Review of Hilary Mantel’s short story collection Learning to Speak

DrHilary Mantel, an author of historical novels who won the Booker Prize multiple times for her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, died unexpectedly in September 2022 at the age of 70. For anyone who does not yet know the author, the stories from the book “Learning to Speak”, which was published in German a year later, are the best chance to change that.

In the cover image by British photographer Martin Parr, famous for his anthropological eye, two children balance on top of a bridge under a gray sky. In the background, dormant housing silos and brick buildings: England in the 1950s and 1960s. If the children had not fallen then, they would be adults now. They might then look back on their childhood, as the author does in Learning to Speak, as a member of the Irish Catholic minority in a village in Derbyshire. The textile mills, the workers and their wives, a confusing family that includes countless cousins ​​and aunts, and the morals of both communities distilled through provincialism characterize the picture. “However, when I was seven years old, my mother brought her lover into our home, and for the next four years I lived under the same roof with my parents.”