a pile of some of the books I've read in the past year

a pile of some of the books I've read in the past year

I’m throwing myself a little blogger’s birthday party because I began this site exactly one year ago today. I wasn’t sure if I would have the stamina to keep it going but now this is my favourite personal project. This seems like a good time to stop and assess why I’m putting so much time and effort into the blog. It was also a little over a year ago that I became a qualified massage therapist – a practice I’ve kept up on weekends and weeknights in addition to my full time weekday office job. I do love the sense of connection and satisfaction I find in body work. Since I don’t earn anything from doing this blog I should really concentrate my efforts into building my practice more and expanding my skills. The thing is I’m not much of a businessman and money isn’t everything. Honestly, I'd rather be lost in a book.

Reading and discussing books is nourishing for the soul. I’ve made some wonderful connections with other bookish folk. And I genuinely appreciate all the lovely people who read and comment here. The blog has opened up some wonderful opportunities for me. I now contribute reviews to the wonderful book site Shiny New Books and review all new Oates titles for the academic journal Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. I’ve met some brilliant writers I really admire and have even cooked tofu for a current Booker shortlisted author at my house. But what I enjoy most is the world of books that I’ve been introduced to by reading other blogs, communicating with readers and gathering recommendations. There will always be stacks of new books I’m aching to read. Even if I feel overwhelmed at times by the amount of books that are added to my To Be Read List, this isn’t a contest. No one is keeping score. This is about reading with care, giving time to fully appreciate the author’s intention, reflecting what it means to me and sharing with a wonderful community of readers. By necessity, reading will always an alone activity but it's good to share feelings and thoughts afterwards.

Now tell me what you’re reading and what I should read next.

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
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I always admire a novel that is wise enough to raise questions about the central dilemmas of our lives without feeling the need to give definitive answers. It shows a mature understanding for how we really stumble blindly through it all though we pretend that we can see. To me it feels there is no greater mystery than our relationships to each other. How do we really see the people we love? As they are or as we believe them to be? How do our memories of them colour our feelings towards them? How do they really feel about us? In what way do our own feelings inform what we think others think about us? “All the Days and Nights” challenges us to consider these queries with the story of aging ailing artist Anna and her younger husband John who has left her for good.

Anna narrates the novel directly to John recalling their life together and the way his image has been made famous in the multiple portraits of him she’s produced. In their New England home she struggles to produce a new painting of her friend and agent Ben who has descended upon her because she has broken off communication with the outside. She has a combative relationship with her assistant, fellow artist and sometimes muse Vishni – a bond that feels as spiky and co-dependant as that which existed between Virginia Woolf and her cook Sophie Farrell. The difficult relationships between the characters are depicted evocatively with pointed conversations and emotionally-jarring reminiscences. 

It’s admirable the way that Govinden writes of the relationship between Anna and John as being totally unique. It seems an obvious thing; after all, every relationship is unique. But we so often affix the labels of marriage or friends or lovers or parents to the people we know and in doing so reduce the complexity of these bonds. So much of what we feel for each other lies in between these notions and mutates as we grow older with each other – yet the labels so often remain the same. Govinden breaks through these restrictions. He conveyed this ambiguity of feeling beautifully in his depiction of another couple in his previous novel (which I reviewed here last year) “Black Bread, White Beer” as well. To Anna and John the word married seems something of a farcical label affixed for convenience rather than as an accurate way of describing the deep bond that they share.

The novel beautifully asserts the central mission of the artist: to memorialize what is ephemeral and fleeting. For Anna the process of creating “is an ongoing act of revelation” giving to her an understanding of her subjects and also fixing an interpretation of them which memory by itself cannot. Anna’s attempts to capture John have resulted in multiple portraits which catalogue their life together and the feelings that have passed between them. Now John is on a mission to discover what these really mean while leaving Anna behind. He also leaves actual photos of them together which Anna thinks are “a happiness you [John] no longer wish to remember.” This all sounds rather mournful and tragic. But I think that rather than destroying what remains of their relationship by leaving, John’s mission is more a desperate act to reclaim their life together and better understand how Anna really sees him.

novel's epigraph by Frida Kahlo "I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you."

novel's epigraph by Frida Kahlo "I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you."

Memories are planted throughout this novel like questions which exist only to garner other questions. Rather than acting as touchstones to arrive at neat reconciliations and resolutions, Anna and John’s recollections make them grapple more for an understanding of the full complexity of what has passed. It’s observed that memories take on a ferocious charm in the way they hound the mind in our advanced years: “The torturer and salve that memory becomes in old age.” The characters noble method of dealing with this accumulation of experience is to create because art is also what we produce and consume to make sense of the impossible joys and tragedies of life. For Anna: “This is the only way that I can understand things, using order and method to make sense of chaos” It’s an inspiring mission, but also a fervently possessive one as Anna also acknowledges “something to be shared inevitably comes from a selfish hand.”

This short, powerful novel depicts a relationship so skilfully condensed that it blossoms in the reader’s mind suggesting experience far beyond what the pages contain. It expounds upon the complex mission for creating art and the transformative experience of viewing art. Govinden shows his characters’ quest to transcend the detail of life and reach for a better understanding of its meaning. It’s a book where certain images and moments really linger in the mind. Since it’s under 200 pages if you can spare a morning and afternoon to devote to reading it in full I’d recommend it. This way you can really immerse yourself in the cumulative power of the prose and swallow this moving story in one greedy gulp.

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesNiven Govinden
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I think a lot of atheists at times feel envious for those who can believe and the spiritual comfort that religion brings. I’ve always been an atheist and I don’t want to subscribe to any religion. Nor do I think anyone should. But there can be a clear sense of community and solace that comes with having convictions in a higher power. It can feel lonely at times refusing that comfort when you find yourself caught on the end of an existentialist tree branch. In Joshua Ferris’ new novel “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour” he takes a man trapped in this sort of quandary and tests him. You could almost take this quote from another novel I read recently “Em and the Big Hoom” by Jerry Pinto “being an atheist offers a terrible problem. There is nothing you can do with the feeling that the world has done you wrong or that you, in turn, have hurt someone” and say that Ferris has written a protagonist with exactly this problem.

Paul O'Rourke is a hard working dentist with a successful practice in Manhattan. He has an aversion to using the internet other than anonymously posting on some forums about baseball so he doesn't have a website or profiles on any social media sites. He emphatically rants: “I was a dentist, not a website. I was a muddle, not a brand. I was a man, not a profile. They wanted to contain my life with a summary of its purchases and preferences, prescription medications, and predictable behaviors. That was not a man. That was an animal in a cage.” It's a frustrated position that many people who willing engage online can certainly sympathize with. However, one day Paul's staff discover a website for his dental practice in addition to a Twitter account for Paul and responses to prominent newspaper articles online in his name. His identity has been convincingly stolen, but the person posing as him rants about a religion that no one has heard of. Paul angrily tries to reclaim his online presence and gets caught up in bizarre theological mind games with a man who is convinced Paul belongs to an ancient sect of persecuted people who actively doubt God's existence.

There is a section in the novel where Dr O’Rourke examines the mouth of a respectable businessman at his office. He finds a few cavities. Although he can see the cavities clearly on his x-ray, the man refuses any treatment because he doesn’t feel like he has cavities. No reasoning from the doctor can get him to change his mind. This sort of inverse logic based on immediate feelings rather than rational thought seems central to the novel. We can know there is a problem and it could be staring us in the face, but we don’t feel like it will really affect us until it does. After his father died early in his life, Paul is a man who has always desperately wanted to belong to a family and established group with all the accompanying traditions and sense of security. By ignoring the real motivation behind his desperate attempts to attach himself to his girlfriends’ families and their religious traditions he isn’t able to admit what he really wants and never finds real happiness.

This all is beginning to make this novel sound too ponderous. While it engages with these issues it's also fantastically funny and full of wry observations. Ferris' style of writing is very easy to read with a narrator that has a conversational tone of voice. He rants about his patients, modern life and American culture. Since he finds himself longing without knowing exactly what he wants he wishes for the immediate comforts that commercialism can bring: “a mall returned me to a time when desire was easy to resolve.” He goes to eat at the Olive Garden as a nostalgic treat. Paul is very sympathetic but the reader learns to not entirely trust him either based on the reactions of people around him who find him increasingly erratic in behaviour and disassociated from what's happening. His past is gradually revealed, particularly his bizarre obsessive behaviour with certain girlfriends and it becomes clear something is very wrong with Paul. A particularly clever trick that Ferris employs is when Paul converses with his office secretary who is an older religious woman. He cuts out Paul's speech and only gives her impatient responses which allows the reader to perfectly imagine the comic scene with Paul grouchily ranting at her.

“To Rise Again at a Decent Hour” is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Ferris cleverly encapsulates a lot of issues about modern life in his story. At times the narrative about the new religion seems to gallop at a pace which becomes confusing. But what Ferris is most successful at is making Paul's observations about his patients and issues around dental hygiene take on a comic universal meaning. While a statement like “pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant” may instantly apply to the way people forgot to care for their teeth after experiencing difficult dental work, it also applies to the way we physically and emotionally engage with the world. I'm eager now to go back and read Ferris' two previous novels as his writing technique and sense of humour are truly admirable.

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesJoshua Ferris

Intense passion often leads to desperate behavior in several stories included in the new Joyce Carol Oates collection Lovely, Dark, Deep.

One of the most intense and hallucinatory narratives, Distance, describes how a woman named Kathryn has crossed the country in an attempt to wean herself from her addiction to loving a man. Her range of self-deception and self-destructive behavior is seemingly boundless as she attempts to contact him in a manic frenzy. This heated inner-psychological drama directed at a seemingly anonymous person shows how the expression of love can often make more of a statement about the individual than about the object of affection. It also shows how vulnerable one is made by loving as is described in the story “‘Stephanos is Dead’” which acknowledges, So risky, to love another person! Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection. Part of the reason one is made so fragile by admitting to love another person is that you might not be loved in return or that the one who is loved might stop loving you as much. This is a dilemma addressed in many stories in Oatess earlier short story collections such as The Wheel of Love (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), and Will You Always Love Me? (1996), and this question is explored further in the story "The Disappearing" where a woman grows increasingly paranoid her husband is having an affair. Here she is aware that If marriage is a masquerade, there is the very real danger that masks may slip. She longs for total candor, but cannot give the trust necessary for a long term relationship to really function.

Read the rest of my review here on the site Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies: http://repository.usfca.edu/jcostudies/vol1/iss1/3/

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson

For a few years I kept a book club going where we would meet almost every month to have a chat about a specific book. It was really fun and enlivening, but the group mostly consisted of women and over the course of a year they all became pregnant. This meant the group naturally fragmented and gradually dropped off. The other day I was thinking about how it’d be nice to be reading books as part of a group that physically meets again. Then I started daydreaming about what celebrities I would like to be in a book club with. Of course, there are lots of writers I’d like to sit down and have a good natter about books with. I was thinking more about people who aren’t authors themselves but individuals in the media who are known to have a serious intellectual side to them. This is the list I came up with. Wouldn’t they make the best bunch to sit down with over cups of tea and plates of cake to discuss the latest read?

 What about you? What are the five celebrities you’d like to be in a book group with?

 

Carolyn Porco

Planetary scientist and the woman who Neil deGrasse Tyson calls “Madame Saturn” is responsible for giving us a unique view of our world. She was one of the scientists alongside Carl Sagan who enabled the Voyager 1 spacecraft to turn around and take a picture of Earth when it was 3.7 billion miles away from us. The photo is only of a “pale blue dot” smaller than a single pixel, but it challenges us to think about our place within the universe. In interviews she’s always perceptive and engaging so I’m certain that Carolyn would also have fascinating perspectives about literature.

Nigella Lawson

As a former newspaper literary editor, Lawson has always been deeply engaged with books. She’s well known for her cookbooks, tv programs and had been the unfortunate victim of many tabloids scandals of late. But all you have to do is look at the size of her library to see how serious she is about reading. Here is an interview with her about her favourite books: http://www.chatelaine.com/living/chatelaine-book-club/nigella-lawsons-reading-list/

Ben Whishaw

Whishaw has appeared in many films and theatre productions with a literary bent. He portrayed the poet John Keats in the 2009 film ‘Bright Star’, the central character of Jean-Baptiste in the adaptation of Patrick Suskind’s novel “Perfume” and he will soon be appearing as the first voiced version of the animated bear Paddington in a new film of Michael Bond’s famous children’s book. Shy, intelligent and thoughtful, Whishaw is also rather easy on the eyes.

Julianne Moore

Speaking of children’s books, actress Julianne Moore has written one herself called “Freckleface Strawberry.” She’s spoken in interviews before about how important books are to her and what an inspiration literature was for her growing up. This is another movie star that has appeared in many adaptations of great books such as “A Map of the World”, “The End of the Affair”, “The Shipping News”, “What Maisie Knew” and, my favourite, “The Hours.”

Alain de Botton

This is slightly a cheat as de Botton has written novels and more popular philosophical books as well. But I think of him more as a presenter and educator known for orchestrating his successful establishment called The School of Life. He’s received a lot of flak for his work which I think is undue as he’s a serious intellectual concerned with helping people engage with the humanities and their life in a more positive way. The only School of Life event I’ve been to is a secular sermon given by the artist David Shrigley about vice. It was both hilarious and fascinating.

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
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It’s something quite different for me to review a cookbook on this blog, but I thought it’d make a nice change from standard literary novel reviews and it’s by a chef whose recipes I’m really enthusiastic about. Much like in Nigella Lawson’s books, Yotam Ottolenghi also writes engaging and intriguing text to accompany his recipes which convey his real passion for flavours and makes the story of food into a narrative you want to follow. Apart from reading and my massage work I’m quite a keen weekend cook and baker so I was thrilled to see Ottolenghi has a new cookbook titled “Plenty More.” From the need to find interesting new vegetarian recipes in order to produce a weekly column he does in the Guardian he “discover[ed] a whole range of cuisines, dishes and ingredients that make vegetables shine like any bright star.” Trips to foreign places like Lebanon, New Zealand and Japan have inspired many of the new recipes as has input from fellow dedicated colleagues who work in a series of arches which serve as the Ottolenghi bakery and testing kitchens. The book is divided into sections based on preparation methods (steamed, braised, grilled, fried, sweetened, etc.) These exclusively vegetarian recipes range from filling hearty meals to the lightest of soups and offer tempting new ways of wowing you with flavour.

I remember the first time I went to Ottolenghi’s restaurant in Islington for dinner. It’s such an inviting venue with meringues piled high and big bowls of delicious looking savoury dishes meeting you when you enter the door. It’s like entering the home of some generous Mamma who only wants to feed you. What could be more inviting?! The small dishes we shared, both hot and cold, were all excellent. Soon after this experience I bought Ottolenghi’s first cookbook and tried out some of his recipes myself. Both his first book which includes meat and veg recipes and his other book of vegetarian dishes “Plenty” have become firm favourites of mine. I’ve made many of his dishes multiple times with his ‘Couscous and Mograbiah with Oven-Dried Tomatoes’ being a particular favourite.

Since I mentioned this recipe, here comes a crucial point as I assume many US and UK home cooks don’t know what mograbiah is (as, indeed, I did not.) With some Ottolenghi recipes, you’ll find they include an unfamiliar ingredient. It’s important to note that many recipes are also centred around common ingredients like lemon and garlic where the more exotic ones can be often substituted with more standard ones. In the case of the above recipe, it calls for Labneh which I often just substitute with feta cheese. The internet has, of course, made many of these ingredients more accessible whereby you can order spices, pulses or kitchen gadgets from specialist or even mainstream shopping sites. Ottolenghi has his own online shop for special ingredients. Once you have a bottle of pomegranate molasses or a za’atar spice mix they keep in the cupboard for ages. I’ve made many excursions to Green Valley market near Marble Arch in London since cooking with this chef’s recipes, but I’m sure many home cooks don’t have as easy access to a Middle Eastern grocer. However, this is part of the fun for me: discovering new ingredients and making the act of cooking into a journey.

'Super French Toast'

'Super French Toast'

“Plenty More” does have plenty of new ingredients including pomelo, fregola, barberries, verjuice and black garlic. The influence of his time in Japan is evident in recipes which utilize ingredients such as soba noodles, edamame, enoki mushrooms, yuzu or Thai basil. In addition to some of the more exotic flavours he brings to his recipes, in this book Ottolenghi offers methods of preparing already familiar ingredients in a way that does the most justice to them. This includes blanching beets to keep their bite, frying brussels sprouts to maintain their texture, crushing carrots to make them into a hot spread, heating cooked pasta under the broiler to give it a crisp deliciousness, grilling lettuce to keep it’s colour, giving lemon a crisp tempura coating or okra a buttermilk crust, deep frying olives or baking French Toast before frying it to make it more warmingly flavourful. He extols how doing simple things like adding fresh lime or lemon to a salad makes it come more alive.

It’s interesting English ingredients are inveigling their way into many of Ottolenghi’s middle eastern style dishes. Cheddar stands prominently into a few dishes. Britain has come a long way from the days when Mr Fawlty looked incomprehensibly at his American dining patron who requested a Waldorf Salad. I love this kind of salad and Ottolenghi has created an updated version ‘Sort-of-Waldorf’ which combines the classic ingredients with cobnuts, dill, sour cherries and maple syrup. Many of us are now familiar with roasting root vegetables like carrots with maple syrup or honey, but Ottolenghi takes this a step further adding a welcoming tahini yogurt to this roast side dish. These flavour combinations are well known, but Ottolenghi’s ‘Pea and Mint Croquettes’ provide a refreshing change as they are packed with all the fresh vitamin goodness but also give you that decadently pleasurable fried crispness.

Colours are brought into fiery life in single-colour dishes like in his very red ‘Tomato and Pomegranate Salad,’ the gleaming yellow vibrancy of his ‘Alphonso Mango and Curried Chickpea Salad,’ the neon orange of his ‘Sweet Potatoes with Orange Bitters’ or the cool glory of his ‘Spring Salad’ which combines green vegetables with green leaves. Others stand out like a glorious rainbow in his simple and delicious recipe for ‘Tomato and Roast Lemon Salad.’ While some recipes have grown more complex with the addition of extra techniques or ingredients, it’s interesting how he offers some combinations in a pared down version to emphasize the star elements of the dish. This is true with his ‘Fig Salad’ which focuses on precision and simplicity. In another recipe he offers more complex flavours for a fig salad with the addition of oranges, cheese and a caramelising technique. Or he’ll show you how to take a simple ingredient like corn on the cob and brush it with miso mayonnaise. In another section, humble scrambled eggs are given a spicy kick. Some wild combinations of ingredients will make you do a double take like ‘Cauliflower, Grape, and Cheddar Salad,’ ‘Ricotta and Rosemary Bread Pudding,’ ‘Beet and Rhubarb Salad’ or ‘Halva Icecream.’ While these may prove stimulating for some greedy eaters, others may mark these mixtures as too experimental. But they may be worth the dare. 

‘Eggplant with Black Garlic’

‘Eggplant with Black Garlic’

I have to admit that I haven’t come close to making most of the recipes in this book, but I feel that I’ve made enough to have an opinion about it and there are many I still want to make. I enjoyed trying out his ‘Dakos’ salad recipe which combines tomatoes, onions, herbs, spices and feta with crispy bread. This worked particularly well as an accompaniment to a barbeque I had. However, due to the nature of the rusk bread going soggy after being soaked overnight with the tomatoes I found this didn’t hold together as well for leftovers the next day. I made his ‘Stuffed Zucchini’ with its rich combination of spices and herbs. I think it makes an elegant and flavourful starter at a dinner party. On a weekday night I made his ‘Tagliatelle with Walnuts and Lemon’ which is utterly simple and stupendously delicious. When I was home alone it was excellent to make his ‘Eggplant with Black Garlic’ so I could enjoy the darkly rich flavour of the black garlic without worrying about assaulting anyone with my breath afterwards. As a bank holiday treat for breakfast I made his ‘Super French Toast’ which is luxuriously sweet. Last month I took a road trip around Spain and in Bilbao I had tomato and watermelon gazpacho. It’s a much more refreshing take on the normally thick soup which usually has a sharp kick of garlic. Ottolenghi is firmly on-trend with a recipe for this very combination in this book. I was thrilled to be able to reproduce it for the barbeque I had.

Behind the scenes making "Plenty More"

Ottolenghi’s recipes are so fresh and vibrant they make you excited to get back in the kitchen again. Whether it’s finding a new way to cook a familiar vegetable or experience the flavour sensation of a new ingredient, he’s created a range of dishes that have real style. I’m sure I’ll be returning to “Plenty More” frequently for inspiration.

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
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When I was young the mother of one of my best friends suffered badly from mental illness. It was a hardship he mainly bore in silence, but sometimes the disturbance it caused to their family life spilled out into the open. I witnessed the shame this caused him. The evident love the family held was twisted and broken by frustration. I saw the aggravation it caused her not being able to be the mother she wanted to be, but there was nothing she could do to prevent the terrors from plaguing her mind. We tried to accustom ourselves to what we knew was not normal, but, being young, it’s not easy to empathize with hardships you don’t understand or appreciate what makes people unique. So I felt a real connection reading this novel about a mother struggling with mental illness and her family’s struggle to help her.

How do you cope when a family member has a mental illness? For people who have a loved one that suffers from this disability, in whatever form it takes, they know the heartache caused by having their love tested year after year. The cold hard truth is that as Jerry Pinto writes in this novel:  “Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself.” This is the experience represented so movingly and astutely in “Em and the Big Hoom.” It’s important to remember that for all the frustration, embarrassment and agony which can accompany caring for someone who is stricken by a mental disease there are also occasional moments of true happiness, humour and inspiration. This book is no romantic portrait. Rather, it's an inventively told story of a family who battle for years to save the mother from the ravages of her illness.

The narrator tells the tale of his family and his mother's disability in fragments. Most of the story is composed of dialogue between the narrator, his sister and mother, Em. They don't have the kinds of conversations you'd normally expect a mother to have with her teenage children. She is disarmingly confessional, flagrantly sexual and speaks with mysterious turns of phrase. Meanwhile, the father, nicknamed “The Big Hoom,” is the pragmatic voice of reason in the family. The narrator's account moves back and forth in time, occasionally reproducing selected letters or diary entries. The family's history builds slowly out of these fragments which recall the parents' courtship, Em's employment, early years of motherhood and her slide towards increasingly manic behaviour. I think the reason Pinto chose to unfurl the story in this piecemeal structure rather than giving a linear narrative is that no straightforward way of telling is appropriate for the experience. The narrator describes how “Conversations with Em could be like wandering in a town you had never seen before, where every path you took might change course midway and take you with it.” The narrative style reflects this. Em's story can't be neatly summed up because it would betray the confusion that remains for the narrator about his mother's life. Although he grew accustomed to the way her mental illness affected her behaviour, she remained a mystery to him – one he desperately wants to solve.

Excellent interview between Jerry Pinto and Madhu Trehan about the novel and writing

Em is a fantastically compelling character for the reader as well. She speaks to her children about sex. When discussing dates she comments that she doesn't see the point of a goodnight kiss because “why send the poor man off with a hard on? Unless you’re a tease.” She makes blunt comments which can be very insightful and funny such as “I don’t understand Zen. It seems if you don’t answer properly, or you’re rude, people get enlightened.” Other times her paranoia and mania rises to the point where she’s mercilessly cruel about her own children to their faces, expressing her hatred of becoming a mother: “I didn’t want to have my world shifted so that I was no longer the centre of it. This is what you have to be careful about, Lao-Tsu. It never happens to men. They just sow the seed and hand out the cigars when you’ve pushed a football through your vadge. For the next hundred years of your life you’re stuck with being someone whose definition isn’t even herself. You’re now someone’s mudd-dha!” This blunt honesty would be startling to hear in itself, but for her to be saying it to her own children is shocking. Of course, there are threads of honesty in it which are feelings probably common to many people. I don’t want to make crass statements about how the mad are not really mad or have special insights that those who are conventionally considered sane do not. What I think is important to consider is that people can’t be simply dismissed as mentally ill, but that there are external factors which those who are prone to mental illness can be particularly sensitive to and effected by.

This novel shows what the repercussions are for the narrator who cares for his mother and how his own identity is limited because he can’t have a life outside being her carer. His struggle with his own dark feelings is meaningfully conveyed. It also shows what strength and love the family has to stick by her. Some people are abandoned as in one scene in a mental institution when a warden remarks “This is a hospital but it is also used as a dumping ground, a human dumping ground.” It’s tragic to think of people’s mental health conditions exasperated by being left alone and that even if a recovery is made there is no home to go to. It’s all the more painful wondering if you’d have the spiritual strength to stick by loved ones who fall victim to conditions of mental illness. “Em and the Big Hoom” is a really powerful novel that challenges your assumptions. 

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesJerry Pinto

I turn 36 today. You know how there are particular books you’ve always wanted to read, but somehow never make the time for? Since I was a teenager, I’ve made it a birthday tradition to read a book that I’ve always wanted to get to but somehow never have. This is difficult since it needs to be short enough to be manageable and reliably well-regarded so as not to be disappointing. Of course, most years it takes me a number of days to get through the entire book. Sadly with work and adult life the days of being able to sit in all day doing nothing but reading are gone. When I turned 17 I think I spent the entire lonely day in my room reading Kobo Abe’s stark brutal novel “Woman in the Dunes.” It’s a fantastic book – though it left me feeling a little bleak.

However, upon waking up early this morning and on the way to work, I finally read “Alice in Wonderland.” I can’t think why this wasn’t on my shelf as a child as it would no doubt have made a terrific impact upon me. I think I would have loved the sheer creativity and terror and absurdity of it… and the illustrations if they were anything like the ones found in the fantastic hardback Bloomsbury edition I own with beautiful drawings by Mervyn Peake and an introduction from Will Self. Of course, I wouldn’t have picked up on the subtler aspects of this profound unsettling book at a young age. Alice’s struggle with identity is something we experience perpetually no matter how established we become in our lives: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!” Alice’s body rapidly transforms. She encounters horror and hilarity, as well as a plethora of personalities all consumed with their own peculiar obsessive preoccupations and egocentric desires – what a true depiction of encountering the world! All the while, Alice approaches every obstacle with a calm sense of logic while maintaining her integrity and desire for civility.

The book’s great lines and imagery are so embedded in the public imagination that even without having reading it I was, of course, already familiar with much of what the story and characters. When I first came to study in England in 1999 I excitedly sat in my first class (where our task was to translate prose text to theatrical text) and volunteered to be the first one to present the first assignment. The imposing lecturer turned and narrowed his eyes down upon me enquiring in a thunderous voice “Who are you?” and I was reminded immediately of the imperial caterpillar from “Alice.” The phrase “curiouser and curiouser” seems common parlance, at least here in England and especially amongst the learned well-to-do. The character of the outrageous anthropomorphic beings and the very spirit of Alice herself seem to be a part of everyday society. This book is an incredible imaginative feat and I’m glad to have finally experienced the original writing.

Since it’s my birthday I’m feeling a little sentimental and want to express my gratitude to everyone who reads this blog. I’m flattered people find value in my thoughts about books and I’ve enjoyed immensely all the communication I’ve had with readers through the blog. It’s a passion project of mine that I really pour my heart into so thank you for giving it your attention. I had a lovely time over the weekend when my boyfriend surprised me with an overnight trip to Cornwall. We drove through the spectacular countryside and I paid a visit to the Screech Owl Sanctuary. I have a particular fondness for owls and enjoyed meeting these curious creatures which included Boobook and Siberian Eagle owls. What beauties!

owl2 copy.jpg
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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
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Saeed Jones’ debut book of poetry “Prelude to Bruise” reads like a complete narrative, but one which is constructed of intense glimmers of experience told in a lyrical way. The six sections of this book carry the reader through a journey of self-discovery. Most of the poems follow the story of “Boy” who in many instances is literally an adolescent/teenager. Even when the poems aren’t specifically about “Boy” much of the feeling is singed by the fire of his personality. By the end of the book, the label of “Boy” has taken on so many meanings and connotations – of naivety, of a wayward son, of social inferiority, of a racial expletive, of gay slang, of the submissive partner in sadomasochistic role play – that when, in the final poem, the boy emphatically denies this label it strikes an optimistic note. His real name remains private and unknown to the reader giving him a dignity and sense of selfhood which has thus far been denied him. This distinct personality finally steps out of the circumscribed role set by those around him.

It’s admirable the way Jones’ writing orchestrates an interplay between the imagination and reality. By blending images, a poem about friends play fighting while out for a swim suddenly takes on a serious tone of eroticism and violence. In ‘Drag’ the personality created through costume assumes a life of its own: “the dress begins to move without me.” This gradually yields to a deeper confusion of self and also revelation: “I don’t even know what I am in this dress.” In one of the final and longest poems in the book the boy is taken to shooting practice by his father and later this pretending might turn into real danger as the boy invades his parents’ bedroom while they are sleeping. There is the sense that we are both in the boy’s mind and in his spatial reality at the same time.

Jones writes forcefully about the power of desire and the dynamics of sexual discovery. Not only does he capture the all-consuming feeling of the act itself, but the emotions which fuel the before and after of it all. He describes how irrepressible sexual urges can physically take over the body: “I’ve got more hunger than my body can hold.” The boy learns the danger of his gaze when his focus on another boy’s muscular thighs and the gap in his shorts is rebuffed with verbal homophobic abuse. In ‘Kingdom of Trick, Kingdom of Drug’ the object of desire takes on the characteristics of a tree and the passion shared decorates it with weighty symbols in a way which is incredibly sensuous and moving. The title poem ‘Prelude to Bruise’ takes the reader into complex corners of desire with the representation of a kink-edged encounter. Through effective use of alliteration invoking words such as boy, black, boot, body, broke, bruise the author portrays the variegated emotions involved in hard play. He shows how sexual aggression can be shaded by racial politics and how sexual punishment can be simultaneously seductive and repulsive. Another poem effectively represents the post-coital tristesse which follows cruising: “I relearn my legs, mud-stained knees, and walk back to my burning house.” But in other poems there is also romantic hope as expressed in this beautiful line: “you are the first hour in a life without clocks.”

One of the most compelling and forceful poems for me is ‘Boy Found Inside a Wolf’ which is a sort of summation of Jones’ themes about fathers, violence and sex. Eroticism is implied by his use of line breakage and the double meaning of his verbs. But it is also heavily mixed with danger, threat and destruction. At the same time the poem radically imagines a father giving birth to his son. Paired with the other poems' commentary about the alternating tenderness and antagonism between father and son, this poem movingly represents a complicated layered familial relationship.

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“Prelude to Bruise” confronts issues to do with race and sexuality in a way that challenges and changes the reader. More than this book’s engagement with identity politics, some of the poems it contains deal directly with instances of key political and historical significance. Creating a ghostly sense of unease, Jones describes the aftermath and repercussions of the tragic storms and flooding of New Orleans. In another poem dedicated to James Byrd Jr who was kidnapped and violently murdered by white supremacists in 1998, Jones vividly re-images the event with the imploring words “go back” reverberating significantly throughout the scene. Jones' invocation of these events shows how their meaning has both personal and broader long-term implications.

Each section of the book shows a different stage in the Boy’s development and evolution towards a more assertively individual sense of selfhood. Although some times this comes in the form of regression: “Run hard, look back, go back, owned.” But there is an awareness that one must always carry forth as is demonstrated by the warning line “If she retraces her steps, the footprints will eat her.” The final more distinctly prose-like poems take him mentally backward to deal with his relationship with his parents. This takes the book full circle. Some of the poetry shows direct influence from other writers such as Lucie Brock-Broido or Alexander Chee (one poem borrows a phrase from his daring novel Edinburgh). But Jones’ style is arrestingly fresh. His distinct voice is the thing which hooks you in this poetry which varies between different forms and methods of arrangement. (To borrow a phrase from a divine songstress) it’s a voice that plays tough as nails with his heart on his sleeve. Saeed Jones has created a radically different coming of age narrative distinctly his own through forceful, original poetry.

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesSaeed Jones

A new Sarah Waters novel is always a cause for celebration. I’ve read three of her previous novels and loved the experience of each with “Fingersmith” topping the pile. But I think “The Paying Guests” may be my new favourite. Waters has that special ability as a writer of gripping you from the start. Even though there isn’t much action at the beginning of this new novel, I was totally entranced by the vividly-described characters and their suffocating sense of claustrophobia as they awkwardly learn to live together. And you know that with this author’s talented ability for writing a long sumptuously twisted plot that the action will come soon enough and boy when it starts it is totally gripping! It’s 1922. At a large well-to-do house in south-east London, spinster-ish Frances Wray and her aging mother anxiously await the arrival of their paying guests, The Barbers. Frances has redecorated some upstairs rooms to rent out to lodgers because they are a respectable family who have fallen on hard times. She lives alone with her mother since her father died of heart trouble and her two brothers died in the war. The too-large house has fallen into disrepair. As Frances’ mother admits: “It’s heart stopped… years ago.” They can’t afford servants. They can barely afford to keep the heat going to stay warm. They need an income of rent money. However, being a respectable family the neighbours refer to the Wray’s new lodgers as their paying guests.

Even though she’s only in her 20s Frances feels like she’s already past her prime spending her days making murky cups of cocoa for her mother and scrubbing the floors of the house. Her thoughts about her position in life are that she should “Be content with your 'role', that you are settling so nicely into, like an oyster digging its dumb way into the sea-bed.” In the past she’s not been so satisfied with such a modest role in life. Years ago she had an affair with a woman which was found out by her family and put to a stop. When Frances unexpectedly finds love again, the affair threatens to completely unhinge her life and the story takes a series of gripping unexpected turns.

What Waters is supremely accomplished at doing in her writing is detailing the psychological intricacies of romance, the ebb and flow of lust and the overriding indecisiveness of love. The awakening of passion, the heat of the moment and the stupefaction at when it goes are all described in utterly convincing scenes. It leads Frances to wonder at one point “if their passion had ever been real.” Although we like to believe that once we’ve found the love of our lives our feelings will remain constant but they always fluctuate. We can be clingy and possessive about a person one minute, then revolted and spiky towards them the next. In “The Paying Guests” Frances and her lover’s relationship undergoes unusually extreme tests as the plot develops and their circumstances drive them physically and emotionally apart.

Watch Sarah Waters discuss THE PAYING GUESTS

Lingering behind so many intense affairs in Waters’ novels is the suspicion that the other person may not genuinely love them back. This is true in any relationship, but particularly so in the times in which Waters writes about homosexual love. The fear of betrayal that could lead to exposure and shame exerts terrifying pressure on the binding which holds these unique relationships together. Frances is a woman unusual in her time in that she is confident about her sexual desires for women. She ardently wishes to settle down in an apartment of her own with the woman she loves. Ironically, Mrs Wray says to Frances at one point, “all I’ve ever wanted for you were such ordinary things: a husband, a home, a family of your own. Such ordinary, ordinary things.” These are the ordinary things that Frances so desperately wants as well with the small substitution of having a wife rather than a husband. Herein lies the real tragedy.

There are a great many things I’d like to discuss about this novel, but can’t because it would give too much about the plot away. But rest assured you’ll find the thrill of passion, criminal intrigue, drunken parties, nosey neighbours, snooping detectives and a heated courtroom battle – all played out against the magnificently rendered backdrop of post-WWI London. Waters is that rare kind of literary writer who creates thrillingly-told historical novels. “The Paying Guests” demonstrates how this writer is at the height of her powers. It’s a novel with real heart.

As with every year, the release of the Booker longlist introduces me to authors I probably wouldn't have read otherwise. This is Joseph O'Neill's fourth published novel but I haven't read any of his previous work.

The narrator of “The Dog” gives up his life working in a US law firm to reside in Dubai. He’s employed by the wealthy Batros family as an individual they can trust. That trust involves coordinating the management of their wealth, but also making absurd arrangements for celebrities to appear at private events and monitoring the weight loss of a wayward nephew of the family. More than usefully putting his legal prowess to their affairs, the narrator spends most of his time trying to dodge responsibility like a modern version of Melville’s Bartleby. He wants to excuse himself from responsibility wafting away email enquiries with the standard response “NOT MY FORTE” and affixes ink stamps to any document he signs to make it more impersonal and have an officious distance from it. He muses about life in Dubai and reflects back on the disintegration of his relationship with his partner Jenn. Although he seems to be someone who thrives on being an alien in an alien land, he receives a stark reminder that he does not truly belong when he takes a moral stance and things go wrong in the Batros' company.

O’Neill’s unnamed narrator is obsessively ponderous. His frequent microscopic examination of the details of life whether it’s completing Sudoku puzzles or the daily exercise of running up a stairwell is very reminiscent of Nicholson Baker’s writing. Here the minutiae of behaviour is shone in a spotlight so that the absurdity of human foibles and the small tragedies of moment to moment existence is revealed. There are lines of rattling analytical detail which investigate with a fine-toothed comb the multitude of meanings behind things such as advertisements, Emirates’ law or a massage chair. For instance, when he receives treatment with a new foot care gel he reflects: “I’d been lulled into a soporific feeling of all going well in the world, of clever men and women in unseen laboratories toiling and tinkering and steadily solving our most disastrous mysteries, of benign systems gaining in efficiency, of our species progressively attaining a technical dimension of consciousness, of a deep and hitherto undisclosed algorithm of optimal human endeavour coming at last within the grasp of the good-doing intelligences of corporations and universities and governments and NGOs, of mankind’s most resilient intellectual/moral/economic foes being routed forever and the blockheads and bashibazouks and baboons running for the hills once and for all.” He extrapolates all this from simply getting softer, better-smelling feet. The point being that we're continually lulled into believing that each mark of civilization carries behind it the workings of a prosperous, well-ordered and just society. However, the narrator isn't convinced. He's wracked with guilt about the injust distribution of wealth leading him to chase anonymous, unseen cleaners down back corridors in a desperate attempt to tip them. The narrator's stubborn refusal to subsume himself within the order of larger systems becomes his undoing.

Mindful of the belief that the world is becoming a more homogenized place, I think what the author is trying to get at in this novel is the way individuals become increasingly dislocated and lost within it. The Dubai O'Neill writes about carries great symbolic weight as a kind of liminal space: “Dubai’s undeclared mission is to make itself indistinguishable from its airport.” It's a clean, stringently-ordered place, somewhere that people are always passing through. People are neither here nor there. The city contains a number of people who are Bidoon or “a stateless person, i.e., a person who is everywhere illegally present.” The environment of the city itself is always in a state of flux with frequent construction making it so disorientating cab drivers always get lost. Huge construction sites are sometimes left as nothing more than giant holes in the ground although the online presence of the project images show an ideal, complete building. The city's Westin hotel has the tagline “Between Being and Becoming.” Existence here is lived in the between. As such the narrator never feels an established sense of identity. The eponymous dog of the title refers to an animal that is not really welcome anywhere in Dubai and, in a sense, this is the kind of animal the narrator becomes.

The most potent symbol of our supposed connectedness as a global community is the internet. As such the narrator naturally turns to it for answer as he describes here: “I took it upon myself to visit websites dedicated to modern psychological advances and to drop in on discussion sites where, with an efficacy previously unavailable in the history in human endeavour, one might receive the benefit of the wisdom, experience and learning of a self-created global network or community of those most personally and ideally interested in humiliation, and in this way stand on the shoulders of a giant and, it followed, enjoy an unprecedented panorama of the subject. I cannot say that it turned out as I’d hoped.” Although the internet strives to be a utopian plain of encyclopaedic knowledge it is more often a jumble of unverified facts, poor logic, strident opinions and misdirected emotion. He eventually finds his name has been slandered online so that the top searches show a series of insults. Although the narrator purports not to engage in any social media, he comments on the unique way people engage within the medium: “They made common their feelings. They grew. They rooted for and bore sympathetic and useful witness to the others as, one by one, each made her or his way along life’s rocky path, facing en route the loneliness, discouragement and pain that are the inevitable and persistent highwaymen of our ways.” The result of interacting this way is far from ideal as evidenced by the way the narrator investigates the social media activities of a missing man named Ted Wilson. Outpourings of support lead to vicious defamatory campaigns from a stream of unnamed individuals when certain facts about Ted are made public. Here O'Neill shows that one's online existence is often a poor approximation of the way one actually lives.

The style of writing in “The Dog” matches this particular narrator. His particular kind of stream of consciousness results in a page of digressions that eventually collapse into a jumble of closing parenthesis. In other sections he accumulates a list which continuously refers back to earlier statements like a legal document. It’s an endless accumulation of questions and counterpoint arguments that leave him feeling discouraged rather than more self-aware. This style illuminates the systematic way people go about tackling any problems in modern life. The rapid accumulation of detail leads to a train of information which crashes at a point of no solution, a pile-up of information.

This is most often a comedic novel that also contemplates the meaning of dislocation in a modern global society and online communities. Early on the narrator becomes enthusiastic about diving where “Very few human ideas survive in this implacably sovereign element; one finds oneself in a world devoid not only of air but of symbols, which are of course a kind of air.” He's attracted to this underwater environment because everything means what it is here. Things aren't attached with sublimated messages. You can simply float. In an increasingly fast-paced, commercialized world O'Neill's narrator faces a kind of existential crisis. With a sense of melancholy he reflects: “It may be that most lives add up, in the end, to the sum of the mistakes that cannot be corrected.” If you were to form a crib sheet on the narrator of “The Dog” his life would look like a disaster, but the spirit he shows in his narrative reveals an individual desperately trying to sort and reason and make the right choices. It makes for a fascinating and funny read.

Read an interview with the author here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/10/joseph-oneill-something-big-happens-post-9-11-novels

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesJoseph O'Neill
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Last night I went to The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green to celebrate the publication of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Year of Pilgrimage.” The night had the feeling of a pub lock-in with bookish folk all gathered together to bond over a shared appreciation of Murakami’s genius. The book couldn’t officially be released until midnight so the shop created a series of events centred on the author to last us until after the clock struck twelve when the book was given out. The shop was colourfully decked out with a fine spread of sushi and wine on offer. I frequently enjoy going to book events at the South Bank, but no one other than independent book shops can better convey such a warm passionate engagement with a new book’s release. This is an environment that can bring readers together and make them feel like family.

The Friday Project publisher and blogger (I love his blog Me And My Big Mouth), Scott Pack came on first to read the opening of the novel. Immediately we meet the central character who is a characteristically quirky Murakami outsider whose awkward standing in life is delineated by the author with savage grace. Pack went on to describe his relationship with Murakami, first as a passionate reader and leading on to the personal/professional relationship he’s had with the author after having interviewed him. His overriding pleasure in Murakami’s writing and respect for the man himself was palpable and set the tone beautifully for all the readers in the room who equally admire this writer. Pack also gave interesting background information about Murakami’s life and the reason why English translations appear so long after the original Japanese publication.  

Next, the writer Stuart Evers gave a “light hearted homage to the great man” in the form of a lecture about themes in his work. He gave a really insightful critique on Murakami’s style of writing and his theories as to why he constructs his stories in the manner he does. He pointed out how in English fiction there is often an extraordinary protagonist in an ordinary situation - whereas other world literature often portrays an ordinary protagonist in an extraordinary situation. Then he insightfully described how in many of Murkami’s books the protagonist makes himself out to be ordinary, but through his/her actions and thoughts emerges as someone quite extraordinary. I really appreciated how Evers challenged us to think more dynamically about how intelligently Murakami writes and why we respond to his writing in the way we do. Evers read Murakami’s near-perfect short story ‘On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning.’ He also planted a series of envelops in the audience which he had people open at random – each containing a major theme found in Murakami’s work including “animals”, “brands”, “non-fiction” and “ears” which he then expounded upon. Evers also wasn’t shy on being critical about certain Murkami publications which he doesn’t find as successful. This had a nice sobering effect – before everyone started to gush too much.

The evening ended with a screening of the film ‘I Hired a Contract Killer’ by one of Murakami’s favourite directors. However, I ducked out before it started. I had flown back in from a trip to Spain the night before which didn’t get in till 1AM and I was up in the morning to open my office early so it had been a long day for me and I was fading. But it was a really special bookshop event and I was glad to have made it there. This is the kind of event that reminds you reading can be a communal activity – not just the solitary experience we often feel it to be. 

I had quite an active holiday in Spain taking a kind of road trip across the north of it enjoying sophisticated Bilbao, fun-loving San Sebastian and seedy Sitges, but I got some good reading time in. Now I feel a little out of touch so I’m catching up on what people have been up to and what’s been happening here in London.

What have you been reading?

Have you ever been to a book event that has stood out as really special to you?

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
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Do you ever read a book and are so intensely involved with it that it feels like a whole year has gone by rather than just a few hours? That was my experience reading “H is for Hawk.” I only started it on Monday and have been totally engrossed reading it during every spare minute that I can find. I had started reading Maria Semple’s re-released novel “This One is Mine” and didn’t find it that engaging so I switched to this book. Since it’s all about falcons I wasn’t sure it was going to interest me. But almost immediately the author reveals it’s also about the death of her father and the grief of dealing with this fact. To tell the truth, Helen Macdonald’s writing is so graceful and clever (yet highly approachable) that I would be interested in any subject she writes about. There’s a tremendous immediacy and directness to it – probably because she often addresses the reader as “you.” In this memoir she makes meaningful connections between her experience trying to train a newly-acquired young goshawk, the process of grieving for her father and the fascinatingly sombre life and writings of T.H. White (famed author of “The Once and Future King”). They seem totally disparate subjects on the surface, but White also had a great affinity for hawks and wrote a book about his (bungled) experiences trying to train one. Macdonald writes about approximately a year of her life in relation to these three subjects and the result is something which is devastatingly powerful. She writes: “What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later.” In making a retrospective survey of this emotional time period she organizes her thoughts about her unique process for dealing with death and finds profound universal meaning.

After she receives the shocking news of her father’s death, Macdonald gradually turns inward and becomes something of a recluse. In reality, I doubt she was as introverted as she makes out in the book. Whenever she encounters people she may think vicious or antisocial thoughts, but then acts quite civil and nice to them. She decides to acquire a goshawk which she names Mabel. On first seeing the hawk emerge from the box she hilariously remarks: “She came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack.” Goshawks are notoriously more difficult to train than falcons – which are the only birds she’s trained before. You learn a lot about hawks in this memoir as Macdonald has an encyclopaedic knowledge of them and the noble bird is a surprisingly fascinating subject. She spends virtually all her time gradually gaining the bird’s trust and taking it for short journeys in the surrounding countryside to hunt game. Meanwhile she maintains only a minimum amount of social contact with friends and family. Her teaching job comes to an end and she puts off looking for more work or finding a new place to live. Bills pile up and she tries not to think about the speech she needs to write for her father’s funeral. She becomes entirely consumed with the present task of caring for her hawk: “I could no more imagine the future than a hawk could. I didn’t need a career. I didn’t want one.” This period of solitude leads to an intense passionate kinship with her hawk. She becomes accustomed to the smallest changes in Mabel’s movements and expressions which betray the hawk’s thought process. Touchingly, the pair even eventually play games together with scrunched up balls of paper. But it’s always a wild creature and accidents involving small injuries to Macdonald are frequent. The hawk is independently minded and, without the promise of immediate access to food, Macdonald is highly aware that her hawk could easily fly away and abandon her.

Egyptian God Horus

Egyptian God Horus

After such an intense amount of time together there is a curious blending of identity which takes place. Macdonald becomes like the hawk as the qualities she admires in it are ones she desires to have herself. She notes that “By skilfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence. You could be true to yourself.” Although the experience of the hunt is a gruesome one, Macdonald finds a spiritual satisfaction in this act of nature. The complex emotions concerning the loss of her father which simmer just below the surface can be released through this savage process. She comes to understand that “Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist.”

“H is for Hawk” is a highly unusual and meaningful book. It also happens to have an extremely beautiful cover. As a personal aside, I particularly appreciated a section towards the end where she travels to my home state of Maine for Christmas. Although this book is primarily about English country life, this section felt like a personal gift and a window to my childhood of snow covered fields, hunting and lobster boats.

We all experience profound loss at some time in our lives. This book certainly isn’t prescriptive about how you should overcome this, but it’s strangely comforting learning about Macdonald’s unique strategy for surviving losing her father. I’m not likely to ever become a falconer, but I can definitely relate to this beautiful statement which encapsulates so much about heartache and loss: “What you do to your heart. You stand apart from yourself, as if your soul could be a migrant beast too, standing some way away from the horror, and looking fixedly at the sky.”

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesHelen Macdonald
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In anticipation of this year's Green Carnation Prize, I thought I'd read a novel I've been meaning to get to for quite a while and which won the prize in 2011. Catherine Hall's novel “The Proof of Love” takes place in the hot summer of 1976. Spencer, a Cambridge University student working on his doctorate in mathematics rides his bike to a rural farming town in north-west Cumbria. He makes an arrangement with a family to stay for the summer in a small outlying building on their property in exchange for providing free labour on the farm. Here we're given vivid details about the labour and sweat involved with this life including a terrifyingly scene where the men have to saw off the horns of a ram. At first Spencer sticks out like a sore thumb in this tightly-knit old-fashioned community. Gradually he becomes accepted, especially after a dramatic fire from which he emerges as a hero. However, he always remains an outsider. Local figures like a snobbish vicar who sees him as an intellectual equal or a bored housewife who tries to seduce him want to use him for their own means. Only the town eccentric, an older lady named Dorothy, and the daughter of the family Alice seem to have no designs on him and see him for the person he really is. Spencer himself remains elusive and evasive about his past, even to the reader for much of the book. He came to this place to leave himself behind. It's somewhere where “he could be somebody entirely different, someone with a certain future, rather than an awkward past.” Like anyone who tries to invent himself wholly anew, his past eventually catches up with him and Spencer has to admit to himself who he really is.

Song: "Yan Tan Tethera" Spencer learns this sheep counting rhyme/system traditionally used by shepherds in Northern England and earlier in other parts of England and the British Isles.

Hall does something in this novel which I haven't experienced since reading Colm Toibin's novel “Brooklyn.” The narrative is compelling and original and wholly enjoyable to read, but I spent much of the book wondering where it's really going. Then, at one point in “The Proof of Love” the dilemma of the protagonist hit me and I was gripped wondering how Spencer's story was going to resolve itself. This has to do with following a particular character's story as they grow and change, but whose past life is at odds with the person that they ideally want to become. Spencer is a man who has been hiding his sexuality, especially after an incident at his university for which he was shamed. Surprisingly he's able to find a man in this rural community who he strikes up a sexual and kind-of romantic relationship with. But this isn't just a novel with the oft-told story about a man struggling with his sexuality. It's about someone who is searching for true belonging in community. Beyond a desire for physical and emotional love from a partner, we also desire to be seen as equal and needed by those who live around us. This is something that's barely been written about in novels that have a gay theme and is, no doubt, one of the reasons why it was selected to win the Green Carnation Prize. Spencer seeks a love that recognizes him as someone wanted and valued for the person he truly is, someone who can give what no one else can.

What Hall captures beautifully is how familiar and comforting small-town life can be, but also how stultifying and rigid it is. Although figures like Mary, the mother of the family Spencer stays with, undoubtably belongs in the community and has a definite place she feels trapped by it. Many of the people in this small town can't ever realize their full potential because of the limited choices available to them. At first, Spencer wants to blend in with the herd and become just another farmer amongst them. He even imitates the local dialect in his speech. But the friendly (if guarded) community which embraces him can just as quickly turn on him when things go wrong. Spencer gradually realizes that he can't become someone totally different and that it might have been better to just be himself. The people who really love and value him do so because they see him, not the person he's trying to be. This is a wise and skilfully written novel that will sneak up on you and pull your heartstrings.  

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AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesCatherine Hall
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