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Summary
Summary
Laura lives alone in a cabin deep within the Italian Alps, making her living translating medical documents and tutoring the children of affluent locals. She spends her days climbing the mountains outside her door and exploring the woods, and when she must venture into the small, conservative town for supplies, she's met with curious stares and wariness. Laura begins seeing a bartender, who alerts her to the villagers' uncertainties, and suggests she get a dog. Then late one night there is a knock on the door, and on the other side stands someone from her past who has finally found her. In beguiling, lyrical prose, the mystery surrounding why Laura has absconded to this remote corner of the Alps comes into focus, while the villagers grow leery of the woman in the cabin and of her increasingly odd behavior, and a few decide to take matters into their own hands; to free themselves from the malevolent forces of the strega who lives amongst them. With its dexterity and appreciation for the natural world, its slow-burn tension and thematic considerations of illness, infertility, and femininity, At the Edge of the Woods calls to mind the work of Richard Powers, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Shirley Jackson, while revealing Kathryn Bromwich as a spectacular and singular talent.
Author Notes
Kathryn Bromwich is a writer and commissioning editor on The Observer newspaper in London. She writes about all aspects of culture, including music, film, TV, books, art and more, and has contributed to publications including Little White Lies , Dazed , Vice , Time Out and The Independent .She has lived in Italy, Austria and the UK and is currently based in east London.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Bromwich's subtle debut, set in an unspecified period with horse-drawn carriages, a middle-aged woman leaves everything behind to live in the woods. Laura Mantovani resides in a secluded cabin outside an Italian village, where she ekes out a quiet existence, translating and tutoring on behalf of the locals, and falling into a diffident romance with a dashing waiter named Vincenzo. Then, after Laura's friend Héloïse unexpectedly visits, the reader learns Héloïse had helped Laura escape her domineering husband, Julien. After Héloïse departs, and with Vincenzo aloof, Laura becomes overwhelmed by her isolation. Increasingly dependent on laudanum and subject to strange, visionary fevers, she yields to a madness that opens her to the allure of the forest, "no longer beholden to the chains and responsibilities of man, but to the perfect harmony of the natural world, where everything has its place, and no rock or broken twig is without purpose." Peril eventually arrives in the form of dangerous wolves and even more dangerous hunters, but the developments will come too late for many readers. It's a slow burn, though it works as a fine portrait of a woman's communion with an untamed wilderness. Agent: Matthew Turner, RCW Literary. (May)
Guardian Review
Kathryn Bromwich's accomplished debut novel begins in a deceptively pastoral register. Her narrator, Laura, is an educated woman who has purposefully removed herself from society to rent a tumbledown cabin in a forest in the mountains of northern Italy. On her first encounter with the reader she presents herself with all the tropes of a fairytale crone: she walks up the mountain at dawn, wrapped in "layer upon layer of coarse, heavy clothing". She is conscious of how she appears to the few people who pass her on the mountain paths: "all matted fabric and dirt and ill-concealed truculence", and yet, alone in the natural world, she can sometimes achieve a state of transcendence that is denied her in the nearby village, where "I make myself smaller, softer, amenable to human interaction". Despite the pleasure Laura takes in allowing herself to become semi-feral in her solitude, she depends on not alienating the villagers, who give her piecemeal work, with her strangeness: "I endeavour to maintain a veneer of respectability: cleanliness, manners, a subdued demeanour toward men." The exact period of the story is left unclear, adding to the folkloric sense of timelessness, but there are enough clues to place it in the early 20th century: Laura has a laudanum habit, her cabin was previously occupied by a soldier rumoured to be a conscientious objector. Whatever the exact year, it's an age in which a woman choosing to live alone in a forest attracts first gossip and then suspicion from a conservative rural community, particularly if - matted fabric notwithstanding - she is not yet 40 and "remnants of my beauty flash through on occasion". The novel is a slow-burner, and Bromwich has the confidence to allow her story to build incrementally through the early chapters. Laura begins an affair with Vincenzo, a handsome waiter from the local cafe, who, like her, is an outsider by virtue of not being native to the village, though he has lived there since his youth; with him she can be both animal and woman. Snippets of Laura's mysterious past are dropped teasingly into this first section; we learn that she was once married, that she has lived in France, that she has reverted to her mother's maiden name. There are strong echoes of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as more of her story is revealed, until two incidents coincide to shatter her uneasy peace: a friend from the life she has fled appears at her door, just as she is struck down by a near-fatal fever. Both experiences change her fundamentally and mark a point of no return; the past has intruded into the present, and her independence is compromised by the loss of her physical strength. Bromwich has written movingly for this paper about her experience of long Covid, and her depiction of Laura's pain and frustration at the failure of her body has the sharp clarity of inside knowledge: "Beyond a certain point, when sympathy has fallen away, pain becomes distasteful to others¿" As Laura becomes stranger and wilder, experiencing the forest as a hallucinatory vision, so the villagers' suspicion turns to fear, and then to violence. Is she santa or strega, saint or witch? These seem to be the only alternatives for a woman who is neither wife nor mother. At the Edge of the Woods is a novel that invites full immersion on the reader's part; the reward is a deeply unsettling exploration of what it means to inhabit a female body but to reject femininity, and to feel a connection with the natural world that embodies both awe and terror. In this, its themes could not be more timely. 5 Jun 2023, On Women by Susan Sontag In her introduction to this pocket-sized new collection of journalism by the American writer Susan Sontag, the academic Merve Emre begins with a reassurance to (younger, I assume) readers that there's nothing to be afraid of here. "A certain anxiety besieges the critic asked to introduce a volume of earlier writings on women, lest she should find the ideas expressed in them interesting only as relics of a distant, less enlightened past," she declares, eyeing the smelling salts she presumably keeps about her desk for times just like these. But don't worry. She has checked and there is no ghastly second-wave feminism to be found in these pages: "Far from prompting the gentle rebuke that they are 'of their time', the effect of reading them today is to marvel at the untimeliness of their genius." To read such a statement in isolation is infuriating enough, and not only because you grow increasingly weary of the conviction that the past must always be measured against our own, supposedly morally superior, times. I can think of lots of "earlier" feminist writing that is as good, if not better, than anything published more recently; if young feminists can't, or won't, acknowledge the debt we owe to those who came before us, they may be fighting the wrong cause. But then you read the essays that follow Emre's, in which Sontag makes some of the most sexist and wrongheaded assertions I've read in a long time, and exasperation turns to bewilderment. What's really going on here? What book did she read? When, you wonder, will the unwarranted allure Sontag holds for a certain kind of intellectual ever begin to fray? Sontag's On Women comprises seven pieces, arranged in chronological order, edited by the writer's son, David Rieff; the earliest dates from 1972 and the latest from 1975. Four are polemical essays, and two take the form of interviews, while another is an extended riposte to the poet Adrienne Rich, who had the temerity to suggest in the letters page of the New York Review of Books that Sontag's recent piece about Leni Riefenstahl (also in this book) failed to make any connection between fascism and the patriarchy ("Nazi Germany was patriarchy in its purest, most elemental form," writes Rich). Sontag's response to such criticism is completely disproportionate, and horribly sneering. Isn't Rich, she asks, just like all feminists, those moaning minnies whose thinking is - Sontag is categorical - "a bit simple-minded"? Such un-sisterliness is everywhere in On Women. Sontag's long-term project, nascent when this book begins and more fully realised by the time it ends, has to do with setting herself apart; she is the special one, which makes solidarity tricky. At first, she's attracted by feminism, or at least she's prepared to go through the motions; maybe it will be useful to her. But it's as if she hasn't read anything: no Betty Friedan or Kate Millett, not a single page of Robin Morgan's classic anthology of women's lib, Sisterhood Is Powerful. All three women had published their big, stylish books before she wrote her mannered, paper-thin essay, The Double Standard of Aging (1972), in which she decides that growing older is really only a disease of the imagination, makes sweeping pronouncements about the sexual lives of spinsters, and talks contemptuously of the way "most" women take their lack of self-respect for granted. As a piece of writing, it's second-rate: it comes with no light or shade; she's too much in the business of generalisations for her arguments to snare (her sentences kept slipping from my mind). Is it that she was young? No, in 1972 Sontag was almost 40. And in any case, nothing changes in the work that follows; her mind is set. "Women have trouble organising," she pronounces in The Third World of Women, a written Q&A from 1973. "[They] are not easily disposed to respect one another and to take one another seriously." What does she think of the struggle to legalise abortion? Well, it is suspect, she writes. It might be desirable on humanitarian grounds, but once the right is won "nothing in the situation of women will be changed". Who needs change, after all? Liberation has been easy for her, except for "the envy and resentment I occasionally felt from other women". Slowly, it begins to dawn on you that Sontag believes women have only themselves to blame for the inequality and discrimination they experience; that they have chosen to go along with it, unable to resist the powerful allure of lipstick and Tupperware. Is this a particularly egregious case of internalised sexism? Or is it just Sontag's regular exceptionalism, in a creakier format? I don't know. But again, I find myself amazed by her reputation, still so burnished almost two decades after her death. There's something almost hallucinatory about it at this point, a haze into which opportunistic publishers may duly step in, offering little more than a name to readers who
Kirkus Review
In this haunting debut, a woman running from her past tries to find solitude and independence in the woods. Laura Mantovani has spent several months living in a cabin in the mountains above an Italian village. There, she walks in the forest, reads, and tends to the small home she has fashioned for herself. Interactions with the locals are limited to brief errands and odd jobs, such as translations and tutoring, and though she is not accepted fully, she seems to command some level of respect from those she meets. This distance is threatened, however, when she takes a lover--a bartender who visits her at night and is eager to keep their relationship a secret. The secrecy suits Laura, who has secrets of her own she'd like to keep from the village; she's hiding from an abusive and controlling husband. When a friend from her previous life appears at her door, Laura's carefully constructed world begins to come apart. Wracked by illness and increasingly dependent on laudanum, she retreats into herself and the woods, unable to see the growing discontent the villagers have with the strange woman who appears increasingly unmoored. At under 200 pages, this tight novel doesn't have much room for revelations to be overly drawn out, including a flashback to the days preceding Laura's decision to run away from her marriage. Bromwich's pacing works brilliantly; languid and slow as we meet Laura a few months into her time in the cabin, comfortable and familiar, before becoming increasingly disjointed and rapid to match her deteriorating mental state. Awkward interactions with locals give way to jarring and difficult exchanges in which Laura, from whose perspective the story is told, struggles to comprehend the growing animosity from even those with whom she was nominally friendly. The result is a slow-burning tension that never quite resolves into something like closure but is nonetheless riveting and original. A gripping, richly layered story of a woman's unraveling as she grapples with threats both past and present. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this debut novel from Bromwich, a culture editor for the British Observer, a woman rents a cottage on the outskirts of a small Italian hill town. The gossiping villagers refer to the house's previous tenant as a monster, for the supposedly "gruesome hunting accident" that preceded his departure. Before this book's end, those locals will find reasons to torment Laura, too. While the era is undefined, its pastness is clear; Laura is fleeing something, and her landlord's approval rests on the lie that her husband will be joining her soon. She spends her days learning the wildness that surrounds her, "slave only to the rules of the mountain." After a near-deadly illness and a shocking visit from someone from Laura's nebulous past, the forest with which she's grown so familiar takes on a darker enchantment, Laura's strength grows to match it, and the villagers call her a witch. Bromwich paints Laura and her woods as vibrantly as an old-fashioned fairy tale and this is just as foreboding. Fans of highly interiorized, richly narrated feminist fiction will tear through it.
Library Journal Review
In British journalist Bromwich's impressive debut novel, Laura Mantovani rents a secluded cottage at the edge of the Italian Alps. Laura's landlord agreed to rent to her only because she promised that her husband will soon join her. In reality, she's fled her abusive marriage to a controlling nobleman and is just barely supporting herself by offering tutoring and translating services to the mostly unfriendly residents of the nearby village. Laura cherishes her time walking in the forest and tending to her small garden and, for a bit, it looks like nature is beginning to heal her. However, when she falls ill and becomes increasingly dependent on alcohol and laudanum, her fragile mental state begins to disintegrate--a decline spellbindingly portrayed by narrator Gemma Dawson. Dawson's expert pacing allows listeners to absorb and appreciate Bromwich's stylized but tight prose and lyrical cadence, as well as her stirring blend of the natural and supernatural realms. VERDICT Recommend Bromwich's completely original slow burn of a novel with its beguiling protagonist, so perfectly captured by narrator Dawson, to those who appreciate gorgeous prose, unique narrative structures, and feminist themes.--Beth Farrell
