Through narrowed eyes, she gazes down on her city. The mountains press close and folds of silencing snow lie on the rooftops of the houses below. Down at street level, fog wraps itself around everything: bombed out cars, dead streetlamps, snow-covered mounds of rubble and rubbish. No one has ventured out yet to collect water. Everything glows faintly in the blue light. But over in the east, where the shelled mosques, churches, libraries and houses of the old town populate the narrow valley, the cloud is shot through with scarlet. It's hard to tell whether this is the first streak of the rising sun or the reflection of buildings on fire.
Sarajevo Red. That's what people call that colour now, as if it were the name of an oil paint.
The author is of mixed Yugoslave/English parentage – growing up in London but spending Summer holidays in Sarajevo. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia which is very relevant to the novel also as I believe that a first draft of the novel formed the basis for her 2014 PhD Thesis which both gives an excellent feel for the novel (large parts made the final book) and for the research and literary critical theory that went into its conception (https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprin...).
The book relies on two main stories from the author’s family.
The original inspiration was the story of her Great Uncle – a Sarajevan Bosnian Serb landscape painter called Dobrivoje Beljkašić “Dobri” (http://dobrivoje-beljkasic.com/index....) whose studio was destroyed in the fire that followed the shelling of the Bosnian national library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vije%C4...) – a fire which forms the pivotal scene of a novel full of harrowing images and experiences, and one which lead to a mass destruction of books giving the book its title
'Black butterflies, he says softly. He peers at the scorched page as if trying to read it, then carefully places it in his breast pocket. 'Burnt fragments of poetry and art catching in people's hair'
The author has said that when she heard her Great Uncle’s story: “something went off in my head – ‘art, fire, war’ – and this combination was the muse for this story”
The second inspiration was her father’s rescue of her maternal grandparents from the now devastated-under-Siege Sarajevo in January 1993.
The book itself has a female third-party protagonist – Zora, a landscape painter, like Dorbi with a penchant for painting bridges, and like him with a studio in the National Library. She is fifty five when the book opens in early 1992 and due to her work decides to stay in a Sarajevo (which increasingly in seeing signs of ethnic tension and military build up) while her older husband takes her elderly and increasingly incapable Mother to stay with their daughter who lives with her English husband and young daughter near Salisbury.
Rapidly accelerating events though as the horrors of the siege quickly unfurl, firstly make her husband’s return difficult, then impossible, then cut off her means of escape and then even of communication and most of the sources of basic essentials such as heat, water and food as the City enters a state of medieval siege difficult even for those living through it to comprehend as happening in late 20th Century Europe.
Zora’s only two sources of comfort and refuge are: the ramshackle community which knit together in her shelled apartment block including a bookseller Mirsad (whose family also left Sarajevo pre-siege); art – including her paintings, classes she teaches to students, collaborative painting lessons she does with a young child in the block and even an improvised art exhibition she stages. Mirsad too (whose evolving relationship with Zora is sensitively and skillfully handled by the author) similarly uses his books and storytelling to give himself and others comfort and identity.
A key theme of the book (perhaps the key theme) is art as a form of defiance to violence, of resistance to war, as a dignity granting antidote to the complete dehumanisation and degradation of a siege.
And while I found this theme admirable, I somehow felt that for me as a reader it actually lessened the impact of the book. While reading it I was reminded of Helen Dunmore’s “The Siege” – and I was therefore fascinated to see it was a key inspiration for the author.
But whereas I found reading “The Siege” an immersive and visceral experience – I found this a little abstracted even though set some 50 years later and during my lifetime. And the reason I think was the art elements – I have always felt that books about painting (just like books about music or sculpture) add an extra layer of distancing between the reader and the novel and that was the case for me here.
It is nevertheless a book which deserves its place on the longlist both for its sadly timely resonance as an account of the siege of Sarajevo (which started exactly thirty years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and for the authenticity leant it by the two separate family accounts which both inspired and informed it.
3.5 stars
She can't tear her eyes from the burning building. Polyvalent and pagan, it's a thousand things at once. It's an offering to the sky, though she's not sure for what purpose. It's a cry for help, a smoke signal to the rest of the world. It's nothing more than entertainment for the Serbs in the hills. A fiery spectacle to break their boredom at the dog end of this fetid Summer.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize for which it is now shortlisted.
I had previThis review contains a Twigger warning.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize for which it is now shortlisted.
I had previously received an ARC of the book ahead of its publication in August 2021 - I confess I had requested the book as part of reading books tipped to be longlisted for the Booker Prize, struggled with an element of the novel and decided only to revisit it if and when it received a prize listing.
The element I struggled with was that a very large part of the book is narrated by a fig tree (hence my warning).
Returning to the 2022 Women’s Prize - the longlist this year was a surprising one, missing out many books heavily tipped to appear, and also a weaker than normal one as it was light on the usual Women’s Prize inclusion of a number of very literary books.
The list also stood out for an unusual preponderance of three types of book: Books which are Young Adult not just in their protagonists but also their writing style; Fantasy/Magic Realism - and particularly ghost stories; and non-Human narrators. And interestingly this book sits at the intersection of all these tendencies.
The book takes place over two main timelines (which also exploring crucial points in between): 1974 Cyprus (about to be racked by coup/civil war, invasion and war crimes - something which of course adds an accidental topicality to the book) and late 2010s North London (plus an exploration of a crucial point between).
In 1974 in a rather clichéd plot two a sensitive (and plant/animal loving) Greek boy Kostas and a more down to earth Turkish girl Defne, conduct a tentative forbidden romance - a romance which to add additional cliché takes place in an atmospheric and famous tavern (at one stage we are even given the menu) marked for both the fig tree which dominates its interior and its owners (two men - of course one Greek, one Turkish and of course in a doubly forbidden relationship).
In 2010 North London (where far too many literary novels are set) - their daughter Ada (Island), now without her mother (who died due to an accidental mix of alcohol and pills) and increasingly starting to be distanced from her eccentric father (now a biologist and researcher) suddenly screams for a full minute in her school history class. This incident and the visit of her newly divorced and mother’s sister (estranged for many years from Kostas/Defne due to their transgressive relationship - but now free to visit after the death of her parents) causes Ada to revisit the past of her parents and on how she may have inherited their trauma.
And an intermediate phase we revisit Cyprus in the early 2000s, as Kostas visits Cyprus for the first time since he was made to go and live in London in 1974, and deliberately engineers a meeting with Defne (with who he lost all contact in involuntary exile) and the two rekindle their relationship against a background of Defne’s harrowing work as a foresnic archaeologist with the (real-life) Committee for Missing Persons - trying to bring reconciliation and closure by finding buried bodies.
But - and it is a very big but, alternate chapters of the book in all three timelines are narrated in first person by the fig tree that was originally in the tavern and which was transplanted (as a cutting) by Kostas to London when he and Defne moved there. And the fig tree relies (particularly in the intermediate timeline) on a mosquito and some ants as an unlikely and rather convenient source of information.
And there are a number of issues with this choice (besides the obvious one of its slight ludicrousness).
Firstly, there seems to be a contradiction at the heart of the choice which then reflects in the narrative voice. I feel that the author is simultaneously setting out and exploring the world of trees and their root systems (in a way which I suspect is now rather over familiar to active readers of non-fiction writers such as Merlin Sheldrake and Peter Wohlleben; and of the many literary fiction books they have inspired); while also trying to write a fairly conventional story of human conflict, love and social interactions - I would contrast this say the writing of Richard Powers in “Overstory” which emphasises and prioritises nature over humanity (incidentally we are told that Kostas does the same but don’t necessarily see it). And this tension reflects in the rather confused voice of a tree which seems to spend much of its time pointing out the differences between trees (and other flora and fauna) and humans, while also adopting an extremely anthromorphic set of expressions, feelings and emotions.
Secondly the Tree appears to have access to Wikipedia but not to a story telling imagination - so that large parts of what the Tree recounts (not just about Flora and Fauna but even more glaringly about the history of Cyprus) feel like a rather clunky factual cut and paste
Thirdly while some of the analogies between tree life and human life work well - for example the idea of hidden trauma, how your hidden roots effect your health and a more complex one about an epigenetic reaction to experienced trauma which then carries down to non-traumatised descendants - even these are often repeated (having both a tree and a tree expert in the book inevitably means both seem keen to explain the same ideas). And some ideas just don’t seem to work - for example one key assertion is about how the cyclicality of arboreal life contrasts with the linearity of human life - which is an interesting one, rather undermined by using tree rings as an example (which are surely an annual record of decades or centuries of linearity).
Ada’s screaming incident is also captured on camera and ends up fuelling a worldwide social media meme and movement which is an interesting idea but one the author seems to completely lose interest in, in a rather anticlimactic ending to the human part of the story. Similarly at two separate points the book flirts with mysticism (both in Cyprus and later England) - in both cases rather fizzling out in the light of the scepticism of Ada and her mother.
However, the tree part of the story does end with a rather nice twist which both reinforces the not-inconsiderable emotional heft of the novel; while also causing one to question some of one’s criticism of the tree’s narrative (albeit second thoughts seem to show that the surprise in the twist is really due to it not really following that logically).
Overall and despite my criticisms this is nevertheless an enjoyable book - with lots of very moving and lyrical writing, a very strong and evocative sense of time and place, and some difficult and unfortunately very resonant for 2022 themes. As a result I would be surprised - and not disappointed - if it did not make the shortlist and not completely shocked if it even won....more
He has several ....... entities he talks to, and many others who talk to him. His Aleph is one of them. He says s
Winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize.
He has several ....... entities he talks to, and many others who talk to him. His Aleph is one of them. He says she lives in trees. …. And another he calls the B-man, or sometimes the Bottleman, whom he describes as a hobo with a prosthetic leg. These appear to be complex visual hallucinations—he can see them and describe them in some detail. In addition, there’s the larger group of elementary auditory hallucinations, including miscellaneous objects like teapots, table legs, shower heads, scissors, sneakers, sidewalk cracks, and glass window panes, to name a few. But there’s one that’s different, a primary and complex auditory hallucination, an entity he calls the Book.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize, although I would have read it anyway (I was awaiting the paperback publication on 24 March) as I was a fan of the author’s Booker shortlisted “A Tale for The Time Being” and indeed asked my first audience question at the In person Booker shortlist readings about that book (on the quantum mechanical aspects).
And in a Women’s Prize longlist which seems to be ratcheting up its focus on alternative voices: three tales of ghosts and magic to offset a bias towards reality: two books with talking animals to counter the resulting anthropocentricity: a book with a talking tree to make the case for the plant world against the colonialism of the animal kingdom: this book takes things a step further by having at its very heart a backlash against (my term) animatenormativity by giving inanimate objects the voice they have long been denied in fiction - here both with a novel effectively narrated by itself and in active dialogue in its own pages with the teenage boy whose story it is telling, and with the key characteristic of that boy being his unwanted and often deeply troubling ability to hear the cacophony of voices of the everyday objects that surround him physically and crowd him aurally.
Amusingly even within the inanimate kingdom it seems that further hierarchies occur - although I think this does rather neatly capture how many present day tensions and injustices (from the caste system to skin colour distinctions) are the legacy of colonialism.
“In the beginning, before there was life, when the world of things was the entire world, every thing mattered. Then life happened, and eventually you people came along with your big, beautiful, bisected brains and clever opposable thumbs. You couldn’t help yourselves, and it was only a matter of time before you caused a rift to occur, dividing matter into two camps, the Made and the Unmade. Over subsequent millennia the schism grew. Haltingly at first, in fits and starts—a pinched pot here, an arrowhead there, a bead, a hammerstone, an ax—you worked your way through the material world, through clay, stone, reed, hide, fire, metal, atoms, and genes, and little by little you became better makers. Cranked by the power of your big prefrontal cortices, the engines of your imagination gathered steam until, in tumultuous leaps of what you came to call progress, the Made proliferated, relegating the Unmade to the status of mere resource, a lowly serf class to be colonized, exploited, and fashioned into something else, some thing that was more to your liking.
Within this social hierarchy of matter, we books lived on top. We were the ecclesiastical caste, the High Priests of the Made, and in the beginning you even worshipped us. As objects, books were sacred, and you built temples for us, and later, libraries in whose hushed and hallowed halls we resided as mirrors of your mind
Like a number of other books on the longlist it has a child/teenage protagonist and putting that together with what at times is a rather didactic approach (with the voice of the book often switching into a rather portentous lecturing style - as the above shows) does I feel mean that this book read perhaps more like a young adult book than a literary novel. Although there too I am perhaps showing that my genre snobbery one also held by books it would seem
Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn’t be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us. Because we’re all connected, we communicate all the time—agreeing, disagreeing, gossiping about other books, name-dropping, and quoting each other—and we have our preferences and prejudices, too. Of course, we do! Biases abound on library shelves. The scholarly tomes disparage the more commercial books. Literary novels look down on romance and pulp fiction, and there’s an almost universal disregard for certain genres, like self-help.
This is nevertheless one of the more intriguing books on the longlist - a lengthy and varied book which perhaps as a consequence is at times very successful and at others can feel in dire need of a traditional editor’s blue pen. However when a novel speaking as a character in its own pages itself strongly makes the case for (my terms) a bibliocentric view of novels with authors largely as intermediaries between books and readers; it is perhaps not surprising that the editing of this book feels like it concentrated more on encouraging and expanding and rather than reducing the wide ranging scope of the novel.
This is also a book which has as its main female lead who is both: a collector of facts and news (via her job as a “scissors lady” working as a reader and print clipper for a media monitoring agency - an agency with an obsession with document retention which only too easily fits this employees own proclivity); an increasingly obsessive hoarder whose tendencies there are not helped by the loss of her jazz musician Japanese-Korean husband who perhaps acted as the one check on her and whose very death introduces an additional need to memorialise.
So it is perhaps not surprising to see similar tendencies in the author herself and in her writing if the book.
When writing her previous Booker shortlisted novel - the author changed tack half way through (I think as a result of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and Tsunami) and did not use around 300 pages of material on an eccentric cast of characters (a young female and rather troubled radical conceptual artist, an alcoholic wheelchair bound Slovakian poet philosopher) who inhabited a large public library with a possibly haunted bindery at its heart. But in the best tradition of hoarding this material was neither deleted or discarded but kept for when it could might prove useful in the future. And in what is perhaps a radical departure from the more obsessive hoarder that moment actually arose and the material was successfully deployed in this project.
And having the “scissors lady” at the heart of the novel also gives the author all the excuse she did not really need (as it is I think an inherent tendency) to throw in current affairs (particularly climate change, anti capitalist activism, the Trump electoral win and its aftermath of protests and police brutality) and any other scraps of information that intrigue her (for example on space exploration).
The novel I think shows a spectrum of research in its myriad of influences: personally experienced (the role and worldview of a Buddhist Priest); rather overworn and cliched (the Marie Kondo decluttering trend); very empathetic and detailed (Hearing Voices and the world of municipal libraries); intermediate (the life and works of Walter Benjamin); rather superficial (the jazz of Benny Goodman).
In terms of some missteps I would include the frequent references to “hobos”, the two very stereotyped Chinese characters and the voice of the poet - as in this example which is actually the first to explain the book’s title
Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem.” He sighed. “In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.” Benny thought about this for a while. He thought about his mother and her fridge magnets. He didn’t write those stupid poems, and that was the truth, but his mother thought he was lying, and that was a problem. He had a lot of problems. “Is that what you write about? Your problems?” The poet shrugged. “Not so much my problems. But ze world’s problems, yes. I listen and write down vat I hear.”
But overall there is enough here to make it a worthwhile read.
My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley....more
This is the first book I have read by Louise Erdich who I have seen described as something of a national trNow shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize.
This is the first book I have read by Louise Erdich who I have seen described as something of a national treasure in America. She who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021 for her previous novel “The Night Watchman” - a prize which of course like most US books prizes excludes any non-American authors (presumably for the same reason that Americans play club team sports that no one else plays so they can claim to be world champions). Now that novel was barely reviewed in the mainstream literary reviewing media in the UK - which in some ways is a puzzle but which I think may be because stories about prejudices against indigenous people do not resonate as well as books about say slavery and its aftermath.
I would also have to say that reading this novel - which I largely enjoyed - I noted firstly that (to me like so many literary American novels) the world outside the US barely exists (other interestingly than in the large number of non-American authors mentioned) and secondly that the novel seemed to me very American - almost as if I was slightly excluded from what it took for granted.
I would also say though that the book reminded me in some - not all aspects - of the most recent writings of Ali Smith: the Seasonal Quartet and particularly Companion Piece) and I have always thought that a non-UK reader cannot really fully understand Smith’s writing.
In terms of similarity to Smith’s writing I would say: in its sometimes seemingly randomly scattered multiple storylines (and side stories) which somehow converge; in its blend of the very real and immediate with the fey/timeshifting (Smith) or indigenous belief/folklore (Erdich); in the way in which it, not always entirely successfully but still admirably, feeds in an almost instantaneous lived-through experience of current political events, alongside its storyline - a tendency which gives the books an urgent immediacy albeit it will be interesting to revisit them in say 10 years and see if they have retained a legacy.
I would say though that one difference could be characterised as that while Smith plays with language, Erdich’s focus in more on literature.
The story starts with a rather odd prologue: the main character Tookie (a Native American who narrates most but not quite all of the book in the first person) tells of her arrest and imprisonment in 2005 (while in her thirties) for the rather bizarre crime of drug smuggling - bizarre because the drugs were concealed (by someone else) in the armpits of a dead body she transports for slightly obscure reasons between two girlfriends of the dead man.
This episode seems to serve a number of purposes (which I cannot help thing might have largely been achieved with a slightly less odd crime): to introduce the subject of death and its aftermath and affect both on those left behind and those who have died; to allow Tookie to encounter (and have a formative experience) with Pollux, the Tribal Policeman that arrests her; to highlight how the anti-black bias of the American Justice system is matched (it not outweighed) by its bias against indigenous peoples; to place Tookie under the book’s first (of many) Sentences - the book’s title is the only place where I felt wordplay came into effect; to allow Tookie to grow in literary confidence via a dictionary gifted to her by her old English teacher (and unofficial school guardian/mentor) and by extensive reading while under that sentence.
The majority of the book takes place over the period November 2 2019 to November 2 2020 - and to be honest for some time felt like a different book. I am aware that most Americans drive automatics so I guess it makes sense that authors struggle with gear shifts? Tookie (by now released from prison and married to Pollux) has taken a job at a Minnesota bookshop, a bookshop which is, to all intents and purposes, the real life Birchbark bookshop (complete with birchbark canoe, confessional booth and a speciality in Indigenous books and art) run by Louise Erdich - who rather cleverly I felt appears as a side character in her own book. One of the bookshop’s most notorious customers Flora - a wannabe Indigenous - has died but continues to visit the store as a ghost, her presence known largely to Tookie. Flora we find, via her daughter, died reading a book called “The Sentence: An Indian Captivity” and Tookie comes to believe that one sentence in the book
From there the book interleaves (sometimes I have to say rather awkwardly) a number of strands:
Observational humour and insight on running a bookshop
Comments on literature - the bookshop workers commonly recommending books to or discussing them with their customers
Observations on life as a native American in modern America - and in particular on interactions with non-indigenous people, including those who believe firmly they are not just empathetic to your plight but even (like Flora) somehow are part of it.
Indigenous and tribal customs, beliefs and folklore, particularly around death - I must admit that I admired the concepts of these sections a lot more than I either really understood or enjoyed them
Tookie’s relationship with Pollux and with his brother’s rebellious daughter Hetta (who regards Pollux as her Dad) - Hetta arrives with a baby and also with another rather bizarre storyline about a shameful part she took in a film.
The lived experience of the pandemic - I must admit I struggled for different reasons to identify with these sections as they really did not match my UK experience of strict and lengthy complete lockdowns. Partly this is because (and this was clearly an important moment for the author as she has herself - as character - remark on it) the bookshop manages to get its staff identified as a critical workers - but even putting this to one side characters seem largely free to move around in a way only possible in the UK if you were one of the people setting the lockdown rules and thus (it seems in your own head if not according to the law) exempt from them.
Political commentary - as the City of Minnesota is torn apart by the George Floyd murder (which happened in the town)
A combined ghost and mystery story as Tookie seeks to understand why Flora is haunting her - and eventually discovers (via it has to be said a set of connections which for me were both obscurely supernaturally and heavily coincidental) not just that but something more of her own identity (this latter involves yet another of the clunky gear shifts).
Overall this is an ambitious and very different, if far from perfect book which makes an interesting addition to the longlist....more
If you two don’t stop all you nastiness, you go eat the bread the devil knead
Now shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize.
I have to say immediately
If you two don’t stop all you nastiness, you go eat the bread the devil knead
Now shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize.
I have to say immediately that it is very reminiscent of another excellent book which was shortlisted for the 2021 prize – “How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps the House” by the Bajan lawyer Cherie Jones. That was a searing and difficult read about male violence towards women set on a beach resort in Barbados in 1984 but was ultimately (to quote my own review) about how "experience of previous generations, passed down to them as societal and familial expectations and teachings, shape and influence their life choices and responses to their own traumas: with what seem like lessons to be avoided from previous generations ending up inevitably repeated."
This book has a similar theme although perhaps with a more positive ending.
It is written by a Trinidadian stand-up comedian and writer: previously of poetry, young adult novels including science-fiction and of local newspaper columns – most recently written in English but previously one written in Trinidadian Creole.
Some of those influences are clear here – others less so as this is very far from a young adult novel (as its themes are very difficult), particularly not a science fiction one (as its all too grounded in an all too common reality) and, despite the judges seeing it as "really funny and witty", for me a harrowing tale (albeit with that ending note of hope).
It tells of male violence towards women in 2005 Trinidad and traces that violence back over the life of the main protagonist – Alethea - and ultimately back to two prior generations.
The main present day parts of the book are narrated in first person by Alethea in a vibrant Trinidadian Creole. This Creole is easy for me as someone from England to follow – and any difficulty in reading the book is due to the subject matter and not the arresting and fully convincing voice. The book also has some occasionally interleaved third party sections set over 6 days 35 years earlier when she was a 5 year old. The narrative of these is in English (although of course the dialogue naturally in Creole). These sections are I believe written by Alethea later in 2005.
Alethea, about to turn 40 in early 2005, is a store manager in one of a chain of knock-off boutiques in Port of Spain. She is attractive, with a keen sense for clothes (but not in her own dress) – her sole (although not inconsiderable given the post colonial colorism prevalent in the society) advantage in a difficult life, a near white skin (and near straight hair) inherited from her strict Catholic mother.
After a series of transitory and commonly violent relationships since she fled her equally violent home at seventeen, cutting of all contact with her family – which included her Uncle Allen and Colin (Allen’s child from an American relationship who he brings back with him to Trinidad and expects his sister, Alethea’s mother, to look after – in practice Alethea (known then as “girly”) becomes his pseudo mother.
Alethea now lives with Leo – a once famous band member, but with his reputation rather faded due to alcohol and who has over the year turned increasingly violent towards her. She is also having an affair with the boss of the stores.
Alethea is something of a closed book to those around her (particularly her fellow workers) and has almost no friends (male or female), instead taking refuge in escaping into (appropriately) fiction and into her interior thoughts (imagining a black hole into which all the bad things in her life are sucked) – but at the start of the year decides to reveal her bruising (which has previously concealed under layers of foundation) to her colleague Tamika. She also agrees for the first time to attend the annual Fire Fete which forms part of Carnival (and which later forms the climax of the novel).
Her passive/resigned acceptance of Leo’s violence is put into sharp context and urgency when a victim of domestic violence is murdered in front of her shop front.
And two serendipitous encounters – with an old school friend with designs on opening a high end boutique on the Island, and then with the Catholic priest Tamika wants to marry her - both open up unexpected new opportunities for Alethea’s future while causing her to have to confront her past, and realise it was even more traumatic and terrible than she even had realised at the time.
This is a difficult book to read – relationship rape, family child abuse, violent death all feature repeatedly, but a powerful one and worth of its place on the list, particularly for the way in which it traces how violence (even the violent entitlement and skin colour gradation division legacy of colonialism) reverberate across generations.
We realise that those eating the devil’s bread are not necessarily those who did not stop their nastiness.
The book does end though with a positive message and an opportunity for Alethea to exorcise the demons in her memory by honestly revisiting the traumas of her past.
A very worthwhile addition to the longlist. And congratulations also to the publisher - Myriad, a Brighton based independent publisher....more
Now winner of the 2022 British Book Awards Best Novel Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize
I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and lov
Now winner of the 2022 British Book Awards Best Novel Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize
I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and love, sorrow and bliss, kitchens, sisters and mothers, joy, fear, rain, Christmas, gardens, sex and sleep and presence and absence, the parties, Patrick’s goodness. My striking unlikeability and attention-seeking punctuation.
I could see what I had now. Everything people want in books, a home, money, to not be alone, all there in the shadow of the one thing I didn’t have. Even the person, a man who wrote speeches about me, and gave things up for me, who sat beside the bed for hours while I was crying or unconscious, who said he’s never change his mind about me and stayed even after he knew I was lying to him, who only hurt me as much as I deserved, who put oil in the car and would never have left me if I hadn’t told him to.
Claire Fuller (Costa Novel award winning and Women’s Prize shortlisted author of “Unsettled Ground”) starts her brief put accurate review of this novel with a line I can only borrow
“If The Bell Jar and Flea Bag had a child = Sorrow and Bliss”
If pushed I would probably go for:
Ottessa Moshfegh with Ostensible Motivation
And the other thing that is most notable about this book is that were one to have a book group on it (or even to discuss it on Goodreads) the one part of the book that simply has to be discussed is not a plot twist, a narrative style, a set piece scene or a character arc (although I should stress that the book scores strongly on all of these but one word or more specifically one non-word, to be precise: “-- --"
The book is narrated (we later find, in what is not really a spoiler, in the form of a written journal) by Martha Friel – starting on her 40th birthday in 2018 but ranging back to when she was 16 (and first met her future husband Patrick – then an effectively orphaned school friend of her younger cousin) and forwards into the aftermath of her birthday.
Martha is the daughter of an obscure poet (now more a wanabee poet) father and a more successful installation sculptor (of minor importance despite her alcoholism) mother – her humorous sister Ingrid is married with a series of young children. Martha writes a humorous food column for Waitrose, while Patrick (who loved Martha from when he was 13) is an intensive care consultant – the two living on a bland Executive estate in Oxford (where they twice yearly roll forwards a rental contract: a sign of the lack of permanence which underlies their marriage).
Martha’s life though is defined from an incident when she was 17 when a “bomb went off in her brain” and some form of never pinned down but variously diagnosed mental illness blighted her life and her relations with others.
Through her words we read of: her complex but vital, tender but fiery relationship with Ingrid (see PPPS); her disastrous and annulled first marriage; her eventual marriage to the patient Patrick and the difficulties the two of them go through; her ambivalent certainty (the phrase is mine and the oxymoron deliberate) about her desire to have children of her own.
All of this is written in a prose which is deliberately prosaic and non-novelistic. The author has said “If a character sits down, Martha says ‘he sat down.’ Not ‘he collapsed onto the well-worn, velvet sofa, riven with anxiety, as a sharp wind forced its way through the peeling window frames like ice cold fingers’”.
But for everything the novel lacks in (unnatural) linguistic invention, it gains in emotional intensity. This is novel and a narrator that are shaded both light and dark and that are at times frustrating and even downright annoying (towards the book’s end many of the very characters closest to her – mother, sister, husband – find themselves almost forced to give up on Martha, and the reader can feel like they were at the same place some time before the author); but on many other occasions wryly observant and also deeply moving.
A key part of the novel is when Martha self refers to a psychologist and suddenly receives a diagnosis which although initially very reluctant to accept (due to its connotations among the general public) Martha realises makes sense of much of her life (and even in turns out some of her family history).
The diagnosis though (and its withholding from the reader) is the crucial word of the book and this is added to by a disclaimer at the book’s end about the inconsistency of the medical symptoms with any genuine mental illness. I believe this decision was a valid one – the author seems (from interviews) to have not set out to write the book she ended producing and been concerned about both the comedy in the book and the way in which she had deliberately blended conditions. She has also said she did not want either her character or the novel to be labelled as the book about X (something she acknowledges is ironical as Martha herself “quests for a label”).
However it does mean that the effect of the not-naming causes us to question our preconceptions about the novel (is this really an empathetic novel about mental illness as it is often portrayed, or really a darkly humorous one about dysfunction induced by soceital and familial expectations of females). But perhaps this nicely (if I think inadvertently) mirrors how the actual (in the novel) naming of the condition causes Martha to question her preconceptions about her life and even the wisdom of conceptions (and conception!).
Overall I am conflicted over this book – but it is definitely a memorable one and would I think be a good prize list addition or book club choice largely due to the conflict it induces in a reader.
PS: one additional comment. There is I think a writing error in this book - a NZ born, Australian born author who has lived in England should know better than to have a purely English character refer to "the median line" on a road.
PPS Paul has pointed out to me that the latest edition has an interview with the author where she says I did get every single British and Irish person I could lay my hands on to read it beforehand, because I have such a horror of [writing] jackhammer when it should be a pneumatic drill. I had people just going through finding those for me, which I was so grateful for because I was worried that it wouldn't ring true.. Unfortunately (my observation) they missed one.
PPPS In the shortlist videos the author revealed that Ingrid was originally meant to be revealed at the end as a figment of Martha’s imagination - a kind of alternative life Martha imagined for herself if the “bomb” had not gone off in her brain …. But she felt that Ingrid as a presence in Martha’s life and ad a positive character in the novel was needed to give the book more lightness. ...more
Now incomprehensibly shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize after being mysteriously shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.
Its longlisting was not jusNow incomprehensibly shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize after being mysteriously shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.
Its longlisting was not just the reason why I read the book but more pertinently the reason I persisted with it to the end as it was the last of that I read (having completed the previous 12) and I was determined to complete my circumnavigation of the longlist.
Reading this one:
I was tempted to call off the whole adventure as misguided on frequent occasions as a number of times on my journey through it I faced numerous and unexpected challenges despite those who had gone ahead of me to chart the ways with their reviews.
Sometimes it was the ridiculous set of melodramas – even in the first 100 or so pages of the historical section we have – inter alia - parental child abuse, sexual obsession, a shipping magnate and his mistresses, severe PTSD, a dramatic ship capsizing, a disappearing mother, a jailed father, a predatory Bootlegging baron meeting a young girl delivering alcohol to a brothel;
Other times the forced coincidences between the lives of Marian Graves and Hadley Baxter – note to author coincidences between two entirely fabricated lives lack impact and even when clever (one person caught out by incriminating letters, the other by a hotel spycam) can seem forced. And this overreliance on forced coincidences goes wider - another example being a character obsessed with animal welfare purely it seems so the author can have the love of his life turning out to be the daughter of a meat-magnate;
Which leads into another issue: pretty well everyone that Marian and her family meet seems to be well connected and/or wealthy (that goes without saying for Hadley but some contrast or normal people might be welcome)– the repeated patronage Marian and her family gain becoming patronising to the reader;
In another place the dawning set of revelations as we are forced (in what I think is the book’s point) to think about what we know about people after their death compared to the truth of their existence (note to author having an omniscient narrator rather spoils this otherwise interesting idea);
In many others it was the author’s insistence on not just including much of her research verbatim but in some cases building odd storylines around it (see Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly - surely this should have been in a different book);
And on the subject of odd subplots a bizarre incident of mistaken identity involving a Japanese family and their gangster enforcers has even one of the characters laughing at its implausibility;
I also struggled with the behaviour of both Marian and Hadley with sleeping with anything that moves (and some that didn’t move - all described in lascivious detail);
But most inhospitable of all the parts of the book I visited was the unedifying Hollywood sections built around a Twilight-inspired film franchise and featuring every sterotype going (the Los Angeles shroom-section was a particular lowlight) as well as ostentatious wealth.
......
Then even with much of the book completed but the last daunting stretch ahead of me it was tempting to abandon the attempt – for fear of drowning in the sea of overelaborated prose.
And finally even with the last part ahead of me I felt what limited enthusiasm I had leaking away and was tempted to bail out – leave the longlist, abandon Gumble’s Yard and live anonymously under another avatar.
It turns out all of those instincts were book appropriate as well as well advised.
But I did not and I have completed my great circle around the longlist leaving behind a list of my reviews to chart my voyage of which I can confirm this was the lowlight.
I must say it is a lot different to what I was expecting - I was thinking of an aviatrix pioneer hagiography lacking depth and with some dreadful prose - entertaining but shallow. And the novel of course features that exact book - the one that inspired the movie. This one is actually a lot more complex in terms of plot lines and themes and serious in its literary ambitions than I expected. But that just made it worse somehow.
I feel like there are probably at least 5 good novels here - the amazing story of the WWII female delivery pilots, the round the world voyage and a story of pioneering fliers, a book about a film of a book which examines what we can really know of dead people especially those who disappear (and the difference between disappearing and dying and their different impacts on those left behind), the story of war artists, something on gender fluidity in history.
But adding them all together lead to a book that for me was simultaneously too long but unsatisfying in every respect....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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Books:
2022-womens-prize-shortlist
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