Although the main story was good, and the alternate chapters were interesting in themselves, I found this book to be a good example of someone trying to hard to be clever and creative.

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oldblack | 1 muu arvostelu | Jan 27, 2023 |

The Tower Tekijä: Carol Lefevre

Composite novels a.k.a. short story cycles, can be tricky things to read: though they have the form of short stories the reader can't just 'move on' to the next one because you know that the stories are linked in some way. You need to remember who's who and what their issues are, so that you can discover the connections so cunningly woven into the text. So it is with The Tower, Carol Lefevre's latest venture with this form, following on from the highly regarded Murmurations (2020, see my review).

The character of Dorelia captured my attention from the outset. I liked her appearances in the stories best of all. Those of us who've had the experience of caring for elderly parents are only too familiar with the emotional tug of war between enabling them to maintain independence and providing care. Dorelia is a feisty woman whose choice of a tower to live in for her old age disturbs her adult children. From the moment she was widowed she was alert to their plans for her future:

When her Geordie died, it had been a shock to come up against that sudden, implacable absence. It was like being slapped hard by an icy hand. Then, in the terrible limbo between his dying and the funeral, she'd caught glimpses of him everywhere, so that coming indoors at dusk, as she reached for the light switch, Geordie's shadow would darken his favourite armchair; in their bedroom, she surprised a flash of his old mustard corduroy coat sleeve in the wardrobe mirror. Every mirror in the house held fragments of Geordie, even the little circular hand-mirror with the crack in it he had used for shaving.

Dorelia would have covered them all with cloths if it hadn't been for the children. They would have pounced on that as a sign that she was not holding up — she imagined Laurence and Hannah frowning and reaching for their phones. Apparently, they stored within those devices lists of suitable places they researched on their parents' behalf. (p.2)

(Yes, been there, done that, and my mother in particular was not best pleased about it.)

It was Dorelia's great good fortune to have stumbled upon the tower house during a rare window of inattention from her children. (p.23)

Ha!

Dorelia and her friend Bunty are creatives and in their early years they struggled with the conflicting demands of art and relationships. Their career paths diverged but their friendship endured. And I loved this aspect of the book: the enduring friendships of older women is such a special phenomenon, it's beautiful to see it depicted in fiction with such perception.

Over tea and doughnuts, Dorelia reveals her ambition to rewrite the stories that put old women in a poor light, the wicked stepmothers and the evil queens of folk lore, starting with Rapunzel's witch, a figure from fairy tale who doesn't have a reader with even a smidgeon of sympathy. Bunty understands this immediately.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/10/01/the-tower-by-carol-lefevre/… (lisätietoja)

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anzlitlovers | 1 muu arvostelu | Oct 1, 2022 |

Murmurations Tekijä: Carol Lefevre

Murmurations came my way when it was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. It's a delicate, melancholy collection of interlinked stories,—each of which could be read independently, but together they form a cohesive novella about a generation of women whose lives were constrained by the mores of the time and the isolation of urban life. The unusual title refers to connections among the behaviour of starlings which persists no matter how large the group is, but it serves to draw attention to the ways in which urban life diminishes connections between people. In these stories characters have only fleeting connections with each other—sometimes only gossip—and they do not support each other. They don't seem to know how.

For me, it is the paintings which inspired the stories that are more significant. In the author's Acknowledgments at the back of the book, Lefevre says that these original prompts are not necessary, but a quick web search enhanced my appreciation of the deft characterisation and the landscaping of the stories.

Murmurations is not set in a specific city, or country, but in the daunting urban landscapes painted by the American artist Edward Hopper. Noted for his reticence and habitual silence, Hopper's flat, saturated colours, his erasing of detail, produced pictures in which absence is as compelling and eloquent as presence. Each of these stories began as a response to one of Hopper's paintings...

The first story, 'After the Island' features a doctor's secretary called Emily, and is a response to Hopper's 1927 painting, 'Automat'. This portrait of a woman alone sets the tone for the collection: her environment is bleak, and she is troubled. It isn't necessary to know this painting to read the story, but it's easy to imagine Emily in this scene, mulling over her dilemma—her unwitting failure to respond to a cry for help.

Automat (1927), by Edward Hopper (*Wikipedia)

If you click through the links to view the paintings that inspired the stories, a pattern emerges. There is tension between the characters, there is resignation and sadness, there is quiet desperation; and there is profound loneliness.

'After the Island' — Automat

'Little Buddhas Everywhere' — Hotel Window

'Evenings All Afternoon' — Stairway (I can't find this one)

'Glory days' — Summer Evening

'The Lives We Lost' — Room in New York

'This Moment is Your Life' — Morning Sun

'Murmuration's — Summer in the City

'Paper Boats' — Women in the Sun

Erris Cleary, the doctor's wife whose death troubles all the characters, haunts the collection. Others who cross her path are not certain whether she was an alcoholic, a madwoman, an embarrassment to her husband or a victim of foul play. Each of them fails to connect, not through malice, but through the exigencies of daily life.

The bleak landscapes seem malevolent:

She had hated this place from the start, hated its weather, and the way people talked, hated its ugly houses. and the shapes of the trees; she hated the way locals stuck together, the way they were always reminding you that you didn't belong, that you would never be one of them, however long you stayed; she hated when they banged on about the natural beauty of the place when honestly it was bleak, and much of it rundown, and all of it desperately behind the times. What she dreaded most, she'd said, was being stuck here until she was old, or dying and being buried here, trapped forever in its cold and hostile soil. ('Evening All Afternoon', p.39)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/04/28/murmurations-by-carol-lefevre/… (lisätietoja)

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anzlitlovers | Apr 27, 2021 |

If you were mine Tekijä: Carol Ann Lefevre

This is a story of mothers and daughters. It tells the story of three woman over three decades. The first is Aurora who lives in outback Australia. Aurora's brother is killed by a lightning strike at a very young age and followiing that event Esther, her mother, retreats into silence for most of the time and Aurora suffers greatly as a result. As a young adult , seemingly unable to form lasting attachments, she travels to Dublin to find out more about her father's family. There she comes in contact with Rose, a pregnant and confused sixteen year old who has been abandoned by her mother as a very young child and adopted out. Rose comes to live with her and has the baby to whom Aurora forms a very strong attachment. Through the clues that she has, Rose is finally able to track down her real mother. She is able to reconcile the relationship with her, and overcome the difficulties with her adoptive mother which caused to her to run away from home and seek refuge with Aurora in the house where she thought her real mother had lived. Through reaching out to Rose, and rediscovering the joys of maternal love Aurora is able to retun to Australia and pick up her own life with some hope for the future. Just an average rataing for this. Wasn't a great story to me.… (lisätietoja)

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kiwifortyniner | Nov 18, 2009 |

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