Anne Peile

Apparently, this is the debut novel of British author Anne Peile; I came across it because it was longlisted for this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction. The reason it caught my interest was partially its subject matter – a father/daughter incest story (yes, yes, I know I’m shallow; I’ve been mostly reading romances the last couple of weeks, after all) – and partially the place and time it is set in – London in the early seventies.

I’m not one for lengthy synopses, and this isn’t show more exactly an action-oriented novel in the first place, so here’s a very brief outline: The story is told in the first person by it’s female protagonist Susie who is sixteen years old when the novel starts, and a quite precocious teenager – even a bit too much so, I thought. Whlie on the one hand it helps to build up the height that makes the tragic fall at the end of the book have all the more impact, and also helps to explain her assured narrative voice, it has the downside to make her come across as just a bit Mary-Sue-ish in the novel’s early parts. But that is a very minor niggle, and just about the only one I can think of in what is otherwise a beautiful and intense novel, one that is likely to stay with me as one of the most emotionally involving reading experiences of 2011.

Susie, who lives in a rather dysfunctional family meets and seduces her father who has not seen her for many years and is not aware that the beautiful young girl showing an inexplicable interest in him is actually his daughter. The first thing one notices about Anne Peile’s novel is how very understated it is considering all potentially sensationalist subject matter, and how subdued considering the penchant for garish colours of the period it is set in. This turns out to be not so much a contrast, but rather an enhancement of the story, like some photographs grip the viewer all the more powerfully because they are monochrome. This is a story about Love with a capital L, and emotions run high and large in this novel, but thanks to Anne Peile’s calm and lucid prose, it never comes across as overly dramatic or in any way overdone, but, in spite of the scandalous nature of the relationship, is touching and beautiful instead. Until, that is, thing take a turn for the bad.

It is pretty clear from the start that this love between father and daughter is doomed and can not end well, and what I was expecting was something along the lines of a bittersweet coda. Which is probably the way a lesser writer would have handled it – the love story taking up most of the book, with a more or less catastrophic reversal at the end and a few paragraphs to wrap it all up. Not so Anne Peile, though – the tragic event occurs two thirds into the novel, and the final third is given to describing the aftermath. And even as she always remains understated and lucid in her writing, the author spares us nothing – while I was pretty much breezing through the first 120 pages of the novel, I spend days on the final 60, because I just could not bear to read more than a few pages in one sitting. I don’t want to give away any details here, suffice it to say that I was utterly heart-wrenching and quite literally in tears for the most part of it. It’s been a long time since any novel had such a huge and powerful impact on me, and while some of that might be ascribed to me being particularly susceptible to it at the moment, I don’t doubt that most of it is due to Anne Peile’s masterful writing and storytelling, making "Repeat it Today with Tears" one of the saddest stories I have ever read. This is a very impressive debut indeed, and I hope it makes the Orange shortlist, and even wins the prize. I for one am eagerly looking forward to Anne Peile’s next book. show less

Anne Peile’s debut novel, Repeat It Today with Tears, opens in this way: “The first time I kissed my father on the mouth it was the the Easter holiday.”

The reader is meant to be shocked. And, fair warning, the author has laid out the book’s subject matter in the opening line: Here there be dragons. If you venture further, you do so at your own risk.

For surely it is risky, taking on such a subject for your first work of fiction: “..something that’s not allowed by law, something show more that’s frowned upon by the medical profession, by the Church, by society as a whole; it’s a taboo.”

But what this debut novelist does with her story is truly remarkable.

I have a lot more to say about it here. show less

Susanna is a teenage girl who is obsessed with the father that she has never known. When she schemes up a way in which to meet him, rather than introduce herself as his daughter, she seduces him. Rather obviously, this is not a relationship that is going to end well for either party involved.

This is the kind of book that I knew I wanted to read the moment I read the synopsis. I am a girl with an absent father. I can relate to Susanna’s longing and desperation for a relationship with her show more father. I was able to look past the repulsive idea of a father/daughter sex affair, and read it for what it meant to Susie- daddy’s love at last. And she was deeply in love with him, in her own obsessive way. She states that she exists only for him, and she believes it to her very core. Without her father, she is nothing. Just try to imagine having this mindset, never wavering, no matter what happens... I find it utterly heartbreaking. There were so many points in this book where the emotion took over me, and I had to put the book down to get my thoughts in order. That, to me, is a good read.

This is a book that I highly recommend, if you are able to get past the subject matter. For being just short of 200 pages, it is an incredibly powerful and engaging story. It may be some disturbing subject matter, but it is very beautifully written. One of those stories that even a week after finishing it, you still find yourself thinking about it, trying to make up different endings, imagining what the characters could be doing now...(I’m not the only one who sometimes believes that characters live on after the story is finished, right?...er, no? well ok).

Also posted at Blogspot show less

Wow. Unputdownable, despite the fact that not a whole lot happens. (But what does happen is pretty intense, so there's that.) The writing is spot-on. I'm docking it a star because I thought the ending was weak, and not wholly plausible. But still highly recommended.