in rural Galicia and the vibrant, albeit transitory, community of young people in New York. It’s a novel about the past, but also very much a novel of our times.

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German Lit Month 2025 Week 4-Das Liebespaar des Jahrhunderts-The Couple of the Century by Julia Schoch.

Posted on November 24, 2025 by mandywight

This week is supposed to be about writers from the former GDR. I can’t really categorise Julia Schoch as such. She was in her mid-teens at the time of reunification, and so has lived most of her life in the new, unified Germany. Yet, she did spend her childhood in the former East Germany, and that experience certainly influenced her, as we see in the first book of the Biographie einer Frau trilogy, das Vorkommnis, The Event. I was keen to read this, the second book in the trilogy, and thought I would nudge it into this category, but in fact there’s less of growing up under communism here, as it’s all about the great love affair. But I read it anyway and shall say a little about it here.

The book starts off with remarking how similar are the three words ich verlasse dich– I’m leaving you, to ich liebe dich- I love you. We’re immediately let in on the tension which runs throughout the book: how can the intense, all-consuming passion of youth morph into the banality of everyday companionship some years on? Is it worth maintaining such a humdrum relationship, or is it better to call it a day and split up? After setting up the tension, the book goes back to that grand passion, and it’s certainly a nostalgic trip for those of us who remember those intense feelings.

The first person narrator describes how her lover—who remains nameless as do all the characters—wooed her by turning up at her flat with Vanilletee one summer. She was delighted as she’d fancied him for a while, the way he’d make an entrance into the lecture hall wearing outlandish old fashioned suits and ties. She soon adopted his style, wore similar clothes and imagined herself Bonnie to his Clyde, Zelda to his Scott Fitzgerald. She describes submerging herself into his identity, as they spent time together in a seedy Paris flat, the first time either of them had visited the West, going out only to immerse themselves in French cinema. There’s a sort of Us Against the World quality to their relationship as they turn their noses up at the Ossies rushing to the West to buy stuff while their heads are full of ideas, of freedom and anarchy.

At the end of their studies, the narrator couldn’t care less about career. She just wants to be with him and leaves work promptly to get home, no thoughts about impressing her boss by going the extra mile. He, on the other hand, does want a career and fulfilling work life—we never know exactly what he does—is he a researcher? An academic? She eventually finds work that suit her skills, working for a publisher and translating, though it’s all rather vague, and they settle down into a conventional life together. They start doing things apart sometimes—work commitments, weekends away with friends—and decide to have a child, then eventually two, which of course means life is even busier, their flat rammed full of stuff and life full of banalities, as the narrator finds herself checking the weather for the first time in her life to see what coat she should take with her for the child, and joins other mothers at the playground sandpit cooing in admiration at that sandcastle. Their passion attenuates, the thought goes back and forth in her mind: is this what it’s come to? Should she leave him?

There were times reading this book I felt like a marriage guidance counsellor, a little puzzled as to what this man was doing wrong. If the spice had gone out of their relationship, why not schedule in a little time together—a date night? A weekend away? At other times I felt like a friend who might tell it like it is: do you think you have unrealistic expectations of a relationship? Or who might in the end just get a little tired of this endless shall I, shan’t I and just say for goodness sake either put up or shut up! Because I did get a little bored with this refrain. Still, there was some impressive writing connected with other manifestations of the passage of time, such as an awareness of generational difference and change. Early on, the narrator contrasts the life and opportunities open to her generation, compared to their parents, brought up in the GDR. Their parents would not now travel, learn another language or freely choose their career. But then years later it’s our couple who are the oldsters, when their children come back from secondary school, having met a whole range of possible sexual orientations (pan, bi, homo, trans). At these moments, the narrator evokes an arc of time, which goes beyond the preoccupations of individuals, reminiscent of Annie Ernaux’s The Years. And it’s at these moments that our couple feel close again.

So this isn’t really a book about the GDR. Where there’s nostalgia for the past, it’s not Ostalgie, but a looking back at the passion the couple once had together. Will I read the final part of the trilogy, after getting a little impatient with this one? Yes, probably. I feel now somehow committed to the narrator as if she’s an old mate and I need to see how it ends.

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German Lit Month 2025-Mann vom Meer-Thomas Mann, Man of the Sea, by Volker Weidermann.

Posted on November 20, 2025 by mandywight

Here I am again, reading around the great Thomas Mann, rather than tackling the work itself. But I couldn’t resist this book, recommended by danares.mag-blog, as I very much enjoyed Volker Weidermann’s book about Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, Summer before the Dark. In this book Volker Weidermann explores Thomas Mann’s life and work in relation to the sea, which he loved, but which also became a symbolic site of struggle, for him personally, but also for his characters.

The book starts with the story of Thomas Mann’s mother, Julia. Born in Brazil to a Brazilian mother and German father, she enjoyed an idyllic childhood on her family’s estate and on the beaches of Paraty, south of Rio de Janeiro. Brought to Lübeck at the age of seven after her mother died, she was left there, together with her siblings, by her father in foster care. She enjoyed acting and stories, but was not allowed to live out her imaginative life in any way, nor to marry her first love, but rather at the age of 17 was married to Consul Mann, ten years her senior. Weidermann describes their marriage as functioning and companionable, but characterises Julia as someone who was self-denying. The German verb sich verleugnen—to  deny oneself—appears time and again in the book.

The dilemma of denying, or remaining, true to one’s own self is explored in relation to Thomas, but more especially his older brother, Heinrich, and their complete lack of interest in their father’s business affairs. Both boys were interested in imaginative play, their puppet theatre, and their mother’s stories from Brazil. Thomas’ imagination was further fired by the sea. The family would spend four weeks every summer on the Baltic coast near Lübeck, and, according to Weidermann, as Thomas was growing up, the sea became associated with: Verantwortungslosigkeit, Sympathie mit dem  Tod, Sog ins Verderben, verbotene Liebe, Unpolitik, Antidemokratie, Rausch, Romantik, seliges Vergessen, Glück ohne Pflicht, Schönheit, Ferien für immer-( freedom from responsibility, sympathy with death, the pull towards ruin, forbidden love, anti-democracy, intoxication, the romantics, blissful oblivion, happiness without duty, beauty, holidays without end- my translation).

There’s quite a lot to unpack here, to say the least, but in general terms I understood this to reflect the intense emotional feelings of adolescence—and in Thomas Mann’s case, the intense feelings of friendship and desire he was beginning to feel for other boys and young men. Weidermann is good at exploring the young Thomas Mann’s struggle with these desires, and how he represented them in his early writings—Tonio Kröger, der kleine Herr Friedemann. He also suggests that his wife, Katia, knew about his desires from early on, and accepted them—they had after all, six children together, and an apparently successful marriage. I can’t help thinking her feelings must have been more complicated, but, as Weidermann says, she probably had no choice but to accept the situation.

The sea plays an important role in several of the books, and I particularly liked Weidermann’s weaving of the books and his analysis into the narrative of Mann’s life. In Buddenbrooks, Weidermann outlines three pivotal moments in the lives of Tony, Hanno and Thomas, which take place in Travemünde on the Baltic coast. These all relate to the question of the characters not being true to themselves—that sich verleugnen again—and Weidermann posits that it was this self-denial which actually led to the demise of the family and their business, rather than competition from rivals, dodgy business deals or unwise marriages. Death in Venice obviously takes place on the Venice sea and Lido, and here, with the creep of cholera, and von Aschenbach’s measureless passion for Tadzio, we see that terrible destructive pull of the sea referred to earlier.

The third text exploring ideas of the sea is The Magic Mountain. Now, a mountain is obviously different from the sea, but Weidermann likens the feelings of Hans Castorp adrift in a vast expanse of snow in the most famous chapter Schnee, to feelings of being overwhelmed, to drowning at sea. Castorp does in fact survive this ordeal, and Weidermann interestingly sees this chapter as representing a turning point in Thomas Mann’s work. He moves away from a preoccupation with death, with the pull of dark forces, and turns towards the light. This coincides with him taking a more public stand in favour of democracy, as outlined in his 1922 speech Von deutscher Republik.

Thomas Mann starts to become aware of the rise of fascism when on holiday in Italy in 1926—Mussolini came to power there in 1922. Having won the Nobel Prize in 1929, Mann’s status as a public intellectual carried much weight, and his support for democracy and condemnation of the Nazis led to him leaving Germany shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. His move to the United States and life there is dealt with only cursorily in the book—it’s as if Weidermann has run out of steam rather—and we move swiftly on to Thomas Mann’s final illness and death in Zurich in 1955. There’s an extra chapter at the end about his daughter, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, and her work as an oceanographer, returning us to that sea theme once again.

The strengths of this shortish book (233 pages) for me were the analysis of the books, and the placing of them into the particular periods of Thomas Mann’s life. It felt at times as if the motif of the sea was a bit of a hook to hang the ideas on, but I’ve no problem with that, as I do wonder how any writer marshals all the information, theories and literary criticism of Thomas Mann into any sort of coherent text. One writer who has achieved that with consummate elegance in my view is Colm Toibin in his book The Magician. It’s a fuller work, with more about the extended Mann family, and much more about his life in the United States. My advice is to read Mann vom Meer as a kind of starter—but read The Magician as the main course.

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German Lit Month 2025- Week 3- Thomas Mann. Der Zauberberg, die ganze Geschichte by Norman Ohler.

Posted on November 17, 2025 by mandywight

It feels like Thomas Mann has been on my mind this whole past year—not surprisingly, as 2025 is the 150th anniversary since his birth, and readers have been looking again at the man and his work. For me, it’s all about The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s 750 page novel published in 1924, set in a TB sanatorium in the early years of the 20th century. I read the novel in English in my late teens, probably understanding very little, and have shied away from rereading it, daunted by the size of it, amongst other things.

How very timely then to come across this book by Norman Ohler, on the danares.mag-Blog für Weltliteratur & Straßenpoesie. The Magic Mountain, the whole Story is a book about the provenance of Thomas Mann’s novel, but it’s also a history of the Swiss mountain resort of Davos, from impoverished mid-19th century backwater, to the sophisticated, luxury ski resort and site of the annual World Economic Forum it is today.

The story is wrapped around by the first person narrator’s account of taking his daughter Suki up to Davos on a skiing trip, which gives him the idea of writing this book. Except it’s not really wrapping round, as the narrator and his 14 year old daughter not only bookend the story, but intrude into the narrative at points scattered throughout the text. We’re brought into the present by their chats about the narrator’s love life, Suki’s part peppered with youth argot like geditchet, chillaxe, lowkey—which even the cool narrator Dad only partially understands. But  there’s also his concerns about the unsustainable environmental cost of skiing, which gives the book a kind of End of Days feel right from the start: the narrator muses that a book on skiing would inevitably involve die großen Themen unserer untergehenden Zeit- the great themes of our declining civilisation ( my translation). Ironic, really, given that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in its foreshadowing of the First World War, also marked the decline of an age and a break with the past.

Having decided to write this book, the narrator goes off to the Davos Documentation Centre to investigate the history of this now glamorous resort. It was Alexander Spengler, wanted in Germany for revolutionary activities, and hiding out in this remote village in the Swiss mountains in the 1850s, who first noticed a complete absence of TB amongst the population there. At the time, TB was rife amongst the population in lower-lying areas, responsible for ¼ of all deaths in England, and ½ of all deaths amongst young people in Germany, according to Ohler. Could it be that the reduced oxygen in the mountain air led to the need for greater inhalation and an improved ventilation in the lungs? Ohler outlines how this theory led to guests coming up to Davos to test its curative effects, followed by investment in hotels, railways and the infrastructure necessary for the transformation of this rural hamlet into a sophisticated health resort for the well-heeled of Europe.

One of these was Katia Mann, the wife of Thomas Mann, who in March 1912, exhausted by having four children in ten years of marriage—and possibly by her role of wife to the great man—went up to Davos to shake off a bad bout of bronchitis. She was visited in May 1912 by husband Thomas, who joined her in the well-known Liegekur (lying on the balcony in a sun lounger for three hours at a time) as well as in the daily consumption of half a litre of Veltliner wine, thought to be essential for the restoration of health. Unsurprisingly for a writer, Thomas Mann started observing the characters and goings on around him in the three weeks he spent there. However, Katia stayed on for several months more, and, knowing her husband was writing a book, continued to feed him stories and gossip from Davos in her letters, contributing substantially to the text that became The Magic Mountain, though that contribution unacknowledged by her husband. Another possible influence on The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, was the novel die Krankheit, The Illness, by Alfred Klabund, published in 1917 and also set in Davos. As well as treating us to a vignette of Klabund—a writer unfamiliar to me—his lover Carola Neher, and their Weimar set, Ohler  points out parallels between the two novels.

Klabund suffered from TB and died in Davos, his death described by Ohler in melodramatic terms, which nevertheless had me gripped for a page or two. It was here that I started to feel a sort of elision, a slide between the chatty journalistic tone used to recount the historical changes and developments at Davos, and the tension and drama of set pieces which seemed to belong more to the world of fiction. This happened again in the account of Martin Heidegger’s visit to Davos in 1929. In an attempt to ameliorate the fall in visitor numbers since the bad press of The Magic Mountain, the Davos Great and Good set up a lecture series called the Davoser Hochschulkurse which, in 1929, featured the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Ohler describes this individual, who later joined the Nazi party, in vivid terms, provoking the establishment by appearing in skiing gear, sitting with the students before the debate with the liberal Ernst Cassirer, his charismatic Selbstinszenierung, self promotion, winning him the youth vote. I found the account of the debate absolutely compelling, not least because of echoes with today’s attacks on liberalism, but I also had to get a hold, telling myself it’s reading like a story here, did the debate really happen like that?

So as well as going meta, the book is also quite mixed genre, the non-fictional elements really enhanced by some excellent black and white photos, the fictional story-telling continued in the gripping account of David Frankfurter assassinating the Nazi Wilhelm Gustloff in 1936, thereby saving Switzerland from becoming a vassal Nazi state.  Towards the end we come back to the non-fiction present, when Ohler gives us an unforgiving critique of Davos’ other present guise as host to the World Economic Forum. While I’d sensed this event was a bash for the rich and powerful, I hadn’t realised it was the brainchild of a wealthy private individual, rather than a state sponsored affair. Ohler is excoriating about the wheeling and dealing that goes on there, for the continuing benefit of the minority and yes, with all the environmental damage involved in putting the whole show on.

So while this book is something of an eclectic mix of time frames, narratives and genres, I found it a very readable and informative story by a highly entertaining narrator, of the history of Davos and the genesis of The Magic Mountain, as well as a glance towards the future. And it’s moved me on from that lingering Shall I reread it? thought. No need to do that now.

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The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing.

Posted on November 10, 2025 by mandywight

Contrary to what the title suggests, this is not just a book about gardens or gardening. It is certainly both those things. But it’s also an exploration of cultural, literary and political ideas around the garden, and the iniquities of land ownership in the last few hundred years. The author combines acute observation of the plants and trees in the garden they’re creating, described in vivid images—the medlar…like a tormented umbrella—with an account of the sheer hard work of getting the garden into shape. We have their interpretation of that first of all gardens, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as their acute political analysis of the great English estates created on the back of slavery. Threading through the book are accounts of the men and women who delighted in their gardens or whose lives were bound up with the land. You don’t have to be a gardener (I’m not) to be fascinated by this book.

The book starts in the dismal spring of 2020 after Covid had struck, and the world was in suspense. Olivia Laing buys a house in a Suffolk village with their husband, Ian. The house was previously owned by Mark Rumary, a well-known gardener at Notcutts nurseries, and they spend their time initially scoping out the garden to see what’s there. The purchase of this house and garden are special indeed for the writer, who up till now has lived an itinerant life in rented accommodation. (We’re given snippets of information about the writer’s personal life throughout the book, including here, at the beginning, the news that their father may lose his home of thirty years—clearly the importance of home as a bedrock, and its fragility, are imprinted deep in the psyche of this writer.)

Olivia wants to know more about Mark Rumary and visits his executor, where they learned that he worked for a while on the Ditchingham estate in Norfolk. In a chapter entitled A Landscape without People they narrate the history of the gardens on the great estates, including the developments in aesthetic tastes, culminating in the Capability Brown gardens which aimed for an uninterrupted view from the house over an expanse innocent of any human presence. The faux naturalism was of course epitomised in the creation of the ha-ha ditch, but also involved the clearing and moving wholesale of houses, farms and villages, in short the upending of people’s lives to facilitate the uninterrupted view for the gentry.

The theme of clearing the land for the benefit of the wealthy is reiterated in the writer’s account of the Enclosure Acts. These were passed between 1760 and 1845, and saw common land used for grazing and cultivation by the people enclosed and brought under the control of the landowners. The writer takes the example of the poet John Clare to describe the result. His poor rural family were driven to destitution, and he himself, forced into hard manual labour, suffered a psychiatric breakdown and spent the last twenty years of his life in an institution. As well as a poet, he was a gardener, and missed his flowers dreadfully. Reading his letters, Olivia quotes the poignant fragments he wrote to his son, You never tell me my dear Boy when I am to come Home I have been here Nine Years or Nearly & want to come Home very much…how do you get on with the Flowers.

Though they’re absolutely gloves off when dealing with the land-grabbing wealthy—and there’s a whole chapter on the greedy Middleton family of Shrubland Hall, whose wealth was based on slave labour and colonial exploitation—they also tell us about more enlightened reformers, such as Robert Owen, Godwyn Barmby and William Morris. I have to confess to a slight twinge of ennui when William Morris hoved into view—like me, Olivia Laing is a little tired of those walls, curtains and armchairs all swimming with willow boughs and pomegranates, rabbits and strawberries, at once impeccably polite and oddly disturbing. But, of course, there’s much more to the man than all those curlicues, which they demonstrate in their analysis of Morris’ News from Nowhere. They describe the ideas behind the development of his garden at his home The Red House—a garden should be small-scale, intimate, cultivated and domestic—but also his utopian vision of a world where there was no concept of profit, surplus and waste, where the goal was not economic growth but the quality, the wealth of every person’s life, as well as the ecosystem in which they lived.

The book is wide-ranging in the scope of its ideas—all along accompanied by an account of discovery and replanting in the developing garden—and it’s inevitable that some sections will speak to readers more than others. One of my favourite chapters refers to Rose Macaulay’s novel The World my Wilderness, which describes the ruined City of London after the Blitz of 1940: the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, brambles and tall nettles. The writer imagines these flowers pushing through the rubble as they wander anxiously round the streets near St. Bart’s, where their father is in surgery for a heart bypass. This account resonates for me, engaged for a while now in thinking about the war-time London my parents grew up in.

I loved this book for its focus on detail at one moment and the bigger picture in the next, which Olivia Laing does both with the story of creating their garden, and their account of ideas. They rail against the injustice of enclosure, and bring us close to tears hearing John Clare miss his flowers. They have an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants and it was almost as if, through their exquisite use of language, they were guiding me, the non-gardener, to look more closely at them. How could I not, after reading about those trees bubbled with fungus, growing in strange disordered forms, strung with luxuriant garlands of bindweed. Or the snowdrop Flore Pleno, beloved of the Victorians, its layers of porcelain skirts finely marked with hair-thin green lines.This is a wonderful book, which I shall be pressing on my friends, gardeners and non-gardeners alike, for years to come.

Posted in Books in English, History, Nature Writing, Non-fiction | Tagged , , | 5 Comments