2000s

All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel

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I see quite a few people write about Alberto Manguel’s non-fiction, about reading and libraries, but not so often his novels. I picked up All Men Are Liars (2008, translated from Spanish by Miranda France) in Washington D.C. in 2013, off the back of enjoying that non-fiction, and it’s interesting to see how the kind-hearted wisdom that characterises his non-fiction does or doesn’t transfer here. I was also drawn by Jason Booher’s excellent cover design.

The title is a quote from (some translations of) Psalm 116 – but this isn’t a biblical book, or even the feminist polemic you might expect from that title. In context, the phrase is really about the way different accounts of the same instance will contradict.

The instance, or at least the person, is a writer called Alejandro Bevilacqua. He has died in suspicious circumstances, falling from his balcony the day before his masterpiece was published, and the various characters of the novel take it in turn to narrate their history with him – and what they know of his death. Amusingly, the first of these men is an author called Alberto Manguel…

While at times it feels like they are under police inquiry, they are actually speaking to a journalist called Terradillos, who is piecing together the truth about Bevilacqua’s life, or is at least trying to. Each account is as much about the speaker as it is Bevilacqua, and we quickly get a sense of their character.

He had something of the provincial gentleman, Alejandro Bevilacqua, an unruffled air and an absence of guile which meant that one toned down jokes in his presence and tried to be accurate about anecdotes. It’s not that the man lacked imagination, but rather that he had no talent for fantasy. Like St Thomas, the Apostle, he needed to touch what he saw before he could believe it was real.

That is why I was so surprised the night he turned up at my house and said he’d seen a ghost.

Each person has their frames of reference, their own go-tos for metaphor, and their own placing in the geopolitics that is the true heart of All Men Are Liars. Because almost everyone involved is an Argentinian ex-pat whose lives were forever changed by the brutal politics of the period. Bevilacqua was imprisoned and tortured for reasons that were unclear to him, and other speakers in the novel have experienced similar ordeals.

There are central questions in the novel – who truly wrote Bevilacqua’s masterpiece, which his lover found amongst his belongings and got published without his involvement; what machinations led to Bevilacqua’s torments and death – but above all it’s an experiment in perspective. What even is lying, if people can tell untruths without realising? Where is the line between deceit and subjectivity?

All Men Are Liars is an interesting and pretty captivating novel, though I did feel a bit at sea by my poor knowledge of mid/late-century Argentina. Manguel is a delightful companion even when he’s writing about dark topics, and there were continual chinks of light coming through the miseries and antagonisms he describes.

I think I’d still start with his non-fiction and treasure books about reading above this sort of fiction, but there is probably more urgency to All Men Are Liars than anything else I’ve read by Manguel. And I think that’s the truth?

Rereadings by Anne Fadiman

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I imagine quite a lot of you have read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, and hopefully you loved it as much as I did. It was one of the earliest examples of those little books-about-reading that have proliferated in the past couple of decades – and I love the genre wholeheartedly. There was something special about Ex Libris, and it felt like finding a kindred spirit in an era before blogging and before social media took off.

She followed up Ex Libris with Rereadings (2005), which my brother bought for my birthday in 2010. As so often, it sat on my shelves for a long time – and I took it on my recent Scottish holiday, and found it was the perfect time for it. I absolutely loved reading it.

While Anne Fadiman’s name is on the cover as the editor of this collection, she only writes the foreword. What follows are 17 essays on rereading, which first appeared in The American Scholar (which Fadiman edited). I’d only read two of the books mentioned – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Journals, Letters and Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Others mention authors I know for other books (D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Colette, Joseph Conrad, Knut Hamsun, J.D. Salinger) while others focus on books by authors I’d never even heard of – H.C. Witwer, Enid Starkie, Helen Dore Bolyston and more. It really didn’t matter which book or author was being discussed, because I was swept away by every single essayist’s contribution.

Each essay talks about a book from the past, of course, but they are really more about the experience of rereading than they are about the individual books. They are about looking back over decades of time to a younger self, and comparing what you were to what you are. That might mean you’ve totally changed your mind about the book. It might simply mean that the world of possibilities, which you were living when you first read the book, has shrunk to a world of actualities, for better or worse. It was curiously moving to read each essay. A poem by Walt Whitman or a guide to wildflowers might be the hook on which the essay is hung, but they are really memoirs in miniature.

Here’s Vivian Gornick, on The Vagabond by Colette:

I want the reading of Colette to be the same as it once was, but it is not. Yet I am wrenched by the beauty of that which no longer feels large, and can never feel large again.

And here is Sven Bikerts, talking about rereading Pan by Knut Hamsun:

For such is the power of a book, a memory, that it can in a flash outwit any structure or system we have raised against it. I had, yes, steeled myself against Glahn, against the sorrow of his story, against his complete destruction by the passion that had erupted in his unguarded heart. I had not, however, braced myself against the encounter with myself, the sixteen-year-old who went at the world, at the dream of love, with the same unscreened intensity. I read Pan, but the person I met on those woodland paths was my feverish younger self. I felt sorrow from the first sentence on, sorrow so sweet and piercing that it was hard to turn the pages. Worse, though – for sorrow recollected can bring a certain pleasure – was my self-reproach. As I read I indicted myself. I had, in stages, without ever planning it, traded off that raw nerved-up avidness. I’d had to, of course; it was inevitable. We do not survive the dream of love, not at that pitch. We build in our safeguards and protective reflexes. We give in to the repetitions, let them gradually tame the erratic element. We grow wise and find balance – or perish. Still, to encounter the stalking ghost of the self here, now, at midlife…

That ended up being a longer excerpt than I intended, because once I started writing I couldn’t stop. I found his reflections profoundly beautiful. Maybe most of us could be some book in place of Pan and feel much the same way.

I could read volumes and volumes more of this, though sadly no more collections were ever published. I had only heard of one of the contributors, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a stunning, moving collection of essays that any lifelong reader will warm to – as soon as you open it, you know for sure that you are among friends.

Finishing off #ABookADayInMay

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Well, here we are! For the third? fourth? year in a row, I’ve finished a book a day in May. I’ll get onto some thoughts about this year’s experience in a moment, but let’s rattle through the final three books…

24 for 3

24 for 3 (2007) by Jennie Walker

This novella is strong competition for ‘review book that sat on my shelves for the longest period’, as Bloomsbury sent it to me in 2008. It was independently published by the author the year before, so I’m considering it a 2007 title. And the author is in fact poet Charles Boyle – ‘Jennie Walker’ is a pseudonym he has used only once, so far.

24 for 3 is from the perspective of a middle-aged woman and her musings over the course of a week – mostly about her stepson, her husband, and the man she is having an affair with (whom she refers to as ‘the loss-adjustor’). As the title suggests to those in know, this is also a novella about cricket. But her husband and the loss-adjustor are cricket fanatics, and some matches between England and India recur through the week.

What’s the equivalent of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for a middle-aged man who wants a woman to have an affair with him AND ask him the rules of cricket? It did feel a bit wish-fulfilment at times, and when you know the author is a man, perhaps even less convincing as a real person.

Having said that, it is a rather beautifully written novella – a lovely observant voice, calmly exposing all sorts of truths about human nature. I marked out one paragraph, which is really more about the stepson.

Then his stepmother apologises for speaking to him the way she did and this is sad, almost as sad as the way his parents spend years of their lives fussing about his table manners or whether he’s cleaned his teeth or his toenails need cutting or he’s getting enough vitamin A or B or Q and then suddenly they stop, they ignore him completely, as if the whole family thing has just been a game to pass the time, like throwing balled-up socks. Although after they’ve dropped out oft he game they still insist, when they bother to notice that he’s still around, that the rules apply to him, and that his vitamn levels are the most important things in his life.

I did find the cricket sections more tiresome, as I find pretty much anything about sport in any context. But otherwise it was a really good little book, and it’s a shame there aren’t any more novellas under Walker’s name. Better late than never?

Everything’s Too Something! (1966) by Virginia Graham

This is a collection of short humorous essays collected from Homes and Garden, of all places. I love Graham’s writing, and I want to review this collection properly – rather than in a speedy A Book A Day in May fashion – so watch this space. She deserves to be better known, and I think she might have been if she’d written this sort of thing thirty years earlier. To tide you over, here’s a paragraph that gives a sense of her tone (and probably, on reflection, couldn’t have been written in the 1930s):

Individualists naturally ahve this tendency to think that laws are not made for them, but in a crowded world, and certainly in this sardine tin of an island, it is difificult to be illegal without inconveniencing somebody else. Contemporary youth, of course, asserts its freedom from conventionality by hitting people over the head with milk bottles, and this causes no little inconvenience too; but even the nonconformists who do not go as far as breaking the law often break the code of good manners by which we painstakingly live with each other.

The Thirteenth Tale (2006) by Diane Setterfield

Everybody was reading this when I started blogging and look, only the best part of 20 years later, I’ve listened to the audiobook!

The premise is fun. Vida Winter is the most famous writer in the UK and famously secretive about her life. Whenever she’s been asked about her history, she’s made up one after another fanciful tales. It’s become part of her lore. But, out of the blue, she writes to Margaret Lea requesting – well, more or less demanding – that Margaret write her biography. So off Margaret goes to Vida Winter’s mansion, kept in residence and regularly taken into Vida’s past with long accounts of her childhood, told by Setterfield as a separate narrative. Margaret is your classic heroine of any book like this: bookishly obsessed with the Brontes, feisty when needed, introspective and clever.

The title of the book, incidentally, comes from a collection of Vida Winter’s stories called Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, which only has 12 stories in it. What happened to the thirteenth tale?

I enjoyed the book, and Setterfield is definitely an excellent and involving storyteller. I’m always a bit dubious of narratives-within-narratives but it captivated me more than I thought it would. It wasn’t always immediately obvious (in the audiobook) whether we were in present-day with Margaret as ‘I’ or in the distant past with Vida as ‘I’. Perhaps it is marked out more obviously in the print edition?

I think the narrative-within-narrative device was stretched a bit far when it turns into somebody’s rediscovered diary late in the book, but perhaps Setterfield was harkening to her gothic antecedents. Anyway, it was a fun and diverting novel. I wouldn’t necessarily race to read another by her, but I’m glad I finally read The Thirteenth Tale.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner #ABookADayInMay Day 5

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Helen Garner Joe Cinque's Consolation Audio Book mp3 on CD | eBay

Today I had an action-packed day in London, and I did get through quite a lot of a book on the train to and from, but not a whole book. Luckily I only had 40 minutes left on an audiobook of Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) by Helen Garner, and I finished it as I was driving into the railway station.

I’m making my way through everything available by Garner on audiobooks – well, everything non-fiction – and Joe Cinque’s Consolation has a lot in common with This House of Grief, published ten years later. It is about a tragic death and the impact it has on those in horrendous mourning, and it closely follows the trial of somebody accused of murder. In this case, though, it’s pretty unambiguous that they committed the killing: one of the central questions is whether or not they have diminished responsibility.

Joe Cinque was in his 20s when Anu Singh, his girlfriend, drugged him with rohypnol and injected large quantities of heroin into him while he slept. During the night, he dramatically died. I’ll spare you some of the more graphic details (which Garner does not spare the reader). Anu Singh had told various friends that she planned to kill him and then kill herself – various motives flew around, from her fear that he would leave her, to her own hypochondriacal (and incorrect) obsession that she had a muscle-wasting disease. None of the friends reported what Anu had said until it was too late, and one of the friends (who had been involved in getting the heroin) is also tried for murder.

Garner got involved in the story after a previous joint trial of both murder-accused broke down, and the decision was made to do separate cases. The book is very Garner: she is interested in the minutaie of the trial, down to the expressions and foibles of each witness. She is as compelled by the way in which people on the stand might make a half-hearted joke as she is with the finer points of law.

Beyond the courtroom, she interviews various people, including Joe Cinque’s distraught parents. (Anu Singh refused to be interviewed.) The scene where she first meets them is fascinating – not only for what she learns from them, but for how she frames it and reflects on it. “Her voice was heavy with the authority of suffering” is a brilliant and concise observation of Mrs Cinque. And afterwards she goes over the mistakes she made as an interviewer – and for sitting, unawares, in the chair that had usually been Joe. Garner takes us so far behind the scenes of reporting that the reporting becomes almost the heart of the book – without retracting from the seriousness of the crime.

A mix of criminology, psychology, elegy and character study, almost nobody else could have written a book like this – Janet Malcolm is the only other name who comes to mind (someone Garner is often compared to, and she does mention The Silent Woman, Malcolm’s brilliant book about the aftermath of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes). I think I’ve almost run out of Garner’s full-length non-fiction, but it’s been a fascinating journey.

#ABookADayInMay is back! And I didn’t like the first one!

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It’s May again, and that can only mean one thing – I’m doing A Book A Day in May again! I don’t know if Madame Bibi is planning to do a novella a day in May again, as I am merely following her lead with this challenge.

To refresh memories – my aim is to finish a book every day in May. I say ‘book’ rather than ‘novella’ because it’ll almost certainly include some non-fiction, and it’s ‘finish’ rather than ‘read a full book’ because I have a whole pile of half-read books that will come into play. Besides those, I haven’t made any specific reading plans. Part of the fun is choosing the book each morning, spontaneously, matching the mood of the day. (And the number of pages I think I’ll have time to read.)

And I started with Antwerp by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño – written in 1980, finally published in 2002, and translated into English by Natasha Wimmer in 2010. I think my copy was actually a review copy in 2010, thinking about it. The cover boldly quotes Bolaño saying, “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp“, which is bold for a publisher who was also issuing a bunch of his other stuff. And also because it’s not really a novel?

Antwerp: Amazon.co.uk: Roberto Bolano: 9780330510585: Books

Antwerp is a series of 56 short vignettes. I’m quite drawn to this sort of fragmented way of crafting a book, as some of my favourite reads of last year demonstrate – though In The Dream House and The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer are both non-fiction. Antwerp is fiction, whatever else it might be, and these vignettes do paint some sort of collective picture – albeit one with such porous edges that the only really safe thing you can say about it, formally, is that it is made of words.

Actually, before we get onto the main part, there is a quick preface by the author – which starts like this:

I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can’t be sure of. For a long time these were just loose pages that I reread and maybe tinkered with, convinced I had no time. But time for what? I couldn’t say exactly. I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

I think that can help us know what we’re dealing with. It’s the sort of experimentalist think-speak that I had a lot more time for when I was 19 than I do now. So I entered the novel (?) proper fearing I might not know what was going on, and so it proved to be. The 55 vignettes take up less than 80 pages in my edition, and many of those pages are only half-filled. Certain characters recur, such as a nameless woman, a pornstar (?), various police officers, and Roberto Bolaño himself, or at least an author of the same name. There are clear themes: police investigation, violence, circuses, rather grubby sex. Maybe there’s even the detective of an actual crime, though I rather failed to pick up the pieces.

I started treating each vignette as a tiny short story, without trying too hard to connect it with what went before and after. And considering they’re things like this, you can perhaps see why:

10. THERE WAS NOTHING

There are no police stations, no hospitals, nothing. At least there’s nothing money can buy. “We act on instantaneous impulses” … “This is the kind of thing that destroys the unconscious, and then we’ll be left hanging” … “Remember that joke about the bullfighter who steps out into the ring and then there’s no bull, no ring, nothing?” … The policeman drank anarchic breezes. Someone started to clap.

But there were some parts that I loved and went back and re-read, like a poem. I noted down this opening to a vignette:

Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we’ll later call the work. Silence reads letters sitting on a balcony. Birds like a a rasp in the throat, like women with deep voices. I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors. Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird. And no work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles.

I keep using the word ‘vignette’, though I have no idea if Bolaño would like it. I got to the end having really appreciated some of the writing, and not at all knowing what the point of Antwerp was. (The city is mentioned, finally, in the 49th of the 55 vignettes – with an anecdote about a man in Antwerp being killed when his car was run over by a truck full of pigs.)

It’s probably the sort of book that would reward a year’s careful studying. Each line could be debated and played with and appreciated. Certainly Bolaño has his admirers. I don’t think I’m likely to become one of them.

Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar

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I wanted to write about Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar (translated by Jerry Pinto) before the end of Novellas in November – hosted by Rebecca and Cathy. It’s only as I sit down to review it that I discover my edition is 228 pages, and thus rather over the suggested novella page limit – but it has big margins and a massive font, and I did some quick sums that suggest it’s under 50,000 words. So… maybe I can count it? I can easily see Cobalt Blue being printed as a 150pp book in a more usual font size.

Enough justification – let’s chat about Cobalt Blue (2006). I came across it because I watched the 2022 film – directed by the multi-talented author. Curiously, the film was in Hindi but the book was written in Marathi. I love watching Indian cinema, and really appreciated Cobalt Blue, which is shot beautifully and sensuously, with a gentle, philosophical feel to it. I was interested to see how the book would compare.

The gist of the plot is that the Joshi family rent out one of their buildings to a mysterious visitor. He is friendly, artistic, ready to be welcomed – and calmly secretive about every detail of his past. I think I’m right in saying that we don’t even learn his name. But we do learn early on that both the son and daughter of the house fall in love with him.

The first half of the book is from the perspective of the son, Tanay – addressed to ‘you’, the visitor.. He’s in his early 20s, and his sexuality seems to be both unspoken and unquestioned. He is not tormented by it, but nor is he open with his parents – instead, it seems like he has entered into an almost dreamlike romance with the anonymous paying guest. Though we know from the opening line that the guest leaves Tanay, Kundalkar still suffuses this half of the novella with a feeling of fairy tale. It is not the reflections of someone embittered. It’s a reverie on a lost relationship. Tanay has a beautiful innocence, observing the world around him and himself with a curiosity that feels poetic, if a little detached.

It’s recently come to my attention that when I’m listening to someone, I cock my head. On the phone I hold the receiver between my head and my shoulder as Anuja does, playing a rhythm on the table in front of me. When I watch a film, I run my fist over my face, as Shrikrishna used to. When I shave, I bring my face close to the mirror, as Baba does. When the milk boils over, I walk to the gas range calmly, turn it off and wipe the counter down, without a word— as Aai does.

How did I acquire those habits? Perhaps that’s what happens during the forging of a relationship: if nothing else, you adopt some of the other person’s habits. It makes you feel those small adaptations, those adoptions, make him one of you.

Have you picked up some habits from me? Do you draw circles with a finger on your thali when you’ve finished eating? Do you, every once in a while, squeeze shaving cream on to your toothbrush? Do you sleep with a knee drawn up to you, the bedclothes kicked away? Do you fold the newspaper neatly and put it where you found it, when you’re done?

Yesterday, when a cobalt blue smudge of the wall ended up on my hand, I wiped it on my trousers without thinking.

Anuja, his sister, is less passive and less contented. In the second half of the novella, we see things from her side – how she and the guest leave the home together. This is scandalous in her society, of course, and is the act of someone determined and reckless. She writes in the first person, and the guest feels more like a catalyst than an end point. Kundalkar’s writing is still lovely, but if the first half is a dream then the second half is more firmly wedded to reality.

Throughout it all, we only get hazy impressions of the guest. He reveals things in the family, but keeps himself hard to pin down. There is no big reveal where we learn his motivations – why he romanced both siblings, or which one he might prefer. Cobalt Blue isn’t about him: it’s about innocence and experience, family and loyalty, hope and the reverse.

Having seen the film first, I did have it in mind – and the film is much more linear, perhaps unsurprisingly. The novella is more abstract and jumps around a lot. I really enjoyed the experience of reading it – and I’ll give the final word to the very able translator, Jerry Pinto, who writes a short afterword:

As readers we expect narratives to fall into seemly timelines. But neither Tanay nor Anuja respect the sequential. Smitten, broken, rebuilt, they tell their stories as memories spill over, as thoughts surface. They move from the present to the past and back to the present without so much as an asterisk to help you adjust. Tanay says things again and again, as if he wants to reassure himself, as if repetition will fix what has happened in his memory. Once you get used to this, you realise that this is how we grieve, how we remember, in the present tense and in the past, all at once, because the imagined future must now be abandoned.

Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban #ABookADayInMay No.21

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In case anybody is counting – yes, I did read No.20 in A Book A Day in May and didn’t blog about it. The book I read is Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, and it’s one of the books in the next episode of Tea or Books?, so I thought I’d wait until then to reveal my thoughts.

And onto today’s book. When I saw Annabel reviewing Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit the other day, it reminded me that I have a couple of his books to read and they’re quite short. Previously I’ve only read Turtle Diary, which I think is his most famous novel, and… well, Amaryllis Night and Day (2001) is very different.

Peter is an artist who first encounters Amaryllis at a distance in a dream. She is getting on a bus – the bus stop, mysteriously, says BALSAMIC and the bus says FINSEY-OBAY, a place he has never heard of. And the bus is made of bamboo and rice paper in yellows, oranges, and pinks, a bit like a Japanese lantern.

He is beguiled by her (and, yes, it’s the first of Russell Hoban being very Male Author Writing About Women’s Bodies, which did get a bit tiresome). But he has seemingly unrelated dreams and cannot recapture the strange scene – and then, at an exhibition, he meets Amaryllis in person.

When I turned again I saw my reflection, as before, in the glass of the case and fragmentarily repeated in the Klein bottles. Then another face appeared beside mine. I spun around and there she was, dressed the same as in the dream, watching me thoughtfully. She was better-looking than I remembered and not really all that thin. Her dream self might have been painted by Edvard Munch on one of his less cheerful days but the real woman was quite different. Her hair was darker than in the dream; she was still pale but her paleness was that of the Pre-Raphaelite nymphs done by John William Waterhouse; like them she had an exquisite figure, delicately chiselled features, big innocent eyes, and a look of sadness and regret, as if she knew she’d be big trouble but was sorry about it. Astonishing, really, how she was so recognisably herself and yet so unlike her dream self.

I like how Peter, as an artist, sees the world through art references – and not in too forced a way. The Klein bottle, incidentally, is some sort of riff on a mobius strip in which a bottle is eternal surface, or something. I have to admit that I glazed over a little on those bits, complete with diagrams, but other readers will enjoy them.

Peter and Amaryllis have a drink and they want to see each other again – but in the dreamscape. He doesn’t know where she lives or even her last name, so has to rely on this hoped reunion. And… yes, they meet there again.

As their lives continue in dreams (which they call ‘glims’, because saying the word ‘dream’ will force them to awake) and in reality, they take part in a curious experiment. Amaryllis is keen that Peter gets on the bus with her, in the dream, though neither of them seem to know exactly why. And Peter is keen to love Amaryllis forever? I wasn’t sure how the insta-love played into the structure, but Amaryllis is clearly captivating.

The novel continues, with dream and reality becoming more and more aligned. Incidents that happen in dream seem to come true; experiences aren’t clearly dream or reality. The prose remains quite spare and straightforward, which I think is wise. We know where we are within the sentences, even if not within the scenes.

At that time of day I always have the feeling that if you gave reality a good kick the scenery would shake.

I did like Amaryllis Night and Day, though nowhere near as much as I enjoyed Turtle Diary. I think that’s partly because I didn’t much care about either Peter or Amaryllis. Rather, the way Hoban constructed realities was interesting – not necessarily what happened within them. And I did find his erotic gaze a little tedious. He was in his mid-70s when he wrote it, and there’s something a little boring and sad, to me, about old men writing droolingly about 20-something women’s bodies.

So, an interesting experiment that I think deserved more worthy content. But keeping up with my May challenge featuring very different books most days!

Making Love by Jean-Philippe Toussaint #ABookADayInMay No.15

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I bought Making Love (2002) by the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint back in 2014, in an edition translated by Linda Coverdale – unusually, and pleasingly, her name even makes the cover. It’s a slim novella at only 114 pages, and I found it beguilingly beautiful… with some reservations. I’ve just learned, from the author’s Wikipedia page, that it’s the first in the ‘cycle of Marie’, of which there are four books so far.

Marie is one of the two main characters in Making Love, the other being our narrator – another unnamed narrator, which has cropped up a few times in May. It is set over the course of a few days in Japan, in Tokyo and Kyoto, and we are told from the outset that this trip is the end of their relationship. It hasn’t been planned as a final trip to say farewell to their love – and it is something the narrator slowly realises, with the sense of something inevitable.

That point comes at the end of this paragraph, though the reason I wanted to quote it is as example of Toussaint’s beautiful, beautiful writing. So much of Making Love is suffused with this sort of gorgeous, strangely elegiac writing. Whether the weather, the glowing lights of Tokyo, or simply the sight of a hotel room, Toussaint (and Coverdale) write prose like poetry – but very readable poetry, that doesn’t obstruct the sense:

From where we sat in the restaurant, the wooden window frame presented only a fragmented and incoherent street scene, giving onto a shadowy building with mysterious electric wires and a column of light made up of seven or eight superimposed illuminated signs rising vertically along the façade to announce the presence of bars on every floor. I watched the snow falling silently in the street, light and impalpable, clinging to neon signs, the contours of paper lanterns, car roofs, and the glass eyelets anchoring the wires of telephone poles. When the flakes crossed the bright zone of a street lamp, they whirled an instant in the light like a cloud of powdered sugar puffed aloft by an invisible divine breath, and that snow seemed to me an image of the passage of time, and then, in the immense helplessness I felt at being unable to keep time from passing, I had the presentiment that the end of the night would mean the end of our love.

Those reservations I mentioned earlier? I think the only thing holding me back from relishing every page of Making Love is clued in the title – there is a seamy side to the novella. Along the way, even as they approach the end of the relationship, the couple make love on several occasions – and I don’t object to that being in the novella. But the words and sentences used to describe those moments lose all gentleness. They tone becomes quite sordid and, dare I say, anatomical. It is at odds with the feel of the rest of the prose, in a way that doesn’t feel effective so much as inelegant.

I was more intrigued by the suspenseful subplot of Making Love – the little vial of acid that the narrator has packed with him on this trip, keeping it hidden in his washbag. He returns to it often throughout, whether in action or thought, and the reader can’t help thinking of it as a Chekhov’s gun – why has he brought it, and what will happen with it, if anything? Interestingly, this additional element to the story doesn’t feel at all jarring, even though it could have done. This part Toussaint managed to incorporate elegantly.

So, I was impressed enough by the writing that I will probably seek out more by Toussaint – and if the Marie cycle is chronological, it will be interesting to see what happens after the end of this relationship.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich #ABookADayInMay No.10

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I haven’t read any of Louise Erdrich’s novels, which I know are well-regarded, but that didn’t stop me being very interested in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), which Daunt Books have now republished and sent me as a review copy.

It’s a memoir-travelogue-history in which Erdrich takes her 18-month-old daughter to Ojibwe Country – the area in southern Ontario where her ancestors have lived for years, and where the father of her daughter lives (a man she calls Tobasonakwutiban). It’s never easy to arrange to meet up with him, but somehow they manage.

And it’s like entering another world – one more connected with the past, with the surrounding islands, lakes, and land, and with their identity. Perhaps it is the precariousness of that identity that makes it so vivid – it is an identity that had been routinely attacked by schools that sought to remove anything distinctive from this people, to quash out their language and force them to assimilate.

In the book, Erdrich has been running a bookshop in Minneapolis. It is a world away from Ojibwe Country, but she has some connection – she is Turtle Mountain Ojibwe (as well as half-German) and her grandfather had been a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. If there is a clash of cultures when Erdrich comes to visit Ojibwe Country, it is not the clash of an outsider coming to the place – the clash is within her. Here’s her reflection on the system of deities, and propitiating them with tobacco:

There was a time when I wondered – do I really believe all of this. I’m half German. Rational! Does this make any sense? After a while, such questions stopped mattering. Believing or not believing, it was all the same. I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as it if contained sentient spiritual beings. The question of whether or not they actually existed became irrelevant. After I’d stopped thinking about it for a while, the ritual of offering tobacco became comforting and then necessary. Whenever I offered tobacco I was for that moment fully there, fully thinking, willing to address the mystery.

There are also elements that are unconnected with her tribal connections or her visit – the fact that, at 48, she is quite old to have a toddler. The girl’s father is in his mid-60s. Erdrich has three teenage daughters too. It’s an unusual life to lead, and Erdrich examines the situation and her reflections on it with the same respect and intelligence that she turns to Ojibwe Country and its customs and history.

My favourite bits of the book, unsurprisingly, were those that dealt with language. In the 2014 afterword Erdrich reveals that one of her teenage daughters (now adult) has invested many hours to a whole-hearted learning of Ojibwe, which is apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the hardest language to learn. I am very much not a polyglot, but I enjoy reading about language learning:

Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb, there are countless forms. This sounds impossible, until you realize that the verb forms not only have to do with the relationships among the people conducting the action, but the precise way the action is conducted and even under what physical conditions. The blizzard of verb forms makes it an adaptive and powerfully precise language. There are lots of verbs for exactly how people shift position. Miinoshin describes how someone turns this way and that until ready to make a determined move, iskwishin how a person behaves when tired of one position and looking for one more comfortable. The best speakers are the most inventive, and come up with new words all of the time. Mookegidaazao describes the way a baby looks when outrage is building and coming to the surface where it will result in a thunderous squawl. There is a verb for the way a raven opens and shuts its claws in the cold and a verb for what would happen if a man fell of a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and drove the stem of it through the back of his head. There can be verb for anything.

I found the historical sections a little less interesting, even though the explain the 11,000 books that were brought to the island, many of which are still housed in a custom-designed library island. It is the fresh immediacy of Erdrich’s experiences and responses that most captivated me.

Books and Islands of Ojibwe Country is an unusual little book. I like its brevity. This is not an exhaustive examination of the region – rather, it is a short and compelling snapshot of one woman’s reconnection with a shared past. And, because of her small daughter, also the forging of an understanding of a shared future.

Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley #ABookADayInMay No.9

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Last year everyone seemed to be reading My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley. I couldn’t decide if it was likely to be my cup of tea or not, but I decided to take a chance on Cold Water (2002) when I stumbled across it in a bookshop in Cheltenham. It’s Riley’s debut novel, published when she was only 23.

It’s about a young woman called Carmel McKisco who works in a run-down bar in Manchester. She has recently broken up from a cheerful man called Tony, and she has vague plans of moving to Cornwall for a fresh start. She and a friend also make a plan to track down a musician they used to obsess about, after his bandmate turns up in the bar.

It’s hard to find much to say about Cold Water, if I’m honest. It meanders through different scenes and people, telling you about some of the locals, or what it’s like to walk the nearby streets. The Guardian review called it ‘a series of well-wrought sketches’, and that’s a good description. They are interesting, well-written vignettes that felt consistently like building up a world in which something could happen… but nothing really does. I think a certain sort of reader will love it. I’ve realised that I don’t need a lot of plot in a novel, but I do need some sort of momentum. And I suppose the absence of momentum is sort of the point of Cold Water, so it didn’t make a huge impression on me.

Here, anyway, is a bit I did like – to give you a sense of her writing:

Margi first started having nights out in Manchester when she was fifteen. At the Hacienda they called her ‘the garage flower’ and would let her in for free. Not unpredictably, she fast acquired a much older boyfriend. Mark Dalton. He was thirty-six. He liked people to see them out together at clubs so everyone would wonder what a pretty young thing like her was doing with him. And Margi liked the idea of this too. She liked him to look old, crumpled and unshaven. They went out together and had drunken, jealous rows. They caused scenes. She started staying at his place in Chorlton most nights, and she says every morning they’d take their caff breakfast, beans on toast in a polystyrene tray and cups of thick tea, into Southern Cemetery, sitting together on the wet grass and talking lofty nonsense. I’m sure it wasn’t every morning, but what the hell. And it was this Mark, so she says, taught her the importance of always making a good entrance and a better exit. “The entrance is important,” he’d say, “but the exit is crucial.” When he finished with her, unceremoniously, she returned to his flat and left an orchid on his doormat, with a note instructing him to think of her while he watched it wither and die. “Well, I was seventeen, I was a romantic…” she shrugs.

Was this a good exit from Margi? Maybe it was. Where was she? My heart thrummed in my stomach all afternoon. I felt uneasy and a little ashamed that I was thinking about it so much. I knocked on the door of her flat that evening on my way into work but there was no reply.

I don’t know how this sort of style and structure compares to My Phantoms or Riley’s other work – but she is good enough a writer here that I would try her again in a different mode.