Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume

He is running, running running.

And it’s like no kind of running he’s ever done before. He’s the surge that burst the dam and he’s pouring down the hillslope.
This time, there’ no chance to sniff and scavenge and scoff. There are no steel bars to end his lap, no chain to jerk at the limit of its extension, no bellowing to trick and bully him back.

This time, he’s further than he’s ever seen before, past every marker along the horizon line, every hump and spork he learned by heart. He is running, running, running.

And there’s no course or current to deter him.

He is One Eye now.

He is on his way

Lucky for the dog, One Eye, that he is adopted by a man as lonely and abandoned as he is. Selected from a bunch of creatures MISTREATED, ABANDONED, ABUSED. When the kennel keeper grabs him by the scruff and leads him to the man. “You are leaning low, nearly dragging your body along the aground, as though carrying a great lump of fear.”

The dog is a terrier, and although the reader never discovers just where he came from or how he was abused, it is suggested that he went down a hole after a badger, losing his eye in the ensuing battle.  

The man is living in his father’s house and has no memory of a mother. His father is dead, but the son remains in the house, which he says is as close to a mother as he has ever known. He is 57, too old to start over and too young to give up. The village in which he lives sees him as ugly and retarded, and his father keeps him away from school and pretty much away from all of society, more or less embarrassed by his awkward, ugly son. 

But the man and dog carve out a life, and very soon, the man cannot imagine life without One Eye. He watches the dog amazed by his nose, amazed that he can be hypnotized by smell. “I wish I’d been born with your capacity for wonder.”

The story of their interdependence is a sad but lovely one. We learn that as a boy, with almost no help from his father, he learned to read. And then when in his forties, because the father is too crippled with gout to drive, he teaches the man how to drive. While he is frightened by most people, he loves to read; despite the villagers misconception, he is not retarded. 

This is a debut novel for Sara Baume, and she finds ingenious ways to have the dog’s voice ‘heard’ by the readers. He talks to the dog, and then tells us how the dog responds. He reads to the dog, and listens carefully for One Eye’s commentary. Turns out that One Eye has a moral take on the world as well as a rational one. Like Iris Murdoch, Baume allows the dog to speak, and the reader learns so much from the interchange between the two.

Unfortunately, just as many in the village see the man as menacing, they come to see the dog as a menace as well. Not entirely undeserved, since he viciously latches on to two other dogs, one small and terrified by the jaws of the terrier, and the other a handsome collie, with a rich owner,  who is bitten on the snout by One Eye. 

Knowing that animal control will soon come to his house and take the dog away, and unable to imagine going back to his utterly lonely life prior to One Eye, the two take off and travel the backroads and small villages of Ireland, living in the car or beside it, and surviving as they can from day to day and town to town.

Shortly before deciding that they need to run, the man takes stock of his perhaps rash decision to adopt the dog.

I should never have adopted you. You bring trouble and then just when I think trouble has passed, you bring trouble again. Caring for you is like keeping a nettle in a pretty porcelain flower pot, watering its roots and pruning its vicious needles no matter how cruelly it stings my skin, until I’m pink and puffy all over yet still worrying the old welts back to life. 

And now I think how I was my father’s nettle. His big lump of an embarrassing son...A son fit only to be kept indoors, away from people and from light. Where there’s nothing to sting but himself.

I know that most of what I have described seems just too sad, but in fact, there is much joy and loveliness in this insightful little novel.

…I wonder have we grown to resemble one another, as we’re supposed to. On the outside, we are still as black and gnarled as nature made us. But on the inside, I fell different somehow. I feel animalized. Now there’s wildness inside me that kicked off with you.

Man rescues dog, and dog rescues man. This is a wonderful love story, and one that you will be glad you read.

The Things We Don’t Say by Ella Carey

Those of you readers who have read earlier works of Ella Carey know that she has had a lifelong love-affair with France (as is manifest in Paris Time Capsule and The House by the Lake).  In her 2018 novel, The Things We Don’t Say, the action switches back and forth between London and a country farm house in Provence. As Carey is quick to acknowledge, this novel was inspired by the Bloomsbury group, and although she insists that all characters are spun from her imagination, in her acknowledgements she says,
“I have long been intrigued by the artist Vanessa Bell and her beautiful relationship with her fellow artist, Duncan Grant.” In the novel, Emma Temple’s story has as its background this intrigue Carey had with Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, and other writers and artists in the Bloomsbury group.

Emma is an artist who establishes a kind of sanctuary in Provence for the unconventional bohemian young artists who she makes into her family. It is 1913. She lives there with her husband, Oscar, who is really more like a brother or companion than a husband, and among the other guests is a famous painter by the name of Patrick and his lover Rupert. It is really the deep love between Patrick and Emma that is central to the story, although he is homosexual and she is not.

The second strand of the story is told by Emma’s granddaughter, Laura, who is studying violin at the Royal College of Music. Thus the reader is taken back and forth between London in l1980 and Provence in the years leading up to and including World War I and beyond. While Patrick and Emma are not sexual lovers, there love is profound, and Patrick spends years painting a portrait of Emma though he has refused in the past to do portraits of anyone he knows. The painting is his tribute to their love. 

Patrick becomes a famous artist and his works are a huge commercial success. For that reason, the paining Ella has is of great value by the time Laura enters the story. Indeed, his work is so famous that Ella is able to secure a loan using it as collateral—a loan large enough to support Laura’s expensive education at the the Royal Academy. Just as art and color are everything to Emma, music is everything to Laura and intensifies the bonds between her and her grandmother.

Alas, a well-respected art critic who is considered an expert on Patrick’s paintings, publishes and article in the Times claiming that the Emma portrait is not his work. All the rest of the novel is occupied with this issue. At first Ewan, the art critic, refuses to divulge to Laura how he knows the painting is not genuine, although he insists that he is absolutely certain that it is not. 

While the story of the painting and of the threat to Laura’s music education is the thread that weaves together the lives of Ella and Laura, what I found to be the overarching significance of the novel was the descriptions of how the so-called bohemians lived their lives in a world that did not at all share their values. Not unlike the young people in the 6os and 70s, Ella’s ‘family’ believes in free love, is open to homosexuality and to all races, and they are also by and large pacifists in a world just about to be engulfed in a world war. 

Because Ella knows all too well how parents can smother the dreams of their children by refusing to support their endeavors, she empathizes completely with Laura when Laura’s parents refuse to support her musical endeavors. Emma’s father had likewise refused to support her love of art, and it is only his early death that allows her to continue with her painting. 

Color was what inspired her, drawing her away from the coldness of her home life. Her childhood walks with her siblings and their nanny in Kensington Gardens every afternoon had started it, and she’d embraced getting out of the dark and stuffy house close to the park. Her delicate senses became assaulted and captivated, drawn in by the blowsy, rain-soaked greens and the whites of meadow flowers, the deep reds and brilliant oranges of spring tulips, the fresh air, the blossoms and blue sky and birds. She’s wanted to capture it, bottle it as soon as she returned home, so it didn’t get lost. Nature seemed the opposite of rules, so that was what she drew and painted early on. 

She’d learned to put men off by seeming distant. She preferred, by far, to be thought cold and aloof than to get caught in any way, having to spend the rest of her life stuck as the wife in a repressive Victorian-style household. 

Painting is her refuge and what gives her life meaning and direction. Her older brother Frederick gathers around himself a group of Oxford intellectuals, and when he dies at a very young age, it is she who becomes the keeper of the group, providing a gathering place for the bohemian misfits. 

Emma’s only romantic love is for Patrick and when her friends scold her for not living with a man who desires her. Since she can choose anyone, why not choose someone who can love her fully. Her reply to Rupert, Patrick’s lover, when he puts a move on her and suggests a menage a trois:

Love chooses us, just as birth chooses us, just as death chooses us. These things are entirely random…I am unable to sleep with anyone without an emotional connection to them.

She continues:

You are being irrational. You just told me that Patrick loves me. And as for the way I choose to live—is there something wrong with a woman wanting to live life on her own terms? I acknowledge that love is beyond our control, that so much in the world is random, but I insist on the dignity of being able to run the aspects of my own life that I can run myself. And that includes saying no to love affairs that will ultimately go nowhere. 

Much like those of us who really came of age in the 60s, Ella’s self-made family decides that sexual jealousy is irrational, and therefore is to be rejected. Since cool rationality should be the guide in life, whatever is irrational can simply be denied or ignored. Didn’t work out quite that way for us or for Ella’s circle; still I find their arguments cogent, and I believe we often give up way too much in our lives (including significant relationships) in the name of monogamy and sexual fidelity. 

Is the famous painting a fraud, and will Laura have to give up her music? These and other plot questions you will have to answer by reading the book.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

I’ve been waiting for years for a new book from Jhumpa Lahiri, but somehow missed her latest novel, The Lowland, published in 2013. Like her other three books, this is a masterful piece of writing—lyrical and lovely, but telling a very somber story. 

Two brothers Subhash and Udayan are just fifteen months apart, and their bond is incredibly strong. Although Subhash is the older of the two, Udayan is the more daring and much more likely to lead them into mischief. Subhash “…was uncertain whether he was more frustrated by Udayan’s daring, or with himself for a his lack of it…But he had no sense of himself without Udayan. From his earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there.”

Both brothers do well in school and have real talents for math and science. But their primary interest is in politics, and especially in the communist parties that battle with one another over whom to follow, and which has the truer line.

 Much of the lowland they live in is covered with water during great parts of the year.

The English started clearing the waterlogged jungle, laying down streets. In 1770, beyond the southern limits of Calcutta, they established a suburb whose first population was more European than Indian. A place where spotted deer roamed, and kingfishers darted across the horizon.

Both brothers are admitted to college and plan to attend graduate school once they graduate. But as it turns out, only Subhash goes on to graduate school in America. Udayan loses interest in continued academic training, and remains behind in India becoming more and more involved in revolutionary politics. The novel jumps back and forth between Rhode Island and India, and as in her earlier collection of short stories, Lahiri describes in great detail the difficulties in straddling countries and cultures. Neither brother is married, though both expect that eventually their parents will arrange marriages. Udayan begins to see the sister of a student friend, and when she, Gauri, becomes pregnant, they marry and move into his parent’s house—a house they keep enlarging so it will accommodate their sons’ wives and eventual grandchildren. 

Without telling too much more of the story (which Lahiri spins out slowly and patiently), Udayan is eventually killed by the police, and Subhash returns briefly to India. Although Gauri is allowed to stay in the home of her in-laws, they ignore her once Udayan is killed. Subhash wants to get to know his sister-in-law, but his parents discourage any real contact. He buys a shawl for his mother and decides to get on for Gauri as well. 

He gave his mother the shawl he’d bought for her. Then he showed her the one for Gauri.

I’d like to give her this. 

You should  know better, she said. Stop trying to befriend her.

You’ve taken away her colored clothes, the fish and meat from her plate.

These are our customs, his mother said.

Eventually, Subhash decides he needs to get Gauri out of the hostile environment of his home, and the only way he can do that is to marry her. Gauri is a brilliant student, and although she cares for little once her husband is dead, she still has a powerful urge to learn, and she consents to go back to America as Subhash’s wife and they decide they will simply treat the baby she is carrying as their own. No decision is made as to when, or even if, the child will be told the truth.

The remainder of the novel is primarily the story of Gauri, Subhash, and their daughter Bella, whom Subhash adores and from whom Bella get most of her nurturing. Subhash takes Bella for a visit to India, but Gauri remains behind committed to her studies and to teaching philosophy courses. For many and complicated reasons, Gauri decides that her husband and daughter are better off without her, and she takes a teaching job across the country in California.

While the description of family life, of what counts as love, what counts as loyalty and what betrayal is the crowning achievement of the novel, there is so much that Lahiri tells the reader about India, its past, its many wars and political unrest. As the author notes, very little of this history gets covered in American press, and most of us know very little about the complexity of the country. That is certainly true of this reader.

I found this to be a beautiful novel, full of heartache for sure, but also full of love and commitment. The relationship between Bella and Subhash is wonderfully described, as are the reasons that Gauri leaves them. 

I will remember this book for a long time, and it also led me to two even newer works of hers—a non-fiction autobiographical book, In Other Words which she wrote in Italian, and refused to translate into English, though she allowed a friend to do it. And a very small book (really an essay) entitled The Clothing of Books, which is really a book about dust jacket designs for hardback books and cover designs for paperbacks  and how little control authors have over such things.

I believe Lahiri to be one of the finest authors alive, and I recommend all of her work to you.