The child of Ashkenazi Jews who escaped to Jerusalem just before the outbreak of World War II, Amos Klausner (the author’s original name) grew up in a scholarly family which encouraged his precocity. His great uncle Joseph was Chair of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and wrote his magnum opus about Jesus of Nazareth. His father read sixteen or seventeen languages, wrote poetry, and had an enormous library, while his mother spoke four or five languages, could read seven or eight, and told elaborate stories. In this elaborate, non-linear autobiography, Oz and his family are seen as archetypal immigrants to Jerusalem, people who arrived when the land was still under British rule and who helped create a new homeland, arguing ferociously about the direction the country should take and the leaders who should lead it. The history of Jerusalem combines with the author’s own genealogical records and his memories about his early family life to create a broad picture of the society in which he grew up and in which his writing talent took root.
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Using documents and photographs that have never before been available, along with private diaries and interviews with some of those who knew the subject, Idina Sackville, author Frances Osborne creates a lively, readable, and well researched biography which attempts to understand what aspects of her early family life might have helped create a person so flamboyant, sexually adventurous, and hedonistic that she became world famous, just for being who she was. The author has special reason to ponder this subject. When she was thirteen, The Sunday Times began a serialization of James Fox’s White Mischief, a detailed account of Happy Valley and the British aristocrats who had participated in the “mischief” in Kenya. Frances and her twelve-year-old sister Kate devoured each installment as it came out. “Was this the secret to being irresistible to men,” she wondered, “to behave as this woman did, while ‘walking barefoot at every available opportunity’ as well as being ‘intelligent, well-read, enlivening company’?” One afternoon, with a twinkle in his eye, her father told his embarrassed wife Davina that it was time for her to come clean. Davina had to admit to her daughters that she was the granddaughter of Idina Sackville, and they themselves were Idina’s great-granddaughters.
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Martin Scobie, David Hughes, and Fred Privett, all age eighty-five, have just been admitted to the nursing home of St. Christopher and St. Jude following the bizarre crash of their three ambulances at the intersection in front of the facility. Admitted for their recuperation, they must share a small single room in which the light switch can only be reached by leaning across one bed. Some furniture has been removed to accommodate the extra beds, and the wardrobe, blocking a window, is inaccessible because of the third bed. Even if they had a view through that window, however, their accommodations would not be much improved. “Immediately outside the window was a mass of dusty green foliage of the kind which grows outside kitchens and hotel toilets…The leaves, moving in endless trembling toward and away from one another, gave an impression of trying to speak or to listen but always turning away before any tiny message could either be given or heard,” a detail emblematic of all life at this nursing home, which specializes in non-communication, not just between staff and patients, but between staff and each other, and among the patients themselves. As Australian author Elizabeth Jolley develops this relentlessly dark-humored and totally absorbing novel, she also displays enormous talent for developing sensitive character sketches of the elderly patients. Jolley is a world class author, capable of creating serious questions and developing the biggest of the world’s themes within small settings and scenes, and I can hardly wait to read the next book being released, MISS PEABODY’S INHERITANCE. She is a new Favorite!
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Those who have loved author Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1970 ) will undoubtedly be fascinated also by Angel (1957). Angel, less subtle in its black humor and obvious satire, will strike chords among all writers and lovers of writing who have ever, in their wildest imaginations, fantasized about producing a blockbuster novel, or even a moderately successful one. In 1900, Angel Deverell, fifteen, lives with her mother above the family grocery store in Norley. Emotionally, however, she lives on a completely different plane, imagining a life in which she is elegant, successful, admired by all, and, of course, wealthy beyond her most fervent dreams. Humiliated at school for something she has said, she announces that she will never return again to school. Instead she will finish writing a romantic novel, The Lady Urania, set at “Haven Castle,” a project on which she works almost around the clock, and she is sure it will be a success. Despite her age, it is HUGE, and Angel’s life and the lives of her family are never the same–and obviously, not always in a good way.
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While the head of the ICBM is addressing participants at a literary conference in the King David Hotel, Jeusalem is being shaken by bombs. When the lights go out, the conference simply continues under candlelight. Attending this conference is the novel’s unnamed speaker, “E.H,” now living in Rome in the aftermath of a two-year convalescence from a serious illness. He has written nothing at all during that time, and he has no idea why he has been invited. The list of other participants offers him no clues: one man is an expert in Jewish religious texts and a passionate lover of chess; another, from Colombia, collects stamps and has written a grammar book; a third, a Miami-based, former evangelical pastor, ex-con, and drug addict has written only religious texts; and the lone woman, a porn actress and the founder of the highly successful Eve Studios, has been the star and producer of Screw Me, Screw Me, I Don’t Want this to End. Each of these participants will tell a novella-length story during this conference on biography and memory, and as their stories unwind, the reader begins to wonder if the conference itself is a kind of necropolis, a memorial to mankind’s complex past and its yet-to-be-buried horrors, attended by speakers, each of whom inhabits a personal “necropolis” as s/he revisits the past.
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