The child becomes close to a painter, Kohl, who occupies an attic room. He paints and draws portraits of her, and of anyone else in the house who will sit for him. He has an unsympathetic wife, Marta, and an enemy, Mann, who dislikes his pictures. Things come to a head in a birthday party in the artist's studio, and the story ends with Kohl's paintings becoming famous and filling an entire room in a New York art gallery.
These two final stories, one judges, must surely come closer than most of the others to the real-life experience of the author, in their general situations if not in the details that later emerge.
Two observations can be made about this book. First, it could well be the case that writers become more autobiographical as time goes on. Shakespeare appears to have become so, with situations involving parents and children occurring over and over again in the later plays, memory (perhaps) mixing with dream. If this is true, then Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is merely running true to form in constructing this book of childhoods she both lived and might have lived.
Secondly, refugees and migrants are characteristically insecure about their social position. They want above all else to be fully accepted in their abode of choice, but this is frequently a satisfaction only their children are fated to enjoy. Seeing that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has been uprooted several times -- born in one country, raised in another, married into a third, and residing later in a fourth -- it's understandable that the desire to nail down a past becomes something of an obsession. "Who am I?" quickly becomes "Who was I?" In these circumstances, the repeated re-working of the past that these stories display becomes more understandable.
All in all, these tales, frequently sad, are less than gripping in themselves. Their interest only grows only when the implications of the author having written such a bizarre collection are fully
considered.
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