Miss Garnet's Angel

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A story about an English spinster travelling to Venice who develops an overwhelming interest in religious art and Christian myths. I went into this with all my warning lights flashing: it's gonna be spiritual (and I'm not), "oh god, there's gonna be romance" (ew); and "she's gonna see angels, isn't she?" This was probably unfair to the author, but that hasn't stopped me before. Julia Garnet is sixty years old, emotionally repressed, sexually inexperienced and has spent her life in almost sacrificial frugality. She is also the amazed heir to her former - even more frugal - housemate's legacy. Harriet seems to have had a secret: a genius for investment! Who knew? Certainly not Julia Garnet.

One of a quartet of "London" novels republished by Harvill, Green's book is more curiosity than essential read. It is set during the Blitz and centres on Richard Roe, a diffident man who comes to London from a well-heeled country estate to volunteer for the Auxiliary Fire Service. Roe, the archetypal, tight-lipped English widower, who "wished that he had never made a point of not kissing Christopher", his five-year-old son, is contrasted with the professional fireman, Pye. Neither the war as whole, nor even the Blitz, impinges much on the narrative - both men are frighteningly at sea in personal emotional anguish - but fear hangs like a pall over this sombre novel. Miss Julia Garnet, spinster and virgin, travels to Venice after the death of her friend Harriet. She discovers more than solace there, something more akin to an awakening. It’s a beautiful premise and is artfully executed, and Venice is the ideal, sumptuous setting for this intriguing mix of stories that Julia’s tale entwines with – my favourite character is the wise and delightful Monsignore Giuseppe, whose presence brings a kindness and affability to the story which I really loved, but while some of the characters fall flat, Julia’s relationship with Venice itself (and the angel Raphael) never does. It is a book that tries to do a lot, but that’s okay because it largely succeeds. 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.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?

No one in any of my books is based on anyone —other than myself. All my characters are aspect on my own selves —and the more successful the character I would say the more unconscious the self. One marvellous feature of being a novelist is that it allows for the possibility of living unlived aspects of the personality —to explore these is part of the reward of writing.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.' 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. Introspective, gentle and beautiful are words that describe this. The main character Julia Garnet is an elderly lady who has held herself tightly controlled through most of her life, but upon the death of her friend and roommate through the past 30 years she embarks on a journey to Venice, where she is captured by its beauty and magic, and not least the angel Raphael, depicted in paintings and sculptures around the historical city, seems to have a special grasp on her. How do you feel about the popular critical and commercial practice today of sorting contemporary novels into tidy categories: women’s fiction, men’s fiction, gay fiction, romantic comedy, literary fiction, etc.? To what categories have you most often found Miss Garnet’s Angel assigned? The novel came out of me almost uninterrupted. But once I had written it I became fascinated with the origins of the story of Tobit and did much research on it —of which a fraction appears in the ‘Authors Note’. I discovered the story has strong Zoroastrian antecedents —and I became very enamoured of the Zoroastrians. It is a religion which, the more I learned of it the deeper its appeals to me. It still exists —and the Parsees are its main inheritors —but what attracts me to it most is its great stress on tolerance —especially religious tolerance, which all of us who have lived through recent troubles must agree has become an urgent necessity in our time. Something which occurred in many small ways throughout the writing of the book: I had written the Epiphany scene before I had realised that the Magi, who visit the Christ child at Epiphany, are for the tribe of the Medians who are Zoroastrian priests; then I had written the important scenes which occur on the bridge by the church of the Angel Raphael, before I had learned that the bridge is a key Zoroastrian image for the threshold of worlds. Perhaps most of all I loved uncovering the role of the dog i the Tobit story —dog’s were not at all popular with the Jews and Tobias’s dog is the only one who gets a good press in the Hebrew scriptures. This is almost certainly because the dog is part of the Zoroastrian element in the story, and for the Zoroastrians the dog was sacred —a psychopomp, one who leads the soul across the threshold of life and death.

Julia Garnet is a lovely creation-inspiring, affecting, charming, utterly believable. Is she based on any real-life models? Near the end of the novel, Julia encounters a young woman on a train named Saskia. As they talk, Julia experiences “the strangest sensation.” And later, Julia reflects that “the meeting had crystallized something for her.” What has happened here? What issues of identification, regret, and mutual recognition might Julia be coming to terms with in this scene? 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." A rich, moving, and satisfying tale of a woman engaged at last with the great mysteries of love and life. Beautifully wrought and impressively wise. 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]Julia Garnet is a thoroughly straightlaced and cautious elderly woman who was a schoolteacher and is now very recently retired. Her flatmate, Harriet, dies 2 days after they both retired, and the elderly cat, that has lived with them a good number of years, disappears. Julia's lifetime of caution is dulled and she decides on the spur of the moment to spend 6 months in Venice. Thus begins a journey where caution is gradually thrown to the wind, where she learns how to make friends, and discovers art, love and mystery.