Seeing the World Through Books

Annie Fairhurst, the narrator of this clever, black-humored character study, hooks the reader from the opening scene, which opens with Annie sending a van containing all her possessions to a new address, after which she strips off all her clothes and viciously attacks the “bloody sofa” which she has left behind. It is the sofa on which her husband proposed to her more than a decade ago, when she was seventeen and he, thirty-two. When she arrives at her new house, she envisions herself as Jackie Kennedy, “getting out of an aeroplane.” Author Jenn Ashworth takes the concept of irony to new heights in this psychological novel which rivals Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy in its intensity, and it is in her irony that this novel achieves something that McCabe’s novel does not—it is pathetically funny at the same time that it is terrifyingly slow in its revelations of Annie’s past life.

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Filled with dry, ironic humor, Quartet in Autumn is a poignant depiction of the lives of four elderly people, who have worked together for several years. All of them live alone, and none of them have much of a life outside of their repetitive and intellectually deadening jobs. They treat each other only as colleagues and not as friends, both in and out of the office. The two women consider the two men to be merely “part of the furniture,” and the men have no interest in the women beyond their function in the office. As a result, they have never socialized, visited each others’ houses or apartments, shared a lunch hour together, or come to know each other as human beings. When the two women retire, life for all of them changes dramatically. Letty has to move, an unexpected development, and her long-time plans to move to the country with a friend change. Marcia becomes even more of a recluse, refusing to let the social worker assigned by the hospital come into the house. When the men decide to take the “old dears” to lunch several weeks after they retire, the four of them have their first social occasion, with mixed results.

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Set in 1963 in Wisla, the rural Polish town where author Jerzy Pilch himself grew up, A THOUSAND PEACEFUL CITIES feels as much like a real memoir as a satirical, fictional retelling of life in Poland in the years preceding the Student Revolt of 1968. In 1963, the Communist party is in power, and the country is under Soviet influence but not control. A strong, independent spirit and the residual respect of the populace for First Secretary Wladysaw Gomulka, who successfully challenged Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, has encouraged the populace to live as they have always lived, though economically they are becoming poorer. The churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are still open and are a major part of life, not just in terms of religion but in the communities’ regular social gatherings. Under the increasing influence of the Soviets, however, Gomulka has become more dictatorial, imposing further limits on his people. At the outset of the novel, the reader immediately discovers that Jerzyk’s father and his father’s friend, Mr. Traba, an alcoholic former clergyman, plan to kill First Secretary Wladysaw Gomulka in Warsaw. What follows is a wild ride through rural Poland in 1963—a novel that is, by turns, hilarious, thoughtful, filled with metaphysical and dialectical argument, and embellished with lyrical details from the natural world.

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Once you enter the world of Trevor Comerford, you will not emerge unscathed. Formerly employed in Dublin at the Central Remedial Clinic, Trevor was empathetic and anxious to help his students in his English classes there, creating firm bonds of friendship with them by making them laugh at his vulgarity, by refusing to recognize their significant physical challenges as limitations, and by taking them on day-trips which became shoplifting expeditions to the local shops. His departure from Dublin for a new life in New York City was made in full knowledge of the challenges he would have dealing with the chaos of that city’s street life, which, in many ways parallels the chaos in his own life. When he arrives in New York, he takes a job caring for a teenager who is near death from muscular dystrophy. In a profane and casual stream-of-consciousness style, Trevor reveals all his thoughts as they occur. By correlating these scattered thoughts, the reader soon becomes aware that Trevor is an exceptionally unreliable narrator, a young man with serious problems finding his place in the world. As he and Ed, his charge, negotiate their lives, the novel becomes a psychological study of two people learning how to channel anger into kindness.

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In this brutally satiric little novella, the “downstairs” servants of the aristocratic Klopstocks, living in Switzerland, have their lives all planned out for the immediate future. They will not be spending another day with the Klopstocks—at least not a day in which the Klopstocks are alive, and they are breathless with anticipation. Lister, who manages the household, knows that both the Baron and the Baroness will be meeting in the library that evening with Victor Passerat, “Mister Fairlocks,” someone with whom the Baroness is passionately in love but who is himself passionately in love with the Baron. Posting a “Not to Disturb” sign on the door, the triangle of lovers meets, determined to settle their issues, but these can be settled only one way—with gunshots. “The eternal triangle has come full circle,” one servant observes. With vivid and hilariously dark dialogue, the novella becomes as much a riotous farce as it is a comedy of manners, with the roles reversed. Spark keeps the actions and the interactions moving non-stop, her use of irony, suggestion, and gallows humor at their peak, and the one-liners coming fast and furiously.

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