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The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Kim Kingston — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 06:17:31 +0000

What’s shocking about this book is that it was written by a man. How, just how does Michael Cunningham get woman so profoundly right? The Hours gives us three different women in three different eras. One of them is Virginia Woolf. All three women are dealing with a profound sense of loss and longing. As Jack Nicholson’s character says in the fairly awful film The Witches of Eastwick “A woman is a hole, isn’t that what they say? All the futility of the world pouring into her.” Cunningham demonstrates this in a much more moving way, but the sentiment is the same. These women suffer in ways which go largely unacknowledged as they move about in their world. They are like icebergs; only one per cent of who they are shows above the surface. And yet they go on, they move forward, they keep their heads up, they fight their secret battles and try not to damage those around them. Cunningham takes us so far into their lives it is difficult to pull yourself back into reality at the end. What a writer. What a book.

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The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan

Kim Kingston — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 02:41:22 +0000

Published in the U.S. under the title Charlotte and Emily (which begs the question-what about Anne?) this beautiful novel takes you inside the cold, damp but deeply imaginative life of the Bronte sisters. It’s a compelling read for Bronte fans, best undertaken just before a visit to the parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire where you can marvel at the doll like size of one of their dresses, which an eight year old girl would struggle to fit into these days. Goodness me, did these people not eat their vegetables?? Fortunately it doesn’t seem to have affected their ability to sustain a rich interior life and commit that to paper. But I digress. Read the book and you’ll understand what their lives were like, in all their windswept, ordinary glory.

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Z, a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Kim Kingston — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 02:26:46 +0000

Ah, what a novel. It brings Zelda alive, before and after her relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, through all the Gatsby-like days, their glorious happiness and their mad sadness, into her final days and what-a-waste end. She’s a fascinating person in her own right, so troubled but so alive, and she deserves to have a brilliant book written about her. This is it.

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Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood

Kim Kingston — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 01:45:53 +0000

Ah, I loved this one. It traces Ernest Hemingway’s relationships with each of his four wives and paints a believable portrait of each of them and the times they lived through. All of the Mrs Hemingways are interesting, intelligent, memorable women in their own right. You have to wonder what they all see in him. If the book has a fault it’s that it fails to convey Henmingway’s charisma, but then the women are the stars of this one after all. At long last.

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The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Kim Kingston — Mon, 21 May 2018 02:24:41 +0000

Even if you’ve never been able to get through one of Earnest Hemingway’s novels (and I confess I haven’t), this book about his relationship with first wife Hadley Richardson still fascinates. Hadley is neither confident nor glamorous but she is kind and loyal, and she and her husband share an unshakeable belief in his brilliance. This belief sustains them through some desperately poor times in 1920’s Paris, but Ernest’s eventual success lures him further and further away from Hadley. Apparently Hadley bore no grudges, made a good second marriage and kept in touch with Earnest for the rest of his life, while he became more and more lost, eventually committing suicide. This book paints an amazing picture of their life in Paris and brings home just how much he lost when he let go of her. Quite beautiful.

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