Christmas Gift Guide: In the Bleak Midwinter
It’s cold outside, everyone’s playing Christmas songs far too early and the Wikileaks are putting any festive jaunts to North Korea into serious disrepute. Kind of get the feeling it’s the worst Winter ever? Wrong!
Here’s our list of some of the glummest Christmases and frostiest winters literature’s fair hand has dutifully penned. So, this Christmas, why not bestow upon a loved one a tome offering a little perspective? For that, truly, is the greatest gift of all…
Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
Morvern awakes one morning approaching Christmas to find her boyfriend has cut his throat and is lying dead in the kitchen. Happy holidays!
Not one to let a little suicide spoil her festive frolicks, Morvern does the obvious thing any self-sufficient woman in her shoes might do: she passes off her boyfriend’s unpublished manuscript as her own and uses the book advance for a bit of a holiday.
It occasionally veers into the territory of ‘whoah crazy hedonism, but like, we’re sad inside,’ but Morvern is written with such warmth and affection you’ll find yourself admiring her strength, strange moral compass and sheer chutzpah. Buy it from Amazon for £5.22.
Ice by Anna Kavan
Don’t you just hate it when an obsessive lover chases you through time and varying frozen dystopic cityscapes just so he can be a total bastard when he eventually catches up with you?
An unnamed narrator and a man known simply as The Warden chase The Girl across an apparently post-apocalyptic landscape whilst navigating the encroaching ice.
Whether the ice is a metaphor for patriarchal oppression, conflict or Kavan’s own well documented drug addiction is unclear, but Kavan’s dreamy chiaroscuro landscapes rings oddly familiar. Buy it from Amazon for £8.99.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Should you wish to thoroughly send yourself under this Christmas (and why would you not?) a swift read of The Road should neatly accomplish this.
Heading south for milder climes down the aforementioned road in order to survive another chilling winter, The Road has all the cheery tropes of any festive read, including cannibalism and the apocalypse.
McCarthy’s descriptions of feeble attempts to keep warm on the glacial nights will have you shivering long after you’ve turned the final page. Buy it for £4 from Amazon.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Centred around a group of precocious Classics students at a fictional Vermont college and the events that lead to one of their murders.
The narrator, downbeat idealist Richard, spends a winter college break seemingly ostracised from the group in an unheated room above his holiday job, narrowly avoiding death from exposure and suffering from pneumonia.
Although not the crux of the novel, thanks to the snappy prose this remains the most memorably powerful portion of it. But for something truly icy, take a peek at the portrait of the author on the inside cover. Buy it from Amazon for £5.17.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” So begins Alcott’s classic novel as the little women contemplate a poverty-stricken Christmas.
But these are no ordinary little women, oh no, and (after a requisite lament) they decide to view their meagre Christmas as an exercise in diligent self-sacrifice.
Banding together like true rebel grrrls of yore – Alcott’s women encapsulate a Christmas spirit devoid of materialism and money. Not so bleak after all. Get it from Amazon for £8.75.
Lara Williams
I love Anna Kavan, and also Morvern Callar. If winter makes you long for snowy scenes and eccentric, intimate narration, may I also recommend Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, about a fascinating emotional conflict between Katri, a determined young woman who has raised her brother, and Anna Aemlin, a celebrated illustrator. It’s very funny, very weird and all about how winter makes us act strangely.
For snow-poetry, check out Kristina Ehin (Estonia) and Aase Berg (Sweden) (read more about their work at: http://deliriumslibrary.blogspot.com/2010/11/fairy-bog-mothers-aase-berg-remainland.html)
Thanks so much for the comment, Sophie, will definitely be investigating all of those. For another shivery read, Shane Jones’ Light Boxes (which we reviewed on here a while back) is beautiful and strange, but makes you want a blanket and a hot chocolate to accompany it!
I shall add Morvern Callar and Ice to my Christmas list…I’m not sure I’m up to The Road!
My own favourite icy read is Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, which is beautiful and spare and strange and so thoroughly evokes its snowbound setting that I wanted to turn the heating on despite reading it in the height of summer.
Great minds think alike, Kate, Sophie recommended that one too but her comment was sat in a queue waiting to be moderated! I haven’t read Ice but can recommend adding Anna Kavan, I loved Sleep Has His House.
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Oh just that bit in the Secret History where he’s living in the loft and there that hole in the roof where the snow falls through forming a perfect square of snow below….. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee thanks Jane you’ve got me squeeling the sqee of the fangirl just *thinking* about it!
I love The Secret History *so* much. I re-read it at least once every six months, and still find new things to love every time…