2010s

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

StuckinaBook All , , , 7 Comments

Sorry I’ve been quiet recently – I got Covid, and while it wasn’t a bad bout of it, I have been quite low on energy since and have spent my evenings watching TV rather than blogging.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado | Waterstones

But I’m back with a review of an audiobook I listened to – and one of the best books I’ve read this year. Published in 2019, I’m rather late to the party – so perhaps you already know In The Dream House, a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. But ‘memoir’ doesn’t do justice to the innovation that Machado brings to this patchwork world – quite unlike anything I’ve read before, though the nearest comparison I can think of is another unusual and brilliant memoir I’ve read this year, Joan Givner’s The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer, which follows a slightly similar fragmented style.

At the heart of In the Dream House is an abusive relationship had years earlier with a woman whom Machado calls solely ‘the woman in the dream house’. Queer abusive relationships are, as Machado explores, hardly ever written about – indeed, barely even recognised as possible by many people. Particularly when both partners are women, it goes beyond all the stereotypes of abusive relationships that people are familiar with from screen and page. It is all the more alienating.

The bare bones of her story are these: that she met a woman who was in an open relationship with another woman, and became another partner. Eventually, they decide to become exclusive – and it is Machado’s first relationship with a woman. They have deep intimacy and some wonderful experiences. But The Woman in the Dream House has a dark side that erupts now and then. The abuse is seldom physical – but there is constant controlling, and anger that is unpredictable and unappeasable. The Woman in the Dream House accuses Machado of sleeping with any man or woman she mentions. She screams the most appalling abuse at her and then claims not to remember. Some of the most chilling moments are when the anger comes with a terrifying calmness – like her whispering that Machado is the most selfish, terrible person she’s ever met when she makes an innocuous comment, or when she refuses to let Machado share the driving on a long car journey even when The Woman is so tired that Machado fears they will crash. The Woman deliberately drives dangerously fast when she sees Machado is scared.

Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.

Machado shows us the silencing terror at the heart of this sort of abusive relationship so brilliantly. It is not the sort of memoir that lingers on horrible details, but it does make you feel breathless with fear nonetheless. Because the relationship seems so inescapable. To outsiders, there is little to suspect. The Woman is usually on good behaviour with others – and has, of course, used the usual ploy of separating Machado from her friends and her safety network.

Machado could have written a straight-forward memoir of this time and it would have been very compelling. But what makes In The Dream House even more brilliant is the unconventional way in which she tells us – as I hinted at in that comparison with Givner’s book. Each chapter is titled ‘Dream House as’ something – a dizzying array of things, from the simple (‘Dream House as Confession’, ‘Dream House as Romance Novel’) to the more unexpected (‘Dream House as Hypochondria’, ‘Dream House as Thanks, Obama’). Many of them are genres or literary styles – though the chapters are not told in these styles, necessarily. The title is often very loose, but frames a new bit of the puzzle. Machado shares memories or stories out of chronology – and many of the chapters are reflections on literature or philosophy or history that weave in and out of personal recollection. A lot is about queer history and reception. For instance…

I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s line-up of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.

At first, when I saw that In the Dream House had this fragmented, multidisciplinary approach, I was a bit nervous. The words of the prologue didn’t encourage me – it felt a bit overwritten, a bit self-consciously literary. But that impression disappeared quickly. Machado takes an experimental, innovative approach and makes it as compelling as a thriller. She finds the perfect balance between literary writing and searingly honest storytelling. And it is a fine balance, extremely difficult to achieve with the assured success that Machado shows.

I was wary about going into In the Dream House for various reasons – would I find it too scary, would I find it too opaquely written – but I am so glad I gave it a chance. It’s an extraordinary book, and one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.

Artful by Ali Smith #ABookADayInMay No.27

StuckinaBook All , , 7 Comments

I haven’t read any Ali Smith before, and I got sent Artful as a review copy when it was published in 2012 – and I decided on a whim this morning that it would be today’s book. And what a strange book it is.

It is based on four lectures that Ali Smith apparently gave at Oxford University (and since I was still a post-graduate student at Oxford in 2012, presumably I could have found my way to attending them) – On Time, On Form, On Edge, and One Offer and On Reflection. But this is not a collection of those essays. Or, rather, it is not just a collection of those essays. It hovers somewhere between fiction and non-fiction – and opens with a woman who is mourning their partner. It has been a year and a day since they left (originally I thought they’d just gone – but it becomes clear that they have died). (By the way, I’m writing ‘they’ because I’m not sure if we know if it’s a man or a woman – though I may have just inadvertently glided past pronouns.)

The narrator goes into the study. “I looked at your books, I took one of your books off a shelf at random – my study, my desk, my books now.” And the book is Oliver Twist. The title Artful suddenly takes on a new dimension when we realise it can refer to the Artful Dodger. And the narrator decides to re-read the book for the first time since university.

And then… the partner has come back. Or have they?

You were standing in the doorway. You coughed. The cough was you in a way that couldn’t not be you.

You were covered in dust and what looked like bits of rubble. Your clothes were smudged, matted, torn. You were wearing that black waistcoat with the white stitching that went out of fashion in 1995, the one we gave to Oxfam. Your skin was smudged. Your hair was streaked with dust and grit. You looked bruised. You shook yourself slightly there on the landing and little bits of grit and rubble fell off you, I watched some of it fall down the stairs behind you.

I’m late, you said.

And somehow all of this morphs into the essays. In the world of the book, the content of the essays has been written by the dead partner – and the narrator is reading them, occasionally (but not as often as you might think) responding to and commenting on them.

The essays themselves are much more what you’d expect. Well, at least what you’d expect if you’ve been to a lot of literature lectures – they are the sort of reflections on literature that tread the line between general and specific, and take in a wide world of books from across languages and centuries. There’s far too much content to even give an idea of it, really, and I did enjoy Smith’s way of moving from idea to idea, encompassing so much. At times it does become little more than a series of quotations with a word or two of commentary, often linking to the previous and next quotations only tangentially. There were certainly times where I wish she’d lingered more on one thought, fully exploring it before going onto another.

I think ‘On Time’ was my favourite of the four sections, perhaps simply because it was the first. And here’s a section of it:

The difference between the short story form and the novel form is to do, not with length, but with time. The short story will always be about brevity, ‘“The shortness of life! The shortness of life!”’ (as one of Mansfield’s characters in her story At the Bay can’t help but exclaim). Because of this, the short story can do anything it likes with notions of time; it moves and works spatially regardless of whether it adheres to chronology or conventional plot. It is an elastic form; it can be as imagistic and achronological as it likes and it will still hold its form. In this it emphasizes the momentousness of the moment. At the same time it deals in, and doesn’t compromise on, the purely momentary nature of everything, both timeless and transient.

The story can be partial, can be a piece of something and still hold its own, still be whole. The novel, on the other hand, is bound to and helplessly interested in society and social hierarchy, social worlds; and society is always attached to, in debt to, made by and revealed by the trappings of its time.

Maybe a book with as many ideas in it as Artful shouldn’t really be read in a day, and I should have spent more time with each thought, rather than moving onto the next. There’s also the undeniable fact that I have read huge amounts of literary theory and literary criticism in my time, and most of it is not very engaging. Smith’s is certainly a cut above the majority, but perhaps I have reached my lifetime quotient of what I find interesting in this genre? Well, I did find a lot of Artful interesting, but often with a sort of jaded “Yes, I see; I’ve read this sort of idea before. I’ve heard an undergraduate talk about it earnestly at a seminar. I’ve witnessed the novel form be dissected in clever ways over and over.” (I do recognise that I am writing this on a book blog, but there is a big difference between a reader’s book reviews and a work of literary criticism, and often I think the main difference is the point behind them.)

If I came to the ideas in Artful here for the first time, then I suspect I’d have been blown away. As it was, I did appreciate a lot but with a certain weariness. And I preferred the more fictional sections – the two characters she creates are very much enigmatic, but also intriguing and compelling. I enjoyed finding out more about them, even in the shadowy way they are revealed.

Did the merge of fiction and non-fiction work? I think so, more or less. It’s unusual and perhaps unnecessary, but does make Artful a more interesting and characterful book than it would otherwise be. Or perhaps just more artful?

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka #ABookADayInMay No.19

StuckinaBook All , , 16 Comments

The Buddha in the Attic: Julie Otsuka: Amazon.co.uk: Otsuka, Julie: 9780241956489: Books

I think I picked up The Buddha in the Attic (2011) at a day that Penguin ran for book bloggers back in 2013 and it has survived numerous culls of my shelves since then on account of its brevity. It’s only 129 pages, I thought. It doesn’t take up much room on the shelf, and surely I’ll manage to read it one day. Ten years later, that day has come!

The Buddha in the Attic is a historical novel about a time between the World Wars where Japanese women would be shipped from Japan to America to meet with their husbands. Not people they had married back in Japan, but new husbands – Japanese men who had already emigrated; people they had exchanged letters and photographs with, each side selling their end of the bargain. The man would make promises about economic opportunities; the woman would talk about her capabilities and beauty. The photos, they learned, were often old or even of other people. The letters were written by other people, filled with lies.

In the first chapter we are aboard the boat, and the opening paragraph shows the technique that Otsuka uses that makes this novella so unusual and, to my mind, so successful.

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years-faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

Throughout the book, the pronoun is always ‘we’. Even if the incidents are clearly individual and unique, the narrator will say either ‘we’, ‘some of us’, or, occasionally, ‘one of us’. There are sections that go through so many different scenarios with a lilting, poetic repetition.

Home was a cot in one of their bunkhouses at the Fair Ranch in Yolo. Home was a long tent beneath a leafy plum tree at Kettleman’s. Home was a wooden shanty in Camp No. 7 on the Barnhart Tract out in Lodi. Nothing but rows of onions as far as the eyes can see. Home was a bed of straw in John Lyman’s barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse at Stockton’s Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us.

And so on and so on. Otsuka’s aim is to give the reader a whole sweep of experience – a whole generation of these young Japanese women. They mostly suffer hardship, whether that be thankless jobs, violent husbands, racism from white Americans, or simply a sense of hopelessness. At no point does an individual emerge as the heroine – rather, the heroine is the whole group. It is an intriguingly collectivist point of view, where almost every novel is an exercise in individualism. What an ambitious undertaking and, to my mind, it works really well.

I had to reconsider what I expected from a fictional narrative. Almost nobody is named, and there is no arc of individual narrative, and so I had to embrace a structure made of infinite variety. And somehow it is still compelling. I’m not sure it would have worked over a much longer book, but at novella-length it is a real success.

Foster by Claire Keegan #ABookADayInMay No.16

StuckinaBook All , , , 12 Comments

Foster by Claire Keegan | Waterstones

Today’s book is so short that it is almost a short story – 88 pages, or an hour and half as an audiobook (which is how I read it – indeed, since I listen to audiobooks fast, it was a little under an hour). So many people have raved about Foster (2010) in the past couple of years that I couldn’t help downloading it when it was on offer.

This is a thoroughly Irish novella, Irishness seeped through every sentence – whether that be depictions of the County Wexford countryside, the turns of phrase like ‘It was a cottage she lived in’, or the open casket at a funeral that takes place halfway through. It is 1981 and the unnamed narrator (another one!) is a young girl who has been deposited with John and Edna Kinsella. They live on a farm in County Wexford, and she has come from Country Carlow – not knowing exactly why she is there, or for how long, or indeed if she is ever going to go home. Her father leaves with a warning not to fall in the fire, and departs with no kinder word of affection. He has also forgotten to leave any of her clothes – but the Kinsellas have some that she can use, until they can buy her some more.

Keegan’s novella is a masterclass in what is not said. We don’t learn a huge amount about the home that she has left, except that it is busy, crowded and not a particularly kind place to live. The narrator is used to incident. There is no space for rest, for simply being. And even while the Kinsellas’ farm is being productively run, there is peace and there is calm.

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end – to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something – but each day follows on much like the one before.

There is a twist in the story, though it is one that simply deepens our understanding of character. It isn’t played to jar the reader; the plot is not as important as the people.

This is a beautiful little book, showing in not-many pages the richness of human kindness, the complex simplicity of country life, and the transformation that can take place when love is gently, generously shared.

People who got Stuck into this Book:

“Foster is a sublime novella, a masterclass in the ‘less-is-more’ school of writing – a poignant story, beautifully told.” – Jacqui Wine

“It is a very well written story, subtle and nuanced with a clear focus on the characters. I think I expected more from it, though.” – The Mookse and the Gripes

“Foster is as lyrical as poetry and has the depth of a full-length novel, yet it’s very brevity is what makes it so impressive.” – 746 Books

 

The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills #ABookADayInMay No.14

StuckinaBook All , , 13 Comments

The Forensic Records Society: Amazon.co.uk: 9781408878378: Books

I love Magnus Mills and have been reading him for years, and have a few on the shelves that I thought would be likely to come up in my May reading. The Forensic Records Society (2017) was a gift last year from my friend Mel, who also introduced me to Mills’ writing in the first place.

The narrator (I think unnamed, though all the men’s names in this book are so bland as to be deliberately forgettable) is chatting one night with his friend James. They are listening to a record that they enjoy but is no longer in the limelight, and decide that probably nobody else in the world is listening to it – one thing leads to another, and they come to a decision about bringing together record-lovers. Or, at least, James has the idea:

“We could form a society for the express purpose of listening to records closely and in detail, forensically if you like, without any interruption or distraction. There would be regular gatherings, and membership would depend on some kind of test to make sure people are genuinely interested.”

“You mean a code of conduct?”

“Certainly,” said James. “We don’t want any charlatans.”

They decide to hold the inaugural meeting in the backroom of the pub. Landlord George, affable and largely unquestioning, is happy for them to hold it there rent-free for a trial period. The only rules of the Forensic Records Society are to turn up on time, bring three records (not LPs) and then listen to them in turn, without comment or judgement.

The group is small at first – and one man, in a long leather coat, is turned away because he arrives a few minutes late. James is firm on that front. The others listen to their records, not making comments or judgements, though one of the men (Chris) often quotes one of the lines from a song that seems to summarise it. Another (Mike) is fixated upon how long each record is, and considers three minutes the perfect length – almost as though it were a holy grail. Curiously, when they leave the room, more time has passed than the number of records played would allow for.

There are a few things that threaten this small group of like-minded men. One is James’s insistence on rules – and using the narrator as a lackey to enforce them, including shutting out the barmaid one evening. The other is the rival groups that start up.

The first is formed by that rejected man in the leather coat – a Confessional Records Society, where people go one at a time to play a record and make a confession. Most seem to leave in tears of joy, though the Forensic Records Society’s attempts to infiltrate don’t go to plan. But that’s not the final rival group that emerges in this ordinary pub, much to the delight of landlord George with his eye on the profit margin.

Along the way, Mills incorporates many names of records – most of which I hadn’t heard of, though there is a playlist you can use alongside. The first edition of The Forensic Records Society (pictured above) even came in the shape of a record, though my paperback is a little more plebian. The text suggests that there is a wide range of styles, artists, and eras featured, though looking through the playlist it definitely leans towards the taste of middle-aged men – which certainly fits the characters.

As so often with Mills, there is a lurking sense of menace throughout. He is so careful never to overstate anything, and it’s the reader who brings all that foreboding to the novel. It’s just about a bunch of blokes listening to records – on the surface. But you can’t help think that it’s about something else.

There are always analogies and parallels floating about when you’re reading Mills – is it all about the October Revolution, as one reviewer suggests? Or is it about religious schisms? Or cults? Mills is too clever to ever let you pin anything down. He is a master of short, sharp dialogue that doesn’t say much. But he simply invests the everyday with an uneasiness that makes each of his novels feel quite powerfully dark – unsettling in the best possible way.

It’s always a discomforting pleasure to spend time with Mills, and there is nobody like him.

History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera #ABookADayInMay No.11

StuckinaBook All , , 5 Comments

History Is All You Left Me: The much-loved hit from the author of No.1 bestselling blockbuster THEY BOTH DIE AT THE END! a book by Adam Silvera.

Today I finished the audiobook of History Is All You Left Me (2017) by Adam Silvera. I first came across his writing when I stumbled upon the title They Both Die At The End. It shows the power of a good title, because that made me read and race through the book – and, in fact, I’ve recently read its prequel too. I loved the premise and the inventive world he built. In History Is All You Left Me, though, we are in a very-much-entirely-real world.

Silvera writes young adult books, most (all?) with queer teenagers as their heroes. This book is no different – it is told by Griffin, a 17-year-old whose first love, Theo, has recently died. They were best friends for a long time before realising that they were (a) gay and bi respectively, and (b) very into each other.

Things are even more complicated than that, though, as Theo and Griffin weren’t dating when Theo died – he was, in fact, away at college and dating a guy called Jackson. The book jumps between ‘history’, i.e. the times when Theo was alive and the journey through their relationship, and the present day. In the present day, Griffin is reluctantly getting to know Jackson. He is very protective over his own grief, and doesn’t feel that Jackson has a right to feel the loss as deeply – though gradually his opinion changes.

There are a few twists along the way, and some things that aren’t twists but just aren’t revealed at first – such as the way in which Theo died – so I shan’t mention them yet.

The other major element of the novel to mention is that Griffin has OCD. I don’t know enough about it to comment in depth, but it did seem like he had compulsions rather than obsessions. He hates odd numbers (except seven), and has to be on the left-hand side when he’s walking with someone. But I don’t remember mention of obtrusive thoughts and worries, or fears for what will happen if these compulsions aren’t obeyed. Again, I am far from an expert, and I appreciated that it was part of Griffin’s character rather his whole character, but some pieces felt a bit lightly touched on to me.

So, there are some heavy themes in the book – and I think, for a teenage audience, they are dealt with well. Griffin is deeply immature, so his reactions and responses are unsurprisingly emotionally immature. He struggles to understand that anybody but himself can be affected, and even before Theo’s death he can only really see his own perspective. I wasn’t sure if this was all intended to be an accurate portrayal of a teenager or if Silvera’s audience are likely to be on Griffin’s side in everything. Perhaps both. (The audiobook is read well by Tom Picasso, though it wasn’t always very easy to tell the difference between the main cast of teenage boys.)

I thought it was a good book, but perhaps I am a bit too old to read it. The brilliant concept of They Both Die At The End elevated that YA book into something that would appeal to me. Without that, this one was enjoyable but not a stand-out for me. For teenagers, I suspect it’ll be a much bigger hit.

This Census-Taker by China Miéville #ABookADayInMay No.4

StuckinaBook All , , 4 Comments

A boy ran down a hill path screaming. The boy was I. He held his hands up and out in front of him as if he’d dipped them in paint and was coming to make a picture, to press them down to paper, but all there was on him was dirt. There was no blood on his palms.

So opens This Census-Taker (2016) by China Miéville, a strange little novella set in an uncertain place and uncertain time. Those first couple of short sentences are representative of what the narrator does throughout – sometimes he is in the first person, sometimes the third person when he wants to distance himself from the memory, and sometimes even the second person. It’s all part of what makes This Census-Taker unsettling and unsure. You never know where you are, literally and metaphorically.

As he runs down the hill, he has a message to shout to people who live at the bottom of the hill. They are technically in the same town, but they are worlds apart. The people at the bottom of the hill think of those further up as savages living in some sort of wilderness, peopled by monsters. And the boy’s shout is unlikely to dispel that idea – “My mother killed my father!”

But as soon as he says this, he is unsure. Is that what he saw? Or did he see someone else being killed? Or was nobody killed at all? Nothing is clear or still.

The novella has a lot of moments of death. The boy’s father is given to killing – a stray dog, a goat, anything that gets him into the silent, taut rage that sometimes comes across his face. He throws the bodies into a seemingly bottomless pit in a cave. The boy believes that there are some humans in there too. But is he right?

The actual census taker of the title doesn’t turn up to take a census until p.110 of 138 pages, and it is a sort of climax that doesn’t do a lot to make things less ambiguous. The whole novella swirls in menace and mystery, and there’s never really a sense that anything will resolve.

I did find This Census-Taker compelling and interesting, though preferred the much-longer The City and the City, which has an equally strange premise though more resolution. In this novella, I thought Miéville was brilliant at moments of high tension, but that his sentences were a bit meandering and overwritten at other times. It’s certainly a successful exercise in creating an atmosphere, but I’m not sure exactly what else I’m meant to take from the book.

Five memoirs I’ve read recently

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , , , , , , 13 Comments

Quite a large percentage of the non-fiction I read or listen to is accounted for by memoirs and biographies. While glancing at my pile of books to be written about on here, I realised that five of them fell into the category of memoir and autobiography – while covering an extraordinary range between them. And all by authors where I haven’t read anything else by them. Here they are…

My Father and Myself (1968) by J.R. Ackerley

I have four of Ackerley’s books, because I’ve always assumed I will enjoy his writing (and because they are delicious New York Review of Books Classics) – I took to Twitter to ask people which I should start with. While My Father and Myself didn’t win the poll, the replies were sufficient to convince me.

As the title suggests, this book is more or less equal parts about Ackerley and his father, Roger – a relationship that grows steadily more fascinating as the book continues. At times, they have a shocking openness, particularly around sexual matters – while there are other, major parts of Roger Ackerley’s life that his son had no idea about until after his death. I shan’t spoil what they are, because they are revealed rather late in this book – though I was already aware of them because I’ve read The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley by Diana Petre.

From the attention-grabbing opening line onwards (‘I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919’), Ackerley is an excellent storyteller – particularly about the things that interest him. What most seems to interest him, for better or worse, is his own sexual exploits. There is an awful lot about the young men he encountered through life and what he did to them (and they to him). There is a startling candour in these passages. In a biographer, it would have felt unprofessionally prurient; in Ackerley’s own words, it seems like a lengthy attempt to understand his own fascination with this aspect of his life.

More interesting to me was his perspective on his parents’ marriage – people say that nobody knows a marriage except those in it, but constant onlookers can perhaps have a more even-handed view. His mother put up with a lot; his father was not a monster, but lived by a set of principles that combine curiously and don’t benefit many people, including himself.

Honesty and accuracy are not the same thing, of course, and Ackerley’s striking openness sits intriguingly alongside the limits of his self knowledge. It’s a fascinating read, often uncomfortable, but mesmerising too.

Diary of a Lone Twin (2019) by David Loftus

To talk of the death of one’s twin to surviving identical twins is almost impossible; the break of that bond is too painful and shocking to describe, too unbelievable to imagine.

Loftus was in his 20s when his identical twin brother died, not long after they had celebrated their birthday together. Three decades later, he takes us through the diary of a year – a year where nothing significant happens in relation to that death, but which is as good an opportunity as any to continue processing the grief, seeing what has happened to him over the years.

As you probably know, I have a twin brother (Colin, who is also reading Loftus’s memoir), and the idea of losing him is as unbelievable as that quote at the beginning suggests. My life doesn’t make sense without him. And that’s the world David Loftus was thrust into, from a brother who was also his best friend. We don’t learn at first how he died, and Loftus measures out the parts of that story throughout the first half of the book. It feels oddly like a thriller, as we piece together how it happened – eventually discovering that it was shocking medical malpractice.

Of course, Diary of a Lone Twin is not an objective account, nor should it be. Rather than simply a description of what happened, it is Loftus’s thoughts on life without John – and how it might have been different. It’s also about his recent second marriage, about his son, about his career as a food photographer. At times, it felt like other things were crowding out the story of John and its aftermath (I could particularly have done without the pages about how much he hates cats). But, even with the padding, this is a very engaging attempt to describe the unthinkable.

Delicacy (2021) by Katy Wix

I listened to Wix reading this extraordinary memoir – about cake and death, as the subtitle says (and isn’t it a brilliant title for that?). It looks through the significant moments of Wix’s life through the prism of cakes that she associates with each of them. And it’s about the deaths of her father, her mother, and her best friend.

I first encountered Wix as a contestant on Taskmaster, and she appears in almost every good British TV show of recent years. While she is extremely funny in character roles, her personality and comic sensibility is rather different on her own terms – it is still funny, but it is equally melancholy. In her narration, there were plenty of lines that would have made me laugh if I’d read them on the page, but she delivers them with calmness, almost a sadness, which makes them effective in a very different way. A possible exception is the chapter on a personal trainer, which does have moments of poignancy but is more unabashedly hilarious than other sections of Delicacy.

As well as discussing the loved ones she lost, in difficult and painful ways, Wix also writes about her career – the highs and the lows, and particularly about the way that she has been expected to look and behave as a woman in the industry. She doesn’t name many of the productions she’s been in, so it’s not a tell-all in that sense, but she is still very candid about the treatment she experienced. And there is a moving, tense chapter on a possible reunion on a project with a bully from her early life.

As you can perhaps tell from this overview, I don’t remember any of the specific cakes that Wix associates with different moments of her life. As a framing technique, it isn’t especially relevant – but if it helped her produce a book this good, then hurrah.

Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds at Once (2021) by Phil Wang

Another comic I first encountered on Taskmaster, and a memoir published in the same year – which I also listened to as an audiobook read by the author. Wang spent the first 16 years of his life in Malaysia, and the second 16 in the UK – so this book is about a life split down the middle in years, but also in terms of identity. He writes of feeling not Malaysian enough for Malaysia and not British enough for Britain.

The book is divided into different categories – food, nature, language etc – which gives Wang opportunities for covering a vast amount of material. There is definitely some serious stuff about racism in here, and about the differences between cultures and the difficulties of trying to ‘be from two worlds’ without either of them suffering – but it’s also a very, very funny book. Wang’s writing is much more punchline-driven than Wix’s, and a lot of the book would feel equally at home as stand-up. I definitely recommend you try the audiobook, if you read Sidesplitter, because it really requires Wang’s insouciantly optimistic voice.

Raining Cats and Donkeys (1967) by Doreen Tovey

Definitely the most uncomplicatedly fun book on this list, it’s one of a series that Tovey wrote about having Siamese cats and a donkey. It opens with:

Charles said the people who wrote this bilge in the newspapers about donkeys being status symbols were nuts.

At that moment we were in our donkey’s paddock dealing with the fact that she’d eaten too many apples, and I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

It’s representative of the entirety of this short memoir. The book is a collection of self-deprecating stories that show how complicated life can get when you fall in love with spirited pets. The stakes are not often particularly high, and that’s what makes them so entertaining to read – because things might go awry, but at the end of the day Doreen and Charles will be happy together, contentedly accompanied with a menagerie of animals.

Tovey is very good at conveying the characters of the two cats, Solomon and Sheba, and Annabel the donkey – without ever making the mistake of making them too twee or fanciful. She is a keen observer of genuine animal behaviour, in its ruthlessness and obstinacy as well as its more gentle moments, and describes them with humour and affection. My edition was given to me by my friend Kirsty and Paul, and has an earlier handwritten dedication from 1968: ‘For Alan, as a Bedside Book (to encourage earlier bedtimes). I can see that it would have done.

Two novels about female friendship

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 12 Comments

At my book group last month, we talked about novels about friendship – how surprisingly few of them there are. It’s something Rachel and I often mention on ‘Tea or Books?’. While there are many, many children’s books where friends are front and centre, it’s an area that novels for adults have curiously overlooked. And yet, for many people, they are just as important as romantic relationships – and likely to last longer.

But I have read two books in recent weeks that are about the intensity, highs and lows of friendship between two women.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?: Amazon.co.uk: Moore, Lorrie: 9780571268559: BooksWho Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994)  has a dreadful title but a very good novella about the friendship between Berie (the narrator) and Sils – starting as children, and both deepening and splintering as they head towards the cusp of adulthood.

The girls work together at Storyland – a sort of theme park, where local teenagers dress up as storybook characters, and younger local and visiting children go on the kind of lacklustre fairground attraction that is only a draw in a small town. The crux of the shift in Berie and Sils’ friendship is the different rate at which they mature. Sils is clearly readier for adult life, or at least believes she is. She is more attractive to men, more confident in her sexuality, more willing to explore a new stage in life. We see all this from Berie’s perspective – which is, in fact, the adult, married Berie looking back on her adolescence. The layers of knowledge and regret cover over the naivety and confusion that teenage Berie felt, and the whirlwind experience that knowing Sils was.

“How yew girls doin’?” was inevitably how it began, and then usually the guy fussed with the front lock of Sils’s hair, pulling it out of her eyes, or he sat next to her, hip to hip, or he asked what she was drinking or did she want to dance to this song, it was a good song for dancing, it was a good night for dancing, didn’t she think so?

Usually it was a humid night, the boards of the place dank as a river dock. Sometimes I protected her with gruffness or a smirk or a cryptic look to make the guy think we were making fun of him. That he was too old. “It’s only teenage wasteland,” wailed the jukebox during the band’s breaks. I would nudge her.

But sometimes I got up and went to the bathroom, let her deal with him, and sometimes later he would give us a ride home at eleven-thirty, hoping for her, dreaming, waiting for us at the corner while we went to one or the other of our houses, said good night to our mothers, went to our room, stuffed pillows under the covers, making curved and lumpy bodies, then climbed out the window.

I’d only previously read some of Moore’s short stories, which I didn’t love, so I wasn’t prepared for the brilliance of this book. Everything is slightly off-kilter, and I thought the tone of Berie’s narration was done so well. There’s a matter-of-factness to it that is belied by the emotional intensity – which, again, is softened by the years that have passed before she narrates the story. It melds expertly, and Moore plays with memory in a way that gives Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? extra depth and nuance.

And all this in under 150 pages! (The cover quote from Dave Eggers says she is one of the funniest writers alive – there is a dry humour at times to this, and the humour of looking back at another self, but I don’t think I’d have called it a comic novel.) I heartily recommend this one, and would be interested to know which other of her novels or novellas to try.

Swing Time (Smith novel).jpgSwing Time by Zadie Smith

If Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is an example of a book that manages to achieve greatness in a short span, then Swing Time (2016) is one which should have had a much more ruthless editor. Or, indeed, should simply have been two novels. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it – I thought it was very good, but could have been much better.

The unnamed narrator is friends with Tracey from childhood. Both are mixed-race girls in London, and unite over their shared passion for dancing – not just as a hobby, but as something which could really be a career. But both are held back by their mothers, for different reasons. Tracey’s is unambitious and can be snide; the narrator’s is so abstract and intellectual that she has little maternal care. Smith is clever at giving two mothers who are very different without simply making them opposites of each other – and without making one a good mother and the other a bad mother. Rather, we see how their richly detailed characters leave a legacy on their daughters.

Tracey and the narrator have a tempestuous childhood friendship – characterised by friendship, love, envy, competition, and everything in between. Both have to learn that their lives cannot follow the same path, for any number of reasons.

Swing Time moves about in time and place a lot, and Smith handles this incredibly well – it is never confusing about where and when we are, even though there are no headings to tell us. And a lot of the novel shows the narrator as an adult, working as an assistant and confidante to Aimee, a worldwide superstar pop icon. Think Madonna. She has been famous for many years, since the narrator was a child, and the narrator is now caught in the strange unreality of the long-term celebrity – a network of people working for Aimee masquerading as a friendship group. It includes long periods in an unspecified African country, where Aimee is trying to Do Good.

The weakness of Swing Time, for me, was that there is a brilliant novel about an intense and important female friendship, and a really good book about working with a celebrity – but, together, they dilute each other. There is little to connect them, except for the narrator’s confused nostalgia when she is no longer close to Tracey. I think it’s fine for a novel to cover a wide time span and be about two stages of life, but when they form two tonally distinct novels with seemingly different purposes, it doesn’t work to fuse them. They do reunite as adults, with a long, silent period of resentment and uncertainty between them.

This is my first Smith novel, and I was a bit surprised by the style – which is assured, but not very distinctive. I don’t think anybody could show me a sentence that I would be able to identify as showing Smith’s style. It is very good, but in the blandly accomplished way that many other novels are written very well.

Of the two books, I think Moore’s is a greater success – though both tackle a neglected topic well, and more interestingly than most of the romantic relationships I read about.

Kokoschka’s Doll by Afonso Cruz – #EUPL

StuckinaBook All , , , , 6 Comments

Kokoschka's Doll by Afonso Cruz | Hachette UKYou might remember that, last year, I read and reviewed a few of the books that had won the European Union Prize for Literature, also known as the EUPL. Among them was Selja Ahava’s Things That Fall From the Sky, one of my favourite reads of 2021. Well, I’ve been kindly asked to do the same again – and got to choose from a list of all the previous winners. Or at least those that have been translated into English. While the prize isn’t a translation prize, and the books are judged in their original language, I can only read English – so I am grateful Rahul Bery for translating Afonso Cruz’s Kokoschka’s Doll (2010) from Portuguese. What a strange and engaging book. Here are its curious and inviting opening lines:

At the age of forty-two, or, to be precise, two days after his birthday that year, Bonifaz Vogel began to hear a voice. Initially, he thought it was the mice. Then he thought about calling someone to deal with the woodworm, but something stopped him. Perhaps it was the way the voice had given him orders, with the authority of those voices that live deep inside us.

The novel is set (at least at first) in Dresden during the Second World War. Rather than a voice living inside Bonifaz Vogel, the voice belongs  to a young Jewish boy called Isaac Dresner – who is living under the floor of Vogel’s bird shop. Yes, ‘Vogel’ means ‘bird’ in Germans. It’s that sort of novel, constantly playful, sometimes in an obvious way and sometimes in a way that cannot possibly be unravelled. Anyway, Isaac is in hiding after a Nazi soldier murdered his friend. Vogel doesn’t particularly question this. Once he realises that the voice is quite wise, he turns to it in every discussion. The voice helps him when people are haggling in the shop. It helps him feel connection.

This alone would be a quirky and interesting novel but, oh boy, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Along the way a young female painter called Tsilia joins them but, again, Cruz is only getting started. Somehow they get onto the trail of Mathias Popa – an author who apparently found a lost manuscript by Thomas Mann and passed it off as his own. And it failed horribly. He is working on a new book, though… called Kokoschka’s Doll.

You might be wondering when that title was going to come into play. The middle section of the novel (printed on slightly greyed pages in my edition by MacLehose Press, and possibly in every edition) is the novel Kokoschka’s Doll. It includes the story of a man hired to write a book alluding to all sorts of other books, none of which exist – until the same man is hired to write all of those books too. Keeping up?

And – so, so briefly – we eventually get to the story of Kokoschka’s doll. For a handful of pages, while we’re most of the way through the book. This is the bit that is based on a true story, so you might know it already. Oskar Kokoschka (curiously referred to as Oscar Kokoschka in this translation of Cruz’s novel – deliberate or mistake? Hard to tell in this sort of book) was a painter who commissioned a life-sized doll of Alma Mahler, after the end of a two-year relationship with her. He later destroyed the doll during a party.

After the end of ‘Popa’s’ book, we are introduced to a whole range of characters we haven’t met before, almost as though we should know who they are. And they do eventually link back to the cast we already know, but it is quite disconcerting.

I came to the conclusion that Cruz loves to unsettle the reader. There is so much allusion and confusion in Kokoschka’s Doll, so you can never predict what is happening next, or even be entirely certain about what has happened before. Cleverly, this is contrasted with simplicity in the writing and in the characters. They are simple people – believable, but easily comprehendible. The writing is spare and enjoyable, and often pages only have a short paragraph or two on them. It makes you feel like you are reading something akin to children’s literature – but the loops you are taken in are experimental.

I think the combination worked really well, and I can see why the EUPL judges wanted to reward Cruz. Apparently he is prodigious and prestigious in his native Portugal and Kokoschka’s Doll is certainly the work of an assured author. I don’t fully know or understand what I read, but I really enjoyed reading it.

Do head over to the European Union Prize for Literature website to find out more about this year’s prize, and all previous winners.