Rose Tremain (again) and Jenny Allen

    Just for the record, to keep track of the books I have read, I am briefly noting a book of short stories by Rose Tremain and a book of humorous essays by Jenny Allen.
    I took out the Tremain from the library as I was so impressed by the novel of hers I read recently--see preceding post. And, yes, the 13 stories certainly showed the range of her talent. If you are into short stories, one of these a night before going to sleep would be my recommendation. The book is entitled "The American Lover," which is the title of the first story.
    As for Jenny Allen--well, I had never heard of her, but the cover of the book quoted Andy Borowitz as saying "One of the funniest writers in America," and I thought that if Andy B. says that then she must be funny. I was mildly disappointed. The collection has 35 essays, most just a few pages (there are 222 pages in total), and the humour is wry and charming with only the occasional LOL moments--some are VERY amusing, and of course others less so, and a few, I feel, just fail. Unfairly--I suppose---it did make me wonder how many writers Borowitz included in the phrase "the funniest writers in America."
The title is "Would Everybody Please Stop," and to be more generous, I should quote another blurb: "Jenny Allen gets to the heart of things in the most inventive, unexpected ways, and she's funny, really, really funny, wildly funny, and sometimes she breaks my heart."

Rose Tremain and Magda Szabo

In the last few days I have read two novels, both of which kept me reading avidly until I had finished them.
The first was "Iza's Ballad" by Magda Szabo, translated from the Hungarian. The novel deals, centrally, with the problems faced by an old lady in her seventies whose husband dies, and her daughter, Iza, takes her from the old family home in a small provincial town to live with her in her modern apartment in Pest (of Budapest), where she is a successful doctor. It does not work out well, this uprooting, and it is problematical both for Iza and for her mother. In addition to this central theme and the 'present day' setting, there is much focus on the internal lives of a range of other characters both in the present and the past: Iza's father, Vince: her ex-husband, Antal, also a doctor, who lives with Iza in the family home for several years, loved by Iza's parents, and then suddenly leaves and he and Iza divorce. But even minor characters, like Terez--Iza's housekeeper --and Lidia, the nurse who tends Vince in his final weeks of life, are given detailed 'inner life' treatment.
This is the second novel I have read by Szabo--the first was "The Door"--which has some similarity in content to "Iza's Ballad," in that each dealt with the psychology of aging women struggling with circumstances that they cannot easily cope with.
The second novel, "The Gustav Sonata" is by Rose Tremain, an English author. I have heard the name but never read any of her several novels. I will now start looking for others. I will not try to summarize the book, except to say, it is the life of Gustav, who is born and raised by a single mother in a small town in Switzerland, with one section going back to 1937--before Gustav was born--and dealing with events in the life of his mother and father. And the final section is in 2002.
I will just quote a couple of other authors:
"...beautifully rendered, and magnificent in its scope. It glows with mastery," Ian McEwan.
"..a work of extreme and painful beauty..Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists..." Salman Rushdie.