A Different Stripe

Gillian Rose offers some acting advice to Jennifer Garner

In one of the most bizarre casting decisions in recent memory, actress Jennifer Garner is, according to the Hollywood insider website deadline.com, to play Miss Marple in the forthcoming Disney reworking of the much-loved TV series based on Agatha Christie’s novels.

—Telegraph, 4 April 2011

Meditating on her future, philosopher Gillian Rose considered the model of Miss Marple. We hope Ms. Garner is listening:

I aspire to Miss Marple's persona: to be exactly as I am, decrepit nature, yet supernature in one, equally alert on the damp ground and in the turbulent air. Perhaps I don't have to wait for old age for that invisible trespass and pedestrian tread, insensible of mortality and desperately mortal.

—from Love's Work

The two Harriet Daimlers (includes mild, cartoon nudity)

All day, the blogger at Bella's Bookshelves has been tweeting about her pleasure in reading After Claude by Iris Owens. Which got us thinking that the book's heroine, Harriet Daimler, with her take-no-prisoners strategy and her viper-tongue, might make a good role model this winter. Let's not take this miserable season lying down, let's rally our wits and bitch at it until it relents. We're all Harriet Daimlers now.

[read Gerald Howard on Owens's "sublime snarkfest" at Bookforum]

Here Maxine, an old friend, tries to offer Harriet some advice:

“Well,” she demanded, “what’s happening between you and Claude? Isn’t he planning to marry you and take you back to Paris with him?”
    If there’s one thing on this earth that irritates me, it’s when a dumpy, frigid, former nymphomaniac assumes that my tongue is hanging out, thirsting for marital bliss. It goes without saying that though ideally suited and ecstatically happy, Jerry and Maxine had flown directly from their wedding ceremony to group therapy, paying top prices for the privilege of insulting each other in front of an audience.
    “I’ll make you a promise, Maxine, and then let’s adjourn this summit conference. I promise you that the day I decide to marry anyone I hate as much as you hate Jerry, one: you’ll be the first to know, and two: I’ll seek professional help.”
    Did Maxine get the message and leave me in peace? Not a chance. She sat there radiant with superior knowledge. “My dear, that is precisely your sickness. You think everybody hates their life. You’re wrong. I don’t hate Jerry. I love him. My heart may not palpitate when he walks into the room, but I’m happy with him. I appreciate his devotion and goodness. I love our child, our home.”
    “Excuse me very much, but if it’s love, sweet love, that makes you parade the streets like a crazed drag queen, if it’s happiness that drives you to come sniffing around here like a starved alley cat, give me hate and misery.”

Of course, Harriet Daimler was also the name under which Iris Owens wrote pornographic novels for the legendary Olympia Press. So maybe we should be looking to this young lady, who graced the cover of a reprint of Owens's notorious rape-fantasy novel, Darling (if not to the contents of the book). She radiates joy of the kind hard to find in bleak midwinter.

"As far back as anyone could remember, there hadn’t been this much snow."

© Tove Jansson (original cover art for The True Deceiver)

It had been snowing along the coast for a month. As far back as anyone could remember, there hadn’t been this much snow, this steady snow piling up against doors and windows and weighing down roofs and never stopping even for an hour. Paths filled with snow as quickly as they were shovelled out. The cold made work in the boat sheds impossible. People woke up late because there was no longer any morning. The village lay soundless under untouched snow until the children were let out and dug tunnels and caves and shrieked and were left to themselves. They were forbidden to throw snowballs at Katri Kling’s window but did it anyway. She lived in the attic over the storekeeper’s shop with her brother Mats and her big dog that had no name. Before dawn she would go out with the dog and walk down the village street towards the lighthouse on the point. She did this every morning, and people starting to get up would say, It’s still snowing and there she goes again with her dog and she’s wearing her wolfskin collar. It’s unnatural not giving your dog a name; all dogs should have names.

A passage from the opening of Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver, posted in honor of the record snowfall we've had in New York this winter, as well as the inclusion of the novel in this year's longlist for the Best Translated Book Award, (one of two NYRB Classics that made the cut—the other is Albert Cossery's The Jokers).

More on the Best Translated Book Award
Damion Searls on Tove Jansson in Harper's

Rebecca's West's Christmas

After the drear of the last post (horses starving, mothers starving, patriotic bears liquidating kulaks) we thought we might bring you something more befitting the holiday season. Herewith an excerpt from Rebecca West's novel The Fountain Overflows, as sweetly Christmasy a passage as you could read without rushing to the dentist immediately after. (If you like you Rebecca West more bracing, we highly recommend reading her Paris Review interview.)

We went upstairs to our room and collected the presents we had made for Papa and Mamma and waited there till we were called. Then we stood outside the dining room until Mamma began to play a piano arrangement of Bach’s “Shepherd’s Christmas Music,” and then we marched in in single file, followed by Kate, and stood round the Christmas tree with our backs to it and sang a carol. That year it was “Silent Night, Holy Night.” Then we handed over our presents to Papa and Mamma. I know what they were, for Mary and I wrote them down in a little book, which somehow never got lost. Cordelia had knitted Papa a silk necktie and had made Mamma a set of muslin collars and cuffs. She was the best needle-woman of the three of us. Mary had practised considerable deception over the money given her for milk and buns at eleven, and had gone to a junk shop we passed on our way to school and bought Papa a little eighteenth-century book about the sights of Paris with pretty coloured pictures and Mamma a watercolour of Capri, where she had spent a wonderful holiday when she was young. I had painted a wooden box to hold big matches for Papa to keep in his study and had made a shopping bag for Mamma out of plaited straw. Richard Quin had given the matches to put in my match-box and to Mamma a bright pink cake of scented soap which he had chosen himself. We were hampered because we had almost no pocket-money, but really these presents were not quite rubbish. All except the necktie and the soap were still in the house when, many years later, we left it, and I do not think they had been preserved simply because Mamma loved us, I believe they survived because of their usefulness and prettiness. We were not specially accomplished or sensible children, but, with Papa and Mamma and Kate in the house, we were propelled along the groove of a competent tradition.

When Papa and Mamma had had their presents we had ours. They were lovely. I really cannot think, looking back over a lifetime in which I have known many quite opulent Christmases, that any children have ever had much lovelier Christmas presents. We had known that Papa was making us new furniture and inhabitants for our dolls’ houses, but he had done better than that. He had given Cordelia’s Tudor palace a maze and a sunken garden and a pleached walk, like the one in Much Ado About Nothing; he had given Mary’s Queen Anne mansion a walled garden with espaliered trees all around it and a vinery outside built against the south wall; and he had given my Victorian Gothic abbey a small park with a looking-glass lake with a rocky island in it surmounted by a mock hermitage. Out of her old dresses Mother had made a pale green Mary Queen of Scots dress for Cordelia, an eighteenth-century white dress for Mary, a rose-coloured crinoline dress for me, and a Three Musketeers uniform with a cardboard sword for Richard Quin. Like everything else that Mamma did each was unique, we had never seen anything like them before, any one of them was something only she would have imagined. So enchanted were we with these big presents that we had hardly time to look at the presents Constance had sent us before we had to dress for church, except to see that for us girls she had pretty little pinafores, each with a hair-ribbon to match, and for Richard Quin a little shirt. There was an air of cool composure about the needlework which made these garments as distinctive as my mother’s wilder work.

It had been decided beforehand that Richard Quin was to go to church with us for the first time on Christmas morning. But he was bemused with his toys. He had not even begun to empty his stocking, but was dragging it about with him. If anybody tried to relieve him of it, he said, “Not yet, not yet in a minute,” but he could not bring himself to take his eyes off the fortress Papa had made for him, a proper fortress with casemates and redoubts and glacis and a garrison numbering twenty, all in silver-foil armour. He could not bear to touch it, he liked it so much. So Mamma took pity on him and said that he need not go, perhaps he was too little, it would wait till next Christmas. But he said that if Papa was going he would like to go too. So we started out through a crisp morning, Mamma going to the steps to see us off. “Gloves?” she said sternly to us three, for all over England little girls were starting a revolt against gloves, which was to succeed before very long, but was then discouraged by all adults. “I wish I could come with you.” She sighed. “I would enjoy the service.”

Jules Renard's Bestiary

If you follow us on Twitter, you might notice that we couldn't help posting bits from Jules Renard's charming and inventive collection of observations of the natural world, Histoires Naturelles or Nature Stories. They were just too delightful not to share. Where writers often seek to make the world strange in order to enable us to experience it afresh, Renard's gift is to domesticate the by-definition inhuman. His patently false imaginings of animals' inner lives paradoxically grant them their own realities—realities that Renard's writings help us to understand that we can never understand. And beyond that, they will make you gasp with the wonder of this gifted and too-little-known writer's wholely fresh way of putting into words everything he observes.

To celebrate the book's official on-sale date, we can finally let you in on some longer excerpts, accompanied by the illustrations that Pierre Bonnard drew for the 1904 edition of the book.

And if, like us, you aren't satisfied with just one book by Jules Renard, then you must run out and buy the selection of his Journals translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget and published by Tin House Books.

 

From "Frogs"

    They’re suddenly relaxing their springs. That’s how they take exercise.
    They’re leaping out of the grass like heavy drops of frying oil.
    They pose, like bronze paperweights, on large water lilies.
    One of them is soaking in air. Through his mouth, you could drop a coin into the money box of his stomach.
    They rise like sighs, out of the mud.
    Motionless, with their large eyes level with the water, they seem like growths on the flat pond.
    Squatting like tailors, they’re yawning, stupefied at the setting sun.
    Then, like street vendors deafening people as they yell, they croak the latest news items of the day.
    They’re giving a party this evening, at home. Can’t you hear them polishing the glasses?
    Sometimes, they snap up an insect.
    Others are only interested in love.

"The Stag"

      I went into the wood at one end of the avenue as he was coming in at the other.
    At first I thought a stranger had just come in, wearing a plant on top of his head.
    Then I could see the little dwarf tree spreading out its leafless branches.
    Finally the stag came plainly into sight, and we both came to a halt.
    “Don’t be afraid, come closer,” I said. “I’m carrying a gun, but it’s just pretense, I’m only imitating people who take themselves too seriously. I never use it, and I’ve left the cartridges in a drawer at home.
    The stag was listening to me and sniffing.
    When I stopped talking, he didn’t hesitate: his legs moved like twirling twigs blown by a gust of wind. He fled.
    “What a shame!” I shouted after him. “I was already dreaming that we’d go off together. I was going to pick all sorts of grass that you particularly like and offer them to you. And you’d be walking along beside me, carrying my gun on your antlers.”

Making Frenemies with Jessica Mitford

The other week, This American Life devoted a 60-minute episode to the subject of frenemies. Listening to the stories presented in the program, we couldn't help but think that Jessica Mitford said it all in under 900 words, way back in 1977, in a piece she tossed off (her characterization, not ours) for The Daily Mail. Wait, frenemies? 1977? Didn't Sex and the City invent that word? Not so, children. Talented coiners all, the Mitford girls were putting down frenemies in the nursery, and to read their letters, they maintained a large circle of them throughout their lives.

"The Best of Frenemies," is collected in Mitford's Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckracking, recently reprinted as an NYRB Classic. Note Mitford's comment that frenemey is "an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary." Pity she didn't live to see it enshrined both in Merriam-Webster's ("first known use: 1977"!) and in no less than than most recent edition of The Oxford English Dictionary.

 
Mitford's commentary—included in Poison Penmanship—on the piece is as entertaining as the article itself. In it she explains how the piece came to be (or nearly didn't come to be: "I'd be hopeless on the subject of friendship, that sort of thing isn't my speed at all"), why it's included in the collection, and her delight in having it later republished in the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

[Image: Kathleen A. Walker, back-cover illustration to the first edition of Poison Penmanship]

***

THE BEST OF FRENEMIES

English newspaper readers were accorded a rare treat this summer when the press discovered that Mr. Ted Heath, former British Prime Minister, maintained a “Friends List” of 110 names, with revealing notations to enable his secretary to identify callers. Among his graphic comments: “Smooth stockbroker,” “Old lady, not too nice,” “Sends goodies,” “Very rich—fork lift trucks,” “We owe dinner.”

Reading in far-off California about Mr. Heath’s Friends List, I visualize that it must have created a new parlour game being played nightly in sitting-rooms all over England: the capsule characterisation of Friends. I know it sent me scurrying for my address book, to scrutinize the names therein for appropriate one-line comment on each: “Lunch, not dinner, too drunk by then.” “Good for $100 contribution Prisoners Support Committee if approached right.” “Gone guru, alas.” “Into ceramics, health foods. Bother.” [Into? Yes, unfortunately—a new and deplorable shorthand for interested in or working at.] “An adorable creature, pity lives New York.” “Moderately good Scrabble, not much cop anything else.”

Actually, I soon discovered that a substantial number of the names listed in my address book belong in the category of Frenemy, an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary, coined by one of my sisters when she was a small child to describe a rather dull little girl who lived near us. My sister and the Frenemy played together constantly, invited each other to tea at least once a week, were inseparable companions, all the time disliking each other heartily.

I wonder whether most of us do not, in fact, spend more time with frenemies than with actual friends or outright enemies? Those fringy folks whose proximity, either territorial or work-related, demands the frequent dinner invitation and acceptance of their return hospitality? Pondering the potential guest list, dear reader, how often have you and your spouse bickered on in this fashion: “Well, if we ask Geraldine, we’ll have to ask Mary and her awful boy-friend.” “We can’t just ask Peter from my office and not the others—makes for bad blood. If we ask Peter, we’ve got to have the lot.”

The return invitation of the frenemy is always cause for alarm, although generally not immediate alarm: “It’s three weeks off, darling, and anyway it’s a free dinner so let’s go,” one says hopefully. In our neighbourhood, the evening too often involves the showing of slides of the frenemies’ trip to Europe. In California, where the threat of earthquakes is ever present, one can take out “slide insurance” on one’s house; but this does not, as I have ascertained from my insurance agent, apply to such gatherings. “There is no such thing as a free dinner,” my husband once gloomily remarked as we staggered, exhausted, from the interminable click-click of the slides being put into their slot: “Oh, sorry, upside down, but this is Maudie at the Kremlin—you can just see her skirt on the left....”

But real friends—ah! Who are they? Mostly people, boys and girls, whom we knew and laughed with and loved passionately circa age twenty. Only rarely does one make new friends in later life; I have some, and I cherish them dearly. The point about the friends of our youth, though, is that no matter how divergent our interests, viewpoints, ways of life have become over the years we can pick straight up with them and carry on as before: “Your pugs, darling, they are too smashing,” I will exclaim to such a friend who knows I actually loathe pugs, and she will counter with “Well darling I haven’t actually read your book [she actually loathes books] but I do think it’s marvellous anyway...” and from then on it is very plain sailing: a sort of basking in mutual fondness that has nothing to do with her pugs or my books, just the heaven of each other’s company for the sake of it.

Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing. For example, when I was writing The American Way of Death, some of my very best quotations of the funeral industry spokesmen were those of Mr. Wilber Krieger, Managing Director of the National Selected Morticians. His pronouncements were always absolutely sure-fire, marvellous copy. I could never have done without him; his “selection room for Merchandising Research to demonstrate lighting to show arrangements and decoration through the 25-unit balanced line of caskets,” and so on; he made my book. After the book came out, his denunciations of it in Casket & Sunnyside made my day. How very sad, then, to read in Mortuary Management that Mr. Krieger has gone on to a balanced-line casket. The news filled me with gloom; lifelong enemies are, I think, as hard to make and as important to one’s well-being as lifelong friends.

Our former President, Mr. Richard Nixon, evidently recognizing this universal human need, maintained an official Enemies List. Surely Mr. Heath could produce one of those? But perhaps it would turn out to be not all that different from his old Friends List, with the same occasional notation “We Owe Dinner.”

 August, 1977

 

 

Translating James Joyce with Stefan Zweig—and James Joyce

In the introduction to our (soon to be released) edition of Stefan Zweig's Journey Into the Past, André Aciman remarks that "it is difficult to think of any European worthy of notice in the early decades of the past century whose biography would not at one point or another invoke the name of Stefan Zweig." And Zweig's own autobiography likewise references many notables. In the following, taken from the 1943 translation of Zweig's World of Yesterday, he talks about meeting, and working with, James Joyce:

When I became acquainted with James Joyce . . . he harshly rejected all association with England. He was Irish. True, he wrote in the English language but did not think in English and didn’t want to think in English. “I’d like a language,” he said, “which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.” This was not quite clear to me; I did not know of his Ulysses, on which he was then working; he had merely lent me A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his only copy, and his little drama Exiles which I had thought to translate in order to be of use to him. The better I knew him the more his incredible knowledge of languages astonished me; his round firmly sculptured brow, which shone smooth like porcelain in the electric light, stored every vocable of every idiom and he was brilliantly able to toss and keep them balanced in the air. Once when he asked how I would reproduce a difficult sentence in the Portrait of the Artist in German, we attempted it first in French and then in Italian; for every word he was prepared with four or five in each idiom, even those in dialect, and he knew their value and weight to the finest nuance.

Hard evidence of Zweig's literary fame can be found in the Stefan Zweig collection at SUNY Fredonia. Here you can peruse some 6,000 letters sent to Zweig from the likes of "Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, Richard Strauss, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luigi Pirandello, Jules Romains, Joseph Roth, Frans Masereel..." along with "a good sampling of" translations of his books, which were translated into 50-odd languages.

A sadder reminder of Zweig's notoriety is on view at an LA Times blog post of a few years back, which reproduces the front page of the paper from May 3rd, 1938. The article is headlined, "Austria Sees Nazi Fire of Jewish Books," and it tells of the burning of Zweig's works, along with  works by other prominent writers. 

Finally, it's worth reading Clive James's appraisal of Zweig, reproduced in Slate a few years back.

 

 

Today's pro-book message, in the form of a poem

Here is a charming bit of verse, found in the beginning of Yasushi Inoue's Tun-huang. The poem helps give us a feel for the ethos of the Song dynasty (the setting of this historical novel), in which erudition was highly valued. Of course, the hero of Tun-huang sleeps through the test he is meant to take, diverting his life-plan along a path of adventure, heroism, and literary stewardship. What's more, the bibliomania of the poem's author, Emperor Chen Tsung, apparently caused the downfall of his dynasty. According to one source: "By 1020 the emperor was insane and his power had passed to eunuchs." 

No need to acquire rich lands to increase the family's wealth,
For in books are a thousand measures of millet.
No need to build mansions in which to dwell in peace,
For in books are abodes of gold.
Complain not that you have no attendants when you leave         your home,
For in books are horses in numbers beyond reckoning.
No need to lament the dearth of fair maidens when you marry,
For in books are maidens with countenances of jade.
You who would realize your aspirations,
Use the light from your window to recite the     Six Classics.

"An insect from the moon"—Ernst Jünger's Glass Bees

image via Journey Round My Skull

In honor of the 4th annual celebration of Pollinator Week, we bring you an excerpt from Ernst Jünger's prescient novel, The Glass Bees. In this section, the book's narrator, called to a job interview at the house of industrialist/entertainer Zapparoni (imagine Walt Disney with a sideline in weapons of mass destruction), notices an odd buzz in the air.

(Jünger, by the way, fought during World War I, and died only in 1998—he saw some action during the Second World War as well, and a little later, in hanging out with Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD.)

The bees seemed to have finished their siesta; the air was filled with their humming. They were searching for food in the meadow, sweeping in clouds over the foaming flood of whiteness which stood high over the grass, or dipping into its colorful depth. They hung in clusters on the white jasmine which bordered the path; and out of the blossoming maple beside the pavilion their swarming sounded as if it came from the interior of some huge bell which reverberates for a long time after its midday peal. There was no lack of blossoms; it was one of those years when beekeepers say that “the fenceposts give honey.”

And yet there was something strange in these peaceful activities.... As I sat there, watching the swarms, I sometimes saw creatures flying past which seemed to differ in an odd way from the usual types. I can rely on my eyesight: I have tested it—and not only when hunting game birds. Now, it wasn’t difficult for me to follow one of these creatures until it descended upon a flower. Then I saw, with the help of my field glasses, that I had not been deceived.

Although, as I said before, I know only a few insects, I at once had the impression of something undreamed-of, something extremely bizarre—the impression, let us say, of an insect from the moon. A demiurge from a distant realm, who had once heard of bees, might have created it.

I had plenty of time to examine this creature, and similar ones were now arriving from all directions like workmen at the gate of a factory when a siren blows. At first I was struck by the large size of these bees. Although they were not as big as those which Gulliver met in Brobdingnag—he defended himself against them with his little sword—they were considerably larger than a normal bee or even a hornet. They were about the size of a walnut still encased in its green shell. The wings were not movable like the wings of birds or insects, but were arranged around their bodies in a rigid band, and acted as stabilizing and supporting surfaces.

Their large size was less striking than one might think, since they were completely transparent. Indeed, my idea of them was derived mainly from the glitter of their movements as seen in the sunlight. When the creature I now watched hovered before the blossom of a convolvulus whose calyx it tapped with a tongue shaped like a glass probe, it was almost invisible.

This sight fascinated me to such a degree that I forgot time and place. We are gripped by a similar astonishment when we see a machine which reveals a new concept in form and function. Suppose that a person from the early nineteenth century could be transported magically to one of our traffic intersections: for a moment the confusion and hurry would fill him with bewilderment, but after a short interval of perplexity, a certain understanding—some vague notion of the principles involved—would dawn upon him. He would see, for example, the difference between motorcycles, passenger cars, and trucks.

....

Time passed quickly while I feasted my eyes on this spectacle. Little by little I began to grasp the construction of the system. The beehives were placed in one long row along the wall. Some of them showed the customary shape; others were transparent and apparently made from the same material as the bees. The old hives were inhabited by natural bees, which served perhaps as a measure of the magnitude of Zapparoni’s triumph over nature. He had certainly seen to it that calculations were made of the quantity of nectar which one colony of bees gathered per day, hour, and second. Then he had installed this colony next to the automatons.

I had the impression that he had upset these little natural bees with their antediluvian economic system, because I frequently saw one of them approach a blossom which had been previously touched by a competitor of glass and immediately fly away. If, on the other hand, a true bee had sucked first from the calyx, at least a dessert remained. It would seem, then, that Zapparoni’s creatures proceeded more economically; that is, they drained the flower more thoroughly. Or, could it be that the vital force of the flowers was exhausted after they had been touched by the glass probe?

In any case, to all appearances here was another of Zapparoni’s fantastic inventions. I now saw that the comings and goings near the glass hives betrayed a high degree of methodical planning. It has taken centuries, I believe, to discover the secret of the bees. But I gained a definite notion of Zapparoni’s invention after having watched it from my chair for scarcely an hour.

Excerpts from The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and The Murderess

     

Yesterday Brian Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne went on sale, along with Alexandros Papdiamantis's Murderess. We couldn't help note both books concern the plight of powerless women living in patriarchal societies—and that they were both written by men. Judge for yourself whether these male writers have done justice to their subjects.

In this excerpt from The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Miss Hearne runs into a tenant from her boarding house as they leave Mass.

She watched him as he walked on, saw his face smile, saw it turn cold and serious. What could he be thinking of? He seemed to be trying to remember something, perhaps an engagement, perhaps an excuse to leave her. For eventually, they all made some excuse. But when they reached the end of the street, he turned and took off his broad-brimmed hat.

“I guess you’ve got a lot of things to do,” he said. “You going back to the house?”

“O, yes. But I go to see my friends, the O’Neills, every Sunday afternoon. He’s a professor at the university, you know. A very clever man. I used to know him when we were children. And now he’s married with a lovely family of his own.”

Why did I say that, she thought, why? But it was her old fault, the old boasts, the shields against pity, against being forced to say that nobody wanted to see you that particular day. The old mistake. Now he would go away.

“That so?” His face showed disappointment.

She tried to undo it: to let him know that life was not all gay friends.

“It’s so nice to have someone to visit occasionally when one lives alone.”

It was a forward thing to say, but she had to come out with it some time: besides, it was the truth, although nobody liked to admit being lonely. How many times before had she turned men away by her habit of boasting, of pretending that she had a good time all the time and needed no one. Looking at him, tall, no longer young, with his rough-red face and his built-up shoe, she knew that he would be easily turned away, that he had not stayed so long alone without something of herself in him. And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late. And so she waited, pretending not to see him lift his hand to say good bye, waited for something, for some little chance to keep him.

And in this excerpt from The Murderess, we are introduced to the novel's title character.

Old Hadoula, sometimes known as Jannis Frankissa, lay beside the hearth, with her eyes closed and her head resting on the step of the fireplace, the cinder-step as it is known. She had not dozed off, she was giving up her sleep at the cradle of her sick granddaughter. As for the new mother, who had given birth to the sick child, she had been sound asleep for a little while now in her unhappy nest on the floor.

The little hanging lamp guttered under the canopy of the fireplace. It threw shadows instead of light on the few miserable sticks of furniture, which looked cleaner and grander at night than in the daytime. The three half-burnt logs and the big upright balk of timber in the hearth made a lot of ash, a few glowing cinders and a flame that crackled quietly and reminded the old woman through her drowsiness of her absent younger daughter Krinio. If Krinio had been in the house now she would have been whispering in a low chant, "If he's a friend good luck to him, and if he isn't, damn him."

Hadoula, or Frankissa, or Frankojannou, was a woman of scarcely sixty, well built and solid, with a masculine air and two little touches of moustache on her lips. In her private thoughts, when she summed up her entire life, she saw that she had never done anything except serve others. When she was a little girl, she had served her parents. When she was mated, she became a slave to her husband, and at the same time, because of her strength and his weakness, she was his nurse. When she had children she became a slave to her children, and when they had children of their own, she was slave to her grandchildren.