Persephone Books discussion

I've posted the Nov/Dec poll - here's a summary of the books from the Persephone website:
The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal
The Exiles Return is set in Occupied Vienna in 1954-5. It describes five people who grew up there before the war and have come back to see if they can re-establish the life they have lost.
The novel begins with Professor Kuno Adler, who is Jewish and fled Vienna after the Anschluss (the events of March 1938 when Hitler’s troops marched into Austria). He is returning from New York to try and take up his old life as a research scientist. We realise through his confrontation with officialdom and with the changed fabric of the city (the lime trees are there no longer, it is hard to know who behaved well during the war and who was a Nazi sympathiser) that a refugee who goes back has a very difficult time.
Next we are introduced to a wealthy Greek named Kanakis. Before the war his family had lived in great style with a coach and horses and many servants, and now the 40 year-old Kanakis has come back to try and buy an eighteenth-century hotel particulier, a little palais, in which to live a life of eighteenth-century pleasure. He meets Prince Lorenzo Grein-Lauterbach (who owes more than a little to Tadzio in Death in Venice). Bimbo, as he is known – and the nickname is an accurate one – is a 24 year-old who, because his aristocratic, anti-Nazi parents were murdered by the Germans, was spirited away to the country during the war years and afterwards. He is penniless yet retains an overweening sense of entitlement. Kanakis and he develop a homosexual relationship (a brave thing to write about in the 1950s) and he is kept by his older lover. But he has a sister, Princess Nina, who works in a laboratory, the same one to which Adler returns. She lives modestly in the attic of her family’s former palais, is a devout Catholic, loyal to her brother and the memory of her parents, intelligent and hard-working, but, as she perceives it, is stocky and unattractive. Lastly, there is 18 year-old Marie-Theres, whose parents went to America just before the war; they, and her siblings, have become completely American, but Resi (as she is known, possibly with a deliberate echo of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew) has never fitted in and is déplacée. So she goes back to her Austrian aunt and uncle to see if she can make a life in the home country (from her parents point of view to see if she can be married off) yet here too she is an innocent abroad, unable to put down roots. Her tragedy is at the core of this moving and evocative book, which explores a very complex and interesting question: if an exile returns, how should he or she behave morally? Some have moral fastidiousness (Adler, Nina), some are ruthlessly on the make (Kanakis, Bimbo), some have no moral code because they have never been educated to acquire one (Resi).

The Persephone Book of Short Stories
Persephone Book No. 100 is The Persephone Book of Short Stories. The hundredth book is something of a landmark for us and we wanted to find a way to celebrate the diversity and range of ‘our’ writers. The best way to do so was by gathering together a varied collection of stories in one large (450 page) volume. We have printed the following comment on the flap: ‘“Most of the stories focus on the small, quiet or unspoken intricacies of human relationships rather than grand dramas” wrote our proofreader, and she pointed out that “the use of metaphor is delicate and subtle; often the women are strong and capable and the men less so; shallow and selfish motives are exposed, and all the stories except the last are third-person. Interesting!’
The dates of the stories range from 1909 to 1986 and there are thirty in all, ten stories by existing Persephone short story writers, ten stories that have already appeared in the Biannually and therefore will be familiar to some, and ten stories that were completely new to us and are, we hope, new to our readers. The ten stories which are already in print in Persephone editions of their work are byKatherine Mansfield, Irène Némirovsky, Mollie Panter-Downes (twice),Elizabeth Berridge, Dorothy Whipple, Frances Towers, Margaret Bonham, Diana Gardner and Diana Athill. The ten stories which have already been published in the Quarterly and Biannually are by EM Delafield (author of Persephone Book No. 13 Consequences); Dorothy Parker; Dorothy Whipple (again); Edith Wharton; Phyllis Bentley; Dorothy Canfield Fisher (author of Persephone Book No. 7 The Homemaker); Norah Hoult (author of There Were No Windows, Persephone Book No. 59 ); Angelica Gibbs; Penelope Mortimer (author of Persephone Book No. 77 Daddy’s Gone A- Hunting); and Georgina Hammick. And lastly the ten stories which are new to us and possibly new to Persephone readers are by Susan Glaspell, Pauline Smith, Malachi Whitaker, Betty Miller(author of Farewell Leicester Square, Persephone Book No. 14), Helen Hull(author of Heat Lightning, Persephone Book No. 101), Kay Boyle, Shirley Jackson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Spencer and Penelope Fitzgerald.

House-Bound by Winifred Peck
We first read House-Bound by Winifred Peck in 1985 when, in a feature in theTimes Literary Supplement, the novelist and critic Penelope Fitzgerald, Winifred Peck’s niece, chose it as one of the books she would like to see reprinted. This was a repeat of the 1977 feature in which Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin both chose Barbara Pym as the novelist they thought most unjustly neglected.
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote: ‘If I could have back one of the many Winifred Peck titles I once possessed I would choose House-Bound. The story never moves out of middle-class Edinburgh; the satire on genteel living, though, is always kept in relation to the vast severance and waste of the war beyond. The book opens with a grand comic sweep as the ladies come empty-handed away from the registry office where they have learned that they can no longer be “suited” and in future will have to manage their own unmanageable homes. There are coal fires, kitchen ranges and intractable husbands; Rose is not quite sure whether you need soap to wash potatoes. Her struggle continues on several fronts, but not always in terms of comedy. To be house-bound is to be “tethered to a collection of all the extinct memories… with which they had grown up… how are we all to get out?” I remember it as a novel by a romantic who was as sharp as a needle, too sharp to deceive herself.’

The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf
The Wise Virgins(1913) is a semi-autobiographical novel about a dilemma: whether Harry, the hero, should go into the family business and marry the suitable but dull girl next door or move in artistic circles and marry one of the entrancing ‘Lawrence’ girls. For, as Lyndall Gordon writes: ‘It is a truth widely acknowledged that Camilla Lawrence is a portrait of the author’s wife –Virginia Woolf.’ This is one reason why the novel is so intriguing. But it is also a Forsterian social comedy, funny, perceptive, highly intelligent, full of clever dialogue and at times bitterly satirical; while the dramatic and emotional dénouement still retains a great deal of its power to shock.
It was on his honeymoon in 1912 that Leonard Woolf began writing his second (and final) novel. He was 31, newly returned from seven years as a colonial administrator, and asking himself much the same questions as his hero. Helen Dunmore wrote in The Sunday Times: ‘It’s a passionate, cuttingly truthful story of a love affair between two people struggling against the prejudices of their time and place. Woolf’s writing is almost unbearably honest.’

I voted for the current leaders on both polls!

:) It doesn't look like a close race so far!

Thanks for participating in the polls! Here's what we're reading for the next few months:
Nov - Persephone Book of Short Stories
Dec - The Exiles Return
Jan - Few Eggs and No Oranges