September’s artist of the month, Barry Woodcock filled the gallery with his exquisitely executed wood engravings. The full-time artist printmaker gave a demonstration of his craft in the shop on 6th September. The October artist is local painter Robert Priseman and for November Helen Lee makes a welcome return to the gallery. 
               
The Literary Lunch

 

The clatter of cutlery, the clink of glasses, the buzz of convivial chatter – yes, another Bookshop Literary Lunch is under way…On July 25th The Bakehouse filled to capacity for a talk and slide show with the lovely Midge Gillies, author of Amy Johnson – Queen of the Air.
The Chef’s most excellent Salmon, Dill and Lemon fishcakes, and a wickedly sweet Lemon Syrup Cake were eagerly consumed, and pleasantly sated, we settled down to enjoy the presentation.
To the accompaniment of an evocative slide show Midge told the astounding  tale of the typist from Hull who set off with a thermos and a packet of sandwiches and flew solo to Australia, attaining instant celebrity status in a world struggling with the effects of the depression, and a generation who felt cheated by the futility of the Great War.
Further record-breaking flights to India, Japan, and across the Sahara to the Cape and back cemented her reputation, and a brief tempestuous marriage to Scottish playboy and fellow flying ace Jim Mollison commanded  newspaper headlines as the “Flying Sweethearts” challenged new records. Although she struggled with celebrity and the accompanying publicity ,Amy enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle mixing with the Mayfair set, and became a fashion icon  feted in the popular song “Amy, Wonderful Amy” . In later life though, she had difficulty finding employment as a pilot in such a traditionally male field, and hers is certainly “a history of fortitude in the face of jaw-dropping prejudice”. Amy’s plane went down over the Thames estuary during a wartime mission, and sadly, the body was never found, but Midge Gillies’ engrossing presentation and riveting biography do much to ensure a continued fascination with the achievements of this fearless and remarkable pioneer.
By Sue Gornall

 

Dispatches from the front line of the Edinburgh International Book Festival by Ginny Waters

 

    This year there was no rain! and no mud!  In fact it was glorious sunshine for the whole week. It was as if the festival had been transported to some exotic location (apart from the haggis and neeps of course.) One of the highlights was seeing Susan Sontag being interviewed by Hilary Mantel. They talked about writing, how it’s function is to make sense of the world, and how the best writing can nourish one’s inner life. Sontag said writers needed to be alone to write but in her view they should experience as much as possible whilst not writing. She said she never kept notebooks or a diary (unlike Mantel). She said writers dream of being invisible watchers of other people.
    The Book Festival invariably has a political edge to it. One night in the festival bar (located in the fantastic Spiegel tent) there was a discussion about progress – what was it? Did it exist? Is it just a western invention? Does progress in one part of the world lead to its opposite in another part? What about pollution? The speakers were David Rieff, John Gray and Linda Colley (all historians). It turns out progress is an illusion and we’re all doomed! Ah well…..let’s have another drink then.
    One of the best book-related events I attended at the Festival was at the Fringe and was a dramatised adaptation of three of Gogol’s short stories entitled Gogol’s Underdogs . They were extraordinarily weird stories with talking dogs and a nose which becomes a government official and a concert pianist. The actors were wonderfully manic to suit the script. You could see how these stories must have influenced later writers such as Bulgakov whose Master and Margarita has similar surrealistic touches. Clearly both writers lived under very repressive regimes and used fantasy as a way of criticising without being  too obviously subversive.

 

Reviews

The Weaver’s Daughter
A New Book By Elizabeth Jeffrey

A new book from local author Elizabeth Jeffrey is always an exciting event. This time she has based her story in Colchester in the late 16th Century among the weavers, most of whom were immigrants who had fled from persecution in Holland. The story revolves around a young Flemish couple who settle with the immigrant cloth trade workers in Colchester and experience great animosity from the indigenous population who demonstrated and rioted against what they saw as unfair competition for housing and jobs from incomers.  Well some things never change!
The book will be published at the end of November and the author will be signing copies at the bookshop during late night shopping on Thursday 4th December.

 

David Williams Naxos review

 

     Autumn is fast coming in and as the leaves turn colour, so my thoughts turn to afternoon tea and music to go with it. This selection of Naxos goodies then is my idea of a seasonal fare.
First up is a wonderful new release in the American Classics series, Ned Rorem’s Three Symphonies. These little performed works are quite simply magical, alive with colour and light. No.1 and 2 haven’t been previously recorded, and couldn’t have wished for a better first appearance. Excellent.
    Another first recording, this time in the Japanese Classics series is Hashimoto’s First Symphony, written to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Japan 2,600 years ago, it contains some quite extraordinary moments, fusing Japanese folk music with the tonality of the 2nd Viennese school.
    Lest I should be accused of being too obscure in my selections my next choice will be familiar to many already, the incomparable Florence Foster Jenkins, possibly the worst singer to have ever recorded. The disc, aptly called Murder on the High Cs is simply the funniest thing on the disc that I know. An excellent antidote to the blues.
Now I’d like to suggest one disc recently arrived in the shop, Muriel Levin’s recording of the Weber Piano Sonatas. This music is too little played, Weber a great figure in late classical music has too low a profile these days, something with the outstanding performances on this disc will correct. Oh and for each Weber disc sold Moorfields Eye Hospital gets a donation.

 

Christopher Moore’s The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

 

Imagine if you will a town full of people, all of who have had their tranquilisers withdrawn by the local doctor, couple this with the advent of a sea monster desperate for sex, a B movie actress who hears voices and a pot smoking constable, add a good slug of corruption and you have a recipe for one of the funniest books you will ever read. I love Christopher Moore, any one who can make HP Lovecraft into a café owner is my kind of writer. Buy it.         By David Williams

 

A Good Read…

 

    Why not try something new? As an independent bookshop we don’t stock just popular books. Why not try one of the new Hesperus series, featuring lesser known works by Tolstoy, Schiller, de Sade, Kleist, Lawrence, Casanova, Wilde and more. Our favourite is Guy de Maupassant’s Butterball:
‘“You can go and tell that slob, that bastard, that swine of a Prussian that I will never consent; you hear me? Never, never, never.”’
     If that sounds a little too much for you, why not try Alexander McCall Smith’s, The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Highly rated by the Times Literary Supplement these books are full of “Wayward daughters. Missing husbands. Philandering partners. Curious conmen.” Plenty for Wivenhoe folk to relate to… It is also this month’s book group read.
     If neither of those grab you, how about two books another local reading group have been reading: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, his first “blistering and impassioned” novel published in 1952 focussing on that period’s troubles and Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story a memoir of growing up in Gay America.
     Still not happy? How about an old favourite – the equivalent of a Mary Berry perhaps? You are in luck because a much requested Mehalah by the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould, (1834-1924) is again in print. Theologian, hymn-writer, archaeologist, folk-song collector, poet, hagiologist, historian, antiquarian and novelist, he would have been at home in Wivenhoe. Mehelah: A Story of the Salt Marshes (1880) brings Mersea Island to life in a style compared by Swinburne to Wuthering Heights.

 If you are still not happy then you’ll have to wait until November for the Launch of:

The Song of the Waterlily
The building of a boat, a new book by James Dodds

 

On 7th November we will be having a literary lunch at the Bakehouse to launch James Dodds and Martin Newell’s new book The Song of the Waterlily. Martin Newell has written an evocative poem that is illustrated appropriately by James Dodds, whose images have the happy knack of capturing the essence and atmosphere of seafaring. If you would like to attend please contact us at the shop: The Wivenhoe Bookshop, 23 High Street, Wivenhoe, Essex, CO7 9BE. Tel: 01206 824050. Email: Wiven.book@zetnet.co.uk

 

From Russia with Love by Elaine Maslin

 

    And no, this isn’t about crime writing. However, I do feel as if I am going to sound like an advert for Russia writing this and I apologise if I do. Its just that sometimes you discover something and it is so great you can’t believe you never found it before, like when you visit a country and it feels like your second home so you keep going back as often as you can. I felt that way about Italy, and still do. With Italy it was the architecture and the art which I had to see. Although Italy is still there, I have something new under my skin. It is vast and dark, and has a very murky but rich past and has had a latent influence over many aspects of Western life and history. Unlike Italy, what drew me to this country was its literature.
Probably about three years ago a second hand copy of Nabakov’s Lolita came into the bookshop I was working in. Valdimir Nabakov’s prose is breathtaking and whatever you think of the story it is hard not to just read it for the sake of his writing. I usually decide whether to read a book by reading the first few lines (I swear the back cover always lies) and so here goes with Lolita:
    “LOLITA, LIGHT OF MY life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down         the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
Read it twice. Say it out loud. All I can compare it to is the last paragraph in James Joyce’s Dubliners -  pure luxurious delight in prose. 
    Three years later, then, I come across Mikhail Bakhtin in a seminar on, of all things, Cubism. One of Bakhtin’s more famous essays was on Dostoevsky’s novels. I actually found it quite interesting and decided to read some Dostoevsky instead of just glossing over the theory. I cheated a bit, as I didn’t know if I’d like it or not, and borrowed a tape book from the library. They had The Idiot available in a four cassette volume which seemed a good length to take on holiday (Italy of course). When I came back I was hungry for more. I got out Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and despaired at Anna’s sheer stupidity. At least poor old Jane Eyre had a dark and brooding English hunk to turn her into a wreck. Still, I wanted MORE.
    A few short stories later (they’ve all done ‘em  - Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky - and they’re all great) and having raved on about Russian literature I was kicked into the twentieth century by an introduction to Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita was amazing. If I was a smoker I’d be lying on my back with a fag in my hand and a satisfied grin on my face (for only £3.99 too!). The only problem though, was that I didn’t have the faintest idea of what it was about. A crazy tale of a rather surreal life during Stalinist Russia interspersed with an intense description of Pontius Pilate’s day when he had Christ crucified. The step into twentieth century literature, of the political allegorical kind, was a shock, but all the more intriguing. I needed to know more about this era of Russian history.  
     A slight problem of mine is that I go on incessantly about something if I am interested in it (can you tell?). Sometimes it pays off. Sat on a train from Leeds I started chatting to a Canadian history professor. Inevitably I got around to Bulgakov and how I thought it was great but wasn’t quite sure what exactly had happened. Something to do with the devil and a woman called Margarita riding off naked on a broom stick into the night – and of course the bits on Jerusalem and Pontius Pilate. He suggested I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, as a good bit of background reading. ‘Background reading’ is such an understatement about this novel. Whilst I had been coping with the shock of Bulgakov I had gone back to Dostoevsky and his criminally good novel, Crime and Punishment. The depth of psychology and tension in the Dostoevsky is brought into the twentieth century by Koestler, describing his character’s battle with himself (despite having an entire regime against him) whilst a political prisoner. The parallels between this book and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita were also uncanny: the title, ‘Darkness at Noon’ is a description used to describe the storm which came over Jerusalem after Christ was crucified; the battle within man as to whether the decisions he makes (ends and means and so on) are correct; it goes on.
     As does the list of literature to come out of an otherwise very grim era. I felt Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was pale in comparison to Darkness at Noon, although a great first hand account of the Gulag. Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude was thought provoking and had touches of writing to match Nabakov, with a great twist of an ending, but still lacked the punch of the Koestler’s, Dostoevsky’s and Bulgakov’s. Yury Dombrovsky’s The Keeper of Antiquities gave a fascinating insight into both life in a museum and life under a politically sensitive, well, volatile, rule in a style reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although lacking punch, Solzhenitsyn, Hrabal and Dombrovsky give three entirely different perspectives of life in Stalinist Russia, from the utterly ambivalent (Hrabal) to all too aware (Dombrovsky), whereas Bulgakov, the earlier Dostoyevsky and Koestler give more personal psychological accounts.
    We would also be mistaken in thinking that politics was only a twentieth century issue in Russia. Father and son also argue about how a country should be led in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. It is a deep tradition in their country and no wonder they argue so much, the amount of Vodka they consume. Nevertheless, the more I read, the more I want to go and visit this strange country which covers such a large area of the earth and of history, and yet, somehow, still seems veiled in darkness. 
    After writing I’ve also managed to get through Andrei Makine’s Requiem for the East, a novel which although slow starting gets more and more gripping (and harrowing) as you go on, leaving you feeling glad to be alive and far from the suffering which scoured Europe last century. Also Zamyatin’s We, some Gogol and I’m starting on another Nabokov…                 By Elaine Maslin