2010s

Dry Season by Gabriela Babnik

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I’m slipping into the final hours of Women in Translation Month with Dry Season (2015) by Gabriela Babnik – originally in Slovenian, and translated by Rawley Grau. It won the European Union Prize for Literature, and is the final of the EUPL books I requested when I was asked by them to review some current and previous winners. As usual, more info at the bottom of this post.

I chose this one largely because one of my close friends in Slovenian and I’ve always intended to try some literature from her homeland – though Babnik’s novel is actually set in Burkina Faso, where a 62-year-old Slovenian woman called Ana is being a tourist. Early in the novel, she meets a young man from Burkina Faso called Ismael – though ‘meets’ is perhaps the wrong word, since he first sees her as somebody he might be able to mug.

Their motivations aren’t clear at first. When Ismael rejects his partner in crime’s suggestion that he grabs Ana’s bright yellow bag, it initially looks like he has decided to play the long con. Ana initially seems like a bit of a fool – exposing herself to dangers on the streets of Burkina Faso, without taking any precautions over her possessions or potentially her life. She is there to escape something – perhaps simply to escape her humdrum life, though the more we learn about her background the more we realise that dark secrets linger there.

And dark secrets linger similarly in Ismael’s past – not least what happened to his young brother. The present day scenes of the novel are interspersed with both of them thinking back to the past – we are jolted to the unsavoury activities under a lone bridge, or inadequate parents, or long forgotten antagonisms resurfacing. As Dry Season continues, the reader realises that these two characters have a lot more in common than it first appears.

This is driven home by the fact that all the novel is told in the first person, but we are given no warning when we shift between Ana and Ismael. Often it takes a while for us to realise who is speaking, or which period we are in. Dividing lines blur and fade continually. This section was one of the most disconcerting, because it describes something graphic and we don’t know who the victim is (content warning of sexual assault):

It happened so fast I had no time to think. He lay down next to me, took off my trousers and, with an adult hand, touched my thighs. I froze; everything in me froze. If I had been awake and the man had approached me in broad daylight, I would have said it did not happen. But his hand travelled up to my most intimate part and there was no way that it did not happen.

Dry Season is an intriguing mix of tones. On the one hand, the haziness and rejection of solid boundaries feels almost fairy-talesque, and there are moments of magical realism that seem to link to Burkina Faso folk tales. On the other hand, the whole novel feels quite sordid. Sex permeates the book, and both characters often think the phrase ‘he put it in me’ or ‘I put it in her’ as the sole description of the act, usually sans affection. Dirt – literal dirt – recurs, as the infant Ismael used to eat handfuls of it. Nothing is sanitised here, and when I finally landed on the word ‘sordid’, it did tie together a lot of the novel for me. It was an interesting, rather than a pleasant, read. I should add, I felt pretty uncomfortable about the racism in the novel – often from the perspective of characters, or received by Ismael, but I’m not sure there’s any excuse in 2015 for a white author to be using the n-word in her writing. Perhaps it doesn’t carry the same weight in whatever the Slovenian word is.

Ana and Ismael are intriguing characters, well-drawn with many layers, and Dry Season is an ambitious and complex novel. Not a cosy read by any means, but an accomplished one.

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

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My book group does a Secret Santa every year at our Christmas meal. Everybody wraps a book and puts it in a bag, and you pick one out. They’re not chosen specially for you, but I’ve come away with some great things in the past – notably, it introduced me to David Sedaris. It has also introduced me, now, to Jeanette Winterson – three years ago I got The Gap of Time (2015), which is a retelling of one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, The Winter’s Tale. Or a ‘cover version’, in the parlance of this edition – with a handy synopsis of the play at the beginning, for those who aren’t familiar with it.

It starts with a short section where an unnamed narrator witnesses a man being pulled from a car and beaten to death. Yikes! And then he and his son see something at the nearby hospital, where his wife had died.

And that’s when I see it. The light.

The BabyHatch is lit up.

Somehow, I get a sense this is all connected – the BMW, the junky car, the dead man, the baby.

Because there is a baby.

I walk towards the hatch and my body’s in slow motion. The child’s asleep, sucking its thumb. No one has come yet. Why has no one come yet?

I realise without realising that I’ve got the tyre lever in my hand. I move without moving to prise open the hatch. It is easy. I lift out the baby and she’s as light as a star.

Then we zoom back a little while to discover how the baby got there, and the plot does indeed closely follow The Winter’s Tale, albeit modernised in various ways. Leontes is Leo, a hedge fun manager who is rich and ruthless and rather too emotional to think about his actions properly. Hermione is MiMi, a French singer who is beautiful and fairly famous – and, as the novel opens, pregnant with the baby we will later see in the BabyHatch. Polixenes is Xeno, a video game designer – who is working on a game called The Gap of Time, in one of the few strands of the novel that I didn’t think was particularly successful.

As with Shakespeare’s play, Leo manages to convince himself that MiMi and Xeno are having an affair – and, indeed, that the baby is Xeno’s. Winterson convincingly makes him as impervious to reason as Shakespeare manages with Leontes – he has the same passions that cannot be calmed, and the same power that can turn those passions into deadly action. Interestingly, in a twist on the original that works very well and almost beguilingly, Xeno is rather lovelorn over one of the couple – but it isn’t MiMi. He is sexually very fluid, but it’s Leo who has his heart.

One thing leads to another, and Leo’s self-destructiveness sees the baby left at a hospital – but adopted by our narrator from that opening section. The second section of the novel sees Perdita retain her name from the play, though some elements of the plot have been changed since Shakespeare’s reliance on flimsy disguise and near-incest don’t translate quite as well to the twenty-first century.

I really loved this novel. Having not read any of her fiction before, I’d rather got the impression that it would be bitter and spiky and earnest. The Gap of Time certainly isn’t – there is a lovely playfulness and elegance to it, where she is having fun with the task of updating Shakespeare but also borrowing his ability to make sentences both amusing and profound.

You never feel the weight of the Bard looking over her shoulder – with the exception of when she echoes some of Shakespeare’s more idiotic comedy; the stuff that was thrown into the originals to delight the people stood in the cheapest spots.

‘[…]he found that Thebes was being terrorISed, TErrorised, terrORised – like having the Mafia come to stay – by this creature called the Sphinx.’

‘Sphinx? Isn’t that underwear?’

‘Spanx is underwear. The Sphinx was a woman – you the type: part monster, part Marilyn Monroe.’

It’s a good impersonation of the bits of Shakespeare’s plays that I tend to glaze over for – and just as glazable-overable here.

I think the first half and the final section, when we are back with Leo et al, were the most successful – I got less out of the middle bit, where we are introduced to a new and bigger cast, none of whom are quite as well defined or as interesting. But overall, her updating is both clever and engaging. The main mark of its achievement is that I would recommend The Gap of Time even to people who’d never read or heard a word of The Winter’s Tale – and it has certainly made me keen to read more by Winterson, if she is on this form elsewhere.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

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My book group recently read Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, from 2016 and shortlisted for the Booker prize that year. Let’s experiment with a review in bullet points. This doesn’t reflect the style of the book – it reflects how much time I want to spend writing this review.

  • Look at that cover. It’s not my usual fare, is it?
  • Beautiful writing of a psychological portrait of Eileen – an old lady looking back on her young days in an unhappy home, alcoholic dad, sister who has escaped with a marriage. Eileen works at a boys’ prison, lusts after one of the guards who works there, doesn’t really engage with anybody.
  • It is a nuanced portrayal of a dislikeable woman – but why was it in the crime section of the library?
  • (Maybe the only time that library shelving has constituted a major spoiler for me?)
  • Eventually, perhaps three-quarters of the way through this novel, the enigmatic and beguiling Rebecca Saint John appears. She is very Hitchcockian and not at all fleshed out.
  • (Isn’t Rebecca Saint John such a femme fatale name?)
  • Things start to get really silly…
  • Oh, a series of twists, increasingly dark, clearly wanting to be the next Girl on the Train…
  • Perhaps the cleverest thing about the book is the reveal about what’s happening on the cover.

Ultimately, I found that Moshfegh was a really clever and interesting writer, but Eileen is a silly and melodramatic novel. Or, rather, becomes one – perhaps because Moshfegh lacked confidence that a quiet and poignant portrayal of an eccentric woman would bring her a publishing deal or success. Which does seem to be the case – have a look at this interview in the Guardian. The most baffling statement in it is “Trying to protect its [the novel’s] reputation as a postmodern work of art would not only be arrogant, but pointless.” It would also not be remotely true?

Have you read Eileen? I certainly found it pacey and compelling, even when it wasn’t clear why I was being compelled, but ultimately it felt like fast food you regret the next day.

Dreaming of Rose by Sarah LeFanu

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I love looking behind the scenes at books, and I’m particularly fascinated by the process of biography – because it’s a type of book that I can’t get my head around attempting. How to capture a full life of many, many days in one volume? How to approach it when there are already two existing biographies of that subject? These are among the things that Sarah LeFanu discusses in Dreaming of Rose, a diary of her research and writing a biography of Rose Macaulay, from 1998 until she finished writing it in 2002. It was self-published in 2013 and has now been reissued by Handheld Press.

I’ve read two biographies of Macaulay – but not this one. Still, a lot of the names will be familiar to anybody who has read any of the biographies, and you don’t have to have read any of Macaulay’s output to find this interesting. Indeed, LeFanu writes a great deal more about Macaulay’s personal life in Dreaming of Rose than she does about her published output – perhaps because trying to track down connections with possible-affair Gerald O’Donovan was more captivating a chase than analysing her novels.

Reviews of books like this tend to replicate all the information found therein, but I shan’t make this a potted biography of Macaulay. There are more than enough places to find that. Instead, I’ll talk about what I liked and didn’t like about LeFanu’s book – the former easily outweighing the latter.

It’s always terribly interesting to see how writers deal with the problems of structure – speaking as someone who finds this the hardest part of writing anything, and the most satisfying to fall into place.

Terrible frustration with my chapter on the Great War. It creaks and plods and I don’t really know what I’m saying about Rose and the war; I’ve been stuck on it all autumn. Reading the descriptive selection on the war in Told By An Idiot I found myself getting annoyed with Rose for not being sharp like Virginia Woolf was sharp, for muddling and muddying it, for sitting on the fence, for saying: the war meant this for this person, that for that person. I found myself for the first time feeling actively hostile towards her.

I suspect I’m blaming Rose for my inability to get on with writing this chapter. I desperately need a clear space with no teaching. I’m doing a day school on women poets the weekend after this, and haven’t even begun to think about it. And then there’s all next term’s reading still to do. Meanwhile a librarian at the Harry Ransom Research Centre will send me a copy of the Rose Macaulay card catalogue, and Muriel Thomas has unearthed six ‘chatty’ letters from Rose that she ‘can’t recollect proffering’ to Jane Emery [a previous biographer], which she’s going to photocopy and send.

For what it’s worth, LeFanu had a much better time with Harry Ransom than I did a decade or so later, where they wouldn’t send me even a photo of two pages from the only existing copy in the world of a journal I really needed for my DPhil. Still shocked at how unhelpful they were!

Of course, LeFanu wasn’t only preoccupied with her Macaulay biography during this period. She doesn’t write a great deal about her personal life, but there are intriguing aspects of other parts of her professional life – particularly when she is writing radio plays, one about Macaulay and one about Dorothy L Sayers. The back and forth with BBC editors sounds extremely painful. And I could have read a whole diary-worth about her brief experience at the helm of Radio 4’s A Good Read, and suspecting (correctly) that she is about to be fired.

This is one of many times when LeFanu has to consider her finances – and the precarious state of these is very illuminating about the process of writing. Grants become vitally important, as do other opportunities for work which are distracting but pay the bills.

As well as LeFanu’s travels all over the place to speak to people who’d known Macaulay, or might have some of her letters somewhere – and, of course, the correspondence with people reluctant to speak to LeFanu – I enjoyed the insights into the process of publishing. I wish she’d kept the diary going until after publication, because I’d have loved to read about her reaction to reviews, PR etc. But things like this, from towards the end of the diary, were great:

I think finishing a book is more like getting a divorce than like sending a child out into the world; and least of all like giving birth. Endless niggling details have to be discussed backwards and forwards, letters of supplication written to Random House, saying no I can’t afford such and such an amount for quoting just three lines of Virginia Woolf, and letters of protestation to the Wren at what they want to charge for reproducing some of the Macaulay family photos. Where are the feelings of pride, or relief? I’m filled with anxiety and frustration, tied by a hundred tiny ties to the book I want to cast off.

I’ll close with the short list of things I felt weren’t so successful in Dreaming of Rose. The addendum on some letters being released from their embargo was interesting but didn’t balance well with the rest of the book – it felt like a heavy weight on the end of the diary structure. Nobody wants to hear anybody’s dreams and, title notwithstanding, it wasn’t interesting to read about LeFanu’s dreams. Then there is a wearyingly familiar disdain for people of faith, which isn’t particularly helpful in a biographer of somebody who had faith.

Those are minor gripes about a book that was engrossing and very enjoyable, even without having read LeFanu’s biography. It hasn’t left me particularly feeling the need to read a third biography of Macaulay, and I think Constance Babington-Smith’s is probably the one that appeals most to me, because I always prefer one written by somebody who knew the subject (even if it less likely to be ruthlessly open, or that impossibility, ‘objective’). But even if you’ve never read a word of Macaulay’s writing and don’t have much interest in her life, I think Dreaming of Rose would appeal for that rare opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain at the life of a biographer.

Notes to Self by Emilie Pine

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One of the flourishing genres that I like is the personal essay. I love it when they’re funny (Casey Wilson’s The Wreckage of My Presence is one of the best things I’ve read this year), but I also enjoy them when they’re more poignant. And lordy me, Notes to Self (2018) by Emilie Pine certainly isn’t a laugh a minute – but it is very, very good.

I think I saw a few people reading it on Instagram last year, and added it to my Christmas list – many thanks Mum and Dad for buying it for me. It’s a collection of six essays which are more or less all about trauma, of one sort or another. The first is about her father – an alcoholic who won’t admit the severity of his problem, and who has escaped his family in Ireland to live a chaotic life on Corfu. Pine flies out when she hears that he is desperately ill.

They call him ‘the Corpse’. He’s attached to machines that monitor his heart and other major organs. He has two IV lines, though the nurses struggle to find a vein that will take them as he has lost so much blood. He is barely awake most of the time. We’re oblivious to his nickname until a Greek visitor lets us in on the joke. Typically, as with most things concerning Dad, it’s both funny and not funny. Nobody, not even the nurses, thinks he’s going to live through this. And yet – he refuses to die.

Like all the essays in the collection, this one – ‘Notes on Intemperance’ (which, fittingly, I misread as ‘Notes on Impermanence’) – is a beautiful, steady unravelling of a topic. Pine’s writing is so steady. Even when she is discussing deeply emotional topics, she takes her time to unwrap them, layer by layer. By the time she has exposed the heart of the issue, whether that be her father’s alcoholism or her parents’ separation or rape and sexual assault, it is the logical conclusion of a series of keenly observed steps. And it is all the more striking because of that.

Pine writes plainly and without many literary flourishes. It means, when the occasional metaphor or imagery comes, it is extremely powerful. She waits until there is exactly the right one to illuminate the moment, and it jolts the reader in the way that really good imagery should. Sometimes it is isn’t even a metaphor, really, just a powerful combination of words. I noted down this excerpt from an essay on trying to have children, as an example of writing which comes together so neatly and effectively:

Maybe if I were more easy-going. More placid. More, well, more maternal, all cuddly and warm. Maybe if I were completely different, if I could swap out every cell, and gene, and chromosome in my body, maybe then this would work. In the early hours of the morning, unable to find sleep, I realise that what I’m trying to be cured of is being me.

That essay, ‘From the Baby Years’, is perhaps the best in the collection in my opinion. She manages to convey the sustained periods of hope and disappointment, as well as a miscarriage and other friends and relatives experiencing trauma related to childbirth. Pine never wallows in despair, but recognises it as the fundamental part of human experience that it so often is. Indeed, it’s impressive that a book this weighted with grief and trauma doesn’t feel heavy – even when it is heartbreaking or infuriating. And I think that’s because of the careful simplicity with which Pine writes the essays.

All in all, a brilliant book – not for every mood, but it is an oddly beautiful experience to share these pages with someone as vulnerable and honest and profound as Emilie Pine.

The Unexpected Professor by John Carey

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My friends Lorna and Will gave me a copy of The Unexpected Professor by John Carey in 2014, the year it came out – fast forward seven years and its time has finally come. I took it away on holiday with me, and it was somehow the perfect read – such a wonderful book.

It’s an autobiography, I suppose, but the subtitle tells you what the main gist of The Unexpected Professor is about – ‘An Oxford life in books’. He does talk a bit about his childhood, and a bit more about his time in the army, but those are not the selling point of the book for me. I couldn’t wait to get to Oxford with him – and even though that doesn’t happen for about a hundred pages, please excuse me glossing over the first chunk of the book to get to the bit that I loved most. (I should say – he writes very well about school life and various experiences during national service in the army, including wondering whether he’d accidentally shot a fellow soldier during an ill-advised demonstration with a gun – an incident that clearly stayed with him vividly. But naturally Oxford and books won me over more.)

Carey goes to Oxford as an undergraduate in the ’50s – following his stint of national service, as was expected then. Despite studying English literature, his interview had involved Latin, Greek, and French – and the course he was set to study ended somewhere before the Victorian period. He would later be instrumental in extending the course to include Victorian and 20th-century literature, and making Old English optional – by the time I arrived as an undergraduate in 2004, we spent a term on ‘1900-present’, though very few people chose to do anything after mid-century. And Old English was technically optional, but nobody ever seemed to present me with the option not to.

Much of what I enjoyed about reading about Carey’s time as a student was comparing what it was like for me, fifty years later. Some of it hadn’t changed at all. He defines things like ‘collections’ – when you sit with the head of your college and he/she talks to you about your studies and your future – which is still exactly the same, subfusc and all. On the other hand, there were no male-only colleges by the time I was studying, and only one female-only college – which is now also mixed.

Carey was at St. John’s College, which is where one of my two closest friends at uni was, so I spent a lot of time there. She lived in a building that is described as a beautiful garden in The Unexpected Professor – for it didn’t exist at the time. He glosses over the ’50s and ’60s desecration of colleges, building hideous concrete blocks in almost all of the beautiful college settings.

What he doesn’t gloss over at all, thankfully, is reading and writing. While he doesn’t mention a female author in any depth under towards the end of the book, Carey does write insightfully and engagingly about many different authors – Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Orwell. When they come up, he spends pages and pages analysing, exploring, talking about their shifting critical reception and the passages that most interest him. It would all be very self-indulgent if it weren’t also so enthralling for the reader. In these sections, autobiography fades away and literary criticism comes in – though in a style different from most books in that genre, which Carey openly derides. More on that shortly…

Carey seems to have lived a very charmed academic life in the next half century in Oxford. Time after time, he was given multiple job offers or funding pots. He even gets offered a job as a Fellow at Keble before he has finished his DPhil! I’m not sure if this is a sign of times changing or Carey’s particular talent, but it is unheard of now for an English academic to walk into a job – or even, for most of us, to get any funding. Carey misses out the years of scarcely-paid part-time work, scrabbling for any chance of a permanent gig. While he and his wife – their romance is dwelt on briefly but touchingly – aren’t exactly rich, they are certainly doing better than most of my academic contemporaries were at that stage. They also got to live on St John’s Street, one of the most lovely streets in Oxford – though apparently rather run-down at the time. His various academic posts and involvement with the English department are a fascinating overview of the changing ethos, and I found his genuine engagement with his students’ work, undergraduate and postgraduate, very admirable.

While teaching, Carey was also writing. Some of his best-received books were anthologies – the Faber Book of Reportage and the Faber Book of Science, the latter of which my father loves. To get his head around centuries and centuries of thought in these areas, and selecting innovative and compelling examples, sounds like a daunting task – but he makes it sound almost a pleasure. He also writes some literary criticism and other cultural texts, including the only one I’d previously read: The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is while compiling critical thought on Milton that Carey realises he thinks most literary criticism is drivel – not quite his word, but not far off.

I’m sure he’s right, but I am coming onto my only qualm about this book. He is very disparaging about his colleagues in the literary field, and not particularly gracious when they don’t like his work. I suppose that’s understandable – but it definitely became clear that when he is critical of someone, their book is bad; when someone is critical of his book, they are wrong – and probably histrionic. Sadly, this does become very sexist at one point – he writes of his former supervisor’s review of his book: ‘when I dipped into Helen’s Encounter review its bossy tone reminded me so forcibly of my mother’s shrill, bigoted denunciations of my teenage relationship with Heather that I never finished it’. Setting aside the fact that he definitely finished reading it, calling a woman’s review ‘bossy’ and ‘shrill’ is not a good look, and I wish his editor had spoken to him about it. Perhaps they did.

It’s a small quibble in a book I otherwise totally loved and relished reading. I might have suggested cutting off the beginning and making this entirely a book about Oxford and books, but also recognise that is because I love those things myself. Part of my pleasure was in thinking of the streets and remembering my time as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Oxford – but I think The Unexpected Professor would delight you even if you’ve never stepped foot in Oxford. Because we all, after all, love books.

Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava – EUPL

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The team behind the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) got in touch to ask if I’d highlight some of the winners of the prize over the past few years, and I was really interested in exploring the list of winners from across Europe. Even better, I got to choose which ones I covered – and one of the first that caught my eye was Things That Fall From the Sky by Finnish writer Selja Ahava. It was published in 2015 and was one of the winners of the EUPL in 2016 – I should note that the prize judges all books in their original language, though I am reading the edition translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah. It’s original title is Taivaalta Tippuvat Asiat, which Google translate tells me means much the same thing.

I’ll explain a bit more about the EUPL at the bottom of this post – but, first, my thoughts on Things That Fall From the Sky. Well, my instinctive choice worked because this is a really brilliant novel. Here’s the opening:

“What’s on your mind back there?” Dad asks, glancing in the rear-view mirror.

Our eyes meet.

“Nothing,” I reply.

We turn off at the petrol station. You go right here for Extra Great Manor, left for Sawdust House. These days we mostly turn right.

Adults are always asking what children are thinking. But they’d be worried if they got a straight answer. If you’re three and it’s a windy day, it’s not a good idea to stare at the horizon and say, ‘I’m just wondering where wind comes from.’ You’re better off claiming you’re pretending to be a helicopter. And when you’re five, don’t ask too many questions about death or fossils, because grown-ups don’t want to think about dying, or characters in fairy tales getting old, or how Jesus died on the cross. When I was little, I thought Mum’s grandma was a fossil, because she died a long time ago. But these days I know you can get fossils with ferns, snails or dinosaurs in them, but not grandma ones. Or human ones, for that matter.

Saara narrates the first section of the novel. She is a young girl whose mother has died – as we learn, through a freak accident. A block of ice fell from the sky, crashed through their roof, and crushed Saara’s mother. It sounds like a fate one might find in a fairy tale, but it has had a real and disastrous effect on Saara’s life – and she is scrabbling to make sure she remembers what her mother was like. Her chapters often end with a simple description – what her mother’s fingernails looked like, or her morning routine, or how she liked to garden. Saara is making an inventory of recollections.

Saara has been compared to the little girl in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, and I think they have more in common than being Finnish. She sees the world with a vivid child’s eye – which has clear vision, but also has yet to form rigid expectations of reality. The details she picks up are a little surreal, like the sawdust that fills their home from all the building work, but she is matter-of-fact too. Ahava has captured a wonderful voice, and it’s that commitment to her voice that lets the reader accommodate the strangeness of the premise.

Saara’s mum isn’t the only woman in the family who has had something very unusual happen to her – Saara’s aunt has won millions on the lottery. This is a far happier piece of chance, of course, but its impact is no less confusing for the people involved. In the middle section, the aunt – Annu – writes to a Scottish man who has been struck by lightning four times, finding a kindred spirit in anyone who has experienced the statistically very improbable. These letters also reminded me of Tove Jansson, in Letters to Klara, and they are a delight that also has significant philosophical undertones.

The final section is narrated by Saara’s new step-mother, some time later. I think she is perhaps the least compelling of the three women who accompany us through the three sections, though this may be because she is the last. She has her own very unusual circumstances, but I won’t spoil them.

At the heart of Things That Fall From The Sky is how people deal with the bizarre – how their worldview can expand to give room for the extraordinary. And the prose and characters that Ahava has created seem both dreamlike and vividly real – I don’t really understand how that combination is achieved, but it is done with astonishing consistency and assurance. I loved spending time in this world, and the way Ahava balances genuine pathos with a fairytalesque surreality is truly wonderful. I was certainly moved by the novel.

I’ve got a couple other EUPL winners to read, and if they’re all as good as Ahava’s novel then I’m very excited for what I have ahead of me.

The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – see the video above for a bit about how it works.

A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz

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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Janeites will read anything about Jane Austen – and it’s also a truth universally acknowledged that this opening ‘bit’ is wildly overused. Sorry about that. Anyway, I can’t remember exactly where I heard about A Jane Austen Education (2011) by William Deresiewicz, but I was delighted when my friend Malie got it for my birthday last year. It seemed like the right sort of book for all this *gestures at world* – and I was sucked in straight away by this opening paragraph:

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

It’s rare to find a man writing a non-academic book about Austen, and Deresiewicz certainly owns up to some masculine prejudice at the outset. He was a graduate student at an American university, doing a six-year PhD programme. Apparently specialising comes quite late in the day in American PhDs, so the first years were spent covering a lot of literary ground – and that included reading Jane Austen. Deresiewicz was much more concerned with the big men of American fiction, and didn’t want to bother with the quiet manners that he perceived he’d find in Austen. Starting with Emma.

At first, he hates it. He hates Emma’s poor decision making and small world. Still more, he hates the boring Miss Bates and the interminable Mr Woodhouse. But he gradually realised that they were meant to be boring and interminable – and a whole lot more than that too, of course. It is the famous Box Hill scene that finally changed this mind.

And that was when I finally understood what Austen had been up to all along. Emma’s cruelty, which I was so quick to criticise, was nothing, I saw, but the mirror image of my own. The boredom and contempt that the book aroused were not signs of Austen’s ineptitude; they were the exact responses she wanted me to have. She had incited them, in order to expose them. By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face. I couldn’t deplore Emma’s disdain for Miss Bates, or her boredom with the whole commonplace Highbury world, without simultaneously condemning my own.

This passage does also reveal one of the few issues I had with A Jane Austen Education – that Deresiewicz leans a little too heavily on the idea of discovering ‘the’ point that Austen was trying to make, rather than landing on one particular interpretation. His moments of revelation are nuanced and intriguing – like Northanger Abbey helping him realise he should ask better questions, or Mansfield Park making him a better listener – but I wish he had more openly recognised that there is no singular conclusion that can come from any novel. As a PhD in literature, he surely knows this full well.

Through the book, each of Austen’s novels gets a chapter – his reading of the book going alongside his own life, including failed relationships (romantic and otherwise), stalled academic work, and a difficult engagement with his father who wanted a different career path for his son. I love books that interweave the personal and the interpretive. This has become increasingly the way that creative non-fiction is written, and I think it has enriched the genre no end; A Jane Austen Education is perhaps most similar to Nell Stevens’ wonderful Mrs Gaskell and Me, though without a particularly biographical slant to his writing. I would have welcomed even more autobiography, but he is excellent at intertwining literary criticism and self revelation. I’d love to know more suggestions in this genre.

Over the course of the book, Deresiewicz goes from an Austen sceptic to regarding her as his favourite author – and the reader, who probably started far further down that spectrum, can forgive him his early hesitancy. I loved seeing his unusual perspectives on the novel, learning about him, and marvelling again at the way that Austen speaks across the centuries in a way that very few other authors have managed or are likely to manage. And, like all of Austen’s heroines, Deresiewicz’s journey through A Jane Austen Education isn’t in learning more about literature or the people around him – it’s a journey to better understand himself, and start changing where he needs to change.

The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham

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One of the most important things about a holiday, I’m sure we can all agree, is choosing which books to bring. If I’m going on holiday by car, I bring wildly too many – because then I can have some choices while I’m away. I took eleven books for my recent week away, and the eleventh of those, thrown into the suitcase at the last minute, was The Snow Queen (2014) by Michael Cunningham. And thank goodness I did, because it ended up being exactly what I wanted to read first – and it’s absolutely brilliant.

We start just before the 2004 US General Election, where various characters are sure that George W. Bush won’t get re-elected because he is ‘the worst President in US history’. Wry laugh. Barrett Meeks has just broken up with his rather-younger boyfriend, who told him by text that they had both seen this coming – Barrett had not – when he sees something extraordinary in the New York sky:

The miniature groundscape at his feet struck him, rather suddenly, as too wintery and prosaic to bear. He lifted his heavy head and looked up.

There it was. A pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil, star-high, no, lower than the stars, but high, higher than a spaceship hovering above the treetops. It may or may not have been slowly unfurling, densest at its centre, trailing off at its edges into lacy spurs and spirals.

Barrett thought that it must be a freakish southerly appearance of the aurora borealis, not exactly a common sight over Central Park, but as he stood – a pedestrian in coat and scarf, saddened and disappointed but still regular as regular, standing on a stretch of lamp-lit ice – as he looked up at the light, as he thought it was probably all over the news – as he wondered whether to stand where he was, privately surprised, or go running after someone else for corroboration – there were other people, the dark cutouts of them, right there, arrayed across the Great Lawn…

In his uncertainty, his immobility, standing solid in Timberlands, it came to him. He believed – he knew – that as surely as he was looking up at the light, the light was looking back down at him…

This moment of inexplicable encounter happens early in the novel, but it is quite possible to imagine the novel existing without it. Its principle impact is to make Barrett look more closely at life, and try to work out how he was the only person to see this light – and what it could mean, and why he was chosen to see it. But, around him, the novel’s other characters continue their complex, anxious, vibrant, and ordinary lives. Few authors show the complexity of the ordinary, and the banality of the extraordinary, as well as Cunningham does.

For instance, Barrett;s sister-in-law Beth is seriously ill with cancer. Her possible death laces every word spoken in the house, where Barrett moves ‘temporarily’ to recover from his break-up. But, in the midst of this, Barrett’s brother Tyler is preoccupied with trying to write a song for his upcoming wedding to Beth. He is a singer-songwriter who has always been the talented one – but possibly not talented enough to ‘make it’, after years of trying, or to avoid falling into cliche when he tries to express himself in song to Beth.

Various other friends form part of the core cast, and we go between the minds of all of them – mostly Barrett and Tyler, but Cunningham elegantly takes the third-person narrative into different people’s perspectives, often for fleeting moments, while maintaining a cohesion and fluidity to the novel. He is so good at the moments that synecdochically represent whole lives. And he is equally good at showing, through narrative and dialogue, the precise degree of love and trust between two characters. Barrett and Tyler are closer than any two brothers I’ve seen in fiction, and Cunningham enables the reader to feel this almost viscerally.

I was a bit worried when I saw, in the blurb, that Barrett would start going to church. Christianity is seldom written about well by people who aren’t Christians. But Cunningham resists a dramatic conversion or a fall from faith – rather, it is one of the ways that Barrett’s life opens up, without ever developing beyond a sense of cautious wonder. The mysterious light sends him on a new path, even if it doesn’t reveal a new destination.

Mostly, I just love reading Cunningham’s prose. There is something about the way he forms communities of characters, and something in the elegant simplicity of his writing, that makes reading one of his novels feel like having  cold, refreshing water pouring through your hands on a hot day. The Hours remains my favourite of the four or five I’ve read, but this is a close competitor. I think there’s a danger that his novels are underrated because they give such an effect of simplicity – of things happening to ordinary people, and then the novel concluding. But to do that well, and even with a sense almost of transcendence, is surely one of the highest possible achievements of the novel.

Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor

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I love Muriel Spark’s strange, unpredictable, funny novels – and she seems like a fascinating person, too. So I was intrigued by Alan Taylor’s Appointment in Arezzo (2017) and delighted when my friend Phoebe gave it to me for my birthday last year.

I had an appointment with Muriel Spark in Arezzo, the Tuscan town where Vasari, fabled for his Lives of the Renaissance artists, was born and bred. Mrs Spark’s fax was brief and business-like. “My friend Penelope Jardine and I will come to Arezzo. I suggest we have dinner at the Continentale Hotel (not far from the station) and we can talk then. Daytimes very hot.

Taylor met Spark thus in 1990 to interview her in his capacity as a journalist. But from then on, until her death in 2006, Taylor was friends with Spark and her friend Penelope Jardine (and it doesn’t seem all that likely that ‘friend’ was a euphemism for something else). Appointment in Arezzo is an account of that friendship and his visits to their beautiful Italian home, as well as a sort of patchwork biography of other parts of her life. It isn’t an out-and-out biography, but he address parts of her life in organic tangents – her shortlived married, her estrangement from her son, the difficulties she experienced with an ex-friend who became the model for the ‘pisser of copy’ in A Far Cry From Kensington, and more. In fact, her relationship with her estranged son gets extensive covering, including lengthy quotes from letters. If anything dominates, it is this.

Because of this loose structure, he is able to explore avenues in a casual way. It feels a bit like a long conversation with one of her friends, rather than anything more formal. We are as likely to hear about their reaction to a burglary as we are about Spark’s writing technique. A menu is described with the same interest as her publishing history. Curiously, Taylor is pretty poor at telling anecdotes about Spark for which he is present – one about her time in America becomes a string of ‘then this happened, then this happened’ – but much better at relaying stories that he has heard from her. Or telling his own stories, of seeing the beauties of Tuscany. Spark is often called a Scottish novelist, but she set more novels in Italy than in Scotland, and spent many years of her life there. Taylor sees how crucial that environment is to the novelist she was in this period.

I really enjoyed anything in Appointment in Arezzo that showed the personal relationship Taylor had with Swift, because I am always more interested in a subjective portrait of a novelist than some attempt to rise above subjectivity – but I also loved when we can see what Spark thinks about her own writing:

I wanted to know what she saw as her achievement, her legacy, “I have realised myself,” she replied. “I have expressed something I brought into the world with me. I have liberated the novel in many ways, shown how anything whatever can be narrated, any experience set down, including sheer damn cheek. I think I have opened doors and windows in the mind, and challenged fears – especially the most inhibiting fears about what a novel should be.

Neither Spark nor Taylor explain whether those fears are in the mind of author or reader – or both – but it is a typically Sparkian half-revelation. And I think, in fact, Appointment in Arezzo is a tribute to Spark’s influence over those who know her. If Taylor’s writing style is not like Spark’s, then perhaps only she could have inspired this curious memoir – unusual, resisting traditional structures, affectionate but also disconcerting – and, like Spark’s great novels, somehow coming together in all its curiousness to make something as satisfying as it is odd.