Author Archives: Katrina

The Fall of Kelvin Walker by Alasdair Gray – 20 Books of Summer

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The Fall of Kelvin Walker by the Scottish author Alasdair Gray was first published by Canongate Publishing in 1985. It’s a very short read at just 140 pages. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer.

Kelvin Walker has left his home town of Glaik, a bit of a rural backwater, for the bright lights of swinging London of the 1960s. He’s determined to make a success of his life in double quick time, despite having no qualifications, he has only worked in his father’s shop since the age of 15. He had discovered the local library in Glaik and had been impressed with Nietsche who had released him from his fear of God as he didn’t exist, an entity that Kelvin felt had watched his every move, just as his father did.

Kelvin plans to pretend that he is Hector McKellar, the one person from Glaik who has become famous, he works in television. He hopes that the name will get him interviews and that he’ll be able to blag his way into a well-paid position.

Kelvin has terrific confidence in his abilities, but he quickly realises that life in London is very alien to anything he has experienced before. He’s saved from having to sleep on a park bench by a young woman who takes him back to the room that she shares with her boyfriend who is an artist. They’re bemused by Kelvin’s plans, he just doesn’t know how things work, but Kelvin is undaunted.

I’ve read a few books by Gray over the years, this is the one that I’ve enjoyed most, it’s described as being Calvinist slapstick. If you add the letters ‘it’ to Glaik you get the Scots word glaikit which means idiot, foolish.

The blurb on the back says:

‘The first major Scottish writer since Walter Scott’ – Anthony Burgess

‘Gray’s work is bawdy and exuberant. Here is an original and talented writer plainly in his prime’ – Robert Nye in the Guardian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean – 20 Books of Summer

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The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean  (S.G. MacLean) was first published in 2008. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer.

The setting is the town of Banff, Scotland in 1626. It’s 10 o’clock at night and two whores are searching the pockets of a man that they have found lying in the street, but they find nothing. When they realise that the man is ill, not just drunk, they drag him to the schoolhouse where the teacher lives, hoping that he will be able to help the man, but they didn’t stay to speak to the teacher, they were worried about getting involved. In the morning the man is found dead, and it seems he must have been poisoned.

The teacher – Alexander Seaton – had trained for the ministry, but he had been denounced as a sinner, unfit for the job, when the dead body was found he was obviously going to be under suspicion.

Seaton sets about investigating the death, it’s a time of witch hunts and extreme religious fervour, a dangerous mixture.  I really enjoyed this one, it is very atmospheric. Maps feature in the storyline, apparently at that time maps were rare and most people had never seen one, so anyone in possession of one is suspect. I must admit that it’s something I hadn’t really thought about

De Sebaldebuurster Molenpolder (Sebaldeburen Windmill)

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It has been fairly quiet on Pining recently because we were in the north-east of the Netherlands, in Friesland, visiting the Dutch branch of my family, my brother has lived in NL for over 50 years. I had intended blogging while we were away but I never did find the time for it.  In recent years Jack and I have been exploring this rural area, but amazingly we hadn’t ever visited a windmill, we rectified that this time.

Windmill at Subaldeburen, The Netherlands

From a distance they look so peaceful and scenic, but when you get up close they are really quite scarily noisy, and like something designed by Heath Robinson, but more about that in another post.

Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer – 20 Books of Summer

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Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer was first published in 1929.

Eustacia has never been to school before, her father had been a professor of Greek and her mother a doctor, they had not made a good job of bringing her up, and by the time she was a teenager she was a rather superior little prig.

When both of her parents died fairly suddenly Eustacia only had two people in her life, her Aunt Margery as her guardian and uncle Edmund as trustee, and it’s decided that she’ll go to boarding school – the Chalet School of course.

When Eustacia gets there she makes herself very unpopular from day one. She’s a prig and a sneak, two things that most schoolgirls detest, as do the teachers. The girls are intent on pulling her down several pegs. Eustacia can’t stand it and decides to run away, over the mountains!

Of course she has an accident which means a long recuperation. With visits from staff and girls Eustacia is a changed girl. When Eustacia is happy to call herself Stacie it’s seen as an improvement by the headmistress, they didn’t like her ‘sister’ Eustacia at all.

There are a lot of books in this Chalet School series, and they are still being written by different authors. I suspect that I will not be reading them all, but will probably just read up to just after the war years – I’ll see how it goes. They’re an enjoyable read, for me anyway.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a short story by Washington Irving was first published in 1820. I bought my secondhand copy of it very recently, for all of £2 and it’s illustrated by Arthur Rackham, he did that in 1928. I really like his style and have quite a few books illustrated by him. Washington Irving travelled around Europe and seems to have collected European fairy tales, which he rewrote with an Amercan setting.

I don’t think I had ever read this story before, I think I would have remembered if I had because the female character is a Katrina. The setting is a little valley which had originally been settled by Dutch people. A drowsy, dreamy atmosphere seems to permeate the place.

Ichabod Crane is the schoolmaster in Sleepy Hollow, he’s in love with Katrina van Tassel, a farmer’s daughter. Abraham von Brunt (Brom Brunt) is also in love with Katrina and he and his friends play pranks on Ichabod.

They tell him the tale of a headless horseman who haunts the area, and of course Ichabod ends up being chased by it.  After that he’s never seen again!

 

 

The Wrench by Primo Levi

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The Wrench by Primo Levi is a quick read at just 171 pages. It’s unlike anything else that I’ve read by the author, which I must admit was a bit of a relief as I wasn’t in the mood for reading about the horrors that he experienced in concentration camps during World War 2. The Wrench has the title The Monkey’s Wrench in America. The book was written after Levi had retired from his work as a chemist at a paint factory.

There are only two main characters in this book, Faussone and the autobiographical chemist. They’re both working in a very remote part of Russia. Faussone is a rigger and he has plenty of tales to tell of his work experiences all over the world, always in remote places.  Each experience takes the form of a short story, they’re all loosely connected. The job of a rigger is to construct cranes and other large mechanical structures. The riggers are the first to arrive at any project, sometimes moving in to places that had been home to animals previously. Problems occur of course, but they’re there to be solved, which they are.

I found this one to be entertaining. Faussone is obviously happy to have a new audience for his tales, he’s by far the most garrulous one.

The blurb on the back says: ‘One of the sanest, most experienced and wisest books I’ve ever read’ Douglas Dunn, Glasgow Herald.

‘Transforms molecules and ballbearings into romantic fairy-tales’ VOGUE

Bernard Levin of The Times wrote at length about it on the back, and he seems to have loved it.

The Wrench was originally written in Italian and was translated by William Weaver, very successfully I think.

 

 

Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge

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Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge was first published in 1972. I find that Bainbridge books are either hit or miss, and for me this one was definitely a miss.

The tale is narrated by a 13 year old girl who is home from her boarding school for the holidays. She had been sent away from home when her parents found that she had been writing ‘dirty’ things in her notebook. At boarding school she learned of even more dirty things to write about. She is very easily led – by her best friend Harriet. It transpires that Harriet is the one who tells her what to write in her notebook, but of course it is all in the handwriting of the unnamed narrator.

Harriet of course is no friend to the narrator, she’s just a user and as the narrator was at a local private school before she was sent to boarding school she is lonely, which is presumably one of the reasons why she puts up with the ghastly Harriet.

They’re out to get experiences, and write about them in the notebook.  Mr Biggs becomes a target for them, he is in late middle age and is unhappily married, they decide to have some fun, the plan being that he will end up being humiliated, but things go badly wrong,  This is really a horror story, the whole thing gave me the creeps, I didn’t enjoy any of it but I ploughed on to the end anyway, luckily it’s only 152 pages long.

The blurb on the back from The Telegraph says: ‘An extremely original and disconcerting story ….. Miss Bainbridge’s imagination is dark …. her landscapes reek and threaten, and her images smell of corruption.’

Apparently this was Bainbridge’s first novel and it was rejected by several publishers. While I was reading it I was reminded of the Parker/Hulme teenage murderers case in New Zealand which you can read about here, and indeed it transpired that Bainbridge used that case as a basis for this book, Hulme eventually became the author Anne Perry.

 

Women and Power by Mary Beard

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Women and Power by Mary Beard was published in paperback form in 2018, it’s based on two lectures which Beard gave in the LRB Winter Lecture series, the first one in 2014, prior to the Me Too movement.

As you would expect she links the mysogyny in our culture to Greek and Roman literature. The first recorded example of a ‘man’ telling a woman to shut up was Telemachus when he told his mother Penelope to go back to her weaving and let the men get on with the important things of life.  Women’s high-pitched voices couldn’t be tolerated. She points out the similarity nowadays to women’s voices not being heard  – or being ignored, showing the Riana Duncan cartoon of men and one woman around a board room table, the caption is: ‘That’s an excellent suggestion , Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it’

The Me Too movement features in the second edition of this book. With women being silenced, or just not believed or taken seriously.  Beard points out that in the Metamorphoses Philomela was raped and had her tongue cut out so she couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to her, but Philomela wove her horrific experience into a tapestry, and so denounced her rapist. It’s more difficult for women nowadays I think!

She does mention ‘mansplaining’, something that I suspect all women have been victims of, despite having far more exerience than the ‘explainer’ – I know I have.

Worryingly she suspects that countries which have more female MPs than male ones might be proof that the real power doesn’t lie within the parliament. I must admit that I didn’t realise there were such countries, and I suspect she is correct.

Anyway, this is a very interesting read, despite it being a very slim book at  just 115 pages.

There was no mention of something that I think is very dangerous for women. That’s the treatment of women at the hands of the medical profession. Women are dying needlessly because they aren’t being taken seriously when they have health problems. Too often they are seen as just another menopausal or paranoid  female, even by female doctors.  Women often get very different care, often no care at all, just told to go away, there’s nothing to worry about,  until they literally can barely move and they are dead a few weeks later, as happened to a neighbour of mine – and I could go on and on as that wasn’t the first time something like that had happened. I know that strictly speaking a different sort of power, but it still leads to women being victims.

Back to Mary Beard, I always look forward to her being on TV, but this is the first book that I’ve read by her, I’ll look out for the others now.

 

 

 

Across the Barricades by Joan Lingard

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Across the Barricades by Joan Lingard is the second in her Kevin and Sadie series, it was first published in 1972.

Although Kevin and Sadie lived just a short distance from each other, they both come from different worlds and so hadn’t seen each other for years when they bumped into each other in Belfast town. In the previous book The Twelfth Day of July they had obviously quite fancied each other, but with Sadie being a Protestant and Kevin a Roman Catholic they couldn’t even be friends.

Now they’ve both left school and are working, so when they realise that they’re still keen on each other they decide to keep their relationship a secret, easier said than done. Kevin ends up getting badly beaten up by his one time best friends, and he loses his job.

Both families are adamant that they’ll have to give each other up and it looks like the end of the road for the couple, but when one of Sadie’s old teachers realises what has been going on he allows them to meet up at his house. He lives in a different part of Belfast, a quiet middle class area, it seems like a safe place to be, but – not for long.

This is a great read, I couldn’t help thinking that at the time it was written it was quite a brave thing to write about.  Things were going from bad to worse in Belfast and Northern Ireland in general, and the violence was moving on to England and even in Scotland it was quite common for the department store that you were shopping in to be evacuated because of a bomb threat. I’m looking forward to reading the next one in this series. Into Exile.