The Bloater: The brilliantly original rediscovered classic comedy of manners

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Still aware of some supernatural occurrences, she embarked on an act that saddened her family when they learned of it after her death: she decided to destroy her priceless collection of oriental treasures. A bequest from an aunt by marriage, they were "graven images" that had to be burned by fire, according to the second commandment. Retrieving the five suitcases from London, she filled two garden incinerators with more than 40 artefacts, itemised in a handwritten list titled "The burning of some idols (11 August 1981)", and set fire to them. These included Chinese silk robes, carved Chinese letter seals and other artefacts of marble, terracotta, porcelain, plaster, mother of pearl, ivory, wood and stone, from China, Korea, Japan, Africa, Greece, Bali and Persia. She smashed and hammered at the Tang and Sung figures until she got the remnants down to "dog-biscuit size". In The New Yorker, writer and critic Audrey Wollen describes a substantial comic achievement—this is from a 2023 Tonks reassessment: "All of The Bloater, however—every single sentence—is funny." [13] Publications [ edit ] Poetry [ edit ] She mellowed in her more peaceful later years, and is said to have been much loved by staff at the Days hotel just around the corner from her house, where she went to have Christmas dinner every year on her own. She even made one friend there, who remembers her as kind, happy and always laughing. Finally, in November 2012, she wrote to a dearly loved cousin she had cut off years before to apologise: "I was boxed up, under the most frightful, frightful mental pressure. I was not myself. All my decisions were wrong, inhuman, appalling. Give me time, please, I long to explain it to you." But that was the last letter. This is one of those cases when the author’s own story may actually be more interesting than her novel.

As our hosts shine the spotlight on strange, funny and sometimes disturbing novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Rosemary Tonks and David Foster Wallace, listeners are invited to inhabit their eccentric worlds - gaining a deeper understanding of their workings and the unique literary minds that created them. In 1970 though, she converted to Fundamentalist Christianity and did her best, even through the courts, to remove her novels, and much of her poetry, from sale, and the public eye generally. Following this, she lived as a hermit, refusing to use a telephone or indeed any other means of communication with even friends and family. I just hate that she tells him he smells. It makes me so sad. The way he deflates and quietly laces up his shoes. It's terrible.The "disappearance" of the poet Rosemary Tonks in the 1970s was one of the literary world's most tantalising mysteries. Bizarre theories abounded as to her whereabouts – if she was still alive. As the poet Brian Patten put it in a BBC radio feature about her in 2009, she "evaporated into air like the Cheshire cat". One contributor imagined her living in Cuba, "smoking cigars in a doorway". Other commentators over the years have made her into a nun; consigned her to a sect; had her communing with the ghost of Charles Baudelaire; or put her in a shed at the bottom of someone's garden. For some reason, these mythmakers always required her to be living in poverty.

I loved the writing. That's one of the strongest narrative voices I've ever encountered - and excellent for this late 60's femme fatale. a b c Brooks-Motl, Hannah (1 January 2016). "Rosemary Tonks, Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems". Chicago Review. 59 (4): 249–254. [Review]. The poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks wrote her third novel, The Bloater, in just four weeks in the autumn of 1967, which would have been impressive by any standards but her own. She had originally set out to finish it in half the time and had hoped it would earn her “a lot of red-hot money.” (Here, she fell short too). But the result was a dizzying, madcap story that was a hit with the critics. Again, most writers would have been over the moon with such a reception, but Tonks could never be so predictable. “It just proves the English like their porridge,” she once reportedly replied to congratulations from her editor. To borrow a confession from The Bloater’s canny narrator—a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tonks herself: “I knew perfectly well what I was doing.”

But on the other hand she's a horrible, horrible person. And she's fatphobic, the whole book is in fact. Rosemary Tonks - The Bloater; Emir; Opium Fogs; Businessmen as Lovers; Love Among the Operators; Way Out of Berkeley Square; The Halt During the Chase; Bedouin of the London Evening: The Collected Poems Clearly, she was intent on making a complete break with her former self. But one can see in Rosemary Lightband a mutation of Tonks’s facilities as a writer into something else. Those same habits of mind – the form-seeking, the heightened awareness, the relentless self-interrogation – metastasized. In a letter to her great-niece from 1987, she writes that her former life was exactly ‘the preparation needed’ for studying the bible, ‘because your mind is alerted to unravelling mysteries hidden in words’. There’s an unassuming passage towards the end of The Bloater in which Min is rueing her domestic failures, but also seems to be reflecting on the source of her difficulties. ‘I know that one of my weaknesses is the fact that I can’t see dust’, she says. ‘I’ve been taught to see the fish lying in a stream, which means that I can penetrate through the glass clothes of a river and see its insides.’ This gift of obscene seeing was Tonks’ too. A writer like her, so vigilant about signs and symbols, so deep within her regime of self-punishment, must have read significance into her misfortune, especially the loss of her sight. Perhaps she decided that if you can’t cure your reading with your life, or your life with your reading, or your life with a different one, you must stop yourself from looking underneath the water. I don't know if I can recommend it on plot. With any other story this probably would have been a 5-star.