2010s

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

StuckinaBook All , , , 3 Comments

Such a Fun Age: 'The book of the year' Independent (Bloomsbury Publishing): Amazon.co.uk: Reid, Kiley: 9781526612144: Books

I don’t hear much about the latest fiction, but there are some titles that break through my early-20th-century mindset. Everyone was talking about Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid five years ago, including being longlisted for the Booker Prize, and I think it became even bigger during the pandemic. Better late than never, I listened to the audiobook – and, yes, everyone was right. It’s one of the best 21st-century novels I’ve read.

The novel opens with a brilliant ‘set piece’. Emira is out for the night with friends, in her party clothes and a few drinks down. She gets an emergency phone call from Alix, asking her to take Briar for the evening. Briar is a three-year-old whom Emira often babysits, and she agrees to come straight away and takes Briar to a nearby supermarket. Emira is African-American; Briar (and her parents) are white. When an older white woman sees them together, she thinks Briar is in danger and speaks to a security guard. He refuses to believe Emira is the babysitter.

It’s an excellent way in to a clever and nuanced novel about race in contemporary America. None of Reid’s central characters are out-and-out racists. What makes it so thought-provoking, and often hard to read, is that Reid is spearing the white progressives who are so self-conscious about being anti-racism. Alix is a writer and influencer whose project LetHer Speak has unexpectedly spiralled her into fame, while Emira starts a romantic relationship with a white man, Kelley, who witnessed the supermarket incident and urges her to go public about it. He doesn’t understand what repercussions Amira would face.

There is much more going on in Such A Fun Age than race, though. Emira is a brilliant portrait of a millennial who is overly qualified for the job she has, and is about to fall off her parent’s healthcare plan, but has no sense of her future. “Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.” Alix is a complex character, swinging between sympathetic and the reverse, anxious and ambitious and never entirely comfortable in what she is doing.

There were moments like this that Alix tried to breeze over, but they got stuck somewhere between her heart and ears. She knew Emira had gone to college. She knew Emira had majored in English. But sometimes, after seeing her paused songs with titles like ‘Dope Bitch’ and ‘Y’all Already Know’, then hearing her use words like connoisseur, Alix was filled with feelings that went from confused and highly impressed to low and guilty in response to the first reaction. There was no reason for Emira to be unfamiliar with this word. And there was no reason for Alix to be impressed.

And, for a zeitgeisty novel, it’s much more than an opinion piece with fictional characters. Reid’s plotting is brilliant. Two of the main characters are connected in a way I didn’t see coming, and Reid is so clever in her creation of their lasting resentments from a shared memory differently remembered. Everyone is so believable, and all the novel’s morals are in convincing shades of grey. Honestly, the only bad thing about the novel, in my opinion, is the title. It’s so flimsy and nothingy, and doesn’t tell you anything about the book.

The audiobook is also up there with the best I’ve listened to. Nicole Lewis is a brilliant narrator, and manages to present Emira’s detailed character so well. Emira often replies briefly – things like “Oh, ok” – and Lewis does an exceptional job of using those small moments to show her discomfort, her intelligence, her refusal to accept everything expected of her.

I bought Such A Fun Age in an Audible sale, and wasn’t even sure I’d ever get round to listening to it. I’m so glad I did. It’s gone from a novel I dimly knew about to one of my best reads of the year.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill #ABookADayInMay Day 26

StuckinaBook All , , , 27 Comments

Dept. of Speculation: Jenny Offill (Best of Granta)

I can’t remember who first recommended Dept. of Speculation (2014) to me, but it was on one of the posts where I talked about loving books told in fragments – specifically Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Joan Givner’s Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer. Those are all non-fiction – until I read Offill’s novel, I hadn’t tried anybody doing anything like that for fiction.

Dept. of Speculation is told in hundreds of fragment paragraphs – most over a few lines, though the longest are about a page and the shortest are one or two words. Together, they tell the story of a relationship, from dating to marriage to a lost pregnancy to a child to an affair. I don’t know if there is any autobiography in there – the unnamed female narrator of the fragments is a writing teacher who has published one novel and struggles to write the second. Offill was certainly all those things, though I couldn’t speak to her relationship.

Something I love about this splintered approach to writing is that there are no restrictions on tonal consistency. You might dive suddenly into the most heart-piercing moment of a relationship breakdown, or the joyful surprises of motherhood, or the painful fears of the same. And, next to this emotional peak, Offill will write something entirely objective – about the Voyager space mission, for instance (it is relevant in context), or – well, this is the opening fragment/vignette/call-it-what-you-will:

Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.

This approach builds up a composite picture of the relationship that a more traditional, linear novel could do, but it will feel less fresh and perhaps a bit laboured. I don’t think you could get away with the same sharp philosophy or character insight that Offill can use – for instance, this next fragment works because of the format of the book. I think it would feel awkward in a less formally innovative novel:

There is such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

I wasn’t sure that a novel in vignettes could sustain the level of character development one would hope for – particularly over the course of several years. But somehow Offill manages to portray the shifting state of the marriage, and the similarly evolving relationship of mother and daughter. You can convey so much in snapshots.

Stop writing I love you, said the note my daughter wrote over the one I had left in her lunchbox. For a long time, she had asked for a note like that every day, but now a week after turning six, she puts a stop to it. I feel odd, strangely light-headed when I read the note. It is a feeling from a long time ago, the feeling of someone breaking up with me suddenly. My husband kisses me. “Don’t worry, love. Really, it’s nothing.”

There is so much nuance in the novel. It’s not a case of marriage-collapsed-by-adultery. There is a complex response to it, with some of the complexity being what falls between the vignettes. The absence of every detail doesn’t diminish the novel. Somehow it elevates it.

I was so impressed by Dept. of Speculation (incidentally, the curious title refers to the faux ‘return address’ both the man and the woman would put on the back of letters). I think it’ll stay in my mind for a long time, and I’ll doubtless re-read. If you have any other recommendations of fiction or non-fiction told in vignettes, or fragments of paragraphs, I’d love to hear them.

Elizabeth Goudge and Maggie O’Farrell

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , 17 Comments

As with previous A Book A Day in May challenges, sometimes I’m doubling up on days – and in the past two days I have finished a 407pp book (The Heart of the Family by Elizabeth Goudge) and a 484pp book (This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell). Before you think I am some sort of reading superhero, I should tell you that I had read most of both of them already. One of the bonuses of having lots of books on the go at once is that it lines up quite a few candidates for this May challenge. Anyway, some quick thoughts about the two books in turn…

The Heart of the Family: Book Three of The Eliot Chronicles

The Heart of the Family (1953) by Elizabeth Goudge

The Heart of the Family is the third in the trilogy about the Eliot family. The first, The Bird in the Tree, was one of my favourite reads last year – I loved the family dynamics, the warmth and clarity with which Goudge wrote about them, and the no-longer-fashionable theme of self-sacrifice. I went onto read the second in the trilogy (though didn’t get around to blogging about it), and really enjoyed that one too – people often single out The Herb of Grace (also published as Pilgrim’s Inn) as their favourite in the series. I can see why, as I loved the theme of setting up a new home, but I missed Lucilla – the matriarch who rather fades into the background.

In the third of the trilogy, Lucilla is somehow still with us – well into her 90s, a little less dominant over her family’s decisions, and in a period of reflecting back on her life and all its triumphs and sorrows. David, the young man with youthful naivety and fervour in The Bird in the Tree, is now an older family man, less impetuous and emotional but still making strained decisions. He has also been successful in his career as an actor, and it has brought him a secretary – Sebastian Weber is the most significant new character in this book. Sebastian intensely dislikes David – and his arrival at the family home challenges both of their views of each other.

But this is truly an ensemble piece. We have grown to know and love (or at least understand) such a wide cast of characters, and it is a poignant pleasure to see more of them. I found myself more drawn, this time, to Margaret and Hillary – two of Lucilla’s children whom she has not loved with extravagant affection of other children and grandchildren, but who are such solid people that I couldn’t help empathising with them intensely.

As before, there is Goudge’s mix of serious Christian spirituality and wry humour. It’s such a pleasure to read a novelist who takes faith seriously, and she is also often great fun. I loved this bit…

For Meg’s religious ideas at this time had been formed more by Mrs. Wilkes than by her mother, and Mrs. Wilkes leaned more to the Old Testament than the New. Sally told Meg shyly and beautifully about the Baby in the manger and the lambs carried in the arms of the Good Shepherd, and Meg listened courteously but was not as yet very deeply impressed, but Mrs. Wilkes’s dramatic accounts of the adventures of the Old Testament heroes sent her trembling to her bed and were quite unforgettable.

“And up to ‘eaven ‘e went,” Mrs. Wilkes would say of Elijah, “with such a clanging and a banging of that fiery chariot that you could’ave ‘eard it from ‘ere to Radford. And all the angels shouted, ducks, and all the archangels blew their trumpets till the sky split right across to let ‘im in. Like a thunderstorm it was, ducks. Somethink awful.”

So, yes, I enjoyed The Heart of the Family – but I did find it very much the worst of the trilogy. The characters were delightful to re-encounter because of my fondness for the family, but the pace and momentum was a bit lacking. It’s a long novel to more or less meander, and there is some hard-to-pin-down quality missing in this book that was there in the other two. It was good, but for some reason it felt a bit like a faint shadow of the other two.

This Must Be The Place (2016) by Maggie O’Farrell

And talking of faint shadows… I won’t bury the lede this time. I really enjoyed this long novel but, again, it’s not as good as the others I’ve read by O’Farrell. I think this is my sixth book by O’Farrell and it’s my least favourite – excellent writing and fascinating characters, but something is missing in the momentum here too. (Sidenote: this beautiful cover was hiding behind the dustjacket.)

It’s too complex a novel for me to cover everything going on – but the gist is that Claudette went missing. She is a world-famous French actor and director who disappeared one day. By the time it became clear that she’d faked her own death, she was away – people knew she was alive, and presumed she was a recluse. In actual fact, she had ended up married to Daniel, an American academic who studies speech development.

Daniel has previously been married to another woman. He has also broken off a previous relationship with a woman who was later found dead. There are children from different stages of his life, some of which he is estranged from.

In typical O’Farrell fashion, we dart all over the place – many, many different relationships and different time periods, from the 1940s to the 2010s. Sometimes we are in America and sometimes in Ireland. A lot of the story has to be pieced together, bit by bit, as more and more is revealed. I’ve described some of it in linear fashion, but that absolutely isn’t how the novel is presented.

I can cope with a bit of jumping around if there is something to keep us hooked. I thought she did it brilliantly in Instructions for a Heatwave, for example. And I did enjoy This Must Be The Place – her writing and characterisation are superb. But I wasn’t really sure what the reason for reading was. In other books of hers, there has been one or more central questions that we want answered. In This Must Be The Place, I wasn’t really sure what that was. It’s in many ways an excellent novel, but I got to the end unsure quite why she’d written it.

As I say, the writing is beautiful, so I want to end with a section that I noted – this is 1940s, with Daniel as a very young man:

Daniel looked at the man. The man looked at him. In later years, he will recollect only dimly the trip he and his mother took on the ferry. He will recall it as a series of sensations: a sock that kept slipping and wrinkling under his heel, the startling white undersides of gulls as they wheeled above him, a girl throwing pizza crust up into the air for them, the amber beads of rust on the rails. And this: the unaccountable sight of his mother sitting with a man who was not his father, her skirt with the sailboat print arranged around her, the man turning toward her and whispering words that Daniel knew were unsettling words, persuasive words, frightening words, her head bowed, as if in prayer.

So perhaps I was a little disappointed by both these books, while also thinking them rather good. It’s a case of expectations being very high, and quite hard to express justly in a quick review! I’m glad to have read them.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

StuckinaBook All , , , , 10 Comments

I think my friend Kirsty first mentioned Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, and it falls in a genre I particularly like – the sort of essay that is both personal and well-researched. When they lean too much one way (entirely confessional without any sort of context) it can feel a little unrelenting. If they fall more into the objective-research category, then I don’t feel sufficient connection.

The latter, of course, has been a mainstay of essay-writing forever. In recent years, a number of excellent essayists have written in the area I most appreciate. (Recent-ish works I’ve admired are Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm, Toxic by Sarah Ditum, Notes From No-Man’s Land by Eula Biss, The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson, Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman. Probably not a coincidence that they’re all by women.)

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) puts ‘self’ right in the title, and there is certainly a lot of reflecting in every sense of the world. She holds up a mirror to her own life constantly – but it is a large mirror, and she gathers in a large number of people standing around her. She sees herself in a number of different groups, about whom she writes en masse – be that millennials, women, millennial women, non-Caucasians, internet-users, unmarried people etc. It works because she doesn’t wield the sort of unanswerable certainty that we see in right-wing column writers and Twitter firebrands. Tolentino’s thoughts on (say) how we represent ourselves on social media would be self-indulgent if she considered herself a lone example of the insecure bravado of internet posting – and far-reachingly bland if she thought everybody was exactly the same. Tolentino finds the middle ground, which sounds like a wide path but is surprisingly seldom trodden.

In each essay, Tolentino often moves from the specific to the broad. In the case of that internet-essay (‘The I in the Internet’), she starts from reading back over a blog she launched in her middle teens, and almost as quickly gave up on. It harkens back to a more innocent (perhaps) era of the internet, where the ‘blog’ section of a free website was about the only place you could launch these performances of the e-self – but Tolentino follows the connected line between this sort of phenomenon and the place we find ourselves now. As she does so, she takes in more and more of the internet landscape, and I found it a compelling take even in a much-discussed arena.

Continuing that specific vs broad and personal vs universal line: Tolentino is at her best when she can combine them, leaning on the specific and personal. Easily my favourite essay in the collection was ‘Reality TV Me’, where Tolentino looks back on her appearance in a short-lived, little-known American reality TV show Girls v Boys. What makes it a fascinating essay isn’t Tolentino’s relation of her experiences – it’s the clever way she comments on the memories. She had never watched the full show – and finds that she has misremembered many elements of it, partly in service to her construction of her own identity. She gets back in touch with the other contestants and, together, they analyse how they were cast, which archetypes they were intended to represent, how the show formed their understanding of themselves, and how their recollections of it relate to it. It’s a layered, complex, extremely well-constructed essay.

Leaning more towards the detailed research side of things is ‘We Come From Old Virginia’, about rape culture on university campuses. It’s a tough, brilliant essay. Even in an era where sexual assault and sexual violence is more widely recognised and discussed than in the past, there is still a lot that shocks and saddens in this essay. It links to the essay on reality TV in its unravelling of memory and truth – centred around a notorious rape claim in Rolling Stone that turned out to include many false details. It is brave to include this sort of scandal in a feminist book – it could too easily have seemed to downplay rape culture, and was used as such by some commentators at the time – but Tolentino writes with nuance, insight and compassion. Above all, she asks, why is the false accusation of rape considered so much worse a crime to many (especially right-wing men, but beyond that too) than rape itself.

At the other end of the spectrum, Tolentino is weakest when she treads old ground. Does anybody really need her takes on marriage as a patriarchal institution? The fact that she doesn’t want to get married is only really interesting to her (and her boyfriend, I suppose). ‘I Thee Dread’ is the most formulaic essay of the lot, and has no specific hook to hang on. ‘The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams’ is interesting but, again, the idea that capitalism is rewarding the super-wealthy and nobody else isn’t ground-breaking. The one turn to literary criticism – ‘Pure Heroines’ – is solid but unexceptional.

I started reading around Trick Mirror and its reception, and discovered the furore around a piece of criticism by Lauren Oyler in London Review of Books, unforgivably badly titled ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!‘ (I don’t know if a sub-editor is to blame for that title, but they should be suspended without pay.) Oyler is apparently renowned for writing savagely about acclaimed books and, sure, it’s easier to get a reputation that way than by writing kindly about them. The critique itself is a masterclass in pieces that sound profound, but don’t actually say anything at all. I went further down the rabbit hole, and the best thing written about it all is Freddie deBoer’s takedown of Oyler’s takedown.

Pace Oyler, I think Tolentino is – at her best – astoundingly good. The only problem with a collection is that her best only comes when she balances the specific/general and the personal/broader spectrums . There are enough examples in Trick Mirror of her doing that to make it well worth reading. It’s not a perfect collection, but I think she is deservedly recognised as a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent and well-researched voice in modern essays, and I’ll certainly read more by her.

Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

When I was in Toronto, I met up with a listener to Tea or Books? – Debra – and, after a lovely dinner, we went book shopping. I told her I was on the lookout for Canadian authors writing about present-day Canada, and she had lots of great recommendations. Indeed, if I hadn’t already bought a lot of books in Vancouver, I’d probably have come home with a great deal more. One I couldn’t resist was Bellevue Square (2017) by Michael Redhill. (Sidenote: wouldn’t the cover be amazing if they hadn’t PRINTED on that sticker?) I now follow the cover designer, Jennifer Griffiths, on Instagram and really love her work.

The premise of Bellevue Square really appealed to me: Jean Mason discovers she has a doppelganger. She lives an ordinary life, working in a bookstore, husband and two sons, when regular visitors to the bookstore start to ask about the woman who looks exactly like her that they’ve seen in the neighbourhood. Indeed, they thought she was Jean.

Jean doesn’t see the woman herself, but becomes obsessed with discovering her. She even pays someone living in Bellevue Square Park to take photographs when they see this other woman, so she can keep track of her movements. (I believe Bellevue Square Park had an encampment of unhoused people in tents at the time of writing the novel.) She meets other people who know both women, such as someone in the food market selling pupusa. But then the people who know them both start dying.

If this sounds like I’ve given a lot away than, hoo boy, you’re in for a wild ride. I’m not going to say too much about the plot of Bellevue Square – but it’s certainly not the novel it seems going in. Indeed, it reinvents itself constantly. And the bit about people dying is revealed in a brilliant sentence on p.8:

I put the phone away and at that exact moment a woman I would later be accused of murdering walked into my shop. She wore a green dress embroidered with tiny mirrors and had warm, buttery skin.

Reading Bellevue Square felt a bit like watching the brilliant film The Father, which disorients the viewer over and over and over, giving a sense of what it is like to have dementia. Jean doesn’t have dementia, but the novel never leaves us on steady ground. Everything we think we know is repeatedly undermined, and even when you think the new piece of information has put you on more solid ground, the rug gets pulled from under you again.

What makes Redhill’s novel so masterful is that Bellevue Square feels so compelling and readable, even when you don’t have a clue what to believe. This sort of trickery could be irritating or confusing from another writer’s pen, but it is done so confidently that you always know you’re in safe hands. Wisely, he leans into clarity and simplicity in the prose – it often feels beautifully written, and is very sharp and funny in places, but he avoids anything overly elaborate. If the plot is a mystery to us, then let’s make sure the individual sentences aren’t. It also helps that the novel is anchored by Jean – her incisiveness, her determination, her wit, her occasional abrasiveness. She was a very compelling character.

I loved reading the novel – and it helped that I knew the streets that Jean was walking around from my visit last year. The moments of recognition were lovely.

I’m also fascinated by the cultural significance of doppelgangers. They come up time and again, from Dostoevsky’s The Double onwards (and probably before) – and every time people mention Shelley seeing his doppelganger shortly before he died. And, yes, it’s mentioned in Bellevue Square too. Readers seem captivated by the idea of encountering their doppelganger, and it is a phenomenon laden with eeriness and even menace. Reading a novel like Bellevue Square as an identical twin is quite an unusual experience. Because I have a doppelganger and have always had one – this spectre that is so eerie to most people is normal, everyday experience for me and for the other identical twins reading this book. So it’s interesting to see the experience from another side, used as the central plot point of a book. (I also think that most people, if they met their doppelganger, wouldn’t think it looked much like them. You know how photos never look like you-in-the-mirror? It’s like that having an identical twin.)

Let’s finish with a quote from early in the book that isn’t very relevant to the rest of the novel – but I love anything about arranging books:

But alphabetical is not the only order. I’m not a library, so I don’t have to go full-Dewey. A bookstore is a collection. It reflects someone’s taste. In the same way that curators decide what order you see the art in, I’m allowed to meddle with the browser’s logic, or even to please myself. Mix it up, see what happens. If you don’t like it, don’t shop here. January to June I alphabetize biographies by author. July to December: by subject.

There are moral issues involved, too. Should parenting books be displayed chronologically by year of publication? I don’t want to screw someone’s kid up by suggesting outdate parenting advice is on par with the new thinking. Aesthetic issues: should I arrange art books by height to avoid cover bleaching? Ethical: do dieting books belong near books about anorexia? And should I move books about confidence into the business section? And what is Self-Help? Is it anything like Self Storage (which is only for things, it turns out.) In Self-Help, I have found it is helpful not to read the books at all.

The World Between Two Covers by Ann Morgan

StuckinaBook All , , , 13 Comments

Every Christmas, I seem to read a book I was given for the previous Christmas. Partly that’s me looking at a particular book and thinking, “Gosh, I’ve wanted to read that for a whole year.” Partly it’s because I have time over Christmas to read anything I fancy, and so I grab a pile of books that look like fun. One of them this Christmas was Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe (2015), also published as Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer. I can’t imagine why the title was changed. Anyway, thanks for buying me this last year, Mum and Dad!

(I say I read this over Christmas – crucially, I finished it this year – so this will be the first link in my Century of Books.)

Ann Morgan runs a book blog to this day, but the title refers to the reading challenge she set herself in 2012: reading a book published by someone from every country in the world. That puts A Century of Books in perspective, doesn’t it? This was back in the peak of the book blogging phenomenon, and when any popular blog seemed to be given a book deal. Morgan’s book is fascinating, even if it doesn’t quite do what it says on the cover.

The World Between Two Covers does start with the genesis of the idea – which came from a comment on her blog. The first chapter is all about deciding to embark on the challenge, working out the list of countries (as you can imagine, not the easiest or most politically neutral task), and wondering if it were possible. Throughout the book we do occasionally get hints about the difficult parts of the challenge (how to get a book from a North Korean? What about South Sudan, which had only existed as an independent country for about six months when Morgan started the project?) and there are mentions of readers and authors who post Morgan their favourite books from any particular country. But, by and large, the mechanics and experience of the reading challenge are largely absent from the book.

I was a bit disappointed by that, I’ll confess. I love reading about reading, particularly the difficult challenges – I think particularly of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair or The Whole Five Feet – and those books often become de facto memoirs. That makes them all the stronger, in my opinion. For whatever reason, Morgan’s book is not that. Perhaps the publisher, or she, decided that readers could already find all that information on her blog. So what The World Between Two Covers is really is a series of essays that are borne of the experience – not about the experience itself. On those terms, is a fascinating and wide-ranging collection.

There are sections on self-publishing and electronic books, on writing under totalitarian regimes, on book banning, on the legacies of imperialism. Morgan covers an enormous spectrum of topics and her research is extraordinary. I didn’t learn a huge amount about the almost 200 books she read, though a fair few are mentioned (almost never evaluatively), but I learned a lot about all sorts of other things. The legacies of her reading, rather than her actual reading. For instance, I loved the chapter on culture shock and the things that are left unexplained for an audience that will not need the holding hand, but which become baffling for an audience in translation. It was also about how we orient ourselves as readers, for better or worse.

In the absence of anything else, we tend to draw on our own experiences to make the best of things as go along. Because reading is an active process in which , as Wolfgang Iser has it , we participate by ‘filling in the gaps left by the text’, we search for things to plug the interpretative holes crying out for our attention. We look for equivalences between what we are engaged in imagining and what we have encountered before – just as in real life we might reach for a comparison to help others picture a place that they have never been, dubbing Montreal the Paris of the West, for instance, or Udaipur the Venice of the East. When I read Libyan writer Ibrahim Al-Kon’s The Bleeding of the Stone during my project, I found myself repeatedly drawn to make comparisons between the novel’s poetic evocation of the age-old practices of the Bedouian and the mournful homage to the rural traditions in the works of Thomas Hardy. The parallel may have some truth to it – both writers have negative things to say about the effect of progress on people who live off, and steward, the land – but it is also distorting, because expectations based on Hardy have no place in Al-Koni’s novel. If I were to give in to the temptation to read the novel in Hardy’s terms, I would find the gory denouement – in which the lone Bedouin protagonist Asouf is crucified – inexplicable and nonsensical. The jolt between what I anticipate and what comes would be too violent and I would have no option but to reject the story as absurd.

It’s a fascinating chapter, and naturally doesn’t come up with any hard-and-fast conclusions. But it did challenge my expectations on how much I can learn about a culture by reading fiction from it – particularly fiction aimed primarily at people also from that culture. And often, of course, in translation.

On that note, I found the chapter on translation particularly interesting. Perhaps the championing of translators isn’t something the book blogging world needs to hear as much as others, but it remains shameful that so few books published in the UK (and other English-speaking countries in the West) are in translation. We see so little of the world’s literature, and the things we do get are often filtered through such rigorous expectations that we only get what the publishing industry knows we won’t find too unsettling. As Morgan notes, that means that Scandinavian crime novels are translated – because they fit our expectations of what crime novels should be – while other cultures aren’t represented in our bookshops at all. I noticed last year that there were enormous numbers of Japanese books about cats available in translation – but not that much else. I can’t imagine that Japanese authors solely write whimsical books about cats (welcome though they are).

Not all the books Morgan reads are in translation. There were, of course, those already written by people from English-speaking countries – but other writers choose English as their language even when it is not their mother tongue. It opens them up to a wider market, and in some cases is a safer language to write in. The only book from her list that I have read is a case in point – Ilustrado by Filipino author Miguel Syjuco – though English is also an official language of the Philippines alongside Filipino (a standardised version of Tagalog).

When I went to look up Morgan’s review of Ilustrado, there was a grumpy comment from someone saying “This was a bad choice for a book representing the Philippines. […] I’m sorry you chose this.” As Morgan points out in her reply, no book could represent an entire country and that isn’t the aim of the challenge. But she also wants something that isn’t too unrepresentative – which is why she isn’t interested in (say) a book by a Brit about visiting the Philippines. Earlier in the book, she discusses whether or not her choice of book needs to be set in the country in question at all:

For the most part, however, just as residency in a place is only part of the picture when it comes to human beings’ sense of national and cultural identity, so setting makes for a rather one-sided approach when it comes to the quest for authenticity in literature from around the world. After all, if national identity is as much about thoughts, feelings and perspective as it is about physical presence in a region, then surely the cultural uniqueness or specialness of a work is likely to be located as much in its voice and mindset and assumptions underpinning it as in its setting, if not far more so. When you think about it, there’s no reason why a Zimbabwean work about a kingdom under the sea couldn’t every bit as enlightening, thought-provoking and culturally specific as the most faithful portrayal of life in Mugabe’s Harare.

This paragraph gave me pause for thought. I don’t think I entirely agree. It’s why, when I was looking for recommendations for Canadian novelist Helen Humphreys, I disregarded the ones set in the UK. I wouldn’t necessarily rule out the ‘kingdom under the sea’ option, but I don’t want to read a Zimbabwean author writing about Nigeria as much as I want to read a Zimbabwean author writing about Zimbabwe. Yes, the ‘cultural uniqueness or specialness’ is going to be found in ‘voice and mindset and assumptions’ (of course, every country will have as many of those as it does citizens) as much as the setting – but why not get both? To truly engage with a country, I want to read a book set in that country by an author from that country – ideally set in a time they know, too. But I recognise that is my own set of wishes and requisites, not a universal law.

Morgan’s book is continually thought-provoking, as well as engagingly written. It feels conversational as well as knowledgeable, and it’s a lovely combination. As I say, it isn’t the book I thought I was getting when I started it – but it’s very good at what it’s aiming to do.

Nocturne by Helen Humphreys

StuckinaBook All , , 13 Comments

Nocturne: on The Life And Death Of My Brother : Humphreys, Helen: Amazon.co.uk: Books

One of the authors I’d been advised to look out for in Canada was Helen Humphreys. I did find a few of her novels, but they were almost all set in England, and I’d much rather read a Canadian writer writing about Canada. So I decided to buy some of her non-fiction instead – Nocturne (2013) from ABC Book Store in Toronto, which looked a little unpromising from the outside but had an amazing stock inside. The book itself is beautiful – a lovely covered, and deckled edges. It is just under 200 pages, and something rather special.

The subtitle tells you what the book is going to be about – ‘on the life and death of my brother’. I’m not going to write a very long review, but I do want to communicated what a wonderfully written book Nocturne is – both as a tribute to a brother and best friend, and as an examination of love and loss that perfectly combines the poetic and the grounded.

Fairly late in the book, Humphreys shares the short obituary she wrote for her brother, Martin – saying she never chose words more carefully. And it is evident from the writing in Nocturne that choosing words carefully is at the core of her being. I’m quoting the obituary first because it really tells you who Martin was, and what happened to him:

Brilliant, talented, passionate and compassionate, kind, handsome, disciplined, elusive, and stubborn, Martin loved music, art, new places and experiences, his friends, the West Coast, connecting with life in all its forms, having a beer, and watching the Maple Leafs (even this season). He hated cruelty, intolerance, stupidity, and Toronto winters.

He died too soon, from pancreatic cancer, and is deeply missed by his parents, Frances and Anthony; his sisters, Helen and Cathy; his many friends in Vancouver, Toronto, England, and Paris. We are lost without his beautiful spirit.

Through Nocturne, Humphreys moves between present and various pasts. She tells us about Martin’s life and his illness – the talent he had for music from an early age, and his triumphs and limits as a composer. His friendships, and his movements around the world, and his flawed relationships. And then his diagnosis and the cruelties of cancer. And, winding through it all, the grief and shock of losing your brother and closest ally. I think what I found most moving in Nocturne is the portrait of how you can know someone deeply and still not know everything about them. How you can live in different parts of the world and be deeply close, and be in the same room and not know how to communicate. But what comes across most is the great depths of love Humphreys has for her brother. Not enough fiction and non-fiction talks about this bond between siblings, and Humphreys honours it so beautifully.

And, my goodness, this woman can write. I’m keener than ever to read her fiction, particularly the one or two that are set in Canada. I noted this down on p.8, but there are so many examples of the same exceptional, reflective writing:

I come to the cemetery in a kind of ad hoc fashion. Sometimes I pick up a coffee and drink it out there, standing with my back to your gravestone. I like how the sun warms the stone and how the stone keeps the heat a little way into the evening, keeps it longer than the air. It’s strange, but when you died and the heat started leaking from your body, it left you at exactly the pace that a stone cools after being in the sun all day. It makes me think that we are made of the natural world after all, attached to it more securely than I had realized.

I am often drawn to books about grief – perhaps because they are the purest way of describing love. Nocturne is up there among the best I’ve read.

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

StuckinaBook All , , , 7 Comments

This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial: Amazon.co.uk: Garner, Helen, Weinman, Sarah: 9780553387438: Books

I hadn’t heard of Robert Farquharson or Cindy Gambino, or their children Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, before I started Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (2014). I suspect the same wouldn’t be true of most Australians. They were at the centre of a tragedy that led to a trial, and a retrial, for murder. This much was clear from the outset: Robert Farquharson drove his three young children into a farm dam and all three drowned. He managed to get out of the car. But was it murder or was it a tragic accident, caused by Farquharson blacking out during a coughing fit?

The initial trial took place in 2007, and Garner was there throughout as a journalist – as she was at the second trial, in 2010. I listened to the audiobook, after hearing Garner’s non-fiction praised repeatedly on the Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast – I’d previously read her novel The Spare Room but hadn’t tried any of the non-fiction. And it is absolutely masterful.

This is the sort of case that would make a compelling newspaper article, or perhaps a podcast episode or hour-long documentary. In Garner’s hands, it becomes something much more granular. Since she is able to devote so much space to the trial, it feels like we are in the courtroom with her. The initial trial took seven weeks, so of course it isn’t in real time, but it sometimes feels that way. Periods of questioning are detailed so thoroughly – say, for instance, the doctor who is brought in to answer questions about whether or not Farquharson could black out from a coughing fit in something called ‘cough syncope’. We go back and forth, back and forth – an aggressive cross-examination, the attempts to discredit his medical credentials, the reactions from the jury. The actual evidence the doctor relates is a small part of Garner’s presentation of the scene. Her eyes are everywhere.

Garner notices things other people wouldn’t – and probably wouldn’t mention, if they did. How often a witness bites their lip, or the look on the face of a juror, or even how bored some people seem during the more technical sections of evidence – ‘the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom’:

The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns.

This certainly isn’t an objective book. One of many ways in which Garner’s writing reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s is that the writer is fully present in the reading experience. Garner relates how she takes the trial home with her, how she desperately wants to believe that Farquharson is innocent but is very unsure, and the mental exhaustion of going back and forth. She writes about camardarie (and the reverse) with other journalists, including being berated by some for her supposed light-heartedness.

Her detailed observation does slip into needless cruelty at times. I was startled by one moment – she bumps into a lawyer she used to know, and he says one line. In that time, she manages to say he is looking bad for his age, has lines on his face, is wearing an ill-fitting suit and hasn’t polished his shoes. It’s all so unnecessarily unkind. Like Janet Malcolm, she doesn’t have any sense of what is kind or unkind to say. She is merciless in the way she presents any of the people she sees. Even the grieving mother is described as having put on too much weight. She censors none of her thoughts.

That’s not to say she always highlights negative things. They are just more shocking, in a context where we might expect a certain generosity of empathy. She applauds a female witness whenever she outwits the unpleasant machismo of the cross-examiner, or describes ‘that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie’ when Cindy Gambino’s new husband takes to the stand. Indeed, he sparks one of the asides which make Garner herself such a dominant figure in the reporting:

But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard, I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed, strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect.

Somehow, the tragic deaths of the three boys do not get lost in the maelstrom and minutaie of the court proceedings. Garner manages to keep the emotion of their deaths central, without being maudlin, even while we are preoccupied with the minute-by-minute trial. And it is that clash of the absurdities – and some mundanities – of the legal system with the searing emotional pain of a grieving mother that makes this book so extraordinary. To the everyman, it feels ridiculous that this tragic event can become, for instance, hours and hours of analysing photographs of wheel marks, and disputing over whether or not the police officer’s yellow lines next to them are accurate. Garner is too subtle a writer to spell out this disparity. But it is key to what makes her analytical eye work so well.

And her writing can be beautiful, without being self-conscious. Sentences like this tread the tightrope of poeticism and journalism so well: “Judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.” ([sic] to ‘men’, please!)

I didn’t think I’d find a non-fiction writer as curiously brilliant as Janet Malcolm – but I think Helen Garner is in the same league. If you’re looking for reportage or dry facts or even a kind, considerate piece about a tragedy – this isn’t the place for you. But if you’re looking for something sharp, odd, poetic and haunting – This House of Grief is a masterpiece.

Road Ends by Mary Lawson

StuckinaBook All , , 27 Comments

Reader, I am distraught. I have read all the Mary Lawson novels there are to read – which, admittedly, is only four. Given that there are usually long gaps between them, it will probably be a while before I get another in my hands – but I can always reread. And I’m sure I’ll be rereading Road Ends (2013) several times. Unsurprisingly, it’s simply brilliant.

I bought it in a sale at Vancouver Public Library and read it on the plane between Vancouver and Toronto – what a great book for a plane ride, as it totally captivated me for the full four hours.

Like all of Lawson’s novels, the action of Road Ends takes place in northern Ontario – near the fictional town of Struan, and by a tiny community called Road Ends. She takes us further afield than other of her novels, as I’ll get to in a bit. But it starts in the middle of nowhere in 1967 – a short chapter where two young men Simon and Tom (Simon Thomas! me!) are witnesses to a tragedy at a cliff edge – Tom’s best friend Rob takes his own life.

He listened as their voices faded into the rumble of the falls. He was thinking about the lynx. The way it had looked at him, acknowledging his existence, then passing out of his life like smoke. . . It was the first thing–the only thing–that had managed, if only for a moment, to displace from his mind the image of the child. He had carried that image with him for a year now, and it had been a weight so great that sometimes he could hardly stand.

Until this moment the fear that it would accompany him to the end, enter eternity with him, had left him paralyzed, but the lynx had freed him to act. He thought it was possible that if he focused on the big cat, if by a great effort of will he managed to hold it in the forefront of his mind, it might stay with him long enough to be the last thing he saw, and its silence the last thing he heard above the thunder of the falls.

Oh Mary Lawson, what an extraordinary writer you are. Just absolutely stunning. And she leaves us with the mystery of why Rob has done this – who is the child mentioned? What has left Rob unable to escape from this memory?

We don’t get quick answers. Instead, we look at three people in some other timelines – in Megan in 1966 (a year before that opening chapter), and Edward and Tom in 1969 (two years after that climactic event). They are all members of the same large, dysfunctional family. Edward is the father – Tom and Megan are two of his children who are recent adults, while he has various other children right down to an ill-advised newborn. His wife Emily has retreated into caring for this baby, totally abandoning all her other children and seemingly losing her grip on reality.

At the heart of this family is a toxic assumption that only a woman can look after the young children. In 1969, with Emily incapacitated by all-consuming obsession with a baby, nobody is caring for the other young children. There is no food in the house, no clean clothes, and no structure or even conversation. None of the men quite express that it isn’t a man’s job, but it is the underlying belief – and Lawson is too subtle a writer to rail against this patriarchal nonsense in the narrative. She simply shows us how attitudes in rural 1960s Ontario are destroying a family.

Things are no better among the adults – Tom and Edward barely speak. Edward is a bank manager preoccupied with his mother’s diaries and his own tragic, violent past – desperately trying not to turn into his father, and missing that he is becoming a terrible parent in a different way. His is the only one of the three voices we hear in the first person – while he is emotionally unavailable to everyone, we do get access to his stumbling attempts to understand himself and his history, and how he has ended up where he is.

Just for the record, I did not want any of this. A home and a family, a job in the bank. It was the very last thing I wanted. I am not blaming Emily. I did blame her for a long time but I see now that she lost as much as I did. She proposed to me rather than the other way around, but she is not to blame for the fact that I said yes.

That phrase they use in a court of law – “The balance of his mind was disturbed” – sums it up very well. I married Emily while the balance of my mind was disturbed.

His son Tom, meanwhile, is in deep grief for Rob and has isolated himself from the world. He is a talented scientist, but has decided to stick to snow ploughing, where he needn’t interact with anyone. Lawson showed in Crow Lake that she is exceptionally good at families who are close-knit (even when they are stubborn and intractable) – she is equally good at families who dislike and distrust one another.

Fans of A Town Called Solace will remember one of the main characters beginning to thaw and get to know the community. While he is a newcomer to town, I also loved seeing Tom’s own thawing. He knows the place inside out, but not all the people – and it is a talkative young woman and her long-suffering brother who begin to bring him back to life. Spoilers: readers of Crow Lake will already know these two – it was such a delight for me to realise who they were, and encounter them a few years after the events of Lawson’s first novel.

So, where is Megan? She has been de facto mother to her younger brothers – but, as we see in the 1966 timeline, she has boldly decided to move to London. Not London, Ontario, but London, England. Despite never having been to a city before, she needs to escape her family and home and moves to stay with an old friend – only, when she gets there, she discovers the friend no longer lives at the address she has. She doesn’t even live in the country.

Megan is taken in by the houseshare nonetheless – she could scarcely be more naïve in some ways, but in other ways has lived a far fuller life than any of her new friends. The capabilities she has had to learn set her off on an unexpected career – and she begins to emerge from the shadow of her family. Over her years in London, she grows to find her group of people – including the handsome man across the corridor, whom she becomes infatuated with. But that, of course, is not a smooth journey. (Lawson moved to England around the same period and age as Megan, and I’d be interested to know how much autobiography seeps in here.)

Wow, what a novel – what characters. Because they are spread out, and there is so much sadness at the heart of the book, I don’t think it will call me back quite as often as Crow Lake. But, like all Lawson’s novels, it is a masterpiece. Her ability to balance brilliant writing, detailed characters who feel absolutely real, and compelling, page-turning prose sets her apart from almost every living writer I’ve read.

So, c’mon Mary Lawson, I need another novel before too long. Please!

All Roads Lead To Austen by Amy Elizabeth Smart

StuckinaBook All , , , 5 Comments

I can’t remember where I first heard about All Roads Lead To Austen (2012) by Amy Elizabeth Smart – but it certainly ended up on my wishlist at some point, and my parents kindly gave it to me for Christmas a couple of years ago. What a treat it is. In the apparently unending world of books about Jane Austen, I will always have time for unusual memoirs relating to her books – and this one, in which Smith tours various Latin American countries teaching Austen’s novels, is exactly the sort of hook that reels me in.

What is it about Jane Austen that makes us talk about the characters as if they’re real people? People we recognise in our own lives, two centuries after Austen created them? When my first development leave from the university rolled around, I decided it was time for me to try my own Austen project, just like my students do. Something creative, something fun. So I got to wondering: the special connection that people feel with Austen’s world, this Austen magic – would it happen with people in another country, reading Austen in translation?

And that is exactly the project that Smith undertakes. She is an academic at an American university, so she is approaching the task with a great deal of knowledge – not simply the amateur’s enthusiasm. But along the way she will be mixing the two with the people she meets: some are people studying from a literary background, while others are juggling reading the book with three jobs or full-time childcare. Smith’s book assumes we are already familiar with the plots of all of Austen’s novels – but are ready to question our assumptions about them, and how believable we think the characters and plots could possibly be today.

In the course of Smith’s travels, she goes to Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. Since she is travelling on her own, this does mean we have to get used to a new cast of characters ever time she lands in a new country. She does a very good job at making us feel familiar with the most important people in each location, and I didn’t find that I was confusing the different groups of readers.

While Smith is an academic, this is a book for anyone – and I appreciated that as much time was given to logistics and personal hopes as we get in the actual discussions and reflections on Austen’s novels. That might mean panicking that nobody is going to join the group, or being frustrated that someone dominant has decided they’re going to read a different book altogether, or how to manage her own expectations when the local cultural norm is to accept every invitation even if you have no intention of going. Smith manages to maintain a clear respect for each different culture she visits, never suggesting the American way is superior, while also conveying how comfortable she does or doesn’t feel in each place.

Sometimes she is literally uncomfortable – along the way, Smith has a number of health incidents that are also documented (including her unfortunate experiences with some of the healthcare professionals along the way – and much better experiences with others).

But fear not – we are not short-changed when it comes to Austen chat. Many of the groups of readers want to talk about the characters (and some have only seen an adaptation), whereas other groups are more interested in literary technique. Smith records all the conversations, so is able to reproduce them. Here’s a little bit from Ecuador:

“I like him just the way he is,” Meli insisted, unintentionally echoing Darcy’s literary descendant Mark Darcy of Bridget Jones fame. “I like him from the first moment.”

“But not that Bingley, ugh!” Leti grimaced at the thought of Jane’s gentle suitor.

“He’s a big nothing,” Fernanda agreed.

Wow! I’d never heard Bingley so maligned. I was reminded of the harshness of the women’s judgements in Guatemala on men perceived to be weak.

“The one that’s really the worst,” offered Meli, “is that cousin, Collins.”

Leti rolled her eyes and groaned. “All of his pontificating, his tackiness! Horrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiible!“

A colourful list of insults followed. Collins is un tarado (a cretin), un blando (a coward), un fofo (a wimp) – in short, ridículo.

It’s all great fun to read. And in each country, Smith asks whether they think the events of the novels could happen today – and gets an intriguing range of answers. She also asks for any early women writers in each country, often getting told household names who aren’t well-known outside of the country in question. I certainly came away with a wide range of possible books to try.

Smith is such a likeable narrator and has clear affection and respect for everyone she meets. There is even a little romance along the way for Smith, which lends the book something unexpected and rather delightful to follow. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this Janeite – an unusual and fun idea for a book carried out beautifully. Jane would have enjoyed it, and you can’t give a greater compliment than that.