Moominmamma and me

This picture, by Tove Jansson, who was the author and illustrator of the Moomin books, is actually nothing at all to do with Moominland. It's one of her illustrations for The Hobbit, but I think it's rather wonderful, and better than a picture of the Moomins themselves, which is my excuse for sticking it in here.

I never read any Moomin books when I was a child. I came upon them only recently and was knocked sideways by the strangeness and loneliness and utter charm of them.

I hope, one day, to write in depth about why I like Jansson's writing and her art but, to be honest, I haven't read enough yet to do her justice. So this is a post about one character's conversation with another and what I think about it in relation to my own role in as Paddymamma.

The following comes from Moominsummer Madness:

[Moomintroll and Moominmamma] sat side by side in the moss and watched the schooner [she had made] sail across the pond and land at the other shore beside a large leaf.

Over at the house the Mymble's daughter was shouting for her little sister. 'My! My!' she yelled. 'Horrible little menace! My-y-y! Come here at once so I can pull your hair!'

'She's hid somewhere again,' said Moomintroll. 'Remember that time we found her in your bag?'

Moominmamma nodded. She was dipping her snout in the water and looking at the bottom.

'There's a nice gleam down there,' she said.

'It's your golden bracelet,' said Moomintroll. 'And the Snork Maiden's necklace. Good idea, isn't it?'

'Splendid,' said his mother. 'We'll always keep our bangles in brown pond water in the future. They're so much more beautiful that way.'

This passage struck me when I read it and has stayed with me long after the rest of the story faded.

Firstly, it reminded me (I suppose tangentially but one's own tangents never seem tangential but perfectly logical and straightforward) of Beowulf's mere and all the gold and armour gleaming bleakly at the bottom of it.

Secondly, I had a wince of shame that my reaction, if my son dropped all my most precious belongings into a puddle, would not resemble hers. At all. I would get very red and hot and prickly, shout a lot, then sulk and probably bring it up for years and years in martyred tones. "This is why I can't have nice things..."

Poor boy.

I know Jansson isn't proposing that to be a good mother you must believe every stupid, selfish or thoughtless thing your child does is genius. But it did make me realise how little a partner-in-joy I am with my son. If he thought something was truly marvellous, would I try to see it from his point of view, or immediately impose my own agenda?

Definitely the latter.

Time to empty my jewellery-box. Sigh.

Helius and Hecate

In those days women labouring on the path between life and death called for Hecate to succour them. And, if she heard, she came.

Bright-cheeked Hecate was a nymph of lonely places, daughter of some god or other, whom none had bothered to acknowledge as his own. She cherished the wilderness for there was no one else to cherish, and because it had cherished her first. But she was lonely and curious, as all the gods are curious, about the little lives of men. And so, when a woman raised her voice in the agony of childbirth, Hecate would straighten in the fields where she gathered flowers, or look up as she waded a green-glinting river, and hurry to see what new player was entering her windswept stage.

One day the call came as the sun dawdled in the sky and Hecate wandered the mountains, hoping to hear the wind wail like a voice through the rocks. A woman, her time come as she pounded cloths in the river, threw back her sweating head and like a heifer, bellowed, "Help me, Hecate!"

Hecate came running. Her legs flashed down the mountainside. Her veil slipped from her brow. The white of her skin was so brilliant, for the sun had never touched it, that it caught the eyes of the fiery horses of star-eyed Helius as they paced the reaches of the sky. They reared in alarm and Helius, who drove the sun in those days, called out to them and cracked his whip. He looked down through the layered depths of air below him and saw bright-cheeked Hecate running like a doe between the olive trees. And straight away he wanted her.

Helius whipped the horses then and set the chariot spiralling out of the sky, tracing circles of fire in the air. Hecate, running with the light of curiosity in her eye down the mountainside, noticed suddenly how her shadow swept round her, now behind, now before. Afraid, she looked up. Too late, too late, Hecate saw the adamantine hooves that struck sparks from nothing, and star-eyed Helius bearing down on her. She ran but the chariot swooped, while the sky above darkened to unnatural night.

He caught her then and held her, while the fiery horses cropped the scorched grass and the poppies that withered in the heat.

Sated at last, Helius leapt back into the chariot and with a crack of his whip drove the horses steeply into the sky. All the world rejoiced as the sun, dragging day behind it, returned to its orbit and banished the weird noon-time night. All except a woman who panted in pain and fear alone on a river-bank, and bright-cheeked Hecate weeping in a meadow to which autumn had come in the space of a moment.

Helius' boasts of his latest love affair died on his lips that night on Mount Olympus. A new fire was burning within him and would not let his tongue taste ambrosia nor his ears hear the music of the spheres. All he could see in the brilliant halls of the gods was bright-cheeked Hecate running before him. He still wanted her.

Day after day that summer eerie nights flitted across the sky as Helius hunted Hecate down. If she waded into a river to hide from him, his horses dried the waters up; if she sheltered in a forest, their manes set fires racing through the branches, if she tried to shelter underground they breathed smoke into the caves so she had to run weeping into Helius' waiting arms. She always ran and he always caught her.

At last the hunt became too easy. Bright-cheeked Hecate's slim form was round with child. She stumbled rather than ran through the wilderness. Helius swung his chariot away from the ground as he saw her.

"Foster your child, Hecate, and grow slim again. I will watch for your quick step on the mountain when the time comes."

As the star-eyed god climbed into the sky, the first pangs gripped Hecate and she sank to her knees in the meadow. "Help me!" she called, as every woman calls in labour. But there was no one to hear her. She laboured for hours alone in the wilderness and, as Helius' horses reached their pasture in the Blessed Isles of the West, the lonely nymph was delivered of a babe, a son. He was blue and cold as eventide.

The moon rose and Hecate turned her face away for the moon was Helius' sister. Through her tears she saw a light moving dimly through the night. A litter was being carried through the field. White lights swung from the drapery and Hecate saw that the bearers were satyrs, their legs bobbing strangely through the gloaming. Within lay Hades' wife, the daughter of Demeter, returning from her summer sojourn with her mother to Tartarus and the black god's embrace. The goddess's sobs floated on the air.

"Lady Persephone!" cried bright-cheeked Hecate. She crawled to her feet with her dead babe tight in her arms and limped to where the procession traced its path to the Underworld. The bearers did not pause but the Queen of the Underworld lifted a white hand to the drapes and Hecate saw eyes as bright as starlight in the shadows within. Rosy-lipped Persephone smiled through her tears.

"Wait a while," she called to her bearers but they paid no heed. They walked on, for the word of the black god was death and Persephone's was only pain. "Wait!" the goddess cried again and leaned out of the litter to speak to Hecate.

"My child is dead," wept Hecate.

"What would you have me do?" said Persephone through the swaying drapes. Her tears were bright.

"Take him with you to Elysium, I beg you."

"Every soul must make that journey by himself," said the goddess.

"I have not the fare for the boatman," said Hecate in despair. "He is the son of a god – please, my lady, take him with you." She ran a little way beside the litter then dropped back as the weariness of her travails took her.

"What god?" asked rosy-lipped Persephone.

"Helius. He hunted me daily in the wilderness and left me at last with this child."

"The sun!" breathed the goddess. "You love him?"

"No!"

The bright eyes of the goddess whelmed again with tears.

"I understand it now,” she said. “All summer there were frosts at mid-day. The flowers I gathered wilted in my hands, my nymphs shivered in their robes and ice formed on the pools where I would bathe. My summers of freedom are so fleeting..." The goddess sighed deeply. "And this summer was cold and uncanny as midwinter. His crime against me is small compared to what he has done to you – but he has wronged us both. Bearers," she cried. "Foul spirits of my husband's law, I order you to halt." They ignored her but she half rose in the litter, her white hands gripping the frame and her voice raised in anger. "You may hasten on with all speed and my blessing upon you – but first slow, that I may take this nymph into my litter."

The satyrs knelt and the Queen of the Underworld reached out and took the tiny child from Hecate's weary hands. At her touch the infant stirred, not with life but with the quickening of the spirit; its shade woke and blinked. Hecate climbed swiftly in and tried to take the child back but the spirit drained from it and only a corpse remained in her arms.

"He is mine now," said Persephone sadly. "But I promise he will thrive in the courts of my husband. He will run through the orchards of Elysium and grow strong there, loved and tended by all my maidens." Hecate returned him to the goddess's lap and marvelled as the tiny babe balled its fists and opened its eyes. "And you, nymph, what will you do?"

Hecate looked out at the moonlit land. "The world is a cold and lonely place," she said. "And love is empty. I have no love left for life."

The moonlight faded as the litter started its descent into the Underworld. Darkness pressed coldly in and the babe in Persephone's arms kicked and mewled. "I want nothing now but vengeance," Hecate said.

"Good," said the goddess. "I will give you what I have never had myself, a chance to repay pain for pain, loss for loss, what evils the gods do wreak upon us. They snatch our happiness from us as spiteful cats snatch birds as they sing. If you are truly tired of the life Helius has given you, I can help. But you must be brave. The path I can show you is cold and perilous and death lies at the end of it.

"Look – " She drew back the drapes and fingers of cold penetrated the litter like ice spreading over the surface of a lake. Hecate saw the utter black of the river Styx, the edge of this world and the border of the next. And here – and here – along the bank, then pressing in around the litter with a wail and a gibber, suddenly, came the ghosts. They were faceless, voiceless but for their wordless cry.

"They could not afford to pay Charon to row them across to the Fields of Asphodel and the Three Judges," said Persephone grimly. "From such a fate I can save your son, and I will. They drink the blood of the living. Poor souls, a drop of blood makes them believe they are men again, not shades of nothing."

Hecate stared in horror at the shifting, formless masses before her.

"You can use them," said Persephone. The litter halted and the satyrs, bending their backwards legs, slid the frame onto the broad base of Charon's ferry. Hecate kissed her child's forehead and scrambled to the shore. "Lead them with blood, as a hunter leads a wolf to his trap," cried Persephone as the barge slipped into the black waters. Her voice seemed distant already. "Let them drink his blood, take his life as he has taken yours!"

Hecate stood alone on the frozen bank of the River of Death and felt the ghosts run hungry fingers over her white and lovely arms.

Hecate climbed then through the dark places of the earth and the ghosts followed her, hungering for the blood she let fall drop by drop. She came at last to a door to the upper air where a cave looked out over a valley full of morning mist and the sound of a river. It was a lonely place, where nymphs disported themselves far from the sight of men. Hecate knew it, had loved it in the days before Helius noticed her. The sight of it brought a blush of memory to her cheek.

But rosy-fingered Eos was unlocking the stable door in Helius' palace, she knew, as she waited in the cave with the ghosts cowering behind her.

He came, as he must come, pacing the paths of the sky with his fiery horses and his golden chariot, star-eyed Helius who drives the sun from far in the east to the Islands of the Blessed far in the west. But he dawdled in the sky and looked listlessly down at the land green and silver beneath him for his love for Hecate was upon him again and he hungered for her as fire hungers for wood or the sea hungers for the shore.

Noon came and the fiery horses stamped high over the mountain. Then Hecate left her cave and ran, her legs flashing down the mountainside, her veil blowing over her cheeks. She caught the eyes of the fiery horses of star-eyed Helius as they paced the reaches of the sky. They reared in alarm and Helius called out to them and cracked his whip. He looked down through the layered depths of air below him and saw Hecate running like a doe between the olive trees. And he wanted her.

He whipped the horses and set the chariot spiralling out of the sky. Hecate noticed suddenly how her shadow swept round her, now behind, now before, leaping over the rocks. She did not look up; she ran. Too late, too late, Helius drove the horses after her as she darted back to the mouth of the cave. The adamantine hooves struck sparks from the rock wall as she disappeared within and the horses blew smoke and fire after her. Helius leapt from the chariot and ran into the cave.

Far away on Mount Olympus Apollo noticed the sky darken to unnatural night. "Saddle my horse!" he cried. He whipped his steed through the eerie night until a blaze of light burning on the mountaintop caught his eye. The fiery horses of Helius were grazing there, cropping the harebells that withered in the heat. With a cry of triumph Apollo leapt into the car and seized the reins.

"Mine!" he cried. The horses bellowed with rage but in a moment they were climbing steeply to the curved path between the stars. And from that day it was Apollo not Helius who drove the sun from east to west across the Heavens.

Hecate ran far through the dark tunnels of the Underworld with Helius pacing behind her, the light of his brow flashing brilliantly before him. "I'll catch you, Hecate," he called to her. "I always catch you."

Hecate halted, deep in the earth and the ghosts huddled round her, sucking at the wounds on her arms. She shivered, thinking of her child far off in Elysium and the bitter-sweet days of her youth alone in the wilderness. "I cannot run any more from you," she said. "I am here."

He found her, his lights catching her robe and the veil that covered her cheeks. The ghosts scattered. The god gripped her arms and tore the veil from her face and saw – a crone with hollow cheeks and eyes so deep-sunken they were like two dry wells. All Hecate's youth and beauty had drained into the life-hungry ghosts. The god pulled back but now she gripped him. She grasped him tight with claw-like fists. Helius cried out. He thrashed in Hecate's grip but the passage was narrow and his heaving shoulders broke the rock around them so that it rained down, crushing them together in the dark. The ghosts pressed in, sucking and tearing at them both.

But Helius was strong. In his body burnt the fires of the sun and as the rocks and the dead tore at him his blood boiled and fevered and finally burst from him in one obliterating eruption. His heat melted the heart of the mountain that trapped him. As he died with Hecate in his arms, liquid stone and ichor thrust through the mountain and into the upper air. It scorched the sky, where Apollo paced in his new-won chariot, with smoke and threw ash over the valleys and rivers of far-distant Hellas that lonely Hecate once loved.

And that is how the volcano Mount Etna came into being.

Elidor

I have dim memories of reading Elidor as a child and being unimpressed. In fact I think I was quite affronted by it as it broke several of what I considered to be cardinal rules of fantasy fiction. Reading it as an adult, I can see exactly why I didn't like it but those 'transgressions' have now become powerful reasons to love it. I found it interesting to notice this, because I don't often get a chance to see how my taste and understanding of books has developed.

Here's a good synopsis/review of Elidor if, like me, you haven't read it in the last twenty years. However, this post is going to be about how my reaction to this book has changed.

Child-me: In my fantasy reading, let there be:

• Lots of description, the richer the better.
• No or very little real-world crossover. Absolutely no television or other trappings of modern life.
• Romance (but no sex because eewwwwww).

And moreover,

• Once the child hero has saved the day he will have full access to the magical world he has rescued and there must be feasting and merriment and more lavish descriptions.
• If it's scary, it will be sword/dragon/monster/dungeon scary.
• The emotional life of the protagonist will be bound up with the story and improved by the end of it.
• There will be at least one magical language, preferably one I can learn a few words of.

Elidor would have upset Child-me because:

• There's hardly any description, none at all of the children. (Boring.)
• The main character is called Roland. (Ugh.)
• Apart from a fairly brief sojourn in Elidor, most of the action takes place in dreary ’60s Manchester. TV, electric razors, washing machines, radios, cars, electricians are much in evidence. (Ugh, it's almost gritty.)
• The protagonists are kids and siblings. (Boring.)
• The moment the children perform their special function (which saves Elidor) all connection with that world is severed and everything is normal again. (That's not fair!)
• We learn absolutely nothing about Elidor, apart from a few place-names. (Boring.)
• It's really fricking scary. Seriously scary, with unseen people continually trying the front door and watching through the letterbox, patches of damp becoming thicker and more solid as unknown men force themselves into our world, unplugged electrical equipment whirring and whizzing and howling away all night. I am a horror-wimp and this would have had me sleeping with the light on. (Mummeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!)

Adult me:

• This story is a taut muscle, working powerfully with complete efficiency. It’s as terse and compact as possible. There is so little fat on these bones, they make Bruce Lee look flabby.
• The description is light and deft. It leaves clear-cut images on the mind's eye and cuts away distractions. This means the images it does provide, linger.
• The children aren't described because they don't really matter. Their personalities would be a distraction from the story.
  
• Roland is a kick-ass name. I read the Romance de Roland at University and loved it.
• The modern world references, particularly the technology, date the story quite obviously. But enough time has past that they now come across as interesting period detail.
  
• No romance. Good. Nothing worse than syrup poured on broccoli.
  
• Wow, how does he make it so scary?!
• The end is perfect. The link between worlds snaps, that's the end of the story. There is no self-congratulation, no pomp. The magic abruptly snuffs out. It's brutal and leaves the reader bereft. I love that.

Buy a copy of Elidor for your very own.

Please may I borrow your character?

I can tell you exactly how I came to read this book. In my endless search for new fantasy fiction I came across a book club which intends to spend 2011 discussing fantasy written by women. Intrigued (and presumably at a loose end) I added all the proposed titles to my Amazon wishlist, planning to take a look at them and delete any I didn't fancy. Of course, I immediately forgot all about them.

Then Christmas happened.

Luckily I was only given two of the twelve. This one was a present from my lovely brother-in-law Ruaidrhi.

"Wow," I said. "This looks...um...interesting. Have you read it?"

"No...It was on your wish list," said Ruaidrhi.

"I don't think so," I said. (I probably laughed at his obvious mistake.) "I've never seen this book before in my life."

"It definitely was," said Ruaidrhi.

"Are you calling me a liar?"

"Are you calling me a liar?"

And so on over Christmas dinner until I remembered about the book club and apologised profusely.

So that's how I came to read it. The harder question to answer is why I finished it, particularly as I had made a New Year's resolution to firmly lay aside any books I started that were badly written, obnoxious, boring or derivitive. I have always been a slave to bad books and have wasted many hours of my life reading things out of pity, duty or a misguided hope that they may, eventually, get better.

So why did I finish this? I wasn't particularly enthused by the blurb:

The Aetherials live among us, indistinguishable from humans. Every seven years, on the Night of the Summer Stars, Lawrence Wilder, the Gatekeeper, throws open all gates to the Other World. But this time, something has gone wrong. Wilder has sealed the gates, warning of a great danger lurking in the realm beyond them. The Aetherial community is outraged. What will become of them, deprived of the home realm from which their essential life force flows?

Nor by the hippyish aesthetic of the exiled fairies. Nor the gay-half-brother-incest. No, the reason I kept reading this novel was the fact that Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer appears in it under the alias of Sam Wilder. I'm not joking.

He has spiky bleached hair (sort of). He's a killer (sort of). He is madly in love with the heroine, despite her revulsion for him. They have lots of inappropriate sex. He dies and comes back to life (sort of). He calls her 'pet', 'sweetie' and 'love' ALL THE TIME. He's witty and insightful (sort of). He's a bad boy, oh yeah (sort of).

Unfortunately for the reader Sam doesn't quite have the courage of Spike's convictions. Only the tips of his hair are bleached, he killed a man by accident and he's only really a bad boy because the author tells us he is. It's never very clear why he's desperately in love with the heroine, who's not particularly engaging; nor is their relationship as transgressive as it's clearly meant to be. And his lines, while better than everyone else's still aren't that funny or sharp. But it's always nice to see a familiar face so I kept reading.

I can't recommend this book and so I have no compunction about making one more complaint, which is also a massive spoiler. We are told repeatedly in this book that Aetherials can't die. They sort of disappear 'into the spiral' and can come back again if they want. When one of the supporting characters is rendered brain-dead in a car accident he is therefore fairly easily fetched from the otherworld and popped back into his body. How nice.

Then, at the book's climax, in an act of supreme self-sacrifice Spike (sorry, Sam) dies (oh no!) saving the world and the heroine Rose is prostrate with grief. How can this have happened to her? It's so unfair! They were so happy! He was so hot! It's difficult to be bothered to read the last few pages waiting for Sam to turn up again, as he obviously will, and difficult to care very much that he does.

The good idea this book has is that the Aetherials live in a rural community that has become renowned for its folk traditions. The Aetherials' rituals are shared (up to a point) by their human neighbours and tourists as charming festivals with elaborate costumes and drinking and (probably) morris dancers. The Aetherials can only keep their way of life going by pretending it's a quaint excuse for a piss up. It is hard not to long for a bit of local pageantry described here with masks and feasts and processions through the woods at midsummer and just a shame that the magic at its centre isn't more satisfying.

Buy a copy of Elfland for your very own.

Don't marry a German

I have just finished reading Christopher and Columbus by Elizabeth von Arnim. It has been sitting on my shelf for months, waiting patiently to be read because although, as a reader, I would (and do) effusively state my undying affection for E von A's books, as a would-be writer and a woman she makes me feel inadequate, ill-educated, charmless and dull.

I suspect she had that effect on a lot of people when she was alive too.

However, I was desperate for something to escape into, so I took down C&C and found myself in England, New York and then California just as the States were poised to tumble into war and anti-German feeling was high. It is a lovely book and the heroines (who feel English but sound and look German) are adorable. E von A writes very wonderful, loveable women and usually dessicates them or stamps on them or wears them to a ravel through their relationships with men. Fortunately, in this book she has a German axe rather than a Man axe to grind and so we get a rare happy ending.

The publisher's blurb:

As the Second World War looms, Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas, seventeen-year-old twins, are thrust upon relatives. But Uncle Arthur, a blustering patriot, is a reluctant guardian: the twins are half-German and, who knows, could be spying from the nursery window... Packed off to America, they meet Mr Twist, a wealthy engineer with a tendency to motherliness, who befriends them on the voyage. However, he has failed to consider the pitfalls of taking such young and beautiful women under his wing, especially two who will continue to require his protection long after the ship has docked, and who are incapable of behaving with tact. Many adventures ensue (and befall them) in this sparklingly witty, romantic novel in which Elizabeth von Arnim explores the suspicions cast upon the two Annas and Mr Twist in a country poised for war.

The first problem with this blurb is that it has the wrong war. Elizabeth died in 1941, before America joined the war and C&C was first published in 1919, so I have a sneaking suspicion that she was writing about WW1.

The second is that the novel doesn't so much explore the suspicions as the suspecting. The suspicions themselves are never really voiced. When Mr Twist turns up with his lovely entourage (a word used to great effect in the book), no one thinks anything of it until it becomes clear that he is neither their relative nor their guardian. Then something must be morally amiss. Of course, we are never told what is morally amiss. We are never told that any of the suspectors (is that a word?) think anything morally amiss is happening, as such, only that the situation is, in itself, amiss and therefore immoral.

No one, ever, for example, seems to actually think that the Annas are sleeping with Mr Twist, which is the conclusion a modern reader would jump to. But things not being exactly what they 'ought' to be is in itself an immoral condition. Which is very interesting from an historical anthropological point of view, but not, I think, what E von A was trying to write about and not what a modern reader is programmed to expect. It makes the catalyst for most of the action perplexing or frustrating. Or rather, it could for some readers. Personally I lapped it up. I love books where characters have a moral code that is alien to my own and where you have to really shoehorn yourself into their shoes to see why they act like they do.

The other odd thing about C&C is that it is almost entirely free of period detail. There is so little description of clothes, food, vehicles, entertainment, government, make-up or indeed anything, that it really isn't suprising that the publishers put the wrong war in the blurb. The characters are like actors in front of a backdrop that is prettily coloured but even squinting you can't quite make out what it is.

I think the reason for this is that E von A really wasn't very interested in things. She liked people, found them fascinating and frustrating. I also have an impression of her, as a well-born Edwardian lady, rather floating through life without having to dwell on the details of anything in particular. And then there's the fact that she started writing to earn money because her German husband (known in her autobiographical books tellingly as The Man of Wrath) was imprisoned for fraud. Her books, though lovely, do have a dashed-off feel, written quickly for immediate consumption, like good sponge cake. It adds to their charm. I imagine she wrote them with a very short shelf-life in mind. She expected a contemporary audience to supply the contemporary background themselves and would have been amused to know that 90 years later, anyone would still be reading her.

Anyway, some people write books with a message. Many have some kind of moral. Sometimes it's a pretty odd one like 'the sins of the fathers will be visited upon their children' in The Castle of Otranto. But the moral of this one was clearly deeply felt by the author: Never, ever marry a German.

If this was a novel by pretty much anyone else, the Annas would have suffered horribly for their half-German ancestry, and everyone's gossipy imaginations, which would have been a shame, because they are really very nice girls indeed. It's a lovely, light comedy and here are a few light and lovely reasons why I liked it:

• The names. It's a small thing but the fact the pretty, tactless twins are called the 'Twinklers' makes me smile. I wish my name was Anna von Twinkler too. Also the euphony of Twinkler and Twist is gorgeous. I want to work at that law firm, don't you? Also (again) they are both called Anna. I LOVE that.
  
• The Twinkler's solemn love of long words and complete lack of understanding.
  
• The Mothers. This is very much a book about the importance of mothers. They Loom Large. The best mother is a man, and the worst mother blights her children's lives with selflessness.
• On the whole her characters are two-dimensional: utterly charming or ridiculous but types rather than real people. But who cares when she describes them like this:

"She was a lady whose figure seemed to be all meals. The old gentleman had married her in her youth, when she hadn't had time to have had so many. He and she were then the same age, and unfortunately hadn't gone on being the same age since. It had wrecked his life, this inability of his wife to stay as young and new as himself. He wanted a young wife, and the older he got in years - his heart very awkwardly retained its early freshness - the younger he wanted her; and, instead, the older he got the older his wife got too. Also the less new. The old gentleman felt the whole thing was a dreadful mistake. Why should he have to be married to an old lady? Never in his life had he wanted to marry old ladies; and he thought it very hard that at an age when he most appreciated bright youth he should be forced to spend his precious years, his crowning years when his mind had attained wisdom while his heart retained freshness, stranded with an old lady of costly habits and inordinate bulk just because years ago he had fallen in love with a chance pretty girl."

Get a copy of Christopher and Columbus for your very own.

Other brilliant E von A books:

Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther
This is a collection of Fraulein Schmidt's letters to the young English man (a former lodger with her family) with whom she has become clandestinely engaged.

The Pastor's Wife
This has the funniest proposal ever and
the most soul-destroyingly trivial ending.
(Again, it's a Don't Marry a German story.)

The Caravaners
Here, the German husband himself gets a turn at narrating the story - but the moral still ends up being Don't Marry a German. Very funny. Wife gets dessicated though, be warned.