The blurb
‘And so Rosina is set free on the path of candour, where we so easily gallop a little further than we would wish. It looks so innocent to begin with. One starts out so far from the great confidences…’
A silken thread loosens Rosina’s tongue to admit the desperation behind her confident manner. A woman allows herself to feel secure when her lover gives her a bracelet, until the history of the bracelet is shatteringly revealed.
Cora Sandel’s short stories are about what is concealed behind ordinary situations; what people really want to say to each other when they argue about money or exchange niceties or merely sit in silence. This collection displays the extraordinary economy of Sandel’s writing: finely tuned and exquisitely understated, yet full of meaning.
The author
Cora Sandel is the pseudonym of Sara Fabricius, who was born in Kristiania (Oslo) in 1880. After studying to be a painter, mainly in Paris, before and during the First World War, she abandoned painting at the age of forty, settled in Sweden, and turned seriously to writing, publishing the first volume of her Alberta trilogy in 1926. She died in Sweden in 1974.
The publisher
The Women’s Press now seems to be defunct, but it used to put out a lot of feminist fiction and non-fiction. Its steam iron logo and stripy black-and-white spines are still worth keeping an eye out for when browsing charity shop shelves.
The bookshop
I can’t remember – this has been hanging around on my shelves for ages, waiting for me to read it – but am fairly sure it must have come from a charity shop in Woking.
The bingo card
This could count towards: ‘A Women’s Press’ (obviously); ‘An author from another country’; ‘A book from your TBR’; ‘Translated book’; ‘A press over 20 years old’; or ‘An anthology’.
My thoughts
There are some gems in here, set across quite a wide range of places and, to a lesser extent, times. The one that’s stuck with me ever since I read the book (several weeks ago, now) is Artist’s Christmas. It’s a detailed, atmospheric piece that evokes all the chill of winter and the misguided idealism of the bohemian lifestyle – with a vicious sting in the tail.
Some I inevitably found less successful, such as The Broad Versus the Narrow Outlook, in which a dispute between neighbours made a slightly clumsy metaphor for the Nazi occupation. On the other hand, I did find There’s A War On very moving – and a timely counter to the assumption that the Blitz was something that happened only to Britain.
This is by no means a comfortable read (and I would recommend skipping The Polar Bears or Two Cats in Paris and One in Florence if you’d rather not read about harm to animals) but I found it a worthwhile one, and am rather regretting letting it languish on my bookcase for so long.
Kathleen Jowitt 