Author(s): Caroline Thonger; Vivian Thonger; illustrations by Alan Thomas

Literature | London | CB Editions | Read our reviews! | Biography and Memoir

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
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STELLA'S REVIEW: 
Here’s a gem of a book. Take Two is a project by two sisters about growing up in post-war London which subtly reveals more than you expect. It is published by the excellent CB Editions, the small (one-man) publishing house of the well-regarded Charles Boyle, who in his recent newsletter (in which he breaks down the negative profit of publishing books) stated, “If I’m putting a book into the world – adding to the world’s sheer stuff – I want, obviously, this book to be a decent thing”. Caroline and Vivian Thonger, among other things, are both writers: Caroline of non-fiction and translation; Vivian poetry and short fictions. Caroline lives in Switzerland and Vivian in Aotearoa, as does the illustrator Alan Thomas. The book is a collection of short pieces, of episodes, that cleverly coalesce to build a picture of a sometimes fraught family life, through childhood memories, letters, remembered pieces of music, and household objects. There are micro-stories, poems, and short plays, all working together to reveal the dynamics of family life and familial relationships. For Caroline and Vivian, their parents figure strongly, each a dominating presence in their lives. Their mother, Ursula, seems glamorous and unconventional — she’s continental and fiercely independent, which must have made her unusual in the Britain of the 1950s, while her mother (the German grandmother), the rather daunting Oma, is opinionated and yet wry. When her sister suddenly dies landing face down in her pudding, she announces that it is very inconvenient. Their father, Richard, is a complex individual. Cambridge-educated, but it's difficult to place him in Britain’s society of the time — he seems contradictory to his core. Immersed in his study surrounded by words within a cloud of smoke, he’s obviously an intellectual, but he’s prone to fly off the handle and his temper has little regard for his daughters’ feelings, particularly Caroline, his eldest child. This is what I gather from reading the entries in this volume, and reading between the lines, for it is not spelled out. Both sisters have set aside their adult knowledge to rekindle the child’s viewpoint. It is deliberate and makes this memoir so very captivating. For the reader these impressions, along with our adult perspective and experiences, allow us to join the dots and fit the pieces into the jigsaw puzzle. Whether we do this accurately is beside the point, for memory is not accurate and perspectives are usually varied. There are ordinary childhood accounts followed by traumatic events, evenly told so that the reader does not notice at first and then pauses in shock. Look for the clues in the addresses in London as the family moves and dynamics change between the parents. See the summer holiday entries, hiking in France with their too-ambitious father or the visits to relatives which are laced with snippets of information. Follow as the sisters recount their childhood — their voices melding — and then take their own paths as young adults.  Add in the delightful drawings of Alan Thomas of remembered household objects, which tell their own story of a place and a time. The illustrations have revealing snippets of text. “Item 15: Coat hanger, padded, floral pattern, used to discipline teenage girls.” These fleeting glimpses offer us so much. In the final few pieces, some disquieting revelations come to light, demanding that you read again, much as one revisits one’s life with new-found knowledge. These facts have been sitting there the whole time, subtly in the sub-conscious of Take Two. This two-sister project is innovative, enjoyable, and a wonderfully distinct gem.

Caroline Thonger (CH) is a technical translator from French and German, and writer of historical non-fiction work The Banker’s Daughter (Merton Priory Press, 2007) about her German grandmother’s family. She was Chief Editor of Hello Switzerland! magazine where her articles, investigations and editorials were published. She volunteers with the Geneva Writers Group; her short stories and poems have regularly appeared in the GWG publication Offshoots.

With a background in psychology, Vivian Thonger (NZ) is a writer/poet and actor/performer. Her writing has featured online at Flash Frontier, Flash Flood, short and long lists for NZ’s annual Flash Fiction Competition, and has twice won Northland’s Short Story prize. Work appears in Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (CUP, 2018) and Te Ripo Wai (Pavlova Press, 2021); poems are included in eight print editions of Fast Fibres Poetry.

Alan Thomas (NZ) is a scientist, sculptor and print artist investigating materiality and dissociations between human perceptions and understandings of the world and what it really might be.