strangeness at the end of may

I read three Elizabeth Bowen novels in a row: The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart and Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. Children all askew, often sad, and aside, long-legged girls and young women shift from place to place for obscure reasons, strong compulsions run amok, they're observant, these long-legged girls and young women, as you need to be if you live on shifting sands. Dodging what? With a view to what? Her teacher Miss Smith asks Eva Trout, age sixteen, newly arrived at the school, if 'here' seemed strange still. Eva replies 'Anywhere would seem strange that did not'.

All Elizabeth Bowen's girl creatures can relate to this. The wayward English chill and freedom, hairpins flying, as with Virginia Woolf. I too can get there in a trice. The pleasure of pinning strangeness to the page, this is the locus, the focus, of reading as the season shifts.

 

Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

I started re-reading Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen among two days of gales. What is she doing, Eva Trout, why is she always escaping, to another household, another hotel, another country, and who are her allies, if any? Lashings of plot are bathed in onward uncertainty.  Elizabeth Bowen, and Eva, do not give much away. The sentences are tight and loose, nervous and lax. You can avoid saying by saying a lot as well by saying a little. You can fall into the abyss almost anywhere.

Twinges of recognition impel me on. I'm glad someone else has written this. I continue reading on flights to and from London, on trains to and from Gatwick. Eva Trout comes into her own when I'm on the move, all antennae out.

Life is an anti-novel, I read on page 211 of my Avon edition, 1978. The front cover has a woman in an unrealistically long blue satin dress, draped about on a sofa, also draped. The blue satin is at your own risk. 'Everything must be plausible, by tomorrow', on page 261. But it isn't.

Anyhow, what a slippery fish is identity; and what is it, besides a slippery fish?... What is a person? Is it true, there is not more than one of each? If so, is it this singular forcefulness, or forcefulness arising from being singular, which occasionally causes a person to bite on history? All the more, in that case, what is a person?