There’s plenty of historical drama in Robert Harris’s latest novel, but the events that led Britain into the carnage of World War I serve mainly as a backdrop for the intimate maneuverings in PRECIPICE (Harper, 464 pp., $30). At its center is the actual clandestine liaison between the country’s 61-year-old prime minister, Herbert Asquith, and a 26-year-old aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, who became his sounding board and confidante as he faced mounting hostilities both within his government and throughout Europe.
Harris notes at the outset that all the letters from Asquith quoted in his text are authentic documents. Around them Harris has deftly sketched his own portrayals of Asquith, Stanley and their social circle, adding invented correspondence from Stanley to Asquith as well as an invented Special Branch detective who finds himself deep in an “off the books” investigation after copies of classified Foreign Office telegrams — meant to be distributed only to a few select ministers — start turning up in decidedly insecure locations. Going undercover at the Stanleys’ Welsh estate, then covertly reading Venetia’s mail, he becomes an increasingly uncomfortable voyeur, disturbed by the Asquith letters’ “bizarre mixture of secret military intelligence and passionate declarations of love.” Will he be tempted to intervene? Or will Venetia, sensing the danger of her position, take action on her own?
Independence is the double-edged sword of Peggy Guggenheim’s existence: seemingly granted by her inherited fortune but denied by the expectations surrounding the Guggenheim name and her own insecurities. At least that’s the impression you get from PEGGY (Random House, 384 pp., $29), a sympathetic first-person narrative left unfinished at her death in 2022 by Rebecca Godfrey and completed by her friend Leslie Jamison.
The result of what Jamison calls their “posthumous collaboration” is an affecting rendition of Guggenheim’s life from her girlhood in New York through the 1938 establishment of her Surrealist gallery in London. Wrenching herself from a deeply disapproving family and then from a dissolute husband who was pleased to be known as the King of Bohemia, she gives a convincing account of her struggles to live on her own terms. But it’s the details of various encounters that best serve her argument: financing Emma Goldman’s efforts to write a memoir by installing her in a St. Tropez cottage, where Goldman gratefully feeds Peggy homemade gefilte fish and offers romantic advice; shacking up for two sublime weeks in a borrowed Paris flat with Samuel Beckett, “one of the only people who ever saw me as more than a spoiled heiress … who thought I could do something that mattered.”
If Felice Bauer is seen at all by literary historians, it’s simply as the recipient of more than 500 letters from her former fiancé, Franz Kafka. In Alex Zucker’s translation of LIFE AFTER KAFKA (Bellevue Literary Press, 256 pp., paper, $17.99), the Czech novelist Magdaléna Platzová mixes an account of her own attempts to track down her subject with fictional renditions of Felice’s relentlessly bourgeois (and intensely discreet) married life in pre-World War II Switzerland and postwar California, where she sold knitting supplies and baked cookies to make ends meet. Platzová’s research extends to the next generation and to venues as varied as 1950s Tel Aviv, the 21st-century Hudson Valley and a remote Italian village in 1945.
“Who,” Platzová asks, “was the woman a generation of Kafka fans knew only as a lover of meaty dishes, heavy furniture and precisely set watches?” The figure that emerges is still a tantalizing mystery, both to Platzová and to Bauer’s descendants, for whom her Kafka connection remains enigmatic. When he finally grants Platzová an interview, Bauer’s now elderly son says it’s a shame Kafka appears to have destroyed all his mother’s letters: “I’d have liked to know more about her.”
In Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson’s new translation of Machado de Assis’ 1891 novel, QUINCAS BORBA (Liveright, 368 pp., $29.99), ignorance of the pitfalls of late-1860s Rio de Janeiro society spells disaster and high comedy for an unsophisticated provincial schoolteacher. After nursing the title character through his final illness, Rubião becomes this wealthy philosopher’s heir, with the sole provision that he care for the man’s pet dog, also named Quincas Borba, as devotedly as he once tended its owner.
Tempted by big-city life — not to mention the charms of a flirtatious, upwardly mobile young woman — Rubião is swiftly established as a source of income for a swarm of hangers-on, who dine at his lavishly furnished mansion even when he has gone out for the evening. Among Rubião’s new friends are the avaricious husband of his not-very-cooperative love object and an argumentative aspiring politician with a perpetually underfunded newspaper. As a rich bachelor, Rubião is also obvious prey for those with an instinct for matchmaking. Bolstered by his apparent success in his new milieu, “Rubião, though he may have lacked ideas, now had imagination.” But will anyone save him when his fantasies drift toward madness?
The post 4 Novels Deliver a Heady Mix of Fact and Fiction appeared first on New York Times.
