Local Author
 
Caroline Thonger & Vivian Thonger, Take Two
20 illustrations by Alan Thomas
 
What happens when siblings revisit shared memories? Charting the growth from childhood to adulthood of two sisters raised in north London, Take Two is an innovative collage of contrasting voices. The jigsaw includes stories, poems, letters, postcards, a menu, one-act plays, objects and popular music. Fractures are exposed; revelations cast new light on previous episodes; both playful and disquieting, the writing itself aspires to be a form of healing.
‘Take Two moves beyond the conventions of family memoir, fusing narrative with something like the spirit of a compendium or almanac, gathering up song titles, drawings of household objects, letter extracts, playscripts, poems, and illuminated micro-stories. The book accumulates into a vivid portrait of a family of German and British heritage, set up in post-WW2 London and torn between impulses to close ranks or break apart. It’s a fascinating and provocative act of witnessing, one that offers up new insights and patterns with each re-reading.’
     – Michael Loveday
‘Take Two is a collaboration, a shared enterprise. Here we have the memories of two sisters, Caroline and Vivian Thonger (“The mother saw she had a fat child and a sick child”), gathered in scraps and shards to build a fragmented picture of troubled child-hood. The Thongers are British-Germans, living in north London after the war – “How ghastly England is!” – though how the girls’ parents, Richard and Ursula, met is not explained. The darker story, of the German grandparents, is briefly given at the end …
     ‘It isn't always possible to tell which sister is writing, but that doesn’t matter – or, rather, the blurring is deliberate. So too how their memories connect: the weight of meaning is generally clear, even if the narrative links are withheld. Schoolgirlish episodes such as “Bathroom secrets”, in which a trio of schoolfriends are introduced to a new bidet with calamitously damp results, are juxtaposed with sadder aspects of family life. The collage of impressions is faithful to the fact that children rarely know what is happening in their parents’ lives, and faithful also to the powerful motions of childhood. The parents seem like monsters at times. Perhaps they were.
     ‘Reading Take Two is like catching the corner of a picture out of the corner of your eye. The material is compelling, but however vivid the vignettes, however scrupulously the individual scenes are com-posed, you ache to know more. As an experiment in family memoir it feels stylistically adventurous ...
     ‘CB editions has produced an attractive volume with wittily idiosyncratic drawings. I especially liked the coat hanger that features on the cover and is captioned in the text: “floral pattern, used to discipline teenage girls”.’
     – Norma Clarke, Times Literary Supplement