Book Serendipity, Mid-February to Mid-April
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away!
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- The protagonist isn’t aware that they’re crying until someone tells them / they look in a mirror in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and Three Days in June by Anne Tyler.
- A residential complex with primal scream therapy in Confessions by Catherine Airey and The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey.
- Memories of wiping down groceries during the early days of the pandemic in The End Is the Beginning by Jill Bialosky and Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly.
- A few weeks before I read Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst, I’d finished reading the author’s husband’s debut novel (Going Home by Tom Lamont); I had no idea of the connection between them until I got to her Acknowledgements.
- A mention of the same emergency money passing between friends in Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez ($20) and The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey ($100).
- Autobiographical discussions of religiosity and anorexia in The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey and Godstruck by Kelsey Osgood.
- The theme of the dark night sky in The Wild Dark by Craig Childs, followed almost immediately by Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henion.
- Last year I learned about Marina Abramović’s performance art where she and her ex trekked to China’s Great Wall from different directions, met in the middle, and continued walking away to dramatize their breakup in The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton. Recently I saw it mentioned again in The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey. Abramović’s work is also mentioned in Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly and is the basis for the opening track on Anne-Marie Sanderson’s album Old Light, “Amethyst Shoes.”
- The idea of running towards danger appears in Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s essay in Edge of the World, a queer travel anthology edited by Alden Jones; and the bibliography of The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey.
- I then read another Alex Marzano-Lesnevich essay in quick succession (both were excellent, by the way) in What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, edited by Michele Filgate.
- A scene in which a woman goes to a police station and her concerns are dismissed because she has no evidence and the man/men’s behaviour isn’t ‘bad enough’ in I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell and Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly.
- Too many details as the sign of a lie in Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Three Days in June by Anne Tyler.
- Scenes of throwing all of a spouse’s belongings out on the yard/street in Old Soul by Susan Barker, How to Survive Your Mother by Jonathan Maitland, and Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly.
- Reading two lost American classics about motherhood and time spent in a mental institution at the same time: The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman and I Am Clarence by Elaine Kraf.
- Disorientation underwater: a literal experience in I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell, then used as a metaphor for what it was like to be stuck in a blizzard on Annapurna in 2014 in The Secret Life of Snow by Giles Whittell.
- A teenager who has a job cleaning hotels in Old Soul by Susan Barker and I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell. (In Stir-Fry by Emma Donoghue, Maria is also a teenaged cleaner, but of office buildings.)
- A vacuum cleaner bag splits in Stir-Fry by Emma Donoghue and one story of Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund – in the latter it’s deliberate, searching for evidence of the character’s late son after cleaning his room.
- An ailing tree or trees that have to be cut down in one story of The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel and The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue by Mike Tidwell.
- Buchenwald was mentioned in one poem each in A God at the Door by Tishani Doshi and The Ghost Orchid by Michael Longley.
- A reference to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass in To Have or to Hold by Sophie Pavelle and Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly.
- A mentally unwell woman deliberately burns her hands in I Am Clarence by Elaine Kraf and Every Day Is Mother’s Day by Hilary Mantel.
- A mention of the pollution caused by gas stoves in We Do Not Part by Han Kang and The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue by Mike Tidwell.
- An art installation involving part-buried trees was mentioned in Immemorial by Lauren Markham and then I encountered a similar project a few months later in We Do Not Part by Han Kang. Burying trees as a method of carbon storage is then discussed in The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue by Mike Tidwell.
- Imagining the lives of the people living in an apartment you didn’t end up renting in Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin and one story of The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel.
- The Anthropocene is mentioned in Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin and The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes.
- I was reading three debut novels from the McKitterick Prize longlist at the same time, all of them with very similar page counts of 383, 387, and 389 (i.e., too long!).
- Being appalled at an institutionalized mother’s appearance in The End Is the Beginning by Jill Bialosky and Every Day Is Mother’s Day by Hilary Mantel.
A remote artist’s studio and severed fingers in Old Soul by Susan Barker and We Do Not Part by Han Kang.
- A lesbian couple in New Mexico, the experience of being watched through a window, and the mention of a caftan/kaftan, in Old Soul by Susan Barker and one story of Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund.
- Refusal to go to a hospital despite being in critical condition in I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell and one story of Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund.
- It’s not a niche stylistic decision anymore; I was reading four novels with no speech marks at the same time: Old Soul by Susan Barker, Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin, The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes, and We Do Not Part by Han Kang. [And then, a bit later, three more: Wild Boar by Hannah Lutz, Mouthing by Orla Mackey, and How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney.]
A lesbian couple is alarmed by the one partner’s family keeping guns in Spent by Alison Bechdel and one story of Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund.
- Responding to the 2021 murder of eight Asian spa workers in Atlanta in Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh and Find Me as the Creature I Am by Emily Jungmin Yoon.
- Disposing of a late father’s soiled mattress in Mouthing by Orla Mackey and one story of Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund.
New York City tourist slogans in Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff and How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney.
- A Jewish care home for the elderly in The End Is the Beginning by Jill Bialosky and Joanna Rakoff’s essay in What My Father and I Don’t Talk About (ed. Michele Filgate).
- A woman has no memory between leaving a bar and first hooking up with the man she’s having an affair with in If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard and How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney.
A stalker-ish writing student who submits an essay to his professor that seems inappropriately personal about her in one story of Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund and If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard.
- A pygmy goat as a pet (and a one-syllable, five-letter S title!) in Spent by Alison Bechdel and Sleep by Honor Jones.
- A Brooklyn setting and thirtysomething female protagonist in Sleep by Honor Jones, So Happy for You by Celia Laskey, and How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney.
- A mention of the American Girl historical dolls franchise in Sleep by Honor Jones and If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard, both of which I’m reviewing early for Shelf Awareness.
A writing professor knows she’s a hypocrite for telling her students what (not) to do and then (not) doing it herself in Trying by Chloé Caldwell and If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard. These two books also involve a partner named B (or Bruce), metafiction, porch drinks with parents, and the observation that a random statement sounds like a book title.
- The protagonist’s therapist asks her to find more precise words for her feelings in Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke Harrison and So Happy for You by Celia Laskey.
- The protagonist “talks” with a dying dog or cat in The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey and If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard.
Shalimar perfume is mentioned in Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin and Chopping Onions on My Heart by Samantha Ellis.
- The Rapunzel fairytale is a point of reference in In the Evening, We’ll Dance by Anne-Marie Erickson and Secret Agent Man by Margot Singer, both of which I was reading early for Foreword Reviews.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
The Smell of Fresh Rain by Barney Shaw
Petrichor: that would be the alternative title for this book about the often-neglected human sense of smell. In avoiding that lovely but obscure word, Barney Shaw is making a specific point: we don’t have an everyday vocabulary for talking about smells; there are specialist terms and concepts, but try to depict an ordinary scent in words and you may struggle.
I had just such an experience myself the other week. We’d bought a jar of Sun-Pat peanut butter at Sainsbury’s that didn’t taste or smell right, but no longer had the receipt to return it to the store. When I contacted the company on Twitter, my attempts to describe the problem were decidedly feeble: we’d bought a “duff jar,” I wrote; it tasted and smelled “off.” If pressed I would perhaps have used the word “stale,” but I had no way of conveying how exactly it didn’t taste or smell right. (Sun-Pat very kindly took my word for it and sent £10 worth of vouchers. The new jars we bought as replacements tasted better but still not the same as before: chances are they’ve recently changed the recipe to be cheaper.)
I’m intrigued by the related senses of smell and taste in general, so I was delighted to find a whole book on the topic. Shaw, a retired civil servant who served as a private secretary to various government ministers, approaches the topic as an amateur enthusiast rather than a scientist, so his language is never overly technical and he ranges between history, anatomy, literature and even self-help.
Much of the book was researched “on location,” as it were. Shaw travels to Portsmouth to grasp the signature smells of the seaside; visits a hardware store to differentiate the odors of different metals (they release no smell on their own, only in contact with human skin/sweat); returns to his hometown to discover the smells associated with suburban gardens and different types of High Street shops; and sniffs at butcher stalls, pubs, and London Underground trains. With his son, blind from birth and autistic, he sets out to capture “the smell of 3 a.m.” as early-morning market sellers set out their mushrooms and cheeses.
Shaw also travels through time, imagining what it might have smelled like in the mid-nineteenth century or earlier: raw sewage, cooking smoke, animal dung, and laundries and tanneries with their reek of stale urine. Once many of those stinks were eliminated, bad smells became associated with the working classes (as in the work of Maugham and Orwell) or with foreigners, a continuing prejudice that fuels xenophobia. The book also traces the rise of the perfume industry and other artificial smells like scent diffusers and vaping. Shaw is uncomfortable with the idea of natural scents being replaced by synthetic ones, and notes the environmental consequences of our obsession with abolishing body odor: “The price we pay for hygiene and deodorants is in the pollution pumped out by a billion washing machines and … soap, toothpaste and washing powder flowing down to the seas.”
There are fascinating facts on pretty much every page of this book; I won’t bore you by listing them, but will just say that if you’re interested in exploring the connections between smell and memory in life and in literature, in discovering what makes the human sense of smell unique, and in learning some wine-tasting-style tips for describing odors, this is the perfect introduction. I noted a bit of repetition in the book, especially at chapter openings, but that didn’t keep me from being as enthralled with the subject matter as Shaw, a passionate tour guide to the olfactory world, so clearly is.
My rating:
The Smell of Fresh Rain was released in the UK on November 14th. My thanks to Victoria Reed at Icon Books for the free copy for review.
Other books referencing smell/taste that I have read or at least sampled:
- Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way by Molly Birnbaum
- Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste by Bianca Bosker
- Parfums: A Catalogue of Remembered Smells by Philippe Claudel
- The Diary of a Nose by Jean-Claude Ellena
- A Smell of Burning: The Story of Epilepsy by Colin Grant
- Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
Other smell-related titles on my TBR:
Nonfiction:
- Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent by Mandy Aftel
- Taste, Memory: Forgotten Foods, Lost Flavors, and Why They Matter by David Buchanan
- The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York by Chandler Burr
- The Case against Fragrance by Kate Grenville
Fiction:
- A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler
- The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge
- The Smell of Other People’s Houses by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock
- The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 