Miss Garnet's Angel

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Beauty does that. Especially when it sneaks up on you. Sensible people, practical people, serious people have little use for Beauty. It's a distraction. It enlarges your senses. Colours suddenly become hypnotic. Sounds that you would ordinarily screen out advance to the front of your consciousness. She went on to teach English at the Open University, Oxford and Stanford, specialising in Shakespeare, the 19th-century novel and 20th-century poetry. Her first major career move came when she left academia to become an analytical psychologist. "I eventually thought that literature is not a very good academic subject," she explains. "The great writers didn't write to be analysed, they wrote to entertain and to share a vision of human life. It's lovely to sit around drinking coffee and talking about books at Cambridge, but I sort of felt that English is a cheat subject."

I am always reading Shakespeare —and, in fact, at present also the Bible, which I am trying to read all through. I am writing on The Book of Common Prayer, so I’m also reading the Prayer Books —so I’m surrounded by what y family call my ‘holy books’. Then I’m reading a lot of poetry for my nest novel —and also quite a bit of philosophy (which I may write about soon). I read almost no contemporary fiction. The last novel I read was Chance by Joseph Conrad. I’m a great devotee of Conrad —when one thinks he wrote not even in his second language but his first, the mind boggles. It makes anything I do seem very unimpressive! And I love detective stories —especially the old-fashioned ones. In 2011 she contributed a short story, "Why Willows Weep", to an anthology supporting The Woodland Trust. The anthology had helped the Trust plant approximately 50,000 trees. [10] She has also published two volumes of short stories, 'Aphrodite's Hat' and 'The Boy Who Could See Death.'A nicely told and rather quiet story, that did not really meet my interests, but probably very nice for the right target group. Fair warning: Miss Garnet's Angel is an irresistible force of nature, a mystery with no solution but many possible answers. At the very least, you will question your assumptions about the possibility of "entertaining Angels unaware", the limits of material existence, and the finality of death. Not bad for one book. Both Julia and Harriet were dutifully pro-labour, even deriving a sense of moral superiority - or at least moral purity - from the connection. But beneath the austere surface, Julia Garnet was hungry for adventure, for travel, and, most unexpectedly, for beauty, the latter having been limited to admiring the inherent loveliness of flowers in other people's gardens. Julia was starved for joy and she was shrinking into oblivion when her housemate's sudden death changed everything and brought Julia face to face with with her surprising destiny. The greatest wisdoms are not those which are written down but those which are passed between human beings who understand each other…. What parallels and distinctions might we draw between the lives of Julia and the Monsignore? Although they’ve both been given, for much of their lives, to starkly different philosophical ideologies, what fundamental beliefs and traits do the two of them share?

Her father was a committed supporter of Irish republicanism, and her first name 'Salley' is spelled with an 'e' because it is the Irish for ' willow' (cognate with Latin: salix, salicis), as in the W B Yeats poem, " Down by the Salley Gardens", a favourite of her parents. [ citation needed] Give us the inside scoop on your writing regimen: How many hours a day do you devote to writing? Do you outline the complete arc of your narrative early on? Do you draft on paper or at a keyboard? Do you have a favourite location or time of day (or night) for writing? What do you do to avoid distractions? What was the germ for Julia Garnet’s story? What is it that drew you to Venice and the Book of Tobit as the setting and occasion for your novel? A story about an English spinster travelling to Venice who develops an overwhelming interest in religious art and Christian myths.Venice is a city of Angels but, perhaps more than any, Archangel Raphael is an abiding presence. Identified with healing and with the protection of travellers, he is a fitting avatar for Miss Garnet's adventure and on her first attempt at navigating the complex paths that lead everywhere and nowhere in Venice, she stumbles upon a rather obscure and little known church, the Chiesa San Raffaele. Led by innocent curiosity, she trespasses on an art restoration project - or perhaps I should say a transformation project because conventional, unimaginative Julia Garnet is about to be changed forever.

Describe each of the other characters in this novel. Vera. Carlo. The Cutforths. The Monsignore. Sarah. Toby. Azarias. Tobit. What are the motivations underlying their choices and actions? This is a tough book to describe, it reads like literature, with a strong reliance on the setting - mostly Venice - and characterisation of the protagonist. Julia Garnet is, among other things, a woman struggling to emerge from the long shadow cast by her father’s censure and abuse. How successful, finally, has she been in doing so?We cannot commission desire,” Julia reflects at one point, referring not only to herself but also to Carlo. To what degree, and on what grounds, does Julia come to feel a sense of solidarity with Carlo, of all people? Explain.

Again I didn’t go about it —it arose as and when needed. I don’t plan, as I say, but I find ideas, and characters, arise like helpful genies when I need them. I loved finding some of the minor character in ‘Miss Garnet’ — Signora Mignelli, for example, Julia’s highly practical and unselfconsciously mercenary landlady, or Mr Akbar —the man who buys her flat an gives her fake champagne and plays her Elvis —I don’t know where he came from; or Mr Mills, the junior senior partner in the firm of solicitors, from whom she accepts coffee, even though it disagrees with her. That’s what the Mr Mill’s of this world make us do. I read this novel when it was first published. That was in the year 2000! This is a novel that has really withstood the test of time and it is a book I often suggest to people who are off to Venice. Reading it offers an even greater cinematic experience of the city (is that even possible?). It is a gentle story, told with charm and detail, that carries the reader along at a thoughtful pace. This is the story of Julia, now in retirement, in many ways an unremarkable woman – and yet. She chooses to spend 6 months in Venice, exploring the city and its treasures, gaining a variety of friendships and experiences. As the time passes, she learns to re-evaluate some of her core beliefs and to trawl her deeper soul in quiet contemplation. Julia Garnet, a retired teacher who has never been in love, seems to belong to that group of disappointed women trapped in the bleak lives that Anita Brookner's readers know so well. But Miss Garnet, soon Julia to everyone she meets, is more robust and adventurous. And she's not exactly conventionally middle-class either: she's a communist and an atheist who disapproves of wealth, religion, and sensual beauty. But much changes when Harriet, the teacher she's lived with in London, dies and Julia decides to go to Venice for six months. There, as she steps off her water taxi at the Campo Angelo Raffael to move into the apartment she's rented, she notices, high up on the Campo's church, statues of an angel, a boy, and a dog. She soon learns that they represent the story from the Apocrypha of Tobias and the Angel Raphael, who exorcised the demons from Tobias's wife Sara (the ancient story is told in sections paralleling the changes in Julia's life). Formerly shy and reserved, Julia now makes friends with her landlady and her son Nicco; an American couple; a charismatic monsignor; and the handsome Carlo, an art historian with whom she falls in love. As she explores Venice, she meets the mysterious twins Toby and Sara, who are restoring a 14th-century chapel where they've found a painting of the Angel Raphael. When both it and Toby disappear, Julia, though by now disappointed in love, rallies to find the painting, help Sara, and live to the full in the city that has taught her how "to learn and enjoy." Hemon was born in Bosnia, went to the US in 1991, and taught himself to write in English. When fiction crosses the Danube, critics scratching for a suitable adjective to describe Eastern European otherness go for "Nabokovian" or hint at kinship with Kundera. Hemon gets compared to both on the cover of his first collection of short stories. As he writes in artifice-rich prose about loss, exile, and the peculiar tangles of Balkan history (Tito, Stalin and Archduke Ferdinand), those comparisons make sense. He excels at that superficially unserious style that communism bred, but some may find his stylistic gymnastics and clotted prose unsettling. As the story of Miss Garnets sojourn in Venice unfolds, the story of Tobias and his Angel unfolds alongside, adding a wonderful extra dimension to this book.This is a book of stories —stories within stories, stories complementing stories, stories refracting and reshaping the elements of older stories. The strange beauty of Venice, with its spectacular architecture and abundance of art pregnant with history and ancient mysticism, storms Miss Garnet’s staunch English reserve and challenges her socialist ideology. For the first time in her life she falls in love —with Carlo, a charming art dealer with twinkling eyes and a white moustache —and her spirit, once awakened, is liberated further by her friendships with a beautiful Italian boy called Nicco and an enigmatic pair of twins engaged in restoring the fourteenth-century Chapel-of-the-Plague. It is her discovery of a series of paintings in the nearby Church of the Angel Raphael, however, that leads finally to Julia’s transformation and reassessment of her past. Intrigued by the paintings, Julia begins unraveling the story they tell of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, an ancient tale depicting a quest of faith and redemption. At the same time, she embarks on a quest of her own to recover losses —not only personal losses but also a priceless angel panel that goes missing from the Chapel, along with one of the twins restoring it. By the time she was at university in the early 1970s she said she had, "crushingly high standards" in writing. "The people I loved were Jane Austen, Conrad, James and Dostoevsky. I felt you had to be in that sort of range. I couldn't just write any old book, so I thought about writing as something separate to earning a living."