04/04/2022
Two-time Booker winner Mantel (Wolf Hall) departs from the broad canvas of Tudor history for a revelatory collection drawing on her childhood in a northern English moorland village. Several center on fraught relationships with parents and stepparents. “You should not judge your parents,” says the narrator, twice, in “Giving up the Ghost.” Mantel quotes Thucydides one moment, Shakespeare the next, or St. Augustine, and high and low fit together comfortably in “Curved Is the Line of Beauty,” in which the narrator remembers seeing the Arthur O’Shaughnessy poem referenced in the title on a jar as a child, which brings solace during a tough time ruled by Catholic guilt and limited means (“we continued to live in one of those houses where there was never any money, and doors were slammed hard”). In “The Clean Slate,” which begins with the narrator working on her family tree with her mother, the narrator reflects memorably on history: “I distrust anecdote. I like to understand history through figures and percentages of these figures, through knowing the price of coal and the price of corn.... I like to be free, so far as I can, from the tyranny of interpretation.” Throughout, the author’s humanity shines through. (June)
Praise for Learning to Talk
“Part of her consistent brilliance lies in her attention to ghosts and mortgages, the light on the moors and 1980s educational policy, adolescent self-discovery and irregular accounting. These stories hold worlds as wide as those of her longest novels.”
—Sarah Moss, The New York Times Book Review
“Those who’ve delighted for decades in Mantel’s fiction revel in her chameleonlike facility with language, her ability effortlessly to evoke wildly diverse characters, settings, and atmospheres . . . . The stories here enable us the more fully to appreciate Mantel’s wide-ranging gifts . . . . The overall effect of the collection is of a palimpsest, the powerfully atmospheric evocation of an unhappy mid-twentieth-century childhood in northern England.”
—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
“It’s a testament to Mantel’s brilliance as an author that even though the moments in these stories are subtle, the book somehow feels epic in its own way…And the result is magnificent. Learning to Talk is a lovely book, quiet but intense in its own way, and it proves—once again—that Mantel is one of the finest English-language authors working today.”
—NPR
“Mantel brings England alive, writing with detail and intellect.”
—Time
“Elegant, pitch-perfect sentences…Here is a writer who can do anything, anytime, anywhere.”
—Oprah Daily
“Although best known for her long novels, Mantel has also excelled at short, intensely atmospheric books…and here that economy shines, as when she homes in on the telling detail with surgical precision…Mantel was born a poor Northern girl, but she was raised to be a writer who would destroy kingdoms.”
—The Boston Globe
“Wish Mantel’s Wolf Hall (award-winning, bestselling trilogy) had never come to an end? You’ll enjoy her new collection of short stories.”
—CNN
“Puts all of the author’s skill and style on display…”
—Town & Country
Praise for Books by Hilary Mantel
“She is our literary Michelangelo.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Every page is rich with insight...soul-deep characterization and cutting observational skill.”
—USA Today
“Deep, suspenseful, chewy, complex and utterly transporting—truly a full banquet.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, Wall Street Journal Magazine
“Sumptuous prose.”
—The New Yorker
“A treasure on every page.”
—The Times (UK)
“Majestic and often breathtakingly poetic…the writing comes as close to poetry as prose ever may.”
—Simon Schama, Financial Times
★ 03/01/2022
"People's lives have become uncomfortable and insecure, and their future has been taken away," says one character in this expertly crafted collection from two-time Booker Prize winner Mantel, whose loosely autobiographical stories capture ground-down 1960s Britain. Still, Mantel doesn't focus on financial stress or even the stubborn snobbery revealed in the title story, whose young heroine has landed at a posh school and spends years taking elocution lessons. Instead, Mantel clarifies the significance of ordinary lives, showing how each of us is a fuse (burning faster or slower) and how each of us can hurt. A young man finally acknowledges the secrets of his childhood, even as he recalls a troubling neighbor, now dead among "the mauled lettuce rows, out of grief and bewilderment and iron deficiency." A boy realizes that a beloved but difficult dog has been destroyed and that he must remain stoic in the face of another pet's disappearance. A naïve young woman initially fails to grasp that it's not spooks but something more sinister raiding the fading department store where her mother is ambitiously pursuing a career. VERDICT A highly recommended collection quietly probing our deep, everyday sorrows.
The multiple performances in this audiobook are uniformly adept, providing listeners the disarming experience of adults unflinchingly looking back at childhood. Mantel's seven short stories capture English childhood with an adult’s reflective capacity and critical eye. The result is not quite a memoir; rather, it sounds like variations on the author's memories. Patrick Moy sets the tone while delivering the opening story of a mother and her various relationships after the father of her children leaves. "Learning to Talk" captures the vulnerability of a young student who struggles with elocution lessons; in "Third Floor Rising," an older child watches her mother at her job and observes how things work there. The collection is an enveloping listening experience devoid of sentimentality. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2022-03-25
Reflections on an enigmatic childhood.
In seven deftly crafted stories that she calls “autoscopic” rather than autobiographical, two-time Man Booker Prize winner Mantel takes a “distant, elevated perspective” on her life growing up in the English Midlands region. Organized chronologically, most of the stories are narrated by a woman evolving an increasingly astute perception of her own reality and the truths obscured by family myths and lies. “All the tales arose out of questions I asked myself about my early years,” Mantel writes in her preface. “I cannot say that by sliding my life into a fictional form I was solving puzzles—but at least I was pushing the pieces about.” They read, then, as lightly fictionalized memoir. In fact, the last story, “Giving Up the Ghost,” acknowledges the author's memoir of the same title, published in 2003. Mantel’s family situation was peculiar: When she was about 7, her mother moved her lover into the house that she shared with her husband. For the next four years, Mantel lived with two fathers, aware of gossip about her mother’s scandalous behavior. Finally, her father left. In “Curved Is the Line of Beauty,” the lover is called Jack, with “sunburned skin and muscles beneath his shirt. He was your definition of a man, if a man was what caused alarm and shattered the peace.” Growing up was hardly peaceful: In “Learning To Talk” (“true save one or two real-life details”), the 13-year-old narrator is sent for elocution lessons, her provincial accent seen as a liability: “People were not supposed to worry about their accents, but they did worry, and tried to adapt their voices—otherwise they found themselves treated with a conscious cheeriness, as if they were bereaved or slightly deformed.” Mantel’s narrators are melancholy or resentful, misunderstood or ignored, vulnerable and cynical. “Mercy,” one observes, “was a theory that I had not seen in operation.”
Sharp, unsentimental tales from a writer haunted by her past.
