Category: The Blog

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space is a novella published by Pushkin Press in one volume alongside the collection of short stories, Karate Chop, both translated from Danish by MIsha Hoekstra. It is a beautiful book, elegantly and sparsely printed so that each title has its own cover requiring a reader to turn the book upside down to read the other work. Even without the trappings however, this is a striking and beautiful volume of work that stays inside your mind long after you’ve finished reading.

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space is written in short sentences laid out like poetry in which Minna strives to rediscover her voice. She is a composer without fame struggling to maintain a relationship with a journalist. She needs rehearsal space and hasn’t been able to make a loud noise in weeks.

It would be easy to imagine finding the layout irritating. The short forms of social media messages, its tweets and texts, feel as if they have influenced Nors’ style but rather than inspire something that reflects a short attention span they demand attention, acting like vignettes that evoke a precise moment in order to convey a wider ongoing present and together they build a conscious flow that is Minna and her experience of the world. It is possible to pick out sentences –

Minna turns her face toward the sun.

Minna’s chest arches over her heart. (p41)

– but they work best together. Minna’s story is one of creative longing, of obsession even, and it is very powerful.

Karate Chop is just as powerful but written very differently. The characters of these stories speak of acts that fall under the radar, behaviours that are shocking not because they don’t happen but because they usually remain hidden. The snide abuse of relatives (‘Mother, Grandmother, and Aunt Ellen’), the kindnesses of men who live adulterous lives (‘Duckling’), the moment in which a parent stops being god-like (‘The Winter Garden’), all those obsessions and behaviours for which we have no straight-forward answers.

The title story typifies what is best about these short stories in its use of a metaphor about colouring in [it makes me wonder how this would extrapolate out into the latest adult colouring craze…]. Annelise often finds herself in abusive relationships and while she is considering her current situation she looks at her lover’s hand:

It looked gentle lying there. A little red across the knuckles, but there was nothing wrong with its outline, especially not if Annelise put her eyes slightly out of focus. She considered its shape and thought about the lines; everything you wanted to see but which in actual fact was not there. Everything that should have been but which never became, and this was important to understand. Not only in respect to herself. It was something she could put to use with the children at school. She recalled that as a child she had been heavily seduced by the black line drawings in coloring books. They were done so well she always wanted to fill the empty spaces with crayon and felt-tip. Behind that burning desire to color in the drawings lay the creative human’s longing to give life, and, not least: to make the drawings her own. In a way, it was like stealing preconceived ideas. The drawing could never be lifelike, and for that reason you reached a point where you began to draw outside the lines. (p73)

The idea of human relationships being about filling in the lines or drawing outside of them has a revelatory quality whose exploration is best read in the story itself, but I’m sure you can see its appeal; her stories have the quality of gems with multiple facets that reflect the light and the dark.

Clearly, I enjoyed Minna Needs Rehearsal Space and Karate Chop a great deal and would recommend it highly. It’s a quick but evocative read that forces the reader to think beyond its pages. Thank you to my Secret Santa who bought it for me for Christmas.

Next week (well this week), I’m reading the comic Bitch Planet, Book One: Extraordinary Machine by Deconnick and De Landro.

The youngest of a family grown from Norfolk’s saltmarshes, Pip tells his own story through the legends of his family’s past. His stories cover the lives of three generations who scrape a life from the land that is almost sea.

His grandmother reads the future in the clouds and fears that everyone will leave her. His grandfather arrives buried in mud and soon covered in samphire. And the history of birthing and leave-taking mingle with the rhythm of the ocean, with the coming and going of the marshland that writes the landscape into the histories of the people who live there.

Jeremy Page’s writing has a magical quality that lends Norfolk and its people a timeless, mythical quality. Pip and his family are too grounded in the land to be changed by the speed of modernity and so Salt drifts free of temporal moorings and into ancient stories of Old Norse and the rhythms of the season.

I could go into the details of Pip’s story but I don’t want to offer spoilers for a novel that creeps its quiet way into the pulsating heart of the earth whose waters rise and fall with the same regular but occasional wildness of our own breathing. There is an inevitability, an ingrained nature to Pip’s story that makes Salt a bleak comedy you would be hard-pressed not to enjoy.

Next week I’m reading A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler.

Emma O’Donovan has just turned eighteen. She is beautiful, conscious of behaving nicely, and popular because of it. She understands what is expected of her and what she has to gain from life with a body and face like hers.

Her beauty is the focus of her mother’s love as well as Emma’s own fantasies. In fact, the novel is more successful because Emma isn’t a particularly pleasant character. She is the bitch she tries so hard to suppress in public. Until [and this is where those who don’t want spoilers need to stop, though the novel isn’t about plot surprises but more about forcing the reader to confront difficult truths] one night she gets carried away trying to prove she is more than others imagine and passes out having drunk too much and taken too many unknown drugs.

The following day her parents find her collapsed on the lawn, sunburn streaked across a lot of exposed flesh. When she goes into school on the Monday her friends shun her and even the most unpopular kids don’t want to sit with her all because of what has appeared on Facebook, uncompromising images that haunt her, forcing her from eating lunch in the bathroom, through refusing to go in to school, to suicide attempts.

The novel jumps ahead a year and Emma has pressed charges of rape, a word she is deeply uncomfortable with. She has begun to feel that the rape charges are not only ruining her own life but everyone else’s too: her parents’ business prospects dwindle, they are shunned by old friends; her brother loses his girlfriend; the boys whose lives were about to take off into university or rugby teams are faced with a life of stigma. Emma feels guilty. Emma feels ashamed.

As you would expect from the title, the reader is forced to think about how a women could ever ask for rape. Issues surrounding beauty, clothing and behaviour are raised so that we must ask ourselves about consent and how it should be understood and valued.

I won’t say what happens in the end, but I will say that the ending is brief. I felt frustrated by it, not because of Emma’s decision (there is a different sense of frustration there, a frustration felt for the character rather than with the novel) but because we don’t get to see how that decision plays out in anyone’s life. I feel Louise O’Neill could have written more. I wanted to see how Emma would feel later in her life. What she would think of her parents, her friends and her own decisions. Whether she would learn to forgive herself and make peace with her body or whether her life would amount to nothing more than literally keeping the peace through maintaining a silent withdrawal.

Asking For It is painful to read because there is no way of escaping the ingrained misogyny that is very much a part of our modern world. A world in which parents expect different things of their sons and daughters, where women speak differently to men, where young girls are taught to value beauty over character and to see sex as a badge of popularity or conquest, a measure of self-worth, and as a tool for building success. Asking For It asks if our progressive technological society has regressed in its use of social media where constantly updated images displace us further and further from ourselves: we are what we appear to be. It is no surprise that Emma’s self-loathing is fueled by her loss of control over these social media images.

Asking For It is billed as a young adult novel, and I can see that it could be a useful, if harrowing, book for young people to read, but I think the novel has a wider scope and says something about the way we live that demands attention from an adult readership. Clever, punchy and painfully provocative, Asking For It is a novel that challenges the reader to think more deeply about the unspoken gender inequalities we tolerate in order to fit in.

Next week I’m reading Salt by Jeremy Page.

The novel opens as Fred Pooley returns to London for the first time in six years. He’s been living in Hong Kong doing nothing much more than work. When spontaneous bouts of crying force him to reconsider his life, he returns to England to try to understand and expunge the gaping hole he feels inside.

He seeks new occupations – writing workshops, a pretty woman – but can’t help reconnecting with his first love, Sally, even though it was their break-up that sent him to Hong Kong six years ago. She now has a daughter and this starts Fred thinking about what it would have been like if they’d had a child of their own and a desire to be a parent, something Fred would never have believed he was capable of before (especially as he persuaded Sally to have an abortion), begins to overwhelm him. He is plagued by a sense of missed opportunity.

All those years ago Fred donated sperm to a clinic, what if his sperm had been used to create children? If there were children running around with Fred’s DNA inside their cells shouldn’t he know about it? Wouldn’t he have some responsibility for their well being? Shouldn’t he look in on them if he could?

And then the pretty woman gets him a job working for a fertility firm, the same company Fred visited all those years ago…

Add the complications of a mother Fred doesn’t want to contact and a Father who deserted him before he was even born, and Mister Spoonface becomes a novel that takes a deep hard look not only at what it means to be a father or a parent, but what it means to be alive at all. That gaping hole Fred feels isn’t just about reproduction, it’s about making sense of the world in whatever way humans can.

The perfect novel for book club debate, Mister Spoonface is a quick and provocative read that forces the reader to question their own assumptions about parenthood, reproduction and the responsibility involved in forging and maintaining emotional connections. As we follow Fred Pooley’s journey into obsession, we are forced to look deep into ourselves.

Next week I’m reading Asking For It by Louise O’Neill. I’ve built up a rather large list of books I want to read while I’ve been taking a break from blogging, but it is fun to be back and great to start with Paul Blaney’s novel. I hope to interview him in a few weeks for Authors QH. I’ll keep you posted.

American Genius, A Comedy is a confounding book in which the narrator, Helen, depicts the circular and contradictory nature of her thoughts during a time of retreat in an institution about which we know only a little. The institution is more than a hotel because we know it is meant to be a place of rest, somewhere in which its residents can relax and restore their strength, but there is a suggestion of its being one step away from a mental institution.

She has come to be relieved of the burden of her aging mother who suffers from dementia and much of Helen’s narrative returns to her relationship with her mother, her dead father, her missing brother and their family pets. Though we are never given a rounded history of any of her past, we do know that her father designed, wove and sold material for the clothing industry. She has a wealth of fabric knowledge that weighs each material’s suitability to encase, shroud, protect and mimic different skin types and needs.

Helen is obsessed with skin as the largest organ. Her own skin is sensitive, something she remarks many women wish to be.

‘But skin is the agent of the body that protects its other organs, by covering them, and by being an information station that allows the other organs, my doctor explained patiently, to adjust to changes in the outer environment. My condition, dermatographia or dermatographism, skin writing, is not life-threatening, but because of it my skin tingles, pulses, and itches, and if I were to stroke my arm with a fingernail, white lines would surface and be visible for at least fifteen minutes, as my skin releases histamines, which produce swelling, and this occurs in about ten percent of the population, but the swelling is not a hive, since in dermatographia only raised lines surface, which resemble writing on the skin. My dermatologist says friends could leave messages on my back, but they’d fade quickly.” (p69)

This interest in skin is a delightful ongoing metaphor. The information exchange of skin is two way: as skin relays information to other organs, so the organs, the mind included, relay information to the skin. Others can interpret our mental and physical state through reading the skin, though meticulous observation is key and no one can see without bias – and so emerges the politics of skin.

Helen’s ability to move between thoughts of dermatographia, shampoo and dreams of Kafka, or anorexia and her careful efforts to always try to buy cotton socks, mark the circuitry nature of her narrative: it evades, it repeats, it evolves into a remarkable rendition of consciousness in and over time.

One could argue that not much happens in the novel, but Helen is never truly idle. She reads about American history, she learns Zulu, she tries to design comfortable and elegant chairs, she takes apart objects, she mulls over her own past, the lives of the other residents who impinge upon her time there and in whom she takes equal delight and distaste, and thinks often of her Polish cosmetician whom she knows only as a client. The turns of her mind are playful, elegant and searing.

Helen is fixated by time. She calls herself a daughter of time and over and again she intones that ‘time is all we have’. She burns keepsakes from her past, she is fascinated by another resident’s compulsive collection of timepieces and thinks often of those who have passed out of time, her dead friends and family, her pets, that she can now only communicate with in her own mind. These lines of thought intertwine with the plot, as even an escape into the woods beyond the residence is unsuspectingly circular (I’m also trying hard not to mention the séance…).

American Genius, A Comedy would be a perfect subject for a thesis not least because its unassuming, tangential structure is as considered as any of the male canon whilst remaining assuredly female: this is a novel that touches on all the so called ‘female’ subjects of beauty, weight, clothes, romance and cats with an elegance and intensity that requires and rewards revisiting. It is funny. It is unpretentious. Though some may find it a little intense, I feel sure American Genius, A Comedy will stand the test of time and earn Lynne Tillman lasting notoriety, at least for as long as the time we have allotted to us. And I’ve said all this without reflecting upon what the novel says about American society, which is plenty.

Some of you may notice that this review comes a week late. I was, and remain, determined to keep November as a writing month and so the reading and blog have been delayed. This will be my last post until December when hopefully I’ll be much further along with my own writing.

Happy reading everyone. Do feel free to keep on sending me suggestions.

Gatekeeper is the story of how one woman, Clare, becomes involved in a project to reintroduce wolves into the wilds of the Scottish Highlands.

Clare was forced to delay her entry to University because of family circumstances. Once the member of a tightly knit pack she becomes the lone wolf, confused and hurt by what family circumstances reveal of her parents, and finds her only solace in her role as volunteer at a local animal shelter.

When she eventually gets to university, she continues to take an interest in animal welfare and joins a group of animal activists. Not every mission goes well though and after one routine animal release goes sour, Clare is unfairly dismissed from the group. Her talents are, however, recognised elsewhere and she is recruited into the highly covert and international group working for the wolves.

The mission has already taken years to plan and takes some more years of Clare’s life as the group finds her jobs and sources her training across the world all to prepare for her role as gatekeeper to the newly reintroduced wolf pack. It will be her job to protect the pack from negative local and international interest. She must do all she can to persuade people that wolves pose no threat to humans and farm animals.

Of course the journey that Clare takes is as significant as that of her wolf pack. She learns to shake off her solitude and find her own place among humankind.

Dominance and submission are important aspects of life in a wolf pack. They are also important aspects of Clare’s life and by implication of all of our lives. It should be noted that position in the pack is always shifting, challenges are made and made again and particular individuals can forge exceptions to the rule. The threat and thrill of the challenge has a visceral and compelling presence in Clare’s story that serves to remind us of the nature and instinct inside our nurture and culture. Clare reminds us how important it is for us to live in body and mind, as beings who share the world with other humans, plants and animals.

Through this journey where violence is always present, if only in threat, there is a thread of narrative which questions the difference between an activist and a terrorist. You’ll have to read Gatekeeper to find Clare’s answer but I can say that this is relevant, elegant writing where the natural landscape in all its beauty and savagery is set against human nature.

Next week I’m reading American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman.

Set mostly in late 1970s, early 1980s Jamaica, A Brief History of Seven Killings is a smoking mountain of a book whose characters live in a present that turns historical fiction into living history.

In 1976 Bob Marley, always referred to as The Singer in the novel, is about to sing in a peace concert, trying to unite the ghetto factions in Kingston to create a united front against external tyranny, to try and channel the internalised rage of poverty outwards, right before the general election.

But not everyone thinks his peace is the answer to Jamaica’s problems and after an initial opening channelled through a dead white politician whose lyrical descriptions of death hold a kind of justice in them (‘Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.’ p.3), the novel focuses on the days leading up to an assassination attempt on The Singer. What motivated the attack? Who followed it through? What implications did it have for those involved and for Jamaica and the wider world?

Told through the voices of several different characters from ghetto, uptown, America and beyond, all involved in some way in that day in 1976, we follow the various routes to and from that day until we reach the 1990s. Throughout it all The Singer remains the only silent character, a kind of vacuum around whom the others gravitate trying to enforce their own vision for their future or the future of Jamaica. It’s an impressive and, at times, exhausting feat.

Though a true epic in size as well as scope, it comes as no surprise to read that Faulkner and Marguerite Duras are mentioned as inspirations for how to structure this novel in Marlon James’ acknowledgements. This isn’t just a book full of research, this is a book full of people whose voices feel distinct and whose words can reach out and mesmerise – even when I struggled with the Jamaican English its rhythms began inflecting my thoughts. There are moments that it’s hard to forget, such as when one of the ghetto characters, Bam-Bam, gets his first gun:

‘When a gun come to live in the house the woman you live with treat you different, not cold, but now she weigh word, measure it before talking to you. But a gun talk to the owner too, telling him first that you can never own this, that outside is plenty people who don’t have a gun but know you do, and one night they going come like Nicodemus and take it. Nobody ever own a gun. You don’t know that until you own one. If somebody give it to you, that somebody can take it back. Another man can think is for him even when he seeing that is you control it. And he don’t sleep until he get it ‘cause he can’t sleep. Gun hunger is worse that woman hunger for at least maybe a woman might hungry for you back. At night me don’t sleep. Me stay up in the dark shadow, looking at it, rubbing it, seeing and waiting.’ p. 72

The waiting that Sir Arthur George Jennings (the ghost politician) talks about in the opening chapter finds many repercussions throughout the book. Gangs and posses, runaways, spies, people in prison, all of them are either waiting to get out or waiting for their past to catch up with them. Tension is everywhere. No one seems to have unrestricted time. None of these characters are free. What might that mean anyway?

The last chapter offers hope to one of the characters. This hope is the possibility for redemption in which freedom becomes the ability to chose, without fearing for your life, to connect, to make meaningful, honest relationships, but this is just one character and we aren’t privy to the outcome.

I’m glad A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker 2015 because it’s a novel we should all be reading and talking about. It’s not always a pretty read, it’s not an easy read, but it’s a novel that speaks new stories into old tropes.

Next week (or rather this week…) I’m reading Gatekeeper by Kay Sexton.

Laura is on an expedition in Antarctica for the Coca-Cola Corporation making sure its latest proposal to use water sourced from the icecap doesn’t harm local wildlife – not, in a world set in the not-too-distant future, that there is much wildlife left. But when the communication system breaks down her two colleagues go in search of the penguin research team and begin Laura’s slow journey into increasing solitude.

Meanwhile, on the other side of life, the remembered dead are living in a vast city. They believe that they continue to live in the city only as long as a living human being remembers them, even if in the most insignificant way, and only disappear when they are finally forgotten. So the dead continue to live in much the same way they did when they were alive. They eat and sleep and work and fall in and out of love.

Then something happens in the living world that causes whole swathes of the dead to disappear.

What is happening and why does Laura seem to be at the centre of it?

I’m not going to spoil the plot by saying more, but it’s fair to say that though I enjoyed the plot my greatest pleasure was in reading the contemplations of Brockmeier’s characters regarding memory and how its various configurations weave together to form an identity and a life.

“The incident was an inconsequential one – of no importance whatsoever, really. But then most of the things she remembered, most of the things anybody remembered, were of no natural importance – were they? – and that never stopped them from rising into the light.” (p59)

He writes particularly well about solitude. Not only in Laura’s journey through the ice – an epic battle against nature that resonates with all the power of religion and myth where human survival is brought to the very brink by the power of ice and sand deserts, or by water, in an attempt to forge new ways of being, as if endurance itself were the purest form of contemplation – but also through the stories of the other characters living in the city of the dead.

… “life – real life – was really just a solitude waiting to be transfigured.” (p78)

I liked the problems that his afterlife posed: if every one of us is bound within our own minds and can never truly know another, perhaps never even truly know ourselves, how wonderful to be gifted an afterlife by the most fleeting but remembered interaction with another.

Writing the Coca-Cola Corporation into the story was also amusing, though it was hard not to imagine some marketing executive finding a positive association in it. But Brockmeier isn’t pointing fingers at corporations. His near future is so much like our own and Laura’s story so much about her individual experiences with and apart from others, that any judgement is reserved for the individual. The responsibility of human history, dead or alive, rests with each and every living one of us.

the brief history of the dead is a delightful and provocative read. Its landscapes both real and surreal are delicately drawn, the force of nature wielding as much power as and within the mind as characters move through life, into death and beyond.

Next week I’m sticking with brief histories to read A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.