The Booker Prize longlist and the Women’s Prize shortlist? You must be kidding me! I know many readers have taken this one to heart, so I’ll try notThe Booker Prize longlist and the Women’s Prize shortlist? You must be kidding me! I know many readers have taken this one to heart, so I’ll try not to go on about how much I disliked it. The plot is enjoyable enough: a Nigerian nurse named Korede finds herself complicit in covering up her gorgeous little sister Ayoola’s crimes – her boyfriends just seem to end up dead somehow; what a shame! – but things get complicated when Ayoola starts dating the doctor Korede has a crush on and the comatose patient to whom Korede has been pouring out her troubles wakes up. My issue was mostly with the jejune writing, which is somewhere between high school literary magazine and television soap in quality. (e.g. “I walk back into the house and head up to my room, before either of them has a chance to respond. My hands are cold, so I rub them on my jeans” & “I have found that the best way to take your mind off something is to binge-watch TV shows.”) Anyway, a quick read....more
I read the first 35 pages. There’s a lot of repetition and random details that seem deliberately placed to be clues. I’m sure there’s a clever storyI read the first 35 pages. There’s a lot of repetition and random details that seem deliberately placed to be clues. I’m sure there’s a clever story in here somewhere, but apart from a few intriguing anachronisms (in 1988 a smartphone is just “A small, flat, rectangular object … lying in the road. … The object was speaking. There was definitely a voice inside it”) there is not a lot of plot or character to latch onto. I suspect there will be a lot of readers who, like me, can’t be bothered to follow Saul Adler from London’s Abbey Road, where he’s hit by a car in the first paragraph, on to East Berlin....more
The other week two grizzled Welsh guys came to deliver my new fridge. Their barely comprehensible banter reminded me of that between Maurice andThe other week two grizzled Welsh guys came to deliver my new fridge. Their barely comprehensible banter reminded me of that between Maurice and Charlie, two ageing Irish gangsters, in this Booker-longlisted novel. The long first chapter is terrific. At first these fellas seem like harmless drunks, but gradually you come to realize just how dangerous they are. Maurice’s daughter Dilly is missing, and they’ll do whatever is necessary to find her. Threatening to decapitate someone’s dog is just the beginning – and you know they could do it. “I don’t know if you’re getting the sense of this yet, Ben. But you’re dealing with truly dreadful fucken men here,” Charlie warns at one point. I loved the voices, and if this was just a short story it would have gotten a top rating from me, but I found that I had no interest in the backstory of how these men got involved in heroin smuggling.
A couple of favorite lines: “The stories we could tell, Benny. Did you ever try and buy 350 goats off a fella from Marrakesh, did you?” and “their smiles are high and piratical; their jauntiness has a cutlass edge.”
“Carbon-based human in a silicon world.” Winterson does her darndest to write like Ali Smith here (no speech marks, short chapters and sections,“Carbon-based human in a silicon world.” Winterson does her darndest to write like Ali Smith here (no speech marks, short chapters and sections, aching timeliness, random pop culture references). Cross Smith’s Seasons quartet with the vague aims of the Hogarth Shakespeare project and Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last and you get this odd jumble of a novel that tries to combine the themes and composition of Frankenstein with the modern possibilities of transcending bodily limitations. Her contemporary narrator is Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor sponsored by the Wellcome Trust who supplies researcher Victor Stein with body parts for his experiments in Manchester. In Memphis for a tech expo, Ry meets Ron Lord, a tactless purveyor of sexbots; Claire, a religious black woman who becomes his unlikely collaborator; and Polly D, a Vanity Fair journalist.
Their interactions alternate with chapters narrated by Mary Shelley in the 1810s; I found this strand much more engaging and original, perhaps because I haven’t read that much about Shelley and her milieu, whereas it feels like I’ve read a lot about machine intelligence and transhumanism recently (To Be a Machine, Murmur, Machines Like Me). I think Winterson’s aim was to link the two time periods through notions of hybridness and resistance to death. It never really came together for me. Best joke: “Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death.”...more
The first word of The Water Cure may be “Once,” but what follows is no fairy tale. Here’s the rest of that sentence: “Once we have a father, but ourThe first word of The Water Cure may be “Once,” but what follows is no fairy tale. Here’s the rest of that sentence: “Once we have a father, but our father dies without us noticing.” The tense seems all wrong; surely it should be “had” and “died”? From the very first line, then, Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel has the reader wrong-footed, and there are many more moments of confusion to come. The other thing to notice in the opening sentence is the use of the first person plural. That “we” refers to three sisters: Grace, Lia and Sky. After the death of their father, King, it’s just them and their mother in a grand house on a remote island.
There are frequent flashbacks to times when damaged women used to come here for therapy that sounds more like torture. The sisters still engage in similar sadomasochistic practices: sitting in a hot sauna until they faint, putting their hands and feet in buckets of ice, and playing the “drowning game” in the pool by putting on a dress laced with lead weights. Despite their isolation, the sisters are still affected by the world at large. At the end of Part I, three shipwrecked men wash up on shore and request sanctuary. The men represent new temptations and a threat to the sisters’ comfort zone.
This is a strange and disorienting book. The atmosphere – lonely and lowering – is the best thing about it. Its setup is somewhat reminiscent of two Shakespeare plays, King Lear and The Tempest. With the exception of a few lines like “we look towards the rounded glow of the horizon, the air peach-ripe with toxicity,” the prose draws attention to itself in a bad way: it’s consciously literary and overwritten. In terms of the plot, it is difficult to understand, at the most basic level, what is going on and why. Speculative novels with themes of women’s repression are a dime a dozen nowadays, and the interested reader will find a better example than this one....more
Sabrina Gallo only appears in about the first five spreads. Her disappearance and what happens next form the bulk of the book. I expect this is meantSabrina Gallo only appears in about the first five spreads. Her disappearance and what happens next form the bulk of the book. I expect this is meant as commentary on American culture today: the glorification of violence, young people’s alienation and inertia, and how the media can be used as a weapon against victims and bystanders alike. It never hit home for me, in part because the drawing style was not my cup of tea. All the characters are rectangular, and often have basic, nearly nonexistent facial features. I can think of many graphic novels I loved more and would have liked to see be the first to make the Booker longlist....more
Lanny is the kind of odd kid who asks questions like “Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?” and builds a bower in the woods “for theLanny is the kind of odd kid who asks questions like “Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?” and builds a bower in the woods “for the whole village and anyone who finds it … to make them fall in love with everything.” His mum Jolie, a crime writer, celebrates Lanny’s uniqueness, but his dad Robert, “a lean mean commuting machine” and fairly stereotypical laddish sort, doesn’t really understand him. Jolie arranges for Lanny to have art lessons from Pete, whom many in the village mostly affectionately refer to as Mad Pete. But when Lanny goes missing a witch hunt ensues, unearthing a lot of the ugliness that was buried underneath the villagers’ everyday quirkiness – as put across in the fragments of their speech that Dead Papa Toothwort, a sort of incarnation of the quintessentially English figure of the Green Man, hears as he rambles around the edges of the village. These snatches of speech reminded me of the style of Lincoln in the Bardo. Inventive, certainly, but by the end I found myself wondering, what was the point of it all? [Warning: gratuitous scene of violence towards an animal.]
Favorite lines:
“he’s not a normal child, he is Lanny Greentree, our little mystery … he had a kind of magic, we all accepted he was enigmatic and special.”
the coy introduction to the last few pages: “False things, endings. Sustenance for fools and never what they claim to be. Nevertheless.”...more
This intense Argentinian novella, originally published in 2012 and nominated for this year’s Republic of Consciousness and Man Booker InternationalThis intense Argentinian novella, originally published in 2012 and nominated for this year’s Republic of Consciousness and Man Booker International Prizes, is an inside look at postpartum depression as it shades into what looks like full-blown psychosis. We never learn the name of our narrator, just that she’s a foreigner living in France (like Harwicz herself) and has a husband and young son. The stream-of-consciousness chapters are each composed of a single paragraph that stretches over two or more pages. From the first page onwards, we get the sense that this character is on the edge: as she’s hanging laundry outside, she imagines a sun shaft as a knife in her hand. But for now she’s still in control. “I wasn’t going to kill them. I dropped the knife and went to hang out the washing like nothing had happened.”
Not a lot happens over the course of the book; what’s more important is to be immersed in this character’s bitter and perhaps suicidal or sadistic outlook. But there are a handful of concrete events. Her father-in-law has recently died, so she tells of his funeral and what she perceives as his sad little life. Her husband brings home a stray dog that comes to a bad end. Their son attends a children’s party and they take along a box of pastries that melt in the heat.
The only escape from this woman’s mind is a chapter from the point of view of a neighbor, a married radiologist with a disabled daughter who passes her each day on his motorcycle and desires her. With such an unreliable narrator, though, it’s hard to know whether the relationship they strike up is real. This woman is racked by sexual fantasies, but doesn’t seem to be having much sex; when she does, it’s described in disturbing terms: “He opened my legs. He poked around with his calloused hands. Desire is the last thing there is in my cries.”
The language is jolting and in-your-face, but often very imaginative as well. Harwicz has achieved the remarkable feat of showing a mind in the process of cracking up. It’s all very strange and unnerving, and I found that the reading experience required steady concentration. But if you find the passages below intriguing, you’ll want to seek out this top-class translation from new Edinburgh-based publisher Charco Press. It’s the first book in what Harwicz calls “an involuntary trilogy” and has earned her comparisons to Virginia Woolf.
“My mind is somewhere else, like I’ve been startled awake by a nightmare. I want to drive down the road and not stop when I reach the irrigation ditch.”
“I take off my sleep costume, my poisonous skin. I recover my sense of smell and my eyelashes, go back to pronouncing words and swallowing. I look at myself in the mirror and see a different person to yesterday. I’m not a mother.”
“The look I’m going for is Zelda Fitzgerald en route to Switzerland, and not for the chocolate or watches, either.”
(2.5)Conversations with Friends was one of last year’s sleeper hits and a surprise favorite of mine. I was part of the official shadow panel for the(2.5)Conversations with Friends was one of last year’s sleeper hits and a surprise favorite of mine. I was part of the official shadow panel for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was pleased to see Sally Rooney win the prize. So I jumped at the chance to read her follow-up novel, especially after it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It’s been earning high praise from critics and ordinary readers alike as being even better than her debut. Alas, though, I was let down.
Normal People is very similar to Tender – which for some will be high praise indeed, though I never managed to finish Belinda McKeon’s novel – in that both realistically address the intimacy between a young woman and a young man during their university days and draw class and town-and-country distinctions (the latter of which might not mean much to those who are unfamiliar with Ireland).
The central characters here are two loners: Marianne Sheridan, who lives in a white mansion with her distant mother and sadistic older brother Alan, and Connell Waldron, whose single mother cleans Marianne’s house. Connell doesn’t know who his father is; Marianne’s father died when she was 13, but good riddance – he hit her and her mother. Marianne and Connell start hooking up during high school in Carricklea, but Connell keeps their relationship a secret because Marianne is perceived as strange and unpopular. At Trinity College they struggle to fit in and keep falling into bed with each other even though they’re technically seeing other people.
The novel, which takes place between 2011 and 2015, keeps going back and forth in time by weeks or months, jumping forward and then filling in the intervening time with flashbacks. I kept waiting for more to happen, skimming ahead to see if there would be anything more to it than drunken college parties and frank sex scenes. The answer is: not really; that’s mostly what the book is composed of.
I can see what Rooney is trying to do here (she makes it plain in the next-to-last paragraph): to show how one temporary, almost accidental relationship can change the partners for the better, giving Connell the impetus to pursue writing and Marianne the confidence to believe she is lovable, just like ‘normal people’. It is appealing to see into these characters’ heads and compare what they think of themselves and each other with their awareness of what others think. But page to page it is pretty tedious, and fairly unsubtle.
I was interested to learn that Rooney was writing this at the same time as Conversations, and initially intended it to be short stories. It’s possible I would have appreciated it more in that form....more
Families and ideologies collide in a Homeland-worthy plot that races between Massachusetts, London, Turkey and Pakistan. The three Pasha siblings areFamilies and ideologies collide in a Homeland-worthy plot that races between Massachusetts, London, Turkey and Pakistan. The three Pasha siblings are the orphaned children of an Al Qaeda terrorist who died en route to Guantanamo. Now Isma, the family’s stand-in mother, is off to Amherst to undertake a PhD in sociology. Her younger brother and sister, twins Parvaiz and Aneeka, have an intense bond that lasts even after Parvaiz becomes radicalized and leaves for Syria to join Isis. Aneeka falls in love with Eamonn, the son of the new Home Secretary, Karamat Lone, a nonobservant Muslim who intends to be tough on terrorism. But is she just using him to get a favor from his father? I don’t know the Antigone source material well and didn’t bother studying up on it. The novel can be enjoyed without, and the most ‘dramatic’ moments, like a keening over an open coffin, are the hardest to believe anyway. The ending is terrific. Of the 3.25 I’ve read from the Women’s Prize shortlist, I’m betting on this or Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing winning....more
I read the first 15% of this Booker-longlisted novel via NetGalley and set it aside. I knew what to expect – lovely writing, much of it descriptionsI read the first 15% of this Booker-longlisted novel via NetGalley and set it aside. I knew what to expect – lovely writing, much of it descriptions of the natural world and the daily life of a small community – but I guess I hadn’t fully heeded the warning that nothing happens. You hear a lot about these Hardyesque locals you can’t keep straight (because what do they matter?) but never anything about what happened to the missing girl. I won’t rule out trying this one again in the future, but for now it couldn’t hold my interest....more
An entirely believable look at the life of the American soldier in the 1850s and 1860s, this novel succeeds due to its folksy dialect and a perfectAn entirely believable look at the life of the American soldier in the 1850s and 1860s, this novel succeeds due to its folksy dialect and a perfect balance between adventuresome spirit and repulsion at wartime carnage. While it shares some elements with Westerns and Civil War fiction, it’s unique in several ways. Though thrilling and episodic, it’s deeply thoughtful as well. Thomas writes semi-literate English but delivers profound, beautiful statements all the same. Lovely metaphors and memorable turns of phrase abound. Finally, this book is the most matter-of-fact consideration of same-sex relationships I’ve ever encountered in historical fiction. Heart-breaking, life-affirming, laugh-out-loud: these may be clichés, but here’s one novel that is all these things and more. Truly unforgettable.
Fridlund’s Minnesota-set debut novel is haunted by a dead child. From the second page readers know four-year-old Paul is dead; a trial is alsoFridlund’s Minnesota-set debut novel is haunted by a dead child. From the second page readers know four-year-old Paul is dead; a trial is also mentioned early on, but not until halfway does Madeline Furston divulge how her charge died. This becomes a familiar narrative pattern: careful withholding followed by tossed-off revelations that muddy the question of complicity. The novel’s simplicity is deceptive; it’s not merely a slow-building coming-of-age story with Paul’s untimely death at its climax. For after a first part entitled “Science”, there’s still half the book to go – a second section of equal length, somewhat ironically labeled “Health”. (Reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement last year.)...more
(3.5) A short work of muted horror, all about atmosphere and the unexplained. Set in a Cornish fishing village, it sees newcomer Timothy Buchannan(3.5) A short work of muted horror, all about atmosphere and the unexplained. Set in a Cornish fishing village, it sees newcomer Timothy Buchannan trying to figure out what happened to Perran, the man who occupied this rundown cottage until his death 10 years ago, and why everyone refuses to talk about him. Flashbacks in italics give glimpses into Timothy’s life with his wife, Lauren, who is meant to join him when he finishes the renovations; and into the fisherman Ethan’s past.
I enjoyed the unsettling mood and the language used to describe the setting and Timothy’s dreams: “The fish appear at first as a lightening of the sea beneath the boat as of a cloud scudding beneath the waves, their scales catching the moonlight” and “He dreams of the vents where life still clings on to the hydrothermal streams that escape the earth’s core, of the shrimps, the crabs, the biosludge that survived the great oceanic apocalypse, and feels the heat of the vents sear the skin on his sunken face as he leans in closer to look.”
Ultimately I’m not sure I fully understood the book, especially whether the late turns of the plot are to be viewed literally or allegorically. What I take away from it, and this is perhaps too simplistic of me, is an assertion that we are all joined in our losses. A quick, creepy read – you could do worse than pick it up this Halloween....more
A gritty tale of adventure and murder set aboard a mid-nineteenth-century whaling ship. Archaic adjectives pile up in a clever recreation of VictorianA gritty tale of adventure and murder set aboard a mid-nineteenth-century whaling ship. Archaic adjectives pile up in a clever recreation of Victorian prose: “The men, empurpled, reeking, drenched in the fish’s steaming, expectorated gore.” Much of the novel is bleak and brutal like that. There are a lot of “F” and “C” words, too, and this is so impeccably researched that I don’t doubt the language is accurate. McGuire never shies away from the gory details of life, whether that’s putrid smells, bodily fluids, animal slaughter, or human cruelty. I thought the novel’s villain was perhaps too evil, with no redeeming features at all. Still, this is a powerful inquiry into human nature and the making of ethical choices in extreme circumstances. From the open seas to the forbidding polar regions, this is a journey worth taking.
Non-subscribers can read an excerpt of my review at BookBrowse....more
Smith’s fifth novel spans 25 years and journeys from London to New York City and West Africa in tracing the different paths two black girls’ livesSmith’s fifth novel spans 25 years and journeys from London to New York City and West Africa in tracing the different paths two black girls’ lives take. The narrator (who is never named) and Tracey, both biracial, meet through dance lessons at age seven in 1982 and soon become inseparable. The way this relationship shifts over time is the most potent element of the novel, and will appeal to fans of Elena Ferrante. The narrator alternates chapters about her friendship with Tracey with chapters about her work for pop star Aimee in Africa. Unfortunately, the Africa material is not very convincing or lively and I was impatient for these sections to finish. The Aimee subplot and the way Tracey turns out struck me as equally clichéd. Despite the geographical and chronological sprawl, the claustrophobic narration makes this feel insular, defusing its potential messages about how race, money and class still define and divide us. A new Zadie Smith novel is an event; this one is still worth reading, but it definitely disappointed me in comparison to White Teeth and On Beauty....more
Smith is attempting a sort of state-of-the-nation novel in four parts – this is the first in a seasonal quartet. Her two main characters are DanielSmith is attempting a sort of state-of-the-nation novel in four parts – this is the first in a seasonal quartet. Her two main characters are Daniel Gluck, a centenarian dying at a care home, and his former next-door neighbor, Elisabeth Demand, in her early thirties and still figuring out her way in the world. (“Demand” from de monde = of the world, as well as being demanding.) The present world Elisabeth and her mother navigate is a true-to-life post-Brexit bureaucratic nightmare where people are building walls and hurling racist epithets – “news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.” Mostly the book is composed of flashbacks to wordplay-filled conversations between Elisabeth and Daniel when he used to babysit for her, as well as dreams/hallucinations Daniel is having on his deathbed. But there’s also a lot of seemingly irrelevant material about pop artist Pauline Boty and the Profumo Affair.
This was most likely written very quickly in response to current events, and while some of Smith’s strengths benefit from immediacy – the nearly stream-of-consciousness style (no speech marks) and the jokey dialogue (as in a brilliant scene set at the post office) – I think I would have preferred a more circumspect, compressed narrative. In places this was too repetitive, and the seasonal theme felt neither here nor there. I’ll listen out for what the other books are like, but doubt I’ll bother reading them. Aspects of this are very similar to Number 11 by Jonathan Coe (the state-of-Britain remit, even the single mother hoping to appear on a reality show), but I much preferred his take.
Gorgeous cover, though – Early November Tunnel by David Hockney (2006).
Favorite passages:
“But the people on the street were oblivious, or made themselves it. They looked and looked away. They looked. But they weren’t looking.”
“Your father’s not dead, though? Daniel said. No, Elisabeth said. He’s in Leeds.”
The judging panels for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award clearly saw something in this slavery-set tale that I missed. Following Cora on herThe judging panels for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award clearly saw something in this slavery-set tale that I missed. Following Cora on her fraught journey from her Georgia plantation through the Carolinas and Tennessee to Indiana is enjoyable enough, with the requisite atrocities like lynchings and rapes thrown in to make sure it’s not just a picaresque cat-and-mouse battle between her and Arnold Ridgeway, the villainous slavecatcher.
But I’m surprised that such a case has been made for the uniqueness of this novel based on a simple tweak of the historical record: Whitehead imagines the Underground Railroad as an actual subterranean transport system. This makes less of a difference than you might expect; if anything, it renders the danger Cora faces more abstract. The same might be said for the anachronistic combination of enlightened and harsh societies she passes through: by telescoping out to show the range of threats African-Americans faced between, say, the Civil War and the 1930s, the novel loses the sense of immediacy.
Ultimately, I felt little attachment to Cora and had to force myself to keep plodding through her travels. My favorite parts were little asides giving other characters’ backstories, such as Ethel and Mabel. There’s no doubt that Whitehead is a seasoned author and knows how to shape a plot and dot in apt metaphors (I particularly liked “Ajarry died in the cotton, the bolls bobbing around her like whitecaps on the brute ocean” and “The afternoon stretched the shadows like taffy”).
However, I kept thinking, Haven’t I read this story before? In Homegoing, Beloved, Ruby and The Diary of Anne Frank? Haven’t I seen it on screen what feels like a million times, in Twelve Years a Slave, Roots and the like? And whenever Whitehead tries to inject a retrospective note of foreboding, it feels clunky and redundant. An example: “That was Sea Island cotton the slaver had ordered for his rows, but scattered among the seeds were those of violence and death, and that crop grew fast. The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood.”
I wanted to read this to see what all the fuss was about, and it’s certainly capably written, but it doesn’t stand out for me compared to a book like Homegoing, which is altogether more affecting, convincing and panoramic.
Did I like it? I guess so, even though much of what I have written here seems to be negative. Call it 2.75-ish rounded up.
Favorite lines:
“One might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.”
“We have all have branded even if you can’t see it, inside if not without”
Lucy Barton is in the hospital for nine weeks following an appendectomy with complications. The novel zeroes in on the five days her mother comes toLucy Barton is in the hospital for nine weeks following an appendectomy with complications. The novel zeroes in on the five days her mother comes to stay by her bedside, a pinnacle in their often difficult relationship. For a short book, this packs a lot in: an artist’s development, the course of a marriage, poverty and class distinctions. Lucy grew up in rural Illinois, where words like “cheap” and “trash” could easily have been applied to her family. “Nice” is another word that comes up a lot (one character is even named Kathie Nicely); Strout seems to be asking just how meaningful a descriptor it actually is.
I read this in one sitting on a plane ride and found it to be a powerful portrayal of the small connections that stand out in a life. For Lucy, some of those are with her doctor and the author whose writing workshop she attended. I was reminded of Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill and Unforgettable by Paulette Alden, but most of all of Academy Street by Mary Costello. This doesn’t quite match up to the latter, but it’s a close run thing. I look forward to discovering the rest of Elizabeth Strout’s back catalogue. Established fans will be thrilled with this new book.
A few favorite lines:
“This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation.”
I was delighted to win a free copy through a Goodreads First Reads giveaway....more
Between the blurb and the first paragraph, you already know everything that’s going to happen. I admire books that can keep you reading with interestBetween the blurb and the first paragraph, you already know everything that’s going to happen. I admire books that can keep you reading with interest even though you know exactly what’s coming, but this isn’t really one of those. What Reeves’s strategy suggests is that the crime and its unintended consequences are not the important thing here, but rather Roscoe’s years in prison and what they do to his relationships, especially with his wife.
Ultimately I would have preferred for the whole novel, rather than just alternating chapters, to be in Roscoe’s first-person voice, set wholly in prison (where he helps out in the library and with the guard dogs) but with brief flashbacks to his electricity siphoning and the circumstances of his manslaughter conviction. I can’t rate this lower because the writing is entirely capable, but the structure made it so I felt the story wasn’t worth my time. (I was meant to review this for BookBrowse but couldn’t rate it highly enough.)
Favorite lines:
“The use of electricity is in the 600s, applied science. Religion is in the 200s. If there were any books on the death penalty, they’d be in the 300s—social sciences—but we don’t have any of those.”
“I fear we don’t grow, either, here in these walls. Instead, we go backward.”...more
(3.5) “How do you recover from that? How would you even begin?” A strong debut novel about personal and community responses to tragedy. Clegg’s(3.5) “How do you recover from that? How would you even begin?” A strong debut novel about personal and community responses to tragedy. Clegg’s multivocal approach works quite well, though there are perhaps a few too many voices diluting the mixture. I like how the revelations of what really happened that night before the wedding to cause the fatal house fire come gradually, making you constantly rethink who was responsible and what it all means. The small-town Connecticut setting is a good one, but I’d question the decision to set so much of the book in Washington, where the bereaved June drives on a whim. This does, however, introduce us to the hotel-owning couple, Rebecca and Kelly, who were among my favorite characters.
For a tragic story, this is admirably lacking in melodrama – except when it comes to Penny’s fate. Though I didn’t like this nearly as much as Clegg’s memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, I’d happily read another novel by him.
Favorite passage: “[June] was, she sensed sharply as she reached the far side of the parking lot, an untouchable. Not from scorn or fear, but from the obscenity of the loss. It was inconsolable, and the daunting completeness of it—everyone, gone—silenced even those most used to calamity.”...more
The title is the first signal that this will not be some cozy domestic novel full of petty family squabbles. Instead, that road through the Burren inThe title is the first signal that this will not be some cozy domestic novel full of petty family squabbles. Instead, that road through the Burren in County Clare takes center stage – a symbolic road to redemption and the home you can never reclaim but never stop looking for. The novel is divided into two roughly equal parts, ‘Leaving’ and ‘Coming Home’. In the first half the four Madigan children disperse across the world. Enright puckishly avoids giving a straightforward chronological rundown of the characters’ lives, instead zooming in on a different point in time for each of them. In mining the depths of each one’s inner life in diverse writing styles, Enright defies common knowledge.
(Full review in November 2015 issue of Third Way magazine.)
Related reading: Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave has a very similar plot setup but lacks the stylistic experimentation.
See Enright’s excellent Guardian piece on returning to the west coast of Ireland....more
(3.5) This has just won the Bookseller book of the year award; I wish I could say I appreciated it more. Kingsnorth calls his Booker-longlisted(3.5) This has just won the Bookseller book of the year award; I wish I could say I appreciated it more. Kingsnorth calls his Booker-longlisted fiction debut “a post-apocalyptic novel set 1000 years in the past.” Written in the author’s own version of Old English, the story traces the English guerrilla resistance movement that followed the Norman Conquest. This novel is hard work, requiring patience and effort from any reader. Prior experience of or interest in Old English chronicles would certainly be an advantage.
The Wake resulted from crowd-funding via Unbound – perhaps the first Booker Prize nominee to arise from non-traditional publishing? So, for its publication journey as well as its linguistic ambition, it was always going to stand out. However, for me it was more an interesting experiment than a readable book.
Mild-mannered biochemist Douglas Petersen hopes to reconnect with his wife and distant teenage son during an elaborate European tour. ThisMild-mannered biochemist Douglas Petersen hopes to reconnect with his wife and distant teenage son during an elaborate European tour. This Booker-longlisted follow-up to Nicholls’s bestselling One Day is a charming but unsentimental look at a family in crisis. The plot may sound terribly clichéd – and at first I indeed feared that that would be the case – but the deft mixture of past and present and Douglas’s endearing first-person narration save the novel from being mundane.
I found it to be a very touching picture of a marriage in decline, and of a father’s realization that he needs to change his ways if he is not to lose his son forever. It is a gently tragicomic tale, with the madcap humor of the travel scenes tempering the sadness of this one family’s dysfunction.
“The bride stood like a pillar of salt, rigid under layers of itchy petticoats.” I loved that first line, with its biblical resonance and its hint“The bride stood like a pillar of salt, rigid under layers of itchy petticoats.” I loved that first line, with its biblical resonance and its hint that this is not an entirely comfortable marriage. Chani is the fifth of eight daughters in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in North London’s Golders Green. I’ve read another novel set in London’s Jewish community, Francesca Segal’s stunning debut, The Innocents; although Chani is not nearly as sophisticated, it taught me more about orthodox customs. I had no idea that theirs are basically arranged marriages, and that women wear wigs from their wedding day onwards, to save the beauty and seductiveness of their hair for their husbands’ view. Some beliefs can have more unfortunate implications, of course, as in the book’s most poignant incident: a rabbi whose wife is suffering a miscarriage cannot bring himself to comfort her, for fear of being made impure by her bleeding.
I’d rate this debut novel a 3.5, probably. It’s best to think of it as a fairly light-hearted, gossipy tale of interclass matchmaking in the Jane Austen vein (another recent take I’d mention in the same breath is Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan). Unfortunately, Chani is no feisty Lizzie Bennet, even though there is a wonderful head-to-head with her future mother-in-law that resembles the meeting with Lady Catherine De Bourgh, and Harris describes her as “lacking the bovine passivity typical of many of the other girls.” Better not to think about the novel as a serious critique of religion, because the tension between restriction and freedom is slightly mismanaged, and Chani and her betrothed, Baruch Levy, can be whiny, flat characters at times. We don’t learn enough about their individual backgrounds or their own thoughts, and Harris can be rather unsubtle in describing their dilemmas (e.g. “Suddenly, Chani felt burdened with her future responsibility, with the weight of being a wife and mother” and “When you have lots of siblings, you can get lost in the crowd”).
By far the most intriguing character in the novel is the Rebbetzin (“rabbi’s wife”) Zilberman. Harris gives us tantalizing glimpses into her backstory – back when she was just Rebecca, a teenager from Manchester finding her way to faith on a trip to Israel. A tragedy from her past explains her ongoing disillusionment with religion and her decision that her husband taking away their secret television is the last straw. Her son Avromi is the other stand-out character; when he falls in love with a Black British girl he meets at university, he tests the strict boundaries of his religion more than Chani or Baruch ever will.
The story begins and closes with Chani and Baruch’s wedding ceremony, and in between it loops back to detail their six-month courtship and highlight a few events from their family past, or the Rebbetzin’s. The narration is a shifting third-person limited, allowing for occasional flourishes of Austen-like free indirect speech. I ended up being surprised by the tenderness of the novel’s wedding night coverage; I thought Harris might evoke Jewish modesty by avoiding it altogether, but instead she treats it with the same bittersweet, clinical approach Ian McEwan employs in his novella On Chesil Beach.
Overall, a bit of a jumble in terms of themes and tone, but there is some definite skill on display. Harris drew inspiration for the novel during her year spent teaching at an ultra-Orthodox school in London. I’m guessing she herself is not Jewish, or at least not part of any orthodox community, but her depiction of people and customs is entirely believable (including frequent Yiddish vocabulary, which you can look up in the helpful glossary).
Chani was a somewhat unusual entry on last year’s Booker Prize longlist, but the nomination speaks to Harris’s (intermittent) talents for characterization, plotting and structure. It will be interesting to watch her development as a novelist....more
(4.5) Through a collection of fragmentary sources, the novel builds a posthumous picture of Harriet (aka Harry) Burden, a larger-than-life feminist(4.5) Through a collection of fragmentary sources, the novel builds a posthumous picture of Harriet (aka Harry) Burden, a larger-than-life feminist and modern artist who released her work under male pseudonyms. An engrossing puzzle as well as a bold commentary on gender identity and the divided self, both stylistically risky and fiercely intelligent.
Hustvedt completed her doctoral studies on Charles Dickens, and in some ways her sprawling narrative, with its large cast of characters, resembles a Dickens novel for the postmodern age, with the quest for the fractured identity taking the place of the standard Victorian hero’s journey.
This was my first encounter with Hustvedt; I am so impressed that I would eagerly read anything else she’s written, fiction or nonfiction. Meanwhile, I highly recommend The Blazing World. Take Harriet’s own advice: “Peel the onion of personas, from one to the next, moving further and further into the book.” You’ll find her intriguing story entirely worth the mental effort.
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