I am sitting in my mother’s living room with her sweet mastiff keeping my company. I flew down on Friday. My brother Michael is already here and my niece flies in on Tuesday. Himself drives down on Wednesday and that is it for the Thanksgiving crowd here – our smallest holiday yet and the first for me without both boys. My dad will only be cooking one turkey and my mom and I are planning on cutting back on the pie production. Last week was an unusual week for me in that both my book groups met. I finished the Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway for the one and So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell for the other. I found it very interesting that both books dwelt with the loss of identity – one through the sustained horrors of war and the other through tragic events like a death in the family. I am also about halfway through Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and I am very interested in seeing out the structure plays out in the film.
Here is what caught my interest this week:
Perhaps because of the news, the infidelity has been a topic of much conversation this week ranging from the number of people who have affairs to the emotional damage that such behavior brings to the people directly and indirectly involved with the affair. So I was interested in reading Book Snob’s review of Dorothy Whipple’s novel Someone at a Distance. Written in 1953, the novel is about an ordinary couple, Avery and Ellen North, living a contented life. When Avery’s widowed mother gets lonely she engages a french companion, a woman who has been bitterly rejected by the man she loves. Louise Lanier wants more from life and she feels that she deserves more so she sets her sights on seducing Avery which leads to the divorce of the Norths, their lives and contentment shattered.
Elizabeth Jolley was an English woman who emigrated to Australia and became a well-know and prolific writer. Her third novel, published in 1983 is reviewed by Guy Savage of His Futile Preoccupations. Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is one of those books that contains a novel within a novel. Miss Peabody is a middle-aged spinster living and working in London. She leads a lonely dreary life alternating between her job and her demanding bedridden mother. She strikes up a correspondence with Australian novelist Diana Hopewell, a correspondence which includes installments of her latest novel. Miss Peabody becomes enthralled with the tale of the adventures of three lesbian ladies traveling in Europe with a female student. This sounds like a good romp of a read. Guy writes, “Miss Peabody’s Inheritence, is of course about loneliness, but it’s also about how little we human beings need to jettison our imaginations beyond our lowly, and often restrictive conditions.
Happy reading!
Reflections from the Hinterland 
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