A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert

Whenever I read a description of another new novel dealing with The Holocaust I feel a little twinge of uncertainty. Despite being one of the most horrific acts of genocide in the past century it’s a subject that’s been covered in countless novels. Is there anything new to say about this atrocity? Of course there is. Many novels from Audrey Magee’s “The Undertaking” to Ben Fergusson’s “The Spring of Kasper Meier” have proven this to me. But never has a novel I’ve read about this period of history felt more relevant and close-to-home than Rachel Seiffert’s new novel “A Boy in Winter.” I’m conscious that this has a lot to do with the current politics of our world, but I truly recognized in this story situations and patterns of behaviour that feel very near. Seiffert has fictionally dealt with this era before in her debut book “The Dark Room” which is composed of three novellas connected to the war and set in Germany. This new book is set in a small village in the Ukraine over a period of a few days in late 1941 when the Nazis come marching through “cleansing” the community of its Jewish population. It’s stunningly told and it’s a devastating story, but it also speaks so powerfully about the world we live in now.

Seiffert has the most unique and powerful way of conveying the inner sense of a character’s emotions using only external descriptions. It’s something she did so expertly in her previous novel “The Walk Home” (which was one of my favourite books of 2014) and she does it again in this new novel with an adolescent Jewish boy named Yankel. Different sections of the book focus on different characters, but the author doesn’t often shine a spotlight on Yankel. Instead, we get a sense of him through other characters such as his father who has been put in a hellish temporary holding cell by the Nazis or a young woman Yasia who takes in Yankel and his younger brother. We get descriptions of the way Yankel carries himself, his stance or the movement of his eyes, but even though the reader is not often keyed into what he’s thinking we get a real emotional understanding of him from the author’s evocative external descriptions. Seiffert does this in a way which is powerful and quite unique. The arc of his story and the semi-tragic transformation he goes through in order to survive is brilliantly told.

This is an incredibly beautiful and impactful novel, but a slight problem I had with it is an instance where a certain character who is conscripted into the Nazi forces leads the reader through the way that Jewish people were processed. There’s nothing wrong with Seiffert’s descriptions of these scenes and their impact is devastating, but it clearly felt like his character was being used simply as a device to show what the author wanted to show rather than what his character would naturally encounter. However, a striking thing about this section is the way she describes the Nazis basically forcing each other to drink while they conduct their brutal and horrific executions. It gave a powerful sense of the way many of these soldiers had to use alcohol to deaden their humanity in order to perform the atrocious duties they were ordered to perform.

The central question of this novel asks what you would do if you were faced with the choice of following the evil will of an oppressive government or being severely punished for refusing to participate. It prompts you to ask yourself what you would do if neutrality wasn’t an option. Seiffert shows the complexity of this question through a number of different characters including non-Jewish Ukranians and a German engineer who takes a remote position in the army because he wants to avoid this moral dilemma but finds himself forced to make a horrific choice. The lines between an individual’s right and wrong become blurred when they are forced to ask themselves: “where was the wrong in staying alive?” It’s a haunting question.

I read this novel as part of a mini-book group I’ve formed with the writers Antonia Honeywell and Claire Fuller. We discussed it over lunch and had a fascinating conversation, but it’s quite special in that it’s the first book (out of the three we’ve read together so far including “The Underground Railroad” and “Mothering Sunday”) that all three of us were overwhelmingly positive about. Antonia and Claire are astute critics so the fact they both liked this novel so much is high praise! Rachel Seiffert is an incredibly talented writer and I find her writing moving in a way that is hard to describe. But it’s safe to say I’d recommend that everyone should read this timely historical novel.

The Shifting Pools by Zoë Duncan

 I felt such a strong emotional connection with Zoë Duncan’s debut novel “The Shifting Pools.” She imaginatively articulates something in the content and structure of this book that I’ve been grappling with for a long time. I’ve often wondered how it is that the fear and pain we feel after experiencing trauma (whether that means being hurt emotionally or physically or unexpectedly losing the people we’re closest to) transforms the way we perceive and process the world. It’s like a kind of poisonous fuel that kindles our creativity in ways which are both beautiful and terrifying. It colours our sense of reality and allows us to cope.

The author shows this process in telling the story of a girl named Eve whose idyllic childhood in her Middle Eastern home comes to a violently abrupt end. As the sole survivor of a brutal attack, she grows up and makes a new life for herself in London but finds her sense of reality has been inexorably altered. Her subsequent journey is utterly surprising and captivating. Duncan’s narrative effortlessly moves between the internal and external reality of this deeply traumatized individual. It’s as if she finds a new language to express the inexpressible. This heartrending story will transport you to an imaginative new landscape that expresses the true nature of our everyday reality.

The novel alternates between Eve’s emotionally-brittle life in London, a fantastic land beset by malevolent darkness, anxiety-fuelled dreams and quotes from a wide variety of music, poetry and nonfiction. This might sound like a chaotic juxtaposition of elements, but they are built naturally into the story in sync with Eve’s journey towards living with her past and fully inhabiting herself as an individual. When Eve first arrived in the UK after the horror of her loss she’s taken to live with her aunt and uncle. It’s unfortunate that her aunt Vi “was a firm believer in life forging on ahead as a remedy for all ills.” While this (very English) coping method enables Eve to carry on in her life it suppresses her complex emotions. These seep out in the forms of dreams and a turbulent alternate world which she eventually physically enters.

The danger with representing such corners of the subconscious in a novel is that they can become laden with superficial symbolism. I know a lot of readers are understandably bothered when a story stops to describe the dream of a character. But, in this case, it felt to me like Eve’s dreams beautifully and dramatically demonstrate the ever-present sense of panic which pulses beneath the surface of her being. They show a disarmingly creative variety of themes which also fascinatingly demonstrate the fluidity of identity. Within Eve’s dreams she changes effortlessly between being a girl, a mother and a boy. This poignantly conveys how at heart we’re not tied to being any one gender or age or role within a family. This reminded me somewhat of Susan Barker's magnificent novel "The Incarnations" where a couple are reincarnated over centuries and change frequently from men to women in each new life.

Photograph by Hannah Lemholt

The author also acknowledges within the story how the fantasy drama of rescuing an innocent girl named Alette from dark forces transparently relates to Eve’s emotional turbulence. When Eve returns from her imagined world of Enanti at one point her cousin remarks “A quest was typical, she said, a perfect symbol of our need to find something precious. And saving Alette was deeply linked to my guilt over Laila. Even I had known that, as I was dreaming.” I bought into this fantasy world because it felt so real to Eve’s struggle and the author interlaces Eve’s adventure with a displaced people with such fascinating ideas. It does become problematic at certain points in the novel where the flow of Eve’s story must be interrupted to explain the “rules” of this fantastic landscape. However, this doesn’t detract from the power of Eve’s transformation as a person.

Part of the reason why I loved this novel is that it harkened back to when I was a teenage boy reading fantasy adventure stories like Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, but it brings a sophisticated psychology and real world currency to an unreal world. On the outside Eve looks like a conventional person but she muses “Perhaps if I had looked like an outsider, the sense of dislocation I felt would not have jarred so much. But nothing marked me out.” She carefully hides her physical and emotional scars, but because she conceals the imperfect parts of herself she tends towards erratic and self-destructive behaviour. Her path towards acknowledging and living with her past is a journey which gripped and moved me. This is a novel rich in heart. It beautifully shows how we creatively reinvent ourselves and the world around us in a way which liberates us from the cruelties of reality and those who seek to diminish us.

Stranger, Baby by Emily Berry

I’ve been taking time with the poems in this collection for a couple of months. This is such a short book, but I often find I need to be in the right headspace to really hear what a poet is saying. Since I read so much fiction I find it difficult not to read a narrative into a collection of poems. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing this, but it feels to me like the primary aim of poetry isn’t to tell a story that can be easily summarized. It’s more like an artistic arrangement of language that should wash over you. Nevertheless, if I had to describe an overarching theme to the moving poems in this collection I’d say it’s about dealing with a mother’s death. The collection is prefaced by a quote from Freud: “The loss of a mother must be something very strange.” The poems frequently delve into the complex psychology of trying to understand this sometimes embattled relationship, especially after death. A cluster of the poems at the centre of the book give nods to Freud. Just how or why the mother died isn’t entirely clear although there are indications of self-harm or suicide: “People you love can be removed from the world (They can remove themselves).” But the overarching impression of these poems is of someone dealing with that grief, reflecting on the condition of loss and the way she still carries the presence of this lost mother.

Part of the reason these poems feel so painfully personal is the way the daughter narrating can sometimes lambast herself for not being self sufficient and for needing a mother that she can’t have. There’s also a frustration at not being able to accurately translate into language all the riotous emotion which accompany this state of being as in the poem ‘Drunken Bellarmine’: “I cannot make manifest this collection of feelings, but look at me: I want to be loved for the wrong reasons. I mean I want to be hated for the right reasons. I have been lonely.” There’s the anguish of being left alone even though she intellectually understands death and accepts this, but it can never be fully accepted. This causes her to perceive the mother as both a care-giver and a tormenter. She imagines the mother sneering down at her “We all have to die sometime, Your Majesty”

This creates a dialogic within the narrator where she understands the departed mother’s point of view, but she can’t reconcile the reality of it. This creates within her a split sense which prompts Berry to write some of her more technically ambitious poems. Some take the form of scripted plays where there is a conversation between Me One and Me Two. It also inspires a lot of imagery looking at water or reflective surfaces where the inner and out life blur into each other. Other poems suggest how she retreats infinitely inward like in the poem ‘Two Rooms’ where she exists “in a room inside a room” and only once within these walls within walls can she feel “safe.”

From a localized story of grief, these poems expand out to meaningfully consider larger issues of love and relationships. The fact that the people we love are capable of surviving without us can feel like a betrayal. Although we’re aware these feelings are entirely selfish it doesn’t detract from the pain of knowing people’s lives can carry on without our being a part of them. In the poem ‘Once’ which narrowly trails down the page she writes: “I sent my loved ones away & kindly they went I imagined them active in my absence & it was like rehearsing my death their capacity for survival was thus proved & mine too insultingly so”. The converse perspective of this is that we are also able to survive without our loved ones if forced to do so and if we can find the strength to carry on. The final poem ‘Canopy’ beautifully encapsulates a possible strategy for doing so.

I really connected with this collection. These are poems worth lingering over.

You can hear Emily Berry read her poem ‘Everything Bad is Permanent’ here: https://soundcloud.com/faberbooks/everything-bad-is-permanent

White Tears by Hari Kunzru

It feels like one of the great functions of literature can be to give a voice to people who have been rendered voiceless through whatever pitfall in history. The same can be said for music which can so powerfully convey the stories of entire groups of people whose voices have been suppressed, ignored or erased by those in power. This is certainly true with the history of Blues music which was originated by African Americans in the Deep South and continued to grow and evolve through generations and decades of black oppression in America. In Hari Kunzru's latest novel “White Tears” he tells the story of an emotionally-arresting Blues song rediscovered by a pair of earnest young musicians and the dramatic effect it has on their lives. But this isn't a simple story about musical admiration or influence. Kunzru posits the compelling idea that a sound once uttered resonates indefinitely throughout history and he weaves this concept into a fascinating detective story which slides into the surreal. It’s a novel that makes powerful statements about race, privilege and the long-lasting resonance of music.

The narrator Seth meets Carter Wallace at university. He’s humbled that Carter wants to be his friend because this dreadlocked, tattooed, trust fund boy is so popular and comes from an extremely wealthy family. But they connect over music and Seth’s tech-savvy ability for capturing sound and turning it into beats and rhythms. Unsurprisingly, Carter is the black sheep of his corporate-driven family, but he’s still allowed money enough to found their music production business once they leave school. Their creative fusion of forgotten Blues and Jazz tunes with modern songs garners them a lot of attention including from an incredibly successful new pop artist that wants to pay tribute to bygone music eras. But Carter becomes obsessed by a particular song that Seth happens to record in passing. It leads them on a strange path into the past and a musical genius that’s been lost in history.

Charley Patton "Banty Rooster Blues" (1929)

There’s a steadily growing tension within the novel about the way these two white boys become attached to a black music tradition. Are they demonstrating an admiration for it or appropriating it? Seth feels that “our love of the music bought us something, some right to blackness, but by the time we got to New York, we’d learned not to talk about it.” Because they are passionate about it, they feel themselves to be in touch with the culture that created it. Seth also recalls a kind of friendship he made with a white male co-worker, Chester Bly, who was an avid Blues record collector and actively sought out forgotten musician’s work: “They were like ghosts at the edges of American consciousness. You have to understand, when I say no one knew, I mean no one. You couldn’t just look something up in a book. Things were hidden. Things got lost. Musicians got lost.” Seth sets out on a journey of discovery for music, but finds himself immersed in a culture and people that he doesn’t understand and didn’t even knew existed within his own country. Here things get very odd within the narrative.

The novel eventually transforms into a hallucinatory story where the boundaries of identity become blurred and history plays back upon itself. Seth becomes caught in a loop of time as if he were in a Beckett play: “I look down at my hands. I have always been looking down at my hands, but as in a dream when you find yourself unable to read text or tell the time, they are vague.” I found this style-shift somewhat alarming and disconcerting at first, but it eventually became really emotionally resonant for me. The later part of the book feels something like a Cesar Aira novel. The story of a man who has been greatly wronged erupts through the chaotic breakdown of Seth’s life. So it becomes partly a tale of possession and partly a revenge tale and partly a testament to an entire race of people that’s been continuously oppressed throughout American history. “White Tears” is a resonant and peculiarly haunting novel.

Baileys Women’s Prize 2017 Winner Prediction

I’ve been following this wonderful book prize for a long time. In the past two years I’ve felt very certain about who will win the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction – and I’ve been right! Yay Ali Smith & Lisa McInerney! But this year I think it’s really tough to guess. There are five incredibly strong novels on this list (and one which made me go huh?) I could go through and list reasons why I think one book will be chosen above another, but to be honest it’s too close to call and I don’t think there’s a way of gauging a proper prediction. If I screw my thinking cap on really hard I’d deduce that Naomi Alderman’s “The Power” will win. But if I listen to my heart it’s telling me Madeleine Thien’s “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” will win. So that’s the best guess I can make.

Who do you think will win? Are there any on the shortlist you’re still aching to read? Or have you studiously made your way through the entire list? 

I had brunch with the shadow panel organised by Naomi this morning and we had a good long chat about our own shortlist and chose one novel as our own panel winner. Our pick will be announced on Tuesday and the real prize's winner will be announced on Wednesday, July 7th! I'll be going to the ceremony and I'm very excited to see who will win. 

An exciting announcement this past week is that in the future this prize will be known as simply the 'Women's Prize for Fiction' rather than the Baileys Prize, as Baileys will now just be one of multiple sponsors. 

Click on the titles to read my full reviews of the shortlisted books and/or watch this video where the fabulous Anna James and I break down the Baileys Prize 2017 shortlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziwhLux3pqQ

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
The Dark Circle by Linda Grant
The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan
First Love by Gwendoline Riley

First Love by Gwendoline Riley

It’s not often that I loathe a novel. Even if I don’t jell with a book I’ll most often quietly put it aside thinking someone else might get something out of it. But reading Gwendoline Riley’s novel “First Love” made me angry. You may think this strong emotional reaction would mean it’s worth seeking it out for yourself. You’re by all means free to do so, but I think you’d be wasting your time because I don’t think this novel has anything to say. The reason it stirs such malice within me is because I think it’s a terrible missed opportunity. It portrays the life of a writer named Neve, her marriage to an older man Edwyn, the difficult people on the fringes of their lives and their vicious arguments. The central question of this book is: why are the people we love horrible to us sometimes? It’s an aching concern that almost all of us will experience to varying degrees throughout our lives. But this novel offers no answers. It is instead a claustrophobic tedious story which purposely withholds letting you know the central characters, but still flaunts all the violent machinations of their egos leaving the reader feeling like they’ve been emotionally vomited over.

I felt like Gwendoline Riley didn’t give any sense of understanding for her characters and therefore she didn’t earn the right to thrust in my face all of their dirty laundry. I’m not saying I don’t want to read about unlikeable characters or that it isn’t right to pay witness to the horrendously cruel way so-called “loved ones” can hurt us or that I want a nice rounded explanation of why people can be so nasty, but I need some context or frame within which to understand them. It’s explained how Neve is a financially unstable writer whose father was abusive, whose problematic mother didn’t support her and who experienced tumultuous relationships prior to marrying her cantankerous and misogynistic husband. However, this story was not properly fleshed out by the author and did not let me understand the experiences Neve has gone through. Instead she flits from one brutal encounter and argument to another.

Later on she considers the pointlessness of reflection and trying to understand the past:

“Time doesn't help. You forget, for years, even, but it's still there. A zone of feeling. A cold shade. I barely drink now, but when I do, sometimes I see so clearly how nothing's changed. Not one thing. About who I am and what I am. I don't have to be drunk. When I least expect it, my instincts are squalid, my reactions are squalid, vengeful. And for what? What am I so outraged by? Little mite with a basilisk stare. Grown woman. My parents were hopeless. And? Helpless, as we all are. Life is appalling. My father ate himself to death. Isn't that enough? A year before that, in a short email to my brother he mused,
'Should I tell you/shield you? The latest. Peri-anal abscesses! Pain unimaginable!'
Won't that do?”

My response to this (which I felt like shouting at the book) is: No! That won’t do. I get that Neve is conflicted and struggles with self-loathing, but I feel like I'm not given her full point of view or a meaningful understanding of her past. And without getting a sense of a character’s sense of being I feel alienated from her struggles rather than sympathetic to them.

Neve and Edwyn have circular arguments where he berates her for her actions and a single evening when she came home as a messy drunk. This sort of emotional abuse within a relationship feels very real. Years ago I saw the pair of documentaries ‘Domestic Violence’ and ‘Domestic Violence 2’ by Frederick Wiseman. In one of them there is a gruellingly long sequence where late at night a husband endlessly criticizes his wife while she pleads with him to simply let her sleep. It’s horrible, but the faithfully-recorded length of this repetitious encounter drives home the reality of this poisonous relationship in a way which is incredibly moving and heartbreaking. Conversely, the circular arguments between Neve and Edwyn don’t give the same effect because they aren’t given any context. Edwyn is simply brutal and Neve simply takes it. Edwyn speculates she might think of him as a stand-in for her horrible father. It even comes into question whether Edwyn even exists; he might be a psychological phantom Neve uses to beat herself up. But these possibilities aren’t given the proper amount of space in the text to be effective.

The one exception to the sketchily drawn characters in this novel is Neve’s mother who is incredibly difficult and troubled and has a lack of willpower, but feels like a more fully rounded character. I appreciated the scenes with her and felt like I got her as a person because she presented to Neve a version of her own past and her point of view. She’s not a reliable narrator in these speeches. Her recollections are, of course, filtered through her own prejudices, but I get that and it made me curious to reading about her as a flawed individual. However, I didn’t get this at all from Neve or Edwyn or Neve’s ex Michael. They spew vitriol without any meaningful reflection. Yet, their stories unfortunately make up the bulk of this short novel.

Even though this is such a short novel, if I weren’t reading it because it’s part of the Baileys Prize shortlist I wouldn’t have bothered finishing it. I don’t think I would have lost anything by not getting to the last page. I don’t think the ending provides any more insight or poignancy than the rest of the novel. Frankly, I’m a bit baffled as to why it’s on the shortlist and why other people have responded so positively to it. I’m going to keep reading other reviews to see what I’ve missed about it. For a different point of view, read a positive review at Naomi’s TheWritesofWomen or Eleanor’s thoughts on why she hoped it’d be on the shortlist at ElleThinks. Or you can watch why Anna most definitely didn’t like this book in our Baileys shortlist prediction video. It will be fascinating to hear Gwendoline Riley’s own thoughts about her novel at the Baileys Prize shortlist readings on Monday. If you’ve read it, I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments below.