Backlisted - Look At Me by Anita Brookner - rerun

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

This is a vintage Backlisted episode recorded back in 2017. John and Andy were joined by Una McCormack and Lucy Scholes to discuss Anita Brookner's third novel Look At Me (1982), a tale of intergalactic piracy in a far off star syste... No, not really. The Cake And The Rain, Jimmy Webb's memoir of life in the 60's music industry, and We That Are Young a reworking of King Lear set in India by Preti Taneja, are the other books John & Andy were reading. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early plus extra bonus episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, it's John. It's Andy. And Nikki, hello. Hello, everyone. Hi, and as you probably guessed, this is another one of our rerun shows. And this is from a long time ago, September 2017, when we recorded our first show on Anita Brookner. Not the first time Anita Brick was mentioned on this show.

Certainly not. With a book that we'd chosen was Look at Me by Anita Bookner, which I seem to remember, Andy, I only discovered about two hours before the recording of the podcast. I'd read a completely different novel. Which one did you read? Can you remember? What's her very first one called?

A start in life. Did you then just power read this just before the show? I sat outside and power read. Cancelled everything and just read. If John sounds quite ramped up on this particular episode. Now you know why. But we had two brilliant guests who, of course, brilliant guests who've become

absolute kind of friends of the show and in Oona McCormick's case a co-presenter with us so but Oona and Lucy's goals I feel like Anita Brookner is like a kind of an icon of backlisted those long-time listeners are backlisted and will know that she gets

not only she gets quoted she gets mentioned you know this probably what once every four episodes, five episodes was this the first sort of real real coverage of Anita Brooknau then. Anita Brutner died in 2016. It's all on the record if people go back. And I read shortly after she died.

I'd read her before, but I read her novel Latecomers, which I talked about in the one-of-in-reading slot. And I was so blown away by it that it began my own personal, I don't know what you call it. Journey. Brookner Journey.

My whole life seems now to have become a and acted out homage to Anita Brunner. But anyway, I think she's the author whose books have brought me the most undiluted pleasure in the last 10 years of my life, I guess. Isn't that marvellous? We've got an update for this. So this was done in 2017.

If you want to hear more, Brookner, where can you go? It's like that hashtag, isn't it? It's like a social media. Hashtag, Never Enough, Brookner. Yeah, we've, we're returning to the well again on our Patreon. Every month on the Patreon, we select at random a winner of the Booker Prize for fiction. We pull a name out of a hat.

We literally pull a name out of a hat. What do you know who it was this month? At the end of last month's meeting. As people who were there will know, one piece of paper literally leapt out of the hat onto the floor. And it was Anita Brunner and Hotel Dulaq, winner of the Book of Prize for Fiction in 1984,

an exceptionally good year, which we will be talking about in the show on Patreon. Anyway, if you would like to listen to us talking about Hotel Du Lack by Anita Bruchner with the benefit of hindsight of a decade of talking about

Anita Brunner and thinking about Anita Brunner and I'm actually these, I'm saying these words that John was talking there about behind the scenes. I have a signed, not by Bruchner, but by the photographer, framed portrait of Anita Brutner on the wall of the room where I am. So she is looking down at me with what can only be described as thorough disapproval for us to, for us having done any of this.

But anyway, we're very glad to have done so. You can hear that on our Patreon And we hope that you enjoy This trip back to 2017 For Anita Brutners Look at me So tell us about your bandry form Okay yes

So my friends And that was the list In fact, happy birthday gentlemen Neon Tim had a joint 50th birthday party And I used to... Neil and Tim I thought that was the name of your band Neon Tim

I couldn't have good though Tim I used to play in a band with him called the Gene Clark Five, which is an extremely esoteric joke. And we split due to lack of interest. But then when we got back together last weekend, for the first time, rather than two of us, there were actually five of us. What did you play?

It's the best drummer that I've ever played with. It's a guy called Bryn. And he used to be the drummer in the band's The Fabulous Poodles and Frur, and Frur went on to become underworld. So imagine, imagine someone who, I can't play the guitar very well, right? But I'm playing with a really good drummer. Some people and an actual drummer.

And a really good musical director as well called Tim Cronin. Okay, this is what we played. We played You Ain't Going Nowhere, the Bob Dylan song. We played September Girls by Big Star. We played, feel a whole lot better by the birds. And then we segued into tracks that the birthday boys wanted to hit. So we played Understanding Jane by the icicle works. Have you ever heard that?

I've heard it, yeah. Yeah, for a long time ago from the 80s. It was really good fun. McNab fan. Also, because my guitar abilities are fairly limited. When they'd heard me play it through once, they went, I'll tell you what you could do on this song, Andy. How about giving you some feedback?

Can do. So, fortunately, my son wasn't there to see me like an utter tit of myself as I threw some shapes. I came off stage and somebody said to me, wow, wow, that was great. You really looked like you were enjoying yourself, which I was, unlike many members of the audience. But it was really, really good fun.

And it made me think, I love. Making music, singing and shutting off. I know I love playing music. I ought to play music more. Yeah. Did you ever play in a banjean? Yeah, we had a school band called the Chartered Accountants. Ramones and Stiff Little Fingers covers.

It's really pretty basic. What did you play? I did a bit of bass, but I was lead singer. Wow. Well, it didn't. It's just a lot of shouting. But we were quite good. We wrote a few songs.

We actually wrote a song that Manitinin, the subject of today's podcast would have loved. It was called Middle Class Twat. Can you remember any of the lyric? Can you say it first one? You and your problems can sit and rock because you're all just middle class twat. So at that stage we weren't sure whether,

do you remember twat and twat? And at that stage it was twat rather than twat. And this was in New Zealand, so it didn't nobody knew what the word meant anyway. I am thrilled to think that people who've tuned in for the first time here at Anita brilliant podcast. Having to listen to this.

Have either of our guests ever been members of a group? Good God, no. Absolutely not. But you like folk music, you know? You are like a folk maven. I will listen to it and I will sing quietly to myself. But the world does not need to hear you see. Absolutely not. I thought that was the point of folk music.

You didn't have to have a great voice. You just turn up and... Turn up, join along. You turn up in the oral tradition. Keene and Keene. And Lucy, you, are against music, I think I'm right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Don't believe in it.

Stop it now. Stop it now. Exactly. Another strange coincidence. But you said to me. Because you need to written that, right? Indeed, right. Yeah. But also, you said to me that there is one song that you know all the words of.

Yes, but I won't be repeating them now. I'm not asking you too. Middle-class twats, by the beach. Like a chartered accountants. My new favourite. Yeah. Hello and welcome to back. the podcast that gives new life to old books.

We're gathered in the slightly stuffy lounge of a flat in a matching block in Maida Vale. And joining us today, both for the second time, are former guests Una McCormack and Lucy Skulls. Hello. Hello. Thank you for coming in. Una is the co-director of the...

I'm going to say what Matt's written here. Una is the co-director of the Angela Ruskin Centre Centre for science fiction and fantasy. And your employers won't mind that, will they? I'm sure they'll be delighted with the name check. And has written an official bestselling books to both the Star Trek and Doctor Who's and is a New York Times bestselling author.

And Una previously joined our happy band to talk about Venetia by Georgeta. That's right. One of our most successful podcast to date. Also, welcome back Lucy Scoles. Lucy is a writer and critic for The Guardian, the Independent and the BBC, amongst others. And she's also a contributing editor to the Bookanista website. And she came into back-listed back in the midst of time

to talk about the vet's daughter by Barbara Cummings, which is one of our favourite books. That was my favourite discovery from the whole podcast all of last year. What a pleasure. Let's love to know. Anyway, the book, one of the countless Brooklyn novels that we could have chosen to discuss is, in fact, look at me by Anita Bruner.

Her third novel, Andy, is that correct? It is her third novel, yes. 1983. And as listeners may or may not know, she wrote two dozen novels. Is that right? 24. Yeah.

So this is the third of a... And did she miss... She started when she was in her 50. 50s, yeah. She's pretty much doing one a year until she gets a little bit older than slows down, maybe one every two. The reason...

Well, you will come on to, but there's the reason for the one a year is stupendous. So we'll wait until we get to it. Anyway. But, as we usual, foul rag and bone shop time, Andy,

what have you been reading? Well, I've been reading with great, great pleasure, the memoir of one of my musical heroes, a book called The Cake and the Rain by Jimmy Webb. Now, Jimmy Webb was the author of many great songs that you would know, including perhaps one of the greatest records ever made, Wichdellignment by the late Glenn Campbell. Also, by the time I get to Phoenix, Galveston,

up, up and away my beautiful balloon. I know that one, there you go. And he wrote, he also wrote, the only song that I'm, Our guest Lucy Skulls knows all the words for, which is... MacArthur Park. He row MacArthur Park. And the title of his book, The Cake and the Rain, comes from the famous lyric from MacArthur Park.

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark. All the sweet green icing flowing down. Someone left the cake out in the rain. And Jimmy Web has spent the last 50 years trying to explain to people what he meant by that bold metaphor. And in fact, the epigraph of this book is a quote from W.H. Auden, which is, my face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain. We were talking earlier. You can decide whether Jimmy lifted it from W.H. Orden or whether his point is, I bet people didn't spend that lifetime asking W.H. Orden what he meant by cakes in the rain. So this book, I really enjoyed this book. It is a fascinating account of somebody who had a foot in two camps in the 60s and the 70s. On the one hand, he's in the world of rock and roll in a very revolutionary period. And on the other hand, he's in the world of pure showbiz. And so the book is a repository of

stories about people like Sinatra, Glenn Campbell, the fifth dimension, Tiny Tim. But on the other hand, there are stories about the Beatles and individual Beatles. There's a story about Paul McCartney here, which clearly was laid down in 1968, and he's waited nearly 50 years to tell. I'm not going to tell it here. But it's so toe-curling, and the book is worth it for that loan. There's also stories about meeting Elvis Presley, the story about Joni Mitchell, there's stories about Harry Nielsen, the stories about Simon and Garfun.

and so on and so forth. And because this is Jimmy Webb, it's written in a mixture of sort of brilliantly turned anecdotes and then sudden flourishes of prose. For instance, here's a bit where he's talking to the music executive David Geffen. David, I responded with a burst of enthusiasm. We'll come to Hawaii. I can't wait.

The phone immediately rang again. It was the D-E-V-I-L. What's up? he asked. Really? I asked, really, he replied. Well, I just went to Omaha and kidnapped Susan. and now I'm going to re-kidnapper and take her to Hawaii with David Geffen. It sounds like your sex life is getting complicated, he chortled. I need a place to stay. How about your place for a while?

Sure, I could put you up for a while. You can watch the place while I'm away. Thanks, bud, said the devil as he hung up. And somewhere in the high belfry of the exoverse. Great black bells chimed antitonal and dispersed a low beating of sub-eternal defibrillation throughout all of space changing the course of time. So that's a bit better than what you get on VH1. So I'm going to give a plug to this because it deserves a plug. He will be making very rare public appearance on the 28th of September at Waterstones in Kensington High Street,

which is the shop in which I used to work and where, 25 years ago in the Returns Room, no doubt packing up Anita Brutner books. I remember hearing P.F. Sloan by Jimmy Webb for the very first time. So that would be a nice circularity there of the exoverse. It's just, yeah, it sounds great. book I'm buying, I'm ordering it. And volume two is on the way, the less successful years. John, what have you been reading?

Well, I think I've been reading very close to my favourite novel of the last few months, new novel of the last sort of six months or so. Pretty teenage as we that are young, a massive doorsteper of a novel, published by the excellent Gali Bega Press. I guess there's no way around it. It is a retelling of King Lear, setting contemporary. I mean, which is, yeah, it doesn't really give the plot away, except to say that there are three daughters

and there is an aging Indian businessman who runs this massive global corporation out of India that is beginning to creak at the seams, and the book starts with his illegitimate son coming back to Delhi. He's been successful in the Western now, is coming back to India, reconnecting with his roots. It is 500 pages long. It ought to be difficult to read.

It isn't. It is pretty sure her first novel. It is. She's an activist and a lecturer at Warwick. And she draws characters, I think, that are completely... It's not... You know, there are Indian novels. There is a drop-down menu, I guess,

of things that you would expect to find in Indian novels. Quite a lot over there. There is an amazing thing. The great storm scene is set in a Delhi slum. The book's about climate change. it's incredibly contemporary. So you feel that you're getting a portrait of Indian life really as it is now. You know, commercialism, the roots of fundamentalism,

all the things I guess you would expect to find in a novel given its setting. But for me, it's the best novel set in India that I've read since a suitable boy. And that is pretty, for me, high praise. So this, as you were saying, was picked up by galley beggars. Galley Beggis are of course the publisher who found Damon McBride after she had been rejected by many people and I was reading a thing that Sam Jordison wrote about We litter Young where he said by the time it got to us it came to us with a history of ecstatic rejections

but it's a fascinating publishing thing and we might talk about this in relation to Brutner as well about how frequently she published and what effect that had on her career But in this case, you know, it's perfectly possible for editors to recognize the merits, the literary merits of a book, while also having to make a decision where they say, but how will we sell it? And that's kind of one of those things that why we need independent publishers and we need publisher like Gally Beggars to pick these books up. Absolutely. I mean, it's exactly the reason why Unbound exists because it just, I mean, it's unthinkable that a novel of this quality. really she writes she writes gloriously she's one of the things I love is that I don't speak Hindi but there's a lot of Hindi in the text and it's gloriously unitalicised throughout it's kind of I wouldn't call it in any sense experimental but she's pushing at the boundaries of the form all

the time I read a tiny little excerpt which is just a guy on the plane but it just gives you a sense of that kind of collision of cultures it's an Indian nor but it's much more universal than its themes I mean, certainly, as I say, the underlying sense of a planet in crisis. I mean, if you like or know King Lear, that's the other thing. It's just brilliant the way. I mean, it's interesting. I read this very soon after I'd read the Camilla Shamsi, Home Fire, which is based on Antigone.

I'm kind of fascinated that South Asian writers are finding these Western myths and turning them into really convincing contemporary fiction. Anyway, he's on the plane on the way back, but I just thought it gives you a flavour of the, and of how well she writes. He calls for another whiskey. Sorry, sir, we only serve unlimited drinks in first class. The flight attendant walks away.

Her hair so neat, her makeup so patched she could be company-made, remote-controlled. She sweeps behind the red curtain that divides the rich from the not-so-much. Beyond that curtain is Wonderland. Drinks and legroom, stewardesses who never say no. The captives of economy surround each other, a tangle of sari's, plats, cardigans, high-heel sand, slung into empty Dunkin' Donuts boxes, torn-up glamour magazines. The men stretch across the seats, the women clutch the children, the children won't let go of their Nintendo DSs, even as they sleep.

Dinner is given, not served, brown plastic lumps in a macani sauce, rice and pickles, or white plastic lumps with herb sauce instead. He chooses Indian, then Western, can't stomach anything. Next to him, the newlyweds try to keep food, sachets cutlery on the tray, to eat without elbowing each other. The bride's fork breaks She uses her fingers for rice The smells are of rehydrated flesh

The toilet's feet It's just It's good And it keeps that up for 500 pages I have to say I've really really thrilled them I was slightly shocked when it arrived Thudded on the mat

How much money is it To buy In your English pounds In nine pounds 99 That's amazing Bargain Seven years work, right, and 500 pages and it's 999.

Yeah. And as I keep saying to people, when you and I were boys, Andy, what was the price of a novel in Waterstones 20 years ago? It was 1419. It was more. I wish somebody would do that if there's anybody out there who's good at looking at how things have changed. Pricing has changed. I would say that fiction has probably kind of halved in price relatively over the last 20 years. And that's at full price, by the way, because people aren't paying 1499. They're paying 999 discounted or 999 because it's a paperback original. Pretty teenage, we that are young. And so back to the main subject, the long-awaited main subject of this podcast. I'm slightly superstitious about it because the elephant in the room, very

elegant, bicaragant elephant in the backlisted room, has been the long-running, barely-concealed love affair of Andy Miller and Anita Bruckner. And finally, it's true. It's true. And finally, Finally, he gets to declare his passion, his love, his enthusiasm. So I'm going to answer my own question first for once. Andy, where did you first encounter the work of Anita Brook now? And the answer is that it was at school. And it was the first Book of Prize winning book that I ever read was Hotel Dulek in 1985 when I was 16. And I didn't really get it.

I knew nothing of the controversy surrounding the fact that Hotel Dulaq won the book of prize. We'll come onto that later. but I was just beginning to discover literature that you could go into bookshops and buy from the fiction section. And I thought, oh, a book of that, wonder, I've heard of the Booker Prize. So I read Hotels ULat. I didn't really get it, but I did enjoy it. And when I read Hotels ULak again last year, I was amazed about how much of it I could actually remember and how much of the tone of it came out and flavor came back. And I read a couple of other Brutner's over the years.

And then as regular listeners to Backlisted, we'll know, last year after Anita Brutner died, I thought, oh, I'd like to read another Anita Brunner. And I read Lakecomers. And as I said on the episode, I think it's on the Raymond Chandler episode after I'd read it. I was blown away by it. I was blown away by it. I cannot remember responding so strongly to a book for a long time. And that sort of led me to read many, many other of her books over the last 18 months.

One of the reasons we wanted to do this episode is because we had a tweet from somebody, say, a few weeks ago, saying, where is your Anita Brunner episode? I can't find it. And I just thought, well, I don't want this to be a running joke. I actually sincerely believe these are some of the best books I've ever read. So that's why we're here today. That's why we've plugged the microphone into the desk. So that's my account of where I first came across Anita Brutner. Oon McCormack. I think I must have read it roughly the same time. I bet it was the same edition, that sort of little blue paperback. I think my much older sisters had it and I picked it up because I was trying to read their stuff. I probably was about the same age, 15 or 16. Imagine me this sort of bookish little girl at a convent school in Merseyside.

It was literally the most glamorous thing I had ever read. Oh, my, imagine such lives could exist. I aspire to these. It's incredible. So I hooved it up. I like you, I must have understood about one word in four, but something about the lilt of the sentences meant that I then went. I've read very little fiction as a teen.

nature, but I consistently read Anita Bruckner, and I think I must have read about the first 10, 11 novels before I went off to university and stopped reading at all. So that's when I first read it. They were incredible. They were a glimpse of a life I barely knew existed. And what was it you liked about them? Because I do, I have noticed that once people, it's a terrible thing to say, they're quite moorish. Once you've got the taste for them, you tend to read quite a few of them. Like that big box of chocolates that Alex and Nick are consuming, aren't they? In look at me. Yeah, yeah.

You read one. You read them very quickly. I can answer that as the sort of ancient reader I am now as the teenager. I genuinely do think it was a glimpse of a sort of sophistication, a metropolitan life that I didn't know. But at the same time, you know, that bookish girl in a conference school is responding to the story of lonely bookish girls everywhere, I think. So I suspect that was it And then it had languages You're always going to be beguiled by those sentences, aren't they?

You always are. So I think that must have been it. Lucy, what about you? When I first read her, actually very recently, which I feel there's a bit of a cheat on I feel like I should come backlist, I didn't always say, talk about a long, a long harboured love.

But actually, no, I, for many years, I laboured under that rather stupid impression that she wrote novels about spinsters in the worst possible shape and form a spinster can take. I think I always thought that she was along the lines of someone like Ivy Compton Burnett, who I'm not a big fan of, novels about taking tea with curates or things like this. And so I just steered clear of her. And then only probably a couple of years ago, I think I read Hotel to Lack for the first time,

because I was writing a piece about hotels in literature. Thought that one would probably fit the bill. The colour of furniture, the colour of beale. Yeah, go on. Exactly. One of these good reads list. or whatever. And then I realized, wow, this is not what I thought it was at all. And very quickly after that, I think I read Look at Me, and that was the one that did the kind of blowing, I mean,

I like Hotel Delac, but Look at Me was the first one I read that I was really kind of blown away by, and it will always be the one I come back to, I think. Yes, I think Look at Me is my, it's probably my favourite, I'm saying. Speaking as the Brooklyn Agenu here, because I came to her very late, like this year. That's not quite true. I'd read Hotel Delac a long, long time ago, and actually had remembered that I'd quite enjoyed it and was surprised by how much I'd enjoyed it. But it was at that time not the kind of thing

that I was interested in reading more of, being callow and male. But, you know, as listeners will know, tediously, I've come to see the error of my ways. And I have to say, coming back to her work for this podcast has been, as ever, a revelation. she just seems to be in that sort of remarkable strand of 20th century. I mean, the pleasure in reading it is very similar to me to the pleasure in discovering,

which, as I again I've confessed to discovering mural spark far too late in life. And rather like mural spark, I'll read the brookness steadily. I don't want to be without them. I think I love the idea that there are 24. I've read four of them, including the one we're talking about today, rather more quickly anticipated. I think with start and life, I mean, I like Hotel Delac and Latecomers, but I really think, look at me as a, and we'll talk about why, it grabs you from the absolute,

one of the great opening paragraphs, I think. You mentioned Lucy, the S word, spinster. And one of the things that it seems to me is revelatory about reading Anita Brookner rather than hearing about Anita Bruchner is the more you read, the idea that she only wrote about. lonely women. It seems ludicrous to me. Actually ludicrous and insulting to her and to her work. And one of the things that's very significant to me and I think he's little understood about her or little reported is that she is very funny. She is funny on the page and she's very funny in person. She was a great interview. If you read any interviews with her, she is terrifically amusing in a kind of e-ore-ish kind of way. And there's a quote here, there's an interview here with Boyd Tonkin.

She's talking about the image problem that she had. She's sort of in... Ten years after Hotel, do you lack? She sort of invented herself. Yes. This is the constant game. She perpetuates it all the time. And she goes on and on about the reviews that she gets.

I mean, you have to work quite hard to find a bad review. She says, well, I am a spinster. I make no apologies for that, but I'm. neither unhappy nor lonely. I am interested in people who live on their own, people who get left behind, who drops through the net, but who survive. They seem to me quite heroic characters sometimes, but no one inquires about them because they're people who do without much conversation, whose loudest moments are internal. If such characters persist through my novels, that's because I don't know much about them, not because I know them too well. I write to find out what makes

them tick. And she described the process of writing fiction as, and this is brilliant, trying very hard to remember something which has not yet taken place. Oh, that's brilliant, isn't that? Yeah. So what she's doing, I think, is mapping out the inner lives of people who are aware of how they are seen by the outside world and constantly challenging them, confirming them, there's a dance going on all the time, I think. And indeed, with her public image. Julian Barnes tells a very funny story about he would have lunch with her once a year and it would last 75 minutes. No more, no less. Everybody said that. She's very precise. Towards the end of the main course, she would lean over and say, I'm working on a new book. It's

about a lonely woman. Lucy, you wrote a fantastic piece, which is a vote on LIT Hub. Yeah, well, thank you. About Penelope Fitzgerald and Brookner and Solitude. Yeah. Do you think that there is a kind of constant challenging going on in these books of both the rewards and the punishments of solitude? Oh, I think very much. And I think that's probably one of the things I love so much about Look at Me is because, for me, at least, it weighs up very kind of cleverly and in a lot of detail the difference between that kind of life that you have. I mean, Francis, the heroine of Look at Me, she lives alone with her housekeeper, her mother and father have passed away.

She lives in their old flat. And she is an aspiring writer. And she's able to write because of this solitude that she has in her life, the way that she looks at people. She's always observing them. She's writing. But she also wants to be living this life outside of that. But she can't have it both ways. And I think that's what's so wonderful about the book is that she pushes towards trying to be part of other people's lives.

But when she pushes sort of too far into that, the year. to be by herself, comes back into play again. So I think it's just a very clever book in telling you both sides of the story and so that one is not loneliness is very different to solitude and there's a push and a pull there at work which I think is obviously, I don't want to say that's exactly what's going on in Brookness's life,

but if you read some of the interviews, she's very happy with the decision that she's made or she says she's happy that decision she's made to be alone and work. It's that old paradox though, isn't it? She's very, at pains to always say that she's not her characters and her life is very different.

And yet when you actually look at the biographical details, the sense that she has, that sort of thing, it comes up in this book, the Darwinian sense, that through accidents of birth or the nature of her relationship with her parents and bad and difficult parents, I mean, that's her first book, a starting life,

is about a spectacularly a nightmarish parental situation, which she kind of, the heromines always deal with to some degree. They kind of rise above or cope with, or courtarise the pain, but it does leave them kind of isolated and finding it difficult.

Look at me, I find that whole thing where she says, you know, she's just not the couple that she wants to be like and wants to be part of Alex and Nick. She feels that they are of a different Darwinian order, that they are kind of their... Sort of Uber mention. And she can't, insofar as there is a plot in this book.

I think we talk not about the food, there's sort of simultaneously a real, there's a real sort of famished nature to the characters, I think, and a kind of hunger. But at the same time, this sort of distaste and revulsion that, you know, there's just something too fleshly about these people. She's just not on food. Rachel, my wife, used to do her publicity.

And she used to have to go out with Anita. And, I mean, the stories are all, but she said she would very often, you know, you'd go out for lunch and she would smoke. But it would literally, it would be steam, she'd eat steamed vegetables. You know, and she'd be quite happy. sort of picking away at that.

But she also tells that that humour thing. There's a story that Julian Barnes tells, which Rachel was there for, where she's in to sign books in the office. And at a certain point out, there's about a thousand, and she's done 50, and she's, I think that'll do.

And Rachel's going, no, you can work. But she did that once, because she went into hatchards with her, and she gasped. She said, you never heard Anita Garst. She looked at the pile of books, and she had to do it.

And then she said at the end of the signing session, she got out and on Piccadilly. She just, she said she suddenly got skittish and leapt onto the back of a rootmaster bus and said, I have to go now, dear, and wave to wind up down the street. She said it was like a sort of weird 1950s musical. Amazing. Moment of brief encounter or something, yeah. I think she's so good.

And look at me particularly. It's such a good book about solitude, yes, but also about writers and writing and about the compromise that exists between looking at the world. and then secluding yourself from the world, clostration. Yeah, she loves that word, doesn't she? In order to write it down. You know, have you got a... I have a little bit. Yes, it's from the start of chapter six of look at me.

It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach out to others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state I hurt or I hate or I want.

Or indeed, look at me. And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer, there is no oblivion. only endless memory. Wow.

I just actually punched the air. Yeah, yeah, some of it. And the beauty of it, speaking it is just joy. And the way she works that look at me theme, you know, from the first kind of brilliant paragraph about memory.

I wonder what the book that Francis writes would be, would it be the comic novel that she hints out in the text? I think it's this book. I think there is a, yeah. I think there's a sense towards the end that it is this book. Let's do the blurb. Okay, so this is the blurb for the first edition of Look at Me.

This is Anita Brunner's third novel. She published A Start in Life and Providence to very, very positive reviews, I think. I'm right in saying. So here we go. This is, if you haven't read it, here's what's in store for you. Melancholy came next to madness in Francis Hinton's filing system. She worked in the reference library of a medical research institute dedicated to the study of problems in human behaviour. There were a number of borderline cases sitting and working in the library itself,

and Francis could be scathingly funny about their quirks on paper. Writing helped to lighten the load of those qualities thought to be essential to a librarian. In fact, Francis would have been happy to throw her sterling qualities out of the window for a little of what Nick and Alex had. Francis always found herself trying to attract Nick's attention in the library. He exuded charm when he had the time. Good looks, good health and good luck. His wife Alex was equally dazzling.

When she was taken up by this legendary couple, and I'm just interjecting to say here, of course, Nick and Alex, Nicholas and Alexandra, you can interpret that how you want, the names of the great Russian dynastic duo. when she was taken up by this legendary couple, Francis thankfully abandoned most of her critical faculties and worked hard at picking up some of their saving nonchalance. It was through them that she made some new friends and discovered new possibilities and impossibilities. They were, in fact, to provide her with her sentimental education. Anita Brunner's third novel is a triumph.

How such an uncompromising gaze at loneliness can manage to be so vastly enjoyable as well as moving is something to which only Anita Brookner holds the secret. That's really good. That's really good. Just as your head was drooping with misery. Should I try and give it a little push at the end? But remember she's funny. She's funny, yeah.

That's the thing, though, isn't it? That what lives, you're saying you know, about the sentences. Just not a massive amount happens in the novel. And you're not quite sure. In fact, we should talk about what does happen without giving too much away. Nothing in everything. Nothing and everything is exactly right. isn't it? You know, it's an Anita Brooklyn novel, and if you've read at least one, you know that

there's so much optimism when she discovers the relationship with Nick and Alex, is full of optimism, but because she's such a good writer, she leaves enough of a trail for you to know that this isn't likely to work out well. Yeah. Lucy, is she, is Francis a reliable narrator? I don't think she's an unreliable narrator in the classic sense of the term, but she's, is unreliable in as much as there are certain confusions in terms of the plot, aren't there? Like what, you know, because the whole relationship...

She deliberately conceals the prior relationship, doesn't she conceals the prior relationship. She doesn't sort of... She also plays... I don't know. I mean, I find Francis incredibly intriguing, not because... I mean, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, that this kind of this push and pull situation between loneliness and solitude and sort of life and action and staying inside and writing.

that what makes me much more intrigued by her than a kind of perhaps the impression you might have from just reading that blurb is the way that she constantly pushes against these options she has to move out into the wider world. You know, all those, because Alex and Nick, without giving too much information away, but they have a spare bedroom in their house that Alex talks about her moving into. And it's she, she pushes back against it. She sort of, and then little things happen. She knows something important will be eaten. Exactly. She's very aware of what she will lose if she kind of moves into the light and sort of starts this life. So she's unreliable in one sense, but I don't think it's, you know, when you say, if you say unreliable or a rate of that, it gives a certain impression. And yes, and it's not exactly unreliable, is it? It's just her judgment. You don't entirely trust her judgment. She believes that James is in love with her.

And yet it probably, it's never, you can never be sure. You're never sure. And as the scene, the client. The climactic scene in her bedroom is comes as a shot to the reader as well as an absolute shock to her. And it's such a confusing one. And it's never really unpacked. It's never unpacked. We're never quite sure of who wanted what, why he behaves the way he does. Not with you, Francis. Not with you.

What does that mean in so many ways? You know, there's so many ways you could read that. And yet because we only ever see it through her, I mean, of course, because we only ever see it through her point of view, that is the kind of unreliability of the narration. And she's bewildered and confused and doesn't understand his motives and possibly he has not been the man that she has fantasised or imagined. That's it. The romantic hero that's always running through the Brooklyn novel.

But also she says in the first few pages of the book, I am invulnerable. This is why I think the creation of the character is so brilliant in this book. That clearly, as the book goes on, you learn that she had suffered a tremendous breakdown after what we might assume was an adulterous affair of some kind. She prefers not to talk about it. I never speak of it is what she says, in fact, several times.

And therefore, the will, the will, she has created a way of living, which is about protecting herself from further harm. Well, protection is a great theme, isn't it? When she first feels James's arm around her shoulder, she said it's the first time she's felt protected since she was at. And I think the sadness of the book is, you know, she allows herself to feel that there might be another way to live in, of living, which would be more rewarding, which would allow her to join the ranks of these people

who take what they want, when they want. And of course, she's cruelly, it's the word, dispossessed of that. Well, she doesn't know how to play by their rules. I mean, she's, she's, I also find her, the idea of her innocence very interesting, because she's obviously not as innocent, I mean, when I'm talking sexually innocent, as someone like Alex, assume she is. because there are vague references, very old ones, to her having had a sexual relationship before. But yet at the same time,

we sort of almost led to assume that maybe she hasn't. Yes, and then this way, also don't think that's fast. And then on the very first page, she makes support, she says, my name is Francis Hinton, and I do not like to be called Fanny.

And yet Alex and James continually, sorry, Alex and Nick talk, call her Fanny all the time. She puts up with these sort of odd, I don't know, it's so hard to trust her sometimes, but equally you don't feel that she's trying to kind of put the water. Writing that afterwards, isn't she as well?

The kind of... Yes, if this is the book she's written as well then. She has been, it seems to me, willing to be infantilised in terms of her relationship with her mother and in terms of the relationship with the woman who lives in the flat, the cleaner and Nancy. But again, she does the same thing. While thinking she's embracing this far more racy world, Bohemian,

by whom we will with Alex Nick. She's their child. He's like their child again. Do you think it's meant to evoke Fanny Price from Mansfield Park, I wonder? These things are not coerlessly done by Brooklyn, I think. There's a lovely part. This is a heart. I thought, this is from chapter 8 where she just says,

I wanted, you see, talking about the failed relationship with James, I wanted you see, to make it all come out right this time. I wanted contentment and peace for myself for him, and I wanted the approbate. of others. Perhaps above all the approbation of others. I wanted it to go according to plan. I even wanted the small satisfactions of congratulations and good wishes. I wanted to see the smiles on the faces of Mrs. Hallor and Dr. Simic as they raised glasses to me. I wanted for once in my life a celebration to make up for all the sadness, all the waste and confusion, all the waiting, the sitting in

sick rooms, the furtive returns and the lying morning face. I wanted more than anything a chance to be simple once again, as I was meant to be, and as I had been long ago, a long, long time ago. It's pretty good. She says something similar here, very near the end of the book. I find this incredibly moving, actually. It seemed to me that I, rather than he, had brought this about, and my despair was extreme. For now that I knew that I loved him, it was his whole life that I loved. And I would never know that life.

changes would no doubt take place and I would not even know what they were how is he I would long to ask but there would be no one to ask if I were to pass him in the corridor or in the library I would have to smile like the stranger he wanted me to be and if I wished to please him I must simply stay away and his life his life would go on without me and I would have no knowledge of it and since I had apparently understood so little, I could not even blame him. I get things wrong, you see. That I get things wrong. It's so heartbreaking, isn't it? I think it is in all senses a harrowing book and that chapter 11, that penultimate chapter, it's like a, it's like a, yeah, she's dissent into hell. Oh, the long walk home. Well, this is another, this is another thing that she's so brilliant at, I think. It's one of the great set pieces I've read. This idea of Brutna writing these sort of polite books. One of the things that really struck me when I started reading them in earnest is if she wants to be funny, she's funny.

She wants to be dramatic. She's dramatic. If she wants to chart someone's nervous breakdown and allow a sort of almost actually Aikman is an Akeman-like horror to start flowing in. The description of the walk across Hyde Park and through her. It's horrendous. I mean, it's truly dark. Also, if you're looking at, you know, it's a classic trigger, the terrible scene with the slapping on of the pudding in the restaurant.

Essentially, constantly triggers a depressive episode. I mean, and what she narrates brilliantly. And, you know, but that whole feeling, it's a brilliant thing that she said to, you know, I think it was a Mick Brown interview. She said she'd always admired Freud, but had resisted any temptation to undergo, psychoanalysis. It wasn't within my scope. And one doesn't know how intelligent the interrogator

would be. Which is such a classic brook now. I'm going to, we're going to come on to the biography in a moment because we've got a little clip. But I just want to read this. I was sent this by our friend Ewan Tant. And this is from, this is the beginning of an introduction to an edition of red lights by her great favourite Georges Simonon that she wrote for the new, a review of books about 10 years ago. This is the beginning of the introduction and see if this rings any bells. Introduction.

The formula is simple but subtle. A life will go wrong, usually because of an element in the protagonist's makeup which impels him to self-destruct, to willfully seek disgrace, exclusion, ruining his search for a fulfillment and a fatal freedom which take on an aura of destiny. In a genre which has since been exploited but never truly replicated, Seaman examines this phenomenon time after time and in a variety of settings. A man, and it is almost invariably a man, will suddenly act out of character and for no apparent reason. This divergence from his normal pattern of behaviour will lead him to abandon all safety, all caution in the interest

of that illusory freedom. This momentary rapture against which he has no defence will ensure his downfall, but the rash act will empower him in ways he has perhaps sought, almost unknowingly, all his life. but for women in the case of Brookner every novel she's written although do you think it's from the rash act or do you think the tragedy

or back to Greek tragedy again do you think the tragedy in her heroines is that they don't act out of character enough I'm fascinated but I'm fascinated by the whole cult around Brutner so I'm fascinated why what is it about Brutner

that's so attractive to people now in a way that it seems to have gathered. I mean, it's the most anticipated on Twitter at least. Never an echo chamber, obviously. But I'm fascinated, but what is it about Brutner that people connect to? My little theory that I push out is that she genuinely writes about people whose lives don't turn out particularly well. And that sense particularly a lot of people have as they're getting older that have of disappointing.

of early promise not having been fulfilled, of relationships either not working or not happening. And that terrible sense that she has in all the books of time passing, you know, of age. And she writes more kind of brilliantly about the sort of the decline. I mean, she says someone, in life there are no happy endings because the body gives you away. It lets you down. It betrays you and you're tied to demorality and there's no escape. Age is the final betrayal But this ties in my theory about Brutner Are the reason

I can't I think she's showing my psychological hand But it's she writes brilliantly Unlike many writers Write about The result of their character's actions The result of their actions What Brutner writes about

Brilliantly in my opinion Is how you manage what is done to you Yeah And inaction as well. By the failure of the body, by friends, by enemies, by how you're born. Your parents. Bad parenting. That's one of the great inadvertent bad parenting, in fact.

How do you live a noble, correct existence with whatever hand you may have been dealt? That is what Brugner writes about, I think. And they're very internal, aren't they? She's always going for walks, having baths, and thinking. That thing of having to, in Hotel Delac and in all, that thing of the heroin having to go and process the things, as you say, that are being done to her that are happening to. Yeah, it's all about that. Almost that sort of, it's almost more like Camus Sartre, a sort of middle of the century sense of just, it's just the difficulty of having relationships. Exactly.

But it's the ordinary difficulties of life as well. It's exactly those. Unlike in those books, there's no, she, her heroines aren't. aren't made into exemplary figures in a way that's what I love about the way she writes, is that at the end of this book, you don't quite know what you feel about, Francis Hinton. You do feel a bit sorry for you. You feel slightly, but I guess it's the book that you've got in your hand is the sort of the point, isn't it? But there are many pleasures in reading her.

I think her, obviously the sentences, the construction of the plot, the psychological intelligence, this about, you know, would the therapist be clever? enough. And the structure of this as you read it is just, when you reread it, I think, to see how meticulously she's built the book is a real pleasure. I just want to say a bit, we need to put some context to the biography of Anita Brunner's life of several achievements before she became a novelist. So first I'm just going to read the, this was her biography for many years in the front of all editions of her books. Anita Brooklyn was born in London in 1928 and apart from three postgraduate years in Paris has lived there all her life. She trained as an art historian and taught at the

Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988 when she abandoned her title of reader in the history of art at the University of London for the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea and the cultivation of certain fictional characters who may one day appear in future novels. So good. This leaves aside being the first. Well, this is it. So the thing about Anita Bruckner, so she's born in 1928. She's the only child of Newsombrunner, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, and Maud Schiske, a singer. And her mother on marriage was obliged to stop singing. And one of the, I think there is a character in one of the novels, who is a singer, who has been obliged to stop singing, not a happy character. And Bruchner grew up, so she had quite a solitary childhood, very few other children around.

Lots of aunts, big Jewish family. Very literary, she says her father gave her the works of Dickens to read at quite a young age. She said he hoped that it would teach me about social injustice, but all I ended up thinking was that everyone in England had a funny name. Does she get one on her birthday from him? Isn't that what? Yes, that's right, yeah. So she becomes an academic, an art historian in 1967, she became the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge University. She was promoted to read her at the Courthold Institute of Art in 1977,

where she worked until her retirement in 1988. And she would often talk about how much the court hold meant to her. We have a clip here. It's an episode of the reunion from about five years ago on Radio 4, which featured people from the court old talking about, amongst others, Anthony Blunt and the effect that Anthony Blunt and indeed on this program John Michael Jacobs also contributes who we talked about on the last episode

and Brian Sewell and Nile Ferguson but here is Brunner talking about the effect that art and the court hold had on her life Well I went to school in Dulwich and went into the Dulwich picture gallery on a regular basis and was absolutely entranced and puzzled by what I saw and I wanted to know more.

I gave the odd lecture but I wasn't on the staff until I think 1964. And Anita, what did the courthold give you? A whole life, really. Everything that came after was very dull. Even the success as a writer.

Oh, that was far less interesting. Really? Yes, yes. it was your life. Yes. I mean... Many things are that you do not hear voices like that anymore, do you? They would say that she used to...

You could feel the semicolons and the punctuation. There's one of the facts about Brutner, which makes my toes crinkle up with happiness, is that she writes her first novel, a starting life at the age of 53. Do you know why? Because she didn't want to have to go out of... during the summer holidays during the long vacation from the courthold.

And so in order just to fill the vacation, she thought, I'll have a go at writing a novel. I'll have a go. Other people do it. That's another theme, isn't it, that aching long periods of time that these characters have to fill. It's so token foreign. And at least for the first few years of her novel writing career, that is what she did. She would say, I write my novels for two reasons. One, to fill the summer, and two, to see if I can do it again.

She also didn't revise them, the early ones in particular. I mean, she would maybe tweet the ending, she said, but she would literally just write them as they were. This is what Julian Barnes says about a started life. He said, can you think of a better first novel that has apparently been written with no prior drafts, no false starts and no short stories? It is one of the greatest. We're constantly used to running her down. There's a thing we keep coming back to while she was publishing and while she was alive of being this small novelist, this niche novelist, and yet the achievement to write that first book and have it be pretty much perfect, have the voice there.

Isn't it also because she doesn't make a song and dance about it? She doesn't sort of publicize herself. She doesn't make a big deal out of it. So therefore she just does this. She turns it out. She does another one the next year. And she deprecates them. Yes, exactly.

And she doesn't really feel. She got some of the feminist criticismists from the great Blake Morrison 94 thing. She said, Knife is not a nightclub. And some of the reviews I've had, particularly from women, which I assume that is, seem to have been quite defensive. These women are angry. They believe they can get what they want from life.

Maybe they're just lucky enough not to have found out that they can't. It's such a daring thing to do. They're lucky enough not to find out. And Rachel tells that story. And she said that I think it was either Liz Colour or Carmen Kalia was having lunch with her once and occasionally there'd be quite long pauses that started to burble about their children

and their life and she just got up and she said, you have had everything that I have not and then just walked out of the lunch. Just a little bit too old for it that 1926, these are women who are born 20 years later who are going no, I'm going to have the publishing career, I'm going to have this,

I'm going to have the family going to have the affair and the romance with numerous men and she's just that bit too much. I love the The piece of information after the success of Hotel Dulac, and we should say Hotel Dulac, which won the Book of Prize. Very controversial Booker Prize winner in the same year that Julian Barnes was nominated for Flobeau's Parra,

and infamously, J.G. Ballard was nominated for Empire of the Sun. But after the success of Hotel Dulac, which became a great bestseller, she didn't buy a second home, but she bought the flat next door in her mansion block, where she would go and write. It's actually perfectly sensible. So she had the flat next door. When she wanted to work, she would go next door.

I mean, she's so full of paradises, though. There's a great thing in that interview as well. When he talks about marriage. And she said, well, you know, there were a couple of people who proposed, but never remotely took them seriously. But then she says, if we could have got the difficulties of the proposal out of the way and settle down as perhaps two old people with small children,

that would have been an ideal setup. Then I could have got on with my reading and writing and all the rest of it. But I really didn't want to be taken over. So she was a feminist, but she was just her own... But she didn't like those early novels, did she? Or she said she didn't like that. Well, no, there's that great... There's that interview from 1984 where she says,

look at me as a very depressed and debilitated novel. It's the one I regret. When I published it, a very old friend of my mother summoned me and said, you are getting us off a bad reputation as a lonely woman. Stop it at once. She was right. It sticks. years after that she said I hate those early novels

I think they're crap yeah but that's the true artist isn't it she says that they're not as interesting as what I'm doing now and what I'm doing now is not receiving nearly as much attention well she says also she would change the end of Hotel deLuck she wished that she'd made Edith choose to get married she wished that

Edith would that's for it now why did she say that I think is it was very interesting rereading that on the back of having just read a lot of Hayer for this because I think it's her Georgia Hayer novel I'm convinced that she's read that hold of Aya, which she refers to several times in... And that's who Edith is right.

She's a romantic moment. It's constructed very like a thrusting name. A thrusting name, that's right. It's like the feel, Colette Ferditza or charity of something. And this is fascinating. You know Hotel Dulaq is dedicated to Rosamond Laman. Well, Rosamondon was on her favorite authors. And Laman would refer to Hotel Jolak as my novel.

They didn't know. And I see my novel has won the book of pride. And also, is it family and friends? No, a friend from England is dedicated to Carmen Khalil. You know, she has this very interesting, ambivalent relationship with feminism. Simultaneously, one of her closest personal friends is the publisher of Viral. And I'm sure that's true for many, many women of her gender. I think what you're saying is right, it's got to be something to do with the time

because she's living this amazing feminist life in one hand, but she doesn't recognise it. And then she sees these younger women who are able to say, for whatever reasons, I'm having this, I'm having it all. And I'm going to have everything. And she goes, well, it was one or the other for me. It was writing or it was family. It was being the first woman professor so that you could be the second one. I think she writes so elegantly as well about being an outsider, being unmarried, being a spinster, being an intellectual, being Jewish.

You know, all these things that are not factored into her, how she has been talked about. And also, John, there's the issue of, I think it's interesting that people who, if we're in the business, we understand what's meant when people say, well, she published a novel a year and that worked against her. But it probably did because some kind of fatigue would set in amongst publishers and literary editors. How do you find something new to say on an annual basis about somebody who is... Especially when they are vaguely similar. I mean, that is their charm for people like us who love her, right? But actually it didn't work particularly in her favour. And I think a lot of reviews, particularly towards the end of her life,

did make some sometimes snide comment about like another, you know, another Anita Brooklyn or not. I have not read many of the, I've not read any of the later ones. I mean, does the standard keep up? I'm six away from the end. I just read Falling slowly. Right. Falling slowly is as good as any of them.

Yeah, I love it. It's wonderful. So that's going to say, where would you go next? I want to read one. I just wanted to go. Cummers if you haven't read late Cummers. Closed eye. Closed eye, wonderful.

You've got a copy of a private view there, owner as well. I love that. I've just started this one. It's absolutely been. I got through that on the train earlier, so you know, you can't put them down. They're like thrillers. They are.

My theory about Britain, there's a really interesting piece on his blog by our former guest, Jonathan Gibbs, the novelist Jonathan Gibbs, where he had read a couple of Brooklyn's books and he said, you know, these don't really work in terms of narrative, the way I would teach narrative in fiction in a creative writing sense. These don't really work. I really like Jonathan. I really gave

me pause for thought, thinking about why don't they work? And I think the reason why they don't follow the rules is that a lot of the time, the rules that Brutner is following, although she has a great respect for the 19th century novel in particular, in a sense, it's her background as an expert on art, which is coming into play in the novels. They are like portraits. They are often she'll do something in the opening chapter of the book where she will literally sketch out what she is going to write about she will she will mark out a canvas yeah and then as each chapter goes on she goes to a different part of the canvas really and fills it in and what she does brilliantly is go back to the same bit of that canvas five chapters later scrub it out a little

bit repaint it so you only understand the picture that you're looking at in fact hence the title, look at me, when you get to the end of the book, when you can suddenly see the picture that you've been watching being painted before your artist. I also think it's a sort of, you know, that each scene as a tableau, and then she goes home and she unpacks the psychological significances, the possibility, she replays different versions of how the scene might have gone. It is that observer, that thing that she writes about being, the person who watches. And the, and that. There's a wonderful passage where she talks about it has to be funny.

Even towards the end, you know, it has to be funny. She has to turn it into something that's funny, which it is quite. Have you got a copy of a starting life, though? So you're talking about it has to be funny. These are the first words we have to assume that she wrote in fiction. I think this is one of the funniest things I ever read, the opening of supposedly the slightly miserable needs of Britain is a starting life. Dr. Weiss at 40 knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

In her thoughtful and academic way, she put it down to her faulty moral education, which dictated through the conflicting, but in this one instance, united agencies of her mother and father, that she ponder the careers of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, but that she emulate those of David Copperfield and Little Dorrit. But really it had started much earlier than that, when, at an unremembered moment in her extreme infancy, she had fallen asleep, enraptured, as her nurse breathed the words, Cinderella shall go to the ball. The ball had never materialised.

Literature, on the other hand, was now her stocking trade, if trade were an apt description of the exchange that ensued three times weekly in her pleasant seminar room, when students, bolder than she had ever been, wrinkled their brows as if in pain, when asked to consider any writer less alienated than Camus. They were large, clear-eyed and beautiful. Their voices rang with confidence, but their translations were narrow and cautious. Dr. Weiss, who preferred men, was Dr. Weiss, who preferred men, was an authority on women. Savage. It's absolutely savage. It's brilliant.

I think you used the words at one point, Merciless, Andy. It's exactly right. Before we go, I must, I just must give a mention. We are all big fans of the blog, Brooke Neary. dot blogspot.com.com. You can find Tom Sabine. I'm going to say Sabine, Sabine, Sabine. He may contact me to tell me.

Hello, Tom. This is a magnificent blog devoted to Brubner and All Matters, Bruchner, which you will very much enjoy if you read, look at me, or Lake Camas or any of these books. And lots of daily updates on Twitter as well. Yes, indeed. Surely the perfect place to end. Surely encroaching night.

We exit the Brooklyn Dome. Thanks to Lucy Skolls, to Yuna McCormick, to our producer Matt Hall, and once again to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at Backlisted Pod, on Facebook at Backlisted Pod, and our page on the unbound site, unbound.com forward slash backlisted. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight.

Thanks very much, everyone.