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Winter King Allen Lane , by Thomas Penn, is a suspenseful historical narrative which combines scholarship with literary flair, telling of Henry VII's deployment of ruthless statecraft, acumen in the financial markets, and a suspicious disposition, to create a modern tyranny, secure the Tudor claim to the crown and, incidentally, lay down the foundations of the modern monarchy and the centralised state. Penn appears to bring an all-seeing eye to half a millennium ago. Penny Kline's Ursula's Arm Matador is a novel convincingly rooted in the s.
A light-handed and generous narration tells of a sexually frustrated wife who undergoes psychoanalysis and metamorphoses into a self-directed disciple of the ideas of Marie Stopes. This novel is a wonderful example of the riches to be found amongst indie-published books. And so it is.
And a wander through Brussels, too. With articulate and flowing narrative, Cole brings anticipation to every page. It's a hypnotic observation of our fragile and frail times, seen through the ideas of a highly intelligent young professional. How can a first novel be so maturely written? By coincidence I read three recently published books involving Nazi Germany. Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, translated by Robert Chandler Vintage Classics , is set in the terrible years of Stalin's Russia in the 20th century and is written on a Tolstoyan scale; like War and Peace it proceeds by episodes between the large and the small and moves from past to present and back.
Its characters illuminate such matters as Stalingrad, the Gulag, the coercion of a state that decides as diktat the nature of reality and of truth, scientists trying to develop the atomic bomb, stressed family life, love in the trenches and bitter cold and hunger. It includes debates on the betrayal of the Bolshevik Revolution, the nature and fact of Anti-Semitism, military strategy and interference by Commissars. The translation reads well and the story is both moving and overwhelming. A German girl came to Edinburgh in the s to improve her English: Her son possesses two grandfathers — a Scot and a German.
He finds that the German grandfather had been an enthusiastic SS and Nazi member, who behaved to type in the s and during WWII, when he was too old to enlist. The victorious allies might have shot him at the end of the war but he had assumed a false name and lived contentedly till he died in Only after his death was the truth about his life established. An extraordinary tale; it reveals much from those terrible years. It is an extraordinary, powerful, well-written and very moving novel: In Hitler narrowly survived an assassination attempt. Conspirators were found and hanged from meat hooks and their executions filmed.
A conspirator, who is one of the hanged, leaves correspondence to an Oxford don; sixty years later the story is unravelled. There are sub-plots and attractive diversions, but ultimately the horror of seeing the film of the hangings nearly deranges the interlocutor. I was so charmed hearing on Book at Bedtime Antonio Tabucchi's Pereira Maintains Canongate — about a middle-aged man suffering a crisis of conscience in Lisbon while the Spanish civil war rages over the border - that I rushed out to buy it and was surprised to find it shelved under Crime. The first is a joyously subversive romp through the Book of Genesis in general and the story of Noah in particular.
The second recounts the journey in of an elephant sent as a present from Lisbon to Vienna and is enchanting. My choice is The Coffee Story by Peter Salmon Sceptre , which is witty, deliciously nasty, highly intelligent, and has a broad scope, from 19th-century Europe to America in the s. It depicts a former coffee baron named Teddy Everett telling his life story from his deathbed. One of the most authoritative first novels I've read. Banger is a member of the landed gentry and a curmudgeonly old sod whose only pleasure in life is blood sports.
Then, one day, he dies and is reincarnated … as a pheasant. It tells the story of a suffragette, Connie Callaway, and a professional cricketer, Will Maitland, of how their worlds collide, pull apart and then come together again during the first world war. The characters are superbly well drawn, the dialogue is spot-on, the storytelling a joy.
Researched over a period of ten years, Into the Silence by the Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis Bodley Head is not just about the first world war and Mallory, but is a minute-by-minute account of the first expeditions to Tibet in the s. Their diaries and letters, revealing their private thoughts, aspirations, dreams and desires, their privations, mistakes and desperate endurances.
Nothing has been left out, from the strange to Western sensibilities religious culture and history of the Tibetan people, to Mallory's body being found preserved in the ice, many years after his last climb. A book that lingers in the mind. The author knows the place intimately and speaks its language. Humanist philosophy, the transmission of ideas, censorship, the recovery of classical manuscripts and Renaissance religious attacks on perceived Epicurean heresies are some themes Stephen Greenblatt explores in his brilliant, elegant new work.
Lucretius posited a godless state of constant flux, matter consisting entirely of moving particles and space. Epicureanism sought liberation from superstitious fear, cultivation of a full, modest life and sense of earthly wonder. Greenblatt's account of the humanist, lay papal secretary who discovered the manuscript fascinates, as does his compilation of contemporary satirical observations within the Papal State. Elsewhere Epicurean legacy is explored.
Montaigne directly quoted him on occasions, Shakespeare and many others absorbed his ideas. These deceptively simple tales of life in the Central Asian borderlands are rendered with such poise and power that each felt as substantial as an epic poem. Written over many years by an elderly Pakistani civil servant, it was by a long way the most memorable book of the year. Elsewhere, Long, Last, Happy: In his hands, language could do absolutely anything except what the reader expected. Published early in the year, Jerusalem: The author provides ample evidence that although Asia is home to many of the world's great rivers its rising population and economic growth makes the issue of water a potential cause of crisis and war as water becomes more scarce.
A whirlwind of amazing ideas. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Allen Lane is about the sometimes dangerous influence of intuition on our thought; the benefits of "slow thinking" are explored and explained. This is a book that could change your life. A must for lovers or haters of either composer. Margaret Drabble's A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Penguin Classics is a hugely impressive work by a writer at the very peak of her art — it is her only collection of short stories, written over many years, some of which reduced me to tears.
And Ruth Rendell's The Vault Hutchinson — her new Wexford novel — gave me more than one sleepless night, with the grisly and macabre twists in the scarily and all-too-believable final pages. I loved the story of how Angus, in one of his many temper tantrums, was told that he'd be thrown in the lake.
THE CITY OF THE GUARDIAN ANGELS (Astralia Wisdom Works Collection Book 1) eBook: Piero La Franca, Piero A. La Franca (Pierrot): www.farmersmarketmusic.com: Kindle. THE CITY OF THE GUARDIAN ANGELS (Astralia Wisdom Works Collection Book THE CAT THAT BECAME A FOOTBALLER (Astralia Wisdom Works Book 1).
Angus didn't wait to be pushed - he jumped! My book of the year is the poetry anthology Being Human , edited by Neil Astley and published by Bloodaxe. There are some old favourites, but I was dazzled by the number of unfamiliar poets featured, particularly those translated from other languages.
I could never have hoped to have the leisure or means to discover them for myself, and I'm so grateful to be introduced to them in this way. I particularly enjoyed the wry humour of John Agard's "Half-caste", and was moved by the five poems from Marin Sorescu's The Bridge , written for his wife during his five-week terminal illness. Like Astley's previous anthologies, Staying Alive and Being Alive , this collection aims at making sense of the human condition and in my opinion is gloriously successful. It is the story of a boy travelling unaccompanied on the liner Oronsay to England to be reunited with his mother.
When he finds two other boys of a similar age on the ship, they decide to solve the mystery of the thief who is aboard. As a boy, Spooner liked to enter his neighbour's house, urinate in the man's shoes, and then hide them in the fridge. As he gets older, well, his behaviour starts to get downright strange. If you had Spooner's phone number, you'd be ringing him every third or fourth page screaming "No, Spooner, don't! This wonderful book also contains the most remarkable menagerie of clapped-out, arthritic, asthmatic, tottering, banjaxed, gummy and utterly lovable old hound-dogs in the history of old hound-dogs.
Oh yes, and Dexter wrote the real Deadwood. David St John Thomas is my author of the year. A publisher too founder of David and Charles, excellent in railways, transport, crafts and other s growth areas , he is still writing in a free-flowing creative anecdotal style that draws on his life and experiences. This year I finally finished his monumental Journey Through Britain: Landscape, People and Books Frances Lincoln , an enticing travelogue celebrating Britain and friendship. For the Love of a Cat: A Publisher's Story Exisle is even more personal, his own life lived cat-wards, as well as practically helpful if like us you have just been adopted by a cat Finally, there is Frances Lincoln's reissue of The Country Railway , first out in , evocative and elegiac of the country branch line sadly overtaken by Beeching, Network Rail and HS2.
Beautifully written, disturbing and funny, it poses difficult questions about the effects, negative and positive, of adoption. Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz Jonathan Cape was passed over for the Man Booker prize, but is a poetic, funny and sad novel about the beginning, middle and end of an affair, as well as a metaphor for how the credit crunch affected Ireland. Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story is set in a midst-century America that is both morally and financially bankrupt; it has hints of both Vonnegut and Coupland.
Using a range of intriguing examples, Survivors: Particular Books is ostensibly about language translation. Written with brio, and sometimes hilarious, it touches on many things besides. Shocked by the sudden and unexpected death of one of her patients, from cancer, psychotherapist Marion Steel finds herself taken unawares, and needing time to reflect.
An autobiographical account, that takes an open-minded look at loss, bereavement, and our finite lives. Interspersed with poetry, and patients' experiences, it's a brave and thought-provoking work. A novel based around actual events, that occurred during World War Two. A Berlin couple turn against The Nazis, following the death of their only son, whose been killed in action.
The reader is taken on a journey into the city, as they work to undermine the regime. Fallada — who lived through the era — captures an atmosphere of paranoia, perfectly. An absorbing and frank autobiography of a musician's career, spanning thirty years. Wobble's down to earth nature, intelligence, and sense of humour, makes entertaining reading. His recollections are always balanced, and he's willing to admit mistakes.
It's peppered with bizarre anecdotes and forthright opinions. From his early success as a founding member of post-punk band PiL, alcoholism, working on the London Underground, and eventually, finding a way back into music. It's a life of highs, lows, and artistic achievements. Marika Cobbold's Drowning Rose Bloomsbury is a book to read, enjoy and remember. Flashbacks explain how a school dance ended in tragedy. Late at night Rose and Eliza wandered off to a nearby lake; Rose drowned and Eliza blamed herself for her friend's death.
Twenty-five years later she is still racked with guilt. She can mend 18th-century Spode but not, it seems, her broken life and broken relationships. Then an unexpected phone call from Ian, Eliza's godfather and also Rose's father, prompts her to visit his beautiful home in the Swedish countryside. With his encouragement she makes the slow and painful transition from a life of "what ifs?
No one writes about life quite like Marika Cobbold; no one combines light and dark, humorous and profound, joyous and sorrowful quite so expertly. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan have a fine track record in handling complex subjects. With their latest book, The Eleventh Day Doubleday , they produce a panoramic account of the terrible events of 11 September that can easily sit alongside the other classics of this new genre including Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower. Marriage to an Englishman in brought her to the UK where she continued to transform food standards.
Her title commemorates hard times when ingenuity kept people fed. Is that a Fish in your Ear? David Bellos sympathises with translators, keeping his ears open to fashionable trends.
One chapter "Language parity in the European Union" makes today's economic problems easy, compared with the EU's protocols to accommodate the languages of members. Beautifully presented images ranging from The Wilton Diptych to Turner's The Fighting Temeraire combine with clear, wise and imaginative meditations, with prayers from many sources.
The film director Philippe Claudel also writes marvellously evocative stories, somewhere between fable and nightmare and Monsieur Linh and His Child Maclehose Press is a superb example of his craft. John Berger with Bento's Sketchbook continues with his magisterial synthesis of fact and fiction to produce prose that encourages the reader to see the world in a different way. Finally, to mark the sad death of Gil Scott-Heron I read his memoir Now and Then Canongate and blasted out some of his magnificent music.
Written in the first person from the standpoint of a young Henry VIII, it enabled me to appreciate for the first time how difficult his childhood was. Not only was he the spare second son whose status was set to take a further dip if his brother had children, but there were also dark conflicts within his parents' marriage: The book deals with the psychology of a neglected adolescent who suddenly finds himself venerated and apparently chosen by God.. Two outstanding biographies spring to mind, equally successful in their depiction of native talent haunted by a sense of personal failure.
Rachel Campbell-Johnston's Mysterious Wisdom: Raw, loving, frustrated letters written to a husband torn away by a sudden heart attack fill the pages of After You by Natascha McElhone Viking. A line catches in the throat - "I deleted the message, because there would always be more messages like that from you. Did her memory serve her well? It is the true story of a child soldier in Sierra Leone and is extremely moving.
Ishmael was only twelve when he was caught up in the civil war and the book tells the horrific story of his life over the next 6 years. Although it is horrific, it is written in a way which does not glorify violence or glamorise it. For me also, the sections on Ishmael's and others' rehabilitation were very gripping. The issue of child soldiers is one which urgently needs addressing globally and if this book can raise awareness of this issue that will be brilliant. The Washington Post said: I could not agree more. Julian Barnes has rightly received plaudits for the Booker winning The Sense of an Ending , but this achievement should not overshadow his entertaining short story collection Pulse Vintage , published earlier in I'm already looking forward to the next instalment: I know of nothing else quite like this in current literary fiction.
Justin Cartwright wittily explored our financial woes in Other People's Money Bloomsbury and, lastly, in Wish You Were Here Picador , set against the backdrop of the Iraq conflict, Graham Swift again skilfully and compulsively probes the effects of a sudden upheaval on the everyday life of an ordinary family. Those of us who relished The Red Hourglass: This time the author takes on the full extent of the animal kingdom, including a chapter devoted to the hazards posed by birds such as aeroplane collisions and avian flu.
He is, by turns, informative, journalistic, anecdotal and philosophical.
And occasionally he lets his enthusiasm for his subject off the leash: What is also clear is that captive and supposedly domesticated animals are the most dangerous - not only do they have the opportunity to harm us, they lose their fear too. In this wickedly funny, painful autobiography her adoptive mother's cold madness and the tiny self that inhabits her bizarre, huge frame inspire Jeanette's later storytelling. This book provides the key, and enriches our understanding of her singular and creative worlds.
The abusive void and lack of love and tenderness in Jeanette's childhood was balanced by access to and a deep passion for literature. This kept her sane enough to deal with the horrific, emotional and physical abuse meted out by the very damaged, fanatical Mrs Winterson. Jeanette's clarity and honesty illuminate the human condition. She powerfully describes the personal turmoil and breakneck speed of emotions encountered by those of us who feel compelled to find our lost mothers. The collection described in the text is a veritable treasure trove and Antrim has produced a volume that will delight anyone interested in social history.
The photographs are sumptuous and make the subject very accessible even to a non-specialist. The text is lively and humorous but authoritative. There is no doubt it is destined to be regarded as the standard work on the subject. Innovatively quirky, poignantly humorous — would you expect this to be the description of a novel whose central theme is depression? Rebecca Hunt's Mr Chartwell , out in paperback this year Penguin , is that and more. The narrative is centred on two parallel and gradually converging stories, that of Winston Churchill and his "black dog" of depression, and Esther Hammerhous, librarian at Westminster who becomes landlady to Black Pat, a huge talking dog.
It is late July , and we follow Churchill in the week leading up to his retirement, and Esther as she learns to deal with aspects of her somewhat painful past. Black Pat — depression personified - is the other central figure, menacing in both his hounding of Churchill and manipulation of Esther…A very fine first novel, not all of which succeeds but Rebecca Hunt is one to watch.
He is a master of his craft, and it was difficult not to do a little dance in my living room when the Booker Prize was announced. Three chilling tales with a warm heart: Ben Macallan's Desdaemona Solaris is an inventive twist on the urban fantasy which opens with the banshee at the bus station and doesn't let up. Anne Fine's The Devil Walks Doubleday combines pitch-perfect Gothic pastiche, action packed adventure and serious moral consideration into a real all-ages book. Peter Bennett's Bobby Bendick's Ride Enchiridion is a fine poet having fun, erudite, allusive and adorned with drawings by Birtley Aris.
My reading has included two wonderfully eccentric and evocative novels: Leonora was disowned by her father, when at the age of 19 she eloped to Paris with Max Ernst, the leader of the surrealist movement. John Burnside's Black Cat Bone Jonathan Cape is an outstanding collection — many of its poems reinterpret place and memory to almost hypnotic effect. A striking first novel, poetic in style and funny, was Vanessa Gebbie's The Coward's Tale Bloomsbury , set in a small Welsh mining village and reminiscent of Dylan Thomas at his best. On the sporting front, Dave Roberts's 32 Programmes Bantam Press provided the fascinating match-history behind each of the football programmes the author was forced to select from his collection of over 1, when he moved to America.
Its power lies in its different narrators and its intricate weaving of the story they tell, spanning continents and generations. Laura is a convincing single narrator, struggling to cope and make sense of a tragedy. Rare skill lies at the heart of achievements such as these, yet the overwhelming effect is of the emotional grab that fiction has at this level. Set among a small community on the Atlantic coast, Dermot Healy's Long Time, No See Faber is a crystal of sea salt amid the bland fare of contemporary fiction. Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when their material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources.
Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life liberated herself into greatness. Even so, when public recognition came, it followed no obvious trajectory, and was attended by a certain level of male diminishment. In her non-fiction publisher, Richard Garnett, informed her dunderheadedly that she was "only an amateur writer", to which she responded mildly, "I asked myself, how many books do you have to write and how many semi-colons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status?
He jocundly replied that if she went on writing fiction he didn't want it blamed on him, and in any case he already had too many short novels with sad endings on his hands. Unsurprisingly, Fitzgerald took herself off to another publisher, and Haycraft claimed he had been misunderstood.
I remember Paul Theroux telling me how, as a Booker judge in , he had been doing his preliminary reading while travelling through Patagonia by train, and would skim out into the pampas books he considered not even worth discussing. Some months later he found himself with a polite smile on his face as the prize was awarded to Offshore.
The BBC's resident bookheads also treated her condescendingly: And after she died, even her memorial meeting was disfigured by the turkey-cocking of a young male novelist. Fitzgerald commented on Robinson's behaviour in a letter to Francis King about the Booker evening. She had arrived at the studio "soaking wet because I'd had to be photographed on a bale of rope on the Embankment". Robinson "was in a very bad mood and complained to his programme executive, 'Who are these people - you promised me they were going to be the losers'.
The Blue Flower, chosen more times than any other as Book of the Year in , was not even shortlisted. However, she did have a few happy memories of her Booker victory night: There are many such moments in the Letters - moments when the professional observer of human beings finds sustenance and reward where others might find boredom or rudeness.
Her life, on this evidence, was largely domestic, frequently peripatetic, and attended by regular economic crises. The magazine she edited, World Review, collapsed; her husband Desmond had trouble with drink; the houseboat they lived on sank not once but twice, carrying with it such archives as she possessed including all her wartime letters to her husband, who is not represented here by a single item. Penelope and Desmond were, in the words of their son-in-law Terence Dooley, "two kind, intelligent and funny people who simply couldn't manage the world".
Rescue at one point came in the shape of a council flat in Clapham, where the novelist collected Green Shield stamps and used teabags to dye her hair. Her writing had to be fitted into the occasional breathing spaces left by her family life; and she made little money until the late success of The Blue Flower in America where it won a US National Book Critics Circle Award in the first year the prize was opened to non-nationals. It was a matter of rueful pride to her - and should serve as a warning to aspirant novelists - that she didn't pass into the higher tax bracket until she was She was also accident-prone, given to falling off ladders and out of windows, getting herself locked in the bathroom and suffering other obscurer incidents "I was knocked down by a bus queue and have a round bruise on my arm, just like the mark of Cain".
She tended to take the blame for things that were not her fault, even feeling guilty towards her publishers when her books didn't sell. She didn't like to offend: That "nice green hat" is a pure writer's touch; and her spirit of fantasy is often waiting to transform observed reality.
This is from one of her earliest, wartime letters:. I have had my brother on a week's leave. He slept in the passage, and the Danish cook evidently regarded him as a soldier billeted on us and ran the carpet-sweeper over him remorselessly. The logical implication being that this would have been quite normal if Danish behaviour had her brother indeed been such a billetee.
There is, at times, something more than a little Pooterish about the life she describes. The Annual General meeting of the Clapham Antiquarians passed off quite well except when I went down to the Church hall kitchen to help Mrs Smith the treasurer's wife, in a green hat and cardigan get the tea for 47 famished members she was having a crise de nerfs, she told me she'd been worrying the whole of the week about the tea for the meeting, and, do what I could, I couldn't get her to put on more than one kettle, so the tea had to be made in small relays and the Antiquarians, who'd already sat down and eaten all the cakes, were getting quite riotous.
I brought some sausage rolls but as soon as Daddy started handing them round they disappeared, everyone said they fancied something savoury. Unfortunately I dropped off to sleep during the talk with lantern slides, so missed many interesting facts about Clapham. True, this is Pooterishness with a difference: She knew what she was doing, and writing. At the same time, this was her life. Alongside the mildness and the blame-taking, however, there lay a clear moral sense and a sharp dismissal of those she found wanting.
Robert Skidelsky is "this absurdly irritating man", Lord David Cecil's lecture on Rossetti was "abysmal", Rushdie's latest novel is "a load of codswallop". Then there is "the dread Malcolm Bradbury", who "seems to be made of some plastic or semi-fluid substance which gives way or changes in your hands", and who patronises her work "I felt like throwing the pale green mayonnaise over him" ; and Douglas Hurd, Booker chairman, with his pitiful notion of what a novel should be.
Those who failed to meet her standards of competence would be more readily identifiable if the letters were less lightly annotated. It seems strange to explain the line "Thankyou so much for your lovely letters and the p. Her fictional personnel are rarely vicious or deliberately evil; when things go wrong for them, or when they inflict harm on others, it is usually out of misplaced understanding, a lack less of sympathy than of imagination.
The main problem is that they cannot see the terms and conditions which come attached to life: As Salvatore, the neurologist in her "Italian" novel Innocence, puts it, "There are dilettantes in human relationships just as there are, let's say, in politics. Such people tend to think that love in itself is sufficient, and that happiness might be its merited consequence.
They speak their minds at the wrong time and in the wrong way; they deal in a kind of robustly harmful innocence. It is a quality shared equally between the sexes, but not mutually recognised. Thus Salvatore - unaware of his own, more intellectual forms of naivety - is driven to exasperation by the strength and sheer carelessness of the innocence displayed by the two women in his life:. He struggled to keep his temper. It struck him that both Marta and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence.
A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either. Fitzgerald's deep understanding of the complexities and ramifications of innocence makes the children in her fiction not just convincing simulacra, but active motors in the plot. In an old friend, Hugh Lee, made the bizarre complaint that he found her fictional children "precious".
Denying this, she replied that: In the novelist reported a conversation with - or rather, denunciation by - her younger daughter:. Maria has much depressed me by 1. Looking at Daddy and me and saying "What a funny old couple you are! Telling me that studying art and literature is only a personal indulgence and doesn't really help humanity or lead to anything, and, I suppose, really, that is quite true: My life seems to be crumbling into dust.
It is at such moments that writers have a small advantage over non-writers: Twenty years later, here is Dolly, the plain-speaking young daughter of Frank Reid, owner of a printing works in pre-revolutionary Moscow. When Frank's wife Nellie inexplicably abandons the family and returns to London, Frank asks Dolly if she wants to write to her mother. Dolly replies, "I don't think I ought to write. Surely you don't think she did the wrong thing?
The mistake she probably made was getting married in the first place. Many readers' initial reaction to a Fitzgerald novel - especially one of the last four - is, "But how does she know that? How does she know Innocence about neurology and dressmaking and dwarfism and Gramsci? How does she know The Gate of Angels about atomic physics and probationary nursing and the opening of Selfridges? How does she know The Blue Flower about 18th-century Thuringian laundry habits and the Brownian system and Schlegel's philosophy and salt mining? The initial, dully obvious answer is: AS Byatt once asked her the last of these questions, and received the answer that Fitzgerald "had read the records of the salt mines from cover to cover in German to understand how her hero was employed".
But when we are asking "How did she know? She had a novelist's and a shy person's fear of being boringly informative: But it is more than just a taste for economy. It is the art of using fact and detail so that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The Blue Flower opens with a famous scene of washday in a large house, with all the dirty bed-linen and shirts and undergarments being thrown down from the windows into the courtyard.
When remembering this scene and its density of effect, I always think it must last a whole chapter - even though, in a Fitzgerald novel, that need mean no more than seven or eight pages. But whenever I check, I find that, in fact, it lasts less than two pages - pages which, alongside this domestic scene-setting, also manage to announce key themes of German Romantic philosophy and inconvenient love.
I have reread this scene many times, always trying to find its secret, but never succeeding. Mastery of sources and a taste for concision might lead you to expect that the narrative line of Fitzgerald's novels would be pre-eminently lucid. Here is the start of The Beginning of Spring. In the journey from Moscow to Charing Cross, changing at Warsaw, cost fourteen pounds, six shillings and threepence and took two and a half days.
This sounds almost journalistically clear, and is, until you reflect that almost any other novelist would have started a Russian novel featuring mainly English personnel by having a character travel - and thereby take the reader with him or her - from London to Moscow. Fitzgerald does the opposite: But the sentence seems so straightforward that you hardly notice what is being done to you.
And here is the first sentence of The Blue Flower. Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend's home on the washday. Again, another novelist would have been content to write "Jacob Dietmahler could see that they had arrived.
A double negative in the first sentence trips our expectation of uncomplicated entry into a novel; further, it sets up the narrative question, "So in that case, just what degree of a fool was Jacob Dietmahler? The definite article hints quietly at the German behind it - am Waschtag - and lets us feel, at a nearly subtextual level, that we are in a different time, a different place. It eases our fictional way.