a summer equinox.
on my new novel, a trip to Germany, and my favorite book I read on that trip.
Writing News:
My novel, Select Screen, got an official announcement in Publisher’s Marketplace, so we are definitely bringing her into existence next spring, and I couldn’t be more excited for y’all to read my internet novel! I will share more once we have pre-orders available.
I attended my friend Shirley’s reading series, Secret Nook, at Clio’s Bookstore in Oakland (what a charming space!) and can’t wait to be a part of the next event (theme: surveillance) on September 18th, where I will be reading some of Select Screen live for the first time.
It has been a busy season of life and I’ve been remiss in recounting it here. Brad and I went on a trip to Germany for two weeks and hiked along the Rhine River, through vineyards, and stayed in some of the most picturesque towns I’ve ever seen. By the end, I was more than half Riesling. As for the hiking aspect, please reference David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” We spent the rest of our time in Munich and Frankfurt, which entailed much less hiking, but we did visit the Residenz and the Goethe House and drank Aperol spritzes in the Viktualienmarkt.
I read four books on our trip to Germany, mostly while on planes or trains, and the one that lingered most with me was A Green Equinox by Elizabeth Mavor, recently reissued by McNally Editions.
Perhaps it was the endless green fields passing by in a blur outside my own train window, but I was drawn into the lush descriptions and ornate prose that characterize this novel of obsessive female love in all its forms—companionable, intellectual, passionate, and spiritual. I later discovered A Green Equinox was shortlisted for the 1973 Man Booker prize—a bucolic, moody, British novel with all the gender politics of the 70’s, what’s not to love?
Hero is an antiquarian bookstore owner having an affair with a married man named Hugh who is also somewhat of a renowned Rococo curator. Their relationship is based almost solely on their dislike of anything modern or contemporary in the arts and in society at large. However, when circumstance brings Hero face to face with Hugh’s wife, Belle, the situation shifts dramatically.
“I also continued to see Belle Shafto. If you’d ask me why, I’d have found it hard to say. A kind of fascinated guilt played some part in it, I think.”
As her infatuation grows, Hero finds herself making excuses to see Belle, or at least not actively avoiding her as Hugh would prefer. In time, her romantic obsession transfers fully from Hugh to his wife.
“I knew Hugh, who knew Belle, who knew Hugh, who knew me. That face, that gravely beautiful face, in all its naïve innocence, was in part mine through Hugh. I mean possessed by me.”
Hero possesses a rich inner world full of yearning and fantasy, some of which becomes reality, but much of which lives only in her imagination. There are moments of hallucination, of dreams both waking and those that come only in sleep.
“For a moment there was total peace. A cool wind was blowing. She seemed to be somewhere on a well-known hillside, perhaps on the warm flowery flank of that mountain which rises behind Assisi—Monte Subasio. She could hear the birds singing quite clearly, which should have put her on here guard. There are no birds in Umbria.”
As Hero further inhabits the Shafto’s world through further unpredictable circumstance, Hero meets, and ultimately falls in love, with Hugh’s formidable mother, Kate. In this relationship Hero finds what she has always been seeking, a mutual affection grounded in a quieter passion, a deep respect, a spiritual understanding between two people and perhaps the zenith of all her cumulative fantasies.
A Green Equinox is a summer dream, both unreal and beautiful. I hope to see additional reissues of Mavor’s work in the future.