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Marina Lewycka, who spoke at the Holloway Arts festival, pictured in Archway last week |
Glue from north London’s melting pot
Novelist Marina Lewycka introduces Peter Gruner to her latest characters – an elderly Jewish refugee and a Palestinian handyman who learn to co-exist in a dusty old house
We are all Made of Glue.
By Marina Lewycka.
Fig Tree Penguin books. Hardback £18.99.
AN elderly German Jew who dresses to kill and calls everyone “dahlink” and a bossy Palestinian handyman, who rides a wobbly bicycle and wears a pink and mauve knitted hat, feature strongly in Marina Lewycka’s new madcap novel.
Ms Lewycka, author of the prize-winning A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, sets her latest work, peopled by strange but endearing characters, in Highbury.
This delightful new book, We are All Made of Glue, also stars seven colourful if incontinent cats, named after
composers or characters from opera.
The story revolves around a large, dusty old Victorian house occupied by a vain former Jewish refugee, Mrs Naomi Shapiro, who claims to be 70 but is actually 81.
This is not just a gentle but humorous poke at immigrants struggling to survive, is a celebration of how people of different racial backgrounds co-exist in cosmopolitan London.
Ms Lewycka spoke about her life in Islington at Sunday’s Connecting Conversations talk at Archway Methodist Church. The event was part of the Holloway Arts Festival.
She described how life in Ockendon Road – where she spent a few years in her 20s – inspired the latest novel.
She was, and still is, impressed by the ability of people of different races, religions and cultures, not to mention political beliefs, to live together relatively harmoniously.
Which is what they appear to do in her book – albeit not without some angry exchanges, particularly over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mrs Shapiro is described as dressed in a long-sleeved dress in carmine velvet, shaped at the waist, and daringly cut away at the front and back to reveal her wrinkled shoulders. She wears matching carmine lipstick (not all of it on her lips) and high heels.
In contrast, her friend, narrator Georgina Sinclair, whose husband Rip has just moved out following a domestic row, is in jeans and a baggy pullover under a brown duffel coat. Georgina writes trade manuals about adhesives, hence the oblique title of the book.
We meet Mr Ali, who is assisted by two young men, nephew Ishmail and his friend Nabeel who are both studying English at nearby London Metropolitan University.
Mr Ali refers to his two assistants as the “Uselesses” because given a job to do they have an uncanny ability to get it wrong.
Mrs Shapiro’s family perished in the Nazi gas chambers, as her pro-Israeli stepson Chaim is always explaining. On the other hand, Mr Ali was driven out of his homeland in Palestine by the Jews, who claimed it was their God-promised land.
Despite acrimonious arguments, everyone has to survive. Mrs Shapiro is never happier than ministering to her devoted cats, which she describes as her “little femily”.
There’s Wonder Boy, a warrior tom cat, who purrs like a motorbike, and the gentler Mussorgsky and Borodin, and Violetta, who naturally is always singing, or meowing, from the opera La Traviata.
Mrs Shapiro falls over and ends up in A&E in the Whittington Hospital after breaking her wrist. She doesn’t like hospital. “You heff to get me out. Food terrible. They mekking me eat sossedge,” she tells Georgina.
Mrs Shapiro makes a friend in her ward, who she has nicknamed the “bonker” lady, and together they slip outside in their dressing gowns to share an illicit cigarette.
Mrs Shapiro asks if Georgina could bring her dear Wonder Boy along at the next visit but is told that the Whittington has a ban on patients being allowed visiting felines.
There is more trouble for Mrs Shapiro when senior social workers at the hospital decree that she is too old to look after herself and must go into a nursing home.
Transported to a home in Dalston against her will, Mrs Shapiro is refused visitors because she won’t sign a form giving officials at the home power of attorney over her Highbury property.
Then they really get tough with her after she is spotted stubbing out a cigarette on the path and throwing the stub onto the home’s pristine lawn.
Meanwhile, back at Highbury, Mr Ali asks Georgina, who is looking after Mrs Shapiro’s house, if Ishmail and Nabeel can move in provided they do repairs and tidy it up. Georgina reluctantly agrees, hoping that Mrs Shapiro won’t mind.
An incident at the nursing home, where another inmate screamingly accuses staff of trying to kill her, allows Mrs Shapiro to make her escape and she grabs a taxi back to Highbury.
Rather than disapprove of the lodgers, Mrs Shapiro takes a shine to them. The next morning Georgina finds her sitting on the sofa with Nabeel. “They were smoking and drinking coffee from the silver pot and watching The Hound of The Baskervilles on the black and white television.
“Mrs Shapiro was wearing her candlewick dressing-gown and her Lion King slippers. Violetta was curled up on her lap, Mussorgsky was on Nabeel’s lap and Wonder Boy was stretched out on the rug in front of the fire.
“It was a scene of cosy decadence.”
Lewycka deals with a lot of issues from aging to the “nanny state”. Perhaps the book’s only minor fault is that it includes so many zany people, including a predatory estate agent, a jobsworth social worker and Georgina’s son Ben, who is a born again Christian.
But it is a story with heart, and as Ms Lewycka explained at the Archway talk, the best thing about London is that it is a community that “really works”.
She adds: “In much of the North, racial communities live in different enclaves. Wandering around Islington and Camden, you see so many different cultures and nationalities.
“They all appear to be rubbing along together. It is a real melting pot where you don’t really notice what race or colour people are. It just doesn’t matter.” |
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