Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

One day the narrator, Elena, is telephoned by the son of her dear friend, Lila (Lina to everyone else), and told that her friend has disappeared without trace. Now in their sixties, the true story of Elena and Lila begins in their childhood and before all trace of Lila can be lost, Elena takes it upon herself to tell the story of their friendship, the story of Lila, as closely as she can.

The tale that unfolds is gripping, eloquent, and beautifully evokes the intensities of childhood and adolescence where one believes true knowledge and feeling are only things that young people can really access. They are the story of the world, the characters of novels; adults, old people, have had their time and have bound themselves in ways which give them no room to manoeuvre and given that Elena and Lila come from a poor area of Naples, manoeuvring, escaping, changing, is everything.

Lila is fascinating because she observes, questions, and formulates her own opinions. Quite simply, Lila is brilliant in the way that most of want to be. She has a force that draws people in, that demands attention and devotion regardless of her often less than nice behaviour. She drives others, the narrator included, to behave in certain ways. Elena in particular strives to be good enough, to know enough, to converse as eloquently, in order to remain Lila’s friend because Lila is more than an intelligent, kindred spirit, she has what Elena considers to be a destiny. Elena feels Lila is going somewhere and Elena wants to go somewhere too, even if, ultimately, that means they go in different directions.

Both girls are learning to navigate the adult world. The novel charts both Elena and Lila as they journey towards an awakening of self-awareness, a journey as much about disappointment as fulfilled expectation, and it is a journey well worth reading.

In some ways, even though the outcomes of their early choices suggest their onward journeys, I wish there were a third section that took Elena and Lila into adulthood. I have no doubt that the story would be written well. Perhaps, however, this novel is not about what happens once you are bound, but the memory of that youthful energy and desire for change. And yet the novel opens with Lila, in her sixties, performing the most amazing change of all: disappearing. Energy and desire, emotional intensity, these aren’t only for the young.

I also wish that the magical real elements of Lila were explored further. Though again, it could be argued that the magic Elena describes is a by-product of intense feeling, an expression of the fullest living of experience, a kind of hyper-real, how wonderful to feel that. Why not explore that further?

Whatever else I may want from My Brilliant Friend, you can’t read it without being reminded of that feeling of wonder. Even when that feeling expresses the most painful isolation, there is within it a suggestion of progress, an upward trajectory that the narrator exposes and exploits. We are the heroines of our own narratives, but how often do we step back, observe and take charge? What does it really mean to come of age?

I would recommend My Brilliant Friend. Don’t be put off by the cover. Yes, there is a wedding and shoes are important to the plot, but this is chic lit only in the sense that it is literature written by a woman whose protagonists are women; this is chic lit in its purest, most relevant, and critical form. Austen and Duras would sit happily on the same bookshelf with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.

Next week I’m reading Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, followed by The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Do keep your comments and suggestions coming.

Ryan has a UFO experience as a teenager. Descent follows Ryan through the unraveling of this experience as its effects shape his adult life. Conspiracy theories abound and truth crosses paths with belief and with paranoia as we move in a near future world where everything can be seen and tracked through satellites, remote flying cameras and the internet. Descent would seem a strange title but for the other implications of the plot. It seems the human race isn’t one species. Future space travel and human survival both rely upon different forms of descent.

Everything about the sound of the novel promises tight plotting, complex character developments and provocative sci-fi theories. I was looking forward to a mind-bending journey that would invade my dreams but instead found a novel which simply wasn’t for me. There are undoubtedly readers who would enjoy Descent. Somehow, though, I couldn’t quite climb aboard the ride. Ryan didn’t draw me in or win my sympathy. I wasn’t uninterested but nor was I gripped and the writing itself wasn’t enticing enough to carry me along regardless. Ken MacLeod has written many books though, and I suspect there are others that would have me screaming my way around the rollercoaster, just not this one.

Next week I’m reading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, followed by Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

Peter is at the Russian front of Germany’s war, fighting for Hitler. He is desperate for leave, for something to fight for, so he chooses a woman from a group of photographs and heads to Berlin to marry her. Katharina offers him leave and Peter offers her a soldier’s pension should the almost inevitable take place. This is the undertaking.

It is a brilliant premise for a novel. Even if the two like each other, as Katharina and Peter do, how will war affect their transaction? Can two people who barely know each other create a real marriage from a few days’ leave and letters? The novel follows their attempts looking at life as a woman in Berlin and life at the front in Russia. Both lives are fascinating and compromising and ultimately survival manipulates and challenges politics.

Again, the plot reads like a moving and thought-provoking novel and The Undertaking does breathe the painful monotony of war into Peter and Katharina’s lives, but somehow, something falls short. Perhaps it is the weight of expectation I brought to the novel. It came highly recommended and the premise was enough to entice all kinds of imaginings. The end, however, just seems to underwrite all the salacious and illicit intrigue the plotline first initiated. In some ways this must be intentional. This isn’t tabloid history. These are lifelike characters acting in a kind of calculated desperation and sometimes true-to-life storylines don’t follow pantomime emotions. Normally I admire and seek the stark but I’m not sure about where this novel goes and what it is meant to leave the reader feeling. I hoped for more. I understood where Katharina ended, but not Peter, almost as if the novel rushed to a close.

The Undertaking is an interesting read, well written and pleasing in that it takes German perspectives on the Second World War. This is a good book many will, and have already, loved, but it doesn’t quite do it for me.

Next week I’ll be reading Descent by Ken MacLeod followed by My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante and then Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Keep the comments and suggestions coming.

This is a collection of short stories that made me want to reread even as I was reading. There is a pleasing mixture of the surreal and the contemporary real that bares the hallmark of great short story writing; think Borges, Kafka, George Saunders, Raymond Carver, Dambudzo Marenchera.

Blasim moves with ease from the fantastic tales of childhood and superstition, to bizarre snippets of human interest that highlight the grotesque and pointless moments of soul- or solace- searching in the daily lives of ordinary people. Men and women fall into time-warping holes (‘The Hole’) or try to remember what happened the day their brother fell into the septic tank (‘The Song of the Goats’). A woman dies from ingesting rat urine when out pleasuring her dog (‘Why Don’t You Write a Novel, Instead of Talking About All These Characters’, great title). A man living far from his country, from his family, obsesses over the life of a dung beetle, dreaming he is the larva growing inside a world of excrement and being lovingly cared for by his mother, pain (‘The Dung Beetle’). Concentrated crying can make knives disappear (‘A Thousand and One Knives’). An animal observes and is saddened by human behaviour (‘Dear Beto’). A drunkard goes home and becomes prisoner to his own imagination when he sees a wolf in his flat (‘The Wolf’). This same drunkard wonders if art is only ever the manifestation of another’s dream while another character questions if villagers stories about drought-bringing trees springing from a woman’s thoughts can be anything more than the babblings of the ignorant (‘Sarsara’s Tree’).

I’m not sure which story is my favourite. Sometimes it is weeks later that such favouritism rises into conscious musing and Blasim’s stories are definitely ones that will set my mind turning even when I consider myself to be thinking of something else. Ultimately, these stories are inspiring. They ask you to look closer, to think more deeply and in less well-travelled ways. They ask readers to pay attention not just to their stories but the world around them. This is the kind of writing that reminds you how powerful short stories can be. I definitely recommend The Iraqi Christ and will probably read his other collection very soon.

Next week I’ll be reading The Undertaking by Audrey Magee.

Rudi has always wanted to be a chef and it has taken him far from home, across many of Europe’s now multiple borders. Sometime in our future separatism has spread through the world like a rash. Even buildings fight to become nation states and passing between these countries presents a challenge Central, a group of Couriers, have become expert at meeting. Documents, people, anything you need delivering incognito requires a courier. When Central recruit Rudi his life becomes a series of seemingly unconnected drops and meets until he is given a key to a whole different set of borders.

There is much to like about this novel: the effortless crossing of genre borders; the way the story creeps up on the protagonist in ever tightening circles, new sections often beginning with different characters whose lives turn around the arrival of Rudi; the mesmerising story line that keeps you hooked on unravelling the mystery of this world just beyond our reach. However, despite greedily returning to the book I’m still not sure about where it ends. The book takes an unexpected turn that intrigues and bemuses me. I’m not sure how well it was foreshadowed or where the novel can go from here if it doesn’t get developed in a sequel and I want a novel, even if it is going to be part of a series, to feel whole in itself. I don’t think Europe in Autumn quite does that, but it does stay in the mind and it does capture what a continually fractured Europe might look and feel like. The espionage is cleverly rendered, driving the plot with a kind of old-fashioned noir appeal all the more enticing because of the future setting. If you like a mixture of crime, espionage, sci-fi, alternate realities, you can’t go wrong with Europe in Autumn. Even if you only like one of those things, you should give it a go. Whatever else you might feel about the novel, you can’t deny that Europe in Autumn is an expertly crafted tale.

Next week I’m reading The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim, winner of the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the only prize dedicated to fiction in translation.

Tenth of December is a kind of monstrous collection – monstrous in that it acts as a portent, a warning of what life has in store, of how soon life is over, of how easy it is to exploit others and take a misstep along the road of social cohesion. The way that Saunders happily throws genres into the blending pot and creates stories with surreal, dream-like edges that can send a reader into labyrinths of possible actions and paths is reminiscent of Borges. What he adds to all of this is humour. This is a writer you want to meet, someone who you feel has truly written themselves onto the page, someone prepared to tell the truth about what they see in this world of ours.

In ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ his narrator is writing about his life for future generations. Not long after winning money on a scratch card, he writes:

“Have been sleepingwalking through life, future reader. Can see that now. Scratch-Off win was like wake-up call. In rush to graduate college, win Pam, get job, make babies, move ahead in job, forget former feeling of special destiny I used to have when tiny, sitting in cedar-smelling bedroom closet, looking up at blowing trees through high windows, feeling I would someday do something great.” (location 1786)

Saunders writing is a like a “wake-up call”. It is innovative, anarchic even. He isn’t afraid to play with language or grammar if it better tells his story and this playful fearlessness is wonderfully refreshing.

I’ve read one other George Saunders book and was struck then in the same way. Here is a unique, embracing voice. A voice that would flounder in England without the kind of accolades Saunders work comes with from America. I can think of several English short-story writers who have a similar mix of the bureaucratic-bizarre – Guy Ware, Adam Marek, Paul Blaney – but we don’t seem to grasp and reward these writers. I wish we did.

I don’t want to summarise the stories. I don’t want to say, oh, in this one… I just want you to read this collection.

Next week I’ll be reading Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson.

I said I would read The Notebook this week but I bought the version published with The Proof and The Third Lie and liked The Notebook so much that I read all three novels that comprise a trilogy of stories about the twins Lucas and Claus. Of all three I think The Notebook is my favourite, but all three novels speak of fractured lives and identities whose loves transgress social conventions, conventions often challenged and changed by war and its ever shifting allegiances. Who are we? Are we bound to the country of our birth? Are we tied to those whose blood we share?

The two brothers are divided during the war, whichever novel you read and whichever plotline you believe. This division, this separation is unbearable and makes life a constant battle fought solely for envisaged reconciliation. This makes The Third Lie particularly hard to read.

It is not hard to miss the historical and political narratives beneath the tales, but nor is it easy to decipher any form of truth not turned by the storyteller’s wheel. The literary oral history of forest and fairy-tale, of epic journeys and miraculous recovery, of transformation and shape-shifting flow fluidly through the lives of the twins making their struggles ache with metaphorical and mythical parallels despite the carefully simple prose. This is stark and potent writing so good it feels as if I’ve read it already and I now know that what may have impressed me in other writing is partly Kristof’s influential echo.

The twins’ description of what work gets written into the notebook they are writing is wonderfully telling. What gets into the notebook must be considered ‘Good’:

‘To decide whether it’s “Good” or “Not good,” we have a very simple rule: the composition must be true. We must describe what is, what we see, what we hear, what we do.

‘For example, it is forbidden to write, “Grandmother is like a witch”; but we are allowed to write, “People call Grandmother the Witch.” …

‘Words that define feelings are very vague. It is better to avoid using them and stick to the description of objects, human beings, and oneself, that is to say, to the faithful description of the facts.’ (p29)

The twins observe life with a fearless, fanatical fervour that sees life and human behaviour without sentiment giving us a picture of the world that doesn’t edit out the unseemly, unpleasant or unconventional. This is truly inspiring, galling work.

Having said that, it’s true that these novels are not for everyone. They don’t make for easy reading, in the sense that they cover difficult topics of war, betrayal and a kind of survivalist cruelty, but they are honest and they are important for anyone hoping to grasp a sense of contemporary European fiction.

Next week I’m reading Tenth of December by George Saunders.

Despite many attempts by my Grandmother, my school, my various universities, to encourage me to read French Literature, my ability to read in the original is pitiful and my knowledge of French Literature consequently unimpressive. Though I have my favourites, Marguerite Duras, Marie Darrieussecq, George Perec, Flaubert and Montaigne, and though I have read Proust, Maupassant and Baudelaire, I am embarrassed by how unfamiliar I am with French Literature and how reliant I am upon publishers to find and translate great works in French (I long for them to do this more). It was no surprise then that I hadn’t read this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick Modiano. What did surprise me was how familiar the work felt.

Included in Suspended Sentences are three novellas written over a five-year period and not originally intended to be published together, but all of which obsess over a Paris seen through the misted glass of memory and loss. It seemed more than fitting for the last novella of the collection to be called Flowers of Ruin, so reminiscent of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal which for me is a collection remembered from adolescence as a flaneur’s musings on the darker side of city life. Though Modiano’s narrators aren’t wandering the streets of a relatively modern Paris (1990s) with tortoises in lieu of dogs, they do meander across the city and through memory with a strange mixture of measure and suggestion that adds to the mystery at the heart of all three novellas. Each narrator is seeking answers to people who feel central to their earlier lives, be it childhood, adolescence or early adulthood, and each of these people remain unanswerable, characters lost to history. In Flowers of Ruin one of these characters disappears before his very eyes:

“At that moment a phenomenon occurred for which I’m still trying to find an explanation: had the street lamp at the top of the steps suddenly gone out? Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain, from falling on him so heavily, had dissolved him, the way water dilutes a fresco that hasn’t had time to dry properly. As hard as I pressed my forehead against the glass and peered at the dark gray wall, no trace of him remained. He had vanished in that sudden way that I’d later notice in other people, like my father, which leaves you so puzzled that you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed.” (p211)

Though each novella tells a different story, they feel deeply connected – the bumper cars of one story reappearing in another – and at the heart is this puzzle over identity; the people and events that make up our past become lost in ways that question our own solidity.

“I was going to disappear in this garden, amid the Easter Monday crowds. I was losing my memory and couldn’t understand French anymore, as the words of the women next to me had now become no more than onomatopoeias in my ear. The efforts I’d made for thirty years to have a trade, give my life some coherence, try to speak and write a language as best I could so as to be certain of my nationality – all that tension suddenly released. It was over. I was nothing now. Soon I would slip out of this park toward a metro stop, then a train station and a port. When the gates closed, all that would remain of me would be the raincoat I’d been wearing, rolling into a ball on a bench.” (Afterimage, p57)

You can hear Modiano’s own struggles written into the narratives of these novellas and yet, despite the fraught difficulty of autobiographical fiction, even the fruitless investigations of his narrators, the writing itself is quiet and elegant, creating careful snap shots that are perfectly clear until they are forced to cohere when the intrusion of light over-exposes them into the beautiful fog of time passed that remains my lasting impression of the book as a whole. In the first novella, the narrator recalls a remark made by his photographer friend, of whom he is now trying to write, saying that you need to “approach things gently and quietly or they pull away” (p47).  What he wants is to “blend into the surroundings and become invisible, the better to work and capture – as he said – natural light” (p55). This is the impossible search Modiano and his characters have entered into, making Suspended Sentences an intriguing and elusive book whose mastery is in the simple reflection of the maze of memory.

Next week I’m reading Tinkers by Paul Harding, followed by The Notebook by Agota Kristof.

Ruth Swain lies in her sick bed and writes the history of her family, which is also the history of her town in Clare, Ireland. She writes of how Irish people grew up from the seaweed, people of story and myth trying their best to take that impossible leap against the tide that will eventually send them back into the cycle of cloud, rain, river and sea. Somewhere in History of the Rain there is a quote (I blame kindle for being unable to find it – how much easier it is to locate things, regardless of search buttons, in physical books with pages where your fingers and eyes find remembered words) about how people remember not what you do or write, but what you made them feel. This is very true of History of the Rain.

The novel is endlessly quotable and there is something both pleasing and irritating about this. It is undeniably a well-written story, full of those writerly conversations readers and writers are addicted to – “All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are.” Locations 5097 – where the history of what you read becomes part of your identity, the story of yourself. Without giving it away, the story is also full of enough family trouble to tug on the heart-strings, especially my heart strings primed with some similar family troubles, but I leave the book both moved and unconvinced. It’s as if I’ve been tricked into feeling, as if the whole novel were some kind of essay in life and in the end I wonder if the novel suffers from its own self-consciousness where the literary canon weighs the words down and forces them to stand in little neat phrases rather than in one long distinct whole. It is true that no story stands alone, but I think I read to find something different, not to find more of what I have already read.

This is an extremely harsh reaction to the book, which many will undoubtedly love with a passion, and this idea that Ruth has of being half part, her father’s Swain half, of a family labouring under the Impossible Standard against which no endeavour will ever quite succeed, makes it impossible not to contend with the literary canon and with God making what I dislike also pivotal to the novel. So, I recommend this book to those who love remarks about the sentimental, romantic nature of men and the carrying-on nature of women (which I don’t), and those whose life is part conversation with authors they have only ever met in the pages of books. I suppose I leave the novel in a state of contradiction. Time will tell which side of me wins over: the side in which the novel leaves a cloying, unpleasant aftertaste or the side that ended the book crying over a story that inspired self pity for my own.

Read it and let me know what you think.

Next week I’m reading Suspending Sentences: Three Novellas by Patrick Modiano.