Now winner of the 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (One of Britain’s oldies literary prizes).
I read this book due to its shortlist for the 2021 GNow winner of the 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (One of Britain’s oldies literary prizes).
I read this book due to its shortlist for the 2021 Goldsmith Prize – a generally strong but mixed and rather too London centric shortlist (four of the six stories are set in London; five of the six authors live in London; three of the six authors are alumni of English/creative writing at a South London University near to Goldsmith, all five publishers are based in London) for an already London centric prize (the Goldsmith and its New Statesman sponsor are London based; three of the four judges live in London).
The way I can best describe this book is as follows.
Imagine someone made a collage of South London Life which was a combination of representational art with the more occasional absurdist elements and which was made from overlapping pieces of material which are drawn from the detritus of South London Life itself.
After I wrote this I found the author’s own description which I think is not that different, he calls it an enneaptych – a nine-panelled painting – “each panel portrays something of its own, but it’s how they work together that makes it what it is. You usually see panel paintings on altars. And, yes, the altar here is London. And it’s a foul and profane and fractured altar, but it’s mine, and I’m poisoned by it”
The book is set in South London (specifically Harriet Harmann’s constituency of Camberwell and Peckham) and features a group of stories and characters which overlap each other in a number of different ways (a quite midweek pub linking many of them, and a party which both opens and ends the book bringing most of them together) to form the collage – each chapter a panel of the enneaptych which is both a stand alone short story and part of a coherent novel.
The Party – this opens the book and is I think one of the strongest in the book for a number of reasons: its mixture of the poignant and the absurd in a way which only magnifies the poignancy; the way it picks it up on many if not most of the themes which recur in the novel; the subtlety of one of its elements. The story was actually featured in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...) and tells of a ageing widow who lives next door to a gay couple who come round to tell her they are holding a party.
Ostensibly the story is of the widow reflecting on the grief and loneliness which is her life after the death of her beloved husband, while growing curious about the party and trying to find a way to spy on it through a gap in the wall – but her spying grows into something both more absurd and into an explicit and acknowledged metaphor for the idea of being trapped, while 2-3 asides in the story make an observant reader realise the widow far from being shocked by her neighbours activities is more reflecting on how simpler their lives are compared to her own. The chapter ends with her fixing on a girl – projecting a potential life story on to her and then catching her eye through the hole.
The Camera – this section is set in a pub and continues the strong start – two old school friends Gary and Stan warily fence around their changed relationship and different lives – Stan a Labour organiser and activist, Gary (who is black) set on a new practice of photography which leaves Stan unsettled as Gary seems to pick him as a subject for surveillance - seeming to take the right to start to tell the story of his life.
The Sweat – this chapter unfortunately rather ruined my experience of the book – an addled tale of drug taking and sex.
The Joke – Stan’s partner Maria, an assistant librarian in a Public School is told by by a much older teacher Anna a tragic if unusual story of the death of her partner only to find Anna is notorious for her tall tales. I enjoyed much of this chapter (and it nicely fits the overall storytelling theme - here inventing stories about yourself) but it was let down by the author’s attempt to convey London public school accents which let us say belongs to the Dick van Dyke tradition of misguided London accents (albeit another Goodreads reviewer has pointed out this could precisely be a parody and be a neat inversion of the way Working Class accents with dropped-aitches are expressed)
The Story – this is perhaps another of the strengths of the book: Anna and a man both Stan and Gary know by different names (neither correct) swap and in some cases seemingly invent stories – three of which are effectively variations of the stories in the novel (The Party, The Flat, The Pigeon).
The Flat – again this was a weak point for me due to its explicitness but tells the story of John, who rents a flat only to find his predecessor tenants disappeared with no explanation, becoming himself sexually obsessed with their story. If not for this explicitness (which felt gratuitous) this could have been a strong chapter fitting with the overall themes by showing someone writing themselves out of their own stories (and other people's stories about them).
The Pigeon – a rather odd tale of a plumber’s apprentice abandoned by his boss in a locked house where he decides to spend the night in the attic to avoid the embarrassment of the owner’s return – the apprentice himself rather obsessed with the lack of onomatopoeic fidelity of the word “coo”.
The Meeting – a grouping of some of the regulars in the pub (and familiar characters in the novel) around an aborted Labour local Party (the link with the opening/closing party as a meeting point is I think very deliberate) – which turns into the culmination of a rodent-infestation theme which has run through the books.
The Song – many of the characters meet up at the opening party which we see (literally) from the other side – the identity of the girl and the ending of the story being rather obvious – as the narrator (who by this time is addressing us as reader directly) cheerfully acknowledges.
There is a lot to like, particularly the interaction between the ideas of liminal and hidden spaces and of lives being trapped and circumscribed - and how both are represented physically as well as emotionally.
I liked the way that a party (and the Labour Party) and a party wall were all ways in which the different characters both converged but also in some cases were trapped in their lives and ways of thinking.
I also liked the way that storytelling, in different forms, was threaded through the chapters.
My two biggest issues I think were:
Firstly that it is all just a bit too sordid for me - the book seems to rather enjoy exploring a slice of London life which I struggled to relate to (perhaps if I am being self-critical because its a slice that fits between the sandwich of the Surrey suburbs and the City - my home and work place but there are other books on the list - noticably "Little Scratch" which I think capture the "real" London far better)
Secondly that it is perhaps oddly a little too straightforward (at least compared to my prior expectations) - the connections between the different characters and chapters seemed in many cases a little too obvious (even at times over Laboured - if you can pardon the pun) – a good example of this would be the subtlety of the first chapter which is explained in painstaking detail by a character in the last story. I would have preferred to have done much more work (although the very obviousness of many connections - and if I am being honest my disinterest in the book - almost certainly means I missed some more subtle ones).
Worth a read but far from my favourite on what is I think a mixed shortlist....more
Certain written words are alive, active, living – they are entirely in the present, the same present
Now shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize.
Certain written words are alive, active, living – they are entirely in the present, the same present as you. In fact it feels as if they are being written as you read them, that your eyes upon the page are perhaps even making them appear, in any case, certain sentences do not feel in the least bit separate from you or from the moment in time when you are reading them. You feel they wouldn’t exist without your seeing them. Like they wouldn’t exist without you. And isn’t the opposite true too – that the pages you read bring you to life? Turning the pages, turning the pages. Yes, that is how I have gone on living. Living and dying and living and dying, left page, right page, and on it goes.
This is Claire-Louise Bennett’s long-awaited second long form publication after her debut “Pond” (published by the small Irish press Stinging Fly) which transversed the novel, short story and flash fiction forms into an ambitious and unique work.
This book is a series of seven (partly auto-fictional?) first person chapters (essays?) - the first written in a plural “we”.
The longest of these (the fourth) has as its centre a story the narrator first started many years previously – which starts life as a rather eccentric character study of an flamboyant Venice-based flaneur before evolving into more of a Borgesian fable about the power of literature – the evolution reflecting the narrator’s own evolving and expanding experience as a reader (the phrase “I hadn’t yet read ….” acting as a recurring motif). But even this centre is at best the starting point for various digression – digressions which seem often more at the non-sequitur than chain-of-association end of the spectrum.
The other chapters are in some ways riffs around the same ideas, linked by narrator and recurring ideas, themes and incidents – all underpinned by literature – writing and reading.
The writing is very much more people and relationship based than “Pond” (which set out to deliberately reject what Calvino called “anthropocentric parochialism”) but shares much of its emphasis on patterns, connections, impressions as well as ultimately on solitude, the individual and the outsider.
The narrator seems more alive in the world of her own writing, her drawing, her reading and identifications with the lives of fictional characters or their authors, and with her own reflections – than she ever is in any relationships (be it with schoolmates, boyfriends, fellow students, flat mates or parents). It is perhaps telling that the book’s title is taken from her time at working at a supermarket and a key recurring character a returning customer whose life she imagines vividly, almost feverishly, especially after he gifts her a book.
Sometimes the writing seems sharp and evocative - – an examination of the writing of Ann Quin and her “fidgeting forensic polyvocal style as a powerful and bona-fide expression of an unbearably tense and disorientating paradox that underscores everyday life in a working-class environment – on the one hand it’s an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet, at the same time, much of it seems extrinsic and is perpetually uninvolving” is both interesting and shows how the narrator is considering both Quin’s own life and how such a style is appropriate to her own writing.
I enjoyed also this description of Yorkshire “Even the mountains were unpleasant and begrudging. They did not soar upwards. They had no business with the sky. No, they were embroiled with the comings and goings below on that mile-long road. Huddled together like debt collectors blocking out the sun.” - and this description leads into perhaps the most sobering and shocking part of the novel.
Other times though I found the writing a little less original or redolent. A lengthy section on menstruation seemed to be something that would have been provocative twenty years ago. And this is buried in a second chapter set in the narrator’s school days which seems sprinkled with thesaurus -swallowing overwriting – for example repeated attempts to try chemistry explosions are: Such recursive hijinks were most often deployed in the science labs, where the pupils’ incendiary hands might easily alight upon and combine a spectrum of appliances and substances that could be counted on to interact with each other in a palpable and fairly predictable fashion – though the exact scale of the ensuing reaction could not be quite so reliably gauged.” – in retrospect though I wonder if this chapter represents the narrator’s early development as a writer.
At one stage in this book the narrator talks about her Swindon upbringing and the Yorkshire upbringing of her once boyfriend and how both were from areas where a relatively conventional life (job in a family trade, marriage, starter home, children, bigger home, annual holiday abroad) is the convention and expectation and yet “we couldn’t say why exactly but neither me nor Dale were cut out for that …………. the encroaching inevitability of that life path had been a source of anxiety to us”. The path the narrator instead follows seems though rather ambiguous and undefined – a yet unfulfilled but not unfulfilling search for a “different turn”, which is sometimes progressing but at other times frustrating.
And for me that is a metaphor for Claire-Louise Bennett’s writing – a sense that the conventional literary novel with plot, characters, linearity is not for her – a refusal to fit into pre-existing templates and a search for something new to do with literature. A search though that has perhaps not yet reached fulfilment and is still uneven in its results but still interesting for an observer.
My thanks to Penguin Random House, Jonathan Cape for an ARC via NetGalley...more
Now longlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize. Shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize which decided to pick half its shortlist (including this one) froNow longlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize. Shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize which decided to pick half its shortlist (including this one) from the next door University’s alumni as part of an extreme London bias.
An exuberant, enjoyable novel which starts as magic realism, aims for social commentary, heads for fantasy territory while flirting with absurdity but which at the end is a rather simple story of postponed and long thwarted love.
Overall a new genre - fictional activist magical exuberance (FAME).
This novel, the author’s third, and some fifteen years in the writing is set on a single day on the fictional archipelago of Popisho (from the Jamaican slang for foolishness – Poppy show), an Island where butterflies (which can be grabbed from the air and eaten) are like alcohol but moths and like Class A drugs, where everyone is born with “little something-something … a little something extra. The local name was cors. Magic, but more than magic. A gift, nah. Yes. From the gods: a thing so inexpressibly your own" and a gift curated by a group of wise-women – The Council of the Obeah Fatidique – the gift once discovered (and verified by the Obeah women) often defines people’s vocation.
The first character we meet (our first member of the thwarted love-pair) is Xavier – his cors is the ability to flavour food perfectly by hand (a skill which I will return to when discussing the author’s execution of the magic realism genre).
Xavier, due to his skills, was picked many years back as the island’s latest Macaenus (a kind of much celebrated, almost venerated official island cook who cooks a perfectly individually-calibrated meal for each inhabitant exactly once during his twenty year reign). Xavier was widowed exactly one year ago – his estranged wife seemingly having drowned herself and her ghost still seemingly wandering the island. Earlier in life he had many lovers including his predecessor as macaenus – the flamboyant and seductive Des’ree, as well as Anise (the girl he realises he should have married). He is also a reformed moth addict – now tempted to indulge again.
The Iocal Governor – Bertrand Intisar – is shortly up for re-election, and while the islands are increasingly prosperous, there is increasing disquiet (fuelled by a mysterious graffiti artist who paints in orange) at the corruption he seems to have bought to the Island fuelled by his time abroad: in particular the magical toys the Islanders loved for many years are now manufactured to his tastes in a huge factory and reserved for export only (their magic kept secret from the outside world, but the exact distribution of the proceeds kept secret from the inhabitants).
Intisar’s so far cors-less daughter – Sonteine is due to be married the next day – and, to gain some favorable PR he is putting pressure on Xavier both to let Sonteine as her husband jump his queue (by cooking for their wedding feast) but also to take part in one of the fabled walkabouts – when the Macaenus walks around the island gathering ingredients and menu ideas.
The other two main characters who with Xavier and Sonteine are travelling across the Island this day (the author talks of four such) are Anise and Romanza.
Anise is our other thwarted lover – despite her healing touch cors she has herself suffered a series of miscarrriages and her unwillingness to try again she hears this day has driven her husband to take another lover now pregnant. She sets off to find out more but ends up in a brothel for the point at which the novel turns rather absurd (more later) while she turns her thoughts back to Xavier .
Romanza is Sonteine’s brother/Intisar’s black sheep son – with a male lover, a lie-detecting cors and living among the indigent (a group of descendants of the Island’s Carib-equivalents) who live an alternative and simpler life (for example with an obsession with mild doses of poison) on some outlying Islands. Xavier and he cross paths and initially Xavier is inspired by him (not realising who he is) to source his food from among the indigents.
This is only a fraction of the novels ideas which also include shape shifting houses, an imminent “sweet-hurricane”, passing sea creatures which act as stepping stones, a fruit infestation, a campaigning radio presenter, an eccentric beauty contest and the novel’s high (or depending on your view) low point: the “pum-pum” incident with the Island’s women all finding that a crucial body part has fallen out.
This starts with the potential to examine female sexuality, sex-work, male/female differences but it is as though the author does not really know what to do with the idea, other than simply returning to it (I was reminded of a standing joke in a sit-com), as Michael Donkor in the Guardian says “the absurd conceit is at first striking and provocative; it loses its comic charge because it is returned to over and again without engaging development or expansion” – and eventually the author just abandons the idea and moves on to her next invention.
And I think this is ultimately the issue with the book in a literary sense.
The book is intended to be in the magic-realism genre. Now of course the literary-fiction master of that genre also set his novels in a Caribbean coastal setting – Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But what makes his work particularly striking is that the magic elements are incongruous to the reader – not because of their magic but because of the otherwise mundane (in the sense of earthly) setting of the rest of the novel.
Here the author I think has failed to pull off (or perhaps to appreciate) the tension that is necessary between magic and realism.
To use a book-appropriate analogy – she I think lacks the magic-realism corrs. Unlike Xavier her own cooking touch is too heavy on adding the magic seasoning so obscuring the underlying flavours of the sociopolitical realism dish.
And as a fantasy novel I do not think it quite works either – one of the reasons that the fantasy genre is so obsessed with series of novels, beyond just genre-expectations, is that they rely on careful world building and then exploration of that world. And again I did not feel that the author here spent enough time ever exploring the world she had built rather than just adding yet another element to the world.
But I would emphasise again that this was nevertheless a very distinctive and fantastically-imagined novel, one that is as vibrant as its beautifully coloured page edgings and which at the end is an exploration of addiction and celebration of the greatest addiction of all - love....more
I re-read this book just ahead of its publication and find myself in broad agreement with Ali Smith who said in the Guardian
Books, and all the arts, naturally and endlessly inspire change because they free up the possibilities between reality and the imagination, and the possibilities for change in us. They never stop doing this. It’s one of the reasons the current powers that be are hellbent on controlling the arts, devaluing them, removing easy access to them and controlling history’s narratives. Last week I read a debut novel called Assembly by Natasha Brown. It’s a quiet, measured call to revolution. It’s about everything that has changed and still needs to change, socially, historically, politically, personally. It’s slim in the hand, but its impact is massive; it strikes me as the kind of book that sits on the faultline between a before and an after. I could use words like elegant and brilliantly judged and literary antecedents such as Katherine Mansfield/Toni Morrison/Claudia Rankine. But it’s simpler than that. I’m full of the hope, on reading it, that this is the kind of book that doesn’t just mark the moment things change, but also makes that change possible
My review
Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much–for this opportunity. For my life. And I’ve tried, tried living up to it. But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I’m ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I’m exhausted. Perhaps it’s time to end this story.
During 2020, during the early stages of the UK’s own attempt to come to terms with its colonial and slave trader past, and its on-going implications into the present as highlighted by the Black Lives Matter protests – there was a period where Bernardine Evaristo and Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first British Black authors to top the fiction and non-fiction charts respectively for “Girl Woman Other” and “Why I am No Longer Talking to White People about Race” respectively.
This short but extremely powerful and superbly crafted book, to be released later in 2021, was for me in conversation with both those books and with the recently Orwell Prize longlisted non-fiction book “The Interest” by Michael Taylor (with its tale of the struggles of a well-connected group of establishment interest to first resist the abolition of slavery and then ensure copious compensation for agreeing to end its atrocities).
Its unnamed narrator – a young Black British woman (who reminded me in many ways of Carole in “Girl, Woman, Other”) has successfully worked her way from her working class beginnings to a senior position in an investment bank, and is on the cusp of further promotion. Her white boyfriend (from an old-monied English establishment family, who secured their fortune from the slave-owner compensation) has invited her to attend a weekend gathering on his family estate – signaling, at least in his view, a further acceptance of her into his family.
But all of this apparent progress has taken place against a constant background of prejudice, condescension, micro-aggressions in all aspects of her life – which she dissects and examines with scalpel like precision.
And the narrator’s health issues give a further sense that this is a crisis/turning point in her life as she pauses to considers whether to continue on her life path – as set out in my opening quote and neatly captured in the book’s Ecclesiastes “chasing after the wind” epigraph.
The book is very short and written in a fragmentary form with prose which has been powerfully distilled to a high level of proof - this was one of those books where I seemed to highlight paragraphs on every page.
Issues that the narrator examines include:
The myths of meritocracy and social mobility
The astonishing arrogance of anti-affirmative action comments – and the almost incomprehensible persistent of the belief that minorities are somehow privileged, protected and over-promoted
The insidiousness of ill-intentioned inclusivity campaigns when designed more to whitewash (pun intended) than to actually address deep-seated issues
Political actions over the years. Her castigation of the path from slave-owner repatriations through Churchill via Enoch Powell to Theresa May’s “Go Home” Vans, Amber Rudd’s Windrush scandal to the inherent racism and hostility to others that underlay Brexit – will get lots of approving nods from the left-leaning literary community. But she also castigates positive Conservatives who see her as an example and frowning liberals who think she is not sufficiently focused on poverty and anti-capitalism (incidentally a poor review in the Guardian of the book is an almost perfect example of this). And her brilliant, unnamed demolition of the absurdity and hypocrisy of the under-achieving and over-privileged supposed leader of the woke pointing the finger at The City, and all who work in it, as being the root of all evil (even setting aside the implicit anti-Semitism of that criticism) will make for very uncomfortable reading for many.
Let’s say: A boy grows up in a country manor. Attends a private preparatory school. Spends his weekends out in the barn with his father. Together they build a great, stone sundial. The boy, now a young man, achieves two E-grades at A-level, then travels to Jamaica to teach. His sun shadows cycle round and round and he himself winds up, up. Up until the boy, an old man now, is right up at the tippity-top of the political system. Buoyed by a wealth he’s never had to earn, never worked for. He’s never dealt in grubby compromise. And from this vantage, he points a finger –an old finger, the skin translucent, arm outstretched and wavering. He points it at you: The problem.
Always, the problem.
Returning to my “conversation” opening, the author has said “I see it as almost one half of a conversation; people are going to read it and bring the other half” – and so for full disclosure my “other half” is sharing the author (and narrators and Evaristo’s Carole’s) working class via Oxbridge degree to City job background, but very much not the inherent institutional disadvantages that come in the City with being Black (and specifically Black not BAME) as compared to the privilege of being white.
Overall an outstanding book – I was very disappointed to see this not make at least the Booker longlist and it is to the discredit of this year's judges.
My thanks to from Penguin General UK, Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley
I’ve watched with dispassionate curiosity as this continent hacks away at itself: confused, lost, sick with nostalgia for those imperialist glory days – when the them had been so clearly defined! It’s evident now, obvious in retrospect as the proof of root-two’s irrationality, that these world superpowers are neither infallible, nor superior. They’re nothing, not without a brutally enforced relativity. An organized, systematic brutality that their soft and sagging children can scarcely stomach – won’t even acknowledge. Yet cling to as truth. There was never any absolute, no decree from God. Just viscous, random chance. And then, compounding
Now as predicted shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize.
look at me now lost in linearity, where is the freedom in my head, to not to only have
Now as predicted shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize.
look at me now lost in linearity, where is the freedom in my head, to not to only have to move side to side, stuck in straight lines every morning once I’ve arrived in this office, breaking myself in every morning, having to loosen the numbness punch by punch but yes I can feel my head loosening, freeing, it’s always this way, numbness ebbs, visits, interrupts, but always gets pushed down eventually taking my head away, but always giving it back (or do I wrench it back? ….
This debut novel - now included in the influential annual Observer first novelist article - will I think be one of the most innovative I read in 2021 – and I would be not be surprised to see it featuring on Prize lists including the Goldsmith. The Goldsmith was of course won in its first year by Eimear McBride’s harrowing stream-of-consciousness novel “A Girl is a Half Formed Thing” which is the only time ever I have listened to an audiobook as a way of gaining entry to a book I had found it difficult to access in print (just for reference in a typical year I read around 150 novels and listen to 0 audiobooks) – allowing me then to read the novel.
So when I heard of this novel – with its experimental stream-of-consciousness rendering on the page of the thoughts of a woman suffering trauma, a book very much about voice and which it is impossible to read other than aloud in one’s head – I was delighted to be able to both buy the novel in print but also to source a copy of the Audiobook (narrated by the author herself) - with thanks to W.F. Howes Ltd via NetGalley.
The style of this book I should stress is very different – rather than McBride’s relentlessness assault of fragmentary sentences and inventive language, we have here intersecting, sometimes parallel, sometimes intervleaved threads of internal monologue but also What’s App exchanges, emails, trip advisor reviews, poems, railway annoucements, brief conversations – all written in everyday language, thought and speech. The look and particularly spacing of the text on the page is itself part of the effect- and very different again to McBride’s wall of text. And the voice too very different in both animation and accent (Southern English, twenty-something, well educated).
The unnamed narrator is an assistant for an unnamed international newspaper – and the story is one Friday in her life, starting with her awakening, slightly hungover, through to her drifting to post-coital sleep. Most of it takes place in her “dreaded” office – and much of the background detail will be very familiar to any London based white collar worker. There though, and what gives the book its propulsive power, the spectre of her sexist boss and a rape (which he blithely will not acknowledge and which the narrator has still not disclosed – including to her “Him” her boyfriend) hangs over her.
The form follows both from the book’s set up and from trying to capture the multi-tasking digital world in which we now exist, the author said in an FT article she authored on the art of fiction in the age of social media “When I started writing my own novel, incorporating this digital compulsion was one of the first issues I ran into. I was writing a book that aimed to follow the mind of a woman in her twenties, nonstop, so ignoring it would be a plot hole. But quickly, I found that it opened up my protagonist, created a portal to others while still keeping her isolated. It inspired me to shake up form; the pressures of an age of distraction making me break up prose into columns and fragments.”
The story originally started life as a prize shortlisted short story – and that story forms the midpoint of the day and is reproduced in full in the novel and gives a good sense of the book – much better than I think I have or can manage or that the formatting on Goodreads easily allows.
Even as I wrote the review it was tempting to refer to elements of the plot that fit closely what I understand of the author’s life and experiences (in a way I am all too conscious I am far more likely to do with a female rather than make author). And very knowingly by the author the one time when the book diverts to a WhatsApp group chat (otherwise the narrator leaves them unread, instead just communicating with her Mum and her Him) it is for a brief discussion on female auto-fiction.
Further then is a benign colleague in the book – who checks in on the narrator occasionally, especially when she senses she is particularly distressed – and this colleague is effectively, in many senses, I believe the author, rather than the narrator.
The text (as my opening and closing quotes show) brings in ideas of linearity (of lack of it) in thought and conventionality in writing (for example when the narrator finds some notes discarded by a colleague in the women’s toilet bin).
Overall I thought this was an excellent and impactful book treating an important if difficult subject –#MeToo and sexual assault in the workplace and female agency in the face of male obliviousness.
And finally to which media to approach it in ..
The author herself, announcing the upcoming audiobook, tweeted recently something which very much captured my different experiences with the novel and the audiobook “It was a strange thing to record as the text is so much about encouraging the reader to make decisions and learn patterns. Instead, it becomes a performance, but it still demands attention and, I think, works. I always heard it in a voice!”. If there is a difficulty in accessing the text it is in deciding how to read when there are two different sections interleaved – do you read each in series or attempt them in parallel (or – which I think is the most appropriate – pick according to context). The audiobook – while still retaining the idea of interleaving threads – makes this choice for you, which both brings you closer to the author’s own choices (and much closer to the narrator’s true voice) but also I think removes some of the reader’s agency.
So my recommendation – buy them both.
I know (even whilst thinking) that my writing would make more sense
diary entries that is – notes on experiences or feelings or whatever, not because my head is stable or makes particular sense as if but
when I write a diary (when I did) or notes (which has not been for a long time yes great I know) (no not since, nothing since) but when I did, it was always there – the other – the performance of writing! I write thinking someone is looking in, translate my thoughts into something a little prettier, more heightened than my actual head, context handily supplied ……….
… that’s why she is so terrifying no unsettling toilet bin note woman
… it’s all just nonsense, whirring, not connection and toilet woman thinks that’s fine ? is too obsessed or whatever to want to compose something
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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