January 29, 2025
Remarkable Debuts: What I Read on my Winter Vacation
Anita Brookner, Margaret Laurence, Elizabeth Strout (#WinterofStrout), Carol Shields, Barbara Pym, and more vintage treasures (including trigonometry?)
December marked the dawn of my Anita Brookner era, arriving with her first novel, published in 1981, appropriately titled The Debut (although only in North America—it was A Start in Life in her native UK). My copy was a Vintage Contemporaries edition obtained at the Vic College Book Sale, and when I started reading and loved it immediately—the opening line is “Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.”—this was the solution to a grave problem that had plagued me in 2024.
The problem being that I’d spent the last 20 years buying all the books in secondhand bookshops and now there was nothing left, save for The Pilot’s Wife, A Million Little Pieces, and a box of dusty National Geographics. How dispiriting to visit the Oxfam Bookshop in Lancaster, UK, last April and emerge with bubkes, especially after years of the seemingly infinite backlists of Laurie Colwin, Barbara Pym, Margaret Drabble, Penelopes Mortimer Lively and Fitzgerald, Alice Thomas Ellis, Jane Gardam, (most recently) Sue Miller, and so many favourites.
I don’t know why I’d never read Anita Brookner, especially since secondhand copies of her books are widely available. She hadn’t started out so long ago that the books aren’t still around, but not so recently either that they’d come back into vogue. She was prolific, publishing a novel annually for 22 years after beginning at age 53 (and she’d publish two more, in 2005 and 2009). She was also spoken of in the company of Barbara Pym, as Brookner similarly wrote mostly of women outside the conventions of marriage and motherhood.
But maybe I had been put off by how any comparison between the two writers always slighted Pym (“Brookner’s ambitions exceed those of Pym’s genteel novels of manners and place her outside that genre…” from the back of my copy of The Debut). I’d also been intimidated by Brookner’s author photo and how her hair was like a helmet, and I’d had this impression that she was a generation younger than she actually was (she was born in 1928), mostly because her author photos never changed or softened as she aged, and certainly her hair didn’t.
And then I discovered that I had read Anita Brooker before. After falling in love with The Debut, with its curious combination of humour, pathos and absurdity, and then buying and reading her 1997 novel The Visitors (a beautiful hardcover first edition, though I didn’t like it as much as The Debut; I read somewhere that Brookner’s books might have been stronger had she slowed down a bit, and maybe it’s true), I returned to the secondhand bookstore and bought two more Anita Brookners—thereby robbing myself of one of my great year-end pleasures, which is seeing my to-be-read shelf depleted, but here in my Brookner era it only grows. And that is fine.
One of these later purchases was Brookner’s Brief Lives which, I realized (via a keyword search in my blog archive), I’d read and reviewed more than a decade ago, along with her novel Look at Me the year before that, even declaring, “There is no charm to Anita Brookner, but this, of course, is why her books [are meant to] seem more literary.” Which sounds clever, but I can’t take credit, having no recollection of the book or even its reviewer, and also disagreeing with the assertion.
And isn’t this why rereading is essential? Because of the way that our selves are formed and reformed, and how the reader I was in my early 30s was unequipped to recognize Anita Brookner’s wry and subtle charms—oh my goodness, her Booker Prize-winning Hotel Du Lac, the book I picked up next and wholly adored!—which perhaps a reader has to be in at least her mid-40s to properly understand.
It would have been a tragedy if I had remembered not being fussed about Anita Brookner, and given up on her work altogether.
This is from my January essay on Substack. Paid subscribers can read the rest here. And, as always, if you’re a longtime blog reader and can’t manage the subscription, drop me a note and I will be all too happy provide you with a complimentary one!
December 2, 2024
“All I Want Is Everything”
I don’t remember the first time I read The Diviners, but whenever it was, most of the richness of the novel was surely lost on me. February 2000 is the date inscribed below my name on the inside page of my New Canadian Library Edition, from a second-year Canadian fiction course in university, but I’m sure I read it at least once before that too. We’d studied Margaret Laurence’s earlier novel, The Stone Angel, in high school English, a curiosity in the curriculum—I’m not sure that 17-year-olds were ever that book’s ideal readers. And to my (very young) mind, for a long time, there wasn’t a clear distinction between its nonagenarian protagonist Hagar Shipley and The Diviners’ Morag Gunn, both of them untamed women with ugly first names, their characters rhyming (hag and rag), both past their prime, unfathomably elderly.
I reread The Diviners again in 2006, according to the second date on the flyleaf, when I was in my mid-20s, an experience that left no impression. My favourite of Laurence’s Manawaka books has always been The Fire Dwellers, a story of 1960s’ suburban housewife ennui, a novel that’s closer to my cultural and pop-cultural sensibilities, and I’ve returned to it a few times more recently. Unlike The Diviners, which stayed up on the shelf until after I’d gone to see the stage adaptation at The Stratford Festival in September (it was magnificent!) which blew my mind with the revelation that Morag Gunn is 47.
ONLY 47, which is to say in the prime of life. In my early-20s solipsism (um, as opposed to my current mid-40s solipsism!) I’d missed this entirely. Morag doesn’t help the cause by proclaiming, “But the plain fact is that I am forty-seven years old, and it seems fairly likely that I will be alone for the rest of my life…” at one point, sounding like some washed-up old hag(ar), although she doesn’t necessarily mean the fact of her solitude as a bad thing, something I didn’t understand before.
And this was just one of the many things I didn’t understand before, until I reread The Diviners again this month at the age of 45, my first experience of truly being able to access its depths and its wonders…
(The rest is available to paid subscribers on my Substack—you can read it here. And I still have two free substack subscriptions available to my blog reads. Send me an email at klclare AT gmail DOT com to claim one!)
July 24, 2024
Summer Reading
Earlier this month I wrote a substack post (available to all readers) about Catherine Newman’s SANDWICH as an ideal beach read. You can read it here!
Paid subscribers can read my July essay, “How to Build a Summer Reading List,” which went up yesterday, and you can read it here. (Thank you to new subscribers! It means everything.)
And finally, there’s a Canadian Goodreads giveaway of my novel ASKING FOR A FRIEND, which makes for an ideal summer read, I must say. Enter before July 29 for your chance to win!
May 31, 2024
Something With Good and Evil
My May essay is about rereading Toni Morrison’s Sula, reconsidering this book about female friendship that is so much more than “just” a book about female friendship—but maybe that’s the thing about great books about female friendship—they’re always about so much more, because that’s the tangle that life is. Read it here! Many thanks to new subscribers—writing these pieces is so satisfying and you’re the icing on the cake.
May 1, 2024
The Road to England, Via Leicester
My first Substack essay for paid subscribers went up yesterday and I’m so proud to have created my fourth of these long-form essays, such a cool and fulfilling creative challenge. This one is about how Adrian Mole’s diaries have been foundational texts and my gateway to English culture. How I’ve never seen how the heather looks, but I learned about the Midlands, about the time I ran away to find an English husband, and how there was actually once a time when I didn’t know what a scone was. Paid subscribers can read it here. Thanks to everyone who has paid to subscribe—your support is so meaningful and helpful to me.
I have two subscriptions left for my dedicated blog readers, just to thank you for all your support of my work here. Drop me an email at klclare AT gmail DOT com if you’d like to claim one.
January 31, 2024
Danielle Steel, and the Person I Used to Be
I’ve started 2024 with the intention of doing things differently, channelling the energy I’ve been putting into social media (rendering my thoughts not only fragments, but disposable fragments) into writing one essay every month. This is the first one, and I’m so happy with how it turned out.
