What do you think?
Rate this book
Mothering Sunday
A luminous, intensely moving tale that begins with a secret lovers' assignation in the spring of 1924, then unfolds to reveal the whole of a remarkable life.
Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild has worked as a maid at an English country house since she was sixteen. For almost all of those years she has been the clandestine lover to Paul Sheringham, young heir of a neighboring house. The two now meet on an unseasonably warm March day—Mothering Sunday—a day that will change Jane's life forever.
As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers—expands with every vividly captured moment. Her story is one of profound self-discovery, and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring, deeply affecting work of fiction.
Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild has worked as a maid at an English country house since she was sixteen. For almost all of those years she has been the clandestine lover to Paul Sheringham, young heir of a neighboring house. The two now meet on an unseasonably warm March day—Mothering Sunday—a day that will change Jane's life forever.
As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers—expands with every vividly captured moment. Her story is one of profound self-discovery, and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring, deeply affecting work of fiction.
177 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2016
About the author
Graham Swift
48 books639 followersGraham Colin Swift FRSL (born May 4, 1949) is an English author. He was born in London, England and educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. He was a friend of Ted Hughes.
Some of his works have been made into films, including Last Orders, which starred Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland which starred Jeremy Irons. Last Orders was a joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the Booker Prize in 1996, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland was set in The Fens; it is a novel of landscape, history and family, and is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English Literature syllabus in British schools.
Some of his works have been made into films, including Last Orders, which starred Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland which starred Jeremy Irons. Last Orders was a joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the Booker Prize in 1996, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland was set in The Fens; it is a novel of landscape, history and family, and is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English Literature syllabus in British schools.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,158 reviews
August 14, 2021
The gathering evening, the apricot light, the gauzy green-gold world, was impossibly beautiful.
Take a look at this self-conscious woman stretched out languorously with her head on a blue cushion, entirely at ease in her sublimely languid nakedness. Amedeo Modigliani’s Reclining Nude (on the cover of this enchanting novella) perfectly conjures the mysteries surrounding the young protagonist of Mothering Sunday, Jane Fairchild. The sultry look in her nearly closed eyes. How would you imagine her life, present, past and future? What is on her mind? Is she a reader, just like you? Perhaps you don’t care, and are you just focusing on her voluptuous body, like her lover does?
This is no sappy story of unhappy or impossible love or formulary variation on the masters & servants theme. There is grief. Loss. Motherless children. Childless mothers. The tenderness and indulgence of a grieving father having lost everything dear to him. Class and feminist issues in a society in transition. Swift acknowledges there is more to a woman’s life than romantic love. Books for instance. Jane is no pitiful or miserable orphan, she is a smart and feisty young woman – instead of whining, she embraces life, exploring the full wingspan of her relative freedom as a blessing: “She’d been put into service at fourteen with a relatively advanced ability to read and write and — free from all family ties — with perhaps more than a usual eagerness for life.”
♪ What a difference a day makes
Twenty-four little hours ♪
This luscious, warm day in March and the tragedy slowly creeping into it, will turn out to be a watershed that will colour the rest of Jane’s life:
By presenting a jocose female writer to write about writing, Swift has crafted a magnificent and sensual hymn to books, libraries and the art of storytelling, and a bounteous ode to life.
Take a look at this self-conscious woman stretched out languorously with her head on a blue cushion, entirely at ease in her sublimely languid nakedness. Amedeo Modigliani’s Reclining Nude (on the cover of this enchanting novella) perfectly conjures the mysteries surrounding the young protagonist of Mothering Sunday, Jane Fairchild. The sultry look in her nearly closed eyes. How would you imagine her life, present, past and future? What is on her mind? Is she a reader, just like you? Perhaps you don’t care, and are you just focusing on her voluptuous body, like her lover does?
And when she’d told him about her own reading at Beechwood (she wished she hadn’t) he’d scoffed, as he scoffed at so many things, and said, ‘All that tommyrot, Jay? You read all that stuff?’ And reminded her at once that their relationship was essentially bodily, physical and here-and-now, it wasn’t for droning on about books.Set in south-east England, Swift depicts the events happening in two neighbouring country houses on a single day, 30 March 1924, a ‘mothering Sunday’ – a day-off for the servants so they can pay a visit to their mothers or family. As an orphan, Jane Fairchild, the domestic servant girl working in the Niven household, has no family to return to and imagines spending her day cycling, and reading Conrad’s Youth. A call from the neighbouring house implies changing her plans into making love with her secret lover instead, the only son of both houses who survived the trenches, while the other 4 have died, leaving empty rooms kept like shrines. That lover for years, Paul Sheringham, is on the verge of entering a proper marriage of convenience with his wealthy fiancée, and invites Jane for a first and perhaps last time to his home and bed, having the house for themselves.
This is no sappy story of unhappy or impossible love or formulary variation on the masters & servants theme. There is grief. Loss. Motherless children. Childless mothers. The tenderness and indulgence of a grieving father having lost everything dear to him. Class and feminist issues in a society in transition. Swift acknowledges there is more to a woman’s life than romantic love. Books for instance. Jane is no pitiful or miserable orphan, she is a smart and feisty young woman – instead of whining, she embraces life, exploring the full wingspan of her relative freedom as a blessing: “She’d been put into service at fourteen with a relatively advanced ability to read and write and — free from all family ties — with perhaps more than a usual eagerness for life.”
♪ What a difference a day makes
Twenty-four little hours ♪
This luscious, warm day in March and the tragedy slowly creeping into it, will turn out to be a watershed that will colour the rest of Jane’s life:
A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her. Her life was beginning, it was not ending, it had not ended. She would never be able to explain (or be required to) this illogical, enveloping inversion. As if the day had turned inside out, as if what she was leaving behind was not enclosed, lost, entombed in a house. It had merged somehow — pouring itself outwards — with the air she was breathing. She would never be able to explain it, and she would not feel it any the less even when she discovered, as she would do, how this day had turned really inside out. Could life be so cruel yet so bounteous at the same time?Throughout the novella Swift offers vistas into Jane’s later life as a writer. In her novels she will never disclose which realities have actually moulded her identity as a writer, contemplating how different things would have been if she had been reading that day in March, instead of cycling to Paul’s house, or what would have happened to her if she didn’t had entered service, or what if other significant moments had got a different outcome, like if her employer wouldn’t have granted her access to the house library, to read the adventure books of his late sons. Essentially, she –and Swift- meditates on her – and Swift’s - mission as a writer: Telling stories, telling tales. Always the implication that you were trading in lies. But for her it would always be the task of getting to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith: the trade of truth-telling.
By presenting a jocose female writer to write about writing, Swift has crafted a magnificent and sensual hymn to books, libraries and the art of storytelling, and a bounteous ode to life.
So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? They would always want even the explanation explained! And any writer worth her salt would lead them on, tease them, lead them up the garden path. Wasn’t it bloody obvious? It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life — oh so many more than we think — can never be explained at all..
June 28, 2017
...enjoy your youth…
Mothering Sunday. Such an old-fashioned name for the day when servants had their day-off so they could go home, visit families. In this day the whole world order seemed to be reversed and landlords without daily help of their servants were childly helpless and the routine of housework almost ruined .
Mothering Sunday is a record of one single day, 30 March 1924 and its heroine Jane Fairchild is twenty two then and works at Nivens' household as a maid. She’s an orphan, a foundling with no home and parents to go so she may celebrate her day whatever she chooses. Cycling through green country, it’s March though it feels more like June, or sitting under a tree with Conrad’s Youth in her hands. Or, since everything is possible on such a lovely day, answer the call from her lover Paul Sheringham from nearby estate.
Youth. Such a word. Youth. Foundling. Orphan. Orchid. Jane is only gathering words. Savoring its texture, learning its weigh. One day she would become a writer and leave behind her everything except that day. But for now she just collects words.
In this day the whole world order seems to be reversed. Like then when Paul is slowly undressing Jane, isn’t it her job as a servant ? There is no rush this time, no furtively stolen kisses, no hasty sex in the shed or greenhouse. There is a sensual pleasure in exposing body, shameless awareness of own beauty and youth, there is a leisurely lovemaking and post-coital languor. Looking at sated Jane lying on the bed Paul is dressing himself. He has an appointment with his soon to-be-wife but seems to not be in hurry at all. It’s only March though it feels like June, sun pours through open windows, half-dressed Paul’s carefully choosing his clothes and on the shelves photos of his late brothers, immovable, frozen in time and eternal youth.
Where have all the young men gone? But youth was slaughtered in trenches and at Flanders fields and Paul is the only remained heir of Sheringhams and makeshift son for the Nivens, their neighbors.
Mothering Sunday is achingly beautiful novella. I was enchanted by the way Swift captured so many emotions and meaning with so little words, from which some additionally are a few times repeated. Narration is slow and languorously unhurried, full of detailed descriptions as if you had only this one precious moment to memorize that day so you could relive it again and again through the years to come. There is such an atmosphere and dream-like ambience in the scenes when Paul is out of the picture already and Jane having his house to herself, comfortable with her nudity, is wandering through its rooms. Watching, absorbing, remembering. Leaving unmade bed and scattered clothes. At this very moment she is not a maid. Such a perfect ending for the glorious day.
There never was a day like this, nor even would or could be again .
Swift with subtlety and finesse conjured an image that is wistful being still erotic, fortunately avoiding vulgarity and triviality. But Mothering Sunday is much more than this review implies. It’s about sense of loss and grieving after the sons that perished in the Great War, it's about storytelling and the role of a writer, it's about gaining independence and self-awareness. But what mostly beguiled me in the novel lies in its style and aura, that evocation of one crucial moment from the past that defined Jane and coloured her whole subsequent life.
4.5/5
Read
April 5, 2018The arrestingly beautiful painting on the front cover of my copy of this book is a detail cropped from a larger painting, Nu couché 1917, by Amedeo Modigliani, in which the artist had already chosen to crop the figure's lower legs and hands and the top of the head. On the back cover of the book, the painting is further cropped and becomes even more powerful as a result of the zooming in.
I think Graham Swift's publishing team made an inspired cover choice - I've rarely come across a jacket design that fits the subject matter as well as this one does. Not only is a large part of the book narrated by a naked woman looking out at the world from a bed, but her narrative zooms in on her subject matter in a very clever way; she takes us right up close to the events of the story, which covers the period 1917 to 1924, and we feel, we know, that everything that isn't absolutely essential to the telling has been cropped.
So, a short book and an economical one. And quite as beautiful in its way as the Modigliani, though we are given, not the artist's gaze but the model's.
I think Graham Swift's publishing team made an inspired cover choice - I've rarely come across a jacket design that fits the subject matter as well as this one does. Not only is a large part of the book narrated by a naked woman looking out at the world from a bed, but her narrative zooms in on her subject matter in a very clever way; she takes us right up close to the events of the story, which covers the period 1917 to 1924, and we feel, we know, that everything that isn't absolutely essential to the telling has been cropped.
So, a short book and an economical one. And quite as beautiful in its way as the Modigliani, though we are given, not the artist's gaze but the model's.
March 9, 2017
In Mothering Sunday, a young man and a young woman who really shouldn't be consorting with each other have an afternoon assignation. Then the young man leaves, and the young woman, our protagonist, wanders around his house naked for a while, thinking the same thoughts over and over again. She thinks a lot about the fact that she's naked, for instance. And she thinks a lot about a patch of semen left on the sheet of the bed upstairs. (No offense to any men reading this, but most women just don't think that much about semen in real life. We think about it for a few seconds at a time at most.) But anyway, this first part of the book is nearly all interior and so repetitive. So. Repetitive. The interiority made me think Swift was trying for a Virginia Woolf type of thing, but sadly this part of the book has neither the beauty nor the insight that Woolf herself might bring. It's just our protagonist, Jane, going around and around about being naked and about semen and about a few other things I won't mention because they're a bit spoilery.
Then finally, exactly halfway through the book, some plot actually happens! Unfortunately, it was precisely what I suspected would happen; it was predictable and unoriginal, and therefore mostly just annoying to me. BUT! I do have to say that Swift handled the aftermath of the plot twist quite well, and I ended this book thinking much more fondly of it than I ever expected I would (hence the three stars instead of two).
So should you read Mothering Sunday? That depends. Do you like Virginia Woolf lite? Do you like Ian McEwan, because this reminded me a bit of his On Chesil Beach—they're both short, largely interior novels about a young couple who each don't really know what the other is thinking. If you answered yes to either of these questions, you might like Mothering Sunday. Also, do you like hearing a lot about (wait for it) patches of semen on sheets? Are you annoyed that I keep talking about semen? Well, don't shoot the messenger—if there weren't so many mentions of it in the book, I wouldn't have to mention it in my review, and we'd all be a lot happier. But one thing's for sure: If you don't like hearing about it here, you probably won't like hearing about it in Mothering Sunday either. You've been warned.
Finally, I've just read some of the other Goodreads reviews for this and now I'm worried I'm going to be burned at the stake for my irreverence toward this tome that others regard so highly. But what can I say? It's not my fault that when I think about this book all I can think about is... well, you can probably guess. Okay, I'll just stop talking now. Have a good evening, everyone.
Then finally, exactly halfway through the book, some plot actually happens! Unfortunately, it was precisely what I suspected would happen; it was predictable and unoriginal, and therefore mostly just annoying to me. BUT! I do have to say that Swift handled the aftermath of the plot twist quite well, and I ended this book thinking much more fondly of it than I ever expected I would (hence the three stars instead of two).
So should you read Mothering Sunday? That depends. Do you like Virginia Woolf lite? Do you like Ian McEwan, because this reminded me a bit of his On Chesil Beach—they're both short, largely interior novels about a young couple who each don't really know what the other is thinking. If you answered yes to either of these questions, you might like Mothering Sunday. Also, do you like hearing a lot about (wait for it) patches of semen on sheets? Are you annoyed that I keep talking about semen? Well, don't shoot the messenger—if there weren't so many mentions of it in the book, I wouldn't have to mention it in my review, and we'd all be a lot happier. But one thing's for sure: If you don't like hearing about it here, you probably won't like hearing about it in Mothering Sunday either. You've been warned.
Finally, I've just read some of the other Goodreads reviews for this and now I'm worried I'm going to be burned at the stake for my irreverence toward this tome that others regard so highly. But what can I say? It's not my fault that when I think about this book all I can think about is... well, you can probably guess. Okay, I'll just stop talking now. Have a good evening, everyone.
Read
April 20, 2016A new Graham Swift novel is cause for a national holiday! He is such a phenomenal writer. This is a dazzling, sexy novella about Jane, a maid in an English country house, and her affair with the heir of a neighboring home. It moves back and forth in time between the 1924 and Jane's life at the end of the century, detailing all of Jane's emotions and memories beautifully. Swift really is a marvel. He's an absolute master with language. Fans of Ian McEwan will doubly love this.
Tune in to our weekly podcast dedicated to all things new books, All The Books: http://bookriot.com/category/all-the-...
Tune in to our weekly podcast dedicated to all things new books, All The Books: http://bookriot.com/category/all-the-...
September 11, 2019
"One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and seek discourse with the shades; unless one has made up one's mind to write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for what it is not, or – generally – to teach it how to behave." So wrote Joseph Conrad in A Personal Record.
How many times it happens that a single moment conjures up the entire narrative, the whole story seems to evolve from that particular event and still it comes across you so beautifully that you- the reader- seem to be part of it; the author, who can brings up such intense prose, is definitely a master in his art. Mothering Sunday revolves around one such event and its aftermath. Jane, orphan and housemaid, lies showered in March daylight in her sweetheart's quaint little inn him dress – unthinkably, wonderfully gradually – to abandon her for his future spouse, the account, while layered with premonition, gathers the soaked sensual force of a Donne sonnet. How she occupy her time when she has no mother to visit? How, shaped by the events of this never to be forgotten day, will her future unfold? She has her unfathomable freedom-which can't be measured or taken away, which is something she may be said to be rich of despite being motherless maidservant- along with a book and half a crown in her pocket bestowed by a kindly employer who, his sons dead in France and his domestic staff reduced, is inclined to be indulgent to her youth.
Feast your eyes. It was an expression that came to her. Expressions had started to come to her. Feast your eyes.
Graham Swift shows us that how Jane's vocation-writing- took birth: the observational gifts she developed as a housemaid, the solitude of her lifestyle gives her ample opportunity to rear those traits which, of course, others-who are blinded with veil of class- may not notice; the freedom she felt, as an orphan, to invent an identity for herself; her love of books facilitated by her access to the library in the house where she worked. The seemingly docile circumstances around her turn out to be fertile ground where seeds of observance, love and talent sprouted and Jane, as world then know her, stood strong on that. Jane may be the motherless maidservant and Paul the carelessly privileged heir, but as she rises from their bed in the wake of his departure, walks naked through his grand empty house and begins to exercise her novelist’s entitlement – to watch, to observe, to describe and to transcend her circumstances – the balance of power shifts momentously in her favour and Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece.
There was also the word ‘fiction’- one day this would be the very thing she dealt in- which could seem almost totally dismissive of truth. A complete fiction! Yet something that was clearly and completely fiction could also contain- this was the nub and the mystery of the matter- truth.
Swift has full grip on his narrative and perfectly knows what is to reveal and what is to conceal. Time slows and there are moments that could be described as Proustian or perhaps, more accurately, as reminiscent of Edward Thomas's great poem "Adlestrop". Here is Jane stopping on her bicycle on her way home to listen to the day passing:
There was not a murmur, in any direction, of traffic. There was only the birdsong and, in the warm air, the half-heard stirring and rousing of – everything. Spring.
This moment of stillness is symptomatic of the book's determined lyricism. Swift is an undoubted master of detail and delay, working by a process of meditation and accumulation to create a narrative that carries far more heft than one might assume from its length.
By then she’d think that Conrad himself must be a sort of secret agent, slipping between worlds. And much later she’d think and sometimes say that all writers are secret agents. But perhaps the truth was- though she wouldn’t say this- that we are all secret agents, that’s what we are.
Though the plot of the novella is quite straight forward and there are not many thrills for the reader and in fact the reader may even know the outcome of the events well before they materalize, however still an unknown urge keeps you moving. For, it is not always the plot where a book attains its fate, sometimes what matters style and impression than content: the persistence of memory and the ensuing feeling of dissociation that rises in Jane Fairchild. This is a sensation that most writers share, the ultimate mix of reality and recollection that invites us on the almost interminably frustrating mental journey to make sense of life, which gives us bliss close to that by poetry- the most refined form of literature.
The tenacity of this glorious novella may be ascertained from the fact that when you come across last moments of this beautiful romance with tinge of tragedy, you wish that it could be extended indefinitely. Jane- the writer, giving interviews on her work, is always conscious that a writer’s work is not only about what she reveals but it is also about what is concealed-for the power of concealing is too strong which what is revealed may not overcome and in fact perhaps that is what differentiate between great and good piece of art; and the reader knows too that such intensity cannot be overextended- for the bliss of imagination is too much for the obvious. Nor is it accidental that the shyest, most unassuming of narrative forms has been chosen for this, the tale that Jane will never tell and the baton which, by literary sleight of hand, is passed to Swift.
It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life- oh so many more than we think- can never be explained at all.
How many times it happens that a single moment conjures up the entire narrative, the whole story seems to evolve from that particular event and still it comes across you so beautifully that you- the reader- seem to be part of it; the author, who can brings up such intense prose, is definitely a master in his art. Mothering Sunday revolves around one such event and its aftermath. Jane, orphan and housemaid, lies showered in March daylight in her sweetheart's quaint little inn him dress – unthinkably, wonderfully gradually – to abandon her for his future spouse, the account, while layered with premonition, gathers the soaked sensual force of a Donne sonnet. How she occupy her time when she has no mother to visit? How, shaped by the events of this never to be forgotten day, will her future unfold? She has her unfathomable freedom-which can't be measured or taken away, which is something she may be said to be rich of despite being motherless maidservant- along with a book and half a crown in her pocket bestowed by a kindly employer who, his sons dead in France and his domestic staff reduced, is inclined to be indulgent to her youth.
Feast your eyes. It was an expression that came to her. Expressions had started to come to her. Feast your eyes.
Graham Swift shows us that how Jane's vocation-writing- took birth: the observational gifts she developed as a housemaid, the solitude of her lifestyle gives her ample opportunity to rear those traits which, of course, others-who are blinded with veil of class- may not notice; the freedom she felt, as an orphan, to invent an identity for herself; her love of books facilitated by her access to the library in the house where she worked. The seemingly docile circumstances around her turn out to be fertile ground where seeds of observance, love and talent sprouted and Jane, as world then know her, stood strong on that. Jane may be the motherless maidservant and Paul the carelessly privileged heir, but as she rises from their bed in the wake of his departure, walks naked through his grand empty house and begins to exercise her novelist’s entitlement – to watch, to observe, to describe and to transcend her circumstances – the balance of power shifts momentously in her favour and Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece.
There was also the word ‘fiction’- one day this would be the very thing she dealt in- which could seem almost totally dismissive of truth. A complete fiction! Yet something that was clearly and completely fiction could also contain- this was the nub and the mystery of the matter- truth.
Swift has full grip on his narrative and perfectly knows what is to reveal and what is to conceal. Time slows and there are moments that could be described as Proustian or perhaps, more accurately, as reminiscent of Edward Thomas's great poem "Adlestrop". Here is Jane stopping on her bicycle on her way home to listen to the day passing:
There was not a murmur, in any direction, of traffic. There was only the birdsong and, in the warm air, the half-heard stirring and rousing of – everything. Spring.
This moment of stillness is symptomatic of the book's determined lyricism. Swift is an undoubted master of detail and delay, working by a process of meditation and accumulation to create a narrative that carries far more heft than one might assume from its length.
By then she’d think that Conrad himself must be a sort of secret agent, slipping between worlds. And much later she’d think and sometimes say that all writers are secret agents. But perhaps the truth was- though she wouldn’t say this- that we are all secret agents, that’s what we are.
Though the plot of the novella is quite straight forward and there are not many thrills for the reader and in fact the reader may even know the outcome of the events well before they materalize, however still an unknown urge keeps you moving. For, it is not always the plot where a book attains its fate, sometimes what matters style and impression than content: the persistence of memory and the ensuing feeling of dissociation that rises in Jane Fairchild. This is a sensation that most writers share, the ultimate mix of reality and recollection that invites us on the almost interminably frustrating mental journey to make sense of life, which gives us bliss close to that by poetry- the most refined form of literature.
The tenacity of this glorious novella may be ascertained from the fact that when you come across last moments of this beautiful romance with tinge of tragedy, you wish that it could be extended indefinitely. Jane- the writer, giving interviews on her work, is always conscious that a writer’s work is not only about what she reveals but it is also about what is concealed-for the power of concealing is too strong which what is revealed may not overcome and in fact perhaps that is what differentiate between great and good piece of art; and the reader knows too that such intensity cannot be overextended- for the bliss of imagination is too much for the obvious. Nor is it accidental that the shyest, most unassuming of narrative forms has been chosen for this, the tale that Jane will never tell and the baton which, by literary sleight of hand, is passed to Swift.
It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life- oh so many more than we think- can never be explained at all.
November 7, 2017
Feast your eyes...
Golden Rain by Leon Francois Comerre
The first half of this seductive novella, Jane Fairchild is reclining much like this: nude, a post-coital feast for the eyes of her lover Paul. She also feasts on him, his "thoroughbred" body and the minutia of his every movement. It is a slow, sensual feast for the reader too, as we share this very private time, which proves to be pivotal in our heroine's life, Mothering Sunday 1924.
Jane is a maid at Beechwood, and today Paul, the dashing young master of neighbouring Upleigh is headed out for lunch with Emma, a lady of means, who he will marry in a few weeks. This may be the last time he and Jane will be together.
Even though the scene is lovely, sun-bathed and languorous, even though it is unpolluted by percussive words and emotions, a tension builds. This is achieved through a lyrical repetitiveness, and the knowledge that this day marks a life changing point on Jane's map.
It was just delicious to read, it was a feast. Graham Swift, with his writerly magic, turned a rather unoriginal story into something captivating, iconic, empowered. It brought to mind for me McEwan's On Chesil Beach. Both novellas encapsulate one meaningful day, and show how one day can influence and shape an entire life, in breathtaking simplicity.
This book, however, didn't hold the perfection of purpose I enjoyed in McEwan's story. The last third veered into places that didn't seem to belong. The tension and mood broke for me when Swift focussed on Jane's later, literary life. I heard his voice, and I learned all about Joseph Conrad (?). Normally, I like authorial consciousness in books that I read, and I do see what he was doing, but it came too suddenly, it needed to be part of the book from the beginning, to belong. The spell he cast was broken, dousing the lovers (and this reader) in a shower of chilly, off-topic prose.
That said, what a lovely story, what a beautiful vignette, a tasty little feast.
Golden Rain by Leon Francois ComerreThe first half of this seductive novella, Jane Fairchild is reclining much like this: nude, a post-coital feast for the eyes of her lover Paul. She also feasts on him, his "thoroughbred" body and the minutia of his every movement. It is a slow, sensual feast for the reader too, as we share this very private time, which proves to be pivotal in our heroine's life, Mothering Sunday 1924.
Jane is a maid at Beechwood, and today Paul, the dashing young master of neighbouring Upleigh is headed out for lunch with Emma, a lady of means, who he will marry in a few weeks. This may be the last time he and Jane will be together.
Even though the scene is lovely, sun-bathed and languorous, even though it is unpolluted by percussive words and emotions, a tension builds. This is achieved through a lyrical repetitiveness, and the knowledge that this day marks a life changing point on Jane's map.
It was just delicious to read, it was a feast. Graham Swift, with his writerly magic, turned a rather unoriginal story into something captivating, iconic, empowered. It brought to mind for me McEwan's On Chesil Beach. Both novellas encapsulate one meaningful day, and show how one day can influence and shape an entire life, in breathtaking simplicity.
This book, however, didn't hold the perfection of purpose I enjoyed in McEwan's story. The last third veered into places that didn't seem to belong. The tension and mood broke for me when Swift focussed on Jane's later, literary life. I heard his voice, and I learned all about Joseph Conrad (?). Normally, I like authorial consciousness in books that I read, and I do see what he was doing, but it came too suddenly, it needed to be part of the book from the beginning, to belong. The spell he cast was broken, dousing the lovers (and this reader) in a shower of chilly, off-topic prose.
That said, what a lovely story, what a beautiful vignette, a tasty little feast.
November 29, 2020
Una obra menor de Swift de la que lamentablemente lo mejor que puedo decir es que es cortita y no le dio tiempo a aburrirme.
April 19, 2016
This delicious short novel is in many ways a Mother’s Day dream. It is a novel short enough to be read in a long, lazy afternoon; it is a novel for mature audiences, weathered in relationships and outcomes, who bring a kind of life knowledge to one remarkable spring day in 1924 when sunlight poured over yellow and green fields and not a smudge marred the bright blue of the sky. In March a day like June, warm and golden, pregnant with potential and possibility. The strange undercurrent of foreboding that springs unbidden feels like something we bring as we recall in some remembered way the lovemaking in the big house empty in the afternoon with the windows opened wide to streaming sunlight and perhaps a breeze: “the sunlight applauded their nakedness.” A young scion and the maid…
He says they were “friends.” He did treat her as a friend—exactly as a friend. Their lovemaking was like a sport. He did not talk of the future…there was no need. He needn’t say goodbye, since it wasn’t goodbye was it? He would marry, but perhaps they would continue their “friendship” long after. One doesn’t lose one’s friends when one gets married. Not necessarily. Our judgement makes us uncomfortable, but we’d be wrong. The foreboding won’t point to that at all. The lovemaking was the maid’s liberation, not her downfall. She learned to be comfortable in herself there.
Swift shows his mastery of the form in this novel, telling us pieces of backstory interspersed with conversation and movement…a phone call bidding the maid, fragrant air filled with light and birdsong, a bike ride past still-leafless trees casting skeleton shade on new green and buds ready to open. We will never forget the day, so rare and so precious. Mothering Day. The staff are off to visit their own parents and the scion is preparing for his wedding in a fortnight to the daughter of a wealthy family. His own parents lost two sons in the last war and he is the last of the brood. This is usually a day of remembrance, but it is such an unusual day, coming as it does a fortnight before a wedding…
The beauty of the day suffuses the story and works its magic on us, despite our reservations. We are unprepared, then, for the foreboding to manifest when it does, finally. And we are unprepared also for the “long course of history” that plays out from the maid’s point of view—how this day will remain in her memory forever and what it meant to her life’s work. It raises questions about the nature and role of fiction and how one gets to the place where fiction can be truth. True things can be imagined, just as fiction can spring from truth. Sometimes fiction might even get closer to truth than real life, getting as it does “to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith.” That is the trade of fiction, the “trade of truth-telling…It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive.” And that is what what this book does. It feels lived.
I hope it is not too late for everyone to buy this gem of a novel before Mother’s Day. It is a rush.
He says they were “friends.” He did treat her as a friend—exactly as a friend. Their lovemaking was like a sport. He did not talk of the future…there was no need. He needn’t say goodbye, since it wasn’t goodbye was it? He would marry, but perhaps they would continue their “friendship” long after. One doesn’t lose one’s friends when one gets married. Not necessarily. Our judgement makes us uncomfortable, but we’d be wrong. The foreboding won’t point to that at all. The lovemaking was the maid’s liberation, not her downfall. She learned to be comfortable in herself there.
Swift shows his mastery of the form in this novel, telling us pieces of backstory interspersed with conversation and movement…a phone call bidding the maid, fragrant air filled with light and birdsong, a bike ride past still-leafless trees casting skeleton shade on new green and buds ready to open. We will never forget the day, so rare and so precious. Mothering Day. The staff are off to visit their own parents and the scion is preparing for his wedding in a fortnight to the daughter of a wealthy family. His own parents lost two sons in the last war and he is the last of the brood. This is usually a day of remembrance, but it is such an unusual day, coming as it does a fortnight before a wedding…
The beauty of the day suffuses the story and works its magic on us, despite our reservations. We are unprepared, then, for the foreboding to manifest when it does, finally. And we are unprepared also for the “long course of history” that plays out from the maid’s point of view—how this day will remain in her memory forever and what it meant to her life’s work. It raises questions about the nature and role of fiction and how one gets to the place where fiction can be truth. True things can be imagined, just as fiction can spring from truth. Sometimes fiction might even get closer to truth than real life, getting as it does “to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith.” That is the trade of fiction, the “trade of truth-telling…It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive.” And that is what what this book does. It feels lived.
I hope it is not too late for everyone to buy this gem of a novel before Mother’s Day. It is a rush.
August 17, 2016
This is totally my kind of book. The story of a woman's life told through the events of one day in 1924. Beautiful writing. Graham Swift is one of my favorite authors, I'm never disappointed in his books.
August 29, 2016
A secret 7 yr love affair between a young English country maid Jane Fairchild, and a wealthy heir Paul Sheringham, from a neighboring property.
It is spring of 1924. This tells how the events of one day, shaped the life of Jane who lived well into her 90's
It is spring of 1924. This tells how the events of one day, shaped the life of Jane who lived well into her 90's
February 17, 2018
It has been several years since I read anything by Graham Swift, but I enjoyed this quiet novella. Most of the book is set on a single day in 1924.
The book has an anonymous third person narrator, but is told from the perspective of Jane Fairchild, an orphan working as a maid in a small country house, who has been involved with Paul Sheringham, a more prosperous young neighbour who is due to marry (largely for money) a few weeks later. He invites her there for Mothering Sunday, having ensured that the house will be empty. Their tryst is described in languorous detail, after which Paul departs late for a lunch with his fiancee, leaving Jane alone and naked to explore the big house. Paul dies in a car crash later the same afternoon, leaving Jane to reflect on what clues she may have left behind.
There is also a metafictional element - Jane is looking back on these events as a successful novelist in her eighties, so much of the book is about the writing process itself - we learn about the ways she has used elements of her story, what she has never revealed, and also about how exposure to writers like Joseph Conrad helped her as a writer, thanks to her employers' library. All of this is beautifully described, making the book a pleasure to read, albeit one that was over rather quickly.
The book has an anonymous third person narrator, but is told from the perspective of Jane Fairchild, an orphan working as a maid in a small country house, who has been involved with Paul Sheringham, a more prosperous young neighbour who is due to marry (largely for money) a few weeks later. He invites her there for Mothering Sunday, having ensured that the house will be empty. Their tryst is described in languorous detail, after which Paul departs late for a lunch with his fiancee, leaving Jane alone and naked to explore the big house. Paul dies in a car crash later the same afternoon, leaving Jane to reflect on what clues she may have left behind.
There is also a metafictional element - Jane is looking back on these events as a successful novelist in her eighties, so much of the book is about the writing process itself - we learn about the ways she has used elements of her story, what she has never revealed, and also about how exposure to writers like Joseph Conrad helped her as a writer, thanks to her employers' library. All of this is beautifully described, making the book a pleasure to read, albeit one that was over rather quickly.
February 15, 2017
[4.5] One of those books for which I wish it was possible to write two reviews addressed to different sets of people, although my rating wouldn't change. There are the friends to whom I'd like to point out that this is middlebrow litfic and that they probably wouldn't like it - but it is a particularly well-written example of its type and contains some meta-stuff about writing that might not be uninteresting if they found themselves stuck with a copy of it at a station/library/relative's house etc. (In further meta-ness, all locations which appear in the book.) And once the review is sitting on the book page, where those readers would barely notice it, said caveats are unnecessary and would only make others feel snobbed at, when I'd rather meet them on the level.
This novella is a great example of how really good writing can elevate a story & setting that in outline are clichéd, and more or less make the proverbial silk purse from sow's ear.
It brought back embarrassing memories of a hackish short story I once churned out for a creative writing course, also with a cycling female protagonist resident in an early twentieth-century minor English country house - set maybe 12-15 years earlier - and the use of a Bloomsbury Group name* for a character (I think it might be compulsory in these). I've long rolled my eyes at that story, but Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday gave a lesson in what's actually possible. It's very accessible, would appeal to fans of Downton Abbey - rather than being a similar tableau, it zooms in to one one character, a maid, Jane; but again it has rather more depth and conscious awareness of tropes than a guilty-pleasure binge on ITV costume drama. (A programme which, come to think of it, started just a few months after I came up with that story - something in the air maybe, and which I haven't seen since the second series...think it was some dread of memories suspended in the theme tune.)
There's excellent attention to detail in the novella, but never too much. Contrasted with a debut historical novel I've been reading the last couple of days, Swift, with at least 35 years of fiction-writing under his belt, knows how not to plaster every page with displays of research, and gets it spot on. Jane is an utterly convincing female character, and there are several details of bodily experience mentioned that a lesser male writer might overlook. If I'd read this book without an author name on it, I'd have been sure the author was a woman. At times Jane reminded me of Will Self's similarly excellent portrayal of young Audrey in Umbrella.
Unlike Audrey, Jane has a brighter future ahead of her, one which is hinted at early in the book. I groaned at the appearance of yet another writer protagonist: stories I've read so far this year in which a character isn't an author have been very few - but even to a reader so sick and tired of them as I am [the phrase "another fucking book about another fucking writer" is waiting in the wings until I can stick it in the review of a less delicate story] this example was actually quite interestingly done: discussion, for instance, of the ways characters emerge sideways from real people. She sounds like the kind of author who would now be in Virago Modern Classics; by the end of the book I could visualise them, she was that convincing.
I just really liked Jane - she has a sense of mischief I found entirely relatable, and she likes to have a go at stuff without being bullishly overconfident. Older Jane also sounds rather like - although is a touch more reserved than - the venerable and irreverent Diana Athill, whose wonderful memoirs I must get back to at some point. The way she sees no barriers to taking men as models for her own ambitions I think reflects formidable older British women writers I've long admired, such as Murdoch and Byatt, and, to use that overused r-word again, is a thought process I found easier to understand than always finding it necessary to follow in the path of another woman; it was by women who felt able to emulate men and had that sense of adventure that many of the trails got blazed in the first place. For a fully evidenced example, see Patti Smith's Just Kids. (I note one reviewer below finds it unbelievable that Jane likes Conrad... Not a fan myself, but I've met a couple of women now of pension age who liked reading Conrad from their teens; because of this, and their attitudes and achievements, I saw him instead as a particularly astute choice. As Jane says, But everything had a masculine bias in 1924 - and for quite some time afterwards - and if you didn't much like, or didn't even really want to read, the marriage-focused Austens & Brontes, and had a limited library of classics as your main reading material, his books were among those you might latch on to.)
I'd never seriously considered reading Graham Swift before, but now would certainly do so again.
I think this is a great little book with the potential to be both a prize-winner (or at least shortlister) and a popular favourite - and unlike the chunksters crossing occupying that territory lately, and which I wouldn't have bothered with on spec due to the time commitment, it's a very quick read.
* The book uses the fairly unobtrusive "Carrington" as a supporting character's middle name.
[When noticing this book online, I'd been trying to remember what the painting on the British cover was; in case I forget again, or someone else wants to know, it's from Modigliani's Red Nude/Nu couché.]
This novella is a great example of how really good writing can elevate a story & setting that in outline are clichéd, and more or less make the proverbial silk purse from sow's ear.
It brought back embarrassing memories of a hackish short story I once churned out for a creative writing course, also with a cycling female protagonist resident in an early twentieth-century minor English country house - set maybe 12-15 years earlier - and the use of a Bloomsbury Group name* for a character (I think it might be compulsory in these). I've long rolled my eyes at that story, but Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday gave a lesson in what's actually possible. It's very accessible, would appeal to fans of Downton Abbey - rather than being a similar tableau, it zooms in to one one character, a maid, Jane; but again it has rather more depth and conscious awareness of tropes than a guilty-pleasure binge on ITV costume drama. (A programme which, come to think of it, started just a few months after I came up with that story - something in the air maybe, and which I haven't seen since the second series...think it was some dread of memories suspended in the theme tune.)
There's excellent attention to detail in the novella, but never too much. Contrasted with a debut historical novel I've been reading the last couple of days, Swift, with at least 35 years of fiction-writing under his belt, knows how not to plaster every page with displays of research, and gets it spot on. Jane is an utterly convincing female character, and there are several details of bodily experience mentioned that a lesser male writer might overlook. If I'd read this book without an author name on it, I'd have been sure the author was a woman. At times Jane reminded me of Will Self's similarly excellent portrayal of young Audrey in Umbrella.
Unlike Audrey, Jane has a brighter future ahead of her, one which is hinted at early in the book. I groaned at the appearance of yet another writer protagonist: stories I've read so far this year in which a character isn't an author have been very few - but even to a reader so sick and tired of them as I am [the phrase "another fucking book about another fucking writer" is waiting in the wings until I can stick it in the review of a less delicate story] this example was actually quite interestingly done: discussion, for instance, of the ways characters emerge sideways from real people. She sounds like the kind of author who would now be in Virago Modern Classics; by the end of the book I could visualise them, she was that convincing.
I just really liked Jane - she has a sense of mischief I found entirely relatable, and she likes to have a go at stuff without being bullishly overconfident. Older Jane also sounds rather like - although is a touch more reserved than - the venerable and irreverent Diana Athill, whose wonderful memoirs I must get back to at some point. The way she sees no barriers to taking men as models for her own ambitions I think reflects formidable older British women writers I've long admired, such as Murdoch and Byatt, and, to use that overused r-word again, is a thought process I found easier to understand than always finding it necessary to follow in the path of another woman; it was by women who felt able to emulate men and had that sense of adventure that many of the trails got blazed in the first place. For a fully evidenced example, see Patti Smith's Just Kids. (I note one reviewer below finds it unbelievable that Jane likes Conrad... Not a fan myself, but I've met a couple of women now of pension age who liked reading Conrad from their teens; because of this, and their attitudes and achievements, I saw him instead as a particularly astute choice. As Jane says, But everything had a masculine bias in 1924 - and for quite some time afterwards - and if you didn't much like, or didn't even really want to read, the marriage-focused Austens & Brontes, and had a limited library of classics as your main reading material, his books were among those you might latch on to.)
I'd never seriously considered reading Graham Swift before, but now would certainly do so again.
I think this is a great little book with the potential to be both a prize-winner (or at least shortlister) and a popular favourite - and unlike the chunksters crossing occupying that territory lately, and which I wouldn't have bothered with on spec due to the time commitment, it's a very quick read.
* The book uses the fairly unobtrusive "Carrington" as a supporting character's middle name.
[When noticing this book online, I'd been trying to remember what the painting on the British cover was; in case I forget again, or someone else wants to know, it's from Modigliani's Red Nude/Nu couché.]
January 29, 2018
Giorno di festa. Coito ergo sum
Coito.
Ha pensato a tutto, Paul. Persino al contraccettivo (diaframma, tenete a mente). La giovane Jane, cameriera trovatella a servizio della famiglia Niven, da qualche anno ha una relazione col rampollo di casa Sheringham. Prima la pagava, poi promossala “amica” ha evitato la spesa. Lui risparmia, e lei non si sente più una prostituta. In fondo, “Amica, [è] meglio ancora che amante”. E di amanti ne avrà un buon numero in seguito, quando sarà a Oxford: “Tanti: di questo avrebbe fatto un punto d’onore”.
E veniamo al 30 marzo 1924, Mothering Sunday. Eccola arrivare, la nostra Jane, in bicicletta. Varca il cancello e pedala lungo il viale d’accesso, tra limoni e narcisi. Questa volta non passa dal retro, ma dall’ingresso principale. La casa di Upleigh è vuota. La famiglia è fuori a festeggiare l’imminente matrimonio fra Paul e Emma Hobday. Le domestiche sono state accompagnate alla stazione dal giovanotto. Trascorreranno la giornata con le rispettive famiglie.
La conduce, o meglio, la spinge su per le scale. Raggiunta la stanza da letto, Paul spoglia la giovane mentre lei, ferma, osserva quella stanza fino a ora sconosciuta. Sdraiati sul letto, nudi, immobili, l’una accanto all’altro fissano il fumo delle sigarette, col cinguettio che arriva dal giardino e rompe il silenzio della casa deserta. Per lei, convinta di una “perfetta politica della nudità” che cancella le gerarchie, è un momento magico. Un momento di pace e incanto che difficilmente una servetta può conoscere. E qui, per non tediarci con troppa poesia, ecco che mr Swift le fa sbatacchiare “via la cenere dall’uccello ancora umido” di Paul.
Post coito.
A questo punto, i termini nudo, nudi, nudità comparsi già una decina di volte, si replicano per altre trenta e più. Il buon Graham teme che ci dimentichiamo, o che non ci sia chiara la loro condizione di nudità. Lo stesso vuole che rammentiamo l’orfanitudine di Jane (e pensate un po’!, nonostante sia cresciuta in brefotrofio, si rivela essere creatura “tutt’altro che priva di intelligenza e spirito d’iniziativa. Era venuto fuori che la ragazza sapeva leggere molto meglio di quanto fosse richiesto a una cameriera, scrivere ben più di una semplice lista della spesa, e anche fare di conto”); si adopera, mr Swift, perché non cadano nell’oblio le numerose “emissioni notturne”, prodotte in solitudine o in compagnia. Ha cura che non scordiamo quelle macchie. Tiene altresì a ricordarci, svariate volte, il diaframma o cappuccio che il magnanimo Paul ha procurato alla giovane domestica.
Mentre il seme di Paul abbandona Jane, con notevole sgocciolio tra le gambe (ci spiega che è per il diaframma), il giovane si veste, lentamente, e non prima che l’egregio autore abbia largheggiato sulla di lui nudità. Nel frattempo lei rimane sdraiata sul letto. Nuda.
Paul se ne va nel primo pomeriggio, Jane approfitta per visitare (nuda) la casa. Entra in biblioteca e stringe al petto (nudo) un libro di Stevenson, raggiunta la cucina, si siede (nuda) e consuma il pasticcio messo da parte. Beve birra. All’improvviso si sente miserabile, senza niente addosso. Rutta rumorosamente (giuro!) e torna di sopra per rivestirsi. Infine esce, inforca la bicicletta e si avvia verso casa Niven. L’incontro amoroso è finito. Jane, consapevole che non ne seguiranno altri, pedala.
E qui… bombshell!: “Aveva ventidue anni. Con il vento che le sollevava la gonna, e le stuzzicava il diaframma.” (riferito al contraccettivo succitato).
Ora, anche ipotizzando una sella col buco intorno (come la famosa menta), un organo genitale somigliante al traforo del Monte Bianco e un vento potente come una tromba d’aria, vi pare verosimile?
Stringendo: gli eventi si susseguono e si giunge al termine, passando per il cambio importante nella vita di Jane. Il trasferimento a Oxford, il suo lavoro come commessa in una libreria, dove di giorno in giorno i libri le diventano sempre più familiari, così come lo divengono i clienti: “Cominciò a frequentarne alcuni, a uscire con loro, perfino ad andarci a letto, e non sarebbe stato errato affermare che era esattamente ciò che aveva sperato, e in qualche modo previsto. Se non era potuta “andare a Oxford” nel senso che comunemente veniva associato all’espressione, tanto valeva che diventasse intima di chi godeva di quel privilegio. Sarebbe stato addirittura possibile sostenere che si muoveva nella cerchia universitaria con molta più libertà, e riscuotendo molto più successo, di tanti poveri sgobboni che dell’accademia facevano parte a tutti gli effetti. Riusciva perfino a spacciarsi per un esemplare di una specie rara quanto spaventosa: le studentesse universitarie.”
Infine la gloria.
Lunga la vita di Jane. Corto (per fortuna) il racconto.
Voleva essere una narrazione sulle convenzioni sociali, sugli strascichi della Grande Guerra, sull’emancipazione, l’indipendenza, i sogni, le aspirazioni, l’amore per le parole? Voleva essere un omaggio alla lettura, alla scrittura? Ai romanzieri citati, primo fra tutti Conrad? Poteva esserlo. Invece no.
Ripetitivo fino al fastidio. Tutto per superare le cento pagine e renderlo vendibile?
E ho percepito uno sgradevole velato “invito” al giudizio nei confronti di Jane. I passaggi sulla giovane domestica/giumenta, che ho riportato, sono alcuni esempi. Su Paul lo stallone, perché “non c’era alcun dubbio che lo fosse”, nulla da dire. O al limite si potrebbe, con un sospiro, borbogliare per “tutte quelle emissioni sprecate”.
P.S. Il 30 marzo 1924, era veramente domenica. È anche l’anno della morte di Conrad, che a Jane piace tanto (lo immagina persino - il vecchio Joseph - disteso al suo fianco. Nudo, naturalmente).
Su su, che a cercare qualcosa si trova. Leggete Conrad. E gli altri scrittori citati.
Tutto quel Modigliani in copertina sprecato…
Coito.
Ha pensato a tutto, Paul. Persino al contraccettivo (diaframma, tenete a mente). La giovane Jane, cameriera trovatella a servizio della famiglia Niven, da qualche anno ha una relazione col rampollo di casa Sheringham. Prima la pagava, poi promossala “amica” ha evitato la spesa. Lui risparmia, e lei non si sente più una prostituta. In fondo, “Amica, [è] meglio ancora che amante”. E di amanti ne avrà un buon numero in seguito, quando sarà a Oxford: “Tanti: di questo avrebbe fatto un punto d’onore”.
E veniamo al 30 marzo 1924, Mothering Sunday. Eccola arrivare, la nostra Jane, in bicicletta. Varca il cancello e pedala lungo il viale d’accesso, tra limoni e narcisi. Questa volta non passa dal retro, ma dall’ingresso principale. La casa di Upleigh è vuota. La famiglia è fuori a festeggiare l’imminente matrimonio fra Paul e Emma Hobday. Le domestiche sono state accompagnate alla stazione dal giovanotto. Trascorreranno la giornata con le rispettive famiglie.
La conduce, o meglio, la spinge su per le scale. Raggiunta la stanza da letto, Paul spoglia la giovane mentre lei, ferma, osserva quella stanza fino a ora sconosciuta. Sdraiati sul letto, nudi, immobili, l’una accanto all’altro fissano il fumo delle sigarette, col cinguettio che arriva dal giardino e rompe il silenzio della casa deserta. Per lei, convinta di una “perfetta politica della nudità” che cancella le gerarchie, è un momento magico. Un momento di pace e incanto che difficilmente una servetta può conoscere. E qui, per non tediarci con troppa poesia, ecco che mr Swift le fa sbatacchiare “via la cenere dall’uccello ancora umido” di Paul.
Post coito.
A questo punto, i termini nudo, nudi, nudità comparsi già una decina di volte, si replicano per altre trenta e più. Il buon Graham teme che ci dimentichiamo, o che non ci sia chiara la loro condizione di nudità. Lo stesso vuole che rammentiamo l’orfanitudine di Jane (e pensate un po’!, nonostante sia cresciuta in brefotrofio, si rivela essere creatura “tutt’altro che priva di intelligenza e spirito d’iniziativa. Era venuto fuori che la ragazza sapeva leggere molto meglio di quanto fosse richiesto a una cameriera, scrivere ben più di una semplice lista della spesa, e anche fare di conto”); si adopera, mr Swift, perché non cadano nell’oblio le numerose “emissioni notturne”, prodotte in solitudine o in compagnia. Ha cura che non scordiamo quelle macchie. Tiene altresì a ricordarci, svariate volte, il diaframma o cappuccio che il magnanimo Paul ha procurato alla giovane domestica.
Mentre il seme di Paul abbandona Jane, con notevole sgocciolio tra le gambe (ci spiega che è per il diaframma), il giovane si veste, lentamente, e non prima che l’egregio autore abbia largheggiato sulla di lui nudità. Nel frattempo lei rimane sdraiata sul letto. Nuda.
Paul se ne va nel primo pomeriggio, Jane approfitta per visitare (nuda) la casa. Entra in biblioteca e stringe al petto (nudo) un libro di Stevenson, raggiunta la cucina, si siede (nuda) e consuma il pasticcio messo da parte. Beve birra. All’improvviso si sente miserabile, senza niente addosso. Rutta rumorosamente (giuro!) e torna di sopra per rivestirsi. Infine esce, inforca la bicicletta e si avvia verso casa Niven. L’incontro amoroso è finito. Jane, consapevole che non ne seguiranno altri, pedala.
E qui… bombshell!: “Aveva ventidue anni. Con il vento che le sollevava la gonna, e le stuzzicava il diaframma.” (riferito al contraccettivo succitato).
Ora, anche ipotizzando una sella col buco intorno (come la famosa menta), un organo genitale somigliante al traforo del Monte Bianco e un vento potente come una tromba d’aria, vi pare verosimile?
Stringendo: gli eventi si susseguono e si giunge al termine, passando per il cambio importante nella vita di Jane. Il trasferimento a Oxford, il suo lavoro come commessa in una libreria, dove di giorno in giorno i libri le diventano sempre più familiari, così come lo divengono i clienti: “Cominciò a frequentarne alcuni, a uscire con loro, perfino ad andarci a letto, e non sarebbe stato errato affermare che era esattamente ciò che aveva sperato, e in qualche modo previsto. Se non era potuta “andare a Oxford” nel senso che comunemente veniva associato all’espressione, tanto valeva che diventasse intima di chi godeva di quel privilegio. Sarebbe stato addirittura possibile sostenere che si muoveva nella cerchia universitaria con molta più libertà, e riscuotendo molto più successo, di tanti poveri sgobboni che dell’accademia facevano parte a tutti gli effetti. Riusciva perfino a spacciarsi per un esemplare di una specie rara quanto spaventosa: le studentesse universitarie.”
Infine la gloria.
Lunga la vita di Jane. Corto (per fortuna) il racconto.
Voleva essere una narrazione sulle convenzioni sociali, sugli strascichi della Grande Guerra, sull’emancipazione, l’indipendenza, i sogni, le aspirazioni, l’amore per le parole? Voleva essere un omaggio alla lettura, alla scrittura? Ai romanzieri citati, primo fra tutti Conrad? Poteva esserlo. Invece no.
Ripetitivo fino al fastidio. Tutto per superare le cento pagine e renderlo vendibile?
E ho percepito uno sgradevole velato “invito” al giudizio nei confronti di Jane. I passaggi sulla giovane domestica/giumenta, che ho riportato, sono alcuni esempi. Su Paul lo stallone, perché “non c’era alcun dubbio che lo fosse”, nulla da dire. O al limite si potrebbe, con un sospiro, borbogliare per “tutte quelle emissioni sprecate”.
P.S. Il 30 marzo 1924, era veramente domenica. È anche l’anno della morte di Conrad, che a Jane piace tanto (lo immagina persino - il vecchio Joseph - disteso al suo fianco. Nudo, naturalmente).
Su su, che a cercare qualcosa si trova. Leggete Conrad. E gli altri scrittori citati.
Tutto quel Modigliani in copertina sprecato…
January 24, 2017
It is hard to find words with such sincerity and warmth for literature, for life. This isn't perfect, but it feels genuine the way only fiction can. It's simple yet its depth is staggering. No matter what I say, it will be hard to convey these concepts best felt. That's why I'm going to skip the discussion and urge you to get yourself a copy. It’s best read, experienced, and through it lived. Well, isn’t that what books are for anyway?
May 26, 2024
4.5 stars
short review for busy readers: a typical Swift: slowish, pensive, the narrative roaming through ideas and notions to build up an exquisite picture of a person, a situation and a time period. This is one of his historic ones, so the period detail is phenomenal. Lots of nudity and rumination on sex and physical love between long-term partners, but not very erotic.
in detail:
Mothering Sunday was traditionally the day house servants had free to visit their own mothers.
By 1924, when this story takes place, it was already going out of fashion. The kindly family who employs Jane Fairchild, the orphan put into service at 14, still adheres to the custom, however, and it is on this "free day" that Jane's entire life changes, thrusting her onto a course neither she, nor anyone else, could have foreseen.
What I adored about this novel was the accuracy of how the servants see the family, and the family the servants. Today, with our "anybody with privilege is an abusive scumbag" mentality, it will be difficult for many readers to understand how come, historically, many servants didn't see their employers like that.
One of my favorite thoughts was that the privileged classes were creatures of "mood and whim". That they could be generous one moment, and snarl at you the next. That was just how their kind were, being that many of them were - in Jane's words - "lost souls" who didn't know what to do with themselves nor saw any real purpose to their lives. They were to be pitied, actually, far more than despised.
Such insight! And very accurate.
A few of the scenes are so wonderfully, vividly rendered, that you feel as if you are there. In those old landed houses with their dark paintings and masculine libraries; zipping down English lanes on a bicycle; standing at an open window, looking out over rolling hills without a stitch on.
And yes, there is lots of sex in this one as it deals with a long term illicit love affair. Not explicit, but of the kind experienced lovers indulge in. More observation and contextual than erotic.
For those who have already read: I think he loved her. Genuinely. And
The only minus point to this novel is the end, which spends too long with Jane's career as a writer. Is anything in fiction as tedious as an author telling us what it's like to be an author? Probably, but I can't think of one.
Thanks to Niharika for reminding me that this was one of the few Graham Swifts I hadn't read yet!
short review for busy readers: a typical Swift: slowish, pensive, the narrative roaming through ideas and notions to build up an exquisite picture of a person, a situation and a time period. This is one of his historic ones, so the period detail is phenomenal. Lots of nudity and rumination on sex and physical love between long-term partners, but not very erotic.
in detail:
Mothering Sunday was traditionally the day house servants had free to visit their own mothers.
By 1924, when this story takes place, it was already going out of fashion. The kindly family who employs Jane Fairchild, the orphan put into service at 14, still adheres to the custom, however, and it is on this "free day" that Jane's entire life changes, thrusting her onto a course neither she, nor anyone else, could have foreseen.
What I adored about this novel was the accuracy of how the servants see the family, and the family the servants. Today, with our "anybody with privilege is an abusive scumbag" mentality, it will be difficult for many readers to understand how come, historically, many servants didn't see their employers like that.
One of my favorite thoughts was that the privileged classes were creatures of "mood and whim". That they could be generous one moment, and snarl at you the next. That was just how their kind were, being that many of them were - in Jane's words - "lost souls" who didn't know what to do with themselves nor saw any real purpose to their lives. They were to be pitied, actually, far more than despised.
Such insight! And very accurate.
A few of the scenes are so wonderfully, vividly rendered, that you feel as if you are there. In those old landed houses with their dark paintings and masculine libraries; zipping down English lanes on a bicycle; standing at an open window, looking out over rolling hills without a stitch on.
And yes, there is lots of sex in this one as it deals with a long term illicit love affair. Not explicit, but of the kind experienced lovers indulge in. More observation and contextual than erotic.
For those who have already read: I think he loved her. Genuinely. And
The only minus point to this novel is the end, which spends too long with Jane's career as a writer. Is anything in fiction as tedious as an author telling us what it's like to be an author? Probably, but I can't think of one.
Thanks to Niharika for reminding me that this was one of the few Graham Swifts I hadn't read yet!
October 28, 2016
Oh, how I disliked this short novel! It's a really thin 'where did I read this before'story. Much ado about nothing... The language is ok, but never wow. I was quite amazed by how such a short book could have such a nagging tone.
When I read the positive reviews on this one, I feel that we read a totally different book.
When I read the positive reviews on this one, I feel that we read a totally different book.
January 29, 2016
Delicious. That's what this book is. Delicious.
Mothering Sunday reveals Graham Swift to be a master at the peak of his powers. Imagine an artist, a Matisse or a Picasso, deftly sketching a scene or a portrait - a line drawing, seemingly effortless for them to do, just something to capture a moment, to capture a mood. It looks like magic to us, and yet to them, a commonplace. The result of genius and experience.
I imagine Graham Swift talking to his editor about Mothering Sunday. The editor grasping it like it was gold. And Swift saying, Oh, you like that do you? I have many of those laying about.
We need to celebrate books like this. We need to encourage these writers to write more. Great writers get better with age. Our obsession with the new can obscure this simple fact.
Mothering Sunday is erotic, moving, honest and beautiful. A very easy read. With the lightest of touches. But it also has the power to surprise. A hymn to youth, a meditation on ageing and a study on the value of experience.
Mothering Sunday reveals Graham Swift to be a master at the peak of his powers. Imagine an artist, a Matisse or a Picasso, deftly sketching a scene or a portrait - a line drawing, seemingly effortless for them to do, just something to capture a moment, to capture a mood. It looks like magic to us, and yet to them, a commonplace. The result of genius and experience.
I imagine Graham Swift talking to his editor about Mothering Sunday. The editor grasping it like it was gold. And Swift saying, Oh, you like that do you? I have many of those laying about.
We need to celebrate books like this. We need to encourage these writers to write more. Great writers get better with age. Our obsession with the new can obscure this simple fact.
Mothering Sunday is erotic, moving, honest and beautiful. A very easy read. With the lightest of touches. But it also has the power to surprise. A hymn to youth, a meditation on ageing and a study on the value of experience.
May 19, 2024
# Mothering May #1
4,5*
Uma parte daquele dia não podia (será que podia?) durar para sempre. Um fragmento de uma vida não pode ser o seu todo.
Insisto que sou uma das pessoas menos românticas do mundo, mas há qualquer coisa nas histórias de amor tristes contadas de forma vaga e contida que me apanham desprevenida e me fazem desobstruir as vias lacrimais. Digo eu que “O Domingo das Mães” é uma história de amor, mas se calhar estou só a projectar o que quero ler nas entrelinhas, porque aqui ninguém fala de afecto nem de sentimentos, já que as emoções são refreadas e conversar não é coisa que Jane e Paul façam propriamente na primeira e última vez que se deitam numa cama, pondo fim, numa bela manhã de março, a um relacionamento de sete anos.
Ela achou difícil, mesmo enquanto o olhava, evitar que os seus olhos se enchessem de lágrimas, mesmo sabendo que permiti-las, usá-las, seria de certo modo falhar. Tinha de ser corajosa, generosa, impiedosa, permitindo-lhe aquele último e possível presente de si mesma. Iria ele alguma vez esquecê-la, ali deitada daquela maneira?
“O Domingo das Mães” é um livro a transbordar de classe, onde a protagonista passa metade dele completamente nua sem que haja a descrição do seu corpo, sem que haja os habituais comentários babões. E, ainda assim, há um ambiente de sensualidade mas também de realismo que tornam estes dois jovens muito concretos.
A porta da frente, o seu diafragma – e um livro para ler!
Pela sua escrita elegante e melancólica recorda livros como “Reviver o Passado em Brideshead” de Evelyn Waugh, com a sua diferença de classes, e sobretudo “Na Praia de Chesil” de Ian McEwan, pela sensação de tudo o que poderia ter sido e não foi, mas não deixa de remeter também para séries como “Upstairs Downstairs” e até “Downton Abbey”, pela mundividência da criadagem em paralelo com a dos patrões abastados.
E ainda seria ela uma criada, ali estendida naquela cama? E seria até ele um “senhor”? Era a magia, a política perfeita da nudez.
Nesta obra de Graham Swift, passada em 1924, se as famílias já não são tão ricas como antes é porque se vive um momento de transição, desta vez no período entre guerras, em que num esplendoroso Dia da Mãe (então celebrado em Março) resta apenas um filho a um grupo de famílias amigas, tendo os outros morrido no conflito recente.
Ela não sabia, até mesmo no Dia da Mãe, como seria ser-se uma mãe que perdera dois filhos – aparentemente, no mesmo número de meses. (…) Nenhum rapaz iria a casa, pois não, com ramalhetes de flores ou bolos de fruta para oferecer?
Com o pretexto de ter de estudar, Paul aproveita a casa vazia e adia tanto quanto pode o almoço com a noiva, para se encontrar uma última vez com a criada da mansão vizinha.
Em seguida ele partiu. Sem se despedir. Sem nenhum beijo tolo. Só um último olhar. Como se a estivesse a esvaziar, como se a estivesse a beber.
Pelo monólogo interior de Jane Fairchild, uma órfã que é serviçal desde os 14 anos, percebemos que ela revive, décadas mais tarde, aquelas horas em restrospectiva e que agora, pela análise das palavras que lhe ocorrem, já houve um refinamento só possível pela imersão na literatura, cujo primeiro contacto na biblioteca dos seus patrões a levou a ousar querer mais.
Contar histórias, contar contos. Sempre a insinuação de que se estavam a negociar mentiras. Mas para ela seria sempre a tarefa de chegar ao fundo, ao coração, ao cerne, ao miolo: o comércio de dizer a verdade.
Depois de tantos elogios, talvez se estranhe não lhe dar a pontuação máxima, mas tal fica a dever-se apenas ao escritor escolhido para ilustrar a leitura de Jane nesse marcante dia: Joseph Conrad. Embora compreenda que na biblioteca de casas habitadas por rapazes Jane só tivesse acesso a obras de aventuras e que faça sentido o livro escolhido para ilustrar o seu fascínio pela arte de contar histórias se intitule “Juventude”, pelo seu título e pela rememoração das personagens envelhecidas, não sinto qualquer fascínio por Conrad e as suas aventuras marítimas. Foi somente esse pequeno desapontamento pessoal que tirou algum lustro a toda esta composição tão refulgente sobre um dia de luz e trevas, um dia de finais e de começos.
E não disse, como o podia ter feito – aos 80, conseguia ser oracular: Somos todos combustível. Nascemos e ardemos, alguns de nós mais depressa do que outros. Existem diferentes tipos de combustão. Mas não ardermos, nunca nos inflamarmos, essa seria a mais triste das vidas, não seria?
4,5*
Uma parte daquele dia não podia (será que podia?) durar para sempre. Um fragmento de uma vida não pode ser o seu todo.
Insisto que sou uma das pessoas menos românticas do mundo, mas há qualquer coisa nas histórias de amor tristes contadas de forma vaga e contida que me apanham desprevenida e me fazem desobstruir as vias lacrimais. Digo eu que “O Domingo das Mães” é uma história de amor, mas se calhar estou só a projectar o que quero ler nas entrelinhas, porque aqui ninguém fala de afecto nem de sentimentos, já que as emoções são refreadas e conversar não é coisa que Jane e Paul façam propriamente na primeira e última vez que se deitam numa cama, pondo fim, numa bela manhã de março, a um relacionamento de sete anos.
Ela achou difícil, mesmo enquanto o olhava, evitar que os seus olhos se enchessem de lágrimas, mesmo sabendo que permiti-las, usá-las, seria de certo modo falhar. Tinha de ser corajosa, generosa, impiedosa, permitindo-lhe aquele último e possível presente de si mesma. Iria ele alguma vez esquecê-la, ali deitada daquela maneira?
“O Domingo das Mães” é um livro a transbordar de classe, onde a protagonista passa metade dele completamente nua sem que haja a descrição do seu corpo, sem que haja os habituais comentários babões. E, ainda assim, há um ambiente de sensualidade mas também de realismo que tornam estes dois jovens muito concretos.
A porta da frente, o seu diafragma – e um livro para ler!
Pela sua escrita elegante e melancólica recorda livros como “Reviver o Passado em Brideshead” de Evelyn Waugh, com a sua diferença de classes, e sobretudo “Na Praia de Chesil” de Ian McEwan, pela sensação de tudo o que poderia ter sido e não foi, mas não deixa de remeter também para séries como “Upstairs Downstairs” e até “Downton Abbey”, pela mundividência da criadagem em paralelo com a dos patrões abastados.
E ainda seria ela uma criada, ali estendida naquela cama? E seria até ele um “senhor”? Era a magia, a política perfeita da nudez.
Nesta obra de Graham Swift, passada em 1924, se as famílias já não são tão ricas como antes é porque se vive um momento de transição, desta vez no período entre guerras, em que num esplendoroso Dia da Mãe (então celebrado em Março) resta apenas um filho a um grupo de famílias amigas, tendo os outros morrido no conflito recente.
Ela não sabia, até mesmo no Dia da Mãe, como seria ser-se uma mãe que perdera dois filhos – aparentemente, no mesmo número de meses. (…) Nenhum rapaz iria a casa, pois não, com ramalhetes de flores ou bolos de fruta para oferecer?
Com o pretexto de ter de estudar, Paul aproveita a casa vazia e adia tanto quanto pode o almoço com a noiva, para se encontrar uma última vez com a criada da mansão vizinha.
Em seguida ele partiu. Sem se despedir. Sem nenhum beijo tolo. Só um último olhar. Como se a estivesse a esvaziar, como se a estivesse a beber.
Pelo monólogo interior de Jane Fairchild, uma órfã que é serviçal desde os 14 anos, percebemos que ela revive, décadas mais tarde, aquelas horas em restrospectiva e que agora, pela análise das palavras que lhe ocorrem, já houve um refinamento só possível pela imersão na literatura, cujo primeiro contacto na biblioteca dos seus patrões a levou a ousar querer mais.
Contar histórias, contar contos. Sempre a insinuação de que se estavam a negociar mentiras. Mas para ela seria sempre a tarefa de chegar ao fundo, ao coração, ao cerne, ao miolo: o comércio de dizer a verdade.
Depois de tantos elogios, talvez se estranhe não lhe dar a pontuação máxima, mas tal fica a dever-se apenas ao escritor escolhido para ilustrar a leitura de Jane nesse marcante dia: Joseph Conrad. Embora compreenda que na biblioteca de casas habitadas por rapazes Jane só tivesse acesso a obras de aventuras e que faça sentido o livro escolhido para ilustrar o seu fascínio pela arte de contar histórias se intitule “Juventude”, pelo seu título e pela rememoração das personagens envelhecidas, não sinto qualquer fascínio por Conrad e as suas aventuras marítimas. Foi somente esse pequeno desapontamento pessoal que tirou algum lustro a toda esta composição tão refulgente sobre um dia de luz e trevas, um dia de finais e de começos.
E não disse, como o podia ter feito – aos 80, conseguia ser oracular: Somos todos combustível. Nascemos e ardemos, alguns de nós mais depressa do que outros. Existem diferentes tipos de combustão. Mas não ardermos, nunca nos inflamarmos, essa seria a mais triste das vidas, não seria?
March 3, 2016
“There never was a day like this, nor even would or could be again.” The day in question is Mothering Day, the day that servants were allowed off to visit their families. It is also the last time that Jane Fairchild, a servant girl, and Paul Sheringham, an upper-class neighbor, will meet for their tryst before he “marries up” and moves to London.
The day – a perfect sunny March day that feels more like June – will start off languishingly and sensually yet will take surprising turns. The initial pace is unhurried, as we play voyeur to Jane and Paul who enjoy their lusty coital time together; after his departure, Jane is left to wander around in an unhurried manner in his wake. Gradually, as the novella reveals its intentions, we discover nuggets about Jane’s past and her future as a well-respected novelist.
In certain ways, Mothering Sunday reminded me of another book I read recently – a book I also loved: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. There, too, the theme is profound self-discovery, leading to a career as a writer. And there as well, the focus is on how we remember and convey truths and how fiction can be used to get to “the heart, the nub, the pith: the trade of truth-telling” and what it means to be true to the “very feel of being alive.”
This is an exquisite little book, a paen to the art of fiction and story-telling, a lovingly crafted character tale, and a compelling read. I could have dwelt in this world longer than the 177 pages allotted to me.
The day – a perfect sunny March day that feels more like June – will start off languishingly and sensually yet will take surprising turns. The initial pace is unhurried, as we play voyeur to Jane and Paul who enjoy their lusty coital time together; after his departure, Jane is left to wander around in an unhurried manner in his wake. Gradually, as the novella reveals its intentions, we discover nuggets about Jane’s past and her future as a well-respected novelist.
In certain ways, Mothering Sunday reminded me of another book I read recently – a book I also loved: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. There, too, the theme is profound self-discovery, leading to a career as a writer. And there as well, the focus is on how we remember and convey truths and how fiction can be used to get to “the heart, the nub, the pith: the trade of truth-telling” and what it means to be true to the “very feel of being alive.”
This is an exquisite little book, a paen to the art of fiction and story-telling, a lovingly crafted character tale, and a compelling read. I could have dwelt in this world longer than the 177 pages allotted to me.
August 31, 2020
Why read this book? What makes it a book worth four stars? It is this I wish to explain in my review.
Simple answer-- the prose. The lines make you curious. There are puzzles begging to be solved. What is hinted at needs to be understood. The lines are tantalizing. Ideas are well expressed.
We learn of a woman’s life. She is not merely an orphan, she is a foundling. In an English orphanage, a good English orphanage, she is educated--she learns to both read and write. At fourteen she was put into service as a maid. At sixteen, during the years of the First World War, she came to work as a maid for the Nivens. The Nivens had a library and there she was allowed to read. As a maid, a pretty maid, in the early 1900s it was not unusual for the sons of the gentry to bed the maids. Such is the situation for Jane Fairchild, the story’s central protagonist. What happens on March 30, 1924, Mothering Sunday? Custom dictates that maids be allowed to return home to visit their mothers. Why does what happen on this day, when Jane is twenty two, influence the rest of her life?
The author’s delicious lines provide clues.
“She had come into the world with an innate license to invent.”
“And what if?” is asked many times.
“Fact and fiction were always merging and interchanging.”
"How can we become a somebody without first being a nobody?”
“It was the whole point of life to embrace it!”
The art of writing is a central theme. Another theme is the loyalty existing between household servants and their masters. Finally, it is asked if arranged marriages are good.
Some may complain that information is repeated. The sex may be viewed by some as too explicit. None of this bothered me.
Eve Webster narrates the audiobook. There are such great lines. For this reason, I wish she had read slower. Words are clearly spoken. The narration I have given three stars.
One learns of Jane’s whole life, but it is not for this that one reads the book. Unraveling the story from the given clues is what I enjoyed.
*************************
*Waterland 4 stars
*Last Orders 4 stars
*Mothering Sunday 4 stars
*Here We Are TBR
*Ever After TBR
*Shuttlecock TBR
*Wish You Were Here TBR
*Out of This World TBR
*The Sweet Shop Owner TBR
*Tomorrow TBR
*The Light of Day TBR
Simple answer-- the prose. The lines make you curious. There are puzzles begging to be solved. What is hinted at needs to be understood. The lines are tantalizing. Ideas are well expressed.
We learn of a woman’s life. She is not merely an orphan, she is a foundling. In an English orphanage, a good English orphanage, she is educated--she learns to both read and write. At fourteen she was put into service as a maid. At sixteen, during the years of the First World War, she came to work as a maid for the Nivens. The Nivens had a library and there she was allowed to read. As a maid, a pretty maid, in the early 1900s it was not unusual for the sons of the gentry to bed the maids. Such is the situation for Jane Fairchild, the story’s central protagonist. What happens on March 30, 1924, Mothering Sunday? Custom dictates that maids be allowed to return home to visit their mothers. Why does what happen on this day, when Jane is twenty two, influence the rest of her life?
The author’s delicious lines provide clues.
“She had come into the world with an innate license to invent.”
“And what if?” is asked many times.
“Fact and fiction were always merging and interchanging.”
"How can we become a somebody without first being a nobody?”
“It was the whole point of life to embrace it!”
The art of writing is a central theme. Another theme is the loyalty existing between household servants and their masters. Finally, it is asked if arranged marriages are good.
Some may complain that information is repeated. The sex may be viewed by some as too explicit. None of this bothered me.
Eve Webster narrates the audiobook. There are such great lines. For this reason, I wish she had read slower. Words are clearly spoken. The narration I have given three stars.
One learns of Jane’s whole life, but it is not for this that one reads the book. Unraveling the story from the given clues is what I enjoyed.
*************************
*Waterland 4 stars
*Last Orders 4 stars
*Mothering Sunday 4 stars
*Here We Are TBR
*Ever After TBR
*Shuttlecock TBR
*Wish You Were Here TBR
*Out of This World TBR
*The Sweet Shop Owner TBR
*Tomorrow TBR
*The Light of Day TBR
May 7, 2016
Well once again I feel like a lone voice in a roar of accolades. This book is about a woman looking back on a day that meant so much to her and which changed the course of her life- Sounds awesome, but it just did not do it for me. I will say if you like books with a poetic flow, this book is for you. If you like books that are introspective, this book is for you. I know this book was not for me- left me flat and disappointed. I had read a phenomenal review on this book, and decided to read it sooner and not just add it to my TBR list. I am sorry I did. The only good thing is that I borrowed it from the library and did not buy it.
March 19, 2016
I found this book exceptionally moving. Beautifully told and on the face of it this is a simple story, although the structure is not straightforward (though it's never confusing). I'm sure other reviews can tell you the characters if you want to know (I always prefer not to) though I have to say that character of Paul is hardly described but each aspect is perfect.
We know there is going to be a bad thing happening and we're told the bad thing half way through the book. The build up to and inevitability of the bad thing seemed to add to it rather than take anything away.
I absolutely loved the way the themes of the story - change, story telling and that we will never understand some things - were woven together.
If I have any slight whinge it's that I found the link to the fourth leg a little clumsy and for me it detracted rather than added to the storytelling. Apart from that it was perfect (so that's a 99/100 from me).
Am I wrong in thinking few male writers tackle writing from a female point of view? Perhaps it's just the male writers that I read, but I'm impressed that Graham Swift writes this woman and her story so well. This is my first Graham Swift book, but I'll look at reading more.
We know there is going to be a bad thing happening and we're told the bad thing half way through the book. The build up to and inevitability of the bad thing seemed to add to it rather than take anything away.
I absolutely loved the way the themes of the story - change, story telling and that we will never understand some things - were woven together.
If I have any slight whinge it's that I found the link to the fourth leg a little clumsy and for me it detracted rather than added to the storytelling. Apart from that it was perfect (so that's a 99/100 from me).
Am I wrong in thinking few male writers tackle writing from a female point of view? Perhaps it's just the male writers that I read, but I'm impressed that Graham Swift writes this woman and her story so well. This is my first Graham Swift book, but I'll look at reading more.
May 19, 2017
Another author ticked off of my (non-existent) list of authors I need to read.
Mothering Sunday is aimlessly meandering through one day - 30th of March, 1924 - in the life of the twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild, who's a maid. She's been having a seven-year amorous relationship with Paul Sheringham, an upper-class young man, who's soon to marry for convenience. On that particular day, a day when servants were given the day off to go visit their mothers or families, Jane goes into Paul's house, for yet another hanky panky session, this time in his bedroom. This book is all about Jane's thoughts on her lover, their love-making, her situation, and a few observation on her employers. I wouldn't be able to say if Jane loved Paul, although she was aware that their relationship was mostly carnal.
Nothing much happens.
Except that, on Mothering Sunday, a tragic event occurs that will change the course of Jane's life, who'll become much more successful than ever thought possible, especially for a woman who was an orphan.
The last third of this very short novel is about Jane waxing lyrically about her own life, few memories here and there, and the importance of books - especially of Joseph Conrad in her discovery journey of good literature, that ultimately pushed her into wanting to become a writer herself.
This was a pleasant enough novel, but nothing mind blowing or life altering. I'm not sure what the message of this little book was. Swift can write very well. Despite all that, I was kept at a distance, never really feeling much or empathising with Jane, who was the narrator.
3.5 stars
Audiobook: excellent!
Mothering Sunday is aimlessly meandering through one day - 30th of March, 1924 - in the life of the twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild, who's a maid. She's been having a seven-year amorous relationship with Paul Sheringham, an upper-class young man, who's soon to marry for convenience. On that particular day, a day when servants were given the day off to go visit their mothers or families, Jane goes into Paul's house, for yet another hanky panky session, this time in his bedroom. This book is all about Jane's thoughts on her lover, their love-making, her situation, and a few observation on her employers. I wouldn't be able to say if Jane loved Paul, although she was aware that their relationship was mostly carnal.
Nothing much happens.
Except that, on Mothering Sunday, a tragic event occurs that will change the course of Jane's life, who'll become much more successful than ever thought possible, especially for a woman who was an orphan.
The last third of this very short novel is about Jane waxing lyrically about her own life, few memories here and there, and the importance of books - especially of Joseph Conrad in her discovery journey of good literature, that ultimately pushed her into wanting to become a writer herself.
This was a pleasant enough novel, but nothing mind blowing or life altering. I'm not sure what the message of this little book was. Swift can write very well. Despite all that, I was kept at a distance, never really feeling much or empathising with Jane, who was the narrator.
3.5 stars
Audiobook: excellent!
August 27, 2024
I loved this novel of first love, self discovery, and ultimately the acceptance and recognition of one's self awareness. "Mothering Sunday" at first plays on the "once upon a time" motif where housemaid Jane Fairchild, who works for the kindly and wealthy Mr. Niven and his depressed wife, is having an affair with the upper crust, handsome Paul Sheringham, who is engaged to marry society girl Emma Hobday.
Jane and Paul spend afternoons on their "mothering Sundays" where the constantly fuck, walk around naked, graphically sharing bodily fluids during the afterglow of sex, and explore one another's bodies as vulnerable human beings, "because there was anyway such an intensity and strange gravity to their experimentation, such a consciousness at least that they were doing something wrong, the whole world as in mourning all around them" (Swift 29). Jane wishes she can be with Paul, but unlike other novels of this same genre, and their heroines- she is not a jealous, harpy type who wishes her circumstances were different, nor would she really want to trade places with the bland Emma. Still, she experiences the heartbreak of first love.
Yes, at first since this novel was written by a white man in the point of view of a woman, with numerous sex scenes where the hot white glaze was strong, Swift's novel reminded me heavily of "A Sport and a Pastime" by James Salter. But unlike the heroine of that novel, Jane is not passive.
I enjoyed how she discovers the work of Joseph Conrad and compares herself to his character Marlowe from "Lord Jim" and "Heart of Darkness" where "she'd think that Conrad himself must be a sort of secret agent slipping between worlds" (Swift 171). Marlowe is a British Westerner attracted to the forbidden reaches of Africa and the East; and Jane is attracted to her forbidden romance with Paul, whom she does love- but is mature enough that they will never be together. After a tragic accident happens to Paul; Niven and Jane part ways.
She ends up a student at Oxford, studying Literature and falling and marrying fellow book nerd Donald. After a few blissful years together, he dies, leaving her lonely, and alone. But Jane embraces her loneliness and independence, and keeps embracing this as she becomes a bestselling novelist, and entering old age.
I loved that Jane is no doormat. I love the scenes where she peruses through the libraries naked looking at books; eating a pie nude and enjoying herself. She knows the score that class differences will keep her apart from Paul, but she uses every bit of her love affair, and of her marriage, to write her heart out, as a way of keeping herself independent and relying on the past as a constant muse.
I cannot wait to see the film adaptation starring Odessa Young and Josh O'Connor as Jane and Paul; Colin Firth and Olivia Colman as The Nivens, and along with the legendary Glenda Jackson.
Postscript:
Note: I did see the film, and everyone in the cast was superb. Odessa Young has the right kind of steel and armor that first love breaks down; Josh O’Connor is smoking hot naked with a cigarette, Olivia Colman and Colin Firth are compassionate as the employers, and Glenda Jackson? The best of them all, making everyone realize that she’s the best actress in the cast, her magical presence lingers.
Jane and Paul spend afternoons on their "mothering Sundays" where the constantly fuck, walk around naked, graphically sharing bodily fluids during the afterglow of sex, and explore one another's bodies as vulnerable human beings, "because there was anyway such an intensity and strange gravity to their experimentation, such a consciousness at least that they were doing something wrong, the whole world as in mourning all around them" (Swift 29). Jane wishes she can be with Paul, but unlike other novels of this same genre, and their heroines- she is not a jealous, harpy type who wishes her circumstances were different, nor would she really want to trade places with the bland Emma. Still, she experiences the heartbreak of first love.
Yes, at first since this novel was written by a white man in the point of view of a woman, with numerous sex scenes where the hot white glaze was strong, Swift's novel reminded me heavily of "A Sport and a Pastime" by James Salter. But unlike the heroine of that novel, Jane is not passive.
I enjoyed how she discovers the work of Joseph Conrad and compares herself to his character Marlowe from "Lord Jim" and "Heart of Darkness" where "she'd think that Conrad himself must be a sort of secret agent slipping between worlds" (Swift 171). Marlowe is a British Westerner attracted to the forbidden reaches of Africa and the East; and Jane is attracted to her forbidden romance with Paul, whom she does love- but is mature enough that they will never be together. After a tragic accident happens to Paul; Niven and Jane part ways.
She ends up a student at Oxford, studying Literature and falling and marrying fellow book nerd Donald. After a few blissful years together, he dies, leaving her lonely, and alone. But Jane embraces her loneliness and independence, and keeps embracing this as she becomes a bestselling novelist, and entering old age.
I loved that Jane is no doormat. I love the scenes where she peruses through the libraries naked looking at books; eating a pie nude and enjoying herself. She knows the score that class differences will keep her apart from Paul, but she uses every bit of her love affair, and of her marriage, to write her heart out, as a way of keeping herself independent and relying on the past as a constant muse.
I cannot wait to see the film adaptation starring Odessa Young and Josh O'Connor as Jane and Paul; Colin Firth and Olivia Colman as The Nivens, and along with the legendary Glenda Jackson.
Postscript:
Note: I did see the film, and everyone in the cast was superb. Odessa Young has the right kind of steel and armor that first love breaks down; Josh O’Connor is smoking hot naked with a cigarette, Olivia Colman and Colin Firth are compassionate as the employers, and Glenda Jackson? The best of them all, making everyone realize that she’s the best actress in the cast, her magical presence lingers.
July 19, 2019
Hoje é o Primeiro Dia do Resto da Tua Vida
“Hoje é o primeiro dia do resto da tua vida. Pouco a pouco o passo faz-se vagabundo. Dá-se a volta ao medo, dá-se a volta ao mundo. Diz-se do passado, que está moribundo. Bebe-se o alento num copo sem fundo...”
Este pequeno adorável trecho pertence a uma canção de Sérgio Godinho, e... por estranho e incrível que pareça é, simultaneamente, a resenha ideal deste pequeno livro de Graham Swift 😊😉
“Hoje é o primeiro dia do resto da tua vida. Pouco a pouco o passo faz-se vagabundo. Dá-se a volta ao medo, dá-se a volta ao mundo. Diz-se do passado, que está moribundo. Bebe-se o alento num copo sem fundo...”
Este pequeno adorável trecho pertence a uma canção de Sérgio Godinho, e... por estranho e incrível que pareça é, simultaneamente, a resenha ideal deste pequeno livro de Graham Swift 😊😉
December 18, 2020
The only bad thing I could possibly say about this sensual, sweeping tale of a life from poor maid to famous writer would be that I wish it'd been longer, which just might be the highest praise I could give this novel made of perfect prose.
This one was awesome on audio.
This one was awesome on audio.
December 13, 2020
I'm really not going to haggle on the praise that has already gotten this magisterial piece of writing. But just one little remark: there is a fairly large difference between the first and the second half of the story.
The first half is downright sublime, especially by its languorous rhythm: it is as if you are really in the head of the domestic Jane Fairchild, lying stretched out, nude (after love making) in the bed of her lover Paul, unscrupulously looking around, and also afterwards walking naked through the empty house. As mentioned above that slow rhythm, - reinforced by the image of the unnatural summerly day in March, a Sunday on which all domestics (we are in the Upstairs-Downstairs-England of 1924) get a rare day off to visit their mother -, is fantasticly written (it made me think of The Dead by Joyce and other sublime pieces of time-stretching literature); and then those layerings (the master-servant-aspect, the secret character of the rendezvous, the fact that it might also be the last one because Paul is to marry a Lady of his class, the portraits of 2 brothers who died in the war on the table next to the bed, Jane who was a foundling and so without mother and therefore can stand in the world untethered etc.) ... all beautifully adding to the sphere of contained tension!
But in the second half things literally get on the move and Swift presents us with a meta-fiction on writing and the relation between words and reality. Because Jane, through what she experienced that day in March 1924, became intrigued by the power of words and their dubious truthfulness, ending in a perfectly postmodernist profession of faith: "Was everything a great fabrication? Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the World and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words. At best it seemed that things might bless the words that distinguished them, and that words might bless everything "; apparantly for Jane it was the start of a brilliant writing carreer.
As interesting as this might be, I can not help it, but the transition disappointed me a little bit: I wanted to get back to those enchanting-magical hours of contained tension of the first part. But let's not complain: in "Mothering Sunday" Swift shows he's a worthy successor of Chekhov! (rating 3.5 stars)
The first half is downright sublime, especially by its languorous rhythm: it is as if you are really in the head of the domestic Jane Fairchild, lying stretched out, nude (after love making) in the bed of her lover Paul, unscrupulously looking around, and also afterwards walking naked through the empty house. As mentioned above that slow rhythm, - reinforced by the image of the unnatural summerly day in March, a Sunday on which all domestics (we are in the Upstairs-Downstairs-England of 1924) get a rare day off to visit their mother -, is fantasticly written (it made me think of The Dead by Joyce and other sublime pieces of time-stretching literature); and then those layerings (the master-servant-aspect, the secret character of the rendezvous, the fact that it might also be the last one because Paul is to marry a Lady of his class, the portraits of 2 brothers who died in the war on the table next to the bed, Jane who was a foundling and so without mother and therefore can stand in the world untethered etc.) ... all beautifully adding to the sphere of contained tension!
But in the second half things literally get on the move and Swift presents us with a meta-fiction on writing and the relation between words and reality. Because Jane, through what she experienced that day in March 1924, became intrigued by the power of words and their dubious truthfulness, ending in a perfectly postmodernist profession of faith: "Was everything a great fabrication? Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the World and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words. At best it seemed that things might bless the words that distinguished them, and that words might bless everything "; apparantly for Jane it was the start of a brilliant writing carreer.
As interesting as this might be, I can not help it, but the transition disappointed me a little bit: I wanted to get back to those enchanting-magical hours of contained tension of the first part. But let's not complain: in "Mothering Sunday" Swift shows he's a worthy successor of Chekhov! (rating 3.5 stars)
June 13, 2023
ya gece gece elime aldım, bitirdim ve iyi bir şey okumanın o hazzıyla nasıl güzel uyumuşum.
1920’lerde geçen kısacık bir roman “annelerin kutsal pazarı”. paskalya öncesi perhizin son pazarıymış bu. tüm “downstairs” çalışanların da annesini görmeye gittiği yani 40 yılda 1 izin yaptığı bir gün. “upstairs”takiler durumdan hoşnutsuz olsa da yapacak bir şey yok, gelenek karşısında.
şimdi downton abbey filan izleyenler bizim aklımızın hayalimizin almadığı bu sınıfsal farklılığı bu romanda satır aralarında nasıl da hissettirildiğini göreceklerdir. ama bu kez zamansal olarak farklı bir atmosfer var. 1. dünya savaşı yeni bitmiş ve her ailede ölü oğullar var. o nedenle inanılmaz bir yas havası hakim. fakirleşmeleri de cabası.
bir klasik okuyacağımı sanırken son derece gerçekçi bir seks sahnesiyle karşılaşmak beni hem şaşırttı hem sevindirdi. ailesi olmayan jane’in yan evin küçük beyiyle sevişmesi, hem de o dönem kitaplarında olmayan cinsten ayrıntılarla bunun anlatılması. o yatak odası sahnesinin söylenen ve söylenmeyenlerle tüm romanı ele geçirmesi çok çok ustalıklı.
bir günde yaşanan iki uç olay zamanda sıçramalarla aktarılıyor. biz jane’in ünlü bir yazar olduğunu hatta 98 yaşına kadar yaşadığını hemen en başta öğreniyoruz. aslında sınıf atlamanın öznesi jane ve bu sebeple onunla yapılan röportajlar da romanın bir parçası.
çünkü hiçbir zaman tam gerçeği anlatamıyor röportajlarda. okumaya yazmaya nasıl başladığını evet ama 15’inde hizmetçi gittiği evde 7 sene süren gizli ilişkisini, her yerde buluşmanın, seksin izini ve üst sınıfta olmayan o ateşi, hayır.
sonrasında kitapçıda çalışmaya başlayan, destek gören, oxford öğrencileriyle yatarak ilmini artıran :)) jane biricik kocasıyla evleniyor ve erken ölümüyle hayatının ikinci yasını yaşadığını hatırlıyor.
hatırlamayla ilerleyen romanda kurgu ve gerçek üzerine kafa yormalar da var, süfrejet’ler de, yetimlik de, kimsesizlik de, 6 peni için birisiyle yatmış olmak da, bunun utanç olmaması da… yani graham swift sen ne büyük bir yazamamışsın ki 110 sayfada tüm bunları böylesi bir metne yedirebilmişsin.
bu arada zaman sıçramaları ve özne karmaşasının olduğu romanda cümleler epey uzun, paragraflar karışık. orijinalini bilmesem de bu zorlayıcı olabilecek anlatımı didar zeynep batumlu müthiş çevirmiş. onu da ekleyeyim. iş bankası çağdaş serisine bayılıyorum.
1920’lerde geçen kısacık bir roman “annelerin kutsal pazarı”. paskalya öncesi perhizin son pazarıymış bu. tüm “downstairs” çalışanların da annesini görmeye gittiği yani 40 yılda 1 izin yaptığı bir gün. “upstairs”takiler durumdan hoşnutsuz olsa da yapacak bir şey yok, gelenek karşısında.
şimdi downton abbey filan izleyenler bizim aklımızın hayalimizin almadığı bu sınıfsal farklılığı bu romanda satır aralarında nasıl da hissettirildiğini göreceklerdir. ama bu kez zamansal olarak farklı bir atmosfer var. 1. dünya savaşı yeni bitmiş ve her ailede ölü oğullar var. o nedenle inanılmaz bir yas havası hakim. fakirleşmeleri de cabası.
bir klasik okuyacağımı sanırken son derece gerçekçi bir seks sahnesiyle karşılaşmak beni hem şaşırttı hem sevindirdi. ailesi olmayan jane’in yan evin küçük beyiyle sevişmesi, hem de o dönem kitaplarında olmayan cinsten ayrıntılarla bunun anlatılması. o yatak odası sahnesinin söylenen ve söylenmeyenlerle tüm romanı ele geçirmesi çok çok ustalıklı.
bir günde yaşanan iki uç olay zamanda sıçramalarla aktarılıyor. biz jane’in ünlü bir yazar olduğunu hatta 98 yaşına kadar yaşadığını hemen en başta öğreniyoruz. aslında sınıf atlamanın öznesi jane ve bu sebeple onunla yapılan röportajlar da romanın bir parçası.
çünkü hiçbir zaman tam gerçeği anlatamıyor röportajlarda. okumaya yazmaya nasıl başladığını evet ama 15’inde hizmetçi gittiği evde 7 sene süren gizli ilişkisini, her yerde buluşmanın, seksin izini ve üst sınıfta olmayan o ateşi, hayır.
sonrasında kitapçıda çalışmaya başlayan, destek gören, oxford öğrencileriyle yatarak ilmini artıran :)) jane biricik kocasıyla evleniyor ve erken ölümüyle hayatının ikinci yasını yaşadığını hatırlıyor.
hatırlamayla ilerleyen romanda kurgu ve gerçek üzerine kafa yormalar da var, süfrejet’ler de, yetimlik de, kimsesizlik de, 6 peni için birisiyle yatmış olmak da, bunun utanç olmaması da… yani graham swift sen ne büyük bir yazamamışsın ki 110 sayfada tüm bunları böylesi bir metne yedirebilmişsin.
bu arada zaman sıçramaları ve özne karmaşasının olduğu romanda cümleler epey uzun, paragraflar karışık. orijinalini bilmesem de bu zorlayıcı olabilecek anlatımı didar zeynep batumlu müthiş çevirmiş. onu da ekleyeyim. iş bankası çağdaş serisine bayılıyorum.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,158 reviews