A fitting but flawed winner of the 2022 Goldsmith’s Prize.
It has at its heart the underreported injustice in the 1960s-1970s to the Chagossian peopleA fitting but flawed winner of the 2022 Goldsmith’s Prize.
It has at its heart the underreported injustice in the 1960s-1970s to the Chagossian people, forcibly deported from their archipelago which the British authorities partitioned from Mauritius immediately prior to the latter being granted its independence by the UK, making it a supposedly unpopulated new colony - the British Indian Ocean Territory as part of a decision to grant the US a cold war and later war-on-terror base on Diego Garcia.
My overall conclusion on the book is that it is an excellent fit for the Goldsmith’s Prize and Goldsmith’s University and a welcome challenge to past Goldsmith Prize practices – but did not quite work for me
It is a great fit for the Goldsmith’s Prize which looks to “reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form ……. [books that are] deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best.” - as it has plenty of inventive elements not least in its treatment of its joint authorship – with two authorial stand in narrators, a melding of perspective and voices between he/she/we and at one stage literally side-by-side narratives of a day when the two characters part ways (other elements like email exchanges or transcribed interviews are I think more hackneyed).
It is a great fit for the Goldsmith’s University – known for its championing/celebration of (for its fans) thrillingly confrontational or (for its detractors) rather self-consciously parodiable performative art with a clear left-wing bias. For me this was most memorably signified when two weeks prior to a Goldsmith’s Prize shortlist announcement 30 tonnes of carrots were dumped beside the University “to provoke a discussion about the discord between rural and City life”. Here we have a novel which itself has layers of performative art – with the authorial stand-in narrators discussing the project which lies behind the book we are reading and whether performative art can really capture the experience of others but more so as the novel itself is only part of a wider project of tumblr performances, extract publications and so on.
The narrators seem to think the best way to fight injustice is to invent new nouns (honger, tubes, screens and blocks for hunger, cigarettes, smartphones and books) while doing no work at all, believing in wild conspiracy theories about the imminent collapse of the financial system and performing some desultory trading in bitcoins – all while complaining about a lack of money of course.
And the book is also a challenge to past practices of a Goldsmith Prize which in its previous 9 year history has shown a shocking lack of racial diversity in judging panels and shortlist/winner choices – with an excellent section in which one of the authorial stand-ins comments in amusing fashion on identical similar biases in a magazine prize for experimental writing.
But in terms of my own experience - it is telling that (due to a very long flight and overseas trip) I completed two books over the 24-36 hour period at which I started this one: one another of the Goldsmith shortlistees, the other a fictional account of the exact same historical injustice which fuels this book (and which incidentally even mentions this novel): both of those I devoured and hugely enjoyed.
This book despite being the intersection of the two forms - took me well over a week to read and even then I was flicking through pages – a combination I think of jet lag and my own disintetest in performative art and slight boredom with Wikipedia/fiction mashups which seems to have become too much of a trope in the more experimental end of literary fiction.
For, in my view, a more concise and focused treatment of the Chagossian read Philippe Sands “The Last Colony: A Tale of Race, Exile and Justice from Chagos to The Hague” – my review here (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5033337136). Interestingly and rather nicely Sands actually references this novel in his book.
Like I said, that was the plan. But I couldn't get a fix on Do Yeon-ssi's attention span at all. I felt her lose interest in our discussion. That h
Like I said, that was the plan. But I couldn't get a fix on Do Yeon-ssi's attention span at all. I felt her lose interest in our discussion. That happened fairly quickly. But--and here's the horror story--she lost interest without losing focus, continuing to respond to my inanities as if something was actually at stake. It's like this: At a marionette show you find four types of engaged audience - four different philosophies of enjoying the performance. There are those whose attention is reserved solely for the actions of the marionette: that's Arpad XXX, wishing to believe that the figure is alive in one way or another. Then there are the ones who can't and won't stop looking at the puppet master (or seeking signs of the puppet master, if that person is hidden): that's how Xavier is. There are those who watch the faces of their fellow audience members: my preference, obviously, since I'm the one here talking about the other types. And there are those who follow the strings and the strings alone. Do Yeon-ssi is a string watcher. She may not much care about the order of the strings – if they tangle, they tangle. Still, they express something to her, something about the nature of the illusion before her. That's enough of a reason for her to pursue the strings to their vanishing point.
I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2022 Goldsmith Prize.
I had read the author’s previous novel “Gingerbread” about which I said “Oyeyemi is a master of what I can only call digressive description, never one to see a tangent and not want to go off on it, often building a fascinating side story … only to sate her imaginative appetite (if not always the readers interest) and return to the main narrative (if that can be even said to exist).” and “I was however reminded a little of the story of Hansel and Gretel’s second trip to the Gingerbread cottage: at times I would feel that I was starting to follow the trail of the narrative only to retrace my steps and see that those crumbs had been snatched away.” Adopting the author’s clear invitation to adopt four different philosophies to examine the book.
MARIONETTES
These major (there are a whole host of side characters) on a series of characters who converge on a train journey (and one who may or may not be present – more later) – an ex-tea smuggling train called The Lucky Day which for me had strong Faraway Tree vibes with a series of carriages each with their own distinctive set up and world, as well as in its old-fashioned winding journey Orient Express links (and the twin solutions to Christie’s novel – a stranger boarding the train and then exiting at risk, and every one on the train being responsible for the erasure of a person are both I think relevant to the novel).
The owner and permanent member of the train is Ava Kapoor, a theremin player and potential heiress (if only she can pass a sanity test) and she is joined there by her girlfriend and composer Allegra Yu and more recently by Laura de Souza a released convict (after a series of incidents including one in which she stalked and threatened the ex-North American Go Champion – wanting him to acknowledge a past victory she achieved over him which was dismissed by onlookers) who is now acting on behalf of a money lender with whom Ava has taken out a punitive loan on the security of her conditional inheritance.
Two others join this particular journey – Otto Shin (nee Montague) now a hypnotist and the first party narrator of the story and Xavier Shin (a ghostwriter and inadvertent plagiarist novelist): Otto and Xavier have recently cemented their relationship by deed poll and are on a “non-honeymoon honeymoon” paid for Xavier’s Auntie Do Yeon-ssi.
The humans are accompanied by two mongooses Otto’s Arpad (technically Arpad XXX from a long line of family mongooeses) and Ava’s purloined Chela.
PUPPET MASTER(S)
As in Gingerbread Oyeyemi’s adopted home of Prague and her love of K-Drama infuse the book with Czech and Korean references. Another key theme to the book is the female recluse – the epigraph is from Emily Dickinson, one interpreted by Oyeyemi in titular form as referring to the illusory peace of apparently stable relationships – and Oyeyemi has talked in an interview of how she wanted to explore her own female reclusiveness through the novel and the lens of Dickinson’s writing and life.
But the book has its own puppet master – or possible puppet in the mysterious person of Prem who seems (as we guess as the book progresses but have confirmed in a series of letters) to have interacted with each person on the train – although whether he is using them or each has in some ways used him is unclear (including to the characters). Most crucially Ava is literally unable to see Prem and does not believe in his existence – and her sanity test (for the inheritance from Prem’s father) seems to hinge on her final views here as well as the actuality of Prem’s existence or non-existence.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS
I have to commend the four fellow audience members who invited me to this marionette show. The Goldsmith judges: Ali Smith (something of a champion of Oyeyemi and herself of course a wonderful writer not least in the Seasonal Quartet and recent “Companion Piece”, Natasha Brown (author of my Golden Reviewer Best Book of 2022 – “Assembly”, Tom Gatti (New Statesman literary/culture editor) and Tim Parnell (of the University and Literary Director of the Prize) have picked an excellent shortlist.
Ali Smith, on behalf of the judges said of the book: "In a blast of visionary life and energy, and with a kind of jovial panache that casually analyses narrative while simultaneously shaking itself free of all preconceived expectations of narrative, Peaces busts us out of isolation, drops us into a train carriage with a bunch of strangers who aren't strangers after all (plus a couple of mongooses), and sends us on a journey of the psyche that liberates its readers into a state of brilliant rich-and-strangeness. ‘Here’s to unseeing the world.’ This novel unfixes everything and sends us out renewed."
Views of other invited audience members will be interesting – I think, in keeping with the prizes aim, this is a book which will appeal (in meta fashion) to those interested in the strings far more so than those interested in marionettes (particularly character and plot coherence).
STRINGS
I guess a key here is – does the book express something?
There are many sub-themes and ideas which could be explored – for example the link (if any) between the younger Laura (witnessed by Xaiver as a child on a different train journey) stuffing her mouth with Go stones and a mysterious Sichuan affair (part of Ava’s family history) which ended with one of her family stuffing her mouth with emeralds.
For me one of the key themes of the book is relationships and what it means to be seen and validated through the eyes of another, and equally importantly the dissolution of relationships and what it means to be unseen (particularly if such breaks are absolute – the book opens with the question “Have you ever had an almost offensively easy breakup?” – Otto believes he is the victim of one such breakup but as the novel progresses we more come to believe that Otto and Xavier were perpetrators).
In one crucial part, the characters view a series of paintings gifted to Ava which are ostensibly pure white frames but on which seemingly each can vocalise a description of the same image despite being unable to “see” it. Otto’s move into hypnosis (and helping other people unsee ideas or obsessions) has its roots in an incident when he nearly died trying to save someone he had “seen” from a fire in what was it seems an empty flat.
The author herself places some of these ideas, as well as her digressive nested story approach in a wider context of her overall project:
I feel like the whole stories within stories approach is part of what I think of as my big project as a writer. Ultimately, what I want to do is to try and find out what stories are actually made of, why we believe them, why they take hold of us, and why no matter what we do to try and control the story, or even to create a story, there’s some element of it that is just wild and almost seems to make itself. And also, I guess, whether stories are our friends or our enemies. I just have a lot of questions about what stories are, and the only way to try and interrogate or possibly persuade stories to reveal something about themselves is to make all these provocations and assaults on them, and try and unpack them and unpick their seams and see if they react. Will the story bite you back? Sometimes it does, and then you do sort of run off, but then you come back and have another approach.
So I think that in Peaces, in particular, there was an interesting new angle in that you have a character who almost is a story, and is trying very hard to move out of storyhood and into personhood, and is somehow being prevented and limited by… well, mainly by Ava. I found Ava so inscrutable. I kept wanting to see if she would wink or something. I really couldn’t figure out what she was doing with this whole, There is no Přem. I honestly couldn’t tell you the answer to what is going on there. But at times I was like, Can you really see him? Like, what are you doing, Ava? What are you doing to this poor Přem? And then other times I just thought, I know whatever’s going on in this group dynamic is interesting. And it’s something to do with stories and stories about a story about a person, a kind of hall of mirrors type investigation.
Overall I am not sure I really fully understood any of the aspects of the novel – but I did remain engaged and appreciative throughout and willing to pursue the pages of the novel to the vanishing point of the last page of what was a fantastical (in various senses) train journey....more
The author was recently selected for the decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list (2023 edition).
This novel was shortlisted for the 2022 The author was recently selected for the decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list (2023 edition).
This novel was shortlisted for the 2022 Goldsmith’s Prize and 2022 Orwell Prize.
Na praia, na beira do mar, sentada na arcia
Ela disse assim
Aqui, com você, é como se não tivesse ditadura
Como se não existisse e nunca tivesse existido ditadura, nemdos, nem conquistador, nem explorador, nema minas, nem corporaçãoes mineiras, nem imperialistas, nem espies estadunidenses, nem portugueses, nem língua portuguesa, nem Portugal, nem Brasil, nem branco, nem escravidão, nem casa grande, nem senzala, nem varíola, nem rei, nem princesa ou imperador
What will our daughters say of us?
I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2022 Orwell Prize for political fiction.
This is the author’s second novel after the intriguing debut novel 2019 “Stubborn Archivist” which as well as various book prize recognitions (Dylan Thomas longlist, Desmond Elliott shortlist, Observer Debut Novelists feature, Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year shortlist) also contributed to her recognition by the FT as one of the “planet’s 30 most exciting young people” across art, books, music, tech and politics – the political angle also recognising her activism and her involvement in boosting the youth vote in the 2017 General Election via the use of a bot on Tinder which encouraged voter registration and tactical anti-Conservative voting.
The author’s first book had a distinct style – one that was on one level experimental but in a way which was far less conscious and more natural than much experimental literary fiction. Non-chronological, copious blank space, a mix of first/second/third person, of different points of view, of conventional prose and fragmentary prose poetry, and perhaps most distinctly in the way the text switched in a natural flowing way from English to occasional and typically untranslated Portugese. It was also a book which aimed at lightness and avoiding the “oppresive weight of the [linear. Realist] British novel” but where I felt the lightness, and the sense of a debut novel searching for a narrative voice was perhaps a weakness.
This book I believe has exactly what one looks for (but so often does not find) in a second novel – something which retains the distinctiveness and strengths of the author’s debut novel (perhaps a little less switch of person, and a more obvious chronological signposting but with more developed use of Portuguese) but adds a greater conviction of touch and a weightier and more purposeful story to make for a really strong and accomplished read.
A quick glance at the author’s Twitter account shows her continued political activism – across a wide variety of progressive causes – and her belief in direct action and yearning for meaningful revolution over incremental, democratic change. That activism and belief has translated into her aims for this novel as captured in a recent Guardian profile (https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...)
I wasn’t worried about writing a political novel – every novel is political – but I was asking myself how I could really agitate the reader. I heard a podcast with Sebastian Faulks talking about this fan letter he got from a woman who said: “I read Birdsong and the sex scenes made me realise I’d never known true love or sexual pleasure and so I left my husband of 20 years.” He was like, whoa. It made me wonder what it would be like if you wrote a piece of fiction that made people feel so full of revolutionary possibility and desire that they want to take to the streets, not necessarily for what might be achieved in their own lifetime, but for generations to come.
At the heart of the book are Catarina and Melissa – who become flat mates and close friends in Mile End (in East London) in 2016-17. The 2016-17 sections follow their burgeoning friendship and their involvement in a series of activist protests and direct actions in London, against a background of the despair they and their fellow travellers in England and Brazil feel with the Brexit Vote and impeachment of Dilma Rousseff (both in 2016).
Both Melissa and Catarina have Brazilian mothers and links and in two lengthy historical sections each we learn more of their background.
Catarina’s is the most known and the most radical – her grandfather a famous three time (deposed by the military on at least one occasion) state governor and her Auntie Laura (her mother’s elder sister) a radical guerilla subject to imprisonment and torture but who then died in a mysterious car accident post a national amnesty and restoration to her family. She is now studying in England for a PhD but shares at least something of the radicalism of her Aunt – one of the first times we meet her she is disgusted to find Melissa’s boss (who runs a PR agency) built his reputation working for early New Labour (that is of course the only non conservative party to win a UK General Election for almost 50 years) and denounces him as right-wing.
Melissa’s story by contrast effectively starts with her birth – as she knows very little of her mother’s origins in Brazil and nothing of her father (who left shortly after her birth). Instead we read of her upbringing in South London, her raising not just by her mother but by a small collective of stand-in Auntie’s/grandmothers who were her neighbours, her early friendship and then relationship (and then break) with another girl Ruth and her mother’s death. Having studied IT she now works for the PR relationship having been found a job by a close friend Femi who has strong (left wing in the conventional terms, right wing in the book) political ambitions of his own
What perhaps really makes the book is a tour-de-force section set in the Brazilian countryside in 1969-1974 as Laura and a fellow, but younger, revolutionary, flee the City and the attentions of the police for the initial (but false) sanctuary of a forest based Communist guerilla group (much if not all of what they experience based on real life incidents which the author sets out in an impressive Author’s note).
Now I have to be the first to say I did not really agree with the political impetus of the book – I felt my sympathies were more with Mel’s boss (who I am pretty sure is meant to be a sell-out anti-hero). But this Centrist Dog nevertheless found this an impressive read which sets out a cross-generational call for action to build a different world.
PS – small correction: I don’t think Maria and Ana can have seen Pele score against England – Gordon Banks prevented that....more
It was a stupid idea. The book was too advanced for her; too advanced, she was sure, for a student of science. But she was trying, at least trying, to understand what was happening to her daughter's body.
Anthracycline, antibiotics.
The problem with it was the lack of story. Narrative. When asked for his definition of Neighbour, Jesus did not turn to his glossary. He had a parable and a Samaritan up his sleeve. Human example is everything, thought Anne, as her hands shaped and carved and built and bent through pathology and insulin and enzyme activity and junctions and ecosystems.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize and I have to say up front that a debut novelist, and in particular one in her mid-20s, simply has no right to write a book this good.
Because this is a remarkable book which combines a fresh voice and literary (as well as typographical) experimentation with a central idea which is universal (but I think seldom covered in fiction), resonant themes, and with a deep maturity in its empathetic understanding of people’s bodies and mind.
Introducing a reading of the book (on Damian Barr’s Literary Salon) the author explained how growing up with a mother with breast cancer for almost her whole childhood, that the cancer never, even from a young age, struck her as something that her family were battling, but something they were living beside every day a kind of abstract, shape-shifting idea that came and went, something they had to understand as if befriending it might tame it. Her mother died of the cancer when she was 14 and it was not something she had ever intended to write about, but the intense last six months of her mum’s life kept returning to her as she began to write.
She also explained that she had been experimenting with prose poetry, based around the interior landscape of a woman’s body, thinking about the idea of how our bodies harbour the events and people that have shaped us, and how she could capture that on a page.
And it is from these two, rather experimental, narrative threads that the book was initially woven.
In a publisher interview (where she also sets out the contemporary novels that have inspired her book (The White Book, Checkout 19, Autobiography of Red, Lincoln in the Bardo, Multiple Choice, The Familiar, Grief is a Thing With Feathers – note the second book on the extremely impressive Desmond Elliott longlist to show Max Porter’s direct influence) Maddie Mortimer describes the book brilliantly by saying
“There are three narrative threads in the book that are not only in constant communication, but are actively competing against one another to ‘tell’ the story. The events happening in Lia’s past and present are mapped onto the landscape of her body, the first person eats away at the third, there are fragments of anatomical science and religious philosophy, of poetry, painting and dance and typographic moments where words drip, or swell, as if magnified — they mirror and bend. By experimenting with form like this, by shifting between styles and building up patterns to pick at and unravel I found that the novel had become about the very act of storytelling; about the way we choose to frame our lives, and which version of ourselves we let take the lead. As Lia (an illustrator with a vast imagination) nears death, she is attempting to make sense of her choices, her illness. The piecing together of self is her final creative act.”
Because the basic plot of the novel, is about a woman and children’s book writer-illustrator Lia who has had a return (and spreading) of the breast cancer which first arose shortly after the birth of her Yellow-loving child Iris (now highly perceptive and recently started at secondary school).
The other key human characters are: Lia’s husband Harry (a University lecturer with a hobby as a Gardener); her mother Anne, now widowed after the death of her high-Anglican and deeply faithful Parish-Priest husband Peter and whose relationship with the rebellious Amelia has always been marked by mutual judgement and suspicion and who now elderly (and scrawny pigeon or generously Dove-like in appearance) struggles with how to deal with, as well as make theological sense of, her daughter’s illness; Matthew – how came to the Vicarage as a waif and stray when he was 15 and Lia 11, and who was effectively adopted as something of a (to Lia) preferred prodigal by Anne and Peter, before becoming an on-off lover of Lia for many years (starting when she was just 15) but who now is something of a Fossil-ised memory for her.
But the most distinctive character is a first-person voice, which (at least at first) I interpreted as Lia’s long-dormant, now reappearing cancer and one which sets out to explore the interior contours, pathways, vessels and organs of her body. There the voice encounters the aggressive Red chemotherapy treatment sent to destroy the cancer and the group of those who are part of Lia’s past and present (who he sees as Yellow, The Gardener, The Dove, The Fossil and so on) which in turn leads to his exploration bringing long dormant memories to life.
All of this captured not just through an often poetic prose shot through with cultural reference, and with an active exploration of words and meaning, but in a fluid and varying typography – starting with the use of bold and italics as signifiers of voice, but incorporating varying font sizes and then even non standard text orientation.
And increasingly the various already porous barriers in the book: the past and the present; the exterior and the interior; Lia’s body and thoughts and the almost constant presence in them of the cancer – largely disappear. So that for example the voice increasingly becomes part of Lia. And there is a remarkable scene with Lia and family attending a dance performance where the voice choreographs the set of internal characters (Yellow etc) on the exterior stage.
Really this description only touches the surface of a novel which is all about what goes on underneath that surface (both literally and figuratively – although the very distinction between literal and figurative, physical and mental, experience and memory is one the book implicitly rejects).
What I think is most impressive about the book is that put all the experimentation to one side and this would still be a deeply thoughtful book about the human condition with a complex and involving plot and a series of fully realised characters.
Be it: the mother/daughter relationship (as experienced from both sides and across multiple generations); Fatherhood and being the partner of a cancer sufferer (there is a brilliant aside when Harry picks up Lia from a hospital appointment wearing the expression he has on Iris’s first day at a new school); the very complex and nuanced exploration of faith/loss of faith (with Anne/Peter/Matthew and Lia all on their own non-linear journeys); school playground politics and dynamics; long term on-off relationships or terminal illness – the book has nuance and depth.
The author herself spoke about how this developed over the course of the book:
for all the play and ‘fizz’ there were also simple delights that emerged unexpectedly along the way. I learnt that a fully realised character or frank, honest dialogue can be just as poetic as a perfectly constructed metaphor, or a bit of clever word play. This, I think, is growing up. It’s realising that you have nothing to prove. It’s leaving your coat and scarf and pretension in the hall, taking the hands of your characters, and letting them lead you through the house.
A comment which I think shows the maturity lacking from many other “literary” or “experimental” books (many of which either are content just to play with form, or which are largely didactic) but which is present in abundance in this really excellent book – one which (returning to the opening quote – taken from the book) has learnt the need for story and human example.
The author was recently selected for the decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list (2023 edition).
This novel (her latest) was shortlistedThe author was recently selected for the decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list (2023 edition).
This novel (her latest) was shortlisted for the 2022 A Post Irish Book Awards Novel of The Year and the 2022 Goldsmith’s Prize.
I have read and very much enjoyed Sara Baume’s two previous novels – her debut “Spill Simmer Falter Wither” and the Goldsmith’s shortlisted “A Line Made by Walking”
Both were books which drew on autobiographical elements (the latter particularly), both involve people who have deliberately distanced themselves from society in a rural setting, both draw heavily on the natural world – and this her third novel draws on very similar ideas, while also sharing with her debut the centrality of a dog (here dogs) as a key character.
The basic, ostensible plot of the book is of a couple (strictly Isabel and Simon but referred to other than once as) Bell and Sigh, who against the advice of their friends move into together into a remote and run-down country cottage with their two dogs – the “spry and devious” terrier Voss and the “hulking and dull witted” lurcher Pip; their move being something of an experiment “to see what would happen when two solitary misanthropes tried to live together”
Their cottage has sat for seven decades at the foot of a mountain, from which you can see “seven standing stones, seven schools and seven steeples” – and the book itself is set over seven years, each marking a year of their occupancy of the house – one designed to be transitory but which becomes increasingly permanent.
The chapters are I believe best interpreted as written by the mountain itself as it looks over and observes:
Bell and Sigh’s quotidian life together in all its minutiae or ritual and habit;
Bell and Sigh’s convergence - initially we are told very deliberately of differences between them or different positions that they take, but over time we can see, and it is signalled, that they are increasingly blending not just their possessions, but their clothes and even their attitudes, speech and quirks;
Pip and Voss – often with their behaviour interpreted by Bell and Sigh;
The house and its contents and their gradual but steady decline, deterioration and degeneration;
The local flora and fauna (from the insects in the house, to the trees and plants in the garden and hedgerows, to the mountainside and coast, to the nearby fields of bullocks and donkeys, to the roads and puddles and at one stage a dead robin which of course is immediately reminiscent of the opening of “A Line Made by Walking”);
Bell and Sigh’s gradual disassociation from their past lives – deliberately losing touch with and any social obligations to their previous friends and family, and from the society around them – other than daily interactions with the nearby farmer, necessary ones with their landlord, weekly shopping trips to town and the radio and television programmes they listen to and watch. Rather brilliantly I felt the book somehow inverts the dystopian genre – showing two people living away from society but not due to societal collapse (the ostensible implication is that society is functioning perfectly fine without them – albeit Bell and Sigh do sometimes imagine its dissolution – “And how they talked about how small their life had become, almost nothing, about how unlikely it seemed that some society other than that of their rooms still existed out there”) but due to their own deliberate choice
And much more besides.
Note that the book, with its seasonal observations of nature is very reminiscent of Jon Mc Gregor’s brilliant “Reservoir 13” - although less rhythmically repetitive than collectively progressive as here the four seasons are covered over the seven years (while McGregor repeats the four seasons each year).
But where it more significantly differs is in that while McGregor’s book also observes the workings of a whole community, this book is, in human terms, largely limited to Sigh and Bell - and their increasingly insular existence. It is also rather accidentally an analogy for lockdown life.
Each chapter starts with an observation that Bell and Sigh have still not got around to climbing the mountain and ends with a lyrical and figurative reference to an eye.
And in the last chapter Bell and Sigh finally climb the mountain and we are left with a closing few lines which I think, rather brilliantly, can either be taken as simply an observation on the increasing melding of their lives (the author’s intention) or as causing us to question the entire premise of the novel.
Overall this is another brilliant and beautiful book by Baume and I would even venture that it is her strongest novel to date.
My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via Edelweiss...more
Previously shortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott and Republic of ConsNow shortlisted for the 2022 Goldsmith’s Prize.
Previously shortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott and Republic of Consciousness Prizes
This book is published by the UK small press And Other Stories under their hugely successful subscription model.
The author Mona Arshi (a human rights lawyer for Liberty and an award winning poet) is best known to me for her spell as writer-in-residence at the nature reserve at the beautiful Cley Marshes in North Norfolk
The book is narrated by Ruby, a British Indian girl and tells of her own troubled childhood (including when she stopped speaking), her mother (struggling with mental illness), her more voluble sister Rania and her retiring father – as well as a cast of visiting relatives, the families neighbours and Ruby and Rania’s schoolfriends.
As can be seen from the excerpt the book has both a distinctive structure and writing style. What cannot be judged is the production of the book – the paperback has a beautifully vibrant cover of a garden (fitting for a book where the mother’s mental state is based around her gardening) and French flaps and this quality production seems to me to both match and enhance the beauty of much of the writing.
The structure is a fragmentary one – a series of 60+ short sections from 1-8 pages, each vignette of the life of Ruby and her family, told in a chronological progression best described I think as part approximately linear (at least as its relates to certain sub-storylines) and part recursive (particularly when relating to key incidents in the family’s history – such as the mother’s first mental attack - or to recurring themes such as racism and misogyny).
And the writing is (as might be expected) poetic in nature. The sections are told in first person with Ruby’s silence a key to the novel in allowing her to act as an observer of others, of society (racism, mental illness, family expectations, sexual assault, misogny all play a part in what at times is a disturbing novel), nature and even of herself in a reflective and descriptive prose.
Overall a novel whose beauty of production and writing is matched only by its slowly emerging but powerful themes....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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