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Insight
JANE GARDAM ON MARRIAGE
Once when I was a newly-wed, I sat next to a lady I didn’t
know at a dinner party. I told her about our wedding, and
her response was rather surly. Getting married was a piece
of cake, she felt. It was the long years after that counted.
Staying together was the real trick. I was a bit thrown by
her directness at the time, and it wasn’t until years later
that I actually understood what she meant: That being in
love isn’t a big deal. The important thing is to perpetuate
that love in a nice relationship. I later read about this
somewhat blunt life lesson in The Man in the Wooden Hat
by British author, Jane Gardam. The main character in this
novel (the second part of a trilogy) is Betty Macintosh, a
young woman from the British upper class who was born
in the Chinese city of Tianjin in the early 20th century. She
marries the lawyer Edward Feathers and spends her life in
the British colonies and England.
Married life is not always easy. Betty has a strong desire
to have children, but is unable to. Her husband is a
workaholic and she is secretly in love with Edward’s
colleague, who has the son she was never able to have.
For Betty, love isn’t a romantic fairy tale, but a path in life
that you simply have to walk. The relationship is a pathway
you enjoy now and then, and which sometimes dumps
you out on the side of the road so you can take a
bumpier one.
Just before Betty dies at an old age, she realizes how
much she loves the man she spent her life with. She sees
Edward in the garden, pretending to shoot birds with his
cane. She thinks that he’s getting a bit strange, that it’s too
late to leave him. For me, this love was like so many
marriages; not a fairy tale, but true love.DANIEL KEHLMANN ON FEARS
It is obvious from the outset that there is something fishy
about the remote Airbnb home Austrian-German author
Daniel Kehlmann describes in the novella, You Should
Have Left. In the book, the reader goes on a journey with
Susanna and her husband, the first-person narrator; the
couple are struggling with problems in their relationship
and the husband is reeling from it all. His state of mind is
portrayed dizzyingly in the book. Susanna describes how
the couple gets lost on the way to the bedroom while
getting to know the house, and how they end up in a
laundry room. A vacuum cleaner falls, and the pair listens
with bated breath as everything remains quiet. >SELF-HELP BOOKS MAY BE EVERYWHERE, BUT JOURNALIST
MARISKA JANSEN FINDS SHE GAINS HER BEST INSIGHTS FROM
NOVELS. SOME BOOKS TAUGHT HER THINGS THAT HAVE ALWAYS
STAYED WITH HER (PROCEED WITH CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD).Lessons
Life
Novels
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