'"A Novel (Or Poem) About Fan" or "The Zoo"' by Camilla Grudova - Running Review of Uncertainties IV

This story looks at Victorian paintings from the other side of the canvas. An artist encounters a pretty girl called Jenny on the street and wants to paint her. Twenty years later she has had ten children, of which Fan - red-haired and precocious - is one. The grim uncertainties of life for poorer women in 19th century England is well evoked, in neat unfussy prose. There is humour here, of the dark and strange sort that recalls Angela Carter.

'After the fourth child she started to name her children after things she wanted but could not afford. Piano, Stove, Grand Fern, and the children grew to resemble the objects they stood in for. Piano was a girl with a wide mouth and large orderly teeth.'

Things end tragically because that is how things tended to end in those days. There are several bizarre and disturbing anecdotes along the way, culminating in a variation on the well-known story of Rosetti digging up his mistress to retrieve the poems he had buried with her. We also get hints of Ophelia in the bath and the inevitable pot of basil. This is the Gothic of the chaotic and messy, where fatal illness is only an unwise decision away.

If the story has a message, it's might be that life is enduring and life is short. But I suspect that it is more along the lines that artists then and perhaps now were self-centred bastards, and when you combine that with our old friend the patriarchy nothing good will come of it. 

More from this running review of Uncertainties IV soon, I hope.