In recasting the marionettist or puppeteer motif, Stead could draw on an extensive tradition that used the puppet theatre as a metaphor for commenting on human existence and authorship.
... as in the first lines of Seven Poor Men of Sydney, she mates the mythic with the actual. In this book the mythic is to the fore.
Only ordinary character in the book is Joseph, whose very ordinariness lights up the grotesque genius of his companions
In the 1930s, the Latin Cafe, run by Madam Helen Pura, was a very cosmopolitan venue, serving excellent European cuisine ... Celebrities and some high-powered elites were also fond of the venue, with the café so famous that it even appeared in Christina Stead's novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney, lightly disguised as the 'Roman Cafe'.
She whips the reader through the landscape with the same certainty that Ann Radcliff shows in The Mysteries of Udolpho - that consuming, roaming eye, searching for contrasts.
Against the realistic but poetically envisaged background of yesterday's Paris, in a political climate heavy with the Stavisky scandals and the riots of Feb. 6, 1934, swarms a crowd of fantastic figures in a kind of Lutetian Lupercalia.
For the first time Stead has decided to lead the reader into the landscape of the book through the eyes of a single character ... which makes this opening, I think, more urgent, less leisurely, than the openings of the two books that came before.
In House of All Nations, it is this very lack of judgment that in collusion with her giddy, caustic humor, allows Stead to probe so deeply.
For this book is also a primer for writers not in the how to sense but more like the scale Everest sense. That is one human being does something you yourself know it would almost be impossible for you to emulate.
Unlike most novelists of financial high life, Author Stead gives the complex details of shady transactions, banking manipulations, stock transfers, wheat deals, makes brilliant sense of gigantic currency speculations, of how the Bertillons make millions in bear operations on Kreuger stocks.
This is a long, unfathomably static but often exhilarating novel about money. There are 104 chapters, at least as many characters, and dialogue that runs on and on like ticker tape.
It may put off admirers of that indelible horror story of family life [The Man Who Loved Children] for its matter is cold and abstract as the other is visceral and intimate.
Is it still true, as Stead wrote, that "I know, as well as you do, that no banker can afford to have his books looked into"? Certainly leading banks still enjoy considerable leeway in their reporting, and seem to acknowledge risks and losses as they see fit.
[Brigid] Rooney says. "For a penetrating anatomy of the corruptions of high finance, the mystery of the market and voodoo economics, there's no going past Stead's epic satire. It should be required reading for any treasurer or finance minister."
The idea that a man would value his health because, "He's afraid to lose his money" - the flow of life the same as the flow of cash - is not something she's put here idly.
The main trouble is that Miss Stead has chosen to write about the most loathsome and amoral characters that can be dredged up from the cocktail bars and brokerage houses of New York.
Several of the book's preoccupations are summed up in that opening: people are measured by their monetary worth and the kind of show they can afford to put on.
The best of them, 33-year-old Edward, a kindly fellow of no particular occupation, startles the family by marrying an actress. This kind of thing is just what the Massines need, Novelist Stead implies.
This is like notes for a novel; this hasn't jelled
Library Fashionista: c1951, first edition, Little , Brown and Co.,1952. Jacket design by George Salter. Thank you!
The Rabelaisian pile-up concludes with the kind of nursery-rhyme repetition that Charles Dickens (king of abundance) used to do so well
Perhaps Christina Stead's latest book should not be reviewed, but exorcised.
Creating moments like these requires pages and pages of preparation. Stead, by this time an experienced novelist, knew exactly the effects she wanted and she does it beautifully.
The mix of characters reveals a mixture of hope and aspiration along with the opposite; it presents a multilayered picture of life but not one that really held my attention.
A crisp opening, so careful to label and explain everything that it seems mocking, or ridiculously jaunty
The opening lines set up a group of men who will act throughout the story as her opposites, normal members of society who are everything she isn't
It is this pattern of self-inflicted frustration that gives The Little Hotel its coherence and links to earlier Stead novels like The House of All Nations (1938) ... and The Man Who Loved Children (1940), a chronicle of domestic agony that Clifton Fadiman once described as "Little Women rewritten by a demon."
Women are cast in a very unflattering light: dependant, inane, trivial and bitchy. Mrs Bonnard wants a friend, but there are none to be had.
There is little action in the novel, and what there is is minor. Miss Stead is not a novelist of incident but of character.
In addition, she manages to make a Marxist perspective seem like an asset to realism rather than an embarrassing inconsistency.
In a letter Stead once complained that she couldn't write "positive" characters. It was not her talent. Aside from the hotel owner no one here comes off as very pleasant, and even she is less a saint than a practical businesswomen. Reprehensible characters, sick, neurotic, or insane, Stead had a special gift for. The joy of The Little Hotel lies in her little portraits.
Unusually for Stead, in The Little Hotel we hear less of her characters’ speeches than we might like. The characters and their pasts are gradually revealed, with much left open to our imaginations. This is a subtle novel, a term rarely applied to Stead.
Madame Bonnard to some extent sits above it all, or at the centre.
Like the title of the novel, Eleanor's life is divided. She thinks of herself always enclosed in parentheses.
I have the later green edition and think that there is a certain mischievousness about the woman on the front of that version which encapsulates Eleanor entirely.
Sympathy is not a necessary virtue in an excellent writer. In Miss Herbert, however, Stead reveals a touch of the sadist.
Miss Herbert is written in a plain tone, or plain when you compare it to the baroque inventions of the early books
This is wonderful material, wonderfully suited to Stead's great gifts, and much of the scene, extremely difficult to translate into fiction, is wonderfully done.
In its large outline the book falters, however, and since Stead has never failed before, it is reasonable to look for explanations in the book's curious history.
Her chief fault here is not knowing when to stop, although she might defend this excess in a novel about excessive people.
The Howards are not always admirable, but they are good company.
Stead shows Emily and Stephen's tragedy as that of a generation, not of an ideology; this novel condemns corrupt Marxists, not Marxism
Her fictional character incorporates the laughing apocalypse, representing even as she displaces not only the despair and horror of the postwar years, but also, it would seem, the difficulty for a generation of committed Marxists of reconciling with their beliefs the mounting evidence of Soviet atrocities.
Hollywood provided Emily and Stephen’s first lesson in political reality, where they learned that the Party can be the enemy. Their second major political lesson is learned in postwar Europe, and it is one that they cannot just move continents to escape: that collaboration is everywhere, and may be the condition of survival.
The problem, Stead thought, was that the talent Americans had, the passion and drive which had brought them so far, was of little use in the face of the Crash, the Depression and the Cold War
Geering's opening sentence is happy, adventurous, while Stead's delivers the reader into a business atmosphere.
Ocean of Story ... does challenge us to think biographically about the sources of her fiction.
She freely mixes dialogue, narration and analysis without subordinating motivation (the spirit) to description (matter); rather, she maintains both on an equal, anarchic footing.
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