The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell

It always feels a bit like magic to be swept away by a new author, caught up in the lives of fictional characters so thoroughly that they seem in many ways more real than the folks one is dealing with everyday. Maggie O’Farrell is a writer of extraordinary gifts, and although her 2010 novel, The Hand That First Held Mine, is the first book of hers that I’ve read, I intend to read everything she has written or will write. Indeed, I am now almost finished with an earlier novel of hers, and as impressed as I was with the book I’m discussing today.

This is really two very separate stories of women who live about a half century apart. We meet Alexandra Sinclair in the mid 1950s when she is twenty-one and just as her life is about to change forever along with her name. She is discovered by Innes Kent, thirty-four, an art collector and editor of a small art magazine, as she lies reading in her backyard in a small town in England. The oldest of several children, she feels constricted, claustrophobic, and somehow in limbo as she waits for her real life to begin. Turning her gaze from the overcrowded house she has grown up in, “She keeps only the sea in her sights. She has had a creeping fear of late that what she wants most—for her life to begin, to take on some meaning, to turn from blurred monochrome into glorious technicolour—may pass her by. That she might not recognize it if it comes her way, may fail to grasp for it.”

Within moments of this thought, Innes stumbles onto her; his car has broken down on a country lane, and while seeking help—a garage or at least a telephone—he spies the beautiful Alexandra. And although their conversation is soon interrupted by her suspicious mother, before he leaves the small town, Innes manages to slip her a note with his London phone number on it and a suggestion for a new name. Not Sandra, the shortened form of her given name adopted by her family although hated by her, but Lexie, a name more in keeping with the bright and energetic journalist and lover of Innes that she is about to become.

Next on stage, fifty years or so later, we meet Elina Vilkuna, a talented young artist who has nearly died just four days earlier while giving birth to a son via Cesarean section. After these two introductions, the novel jumps back and forth between the two women and the men in their lives. While the reader has some inkling that the two lives will in some way intersect eventually, part of the intrigue of the novel is trying to unravel the mystery that connects the two women. Both women are bright, both think primarily of their careers, their quests for meaning, and both find men (on the whole) to be a distraction from those quests rather than a fulfillment.

One thing that unites the women is that both find themselves pregnant without having chosen that course, and both find themselves not only unprepared for motherhood, but overwhelmed by it. Ted, the father of Elina’s son, is also thunderstruck by the birth of his son, but not so much by the burdens of fatherhood as by strange, unbidden memories that begin to surface—memories that seem to have nothing to do with the story of his life as presented by his parents, and indeed, some of which seem even to contradict that story. Elina finds herself dealing not only with her own weakened condition and a new baby, but with a psychologically fragile and oddly distant mate.

This novel is enchanting in so many ways; the language is rich and painterly. The descriptions of London life in the 50s and early 60s, and especially of the painters who congregated there, are fascinating. But while there are many threads in the novel, for me it is primarily the intensity of the two female lead characters and their reactions to motherhood that leave a lasting impression.

No doubt parenting profoundly alters the lives of both female and male parents, but I find that I can scarcely even imagine what it must be like for women, especially for women who never see motherhood as even a goal, let alone the goal, of their lives. O’Farrells descriptions of the early days of mothering are frightening, sometimes horrific, but also spellbinding. She talks about the special form of blinding love that some mothers have for their offspring so clearly that even I, an old and quite ignorant man, can grasp something of its ineffable significance. When Ted’s father asks Elina about how she is finding the whole baby thing, she wonders how to reply.

‘Well’ She considers what to say. Should she mention the nights spent awake, the number of times she must wash her hands in a day, the endless drying and folding of tiny clothes, nappies, wipes, the scar tissue across her abdomen, crooked and leering, the utter loneliness of it all, the hours she spends kneeling on the floor, a rattle or a bell or a fabric block in her hands, that she sometimes gets the urge to stop older women in the street and say, how did you do it, how did you live through it? Or she could mention that she had been unprepared for this fierce spring in her, this feeling that isn’t covered by the word ‘love’, which is far too small for it, that sometimes she thinks she might faint with the urgency of her feeling for him, that sometimes she misses him desperately even when he is right there, that it’s like a form of madness, of possession, that often she has to creep into the room when he has fallen asleep just to look at him, to check, to whisper to him. But instead, she says, ‘Fine. Good, thanks’

Lexie and Elina, both passionate about what they do, both quite content being childless, and yet both metamorphosed by motherhood. I love both characters, wish that I could know them. I have not mentioned, of course, the mystery that unties them, nor do I intend to. Suffice it to say that it is not an artificial hook to keep the reader interested. The mystery and its solution are integral to the story and to its worth. I hope you will read the book and solve the mystery for yourself.

The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa

Most of you who are avid readers will already have read one of the many novels by the Nobel Prize winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. For some reason, I had not been introduced to him until picking up a copy of his 2006 novel The Bad Girl. The ethicist and novelist Iris Murdoch reminds us again and again that egoistic selfishness is only one of many ways of being morally blind. As she shows us in novel after novel, anger, resentment, grief, infatuation, hatred, lust, all can return the gaze to the self in ways that make attention to others, which she sees as the essence of morality, impossible. I have to admit that for the first hundred pages or so of The Bad Girl, I saw this novel as simply another example of how so-called love (really obsessive infatuation) can lead one away from the social-political world and into self-absorption. And this is one very plausible interpretation/explanation of the entire novel. However, I think a careful reading shows clearly that the author, if not his lead character, has a keen eye on the political and social turmoil not only of his native country Peru, but of all of South America and ultimately of Europe and the world from the 1960s to the present.

The story-line is deceptively simple: Ricardo Somocurcio, a young Peruvian boy, falls in love with Lily, a mischievous, full-of-life Peruvian girl who appears in his life one summer with a story about coming from a wealthy family in Chile—the first of many stories and made-up backgrounds that she is to tell him over a lifetime. Ricardo has a rather simple ambition, which is to go to Paris to be educated, and then to live out his life there in what to him is the most glamorous and wonderful city in the world. He does not desire great wealth, or power, or even erudition; he simply wants to be a Parisian. From the first, Lily finds this an impoverished ambition; she wants to be rich, very rich, and to live in a style that only the rich can live.

This is the summer of 1950, and Ricardo is fifteen. Soon enough, the summer is over, and the lie about the wealthy Chilean background is uncovered; Lily and her sister are nothing but very poor Peruvians from a small, insignificant village. They soon disappear from the larger city Ricardo lives in and are forgotten by all but Ricardo:

I keep her in my memory, and evoke her again and again at times, and hear her mischievous laugh and see the mocking glance of her eyes the color of dark honey, and watch her swaying like a reed to the rhythms of the mambo.

Ricardo realizes his dream of moving to Paris, and because of a relatively easy command of languages, becomes an interpreter for UNESCO. In Paris he meets again one of the many incarnations of Lily, this time as Comrade Arlette, a freedom fighter who has been awarded a kind of scholarship to go to Cuba and receive guerilla training. Ricardo finds out quickly that Lily has had no conversion to political awareness, but has simply used the scholarship process as a way of escaping Peru and poverty. Because of passport and identity problems, she ends up having to remain with the other scholarship recipients and actually leaves for Cuba despite begging Ricardo to find a way to rescue her. And thus begins a series of perhaps incredible coincidences that bring Lily back into his life again and again over the next forty years, each time with a different name and very different economic circumstances, usually as wife or mistress to a rich and powerful man who has fallen for her flamboyant charms.

He knows her as Madame Arnoux, when she is married to a semi-wealthy Parisian, who himself stole her away from a Cuban military officer. And again as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of an even wealthier British businessman. And later still in Japan as the mistress of a rich and powerful Japanese man, Fukuda.

However, what is really interesting about this novel (quite apart from Ricardo’s obsession with the many Lilies), is the commentary Llosa gives of political and social life in Paris of the 60s, London of the 70s, and of world events from the 50s through the turn of the century as seen through the eyes of a Peruvian. Very little is said of the United States, partly because it seems such a politically backward and unenlightened country—increasingly powerful economically, but so conservative politically that it only adds to the economic woes of South Americans and of poor, disenfranchised people around the world. It is certainly not seen as the beacon of democracy and freedom.

I am no doubt betraying my own political myopia when I confess that I felt a great let-down in the 70s with the dissolution of the so-called new-left in this country and the abandonment of the high hopes for significant cultural and economic revolution that occurred as the Viet Nam war ended. Writers like Doris Lessing, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and many others) revealed to me the much larger and longer struggles against economic oppression that had been going on all through the 20th century, continuing on into this one. Llosa’s novel again reminds me of a bigger picture and the need for continued struggle.

The hero of this novel is almost the same age as I, and he witnessed the same world events. While his eye is trained particularly to Peru and the nearly constant political upheavals that have occurred there since the 50s, by moving his hero to Paris and then having him work as a translator in London, Russia, and Japan, Llosa enables us to get beyond a narrow American-eye-view of both culture and politics. I find that not only refreshing, but also more hopeful and less pessimistic. Ricardo sees the declining influence of the Soviet inspired Communist Party in France, but also birth of “a left more modern than the French Communist Party.” In London in the second half of the 60s, he saw “the emergence of homosexuals from the closet, gay pride campaigns, as well as a total rejection of the bourgeois establishment, in the name not of the socialist revolution, to which the hippies were indifferent, but of a hedonistic and anarchic pacifism, tamed by a love for nature and animals and a disavowal of traditional morality.” He sees the rise of structuralism “in the style of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, and then the deconstructionists like Gilles Deluze and Jacques Derrida, with their arrogant, esoteric rhetoric, isolated in cabals of devotees and removed from the general pubic, whose cultural life, as a consequence of this development, became increasingly banal.”

Yes, this is a simple, even a demented, love story, but it is also a long look at fifty years of cultural and political struggle. Lily, the bad girl, repeatedly refers to Ricardo as ‘the good boy,’ both because of his stubborn loyalty and his refusal to sacrifice his life to the pursuit of riches and power. And while Ricardo is neither a political hero nor a champion of the good, he does give us readers a broad view and in-the-end hopeful view of the world.

Hungry For The World by Kim Barnes

By the time I was thirteen…I would have come to understand that it was Eve who desired the fruit and its store of hidden knowledge, Eve who had damned us all from the Garden. Years away from that child sleeping in her mother’s arms, I would enter into my young woman’s life knowing these two things: by my gender I was cursed, and my mind would destroy me.

This we learn from Kim Barnes near the very beginning of her chilling memoir, Hungry for the World. Those of us who have escaped from fundamentalist upbringings immediately recognize a kindred spirit in this often heart-wrenching account, and cheer mightily as she tears herself free of the Pentecostal church and the well-meaning but authoritarian father who see’s himself as God’s appointed caretaker of his wife and children, especially his female children.

As a woman, she must compensate for the flaw of her gender by extreme modesty. Her hair was her glory and could not be shorn. For a woman to don pants shocked the male’s superior station. Her arms must be covered, her shoulders, her knees—any part of her that might entice, intrigue, attract, cause another to sin. Silence was her virtue.

For most of her young life, Kim is a dutiful daughter. She admires her nature-loving father and wants both to please him and to be like him. But one of his exhortations to her is to use her mind, to question and think for herself, and this seems to contradict the unflagging obedience that is demanded of her. She describes herself as being “ravenous for words.”

Words were jewels to be turned and examined for every facet, every refraction of light. The only absolutes were the legalities of my faith—the rules for behavior and salvation—and my father’s authority, his word that could not be questioned.

I wonder now if my father may have foreseen that the analytical skills with which he engendered me might someday lead me away from the beliefs he himself embraced. For even as he insisted that I think for myself, he cautioned me against thinking too much. To think was to know, but the desire to know more than had been granted was blasphemy.

Believing as her church told her that she was one of the chosen few and that “God would return to gather His chosen ones home…Dancing was a sin, as were smoking, drinking, rock and roll, swimming with the opposite sex,” she endeavored to make herself pure, to conquer the hunger for life that led her to books and to impure thoughts. After an early outbreak of will and disobedience led to her being sent away, banished for a summer to the home of a preacher who would try to save her from herself, she is reborn to her faith.

I remember how I lay on the floor of my narrow room and cried, then prayed. I felt the weight that was all my sins and worries and cares press me down, then fall away. It happens just this way: one moment, the horrid drunkenness of a life not right, of a soul bloated by neglect and transgression; the next, a feeling of lightness and sharp cleansing. Simply by letting go of my will, my stubborn refusal to submit, I’d been unbound, reborn to the Kingdom of God.

But her rebirth does not last; tempted by a boy in her church to touch in forbidden ways, she soon finds that she has not only alienated her father, but has simply been delivered into the hands of another boy-man who insists that he must determine her boundaries; she learns also that men are dangerous if they become angry. The lesson comes home yet again, “Above all, I must, for the length of my woman’s life, give myself over to the direction of another.”

Although a bright student with what seems to be a promising future in college and beyond, when she refuses absolute obedience to her father, she has to leave his home shortly after graduating high school.

Up to this point in her account of her young life, I was simply enthralled, by her skill as a writer, by her courage in going her own way, thinking for herself and rejecting the absurd and narrow dictates of her church and her father. I could hardly wait to finish her memoir and to encourage others to read it. But although she manages to leave both church and father, she remains so self-absorbed in her own struggle for identity that she appears not to notice the political world around her or the ways in which her struggles are a part of much larger struggles against economic oppression, sexism, and racism. She finds men who allow her to be like them, to hunt with them, drink with them, indulge in sexual desire, but she realizes almost nothing about the larger world that the reader supposes she hungered for.

In fact, she finally falls for an older man, David, who is very much like her father in wanting her total submission to his will; and again she decides that somehow her freedom, her identity, is to be found via submission to his kinky sexual appetites.  She seems really to have learned very little from her break from religious fundamentalism. David is not only an avid hunter, he is cruel. He kills animals that he cannot eat, including an owl that he so wants to posses that he shoots it, has it stuffed, and puts it on his mantel as a show of his power. Together they shoot songbirds out of the sky; “I followed David’s lead, blowing the early monarchs and lacewings into velvet tatters. I remember being made uneasy by such casual cruelty, but I dared not protest. Just as when I’d watched John sight in the starlings and inky ravens, I knew that any emotional response on my part would compromise the place I held in the company of men.”

David wants her to submit to his will completely. If he needs her to give herself to other men (showing them the prize that belongs to him), she is to do it. She is not to question what he does when not with her, whom he sleeps with. And for almost all of the remainder of the memoir, we read of how she adjusts to the needs of the men in her life.

There is finally a hint of genuine consciousness towards the end of the book, a dawning realization that her struggle is like the struggle of others.

I lay on my bed, surrounded by my guns, my marksmanship medals, my karate certificates, library books piled high on the nightstand, at the bottom a copy of Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. I did not yet know how this book would give me my first true taste of political awareness, how it would make me see my struggle in larger terms, give me membership in a common sisterhood.

She does go back to school, does become the writer who produces this memoir, but while I admire her skills as a writer, I remain skeptical of her wisdom and her understanding of political realities. For this reader, she is still the girl who wants to please her father and the cruel men in her life, even if that means taking on the very characteristics that forced her rebellion. Perhaps we will see how her escape and salvation play out in a subsequent memoir.