Category: The Blog

I read Her at a feverish pace, falling asleep at night with a feeling of unease. Whenever I approached the book I did so with a mixture of eager desire and dread: I both wanted and didn’t want to know what the main characters were capable of.

Without spoiling the plot, the novel is about two women in their early forties living through very different phases of life.

Emma has small children – she starts the book pregnant with her second – and as such her life is governed by their care, by the relentless cycle of feeding, changing, cleaning and managing emotions that simultaneously saps her energy and brings her joy.

Nina has a seventeen-year-old and a career as a moderately successful painter. Her days are mostly her own. She can chose when to go in to her studio, where to eat lunch; she has time to think and breathe.

Nina is the drive behind the novel because it is Nina who recognises Emma in a busy London street. From that moment, Nina is consumed by the idea of finding Emma, of somehow insinuating herself into Emma’s life. Emma, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to recognise Nina at all.

Though Emma admits that she has ‘always felt lucky’ (p229), that she is ‘due for a bit of a kicking’ (p230), the Emma we meet in the novel is struggling through the fog of early parenthood mostly unappreciated and unnoticed. She may have been blessed with golden charm in her youth, but does she really deserve the flip side of Nina’s attentions?

As the novel progresses we grow ever keener in our desire to understand what happened between Emma and Nina in the past and Harriet Lane does an impressive job of allowing the reader to imagine whilst withholding the truth, letting us think of things that might blacken Emma’s character and warrant Nina’s obsession, without seeming divisive or tricksy.

Even without the enticing plot line, Her is full of sharply observed writing that cleverly exposes the conflictions of modern motherhood and the way in which old pain can linger and consume beneath the surface. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. Whether you are irritated or drawn-in by Emma’s self-absorbed, middle class, dilemmas (there are references to Mrs Dalloway), whether you are horrified or delighted by Nina’s cold, clinical regard, you will feel something, you will feel forced into some kind of reaction. And the empty, open maw of the ending is a delight.

Reflecting upon the novel in its entirety, I’m not sure how much I like Her. I’m drawn to it, the characters are brilliantly depicted, but whether I would want to return to it without the relentless pace of the plot I can’t say for certain. I suppose time will tell. For now, I’m relieved to be released from it, though still a little nervous of what my dreams will bring. If last night brought visions of my youngest daughter’s naked chest lurid with welling bruises, I can only hope for better tonight. Let’s just say, you have been warned.

Read it and let me know if your dreams turn to nightmares…

Next week I’m reading In the Beginning was the Sea by Tomás González.

The Fat of Fed Beasts opens in an office. A seemingly inauspicious start but characteristic of Ware’s love for the bizarre within the mundane because although it seems like a typical office filled with red tape, disillusioned workers and colleagues who use it as a place for browsing the internet and drinking coffee, this office is special: this is the Office of Assessment where workers write reports on our souls, recommending where the recently deceased should spend their afterlife.

The comic and theological ramifications of this idea feel unending. Not only might our fate be decided by a bored salaryman keen to clear his desk, there is the terrifying possibility that the Office of Assessment could be infiltrated and corrupted… Especially after a colleague witnesses a bank robbery in which one old man refuses to comply with the robbers’ requests to lie on the floor even after he is shot at. Who is this old man? What does he have to do with the Office of Assessment?

The title of the novel comes from Isaiah and is God’s rejection of sacrifice as a means of excusing rather than renouncing sin. Instead of following the letter of God’s law, his people should change their hearts. Is this a reflection upon how humans live their life, or on the Office and how it judges life, or both?

And this is the beauty and consternation of Ware’s prose and narrative. What is happening and the meaning we ascribe to it is constantly shifting. It is hard not to think of Beckett and Kafka as well as a few other famous literary giants because the machine of the civilized world is pitted against the individual and the individual’s concerns.

The novel is told through different characters’ first person perspectives in which each character is also grappling with the agonies of daily living – their relationships and livelihoods. This enhances the conflation of fate with the transitory, of grand over-arching principle with the miniscule desires of the flesh.

The Fat of Fed Beasts is funny and clever because the sublime contemplation of the soul is rendered petty and banal, is given a hard dose of realism. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable, if at times bamboozling, read. I’m already looking forward to what Guy Ware will publish next.

Next week I’m reading Her by Harriet Lane.

One of the things I like most about The End of Days is how a potentially sentimental plot is transformed into a thought-provoking and complex work of literature: it would take a rare creative writing tutor or editor to encourage the notion of writing a series of stories about the life of one woman, a series of stories that not only each end in a different time of death, but follow on one from another after interim sections that explore alternative events in which the woman would have evaded death. It is surprising to find not an irritating exploration of serendipity but a searching, eloquent narrative about the nature of chance and the value of human life. Part of each on-going story explores what only others can reveal about ourselves. If those others chose to keep that knowledge hidden, we will always remain a mystery to ourselves.

In a later section of the novel, the woman’s son is visiting Vienna, the city in which his mother once lived as a child.

‘As far as this descendent of a Viennese resident is concerned, Vienna has been washed clean of stories, it took less than a human lifetime for the city to lose all connection to him. Less than a human lifetime for homeland and origins to diverge. He is free, doubly free; he carries around within him a vast dark land: all the stories his mother never told him or that she hid from him; perhaps he carries with him even those stories his mother never knew or heard of, he can’t get rid of them, but he can’t lose them either, since he doesn’t even know them, since all of this lies buried deep within him; for when he slipped from his mother’s womb, he was already filled with interior spaces that didn’t belong to him, and he can’t just look inside to inspect his own interior.’ (Loc 2804)

This ‘vast dark land’ is what writing is all about. The woman herself becomes a writer. She uses words to make sense of the world, to bare witness, to try to be truthful and to hope for a better world to come. Her story is individual and it is the story of the 20^th Century. A half-Jewish, half-Christian Austrian, much of the woman’s past is run from, but as the stories progress her desire to forge a new life with knowledge of the past consumes her. But finding one’s true identity is like searching a ‘vast dark land’, an unfathomable abyss of what ifs, where daily life unfolds without a map and leaves us all exposed: ‘Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death. If not sooner, then later.’ (Loc 2552) Are we meant to read the novel thinking that the greatest force in life is death? The son thinks of it as walking around accompanied all our lives by our own corpse. And is this something that is meant to force us to push for a better life or to accept the futility of trying to create change?

Perhaps, in the end, the ‘vast dark land’ inside us is the most important part of us. What matters more than anything are all the possible stories that could be part of us and our attempts to tell even the smallest proportion of them. Of course that’s the writer in me. What could be more important than telling stories? Lies are always the best kinds of truths. But whatever you take from The End of Days, it would be difficult not to be compelled and inspired by just how much one woman’s possible lives can explore.

Next week I’m reading The Fat of Fed Beasts by Guy Ware followed by Her by Harriet Lane.

Your Father Sends His Love is a collection of twelve stories that together create a reflective and melancholic whole. I felt I knew the characters, felt I shared something with them and though the picture is at times amusing, there is an underlying bleakness that entices and appeals to me enormously. The stories are clear, precise and often unrelenting.

Though it is always difficult to decide upon favourites in story collections, especially as I liked all of the twelve and felt Evers moved easily between genders and ages, ‘Something Else to Say’ is the story that stays with me the most. The narrator is waiting to meet his best friend in a pub and endlessly runs through a list of what things, what facts he has to offer as conversation. As the story progresses, we learn what lies beneath their need to stick to safe, distant fact. It is a beautifully eloquent and moving story that highlights something Stuart Evers is particularly good at exposing, the absences and failures of our attempts at communication, communication with others and communication with ourselves.

Perhaps this is something the short story form lends itself to – it finds images and moments to represent lifetimes of striving for communion – nevertheless, Your Father Sends His Love is a particularly pointed collection of stories that questions our need to bridge the gap between self and other. Out in May, I can’t recommend it enough.

Next week I’m reading The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck.

By Night The Mountain Burns is the story of a remembered childhood living on an Island off the West Coast of Africa. The narrator’s childhood is coloured by a murky period in the island’s history whose origins the narrator seeks and speculates upon forcing the story into a cyclical song-like pattern where repetition brings revelation and rhythm. Apparently simple, this resonant eloquence is enticing, suspenseful and offers history a flavour of myth.

Island life is ruled by suspicion and full of characters whose mystery is magical not just because the narrator remembers them through the eyes of childhood. We wonder what happened to the grandfather who shaves his hair only on one side, who rarely talks or comes downstairs and who built his house facing the mountain not the sea. We want to understand what makes the she-devils, women who grow so hot they bathe naked in the sea at night and gain evil powers. And while this seems like a safe magical place, full of ritual and song, the story circles around the public hounding and murder of a woman, the death of a child, the burning of plantations and the terrible spread of cholera. So whilst a feeling of the magical real and the haze of events seen through memory can create a sense of safety, of distance, the heart of the story is about the culpability of the witness and the true evil that resides in watching and doing nothing, a message very close to the bone.

Whether you chose to hear this message, or simply enjoy a journey, By Night The Mountain Burns is a delight to read.

Next week I’m reading Your Father Sends His Love by Stuart Evers.

 

The Book of the Crowman is an apocalyptic work about the importance of death and renewal. The Crowman, part man and part crow, who often appears as a scarecrow in a feathered top hat, harnesses the duel power of the land that needs death to sustain it. The people have forgotten to think of the earth and their greed for power is knocking life off balance. The earth has started to hibernate, waiting for men to die out before putting forth seed once more.

In England, in the face of this crisis, a group called the Ward rise up and seize control, promising to safeguard all of England whilst in reality running a brutal and selfish regime. Those who see clearly and long to survive with the land awaken the spirit of the Crowman. In order for balance to be restored, a boy must find the Crowman and persuade him to reveal his power.

This story of the Crowman is a faith that must continue to be witnessed and retold across generations to keep the balance alive. Those entrusted with this witness and retelling are the Keepers, individuals who are able to follow the feathered path of the Crowman into the weave of stories past, present and future. Each Keeper tells a slightly different tale. We follow the story through Megan Maurice, the first female Keeper, whose time is again facing rising greed for power over the land requiring a new faith-inspiring retelling. Her story is told alongside the boy’s as together they fight to overcome man’s lust for the machine and for dominion over the earth.

Without saying more about the plot it is already clear that familiar myths, legends and religious stories work within The Book of the Crowman: Prometheus wrestles with Christ; Cassandra and Mary Magdalene lend magnitude to Megan. This makes the story of the Crowman – and I wish I had read the two volumes closer together – resonant with a reverberation that is pleasing, relevant, occasionally irritating, but undoubtedly gripping. Meat is still my favourite Joseph D’Lacey novel, but if you are a fan of The Stand by Stephen King you will want to read these volumes and Spring is the perfect time for them.

This coming week I’m reading By Night The Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel.

‘Underfoot the mess of spread-out books started to shake their pages, become fan-shaped, but there was no wind in the house. Maria knew these were the original source of Joe’s square, from which his stories extended, becoming a limitless web of stories. Now he had abandoned all this and become the story himself.’ p 249

Reading The Last Lover is like entering a labyrinth. All of the characters move between states of varying degrees of reality leaving the reader no firm ground upon which to gain a sense of stability so that the very nature of the real is itself put into question. The implication is that we all exist as simultaneous but varying versions of ourselves as interpreted by us and by others; identity becomes a series of interrelated stories.

Every possibly way of enhancing this outlook seems to be explored by Can Xue. As we move through different aspects of the different characters lives – all of whom seek to run from and to their lovers or loves – we are accompanied by differing hoards of animals or insects. Snakes, crows, mosquitoes, wolves, fish, wasps all buzz and bite, sting and poison, humming with a multitudinous singularity, all representing the complex nature of being alive as a unique reflection of an interconnected multitude of facets. The teeming sense of fecund nature overwhelming and infusing human life with, alongside the animals and insects, mudslides, earthquakes and the immensity of mountainsides, brings desire and procreation into the dream-weaving mix. Even plants are not to be left out with the disorientating power of woods and forests, the scent of roses and the haze of the poppy’s opium hanging in a complex fug over a novel whose heady cocktail induces a reader into a wandering mental state where the logic of dream takes over. This makes reading The Last Lover an imaginative feat.

Even as I read I knew I should be paying greater attention, thinking about how different characters stories took similar turnings, met with parallel dead ends. This is a book that could be read many times and even if I were to read it again and possibly again, I suspect that there would still be references lost to me, repetitions as yet unnoticed. Once again, it seems important to revisit the notion of this book as a labyrinth. It even feels like it could be the labyrinthine book at the heart of Borges’ story, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (there’s probably a nice academic essay in their comparison). The shadows cast by some of the characters, the mysterious Eastern woman whose appearance shifts when seen through different characters’ perspectives, the need for witnesses, the distance perspective brings (because to look head on would blind), not only brings to mind Plato, but also suggests that the true last lover is the reader.

I haven’t outlined the plot and I don’t intend to. If you like the idea of being lost, trapped even, in worlds you can’t control, if you like having your mental landscape shifted off kilter and leant the uncertain clarity of dream, The Last Lover is for you. The Last Lover is entrancing, ensnaring, and vicious. I think it is no coincidence that this is the novel that broke my novel-a-week rule.

Next week (or rather this week) I’m reading Joseph D’Lacey’s The Book of the Crowman: Black Feathers Book Two, followed by By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel.

All Our Names is a powerful novel set in the 1970s in Uganda and Midwest America. Narrated by a male African voice whose first given name is never revealed, and a white American social worker, Helen, the novel explores one man’s experience as he moves through different continents finding friendship and love in people with whom he has no genetic kinship.

The male voice speaks of Isaac, his revolutionary friend of the hungry classes who embroils him in war and then helps him escape. The female voice speaks of another Isaac, a man with a borrowed name who has been given his friend’s escape route in the form of a student’s visa to America.

What I like most about All Our Names is the eloquence of the unspoken. The narrative and the style both opt for sparsity creating a novel whose message navigates difficult boundaries through fear’s common ground. Blending in is what keeps you alive but everyone should have the right to stand out, to own the names of their life’s journey. My paltry attempt at summarising these themes shows why it is a good thing for the novel to avoid these crass generalisations.

Just before the middle of the book, our unnamed narrator recounts a story that his father told him as a child about a city that was kept alive by the dreams of its citizens. At first it was an honour to dream of their house, their street, all the municipal buildings, the roads and railways, but as time passed more and more citizens grew tired of always dreaming of the same things. Finally, one man stands up and says he will take away the citizens suffering by doing all their city dreaming for them. Thinking they are now free, they dream all manner of wonders only slowly to discover their streets and shops, the people themselves are shifting and disappearing under this one man’s control. ‘Those who tried to dream of the city again could see only their house or their street as it looked years ago, but that wasn’t dreaming, it was only remembering, and in a world where seeing was power, nostalgia meant nothing.’ (p131)

Something about this dream speaks to one of the problems at the heart of the novel: dreaming is central to change and plodding behind a chosen course without question, without truly seeing the path you are on, will lead you nowhere you want to go. In other words, thinking you are free is one of life’s greatest shackles. Something that often comes to mind when I’m encouraged, yet again, to get a credit card because you need to be in debt before you can be free to borrow. In the name of freedom other countries and peoples have been ravaged and it is the cruelty of power, set against friendship and love, set against personal safety, that this novel seeks to discuss. When you read a novel and feel as if a sharply nailed grasp is constricting the beats of your heart, you know you are reading something challenging, something that speaks directly to you and questions your integrity. I wish I could write something even a little like it.

It doesn’t escape my notice that the American lover and narrator Helen has the name that launched a thousand ships. Will she go back home or will she stay with the newly named Isaac? It’s an ending we aren’t told but need to imagine in our own minds.

Next week I’m reading The Last Lover by Can Xue.

White Hunger is about the famine in 1867 in Finland and looks at the lives of two very different families – one poor and one rich – whose paths cross and enmesh. The Senator, based on the finance minister of the time whose stringent policies did nothing but provoke the crisis, also has a voice.

I was expecting to love this novel. It has won many literary prizes and has a theme I am usually drawn to. However, I was somehow, like many of the characters within its pages, left in the cold. For the first time in an age of reading translated works, I wondered if it was the translation I was struggling with. Austere prose is one thing, but the novel seemed full of general platitudes about the baseness of man reduced by hunger that did nothing to set my literary desires aflame. I was disappointed. It is nothing new to read of rich people making unfair decisions about poor people. It is nothing new to see poor people turn thief in the face of death. Elevating this into a narrative that forces new neural pathways, that challenges the reader to think differently about poverty and hunger, is what books like this should be doing and whether it was the translation (from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah) or the novel itself, I was disappointingly taken nowhere new.

I say disappointingly because as well as the praise I read for the novel, I also love the publisher’s, Peirene’s, aims and the causes they support. Everything about this book makes me want to love it. And still, I remain unconvinced, unmoved by the image of a boy watching his mother’s dead body slowly shrouded by a blanket of snow. This lack of emotional response comes in a week when I was lucky enough to see the birth of my friend’s beautiful baby son.

I won’t say that you will not enjoy this novel. It is compelling enough. I only wish I could read it in Finnish. Then I would know for sure where my frustrations lie, with the novel or the translation.

I will read Aki Ollikainen’s next novel. There is the seed of something promising here, but more in hope that anticipation.

Next week I’m reading All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu and mulling over the joys of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Longlist and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist.

I’m about to sit down and post about the book I read this week but I can’t blog without mentioning Terry Pratchett who died yesterday, Thursday 12th March 2015. I’ve been heartened to see how many writers have wanted to make known their sorrow over his death and their love of his work. Even if the literary establishment doesn’t recognise him other writers (and of course the public) do because this was a man who knew how to bend your reading ear and tell you a story. This was a man who was never pretentious but who understood and knew how to communicate the strange predicament of being human. Like all brilliant writers his fantasies come closer to the truth than any recordings of fact because he knew how to turn philosophical thought into narrative in such a way that most readers weren’t even aware he was doing it. To my mind that is the work of an artist. I’m going to miss having new works of his to look forward to.