Book review: She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons by Kathleen Hill
Kathleen Hill writes about her love of reading, from childhood to adulthood …
She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels (2017) is a memoir and a life journey about the love of reading.
Kathleen Hill, from England, begins with an introduction to author Emily Dickinson and, at 12 years old, to Willa Cather’s 1935 novel Lucy Gayheart that she read in middle school. Cather’s novel is about drowning, and it reflected her own reality. Her trip to Paris, the river Seine, Mozart’s death, it all had an impact on her.
When she married and became a teacher, Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart was part of the school syllabus. Kathleen was living in Nigeria in 1963 just after its independence, and the legacy of a violent colonialist past has a great influence on her life. At the same time, she read the Henry James novel A Portrait of a Lady, written in 1881, and Isak Dineson’s 1937 novel Out of Africa set in Kenya just before its independence in December 1963. These three novels evoke the theme of independence found and independence lost: the countries Nigeria and Kenya found their independence and freedom, whereas Isak Dineson wrote about independence lost (her singledom).
At 25 years of age in 1965, with two children, Kathleen Hill accepts a teaching position in Avesnes and Paris, in France. So, next on her reading list is Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary which she read while listening to Paul McCartney’s song Michelle Ma Belle: ‘His was the voice of possibility, of hope,’ she wrote.
Still in France, she reads Diary of a Country Priest, a 1936 French drama by Robert Bresson about poverty and suffering. In 1996, Hill befriends author Diana Trilling in Venice, soon after she is diagnosed with cancer, where they discuss novels and the routine of writing. Diana reads Proust to Kathleen and her family in the late afternoons.
This is not just a reading-log, but also a travelog, and an introspective look at the countries, situations, and books that changed her thoughts and her life. This memoir is a step back in time, to the books I read too. Where was I around the world when I read a memorable book that influenced me?
I compared my experiences, my thoughts, my reactions with Kathleen’s. I thought about the books I had to read as part of the school curricula, the books I wanted to read, the books I read because they were cheap or from the library, and the books my friends were fired up about. I read books I liked that had no impact on my life, and books I didn’t like that left a profound legacy and shaped not what I wanted from life but what I didn’t want from life. And everything in between.
This memoir is a heartfelt love of literature and how books fit into an historical context, a perspective, a philosophy of living, and how books – and the love of reading – influences our lives.
