SOME WORDS ABOUT ROSE TREMAIN, by Elisa Sola
Rose Tremain was born on August 2nd, 1943. Nowadays, she
is 81 years old. She was born as Rosemary Jane Thomson, but she married John
Tremain in 1971, and they had a daughter. The marriage lasted about five years,
and she remarried the theatre director Jonathan Dudley. This marriage lasted
nine years. Since 1992 she is with Richard Holmes.
She was educated
at Francis Holland School, Crofton Grange School, the Sorbonne (1961-1962) and
the University of East Anglia (BA, English Literature), with which she has been
very linked professionally, because she taught creative writing in this University
from 1988 to 1995, and she became Chancellor in 2013. She has written three
collections of short stories and nine novels, and she is best known as a
historical novelist, who approaches her subjects “from unexpected angles,
concentrating her attention on unglamorous outsiders”. When she was young, she
experienced an epiphany: “I remember standing in the middle of a very beautiful
hayfield with the sun going down and thinking that I didn’t want just to
describe how beautiful I thought that place was, but I wanted to write down all
my feelings about it, and then try to make some equation between that place and
what I felt about it, and what hopes I had for my own life. I can remember the
intensity of it…, and it seemed to me then that my life would be a life in
which this process of describing and identifying feelings would play a part.”
Although she knew that she was a writer very early, she didn’t publish any
fictions until she was 33. In an interview about her work, she explains that
she avoids the autobiographical fiction, because she is not interested in
writing about herself, although there are aspects of her life in all of her
novels. What she wants to show are the sensations, the emotions experienced by
her protagonists. In this sense, she did many interviews with Polish workers in
her neighbourhood, and not so much to steal the stories of their lives, but to
understand what they have felt in the case of so many adversities. About the
documentation for her historical novels, she says that she has to do it in such
a way that it doesn’t seem like it, the data has to be digested and integrate
into the novel naturally. Tremain has judged the Booker prize twice, in 1988
and 2000, and makes no secret of the fact that she would love to win it.
SOME LINKS:
An article:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview5
An interview to Rose
Tremain:
SUMMARY
During a business lunch, a wealthy financier, elderly
and disabled, explains the relationship he has with his wife and express some
reflections about the meaning of his life and about his behaviour. The anecdote
takes place in a luxurious French restaurant in London, in a sunny morning in
May, and the protagonists are two couples of two businessmen and their wives.
This framework is the pretext that allows the protagonist to tell the story of
his intimate life, always from his unique point of view. The literary device
used is the description of the present meal and the mixing of the memories of
the past. The protagonist, named Hubert (the only character in the story whose
name we know and the only one who narrates, because the story is written in the
first person), tells us that he is a rich financier who has many investments in
precious metals, and we know that his work gives him great satisfaction - even
physical. We can deduce that business has been the centre of his life (“I
hope you’re happy in your work” is the advice he gives to the young financier,
as if it were a testament).
Throughout the narration we realize that the
protagonist had a stroke that left him paralysed and that he has many mobility
and speech problems, which gives more strength and authenticity to his
reflections, because he makes them from pain and from the truth of his life, as if
passing an account review.
The character that is best described is that of his
wife, as the title of the story announces. He tells us right away that his wife
doesn’t love him and has always been with him for money. He tells us that they
met in Paris, and that she was a very poor white Russian, and she agreed to be
with him for money (“I’ll fuck for money”). The white Russian is addicted to
luxury, jewels, wine, opera and ballet, and she is described as a superficial,
selfish and domineering person.
We deduce that they have a toxic relationship of
dependence on each other: he is emotionally and physically dependent on her
(physically: “he married her because he began to need her body” / emotionally:
“he, obediently, moved out to the child’s room”). On the other hand, she is
financially dependent on him, but also dependent on his contempt for him. She
seems to enjoy ignoring him (“without looking at me, she puts my glass down in
front of me”, “I exist only in the corner of her eye”), not letting anyone help
him “don’t help him!”...
The story is built on oppositions, which are loaded with meaning and which help to emphasize the message: the young couple and the old couple, the white Russian (his wife) and the wife of the young financier, Toomin Valley before (fertile and rainy) and Toomin Valley now (immense desert), as a metaphor for his own life, the young woman’s freckles and his old man’s spots on his skin (“his blotched hand with oddly and repulsive stains”), the dark mouth of his wife (“why are your lips this terrible colour these days?”, “the colour of claret”) and the frank smile of the young woman (“freshly peeled teeth and a laugh”) ...
There are also very powerful images that act as
symbols of the sexual relationship: the oysters they eat (“she sucks an oyster
into her dark mouth”), the scallops “saffron yellow and orange”, warm colours
that lead us to female sex, and the author goes on into this metaphor
explaining that the flesh of the scallop is firm and soft “like a woman’s thigh
when it is young”. During the banquet, he’s reliving moments of his sexual
relationship, having in front of him the voracity of his wife (“She is drinking
quite fast”) and the tenderness of the young couple. Above all, the difference
between the two women stands out: “She is drinking quite fast” (his wife) in
front of the tenderness of the young Australian wife. The comparison highlights
the difference between the two women.
The protagonist approaches the relationship with his wife as just another business. He marries her to decorate his life: “her body, the white and the gold of her (the importance of colours to define people!), I thought, will ornament my life”, but we see that he is completely hooked in this relationship, a relationship that he lives in silence; “I wanted to brush her gold hair and hold it against my face, but I didn’t ask her if I could do this because I was afraid she would say: ‘you can do it for money’”. And silence or lack of communication is the essential element at the end of the story. In the last paragraph, the narration takes an unexpected turn. From decrepitude, but with lucidity, he stops looking for reasons for his heartbreak outside, and does an exercise in self-criticism. The protagonist seems to realize that what would have given meaning to his life is love, symbolized by the pair of young Australians, “with their fingers touching...”, “into the private moments together is crammed all that we ask for life”. And he laments that she never loved him, asking the big question, “Why did she never love me?” And he finds the answer in his silence and in the hardness of his words, a twist of script that we might not have expected, but which is very instructive. How many times should we stop complaining about the behaviour of others to start looking inside ourselves? This mea culpa has surprised us.
We have missed the point of view of his wife, who
looks for the meaning of life in art, in opera and classical ballet, and she
does not find it. How would the story be told by his wife?
QUESTIONS
-The financier thinks: “If she loved me, she probably
wouldn’t mind wiping my arse.” What is your opinion about this?
-Do you think theirs is a toxic relationship? Why?
-How do you react when some invalid / stammerer / …
needs some help? What is it the best behaviour towards them?
-Have you seen the film Indecent Proposal? Do you
think everybody has a price?
-Have you written your last orders? Do you think everyone has to do it?
-What can do a wife to stop being only a wife?
-How do you know when somebody is a snob? Is his wife
a snob? How do you know?
-According to your mind, why does she like Don
Giovanni so much?
-Do you think marriages between sex workers and their
costumers are good matches?
-What does the last sentence (“the answer comes from deep
underground: it’s the hardness of my words”) mean for you?
Why does the narrator use the adjective “white” to describe his Russian wife?
VOCABULARY
assets, dabbing, prancing, riff-raffy, bean pole, pavement,
scallops, cooped up, scorching, gritty, escarpment, still-life, trundled