When Mrs. Palfrey, a genteel, elderly widow, arrives with her possessions at the formerly elegant Claremont Hotel in London, she expects “something quite different.” Planning to stay at least a month, possibly permanently, she prefers her independence in this aging London hotel to living in Scotland near her daughter, who prefers to ignore her. A variety of elderly eccentrics call the Claremont home, and though the residents put up a good front, their loneliness and boredom are obvious. When she falls while walking one day, Mrs. Palfrey is rescued by Ludovic Meyer, a struggling young writer. As the two develop a close relationship, Mrs. Palfrey reminisces about her married life, teaching Ludo about the many kinds of love and all its pleasures, and he, having failed in past relationships, begins to understand what love means, blossoming under her attention. This 1975 novel is a sweetly romantic comic masterpiece in which old age is shown as a stage in life, one in which rewards and happiness are more important than the inevitable conclusion. (One of my Favorites for 2008)
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With sales of over half a million copies in Europe, this clever novel, newly released in the United States, may make Muriel Barbery as much of a literary phenomenon here as she is there, despite the novel’s unusual philosophical focus. The first narrator, Renee Michel, is a fifty-four-year-old woman who has been working for twenty-seven years as concierge of a small Parisian apartment building. Describing herself as a “proletarian autodidact,” she explains that she grew up poor and had to quit school at age twelve to work in the fields, but throughout her life she has been studying philosophy secretly. Alternating with Renee’s thoughts about her life and the books she has been reading, are the musings of Paloma Josse, the twelve-year-old daughter of wealthy and overly busy parents. Like Renee, Paloma pretends to be just average, carefully constructing her own façade so that she can fit in at school. She has decided that on her thirteenth birthday, she will take the only path open to her: she will commit suicide, burning down her house at the same time. The arrival of a new tenant changes all their lives.
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Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, one of Australia’s most honored contemporary writers, creates his most dazzling novel yet with this send-up of the art world, filled with satire about dealers, auction houses, compulsive collectors, forgers, conservators and technicians, art researchers, catalogue writers, those who crate and ship paintings, and even the artists themselves. At the same time, he creates two splendid characters through whose limited vision this world is viewed—Michael “Butcher” Boone, a successful avant-garde artist from Australia, now experiencing hard times, and his “slow” brother Hugh, a 220-pound giant with little control over his emotions and a penchant for breaking the little fingers of people who get in his way. The story of how Butcher is drawn into a complex scheme to defraud is told in alternating chapters by Butcher himself and by Hugh, who sees himself as his brother’s “helper.” The action ratchets up as the financial stakes in the art market increase, and a murder, filled with shocking details, draws the complexity of the art fraud into the open for the reader—and for Butcher. The final chapter, almost an Afterword, gives new meaning to the word “irony.” (On my Favorites List for 2006)
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Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison continues her powerful examination of slavery’s evil legacy, a focus of her long career, by creating an intense and involving novel set in the Atlantic colonies between 1682 and 1690, when the slave trade from the Portuguese colonies in Africa was a lucrative business for many colonists. Here Morrison examines slavery from its earliest days, concentrating on its short term and long-term effects on society as a whole and the people, especially the women, who were it greatest victims. Even in New York, where most of this action takes place, slaves were owned, and property laws governing their ownership were respected. The primary speaker is Florens, a young black girl, aged sixteen at the outset of the novel, who tells the reader that her narrative is a confession, “full of curiosities,” and that she has committed a violent, bloody, once-in-a-lifetime crime which she will never repeat. This is a novel of epic scope, filled with complex philosophical, Biblical, and feminist issues and symbols.
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In simple language that sometimes takes on the cadences of the psalms, the soaring intensity of opera, and the beautifully repeated phrases of canons, author Veza Canetti tells the semi-autobiographical story of an artistic couple trapped just outside Vienna at the time of Kristallnacht, November, 1938, a terror she and her husband had also endured. The Canettis managed to escape from Austria just ten days after Kristallnacht, and immediately upon their arrival in England, Veza Canetti began to write this book. Using fictional characters, she fills the narrative with vibrant details from her own recent experiences, completing the “novel” in the spring of 1939. Though this novel was scheduled for publication in 1939, Britain’s entry into the war prevented this, and it remained among Canetti’s papers after her death in 1963. Prepared for publication and released for the first time in 2001, sixty-two years after it was written, it has finally been released in paperback. (On my Favorites List for 2007)
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