Letters from bewilderment
January 18, 2017
J. D. Daniels deserves high praise in this essay collection for his droll narrative style and razor-sharp insight. Sometimes he’s deliciously funny. Other times he describes life situations with perfect cleverness. Always, he calls it like it is. There’s a moment in one of the essays when he describes a waterfront bum walking toward him, the kind of guy whose darkly tanned, wrinkled skin has spent a lifetime in the sun. Daniels tells us, “He looked like a wallet someone had been sitting on for forty years.” In the essay about Kentucky, he writes: “…I ate a plate of biscuits and sausage gravy that would almost have fit into a football stadium.” And that deliciously funny part of the equation? “When Martha was a little girl and asked her father why she had so many freckles, he told her she had been standing behind the cow when it farted.”
The Correspondence is a small, unpretentious book in appearance – no dust jacket or colorful, eye-catching illustration – yet it’s large and affecting in its content. The six essays are written as letters, although they’re not addressed to anyone in particular; if anything, they are written for that unseen audience we all talk to in our private moments. In the majority of the essays, Daniels’ writes about significant times in his young life. His singular authorial voice sings with sarcasm, confusion and casual wonder, which altogether are magnetically seductive.
In the best essay, “Letter to Cambridge,” Daniels tells of the time he joined a fight club to learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He’s a self-described bookish, hairy, skinny guy getting pummeled by hulks with shaved heads. He even signs up to fight in tournaments where he’s clearly the underdog. In one of those droll moments that are so entertaining to read, his doctor reacts indifferently to Daniels’ broken nose, pointing him toward the X-ray room without pity or concern for his repeated, pointless injuries. Only, they’re not pointless. Daniels tells us he came to fighting after years of self-destruction. He writes: “You learn a lot about yourself when you train to failure, when you go out to the edge of your ability…”
In another great essay, “Letter to Majorca,” it’s several years later, and Daniels continues to be unsure about what he should be doing with his life. He signs up to work on a 43 foot boat with four Israelis off the coast of Spain. He encounters an overwhelming sea sickness and a language barrier, yet he finds focus in the daily work. The captain tells him, orders make you stupid, figure it out for yourself, and although Daniels breezes past this comment, we recognize its significance to his unsettled state.
There’s no sentiment in these six essays, no grabbing at our emotions, rather an alluring genius that traps us with its smart twists and turns. It’s in full play in “Letter to Kentucky,” the state where Daniels grew up. He names places he passes, as he travels the roadways on his visit, such as Cash Xpress and Mister Money, Xtreme Auto Sounds, the Heart of Fire City Church, Urban Creek Holiness Church, Jimbo’s 4-Lane Tobacco, the Federal Correctional Institution and, my favorite, Chain Saw World. The essay is about nostalgia and the roots of Daniels’ bewilderment.
The remaining three essays lack the power of the ones I’ve mentioned, although they retain the bold remarks and colorful detours in storytelling. They’re just not as well-rounded in their delivery. Even so, they don’t diminish this unusual debut that heralds a promising future for J. D. Daniels.
The books I gave this holiday season
December 29, 2016
Over the years, I’ve given books to friends who come to my house for dinner on Christmas Eve. It’s a joy for me and them, this book carefully selected and then placed on the table to function as their place card. Below are the selections I made this year and the reasons behind my decisions.
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie
I’ll start with a misfire. It’s not the book you see here. This actually was my first choice, but I second guessed myself and instead gave Paul Kalanithi’s bestselling memoir When Breath Becomes Air. With Kalanithi’s book being front and center in the media and on bestseller lists, I knew I was risking that my friend would already have read the book, and indeed she had. That was the misfire, i.e., not listening to my gut instinct. With my first choice on hand, I was able to get it to her the next day — Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own, focused on the literary life and religious faith of mid-20th century writers Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. I thought my friend, an entrepreneur and ordained minister, who enjoys deep, thoughtful topics, would find many pause-worthy moments in Elie’s acclaimed work that The New York Times described as “a freeze frame from another era of the perennial search for truth.”
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
I always look for an absorbing novel for this friend. She’s one of those readers who will stay up all night to find out what happens next. She tells me she must plan her reading so as to miss not just sleep, but also appointments or anything else that would get in the way of The End. And so this novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and penned by the lyric Alaskan native author, came to mind for its intrigue of an unusual child’s presence in the lives of a struggling couple. Jack and Mable are trying to make a life together in 1920’s frontier Alaska when the snow child comes into their lives, but is the child fantasy or reality? Ivey released a new novel this past summer, To the Bright Edge of the World, but I selected her first novel because my friend is a specialist in early child education. I thought the combined mystery and child focus would deeply absorb her.
Upstream: Selected Essays
by Mary Oliver
Oliver is a popular poet whose beautiful words, philosophies and insights transport readers into the natural world and its wisdom. Among forests, rivers, ponds and fields, she presents a kind of peace and acceptance that transcends the hysteria of modern life. An example is her poem “Am I Not Among the Early Risers” in which she writes: “What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly / at the top of the field, / her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine / has not already done?/” Oliver’s new collection of essays seemed like a no-brainer for this friend who loves poetry and the outdoors. These essays have been gathered together as a sort of autobiography, with Oliver reflecting on the natural world, as well as topics from childhood and her adult writing life. As much as I knew my friend would enjoy the book, though, I afterwards wondered if I should’ve reached for something more unexpected. Oliver’s essays are a best-seller, like Kalanithi’s memoir, and while my friend hadn’t read it, upon opening it, she recognized it. Is there more magic in receiving a book that’s completely unknown?
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Speaking of bestsellers, here’s another one. I tend to avoid the bestseller list because it is the go-to source for many when they want a book selection – and the list is so limiting, given the phenomenal choices beyond it. Alas, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ phenomenal book also came to mind. I selected it for a friend who read Hillbilly Elegy and loved it. I don’t believe she’s an avid, even frequent reader, and so I thought giving her this important, highly lauded book about ideas of race would capture her attention. Between the World and Me is a letter to Coates’ adolescent son about what it’s like to be black in America today. It’s universally described as “required reading.” Between the World and Me won the 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction and came in as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson
Here is another friend whose reading habits I believe are spotty, at best, and by that I mean it’s possible she doesn’t think to read, except maybe when someone hands her a book. Given the Kennedy family story continues to fascinate this nation of readers, I thought this new biography of a lesser-known Kennedy daughter — sibling of the famous Jack, Robert and Ted, her brothers of political fame — would capture my friend’s interest. Rosemary Kennedy was intellectually disabled and kept as a family secret. It’s a tragic story that is the reason her Kennedy relatives established and supported government opportunities and resources for the disabled. In an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, author Kate Clifford Larson said of Rosemary: “She was virtually hidden for decades, but the siblings apparently — or so it has been said — that they were not aware of what happened to Rosemary, or where she was, for nearly 20 years. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate … but they had learned not to ask, and so they didn’t ask.”
Speak, Memory by Vla
dimir Nabokov
Finally, a classic autobiography chosen for a friend who has become an avid reader, one who keeps a list of books to be read, frequents the library and reads every day. She posed a challenge in that I know she reads this blog, and so I didn’t feel I could select from anything I’d written about here. Likely, if it was a good match, she would already have it on her list. I’ve given her literary novels she has loved and not loved so much (yet she has read every page); and then, I remembered she loved Friday Night Lights, a book I recommended a while back. I took that non-fiction cue and immediately this beloved memoir by Nabokov came to mind for its nostalgia, beautiful writing and Nabokov’s insight into his Russian childhood. It struck as a perfect combination of literary style and a true story that my friend would enjoy. From the Humanities article Why Nabokov’s Speak Memory Still Speaks to Us: “After closing the pages of Speak, Memory, John Updike, no slouch himself as a prose stylist, was carried away.” I hope the same for my friend.
He knew how to keep Christmas well
December 20, 2016
I haven’t been much in the holiday spirit this year. It’s been hard to allow it into an already full schedule. Meanwhile, sitting before me has been a new, special edition of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I borrowed it from the library, wanting to look at the photos of Dickens’ original manuscript pages that are included. Each page in his handwriting is positioned opposite a page of what it says in print.
It occurred to me to read the book, but why read this well-known story? I know what happens from all the TV and stage adaptations I’ve seen: The miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future, whose visitations transform him into a generous man. And yet, maybe the story would light up my Christmas spirit. So I began to read it.
The conversation between Scrooge and his nephew at the beginning of the story is where it grabbed me. Because the nephew, who enters Scrooge’s business on Christmas Eve to invite him to Christmas dinner, doesn’t easily give up when verbally attacked by Scrooge, who snarls:
“What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”
The nephew retorts: “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”
Dickens sustains their opposition in a momentous argument, driving home how firmly Scrooge is encased in his bitterness and his nephew in hope.
A bit later in the story, the girlfriend of a young Ebenezer breaks up with him in a similarly memorable rejection scene shown to Scrooge by the Spirit of Christmas Past. She eloquently speaks about how Scrooge has changed, identifying why, and so I newly became aware of what fueled Scrooge’s life choices.
“You fear the world too much,” she says. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its reproach.”
The transformation of the man alone is not what felt strongest to me in this reading of The Christmas Carol, rather the impact of these and other moments that took my attention in meaningful directions.
Also, Dickens’ descriptions gave much to think about, such as when the Spirit of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to a ship on “the black and heaving sea” where he witnesses men isolated by their work –“dark, ghostly figures in their several stations” – and yet they are humming Christmas carols and speaking of “bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it.”
Note to self: Those men at sea didn’t need to be participating in all the seasonal busyness and galas to have the Christmas spirit. It resides in their hearts. And so with carols playing and several trees glittering in the house, I stopped being so hard on myself. Perhaps I’m more in the spirit than I’ve thought.
Tiny Tim, the son of Bob Cratchit, who works for Scrooge, speaks the story’s hallmark last line: “God Bless Us Every One!” But it’s the previous line that lingered with me: “And it was always said of [Scrooge] that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”
This unique edition includes a foreword by author Colm Tóibín and introduction by Declan Kiely, chief literary curator of The Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan, where Dickens’ original, hand-written manuscript resides and is displayed at Christmastime.
A journey home through Texas
December 9, 2016
There are many moments in this small, enticing novel that showcase its excellence, with one that particularly stands out for me. It’s when a 10-year-old girl is perplexed by windows. For four years, she has lived with Kiowa Indians, who kidnapped her after murdering her family. Now she’s being returned to relatives, but she’s lost all acclimation to her former life: “There were drapes hanging in front of the windows against all logic. She did not know why one would make windows in a stone wall and put glass in them and then cover them over with cloth.” The phrase against all logic is the power punch. How silly of us to shut out the natural world. To live separately from the outdoors, rather than with it, something the girl must unlearn.
The half-savage Johanna Leonberger steadily, suspiciously observes Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd. He’s transporting her from Witchita Falls, through the heart of Texas, to Castroville, just outside San Antonio. Not an easy trip in 1870. The unsettled territory between towns is lawless, populated by raiders, vigilantes and Indians. It’s also a politically unstable time during Reconstruction after the Civil War. The Captain’s been paid a $50 gold coin to make the difficult journey. Still, he’s annoyed by the imposition, which he can’t honorably refuse: Kidd drifts from town to town reading newspapers to audiences in assembly halls at ten cents per person. A trip to Castroville is do-able, more so than for the men hauling freight, who have no business in the area. Also, the Captain will protect her.
These are two of fiction’s strongest, most colorful characters I’ve come across in recent books. Captain Kidd is a 71-year-old widow, who fought and lived through the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the American Civil War. His experience, self-confidence, moral character, insight and empathy get him and the girl through the uncertainty of the three-week journey. So, too, does money he receives from reading articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Memphis Daily Appeal, London Times and other newspapers to the public. Meanwhile, the dark blonde, freckled Johanna remains a Kiowa at heart, from a tribe for whom “the baseline of human life was courage.” She’s wise beyond her years and so her choices – and how she interacts with the Captain – provide insight on the nature of her Indian soul.
Not surprising, News of the World is showing up on lists for notable and best novels of the 2016 year. The interesting time in history and unique bond between the Captain and Johanna deliver a solid masterpiece of perfect storytelling. News of the World also was a candidate for the 2016 National Book Award in Fiction.
Music of the Cultural Revolution
December 1, 2016
I’m listening to Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations due to Madeleine Thien’s absorbing epic novel, set in 20th century China. Sparrow, one of the main characters and a composer, passionately embraces the Variations and notably this recording. For a week I’ve been listening to it — I wanted to experience what the gifted Sparrow was hearing.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing spans a large chunk of time from the early years of Mao Zedong’s rise to power through the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square – essentially 1949 through 1989. It follows the lives of three musicians studying at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music: Sparrow, who’s working on the final movement of his symphony; his cousin Zhuli, a violin prodigy living with Sparrow’s family after her parents are denounced and sentenced to hard labor; and Jiang Kai, a brilliant pianist, orphaned by the sweeping famine of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1962). Together and apart, the composer, violinist and pianist remain devoted friends and musicians who struggle through the terrifying repression of Mao Zedong’s communism, including the Cultural Revolution that began in the late 1960s.
Their fates are deeply involving, as one would want from an epic story. Also, the historical perspective pierces with an unsettling recollection of China’s violent, cruel past where people were randomly accused of crimes against the state, tortured and sent to labor camps. The detail of the music, which the three study, share and keep close to themselves, uplifts the narrative with inspired joy. For those who know and love classical music, there’s a thrill of satisfying recognition.
In this small paragraph toward the book’s end, Sparrow is now a husband and father working at a factory. He long ago had to abandon his symphony, due to repressive communist rule. Here he listens to the Goldberg Variations.
It was dawn by the time Sparrow cycled home from the factory. The 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations rippled through his headphones, and the music felt both long and momentary. For this new recording, Glenn Gould had instilled a continuous tempo, a pulse, so that all thirty variations more clearly belonged to a unified piece. A few weeks after the 1981 recording was released, Glenn Gould had died suddenly at the age of fifty. Sparrow had not learned of Gould’s death until years later, and convinced himself the radio announcer was mistaken. So much so that a few months ago, when a letter from Kai mentioned the death of Glenn Gould, Sparrow had been upset by it all over again. What kind of a man had the celebrated pianist been? he wondered. If Gould had been prevented from playing the piano for twenty years, what other form might his music have taken?
Do Not Say We Have Nothing begins in December 1990, when Sparrow’s teen-aged daughter Ai-Ming arrives in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the home of Jiang Kai’s daughter and widow. She becomes close to them, and through Ai-Ming’s storytelling about the past, the lives of the musicians and their extended families come to life. Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. It’s a large, engrossing novel.
When I talk to you
November 22, 2016
The first page of Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ memoir may put you off for its darkness. She confesses she has changed, that she is no longer the cheerful person she has been throughout her adult life (she is now in her late 80s). There’s no bitterness, she says, rather a recognition she knows what’s happening. “I don’t belong here anymore,” she writes. “Perhaps it’s an acceptance of death, or a lack of will. I’m slowing down.”
The book is only 100 pages, and she’s not writing it to you, the reader. She’s writing to her father, and that keeps the emotional burden from pulling you in too close. It’s like secretly overhearing Marceline talk to him in the next room, safely hearing difficult material without demands. So I wouldn’t put the book down just yet.
Marceline is a Holocaust survivor. When she was 15 years old, she and her father were arrested by the Vichy government’s militia at their château in southern France and deported to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. While the book is concerned with telling a Holocaust story, it is also firmly in the realm of doing what books do so well: putting us in someone else’s life to walk the proverbial mile in their shoes.
Marceline’s one-way conversation with her father, who never returned from Auschwitz, accomplishes this with meaningful clarity. She tells her father about her time in Birkenau, with particular emphasis on the small note he managed to get to her via a messenger. She remembers only the salutation and closing, not the essence of the message, and that torments her. She recalls the time they saw each other, when she marched by his camp. And she explains how she left Birkenau, spent a short time at Bergen-Belsen and then worked in a factory at Raguhn near Leipzig, Germany. When the war ended, she describes walking toward the Americans in Prague, and away from the Russians. “Where were you? All I could think about was you. But I didn’t try to find you among the others. That’s not how we’d be together.”
The effort here is not a capturing of facts, rather an intimate sharing. She knows her father will understand her life, when so many others have not understood it. That’s particularly true about coming home to a mother who wanted life to continue normally for Marceline, with a wedding and children. “If you had been there, you wouldn’t have been able to bear her questions, you would have told Mama to be quiet. You also would have told her to let me sleep on the floor. She didn’t want to understand that I couldn’t stand the comfort of a bed anymore.”
The adult years take Marceline into a career as a documentary film-maker, giving her purpose, and she finds a deep connection with her second husband, giving her the love she needs. In the last pages of the book, there is concern that “everything is getting tense again,” referring to “threats that sounded like echoes from the past” and “policemen outside of synagogues but I do not want to be someone who needs protection.”
This is profoundly moving literature, with the last pages expressing a trust Marceline brings to her telling of the story. This trust allows her to be vulnerable — and us to be immersed in an important life story. “When I talk to you, I don’t feel consoled. But I release what is clasped tightly in my heart.”
48 people, 48 agents of uncertainty
November 11, 2016
Constellation is Adrien Bosc’s first novel. It’s based on the true story of the October 28, 1949, crash of the Air France F-BAZN Lockheed Constellation passenger airplane. More than a simple re-telling of the event, Bosc connects the dots of chance decisions and unusual incidents that occurred before and after the accident. While he chillingly recreates the tragedy, he builds a theme of coincidence.
One of the passengers on the Constellation was Marcel Cerdan, the French middle-weight world boxing champion. He was taking the Paris-to-New-York flight to recapture his title at Madison Square Garden in a rematch with Jake LaMotta, a.k.a. the Bronx Bull. Cerdan originally was scheduled on a later flight, but Cerdan’s lover, the famous French singer Edith Piaf, begged him to move up his date of departure, so they could spend more time together in New York. Giving priority seating to the celebrity’s last-minute reservation, which included his manager Jo Longman and friend Paul Genser, Air France bumped a newlywed couple returning from their honeymoon and a woman. Lucky for them. The plane crashed into a mountain while attempting to land at the Santa Maria airport in the Azores, an archipelago of islands west of Portugal. None of the 37 passengers or 11 crew members survived.
Bosc delves into the lives of other passengers and their reasons for flying, including Ginette Neveu, a famous French violin virtuoso, scheduled to go on tour in America. A violin apprentice, who helped maintain her Stradivarius violin, was to accompany her, but Neveu asked him to delay his departure. He traded in his plane ticket for a trans-Atlantic crossing on an ocean liner. (The Stradivarius was never recovered from the wreckage.) Air travel in the 1940’s was a luxury, but a young spool operator in a textile mill was on the flight. Her wealthy godmother in Detroit had made her the sole heir to her estate and purchased the girl’s ticket on the doomed flight, which she otherwise would not have been able to afford. On October 26, a successful artist on a Paris-to-New-York flight gave his seat to an actress, who had too much luggage. He got transferred to the October 27 Air France F-BAZN flight. Bosc also writes about Kay Kamen, the merchandising genius behind Disney products, including the Mickey Mouse watch. He was on the flight not out of chance, but the dots rather suggest an unusual fate. Disney wanted to disengage from Kamen’s company and bring the merchandising business in-house.
The story is powerful, building on curiosity and dread all the way to the investigation into why the plane went off course. As each page is turned, there’s a stunning coming-together of Bosc’s information, with theory and conjecture, that’s carefully drawing a constellation of people and how they came to board — or be affected by — the flight. The story does have its flaws, but they don’t interfere with the enticement of this brief story. One is the author’s out-of-the-blue, awkward insertion of his voice midway through the book, and another is occasional references to places and people that aren’t clarified. “A vast confluence of causes determines the most unlikely result. Forty-eight people, forty-eight agents of uncertainty enfolded within a series of innumerable reasons, fate is always a question of perspective,” Bosc writes.
Marcel Cerdan visited a fortune-teller in Paris in early October. She warned him not to fly, but Cerdan didn’t take her seriously. She felt so strongly about her premonition that a week later she sent Cerdan a letter telling him to avoid air travel, especially on Fridays. He continued to ignore her, even though he had superstitious tendencies, such as holding fast to pregame rituals to ensure a winning game. The Air France F-BAZN Constellation crashed on a Friday.
French lessons with extraterrestrials
October 21, 2016
Throughout my adult years, I’ve sporadically tried to become fluent in French, drawn by an unrelenting desire to converse casually and flawlessly in this language I studied in high school. This has led me several times down the subscription path to French language audio magazines, such as Champs-Elysées and Bien-Dire, as well as to the print magazine Paris Match. Each time I subscribe, I enthusiastically embrace the prospect of French reading and learning, only to abandon the effort shortly after.
One year, I took private French lessons on Saturdays. I hauled myself out of bed for the early morning sessions on the other side of town, feeling more lost than proficient during the brain-twisting 90 minutes of only-speak-in-French conversations and tutorials. The accountability of meeting with a teacher kept me going, and I got to be pretty good. I was able to hold my own in a French conversation with a French-speaking customer in a coffee shop, and I could understand random French blurt-outs in movies. Even so, I let the tutoring go, tired of getting up so early and wanting my Saturday mornings at home.
Lauren Collins’ decision to learn French wasn’t a casual choice, like mine. While living in London as a staff writer for The New Yorker, she fell in love with a Frenchman from Bordeaux. They moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and married. Collins, from North Carolina, opens her new memoir about the challenges of learning French with an uneasy meeting at the Geneva apartment with a chimney sweep arriving for the annual, mandatory cleaning. She fumbles her way through the service call and later tells us she felt untethered and displaced living in a non-English speaking country. “’Language, as much as land, is a place,’ she writes. ‘To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.’”
Much of her fumbling also occurs in her communications with husband Olivier, who is fluent in English. It’s not so much about speaking French with him as it is about the two of them culturally understanding each other — Olivier’s French literalism butts up against her American enthusiasm. Some of the liveliest moments in the book occur when the two get testy with each other over nuance in meaning, such as when Collins said she would clean the kitchen, and Olivier asked why she said “clean” when she meant “tidy up”.
There’s more to this delightful memoir than personal experience. Collins expertly detours into topics about the nature of language – fascinating topics – such as the controversies of bilingualism in the United States and France; the assimilation of English words into the French language (which the French government tries to stop); untranslatable words and translations gone wrong; and the importance of not just learning the words of a language but understanding its culture, as she experienced with Olivier.
As one would expect from a writer at The New Yorker, Collins’ prose is concise and rich with investigative details. And yet it’s not clear if she ever mastered speaking French. This, of course, I wanted to know about in depth, with all the excruciating moments of confusion. I also wanted to know more about her successes and failures in conversations not just with Olivier but in public. Did she ever become good enough so as not to feel homeless surrounded by French speakers? Does she now think in French? Can she follow conversations and understand French radio and TV?
I recently signed up yet again for another French learning experience, this time with an app that uses Victor Hugo (yes, that Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables) and French-speaking extraterrestrials. They are very funny, smart and definitely not teacherly, which I like. Every day the app sends me a lesson and story, plus personalized corrections — all in French, no English — that take 10 minutes, maybe 15. So far so good. (I think it’s the ET factor that’s making the difference.) Mais, nous verrons si je peux garder avec elle. (We’ll see if I keep with it.)
The 2016 Short List for Britain’s Top Novel
October 7, 2016
Britain’s Man Booker Prize is given to the best novel of the year written in English and published in the United Kingdom. According to the Man Booker website, contenders must be novels originally written in English and published in the UK in the year of the prize, regardless of the nationality of their author. The novel must be an original work in English (not a translation) and published by a registered UK imprint; self-published novels are not eligible.
Below are this year’s six finalists. Two are from the United States. The others are from the UK and Canada. All are available in the US. The winner is to be announced on October 25.
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
The narrator from Dickens, California, (a city that’s been disappeared, which he’s trying to get back on the map) initiates the unthinkable when he reinstates slavery and segregates the local high school. But hold on — it’s a “biting satire,” according to the publisher’s website, about “a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court … It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality — the black Chinese restaurant.” The New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Publisher’s Weekly listed Beatty’s comic novel among their Best Books of 2015. Also, it won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction.
Hot Milk by Debra Levy
Levy’s previous novel, Swimming Home, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker 2012 prize, is an unforgettable story I recommend. (A family arrives at their vacation villa and finds an attractive woman swimming in the villa’s pool. And from there, it gets interesting.) Hot Milk, Levy’s new novel, promises to be similarly intriguing. Bloomsbury, the publisher, writes on their website: “Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother’s unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant — their very last chance — in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis.” From The Guardian: “This isn’t a long novel, but it is dense in the way a poem is dense, rich with meaning poured into its simple language.”
His Bloody Project
by Graeme Macrae Burnet
This novel had me from the forecasts, portending to be one of those “gripping” novels that hook you ‘til the end. Skyhorse Publishing lays out the book’s premise: “A brutal triple murder in a remote Scottish farming community in 1869 leads to the arrest of seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae. There is no question that Macrae committed this terrible act. What would lead such a shy and intelligent boy down this bloody path? And will he hang for his crime?” The narrative is multi-layered, including a collection of documents (e.g., medical reports, psychological evaluations) and the accused’s memoir. Skyhorse describes it as “both thrilling and luridly entertaining from an exceptional new voice.”
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
Ever since its publication in the United States last year, Moshfegh’s novel kept popping up and enticing me to read it – from rave reviews to being a contender for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. When it got short listed for the Man Booker I thought, okay, that’s it, I surrender. My hesitancy was only that I wasn’t in the mood for one more “girl crime” or “wicked girl” book. Now, having read this brilliant novel, I not only see why it received high marks but wonder why it didn’t win more awards. It’s a classic novel, whose perverted narrator is of the memorable kind, like Humbert Humbert (Lolita) or Frederick Clegg (The Collector). In 1964, Eileen works in a juvenile boy’s prison and lives with her constantly drunk father in a mess of a suburban home. Then, an enigmatic woman is hired by prison administration. Eileen wants to please her, and she falls into a dark situation that changes the course of her life. What’s brilliant about this book is the patience the author gives to her narrator, slowly letting her interior story unfold to a highly rewarding conclusion.
All That Man Is by David Szalay
This Man Booker nominee is a collection of nine connected short stories. From the website of the US publisher, Graywolf Press: “Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving — in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel — to understand what it means to be alive, here and now.” A few critics have mentioned running out to read Szalay’s previous novels and, by that, indicate talent not to be overlooked. The Guardian writes: “But if you are unfamiliar with [Szalay’s] work, let me urge you to read him since, on this evidence, he is one of those rare writers with skill in all the disciplines that first-rate fiction requires.”
Do Not Say We Have Nothing
by Madeleine Thien
Of all six, this novel is the one door-stopper at more than 400 pages. But it’s an epic story, and epics tend to warrant the length. From the publisher’s website: “Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations — those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming.” A talented pianist, a brilliant composer and a violin prodigy are among the characters. From the Man Booker website: “It is a story of revolutionary idealism, music, and silence, in which three musicians – the shy and brilliant composer Sparrow, the violin prodigy Zhuli, and the enigmatic pianist Kai – struggle during China’s relentless Cultural Revolution to remain loyal to one another and to the music they have devoted their lives to.”
Which one Faulkner novel should you read?
September 20, 2016
Photo From Books That Shaped America
Many readers tell me they start The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and then quickly give up because it’s too confusing. That’s not surprising. In this author’s fourth novel, which he believed to be his best, Faulkner challenges readers by shifting abruptly in time between past and present, let alone starting the book with a demanding first-person narration by the mentally challenged Benjy Compson. The novel is a 20th century classic, the one many believe they should read if they’re going to read or ‘tackle’ Faulkner. I typically recommend Absalom, Absalom! instead because it’s the novel among Faulkner’s great ones that I enjoyed most.
I have doubt, though, about that recommendation. I haven’t read all of Faulkner’s novels. Maybe I should recommend the scandalous, dark potboiler Sanctuary that Faulkner wrote to make money – and that attracted reader attention to his work for the first time. Except readers want to read an important Faulkner novel, just like they want to tackle James Joyce’s Ulysses. You can’t preen about having read Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as Young Man like you can preen about having read Ulysses – and like you can preen about having read The Sound and the Fury. It’s not escape or an unputdownable reading experience that’s at play here. It’s an accomplishment.
Photo From Sotheby’s
The doubt about my Faulkner recommendation also comes from being fascinated by Faulkner as a person. When I blurt out that I love Faulkner, it doesn’t mean I love his books, rather all that is of him: his life in Oxford, Mississippi, at his home Rowan Oak; his script writing days in Hollywood, working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and film director Howard Hawks; his long road to getting published, the richness of his imagined Yoknapatawpha County, how his work progressed and the effect literary critic and editor Malcolm Cowley* had on his reputation; his speeches and essays that speak thoughtfully and intellectually about the human condition; and his individuality.
The last page of William Faulkner: The Cofield Collection, a photography book illustrating Faulkner’s life, tells of a typewritten note appended to the back of a framed portrait of Faulkner taken by photographer Jack Cofield. The note says:
“I once read a statement by Rudyard Kipling (made, I think, in one of his last interviews in London), which I think applies to Bill Faulkner the man as well as William Faulkner the author: ‘The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.’ Bill Faulkner lived up to this principle to a T.”
Photo From Heritage Auctions
The Culture Trip’s The Nine Best Books by William Faulkner You Should Read describes the prose of Sanctuary as “considerably more fluid than a lot of Faulkner’s denser novels, and thus easier to grasp for readers less familiar with the author’s particular style of writing.” It describes The Sound and the Fury as “a notoriously arduous and disturbing read, whose often disorienting narration requires patience and persistence.”
In Flavorwire’s The 50 Best Southern Novels Ever Written, eight of the 50 are by Faulkner. No wonder they refer to him as “that titan of American letters.” Among the eight, The Sound and the Fury is called his best novel, while Absalom, Absalom! is called “the greatest Southern novel every written.” That’s enough for me to continue recommending it as the one to read. As for me, I have a desire to keep reading Faulkner, but it has to be the right time. To randomly pick up one of the titan’s complex novels as a next book to read feels like selecting a complex, expensive wine to drink when you’re thirsty. One needs to be ready to read Faulkner.
*Malcolm Cowley and the Nobel Prize: By 1944, William Faulkner was off the literary radar screen. “His seventeen books were effectively out of print and seemed likely to remain in that condition, since there was no public demand for them,” Malcolm Cowley writes in The Faulkner-Cowley File. Cowley, recognizing Faulkner’s neglected genius, brought his literature back into public focus with The Portable Faulkner, published by The Viking Press in 1946, which Cowley edited and introduced. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Speaking of that prize, I recommend reading Faulkner’s short, moving acceptance speech in which he says, “the basest of all things is to be afraid.” His words resonate today, including this famous quote:
“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
A bibliomaniac’s burden
September 1, 2016
The original “stiff” paperback
I’ve always been one to love the feel of a book: the softness of an age-old paperback with a loose cover in my hands, or the heft of an epic novel the size of a microwave on my lap. I’m also a sniffer, with an automatic impulse that pulls a book up to my nose, so I can smell the paper. It never occurred to me that pressing my nose into the middle of a book would be considered odd behavior, until a stranger stared at me with an expression of having observed a weirdo.
Given this, I suppose it’s not odd to admit that I spent precious time on a weekend afternoon in search of a more pleasing edition of a book I had started reading and had to put down because it felt too stiff in my hands.
For a long time I’ve been meaning to read Pat Barker’s acclaimed World War I Regeneration Trilogy. When I found a paperback of Regeneration, the first book in the trilogy, at a Half Price Books Clearance Sale, I took it as a sign that it was time to begin. This trilogy is considered to be among the best in World War I fiction, right up there with Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Of its three books — Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road — the trilogy’s third book was awarded the 1995 Booker Prize.
I was pretty excited to start reading, until a few pages into Regeneration I felt dissatisfied and whiny about the way the book felt: There was no softness of the pages typical to paperbacks and no flexibility to the spine. The cover felt like rigid cardboard. It was like missing the scruffiness of an old shoe or the comfort of a familiar sweatshirt. Silly as it seemed, I stopped reading and drove to the library and then a Half Price Bookstore and then a used bookstore to find a better book. (This may be a bibliomaniac’s version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.)
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- The library copy
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- The written-in copy
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- The winning copy
I’ve rejected a book to pick up a better translation, but this is the first time I’ve driven around town looking for a better tactile experience in a book. The hard-bound library book could’ve worked but, at this point, I gave in to all my pickiness and put it back because I didn’t like the abstract illustration. At Half Price Books, I found a great copy, but there was handwriting and underlining on the pages. At the used bookstore, in the history section, on the very top shelf, I found a paperback copy that worked — the softness, the flexibility and enough of a smell were present. I felt victorious.
And then this: I got to the cash register and told the bookseller that I didn’t like the paperback I already owned. Yes, here I was spending money on yet another copy of the same book. I didn’t offer any details, as I pulled my original copy out of my purse and showed it to him. He reached for it and immediately frowned. He said, “It’s very stiff.” All my feelings of silliness dissolved. I eagerly agreed and then went home to read this great book that felt just right.
Eudora Welty & Larry McMurtry
August 11, 2016
Summertime is classics TBR time for me. That is, a time to dig into those “to be read” books from the past. Maybe it’s the long summer days hearkening back to the childhood time of summer reading lists for school or reading on the porch at night to the comforting sounds of the cricket and cicadas that call me toward the classics. I don’t get to a lot of books published in the past – new books demand I keep up with them — but just a few classics is a enough.
The other day I came across the Penguin Random House list of “21 Books You’ve Been Meaning to Read.” It’s one of those lists that are fun to scroll through and see what you’ve already read. And of course, it will entice you to pick up the ones you haven’t read.
If anything, check out the Penguin Random House list for the beautiful and intriguing cover illustrations, such as the one you see here for Louisa May Alcott’s classic, Little Women.
The following two books aren’t on the Penguin Random House list, but they are on mine and now checked off. I recommend both of them.
The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
I could’ve read this short novel in a day, but I held onto it for a second day because I didn’t want to reach the point where I had to leave the story. Welty’s characters grapple with the untimely death of Judge McKelva, notably his daughter, Laurel McKelva Hand, and the Judge’s young second wife, Fay. Welty won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel in 1973, and deservedly so. The Optimist’s Daughter is fine literature and a memorable story told with undeniable talent. Welty profoundly captures Laurel’s shock, loneliness and courage as she tolerates her father’s crude, second wife behaving selfishly (and ignorantly) at the Judge’s deathbed and funeral – and also as Laurel recognizes she must let go of the past. Mississippi writer Eudora Welty is known for her southern settings, themes and characters. She’s highly acclaimed for her short story collections.The Guardian wrote in her obituary: “In spite of the countless accolades and awards her work garnered, both in the United States and abroad, she remained a regional writer, whose quietly magnificent short stories and novels are suffused with Chekhovian wit and clear-sightedness.”
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry
This year marks the 50th anniversary of this classic McMurtry novel, first published in 1966, a coming-of-age story about two boys, Duane and Sonny, graduating from high school in a go-nowhere small town, Thalia, Texas. Atmospheric, populated with quirky, memorable characters, The Last Picture Show took hold of me and reminded me why I love to read books rich in storytelling about ordinary life. Duane loves Jacy, who’s the popular, rich girl, whose parents don’t want her to marry Duane; Sonny yearns for Jacy at a distance while getting sexually involved with the high school coach’s wife. Fist fights and football games; a local café diner, pool hall and movie theater; big cars and pick-up trucks; and a lot of sex and drinking (what else is there to do?) fill the time for Duane, Sonny and Jacy. But there also are kind, wise, tired small-town folk in this wonderful book that was made into a movie in 1971 with Cybill Shepherd (Jacy), Jeff Bridges (Duane) and Cloris Leachman (coach’s wife).
If you need assistance selecting classics you might want to read, I highly recommend Michael Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure. As the dust jacket says: “This is not your father’s — or your mother’s — list of classics. In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world’s most entertaining books.”
Good books coming in August
July 28, 2016
To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey
Due out next week, this new novel by Alaskan resident Eowyn Ivey is an epic tale set in her state at the end of the 19th century. A husband ventures out on an expedition to explore unknown southern territory and keeps a daily journal. His wife, back home, embarks on her own adventure of discovery by exploring the art of photography. Much that I’ve read about this fictional tale promises an engrossing read.
From the publisher’s plot description: “In the winter of 1885, decorated war hero Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small band of men on an expedition that has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River and pierce the vast, untamed Alaska Territory. Leaving behind Sophie, his newly pregnant wife, Colonel Forrester records his extraordinary experiences in hopes that his journal will reach her if he doesn’t return…”
Kirkus Reviews gives the novel a star rating, saying “…this is an exceptionally well-turned adventure tale, rich with Allen’s confrontations with brutal snowstorms and murky underwater beasts and Sophie’s more interior efforts to learn her craft and elbow local busybodies out of her way.”
Publisher’s Weekly also starred the new book, saying Ivey’s fictional tale is “an entrancing, occasionally chilling, depiction of turn-of-the-century Alaska.”
Watch this YouTube video summary of the book, describing it as “a sweeping epic Alaskan tale with just a touch of magic.”
The Golden Age by Joan London
The Golden Age of this new novel’s title refers not to a period of time, rather a polio clinic in Perth, Australia, where teenagers Frank and Elsa fall in love and together face the challenges of their crippling disease, adolescence and the adults in their lives. First published in Australia, The Golden Age has won several literary awards and will be available in the U.S. mid-August from Europa Editions.
My research about this forthcoming book intrigues me not only for its setting and premise but also for Frank’s family as Jewish refugees from World War II Hungary. The story entices with the promises of an involving plot not only about the teenagers but also regarding their parents. From the publisher’s plot description: “Elsa’s mother Margaret, who has given up everything to be a perfect mother, must reconcile her hopes and dreams with her daughter’s sickness. Frank’s parents, transplants to Australia from a war-torn Europe, are isolated newcomers in a country that they do not love and that does not seem to love them. Frank’s mother Ida, a renowned pianist in Hungary, refuses to allow the western deserts of Australia to become her home. But her husband, Meyer, slowly begins to free himself from the past and integrate into a new society.”
Kirkus Reviews says, “Every character, however minor, comes to life in these pages.”
Publisher’s Weekly says, “It is pretty much perfect.”
The Nix by Nathan Hill
The page count on this debut novel clocks in at more than 600 pages. Such a size always provokes me to consider if the investment of time will be worth it. I’m leaning toward a big YES for The Nix, given the positive forecasts and also for this comment by Kirkus Reviews: “There are hints of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys as Hill, by way of his narrative lead, wrestles alternately converging and fugitive stories onto the page, stories that range from the fijords of Norway to the streets of ‘Czechago’ in the heady summer of 1968.” I loved Wonder Boys. The protagonist in The Nix similarly is a college professor and stalled writer.
From the publisher’s plot description: “It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson … hasn’t seen [his mother] in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s re-appeared, having committed an absurd crime [throwing rocks at a presidential candidate] that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she’s facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel’s help.”
As did Kirkus Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly gave the novel a star while The Huffington Post listed The Nix among 2016 summer books not to miss. New York’s Strand Bookstore lists the forthcoming novel among the 16 books we can’t wait to read this summer.
Blockbuster sales for this crime novel
July 21, 2016
Six Four has caught my attention not as much for the story as for the fact that it sold one million copies in six days in Japan, according to its publisher (via The Guardian). Author Hideo Yokoyama is hugely popular in Japan for his crime novels and often likened to Stieg Larsson, the Swedish author who penned The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. From The Independent: “Like Stieg Larsson, with whom he has been (unhelpfully) compared, he is a driven workaholic and, like the late Swedish writer, suffered a heart attack after working continuously without breaks for many hours.”
The plot of this immense book (640 pages) is typical crime-novel fare. In 1989, a seven-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl was kidnapped, ransomed and murdered. The killer was never identified or found, and the Japanese public neither forgot nor forgave the botched investigation. In 2002, Inspector Yoshinobu Mikami must arrange a visit by the police commissioner to the girl’s family on the latest anniversary of the crime. Mikami is the police press director. He takes a look at the case file and discovers an anomaly. From the publisher’s book description: “He could never imagine what he would uncover. He would never have looked if he’d known what he would find.”
From what I’ve read about the book in several publications, much of the story is spent delving into police bureaucracy, hierarchy, procedure and corruption. While such detail can be antithetical to what one would expect in a page-turning crime thriller, it sets this book apart. Reviewers agree time invested in the long story is well worth it, claiming readers will find themselves involved, gripped and rewarded. The Guardian calls Six Four a “binge read.”
The Times Literary Supplement writes,“The denouement is surprising, but there are no neat endings to the various strands of this well-written epic tale, which reads beautifully in Jonathan Lloyd-Davies’s translation. Six Four is far more a monument to the idiosyncrasies of Japanese bureaucratic life than it is a simple detective story.”
The Japan Times writes: “Yokoyama’s strength lies in his portrayal of the police: the stifling hierarchy, the politics and duplicity Mikami has to navigate. In true police-procedural fashion Six Four takes its time to reach its conclusion, all the while fleshing out characters who are headed for a denouement that is as original as it is ingenious.”
The Guardian writes: “The plot would grip in any language but, for readers in the west, there is extra fascination in Six Four being not just a police procedural but a guide book to Japan. Some of the local details – such as the cops’ repeated concerns with ‘losing face’ – might have been rejected by an English writer on Japan as too stereotypical. Other material, though, is educationally exotic.”
All of this fascinates me and, given the time, I’d jump into this book for the adventure of it. The Guardian writes: “It’s very different, in tone, narrative and style, from almost anything else out there.” I don’t often read that – or say that myself – about a book. Six Four is Yokoyama’s sixth novel and the first to be translated into English. It’s not been published by a U.S. publisher, but it’s released in Britain by Quercus, translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies. You can order it online. Maybe by the time – and if – it arrives in the U.S., I’ll have reading space and be ready for it.
2016 International Award Winners
June 23, 2016
It’s always fun to check out what the literary community believes is “best in show” for novels. Here are three major international awards and their winners, recently announced.
International Dublin Literary Award
Akhil Sharma wrote seven thousand pages over twelve and a half years to produce his 224 page novel Family Life. The story is based on the author’s own experience, according to an article he wrote for The New Yorker. (The article reveals the technical difficulties Mr. Sharma encountered writing the book.) Nominations for this award, formerly known as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, are received from public libraries in cities all over the world. Family Life was selected from 160 contenders nominated by librarians in 118 cities and 43 countries. The prestigious award recognizes both writers and translators. Mr. Sharma is the third American author to win the International Dublin Literary Award in its 21 year history. Here’s the plot summary of his novel, from the publisher’s description: “Growing up in Delhi in 1978, eight-year-old Ajay Mishra and his older brother Birju play cricket on the streets, eagerly waiting for the day they can join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more—until tragedy strikes. Young Ajay prays to a God he envisions as Superman, searching for direction amid the ruins of his family’s new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.”
Man Booker International Award
The 2016 Man Booker International Prize has a new focus this year – to encourage more publishing and reading of quality fiction in translation. The prize money, divided equally between the author and the translator, is now awarded annually for a single work of fiction. Prior to 2016, the Man Booker International Award highlighted one living writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage and was announced every two years. The 2016 award went to South Korean author Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith for The Vegetarian. The novel’s spare prose tells an unsettling story of a woman who, after a disturbing dream, stops eating meat. Her husband and family react with shock, anger and disapproval, as if Yeong-hye has committed an unforgivable crime. What unfolds is a difficult family story about Yeong-hye’s emotional demise and her family’s controlling abuse and angry incomprehension. From the Man Booker International Award website: “As her rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, Yeong-hye spirals further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming – impossibly, ecstatically – a tree. Fraught, disturbing, and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire, and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.”
Baileys Women’s Prize (formerly the Orange Prize)
The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction is the UK’s annual international book award for fiction written by a woman. According to the award website, founded in 1996, the Prize was set up to celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women throughout the world. This year’s winner — The Glorious Heresies written by Irish writer Lisa McInerney — is about life on the fringes of Ireland’s post-crash society. Set in the dark, underbelly of the city of Cork, the story brings together several misfits after a murder, including a 15-year-old drug dealer, his alcoholic father, a prostitute and a gangland boss. From the publisher’s press release: “In this gritty, darkly comic novel, McInerney crafts a twisted web of shifting loyalties and betrayals while interrogating notions of salvation, shame, and the legacy of Ireland’s past attitudes towards sex and family. She quietly explores money, violence, and the unbreakable bonds we form with each other through the story of one accidental murder and its rippling effects on five people who exist on the fringes of Ireland’s post-crash society.” From a review in Britain’s Telegraph: “The Glorious Heresies is a spectacular debut … Tough and tender, gothic and lyrical, it is a head-spinning, stomach-churning state-of-the-nation novel about a nation falling apart.” The Guardian’s more tempered review says “the energy level flags in the final third of the book, as the characters keep repeating the same patterns of behaviour to less compelling effect.” The book is scheduled for release in the United States in August.
