Daddy's Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thoroughly depressing story of a woman's breakdown in a bad marriage with unsympathetic children in 1958. I loved it. Penelope Mortimer is a skilled writer with superb attention to detail and a real empathy for her main character. The adulterous husband is almost textbook awful. The dialogue is spot on, funny at times, accurate always. I was reminded of Ex-Wife, another sad tale of women's lot in the 1950's which I relished.

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Jacob's Room is Full of Books

Jacob's Room is Full of Books: A Year of Reading by Susan Hill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The inscription to Lynne Hatwell at the front of the book tickled my soul. For years, I followed Hatwell's blog, Dovegrey Reader which is no longer extant, but I had the pleasure of talking books with her in her Devon home in 2018. She gave up book criticism to our great loss.

Susan Hill has written the kind of book that I reach for first, not unlike my book conversation with Lynne, a discussion of what she's reading over the course of a year. This is the second such treasure from Hill, the first was Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home where she forsook all purchases and borrowing of books for a year to read what was on her shelves. These books put such fantasies to rest for me. She's listed dozens of titles I've yet to read and had to order at once. Best of all, her opinions are forthright and firm: May Sarton's best book wasThe House by the Sea: A Journal ; Alexander McCall Smith has written an illuminating little book on poetry, What W.H. Auden Can Do for You; Martin Amis' early books such as London Fields and Money are his best; good fiction on gambling at the tables: Casino Royale (the only one of the films she likes), Daniel Deronda, Can You Forgive Her? and Dostoevsky's The Gambler. She also writes about the weather and birds in Yorkshire where she lives and the South of France where she summers. She talks about being a controversial judge for the Booker Prize in 2011, writers with whose books she is unable to get along (Patricia Highsmith or most of Iris Murdoch with the exception of The Bell and her essays), geese, the Reformation, notebooks, Edith Wharton, and all titles and authors are indexed. A treat.



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Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"The trick is to lift up the right foot, just a few centimetres off the floor, move it forward through the air, just enough to get past the left foot, and when it gets as far as it can go, lower it. That's all it is, Elena thinks. But she thinks this, and even though her brain orders the movement, her right foot doesn't move. It does not lift up. It does not move forward through the air. It does not lower back down. It's so simple. But it doesn't do it. So Elena sits and waits."

Elena is waiting for the medicine to take effect. Claudia Piñeiro, described on the back of the book as a crime writer, has written a haunting, detailed story of a mother trying to understand her daughter's death by hanging. The police have closed the case as suicide but Elena knows it can't be true. The book is divided into three sections label by each of the day's pills (L-Dopa) the narrator ingests to move her Parkinson's-riddled body as she investigates the death. The writing is dense, the chapters short but this story is a first-person pondering on aging, illness and caregiving. I found it completely absorbing, not without humor, and relatable to friends who have had this horrible disease. I have ordered others of Claudia Piñeiro's novels and hope they share the fine translation of Frances Riddle .



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