Unpicking the past while there is still time
The Lupo Stick
Amazon, £8.99
Reviewed by Madeleine Kingsley
AVERITABLE A-Z of emotions flow from Valerie Blumenthal’s fingertips. Her new novel, The Lupo Stick, is a portrait of sixtysomething Graziella, Sicilian émigrée to Oxfordshire, now spilling her life story (with all its long-held sorrows, secrets and bittersweet elation) to her muchloved daughter, Rosa.
At 13, Graziella’s simple yet secure childhood on Isola delle Pecore ended in an instant, when her chicken-vendor parents died in a freak accident: their cart somersaulted over a cliff when the mule pulling it stumbled on a stone.
Taken in by relatives — a viciously corrupt mayor and his wife — Graziella is deprived of love, education and the opportunity to thrive. Becoming a single mother to Rosa (father unknown), Graziella is also scorned by most of her community who, if not ignorant, are shamefully hypocritical.
Her plight could come straight from a Grimm’s fairytale, but there is no rescue from magic key or melted icicle. Only through her own supremely private grace and determination, will Graziella overcome anguish to achieve prosperity, revenge and the longlost love that leads her to rural England, where she runs an animal sanctuary.
This is a morality drama of resilience and revelation. It’s also a meditation on identity
Valerie Blumenthal — about who we become when we find ourselves, only to lose that self again: at the heart of The Lupo Stick is the fact that Graziella has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She can only remember and recount her own harrowing past in uncertain, possibly unreliable, fits and starts.
So Rosa faces a race against time to unlock the full story before it is lost to a tangle of plaque in the brain. Meanwhile, the precious mother/ daughter relationship requires recalibrating amid Rosa’s irritation and anxiety, her mother’s unpredictable moods and mem- ory lapses. Loss and lost control are twin terrors of dementia. Blumenthal’s gift is to demonstrate that, despite her fragmenting world, Graziella’s spark and spirit remain essentially intact.
Just as her narrative leaves its most searing disclosure to last, so it feels fitting to commend Blumenthal’s elegant epic before making it known that she herself has PCA, the same earlyonset form of Alzheimer’s as her heroine — and the same as afflicted author Terry Pratchett.
You would never guess from her stylistic finesse and prose artistry that Blumenthal — a long-established novelist — struggles to butter bread and not the plate, or that letters dance before her as she types. This novel took six years to complete: a labour of love stymied by setbacks, it is all the more richly remarkable for that.
Madeleine Kingsley is a freelance writer and reviewer
£9.99) life seems truer among the homeless, Arabs, Eritreans, Ethiopians and Sudanese refugees.
In the background, bombs fall, politics fail, peace dies. This is a dark novel evok- ing the restlessness of a country whose endless wars have invaded the soul of the protagonists. It is serious and well-intentioned but, for me, the characters remain cold and impenetrable.
By contrast, Jan Shure’s novel, If Not
(Amazon, £9.99) expresses romantic sensuality: tanned bodies, silky textures, expensive restaurants, Porsches, Bond Street glamour — all the emblems of a sex-and-shopping novel.
There is a more serious side, however. Two Cambridge students fall in love. He is
Jewish, she is not and their affair is shadowed by parental rejection and spectres of the Holocaust.
Events force them to move on, bring- ing another layer of tragedy and guilt. Shure sustains the tension, driving the story towards a stark and desperate resolution.
Paul Boorstin, in his novel, David and the Philistine Woman (Top Hat books, £13.99) introduces a new character to the biblical story — Goliath’s bride. This is no Bride of Dracula story and the dénoument is always going to be the final face-off between the Philistine’s blood-thirsty giant Goliath, and his unlikely challenger, the gentle and introspective Israelite, David, to whom Israel’s leadership is promised by prophecy.
But when
Nara, the Philistine blacksmith’s powerful daughter, is chosen as the king’s bride and must produce a son on pain of death, the familiar plot is given another spin. The novel is a gripping read, although weighed down by a somewhat portentous prose style. But it conveys a vivid sense of Goliath’s Philistine stronghold — its smell of pork, endless animal sacrifice, its colour and its cruelty.
GLORIA TESSLER Julian Furman Jan Shure Paul Boorstin