Nothing to fear? #logophile

On By CalmgroveIn Books3 Comments

The second quarter of 21st century began – and has since continued – to witness a significant growth in fearfulness amongst people who are particularly sensitive to the existential crises facing us. Others however see dread instead in those who exhibit difference of any kind, whether skin colour, gender, religion, politics or philosophy.

Concomitant with fear, therefore, there are often additional feelings, along the lines of anger, rage, hate and antagonism. Therefore, being afraid can give rise to a polar opposite, abhorrence. Fear, in fact, followed by loathing. But do fear and loathing have to go together like a horse and carriage?

There also are those who say, like former US president Roosevelt, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. (However, tell that to arachnophobes and see what response you get.) Yet is this oft-cited truism as true as it seems? I feel these are questions in search of answers, so here followeth my two penn’orth.

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Bookwise 10/2026

On By CalmgroveIn Books, Bookwise16 Comments
Harry Wingfield’s ‘The Bookshop’ (1964), in ‘Read and Write 1c’, The Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme.

October has been an especially bookish month, has it not? For a start there was Banned Books Week (for which I read Octavia Butler’s The Fledgling) and Bookshop Day in the UK, Love your Bookshop Day in Australia (Luke Pearson’s graphic novel Hilda and the Black Hound was my purchase on this occasion); and finally there was Green Libraries Week (21st–28th October), a celebration of libraries across the UK with a focus on sustainability and the climate. I’ve dug out a Mount TBR book on long-lived yew trees to finish reading and review some time next month.

Meanwhile I completed eight titles for this year’s Readers Imbibing Peril challenge (though no real challenge for me) – just in time for Halloween – and I’ve added a couple of posts for my Gulliver300th project. I also focused on a Jorge Luis Borges collection for the week-long 1949 Club, included a title tangential to Black History Month in the UK, and enjoyed the middle instalment of Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy. That’s all of course along with using any old excuse to write about books and reading.

Meanwhile, Goodreads informs me that I’ve read 72 titles so far this year* – which also happens to have been my tentative total for the whole year! I do think that at this rate I shall have to up my goal to something like 86 books.

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‘A freak of nature’: #Gulliver300th

On By CalmgroveIn classic6 Comments
Brobdingnag, north of California (1703).

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts.
By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships.
Part Two. Benjamin Motte, 1726;
in Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Albert J Rivero (2002).

A Voyage to Brobdingnag

‘I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.’ — Chapter 6.

It’s 1702 and, scarcely two months after returning home from his fortuitous escape from Lilliput and seeing his wife and family, Gulliver is ready to embark on a new trip – perhaps a foretaste of the antisocial and misanthropic attitudes he’ll display in his final voyage.

While sailing aboard the Adventure – surely a double indication of an intended commercial venture which then becomes a risky activity – he encounters storms and tempests, which drive the ship to an unknown land; here he is accidentally marooned by the crew rushing to escape in their boat, like Odysseus’s men fleeing from the Island of Cyclopes.

Alas, the parallel with Odysseus and the giant Polyphemus is only too apt as Gulliver escapes death by being scythed only to be exhibited like a sideshow freak, discussed by giant philosophers who declare he’s a lusus naturæ or ‘freak of nature’, and get carried aloft by a gigantic bird (as was Sinbad the Sailor) before finally returning to his own country.

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Pupal soup: #RIPxxi

On By CalmgroveIn literary fiction6 Comments
1863 lepidoptera print.

The Behaviour of Moths
(The Sister in North America)
by Poppy Adams.
Virago Press, 2009 (2008).

‘I might have a poor understanding of people but I have an instinct for moths,’ Ginny Stone declares towards the end of the novel, in a rather late admission of what was very evident from very early on in her narrative; and a score of years on from the novel’s first publication (and a quarter of a century after the term was first coined) it’s very clear that Ginny is what we now would diagnose as neurodivergent.

That dichotomy of understanding and instinct that Ginny acknowledges is even signalled in different title choices for this novel – The Behaviour of Moths in the UK editions, The Sister in North American editions. I suppose the transatlantic title was selected because the British original might have suggested a natural history study, which is understandable enough.

But with a novel that highlights two very different siblings, the older one with what’s slightingly now called a ‘special interest’, the younger one much more interested in engaging with wider social circles, the two very different titles accurately reflect the two sides of the tragedy. And tragedy it is because the testimony we read may not be entirely reliable, in terms of what it omits as well as what it purports to describe.

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Transgression: #RIPxxi

On By CalmgroveIn speculative fiction, supernatural horror14 Comments
Daniel Olivier, Pexels.com

Fledgling by Octavia E Butler.
Headline, 2022 (2005).

‘I awoke to darkness. I was hungry—starving!—and I was in pain. There was nothing in my world but hunger and pain, no other people, no other time, no other feelings.’

This dramatic start signals a novel that challenges perceptions and questions assumptions, rejuvenates a hackneyed genre and examines transgressive actions.

That the first-person narrative begins in a cave, from which the protagonist has to emerge almost like a newborn, already tells us a lot about the story arc: why is this character here, and what do they need to learn about who they are?

And we too need to have answers: is this a murder mystery or a horror novel, a vampire tale or science fantasy, an action thriller or a courtroom drama, an allegory or autofiction? Given that this is a novel by Octavia Butler it could be any or, indeed, all of these.

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A new venture: #Gulliver300th

On By CalmgroveIn classic6 Comments
Captain Lemuel Gulliver: 19th-century engraving by Willmann, Colin, & Outhwaite, after Paul Gavarni.

After his shipwreck on and fortuitous escape from Lilliput and Blefuscu, Lemuel Gulliver was still smitten with wanderlust due to his restless nature. This time, en route to Surat on the west coast of India via the Cape of Good Hope, the Adventure (the sailing vessel he’s travelling on) is blown violently off course right across the Pacific towards the west coast of North America.¹

And it’s here, in 1703 and this time marooned by the crew, that he discovers a hitherto unknown land mass which will become known as Brobdingnag (though later editions of his Travels will insist that this is a printing mistake, and that the land is really called Brobdingrag, with a second ‘r’). A map is duly appended to provide a visual indication of the country’s location, size and proportion.

Except that little in the text about Brobdingnag marries up with can be deduced from the outline map. Does Swift Gulliver think we’re truly gullible, or is he perhaps again dissembling so as to hide the actual position of this new found land? After all, in view of his experiences there, maybe it’s just as well no clues are offered to the curious modern traveller in case they too find themselves in dire straits. This post attempts to chart how our hapless mariner finds his way to the Land of the Giants.

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Aleph to Zahir: #1949Club

On By CalmgroveIn Library of Brief Narratives, short stories9 Comments
‘Hand with Reflecting Sphere’ by Maurits Cornelis Escher: lithograph, 1935.

El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges.
Editorial Losada, 1949.

Part 4/4 of a review of this collection.

  • The Zahir (El zahir)
  • The Writing of the God / The God’s Script (La escritura del dios)
  • The Aleph (El Aleph)
  • Postscript / Epilogue (Epílogo)

In previous posts (here) I’ve been taking a closer look at the short stories Borges wrote and published in his 1949 collection entitled El Aleph, in the order that they appeared in that publication; the translations made by various hands have appeared in various English-language publications in the 1970s which I’ve had for over half a century.¹

We come now to the final three stories in El Aleph which unsurprisingly share many of the same themes and approaches as the previous ten offerings; but I’ll also give some attention to the Epilogue or Afterword which was appended in 1949, and to commentaries he subsequently gave for four of the stories in 1970 in a translated collection confusingly titled The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933–1969.²

In many ways these final three narratives have similarities in their plots though differing in other aspects, so I’ll attempt to bring out what they have in common as well as what makes them distinctive.

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The tragic and the comic: #1949Club

On By CalmgroveIn Library of Brief Narratives, short stories13 Comments
© C A Lovegrove.

El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges.
Editorial Losada, 1949.

Part 3/4 of a continuing review.

  • The Other Death (La otra muerte)
  • Deutsches Requiem (Deutsches réquiem)
  • Averroes’s Search (La busca de Averröes)

Death and identity, guilt and innocence, the tragic and the comic: all have a part to play in the next three tales, from Jorge Luis Borges – in the 1949 short story collection El Aleph –that there is to consider.

A bit of globetrotting is involved as we successively find ourselves in Argentina, then Germany, and finally Spain; and we also travel back through time, from the middle of the 20th century back a few decades or even a few centuries.

Borges will ask us to consider the reliability of memory, question racist dogma and whether those with little or no notion of dramatic storytelling can understand the concepts of tragedy and comedy.

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Life and death: #1949Club

On By CalmgroveIn Library of Brief Narratives, short stories5 Comments
‘The Minotaur’ by George Frederick Watts.

El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges.
Editorial Losada, 1949.

Part 2 of a review of this collection.¹

• Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874))
• Emma Zunz
• The House of Asterion (La casa de Asterión)

As with the first four titles in this short story collection there will be motifs, themes and approaches in common in the succeeding titles, as will be evident when we examine the next three titles.

The main approaches Borges generally takes are four, as identified by Rex Butler: the labyrinthine; the Borgesian; infinity and unity; and short fiction which, like well-constructed jokes, have a final twist or sting in the tail.

Given that the stories in El Aleph virtually represent the culmination of his major fictional endeavours – a series of setbacks including virtual dismissal from his post, the end of a serious relationship, and his deteriorating eyesight all deeply affected him – it’s important to give these stories due consideration even while he continued to write essays, literary criticism and poetry for the next three decades or so.

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Identity and infinity: #1949Club

On By CalmgroveIn Library of Brief Narratives, short stories17 Comments
Giambattista Piranesi, Carcere XIV (‘The Gothic Arch’).

El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges.
Editorial Losada, 1949.

In 1949 the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges arranged to have a collection of his short stories in Spanish published in Buenos Aires; this first edition of El Aleph contained thirteen individual pieces including the title story. Though seemingly expanded and translated into English as The Aleph and Other Stories (1971), confusingly just four were selected to appear in the English-language collection with the same title, a collaboration by Borges with Norman Thomas di Giovanni.

Subsequent editions of El Aleph would include additional stories – ‘Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth’ (Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto), ‘The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths” (Una leyenda arábiga: Historia de los dos reyes y los dos laberintos, como nota de Burton), ‘The Wait’ (La espera) and ‘The Man on the Threshold’ (El hombre en el umbral) in 1952 and, in 1966, ‘La intrusa’ (The Intruder) – but I don’t want to examine those extra five here.

Instead I want to consider translations of the original offerings just in that 1949 volume and, because there are thirteen items plus a postscript or afterword, split them up into four separate posts discussing each one in some detail – as befits well-crafted and singularly extraordinary stories. In this first post the focus will be the first four stories from the list of contents.¹

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Go all in: #ChooseBooks

On By CalmgroveIn Books39 Comments
#BooksAreMyBag #ChooseBooks.

10th October is Bookshop Day, celebrating local bookshops in the UK and Ireland; it’s organised by the Booksellers Association under the #BooksAreMyBag umbrella. The annual one-day celebration of all high street bookshops launched in 2013, and now always falls on the second Saturday in October.

Approximately a thousand retailers, both independents and branches of chain bookstores, participate. Bookshop Day (hashtag #ChooseBooks) aims to celebrate bookshops – their contribution to our communities as well as the service they provide for their customers – and to encourage people to start their Christmas book-shopping early, on their high street, with their local bookshop; to “choose bookshops”.

As it happens, the theme for 2026 aligns with the theme of the UK’s National Year of Reading, “Go All In” (“If you’re into it, read into it”), a campaign led by the National Literacy Trust and the Department for Education and aimed principally at young people. But we can all do our thing, can’t we?

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“A good sort”

On By CalmgroveIn literary fiction12 Comments
Hong Kong Star ferry, 1950s.

The Man in the Wooden Hat
by Jane Gardam.
No 2 in the Old Filth trilogy.
Abacus, (2009).

In Old Filth we gained more than a glimpse of Edward Feathers’ long life from the early 1920s to the early 21st century, from his birth in what was then Malaya to fosterage in Wales, boarding school, university and then training as a lawyer to become a well respected figure in the courts, though still familiarly known as Filth – from the epithet Failed in London, Try Hong Kong.

What Jane Gardam aims to do in this sequel is to present the same story but from a different point of view, that of Filth’s wife Betty. You might think that this could merely be a rerun of the popular adage ‘Behind every successful man there stands a woman’ but Gardam doesn’t resort to this tired cliché; The Man in the Wooden Hat is much more subtle and wide-ranging than that.

When Edward Feathers proposes to Elisabeth Macintosh the bland reason he gives for choosing her is that she’s “a good sort”; what we will find is that she has a complex inner life and secrets of her own, and that the actions she takes will impact, as well as being impacted by, a number of significant others over the decades. The question though that will recur to the reader throughout the narrative is ‘What part does love play in all this?’ Will there be an answer?

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“Writing about himself”: #RIPxxi

On By CalmgroveIn novella14 Comments
New York City, WordPress Free Photo Library.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster:
City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), The Locked Room (1987).
Faber & Faber, 2011 (1987).

I think he’s writing about himself. The story of his life. That’s the only possible answer. Nothing else would fit. — ‘Ghosts’

Auster’s two-part debut The Invention of Solitude (1982) which immediately preceded The New York Trilogy is, as I understand it, a memoir of his father and a third-person rumination on fatherhood, writing and creativity. Not having read it I can’t say how intertwined it is with the three novellas in this trilogy, but it’s clear several obsessive themes link the two titles as well as feeding into their component parts.

While reading, and then after completing the trilogy, my response was to admit toyself that I admired but didn’t love it. I think it’s a tour de force, an extraordinary and intense accomplishment, but it’s never easy to observe personal pain and torment, albeit expressed in inventive ways, and simultaneously sensing that come the final page there’s unlikely to be a truly satisfying resolution.

Therefore I found the best way for me to appreciate the work as a whole was to see it more as a triptych than a trilogy in the usual sense: the latter suggests a chronological narrative while the former invites comparison of three panels that share characters, motifs, ideas and themes, which the eye takes in as it darts to and fro, backwards and forwards, all the while attempting to gain some idea of coherence in Auster’s creation.

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The freedom to read: #BannedBooksWeek

On By CalmgroveIn Books, essay10 Comments

“A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.” This oft-quoted statement by Mary Jo Godwin is a fitting concept to highlight one of the aims of Banned Books Week which, in the UK at least, is this year running from the 4th to the 10th October, 2026, promoting the theme Let Books Be. Protect the Freedom to Read.

Held every year since 1982, sometime between late September and early October, Banned Books Week is an annual awareness campaign promoted by the American Library Association and Amnesty International; while celebrating the freedom to read it draws attention to banned and challenged books, and in addition it highlights persecuted individuals.

As an annual event it draws attention to the importance of free and open access to information whilst also protesting against literature being censored. The issues are of course never plain and simple; the following overlong essay therefore is necessarily serious: any laugh-aloud moments are therefore unintentional.

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Jerome’s successors: #ITD2026

On By CalmgroveIn Books, essay16 Comments
Albrecht Dürer: ‘Der heilige Hieronymus im Gehäus’ (1514); St Jerome in His Study.

As a monoglot reader with limited fluency in French and even less in Italian and Welsh there’s a group of people I’m always grateful to. And there’s even a occasion when I and others can think of celebrating them, for International Translation Day is a day for recognising the often neglected class of ‘translation professionals’.

Celebrated every year on 30th September, this date was chosen because it’s the feast day of Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus. He’s considered the patron saint of translators because he rendered New Testament Greek texts in Latin to create the standardised Vulgate version (biblia vulgata) in the late 4th century.

So all hail St Jerome, as he’s much better known now! (It’s Geronimo in Spanish, Girolamo in Italian, Jeroen in Dutch . . .) He also attempted to create a more accurate translation of the Old Testament based on a Hebrew version, rather than the Septuagint, the 3rd century BCE Greek translation by (it’s said) seventy scholars which had long been the basis of later Latin renditions. But as well as Jerome I want today to remember a female translator who was born ninety years ago in 1936 – a certain Anthea Bell.

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Ancient Pygmæans: #Gulliver300th

On By CalmgroveIn classic13 Comments
‘Gulliver seizes the enemy’s fleet’ by Arthur Rackham, 1904.

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts.
By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships.
Part One. Benjamin Motte, 1726;
in Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Albert J Rivero (2002).

A Voyage to Lilliput

Some ten years before its publication in 1726 Jonathan Swift pithily summarised what was to be the theme of Part One of Gulliver’s Travels as “a Discovery of the Remains of the ancient Pygmæan Empire”, though he then ascribed it to one ‘Martin Scriblerus’, a satirical figure invented by Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and others.

This empire, one of “several remote nations of the world” purportedly visited by a Lemuel Gulliver in 1699, remains the most famous and remembered section of the Travels, almost to the exclusion of the remaining three voyages supposedly undertaken by the accidental explorer.

It will therefore be the focus of the first examination of the Travels I will be making for the tercentenary of the work’s publication, first issued under a pseudonym to avoid the then Whig government’s censure of Swift, one of their best-known critics. To distinguish between ‘Gulliver’s account and Swift’s different intentions I shall hereafter cite either ‘the Travels‘ or ‘his Travells‘.

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Bookwise 2026/9

On By CalmgroveIn Bookwise4 Comments
September is Read a New Book Month.

The equinox has come and gone and the end of September looms, so time now (a little early, I know) for a bit of retrospection before I gird my loins for October, if you’ll pardon the phrase… Note, a couple more sartorial expressions may well be shoehorned into this post!

Two prompts – Readers Imbibing Peril and Short Story September – have provided the virtual mannequin which I’ve clothed with a range of books read this month: titles by authors such as Paul Auster, Angela Carter, Franz Kafka and Ben Okri, and genres such as children’s fiction, classics, mystery, suspense and more, capped off by posts with me wearing Gulliver‘s tricorne hat. But September is also, as I’ve only recently discovered, Read a New Book Month, with the sixth of the month singled out for a special Read a Book Day.

Both these initiatives of course are especially important for the UK’s criminally under-promoted National Year of Reading 2026, a campaign designed to inspire more people to make reading a regular part of their lives. On a personal level some recently acquired books – well, bought actually – function as “new” for this month, for example Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted (2025), Kafka’s The Castle (read for its centenary) and Rebecca Kuang’s Taipei Story (2026, a review for this last will appear in due course).

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Warmhearted and curious

On By CalmgroveIn children's book14 Comments
Stylised raven from the Sutton Hoo shield.

Hilda and the Bird Parade
by Luke Pearson.
Flying Eye Books / Nobrow Ltd, 2016 (2012).

The appeal that graphic novels can have for me is generally the combination of text and image, even though certain brilliant examples of the genre eschew text altogether.

Just as comics have always done, the primary aim is to tell a story, but because we are social animals we pick up much more from cues such as visuals, so that words spoken or written become just one part of the meanings we draw from social interactions.

And so it is with Luke Pearson’s Hilda and the Bird Parade, the third in a series of six fantasy novels which feature a young girl living in an unnamed Nordic country and recount her encounters with humans and mythical beings. And it is the visual cues allied with storyline and text that make this particular title so especially appealing.

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Eye-catching: #ShortStorySeptember

On By CalmgroveIn Library of Brief Narratives4 Comments
Sophie Anderson’s ‘Scheherazade’ (ca 1870), The New Art Gallery Walsall.

‘The Kiss’ (1977),
‘Our Lady of the Massacre’ (1979)
and ‘The Kitchen Child’ (1979)
in Black Venus by Angela Carter.
Picador / Pan Books, 1986 (1985).

She scarcely seems to inhabit time. Or, it is as if she were waiting for Scheherezahde to perceive a final dawn had come and, the last tale of all concluded, fall silent. — ‘The Kiss’

Angela Carter’s Black Venus collection of eight short stories, which were published in various periodicals over some half dozen or so years, are very loosely of a piece though not explicitly treating of the “steamy world of the seven deadly sins” as was asserted in a review at the time. ‘The Kiss’, ‘Our Lady of the Massacre’ and ‘The Kitchen Child’ were the earliest to appear and so may conveniently be considered together, however different they may be from each other.

But not so different that they lack qualities in common: two of them are lengthy faux memoirs; two of them are the author’s treatment of folk legends; all three feature women who live by their skills and their wits; and all three exhibit Carter’s gift for storytelling, her facility in transporting us into different very vivid environments, and above all her uncanny ability to draw us into the mindsets of her protagonists.

In these respects she is like a modern-day Scheherezade, some tales hinting at lives that continue after the final sentence, others scarcely concluded before we beg to begin the next.

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Surveyor or survivor? #RIPxxi

On By CalmgroveIn classic20 Comments
Orava Castle, Slovakia, engraving by G A Troitzsch after Ferdinand Laufberger.

The Castle by Franz Kafka.
Das Schloß (1926)
translated by Anthea Bell,
introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson.
Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.

I tend to think that books are most effective and, especially, affective when they speak directly to me, either because of circumstances I may find myself in or because they reflect feelings and emotions, inclunations and instincts which I have at the time of reading.

Kafka’s The Castle is a difficult novel to get into – let alone enjoy – for any number of reasons, but rather unexpectedly I found that I increasingly engaged in the rambling narrative for reasons that had much to do with what I recognised about people I know of, or hear about, and with global situations we’re all currently watching with a sense of increduluty.

It may seem strange then to discover the story opens with a lone traveller in a snowy landscape arriving in a community of oddly unhelpful villagers, intent on taking up a position as land surveyor at a castle somewhere in Mitteleuropa, just a century ago. How can a story set decades ago in a distant fictional land be revealed as relevant to the world we find ourselves in now?

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Vexing the world: #Gulliver300th

On By CalmgroveIn Books14 Comments
Jonathan Swift, 1667–1745: detail of portrait painted ca 1718 by Charles Jervas, National Portrait Gallery, London.

“The chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it.”

The popular impression of Gulliver’s Travels is that it only involves one voyage, in which Lemuel Gulliver is a giant among the little people of Lilliput and its neighbouring island. Reinforced by films such as the famous animated musical produced by Fleischer Studios in 1939 (which treated Part One of Jonathan Swift’s satire as a love story with comic touches and songs) the work has long been seen as a diverting fantasy, even a fable fit for children.

But, given that Swift was quite clear that he wanted to “vex the world rather than divert it,” I wanted before sailing off on Part One to start examining GT first for its context, then for templates for Swift’s schema, and finally for how exactly he vexed his readers, then and, perhaps, now.

However, I am neither a scholar, a historian, nor a specialist in Swiftian satire; I come at this narrative as a reader with my own agendas, my own prejudices and my own obsessions. Don’t, therefore, expect me to offer the final word nor an authoritative assessment – these are merely the confused ramblings of an ignorant scribbler.

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Shivers or sniggers? #RIPxxi

On By CalmgroveIn Library of Brief Narratives, short stories4 Comments
Genuine authenticated fake AI photo of an extended Victorian family (credit: unknown).

Classic Horror: An Anthology.
Penguin Horror, Penguin Books, 2025.

Cursory research into the various subgenres of the horror genre can be bewildering, but as far as I can see there are two basic categories: supernatural horror and psychological horror.

Yes, occasionally one can – if you’ll pardon the expression – bleed into the other, but essentially one is predicated on a belief in ghosts and the uncanny while the other preys upon the fears we entertain in our minds, based on traumas we may’ve physically experienced or can imaginatively anticipate.

The stories in this anthology generally fall into the first category, and if like me clanking chains and revenants evoke sniggers more than shivers then ‘horror’ may be an inadequate descriptor; the couple of genuinely psychological tales here make up for some disappointment for the fare proffered. But we don’t really read ‘classic’ horror just to scare the bejabers out of us, so I want instead to focus on what might possibly appeal.

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A patchwork of papers: #RIPxxi

On By CalmgroveIn children's book16 Comments
‘Young Hare’ (‘Feldhase’ 1502) watercolour by Albrecht Dürer.

Witch Child by Celia Rees.
Bloomsbury, 2000.

I am Mary.
I am a witch.

It’s spring 1659, and somewhere in the Midlands Mary Newbury has started a diary. Believing herself an orphan, she has been brought up by her grandmother in a rural location, taught not just traditional female pursuits but also how to read and write English and Latin.

But, like her grandmother, she knows she has powers which are out of the ordinary. Unfortunately such abilities seem to be instinctively suspected by those without them; and Obadiah Wilson, firebrand preacher and self-proclaimed witchfinder, condemns Mary’s only carer to be executed as a witch.

Before Mary herself suffers a similar fate a mysterious woman spirits her away, sending her first to Southampton where, in company with a Puritan community, she will take ship to Salem in New England. But is it a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire?

Continue reading “A patchwork of papers: #RIPxxi” →

Reading the cards: #RIPxxi

On By CalmgroveIn magic realism2 Comments
The Lovers, from the Rider–Waite Tarot.

Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted
by Ben Okri.
Head of Zeus, 2026 (2025).

‘The festival would have to be somewhere fabulous. The Amalfi coast or the Côte d’Azur. A bit bucolic. Like a Watteau painting. Everyone in costume. Nobody appearing as themselves. What mischief!’

Many moons ago, sometime last century in fact, I read Aldous Huxley’s 1921 novel Crome Yellow, and although I remember little from that reading I knew it deserved a revisit at a time when I would be more able to appreciate it. Of course I retained no memory of a crossdressing character who played a fortune-teller he called Madame Sesostris.

Nor did I recall Madame Sosostris in T S Eliot’s The Waste Land which I’d skimmed during the same decade without much understanding but with a lot of bewilderment. So when I picked up Madame Sosostris and the Festival of the Broken-Hearted the name still meant nothing to me. But the promise of the title and the premise of the plot did somewhat intrigue me.

Sesostris (with an ‘e’) is the Greek rendition of an ancient Egyptian king whom Herodotus said crossed Western Asia with an army into parts of Europe. Huxley, Eliot and now Ben Okri clearly thought the name sounded sufficiently exotic, speaking as it did of archaic magic practices, enough to colour their accounts; so it is that this novella introduces notions of clairvoyance, tarot readings and ghostly figures, all culminating in a masquerade held in a French château, in a sacred wood, around midnight.

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Orbits and obits: #ShortStorySeptember

On By CalmgroveIn Library of Brief Narratives, short stories8 Comments
1860 photograph by Nadar, believed to be Jeanne Duval (Florine Prosper), Baudelaire’s ‘Black Venus’.

‘Black Venus’ (1980) and
‘The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe’ (1982),
in Black Venus by Angela Carter
(published as Saints and Strangers in North America).
Picador, 1986 (1985).

Two of the pieces from Angela Carter’s collection of eight short stories focus on the women in the lives of two 19th-century writers, giving them names and identities, character and personality, effectively counteracting the dominating male presences on the literary stage.

One treats of Jeanne Duval, best-known as the mistress of French poet Charles Baudelaire, who outlived him; the other asks us to consider Elizabeth and Virginia, the former the actress mother of Edgar Allan Poe who died when he was young, and the latter his young wife, who also predeceased him.

In these creative biographical sketches Carter does what she does so well: she weaves in and out of her subjects’ minds, blurring boundaries between first- and third-person narrative styles; she also mixes reportage and portraiture, switching from near-hyperrealism to impressionism in the blink of an eye. The effect in a short story is place the reader in the room, on the stage, in the mortuary, there to powerlessly observe how these individual lives play themselves out.

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Peril in the air: #RIPxxi

On By CalmgroveIn children's book6 Comments
“Le Drapeau noir” by René Magritte (1937).

Biggles and Co. by Captain W E Johns.
No 10 in the Biggles series.
Red Fox, 2004 (1936).

Biggles shook his head sorrowfully. ‘We may be airmen, but that doesn’t mean we can live on air, ‘ he said softly. ‘Do you mind making the cheque out to Biggles & Co? ‘

It’s the early 1930s and James (‘Biggles’) Bigglesworth is still a pilot – but not of warplanes – and still with his wartime associates, flight engineer Smyth and cousin Algy Lacey, though the team has acquired a keen teenager simply known as Ginger Hebblethwaite.

At their Home Counties aerodrome Biggles, having been recommended by a former commanding officer but now in Scotland Yard, is approached by the firm of Cronfelt and Carstairs (‘Bullion Brokers; Dealers in Precious Stones’) to ferry gold by air to Paris.

The problem is that previous shipments from London have not arrived at their destination; is Biggles prepared to risk all and take on the job? At first he’s reluctant even to consider it, but at a crucial moment he agrees, providing he runs things his way; however, operating as Biggles & Co, little does he know what peril is in the air.

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