CHANTEMESLE by ROBIN FEDDEN

Chantemesle is sub-titled 'A Normandy Childhood' and is exactly that.  A memoir, written in middle-age by an Englishman who grew up on the banks of the Seine in an untroubled time before the Second World War.

It is an enchanting, innocent story of a near perfect pre-adolescence.  Fedden has the descriptive feel of the best of Zelda Fitzgerald - an extraordinary ability to evoke, in prose, a sense of light and shadow, of life and of landscape.

Fedden's part of the Seine valley, which he explores extensively, is populated by very local characters, none more so than the blind Battouflet who knows all but whose mind-map is fixed decades earlier.  We also have Mademoiselle Firmin, the Fedden family's nearest neighbour who agrees to go bathing with the children some months after her husband died in February:

"At last she got up and lowered herself down the steps that hung from the stern.  Then giving a self-conscious wave, she launched out and began to swim deliberately downstream.  ... The head bobbed away from us at each stroke, moving into the swifter current. ... and then, as we watched, it disappeared.  We waited for it to re-emerge.  Heads, we knew, always re-emerged, the face spluttering and smiling.  We waited in vain."

I said pre-adolescent and so the book largely is but there is a sexual undercurrent as Fedden becomes friendly with Clotilde with whom he has lessons (of a sort) and with whom, later, he waltzes and shares a range of adventures.

No character, even Battouflet, should however detract from the fact this book is a fine prose painting of a landscape long since gone.  The love affair was with the house, Chantemesle, and its environment and the characters, even Clotilde, serve to highlight the description rather than carry it themselves.

It is a exquisite piece of writing - and written poignantly from the heart.

"From the blue brushstroke on the water I could see the whole landscape - hill, forest, islands - beautiful as it had ever been and apparently still as close; but mute.  I was no longer part of it.

"A week later I left with the sense of disloyalty and loss.  Thirty years have not obliterated this sense, or the knowledge that I was most myself at Chantemesle.  I have written this to make amends, a gesture of love."



Chantemesle, a Normandy Childhood, Eland Books - paperback 2002.  100pp.

THE OLD CAPITAL by YASUNARI KAWABATA

I came across Kawabata via his semifictional masterpiece, The Master of Go, and was surprised to find this tale was not among the three books specifically cited to support his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.  However, The Old Capital, one of his later works most certainly was, and deservedly so.

The book is a story of identity in post WWII Japan, specifically the 'Old Capital' Kyoto, struggling to refind itself through the traditions and formalities of earlier years.  Within this highly structured environment, the principal character Chieko, daughter of a wholesaler and sometime designer of cloth for obis and kimonos, is also struggling both to come to terms with two suitors and, more significantly, with her alter ego - in fact her twin - whose existence she discovers by mistake and whom two suitors mistake for her on several occasions.

The background to the whole novel is a series, apparently a never-ending series, of festivals - of the Hollyhock, the Gion Festival, the Festival of Ages and others.  Indeed the author tells us that Kyoto of the 1950s held so many such events that it would have been impossible to witness all of them in a single year.  The counterpoint is Chieko's increasing, and only partially relieved, uncertainty about her birth.

Her parents variously tell her that she was left on the doorstep of her father's shop, that they found her in a rose garden or that they stole her.  This last is closer to the truth but it is not until her orphaned twin Naeko appears, that we learn the something of the real history.

Naeko lives in the forest outside Kyoto where work - hard manual labour - is focused on preparing and treating Japan's best cedar logs for top-end buildings.  Her father, engaged in the same work, brains himself falling out of a tree and for some reason Chieko is left - to be discovered and, frankly, abducted by Chieko's 'parents'.

The story is never fully resolved - this is no Shakespearian Comedy of Errors .  The son of one of Chieko's father's clients, an expert weaver, meets Naeko first unaware and again because he has, at Chieko's behest, woven her a forest-themed obi.  He proposes to Naeko who has a mind to refuse him because she perceives, almost certainly correctly, that he sees her as an 'illusion' of Chieko.

This sense of 'illusion' (which Chieko contests) dominates the final section of the book and the reader is left to wonder whether Naeko herself is in fact the principal illusion as, on the morning after her first and only visit to Chieko's parents at their home, she walks out into the gathering snowstorm.

The Old Capital, Counterpoint - paperback 2010 (first pub 1962).  Translated by J Martin Holman