Coralie Bickford Smith

This woman not only has the coolest and poshest name ever to have been conceived, but she also designs incredibly beautiful books. My favourites are her hard backed editions of Penguin classics. A set of 10 appeared at the end of 2008...

...and last Christmas, more beauties arrived in Waterstones (as these editions are exclusive to the store):

I have a few from each series (I was not allowing myself to buy books that I already had more than one edition of, so no Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility) and picked up the edition of William Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint last week. I do have the sonnets in a collected works of Shakespeare and my Norton anthology but I seemed to conveniently forget that when faced with such a lovely crimson and peach coloured confection.

The sonnet I know best is still number 130:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare. 

This sonnet played a pivotal role in the episode of My So Called Life when Jordan discovered that he did love Angela. The English teacher Mr Katimski reads out the entire sonnet and, with the help of boffin Brian, helps to tease out it's meaning for a passive class. I have said it already, but that was such a great programme. What other teen drama would leave you with a Shakespeare sonnet memorised and explained?

Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau

Paul loves Dargelos, Gerard loves Paul, and so does Elisabeth. Elisabeth and Paul are brother and sister.

Jean Cocteau once claimed that everything he made, be it poem, book, play, drawing or film, they were all poems really. This makes sense, as this book is not a plotty, observational saga, but a dream.

The book begins during a boys' snowball fight which is taking place at dusk in a Parisian street. War has been declared and the combatants are determined to win for their chosen side. The game is referred to only as 'the battle' and as Paul, warm with love, searches the icy battleground for Dargelos, soldiers fall and missiles fly.

The reader is drawn into the boys' world which, already insular, is made further otherworldly by the snow.

'The snow had gone on falling steadily since yesterday, thereby radically altering the original design. The Cite had withdrawn in Time; the snow seemed no longer to be impartially distributed over the whole warm living earth, but to be dropping, piling only upon this one isolated spot.'

This feeling of claustrophobic isolation is carried on when Paul, hit in the heart by Dargelos' rock centred snowball is taken home by Gerard. Paul and Elisabeth's mother is ill and the siblings share a room, 'The Room', which is their own private world with treasures, stories and 'The Game'. This Game seems to be ultimate escapism, the ability to retreat into your mind and enjoy a swooning reverie which Elisabeth thinks of as 'their private legend.' (Cocteau wrote this book during a week of drug withdrawal.)

These children are utterly immune to the realities of life. When their mother dies, they are looked after by Gerard, a maid and a kind family friend. They exist in a private netherworld of barley sugars, crayfish, shoplifting, dares and dens.

It is apparent to the reader from the first few chapters, that these two innocents are not going to thrive, but it is the arrival of Agatha, a spitting image of Paul's lost love Dargelos, that precipitates the end of The Room and of The Game.

The book is illustrated by Cocteau's pen and ink drawings and these help to contribute to the dreamlike feeling that pervades the text. Simple line drawings show Paul in battle, Elisabeth as a spider caught in the web of her own making, and a group of ghostly school boys pressing their noses against a snowy window.

The translation is by Rosamund Lehmann and was said by The Times to have 'the rare merit of reading as though it were an English original.' The prose does seem fresh and uncontrived. Translations can often be stilted, but this highly specific book seems to flow straight from Cocteau's pen into English.

'The street lamps shed a feeble light upon what looked like a deserted battlefield. Frost-flayed, the ground had split, was broken up into fissured blocks, like crazy pavement. In front of every gully-hole, a stack of grimy snow stood ominous, a potential ambush; the gas-jets flickered in a villainous north-easter; and the dark holes and corners already hid their dead.'

If you enjoy pacy, plot-driven reads, then do not bother opening this book. If, however, you enjoy beautiful writing that you can dwell on, rather than be pulled along by, then this poem of a book will haunt you for ever.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Francie, the young protagonist of Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is a wonderful character because she is a real little girl. Her circumstances may not be the same as the readers' (unless of course you live in turn of the 20th century Brooklyn), but her inner life and fears are so easy to relate to.

She is not an orphan, nor do her parents seem to be mere shadowy background figures in their child's thrilling, magical adventures. She has a very vividly painted home life.

We know what she eats, (stale bread dumplings),exactly what her house looks like,( a corridor) and we see her being scolded by her mother and comforted by her beloved yet useless father. We also see clearly that she is her father's favourite, but that her mother prefers her brother, Neely.

Instead of travelling through time, Francie looks at an old man's toe sticking out of a broken shoe and is hit by the idea of mortality. She does not find treasure, but knows the joys of peeling open a lychee and making a 'potsy' for hopscotch with a run-over tin can. She peers down the ventilation shaft in her bedroom and imagines that it's Purgatory and knows no greater felicity than sitting out on her fire escape on a sunny day with five cents worth of pink and white wafers and a brand new library book.

'As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed. About four o'clock, the flats in the tenement across from Francie's yard came to life. Through the leaves, she looked into the uncurtained windows and saw growlers being rushed out and returned overflowing with cool foaming beer. Kids ran in and out, going to and returning from the butchers, the grocer's and the baker's. Women came in with bulky hock-shop bundles. The man's Sunday suit was home again. On Monday, it would go back to the pawnbroker's for another week.'

Francie does not encounter any evil witches or monsters, just cruel neighbourhood kids, bitter teachers and the terrifying child killer who made my blood run cold 17 years ago, when I first read the book, and now, still.

This is a book that can be revisited countless times as the reader ages and there is always more to find and enjoy. This is partly because Francie's story is traced from before her conception until her early adulthood and partly because this book is not only a coming of age story, but an excellent social history of immigrant life in early 20th century New York. The adult characters are just as complex and sympathetic as Francie's and they swim into a clearer focus as the reader ages. It is rich and therefore endlessly rewarding.

It is a pity that the old Heinemann edition seems not only to be out of print but off the face of the planet. It's cover image was this Julia Margaret Cameron image (see below) which led me to her photographic work. The image above is taken from the film poster. Unusually for a book so beloved, the film adaptation is very satisfying and heartbreaking.

Where did I first hear about this profoundly moving life companion of a book? A character from the series 1990s hit series The Babysitter's Club had to do a book report on it. The glittering burn of culture is a wonderful thing!