Jane Gardam: The Queen of the Tambourine

Fate is so peculiar.  Last year a friend was unloading a pile of his books before leaving the country, and I of course accepted them all sight unseen.  I am occasionally guilty of literary tunnel vision, seeing only fiction, poetry, and drama by long dead authors as worthy of my time.  The bag I received from this friend was, by contrast, filled with modern writing, both fiction and non; decidedly outside of my usual wheelhouse.

So were it not for Fate, I would never have read this book--at least not until long after the author had died and it had proven itself worthy.  What a loss that would have been.  At first slightly unimpressed by the epistolary framework, I gradually succumbed to its charm, and by the end admitted that there was no other way it could have been written.  A good book until the last chapters, at which point it revealed itself to have been secretly great all along.  Every seemingly out of place or jarring addition earlier in the book gradually unfolded into a lovely and perfectly intentional flower by the end.  One scarcely noticed the seeds until they had bloomed, and that is, by my definition, literature.  Perhaps an author doesn't have to die to earn the label after all.