I had a bunch of things on the go; end of summer, last orgy of ‘fun’ reading before the semester starts and reading tends to focus on what lies ahead both in teaching and other work. Good thing I have cut back on conferences — just one this fall — but the semester is off to a ragged start as I ended up hopitalised on the first day of classes no less, so that was not fun or convenient. Thanks to my chair for alerting my students I wouldn’t be responding to emails for a few days. Not that it seemed to affect them much; most of the emails came from students wanting me to work for free and overload my full courses.

I had ordered No Bed for Bacon because it was research for a current project, but while I was waiting for it to arrive, I read Brahms & Simon’s No Nightingales which supposedly had some influence on Good Omens, which I can see. Two military men inadvertently killed in the eighteenth century have to shelter in place in a Berkeley Square house for three hundred years as ghosts who watch the goings on around them with often bemused irritation. These include French nobles fleeing the revolution and English suffragettes, all poked with amusement. The latter became something of an inadvertent theme.

No Bed for Bacon was what I grabbed as I headed to the hospital, hoping that they’d give me some antibiotics and send me home but it wasn’t to be — at least not immediately. When Mark came to visit me that night, he brought another book for me as I feared finishing this one. Once you’re past the vomiting stage, there is just time to wait so reading was more devouring to keep my mind off things. I did enjoy the book and Ned Sherrin’s introduction mentions how Tom Stoppard borrowed his copy to make sure they didn’t repeat any of the jokes in Shakespeare in Love so there’s that. The bard is a little more peripheral than this cover implies: more sort of general shenanigans in and around Bess’ court.

The book I asked for was one of the two Chloë Aridjis novels I have been meaning to read for ages, spurred on by Catriona McAra’s book to finally do so. So much doubling (and not all of it doubling over–bleh). Not only another pair of books by the same author, but also another link to suffragettes. One of the incidents that resonates through the novel is the Rokeby Venus, slashed by Mary Richardson with a meat cleaver. Aridjis’ Marie is a guard at the National Gallery and often drawn to that painting as well as its craquelure (a word I will only ever hear in Mads Mikkelsen’s voice).

Marie is someone who likes — or thinks she likes — her contained, restrained life. Guarding paintings, making her little landscapes, maintaining friendships at arm’s length. But deep within burning to do something more, drawn to that moment of violence against beauty, against control.

The other Aridjis novel is Book of Clouds, which takes place in Berlin. This is a first novel by someone who had lived the same experience of living in Berlin for five years so you get a vivid picture of the place both from a childhood visit during partition and then the post-unification city. The elliptical mood and vivid characters give a sense of loss and yet a touch of magic, sometimes quite dark. After all the history of the city is always full of tragedy, and Berlin perhaps more than some cities.

The clouds themselves, like the craquelure offer a concrete yet elusive metaphor that takes on surprising forms. And yes, some links to Carrington and Varo in these pages, so much to chew on. I think I will wait to write about Bolaño’s Amulet because there is another novel I should write about with it, but I can’t immediately call it to mind.

The last one I will mention is E. F. Benson’s Mrs Ames. If you know Benson’s Mapp & Lucia stories, you know the vibe I was going for. More middle-class than Wodehouse (there’s only so many bluebloods one can stomach at a time) the novels are the common foibles of people who want things to be nice and cannot countenance anyone going ahead of them in line or social circumstances. Edwardian humour is an acquired taste I guess if one is not actually Edwardian but gentle fun that isn’t fart jokes and double entendres is restful. Making fun of suffragettes, of course, is the price your pay. Well, the ones who became fascists deserve to be ridiculed; wealthy white women with no practical knowledge may kill us all.

So anyway, I am home recovering and through all the antibiotics, declaring an uneasy truce with my gall bladder for now. I may have to resort to a more permanent solution, but anon. For now there’s work to be done.

AMENDING to add: all blessings upon the NHS which Britain is going to lose because they Tories have been stripping it for a decade and it is trembling on its legs. But my fellow Americans, imagine a hospital stay with excellent care, next to no paperwork, lots of attentive follow up and all requisite drugs without handing over a credit card first. Also, of course my sweetie was the best throughout all this in addition to delivering books 🙂