Tag: literature

#IFFP2014: Javier Marías and Andreï Makine

11th March 2014 / / 14 Comments

Javier Marías, The Infatuations (2012)
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

Andreȉ Makine, Brief Loves that Live Forever (2011)
Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan (2013)

My first IFFP titles are both by veteran authors whom I’m reading here for the first time.

InfatuationsJavier Marías’ The Infatuations is narrated by one María Dolz, who takes breakfast at the same café as an attractive couple who are clearly very much in love; though she doesn’t speak to them, María enjoys being in the same place as them, feels her life is brightened by the simple fact of their happiness. All this is disrupted when the couple stop appearing at the café, and María discovers that the man, a businessman named Miguel Desvern (or Deverne – his family changed their name for their film distribution business; nothing settles into stable certainty here) was murdered. When María later sees the woman of the couple return to the café alone, she introduces herself; she and the woman – Luisa – become fast friends, then María gets to know Javier Díaz-Varela, a museum???friend of Luisa’s. As María becomes more attracted to Díaz-Varela, she has to face not just that he has feelings for Luisa, but that she might not know him at all as well as thinks.

Perhaps Marías’ key concern in The Infatuations is the gap between what can be thought and what can be known. At the start, María watches Luisa and Miguel from afar; she wonders who they might be, though of course she can’t know. Then she tries to imagine what Miguel might have thought before he died, and realises she can’t know that either. The novel is full of its characters’ second-guessing others’ thought processes, or recalling their own thoughts to such a degree of detail that the very amount of information causes us to doubt its truth. The more you think, Marías seems to say, the less you can really know.

But this uncertainty is not confined to thoughts; when Marías’ characters engage in lengthy, discursive speeches, we see that the author’s techniques are distorting the reality of his novel as well, when his characters engage in lengthy, discursive speeches. This creates an interesting contrast between content and style: at the centre of the novel is an act of extreme violence, but the text that surrounds it – that mediates and tries to make sense of it – is still and reflective. In the end, perhaps reflection is all we have; as one character remarks, even the darkest of life’s events will eventually recede and become memories. It is the distinct texture Marías creates from layers of subjectivity (and Margaret Jull Costa has done a superb job of conveying this texture through her translation) that makes The Infatuations for me.

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Brief Loves‘The fatal mistake that we make is looking for a paradise that endures,’ says the unnamed narrator of Andreȉ Makine’s Brief Loves that Live Forever, pointing towards the central theme of this novel: that the things which last in life are actually the fleeting moments, the memories and experiences. Makine (a Russian author who writes in French) guides us through key moments in his protagonist’s life, when the narrator experienced a transitory instance of love, which has nonetheless stayed with him: seeing a girl run into the arms of the grandmother she’s never met, for example; or a summer affair by the Black Sea.

Alongside this are glimpses of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, often represented by structures which are ignored or decaying (or both): the grandstand for a parade, which is soon emptied; an factory bearing a slogan that claims permanence but goes unnoticed; perhaps most striking of all, a giant orchard that was intended to make a statement, but not to be harvested. These structures may pass into ruin, but the emotions experienced in their shadow remain.

The interplay between these two aspects lies at the heart of Makine’s novel, and leaves its mark on our narrator: though he sees flaws in the Soviet project, he has not entirely discarded it by the time of perestroika; but it’s not that he clings to the old times so much as he recognises that they have provided the context for the life he has lived Makine’s prose and Geoffrey Strachan’s translation are elegant, and the novel’s reflections on love and history insightful; all adds up to a fine short novel.

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What about these books as contenders for the IFFP? They strike me as well-made mid- to late-career novels, but not as the kind of major work that I’d want to see winning an award like the IFFP. I admired, enjoyed, and would recommend both books; but, at the same time, I suspect they are not the best that their respective authors have written. So I could see either of these novels making the shortlist, but I’d hope for more from a potential winner.

This post is part of a series on the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Reading round-up: early March

5th March 2014 / / 1 Comment

Rebecca Hunt, Everland (2014)

EverlandThe author of 2010’s Mr Chartwell returns with a tale of polar exploration. In March 1913, three men embark on an expedition to an uncharted Antarctic island which is being dubbed ‘Everland’ – a journey that we know won’t end well, as we’ve already seen others of their ship’s crew go after the men a month later, and find only one alive. In 2012, the men’s expedition has become famous, and three researchers set out from their base on their own trek to Everland. Over time, the two expeditions start to parallel each other – subtly at first, then more overtly, in terms of both events and the frictions that develop within each group. Hunt places her characters in a situation where they’re trapped by their environment, then uses the parallels between the two groups to underline just how much they are trapped.

Tamara Astafieva, Born in Siberia (2014)
Translated from the Russian by Luba Ioffe

Born in 1937, Tamara Astafieva became a television editor for the Soviet press agency, Novosti. This book is a collection of autobiographical essays (and the occasional poem) sent by Astafieva a few years ago to an old acquaintance, British TV director Michael Darlow (who also provides linking commentary throughout). Born in Siberia illuminates a time and place in history that I personally didn’t know about; and Astafieva comes across as a bright, charismatic personality who is a pleasure to meet through the pages of her book.

Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

This was my book group’s latest choice: the tale of Thomas Fowler, a British journalist working in Indochina, and the idealistic American Alden Pyle, who believes that the  war can be ended with a ‘third force’. Reading The Quiet American was an unusual experience for me, as I saw the film back in 2002, but don’t remember much about it; so the book kept snagging on shadowy memories. I often find it difficult to get into books written in the 1950s and earlier (I don’t know why; a cultural distance that’s hard for me to cross, perhaps); and this was true for Greene’s novel to an extent – though I appreciated its nuanced exploration of morality; and the ending could still shock me, even though I knew what was coming.

Carlos Busqued, Under This Terrible Sun (2009)
Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, 2013

I said to myself that I would only buy an e-reader if I felt that I were truly missing out on ebooks that I wanted to read. I finally reached that point when I started hearing about publishers like Frisch & Co., a Berlin-based who specialise in digital works in translations; and my first electronic title is one of theirs.

Under This Terrible Sun (the first novel by Argentinian writer Busqued) begins as Javier Cetarti – who does little more than lounge around his apartment watching documentaries – learns that his mother’s lover has killed her, and Cetarti’s brother. The bearer of this news, Duarte, has an idea to cash in on a life insurance policy, and Cetarti is happy to play along. But Duarte has darker motivations than Cerarti realises. Busqued’s novel works almost by stealth: the characters will drift along for a while; then something sinister or violent will intrude – unbidden at first, then with growing tension, until… ah, but that would be telling.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013)

Flamethrowers

In 1977, Reno (not her real name, but it’s as much as we’ll get) heads east on her motorcycle to New York, where she becomes involved in the art scene. A relationship with an Italian artist leads her to Milan, where a more political revolution is taking shape. The Flamethrowers is a long novel, dense with incident; yet in some ways Reno’s narrative voice remains detached from it all. Kushner‘s novel reflects on performance, and finds it in all the worlds through which Reno moves – and not always to the good. The ending manages to be poignant, chilling and optimistic all at once.

Emma J. Lannie, Behind a Wardrobe in Atlantis (2014)

Mantle Lane Press is a new small publisher focusing on short volumes by writers with an East Midlands connection. This, Mantle Lane’s second book, is a set of eight short stories by Derby-resident Emma J. Lannie. Lannie’s stories are snapshots of characters at key emotional moments, and are shot through with flashes of myth or fairytale. So, for example, ‘Rapunzelled’ sees a girl caught in the shadow of her photographer sister as they go on a shoot in an abandoned tower; while the narrator of ‘Not Gretel’ wanders through the forest, leaving her old life behind, in search of… something. This book is an intriguing start to Lannie’s career, and I look forward to reading more from her in the future.

We Love This Book reviews: Hannah Michell and Deborah Kay Davies

2nd March 2014 / / 0 Comments

Here are two of my latest reviews for The Bookseller‘s online book magazine, We Love This Book:

Hannah Michell, The Defections (2014)

DefectionsHannah Michell’s first novel is a tale of secrets and desire at a meeting-point of cultures.

Mia Kim is a translator at the British embassy in Seoul; she’s been able o work there despite her uncle’s history of political activism, and knows that in some ways she is still on shaky ground – her uncle now runs a school for North Korean defectors. Mia is infatuated with the new counsellor, Thomas Dalton-Ellis, whom she puts in her debt when she hides the evidence that he caused. The two embark on an affair, but then Thomas is given the assignment of running a discreet check on Mia background to see if anything might compromise her integrity – and Mia learns that one of her uncle’s young defectors, may be passing messages over the border…

The Defections is partly a novel of the past refusing to let go of, or threatening to catch up with, its characters: Thomas left his previous posting in Vietnam under a cloud; Mia’s uncle’s activities may affect her current position, of course, but she’s also haunted by never knowing the English mother, of whom she is reminded whenever she looks in the mirror. These stories combine to create a nicely complex background, and you never quite know which detail the plot will turn on next.

Much of the pleasure of reading The Defections comes from seeing the different plotlines play off against each other, as a perfectly explicable detail from one character’s viewpoint becomes open to misinterpretation when seen from another. We also see how easily the personal may slide into the political for these individuals. Michell has created an engaging novel which leaves the reader intrigued to see what she will write next.

(Original review)

Deborah Kay Davies, Reasons She Goes to the Woods (2014)

ReasonsDeborah Kay Davies’s second novel chronicles, in a series of fragments, the ordinary and extraordinary moments of one girl’s childhood.

Right from the beginning, Pearl is acutely aware of sensations: the rising and falling of her sleeping father’s chest; the feel of mud on her hands after she has been playing with worms; the sunlight and water of her beloved woods. The short, disconnected chapters (vignettes, almost) in which Davies writes reflect the intensity of Pearl’s experiences – place, action and emotion – are evoked vividly.

The Pearl depicted in these snapshots of her life is an ambivalent character: she can be cruel (she calls her younger brother “the Blob”, and often treats him with the contempt that implies), but she also has a strong capacity for love and friendship – when she lets people into her life. As the novel progresses we start to see more of the contours of Pearl’s world: the difficulties in her family life and suggestions that she may not perceive life in quite the way we had thought.

The full extent of this is revealed subtly: the tone of Davies’s prose and the closeness to Pearl’s viewpoint give Reasons She Goes to the Woods a slightly unreal quality, with a touch of the folktale. It’s up to the reader to tease out the reality of Pearl’s life (and to decide what ‘reality’ means in this context). We end up with a rounded, complex portrait of growing-up that has an atmosphere all of its own.

(Original review)

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On the subject of We Love This Book, I must congratulate my fellow blogger (and Eleanor Catton fan) Anna James from A Case for Books, who is starting a new job at the end of this month as The Bookseller‘s books and media editor. So: congratulations, Anna!

"I saw life; I thought about death"

26th February 2014 / / 9 Comments

Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family: My Struggle, Book 1 (2009)
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (2012)

Knausgaard book 1Coming to a book like this relatively late – when I’ve seen so much said about it, in so many places – makes me wonder: how will I react to it? For this surely isn’t a book to inspire indifference. If you don’t know the background, Karl Ove Knausgaard has become something of a phenomenon in his native Norway for My Struggle, a six-volume sequence of… novels? memoirs? something else? which draws on his life in immense and (on the evidence of this first volume, anyway) uncompromising detail.

A Death in the Family (the UK editions of the My Struggle books have been given individual titles) begins with a meditation on death which is one of the most affecting passages of writing that I’ve read in months. Why, Knausgaard asks, do we try to conceal the reality of death from ourselves, when we know that it’s an inevitable part of life? Slightly less than half of the book is then given over to an account of events in (mostly) the author teenage years. The second half focuses mainly on how Knausgaard reacted to his father’s sudden death.

But that is not (or not all) of the struggle that animates this book. One thing that becomes apparent very early on is that the deepest feelings Knausgaard experiences arise from art. He is quite clear on the implications of this for himself:

When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfil a whole life. Not mine at any rate. (p. 32)

When Knausgaard writes about art in this book, we experience something of how he feels; but we also see the difficulty he has in comprehending and expressing those feelings:

…the moment I focused my gaze on the picture again all my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go. But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go? (p. 186)

Immediately after this, Knausgaard returns to more prosaic activity: microwaving a meal, washing, fetching cutlery, eating.  Earlier in A Death in the Family, he talks about yearning ‘to write something exceptional one day’ (p. 28), and feeling thwarted in that ambition by the day-to-day business of life.  And we see this manifest in the form of the book: Knausgaard will spend pages on the minutiae of events, but moments like his experience of art are rather fewer and further between. We feel the weight of all that detail bearing down on the author’s ability to express his innermost feelings.

This is not confined to Knausgaard’s encounters with art. One of the most powerful sequences in the book for me is when Karl Ove and his brother view their father’s body in a chapel, while a gardener mows the lawn outside. Knausgaard registers great detail about the body (of course), but is as aware of the noisy lawnmower as he is of his response to what he’s doing. The fact of his father’s death has no more significance in that situation than does a spot of gardening.

At the back of all this is the issue of memory. We are reminded several times that human memory is fallible; so just how are we to take all this information we are given about Knasgaard’s life – information that creates a pictures more vivid at times than our own lived experience? Perhaps we can see it as an expression of the mix of knowable and unknowable that his father’s life is to Knausgaard; Karl Ove has seen so much, but cannot know how the father he once looked up to became a man who drank himself to an early death.

A Death in the Family begins with a question about death, and ends with something of a conclusion about death. I’d like to quote that conclusion here, because it struck me so much, and because I think it sums up Knausgaard’s book so well:

…death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. (p. 393)

Here, the everyday becomes interchangeable with the depths of existence; only by writing about one, it seems, could Knausgaard find a way to address the other.

In a fairytale frame: Helen Oyeyemi and Robert Dinsdale

20th February 2014 / / 4 Comments

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird (2014)

Boy Snow BirdI joined Helen Oyeyemi’s career in the middle, so I know her for White is for Witching (2009), her haunted house story with its cast of merging narrative voices; and Mr Fox (2011?), her tale of a writer and his muse who journey through many iterations of the Bluebeard story. Both are complex works of fantasy, against which Boy, Snow, Bird might seem something of a curveball: it’s a subtler, ostensibly more straightforward piece of work, reminiscent perhaps of Aimee Bender’s fabulations.

We begin with a girl named Boy Novak, who escapes from her violent rat-catcher father in 1953 at the age of twenty, moving to the Massachusetts town of Flax Hill. There, she falls in love with a man named Arturo Whitman, who looks after his young daughter Snow, his wife Julia having died. Boy becomes pregnant by Arturo, and gives birth to a girl, Bird; at which point, Boy discovers the truth about the Whitmans: they are a black family who have been passing themselves off as white. Boy sends Snow off to live with her aunt, ‘just for a little while’ – which turns out to be a while longer than that.

Amongst all this are touches of the uncanny (Bird finds that her image does not appear in mirrors, for example) and references to the tale of Snow White. But a story like this could be told without those; so the question arises: what do they enable Oyeyemi to do? Indeed, how does she make them key to the whole book?

What these aspects of the novel do, I think, is affect how we read it. Look at Boy, Snow, Bird through the lens of Snow White, and the beats of the story are off: Boy would be the ‘wicked’ stepmother, but her heart is (at least partly) in the right place when she sends Snow away; Snow would be the banished princess, but she’s the only one of the three title characters whose viewpoint we never experience – and Bird is as much a ‘heroine’ as her sister. The situation is more complex than simple readings of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ will allow. Though the presence of the uncanny underlines that nothing is as it seems, everything is ultimately brought back to reality. Oyeyemi seems to use the trappings of the fantastic to point up that the real world is more complicated – which helps give Boy, Snow, Bird its power.

And here’s another book that puts a fairytale frame around the real world…

Robert Dinsdale, Gingerbread (2014)

GingerbreadHistory slides into fairytale and back again in Robert Dinsdale’s latest novel Gingerbread.

In Belarus, a young boy’s dying mother takes him to live with his grandfather, her last wish to have her ashes scattered in the forest. His grandfather tells the boy stories: first the myth of Baba Yaga, but then also history twisted into myth – tales of the “great frozen city of Gulag”. As the months pass, boy and grandfather retreat from the outside world and into the forest, marking out a space as their own “gingerbread house” (the mother’s gingerbread being the main tangible reminder that the two have left of her); but, when the boy meets a girl who has moved into his old home, he realises that it may be time to return.

Gingerbread is a wonderfully atmospheric novel, in both Dinsdale’s depiction of the forest landscape, and in the way he translates the “real” and historical into fairytale. The boy and grandfather’s existence in the forest itself takes on a fairytale quality, to the point that there’s quite a perceptual jolt when external forces threaten to bring that existence to a halt.

Dinsdale’s novel is also a thoughtful examination of grief, and our reactions to life’s darkest moments – from individual bereavement to the long-term effects of an experience like being held in the Gulag. Dinsdale explores how we might continue to deal with such events as they fade from living memory into history, and comes to no simple conclusion. Gingerbread is all the more enjoyable for that complexity.

(This review first appeared at We Love This Book.)

Pushkin Press: The Rabbit Back Literature Society

17th February 2014 / / 2 Comments

Rabbit Back Lit SocLast week and this, Stu at Winston’s Dad has been celebrating Pushkin Press. Founded in 1997, Pushkin are one of the UK’s leading publishers of translated fiction. I haven’t read many of their books, but, as I’m reading more translations this year, I thought I’d take the opportunity to explore further. The Pushkin book I’ve been reading is Pasi Ilmari Jäaskeläinen’s The Rabbit Back Literature Society (2006; translated from the Finnish by Lola M. Rogers, 2013).

In the little town of Rabbit Back, a teacher named Ella Amanda Milana is disconcerted to find her students submitting essays based on copies of classic texts whose plot details have changed Sonya shooting Raskolnikov at the end of Crime and Punishment, for example. At the same time, Ella receives an invitation to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society, an exclusive writers’ club run by the town’s most celebrated author, Laura White. At a party to welcome Ella into the Society, Laura White disappears in an indoor snowstorm – and Ella sets about investigating what happened. She makes use of ‘The Game’, a Society ritual in which members must answer truthfully any question put to them, however painful it is to do so. Ella discovers that a former member of the Society disappeared many years ago – could Ella be next?

There’s a wonderful dissonance to the opening sections of The Rabbit Back Literature Society, as the town and its inhabitants (and Jäaskeläinen’s prose) exhibit a playful theatricality that contrasts with some very real tragedy. On the basis of this, I thought I knew where the book was going to go; I expected a fairly straightforward fantasia, something along the lines of Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Not quite.

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Rabbit Back is a place which has become infested with story; Laura White’s tales of fantastical creatures have shaped the way in which the town is perceived, by outsiders and denizens alike. White also appears to have had some kind of hold over the members of her Society; and one of the key things about them is the extent to which they have used other people as sources of material for their own writing.

This is reflected in The Game: the idea is not to tell a story in response to a question, but to ‘spill’ – to surrender all the raw, unshaped information one has about the subject raised. It’s all, in a way, reflected in how the novel treats Ella: it is not until well into the book that we start to hear her answers to the challenges she receives through The Game; her emotional responses – such a crucial part of the individual she is – are withheld from us. This is what it’s like, Jäaskeläinen seems to say, when you take away part of someone.

The jarring dissonance of the early section doesn’t carry through to the later parts of The Rabbit Back Literature Society, and it’s hard not to feel a pang of regret about that. But what we have instead is intriguing an exploration of how stories can define us, and what it means if reality doesn’t measure up.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of The Rabbit Back Literature Society: Beauty in Ruins; The Complete Review; Whimsies & Words.

Reading round-up: early February

10th February 2014 / / 1 Comment

Roelof Bakker & Jane Wildgoose, Strong Room (2014)

A new project from Roelof Bakker, the artist-photographer behind the 2012 anthology Still, presented as  a stapled booklet fastened with a crocodile clip. Like the earlier anthology, Strong Room contains a selection of Bakker’s photographs of the vacated Hornsey Town Hall; but, where Still was perhaps more about space, this collection is focused on detail, and how physical objects can be both permanent and transient.

The images in Strong Room are close-ups of objects in the Town Hall: the torn upholstery of chairs in the council chamber; boxes of nuts and bolts in the maintenance room; document files in the strong room. It seems to me that Bakker is highlighting that the context in which these objects mattered has gone, and what’s left is their abstract detail.

Alongside Bakker’s photographs is a short piece in which writer Jane Wildgoose describes an instance of requesting an old document from a medical library. It seems a fairly unremarkable act, but Wildgoose uses it to reflect on themes of past and present, virtual and physical: using the electronic technology of her laptop to call for a hefty leather-bound tome which is handled with great care. Wildgoose’s text approaches the same issues as Bakker’s photographs from a different angle; all adds up to a thought-provoking whole.

Darkness at NoonArthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)
Translated from the Hungarian by Daphne Hardy

This was my book group’s most recent selection, and it generally went down well. I was undecided after reading Darkness at Noon as to whether it was a book for me, and I’m still not sure after our discussion. This book is the tale of Rubashov, once a high-ranking official in his country’s governing Party, now imprisoned and interrogated as a traitor to the regime. Koestler’s depiction of a show trial is grimly effective, with reference to people being executed for holding the ‘wrong’ opinions on seemingly trivial subjects, and Rubashov being inexorably worn down. I still suspect that Koestler’s prose is a bit too clinical for me to experience its full force; but, then again, that detachment is part of the point. I’m glad I read Darkness at Noon, though; and I wouldn’t have read it if not for the book group.

Eliza Granville, Gretel and the Dark (2014)

In Vienna of 1899, eminent psychoanalyst Josef Breuer is intrigued by his latest case, a girl he calls Lilie, who claims to be a machine. Some years later, young Krysta is living in a strange new place, where she befriends a boy named Daniel, whom her uncle insists is not a real child. Gradually, the two stories intertwine, as Josef tries to find out more about Lilie, and Krysta’s world grows darker. Along the way, Granville reflects on different ways in which people may put stories to use: to justify terrible prejudices, but also as a source of hope and (literal) escape. And the closing revelation is of the sort that makes me feel like reading the novel again, to see what else there is to find.

Antti Tuomainen, The Healer (2010)
Translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers (2013)

In a Helsinki beset by the effects of climate change, poet Tapani Lehtinen searches for his missing wife, Johanna. He learns that Johanna, a journalist, was researching ‘The Healer’,  a serial killer targeting those he deems responsible for climate change, with the aim of ‘cleaning up’ society’s ills. Tapani starts to wonder whether Johanna’s work took her too close to The Healer. There’s an interesting sparseness to the atmosphere of Tuomainen’s novel, but overall The Healer doesn’t quite work for me. The near-future setting doesn’t seem to add much (there is a subtext comparing the encroachment of climate change to Tapani’s personal situation, but I don’t find it to be carried through), and the resolution of the mystery plot is corny.

Mother Mother

Koren Zalickas, Mother, Mother (2013)

Things are not going well for the Hurst siblings. The eldest, Rose, disappeared in her last year of school. Violet attacked her brother, Will, and has been sent to a psychiatric institution. Will, who has autism and epilepsy, is looked after and home-schooled by his mother, Josephine, who obviously knows best for him – doesn’t she? But now Violet is receiving letters from Rose, who appears to be happily settled in a new life; and child protection officers are calling on Josephine… The ghastly truth of what’s really happening in the Hurst household is only gradually – and effectively – revealed in an interesting debut novel from Koren Zalickas.

"Ernest, the great writer, standing in the middle of the story"

5th February 2014 / / 10 Comments

Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway (2014)

Mrs HemingwayI find it intriguing when an author’s second novel is very different in subject from his or her first makes me want to look for the deeper connections that point to what the writer’s key concerns may be. Naomi Wood’s first novel, The Godless Boys (2011), concerned an alternate history in which atheist rebels had been exiled to an island off the coast of a theocratic English state. What does any of that have to do with Ernest Hemingway’s wives?

Ah, but it’s not the subject that counts: it’s the treatment. The Godless Boys could be seen as a ‘what if?’ character study: place a set of characters in an unusual situation, and explore how they might react. Wood does a similar thing in Mrs. Hemingway; it’s just that the unusual situation is real, as are the characters.

(I should say at this point that I don’t know much about Hemingway’s life or work, or the women concerned; so I approach Mrs. Hemingway very much as a work of fiction; I believe that Wood’s novel isn’t meant to be taken as entirely historically accurate in any case.)

What makes the situation of Hemingway’s wives particularly unusual is there in the book’s first sentence: ‘Everything, now, is done à trois (p. 3).’ The scene is the Hemingways’ villa in the French coastal town of Antibes, 1926: Ernest’s marriage to his first wife, Hadley, is on the ropes. She invited his mistress, Fife, to the villa in the hope of stopping the affair in its tracks; instead, Fife has effectively become part of the Hemingway household, and Hadley comes to realise that it’s only a matter of time before she loses Ernest to the other woman (when Ernest and Hadley leave the villa one morning, trying not to wake Fife, ‘it feels, to Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway, as if they are the ones who are having the affair,’ (p. 5).

This is the structure of Mrs. Hemingway: each of its four sections begins with one of Hemingway’s wives approaching the end of her relationship with him; we go back to see how that relationship developed; and past alternates with present. The thing is that each wife knows Ernest is having an affair, and with whom; the mistresses become a part of the relationship. When Martha (Ernest’s third wife), learns of his infidelity, she goes to meet her husband’s new lover, Mary; and she’s resigned to the knowledge that her marriage will soon come to an end:

They walk down the Élysées together, Mrs. Hemingway and Mr. Hemingway’s mistress…They stop off at the tobacconist to see if they can get more cigarettes. Martha holds out the door for her and lets the other woman in (p. 184).

The idea of an affair and subsequent divorce has gone from something to be fought against, to the price that one pays for loving Ernest Hemingway. Some of the wives even keep in touch with each other down the years.

So the title of Mrs. Hemingway is just that: a title, not an individual; almost an office, to be held for a finite term. Wood delineates the different ways in which Hemingway’s wives perceive that title, also showing how the women change as they move from mistress to wife (and beyond), and how the way others perceive them may not be how they actually are. For example, Hadley sees Fife as the kind of modern, confident young woman that she is not; when the story is told from Fife’s viewpoint, we see that she’s not quite so self-assured; but Fife’s glamour returns when Martha meets her some years later.

There’s another interloper in all these relationships: Hemingway’s writing. It is so often what brings Ernest and his lovers together; and so often what ultimately drives them apart. When Hadley meets Hemingway, his writing is one source of his charisma, and something he wears lightly (‘I’d rather be read by crooks than critics,’ he says at a party in Antibes [p. 58]). By the time he’s living with Fife in Key West, Ernest has become rather more concerned with what the critics think; his relationship with his writing grows more troubled as the years go by, and he sometimes turns violent. When we meet the widowed Mary at the Hemingways’ Idaho home in 1961, there’s a rueful double irony: all that’s left of Ernest is his writing, and his papers are now what feed the fire.

Mrs. Hemingway explores the characters of four women united by an experience that places them in opposition to each other, yet is also something only they can ever share. As in her debut, Wood depicts lives and individuals shaped by an extraordinary external force (in this case, their encounters with the person of Ernest Hemingway), and creates a fine work of fiction in the process.

Elsewhere
M. Denise C. interviews Naomi Wood.

Reading round-up: late January

27th January 2014 / / 6 Comments

The ThiefFuminori Nakamura, The Thief (2009)
Translated from the Japanese by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates, 2012

Nishimura is a pickpocket, and so spends his days blending in even as he stands apart. He was once part of a group brought together by a man named Kizaki to rob a set of documents from a speculator’s house – or, rather, to be the expendable distraction, as the speculator was killed soon after. Now Kizaki is back, and has a new proposition for Nishimura. In this lean and spare novel, Fuminori Nakamura is concerned to explore what it means to live a life like Nishimura’s. The title of The Thief may not just refer to its protagonist; it could also be seen as applying to Kizaki, who has stolen Nishimura’s control over his own life. The layers of theft and manipulation go all the way down.

Dr Benjamin Daniels, Further Confessions of a GP (2014)

This is a follow-up to the first book in The Friday Project’s ‘Confessions’ series, whose (usually pseudonymous) authors pull back the curtain on their various professions with a collection of anecdotes. I’ve enjoyed all of these books that I’ve read; but I find there’s something particularly special about Daniels’ titles. He’s a good raconteur, that’s for sure; but he also controls tone superbly. He goes from telling  amusing stories, to expressing heartfelt opinions on particular aspects of healthcare, to poignant reflections on the patients he knows he can’t save. Both his books are well worth reading.

Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool (1990-1)
Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, 2008

A collection of three novellas by the author of Hotel Iris; as in that novel, Ogawa explores some dark psychological territory in a way that belies the spare tone of her prose. The title story’s narrator is infatuated with her foster-brother, and prone to a blank cruelty which is unlikely to lead anywhere good. In ‘Pregnancy Diary’, a girl chronicles the ups and downs of her sister’s pregnancy, which she seems to regard with equal parts fascination and contempt. ‘Dormitory’ is more dreamlike (or nightmarish), as a woman returns to her old college dormitory, finding it a very strange place indeed. (For more on The Diving Pool, see Tony Malone’s readalong at January in Japan.)

Skinning Tree

Srikumar Sen, The Skinning Tree (2012)

As Japanese forces encroach on India during the Second World War, young Sabby is sent from his family in Calcutta to a boarding school in the northern hills. Sen’s novel is a portrait of Sabby’s illusions being comprehensively shattered, and the consequences that follow. Not only is school discipline harsh; the bright world which Sabby imagined himself to inhabit is taken from him. He has become Anglo-Indian without ever knowing what England means. And where the school’s regime fosters violence, so the boys follow – to a tragic end that Sabby can barely bring himself to recall.

Lee Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize (2009)
Translated from the Korean by Christopher J. Dykas, 2013

Jin-man and Si-bong met in a psychiatric institution, where they were routinely beaten by the caretakers for… well, they didn’t know; so they started coming up with their own wrongs to confess. When the institution is raided and shut down by the authorities, the two stick together because Jin-man has nowhere else to go. They set up in business, offering apologies on behalf of other people; and, if there’s nothing to apologise for, Si-bong and Jin-man will find something – or create it. The pair go to ever greater lengths as Lee’s novel progresses; and the book never quite turns in the way you might expect, up to the very end. (This book is part of the Library of Korean Literature series from Dalkey Archive Press.)

The sound of fury

20th January 2014 / / 2 Comments

Joanna Kavenna, Come to the Edge (2012)

Last week, I went to the launch of the new Best European Fiction 2013 anthology; I was struck by a comment made there by the Welsh writer Robert Minhinnick before he gave his reading: that he was less interested in what a story was ‘about’ than in what it sounded like. Sure enough, there was indeed a distinctive and captivating rhythm to his delivery; it seemed to me quite a different experience from that of reading words on a page.

I was reminded of hearing Janice Galloway reading one of her stories at ShortStoryVille a few years ago. I’d read one of Galloway’s collections not long before, but that hadn’t prepared me for this. It wasn’t simply that she was reading in the Scottish accent of her narrator (something I could only ever approximate in my mind); it was that she was able to inhabit that narrative voice in a way that just wasn’t possible for me sitting on my own with a book. I can think of several other occasions when a text has been transformed for me by hearing it read aloud – transformed in a way that is hard to capture in words.

Come to the EdgeSo, how to describe the experience of reading a book like Joanna Kavenna’s Come to the Edge, which seems almost made to be spoken, and where so much of the affect is cumulative? Well, let’s see. Kavenna’s unnamed narrator has been abandoned by her husband; feeling disillusioned with her comfortable suburban life, she answers a newspaper ad to be the helping-hand on a widow’s farm, and finds herself driving up to Cumbria. The widow is Cassandra White, a larger-than-life character with forthright views on modern life (she detests most of it, from plastic food packaging, to bread, even soap). She promptly puts the narrator to work – dirty, back-breaking work.

The first chapter of Come to the Edge shows a vision of rural apocalypse: guns firing, houses burning, helicopters approaching. The bulk of the novel is the story of how that came about. The seed is planted when a couple of long-standing local residents are evicted so their house can be sold on. Cassandra decides to ‘resettle’ them in the well appointed, but rarely occupied, second home of a banker. A thriving resettlement programme is soon underway, but always with the nagging possibility that the owners of those second homes could return at any moment…

In the back of my mind when reading Come to the Edge was a comment I heard Joanna Kavenna make last year: that she was writing as though her characters didn’t have the usual inhibitions. The resulting book is darkly comic, as Cassandra pushes things ever further; and of course there’s an element of satire on contemporary aspirational lifestyles. But it seems to me there’s also a cautionary tale here about becoming too entrenched in a given viewpoint: as the first chapter shows, the valley doesn’t do all that well out of Cassandra’s high-minded ideals; and the narrator eventually realises that she’s the one doing all the leg-work.

I loved Kavenna’s prose in this novel, and I’ve thought about quoting from it; but so much is gained from context and repetition that I don’t know whether an isolated snippet can really convey what I want to. That’s why I would also think this book would be great read aloud: that momentum would build, the characters’ voices would ring out… Then again, there’s such an energy to Come to the Edge that it almost shouts from the page.

Links
Joanna Kavenna’s website
Kavenna writes about her inspiration for the book

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