The See-Through House
My Father in Full Colour
by Shelley Klein
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Pub Date 23 Apr 2020 | Archive Date 23 Sep 2020
Random House UK, Vintage Publishing | Chatto & Windus
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Description
*Chosen as BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week*
The See-Through House is a book about saying goodbye to a much-loved family home. It is also a very funny account of looking after an adored yet maddening parent and a piercing portrait of the grief that followed his death.
Shelley Klein grew up in the Scottish Borders, in a house designed on a modernist open-plan grid; with colourful glass panels set against a forest of trees, it was like living in a work of art.
Shelley’s father, Bernat Klein, was a textile designer whose pioneering colours and textures were a major contribution to 1960s and 70s style. As a child, Shelley and her siblings adored both the house and the fashion shows that took place there, but as she grew older Shelley also began to rebel against her father’s excessive design principles.
Thirty years on, Shelley moves back home to care for her father, now in his eighties: the house has not changed and neither has his uncompromising vision. As Shelley installs her pots of herbs on the kitchen windowsill, he insists she take them into her bedroom to ensure they don’t ‘spoil the line of the house’.
Threaded through Shelley’s book is her father’s own story: an Orthodox Jewish childhood in Yugoslavia; his rejection of rabbinical studies to pursue a life of art; his arrival in post-war Britain and his imagining of a house filled with light and colour as interpreted by the architect Peter Womersley.
A book about the search for belonging and the pain of letting go, The See-Through House is a moving memoir of one man's distinctive way of looking at the world, told with tenderness and humour and a daughter’s love.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781784743109 |
| PRICE | £16.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 288 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
G H, Reviewer
When I think of the Scottish Borders, images of ruined abbeys, medieval castles and splendid mansions immediately come to mind.
A romanticised and fictional vision of the past was at the heart of Sir Walter Scott's writing and it is not surprising that Abbotsford, the home he became obsessed with, is to be found here.
Like Scott, Bernat Klein was equally obsessed with his created home, but unlike Scott his attitute to the past was perhaps far more complex and his home a better integration of art and life.
This book may on the surface be about a house, however extraordinary, but it is much more and like its subject it has multiple themes to it. One is memory and its often fractured nature.
There was one point in the book when I thought of W. G. Sebald's masterpiece Austerlitz and then a few pages later it was infact referenced by the author.
Shelley Klein here has written a haunting tale of her life, her father's textile designing and her home, which as the book progresses become increasingly interwoven.
Built in 1957 and designed by the architect Peter Womersley, High Sunderland would be a modernist creation, a Bauhaus for the Borders.
Incidentally, just a few weeks before I read the book, I saw an article about someone visiting for the first time the nearby football ground at Galashiels and mentioning the listed Brutalist 1960s groundstand (now sadly closed), which was designed by Wormersley. Certainly worth a visit.
As the book progresses to, I suppose, its inevitable conclusion, the author painfully reaccounts how her life must now change and what this house has meant to her and sees this glass house as a lens to her future.
I read this book in one sitting which I believe is recommendation enough.
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