Off to Award-Winning Books -- Goodbye Passion

Am I ready to admit that the 2011 list of books has been cast aside, maybe for good. Yes, there are several more left without a corresponding check off date and even a couple that have been on library-reserve for months, but it is no longer seducing me.

So desperate for substantial themes to read, I looked up nominees and winners for Man Booker, National, et cetera awards. The first I finished is The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant, short listed for Man Booker in 2008.

It is the story of Hungarian refugees. One brother, a quiet unassuming jeweler with a mousy wife, living in a flat with eccentric neighbors. The story is narrated by his daughter, Vivian. The other brother skirts the law and eventually ends up imprisoned for being a slum landlord. Vivian, anxious to learn about her family history, maneuvers into becoming his scribe as he dictates his memories in Eastern Europe and London.

As a literary conceit, Grant does not use the metaphors of clothes as disguises or conveyors of social status heavy-handedly. Only the title reminds the reader to look for such references. Instead, rather quickly, the novel focuses on what it means to be dislocated and how that trauma effects not only the émigrés but their families for generations. Vivian so describes her parents:

“… Logic. Which nobody in my family had ever considered to be a trait worth cultivating or a methodology with any discernible purpose to it. You operated on instinct and emotions, mainly fear and cowardice. Principles were for other people, the kind who had sideboards and cut-glass decanters and documents with their names on that nobody in a uniform could quibble about. They were a luxury, like fresh flowers in vases and meals out in restaurants; you could aspire to be one day the sort of person who had the status and disposable income to afford principle, but the foundations of your existence were distrust and, if you were endowed with brains, cunning.”

The nest her parents constructed admitted no outsiders, and allowed contact with the world only to the extent that they left the news on when they were afraid that turning the set off after the game shows were over would cause it to go dead. Vivian grows up like a frail root-bound violet, escaping only to attend a second or third rate university, where surprisingly she meets her husband when he rushes into the bathroom when she is lolling smoking a cigarette soaking in the tub. The tall thin son of a vicar, he admits to marrying her to beef up his gene pool. Poor Alexander dies on their honeymoon and rather than falling back into the trap of her parents’ apartment, she goes to live in one of her uncle’s buildings.

This transition of her life into a rootless young widow, coming mid-point in the story is the most obvious play on the title:

“ … It was very hard in those days to stay up all night in London, you had to know where to look to find the young vampires … I was apprehensive. I didn’t know how to behave or dress … Looking back over that summer, I remember almost everything I wore. I can recount my whole wardrobe, but this night is a blank. I changed and changed and changed until the bed was piled with discarded clothes, mountains of silks, crepes, velvets, belts, scarves, high-heeled shoes, jeans, bell-bottom trousers, bras and knickers. Deep uncertainty about what to put on has wiped clean the memory’s slate and what the final choice was.”

So she is introduced to the edgy counterculture of London’s youth in the 70s, with its threatening skin heads, so reminiscent of the terror in Hungary in 1956. The threat of paramilitary thugs against the weak is compounded with the introduction of Vivian’s uncle’s girlfriend who is a Black woman from Wales who works in a chic boutique selling designer clothes. Eunice, more than Vivian, believes her outward perfect appearance is her ticket to social acceptance.

I am left with a sense that Grant used the perfect double-entendre title for it is not about disclosing or hiding oneself using apparel, but what it is like to be strangers in a strange land who had escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.