The Name on the Wall

July 14, 2026
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After the success of The Anomaly, one might think that Herve le Tellier’s next novel might also find a publisher in the UK, but instead we must rely on the Other Press who have already published a number of le Tellier’s novels in the US.  The Name on the Wall, once again translated by Adriana Hunter, has more in common with the novel which preceded The Anomaly, All Happy Families, in that it is autobiographical in origin, beginning when the author buys a house near the village of Dieulefit and discovers a name carved into the wall. The name is Andre Chaix, a name he later reads on a monument for those who ‘died for France’ during the Second World War and it soon transpires that Andre was in the resistance, “and I very soon knew I wanted to tell Andre Chaix’s story.” The book (le Tellier says, “I haven’t written a ‘novel’, the ‘Andre novel’”) is more than the story of one man’s life, however, as le Tellier discusses wider issues around France’s experience of the war, the Vichy regime, and the aftermath:

“…looking at the world as it is now, it seems obvious that we still need to talk about the Occupation, collaboration, fascism, racism and othering to the point of complete destruction.”

The book, therefore, covers Andre’s short life (he was killed at the age of twenty) but also happily digresses on a regular basis – as le Tellier says in his introductory chapter, “That’s a digression – the first of many – but its relevance will soon become clear.” After revealing the circumstances of Andre’s death and also describing the documentary evidence he has uncovered (much of it visible in the book in the form of photographs), le Tellier proceeds to devote a chapter to Andre’s fiancée, Simone, who also lost her father, Celestin, during the war. He, too, was member of the resistance, was arrested, and then taken to a field a few days later and shot. As he does throughout, le Tellier refers to literature and film to convey the experiences of those he is writing about, quoting Blaise Cenderas in relation to Celestin being wounded in the First World War, and the film Army of Shadows when discussing his approaching death, quoting the voice-over of a character on his way to a firing squad:

“It’s impossible not to be afraid when you’re going to die… But if I don’t believe it right up to the last moment, right up to the narrowest borderline, then I’ll never die.”

In the next chapter, however, (‘So Nazism, Then’) the book uses a wider lens as le Tellier searches for a German soldier born and dying on the same days as Andre. However, he is not doing so to create a parallel life which also fell victim to the war:

“There is also such a thing as a guilty victim. Those young men were Nazism. If they hadn’t been there to bear its arms and, in some cases, to perpetrate its crimes, in a word to incarnate it, then Andre Chaix would one day have turned twenty-one.”

Le Tellier goes on to explore the racism at the heart of Nazism and the proclivity of ordinary people to engage in violence and cruelty, drawing in the work of historian Christopher Browning, who “demonstrates…that submitting to authority, peer pressure, and a ‘sense of duty’ can churn out killers with no qualms.” Browning’s work was popularised in David Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, but le Tellier dismisses his idea that Germany was particularly prone to antisemitism going on in the next chapter to elaborate on experiments which demonstrate how susceptible we are to group think such as that dramatized in the film The Wave:

“Everyone, or nearly, can become a torturer if there’s a higher authority to relieve them of responsibility.”

Le Tellier looks at both collaboration and resistance in France during the Occupation, the former largely through the world of film, the latter mostly focused on the village of Dieulefit, linked by the residence there of Henri Roche when he started writing Jules et Jim. The school in Dieulefit in particular saved the lives of many Jewish children and teenagers. In the final chapters, le Tellier returns to Andre, describing the various branches of the resistance, their relationship with de Gaulle, and Andre’s death.

This is a book for anyone interested in life in France during the Occupation and in the wider issue of popular acceptance, enthusiasm even, for fascism. Le Tellier is an engaging and erudite companion, one the reader will happily follow on any digression with complete trust.

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The Emperor of Ice Cream

July 4, 2026
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After two novels set across the Atlantic, Brian Moore returns to Belfast with his fifth novel, The Emperor of Ice Cream, first published in 1965. A coming-of-age story set during the Second World War, Moore regarded it as his most autobiographical novel as, like his protagonist, seventeen-year-old Gavin Burke, he had worked for the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) when only a little older. Gavin’s choice of employment is a double disappointment to his family as it marks his failure in his Schools Leaving Certificate which means he cannot go to Queen’s like his older brother, Owen, and anything seen as remotely pro-British is greeted with suspicion by his Catholic parents, especially his father who frequently predicts Hitler’s victory. We gain an insight into his family’s animosity when he appears in his uniform asking his mother to take his trousers up and his aunt remarks:

“If you were my son… I’d shorten them all right. I’d burn them.”

His job is an act of rebellion and an attempt to escape – in his brother’s words, “You just joined up in this thing to dodge going back to school for another year.” Gavin also worries about his developing personality, rejecting his Catholic faith but unable to reject the associated guilt. In a novel full of internal voices, he imagines opening up to his girlfriend, Sally:

“I’ll tell her the real trouble, which is that I have sex on the brain, that I think about it every waking minute, day and night.”

Other voices are provided by the Divine Infant of Prague, “a desperate little preacher whose aim in life was to catch Gavin Burke’s eye” (not dissimilar to Jesus and his Sacred Heart in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and the cross in Tierney’s mother’s room in An Answer from Limbo) and the Black and White Angels which fight for his conscience. These internal conversations highlight Gavin’s immaturity and lack of a cohesive set of principles. Having rejected his family’s way of life, he has yet to replace it. On the one hand, he wants the freedom to enjoy adult vices, on the other he is attracted to something finer as seen in his love of poetry and, to some extent, Sally. The adults in the ARP provide both influences and warnings. Sheila, only a few years older and trapped in a loveless marriage, recognises his longing for freedom:

“I was like you. I wanted to be grown up. I wanted to leave Portstewart and smoke and drink and neck and never, never, never have anyone say again that I mustn’t do this or mustn’t say that.”

A fellow member of the ARP, the captain, is a drunk who borrows money off Gavin and then uses it to buy him a drink, even when Gavin and Freddy (the closest he has to a friend in the ARP) are helping him move because he has been thrown out of his lodgings:

“Can’t you see I’m falling apart?”

Moore uses the ARP to immerse Gavin in the adult world and witness the weaknesses of the surrounding adults. The man in charge, Craig, is a sadist who goes as far as to hit the men on their helmets with an axe handle to imitate the conditions of an air raid. Soldier flirts with the women so that the others underestimate his age (“It made him seem younger, all that woman talk”) and swears Gavin to secrecy when he meets his granddaughter. For most of the novel, the threat of air raids remains distant, even when London and Liverpool are being bombed, but in the novel’s final section the German bombers finally arrive, and Gavin must see if he is equal to the test. This makes for a dramatic conclusion to the coming-of-age element of the story, as well as suggesting what Moore has learned from the thrillers he wrote earlier under different names.

The Emperor of Ice Cream is a more serious novel than those that preceded it, not because it lacks humour but because that humour is wilder and darker. A good example is the Captain’s eviction, a result of him carving a drunken ‘z’ on the wall after seeing Zorro at the cinema, which is interpreted by his Jewish refugee landlady as antisemitic. Moore also adds an ironic commentary from Gavin’s Black Angel:

“Maybe this whole uproar about the German treatment of the Jews is exaggerated. The Jews are certainly terrible moaners.”

Unlike in previous novels, the humour is not balanced by pathos but more intent on provoking, challenging the reader. The novel’s extensive cast is not only entertaining but purposeful – a microcosm of the adult world – and its final scenes not simply thrilling but deeply felt. The Emperor of Ice Cream is surely among Moore’s best.

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The Holy Innocents

June 26, 2026
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Miguel Delibes was a Spanish writer who published his first novel in the 1940s and his last in the 1990s but has only occasionally been translated into English. Delibes fought on the Nationalist side during the civil war, though by joining the navy he may have been avoiding what was largely an infantry war. However, he become disillusioned with the Franco regime and was forced to resign as director of the newspaper El Norte de Castilla for refusing to accept state censorship. The Holy Innocents is one of his later novels, originally published six years after Franco’s death in 1981, and now translated by Peter Bush. The novel is set among the poorest in rural Spain living a life that is almost feudal. As Colm Toibin says in his introduction:

“There are moments when the novel could be set in medieval Europe. But then we notice a tractor, ‘a brand-new red imported tractor.’”

The class division certainly suggests serfdom with ‘señoritos’ lording it over peasants they regard as less than human. To some extent Delibes lures the reader into sympathising with this low opinion by opening the novel with Azarias, a simple old man who wanders “around barefoot mumbling to himself with patches on his knees and on the seat of his corduroy pants and his fly unbuttoned.” He works for his señorito polishing his car and plucking the partridges, woodcocks and other wildfowl that he shoots. He has tamed a tawny owl which he calls “kitey” and our first indication of the cruel way in which the señorito class treat the peasants comes when the bird falls ill and the señorito laughs at the idea anything should be done. “Señorito, don’t laugh like that, I am begging you,” Azarias pleads but he only laughs louder with “thunderous guffaws.”

Over the course of the novel’s six chapters this cruelty becomes ever more apparent, though to call it cruelty is not entirely accurate: as already mentioned, the señoritos do not regard the poor as fully human treating them instead as a lower form of life. When Azarias’ niece, Nieves, asks to take First Communion, Doña Purita finds the request ridiculous:

“what a crazy idea, love! sure it’s not a man you’re really after?

“and she laughed until her sides hurt and repeated

“what a crazy idea!”

Azarias is fired by his señorito (“a fellow who pees on his hands, I can’t eat a woodcock he’s plucked, can’t you see?”) and goes to live with his brother, Shorty Paco. Paco has disabled daughter, Tiny, who can’t walk or talk – his wife refers to her and Azarias as “innocents, a couple of little innocents” and neither seem to have an ounce of cruelty in them. Paco’s señorito, Iván, relies on him when it comes to shooting birds, a hobby which seems to take up most of his time. When Paco falls from a tree and breaks his leg, we again see the lack of empathy so typical of their class:

“for fuck’s sake, don’t cop out, fag, who’s going to fix the decoy for all the wood pigeons over in Las Planas/”

When the doctor tells Iván that the ankle is broken only for Iván to insist he needs Paco at the next hunt, he adds:

“I’m telling you what I know Iván, you do what you want, you’re the donkey’s master.”

Paco is replaced by his son, Quirce, who, despite his skill, is disliked by Ivan: “sulky, yes-maybe-no gruff, surly, unresponsive”. In fact, he is simply not subservient enough. Later he is replaced by Azarias, a decision which will lead to the novel’s violent conclusion.

The apparently timeless setting and the chapter headings, which begin with characters’ names but end abstractly with ‘The Accident’ and ‘The Crime’, give the novel a fabular feel, and, indeed, it is certainly a morality tale. Rarely will you experience such a powerful condemnation of the divide between rich and poor (at one point Paco is described as “poorer than a pig”). More than simply suffering a lack of material goods, the poor are denied not simply freedom but agency; their humanity is only rarely recognised. Azarias barely exists for Iván – until it is too late for both of them.

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An Answer from Limbo

June 21, 2026
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Brian Moore’s fourth novel, An Answer from Limbo, like his third, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, features a self-centred Irishman in America, though in this case Brendan Tierney does seem to have some genuine talent as a writer. Having published a handful of short stories, his novel remains a work in progress, hampered by the responsibilities he has as a husband, father and son (sending money home to Ireland for his widowed mother). He is finally prompted into action by the success of a (less talented) friend who was once “filled with the same daydreams and bitternesses” but has now gained the publishing contract Tierney seeks:

“How many works of the imagination have been goaded into life by the envy of an untalented contemporary’s success. More, I would wager, than by any sight of talent rewarded.”

Tierney decides that the solution to his problem (time to complete his novel) is to bring his mother over from Ireland to look after his two children while his wife, Jane, returns to work so allowing him the opportunity to finish in months what would otherwise take years. Early signs of the tensions that will arise from this arrangement are evident even before his mother has stepped off the plane when Teirney suggests to Jane that the room she redecorated for the other Mrs Tierney would benefit from an armchair:

“But it will destroy the room.”

While this hints at the more profound culture clash that will follow, Tierney’s idea is also born of selfishness, however, as he tells Jane, “It’s just that I hope she sits in here a lot. After all, we don’t want her on top of us all the time.” As Moore has previously demonstrated, he is as adept at portraying female characters as male and it is therefore no surprise that he gives as much space to the two women as he does to Tierney, alternating his protagonist’s first person chapters with those which recount events from the point of view of Jane and Tierney’s mother, though in the third person (a narrative choice that also suggests Tierney’s self-centred nature). But, although Teirney’s egotism is the main focus of Moore’s novel, both Jane and his mother will also make their own selfish choices.

In Jane’s case, her dissatisfaction with life is centred on Tierney’s inability to satisfy her sexually. She is first introduced with the sentence:

“Jane Tierney dreamed of dark ravishers, young and fierce, who loomed in her thoughts like menacing yet exciting phalli…”

It is such dreams that lead her to begin an affair with a work colleague, Vito, whom she finds “menacing yet exciting”. Although she attempts to resists his approaches, she finds herself overwhelmed by, in her own words, “some sick thing that was hidden inside you all these years just waiting its chance to come out.” Her only chance, she decides, is to leave the job which her husband insists she keep until the novel is finished. Meanwhile, Tierney’s mother worries that his children are not baptised, especially after her grandson falls from a slide and cuts his head. Knowing her son will never agree, she secretly baptises them herself, only for Jane to find out later from her daughter:

“She did this spooky spell and she wet our face with water and she said, ‘I baptize thee in the holy ghost.’”

In all three cases the characters are subject to fixations which eliminate their ability to consider others, and which they excuse by suggesting they are outwith their control. On this occasion Moore implies that Tierney is a talented writer – no longer a comic figure like Ginger Coffey, he veers towards the tragic. Before he leaves Ireland for America he boasts to his friend, Tom, “I’ll be perfectly willing to sacrifice anybody or anything for the sake of my work,” and Tom replies:

“I believe you. You’ll sacrifice other people, all right. But will you sacrifice yourself?”

And though by the novel’s end, he feels he has, the reader would do well to note Jane’s misgivings:

“At twenty-eight wasn’t it an admission of failure to have no person, nothing which you loved more than you loved yourself?”

“Pathetic is not tragic,” she concludes. An Answer from Limbo is Moore’s most complex novel yet, applying its questions about the creation of art and the figure of the artist to all of life and finding an answer that admits to our essential loneliness.

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Bait

June 14, 2026
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Daunt Books already has a track record in dark, Spanish-language fiction having published both Maria Bastaros’ disturbing short story collection, Hungry for What, and Elisa Levi’s novel That’s All I Know which begins with a warning not to enter the forest as no one ever returns. Uruguayan writer, Eugenia Ladra’s, debut novel, Bait, translated by Miriam Tobin, can now be added to that list. Like That’s All I Know, it is a coming-of-age story with a rural setting, one where modernity only occasionally raises its head (noticeably, the first mention of mobile phones refers to “dodgy reception” and “batteries dead”) fostering the impression of a village, Paso Chico or ‘small step’, rooted in its primitive past. There is certainly something primitive in the opening scene where we find the novel’s protagonist, thirteen-year-old Marga, kicking a dog to death:

“Amid the dust raised by the blows, the men stared at her, confused, nobody more than Recio who couldn’t understand why his girlfriend, rooted firmly to the spot, was shattering the ribs and backbone of the animal on the earth, making it jerk back and forth.”

While such violence may not be normal for Marga, it is pervasive in the village, as we see when the narrative rewinds a few months to document Recio’s arrival and his experience of The Welcoming, “a beating that was held whenever some stranger pitched up in the village and decided to stay.” Marga first sees Recio at The Welcoming:

“…unable to hide how the boy a few steps away struck her as a new thing, from another world, though in reality he was just like the rest of them: the same lean body, the same sweaty hair stuck to his temples, forehead and back of his neck…”

Recio is given the task of accompanying Paso Chico’s statue of the Virgin which moves from house to house each Friday, and so he comes to stay with Justa, Marga’s grandmother (her mother died giving birth to her). Marga’s sexual awakening is central to her coming-of-age story: when she wakes, we are told she feels the urge “to slide a couple of her fingers down below…ready to explore the wet patch she’d made during the early hours of the morning.” When Recio falls drunkenly asleep she sneaks into his bedroom:

“Soundlessly, she latched onto Recio’s open mouth and, emboldened by being the only one awake, stuck her pink tongue into its black hole.”

Rather than being a passive victim of seduction, Marga initiates the contact between them with her sexual curiosity. Her agency is contrasted with the expected passivity, for example when she finds work helping a blind man, Don Godoy, who encourages her to lie on the mattress beside him, lying still “even when the hand was no longer on top of her T-shirt and started moving underneath it, caressing her back between her clothes and her skin.” At this point she walks out, asserting her ownership of her body.

There is perhaps something similar in her later attraction to the tiger which accompanies the annual visit of the circus. Throughout the novel it is clear that wild dogs roam Paso Chico’s streets and, despite the reassurances of Olga, the village midwife, Marga is terrified:

“Marga clung to Olga trembling, and though that she’d never felt like this, so small, so much like a piece of meat, like bait, even when she glanced down and saw nothing but a jumble of bristling fur and frenzied tails.”

Later she is tasked with bringing the tiger meat in return for circus tickets (“surely you can come up with some kind of meat to bring this creature, one of God’s own”) and she names it for the first time (the circus owner never having considered doing so), Sol, as its fur was “just like the sun at first light.” With men and animals, Marga struggles to be more than bait; unable to escape the sexual threat and violence around her, she attempts instead to gain some control. It is this that gives the novel some semblance of hope, like the sun at first light, “when it wasn’t yet strong and  could barely penetrate the darkness of the early hours.”

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Lowest Common Denominator

June 9, 2026
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Pirrko Saisio is a prolific Finnish writer, particularly for the theatre, whose work goes back to the mid-seventies. Lowest Common Denominator, a 1998 novel and the first part of a trilogy, seems to be her first appearance in English, thanks to translator Mia Spangenberg. The novel is clearly autobiographical with details such as her middle name, Helena, and her daughter’s name, Elsa, included. It is largely concerned with the narrator, whom I think we can safely call Saisio’s, childhood, though (as the mention above of her daughter’s name makes evident) some chapters are set when she is an adult. The novel opens with a scene that will be repeated later: the first time she writes imaginatively:

“I wrote a sentence in my mind: She didn’t want to wake up.

“I changed the sentence: She didn’t want to wake up yet.

“I added another sentence to the first: She was too tired to go to school.”

“I had become she,” she observes, a technique that will be used throughout the novel as the narrative voice moves from first to third person from paragraph to paragraph. As disconcerting as this is for the reader, Saisio’s uncertainty over her own identity is more disconcerting for her. Early in the story she tells us, “I would like to be a boy.” Later she lists all the different people she has to be:

“One for Grandma during the long, grey winter days, a girl who knows how to wash dishes…

“One for Grandpa, a girl who’s brave enough not to go to school…

“One for Mother, a girl who’s energetic and likes sports…

“One for Father, a girl who’s sure on her feet as soon as she puts on a pair of hockey skates…

“And one who’s a boy, and that’s me.”

Lest we take this literally and assume the narrator is transgender, we soon learn that as an adult she is in a lesbian relationship, and as a child her crushes are on women, beginning with Miss Lunova, who announces the acts in a revue wearing a swimsuit:

“She loves Miss Lunova with a passion that consumes her…”

When the show ends, she insists that Miss Lunova move in with them. When she realises this is not possible, she is not only distraught because she will not see Miss Luniva again, and because she realises that she will forget her:

“But the most horrific thing of all is that she will never get Mother and Father back, because they don’t understand any of this.”

This is perhaps the first sign of her strained relationship with her parents, and her father in particular. Interestingly, she also presents this as if her self were divided, in this case into a Complainer and a Tormentor. “Nothing was ever good enough,” the Complainer complains, while the Tormentor adds:

“Your father didn’t accept you as the girl you were, and then you went on to become a homosexual. Brilliant!”

Despite this, the father is one of the most interesting characters in the novel. A beneficiary of the Finland – Soviet Union Society who owns shelves of (unread) works by Lenin and Stalin, he later embraces capitalism more fully than the rest of his family, complaining when the gummy bears sold in his wife’s shop are placed in paper bags thus costing more than they retail at. But this is a novel full of characters, reaching back through the generations and extending to aunts and uncles, providing the reader with plenty of stories to enjoy. The novel ends with her father’s funeral, but it is largely the story of Saisio’s childhood. Luckily the second volume, Backlight, about her teenage years, has already been trnalsted and published with the third to follow. Given the engaging voice and innovative style of Lowest Common Denominator, I would imagine most readers will be keen to return to Saisio’s work and life.

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Dreaming of Dead People

June 5, 2026
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Dreaming of Dead People is the last of Rosalind Belben’s four 1970s novels, published in 1979 – it would be ten years until the next one. The novel is made up of six sections, connected by the narrator’s reflections rather than her story:

“I visualized the arrangement of these chapters to echo the compartments of a biography… Sexuality for sure, and visual images, dreams, the habit of reading, the centrality of animals in her life as in mine, guilt, sorrows and deep grief, the barriers between Lavinia and other people…and the chemistry.”

Lavinia (named after the ill-fated character from Titus Andronicus) finds herself halfway through her life (echoes of Dante – though we might find thirty -six a little early to be coping with age and aimlessness) and facing the future without purpose and alone:

“I have turned thirty-six and have never had children. I am a shrivelled person, I have sucked myself dry; I am a figure of fun; an object for curiosity; an old maid; or I shall be, old; don’t suppose I don’t mind. I do.”

She sets her intention out in the opening section, stating “I want to make sense of my life.” It is set in in a gloomy, winter Venice and revolves around her interaction with an English family with two young children, a pointed reminder of her own childless state. She grows fond of the children and offers to babysit, but doubts herself as she does so, reflecting an essential solitariness in her character as much as a lack of confidence in her role. The section ends on a moment of shock typical of Belben, which Lavinia confesses is her lasting impression of the family, when the youngest child, Kitty, bites a glass, cutting her mouth.

The second section, ‘The Act of Darkness’, moves quickly onto Lavinia’s sex life, or rather its absence – “I have not fucked for ten years.” The writing, as with The Limit, is fiercely physical, with description that is almost aggressively apt:

“Or I feel nothing else but cunt, twitching like the nose of a rabbit…”

From desire we move directly to orgasm, which she only experiences later in life:

“I thought sex so marvellous I couldn’t imagine there was more.”

Not wanting a vibrator to be discovered should she drop dead, she uses an electric toothbrush. In another writer the humour would be self-deprecating but here there is no attempt to make her experiences palatable by removing any seriousness – yet at the same time there is an English practicality to it, with no sense of seduction, even though the need is deeply felt.

If these two sections are united by Lavinia’s loneliness and lack of fulfilment, the next (‘Cuckoo’), in which she retells the story of Robin Hood interspersed with middle-English songs, is harder to incorporate in a wider vision. Yet somehow, by the time he reappears in the novel’s conclusion, it makes a kind of sense. At the very least he represents Lavinia’s ties to the land and nature which form the focus of the next section, ‘Owl’. Here she tells of the animals she has known, and one dog in particular:

“Just as one loves many human beings, and in a whole lifetime two or three more than the rest, one loves many animals, and a single dog, or horse, or monkey with a special love, most of all.”

This is perhaps the most moving section of the novel, which, given the final section is about her relationship with her mother and her father (who died when she was child), is a bold but defensible claim. In his introduction, Gabriel Josipovici begins, “Rosalind Belben’s books are hard to read and impossible to forget.” There is certainly something unrelenting in her gaze, both inward and outward – though the distinction is less clear than it generally is in literary fiction, everything is physical. Almost fifty years later, her work continues to discomfort and unsettle.

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Memoirs of a Midget

June 1, 2026
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A couple of years ago I began reading the winners of the James Tait Black Prize, the UK’s oldest literary prize, starting with the very first winner, Hugh Walpole’s The Secret City. Unfortunately, I only got as far as the second winner, D H Lawrence’s The Lost Girl before faltering in my endeavour. Fear not, however, as I have eventually returned to the fray with the 1921 victor, Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget. Walter de la mare is best known today as a writer for children, and perhaps also of ghost stories, but he wrote a handful of novels and this (his third and final) – described by Angela Carter as “a minor but authentic masterpiece” – won the third James Tait Black Prize despite, or perhaps because of, its rather unusual premise.

The novel’s narrator is a young woman of unusually small size – how small is never entirely clear, but certainly small enough to be easily carried around and to walk across a table. Her name is also never revealed as she is known throughout by various nicknames such as Miss M or Midgetina. Most of the novel is set between her twentieth and twenty-first year as prior to this she has stayed quietly with her parents. However, her mother dies and, when her father quickly follows, it is discovered that his business affairs are such that she cannot continue to live in her family home and must move to lodge with a Mrs Bowater. Mrs Bowater treats her well, but she develops a habit of sneaking out at night to look at the stars, only to be caught when her landlady’s daughter (well, adopted daughter), Fanny, returns from the school where she teaches. This marks the beginning of an uneven relationship, evident from the moment they speak, Fanny rejecting the stars as “angels’ tin-tacks.” It is Miss M, however, who first turns down the idea of friendship, embarrassed at having been found out:

“The sidelong face grew hard and solemn in the firelight, and once more the eyes surveyed me under lifted brows… ‘If you wish to see the last of me, here it is. I don’t thrust myself on people there’s no need.’”

Both characters are prickly for different reasons – Miss M due to her diminutive stature, Fanny from a desire to escape her straightened circumstances. Soon they appear to be firm friends, though Miss M’s devotion outweighs Fanny’s more selfish view of life. We see this in the way she continues to give hope to a suitor, Mr Crimble, even involving Miss M in the deception. Later Mr Crimble will kill himself, leaving Mis M feeling partly responsible, especially as she becomes impatient with what she knows is his hopeless love:

“Why couldn’t the black cowering creature take himself off? What concern of mine was his sick sheepish look?”

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De la Mare makes Miss M a complex character, seeking to be kind but often self-absorbed and even stuck-up. Fanny is, if anything, more interesting, but less likeable.

From Mrs Bowater, Miss M goes to London and a Mrs Monnerie who sees her guest as something unique to exhibit and yet still treats her in a friendly manner:

“If life is a fountain, she preferred to become of the larger bubbles as near as possible to its summit. She almost succeeded in making me a minute replica of herself.”

But if the novel is in part about the morality of using Miss M for entertainment (she will, at one point, join a circus) it is also about love, something she initially cannot comprehend (beyond her feelings for Fanny) but later experiences in the form of Mr Anon, a man only slightly taller than her (also described as a ‘hunchback) who first watches her then introduces himself. He remains a mysterious figure, but one she eventually accepts.

Memoirs of a Midget is (ironically) a long novel at over 500 pages and with a plot stretched rather thin. It has a tendency to come to life for a chapter or two but then slow the pace unnecessarily, particularly as Miss M’s thoughts are not as interesting as she appears to think they are. Certain elements of obfuscation (Mr Anon, a writer Miss M meets) merely make the narrative unconvincing especially as it is rich in detail unless, it sometimes feels, that detail is important – for example, what do Miss M and Mr Anon really look like? There is also a sense that despite being in constant communication with us for a very long time, Miss M is determined to keep her innermost feelings to herself. Angela Carter is quoted on the cover: “It sticks like a splinter in the mind” – but for me it was that very sharpness that was missing.

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Posted in James Tait Black Memorial Prize | 4 Comments »

The Messengers

May 23, 2026
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Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud is a French author of numerous novels and short story collections, the first published in 1973 and the latest, it seems, this year (Un beau diable – A Beautiful Devil), yet he remains largely untranslated. Until this short novel from 1974, The Messengers (translated by Edward Gauvin and published by Wakefield Press), only a selection of stories, A Life on Paper had appeared, fifteen years ago. “It is no secret,” Gauvin tells us, “that The Messengers is Chateaureynaud’s most nakedly Kafkaesque work,” – and it is from Kafka that the author draws his epigraph in a novel that almost insists on being read allegorically.

Its setting is deliberately vague, though not modern, with its ancient buildings and firelit feasts. Rank is clearly important – we have servants, peasants, men of power and veiled ladies – though less so to our protagonist, a young man who remains nameless, and has little sense of his place in the world. He is easily persuaded, as the novel opens, to go with a hunchbacked servant girl to a place “where it’s warm and you can eat,” but she advises him not to join the celebration he witnesses and instead she takes him to a barn and tells him to wait on her return. At night, however, he leaves his hiding place to explore, an early indication of an innocent impetuousness which quickly escalates when he sees a beautiful woman:

“Scorning all caution, he steps out from hiding. The woman has vanished round another corner of the corridor. The boy gives chase.”

He follows her to her room where his initial childlike appeal (Chateaureynaud refers to him as a “child” more than once) begins to change when he finds himself close to her (“his eyes glitter with a harder flame”) causing the woman to cry for help even as she tells him to flee. This early adventure gives an indication of how the author will proceed, with a detailed realism in the moment but with characters who have neither past nor (in the woman’s case) future and whose relationships will be significant but brief.

Even as he implores the woman to let him have his way, the young man remains, in the extravagance of his passion, sympathetic, but Chateaureynaud quickly disabuses us of any notion that these are the adventure of an embryonic hero when he encounters an old peasant woman after escaping and she realises he is on the run:

“The boy is upon her, grabbing her with both hands. She screams. No time to put off a fight: a few quick steps of a grotesque pas de deux and they’re at the well. He throws her in headfirst, in a dusty blossoming of underthings. A dull smack, a distant slosh, and it’s done.”

Again, the action is impetuous and, similarly, is neither prepared for nor has any consequence, either practical or emotional. Instead, Chateaureynaud uses humour to ensure the shock of the violence is mitigated. This is not the only act of violence that will occur involving the young man especially when he meets the messenger (for, as you may have guessed, our protagonist is not the messenger of the title). He falls into the messenger’s company after a (impetuous) confrontation on a footbridge (which he loses). The messenger takes pity on him:

“You’re coming with me… At least you’ll eat your fill tonight. Well, what are you waiting for? Come, I say!”

The messenger is, of course, the novel’s central allegory – a man who carries a message from place to place but each time he thinks he has reached his final destination he is told to go further. It’s interesting that Chateaureynaud does not make him the central character of the story, though one reason for that will become apparent at the end. However, it is also advantageous in allowing the reader to identify first with the flawed, immature young man rather than a character that might be dismissed as a symbol.

The Messengers is a wonderful short novel that should have been available in English long before now and will hopefully signal more of Chateaureynaud’s work being translated without a further fifteen year wait.

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Good and Evil and Other Stories

May 14, 2026
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From her earliest work Samanta Schweblin has been adept at not only writing children but utilising childhood in her work, and in her latest collection of six short stories, Good and Evil and Other Stories, translated by Megan McDowell, most feature a child or children either centrally or peripherally. This is more than an exercise in characterisation as childhood exists on the same border of the known and unknown where most of her fiction occurs. In ‘A Fabulous Animal’ Leila says of her friend Elena’s son:

“He was an extraordinary kid, and at the same time an extremely normal one.”

The story, as is the case throughout this collection, is built upon layers of narrative. Leila narrates both to the reader and to Elena, recalling the day of her son’s death when she was present. The phone call takes place almost twenty years later, during which time the friends have not kept in touch, occasioned by Elena’s discovery that she is dying. Leila tells the reader more than her friend (“I don’t say anything about this to Elena…”). At its heart, however, is one of those strange connections Schweblin excels in (the collection’s epigraph, from Silvina Ocampo, is “Strange is always truer”) where the boy tells her about wanting to be a horse, and on the day of his death she finds “a horse…”

“…lying in the road as if fallen from above… Its big dark eyes were searching the night, and I felt certain they were searching for me.”

In the opening story, ‘Welcome to the Club’, the daughter is instrumental only so far as her pet rabbit goes missing. And yet there is more than that at the root of the mother’s fears, in a tale which begins with her attempted suicide:

“My oldest watches and listens. The worst part is whatever it is she’s learning from us.”

The rabbit is returned by a neighbour, a man the narrator has often seen hunting, but her assumptions are unfounded – “You think I hunt because I like it?” He saw her attempting to drown herself earlier and the advice he offers her is to cause pain to those she loves:

“That will fill you with guilt, and if the guilt is strong enough, you’ll need to stay to take care of them.”

Death is a common theme, but never the casual deaths of horror fiction. Each death reverberates through the living, even if, as in ‘Wiliam at the Window’, it is the death of a cat. This story also has the advantage if being set among writers giving the impression of autobiography. In ‘The Woman from Atlántida’, the narrator must live with the death of her sister.  This, too, is a story of childhood, as the sisters are young when they first meet the woman on holiday, sneaking out at night to explore the town. The woman is supposedly a poet but is living the life of an alcoholic. When the girls appear she asks them if they are ghosts, but the older sister replies, “We are inspiration.” They care for the woman, washing her and cleaning her house, but their kindness has a tragic end.

In ‘An Eye in the Throat’ the narrator is also looking back at his childhood when he swallowed a battery which damages his throat to the extent he needs a tracheotomy and cannot speak. The real focus of the story, however, is the father and an incident where he leaves the son at a petrol station. Though he is found there when he returns, the father becomes convinced something has happened to him:

“Before the bath, my father checks my body meticulously, including under my arms and between my legs, and even makes me open my mouth.”

Over the years that follow he receives numerous silent phone calls and blames the owner of the petrol station until he eventually confronts him and discovers the (strange) truth.

The final story, ‘A Visit from the Chief’, is perhaps the most shocking, despite its very ordinary premise. The narrator, whose mother is in a care home, spots another patient who has escaped (she is partly responsible having given them money) and takes her home. When the son comes for his mother, however, he is armed and intends to take anything of value but also offers to help her “improve”:

“…stealing makes taking money from people without giving anything in return, and I, as you must have realised, have a lot to give.”

Whether he does so or not will be for the reader to judge.

Good and Evil and Other Stories is perhaps Schweblin’s most accomplished collection of stories so far. Very little is left of the supernatural; instead the strangeness grows out of everyday life. The telling is supported not only by the choice of narrator, but also by layers of memories and viewpoints, what’s said and what remains unsaid. And at the end of each one some kind of truth, whether we want to see it or not.

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