Backlisted - Look At Me by Anita Brookner

Episode Date: September 17, 2017

In a long awaited episode John Mitchinson and Andy Miller are joined by Una McCormack and Lucy Scholes to discuss Anita Brookner's third novel 'Look At Me', a tale of intergalactic piracy in a far off star syste... No, not really. 'The Cake And The Rain', Jimmy Webb's memoir of life in the 60's music industry, and 'We That Are Young' a reworking of King Lear set in India by Preti Taneja, are the books John & Andy have been reading. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)6'09 - The Cake and the Rain by Jimmy Webb9'50 - We that are Young by Preti Taneja18'16 Look At Me by Anita Brookner* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. So tell us about your boundary for me. Okay, yes, so my friends, and that was the list, in fact. Happy birthday, gentlemen. Neil and Tim had a joint 50th birthday party.

Neil and Tim? Neil and Tim. I thought that was the name of your band. Neil and Tim. Quite a good name, good name. Yeah. Tim, I used to play in a band with Tim called the Gene Clark Five, which is an extremely esoteric joke,

and we split due to lack of interest. But then when we got back together last weekend, for the first time, rather than two of us, there were actually five of us. What did you play? It's the best drummer that I've ever played with. It's a guy called Bryn, and he used to be the drummer in the band's Fabulous Poodles and Frere, and Frere went

on to become Underworld so imagine imagine someone who I can't play the guitar very well right but I'm playing with a really good drummer some people and an actual drummer and a really good musical director as well called Tim Cronin okay this is what we played we played You Ain't Going Nowhere the Bob Dylan song we played September Girls by Big Star. We played Feel A Whole Lot Better by The Byrds. And then we segued into tracks that the Birthday Boys wanted to hear. So we played

Understanding Jane by The Icicle Works. Have you ever heard that? I've heard it, yeah. For a long time ago, from the 80s. It was really good fun. I'm a MacNab fan. Also, because my guitar abilities are fairly limited, when they heard me play it through once, they went, I'll tell you what you can do on this song, Andy.

How about giving it some feedback? Can do. So, fortunately, my son wasn't there to see me make an utter tit of myself as I threw some shapes. I came off stage and somebody said to me, wow, wow, that was great. You really look like you were enjoying yourself, which I was, unlike many members of the audience.

But it was really, really good fun. And it made me think, I love making music, singing and showing off. I love playing music. I ought to play music more. Did you ever play in a band, Jim? Yeah, we had a school band called the Chartered Accountants. Ramones and Stiff Little Fingers covers. It's really pretty basic. What did you play?

I did a bit of bass, but I was lead singer. Wow. Well, I didn't. It's just a lot of shouting. But we were quite good. We wrote a few songs. We actually wrote a song that Moniece Bruckner, the subject of today's podcast, would have loved.

It was called Middle Class Twats. Can you remember any of the lyrics? You and your problems can sit and rot because you're all just middle-class twats. So at that stage, we weren't sure whether... Do you remember twat and twat? And at that stage, it was twat rather than twat. And this was in New Zealand,

so nobody knew what the word meant anyway. I am thrilled to think that people who've tuned in for the first time to hear an Anita Bruggen podcast are having to listen to this. Have either of our guests ever been members of a group? Good God, no. Absolutely not. But you like folk music, you know. You are a folk maven.

I will listen to it and i will sing quietly to myself but the world does not need to hear me sing absolutely i thought that was the point of folk music you didn't have to have a great voice you just turn up and turn up turn along in the oral in the oral tradition and lucy you are against music I think I'm right in saying absolutely, absolutely, don't believe in it stop it now another strange coincidence but you said to me indeed right

but also you said to me that there is one song that you know all the words of yes but I won't be repeating it now I'm not asking you to middle class twats by the way. By the Chartered Accountants. My new favourite.

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. We're gathered in the slightly stuffy lounge of a flat in a mansion block in Maida Vale, loaned to us by our sponsors Unbound, the website where authors and readers come together to create something special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today, both for the second time, are former guests Una McCormack and Lucy Scholes. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Thank you for coming in. Una is the co-director of the... I'm going to say what Matt's written here. Una is the co-director of the Angela I'm going to say what Matt's written here. Una is the co-director of the Angela Ruskin Centre Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. And your employers won't mind that, will they? I'm sure they'll be delighted with the nameshake. And has written official best-selling books for both the Star Trek and Doctor Who series and is a New York Times best-selling author.

Woo! And Una previously joined our happy band to talk about Venetia by georgette hayer that's one of our most successful indeed podcast today also welcome back lucy skulls lucy is a writer and critic for the guardian the independent and the bbc amongst others and she's also a contributing editor to the book and easter website and she came into backlisted back in the midst of time to talk about uh the's Daughter by Barbara Cummings, which is one of our favourite books.

That was my favourite discovery from the podcast all of last year. What a pleasure. It's lovely to know. Anyway, the book, one of the countless Ruckner novels that we could have chosen to discuss, is in fact Look At Me by Anita Brutner. Her third novel, Andy, is that correct? It is her third novel, yes.

1983? Three. And as listeners may or may not know, she wrote two dozen novels. Is that right? 24. Yeah, so this is the third of it. And did she miss, she started when she was in her 50s. 50s, yeah.

She's pretty much doing one a year until she gets a little bit older and slows down maybe one every two. Well, you will come on to it. She's pretty much doing one a year until she gets a little bit older and slows down maybe one every two. The reason for the one a year is stupendous. So we'll wait till we get to it anyway. But, as usual, foul rag and bone shot time, Andy. What have you been reading? Well, I've been reading, with great, great pleasure, the memoir of one of my musical heroes,

a book called The Cake and the Rain by Jimmy Webb. Now, Jimmy Webb was the author of many great songs that you would know, including perhaps one of the greatest records ever made, Witch Delignment, by the late Glen Campbell. Also, by the time I get to Phoenix, Galveston, Up, Up and Away, My Beautiful Balloon. I know that one as well.

There you go. And he wrote, he also wrote the only song that our guest Lucy Sculls knows all the words for, which is... MacArthur Park. He wrote MacArthur Park, and the title of his book, The Cake and the Rain, comes from the famous lyric from MacArthur Park.

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark. All the sweet green icing flowing down, someone left the cake out in the rain. And Jimmy Webber spent the last 50 years trying to explain to people what he meant by that bold metaphor. And in fact, the epigraph of this book is a quote from W.H. Auden, which is, my face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain. We were talking earlier, you can decide whether Jimmy lifted it from W.H. Auden or whether his point is, I bet people didn't spend that lifetime asking W.H. Auden what he meant by cakes in the rain. So this book, I really enjoyed this book. It is a fascinating account of somebody who had a foot in two camps in the 60s and the 70s. On the one hand, he's in the world of rock and roll in a very revolutionary period. And on the other hand, he's in the world of rock and roll in a very revolutionary period and on the other hand he's in the world of pure showbiz and so the book is a repository of stories about people like sinatra glenn campbell the fifth dimension tiny tim but on the other hand it's also there

are stories about the beatles and individual beatles there's a story about paul mccartney here which is clearly was laid down in 1968, and he's waited nearly 50 years to tell. I'm not going to tell it here, but it's so toe-curling, and the book is worth it for that loan. There's also stories about meeting Elvis Presley, the story about Joni Mitchell, the stories about Harry Nielsen, the stories about Simon and Garfunkel, and so on and so forth.

And because this is Jimmy Webb, it's written in a mixture of sort of brilliantly turned anecdotes and then sudden flourishes of prose. For instance, here's a bit where he's talking to the music executive David Geffen. David, I responded with a burst of enthusiasm, will come to Hawaii, I can't wait. The phone immediately rang again.

It was the D-E-V-I-L. What's up, he asked really i asked really he replied well i just went to omaha and kidnapped susan and now i'm going to re-kidnap her and take her to hawaii with david getham it sounds like your sex life is getting complicated he chortled i need a place to stay how about your place for a while sure i could put you up for a while you can watch the place while i'm away thanks bud said the devil as he hung up. And somewhere in the high belfry of the exoverse, great black bells chimed antitonal and dispersed a low beating of sub-eternal defibrillation throughout all of space, changing the course of time. So that's a bit better than what you get

on VH1. And also, I'm going to give a plug to this because it deserves a plug. He will be making a very rare public appearance on the 28th of September at Waterstones in Kensington High Street, which is the shop in which I used to work and where 25 years ago in the returns room no doubt packing up Anita Bruckner books.

I remember hearing P.F. Sloan by Jimmy Webb for the very first time. So that will be a nice circularity there of the exoverse. It's just, yeah, it sounds great. I'm buying, I'm ordering it. And Volume 2 is on the way. The less successful years.

John, what have you been reading? Well, I think I've been reading very close to my favourite novel of the last few months, a new novel of the last sort of six months or so, Pretty Tannage as We That Are Young, a massive doorstepper of a novel published by the excellent Galley Beggar Press. I guess there's no way around it. It is a retelling of King Lear set in contemporary England,

which is, yeah, it doesn't really give the plot away except to say that there are three daughters and there is an ageing Indian businessman who runs this massive global corporation out of India that is beginning to creak at the seams. And the book starts with his illegitimate son coming back to Delhi. He's been successful in the West and now is coming back to India, reconnecting with his roots. It is 500 pages long. It ought to be difficult to read.

It isn't. It is pretty sure her first novel. It is. She's an activist and a lecturer at Warwick. And she draws characters, I think, that are completely... It's not... You know, there are Indian novels. There is a drop-down menu, I guess, that are completely... It's not... You know, there are Indian novels. There is a drop-down menu, I guess, of things that you would expect to find in Indian novels.

Quite a lot over there. There is an amazing thing. The great storm scene is set in a Delhi slum. The book's about climate change. It's incredibly contemporary. So you feel that you're getting a portrait of Indian life really as it is now. You know, commercialism, the roots of fundamentalism,

all the things I guess you would expect to find in a novel given its setting. But for me, it's the best novel set in India that I've read since A Suitable Boy. And that is pretty, for me, high praise. So this, as you were saying, is picked up by Galley Beggars. Galley Beggars are, of course, the publisher who found Game of the Bride after she had been rejected by many people and I was reading a thing that Sam Jordison wrote about We That Are Young where he said,

by the time it got to us, it came to us with a history of ecstatic rejections. But this is a fascinating publishing thing and we might talk about this in relation to brutner as well about how frequently she published and what effect that had on her career but in this case you know it's perfectly possible for editors to recognize the merits the literary merits of the book while also having to make a decision where they say but how will we sell it yeah and that's kind of one of those things

that why we need independent publishers and we need publishers like Gally Beggars to pick these books up. Absolutely. I mean, it's exactly the reason why Unbound exists because it just, I mean, it's unthinkable that a novel of this quality, really, she writes gloriously. One of the things I love is that I don't speak Hindi, but there's a lot of Hindi in the text and it's gloriously unitalicised throughout. It kind of i wouldn't call it in any sense experimental but she's

pushing at the boundaries of the form all the time i'll read a tiny little excerpt which is just the guy on the plane but it just gives you a sense of that kind of collision of cultures it's an indian but it's much more universal in its themes certainly the underlying sense of a planet in crisis if you like or know King Lear, that's the other thing it's just brilliant the way it's interesting, I read this very soon

after I'd read the Camilla Shampsey Home Fire which is based on Antigone I'm kind of fascinated that South Asian writers are finding these western myths and turning them into into really convincing contemporary fiction anyway he's on the plane on the way back but i just thought it gives you a flavor of the and of how well she writes uh he calls for another whiskey sorry sir we only serve unlimited drinks in first class the flight attendant walks away her hair so

neat her makeup so packed she could be company-made, remote-controlled. She sweeps behind the red curtain that divides the rich from the not-so-much. Beyond that curtain is Wonderland, drinks and legroom, stewardesses who never say no. The captives of economy surround each other, a tangle of saris, plaits, cardigans, high-heeled sandals slung into empty Dunkin' Donuts boxes, torn-up glamour magazines. The men stretch across the seats, the women clutch the children, the children won't let go of their Nintendo DSes, even as they sleep. Dinner is given, not served. Brown plastic lumps in a makhani sauce, rice and pickles,

or white plastic lumps with herb sauce instead. He chooses Indian, then Western, can't stomach anything. Next to him, the newlyweds try to keep food, sashays cutlery on the tray to eat without elbowing each other. The bride's fork breaks. She uses her fingers for rice. The smells are of rehydrated flesh, the toilet's feet. It's just, it's good.

And it keeps that up for 500 pages i have to say i'm really really thrilled i was slightly shocked when it arrived thudded on the mat how much money is it to buy in your english pounds in nine pounds 99 that's amazing bargain seven years work right and 500 pages and it's 9.99 yeah and as i keep saying to people when, and 500 pages, and it's £9.99. Yeah, and as I keep saying to people, when you and I were boys, Andy, what was the price of a novel in Waterstones 20 years ago? It was £14.19. It was more.

In fact, I wish somebody would do that, if there's anybody out there who's good at looking at how things have changed, pricing has changed. I would say that fiction has probably kind of halved in price relatively over the last 20 years and that's at full price by the way because people aren't paying for 14.99 they're paying 9.99 discounted or 9.99 because it's a paperback original pretty teenager we that are young thank you very much so are we hearing from an unbound author at this point uh well we're not going to hear from an unbound author at this point? Well, we're not going to hear from an unbound author. We're going to hear from Aretha Ackbar, who is... She said she's there.

She's sat there. She doesn't know this, but she... Who's going to tell us about a very exciting thing that we're launching called Boundless. Boundless is a site where you can read long essays about topical things, but also universal things, completely quirky things. We're going to get writers to write about subjects that they're passionate about

but also completely counterintuitive things too. The idea of Boundless is to get people reading things that they can't read in newspapers anymore because newspapers just don't have the space for it or maybe don't even have the imagination for it we're featuring some pretty amazing writers like Ali Smith like David Olisoga like Neil Mukherjee but I hope they're going to be writing about subjects that are incredibly important or interesting to them but that people haven't read them writing about before it's not just essays we've got I mean we've got Ali Smith and David Olisoga writing about something. It's not just essays. We've got, I mean, we've got Ali Smith and David Olusoga writing about something whimsical or important to them. That's coming

up in December and January. But in the meantime, we've got Alex Clark interviewing Siri Husvedt. We've got Bidisha interviewing the poet and novelist Anne Michaels, who's coming to town, who's coming to London this autumn. We've got wonderful writers like Jenny Erpenbeck and Andrew Solomons writing about in our slot called, which it's a weekly slot called Book of a Lifetime and this is where writers write about the book that touched them or changed them or made them become writers. So it could be the book they picked up the age of 13 or the age of 30 or whatever but it just marked them in a significant way so the kind of person who would enjoy I hope reading Boundless and becoming a

Boundless reader would be the sort of person that has the time and the interest to sit down read three or four thousand words on the latest book or on a writer like Andrew Solomons or Preeti Taneja, maybe a book lover but not necessarily an ideas lover. I'm really impressed by some of the fabulous and imaginative sort of online literary content. There's things like the Literary Hub, there's other sites like that growing and Boundless is part of that. So it's launching hopefully in a couple of weeks from now, so around Boundless is part of that. So it's launching hopefully in a couple of weeks from now, so around early to mid-October.

And it's completely free, no subscription. You don't have to sign up for it. You just, you know, we'll put out content for free on all of social media. You can go to Boundless and we'll put a piece of content on every day of the week. Let's pick this up again shortly. And so, back to the main subject, the long-awaited main subject of this podcast. I'm slightly superstitious about it because the elephant in the room, very elegant, becardicant elephant in the backlisted room,

has been the long-running, barely concealed love affair of Andy Miller and Anita Bruckner. And finally, he gets to declare his passion, his love, his enthusiasm. So I'm going to answer my own question first, for once. Andy, where did you first encounter the work of Anita Bruckner? And the answer is that it was at school. It was the first Booker Prize-winning book that I ever read, was Hotel Dulac in 1985

when I was 16 and I didn't really get it I knew nothing of the controversy surrounding the fact that Hotel Dulac won the book of prize we'll come on to that later but I was just beginning to discover literature that you could go into bookshops and buy from the fiction section and I thought oh Book of Black one I've heard of the Booker Prize so I read Hotels You Like I didn't really get it but I did enjoy it and when I read Hotels You Like again last year I was amazed about how much of it I could actually remember and how much of the tone of it came back and flavour came back and I read a couple of other Bruckner's over the years and then as regular listeners to Backlisted will know last year after Anita

Bruckner died I thought I'd like to read another Anita Bruckner and I read Latecomers and as I said on the episode I think it's on the Raymond Chandler episode after I'd read it I was blown away by it I was blown away by I cannot remember responding so strongly to a book for a long time. And that sort of led me to read many, many other of her books over the last 18 months. One of the reasons we wanted to do this episode is because we had a tweet from somebody, say, a few weeks ago, saying, where is your Anita Bruckner episode? I can't find it. And I just thought, well, I don't want this to be a running joke.

I actually sincerely believe these are some of the best books I've ever read. So that's why we're here today. That's why we've plugged the microphone into the desk. So that's my account of where I first came across Anita Bruckner. Una McCormack. I think I must have read it roughly the same time. I bet it was the same edition, that sort of little blue paperback.

I think my much older sisters had it and I picked it up because I was trying to read their stuff. I probably was about the same age, 15 or 16. Imagine me, this sort of bookish little girl at a convent school in Merseyside. It was literally the most glamorous thing I had ever read. Oh, my, imagine, such lives could exist. I aspire to these. It's incredible.

So I hooved it up i like you i must have understood about one word in four but something about the the lilt of the of the sentences meant that i then went i read i've read very little fiction as a teenager but i consistently read anita brookner and i think i must have read about the first 10 11 novels before i i went off to university and stopped reading at all so um so that So that's when I first read it. They were incredible. They were a glimpse of a life I barely knew existed. And what was it you liked about them?

Because I have noticed that once people... It's a terrible thing to say. They're quite Moorish. Once you've got the taste for them, you tend to read quite a few of them. It's like that big box of chocolates that alex and nick are consuming aren't they you just yeah yeah you you read one you read them very quickly i can answer that as the sort of ancient reader i am now as the teenager i genuinely do think it was a glimpse of a sort of uh sophistication a metropolitan life that i didn't know but at the

same time i you know that bookish girl in a conference school is responding to the story of lonely bookish girls everywhere I think so I suspect that was it and then it had languages I mean you're always going to be beguiled by those sentences aren't they yeah you always are so I think that must have been it Lucy what about you when I first read her actually very recently which I feel is a bit of a cheat on, I feel like I should come on Backlist and always talk about a long, a long harboured love. But actually, no, I, for many years, I laboured under that rather stupid impression

that she wrote novels about spinsters in the worst possible shape and form a spinster can take. I don't know, I think I always thought that she was along the lines of someone like Ivy Compton Burnett, who I'm not a big fan of, novels about taking tea with curates or things like this. And so I just steered clear of her. And then only probably a couple of years ago, I think I read Hotel Delac for the first time because I was writing a piece about hotels in literature. Thought that one would probably fit the bill.

I'm hacking it out. Furniture the colour of veal. Yeah, go on. Exactly. One of those Goodreads lists or whatever. that and then i realized wow this is not what i thought it was at all and very quickly after that i think i read look at me and um that was the one that did the kind of blowing i mean i like hotel delac but look at me was the first one i read that i was really kind of blown away by and it will always be the one i come back to i think yes I think look at me is my well it's probably my favorite speaking as the Brooklyn ingenue here because I came to her very late like this year that's not quite true I'd read I'd read Hotel Dulac a long long time ago and actually had remembered that I'd quite enjoyed it and was surprised by how much I'd enjoyed it but it was at that time not the kind had remembered that I'd quite enjoyed it and was surprised by how much I'd

enjoyed it but it was at that time not the kind of thing that I was interested in reading more of being callow and male but you know as listeners will know tediously I've come to see the error of my ways and I have to say coming back to her work for this podcast has been as ever a revelation she just seems to be in that sort of remarkable strand of 20th century I mean I there's the pleasure in reading it is very similar to me to the pleasure in discovering which as I again I've confessed to discovering mural spark far too late in life and rather like mural spark I'll read the Brookness steadily I don't want to be without them them. I love the idea that there are 24. I've read four of them, including the one we're talking about today,

rather more quickly than anticipated. I think with Start and Life, I mean, I like Hotel Delac and Latecomers, but I really think Look at Me is a... And we'll talk about why. It grabs you from the absolute... One of the great opening paragraphs, I think. You mentioned, Lucy, the S word, spinster. And one of the things that it seems to me is revelatory

about reading Anita Bruckner rather than hearing about Anita Bruckner is the more you read, the idea that she only wrote about lonely women it seems ludicrous to me actually ludicrous and insulting to her and to her work and one of the things that's very significant to me and i think he's a little understood about her or little reported is that she is very funny she is funny on the page and she's very funny in person. She was a great interview. If you read any interviews with her, she is terrifically amusing in a kind of Eeyore-ish

kind of way. And there's a quote here, there's an interview here with Boyd Tonkin. She's talking about the image problem that she had. She sort of... Ten years after Hotel Dulac. She sort of... Ten years after Hotel Dulac. She sort of invented herself.

Yes, this is the constant game. She perpetuates it all the time. And she goes on and on about the reviews that she gets. I mean, you have to work quite hard to find a bad review. She says, well, I am a spinster. I make no apologies for that, but I'm neither unhappy nor lonely. I am interested in people who live on their own, people who get left behind, who drop through the net, but who survive.

They seem to me quite heroic characters sometimes, but no-one inquires about them because they're people who do without much conversation, whose loudest moments are internal. If such characters persist through my novels, that's because I don't know much about them, not because I know them too well. I write to find out what makes them tick. And she described the process of writing fiction as, and this is brilliant, trying very hard to remember something which has not yet taken

place. Oh, that's brilliant, isn't hard to remember something which has not yet taken place. Oh, that's brilliant, isn't it? Yeah. So what she's doing, I think, is mapping out the inner lives of people who are aware of how they are seen by the outside world and constantly challenging them, confirming them. There's a dance going on all the time, I think. And indeed, with her public image, Julian Barnes tells a very funny story about he would have lunch with her once a year

and it would last 75 minutes. No more, no less. Everybody said that. Very precise. Towards the end of the main course, she would lean over and say, I'm working on a new book. It's about a lonely woman. Lucy, you wrote a fantastic piece, which is available on Lit Hub. Yeah, thank you. About Penelope Fitzgerald and Bruckner and solitude. Yeah. Do you think that there is a kind of constant challenging going on

in these books of both the rewards and the punishments of solitude? Oh, I think very much. And I think that's probably one of the things I love so much about Look at Me is because, for me at least, it weighs up very kind of cleverly and in a lot of detail the difference between that kind of life that you have. I mean, Frances, the heroine of Look at Me, she lives alone with her housekeeper, her mother and father have passed away, she lives in their old flat. And she is an aspiring writer. And she's able to write because of this solitude that she has in her life, the way that she looks at people, she's always observing them, she's writing,

but she also wants to be living this life outside of that, but she can't have it both ways. And I think that's what's so wonderful about the book is that you she pushes towards trying to be part of other people's lives but when she pushes sort of too far into that the yearning to be by herself comes back into play again so I think it's it's just a very clever book in telling you the sort of both sides of the story and so that one is not loneliness is very different solitude and there's a push and a pull there at work which I think is obviously I don't want to say that's exactly what's going on in Brooklyn's life but if you read some of the interviews she's very happy with the decision that she's made or she says she's happy that decision she's made to be alone and work it's that old paradox though isn't it it's she's very

at pains to always say that she's not her characters and that her life is very different and yet and yet when you actually look at the biographical details the sense that she has that sort of thing it comes up in this book the darwinian sense that through accidents of birth or the nature of her relationship with her parents and bad and difficult parents i mean that's her first book a start in life is about a spectacularly a nightmarish parental situation, which the heroines always deal with to some degree. They kind of rise above or cope with or cauterise the pain.

But it does leave them kind of isolated and finding it difficult. In Look At Me, I find that whole thing where she says, you know, she's just not the couple that she wants to be like and wants to be part of, Alex and Nick, she feels that they are of a different Darwinian order, that they are kind of their... Sort of uber-mention. Uber-mention, and she can't, insofar as there is a plot in this book.

I think we joke a lot about the food. There's sort of simultaneously a real... There's a real sort of famished nature to the characters, I think, and a kind of hunger, but at the same time, this sort of distaste real uh there's a real sort of famished nature to the characters i think and a kind of hunger yes but at the same time this sort of distaste and revulsion that you know there's just something too fleshly about these people she's just not on food rachel my wife used to do her publicity and she used to have to go out with anita and i mean the stories are all but she said she would very often you know you'd go out for lunch and she would smoke but it would literally it would be steam she'd eat steamed vegetables you know you'd go out for lunch and she would smoke but it would literally

it would be steamed she'd eat steamed vegetables you know and she'd be quite happy sort of picking away at that but she also tells that that humor thing there's a story that Julian Barnes tells which Rachel was there for where she gets into to sign books in the office and at a certain point she says about a thousand and she's done 50 she said i think that'll do but she did that once because she'd had a she went into into hatchyards with her and she gasped she said you never heard anita gasp she looked at the pile of books and she had to do and then she said at the end of the the session the signing session she got out and on piccadilly she just she said she suddenly got skittish and leapt onto the back of a group master bus and said i have to go now dear and waved down the street she said it was like a sort of weird 1950s musical

moment of brief encounter or something yeah i think she's so good and look at me particularly it's such a good book about solitude yes but also about writers and writing and about the compromise that exists between looking at the world and then secluding yourself from the world, claustration is your favourite written word, in order to write it down. Una, have you got a...? I have a little bit, yes. It's from the start of Chapter 6 of Look At Me.

It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach out to others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words past, present and to come in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state I hurt or I hate or I want or indeed look at me and I do not go back on this for once a thing is known it can never be unknown, it can only be forgotten and writing is the enemy of forgetfulness of thoughtlessness

for the writer there is no oblivion only endless memory wow i just actually punched the air and the beauty of it the speaking it is just the way she doesn't the way she works that look at me theme from the first brilliant paragraph about memory. I wonder what the book that Frances writes would be. Would it be the comic novel that she hints at in the text? I think it's this book. I think there's a sense towards the end that it is this book. Let's do the blurb.

OK, so this is the blurb for the first edition of look at me this is um anita brittner's third novel she published a start in life and providence to very very positive reviews i think i'm right in saying uh so here we go this is if you haven't read it here's what's in store for you. Melancholy came next to madness in Frances Hinton's filing system. She worked in the reference library of a medical research institute dedicated to the study of problems in human behaviour. There were a number of borderline cases sitting and working in the library itself, and Frances could be scathingly funny about their quirks on paper.

Writing helped to lighten the load of those qualities thought to be essential to a librarian. In fact Francis would have been happy to throw her sterling qualities out of the window for a little of what Nick and Alex had. Francis always found herself trying to attract Nick's attention in the library. He exuded charm when he had the time. Good looks, good health and good luck. His wife, Alex, was equally dazzling. When she was taken up by this legendary couple, and I'm just interjecting to say here, of course,

Nick and Alex, Nicholas and Alexandra, you can interpret that how you want, but the names of the great Russian dynastic duo. When she was taken up by this legendary couple, Frances thankfully abandoned most of her critical faculties and worked hard at picking up some of their saving nonchalance. It was through them that she made some new friends and discovered new possibilities and impossibilities. They were in fact to provide her with her sentimental education. Anita Bruckner's third novel is a triumph. How such an uncompromising gaze at loneliness can manage to be so vastly enjoyable

as well as moving is something to which only Anita Bruckner holds the secret. That's really good. That's really good. Just as your head was drooping with misery, should I try and give it a little push at the end? But remember, she's funny. Remember, she's funny, yeah. That's the thing, though, isn't it? You're saying you know about the sentences. Just not a massive amount happens in the novel, and you're not quite sure.

In fact, we should talk about what does happen without giving too much away. Nothing and everything. Nothing and everything is exactly right, isn't it? You know it's an an Anita Brookley novel, and if you've read at least one, you know that there's so much optimism when she discovers the relationship with Nick and Alex.

It's full of optimism, but because she's such a good writer, she leaves enough of a trail for you to know that this isn't likely to work out well. Yeah. Lucy, is Frances a reliable reliable narrator i don't think she's an unreliable narrator in the classic sense of the term but she is unreliable in as much as there are certain confusions um in terms of the plot aren't there like what you know because the whole relationship she deliberately conceals the prior relationship... She deliberately conceals the prior relationship, doesn't she? She conceals the prior relationship. She doesn't sort of...

She also plays... I don't know. I mean, I find Frances incredibly intriguing, not because... I mean, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, that this kind of push and pull situation between loneliness and solitude and sort of life and action

and staying inside and writing, that what makes me much more intrigued by her than than a kind of perhaps the impression you might have from just reading that blurb is the way that she constantly pushes against these options she has to move out into the wider world you know all those because alex and nick without giving too much information away but they have a spare bedroom in their house that a talks about her moving into. And she pushes back against it. And then little things happen. She knows something important will be eaten.

Exactly. She's very aware of what she will lose if she moves into the light and starts this life. So she's unreliable in one sense, but I don't think it's... If you say unreliable narrator, that gives a certain impression. And it's not exactly unreliable, is it? It's just her judgment.

You don't entirely trust her judgment. She believes that James is in love with her. And yet it probably... Yeah, you can never be sure. You're never sure. And the scene, the climactic scene in her bedroom comes as a shock to the reader as well as an absolute shock to her. And it's such a confusing one.

And it's never really unpacked. It's never unpacked. We're never quite sure of who wanted what, why he behaves the way he does. Not with you, Frances, not with you. What does that mean? There's so many ways you could read that. And yet, because we only ever see it through her, I mean, of course, because we only ever see it through her point of view that is the kind of unreliability of the narration. And she's bewildered and confused and doesn't understand his motives and possibly he has not

been the man that she has fantasised or imagined. The romantic hero that's always run through the Brutner novel. But also she says in the first few pages of the book I am invulnerable. This is why I think the creation of the book i am invulnerable she's this is why and why why i think the the creation of the character is so brilliant in this book that clearly as the book goes on you learn

that she had suffered a tremendous breakdown after what we might assume was an adulterous affair of some kind she prefers not to talk about it i never speak speak of it, is what she says, in fact, several times. And therefore the will, she has created a way of living which is about protecting herself from further harm. Well, protection's a great theme, isn't it? When she first feels James's arm around her shoulder, she said it's the first time she's felt protected since she was a... And I think the sadness of

the book is you know she allows herself to feel that there might be another way to live in of living which would be more rewarding which would allow her to join the ranks of these people who take what they want when they want and of course she's she's cruelly, is the word, dispossessed. Well, she doesn't know how to play by their rules. I mean, she's... I also find the idea of her innocence very interesting because she's obviously not as innocent, I mean, we're talking sexually innocent,

as someone like Alex assumes she is. Because there are vague references, veiled ones, to her having had a sexual relationship before. But yet at the same time, we sort of almost led to assume that maybe she hasn't. Little orphan Fanny. Yes, and then this way... Also, do you think that's fascinating?

On the very first page, she makes a point, she says, my name is Frances Hinton and I do not like to be called Fanny. And yet Alex and James continually... Sorry, Alex and Nick call her Fanny all the time. She puts up with these sort of odd... I don't know, it's so hard to trust her sometimes, but equally you don't feel that she's trying to...

She's writing that afterwards, isn't she, as well? Yes, if this is the book she's written as well, then... She has been, it seems to me, willing to be infantilised in terms of her relationship with her mother and in terms of the relationship with the woman who lives in the flat, the cleaner, Nancy.

And then she, again, she does the same thing, while thinking she's embracing this far more racy world, bohemian world with Alex Nixon. She's their child. She's like their child again. Do you think it's meant to evoke Fanny Price from Mansfield Park I wonder

these things are not carelessly done by Brooklyn I think there's a lovely part this is from chapter 8 where she just says I wanted you see talking about the failed relationship with James I wanted you see to make it all come out right this time

I wanted contentment and peace for myself for him and I wanted the appro and peace for myself, for him, and I wanted the approbation of others. Perhaps above all, the approbation of others. I wanted it to go according to plan. I even wanted the small satisfactions of congratulations and good wishes. I wanted to see the smiles on the faces of Mrs Halloran,

Dr Simic, as they raised glasses to me. I wanted for once in my life a celebration, to make up for all the sadness, all the waste and confusion, all the waiting, the sitting in sick rooms, the furtive returns and the lying morning face. I wanted more than anything a chance to be simple once again, as I was meant to be and as I had been long ago, a long, long time ago. to be and as I had been long ago, a long, long time ago. It's pretty good. She says something similar here near the very near the end of the book. I find this incredibly moving actually. It seemed to me that I rather than he had brought this about and my despair was extreme. For now that I knew that I loved him it was his whole life that I loved and I would never know

that life. Changes would no doubt take place and I loved. And I would never know that life. Changes would no doubt take place and I would not even know what they were. How is he? I would long to ask. But there would be no one to ask. If I were to pass him in the corridor or in the library, I would have to smile like the stranger

he wanted me to be. And if I wished to please him, I must simply stay away. And his life and his life his life would go on without me and I would have no knowledge of it and since I had apparently understood so little I could not even blame him I get things wrong you see that I get things wrong, you see. That I get things wrong is so... It's heartbreaking, isn't it? I think it is in all senses a harrowing book

and that chapter 11, that penultimate chapter, it's like a... It's the sort of breakdown chapter. Yeah, she says, descent into hell. Oh, the long walk home. The long walk home. Down and down and down. This is another thing that she's so brilliant at, I think.

It's one of the great set pieces I've read. This idea of Brutner writing these sort of polite books, one of the things that really struck me when I started reading them in earnest is if she wants to be funny, she's funny. Absolutely. If she wants to be dramatic, she's dramatic. If she wants to chart someone's nervous breakdown

and allow a sort of almost, actually, Aikman is an Aikman-like horror to start flowing in. The description of the walk across Hyde Park. It's horrendous. I mean, it's truly dark. Also, if you're looking at, you know, it's a classic trigger, the terrible scene with the slapping on of the pudding in the restaurant.

The creeper custer. essentially triggers a depressive episode. I mean, and what she narrates brilliantly. And, you know, but that whole feeling, it's a brilliant thing that she said to, you know, I think it was a Mick Brown interview. She said she'd always admired Freud, but had resisted any temptation to undergo a psychoanalysis. It wasn't within my scope.

And one doesn't know how intelligent the interrogator would be. Which is such a classic Ruckman. We're going to come on to the biography in a moment, because we've got a little clip. But I just want to read this. I was sent this by our friend Ewan Tant. This is the beginning of an introduction to an edition of Red Lights by her great favourite Georges Simenon that she wrote for the New York Review of Books about ten years ago. This is the beginning of the introduction. See if this rings any bells. Introduction. Introduction.

The formula is simple but subtle. A life will go wrong, usually because of an element in the protagonist's make-up which impels him to self-destruct, to willfully seek disgrace, exclusion, ruin in his search for a fulfilment and a fatal freedom which take on an aura of destiny. In a genre which has since been exploited but never truly replicated, Simonon examines this phenomenon time after time and in a variety of settings. A man, and it is almost invariably a man, will suddenly act out of character and for no apparent reason.

This divergence from his normal pattern of behaviour will lead him to abandon all safety, all caution, in the interest of that illusory freedom. This momentary rapture against which he has no defence will ensure his downfall, but the rash act will empower him in ways he has perhaps sought, almost unknowingly, all his life. But for women.

LAUGHTER In the case of Bruckner. Every novel she's written. Although, do you think it's from the rash act or do you think the tragedy, back to Greek tragedy again, do you think the tragedy in her heroines is that they don't act out of character enough yeah i i'm fascinated but i'm fascinated by the whole cult around brutner so i'm fascinated why why what is it about brutner

that's that's that's so attractive to people now in a way that it seems to have gathered. I mean, it's the most anticipated on Twitter, at least. An echo chamber, obviously. But I'm fascinated. But what is it about Bruckner that people connect to? I mean, my little theory that I push out is that she genuinely writes about people whose lives don't turn out particularly well. And that sense particularly

a lot of people have as they're getting older that of disappointment of of early promise not having been fulfilled of relationships either not working or not happening and that terrible sense that she has in all the books of time passing you know of of age and she writes she writes more kind of brilliantly about the sort of the decline i mean she says someone in life there are no happy endings because the body gives you away it lets you down it betrays you and you're tied to demorality and there's no escape age is the final betrayal yes that ties in with my but this ties in my theory about Bruckner and the reason why I can't show you my psychological hand. But she writes

brilliantly. Unlike many writers write about the result of their characters' actions. The result of their actions. What Bruckner writes about brilliantly in my opinion is

how you manage what he's done to you brilliantly in my opinion is how you manage what is done to you and inaction as well by the failure of the body, by friends by enemies by internal fear bad parenting, that's one of the great inadvertent bad parenting

in fact how do you live a noble, correct existence with whatever hand you may have been dealt? That is what Bruckner writes about, I think. And they're very internal, aren't they? She's always going for walks, having baths, and thinking. That thing of having to, in Hotel Delac,

that thing of her own having to go and process the the things that as you say that are being done to her that are happening to her yeah it's all about that almost that sort it's almost more like Camus Sartre a sort of middle of the century sense of just it's just the difficulty of having relationships exactly but it's the ordinary difficulties of life as well it's exactly those those. Unlike in those books, her heroines aren't made into exemplary figures. In a way, that's what I love about the way she writes, is that at the end of this book, you don't quite know what you feel about Frances Hinton.

You do feel a bit sorry for her, you feel slightly... But I guess it's the book that you've got in your hand is sort of the point, isn't it? But there are many pleasures in reading her. I think her, obviously the sentences, the construction of the plot, the psychological intelligence, this about, you know, would the therapist be clever enough?

Yeah. And the structure of this as you read it is just... When you reread it, I think think to see how meticulously she's built the book is a real pleasure I just want to say a bit we need to put some context to the biography of Anita Bruton's life, several achievements

before she became a novelist but first I'm just going to read the, this was her biography for many years in the front of all editions of her books. Anita Bruton was born in London in 1928 and apart from three postgraduate years in Paris has lived there all her life. She trained as an art historian

and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988 when she abandoned her title of Reader in the History of Art at the University of London for the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea and the cultivation of certain fictional characters who may one day appear in future novels so good this leaves aside being the first well yeah this is it so the thing about anita brookner um so she's born in 1928 she's the only child of Newsom Bruckner, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, and Maud Szyska, a singer. And her mother, on marriage, was obliged to stop singing.

And one of the... I think there is a character in one of the novels who is a singer who has been obliged to stop singing. Not a happy character. And Bruckner grew up, so she had quite a solitary childhood, very few other children around, lots of aunts, big Jewish family. Very literary, she says her father gave her the works of Dickens to read at quite a young age. It's heaven, isn't it?

He hoped that it would teach me about social injustice, but all I ended up thinking was that everyone in england had a funny name does she get one on her birthday from him isn't that one yes that's right yeah so she becomes a an academic an art historian in 1967 she became the first woman to hold the slade professorship of fine art at cambridge university she was promoted to reader at the courthuld Institute of Art in 1977, where she worked until her retirement in 1988. And she would often talk about how much the Courtauld meant to her.

We have a clip here. It's an episode of the reunion from about five years ago on Radio 4, which featured people from the Courtauld talking about, amongst others, Anthony Blunt and the effect that Anthony Blunt, and indeed on this programme, John, Michael Jacobs, also from Trivias, who we talked about in the last episode,

and Brian Sewell and Niall Ferguson. But here is Bruckner talking about the effect that art and the Courtauld had on her life. Well, I went to school in Dulwich and went into the Dulwich Picture Gallery on a regular basis and was absolutely entranced and puzzled by what I saw and I wanted to know more. I gave the odd lecture but I wasn't on the staff until I think 1964. And Anita what did the Courtauld give you? A whole life really. And, Anita, what did the Courtauld give you?

A whole life, really. Everything that came after was very dull. Even the success as a writer? Oh, that was far less interesting. Really? Yes, yes. It was your life? Yes. I mean... Many think so

that you do not hear voices like that anymore do you? You could feel the semicolons and the punctuations There's one of the facts about Bruckner which makes my toes crinkle up with happiness is that she writes her first

novel, A Start in Life at the age of 53. Do you know why? Because she didn't want to have to go outdoors during the summer holidays, during the long vacation from the courthouse. And so in order just to fill the vacation, she thought, I'll have a go at writing a novel. I'll have a go. Other people do it.

That's another theme, isn't it? That aching long periods of time that these characters have to fill. It's so totally foreign to any of us. And at least for the first few years of her novel-writing career, that is what she did. Every summer. She would say, I write my novels for two reasons. One, to fill the summer, and two, to see if I can do it again.

She also didn't revise them, the earlier ones in particular. I mean, she would maybe tweet the ending, she said, but she would literally just write them as they were. This is one of the amazing things. This is what Julian Barnes says about A Started Life. He said, can you think of a better first novel that

has apparently been written with no prior drafts, no false starts, and no short stories? It is one of the greatest. We're constantly used to running her down. There's a thing we keep coming back to while she was publishing and while she was alive

of being this small novelist, this niche novelist, and yet the achievement to write that first book and have it be pretty much perfect, have the voice there. Isn't it also because she doesn't make a song and dance about it? She doesn't sort of publicise herself, she doesn't make a big deal out of it. So therefore she just does this, she turns it out,

then she does another one the next year. And she deprecates them. Yes, exactly, and she doesn't really feel... I love that she got some of the feminist criticism from the great Blake Morrison, 94, thing. She said, life is not a nightclub. Life is not a nightclub. And some of the reviews I've had,

particularly from women, which I assume that is, seem to have been quite defensive. These women are angry. They believe they can get what they want from life. Maybe they're just lucky enough not to have found out that they can't. That's such a daring thing to say. They're lucky enough not to have found out. And Rachel

tells that story and she said, I think it was either Liz Cold or Carmen Kalea was having lunch with her once, and occasionally there'd be quite long pauses. They'd start to burble about their children and their life, and she just got up and she said, you have had everything that I have not, and then just walked out of the lunch. Just a little bit too old for it, that 1926, that these are women who are born 20 years later

who are going no i am i'm going to have the publishing career i'm going to have this i'm going to have the family going to have the affair and the romance with numerous men and she's just that bit too i love the the the piece of um information after the success of hotel du lac and we should say hotel du lac which won the book of fries very controversial book of prize winner in the same year that Julian Barnes was nominated for Flobo's Parrot, and infamously J.G. Ballard was nominated for Empire of the Sun.

But after the success of Hotel Dulac, which became a great bestseller, she didn't buy a second home, but she bought the flat next door in her mansion block where she would go and write. It's actually perfectly sensible, where she had...

So she had the flat next door. When she wanted to work, she would go next door. I mean, she's so full of paradoxes, though. There's a great thing in that interview as well, when he talks about marriage. And she said, well, you know, there were a couple of people who proposed, but never remotely took them seriously. But then she says, if we could have got the difficulties of the proposal

out of the way and settled down as perhaps two old people with small children, that would have been an ideal set-up. Then I could have got on with my reading and writing and all the rest of it. But I really didn't want to be taken over. So she was a feminist, but she was just her own... But she didn't like those early novels, did she? Or she said she didn't like them. novels, did she? Or she said she

didn't like them? Well, no, there's that great, there's that interview from 1984 where she says, look at me as a very depressed and debilitated novel. It's the one I regret. When I published it, a very old friend of my mother's summoned me and said, you are getting yourself a bad reputation as a lonely woman. Stop it at once. She was right. It sticks. Ten years after that, she said, I hate those early novels. I think they're crap. Yeah. But that's the true answer, isn't it? She says that they're not as interesting as what I'm doing now. And what I'm doing

now is not receiving nearly as much attention. Well, she says also she would change the end of Hoteau du Lac. She wished that she'd made Edith choose to get married. She wished that Edith would... That's very... Now, Hoteau du Lac, I think, it was very interesting rereading that on the back of having just read a lot of Heia for this

because I think it's her Georgette Heia novel. I'm convinced that she's read the whole of Heia because she refers to it several times in her books. And that's who Edith is, right? She's a romantic novelist. It's constructed very like... A thrusting name, that's right. It's like the veal coloured furniture.

Hope or charity or something. And this is fascinating. You say Hotel Dulac is dedicated to Rosamund Lehmann. Well, Rosamund Lehmann was one of her favourite authors. And Lehmann would refer to Hotel Dulac as my novel. Didn't he? And I see my novel has won the Booker Prize. And also, is it family and friends?

No, A Friend From England is dedicated to Carmen Khalil. You know, she has this very interesting, ambivalent relationship with feminism. Simultaneously, one of her closest personal friends is the publisher of Viraga. And I'm sure that's true for many, many women of her generation. I think what Ewan is saying is right. It's got to be something to do with the time, because she's living this amazing feminist life in one hand, but she doesn't recognise it as such.

And then she sees these younger women who are able to say, for whatever reasons, I'm having this, I'm having this, I'm having it all. I'm going to have everything. And she goes, well, it was one or the other for me. It was writing or it was family. It was being the first woman professor so that you could be the second one. I think she writes so elegantly as well about being an outsider, being unmarried, being a spinster, being an intellectual, being Jewish.

You know, all these things that are not factored into her, how she has been talked about. And also, John, there's the issue of, I think it's interesting that people who, we're in the business of i think it's interesting that people who we're in the business we understand what's meant when people say well she published a novel a year and that worked against her but it probably did because some kind of fatigue would set in amongst publishers and literary editors how do you find something new to say on an annual basis about somebody who is especially when they are vaguely similar i mean

i that for there is their charm for people like us who love her right but yeah actually it didn't work particularly in her favor and i think a lot of reviews particularly towards the end of her life did make some sometimes snide comment about like another you know another anita brooklyn i have not read many of the i've not read any of the later ones. Does the standard keep up? I'm six away from the end. I just read Falling Slowly. Falling Slowly is as good as any of them. It's wonderful.

So that's good to say. Where would you go next? I want to read one. I just wanted to go... Latecomers, if you haven't read Latecomers. Closed Eye. Closed Eye is wonderful. You've got a copy of a private view there as well i've just started this one it's absolutely brilliant i got through that on the train earlier

so uh you know you can't put them down they're like thrillers they are my theory about britain there's a really interesting piece on his blog by our former guest jonathan gibbs the novelist jonathan gibbs where he had read a couple of britainner's books and he said, you know, these don't really work in terms of narrative, the way I would teach narrative in fiction in a creative writing sense. These don't really work. I really liked Jonathan. I really gave me pause for thought

thinking about why don't they work? And I think the reason why they don't follow the rules is that a lot of the time, the rules that Bruckner is following, although she has a great respect for the 19th century novel in particular yeah in a sense it's her background as an uh an expert on art which is coming into play in the novels they are like portraits they are often she'll do something in the opening chapter

of the book where she will literally sketch out what she is going to write about she will she will mark out a canvas. And then as each chapter goes on, she goes to a different part of the canvas and fills it in. And what she does brilliantly is go back to the same bit of that canvas five chapters later, scrub it out a little bit, repaint it. So you only understand the picture that you're looking at, in fact, hence the title, Look At Me,

when you get to the end of the book, when you can suddenly see the picture that you've been watching being painted before your eyes. I also think it's a sort of, you know, each scene is a tableau, and then she goes home and she unpacks the psychological significances, the possibilities. She replays different versions of how the scene might have gone.

It is that observer, that thing that she writes about being, the person who watches, and there's a wonderful passage where she talks about it has to be funny, even towards the end. It has to be funny. She has to turn it into something that's funny, which it is, you got a copy of a start in life yeah so you're talking about it has to be funny these are the first words we have to assume that she wrote in fiction i think this is one of the funniest things i've ever read the opening of supposedly the slightly miserable

needs of written as a start in life dr weiss 40, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. In her thoughtful and academic way, she put it down to her faulty moral education, which dictated, through the conflicting, but in this one instance united agencies of her mother and father, that she ponder the careers of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, but that she emulate those of David Copperfield and Little Dorrit. But really it had started much earlier than that, when, at an unremembered moment in her

extreme infancy, she had fallen asleep, enraptured, as her nurse breathed the words, Cinderella shall go to the ball. The ball had never materialised. Literature, on the other hand, was now her stock in trade, if trade were an apt description of the exchange that ensued three times weekly in her pleasant seminar room, when students, bolder than she had ever been, wrinkled their brows as if in pain when asked to consider any writer less alienated than Camus.

They were large, clear-eyed and beautiful. Their voices rang with confidence, but their translations were narrow and cautious. Dr. Weiss, who preferred men, was... Dr. Weiss, who preferred men, was an authority on women.

Savage. It's absolutely savage. It's brilliant. I think you used the word at one point, merciless, Andy, which is exactly right. Before we go, I just must give a mention. We are all big fans of the blog brooknerian.blogspot.co.uk. You can find Tom Sabine.

I'm going to say Sabine. He may contact me to tell me. Hello, Tom. This blog is a magnificent blog devoted to Bruckner and all matters Bruckner, which you will very much enjoy if you read Look at Me or Late Comers or any of these books. And lots of daily updates on Twitter as well. Yes, indeed. Surely the perfect place to end.

Surely, encroaching night. We exit the Brooklyn room. Thanks to Lucy Scholes, to Una McCormick, to our producer Matt Hall, and once again to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at BacklistedPod, on Facebook at BacklistedPod, and our page on the Unbound site, unbound.com forward slash backlisted. Thanks for listening.

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