"The Gustav Sonata" by Rose Tremain

An audio book. It's 1947. Switzerland. Gustav's 5. His mother, Emilia, is poor. She defends the reputation of her dead, apparently disgraced husband Erich. A new boy, Anton, turns up at school. He can play the piano. He and Gustav become friends, going to each other's houses. Anton's Jewishness and affluence makes Emilia wary.

It's a 3rd-person narrative, Gustav the focal character. Sometimes his thoughts are from the future, looking back on the described incidents. His thoughts in the 1940s often seem too sophisticated. The phrasing seems lax to me in places too, and slow. The child-PoV's nothing special.

When Gustav's 10, a youth exposes himself to him. Anton fails to win a national piano competition because of nerves. Anton's family takes Gustav with them on holiday to Davos (where Gustav's parents had once holidayed). The 2 boys find what they think is an abandoned sanitorium in the woods. They imagine having patients, one of them being Ludwig, the sex-exposer. When patients die the boys burn them in the big ovens.

We go back to when Emilia sees Erich for the first time. She immediately wants to sleep with him. He's a policeman. They marry. He pushes her in a moment of anger when he was feeling neglected. The fall causes a premature birth. He's dismissed for falsifying documents to let Jews in. Emelia leaves him to live with her unpleasant, never-married mother. Erich sleeps with Emelia's best Lottie, who's also his boss's wife. Emilia returns. Lottie breaks the affair off. Gustav is born. Lottie wants a child too, and asks to see Erich again. He rushes to her and has a heart-attack at her door.

We go forward to when Gustav is 50. He feels that his mother never loved him. With an unexpected inheritance from Emilia's mother he's bought a little guest-house. Anton's become a music teacher at the local school. They're both unmarried. Gustav begins to wonder who had betrayed his father. He meets Lottie and discovers things. A visiting English Colonel tells him about Belsen. When 52, Anton's discovered by a talent scout, Hans, and goes with him to Geneva.

In 1992 Gustav's guest-house begins to lose money. While it's being renovated he spends 2 months in Paris with his father's ex-lover, Lottie. He indulges her. It emerges (no great surprise) that Gustav and Anton are gay. At the end, after Anton's mental breakdown and Gustav's selling of his guest-house, the 2 are living in Davos with Anton's mother. Anton plans to complete a piece he started in Geneva called "The Gustav Sonata".

There's far too much boiler-plate prose for my liking. Some things ("Hans", pigs, etc) are repeated, though the significance isn't obvious to me. And what's the colonel for? In old age, several of the characters regret not having confessed their longings. Gustav remains caring and exploited throughout.

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway (At every turn, Tremain knows when and how to let us read between the lines and see beneath the Swiss surfaces. [...] And what ultimately matters here – the heart of this remarkable and moving novel – is Anton’s imperative. He tells Gustav: “We have to become the people we always should have been.”)
• Eric Stinton (Yet for all of her mastery of conducting personal narratives against a historically turbulent background, Tremain is at her best when capturing the quaint charm of small-town life and the fuzzy innocence of childhood. [...] While the novel is saturated with unresolved emotions and unspoken tensions, it arrives at a beautiful, wholly satisfying conclusion.)
• Lucy Scholes (It’s cleverly layered and finely woven together in a way that’s eminently pleasing to read: there’s something soothingly melodic about the pace of Tremain’s prose. But hidden amongst this harmony are a series of individual notes that seem strikingly off-key. For example, I’m pretty sure nobody in 1940s rural Switzerland ever said “I’ve got a cool idea”; and neither am I convinced that any 1930s hausfrau was as brazenly sexually empowered as Tremain invents – especially not in über-conservative Switzerland, a country that didn’t even give women the vote until the 1970s. More problematically, I was left feeling entirely unsure of whether I should have been rooting for Gustav and Anton’s relationship or not. The narrative arc suggests yes, but Anton is so distressingly oblivious to Gustav’s support and affection, I couldn’t help but want the latter to just give up trying)

"The Darkness of Wallis Simpson and Other Stories" by Rose Tremain

An audio book.

• In the title novella, a monologue by Simpson on her French deathbed, the old woman's lost track of time. She doesn't understand why her carers are angry at her for not remembering things, then angry when she recalls visiting Hitler. She recalls being a girl from Baltimore but doesn't recall what she's most famous for. She recalls a little man with blue eyes, the only man who really loved her. She hears voices outside, wanting to get in, to hear her story. I think it's too long, though there are excellent passages.
• "How it stacks up" - a father wonders what to do on his birthday. He goes to a restaurant with his family. They're all stock characters, which is fair enough. "Katy and the garden have something in common: they're both small, and it looks like they'll never be beautiful no matter how hard anyone tries". Nothing there for me.
• "The beauty of the dawn shift" - an East German armed border guard (who's against the West; he's into incest and shooting people) decides to head for Russia when the wall comes down. He dies of cold on a Polish freight train, a reminder of WW2. It's a fast-paced story.
• "Death of an advocate" - It's 1877. France. At the end the man dies on a train - "too early, hardly any leaves had fallen". But they'd fallen on the earlier picnic. I can't see anything of interest in the piece.
• "Nativity story" - An up-dated version. A couple find shabby accommodation after a car accident. The woman gives birth. They a given presents. No.
• "The over-ride" - Steffan, the son of a concierge, heard music from the Albi's apartment. Later he married, got a gas fitter's job. His wife died in a car accident.He gave up his job, helped his mother, and drank. Later Mr Albi left his wife (45) for a younger musician. The wife kills herself thanks in part to the son's boiler fix. The son now finally recovers his mental health - because there was no more music?
• "The ebony hand" - A childless aunt (41) in the fifties, Norfolk, raises her niece, Nicholina, 13, whose mother had died and whose father was in a mental home. She looks after her, gets a radiogram, seeks a husband for her. Nicholina prefers an exciting boy, Gregory, to Paul, a solid farmer's son. The aunt works in a shop where objects are displayed on a black hand. It means a lot to her - it's timelessness. When the shop shuts down, she asks to keep the hand but the shop owner says its too expensive. Nicholina's heartbroken (and pregnant) when Gregory leaves her. They're still visiting the mad father most weeks. They discover that Paul's become a mental home resident. The aunt goes to town, sees the hand in an antique shop. She buys it. It consoles her.
• "Loves me, loves me not" - A retired American is returning to England in 1985 to see the woman he'd met during the war and had planned to marry. After the war he'd returned to the States, found a house and awaited the woman's arrival at the dockside. She never arrived though her trunk did. She'd changed her mind at the last moment. He'd got over it in the end, and had married. In the London hotel, awaiting the woman, he suddenly decides to stay in his room rather than see her.
• "Moth" - The female neighbour of the narrator, a trailer-park resident, is left by her husband after the birth of their second child. He suddenly returns when it's discovered that the 2nd child has wings and can fly - i.e. a source of money.
• "The Cherry Orchard, with rugs" - Effeminate Darren, 34, is sometimes Diego, sometimes Daniella. He works in the carpet section of a department store. On the EuroStar to Paris, as Daniella, he starts talking to a teacher who's on his way to see a Peter Brookes production which uses carpets instead of scenery. They exchange aesthetic opinions. The teacher invites Darren to the play. After, in a hotel room, the teacher says "I can't do this" and leaves suddenly.
• "The dead are only sleeping" - Nell receives a call from her step-mother telling her that her father's died. She doesn't believe it. When Nell was 5 her mother suddenly died. Nell had been told she was "sleeping". She goes to her father's resting place (at a hospital) and asks the staff if he's dead for certain. It's likely that her father's behaviour (drinking, etc) had contributed to her mother's death. The story (like several in the book) lacks psychological authenticity to me.
• "Peerless" - I've read this before. An old man whose 2 kids have moved away has a wife who's a keen charity helper. He's invited to sponsor a penguin at a local zoo. He does so, because the penguin's called Peerless, the name of a boarding-schoolmate, his best friend (fey), who killed himself in the holidays. He visits the zoo. To cheer Peerless up he regularly gets ice and delivers it to the zoo to keep the pond cool.

Characters re-assess their lives in the light of someone's death (or their own impending death). There's dramatic irony, the characters seemingly unaware of what's clear to readers, but I don't think the characters need be quite so cartoonish. The voices are convincing enough. Maybe the stories are aimed at mainstream audiences. Maybe 3 of them are alright. Some of the others wouldn't normally be published, I feel.

Other reviews

• Stevie Davies (Rose Tremain's remarkable new short story collection maps a world of terminal decline, whose characters search for honourable closure to lives that have outlived themselves. ... The author practises a kind of aesthetic abstinence, denying herself the easy epiphanies that are the short story writer's stock-in-trade. ... Like a lamp, the lemon sheds weak lustre in the bleak moral landscape, one of a series of finely imagined objects that accumulate talismanic but ambivalent private value for Tremain's people: the precious oyster-shell in "The Nativity Story"; the glove-display hand in "The Ebony Hand"; Wallis's tiny hoard of jewels.)
• Simon Savidge (The Darkness of Wallace Simpson [] is one of the best short stories I have ever read.)
• Eliza Charlton
• Goodreads

"The American Lover" by Rose Tremain (Chatto and Windus, 2014)

Stories from "Vogue", "Good Housekeeper", "Prospect" and "The Guardian". I've heard the title story before - it was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. I liked it. An interview with "The Independent" says that "Readers should pace themselves (“One story a day or perhaps one a week”), allow stories space to resonate". I don't think that all these stories could fill a day, let alone a week. I wasn't convinced by most of them. I didn't mind the short pieces that edged into fable - "Extra Geography" is pacy, and "Man in the water" ends well. The latter's prefaced by the 1797 painting that inspired it - a fairly rare example of prose ekphrasis. Other stories also extrapolate from events - "The Jester of Astapovo" re-imagines Tolstoy's last day - a film, ("The Last Station" with Helen Mirren) covers the same material. "The Housekeeper" imagines an event in Daphne du Maurier's life.

Sunsets, shores, power-cuts and people's ages frequently figure. In time-honoured fashion, people act and speak unrealistically for the sake of the story. In "Smithy" there's It was as if the land were saying to Smithy, 'There's no explanation in hedges and trees or stones, boy; the explanation is in you.'. And Smithy responds!

Other Reviews

• Gerard Woodward (Guardian) (Rose Tremain has always been drawn to outsiders in her fiction ... The story that most forcefully deals with the idea that we live within the boundaries of how others see us is “The Housekeeper”)
• Christian House (Telegraph) (this collection highlights with subtlety and grace just how human it is to get things wrong)
• Boyd Tonkin (Independent)
• Alex Clark (New Statesman) (The protagonists ... are all operating under some form of constraint: social, sexual, emotional, pressingly immediate or far distant, unrelentingly real or garlanded with imaginative flourishes)
• Mary Gordon (New York Times) (A few of these stories — “Juliette Gréco’s Black Dress,” “BlackBerry Winter,” “21st-Century Juliet” — seem rushed or slight or unfinished. But, over all, this is a collection of stylish daring, tonal mastery and smart, tough love.)
• Michael Prodger (Financial Times) (It is all done with an economy that seems effortless but which is the product of years of craft. Her real gift here though is in giving form to the loneliness and melancholy present in every place and every age. ... In the best of the stories, “The Jester of Astapovo”)