20 Books of Summer, 14–16: Polly Atkin, Nan Shepherd and Susan Allen Toth
I’m still plugging away at the challenge. It’ll be down to the wire, but I should finish and review all 20 books by the 31st! Today I have a chronic illness memoir, a collection of poetry and prose pieces, and a reread of a cosy travel guide.
Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better by Polly Atkin (2023)
I was heartened to see this longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. It was a perfect opportunity to recognize the disabled/chronically ill experience of nature and the book achieves just what the award has recognised in recent years: the braiding together of life writing and place-based observation. (Wainwright has also done a great job on diversity this year: there are three books by BIPOC and five by women on the nature writing shortlist alone.)
Polly Atkin knew something was different about her body from a young age. She broke bones all the time, her first at 18 months when her older brother ran into her on his bicycle. But it wasn’t until her thirties that she knew what was wrong – Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and haemochromatosis – and developed strategies to mitigate the daily pain and the drains on her energy and mobility. “Correct diagnosis makes lives bearable,” she writes. “It gives you access to the right treatment. It gives you agency.”
The book assembles long-ish fragments, snippets from different points of her past alternating with what she sees on rambles near her home in Grasmere. She writes in some depth about Lake District literature: Thomas De Quincey as well as the Wordsworths – Atkin’s previous book is a biography of Dorothy Wordsworth that spotlights her experience with illness. In describing the desperately polluted state of Windermere, Atkin draws parallels with her condition (“Now I recognise my body as a precarious ecosystem”). Although she spurns the notion of the “Nature Cure,” swimming is a valuable therapy for her.
Theme justifies form here: “This is the chronic life, lived as repetition and variance, as sedimentation of broken moments, not as a linear progression.” For me, there was a bit too much particularity; if you don’t connect to the points of reference, there’s no way in and the danger arises of it all feeling indulgent. Besides, by the time I opened this I’d already read two Ehlers-Danlos memoirs (All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett and Floppy by Alyssa Graybeal) and another reference soon came my way in The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke. So overfamiliarity was a problem. And by the time I forced myself to pick this off of my set-aside shelf and finish it, I’d read Nina Lohman’s stellar The Body Alone. For those newer to reading about chronic illness, though, especially if you also have an interest in the Lakes, it could be an eye-opener.
With thanks to Sceptre (Hodder) for the free copy for review.
Selected Prose & Poetry by Nan Shepherd (2023)
I’d read and enjoyed Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, which has surged in popularity as an early modern nature writing classic thanks to Robert Macfarlane et al. I’m not sure I’d go as far as the executor of the Nan Shepherd Estate, though, who describes her in the Preface as “Taylor Swift in hiking boots.” The pieces reprinted here are from her one published book of poems, In the Cairngorms, and the mixed-genre collection Wild Geese. There is also a 28-page “novella,” Descent from the Cross. After World War I, Elizabeth, a workers’ rights organiser for a paper mill, marries a shell-shocked veteran who wants to write a book but isn’t sure he has either the genius or the dedication. It’s interesting that Shepherd would write about a situation where the wife has the economic upper hand, but the tragedy of the sickly failed author put me in mind of George Gissing or D.H. Lawrence, so didn’t feel fresh. Going by length alone, I would have called this a short story, but I understand why it would be designated a novella, for the scope.
None of the miniature essays – field observations and character studies – stood out to me. About half of the book is given over to poetry. As with the nature writing, there is a feeling of mountain desolation. There are a lot of religious references and hints of the mystical, as in “The Bush,” which opens “In that pure ecstasy of light / The bush is burning bright. / Its substance is consumed away / And only form doth stay”. It’s a mixed bag: some feels very old-fashioned and sentimental, with every other line or, worse, every line rhyming, and some archaic wording and rather impenetrable Scots dialect. It could have been written 100 years before, by Robert Burns if not William Blake. But every so often there is a flash of brilliance. “Blackbird in Snow” is quite a nice one, and reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush.” I even found the cryptic lines from “Real Presence” that inspired a song on David Gray’s Skellig. My favourite poem by far was:
Overall, this didn’t engage me; it’s only for Shepherd fanatics and completists. (Won from Galileo Publishers in a Twitter giveaway)
England As You Like It: An Independent Traveler’s Companion by Susan Allen Toth (1995)
A reread. As I was getting ready to go overseas for the first time in the summer of 2003, Toth’s trilogy of memoirs whetted my appetite for travel in Britain. (They’re on my Landmark Books in My Life, Part II list.) This is the middle book and probably the least interesting in that it mostly recounts stays in particular favourite locations, such as Dorset, the Highlands, and various sites in Cornwall. However, I’ve never forgotten her “thumbprint theory,” which means staying a week or more in an area no larger than her thumb covers on a large-scale map, driving an hour or less for day trips. Not for her those cram-it-all-in trips where you race through multiple countries in a week (I have American friends who did Paris, London and Rome within six days, or five countries in eight days; blame it on stingy vacation policies, I guess). Instead, she wants to really bed into one place and have the time to make serendipitous discoveries such as an obscure museum or a rare opening of a private garden.
I most liked the early general chapters about how to make air travel bearable, her obsession with maps, her preference for self-catering, and her tendency to take home edible souvenirs. Of course, all the “Floating Facts” are hopelessly out-of-date. This being the early to mid-1990s, she had to order paper catalogues to browse cottage options (I still did this for honeymoon prep in 2006–7) and make international phone calls to book accommodation. She recommends renting somewhere from the National Trust or Landmark Trust. Ordnance Survey maps could be special ordered from the British Travel Bookshop in New York City. Entry fees averaged a few pounds. It’s all so quaint! An Anglo-American time capsule of sorts. I’ve always sensed a kindred spirit in Toth, and those whose taste runs toward the old-fashioned will probably also find her a charming tour guide. I’ve also reviewed the third book, England for All Seasons. (Free from The Book Thing of Baltimore)
Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan (Blog Tour)
I read Donal Ryan’s first three books – two short novels and a short story collection – but then lost track of his career. When I heard he was publishing a sequel of sorts to his terrific The Spinning Heart, I couldn’t resist. “Madness comes circling around. Ten-year cycles, as true as the sun will rise,” one character remarks here. Set a decade on, this replicates the structure of Ryan’s debut novella: 21 short chapters, each with a different first-person narrator. The Spinning Heart (see my BookBrowse review) took place in the wake of the financial crisis and centered on murder and kidnapping cases – both of which still resonate 10 years later. I read it as an e-ARC and can’t go back to check, but my impression is that Heart, Be at Peace focuses on many of the same characters, if not the same exact set and order.
Once again, Bobby Mahon is the closest thing to a protagonist. His construction business has recovered from the crash, but he still struggles with guilt and anxiety, including when a so-called friend tries to blackmail him over a compromising photograph. The main plot, which involves a small-town drug ring, pulls in so many people and incidents. You piece it all together through hints that accrete gradually. More so than parsing the Limerick organized crime network, though, the pleasure is encountering all the fully realized but very different voices. You can hear them in your head, the Irish accent stronger in some and the speech more slang-filled in others. Each narrative is self-contained but they also link together.
In what is quite a gritty, macho book, the women’s stories stand out all the more. Lily has ancient knowledge of spells that she’d love to pass on to her granddaughter, yet is dismayed when Millicent only wants the magic to bind her no-good boyfriend to her. Hillary is a defence lawyer whose clients never do themselves any favours with their behaviour and dress. Fathers and sons are key, as in this novel’s predecessor, but Ryan also features mothers, daughters and wives who often know more than they let on. Another interesting voice is that of Vasya, a Russian immigrant who chooses to live in an outdoor encampment.
It can be a challenge to keep track of who’s who and how everything is connected. Overall, this feels less fresh and timely than The Spinning Heart. But it’s certainly possible to enjoy it even if you haven’t read its companion novel. It reminded me especially of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, and you may also find the style reminiscent of Colin Barrett or Caoilinn Hughes. So many Irish writers are masters of voice and tone, and the same is true of Donal Ryan. Do try his work if you haven’t already. He has eight books to choose from now!
With thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and Doubleday for the free copy for review.
Buy Heart, Be at Peace from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was delighted to be part of the blog tour for Heart, Be at Peace. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will appear soon.
#WITMonth, Part I: Novellas by Eva Baltasar and Françoise Sagan
I’m starting off my Women in Translation month coverage with mini responses to two novellas: one Catalan and one French; both about disaffected women trying to work out what they want from life.
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar (2022; 2024)
[Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches]
I’d been vaguely attracted by descriptions of the Spanish poet’s novels Permafrost and Boulder, which are also about lesbians in odd situations. Mammoth is the third book in a loose trilogy. Its 24-year-old narrator is so desperate for a baby that she’s decided to have unprotected sex with men until a pregnancy results. In the meantime, her sociology project at nursing homes comes to an end and she moves from Barcelona to a remote farm where she develops subsistence skills and forms an interdependent relationship with the gruff shepherd. “I’d been living in a drowning city, and I need this – the restorative silence of a decompression chamber. … my past is meaningless, and yet here, in this place, there is someone else’s past that I can set up and live in awhile.” For me this was a peculiar combination of distinguished writing (“The city pounces on the still-pale light emerging from the deep sea and seizes it with its lucrative forceps”) but absolutely repellent story, with a protagonist whose every decision makes you want to throttle her. An extended scene of exterminating feral cats certainly didn’t help matters. I’d be wary of trying Baltasar again.
With thanks to And Other Stories for the proof copy for review.
Aimez-vous Brahms… by Françoise Sagan (1959; 1960)
[Translated from the French by Peter Wiles]
At age 39, divorced interior decorator Paule is “passionately concerned with her beauty and battling with the transition from young to youngish woman”. (Ouch. But true.) It’s an open secret that her partner Roger is always engaged in a liaison with a young woman; people pity her and scorn Roger for his infidelity. But when Paule has a dalliance with a client’s son, 25-year-old lawyer Simon, a double standard emerges: “they had never shown her the mixture of contempt and envy she was going to arouse this time.” Simon is an idealist, accusing her of “letting love go by, of neglecting your duty to be happy”, but he’s also indolent and too fond of drink. Paule wonders if she’s expected too much from an affair. “Everyone advised a change of air, and she thought sadly that all she was getting was a change of lovers: less bother, more Parisian, so common”.
I was by turns reminded of Chéri by Colette, In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor, and even The Graduate (“Mrs. Robinson,” anyone?). Simon asks the title question to invite Paule to a concert; that she has to ponder it carefully tells her she’s “losing herself, losing track of herself”. But it’s all too easy for the status quo to be reinstated after a brave act. Middle-aged woman makes bid for freedom but ultimately nothing changes: same plot as The Funeral Cryer and any number of other books, but this was so much better. How did Sagan manage such insight at age 24 (and this was her fourth book)?! While not quite as memorable as Bonjour Tristesse, this is another incisive slice of fiction that has aged well apart from using “sodomite” and “Negress” as matter-of-fact terms for bit players. I’d read anything else I can find by Sagan. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Summery Reading, Part I: Heatwave, Summer Fridays
Here we are between short, bearable heat waves. As the climate changes, I’m more grateful than ever to live somewhere with reasonably mild and predictable weather; I don’t miss the swampy humidity of the Maryland summers I grew up with one bit. Today I have some brief thoughts on a first pair of summer-themed reads I picked up last month: a queasy coming-of-age novella about French teenagers’ self-destructive actions on a camping holiday; and a fun, nostalgic romance novel set in New York City at the turn of the millennium.
Heatwave by Victor Jestin (2019; 2021)
[Translated from the French by Sam Taylor]
Victor Jestin was in his early twenties when he wrote this debut novella, which won the Prix Femina des Lycéens and was longlisted for the CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger. It opens, memorably, with Leonard’s confession: “Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing. He was strangled by the ropes of a swing … Oscar was not a child. At seventeen, you don’t die like that by accident.” A suicide, then: fitting given the other dangerous behaviours – drinking and promiscuity – rife among the gang of teenagers at this campsite in the South of France. What turns it into a crime is that Leonard, addled by alcohol and the heat, doesn’t report the death but buries Oscar in the sand and pretends nothing happened.
The rest of the book takes place over about 24 hours, the final day of a two-week vacation. Leo stumbles about as if in a trance, outwardly relating to his family, a male friend who seems to have a crush on him, and girls he’d like to sleep with, but all the while inwardly wondering what to do next. “I hadn’t made many stupid mistakes in my seventeen years of life. This one was difficult to understand. It all happened too fast; I felt powerless.” This is interesting enough if you like unreliable teenage narrators or are drawn by the critics’ comparisons to Françoise Sagan – accurate for the sense of sleepwalking toward disaster. One could easily breeze through the 104 pages during one hot afternoon. It didn’t stand out to me particularly, though. (Little Free Library) 
Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell (2024)
I was a big fan of Rindell’s first two stylish historical novels, The Other Typist and Three-Martini Lunch. She seemed to go off the boil with the next two, which I skipped, and now she’s back with an unexpected foray into romance, a genre I almost never read. The cover’s whimsical (nonexistent) birds and Ryan Gosling-like male figure make the novel seem frothier than it actually is, though we’re definitely in classic romcom territory here. The comparisons to You’ve Got Mail are apt in that the main character, Sawyer, strikes up a flirtation over e-mail and instant messaging. She’s a New York City publishing assistant whose ambitions threaten her day job when she has several poems accepted by The Paris Review. Nick, her correspondent, teases and cheers her on in equal measure. The complicated thing is that Sawyer is engaged to Charles, her college sweetheart, and Nick is dating Kendra. Nick and Sawyer initially became digital pen pals because they suspected that their partners, who work together at a law firm, were having an affair; they never expected sparks to fly.
It’s overlong and reasonably predictable, but I enjoyed the languid unfolding of the romance over the weeks of summer 1999. It was truly a simpler time when you had to dial up and wait for an inbox to load instead of having it in your pocket 24/7. Every Friday afternoon, Sawyer and Nick do touristy things like taste-test hotdogs and slushees, ride the Staten Island ferry back and forth all day, and visit little-known bars and restaurants Nick knows through his amateur rock band. They try to convince themselves that these are not dates. It’s like time outside of time for them, and a chance to sightsee in one’s own town. Eventually, though, Sawyer has to face reality. The 2001 framing story reflects the fact that, after the events of 9/11, many asked themselves what they really wanted out of life. This was cute but doesn’t quite live up to, e.g., Romantic Comedy. (Read via Edelweiss) 
Any “heat” or “summer” books for you this year?
20 Books of Summer, 11–13: Campbell, Julavits, Lu
Two solid servings of women’s life writing plus a novel about a Chinese woman stuck in roles she’s not sure she wants anymore.
Thunderstone: A true story of losing one home and discovering another by Nancy Campbell (2022)
Just before Covid hit, Campbell’s partner Anna had a partially disabling stroke. They had to adjust to lockdown and the rigours of Anna’s at-home care at once. It was complicated in that Campbell was already halfway out the door: after 10 years, their relationship had run its course and she knew it was time to go, but guilt lingered about abandoning Anna at her most vulnerable (“How dare I leave someone who needed me”). That is the backdrop to a quiet book largely formed of a diary spanning June to September 2021. Campbell recounts settling into a caravan by the canal and railway line in Oxford, getting plenty of help from friends and neighbours but also finding her own inner resources and enjoying her natural setting.
The title refers to a fossil that has been considered a talisman in various cultures, and she needed the good luck during a period that involved accidental carbon monoxide poisoning and surgery for an ovarian abnormality (but it didn’t protect her books, which were all destroyed in a leaking shipping container – the horror!). I most enjoyed the longer entries where she muses on “All the potential lives I moved on from” during 20 years in Oxford and elsewhere, which makes me think that I would have preferred a more traditional memoir by her. Covid narratives feel really dated now, unfortunately. (New (bargain) purchase from Hungerford Bookshop with birthday voucher)
Directions to Myself: A Memoir by Heidi Julavits (2023)
Julavits is a novelist and founding editor of The Believer. I loved her non-standard diary, The Folded Clock, back in 2017, so jumped at the chance to read her new memoir but then took more a year over reading it. The U.S. subtitle, “A Memoir of Four Years,” captures the focus: the change in her son from age five to age nine – from little boy to full-fledged individual. In later sections he sounds so like my American nephew with his Fortnite obsession and lawyerly levels of argumentation and self-justification. A famous author once told Julavits that writers should not have children because each one represents a book they will not write. This book is a rebuttal: something she could not have written without having had her son. Home is a New York City apartment near the Columbia University campus where she teaches – in fact, directly opposite a dorm at which rape allegations broke out – but more often the setting is their Maine vacations, where coastal navigation is a metaphor for traversing life.
Mostly the memoir takes readers through everyday conversations the author has with friends and family about situations of inequality or harassment. Through her words she tries to gently steer her son towards more open-minded ideas about gender roles. She also entrances him and his sleepover friends with a real-life horror story about being chased through the French countryside by a man in a car. The tenor of her musings appealed to me, but already the details are fading. I suspect this will mean much more to a parent.
With thanks to Bloomsbury for the free copy for review.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu (2023)
The title character holds a traditional position in her Chinese village, performing mourning at ceremonies for the dead. It’s a steady source of income for her and her husband, but her career choice has stigma attached: “Now that I brought bad luck and I smelt of the dead, nobody would step into our house to play mah-jong or chat.” Exotic as the setup might seem at first, it underpins a familiar story of a woman caught in frustrating relationships and situations. A very readable but plain style to this McKitterick Prize winner.
With thanks to the Society of Authors for the free copy.
July Releases, II: Howard Norman, Andrés N. Ordorica, Neil D. A. Stewart
Three more July releases after yesterday’s Disability Pride Month special. Today is all fiction, but with rather different settings: Atlantic Canada, upstate New York and Mexico, and a London restaurant. The time period ranges from the last days of the First World War to 2013. The themes? Murder, plagues, accidental deaths and gourmet food in addition to those perennial subjects of finding love and coming to terms with identity.
Come to the Window by Howard Norman
This was my eighth book by Norman and felt most similar to My Darling Detective and Next Life Might Be Kinder. Nothing much happens in the Nova Scotia fishing village of Parrsboro – until the night in April 1918 that Elizabeth Frame shoots dead her husband of 11 hours and throws the revolver into the blowhole of a beached whale. The story is a boon for Toby Havenshaw, a journalist with the Halifax Evening Mail, and quickly becomes an obsession. It’s never a whodunit so much as a why as Toby reports on the trial and follows Elizabeth when she goes on the lam. The sordid case just keeps getting stranger, drawing in bigamy, illegitimate pregnancy, and so on.
But Norman never treats all this too seriously; it is almost a tragicomic foil to the more consequential matters of world war and an influenza pandemic, which soon has Atlantic Canada in its grip as well. Toby’s wife, Amelia, is a hospital surgeon operating on returning veterans. She’s so quietly capable she makes Toby look a dunce, and their everyday rapport and unusual road to parenthood in their late thirties are charming. I also enjoyed Norman’s Dickensian naming (Bevel Cousins, Dr. S. S. Particulate) and literary references: the title phrase is from Matthew Arnold, and L. M. Montgomery gets a mention.
No doubt Norman wrote this as a Covid response; the parallel with the Spanish flu has been irresistible for many. He really captures the feeling of living through a uniquely terrible world situation. However, I’m not sure this short novel will prove memorable. Such has been true for his other recent novels, which pale in comparison with The Bird Artist. (Read via Edelweiss)
How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica
I learned about this through the Observer’s 10 best new novelists feature and requested a copy via a Northern Fiction Alliance online showcase. There’s a sweet Heartstopper vibe to the story of an unlikely romance blooming between Daniel de la Luna and Sam Morris, his roommate at the University of Cayuga (= Cornell). Sam is a hunky jock while Daniel is a nervous would-be writer who has only just become comfortable with calling himself gay.
Ordorica, also a poet, immediately sets an elegiac tone by revealing Sam’s untimely death soon after the end of their freshman year. To cope with losing the love of his life, Daniel writes this text as if it’s an extended letter to Sam, recounting the course of their relationship – from strangers to best friends to secret lovers – and telling of his summer spent in Mexico exploring his family history, especially the parallels between his life and that of his late uncle and namesake, who was brave enough to be openly gay in the early days of the AIDS crisis.
Unfortunately, solid ideas and a warm-hearted approach are swamped by a host of problems. Ordorica writes a pretty good sex scene but the rest is clichéd, purple or awkward prose (“I snapped photo after photo of you, laughing all the while from your infectious elation”; “I felt unmoored, unsettled, and utterly liminal, in a state of flux”; “I sank into my pillows, muffling my tears as my mind floundered into even deeper waves of sadness”) and stiff dialogue. The cultural references and terminology feel all wrong for 2011, let alone for the 1988 diary entries of Uncle Daniel’s. The Mexico subplot is too tidy and Daniel’s breakdown after news of Sam’s death, which appears to involve full-blown alcohol addiction, is implausibly resolved within a chapter. The characterization of the secondary figures, particularly Daniel’s trio of queer Cayuga friends, is tissue thin.
It seems likely that Ordorica channeled much of his own experience into this queer coming-of-age narrative. He may have been aiming for star-crossed lovers and a groundbreaking own voices story, but this is run-of-the-mill stuff – more like a college student’s first draft than a finished book.
With thanks to Saraband for the proof copy for review.
Test Kitchen by Neil D. A. Stewart
I spied this in one of Susan’s monthly previews. (If you haven’t already subscribed to her blog, do so at once. You’ll never be short of ideas for what to read.) Midgard is a fine dining restaurant with a tree in the middle whose multiple small courses evoke childhood memories and disguise one foodstuff as another. The London establishment earned two Michelin stars and has a perpetual waiting list, but as a news piece at the start presages, it will be forced to close its doors within five years after a series of disasters. Every other chapter introduces another set of diners, table by table: a first date, a reunion of old friends, a 12-year-old foodie trying to forestall his parents’ divorce, a restaurant critic and her freeloading acquaintances, and a solitary man who should really get that face wound seen to.
Many of these situations aren’t what they seem; the same goes for the intervening glimpses into the kitchen. Our host for these is Marley, the most recently hired waitress, who fled a chaotic home life in Melbourne. She didn’t show for work today; she’s in hiding, yet knows everything about the staff dynamics so is a perfect tour guide. There’s a mixture of nerves and bravado running through the kitchen as dinner starts. A knife accident, a food allergy, and a champagne cork hitting a customer are only the beginning of the evening’s mishaps. While I was initially drawn to the structure, which is almost like a linked short story collection, and I can’t resist a restaurant setting, the narrative trickery and the way that the mood evolves from slapstick to grotesque put me off. I enjoyed individual vignettes, but the whole didn’t come together as satisfyingly as in Sweetbitter or Service, among others.
With thanks to Corsair (Hachette) for the free copy for review.
Any July releases you’d recommend?
July Releases, I: Books by Nina Lohman and Ricky Ray for Disability Pride Month
The Wellcome Book Prize (for health- and medicine-related books) and the Barbellion Prize (for representations of disability and/or chronic illness) are much missed, but I continue to be drawn to their highlighted themes in my reading. This is the first year that I’ve been aware of July as Disability Pride Month, though it’s been a thing since 1990 in the USA and 2015 in the UK. My first set of July releases – I have reviews of three novels coming up tomorrow – consists of a nonlinear memoir interrogating life with chronic pain and a chronically ill poet’s collection in which an old dog is an example of grace through suffering.
The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain by Nina Lohman
For well over a decade, Nina Lohman has endured Chronic Daily Headaches – when a doctor presented her with this phrase, she remarks, it was not so much a diagnosis as a description. Having a clinical term for her extreme pain did nothing to solve it; no treatment she has tried has helped much either, from pharmaceuticals to acupuncture. (Doctors think they’re breaking new ground if they suggest ice packs or elevating her neck.) Like Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, this documents a quest with no natural end. Lohman’s health fluctuates, and medical professionals and family and friends minimize her pain because she is able to pass as well, to carry out the daily tasks of raising two children.
The subtitle is apt for a work that is fragmentary and not driven by chronology. Had Cataloguing Pain not already been taken (by Allison Blevins), it might have been a perfect title. Some of Lohman’s short pieces read like poems, including erasure poems based on her medical notes. Repeated headings demonstrate a desire to organise her illness so as to make sense of it: “A Primer,” “Classifications” and “Perhaps” musings. She dwells on the names of things – shades of colours, groups of animals – while she longs for a vocabulary tailored to her own circumstances. Imagined monologues by doctors, friends and her husband (“He”) show pain has not turned her insular; she has empathy even when people act in hurtful ways.
One aspect of the book that I found particularly interesting is that Lohman, though not raised with Christian beliefs, studied theology at university level. Doctrines of the Fall bringing anguish and the Cross offering atonement are logical to her yet feel irrelevant to her situation. She bristles when a religious friend suggests that pain might be “her cross to bear.” Lohman admits she has given up hope on ever being free of pain, so finds resonance with poet Christian Wiman, who has been living with cancer for decades and whose work is equally infused with pain and faith.
It’s a journalistic as well as personal narrative, in the tradition of Anne Boyer, Sinéad Gleeson and Susan Sontag, shifting between modes and registers as Lohman gives a history of opiates, records of her pregnancies, and précis of philosophical understandings of suffering. “Theorizing can only take me so far,” she acknowledges, toward comprehending bodily experiences that defy language. And yet she employs words exquisitely, marshalling metaphors though they’re inadequate. The tone flows from enraged to resigned to cynical and back as she depicts the helplessness of women in a medical system that ignores their pain. Especially if you have enjoyed work by any of the authors I mention above, I highly recommend this debut: it’s sure to be one of my books of the year.
Published by the University of Iowa Press. With thanks to Nectar Literary for the free advanced e-copy for review.
The Soul We Share: Life with Earth and an Old Brown Dog by Ricky Ray
New England poet Ricky Ray describes himself as an “eco-mystic” and is the author of several previous works. Maura Dooley chose this as the Aryamati Collection Prize winner in 2023. As in Birds Knit My Ribs Together by Phil Barnett, nature is a source of comfort in a life complicated by chronic illness. In “Pain: 8 on a Scale out of 10,” Ray explains how “Some days, I never make it out of my head, / that coal-eyed melon … The impinged nerves crack their whips / within my animal pelt”. An accidental overdose and depression are matter-of-fact components of the poet’s history. While uxorious, he regrets that he may never become a father. And yet this couplet expresses deep pleasure in life:
(Dis)ability
Some days, my body is so beautiful
I can’t believe I get to live here.
His elderly rescue dog Addie is his beloved companion, and the delight she takes in physical existence despite advancing cancer is a model to him: “she still has a lot / to teach me about aging, about ignoring it, about how to throw my body— / even when it fails me, even when it hurts like hell—headlong into joy.” Multiple poems remember particular walks with her, such as in a Connecticut forest. He even gets a tutorial from her in how to dig a hole. Later on, he remarks as if to her, “Forgive me, I’m human, / we’re slow to learn, quick to forget— / it could be said we live too long / to appreciate each drop of time in the heart’s well.”
If his primary engagement with the nonhuman world is via a pet, Ray also widens the scope to include environmental plight: “you look up and extinction’s / already guzzling half the bestiary, / You think, / God, what have I done? / And the God in you answers: / harm, now what will you do?” This sense of responsibility meeting resolution echoes throughout the book. Ache is a spur to seek remedies; “I learned that hurt inducts all painfolk as conspirators // in the craft of healing.” The prose poems were a bit long and ranty for me (e.g., “Identity Earth: A Brief Biography of Our Planetary Self” goes on for more than six pages) and overall I found the book a little sentimental and New Age-adjacent. However, the poems about Addie are undeniably touching, and perfect for fans of Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs.
With thanks to Fly on the Wall Press for the free copy for review.
Have you read anything to tie into Disability Pride Month?
20 Books of Summer, 10: Babel by R. F. Kuang (2022)
I substituted this in as my one doorstopper of the challenge after I failed with the new Persaud. It’s a bit of a cheat in that I actually started reading Babel in January, but I only just finished it this morning. I raced through the first 200 pages or so at the start of the year and loved all the geeky etymological footnotes and musings on translation. I thought I’d read it within a matter of days, which would have been a real feat for me. It’s hard to say why, instead, I stalled and found it difficult to regain sustained interest in the months that followed. Initially, it was a buddy read for me and my husband (his bookmark is still stranded at p. 178). His pithy comment, early on, was, “So, this is basically a woke Harry Potter?” And that’s actually a pretty apt summary. Four students at a magical academy – the Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford University, also known as Babel – find themselves questioning their responsibilities and loyalties as they confront the forces of evil, specifically colonialism.
When Robin Swift’s mother dies of cholera, he’s rescued from Canton by Professor Lovell and taken to England to train for entrance into Babel, a tower beside the Radcliffe Camera. He, Ramy (Indian), Victoire (Haitian) and Letty, the only white member of the quartet, are soon inseparable. While Victoire and Letty face prejudice for being female, it’s nothing to the experience of being racially other. Luckily, Babel values foreignness: intimate knowledge of other languages is an asset. In Kuang’s speculative 1830s setting, Britain’s economy is founded on a warped alchemy: silver is turned into energy to keep everyday life running smoothly in the industrializing nation. This is accomplished by harnessing the power of words. Silver bars are engraved with match-pairs – a phrase in a foreign language and its closest English counterpart – and the incantation of that untranslatable meaning sparks action. Spells keep bridges standing and traffic flowing; used for ill, they kill and destroy.
Robin and his friends gradually realise that their work at Babel is reinforcing mass poverty and the colonial system and, ultimately, fuelling future wars. “Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others, who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.” He becomes radicalized via the clandestine Hermes Society, which, Robin Hood-like, siphons silver resources away from where they are concentrated in Oxford to where they can help the oppressed. Surprised to learn who else is involved in Hermes, Robin (name not coincidental!) starts working behind the backs of his friends and professors, driven by conscience yet loath to give up the prospects he has through the tremendous privilege of being part of Babel. It goes from being an ivory tower of academia to being a hideaway for strikers and the besieged. And if you know your Bible stories, you’ll remember that Babel is destined to fall.
In faux-archaic fashion, Kuang has given her novel a lengthy subtitle: “Or: The Necessity of Violence – An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.” The principle behind Hermes is that justice will never be achieved by negotiation; only by force. “Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option.” Kuang published this fourth novel at age 26 and it manifests a certain youthful idealism. The sense of retrospective righteous anger is justified but also unsubtle; I felt similarly about Kuang’s Yellowface. Although there are exciting twists in the latter half of the book, I preferred the early semi-Dickensian atmosphere as Robin investigates his parentage and learns the joy of language and friendship. Kuang also adds a queer angle: an unrequited heterosexual crush comes to nothing because two same-sex friends are in love, even if they can never say. For as full-on and high-stakes as the plot becomes, I wished I could stay in this quieter mode.
Kuang has rendered the historical setting admirably and, though this is a typical adventure novel in that she has prioritized action over depth of characterization, one does get invested in the central characters and their interactions. The whole silver-working motif at first seems implausible but quickly becomes an accepted part of the background. Longstanding fantasy readers will probably have no problem reading this, but if you’re unsure and daunted by the 540-page length, ask yourself just how interested you are in word meanings and the history of colonialism and uprisings. (Little Free Library)
[P.S. OMG, have you seen her wedding photos from a few weeks ago?!]
Also two DNFs, argh!
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels among the Collectors of Iceland by A. Kendra Greene (2020) – This sounded quirky and fun, but it turns out it was too niche for me. I read the first two “Galleries” (78 pp.) about the Icelandic Phallological Museum and one woman’s stone collection. Another writer might have used a penis museum as an excuse for lots of cheap laughs, but Greene doesn’t succumb. Still, “no matter how erudite or innocent you imagine yourself to be, you will discover that everything is funnier when you talk about a penis museum. … It’s not salacious. It’s not even funny, except that the joke is on you.” I think I might have preferred a zany Sarah Vowell approach to the material. (Secondhand – Bas Books and Home, Newbury)
Because I Don’t Know What You Mean and What You Don’t by Josie Long (2023) – A free signed copy – and, if I’m honest, a cover reminiscent of Ned Beauman’s Glow – induced me to try an author I’d never heard of. She’s a stand-up comic, apparently, not that you’d know it from these utterly boring, one-note stories about unhappy adolescents and mums on London council estates. I read 108 pages but could barely tell you what a single story was about. Long is decent at voices, but you need compelling stories to house them. (Little Free Library)
20 Books of Summer, 7–9: Furies, The Earthquake Bird, and Greta & Valdin
It might seem that I’m very behind on 20 Books of Summer, and I am, but that’s mostly because I’ve done my usual trick of starting loads of books at once so that I’m currently in the middle of another nine with no prospect of finishing any particularly soon. I will eventually review more, but probably all in a rush and on the later side. It doesn’t help that quite a few happen to be lacklustre reads, such that I have to push myself through them instead of enjoying spending time with the stack. For today, though, I have a pretty readable trio made up of feminist short stories, a mild Japan-set mystery, and a highly random queer dysfunctional family novel that rose from indie obscurity in New Zealand. (Also a DNF.)
Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild and Untamed (2023)
It was my second attempt at this Virago anthology; I borrowed it from the library last year but never opened it, as far as I can remember. Each story is named after a synonym for “virago,” so the focus is on strong and unconventional women, but given that brief there is huge variety, including memoir (Ali Smith’s “Spitfire,” about her late mother’s WAAF service), historical research (CN Lester on sexology and early trans figures, Emma Donoghue on early-twentieth-century activist and lesbian Kathlyn Oliver, Stella Duffy on menopause) and even one graphic short, the mother–daughter horror story “She-Devil” by comics artist Eleanor Crewes.
As with any anthology, some pieces stand out more than others. Caroline O’Donoghue, Helen Oyeyemi and Kamila Shamsie’s contributions were unlikely to convert me into a fan. Margaret Atwood is ever sly and accessible, with “Siren” opening with the line “Today’s Liminal Beings Knitting Circle will now be called to order.” I was surprised to get on really well with Kirsty Logan’s “Wench,” about girls ostracized by their religious community because of their desire for each other – I’ll have to read Now She Is Witch, as it’s set in the same fictional world – and Chibundu Onuzo’s “Warrior,” about Deborah, an Israelite leader in the book of Judges. And while I doubt I need to read a whole novel by Rachel Seiffert, I did enjoy “Fury,” about a group of Polish women who fended off Nazi invaders.
A few of my favourites were “Harridan” by Linda Grant, about an older woman who frightens the young couple who share her flat’s garden during lockdown (“this old lady, this hag she sees, this bitter travesty of her celestial youth and beauty is not her. Inside she’s a flame, she’s a pistol”); “Muckraker” by Susie Boyt, in which a woman makes conquests of breast cancer widowers; and “Tygress” by Claire Kohda, where the stereotype of the Asian ‘tiger mother’ turns literal. Duffy’s “Dragon” closes the collection with a very interesting blend of autofiction, interviews and medical reportage about different experiences of objectification in youth and invisibility in ageing. It brings the whole together nicely: “Tell me your tale and, in the telling, feel it all drop away. You are, and you are not, your story. Keep what serves you now, make space for new maybes.” (Free from a neighbour)
The Earthquake Bird: A Novel of Mystery by Susanna Jones (2001)
Susanna Jones’s When Nights Are Cold is one of my favourite novels that no one else has ever heard of, so I jumped at the chance to buy a bargain copy of her debut back in 2020. Lucy Fly has lived in Tokyo for ten years, working as a translator of machinery manuals. She wanted to get as far away as possible from her conventional family of six brothers, so she’s less than thrilled to meet fellow Yorkshire lass Lily Bridges, a nurse new to the country and looking for someone to help her find an apartment and learn some basic Japanese. Lucy is a prickly loner with only a few friends – and a lover, photographer Teiji – but she reluctantly agrees to be Lily’s guide.
We know from the start that Lucy is in custody being questioned about events leading up to Lily’s murder. She refuses to tell the police anything, but what we are reading is her confession, in which she does eventually tell all. We learn that there have already been three accidental deaths among her family and acquaintances – she seems cursed to attract them – and that her feelings about Lily changed over the months she showed the woman around. This short and reasonably compelling book gives glimpses of mountain scenery, noodle bars, and spartan apartments. Perhaps inevitably, it reminded me a bit of Murakami. It’s hard to resist an unreliable narrator. However, I felt Jones’s habit of having Lucy speak of herself in the third person was overdone. (Secondhand – Broad Street Book Centre, Hay-on-Wye)
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (2021; 2024)
The title characters are a brother and sister in their late twenties who share a flat and a tendency to sabotage romantic relationships. Both are matter-of-factly queer and biracial (Māori/Russian). The novel flips back and forth between their present-tense first-person narration with each short chapter. It takes quite a while to pick up on who is who in the extended Vladisavljevic clan and their New Zealand university milieu (their father is a science professor and Greta an English department PhD and tutor), so I was glad of the character list at the start.
I was expecting a breezy, snarky read and to an extent that’s what I got. Not a whole lot happens; situations advance infinitesimally through quirky dialogue thick with pop culture references. There are some quite funny one-liners, but the plot is so meandering and the voices so deadpan that I struggled to remain engaged. (On her website, Reilly, who is Māori, ascribes the book’s randomness to her neurodivergence.)
The protagonists seem so affectedly cynical that when they exhibit strong feelings for new partners, you’re a bit taken aback. Really, Reilly can do serious? One of the siblings is reunited with a former partner and starts to think about settling down and even adopting a child. This is the last novel I would have expected to end with a wedding, but so it does. If you’re a big fan of Elif Batuman and Naoise Dolan, this might be up your street. Below are some sample lines that should help you make up your mind (quotes unattributed to minimize spoilers).
I don’t really feel like anything these days, just a beautiful husk filled with opinions about globalism and a strong desire to go out for dinner.
I don’t think you’re the weirdest person I’ve ever met even though you do sometimes talk like a philosophical narrator in an independent film.
I’m trying to write my wedding speech, so I don’t go off on a tangent and start listing my favourite Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. I was thinking I could write an acrostic poem, but I’ve made the foolish decision of marrying someone whose name begins with X.
With thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann (Penguin Random House) for the free copy for review.
And a DNF:
The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh by Ingrid Persaud – I thought Persaud’s debut novel, Love after Love, was fantastic, but I was right to be daunted by the length of this follow-up. The strategy is similar to that in Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood: giving sideways looks at a famous man through the women he collected around him. John Boysie Singh was a real-life Trinidadian gangster who was hanged for his crimes in 1957 (as the article reprinted on the first page reveals). The major problem here is that all four of the dialect voices sound much the same, so I couldn’t tell them apart. Each time I opened the book, I had to look back at the blurb to be reminded that Popo was his prostitute mistress while Mana Lala was the mother of his son Chunksee. In the 103 pages I read (less than one-fifth of the total), there were so few chapters by Doris and Rosie that I never got a handle on who they were. Nor did I come to understand, or care about, Boysie. The editor needed to make drastic changes to this to ensure widespread readability. (Signed copy won in a Faber Instagram giveaway)
The Bookshop Band in Abingdon & 20 Books of Summer, 6: Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch
The Bookshop Band have been among my favourite musical acts since I first saw play live at the Hungerford Literary Festival in 2014. Initially formed of three local musicians for hire, they got their start in 2010 as the house band at Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, England. For their first four years, they wrote a pair of original songs about a new book, often the very day of an author’s event in the shop, and performed them on guitar, cello, and ukulele as an interlude to the evening’s reading and discussion.
Notable songs from their first 13 albums are based on Glow by Ned Beauman (“We Are the Foxes”), Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (“Bobo and the Cattle”), The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (“How Not to Woo a Woman”), and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (“You Make the Best Plans, Thomas”). They have also written responses to classic literature, with songs inspired by Alice in Wonderland, various Shakespeare plays, and a compilation of first lines called “Once Upon a Time.”
I got to see the band live five times pre-pandemic, even after husband-and-wife-duo Ben Please and Beth Porter moved nearly 400 miles away to Wigtown, the Book Town of Scotland. During the first six months of Covid-19 lockdown, the livestream concerts from their attic were weekly treats to look forward to. They also interviewed authors for a breakfast chat show as part of the Wigtown Book Festival, which went online that year.
In the years since, the band has kept busy with other projects (not to mention two children). Porter sings and performs on the two Spell Songs albums based on Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Words and its sequel. Together they composed the soundtrack to Aardman Animations’ short film, Robin Robin (2021) – winning Best Music at the British Animation Awards, and wrote an album of songs based on Scottish children’s literature. And they have continued writing one-off book songs, such as for the launch of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. (I’m disappointed their songs about All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett and The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan still haven’t made it onto record.)
I’ve been enthusing about them for nearly a decade, but they’ve remained mostly under the radar in that time. Not so any longer; their recent album Emerge, Return was produced by Pete Townshend of The Who; the production value has notably advanced while retaining their indie spirit. Foreword Reviews kindly agreed to pay me to fangirl – er, write a blog – about Emerge, Return and the tour supporting it, so I’ll leave it there for the music criticism (their complete discography is now available on Bandcamp and Spotify). I’ll just add that a number of these ‘new’ songs have been kicking around for six to ten years but went unrecorded until now. For that reason, I worried that it might feel like a collection of cast-offs, but in fact they’ve managed to produce something sonically and thematically cohesive. It’s darker than some of their previous work, with moody minor chords and slightly sinister subjects.
Julia Pastrana after death. George Wick, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve often found that the band will zero in on a detail, scene, or idea that never would have stood out to me while reading a book but, in retrospect, evokes the whole with great success. I decided to test this out by reading Carol Birch’s Orphans of the Carnival in the weeks leading up to seeing them on their months-long UK summer/autumn tour. It’s a historical novel about real-life 1850s Mexican circus “freak” Julia Pastrana, who had congenital conditions that caused her face and body to be covered in thick hair and her jaw and lips to protrude. Cruel contemporaries called her the world’s ugliest woman and warned that pregnant women should not be allowed to see her on tour lest the shock cause them to miscarry. Medical doctors posited, in all seriousness, that she was a link between humans and orangutans.
My copy of Birch’s novel was a remainder, and it is certainly a minor work compared to the Booker Prize-shortlisted Jamrach’s Menagerie. Facts about Julia’s travel itinerary and fellow oddballs quickly grow tedious, and while one of course sympathizes when children throw rocks at her, she never becomes a fully realized character rather than a curiosity.
There is also a bizarre secondary storyline set in 1983, in which Rose fills her London apartment with hoarded objects, including a doll she rescues from a skip and names Tattoo. She becomes obsessed with the idea of visiting a doll museum in Mexico. I thought that Tattoo would turn out to be Julia’s childhood doll Yatzi (similar to in A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power, where dolls have sentimental and magical power across the centuries), but the connection, though literal, was not as I expected. It’s more grotesque than that. And stranger than fiction, frankly.
{SPOILERS AHEAD}
Birch sticks to the known details of Julia’s life. She had various agents, the final one being Theo Lent, who married her. (In the novel, he can’t bring himself to kiss her, but he can, you know, impregnate her.) She died of a fever soon after childbirth. Her son, Theo Junior, who inherited her hypertrichosis, also died within days. Both bodies were embalmed, sold, and exhibited. Theo then married another hairy woman, Marie Bartel of Germany, who took the name “Zenora” and posed as Julia’s sister. Theo died, syphilitic (or so Birch implies) and insane, in a Russian asylum. Julia and Theo Junior’s remains were displayed and mislaid at various points over the years, with Julia’s finally repatriated to Mexico for a proper burial in 2013. In the novel, Tattoo is, in fact, Theo Junior’s mummy.
Two Bookshop Band songs from the new album are about the novel: “Doll” and “Waggons and Wheels.” “Doll” is one of the few more lighthearted numbers on the album. It ended up being a surprise favourite track for me (along with the creepy “Eve in Your Garden,” about Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, and “Room for Three,” a sombre yet resolute epic written for the launch of Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage) because of its jaunty music-hall tempo; the pattern of repeating most nouns three times; and the hand claps, “deedily” vocal fills, unhinged recorder playing, and springy sound effects. The lyrics are almost a riddle: “When’s a doll (doll doll) not a doll (doll doll)?” They somehow avoid all spoilers while conveying something of the mental instability of a couple of characters.
The gorgeous “Waggons and Wheels” picks up on the melancholy tone and parental worries of earlier tracks from the album. The chorus has a wistful air as Julia ponders the passage of time and her constant isolation: “old friends, new deals / Winter or spring, I am hiding … Winter or spring, I’ll be travelling.” Porter’s mellow soprano tempers Julia’s outrage at mistreatment: “who are you to shout / Indecency and shame? / Shocking, I shock, so lock me out / I’m locked into this face.” She fears, too, what will happen to her child, “a beast or a boy, a monster or joy”. Listening to the song, I feel that the band saw past the specifics to plumb the universal feelings that get readers empathizing with Julia as a protagonist. They’ve gotten to the essence of the story in a way that Birch perhaps never did. Mediocre book; lovely songs. (New (bargain) purchase – Dollar Tree, Bowie, Maryland) 
I caught the Emerge, Return tour at St Nicolas’ Church in Abingdon (an event hosted by Mostly Books) last night. It was my sixth time seeing the Bookshop Band in concert – see also my write-ups of two 2016 events plus one in 2018 and another in 2019 – but the first time in person since the pandemic. I got to show off my limited-edition T-shirt. How nice it was to meet up again with blogger friend Annabel, too! Fun fact for you: Ben was born in Abingdon but hadn’t been back since he was two. Beth’s cousin turned up to the show as well. Although they have their daughters, 2 and 7, on the tour with them, they were being looked after elsewhere for the evening so the parents could relax a bit. Across the two sets, they played seven tracks from the new album, six old favourites, and two curios: one Spell Song, and an untitled song they wrote for the audiobook of Jackie Morris’s The Unwinding. It was a brilliant evening!
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 