#MARM2024: Life before Man and Interlunar by Margaret Atwood
Hard to believe, but it’s my seventh year participating in the annual Margaret Atwood Reading Month (#MARM) hosted by indomitable Canadian blogger Marcie of Buried in Print. In previous years, I’ve read Surfacing and The Edible Woman, The Robber Bride and Moral Disorder, Wilderness Tips, The Door, and Bodily Harm and Stone Mattress; and reread The Blind Assassin. I’m wishing a happy belated birthday to Atwood, who turned 85 earlier this month. Novembers are my excuse to catch up on her extensive back catalogue. In recent years, I’ve scoured the university library holdings to find works by her that I often had never heard of, as was the case with this early novel and mid-career poetry collection.
Life before Man (1979)
Atwood’s fourth novel is from three rotating third-person POVs: Toronto museum curator Elizabeth, her toy-making husband Nate, and Lesje (pronounced “Lashia,” according to a note at the front), Elizabeth’s paleontologist colleague. The dated chapters span nearly two years, October 1976 to August 1978; often we visit with two or three protagonists on the same day. Elizabeth and Nate, parents to two daughters, have each had a string of lovers. Elizabeth’s most recent, Chris, has died by suicide. Nate disposes of his latest mistress, Martha, and replaces her with Lesje, who is initially confused by his interest in her. She’s more attracted to rocks and dinosaurs than to people, in a way that could be interpreted as consistent with neurodivergence.
It was neat to follow along seasonally with Halloween and Remembrance Day and so on, and see the Quebec independence movement simmering away in the background. To start with, I was engrossed in the characters’ perspectives and taken with Atwood’s witty descriptions and dialogue: “[Nate]’s heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians” and (Lesje:) “Elizabeth needs support like a nun needs tits.” My favourite passage encapsulates a previous relationship of Lesje’s perfectly, in just the sort of no-nonsense language she would use:
The geologist had been fine; they could compromise on rock strata. They went on hikes with their little picks and kits, and chipped samples off cliffs; then they ate jelly sandwiches and copulated in a friendly way behind clumps of goldenrod and thistles. She found this pleasurable but not extremely so. She still has a collection of rock chips left over from this relationship; looking at it does not fill her with bitterness. He was a nice boy but she wasn’t in love with him.
Elizabeth’s formidable Auntie Muriel is a terrific secondary presence. But this really is just a novel about (repeated) adultery and its aftermath. The first line has Elizabeth thinking “I don’t know how I should live,” and after some complications, all three characters are trapped in a similar stasis by the end. By the halfway point I’d mostly lost interest and started skimming. The grief motif and museum setting weren’t the draws I’d expected them to be. Lesje is a promising character but, disappointingly, gets snared in clichéd circumstances. No doubt that is part of the point; “life before man” would have been better for her. (University library) 
This prophetic passage from Life before Man leads nicely into the themes of Interlunar:
The real question is: Does [Lesje] care whether the human race survives or not? She doesn’t know. The dinosaurs didn’t survive and it wasn’t the end of the world. In her bleaker moments, … she feels the human race has it coming. Nature will think up something else. Or not, as the case may be.
The posthuman prospect is echoed in Interlunar in the lines: “Which is the sound / the earth will make for itself / without us. A stone echoing a stone.”
Interlunar (1984)
Some familiar Atwood elements in this volume, including death, mythology, nature, and stays at a lake house; you’ll even recognize a couple of her other works in poem titles “The Robber Bridegroom” and “The Burned House.” The opening set of “Snake Poems” got me the “green” and “scales” squares on Marcie’s Bingo card (in addition to various other scattered ones, I’m gonna say I’ve filled the whole right-hand column thanks to these two books).
This one brilliantly likens the creature to the sinuous ways of language:
“A Holiday” imagines a mother–daughter camping vacation presaging a postapocalyptic struggle for survival: “This could be where we / end up, learning the minimal / with maybe no tree, no rain, / no shelter, no roast carcasses / of animals to renew us … So far we do it / for fun.” As in her later collection The Door, portals and thresholds are of key importance. “Doorway” intones, “November is the month of entrance, / month of descent. Which has passed easily, / which has been lenient with me this year. / Nobody’s blood on the floor.” There are menace and melancholy here. But as “Orpheus (2)” suggests at its close, art can be an ongoing act of resistance: “To sing is either praise / or defiance. Praise is defiance.” I do recommend Atwood’s poetry if you haven’t tried it before, even if you’re not typically a poetry reader. Her poems are concrete and forceful, driven by imagery and voice; not as abstract as you might fear. Alas, I wasn’t sent a review copy of her collected poems, Paper Boat, as I’d hoped, but I will continue to enjoy encountering them piecemeal. (University library) 
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)
March Releases by Akbar, Bosker, García Márquez, and Wrenn
I’m catching up after a busy end to last month. Today I have an uneven debut novel from a poet whose work I’ve enjoyed before, a journalist’s jaunty submersion in the world of modern art, a posthumous novella from a famous Colombian author I’d not previously read, and a (literally) trippy memoir about C-PTSD, coral, climate breakdown, queerness and more. I can pinpoint a couple of elements that some or all of them have in common: beauty (whether in art or in nature) and dead mothers.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
I’d read the Iranian American poet’s two full-length collections and particularly admired Pilgrim Bell, one of my favourite books of 2021. That was enough for me to put this on my Most Anticipated list for 2024, even though based on the synopsis I wrote: “His debut novel sounds kind of unhinged, but I figure it’s worth a try.” Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s blurb: “When Cyrus’s obsession with the lives of the martyrs – Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc – leads him to a chance encounter with a dying artist, he finds himself drawn towards the mysteries of an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of Death; and toward his [late] mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed.”
Cyrus Shams is an Iranian American aspiring poet who grew up in Indiana with a single father, his mother Roya having died in a passenger aircraft mistakenly shot down by a U.S. Navy missile cruiser (this really happened: Iran Air Flight 655, on 3 July 1988). He continues to lurk around the Keady University campus, working as a medical actor at the hospital, but his ambition is to write. During his shaky recovery from drug and alcohol abuse, he undertakes a project that seems divinely inspired: “Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest”. By seeking the meaning in others’ deaths, he hopes his modern “Book of Martyrs” will teach him how to cherish his own life.
This document, which we see in fragments, sets up hypothetical dialogues between figures real and imaginary, dead and living, and intersperses them with poems and short musings. But when a friend tells Cyrus about the Brooklyn Museum installation “DEATH-SPEAK,” which has terminally ill Iranian artist Orkideh living out her last days in public, he spies an opportunity to move the work beyond theory and into the physical realm. So he flies to New York City with his best friend (and occasional f**kbuddy), bartender Zee Novak, and visits Orkideh every day until the installation’s/artist’s end.
This is a wildly original but unruly novel with a few problems. One: Akbar has clung too obviously to his own story and manner of speaking with Cyrus (e.g., “I honestly actually do worry about that, no joke. Being a young Iranian man making a book about martyrdom, going around talking to people about becoming a martyr. It’s not inert, you know?”). Another is that the poems, and poetic descriptions, are much the best material. The only exception might be a zany scene where Zee and Cyrus chop wood while high. But the main issue I had is that the plot turns on a twist 50 pages from the end, a huge coincidence that feels unearned. I admire the ambition Akbar had for this – a seething, open-hearted enquiry into addiction, love, suicide and queerness – but look forward to him getting back to poetry.
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker
I was a big fan of Bosker’s Cork Dork (2017), her deep dive into the world of fine wine. Her second book is similarly constructed and equally fun: more personal than authoritative, light yet substantial, and accessible to the uninitiated as well as those with an existing interest in the subject. She begins as a complete novice, wondering if she’ll ever know what art is, let alone what it means and whether it’s any good (“the familiar feeling that everyone got the punch line except me”). By the end, she has discovered that, like the love of wine, art appreciation can be a way of expanding and savouring one’s life.
The aim was to get the broadest experience possible, generally through voluntary placements. She started out as an assistant at Jack Barrett’s 315 Gallery, where one of her tasks was to paint a wall white; she failed miserably to meet his expectations even for this simple task. He never lost his fundamental distrust of her, a writer and outsider, as one of “the enemy.” It was expected that she would attend as many art shows and openings as possible per week. “Talking shit was essentially a job requirement.” Bosker might not have known what to make of the art, but others were gossipy, snobbish and opinionated enough to make up for it. When she was tasked with writing a press release for an exhibit, a gallerist taught her the clichéd shorthand: “Every f**king artist allegedly transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, or vice versa.”
In the course of the book, the New York City-based author also:
- attends the Art Basel Miami Beach contemporary art fair and sells photographs on behalf of Denny Dimin Gallery;
- befriends performance artist and “ass influencer” Mandy AllFIRE, who – ahem – sits on Bosker’s face as part of a temporary installment;
- serves as a studio assistant for French painter Julie Curtiss, whose work is selling for alarmingly high amounts at auction (not actually what a painter wants, as it tends to signal bad things for a career);
- meets a pair of North Dakota collectors known as “the Icy Gays”; and
- works as a Guggenheim Museum guard.
This last was my favourite episode. Forty-minute placements on particular ramps gave her time to focus on one chosen artwork – for instance, an abstract sculpture. She challenged herself to stay with it for that whole time, doing as one artist advised and simply noticing five things about the work. Before, her “default approach to art had just been to plant myself in front of a piece and wait for the epiphany to wash over me.” Now, she worked at it. In fact, she counsels newcomers to not read a caption because many people take a title at face value and an interpretation as gospel, and so don’t experience the art for themselves.
At times I found the book slightly scattered in the way that it zigzags from one challenge to another. There’s differing attention to various experiences; a week-long art school merits just one paragraph. And there’s no getting past the fact that some art she encounters sounds outlandish or just plain silly. (Is it any surprise that she mistakes part of a wall, and a mousetrap, for art pieces?) Ultimately, I think it’s best if you have at least a modicum of appreciation for modern art, which I don’t; whereas I do enjoy drinking wine even if I don’t have a trained palate.
Even so, Bosker’s writing has such verve (“artists were coyly evasive about their work and treated my questions like I was a cactus running after their balloon”; “a hazy daydream of an idea solidified into a yappy, un-shut-uppable chihuahua of want”) that you’ll be glad you went along for the ride. She concludes that taste is subjective, but “Beauty … pulls you close.” Art is valuable because it “knocks us off our well-worn pathways” into something uncharted, a tantalizing prospect.
With thanks to Allen & Unwin (Grove Press) for the free copy for review.
{SPOILERS IN THIS NEXT ONE}
Until August by Gabriel García Márquez
[Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean]
A posthumous ‘lost’ novella was not a good place for me to have started with this celebrated author. García Márquez okayed the fifth draft of the text in 2004, 10 years before his death. By this time he was already suffering with memory loss that interfered with his creativity. His sons got the message that he didn’t think the book worked and should be destroyed. But they didn’t do his bidding and, revisiting the book nearly a decade on from his death, decided it wasn’t that bad, if not up to the standard of his best work, and that it should see the light of day after all.
Every August 16th, Ana Magdalena Bach travels to the island where her mother is buried to visit the grave and lay gladioli on it. (My review book came with a bag of three gladioli bulbs and a mini Colombian chocolate bar.) Each year she takes a different lover for the one night at a hotel. The first time, the man leaves her a $20 bill and she feels ashamed, but it doesn’t stop her doing the same thing again for the next four years in a row. Once it’s a long-ago school friend whom she runs into on the ferry. Another time, by golly, it’s a bishop.
It’s refreshing to have a woman in middle age as protagonist and for her to claim sexual freedom. However, the setup is formulaic and repetitive, the sex scenes are somewhat excruciating, and the hypocrisy of her gleefully having one-night stands while fretting over her husband’s potential infidelity is grating. I did like the ending – Ana hears that an anonymous elderly gentleman has been paying to have gladioli laid on her mother’s grave year-round and she wonders if she is in a sense following in her mother’s footsteps all along without knowing it; and decides she’s had enough and exhumes her mother’s remains, returning to her husband with a bag of bones (gruesome!).
But nothing about the plot or the writing – fluid enough bar one awkward sentence (“She listened to him worried that he meant it, but she had the strength not to appear as easy a woman as he might think”) – suggested to me a master at work. At best, this might be reminiscent of the late work of misogynist-leaning authors like Coetzee or Updike.
In my mind García Márquez is linked with magic realism, so I’d be better off trying one of his more representative works. I have several of his earlier novellas on the shelf (received as review copies as part of the same recent marketing push), and if I get on better with those then I’ll be sure to try one of the most famous full-length novels. 
With thanks to Viking (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis by Greg Wrenn
Wrenn is an associate English professor teaching environmental literature at James Madison University. He has also been exploring coral reefs for 25 years, with a love of marine wildlife sparked by growing up in Florida. But all along, he’s been trying (much like Cyrus Shams) to come to terms with addiction, queerness, suicidal inclinations, and especially his mother’s place in his life. She made him feel dirty, that he would never be good enough; she hit him with a wooden spoon and bathed him until he was 17. Though he never found out for sure, he suspects his mother was sexually abused by her father and repeated the cycle of molestation.
This is the third C-PTSD memoir I’ve read (after What My Bones Know and A Flat Place), and has a lot in common with I’m Glad My Mom Died, which features a co-dependent relationship with an abusive mother. After Wrenn’s parents’ divorce, he and his mother remained close. “I had been her therapist, confessor, girlfriend, and punching bag.” He helped care for her after a stroke but eventually had to throw up his hands at her stubborn refusal to follow doctors’ orders. Drawing on the Greek etymology of ecology (oikos means house or family), Wrenn insists on a parallel between the personal and the environmental here: “What we’re facing amounts to global C-PTSD” as “Mother” Earth turns against us. On each trip to Raja Ampat, he knows the coral reef is dying, his carbon footprint only accelerating it.
There’s a lot in this short memoir. Even the summary had me shaking my head in disbelief. For me, though, the tone and style were too erratic. Wrenn can be wry, sorrowful, or campy; he includes scientific data, letters to Adrienne Rich and an imagined descendent, a chapter riffing on “Otters” (the animal and the gay stereotype), flashbacks, and E.T. metaphors. The final third of the book then takes a left turn as he experiments with therapeutic psychedelics via ayahuasca ceremonies in South America, and ditches dating apps and casual sex to try to find a long-term relationship. The drug literally alters his brain, allowing him to feel trust and love. Add on nature and a husband and that’s why he’s still here rather than dead by suicide.
Like Akbar, Wrenn published poetry before switching genre. Their books are both amazing in premise but wobbly in execution. Still, I’d say both authors are laudable for their effort to depict lives wrenched back from extremity. 
With thanks to Regalo Press (USA) for the proof copy for review.
Rathbones Folio Prize 2021 Shortlist Reviews & Prediction
I’ve nearly managed to read the whole Rathbones Folio Prize shortlist before the prize is announced on the evening of Wednesday the 24th. (You can sign up to watch the online ceremony here.) I reviewed the Baume and Ní Ghríofa as part of a Reading Ireland Month post on Saturday, and I’d reviewed the Machado last year in a feature on out-of-the-ordinary memoirs. This left another five books. Because they were short, I’ve been able to read and/or review another four over the past couple of weeks. (The only one unread is As You Were by Elaine Feeney, which I made a false start on last year and didn’t get a chance to try again.)
Nominations come from the Folio Academy, an international group of writers and critics, so the shortlisted authors have been chosen by an audience of their peers. Indeed, I kept spotting judges’ or fellow nominees’ names in the books’ acknowledgements or blurbs. I tried to think about the eight as a whole and generalize about what the judges were impressed by. This was difficult for such a varied set of books, but I picked out two unifying factors: A distinctive voice, often with a musicality of language – even the books that don’t include poetry per se are attentive to word choice; and timeliness of theme yet timelessness of experience.
Poor by Caleb Femi
Femi brings his South London housing estate to life through poetry and photographs. This is a place where young Black men get stopped by the police for any reason or none, where new trainers are a status symbol, where boys’ arrogant or seductive posturing hides fear. Everyone has fallen comrades, and things like looting make sense when they’re the only way to protest (“nothing was said about the maddening of grief. Nothing was said about loss & how people take and take to fill the void of who’s no longer there”). The poems range from couplets to prose paragraphs and are full of slang, Caribbean patois, and biblical patterns. I particularly liked Part V, modelled on scripture with its genealogical “begats” and a handful of portraits:
The Story of Ruthless
Anyone smart enough
to study the food chain
of the estate knew exactly
who this warrior girl was;
once she lined eight boys
up against a wall,
emptied their pockets.
Nobody laughed at the boys.
Another that stood out for me was the two-part “A Designer Talks of Home / A Resident Talks of Home,” a found poem partially constructed from dialogue from a Netflix documentary on interior design. It ironically contrasts airy aesthetic notions with survival in a concrete wasteland. If you loved Surge by Jay Bernard, this should be next on your list.
My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long
I first read this when it was on the Costa Awards shortlist. As in Femi’s collection, race, sex, and religion come into play. The focus is on memories of coming of age, with the voice sometimes a girl’s and sometimes a grown woman’s. Her course veers between innocence and hazard. She must make her way beyond the world’s either/or distinctions and figure out how to be multiple people at once (biracial, bisexual). Her Black mother is a forceful presence; “Red Hoover” is a funny account of trying to date a Nigerian man to please her mother. Much of the rest of the book failed to click with me, but the experience of poetry is so subjective that I find it hard to give any specific reasons why that’s the case.
The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey
After the two poetry entries on the shortlist, it’s on to a book that, like A Ghost in the Throat, incorporates poetry in a playful but often dark narrative. In 1976, two competitive American fishermen, a father-and-son pair down from Florida, catch a mermaid off of the fictional Caribbean island of Black Conch. Like trophy hunters, the men take photos with her; they feel a mixture of repulsion and sexual attraction. Is she a fish, or an object of desire? In the recent past, David Baptiste recalls what happened next through his journal entries. He kept the mermaid, Aycayia, in his bathtub and she gradually shed her tail and turned back into a Taino indigenous woman covered in tattoos and fond of fruit. Her people were murdered and abused, and the curse that was placed on her runs deep, threatening to overtake her even as she falls in love with David. This reminded me of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise. I loved that Aycayia’s testimony was delivered in poetry, but this short, magical story came and went without leaving any impression on me.
Indelicacy by Amina Cain
Having heard that this was about a cleaner at an art museum, I expected it to be a readalike of Asunder by Chloe Aridjis, a beautifully understated tale of ghostly perils faced by a guard at London’s National Gallery. Indelicacy is more fable-like. Vitória’s life is in two halves: when she worked at the museum and had to forego meals to buy new things, versus after she met her rich husband and became a writer. Increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage, she then comes up with an escape plot involving her hostile maid. Meanwhile, she makes friends with a younger ballet student and keeps in touch with her fellow cleaner, Antoinette, a pregnant newlywed. Vitória tries sex and drugs to make her feel something. Refusing to eat meat and trying to persuade Antoinette not to baptize her baby become her peculiar twin campaigns.
The novella belongs to no specific time or place; while Cain lives in Los Angeles, this most closely resembles ‘wan husks’ of European autofiction in translation. Vitória issues pretentious statements as flat as the painting style she claims to love. Some are so ridiculous they end up being (perhaps unintentionally) funny: “We weren’t different from the cucumber, the melon, the lettuce, the apple. Not really.” The book’s most extraordinary passage is her husband’s rambling, defensive monologue, which includes the lines “You’re like an old piece of pie I can’t throw away, a very good pie. But I rescued you.”
It seems this has been received as a feminist story, a cheeky parable of what happens when a woman needs a room of her own but is trapped by her social class. When I read in the Acknowledgements that Cain took lines and character names from Octavia E. Butler, Jean Genet, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Rhys, I felt cheated, as if the author had been engaged in a self-indulgent writing exercise. This was the shortlisted book I was most excited to read, yet ended up being the biggest disappointment.
On the whole, the Folio shortlist ended up not being particularly to my taste this year, but I can, at least to an extent, appreciate why these eight books were considered worthy of celebration. The authors are “writers’ writers” for sure, though in some cases that means they may fail to connect with readers. There was, however, some crossover this year with some more populist prizes like the Costa Awards (Roffey won the overall Costa Book of the Year).
The crystal-clear winner for me is In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, her memoir of an abusive same-sex relationship. Written in the second person and in short sections that examine her memories from different angles, it’s a masterpiece and a real game changer for the genre – which I’m sure is just what the judges are looking for.
The only book on the shortlist that came anywhere close to this one, for me, was A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, an elegant piece of feminist autofiction that weaves in biography, imagination, and poetry. It would be a fine runner-up choice.
(On the Rathbones Folio Prize Twitter account, you will find lots of additional goodies like links to related articles and interviews, and videos with short readings from each author.)
My thanks to the publishers and FMcM Associates for the free copies for review.
A Keeper of Records: What’s Worth Saving?
It’s safe to say that book bloggers love lists: not only do we keep a thorough list of everything we read in a year, but we also leap to check out every new top 5/10/50/100 or thematic book list that’s posted so we can see how many of them we’ve read. And then, at the end of any year, most of us put together our own best-of lists, often for a number of categories.
When I was younger, though, I took the list-making to an extreme. As I was going back through boxes of mementos in America a few weeks ago, I found stacks of hand-written records I’d kept. Here’s a list of what I used to list:
- every book I read
- every movie I saw
- dreams, recounted in detail
- money I found on the ground
- items I bought or sold on eBay
- gifts given or received for birthdays and Christmas
- transactions made through my mail-order music club
- all my weekday outfits, with a special shorthand designating each item of clothing
Age 14 (1997-8) was the peak of my record-keeping, and the only year when I faithfully kept a diary. I cringe to look back at all this now. Most of the dreams are populated by my crushes of the time, names and faces that mean nothing to me now. And to think that I was so self-conscious and deluded to assume people at school might notice if I wore a shirt twice within a couple of weeks! My diary isn’t particularly illuminating from this distance, either; mostly it brings back how earnest and pious I was in my teens. It’s occasionally addressed in the second person, as if to an imaginary bosom friend who would know me as well as I knew myself.
What’s clear is that I was convinced that the minutiae of my life mattered. Between us, my mother and I had kept a huge cache of my schoolwork and craft projects from kindergarten right through graduate school. I was also a devoted collector – of stamps, coins, figurines, tea sets, shells, anything with puffins or llamas – so I obviously felt that physical objects had real importance, too. It’s a wonder I didn’t become an archivist or a museum curator.
Why did I save all this stuff in the first place? Even as a teen, was I imagining an illustrious career for myself and some future biographer who would gleefully mine my records and personal writings for clues to who I really was? I’m not sure whether to admire the confidence or deplore the presumption. We all want to believe we’re living lives of significance, but when I take a long view – if I never have a child … if I never publish a book (though I think I will) … if human society does indeed collapse by 2050 (as some are predicting) – it’s hard to see what, if anything, will be preserved of my time on earth.
This is deeper than I usually get in a blog post, but these are the sorts of thoughts that preoccupy me when I’m not just drifting along in life’s routines. My nieces’ and nephews’ generation may be the last to inhabit this planet if we don’t take drastic and immediate action to deal with the environmental crisis. Many are working for change (my husband, a new Town Councillor, recently voted for the successful motion to declare a climate emergency and commit Newbury to going carbon-neutral by 2030), but some remain ignorant that there is any kind of problem and so consume and dispose like there is (literally) no tomorrow.
My home is a comfortable bubble I hardly ever leave, but more and more I feel that I need to become part of larger movements: first to ensure the continuation of human and non-human existence; then to improve the quality of human life, especially for those who have contributed least to climate change but will suffer the most from it. I have no idea what form my participation should take, but I know that focusing on outside causes will mean less time obsessing about myself and my inconsequential problems.
That’s not to say I won’t listen to the angst that’s telling me I’m not living my life as fully as I should, but I know that working with others, in whatever way, to tackle global issues will combat the lack of purpose that’s been plaguing me for years.
Appreciation for my past can only help with bolstering a healthy self-image, so I’ve kept a small selection of all those records, and a larger batch of school essays and assignments. Even if this archive is only ever for me, I like being able to look back at the well-rounded student I was – I used to get perfect scores on calculus tests and chemistry lab reports! I could write entire papers in French! – and see the seeds of the sincere, meticulous book lover I still am. As Eve Schaub writes in Year of No Clutter, “I’m not about to stop collecting my own life. It has been a source of pleasure for me ever since I can remember; it helps define me.”
A selection of favorite mementos I discovered back in the States:
In high school I started making my way through the American Film Institute’s list of Top 100 movies. I’ve now seen 89 of them.
I kept a list of new vocabulary words encountered in novels, especially Victorian ones. Note trumpery: (noun) attractive articles of little value or use; (adjective) showy but worthless – how apt!
As a high school senior, I waded through Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead to write an essay that won me an honorable mention, a point of interest on my college applications. Though I find it formulaic now, it’s a precursor to a career partially devoted to writing about books.
I planned my every college paper via incredibly detailed outlines. (I’m far too lazy to do this for book reviews now!) Can you work out what these essays were about?
As a college sophomore I wrote weekly essays in what looks like pretty flawless French. This one was an imagined interview with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy about the autobiographical and religious influences on their fiction.
Are you a list keeper? Do you have a personal ‘archive’?
How do you balance a healthy self-regard with working for the good of the world?
Reviews Roundup, May–June
One of my goals with this blog is to have one convenient place where I can gather together all my writing that has appeared in disparate online locations. To that end, once a month – or maybe more often – I’ll provide links to all the book reviews I’ve published elsewhere, with a rating and a short taster so you can decide whether to click to read more. (A couple of exceptions: I won’t point out my Kirkus Indie or BlueInk reviews since I don’t get a byline.)
BookBrowse
Girl at War by Sara Nović [subscription service; excerpt available to non-subscribers]: This pitch-perfect debut novel is an inside look at the Yugoslavian Civil War and its aftermath, from the perspective of a young girl caught up in the fighting. The careful structure is what keeps it from becoming just another ordinary, chronological war story. The recreation of a child’s perspective on the horrors of war is stunning. In fact, I can barely think of a negative thing to say about this concise novel. It strikes a perfect balance between past and present, tragic and hopeful.
Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry [subscription service; excerpt available to non-subscribers]: With settings ranging from a Coney Island theater to an opium den and a mental asylum, this is a gritty look at late-nineteenth-century outsiders. Circus and sideshow themes have been very popular in fiction in recent years, and this is a great example of a novel that uses those elements as background but goes beyond the incidentals of the carnival lifestyle to examine sexuality and societal outcasts. A very atmospheric and accomplished debut novel.
The Bookbag
Secrets of the Pomegranate by Barbara Lamplugh (& interview): In the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the secrets harbored by two English sisters, one of them settled in Granada, will come out into the open and affect the entire family. Lamplugh does a great job of unveiling a little at a time – but still maintaining tension until the surprise of the final revelation. The novel shifts easily between the central narrative and Deb’s diary entries, and between Alice’s and Mark’s perspectives. A strong debut novel.
An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It by Jessie Greengrass: An unusual mixture of historical, contemporary and dystopian short stories. A number of the first-person narratives feel like vague interior monologues, though there are some universal sentiments. When Greengrass picks one genre (but which will it be?) and sticks with it for the length of a whole book, she should have the time and space for the deep characterizations I thought were missing here. (But you can’t beat this book’s title, can you?)
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg: This was one of the key books of my American childhood. All these years later, phrases were still familiar to me, such as Jamie’s frequent exclamation of “Oh, boloney!” I clearly remembered the delicious overall sense of adventure and secrecy. Konigsburg captures school group chatter and brother/sister banter perfectly. The museum and archive settings are a great way to get children interested in art, history and library research. This was the original Night at the Museum before that franchise was ever dreamed up.
The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Richard Girling: From Victorian animal collecting to present-day poaching, Girling surveys the contradictory human instincts toward exploitation and preservation of mammals. The book is rather scattered, with too little about the actual quest for the mole, but the message about species extinction is powerful. (The Somali golden mole has never been seen in the wild, except as a few bones in an owl pellet found by an Italian zoologist in 1964. For some reason, it captured Girling’s imagination, becoming a symbol of rarity and fragility.)
Nudge
Road Ends by Mary Lawson: Contrasting rural Canada and London in the 1960s, Lawson’s third novel is a powerful story about how people deal with a way of life ending. She creates a perfect balance between her two plot strands, and the evocation of both locations is flawless, perhaps because they have autobiographical worth for her – she grew up on a farm in Ontario but moved to England in 1968. One remarkable thing about the novel is how she traces every decision back to a traumatic event in a character’s past.
The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall: Rachel Caine has run Idaho’s Chief Joseph wolf preserve for nearly a decade, but her roots are in England’s Lake District. Her two worlds unexpectedly collide when an earl asks for her help reintroducing wolves near the Scottish border. Alongside the story of the wolves’ release runs Rachel’s decision to become a mother. The twin plot strands – one environmental and the other personal – ask what can be salvaged from the past.
Italian Ways by Tim Parks: Parks, an Englishman, has lived and worked in northern Italy for over 30 years. To start with he saw his train travel as an everyday source of woes about ticket queues, late running, officious staff, and so on, but as years passed he decided to interrogate Italy’s rail system as a metaphor for the country itself. He structures this book around seven train journeys. It’s better suited to train spotters than to armchair travelers: there is quite a lot about train schedules and not enough about the countryside itself.
Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane: This new classic of nature writing zeroes in on the language we use to talk about our environment, both individual words – which Macfarlane celebrates in nine mini-glossaries alternating with the prose chapters – and the narratives we build around places, via discussions of the work of nature writers he admires. Whether poetic (“heavengravel,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for hailstones), local and folksy (“wonty-tump,” a Herefordshire word for a molehill), or onomatopoeic (on Exmoor, “zwer” is the sound of partridges taking off), his vocabulary words are a treasure trove.
Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee: A thorough and sympathetic appreciation of an underrated author, and another marvelously detailed biography from Lee. Fitzgerald is, like Diana Athill, a reassuring examples of an author who did not find success until well into middle age. Although she always guarded literary ambitions, she was not able to pursue her work wholeheartedly until she had reared three children and nursed her hapless husband through his last illness. The approach is largely chronological, though Lee pauses at key moments to investigate the biographical origins of each of Fitzgerald’s books.
Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg: Mazie Phillips-Gordon, a real ticket-taker at The Venice movie theatre, barely gets a footnote in history. Here we see all sides of this bold, brassy broad through Attenberg’s fragmented, epistolary narrative. The novel intersperses Mazie’s fictional diary entries (1907 to 1939) with excerpts from her unpublished autobiography and interviews with people who knew her. This is historical fiction – but not as we’re accustomed to it. Attenberg shows how fragile and incomplete the documentary record can be. A hard-nosed heroine with a heart of gold, Mazie will leave her mark on you.
A Buzz in the Meadow by Dave Goulson: As Goulson did in his book about bees, A Sting in the Tale, he treats readers like friends he is taking on a gentle tour to have everyday encounters with nature. The low-key, humorous anecdotes are reminiscent of the writings of Gerald Durrell, but – like Durrell – Goulson has a serious environmental agenda. Some of the most amusing chapters are about the sexual habits of insects and plants. This is less focused than his previous book, though, and repeats some of the material. The main draw, as always, is Goulson’s infectious enthusiasm and excellent explanations of science.
We Love This Book
War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite: In this postmodern satire, two Seattle hipsters must face reality when one of them leaves to fight in the Iraq War. From now on they keep in touch by updating their pretentious Wikipedia article. While Hal applies literary criticism to Star Wars and tries to make amends to his ex-girlfriend, Mickey is in life-and-death situations, looking for car bombs and overseeing local elections. Robinson and Kovite (an Iraq War veteran) alternate their settings in a fairly seamless whole.
The Edible Atlas by Mina Holland: Food lovers and armchair travelers alike will savor this tour through the world’s regional cuisines and trademark dishes. In her first book, the editor of the Guardian’s Cook supplement introduces 39 cuisines with larder lists, a rundown of crucial flavors, and one to four recipes. Maps show which spices and chilies are used in different areas, while sidebars present key ingredients. The book strives for a balance of common imports and unknown dishes, prioritizing authenticity and reproducibility at home.
Hollow Heart by Viola di Grado: Twenty-five-year-old Dorotea Giglio slit her wrists in the bathtub in July 2011 and expired in “a grim mojito of mint bubble bath and blood.” Over the next four years she chronicles her physical decomposition as well as her spirit’s enduring search for love. In alternately clinical and whimsical language, with fresh metaphors that have survived translation from Italian admirably, di Grado’s second novel examines the secret sadness passed down through families.
Foreword Reviews
Auschwitz #34207: The Joe Rubinstein Story by Nancy Sprowell Geise: This eye-opening account of a Polish Jew’s life before, during, and after Auschwitz deposits readers right into concentration camp horrors. Instead of presenting this as a third-person biography, Geise writes as Rubinstein, using extensive interviews and documentary research to recreate his perspective. While the story is necessarily a bit less dramatic after the chapters on the Holocaust, the fact that Rubinstein survived and later became a successful shoe designer in New York is inspiring.
The Contaminants by Devin K. Smyth: Two teens aboard a spacecraft hold out hope for new life on post-apocalyptic Earth in this believable YA science fiction novel. Composed of two solid first-person narratives and based around two father-child relationships, this is a novel that prizes emotions as much as it does technology. The novel is on the thin side; it could have done with another subplot or two to add some complexity. However, the subtle eugenics theme will give teen readers plenty to think about while they follow the fast-paced story.
The Loneliness Cure by Kory Floyd: A professor of communication tackles the loneliness epidemic with stories and science. Floyd explains the problems associated with chronic affection deprivation and suggests practical strategies for getting more of the human contact we naturally crave. Two-thirds of the text goes to preliminaries, but the subtitle’s six strategies are worth waiting for. Like the best self-help books, this convinces readers that “it pays to reach out for help when you need it” and gives the confidence and tactics to do so.
BookTrib
In this article I give a more in-depth preview of Circling the Sun by Paula McLain, her fictionalized biography of Beryl Markham.
I also post reviews of most of my casual reading and skimming on Goodreads.
Insomnia by Linda Pastan: Excellent free verse poems infused with images of weather, heavenly bodies, the night sky, art history, and travels. No rhymes to speak of, but plenty of alliteration and repetition – like in “Necklace,” where nearly every line ends with “pearl” or “pearls.” Historical and mythological references are frequent and highbrow. Especially in Part 3, the main theme is facing old age and illness. Linda Pastan has been writing poetry for nearly half a century; I’ll be sure to seek out more of her collections. Releases October 26th.
The Kindness by Polly Samson: This very subtle novel reminds me of works by Tessa Hadley and Lucy Caldwell. It takes one seemingly perfect couple – Julia and Julian – and parses out what went wrong between them and the aftermath. The book is so elegantly structured; characters drift in and out of flashbacks with none of the customary warnings. Instead Samson leaves it to readers to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of how they met and raised their daughter, Mira, and then how everything fell apart.
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett: In this impressive debut, Barnett chronicles the romantic lives of two Cambridge graduates through three-quarters of a century, giving three options for how their connection might play out. She juggles her storylines and moves through decades with ease. Less mawkish than One Day; less gimmicky than Life After Life – though there are shades of both. The message seems to be: there is no one perfect person, no one perfect story. Unsentimental this may be, but it feels true to how life works. (My full review will appear in the July 2015 issue of Third Way magazine.)
Eating Appalachia: Rediscovering Regional American Flavors by Darrin Nordahl: Nordahl travels through Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina in search of truly indigenous local ingredients. He highlights ramsons, pawpaw, elk (leaner and richer than beef), squirrel, hickory nuts and black walnuts, sumac, spicebush berry, sassafras, and persimmons. There are a few recipes and photographs in each chapter, although this is more of a narrative than a cookbook. I loved how he brought it all together with an imagined Appalachian Thanksgiving feast.
Eating Rome: Living the Good Life in the Eternal City by Elizabeth Minchilli: Minchilli’s parents moved the family from America to Rome when she was 12. Over the years she kept going back to Italy: to Florence as a graduate student, and then to stay when she married Domenico. Here, through recipes and personal stories, she shares her enthusiasm for Italian food and for Rome in particular. She finishes each chapter with a list of favorite eateries, so this is a practical guide anyone would benefit from taking along on a trip to Rome.
Some Churches by Tasha Cotter: I loved the first two poems but felt a number of the rest were lacking in artistry. Almost all are written in complete sentences, some in paragraph blocks, and alliteration isn’t always enough to differentiate them from prose. Favorite lines (from “Blood Orange”): “People think that either the red or the orange should go, because to blend the two / alienates some readers. / … I, too, am having an identity crisis, / just like the blood orange. Now that we’ve peeled back / the artifice, you’re inviting me in anyway”.
South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature by Margaret Eby: This tour through Southern literature is a great introduction for someone whose familiarity with Southern authors is minimal. Starting off in her home state of Mississippi, Eby travels through Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and back to Mississippi in a roughly circular road trip. My favorite chapter was on Flannery O’Connor, but I was also interested to learn about Harry Crews, who I’d never heard of before – it certainly sounds like he was a character. Releases September 8th.
Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing by Reba Riley: I could relate to much of Riley’s story. She was a Pentecostal-leaning fundamentalist through high school, but now even setting foot in a church made her feel nauseous. Yet she retained a strong spiritual compass that helped her tap into the energy of the “Godiverse.” Aged 29, Riley had the idea of experiencing 30 different religious traditions before 30. She writes in a chatty, girlfriend-to-girlfriend style, as if you’ve joined her book club for a glass of pinot grigio.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 