Alice Fell

Alice Fell / Emma Tennant
London: Picador, 1982, c1980.
124 p.

I found this odd little book on my shelves with no memory of how it got there. Must have been on one of my second-hand shop browses. But I decided I would read this little book; the cover gives a strong hint of how surreal it is. 

This is a family that does not live in a gentle and comprehendable world. The writing here is very English of the 70s/80s -- experimental, surreal, rushing forward with imagery all mixed up and the meaning slightly obscured. 

Alice is our main character; her prebirth thoughts and her infant impressions take up quite a lot of this short book. Her later, supposedly conscious life, takes up much less and the years are rushed through. There is a throughline of history and time passing, from the family portraits on the walls to memories and the thin membrane between reality and remembrance. It's like a long poem in a way, in which some moments are clear and some are just language playing. 

I sort of liked it. There were lines and images that were striking; there were thoughts of women's roles and potentiality that were also interesting for the reader. However, overall it gave me a muddled impression and at times I wasn't sure what I was reading -- and what's more, I didn't feel the desire to go back and puzzle it out. The characters are vague and dreamy for the most part and I couldn't clearly grasp where one ended and another began (kind of the point, in a way). It was a book full of impression and illusion, and I appreciated some of it, but in the end it didn't catch my interest enough to be all that memorable. I probably won't try another of her books.