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0008618925
| 9780008618926
| 0008618925
| unknown
| 4.00
| 29
| unknown
| unknown
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it was amazing
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Eley Williams brilliant debut short story collection “Attrib.” was the Winner of the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize (for which I was a judge) an
Eley Williams brilliant debut short story collection “Attrib.” was the Winner of the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize (for which I was a judge) and included in the Guardian as my Book of the Year for 2017 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...). It subsequently went on to win the James Tait Prize - Britain's longest running literary prize and its first ever short story winner. Her debut novel – “Liar’s Dictionary” – I described in my review as Williams’ Wonderfully Whimsical Wordsmithery. And since then she has been recognised as one of the 20 writers on the prestigious decennial Granta Best Young British Novelists lists – and the story she then submitted for the subsequent Granta issue “Rostrum” (ostensibly about a woman failing to enter an office building and for me reminiscent of “Alighting” in her earlier collection) is one of 19 stories in this new short story collection (typically of around the 8-12 page length, the shortest 6 the longest 18). “Sonant” about a sound editor working on canned laughter equally evoked for me the Foley Artist of the titular story in “Attrib.” as did, to a lesser extent, “Cuvier’s Feather” about a Courtroom artist. And more generally the collection is very much in the tradition of both “Attrib.” and “Liar’s Dictionary” – lexicographical literature (unusual names, definitions, wordplay all abound) with interior stories (normally they take place almost entirely in the mind of the first or third party protagonist) with a sense of pathos and occasional hidden menace. Dialogue is rare or typically absent – one of the main stories about communication “Words of Affirmation” (taken from the Five Love Languages) a husband re-opens communication with his wife, in a marriage which has become devoid of love, by way of the search history on his laptop. If the collection lacks anything I think it is the sheer beauty of “Attrib.”’s “Smote” – with the two most impactful stories being “Message” about a failed marriage proposal via light aircraft writing and “Squared Circle” about wrestler who every year rings another older and now dying wrestler on the anniversary of the epoch defining (or given its faked - epoch defined) fight between them. But overall, Williams remains one of my favourite writers – and the real impact of her stories is in the cumulative power of reading them. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 2024
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Sep 02, 2024
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Sep 01, 2024
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Hardcover
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057138904X
| 9780571389049
| B0D9YYZBVG
| unknown
| 3.60
| 10
| Mar 04, 2025
| Mar 11, 2025
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 21, 2024
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not set
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Aug 21, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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1787331741
| 9781787331747
| 1787331741
| 3.90
| 231
| Sep 03, 2024
| Sep 05, 2024
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really liked it
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On a second read this was again a perfect combination of thought provoking and enjoyable with the single best narrator on the longlist. I enjoyed the On a second read this was again a perfect combination of thought provoking and enjoyable with the single best narrator on the longlist. I enjoyed the many links to other books – as well as scriptural references, Francophone setting and extractive multinationals, I noted: The book opens with a discussion on addiction coming from Neanderthal genes – Wandering Stars is almost entirely about addiction (in that case though due to external circumstances). Also both novels take their titles from songs - by The Movies and Portishead respectively. It also opens with an imagined image of a man touching a match to a cigarette – like the front cover of This Strange Eventful History. Serge’s family are now rootless ex French Algerians – again reminiscent of the family in This Strange Eventful History. Bruno also spends some time discussing how it is that ancient Polynesians navigated over 1000s of miles without a method clear to modern science – the passages are almost exactly duplicated in some of Evie’s thoughts in Playground. Lucien is questioned by Sadie about the origins of his family home (which he is unclear on) – and while this goes back 100s of years it reminded me of Isabel’s family home in Safekeep. Bruno’s family were almost all killed in Nazi camps – like Eva in Safekeep. One of Bruno’s formative experiences is finding a dead body of a soldier – which reminded me of the opening chapter of Held. ORIGINAL REVIEW Because of his exposure to the kerosene, at the outward periphery of each of his two eyes, Bruno’s vision periodically degraded in a vertical line. The line quavered as if a zipper had riven the seen world at this outer periphery, riven it and then sewn it back up, but unevenly, and the living parts of the riven world were vibrating, sutured badly, and leaking something from under the sutures—an unseen, untouched absolute. It was at the quavering edges of his vision, he told them, that the truth of the seen and unseen was attempting to break through, to communicate, to coalesce. A critical point, as a terminology of chemistry, he summarized, was that moment when gasses and solids had the same valence. Perhaps the two trembling seams at the edges of his vision were the destabilized place where two worlds were reaching equilibrium, attempting to find balance where each did not annihilate the other. He regarded this tremble as pertaining to the riddle of history, and to a dream of forging a future that did not negate the past, a dream that honored reality without occluding its own verso, its counter-reality. Jean-Patrick Manchette (French crime novelist) meets David Reich (ancient human population geneticist) with a backdrop of post Marxist radicalism and to a soundtrack of Daft Punk (and Serge/Charlotte Gainsbourg). I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2024 Booker Prize – and with reading it completed the longlist (on 6th August – 6 days ahead of 2023, but a week after 2022 when I managed to complete the longlist by end July – the announcement was 4 days earlier that year). Rachel Kushner has previously published 3 novels – of which I have only read the last – Mars Room, eventually shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize (and one of the very few potentially predictable novels on what was the oddest of longlists), a deeply researched and heartfelt but also rather sprawling examination of the Californian penal system which for me both had the best single literary image of the longlist, but also some more flawed elements. When asked the “what are you working on next” question on the Booker website at the time of “Mars Room”’s shortlisting Kushner talked about ”A novel about the tyranny of the human face, which is, so far, its title. It’s partly about early humans, wanderers of separate tribes—sapiens and Neanderthals—who either snubbed one another, or simply didn’t know, for half a million years, that they coexisted, until one day, two met on a path, cataclysmically, as thrilling new genomic analysis tells us. That part’s the love story. There are some contemporary people in it too, less romantically, and in particular a person of unknown provenance who covers their face, unsettling the rules and lives of those who choose not to.” However, this idea mutated somewhat into this novel set instead set in 2013 France (although with a couple of minor inconsistencies in timing) - and which fits the way the author’s novels progress forwards in time – 1950s, 1970s and early 2000s previously. The novel as published coalesced around a number of other elements which she has described in more recent interviews: Setting: an area of remote southwestern France she knows well and one rich with caves and traces of ancient early human habitation). Milieu: commune of idealistic young Parisians attempting to farm the inhospitable land. Research interest: the early genetic origins of humanity. Narrative tension: the Parisians resistance to the French authorities and in particular their policy of building megabasins – large scale, artificial reservoirs which divert water from small farmers to agro-industrial irrigation. Narrator: a female “spy” acting as an undercover informant and agent provocateur. The idea inspired by the IRL story of Mark Kennedy – the UK police officer who infiltrated various environmental organisations (including some of which Kushner’s friends were members of) forming sexual relationships with a number of the activists before – after a scandal blew up – switching to working in the same line for private organisations. “Sadie Smith” (we do not know her real name) is a 34 year old America – multilingual, ruthlessly focused, self-confident and opinionated, master of seduction with her conventionally beautiful face and cosmetically enhanced body, and even greater master of dissimulation and misdirection. She is a heavy drinker but also heavy thinker and as a first party narrator we gain close access to her thoughts and motivations (unlike anyone around her). Sadie was, we learn, dumped many years ago by the FBI after a honey trap sting in which she lured an young US environmental activist into planning a bombing, was thrown out by the courts for entrapment (as a running background to the novel the documents for that case are just being released). Now she works for an anonymous but clearly well-connected set of masters who we and she surmise represent French big-business interests. Her immediately previous job had her shadowing the hugely unpopular figure of Paul Platon - Deputy Minister for Security in the fictional Ministry of Rural Coherence (loosely modelled on Manuel Valls) - whose job is to persuade areas to accept the installation of unwanted state infrastructure. Now she has been asked to infiltrate Le Moulin, an agricultural collectivist of anarchistic and idealistic subversives run by the charismatic Pascal Balmy and suspected of unproven sabotage. Her introduction is engineered by her by way of Pascal’s cousin Lucien, a filmmaker, her current adopted lover and and (in his eyes) her fiancée - who sets her up to translate the group’s manifesto. As part of her research, she hacks into the emails of the group’s mentor - Bruno Lacombe - often seen as the successor to the notorious IRL Marxist filmmaker and philosopher Guy Debord. But disillusioned by the complete absence of any communist/socialist uprising in the West in the second half of the 20th century, Bruno has turned away from Marxism and rejected not just capitalism, not just a working class who seem content with their exploitation but the whole of humanity - or more specifically Homo sapiens. Rather than harking back to an earlier pre-industrial era he instead goes back to Neanderthal times, believing that all the ills of modern society stem from the very same greed and rapaciousness that allowed Homo Sapiens to largely eradicate the ethically and artistically superior Thals (his term for them). His views on this - and his decision to retreat into a cave network which he believes have the more visionary Thal cave art (not just pictures of hunting and killing) - are set out in a series of emails to the collective and which Sadie summarises for us - being it seems increasingly seduced herself by the shadowy figure of Bruno. We sense too that Kushner rather enjoys exploring these ideas - and particularly the idea of restoring the reputation of the maligned Neanderthals aligns with the championing of the underdog that informs much of her work. Meanwhile at the collective Sadie starts an affair with a man there and starts to find ways to carry out the directions of her shadowy masters which seem to consist of getting the collective to carry out an outrage which will lead to them being arrested en masse as terrorists, with Platon (who is visiting an agricultural fair at which the local farmers and collective were planning a smaller scale and largely peaceful disruption) as a sacrificial pawn - this fair forming the book’s climax. Note that a setting in a Francophone country is something of a theme on this year’s longlist (Playground, This Strange and Eventful History, Held) and like all those books this book also features some famous French people (here for example the novelist Louis Ferdinand Celine as well as the Marxist philosopher Guy Debord). Interestingly both these first two of those books also feature French multinationals although in both cases focused on excavating minerals/metals. Another recurrent theme on this longlist is the use of Old Testament scriptural references (Safekeep – Isaiah; Wandering Star – Proverbs, Job; Stoner Yard Devotional – Psalms; Enlightenment – Ruth and Esther) and here Sadie’s worldview (as well as her grooming technique) is heavily informed by the more world weary parts of Ecclesiastes. Something happens and people think, This was meant to be. The random nature of luck and of incident is too disturbing to acknowledge. I’m not the first to know this. It’s in the Bible. Ecclesiastes declares that life has no meaning, that evil will be rewarded, and goodness punished. He says that even the most honorable man can be left in town to die in the street, while the greediest fool gets a eulogy and a proper burial. But either people skip that part of the Old Testament, or they never read the Bible at all, and instead they follow their instinct to mythify a sequence of random events and the stream of strangers they encounter in life: Good things happen to them or people they like and they think, “justice.” Bad things happen to people they don’t like and once again they think, justice She also has a strongly held view on the non-political critical essence of people (which she sees as salt) although disappointingly not linked in any way to Lot’s wife. Overall, I enjoyed reading the book a lot - both the spy style capers and Bruno’s home spun prehistorically rooted philosophy in isolation would I think soon wear thin. However the alternating of them, together with the vivid picture Kushner paints of both the local community and of the upper echelons of a French society as well as the additional ideas she brings in - there is for example a thoughtful and fascinating link drawn with the local minority of the Cagots, treated for many centuries as a kind of untouchables caste - make for a novel which at no point overstays its welcome. I also enjoyed seeing a novel which tries something different - both from the author’s previous novel and from most literary fiction (with a sense of fun which is so often lacking from her more earnest contemporaries). If I had a reservation, it is that the novel felt like a story which was building to more of a series of twists, character revelations or just the unification of various plot strands (or revolution of the plot arcs of a faulty sprawling list of cast members) than did occur in the finale. I first was made aware of this novel when the Guardian’s Alex Preston, in his fiction preview of 2024, called it as his “early pick for this year’s Booker” - and while I would be surprised to see this as the winner unless it, in keeping with the song that is ever present in the book, gets lucky, it’s a welcome addition to the longlist. My thanks to Jonathan Cape, Vintage PRH for an ARC via NetGalley. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away. What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self ? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being....more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Aug 30, 2024
Aug 04, 2024
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Aug 30, 2024
Aug 06, 2024
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Aug 05, 2024
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0063352613
| 9780063352612
| 0063352613
| 3.70
| 1,621
| May 02, 2024
| Jun 04, 2024
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really liked it
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On a second read (this was one of only 2 of the 13 I had not read prior to the longlist being published, so I decided to re read them all) I particula
On a second read (this was one of only 2 of the 13 I had not read prior to the longlist being published, so I decided to re read them all) I particularly enjoyed the way in which much of the plot very deliberately mirrored astronomical phenomenon. For example - the concept of comets and their orbital periods explains the way that characters (the troubled woman, the Romanian priest, but also Nathan and even Grace) and objects (Maria’s writing and letters) keep returning. And there are a series of relationships which function like binary stars: the two unrequited lives: Thomas and James, Grace and Nathan; the key relationship in the whole novel Thomas and Grace; but perhaps also Thomas and Maria, Maria and M. Most stars, I’m told, are binary stars, and these pairs affect each other profoundly. One star might waylay another in space, but find in due course it suffers from this new proximity: it is possible for one star to draw matter from another in what they call mass transfer, growing larger and more bright at a dreadful cost to its companion. In this way the bodies of the stars are formed by the forces of attraction between them, and the closer the relation, the higher the risk. If there cannot be equity, I wonder if it’s better to receive the greater proportion of love, or give it? I wish I knew. W. H. Auden, whose poem ‘The More Loving One’ considers the stars’ indifference to the love of men, wrote this: If equal affection cannot be Let the more loving one be me. But also my concerns over the way the novel drifted in the second half - after Thomas moved away from James and Grace from Nathan - were I realised in fact unfair, as the effect is deliberate and based on Kepler’s Second Law. “And did I ever tell you about the laws of Kepler? The first describes how heavenly bodies orbit the sun, and that is the law of ellipses. The second law I’ve memorised as I used to memorise Bible verses when I was young: the semi-major axis sweeps out equal areas in equal time. This means that bodies in orbit move faster and faster as they near the heat of the sun, rushing like a man into his lover’s arms. Then they move past their perihelion, the embrace is done, and they become listless and slow in the dark. Lately it’s seemed to me that you became a kind of sun – that since you’ve been gone I’ve moved through a world with no warmth in it. But my orbit is closed, and everything that passes will in its time return – so I imagine myself moving again towards some heat and light I can’t make out” Overall a very impressive and distinctive novel. ORIGINAL REVIEW So I told her this: that it’s true that I’ve only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I’ve been faithless, devout, loving, indifferent, ardent, diligent and careless; full of loathing and wanting, hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or comforted by providence – and all of it ticking through me while the pendulum of my life loses its amplitude hour by hour. All the while she sat crying in her childish way. And I wanted to console the child I’d loved, and so I told her this: that in the ordinary way we love because we’re loved, and give more or less what we’re given. But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I’d once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand we are made in the image of God – because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree. So if you go on loving when your love is unreturned it makes you just a little lower than the angels. I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2024 Booker Prize – although it was very much something I intended to read as I had read all of the Essex-born, now Norfolk-based author’s previous three novels. Her first “After Me Comes The Flood” (2014) was East Anglia Book of the Year and Folio Prize longlisted, It is set in a “slightly off kilter Norfolk” – light on plot (unlike her subsequent work) and more a vehicle to explore ideas of religious faith and doubt and of community which have informed much of her later writing. An early draft (called “Confusion”) was a key part of her Creative Writing PhD (see below). Her second “Essex Serpent” (2016) – set in the fictional village of Aldwinter in the Estuarine marshes of Northeast Essex, it gained commercial (more than 200,000 hardback copies alone) and Prize (Waterstones Book of the Year, Overall winner at the British Book Awards, Costa Prize/Encore Award/Dylan Thomas prize shortlisted, Women’s Prize/Walter Scott Prize longlisted) success – and was later adapted for Apple TV. Something of a cult hit with at its heart the enigmatic widow and amateur palaeontologist Cora Seaborne (whose draw – much as I appreciated the book – seemed lesser on me than on other readers or the characters in the book). And her third Melmoth (2018) was Dylan Thomas Prize shortlisted. Set in Prague and a reimagining of the 1820s novel “Melmoth the Wanderer” by Charles Maturin it drew heavily on the author’s love of the gothic, the use of which by Iris Murdoch inspired her Creative Writing thesis (which also covered Maturin’s book). Her “Melmoth” also as an aside formed half of my eldest daughter’s English A Level NEA. So now with her fourth novel – set in the fictional Essex town of Aldleigh (her childhood home of Chelmsford in all but name) – she finally achieves the Booker Prize longlist she has long deserved and I will note in passing given her PhD thesis that the Booker Prize trophy is now of course named the Iris. And it is even closer to home as it takes place in an around a Strict Baptist Chapel – Bethesda – the same denomination in which the author was raised; strict both in both the more common meaning (the congregants shunning much of the trappings (seen more as entrapments) of modern life – from jeans, to pubs to television to pop music) and the theological one (withholding communion from all but members of the church – who in turn they, based on a Calvinistic/Particular Baptist tradition, believe are part of a pre-determined elect). Their world (or it may be more appropriate to say heavenly) view is described (rather brilliantly by an outsider character) as that “They lived with God, he thought, as if they had a lodger upstairs who'd bang on the floor with a broom if they ever made a noise.” The novel starts in 1997 before moving on to following the same characters in 2008 and 2017 – with the two key characters being Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay. Thomas – a well-dressed but resolutely old-fashioned bachelor (50 years old in 1997) – writes a weekly column for the local newspaper on the topics of literature and ghosts, but in the book’s opening scenes is told by his editor to switch his attentions to astronomy, starting with the in-the-news Hale-Bopp comet and despite his initial lack of enthusiasm finds himself drawn to the subject – seeing in the stars (and planets and comets) as well as in the science behind them (Carlo Rovelli’s writing played a crucial part in the novel’s conception), something of the wonder and beauty and life lessons he first found in a religious faith he is starting to lose (his persistence in faith despite his doubts of course reflecting his name in a form of scriptural normative determinism – and the interplay of faith and doubt being one of the key themes of the novel). Thomas’s relationship with the chapel is now slightly semi-detached, and he feels like he lives something of a double life with frequent trips to London for homosexual encounters which he hides from the church (in the same way he hides his beliefs and background from those he meets in London) “He survived, as he put it to himself, by dividing his nature from his soul,, he left his nature in London on the station platform and picked up his soul in Aldleigh as if it were left luggage” Grace –17 when we first meet her - is the daughter of the widowed (her mother having died giving birth to her) Ronald – now pastor of the church – about who the best metaphor line in a novel of brilliantly crafted writing is written: “Then Ronald Macaulay came in with holiness in the pleats of his trousers.” She is something of a free spirit – eccentric in dress and mannerisms, and a magpie like thief but otherwise only now starting to explore the limits on her freedom imposed by the church. She is much loved by Thomas for all he refers to her semi-affectionately as “wretched child”. Thomas (unbeknownst to her) was drawn to stay in the church when being irretrievably struck by her as a few days old baby, determined that he would “keep a foot in the chapel door, and let a little of her spirit out and a little of the world in”. The book begins brilliantly – with some superb old-fashioned and high-quality writing – see for example this early passage describing the chapel – and note the biblical references (Potter’s Field, Bethesda – later explained, and Psalm 37 which only works in the King James version). Also note the effective repetition of 1888 and the clever pun on damned in the last sentence picking up both the world-judging view of the chapel (which of course forces Thomas to keep his sexuality concealed) and on the earlier metaphor about Aldeligh as a river. It was flanked by a mossy wall, and by a derelict patch of ground known to him as Potter’s Field; its iron gate was fastened with a chain. Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the thirty-seventh psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its bricks were pale, its proportions austere: it was a sealed container for God …… This was Bethesda Chapel, as fixed in time’s flow as a boulder in a river: Aldleigh ran past it, and round it, and could never change it. Above the door a narrow plaque read 1888, and beyond the bristled threshold mat, 1888 persisted. All the dreadful business of the modern world – its exchange rates, tournaments, profanities, publications, elections, music and changes of administration – washed up against the green door and fell back, dammed. As I said the writing is old fashioned and the same could be said of the characters – but this simply reflects the milieu in which they have developed (and of course in which the author grew up) – and I must admit the references she uses often work better for me than novels which use art history, cinema or modern TV/pop. Returning to the plot – in the book’s opening phase both fall in (earthly) love for the first time. Thomas with James Bower – the head of the local museum who contacts Thomas with something that may interest him (more later); Grace with Nathan – a young lad (from a rather more worldly background than Grace) who first comes into contact with her when he strikes her with a golf ball through the church window. Both love relationships prove doomed – Thomas as it is entirely unrequited by the married James; Grace’s largely due to Thomas’s impulsive decision to impede it (the repercussions of which play out over decades in his relationship with Grace – forgiveness also a theme of the novel). But over the decades they continue to play out in the imagination of Thomas and thoughts of Grace. But that is only the start of the plot which could be described I think as a little maximalist and unashamedly so – Perry spoke of her writing style in a recent interview: There’s a certain terminology around the kind of literature that will always pop up on best books of the year, say: it’s very taut, very spare, as if it’s a woman who’s expected to be very thin. People write about books as if they’re women’s bodies: slender, there’s barely anything there. And I don’t write like that. I can’t. I don’t live like that. For a little while, I thought perhaps I ought to give it a shot. And it was like writing for a year with my left hand. It was just painful and terrible. So I then came to terms with the fact that this is how I write, and how could I not when I was raised reciting reams of the King James Bible and reading Shakespeare for fun? I’m not going to suddenly write frictionless prose with no speech marks.” The other main plot line is a mystery around a woman he identifies as “Maria Vaduva Bell, late of Lowlands House-astronomer, Romanian, unquiet spirit and friend” and who is the intersection of multiple plot lines: the rumoured ghost of an abandoned manor house near the chapel; author of a diary found by James Bower (and why he contacts Thomas); the mysterious woman in a picture Thomas has of the day the chapel was inaugurated – a woman whose ghostly presence has always unsettled him’ for much of the book an actual ghost almost always in the background of scenes involving Thomas and often speaking to him (in his head we assume); an unheralded astronomer and alleged initial observer of a comet (another comet – this is not a book that shies from coincidence) due to appear again in the last section of the book. For a time it feels like any one only has to slightly touch some part of Lowlands House or Bethesda Chapel for another clue about Maria’s life to appear. She also furnishes a link back to Essex Serpent (see below). And other key side characters include (but are not restricted) to: Grace’s Aunt and effectively her adopted Mum; Grace’s Aunt’s rather overbearing and interfering flamboyant friend; a Romanian pastor, victim of Ceausescu’s secret police and now homeless; a lady squatting in Lowlands and obsessed with catastrophic comet conspiracies; a red haired man who turns up towards the end. I must admit after the very strong start than at some points in the middle of the book I did feel the pace was starting to drag and the plot taking slightly too many detours, and also that some of what was going on was a lot more clear to the author than me, and similarly that some of the characters were much more vivid in her imagination than they were to me on the page. However, I think the author does then draw her plot, characters and themes together really well for a very strong ending. Many of Perry’s signature devices appear in the book – the heavy use of the epistolary form (here via frequent reproductions of Thomas’s newspaper columns and by letters – sent and unsent – to James), and more symbolically the frequent appearance of her “familiar” animal – jackdaws. There is also an excursion to Aldwinter and a cameo puzzle-solving role for Cora as easter eggs for her fans. Dymphna Flynn (who I first met when she invited me to the Booker Prize Book Group on the Front Row shows she used to produce) said on a comment to me of this book “I loved it for her integrity in dealing with faith and love both earthly and divine, which I find not fashionable in fiction; but thought fascinating” – and that is I think a brilliant summation of the book one which I am glad to have read and thanks to the Booker judges for accelerating my reading of it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Aug 27, 2024
Jul 30, 2024
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Aug 29, 2024
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Hardcover
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1399724363
| 9781399724364
| B0CDDBCRGR
| 3.67
| 3,125
| Oct 03, 2023
| Oct 03, 2023
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really liked it
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[image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement [image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement as it was mentioned in some Booker speculation. On a second read the theme of mortality/death/end of life became much clearer and an equally dominant one with those of forgiveness and of activism/retreat in the face of environmental decay (and whether either really works) which I identified the first time - right up to the very end of the book. “My mother said that anything that had once been alive shoula go back into the soil. Food scraps went into the compost, of course, including meat and bones, despite the general advice against this. Paper, torn into strips to allow air and microbes to move freely through. She would cut old pure cotton or silk or woollen clothes into small shreds and compost them too. Fish bones and flesh. Linen tea towels. She reluctantly left out larger pieces of wood, but longed for a woodchipper. She left cane furniture to rot and then buried it. She quoted a Buckingham Palace gardener she had once seen on television, who added leather boots to his compost bin. All that was needed was time, and nature. Anything that had lived could make itself useful, become nourishment in death, my mother said. I was struck again though by the quiet and contemplative nature of much of the writing and perhaps one of my favourite images (for its subtle depth) across the longlist. “I yanked at the sheet and the motion sent everything to the carpet. I lifted the sheet with two hands and it billowed slowly back down, and as it did I felt some otherworldly possibility open up inside myself … stood looking at the bed and breathing. It isn't something I ever told anyone - how could you say this? - but the lift and descent of that sheet, the air inside it, the peace when it settled, showed me what I wanted. However I also found the three visitations a little more jarring this time - for all they allowed the themes to be examined and developed (part directly, part allegorically) they seemed to detract a little from the core of the novel and the author’s stated intent to “try to master what Saul Bellow called ‘stillness in the midst of chaos’, risking a tonal restraint and depth”. In particular this is true of the mouse infestation which rather than being turned down seems to be dialled up to a Nigel Tufnel style 11. Booker links: the theme of death and end of life that plays through this novel dominates the final parts of This Strange Eventful History (earlier parts of which are - like this novel - set in Australia, a land the Booker has largely ignored for around a decade). the narrator’s school day reminiscences include a predatory piano teacher of the boys in her class - which links to the incident which caused the rift between Hendrick and his mother in Safekeep. ORIGINAL REVIEW In the church, a great restfulness comes over me. I try to think critically about what's happening but I'm drenched in a weird tranquillity so deep it puts a stop to thought. Is it to do with being almost completely passive, yet still somehow participant? Or perhaps it's simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit. This is the author’s seventh novel and the first I have read. Her fifth “The Natural Way of Things” won the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction; her sixth “The Weekend” was shortlisted for both prizes. An austere and quiet novel which looks at the challenge of forgiveness for severe transgressions, examines spiritual and religious practices through an atheist lens and looks at the dilemma between engaging with the intractability of global issues, or instead retreating from them into ritual and contemplation. The unnamed first party narrator is starts the book as a non-believing guest – for a short term retreat - at a Catholic Convent in rural New South Wales (close to where she was born and where her parents – including her eccentric but generous spirited mother – are both buried – graves she has not visited for 30 years). This first part of the novel – where she effectively observes as a visitor, and joins on the fringes, the practices of the convent will I think be alien to many readers – with the silences and reflections: but I make a point from time to time on taking a weekend at a Christian retreat centre (there is a lovely one near Battle in Sussex) and even last time I was there purchased a round edged cross to hold in the hand like the narrator albeit with more purpose (for me to stop me reaching for my smartphone). I do buy a plain sandalwood-scented candle, a plastic torch and a wooden cross. The cross has rounded edges and fits snugly in the hand. I am a bit ashamed of it. I don't know why I buy it, except maybe as a mark of respect to these people, and as a kind of talisman, to hold and feel. It is for the body, not the mind. In the second part of the novel – we are perhaps initially surprised (as perhaps is the narrator and as definitely are her friends and colleagues) that she has joined the community permanently – the question of her lack of belief never really explicitly raised. From the little detail we get of her past live we understand (or at least I did) that she has turned her back both on an environmental organisation for which she works (the Threatened Species Rescue Centre) and on her marriage (to it seems some form of environmental activist as well). And in this second section, while the mediative aspects of both the narrator’s life and the writing remain – there are three separate visitations to the convent: Visitant: a guest or visitor like Helen Parry, or a supernatural being, an apparition, like a saint. Like a delivery of bones, like a plague. Firstly a plague of mice – which has it seems to be both aspects resonant of the plagues God via Moses let loose on Egypt, but is also intimately related to the climate change and species displacement that dominated the narrator’s before-life, and even has some links to the COVID “plague” which is still impacting the world at the time of the novel. And note also that the very idea of retreat was explicitly inspired in the author by the impact of lockdown and how it lead to a sudden imposed retreat from the “kind of constant flurry of activity that we generally live in. “ Secondly the discovery of the body of a former nun who left the convent to run a relief mission overseas but was murdered – and the decision to repatrirate the bones and to bury them in the convent grounds – a nun with an unresolved before her death conflicted relationship with one of the other nuns. Thirdly – the person who accompanies the bones – effectively a celebrity nun and high profile campaigner (Helen Parry) whose presence and activism initially threatens the nuns and the narrator by the contrast with their turning of their backs on the world. But the narrator – between fighting of the mice – has a more personal impact: as she knew Helen from when she was a child - (when Helen was abused by her troubled mother and shunned and humiliated by the other children including the narrator) – something the narrator reflects on with shame especially when contrasting with some of the much more charitable activities of her own mother on which she increasingly reflects. The author has said in interviews: “There is something sacred … or holy about [writing]. When you're fully engaged in it, when you're fully absorbed in the practice of it, there is an almost prayer-like aspect." – and I think that sense of sacredness informs the writing of the novel. It is one with lines taken all the way from REM to Simone Weil by way of Nick Cave – but one key line is Matisse’s 1951 claim that “All art worthy of the name is religious. Be it a creation of lines, or colors: if it is not religious, it does not exist. If it is not religious, it is only a matter of documentary art, anecdotal art…which is no longer art.” Overall, this was a novel which spoke to me strongly – a lot with which I am familiar but told through the eyes of a narrator (and an author) whose default reaction is scepticism but who over time examines their beliefs just as the best novels – like this one – cause me to examine my own. In the hallway to the dining room hangs the famous Julian of Norwich quotation: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Nearby, in a little alcove, hangs something else - a boxed collection of pinned dead butterflies, orange and black, apparently a gift from some old priest of the area, long dead.. ...more |
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really liked it
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[image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement [image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement as it was mentioned in some Booker speculation. I was intrigued how this would work on a re-read given the “twist” It actually worked well - I think because the book is more than the twist: Isabelle re-examining aspects of her life (the confrontations with Uncle Karel and Rian) and then the working out of her relationship with Eva. So knowing what was coming (which anyway I know different readers worked out at different times) did not really change the story. And I did admire the author’s decision to have a positive ending. She has said of this: “This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I think it’s so, so much more impressive when a hopeful ending is made to feel true, like a real possibility. It’s harder than making a sad ending feel true and possible—that’s life. That’s more or less my relationship to hope, I think. It’s hard work, but God, isn’t it impressive when it works?” My favourite passage second time around “What certainty can you give me? What home” Booker link: Hendrik’s falling out with his mother stems from an encounter with a predatory piano teacher - such a teacher also appears in a story the narrator of Stone Yard Devotional remembers from her childhood. ORIGINAL REVIEW The Hebrew scripture was inlaid in what once must have been a gold-painted stone but was now graying, dull. She stepped closer. In Roman letters, the quote announced itself: Isaiah, 56:7. Isabel drove back home. Her Bible she kept in her room, on her shelf. The little hare leaned its little back against it. Isabel found the quote. For my house will be called, she read, finger next to the number seven, a house of devotion for all. The author was Tel Aviv born (and spent her early childhood there) before moving with her Israeli citizen mother and Dutch father to her father’s country where she now teaches. This essay (https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articl...) gives a good background on her conflicted relationship with her heritage and with her adopted society. The novel, set in the Eastern Netherlands in 1961, opens in and is dominated by the third party viewpoint of Isabel. Isabel, while not a practicing believer, is infused though with a Dutch Calvinistic sense of austerity, primness, and judgementalism and self-denial. She still lives, now alone, in the family home that she and her family (her mother – whose worldview seems to have permeated her own – and her 2 brothers moved into – from their Amsterdam home – in 1944 at the tail end of the war, when she was 11, her older brother Louis 13 and her younger brother Hendrik 11). Now their mother dead the house is promised to Louis when he gets married – but with Louis something of a Lothario she assumes he will never settle down and increasingly sees the house as her own possession – obsessing over the housekeepers she employs and discards for some form of transgression – the book opening with her finding a shard of one of her mother’s favourite plates (Delft like with a hare design) and having to be talked down by the calmer Hendrik (who also tries to stop her habit of pinching her skin) from accusing the latest maid of breaking and hiding it. Hendrik left home some years back after a row with his mother about his homosexuality – and now lives with a mixed race male partner. Isabel seems determined to be a life long virgin – fending off the rather clumsy advances of her putative boyfriend. The opening chapter – and the original seed for the novel in a creative working exercise – has the three siblings getting together with Louis bringing his latest girlfriend Eva to the condescension of Hendrick and the open hostility of Isabel – who is then horrified when Louis visits her only 12 days later saying that he has to go to a conference abroad and that Eva is to stay with her while he is away in the family home that she now thinks of as simply for her. From there the book develops as the relationship between Isabel and the slightly mysterious but quietly fierce Eva (no known family) simmers – first of all into scarcely concealed animosity but then veering into sudden passion. Amusingly in the Acknowledgements she thanks her family for their respect in not talking to her about Chapter 10 – and I have to say that I was not really sure what to say about that Chapter in my review, so I will share their respectfulness. But Isabel’s paranoia does not rescind – and she is convinced that her servant is gradually stealing some of her mother’s old possessions and keepsakes – and suspicious and unhappy at Eva’s befriending of the maid. And tension mounts as Louis’s return brings to a head her Isabel and Eva’s affair. The book then takes a twist – although one I think most readers will have seen coming at some point (even if only a few pages earlier) with the novel then switching to (appropriately given the essay I referenced) a diary which brings everything into perspective. But the twist is not the end of the story – as it’s the resolution of the revelations which really plays out in a strong closing section which I think makes the novel a success. I felt that when reading it this novel was in a complex conversation with the Women’s Prize shortlisted, Aspen Words Literary Prize and RSL Encore Award winning novel “Enter Ghost” by Isabella Hammad – and particularly the verse which opens my review of that book. And I particularly liked this quote from the author when asked about how the novel speaks to on-going events: This is what the story is about. It’s about displacement, and it’s about the way that we think about ownership. Loving a place does not make us the owners of it. What I’m really afraid of is that people will read this and be like, “Naive Yael, thinking that we can all live in one house and only love could save us at the end of the day.” I know it’s not that simple. I know it’s not that, but it is what I wanted for these characters. Also because that’s the history of me. That’s the history of where I come from. And these are the two histories of displacement that I’ve, sort of, both lived through and had in my history. The story is about Isabel herself having to deal with complicity. I embody those two ends of the spectrum: both complicity on the one hand and, on the other hand, also a history of victimhood. Both of them are within me and that’s not even counting my Dutch grandmother, who was born in Indonesia and was part of a colonial system. Overall an extremely assured debut novel which starts as something of a gothic psychological novel, takes a turn into a highly charged erotic one, ends as a surprisingly positive love story but which is also at heart a powerful examination of the unspoken elements in post war Dutch society. ...more |
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really liked it
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[image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement [image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement as it was mentioned in some Booker speculation. I have to say that following on from the way that the initial momentum wore off first time - on a second read through the book revealed very little new and was definitely the weakest of the novels on a re-read. This quite second time around struck me again but more for its mention of repetition than the idea of a circular groove. “As the referees begin this fourth bout, the last bout of the day, in this darkened warehouse where only nine onlookers remain, there is the implication of a loop, or the suggestion of a repetition, a circular groove within which the tournament has fit its narrative.” The fidelity to boxing me bothered me just as much the second time. The author said in a Booker interview after being Longlisted (in which incidentally she name checks Kick The Latch - see my initial interview - as the book that impressed her the most). “I wrote this book l because I wanted to remember how I felt when I was a young woman and obsessively competed in every sport I could find. I would often drive, or have my parents drive me, to tournaments that felt very similar to the tournament in this book. My hope is that boxers, and lovers of boxing, will find authenticity in this book, but that also anyone who has ever been gripped by an obsessive drive to accomplish something, and to be seen at a time when they felt otherwise invisible, will find themselves in these pages.” And my conclusion is that she achieved the second aim much more than the first. The best chapters remained the first two and my impression from my first read - not one mentioned in my review - that that story may have been better combined as a standalone novella in a collection of short stories about young women playing sport - was even stronger this time. ORIGINAL REVIEW Like a boxing match, the backwards and forwards movements of how girl fighters spring up over time is not linear. Rose Mueller does not immediately get reborn as another girl fighter. Rather, each girl born has the ability to be activated into a boxer. When Artemis Victor and Andi Taylor and Iggy Lang and Izzy Lang and Rachel Doricko and Kate Heffer and Tanya Maw all age out of the Daughters of America tournament they will immediately be replaced by new fighters. The book was published by Daunt Books Publishing – an independent publisher which grew out of the independent bookshop chain. With Kathryn Scanlon’s knockout “Kick the Latch” winning the Gordon Burn Prize in 2023-24 and Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life” Booker shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020, they are definite prize fighters ever since they threw their hat in the ring, punching above their weight when compared to many of the heavyweight publishers, albeit it must help having James Daunt (MD of Waterstones) in your corner if you are trying to score points with the judges. The 12th Annual Women’s 18 and Under Daughters of Americas Cup at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, NV July 14th – July 15th 20xx …. so this novel starts and so it is structured and proceeds. The set up is simple but clever and relatively unique: the tournament – which had 100s of competitors and is a national championship - is down to its last two days and its last 8 boxers, who compete in four quarter finals, two pre-drawn semi-finals and a final. Each of these seven bouts is a chapter of the book – listing the two fighters and with each round proceeded by a tournament bracket - which take place immediately before, during and immediately after the fight, and largely in the heads of the two boxers – in an extreme form of unspoken dialogue (both sizing each other up) combined with interior monologue (as the boxers thoughts range over their past) but expressed through a third party narrator (who often looks into the near-term, post tournament as well as long term future of the two boxers – typically linking their future jobs back to the bout). In later chapters the voices of the girls merge a little – with each boxer rather cleverly inheriting something of the story of their vanquished opponent. Two other short chapters cover the night between the two days with a final post tournament chapter starting with the immediate aftermath but then (not entirely successfully for me) swooping into the long term future and even other-planetary settlements. The boxers briefly are: Artemis Victor (following in the footsteps and perhaps overshadowed by two older and highly successful siblings); Andi Taylor (by contrast very much on her own and whose life has been impacted by a young boy who drowned when she was serving as a lifeguard); Rachel Doricko (who delights in unsettling others both in life and boxing – for example by wearing weird-hats); Kate Heffer (from a more prosperous background – someone who believes that life adapts to her - and who reals off the digits of Pi during her bouts); two cousins Izzy and the younger Iggy Lang; Rose Mueller (from a small village and Catholic community); and Tanya Maw (who reflects on her mother having left home when she was young). There is a lot to like about the book – the bouts can be very engrossing and the tournament bracket idea works really well, and the idea of the narrator is a fascinating one. I enjoyed an interview with the author where she makes enlightening comments on some of her choices: I think the [tournament bracket] structure’s closest literary relative is a map, which is often included at the beginning of books, especially science fiction and fantasy books. It’s a visual to ground the reader in an unreal world. The space of the tournament has always felt very unreal to me. I think I needed a tether to earth, and with the tether of the tournament map I could take the narrative really far out in deep time and future space. Interestingly the book has a lot of overlap with another book I read recently – the Orwell Prize finalist “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey. Taking place over limited and specified time (2 days here, 1 day there) but in a deliberately unspecified year; an imposed regular structure (a tournament bracket, earth orbits); an omniscient narrator who swoops between characters who seemingly (slightly unrealistically) muse on their lives while going about other tasks; the way in which the free form of the thoughts contrasts with but is facilitated by the regularity of the chapter structure; no reported dialogue; the characters merging at times into a collective. I did have some concerns about the book. My interest rather waned over time – other than the “story merging” idea I felt that the author seemed to run out of ideas a little in subsequent rounds of the tournament. By having the narrator in the first matches go far into the future of each boxer – it meant there was relatively little to cover in their subsequent fights and the chapters were shorter but also less enjoyable (at least for me) as a result. In one case in particular (Rachel Doricko) I felt that a feature of the earlier round – a quirk but one fundamental to how her character is described and how she is contrasted to her opponent (her use of images and phrases to experience and remember the fight) is completely dropped for her next fight. Run under the auspices of the fictional Women’s Youth Boxing Association and at a deliberately unspecified date the boxing itself is I have to say rather fictional. At first I thought perhaps US girl’s boxing was different to Amateur boxing that for example will shortly be featured at the Olympics – but as the book went on I realised that this was not really representative of actual boxing at all. Some examples: junior girls going eight rounds (I think that would get you closed down pretty quickly by the medical authorities and lead to lots of future lawsuits– three would be more normal); no mention of TKOs or stoppages (and this takes away some of the hazard of the sport – that with one punch or flurry a fight can end, even if one boxer is hopelessly outclassed but also increases some of the danger - in reality the second fight would have been stopped by the referee); points called sometimes when blows struck and always announced at the end of each round so the boxers know who is ahead (again very different to the usual scenes where both boxers are convinced they won); bouts stopping if someone has won more than half the rounds (as without any mechanism to stop the fight they have lost); extra round if a tie (again the medical implications are obvious and ignored). Now as I said there is a strong fictional element to the set up – but the lack of fidelity for me rather took me out of the experience of the book as I started to think of the bouts as fencing-with-fists rather than boxing. I would contrast the novel here with a Kathryn Scanlon’s brilliant Gordon Burn Prize winning “Kick The Latch” – another notionally sport based reflective novel by the very same UK publisher, but one dripping with authenticity. Overall, a novel I enjoyed reading and admirable for its inventiveness – with the narrator/structure reinforcement particularly clever – but one perhaps losing its initial momentum and for me also slightly undermined by the lack of fidelity to real life sport. ...more |
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1250899907
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really liked it
| He’d asked his mother before leaving, small questions without raising suspicion, about Sree, about Vijaya. He walked to the red postbox. The metal He’d asked his mother before leaving, small questions without raising suspicion, about Sree, about Vijaya. He walked to the red postbox. The metal was warm from the day. He had written the letter on the train, he had written without pausing. He did not strike things out, he did not re-write. He wrote recklessly. Now, in this moment, he grew aware of the fact that this letter leaving his hands would breach the boundaries he had set up around himself, and perhaps ones she had too. Time had built those boundaries. Regret had built those boundaries. Guilt had built those boundaries. And the transgression he was committing now would destroy them, raze them, and he knew that it was a transgression he would never be able to stop himself from committing again, that it may fate him to yearn for her as long as he lived. The author of this book Ruthvika Rao and grew up in Hyderabad and worked for many years as a computer programmer (I think in the US) before studying at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she refined the manuscript for this book – one I would describe as a literary love story (across social and caste divides) set in her birthplace of the Indian state of Telangana and written in her second language of English (although with some limited Telegu – her first language, all of which is explained – this is thankfully not one of those books with huge amounts of untranslated langauge) The book starts in 1970 in the small village of Irumi in a dramatic scene where a 11-year-old boy – Kanakam, son of a tanner and therefore an outcast - wanders through the burning gadi (the local manor house) ruled by the local zarimandars (feudal landlords with life and death type powers) the Deshmukh family – who he watches being summarily executed after being sentenced to death by a “people’s court” of armed guerillas. The rest of the story then – starting in 1955 – leads up to this incident, concentrating on the Deshmukh household (including two daughters of the Zaminder’s brother – Vijaya and the younger Sree, the latter strongly favoured by their mother) as well as one of their live-in servants (Katya – who seems oddly favoured in the household) and the two sons of another seamstress servant (the older and rather reckless Ranga – already doing the lifelong indentured servitude known as vetti - and the one year younger and more academic Krishna – who his mother has asked to be exempted from vetti and sent to school). The key episode of the novel – and both families lives – occurs in that year. Vijaya and Krishna (who have developing feelings for each other despite the various social lines that crosses) hatch a plan to try and capture a man-eating tiger that has even managed to elude Vijaya’s Uncle – and end up taking Ranga and Sree with them, only for Sree to have a terrible fall into a ravine. Ranga takes the blame for the incident (he and Vijaya deny that Krishna came with them) and the Zaminder despite knowing they are lying – beats Ranga on a whipping post almost to death (forcing his mother to watch) – also agreeing to Krishna going to school but only on the condition he never returns (and that Ranga never leaves) so aiming to stop any relationship with Vijaya. The book then follows the lives of the various individuals: Ranga ultimately joining and rising in the Marxist Naxalite guerilla group; Vijaya trying to find some freedom from her family – but struggling with her mother’s seeming hatred for her as well as her own guilt over Sree’s health and eventually the shadow of an arranged marriage; Krishna befriended by a Hinda-Nationalist anti-communist student activist who draws him into dangerous political activity against both his wishes and the advice of his professor. Vijaya and Krishna re-make illicit contact after Krishna reappears at a village fair. And in the background the power of the Zaminder’s starts to diminish as the Naxalite lead uprisings become more frequent. Overall, I found this an interesting novel – although one that is very plot and character rather than innovation or language driven. Immersive perhaps more than impressive. It is published by the independent press Oneworld – who have managed no win no fewer than three of the last nine Booker Prizes (2015, 2016 and 2023) – and I think this does have a longlisting chance although I don’t easily see it going much further and it is probably more suited to the Women’s Prize (which they have not yet one despite several longlistings). My thanks to Oneworld for an ARC via NetGalley ...more |
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liked it
| I had trusted my own lies in the early days with my husband. By the time I met him, Clove had become a real and full person to me, the resilient ch I had trusted my own lies in the early days with my husband. By the time I met him, Clove had become a real and full person to me, the resilient child of parents who had died together tragically, the ever-growing, self-improving adult. Substance-free, with an early bedtime, a morning run and evening yoga routine, meditation, the cleanest of eating. Grueling shifts at grocery stores, no room for nightmares of my father and me in the middle of the ocean, only room for item codes. Fennel bulb 10223, head of radicchio 10557. Then, when I married and left grocery, I filled my head with the consumerism of impending motherhood, researching things to buy, NoseFrida, DockATot, balm for everything from nips to lips, preparing the way for the arrival of a new person who would be a glimmer of myself, but so much better: they would never know you or my father. But then Nova arrived, and along with her, my father cruising around my block in his Jimmy. Told in the first party voice of Clove, and effectively addressed to her absent mother, we immediately realise that Clove – outwardly a whole foods and health supplement obsessed, Instagram-influencer mother of a seven year old girl and three year old boy, living with her husband in reasonable prosperity in Portland – lived a very different life as a child with the threat of violence from her father (particularly towards her mother) ever present. And quickly after (and this is not a spoiler as it is revealed in the start of the second chapter) we realise that she is living something of a double life – firstly hiding a debt-racking-up online shopping issue from her husband, but more seriously the fact that – rather than the story he believes that she was orphaned by a car crash when around 17 – her mother was convicted of murdering her father, she fleeing the scene and adopting, with the contrivance of a sympathetic neighbour, the identity of Celine (the neighbours chronically sick daughter of the same age, now many years later dead). Now a letter from her mother in prison threatens to unmoor the life she has carefully created and curated – including a husband she picked for both his safety and normality and that, unlike her first lover and soulmate, he knows nothing of her past. Her mother, who she had not realised knew where she lived – she immediately thinks her earlier lover must be to blame and contacts him for the first time after running out on him – wants her help for an appeal that she is hatching with the help of an activist feminist lawyer. And into the mix Clove becomes obsessed with Jane – a glamourous if rather adrift woman she literally runs into (with her car in her confusion after getting the letter) and then subsequently meets working at her favourite health store. When Clove offers the homeless Jane board in exchange for acting as a nanny for the children, the relationship starts to veer off the rails, with Jane increasingly wanting to influence her decisions (and hoping that Clove will agree to birth child for her to adopt). And from there the book which seems to circle around the same ideas albeit with increasing tension, suddenly unwinds itself with a series of revelations. To be honest this is not really my normal literary read – a little too much in the form of a psychological thriller - and I was not always that comfortable with the juxtaposition of a serious subject matter (domestic abuse) with an increasingly coincidence and twist driven plot. However, I know that the author is writing from a place of having to deal with a difficult upbringing and a high trauma childhood and as an encounter at a school event reveals that is understandably likely to be lead to a different type of book from the literary prize winning fare I normally read. Overall I think this will appeal to many fans of psychological drama. My thanks to Oneworld Publications for an ARC via NetGalley A line had formed behind me, and in it stood a father from Nova’s class who was a real writer. Last I’d heard he was penning a long, important pastoral American novel that might actually be one of a trilogy. But what did he know about America? A profile I’d read of him mentioned his wife brought him tea to his study. America was my mother trying to take a community college class and my father beating her up before she could get out the door. This writer reminded me of the thing I’d learned at college that nearly broke me, nearly derailed my plan of forward success and normalcy: no matter what I did, I would never catch up to the very apparent generational wealth all around me. I wasn’t talking about money, though that mattered too. I was talking about the wealth of familial love. The leg up of a trauma-free or low-trauma childhood. The students around me had parents who called every other day, who beckoned them home for the holidays, where their childhood bedrooms were still intact, like shrines. They had not had to bloody their hands to get a seat at the table. And this man in line, this real writer. I could only imagine how much he’d been encouraged, nurtured, connected, and exposed early in life to the arts and sciences. Above all, given access. He gave me a small wave. He’d probably win a Pulitzer Prize....more |
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really liked it
| Gillis tried to explain. How the ancient elm tree in the manse garden had been leaning toward the kirk, and the spire had started to crack. So they Gillis tried to explain. How the ancient elm tree in the manse garden had been leaning toward the kirk, and the spire had started to crack. So they had to pull the tree out. And Gillis had fallen into the hole they’d left and found this hand. Which was strange enough, but the hand could actually move and it drew pictures as if it was trying to tell us all something, though it was anyone’s guess what the images were meant to represent. ‘Here, wait here,’ he said, and grabbed the papers from the kitchen table, then brandished them at his father. He told him how recently, only last week, there had been a miracle. The flash of light, the angel, the insects and the fish. This is a very distinctive and unsettling debut novel – which I think examines how the Scottish reformation lies buried in rural Scottish society to this day, despite the prevalence of agnosticism. It is told from the third party viewpoint of Gillis – now in his early thirties and a minister in the Church of Scotland in a remote and largely run-down coastal town where the only remaining industry is fishing-dominated, that in turn being increasingly centred around some large (and for from organic) salmon farms with the harbour and fishing boats returning increasingly diminished catches and with all of these (as well as the local hotel, smokehouses and it seems the manse in which Gillis lives and the crumbling Kirk next to it) owned by a local man Nicholson (known to all as Nichol). Gillis we learn early on was a successful long distance cross country/road-race athlete as a youth (having turned to it after an abortive football career) and moved to England with dreams of fame – only for his knackered knees to put pay to his success. Drifting in England for some years – and having broken off with his Scottish girlfriend Rachel (who he knew since primary school) – he has returned to his home area after a divinity degree despite a lack of belief (“Never believed in God, or heaven, or anything. Just needed the work and wanted a house and a decent car. He knew heaven was empty, so who would it hurt?”). Now his work consist almost entirely of carrying out funerals. Two key incidents begin the book: Firstly, falling down a hole left by a falling elm tree which has undermined and cracked the Kirk he finds a severed hand which appears still to be alive – capable of pointing and producing crude but disturbing sketches (which are threaded through the book). Gillis feels it is somehow a message from God but does not know how to receive the message and disturbs people by showing them the drawings, while carrying the hand in a shortbread tin. Secondly a funeral he is asked to take turns out to be for the husband of Rachel (now mother to a small boy Jamie) who has gone missing at sea – the husband a bookkeeper for Nichol had gone out to sea on one of Nichol’s boats (something he enjoyed doing) still wearing his office clothes and was swept overboard – his body now missing (although later found which gives rise to a second funeral which forms the climax of the book). Then when Nichol finds the hand – after a post funeral tussle with Gillis as who thinks the pictures are somehow pointing out his culpability in Rachel’s husband’s death (as a key aside this winds up with Gills and Rachel spending the night together after she tends his wounds) – he comes round the next day to say that the hand has somehow cured a chronic skin condition with which he suffered. Nichol then tries to draw Gillis into two schemes: to persuade the church to deconsecrate the Kirk and move the bodies in the graveyard so as to facilitate his plans to bail out his fading and infection-affected fish-farms by developing the Kirk into flats; to somehow monetise the miracle producing impact of the hand – which also seems to cure Nichol’s secretaries cancer and later the fish-blight. But Gillis is increasingly drawn to almost messianic visions of his destiny as some form of prophet – able to lead Scotland into national renewal and a rediscovery of faith (for example believing the hand is the first part of the discovery of a long buried national hero). While to others – Rachel (considering a restored relationship with him but disturbed by his behaviour); Gillis’s father (convinced that Gillis has committed murder and trying to get him to escape); the authorities (police and medical) and the church (who are already considering axing Gillis’s post due to its lack of revenue) – Gillis’s behaviour is increasingly erratic and demanding of intervention. Gillis’s story is though only the main narrative. Interleaved through his story is one set many hundreds of years earlier in what we intuit is the same location. A young apprentice painter Jan is on his way to deliver a lavishly illustrated Book Of Hours and Prayers to the Laird of Hamilton (a commissioned gift by the Laird for his wife) when he is swept off board and washed up on a river with the book already damaged. His attempts to deliver the damaged book are rebuffed and he finds himself caught up in a violent anti-superstition/Catholicism uprising by a group of austere black jacketed men (to which he claims the book was part of a devilish plot) and then later a counter-revolution with the black jackets treated as heretics to be burnt (in which he is again caught up). During all of this the book gets more and more cut up and damaged – and Jan makes something of a living firstly trading extracts of the book for food and lodgings and then later using torn strips of the book as miraculous charms as an itinerant (if rather fraudulent) healer and holy man. Increasingly we see the stories converge and both reach a climax (Gillis’s at the second funeral and with a dramatic roof top escape ended by a lightning strike; Jan’s when his hand is put to the flames) and a convergence. Overall, I found this a very distinctive novel – if not a completely successful one. The modern day sections worked really well for me – there is an offbeat humour and the side characters (Nichols, Rachel and Gillis’s Dad) and their relationships have a satisfactory level of complexity and ambiguity to them. The historic sections did not quite work so well for me – more based on empirical evidence as I was always pleased to return to Gillis’s story. I was also unsure that I really grasped everything that was happening – in particular the drawings (whose very inclusion in the story seems to herald their importance) remained unclear to me in their meaning – and perhaps that could go for the whole novel in that I was not fully clear if there was a deeper meaning to the novel beyond its intriguing quirkiness. My thanks to Atlantic Books for an ARC via NetGalley A loose spiral of seagulls ascended to heaven and returned with no message save an incoherent screech. On the horizon, blurred between cloud and sea, no drones and no missile strikes. The established powers seemed to suspect nothing. Why would the light of God’s grace and truth have fallen here? Rain and cloud and roof tile, moss and bird shit, he pushed himself to climb further. To the very peak of the spire and the upright cross. A golden door might open? Something might be passed to him. Or he might be asked to return the hand to its original owner. The Archangel Michael, or the Pale Rider who announces the end of this world. Or maybe he would be welcomed inside, into the hallways of heaven. The waiting rooms. The conference centre. Might meet one of those terrible beings, the ones with eyes all over its wings and wings all over its eyes. Wheels spinning above and below. A sword for a tongue. He wished he had his Bible with him. Gillis could slip in and out of these ideas, believing, then not believing, toggling between third and first person, staring down at the crown of his own head, embarrassed and selfconscious. Then back behind his own eyes, staring down at the shortbread tin held in front of him like a weapon....more |
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Jul 19, 2024
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Jul 19, 2024
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Jul 19, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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B0CMBN4X4Q
| 4.06
| 583
| Jul 09, 2024
| Aug 01, 2024
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really liked it
| Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would the tiny anthropologist point to in our makeshift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place? What would she identify as our rituals and ties of kinship, the symbols that constituted a sense of the sacred and the profane? Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise. The book is narrated by Aysa – trained as an anthropologist and now a funded documentary filmmaker. She lives in a foreign City (in what I at least took as the USA) with her boyfriend Manu who she originally met doing fieldwork in his hometown and who now works at a nonprofit. The two of them are looking at moving out of their current rented apartment and buying somewhere together to make more of a foundation to their lives in what for both of them is something of a country of exile from their own (different) countries. Aysa meanwhile bases her documentary om filming interviews with those who use a local park. Their small group of friends include: Ravi “We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be.”“– the three forming a tight group, particularly Manu and Ravi; Lena – Aysa’s “only native friend in the City” who she met at a monthly expatriates group; Tereza – an elderly and increasingly dementia affected lady who lives above them. They are also visited by both sets of parents – which reminds them of their very different lives in their hometowns where they would be part of interwoven community of family/tribal ties and obligations. And these ideas of community, family, tribe lie at the very heart of the novel and Aysa’s quest – really seeking to make her and Manu’s new life into something meaningful by working out (and in some cases founding) the series of rituals, the ties of friendship, that will make up their new life including of course where they will choose to live (and how they will choose to live there) The novel is told in a very fragmentary form – short sections all with a heading and with a number of headings repeating. For example Future Selves (which are the sections where they view possible new homes and imagine their lives there); Principles of Kinship (which are largely sections about the friendships and relationships they are building); In the Park (records of Aysa’s interview – with Fieldwork her initial preparation); Ways To Live (as Aysa tries to assemble rituals that will define their lives “the green jacket, the ceremonial stones, breakfast with Manu, the Dame on the terrace, and the shapes of poems”). And with many more one-off: Courtship, ChildRearing, Urban Costume, Gift Exchange etc. Overall this is a simple novel – but one with a deeper meaning despite its rather quirky approach. At one point Aysa’s grandmother chides her over the phone: “Forget about daily life … We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.” And that of course lies at the heart of the novel – one which does not tell an epochal tale but instead examines what it means to make a life together, particularly away from family and home. My thanks to Simon and Schuster for an ARC via NetGalley My last year at university, one professor of anthropology trained our attention inward at the close of every lecture. The professor looked wizened beyond age and seemed perpetually troubled by the world, which made me inclined to take her teachings seriously. She asked us to notice that just life—writing papers, going to parties, applying to jobs—could always be mapped out following the structures we learned about in class. Friday night blackouts and graduations and hockey games, the cigarettes we bummed off one another outside the library. All these were the unspoken foundations of our society, whose rules we had perfected, so as not to think of them as rules but as the smooth tracks of life. From time to time, the professor would ask us to imagine an anthropologist observing the everyday routines with which we had set up our lives. They might be arbitrary or essential, but they were rules to a game nonetheless, one which gave an illusory sense of harmony and permanence. The first time she brought up the imaginary anthropologist, I visualized a tiny Martian in a safari outfit, taking notes on a flip chart. But even with the absurd image, the point was clear. The imaginary anthropologist remained with me after I finished university. I would summon her to narrate the simplest interactions when I tried to untangle the layers of an argument, when I edited footage, when I was dressing up for an event. I called on the anthropologist to examine our lives as we moved from place to place, where we were never natives....more |
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Jul 18, 2024
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Jul 18, 2024
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Jul 18, 2024
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4.24
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| Mar 26, 2024
| Feb 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 Barker Prize shortlisted. I recall the night Gelon told me he wanted to do this. He sang a song from Medea's chorus ……… when the kids are dead2024 Barker Prize shortlisted. I recall the night Gelon told me he wanted to do this. He sang a song from Medea's chorus ……… when the kids are dead, and it gives a weird sense of time merging, and for a moment, I have the feeling that the future and the past aren't separate at all, just different snatches of single song, always sung, given consequence when heard. This impressively memorable and distinctive debut novel – now winner of the Waterstones Debut Novel Prize and likely I think to make other prize lists over the next year or so – sits at the intersection of the author’s two degrees: A BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. If there is a genre to which this otherwise sui generis novel it belongs it could be the retelling of Greek classics genre which has appeared over many a prize list in recent years (mainly written by female authors) but other than its classic-age Greek setting (more later) it perhaps draws equally on firstly the writing of the two Barry’s - Sebastian and (more so) Kevin with descriptive Irish-laced English prose telling the story of the Irish diaspora over history – but in this case taken to a more extreme case with instead characters from ancient times and distant shores who nevertheless deal in Dublin-inspired dialogue (and maybe slightly the surrealism of Monty Python). But its also at heart something of a love story. The origins of the novel have been described by the author in a line in Plutarch about the disastrous Athenian invasion of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War – in the author’s words: It was a complete disaster, and at the end, there were so many Athenian prisoners, they couldn't fit them in a prison, so they put them in this limestone quarry outside of the city of Syracuse. Plutarch tells us that some of these defeated Athenians survived because their Siracusan captors would give them food and rations in exchange for quotes from Euripides Interestingly I have seen two interviews where the author mentions this and then draws two different lessons, the first that “This is in that historical record: the idea of art as literally a lifeline. On an individual level, art can just make our lives richer. But then as a community, it can definitely be something that brings people together.", but the second “Who were these Siracusans who were so obsessed with the poetry and art they'll feed these prisoners of war while also dehumanizing them to the point that they're just leaving them to die in a quarry” And both of these aspects come out in the novel. The second and the really distinctive aspect of the novel is the voice of the main characters – and again this is best explained by the author: It came to me. Out of nowhere, I had a character-and he sounded Irish. I had to step back and think, "What's the logic? Why does this man sound like a contemporary Dub?" And I realized that Sicily is this island that's been colonized a few hundred years before the novel is set; Ireland is an island that's been colonized by another maritime empire. And the Hiberno-English that we speak is recognizably English, but there are little nuances and differences, sometimes because the native Gaelic is playing underneath it. In terms of the story – the first party narrator is Lampo (something of a chancer) and together with his sidekick Gelon (a more mournful figure – his wife having left him and his son dead) the two unemployed (or at least not gainfully and legally employed) potters decide to visit the Athenian’s quarry prison and to give them some food in exchange for some play lines: “No Sophocles, nor Aeschylus, nor any other Athenian poet. You can recite them if it pleases you, but water and cheese are only for Euripides … A mouthful of olives for some Medea?” From there they hatch a plan to stage a production of Medea in the quarry – adapting their plan to be a dual play when they realise Euripides has written a new play “The Trojan Woman” which with what seems the inevitable defeat of Athens (its navy ruined on the shores of Syracuse) may be the only way to ever stage it. And it’s a rather aspirational plan which only takes shape when they are backed by the rather menacing figure of Tuireann – a hugely wealthy trader from the “Tin Islands” (clearly ancient Ireland) who now engaged in antique and curiosity collections – Tuireann’s involvement being something of a metaphor for the blend of classic restating and Irish vernacular literature. And like that, we're flush. It hits me, sudden, how foolish we've been. Directors without a producer are like a ship without a sail, the medium of wind to endeavours nautical being equivalent to coin in all theatrical, and till now we've had _ all of that. Tuireann, for that's the queer-sounding name of our producer, thinks staging a play with the Athenians is genius. See, he's always been fascinated by the theatre but felt there was something too safe about the surface level of its pageantry that put him off investing. Now, at last, with us, he's found his kind of show. In fairness, I have my reservations about Tuireann, and his talk is most peculiar, but he's minted and understands talent, and that will do for now. The rather sentimental Lampo gets increasingly invested in the fate of their lead actor (particularly as it becomes clear that some of the Syracusans – most of all a brutal local who delights in beating the Athenians including we come to understand having killed the actors closest friend and likely lover – are hell bent on revenge on the Athenians for the deaths of their families and friends in the early stages of the invasion) and falls in love with a foreign slave girl who serves in his local pub (which alas is not some classic variation on a Guinness-themed faux-Irish Pub – perhaps one part of Irishness too much for the author). And as a result of these – as Lampo plots how to free both of them – the book increasingly becomes an engrossing, character led drama – a welcome development as while I really appreciated the set up and enjoyed its early execution - I did wonder if it would start to pale as something of a one trick novel. And while the plot trajectory threatens perhaps excess sentimentality there is a pleasing amount of pathos (if perhaps a little too much of a sitcom style misunderstanding) But overall, highly recommended. "The Trojan Women? The finest I've ever seen..' He hesitates. 'Once, something very much like that happened:...more |
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Jul 15, 2024
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Jul 15, 2024
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Jul 16, 2024
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Hardcover
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1913111547
| 9781913111540
| 3.85
| 54
| Sep 10, 2024
| unknown
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it was amazing
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[image] Ann Toft clutches what is left of the rabbit. What is left of the rabbit is a disappointment. Ann Toft thinks about the daughter-in-law, put[image] Ann Toft clutches what is left of the rabbit. What is left of the rabbit is a disappointment. Ann Toft thinks about the daughter-in-law, put through yet another tragedy. The latest novel by the brilliant Norfolk based small press Galley Beggar whose publications include such innovative books as After Sappho, We That Are Young, Ducks Newburyport, Lucia and a Girl is A Half Formed Thing – including remarkably winning both the Desmond Elliott Prize (and even more appropriately) the Goldsmith Prize (for novels which break the mould of fiction). And I think this book is a worthy addition to their formidable canon – managing an excellent combination of powerful themes and page turning readability - it was one I thoroughly enjoyed reading in only two sittings. Its is an imagined version of the life of Mary Toft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Toft) – a poor woman from Godalming (less than 20 miles from my now home) who in 1726 gained some national celebrity and controversy due to her apparent ability to/affliction of giving birth to rabbits (or more specifically parts of rabbits). As the author makes almost immediately clear – this was due to the initial machinations of her mother-in-law Mary who inserted animal parts within her – in the author’s view motivated it seems less by money or fame than as some form of social protest (large rabbit farms at that time rather taking over the countryside but with strict anti-poaching prohibitions on the poor and dispossessed). Mary’s case and her seeming ability to continue to deliver rabbits interests various Doctors – some for personal reasons (for example a need for acceptance or simply for a new interest), some due to their firm belief in and desire to use the newly developed tool of empirical science to overcome ignorance and superstition, some due to more superstition (one of them leads Mary into the idea that she has given birth to rabbits due to a vivid dream of them – something which seemed like an extreme manifestation of the then still widely held belief that maternal imaginings shaped the fate and future life of a foetus), and some from the orders of the King both intrigued and disturbed by the case. For all of them though, taking advantage of the privilege of their sex and station Mary’s will are of little consequence and entirely subservient to their aims – and her body in particular is simply a site for their investigations – the lack of female (particularly poor female) bodily autonomy and the chasmic social divides of English society lie at the heart of the novel. What really distinguishes though is its narrative voice – detached, written with a deliberate 21st century sensibility but at all times seeking for the truth of the then contemporary societal mores and practices, it employs staccato sentences resplendent with repetition and rhythm, to surgically examine motivation in the same way the Doctors examine Mary, but with all of the wit and humour and empathy which they lack. Special mention needs to be made of a really impressive (why can’t more novels do this) Afterword and Acknowledgements which as well as a series of sources and suggested further reading is really open about topics such as the non-fictional inspiration for the novel (Karen Harvey’s “The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder – Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century Britain”) and the small number of knowing anachronisms and changes to the historical facts. Highly recommended and I really hope to see this as the latest Galley Beggar book to grace a prize list. Ann Toft is opposed to it. All the women are opposed to it....more |
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Jul 11, 2024
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Jul 11, 2024
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0349127050
| 9780349127057
| 3.64
| 1,681
| unknown
| May 23, 2024
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liked it
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[image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its Booker longlisting have deliberately read it in the weeks leading up to [image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its Booker longlisting have deliberately read it in the weeks leading up to the longlist announcement - the front and back cover blurbs from a judge a strong indication it was in contention. Second time around I noted again how so many of the world events (e.g. the Algerian war of independence whose repercussions reverberate through the family’s history) and family events (e.g a breakdown at college by Francois, two suicide attempts by his sister) take place off stage but was interested to link it to this quote from Barbara visiting her dying father in hospital. ‘He hadn't even been excited the previous weekend about the drama of the Grey Cup, played that year at the Exhibition between his beloved Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and, for the first time in history, suspended in mid-game due to fog. "It's all about what you can't see," the radio commentator had said, and Barbara had thought, ‘How true."’ I also noted a number of links to other Booker longlisted novels: The novel is one of three on the longlist which involves extractive (and mainly French) multinationals - here mainly the Algerian oil and the global aluminium/bauxite industries, with Polynesian phosphorus mining in Playground, and water megabasins in Southwest France in Creation Lake. Another dominant Booker theme is the use of scriptural (mainly Old Testament) references in over half of the longlist, almost always be either lapsed, wavering or non believers. Here though, the book has a devout Catholic family at its core in Gaston, Lucienne and Denise the only Old Testament reference “sold your birthright for a mess of pottage” is by a relative non believer and also not actually a Bible quote but a saying based on a Bible story (Genesis 25). François’s wife and best friend suffer from Lewy Body Dementia - the condition which Todd in Playground suffers from and which there is integral to the story. And in a year the Booker finally remembered Australian authors (but forgot African ones), much of the early part of the book is set in pre independence Algiers - the birthplace of Sebastian in This Strange Eventful History, and a substantial mid section is in Australia the setting for Stone Yard Devotional. And those two books are thematically linked by their detailed consideration of the themes of end of lives. Francois alcohol addiction is reminiscent of the wide ranging treatment of addiction in Wandering Stars and the claim in Creation Lake that our addictive genes are inherited from the Neanderthals. Chloe (effectively Clare Messud) takes a train from Gare du Nord which is where Hosam in My Friends sends a picture from at the very end of that novel. I did enjoy his time much of the writing - for example “There’s was a small tributary of the past continuing into my present.” and “He sometimes felt that getting older was like inhabiting a mansion you couldn't afford, so that you were forced to shut down one room after another, eventually entire wings, until you huddled in the kitchen, breaking up the furniture for firewood.” I also enjoyed: a comparison of the dying of the elderly (an important part of the novel) to childbirth (very much missing from the novel) in its lack of agency with an involuntary surrender to being “seized by the forces of Nature” and being the two times “at which the portals between life and death were flung wide” and this extended train/boat journey metaphor. “This, too was life: if the train carried in itself the sounds and textures of history, all of us anonymous in the dark, all of us trapped on the thundering rails, hearing even in the European stations the mournful cries of separated families or the military march of troops echoing through the air, floating beneath the cavernous ceilings with the greasy-winged pigeons — We are all the same, the echoes whispered, History is always around us and in us …. If, on the train, we were subsumed into general invisibility and a sense of the inevitable, of History, then the boat, surely, approached an analogy to the future …. How turbulent might the crossing prove? Each of us carried to the shore by all that had come before, then launched upon the wide, dark ocean …. Look at all the others with whom you share the boat. Beyond the most immediate, you can't choose your companions for a crossing or a generation. You can't know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain.” I noticed this time that there was a tail of breadcrumbs leading to the last chapter revelation. We read about a Vatican dispensation for marriage in the same Interlude where we first that know there is a secret. Francois talks about his father’s “unexpected and uneasy choice of spouse” and later that “he’d long considered himself monstrous, the child of unspeakable error”. Most of all through Barbara’s mother makes a comment about Francois parents in the Toronto chapter in Part III which on a second read (and knowing the truth reads very differently). But while I know that the author finishes the novel with an explanation of the significance of the revelation: “the cost of their illicit love, and the cost of their forefathers' sins, will be for them and their children to be cast from that illusory paradise, to wander the earth, belonging nowhere.’ - I was still far from convinced on a re-read that the revelation really changed significantly my reading of the novel and was forced to conclude again, like so much of the novel, that it meant more to the author than me. And for all its great writing, its strong opening chapters and moving final chapters, this was again a novel I found a chore to read for much of the midpoint, which not coincidentally was the point at which the author first entered as a character (the chapter written when she was a child was a particular low-point) and this will as a result stay very low in my rankings. ORIGINAL REVIEW I'm a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It doesn't really matter where I start. We're always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially. I know also that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us. The ebb and flow, the harmonies and dissonance-the music happens, whether or not we describe it. A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats itself … And so this story— the story of my family—has many possible beginnings, or none …..all and each a part of the vast and intricate web. Any version only partial …. I could begin with the secrets and shame, the ineffable shame that in telling their story I would wish at last to heal. The shame of the family history, of the history into which we were born. A sprawling multi-continental (there cannot be many novels which have an illustrated map which is literally a map of the whole world) and epic novel which is very heavily inspired by the author’s own family biography- not least as set out in 1000+ page family history (and particularly memoir of his and his wife’s lives either side of World War II) written by her grandfather Gaston Messud for the author and her sister. She has said: “I’ve been thinking about this novel in one way or another for probably the last twenty years—and arguably you could say that my second novel, The Last Life, was in some ways a first approach to some of the material—that’s to say, the pied noir history. I was certainly doing research for this novel well over a decade ago. I couldn’t have written it when my parents were still living; and then couldn’t have written it in the years immediately after their deaths, when I was full of sorrow. When I had a leave from teaching in 2017, I finally read my grandfather’s memoir—an account of the years from 1928 to 1946, which he wrote by hand for my sister and me—and only after that did I finally start thinking about the form the novel might take” And the novel although as the Author’s Note says a work of fiction, also as it says features a family the Cassar’s whose “family movements hew closely” to that of the Messud’s (both family names I believe even having Maltese origins”). Many of the corresponding details of the novel are clear even to the reader – with for example Claire Messud herself appearing as Chloe (doing the same MFA course in the US) and who as the novel progresses becomes the only first party voice in the novel and effectively its fictional author, Chloe’s husband who makes something of a cameo appearance has for example precisely the same family background as James Wood – the famous and much respected literary critic of the New Yorker (and of course Messud’s husband). The family tale told begins in 1940 – Lucienne Cassar and her two young children the rather highly strung Denise and François have fled to the family’s native Algeria (staying rather unwelcomely with relatives) while their husband/father Gaston – a naval attaché to the French embassy stays in Salonica and hearing the fall of France and De Gaulle’s call for the Free French to join him decides (too much reflection over the years) to ignore the call and stay in post. From there we move forwards a decade at a time. The action goes from the US to Algeria to Canada (home to François’s wife Barbara’s family – particularly her domineering mother) to Argentina (where Denise – a heavily religious life long spinster has perhaps the most fulfilling time of her life including working in an Anglo-German bookstore and developing what she believes to be a mutual unconsummated attraction to/fidelity for the married brother of her best friend) to Switzerland (where François who puts aside his love for writing for an industrial career at his father’s urging goes to study at an business school promoting a form of European enlightened capitalism) to Australia (where François is posted with his family to run a bauxite mine for this French aluminium conglomerate employer) to France (where Gaston and Barbara settle and where the rather tragically proud Denise has a potentially suicide-induced car crash – when she learns her fantasy lover is actually a serial philanderer) to the US (where François takes a job and effective demotion after Barbara moves the family back to Canada to nurse her parents – and where he narrowly avoids being caught in an insider trading scandal as French industry succumbs to US style predator capitalism) and through family reunions at birthdays and funerals with Chloe’s voice and perspective becoming more prominent. The book has something of a mathematical structure: in the author’s words: There are seven decades (hence the epigraph from Jaques’ “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy), and five points of view. There are three points of view in all but one of the seven sections—the first one has two—and then the prologue, interlude and epilogue—which makes a total of 23 sections altogether. All prime numbers—misfit numbers—because they’re misfits. And while this is not even close to the almost Oulipian mathematical and astrological constraints of the Booker winning “The Luminaries” it is an important idea. Because that idea lies at the heart of the novel – the Cassars and Messuds are from Pied Noir background: the European – here French/Maltese - descended Algerian born group who fled in the Algerian wars and were made unwelcome in France – mainly (not in the case of the two families) being thereafter associated with the extreme right in France), but in any even seen as something of an embarrassment at the time and now as hardly sympathetic victims (being effectively white colonialists – although in a rather didactical section Gaston points out to some critical American and Australian visitors that the key difference is their near extermination of their native populations). I was I have to say reminder of the Citizens of nowhere speech by Theresa May (without its dog whistle undertones) but with here the Cassars as largely rootless and even attempting to reign in the worst excesses of multinationals (as well as François’ course, Gaston – who works for an oil major after leaving the navy – forces his firm to pay compensation for the victims of a tanker collision) and Barbara as a law student muses on corporate responsibilities). And how this plays out well in the novel is in how it is actually François (with a fairly unhappy marriage to Barbara -one that feels to her like a mistake almost from the beginning) and the conventionally (and probably actually) unfulfilled Denise who suffer from this rootlessness rather more than their Gaston and Lucienne (who at heart simply belong to each other). So, in lots of ways there is much to admire in this novel – and its inclusion in prize lists would be of no surprise but I have enjoyed preparing and writing the review far more than reading the novel which to be honest was largely a chore from start to finish. And the reason for this I think is the uneven pacing. I appreciate that this is a novel where the major action (either world events – for example the very Algerian Civil War – even many major family events) deliberately take place off page (with heavy back references and rather more heavy handed foreshadowing – even if the framing device of Chloe as narrator justifies this part) – but what is more of a surprise is the actions that takes place on stage - a seemingly odd selection of stories with whole pages are taken up with side characters or episodes that seem largely inconsequential to the reader (or at least this reader). And the reason for this in turn is I think the fidelity of the novel to the family biography – it feels to me that Messud has selected incidents which particularly struck her from either her own memory or the stories told to her by her family (or of course) her Grandfather’s account. So overall a novel I can admire but cannot really say I enjoyed – and so can only recommend with some ambiguity. For François in America it was barely afternoon, the siesta hour, two-thirty. Hopefully he was resting. In her mind, she could see him, not as he was now but in all his ages. If nothing else, on this planet, they had borne loving witness to each other's lives, to the days and journeys, the freight of emotions, to the blossoming and dwindling of their animal selves. Much sorrow and rage, but more than that, laughter, joy, and wonder. How, now, as the shadows had grown so long, to cleave to the light? To be a witness, to stand alongside, simply to have lived through these strange, beautiful, appalling times, to have been a night-light, a mirror, a support-that, too, was God's work, though the ambitious American nieces, faithless and perhaps soulless, might disdain it. That wasn't nothing....more |
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1324075015
| 9781324075011
| 1324075015
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| Apr 02, 2024
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really liked it
| In an industry that secretly hated books and writers, for its captains to describe themselves regularly, and with defiant pride, as 'not an intelle In an industry that secretly hated books and writers, for its captains to describe themselves regularly, and with defiant pride, as 'not an intellectual or as a tart, deeply shallow', Ayush feels that he, like a few others, a very few, has to hide his passion for that unspeakably embarrassing thing, literature, to put a lid on arguments band. on literary criticism, not commerce. Economic is life, life is economics. But no more, at least not in this instance. Open range is daunting: he - he? - begins the discussion on sequentiality with references ranging from Spenser's Amoretti and Sidney's Astrophil and Stella to Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond. Neel Mukherjee’s second novel “The Lives of Others” a sweeping Bengali family novel with a focus on commerce and capital, was the RSL Encore Award winner and Booker shortlisted (both in 2014). I have read both that and his third novel, the VS Naipul In a Free State inspired “State of Freedom” which played with assembling disparate stories into a themed novel. Neither entirely worked for me (I marked both as 3 star reads) but both showed literary ambition. This his fourth novel perhaps builds on the themes of the former and the structure of the latter in a meta fictional triptych, which could have taken its title from the mantra of one of the characters in the first section “Economics is life, life is economics”. The opening section of the novel – and perhaps its heart – is about two married men and fathers to 5 year old twins, Ayusha and Luke. Luke is the economist – well paid and absolutely convinced of the ability of his profession and (dismal) science to capture the heart of human reality. Ayusha is a publisher at a “vast international publishing conglomerate” Sennett and Brewer (more commonly referred to as Sewer) – and note immediately that the clumsiness in the nickname of the publisher and the “tell not show” clunkiness of the way it is described is very in keeping with Mukherjee’s writing style and one that is deliberately dialled up here to sit alongside some equally deliberately didactic but refined ruminations on market value, economically imposed choices, the literary world and publishing. Further though Ayusha has some form of ADHD and an acute anxiety about the environment – traits which reinforce each other as he records and calculates the optimal time for a shower and then employs a plumber to cut off the water after that point; or in the book’s opening when he calmly shows the children a brutal video of an abattoir so they can make an informed choice about continuing as carnivores. In his job Ayusha champions a publicity-shy author going under what seems to be a pseudonym of MN Opie who has written a striking short story collection (one about an academic who witnesses an apparent hit and run accident in an Uber she is taking home from a party, and then becomes entangled with the life of the driver – who is not the person the app said was driving the car); he also befriends a development economist colleague of Luke who tells him about a successful intervention in India where rural women were gifted cows to transform their economic circumstances. And in brief the second and third parts of the novel are effectively those two stories – the first slightly off kilter as the academic (Emily here) gets further drawn into the driver of the illegal immigrant driver and his kidney-failure-suffering brother; the second – featuring one recipient of a cow - slightly satirical as the cow serves only to complicate the family’s hand to mouth circumstances. The first two are linked by a final drastic social-action motivated intervention by the protagonist (the giving away of a trust fund and a body organ respectively), the first and third by someone fleeing their life. The book seems very knowing and self-referential. Ayusha and Luke feel more like ciphers for the ideas the author wants to examine rather than flesh and blood characters, but of course no fictional characters are actually flesh and blood and anyway In Luke’s discussions with others we read: Was it fiction, the way things were selected to be represented, that led us to believe that lives were interesting, had legible shapes? Perhaps things were interesting only in the stylization, when they were narrated within the bounds of form, not in the living. In which case, the stylization, or the modeling, if you will, had a fundamental falsehood at its heart. And later "Can ideas be discussed openly as ideas, or do they always need to be disguised under drama and action and emotional development and all that rubbish, like vegetables smuggled into food for children?" When MN Opie is asked to come up with some authors who may blurb their book, they come back with an imagined list of greats – but Mukerhjee’s publisher (while not a huge conglomerate, a pretty large independent) have massed a pretty impressive list – including (longlist chance alert) one of this year’s Booker judges. And MN Opie’s writing – and a debate that ensues about the short story or connected story form (see the opening quote to my review) is explicitly linked to one of the key pre-occupations of Mukherjee’s writing (both in this book and in the very motivation for his previous novel) And the third part of the book left me a little uneasy – after perhaps the over sophisticated world views and actions of his London based characters, the third section can seem condescending in its treatment of the rural poor in India – my first reaction was, is: this is not your story to write – which I would have addressed in my review to the author had the author not addressed it to me (through Ronan – Emily’s friend and a well known author critiquing her attempt to write a fictionalisation of the story of the driver of her Uber). For a little lighthearted relief– my favourite character was Spencer (albeit his ending is rather tragic) Spencer keeps turning his head to see if his full pack is following. A biscuit-gold creature, darting, leaping, alive, his tail like a pennant in a Renaissance painting, moving through the still, stationary, alive green. .. Spencer sniffs at the great roots, lifts his leg under a hornbeam and marks it, then turns his head to sniff at some undergrowth. He occasionally lets his tongue hang out in a doggy smile. The world is a whole map of smells. He follows them and thinks, Ha, a squirrel has been here, and here there is the faintest trace of a fox But overall, this is a novel as articulate as it is artificial, with an underlying mantra I think that ideas are literature, literature is ideas. Underneath roils, unarticulated, a lifetime's belief bordering on an incurable disease: that everything in the world, from Lukey's discipline to Ayush's own second-hand domain of fiction, everything hinges on the individual, the rational agent making choices, exhibiting or hiding preferences, the character and her destiny, unfolding over time, developing, changing, reaching a point of fulfilment or its denial; everything in the world makes one think that the solution lies within private choices, personal responsibility, that it is the individual at the centre of things, that personal agency is everything - taking antidepressants, going running, going to the gym, going for therapy - that these actions, within a person's power, are going to solve everything, because the problems are at the level of the self, the self is everything - look at the chattering monkeys' unceasing din about the zeitgeisty, crapulous 'autofiction' ... But what if this centrality accorded the self is entirely misplaced, erroneous, or, as a scientist once joked, not even wrong?...more |
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1399620401
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| 4.00
| 207,486
| Aug 08, 2023
| Nov 09, 2023
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really liked it
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The book begins and ends with the discovery of a skeleton in 1972 Pottstown, PA – in the run-down Chicken Hill district which has a history of mixed A
The book begins and ends with the discovery of a skeleton in 1972 Pottstown, PA – in the run-down Chicken Hill district which has a history of mixed African American/Eastern European Jewish immigrant communities. But the box is mainly set in the same district past – beginning in 1925 with Moshe Ludlow who runs a theatre (and features jazz and swing bands) and his wife Chona who still runs the eponymous grocery store that she inherited from her father. The story is sprawling from there – but a key to the novel is am orphaned deaf black boy – Dodo – who has been unofficially adopted by Nate Timblin (the unofficial leader of the black community (a man with a sense of inner strength and quiet menace whose origins are slightly unclear) and his wife Addie (who works in Chona’s store). When the government officials come looking for Dodo Moshe and Chona hide him with the assistance of Bernice (a formidable black neighbour with a brood of children by different fathers). When their attempts to hide him fail – leading to Dodo trying to flee being hopsitalised in an insane asylum – the communities come together with a plot to spring him from hospital. Overall this is a big hearted novel – the author has said in an interview about the book “If you're a writer and you're writing about race, the best thing you can do is forget about it and deal with the humanity of characters. You know what the boundaries are. Now you have to see which characters can kick up against those boundaries or illuminate those boundaries, so - to make your story go. So l look at it from that point of view and also from the point of view that cynicism is like — cynicism in a story is toxic. You have to really have a desire to see the good in people, to them push past their boundaries … An openness to who they are, because they will lead you into a story that shows you good stuff.” And it was one I enjoyed reading with its vibrant cast list of memorable characters and strong sense of time, place and above all community. ...more |
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1526673584
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| 3.81
| 19,347
| Oct 31, 2023
| Oct 31, 2023
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really liked it
| Inconsequential good, you said, describing your mothers life, all her little efforts. Inconsequential good, you said, describing your mothers life, all her little efforts. Alice McDermott was between her first six novels, three times a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a one-time National Book Award winner (between 1987 and 2006). Her novels are typically I understand based around Irish emigrants to the US (particularly in the Brooklyn area) and often heavily laced with Catholic themes. I have previously read her eighth novel “The Ninth Hour” and found it an excellently written, considered and fascinating work. Perhaps unusually this, her ninth novel and one I came to as it had received a number of Booker Prize longlist tips, is effectively telling a story of Saigon (in 1963), although with a New York based Catholic character as its narrator. The novel uses an epistolary framing device: one I was not sure was entirely realistic given the length of the letters as well as the level of recall of clothing and conversations even while the letter writer is conveying chronological confusion; but one that is crucial to the novel as it enables the main letter writer to finally look back on a key period of her life and some of those she encountered. The letters are written by Tricia – in 1963 the shy, 23-year-old newly wedded wife (and self-styled helpmeet) of Pete (an attorney now employed by Naval Intelligence and effectively a CIA operator) – they are written to Rainey, then the eight year old (twin) daughter of Charlene. And it is Charlene who lies at the heart of the novel – as practiced in the ex-pat, corporate-wife scene as Tricia is unpractised, addicted to tranquilisers due to some night-terrors from her youth, by day she is something of a social and social action whirlwind: glamourous but unconventional, and leader of a group of women who fund-raise for local hospitals and orphanages. She quickly enlists Tricia into her schemes – effectively making her the lead figure for a scheme to get the local house girl (Ly but called Lily by all the Americans) of one of her friends – a talented seamstress – to make Barbie costumes in the style of the Vietnamese national dress. Later she decides to extend this to full size costumes for the lepers in a nearby colony – a journey and visit Tricia takes there with Charlene, hitching an unofficial ride with a Doctor and an American soldier (Dominic – who its clear was mentioned in Rainey’s stories), and an American ex-army Doctor they meet there and agree to take back with them (and whose brutal anecdotes and manners seem to deeply disturb Tricia) form the last part of the story. Peter – a Fatima devotee - is convinced that with a Catholic President of both the US and Vietnam, the American presence in that country is part of a Marian-inspired mission to hold the bulwark of Christianity against the existential threat of world communism. A smaller part of the novel is Rainey writing to Tricia and explaining that she contacted her after finding that her new next-door neighbour – Dominic – knew Rainey’s mother from Saigon – and she tells of Dominic’s adopted youngest child who has Down’s syndrome and who she befriends. A final section is by Tricia – a key theme of Tricia’s story is her repeated miscarriages, and her final recollection of Charlene is of when she procured an abandoned, birthmarked but otherwise perfect baby for Tricia to adopt, only for the baby’s siblings to immediately reclaim him. Overall this is a beautifully crafted book – one without gimmicks but with a really strong sense of period detail (as equally in social attitudes as in sights and sounds) and with at its heart the question of what it means to try and right the world in whatever small way is possible, even if with complex motivations. ...more |
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Kindle Edition
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152943095X
| 9781529430950
| B0C5SY4137
| 4.22
| 239
| unknown
| Feb 15, 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 Barker Prize Shortlisted A stunning debut novel by the former slam poet champion and more recently award winning poetry writer (TS Elliot Prize an 2024 Barker Prize Shortlisted A stunning debut novel by the former slam poet champion and more recently award winning poetry writer (TS Elliot Prize and Polari Prize) and performer. It begins in a holographic dominated, weather-modified London in 2233, under a railway bridge in a gentrification and future-resistant Hackney which still feels like something from the late 20th Century – and from that and the opening words ”I know where I am. Back This is the last time; it has to be” – we are early on introduced to the idea that this novel will have a fluidity in linearity as well as sexuality. Our narrator is Jones – heavily tattooed, she enters a tattoo parlour (tattoos in the 23rd Century being more like holographic skin inserts) and asks the two tattoo artists (Small and the younger Cass – both of whom she clearly knows even though they do not know her) to carry out an old fashioned tattoo with needle and ink plus (to only add to the strangeness of her request) a vial of her mother’s blood – the tattoo she wants is effectively a series of lines linking the various images over her body. The structure of the novel is that as each tattoo sequence – which are both described and illustrated in the book - is joined (whether over one visit or several is part of the novel’s temporal fluidity) Jones tells a story associated with the tattoo – before the novel returns briefly to her discussions with Cass and Small – both these returns but also the clear thread (pun intended) running through the stories making this very much a novel and not a short story collection (Goldsmith and even Booker judges please note). And the stories that Jones tells are made more remarkable to Cass and Small as being set over many years in the past and future and in different places; and more importantly being ones that Jones claims to have experienced herself. She reveals that she (like her grandmother and mother) before her has developed and refined an ability for “rememberings” – the ability to “fall” into the lives of others and experiences them herself (later developing the ability to travel to the same scenario as her mother and grandmother – although they never really develop the ability to recognise each other while in the story, only realising when they return what roles each other played). The truth is that there is no reason, no great plan, no real way to control it. The only theory I have been able to develop that holds any great weight is that we all do it but only a few people remember. My gift is not the falling into lives but in the memory of them. This is the only explanation that seems real to me. I am not God's messenger. I am not an omen or augur. There is no pattern. A number will not solve me. It is what it is. Cass is likely to remind me that that's pretty much what Siddhartha was saying as well. It is what it is. At the heart of all of the stories is male violence against women and female bodies – with often (but not always) females taking some form of agency although typically not turning the violence back on the men but aiming to expose and confront what is happening as well as the attempts to explain it away I read the novel on the day of the terrible triple murder (by a man) of Carol Hunt and her daughters Hannah and Louise and this gave rise to two reflections: firstly that whenever I had read the book there would with terrible inevitability have been some form of male on female violence in the news in the UK (as Jess Phillips powerful annual Commons speech illustrates only two awfully) and secondly that the social media about the incident was filled with debates over crossbow control, mental health and even pro/anti trans rights rather than the fact of another male killing of female which made this passage particularly powerful The men accused one another of taking the women, transplanting them in labour camps in unknown territories of uncatalogued coun-tries. We were all in North Korea. We were in Afghanistan, swaddled eneath blue burkas. There were sightings of missing mothers clus-ered like oases in the middle of African deserts. Amateur astronomers ported additional space travel during the time of the disappear-ices. Serious news outlets followed the thread that we had all been transported to another planet, getting it ready for repopulation. Had anyone searched Area 51? The men made it about borders. About national security. They made it about oil. About climate change. The only thing the men did not make it about was themselves. There were battles, some brief and with broken bottles, others carefully planned and fought out in boardrooms and underground bunkers. Women died in the fight to save women. It is always this way. It has always been this way. When a man hurts, someone must cry. In terms of the stories the first is perhaps something of an anomaly as its pure historical fiction – set in a Lancashire mining village in 1911, Jones is the daughter of a family facing devastation after their father (and main breadwinner) succumbs to lung disease – she joins the mines pretending to be a boy as that is the only way to earn enough wages. In the second is is one of a series of human-trafficked sex workers who mark the back of their clients with messages about the client – this story can at first be hard to follow due to a mosquito metaphor (or at least I assumed it was a metaphor). In the third three female furies revisit the male perpetuators of violence in the shape of their female victims – avenging the wronged women not with violence (“They hinted those who had only given chase before and spoke to them gently of their crimes. They touched not one man in not one land”) with any harm to the men coming from their own guilt or exposure. The next is perhaps one of the hardest to read – and I suspect even harder to research and write – as Jones becomes an online Incel who turns to staging and filming violent sexual attacks. The next tells the story of the “Gutter Girls” a group who starting from a bordello ina gang infested London begin an anti-male violence protest movement. There is also a story set in a lesbian bar which I must admit I did not really get but which I understand draws on characters and places from the author’s award winning poetry collection – and one which also brings out one of the key themes of the novel and the author’s writing – that male violence (and more broadly fascist or repressive tendencies in society) can only be combatted by solidarity among those opposed to them and by physical meeting places rather than divisive social media discourse. The last stories are perhaps more dystopian in nature. A future England run by a Grande Toddler King and his Quiet Men after something of a right-wing and patriarchal (with Handmaid’s Tale vibes) democratic coup. A girl who works as an agency where she takes roles as family members – who ends up in a job where she is playing the perfect daughter for a childless but old fashioned couple who effectively gaslight her and the medical authorities by claiming she is their real daughter suffering from delusions and self harming. A world where women start to disappear – body part by body part and woman by woman – due to some unknown phenomenon. And a world where women donate their wombs for a male controlled ectogenetic designer birth process (one where she loses her mother and daughter as they become embryos and are unable to return from the remembering). A recurring theme through the novel and one which ultimately confirms what we (but not they) have increasingly suspected about the reason for Jones’s presence in Cass and Small’s parlour is Anna Swir’s poem “Woman Unborn” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...) and its opening: I am not born as yet, Simply brilliant and I surely destined to give the author prize recognition in a new field. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 17, 2024
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Jul 19, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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1800819528
| 9781800819528
| B0CCBXLWL8
| 4.17
| 108
| unknown
| Apr 11, 2024
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really liked it
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This book featured in the 2024 version of the influential and frequently literary-prize-prescient annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (last ye
This book featured in the 2024 version of the influential and frequently literary-prize-prescient annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (last year included Tom Crewe. Michael Magee and Jacqueline Crooks – and previous years have featured Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Rebecca Watson, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, JR Thorp Bonnie Garmus, Gail Honeyman among many others). Nicolas Padamsee is the founder and editor of the website Arts Against Extremism (https://www.artsagainstextremism.org/) which publishes “poetry, flash fiction, short stories and novel excerpts that tackle the subject of extremism – blurring black-and-white narratives and encouraging empathy for those ‘beyond the bounds of our personal lot’ – as well as interviews and essays that consider how art can help to stem the tide of radicalisation.” – and this novel fits that aim almost exactly. It was written as the creative part of the author’s PhD Thesis at the UEA – and the more theory part is I think this document (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/1...) which is equally helpful in understanding the novel and its origins in an attempt to go back to the writing of Dostoevsky as a way to examine extremism and its interactions with social media/online experiences (which he argues was an element missing from most contemporary novels on extremism) – with Dostoevsky’s recognition of the impact of newspapers on radicalism as well as the use of polyphony (particularly in “Crime and Punishment”) proving a useful starting point. At different points he says (on polyphony): “A contemporary novelist writing about extremism could in this vein bring together, say, a liberal white boomer, a woke white Gen Zer, a first-generation Iranian immigrant who fled their birthplace after the Islamic Revolution, and a second-generation immigrant desperate for a sense of identity.”, on physical setting “a contemporary novelist could set the narrative in London, with conservative Muslims, liberal Muslims, racists and far-right extremists all living in a deprived outer borough. On a character’s walk home from a Tube station, they could plausibly pass a mosque, a pub, a kebab shop and a newsagent and be required to take underpasses, where all sorts of kids could hang out. The structures of family and school could provide further dialogic opportunities. A character could attend a local state school in the outer borough, but also spend time in an up-and- coming, fashionable borough where one parent has moved with a new partner. When the action takes place online, a common meeting place could be a comments section on the Guardian. The comments section for a review of an album by an artist with politically controversial opinions would draw haters (who want to celebrate a negative review they feel is deserved) as well as loyal fans (who want to defend the artist and their right to hold politically controversial opinions, if not the opinions themselves). Any of the characters could conceivably find their way here.”, about the characters journey “After swinging from the left to the right, their protagonist could find themselves needing to find a new tribe online, a new target audience, and gradually move further and further right under the pressures of social media’s like economy, until they start retweeting members of Generation Identity. Everyone who used to follow the protagonist, while they were on the left, would stop following them. They could then end up in a totally monologic echo chamber where everyone is, indeed, singing the same song in the same way. But this song would be a nationalist one.” All of which (and much more) could serve itself as a review of this novel. And returning directly to it – the main character is David (half Iranian on his mother’s side), studying at Sixth Form but suffering something of an identity crisis. Something of a loner he was bullied at primary school (by white pupils) for his mixed heritage, and now at Sixth Form for his rather asexual dress, eyeliner and vegan lifestyle (which is motivated by his love of the singer Karl Williams). His parents have separated – his father (an electrician) living in Newbury Park – where the two of them survive on convenience food and repeat watching of episodes of “Only Fools and Horses”; his mother - who works for an left win NGO – living with a man who works for Amnesty and with Karl’s SJW (social justice warrior) step sister. It is in his love for Williams that gives him his initial identity – the book opening with a great description of a concert he attends with his stepsister at Brixton Academy (and a – for me at least – Proustian description of a sticky beer soaked floor) where for once he feels part of a wider movement. But when some remarks Karl makes about Islamists protest about sex education outside a school (basically questioning the compatibility of Islam with Western liberalism) cause his hero to be cancelled, David decides to double down on his following of Karl – and when he is beaten up by three Muslim students at his school it only encourages him to turn from the more left wing sites he previously followed to those which sympathise with Karl’s comments. And from there, and to the despair and incomprehension of his parents, he drops out of school working at what he himself knows is a dead end supermarket at Sainsburys, and gets more and more involved in online gaming – in particular Call of Duty – from there falling into sub-Reddit groups and then discovering that his Iranian heritage can be reconfigured as an Aryan identity into an activist anti-SJW right-wing group (with some implicit incel tendencies) and further into the dark web, as his online shooting prowess stats to give him real life ideas. As an aside this is a novel very grounded in the real world – the supermarket is Sainsburys and the book gives a very detailed description of life as a Sainsbury’s supermarket worker. And Call of Duty missions and tournaments are described in huge detail – the author has said that the hardest things about the novel was “Making video gaming interesting on the page to somebody who’s not in the moment frenziedly racking up kill streaks” and to be honest I am not sure he really succeeded as I found myself largely skimming these sections. Twitter, Guardian BTL discussions, Reddit threads, You Tube comments, online gaming discussions are threaded throughout – a crucial and for me more successful part of the novel’s attempt to capture Social Media. But there is a second viewpoint in the novel whose sections alternate with David’s (albeit they are much shorter). Hassan is one of the three involved in beating up David but his role is passive and the actions of his two childhood friends force him into a final break with them – as his life (still involved in the Muslim Youth Centre, interested in his mother’s moderate Islam website – Muslim voices) is at increasing odds with their drop out lifestyle of drugs and drinking. Determined to build some credentials for his personal statement for an application to Goldsmiths Hassan takes place in a befriending scheme run by the local Youth Centre, although he is real interest is in FIFA – which overtime gives him an opportunity in E-gaming from hie beloved West Ham (FIFA and West Han described with the same detail as Call of Duty and Sainsburys). The Hassan sections were less convincing for me than the David ones – they did not seem to really advance the novel or at least not in a way that was clear to me reading it (or even when examining the author’s PhD thesis): I had wondered if the point was to have some exposure – even indirect - to Islamic extremism but this does not happen and instead Hassan and his mother’s relatively liberal view of Islam leaves the novel a little unbalanced I felt. Instead Hassan and his family seem to be there to make David’s beliefs and actions even more extreme and unfounded (he believes Hassan to be one of his attackers) than they already are, while at the same time there is an almost a reverse Chekov’s Gun element to the narrative (we wait for the gun to be introduced but with Hassan’s family acting as its pre-determined target). I did though enjoy the early English A Level discussion of possible societal motivations for the actions of the Crucible’s Abigail Williams (which we immediately know is the author signalling to us that we need to consider the same for David) and David’s reasons for not reading English at University “There would be no reading novels anyway, he thinks. There would only be criticising novels for their heteronormativity, their whiteness, their Europeanness, their whateverness" And overall this was a book that I very much enjoyed reading. Even if perhaps did not quite match the ambition of the PhD thesis, the fidelity of the book (from Brixton Academy to FIFA to Sainsburys to Call of Duty) was a very welcome contrast to much of literary fiction which often seems set in an artificial world. I was surprised this novel was not on the Orwell Prize longlist and having read it that surprise (which was matched by the omission of Andrew Mc Millan’s very different but equally grounded in contemporary UK “Pity”) has only increased. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 05, 2024
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Jul 07, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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0063336529
| 9780063336520
| 0063336529
| 3.99
| 2,478
| Jun 04, 2024
| Jun 04, 2024
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really liked it
| 'No, Mrs Keaveney, the detective said. 'How did a woman living two miles across the bay look out her window and see a bit of smoke and know the fir 'No, Mrs Keaveney, the detective said. 'How did a woman living two miles across the bay look out her window and see a bit of smoke and know the fire had been set intentionally?' When reading this book I was reminder of LP Hartley’s opening lines to “The Go Between” – “The Past is a foreign country, they do things differently there” as the real strength of this character driven novel is how it captures Ireland in the mid 1990s just on the cusp of the start of the “quiet revolution” of moving away from a Catholic-Church dominated patriarchal society – a society so different from either the UK of the same time or Ireland only some thirty years later. Both in the background to but at the heart of the novel is the November 1995 referendum to remove the constitutional prohibition on divorce (which eventually passed with a 0.6% majority). The novel takes place over a period from November 1994 to around July 1985 and features three women, all with conflicted marriages and living in and around a coastal village. Izzy is married to James – the local TD (the equivalent of an MP) but their relationship is gradually deteriorating as Izzy increasingly resents less James’s intense focus on his own political career (which has gained him a good reputation locally but in which he lacks Dublin contacts for a ministerial position) than his disinterest (it not opposition) to her own ambitions – refusing to take out a lease on a now vacancy shop that she used to run as a flower shop before giving it up (at James’s heavy urging) when she had their child Niall. She also strikes up a friendship with Father Brian the new and relatively liberal village priest whereas her own marriage is increasingly marked by her silence and anger. Collette - a bohemian published poet – has returned to the village after breaking with a man that she left her family home to live with in Dublin. Collette’s husband Shaun – a rich local business owner – completely refuses to take her back (and has started his own relationship) and also forbids her contact with their youngest child Carl (a classmate of Niall), as well as refusing her money. She moves into a small cottage and starts a creative writing class to try to get some money. When Izzy attends the class she tries to get Izzy to ask James to influence Shaun and then hits on the idea of Izzy taking Carl and Niall on excursions which she secretly joins. Dolores is married to Donal and pregnant with their fourth child – living in their beautiful beachview home (the cottage sitting in the grounds). Donal, a successful tradesman, is something of a serial philander and inevitably makes a move on the attractive, available and vulnerable Collette and the two begin an affair – which takes place against a background of Collette’s Dublin lover’s attempts to get back with her by writing her increasingly desperate letters. Increasingly all three women find their lives restricted by, or resent the activities of their husbands – and the power imbalances in each relationship underpinned by social convention; patriarchal ties (for example far from James influencing Sean the reverse occurs with James telling Izzy to stop interfering in Shaun’s marriage and also using his clout as an MP to get Father Brian removed from the parish) and the lack of a divorce option - are core to the novel. There is no question that this is a well written novel – particularly for a debut. It is one driven much more by depth of characterisation than language (which for an Irish novel can seem rather flat). One could I think question the decision for a male author to write a novel with three women as the main characters and with a feminist theme, but Murrin seems to pull it off really well and if anything it is the male characters which are not convincing (only perhaps James feeling like a three dimensional character rather than a foil for the female characters – this is a novel which would comprehensively fail a reverse Bechdel test) A more legitimate question/less defensible challenge would be around the decision to open the novel with what is set up a framing device but is effectively a spoiler – Izzy telling the police of her suspicions over a fire she observes when looking across at the cottage – of what is, at least for me, a rather unnecessarily dramatic plot development towards the end of the book. I did think this was redeemed though by the novel continuing after this development and showing how Iris’s life in particular continues and linking this to the societal developments around the referendum. Overall, a solid if not spectacular read – but one I think will have wide appeal and may well appear on Book award lists. Months spent in this way, trying to find the language to describe who she was now, when nothing in her day-to-day life had altered in the slightest. She woke beside the same man, they joked and laughed about the same things, she felt so many of the same resentments towards him. And in a month's time she would step into a small wooden cubicle and a curtain would fall to behind her, and in that secret space cross YES or NO on a ballot paper. And whatever decision she made, she knew she would never leave her husband. Something told her now that they would grow old together, and sick together, and while they might remain strangers to each other, she needed him. She had exhausted herself with stories, spent her life and energy in always wanting things to be another way. The only thing that seemed to offer her comfort was the lesson she had taken from Colette - that acceptance was not the same as resignation....more |
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my rating |
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4.00
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2024
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Sep 01, 2024
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3.60
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not set
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Aug 21, 2024
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3.90
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really liked it
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Aug 30, 2024
Aug 06, 2024
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Aug 05, 2024
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3.70
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really liked it
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Aug 29, 2024
Jul 31, 2024
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Aug 04, 2024
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3.67
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really liked it
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Aug 27, 2024
Jul 29, 2024
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Jul 30, 2024
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4.08
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really liked it
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Aug 26, 2024
Jul 28, 2024
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Jul 30, 2024
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3.64
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really liked it
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Aug 25, 2024
Jul 26, 2024
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Jul 27, 2024
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4.49
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really liked it
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Jul 25, 2024
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Jul 26, 2024
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4.27
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liked it
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Jul 22, 2024
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Jul 20, 2024
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3.75
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really liked it
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Jul 19, 2024
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Jul 19, 2024
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4.06
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really liked it
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Jul 18, 2024
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Jul 18, 2024
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4.24
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it was amazing
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Jul 15, 2024
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Jul 16, 2024
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3.85
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it was amazing
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Jul 11, 2024
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Jul 11, 2024
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3.64
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liked it
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Aug 25, 2024
Jul 20, 2024
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Jul 11, 2024
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3.44
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really liked it
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Jul 12, 2024
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Jul 11, 2024
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4.00
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really liked it
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Jul 17, 2024
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Jul 11, 2024
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3.81
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really liked it
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Jul 10, 2024
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Jul 11, 2024
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4.22
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it was amazing
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Jul 19, 2024
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Jul 11, 2024
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4.17
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really liked it
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Jul 06, 2024
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Jul 07, 2024
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3.99
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really liked it
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Jul 02, 2024
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Jul 05, 2024
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