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Only a Lodger . . . And Hardly That: A Fictional Autobiography
A novel in five parts, Only a Lodger . . . And Hardly That puts Vesna Main’s power of beautiful observation on full display as she explores how writing stories about one’s ancestors is key route to learning about and fashioning one’s own identity. While the stories are self-contained, together they form a narrative whole that approaches this age-old idea from five unique perspectives. In “The Eye/I,” we meet someone called She, who obsessively tells the story of her childhood and adolescence to an unnamed narrator. “The Acrobat” is a sequence of prose poems, written in the style of magic realism, which tell the story of Maria and her life-changing adolescent encounter with a flying circus performer. The female protagonist of the first section narrates “The Dead,” describing the secret life of a grandfather she never truly knew and his unusual habit of sending family members anonymous parcels of carefully chosen books. In “The Poet,” she examines four family photographs in order to piece together a story of her other grandfather, the husband of Maria. The final section, “The Suitor,” is a first-person narrative told by Mr. Gustav Otto Wagner, an older man who hoped to marry Maria but was ultimately turned down.
- GenresFiction
281 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 15, 2019
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July 13, 2024
My favourite book of 2020 - a highly literary and yet very personal, and moving, meditation on memory and ageing.
The novel takes its title from a quote from the 18th century British composer, actor, and writer Ignatius Sancho, the only Briton of African heritage known to have been eligible to vote in an 18th-century general election (https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/re...). The quote comes from a letter talking about the dire state of England in 1779, part of which reads (the reference in the first line is to Lord Sandwich):
This quote forms one of two epigraphs to the novel, the other from Thomas Bernhard in Gathering Evidence in David McLintock's translation:
We are the living proof of everything that has befallen us in our lifetime. Getting a clear view of existence – not just seeing through it but throwing the brightest possible light on it every day – is the only possible way to cope with it ... it is the daily process of making order.
The significance to the author of both are explained in a 2018 article that predates this novel and her 2019 Goldsmith's Prize shortlisted Good Day?): https://www.elsewhere-journal.com/blo... (although I believe the particular quote comes from a letter to a different correspondent than Sterne):
As serendipity would have it, while in my teens, struggling with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, I came across a phrase by Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth-century freed slave, born to a captured West African woman on the notorious middle passage, and later a resident of Westminster. Writing a letter to the author of the novel, his friend Laurence Sterne, Sancho remarked that he didn’t wish to express an opinion on a particular political issue since he was ‘only a lodger…and hardly that.’ The words accurately described my own feelings about the place where I was born and where I grew up.
...
As Thomas Bernhard writes, ’we can leave our place of birth if it threatens to suffocate us’.
...
My favourite writers of the twentieth century – who include Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, WG Sebald and Gabriel Josipovici – are lodgers too, displaced in one direction or another. Not belonging exclusively to the literary tradition of their birth countries, whether or not resident there, they operate in the space created by the difference between the native and the foreign, between the established, the dominant, and the predictable on the one hand, and the alternative, the marginal, the unforeseen on the other.
The second part of the novel's title 'A Fictional Autobiography' speaks to the book's form, although it is much more innovative that this may suggest, a collection of five separate pieces, in different styles, that together form a picture of a life. The different styles of the different sections are (as the author explains in this fascinating podcast https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/2020/01/...) themselves representative of the uncertain and shifting identities of the author.
Main dedicates the book to her grandparents Marija Ondruš (1898-1968) and Franco Josip Genus-Pistonik (1897-1970) and the novel's main narrator tells her own story largely via those of her grandparents, in part as she herself is now ageing (mid 60s from the chronology suggested) and reflecting on her own mortality.
The book's blurb explains the set-up as follows:
In “The Eye/I” we meet someone called She, who obsessively tells the story of her childhood and adolescence to an unnamed narrator.
“The Acrobat” is a sequence of prose poems, written in the style of magic realism, which tell the story of Maria and her life-changing adolescent encounter with a flying circus performer.
The female protagonist of the first section narrates “The Dead”, describing the secret life of a grandfather she never truly knew and his unusual habit of sending family members anonymous parcels of carefully chosen books.
In “The Poet” she examines four family photographs in order to piece together a story of her other grandfather, the husband of Maria.
The final section, “The Suitor”, is a first-person narrative told by Mr. Gustav Otto Wagner, an older man who hoped to marry Maria but was ultimately turned down.
"The Eye/I," actually subtitled A Story To Love Her is much the longest piece (150 pages and half the novel's length) and actually I'd take slight issue with the blurb. The person whose story is being told is actually called V. a number of times, the use of "She" mainly resulting from the form of the story which is actually her story as relayed by the narrator to another listener, a very Bernhardian form of distancing, and a technique also deployed extensively by Josipovici. Hence quotes such as:
Ignorance was embarrassing and most people had no excuse to remain ignorant, that is what her mother said, she said.
Although the narrator adds no views of their own, simply reporting V's story and thoughts in indirect speech, and the 'Autobiography' of the novel's title raises the intriguing possibility that we are perhaps actually reading V's own words, filtered through a deliberate distancing device.
Her mother is the more Bernhardesque figure (although she does admit to a tendency to misantrophy as she grows older - by the time of the story she has grown up children of her own). In particular the story starts with and circles around her time as a 4 year-old in a small provincial town, a long way away from their family home in the capital city, where her father has his first appointment as the local doctor, and where her mother makes it clear that she as a mother and V. as a child are different from other local families and their children, those street urchins always on the road like horse manure, two phrases that recur throughout her account of her life and gradually infect her own thinking, the distinction not economic though but rather one of intellectual aspiration vs. the choice to remain ignorant.
In particular she remembers her mother making her kneel in the corner, on a blank white sheet of A4 paper to protect her clothes, whenever she failed to fluently recite a poem she'd been taught, not to punish her but to help her think about how she should improve, an incident to which she frequently returns as she also does to another, a year later, after she starts school, when the 'street urchins' pushed her into a swimming pool, and the memory of her parents seemingly more anxious to analyse the scene of the incident than provide her any comfort:
But hang on, did she really long to be hugged or is that her older self looking at herself not-yet-five years old standing in the dark, on the edge of the pool, her older self imagining that her younger not-yet-five-year-old self longed to be hugged and could it be that she is seeing her not-yet-five-year-old self longing to be hugged because her older self had been told by someone, a friend, or a so-called friend, her older self had been told that her parents should not have been theoretical, that her parents should have hugged her?
Her childhood account gradually evolves into one of her late teenage years and her discovery of literature. Her first crush is not, like the other of her age, a pop star but a dead poet, later identifiable as the Croatian writer Antun Gustav Matoš. She lays red roses on his tomb in tribute to his poem (not named in the text) Tajanstvena ruža.
Her sense of estrangement triggers her decision to move from her country of birth to England, a country she saw (as she rather admits in her later account) as the home of both Shakespeare and On the Buses; except in her naivety she assumed that in England, Stan Butler would dip into Hamlet between bus journeys. Her destination, to study at University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute, mirrors the author's own.
And ultimately to a life where sometimes she wondered who was that real her and where was that place where she would not be different. She lived her life, and she would continue living it, as if she was always walking on the wrong side of the road, as if she was always looking in the wrong direction - except that at the time she did not know that - and she would continue living her life as a stranger, a stranger who moved from one place to another, and moved with a relative ease, more ease than others would have managed, others who could not move from one place to another, the others who did not have to move since they were fine where they were.
The second, third and fourth parts are all 40-50 pages in length.
The second “The Acrobat” marks an abrupt change of tone from the psychological intensity of the first, with an almost fable like quality and a narrative style that has a chorus of first person voices and speech (the prose poetry of the blurb).
At the heart is the story of V.'s paternal grandparents, Francis and Maria, and in particular the story of how Maria, when she was 16, almost ran away with a circus. In Maria's own account, told to V. as Maria lays dying and when V. was 12, Maria had an encounter with an acrobat and the two literally flew over the city. Following this she some months in bed, believed by her parents to be psychologically ill (specialists were brought in from Vienna to treat her) and then she broke off her engagement with the older businessman Gustav Otto Wagner (25 years her senior) to whom she was bethothed, and instead married Francis, a printer from a much more humble background to Wagner and Maria's own.
The different accounts include: Maria's story to V., V's parents telling Maria to ignore the old woman's ramblings, Francis's account as the time as to how he approached Maria, Francis and Maria's account from the time of their rather distant marriage, Francis's mourning after Maria's death (he searches for a single hair to remember her, in a concious echo of Maria's favourite poem, Matoš's The Consolation of the Hair) and finally V's own later reflections on the incident. The theme of being a lodger, not belonging, is again key here - Maria's attraction to the itinerant acrobat was that he came from elsewhere (and nowhere) and she sees in V. a kindred spirit passing on the dream to her: Elsewhere. I want to travel to elsewhere.
Tthird part of the novel comes fittingly with an epigraph from Sebald, found in Jo Catling's preface to A Place in the Country, as the novel takes a more melancholic turn:
There are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection and recounting of things.
The poems of TS Eliot also feature more explicitly (thanks to the author for pointing out an allusion I'd missed to Prufrock in the first part) in this second half of the novel. with a focus on ageing.
In “The Dead” The narrator (the V. of the first story) tells - or imagines - a story of her maternal grandfather. In the family history, he was killed shortly after being called up for service in the Second World War. But in her account, the report of his death was a mistake and when he returns after the war he decides not to announce himself to his family, but to invent a new identity for himself, even a new name, but one where he sends his descendants (although he sees them as the family of another, different, man, the one he once was) a parcel of carefully curated books each year, based on his secret observations of their character and intellectual development.
The fourth part, “The Poet” is more consciously Sebeldian, with the same narrator now turning to her paternal grandfather Francis, Maria's husband, a proud trade unionist and social activist, and telling his story via four photographs, two of which she contrasts to classic paintings.
All I have are my unreliable memories and the photographs, around which I invent stories, the photographs that capture a split second and turn a casual gesture or a facial expression into forensic evidence, the photographs that fix an ephemeral moment into eternity. The photographs that have meaning only after I tell a story about them.
At one point in her story, in a meta-fictional touch, she appears to meet Isabella Fischer from Doppelgänger (an elderly woman who is regularly sent boxes of chocolates made in the factory that bears her former husband's name), although asking the author this is actually an odd and wonderful literary coincidence.
The last part “The Suitor”is just 13 pages and has the spurned suitor from “The Acrobat” tell us his side of the story and his views on the Ondruš family, managing to cast doubt on whether there was even a circus, let alone an acrobat with the power of flight, and, neatly bringing the narrative full circle, dismissing Maria's eventual husband as a 'street urchin.'
Stunning.
A review of the book which was very helpful to my own understanding:
https://www.litro.co.uk/2020/05/book-...
The novel takes its title from a quote from the 18th century British composer, actor, and writer Ignatius Sancho, the only Briton of African heritage known to have been eligible to vote in an 18th-century general election (https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/re...). The quote comes from a letter talking about the dire state of England in 1779, part of which reads (the reference in the first line is to Lord Sandwich):
L--d S--h is gone to Portsmouth, to be a witness of England's disgrace--and his own shame.--In faith, my friend, the present time is rather comique--Ireland almost in as true a state of rebellion as America.--Admirals quarrelling in the West-Indies--and at home admirals that do not chuse to fight.--The British empire mouldering away in the West, annihilated in the North--Gibraltar going--and England fast asleep.--What says Mr. B-- to all this?--he is a ministerialist:--for my part it's nothing to me,as I am only a lodger --and hardly that.
This quote forms one of two epigraphs to the novel, the other from Thomas Bernhard in Gathering Evidence in David McLintock's translation:
We are the living proof of everything that has befallen us in our lifetime. Getting a clear view of existence – not just seeing through it but throwing the brightest possible light on it every day – is the only possible way to cope with it ... it is the daily process of making order.
The significance to the author of both are explained in a 2018 article that predates this novel and her 2019 Goldsmith's Prize shortlisted Good Day?): https://www.elsewhere-journal.com/blo... (although I believe the particular quote comes from a letter to a different correspondent than Sterne):
As serendipity would have it, while in my teens, struggling with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, I came across a phrase by Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth-century freed slave, born to a captured West African woman on the notorious middle passage, and later a resident of Westminster. Writing a letter to the author of the novel, his friend Laurence Sterne, Sancho remarked that he didn’t wish to express an opinion on a particular political issue since he was ‘only a lodger…and hardly that.’ The words accurately described my own feelings about the place where I was born and where I grew up.
...
As Thomas Bernhard writes, ’we can leave our place of birth if it threatens to suffocate us’.
...
My favourite writers of the twentieth century – who include Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, WG Sebald and Gabriel Josipovici – are lodgers too, displaced in one direction or another. Not belonging exclusively to the literary tradition of their birth countries, whether or not resident there, they operate in the space created by the difference between the native and the foreign, between the established, the dominant, and the predictable on the one hand, and the alternative, the marginal, the unforeseen on the other.
The second part of the novel's title 'A Fictional Autobiography' speaks to the book's form, although it is much more innovative that this may suggest, a collection of five separate pieces, in different styles, that together form a picture of a life. The different styles of the different sections are (as the author explains in this fascinating podcast https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/2020/01/...) themselves representative of the uncertain and shifting identities of the author.
Main dedicates the book to her grandparents Marija Ondruš (1898-1968) and Franco Josip Genus-Pistonik (1897-1970) and the novel's main narrator tells her own story largely via those of her grandparents, in part as she herself is now ageing (mid 60s from the chronology suggested) and reflecting on her own mortality.
The book's blurb explains the set-up as follows:
In “The Eye/I” we meet someone called She, who obsessively tells the story of her childhood and adolescence to an unnamed narrator.
“The Acrobat” is a sequence of prose poems, written in the style of magic realism, which tell the story of Maria and her life-changing adolescent encounter with a flying circus performer.
The female protagonist of the first section narrates “The Dead”, describing the secret life of a grandfather she never truly knew and his unusual habit of sending family members anonymous parcels of carefully chosen books.
In “The Poet” she examines four family photographs in order to piece together a story of her other grandfather, the husband of Maria.
The final section, “The Suitor”, is a first-person narrative told by Mr. Gustav Otto Wagner, an older man who hoped to marry Maria but was ultimately turned down.
"The Eye/I," actually subtitled A Story To Love Her is much the longest piece (150 pages and half the novel's length) and actually I'd take slight issue with the blurb. The person whose story is being told is actually called V. a number of times, the use of "She" mainly resulting from the form of the story which is actually her story as relayed by the narrator to another listener, a very Bernhardian form of distancing, and a technique also deployed extensively by Josipovici. Hence quotes such as:
Ignorance was embarrassing and most people had no excuse to remain ignorant, that is what her mother said, she said.
Although the narrator adds no views of their own, simply reporting V's story and thoughts in indirect speech, and the 'Autobiography' of the novel's title raises the intriguing possibility that we are perhaps actually reading V's own words, filtered through a deliberate distancing device.
Her mother is the more Bernhardesque figure (although she does admit to a tendency to misantrophy as she grows older - by the time of the story she has grown up children of her own). In particular the story starts with and circles around her time as a 4 year-old in a small provincial town, a long way away from their family home in the capital city, where her father has his first appointment as the local doctor, and where her mother makes it clear that she as a mother and V. as a child are different from other local families and their children, those street urchins always on the road like horse manure, two phrases that recur throughout her account of her life and gradually infect her own thinking, the distinction not economic though but rather one of intellectual aspiration vs. the choice to remain ignorant.
In particular she remembers her mother making her kneel in the corner, on a blank white sheet of A4 paper to protect her clothes, whenever she failed to fluently recite a poem she'd been taught, not to punish her but to help her think about how she should improve, an incident to which she frequently returns as she also does to another, a year later, after she starts school, when the 'street urchins' pushed her into a swimming pool, and the memory of her parents seemingly more anxious to analyse the scene of the incident than provide her any comfort:
But hang on, did she really long to be hugged or is that her older self looking at herself not-yet-five years old standing in the dark, on the edge of the pool, her older self imagining that her younger not-yet-five-year-old self longed to be hugged and could it be that she is seeing her not-yet-five-year-old self longing to be hugged because her older self had been told by someone, a friend, or a so-called friend, her older self had been told that her parents should not have been theoretical, that her parents should have hugged her?
Her childhood account gradually evolves into one of her late teenage years and her discovery of literature. Her first crush is not, like the other of her age, a pop star but a dead poet, later identifiable as the Croatian writer Antun Gustav Matoš. She lays red roses on his tomb in tribute to his poem (not named in the text) Tajanstvena ruža.
Her sense of estrangement triggers her decision to move from her country of birth to England, a country she saw (as she rather admits in her later account) as the home of both Shakespeare and On the Buses; except in her naivety she assumed that in England, Stan Butler would dip into Hamlet between bus journeys. Her destination, to study at University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute, mirrors the author's own.
And ultimately to a life where sometimes she wondered who was that real her and where was that place where she would not be different. She lived her life, and she would continue living it, as if she was always walking on the wrong side of the road, as if she was always looking in the wrong direction - except that at the time she did not know that - and she would continue living her life as a stranger, a stranger who moved from one place to another, and moved with a relative ease, more ease than others would have managed, others who could not move from one place to another, the others who did not have to move since they were fine where they were.
The second, third and fourth parts are all 40-50 pages in length.
The second “The Acrobat” marks an abrupt change of tone from the psychological intensity of the first, with an almost fable like quality and a narrative style that has a chorus of first person voices and speech (the prose poetry of the blurb).
At the heart is the story of V.'s paternal grandparents, Francis and Maria, and in particular the story of how Maria, when she was 16, almost ran away with a circus. In Maria's own account, told to V. as Maria lays dying and when V. was 12, Maria had an encounter with an acrobat and the two literally flew over the city. Following this she some months in bed, believed by her parents to be psychologically ill (specialists were brought in from Vienna to treat her) and then she broke off her engagement with the older businessman Gustav Otto Wagner (25 years her senior) to whom she was bethothed, and instead married Francis, a printer from a much more humble background to Wagner and Maria's own.
The different accounts include: Maria's story to V., V's parents telling Maria to ignore the old woman's ramblings, Francis's account as the time as to how he approached Maria, Francis and Maria's account from the time of their rather distant marriage, Francis's mourning after Maria's death (he searches for a single hair to remember her, in a concious echo of Maria's favourite poem, Matoš's The Consolation of the Hair) and finally V's own later reflections on the incident. The theme of being a lodger, not belonging, is again key here - Maria's attraction to the itinerant acrobat was that he came from elsewhere (and nowhere) and she sees in V. a kindred spirit passing on the dream to her: Elsewhere. I want to travel to elsewhere.
Tthird part of the novel comes fittingly with an epigraph from Sebald, found in Jo Catling's preface to A Place in the Country, as the novel takes a more melancholic turn:
There are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection and recounting of things.
The poems of TS Eliot also feature more explicitly (thanks to the author for pointing out an allusion I'd missed to Prufrock in the first part) in this second half of the novel. with a focus on ageing.
In “The Dead” The narrator (the V. of the first story) tells - or imagines - a story of her maternal grandfather. In the family history, he was killed shortly after being called up for service in the Second World War. But in her account, the report of his death was a mistake and when he returns after the war he decides not to announce himself to his family, but to invent a new identity for himself, even a new name, but one where he sends his descendants (although he sees them as the family of another, different, man, the one he once was) a parcel of carefully curated books each year, based on his secret observations of their character and intellectual development.
The fourth part, “The Poet” is more consciously Sebeldian, with the same narrator now turning to her paternal grandfather Francis, Maria's husband, a proud trade unionist and social activist, and telling his story via four photographs, two of which she contrasts to classic paintings.
All I have are my unreliable memories and the photographs, around which I invent stories, the photographs that capture a split second and turn a casual gesture or a facial expression into forensic evidence, the photographs that fix an ephemeral moment into eternity. The photographs that have meaning only after I tell a story about them.
At one point in her story, in a meta-fictional touch, she appears to meet Isabella Fischer from Doppelgänger (an elderly woman who is regularly sent boxes of chocolates made in the factory that bears her former husband's name), although asking the author this is actually an odd and wonderful literary coincidence.
The last part “The Suitor”is just 13 pages and has the spurned suitor from “The Acrobat” tell us his side of the story and his views on the Ondruš family, managing to cast doubt on whether there was even a circus, let alone an acrobat with the power of flight, and, neatly bringing the narrative full circle, dismissing Maria's eventual husband as a 'street urchin.'
Stunning.
A review of the book which was very helpful to my own understanding:
https://www.litro.co.uk/2020/05/book-...
July 14, 2020
This goes straight to the top of my re-read pile. For me, it is a book that requires and will reward a second reading. But that is not to say that the first reading lacks anything: this is one of my top books of 2020 so far.
You can look at the book as a collection of five different pieces. You could read each piece separately and it would make sense. But when all five are read together, it becomes a moving meditation on identity and memory.
I believe this book would make a good companion piece to Siri Hustvedt’s “Memories of the Future”. If you have read that, consider some of these quotes:
Our present always casts a light on our past and therefore the past is constantly reshaped…
...and I would add that only a fool or a narrative pedant would insist on the coherence of a life story.
Anyone can imagine the past they need and turn it into a story, preferably a written story because writing it down makes it real.
But who were they, my ancestors - those people with their secret lives? I don’t know. All I have are my unreliable memories and the photographs, around which I invent stories…
The first two of these could be from either book, really. But the second two show how this book takes a different path to Hustvedt’s, which we sort of know it will from its subtitle “A Fictional Autobiography”.
The first part of the book investigates what it means to try to retell your own story. How does memory, unreliable as it is, shape our understanding of what happened to us earlier in our lives? Can we identify pivotal moments that shape or explain our personality? Here, the writing is dense on the page and a sort of stream of consciousness that loops around repeating phrases and ideas. It’s a style that took me a few pages to settle in to, but once I was there, I was hooked. We read the story of V (I am not sure why the blurb says she is only known as “she” because she is clearly called V several times through this section) and various episodes from her growing up.
Part 2 is completely different, effectively taking the form of a “prose poem” that follows several threads of story that all mix together. It’s almost magical realism and the text is far more spread out on the page. Reading it after reading Part 1 makes you feel almost light-headed! We read the story of V’s (paternal) grandparents with the focus on Maria, her grandmother, who tells V a story from her past, as she, Maria, lies in bed close to death. This story mixes with V’s parents telling V to ignore the ramblings of mad, old woman, with Francis’s (V’s grandfather) account of how he got close to Maria, with Francis’s mourning after Maria’s death and with V’s own thoughts about the story from much later in time when V is older and sees things, maybe, differently.
Part 3 is V’s re-imagining of the story of her maternal grandfather. As far as her family is concerned, Victor died in the Second World War, but V imagines a different scenario where this was a mistaken report and her grandfather, complete with new name, built a whole new life for himself, albeit one with a strange connection to his erstwhile family.
In Part 4, V turns her attention to her other grandfather, Francis, and tells us his story via a meditation on 4 photographs (reproduced in the text), 2 of which are contrasted with famous paintings (also included). For me, being a photographer and having recently read Barthes’ “Camera Lucida”, some of the reflections on photography and images in this section were very interesting.
Then Part 5, which is very short, jumps out of the family to hear from a man who was once a suitor to Maria (we heard about him in Part 2).
Time and again the book returns to different motifs. There are repeated mentions of Matoš’ poem “The Consolation of the Hair”, there’s the piece of white paper on which V’s mother made her kneel, there are white collars/gloves, there are street urchins. There are more. That's part of the reason for wanting to re-read the book.
Some parts are real, some parts are re-imagined/borrowed, some parts exist only in the minds of the book’s characters. Which is, I think, part of the novel’s appeal. The past, re-shaped by memory, is partly real, partly borrowed from other people’s pasts, partly imagined. And it is here that I see again connections with Hustvedt’s book. It would, I think, be a fascinating reading project to read this and “Memories of the Future” together.
Comfortably 5 stars. One of those books where you wish a sixth star could be made available.
You can look at the book as a collection of five different pieces. You could read each piece separately and it would make sense. But when all five are read together, it becomes a moving meditation on identity and memory.
I believe this book would make a good companion piece to Siri Hustvedt’s “Memories of the Future”. If you have read that, consider some of these quotes:
Our present always casts a light on our past and therefore the past is constantly reshaped…
...and I would add that only a fool or a narrative pedant would insist on the coherence of a life story.
Anyone can imagine the past they need and turn it into a story, preferably a written story because writing it down makes it real.
But who were they, my ancestors - those people with their secret lives? I don’t know. All I have are my unreliable memories and the photographs, around which I invent stories…
The first two of these could be from either book, really. But the second two show how this book takes a different path to Hustvedt’s, which we sort of know it will from its subtitle “A Fictional Autobiography”.
The first part of the book investigates what it means to try to retell your own story. How does memory, unreliable as it is, shape our understanding of what happened to us earlier in our lives? Can we identify pivotal moments that shape or explain our personality? Here, the writing is dense on the page and a sort of stream of consciousness that loops around repeating phrases and ideas. It’s a style that took me a few pages to settle in to, but once I was there, I was hooked. We read the story of V (I am not sure why the blurb says she is only known as “she” because she is clearly called V several times through this section) and various episodes from her growing up.
Part 2 is completely different, effectively taking the form of a “prose poem” that follows several threads of story that all mix together. It’s almost magical realism and the text is far more spread out on the page. Reading it after reading Part 1 makes you feel almost light-headed! We read the story of V’s (paternal) grandparents with the focus on Maria, her grandmother, who tells V a story from her past, as she, Maria, lies in bed close to death. This story mixes with V’s parents telling V to ignore the ramblings of mad, old woman, with Francis’s (V’s grandfather) account of how he got close to Maria, with Francis’s mourning after Maria’s death and with V’s own thoughts about the story from much later in time when V is older and sees things, maybe, differently.
Part 3 is V’s re-imagining of the story of her maternal grandfather. As far as her family is concerned, Victor died in the Second World War, but V imagines a different scenario where this was a mistaken report and her grandfather, complete with new name, built a whole new life for himself, albeit one with a strange connection to his erstwhile family.
In Part 4, V turns her attention to her other grandfather, Francis, and tells us his story via a meditation on 4 photographs (reproduced in the text), 2 of which are contrasted with famous paintings (also included). For me, being a photographer and having recently read Barthes’ “Camera Lucida”, some of the reflections on photography and images in this section were very interesting.
Then Part 5, which is very short, jumps out of the family to hear from a man who was once a suitor to Maria (we heard about him in Part 2).
Time and again the book returns to different motifs. There are repeated mentions of Matoš’ poem “The Consolation of the Hair”, there’s the piece of white paper on which V’s mother made her kneel, there are white collars/gloves, there are street urchins. There are more. That's part of the reason for wanting to re-read the book.
Some parts are real, some parts are re-imagined/borrowed, some parts exist only in the minds of the book’s characters. Which is, I think, part of the novel’s appeal. The past, re-shaped by memory, is partly real, partly borrowed from other people’s pasts, partly imagined. And it is here that I see again connections with Hustvedt’s book. It would, I think, be a fascinating reading project to read this and “Memories of the Future” together.
Comfortably 5 stars. One of those books where you wish a sixth star could be made available.
December 22, 2020
See below for two outstanding reviews from the two leading Goodreads reviewers (and who are also the people I probably have exchanged book related messages with every week of this year) - both of whom rated this book as among the very best of the 100+ they read in 2020.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Unfortunately this book simply failed to work for me, much as I can admire its technical merit I simply did not enjoy the experience of reading it.
I think that the issue lay with the first section – a very lengthy, deliberately circular, deliberately distanced (*) tale – but one that is effectively, to me at least, about a lack of self worth turnig increasingly into misanthropy. I simply did not enjoy spending time in the character’s thoughts (as relayed) and found this section as a result both far too long (it is completely out of proportion to the rest of the book) and suffocating to the point that it was completely prejudicial to my appreciation of the rest of the book.
(*) as an aside the misleading blurb contradicts itself here - the woman whose story is told is called "V" - the "she" is simply because, as the blurb itself says, her story is told at second remove by an unknown narrator
My other issue I think relates to the sentiments which underly the book’s title (and epigraph) – a confrontation with Theresa May’s “citizen of the world = citizen of nowhere” speech. To be truly effective I think a justifiable challenge to that speech needs to do two things: celebrate being a citizen of everywhere (as a way of embracing cultural difference, of being open to ideas); acknowledge that for many people a fixed sense of belonging is important.
The first section seemed to portray citizenship-of-the world as effectively a state of profound dissatisfaction with everything (perhaps even with life and existence itself); and the first two sections (**) seemed to look down on those inferior people who actually enjoy simple pleasures or belonging somewhere – culminating in describing them as people who only see “the mud around their feet”.
(**) incidentally returning to the odd blurb – most of the “prose poetry” of the second section is simply dialogue denuded of speech marks and he saids, interspersed with normal prose paragraphs
And then a fourth section perhaps betrays the worldview that lies behind such thinking and writing – and one so alien from my own - when the narrator of that part bodly asserts that when seeing pictures of the adoration of the magi they see only death, the passage of time, fear and apprehension – and a story about the Kings not the baby.
So 3 stars rounded for me – but this is very much a personal view.
Prior to me reviewing it only had 5 star reviews on Goodreads. However the number of Goodreads reviews (5 ratings) and the complete lack of press coverage is hugely undeserved for what is a very intricately crafted, heavily literary and deeply complex novel.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Unfortunately this book simply failed to work for me, much as I can admire its technical merit I simply did not enjoy the experience of reading it.
I think that the issue lay with the first section – a very lengthy, deliberately circular, deliberately distanced (*) tale – but one that is effectively, to me at least, about a lack of self worth turnig increasingly into misanthropy. I simply did not enjoy spending time in the character’s thoughts (as relayed) and found this section as a result both far too long (it is completely out of proportion to the rest of the book) and suffocating to the point that it was completely prejudicial to my appreciation of the rest of the book.
(*) as an aside the misleading blurb contradicts itself here - the woman whose story is told is called "V" - the "she" is simply because, as the blurb itself says, her story is told at second remove by an unknown narrator
My other issue I think relates to the sentiments which underly the book’s title (and epigraph) – a confrontation with Theresa May’s “citizen of the world = citizen of nowhere” speech. To be truly effective I think a justifiable challenge to that speech needs to do two things: celebrate being a citizen of everywhere (as a way of embracing cultural difference, of being open to ideas); acknowledge that for many people a fixed sense of belonging is important.
The first section seemed to portray citizenship-of-the world as effectively a state of profound dissatisfaction with everything (perhaps even with life and existence itself); and the first two sections (**) seemed to look down on those inferior people who actually enjoy simple pleasures or belonging somewhere – culminating in describing them as people who only see “the mud around their feet”.
(**) incidentally returning to the odd blurb – most of the “prose poetry” of the second section is simply dialogue denuded of speech marks and he saids, interspersed with normal prose paragraphs
And then a fourth section perhaps betrays the worldview that lies behind such thinking and writing – and one so alien from my own - when the narrator of that part bodly asserts that when seeing pictures of the adoration of the magi they see only death, the passage of time, fear and apprehension – and a story about the Kings not the baby.
So 3 stars rounded for me – but this is very much a personal view.
Prior to me reviewing it only had 5 star reviews on Goodreads. However the number of Goodreads reviews (5 ratings) and the complete lack of press coverage is hugely undeserved for what is a very intricately crafted, heavily literary and deeply complex novel.
July 19, 2023
Updated Review (July 2023):
Vesna Main’s Only a Lodger… And Hardly That is very special and personal for me, even the second time reading it, almost three years later. I don’t think I have come across a book that speaks so deeply to my own experiences and feelings—a childhood spent in constant anxiety, how isolation and foreignness in a different country is preferable to feeling that way in one’s own country, the books and stories that bring us far greater consolation than most other people.
Only a Lodger… and Hardly that is a fictional biography in five parts that are both separate and connected with different styles and themes—across them one can see the influences of Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, Gabriel Josipovici and the affinities to (if not influences from) Annie Ernaux and Dubravka Ugresic, to name a few. But at the book’s core is the idea that within each of us is a medley of fragments that have come together to make us who we are. There are our childhoods, how easily we are shaped during these early years, the things that make up our childhoods that can be both a curse and a blessing, that we carry around, sometimes our whole lives, whether its anxiety, fear of failing, the need to create, the desire to be loved, or even just stories. Our most infantile selves follow us into adulthood like shadows.
And then there are the people who have led to our creation, our parents, our grandparents, different pieces of them recast themselves into us. We become our parents and grandparents, or parts of them. Is it predestined to be that way, or is it some kind of heritage we are seeking? What if things would have been different? This is the struggle, because memories and the stories we tell ourselves can be so unreliable, without order, relying on the sinewy nature of memory. But this makes it all sound so sad and depressing. Because these memories and stories can be beautiful, even if they push beyond the bounds of truth. Memory and stories can be whimsical delights, our memories and stories can also be dreams, fantastical dreams that lift us above everything else-- “Sometimes you have to dream in spite of the world.”
Quotes:
“When she thinks about the story of her life, she wonders whether anything from her past, from the past as she knows it, as she remembers it, really happened, or has come from someone’s story, someone’s story that they have presented as their memory of her past, or perhaps it might have come from someone else’s story that she had read about and perhaps it was someone else who was kneeling in the corner of their mother’s kitchen as part of their constructive punishment.”
“How much of them remains in me? How much of what matters to me in my life have I inherited and how much of me is part of some self-electing affinities that travel across space and time… There can be no simple, straightforward answer; no way of providing a list and ticking this and that trait and tracing it back to any of them. But who were they, my ancestors—those people with their secret lives? I don’t know. All I have are my unreliable memories and the photographs, around which I event stories, the photographs that capture a split second and turn a casual gesture, or a facial expression into forensic evidence, the photographs that fix an ephemeral moment into eternity. The photographs that have a meaning only after I tell a story about them.”
"Memory again, is there no way of existing outside of memory?"
"... Sometimes she wants to tell them that she needs no country, no country as soil, no country of blood connections, for those are real myths and those are dangerous myths... sometimes she wishes to tell them that the only country she needs is her library, the only country she could miss is her real library and her imaginary library, an ever-expanding world of words, that is her country."
"She had to possess books, she had to possess them physically, she had to surround herself with books, she had to have books next to her, or at least some of them, those that she liked more than others, those that were not written for her but came close to what she imagined was the book written for her and because she could never be sure."
-----------------
Original Review (December 2020)
Only a Lodger… And Hardly That: A Fictional Autobiography by Vesna Main is described as a novel in five parts. In some regards, these five parts can be read separately, as they are distinct stories with different narrative structures, ranging from a looping, repetitive stream-of-consciousness investigation of one’s story to an examination of family photographs to piece together the story of her grandparents. However, read together, the entire novel becomes a search for identity and one’s history while at the same time dispelling the possibility of this task as memories are unreliable and photographs only give us brief glances into the past and are open to a multitude of interpretations. It’s a book that demands your full attention, pen in hand, as you wade through its simple and insightful beauty, examining not only the protagonist and her grandparent’s memories and identities but your own as well.
“When she thinks about the story of her life, she wonders whether anything from her past, from the past as she knows it, as she remembers it, really happened, or has come from someone’s story, someone’s story that they have presented as their memory of her past, or perhaps it might have come from someone else’s story that she had read about and perhaps it was someone else who was kneeling in the corner of their mother’s kitchen as part of their constructive punishment.”
“How much of them remains in me? How much of what matters to me in my life have I inherited and how much of me is part of some self-electing affinities that travel across space and time… There can be no simple, straightforward answer; no way of providing a list and ticking this and that trait and tracing it back to any of them. But who were they, my ancestors—those people with their secret lives? I don’t know. All I have are my unreliable memories and the photographs, around which I event stories, the photographs that capture a split second and turn a casual gesture, or a facial expression into forensic evidence, the photographs that fix an ephemeral moment into eternity. The photographs that have a meaning only after I tell a story about them.”
Vesna Main’s Only a Lodger… And Hardly That is very special and personal for me, even the second time reading it, almost three years later. I don’t think I have come across a book that speaks so deeply to my own experiences and feelings—a childhood spent in constant anxiety, how isolation and foreignness in a different country is preferable to feeling that way in one’s own country, the books and stories that bring us far greater consolation than most other people.
Only a Lodger… and Hardly that is a fictional biography in five parts that are both separate and connected with different styles and themes—across them one can see the influences of Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, Gabriel Josipovici and the affinities to (if not influences from) Annie Ernaux and Dubravka Ugresic, to name a few. But at the book’s core is the idea that within each of us is a medley of fragments that have come together to make us who we are. There are our childhoods, how easily we are shaped during these early years, the things that make up our childhoods that can be both a curse and a blessing, that we carry around, sometimes our whole lives, whether its anxiety, fear of failing, the need to create, the desire to be loved, or even just stories. Our most infantile selves follow us into adulthood like shadows.
And then there are the people who have led to our creation, our parents, our grandparents, different pieces of them recast themselves into us. We become our parents and grandparents, or parts of them. Is it predestined to be that way, or is it some kind of heritage we are seeking? What if things would have been different? This is the struggle, because memories and the stories we tell ourselves can be so unreliable, without order, relying on the sinewy nature of memory. But this makes it all sound so sad and depressing. Because these memories and stories can be beautiful, even if they push beyond the bounds of truth. Memory and stories can be whimsical delights, our memories and stories can also be dreams, fantastical dreams that lift us above everything else-- “Sometimes you have to dream in spite of the world.”
Quotes:
“When she thinks about the story of her life, she wonders whether anything from her past, from the past as she knows it, as she remembers it, really happened, or has come from someone’s story, someone’s story that they have presented as their memory of her past, or perhaps it might have come from someone else’s story that she had read about and perhaps it was someone else who was kneeling in the corner of their mother’s kitchen as part of their constructive punishment.”
“How much of them remains in me? How much of what matters to me in my life have I inherited and how much of me is part of some self-electing affinities that travel across space and time… There can be no simple, straightforward answer; no way of providing a list and ticking this and that trait and tracing it back to any of them. But who were they, my ancestors—those people with their secret lives? I don’t know. All I have are my unreliable memories and the photographs, around which I event stories, the photographs that capture a split second and turn a casual gesture, or a facial expression into forensic evidence, the photographs that fix an ephemeral moment into eternity. The photographs that have a meaning only after I tell a story about them.”
"Memory again, is there no way of existing outside of memory?"
"... Sometimes she wants to tell them that she needs no country, no country as soil, no country of blood connections, for those are real myths and those are dangerous myths... sometimes she wishes to tell them that the only country she needs is her library, the only country she could miss is her real library and her imaginary library, an ever-expanding world of words, that is her country."
"She had to possess books, she had to possess them physically, she had to surround herself with books, she had to have books next to her, or at least some of them, those that she liked more than others, those that were not written for her but came close to what she imagined was the book written for her and because she could never be sure."
-----------------
Original Review (December 2020)
Only a Lodger… And Hardly That: A Fictional Autobiography by Vesna Main is described as a novel in five parts. In some regards, these five parts can be read separately, as they are distinct stories with different narrative structures, ranging from a looping, repetitive stream-of-consciousness investigation of one’s story to an examination of family photographs to piece together the story of her grandparents. However, read together, the entire novel becomes a search for identity and one’s history while at the same time dispelling the possibility of this task as memories are unreliable and photographs only give us brief glances into the past and are open to a multitude of interpretations. It’s a book that demands your full attention, pen in hand, as you wade through its simple and insightful beauty, examining not only the protagonist and her grandparent’s memories and identities but your own as well.
“When she thinks about the story of her life, she wonders whether anything from her past, from the past as she knows it, as she remembers it, really happened, or has come from someone’s story, someone’s story that they have presented as their memory of her past, or perhaps it might have come from someone else’s story that she had read about and perhaps it was someone else who was kneeling in the corner of their mother’s kitchen as part of their constructive punishment.”
“How much of them remains in me? How much of what matters to me in my life have I inherited and how much of me is part of some self-electing affinities that travel across space and time… There can be no simple, straightforward answer; no way of providing a list and ticking this and that trait and tracing it back to any of them. But who were they, my ancestors—those people with their secret lives? I don’t know. All I have are my unreliable memories and the photographs, around which I event stories, the photographs that capture a split second and turn a casual gesture, or a facial expression into forensic evidence, the photographs that fix an ephemeral moment into eternity. The photographs that have a meaning only after I tell a story about them.”
April 22, 2020
This is a book that requires re-reading. It is published as autofiction - not sure of the term - but it reads as a novel or, more precisely, a text with five sections, each in a different style (first person narrative reminiscent of Bernhard and Sebald, a series of poems in prose, an essay on family photos, a third person narrative and a short story) and with characters popping in from one to another.
I wonder if the first sentence ( 'For a long time my mother read to me.') is an echo of Proust's first sentence?
Beautifully written, this is a text that will stay with you for a long time after you have finished reading it and will make you ask questions about identity, exile, self-fashioning, and story telling, among others.
I wonder if the first sentence ( 'For a long time my mother read to me.') is an echo of Proust's first sentence?
Beautifully written, this is a text that will stay with you for a long time after you have finished reading it and will make you ask questions about identity, exile, self-fashioning, and story telling, among others.
August 23, 2022
There are books and there is literature. This is certainly an example of the latter. What Vesna Main created in “Only a Lodger… And Hardly That” is a masterpiece when it comes to first and foremost structure and perspective. It’s a novel in five parts, each very different from the other four, which altogether feel like various pieces of the same memoir-like mosaic.
Magical realism, historical revisionism, coming of age story, poetry, psychologically oriented love story - there is so much on these pages I marvelled at Main’s talent and ability to grasp my attention and make me feel richer with every dozen of pages or so.
I loved the circular style of writing in the first chapter and Main’s (or her character’s) observations about her upbringing and relationship mainly with her mother: “She was more aware of being a failure and she did not know what to do about being a failure, she did not know how to cope with being a failure and that really meant she did not know how to cope with not being loved”. There are so many eye-opening passages, how life is about improving oneself in order to be loved. Isn’t it so simple and yet so obscure that most people never realise that?
What I will carry forward from this novel is an open mind. “Remember. Sometimes you have to dream in spite of the world”, said the grandma to the girl in the second chapter; grandma’s life’s highlight was one night during which she flew in the sky with Fabrizzio, a circus’ acrobat. In “Only a Lodger… And Hardly That” Vesna Main wove a new realm from words, evocative of our world, and yet full of magic, illusions and serendipity. This is what literature is. “(…) she does not write to produce a good story, for that is for children, that is for children who always want to know what happened next (…). That is for readers who have not grown up. Had they grown up they would know that it does not matter what happens next, and such readers do not think of other things that matter that that was fine when she was a child, and when she was telling stories, but now she is not a child and she cannot tell what happens next and even if she could what difference would it make?”. This is the point here.
Magical realism, historical revisionism, coming of age story, poetry, psychologically oriented love story - there is so much on these pages I marvelled at Main’s talent and ability to grasp my attention and make me feel richer with every dozen of pages or so.
I loved the circular style of writing in the first chapter and Main’s (or her character’s) observations about her upbringing and relationship mainly with her mother: “She was more aware of being a failure and she did not know what to do about being a failure, she did not know how to cope with being a failure and that really meant she did not know how to cope with not being loved”. There are so many eye-opening passages, how life is about improving oneself in order to be loved. Isn’t it so simple and yet so obscure that most people never realise that?
What I will carry forward from this novel is an open mind. “Remember. Sometimes you have to dream in spite of the world”, said the grandma to the girl in the second chapter; grandma’s life’s highlight was one night during which she flew in the sky with Fabrizzio, a circus’ acrobat. In “Only a Lodger… And Hardly That” Vesna Main wove a new realm from words, evocative of our world, and yet full of magic, illusions and serendipity. This is what literature is. “(…) she does not write to produce a good story, for that is for children, that is for children who always want to know what happened next (…). That is for readers who have not grown up. Had they grown up they would know that it does not matter what happens next, and such readers do not think of other things that matter that that was fine when she was a child, and when she was telling stories, but now she is not a child and she cannot tell what happens next and even if she could what difference would it make?”. This is the point here.
October 26, 2020
"A silly story, a dirty story, that is what she thought then but that is not what she thinks now. That is not what she thinks now, now that she knows that stories have no end, now that she knows that ends to stories are false ends and this story, the story to love her, this story that she is telling now, this story has no end."
RATING: 5/5
This is perhaps the central concern of this fine book: "Is there no way of existence of outside of memory?" Remembrance after all is an exercise in constructing life. We mould the past, trying to give it an acceptable shape. What is history but stories we tell ourselves? It's a way of making sense of this world. It's a way of creating meaning where it did not exist before. How much of our identity is truly ours, how much of it is inherited? We contain the surviving remnants of our parents, their parents before them, on and on and on. There's no solid line to mark where one ends and the other begins, a liminal setting where both intermingle in the twilight. Subtitled "A Fictional Autobiography", this magnificent experimental literary work explores identity and memory in five unique ways, a delightful Gestalt consolidating in a deeply moving narrative.
The book is as much about the protagonist, V, as it's about both sets of her grandparents. It is a life story which doesn't concern itself with either adhering to a strict chronology or maintaining overall coherence; the narrator in fact consciously dismisses both. She further rejects the assumption that anyone's life can be empirically narrated, everything in its right place and everything accounted for perfectly. Life, after all, is rough and meaningless, full of contradictions, she claims while telling us of her maternal grandfather who walked out on his family. She looks at the past as malleable, as an ingredient for telling stories and turning them real. We continuously tell and retell our own stories, in a bid to come up with a single authoritative version that pleases us, but this version also keeps on changing according to our needs, according to what we identify as integral parts of our life. We beg and borrow, invent and steal, all in the effort for narrative. We use photographs to seal a present which is dead and decaying the moment the shutter is clicked. We come once more to things we thought we had abandoned, in old known forms and changed new shapes. Life is just a repetition of motifs.
Make no mistake: this is a book only an indie press could have published. It is bold, daring, going into places that traditional publishing is too conservative to risk. It is a work that will exponentially reward rereading and open up the text to new ways of seeing. It's one of the best things I have read this year and I cannot recommend it enough to you. It is obviously challenging, but all good books demand your attention, engaging your brain to work, and this is no different. So please go and read it.
(I received a finished copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
October 10, 2021
"I remember", we say. Then we begin to tell our version of what we can recall, filtered by how we felt at the time, what they failed to notice, the knowledge of what followed. Our memories must always contain some element of invention. So, it is immediately honest of Vesna Main to subtitle her novel, "A Fictional Autobiography" and an indication of the method she will use in setting out to trace how her antecedents and upbringing impacted on her life and the decisions she made; the rebellious impulses she favoured and the many ways in which she feels she failed.
Review continues at: https://dodmill.wixsite.com/theunfort...
Review continues at: https://dodmill.wixsite.com/theunfort...
February 1, 2021
An imaginative and literary (but certainly not inaccessible) rumination of how memories and the narratives we tell give meaning to our lived lives. Far from having a conventional form, it weaves recurring motifs through five chapters, each with a unique style, gradually forming a more cohesive narrative on Main and her family history. A unique and delightful read, and deserves multiple re-readings
November 27, 2025
A very literary collection of entertwined short stories about a family. It's a really interesting take on genre and form. The book is written as different ways to narrate a (fictional) biography: it features a very modernist/stream of conciousness tale, a one that's writen in free verse/narrative poetry, one that uses photographs as starting points to articulate the character featured's story.... It also offers a nice meditation on identity, the role our ancestors play on who we are, and how we deal with the past. Overall, a really nice and sometimes challenging (form-wise) read.
January 27, 2025
4.5 stars. The first chapter is brutal-it's extremely long, excessively repetitive (to the point of being tiresome rather than incantatory), and reveals a person it is very hard to like, BUT it is absolutely necessary to read, providing crucial information that sets the scene for the rest of the book. So slog through it (skim a bit if you must; I won't judge you, as I skimmed too) and as a reward you will be met with a beautifully written, sometimes playful, sometimes scholarly, often elegiac evocation of a family across time.
While Main has titled this a "fictional autobiography" and others have labeled it a novel in stories, it really reads more like a great literary memoir to me and reminds me strongly of Marina Jarre's remarkable Distant Fathers and Return to Latvia. As far as I'm concerned, there can be no higher praise than that.
While Main has titled this a "fictional autobiography" and others have labeled it a novel in stories, it really reads more like a great literary memoir to me and reminds me strongly of Marina Jarre's remarkable Distant Fathers and Return to Latvia. As far as I'm concerned, there can be no higher praise than that.
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