skygiants | (no subject)

You know that feeling when you predict something is going to happen in a book that's going to annoy you, and then you spend the rest of the book knowing that you will ultimately be unsatisfied, because either the thing is going to happen and you'll be annoyed or the thing won't happen and you'll be annoyed at having been wrong?

Anyway, Natasha Solomons' The House at Tyneford is a book about a teenage Austrian-Jewish refugee who gets a position as a maid in a British house during WWII while she's waiting for her famous opera singer mother and famous author father to make it to America and get her a visa.

THE BACK COVER: And there she will strike up a connection with the son of the master of the house!
ME: Ah yes, I suppose there will be a romance.
THE BOOK: And the first person she encounters at Tyneford is the master of the house, in a middle-of-the-night meet-cute!
ME: Hmmmmm.
THE BOOK: Oh and here's the son, they're flirting, it's sweet.
ME: OK fine!
THE BOOK: Now they're engaged!
ME: OK great!
THE BOOK: His dad seems upset about it.
ME: Oh, not unexpected.
THE BOOK: But, like, not necessarily for the normal reasons a British dad with a big house would be upset about his son getting engaged to the Jewish parlor maid, and also he sold a priceless painting to try to get her parents out of Austria
ME: ... oh no.
THE BOOK: Now she's been arrested as an enemy alien and the dad comes and rescues her and carries her home in his arms!
ME: OH NO.
THE BOOK: Oh here's the son back again from the army! Look, he's on leave and they're perfectly cute! Though he's going to have to go back to the front lines soon, of course!
ME:

I was not a hundred percent correct in my prediction, for the record! My theory was that she and the son were going to bang and she was going to fall pregnant, and then the son would die in WWII and she and the dad would have a weird and awkward marriage of convenience that turned to love. In fact she never did bang the son, but he definitely and predictably did die in battle, after which I spent the entire rest of the book watching Natasha Solomons complete the work of hooking her heroine up with her fiance's father with much the same feeling as someone watching a cat slowly push a teacup off a table; after a certain point you just want the satisfaction of the crash.

Also, her parents died in the ghetto, the novel that her father asked her to smuggle out of Austria inside a musical instrument was blank, and her older sister (who'd made it to Americca with her husband) was for some reason so mad that she'd never told her about the novel in the viola that they then didn't speak for forty years. Lots of very beautiful descriptions of the English countryside, though.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

landofnowhere

The premise sounds very Eva Ibbotson, but I feel like the Eva Ibbotson ending would be less gratutiously depressing.

From:

skygiants

It is very much like a less whimsically charming, more depressing Ibbotson (though Ibbotson also wouldn't have bothered with the whole folderol of having her engaged to the age-appropriate son for a while, she would have just hooked her heroine up with her forty-something boss from the beginning and made no bones about it.)

From:

nineveh_uk

Ibbotson would have a rival and obviously unsuitable female love interest there instead! She would probably have stolen the original manuscript and swapped it for the blank one, and eventually all would be revealed.

From:

lirazel

That was exactly what I thought reading this post. I read the initial description at the top, and I was like, "Oh, like Ibbotson! I should read this one!" And then I read the rest of the post.

From:

sovay

the novel that her father asked her to smuggle out of Austria inside a musical instrument was blank

Wait, what?

From:

marginaliana

My reaction exactly.

From:

watersword

I love how this is what 80% of the comments are reacting to.

From:

sovay

I love how this is what 80% of the comments are reacting to.

It's depressing for the heroine's parents to have died in the Holocaust despite heroic efforts to get them out, but that sort of thing happened. The blank novel is surreally depressing and I want to know how that was even supposed to have worked, although I suspect the answer is going to be "it didn't."

I am also a little bemused by this entire plot because I read and very much enjoyed Solomons' first novel, Mr. Rosenblum's List (U.S. Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English) when it came out in 2010 and except for the continuing theme of immigration/assimilation/British Jewishness, I would not have predicted cement truck Gothic romance as an obvious next step.

Edited Date: 2020-02-03 07:27 pm (UTC)

From:

skygiants

I came to this book via a rec elsewhere on DW for Solomons' stuff (I do not recall where exactly) so I am glad to hear that at least some of her books are ... other than this!

From:

sovay

so I am glad to hear that at least some of her books are ... other than this!

I have read only the one book, but it was not this!

From:

plinythemammaler

I'm SO GLAD it wasn't my 2am initial positive reaction to this book because I would have felt so guilty! Mr Rosenblum's list is great, this has very poetic writing and benefits from not thinking about the plot for more than 30 seconds......

From:

skygiants

To be honest, I did not spend much time on it in the write-up because I still have no idea what happened to it!

From:

rachelmanija

...I thought the master of the house was going to turn out to be secretly her bio-father.

From:

flamebyrd

I definitely thought that's where this post was going!

From:

sovay

I definitely thought that's where this post was going!

I didn't think that's where it was going, but I think I'd have preferred it.

From:

ranalore

Same.

From:

skygiants

Honestly it shocks me that this never occurred to me, you'd really think I'd be braced for the specter of surprise incest by now!

From:

ranalore

It does seem to be rather a theme, doesn't it?

From:

rachelmanija

the novel that her father asked her to smuggle out of Austria inside a musical instrument was blank

Why? Was it just his delusion that he'd written a novel, a la ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY?

From:

skygiants

I still, quite honestly, have no idea. The heroine and her sister both seem to believe it's her fault somehow, but how she could make words disappear entirely from three hundred manuscript pages I DO NOT KNOW.

From:

rachelmanija

Whaaaaaaaat?

From:

skygiants

improper ... care ..... of the viola .....???????

From:

merit

I guess there are still narrative surprises out there!

I think secret love child and a marriage of convenience would have been more entertaining though. Weird sisterly estrangements seem unnecessary with all the other plot elements.

From:

skygiants

I honestly would probably also have been more sympathetic to weird marriage of convenience than to 'sometimes you just fall in love with your dead fiance's dad, sometimes that's just the way things go."

(I honestly think the weird sisterly estrangement is just to make her feel more alone so that it's less weird that she falls into her fiance's dad's loving arms.)

From:

littlerhymes

I am amazed by the dad thing but please also know I am ANGRY about the blank novel thing.

From:

skygiants

THE BRITISH TITLE OF THE BOOK IS 'THE NOVEL IN THE VIOLA'

From:

ethelmay

How do you fit a novel in a viola? They aren't that big!

From:

cinaed

I just assumed the British dad was actually her biodad or something, but I will join in the comments of being baffled about that blank novel! Why was the sister so mad??? What was there nothing written on it???

From:

skygiants

WOULD THAT I UNDERSTOOD. The sister was originally mad that her sister didn't tell her about the novel, which, ok, but the fact that she would blame her for it being blank BAFFLES me.

From:

osprey_archer

I have been looking forward to your review of this book (not that I knew it was this particular book) ever since you posted on Twitter about books where you predict something is going to happen and the prospect of it not happening is just as annoying as the prospect of it happening, and this review did not disappoint. He CARRIES her back to the HOUSE in his ARMS, my God. Ibbotson would have committed!

Also, I cannot imagine that Eva Ibbotson would have been so cruel as to have the novel turn out to be blank. Written in invisible ink, possibly, but they would figure that out before the end of the book. Not blank.

From:

skygiants

They're out doing the haying because all the young men are at war, and the dad pulls off his shirt, and she modestly averts her eyes, and I'm just like OKAY, NATASHA SOLOMONS! I GET IT! I UNDERSTAND!

Ibbotson would never have had the whole novel turn out to be blank.