Liars' League NYC is a live literary journal featuring professionally trained actors reading original short stories by both up-and-coming and well-established writers. On April 2nd at the monthly meeting held in KGB bar my short story 'Rise' was read by the actor Matt Alford. It's a slight comedy about a plane that witnesses the apocalypse/rapture from above. You can listen to it below.
It's been a month since the long list for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction was announced. My mind is buzzing wondering what six books will be on the short list which is announced tomorrow.
I've managed to fully read seven titles on the list on top of the three I had already read. Currently I'm halfway through reading Eimear McBride's imaginative and original “A Girl if a Half-Formed Thing.” Strangely, out of the four books I picked out as the ones I was most looking forward to at the time, I've only read Elizabeth Strout's beautifully-constructed and socially-relevant “The Burgess Boys.” Here is the full list of books I've read with links to reviews:
Evie Wyld -All The Birds, Singing
Eleanor Catton -The Luminaries
Deborah Kay Davies -Reasons She Goes to the Woods
Anna Quindlen -Still Life with Bread Crumbs
Suzanne Berne – The Dogs of Littlefield
Elizabeth Strout -The Burgess Boys
Since I haven't read all of the books on the long list I don't feel like I can make predictions with absolute authority, but I'll base my opinions about the remaining books on reviews, bloggers' opinions and gut-instinct. It's really difficult to choose since so many of the books are brilliant in their own ways. So, here are my predictions for the short list:
I have to guess Adichie because I think she's a monumental writer. I've read her previous two novels and short stories which are so precisely written and intelligent. From all accounts, like those of the wonderfully engaging blogger The Writes of Woman, “Americanah” is an incredibly successful novel. I'm quite annoyed I haven't got to reading it yet.
“All the Birds, Singing” is a brilliantly structured and powerful novel with a deeply moving story. My mind keeps drifting back to it and thinking about different passages. The way that time and carefully-contained emotions are dealt with in this novel is masterful. Wyld is a forceful independent writer whose two novels are wholly original and unlike anything I've ever read.
“The Luminaries” has, of course, been heavily praised and won the Booker prize already. But if I were a judge I couldn't let a book's reception or pre-existing popularity influence my opinion. Yes, it would be great for lesser-known books which are great in their own right to get more attention, but when it comes down to it, it should be about the best book. Catton's second novel is a staggering achievement and even if it wins book prize in the world it might make people really embrace the challenge of reading it. Because to most readers it is no doubt a very challenging novel.
“Eleven Days” is a novel that really deserves more attention and I don't think most readers in the UK have taken note of how excellent it is. It's a book which meaningfully explores the impact of serving in the military and really calls into question what battles mean. This novel has given me such a knowing insight into that side of life so far removed from my own. It's also cleverly structured so that I was incredibly tense until the end of the novel wondering what happened to Sara's son.
“The Goldfinch” is another novel that has been so incredibly successful due to Tartt's ability to create such a riveting read that captures readers' imaginations. It's a book that I really had to tear myself away from to get sleep at night because I was so engaged with it. It's a highly literary book without being pretentious and speaks about universal issues of identity that reach far beyond the particularities of the compelling characters who are portrayed.
“A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing” is a book that I can already tell breaks the mould and forces you to readjust the meaning of language as you read it. Speech and thoughts are jumbled up and crushed together, but the narrative is expertly controlled so that if you read attentively you know exactly what is happening at all times. As a first novel, it's a staggering achievement.
I will still be reading some of the other books on the long list no matter who is short listed tomorrow. I'm amazed by the diversity and originality of so many books on the long list and thankful this prize has introduced me to writers I might have missed otherwise. It's been a pleasure reading other readers' reactions to the prize like The Writes of Women, Antonia Honeywell and Farm Lane Books. One of the most fun things about book prizes are the conversations they create. In the intervening time since the long list was announced I have been reading other books and it surprises me that novels like Hustvedt's “The Blazing World” wasn't on the list for this prize. But there are always more books to discover.
I have to admit that my reactions to this book must include some personal bias since it is mostly set and largely about the State of Maine – the place where I grew up. As such this novel is painfully close and familiar to me: from the cans of Moxie stacked in the refrigerator to the yellowing leaves of maple trees in the Fall to the remote bus station in Maine’s largest city to the restaurants all closed by 9PM because most residents have dinner at 5:30PM. It’s a detailed portrait of life in this largely rural, economically-depressed, sparsely populated, beautiful rocky coast-lined place known as The Vacation State – a place that I love in many ways but which I couldn’t wait to move away from when I became an adult. As is noted in the novel, it has a dwindling population because many young people move out of state when they come of age. With many of the new generation leaving and non-white immigrants moving in there will inevitably be clashes (since the majority of the population in Maine is Caucasian.)
This is the issue at the centre of Elizabeth Strout’s novel focusing on a fictional town called Shirley Falls. A teenage boy named Zach rolls the head of a pig into the town’s mosque attended by the steadily growing Somali population. This sparks off a political debate about racial and religious intolerance in the state. Zach’s uncles Jim and Bob Burgess who both work in the law profession (although Jim is much more successful) and live in New York City return to Maine to help defend Zach’s case. In the process they reignite family ties with Zach and his mother, their estranged sister Susan who has lived all her life in Shirley Falls. The Burgess siblings lost their father when they were all quite young due to an accident that has caused strained relations between them ever since. As the truth about the past gradually emerges the insecurities of all three of the adults comes to the forefront, particularly the antagonistic relationship between bullying arrogant successful Jim and large-hearted Bob described as “big, slob-dog, incontinent self, the opposite of Jim.” They have to renegotiate the meaning of family as their need for each other becomes evident.
The novel begins with an interesting prologue about a mother and daughter gossiping about this family and the incident with Zach. It gives you information about the fates of some of the characters we follow throughout the novel. Thus I found it fascinating to go back to the beginning and read it again after finishing the novel since I was now very acquainted with the characters. The novel is the daughter’s account of the siblings (as well as Jim and Bob’s wives). However, as a counter-point to the purely white perspective, sections of the novel switch to focus on Abdikarim, one of the Somali population who has taken up residence in Maine. He’s also a character who comes to play a pivotal role in the plot near the novel’s end.
Strout creates subtly written scenes which hint at much deeper feelings than what are on show. Here is an example of the artful (almost Jamesian) composition of Strout’s scenes. In one chapter while on vacation Jim’s wife Helen plans to seduce him after reading a magazine article about maintaining intimacy in a marriage. She finds him enraged and ugly after speaking with his brother on the phone. Her focus turns to a bowl of lemons and “a queer calmness descended on her” while her husband rages. As she looks at the lemons the idea of them can’t seep into her consciousness. At a point of emotional crisis there is a separation between her essential being and the world around her. It’s as if in looking at a still life painting which clearly represents a “thing” you have no understanding of what that thing is. It’s the gap between experience and emotional involvement with that experience. It’s a profound way to represent the interstices between knowing and being.
One scene in particular is so powerful it made me physically cry. The sister Susan reflects on her early marriage and first pregnancy which resulted in a miscarriage. The grief accompanying this loss is a shock for her to bear and transforms her: “It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn’t. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, ‘You’ll have another one.’” This is a searing indictment of the way society deals with women who have lost children to miscarriage – something that sadly happens to so many women in the early stages of their first pregnancy. It reminds me of another powerful and original novel – “Black Bread White Beer” by Niven Govinden (which I reviewed a few months ago) about a couple dealing with a miscarriage.
“The Burgess Boys” provides more in-depth, but equally complex social critiques about the issue of strained race relations in the US in the past decade. The rise of fear and mistrust following 9/11 has led to sublimated and sometimes overt expressions of xenophobia. Strout states “that’s what we ignorant, weenie Americans, ever since the towers went down, really want to do. Have permission to hate them.” In some scenes characters find reasons to cite why the cultural differences between the native Maine population and the Somali immigrants is untenable. Although a huge amount of people show up for a rally to support tolerance (as opposed to the handful of white-supremacists who show up to demonstrate against them) there are hushed private conversations between the white population who make generalizations and speak negatively about the groups of Somali. Many of the events concerning the Somali depicted in this novel are inspired by real incidents. Strout beautifully illustrates various points of view to raise questions and make you think more about this complex, difficult issue.
More than anything, this novel was a nostalgia trip for me. Describing the powerful connection and the mixed emotions you have for the place where you grew up is difficult. However, Strout does this incredibly well when Bob arrives back in Maine to advise his sister and nephew: “How could he describe what he felt? The unfurling of an ache so poignant it was almost erotic, this longing, the inner silent gasp as though in the face of something unutterably beautiful, the desire to put his head down on the big loose lap of this town, Shirley Falls.” There is a strong sense of familiarity and reverting back to a childhood self, but that self is now imbued with an adult sensibility that is both hesitant and yearning. It’s a sensation I know very well, especially for this specific location, and it’s what I feel whenever I return to Maine for a visit. It makes me wonder how authentic my accent now sounds when I say “You can’t get they-ah from he-yah.”
Elizabeth Strout interviewed at Politics & Prose in Washington DC
Strout uses a lush poetic language at the beginning of many chapters to describe the physical environment of her scenes. Whether you are familiar with the Maine landscape or not this book will make you feel like you’ve been there. Although I felt a deep, personal connection to this book I believe that “The Burgess Boys” will resonate with many people because of the universal issues it raises about family and community.
In the dramatic opening of “Caught” a young man named Slaney has just escaped from prison. He seeks to meet up with his friend Hearn again so they can immediately embark on a new scheme of importing marijuana into Canada – the very thing which landed him in jail previously. At the same time Slaney is being followed by a detective named Patterson who hopes to gain a much-needed promotion from bringing this escapee to justice. The stories of these two diametrically opposed characters are told in parallel to each other. Both men are desperate in their own ways and need to find different methods of concealing their identities to achieve their goals. More than a gripping thriller, “Caught” is a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of identity, life choices and time.
Slaney is humbled by the beauty of the world having been incarcerated for four years. In sensuous detail the environment around him is described as rich in smells and colours. The first half of the book recounts a series of colourful episodes Slaney experiences trying to make his way to his friend while evading capture. He encounters idiosyncratic people who are in their own ways trapped by the circumstances of their lives. There is a lonely bride stuck in a sweltering hot hotel room, a gambler who desperately tries to hock his wife’s vacuum cleaner and two exotic dancers who want to share a joint with him. Their stories could easily unfold into larger narratives but we only see snippets of their lives as juxtaposed against Slaney’s newfound freedom. There is a tense understanding that the choices he makes now that he’s sprung himself free will determine his future so that he is simultaneously experiencing “two possible lives formed and unformed…” on a moment by moment basis.
Naturally for Slaney time has taken on a special meaning having spent the precious first few years of his adult life in prison. The repetition of a highly regulated life while being incarcerated flattened out the meaning of passing days for him. The author writes that “In prison he had thought time was an illusion. But now he believed time was a natural force, like the hurricane, except he believed that it could be harnessed.” His perception of time changes from passively letting it flow through him to energetically seizing it for his own use. Having sprung free of his shackled existence Slaney is galvanized to take advantage of opportunity and claim the share of luck that he believes he’s owed.
Moore captures the heart-racing fear of being on the run when in moments of high tension the environment turns vibrantly alive and threatening: “a thin bank of trees, mostly skinny birch, the white trunks like bones, and the leaves so green they seemed lit up and the branches were trembling hard with the breeze.” The landscape becomes imbued with Slaney’s psychology. His heightened sense of awareness when he comes close to being caught twines around the landscape and how he perceives it. This skilful method of writing draws you into the narrative and makes you feel what’s at stake.
I particularly liked a shocking habit that the author creates for a character named Ada who shows a voracious appetite for reading. While sailing on a boat Ada reads book after book. But instead of shelving each title as she finishes them she drops the book over the side of the boat. This powerful image of setting free and destroying the book that’s just been consumed is both a devastatingly horrific idea and a romantic notion of making reading a singular experience.
One of the most difficult issues the novel deals with is the notion of trust. This includes the degree to which we can trust other people and the trust that life will yield fresh opportunities for us. Jaded from his early experiences Slaney finds it difficult to embrace trust in either sense. For him “trust was just another form of laziness.” To put his trust in people feels like having a lack of initiative for him. Likewise Patterson has his own issues with trust as he feels that “Trust was an unwillingness to think things through.” He is a man that has learned that caution and preparedness are actions which can eradicate the need for trust. These strong-willed and cavalier beliefs jostle against the need both men find for showing faith in other people. They gradually learn that their fates cannot be strong-armed into being, but must be guided in sync with the wills of others.
Lisa Moore reveals her own narrative process when she describes how Slaney’s consciousness has been transformed by his experiences: “Time was not linear: it looped, concentric rings within rings.” Throughout the book the past is continuously intruding upon the character’s thoughts while he’s in the present. Memories of Slaney’s great love and his daughter fold into each moment of existence preventing him from making a great leap forward into the future. The endless process of looking back to the man he could have been if his choices had turned out differently is where Slaney is truly caught. Moore’s novel describes how a journey to break out of this cycle is extremely difficult, but necessary.
Exposing the problems and paranoia lurking beneath the surface of a seemingly idyllic middle-class American neighborhood is something that has been done in many novels and films. Anything so ordered and perfect must be hiding something when it’s inhabited by that wild part of the animal kingdom known as homo sapiens. Yet Suzanne Berne brings something so fresh and moving in her expose of the privileged and ordered fictional town of Littlefield. When a number of dogs are poisoned at the local park, the resulting anger and fear shakes up the complacent lives of the citizens. Mistrust and paranoia grow. The central character Margaret begins seeing the threatening specters of departed dogs and her civilized existence begins to unravel with her husband Bill who claims to no longer feel anything and her socially awkward teenage daughter Julia.
Through vivid descriptions of the surroundings and minute details, Berne creates an atmosphere of unease in an environment intended to be ideal. Carefully planned landscaping, tight community spirit and progressive ideals conversely result in the sensation of an impending nightmare. It all feels a bit Lynchian like a slowed down sprinkler system drawn out to sound like a scream. In one scene Margaret even has a nightmare of intimidating figures that have the heads of dogs. For all the safeguards this community builds into the structure of their community and the security they impose it’s as if the gaping hungry jaw of death will snap at their vulnerable faces at any moment.
Is this novel satirical? The author does certainly poke fun at her characters and there are many funny observations – all viewed through the observant eye of a sociologist who has infiltrated the community as part of her research to write a paper about suburban discontent and fear. However, more often than not (as I believe the author intended) I felt real sympathy for and related to the characters’ plights although many of them are nothing like me. Maybe a key to understanding Berne’s method is with the tragic-comic tone she employs when writing about a novelist named George who is working on a novel about a zombie baseball player. He really wants to write about the deeper darker things about life, but feels like he has to transmogrify his subject through established modes of genre.
Death looms large in this haven of progressive civilization that also holds fast to traditional values. The realization of its inevitability amounts in many cases to moments of existential crisis. “From across the room, Margaret saw herself sitting on the sofa, a slim blonde-haired woman in a blue silk blouse, holding a wine glass and smiling, a small piece of barbed wire in her mouth.” Especially in social gatherings characters are pulled out of themselves, witnessing the way pain and fear is being suppressed in going through the motions but they are unable to break out of what is habitual and seems “right.” Personal pains are subsumed for the sake of social appearance and are usually only revealed in overheard conversations or sly observations or personal meltdowns.
It’s only through an acknowledgement of common fears and embracing idiosyncratic behavior that the social network of this community is able to find real comfort rather than experience individual isolation for fear of being socially stigmatized. When Margaret tells George about hallucinations her husband is experiencing where he sees his dead father George comments that this “‘Sounds like regular nuts to me.’” In other words, this sort of recurrent fear is normal and part of everyone’s life because misfortune and death find us no matter how carefully we try to safeguard against it. Berne examines this not only in the lives of the adults in the novel, but how this manifests itself amongst the next generation down with the teenage children of several of the characters.
“The Dogs of Littlefield” is an extremely clever novel that presents what is familiar in poetic language that makes it wholly new. It made me think about and see the world differently when I walked down the street after finishing a chapter. It’s as if my senses were newly attuned to the micro world around me and the veiled emotions of the people walking past. There haven’t been many books I’ve read where I felt such a strong shift in my own vision of what’s around me.
Read a good interview with Suzanne Berne at Bookanista here: http://bookanista.com/suzanne-berne/
Fictionally recreating a story taken from an Icelandic legend, Hannah Kent crafts a thrilling first novel about the last execution in the country which took place in 1830. In a richly descriptive narrative she evokes the bleak barren northern region of Iceland with its sparsely-populated lands battered by snowstorms. Only a scattering of claustrophobic rural houses are scattered across the land heated by compact dung and teeming with mold which creeps into the lungs of the inhabitants. A woman named Agnes has been convicted for the murder of two men at a remote farm where she was working as a servant. Due to financial constraints the district commissioner has placed Agnes in the custody of a family to look after. Agnes requests that a young assistant reverend nicknamed Toti council her in the time leading up to her execution. The novel recounts her time at this farm where she slowly builds a strained relationship with the family that keeps her and recounts the story leading up to her conviction to the reverend who becomes enamoured with the tragic fated woman.
Touted primarily as a Scandinavian thriller (since those are all the rage at the moment) the book’s real driving motivation is to give voice to a woman who was scandalized in her time and persecuted. The author has spoken about how Agnes is a well known presence in Icelandic popular tradition and someone who probably didn’t receive a balanced judgement in her time because she was an illegitimate woman from the lower classes. As Agnes states to the reverend: “'To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.'” Informed by only a few scant details driven more by gossip than a serious investigation, the community persecutes Agnes and mistrusts her. However, through revealing her personal story to those around her and gaining their trust by hard menial labor and lending her dynamic knowledge about farming and medicine, Agnes gains a guarded amount of respect.
It was a challenge trying to mentally sound-out the long complex Icelandic names in my head while reading – as bad as reading Russian novels – but after a hundred pages it all started to flow and sound familiar. Kent has a good ear for creating tense dialogue between characters. At her most poignant, the author merges the characters emotion with the stark landscape around them: “Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another... It's the glaze of ice over the water, too fragile to trust.” The haunting landscape mirrors the fragility of her position. It’s as if the cold bitter country all around her is adding to Agnes’ indictment and embodies the cruel dismissal of her human integrity.
One of the most impactful scenes is when Agnes begins an affair with Natan, the man she’ll later be accused of killing, who speaks to her about absences they share in life:
‘Do you know what it means, to have a hollow palm? It means there is something secretive about us. This empty space can be filled with bad luck if we’re not careful. If we expose the hollow to the world and all its darkness, all its misfortune.’
‘But how can one help the shape of one’s hand?’ I was laughing.
‘By covering it with another’s, Agnes.’
This gesture of intimacy which would seem like a tender exchange of someone revealing the most hidden aspect of themselves to another and discovering a commonality here has a darker edge. It’s as if it signals the prelude to nightmare rather than high romance. I admire how Kent twists expectations to create this effect.
“Burial Rites” is a fast-paced and emotional read. The hints of an impending civilized approach to living for the hard-working poor communities in rural Iceland are presented in stark contrast to the barbaric forms of punishment doled out to those who don’t even receive a fair trial. The novel isn’t so much a thriller as it is a tribute to women who have been used and oppressed.
“Eleven Days” has been sitting on my ‘to be read’ pile for about six months. The subject matter of a contemporary American military man made me slightly wary of approaching it; I wasn’t sure I would really enjoy it. However, I found the book difficult to put down once I started getting into the story of a single mother named Sara whose son Jason is a member of a special operations team and has gone missing during a mission. The location of where he went missing is classified and she has no idea what might have happened to him. She’s suspended in time. The novel follows a period of eleven days until the point she finally discovers what’s become of him. In between we’re given the back story of Sara’s relationship with an elusive man who works for the CIA and who fathered her son. The author describes Jason’s development and his choice to join the military after 9/11. With exquisite detail and thoughtful insight she details his training in preparation for important missions which demand highly refined skills. The stark realism of Carpenter’s subject coupled with her characters’ deeply profound meditations on the nature of war lead to poetic insight and a deeply engaging story.
It’s impressive how intricately the author details the strenuous training Jason goes through. Alongside the arduous physical demands, the soldier’s most profound development is psychological. Here Carpenter meditates on different levels required in training to deal with battle over time: “Pain management allows you to move through the moment; expectations management allows you to move through the day; and anger management allows you to move through being denied not only any privacy but any acknowledgement of being you.” The way civilians manage their state of being day to day totally shifts when those people are indoctrinated into military service. Personal ego is necessarily set aside because the operation is what takes precedence.
Does this mean that to be in the military necessitates turning oneself into a thoughtless tool to be wielded by some strategic general? What this novel showed me is that there is a strange alchemy which occurs when a highly intelligent individual willingly engages in a cause which is much larger than him. “Somewhere he had developed a deep belief that a man was someone who acted, not someone who spoke, and that honor was about discretion and progress.” Jason’s faith in the values of serving his country doesn’t mean blindly following. He’s shown to be a highly intelligent and incredibly well-read person. Turning into a soldier doesn’t annihilate his personality, but adds to his character since it makes him an active part of civilization’s movement forward. To engage in service without questioning whether your personal sacrifice might be for a flawed cause is anathema to most people. It’s acknowledged: “They are aware that what they do and the choice to do it will never make sense to most people.”
U.S. Navy Special Warfare Trident insignia worn by Navy SEALS.
This novel captures how the meaning of battle has changed in the past several years from what it meant before the rising fear of terrorism. There are no longer any clear time lines for war or a sense of it being declared or ending. “The definition of success in wartime as Jason’s generation knew it was the prevention of future bloodshed, the corralling of ‘terror.’” Our society has increasingly become preoccupied with potential threats and reliable intelligence about the possibility of terror because of the understandable sense that attacks can spring up at anytime and anywhere. It’s interesting how this novel explores the creeping predominance of unspecified borders of military engagement because there are no longer any specifically demarcated battlefields.
The emotional heart of the story is, of course, the relationship between Sara and her son Jason. What this novel beautifully shows is the way love is honed and safeguarded in a relationship that is stretched by the kind of unknowningness and time-sensitive nature of military service. The connection between them is beautifully evoked in small personal interactions that signal carefully marshalled emotion. When separated from her child, Sara’s ability to quietly endure is a testament to her faith and love for her son. At one point it is described that for a sniper “Stillness, it turns out, is an athletic experience.” The same could be said for the training and emotional control needed by a mother whose child is actively serving. “Eleven Days” is an excellently crafted intelligent novel which incorporates an impressive understanding of the mechanics and psychological processes of the military.
Any bibliophile knows that at some point you have to make some painful decisions. Unless you are blessed with unlimited space, bookshelves eventually fill. Depending on your tolerance for clutter there is only so much stacking books behind each other, piling them on the floor, filling the cupboards and funny spaces between appliances that you can do before enough is enough. Something has to go. It's a painful process getting rid of books. When deciding what goes and looking between one book and another it starts to feel like “Sophie's Choice.”
My bookshelves are always on the brink of overflowing and since my boyfriend likes to keep things neat it's not fair to let our apartment fill up completely with the books I acquire. Over the weekend we had a clear out and came up with this stack of books to go. These are the victims...
I've read most of the books on the right side. The left side has books which are quite big and that I don't think I'll get to anytime soon. Sedaris is a duplicate.
I make my book culling decisions based on the following:
Is this a duplicate? (These are the first to go. I was given a beautiful old edition of O'Connor's stories at Christmas which is why this edition is going)
Have I read it and do I realistically believe I'll read it again? Many of the books on my shelves are ones I haven't read. Quite often there are ones that I have read and enjoyed I'm happy to let go but there are others which I want to be part of my permanent collection.
If I've had it for several years and haven't read it is it time to let it go? Some books I look at and think 'It'd be nice to read that one day' But if I'm honest with myself I'll probably never find the time.
Will it be difficult to reacquire this book if I want it again one day? It's easy to find almost any book that's been published with bookfinder.com. However, some small print/rare books can even be difficult to track down online.
Does it have sentimental or monetary value? I barely ever get rid of books given as gifts or ones that I acquired at a special event or at a special time.
How thick is it? Sadly with so little space on offer it's the fattest books which are easier to dispose of since they take up more room. I love immersing myself in a long involving book, but many big books now I make sure to only purchase e-copies of.
Usually it's only the process of disposing of books which is painful. Once they are gone I don't really miss them. There are always more coming in.
How do you make your book culling decisions? Have you ever let go of a book and then really regretted it?
It's admirable when a novel sets out its own rules forming a unique rigid structure to convey a story. Rather than limiting the narrative, this can give the author freedom to drive through her meaning and create a rhythm to the story which gives the reader a comforting sense of being held by an authoritative voice. It's something I love so much about the monumental achievement that is Virginia Woolf's “The Waves” - a book that invokes six characters' interior poetic voices throughout the course of their lives with each section prefaced by short descriptions of the sun's movement over the course of a day. Deborah Kay Davies invents her own structure writing a book composed of page-long lyrical scenes headed by titles that trace the development of a young girl. “Reasons She Goes to the Woods” is the story of adolescent Pearl who grows from girlhood to a young adult over the course of the book exploring the sometimes deviant compulsions and tumultuous passions which contribute to the formation of identity.
Davies creates a constellation of sensory images invoking all the beauty and rancor of childhood. Pearl is a wilful child who explores the nearby forested area surrounding her house, pines for the attention of her stalwart father, plays with and tortures her younger brother who she dismissively labels “the blob” and rebels against her emotionally-volatile mother. The independently-minded girl forms her own rules by which to conduct herself and orchestrates intensely cruel initiation ceremonies which her playmates must go through before they can become her friend. This is very reminiscent of the opening section of Jane Bowles' “Two Serious Ladies” where gruesome muddy rituals between children are carried out with an emotionally-intense religious fervour. Pearl emerges as a natural leader who is revered by her friends and brother despite the vicious way she deals with them. It seems to be in the natural order of things that strength is followed over those who have empathy but are weak. The young heroine is also frank in her sexual exploration seeking out pleasure without any embarrassment.
The author's beautifully lyrical writing teases out hidden dimensions to the surface of the world. At one point in Pearl's early life when she's immersed in nature she observes “Lightning cracks above the rooftops, revealing the stunning light from a more interesting world behind the sky.” The physical dimension of the landscape in this novel constantly shifts to show different forms of reality lurking behind what is only immediately apparent. It feels as if this extends to people themselves, particularly Pearl's unstable mother who is prone to fits of mysterious illness. At times she is a presence so threatening I felt intense distress for the welfare of Pearl and her brother. Other times she's incredibly delicate and subject to Pearl's own pernicious will. Pearl's revelation chimes like a blaring alarm: “In amongst the apple trees she feels so excited she wants to float like a balloon. So, mothers can die, she thinks, running from tree to tree. I never knew that.” The girl's seeming intent to take her mother's place in her father's affections works as a mother-daughter form of the Oedipus story.
Gradually Pearl progressions into her teenage years completing exams at school and casting off her childhood romantic love affair. The evolution of her identity is beautifully and cleverly marked by Davies through periods of reflection. “Pearl stares into her own eyes and thinks someone else is peering out through them. Her real self has leaked away. Now all that is left is this stranger, almost as unhappy as she is.” This marks both Pearl's physical growth and transformation as well as interior shifts in personality. It's as if her essential identity must be emptied out to make room for a more mature and savvy self that can confront the challenges of the world.
This is a brisk poetic novel that can be easily read over a quiet afternoon. But I frequently found myself having to stop and slowly read certain pages to feel the full gravity of what Davies was writing. I enjoy that the narrative isn't always straightforward and it's necessary to try to figure out what's really happening amongst the characters. Davies is a confident talented writer who has here given an original coming of age story more concerned with a rapidly-shifting internal reality than the solid milestones of development.
Our lives are a mess. Reading “The Blazing World” I’m reminded of a performance by the brilliant artist Bobby Baker I once attended. She delivered a monologue about her life that included a scattering of memories, disappointments, happy highlights and concerns about contemporary issues. With each subject she added dry ingredients into a pot collecting them all until it overflowed. She poured it over herself till her clothes, hair and face were completely soiled and a floury cloud floated around her head. She stared around at the audience solemnly proclaiming: “What a mess!” The sight was comical, but through the manner in which she delivered the monologue it was understood that her whole being had tragically unravelled. In a similar way, the life of this novel’s central character Harriet Burden (or Harry as many intimates call her) is a mess. The narrative reflects her state of mind as it is a loose collection of fragments: personal notebooks, statements from family, friends and an art critic as well as gallery show reviews. It is an assemblage which is incomplete, meandering and circuitous. But in its fragmentation it becomes a truer portrait of a person than any straightforward narrative could hope to represent. This account is a more meaningful reflection of the many facets of personality and the multi-layered ways in which a person can be viewed.
Harriet is an artist in her sixties living in New York City who is frustrated with the way female artists don’t get taken as seriously as men. She devises a grand artistic project to expose this prejudice and take revenge by exposing the art world’s sexist nature. Three living male artists are selected by her to present original shows as their own work when really Harriet is the true artist. Only after the third show does she reveal her grand prank through an indirect route by writing an article for an obscure art publication under the pseudonym of a fictional critic. With so much subterfuge going on, people naturally question whether Harriet has made all this up or if she’s created one of the most ingenious artworks of our time. The book begins with a preface from someone attempting to answer this riddle by compiling the various accounts about the late Harriet Burden into a somewhat chronological order. This may all sound exhaustingly convoluted, but it’s actually quite straightforward to follow the story once you get the gist. At it’s heart, “The Blazing World” is really about the more profound question of personality.
It’s as if “The Golden Notebook” were written by Susan Sontag, but of course the writing is totally unique and purely the innovation of Siri Hustvedt. It’s a brilliant assemblage of knowledge full of clever word play, innovative narrative technique, psychological insights and dramatic twists. It’s sparked by a feeling of real anger: about our complacency to accept things as they are when there has been so much hard intellectual work dedicated to progress. It’s a passion which burns on every page. Harriet is a voracious reader and thinker. Therefore, her notebooks are layered with a heady amount of references to great works by psychologists, artists, philosophers, writers, scientists and theologians. I love it when I finish a novel with a long list of books and authors that I want to look up and learn even more from. This novel has given me a list longer than most. But this isn’t a showy intellectual feat by Hustvedt. This knowledge is layered into her central character’s reasoning because it relates to the ontological issues which stir her heart and cause her to create such an elaborate complex deceitful artistic project.
Going even further, accounts from both Harriet’s friends and enemies offer counter arguments to the statements Harriet makes. For instance, the primary question at the centre of this novel asks if art by women is taken less seriously. On one side a psychoanalyst named Rachel said: “With almost no exceptions, art by men is far more expensive than art by women. Dollars tell the story.” Harriet echoes this thought when she says: “Money talks. It tells you about what is valued, what matters. It sure as hell isn’t women.” However, an art critic named Oscar states: “To suggest, even for an instant, that there might be more men than women in art because men are better artists is to risk being tortured by the thought police.” Whereas a bi-racial artist named Phineas muses upon the superficiality of the art in general world concluding that: “It was all names and money, money and names, more money and more names.” Later on Harriet suggests that the question of gender isn’t even her central preoccupation: “it’s more than sex. It’s an experiment, a whole story I am making.” Points of view jostle against each other until a multi-layered portrait of this and other questions are presented and the reader must come to their own conclusions.
The accounts which struck me the most in this novel are Harriet’s own recorded in her various notebooks. One of her preoccupations is her fight against time, against being marginalized forever as a footnote rather than having made a grand statement about life. She states: “I am writing this because I don’t trust time.” Her tireless efforts to create and communicate show how desperately serious she is about the issues she raises. Having spent her life living somewhat quietly as a wife and mother she has reached middle age and is now keenly aware that if she doesn’t make her statement soon time will defeat her. With great precision she observes that: “Time creeps. Time alters. Gravity insists.” The razor-sharp language used cuts right to the heart of what she means and is merciless in its exactitude. Through short dramatic fragments of memory she recollects scenes from her past: her father who didn’t want her, the discovery of her husband’s infidelity, the cruelty of schoolmates who misunderstood her and finally the pernicious betrayal which threatens to dismantle her grand artistic project.
There is plenty of humour to be found in this novel as well. The comedy is of a highly intellectual sort – plays on words and jokes that need a footnote about a French cultural theorist to fully understand them. But there is also humour of a more bawdy nature cutting down the ridiculous importance men place on their manhood “He worries over semen flow, a bit low, the flow, compared to days gone by. You’d think he had walked around with a volcano down there for years, conceited man” and a satirical humour that slices apart Harriet’s perceived enemies in a merciless way. Harriet pokes fun at the art world and its parade of ego-driven denizens, but somewhat sadly she finds little to laugh about in how seriously she takes herself. For it is perhaps the most important characteristic of Harriet’s personality that she takes the world so seriously and expects everyone else to as well despite her partner Bruno trying to tell her differently: “Harry’s magic kingdom, where citizens lounged about reading philosophy and science and arguing about perception? It’s a crude world, old girl, I used to tell her.” Because no one seeks to understand the world with as much intellectual vigour and passion as she does, she desires to take revenge upon the people who don’t take her or the world so seriously. The fact that she does this through an artistic prank so elaborate it can only be comprehended after her death is a tragic joke itself. What she really desires is recognition, not revenge. She daydreams that after her death someone will come upon her work and “nodding wisely, my imaginary critic will stare for a long time and then utter, here is something, something good.” The creation of any art is an act of faith that the artist's vision will be recognized and understood and influence the culture its a part of.
Siri Hustvedt is a supremely talented writer and this novel might be her great masterpiece. Feminism and experimental forms of narrative have always had a strong presence in her novels like “The Blindfold” and “The Enchantment of Lily Dahl” while in “What I Loved” she created a novel about the NYC art world and the breakdown of a family. “The Blazing World” seems to synthesize all her primary concerns and turns them into an astonishing story. The truth lies not in any one account in this collection of fragments, but in between the pages and how we construct an idea of Harriet/”Harry.” This is what novels artfully do for us when they are written as brilliantly as this book: give us an incomplete picture of the world to fill in with our own understanding of it. But in the end it's not the artist herself who really matters but the art she leaves behind. As Harriet notes: “I am myself a myth about myself. Who I am has nothing to do with it.” At a certain point personality dissolves and the integrity of the art work's ideas are what determine whether it will stand throughout time. It's my hope that this novel will survive to be read for centuries.
There’s an old cliché that relationships formed in times of emergency are tighter and more intense than those that come together in more natural circumstances. At least, they are at first. Audrey Magee’s debut novel “The Undertaking” begins with the marriage of German soldier Peter Faber and Katharina Spinell during WWII, but the couple aren’t physically together in the same place. In fact, they’ve never even met. Their marriage was negotiated through an agency for cold practical reasons. Peter wants leave from the battlefront to return to Germany. Encouraged by the parents she lives with, Katharina wants to receive a pension if Peter should die in combat. The two finally get to meet and, after some initial awkwardness, form an intense close bond. This hastily arranged relationship gives each of them something to hope for throughout the terrible war that ensues and it is incredibly brutal. At first the German forces and ordinary citizens smugly believe that their victory will continue and their empire will expand into the Russian territory they invade. The story follows the long bitter loss of this dream and cleverly portrays how the characters’ ideologies gradually shift with its withering.
The really striking feature of Magee’s strong writing is how incredibly spare it is. The novel is largely composed of dialogue. The conversations between characters are sharply distilled so that they evoke not only exactly what the characters are thinking, but the political ideologies behind what they are saying and the emotions thickly surrounding those words. The descriptions of location or events between these sections of dialogue are very sparse, simple and declarative because that’s all they need to be. It’s in the rich meaningful speech of the characters that the physical environment and entire culture at that time in history is evoked. This is a very clever writer’s trick and devastatingly effective for the subject of war. No poetics, interior contemplation or elaborate metaphors are necessary. The hard brutal facts and carefully chosen words spoken by the characters form a deeply felt, layered understanding of the personal dilemmas involved in life during battle.
At times I was on the brink of tears reading certain scenes in this novel because they are so blunt. A few terse lines in some scenes hit like a hammer. Characters celebrating moving into a richly decorated, spacious new apartment or the acquisition of a sparkling expensive jewelled necklace become something horrific because the reader knows that these have just been forcefully taken from Jewish people who have been rounded up by the Nazis. A temporary shelter with still smouldering fire and meagre meal for battered German soldiers in a tiny Russian village becomes revolting because the reader knows the helpless Russian civilians who just recently inhabited it have been forced out into the snow to freeze. These acquisitions taken by the characters seemingly without guilt don’t need any justification because it’s wartime. Normal moral impulses don’t apply. There is an enemy who is dominated and the spoils of war become the possessions of the victor. This steely merciless nature of battle comes through Magee’s story causing the reader to imagine the multitude of personal sufferings that are behind these physical takings. Scenes like this and ones where personal conflict actually occurs in a few short lines left me utterly devastated.
A German soldier being captured in Russia, Dec 1941
It’s fascinating how political beliefs and allegiances gradually shift throughout the novel - not because of the suffering the characters witness in others, but because of the gradual wearing down of their own minds, bodies and spirits. This isn’t a rose-tinted view of humanity. Magee shows how people act in a highly pressurized environment where desperation and necessity are the only things which motivate normal individuals. This isn’t a book about extraordinary heroes or viciously-minded villains. It’s about ordinary citizens involved in a war which we as historically-informed readers know they are doomed to lose. By dragging us through the battles both on the home front and fields of conflict, Peter and Katharina’s relationship which holds such a fiery aura throughout the novel is gradually, heart-wrenchingly demystified. I’m not going to say what happens or if the couple find each other, but what’s extraordinary is that the natural compulsion (for most readers, at least) to see a happy reunion is confounded by the way the society’s values shift over these wartime years.
I was having a conversation with someone recently about why Ireland produces so many distinctly strong writers. Recently I’ve been reading a lot of excellent new and established ones. Of course, any discussions like this inevitably fall into generalizations. Usually people cite the highly lyrical quality of Irish writing borne out of a long oral tradition and strong sense of culture. What’s striking about Audrey Magee is her writing doesn’t have any of this but is nevertheless intensely felt and still beautiful. I’m so happy that this book came to attention through its appearance on the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction long list as I might not have read it otherwise. It’s a gripping, terrifying and brilliantly conceived novel.
Here is a wonderful interview about Magee’s thought process in composing the novel and her motivation for writing it:
I've been struck down with a cold all weekend so I've spent most of it inside despite it being gloriously sunny and mild-warm in London. I'm not much of a sit in the sunshine type as I generally prefer the shade, but I do like a good walk around the city when the weather is nice. Anna Quindlen's latest novel made an excellent partner for my time slumped on the sofa with views of the bright blue sky outside. “Still Life with Bread Crumbs” is the story of Rebecca Winter, a middle-aged photographer of some renown who has fallen down on her luck. She came to fame with a series of close-up, introspective photographs she took in her home following a dinner party and fight with her husband. Since her royalty checks have dwindled and her expenses for caring for her mother beset with dementia keep rising she's had to rent out her New York City apartment and take up residency in a cheap rural house up state. Here she strikes up relationships with some of the colourful locals and starts new projects including photographing mysterious memorial crosses set in the nearby forest and a stray dog she takes ownership of. Her priorities in life shift in this new environment and her relationship to her artistic photographs alters as she makes a new home.
Rebecca has divorced her husband who found her success in photography difficult to take. It's only through her artistic expression that she understands that her relationship with him really isn't working and they have diametrically opposed views on how they want their life together to progress. “Rebecca simply wasn't much of a story... She realized that marriage doesn't really make much of a story... most of it is the mundane middle part.” The heady excitement of a new relationship is easy to get caught up in, but the experience of a long, steady companionship is something quite different. Her husband simply isn't interested in the second part. When there is an imbalance in relationships like this Quindlen makes a well-observed statement about how passionate love affairs can slowly wilt: “in love no one ever leaves well enough alone, and so it settles into a strange unsatisfactory kind of friendship or sours into mutual recriminations and regret.” Likewise when Rebecca starts a new relationship with a man who helps catch a racoon that's taking up residence in her attic, the author cleverly traces the patterns of missteps and misunderstandings that occur when heightened passion supersedes straightforward honest communication.
One of the things I appreciated about this novel the most is the honest way it deals with the importance of money in an individual character's life. Too often in novels it seems the financial concerns of working class people and artists are left in the background when really it is something at the forefront in people's minds when money is a day to day concern. Since Rebecca has seen a declining interest in her photographic work money has become a much greater concern for her. She constantly calculates what her remaining funds are in relation to the expenses she has going out because she is growing older and has people dependant on her. Quindlen shows how the value of money can become so easily mixed up with personal values. People must constantly weigh up the sentimental value of something against its monetary value. Herein the importance of a thing shifts depending on the financial circumstances of the individual.
Over the course of the novel Rebecca develops a deeper understanding of life as a process: “The problem was that she'd thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product.” It comes as a relief when Rebecca stops trying to shape her life into something she can control and embrace what pleasure can be found in the ever-shifting present. Written in a series of short fast-paced chapters it speeds along through Rebecca's year in her remote home. “Still Life with Bread Crumbs” is a thoroughly pleasurable warm-hearted read.
Sometimes the feeling of a novel resonates so strongly with my current emotional state that it’s eerie. It’s that magical moment where consciousness becomes fused so tight with the narrative and the particular story becomes my own – particular and universal. True. I had this sensation as I got into the thick of this novel’s story. It seems an unlikely place and person to feel so connected to: Galgut’s fictional imagining of writer EM Forster. The novel mostly takes place between the publication of “Howard’s End” in 1910 and the publication of “A Passage to India” in 1924. Forster (or Morgan as he is commonly called) travels to India primarily to visit a man he's fallen in love with named Syed Ross Masood. He experiences first hand the strained racial relations and the way imperialism was transforming at that time. Having met in England when Morgan was tutoring him the pair became close friends, but never lovers as Masood denied Morgan's advances. When Morgan returns to England he continues to live with his mother who is both his closest companion and worst enemy. During the war Morgan takes up a position in Egypt and there meets the second great love of his life Mohammed. Galgut carefully reconstructs the tentative relationships Morgan builds with other people, elucidating the suppressed sexuality of Morgan and the complexity of racial politics. The story is overall a speculation on the events and emotions which fed into the difficult creation of “A Passage to India” as well as the novel “Maurice” which wasn't published until after the author's death.
What resonated so strongly with me was the way Galgut skilfully conveys how an intensely intimate relationship can transform over time to something distant and unknown. What was once fiery can become nothing but smoke. But what also resonated with me was the distance Morgan feels between himself and other people. He is sociable and well liked. But it's as if the most essential parts of himself must be hidden from others. “His mood, which seldom left him, was like being under the sea, in aquamarine light. However bright or loud your surroundings, you were somehow always alone.” There is a yawning ravine between his essential self and others which causes him to feel intense isolation. This has to do with his personality but also with his Englishness; Galgut muses upon the way the national characteristics of being proper, not expressing intense emotion and being locked in a class system feed into the way Morgan feels so removed from others. Although it's a culture he was raised in he doesn't feel its inherent to him: “Although he was English all the way through, a great many English attitudes felt foreign to him.” Therefore his encounters with men from other cultures which tend to be more expressive and forthright with emotion entrance the impressionable writer and assist him in allowing his own true personality to emerge.
Morgan's sense of isolation also has a lot to do with his sexuality. He must hide his attraction to men as a necessity as he's very mindful of Oscar Wilde's persecution and fears being scorned by his mother and the people close to him. Some of his similarly closeted companions speak of this desire with carefully modulated language, but it can never be fully acknowledged. Although Morgan is in his thirties when the novel begins he's never had a full sexual experience: “The world of Eros remained a flickering internal pageant, always with him, yet always out of reach.” The roiling sexual fantasies stirring within remain theoretical as he has no real world experience of physical sex. Morgan's tentative approach to initiating sexual contact is masterfully handled by Galgut and when he finally does experience sensual relations it's tenderly described. Even if some people close to Morgan accept his sexuality it can never be publicly acknowledged and this also adds a burden to Morgan's feelings that no one knows his true self. When Morgan loses a man he loves he can't acknowledge how he really feels: “There was something humiliating, too, in a display of grief when the relationship had been unwitnessed.” Since his love for a man is never publicly declared he must suppress the grief of its loss as well. This drives Morgan even further inside himself, guarding his emotions and transforming them into the artistic expression that is his writing.
A curious thing that Galgut explores is the way Morgan doesn't really feel like a writer. He doesn't take his writing entirely seriously and is a bit bemused when his novels begin to be received so well. Nor does Morgan feel that novels are entirely suitable for encapsulating reality: “Fiction was too artificial and self-conscious, he thought, ever to convey anything real.” Although he is highly aware of the shortcomings of literature it's something he does return to continuously and Galgut seems to be proposing in this novel that Morgan does so because he has no other outlet for expressing how he truly feels. Morgan is described being locked out of his own emotions: “there were days when all passion seemed to be frozen in marble.” Only in the carefully controlled and modulated reality inside the fiction he creates by chiselling away at that marble can Morgan's true self come alive.
The writer EM Forster as private secretary to the Maharajah at Pondicherry, 1934 - a period covered in this novel.
Since Morgan was heavily involved with the highly canonized literary movements of the time there are naturally some scenes in “Arctic Summer” which feature appearances from writers like a spirited young D.H. Lawrence, a befuddled Henry James, a sage-like Cavafy and an intimidating Virginia Woolf. Although he draws a lot of inspiration and support from them, Morgan expresses his hesitancy about engaging with the Woolfs and Bloomsbury Group: “They were all so interwoven and intimate, changing relationships and sexual tastes the way other people changed hats. To say nothing of their cleverness, which was sometimes cruel, and used against friend and enemy indiscriminately.” These portrayals of other writers are great fun for bookworms who naturally enjoy musing upon what the real life interactions between famous writers must have been like. Inevitably they are not as momentous as you would hope for or might imagine.
One of the more writerly aspects this novel explores is the slightly testy relationship a writer has with the people he’s intimate with and how it influences his productivity. One of the primary things that inhibits Morgan from writing as freely as he wants is fear about what his mother and close relations will think. Alternatively his loquacious friend Masood has a deep reservoir of faith in Morgan’s genius and continuously encourages him to write more and complete what he’s started. Galgut writes beautifully about the craft of fiction when he comments: “He had learned, with his earlier novels, that if you screwed up your inner eye when looking at somebody familiar, you could glimpse a new personality, both like and unlike the original. Once this outline had taken shape, you could fill it with traits that in turn had been borrowed elsewhere.” In the novel, Leonard Woolf provides the most constructive advice any writer can have that rather than planning in his head and fretting Forster should work out how his novels form “‘Simply by taking up your pen.’” All this hesitancy feels warranted by the way Morgan's books are received and may provide an answer for why he never published a novel after "A Passage to India" despite living many more years. When Morgan’s fame and status are elevated by his publications the casual cutting judgements directed toward him from the general public who haven’t even read him are chilling.
The title “Arctic Summer” comes from a novel that Morgan begins after publishing “Howard's End” and never completes. The pairing of the words perfectly summarize the emotional friction between intense heated passion and frozen feeling. However, the fact that it was an unfinished book becomes a sort of symbol for the unexpressed aspects of Morgan's personality. Poetically, Damon Galgut writes the novel of Morgan's life, creating a book that Morgan himself couldn't complete in his own real life because of the circumstances of the time.
Galgut is a masterful writer. I've only read his other novels “The Good Doctor” which enthralled me and “In a Strange Room” which intrigued me but left me frankly baffled. “Arctic Summer” makes a natural companion to Colm Toibin's brilliant novel “The Master” which similarly fictionalized the life of Henry James exposing the emotional inner life he strove so fervently to conceal. I'm very much looking forward to hearing Damon Galgut being interviewed by the excellent writer and charming man Patrick Gale at Kings Place in London at the end of March: http://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on-book-tickets/spoken-word/damon-galgut-arctic-summer
A plague of sleeplessness descends over the majority of the population in this eerie dystopian novel by Kenneth Calhoun. Nobody understands why this suddenly happens although there is speculation that includes a wide range of wild conspiracies. Without the rejuvenating assistance of sleep the majority of population lose all reason and now “the unguarded gate in their heads was now propped wide open to suggestion and persuasion.” Only a handful of people are still able to sleep without assistance. The book follows these few as they navigate the deteriorating social landscape and search for their loved ones lost to the agonizing spell of sleeplessness.
The thriller aspect of “Black Moon” is essentially like a zombie novel. The few unaffected must stagger around pretending to be sleep-deprived in order to avoid detection. If they get caught asleep they are attacked by the perpetually awake masses as they are jealously enraged by the sight of those resting peacefully. There are some creepily brutal scenes involving things like a woman trapped in a tree with a circling angry mob, a man undergoing brain surgery by half-crazed doctors and a truckload of captive sheep being driven by a man with a perpetual erection who is slowly going insane. Yet, unlike a horror genre novel, this book deals with the real-world mysterious interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness.
More than the physical threats of the perpetually awake masses or the body breaking down from lack of rest is the nightmarish terror of losing ones mind and all the fear and unrestrained carnal rage rising to the surface causing people to act totally irrationally. Personality is inverted until each person becomes “the opposite of all that he had been.” Like voices from a Samuel Beckett play, the perpetually awake prattle on and on expressing every core emotion that flits through their head and mixing memories of the past with the present so that time is condensed down to one unfathomable point in reality. This babbling is nonsensical but also lyrical and highlights surprisingly bizarre connections underlying the force of people’s most base motivations.
In one section a couple named Adam and Jorie who have been experiencing sleep deprivation for almost a week continuously lose and find their infant baby. The gripping horror of what must be happening in reality to the child as the couple stagger confusedly through their days is intense. Although, the hallucinatory nature of the narrative as it follows the couple’s interaction with the child keeps you guessing if the child was lost some time ago or if it is even real. When following a character who has stopped sleeping the author changes the style of writing to reflect their increasingly fragmented psychological state. This had a bewitching effect on me as if I was losing grasp of reality too and made the story feel intensely real.
“Black Moon” makes you think about what importance your dream life has with your conscious life. But it doesn't linger ponderously on these questions – merely summons them up in the natural course of the story as the characters struggle to connect with each other and find a solution to the epidemic. This reminded me quite a lot of Jose Saramago novel “Blindness” about a sudden unexplained epidemic where the majority of the population goes blind (seeing white instead of black) and only the central character maintains her vision. These frameworks strip the construct of society down to its elements so that it must be rebuilt upon principles of cooperation or be torn apart by selfishness. It makes for a chilling, unsettling but altogether absorbing read.
See a playlist of songs about sleeping and insomnia that the author created here: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2014/03/book_notes_kenn_1.html
So I was trying to wait till midnight to see the longlist announced but I drifted off to sleep around 11:45 as I was still hungover from the night before. But I woke up about quarter past twelve and was thrilled to see the list posted. Now I'm wide awake and perusing this fascinating new list. It's really my favourite prize for fiction. I am a shameless book prize groupie. Yes, it can get overblown and good books are often left out, but it's just fun to see books discussed and in the news. I'm also a fan of Baileys so quite happy that they are the new sponsor for the prize. I went to a wedding once and the bride knew how much I like Baileys so got me a glass of it rather than champagne. I managed to spill it all over myself while taking a picture of the groom, but no matter. Anyway, back to thoughts about the prize. I was dearly hoping to see the authors Kerry Hudson and Joyce Carol Oates on the list as well – but I'm glad that my other picks Eleanor Catton, Donna Tartt and Evie Wyld are on it. Having already read and reviewed their books I can confidently state that all three are excellent in their own unique ways.
For the remaining titles on the longlist these are the books I want to get to reading first:
It's really neglectful I haven't read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's “Americanah” yet. I love her previous novels and book of short stories. She's such a daring thoroughly intelligent writer. I saw her read from this new book last summer. It sounded both entertaining and challenging, but for some reason I haven't got to reading it yet.
Another author I've seen read from her longlisted book is Charlotte Mendelson. She read from “Almost English” at Polari on the very same night their own Polari First Book Prize winner was announced. Mendelson came across as warm, witty and entertaining. Again, this is a book I've been looking forward to reading but haven't got to yet.
I really enjoyed reading Elizabeth Strout's novel “Olive Kitteridge” so I'm also really looking forward to reading her new longlisted title “The Burgess Boys.” Part of it takes place in my home state of Maine which is always a draw for me.
I'm now in a bit of a conundrum about reading Margaret Atwood's “MaddAddam” since it's the third book in a trilogy. I've read “Oryx & Crake” but haven't read “The Year of The Flood” so do I skip over the second? Or do I read the second and then this new one? The completist in me feels like it would be cheating to skip right to this latest book. Has anyone read all three and do you think reading the second is essential before reading the third?
The other longlisted titles all sound like really fascinating varied reads as well. See the full long list here: http://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/2014/baileys-womens-prize-for-fiction-announce-their-2014-longlist
Oh dear, I feel a book shopping spree coming on! Especially after downing a glass or two of Baileys.
“Loneliness weakens. Aloneness empowers. Aloneness makes of us something so much more than we are in the midst of others whose claim is that they know us.”
- Joyce Carol Oates from The Lost Landscape
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
- May Sarton
“The cure for loneliness is solitude.”
—Marianne Moore
"If aloneness is inevitable, I want to believe that aloneness is what I have desired because it is happiness itself."
-Yiyun Li from 'Amongst People'
“Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city.”
-Olivia Laing from “The Lonely City”
